Touch the Earth Farm

For Sale

2011-04-18T09:44:00.002-05:00

Yes, folks, our lovely beyond-organic farm is for sale. As difficult as it is to say goodbye, we are all looking forward to moving somewhere to reduce Jim's commute. Please spread the word if anyone you know is interested in a homesteading property in Maryland.

Thanks for sharing the adventure!

For Entertainment Purposes Only:

2010-02-11T09:02:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Sir; may I have another?

2010-02-10T13:03:00.003-05:00

Getting crushed by yet another winter storm. We have more than 12 additional inches on the ground now, and the snow is up to my crotch. Granted, I'm not all that tall at 5'3.5", but still!

Farm dogs are now in the mud room. Piggies are now in the barn. High tunnel dug out yet again, but without collapsing this time (hopefully!). Jim went out last night to clear it off, and I was out again this morning at around 5:30 am. By that point we'd already had 10" of snow.

Blasted by yet another storm!

2010-02-07T17:59:00.003-05:00

More than 24" this time around and yet another high tunnel collapse. Thank you Jim for digging it out again! The animals are all faring well--gotta love the hardy heritage breeds! And I'm mighty glad to not be milking in this weather, though the kiddos are definitely missing the milk.

Frosty Moo:

Frosty piggies:

Collapsed tunnel from the inside:

Digging out:

Facebook stole my soul.

2010-02-03T12:54:00.006-05:00

Well, not really, but that's where I've been hanging out during the limited amount of computer time I have. The great thing about fb is that I can chat while baking or doing other housework, and the short little bursts lend themselves more to my lifestyle than blogging these days, it seems.

I want to thank all of you who have reached out to check in--I'm really humbled by the care and consideration.

I haven't lost interest in the farm blog, but we've had a difficult year here, and I find it hard to be inspired to write about the farm when life itself is in limbo. Jim quite understandably grew tired of his hellish work commute, and we've gone back and forth over the past six months or so about whether we should sell the farm, whether he should quit his job, and any number of other potential solutions. We've decided to stay put for a while longer and find ways to feel less tied down by the farm, so we're in the market for a good farm sitter if you know any.

Of course, the fact that we've all gotten into skiing/ snowboarding this winter has helped make our decision easier as well. Being 15 minutes from the slopes has its appeal! We just need to free ourselves more for summer beach trips that will help feed our souls.

We've gotten lots of snow this winter season, which has been wonderful, but unfortunately brought the collapse of one of our high tunnels and the loss of a litter of piglets. As with everything in life, there are ups and downs.

I'll post more pictures and updates soon, but for now, a teaser photo of some of the animals enjoying the snowy day.

My New Stove!

2009-07-26T13:49:00.005-05:00

Yay! I'm so pleased! It's obviously not hooked up yet—hopefully it will be by October. We still need to build a hearth, pipe it, and possibly plumb it as well, as it has a rear water reservoir for heating water.

Isn't it pretty? Makes my farmhouse kitchen feel complete, and I can't wait to cook on it this fall and winter.

Down Side of Farming

2009-06-20T09:35:00.007-05:00

We finally had 5 turkey poults hatch out yesterday only to lose 4 of them to a damn raccoon last night. I was so psyched to post about the success today and even got some photos last evening. There was no sign of the rest of the babies, but there was the unmistakable sign of coon scat. Grrrrrrrr.

We lost our first goat this spring as well. Poor little Cocoa, on top of the truck cap in the photo, was down one morning when Jim went out to feed everyone. Her pupils were fixed and dilated and she was having convulsions. I was positive she'd been poisoned somehow, because it was so sudden, but I just couldn't figure out how. I scoured the area they'd been and couldn't find any sign of diarrhea or vomiting, which would've been likely with some of the known problem plants. But nothing, and this was fast.

The other day, I think I found my answer in the potato patch. Loco jimsonweed. I could be wrong, but the symptoms certainly fit. Goats are usually really good about not eating things that are poisonous to them as long as they have plenty of other browse and grass. I'm not sure how or why she ate it, as they'd been rotated to a fresh paddock. It was young when she ate it, but she was tiny, so it wouldn't have taken much.

I don't think I would have identified it without the telltale flower, and the plants in the pasture never mature enough to flower before being mowed. I knew we had some horse nettle and some other nightshade, which is what I thought this was, I'm sure, but there's a distinct difference in the flower. After doing some research, I found that supposedly the drought we had a couple years back brought this plant back into prominence regionally. One more weed id under my belt, but at what a cost.

At any rate, losing animals is the down side of farming, and I really hate this part.

Whipping Cream, Whipping Gardens

2009-06-17T06:26:00.004-05:00

Whipping gardens back into shape, that is. I was on a tear yesterday and got so much done, and it felt so good! My energy levels have been kinda low lately between my allergies and cold of some sort I think, though it all just blended together. It felt great to really accomplish a lot.

My day started around 5:45 am with coffee, morning news reading, email and facebook play. Before going out to milk I got 3 pounds of butter made and kneaded bread dough for its first rise. I even got the kitchen mostly cleaned up. Then I went out to milk and feed the animals. Came back in to process the milk.

The rest of the day was spent trying to catch up on garden work that's been put off because of all the rain we were having. The ground finally dried out enough this weekend to get a tiller in the gardens and take care of some of the weeds and prep the soil for new plantings where I ripped out old.

Knowing the rain was coming again, I was a planting fool! We have another week of rain in the forecast, so I got as much in as possible. I planted the Amish paste tomatoes that had been languishing in seed flats. I don't know how they'll do at this point, but they've gotta be happier in the ground than in the seed tray. Here's the final tally:

around 75 Amish paste tomatoes
around 15 or so nasturtium plants
half a row each of parsley, basil, and dill seedlings
seeded half a row of cilantro
2 rows of edamame
3rd and final planting of sweet corn
several rows of dent corn
~40 lbs of seed potatoes, the last yukon golds
scattered amaranth seeds
scattered insectary herb seeds
1 row of moon and stars watermelon
1 row of strawberry watermelon
1 row of Hale's best muskmelon
1 row of edisto muskmelon
half a row of calendula
half row of sunflowers
oh, and the sweet potato slips—forgot those

Along with planting, I got most of the garden weeded. (We won't speak of the onions and carrots.) I was out there in my bathing suit, trying to get rid of this silly farmer's tan I'm sporting at the moment where I have tan stripes on my legs between the tops of my tall boots and bottoms of my shorts, belting out songs from my i-pod shuffle. It was the perfect day for working. Overcast, not too hot or muggy. Once I really started weeding and working up a sweat, the bugs were irritating, but that kinda goes without saying around here in the growing season.

I was too busy to take pictures, but I'll try to get some today if I can. Right now, I'm pleased as punch watching the rain come down and water all that in. A week of rain right now with moderate temperatures seems like a blessing for the garden and all the remaining lettuces. There was, of course, still more to be done before I collapsed in the shower at around 7:30 last night, but there's always more to be done. All work and no play makes Danielle a very cranky girl.

And the rain, rain, rain came down, down, down....

2009-06-12T07:49:00.006-05:00

What three weeks of rain will do to a garden....

and to the weeds...

The onions are in there somewhere. Yes, I'm whingeing about the weather. We've had so much rain that the ground is completely saturated and unworkable. I can't plant, cultivate, till or weed. I have a cover crop that I wanted to till in before it went to seed, but that's looking like it may not happen. I have loads of stuff that needs to go in the ground and more stuff that I really need to direct seed. I have a late planting of potatoes that desperately needs planting. Not to mention the incredibly favorable conditions for disease. Ugh. With dry one can at least irrigate; with rain, there's nothing to be done but float away.

Wheeeee! New Camera!

2009-06-10T07:24:00.001-05:00

I'll be playing with it all day today.

My Camera Is On the Fritz...

2009-06-05T17:16:00.001-05:00

... and it's crampin' my style. More posts soon, promise.

Fancy Feet

2009-05-30T18:04:00.004-05:00

Last week (or was it the week before?) Bella had her hooves trimmed by our traveling hoof trimmer. He pulls the table behind his truck, and it's pretty cool. The cow walks into it like a chute/ stanchion; he locks her in place, straps her in, and the table lifts her in the air. She most definitely does not appreciate this.

She doesn't look happy, does she? But see how those front hooves are starting to touch? That's not good for her feet.

Last year we had the trimmer out sometime in the summer, and I was worried the whole time that she'd miscarry from the stress. Neal said he didn't think she'd ever had her feet trimmed, so this was all new to her. This year, I knew I wanted to have her hooves trimmed before I tried to get her artificially inseminated (AIed). The fact that she doesn't walk on concrete here means that her hooves grow really fast.

She handled it better this year than last, perhaps because it was familiar to her. I kept telling her how lucky she was to be going in for a pedicure since I've never had one.

Independence Days Update

2009-05-15T06:42:00.011-05:00

Weekly updates, it seems, are more than I can do in this busy, busy season. Besides, if I did hold myself to that standard, chances are I wouldn't blog about anything else! We have another rainy week ahead, so expect a spate of posts over the next few days as I run through my backlog of topics.

Plant:

Direct seeded: 4 varieties of bush beans (provider, rocdor, royal purple, contender) and 2 rows of red core chantenay carrots down in the market garden.

Transplanted: ~ 300 tomato plants to the market garden (green zebra, Cherokee purple, striped German, Brandywine, sungold, sweet olive and gold nugget); Egyptian walking onions, shallots, thyme, citrus thyme, rhubarb, horseradish, and black raspberries to the front garden. Set in plants from Edible Landscaping—4 hops vines, 3 filbert trees, and 20 asparagus crowns.

Seeded in flats: calendula, evening primrose, pennyroyal, saltwort, fennel, lovage, peppermint, hyssop, arnica, marshmallow, paprika chili, Thai chili, and chamomile.

Harvest:

Spinach, lamb's quarters, kale, broccoli raab, lettuces, carrots, radishes, thyme, citrus thyme, oregano, tarragon, chives, rosemary, sorrel, horseradish, cilantro, parsley, eggs, milk.

Preserve:

Still eating down reserves. Made and froze butter.

Manage:

With some volunteer help, we got one of the high tunnels cleaned out and ready for cover cropping, which I'll hopefully get done this weekend. Meanwhile I'm trying to stay on top of the weeds in the market garden with all this rain and dealing with flea beetles. Grrrrrr.

Continuing managed intensive grazing—this is primarily Jim's thing, and he gets total credit for staying on top of the frequent moves.

Prep:

Our silver fox rabbit doe, Jewel, gave birth to 7 kits the other day. While she did all the work, it does bode well for the beginnings of our breeding program. Silver Fox are meat rabbits listed on Slow Food's Ark of Taste list. They will be both human and pet food, letting us reduce our dependence on commercial pet food even further, which should be healthier for both the dogs and the cats and lighter on the earth besides. I know some people will have a problem with that, but I can guarantee that these rabbits will have a better, healthier life than anything that goes into the commercial foods.

Set up three bee hives in the hopes of maintaining at least two hives on our property.

Continued working on our "insectary" around the gardens to encourage beneficial insects. ATTRA has a great pdf publication on "farmscaping" for beneficial insects for those who'd like to read more about this idea.

Our cookstove arrived this week, so we'll be working on the install over the next few months to have it up and running for fall burning season.

Store:

Added more bread flour, as we really blow through it quickly here. I still have my hi-gluten bulk flour, but it's twice as much as the King Arthur brand I use on a regular basis, so I try to stock up on K.A. whenever it's on sale.

Add:

CSA delivery to four families: eggs, mixed baby greens, lamb's quarters, head lettuce, broccoli raab, radishes, carrots, spring garlic, horseradish greens, oregano, sage, parsley, cilantro, rosemary.

Cook:

I found a bag of roasted red peppers in the bottom of the freezer, so I made some roasted red pepper cous-cous to go with an herb roasted chicken and sauteed lamb's quarters seasoned with sea salt and spring garlic. Quite tasty.

Learn:

Julia and I learned more about rabbits and "kindling" (what it's called when rabbits give birth). Did you know that baby rabbits only nurse about 5 minutes a day and that mama doesn't sit on them or near them for warmth? Neither did I, but we do now.

I'm hopeful that our first time mama knows what she's doing. She's pulled off some fur for the nest, but not a ton. The babies seem to have nice, rounded bellies from what I can see, so that's a good sign. I'll continue to monitor them over the next couple of weeks.

I can bring home the bacon...

2009-05-14T07:06:00.003-05:00

Fry it up in a pan....

This is Jules's first rabbit of the season; she's quite a good shot.

Last year she got one while wearing a bikini:

And here's one of my favorite photos—target shooting in a leopard suit:

Julia plans to sit for her hunting license this year and head out deer hunting on kids' day. Jim has modified a deer rifle for her (or some such thing). I really don't know what I'm talking about, but since he's not posting these days....

Busy As A Bee

2009-05-13T06:18:00.004-05:00

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post, both my hives from last year were deadouts this winter, which really sucked. They starved with frames full of honey just inches away, so bee numbers rather than honey stores was the culprit. Thinking I wasn't supposed to open the hives until the first nice day in late winter/ early spring, I missed the opportunity to move full honey frames in closer to the brood nest where the bees could reach them, likely preventing them from starving as they refused to leave the brood nest.

There were a couple other things I could have done, too. First, knowing that one hive was weaker than the other, I could've combined the two hives and their honey stores going into winter, and there's a good chance that I would have had one strong overwintered hive this spring. Second, although my mentor suggested that I could leave the screened bottom boards all winter, I could have put the IPM board in to reduce drafts, especially considering the way the wind whips across the pasture up there. Third, we could have parked our mobile coop on the west side of the hives for the winter, creating a bit of a windbreak for them. Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, and the only way I know of gaining experience is by, well, gaining experience, sometimes the hard way.

The good news is that my bee inspector checked both hives and declared them free of disease, which means that I now have all that stored honey (probably 70 lbs or so, all without any artificial feeds or treatments) to help establish the new packages I installed last weekend, eliminating the need for any artificial feeding again this year. So, all is not lost, though the nucs I got last year were a much better start than packaged bees, and I'm sad to have lost them.

The packages I installed have a couple of things going for them, however, even if I do need to be on the lookout for mite and beetle problems. First, the bees themselves supposedly came from a bee yard that hasn't been treated in 7 years—I'm not sure exactly where, but I'll post once I find out. Second, the queens I installed come from hygienic queen stock from Bee Happy Apiary in Vacaville, California, which will hopefully give the hives a leg up against mites. (For a list of hygienic queen dealers click here.) I'm considering requeening either later this year or definitely next year if they overwinter with a local source of hygienic queens: VP Queen Bees, who raises without treatments and, I think, using small cell, which I use as well.

Installing the package:

I installed three packages last weekend using a place and wait technique that's a bit gentler on the bees than shaking them into the hives. Basically as you can see, you remove five of the frames in a deep box and place the package directly inside, place your queen cage between two of the center frames, open the package, and close up the hive. Come back in the late afternoon/ early evening and most of the bees will have moved out of the package and into the frames on their own. Remove the package and set it in front of the hive overnight if there are any remaining bees, replace the remaining frames, close up the hive, and you're done. Easy on bees and beekeeper alike.

Installing the queen cage:

Opening the package:

Closing up the hive:

Finishing touch, a brick on top:

We use an old piece of carpeting to set our hives on for weed suppression; it makes maintenance and mowing easier. When I came back that evening, I installed five frames of new small cell foundation. The five frames that were in the hive when I installed the package included both open brood comb, pollen, and plenty of capped honey. Between the queen and the frames of honey, I'm hopeful that the bees will want to stick around. I'll be checking on them today to be sure that they've freed the queen from her cage.

**UPDATE: Only one of the hives had released the queen, so I released the other two into their respective hives and closed up. I'll be checking on them in a week or so, depending on the weather, to look for signs that the queens are accepted and laying.

Also, by way of clarification, it was the queens who came from a yard not treated for the past 7 years, so all those good genetics will be passed on to my hives.

Independence Days Update

2009-05-05T05:57:00.005-05:00

Sharon over at Casaubon's Book is starting a new Independence Days Challenge for anyone who would like to sign up, though it's run pretty informally. I'm not going to keep count, personally, since it's really an ongoing thing and the counting just adds pressure.

It's been two weeks since I last posted an update, and we've gotten lots accomplished. And many more things have been left undone due to rain, illness, and just lack of time! We had a quick cold, which knocked me out of commission for a couple of days, not to mention a week of 90° + days. Though I gave it a valiant effort, working in 90° weather with a fever of 102° just didn't cut it. I gave up and sat on the couch watching Battlestar Galactica, my new favorite netflix get.

I also managed to travel up to Lebanon, New Jersey, to give a talk at an unschooling conference, which was loads of fun. I got to talk farming with folks from New York state and a woman from Trinidad y Tobago. Very cool. Hopefully we'll have lots of farm visitors over the next few months. I learned about qigong and even had a brief healing massage. Yet again I discovered the truth of the notion that we are always exactly where we need to be. I got home in time to harvest for my CSA and transplant some more herbs to my new front garden before the rain set in. Whew! It's been a full two weeks!

Plant:
Transplanted: chives, sage, thyme, salad burnet, yarrow, heartsease, echinacea, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries to the front garden. Set in roses that arrived and some rhubarb that I bought on the spur of the moment at the feed store. Divided and dispersed wormwood, bee balm, lemon balm, horehound, feverfew, and mullein in the front from last year's plantings. I had more stuff planted, but unfortunately Jim, in his overzealous desire to try out his new tiller, tilled it under in the kids' garden where I'd healed them in last year. *sigh*

Seeded in flats: Amish paste tomatoes, basil, dill, parsley, borage (both white and blue), calendula, lemon grass, nasturtium, asclepius, winter savory.

Harvest:
Asparagus, lettuce, swiss chard, spinach, kale, carrots, radishes, turnips, endive, tarragon, sage, cilantro, thyme, sorrel, chives, eggs, milk.

Preserve:
Still using down stores. Kids found some frozen strawberries, which were a great treat as we impatiently watch the blossoms turn to tiny green berries. Made butter.

Prep:
Continued to work on front herb/ edible garden, spreading ~5 yards of topsoil/ compost mix to ammend the soil and mixing peat moss where the blueberries and cranberries will grow. Ordered 2 varieties of cranberries, 3 varieties of filbert, 20 asparagus crowns, weeping mulberry, and 4 hops vines from Edible Landscaping in Afton, Virginia. My patio peach was out of stock, unfortunately. They're a great little company that I've been ordering from for about 6 or 7 years now, and they've always made good on their plants.

Manage:
Potted up about 150-200 tomato plants and have about 100 more to go, but I ran out of yogurt cups.

Found the market garden again, which is being taken over by chenopodium seedlings. Guess what CSA will be getting this week? Also sprayed and covered crops to combat those damn flea beetles.

Cook:
The first of our asparagus has come in, and we've been loving every bit of it! In fact, I loved it so much that I added 20 crowns to my order for the front garden. The ferns are so pretty, and one can never have too much asparagus!

We had chicken, asparagus, chevre sandwiches on homemade bread—all zero mile. The chips are store bought, as we've run out of our storage potatoes and the store bought potatoes just don't fry up well for chips. Or anything much for that matter. Yuk. I'm always reminded how easy it is to eat seasonally when you're used to fresh food.

Add:
CSA delivery to four families: mixed greens, spinach, chard, head lettuce, radishes, carrots, turnips, spring garlic, chives, thyme, tarragon, cilantro.

Shared bedding plants and berries with neighbors.

Learn:
Learned about qigong, an Eastern meditation through movement practice that focuses on energy flow in the body.

Grow Your Own

2009-04-25T06:03:00.002-05:00

I'd venture to guess that most folks reading this blog have a pretty good grasp of why buying local food is good for the earth, good for your health, and good for the local economy. Many probably even buy into the whole food security issue. Now, here's one more good reason to grow your own.

California is dealing with serious drought conditions. If it continues to worsen, food availability across the nation may be affected, considering that California supplies about half of the nation's produce. The governor declared a state of emergency in February, as three years of low rain and snow fall have produced one of the state's most severe droughts on record. 600,000 acres have been taken out of production in Orange Cove, California, alone, where the unemployment rate is at 25%. In the Westlands Water District that includes Fresno and Kings County officials estimate that 300,000 acres of lettuce, tomatoes and other crops will not be planted this year due to drought. Some experts predict that the total acreage left unplanted this year may go even higher than 850,000.

A recent release of federal water supply to ease drought conditions has brought the area water allowance up to around 30% of its typical allowed water usage under existing contracts, up from the 10% it was getting before federal intervention. Still too little, too late to help most farms in the region, which could seriously affect pricing and availability of produce and other products like orange juice or wine.

To read more, check out California's Department of Water Resources and this article in the New York Times. I'll be following this story closely. Seems Great Depression 2.0 also has a ready-made Dust Bowl 2.0 in the making.

It's not too late to start a garden for those who haven't gotten around to ordering and starting seeds. Buying vegetable seedlings from the nearest garden center is a great way to go, especially when just starting out, as it frees you from starting those seeds in the depths of winter when few folks are thinking about gardening at all. Most of the garden centers around here are watching their vegetable starts fly off shelves, as more people turn to gardening as a way of easing grocery bills. Turns out, the summer garden may be a good plan in terms of availability as well.

Bustin' Sod

2009-04-20T07:02:00.010-05:00

More than a year after making my front garden plans, we've finally broken ground. Below is my sketch, which is not drawn remotely to scale. It's more of a vision than an actual plan, and I've already made several changes, but hopefully this will give you a sense of what I'm going for with the herbs and edibles. Our front yard is fairly shallow, sloped, and close to the street, making it relatively useless as yard space. My goal is to eliminate as much of the turf as possible, but I'll be leaving all the paths in grass.

Jim brought the tiller around to break up the bigger areas, but the spiral paths require quite a bit of hand work. We tilled several bales of peat moss into the bed closest to the porch to lower the ph for the blueberries and cranberries. I planted five blueberry bushes there this weekend that I purchased locally—Sunshine blue and Bluehaven, varieties that will stay more compact than most, topping out at around 4 feet. We already have six bushes that I planted along our property line when we moved, so hopefully we'll have plenty of blueberries! I've also started to transplant strawberries for ground cover, and I have four hop vines on order for training up the patio pillars. Up towards the house in between the Hollywood juniper and mugo pine, I planted two ground cherries, pretty flowering shrubs that produce a profusion of sour cherries.

In the bed toward the street, I divided and transplanted several lavender plants, and I ordered some rosa rugosas to fill the area between them. I miss my roses from the old house, and I'm so excited to have some again. I ordered one "new dawn" climber for against the house; two gallicas—"apothecary's rose" and "rosa mundi"; and three "jens munk" rugosas.

We transplanted three of our grapevines that weren't performing well in the kitchen garden out to the front and set in some oregano for ground cover. We'll also be transplanting lots of raspberries and blackberries to create a hedge along the property line. The center of the spirals will feature a sage bush, and I have several starts from last year that I can transplant once I get the soil conditioned. I'll also be spending most of today and tomorrow seeding flats for out front. Tree-wise, I planted a witch hazel this weekend, and I have a weeping mulberry and a dwarf patio peach on order, as well as three varieties of filbert to anchor the front left corner of the yard.

Should keep me busy this year, huh?

Too Late!

2009-04-15T13:31:00.009-05:00

Madeline wrote: "I get an apron?! I had forgotten that beautiful offer. :) Listen, as someone who hates her sewing machine more than you, you are off the hook (or tension:) if you want. Play with all those animals instead."

Well, my dear, it's too late. They're already done, or nearly so. I still need to get ribbon or some such to make the tie.

For those outside the loop, Madeline had this beautiful skirt that she picked up somewhere but was not happy with, so she wanted to pass it along to me. I also thought the skirt was lovely but knew from many fitting room experiences that these style skirts always look much better on the hanger than they do on me. But I took it anyway because I thought it would make a beautiful apron, and I liked the idea of sister-aprons on two unschoolin' farmin' mamas.

When I got home, I picked out the stitches along the side seams of the skirt to create two apron bottoms. I chose some vintage chenille fabric that I salvaged from an old bedspread. We don't know where it originally came from, but we found the spread in Jim's grandfather's old boarding house at the beach just before he sold it. I worked parts of it into Julia's baby quilt and the quilt square we made for Hannah Jenner's quilt.

The lace was hand-~~tatted~~crocheted by my great-grandmother, who would be tickled, I think, at the idea that her lace now graces two farm-house aprons made from scraps of an old chenille bedspread from a boarding house and a re-purposed skirt. And Madeline, if you give me any grief about using the lace, I shall assign you to read the short story "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker if you haven't already, in which case, there you go.

Independence Days Update

2009-04-14T11:45:00.006-05:00

The older and wiser(?) I get, the more my mantra becomes "everything in its own time."

Homesteading means a never-ending list of tasks that need doing. My to-do list never gets shorter—the moment I cross off one item, at least two more are added. Some things, like getting to the post office to mail out several packages that I owe folks, seems nigh on impossible because it means leaving the farm and all the things that need doing here. And, of course, why go when I still haven't finished that one thing that I need to mail out—might as well wait and mail everything at one time. I'm getting there, plugging away, and Madeline's pretty Easter apron has re-motivated me to finish the apron I'm making for her.

The rainy spring days are helping as well. Although I admit to secretly hating to sew. Well, not so much hating to sew as hating my machine that always bunches up because the tension isn't right or some such issue. The minutiae and the attention to detail drive me batty. But rest assured, I will be seated at the sewing machine over the next week, trying to complete all the projects I've been putting off because what else is one to do on rainy days while waiting for the plants (and weeds!) to grow?

Plant:

More direct seeding in the market garden: leeks (which I accidentally dug up and planted over because they didn't get written on my garden plan. grrrrrr.), batvian endive, red Russian kale, Swiss chard, rouge d'hiver lettuce, salad bowl lettuce, drunken woman lettuce.

Jim got ~ 75-100lbs of potatoes, Yukon golds and red nordlands, in the ground with some help from the kids.

I transplanted ~ 500 seedlings to the market garden: napa, savoy, early Jersey Wakefield and red acre cabbages; windsor and de cicco broccoli; radicchio; red giant mustard; black seeded simpson, winter density, red salad bowl, red lollo, and speckled bibb lettuces.

Harvest:

Red Russian and vates kale, lettuce, spinach, endive (batvian and frisee), escarole, swiss chard, cherry belle radishes, turnip greens, green onions, spring garlic, carrots, arugula, thyme, citrus thyme, tarragon, oregano, sage, cilantro, parsley, chives, early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, milk, eggs, last 2 geese.

Here I am during evening milking. We use a milk machine and milk twice a day, approximately 11-11.5 hours apart.

Preserve:

Mostly still working at using down our stores, but I preserved a couple pounds of butter.

Prep:

Not much on this front. Mostly, we're in the process of pulling together some orders for the farm, so I should have more to report on the next update.

We've been without our second fridge for a couple months now, and that's going surprisingly well. Our inside fridge is packed, and it can be annoying trying to find things, but the stuff outside in our big cooler is doing quite well. The frozen juice containers keep things nice and cool; the trick is remembering to swap them out. Of course, the garage still stays pretty cool because the nighttime temps are low. I'll let you know how things go in the summer.

Our first round of turkey poults will arrive later this week, so I'll be prepping the brooding equipment for them.

Manage:

As you know, I've sheared the sheep, and we've taken down the high tunnel plastic.

Big Boy and Maya, our tamworth pigs, are out on their first pasture paddock, which they'll till up over the next month or so. They're so good at rooting and plowing that we use them for tilling new garden beds and for rennovating our pasture. We put them in places that are overrun by weeds or generally not doing well. They till, and then we replant with a pasture mix.

Before pigs:

After pigs:

We've also moved Bella and the goaties out on pasture, though Bella is still splitting her time between there and the barnyard, depending how wet the pastures are and how quickly the paddocks recover. The sheep and chickens will go out this weekend, I hope.

Cook:

No good photos this update. I'll try to be better about it!

Add:

CSA delivery to four families: eggs, spring salad mix, escarole, spinach, kale, carrots, radishes, thyme, citrus thyme, tarragon, oregano, chives, green onions, spring garlic, baby cabbage, sorrel.

Learn:

Julia and I have been learning about breeding bunnies, and we put her Silver Fox rabbits together for the first time on Easter. With any luck we'll have our first litter in about a month.

On Lambs and Lawnmowers

2009-04-12T07:04:00.005-05:00

Early spring rains and everything is finally greening up around here. While the neighbors were firing up their gas guzzlers this holiday weekend, we had a little help from our furry friends. Yes, that's Daisy in the background, and little ram lambs kept trying to run her off, feeling all big and bold until she turned and looked at them. Then they'd bounce back to mama with silly little jumps that put Pepe le Pew to shame.

Shearing Time

2009-04-06T10:48:00.008-05:00

And every muscle in my body is sore. Wrestling three sheep will do that to a body. Some readers might remember that I took a shearing class last year in the New Zealand shearing method, so that's kinda, sort of what you're seeing below.

Okay, now I'm starting to work up a sweat! Time to shed some layers. Esther's not very happy about shedding her extra layers right now, but she will be soon enough.

You can see Esther's neck and head behind my leg. Her fleece is very nearly off by this point, as I work on her last leg:

Two shorn sheep back in with babies and feeling much happier:

And then, there was Candace, who flat out refused to cooperate for a second year in a row. She stayed on her rump about long enough for me to trim her hooves, and then it was a friggin' free for all!

It took both of us some serious wrestling to get her shorn, and I ended up shearing quite a bit with her standing up.

We did finally get her shorn and back out on the winter pasture as we wait to see whether she will lamb or not. She didn't look terribly pregnant to me, but she has another month or so within the realm of possibility.

So Long High Tunnels

2009-03-31T15:02:00.013-05:00

We got the high tunnels down this weekend in between rain storms, and I have the plastic drying on the driveway as I type. As you'll see, we didn't get it down soon enough to avoid the bok choi or the tatsoi bolting, but everything else seems to be doing well. The February planting of turnips, radishes, kale and beets are doing well, and everything else is green and growing.

Early spring here in Maryland is a tricky season. We can be 70° F one day and 42° the next with night time temps still dipping into the 20s° occasionally. Cold season crops don't like high tunnels in hot weather, and that's one of the drawbacks of our homemade tunnels: the sides don't roll up, and the end venting is inadequate at best on warm, sunny days. (I need to get me one of those cool thermometers that El has.)

You can see the tunnel skeletons in the background of the picture above, but that's our neighbor's house in the photo, not ours. This is our house, looking pretty barren at the moment. It sits directly in front of the barn, and it's a nice, short walk out there for winter chores. Soon, we'll be moving all the animals back out onto our rotational pastures.

You can see the tunnel frames in the foreground. These lean against the side of the barn until they're needed again. The advantage to taking the plastic down, besides prolonging its life just a bit is that it helps prevent salt build up in the soil by allowing the natural rains to thoroughly flush it. Our tunnels are up between November and March. Plus, our summers get so hot that without being able to roll up the sides, we'd be hard pressed to grow much of anything in there. I'll be using the new tunnel again with shade cloth to try to grow lettuces through the summer.

My plan with the tunnel to the right, our first one, is to plant a buckwheat cover crop, till it in, solarize the soil, and have it ready for planting late fall/ winter crops by August. I've been dealing with some pest and lettuce disease issues in parts of it, so I'm hoping this will eliminate much of that non-chemically while also improving the soil. I'll till in the buckwheat, and the solarizing will help break down the organic matter, making its nutrients more available for the plants. Buckwheat is a fast growing crop, so it suits my needs particularly well here, in addition to being good at taking up phosphorous in the soil, one of the problems with Maryland soil in general, and mine in particular. So, it'll satisfy those fellas in charge of nutrient management planning.

I thought I'd post a photo of our set up for folks to see. If you click on the photo, you'll be able to see the captions I photoshopped in:

Our lot is shaped like a giant L: you're looking at the short part of the L and the long part extends out to the left past the market garden. I would guesstimate that the house, barn, and two winter pastures take up about 1.75- 2 acres; the rest we use for the market garden and summer rotations. Here's a picture of the kids and the dogs running through those pastures back in December:

That's the mobile chicken coop off to the right side looking like a solar panel.

And here are some parting shots of the tunnel plantings:

Independence Days Update

2009-03-23T05:56:00.005-05:00

Okay, it's been so long since I posted on my independence-oriented doings that I've forgotten the categories and what week we're on at this point. Maybe we could now call it the sporadic independence days, or SID for short? This covers the last month or so...

A quick confession: I haven't been posting as much in part because work has stepped up, but also because I lost my camera battery charger and am at a loss without photos. *sigh* I kept hoping it would turn up, but nothing. I guess I'll have to suck it up and buy a new charger. In the meantime, I'll try to get Jim to take some photos for me and upload them later.

Update: My honey's so sweet. He read my blog post at work and sent me some photos already!

Plant:

First sowing of radishes, beets, turnips and kale is already up and growing nicely in the high tunnels, which will be coming down in the next few weeks.

Seed trays have germinated and live in my mobile greenhouse, allowing me to roll them into the garage on cold nights to protect against frost. Don't worry, it's anchored to the truck this year and performing beautifully. I don't want to jinx myself, but I ought to actually know which tomato and pepper plants are which this year. Imagine that! I have two varieties of broccoli, several lettuces, cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and Julia's seedlings out there now, all doing well.

This past week, I began direct seeding the market garden, which Jim tilled for me with his new tiller, making for some lovely garden soil. While I hope someday to get away from tilling, breaking new garden out of weedy old pasture can be back-breaking work, and right now, I welcome the tiller. The kids and I laid the drip tape irrigation this past week, and yesterday I began laying some polymulch for designated working paths.

I've seeded 2 varieties of carrots, several varieties of onions, second sowing of turnips and radishes, 3 varieties of kale, spinach, peas, beets, lettuces, and 2 varieties broccoli raab. Jim and Julia got 4 rows of Russian banana fingerling potatoes in yesterday.

Harvest:

We've been harvesting all winter out of the high tunnels, which are just the most amazing things. Everyone should have a small one in their backyard. Really.

Right now, we have all of the following available for harvest: spinach, kale, swiss chard, carrots, arugula, lettuces, 2 varieties of endive, escarole, turnip greens, thyme, citrus thyme, sage, rosemary, chives, salad burnet, parsley, oregano, tarragon, rosemary, sorrel, cilantro. The bok choi and tasoi have long since bolted, and the beet leaves are just too tough now, but Bella and the chickens appreciate them. Outside the tunnel, the kales are coming back, as are some of the napa and savoy cabbages and green onions and volunteer spinach. We'll see on the overwintered beets and carrots.

Preserve:

Still working on that country ham cure from December; it should be finished this week and ready to hang and age. I also preserved several half gallons of Bella's colostrum in the freezer for emergencies. Other than that, I'm working on using up my stores to make room for a new year.

Prep:

Jim pulled a new fenceline at the top of our property, and he bought a pull behind tiller for the tractor, which will make life much easier for both of us. He also put a load of Delaware eggs in the incubator, so we'll see what comes of that. It's a home-made incubator, and so works questionably at best. We have a new heat regulator, so maybe that will make a difference. Last year we had no luck with the Ameraucana eggs we put in there, but they could have been sterile.

On the safe side, I placed my poultry orders, and I'll be adding Bourbon Reds to our heritage turkey line up. I also ordered more Ameraucanas because everyone loves the colored eggs and some Buff Cochins, who are supposed to be good broody hens, since I've had no luck getting any of my existing hens to go broody.

I also ordered three new packages of bees and picked up some new wooden ware that I need to start assembling. Unfortunately, both my hives were deadouts due to low numbers. They starved with plenty of honey just inches away. Very sad. If I'd combined the two hives at the end of the season, I think they would've made it through. My bee inspector came out to inspect the hives and declared them free of any disease or problems, so I'll be able to use all those frames of honey to help establish the new bees without artificial feeds, I hope.

Manage:

We're starting to get everyone off the barnyard and out onto pasture. This weekend, Jim divided the turkey shelter (which they never use, but roost on top of) into 3 parts, making a nesting space for each hen. At this point, they're still not laying, but they should start soon.

This week, I separated Maya from her two remaining piglets, who are more than thriving—they are fat little snausages. I'm working on reconditioning her, as three litters in a year took too much. She's in heat again and spending lots of time right next to the fence, but we're planning on keeping her separate from Big Boy until mid-summer for a fall litter. Two litters is plenty per year... if we could just get the pigs on board with that, we'd be good to go.

We've also had two out of three of our sheep give birth, and we have 4 little boy lambs. They're all just about ready to move back out on pasture in another week or so. Right now, they're up in the barn safe and snug. It'll soon be time to think about shearing.

And speaking of births, Bella's calf Daisy is doing beautifully, so we'll be looking for a home for her soon and trying to plan next year's calving. I've been watching Bella closely, trying to detect her heat cycles, made all the more difficult because she's a lone family cow. I'm planning to AI, but I still need to figure out all the logistics of that one. She's coming back into condition nicely, especially now that I have her salt levels worked out, and once the spring grass comes in, she'll be good to go. Of course, she's shedding that winter coat like crazy and looking kind of spotty, but still much sleeker than she was.

Cook:

While I'd really like to work on cooking new things, sometimes that's just beyond what I'm capable of in a week, especially busy weeks. Heck, I feel good just getting dinner on the table most nights! So, I'm turning this category into a zero mile meal challenge, and this week's props go to Jim who made a delicious chicken giambatto last night and actually got photos. It featured our chicken, sausage, onions, some of the last of our yukon gold potatoes, and garlic. I made some Southern-style turnip greens cooked in our salt pork to go with the meal and, of course, homemade artisan bread with Bella's butter. Yum!

Add:

CSA started back up the first week of March, and I've been pleased so far with what we've had to offer folks for so early in the season. This past week we distributed eggs, spinach/ kale mix, swiss chard, spring greens, arugula, carrots, tarragon, thyme, and oregano.

I'm still trying to find a food pantry that accepts fresh foods, and I'll be stepping up those efforts now that the season is picking up.

Learn:

Well, I'm still learning lots of things, but this week I'll be working on organic fruit management. I have everything in place, have pruned and cleaned the beds, and now need to figure out the spraying schedule for the Surround kaolin clay. So, that's what I'll be focused on for the next week or so.

Lamb Watch

2009-03-16T14:59:00.003-05:00

Well, today was our first official day of lamb watch, and yet again before I have a chance to post, there are babies! There was sweet little furry head out there to greet me this morning when I went to milk Bella. I fed and watered everyone as usual, milked, and went back inside to process the milk and tell the kids.

While I was back out giving Bella's calf, Daisy, her morning bottle, Jules came out and exclaimed that Faith had twins. No, there was only one when I looked. But Jules was sure that she saw two fluffy white heads, and she was right. Faith gave birth to the second little boy while I was giving Daisy her bottle!

We went out together, and Jules helped me to dip the navels in a gentle iodine to help prevent infection called navel ill/ joint ill, which is just nasty and not worth dealing with when it can be prevented with good hygiene. One of the umbilici was too long, so I shortened it a little bit by teasing it off jagged like with my nail before dipping, which is supposed to be better than cutting to prevent bleeding. All went well; though Faith is still very skittish and uncooperative, she let me handle the lambs.

Jules and I went to collect siblings and Sam's lasso to bring them all up to the barn where it's clean and dry. At first, I tried just picking up the little boys, hoping Faith would just follow, but of course that would've been too easy. It took me about 5-6 tries with the lasso before I got her, and she fought me the whole way up to the barn. Sam held the lasso while I push/ dragged Faith, and the girls brought up the rear with the babies. Whew! Next year I'll need to figure out some system for all the births.

Mama and babies are doing well. Faith passed the placenta and has nibbled a bit. Both boys have nursed multiple times, and seem nice and strong, though we'll be keeping a close eye on them for the next few weeks.

A Trip Through Time

2009-03-13T14:30:00.007-05:00

We spent the first half of this week in Williamsburg, playing at Great Wolf Lodge, an indoor water park, and exploring Jamestown Settlement and Colonial Williamsburg. A rare getaway as a family, we really enjoyed our time down there and felt lucky to get such a great rate through a local homeschooling group. Usually, one of us needs to stay home to take care of the farm, but we're lucky enough to have a really reliable farmsitter (who didn't organize this particular group trip!) that lets us get away for short periods of time every once in a while.

The highlights of the trip for me were the time spent poking around in the colonial garden in Williamsburg and talking with a food historian in one of the colonial kitchens. Unfortunately, my favorite place of all, Great Hopes Plantation, was closed for the season, but I still found ways to nourish my own love for all things homesteading. Knowing that I won't likely get back down there this season has made me more determined to seek out some of the historical homesteads closer to my neck o' the woods, and I'll definitely be heading down to Monticello at some point during this growing season.

Here you can see all the cloches out to protect the plants at night; during the day they are set aside:

They had row covers made from saplings and cuttings and canvas tarps. You can see the tarps thrown aside in the above photo on the potting benches behind me. They also had some permanent row cover frames built that could be lifted on and off the rows of plants. These were constructed of solid framing wood and tar paper, though Jim didn't get a photo of them for me.

Here are some of the standard cold frames for starting plants:

And here, you can see the very clever straw insulation design:

The food historians were cooking over an open fire and had just finished spit roasting a piece of beef and making mashed potatoes, which Emily sorely wished she could taste. One was making some lemon custard tarts in a dutch oven near the fire, and he said it only took a ship about 6 days to bring citrus up from the Caribbean, which made sense once he said it. Nutmeg was also a plentiful spice.

I asked if he thought the food tasted better cooked with wood fire, to which he responded that the meat definitely did, but mostly the food tasted better simply because it was fresh. He continued to say that people now don't know what fresh ingredients taste like, and the girls had to say, "Well we do!" The historian protested, beginning a spiel about how grocery food isn't really fresh in the same way. My girls indignantly said, "we don't go to the grocery store!" *laughing* I told him that we raised our own food, that I went out and milked our cow, etc. and we talked a little bit about the different breeds we raised and those that were raised at Colonial Williamsburg. The piece of beef was from one of their Devons.

Overall, we had a lovely time, but it is good to be back home. I'll leave you with a few more garden images, while I go get to work on mine!

T & A

2009-02-25T12:30:00.003-05:00

My life this past week or so seems to have revolved around a little bovine T & A action—either working with Bella's udder to help relieve some of the engorgement or working with the calf, Daisy, to get her to eliminate. Of course, this was much my own making...

We made the difficult decision not to share milk Daisy because Bella was not showing signs of being cooperative with human and calf milking, and we didn't have 2-3 months worth of patience with the kicking and other behavior problems. So, we decided to bottle raise Daisy—sad from a mama's point of view, but great from a kids point of view.

We left them together for more than 24 hours, and then decided to separate them. Once we did, Bella immediately stopped the kicking and general recalcitrance, and she's settled back into her milking routine nicely. She did bellow a bit for about a day, but after that she settled down. We have Daisy in the stall right next to Bella's so they can hear each other and smell each other, but we're now Daisy's surrogate mamas. She had no problem adjusting whatsoever and takes her bottle greedily.

She's gotten so strong by this point that the girls aren't feeding her much anymore. She butts the bottle way too hard for them to hang on. My job, besides feeding her has been to make sure she's eliminating and maintains a healthy gut. She had a great start with all mama's colostrum, but calves can still have really sensitive guts before the rumen gets going, and they can be very susceptible to parasites as well. The poo color and consistency are some of the best indications of what's going on.

Although it probably wasn't necessary, as I can't imagine big dairies worry much about this at all, I did rub her backside while feeding her for about the first week or so, just like you do when hand-raising kittens. This stimulated her to eliminate, and I'd seen mama doing it, so I figure whatever mama does is probably the right way to do things. She's ten days old today and is now eliminating independently, but I still make sure that I give her nice firm little circular rubs all over her back and sides just like mama would with her tongue while nursing her. My theory is that will help stimulate digestion and good health. I'm not mama, but I'll do my best to emulate her.

Bella seems to have accepted that I've taken over her calf—maybe it's the whole alpha cow thing—but she likes being able to talk to and smell her through the stall, and she'll bellow if she sees us taking Daisy out for a walk on the lead rope. Daisy's doing well learning to lead, and we hope to have a nice little heifer calf for sale in a couple months.

Bella's milk has come in nicely, and her udder is doing well. It was very hard and engorged for about a week, with the square between the four teats being the last area to soften. At first, I was massaging most of the milking time, which made for a pretty gymnastic milking. She was so engorged that her teats were spread almost too wide for the milking machine, necessitating one hand on that to keep it from sucking air and losing vacuum while the other massaged her udder to make sure mastitis wouldn't take hold. There are different kinds of mastitis and lots of different causes, but leaving milk in the udder is one of the primary causes. Complete milking out is really important, and mastitis isn't something any cow owner wants to mess with. An ounce or ten of prevention is worth a pound of antibiotic cure!

We chose not to dry treat her, which is routine in most dairies. This involves injecting a prophylactic antibiotic directly into each teat and then sealing it in with a wax or glue throughout her dry period. Since we weren't having any mastitis issues going into the dry period, I opted not to use the antibiotics and see how things went. So far, so good. Of course, it's also possible to treat many mastitis cases naturally by increasing milkings and massage, and this is one of the really good arguments for share-milking with the calf because the calf can help with the workload.

We were also very lucky in terms of milk fever, which is more common in Jerseys than other breeds because of their milk production relative to their size. Milk fever is basically the body's inability to mobilize calcium quickly enough as the milk comes in, and once a cow is down, she can die quickly if not treated. It generally happens within the first 24-48 hours after birth, but can happen within the first week. The chances of it happening increase with the cow's age, and first fresheners are rarely affected. This was Bella's second calf, so we were on the safer side of things. Still, I kept a close eye, and checked on her in the middle of the night that first 24 hours and about every two hours for the first 48 hours though the second night I went out just before bedtime and then again at around dawn.

Milk fever can be pretty successfully managed through diet by lowering the intake of calcium throughout the dry period. While this seems somewhat counter-intuitive, it ensures that the cow's body will be able to access the calcium quickly once it's added back in at birth. We dropped all alfalfa, which is high in calcium, out of her diet and lowered the calcium in her minerals for the two months leading up to birth. We also gave Bella two tubes of calcium paste as a preventative measure—one right after birth and another 12 hours later. I also had an IV kit and a calcium solution on hand in case she'd gone down, which I would've given subcutaneously, or sub-Q. For an actual IV, I would've called the vet.

I can't stress how important it is for anyone thinking of having dairy animals to educate themselves on milk fever, how to prevent it, and how to deal with it if/ when it happens. Goats can suffer from it as well as cows, so it's a good thing to read up on and to be sure you have everything on hand in the case of an emergency. The last thing you want to do is to have an emergency and have to run out to the store for something, especially if the stores happen to be closed. Lots of these emergency measures can be purchased from a local feed store or an online source like Valley Vet or Jeffer's Livestock.

This goes for all livestock: have what you'd need in the case of an emergency and consider it an insurance policy. I don't ever want to use antibiotics on my animals and I haven't needed to yet, but I want to have it on hand if I ever should need it. There are also homeopathic kits available online that will help with a variety of issues, and this is on my purchase list this spring. Matron of Husbandry has a good blog post on homeopathy, but a general search of her site will bring up even more. She's a great source of information and provides links and resources for further reading.

I was lucky enough to attend a conference session last year by a homeopathic vet from Pennsylvania, and she was very helpful. The two books she recommended most highly for the small homestead were Homeopathic Care for Cats and Dogs, which although specified for cats and dogs is really applicable for most small animals, and Homeopathic Medicine at Home. Pat Coleby's natural care books are really great too, but it's important to understand the theory behind what she's recommending so you can tailor it for your specific area, as some of her recommendations are specific to her soil experience in Australia. Mineral needs and deficiencies can vary greatly from region to region, so it's always important, in my opinion, to understand why you're doing something rather than just following a recipe or formula.

Birth Announcement

2009-02-15T15:56:00.007-05:00

Before I even got to post about being on calf watch, Bella had her baby. She was due on the 18th, but had already begun bagging up, so I knew it was imminent. This morning around 9-9:30 am the event occurred, and I missed the actual birth by just minutes. Baby was on the ground by the time I arrived, and mama was cleaning it nicely. We had a light dusting of snow yesterday, but it was a nice, warm sunny morning with relatively little wind.

I quickly fed the pigs so we didn't have a mutiny, and then ran inside to get Bella some warm molasses water. Blackstrap molasses provides energy, iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium and other useful vitamins and minerals. I give it to all my livestock after they give birth. Bella gratefully sucked down two canning pots full in between licks to clean off baby.

Baby was up and standing within the first hour, wobbly but strong, and has nursed a couple times already today, and Bella passed her placenta with no problems about 3 hours after giving birth. We had a healthy little heifer calf, and we're still trying to settle on a name. We won't likely be keeping her, but we'd like to halter train her and enjoy her a bit before we try to sell her.

I was able to milk out about a quart of colostrum from one of Bella's quarters, but she was a little fussy about the back teats. I froze the clean bit I was able to catch, then went back out to try to milk some out of her back quarters to give her some relief. I was able to milk some by hand, but she's so distended at this point that it's hard to get my hands around her teats. I'll milk her out fully, hopefully, tonight with the milk machine, which should give her some welcome relief. I'm hoping the milking will go smoothly so I'll be able to freeze some of this colostrum as well, but I'm not counting on it.

More later....

Blog Look

2009-02-06T11:34:00.001-05:00

Just an fyi type thing...

I liked the background, but the slow scrolling was driving me batty. So, we're back to the ameraucana blue background.

State of the Homestead Report

2009-02-02T13:11:00.009-05:00

Mid-winter. Starving time. Full hunger moon.

A groundhog in Pennsylvania predicts 6 more weeks of the stuff, and though the days are getting longer, fresh food this time of year is often scarce. Time to assess food storage and adjust planting times, quantities, and varieties accordingly for next growing season. What worked and what didn't? What held and what didn't? What do you wish you had more of or less of?

Our food stores are holding out well here, and we still have plenty of home-canned goods.* We're starting to run low on raspberry jam, but hopefully it won't be too long before we have a fresh crop, so I think it will hold out. Strawberry and black raspberry jams still going strong. Plenty of tomatoes in all fashions—need to start using those more often. Still lots of peaches, though I'm sure those will be gone before peach season rolls around again. Salsas holding well, though I'd like to put up more hot next year. Soups going strong; need to nudge Jim to take more into work.

Onions are holding out well, though we're running low on red onions. Will plant an extra row of both yellow and red this coming year. Garlic still going strong. Still have several leeks. Hopefully all these alliums will hold out until the first harvestable batch of spring onions and garlic.

We're just about through all the red potatoes we put up, which are now sprouting and shriveling but still work for mashed potatoes. Yes, that's the bottom of the bin you see there. Our yukon golds still look great—will plant more of those next year, hopefully in an early and a later batch. They probably will not hold out until harvest time next year, though that would be a neat trick if I could pull it off. We do love our homegrown potatoes around here. We still have some fingerlings that are just starting to sprout, which I'm hoping to hold as seed potatoes for March. We'll see how they do.

Winter squash was a no-go thanks to the hordes of squash bugs during the 2008 growing season. *sigh* I've ordered some organic insecticides and will be moving to a pre-emptive spraying program for the squashes in 2009 as loathe as I am to do it. The problem is that as soon as you know you have a problem, it's often too late to address it with organic sprays, which don't tend to operate on the instant-kill model of conventional pesticides. I will also be trying several non-spray-reliant methods, including later planting and heavy composting, which will hopefully help strengthen the plants. Regular compost tea applications should help as well. We do use barrier methods while the plants are young, but as soon as we need to take them off for pollination, we get crushed.

Meat is holding well. Plenty of pork and chicken, though we've definitely made room in the freezer for a side of beef we'ree hoping to get from down the road. In 2008, we raised 100 broilers, about 25 of which we sold. For 2009 I'm planning to raise just 75 for our consumption, 25 for whole roasters and 50 for parts. That sounds like a lot, I'm sure, but for a family of five, that will feed us quite nicely for a whole year, allowing us to have some kind of chicken at least twice a week for dinner. We won't be selling chicken or pork for 2009; we just can't charge enough to make it worthwhile.

Frozen butter holding well. Bulk goods are doing fine in a normal rotation, and we're still lucky enough to be harvesting fresh greens and herbs from the high tunnels.

It will soon be time to start planting my seedlings!

*Yes, my dirty little secret: we use soft, bleached toilet paper. Sorry, we're just not willing to make that sacrifice yet. I could try to play it off as barter material in the event of a major emergency, but we all know that would be a lie.

++Editing to add that we also still have a whole refrigerator drawer full of turnips, and a very large bag of carrots. Definitely planting the Eliot Coleman hybrid "Napoli" carrot from Johnny's for next fall. It sized up very nicely compared to the heirloom "red core chantenay," which I'll still plant, but in the spring.

My New Cookstove

2009-02-01T17:36:00.009-05:00

I let slip in the last post that I am indeed getting a new cook stove this season. Yay! It's my anniversary/ mother's day/ birthday gift for 2009, and I promised to lay off the quest for solar until at least 2010. Basically, I called in a lot of favors for this one, and it's the most expensive "appliance" I've ever owned. It's not in the house yet, but it is on order.

I went back and forth on what exactly I wanted to get. I had considered a refurbished cook stove and was scouring nearby Craigslists for one when I ran across a like-new, 2 year old Waterford Stanley up in PA. While it was half the price of a new one, Jim didn't like the green or the Victorian design.

It did, however, get me thinking that if I could find one at a reasonable price, a new stove made more sense than an old one from the standpoint of efficiency as well as longevity. Jim was moving in the direction of a wood stove, so it wasn't too hard to convince him to go with a stove that offered more than just heat.

So I found this stove: the Baker's Oven, which seemed an ideal solution. It would fit in the space nicely, offered more than just heat, yet wasn't too much of a stretch beyond just a typical wood stove. Nothing froo-froo or out of time. I also loved the idea of being able to see the fire. Plus, it was a much better price than any of the true cook stoves, and so a better sell to my other half.

Out of Australia and out of stock. I continued my search, which soon brought me to the stove I ended up ordering and the company that so far has been a joy to deal with. AntiqueStoves.com offered a great price, so I decided to explore a little further. The owner of the company spent quite a bit of time on the phone with me, helping to assess my needs against the stoves that might best fulfill those needs. After asking several questions and listening carefully to my answers, he strongly recommended against the Baker's Oven on the grounds that it would likely disappoint and frustrate me in the long run.

Its strengths—size and hybrid nature—were also its weaknesses, he argued, in terms of serving as a true cook stove. If all I really wanted was a wood stove for ambiance and space heating with the ability to cook in the event of a power outage, then the Baker's Oven was just the ticket. But if I really wanted a cook stove to do the majority of my cool-season cooking, then he recommended I check out the Gem Pac, which was a lot more stove for the same money.

I absolutely love it, and it promises to be a real workhorse. While the next model up would have been lovely for a number of reasons, Ed didn't think it would suit the layout of our house, which is not set up at all for cross ventilation or circulation. (*sigh* It was built on the electric heating/ cooling plan for the duration.) He believed we'd quickly heat ourselves out of the space without being able to benefit from the Flame View's increased heating capabilities. While it had a couple of nice features, specifically the view of the flame as well as the larger, side-load firebox, it was also significantly more expensive.

Ultimately, I opted for the Gem Pac from Margin Stoves, a small Amish company out of Canada that uses Antique Stoves as a distributor. I was also able to get a rear mount 20 gallon hot water reservoir, which Jim plans to plumb directly into our hot water heater. Very cool. Of course, I could have done this with the Flame View as well, but this feature wasn't offered at other stove companies I investigated. Both stoves have an optional integrated side water reservoir that's made out of copper, but only holds 5 gallons and runs about $100 more, but that didn't seem nearly as appealing.

The stove should be delivered some time in March or April, giving us the whole summer to get the stove set up and plumbed. It will go in the corner of my kitchen directly opposite my electric ovens, displacing the coat tree and a small side table. Here's its spot: in the corner just behind and to the left of Em; we'll just slide the table and sideboard to the right a bit. It'll feel like such a real farmhouse kitchen! I'll be sure to post pictures once it arrives.

New Era of Responsibility

2009-01-21T13:50:00.003-05:00

Yesterday on the National Mall, President Obama reminded us all of the "price and promise of citizenship" and called for a "new era of responsibility."

Amen.

While I could quibble with some of his choices and some of his ideas (most notably harnessing the "soil" to run our cars and factories), overwhelmingly I breathe a sigh of relief to have a leader willing at least to address climate change in serious and substantial ways, willing to admonish us all for our "collective failure to make hard choices," and willing to call on us all to reconsider the "ways we use energy."

Now, what the future brings depends upon each of us to take up Obama's call in ways we see fit, adding our individual preferences and opinions to a collective surge toward energy independence. Up to each of us is the task of making our individual opinions heard and seen by providing a model to move forward in ecologically responsible ways.

With each step we take, so too do our nations move forward. With each willing step, we show others a way forward. Do not look to Obama to do this hard work; we must look deep within ourselves, for there the responsibility lies. This is the gift he offers: the motivation to find within ourselves a higher purpose and a noble sacrifice, the opportunity to "choose our better history" as men and women "obscure in [our] labor."

If "everywhere we look, there is work to be done," what work will you choose? How will you answer this call to service and sacrifice and usher in a new era of responsibility?

I hope folks will commit to making at least one change in the comments section, and we'll work together to hold ourselves responsible for these changes. In that spirit, I'll close with my own pledge for energy reduction and learning to live with less because this is how I choose to define "progress" and "growth." This is the legacy I want to leave my children's children: a way of living in harmony with technology and sustainability.

We will eliminate our second refrigerator, which at first blush seems like a major luxury, but with our dairy cow plus egg and meat sales, we've felt we really needed that second refrigerator. We're in the process of figuring out how to maximize our inside refrigeration space and change our habits with regard to refrigerated food. My goal is to have the garage fridge unplugged and decommissioned by February.

We will be getting a cookstove this year (yay!), which should be up and running by the fall burning season. It will enable us to cook, warm the upstairs, and heat water simultaneously without coal-generated electricity. Jim plans to plumb it into our electric hot water heater to reduce the amount of electricity we draw to heat our household water.

We will install our outdoor shower with solar hot water this spring, and I'll even dig the post holes myself rather than waiting on Jim to do it. (Yes, you all heard that, and Woody, I'm sure you'll take his side and hold me to it. *grin* ) Between this and the cookstove, we ought to achieve a roughly comparable seasonal reduction of electric-heated water as we would if we installed an expensive solar hot water system. That's our hope anyway.

C'mon, what are your ideas? What will you pledge?

Regime Change and the Politics of Hope

2009-01-20T08:43:00.002-05:00

Inauguration Day here in America, and we'll be watching with bated breath as Barack Obama is sworn in as our 44th president.

Yes we did.

There is much to hope for as the next four years unfold, and so much for concern.

The economy for one, and whether Keynesian economics will provide work and much-needed infrastructure changes or whether it will be the shackles on the legs of future generations.

Climate change and James Hansen's rosy report of "flooded cities, species extinction, and climate catastrophe" for two. Will we keep hearing words like "clean coal" and "cap and trade" or will serious efforts begin?

Two wars and America's standing in the eyes of the world for three. What does a responsible draw down look like, and how long will it take?

Agriculture and food security for four. Vilsack offers no great hope on this front, but there is hope that Alice Waters is getting through to Michelle Obama on an organic garden at the White House.

Here's to the politics of hope and change overriding the age-old addage, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Artisan Bread Baking

2009-01-18T12:31:00.013-05:00

For my birthday, my mother-in-law gave me some cash, which I quickly disposed of by signing up for two artisan bread baking classes offered through our Rural Heritage museum. Our instructor, Bill Theriault, a historian and founder of the Peter Burr Living History Farm, has been baking artisan bread for many years. That's my friend Joan standing next to him in the photo to the left.

The first class I took was a beginners class that covered the basics of sourdough starters, kneading, shaping, proofing, and baking. By the end of that class, we'd all baked at least one loaf of bread and tasted all the others, and had some to take home to our families in addition to our very own bag of established starter.

For the past month, I've been diligently practicing my basic artisan bread skills at home, trying to figure out how to integrate them into my world. Baking artisan bread is about a 24 hour process from start to finish, and while it's not all that labor intensive, it can be tricky to remember to do all the steps at the right time and to figure out how to fit it into one's already-busy day.

The process begins with pulling the starter out of the fridge the morning before baking and feeding it, though I'm baking often enough that I'm just leaving my starter on the counter. First, discard any "hooch" (the alcohol waste-product from yeast feeding) on top and the very top layer, which probably has some dead yeasties. Then feed it with about a pound of flour and a pound of water. About 12 hours later, or before you go to bed, reserve half the starter to store in the fridge, and feed the remaining starter enough flour/ water mixture for the recipes you'll be using the next day.

Kneading takes about 20 minutes, the 1st rise with a natural leaven will take approximately 3 hours at temps between 70-85°, and the "proofing," or second rise will take approximately another 3 hours. The bread itself bakes for around 45 minutes, and then it will need to cool an hour before cutting. Quite drawn-out a process, eh?

For Christmas, I got these gorgeous willow proofing baskets along with a stoneware cloche in each shape—a boule and a batard. The cloche is absolutely essential for reproducing at home the thick, chewy crust that defines artisan bread... short of putting in your own masonry oven, which of course I'd love to do, but doubt that's happening any time soon. The floured proofing baskets are what create the beautiful pattern on the bread, along with the slashing, which can take any shape the artisan baker chooses. Some folks have made their own cloches by using terra cotta planters, a great, low-cost solution, but at such high heats, I was concerned about any lead or additives that might be in these off-the-shelf buys and decided to invest in good, food-grade stoneware. Breadtopia is a great source for both materials and tutorials—loads of information there.

I just took the advanced class this Saturday, and it was wonderful. We made several flavored loaves as well as several different kinds of recipes, including bread pudding, savory french toast, stuffed dinner and dessert rolls, and English muffins. We experimented with many toppings and fillings and ingredients, creating lots of variations on a theme to expand upon at home.

Knowing my family's likes and dislikes, I left the chocolate breads to others and jumped all over the savory breads and English muffins. I made a delicious savory French toast from a 3 pepper bread, as well as a raisin spice artisan loaf, and raisin spice English muffins. I made a double batch of raisin spice dough, enough for a 2 lb. loaf and at least 8 muffins. Here I am rolling out the mini-boules to create the muffins after the first rise; the bread boule is already resting after its first shaping. By the time I was done the muffins, the bread loaf was ready for its second shaping before placing in the proofing basket.

Here I am taking my finished loaf out of the oven. The raisin spice recipe was amazing, though I'll be adding walnuts to mine because we love nuts. Jim was wild about the 3 pepper dinner rolls stuffed with roasted peppers, which I knew he would be. For any chocolate lovers out there, we had one loaf made with ghirardelli cocoa substituted for 1/3 of the flour in the recipe, making for a stunningly black loaf of bread with an intense chocolate flavor reminiscent of a black forest cake when topped with cherry preserves and a dash of powdered sugar. We also made cranberry chocolate dessert rolls; a pecan, cinnamon, carrot bread; 3 pepper bread; and a 3 pepper bread pudding stuffed with sausage and caramelized onions.

The class was invaluable because we talked about when to add different ingredients, which ingredients are yeast-inhibitors and how to deal with those, how to troubleshoot different problems, etc. The English muffins were amazingly easy to make, as was really just about everything else, but just having the chance to play around with all the recipes with an experienced someone along for the ride was really helpful. Bill's a terrific mentor, and the best part about all this is that come Spring, we'll hopefully have community baking days in the new brick oven he's helped build at the museum! Because I've been a part of the classes, I'll have dibs on baking my dough when it's fired. I'm very excited!

On Awards

2009-01-16T15:09:00.012-05:00

Over the past year or so, several folks have been so kind to bestow blog awards while I've been decidedly ungracious about accepting them. My humble apologies. I always mean to get around to writing about it and following through with the passing on, yet time always seems to get away from me.

Christy, over at Farm Dreams, just gave me an award together with some very kind words, which were, in truth, much better than the award itself. Maybe that's what these blog awards are good for—giving us the opportunity and cause to say something nice about someone else. (Even if they do often feel more like chain letters, but that's the humbug in me talkin'.)

So, to put the humbug to rest and do my homework: here goes... I hope I didn't miss anyone, but if I did, thank you, thank you, thank you! I am grateful for your acknowledgment.

Pass this along to at least 3 blogs.

Crunchy Chicken
(not so) Urban Hennery
Sharon Astyk

For their ability to inspire and motivate so, so many readers to make this world a better place.

Lisa over at Zahn Zone passed this one along, and so did my friend Ren:

1. The winner can put the logo on her/his blog.

2. Link the person you received your award from.

3. Nominate at least 5 other blogs.

4. Put links of those blogs on yours.

5. Leave a message on the blogs you’ve nominated

6. Bonus points, list 5 random things about yourself that we might not pick up from your blog.

Crystal for her style and energy and orderly approach to urban homesteading and for jumping in with both feet.
Olivia for her amazing and enviable sense of self.
Dayna for her optimism, enthusiasm, and willingness to share all of herself.
Sarah for all that she does with littles and all.
Grow the Change I just found her blog, but I like her style, and anyone who can knit a bra deserves an award. (So does the person willing to wear it!)

From Kim at Achorn Farm Blog:

These are the rules to accept the award:
1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserving of this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contribute to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2. Each award has to have the name of the author and a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that presented her/him with the award.
4.The award winner and one who has given the prize have to show the link of "Arte y Pico" blog so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5. To show these rules

Ren Ren has a couple blogs, but I linked you to her personal, creative space. She's amazing and inspiring and always follows her passion. She is creativity personified.
Madeline I know she's already received it, but she deserves it at least twice. I love her creativity, her photography, her honesty and zest for life, and her bee novel, which I hope one day to be honored to read.
Rue who probably already received this, too, but she's amazing, artistic, profound, and occasionally, just plain twisted. Plus, she wrote one of the best unschooling books around.
Laura a quietly amazing artist whose style is vibrant, feminist, celebratory and thoughtful all at once.
Tansy who makes beautiful homespun inspiration filled with love, sugar and spice, and everything nice.

And this one from one of my favorite bloggers Madeline, and sweet Jenny, my neighbor in West Virginia:

Whomever chooses to accept the award then needs to nominate ten other blogs. (Yes, this one's intimidating. Ten?!!)

The Matron of Husbandry Nita might be the most knowledgeable person I "know." She's gritty, practical, and a veritable wealth of information. I want to be her when I grow up.
Contrary Goddess CG pulls no punches and follows her ethical compass, straight and true. I admire who she is and what she stands for.
El someone I'd like to invite for dinner, share a good glass of wine and great conversation.
Jenny, who doesn't blog nearly enough but who is an amazing inspiration nonetheless and one of those soul-mates who lives just way too far away.
Chile Chews who always has something to think about.
Peak Oil Hausfrau practical and motivating.
Walter at Sugar Mountain Farm filled with great information and perspective, from farming to photography.
Women Not Dabbling in Normal the sum is better than its parts, or something like that. Good stuff. Check it out.
Choosing Voluntary Simplicity The title's a bit redundant, but it's a veritable clearinghouse of information.
The Automatic Earth a go-to blog for enjoyin' the ride to hell in a handbasket.

This one is from Gracie over at Urban/Prairie Living:

"With the Premio Dardos, recognize the values that each blogger shows each day in commitment to transmit cultural values, ethical, literary, personal, etc. that, in short, demonstrate their creativity by alive thinking that remains intact from their letters and words."

The rules for accepting the awards are:

1. Accept the award and post it on your blog along with a link to the person who has awarded you.
2. Pass the award on to 15 other blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgement. Remember to contact them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

15 is a huge number of blogs to name, so I'm going to acknowledge several bloggers who have worked hard to make their dream a reality, to walk in step with their ideals, and to make the time to share some of that journey with us. Thank you for your commitment to sustainability and to reducing your impact on the earth. Some of you already received this, but you deserve it again. I haven't thanked you yet, so it still counts!

Wendy over at Home Is
Kim at Achorn Farm
Christy at Farm Dreams
Lisa at The Zahn Zone
Verde at Justice Desserts
Vicky at Perry Hill Farm
Heidi at Wisdom of the Trowel
Tara at Enough
Shasha at Seeking Simplicity
Jayedee at Life in the Lost World
Susan at Stepwise
Burbanmom at Going Green
Destabee at Kaleidascope Living
Tracy at Ramping Up the Garden
Robin at MommyMommyLand

Whew! I think that does it, and now I can sleep easy at night, knowing I haven't dropped the ball. ;)

Independence Days Update

2009-01-14T06:32:00.001-05:00

Okay this is just a teaser since a new one is coming. From my drafts folder back in November....

Contrary to popular opinion, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I'm still here, plugging away, working just a little bit harder in the face of all this economic uncertainty to learn new skills and get the homestead in tip-top shape.

I have an OCD-like quality that emerges when life feels beyond my control, and I respond by controlling as much as I possibly can, which generally includes my immediate environment. This means my house is actually clean (yeah, that's where all that time not posting is going), I've been working like a dog to finally finish the basement family room that's been three years coming, and I've been reorganizing and reworking our pantry system as well as continuing to stock it with home-made canned goods, bulk grains, and even home-made cheese.

So, without further ado, here are some category updates:

Plant:

Transplanted all those seed trays into both the market and winter gardens for fall and winter harvesting. The gardens are going like gang busters, and I've already harvested a couple of lovely heads of napa cabbage and bok choy. The peas were tasty if not prolific, though the first frost took them out. Next year I need to make space for them in the high tunnel perhaps because the kids do love them so.

We had our first killing frost October 20th, and I lost a huge harvest of peppers because I wasn't on top of it. Thankfully I'd already put up lots of salsa and roasted peppers and had a big basket of hot peppers drying in the kitchen. Still, it was a disappointment, and I vowed to be more diligent come October about keeping the plants harvested.

Food Post

2009-01-11T10:58:00.005-05:00

Because it's been a while since I've done a food post...

We've been enjoying lots of pork this year thanks to our very productive Tamworth piggies. This last round we took to the butcher we had the ground made into hot Italian sausage ropes, which are absolutely delicious. Here I am making a sourdough calzone with spinach, hot Italian sausage, homemade sauce, and mozzarella cheese. (And see that corner behind me where the coat tree is? That's where I want to put my new cookstove that I'm trying to talk Jim into.)

This is my baking center, which you can see is lower than the rest of the counter. I love it. It's the perfect height for rolling out cookies and crusts, kneading dough, and kid cooking. It's the short part of our "L" shaped island, with the longer part a standard-height breakfast bar where we do most of our eating because the kitchen table is usually covered with projects and clutter, as you can also see in the photo above.

Easy, fast, and deeeeelicious! C'mon, take a bite... Yummmm.

Food Security, Part IV

2009-01-07T07:28:00.003-05:00

Time to get into the nitty-gritty of food security: seed saving. I'm still working on a steep learning curve with this one, but each year I'm able to take another step in the right direction. I've come to believe that seed saving is the very foundation of food security. Even for those who grow their own food, myself included, dependence upon seed companies could quickly create a large hole in our food security should seed sources dry up for whatever reason. Demand outstripping supply, crop failure, bankruptcy, and worse, all could play havoc with our ability to grow food for our families. Making time now to learn seed saving techniques while the supplies and time are still available is valuable insurance against an uncertain future.

By saving seeds, you'll also be helping to preserve biodiversity, a worthy goal all its own. Seed saving is something our ancestors practiced not only because it was frugal but also because it was practical and the only real way to guarantee that they'd have the seed they needed for next year's growing season. Without these seed savers so many of our heirloom varieties would have been lost, yet this threatens to become a lost art. If younger generations do not step up, learn these techniques, and preserve the knowledge along with the seeds, we may literally find ourselves relying on single hybrids susceptible to mass die-out, not unlike the great potato famine.

How could this be, you may ask? As Monsanto and GMOs march (and drift!) on, small seed savers become more and more crucial to maintaining species diversity because many are lucky enough to live in pockets isolated from larger growers and the cross pollination that can result. More and more heirloom varieties are being lost because commercial hybrid seeds dominate growing fields, resulting in both cross pollination and decreased demand for heirlooms. While there's nothing wrong with non-gmo hybrids, most will not reproduce true—some can be stabilized over a few generations—or are completely sterile, rendering a gardener dependent upon the seed supplier. Large market growers and agribusiness turn toward hybrids that will work for their conditions of production—pest and disease resistance, travel, storage, uniformity, machine harvest, etc.—and as long as consumer demand supports these conditions, heirloom seeds will continue to be under threat. Often, too, taste and nutrient density are sacrificed for market qualities because so many heirlooms can't stand up to the demands of shipping and storage.

Besides protecting heritage and diversity, seed saving also builds a seed store adapted to a particular climate, meaning that saved seed likely has a better chance of thriving in its environment than shipped seed. This kind of adaptation takes generations of seed, but perhaps in the face of climate change such efforts will prove invaluable. Grand seed saving projects like the Seed Vault in Iceland are terrific efforts for governments to undertake, but I don't think they should be the only efforts, nor should they absolve each of us from doing what we can to help as well. At the very least, they fall prey to political whims, at worst, they could fail entirely, so they shouldn't replace individual seed savers by any means.

Seed purity can be tricky business, however, and I strongly suggest getting a good book like Suzanne Ashworth's Seed to Seed as a reference guide. If you're anything like me, this book will become a go-to guide, as I'm inevitably forgetting things and having to look them up all over again just to be sure: which plants require pollinators, which can be left under row covers, that kind of thing. Maybe some day all this will become second nature, but for now, this is my seed saving bible. There are also several good organizations like Seed Savers Exchange that offer information and support. In my blog sidebar, I list several sources for heirloom seeds from different regions of the US. I personally order the majority of my seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, a small, mid-Atlantic company based in Virginia, and I've been very pleased with them; however, I've heard lots of wonderful things about the other companies listed as well.

The many different available resources cover ways to ensure seed purity from insect and wind pollination, including isolation distances, maturation time, and day-caging, but they can make it all seem pretty daunting at first with all the information and conditions. Getting started seed saving, however, really is as simple as ordering a variety of open pollinated seeds from an heirloom seed source. (Open pollinated simply means that plants will reliably reproduce the same variety from seed, and this is essential for saving your own seed.) I try to grow at least one open pollinated variety of every vegetable I grow even if I'm growing hybrids for other reasons. I'm not saving seed from all of them each year, but ordering the seed at least ensures that demand for o. p. seeds remains steady. This way, too, I'm able to try out different varieties to see how they perform in my garden conditions. I also try to hold back a few seeds from each of the o.p. varieties, so I will have them for the following year if I can't get them.

For the first year of actually saving seeds, I'd recommend starting with something easy like beans and then branching out from there. The more you do it, the easier it will seem to take the next step. Beans are good first plants because they're perfect and self-pollinating with relatively low isolation distances, meaning that they don't need to be miles away from the nearest planting of beans to ensure purity. Choosing a distinct-looking bean, too, can be an easy visual cue. When planning to save seed, it can make good sense to plant only that variety for the season just to minimize any chances of cross pollinating. Row covers can also help reduce the chances of cross-pollination by insects with bush varieties. Because beans are self-pollinating, the row cover can be left on except to harvest, and this has the added benefit of protecting plants from bean beetles.

Moving further into my own seed saving journey, I've found that learning the different plant families for seed saving is just an extension of knowing them for good garden rotation to minimize pests and diseases. It's all part of the same whole. Because plants within the same family can often cross with others in the same family, knowing which plants are related starts to become really important, and it's not always obvious. I'm not going to go into very much detail about the hows here—it would take up too much space, and I'm no where near as knowledgeable as a good book on the subject, but there are some simple tricks that I've found helpful.

One easy way around cross pollination in the home garden is to simply save seeds from one variety one year, and another the next, being sure not to let the off year plants go to flower. This year, for instance, I was able to save seeds from over-wintered chard in the spring, pull those, and save the seed; next year, I'll save the beet seeds. It's also possible to stagger plantings chronologically within the same season, but this requires a bit more planning ahead. These methods require a close eye, and they're certainly more demanding than just throwing a few seeds into the ground willy-nilly, but they can integrate really well with an intensive planting rotation. Simply pull the plants as they start to bolt, and plant something else in their place that won't cross pollinate.

So far, I've been able to save my own beans, tomatoes, chard, endive, gourdseed corn, popcorn, spinach, sorrel, dill, cilantro, sunflowers, okra (thanks to Pam G. for the original seed), lettuce, chives, leeks, and green onions. I've also saved potatoes and garlic, but not from seed. I'm hoping to get some turnip and beet seed from over wintered plants next spring, but the turnips can be tricky, as they'll cross with any bolting Chinese cabbages and broccoli raab, meaning I'll need to be on top of things to make it work. I'm considering venturing into day-caging, depending upon how much energy I have at the time. Still, it's possible to get a decent seed store going without all the hoopla. I've had some failures along the way, too—carrots, michihli, and quinoa, for instance—because I wasn't careful enough. In the case of the carrots and quinoa, I had wild species growing too close that were impossible to eradicate, so those may be something I'll have too much trouble saving to make it worthwhile.

As you can see, used egg cartons hold a lot of my seeds. Not necessarily the most sanitary method, but it's what I often have on hand while collecting or sorting the dried seed. Other recycled containers work well, too, for large quantities of seed. For small amounts of seed, envelopes are good, and they can be easily labeled and traded. The key is to keep seed cool and dry to avoid any mold formation. Silica gel works well in sparing amounts because the seeds need a small amount (around 3-5%) of moisture for proper germination. For long-term storage the freezer works best, but be sure to allow the storage container to come to room temperature before opening so the seeds don't collect condensation. I keep back up seeds vacuum packed in my freezer as a minor insurance policy. They take up very little space and may prove quite useful down the road. Then again, maybe my kids will be cleaning out my freezers one day wondering why the heck I have all these vacuum packed seeds. Ahhh, better to be safe than sorry, especially if it's easy enough.

I'm by no means self-sustaining in terms of seed saving, but I hope to keep improving on that front. Right now, I'm too much of a variety-addict to limit myself to my own saved seeds, but if something were to happen, I'd have a pretty decent garden all on my own, and I hope to keep improving. Seed ordering the way I do is a luxury, but at $2 or $3 a packet, it's a luxury I'll continue to indulge. I've already placed my '09 seed order, not wanting to put it off too long. Even ordering before the holidays, I encountered several back orders, my onion seed among them unfortunately. Neither onion nor corn do well saving beyond a year, so they need to be ordered or saved fresh every year. Luckily, many other seeds will save for years under the right conditions.

My 2009 Seed Order: modest compared to previous years, but that's due as much to leftover seed as to my own seed saving efforts. At this point my goals are still to try different varieties as well as to have a wide variety, though not a great quantity, of seed in cold storage. The asterisk indicates hybrids.

bean, louisiana purple pole

Beet:
bull's blood
chioggia

Buckwheat (cover crop for high tunnel)

Carrot:
purple dragon

corn, super sweet*

Cucumber:
straight eights
edmonson pickling

edamame, asmara

Eggplant:
listada di gandia
ping tung long

Greens:
bok choi
purple mizuna
red giant mustard

Kale:
lacinato
red russian

Lettuce:
Thai oakleaf
red salad bowl
salad bowl
rouge d'hiver
drunken woman
winter density

Melons:
moon and stars watermelon
strawberry watermelon
hale's best muskmelon
edisto muskmelon

Onions:
copra*
ruby ring*

Peppers:
Serrano*
Sahuaro anaheim*
Gourmet*
Red Knight*

Potatoes:
Yukon gold
red nordland

cherry belle radish

Squash, summer:
yellow crookneck
early white scallop
costata romanesca
golden bush scallop

Squash, winter:
table queen acorn
Cornell's bush delicata
waltham butternut
marinia di chioggia
blue ballet
confection*
Galeux d'Eysines
Cinderella pumpkin

Tomatoes:
sungold*
gold nugget
striped German
green zebra
sweet olive*
brandywine

Okay, the gray was bringin' me down

2009-01-03T19:16:00.001-05:00

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-03T08:03:00.007-05:00

That reflective time of year again where we're invited to look back on the outgoing year and assess where we've been and determine where we'd still like to go. Taking the time to write my goals here not only gives me a record, but it also holds me more accountable... to a certain degree anyway. Lord knows I can be my own worst enemy.

1) Bring my actual lifestyle more in line with my ideals on a sustained basis.

This is something I'd like to work on across the board—translating those good intentions that are always so resolute at about 3am yet tend to fall by the wayside by about 3pm. Or, I'll be really good about stuff for a burst of time, only to fall back into bad habits and the ease of disregard or denial. Entropy is my enemy. This resolution, of course, blankets all that follow, so this will be my governing principle for 2009.

2) Be better about record keeping and writing in my journal.

Yep, this would be one of those things that I'll be really good about for a while only to drop off mid-season, only to resolve to be better about it, only to drop off again. Fits and starts. Bursts of disciplined energy. Must. Keep. It. Going. I need to find a way to integrate journaling into my day so it doesn't get left out. I've tried doing it right before going to bed, but sometimes I'm just too tired. I've tried doing it first thing in the morning, but I get side tracked checking the news, and emails, and all your blogs....

3) Get back into a pattern of morning meditation and stretching.

As I get older, my body rebels. Recovery and bounce back take so much longer than they used to on those days when I push myself too hard. Consistent care and stretching will go a long way. Focus more on health, less on dis-ease both in myself and in the world at large, cultivating the positive and releasing the negative.

4) Get out more as a family.

We used to rock climb on a fairly regular basis before we moved, and we'd all like to get back into that. The animals make it tricky to do much camping, but we can certainly do more day hikes and camping in the backyard. We need to explore our local areas more and take the time to get out and do the things we enjoy.

5) Dig out the front yard and get the medicinal garden going for real.

Last year the family cow preempted my front garden budget, so that vision was put on hold for a while. 2009 will be the year of the herb. I have a gorgeous plan sketched out that one of these days I'll scan and upload. It includes several spiral walking paths along with a host of edible plants in addition to the medicinals. On a bright note, we have been dumping all our coffee grounds in what will be a blueberry/ cranberry bed, which is at least the beginning of conditioning the soil for these acid lovers. I also heeled several varieties of plants that I started into my kids' gardens, so I should have several established plants to pull from in addition to starting even more from seed.

6) Continue to reduce our impact on the earth and help inspire others on their journeys.

I'd like to find a way to reinvigorate the community group I tried to start last year and to keep a circle of local support going, which helped inspire and motivate us all, myself included. I'd like to move forward with some of the more expensive updates to our household that will help make us more sustainable, including the washing machine and refrigerator issues. Additionally, I'd like to open our farm to interns through local and regional channels, as well as, perhaps, WWOOF.

7) Community outreach.

Linked to number 6, but not limited to sustainability, this would include broader community projects and giving, particularly in terms of food and health. The kids, too, would like to become involved in our local Appalachian trail group and our 4-H clubs, and I'd like to do more with our Rural Heritage Museum. My goal, too, is to be more proactive about creating my own local social support network and to become more active in our homeschooling group.

8) Work more with my kids on their goals.

The kids are getting old enough that I'd like to begin actively encouraging them to set goals and supporting them in what they need to achieve those goals. Up until now, while I've certainly tried to support them in any way possible, I've been content to model goal-setting for the most part, allowing them to focus on valuable play time and all the learning that comes from that. Now that they're getting older, I'd like to see them learn and grow through more deliberate goal-setting and working towards larger projects. In particular, I want to focus this year on helping Em pursue her drawing and designing, encouraging and enabling Julia's entrepreneurship and 4-H goals, and fostering Sam's desires to learn karate and blacksmithing.

9) Spending less and giving more.

I'm still working on my relationship to consumerism. While I've never been a huge shopper, I still find our budget disappearing every month, which ends up being somewhat puzzling. Of course, much of it has gone towards stocking the pantry, farm infrastructure and such, but I'd like to get to a point where that kind of spending starts to pay off. The flip side of this goal is my hope that as we get our infrastructure set up that we'll be able to free up more money to donate. More than that, though, I'd like to continue to encourage and support an economy of caring and sharing, of bartering and mutual assistance where the benefits go toward real, local folks rather than faceless corporations by acting locally to produce global change.

10) Continue my own ongoing education efforts.

I'd like to continue to learn and grow in new areas, fostering and modeling a love of learning and life. My goal is to cultivate projects that benefit myself, my family, my community, and my planet, and to share what I've learned with others. Mostly, I'd like to continue to find ways to make this world a better place, to use my energy for global good, and to nurture and nourish those close to me.

May this new year bring us all the resolution to achieve our goals, the health to maintain our energy, and the strength to sacrifice for greater good.

Peace and Joy.

Food Security, Part III

2008-12-30T21:00:00.001-05:00

What's in your yard?

Think of it as a new commercial: replace the tired image of a barbarian asking what's in your wallet with a perky—even sprightly—elf asking what's in your yard.

Could you eat off your land? What if you couldn't get to the grocery store... what if the trucks couldn't get to the grocery? Would you and your family have fresh food?

We all know there are no guarantees in life. Jobs are lost, freak storms happen, and much worse. Nita, the matron of husbandry from Throwback at Trapper Creek, demonstrates the hard way that not even the best laid plans can thwart mother nature. The trick is to cover several fronts at a time. In diversity there is security. Or, don't put all your eggs in one basket. (Going back to the land, so many cliches come clear.)

One of the reasons I wanted to break this topic into a series, besides just keeping it manageable, was to demonstrate the different facets of food security and the ways each complements the other. If all your food is coming from one place, then that should be a major red flag. And by "one place" I don't mean the Piggly Wiggly versus Super Wal-Mart. Sure, that's obvious to most of us, but maybe not so to others. Look around for a minute and assess how many others will be turning toward the same food sources in an emergency. Population density as well as the severity of the emergency will dictate how secure your food sources are. That's the advantage of the pantry: you're likely to be the only one shopping there. But the pantry is by no means your only resource.

Insulation from emergencies or hard times rests upon reducing dependence on outside systems. Not eliminating it, necessarily, which I riffed on in the self-reliance series, but reducing it as much as possible. But insulation also comes through having multiple resources that back each other up, the whole being stronger than the part. The freezer backs up the pantry which backs up the yard. Fall back and redundancy are key.

The yard provides valuable fresh food and can do so year round in many, many places in countless ways, but you'll need to how to take advantage of them. For instance, did you know that fir and pine needles contain loads of vitamin C and that the bark has medicinal properties? Can you identify which evergreens are nourishing and which are poisonous? Do you know what a yew looks like and why to avoid it? Don't just take my word for it; do the research. The point is that yards can nourish us in more ways than one, and while gardens are an obvious resource, landscaping can be just as important, as can weeds. Dandelion leaves are often available long into winter for a nourishing salad where I live. Common purslane and chickweed appear in the spring and provide whopping nutrition for their size, rich in vitamins, minerals, and even protein!

So, what's in your yard?

Beginning with just that simple question opens up so many possibilities for food security before ever even planting a garden. Assess what's already growing and stop applying herbicides if you haven't already—they're bad for the earth, bad for the bugs, and they're ridding your yard of valuable food both for you and the bees, among other creatures. Look at all tiers of your yard from trees to shrubs to weeds and try to envision an integrated and holistic system working at multiple levels, with the vegetable garden as just one part. Look into edible landscaping and forest gardening for starters. Then consider wildcrafting and herbal medicine thrown in for good measure.

A large yard isn't a necessity. Once you begin thinking of outside space as an extension of food security rather than strictly ornamental curb appeal, play space, or just wasted space, the number of options available even in the tiniest of yards multiply. Even apartment dwellers with access to the outside or renters can create container gardens that offer at least some food sources, and even a large sunny window presents the opportunity for an indoor herb garden. Of course, larger properties offer nearly infinite possibilities, and it may be helpful to separate bigger parcels into zones to make projects more manageable. That's one of the beauties of the forest garden: it can take quite a bit of work to set up an ecosystem, but the goal is a self-sustaining copy of nature's methods, allowing that system to do most of the work.

The Usserys of Boxwood, a 2.5 acre homestead in Virginia, offer one of the best examples online of forest gardening with limited space. If you haven't already encountered Harvey Ussery's articles in one of several publications, you'll be delighted to get to know him through his website, which is incredibly informative. Another excellent example of how much can be done in a really small space is the Dervaes family, homesteading on 1/5th of an acre in urban California. I've recommended both these sites before and have links to each in my sidebar resources in case you're looking for them later. They're the two best sites I know of for homesteading in small spaces, but please feel free to share other resources in the comments section.

Here at Touch the Earth farm, we have less than an acre in actual garden production, and I'm working to transform our 5.25 acres into a more integrated whole, an ongoing project that will take years. When we bought the property it was a horse farm, with a lovely 3-stall barn and several acres of pasture in dire need of renovation and shade. The first thing I did when we moved in was to plant some fruit trees close to the house because they take so long to get established. I planted 3 dwarf varieties of apple, 2 dwarf pear, 1 plum, 1 cherry, 1 fig, 1 peach, and 6 blueberries, making sure that the single varieties were self-fruiting. I got the majority of my stock from Edible Landscaping in Afton, Virginia, an excellent little company whose catalog is worth getting for the info and ideas alone. Last year I planted 50 saplings to provide shade for the pastures, food for the bees, and potentially, firewood for us.

Planning 10 or 20 years down the road can be difficult, especially in our nomadic culture, but true food security depends upon it. On the one hand, a person with large financial resources could certainly plant trees on a grand scale by simply purchasing them all at once. I, on the other hand, have opted to buy seed stock and gradually expand our plantings myself, requiring an even longer term point of view. I've been dividing and expanding my berries for the past two years, hoping to let them naturalize in different parts of the homestead. The first year I lost most of the plants to a severe summer drought, but I think last year's transplants took pretty well—about 350 strawberry plants and 50 raspberries. This year, I'm hoping to focus on grafting some of our fruit trees to begin creating a small orchard in one of the upper pastures, and we'll continue to divide our berries, planting on different parts of the property. (Matron of husbandry has an excellent post on grafting that's well worth checking out.)

Luckily, not all projects are so long term, and there are many gratifying ones that offer short-term returns. The most obvious is the summer vegetable garden. Lots of folks are already comfortable with growing a summer garden, so a great way to expand upon that is to consider adding an herb garden, a spring/ fall garden, and even a winter garden. Finding ways to grow fresh produce year round will make a huge difference both for the wallet and the environment, not to mention health since the fresher the produce, the more nutrients it has. While fresh, raw produce is nearly always preferable from a nutritional standpoint over preserved, growing your own also has the added security of knowing exactly what goes into the soil and onto the produce—no added chemicals, colors, waxes, etc. I've gotten so spoiled by fresh produce year round that I don't bother preserving certain things like green beans that never taste so great anyway. I spend my time preserving other things that offer both nutrition and taste satisfaction.

We built our first high tunnel for winter gardening in 2007 and just added a second in fall of 2008. After making the plunge, I won't be without some form of winter garden as long as I'm able. I'm still fine-tuning my winter growing, but having a dedicated space has helped tremendously because I'm not stuck waiting for summer plantings to give up the ghost before I can get winter crops started, many of which need to be in as early as July to really get growing before the days shorten. Some, like leeks and parsnips have such a long growing season that they need to be started even earlier to be ready by fall and winter. Starting plants in seed trays helps get a jump on the season if there are still things in the ground, and I've also found even with the crops I direct sow that having a back up seed tray allows me to fill in any gaps that may occur for whatever reason. The two photos above show our high tunnels after having endured temps in the teens this month. The bare looking areas have small lettuces that will do little growing over the winter, but will have a real jump on the spring season as the days get longer.

Growing cold-tolerant crops is key, and in our zone 6 climate I find I don't really need a double layer of protection for most of the crops I grow. Currently, I'm growing tatsoi, kale, chard, bok choi, spinach, several varieties of endive and lettuce, arugula, green onions, turnip greens, beet greens, thyme, citrus thyme, rosemary, cilantro, flat leaf and curly parsley, oregano, sorrel, chervil, carrots, and radishes. Outside the tunnel, I have broccoli, more kale, and several cabbages, and I just harvested the last rows of turnips, carrots, and leeks to bring into the garage. Winter produce often won't be quite as pristine as that grown in milder weather, but most blemishes can be cut out or worked around.

Gardening itself can be a steep learning curve, but so can learning to eat seasonally, which is truly the only way to eat locally. I've found food tastes so much better fresh that limiting myself to seasonal eating isn't very difficult at all. The hardest part for me was broadening my cooking repertoire, and a few choice cookbooks really helped on that front. Pretty much anything by Alice Waters will be invaluable because of her focus on vegetarian dishes; same goes for the Moosewood cookbooks. There are also several farmer's market cookbooks out now, which focus on seasonally available produce and the meals that can be built around it. Committing to trying a new dish at least once a week can quickly offer experience and familiarity with new vegetables. I've found that doing this during the summer when life naturally slows a bit makes it more manageable and less stressful.

I'm including some of my favorite books below. Please offer your own recommendations in the comments section—the more the merrier!

Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman, the winter gardening bible, this is a definite must have if you're considering growing year round. He has loads of useful info, tables, varieties, etc.

Fresh From the Farmer's Market by Jane Fletcher.

Local Flavors by Deborah Madison.

The Farmer's Market Cookbook by Richard Ruben.

Tools and Goals 2008

2008-12-30T07:34:00.005-05:00

To Do 2008:

~~put seed order together~~
~~pull roosters from laying flock~~
~~set up breeding flocks~~
~~start microgreens~~
~~begin sprouting~~
~~start seedlings~~
~~continue watering in tunnel~~
~~clean up strawberries~~
~~move berries~~
~~finish fencing~~
~~finish painting barn~~
~~plant trees~~
~~schedule pig butcher~~
~~order egg cartons~~
~~learn to shear sheep~~
~~shear sheep~~
buy ram
buy buck
~~feelers for ~~Dexter~~ Jersey heifer~~
~~Jules' rabbits~~
~~order bees~~
~~build bee hives~~
learn to make goat's milk soap
~~use the pressure canner~~
~~plant more medicinal plants~~
learn to make tinctures and infusions
harvest more wild edibles
~~continue working on hedgerows~~
rework front yard into edible/ medicinal garden
learn to tan hides
~~learn to use our drop spindle~~
~~learn to felt~~
save seeds √√
~~second high tunnel~~
make Navajo spindles
~~round bale contacts~~
well pump

Tools for 2008:

A New Look for the New Year

2008-12-29T12:05:00.003-05:00

I've been playing around with my blog, as you can see. I'll be updating the look and content over the next couple of days, archiving my 2008 lists and making those for 2009.

Happy New Year to All!

Happy Holidays!

2008-12-24T08:57:00.003-05:00

I'm busy baking away, as I imagine many out there are as well, but I wanted to pop in and wish every one happy holidays.

The sun has returned, but we've yet to see it here in our neck o' the woods where we've been gray, gloomy and rainy for ages now it seems. We just missed a white Christmas as the cold snap broke yesterday, leaving us with ice and inches of rain and mud but nothing like what's hit other parts of the country. This weather has made me keenly aware how tenuous off-grid solar would be for us: I think we'd be going into month 3 of no power at this point. I feel very grateful for the electricity that enables me to make nourishing food and wonderful treats as well as for all the other many blessings in my life.

I feel grateful for our basement family room that has taken us 3 years to create, which is now nearly done. Down here, it's always sunny with our yellow walls, warm with our woodstove, and filled with love and happy faces. Here, I can leave the outside gloom behind and snuggle in my cozy cave, dreaming of spring while I plan and rest.

I feel grateful for food and job security, for our land and animals, for all the choices we've made that have contributed to our relative insulation from the hardships hitting homes all around the world this season. I feel especially grateful that we've managed to disentangle ourselves from so many failing systems, and I feel hopeful that we can rebuild local ties from the ground up in ways that empower individuals. Mostly, at this reflective time of year, I feel grateful for my ability to remain optimistic and to be in a position to make plans for outreach and help in the coming year.

We'll be caroling and delivering cookies to neighbors tomorrow, something the girls have really pushed for, and something I've come to see the wisdom behind even if it means I have to sing. ;) We'll be adding another link in the community chain we're working to forge, hopefully bringing a little bit of light into other people's homes from a place they least expect it. We're still the new folks on the block around here, so making connections is important. We delivered cookies our first Christmas here, but have missed the last two years for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's hard to be the outsider in a rural community, but I've noticed that there's not much interaction among folks here on our road, partly because we're so spread out. Maybe we can be the spark that ignites a new energy of neighborliness by reaching out and sharing a little of our time and ourselves. Maybe this small connection can create the space for larger connections when the time arises.

Happy holidays to all, wishing you peace, love, and joy this season.

Food Security, Part II

2008-12-12T06:17:00.017-05:00

In my last post I talked primarily about dry storage, but now I'd like to turn to the importance of freezer storage and the role it plays in my family's food security. I'd be remiss for not pointing out here what an incredible luxury freezers represent for food storage; they are by no means necessary. People stored meat on the hoof, smoked, cured, dehydrated, and devised ways to keep foods cool before the advent of electricity, including ice houses, spring houses, and even ice pits, which many grand mansions in Europe relied upon for hundreds of years. Familiarizing ourselves with alternative storage methods makes sense on many levels—economic, ecological, preparedness—and there are many wonderful resources available. Preserving Foods Without Freezing or Canning makes an excellent reference addition to any bookshelf.

Freezing is also a huge energy draw, so considering carefully how to preserve different kinds of foods is crucial. Valuable freezer space should be reserved for the most perishable items in order to maximize the investment. Freezing produce often seems so much easier than learning to can, but by doing this, you're giving up space for meats, fats, and whole grains that go rancid quickly when stored at room temperature. Freezers offer the luxury of longer term storage for these kinds of items. While meats can be dried, smoked, canned, and cured, this kind of preservation changes the quality and the consistency as well as the nutritional aspects of the meats. Dry cured meats, for instance, should be eaten far more sparingly than frozen meat because of their high salt content.

This would, in addition, be the moment to point out that avoiding animal products altogether can drastically reduce or eliminate the need for freezers completely, though as I said, even a small chest freezer can be useful for storing whole grains, nuts, and oils long term, ensuring that essential fatty acids are part of food stores and the family diet.

A full freezer is more efficient than an empty one, so keeping the freezer at least 3/4 full at all times will increase efficiency. Chest freezers are more efficient than uprights, taking advantage of cold's natural tendency to sink: opening a chest freezer releases less of the refrigerated air than opening an upright, which allows that air to quickly spill out. If I had my druthers, I'd have chest freezers and do away entirely with electric refrigeration by rotating frozen water jugs from my freezers into a large upright box fridge for cooling, much like the old fashioned ice boxes, but that's another post.

Freezing is convenience, certainly, but it also allows us to preserve safely many things that do not store well dry, like butter, milk, or colostrum for instance, and even very low acid foods like pumpkin, as well as to preserve more of the nutrients in the foods as they've not been subjected to the heat processing of canning. Freezing, however, does not stop microbial action, so careful maintenance and organization of freezer stores is essential, particularly with chest freezers that have the ability to bury older items at the bottom or in corners. Those that come with compartments will make the job easier, though homemade compartments can easily be fashioned. Vacuum sealing can extend the freezer life of any food because it excludes oxygen, which supports bacteria growth, and seals in moisture. Vacuum sealed meats can easily last a whole year in a deep freezer that goes down at least to 0° F.

Freezers also enable people to purchase pastured meats from local farmers by buying in bulk. Many farmers sell beef or pork by the whole, half, and even quarter at a much better price than each individual cut would cost. Some sell by the share, but most sell by "hanging weight"—a per pound price based on the weight of the cleaned carcass. For example, buying a half beef at $3/ lb would mean expensive ground meat, but very cheap tenderloin. So if you like the more expensive cuts, buying by the half will definitely save money. More than that, however, many small, sustainable farmers don't have the capacity to sell individual cuts, so buying a half or a quarter is the only option. If that amount seems overwhelming, finding a friend or family member to split the share with you can be very helpful.

There's a learning curve to buying meat this way if you haven't grown up with it, and having an adventurous spirit—and a few reliable cookbooks—can help. Those of us who grew up in the supermarket generation have missed out on the incredible variety of butcher cuts. An old fashioned butcher will offer dozens of cuts never seen by cellophaned grocery aisles. Learning what to do with and how to cook all the different parts of an animal takes a bit of time and experimentation. Mostly, you'll come to realize how much gets wasted in conventional food systems! Well, not wasted necessarily, but funneled into different food chains, obscuring the relationship of factory processed meat to a living, breathing animal. I'd like to see an artist's rendition of the supermarket animal along the lines of Kingsolver's "vegetannual." Now that would be a scary sight indeed!

Here on the farm we use freezers for storing most of the meats we produce, allowing us to focus on seasonal production, giving the pastures (and farmers!) a much-needed rest. We can raise a batch of meat birds when the weather's warm and put them up in our freezer for the rest of the year until the cycle begins again. Meats take on a seasonal quality in much the same way as produce: chicken in mid-summer, turkey in November, pork in December. Everything but our breeding stock is off the farm by the time cold weather sets in. Of course butchering traditionally took place in the fall, taking advantage of the natural cold weather and the animal's well-fed state heading into winter. Butchering in one large batch can also save both time and resources over one-at-a-timing it, offering another potential advantage of freezers over storing meat on the hoof. As with most things, however, the energy equation certainly isn't cut and dry; there are savings and expenses on both sides. Finding a food storage system that works for your family and maximizes energy savings will take some tinkering.

Arguably the most important aspect of food security that a freezer offers is the ability to store humanely, sustainably raised meats from farmers you know and trust. A freezer can mean the ability to disconnect entirely from factory farmed meats and the many hazards they represent to animals, the earth, the workers, and the consumers. Knowing where your meat comes from can be the biggest step towards food security you can take short of cutting animal products out of your diet entirely. There are loads of resources out there that detail the dangers of factory farming, including both Eric Schlosser's and Michael Pollan's excellent work, but the Meatrix videos offer a clever overview if you haven't already seen them. The sustainable family farm is not just a fantasy, but it does take some effort from the consumer to find one.

For those interested in some really good resources for cooking, curing, and butchering different kinds of meats, I highly recommend Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. (Love the guy, have to look up his name every damn time.) His River Cottage website has some wonderful recipes and info, but his books are simply outstanding. Though I haven't read them all, I can't imagine you could go wrong with any, but I've listed my favorites below along with some other useful books.

The River Cottage Meat Book, now available in paperback, is worth every penny for its information; Hugh's outstanding commitment to organic, sustainable meat production; as well as its amazing photos. A truly stunning book.

The River Cottage Cookbook, also available in paperback, is another must have. Its seasonal recipes are delicious, and it has lots of valuable information about curing meats.

Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn is another excellent addition to your collection, especially if you have any inclination towards making sausage and salamis.

And of course, for anyone interested in raising and butchering their own meats, I'd recommend Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game by John Mettler.

Our basic freezer stores are listed below. At the moment, we're out of beef and goat, both of which we often have in the freezer; next year, we'll also add lamb. After Bella calves in February, I'll also be sure to freeze some colostrum to have on hand; same when our goats kid. This can mean the difference between life and death for an animal.

Pork:
chops
roasts
ground
ribs
bacons
breakfast sausage
sweet Italian sausage

Chicken:
whole
wings
breasts
legs/ thighs
soup backs

Whole Turkey

Other:
butter
chevre cheese
pine nuts
cashews
pumpkin puree
shredded zucchini
basil leaves
pesto
roasted red peppers
cherry tomatoes
whole wheat flour
yeast and cultures

Food Security, Part I

2008-12-10T08:27:00.016-05:00

I've been wanting to do a series on food security for a while now, and a question just came through one of my email lists about food storage. So now seems like a good time to begin talking about what food security means, especially during these uncertain economic times.

Back in the spring, the conservative paper The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the pantry being the best return for one's money based on rising food costs. It was an interesting and telling piece because the ideas many of us have been talking about and thinking about for some time had begun to go mainstream. The idea that one could have home food stores instead of relying on capricious prices at the grocery stores is such a basic idea but so foreign to so many people that I used that article in many a conversation and correspondence to begin convincing skeptics that basic food security might be a good thing to have on their radar. The fact that at least half these people still gave me that, "Riiiiiight" kind of reaction didn't deter me from prattling on like a freak, citing Katrina, 9/11, and winter storms as evidence for my own increasingly debatable rationality... from their perspective, of course.

But now, we've gone past the writing on the wall (street) stage and have gone straight into the bashing over the head stage. To put it bluntly, folks who don't have some basic food and emergency supplies in place are downright irresponsible. Everyone, and I mean every one, with an income to manage it needs to have at least two weeks of food storage and basic survival supplies for power outages and water supply compromises, no matter how meager. Even if it's just a big ol' bag of rice and beans.

Folks need to take responsibility for themselves instead of relying on and then blaming FEMA's incompetence. C'mon folks, this is the federal government we're talking about—of course they're going to be incompetent! Of course they're going to drop the ball and leave people floundering and falling through the cracks. Don't let it be your family.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone has to go all Mormon or survivalist (and there's a lot to learn from both groups) as I've been gently teased of doing, but I am saying that as a culture we have become dangerously complacent. It's time to take a page out of our grandparents' Depression book and learn to take care of our own instead of depending on the system to take care of us. Considering most of us have been schooled in the system at every turn from an early age, this is a pretty tall order. I get that, and I've been there. I remember when Jim and I were on our honeymoon in a small New England town and couldn't figure out how people got money without any ATMs in town. Well, we got that people went to the bank and all, but how inconvenient that seemed! Why not just do everything electronically? Why not just run to the 24 hour convenience store if you run out of something?

This thought pattern is pervasive, and it's what the system itself depends upon. What we're now seeing unravel in the financial markets and beyond is the idea that the system is self-sustaining and doesn't need to rely on real goods or real money or real responsibility. But the minute people pull up and say "whoa!" the illusion of sustainability collapses, revealing the very tentative structure of the system itself. We're seeing the house of cards this illusion was built upon collapsing all around us, and it's not going to stop any time soon, certainly not until it reaches a supply chain near you.

I'm not talking about panic or hoarding. I'm talking about taking the time now while it's still a luxury to do the slow, steady food storage thing: a little bit extra here and a little bit extra there leaves plenty to go around for the time being. The more of us who prepare in this way ahead of time, the more supply will be available when it's really needed for those who didn't prepare in advance. If you still need a reason to act now, consider the fact that the US has lost more than 1 million jobs in the past three months alone. How comforting would it be to at least have paid for food to feed your family in the face of unemployment?

Enough ranting and convincing and on to the nitty, gritty practical details; I'll start with our pantry.

For my family, I store what we eat, so there's a constant rotation, with some things obviously going more quickly than others, especially based upon the season. I can't really give amounts off the top of my head, but I would say that at this point we easily have a year's supply of food. We don't have a year's worth of everything we like, but we have a year's worth of healthy meals.

It's taken me the past year to make that a reality, just buying a few things extra every month. I belong to a bulk co-op, which has made that kind of buying really easy—a bag of rice and case of coconut oil this month, a bag of rolled oats and a case of tuna the next, that kind of thing. Also, picking up extra jars of peanut butter or boxes of pasta from the grocery when it goes on sale helps tremendously. Spreading out this kind of purchasing not only leaves enough on the shelves for others, but it also ensures that your own food stores have different expiration dates. Once you have your food storage in place, then it's just a matter of basic maintenance purchasing to keep your rotation going.

Because we live on a small farm we have a steady supply of eggs, meats and dairy. I'll expand on our freezer storage more in the next installment, and I'll also do an installment on growing fresh food year round, as well as one on the practicalities of preserving. But for now, I'd like to focus on just a basic list of what's available in our pantry to give folks some sense of what a well-stocked pantry might look like.

Below is a general list of what's in my food stores, though I may be leaving something out—I didn't go in and do a detailed list, and no, I don't have an elaborate tracking system. My food storage system is based on the kinds of things I need on a regular basis. If I run out of something, then I know there's a gap in my storage plan.

My stores say a lot about how we cook and the kinds of food we eat. Pantries should reflect the regionality, personal preferences, cultural traditions, and diverse needs of the families they serve. I make most things from scratch, but not all, as you'll see, so I have lots of basic baking ingredients. I also have lots of home canned goods, in large part a result of growing my own food and cooking from scratch, but this kind of thing can also be done with bulk purchasing from co-ops, farmer's markets, and even grocers.

Most of my bulk grains are stored in the colored 5 gallon buckets on the left side of the photo just above. I finally splurged and bought the buckets and gamma lids, which make them much easier to open, from Pleasant Hill Grain, who offers free shipping on orders over $99. My buckets are somewhat color coded, but they're also labeled. The large wooden bins at the back hold potatoes, and I have wire baskets on my shelves for other stored produce like onions, garlic, and sweet potatoes. If you look at the first photo above, you'll see the baskets and the reused orange juice containers behind them that store water, not much but enough for an emergency.

You'll notice my list below loosely broken down into related categories that reflect different nutritional needs: be sure to have stored whole grains, fats, protein, and sugars. You'll also notice a lot of redundancy because I use different varieties for different purposes in my cooking; this is a definite luxury, and it's certainly possible to make do with less.

Grains:
jasmine rice
brown basmati rice
arborio rice

grits
popcorn

rolled oats

couscous
quinoa

wheat berries for long term storage
all purpose flour
bread flour
whole wheat pastry flour
whole wheat flour
dry pasta

Fats and Proteins:
red and green lentils
black beans
garbanzo beans

olive oil
coconut oil
peanut oil
hard cheese

peanut butter
tahini
tuna
refried beans
cashews (freezer)
pine nuts (freezer)

evaporated milk
dry milk

Sugars, spices, baking needs:
cane sugar
brown sugar
powdered sugar
turbinado sugar

raisins
maple syrup
chocolate chips
baking powder
baking soda
shortening

canning salt
real salt
sea salt
cheese salt

bay leaves
vanilla beans
sesame seeds
bouillion
bottled lemon juice

Home Preserves:
dried apples
dried tomatoes
jams
peaches
soups
tomato paste
whole tomatoes
chutneys
salsas
chicken and beef stock
dry cured ham
dried chilis

yellow onions
red onions
shallots
garlic
red potatoes
gold potatoes
fingerling potatoes
sweet potatoes

Other:
coffee beans
basic condiments
snack foods my kids like
cereals my family likes

Please feel free to ask any questions about why, how, what, etc. of anything I have in there, and I'd be happy to elaborate in the comments section.

Thankful for Slow Food

2008-12-07T08:22:00.008-05:00

From this:

To this:

To this:

To this:

To this:

Round here, Thanksgiving dinner begins in the spring with the hatching of an egg. It takes 7 to 9 months to grow a heritage turkey to a modest table weight. That's roughly 420 to 540 trips out to the pasture to provide food and water for the gobblers. That's a lot of time.

This year I cooked two ~ 8 lb hens for our Thanksgiving feast: one for dinner and one for left overs. Me, I don't much like leftovers, but I found out the hard way one year when it was just Jim and I—after I'd brilliantly labored over a gorgeous duck—that Thanksgiving leftovers are apparently more important than the celebratory feast itself. So, I oblige.

Our turkeys not only provided a feast for 8, they also provided leftovers for four households, at least two more dinners for us, as well as lunches for Jim over the coming year, not to mention the remaining meals provided for two very happy dogs. Once all Thanksgiving gluttony was sated, I made turkey lentil soup with the two carcasses, eking out one last dinner before canning the remainder—5 quarts of soup that will nourish Jim through the winter.

Thank you turkeys for your beauty in life and your bounty in death. I am humbly grateful for all you have provided my family and sincerely wish to be worthy of the gift taken.

My Birthday Present

2008-12-04T08:41:00.009-05:00

This year I got a cheese press for my birthday. Pretty lucky, huh? So, I've been playing around with making my first hard cheeses. I started with a farmhouse cheddar, an easy starter cheese without too many steps.

Here I am heating the cut curds to temperature in a waterbath:

Adding the curds to the mold for the first press:

After the first 10 minute pressing:

Here's what the mold looks like all put together:

After it's first 50 lb press. You can see it starting to firm up considerably as the whey is forced out:

Waxed farmhouse cheddar ready for aging in the cellar:

I chose red wax because I thought it would make nice looking holiday presents. The hardest part was cutting the block of wax for the initial melting. I bought a nice stainless steel bowl for it to live in, which I can use as a double boiler when I heat it for dipping. The nice thing about the cheese wax is that once you peel it off the cheese, you can reuse it many times.

The farmhouse cheddar only needs to age about a month, so we should be able to try our first cheese soon. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Easing Hunger

2008-11-26T15:03:00.002-05:00

Thanksgiving conjures up notions of plenty: a board groaning under the weight of a well-won harvest. But this year's food shortages and economic downturns ensure that more people all over the world will go hungry.

Thick in the midst of planning our own celebration, I took time out to donate some of our turkey proceeds to Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest. This is a tradition for me, and I encourage folks from all over to reach out to the world's hungry and consider giving food, time, money to one of the many outstanding organizations dedicated to easing hunger. Food is a basic necessity as well as a basic comfort, and there's no better time than harvest celebration to extend a bit of that comfort to others. Now more than ever the world needs you.

Go Vote!

2008-11-04T07:58:00.001-05:00

An Idealistic Hedonist

2008-10-27T20:27:00.004-05:00

I'm self-identifying here. This is how I think of myself and how I contextualize my life and world view. You see, I'm all about hope and joy and pleasure, which is a big part of why these phases of doom and gloom get me so off kilter.

I just attended my 20 year high school reunion this past weekend. It was a surreal experience that has resulted in a surprising amount of reflectiveness. On the longish drive up and back, I had that rarity: uninterrupted quiet time to think. And think I did. I thought about the person I was back in high school: angry and cynical and wounded. I was also pretty lost, searching for something to believe in, into which I could pour the energy and passion I contained; in short, I was a rebel without a cause. Ha... I and how many more, I'm sure, though I was probably just as often Tom Petty's rebel without a clue.

What I have become, however, as a mother, as an activist for peaceful parenting and alternative education and now, to an extent, for organic farming and self-sufficiency, is an idealist grounded in causes that provide meaning and import to my thoughts and actions. To a huge extent my children have given me reason to hope, reason to be the change I hope to see, reason to make this world a better place.

This is what I see in Barack Obama. He speaks to the idealism, the audacity of hope if you will, that says this world—and by extension ourselves—can be better, can be all that we long in our patriotic hearts for it to be. I recognize both the incredible potential and the frightening pitfalls in that kind of passionate idealism. Like the flip side of a coin, it's the kind of pathos that turns a country toward a Roosevelt or a Hitler in difficult times, and I think that encapsulates what we're facing in this election. I also think that's the kind of pathos both campaigns are trying to play to different ends, as the recent "socialism" charges demonstrate. I have a really hard time, however, seeing the kinds of public works projects that Obama speaks to in any light other than Roosevelt's New Deal to bring Americans out of depression and despair.

I wrote to a friend recently that I believe Obama is our last great hope for navigating this perfect storm of peak oil and economic crisis. We don't have lots of cheap and abundant oil to pull ourselves out of the next great depression, or whatever name we want to put to it: the great unwinding, the great deleveraging, the long emergency, etc. What we do have is a power of the people, a power of hope, and a power of idealism and belief in a better world, and we must tap that power if we are to weather the storm.

Here in America, we have entire generations who have grown up without ever having to give back to their community, without ever being asked by their leaders to do anything other than shop. We've grown up labeled as the "me" generation, but the ennui that characterizes Gen X and beyond reveals the psychic and spiritual emptiness of that kind of thinking. Barack Obama taps into the latent power of idealism and offers Americans the chance to pull ourselves out of this mess we're heading into not through cheap oil but simply by looking inside ourselves and believing, deep down, that each of us can make a difference and then by acting on that belief.

Why is idealism so often associated with youth, wishful thinking, even naivete? Why is it so cavalierly dismissed by the cynicism of age? Idealism is the foundation of principled living, the foundation of hope, of optimism, of the belief in life itself. Idealism has the power to be an infinite resource if properly nurtured. And by tapping into that belief we have a window, however small, to put in place the infrastructure that can potentially take us into the 21st century with alternative energies and a reduction of the greenhouse gasses that threaten not just our country but our entire planet.

As part of his message, Obama seeks to rekindle the idealism behind the notion that I am my brother's keeper, and I think that's worth parsing a bit because it goes back to my earlier comparison: what makes the difference between a country turning to a Roosevelt or a Hitler during trying times? I think it's an interesting question and a fine line to walk, and I think in many ways it encapsulates the concern many conservatives feel when confronted by phrases like "spreading the wealth." Folks fear the idea of a liberal nanny state, and I find that a very legitimate fear. I certainly don't want anyone telling me how to live, but Democrats surely don't have a corner on that market, and I find Palin to be the most fascist candidate out there. Honestly, she scares the hell out of me, and we had brief glimpses at her rallies of the kind of emotion and fervor she generates, nurturing the worst of America.

What we need now is a compassionate state, one that provides opportunity for all Americans rather than just a privileged few. We have been given this economic crisis as a moment to take our country in a new direction, to rebuild its infrastructure while simultaneously putting people to work, to make good and wise use of our dwindling oil supplies to potentially usher in a new era of sustainable energy and sustainable human habitation of our planet. Of course this change requires a massive paradigm shift, but crises have a funny way of creating the context for just such rapid shifts.

Folks all across Main Street, Republican and Democrat alike, are up in arms about the federal deficit and the legacy of debt we're leaving to our children and grandchildren, but very few are taking a close look at global warming or greenhouse gasses and asking the same questions about the legacy our choices will leave for generations to come. Rightfully, we should be far more concerned about our planet than what's happening on Wall Street or Main Street because global warming has such far reaching implications. Some of the world's top scientists have suggested that we need a 70 to 90% reduction in greenhouse gasses in order to reverse the effects of global warming. Mantras like "Drill baby, drill" aren't going to get us anywhere close to those reductions.

We stand now at a cross roads where our choices mean the difference between sneaking through a rapidly closing window, transitioning somewhat gracefully into a more sustainable way of life, or standing idly by and watching that window close for good, leaving future generations a world at war for ever-dwindling resources and an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

Please choose wisely.

Welcome to the "Real Economy"

2008-10-22T09:18:00.003-05:00

I know, I promised no more doom and gloom, but heck, it's how I'm feelin' these days. (Sorry, been watchin' too much Sarah Palin on the news. Ei-yei-yei.)

The "real economy" is about to bite us all in the ass no matter whether credit markets are beginning to crack. The real economy is where we all dwell, and things are starting to get ugly just in time for the holidays. Job losses will be very, very real and hurt very real people, and the pervasive fear of potential job loss will cause consumers to guard their cash dearly, creating a negative spiral downward.

How is the economy affecting you? Have you all started to feel the pinch? Are you circling the wagons in the expectation of a pinch? Or is it shopping as usual?

For us, we're already facing tough decisions. The "real economy" has meant dwindling resources for my mother, and it looks like we will be combining households within the next few months. There's a very good chance that she'll be joining the ranks of mortgage defaults, as the likelihood of her home selling is pretty slim. Certainly we're in no financial position to maintain two households, and so the real economy comes crashing through our doors. These transitions will not be easy for any of us, and I'm working to wrap my brain around the change and come to a place of open acceptance, trying to prepare myself to take the high ground of empathy over selfishness. And I know we're not alone.

Most moments I feel so incredibly grateful for all that we have. We're lucky that Jim's job is very secure. I look around at my beautiful children, and thank our lucky stars for our health. I look around at the bounty on my land, and I'm humbled by the abundance. Most moments I trust how very insulated we have made ourselves, but there are those other moments when I recognize my own sense of attachment to that insulation and feel the lurking specter of fear that goes hand in hand with that attachment and understand that my real job right now is practicing non-attachment even as I continue to prepare.

And Life Goes On...

2008-10-14T06:24:00.004-05:00

An old REM song keeps popping into my head with greater frequency these days, and I find myself crooning, "The world is collapsing ... around our ears..." to my cow, for instance, as I go about milking.

No doubt this financial crisis is worming its way into more American (and beyond!) psyches than just mine. We're poised on the brink of a reckoning, without a doubt, and regardless of how it all shakes out, the unknown is difficult to handle. There's simply nothing out there yet to wrap our brains around, no solid challenge to tackle head on. Just lurking shadows of history and chimeras of fear that keep us all on edge each time we round a corner.

Add to that the perfect storm of peak oil, population, and global instability and we live in very interesting times, indeed.

I vacillate between panic and paralysis in my own head, and who really needs to read about my private neuroses? So, I've been pretty quiet here lately, preferring to go insular and spend much of my time, mouth agape, watching the train wreck in front of my eyes, searching for small hints and signs of direction and best action.

I admit I'm filled with doom and gloom these days. I think there's a very good chance that we're headed into a global depression as the culture of credit and consumption catches up with all of us whether we're complicit personally or not. (Though I'd argue that it's impossible to live in the developed world without being complicit.) The direct infusion of cash into banks worldwide is enough to momentarily shore up the financial systems, but simply printing more money is not a long term answer. Far from it—it is instead a short-term band-aid that arises out of the same profligate mentality that got us into this global crisis in the first place.

We humans are unsustainable. That is the most basic inconvenient truth of our lives and one we're now forced to face. What we're seeing is a mad dash to deny that truth, or at the very least to keep the man behind the curtain for just a little while longer and continue the deception for the masses.

Our culture is unsustainable. Our sense of comfort and convenience and the entitlement to both are unsustainable. Our hubris and push toward immortality are unsustainable.

Our governments and financial leaders keep telling us that the central problem to the crisis is that credit is locked up. No. The central problem to this crisis is that the cash to lend no longer exists. Not that it ever did, of course, but now the house of cards has collapsed, and the Ponzi scheme of endless credit is revealed. Banks are holding onto their cash to try to cover their own asses. But that doesn't change the fact that there's nothing real, nothing hard behind the paper, and if we continue to try simply to print our way out of this mess, we're in for a world of hurt down the line. Pain now or pain later. Or both.

The point is that our economy is contracting, and this contraction back toward some semblance of sustainability will be painful. Jobs. Homes. Food. These are the basic things that we'll see falter. As the economy contracts, more and more jobs will be lost, affecting folks' ability to pay mortgage or rent, which means more people will lose their homes. Not just people who were overextended, but perfectly solvent and responsible people who depended upon their job to pay for food and shelter. Pretty basic stuff since most of us fall into that category.

How secure is your income? How adaptable are you? How self-sufficient? These are the questions I'm asking myself and I think everyone should be asking.

Can we pay off a 30 year mortgage in the next year? No way. Is our income secure enough to rest assured that we'll keep our home? I hope. Do we have ways of creating income should our current one fail? I don't know because history tells me that even if I can produce goods for sale, there's no guarantee anyone will be able to buy them in a depressed society.

Aren't you glad I'm back? I promise I'll go light on the gloom and doom and heavy on the self-sufficient stuff in the coming days.

Mother of All Bailouts

2008-09-21T16:47:00.011-05:00

Some of you have been asking where I've been. Well, besides this being my busiest season of the year between preserving the harvest and planting the fall garden, I've been sidelined from blogging by a brief trip to the beach and an ongoing obsession with the coming election and recent economic crisis. Not wanting to turn this blog into a place of political rants, knowing that I have readers of different political persuasions just as I have good friends in real life of different political persuasions, I have opted to remain silent about my own political leanings.

But silent I can remain no longer, as I believe Secretary Paulson's bailout plan has far reaching implications for all Americans regardless of political party. I don't pretend to have any answers, but I recognize a bid for power when I see one, and this my friends—Paulson's good intentions aside—is a bid for boosting the power of the executive branch of government via the Department of the Treasury in a way that shuts out both the legislative and judicial branches of government in very, very frightening ways, bypassing the system of checks and balances that our forebears so prudently put into place in the founding of America.

Yet another backroom, weekend deal will be struck and announced perhaps tonight, but this time the administration is seeking congressional approval that will legitimize this unprecedented expansion of executive power by rushing legislation through congress by the end of the week. And please, do not forget, that as much as we may trust Paulson, his motives and intentions, he serves in the cabinet of George W. Bush, a tenure which will expire in just a few months. That we do not know who will inherit these broad-based powers should be enough to motivate us all, regardless of political party, to write, call, email our congressional representatives and urge them not to rush this plan as it stands through congress.

That is my non-partison pitch on the problems with this legislation, but I also believe that the argument for helping Wall Street with what Paulson and Bush call clean and quick legislation without any provisions for helping the taxpayers of America who are being asked to foot this bill is just another example of trickle down economics at play, where taxpayers are being bullied by fear-based tactics into believing that helping the fat cats is best for us as well... much better and cheaper than the alternative, we are being told on just about every news venue on television.

Yet, keep in mind, there are no guarantees that this plan will even work. Wall Street could still crumble, our jobs and retirement funds could still be at risk. But, what we are guaranteed is that our dollar will buy less because this plan, as Ron Paul has argued, is based on inflationary tactics of printing more money and taking on more government debt, guaranteed to result in devaluation of the dollar.

While there are republicans, democrats, and libertarians alike raising concerns about this plan for various reasons, regardless of the politics behind it I urge folks not to stand by and allow this plan to be railroaded through congress as it stands.

Of course none of this even begins to address the problems behind re-establishing the "flow of credit" necessary to continue to fuel the unsustainable consumerism that makes up the U.S. economy... but that's a different rant.

But don't just take my word for it, here are some links that feature multiple opinions to get you started if you're not already obsessively following the story like I am. I'm also including a copy of the email I've sent to my representatives as well as a copy of the plan being considered so folks can read the language for themselves.

The Arena at Politico.com

The Automatic Earth: Debt Rattle September 21, 2008

My letter, for what it's worth:

Dear Representative _____ and Senators _______ and ________,

I strongly urge you NOT to support the $700 billion bailout plan proposed by Secretary Paulson as is. Any Wall Street bailout that falls on the taxpayers of America MUST also include provisions that directly help those taxpayers, not just the financial institutions on Wall Street whose predatory lending practices rest at the heart of the current economic crisis.

I feel strongly that any kind of bail out plan must include help for those Americans currently under or under threat of foreclosure, must include some kind of stipulation against rewarding the financial management of bailed out institutions with golden parachutes, must include some kind of congressional oversight and possible interventions during the 2 year power tenure for the Treasury. I am extremely concerned by the idea of granting overarching powers to the Treasury together with an unprecedented amount of money and strongly urge against that action even with the two year stipulation. Lack of oversight and checks and balances are part of the problem and should not be made part of the solution.

Along those same lines, I am dismayed that the solution to prop up Wall Street depends upon more reckless government spending—deficit spending—rather than fiscal responsibility. Our government is modeling the behavior from both Wall Street and Main Street that got us into this trouble in the first place. The idea that keeping the credit flowing to enable further profligate spending is the answer to our current economic crisis is both irresponsible and wrong headed.

Respectfully,

Danielle ________

Text of plan:

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL FOR TREASURY AUTHORITY
TO PURCHASE MORTGAGE-RELATED ASSETS

Section 1. Short Title.

This Act may be cited as ____________________.

Sec. 2. Purchases of Mortgage-Related Assets.

(a) Authority to Purchase.--The Secretary is authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution having its headquarters in the United States.

(b) Necessary Actions.--The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation:

(1) appointing such employees as may be required to carry out the authorities in this Act and defining their duties;

(2) entering into contracts, including contracts for services authorized by section 3109 of title 5, United States Code, without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts;

(3) designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them;

(4) establishing vehicles that are authorized, subject to supervision by the Secretary, to purchase mortgage-related assets and issue obligations; and

(5) issuing such regulations and other guidance as may be necessary or appropriate to define terms or carry out the authorities of this Act.

Sec. 3. Considerations.

In exercising the authorities granted in this Act, the Secretary shall take into consideration means for--

(1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and

(2) protecting the taxpayer.

Sec. 4. Reports to Congress.

Within three months of the first exercise of the authority granted in section 2(a), and semiannually thereafter, the Secretary shall report to the Committees on the Budget, Financial Services, and Ways and Means of the House of Representatives and the Committees on the Budget, Finance, and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate with respect to the authorities exercised under this Act and the considerations required by section 3.

Sec. 5. Rights; Management; Sale of Mortgage-Related Assets.

(a) Exercise of Rights.--The Secretary may, at any time, exercise any rights received in connection with mortgage-related assets purchased under this Act.

(b) Management of Mortgage-Related Assets.--The Secretary shall have authority to manage mortgage-related assets purchased under this Act, including revenues and portfolio risks therefrom.

(c) Sale of Mortgage-Related Assets.--The Secretary may, at any time, upon terms and conditions and at prices determined by the Secretary, sell, or enter into securities loans, repurchase transactions or other financial transactions in regard to, any mortgage-related asset purchased under this Act.

(d) Application of Sunset to Mortgage-Related Assets.--The authority of the Secretary to hold any mortgage-related asset purchased under this Act before the termination date in section 9, or to purchase or fund the purchase of a mortgage-related asset under a commitment entered into before the termination date in section 9, is not subject to the provisions of section 9.

Sec. 6. Maximum Amount of Authorized Purchases.

The Secretary’s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time

Sec. 7. Funding.

For the purpose of the authorities granted in this Act, and for the costs of administering those authorities, the Secretary may use the proceeds of the sale of any securities issued under chapter 31 of title 31, United States Code, and the purposes for which securities may be issued under chapter 31 of title 31, United States Code, are extended to include actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses. Any funds expended for actions authorized by this Act, including the payment of administrative expenses, shall be deemed appropriated at the time of such expenditure.

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Sec. 9. Termination of Authority.

The authorities under this Act, with the exception of authorities granted in sections 2(b)(5), 5 and 7, shall terminate two years from the date of enactment of this Act.

Sec. 10. Increase in Statutory Limit on the Public Debt.

Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $11,315,000,000,000.

Sec. 11. Credit Reform.

The costs of purchases of mortgage-related assets made under section 2(a) of this Act shall be determined as provided under the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, as applicable.

Sec. 12. Definitions.

For purposes of this section, the following definitions shall apply:

(1) Mortgage-Related Assets.--The term “mortgage-related assets” means residential or commercial mortgages and any securities, obligations, or other instruments that are based on or related to such mortgages, that in each case was originated or issued on or before September 17, 2008.

(2) Secretary.--The term “Secretary” means the Secretary of the Treasury.

(3) United States.--The term “United States” means the States, territories, and possessions of the United States and the District of Columbia.

Birth Announcement

2008-08-26T10:17:00.005-05:00

Our sow, Maya, gave birth to 9 piglets last night, unaided on pasture. She's such a good homestead hog—I really couldn't ask for more. There are a couple of small ones, but all were up and walking around this morning and look to be strong and vigorous. Big Boy, our boar, is in with them and seems to be handling it all in stride, keeping an eye on everything but not being aggressive toward the piglets or aggressive toward us.

Independence Days Weeks 16 & 17

2008-08-24T16:33:00.002-05:00

Yea, I missed last week's post, so I figure I'll do a combined one today. Last week was kind of a holding pattern, so most of what's gotten accomplished has been this past week.

Four months of the Independence Days challenge, and I can finally remember all the categories in order without looking. What I still can't remember is whether I did something this week or last. Thank goodness for a blog record! Now if I were just more reliable about writing in my journal. A constant falling off the wagon for me... *sigh* I'm so undisciplined.

Plant:

A fill-in flat of swiss chard, 7 top turnip, and spinach that will help me fill gaps in the direct seeded beds. I also planted three varieties of endive and four lettuce varieties.

Harvest:

lettuce, onions, tomatoes, summer and winter squash, egg plant, peppers, beans, corn, basil, rosemary, thyme, chives, eggs, milk, pork.

Preserve:

24 lbs of grape tomatoes in the dehydrator, canned 1/2 bushel of peaches, made butter and two kinds of cheese.

Store:

raisins, garbanzo beans, tortilla chips, refried beans.

Prep:

Washed three Navajo-Churro sheep fleeces, and we're now learning how to card the wool. Also helped the girls learn to knit, which I can't do because of my wrists, but they seem to be enjoying it immensely. My guess is this winter will be filled with knitting and felting.

Manage:

After unsuccessfully trying to control the aphid/ thrip/ cricket damage in the high tunnel with sticky traps and insecticidal soap, I ended up spraying neem oil this week to try to get things under control in time for fall and winter crops in there. A couple weeks back I'd done a lot of cleaning out, which really helped reduce hiding places. I'd been allowing some things to go to seed in there, which has the down side of being a haven for pests.

At any rate, I was able to hand pick the remaining praying mantids before spraying, and I sprayed early in the morning before most pollinators would be out and about. The neem seems to have really helped a lot, and it looks like I'll be able to harvest some spinach for CSA this coming week. Yay!

I also finally finished laying my irrigation lines and got them up and running. All the rain we've gotten this season has spoiled me, and this is the first I've really needed to think about it. Of course, we're getting dry and crunchy now that it's August, but it's been a cool, wet year, especially compared to last. Not only are the established plants starting to need the water, but also my seeds and seedlings desperately need it to get established for fall. I'm loving the drip tape. The cool thing about it, too, is that I can use it to deliver fish emulsion directly to the plants.

Cook:

This was my first time canning peaches. I got 27 pints from a 1/2 bushel, packed in a light syrup. Hopefully the kids will like these and not complain that they're different from the store-bought.

Add:

CSA delivery to 11 families. Bought peaches from local orchard for canning.

Reduce:

Farming and self-sufficiency take a tremendous amount of resources, as I've discussed other places. Figuring out ways to produce our own while reducing the amount of resources we use to do so is an ongoing challenge for me. In particular, the home dairy takes quite a bit of water, from the water necessary to the cow to the water necessary to clean equipment to the water necessary to rinse butter. Lots of water. We're on a well here, so there's no good way for me to measure our water usage, and although there's no shortage of water, the principle behind conservation is a sound one. So I find myself constantly looking for ways to eliminate waste and streamline the efficiency of my routine towards reduction. I've been able to reduce much of my water usage by reusing rinse water, for instance, as well as finding ways for sanitizing rinses to be used multiple times.

Learn:

Learning all about natural deworming, as I've been deworming our piglets to ensure their health and weight gain. I've had them on a week of treatment where they receive 2 oz of garlic powder, 1/2 oz of cayenne pepper, and 1/2 oz of thyme mixed into their milk each morning. There have been some studies as well as anecdotal evidence on the efficacy of garlic as an anthelmintic, along with both cayenne and thyme. I have wormwood growing here, but it's a very powerful herb, which I'm hesitant to use. Caution, too, should be used with regard to tansy (listed in the first link below), which can be poisonous to livestock in large quantities.

I'm going to see if I can also get my sheep to eat the garlic powder. They're completely grass fed, so I'm not sure they'll go for it. The piggies, however, don't mind the flavored milk one little bit. Big surprise. Picky pigs they are not.

Alternative dewormers for ruminants

Dutch abstract on herbal swine dewormers

Garlic as sheep dewormer

Garlic as pig dewormer

One Local Summer: Week 12

2008-08-23T06:03:00.000-05:00

Rotisserie chicken, fingerling potatoes with garlic butter, heirloom tomatoes stuffed with onion, garlic, basil and chevre cheese.

All zero mile. Not too shabby, and pretty darned tasty, too.

Yessir, yessir, three bags full

2008-08-19T16:44:00.007-05:00

I finally washed my fleeces (fleeci?) this week. I broke down and did it in the washing machine because I hadn't come up with a better plan, and I didn't want them to get infested out in the garage. I don't figure three fleeces will kill the septic tank, and hopefully by this time next year I'll be able to procure a cast iron tub on freecycle or craigslist.

Here I am starting to skirt the fleece, which basically means cutting off all the yucky or short bits:

This is Esther's fleece, our light-haired sheep, though from what I understand, all the sheep will become lighter in color as they get older. At least their outside coat will, not the underside wool, which will hold its present color. Esther has gray wool, beautifully flecked with cream.

Here's the fleece after soaking in super hot water with ~1/4 cup of Dawn dishwashing liquid and rinsed twice:

Here it is drying on the trampoline:

And here is Tabby, wishing I hadn't sewn the opening shut because it looks so inviting:

Dead Zones

2008-08-18T21:12:00.003-05:00

A recent article about the growing number of dead zones around the world over the past two years demonstrates that just because we can grow more food doesn't mean we should. Here's one more argument for local, sustainable farming practices that don't rely on heavy fertilizer applications.

"We're not finding enough oxygen to support life, aquatic life," said scientist Lora Pride aboard the Pelican, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium research vessel that studies the Gulf.
CNN traveled aboard the ship August 14-15 as consortium researchers sent sensors to the bottom of the sea, scooped up sediment and collected water samples for analysis at nine testing stations in the Gulf.
As an oxygen meter sank far below the Pelican, Pride pointed to an onboard computer screen displaying the meter's findings in real time.
"This green line is the oxygen right here and at the bottom it's reading less than 2 milligrams per liter," Pride said.

Six of the nine stations revealed such oxygen-deprived, hypoxic water, compared to a normal reading of 6 milligrams per liter.
As Pride and her crew aboard the Pelican monitored the Gulf waters, the journal Science last week published a study that reveals there are more than 400 dead zones around the globe, double the number found by the United Nations two years ago.
One of the major dead zones is in the Gulf of Mexico. It is 8,000 square miles, nearly the size of New Jersey, according to the marine consortium's annual measurement completed in July.
"There's no oxygen in the water for shrimp, crabs, fish to live," said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the consortium.
Fish and shrimp "can sense that and they start to move out of the area. Otherwise they would die. The animals that still remain in the sediments have to keep breathing. There is not enough oxygen and eventually they will die off," Rabalais said.
Scientists have been studying the Gulf's dead zone for about 20 years, although its existence has been known for decades. So why is oxygen disappearing from fishing waters in the Gulf of Mexico? The answer, scientists say, is found hundreds of miles to the north, up the Mississippi River in corn country.
Farmers in Iowa and across the Midwest use tons of nitrogen and phosphorous to make their cornfields more productive, which allows the farmers to take advantage of high corn prices resulting from growing demand from ethanol factories and developing countries.
Rain always causes some fertilizer to run off farmland, but this summer's historic flooding caused even more runoff into rivers that flow into the Mississippi.
"That's the primary source of the nutrients that go to the Gulf of Mexico," said Rabalais. "And so the size of the low-oxygen zone has increased in proportion to these nutrients reaching the Gulf."
Fertilizer flowing into the Gulf of Mexico triggers an overgrowth of microscopic algae, which eventually die and fall to the bottom.
"When they die, they decompose, and decomposition requires oxygen," said Pride. "So these things will fall to the bottom and as they decompose they consume oxygen."
So much oxygen is taken from the water that slow-moving sea life like clams, small crabs, starfish and snails suffocate....
With demand for corn growing, scientists say the dead zone could expand in coming years.

And the winner is...

2008-08-16T10:20:00.004-05:00

Drumroll please...

My lovely assistant upon waking up in the morning, complete with blanky:

But what a sport, she was happy to help out and choose a winner at random from the hat:

This is the "official" hat in our home for choosing who is "it" first in games or who gets the first turn, so in true olympic spirit, we used only state of the art equipment for the drawing.

And the winner is...

Congratulations Carolyn!

Email me with your snail mail at danielle at touch the earth farm dot com, and we'll get your earthy package in the mail.

One Local Summer: Week 11

2008-08-16T07:10:00.005-05:00

Breakfast is really my favorite meal of the day. I like dinner food, but not nearly as much as breakfast food, and I think a good brunch buffet is really the most perfect thing in the world.

Here's one of our zero mile breakfasts: fried quick potatoes and an onion, tomato, mozzarella omelet.

The fresh mozzarella I made didn't keep well texture-wise for eating fresh, but it melted beautifully, as you can see in the photo. The omelet sports sauteed mini puplette onions and sungold tomatoes. I like to caramelize the onions with some sea salt before adding the tomatoes to cook down just a bit. Then add eggs, cheese, and cook down before folding. Yummm.

For quick potatoes, heat a high-heat oil like peanut in a skillet on medium high heat until hot but not smoking, then grate the potatoes directly into the oil to barely cover bottom of the pan—too many and they won't cook properly. Turn the heat down to medium after a minute or two and cook until golden brown; flip and repeat. Salt and pepper to taste. These are a super-quick version of hash browns, and they come out light and crispy, especially when made with fresh potatoes. Store-bought potatoes can be disappointing and starchy, but that's just cuz I'm spoiled.

Independence Days Week 15

2008-08-10T07:23:00.008-05:00

Plant:

Lettuces, chard, carrots, kale, turnips. Transplanted the pea seedlings, which shot up like crazy, and covered with shade cloth to help keep them from burning up in the sun. They seem to be holding their own, and the recent spate of cool weather has been a boon.

While I direct sow many of my seeds, some I still start in seed trays either because they're too fussy or there's not enough room. With my succession planting, the idea is that the first round will be ready to come out of the ground in time to stick something else in its place, hopefully with the second planting getting ready to hit full production so I don't miss a beat in terms of harvest. This generally works out better on paper than in reality, though, as pests like squash bugs and borers often have something to say about when a planting is done.

Harvest:

Carrots, beets, beans, tomatoes, peppers, summer squash, eggplant, cucumbers, basil, thyme, rosemary, chives, fingerling potatoes, sweet corn, eggs, milk.

Preserve:

Butter, 23 lbs of grape tomatoes in dehydrator. I grow the sweet olive grape tomatoes almost exclusively for winter enjoyment, as I find they make the most succulent dehydrated tomatoes. I'll admit, too, to not dehydrating them completely or cutting them in half. Although this means that they need to go in the freezer rather than on the shelf, it leaves that little burst of tomato flavor that's released when biting into it—kinda like that gum that came out in the 80's or 90's. But better.

Store:

~60 lbs fingerling potatoes.

Prep:

Nothing this week.

Manage:

Weeded gardens, sprayed insecticidal soap for aphids/ crickets in high tunnel that are crushing my greens. Grrrrrr. The high tunnel has been a blessing in many ways, but it's also been a pest haven. I guess the critters like it as much as the plants. The upside is that the praying mantis population is exploding; the down side is that I'm considering resorting to spraying neem to help get a handle on the pest population.

Cook:

Made fresh mozzarella for the first time from our raw milk, and it turned out sooo tasty. The texture was fleeting, however, and it wasn't nearly as good the next day. It did do nicely in omelets though. I used the microwave method, and it really only took about 30 minutes at most. The ingredients were whole raw milk, citric acid and rennet, and voila! Delicious fresh raw mozzarella.

NOTE: Danielle from Savor Culture had this helpful hint in the comments section:

Regarding mozzarella, I also use Ricki Carroll's recipe, but not the 30-minute mozz recipe. I use raw milk in my mozz, which requires some adjustments as suggested by cheese consultant, Jim Wallace. With raw milk, lower the ripening temperature by a few degrees, and decrease the amount of rennet by 10-20%. This gave my mozzarella a more tender texture. Also, when you store the finished mozz in brine, use a solution of one part whey to four parts water. Add salt until a little remains undissolved to ensure proper salinity. The calcium in the brine prevents the calcium in the cheese from releasing the protein bonds, which would cause the exterior to become "goopy."

Check out her blog—it's loads of fun.

Add:

CSA delivery to 11 families, the following in some combination: beets, carrots, beans, summer squash, eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, hot peppers, onions, basil, rosemary, tarragon, chives.

Reduce:

Having trouble fitting all your laundry on your line? Go vertical. Depending on what kind of loads I'm doing, I can fit up to 3 laundry loads on our line at once by hanging clothes on other clothes. Of course my tendency toward OCD often gets the better of me, and I group things together like similar napkins, handtowels, etc. That way they hang off each other quite nicely. Of course, you'll find you need lots more clothespins for this method.

Learn:

Learned how to make mozzarella. Can the same thing count for two different categories?

One Local Summer: Week 10

2008-08-09T07:02:00.008-05:00

Wow, it's the beginning of August, and it's starting to feel like the summer's already over. Kids are heading back to school all across America, and even the weather is turning fallish. Not to mention the days getting shorter. But I've just started to harvest my tomatoes! Surely we have a few good weeks left to revel in the glorious food of summer.

Last year, we enjoyed tomatoes into October, so I remain hopeful.

This week's meal for One Local Summer features some of those glorious tomatoes, though I was so excited about my mozzarella that I let it hog the camera. This is a fabulous(ly easy) bruschetta, featuring multicolored heirloom tomatoes: German red strawberry (red), German striped (yellow with sunsplashed rays of red), ananas noire (green—donated by CSA member Carrie P.) and the non-heirloom sungold (orange, sweet, and tasty!).

Also in the bruschetta are purplette onions, basil, garlic and fresh raw mozzarella from our cow's milk, which was absolutely divine. I'll be making that much more often, I can tell you. We enjoyed this atop some bread baked local to my in-laws, who were kind enough to bring a giant bag down for my freezer last time they visited. Sometimes it's nice to be able to pull something out to reheat rather than baking from scratch.

To round out our meal (though I would've been happy with just the bruschetta and wine!) was a whole chicken, roasted with butter, rosemary, thyme and Russian banana fingerling potatoes, another heirloom veggie—all fresh from our farm. If you've never tried fingerling potatoes before, you're missing a real treat. They are creamy, buttery goodness: roasted in homemade butter and herbs, they approach Nirvana.

Don't forget to check out the giveaway and sign up for the drawing by August 15th if you'd like to participate.

A Little Bit of Tansy

2008-08-06T06:46:00.003-05:00

How lucky am I?

I never win anything, but I was lucky enough to win Tansy's giveaway over at her blog, and as you can see she put together a lovely package. (Though not nearly as lovely as her lovely assistant.)

I love the cool bag made from a bag of scratch grains. There was also some rose petal jelly, raw honey, and pickled garlic, as well as some medicinal herb seeds, spicy homemade soap and lip balm. She even wrapped individual little packages for each of the kids—the little flower gnomes—which they had great fun with and immediately went down to our art center to craft some friends.

One of the coolest things about the package, however, was the packing material: shredded money! Okay, maybe we're total geeks, but we'd never seen this before, and all of us were marveling at it. And yes, it's legal. And no, I don't think Tansy shredded her own cash as the kids were wondering. You can, in fact, purchase shredded cash from the U.S. Treasury. Who knew? Well, besides Tansy? Too cool.

Thank you, thank you Tansy for such a fun gift package!

Now, to continue the joy and fun...

I'll be hosting a Touch the Earth Farm giveaway, which will include earthy things and little bits of our farm. To sign up for the giveaway, please leave a comment by August 15th, including what you like about reading this blog—yeah, just a little something for me. ;) The kids and I will choose a winner at random that weekend.

Independence Days Week 14

2008-08-03T15:25:00.007-05:00

Plant:

This was a big week. Told ya I'd get back on the wagon.

Vates, red Russian, and lacinato kale; red chard; purple and white kohlrabi; purplette and hardy evergreen onions; hakurei turnips; broccoli; Amish snap peas; lutz and chioggia beets; spigariello liscia and sessartina grossa raab; napoli and red chantenay carrots; bilko and minuet napa cabbage; early Jersey Wakefield cabbage; red cabbage; chieftan savoy cabbage; bok choi; brussels sprouts; chervil; cilantro; flat leaf and curly parsley; fennel. The row cover in the picture is covering the seed beds to help keep them moist and prevent them from baking out.

Seeds saved:

Endive, swiss chard, leek.

Harvest:

Lettuce, chard, purplette mini onions, green onions, mixed beans, sweet olive grape tomatoes, gold nugget and sungold cherry tomatoes, costata zuchini, yellow squash, slicing cukes, Asian cukes, purple dragon and chantenay carrots, dill, basil, thyme, chives, green peppers, Anaheim hot peppers.

Preserve:

Pressure canned 9 pints of black beans and 9 pints of chicken stock. 7 lbs butter.

Store:

Gallon water, citric acid, plastic storage lids for canning jars.

Prep:

Canning lids, pint canning jars, picked up 75 slow growing broilers.

Manage:

Pulled plants, weeded, tilled, added compost, fed plants.

Cook:

Chili rellenos: roasted Anaheim peppers we grew, stuffed with chevre from our cow and battered with eggs from our chickens.

Yummmm.

Now, if only I could get the cilantro to grow through the heat of the summer.

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuce, chard, mixed beans, mixed tomatoes, mixed carrots, potatoes, summer squash, purplette onions, green onions, bell peppers, hot peppers, slicing cukes, Asian cukes, dill, basil.

Reduce:

Turned water heater down further. It's an iterative process. We're trying to get it cool enough to use only the hot water faucet for hot, but not so cool that the hot water heater incubates bacteria.

I'm hoping to convince Jim to put a timer on the hot water heater, but at this point, we need to decide what hours we want hot water access. Of course, having the outdoor shower would help considerably in terms of flexibility. Money enough and time.... And, apparently it's hard wired and, therefore, non-trivial to add a timer. He looked for me yesterday. Bummer.

Learn:

This week I learned to pressure can! Yay me. I'll do a follow up post about the pressure canning with more details later this week.

Let's just say that once I did it, it was easy peasy. Low stress, low energy, high output. Definitely worth learning.

I did it... twice in one day.

2008-08-02T21:27:00.005-05:00

Pressure canning that is.

Today was the day I faced the pressure canner and figured it out. I started with some black beans that I'd soaked and cooked and then finished the day with 9 pints of chicken broth.

Yay me!

One Local Summer: Week 9

2008-08-02T07:12:00.003-05:00

The first ripe tomatoes of the season are finally here! Well, this week anyway. This is probably the third time we've eaten them, not counting the number I eat while harvesting.

This is my one pot chicken dish, yet another really great meal for CSA nights, not counting the hot oven. I stuff the chicken with onions and garlic and rub it down with butter, sprinkling some garlic, thyme, and cayenne pepper over top. Surround it with diced potatoes, sliced carrots, and chunked onion and bake. The potatoes get nice and crisp while the carrots and onions caramelize so deliciously. Yummmmm.

Accompanying the one pot chicken is a salad of tomatoes, basil, green onion and fresh mozzarella in a balsamic vinaigrette and an herb focaccia.

All zero mile but the flour, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and some spices—even the butter was ours. Herbs, too, were all from Touch the Earth Farm. Mozzarella was made local to my in-laws and brought down on a visit. The potatoes are red nordland potatoes; the carrots are red core chantenay and purple dragon, a showy, spicy little carrot; tomatoes are a mix of gold nugget, sungold, and sweet olive.

The $250 Tool

2008-07-30T07:19:00.005-05:00

No, not Jim.

There's a phenomenon I'm noticing as I move more deeply into our homesteading adventure that I call the $250 tool. It seems like each new hobby or activity requires a tool that costs somewhere around the neighborhood of $250.

There's the cheese press: $279.95.

There's the grain mill, which is a two parter:

the electric version at $269.99, or the non-electric version, which comes in at $395.95, considerably outclassing the $250 tool phenomenon.

There's the honey extractor: $245.00.

There's the water filter, also a two parter:

the Big Berkey, which comes in at waddya know... $250, or the Aquarain at $239.99.

There's the broadfork, a bargain at only $166.00.

There's the six row seeder I want that about doubles the tool phenomenon at $505.50, making up for any savings on the broadfork.

Don't forget the scythe, which will run at least $180 and must be tailored to the individual. Since there's about a foot difference in height between Jim and I, we'd each need our own.

Then, there are the really big ticket items like a cook stove, or solar, or a fancy high tunnel, and this doesn't even count the $250 tools I've already purchased like the milk machine, dehyrator, vitamix, stand mixer, and pressure canner.

This phenomenon verges on the uncomfortable brink of a new, green consumerism that's fast becoming fashionable in our society—because, dahling, green is the new black. I try to be cognizant of falling unaware into the yawning consumer abyss... well, not really yawning, but looming, or... lurking maybe, rising behind me like one of those giant venus fly traps in the new movie Journey to the Center of the Earth. (Which, by the way, look disturbingly like giant vaginas, but I'll refrain from doing the whole gendered reading of consumerism and venus fly traps.)

No worries now, though, as I've just provided Jim—my priceless tool—an accurate accounting of all the things on my wish list, so he'll be sure to nix them all as too expensive. Brendan Fraser's got nothin' on him.

Simple Living the Easy Way, Part IV

2008-07-28T06:30:00.002-05:00

To start bringing this series to a close, I'm going to come back around to discussing exactly what I mean by simple living the easy way. What I'm advocating is a mindful relationship with both the machines and the people whose labor we use and depend upon, a relationship based on awareness and out of which flows both gratitude and respect.

Simple. Basic. But not necessarily easy. Awareness needs to be cultivated in each small moment of the day with reminders of our indebtedness and embeddedness in the world around us. Central to this awareness needs to be an acknowledgment that we are not in control but in an ongoing partnership with a myriad of elements.

What I'd like to see is a world in which human labor is fairly valued, in which consumer goods are rare luxuries or investments in the future, in which the sense of entitlement so pervasive in our culture has given way to a gracious and humble acknowledgment of privilege instead of whining and pining for more.

I'd like to see us return to a world in which machines are valuable contributions to our labor rather than throw-away things to be replaced next year with something new, shiny, and a la mode. Down with the planned obsolescence and up with the small-town repair shop. Our throw-away culture with its cheap manufactured goods designed to break or become useless in a year needs to end, and a large part of that means a willingness to buy high-end tools that are designed for a lifetime of use, rather than low-balling and buying the cheapest version the big box store has to sell.

With that, too, would hopefully come a valuation of human labor, a return to craftsmanship and practical knowledge. Enough of the accountants and bankers and lawyers and stock brokers who've made such a mess. Let's start valuing real work with real money. Support the artisans and the farmers and not the MBAs and CEOs.

Sure, I'm biased in all of this, but I think our priorities have gotten totally out of whack in this culture, and I'm guessing most of my readers would agree. So, perhaps I'm just preaching to the choir here, but still I think these things are important to voice and reaffirm. We all need to sit down and do a personal accounting of our own priorities and how they fit in with a sustainable future. Those of us lucky enough to have money to spend, how are we spending it? Those of us lucky enough to have able bodies and minds, how are we using them?

Too many folks are out of touch with what goes into the most basic element of our survival: food. Most people don't even know what's in their food, never mind what it would take to make a real approximation of the things they eat without all the refinement and additives. And the really sad part is that most don't even care. Food security isn't even on the radar for most Americans, and if Katrina is any kind of lesson, they'll be wandering the streets in a disaster situation, looting the convenience stores until all the twinkies and chip bags and bottled liquid are gone wondering what the hell to do next.

So as much as I've tried to dismantle the idea of self-reliance, I'm now wanting to prop it back up with a somewhat different twist—intertwined with gratitude and respect.

Part of the gift self-reliance gives us is the realization of value and the understanding of labor. The idea of being able to go into a glaringly fluorescent grocery store open 24 hours a day and purchase a jar of jam off the shelves for just a couple bucks boggles my mind now that I understand the value and labor contained within one of my jars of jam.

Of course, five years ago I didn't give it a second thought—where else would jam come from but a grocery store? Because I was raised in a world where everything came from a store. Growing food and preserving it were what my people did in the Depression because they were too poor to do anything else. (Of course my maternal grandparents, both of whom grew up on farms, were fond of pointing out that they were also too poor to know anything different and they always had plenty to eat.)

The gift that my own journey towards self-reliance offers my children is the knowledge that everything need not come from a store. It demonstrates the amount of work that goes into growing the berries, harvesting the berries, and preserving the berries to make that tasty jam. But also there is the awareness that we did not grow the sugar that goes into those preserves and we did not make the electricity that pumps and heats our water. That awareness, in turn, generates gratitude for the luxury the big bag of sugar and the flow of electricity represent.

Of course, these kinds of things are just glimpses into the ideal that flickers on the cave of my brain, and my household only ever approximates this ideal, myself included... lest anyone think that I'm touting some kind of perfection or claiming to have it all figured out over here where the grass is greener. My kids vacillate between an amazing grasp of knowing where food comes from and what goes into producing it and falling into the typical consumer mindset of whining and pining. I vacillate between having my feet firmly planted on solid ground and wistfully admiring a pretty sweater worn by a CSA member, remembering a time when I spent money on hair and clothes, remembering my hands, which although never glamorous, didn't look as if they belonged to a mechanic.

Oh, sure, I could scapegoat our consumer culture, television, technology, whatever for this vain longing in myself and the consumer ennui of my children, but the dilemma is really about living with a foot in two different worlds and how we navigate that dilemma because, as I said in an earlier post, we can't live in isolation as if the entire world, such as it is, didn't exist.

So how do we straddle that fence between two such different worlds?

Well, personally, I don't want to straddle it. I want to redefine and keep more of my choices on my side of the fence, the part where I can actually have some effect. But I want to be able to do this in a way that respects how others around me want to define their side of the fence as well, and that's meant embracing some things that I might choose differently because after all, I'm choosing to spend my life with those I love on the same side of the fence.

Part of that redefinition includes, as I've said, the paradoxical relationship of independence and interdependence. By taking responsibility for such things as food, health, and education and becoming independent of elaborate social systems designed to replace our own brains with experts, governments, codes, and laws, half of which are designed to protect us from ourselves, or at the very least to keep us from thinking for ourselves, we become more capable of interacting from a place of personal empowerment. Through our own independence, we're more able to realize an interdependence among autonomous parties, lending individual strength to the larger whole. Gone is a servile dependence or blind acceptance that builds a community based on tyranny and ignorance.

So many of these ideas are easy to pay lip-service, or to ponder obsessively while performing manual labor in the field, for instance, but they're not always so easy to implement.

Like I said: Simple. Basic. But not necessarily easy.

Walking the walk for me has meant embracing the very foundation of self-reliance: liberty. Liberty as an ideal needs to apply to everyone, or it's not really liberty at all but just another form of dictatorship, however benevolent it may be. And it's that part of the American myth of self-reliance that I seek to root out and replace with gratitude and respect. It's that part that I think the founding fathers—idealists like Jefferson—got wrong because they couldn't quite imagine humanity extended to women, people of color, or children. The revolutionary ideals of equality were, unfortunately, nourished in the intellectual soil of the benevolent master, and the vestiges of those ideas continue to inform the current myths of self-reliance.

Like so many things in life, my thoughts in this series really can be boiled down to just a few cliches:

1) No man is an island entire of himself;

2) Live simply so that others may simply live;

3) Do unto others as you would have done to you (or better yet, as they would have done to them).

But sometimes those cliches are worth unpacking a bit because even though the journey to get there is a bit longer, the devil, as they say, is in the details, and it's only by taking the time to consider and understand the details that we can consider and know our selves. And in knowing the self and its relationship to the world around it, to all the things necessary to sustain the self, we begin to understand that there is no such thing as self-reliance but only an embedded and embodied self in a particular historical moment.

One Local Summer: Week 8

2008-07-27T10:51:00.004-05:00

Among other local meals this week, we enjoyed barbecue ribs, mixed beans, and country home fries made with our potatoes, onions, and peppers. All zero mile.

We also served a mostly zero mile menu for Emily's birthday party yesterday: roast turkey carved for sandwiches, slow-cooked pork shoulder, and homemade potato chips. Yummm. Sandwiches were served on bread made local to my in-laws who joined us for the celebration. There's just nothing quite as good as Jersey bread products.

Independence Days Week 13

2008-07-27T07:06:00.003-05:00

Not much to report this week between the rain, birthday activities (happy birthday Em!), visitors and holding the farm together while Jim was out of town. I was, however, lucky enough to have a couple of visitors willing to work for their supper, such that it was, so we knocked out the tomato trellising that desperately needed to be done down in the market garden. A huge thank you to Cindy and Jim!

Plant:

Nothing this week, but I will be jumping on the fall planting this coming week for sure.

Harvest:

tomatoes, basil, peppers, lettuce, mini onions, green onions, carrots, beans, dill, borage, summer squash, cucumbers, eggs, milk.

Preserve:

I made chevre and butter. Cindy, bless her, tried her best to cajole me into pressure canning with her on Friday, but it was more than I could handle this week. We made a pact that we would both use our new pressure canners for the first time before a month is out, so hopefully she'll hold me to it. My readers, too, are invited to encourage, harass, harangue, whatever, if I don't post by August 25th about my successful foray into the pressure canning world. Black beans, here I come!

Store:

Canning lids.

Prep:

Nothing this week.

Manage:

Trellised tomatoes and beans. Cleaned out and organized my kitchen pantry cabinet, making use of my half gallon canning jars for storing bulk grains and nuts.

Cook:

Nothing new.

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuce, beans, carrots, mini onions, green onions, summer squash, pickling cukes, Asian cukes, red new potatoes, dill, basil, borage, eggs.

Reduce:

This week's tip: drying plastic bags. My method of drying my reusable produce bags and ziploc bags takes advantage of the several glass vases I've acquired over the years. I keep these in the deep sill of my kitchen window behind the sink. They're pretty to look at (when not covered by plastic bags, that is) and convenient, but they also make perfect perches for drying bags of all sizes. They keep the air flowing inside the bag and also make use of the sunshine to help dry.

Learn:

All about my pressure canner, whose manual I'm reading cover to cover.

Finally, Some Sense

2008-07-23T21:11:00.004-05:00

According to a recent New York Times article, Texas governor Rick Perry has requested that the EPA requirements to add an everincreasing amount of ethanol to gas be relaxed:

Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel. Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.

“When you find yourself in a hole, you have to quit digging,” Mr. Perry said in an interview. “And we are in a hole.” His request for an emergency waiver cutting the ethanol mandate to 4.5 billion gallons, from the 9 billion gallons required this year and the 10.5 billion required in 2009, is backed by a coalition of food, livestock and environmental groups.

A decision is expected soon, though apparently the request has been met with lobbying from farmers and ethanol producers objecting to the freeze.

Here's to hoping that the EPA makes the sensible decision.

Independence Days Week 12

2008-07-20T06:02:00.006-05:00

Wow! We've been doing this for three months now. Hard to believe.

Last week I did 5 days of work in 3 in preparation for a weekend at the beach. My in-laws have a house on the Jersey shore, which we don't get to enjoy nearly as often these days because it's so hard to get away from the farm. While the idea behind the independence days challenge is to become more self-sufficient, the reality is that it's all too easy to become a slave to one's homestead. I weeded and harvested like mad just to get on top of things and be able to sneak away for 3 full days. Of course, this week has been spent playing catch up because the garden waits for no woman.

Plant:

Nothing this week. I'm on hiatus for one, maybe two weeks before fall planting begins in earnest. Which means that I've been focusing on clearing out space for that to happen, pulling many of the plants I've allowed to go to seed and yanking all the others that are just past their prime.

Harvest:

Lots this week. The first tomato—a lovely little sweet olive grape tomato that was quite tasty. Hopefully this means more on the way! The peppers, too, are just about in, along with the sweet corn.

Also lettuce, beets, green onions, garlic, mini onions, dill, basil, chives, last of the garlic, carrots, summer squash, mixed beans, slicing cukes, Asian cukes, pickling cukes, 100+ lbs of potatoes, eggs, milk, 39 broilers.

We also harvested the 15' x 60' test plot of hulless oats yesterday. They now reside on three pallets in my garage to finish drying before threshing. We're taking bets on how many oats we'll get. Jim thinks just a tiny little container. I'm guessing about a 1/4 bushel. Wanna play?

Preserve:

Seeds saved this week: cilantro, spinach, and radish. Leeks and chard aren't quite ready yet. Neither is the endive. I'm leaving the broccoli to go to seed and hopefully act as a trap crop for the flea beetles now that I've uncovered the eggplants.

Store:

39 broilers, garden seeds, shallots and garlic, though the garlic is all going for seed stock. (pouty face here)

Prep:

Picked up 3 small oil lamps, needles and safety pins (thanks to Sharon's recent post), and bamboo knitting needles for the girls. I also ordered some tomato clips from Johnny's thanks to a post over at Nita's blog, and I now seem to have a lifetime supply of those. Luckily, they're small and light, and so fit my criteria for storing. ;)

Our 25 lbs of red clover seed arrived this week for cover cropping after the potatoes. I'm still searching for a good bulk source of beet seeds to reseed the grain plot, which will enable the piggies to self harvest during the winter.

Ordered 75 slow growing broiler crosses for our fall batch. These guys are double breasted, typical meat birds, but are very healthy and active, unlike the industry standard bird, which grows way too fast. The slow growers take about 12 weeks as opposed to the 6 weeks for their industry counterparts. Yikes!

Manage:

Everything! The gardens are going crazy, and we've hit the stage in the year when it feels like we have about 5 different balls up in the air. Like I said, I have about one more week before I need to get the fall gardens going in a big way, so I'm trying to figure out where all that's going.

There's also the mundane stuff like cleaning all the feeders and waterers, moving the animals onto fresh pasture, filling the water barrels from our rain catch, etc. I realized that I often don't mention that kind of stuff.

I finally got into my bee hives again this week after a 2 week hiatus. Hive #2 is doing so much better after stealing the frame from Hive #1, and you'd never even know the difference in #1. They both have lots of honey stores, much of it capped. I'm hopeful that they'll go into the winter strong.

Cook:

Nothing new this week. Too much pressure!

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: mixed baby greens, carrots, beets, green onions, mini onions, summer squash, mixed beans, slicing cukes, Asian cukes, basil, dill, potatoes, eggs.

Bartered some raw milk for new kombucha cultures.

Reduce:

This week's tip is about how to store food in the fridge without resorting to plastic.

Besides having some lovely glass refrigerator dishes, both vintage pyrex and some newer Anchor-Hocking, I also use this little trick for covering bowls: just put a plate on top. Simple, huh?

It not only keeps the air out, but makes for a nice, stackable surface that saran wrap can't beat. Of course, this is such a simple, obvious solution that most of you probably thought of it long ago, but I do think it's a good one. This is some garlic olive oil for dipping bread, but I also find it useful for large bowls of rice and pasta and such.

I still use plastic, but far less often, and I'm careful to wash out the bags for reuse. I just haven't yet found a good solution for bulky items like waffles and pancakes. Oh, and I do love the repurposed yogurt and sour cream containers for freezer storage. But now that I have my pressure canner, all that may change! Woohooo.

Learn:

Still learning all about seed saving and small grain production. So much of this is just one grand experiment.

One Local Summer: Week 7

2008-07-19T06:18:00.002-05:00

This week, among other meals, we enjoyed a delicious fresh rotisseried chicken from our farm, mixed beans, small red new potatoes, salad with onion, cucumbers, grated Italian zucchini, and chevre cheese. The garlic in the sour cream and on the garlic bread was our own, and the bread was made locally to my in-laws whom we visited last weekend. The sour cream was store-bought, all else was zero mile but for the balsamic vinaigrette.

Simple Living the Easy Way, Part III

2008-07-17T07:38:00.005-05:00

So, we left off with the myth of self-reliance and the underlying guilt that I suspect fuels the perpetuation of that myth. The big question, as I see it, is why Western culture in general, but American culture more specifically, has at its center the idea of self-reliance as a moral virtue?

I would argue that the whole idea of the individual, independent or dependent, is a product of the Enlightenment and the colonial culture that went along with it. Prior to roughly the 18th century or so, "individual" wasn't a Western concept in the same way it is now. People were part of larger wholes: family, church, community. At the time when John Donne wrote his "No Man is an Island" meditation in 1624, death was an ever-present part of life, and community was integral to survival. People felt strongly their connection to and embeddedness in larger systems, and it's that sense of connection that Donne sought to convey:

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

As real property and the aristocracy began to erode and the middle class arose triumphant on the wave of colonial consumption in the 17 and 1800's, the idea of the self-made man—the individual as we have inherited the concept—was born. Philosophy and literature were heady with the infinite possibility presented by the self-made man, never mind the nagging little fact that he was made on the backs of women, children, and people of color who didn't get to self-define.

Well, there was a whole lot more history in there, but that's the general gist of things. Writers like Locke and Hobbes paved the way for thinkers like Wordsworth over in England and his Romantic counterparts Thoreau and Emerson over in America decades later, who eventually gave way to Whitman, radical individualist and author of "Song of Myself," a celebration of that particular brand of rugged American individualism. Over on the continent, Friedrich Nietzsche was extolling his very own version of radical individualism in works like Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil.

Radical individualism, then, is a huge part of Western consciousness, built over centuries of political and social thought. So, too, is it an important part of the American dream and a deeply rooted meme in the American psyche. Think Marlboro Man. Only, the Marlboro Man didn't have a wife or children, did he?

No. What we get instead is a very different version of homesteading independence when families are involved, but still with the rugged patriarchal figurehead firmly at the helm. Think Pa Ingalls, who moves his family from one place to another in search of his own illusive self-reliant masculinity only to be thwarted at nearly every turn by the government, the weather, and just plain bad luck—not to mention haunted at the margins by rebellious natives. Maybe a more admirable figurehead is Mr. Wilder who discourses persuasively with Almanzo on the true freedom enjoyed by the self-reliant farmer versus the servile dependence of the businessman in town. But he, too, even in his level-headedness represents the benevolent master in all his glory.

What I'm seeking here—both in this long-winded post and in my life on our homestead—is not a replication of that kind of authoritarian self-reliance that depends upon the unacknowledged work of others but rather a kind of interdependence that seeks its model outside the pervasive myths of our culture, leaving guilt and force behind.

What does that model look like, you might ask?

Well, that's a really good question to which I can only respond that, for me, that model is unfolding day by day... in the thousand little steps of the journey and the thousand little ways in which I respond to those around me: partner, children, animals, plants, soil, creatures, earth, universe.

Some moments are better than others, and I work in harmony with the life forces I share this independence with, following a mutual path of least resistance and least harm. Other moments, I lose my way and find myself resorting to force. But something—usually the utter ineffectuality of trying to force a particular outcome—jolts me awake to a more mindful way of relating and I come back to the knowledge that I am only a very small part of what holds this self-reliance together even as I am, paradoxically, a huge part of it.

Independence Days Week 11

2008-07-12T08:00:00.003-05:00

Plant:

3rd round of summer squash, 3rd round of beans, two more batches of lettuce

Harvest:

Lettuces, carrots, mini bulbing onions, green onions, garlic scapes, dill, basil, beets, broccoli, kohlrabi, summer squash, pickling cukes, bush beans, eggs, milk.

Preserve:

7 lbs butter, sorrel seeds.

Store:

another gallon of drinking water

Prep:

Ordered pressure canner, butter crocks, cover crops,

Manage:

Weeded gardens, continue to eat down last year's stores.

Cook:

Made a double cream chevre.

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuces, beets, end of kohlrabi, carrots, summer squash, beans, mini bulbing onions, green onions, garlic scapes, dill, eggs.

Reduce:

Besides the usual, I thought I'd try to share a tip or trick that has helped me in my reduction journey. These are ongoing and often things I've been doing for a while, and maybe folks have already thought of these long ago, but I thought I'd post about them anyway.

Tip: In order to help reduce our hot water usage, I put red electrical tape around the hot faucet handles to remind us to grab the cold instead of hot for small tasks. Obviously, this only works if you have separate handles for hot and cold water, but for us, it was a helpful visual reminder to break the habit of reaching for the hot.

Learn:

I continue to read and learn about cover crops and seed saving.

One Local Summer: Week 6

2008-07-10T07:07:00.006-05:00

Just to get off my zero mile high horse for a bit... because OLS is largely about showcasing local foodsheds:

We don't produce our own beef here on the farm (though with the new cow, that will hopefully be changing in the next couple of years), so we buy it from two different farms down the road. Well, one farm is up the road: Groff's Content grass fed beef. The other farm, Legacy Manor, is down the road, closer, and more convenient, but we wanted to try both. I know both farmers, and I'd highly recommend beef from either, though LM grains their beef while also pasturing. The pure grass fed beef definitely has a gamier flavor that may take some getting used to. Personally, I like them both.

This week we enjoyed our first red potatoes. Yay! After the drought last year, I can't tell you how much we've been looking forward to these babies!

We also had broccoli and the first of our green beans, together with a salad of mixed greens, onions, and grated zucchini and balsamic vinaigrette; herb focaccia; marinated beef kabobs from Groff's Content; and a garlic herb butter to top the potatoes. All from our farm.

Yummmm.

Here's to more potatoes! The fingerlings will come out to play next week.

And while Touch the Earth Farm is definitely part of the Northwestern Maryland food shed, I think it's also useful for folks to see how much of their food they could actually produce themselves with just a little land and a lack of restrictive covenants. We have 5.25 acres—not very much by farming standards, but plenty in terms of creating a zero mile food shed. Get to know a few other local farmers, and voila! You've some great local eats. Even an acre can produce an excellent veggie crop, eggs, maybe a bit of goat's milk, and a few broilers to boot for those who eat meat.

Some good resources for farming on small holdings:

Path to Freedom

The Modern Homestead

Independence Days Week 10

2008-07-06T06:10:00.006-05:00

Plant:

Sunflowers and nasturtium.

Transplanted: yarrow, feverfew, motherwort, mullein, evening primrose, bergamot, wormwood, valerian, saltwort, salad burnet, joe pye, skullcap, arnica, woad, horehound, marshmallow.

Harvest:

Raspberries, black raspberries, lettuce, carrots, zucchini, squash, onions, garlic, shallots, broccoli, kohlrabi, beets, dill, oregano, basil, rosemary, chives, eggs, milk and our first potatoes—yay!

Preserve:

7 half pints black raspberry jam, 20 half pints raspberry jam, 7.5 lbs butter.

Store:

Nothing this week, unless you count the preserves.

Well, not really "storing" per se, but we did have two goatie babies born on the farm this week, and we lucked out with little girls, which means more dairy animals on the farm. They'll be keepers, so it's kinda like storing. Yeah, it's a stretch, but I got to include gratuitous baby farm animal photos.

Prep:

Jim made more bullets for hunting, built a more solid backboard for target shooting, and sighted in his deer rifle.

Manage:

Trellised the cucumbers with cattle panels, and they're much happier. Continue to monitor plants for insect pests: squash bugs, borers, japanese beetles, potato beetles, bean beetles.

Harvested garlic and put it up to cure before braiding. I'll likely replant most of it this fall, as I'm trying to build up my seed stock this year. Garlic is sooo expensive to buy.

Cook:

Raspberry jam. I made the black raspberry last year, but this was my first time making the red raspberry.

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuces, kohlrabi, carrots, onions, beets, dill, chives, eggs.

Finally purchased hair care and toiletries from local, organic company Terressentials after using up all the various little bottles of stuff around the house.

Reduce:

Continue to compost, reuse plastic containers, reduce electricity usage, use reusable shopping bags, reduce driving, reduce reliance on grocery stores, harvest rainwater, etc.

Learn:

Researched more on grains, pressure canners, and local coffee roasters.

One Local Summer: Week 5

2008-07-05T17:39:00.008-05:00

We had some friends stop in for dinner on their way home from dropping their daughter off at camp in Central Pennsylvania this week, and we enjoyed a delicious homegrown meal.

Wine: Boordy Vineyards Chardonnay.

Roast heritage turkey from our farm; couscous with mini bulbing onions, basil and garlic from our garden and chevre from our milk; salad greens, carrots, onions, and kohlrabi from our garden topped with a balsamic vinaigrette. The bread is an Italian bread local to my in-laws and brought down on a visit—ain't nothin' like Jersey bread.

For dessert we enjoyed fresh raspberries from our farm, whipped cream from our milk, and fresh shoofly and peach pie from a local Pennsylvania market where our friends were visiting. As far as I can recall, this was the first time I've had shoofly pie, and I'm a total convert. Yummmm. The earthy density of shoofly was the perfect foil to the raspberries and just-barely-sweetened whipped cream. The photo isn't very appetizing because, as you can see, I've already heartily tucked into it as I remembered to take a picture. Ummm, and yes, I'll admit to having three slices of that pie, though in my defense, they were little personal pan pies and tiny slices.

*Note to self: must learn to make shoofly pie.

WALL-E Achieves What Kunstler Failed to Do:

2008-07-01T17:15:00.007-05:00

To paint a moving characterization of a dystopic future, that is.

**WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD**

Although garbage rather than peak oil is the downfall du jour of Pixar's latest movie, the messages of environmental disaster, human greed and hubris, and the end of the world as we know it are admirably represented.

My generous guy Sam, who made the most money from our recent yard sale, decided what he really wanted to do with all that cash was to take the girls and I to see the movie he's been awaiting. Yup, all that marketing hype hit home for him, and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by our cinema experience.

Well, pleasant may not be the best description, as this may have been the darkest children's movie I've ever seen. In a nutshell, humans shit up the planet so badly that it's no longer habitable. But, with the typical human hubris, the multinational robotics corporation BNL, whose CEO is now president of the world, turns to technology to save humanity and the planet—not to mention make a few bucks on the side, I'm sure.

Humans get to go on a fabulous, fun filled space cruise for five years while a fleet of WALL-Es— the lovable little mobile trash compactor—stays behind to clean up our mess.

Unfortunately, things don't quite work out that way. Best laid plans and all. And the movie opens to WALL-E tooting around a trash filled planet, still dutifully making garbage bricks and using them to build sky scraper sculptures, eerie mirrors to the abandoned buildings all around him, acting as monuments to a long-gone culture of consumption and waste.

WALL-E is a lonely little robot with only a twinkie eating cockroach for company until a space ship arrives with a fancy, shiny egg shaped probe named EVE. Robot love ensues, which is sweet and suitably endearing, but of course, not without some trouble along the way.

As EVE fulfills her directive on earth, she clamps back into a shiny egg and calls home. WALL-E follows EVE into space, an adventure which finds the remains of the human race still cruising along 700 years later. Only now, they're all so fat they can no longer walk unsupported, not to mention the bone density loss from a lifetime in space, and they spend all their time floating in robotic versions of those little electric scooters that resemble chaise lounges, drinking their food from robot-delivered super size cups, chatting and surfing the web on virtual computer screens that float in front of their faces, blinding them to the real world all around. Only by falling off the wagon, or being knocked of by WALL-E to be more precise, do the people begin to see what's right in front of them: stars, pools, each other. As my kids observed, there are babies and adults, but few kids on the ship, and if the people never touch each other, how are the babies made?

Good question, as the movie pans to a nursery filled with bassinets and virtual mobiles in a scene that rivals any good sci-fi portrayal of mass body production and corporate brainwashing. Pixar's movie is a pint-size Matrix, pitting man against machine with some very dark undertones.

I'll skip the total spoilers to say that the ship's captain rises to the occasion, managing to haul himself to his own two feet and take the first small steps forward for the new humanity, albeit with the kind of grace seen only in sumo wrestling matches. The writing on the wall as the final credits roll gives hope, definitely, but also the clear indication that humanity is starting from scratch. The earth will heal, human bodies will get stronger as they rediscover labor and meaning in both the soil and each other. Even if pizza plants never materialize, viewers are left to hope that eventually all the ingredients to make a pizza may, indeed, be possible.

While WALL-E may not be the wake up call the world needs (and oh, the irony of the pre-movie marketing consumption!), it does offer wonderful fodder for conversation and a place to begin talking about sustainability with kids, though hopefully without the scapegoating of fat people that this movie comes dangerously close to doing. It also does a really great job of raising difficult and painful ideas within a relatively safe space, which might... just might offer adults the opportunity to consider conservation and sustainability on a wider scale. MAUS it is not, but the movie achieves a similar effect of demystifying collective denial by using innocent images of cartoons and cute little robots.

Fuzzy Little Doelings

2008-06-30T14:20:00.004-05:00

Latte, our Nigerian Dwarf goat, finally gave birth today to two little doelings. Yay! We are very, very excited. We'll be keeping them both. Both Emily and Julia are thrilled, but Sam's a bit put out that we have so many girls around the farm.

Simple Living the Easy Way, Part II*

2008-06-29T07:21:00.000-05:00

Someone brought up an interesting point about guilt in a comment: "I for one would have no guilt from having machines to help me conserve time, especially if I was able to get off the national electrical grid.... With enough solar panels, a wind machine, and a couple good banks of batteries, you could get off the grid and rid yourself of any guilt you might be feeling."

I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, that one might identify what I'm talking about as "guilt" as well as the psychology of that interpretation, and second, it nicely illustrates the paradox I was getting at in the first part of this series: that we are dependent in our very independence.

And really, those two points of interest are intertwined, for it's that sense of guilt, I think, that perpetuates the insistent denial of our own dependence, that willful erasure of our dependence in romanticized notions of self-reliance.

Sure, it goes back to that whole "no man is an island" kind of thing, but I think there's a complexity here that's worth exploring a bit to see why Donne's words resonate even today. What does it mean to be self-reliant? Is there such thing as an independent self or is that a myth, a story we tell ourselves? And if it's a story, then why is it such an important story?

And to come back around to the guilt for a minute, why is it that we associate using one kind of machine with guilt, but then turn around and believe that our guilt would be expiated if the same thing were powered by something made by different machines? I'm not trying to pick on Tim here; rather, I think he reveals a sticking point of trying to think through these tough issues: that is, the moral attachment to a particular kind of machine use.

Why is one machine better than another? I think, too, this is what folks are getting at when they try to get us to think more critically about embedded energy costs of things like solar and wind and even buying local. Solar is far from zero carbon, so why should a machine powered by solar be inherently better than one powered by connection to the grid?

In large part, it's the moral value we attach to solar, which I would argue has an awful lot to do with the difficulty of calculating the embedded energy of photovoltaics. Some figures place the embedded energy payback for solar at 4 years: in other words, it takes 4 years for a solar panel to produce as much energy as it cost to produce the panel itself. So 1/5th of the energy produced during the solar panel warranty period (generally 20 years, some are 25) comes from fossil fuels. One can't even make the argument that this is a one-time energy input for a lifetime of energy independence, what with the batteries and inverters required for an on-demand system, most of which have a lifespan of 5-10 years. In fact, the embedded energy costs of those aren't even factored into the 4 year recovery period for the silicon cell panels themselves, best I can tell.

See how this all becomes very complex very quickly? Once we factor in the embedded costs of batteries and inverters, not to mention the waste issue once they're done and the ecological impact of that, the equation becomes far more difficult. Solar, wind, hydro, coal, nuclear, natural gas—they all have their advantages and pitfalls. And it all depends on how we use them and to what extent. None is a free ride.

This kind of complexity is the problem with all those online carbon footprint calculators or with the kinds of calculations out there about what a meat-based meal, for instance, costs in terms of carbon. All burgers are not created equal, just as all lifestyles are not created equal. Is my use of a bread machine more or less justifiable than some urban socialite's use of one? If so, why?

Because of the whole lifestyle picture or not at all. But how does one calculate an entire lifestyle?

By the same token, however, that urban socialite could still have a lower carbon impact than I, depending upon how one wanted to calculate it. Living in a small apartment, not being home much of the day due to work and running in fashionable circles, being able to walk to all the great restaurants where cooking is being done on a mass scale, which arguably conserves resources, she might have an ostensibly lower carbon footprint than my meat-raising, meat-eating, rural, homeschooling, homesteading household. So, how does one account for that? Is it more eco-friendly to be a single urban dweller?

Maybe I need to just keep planting a boat-load of trees every year to offset my household's usage? Do I get carbon credits for farming organically and sustainably, for having carbon-sequestering pastures, for having self-sustaining garden inputs? Do I get carbon credits for feeding more families than just mine? Do I get carbon credits for all those institutions we avoid like school and doctors and pharmaceuticals? Is my electrical usage even comparable to a childless urban apartment dwelling couple, and how do they calculate the embedded energy costs that make their low-impact lifestyle possible?

So the Luddites in the crowd are probably nodding along at this point, as all this seems to reinforce the argument for moving away from energy intensive living altogether. And I think this really is a large part of the answer—going low-tech as much as possible.

But again, I'd argue that even this line of thinking operates under a certain kind of disillusionment that there is such a thing as moving away from energy intensive living. As I claimed in my earlier post, low tech is really just another form of alternative energy: exchanging human energy for electrical energy. Energy has to come from somewhere: it's the basic law of conservation of energy—you can't get more energy out than you put in. (Though we're awfully fond of inventing stories about such magic. And why not? That would really be independent living with impunity.)

Even the tools required for manual labor need to be mined, manufactured, and moved, so they have embedded energy costs as well. There's a treadmill effect of certain kinds of manual labor, too, that often gets ignored. Things like plowing or hauling that require the work of large draft animals necessitate the feeding of those animals, generating more plowing and planting and harvesting that need to be done just to support those animals. Unless of course one relies on off-farm feed inputs, in which case we're right back where we started: dependence on others to support our chosen lifestyle.

So what am I getting at? What am I advocating here? Am I really suggesting that we should just throw up our hands and use electricity no matter what the source?

No. What I'm really trying to do is to problematize the idea of self-reliance altogether because I think it's a notion that serves a kind of holier-than-thou perspective when really we are all complicit, all making trading offs and setting priorities no matter what our chosen path. And I believe that most often, these trade offs are what enable us to support our continued belief in the illusion of self-reliance in the first place.

Which brings me back around to the ideas of guilt and why the self-reliance story is such an important one to tell ourselves, which I'll try to explore more fully in my next post in this series.

*Just for the record, Jim really wanted me to title this post "Complex Living the Hard Way." Silly man.

Independence Days Week 9

2008-06-29T04:51:00.001-05:00

Things are slowing down a bit... well, not really slowing down, but I felt like I could relax this week without losing the gardens in a sea of weeds thanks to all the help I received last week. We've gotten some good rain this week, though, so there will be a whole new crop of weeds waiting for me in the coming days.

Plant:

Got all my winter squash and dry beans in this week: Cinderella pumpkins, acorn squash, butternut squash, Seminole pumpkins, sweet meat squash, winter luxury pie pumpkins, marina di chioggia pumpkins; sulfur baking bean, Taylor's dwarf horticultural bean, black valentine bean, and flagrano bean. Planted calendula, and replanted the gourdseed corn, which didn't germinate worth a darn. Hopefully all the rain we've gotten this week will give them a good start. The gourdseed corn and dry beans are already popping.

Harvest:

Lettuce, kale, chard, onions, kohlrabi, hakurei turnips, carrots, broccoli, citrus thyme, dill, oregano, rosemary, basil, raspberries, eggs, milk.

Preserve:

Almost 5 lbs butter, froze 24 oz blueberries.

Store:

Olive oil, snack crackers, pine nuts, 5 gallons drinking water.

Prep:

Saved seed from chives and green onions. Put up our pool, which also doubles as a 4,000 gallon cistern. The plan is to leave it up, covered, year round.

Manage:

Organized larder and pantry again, as I have a tendency to just dump bags and boxes in the room when they come in if I don't have time to unload and put away. I still need to get some kind of storage system going for the grains.

Weeded in the market garden: found the peppers again; tomatoes are an ongoing battle. Tied tomatoes into trellises. Pulled the remainder of the turnips to get ready for more mini onions, and pulled the peas where pole beans are already popping.

Checked on bees again. Hive #1 is so strong—plenty of honey, still mostly uncapped, both capped and uncapped brood, eggs. Hive #2 is still struggling to draw out the frames I moved into the center last week. Some eggs, some uncapped brood in center frame, but not much. I pulled one of the still mostly undrawn frames and switched it for a frame of brood in Hive #1. Hopefully that will give Hive #2 a bit of a boost.

Cook:

Nothing new this week.

Add:

CSA delivery to 10 families: lettuces, kale, chard, mini onions, kohlrabi, hakurei turnips, citrus thyme, rosemary, oregano, dill, raspberries.

Reduce:

I've used up all my yogurt containers for seedlings (they've now all been bleached and put away for use again for next year) and have just used up all my sour cream/ ricotta type containers for storing butter. So, I'm now soliciting containers from CSA members, family and friends, helping to keep their plastic out of the waste stream as well. Most of these containers are not recyclable where we live, so keeping them out of the trash is important.

Learn:

Still learning about grains in my test plot. The naked oats are doing well, but now I'm trying to figure out how the heck to harvest them, so if anyone has any experience with that, please share. In the plot here from left to right are naked oats, quinoa, gourdseed corn, burgandy amaranth, popcorn, huazontle, dry beans and winter squash.

One Local Summer: Week 4

2008-06-28T06:01:00.005-05:00

This week is a transition week here at the farm as we move into the very beginnings of summer's bounty.

This meal features pesto-chevre fettuccine (no the pasta's still not mine—I'm lame, I know) with pesto from the freezer, but sprinkled with the season's very first fresh basil trimmings. Yummm!

The chevre in both the pasta and the salad is homemade with our own milk. The grilled pork tenderloin is from one of our Tamworths, and the salad combines our salad greens, mini bulb onions, and hardboiled eggs from our hens, topped with a homemade balsamic vinaigrette. The bread is a homemade flat bread topped with garlic and olive oil.

Zero mile but for: garlic (coming soon though!), bulk pine nuts, flour, pasta, and vinaigrette ingredients.

Oh, and ummmm.... I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but yes, that is my plate full of all that food featured in all these photos, not my husband's or some other reasonably large individual's. And sometimes it's so tasty I even have seconds. Hey, growing all that food works up a serious appetite!