Author Archives: Jenny Wren

Jenny is a nature Essayist and cozy mystery author living in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, between the mountains and the sea.

Bankrupting Billionaires In the Kitchen

The homespun foodies week in review, Sept 29 — Oct 4

If greed is written into our animal nature, then sharing is also there in equal measure. Greed tends to rear its horrid head only when there is a bounty. Those with little, both history and my own experience has proven, tend to share the most.

In a world ravaged by greed of a filthy billionaire class, how can we, the meek and meager, prevail?

We defund the billionaires.

To do this, we must opt out of their systems and step out of their bank accounts. The less we spend, the less power they have. Remember, the joy is not in the billions they already possess, but in the challenge of extracting more from the turnips we have allowed ourselves to become. We can’t continue to bankroll them, even if it makes our own lives a bit less comfortable.

Especially because it makes our own lives less comfortable. To relearn the joy of living with useful work to be done and cheerful company to be had could very well be the elixir for contentment that a discontent modern populace is seeking behind every screen and delivery service purchase.

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Our Food Choices Can Define Our Resilience

A recipe for community and self reliance

By 6 am my feet are always on the ground. Mornings are my siren song, and I begin my day with the birds — sometimes earlier in the winter months. When I was younger, this was a burden. Now, in my middle years, it is a delight.

On this late September morning summer has finally come to a crashing halt. The sound of rain against the window announces the arrival of fall more surely than the yellowing bigleaf maples.

The bronze orbs of ripening Asian pears catch my attention from my neighbors yard. We share 12 acres with our neighbor. In his yard is a small fruit orchard featuring pears, plums, and two apple trees that need a bit more TLC to produce well. An orchard he doesn’t harvest or care for, so he has granted us permission to treat it as our own.

I thank him with apple cakes and plum preserves.

Taking the day in hand, I glance at my phone. There is a message alert from the Buy Nothing app. My request to pick apples has been answered by someone with an apple tree in their yard but no need for the fruit. Their house is on the same street as one of my gardening clients, so stopping to pick a bucket or two won’t detract much time from my day.

In fact, it takes far less time than driving to the grocery store and buying apples. Even less time than earning the money that would otherwise be needed to purchase apples.

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Why I Am Done With Human Domestication

Are you a tame, wild, or domesticated animal?

Photo by Christopher Windus on Unsplash

The half acre of land that makes up my front yard is a mixture of lawn grasses, invasive plants, and native flora. Each morning, a menagerie of native mule and white-tailed deer, robins, and douglas squirrels commune and compete with introduced eastern gray squirrels, barred owls, and wild turkeys.

All are wild, although some of the mule deer and douglas squirrels are tamed due to their own choices and human meddling.

I, on the other hand, am domesticated. Uneasily I pace within the cage, both this physical home with window sizes and wall heights prescribed by international building codes, and the psychological home of for-profit work, infinite growth economics, and modern constructs of the good and proper life.

Inside, I am a wild animal, willing to be tamed but chafing at the bit of forced domestication.

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The Myth of the Patient Gardener

Garden lessons are life lessons

All great things start small. Photo by Filip Urban on Unsplash

Gardeners aren’t patient people.

Oh, it may appear to the uninitiated that gardeners are patient. How else do we wait so long for a seed to grow into a sprout and a sprout to grow large enough to produce a tomato? Who else can play a long game and plant a tree today knowing that it won’t provide shade enough to host a teddy bear picnic for at least another decade?

Yet, I still stand by my statement — gardeners ARE NOT patient people.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a new garden, particularly a new ornamental or cutting garden. All too often, in an effort to make the garden look full and established, small perennials are planted nearly on top of their neighbor.

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It’s Time to Let Go of the Brown Thumb Myth

Your thumb has nothing to do with your gardening ability

Photo by Katya Ross on Unsplash

“I have a brown thumb,” Jan said apologetically, “I mean, it’s so bad that even silk flowers curl up and die.”

The rose bush I had planted a few weeks earlier was dropping its leaves and looking a bit yellow, but it wasn’t dead. I knelt beside it and dug my fingers into the soil. The roots were still firm and there was no sign of slime. We weren’t too late.

I smiled at Jan in an attempt to put her at ease. She had hired me because she had always dreamed of being a gardener, but she didn’t know the first thing about gardening. My job wasn’t just to install plants, it was also to teach her how to garden.

“You don’t have a brown thumb, just a heavy hand with the watering can.” I couldn’t help but chuckle, “You’re loving this poor rose to death!”

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The Day I Spared Peter Rabbit

Beneath dead earth new life arises

Photo by Davies Designs Studio on Unsplash

I was wading knee deep through the fallen soldiers in a wasteland of death. The skeletal remains of heather, a sword fern, and countless other shrubs and perennials that could no longer be identified crunched underfoot.

Someone, in the not-too-distant past, had tried to eradicate a horsetail problem by dousing the entire garden border with a broad-spectrum herbicide. The only living things that remained were the prehistoric green fronds of the horsetails themselves.

I levered my spade underneath one of the heather remains and pushed it upward. A frantic squeaking accompanied the severing of the plant’s roots. I quickly stepped back and surveyed the scene before me.

With the heather gone, I could clearly see a small burrow with a lining of soft brown and white fur sticking out.

Oh no. Bunny nest.

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Happiness Will Ruin Your Life

Choose contentment and you choose life.

Photo by Timothy Rose on Unsplash

26 years ago Irvine Welsh’s Choose Life Monologue from his book Trainspotting made it’s movie debut:

“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

And, like so many before and after me, that’s exactly what I set about doing.

Although Welsh was writing about the heroin epidemic destroying Edinburgh, these words perfectly sum up the American dream that was piped into my house via Friday Night Laugh Packs and Saturday Morning Cartoons throughout my 1980s childhood. It was the same dream, now upsized, that was sold to my parents in the decades following the wars that DIDN’T end all wars.

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