Tag: food

First fruits

nikkirwrightLeave a comment

Picking ripening apples and plums on garden trees, foraging for blackberries in gullies, watching swelling pumpkins and birds eating karaka and karamu berries. Today I’m acknowledging all the unpaid work of our pollinator neighbours which now bears juicy fruit under the midsummer heat. Food for all of us – humans and more-than-humans.

Artist, writer and psychotherapist Juliet Batten’s calls this time ‘First Fruits’ – Te Waru (Māori) Lugnasad (Celtic) Lammas (Christian). It celebrates early harvest time and is one of eight seasonal markers based on pre-Christian nature-based festivals, brought into rhythm with Aotearoa’s southern seasons and into a relationship with practices and knowledge of Te Ao Māori.

Link to Juliet Batten and her books

Lemon and Honey

nikkirwright3 Comments

Two incredibly good things made possible by insect pollinators. I’m stating the obvious of course.

But stirring the umpteenth cup of hot lemon and honey this week, for the whole family flattened by a nasty cold, the simple connectedness of it all, embodied in the therapeutic drink, strikes through my brain fog. The lemons, from a scraggy tree in the garden, were pollinated by bees and other insects several months ago. I remember watching them. And the multiflora honey, from local father and daughter beekeeper team Mike and Shona of Harris Road Honey, is made by honeybees, feeding on flowers around this neighbourhood. I stumble back to sleep, nourished by the drink and the interdependencies of insect, lemon tree, honey and human.