Fast Grow the Weeds

Time for a move

2007-12-22T09:03:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone,

Please update your information. I know it is a pain, and I apologize. I have moved shop over to here: http://fastgrowtheweeds.com/

Greenhouse statistics

2007-12-20T07:10:00.000-05:00

Cold day atop Mont Merde: the greenhouse is MUCH taller than it appears in this picture

Many have asked, so here it goes:

Coldframe, high tunnel, hoop house, polytunnel: we just call it The Greenhouse. Folks: It will add a zone and a half to your growing season. My 6B garden? An 8A, people...Panhandle Florida!

I got the greenhouse kit from an outfit in Tennessee called Grower's Solution. The guy on the phone was both supremely friendly and extremely kind, answering my myriad questions as well as easily and quickly supplying a hardware shortage (one measly part!). I had hoped to use a local manufacturer for my greenhouse, but my request was a small one, and the local outfit doesn't deal with little orders like mine. Sigh.

The goods: It's 16' wide, 20' long, about 9' high in the center, and is composed of six bows (arches) that are set in ground stakes 4' apart. For ease of shipping, the bows are in three pieces: you screw them together to create one bow. It has one central purlin (center pole) that ties the bows together. If it were self-standing and 4' longer, it would require more bracing; as it is, it relies on a building for its one end and it is free-standing at its door end. For ventilation, I purchased one hand-rolled side (it rolls the plastic up about 4' off the ground on one long side) and created one large gable vent above the door.

You are supposed to supply the ground boards and the end framing for the end wall (in wood); they supply the plastic to cover the whole thing, and the channels and wiggle wire to hold the plastic to the bows.

We (i.e., nonmotivated husband and myself) hammered in the ground stakes, screwed together and erected the bows, and attached the purlin in under two hours. It was Instant Gratification, I do not lie. But then it was my work from then on: I excavated the ground on 3 sides to both bury hardware cloth and the 2x8 wood ground anchor and then erect the 2x4 notched studs for the end wall/door framing. This actually took me two whole days to do...separated by a week, of course, because, really, who has two full days to work on anything?

Putting the plastic on was another battle with the husband (that is, getting his free time). He committed finally on a day that was windy: I advise you not to put plastic on a greenhouse in the wind. Ever. But that was our fate. We anchored the plastic to the endmost bow (against the building) and then went from bow to bow until we reached the door end, kind of like pulling pantyhose over a reluctant leg. That wiggle wire is quite amazing stuff. It really is great at holding down the plastic film. The film is graded to last of 6 years without significant UV decomposition: I have heard neighbors say they've gotten 8 years of use, which rather helps me, as plastic is not exactly the most eco-friendly of things. We held the plastic down to the last bow with some pre-soaked 1x2 furring strips.

I say this all with a rather blase' attitude. I here admit that I am a builder of many things: neither construction nor power tools intimidate me (hahahaHA), but, well, if you have never held a hammer nor worn a toolbelt, then putting up your own greenhouse could be a challenge. (Compared to building our coop? This was a walk in the park.) But I will say that Tom's purchase of a hammer drill greatly eased our pain: it helped put the bows together and helped put the channel atop the bows in, like, no time at all. I had gone along just fine with my 14 amp cordless drill for two houses' worth of renovations; Tom has helped me see the light with his 18a Drill of Pain. I admit, I was impressed. (I still like mine better.)

Am I saying you all need to go out and erect a hoop house in your backyards? Well, absolutely! (I'm getting salads and veggies out of my garden in late December, are you?) Just read this guy's books, read his wife's gardening columns and book, and yes, you too shall Sip The Kool-Aid.

Greenhouse in the plural

2007-12-19T07:40:00.001-05:00

Tasty but rare

Getting the coffee going this gray, ugly morning, my husband and I were discussing full-spectrum lights. It seems one of our friends uses them to avoid S.A.D.

I told him I tend to just go into the greenhouse at midday, when I get a little tired of working. "I think it helps, just sitting in there for five minutes," I said.

"Yeah, I went in there too recently. It smelled just wonderful." (This from the guy who expresses zero interest in my gardening, except at suppertime.)

I told him I hated to be so stingy with all the greenhouse's contents. The salads we have had from there are positively heavenly, so tender and deeply colored. (FWIW, it is not fully planted: construction ran too late for some seedlings, and then an escaped chicken made a mess of my mache bed. It will be full when the sun swings back into our hemisphere, say, in February.)

"Maybe we should build another one, then," he said.

And here I was, wondering how the heck I was going tell him I think we should build a second one next year!

Moving away from this site

2007-12-18T09:04:00.001-05:00

Hey, I need some input from you non Blog**er people out there. Where should I go, type8pad, word8press? I am looking to free sites, so any input would be appreciated.

OH, and the reason I am considering a move? COMMENTS! It's hard to do here! So email me or, if it is not too arduous, leave a comment.

the email is fastweedpuller at gmail dot com.

Thanks in advance, kind readers!

Orcharding, or, Greater Field Domination

2007-12-17T08:58:00.000-05:00

Soon, poor neglected tree, I will bring you friends!

'Tis the time of year for lots of planning. Right now, I am planning my first orchard.

'Tis true, I have apple, plum, (and one) peach trees extant on this farm already. I've got currants, gooseberries, blueberries and strawberries, and that elusive lingonberry, too. And I am in the Fruit Belt, which means that relying on others' efforts to sustain our fruit habit is actually a very inexpensive endeavor: I can get bushels of fruit for an eighth of what you all are paying for it, or less, with no exaggeration.

So I will let the Fruit Belt sustain us with the genus Prunus persica (peaches). Peaches are beautiful but fussy things, well suited to folks with deeper pockets than my own. And I'll look elsewhere for blueberries, though we have them too here on the farm; for vast quantities, I easily can just go to a friend's farm, or, if lazy, I will go to the fruitstand and shell out a whopping $18 for 10 pounds. Yea, people: behold, the Promised Land of fruit production.

(I once went apple searching when I lived in Minnesota. They wanted--I shit you not--$48 for a HALF bushel of McIntosh. It was dispiriting, and it factored in to my desire to move here. Apples should not cost $2 per.)

Why plant my own, if not doing so is so cheap? Oh boy, if you have to ask that question, well, you've only started reading this site then. Let's just say I ADORE a challenge, and am very interested in permaculture. So I am platting my land for the fruits of the genus Malus domestica (apples, baby. Lots of apples: twelve varieties to complement my native two). Pears as well: these are always welcome. Oh, and apricots and cherries. These latter fruits are bird-prone, and will be put at the north of the main garden to act as a windbreak, but also to help me keep away the birds. Throwing nets over them will help.

There are also plans for an arbor of just hops. (Beer.)

Of course, I am looking long-range: I won't harvest my first apple until probably 2010. Do I mind this? No, I do not. My first pawpaw will be harvested in 2019! My first wine grapes (the ones I planted in 2005) in 2009! In other words, if you're planning an orchard, you are planning to stay put and, uh, put down roots.

More on seed-saving

2007-12-16T13:10:00.001-05:00

Very dear to me

The tone of my most recent post was rather flip. Granted, I do cast a jaundiced eye on most of the world, particularly the world of commerce (in this instance, seed catalogs), but on occasion I actually am reverential.

And today, I revere my seeds. Today I am back in my cold basement, cleaning and sorting seeds, shelling dried beans and the like. I look at what is in front of me and I feel positively giddy.

Especially with the winds howling and the snow blowing outside, I feel like I am the keeper of a vast store of botanical wealth. Seed-saving, like bread-baking and vineyard maintenance, are three very particular activities which connect me with the past. My great-great grandparents would know this feeling, and would know the value of saving the seeds of this year's harvest. They'd know the love and the satisfaction that goes into kneading and forming loaves of bread. They'd have enjoyed the small labor that is vineyard and orchard maintenance, especially considering the vast reward found in a successful harvest. They would be appreciative, in other words.

I will tell you this: there is not much in this world for which I would trade my hills of beans.

On seeds and seed-saving

2007-12-15T08:12:00.000-05:00

'Mama, these flowers don't smell': the kid with the parsnip umbrels last spring: as you can see, I'll have enough parsnip seed next year

It's happening earlier every year: this inrush of seed catalogs into our mailboxes. Is it a good thing?

I wonder. I suppose the earlier they show up, they've got the advantage that we haven't wholly forgotten the previous garden season (and then buy accordingly). But then I wonder about this, too: I would think that a forgetful gardener, snow-deadened late in the winter season, would be the best customer. So happy for greenery would he or she be, the orders would be flying. I am quite sure, though, they've market tested all of this, and have decided the holiday stressed gardeners out there need to spend their money on seeds TOO.

Boy, I sound bitter. This is not the case. I enjoy getting these catalogs (within reason). Mainly, I enjoy getting them and huffily sniffing at them that "I would never plant THAT," and various forms of the same.

But over the last two years, I have become a seed-saver. This started small (as all bad habits do: it's just a little bit of cocaine, officer) and now, well, now I am a bit overwhelmed. I undertook the task of placing the darned things in some recognizable order last night, down in the chilly basement, accompanied by loud music and a big mug of wine. I'll say it was fun, but that may have been the wine talking. I will say I probably don't NEED to order any seeds this year, I have done such a good job preserving my last harvests. That is gratifying, but not...satisfying.

So, I will give in, probably in January, and order more seeds. In this, our hyperconsumerist culture, I could always...use...more.

On seasonal food preferences

2007-12-13T08:28:00.001-05:00

Big bowl of yum

When the days start getting shorter, I notice lots of changes in my habits. I'd like to think that moving to a farm and actually being outside for some period of time every day has tuned me in more to the tilt of the planet, but I think it's more ingrained than that. I think it's biological in nature. Evolutionary biology, to be exact. Bear with me here. As far as I can trace them, my forebears came from either Ireland or France (and many more from the former than the latter). Both of these places see lots less light at this time of year than my little farm does, which, latitude-wise, is as far south as Rome. I have no known biological ties to Russia, but that is where my thoughts go at this time of year.

It is usually in November that I pick up a particularly long book to read, sometimes Russian; this year it's the Oxford imprint (Maude translation) of War and Peace. Maybe it's the early, Doctor Zhivago-inspired visions I had of an icy dacha, but I adore the good long slog in a sledge that a Russian novel reliably provides me at this time of year. It's colder there than here, I tell myself, and darker too. So I tend to put the child to bed and then climb into bed myself, armed with my book, quite early in the evening.

And it is this time of year that, if given the choice, I will always choose a starch over any other food form. Bread, yes, of course; but also potatoes and (xoxoxo) beets, as I love them so. So I read an article like this one with interest: perhaps starch is just something I have been adapted to crave to, uh, tide me over until spring comes again. It's a nice rationalization, really, as I grab my third beet of the week (and these the size of grapefruit).

But think about it. What DID people eat three hundred years ago to sustain them through a long winter? (In places where winter is an issue, that is.) And the answer, reliably, is starch: starch in the forms of roots like rutabagas, turnips, and sugarbeets. And potatoes, that new world wonder.

So bring on the borscht, baby.

Gardening and the theory of Always

2007-12-11T08:27:00.000-05:00

Maybe next year

If all these years of dirt-digging have taught me anything, the one thing I can definitely say is the word "Always" has no place in the garden.

I think there is something very gratifying in this statement, even though it's a statement of insecurity. If there were an always, or a never, we would not try to plant things outside of our hardiness zone, or we would give up after one failed crop.

But it is a truism that pisses me off sometimes. I went into the main outdoor garden on Saturday, scissors and colander in hand, to retrieve some lacinato kale and parsley. I had a big pot of my navy beans boiling on the stove inside and needed the greenery to add to make soup. And lo, in the snow-covered garden, I was met with...green mush. What happened? This has never happened before, I have ALWAYS been able to harvest kale and parsley all year!

There is that word: always. It is humbling in its absence.

It also means that three seasons in one garden does not a pattern make, four is better and 15 better than that: I will know, in 2019, if I can expect kale and parsley to be reliably hardy. It means I have a lot of growing to do, too.

Another non-gardening post

2007-12-09T08:28:00.000-05:00

Hey! Allow me a bit of spousely bragging. My husband's book came in as book #100 of Amazon's Best Books of 2007!

My comment: "Somebody had to be #100."
His response: "Better than #101."

FYI: it's an art book, in a toddler's board-book layout. Uh, it could be considered a bit too naughty for your average toddler, but our daughter has taken it to school at Show and Tell (and she's pushing 4). You can see more of Tom's work here.

This really should just be a garden blog...

2007-12-07T16:16:00.001-05:00

Not edible, but pretty

...but I seem to have other food-related interests, though, especially during the non-food-growing winter months. Could it be I simply have more time on my hands?

Anyway, I thought I would share some "food activist" things I have been doing.

My daughter goes to a private school. There is no lunch program, so lunches are up to a child's caregivers, but snack (yes, snack) is up to the school. Last year and the year before that, I worked with a friend of mine to do an organic box scheme wherein we got lots of California veggies and fruits and sold them, in boxes, to some interested families in the school two times a month. This was fun, but...let's face it, it wasn't local, so I felt pretty guilty about those boxes. Our reason for doing was twofold: any profit we made went right back into the snack program, AND our buying power enabled us to buy the kids lots of wonderful fresh fruit and veggies for their midmorning snack.

So this year, well, we kind of dropped the ball by dropping the box (scheme). And now? Now the kids get things like knockoff Chex mix for snack. Chex mix, and #10 cans of pears. (Egads, how far we have fallen.)

This made us a little angry. We're now back at it, this time by starting a Slow Food Convivium that is centered in the school itself. It seems there is a convivium already in our area, and that it was actually the first one in the U.S., but their mission (dinners and wine) and ours (child/parent nutritional education) is different. So, starting in January, we'll be doing Slow Snack two days a week.

Another thing I have recently done is start a buyers' club. A local buyers' club! One of the places we get things from is a new co-op in Grand Rapids. It is a virtual farmers' market: there is NO bricks-and-mortar store. Monthly, members simply order their items online and then pick them up about a week later at a warehouse. This co-op is fascinating, as it is ONLY LOCAL ITEMS from local farmers; grass-fed meats, organic veggies and fruits, home products, knitted goods, soaps... And, get this: they thought I lived too far away!!! So I said the magic word ("buyers' club") and bingo, I am now a member. I place orders with 4-5 of my friends.

Other places we're getting our goodies from are an organic farm near Lansing that mills their own grains, grows their own beans, etc. (They have been my primary source for flour for a while now.) We can still use our California organics source for things like kiwi, avocados, and citrus fruits. And we also "know a guy" (always helpful) who roasts coffee as a hobby, and is able to get fair-trade organic coffee at the fairly traded price, thus charging us only $6 a pound.

Again, my point in telling you all this is to give you some ideas. Child nutrition is a no-brainer in my mind. That my child doesn't know what a marshmallow or a hotdog are is something I'm proud of, frankly. And as for the buyers' club, it helps to pool resources, I think, as there's lots more purchasing power in big orders. (By getting flour delivered to my house in hundreds of pounds, for example, I am able to save big bucks than if I only bought 25 pounds of the stuff.) And as you all know, I think food is very, very important: especially good food. So I put my money where my mouth is.

Life in the batting cage

2007-12-06T10:42:00.000-05:00

Phyllis in a more lushly feathered phase

The hawk (a hawk?) came back, and attacked poor Phyllis, our sole Ameraucana (blue/green egg layer). Luckily, I was around, and chased the bird off. What a horrible potential death, though: and yes, don't chide me about the "circle of life" and all that: the chicken doesn't die immediately, it gets ripped apart, bite by bite, while the hawk straddles its neck and tail with its talons. Ouch.

So she's missing a few feathers now, and is a bit more of a chicken chicken. The attack led me to move one fence line in about 30'. Their run is now about 45' wide and maybe 50-60' long. And I undertook a big crafting project: I covered the whole thing with deer netting, and sewed the 7.5' wide pieces together.

Ice caught on the deer netting at the coop's eave

Thus, the batting cage (thank you, Tom).

He suggested making a chicken wire geodesic dome, a la Bucky Fuller: hey, El, we could electrify it, he said.

On eating local in a Michigan December

2007-12-04T09:11:00.001-05:00

I'm so pretty: Treviso-type radicchio in the cold, cold ground

Remember One Local Summer? Well, one brave soul decided to continue the idea of producing, eating and then posting one locally sourced dinner per week over the course of the winter. Laura at Urban Hennery has found more willing folks who are also giving it a try: go check out the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge.

I did not do this challenge. My reason for withholding is simple: with all food in our larder locally produced, there isn't much of a challenge to be had. This sounds like bragging. It's not: it's just me being single-minded. Admittedly, I thought ahead; this wasn't something I just started to do. I just wanted to show you that, with a little forethought, you might be able to do the same.

My weekly meals rely fairly heavily on making fresh, filling breadstuffs, and on the contents of our freezer/root cellar/canned goods. Lunches are usually leftover dinner. I try hard to mix up the vegetable offerings, but mostly I use up what is fresh first before moving into the deep freeze stash of last summer's veggies. Most of our salads nowadays are fruit-focused, with lots of apples and pears mixing it up with the heartier cabbages, fennel, celeriac and radicchio fresh out of the gardens.

So here's a sample of this week's local eating at Chez El.

Sunday:
Eggs and toast for brunch, with jam (strawberry or Damson plum this week)
Dinner (with company!) of minestrone soup, frozen from August's beany bounty; roast chicken with potatoes and carrots in the roasting pan; roasted beets; oaty whole-wheat bread and a fennel/bosc pear salad

Monday:
Oatmeal for breakfast with applesauce for the sweetener
Lunch of either a cheese or chicken sandwich on the oaty bread; apple
Dinner of biscuits and gravy (with pan drippings from Sunday's chicken dinner, as well as a few pulls of leg meat in there too) with a salad of "hot" coleslaw (think warmed spinach salad); dessert of cranberry muffins (10 lbs. of cranberries from Thanksgiving: luckily, we like them! I've frozen them in 2-cup portions)

Tuesday:
Breakfast of cranberry muffins and applesauce
Lunch of biscuits/honey, fruit, and cheese
Dinner of Michigan-made spaghetti and a jar of tomato sauce

Wednesday:
Eggs and toast for breakfast
Leftover spaghetti for lunch with apple or pear
Soup night: either something with the stock made from Sunday's chicken or potato/leek or potato/kale soup. New whole-wheat loaf, salad from the greenhouse.

Thursday:
Eggs and toast for breakfast, with jam
Lunch of leftover soup, cranberry muffin and apple
Dinner of vegetarian chili with cornbread: my beans, peppers, tomatoes; local Bloody Butcher cornmeal; canned peaches for dessert

Friday:
Cornbread with honey and homemade yogurt with fruit for breakfast
Cheese sandwich or leftover chili for lunch with yogurt/apple for dessert
Dinner of root mashers with steamed cabbage thrown in: think Colcannon without the cheese; salad of shaved celeriac and apple; toast with butter

Saturday:
Porridge (5-grain) for breakfast with fruit
Quick soup for lunch (either out of the freezer or off the shelves downstairs: tomato, eggplant/tomato, or something bean-y) with bread
Dinner of leftover lunch soup, herbed omelet, pan-roasted potatoes, roasted cauliflower; apple tart for dessert

What this weekly sampling kind of tells you is we've got lots of variety. Olive oil and butter are my big out-of-foodshed weaknesses, but lately, I have found a local source for soybean oil, and it is okay, especially for baking. The spaghetti and the cheese were the only things I purchased that were "ready-made," all else is just stuff I chop up and have either cooked and canned/frozen earlier, or am chopping and cooking for the day. Bread gets made about 3-4 times a week, with quickbreads like biscuits or cornbread filling in the gaps. I am not a maniacal breadmaker, though; I often rely on some slow-rising sourdough or a variant of the no-knead method. We free-range on apples and pears in the winter; our root cellar is fairly full of these fruits now. Not much goes to waste, certainly. The chicken carcass always becomes soup or stock, cooking all night and then refrigerated in the morning to be picked over later. The stock is usually then frozen with the meat, sometimes without, it just depends. I also am VERY stingy with the greenhouse greens! Those babies need to grow a bit so January and February aren't so dire. I am also, for some unknown reason, saving all my winter squash. Maybe it's because I am the only one who really truly loves it in the household...who knows.

If this helps just one person think about how he or she can eat closer to home, I will feel gratified. And if anyone would like my sources or recipes, please let me know. Local winter eating can be done, and I swear it doesn't have to be boring!

(Luckily, though, we do like pears and apples.)

Thoughts for Monday

2007-12-03T06:58:00.001-05:00

For $1.98 per seed pack, these too can be yours!

"Eat responsibly. [E]ating is an agricultural act....(consumers of food) must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.... This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship."*

Wanna commit an agricultural act of your own? Our mailbox has already seen a couple of seed catalogs this year. When they arrive at your place, do a little bookmarking, and do a bit more mental gardening for next year: how about more vegetables? It will be so fun, and so very good to eat! And, well, it might just make you feel a bit more connected with your world.

*What Are People For? by Wendell Berry (New York: North Point Press, 1990)

Garden Rant

2007-11-30T08:27:00.000-05:00

HEY dear readers!

I am ranting today at Garden Rant. Go check it out.

xoxo

On apostacy

2007-11-28T15:48:00.000-05:00

Me, outstanding in my (septic) field: view from Mont Merde
Apostacy: from Greek αποστασία, meaning a defection or revolt, from απο, apo, "away, apart", στασις, stasis, "standing"

I understand dogma, I understand rules. Rules are out there for many very good reasons: for social cohesion, for safety, for clarity. Dogma is an interesting nut. It throws rules and religion (or at the very least, orthodoxy) into the works.

What does it mean to cheat, though? Cheating has been a purely academic exercise for me for a while now. There is nothing that stirs me up enough that I feel I need to cheat at it. There is nothing in my life (and I consider myself highly fortunate to have achieved this state) that I wish to cheat on, or from. No strictures, no bridles, no ties from which I wish to loosen myself, nothing that I feel I am denied or in want of that I need to bend, or break, life's rules to get, or to achieve. Again, I feel fortunate.

But (and there is ALWAYS a "but")...but, in this life I lead now of living with less, in so doing, I am continually restricting my access to "the great more" that is out there. I cut up my credit cards before I went to grad school. That was nearly twenty years ago, so I suppose I am out of the habit of credit spending; should I go out and get one, and go wild? Should I buy a gas-guzzling vehicle, just because I have denied myself the pleasure of driving one, these last ten years that I have had my miserly one? Should I leave a light on all night? Should I plug the dryer back in?

Should I eat meat again?

Ah. There is the rub. We're plumbing the depths of my own personal orthodoxy. I have been a vegetarian for, what is it now, either 15 or 16 years. A long time, in other words. I have been a vegetarian on moral grounds: I really did not think anything needed to die to keep me alive. (And yes, that, like any orthodoxy, is hairsplitting: how many poor little fieldmice and bunnies had to die to cultivate my grain and bean meals?) My main reason for it is I just did not want to eat anything that had been badly treated, and let's face it, the vast majority of the meat animals in this country have lives of horror and pain. I just couldn't turn a blind eye to CAFOs and continue to enjoy a rare steak.

But now, now in this world, there are animals that have been humanely raised, pasture fed, living their lives out the way they naturally would have lived, or at least how they'd lived on farms of 100 years ago. And this meat is available widely, if you look.

My new dogma, or rather my walking papers, are another big nut: local eating, low impact lifestyle, thrift, living close to the land, doing things ourselves, permaculture. I grow my own food, I raise my own chickens for eggs. This spring, I will raise my own chickens for meat. Turkeys too, and maybe ducks.

What has come over me? A hard look at our household, that is what. I'm looking at things like the nutritional needs of a growing child. I am looking more to traditional foods. I am also looking at the fossil fuels that are expended to continue to supply my Michigan-based vegetarian diet. Some studies have stated that omnivorous lifestyles actually use less land than pure vegetarian ones do...and that is intriguing, in these trying times. I am all about having a smaller footprint on this earth.

I am often asked if I ever really missed eating meat in all those flesh-free years. Yes, I did cheat on occasion: our annual family clambakes were my once-a-year binge on molluscs, and there were times I tried bites of things off others' plates. But I never went through Wendy's drive-thru or anything. (Bleck, the idea gives me the willies, frankly.) It just did not appeal; my life, and my palate, were well sated on the diet I have had.

But it is with some reluctance that I here admit that I have become an apostate to the vegetarian lifestyle. We are now practicing a diet of meat from one animal every other week or so. I usually stretch things far, so the beast's sacrifice is spread over many different meals. It is my goal to know the animals I will kill and eat. But now, we are only eating animals from farms we have visited, from farmers we know. We have seen them alive. In a couple of cases, like our turkey, I have seen them killed. For our family, for our life here, this is just enough syncretism to make complete sense to me: occasional meat-eating is the answer, frankly, to the trajectory of the life that has led me to this farm.

Floral wonder

2007-11-28T09:03:00.000-05:00

We had a HUGE dinner of just salad last night. It is getting mighty cold, so up came all the greenery that was still hanging on out in the gardens (I had it under some Reemay) and into the kitchen it went. Slight frost damage, but otherwise, yum.

Today, though? Today? VERY cold out there. That snow is gone, as I mentioned...but now it is a crackling 28*. I went to the garden after feeding those chilly chickens this morning, and was surprised by the blooms I found. Calendula is quite amazing. Though after today, it will be gone, too. (Big sigh.)

Girl in the plastic bubble

2007-11-27T08:36:00.002-05:00

View from my chair: yes, it's gray. It's winter in Michigan after all.

Three o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday: I had finished my chores, so I went back in the house, poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed a book, and went back into the greenhouse. It is a bit early to be hitting the sauce, admittedly, but I had lots to celebrate. My greenhouse was 98% finished, 100% enclosed.

Sssh! Plants are sleeping: double-coverage this morning. Chair in middle, fig trees wrapped up, 6 of the 8 raised beds in view

I was warned that there is not much to do in a cold-frame greenhouse in the wintertime except harvest. And wait. Seems I will do a lot of waiting, watching that produce grow. (I am okay with that, really I am.)

Winter slinks in, slinks back

2007-11-25T10:58:00.000-05:00

Penny loves the snow

It was quite beautiful, looking out the steamy kitchen window on Thanksgiving day, watching those fluffy snowflakes fall. I knew it was coming. It was Lake Effect snow: a rather common occurrence around here. I was surprised, on moving here and practicing architecture, that the requirements for roof members (structures) weren't more stringent: our average winter will see something like 70-80" of snowfall. But the reason they're not so tough? The stuff melts. Quickly.

And so it is, looking outside today: I knew the ground wasn't frozen yet, and that 5" of snow didn't have a chance to stick around. The chickens and guineas are happy. They see their precious grass again, and they've found their dirt-bath dirt. About every half hour I am scared witless by ice crashing from the house roof onto the porch roofs (metal roofs on all both expedite and amplify this effect).

I step outside and look toward the back of the property, looking northeast. The leaves have finally fallen off the trees, and the world is still white, at least for a little while. I hear the roof dripping, and I smell...I smell nearly nothing, just that great outdoor fresh-air smell. No vegetative funk, no burning leaves, just the winter air. I can just hear the sound of the lake's waves crashing, but I need to strain to hear it.

This snow will go. We'll get one more grass cutting/leaf pickup done, probably within two weeks, and then we'll steady ourselves for winter in earnest, when the snow comes and stays.

And if I grow to miss that smell of vegetation, I will just need to step into the greenhouse to smell it again.

First snow

2007-11-23T16:30:00.000-05:00

Pauline and the guineas, unhappy with the white stuff
First snow for the new chickens and guineas. The guineas were not pleased, and spent half the morning voicing their complaints.

First snow means of course first snow man

And the first snow means I can still get my gardening jones fixed, as it was toasty and warm in here. I need to compose a sonnet, describing my love of this greenhouse.

100 Mile Thanksgiving (burp)

2007-11-23T09:36:00.000-05:00

Whee! Loosen that belt!

--Roasted butternut squash soup (my squash, veg stock, nonlocal butter and curry powder)
--Salad from the greenhouse and what is still out there in the snow
--20.75 lb. hen turkey from Providence Farms, roasted with home herbs under her skin (parsley, rosemary, winter savory, thyme and sage)
--Giblet gravy with a white wine reduction
--Mashed homegrown Russet potatoes with homemade yogurt and nonlocal butter
--Stuffing, both in and out of the bird, with my usual bread and cornbread and celery from here; onions, parsley, sage, thyme homegrown; Maldon salt and homemade vegetable stock
--Brussels sprouts: my two, plus one more stalk from Eaters' Guild
--Roasted root veggies: my few cute sweet potatoes, fennel, turnips and small white onions in a balsamic glaze
--Mashed rutabagas at my mother's insistence
--Caramelized local chestnuts
--Corn spoon bread with local corn (canned by me in August) and Bloody Butcher cornmeal from here; eggs from our girls, veg stock from home
--Cranberry sauce with sugar from the Thumb (+100 miles, but Michigan grown!)
--Applesauce from our trees and that Thumb sugar
--Pumpkin pie and an apple pie (homegrown pumpkins and apples) with flour from here and nonlocal butter in the crust.
--Local wine and homegrown grape juice for toasting

We had eight people, and today we've not got a lot of leftovers, except that huge turkey, which is today destined for sandwiches and soup.

I feel rather pleased that I was able to provide all the vegetables except two. Next year, we are venturing into Turkey Land ourselves (and some meat chickens, too) so I will hopefully be able to reduce the food miles even more. And I keep threatening to get a milk cow for that demon butter I am so very fond of, but that's just me dreaming.

I hope you all had a wonderful, delightful, thankful holiday.

Cheapo garlic

2007-11-20T08:37:00.001-05:00

Some naturalized cloves

Have you planted your garlic yet?

Like spring bulbs, garlic cloves are planted in the fall in this part of the world. My garlic is planted: I made a fairly large purchase from Filaree Farm last year, and saved some good-looking heads from this year's harvest to set out this fall. (Getting bulbs from a local farmer's market is also an idea: if they grow for them, they'll grow for you. Just make sure you ask if THEY have grown them!) But making a big purchase is not the only way to go about getting garlic.

Now, to be frank, growing big, beautiful heads of garlic is not always an easy thing to do. I'm getting rather boring by repeating how tough my clay soil is on most things, but let's just add garlic to that list, too, okay? But if big garlic is what you are after, then by all means buy your seed garlic from a knowledgeable place like Filaree: the catalog is long, and they will gladly make suggestions to you regarding your area. And growing place-appropriate garlic is important. Most of the allium family are sensitive to day length, so that store-bought California stuff will just not do all that well for you in Indiana. It's not you, in other words, it's the garlic!

But as I have mentioned here before, I just do not like waste. And occasionally, some of the kitchen's cloves will sprout, turning into rank little sulfur bombs as they do. My solution? Stick the danged things into a corner of the garden, and let them do their thing. They won't get big, they will spread (nicely, though), and...voila, instagarlic. I find I use it as green garlic, and I readily snip off the greens for a salad or soup topping, and, well, I will harvest a minihead and pound the snot out of it in the mortar just because.

On things going well in the garden

2007-11-19T05:18:00.000-05:00

Par-cel cutting celery and wildling garlic greens

Two days in the garden can do wonders for one's spirits. (One's back, though? Ouch!)

There is much still green in the vegetable beds. It dips below freezing nightly now, so I am a bit surprised by all the photosynthetic fireworks still out there. The above has been my "new favorite thing," and really, something THIS green and showy, so late in the year? It's a tonic.

And it has been used as a tonic, too. This stuff is definitely more celery than parsley, taste-wise, but is used more like parsley, chop-it-up-wise: its leaves are a little stiff, but do cook down easily. I have planted oodles of it, and it's a good thing, too, as it's been the green of choice for all those jars of vegetable stock sitting in rows downstairs. I just adore it. It will go into the mounds of stuffing I am making for Thursday's big pig-out.

I didn't find it too tough to sprout, though I did plant it indoors very early, with the Italian flat-leafed parsley. It's a biennial, so...I only expect to get to use it through the winter; once the sun comes back in earnest next spring, it'll shoot into flower. But then again, I will have a bunch of seedlings to set out, and so it goes...

On the efficacy of tears

2007-11-17T07:57:00.000-05:00

Thank you all for your warm sentiments. I appreciated the cyber-hugs!

Gardens, in the scheme of things, are nothing to cry over. I didn't lose my job, I didn't lose a loved one in a war, I don't have an incurable disease. Those, frankly, are great reasons to cry.

My first thought, honestly, when I was pulling out the posts for the chicken fence were this: what's with the waterworks? Is this The Change Of Life? So even among the tears, I am always laughing at myself.

I'll tell you this, though: when Tom came back inside from talking with the propane guy, and heard me sobbing, he freaked OUT.

So, today, my task list is especially long. That chicken run needs to be put back up, as those happy birds again have free range, but they're easy targets for the hawks. The damage needs to be assessed in the herb garden. Compaction is a bigger problem than just getting smashed: this clay soil becomes positive concrete when it's run over. I think the only loss, as far as Thanksgiving is concerned, is the sorrel: it is ripped to shreds. And the fence needs to be put back up around the herb garden. And then there's all that other stuff I need to do.

I'm time-crunched is all. Considering I adore having lots to do in the gardens, you'd think getting one uprooted and another run over would be seen as opportunities by me!!!!

On tears

2007-11-16T07:01:00.000-05:00

I did something yesterday that I never do. I cried.

Yes, I am normally very much a tough cookie, and am not easily given over to much sentimentality or, indeed, to tears of any kind. My first reaction is usually anger. It's a wave, usually, of red-eyed steaminess that, with much social grace and coaching I have tamed to...well, at least a deep intake of breath before I blow my top.

And gardens are nothing to cry over, in the big scheme of things, but...

...the propane gas guy HAD to drive right over the kitchen herb garden yesterday. And I cried. I cried A LOT.

What the hell is THIS about, I wondered?

I guess it started with having to get our well replaced. I had to move a whole bed of perennials in order for that to happen. Have they moved back? No. Has the bed been reaugmented with lots of organic matter and new soil? No. Is the front yard still a clay-filled unsightly mess? Yes, why, yes it is!

So, what's with the propane guy? Is the driveway all of a sudden not big enough for him? Well, welcome, friends, to the joys of country living, where all services (electric, gas, water, sewer, trash, internet) are YOUR responsibility!!! There IS no city or township or county system to plug into. Propane is only (thankfully) used to heat up the hot water heater, and the dryer, which now sits unused. So our propane tank, a small lovely looking R2D2 thing outside the basement door, sprung a leak. You would walk outside and think: 'did something die under the back porch? By Dog it stinks out here.' So the whole tank had to be replaced, and he had to drive a big truck back there and boom the old tank out, new tank in. This required that I first remove the chicken fencing, remove the decorative fence around the garden, take one of the clotheslines down, and then go inside and cry.

(I should say I harbor absolutely no malice toward our propane guy. He is, though maybe 10 years younger, and sporting a 'I Heart Jesus' keychain, a dead ringer for Michael Moore. He is actually quite a sweet man, and he felt horrible about the garden.)

What's with the tears? I guess it is because I have absolutely no time to redo what has been undone. The greenhouse is only now just enclosed, the other gardens need to be put to rest, the compost needs to be made, leaves raked, chicken coop windows reinstalled, etc. etc. etc. No time for extras. So thus, I cry. It's the overwhelming hopelessness that I remember as a child: I have no power over this situation, these tears say. It's not a comfortable feeling.

One week countdown

2007-11-15T08:32:00.000-05:00

Thank you NYTimes

Anyone else out there experiencing a tiny bit of pre-Thanksgiving panic?

I guess it started on Tuesday night, when my mother came over for dinner. She began to grill me (lightly) about what she can do, what the menu was, what I had in the garden or in storage that she could take home with her that night to make ahead: I blanched. "I haven't gone down that path yet," I told her after I could breathe normally again.

You see, for we non-religious types, Thanksgiving is a high holiday. Scratch that: it is THE high holiday, as it celebrates food and companionship above all else. Last year, I did the 100-Mile Thanksgiving, and it was quite fun, quite festive, quite a bit of work on my part...but according to our guests, it was also quite tasty. This year I expect the same. Our one exception to the 100 miles is (as ever) butter.

So it is a week away, and I have begun my planning. We pick up our bird on Saturday; she is not a heritage breed, though next year our meat friends have conservancy on their agenda. I have found a new farm for flour and cornmeal. Wine and cider come from down the road. Most other things are coming out of the garden. Our few sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts will be lovingly prepared. I have already begun to cut up, dry, and freeze any leftover bread, biscuits and cornbread we've had for the future stuffing. I even found a source for local cranberries, something that was missing at last year's table.

So, why the panic if I have all the goods? I don't know. Maybe because I have to work on Wednesday!

Canning season is finally finished

2007-11-13T10:43:00.001-05:00

"Aack, what IS that? You're KILLING me," says Tom, coming down the stairs to the kitchen. I am scraping off the top layer of sauerkraut from the crock in which it had been fermenting.

So that three heads of cabbage that I chopped and salted in late September have yielded six quarts of sauerkraut. Personally, I thought it was a tad salty coming out of the crock, but the canning instructions said to add some fresh water to the warming pot, so actually the kraut is quite tasty. (You heat the kraut to boiling before you ladle it into the waiting canning jars. Then, it's processed in the pressure canner for about 20 minutes at 10 pounds' pressure.) It's crunchy and somewhat briny and definitely has that cabbage stink that makes my husband gag.

Tom, in no uncertain terms, has stated it will not be eaten if it finds its way onto his plate. (He's such an ingrate, isn't he?) But me? I'm a convert! Bring on the stinky stuff!

But gone now, until next year, is the metallic click and tonk of the cooling jars of goodies. Away, downstairs on a high shelf, now sit the ceramic crock, the monster pressure canner, and the small boxes of the screw-down lids. Two of the three food mills, the big water bath canners, and the extra bowls and scrapers too have made the trip downstairs. And do I have enough food, do I think I was successful in putting up enough victuals to feed us? I...do.

I might have to find a way to disguise the sauerkraut, though.

Fencing as a state of mind

2007-11-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

We fenced up the chickens recently, enclosing them in a large area of the yard behind some deer netting.

Last week, I was harvesting more spuds, this time in the greenhouse beds. The greenhouse is adjacent to the chickens' area. Bloody Beatrice let me know that, in no uncertain terms, their cage is really just a state of mind. She saw that I was digging up the dirt, and therefore had to join me.

The chickens were very young last year when they learned that a kneeling me with a trowel in my hands means there are worms and other goodies to be had. I have never been able to dissuade them otherwise. It's actually fairly amusing. It makes things like bulb-planting rather difficult (last year I had four birds vying for the gleanings). But I do enjoy the company.

And within no time, Beatrice's sister Bonnie made her way through the fence to "help" me.

Dirty progress

2007-11-11T12:41:00.000-05:00

Getting a lot accomplished with a small child around can sometimes be a challenge.

Lucky for us, we have no fear of dirt, and neither does the kid. So while her parents worked on the greenhouse, our kid tricked out my 4+ yards of topsoil, Three Little Pigs style.

This will be a short autumn I fear

2007-11-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

So the time to fritter and waste, thinking the cold weather will not hit us, has come and gone. I wasn't completely lax in my outdoor tasks, but there still is a large to-do list around here that needs to be checked off, item by item, before the snow comes for good.

Yes, snow. We've had our first blast of it: scatterings on the grass, peltings of hail on the windows.

I had another of my juicy rationalizations the other day: I can kid myself, being teased by sunshine and a wind-less day here and there, but winter is nigh at hand and the season for growing has finished for the year. The lawn furniture needs to be put away, the hammock taken down (always a sad day). My juicy rationalization is this: I am still gardening, a lot, and won't be prohibited from doing so until the ground freezes solid...something that doesn't happen until December 1st or so. And gardening for me begins around St. Patrick's Day, with peas, onions, and potatoes going in the ground, so: that's only, what, a little over three months of no gardening? Not bad!

But now, I scurry about, mostly with the trusty wheelbarrow. I am augmenting the existing beds in an effort to avert the flooding problems that befell the gardens this last August. The beds need to have lots more organic matter in them; the resident clay holds too much water. First I clear and weed the beds (if necessary), then I put down 2"+ dried grass mulch, then 3" new dirt, then 2"+ mostly not finished compost, then 2" dirt, then another 2" of chopped leaves and grass. (I have not forked up the existing ground; I know the worms and microbial friends will move upward, devoring what they find and doing the forking for me.) It is a lot of work, but it is fun to do in the early morning before work. Breathing is important when slinging shovels-full of dirt: I don't get winded, but it's nice, in the cold air, to feel a little sweaty.

I've always said gyms are for people who don't have farms!

Stalking the Amish

2007-11-06T06:58:00.000-05:00

I said I was going to stay away from religion in this blog, but today I am making an exception.

My friend Michele is a writer. This summer, in Ohio, she had a week to kill between dropping off and picking up her daughter and niece at summer camp, so she decided to avail herself of some of the local Amish community.

"Thinking I will learn something, I visit Amish country. Sure enough, there is nothing to do. As promised, I see people in buggies and on bicycles. I see boys fishing in ponds. I see people walking up and down roads. Everyone seems cheerful. I find a windmill maker, a birdhouse maker, a chair maker, a broom maker. None seem particularly anxious to sell anything.

In Yoder's store, where I buy a few hand-drawn coloring books, there is a small index card with writing, in script: 'Newlywed Special. 10% off furnishings for all newlyweds, to set up your new house. To be used by your first anniversary.' There are cups, and bowls, and plates, and coffeepots. There are dishtowels, and trivets. There is, in this small set of rooms where the only sound is that of a ticking clock, everything one could need for a house."

So I asked Michele about her experiences. Had she gone specifically to learn something, or had she gone merely to observe? Is she, as I asked her pointedly, a seeker?

No, she said, she is not a seeker. There is a Buddhist phrase she asked me if I knew of: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water." In other words, do things one at a time; they need to be done. She went looking to see if the Amish live their lives one task at a time. She did not come away with one answer.

I am struck by the image of that general store. It was not the Town Square general store of our minds a la Little House on the Prairie; it was a man's house, a few rooms of which were devoted to commerce. Can you imagine finding all you need to set up your house and live your life in one store? Sure, Target or Wall*Wart fit the bill, and, of course there are charity second-hand stores like Goodwill that could, too. But the idea of parsing your life down from what you want to what you only need? Now there, there is a thought to live by.

I believe we all find something inspiring in a willful existence. Unplugging from the hurly-burly craziness of 21st century life for an 18th century one sounds appealing to those of us trying to declutter and simplify our lives. It may not be THE answer, but there is something small there to learn. Chop wood...

On failures, part two

2007-11-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

I should clarify what I meant in my last post about failures. It's a failure of expectations.

Here is an example. Today was one of those nice cool fall days, perfect for garden work. I had a long task list but encountered too many obstacles to complete even half the list. For one, the wheelbarrow's wheel was underinflated, a fact I noted but did not stop to do anything about until, when it was fully loaded with dirt, I turned it hard and the tire completely deflated. Ahem. (This is one of those tube-less tires: the only way to refill it is to take it to a mechanic.) Considering I had lots to do with that wheelbarrow, I was rather peeved. Off came the wheel, and off it went with the husband to get reinflated.

So I undertook a bit of chopping therapy, dispatching old broccoli plants into tiny pieces for the compost. It helped me get back on track. And, if you breathe correctly, chopping with a machete is something you can do for a long time...or, well, at least I can. WHACK!

Here's the thing about crop failure. I *understand* crop failure. But crop failure, as a black and white concept, is fairly rare in a vegetable garden as varied as mine is. In other words, yes, I can and do expect reduced yield, but seldom is something completely written off. I did find a sweet potato or two today. Not the buckets I had expected, but really, it can't be a complete failure if I found a meal.

I have set out to produce everything we eat, year-round. This doesn't mean I have fields of wheat or corn, oats and rice in the back forty. What I do have is a full freezer, sagging shelves of canned goods and a somewhat wimpy cold cellar of stuff that I can grow. I have fallen short in the onions department, and it was a crummy year for the cole crops. Certainly, we will not starve; we could probably live on potato/leek soup all winter (with no exaggeration, such is my love of spuds and leeks). The winter garden is mainly greens: someone once said that at $5 a box of organic greens, my cold frame will pay for itself in a season, and...well, let's just say it will take two seasons.

For me, it is a moral imperative, this growing of stuff on our land. I have the land, I have the knowledge, I have the will. That I harvested only one broccoli romanesco means that that one plant was like Thanksgiving turkey: so celebrated was it, so lovingly prepared, so savored. (My two remaining Brussels sprout plants will actually BE Thanksgiving fare.) I am ever grateful I have the opportunity and the health to go out and bust up the sod, to coax stuff into being for our plates. I am sad when things don't grow well, that the critters or the weather lays waste to something. But I truly believe that this little thing I can do, using just my own sweat, is greatly helping the health of those I love...and the reduction of CO2 that growing things here instead of getting them from California helps this planet, and all of you, that I love, too.

On failures

2007-11-02T21:51:00.000-04:00

Entire sweet potato harvest eaten by voles.

Another personality trait of mine (seeing as I seem to be throwing them around a lot lately) is I am the last person to ever admit I was wrong. Wait: Scratch that. I am prone to glossing over my failures. (There, that's much more truthful.)

This hasn't helped me in all situations, which is understandable. As a contributing member of The Working World, I realized early that admitting fault was actually an admirable trait, especially in one both young and female (in the old and male profession of architecture, that is). Now? Now I am past young, and am past the peculiarities of my chosen profession. Now, though, I wonder about the educational value of failure.

As humans, we learn by failing. It starts when we have the barest grasp of any ability. Fail to cry, fail to get soothed and fed: it's an easy cause/effect lesson to learn as an infant. But perhaps the word "failure" is an awkward one on our tongues, as it is on mine: perhaps the word I should be using is more enabling, more encouraging, more...more of a soft landing. Like mistakes, like simple error.

In the mail last week I received my loaned-out copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. The friend to whom I had loaned it is my best friend from college: she has just moved to the wilds of Athens, Georgia, and has recently voiced a putative interest in locavoreism. So I was curious what she thought of the book. "Not enough stories of failure," said she. And it was true: this book, though wonderful, does gloss over the difficulties their family had in securing local food. Excepting turkey sex, this is a story of successes.

Failure on the farm is an easy prospect. With little knowledge and less skill, one can rapidly go through lots of money and time. Add to this the fickleness that is weather, one can lose whole crops of things. Failure, then, if it does nothing for the farmer, at least makes good copy: it makes an interesting story. Giants in the Earth this is not, though; I am no Ma Ingalls. My family's very existence is not dependent upon my ability to extract things from our soil. But, without hubris, I can fairly say my family's lives are made more interesting by the giants I find in our earth.

But failure, here on my own farm? Well! Take a glimpse at the mostly empty root cellar. (It's the uninsulated back stairwell to the basement. A nice feature, incidentally, and an easy if inadvertent coldcellar.) NO Brussels sprouts, no Napa cabbage, just a few onions, no mounds of carrots. All these lovelies rotted in the ground in our wet, wet August with our heavy, icky soil. It's the Brussels sprouts I most miss; at the time of the loss, I was well on my way to having my largest crop ever of 8 purple and 24 green plants. I have done what I can to secure their replacements from other local organic farms, and have no fear that we'll starve. But am I disappointed? Damn straight I am.

On fencing

2007-11-01T07:14:00.001-04:00

Verloe: Hey, what gives?

We locked up the chickens yesterday. It took about two hours to string 250' of fencing. Now, will it keep the hawks out? Hard to tell. It'll keep the chookies in, though, which is very much the point.

But don't feel too bad for them: I would have been OH so happy if I had half as big a yard as they do when I was a city person.

Happy pumpkin day

2007-10-30T22:06:00.000-04:00

When one tends a compost pile (or two), on occasion it yields some rather tangible human benefits.

Every year since I have lived here, I seem to have "allowed" a squash seed or two to do its thing and grow in or around the compost area. The first year, it was cantaloupe: the most delicious, tiny netted fruits you can imagine. The second year, it was birdhouse gourds. This year? Pumpkins from our daughter's discarded seeds from last year's jack-o-lanterns.

I mistook them for something else earlier in the season, and actually ate a few of the tiny squash. Quite tasty!

But they've found a good use as future pies. And then again, there's an even better use: here, art by the 3.5 year old, carving and candles by dad. Spoooky!

On ranting

2007-10-29T08:41:00.000-04:00

In need of defense

Some very interesting comments came out of my Wednesday post on how the world is a-changing, and how some of us are doing something about it, and others, well, aren't.

Here's a comment: My friend Tim, in an email, said "The list of things not to be discussed in polite company (this includes the internet) now includes 'consumption patterns'."

I agree it's a touchy subject, especially when one trains one's sights on one's relatives as examples. (OUCH. Believe me, things've cooled considerably in my own household after that post; I've done a lot of mea maxima culpas to those affected.) But, (and Tim knows this about me) BUT...polite company aside, isn't discussing religion, politics and now consumption patterns at least really INTERESTING? Maybe it started in college, where I was one of maybe 6 Democrats in a student body of 7,000...maybe that is where I honed my combative skills. (It was the Reagan era: tough time to be a liberal, believe me.) But maybe it's a personality fault, or something, but I do like a good argument; I do like to poke the hornet's nest, to rattle a cage here and there.

Why consumption? Here is the thing: here is why: we are all connected. That Big Mac you had for lunch? It has global implications. It really does. And how good did you feel after eating it? Did you feel as good as you did when you ate your last homegrown tomato?

Big Macs are not the Great Evil, nor is a homegrown tomato a kind of Grail (though close, if it's a Brandywine). But it's a small, small, shrinkingly small world out there. By 2050 there'll be 9 billion of us calling this little planet home. You don't need to be an economist, geophysicist or even a farmer to realize that having India and China on a Big Mac diet too is just not going to happen. Our world is too small for this kind of consumption pattern. And we have to face this fact. Collectively. Together.

Our leaders are not leading on this issue, much less any other. Detroit continues to roll out vehicles that get only 18 mpg. We keep doing things as if there were no Katrina, no fires, no drought; that these were fickle aberrations of the weather. So, well, I will be discussing consumption patterns (and politics, but will stay away from the third rail that is religion) here. Why? Because enough of you have told me you do take a little something away from my rants: encouragement, head-shaking disagreement, something. And because someone needs to stand up for homegrown tomatoes!

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

2007-10-26T07:04:00.000-04:00

Sunset, Wednesday night

I can't seem to shake this feeling of dread, this the-world-is-f***ed-up dread. But I am able to appreciate things, like this beautiful sunset. The wind brought in our first frost too Wednesday night: little glittering bits on the pumpkins, and look at the tiny damage it's done to the seeding basil. One little blackened leaf. It's like a stay of execution, you know?

I hope to be out of this funk soon.

I am the bridge

2007-10-24T07:04:00.001-04:00

The source of guilt AND motivation.

This post has been floating in my head for a long time now.

I was on the phone with my mother Sunday, trading tales, when she said, "don't you just love this [mild] weather? I guess global warming does have an upside, doesn't it?"

Now, my mother is a terminal optimist. Her motto, quite seriously, is Marty Feldman's line from Young Frankenstein: he played Igor, and, when queried by Gene Wilder's character about his hunchback, said, "What hump?" She cannot help herself. That said, she does understand that coal-burning power plants like her own really do compel you to save electricity by at least buying compact fluorescent bulbs and adjusting the thermostat all year. She has reset her sprinkler system, and I am trying to wean her off her green lawn love. It is a small gesture.

But frankly? My mother and [name redacted for family peace] have an enviable lifestyle. The [redacted ones] especially, God love them, don't practice conspicuous consumption, practice instead what I call Entitled Consumption. You know: we worked hard all our lives dammit so therefore we SHOULD be able to...fill in the blank consumptive habit. Maybe they are tinged with a bit of planetary guilt, but in reality, they won't live long enough for their lifestyles to be changed in any measurable way to them.

Me? LOADS of guilt. Especially since I became a mother myself: I realize SO VERY WELL that my daughter will not live in the same cushy world her grandparents, uncles, and parents had. The damage, in so many ways, was done long before she was born. Whether she grows up to resent the hell out of those who have gone before, soiling the planetary nest as we go, is yet to be seen.

I can only do what I can do. Moving to this farm has helped lighten our load (and my guilt) considerably. Thumbing my nose at industrial agriculture by growing my own has helped both our health and our wallets, and it certainly has challenged me in many ways to both show how easy it is to do, and to progressively do more. This blog is my small attempt to buck up and teach. But really, our lives, they are going to be a-changing. And I unfortunately have not inherited my mother's optimism. It is a lot more work, I know, to be a pessimist, but people, there is no quick fix to our problems. There are small gestures that, if taken collectively, will make a small impact. With the rest of the developing world following us by imitating our lifestyle, from hamburgers to SUVs, our little gestures are but a trifle, a drop in the ocean.

I am the bridge between the used to be and the future. I will see my parents' generation die off, and hopefully will see their habits die with them. I will see my daughter grow up in a world where consuming less won't be a matter of personal do-gooding preference but a matter of global imperative. Who knows if I will live long enough to see my daughter's own progeny be born and grow, because, let's face it, at 38 I was an old bat to be giving birth to her. But if I do live that long, I hope some solutions have been undertaken, Manhattan project-wise, going-to-the-moon-wise, to solve some of our global screwups, because, really, I don't want my succeeding generations to be cursing my name.

And I know my kid will at least know how to grow her own food, raise and slaughter her own chickens and make her own bread. This, this I can do.

You know, I do wish this blog could be something as light and simple as a documentation of the pretty flowers and luscious vegetables I grow. Maybe this could've been the case 15 years ago. But fifteen years ago, there were no blogs, and I didn't own a farm. I apologize to all of you whom I have potentially offended here in this post. I simply do not see enough being done. We're all still arguing about if things are really changing, whilst we still go about with our spendthrift habits. (I am not above reproach myself, jetting about hither and yon.) But really. Let's all get busy, doing what little we can do.

On annuals

2007-10-23T08:50:00.000-04:00

Zinnia, calendula, marigold and nasturtium

Every year, I plant rows of annual flower seeds. They get to be about 4" tall and then I scatter them willy-nilly all around the vegetable and perennial gardens. Usually, they don't do much all spring and summer: they kind of limp along, and, especially when interplanted with the veggies, I wonder "why did I devote the space to these wimpy things?" Well, it is because in late summer and all fall these things go NUTS.

Color and pollinator attraction is why they're in the veg gardens. In the perennial gardens, they act much like spring tulips and daffodils do: they tide things over as the clumps of green perennial leaves just sit there, flowerless. It's a good way to keep visual interest going, as your eye flits from color blotch to color blotch.

And then interesting things do happen. Look at what this calendula is doing (normally they're just single dark-eyed daisy-like plants). Isn't that just weird?

On the winddown to autumn

2007-10-21T21:11:00.000-04:00

It feels mighty strange to sit here on the front porch at 9:30 at night in late October, windows all open, and see that my trusty computer temperature gauge says it's 72* outside. That, my friends, is beyond weird. In all rights the windows should be closed and I should have a comfy blanket warming my lap, and a hot tea at my side.

This weather is sapping my normal need to hurry the hell up to get the garden put away for the frost. (Frost?) Instead, I putter as usual, or, rather, as I usually putter in August, but noticing instead how things that abhor August's heat are really putting on quite a show with their fleshy abandon: the nasturtiums, fennel, broccoli, and salad fixings are all positively Rubenesque, in their own photosynthetical way. We had a scraping of 39* in early September, but since then, well, it does not feel like October 21st.

I have, however, begun the process of plant tagging. I make notes, furtively, in my planner according to a plant's variety. As a succession planter, it makes no sense at all to list things according to plant date and harvest date: these terms are quite meaningless if your greening motto is No Dirt Left Exposed. My notes instead have listed that more new pests have emerged, yet some others remained (mercifully) missing. It was a good year for some things, a bad year for others. In other words, it was a normal year, except for its duration.

I learn more every year. This helps me immensely as I am a person who dislikes a plateau in her understanding of anything. I instead love the uphill slog that is, say, anything new (to you). So this greenhouse should be an amusing diversion. It hums along, nicely, its four of six beds seeded with new things, its unmade seventh and eighth bed at least partially newly made. Today I concentrated on keeping the greenhouse's enemies out, building the putative moat and drawbridge which is buried hardware cloth on the outside of buried 2x8 planks...all to keep the voles out. Voles love them some tender plants, especially in the throes of winter.

So I sit here and think, wondering what my next task should be, wondering if I have put enough applesauce by to feed us, wondering if this is the week to roast some pumpkins, wondering, well, as usual, wondering a bit ahead. Ahem. Even if it is warm, the country life is a good life to live. Even if my Metro card still has four rides on it....

We have returned

2007-10-20T19:07:00.000-04:00

We liked it so much, we stayed an extra day.

The kid is definitely an urbanite. She'd say things like "I need to make a call," and she would. She also had me in tears when she saw that I was taking her to the train and she said, "No, we don't take the subway to the restaurant. We take a taxicab."

Note kitties in the Hello Kitty bag. Don't leave home without them.

Stepping away from the gardens

2007-10-14T18:55:00.000-04:00

Hello all...

My kid and I will be away for the week, going to "pick up" her daddy in New York.

Tom's book signing/book release party and talk will be on Tuesday night, October 16th, starting at 6:30, at Aperture's offices in Chelsea. He will be holding a joint talk with Chip Kidd, the graphic design world's rock star. Chip has followed Tom's work for years, and has utilized Tom's art on book covers for some James Ellroy rereleases and to illustrate a full edition of Francis Ford Coppola's literary publication, Zoetrope: All-Story.

Personally, I am hoping that book release parties are as entertaining as art openings. This should be some serious fun. And, of course, it's great to step off the farm every once in a while...at least for a bagel and a schmear.

Things you're not seeing

2007-10-13T08:31:00.000-04:00

...because the camera is away, with Tom, on his trip.

Robins. Robins, today, flying south, a few at a time, a hundred at a time, flap flap flap swoop with their wings. They've been flying by all day, just above the treetops. Last week it was starlings, two weeks before it was red-winged blackbirds. The blackbirds even stopped for a visit in our maples. LOUD! Then, as I stood there in awe just staring, some unknown and noise-less signal caused them all to fly off, with an immense whoosh sound of their thousands of wings.

The changing trees. The deciduous trees are all in and around this pantone shade: wait, I can't find my wheel. So, if you squint, they're an unhealthy orange-brown.

Babies. Seedling babies, that is; of all the little seeds I planted in the greenhouse last weekend, most are up already.

The gross white scum that forms atop tomato gel when you squeeze the overripe fruits into jars for seedsaving. (Be thankful for not seeing this.)

The new chicken run. They're getting fenced in for the winter, as I don't trust the neighborhood raptors. The fence isn't finished yet, but boy will they be mad when it is. Lucky for them, their "pen" takes up almost 300' of fencing, so they shouldn't complain overmuch.

Bugs. Specifically, bugs eating my precious plants. I have taken to twice-daily prophylactic raids into the greenhouse garden to squish the cabbage worms that insist on munching my broccoli. But I spare the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, who're doing just as much damage to the neighboring parsnips and parsley.

Produce/recent harvest. Fall peas (egads!) and my one-and-only head of broccoli romanesco, the only cabbage plant (other than broccoli) that survived this August's monsoon rains, were dinner last night. And the lettuces, runner beans, rutabagas and radicchio have loved the cold weather that's moved in since our 90* day on Monday. I swear they've doubled in size.

(Can I just mention this again: fall peas. It's amazing they made it into the cooking pan.)

Ah, well. I'm sparing you my blurry shots; just use your imaginations.

On guineas

2007-10-12T06:51:00.000-04:00

Ick, another bad picture.

Robin wanted to learn more about our guineas. I have been thinking I should do a complete post about them, so here it goes.

We decided to get guineas because we lost two hens to a hawk last year. What's the connection? Well, guineas are the Chicken Littles of the farmyard. Anything that flies, drives, or walks by that's out of the ordinary, they start howling. We decided on guineas over a rooster, who'd also watch out for hawks, but...well, I didn't want to risk the idea of getting a "bad" rooster who'd attack our kid. (I also wasn't too hep on having pecked sex-enslaved hens or being awakened by a 2:00 a.m. crowing.)

The guineas, of which there are four (three hens and a cock) are virtually indistinguishable in looks, activity and any other way from each other. They subscribe to a severe case of Group Think so if one of them is doing something, the other three will soon be doing the same. As a farm animal, they haven't been domesticated for long. This near-wildness appealed to me if I had to continue to pen in our birds: I really like seeing the chickens walking around the farm, in pursuit of their chicken-y desires; I figured if the chickens needed to be penned, the guineas, who can fly, would still be free-ranging. Well, let's just say that near-wildness is an acquired taste.

So, the initial reason that we got them remains. They are excellent watchdogs. They immediately notify the other birds, and the surrounding township, if anything is amiss. On Monday, for example, they were making quite a din and I thought: geez, it's kind of late, aren't those birds in bed yet? And I look out at the side yard and they are yelling at THREE DEER, one with a huge rack on his head. They actually chased the deer, too, once one of them turned and started to run.

Other than that, they lay their eggs in the bushes, what few eggs there are, so...if you expect to get eggs out of these creatures, you really have to work for it. They can sleep in trees, and expect to have a very high perch in the coop. They completely imprinted on the one chicken that looks like them: Letha, the Barred Rock. Anywhere their Mama goes, they go...otherwise, they'll follow Maggie, the Black Australorps or Pauline, the white Leghorn. (Interestingly, they never follow any of the other birds, who're all red or brown: they definitely segregate themselves with the monochrome range of the feather spectrum.) I think it was a good idea to get them and put them with the young chicks we had, as they picked up some but certainly not all of those good chicken traits, like, She is not the enemy; She is the bearer of all good treats. The guineas were the ugliest birds imaginable until they got all their feathers. Now, at least, they are mature: their heads are the only things odd-looking about them.

And from a very young age, they developed the ability to count. If one of them is not with them, they start hollering, trying to find him/her. It's an interesting but annoying talent.

My friend Tim said he ate them a lot when he lived in Italy. He said his Italian friends told him they had them to eat small blood-sucking bugs, of which he never had the English translation. (Ticks. They love ticks.) Supposedly, their meat is great roasted. I guess I will never know. We will keep them for the rest of their happy dopey lives, I think, but...they are just so incredibly loud that I doubt Tom would ever go for getting more of them.

Would I ever get guineas instead of chickens? Not in a million years. Chickens are friendly, egg-laying, happy souls. Guineas have an amazing persecution complex, one that will probably be worn down by another 10,000 of domestication. Don't get them if you have neighbors, period, unless your neighbors have them or their near cousins, peafowl.

On tidiness

2007-10-11T07:05:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I mentioned how I strive to keep the farmyard tidy. It's a hangover from my city-house-owning days; you gotta be spic and span if you live on a major thoroughfare, you know. And it's also a counteraction to the sloppy farmyards around me (including this one when we moved in) where piles of "stuff" just seem to happen.

But inside the house? Forget it! Tidiness is a lower priority to the great outdoors and the kitchen, and I will do it only when I have time. This point was driven home with me this morning when I saw the chaos wrought by our kid yesterday. She was sick, so she stayed home from school. I worked a full day and was very proud of myself that I didn't put in a DVD for her all day. Instead, she played, as she will, with any and everything.

And Tom wasn't here to put order to the chaos.

I guess I take for granted that he acts very much like the Cat in the Hat when the Cat sweeps in to the messy house atop that machine, putting everything back in place while the kids' mother walks up the sidewalk.

Back to my old friend, Compost

2007-10-10T07:41:00.000-04:00

No photo today. My camera is in London.

If I were to separate my time in the garden into some kind of pie chart, a very large slice would be "Compost Making." I've documented here, often, about my love of the stuff. But maybe the size of this pie slice is merely creative accounting on my part: not of the Enron sort or backdating stocks or whatever, but more that everything in the garden becomes compost, eventually.

My search for some nearly unattainable level of Farm Tidiness nudges me to gather any and all compostable material around here: Kitchen scraps. Fallen apples. Grass clippings. Branches. Leaves. Chicken poop. Weeds. Dead plants. Pet hair, broom sweepings. Cardboard boxes, junk mail, paper bags. All of it goes in.

I was mucking out the chicken coop Sunday, and for once I was thankful that my higher sense of order had actually NOT come to fruition. You see, I really, really wanted a concrete slab in the bottom of the coop. I had planned to put deep, deep bedding atop it to counteract the cold sink effect of all that concrete on those cold bird legs in the winter, but...well, we never got around to putting in the slab. And I am grateful!!! I muck the thing out with great regularity (about 6x a year) and when I get down to the bottom, to the dirt, you would just be amazed. The color. It is crumbly, BLACK DIRT. All that poop atop all that straw atop all those wood shavings equals microbe and worm heaven. So I scrape that stuff right up, put it in my faithful garden trugs, and layer it oh so carefully in the compost piles.

What's with the compost love? Well, I have clay soil. It could use some lightening up, so I try my darndest to do so with all the vegetable matter I pile atop the beds. It's helping. But even in the perfect soil of my Minneapolis garden (and it was, I swear), even the tiniest bit of compost goes a long way to ensuring happy plants.

So go out there and build a pile! Autumn is the perfect time, especially with all those leaves falling out there. And it will answer your need for tidiness.

Cold-weather crops

2007-10-08T10:35:00.000-04:00

My photographer husband just shakes his head when he sees my overexposed and fuzzy photos. This is a bed planted mostly in September.

Now that I have the greenhouse frame up, let's see what's putting down roots in the beds. The greenhouse itself is 20' long by 16' wide. I (will) have eight raised beds in there, all 6' x 3'. There's also one big back bed that's currently part of the herb garden. I will be removing much the oregano, tarragon, lavenders and marjoram that are in the back bed now and hopefully espalier a hardy citrus tree up the back wall. My two fig trees will overwinter in there, too.

SO here is the running list of the first four beds. (Two beds need to be built yet, and the other two are currently growing late-season potatoes (Katahdins and Russets) that I will not evict until November.) You can see how I have packed things in...

Chickories in many stripes: I fell in love with these bitter things when I lived in Italy after college. As a family, they prefer the cold, so I've planted the following: 1. Radicchio: The bunching/heading varieties never work for me, so I have lots of the leafy Treviso type both out in the regular garden and now in the new greenhouse garden. 2. Rosso Italiano: This is a type of dandelion. Its red stems and green, bunching leaves will go well in both salads and in sautees/soups. 3. Catalonian asparagus chickory: This wild looking thing looks like a white pinecone; you eat it before the leaves get big (thus its resemblance to asparagus), cut up like celeriac. 4. I haven't planted it yet, but frisee is always a hit in the salad bowl.

Spinach: I'm growing three types. This is something I will succession plant, too; my first batch (planted early September) is getting eaten now. The three types are 1. Space Hybrid, 2. Tyee Hybrid, and 3. Winter Giant.

Lettuces: Where would the garden be without them? Two types are up and running (1. Grand Rapids and 2. Winter Marvel Bibb). I planted two rows of mesclun Sunday.

Other greenery: This is a wide-net category! Technically, I can use the beet greens and chard as salad fillings, but there are other strange types of cold-hardy greens that have been sown in these beds: 1. Arugula (two types), 2. Erba Stella minutina (a tall skinny leaf thing similar to that dandelion I mentioned earlier) 3. Two types of mache/corn salad. This latter thing will be spread into the potato beds when I harvest them, as mache, a tiny rosette of a plant, loves the cold. 4. Likewise, claytonia loves the cold and will be planted later in the potato beds.

Root crops: These have been in the beds since last spring. It takes them a while to get going. 1. Parsnips 2. Scorzonera 3. Salsify. In September, though, I also planted 4. Lutz leaf beet for both its leaves and its root.

Brassicas: I optimistically transferred 1. four seedlings of broccoli (Piracicabia and Calabrese) to the beds in August, but these are being decimated by those nasty green caterpillar worms. I squish them daily by hand (ick), but I am losing the battle. Sunday, I planted a row of 2. Red Russian kale for salad fixings, and I also planted 3. purple kohlrabi: it will be an early spring harvest.

Onion family: There is one stand of 1. leeks that I planted last spring. I also seeded 2. a hardy bunching scallion in late July. This is a perennial plant, so I am looking forward to eating it all winter. It's quite zesty now! The tightwad in me grabbed some mealy looking 3. shallots left over from last year's harvest: these things were dried up and quite unpromising, but, well, a week after planting them? They're now 2" tall. I'm not sure how they'll handle the cold, though. 4. Chives. These have been in the herb bed for years. I hope they like their extended season.

Herbs: I transfered into one bed some 1. chervil, 2. wild arugula, and 3. rosemary. Chervil and this kind of arugula are wild self-seeders, so I have to watch it. I forgot my other 3. rosemary plant last year, leaving it in the ground over the winter: it lived, so I figure maybe this new plant will fare better in the warm-ish greenhouse. 4. Six plants of Italian parsley was interplanted with the tomatoes last spring. Then there're all the other herbs I mentioned that I will need to partially evict for my trees.

Other things: Ruby Red Swiss chard. This is up and running.

The other four beds might hold more of the same, and I will also add one row of carrots, though I'm doubtful they'll like the greenhouse.

All this dreaming-turned-near-reality is due to reading Eliot Coleman's book a few years back. He bought some of Helen and Scott Nearings' land in Maine (they, the original back-to-the-landers) and has been experimenting ever since. Anyway, he's convinced me to dream big. So we'll see how it all goes; stay tuned!

The dream so far. Excuse the construction debris.

One small thing crossed off my list

2007-10-06T18:45:00.000-04:00

View from Mont Merde

Look what we were able to do this afternoon.

Of course I had to pick a record-high day to do it: here it is, quarter to 7 in the evening and it's 84* out.

There is a lot more to be done to the greenhouse, but putting it up was the biggest thing. I won't put the plastic film on it until it starts getting cold (and considering the temperatures now, who knows when that will be).

But I did need to commit tomatocide. I cut down/pulled out the Brandywines, Aunt Ruby's German Greens, Green Zebras and one Amish Paste. The dang things were 7' high, some of them, and--well--I needed to plant the December crops (!).

Payola

2007-10-05T06:48:00.000-04:00

Yep! Hot off the press, just released Tuesday night: Alice Waters' latest. I am happy, as simple food is what I love. It's a fairly basic cookbook, actually. But consider the source: in her talented hands, and with her instructions, simple magic can happen in anyone's kitchen.

But what you're looking at, of course, is a bribe.

You see, Tom leaves for London on Tuesday. Alone. Without us! So he needs to do some things to curry my favor.

He's going to be in an art fair--slash--show there. It's his profession's version of a convention, I suppose; in such an instance I am glad I am not going, conventions being what they are. (I would never drag him to an AIA convention.) But then, London is a place where the child and I could have plenty of fun...with or without him.

As it is, we'll see what trouble we can get in at home...

Morning errands

2007-10-04T08:51:00.000-04:00

Maggie has gone broody, so I brought her some food...

...but it looks like she'll have to share. I ended up putting those fake eggs in the right nesting box (from the kiddie kitchen section at Target: quite realistic, which is why I've marked them with an "X") under her to make her feel useful.

Every morning, between dropping our daughter off at school and starting work, I try to do one outdoor task. This morning, I headed east to the Fruit Exchange to get the birds some more scratch.

I adore the fruit exchange. It's our feed-and-seed shop, but it is also the regional fruit processing and storage facility. Normally, I can chew the fat with the guys who work in the warehouse. They look at me (I think) as an anomaly: when we first moved here, I was in there often to get supplies to beef up my compost piles (greensand, dolomitic limestone, cast-off fruit, moldy straw) so I guess I have rightly earned the reputation as "that organic gal." But today they were busy, far too busy to chat, and the place was hopping! Big semitractor trailers are rolling in, their trailers piled high with wood boxes filled with apples and pears. Conveyor belts were rumbling away in the now well-lit warehouse, with a few women sorting and dumping the beautiful red round fruit rumbling down it.

I got a peck of Cortlands for $3, got my scratch, and made for home.

Swiss chard

2007-10-03T08:53:00.000-04:00

Even if the trees don't cooperate, the Swiss chard will give you a great shot of color.

Autumn is treading very lightly on our little world here. It appears that this year's leaf display will again be very muted. (My indicators are the sassafras: in a good year, these rhizomatous trees will go through the whole hot range of the spectrum. This year, they've slowly slipped into the rusty-plummy range.) The veg garden is still going nuts (the peppers, eggplants and tomatoes have all hit a second wind), and the recent rain has helped the long-neglected perennial beds.

Chard! I am the only person in the house who adores it. It sure is a sight to behold in the garden, though. Last night, I made a stew in which the chard was a key feature. Rich stews and hot bread are a seasonal favorite. (Thanks, Kelly, for the chard reminder.)

Chickpeas and Chard with cilantro and cumin
From Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Suppers
2T olive oil
1/2 t ground cumin or more to taste
1 large onion, finely minced
2 t tomato paste
sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
pinch of saffron threads
14 chard leaves and stems
2 garlic cloves
2 15-oz cans chickpeas or 3 cups home-cooked, with some cooking liquid
1 c cilantro leaves
1/4 c parsley leaves

1. Heat 1T+1t of olive oil in a wide skillet; add onion and saffron and cook over med. heat, stirring occasionally, 12-15 mins. Meanwhile, pound garlic and 1/2 t salt with the cilantro and parsley to make a rough paste. When the onions are golden and soft, add the paste to the pan along with the tomato paste and work it in with the onions.
2. Slice the chard leaves off their stems. Put them in a wide pot with 2 cups of water and cook, covered, until wilted and tender, about 5 minutes. Set the leaves aside and reserve the cooking water.
3. Chop the chard stems into dice and drop them into the reserved chard water. Simmer until tender, about 10 minutes, and turn off the heat.
4. Add the chickpeas to the onion with their liquid or 1 cup water or stock. Coarsely chop the chard and add it as well. Simmer for 10 minutes, then add the stems. Taste for salt and pepper. Serve with the remaining oil drizzled over it all.

Thoughts on how far we've come...

2007-10-01T20:08:00.000-04:00

...and how far we have yet to go.

So, today is October 1st. Three years ago today we bought this house and came here, with our eight-month-old daughter, directly from the closing, to start to pull up carpeting, shovel out old furniture, and pull down curtains...all to prepare it for the floor refinishers, the electrician and the drywaller. Whew.

I am showing you a picture of the shelves of canned goods. I have a slowly filling root cellar elsewhere, and the chest freezer is nearly full, and there are at least 15 pounds of dried beans that need to be shelled in the potting shed...and the gardens are still full of goodies, including about 100 pounds of potatoes. There's a good three pounds of garlic braided and hanging in the kitchen. My mention of these things is really simply a wrap-up of September's Eat Local Challenge. And I have a long way to go.

But the recent Harvest Moon got me in mind of this whole "eating-in-season" idea. What would the ideal be, I thought to myself. The ideal, of course, is what most everybody has now: the denial of the seasons that our first-world global-access grocery stores offer us. But what would it truly mean, that is, to deny the seasons and STILL do what I am doing on my 100-Foot Diet?

I am going to seriously look into this. I have a feeling the greenhouse will help.

An afternoon's efforts

2007-09-30T08:09:00.000-04:00

The six beds on the bottom are where the greenhouse will be. That mass of boxes is used to line the paths in the gardens...then, I dump wood chips on top. Today it's just a mess. Oh, and I am atop the chicken coop.

So, this was my task yesterday. I thought about renting a ditch witch, but I knew renting/loading/unloading/using/loading/unloading/unrenting would be about as much caloric energy (and probably more time, frankly) than getting out my big daddy boss hog tiller to bust up the sod and then using my little girly wageslave lackey arms and back to dig the trench.

Frankly, this little trench was beautiful. It was a bit of a shame to have to fill it back in again.

Oh, and I ended up needing more than 100' of pipe. And I hummed chain-gang tunes to myself whilst I worked.

On the order of work

2007-09-29T08:28:00.000-04:00

100' of 3" perf pipe in the back of the Volvo. I need a chain-gang song to accompany it.

A long time ago, for some work-related reason, I took the Myers-Briggs profile test and found out that I am a contingency planner. (INTJ for those of you who know what the heck I am talking about.) Well, that certainly didn't come as a surprise to me: I have always looked to a future goal and figured out eight ways of running up the hill to get to it. But sometimes, I swear, despite all my plans and counterplans, my life (anyone's life) is like one of those sliding tile games: you know the ones, with fifteen sequential numbered tiles and sixteen spaces? I have to move each and every tile first to get the number one up to its proper spot.

And so it goes. My task list, this weekend, is growing. Before I can put up the greenhouse, I need to trench up lots of earth! We've got drainage issues.

Sauerkraut

2007-09-27T08:53:00.000-04:00

What a crock

So I bought three heads of cabbage at the farmstand on Sunday.

"I bought cabbage for sauerkraut," I told Tom when I got home.

"But we don't eat sauerkraut," he said, wrinkling his nose.

"Yeah, but then, have we ever really HAD sauerkraut before?" I asked. "I'm doing this on the Chinese Food Principle," I told him.

You see, I despised Chinese food, that is until I got away from my small-town Indiana take-out establishment and actually ate real Chinese food in the city. That cornstarch and MSG-laden fare I'd grown up with just did not resemble the stuff I got in Chinatown, thankfully!

So I have a crock of the shaved stuff sitting (stinking) away in the basement right now. It takes a while to ferment and "cook down." I will let you know if we end up becoming converts to the home-made kraut. (Remember, microbes are my friends, so this is yet another experiment in friendship maintenance.)

Food preservation is funny this way. You end up making (or trying to make) that which is outside your normal victuals, mainly because you CAN. The garden is like that, too, though thankfully I have planted enough different veggies that I have stumbled on more winners than losers. The quest for variety is fairly high here in this household with our city-shaped palates; I do tend to go out of my way often to make something novel. We can always get down a can of tomatoes to throw on spaghetti if my "creations" end up being really awful...and the chickens and the compost heap are none too picky, frankly; to them, it's all good!

And if this cabbage is a kraut failure? Well, I'm out $2.19 and a bit of time.

Eat Local: Preserving tomatoes

2007-09-25T08:13:00.001-04:00

This made 3 quarts of juice, 3 pints of sauce and 5 half-pints of ketchup

Tomatoes: Love them! Other than fruit jam, it's tomatoes that get the most processing around here. They are very versatile, as you all well know. There are loads of sites that will tell you how to process them, starting with the USDA. I'm just going to describe the ways I "put them by," as processing tomatoes is a task I take on every other day between mid-July to the middle of October.

Tomatoes are one of the few things most anyone can can. Boiling-water baths are great! However, for a few reasons, I have mostly abandoned my big black enamel pots when I get the glass jars out during Tomato Season. Instead, I use my pressure canner.

Clockwise from top right: cook pot, food mill, can funnel, can lifter and big pressure canner

Pressure canners, though huge, spendy, and somewhat spooky, are actually a lot more forgiving of the harried home-canner than boiling-water baths. One, they get a lot hotter (240*+ versus maybe 212*), and the actual pressure process allows you to add things to your tomato sauces that would be too risky to do with a boiling-water bath (it has to do with the acid level in the tomatoes themselves: any added onions, peppers, basil, etc. may tip the pH scale to Microbe City, which is not a city you would like to visit, trust me.). You can actually put nearly ANYTHING in jars and can it in a pressure canner. I have rows of cooked beans downstairs, as well as jars upon jars of stock. If I were a carnivore, there'd be jars of meat, too, as premade as soup or stock or chili or whatever.

Likewise, with a boiling-water bath process, you need to be monomaniacal about cleanliness, boiling both the jars and the sealing lids before you fill them (and fill them with HOT contents, while the jars are still HOT). Pressure canning? Not so much. YES the jars and lids should be absolutely clean, but they don't need to come out of a boiling pot before they're filled.

But back to the tomatoes. My larger heirloom tomatoes tend to have thick skins, so I try to get the peels off before I do my preserving. There are two ways to do this: one is by hand and the other is the Lazy Person's Way, with a food mill. By hand: Wash and score (make an "X") on the bottom of the tomatoes with a sharp knife. Place tomatoes in a pot of boiling water for about a minute or more; scoop them out and immediately plunge into a pot of iced water. You can use your knife and peel the skins off, core them, and then cook them. By the LPW: Wash and cut off rough spots of the tomatoes. Core them and cut into smaller pieces. Place in pot and cook until mushy. Run through food mill: I use the medium screen, as I like the pulp and can tolerate the few seeds that get passed through it. They're now ready to can.

In the beginning of the Tomato Season, I am much more fussy about separating the tomatoes by type (cherries for sweet things like ketchup, paste tomatoes strictly for paste, big fat watery ones for juice, etc; I also separate by color because I'm obsessive), but toward the middle of the season I am tired of all that and process maybe two-three quarts at a time with Whatever Is Ready To Go TODAY. This mix just ends up being simple sauce. In the winter, I will figure out what to do with that sauce when I take the jar off the shelf. Soup? Pasta sauce? Chili? It might need to be cooked down some (i.e., boiled off), but that can happen when I'm readying everything else for the meal.

But back to the pressure canner. This device allows me to make things like salsa, or the Glut Sauce I made the other day, or ratatouille, etc. with the 'maters. It usually isn't too much work to prep the tomatoes a la Lazy Person's Way whilst I do dinner prep, and while they're cooking down, or processing, I do my other cooking.

One thing about the pressure canner: it does take longer. Getting one load up to pressure, the processing time itself, and getting down from pressure sure takes lots longer than doing one boiling-water bath. Because I do my pressure canning in dribs and drabs while I do other things, this is no big deal. But when I have a bushel of things to put up? Yeah, either I set aside the whole evening to do it, or I get out those old black pots!

So: am I advocating that you all should run out and buy pressure canners? Absolutely not. I would say put it on your wish-list if you plan to do both as much, and as many, varied different kinds of food preservation as we do around here. But if you buy your produce in big quantities from the farmer's market, as I used to do as a city girl, those big boiling-water pots work just fine! For jams, pickles, and simple tomatoes, this may be all you need. For other stuff, though, yeah, pressure canning is the way to go.

Paper or plastic?

2007-09-23T09:35:00.000-04:00

I've started packing things away for the end of this growing season.

One way to preserve the harvest, of course, is to preserve the next one! These are sprouted lettuces. I cut the stalks, place them blossoms-down in paper bags, and then hang them up (closing the bags first) on the walls and rafters of the potting shed. I don't deal with them, then, until early next spring, when I crush the dried blossoms to release the tiny seeds.

After I bag and hang the seed heads, I chop down the rest of the stalks to about 2-3" above ground. I cover the bed with a good 2" of compost, then another 5-6" or more of grass clippings. The worms appreciate the cover of the clippings and the food in the compost, and the lettuce stalks and roots slowly decompose and aerate the soil at the same time.

All this nonsense takes me about 15 minutes to do. I find I have an endless supply of lettuce seed, though, for a little bit of effort.

Geek notice: Lettuces do cross-pollinate, though the extent to which they do is debatable. This is the second year of these three particular types, and I have grown and harvested them side-by-side the whole time. They still appear to be that which they were originally (namely, Green Oak Leaf, Amish Deer Tongue, and Green Bibb lettuce), so I continue to grow them in the same bed.

The Return of the Salad

2007-09-21T19:54:00.001-04:00

Yay Autumn! Cooler weather means cool salad greens.

I so looked forward to the day that those little seeds would sprout. Tender greens bolt into hot bits of cellulose here usually around the end of June. For years past, I have tried in vain to find something to substitute for those little bites for July-September. Malabar spinach, amaranth, chopped cabbage, some more stalwart Asian mustards...blah! So this year I gave in and went without.

Like awaiting that first tomato, the return of the Salad is something to be savored, to be...celebrated. So we did, last night. Bread, soup and...salad.

And the best part? The kid kept asking for more.

Waste not!

2007-09-21T11:51:00.000-04:00

Here is one way of making sure your grape harvest won't go to waste: have the middle school kids pick them all! They'll be making jam and juice in their classroom this afternoon.

(Now, if I could've only figured out how to make them pick the grapes for US...)

Fruit leather

2007-09-20T09:36:00.000-04:00

Yet another example of our tightwaddery: Fruit Leather
(And yes, I either need better eyes or a better camera)

Okay, I admit it! Last night I cried "Uncle!" and went to bed at 9:30 after *only* decanting four gallons of grape juice into the freezer. I just did not have the energy to go on. Tom said he'd finish up, and he also said he'd use the residual grape pulp to make fruit leather.

If you are the parent of a small-ish child, you know the ubiquity of "fruit snacks," plastic packaged bits of carrageenan and maybe (maybe) 5% REAL fruit juice. I pack my kid's lunch every day, all organic, all home-grown, all whole foods, and yet I can't stop her from snacking on her friend Olivia's "Froot Snacks". But Hah! Revenge is sweet. And so is this grape leather.

Basically, any kind of fruit pulp (ground in a blender) that's dried in the oven overnight will result in leather. Some of the naturally drier/stringier/less sweet fruits like apples or peaches may need a bit of presweetening first to appeal to the young palate; we do add some spices to the apple leather we make. Tom looked at all our food preservation books, but he used the how-to's from this site to make the leather.

On sweat

2007-09-19T09:27:00.000-04:00

I kind of knew that putting chairs in the garden was a bad idea. Here they are this morning, receptacles of "stuff" like drying Hutterite Soup Beans and the ever-patient Mother of All Colanders

"Don't you ever just sit down and take it easy?" my next-door neighbor asks. I have just come with the Mother of All Colanders to load up with some freshly-washed grapes from the wheelbarrow that's in his front yard. (We still can't use our water for foodstuffs, so I am still schlepping back and forth to use his hose.)

"I don't know of any parent of a young kid who just sits down," I reply, hoping to divert him. This is my umpteenth trip with the colander: it's Sunday, and we're juicing the grapes.

I look at my stained fingers typing this. Every night has been devoted to filling up the larder, whether I am jam-making or saucing tomatoes or roasting eggplant or making vegetable stock. Call me a masochist, but frankly, I'm simply more of a glutton. There is something really--and excuse me for dipping into the woo-woo--centering about all this. I don't know. It's a purposeful way of being.

And it's a way of being that doesn't allow for much rest, at least at this time of year!

Lightening our load

2007-09-18T08:59:00.000-04:00

Nabbed from a website.

SO! We have successfully made it through a summer without air conditioning here at Old Vines. The a/c window units are still gathering dust on their shelves out in Tom's garage. I am glad. We've used the whole-house fan some, but in general, it's fortunately not been a really hot year. If we have felt the heat, a dip in our daughter's kiddie pool or a swim in the lake have helped us deal with it.

That said, when Canning Season rolls around, I am compelled to turn on the stove and heat up the place. We know this will just have to happen. The house came with an old cookstove that can be hooked up to a propane tank: I suppose I could resort to that with my canning madness. But general cooking? Hmm, we still need to do a lot of that.

SO, again! What can we do that's environmentally sound? How about a solar cooker? I married McGuyver, after all: I have sent him searching out this task. These things can be as simple as a cardboard box and tinfoil. He will most likely put something together that's far more elaborate than that. And the best place to put it? Atop the chicken coop! It's on a 35* angle facing south.

And then there's the idea of a bread oven. We're investigating a purchase of land adjacent to our house (mainly so no yahoo builds on it); this land is a woodland now. A wood lot. Wood. Oven. They go together. When I was a Minneapolitan, I helped a couple different friends build their own pizza ovens. I had friends who were chefs, and this was an obvious extension of their breadmaking abilities. We also plan on building one for my daughter's school here, too. So, why not one here? Why not. Let's just do it.

I'm sure I will keep you informed about all this nonsense.

...and Sunday was Grape Day

2007-09-17T08:49:00.000-04:00

Yes, everything else gets shoved aside when it's Harvest Season.

Saturday was Apple Day...

2007-09-16T08:34:00.001-04:00

Child labor

Time for a turn with the cider mill

Time for another turn with the peeler/corer

I swear most of my posts for the Eat Local Challenge seem to be all about the wonders of Products, not Produce. Here I am, shilling for cider mill and peeler/corer producers everywhere, but I swear my natural instinct is What Would the Amish Do. As it was, the mill doesn't work too well with our mostly juice-less McIntosh apples, but that peeler/corer worked great. We ended up making 12 quarts and 7 pints of applesauce, one small thing of apple leather, and only half a gallon of juice.

Stepping down

2007-09-15T10:01:00.001-04:00

Bloody Beatrice, Bonnie and the guineas out on patrol

Seasonal transition is fairly gradual here. I would think it is because we're zone 6-7 and are surrounded by zone 5, but really, it's just Lake Michigan.

I loved Minnesota, but it really didn't seem like too long a time between Air Conditioning Season and Heating Season. There was no gradual step-down; it was fairly quick. (And spring, I swear, took FOREVER!!!) But I am a great season-denier. And now I live in a place that supports this crazy tendency of mine. The leaves here have had the good sense to not shock me out of my revelry: they, on the extreme side, have turned yellow-green. Only on the drive to school do I see a few heraldic (panicky) sumac and maples who've gone over to the red end of the spectrum.

Today, though, it's 10:00 and it's 48*. I think my denial will not last long! Especially now that it is cider season.

Well prepared

2007-09-14T06:51:00.000-04:00

Or, preparing for the well

We can't just, you know, have them dig a well in the front yard. Nope, we need to take down one tree and a few branches from two more trees, move one large perennial bed, and then move a whole bunch of stuff around in the basement.

Tom got to have "fun" yesterday with the chainsaw, and I with the chipper/shredder (think Fargo without the blood).

And no, we don't have "chainsaw art" where the tree was, though it certainly does appear that way in this picture!

1:00 p.m. Update:

Hey! I recognize that gray muck! That's our clay soil! This process is rather fascinating. From what I can understand, it's dug hydraulically. Fascinating. (And yes, our house does have a tin roof. It's the one thing we'll never have to replace!)

5:00 Update: A beautiful sight.

More bugs

2007-09-13T09:33:00.000-04:00

September is a beautiful month around here, but it is also Fruit Fly Month. Even if we don't have any fruit/veggies lying around, they manage to appear. So, this is how we solve that problem. Take a piece of paper, 8.5" x 11", the thicker the better. Make a cone with a small hole at the bottom. Tape together, then place over a jar in which you have placed a juicy piece of fruit. Voila.

The disgusting thing is this is one day's worth of bugs. I kill them by filling the jar with water (cone still intact) and adding a few drops of bleach.

Freezing herbs

2007-09-12T06:46:00.001-04:00

Don't look too closely. It is very blurry.

This lack of water here at the house has put a serious dent in my plans for Greater Grape Domination. I've been canning and freezing still, somewhat miraculously, but somehow I don't have the heart to do anything grape-related over the next few days. (Maybe it's the fact that I have to boil water to wash, then rinse, the dishes. Maybe.)

BUT! Enough about me. I did manage to put away about a garbage bag full of basil into the freezer last night. This method works with most fleshy herbs, like parsley or cilantro, though basil is a great candidate as its flavor is so fickle and easily lost with cooking. (The other herb that freezes well this way is sorrel, but I know that is something not everyone has growing in their Back 40.) I lightly rinse then remove the leaves from basil that has not flowered, tearing them into small pieces. I put them into my grandmother's Cuisinart food processor (circa 1975 and still whirring away) with a tiny bit of water. I pulse to a mince (no further) then I scoop them into ice cube trays. Once they're frozen, I put them in a resealable freezer bag and keep them in the upstairs freezer for easy use. I will reheat one of those many jars of tomato sauce, and, at the end of the heating, I will pop in a cube, then toss the lot over some spaghetti for a quick winter meal.

Pretty easy-peasy.

My mom goes about 4 steps further by making actual pesto that she freezes in trays, then wraps the cubes individually in foil. This obviously works, too, but my husband isn't too hep on cheese and nuts, so I just stick to the simple stuff.

This is yet another entry into the Eat Local Challenge for preserving the harvest.

Oh, well....

2007-09-11T08:51:00.001-04:00

Alot at stake

The one thing I didn't mention that happened Sunday evening, as I was washing up after my Grape-A-Thon, is that our well went out.

I can think of better ways to spend $5,000., can't you?

But honestly, the well was the ONE thing we hadn't replaced here on the homestead.

Behold, the magnificent grape

2007-09-09T19:51:00.000-04:00

Ding! The Niagara grapes (Vitis labrusca) are ready. Time to harvest and process them.

Step one: Send child off for a day with her Nana. (This step is not really necessary; the circus, fortuitously, was in town. Believe me, the child will have other grape opportunities yet this year.)

Step two: Grab pruners and the wheelbarrow. Yes, the poop hauler/coop cleaner/dirt slinging wheelbarrow: I am of the school that, with a little effort, anything can be clean again. It's the only form of redemption I truly believe in. Now go out and hit the vineyard!

Step three: Shocking, but true: the first two vines made a wheelbarrowload! Egads. This here is about 60 pounds. Sixty pounds will yield about 5 gallons of juice. Considering I am working solo today, it's time to process the first barrow. (Notice Penny, ever wanting you to please, please throw her frisbee for her.)

So, over the next three hours, I hose off, then de-branch, this load of grapes in ten- to fifteen-pound increments. I take them inside, run them through the food mill, then squeeze the resulting juice through two cheesecloth-lined flour sack towels (one at a time). The juice goes in the fridge until I get a big batch. Then, I put the juice into freezer bags and pin the bags closed with clothespins to do a first freeze in the basement freezer. I will haul them out tomorrow and seal them for the final time.

A bit of background on the vines here: our farm is called Old Vines. It's an old fruit farm, one of thousands in this area; ours hasn't been a working farm for probably 30 years. The grapes, though, still produce; they're 80-90 years old. We have been organic since we started with them. Our method the first year was nothing, just to see what cooties came and ate them. Well, Japanese beetles were our pest of note. So that fall Tom started applying milky spore to the ground by the grapes. Last year was a no-harvest summer, as a very late frost wiped out the imminent fruits. This year? Bonanza. It was a near-drought year then tons of rain in August, so, um, we're overwhelmed. Tom sprayed kaolin clay on the leaves and fruit twice during the Japanese beetle push (late June through July). Kaolin colloidal clay is just that: clay, the kind you'd use in facial masks, interestingly. Well, it sure made for some pretty and mostly critter-free grapes, I will say. The leaf canopy was undamaged by the bugs, so the fruit production was enhanced.

You're just making juice, you ask? Yes, partially. Niagara grapes are the #1 grape used in this country for white grape juice. We'll thaw the bags in the winter and dilute the contents slightly for a morning beverage. Anyway, this is the simplest way that I process these growing things. I mentioned that for the September Eat Local Challenge, which emphasizes food preservation, I would start simple and move my way up to more "complicated" preservation methods. Dang, though, I am beat, as I did another wheelbarrow load after this one! Another 60 pounds, another five or so gallons. And this, quite frankly, is JUST THE WHITE GRAPES! Only 4 vines out of 44!!!!

(Yes, I will be getting help with the next batches...)

Drying herbs

2007-09-08T08:43:00.001-04:00

Lemon balm, tarragon, basil, summer savory and marjoram tied up and ready to go

With September's Eat Local Challenge's emphasis on food preservation, I thought I would show "easy stuff" first. Refrigerator pickles are easy. This is even easier.

A lot of the reasons I do what I do is because, in the country, I have no access to the gourmet establishments that populated my city life. Instead of doing without, though, now I am D.I.Y. But even when I was a city kid, I dried my own herbs. It was so easy to do. Considering how expensive spices can be, this certainly appeals to my tightwad side. And in the thick of winter, it is so nice to be able to grab a bit of summer seasoning off the shelf.

Not that I am growing cinnamon, vanilla, peppercorns or even ginger outside (though I could grow the latter, I suppose). Instead, most of the spices I grow fit in that generic French category of "fines herbes." These are the green ones that most of us can, and DO, grow in our North American gardens. Basil. Borage, chervil, cilantro (coriander), fennel, mint, marjoram, oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, savory, thyme. Chives. Tarragon. Lemon balm, lemon grass. And Hungarian peppers can even be dried and ground into your very own paprika.

So, here's the procedure. Select the healthiest, strongest herbs: generally, they're at their peak before they go into flower. Go outside in the morning and cut some herb branches. If they are wet with dew, shake them off a bit and set them in the sun to dry (but not fry: it is important to watch out for this). DO NOT wash them off; just try to brush or shake off any of the dirt you see. Tie them up with some twine and place inside a small paper bag (lunch bags work well for this) that you have punched a bunch of small holes in. Cheesecloth also works: you must make sure, though, that the drying place is dark. Tie the bag around the branches and hang it up in a dry, dark, well-ventilated spot (not your kitchen, in other words: your bedroom, maybe, or your garage). The herbs should be dry in about 3 weeks. You can them remove the leaves from the stems and gently crush them or grind them as needed.

I love making my own herb mixes. Italian herb mix is one I use frequently (oregano, rosemary, thyme, marjoram and basil). The true Fines Herbes is an equal mixture of of the following: chervil, chives, parsley and marjoram (or tarragon). Bouquet garni is a stronger mixture of thyme, sage, and parsley, but, like Fines Herbes, its contents can vary. I am also a huge sucker for savory (both winter and summer) and thyme, so I make a big mix of that, too.

Confession here: I did a lot more herb-drying in Minneapolis, as those harsh Minnesota winters generally laid waste to all but my most hardy perennial herbs. Now? I am a lot more lazy, as our winters here are a lot more forgiving. I find that I can still go out in December and pick fresh, frost-bitten herbs for my cooking.

Ugly bugs

2007-09-07T08:35:00.001-04:00

Did you ever wonder what those disgusting tomato hornworms look like when they grow up?

I found out yesterday...YUCK. It was so ugly I had to grab my gloves. I think the pink part behind its head freaked me out more than its size.

But around here, it's Chicken Dinner!

A surprise

2007-09-06T09:48:00.001-04:00

So, maybe those guineas aren't completely useless after all.

We got them because we lost a couple of hens to a hawk last year. Instead of getting a loud and obnoxious sex-crazed rooster with eyes peeled to the sky, we got loud and obnoxious guineas instead. I will have to take a picture of them, though it is hard: they're really skittish. Anyway, the guineas are loud and proud, and extremely alarmist about the slightest thing flying overhead. So they're useful.

I didn't expect eggs, though.

From all that I have read, these birds tend to lay in sneaky places, places other than the coop's three nesting boxes. Guess what. At least one of the guinea hens (there are three, plus a boy) is laying in the box. Just like the chickens.

So we cooked up our first one on Sunday for lunch. Economic, this egg. Not at all watery. Tiny yolk, thick white...and the most amazingly thick little shell and inner lining: I had to all but cut the darned shell open! It was TASTY.

But it sure would take a lot of them to make a souffle.

POSTSCRIPT: I spoke entirely too soon. I just went to investigate a particularly long guinea-screaming-session, and behold: behind the greenhouse garden, in the weeds, a guinea nest.

Little sneaks.

So, you say you can't can...

2007-09-05T08:50:00.000-04:00

Three weeks to go

...and I say you can can.

September is the Eat Local Challenge with an emphasis on preserving the harvest.

BY FAR, the easiest method of food preservation is cold storage (a la a root cellar), but I will get to that at a later post.

Right now, though, I would like to discuss refrigerator pickles. You need a refrigerator, pickling produce (cucumbers, green beans, even summer squash or corn), vinegar, a way to boil water, and some clean jars and lids. Oh, and some salt, and maybe some dill or other herbs. Here is a good site for refrigerated cucumber pickles. The one advantage that I have found to this method is that the lack of cooking makes for some crisp little salty treats.

Now, before you all rush out there to try this, realize that the USDA does not recommend doing any preservation without boiling-water bath canning or pressure canning. BUT, well, for years now I have made "Dilly Beans" with my first green beans and my first fresh dill. Basically, these are pretty little treats is all; I put up about four pints, wait 12 weeks, and then we eat them. Likewise, I make small batches of things like jam or pasta sauce that can be frozen or refrigerated if the harvest was too small to invest the time in getting out the glass jars. In other words, that precious space in the refrigerator? I'd rather it IS NOT taken up with canning jars!

But if you have extra refrigerator space, are afraid of canning, and you are a sucker for pickles, you should give this a try.

On the art front...

2007-09-03T10:29:00.001-04:00

Okay, it's the third day in September and I have not mentioned yet that my husband's book (or monograph, if you want to be technical) went on sale on the first. Yes; he is an artist, an honest-to-pete, makes-a-living-doing-it artist. The book is published by Aperture, which is the premier book house for photographers' books.

It is a board book, in the same vein as that which we give our toddlers to mangle, but, in the words of my friend's eleven-year-old daughter, this is much more naughty. Well, the cover might be, just a bit...artistic license, you know? Anyway, if you're so inclined, you can read about it here.

What's funny is publications as disparate as Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, Harper's, The New Yorker and full-on literary publications like The Georgia Review and Virginia Quarterly have either reviewed this book or have recognized his art. Which I take to mean that he's got broad appeal.

So go check it out. You should be able to find it at your local bookstore, but you can always get it on Amazon and other on-line stores.

Tom's galleries are Foley Gallery in NYC and Thomas Barry Fine Arts in Minneapolis.

One Local Summer 2007: Week Ten

2007-09-03T09:02:00.000-04:00

Sweet potato flower (who knew?)

With this, the last week of August, our One Local Summer experiment has ended!

I hope you all had FUN with this challenge. I certainly learned a lot from all of you. This exercise may have been frustrating at times, and if anything it has proved to us that, like it or not, we have really become separated from the food-growing process. (I mean, my grandparents did not need to go 80 miles from their homes to find dairy and flour, as I have done!) With any hope, you've all done some thinking, and more than likely, you have inspired other people to consider their food miles. And let's not forget the food itself! YUM!

I recycled the meal I made for the last meal for One Local Summer last year. Very univentive, I know, but it was so good, I had looked forward to making it again this year...just needed some beans to ripen.

Matt in Iowa made two local dinners this week. He made his first pesto! And his mom promises to teach him how to make noodles for the next time he makes it. How great is that.

Lucette in Cleveland made a meal with simplicity and ease, she said. Listen to this: "vegetables chopped and sauteed to a sputter...." (I will certainly miss these tomato/cucumber daily salads in three months, won't all of you?)

Farm mom Ang in Michigan posts a lot of firsts in this week's meal. This challenge was really hard for her at first (she is surrounded by farms but nothing to eat), but with some effort, they've done it. And she says if she can, anyone can! Go see her Eggplant Parmigiana.

Emergency surgery and prolonged recovery has taken its toll on Frugalmom in Illinois. She hasn't posted to the challenge as much as she would have liked. That said, she reminds us that eating local need not be a complicated affair: a BLT or some home fries is a simple start.

Evie in South Dakota grabbed her last meal on the run: literally! She did not one but two marathons this week. (Whew.) Speaking of influencing people, she thinks this challenge has helped her daughters the most, and will be something they remember through their lives.

Kelly in Ohio will be continuing the challenge on her blog. She feels that she hasn't made nearly all the recipes she wanted to try, so she needs a few more weeks! Now, that is inspiring. This final meal looked delicious and not too difficult, which is also inspiring.

I will say that Linda in Missouri has had some of the more interesting meals of the challenge: she really goes all-out! She put an Asian spin on this last one, using her own lemongrass and tag-sale dishes. Those cabbage rolls sure looked great!

Ohioans E4 and Lori made a huge haul at the farmer's market this week, but life's complications got in the way of a 100% local meal. (I think 90%, or even 50%, qualifies if your heart is in it!) But both their barbecue and its charcoal were local...

I realize that today is a holiday and that many of us are caught up in the frenetic pace that is Back To School season. If you're still planning on posting a meal, please do so: I will try to catch you all up on the One Local Summer site. I'm missing many of my usual Midwesterners this week, so I hope you can still participate!

Thank you, Liz, for dreaming up this challenge!

The Last Supper

2007-09-01T11:35:00.001-04:00

The Last Supper (of One Local Summer 2007)
and Meal #1 of the month-long Eat Local Challenge for September, 2007

Am I saving the best until last? Well, maybe. How about the most time-consuming. Though this is a great meal to put together if someone's hovering about your kitchen, chatting with you while you work.

Paula Wolfert, whom I generally consider a windbag, I readily concede knows her way around a kitchen. Her take on the Provencal soup Soupe au Pistou was amazingly delicious last year when I first made it. (Yes, how ridiculous is that: I am recycling my last supper from last year's One Local Summer!) You see, I've been judiciously watching the ripening of my Flageolet shell beans in preparation for this soup this year. All other stuff came from the garden, and the butter (yay!) came with a wink and a nod from a vendor at a local farmer's market (it's illegal to sell raw milk products in Michigan). The noodles are quasi-local too; coming from another farmer's market in Indiana.

I also made a roulade (basically, a rolled-up souffle) with a roasted tomato filling, topped with some Amish farmer's cheese.

A salad of fresh tomatoes rounded things out. My mom and brother were our guests. (I called Mom this morning, knowing she was coming by to take the kid to the beach, and asked if she planned on staying for supper. "Of course; I am no fool," she said.) It was great!

Okay. The Eat Local Challenge thing: I certainly won't be posting daily meals, though I might do weekly. This local-eating thing is kind of old hat with us. But I will be posting about ways to save the harvest, as that is the challenge of this month's Challenge. I'm looking at all the fruit still coming down the line (pears, apples, and all those hundreds of pounds of grapes on our vines) so just getting ahead of all that WILL be a challenge! Stay tuned...

NOTE: ROULADE RECIPE FOLLOWS IN THE COMMENTS!!

Everyone's got tomato stories...

2007-08-31T18:57:00.000-04:00

The turkey roasting pan gets a second use this year

...so I thought I would post a tale too.

I read a lot, and am usually not terribly forgetful about what it is I read, but I am now realizing--a big smacks-forehead moment--that I need to credit someone's writing for many of my recent thoughts. You see, I read this book when it first came out: I got it at the library. I was a city girl at the time, and lived a very organic life in my own small city plot. But somehow, though I loved the book, it didn't stick, at least obviously, in my thinking about my new life here in the country.

But enough of you have either listed this book as a favorite or have simply mentioned it that I actually spent money (!) and bought it. I've been rereading it this week. So when I read things that she says like

"...it is difficult for me to take seriously the question of whether eating locally is worth the trouble. Clearly it is for me. Trying to understand why, I have realized that my own commitment is probably driven by three things. The first is the taste of live food; the second is my relation to frugality; the third is my deep concern about the state of the planet.

As is surely obvious in all I have written to date, the production and consumption of fresh local food is so rich an experience for me that I find it hard to imagine how I would live if I couldn't grow what I eat and eat what I grow."

I say, sing it, sister!

So. No tomato story. How about a tomato thought:

Joan's Tomato Glut Sauce (adapted from the NYTimes)

Preheat oven to 400*.
Put into a large roasting pan:
6 pounds tomatoes (plum are best), cored and quartered
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped carrots (optional)*
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped celery (optional)*
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped onions
9 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
6 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 tablespoons each fresh thyme, oregano, basil, parsley
1 1/2 teaspoons salt...or less
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper

Roast 45 minutes, or until veggies are soft. Process briefly to leave slightly chunky, and freeze in 2-cup portions. Makes 2 quarts (4 pounds).

* Very optional. I used pepper, eggplant and yellow squash in mine (it's a color thing) and I used all the tomatoes that happened to be fresh TODAY. It's Glut Sauce, you know...

Enough is not enough

2007-08-30T13:07:00.000-04:00

So those chairs are coming in handy.

Last night, I stopped my greening activities and sat for a spell and thought about world domination. And domain, dominion. Specifically, this domain.

What would it take to really produce all our food here?

You see, we are not wanting for land. Despite my somewhat adversarial relationship with its clay soil, I know that this is good land, mostly flat, sunny, open land. I have not been in land-grab mode; I mostly think the gardens I have built have been "enough," though interestingly I have increased their size by about a third each of the three years I've been gardening here.

So I was wistfully planting the last of the beans last night and I wondered if I should build more vegetable gardens this fall. How much is enough? How much do we need? There is a certainty to what we, a family of three, consume over a year. It's not really a year I am concerned with, either: it is those dead months of November-May. How many onions, how many potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips and beets. How much? And when does it become too much for just me to maintain?

Knowing me, I will go for it: I will make more of a landgrab, I will build more beds, it will get done, this experiment will continue. Ah! Carpe diem!

Postscript, the next day: This is the kind of crazy thinking I do when I am not working. Today, I saw how much paid work had piled up during my 3 days off, and my land-grab plans seem like such happy talk. But the really crazy thing is? I will probably do it: expand the darned gardens by a third again.

Vacation

2007-08-28T12:05:00.001-04:00

Come, have a seat

I'm taking as much time off from work this week that I can.

The last vacation I had was back when we went to New York for Tom's show. I've taken a few days off here and there, but it has been nowhere near the European 5-6 weeks or the stingy American two. So, what is it that I do to "vacate," you ask? I work in the gardens.

Yes, so far, I have had two days of unbothered bliss in the veg garden, pulling weeds, moving mulch, harvesting, making more compost...you know, puttering. (Or pottering, if you're English.) It has been such a tonic! All that sun, all that greenery.

The one significant thing I did was put two chairs in the garden. Since I fenced it in, there's been no place to sit...intentionally. This is no place for slacking, I thought. Then my friend Kristie emailed me and said she reads this blog and thinks how much fun it would be to walk around the gardens and shoot the breeze. Well, dang! Now you can pull up a chair and do so.

Tom and I opened a bottle of wine and sat in the chairs for a long time last night. (Most of the bottle got drunk, too.) I gave him a tour at one point, and asked him what he thought. He said that it was so beautiful he didn't know why people just grew flowers. And I agree. The mass that is a blooming bunch of bush beans and the vibrance that is swiss chard, the fronds of waving leek leaves, the ripening fruits of the tomatoes and the seductive darkness of the eggplants: this gorgeous stuff also FEEDS US!

Every visitor comes to the garden and invariably says "Wow this is a lot of work." To which I also invariably say, work? This, this is not work at all.

One Local Summer 2007: Week Nine

2007-08-27T09:02:00.000-04:00

Shameless stealing of Becke's meal posting

Welcome to the Midwest roundup of One Local Summer. One week left to go!

"Eating in season" also means "eating what's available now." I mixed up a lot of what I had a lot of for this week's meal. (It tasted better than it looked, I swear.)

Matt did a Comfort Food meal for his family this week. And what is more comforting than Cottage (Shepherd's) Pie? (Even the name gives you a warm, toasty feeling, right?)

Lucette found the last of the last, she thinks, of her venison. Her photo of the burgers she made of them scared her, though, so she substituted instead pics of the corn and salad she made.

Ang has been busy using her stove for things other than meals. How can this be, you ask? Well, her kitchen is like a lot of ours lately: we're all putting away that harvest, one boiling pot of water at a time. She wanted to keep things simple, yet tasty, this week: sure looks like she succeeded!

Evie has had lots to contend with this summer. Hail, then a flood, has done away with much in her garden. She's a stalwart Scandinavian, though, so she's carrying on with a Swedish meal her grandmother made quite often.

Ever-diligent Kelly has discovered the secret of perfectly-grilled chicken breasts: it's diligence! She praises the flood of wonderful veggies that now show up on their plates, knowing well this late-summer eating is but a small slice in time.

Joanna missed this week. She knows why, and how. But here's the best thing: she knows that next year, they'll have a house, and a garden of their own, so this eating-local thing will be REALLY local.

Linda made a spookily autumnal meal this week. It looked GREAT! She confesses, though, that it tasted awful. (I blame it on rushing the seasons: fall will be here soon enough, girl!)

Lori and E4 posted last week's meal this week. Hey: at least they posted it! They both brought up how kooky this Midwestern world is, though, in terms of getting local goodies. You'd think in a breadbasket like Ohio you could get local wheat. I think the same of dairy in Michigan. Farmers out there, listen up! Sell local! We're HERE, and we want to buy!

Becke was chilling with some local soup this week, too. Dang, that looks good. And she, like me, can't believe One Local Summer is almost over!

Manerva missed the floods that hit her state. She got some much-needed rain, though. She happily shared some great grub with visiting relatives this week, though. That's the best kind of meal, I think.

One Local Summer 2007: Week Nine

2007-08-26T21:25:00.001-04:00

One of the marching orders about local eating is you eat what's ready.

Perhaps this removes a lot of choice. Choice, though, is suspect. Frankly, I don't like the idea of eating asparagus in September or raw tomatoes in January. It does not feel right to me: those poor vegetables have been carted in to us from many thousands of miles. How many calories are expended, by diesel and jet fuel, for the few measly calories these things yield us on our plates?

Choice-wise, though, the late August garden is chock-full. This week for One Local Summer, I scanned the supplies and the recesses of my brain and I said: Eggs. Eggplant. Tomatoes. How about moussaka?

The menu was as follows:

Eggplant moussaka (eggplants, parsley, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and veg stock from the garden; eggs from the chickens; and local smoked gouda cheese; nonlocal EVOO and salt and pepper.)
Cucumber-yogurt soup with scallions (cukes, onions, garlic and veg stock from the garden; nonlocal milk that I made into yogurt)
Steamed Haricot vert (green beans) from the garden
Whole-wheat/oat bread (local flour and oats, our sourdough starter)
Peaches, nectarines from town
Classic Demi-Sec white wine from Tabor Hill

I will say this for this meal. When things are super fresh, I know that my cooking talents can't really compete with nature. It seems somewhat heretical to, say, really cover up a dish with tons of spices when a fresh green bean really just needs a quick steam to be its best. This meal went a bit more toward the alchemy that is winter cooking for me. Not that I minded the change that this extra work took: the moussaka was really good!

Comfort me with apples (and grapes)

2007-08-26T09:46:00.000-04:00

It's a decent year for fruit here at Old Vines. We had a killing frost over Easter weekend, which locally did lots of damage to whatever was blossoming at the time. Apricots and plums were mainly affected, the latter here at the farm, too. Last year, frost got our grapes. (It's always something?) What it proves to me is we need to make sure we diversify.

We plan on expanding our orchard significantly this fall. Lots more different kinds of apples, with different bloom times. Other fruit trees, too, will join us: pears, peaches. And the Old Vines of the title of the farm? They'll stay, those 80 year old vines, but maybe I'll invest in some European varieties, too. You know, if I decide to make my own hooch.

Canning season, then, will extend into November! Yum. Grape jam, apple butter, apple sauce...

Let's go on a garden walk, part one

2007-08-22T22:52:00.003-04:00

Today, the kid was at my mom's so I didn't feel the ultimate rush I usually do at dinnertime to make dinner. It has been raining here to an absurd degree: the usual August allotment came in two days, but that was eight days' worth of rain ago. SO! Let's see what we shall find, okay?

Step one: Don shoes. Roll up pants.

Step Two: Open a bottle of liquid courage (you see, I don't think I will like what I find out there, frankly) because, well, it's darned hot. And I like this beer.

Step Three: Pick up The Mother of All Colanders, and her sister, The Mother of All Dough-Rising Bowls. (Note beer bottle for scale.)

Step Four: Say hello to chickens. They assume, of course, that if I am bringing a bowl out AND setting it down, it must be for them. This is Phyllis II on the right, an Ameraucana, and Verloe on the left, a Rhode Island Red.

Step Five: Say hello to Penny, and throw her Flying Squirrel twice. She wishes you'd throw it more than twice. How about a half hour's worth? How about more than that? I will catch it every time, I will, I will! Promise her you will, but later.

Garden walk, part two

2007-08-22T22:52:00.001-04:00

Now, well, there are no steps. You've arrived at the first garden: the greenhouse garden. It is the newest one, it's six raised beds and one big flat one against the back of the icehouse and my garden shed. What greenhouse, you ask? The one that's not assembled yet in the garage. It's actually a coldframe.

This picture depresses me. All my tomatoes have uprooted their supports and have flopped over. The root veggies (carrots, parsnips, scorzonera, skirret) in the lower right bed are all beginning to stress out and rot in the ground. Tomorrow I will have to pull them all. Sniff.

Move on a few steps to the garden proper. Note scary weeds growing outside garden! It's surrounded by very chicken- and other critter-proof fencing though that keeps most unwanted creatures out. I just have to be diligent with dispatching the green unwanted creatures.

The onions appear to be drying well. Luckily, I pulled them a few days ago.

Beautiful artichoke, right?

Yeah, well look again. Stress! Soggy feet! Sadness!

Garden walk, part three

2007-08-22T22:31:00.001-04:00

Okay, at this point of my tour, I am rather depressed. It appears that many of the plants really do not appreciate wet clay soil for days on end. I am probably going to lose about half of the brassicas (cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli) and that saddens me. I have a second sowing of broccoli for a fall crop that's unaffected. The other things require the whole season. I hope it stops raining soon.

But hey, look! Other things seem unaffected. The tomatoes, for one. Other than slipping out of their traces (wet clay is the enemy of any post in the ground), they're plumping up rather too well. I need more time to cook them down when I can them, otherwise I have really runny sauce. And then take a gander at these sweet potatoes. They certainly look happy. I can't even find the path in front of their bed.

And then there's the edamame (soybeans)!

And then, there are friends.

So, I filled the colander AND the bowl with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans, broccoli and soybeans. The tomatoes got stewed and bagged and frozen, the eggplant and peppers got placed in the refrigerator for a later meal, and the broccoli and beans got blanched and bagged and are now in the deep freeze. We ate the edamame for dinner with some potatoes and eggs. The kid came home asleep in her carseat, worn out from a day at the beach.

It's a good life here, even if it is too wet for the brassicas.

Garden panorama

2007-08-22T22:31:00.000-04:00

As you can kind of see, I didn't really take you on a full tour. It would take a while! But thanks for virtually visiting!

One Local Summer 2007: Week Eight

2007-08-20T07:57:00.000-04:00

Just hand me the salt: Hillbilly potato leaf or Flame heirloom tomato, 2.5 pounds of goodness

TWO MORE WEEKS OF ONE LOCAL SUMMER!

I made a lot of meals. It's easy with so much available, but I also wished to show that even busy people can make good food.

Matt agrees that it is easy cooking at this time of year; he's a cyclist so he calls it a "no chain day" to demonstrate how untaxing things can be. He didn't even need to cajole his kids to eat, they readily did!

Lucette thought ahead and froze the dough for this week's pizza. What she really delighted in, besides the good food? The way the house smelled! "Like someone Italian who was a brilliant cook." Brava!

Ang is also thinking Italian with her meal. She made an eggplant bolognese. I keep forgetting that Eden Organics is a Michigan company, so thanks, Farm Mom! I can now slurp pasta local-style too!

Stacie ate a meal that tasted just like chicken...because it was! The veggies were hers, the meat was local...and THEN just take a look at what she had for dessert. YUM.

Kelly sometimes wishes she had some help in the kitchen, and as the solo chef in my house, I hear her on that. But there's so much going on in the background of her meal preparation! Luckily, things are just jumping out in the garden to help her.

Linda, bless her, went foraging for her meal. Lamb's quarters are a...weed in most people's parlance, but in actuality they're a vitamin-rich spinach substitute; I've certainly served my share, especially since it's hot and lettuce isn't available. But she even went out and caught herself some bluegill! LOVE those pan fish!

Debbie made a really yummy-looking stew, complete with local quinoa. It looks both delicious AND healthy.

Poor Becke's air conditioning has been on the fritz! Considering she loves to heat up her kitchen, this is quite a predicament. She made a lovely cold dish this week, though; go wish her a happy birthday.

Manerva has had water woes (her well pump went out), but that hasn't stopped the tomatoes. Big fans of the red stuff, her household...but this week was pizza. Delicious. (And M: I'll clean a messy kitchen over folding laundry any day, won't you?)

One Local Summer 2007: Week Eight

2007-08-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

Who could resist a soybean variety called "Beer Friend"? Not me.

Feeling like I need some cosmic brownie points, I decided I would post a whole bunch of local meals this week. I am THE cook and gardener and kitchen cleaner in this house. I work 45 hours a week, typically. I also do commute to work on Mondays and Fridays, and my commute is 40 minutes long, one way. So if people say "I don't have your kind of time to cook the way you do," I say bully.
Monday's dinner
Monday: This is a commute day, so I found some local-ish Indiana Amish egg pasta in the pantry and whipped up my favorite pasta dish with potatoes, beans, basil and garlic from the garden.
Tuesday's dinner
Tuesday: Family came for dinner, so I cooked a bit more than usual. Edamame (green soybeans) are now edible, and the variety I grew this year is called "Beer Friend," so I paired them with local Bell's beer. Menu was broccoli souffle, roasted beets, the edamame, cucumbers, and a sourdough boule.

Wednesday was the Forgot to Photograph It Day. Just as well because I make the ugliest tortillas you have ever seen! My new source for cornmeal is also a source for masa, I am most grateful. I made bean burritos with refried cranberry beans from the garden, served with lots of onions and salsa.

Thursday was our fifth anniversary, so we went out to dinner at a fabulous restaurant that features local food. All the food and the wine was harvested within 50 miles of their door. I had the Fruits and Vegetables entree: Cauliflower and garlic soup with curry oil, Yellow watermelon salad with pickled red onion, basil gelee and watercress, and their house-made fettuccini with beets and fennel in a goat cheese broth. Tom had Providence Farms wood-roasted chicken over bok choy and chanterelles in a mushroom jus with a poached egg on top. We split an apple-raspberry cobbler with local vanilla gelatto, and our wines, from Fenn Valley, were Meritage red, Desert Sunset rose, and a lovely sparkling riesling with dessert.

Friday's dinner
Friday was another Commute Day, so I made a simple tomato sauce from the tomatoes I was stewing on the stove to can (three days of no canning = a huge amount of tomatoes to can; gotta double up my time on the stove). To more of that Amish pasta, I added the sauce, and some mozzarella I made. I also caramelized some onions and overgrown green beans.
Saturday's dinner
Saturday we had more relatives come to dinner, so I made another broccoli souffle. (We're going nuts with all these eggs, frankly.) I roasted some carrots in brown butter with thyme. I've got some lovely shell beans now, so I served them with collards, onions and garlic and the pot likker. The green beans were a hit from Friday night, so I made more. I made a yogurt-honey-wheat bread. We had a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers (not shown).

Sunday, we're going to grandma's to eat, otherwise there'd be another meal to post!

Everything was local or garden- or chicken-produced, excepting salt, EVOO, butter and the milk that I made into yogurt and mozzarella.

A manifesto of sorts

2007-08-18T09:28:00.000-04:00

Manifesto: from the Latin manus (hand) + festus (struck, stuck)

So, I have done some thinking.

I am always doing "some thinking," frankly. My mind is like a hamster on its wheel: constantly churning, sometimes realizing I'm going nowhere, but liking the motion just the same.

This blog is as its by-line says: a garden journal of sorts. I'm a big picture person, though; the garden is but a wee slice of my life. Food is a bigger part, and the garden has been servicing that bigger part since I dug it up. "Eating local" is an exercise that I have enjoyed mainly because it is something I love (food) mixed with something else I love (avoiding both the car AND shopping). In other words, it's an exercise slanted very heavily toward reward in a risk/reward sense.

I realize that what I do, what we do here at this house, is not for everyone. We are both artists, although it's Tom who makes the money strictly with his ability: I only dabble now, getting paid instead to do architecture. As artists, though, we favor craft, we favor working by hand. And craft is exactly what we do: we craft our living. And craft, frankly, requires one thing above all others: it requires time. There are no shortcuts. We take the long view on most of our undertakings, be it cloth diapering our child or making our own bread or building our own buildings. Craft comes easily to us. The long way is the preferred one. The long way generally reaps the greatest rewards, too, longevity-wise, consumption-wise, and, best of all, it's rewarding in and of itself.

Knowing, then, that our long view and way is antithetical to the modern way of living, I am not out to seek converts. I am also not really out here to do anything but perhaps document how my gardens affect our small, plodding lives here on the farm. IF I am a nag, and I can be, it's only because I do not understand how people can honestly prefer HotPockets to a homemade pasty (half my family hails from Michigan's U.P.). Do people really worship at the altar of their microwave ovens? Or are their lives so stretched, time-wise, that they have to shortcut their lives, one bad microwaved meal at a time?
Food sustains us. I value my life, therefore I value the quality of food that sustains our lives. That it sometimes takes longer to prepare is not a sacrifice. I suppose I'm just doing the work that the HotPockets workers are doing, just without paying a middleman. Middlemen usually mean shortcuts and poor quality, but you're paying for quicker service. I prefer absurdly high quality, patient service, therefore...I do it myself. By hand.

It's not for everyone, all the time: but really, people. Try making a pasty sometime instead of reaching for a frozen box. Try kneading your own dough. Try growing your own garden. Just try.

Wait: maybe I am out to seek converts, after all...

Words of others

2007-08-17T09:29:00.001-04:00

I'm still doing lots of thinking, so instead of going completely dry here on the blog, I thought I would give you an article to read about the Fruit Belt. We live a paltry eight miles to the north of Benton Harbor, and almost every small business around here of longstanding either goes by Blossomtime X or Fruit Belt Y. And yes, I can easily buy cheap produce here...it's one of the reasons we moved!

Books on food

2007-08-14T11:58:00.001-04:00

Meredith, bless her heart, asked for some of my favorite culinary reads. So I did a quick gleaning, and scooped up "something for everyone" in this pile. She wanted ten, but I'm giving you eleven.

Biography/autobiography:
Mary Frances Kennedy (M.F.K.) Fisher: any and all essays, but a good place to start would be The Art of Eating. She is able to limn the most attendant details: if you read her, you are seated across the table from her.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison: Italian Days. This is another instance of food plus autobiography. BGH returns to Italy in her 50s. I did not want this to end.

Julia Child: My Life in France. Like the previous two books, this is personal history. This is a love story, though: love of food, love of France, love of her husband. Child is just as witty and charming as ever, willing to make mistakes and quick to laugh about them. Now, if I could only find out if her pot/pan shop is still open somewhere after Les Halles closed...

Eat = Memory, so I cannot in good conscience overlook Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu: Remembrance of Things Past. If you have a lot of time on your hand, you should try this.

Technique:
Paul Bertolli: Cooking By Hand. Bertolli is a former chef of Chez Panisse, and now mostly makes sausage. I admire his passion, and the depth he takes with his subjects. This book handles balsamic vinegar, sausage, and pasta-making to a depth that will astound you.

History:
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel. What the hell am I thinking, including a book about the rise and fall of civilizations in a list of culinary books? The social history of food is directly tied to the success or failure of any civilization. The cultivation of grain, the domestication of animals, the migration of peoples: it is all here.

Michael Pollan: The Botany of Desire. Pollan, who's well-known thanks to his recent book, has actually been around for quite a while, writing his little heart out. This book's my favorite of his, covering the history of apples, potatoes, tulips and...pot.

The Oxford Companion to Food. Everything, and I mean it, is in this book.

Studies, Polemics, or A Bunch Of Food Nags
These books will hopefully make you think about what you eat.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason: The Way We Eat (hardback) or The Ethics of What We Eat (paperback): Why our Food Choices Matter. Singer is the preeminent philosopher and ethicist best known for his work in applied ethics (i.e., weighing life choices) and animal liberation. That said, this book will give you a lot to think about regarding food choice: local versus organic, farmed fish versus wild...it's all here. And you won't turn vegan after reading it.

Want to figure out how to negotiate the fraught aisles of your grocery store? Marion Nestle's What To Eat will show you just how very devious stores and food companies really are.

Nina Planck throws bombs, too. Her book Real Food is one I turn to often, mainly because I cannot readily remember which oil I should grab for what purpose: this book is the best one I have found to decipher the mono- versus polysaturated fats. It is an interesting read.

One Local Summer 2007: Week Seven

2007-08-13T07:40:00.001-04:00

'Tis the season

Summer is slipping away! We're up to Week Seven of OLS.

We had a custard for dinner this week, along with some corn chowder. No, it's not an instance of dessert before dinner, silly, it was a savory custard!

Phelan is having camera woes, but she made game hens and a mighty fine peach cobbler this week.

Matt has been consuming lots of local meals lately, but the one he documented used local pasta. The pasta takes some getting used to, as it tends to cook quickly! I've noticed this with homemade stuff, too: just gotta watch it.

Lucette was feeling under the weather, but some local chicken soup lovingly prepared to help see her through definitely made her believe food = medicine.

Farm Mom Ang didn't especially feel like cooking, but she didn't especially feel like wasting good food, either. Maybe many of us feel this way, in this time of extreme produce glut. Just remember this won't last forever, folks.

FrugalMom has missed a couple of weeks due to a longer than anticipated recovery from surgery. She's on the mend, though, thankfully, so go check out her grub.

Evie has had a rough summer, too. This week, though, she put her daughter to work to go out and scavenge a meal from the garden. The first little eggs from their hens helped things out, how exciting!

Stacey just had a birthday and her loving hubby got her a KitchenAid mixer, so she's stepping up and stepping out...this week with pizza. YUM.

Kelly also went in for pizza this week. Whoa: didn't she do this last week, too? Well why yes. But hey: don't you all remember college? Or the once-a-week that our school cafeterias offered pizza and we all wanted it? Yeah. You'd eat it once a week, too.

Joanna made some lovely pasta and some only so-so corn fritters. She'll be out camping next week: anyone have any help for her for her local meal in NW Pennsylvania?

Linda had a meatball quite literally roll off the top of her spaghetti and onto the floor and the next thing she noticed...it rolled under a cabinet. Okay, it wasn't quite like that old song, but she does have some pointers about making sausage, so go check out her post!

E4 and Lori have been...busy. But! this week's meal was fast and satisfying for all.

Becke is the farmer's market shopper extraordinaire, so finding yummy dishes on her site is nothing new. She's getting help from her own garden with this week's meal.

Manerva says it's never too hot for soup if you're in the mood, and I quite agree with her, don't you? This soup featured some home-grown black beans, too.

And finally Kate agrees with Manerva: soup is just plain good eating, especially when it comes from the back yard! In fact, she calls it backyard soup, so go check it out.

One Local Summer: Week Seven

2007-08-12T15:08:00.000-04:00

We've been eating outside a lot this summer, out of the hot a/c-free house, mainly to take advantage of the lake breezes out on the west lawn. On Wednesday, the designated OLS meal day, we expected my carb-phobic mother and brother to dine with us, but they canceled at the last minute, sadly! Which was too bad as they missed a decent meal.

The menu:

Corn chowder (peaches and cream corn, my stock, salt/pepper/butter not local)
Chard custard (our eggs, ruby chard, onions, garlic, and herbs; local smoked gouda)
Shredded raw-beet salad (beets, tarragon vinegar, local blue cheese)
Nearly nekkid cucumbers (just a bit of salt and tarragon vinegar)
Yellow plums, red peaches
Round Barn wine (Red Demi-Sec)

Note the difference in pictures. The first was taken outside, with the "soup course," and then it started raining. Inside we ran, food in hand, and I forgot to reset the camera's focus. Actually, that is what I am telling myself; my husband says I just need glasses!

Call me a peasant

2007-08-08T08:24:00.000-04:00

This monster made a lot of salsa yesterday. A LOT.

I have always loved food writing. Always. I remember learning about M.F.K. Fisher in college and was hooked, even though my preferred diet at the time was diet Coke and peanut M&Ms (oh the stupidity that is youth). Food plus culture? Even better. So writers like Barbara Grizzuti Harrison and other Europhiles became my escapist reading. But then I found Frances Moore Lappe and I changed my life.

Today, while rolling out tortillas over my lunchbreak, I thought again about my current reading jag: local foodism. It is true that what most attracts me to cucina povera is the fact that there is a local food culture that backs it up. Sure, it's immensely obvious that the Greeks' hilly, sunny clime was an excellent place to have goats, grapes and olives. Or that the arid climate of northern Mexico and the American Southwest enabled its people to cultivate the native corn, peppers and squash. Or the grassy beauty that is central Europe allowed those people to have the most wonderful dairy cattle, sheep and goats. I could go on: the leftovers that weren't good enough for slave owners became the fatback, collards and cornbread of its slaves. All these foods were amazingly whole, and amazingly healthful to those who ate them.

So I look at culturally loaded things like French food and I see through it to the farms that initially produced it: the mother sauces, after all, were simply ways to sex up the common, daily cuisine. Crepes, like tortillas, dosa, injera, pita and countless other flatbreads, are simply using what is at hand to both fill the tummy and extend what little protein is available.

With all this floating in my mind, I do wonder where I am going with all this research. I complained to my uncle a couple weeks back that I am kind of in a reading rut. He, like many of my family, is a voracious reader, and his advice was that this is no rut: you are simply working through something.

And I do know where I am going with it, at least tangentially: I am looking to produce my own food culture, whereby we can live, mostly, off what we produce here on the farm. And that there is a whole tide of generations who have done it before me is both daunting, and really, really inspiring.

And it'll be much better than M&Ms.

I'm going to take a few days off from blogging to do some thinking.

Weather

2007-08-07T09:16:00.000-04:00

Hot chickens in a hot coop at dusk

"What's that noise?" our daughter asks us, eyes wide, about a week ago. "It's raining!" we say.

This summer will go down in memory as one marked by what it wasn't: it wasn't hot, it wasn't raining, it wasn't humid. The middle one, the rain, was certainly missed. August, though, has seen to it to make up for the deficits of May, June and July, wetness-wise. We are now swamped.

With this rain has come humidity. Like most "coastal" areas, we tend to be buffered from extremes in anything, except snow, here; it is usually cooler and less humid in the warm months and warmer and more moist in the cold ones. I am very curious about what global warming is doing to our area, though. Is all this rapid rain a part of that picture? And all that lack of rain earlier this summer?

For many reasons, our window air conditioners are still sitting on their shelves in the garage. One big reason is we installed a whole-house fan when we moved in: what a miraculous device. It exhausts the hot air completely out of the house when we turn it on. It doesn't, of course, "condition" the air by dropping its relative humidity. But it does certainly work, especially in this temperate summer. And its meager consumption of electricity, compared to the a/c units, helps ease our minds that we're at least not contributing, overmuch, to these wild swings in weather.

But this humidity! Makes me reconsider all that canning I'd planned to do this week!

One Local Summer 2007: Week Six

2007-08-06T07:13:00.001-04:00

Can't you almost taste me?

I'm hoping the dog days of summer, and not the rigors of local eating, have affected people's schedules out there, as I am missing a lot of fine Midwesterners this week. Sigh. I *know* cooking + hot weather are not the funnest combination. But just think of the bounty of produce out there just WAITING for you to eat it!

I found it hot this last week, too, so we made pizzas on the grill. They were so filling that I forgot both the salad in the refrigerator and the peaches ripening on the counter! The family didn't seem to mind.

Phelan has been a busy bee, canning her little heart out. Though if you see this post, you may wonder if she's got a touch of heatstroke, poor thing.

Matt has been busy canning, too. Here is his meal, better late than never.

Lucette shares an omelet and a salad this week for her meal. But it wasn't just a salad; it was a metasalad, an ubersalad: a so-not-to-be-compared to iceberg and carrot shavings salad: check it out.

Ang the Farm Mom sang a little bit of Italian this week for her meal. And don't you agree that eggplant goes with everything??

Evie is putting her tortilla press to good use again, this time for the pita for gyros! Doesn't that look delicious?

Stacey has been busy, too, but you will simply love the photo she took of her late-night scramble of a meal.

Gina and her family are contemplating a move, AND she's doing a lot of food processing now. But she did get a chance to prepare a meal this week on the 100 Foot Diet.

Jennifer made a quick fridge-to-skillet-to-plate meal this week that looks like it tasted quite yummy.

I know Kelly had some company coming, and decided grilled pizza sounded like a perfect crowd-pleaser...but I am not sure if she posted the meal in time. Go see her site anyway!

Joanna had a couple of locally-produced meals this week. She posts her lovely pasta/cherry tomato dish, but she really loved corn in the husk on the grill, the good Hoosier that she is!

Linda made a meal her grandmother served almost every Sunday. How wonderful that she is able to keep these traditions going! The one thing Linda admits, though, is she didn't wring the chicken's neck that morning, as her Grams would've done; she did it earlier this year.

E4 and Lori produced a meal that included one of their extra goats...or chevon, as they say. (Tomayto tomahto?) It certainly looked quite good!

Debbie made a meal that really looked great. She made a slaw and a risotto, and is still eating local cantaloupe, though she's not particularly relishing the latter.

Norma Jean made burgers this week, and she was really excited for the leftovers she'd eat the next day. They also polished it off with some homemade beer. You should check her tip about what she plans on doing with her leftover burger, though!!

Becke made a lovely soup-and-a-sammie that probably made us all wish we lived closer to her! That corn chowder...mmm...

Manerva also made a sandwich for this week's meal, even grinding the buns' grain herself. I personally think arugula belongs with any sandwich in which mayo is used, don't you?

Looking for something to do with all that corn? Kate (no pic this week, her little boy is sick) has given us a link to her CSA's newsletter, where she got the recipe for corn risotto.

Mystery plant

2007-08-04T08:21:00.000-04:00

I've begun to realize this blog must be very disappointing to lots of flower gardeners lately. Maybe people aren't "coming for the food."

SO! This beauty has mystified me. It's a perennial, it's about 4' tall, and...I haven't a clue what it is. It's blooming now (obviously), and I appreciate that, as many of the riotous July flowers have finished. Does anyone have a clue what it is?

One Local Summer 2007: Week Six

2007-08-03T09:35:00.000-04:00

Pizza on the grate

I had planned a more elaborate meal here at Old Vines, but somehow it is Canning Season so my culinary energies have been diverted.

We grilled pizzas last night for this week's meal. Each of us has our own particular loves/hates as pizza toppings, so it is just as well that we made these individually. (Four things help the grilling process: 1. pizza dough is usually a sticky dough: either add more flour, OR coat the rounds with flour on both sides; 2. get a pizza grate; 3. liberally coat the grate with nonstick cooking spray, and 4. precook one side of the dough, then take it back inside and put the toppings on it.)

Dough made with local flour, nonlocal EVOO and salt

These were the potential toppings:

Tomato sauce from brand-spanking new tomatoes (Orange Banana, Black Russian, Riesentraube, Amish Paste)
Red or Sweet Onions
Minced garlic
Green or White peppers (sweet) or roasted Poblano pepper (zesty)
Roasted eggplant
Herbs (any combination of onion greens, basil, rosemary, marjoram, summer savory, oregano, arugula)
Homemade mozzarella (from organic Iowa milk, sigh, so not local but the sweat effort was local)
Sea salt and/or olive oil (obviously imports)

Other than the doughmaking and the chopping, this is a fairly unlaborious meal for the head chef; everything else is DIY...

Finished pizza. Note flour on crust.

Hills of beans

2007-08-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

"Maxibel" haricot vert and Roma

Hardcore food processing has begun. The picture shows--and I am such a geek I weighed them--about 5.25 pounds of the skinny beans and 1.75 pounds of the fat ones (after processing). Beans get tipped and tailed, cut (sometimes), blanched, cooled, bagged and sealed with a FoodSaver, then put into the deep-freeze. This should last us a while.

I'm pleased with the haricot vert variety this year. VERY productive plants, and the beans don't get fat and lumpy. My usual rule is "do not sit down" when doing anything in the garden: you tend to get planted yourself. Each bush plant, though, was so laden with these beans I had to break my cardinal rule. The Romas are my favorite, and are great, especially, in minestrone. (Coincidentally, I made and processed about two gallons of that soup yesterday. It's also in the deep freeze, though I suppose I could've canned it.)

Earlier, I had mentioned how I have to relearn how long things take: initially, it is a shock to the system. Now, though, it is meditative, this "work." But frankly, I was so overwhelmed by the bean-y bounty I enlisted my husband's help! (Thanks, man.)

Today, it's corn, and Saturday, it's peaches. Yum!