Lisa's Garden

Is it spring?

2012-01-31T20:59:00.000-08:00

We've had some warmer weather the last couple of days, the frogs are making a lot of noise and the grass is starting to grow. This afternoon I checked on the beehives, and all three hives had bees coming in and out, enjoying some sunshine. Then this evening when I went out after dark to pick some kale for dinner.... the garden is full of... slugs! And cutworms and even a few earwigs. So I did the first slug pick of the year, into a jar to dispose of by duck in the morning. Not many huge brown slugs, it was mostly the striped ones that don't get as big, but they were full size, many an inch and some two-inchers. The cutworms were fat and healthy looking. In Portland the cutworms were a problem, but I saw more cutworms tonight than I've seen in the last decade. But it really seems to early to have to deal with this, it's January.

For dinner: meatballs made of lamb heart, cooked with onions and garlic and kale and served over spaghetti squash. That's the last of our "offal" from the sheep butchering, we ate liver and kidneys over the weekend, I think I've figured out how to cook these parts so they are pleasant in texture and flavor. The squashes are starting to go, at least the large ones have some spots, so we have to cut out bits before cooking. The delicatas in the garage seem to keep better, maybe it's too cold in the "root cellar" The onions are keeping well, but the garlic is getting dry, and the kale is at an awkward stage (as well having to inspect for slugs). The onion and lettuce starts are spending their first night in the greenhouse tonight. It does seem to be rolling along for spring.

What, exactly, do I do with a lot of turmeric? Or, I love the greenhouse

2012-01-15T18:59:00.000-08:00

So our greenhouse is wonderful, but it's not heated. The "tropicals" I've been growing are mostly happy, but not all of them.

Both basil are dead, as is the tomato.

There are 5 citrus which are all doing very well, insofar as I have been able to keep the scale and aphids under control.

Of the 10 peppers that started into fall, 6 are alive. There were 5 jalapenos, of which only one died (two of these jalapenos overwintered last winter too), and at least one is making baby peppers. The anaheims are both dead, but the Yankee Bell, while fruitless and ratty looking, is alive, and the Nardello keeps ripening but not making more peppers. Since we have lots of hot sauce, I'm not sure what to do with all the jalapenos.

The coffee tree is very unhappy; I brought it into the house but I think it's too late to save it. Too bad, it was looking really good and probably 4 years old. It did fine in the garage the last two winters.

The turmeric - well, I'm impressed. The leaves all died down so I harvested the tubers, and there's almost two pounds of pretty good looking roots! That's from a 2-3 gallon pot, after repotting 3 smaller plants, although it was 2 years in the pot since I thought it was all dead last winter. I don't know what to do with it all! I can see that it should have been harvested earlier, there's some browning. Tumeric is a beautiful plant, with big, tropical banana leaves. I put the pot inside a larger pot with no holes, elevated on some rocks. So it usually had water under the roots, which helped when the greenhouse gets so warm in the summer.

The aloe and scented geranium are doing fine with this degree of chill. The vietnamese coriander is okay (better than the spearming and peppermint, actually). The unknown variety of banana plant that Don gave me seems unphased by the cold, although it's not actually growing.

After a week of cold but sunny weather, today was a mix of snow with cold and some sun and some gray. Winter in Oregon... I've got most of my seeds orders done, started onion seeds already, and some arugula and lettuce... but it's time to work on the greenhouse floor, rather than play with seeds. We worked on the duckhouse floor and foundation yesterday, so we've got the really heavy work done for that.

Diet and Forks over Knives

2012-01-14T18:42:00.000-08:00

I was recently annoyed by a video called Forks over Knives. I've been reading off and on about nutrition over the past few years, and so I did come into the movie with some existing beliefs (I tried to keep an open mind, but I am not sure it was successful). But the movie didn't give much information, it was dramatic and entertaining with lots of graphics, but not much convincing argument. Over and over, it set up a comparison between "industrial food including animal products" and "natural foods with no animal products". The message seems to be that the problem is the animal products, not the industrial food!

I didn't realize it at the time, but Forks over Knives is by a Dr. Campbell, who did write a book with the same material called the China Study, and that book caused some uproar and discussion in the paleo-nutrition blogosphere that I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to at the time. Here's the article: China Study Response (pdf).

When I was looking for that article, I found a critique of the science in Forks over Knives, written by the same writer: forks-over-knives-is-the-science-legit-a-review-and-critique
It's great; it expands and goes into excruciating detail on many of the points that bothered me, so I don't have to even start trying to figure out the problems. Warning, though, it's very, very long and full of data.

Myself, I'm kind of with the Dr. Weston Pricers, and believe that animal meat and fat are healthy. Dr. Cate Shanahan wrote a book called "Deep Nutrition" that is by far my favorite; it's against sugar (including starches) and seed oils, and in favor of meat especially bone broth and organ meats. While I see her points (and some of the data from the Paleo people) about the problems with starches and especially wheat, I'm just not sure - I don't do well without some starches.

The bottom line for us, though, is that any sort of diet philosophy has to work with the foods we can grow for ourselves at different times of the year. Since we do grow so much, it's a reality test that makes more sense for us than for almost everyone else (at least in the industrial world) who just buys food at the store. I was reading another book that said to avoid root vegetables since they were too startchy. Well, that's what we have right now, and no one's going to take away my carrots!

And don't forget to get plenty of sleep and exercise regularly.

Sugar

2012-01-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

So I watched this video, Forks over Knives. More on that later, but I did start wondering about sugar alternatives like honey, since I've never been entirely clear on the whole business. Sugar's not good for us, but is honey much better?

glucose and fructose are the basic sugars.
sucrose (table sugar) is disaccharide made up of 50% glucose and 50% fructose; it's broken down into glucose and fructose in the digestive tract.
There are also maltose, lactose and other sugars that I'm not consdering here.

Fruit and vegetables contain both sucrose, and free glucose and fructose; the proportions vary.

Apples and Pear have a much higher percent of fructose (total).
Apricots, plums, and sweetcorn have a somewhat lower percent of fructose (total).

Considering sucrose separately:

relively more sucrose in apricots, peaches, pineapple, beets, carrots and sweet potatoes
relatively less sucrose in figs, grapes, pears, sweetcorn, sweet peppers, and sweet onion

Other sweeteners are made of of some combination of sucrose, fructose and glucose, plus water (for liquids) and traces of this and that:

Honey - varies, for example: 38% fructose, 31% glucose, 7% maltose, 1% sucrose
Maple syrup - mostly sucrose with variable amounts of fructose and glucose
Agave - variable and not regulated, some sources give 92% fructose and 8% glucose; another gives 56% fructose and 20% glucose. Agave nectar is hydrolized from agave juice by heating or using enzymes.
Corn sugar/dextrose - entirely glucose. Derived from corn (via a chemical process)
HFCS - the one in soft drinks is 55% fructose and 42% glucose. Derived from corn syrup via further chemical process.

Fructose is much sweeter than glucose (so less can be used) and has a lower glyemic index, but has equivalent impact on diabetes. Unlike glucose, fructose must be metabolized by the liver and excessive amounts may cause liver problems (such as fatty liver)

It's not clear why HFCS would be worse than sugar, but rats did gain more weight and get more unhealthy on HFCS than on plain sugar. See Princeton study on rats. They hypothesize that glucose and fructose bound together into sucrose metabolizes differently than as free glucose and fructose.

There's a number of studies that are particularly focused on HFCS, and of course the usual it's-all-just-sugar, but I don't find the results conclusive; everyone has an agenda. Here's one analysis and an article on liver issues.

Given my personal opinions about nutrition, and this is fairly well supported by all the information out there; the right answer is certainly "none of the above". Honey is not that different in proportion from HFCS but is the least processed, the most local, and has minerals, enzymes, and antioxidants.

Winter is almost here

2011-12-17T13:02:00.000-08:00

It's that damp cold outside, but with Christmas sort of under control, we might go out and move some rock or put up some tree protection anyway. The two sheep appear to have eaten all the grass, and when the ladies come back from their visit with the ram, we'll need to put them on the upper pasture. And since at least one will go into the freezer soon, we want them to be eating...

Last week there was a low of 19 degrees, so the garden is a bit sad looking. There's still a lot growing; kale, lots of parsnips, turnips, beets, fennel, and carrots (for seed), plus parlsey and some odds and ends. Some of the lettuce doesn't look bad but when you get it in there's frost damage. But making dinner is much more work when you have to dig, scrub and peel roots. We have been enjoying the spaghetti squash very much. My expectations weren't high, but put some sauce on and it's actually quite good, and surprisingly satisfying. This was an excellent addition to our diet. This year I also starting making squash spoon-bread, which encourages us to eat squash, and oven-roasted tomato sauce, which is what we've been putting on the spaghetti squash.

The greenhouse is again really doing well. The floor isn't done, but I'll start back working on that... one of these days. With that cold spell, it did not give total protection; the basil and one pepper plant seems to be suffering from cold. But there must be 4 or 5 jalapeno plants (two from 2010 that overwintered last year) that are doing fine and covered with peppers, the bell has a pepper, the nardellos appear to be ripening, and even the tomato plant, although suffering, doesn't seem to have given up. The ripe yuzus are hanging on and the one orange is sloooowly starting to turn orange.

Any day now I want to start some onions, since it seems like the more time they have to grow the better. I got some shallot seed so we'll give that a try too. I keep forgetting about the daffodil bulbs (I don't think it's quite too late...) and it's high time to order fruit/nut trees. Once the river rock is removed from the area in front of the house I'll put in low-growing fruiting groundcovers, kinnikinnick and salal and wintergreen and wild blueberry.

Garden report 2011

2011-09-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

We are winding down the summer garden - they are expecting rain the next few days, which is often the transition from a happy late-summer garden to an unpleasnt mess. The various roots and kales will be happy, though, and slugs will come out to be collected and fed to the ducks. So while it's not the end of the garden, really, it's coming on the end of the glamor part of the garden.

This was really a bumper year in the garden; possibly the best ever, although it was a slow start so maybe I'm getting the wrong impression from this late bounty.

The tomatoes were 2-3 weeks late, but I've NEVER had such perfect, beautiful specimens of the large heirlooms. Even on the last day of September there's hardly any cracked or rotten fruit. Chickens lose out... And we've been canning and canning and drying and drying and the freezer is full of giant bags of tomatoes.

We have been overwhelmed with melons. We had two hills of Haogen and one of Chanterais, and they are producing dozens and dozens of small melons. Most I've had before in a year was about 6, and that only in greenhouses! They are a bit watery, I think, but sweet and fragrant.

The cucumbers were very prolific, but the powdery mildew has pretty much stopped them at this point. The chickens did win out with cucumbers, there was no way to even hope to keep up. The Poona keera wasn't that great, and even Mideast Peace wasn't as delicious as I recall.

While the tomatillos did okay, the were particularly badly located between the rather aggressive melons and the peppers. So I haven't been paying much attention to them. Still short on good recipes to use them.

We are still picking green beans, in spite of more in the freezer than I had targetted. While I still love Rattlesnake the best, the other ones - I don't recall, Oregon Blue lake and/or Kentucky Wonder - were considerably more productive. A lesson: even when you think you have reached perfection, in bean variety or whatever, you still might be wrong.

The storage onions were a reasonable crop, although smaller than I'd like to see, but there was less bolting than usual. They went out late, but were really affected by slugs early on.
Sweet onions did very poorly; I tried a new ways of starting the seeds that did not work well, and they didn't recover.

I planted four types of potatoes; Yukon Gold (our old fav), Carola, German Butterball and a purple potatoe. While I did do some early harvesting, it looks like the yields from the yukon gold are so much lower than carola and butterball, and butterball seems to have yielded better than carola. The butterball was the latest, though, the vines weren't entirely dead when I dug the patch. I just don't know if Yukon Gold is really what I should be planting, except for new potatoes.

Corn did pretty well, the second planting was not nearly as good as the first. Not sure why. Possibly the giant borage plant was siphoning off the N. The bees sure loved the borage. We had to ripe it out so Sophie could get the vole that ate one of the squashes.

The winter squash plants seems to have done very well - we haven't eaten any yet - but there are a lot of squashes out there. The butternut started fruiting very late so I'm not sure if all of them are ripe. Several of the plants have pretty much succumbed to the powderly mildew. I damaged an unripe tetsukabuto so we harvested and prepared it as a summer squash and it was very nice, much more flavorful than zucchini. Been meaning to pick off the small butternuts and try... but there's too many tomoatoes.

We grew Costata Romanesco and Magda summer squashes, reputed to be delicious, but they were just another blah zucchini. I've never seem as large leaves on a squash as on the Costata, though. I had to hack it back to save some carrots.

A dud year for cilantro - nothing that didn't bolt immediately. But I've never got a good crop of cilantro in summer, so my aspirations are low.

The one area that feel really short was peppers. I think the cool weather - it was a very cool summer well into August - stunted them. And the slugs were serious problems, eating off the tops of several plants as well as ruining more peppers than we've been able to harvest.
The King of the North seems to be making a late play for a good crop, and the Cuneo that were under remay for seed saving are large. But otherwise it's been thin; no green chile relish this year. I did have enough green Jalapenos to figure out a jalapeno hot pepper sauce like the Tabasco one we love. I hope I can collect another pound of jalapenos to make another batch. They keep turning red.

Sustainable Food Choices

2011-09-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

This is an article I wrote some years ago, but it's not on the SPRG website any more, so I figured I should make sure it's not lost.
We are up to our eyeballs in tomatoes - best year ever for heirlooms, although they are all very late.

Sustainable Food Choices

This is an area where the individual can do a great deal. We all eat, and collectively our eating habits have a huge impact on the world. 10% of all the energy used in the US goes to producing, processing shipping, and cooking food.

Eating more local and more in season is the biggest impact. The average food item travels 1500 miles to your table. Eating out of season almost guarentees that the food will have come from far away - I've seen peppers from Israel and Apples from New zealand in the store, just in the produce section. Does our food need to travel more than we do?

It can be hard to find out if grocery store food is local; reading labels helps. Buying something made in Portland rather than New York isn't huge but it's going in the right direction. If you are inclined, asking the grocery store where items come from. Making it clear that you, the shopper, wants local food, will eventually push the stores to respond, although I'd expect the Co-op to be more responsive than Albertsons.

Buying from the grower's market and asking the farmer will assure you have local food with minimal transportatation. It will be fresher and therefor more nutritious. It supports the small farmer who needs it more than agribiz. You could also join a CSA and get a weekly basket of fresh vegetables - this is easier for the farmer who can plan ahead.

Even better, grow your own! That reduces the transport of your food down to a few yards. Grow basic crops in the right season and they are easy to grow. Again this is where if we all do it, it makes a huge difference - one lettuce plant isn't much, but if everyone in Ashland (pop. 26,000 or so) grew one lettuce plant each, that is a whole lot of lettuce.

Plus you know exactly how it's been grown. Even those so-called organic
standards now have loopholes you could thow a dog through. The most healthy food is the fresh food you've grown yourself and picked moments before eating. It's also the most delicious.

Speaking of organic, buying organic is a good thing. It may cost more but
voting with our dollars is important and food is cheap in the big picture. But don't feel too warm fuzzy about it in the big picture of sustainability and climate change. A lot of this organic food is grown on mega-farms where they use twice as much machinery and oil to make up for not using chemicals. It's certainly better for you to eat, and poisons the planet less, but a lot of organic food production isn't in any way really sustainable.

The less processed the food you eat, the less processing (which equals energy use and factories) is needed. This does involves changing our preferences - raw apples or applesauce or frozen apple pie? Making your own soup rather than buying soup is a tricker calculation, but eating more foods raw as nature provided, or barely cooked, is a sure win.

As an aside, you can make your own solar oven, or buy a nice one for about $250, which will bake and steam very nicely and not use any extra power at all.

Changing our preferences isn't fun, we like what we like, but we can do it if we think about the true costs. You can eat all the in season strawberries you like, but when they aren't in season you have the choice of trucking them from Mexico or processing. While strawberries are delicious, we don't really *need* to eat strawberries in January. Waiting for a special food to come in season used to be one of the special delights of the year. If you can always get them, they aren't special, right? So while it feels like giving up something we enjoy in life, it's also putting that something on a pedestal and perhaps enjoying it a little bit more as a result.

This applies to non-local foods too. Tropical foods like mangos are less special when you can buy then any time - so think of the airplane fuel and don't buy them. If you love mangos, buy them only for special occassions, you will enjoy them much more for the waiting.

Buy in bulk, too, whenever possible. Packaging is pure waste, even if some of it is recyclable, that doesn't excuse all the energy and materials that went into manufacturing it and printing all sorts of designs on it and shipping it empty, filling it, shipping it to the store... you get the picture. If you do have the opportunity to buy bulk, bring your own containers or bags. And of course bringing canvas bags whereever you shop means less packaging.

If you can't buy bulk, you can buy in larger containers - those individual small packages of raisins or juice have a great deal more package for the same amount of contents than a large single box. Usually the larger quantity costs less too, so it's win-win, as long as it's something you will use before it goes bad. Or freeze it.

Figure out how to not waste food. A study in Scandanavia found more than half the food that's purchased is thrown away. This seems to disagree with the buy large packages suggestion, but it's really depends on what you are doing now, where the easy wins are for you and your family - if a lot of food spoils in your fridge, maybe consider making some effort in this area. Observe your shopping and eating habits. Take a few things out of the grocery cart before you check out; supress your impluse to buy food. Make an extra effort to eat what is in the fridge before it goes bad. You can also get a dog, or chickens, or start a worm bin, or even just a compost pile, to deal with the waste - but far better not to have that food grown somewhere, shipped all around carefully refrigerated, handled in the store, and cooked: just for the worms.

Eating "low on the food chain" - plants rather than animals - is also good. There's an inherent loss in feeding a cow or chickens, they use a fair amount of the food to walk around and moo or squawk. Industrially produced animal products (including milk and eggs as well as meat) come from animals that are treated very badly and is neither sustainable, moral or healthy.

However, animals can also eat things that we don't care for (like grass) and scraps like carrot tops. Animals can lead enjoyable lives on small farms. If you eat meat, seek out animals raised in these more sustainable ways.

Learn to cook from more basic foods. For example, while canned beans are handy, it's not that much more work to soak and cook dried beans - just a matter of learning and practice. Baking bread isn't hard either, and the results are better tasting, cheaper and much more rewarding than store bought.

Try new kinds of foods - sustainable local foods - learn about native and wild edibles. Try unusual things in your salad; sorrel soup is a french delicacy that's made from a perennial weed. Try serving millet with dinner. Go wild and learn how to process acorns for food. I don't know that this is so really a suggestion for individual action for sustainability, but it's a way to get in touch on a whole new level with food and history and the land that supports us.

Lisa Almarode 2006

Paths and garden growing

2011-08-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

One question I don't really see asked is how wide paths should be between raised beds. I don't actually have an answer. I like to use a 3' wide path, but once the plants start growing there is no path left. And this is just potatoes and kohlrabi. A 4' wide main path is wide enough for walking now (the zucchini only takes up about half the space), but that's partly since onions are well behaved and beets don't stick out more than a foot or so. In the tomato area, I left 5' between rows, and there's just about enough space to walk; at least half the plants have stuck branches several feet out into the path. I've done hard pruning of the tomatoes at the ends where there's a 3' path, so I can walk, but a couple of days later there's another branch in my face.

The squash of course have eaten the path, and are invading everywhere. All that plenty-of-space was nothing like enough. The cucumbers are invading the onions, the melons are overwhelming the tomatatillos, which are leaning over to menace the peppers; those poor peppers that have a 5' high wall of squash vines massing on their border.

But I'm happy that all the plants are happy, and we can eat as much zucchini as we want, the potatoes are ready, there's cucumbers, beans, beets, onions and all sort of good things to eat.

More on ducks and slugs

2011-06-24T21:41:00.000-07:00

What a year it has been for slugs! Wow, they are big and everywhere. Not just us, either, almost everyone I've talked to says this is one of the worst years. I even lost a tomato plant to slugs - this was shocking; I didn't even know that would be a problem, earwigs never bother tomato plants. And tiny slugs were eating off the onions and corn seedlings, too (as well as everything else).

But there is a solution. Our ducks are 6 weeks old now. From day 1 (well, day 3) they have been eating slugs - I have to pick them off the plants for them, but they do the hard part. Even tiny little ducklings a few days old will tackle any size slug, although I worried a lot about choking when they were smaller. They can eat an awful lot of slugs and are always ready for more. I can't wait until they can start harvesting their own.

It would have been a very discouraging spring without the ducks... at least there is some up-side to the slug invasion. Picking slugs has some advantages over earwigs... low-tech, no vacuum needed; slugs don't run very fast; and they often come out before dark.

Other than that, we are up to 4 sheep, who are not keeping up with the grass at all; chickens are laying, meat chickens ready to go to the butcher; the garden is in and growing, and the slugs are really not too much trouble any more. Things really are beautiful and bounteous here!

Ancona ducks, from Boondockers farm, south of Eugene. From the left; Duckie, Bill, Donald, Cenk, Ping, and Ryan, and the 7th, Quacky, is not apparently in the photo. (unless I have mixed up Quacky and Ryan)

Seed companies

2011-01-08T23:49:00.000-08:00

So, now that I'm living only 15 miles from Nichol's Garden Nursery, I have a chance to pop in. (It's actually much more inconvenient for me since we move - I used to drive past Nichols twice a month during daylight hours, and it was well positioned for a break from driving. Oh well). Anyway, I've been having less than warm feelings about Nichols since about 2007, when Monsanto bought Semenis and I took a strong position against Semenis seeds. I wrote to Nichols and they weren't very helpful, they were relucant to clarify sources on their various varieties. I had a little better luck with Territorial, perhaps since I stopped in their store in person when the product manager happened to be around and we looked up some varieties in his system.

Anyway, now I learn that Nichols is phasing out the Semenis varieties, that they are no going to be carrying them. The Semenis varieties are on a separate rack, away from the regular seeds. This is good; I feel much better about them and trusting them for something as important as the very source of our food!

And I think it's wonderful that we have seed companies so close! Oregon is blessed with many wonderful small seed companies as well as larger ones like Nichols and Territorial/Abundant Life. One I've found recently is Adaptive Seeds. These folks are pretty close to us (as the crow flies, there's some hills between). They are big advocates of seed saving and have a wonderful instruction book: Seed Saving 'zine.

I've also discovered that Tom Wagner, the seed breeder who came up with Green Zebra (as well as many other well-known tomato varieties), is around here, Washington state somewhere, breeding tomatoes and potatoes. Tom Wagner's blog He will sell an assortment of seed potatoes from his breeding lines. It's tempting, but we are so fussy about potatoes.

And finally short plugs for Peace Seedlings/Peace Seeds (I'm not sure why these are distinct) and for Wild Garden Seed.

I don't really need more seed this year, though, I already have more than I can possibly use

Ducks, cold and rain and slugs

2011-01-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

Some years ago in southern oregon we tried raising ducks (it was during the period where Jay had to limit me to one new species per month). We got 3 Khaki Campbells and raised them in the master shower in the mobile home. They were very stinky. They were nervous and high-strung. They got moved to the orchard, where they messed up the tree mulch. Their wading pool water was always filthy. One lost to a hawk, one disappeared, so we got 3 Indian Runners. They were even more nervous, and at least two of them were males resulting in some inapproproiate behavior :-). Finally we gave them away to someone with a pond. It was Not A Success.

So, moving ahead 8 years and 200 miles, to the Willamette valley. I'm reading Deppe's book, "the resiliant gardener". She's in Corvallis, less then 30 miles from me, so her observations are more relevant to me than they used to be. She points out that ducks eat slugs. Hey, we have lots of slugs here, all over the greens! She notes ducks like rainy weather. Well, we have that in spades now! It won't stop raining! She claims not all ducks are nervous and unfriendly - well, we'll wait and see, but perhaps I've been unfair to duckdom. Hey, you can eat ducks! Last go round, I was still pretty much vegetarian; but now we've learned how to smoke poultry, which makes even fatty meat like turkey legs delicious.

Our ducks used to hide their eggs in the grass and they were always filthy, so I'm not that enthusiastic about duck eggs, but they are a bonus.

Jay has always liked ducks, and I guess he's on duty to change their water. Ducks do have the ability to hang out and be happy in a way chickens never are. I think ducks are type B personalities, while chickens are type As and are only happy when they have projects to work on. Perhaps I identify too much with the chickens...

Record keeping (and some rambling)

2010-09-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

We have very bad records for this year. Record keeping is one of the unsung but important things in food production - and it's hard to keep good records in your head. But without knowing what you did, what worked and what didn't work, you won't be able to reproduce success or avoid doing repeating something that didn't work.

Some things are burned into my mind; like the tomato ripening issues. While we hope that this year, with it's late cold wet spring and early wet fall, is not typical and we'll have decent tomatoes in future years, I still need to plant the tomatoes in a sunnier spot, with more space between them. I'm used to so much hot sun and no shade at all, it's not been easy to consider that factor.

But when we planted things and when they were ripe - like the existing apple tree here, down by the creek. It's an early type, the apples were ripe a while back, but now that it's been some time (in the time warp of September), I don't remember exactly when we noticed they were ripe...

Other than that... the turkeys are going to the processor this week, we just got the last of the first planting of corn in the freezer, there are lots of peppers to deal with, I have another round of tomatoes to can (sad though our yield is this year) before vacation. We planted a fig, a hazelnut, all three potted grapes, and moved the pawpaw, and finally got the big old Japanese Raisin in the ground - and all deer protected. We are hoping to get the bees dealt with in the next few days, that will be an adventure.

This past weekend was full of social events, a potluck at Seed Ambassadors (fascinating place! They have a seed company and a seed saving organization) on Saturday, and on Sunday, an event for the online farmer's market (Willamette Local Foods) that was cancelled but we didn't know so we had a delightful potluck anyway. So we didn't get as much done as we might, but we met lots of wonderful folks.

Local farm

2010-08-08T21:39:00.001-07:00

There's a rather cool farm not too far from us, in Sweet Home. It's name is Sweet Home Farms. I met the owners, Carla Green and Mike Polen (not the famous guy with the similar name) at a food event earlier this year (she got the door prize of chocolates that I was eyeing, but I'm happy with the chicken butchering certificate). They are Salatin-ites who work a day job from home and are overworked. They remind me a lot of us (but much more serious about the farming). They even have an English Shepherd dog.

I was trying to buy a half a lamb a few weeks back and had trouble with their website, and didn't understand their pricing. I know how hard it is, and they are trying to make a profit... but with the confusion and delay means I got sucked into other things, by now they presumably have butchered and the opportunity has gone by.

They also sell by the piece but I CANNOT find their website using google. So just so I can find it again, it is sweethomefarms.com. It sure seems like if you can't be googled, you don't really exist, maybe this link will help them.

Quick update

2010-07-29T13:46:00.000-07:00

We're coming up on living here a year, and often think about what a lot we've got done. It's too much to catalog now, but some updates, so I don't forget when we got the first green beans, the way I've forgotten just when the first blueberries showed up.

I'm enjoying the greenhouse very much; though ceiling painting is no fun (heat rises!). The plants are thriving in the greenhouse, I'll be happen when painting is done and they can move into the final locations. I found a tiny little tree frog at eye level in the melon plant, which was a treat. Alas, spider mites on the kiwi.

Of the two roosters that showed up in place of the pullets we ordered, one leaked out of a fence, found by Sophie, and died a week later from the injuries. We gave the other to the Hess's (who gave us in return some very delicious blueberries). 12 cornish cross went to Scio for butchering, which went smoothly. We have six cornish left, which we'll butcher ourselves with the Hess's. The 5 turkeys have a ways to go yet. These guys are stuck in the barn stall until we get fencing.... which had to wait until the leftover construction dirt pile was moved... which just happened. So, progress, but unhappy poultry meanwhile. I bring them dandelions and sow thistles, since they've gone through the kale and collard bolts.

We had our first pickings of green beans this week, they have been delicious. I've only seen two cucumber beetles so far, but the second one got away so we're doommed :-). I check tomatoes frequently but nothing has ripened yet. The peppers look small but we do have some eating size jalapenos. Potatoes have started to die back, they potatoes look great. The cucumbers, squash, and melon plants look good. The corn has just barely started to tassle up. We made a second planting of corn, a bit late on July 20, but we will see. Onions are finally getting large. The garlic, which all sprouted in the ground in spring, has been depressing and I've tried to ignore it. Starting to feel the pressure to get ready for the fall/winter garden; need dirt. We haven't had rain for some weeks, the ground surface is pretty dry, the grass is still green. Keeping things watered has been easy (well, with the irrigiation in...). We haven't yet watered the orchard, though I exect to soon; all the black plastic over the grass must be helping a lot.

The new kittens, Greta and Sundance, are starting to adjust. Greta is much braver and will stick around when we are outside, but we rarely glimpse Sundance. Greta actually came up behind the barn yesterday where we were watching turkey TV, in spite of Sophie being with us. Greta followed Buddy and sat down in the dirt along with the other cats and dog. I think she was hungry. Buddy likes the kittens (Greta, anyway), but KitCat has not been himself since they arrived; he's stayed away for long periods and is grumpy when he's around. He hisses at the kittens, if you pick him up, or sometimes when just walking along. But sometimes he comes and sits on your lap, so we hope he'll eventually adjust. Sophie thinks Greta is a squirrel and behaves accordingly. The kittens are very, very cute (well, the hostile expression always on Sundance's face isn't that cute).

Moving gap

2010-06-08T09:44:00.001-07:00

It's been a long time since I posted. We moved! 200 miles north, to the cool, moist Willamette valley. Moving a farm is a horrific task, though we sold off the stock and only took a few chickens (besides the dog and cats). But we did bring hayfeeders, rolls of fencing, water tanks, and a small greenhouse with us, we didn't exactly move light.

Starting over again in a new place is not easy; there was nothing here, we've had to put in a garden, fruit trees, and build a barn, and still have some fencing to do. Relying on store-bought food has been challenging. Eating your own food is a pipeline, where you start things at one point, tend them for a while, and eat them much later. But I didn't realize just how long the pipeline is. Some things you get pretty soon - we've had kale and eggs from an early point of living here, plus this place has oaks and acorns to experiment with. But it's been over eight months now, the carrots, parnips and potatoes we brought with us are long ago eaten, we just ran out of onions, and there isn't much to replace it. We're buying most of our food, and the freezer looks bare and empty.

The soil here is pretty good, so we've managed to put in pretty extensive beds and should have more to harvest starting maybe in a month or so. Chicks and Poults are growing fast now in the barn, so some meat's in the pipeline, but we won't be harvesting any lamb until next year the earliest. Unexpectedly we might have a couple of cherry-producing cherry trees (there are any number of fruitless flowering cherries, so sad).

This land can certainly be abundant, the grass is shoulder high and the weeds are lush. So some future point we've have food again. Then we'll have to wean ourselves off bananas and barbecued salmon :-)

People eat a lot: producing more and bigger

2008-09-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

It's easy to grow some food, and growing your own makes a big impact on your diet, since you can grow the most delectable and interesting parts of your diet; summer tomatoes, basil, cilantro, green beans. Once you go beyond the glamous stars, and start producing the everyday and mundane, and filling in more of the background, every day, every month, then producing your own food means producing volume, storing, and much more cooking. Maybe I'm a gardener first, but I find producing the food is the fun part, while storing and cooking it is a lot of sorting dirty roots, peeling and chopping, standing over a hot canner of boiling water, and cleaning up the mess. And I don't even want to start on how unpleasant it is to "harvest" chickens.

Coming as I do from a normal backgroud, a fairly small family of light eaters, we'd cook meals that would produce leftovers but still quite modest quantities. I imagine familiies with 5 or more childen or teenage boys would have a very different perspective! One of my challenges has been to "think big". For example, my chili recipe made enough for two meals. But it's not that much more work to double it. Last time I ended up making 3 gallons of chili, which was perhaps a little over the top; 11 people barely ate half of it. But it freezes fine, and it's so nice to have some quarts of chili handy. It was a lot of peeling tomatoes, but with so much it's worth it to get the food processor out for the onions and peppers, and the kitchen only had to be cleaned up once.

The same is true of canning. Much of the work of canning is dealing with the hot water bath. I used to end up canning only a couple of quarts of sauce or quarters, a few pints of salsa. But it's much more efficient in kitchen work to can a full canner load (7-9 jars), or two loads. We got the larger 9-quart size canning kettle this year.

Getting more serious about producing food is the other part (the part that comes first, really). You need to have enough reliable if not exciting producers. I most enjoy growing interesting and exotic heirloom tomatoes, but the interesting colors, odd shapes and shy production just don't work as well for processing. It's been a road to learn to grow a bunch of dull but productive plants to get serious tomatoes, enough to make gallons of chili and gallons of salsa. Giving up growing a few of the intesting ones - but how many interesting tomatoes can you really eat? I'm more of a graze-on-cherry-toms-right-from-plant person, myself. The interesting tomatoes go into tomato juice which seems to even things out, I can even put a few green-when-ripe in there.

Lisa’s Vegetarian Chili

2 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 large red or green pepper, chopped
1 lb.Tofu, frozen, thawed, and crumbled
4 cloves garlic, mashed
15oz can tomato sauce
1 lb. Can whole or diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper
1 tablespoon ground cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder, or more to taste
A little cayenne flakes, if desired
1 can corn
1 can black beans

Squeeze water out of thawed, crumbled tofu, and mix with part of the chili powder. Add a little liquid from the canned tomatoes and mix well, squeezing to let the spice color the tofu.

Fry onions and peppers in oil until soft and just starting to brown. Add tofu and garlic and cook a few minutes. Add other ingredients and cook for at least an hour, longer is better, until it looks like chili.

Serve over cornbread or rice and garnished with shredded cheese, chopped onions, and chopped jalapenos.

Notes:
- all quantities are general and I use fresh instead of canned when possible.
- Cook beans before adding, and peel and quarter tomatoes, but everything else can go in fresh.
- Using all fresh tomatoes increases cooking time.
- It's important to freeze and thaw the tofu before using, to get the right texture.
- I usually use a lot more chili powder but it depends on the quality of the chili powder you have.

Late in the non-lull of summer

2008-08-19T15:02:00.001-07:00

Usually I have a lull in summer, between the time the garden is in and the tomatoes start to ripen. This year that didn't happen; I think knowing there's a lull it gets overcommitted before it starts.

It's mostly been animal activities that took up the slack. We had a batch of meat chickens, scheduled to be full size in the early august part of the summer lull. And they were. We're getting better at butchering, but it's still a lot of work and energy, never mind trying to cram them into the freezer. We were didn't feed them too much, so they ran out and had to wait for morning and evening feed; perhaps as a result, they grew large without any deaths, coming out in the 5.5+ pound range. There are still three left, along with the poor turkey.

We also acquired a ram from Eagle Point, three sheep from Phoenix, and a young buck from another place in Phoenix. Then one of the sheep and the ram turned up with health issues we had to deal with. Calla's been dropping off milk production, worryingly, but Lily did turn out to be pregnant and produced a kid a few days ago.

It was such a late wet spring and cool summer that the tomatoes are still not ripening; usually by this time we're up to our eyeballs... but we just get an occasional one. Very worrying. The peppers also look good but aren't ripe yet. It has been a stellar year for green beans, though; and the spring planted kale is nice looking, which is something I'm not used to in August. The basil that looked so bad in spring is looking fine now... the secret is to plant a lot, since only about a third of the plants survived. I've been better than most years about starting seeds in flats for fall crops; but it's been difficult to find time to plant the seedlings. And the cabbage worms really are hard on tiny little seedlings.

The yellow plums were late, but we got too busy (camping trip!) and missed most of them (the chickens liked them). There are more plums to come, and the apple trees are loaded. The peaches are just gone by, not as many as last year, but Jay and Lindsey enjoyed them a lot (I can't abide the fuzz, myself).

More on wheat

2008-07-25T14:43:00.000-07:00

The winter wheat is harvested, and the spring wheat is nearly so. The differences between them are so great I am just fascinated - it's like that time some years ago when I realized that tomatoes were not boring red round bland mushy things but had flavors and colors and complexity. The differences between these two wheats are as big as between Brandywine and Green Grape! Well, maybe not, but that's the idea.

Since on closer look both wheats have awns, I've been calling the shorter many tillered one "East" and the taller, greener one "West". The East was ready first,
and threshed out (with great difficulty, a lot of straw to the amount of grain) to about 4 or so pounds, but the hulls are staying on the grains, so it's likely to go to the animals. The West wheat was/is MUCH easier to thresh; I expect yields will be similar, but we took a big clump for decorative purposes.

Side note: I think the spring wheat is much prettier for display than the West wheat. The spring wheat has a nice light tan color and is nice and fat, while West wheat has darker or blueish tones. The grain head pattern is similar for the spring wheat and the West wheat, with sticking-out awns instead of ones that lay flat; but besides color, the Spring has shorter stalks, and the heads are a fatter. Haven't counted the tillers.

Threshing hasn't become easier; the rubber trug on the porch, and pounding with a 2x4, sift out the straw, wind-winnow the grain, handpick the bits of stem. With the East wheat I did a lot of hand twisting and folding, but the West wheat's awns are too stiff for that, it hurts.

Back to awns; when I grew these wheats out the first time 2-3 years ago, I do remember one of them not having awns. So what happened? I can't believe they cross-pollinated, since each type has been very consistent within the patch. Perhaps a mislabeled jar? I must grow test plots of the originals too!

I've got another grain, presumably one I planted, growing in the circle beds, but I don't know what it is - maybe barley? It looks like something I planted, but I don't remember anything. It has truely naked seeds, not like the wheat that has an easily broken off covering. It could also be kamut, or even rye...

And the oats were harvested and threshed by rubbing in my hands, some work but no stabbing awns... came out pretty clean. It's a long way from dry, though.

On other notes, garlic is all harvested, cabbages are harvested, a new one for us, what fun! and the first tomatoes have ripened (polar baby, of course). Beet seed is ready for harvest, and there could be enough basil for pesto. I'm still fighting the squash bugs and cucumber beetles, but the green beans are already ahead of us. The chickens in the orchard are getting larger by the day, and the freezers are still full so we won't have anyplace to put them. Two more chicks hatched out, and unlike the first three these are very friendly and come running when they see us, which adds greatly to their cuteness factor. The dog had foxtail in her paw, one surgery at the vet, two weeks of swollen paw, another surgery by Lisa to remove the last foxtail, and she's finally better and can get the skunk-smell-removal shampoo that's been waiting for her.

Bountifulness

2008-06-15T21:06:00.000-07:00

Hummus might not be what most people want for Sunday dinner, but I didn't have enough energy after a full day moving greenhouses, etc. to make falafel, my orginal plan (I'm haven't got a good recipe or techinque, but I keep trying). But to go along with it I made a salad, a kind of spring-variant greek salad, and it was something special about going out and harvesting for this.

There's fresh garlic (chinese pink, a very early garlic) for the hummus, but most of the rest of that was purchased. I did soak the chickpeas and cook them in the sun oven.

For the salad, I picked snap peas, broccoli, a few carrots, a walla walla onion and some romaine type lettuce. It was a special pleasure to walk around the garden and put this and that into the harvest bucket! After so long when it seems like more goes in than comes out... although we did just eat the last of last year's potatoes for lunch today, so I guess I shouldn't complain. For the salad, the harder vegetables got steamed a bit, and then some cider vinger and olive oil. We stuffed all in homemade pitas, and the flavors really were wonderful.

There's bounty all year in the garden or from the garden, if you plan ahead and accept the differences that the seasons bring. There's a special sense of bountifulness in fall, when the vegetables are root cellared, or dried, frozen, canned; or waiting patiently in the garden for harvest. And even in early spring, the bounty of salad greens and delectable green shoots and leaves. But the bounty of summer, the abunance of plants growing passionately with the all the different varieties of textures and flavors and shapes, well, it's hard to beat. For me as well, this is a time where the abundance does not come with directly-related pressure. We eat peas, broccoli, and sweet onions only fresh, lettuce we don't save, and carrots and garlic can wait much longer before being dealt with - there's no looming chore of putting-by, just picking and eating.

Not that I'm not hugely busy - trying to save the squash and beans from the quintuple threat of striped cucumber beetles, earwigs, slugs, spotted cucumber beetles and squash bugs. But more on that later.

Wheat

2008-06-08T15:06:00.001-07:00

I usually grow a little plot of wheat. You can get 10# of wheat berries from a 5x20 plot, it's not enough to live on, but that is a few loaves of bread, and it's quite fulfilling. I also try different kinds of wheat (winter wheat, spring wheat, kamut, stone age, etc.) and different ways of growing it (plug trays, broadcast).

The kinds I grow are fairly easy to tresh and winnow, although it's hard to get all the bits of stem out of the grain. I suppose it adds fiber... We use an electric grain mill to make flour and from that bake bread. It's perfectly nice bread, perhaps a bit dark and heavy, even using 100% home grown wheat. But we like dark interesting breads.

Tall, non-awned wheat

I believe it is SS 791 from Bountiful Gardens. This from saved seed that I grew out from 2005-2006 (I think). It germinated slower than the other.

And this is the shorter, awned wheat. This, I believe, Hard Red Winter from Bountiful Gardens. (I could have these backwards).
You can see a little of the tall wheat to the left.

The last time I grew these varities, I don't remember a differnence in the plots, but the non-awned was a little easier to thresh, the grains were a little larger, but the yield was a little less than the awned.

This year, the difference is dramatic. Both were planted in the same bed, same number of plants (transplanted from 244-plug trays), at the same time with the same spacing, and treated the same (i.e. ignored). The awned wheat is been yellow and unhappy, while the non-awned grows tall and green. I counted tillers (stalks with seed heads) on a particularly healthy looking plant of each; the non-awned one had about 20 tillers, while the anwed one had almost 80! If I'd heavily fertilized the awned wheat, it could have really gone to town with production.

I think this is the heart of the "green revolution", both the good and the bad. Yes, the right variety when treated optimally will give you a much better yield. But equally, if you can't give it all the fertilizer it craves and demands, perhaps the old traditional varieties have a use. It's too soon to see how they will yield.

And I would never have though two types of winter wheat would be so different. I wonder if they taste different?

Weather

2008-05-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

The weather has been very weird this year. We had an unusually cold spell in spring (20 degrees in late March), and unusally hot spell in mid-May (broke 100). And this week totally unexpected heavy rain - the official tallies are too far away to apply, but we've had at least 2" of rain in the past week. We probably had half an inch today only - never thought I'd be digging drainage ditches on May 31.

Usually I have good luck with Feburary or March planted carrots, but I checked today and many of them are bolting. Well, who can blame them - it's been cold and hot enough to fool a vegetables (I'm confused too). There were a couple of ones almost big enough to eat - there is nothing like fresh garden carrots!

The reason for the ditches is for the tomatoes - tomatoes can get root rot in waterlogged soil. A few plants aren't looking very good after a week of downpour. Hopefully the new ditches will let the soil water level sink fast enough that they can recover. And a few dry days would help a lot.

Sitting inside (it was raining too hard even for gore-tex) I found a great site,
http://organictobe.org/. Who knew that Gene Logsdon had a blog? He wrote the Gardener's Guide to soil that my Dad gave me so many years ago, and the Small Scale Grains book (and many other books). And Roselind Creasy and several others who's names I'm not familar with.

Back to the garden - it's almost all planted now, the peppers went in today in between the rain showers, under shade cloth to keep them warmer. We got more of the flimsy little tomato cages - while silly for tomatoes, they work great for peppers, and support the shade cloth. The only starts left to plant are a two more tomatatillos, a couple of squash (maybe one's a cucumber), and a bunch of basils. And the upper beds got de-grassed and sheetmulched borders, so the invading grasses should be easier to eliminate. I might have time to move the broody hens to another coop, rig some nest boxes, and see if they can set some eggs decently. They are doing a very poor job in the regular coop.

Cooking fat and rendering lard

2008-05-28T08:41:00.001-07:00

One of the problems of trying to produce all your own food is cooking fat. We do a lot of saute and stir fry; it seems like every thing I cook starts with saute an onion in olive oil. While I have two little olive trees, which have produced a few olives, I was baffled when I picked the olives to figure out where this olive oil might be. The olives produced a bit of whitish juice that did not much resemble olive oil. When the trees are larger perhaps with many more olives it will make some sense.

There are directions online for making a seed press from a hydraulic jack doing some welding.
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/oilpress.html.
You grind up your sunflower seeds, hull and all, and press. It would take a lot of sunflowers, though; a few plants yield a rather piddly amount of seeds. In a few years perhaps nuts will be a source.

We can make butter from the goat's milk, but it's not abundant (goat's milk is naturally homogenized so you don't get much) and we'd eat it up as butter rather than waste it on cooking.

I've rendered chicken (and turkey) fat but it has a sticky mouthfeel and a chicken flavor. It's not impossible, just distracting. Lamb fat isn't nice looking at all and doesn't smell nice. I don't even like it for soap making, the smell lingers.

But lard may be a good solution. This weekend I pulled out 10 or 15 pounds of pork fat trimmings that the butcher returned with our half-pig (not all from our half; apparently most people just let the fat be thrown away). I ground it up to extract the fat, lard. I'm quite impressed with how friendly this fat is; it's barely solid at refridgerator temperature, has little flavor, no stickiness. I got several gallons and froze much of it. I hear you can make the best piecrusts from lard. I heard that about chicken fat too, but I couldn't picture an apple pie with chicken-flavored crust. The lard might actually work.

I tried continuing the rendering process to make cracklings. This resulted in lard with a carmellized fragrance, a nice flavor for savory food but not for piecrust. It also resulted in a lot of unpleasant fatty cracklings. Perhaps I'm not doing it right but it wasn't worth it.

While it's hard to imagine us raising regular pigs (mature pigs grow to over 1000lbs), there is a endangered heritage breed of pig that says pretty small (topping out about 250lbs) and are more adaptable to pasture. Traditional pigs put on a lot of fat, since the lard was a very desireable yield back before Crisco. Modern pigs are bred to be leaner (and per "Animals in Translation" lean pigs are also nervous and poor breeders"). So an old breed, bred to be fat and peaceful and easy to keep, and smaller, bred for the old-fashioned multi-purpose farm.... it might be perfect again for the New Peasant.

Earth Day

2008-04-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

Our Local Earth Day event is a big deal for the permaculture group. It's a fair held on the saturday closest to Earth Day. The permaculture group has a table and passes out brochures and we talk to lots of people about permaculture, and it's fun to see lots of people we know, there's an especially get to see a lot of people we know from other sustainability groups. Unfortunately, many years it's cold, windy and miserable outside and a exercise in endurance to spend the entire day there. This year was predicted to be worse than ever, colder and rainier; but as it turned out, the sun was out and wind wasn't too bad, although it was rather chilly. The predicted storm held off until just after the event; by 5:30 it was snowing fairly hard (for late April, even a little snow counts as extremely hard), and we woke up to a snowy view on Sunday.

The local seed saver's exchange idea is getting more and more concrete. Everyone I've talked to thinks it's a great idea... I got a domain (they were on sale for 8.95) so the draft is up at www.seedsave78.org. There are still a few people I'd like to talk to about it, and I need to do some legwork to collect information. Once spring is a little less intense, this should come together and we'll have a kickoff party.

On the real Earth Day (the 22nd, Tuesday), I traditionally plant a tree. There are at least a dozen trees in pots behind the greenhouse... I wonder if they will ever all get planted. It's like those odd items in the bottom of the laundry bin that never seem to get washed.

Spring is slowly, slowly arriving

2008-04-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

The tomatos and peppers starts are in full swing. I had a horrible accident yesterday, dropping an entire tray of 50 starts; of many different varieities. The plants were fine, but all the labels are mixed! Horrors! There were 17 different types on that tray! The good news is that for the most part, these can come out of spares; only for one, Taxi, was every single start on that tray. And it's not entirely too late to start more, we have 6 weeks before target date.

The no-mow project moved onto phase 2 yesterday also; the new fence is halfway across the back yard, with lots of new lush grass. The sheep are thrilled, voracious things. Turns out sheep are quite interested in tree leaves and flowers, they nibbled the flowering plum flowers they could reach and starting on what I think are elderberry leaves as soon as they got into the phase 2 area. I called the butcher today. The last thing we need is more meat in the freezer (anyone wanna buy half a sheep?) but the wethers are getting to that size and age... we still have't quite given up on Macy and Little Bo having lambs, but it's not looking good.

Chickens are off the garden, paths raked and mulched. Peas are coming up, the garlic and winter wheat look great; seeded the spring wheat, some onions are in, and the first broccolis. The early seeds in the uppper beds are up too.

Earth day is fast approaching, so there are a set of tasks to get ready for that. Plus I have decided that we should have a local seed exchange, a la Seed Savers Exchange. This idea has been well received by everyone I've talked too, perhaps this is a meaningful sustainability project that will work for me.

Eating in spring

2008-03-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

We had a houseful of guests for the Easter weekend, a timing coincidence due to spring break. While I love having guests, I'm a little distracted this time of year and can't give guests 100% attention; hopefully they are tolerant.

Having to feed a crowd is tricky, this time of year, especially with non-meat eaters. The freezers are full of meat and we have an abundance of eggs and milk, but there isn't a whole lot of vegetables available. We smoked a turkey, the other one of the two older Narragansett males we got before the racoons did. I managed to salvage a bit of one potimarron squash that wasn't moldy, but this is it; the winter squash are gone. The potatoes are still doing okay, they have tiny sprouts that can be ignored, and there are onions and garlic. Of the overwintered in the ground roots, we ate the last parsnip, a huge beet and some very small carrots. There was small new kale leaves and sun dried tomatoes for a quiche. And there are green beans still in the freezer, and we made dessert from berries we froze last summer.

It was a great meal, but a lot of worry. Usually there's some vegetable we have in abundance but this time of year it's the somewhat bedraggled remains of last year and the scanty new stuff.

I did see some new and beautiful broccoli side shoots out there, on last falls's plants. And there are a few asparagus spears peeking out. Now that most of the guests have left there will be some interesting variety, enough for two if not for ten...

Tomato Obsession

2008-03-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy that tomato starting season has sort of crept up unnoticed. But yesterday the seed starting began, and some email followup with people who haven't got specifics yet. I mentioned it to the librarians when I volunteer; telling them about the seed starting and the varieties, I got almost too excited to work. After settling down they would ask me questions like "what's the best tasting red tomato" and it would start me off again. I don't know why tomatoes are so exciting! But they are! And I've planted over 200 seeds and many more to go :-) Now my problem is going to be collecting enough coffee cups to distribute them all in.

And I don't know the best tasting red tomato. Sungold, Ananas Noire, Purple Cherokee all come to mind when I think of best tasting - none of them plain red. Red tomatoes don't tend to stand out in my memory, they all sort of look the same in retrospect. This means we need to do more careful research...

Project No-Mow

2008-03-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

We have four grass-hungry sheep, some empty spaces between gardens and house where the grass grows raggedly, and one guy who hates weedwhacking. Permaculture has a principle "the problem is the solution"... so, this weekend we rigged up chicken wire with t-posts and rebar, and closed off half the yard, and the sheep attacked the grass like ravenous wild beasts. Assuming that 3' of dainty mesh keeps them in that area and out of the garden, we'd like to protect the small trees in the rest of the yard, and let the sheep really take over mowing duty.

(The sheep have no business being quite that hungry, by the way. They are fat enough that they jiggle when they run; real sheep people tell us the girls need to be on a strict diet).

Season is moving on

2008-03-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

How does time fly by so fast? Whooosh and it's been a month.

Tree planting season almost slipped by, but tree orders should be arriving this month and a few of the potted ones have been planted - the two pears that I got last year, very late, and didn't get planted. Those are in the back of the orchard, where we have to protect them from the neighbor's goat. There's an 8 foot fence going up on the north side of the property, which act as a trellis; the hardy kiwis will finally get planted, along with a grape or two. But enough of future plans...

Some starts got planted out under a tarp in the upper beds, and some in the lower beds without protection. The ones in the lower beds don't look so good, they look dry - it's been dry and cold mostly, lately. Seeds planted a few weeks ago haven't come up yet. The kale is putting out small new leaves which are yummy, I eat those whenever we can! There are still beets and carrots in the garden, and one parsnip. And we still have onions, garlic, and potatoes. Dunno if any of the squash is unrotted; the test ones in the SB root cellar have spots but aren't totally gone. I'm giving a talk on seed saving on March 19, for the permaculture group; I'm excited out it, trying to prepare well. There's a lot of talk about seed saving but I hope I can get past both the mystique that intimidates people, but clarify the long term genetic issues so people know where they are going.

The turkey adventure is over; something (most likely a racoon) ate or scared away one male and both females. So we butchered the last two males. The narragansetts are smaller (about 20# live weight at 9mo) and with less breast then the BBB but we smoked him, it was still a very satisfactory turkey. Better a 20# live weight turkey than a 50# or 60#! We'll try again this year, trading tomato plants for poults or eggs.

I just ordered potatoes - forgot to separate and mark the seed potatoes after harvest last year, and I can't handle not knowing if I'm planing yukon gold or carola. I still need asparagus - new aspargus bed in the orchard is dug. And sweet potatoes, going to try again this year. I've received orders for nearly 200 tomato and pepper plants already, I'll start the seed starting this weekend. And we're still milking Lily; Calla and the sheep are due this month. The grass isn't really growing strongly yet in the pastures but the sheep need to come off the hayfield this weekend - we're trying to fence off the side yard so the sheep can act as lawn mowers.

Snow

2008-01-29T18:22:00.001-08:00

I don't like snow all that much; yeah it's pretty, okay, but it's inconvenient, cold and wet. Sunday we got a lot, and today it was snowing off and on all day. Going out to milk the goat today was so hard to do, it's such a struggle to make myself leave the warm dry house. Especially when the wind's from the north so it blows into the carport where I'm milking, and the snow and mud and puddles on the way to the goat area is sticky and chicken-poop smelly (thank goodness for muck boots!) At least Lily seems happy and willing - in spite of the snow, she comes right out and finds her way to the carport in spite of snow and drainpipes and stuff in the way, and eagerly if awkwardly hops up on the stanchion for her lunch. It's not quite so bad a chore if someone is enjoying it! And the milk is tasting good, the feta and chevre had a good sweet flavor. I've run out of rennet for cheesemaking; one more thing to remember to order.

Sophie loves the snow and bounds around happily, it does add some cheer to the bleak outside world. I wish for warmth and sunshine and vegetables, I'm really missing greens, the ones in the garden all look so ratty (and now of course they are covered by snow). I'm not really a meat and potatoes person.

I've started on a rag rug, a small practice rug for Sophie's kennel. It's a bit raggedly looking, which isn't surprising. Not sure this type of weaving is my cup of tea, but she needs a new rug and there's lots of fabric around - these are some old poly cotton sheets from Jim's stuff.

Of pigs and winter

2008-01-27T18:42:00.000-08:00

For the first time, we ordered a half a pig from a local farm, Will-o-witt ranch, up in the hills outside town. Pork is so much tastier than other meat... and boy have I been eager to eat, and make, sausages... lamb and poultry just don't make sausages with that zing. Also my old recipe for vietnamese chao gio... ummm. Alas, we managed to miss butchering day, so much of the useful bits ended up who-knows-where. The butchers are great at letting you have livers and hearts and whatever you like, but you have to be there, they don't bother to save these things otherwise. One part we missed is the feet, and I see lots of recipes for pig's feet, which make me curious. Although chicken feet are supposed to be good for chicken soup and frankly all I have to do is look at a chicken foot and I give up. But it seems a terrible waste to not use the entire pig, that gave it's life for us to eat.

Already we've have had sausage patties, (with fried potatoes and baked squash), and pork chile verde (in burittos with saute'd vegetables and peach salsa). Both came out great... after years of ignoring any recipe that used pork, I've got a new thing to figure out how to use.

We had a whole lot of snow today, the weather is terrible, so I'm staying inside. Jay and Sophie had fun playing outside... I finished the first sock in cascade fixation, which was so fun to knit; it fits very well, which it'd better after knitting one ankle three times, but it's a little rough on the sole. There's just a bit to go on the other sock, so I need to order more yarn; I really liked knitting with this stuff. I can't figure out what is going on with the dark green sweater that got stuck sometime in fall; I need to redo some math and take more notes and maybe do a little reknitting. It also looks like it's going to be huge, I guess that's better than being too small.

The plaid came off the loom on Friday evening. That last towel had more tension problems, the tie-on to the back wasn't very good, so finishing was a real struggle. The results look okay, overall, but I enjoyed earlier projects more than this. Now I'm not sure if I should warp on more towels or start on a rag rug or what. Towels are so much fun to weave, but how many kitchen towels can anyone use?

Winter solstice

2007-12-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

The Winter Solstice - the shortest day, the longest night - is celebrated pretty much everywhere by everyone, currently (by us) as Christmas. For those of us to try to be more in touch with the seasons, it seems significant to observe this change in direction of the day length, separately from all the Christmas holiday stuff. But as I've been reading about traditional, pre-Christian observations of the winter solistice, boy it all sounds just like what we are doing anyway for the Christmas; feasting, candles, fires, gifts, singing, evergreens and holly, hospitality and sharing.

An interesting thing I did learn was about "cross quarters" and how the old celts counted the seasons. Besides the summer and winter solistices and spring and fall equinoxes, half way between each of these was another holiday. February 1 was Imbolc (now Ground Hog Day), May 1 was Beltane (now May day), August 1 was Ludgnasa (now just echoed in State and County fairs), November 1 was Samhain (Halloween), and these days were the actual divisions between the seasons. So summer began on May 1, and ended on August 1, leaving the summer solstice in the middle of summer. Which is how it came to be called midsummer night's eve, and makes more sense in many ways since it gets pretty summery so long before the June 21.

Thanksgiving

2007-12-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

We had a wonderful, somewhat locavore Thanksgiving, that we got to share with family and friends. Lindsey, her mother and grandmother came, and our friend Cynthia and her daughter.

The turkey was a 20# Broad Breasted White, one we raised ourselves, and butchered ourselves - the processor who used to do them closed down, so we were stuck. Since it was only 20 pounds, we cooked it half the time upside down, then turned him right side up to finish. We did need to cover with foil to keep from getting too brown (we have a stash of pieces of used foil - I'm not sure where it all comes from, but we didn't have to use any new foil).

The stuffing used organic bread stuffing mix (I've tried to make stuffing with stale bread and it hasn't been very good), onions and lots of red peppers, turkey stock (from a previous turkey), and Bell's seasoning. Usually I put sun dried tomatoes in the stuffing, but it was too hard to find them in the black hole that is our freezer, but - maybe since they were so many sweet, delicious red peppers - the stuffing was outstanding.

The gravy - pan drippings, more stock from previous turkeys, and ground giblets, thickened with cornstarch. Better than usual.

Then mashed potatoes - the late ones we grew, with goat milk, but no butter. They weren't as good as usual, not sure if it was the variety of potato or lack of butter. Carrots fresh from the garden, and green beans from the freezer. And parsnips - or rather, about half of one parsnip. Just about killed me to get it out of the ground; those parnips have long roots and hold tight (last year I bent my spading fork trying to dig parnsips...) It wasn't that sweet, this early in the year, so rather than just cooking, I sliced it thinly and sauted in butter. It was a big hit - it always surpises me how much people like parnsips.

Ruth brought rolls and pumpkin bread, Cynthia and her daughter brought cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, apple crisp, ice cream and whip cream. We all ate heavily and sat around in a stupor...

Final garden peppers

2007-11-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

Last night it got very cold - upper 20s; and it's stayed very chilly today. Milk a little down, just 1 1/2 quarts.

Yesterday picked the last of the peppers outside in the garden; there were a whole lot of "king of the north" on the one plant under the tarps, about 15, probably 10 of them red, and a good many "nardello". Also picked the persimmon crop (about 5). Tarped the winter veggies, the fall broccoli has heads peeking out. It's getting dark very early now.

Beeswax

2007-11-19T15:32:00.000-08:00

Pretty warm and sunny for this time of year; if I knew where the sunoven was, we could have used that to make bread. But at night, it rained heavily; snow on the mountains behind us. We made progress on sheet mulching the new beds for the field crops (a.k.a the corn beds).

Finally got to separating beeswax, which means a lot of heating jars of wax in the microwave, trying to pass this hot wax through filters, and a huge mess. With a
little plastic mold, I tried to make beeswax votives, but they stuck to the mold
badly and didn' come out very nice looking. They would probably burn just fine.
This year's honey harvest, the part that I hadn't got around to putting into jars, has crystalized already.

For dinner, baked potatoes with broccoli, carrots and an amazing semi-red bell pepper from the greenhouse, topped with feta. And bread.

A week of eating our own food

2007-09-15T23:15:00.000-07:00

We took the eat local challenge for a week and went on our 100-yard diet, with a few exceptions and wildcards. As it happened, I did daily blog entries for a local newspaper, so I didn't get around to posting them here, but I figured why not duplicate them, and I'd like to post my musings and thoughts as well.

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Sunday: day 1
Breakfast:
We start with coffee with goat's milk. Today we used honey to sweeten instead of sugar; honey is local, sustainable and more nutitious than sugar. It just takes me some getting used to the honey flavor in coffee.

We scrambled eggs with onion, sweet red pepper, fresh tomato, and garlic in olive oil, with salt and pepper, and topped with goat feta. Along with this we had hash brown potatoes cooked in butter.

It was very filling and tasty, but I miss bread... I like simple, starchy breakfasts. I ended up with too much egg dish and not enough potatoes for my taste. And feta doesn't work as well as cheddar in this dish, but feta is so easy to make.

Lunch:
With the late and filling breakfast, we didn't really eat lunch. I ate as I worked - raspberries, cherry tomatoes, green beans, sweet peppers and peas, all raw right off the plants in the garden. Then bits of meat as I striped the last of the meat off the turkey we cooked last weekend.

I started some preparations for eating later this week, since we're so busy during the week. I'm making stock with the turkey bones, onions, salt and pepper and a few bay leaves from the small potted bay tree on the patio.

We grow a small amount of grain and beans, this year about 5 pounds of wheat and a couple of pounds of garbanzos and black beans, and small amounts of minor grains - we'll rely on this to vary the potato diet. Potatoes are so easy to grow and a nutritious source of starch, but personally they just aren't as delicious as wheat or rice.

I started garbanzos soaking for tomorrow's dinner, and ground flour from 1 pound of wheat. That should make one loaf plus extra for all the other things we use flour for.

Dinner tonight is eating out - the Rogue Flavor Dinner! Adam Treister (Jay's boss) got tickets for us all to attend, lucky us! So we're bending the rules, but it is an eat-local event, after all, and it's just too good to pass up.

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Monday: day 2

For breakfast, I experimented with amaranth. This is a tiny round grain that grows from a decorative, easy to grow plant (they are in fact often weeds); the leaves are also edible. I grew some last year - just a couple of plants - but not knowing what to do with it, the harvested grain was just sitting around in a jar.

I cooked 1/3 cup amaranth in 1 cup water, it takes about 10-15 minutes to cook. To
serve, I added honey and milk. It's tasty, but doesn't stick together in the bowl
and does stick in the teeth... probably better as flour. Along with the cereal, I
also had hard boiled eggs.

Midmorning I put a butternut squash in the sun oven to bake. After a couple of hours, out it came and in went the garbanzos to simmer. The sun oven is great this time of year, I can cook without heating up the house (we don't have A/C).

Bread is very easy to mix with the bread machine; but we always take it out and bake in regular loaf pans or in whatever other form is useful, it comes out much nicer. We use the same basic recipe we use for bread, pizza dough, burger buns, etc. In the simplest form:
1 1/4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
4 cups wheat flour (this took the whole pound of wheat from yesterday)
1 1/4 teaspoon yeast

Today I formed the dough into pita bread to go with the falafel. A little heavy with all home ground whole wheat flour, but good flavor and we like a good hearty bread.

For lunch it was quick to make turkey salad with some leftover turkey, our own chevre thinned with milk to give it a mixable cream cheese texture, and chopped sweet red pepper. Add a slice of home grown tomato (Big Rainbow), put in a pita and it made a delicious sandwich.

For dinner, soup and falafel sandwiches. I roasted some sweet and hot red peppers, fried a small onion, and pureed both with half the baked squash, a little cumin, salt and pepper, then thinned with goat yogurt to soup consistencey; and it resulted in a really delicious, spicy soup.

The falafel was just okay; cooked garbanzos, onion, garlic, parsley, cumin, coriander, and a bit of flour. Garbanzo beans (they are really a type of pea) are the easiest dry bean to grow and harvest, I think; they tolerate some frost, so they can be planted early and harvested early before the really hot dry weather sets in, and since they are big it's easy to separate the dried beans from the pods. The parsley reseeded itself in the perennial garden. Coriander is the seed of cilantro, and since my cilantro usually flowers before I have many leaves, I do have coriander seed. All this was blended together, formed into patties and baked. The falafels were served in pita bread, along with chopped cucumber, tomato and yogurt sauce. Maybe I don't have the right recipe, or maybe they just are better deep fried...

There's so much to eat around me, though it all does takes effort to prepare, but I've been oddly hungry today. I'm afraid my body is used to more simple carbohydrates, sugar and white flour. It's eye opening since Jay and I thought our diet was pretty good already. But now, how much more so, with nothing that came from a factory, nothing from the Iowa cornfields, nothing refined, no additives, no packaging... this is the way real food really is.

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Tuesday: day 3

I missed breakfast this morning, so I had an early lunch of yesterday's leftovers; falafel in pita and leftover red pepper and squash soup. The soup thickened when it was chilled and was a great sauce. The heat from the hot peppers comes through.

For dinner, I made turkey soup. I sauted onions, added stock, added a lot of potatoes, carrots and green beans, and the leftover turkey meat. The turkey was smoked so the soup has a smokey flavor, I didn't even bother to go outside to pick sage or thyme. We usually add noodles (ah, refined flour) but not today. There's one pita roll left from yesterday that we split to go along with the soup. I sliced a cucumber also, since the one yesterday was so good; it's an heirloom cucumber called Uzbkski.

Today we also had a dessert. This was an experimental dish, with squash, eggs, milk, honey, and soft goat cheese. It came out very tasty but really misses vanilla and spices like nutmeg.

I've done a little googling on locavore (who knew there was a name for what I try to do?). One group in the bay area has a whole month long challenge, not just a week, and it moves from year to year. This year is supposed to be an emphasis on food preservation. And this is the time of year to think about it, if you have a garden.

We eat a lot of our own food all year, but canning is just not a big part of this. Canning uses so much energy and generates so much heat - boiling gallons of water for 10-40 minutes... While I have heard that it takes more energy to run a freezer for a year than to can the same amount of food, we have to run the freezer anyway since it's full of lamb and turkey. So the total additional energy for us to to freeze food: nothing, and in fact a full freezer is more efficient.

Canning is used for jam, pickles, tomato sauce and juice (maybe a dozen quarts each). And we freeze some foods. But the best way to eat is right out of the garden - there's something growing in our garden all year, even carrots and kale in January, that we can pick fresh. And "root cellaring" (we use an unheated storage space) lets us keep potatoes, squash, onions and garlic through March, depending on how warm it gets. No energy at all. We also dry a lot of tomatoes (boy, do we dry a lot of tomatoes). In our dry climate here, and with the steady hot wind in summer, you don't really need an electric dehydrator. Screened racks in the wind will dry tomatoes in a couple of summer days.

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Wednesday: day 4

I finished the bread for breakfast, spread with butter and honey (I'm only supposed to be using the butter for cooking, so this probably consitutes a violation, but it was so good). That's two days from 1 pound of wheat. So doing some calculations - I suspect Jay's been off eating store bought bread - it comes to about 122 pounds of wheat per person for a year. Over the year, there are the equivalent of 2 1/2 people living here. That's about 300 pounds of wheat we'd need to grow to keep the family (just barely) in wheat for a year.

I've grown small patches of wheat for the last few years. The yields came out to about to 4 and 10 pounds per 100 sqft - I planted smaller patches, this is just standardized for comparison. Jeavon's book "How to grow more vegetables..." claims to get yields of to 25 pounds in that amount of space - if you have really rich soil, you get more grain. But wheat can grow in unimproved clay soil too (that's my 4 pound yield), and is drought tolerant, and can grow over winter.

Anyway, assuming I don't get Jeavon's yield, but that I'm growing in improved beds for a reasonable yield, I'd need 10 beds to grow all our wheat (1000 sq ft). That's half our total garden space. I don't know whether to be shocked (so much space just for wheat) or happy (only half the garden, we can eat plenty from the other half).

For lunch: leftover turkey soup, and whatever else I could scrounge. I was hungry again this afternoon, and a little cranky.

For dinner we had guests, so we barbecued lamb. I thawed some lamb chops; they are from an older sheep, a 2 year old ram. It's technically mutton, but our sheep just lie around in the pasture and eat, so this one didn't get tough. To be sure, I marinated it in some homemade plum vinegar (originally a failed wine), olive oil, garlic, pepper and salt. Then roasted potatoes, carrots and onions (in more olive oil; we really need that stuff). I made a greek salad from cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers,feta, fresh basil, plum vinegar and olive oil. And some green beans. I also baked a squash - Potimarron, an old variety of squash from France with a creamy texture and a flavor that's supposed to taste like chestnuts. But I forgot to serve it, so it's left for tomorrow, and I gave some for the guests to take home. I ate way too much after being hungry all day.

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Thursday, day 5

For breakfast, wheat berries with cream and honey. It was tasty and satisfying and fairly quick. I'd soaked them overnight - I'm doing even more thinking ahead.

Then, time to grind another pound of wheat for bread. This time I picked through the wheat to remove more bits of stem and hull. They may add fiber to the flour, but it's already pretty high fiber. I also added a glob of honey - fast food for yeast, so the bread will rise more. The bread is higher, and delicious, but still dark.

For lunch, leftover turkey soup.

This afternoon we learned that a good friend was rolling into town, so we invited him for an quick early dinner, since I had to go out in the evening. I made potato pancakes: grate potatoes and onions, add a bit of flour and an egg, salt and pepper, and fry in butter. I like it served with cottage cheese and applesauce. Many of our apples are too wormy to use, but I found a few to make applesauce. Then I made a quick cottage cheese; adding some rennet to warmed goat milk causes it to set, and after a hour or so I cut it into chunks. and drained the curd in cheesecloth. It wasn't an accurate cottage cheese, but it worked. We also had some homemade turkey sausage in the freezer, which we pan-fried.

Tonight constitutes my first violations: Chet brought some California Wine, and I do not turn down Chet's choice of wine (it was lovely); and the turkey sausage used purchased sausage casing, and the fennel in the sausage was also store bought.

Since Chet loves good food, we set out a selection of heirloom tomatoes - I picked different colorful varieties, including pink (Rose de Berne), orange (Persimmon), yellow (Sun and Snow), red (Shuntuksi Velican), and purple (Purple Cherokee), and some roasted red peppers and feta.

I cut up a lot of apples today for drying, as well as the ones for applesauce. Growing your own food, especially growing organically, means some worms in the apples and bits of stem in the wheat. Food in grocery stores is so perfect, as if it was made in a factory. We tend to think that's normal, like those models in advertisements. But it's not always like that in real life. Real food as it comes from the earth has character and quirks and it's not always pretty and sometimes there are bugs.

And then you have to pick out the stems from the wheat, and cut around the spots on the apples, and if there are holes in the kale leaf, as long as there's no caterpiller still there, it's just as good as a whole leaf. Although I have to say, growing apples and pears is the hardest, the bugs don't seem to miss any of the fruit. Plums and grapes produce so much and we rarely have to deal with any bugs or spots on the fruit.

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Friday: day 6

The bread keeps calling out to me. I had bread for breakfast and lunch; with butter and honey for breakfast, with feta and roasted red peppers for lunch.

For dinner, I made black beans and cheese in corn crepes, with salsa.

I had soaked some black beans overnight - a pole variety named Cherokee Trail of Tears, said to have been brought from Tennessee to Oklahoma on the infamous journey. These were simmered in the sun oven, although since the day was a bit cloudy, there was barely enough sun to cook the beans. I sauted onions, peppers and garlic, added the beans and seasoned with cumin.

Queso fresco is made by adding vinegar (I used plum vinegar) to almost simmering milk so it curdles, and straining out the curds.

Then I made salsa, my usual recipe: tomatoes, jalapenos, onion, cilantro, and salt. Usually I add some lemon juice, but skipped it today - the salsa missed it, but was still delicious. I'm happy that I have enough cilantro to make salsa - for some reason I can't grow this very well, it's the one thing in the produce department that we buy regularly.

Finally, the crepes; a thin batter of eggs, milk, wheat flour, and corn flour. We had some regular sweet corn that got starchy before we picked it, so I tried drying and grinding it.

It was beautiful and delicious, but probably would have been better with tortillas. No reason I can't make masa and produce tortilla - it's just takes more skills, ones I don't have. But this isn't a great climate for growing corn, either - corn likes water, and our summers are so dry.

In the far distant past, food was hard to come by, and precious. You didn't waste energy coddling along some plant or animal that didn't grow easy and abundantly in your particular area, and when travel was by foot or boat, you didn't rely on food that grew thousands of miles away - like the cornmeal we buy, which probably comes from Iowa, right? Part of the whole eat-local philosophy is remembering that - eat what grows locally, in the season it's abundant.

It's a hard concept for us to remember, since the bananas and apples are right next to each other at the grocery store, and our tastes are developed around that - like for example mangos. I love mangos in any form (my favorite snack is dried mangos), but mangos just don't grow here. We can get mangos flown in from anywhere nowadays (why does our food travel more than we do?). Or I could find a dwarf mango tree, plant in a big tub, keep it in the greenhouse, and spray regularly for the mildrew and diseases it's prone to under these conditions, and maybe get a mango now and again, but not one at the top of its flavor. For much less effort, no travel involved, I could have abundant and flavorful peaches, cherries, raspberries, strawberries... there's no shortage of things we can grow locally and enjoy.

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Saturday: day 7

We started off the day with a late breakfast of scrambled eggs with onions, sweet red peppers, and sun dried tomatoes; and hash browns. I still haven't quite got the hash browns down; more practice. Toast is easy. Jay put leftover salsa on his eggs.

For lunch, we have just enough bread left for sandwiches. Jay had feta, tomato, and pickles; I made up hummus with leftover garbanzos, garlic, salt, olive oil and roasted red pepper. We don't normally eat red peppers every day, but it's that time of year, I'm trailing pepper varieties so have an unreasonable number of plants, and red peppers just don't keep. While it could have used a bit of lemon, and tahini, the hummus was still a hit. Jay finished up whatever I missed.

For dinner, we had the same as Friday night; made up fresh crepes, of course, and we needed more salsa, but there was plenty of the other ingredients left. It was a very satisfying meal.

Eating Local

2007-08-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

Happy Kitchen Garden Day! Here, we celebrate a week later, on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend; we invite everyone to come over and look at the garden and eat farm fresh food and we have a big tomato tasting (this year I'm growing 50 varieties, although we found TSWV on a few, and pulled up 6 plants to try to get it under control).

Our annual tomatofest kicks off September, which is a month filled with labor: tomatoes, the honey harvest, poultry butchering, potatoes and squash, winter garden fit in somehow, fruit, and we lose our farm hand (Jay's daughter) to school. September is also eat local month:
- http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/
- http://www.locavores.com/
And our local eat-local group pushes an eat local week:
- http://www.rogueflavor.org/
(September 9 to 16) with lots of activities to encourage eating local. It's a good time of year to do it, there's so much food out there, all fresh and delicious. Since we grow so much, rather than a 100-mile diet, I'm thinking of a 100-yard diet; only eat food that we produced right here on the farm. Given the realities of trying to get the harvest in, while keeping our day jobs, and not causing upset and consternation amongst the stock and pets, and good taste, we'll make some exceptions, like coffee, animal food, salt, etc. The most challenging part are the starches... We like rice, and I've grow only a few pounds of wheat... what we have lots of is potatoes, and I don't know how well I'll do on mostly potatoes for a week.

So this year we (Jay and I) are going to take the week-long challenge and eat all our own food, with a few exceptions, and I'm going to try to blog about it, what we eat and just how local the food items are and what energy went into producing them.

Macy's fleece

2007-01-07T17:57:00.000-08:00

Yesteday washed some of Macy's fleece and today spun and plyed it. It's very easy to card and easy to spin - thicker than the usual romney, but more slippery, and a great length, just about 8" long. The only problem is since it's dark it's tricky to spin, I need to put a white cloth on my lap so I can see the fibers. I was afraid it would be scratchy, but it seems okay. I spun thin, it's ~22gm for ~50yd. The color is very heathered dark gray with brownish touches; nice but a bit masculine. It is a little nubby, with a busy color yarn and some texture the knit will need to be plain... if this works out, I'm optimistic about the sweater. I also figured out the top of the fair isle hat - I can do the decreases in pattern. Weather was nice but all I did outside was a couple of loads of dirt out of the new tomato bed. Tired. It's January, after all.

New Years Day

2007-01-01T18:59:00.000-08:00

Day started sunny but clouded over and a touch of rain. Noticed that the cold weather pretty much wiped out the calendula - this is the coldest winter since they've been growing here - and icey; see what the ice looked like on the rosebush.

Wormed goats. Cleaned up the greenhouse; removed the dead tomato plant and pruned peppers. And started some seeds (first this winter): 4 kinds of onions and 6 kinds of lettuce, one pot each.

Made a good, warming stew out of odds and ends - stored onions, garlic, potatoes, butternut, fresh tomatoes, canned tomato sauce; purchased ginger, spices, peanut butter; from greenhouse and garden, jalapenos, leek, bok choy, kohlrabi; already in fridge: carrots, a bit of white beet, a little chicken.

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" book review

2006-06-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

I very much enjoyed this book by the author of "The Botany of Desire" (which I also highly recommend).

The Omnivore's Dilemna is written in three sections. The first covers industrial agriculture, most specifically corn and the meat animals that eat it. The second is organic agriculture, starting with the integrated polyculture small farm, then looking at industrial organic. The last section is hunting and gathering, with some musing on vegetarianism.

The first section was the most interesting and illuminating for me. I find Polson's best stuff is looking at industrial production; he's about the one one I've read who approaches these topics with an open mind (I'm reminded of the potatoes chapter in The Botany of Desire). The problem facing farming is that it has become business, and our current paradigm requires growth; a mere 2% growth is standing still. Using hybrid corn varieties, lots of chemical inputs, and now GMO, we have increased production amazingly. But that's only half the problem: the population grows slowly in the US, and we can only increase our eating so much. One result is we are getting fat. We also eat more processed food, since we pay more for the same calories in a highly processed form.

There's a lot more on how miserable cows and chickens are, and all the industrial processing for cereal, etc. and how the system is systematically set up to stick it to the actual farmer - but for this I'd recommend the book "fast food nation" and the film "The future of food".

The second section starts with his visit to Salatin's famous pastured poultry setup. I find his enthusiasm about Salatin's integrated small farm to be a little over-the-top; I don't really like cheerleaders, honest skeptism is more interesting and educational. But I agree it's a great system. The discussion of industrial organic and the evolution and co-opting of the organic movement is also excellent; I knew that it wasn't all Farmer John with his hoe, but laser-leveled fields so specialized tractors can automatically cut hundreds of acres of baby greens is farther than I had imagined.

I don't hunt, nor am I a big fan of mushrooms, which may be one reason why the last chapter didn't do much for me - it was all driving hundreds of miles to hunt wild pig and find gourmet mushrooms (chanterelles and morels) and prepare grand cuisine. Perhaps you can justify it by his allusion to this being a meal from the forest, rather than from annuals (corn) or perennials (grasses eaten by cows). But he doesn't seem to notice in his all home grown or gathered meal that he's got wheat in his bread and pasta and garlic and sage (perhaps he grew them, he didn't say) and butter and pepper, etc, etc. All together it comes across as elistist and irrelevant. It's deeply satisifying to eat a meal all of food you grew yourself, it gives a feeling of connection to the land that can't be described, but while his meal was doubtless far finer than the simple meals we eat, our meals are much more real.

The discussion of vegetarianism, speaking as a ex-vegetarian who raises her own meat, was very well done. There is a dilemna between caring for animals and eating them, and I especially like this quote:

"Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, 'Why Look at Animals?' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away."

We do feel honor for our animals and appreciation for them, in spite of having cared for them and then having had them killed. The sheep butchering is a solemn moment. And somehow eating them does not seem wrong or bad.

...

Besides my impressions, there's another blog review of this book I recommend; it has a rather different perspective: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/06/omnivores-dilemma.html

Lots of work, not so much produce

2006-05-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

Spring is really here, and the warm weather makes me realize just how far behind I am! I don't have time to think, never mind blog... but here are some random garden observations.

I started almost 300 tomato plants (for about 18 people). Previous years it was in the 100 range. 300 is over the edge where the transplant-twice system works, and with so many people and so many varities organization is key. I'm organized, but not organized enough. I started starting on March 1 and the last ones were started on April 5. The early starts are nice and big, the late march ones are wimpy, the april 5 ones are teeny; although it's still some days short of the traditional tomato-safe day which is May 15. But I think for me, first week of March is ideal.

I ran out of pots (of course), so I tried newspaper pots again. Last time I wasn't too impressed. But this time I had lots in newspaper pots and pushed them close together, and the tomatoes did very well - I think since the newspaper stayed wet. The roots came right through the pots! I don't really like the official potmaker - I still need to tape the bottom about half the time. So any old jar will do just as well.

This year, like last year, I didn't have enough onions started. I started seeds in flats as early as January. Some of the early plantings were last years seed and didn't germinate well (onion seeds are like that). I think I need to start in December or something, though, if they are going to be large and robust by April.

"longkeeper" tomatoes lasted until April 1, at which time I said forget it and gave the rest to the chickens. Amazing.

For some reason the earwigs are late this year, and the chard is nice looking. We're eating a lot of chard. Well, to be honest, we're eating a lot of pizza, since we don't have time to cook :-) but when we do cook, there's just greens (and frozen, canned or dried stuff). There are a few potatoes left (getting sprouty) and some squash. We've had a couple of stalks of asparagus, but our bed is still young and the first shoots are like knitting needles (size 5). The first non-leafy-green I generally get is kohlrabi, which is just the stem of a green; we might be just a couple of weeks away for that. It takes forever for the carrots and beets to be ready and the peas are still only about 6" high. And there's rhubard, but that's not a proper vegetable.

Busy, busy - life as a dairymaid

2006-03-11T13:58:00.000-08:00

Spring is still a couple of weeks away, but it seems like I'm already way, way behind. Behind on seed starting, tree planting, digging, you name it, I'm behind. I blame it on the goats - milking two goats and coping with the milk takes time - half an hour twice a day, plus making cheese (even with other things done in the elapsed time, it's at least an hour per gallon of milk/pound of cheese), then the laundry and dishwasher to keep the milking materials clean; it's a 10 to 15 hour a week part-time job. We are getting 4-6 pounds, twice a day; so about 9 gallons a week. We do enjoy the fresh milk; we used to go through about a gallon a week. Having lots of yogurt is nice; it's thinner than store bought yogurt, as expected (they do all sorts of tricky things to make yogurt thicker, gelatin and modified food starch and all that). It makes great lassi, though. You can drain it to make a type of cheese, but it's easier to just make cheese in the first place.

I make a lot of chevre. It's very easy; just add culture and rennet, let it sit for 24 hours, then drain. It's rather dull by itself, we try adding it to quiche and pasta sauce, but it remains plain. It really needs to be made into cheesecake :-). To get over the plainness, I've been experimenting adding garlic, herbs and things to it; Jay's a big fan of the garlic. The other type of cheese I can make reliably (well, usually - todays isn't looking good - if you forget to add the lipase before the rennet, just give it up...) is feta. I have been experimenting with a cheddar recipe; I'm not happy with the way my cheese press works, so I've not been even trying to get something I can age for 6 months! But every so often, my not-pressed-enough, lightly aged cheese is really delicious. I'm rather taken aback when I cut into one of the many rounds in the fridge and find a tangy, creamy, delicious cheese that works on a sandwich.

I used to make mozzarella a lot, but I haven't done it lately. I'd need to find time to make lasagna to use it up...

Last year I tried making butter from cream from our goat's milk. Goat butter is pure white. It also has very little flavor. It was like crisco, and there didn't seem much point in it for all the work. But the chevre often has a buttery flavor, so I added some chevre culture so some cream (just spooned off the top of the 6 quarts that went into the unlucky batch of feta), left it for a few hours, and the resulting butter actually has a buttery flavor! It's still stark white, but we can learn to live with that.

Permaculture

2006-01-31T09:24:00.000-08:00

I first heard about Permaculture around 2000. I actually got the idea when I was thinking about planting my first fruit trees, and getting my first chickens - and the loop between the chickens eating the fruit and the poop being fertilizer sprang into my mind. As I went around telling everyone about this, I was pointed to permaculture and Bill Mollison's "Introduction to Permaculture". I think I photocopied half the book. I tried some of the ideas, mostly with rather indifferent success, and I didn't think about it too much.

I finally took the official PDC (permaculture design course) last year, in 2005. This did change my perspective quite a lot.

Since then, I've had some seemingly endless discussions about what permaculture actually is. It's kind of like arguing with myself before I took the course . Some things about permaculture, or at least the culture surrounding permaculture, really bothers a lot of people. And some of the techniques sound great, but it's unclear how practical they really are if you just want to feed yourself and others. And I can understand all this, since these same thing used to bother me. Now I can ignore the sillier suggestions, and ignore the "culture", and just apply permaculture and use the skills, in as many ways as I can.

Permaculture is a way of looking at the problems and working on solutions that are nature-derived and inspired (water flows downhilll, bugs eat plants); rather than the rather determinisitic, authoritarian way that is embedded in our culture (the water will flow where I want it, or else! Kill all the bugs, no matter what the cost!). There is a simple ethic; and some principles (between 10 and 50, depending on who you listen to) that are useful thinking points (like each element should perform multiple functions, or edges are the most diverse and productive parts). That's what I use of permaculture. There are also any number of ideas and techniques, and many people seem to associate these techniques with Permaculture and insist these techniques are the by-all and end-all of it. But if that was all, well, they are fine and grand ideas but they must take quite a bit of tuning to get the technique actually working right.

It's been a year since my course, I was helping with registration for the 2006 course that's started, which has got me thinking about what differences the course might have actually made, on the ground. Most things are about the same, frankly - the biggest change was involvement in community, we met a number of interesting people who have similar interests, which is wonderful. I started a website for the local permaculture group (the siskiyou permaculture resources group): http://www.sprg.info; and a yahoo mailing list (sprg). I've tried a few more techniques, with indifferent success :-) Planted a lot of trees and plants in hedgerows. I feel more strongly about eating diverse plants and that weeds may be edible too. More encouraged to leave areas wild, rather than neatening everything up. I examine and care about various individual weeds. Some has been validation and deeper understanding of why some of the things we're doing already is good. The most useful part has been in thinking about the layout issues - deciding where to put the garden, where to put rainwater cachement tanks, how to handle drainage ditches, is easier with some design criteria.

And I'm more aware of this particular place, of Fairweather Farm, as an entirely unique place, not like any place described in any book, so I should observe carefully and consider what I see and experience as more important than what I read in books or find on the web. Who knows our soil, who knows the wind here, who really understand how dry it gets in summer? Even other parts of Ashland are quite different in soil and water and wind. We all have to observe our own gardens, and learn from them, there is no book or teacher that can replace that.

The Future of Food

2005-12-31T14:47:00.000-08:00

There's a documentary out called "The Future of Food", which someone loaned to us recently. While I'd known about the creeping dangers of GMO and agribusiness, this documentary really makes it clear how systematic and organized the system is: the government, the courts, and Monsanto and the rest of agribusiness are setting up a system that will make it virtually impossible for farmers to not live indebted or owned by big chemical companies, and give us no choice about what's available for the consumer to eat. I have a renewed mistrust of any bit of food that I didn't grow myself; organic food is better, but it's still probably not a good idea to trust anything. And what about eating when I'm away from home? I don't eat fast food, but even at nicer restaurants: what's really in the corn chips or the tofu?

It seems to be much worse in the US than other countries; other countries have wisely rejected or required labelling on GMO foods. I think we are so out of touch with where food comes from, and have had our taste buds dulled if not killed outright by fast food (I read recently that one quarter of all meals in the US are fast food), that we are more vulnerable to the transformation of our food supply into something that does not fill the needs of healthy support for our bodies, nor healthy support for the land, and utterly ignores the future in favor of making a little cash today.

I strongly recommend everyone try to see this documentary, although it's pretty depressing. We all need to be aware of what we eat and vote with our food dollars against this evil.

Scaling up the garden

2005-12-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Our climate is mild enough that we can grow a lot of vegetables outside over the winter without much in the way of protection. But mere lack of single-digit temps doesn't mean that we get enough sunshine in winter to actually allow plants to grow and for example put out new leaves; what's there in mid-October is as much as you get. If your aim is to grow all your own vegetables, you have to make sure to plant what seems like an unreasonable quantity. For the average person (well, at least for me), 6 kale plants seems like an awful lot of kale - and it is, in April. But in December, you can eat them to the ground in a week or two, and then it's store bought veggies for the rest of the winter. In the abundance of midsummer, it's very hard to think ahead to the cold dark days where that kale plant will be precious, and make sure there's a nice, rich spot for them all that won't get too soggy in the rains.

This problem of scale goes for things like onions and potatoes - many (most) people have no idea how many onions or potatoes or garlic they actually eat in a year, and how much that is; yet if you want to grow your own, you need to think on that scale. And that means some awareness of how much you planted last year, so you can tell if you should plant the same next year, or if you need to plant more. And of course, even then, things change from year to year - our potato crop was low this year, my guess is that after replanting tubers for some years we have built up viruses. So new seed potatoes this spring (from Ronningers - organic heirlooms from a family business).
And we are already getting low in potatoes to eat - we're having to eat All-Blue potatoes (which did very well) in the chicken noodle soup, and the potato pancakes, making some dishes look a little surreal (they really are blue - very funky with carrots). We're also low on onions (I saw this coming in June, but the later planted onions did poorly - and interplanting with tomatoes didn't work, the tomatoes ate the onions for breakfast). Fortunately, we do have what appears to be a vast amount of acorn and sweet dumpling squash (from just two hills!). We also have plenty of garlic. Oh, and the jerusalem artichokes, there's no end of those . All we need, really, is the right recipes.

I'm not sure if assuring an even stream of vegetables, without the feast-or-famine, is even possible when gardening, or if someday I'll have that kind of skill. Partly it may be accepting eating the less appealing foods when the good stuff is gone (like those tasteless tomatoes ripening in the pantry, "Longkeeper", and the jerusalem artichokes). But thinking ahead, learning how much you eat, and planting it in spite of how much it looks, is a set of hurdles to overcome or skills to acquire in the process of taking control of your food supply.

Sheep-to-lamb

2005-11-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

First: don't read this if you're squeamish.

This is a garden blog site, but one thing we grow in our gardens is sheep, which we eat. Now that the garden is resting, and there's not enough grass left in the pastures for all the sheep, it's butchering time. We have it done; cutting up meat is quite a skill. But when the mobile butcher normally takes away the "guts" for discard, we try to use as much of them as we can; it honors the sheep to allow him to provide more value to us. At least, this is how we think. To a ex-vegetarian who's never been much interested in "variety meats" it's a real challenge; I have enough trouble with roasts, never mind hearts. So there's a lot of parts that still don't get used (tongue?), but we do our best.

First, sausage casings are really made of well-cleaned intenstines. It's laborious but not difficult to clean them. I have a new sausage stuffer, so we made some sausages (defrosted some ground rooster), and fried them up. Amazing to make your own sausages - lamb casings make small sausages, the diameter of a thumb - and the sausages look good and are delicious!

Then, haggis, though I chickened out from using the actual stomach of the sheep. The stomach is impressive to see but not appealing to use for food. Proper haggis contains the liver, heart, and lung, along with oatmeal, onion and spices, and steamed. Traditionally it's cooked inside the stomach, but I used a foil-covered bowl. It's not bad, but not that great, either; a fluffy, spicy, dark colored meatloaf with a liver favor. But I don't like meatloaf that much - Jay does, and he liked the haggis a lot.

Last year we sauteed liver and onions, and used heart and liver in shepherd's pie, both of which were fine. We still have a liver and a heart left, and four kidneys. Steak and kidney pie?

Another thing that comes from sheep butchering is the skins. We salt and dry them, then send them off to the Amish to be tanned, and get back sheepskins with long, wavy fleece, very soft.

I wish sheep were made entirely from steaks and chops, but they aren't, and eating meat means taking responsibility; for us "variety meats" are free food that would otherwise be thrown away (commercially they mainly go into pet food), it's highly nutritious, and most traditional cultures have highly esteemed these parts.

Our deep thanks to Baa-52 and his half brother.

Early tomatoes - variety trial report

2005-11-04T10:40:00.000-08:00

It's time so start tomato retrospective (as I clear out the dead tomato plants - one of my least favorite chores). We plant a large variety of tomatoes, and usually we take careful records of which ones people like and their opinions. This year was so hectic we only have good data in the category of early tomatoes. But that was a good trial.

The early tomatoes tested this year were Stupice, 4th of July, Polar baby, Silvery Fir Tree, Early Pick, Oregon Spring, and Red Robin - all red tomatoes. The best find was Polar Baby - wow, it's early. It's unclear which of 4th of July, Stupice and Early Pick we'll grow; Early Pick and 4th of July have better flavor, but Stupice is open pollinated. Silvery Fir Tree and Oregon Spring are out. Red Robin only if I'm inspired to experiment more in containers - it wasn't really worth it.

The Data:

(note on dates: we had an exceptionally late, wet, spring this year - lots of rain in May and June. With our cold nights and clay soil, it takes tomatoes a while to get started and most production is in August, September and October. Official last frost is April 30, locals say May 15 is tomato-safe, but last couple of years we've had killing frosts in late May. This year we had no frosts after April 25 or so. And the killing frosts in late October were right on time - though we were spared the usual regular light frosts earlier in the month.)

Stupice (OP/Peter's Seed)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/20
Small red salad type. Very sweet ("too sweet"). Productive for a long time.

4th of July (Hybrid/Burpee)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/20
Small red salad type. Great flavor, much more flavor than stupice but not as sweet ("too sweet"). Productive for a long time. tends to crack.

Polar baby (OP/Peter's seed)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/2 (maybe before, I wasn't checking!)
entered in county fair 7/16; won first in "red tomatoes"
Very small plant. Tomatoes were small, red, sweet but not much flavor - only worth it since they are remarkably early, several weeks before any others. Gave up producing in midsummer.

Silvery Fir Tree (OP/containerseeds.com)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 5/14
first ripe in august
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. Nice foliage. Terrible flavor in our trail. Not productive, had disease problems.

Early Pick (Hybrid/Burpee)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 5/14
first ripe 7/29
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. Lots of flavor: more flavor but less sweet than stupice.

Oregon Spring (OP/Pinetree)
seeds started early March; planted in garden 4/30
first ripe mid-july
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. more acidic, less flavor, consistency not great.

Red Robin (OP/containerseeds.com)
seeds started early March; planted in pots in late April
First ripe late June
entered in county fair 7/16, won first in "cherry tomatoes".
Very small, compact, designed for containers.
In container outside: very small, very flavorful tomatoes. In greenhouse: much larger, watery and bland. Haven't tested in the ground.

"Vegetable Surprise" recipe (or way of life)

2005-11-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

When you work full time, and have gardens and animals to care for, plus lots of other projects, something tends to get less attention. For us that is cooking. Often we just come in at dusk and look at each other and hope the other has some great dinner idea... but rather than order out for pizza, since we do strongly believe in eating our own food as much as possible, we've come up with quick meals that use whatever vegetables are available.

Besides Top Ramen (which I'm embarrassed to say we do eat from time to time) the main thing we make is what I call Vegetable Surpise. (I think the name is funny, since it's not a surprise - but no one else thinks it's funny; just humor me). Here's the "recipe". You can make as much or little as you like by adding more vegetables, but when vegetables are the main part of the meal you need a surprising amount - I rarely manage to cook up enough for leftovers.

Vegetable Surprise
- onion (one small or 1/2 large)
- garlic ( as much as you like; I use a big spoonful of that canned chopped stuff, or 2-4 cloves fresh)
- oil
- vegetables (such as cabbage, kale, collards, chard, gailahn, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, beets, dried tomatoes, peppers, jerusalem artichokes, green beans, snap peas, zucchini, winter squash, kohlrabi) cut in bite size peices.

You may need to parboil beets and winter squash; it's hard to get them soft enough in saute.

Chop onion and garlic and saute in medium hot oil. After a couple of minutes, add vegatables in order of hardness (hard to soft). Cook vegetables until done to taste (we like them undercooked, but then, we're hungry at this point).

Serve over pasta and top with grated hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino romano (or any cheese, really - gorgonzola is good, cheddar works)

Or serve over baked potatoes and top with cheddar.

Or add a couple of eggs with the cooking vegetables, and some soy sauce, and serve over rice.

Or add a lot of eggs, let cook for 10min, flip over and cook on the other side, and call it a frittata (we usually add sliced potates to the vegetables when we do this)

Or only cook vegetables halfway, remove from heat, add a lot of beaten eggs and a little milk, and pour into a pie crust and bake, call it a quiche.

Or you can add cream (after the end of cooking to make a cream sauce), or ricotta; but these require more sense of adventure and having some leftovers that need using up.

Fresh tomatoes don't generally work, they release too much liquid when cooked so you get a runny, sloppy dish. However, if you add cut up small fresh tomatoes shortly before serving, so they just get barely hot, it's particularly delicious over pasta with grated cheese.

End of the season

2005-10-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

Our first serious frost was last week - 27 degrees. So the tomato plants are history, and my life is my own again. There's a sadness in all the dead plants, but relief in not having to worry or work anymore. And as the days get shorter and colder and wetter, the indoors becomes more appealing. We'll still be enjoying the garden, from the freezer or pantry or the cool place in the barn where we keep potatoes and squash. And of course the greens are growing happily outside now, and there are beets and carrots still to be dug up.

The "Long Keeper" tomatoes we keep in the pantry in the house; last year we had fresh tomatoes until February. (they were terrible, but Jay ate them happily). And there are still peppers growing in the greenhouse - I don't know what I'll do with them all - we don't grow that many, really, but we don't normally use that many. And I have *got* to dig up the jersalem artichokes - last year I never got to it, which meant a 9' jungle; they grow into a reasonable stand if you do carefully harvest them all. I haven't been happy with the dishes of jersalem artichokes lately - maybe peeling really is necessary.

We picked the last of the melons in the greenhouse last week, just before the frost. This is the first year we had a decent crop of melons. This year we tried ha-ogen in a large planter box in the greenhouse, trellised on a tomato cage, and they grew lushly and produced perhaps 5 or 6 fragrant, juicy, perfect melons - I knew they were ready to pick when I would go into the greenhouse and the fragrance filled the air.

And lastly, surprising observations: yacons are not at all frost hardy, hopefully the tubers are okay. But chickpeas didn't seem bothered by the frost. Of course there are about 10 actual chickpeas in the patch, so it doesn't really matter...