Grafting

   Eric confessed yesterday that he was done grafting for the year (but this morning that's sounding a little too final). This may not sound like a big deal, just another farm task completed, but then again, you've probably never lived with an obsessive grafter. Let's start with a quick lesson on grafting. In short, you connect a piece of wood from an outstanding tree on any random tree and that transforms that tree into an extension of that outstanding tree. Take an apple tree grown from an apple seed, for example, and you'll get an apple tree that will most likely produce a fruit not fit to eat. Now cut a twig off a good apple tree and graft it onto the sorry apple tree and now it too will produce wonderful fruits. It's an ancient practice, talked about even in the Bible. While some of Eric's good wood comes from neighbors or a remarkable tree found growing in a ditch somewhere, he gets most of his wood sent to him through the mail. Yes, grafting addicts mail each other twigs! These folks typically meet each other on a fruit forum chat group. They discuss to exhaustion the pros and cons of all known cultivars of mulberries, they console each other about the coming emergence of the 17 year cicadas that could decimate their orchards, they post pictures of their first blossoms of the year; they are fruit and nut nuts. And they share wood. Often it's an exchange, you send me this and I'll send you that. But sometimes they force their favorite varieties on each other, like a package that arrived this spring full of seedless native persimmon cultivars we just had to try. In any case, the 6 inch pieces of wood arrive carefully packed with damp paper towels sealed in plastic bags labeled with names like Rosseyanka, Shinseiki, and Thomas Myers. They are cut in the winter before the trees start to grow and stored in the fridge until the trees they'll be grafted onto are ready. Soon the fridge produce drawers are all taken up with twigs. A friend suggested we could serve dinner to a family of beavers with all the wood in our fridge!
   In practice, it's interesting, especially when grafting season begins. First, he grafts onto potted plants to be planted out after the graft has established itself. At our house, many of these potted plants found their way into the house "because it's warmer in here and the trees will be ready to graft earlier." I envisioned delicious Asian persimmons and accepted, for a time. The other method is field grafting. Here you have a seedling already established in the ground where you want it, no need to dig a hole or to worry about watering transplanted trees. All you have to do is graft onto it. You simply turn a weed into food. Our pastures and fence lines are full of useless callery pears (with tiny bad tasting pears like the ornamental Bradford pears) and persimmons and mulberries of unknown quality and possibly non-fruiting male trees. So Eric has put wood of known pear or persimmons onto them, marked them with flagging tape (a reminder not to let the cows graze too close). But here there is less control as the elements can be hard on the delicate new grafts. Little tin foil bonnets protect the persimmon sticks until they get established. Many times a weeks, Eric takes the kids out on the graft march into the fields. They too can now spew off the technical terms: scion, stock, cambium, banana graft, bark graft, whip and tongue...
So grafting season is pretty much over. And now we watch as the new buds swell, turn green, and expand into new branches. Yesterday I was checking on the bean planting and Eric came over and asked if I wanted to go look at the nearby Hana Fuyu graft. Jokingly -- although he takes his grafts too seriously to have gotten the joke at first -- I immediately responded that I already had. Once the tree begins to fruit it will be another story: I'll be at least as eager for the fruit as he is to see his buds grow. Our farm is quickly growing into a forest of seedless persimmons, and sweet, crunchy Asian pears, thin-shelled black walnuts, big fat pawpaws, and delicious mulberries. We look forward to sharing, too.

Sweet potato pies

We couldn't resist, we made a sweet potato pie with our blue sweet potatoes.  While we were at it, we did pies of our white potatoes, yellow and orange.  They all disappeared pretty quick!

PRAISE FOR CORNMEAL

  We're just back from the mill this week where we had another batch of our heirloom white 'Floyd' corn ground.  After having it ground, we store it in our freezer until we bring it to you at the market. We don't understand what makes store-bought cornmeal sit just fine on the shelf for months, but we wouldn't want to store our cornmeal at room temp for more than a couple weeks.  In any case, there's a huge difference between our fresh cornmeal and what you're probably used to.  To keep it fresh, our freezer is now full of cornmeal, so this seems like a great time to sing the praises of cornmeal (we just had some delicious hush puppies last night).  We encourage you to stock up on cornmeal (simply store in your freezer for months/years or fridge for several weeks) and enjoy using the only local heirloom grain staple you're likely to find anywhere.  Isn't it time you sourced your most basic food staples from within your community instead of buying all your grains from huge-scale farms that you really couldn't know much about even if you wanted to, that you probably don't even know what state (or country) they're in, exclusively processed and sold by corporations motivated by anything but the interests of the health of our community (to say nothing of what's not even organic)?  Is that the system you trust to stand up against the onslaught of chemicals and biotechnology redefining food?  Here are a few of our favorite cornmeal recipes.  You can find more recipes, including a couple types of cornbread, fritters, and spoonbread, on our blog.  Anson Mills' website also has a lot of good recipes highlighting heirloom grains.  (Let us know, by the way, if you'd like to buy whole kernel corn for making your own hominy/tortillas/tamales/etc. from scratch.)

Almost As Good As Aunt Gerri's Hush Puppies

1 2/3 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp honey
black pepper
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup finely chopped onion

Mix well.  Drop in heaping teaspoonfuls into hot fat.  Flip and cook until well browned on both side.

Cornmeal Pancakes

1 1/2 cups cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp honey
2 cups buttermilk
2 tbs butter or oil
1 slightly beaten egg yolk
1 stiffly beaten egg white

Mix dry ingredients.  Add buttermilk, fat, and egg yolk; blend well.  Fold in egg white.  Let stand 10 minutes.  Bake on hot griddle.

Corn Mush
we'll just give you a link for this one:
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-cornmeal-mush.htm

Photos from the last month

peach blossoms at the breakfast table

the second mother hen of the year to hatch a clutch

Liz, our WWOOF visitor from Maine

our family

DIET THEORIES

  We just watched a documentary film about a diet of veganism (plus no added plant fats/oil) as a way to stop and potentially reverse the adverse health effects of the standard industrialized diet. We're definitely not vegans, and we don't mention this film because it represents us or any of our views, but as farmers we take extra interest in all the various diet theories and their supporting arguments, and even diet theories that fail to offer good solutions can be helpful in assessing the problems.

  As we've discussed before, our diet theory -- if we had to give it a name we might call it "radically homegrown" -- isn't based on any kind of nutrition or health theories. In other words, we're strongly inclined to believe that eating a radically homegrown diet while completely ignoring the difficult questions of any and all nutrition theories will actually result in a healthier diet than following the advice of the world's most brilliant nutrition experts, whoever they may be. Are we saying that ignoring nutrition theories will lead to better nutrition? Short answer, yes. How could that be?

  First, nutrition science is invariably a very muddy field. If any of the fringe theories (like the one in the film we just watched) were scientifically compelling it would be more than a fringe scientific theory. That's not to say those theories are necessarily wrong, only that the scientific case for any of them is fraught with questions and legitimate doubts. On the other hand mainstream dietary advice like is embodied in the USDA food pyramid seems undeniably damned by its results. In other words, mainstream dietary advice is too closely tied to our problems to reasonably consider it any kind of solution. And, in any case, even if the nutrition experts could agree on a diet theory -- which they can't -- that still leaves the rest of us needing to eat but without the expertise to sort out the advice from conflicting experts. (The arguments that we always find most convincing are the ones making the case that the case for someone else's theory is grossly overstated.) In short, as with the documentary we just watched, every diet theory seems to lose any real scientific footing as soon as it moves beyond criticizing the standard industrialized diet.

  So the next question then: what reason is there to trust that a radically homegrown diet offers any better hope of nutrition? First, our current diet-related health problems are clearly the result of the industrialization of our food supply, and a radically homegrown diet is the only alternative (at least in the industrialized world today.) Secondly, although the nutrition science is very muddy, one thing that seems very clear to us is that the giant food and agriculture corporations (and the government and university systems that serve them) aren't fundamentally pursuing any kind of health (of persons, soils, waters, air, animals, communities, etc. -- which, of course, are all deeply interconnected), but rather all large corporations are structured so as to ensure a narrow focus on corporate and executive profit. Surely dependence on that corporate system, no matter how much it conforms to any superficial diet theory, is fundamentally at odds with good health. If we are to have any real nutrition choices at all, we're convinced the first step needs to be breaking loose of the corporate-industrial grip on our diets.

  In that light, a question this documentary raised, as all nutrition theories do for us, is how compatible is veganism with a radically homegrown diet versus dependent on an industrialized corporate food supply. There is a limited point on which we think vegans score some points here. In recent years vegans have commonly made the case that animal products increase our dependency on the evils of the corporate-industrial system. They'll say that animals are an inefficient use of grain crops, i.e. that the grain fed to animals would go a lot further if fed directly to people. If we lay the nutritional and gastronomic problems with that idea aside, we think it has to be conceded that they have a real point: raising animals strictly on field crops grown for the purpose of feeding animals is highly questionable. (So, of course, is raising annual crops for the purpose of feeding our cars, which now consume more of our most planted field crop (corn) than all farm animals combined.) The limits we see in their argument are that (1) exchanging dependency on large quantities of grain for dependency on smaller quantities of industrialized grain doesn't really solve the problem, and (2) although modern industrialized agriculture completely fails to realize it, animals offer all sorts of potential for making food out of things that aren't food to start with. The most important example of this second point is grass, and the benefits of grass are huge. Especially in regions like ours where much of the land is quite susceptible to erosion, a permanent cover of grass is surely the most sustainable farm use of land. Pasture also drastically reduces the pressure on farmers to depend as heavily or at all on herbicides, insecticides, fossil fuel-powered tractors and combines, genetically modified seed, etc. Much more could be said about the gains to be had from farm animals and from grass, in particular, but the point here is that animals offer lots of potential (even if commonly unrealized) for reducing our dependency on the corporate-industrial food system.

  This is a bit of a tangent, but to be clear, "pastured" pork and poultry and eggs even from "organic" (whether officially or unofficially) family farmers selling directly at small farmers' markets rarely redefine the equation any more than their supermarket counterparts: simply keeping animals on pasture while feeding them complete rations of combine-harvested annual field crops (which is the case with the vast majority of large- and small-scale "pastured" and/or "organic" pork, poultry, and eggs) does nothing to silence the vegan argument we've discussed. Swine and poultry and other animals certainly have lots of potential in a radically homegrown system of agriculture, too, but so long as farmers and consumers continue to measure these possibilities against the artificial cheapness of their industrialized counterparts any market for radically homegrown pork or poultry will remain practically non-existent. In the meantime, we would concede that vegans score valid points here, too.

  But truly grass-fed/grain-free beef and dairy (and goat meat, lamb, wool, leather, etc., not to mention wild game) does radically redefine the equations, not just historically but in accessible ways here and now. As practically the whole continent of Africa figured out before us, goat meat and, in our case, also goat milk may be the most sustainable products we produce, and we'd make nearly as strong a case for our beef and cow's dairy. There was an interesting and repeated contrast in the film we just watched that highlights some of these differences. Images of dairy cattle on pasture were contrasted more than once with huge, super-expensive, diesel-powered combines harvesting mono-cropped annual grains. Completely apart from all the questions of sustainability, is the corporate-industrial dependency of the implicit vegan model not starkly obvious, especially in contrast to the pastoral image of dairy cows? There are plenty of misleading pastoral images in today's food marketplaces, but here the vegan advocates (apparently unwittingly) chose images that exposed the flaws of their case. Small herds of all grass-fed livestock are rightly viewed as consistent with sustainability, small family farms, and community food sovereignty. Equivalently homegrown grain and pulse (dry bean, peas, etc.) crops are as non-existent in the industrialized world today as the radically homegrown pork and poultry we already lamented. As with pork and poultry, grains and pulses have plenty of potential in a radically homegrown system of agriculture, but that potential is largely lost to mass-produced corporate counterparts.

  One more thing begs to be addressed on the subject of veganism and a radically homegrown diet. With the diet promoted by this film as with every other example of veganism we've encountered, simple homegrown foods are replaced with fake counterparts: milk is replaced with rice or almond "milk" -- it's worth noting, too, that we live in the most dairy rich county in North Carolina, but rice and almonds, of course, aren't grown here and are very marginally adaptable if at all -- turkey with "tofurky," eggs with "egg substitute", etc., etc. Avoiding real milk or turkey or eggs commonly has the result of forcing consumers to turn to corporate-industrial foods from far away, often in less homegrown, more processed manifestations. This is an aspect of veganism to which we definitely object, and we suspect that it's an unavoidable aspect of any diet theory that shuns any major food groups.

  Obviously there's plenty of controversy to stir up with these questions, but there's also lots of room for agreement. Proponents of veganism and paleo diets and "traditional" diets and low-carb diets and the USDA food pyramid and raw foodies, etc. together with us, can all potentially agree that moving away from sugar and corn syrup, artificial flavors, preservatives, and sweeteners, white flour, pre-processed foods, confinement style animal products, and chemical-intensive field and garden crops would be an improvement. These are the most emblematic parts of the standard diet in the industrialized world in which we live. And it seems quite plausible that drastically reducing these things could indeed solve a majority of our dramatic, diet-related problems. Without paying any particular attention to any questions of diet or nutrition, pursuing a radically homegrown diet would necessarily accomplish all these things, and it's something any of us can understand unassisted (and unmanipulated) by any experts.

Fall WWOOFer

  Justin came from Los Angeles this fall to stay on the farm with us and help us.  We enjoyed his time with us and are grateful for his help.  We often remember our WWOOF volunteers in part by the projects they help with.  Like a jar of tomatoes I opened yesterday was dated with Chelsea's writing, a reminder of those hot days of processing tomatoes last year.  As we've been snacking on peanuts this winter we remember Justin's help digging and pulling peanuts off of the plants this fall.

Boiled Peanuts

  You might think you don't like boiled peanuts.  But maybe you've never had boiled peanuts made with fresh dug Virginia type peanuts. When boiled peanuts are made with dry peanuts, they can take 24 hours or need to be pressured cooked and are often said to be slimy.  Fresh dug peanuts, like we have now, though, just need an hour in a pot of boiling salt water.  Then they are delicious. We've found them quite addictive.  Give this seasonal treat a try.