Rutabaga

Out with the old....

And on to something new!

Seems my heart hasn't been in this endeavor for a while, and I also seem to be hopeless at anything requiring regular input, i.e., a blog. So I've been working on a new project, which will focus on food security in the context of edible gardening, food storage, neighborhood cooperation, and all that good stuff.

With all the time spent outdoors these days it's not up and running yet, but I'll post a link here when it is, if you'd like to take a peek.

In the meantime, thanks for stopping by, and hope you're enjoying the sunshine!

Power to the City People!

If you can find this book, and you live in a small space and want to grow your own food, buy it! I think this is the top small-space permaculture/food-raising book I own. Nothing fancy, no photographs or glossy pages, just good, old-fashioned gardening know-how and advice. I was drawn first to the cover, then to the title (can't resist a People's anything, really) and then to my delight I realized that the authors were the egg farmers we bought our fresh eggs from way back in the early nineties at the groovy vegetarian cooperative restaurant I was working in at the time.

Bill and Helen Olkowski's style is friendly and straightforward. For years, they raised a good portion of their own food in a small lot in Berkeley. Complete with chickens and rabbits, they really experimented with getting the most out of a tiny plot and share their successes and failures with us here.

Find it through Amazon here.

April in Dunsmuir

Whew! How fast time flies in spring. Busy, busy, everywhere. Trying to get the rest of the food forest planted, and avoiding the computer like the plague. Wondering where I'm going, if anywhere, with this little venture here. Getting ready for a big blog makeover-redo, and realizing that I don't want to spend more time staring at a screen. So I haven't been. Which has been great, low-key, and affords more time in the garden.

So for now, a few snaps of spring unfolding in the canyon:

The Klamath plums are the first to bloom. Mesmerizing, especially as the sun sets.

The Ladies are back, and oddly, feeding at the plum tree. I'd never seen butterflies on the fruit trees before.

Happy, happy chickens this time of year.

Lots and lots of seed-planting, and sending some out into the world to start new gardens.

And lots and lots of trees & shrubs. From One Green World, Forest Farm, and Raintree Nursery. This has been keeping my plate full for over a month. Earthworks aplenty still need to happen before the hedgerow goes in.

Speaking of trees, our Pink Lady apple we planted (for the third time--ahem) six years ago finally popped. Fortunately it was during the good spell of weather and was covered in tiny little pollinators.

Goodies from the garden here & there. Greens, peas popping up, flowering kale amidst the gung-ho parsley, and the first spearmint harvest.

Lastly, a little something to brighten up the inside. Violets, and my other favorite flower, forget-me-nots. Which liven up even the dreariest of fickle spring days.

So, what's happening in your corner of the world right now?

'Tis the season

Time for planting and sowing, time to watch the greenery reappear.

Planted my first soil blocks this year; while I think they will work germination is proving to be much slower than in my usual seed-starting mix, but we shall see how they turn out. Fingers crossed!

Broccoli is always happy to put on a show right from the start.

  

Like underwater lily pads. Nasturtiums are so tasty.

Oh, violets.

The parsley, chives, and daikons are coming on strong.

Baby succulents to brighten things up a bit.

Sidewalk salads....nutrition-packed miner’s lettuce and chickweed are greening up the whole darn town. Love it!

Hello Spring! We’ve been waiting for you.

Adaptation

In a sluggish economy

Inflation, recession hits the land of the free

Standing in unemployment lines

Blame the government for hard times

We just get by however we can

We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan!

--Circle Jerks

For some reason, that song has been getting stuck in my head more and more lately. Could it be that the punk anthem so appropriate under the Reagan regime has only become even more fitting for our times?

Never-ending? I wouldn't count on it.

Soup lines, free loaves of bread, five pound blocks of cheese--Social Security running out on you and me--these are the types of scenarios being discussed in the latest Adapting in Place class taught by Sharon and Aaron this month. (You can follow along on their blogs, if you’re into that sort of thing.)

So why are we adapting? What do we have to adapt to? Everything’s fine, right? The government's gonna fix it, just you wait, we got our man in there now. Well, unfortunately, there’s that pesky little bugger called peak oil and oh, let's not forget climate change, now, shall we? We’re already seeing the dire consequences of lessened snowpack and lack of precipitation here in California. The nation’s salad bowl may be out of dressing. (Although the very existence of agriculture in a region with no water is a problem to begin with, but that's another discussion.)

And how many people do you know who have lost their homes or jobs? Sure, there's a little tightening in the economy right now but it will pass, right? My ipod will drown out those whiners who say otherwise. Lemme at my cheeseburger.

But the truth is, this is just the beginning of a major shift in The Way We Will Be Living in times to come. So what's a good scout to do? Be prepared, of course! And what if nothing happens and everything returns to the status quo? Well, you'll be making less trips to the grocery store and will have damn good homegrown salad. You'll be better insulated against those boring ol' common disasters like job loss and ice storms. You might even like getting to know your neighbors. To me, it's really a matter of using the precautionary principle. Plan for the worst and if the worst doesn't come, what harm is there in that?

Adapting in place takes the notion of preparing for the power down to a lower energy life and applies it to your current situation, where you are right now. Sure, lots of us dream of the big farm with family and friends and big fat walls of cob and solar panels and our own biodiesel generator. Or whatever. But the reality is, that most of us won't be able to achieve all those notions just now, and the best bet is to stay put and start where you are, imperfections be damned.

So off we go, one bag of beans at a time, one corn seed at a time, one water barrel at a time, trying to make the best of a tenuous situation. 'Cause when it starts flyin', we all gotta duck. Doobiddy doowop say what, yeah?

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Why Adapt in Place?

Another post on the subject

Now you can get it stuck in your head:

The Java Jive

In attempting the eat local challenge, many folks choose to keep an item or two on their lists that come from afar, as a comfort item, something they just can't live without just yet. And for a lot of us, that item is coffee. The idea is to try and keep it to locally roasted, organic, fair trade. But the question has been raised: is Fair Trade really fair? Or just another marketing tactic like USDA Organic? To those in the know, the coffee we buy with a (Transfair certified) Fair Trade label may not be that much better for the individual farmers than “regular” coffee.

As my roaster friend Keith explains, much of what is marketed as Fair Trade is negotiated by farming co-ops; these co-ops may get a higher price per pound for their beans but the money is not necessarily transferred to the farmers who grow the coffee. What might be a better choice, is a newer option sometimes called Direct Trade.

Direct Trade coffees cut out the middle man. The roasters, who usually visit the coffee growers throughout the year, buy directly from the farmer at a price that is generally well above the Fair Trade levels. They also seek out coffees of excellence. Where Fair Trade doesn't necessarily indicate quality, Direct Trade almost always does.

Are these more expensive for the consumer? You bet. But as Keith points out, even at 20 dollars a pound you can brew a cup for 44 cents. Not so bad when you look at it that way, is it?

Good for the growers, and good for our taste buds. If you’re gonna drink it, this might just be the way to go.

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Learn more about "Relationship Coffees" (and grab a pound or two, while you’re at it):

Intelligentsia, Chicago, IL

Counter Culture Coffee, Raleigh, NC

Stumptown Roasters, Portland, OR

Or buy your own beans and roast at home:

Sweet Marias, Oakland, CA carries Cup of Excellence beans.

Plantgeekery: Sweet Violets

Have I mentioned my undying love and adoration for violets yet? No? Well, now I have.

I mean, what's not to like? Fragrant, tasty, beautiful, flowers under a foot of snow....I really can't believe some folks actually consider these beauties weeds.

Along with robins and torrential rain, violets are one of the very first signals of impending spring. In some places, they bloom all winter long, and will happily wait under a blanket of snow for weeks until the sun returns. Violets not only serve as decorative dots of cheer in your early garden, but have several other (mostly forgotten) uses, as well.

The flowers can be candied, honeyed, or enjoyed in a vase. The young leaves are excellent in salads before the rest of the greens get going. And they provide a good dose of vitamin C, too.

Along with other species in the Viola genus, sweet violets also have medicinal properties. (See? They just keep getting better.) Long used for making superior cough syrups, violets contain a soothing mucilage and are especially suited for children. They have also been used to treat oral cancers.

The leaves make an excellent healing poultice or salve, as well. For everyday scrapes and cuts, just mash or chew up the leaves and apply them to the surface of the skin, or a compress can be made out of the tea. Make an herbal oil out of the freshly dried plant and add it to your homemade salve.

Being of woodland origin, violets prefer some shade in their daily diet, but can handle full sun in cooler areas. They appreciate a good drink, and are prime candidates for some of those shady, drippy spots near the faucet. They will spread like strawberries, via above-ground runners, which is always a bonus--no work! You can transplant the babies or leave them where they are. A strange thing about violets: the flowers we enjoy are not the seed-producing parts of the plant. These come later, in the form of barely noticeable, funny little lumpy green things that are actually closed (or cleistogamous, if you want to get fancy) flowers, which form seeds inside. When ripe, these flowers burst and your yard is now even more violaceous.

The name violet is said to come from a Greek myth in which Zeus had become enamored of King Argos's daughter, Io. Concerned that his wife Hera would find out about his love affair, he turned Io into a white heifer. When she wept, her tears were transformed into sweet violet blossoms only she could eat. Romantic, no?

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Wanting more?

Canyon Creek Nursery has a drool-worthy selection of sweet violet plants, from singles to more tender Parmas. I bought several from them years ago and they are all happily spreading and co-mingling in the garden. Oh no, it looks like they are no longer offering mail-order plants, but apparently plan to resume selling violets in the next couple of years.

Here you can find the entry on violets from Mrs. M. Grieve's classic, A Modern Herbal .

Gearing up

Yes, it's upon us. Despite the snow, gardening season is here, and what better way to occupy our time during these last stormy moments but to take pencil and paper in hand, and make some plans. Turn dreams into reality, and realize our limitations. Reality check.

This month I've been taking Sharon and Aaron's Sustainable Garden Design class, which has forced me to get down & dirty in my planning and organizing tactics. Make a garden project notebook. Measure the property. Draw up some plans. Evaluate the site's strengths and its problems. Things I have started and not finished a thousand times.

Fortunately, for the sake of this fast-paced class, I had already completed some of the preliminaries. But I am now finding it immeasurably helpful to actually move forward with this work, to scratch out all the little details of our property on one big map, to collect all those planning notes and garden journal archives and seed-starting tables into one cohesive unit to refer to and work in. Little things, it seems, but I can already feel a lightening, an "aha!" of learning where we are right now and starting to figure out where we're going. Grounding.

Having a better idea of where we are right now, my goals for this year are coming easily into view. So far, my plans are:

• To start more seeds than I need (not usually a problem) and actually take care of them all, then distribute the extras around to people like a crazed plant lady.
• To stuff more food in corners of my yard heretofore unused for the purpose, overcoming obstacles like access to water and poor soils.
• To create as much water storage on site as possible, in the soils and in containers, and create a plan for the ultimate water storage system.
• To use as much greywater as we can on the garden, bucket by bucket if need be.
• To ask my neighbor if I can garden in his yard, which has the most fantastic aspect and layout but is completely unused. (This year I will really do this!)
• To start a neighborhood food project, getting as many people/gardens into production as we can. (Kind of like this one.)
• To look into vacant city-owned properties and seeing what can be done to create a larger scale food forest for the whole town.

Of course, there are more mundane goals on the list, you know, fix this, plant that, design there, but these are all the biggies. It's nice to have a plan, for a change, rather than vague ideas of what I'd like to accomplish. Getting all this practical business down first is oddly motivating. I highly recommend it. (Check out Sharon and Aaron's blogs for their February posts on the topic; there's a lot there to get you started!)

Now, back to the business of seed-starting we go...

Cheesy goodness

What does one do when a friend offers up some out-of-date raw milk from her place of work? Too sour for the kids to drink, but still good food, the answer’s easy: make cheese.

Cheesemaking is a project I’ve been wanting to delve into for some time, but I still haven’t made it past the yogurt cheese stage, and more recently, farmer’s cheese. To make farmer’s cheese out of either goat (you get chèvre) or cow’s milk requires very little time and basically no skills. (If you can simmer & strain, you’ve got it made). Now, if I actually had to pay for the milk, I’m not sure if it would be cost-effective, but if you or someone you know has a dairy animal, or you have a friend in the it's-going-out-of-date-do-you-want-it? profession, then by all means, it’s a great way to use up what would otherwise be thrown away.

(1. milk 2. curds forming 3. finished cheese)

The technique is simple: add a teaspoon of salt to a gallon of milk (you can adjust the recipe to suit the quantity of milk you have on hand), place in a pot over medium-low heat, and wait for the bubbles to appear. (This isn’t exact, either. I just walked into the kitchen to a roiling, frothing, steaming pot of milk and it’s still ok, but the bottom started to stick. Oops. Definitely stir.) Take it off the heat, add the juice of one lemon (about four tablespoons) and let it sit for several minutes until it starts to curdle. Then line a strainer with cheesecloth or a clean towel, put it over a large container, and pour it on through. You get quite a lot of whey, which can be used for soaking grains & beans or fed to the chickens. Once it’s all drained, squeeze the remaining liquid out of the curds and place into a container and into the fridge for storage. 

You end up with a cheese that’s similar to ricotta, but more lumpy like cottage cheese. I’ve used it in a baked pasta dish (a kind of lazy-man’s lasagne), where it was the cheap-o understudy for the usual ricotta. Sprinkling on salads or tacos or folded into omelets are other ideas. It even swings both ways; use it as a dessert cheese or in baking. You can mix it up, too: add chives, pepper, herbs, nuts, whatever your heart desires, and you’ve got custom cheese. It’s easy-cheesy.

Sounds like a good idea to me...

So many excellent choices. So many great names in sustainable food growing policy. Some well-known, some not. What a great day it would be were this to actually come to fruition. Ditch the lawn, grow some grub...now that's good policy.

White House Farmer

Inspired by Michael Pollan's call for a White House farmer, a couple of folks have put up a website, gathered nominations, and are now holding a vote for who should be the first to hold that title, were it to come into existence. The results will be forwarded to President Obama for consideration. Hey, the White House chef needs something to cook, doesn't he?

Of cabbages and kings

(Ok, so there are no kings in this post, but there is a cabbage.)

For our food storage homework this weekend, Sharon encouraged us to do a little food preserving. So I decided that it was time to finally get that cortido together that I’ve been intending to make for quite a while.

Sometimes found next to the salsa on the tables of Mexican restaurants, cortido is described as a Latin American version of sauerkraut; basically fermented cabbage with a couple of other veggies and spices thrown in. I used the recipe in Nourishing Traditions, which goes a little something like this:

Cortido

makes 2 quarts

Ingredients:

1 large cabbage, cored and shredded

2 medium onions, quartered lengthwise and sliced thinly

1 cup grated carrot

1 tablespoon sea salt

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1/4-1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes

4 tablespoons whey, or an extra tablespoon salt if whey is not available

Mix the ingredients together in a large bowl, and pound with a wooden pounder for about ten minutes, until the juices are released. Put into two clean, wide-mouth quart jars, pressing the cabbage mixture down so that the juices cover the top. Make sure there’s at least an inch of airspace above the vegetables.

Leave out at room temperature for about three days, then transfer to cool storage. (The refrigerator is fine.) Although it can be eaten after three days, the flavors improve with time.

Serve as a condiment alongside your favorite Mexican-style dishes, or with anything else you desire!

It's really easy-peasy, especially when you have a small person to do the pounding.

Olé!

It's the little things

Like finding these in a thrift store:

When I checked One Straw Revolution out of the library years ago, I think I renewed it three or four times. I was not going to let that book go! Later, I found it in an online version at the Soil and Health Library, but as I detest reading on the computer, suffice it to say I haven't gotten to it again. But now I have my very own copy, in mint condition. The others are excellent, too. Ruth Stout is also at the library but how can you pass up a copy for two bucks? And I didn't even know Gene Logsdon had a book on soils...sigh.

Then there's the big envelope of seeds that appeared in my mailbox:

A sure sign that spring is indeed around the corner!

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You can get many publications on agriculture, personal sovereignty, and more at the Soil and Health Library for free, including the classic Alcohol Can Be a Gas,the Albrecht Papers, and more. Good stuff.

When life gives you boxes...

...make a solar oven!

Every year in January, we tend to find ourselves overrun by a giant pile of boxes brought to us over the holidays by our friendly delivery pixies. And while the kids were thrilled, there's always the question of what to do with all. that. cardboard. Yes, I can mulch, yes, I can recycle, and yes, I can even make a pretty cool chair. But I just so happen to have the perfect sizes to finally make the cardboard solar oven that I've always wanted to try.

Ideally, we'll make a sturdier, wooden version in the future, but this one seems like a good start.

There were three variations on a theme that I was considering, but opted in the end for the basic model since that's what fit our box selection the best. (See also the “Easy-Lid” Oven and the Collapsible Oven.)

I found that as simple as it is, it does indeed take a little while to put it all together. Gluing aluminum foil isn't as speedy as it sounds! (Honestly, though, I probably spent the most time just figuring out the logistics of model choice, with regards to our box supply.) A perfect project for one of those gloomy winter afternoons.

Now we'll have to wait for the sun to shine to try this baby out. The Girl has already decided on Blonde Brownies as the first experiment. I think I can get behind that!

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Next in the works: The Fun-Panel Cooker, a panel-type rather than a box-type cooker. Because we still have plenty of boxes...

Get your pantry on

 

Today was the first day of the month-long food storage class I recently signed up for over on Sharon's blog. While I've wanted to get this sort of thing rolling for some time now, I had a hard time focussing and sitting down to plan it all out. Now, I'm not some wingnut survivalist type, really. I won't be storing guns & ammo next to the Crisco or anything like that. But I do think it's prudent to have ample amounts of food and water on hand so when the shit does hit the fan (and that could range from being totally snowed in for a week or two to total economic and planetary meltdown, and anything in between) you'll be ready.

What I'm hoping to do now, is get as many people on board with this as I can, without risking my friends and family committing me to an institution. So if you're interested, check out Sharon's first few posts on the subject here, here, and here. There are links galore if you care to follow along. (I think she might still have room left in the class, even.) And if you're a local peep, let me know if you're interested in a food buyer's club, canning parties, garden network, and what have you. I think it could be kind of fun. Not to mention one less thing to keep us awake at night...

Quiet

Being a summer baby, I'm always sad to see the sun grow dim each fall. But then the quiet settles in, and I realize that there's something to be said for the slow pace that winter brings. Between the mad holiday rush and ramping up for the gardening season, there is a lull that beckons. Do Nothing, it says. Just Stay Inside and Keep Warm.

Sounds good to me.