Author Archives: wendywelch

The Monday Book: THE WAY OF TEA AND JUSTICE by Rev. Becca Stevens

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I picked this book up off the counter of my friend Randy’s bookstore Oracle Books. He looked vaguely discomfited and said, “OK but I wanted to read that so bring it back?”

It was returned Saturday. Normally we don’t do Monday books unless they are enthusiastically appreciated, or hated enough to evoke 400 words. Tea and Justice was kinda middling, in all honesty, like a cup of good tea that has cooled.

Its premise is exploring the history of tea tangled with terrible social injustices toward workers, women, how they were denigrated (and worse) in the name of profits. And explaining how Thistle Farms and its sister Magdelene program (helping women leave sex work and addiction) embedded got its tea room up and going even as it struggled to sustain existing businesses and services. The whole book reads something between insightful and advertising how hard Thistle Farms is working to help people.

Tea does have a violent history, which Stevens addresses in one of the chapters. It also has a snobby history, another chapter, and an intellectual history that overlaps with this snobbery. My favorite chapter was the one on the Inklings (Tolkein, Lewis et al) and mortality; drinking tea is lovely, but what will you do with your life as well, Stevens more or less asks.

My beef with the book is that it continually circles in a naval gazing way and tells all its stories one-person-removed. A difficult encounter with a potential funder appears in two chapters, the first time using his undrunk tea steeping into bitterness as an example. The second time, the story bordered on revenge for Thistle Farms, the women’s center on which I had hoped this book would be centered.

Thistle Farms and the Magdelene Center seem like wonderful programs, yet Stevens makes much of their mileage without telling too many stories from them. There are three or four stories from the women at the ends of each chapter, not so much woven in as tacked on. They are moving. They don’t feel integrated into the planning.

So there’s the dilemma. The book has some wonderful insights, but they slide past in a dreamlike fashion, buried under ever-circling spiritual comments and self-plumping of the farm and its work. The book was written more to raise profits and awareness than consciousness, methinks. Which is not a bad thing, given the work the farm does. It just wasn’t as enticing as it might have been. I feel bad giving it a lukewarm review.

How Green is my Garden – – –

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Jack feels doubly competent today – the blog post on time and – – –

One of the things I really like about living in this part of the USA is the weather. The winters are similar to Scotland, but a good bit shorter, and the summer is much sunnier and warmer. Combine that with lots of short sharp rain showers and you have perfect conditions for growing things.

So Wendy and I have been learning how to (or not to) grow vegetables and herbs. It’s been a steep learning curve but we’re getting there. We inherited a large back yard that already had a veggie plot laid out so, nothing daunted, we set to. The first problem was that the yard had six mature walnut trees on two sides and we learned from Wendy’s former student Erin Dotson, a genius in gardening (yes you can hire her) that these are death to many plants in the nightshade family. They send out a maze of tendrils from their roots that exude something called juglone that is poisonous to many vegetables.

But we didn’t know that when we started preparing the long neglected plot and found a layer of garden cloth below the soil, so we pulled it all and threw it in parts of the yard where we wanted to kill things. Big mistake! It was there because of the juglone – – –

Luckily there were some raised beds that still had the barrier in place. So we were able to grow peas and asparagus in them and choose other stuff for the areas we had denuded of cloth. We also planted tomatoes as far away from the walnuts as we could or in plastic bags with earth from elsewhere, and these did well.

I’m happy to report that we were successful with peas, tomatoes, kale, onions, and lots of herbs. Much less with potatoes, peppers, Brussel sprouts and cauliflower. We also inherited raspberry canes which also have done well (too well in places) and volunteer cucumbers appeared without warning in our wooded areas.

We’re watching our second crop of peas developing right now and have high hopes for them before the frosts arrive, and we’re experimenting with planting seeds and seedlings in pots inside the house to have them ready for either an early start next year or even some winter produce. These include cumin, coriander, red current and marigold cherry tomatoes, basil, thyme, and blue potatoes. All are thriving. We even have a winter squash wending its way from the back garden toward the house, developing fruit along the way. We’re feeling almost competent!