The Milk Moon of May

The first full moon after Beltane is also known as the Milk Moon. This make sense since Beltane signifies a time when cattle were traditionally moved to rich summer pastures—definitely effecting the quality of the milk. One of my favorite milk products is cheese, and, as mentioned in a previous blog posting, Inverbrook Farm CSA is happy to host a new cheese share from Hillacres Pride Farm. The good folks at Havest Market Natural Foods (which also carries Hillacres Pride cheeses) recently paid a visit to the farm—click here to see pictures and read up on their visit (the photo above is from this posting). If you are interested in signing up for the cheese share you can call or email Mandy at Hillacres Pride--email mandy@hillacrespride.com or call 717-548-9031.

There is a short but lyrical chapter on the Milk Moon in Ted Browning’s collection of Kennett Paper essays Notes from Turtle Creek. The chapter is so full of wonderful sensory references appropriate for the season, I thought I would share it will you all now (hopefully I am not breaking any copyright laws). Enjoy the descriptions of milking barn and do not forget to sign up for the cheese share.

Native American tribes called the full moon of May the milk moon. May is calving season. Udders are brimming, but the idea of the milk moon flows across the rich earth of May and through the nights of middle springtime.

Some of my earliest memories bring me back to our first barn and our small gold-brown patterned cows with large eyelashed eyes and soft faces like deer. Milking time – the most important and exciting part of the day. Sometimes at bedtime, I just couldn’t force my eyes shut – lying there on top of the quilt, hearing the sounds of the night, counting the minutes, waiting anxiously for first light when the cows would gather and snuffle in the barnyard, and when I would wolf my corn flakes and stride down to the barn with my father for milking.

I remember as if it were yesterday – the barn, the hay, the cows, the milking. The barn was half sunk into the hill, making the milking shed more a cave than a building – sounds, smells and memories condensed, amplified, heightened.

The smell of the barn – a stewpot aroma of cows, milk, meadows; of oats and corn mashed into cowfeed; the spicy tang of chopped corn in the silo, churning and fermenting and stewing down to sour mash and cow beer; the brown squishy smell of manure.

I remember the soft rustle of the cows as they settled into their stanchions – the low murmuring sounds they made, almost like the cooing of pigeons, and the sound of water gushing as if from a hundred springs deep in the earth, when the cows pushed their noses into their water bowls.

We didn’t have milking machines yet, back in those days. Streams of milk hit the sides of steel milking buckets with a pinging sound like hard rain on a window pane. The milk gathered in the pails and rose to the top in a froth of heavy yellowlike melted butter.

One time a cow kicked over a milk pail full almost to the brim. The picture remains frozen in my memory – every detail, every sound and smell. A gush of thick yellow paint gleamed in the shadows of the barn and spread over the barn floor like the flow of warm lava. The milk vanished magically into the straw bedding that cushioned each cow but which ended up kicked all over the place.

The funny thing about it was that nobody got upset. My father and the hired man went back to milking; the barn cats soon gave up trying to tease the spilled milk out of the straw and the whole incident just sort of settled out. But something was different. I could still smell the milk down in the straw. Even a few days later, I could smell it, all mixed up down deep with the other familiar smells of cows, hay, feed and new milk.

Several nights ago I went outside for a night walk up Locust Grove Road and down into the basin of Owl Creek. The sounds of night are muted this time of year. Spring peepers and singing toads have calmed down, and bullfrogs and katydids haven’t got going. But the smell of the night is as strong as the night is dark and silent. Autumn olive throws out a perfume so strong your nose tingles and you might sneeze. Low to the land it sits, enriched by the earth smells of marshy wet places.

Starlight is softened by the mists and the heavy moist air, but the Big Dipper shines out strongly, almost directly overhead, a bit to the north.

At this time of year, the Big Dipper stands up on the edge of its bowl. Whatever is held in the bowl of the Big Dipper spills out through the night and into the earth, rising back up in luminescent vapors and rich milkhouse aromas.

I think back to the time when the milk pail tipped over…
No wonder the Native Americans called the moon of May the milk moon.

Signs of Spring-Skunk Cabbage

I have decided to start a new series of postings titled “signs of spring”. This self-imposed communication assignment is just an excuse to include walks and hikes into my daily routine, a way to get in shape for the farming season to come. Early spring farm work is all about precise seeding, filling trays, and making soil blockers- hardly tasks that improve one’s cardiovascular health. A focused walk with the goal of discovering and observing nature’s indicators of the spring season will be a welcome addition to my daily routine. An active step to peace of mind, spirit, and good health-productive slacking off so to speak.

My first of these “signs of spring” mission walks lead me to the swampy area at the edge of our woods, a place where I knew one of the earliest harbingers of the season can usually be found. I was not disappointed. The recently melted snow revealed the wine colored peaks of the skunk cabbage spathe emerging through the cold soil. A closer examination revealed the little knob of the spadix covered in small yellow flowers. I have always loved skunk cabbage, despite its strong smell. Skunk Cabbage is one of the few plants that have the ability to produce its own heat through a process called thermogenesis. Skunk cabbage also have these "smart" root systems that can literally pull the plant down into the swampy soil to protect it from storms and floods (triggered by some environmental indicator). It is just amazing to watch this plant change through the spring season. It reminds me of radicchio (in looks only—I am pretty sure skunk cabbage is poisonous to humans) when it first comes through up through the earth. Later on in the spring, the plant will generate large waxy green leaves that smell “skunky” when broken or crushed—giving rise to its descriptive and appropriate name.

In the wonderful collection of nature writing Notes From Turtle Creek, author Ted Browning writes of a winter class and nature walk he lead at the BVA's Myrick Center, with the focus being skunk cabbage. Teddy ends this column (the book is a collection of natural history themed essays he wrote for the Kennett Paper in the mid to late 1980s) titled "The First Flower of Spring" with the following paragraphs:

After a hearty trek, we reached the ancient colony of skunk cabbage deep in the Myrick woodland. Most of the plants sat in little circles of cleared ground -- they had melted the snow around them with internal fire. We indulged in some good old belly botany, flopping on the snow to look inside the plant. On one plant a tiny spider had woven a web across the opening to catch pollinating flies. We were amazed at the size of certain plants, deeply knobbed and convoluted, swirly red-blotched masses of plant tissue fully twice the size of plants usually seen. If recent research is near the mark, these plants could be very old, for it is now believed that cabbage plants can live up to 700 years.

It was impossible not to feel wonder and even awe as we studied the ancient colony and though about what we had learned: wonder in response to the astonishing things the plant can do; awe in realization of the near perfection of environmental adaptations. This plant is deeply beautiful in ways we hadn't thought of. We dismiss the skunk cabbage as a common, unattractive thing with a bad smell. And, unlike decorative garden plants, with their exuberance of colors, shapes and perfumes, the beauty of the skunk cabbage is like that of the earth itself-a rich, fecund, intricate, sometimes obscure sort of beauty. It is a beauty that results when living organisms evolve into near-perfect harmony with the soil, the rocks, the water, the other creatures that make their world - with their enviroment.
-February 19, 1987





I leave you with more pictures from my walk, along with Mary Oliver's wonderful poem about skunk cabbage.

Skunk Cabbage
And now as the iron rinds over
the ponds start dissolving,
you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding,
upon the brash
turnip-hearted skunk cabbage
slinging its bunches leaves up
through the chilling mud.
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein. Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!
But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again - a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.
-Mary Oliver