Milk and Honey Farm

2012 CSA PLAN

2012-02-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

WHY DO WE OFFER A CSA?
   We want the CSA to be especially for those customers that are committed to gradually getting nearly all of their food dollars out of the global/corporate/commodity food system. That's our vision. We're committed to the value of small diversified farms, and so we see the long-term potential to cooperatively regain local control of pretty much everything we eat. If that isn't a goal you share, as we expect it won't be for most of our customers, we hope we can still find lots of common ground at the farmers' market or through farm pick-ups without the special partnership involved in the CSA. If, on the other hand, it is a goal you share, read on!

THE 2012 CSA PLAN
   We offered two different CSA plans last year. This year we're basically combining the two into one. The 2012 CSA plan will consist of 23 weekly boxes with a value of $18 each, for a total of $414, except we'll give you the last box as a bonus, so the price is $396. Alternatively, we're offering half season shares at $198 for 11 weekly boxes. That part is basically the same as the traditional CSA plan from last year. The difference this year is that we'll give you the option to e-mail us specific requests for your box in response to our weekly e-mail. That will do away with keeping track of dollar balances (because we'll make sure every CSA box comes to the same total -- if you want more, we'll have you pay for the extra in cash each week), but it will still allow you the option of e-mailing us specific requests. It will also allow you to request things that we haven't and wouldn't automatically include as part of your box (plants, eggs, flowers, soap, candles, bread...) For things that don't fit into the weekly box (like shares of beef), we'll give you first dibs as CSA members.

THE PRESERVING SHARE
   As an optional addition to the regular full-season CSA share, we're offering something new this year. We're calling it the preserving share. For an average of $10/week we'll give you a second box of all one item suitable for preserving for the off-season (things that might be frozen or dehydrated or pickled or canned or simply stored in a cool closet.) The preserving share will be deeply discounted off the regular price (typically about half price.) It may include "seconds" with cosmetic or other flaws (e.g. odd shaped cucumbers or cracked tomatoes or misshapen carrots or onions with soft spots or strawberries with little bug bites.) Other times it will simply be an item of which we have an over-abundance that week (things like beets, cabbages, eggplant, field peas, cooking greens, okra, green peppers, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, summer squash, winter squash...) The price is an additional $160 for 16 boxes (with possibilities for continuing past the 16th box.) We'll choose from the 23 weeks when you're receiving a regular CSA box to give you your preserving shares. We'll make sure you get at least 12 different items by your 23rd week. If you're looking for an economical way to enjoy the same food we sell in-season during the off-season, and if you're flexible enough to deal with preserving a larger quantity of a different crop each week (occasionally with a very short shelf life), then the preserving share might be just the thing for you. We're only going to offer a very limited number of preserving shares, however.

WHAT IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN OUR CSA CONCEPT BUT NOT IN THE FOCUS ON THE WEEKLY BOX?
   If you'd like to build a deeper relationship with a particular farm like ours but you're more interested in things like freezer shares of meat, eggs, honey by the case, other bulk purchases, hand-harvested grains and dry beans, maybe even cooperative milking arrangements... (perhaps because you grow your own year-round supply of vegetables already), then we don't have a prepared plan to present to you, but please come visit. If you're serious about going beyond the farmers' market basics but don't have enough land or time to do it all yourself, there are lots of options to discuss that are too complicated or specialized for any kind of standardized offering.

WHY SHOULD YOU LET US CHOOSE WHAT TO PUT IN YOUR BOX?
   If you don't e-mail us an order (or if you order less than $18), we'll pack your box with a full assortment of vegetables, strawberries and any other fruit we have, mushrooms, other garden and field crops (like peanuts, popcorn...), etc. You have the option of placing an order that will cover the whole box, but there are several reasons to let us choose at least some of what you'll receive. One reason is that it's a good way to discover things you might not otherwise have enjoyed. Another reason is that we'll choose the crops that are at their peak of quality each week. Letting us choose also frees you from having to e-mail us if e-mail isn't convenient for you. And if you let us choose, that allows us to include things that we don't have in enough quantity to offer to everyone or that didn't make the e-mail list for other reasons. Often that means extending the season for crops: for example, we may have a few early tomatoes for a couple weeks before and a few late tomatoes for a few weeks after the main tomato season. It also means that we can include items that we only grow in smaller quantities or perennial crops (especially the many types of fruit we're growing) that haven't reached full production yet (e.g. Asian pears, blueberries, tame blackberries, figs, cherries...) These are all marginal things -- the bulk of what we'd pack for you would be the same as what we list, centered on vegetables -- but we enjoy being able to treat our CSA members to these kinds of extras.

WHAT IF YOU'RE OUT OF TOWN OR CAN'T COME TO THE PICK-UP ONE WEEK? WHAT ABOUT EXTRA WEEKS?
   Our CSA season should run at least 26 weeks, so you should have at least 3 bye weeks (4 if you don't count the bonus week.) If you don't want to get a box one week, just let us know by the order deadline on the day before pick-up. If we don't hear from you by the order deadline, we'll pack you a box like we described in the paragraph above. If you don't use your bye weeks up before the end of the season you'll have the option of paying as you go for the remainder of the season.

HOW TO PROCEED IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN JOINING
   If you haven't ever been to our farm before, we require a visit to the farm before the start of the CSA. (Anyone is welcome to make plans to visit or pick up an order at the farm.) If you have any questions call (704-546-5074) or e-mail us. If you think you're ready to sign up, contact us, and we'll send you a sign-up form.

New baby!

2012-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

Christina Irene Brown, born Jan 21.

Corn harvest and corn mush

2011-12-17T19:39:00.000-08:00

We recently finished harvesting our open-pollinated white corn. The shucked ears are now drying in the corn cribs. We've enjoyed incorporating cornmeal and grits into our everyday diet. Corn mush has become a favorite breakfast food. It's quick easy and delicious, similar in taste and texture to cream of wheat. We cook ours in a ratio of one cup of cornmeal to two cups water and two cups of milk with some salt to taste. Cook until thick, about 20 minutes.

Pig update

2011-12-17T19:08:00.000-08:00

Our two pigs are eating a lot and growing incredibly fast.

Small potatoes

2011-12-17T18:57:00.000-08:00

Lately, we've been enjoying our little sweet potatoes. Maybe it has to do with the increased surface area of sticky sweetness. When we need a quick meal, we'll fill the whole oven with the little guys. At 400 degrees it doesn't take long. They are easy to peel. When we cook a mix of colors, the kids have fun peaking under the skins, trying to find their favorite kind (the pale orange Porto Ricos). Then any leftovers go in the fridge, a wonderfully easy snack.

Homegrown tea

2011-12-17T18:51:00.000-08:00

With the cooler weather and a bit more relaxed schedule we've been enjoying some homegrown teas. The dried roselle/hibiscus makes a beautiful red tangy tea. Mint is our other favorite, made with dried peppermint. Both of these we lightly sweeten with honey. This year we planted two Rosa rugosa roses as they are known for their large rosehips good for tea. And we also planted a Camellia sinensis, the camellia from which black and green tea is made. We continue to search for more good tasting tea plants.

Do we farm organically?

2011-12-09T20:27:00.001-08:00

   Not very many years ago, farming exactly as we do now, we could have answered this question with a straightforward yes. What's changed is that farmers can now only legally use the word "organic" to describe their farming practices if they're part of the USDA program that the government recently set up to regulate the definition of "organic." So if, by "do you farm organically?" you're asking whether we take part in the USDA-regulated program, the answer is that we don't believe in and don't take part in that system, but if you mean to ask about how we actually farm -- what things we do and don't use, how we maintain fertility, how we deal with pests and diseases, etc. -- then the answer would be yes, except that farmers like us aren't allowed to say so any more. We'll save the question of what we have against the USDA program for another week, but we'll address the question of how we farm here.
   As far as not using pesticides or synthetic fertilizer or genetically modified crop varieties on our farm, we would fully meet and exceed all the USDA requirements for organic farmers. We never use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers or grow genetically modified crop varieties. Just generally speaking, perhaps the most important thing we do instead is to accept some losses. For example, if some strawberries have holes chewed in them, we'll cut the bad spots out and save those for our own family. On a family farm like ours, it's not a bad thing to have some strawberries that we can't sell!
   We never use any herbicides; instead we manage weeds by mechanical methods (hoeing, hand weeding, mowing, discing, etc.) and by use of mulch (mainly straw or hay) to suppress weed growth.
   Instead of using fungicides or antibiotics to control disease organisms, we mainly just avoid problems by selecting crops and varieties not prone to problems. With some crops we also use trellises or pruning or mulch to improve air circulation or increase exposure to the sun or reduce leaf contact with the soil, although we don't find it necessary to even go that far with most crops.
   Avoiding problems and simply accepting marginal losses are likewise the main ways we deal with insect problems. We keep our eggplants in pots in the cold frame until they're big enough to simply outgrow the flea beetles when we put them in the garden. We grow squash mainly in the first part of the summer before the squash bugs get very bad. Potato beetles are one insect problem that often threaten to get out of hand. We deal with them by squishing them between our fingers -- yes, it's gross at first (and labor-intensive), but when the only other way to produce a crop would be to use insecticides, it's a simple choice. We deal with earworms in sweet corn by telling our customers there will be a worm in the tip of almost every ear and that they'll need to cut the tip off. We do sometimes use a "natural pesticide," dipel (which is OMRI approved and also used on USDA-certified organic farms) on some cole crops (e.g. cabbage, broccoli.) Even though it's officially organic, it's our last choice for dealing with insects. It's the only purchased product we use for insect control, and we only use it on cole crops.
   For maintaining fertility, instead of using synthetic fertilizers (e.g. 10-10-10), we depend on manure from our own cattle and chickens and goats and also horse manure from a neighbor, lots of leguminous cover crops, and ashes from wood and bones that we burn in our stove (for potassium and phosphorus.) We recycle crop residues and leftovers like corn cobs back to the soil, and we recycle other surpluses through our animals like the sweet potatoes that are too small for our own use. Using natural hay and straw mulches also helps to improve the fertility of our garden spots. We never use amendments like oilseed meal from genetically modified soybeans or cotton for fertilizer (although USDA-organic rules allow the practice and a lot of organic produce farms do.) We try to scavenge a lot of nutrient-dense things (manure and other organic waste) to bring back to the farm, but we don't actually purchase anything to use as a fertilizer or soil amendment, except for the hay and straw we use mainly for mulch, and lime (ground limestone) to reduce soil acidity.
   The way we maintain our pastures and the way we grow corn or forage crops or hay crops to feed our animals is no different (in terms of pesticides and fertilizers, etc.) from the way we grow our vegetables or anything else, but we also typically buy hay and small grain (wheat or barley) from other nearby farmers in order to fill some gaps in our feed system. The feed we buy often doesn't fully meet the standards we follow ourselves, but at a minimum it's all locally grown and non-GMO (not genetically modified.) Ultimately our goal is to see our community exercise full control of what it grows and how that's grown -- meaning people in our community would be making informed choices about how to grow their own food -- and we feel like dealing directly with other local farmers does the most to get us to that point. Meanwhile we're doing a lot to provide for our own animals. We're able to raise our goats pretty much exclusively on forage and garden surpluses (like greens that have turned bitter or gone to seed), and between the heirloom corn we've grown and our own surplus dairy we have all we need to raise out our two hogs without purchased feed either. We still buy most of the hay that we need for our cattle, but we're increasingly cutting and putting up our own hay by hand. Our chickens are fed largely on forage from free range -- we only "top them off" with grain at the end of the day -- and much of the year the grain we're supplementing is our own heirloom corn.
   We don't give any pharmaceuticals to any of our animals. That doesn't just include the kinds of growth hormones and antibiotics used by the largest producers, but it also means we're not using heat synchronization hormones (used with dairy cattle) or the de-worming chemicals that a lot of small farms depend on (especially with goats, but also with hogs and cattle.) In order to avoid the need for de-worming medications we rotate our animals frequently, give pastures more rest between rotations, and we graze the cattle ahead of the goats so that parasites don't find their way back to their specific hosts.

Corn harvest

2011-11-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

The corn cribs are filling up as we continue to harvest this year's corn. We're especially grateful to Laura for her help on this project and many other projects around the farm during her stay with us. We're still hand harvesting the corn, so let us know if you'd like to join in. This heirloom white corn will dry in the crib for a couple months then we'll start grinding it into cornmeal and grits.

Hush Puppies

2011-11-09T19:37:00.000-08:00

We hope this picture tempts you to make a batch of hush puppies for yourself. Quick and easy and delicious. We'll post a recipe soon.

Popcorn

2011-10-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

We grew a small crop of popcorn this year and are glad to say it's ready for you to pop up a bowlful for yourself. If you've never popped popcorn on the stove top, it's rather easy. Simply shell the popcorn off from the cob into a bowl. Start at one end of the cob and rub the kernels off - they should come off easily. You can also use an empty cob to rub them off. Then heat about 2 tablespoons of fat on high in a pot. When the fat is hot pour in the popcorn and slide the pot back and forth over the burner. This will cover all the kernels with fat. As soon as you hear the first pop, cover the pot with a lid, leaving a small vent on the side for steam to escape. Keep sliding the pot back and forth to keep the bottom kernels from burning. When the popping ceases, remove from the burner. Pour into a bowl and add salt and butter as desired. Though we haven't tested it, our popcorn should also pop in a popcorn machine and an air popper. We hope you'll enjoy this homegrown snack food.

Sweet potatoes

2011-10-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

We were glad to get the sweet potatoes dug last week before the wet weather and the forecast frosts. We grew over a dozen varieties this year including many new ones given to us by a friend who grows over a hundred varieties. They are a beautiful colorful assortment.

Lessons from intersex fish

2011-10-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago we read about a USGS survey of large- and smallmouth bass that covered river basins all across the country. This survey found that a third of all male smallmouth bass and a fifth of all male largemouth bass were intersex, meaning that the male fish also had partially developed female parts. (This is equivalent to boys with breasts!) Intersex fish were found at sites both with and without obvious sources of endocrine-active compounds, such as household chemicals (laundry detergent, shampoo...), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and heavy metals, that are associated with dense human populations or industrial and agricultural activities. The survey found intersex fish in every river basin examined except for one river basin in Alaska. Intersex traits were most prevalent in largemouth bass in the Southeast, where they occurred at every site tested, including very high percentages at sites from our own Pee Dee River basin. What's especially interesting to us about this story is that no one really knows why it's happening. We know from frozen samples of fish from 50 years ago that it's a new thing: some kinds of modern human activity are clearly causing the abnormalities. We know it's happening, but we don't know the mechanism or the specific causes. Whatever is causing these dramatic changes in fish is in the same water that most (or all) of us are drinking.

We see clear lessons to be drawn from stories like the intersex fish when it comes to how we should farm. Most important, these stories tell us that the “smart,” educated use of chemicals and pharmaceuticals and heavy metals, etc. involves a whole lot of false confidence and risky ignorance. In other words, we believe the smartest “use” of agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals is generally to completely avoid them. We think it would be absurd to say that even if particular genetically modified crops haven't yet been proven harmful that they have any scientific claim to being safe. There are plenty of known costs to agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals (hypoxic “dead zones” in the ocean, the breeding of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the loss of beneficial insects, dependence on foreign oil, dependence on rapidly depleting resources, etc., etc.), but we suspect the costs we *don't* understand are just as great. It comes as no surprise when we read that the only thing dwarfing modern cancer rates is the rate of increase in the price of cancer treatment. Intersex fish are one clear example that scientifically proven harm is coming from our “scientifically advanced” way of life, yet “science” can't offer solutions to these kinds of problems. When it comes to farming (which is closely tied to everything else), the solution we see is to build deep ties with small, diversified farms committed to building thorough alternatives to the “scientifically advanced,” chemical-intensive norm, because small scale and diversification set the foundation for solving problems without chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Peanut roof

2011-10-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks to our most recent visitors, Marilyn and Jelson, the peanuts are harvested and drying on an outbuilding roof.

Roselle or hibiscus flowers

2011-10-09T19:57:00.000-07:00

We're very excitable when it comes to new farm ventures. Of late, Eric's been intently researching cold-hardy citrus in the hopes of having some taste of local citrus someday. Today, though, we're excited to share with you the harvest from a new to us plant that has done great here. A friend gave us a few Roselle seeds this spring and this fall we have plants loaded with their 'fruits'. A member of the hibiscus family, this okra relative grows to a huge beautiful bush, about 4 feet in diameter. Along the dark red stems grow short lived hibiscus like flowers. When the petals fall off, a thick calyx is left behind. These flower parts are then harvested for a number of uses. Mostly commonly, they are used for a red 'Koolaid' colored tea. Roselle is actually one of the main ingredients of Red Zinger tea. They can be used fresh or dried for tea. While we enjoy the tea, roselle also makes a great mock cranberry sauce. Just boil the chopped red pods with a little water, honey and maybe ginger.

Time to plant garlic, shallots, and multiplier onions

2011-10-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

Cooler weather means planting time - for garlic, shallots and multiplier onions that is. We're about to put ours out and if you'd like to set some out yourselves we have plenty of 'seed' to get you started. All three of these alliums are planted in the fall here in NC and then overwinter and are ready to harvest sometime in May and June. They are all planted similarly about 6-8 inches apart. We grow ours on beds containing four rows. After the first shoots emerge, we mulch them with hay or straw. This helps keep the weeds down and also gives a little winter protection. All will put on a little fall growth, then go dormant a bit through the worst of winter and start growing strong in late winter. All of them can be eaten as soon as you have a craving in late winter as green onions or green garlic. To plant garlic, break the head apart into cloves and plant pointy side up about an inch and half deep. Each clove will produce a head of garlic. For the shallots and onions, break apart what is easily broken apart. Small shallots and onions will produce fewer but larger shallots and onions the next year, while planting larger shallots and onions will produce more but smaller sized shallots and garlic. There are some pictures of our allium patch in some older posts on our blog.

Newest farm additions

2011-09-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

We've been wanting to get pigs for years now. We've just been afraid we weren't really ready! This week though, putting fear aside, Eric brought home two weaned pigs (about 50 lbs each.) We were mostly ready for them. We have plenty to feed them. When milk was overabundant this spring, we let the skim milk clabber, then strained this for "cheese" and froze it. So we have a good reserve in the freezer. (We would have just fed it straight if we had been ready with the pigs.) We also have a good supply of local non-GMO grains for them - wheat from neighbors and what looks to be a good surplus of the open-pollinated white corn we're growing. And then there will be kitchen scraps and garden waste. And we hope to move them through the sweet potatoes and peanuts to forage for what we miss when we dig these crops. And then maybe even run them through the oak grove to feast on acorns this fall. So we think we're ready to feed them right.
The big question though, and the cause of our hestitation, was how to contain them. We have hopes of relatively simple electric fences to rotate them through gardens as they can be useful. But until we get to know each other better, we wanted a more secure system. For the first few weeks here, we had plans to put them in a movable cattle panel cage. Sure enough, the little guys could squeeze right through the holes. So we lined the cage with some smaller welded wire fencing. And they seem happy in their new home. We're also hoping that moving them one to two times each day for starters will help them off to a clean, healthy start on our farm. We're trying to keep them well fed and familiar to us, in case we should have to call them home sometime with a slop bucket.
We'll keep you posted on our newest adventure here on the farm.

How to grow strawberries

2011-09-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

This picture is from this past April. It's time to plant your own patch.

Now is the time to set out strawberry plants for fruit next May. We maintain a part of our strawberry patch each year after the harvest and through the summer until now, when we dig up the multiple runners and plant them out in a newly prepared section of garden. The plants establish themselves in the fall, then begin to really put on new leaves on warm days in the winter and in the early spring. By about the end of March they should begin flowering, and about the end of April/early May the harvest should begin and last for about three or four weeks. These are the same plants we've sold strawberries from since we first started selling in 2004. We normally plant our strawberries in double rows. We space the two individual rows about 10-12 inches apart with about 24-32 inches between double rows. We space the plants about 10 inches apart in the row. Sometimes we'll mound up the double rows a little, especially if we have any concerns about poor drainage: strawberry roots don't like to stay wet. We mulch lightly with straw (or poor hay) for protection from the hardest winter cold, then mulch heavily in and around the plants in the early spring to suppress weeds and keep the berries from getting mud and dirt on them. Bare root plants will require very regular watering until they get established. It is time to begin getting plants established, though, so if you can't keep them well watered in the garden, you might want to plant them in small pots or flats as an intermediate step. It's also important not to plant the plants too deep. Find the growing point in the middle of the plant and make sure not to cover it with dirt.
If you've realized how hard good organic fruit is to come by, strawberries may be an excellent place to start growing your own.

Planning for the off season

2011-09-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

May 11, 2010
What if you've become convinced that food grown who-knows-where and who-knows-how isn't what you want any more? What if you wanted to try to eat (and support the production of) only local food -- food that you either grew yourself or got directly from the source -- grown with old-fashioned organic integrity (free of any pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, etc.)? What would you have to do to make it happen? How could it be done? We want to consider these questions as they apply to a full spectrum of food groups, but for this week we want to talk about vegetables.
Vegetables may seem like the easiest food group to "go local" with, and they can pretty easily and conveniently be found from small farms and backyard growers. When it comes to vegetables, the challenges lie in eating in-season and in putting up surplus for the off-season. If you limit yourself mostly to a small handful of familiar vegetables, you're likely to encounter lots of weeks where there's little or nothing on your list that's in season. Learning to enjoy a wider variety of vegetables, besides being healthier, will surely help a lot in the effort to eat locally. Last year, even with several crop failures caused by all the spring rain, we had at least 7 (and as many as 14) different vegetables (and multiple varieties of many of those) to offer every week from the beginning of May through early November. Of course, some of those crops were more abundant and others sold out quickly, but even just from our farm there's a lot of variety to be had if you know how to enjoy it. One of the big advantages to a traditional CSA box (where members simply receive a full assortment of whatever is in season as opposed to custom ordering their boxes as our CSA members normally do) is that it encourages families to eat more like they were eating from their own gardens and to enjoy a fuller variety. Of course, eating with the seasons also means cooking with the seasons. Instead of letting a recipe or menu dictate your shopping list, eating in season generally turns things around: if you're eating in season, you'll probably start with what's fresh and in season and let that determine what you cook.
As winter begins to set in continuing to eat locally mostly means relying on crops that you froze or canned or dried or simply put in the pantry earlier in the year. Sweet potatoes, garlic, and winter squash will keep well in the pantry all through the off-season without any special attention. Freshly dug fall carrots will keep for many weeks in the fridge. Most vegetables are well suited to simple freezing: butterbeans, October beans, broccoli, collards, sweet corn, roasted eggplant, field peas, kale and all the other cooking greens, leeks and onions, okra, garden peas, bell peppers and banana peppers, also roasted peppers, spinach, fava beans, and even tomatoes and tomato juice and sauce, etc. Canning intimidates a lot of people, but there aren't really that many vegetables for which canning is the only good way to preserve them, and if you want to learn to can, it's simple. (We'd be glad to teach you.) We use canning for green beans, beets and pickles (cucumbers as well as pickled beets and dilly beans.) Irish potatoes can be kept in the pantry for a few months (longer at cooler temperatures), but we can some potatoes for later in the winter. We prefer to can most of our tomatoes (whole tomatoes, juice, sauce, salsa), but we also dry tomatoes ("sun"-dried) in a cheap dehydrator, and we freeze oven-roasted tomatoes and tomato paste. We don't actually can (with heat) our sauerkraut, but we do make it in canning jars and keep it along with the rest of our canned goods. The Ball Blue Book is the most common "guide to home canning, freezing, and dehydration", and an old version is our standard reference book. Putting up vegetables for the off-season does require planning ahead. If there are crops you'd like to put up for the off-season that you'd like to get from us, please talk to us about your particular interests ahead of time, and we'll try to help plan for you to get larger quantities of those things to preserve for later.

Southern heritage staple

2011-09-12T20:08:00.000-07:00

We want to draw your attention this week to one of our most special and at the same time most basic products, our Southern heritage staple. Do you want to break away from the standard corporate food/agriculture system? Do you want to resist the take-over of our farmland and our food supply by GMO's (genetically modified organisms) and everything that goes along with them? Do you want to help build a comprehensive local food system, independent of pesticides and non-renewable chemical fertilizers? You should try our cornmeal and grits and make them regular staples in local kitchens again! If we can recover that foundation, imagine what further steps our local food system could take! If local agriculture is going to expand into grains and field crops (and all the animal products that depend on them), it's all going to have to start with the same grain that was most practical for our great-grandparents. In terms of how our land is farmed, field corn (which is corn that's harvested when the kernels are hard-dry) is singly more than 5 times as significant as all the fruits and vegetables we consume put together. Cornmeal isn't just for cornbread and grits aren't just for breakfast!

Besides basic cornbread, we use cornmeal in a number of recipes including some of our regular favorites - okra fritters and cornmeal spoonbread. We also make a basic cornmeal pancake. Eric likes the cornmeal pancakes best unsweetened, topped simply with butter. Of course, cornmeal is great for breading all sorts of things, from vegetables to poultry to fish. Hush puppies are another southern classic worth remembering. Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina has several cornmeal and grits recipes on its website well worth checking out: http://www.ansonmills.com/recipes-corn.htm
   Grits are, of course, a great breakfast staple, whether with eggs or cheese or country ham... For expanding beyond breakfast, shrimp and grits are the classic low country combination, but one of our favorite ways to eat grits is to make an extra large batch for breakfast and pour the leftovers into a greased bread loaf pan and refrigerate until gelled...then we'll slice the grits about a half inch thick and fry in butter until the surface is crispy. It makes a great starch to go alongside most any meat and vegetables. It's certainly different from rice, but it roughly fills that niche for us in a local, homegrown way. Polenta is just the fancy name for grits. We also use cornmeal for a crust in casseroles that we'll top with things like black beans, chicken, tomatoes, cheese, peppers...
   If you'd like to read the specifics about where our corn came from and what we do with it, see our blog entry http://themilkandhoneyfarm.blogspot.com/2011/05/stone-ground-heirloom-white-cornmeal.html
    We've optimistically planted more than double the 'Floyd' corn this year than we've ever grown before (and convinced a neighbor to organically grow even more.) We'll be hand harvesting it all fairly soon. It's another heirloom white corn very similar to the 'hickory king' that we're selling now, but an interesting thing about 'Floyd' corn is its recessive trait that leads to a small percentage of ears that are entirely dark red. If you'd like to help out in this year's harvest, let us know! If you have any custom grinding requests, or if you'd like whole kernel corn to grind yourself or to make nixtamal with for tortillas, we're happy to accommodate with a little extra advance notice. (By the way, we're looking for a mentor to show us how to best make nixtamal/tortillas starting with whole kernel corn.) If you have any questions about differences in using homegrown cornmeal or grits like we're offering, please ask.
   We're excited to be able to offer what nowadays is a very unique product. There are some historic mills that still grind corn, but we only know of one other person in all of North Carolina (in Old Fort -- he also happens to be a farmer with his own mill) that's grinding locally grown heirloom corn. We believe it's important to preserve these heirlooms not just to maintain non-genetically modified options, but also because these varieties weren't bred to depend on high rates of conventional fertilizer, on chemical control of weeds, diseases, and insects, and on combine harvesting. That means they're all around suitable to local use on small farms and to communities deciding how to grow their own food. If you share our desire to restore a comprehensive local agriculture that doesn't depend on non-renewable chemical fertilizers and pesticides and genetically modified crops, consider making our corn a staple in your kitchen. There's a lot to enjoy.

Thanks to Lee

2011-09-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

The nice rains from tropical storm Lee last week have brought on a nice flush of shitake mushrooms this week.

Pickin' up paw paws

2011-09-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

We were excited to try a paw paw for the first time the other day and even more excited at how good they tasted. Our young trees have yet to bear fruit so we visited the man we got our trees from in Wilkes County. He treated us to a taste from his trees and the paw paws are as close to a mango as you can get this far north. We also had our first jujube from our own tree the other day - a great date like little fruit. This was the only fruit from all three trees, but we're looking forward to bigger harvests in the years to come. In the meantime, some of our other fruits are coming on strong - we've been enjoying figs, asian pears, and even some muscadine grapes (from our much neglected vines).

Corn Bread Variations

2011-09-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

Buttermilk Corn Bread

2 cups cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups buttermilk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon bacon fat or butter

Preheat oven to 375. Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Pour in the buttermilk and honey and beat in the eggs. Melt the fat in a cast-iron skillet. Pour in the batter and bake in the skillet for 20 to 25 minutes, until risen and browned.

Cakey Corn Bread

1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
1 cup cornmeal
2 tablespoons honey
2 eggs
1 cup milk
¼ cup butter or lard

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add honey, eggs, milk, and fat. Beat until just smooth. Pour into greased 9x9x2 pan. Bake at 425 for 20 to 25 minutes.

Corn Griddle Cakes

Melt a couple tablespoons of fat in a cast-iron skillet. Mix cornmeal and a bit of salt with enough honey and water to make a sloppy batter. Spoon into hot fat and cook on one side until solid enough to flip. Cook on other side until done.

Why Heirlooms?

2011-08-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

We probably ought to begin by explaining some terminology. An heirloom plant variety is a variety that you can save seed from, plant it, and get essentially the same thing again generation after generation. The alternative is a hybrid variety, which if you were to save seed from, you'd get something not quite the same as the previous generation: maybe a different color or shape, often less productive, probably a different taste or texture, etc. So, for example, the seed of an heirloom 'German Johnson' tomato should yield another 'German Johnson,' but the seed of a 'betterboy' (which is a hybrid) would yield a tomato that might more closely resemble one or another of the parent lines that were crossed to yield the 'betterboy' or some very different cross. So the most basic thing to understand is that for the gardener or farmer growing hybrid plants means going back to the seed company to buy more seed every year, whereas with heirlooms there's the potential to isolate a variety (from other varieties of the same species it might cross with) and save seed to replant.
We grow pretty much exclusively heirlooms (or more accurately “open-pollinated” varieties which includes all heirlooms.) Even those crops that are almost always hybrid, like corn, onions, broccoli, bell peppers... even with those crops we're growing heirlooms instead. So why grow heirlooms? There are a lot of little reasons. Heirloom varieties were often bred for taste; modern hybrids are often bred more narrowly for productivity or traits like suitability to picking under-ripe and shipping long distances. Heirloom varieties are often more suitable to simple organic growing methods; modern hybrids are often bred specifically for use with heavy applications of purchased fertilizers, intensive irrigation, and other chemicals and plastics. Of course, heirloom varieties also allow us to save a lot of our own seed, which means we can be more self-sufficient and grow a product with more local value. Saving our own seed means we don't have to worry about buying seed that might come treated with chemicals we'd rather not use. It means we can grow varieties that originally came from 50 different sources without having to pay separate shipping and handling to 50 different seed companies every year, because if we can save our own seed we only need to get it here once, so overall it means that we can grow a greater diversity than we could otherwise. And when we save seed from an eggplant, instead of a packet with 30 seeds, we have 10,000 seeds, which means we can share with friends and neighbors and other farmers, and they can often share with us. We wrote last week about the field peas that came from Eric's great uncle. Another pea variety came from friends at church and another variety from a customer. We're growing yacons and roselles (wonderful crops that we didn't even know about), sweet potatoes and tomatoes from friends in Rutherford County, another tomato from Melissa's mom, rhubarb and field corn from Eric's former workmate in the Brushy Mountains, beans and butterbeans from a farmers' market customer, peanuts from a friend in Virginia peanut country, etc., etc. Many of these seeds came with working knowledge of how to grow them. What all this amounts to is independence: heirlooms mean the potential to eat the kinds of crops and to farm in ways that aren't determined by corporate profitability. And as much as anything, what we want to offer to you is a real alternative to the corporate food system.

Summer peas

2011-08-20T20:54:00.000-07:00

On these late summer afternoons we've been retreating to the house to shell peas. We each take a bowl, even the kids, and start working on the pile in the middle of the table. A few summers ago we visited a neighbor with a homemade sheller; in a half hour his machine shelled out the couple bushels we'd brought along. We haven't been able to talk him into making a similar sheller for us. But an excuse to sit down in front of the fan (and even watch a movie!) when it's hot outside isn't so bad. Then come winter, we'll pull peas out of the freezer or pour them out of a can and enjoy the summer's work.
I'd never had "peas" growing up. I'm not even sure the related dry black-eyed pea made it on our table. Soon after moving to North Carolina, though, Eric's great aunt and uncle offered me a big bowl of little green peas grown in their garden. I was hooked. His great Uncle Nick sent us home with seed and we've been growing them since, saving seed every year to keep the family seed going.
But we haven't stopped there. We've become pea collectors, always curious and ready to try another variety. There is an incredible number of varieties with each corner of the South having a favorite pea and many families having seed handed down from generation to generation. This year we're growing pink-eye purple hulls, strawberry crowders, red rippers, colossals, and “Nick's peas.” (“Crowders,” by the way, are so called because they're closer together in the pod than other field peas.)
Of course one problem with growing so much variety is that it complicates seed saving. Peas need one or two hundred feet of isolation distance to come true. To meet this challenge we separate varieties we want to save seed from in separate gardens and harvest enough seed for multiple years. Saving pea seed is simple. Just let the pods go until they are completely dry on the plant. Then on a hot dry day harvest them into a feed sack and thresh with a baseball bat like we did with the dry beans. Put them in a glass jar and freeze them to make sure any bugs are dead. If there's room, just keep the jar in the freezer.
In the garden, peas are space hogs. It takes a large area to grow enough to have some to put up. That said, we think of our pea plantings as cover crops. They are legumes that add nitrogen to the soil. And fairly quickly, they vine to completely cover the soil surface and outcompete weeds. So it's a cover crop that's edible and profitable to grow. Peas are also fairly quick, 60-90 days depending on the variety. They can be planted any time from early May to late July. There are hardly any other crops that can be planted mid-summer and withstand the heat and dry spells and mature a crop before it gets too cold like peas will. They have few pests and diseases aren't a problem.
Harvesting the peas can be easy or challenging. Some varieties have peas that stick straight up above the canopy while others hide under the leaves. The easiest to harvest are ones that have a colored hull when they are ready, like pink eye purple hulls. There is actually good debate about when a pea is ready to harvest. Some folks like them in the "green" stage for a fresh vegetable taste. These are not quite so easy to shell as when the pea has just started to dry down a little. We usually pick a bit at both stages and if there are enough peas, separate them out as we shell.
Peas are simple to prepare. Simply boil in salt water (or with some pork product) until soft. Then drain and add some butter. We also enjoy them cold in a summer salad mixed with corn, peppers, tomatoes and onions. They are great in soups, too.
The pea season should last as long as it stays warm. If you happen to stop by the farm some hot afternoon, we'll find an extra bowl for you.

Melon Ice Cream

2011-08-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

It's melon season and it's also ice cream season. So how about melon ice cream? Why not. We even found a recipe in an ice cream cookbook that inspired us. Here's our version, approved by Hattie.

2 cups melon puree

2 cups cream or mix of cream and milk

7.5 oz honey

Cut one melon in half. Remove seeds and peel; cut into chunks. Using an immersion blender or blender, puree. Measure out two cups. Put the rest in the freezer to use another time for ice cream or for making smoothies. Add the dairy and the honey. Puree again to make sure it is all well blended. Thoroughly chill before freezing according to your ice cream maker.
Next on the agenda - watermelon popsicles.

2011 Tomato Blind Taste Test Results

2011-07-28T19:16:00.000-07:00

We conducted our annual blind taste test of our tomato varieties this past Tuesday. We compared 15 varieties of paste and slicing type tomatoes including a couple small varieties that would probably better be described as salad size. We left the cherry/grape tomatoes for a separate tasting to do later. In addition to Eric and Melissa, Nora took part for the first time this year, and our two visitors took part, too, so we had 5 tasters altogether. The tasters were blindfolded and asked to score each tomato with a number between 1 and 10, then each taster's 4 highest scored tomatoes were tasted again and ranked from 1 to 4. A new variety for us this year scored the most #1 rankings (from Nora and both of our visitors): 'Thai pink,' a small, pink, oval tomato about the size of a very small egg. The other #1 rankings went to 'San Marzano redorta' (the banana pepper shaped paste variety) which also scored a #3 ranking and 'Amish paste' (the red "oxheart" variety) which also scored a #3 and a #4 ranking. 'Amish paste' has the most #1 rankings from the last 8 years total. 'Mr. Stripey' scored two #2 rankings this year. 'White queen' and 'German Johnson' each scored a #2 ranking. 'Azoychka' (the bright yellow variety), 'vine peach,' and 'Peron sprayless' (the medium-large regular round-shaped red tomato) each scored a #3 ranking. One of these years we're going to invite you all up for a taste test, but you'll have to do your own this year. You might be surprised what you really like best when you're blindfolded. One of our visitors discovered that she really likes the white/yellow varieties, which she never would have bought before. And we were all very impressed with the odd little 'Thai pink.'

Processing tomatoes

2011-07-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

   It's peak tomato season, and today the kitchen was a furnace of tomato processing (making the heat outside not feel so bad). There were tomatoes roasting in the oven, a crock pot simmering sauce, and two water bath canners going, full of whole canned tomatoes. Canned jars are now cooling on the counter filled with the colorful array of the tomato rainbow. But the effort of capturing this peak tomato flavor will be well worth it for all the other nine to ten months, when we can open a jar of tomatoes and taste summer.
   Here's a quick preview of how we preserve:
   For most of our tomato processing, we prefer to use the "paste type" San Marzano redortas. As our tomato patch is as much for ourselves as it is for you, we grow about seven times as many of the San Marzanos as our average, far more than any other variety, and this despite the fact that they're poor sellers. With their almost solid flesh and their low seed and juice content, we think they're the perfect type for canning whole, for roasting, for making sauce or paste or ketchup, for drying, for salsa... But as we wind up with cracked tomatoes and extras of every variety, they all find a preserving purpose. We mostly use the slicing types for juice -- the ripe-green or the cherry tomatoes make really good, out-of-the-ordinary juice -- but roasting is a quick way to process tomatoes, so we'll use any varieties for additional roasting tomatoes, too.
   The most basic way we preserve tomatoes is to can them whole. Simply drop the whole tomato (as is) into boiling water for about 30 seconds. You'll see the skin start to crack. Remove the tomatoes and cool in cold water. At this point, the skin will easily slip off. Then we core them and put them in jars. We can them as recommended by the Ball Book of Canning in their own juice in a water bath for 1 hour and 25 minutes. Instead of canning, these whole peeled tomatoes could easily be slipped into a freezer bag and frozen.
   A couple years ago, we were introduced to roasting tomatoes, and it has changed the way we enjoy tomatoes. We'll load a couple cookie sheets with mixed tomatoes cut into about one inch pieces. Then we might throw on some garlic or quartered onions, drizzle with oil, and sprinkle with some salt. Then we'll roast them at 325 for about an hour or until the pieces are concentrated but not burned. At this point we might enjoy them as an appetizer with bread or cheese, or we'll put them as is in jars and can or freeze. Or we'll puree them together with the onions and whatever else we added for a thick sauce, then run them through a food mill to take out the seeds. It's thick and has a wonderful roasted tomato flavor. Sometimes we add herbs and more garlic and onions. Then we'll can or freeze the sauce.
   Drying tomatoes is a great way to concentrate tomato flavor and store it in a really small space. We run several loads in our dehydrator then store the pieces in the freezer just in case they didn't get dry enough. Then we'll pull them out as we need for meat or bean dishes.
   We make a lot of juice which we really relish in late winter and early spring. Simply cut off any bad spots from the tomato then quarter, put in a large pot and cook until soft. We have a small hand food mill we'll then run it through to get out the seeds and peel or we have a larger Victorio strainer that is useful for large quantities. We especially enjoy separating the different colored tomatoes to end up with the different colored juices.
   And finally we make salsa. This is basically chopped tomatoes, peppers and onions with some vinegar added. Cilantro, of course, is a normal addition, but cilantro is a cool season crop, so we can our salsa without cilantro and then add fresh, chopped cilantro in the fall, early winter, or spring as we enjoy it.
   We'll probably have another big day or two of tomato processing in the next week (maybe two), so if you'd like to come help out and learn firsthand how we preserve our tomatoes, let us know, give us your phone number, and if we can plan ahead well enough, we'll get in touch and invite you to spend some time in our very hot kitchen with us!

Potato and onion harvest

2011-07-17T19:12:00.000-07:00

Harvesting potatoes was a community event this year. Especially with the record harvest this year, we were grateful for the help. Here is Steve plowing out the taters.

We even had some young people join in the pickup.

Lea, our current WWOOFer from France picked up pounds and pounds of them.

Piles of Kennebecs and Red Pontiac in an outbuilding.

Melissa pulling our Yellow of Parma onions.

A pickup full of onions. Next step, the outbuildings to hang them cure.

PESTICIDE EXPOSURE LINKED TO LOWER IQ IN CHILDREN

2011-07-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

    A few months ago we read about some then newly publicized studies showing that higher levels of exposure to organophosphates (a class of chemical pesticides) in pregnant mothers corresponded with lower IQ scores in their children at age 7. Here's one article on the subject:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-health/articles/2011/04/21/pesticide-exposure-in-pregnancy-linked-to-lower-iq-in-kids?PageNr=1
   These were interesting studies to us, not just because they highlighted yet another unforeseen and imprudent risk of using chemical pesticides, but especially because they drew our attention to unexpected types of risks. We consider it old news that chemical use is responsible for various forms of cancer and other diseases that will make you sick or kill you -- the only new news about chemicals making us sick is connecting each new generation of chemicals to the specific illnesses they cause -- but it's a little different to think about pesticides causing problems that aren't illnesses (like lower IQ's.) Last year we heard from a beekeeper that pollinates low-bush blueberries in Maine that consumption of low-bush blueberries and a pesticide used on them has been linked to much higher levels of behavioral disorders like ADHD in children. (Low-bush blueberries are different from the blueberries grown locally; if you want to avoid pesticides, local blueberries are actually a much better choice than peaches or apples, for example. Frozen blueberries and other blueberries from up North would be the ones to avoid.)
    So what do we conclude from these kinds of reports? First, we conclude that the problems stemming from chemical use in agriculture are far, far too complex to try to navigate piecemeal. Trying to ban or avoid just the "bad chemicals" that we hear about in the news, etc., surely won't leave the "safe chemicals but rather simply other bad chemicals that cause less expected problems or chemicals that are more difficult to link to the problems they cause. In other words, we believe the only reasonable response is to avoid chemical agriculture (and lawn care, home pest control, household chemicals, etc.) in general. Regaining control of those things for which we've become dependent on the corporate system is the only response we find promising. For us that means, of course, not using any chemical pesticides (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.) in our own farming and accepting the ensuing costs and losses as our new baseline, but more to the point it means doing as much as we can for ourselves (instead of simply doing what's most profitable and then feeding that money back into the consumer economy), wild harvesting and buying directly from people we know (that likewise aren't using chemical shortcuts) those things that we aren't growing ourselves, and re-learning how to eat locally so that more and more we can do without the kinds of supermarket foods that we've grown up thinking of as staples. This means, for example, accepting the time and commitment it takes to hand milk or tether out a cow, even though supermarket-scaled dairies can produce milk far more cheaply. It also means we don't compare the cost of local, unofficially-organic strawberries to conventional strawberries (knowing that even five cents for a truckload of sweet, red lowered IQ's and behavioral disorders is no bargain), or compare the appearance of unsprayed apples to conventional apples, or the taste of homegrown fruit to chemical-intensive peaches, but rather we compare the cost of local, unofficially-organic strawberries to picking wild blackberries, and we compare the unsprayed apples to the alternative of unsprayed Asian pears, and we simply do without chemical-intensive peaches altogether and let that motivate us to plant more figs and to try making melon ice cream instead of peach and to freeze more blueberries for this winter.

RAINBOW IN THE TOMATO PATCH

2011-07-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

A tomato plant for the most part looks like a tomato plant. For months, we've been looking at long rows of these green plants. Now suddenly the plants are giving forth their signature colors and shapes. We do have a map of the tomato patch, but it's been more fun to let the fruits form and then color. This way we recognize the arrival of our old favorites and meet for the first time our new trialed ones. But we don't look at them long - tomatoes are for eating!
When tomatoes are this beautiful, they simply need to be served as is. A favorite side dish of ours is a plate of sliced tomatoes - with the whole spectrum of colors. Starting from the bottom of the rainbow, we have our repeat favorite 'Cherokee puprle.' It's often the first to disappear from the platter with it's tempting maroon/purple fully ripe color and rich flavor to match. Next, greens: ripe tomatoes can be green - they actually get a bit of yellowish hue which, in addition to the softness, clues you they are ready. Our greens this year include a smaller salad one 'green zebra' with its delicious tart bite and yellow stripes. 'Aunt Ruby's German green' is a new full-size green slicing tomato that Melissa's mom saved seed from for us and we're trying for the first time this year. In the orange/yellow spectrum we have 'Djena Lee' a very pretty, slightly oval shaped yellow-orange tomato. 'Azoychka', a Russian heirloom, ripens to a taxi cab yellow with a hint of citrus flavor. We love the way it contrasts, in taste but especially in color, with the red tomatoes. Another very unusual tomato is the 'white queen,' which is such a pale yellow that it's really about white. And then we get to the reds and pinks. 'Akers West Virginia' has been our long-time favorite large red slicer, the one that says put me on a slab of mayonaise lathered bread. With homemade mayaonise (very easy to make), even our kids love this regular lunch time meal. 'German Johnson' the pink version of a large slicer, are a locally recognized favorite and for good reason. They come on early and big. 'Peron sprayless' and 'Illini star' are reds, and a bit smaller than the previous big guys, so they can go for a sandwich or something smaller. But if you're undecided on color, 'Mr. Stripey' is the tomato for you. It's a gigantic, gorgeous red tomato with yellow stripes or is it a yellow tomato with red stripes. Either way, cut crosswise it's a treat for the eyes. But don't stop there. Eat it up and we'll have more for you next week.
In the just for fun category this year, we're trialing 'vine peach', a seed gift from a friend. And true to their name they are covered with a peach-like fuzz and a peach-like color enough to really make you think you're holding a ripe peach in your hand. 'Thai pink' is a smallish "plum tomato" new to us this year from the same seed-saving friend. And we love our cherry tomatoes. Just mentioning the names and you certainly can envision a bowl-full of mini color balls - 'orange cherry', 'red pearl', pink cherry, 'black cherry', Harry's yellow grape, and 'tommy toe,' a well-known red heirloom.
And finally, what we refer to as our processing or 'winter' tomatoes - 'Amish paste' and 'San Marzano redorta'. 'Amish paste' actually is a wonderful multi-purpose tomato. If we had to grow one tomato, it would be this one. In fact, a neighbor who claims not to really like tomatoes, now only grows this one. A repeat winner in our blind taste tests, it excels fresh in the summer and is a winter treat out of the jar on pizza or pasta. We can't say enough about 'San Marzanos' either so we just planted about a quarter of our tomato patch to them! They are big. Forget hours peeling baby romas to can. One of these equals 5 romas, with much less trouble and double the flavor. They are nearly juiceless and seedless (which can make seed saving an effort) so canning them is a joy. Their meatiness means that they don't cook down nearly as much as other tomatoes, so for making a sauce or anything you want to thicken up, a pound of these San Marzano seems to be worth two pounds of slicing tomatoes. Stick 5 or 6 peeled tomatoes in a quart jar and they are ready to go into the canner.
All our tomatoes are open-pollinated varities grown from seed we saved (except for the ones we are trialing for the first time). They are put through a rigorous taste test each year to make sure they perform where it counts the most. Let us know what you think as you enjoy this year's tomato season!

Helping Visitors

2011-07-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

We've had a string of visitors come stay on the farm and help out this year, starting with Gildas (pictured weeding the strawberry patch), followed by Tim (whose picture we failed to take -- didn't mean to leave you out, Tim!), then Zeke (pictured milking the cow), and most recently Melanie (tying up onions). Thank you again for the help! We very much enjoyed the time we got to spend with each of you on the farm. Keep in touch, and come visit whenever you get the chance!

Homegrown Beer: the Barley Harvest

2011-06-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

A good sharp sickle -- we got a sharper sickle in time for
the wheat harvest -- seems like the best harvesting tool.

Our threshing system gets the job done,
but we'd love to find a better way.

Paul and Hattie playing on the tractor as it starts to get dark.

Bringing in the barley harvest.

DIVERSITY AND KNOWING WHAT WENT INTO GROWING YOUR FOOD

2011-06-25T08:26:00.000-07:00

One of the several reasons we maintain a highly diversified farm -- we grow well over 100 varieties of garden crops; manage permanent pastures to feed cattle and goats for dairy and meat; grow grains for food and as a supplement to forage for our chickens; grow fruit trees, brambles, bushes, and vines; keep honeybees; raise mushrooms on logs; etc. -- is so that our customers can have a realistic option of knowing what went into growing their food. The modern food economy has gotten so complex that it's impossible for normal consumers to know what goes into growing their food (which we see as a fundamental step to exercising good stewardship of the earth.) Diversifying our farm is a way we offer to simplify your food economy. The alternative would be for us to sell a much smaller variety of farm goods to a much wider pool of customers and, correspondingly, for our customers to buy just a small number of things from each of a much greater number of farmers, but that would mean that consumers would have that much less reason to get to know any one farm -- and it's hard enough for farms and consumers to make meaningful, informative connections as it is. So we want to make it worth your while to get to know us, to learn what we do and why we do it. In order to farm in a truly different way, we believe that truly different relationships with the consumers of our farm goods are absolutely essential. Along these same lines, here's a little excerpt from a Wendell Berry interview:
Berry: Shorten the supply lines. Bring your economic geography back into your own view. That's not to say that we don't need tuna fish here [in Kentucky], but even if we were catching ocean fish in the least destructive way, it would still be wrong for us to be too dependent on tuna in Kentucky. We ought to eat more catfish.
We ought to see to it that our rivers are unpolluted here, and eat the local fish from them. And we ought to fish in a way that preserves the supply and, therefore, preserves the livelihood of fishing. What I'm trying to talk against is the idea that a so-called environmental problem can ever be satisfactorily reduced to a simple moral choice. It's always complex in its causes, and so its solutions will also have to be complex.
Fisher-Smith (Interviewer): It seems to me that you've turned these words "complex" and "simple" upside down, in terms of their usual positive or negative values. You've said you wish to complicate, not to simplify, every aspect of daily life.
Berry: Absolutely! Simplicity means that you have brought things to a kind of unity in yourself; you have made certain connections. That is, you have to make a just response to the real complexity of life in this world. People have tried to simplify themselves by severing the connections. That doesn't work. Severing connections makes complication. These bogus attempts at simplification ignore or despise the real complexity of the world. And ignoring complexity makes complication--in other words, a mess.
Interviewer: But that complication is considered to be outside the accounting?
Berry: It's left out of the accounting. That's right. People think either that they'll die before the bill comes due or that somebody else will pay for it. But the world is complex, and if we are to make fit responses to the world, then our thinking--not our equipment, but our thoughts--will have to become complex also. Our thoughts can never become as complex as the world is--but, you see, an uncanny thing is possible. It's possible to use the world well without understanding it in all of its complexity. People have done it. They've done it not by complicated technology, but by competent local adaptation, complex thought, sympathy, affection, local loyalties and fidelities, and so on.

THE CHALLENGES OF SIMPLICITY

2011-05-18T19:15:00.000-07:00

   Talking about poultry and eggs last week we mentioned some things in passing about how we feed our chickens, and it occurred to us that we might have given a false impression about the simplicity of keeping chickens the way we do, so we thought we'd tell you more this week about what's involved. Straight heirloom corn, for example, is certainly a simple chicken feed, but feeding simply corn (or barley or wheat, depending largely on the season) presents a whole array of other challenges, which is why most small farmers and even most people with backyard chickens opt for the store-bought, “scientifically formulated” chicken feed mixture with the long list of mysterious ingredients (whether conventional or USDA organic) like we discussed last week. So the question we want to address here is why feeding a homegrown kind of feed to chickens is so uncommon. In other words, what's not simple about feeding simple, homegrown feed?
   The first challenge is that locally grown, non-GMO (not genetically modified) grain -- which is the only grain we feed -- isn't typically for sale anywhere, so generally our only options are to grow grain ourselves (and hand-hoe and hand-harvest it, etc.) and to find local grain farmers willing to deal with us in relatively, by today's standards, very small quantities. However, a small quantity for the grain farmer is typically a large quantity for us. The heirloom corn we bought from a nearby “retired” hobby farmer last year -- it took years just to locate a farmer growing a surplus of heirloom corn like this -- wasn't for sale by the bag as needed; really the only way we were able to buy it was to buy the entire crop at harvest time. And the corn came on the cob, so we had to have built a corn crib to store it (about 70 bushels on the cob) and finish drying it. Then in order to feed it we had to remove the cobs by hand and pass them one at a time through our corn sheller. That's one series of logistical hurdles, but since we don't use insecticides we can't simply store large enough quantities of corn to feed our flock of chickens through the summer and early fall without the corn getting destroyed by little grain-eating insects. So to make it through those months we've been buying wheat from some brothers that keep an old combine running and grow a few acres of grain, as best we can tell, just as a hobby. (That the only farmers growing the kind of grain that we'd want to buy can only justify their farming as a hobby shows how badly we need to increase our awareness and the value we place on local grain farming and grain-fed products like pork and poultry, etc.) Together with another friend that raises livestock and poultry, we've been buying these brothers' entire wheat crop as feed for our animals. What that means for us is that we wind up with a row of 55-gallon drums full of wheat lined up in front of our barn, where the brothers are able to unload the wheat. Then we had to get those drums under shelter. This past year we borrowed a hand truck for moving appliances, which was a big improvement over brute wrestling, but with uneven ground and barn bedding, etc. still took two plus hours of strenuous work. As nice as it would be to avoid that kind of work, it was the most efficient way to get the job done, given the scale necessitated by breaking with mainstream ways of farming, which is the broader point we're trying to make: breaking with mainstream ways of farming isn't easy and it often dictates a scale incompatible with modern, labor-saving machinery.
   But the challenges to simply feeding locally grown grain don't end with the grain, because grain isn't a complete feed. Corn or wheat only work as feed for our chickens because all day long, until we top them off in the evening, they're eating grubs and worms and grass and weed seeds, etc., etc. In order to make that kind of foraging possible, we have to manage predator threats, we have to keep the chickens out of the gardens and away from all the crops they would eat or scratch up, and we also have to deal with infringements on people spaces. We keep predators shy mainly by keeping a couple outdoor dogs (which have their own set of requirements) and by being here, working outside and walking back and forth, all day long almost every day. We keep the chickens out of the gardens and away from our crops at the expense of fencing, and by chasing down the occasional fence jumpers with a fishing net (i.e. at the expense of our dignity) and then finding someone else to whom we can give or sell those hens. Furthermore, allowing chickens to free forage means allowing chickens to poop in all sorts of places we would rather not have chicken poop, like on the walkway from our driveway to the house. Fortunately for the sake of our chickens' forage we don't have neighbors within 1/8 mile or too much traffic on our road -- that comes with the cost of being further from town and market and customers -- but for most other small farmers providing comparable forage would probably mean daily setting up new rotations with poultry netting. All this to say there are plenty of hurdles and costs to keeping things simple. We hope understanding some of these things will help you appreciate the end product.

Why does feeding a chicken have to be so complex?

2011-05-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Chickens roosting in the barn for the night

   Last year we recommended Organic Valley to you all as a relatively better choice for milk by supermarket standards. We figured any company that big wouldn't maintain much integrity very many years, but we didn't foresee having to issue a retraction so soon. We know there are still a lot of good farmers supplying Organic Valley, but a recent comment by the CEO, George Siemon was enough to spoil any endorsement we could make for the brand. The CEO's comment actually had nothing at all to do with dairy; his comment was made in defense of using synthetic methionine in organic broiler feed -- apparently eggs are sold under the same brand name: “I don’t understand what the big deal is. There are tons of synthetics in your life; now we are saying none in animals?” You see, a diet of strictly grains and oilseed meals (i.e. corn and soy) is so unnatural for chickens that they're unable to get all the essential amino acids they need, and because a natural diet is so incompatible with modern, large-scale ways of keeping chickens, the people that write the rules for the USDA organic program made an exception for synthetic methionine in poultry feed, so that modern, large-scale farms could continue to supply organic consumers with poultry products.
   There would be several ways to avoid the need for synthetic methionine in poultry feed, but the solutions all get in the way of industrially defined efficiency. One solution would be to supply chickens with fresh, green feeds. Another solution would be to let chickens scratch up things like earthworms and grubs. Another solution would be to simply raise chickens that grow at a more natural rate and don't run into nutrient deficiencies as readily as the modern hybrids bred for intensive factory farming. Another solution would be to give chickens the kind of surpluses (like dairy byproducts) that small farms generally find themselves with. All of these things happen as a matter of course on a farm like ours, and any one of them would likely be a solution to the USDA organic methionine problem. Unfortunately, all of these solutions are too far removed from the reality of “USDA organic” practice, so the people in charge simply wrote the rules defining “organic” to accommodate industrialized farming methods by allowing synthetic amino acids in poultry feed. Now, maybe synthetic methionine isn't as harmful or risky as many of the other synthetics used in agriculture -- we don't know and for our sake we don't need to know -- but the kind of farming made possible by synthetic methionine, thousands of chickens crowded into buildings never eating anything fresh, fed by Midwestern mega-farms, is certainly harmful, and it's a far cry from what organic ought to mean.
   We found the following mystery ingredients in one blend of USDA organic feed (which we're sure is more natural than what's fed to the flocks supplying supermarkets, whose feed ingredients we've never seen disclosed) -- keep in mind this is a USDA certified organic feed:
Sodium Silico Aluminate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Yeast Culture, Vitamin A Supplement, Vitamin D3 Supplement, Vitamin E Supplement, Choline Chloride, Menadione Nicotinamide Bisulfite Complex, D-Calcium Pantothenic Acid, Niacin Supplement, Riboflavin Supplement, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride, Thiamine Hydrochloride, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Biotin, Folic Acid, Manganese Sulfate, Ferrous Sulfate, Calcium Iodate, Zinc Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Sodium Selenite, Dried fermentation product of Enterococcus faecium, Dried fermentation product of Bacillus coagulans...
   Some of these ingredients have more natural sounding names than others, but surely none of them was fed to poultry 200 years ago. Where do all these things come from and at what ecological costs? Would you know how to grow or mine or synthesize any of these things? Why does feeding a chicken have to be so complex? For comparison, we don't feed anything to our chickens that farmers didn't feed 200 years ago. According to the season and what we can grow ourselves or buy directly from neighbors (besides surpluses from our own farm like garden extras or surplus dairy from our animals) we simply supplement free range forage with barley or wheat or heirloom (non-GMO) corn. It really doesn't seem to us that normal chicken feed ought to require sophisticated modern science. For us eating organic doesn't mean eating processed foods with long lists of ingredients that came from who-knows-where and were produced who-knows-how; why should eating organic be defined so differently when it comes to feeding animals?
   USDA organic is a huge improvement over conventional -- don't get us wrong, it gets a LOT worse -- but it still leaves a lot to be desired, and as a system it's nothing we find hope in.

Late frost

2011-05-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

Pretty reliably we can subtract at least 5 degrees from the forecasted low. So when the forecast is for 38, yikes! Forget that the calendar says May. Wednesday and Thursday nights we pulled out all the large garden pots we've been so generously given over the years and covered all 309 of the newly set tomato plants plus the squash, cucumbers, and zucchini. We knew there was nothing we could do for the field corn and potatoes. Then we set the alarm for 5:00 a.m. to try to wash any frost off the strawberries if needed. For the most part, everything came through alright, although we did see some damage to some of the strawberry plants.

STONE GROUND HEIRLOOM WHITE CORNMEAL AND GRITS

2011-05-05T21:19:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, while looking for extra grain to feed our chickens, we found an 80 year old farmer nearby that was growing about an acre of 'hickory king' white field corn. Even though he was growing this very special heirloom without any herbicides or other pesticides, he was selling it to the local feed mill for commodity prices. We arranged to buy his whole crop and paid him double what he asked for it, knowing how much it was worth since we were growing a half acre of a very similar heirloom ourselves (the only difference being we avoid the use of conventional fertilizer.) This past year we grew a much smaller section of field corn since we were expecting a baby right about the time we'd need to be hoeing the corn, so we were very pleased to again be able to buy this 'hickory king' corn from our neighbor. We stored the corn in our little corn crib (pictured here) until about January when it was thoroughly dry and then began the process of sorting and shelling. We used a hand sheller to remove the less perfect kernels from the end of each ear, setting aside that corn for chicken feed along with the whole cobs that weren't as nice, inspecting each cob underneath to make sure it was free of any mold before shelling the remaining corn for grinding. We winnowed the corn in front of a fan and froze it one bucket at a time to eliminate any insect pests. Now we're grinding it fresh as needed with the small granite grist mill (made in Wilkes County) that we bought when we first started growing corn. Unlike almost all the other field corn grown in our area (and nationwide), heirloom corn varieties are not genetically modified with non-corn genes. We believe it's important to preserve these heirlooms not just to maintain non-genetically modified options, but also because these varieties weren't bred to depend on high rates of conventional fertilizer, on chemical control of weeds, diseases, and insects, and on combine harvesting. That means they're all around suitable to local use on small farms and to communities deciding how to grow their own food. We normally grind our cornmeal coarser than what you'd find in supermarkets. It's the texture we mostly prefer for our favorites: corn muffins, corn mush, hush puppies, hoe cakes... If you prefer a different grind, we're happy to grind to custom requests. We also grind and sift grits. Our grits still contain some of the hulls of the corn kernel. These will float to the surface when you add the water to your grits. Skim these off. Once ground, cornmeal or grits like we're offering are best used promptly or stored in the freezer. Enjoy!

Time for lettuce

2011-05-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

We're off to a very nice start on a beautiful lettuce season, so please enjoy. May is perhaps the best month of the whole year for lettuce. Right now the loose mix is at its peak. Our spring mix is an assortment of buttercrunch and green and red leaf lettuces. Our head lettuces have started to mature as well. Last year we discovered a green butterhead variety, which you hopefully enjoyed as much as we did. This year we've found a red butterhead variety that's looking very good, as well as a new Romaine type, plus two Batavian types with heat
resistance we're hoping will extend our lettuce season into early
summer.

Here's our standard salad dressing recipe. Of all the meals we've shared with people, our simple salad dressing probably gets the most recipe requests of all, so here it is:

1/2 cup honey

1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup oil
1 tsp salt
2 tsp prepared mustard or 1/2 tsp ground mustard (optional)

optional additions: minced dried strawberries, poppy seeds, herbs...

Growth spurt

2011-05-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Rhubarb patch

Strawberries growing on straw

Garlic growing up

First of the sweet potato slips emerging

Home brew here starts with a barley patch

Redoing the landscaping

2011-04-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

The important thing to see in this picture is what you don't see. But imagine with us, edible berries on bushes along the foundation and hardy kiwis growing up the pillars. The other day, we used the tractor to rip out the old bushes along this side porch, making room for our new edible landscaping. All of over the farm, we're slowly intergrating edible bushes, vines and trees into the landscape. Some of the newest additions include pinenuts, a hardy citrus, a hardy pomegranate, chestnuts, a cork oak, and some hazelnuts.

Putting the sweetpotatoes to bed

2011-04-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

A week ago, we bedded up our sweet potatoes. The onion plants had come out of these coldframes so they were mostly ready to go for growing our sweet potato slips. This year, we're growing them in sawdust, so we dug out most of the soil and filled back in with some aged sawdust. This picture shows before we finished covering them with more sawdust. We're excited to be growing many of our favorites, especially Porto Rico, white triumph and Red Japanese. We also have some new ones to try this year, including an all-blue one. It will probably be another month before the weather is consistently warm enough to start setting out the slips in the garden. In the meantime, we're still feasting on sweet potatoes dug last fall. They are great keepers.

Farm update in pictures

2011-03-08T20:18:00.000-08:00

Garlic, shallots and multiplier onions mulched and growing

The first of the tomatoes germinated in the chest freezer chambers

Onion and leek plants in the cold frames eager to go out

Our sweet potato tasting event

Considering if a plant would be happy in a cold frame here

The completed cold frame in front of the house

Lettuces ready to go out

Bugs the steer

What's Happening on the Farm

2010-10-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

Breaking apart garlic heads for garlic planting

With the sweet potatoes all out of the ground, we're now starting to sort them. First we set some aside for "seed" for next year. When planted in our cold frames in early spring, the sweet potatoes will send up lots of "slips" which we then plant. Even though we have many bushels of sellable potatoes, there are also plenty of tiny, cracked, etc. potatoes that have us thinking we ought to finally get started with a couple pigs.
We've also been working on pulling the peanuts off the vines. After digging the vines we brought them (peanuts still attached) to one of our buildings where we pull the peanuts off. The peanuts are then put on trays to dry. We then feed the vines to Elsea our cow.
We finished planting strawberries a couple weeks ago, expanding a bit from last year. The neighbor farmer brought over some straw for us to mulch them. This is especially important for keeping strawberries clean. The mulch is also great for weed control and eventually organic matter for the soil. Now going on to our fourth season here, we are starting to see the regular additions of mulch and manure, along with cover crops, making a difference. We also finished planting the garlic, shallots and multiplier onions. We expanded this patch too! We're hopeful the multiplier onions will give us plenty of spring onions come early spring. We've also been planting the fields that don't have fall or over-wintered crops to cover crops.
During this recent warm weather we've seen a good bit of bee activity on asters, small white or purple wildflowers. We were hopeful the bees were getting some winter honey stored for themselves from it, but it seems it has barely helped them hold their own. It's definitely time now to feed the colonies that didn't maintain sufficient stores to make it through the winter. Although we had a very good honey crop, it came early and was very short, so it's been a good five months since the bees had any opportunity to get ahead. Summers are very typically discouraging, trying just to limit losses from queen problems, starvation, disease, robbing, etc., and knowing that the next real opportunity to make honey isn't until next May. At this point we're hoping just to hold on to as many hives as we had this year for next year.
We ended up with only one goat in milk this summer. Now that we have a bit more time, we've been milking her once a day and making a simple cheese for ourselves. Our other cow, Mary May, is due at Thanksgiving.
We're certainly looking forward to winter. But to keep ourselves disciplined we have a few projects we hope to get done, including hooking up a wood stove, building fences, shoveling out and spreading manure, building grape and kiwi trellises, reconfiguring the chicken fences around the gardens, assembling and cleaning up bee equipment, sorting and shelling and winnowing corn for cornmeal, planting trees, pruning, maybe building a greenhouse, building/setting up some basic infrastructure for a couple pigs...

The Harvest

2010-10-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

Look what I found in the garden

2010-10-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

What's that in your hair Nora?

Wet Pockets

2010-10-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

Paul said the grass got his pants wet. Upon further inspection, we found them filled with muscadine grapes!

Butter

2010-10-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

Nora and Paul milking Elsea

Skimming the cream

Churning the cream into butter

4 pounds of butter!

Okra

2010-10-03T20:20:00.000-07:00

It's almost too late to be sharing an okra recipe, but maybe you stocked up your freezers with enough okra to keep trying new okra recipes all through the winter. We've certainly had a bounty of okra this year. Maybe we shouldn't have planted that extra little row in the triangle garden. Now that the okra plants need to be bent over to be picked and are still growing strong, Melissa might confess -- Eric never! -- that she's gotten a bit tired of okra. We've sauted it, stewed it, roasted it, and fried it. Then a week ago we discovered a new way to cook it. Okra fritters! Suddenly, we weren't sure we'd frozen enough okra to keep us in fritters for the winter. We're nearing the end of the okra season, so enjoy some now and make sure you are stocked up for the winter, too.

Okra Fritters (adapted from Everyday Food)

2 cups oil or lard
1/2 cup cornmeal or flour
salt and pepper
2 cups coarsely chopped okra
1/2 small onion diced small (1/2 cup)
1 egg
1/4 cup buttermilk

1. In a large, heavy skillet, heat oil over medium. In a medium bowl, combine flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/4 tsp. pepper. Add okra and onion and toss to coat. In a small bowl, whisk together egg and buttermilk. Add to okra mixture and stir just until combined.

2. In two batches, drop batter in 2-tablespoonful mounds into oil. With a small spatula or butter knife, gently flatten each mound and fry until golden, about 4 minutes per side, flipping once (adjust heat if browning too quickly). Drain on paper towels. Season with salt and serve warm.

Big News

2010-09-26T19:19:00.000-07:00

The Statesville Record and Landmark recently wrote a story about our farm:
http://www2.statesville.com/news/2010/sep/25/low-tech-farm-produces-little-bit-everything-ar-419219/

LIVING OFF GLOBAL COMMODITIES

2010-09-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

We heard a couple interesting statistics and stories recently that spawned some thoughts on global commodity markets. The first story had nothing directly to do with agriculture. An economist was talking about what impact proposals that would increase domestic oil drilling would have on oil prices. The economist made the point that no matter which course we took oil would remain a global commodity product dominated by OPEC. In other words, talking about increasing domestic production by 5 or 10% of domestic consumption missed the reality that there is no domestic oil market; rather, the U.S. is just one piece of a global market. Americans would make an impact on domestic prices only insofar as we could make an impact on global production, because domestic prices are determined by and are a part of a globalized market. Of course, that's just one small part of the story of American oil use, but it got us thinking about parallels in agriculture. Corn and soybeans and wheat and cotton are similarly global commodities nowadays. Of course, not all corn and wheat are part of that global market -- the wheat we grow for ourselves or the heirloom cornmeal we've sold at the farmers' market are anything but global commodity products -- but the overwhelming majority of corn and soybeans and wheat grown in America are bought and sold into the same global market that China and France and Zambia and Brazil belong to. Wheat prices are high in America right now in part because of wildfires in Russia. That's true even if you're buying commodity wheat from a farmer half a mile down the road, because that transaction still takes place in the context of a global market. With all that in mind various stories and tidbits we've heard recently about Brazil particularly intrigued us. One story was about the low cost of production for an Irishman farming commodity crops on several thousand acres in Brazil. Eric hadn't even realized that soybeans could be grown in Brazil's climate, and then we find out that Brazil recently overtook the United States as the world's leader in soybean exports (and was already the world's largest beef exporter.) We remember ten or twenty years ago when saving the rain forests was as prominent an issue as global warming is today -- the kind of thing elementary school children everywhere were teaching their parents -- but while the rain forest issue lost our attention, Brazil doubled the amount of land planted to soy in the last decade. The global soybean market that's propelling these dramatic changes on the Amazonian frontier is the same market that we give a little push to every time we buy a tub of Crisco, a gallon of biodiesel, a book printed with soy ink, a bar of soap made from soybean oil, chickens raised on a standard diet of corn and soybean meal, soy-based pharmaceuticals, soy-based candles, crops grown with soy-based pesticides and fungicides, farm raised fish, etc., etc. Our response is to echo Wendell Berry when he wrote: "We can't go on too much longer, maybe, without considering the likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough to work on the scale to which we have been tempted by our technological abilities." On smaller scale farms with free range chickens soybean meal was entirely unnecessary: chickens could find their protein in the form of grubs and worms. Instead of field crops, hogs used to be raised largely on diets of acorns and table scraps and crop residues that now go unused or contribute to landfills. Soybean meal has proven significantly cheaper, at least in the short-term and if we don't account for any of the indirect costs (like costs to our health, loss of rain forests, loss of community self-sufficiency, etc.) We see a tremendous value in maintaining and rediscovering and developing alternatives to our broad dependency on commodity soybeans.

Helping Hands

2010-09-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

We just signed up as a host WWOOF Farm a few months ago but have been blessed with "willing workers" since. Shane and Sarah spent two weeks with us, the start of a series of WWOOF farm visits for them. We are grateful for their help!

Farm Update

2010-09-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

    We're at another small turning point this week with the first of the fall greens ready to harvest. Despite the first taste of fall crops, we haven't really had much fall weather yet, certainly not if you look at the daytime high temperatures. That's making for a slow start for fall crops that germinate and grow better in more moderate temperatures. If the hard winter weather holds off long enough, there's still time for a lot of the fall crops to make, but we surely won't have as much as early as we would in a more average year. There are still several of the summer crops that are maturing meanwhile. We started enjoying this year's crop of popcorn this week. Our first batch of creamed honey was ready last week. Some of the earlier maturing sweet potatoes are sizing up already, but we're still looking forward to some of our favorite baking varieties. (We think some of these early varieties make great sweet potato chips, though.) The peanuts are looking pretty good, and we plan to harvest those sometime next month. The growing season is definitely nearing its end, though.
     The last two and a half weeks have made for the longest dry stretch we've had all year. For now, we're holding off on planting strawberries until we can see a break in that pattern coming. All in all, we've had more regular rainfall through this growing season than we can remember in any of the last few years, though.
Last year we started talking about the years as the year of the beans and bell peppers (2008), the year of the tomatoes and sweet potatoes (2009), etc. This year will have to be the year of the strawberries and the Mexican bean beetles. (Not a good bean year!) We probably had more strawberries and more bean beetles than we had in all the previous years (since we started selling in 2004) combined. Besides the strawberries, we were also well pleased with the garden peas and lettuces this spring. The onions -- which we're about to the end of -- also held out to produce a surprisingly nice crop this year. Although only a minor crop for us, the pumpkins and winter squash did quite well this year. We need to find more ways to use these pumpkins than just desserts and soup! We're excited about all the different varieties of winter squash there are to grow and want to grow more next year.
     Although our number of bee hives was a little down this spring, things went very well in the bee yard, and we had what was probably our best per hive average yet. The honey flow was early, short, and intense, but fortunately we were able to build last year's nucleus colonies up in time to make an excellent crop. There wasn't any summer crop to speak of this year, but the bees seem to have held their own through the summer pretty well, and we feel pretty good about the way things look heading into winter, even though we never much know what to expect: there are just so many variables when it comes to bees.
If you've asked for eggs the last few weeks, you know that our supply of eggs has been very limited lately. That's mainly due to the normal seasonal cycle. We actually reduced the size of our laying flock this spring, because we were having trouble selling all our eggs, and now it's quite the opposite. It will probably be January or February before we see egg surpluses again, but we hope you'll remember our eggs then.
     We're continuing to learn and improve on our management of the pasture and our cattle and dairy goats. One of our Jersey cows is bred to a Jersey bull and due to calve Thanksgiving Day. The other is maybe too old to successfully breed again, but we hope she'll keep milking for a long time anyway and maybe provide an opportunity for some more veal early next year. Our little herd of Saanen dairy goats is up to four now, although just one of those kidded and is in milk this year. We're slowly trying to increase there.
     We're increasingly optimistic about the prospects for selling a full variety of local, organic fruit. We were able to pick most of our blueberries off our own bushes this year, and the bushes are still just getting going. Our little orchard that we planted in the fall of 2007 when we first moved to Iredell has already yielded its first apples and pears. We've especially been enjoying figs and Asian pears lately, and we found our first ripe persimmon (from a delicious wild tree) this week.

Local Milk

2010-08-26T20:24:00.000-07:00

We want to continue this week sharing our thoughts on how to get away from the conventional, corporate food system and how to develop a dependable, community-based food system free especially of chemical and pharmaceutical dependency. This week our focus is dairy. Increasingly, dairy cows are being kept (like poultry and hogs) without any access to forage or any fresh feed at all. Fortunately (unlike poultry and hogs), real, significant fresh feed is a part of the USDA organic requirements for dairy cattle. Of course, as with all rule-based programs, there are producers that seek to meet the minimal letter of those rules without following the spirit of the rules in order to gain cost advantages and increase their market share. However, there is one fairly big organic cooperative with farms in Iredell and Rowan Counties (and all over the country) that has really impressed us with their integrity, and that's Organic Valley. If we had to buy milk and butter, etc., in the grocery stores, we would definitely choose Organic Valley. First, so far as we're aware, there is no other government-regulated dairy or cooperative with farms in North Carolina that sells organic milk. Second, we've seen a couple of the farms that sell to Organic Valley and we've talked to some of the farmers, and what we've seen up until now are real family farms with cows on green pastures. If you're going to buy government-regulated dairy products, the Organic Valley cooperative would be, by our recommendation, the best option (and well worth the price compared to the other supermarket options we're aware of.) Of course, even the best milk in stores still leaves a whole lot to be desired in terms of community accountability; dependency on "organic" grain and/or hay from halfway across the continent; dependency on conventional transportation, processing, and distribution systems; and other issues of sustainability.

At this point we're forced to confront the hot button issue of "raw milk." We wish it hadn't become such a hot button issue. It's an issue that the mainstream food/agricultural system clearly feels threatened by. We would much rather just mind our own business and let the people that want the government to oversee and guarantee the safety of their food supply remain in their own little world. Ideally, we would definitely want to offer milk (and cheese and butter, etc.) from our cows and goats for sale, but as things are, we just want to steer far away from the whole controversy of distributing "raw milk." There are still a lot of things we can actively encourage you all to do, however. We are very happy to share what we know about keeping a family cow or goat, and we would love to help you figure out how to get started milking your own animal, if you're at all inclined. Even if you live in town or can't keep an animal on your own land, there are other ways to keep a dairy animal. We like the idea of a real "cow share" where several families share not just the milk but the actual work, taking turns milking over the course of a week, such that the milk is only ever handled by the consumer himself. In the past, we have milked neighbors' animals when they've wanted to get away or take a vacation. If these kinds of ideas interest you, we'd be more than happy to talk to you and try to help you become more self-sufficient with regards to dairy. Even if you're simply buying all your milk, we would encourage you to learn how to take control of more of the processing, e.g. butter and ice cream and cheese and yogurt, etc. Making yogurt is often a very cost effective thing to do at home. It may be cheaper to simply buy finished butter than to buy cream in the store and churn it, but the more you get away from the industrial food system, the more opportunities you'll find to do these kinds of things and save a few cents along the way, and, of course, enjoy dairy products that you can feel worlds better about. We'd be very happy to talk to you about any of these dairy-related things, so don't be shy!

Low-tech beans

2010-08-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

Our farm is as much a homestead as it is a "for market" production farm. This means many of the things we grow or do are just for ourselves. Dry beans, for example. When we moved to this farm three years ago we had enough garden space to experiment with growing a larger variety of our own food. So we pulled some dry beans out of the pantry and planted them. To our delight, the kidney, black, pinto, white beans and black-eyed peas all gave a pretty good yields. We've yet to have any luck with chick peas.

Without a combine to harvest the crop, we were left with low-tech options. So we hand pulled the dried plants and put them in feed sacks. Then this week, we finished the final steps of getting the beans back into the pantry. Since the plants were good and dry it took only a couple minutes of beating with a bat or stick for the beans to fall out of the pods and to the bottom of the bag. The empty plants were lifted out of the sack and the beans were poured into a bowl. Then we winnowed them in front of a fan to get the chaff out. Before using them, the beans will just need a once over to make sure they are fully clean.

Queen of the okra

2010-08-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

Our first ever WWOOF'er arrived just in time for peak okra season this summer. During her three week stay, Lucie loyally harvested the okra three times a week. Though she'd only eaten the vegetable for the first time this summer (during her volunteer time in Haiti before coming to our farm), she was hopeful it would grow well in her mother's garden back home in France. We were grateful for all of Lucie's help during her visit.

Where to buy good poultry

2010-08-01T20:17:00.000-07:00

We were asked recently where we would recommend to go to buy good chicken. Unfortunately, chicken is an especially "corrupt" meat, having about 100 years of ever worsening factory farming history, which makes the industrial product especially bad and leaves us with very few real alternatives. “Hormone and antibiotic free” poultry can be found in some stores, but those are misleading claims: there are lots and lots of bad things about what goes into chickens, but hormones aren't one of them; artificial hormones are available for and used on cattle, but there aren't any available for poultry, so all poultry is "hormone free." Antibiotics, on the other hand, are used with poultry, so that would be a potentially substantive claim. However, are the antibiotics just being replaced with another pharmaceutical product that isn't any more organic but technically just isn't an antibiotic? There are so many additives in conventional chicken feed that we don't know if that's an option, but we're suspicious of any such claims from any corporate source. Even if it were true and substantive, “hormone and antibiotic free” still leaves a tremendous amount to be desired. To pick just what we see as the two biggest issues, we would want to see the chickens fed something other than pesticide-intensive genetically modified (GMO) feeds, and we wouldn't want chickens raised thousands to a confinement house without any significant fresh grass or grubs or other forage. We consider those pretty minimal expectations, but there's really no regular place to go and buy chickens that meet both those expectations. You can avoid the GMO feed by buying USDA certified organic, but then you're still buying confinement house birds from a very industrial system, and you're doing nothing to contribute to the kind of local, independent alternatives that empower communities to stand up to industrial abuses. Alternatively, you can find chickens raised by local farmers in movable range shelters -- not free range, but a huge improvement over confinement houses -- but those birds are almost always fed GMO grain that's exactly the same as what's fed to conventional birds. (A straight-forward question to ask the organic-looking farmer at the farmers' market is if he feeds his chickens any GMO grain. If he knows anything about how his chicken feed was grown and if he's honest, the answer to that question should tell you something of substance.) So typically as a consumer the only options left today are either the chemical-intensive GMO grains (farmers' market) or the factory farm confinement houses (USDA organic.) Forced with one of those choices,we would probably have to choose the GMO grains, because small local operations at least carry some hope of future improvements. We would be very eager to support and encourage those producers to take responsibility for the grain they feed their chickens, though, if not to find the motivation to engage in that work personally. Hopefully, if more people realize how bad things have gotten, some of them will be inspired to start growing their own grain on a small enough scale (maybe a fraction of an acre) to be able to withstand commodity pressures, and maybe that could even lead to some small surpluses to sell to friends and neighbors. We certainly believe that there isn't any good way to raise and sell chickens at anywhere near conventional costs, especially not without hardly anyone living on appropriately scaled (small), working farms anymore. As consumers we've consented to giving so much control of our food supply to forces so far outside of our control, that a lot of options have just disappeared, especially when it comes to grain farming and grain-fed animals like poultry, for which there are practically zero local options outside the commodity system. As communities and as individuals, we have to expect our helplessness to lead to our exploitation, and that's where we're at. Lest we preach too much doom and gloom, there are some much better options with grass-fed (ruminant) meats (especially cattle.) A partial solution to eating better poultry may be to eat less poultry (and less pork) and more grass-fed meat. We've got nothing against feeding grain to poultry, but the only easy way to avoid the abuses of modern grain farming is to avoid grain-fed animals, so animals that can be raised exclusively on grass (like cattle) at least offer some ways to avoid some of the worst abuses of industrialized agriculture. You might even think further outside the box and hunt wild doves or raise a domestic gray goose in your backyard.

New addition

2010-07-31T10:10:00.000-07:00

Our new daughter, Hattie Elisabeth, was born July 21.

Cherry pickers

2010-07-31T10:08:00.000-07:00

With so many colors and shapes of cherry tomatoes, Nora and Paul have had fun picking and sampling in the tomato patch this year.

Mead and How to Make It

2010-07-03T20:05:00.000-07:00

Mead is the proper term for alcohol fermented from honey. In mead's simplest form, honey is diluted with water to about the same sweetness as juice and then allowed to ferment like wine. Mead is one of the very few kinds of alcohol we're able to make from all local, homegrown ingredients grown without the use of chemical pesticides. (Traditional wine grapes are almost always grown in very pesticide-intensive ways, and most other fruits can't be made into wine without added sugar.) If made only with honey and water, mead assumes its flavor mainly from the particular flowers from which the bees collect the nectar to make the honey. Alternatively, honey can be combined with fruits that are otherwise unsuitable for fermentation on their own to make fruit meads, for example: blackberries, elderberries, muscadines, or strawberries. Although most people assume that anything made with honey would have to be sweet, by using more or less honey, mead, like wine, can be made in a range of dry to sweet styles. The alcohol level of mead is comparable to wines.
Mead is very easy to make. Begin with very good tasting honey. Mead making generally amplifies the underlying flavors of the honey. It takes about a quart of honey (slightly more for added sweetness) to make a gallon of mead (or about 5 standard wine bottles). Mix the honey in with the water until it dissolves, then let it ferment. Naturally occurring yeast strains could be used, but we've always added a selected yeast strain to our honey-water mixture. Enough wine yeast to ferment 5-6 gallons can be purchased for well under a dollar. We think it's best to ferment mead in what's called a carboy, a large glass container with a narrow opening that can be fitted with a stopper and airlock. Once filled with water, the airlock allows the carbon dioxide given off by the yeast to escape but seals the mead off from the air, which helps prevent the mead from turning to vinegar. It typically takes one to three months for the yeast to do their job and another three to nine months for all the yeast to drop out of suspension and for the mead to turn clear, which is when we like to bottle it. Adding fruit can greatly accelerate the process. If you've made wine before, you should already have all the equipment you'd need. If not, you could spend anywhere from $40 to $150 for equipment that would pretty much all be reusable.

What's Special About our Honey

2010-06-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

Honey is, of course, naturally a very special food, but what most readily sets our honey apart from other honey you might find are our efforts to preserve honey's natural goodness. As in almost every other field of agriculture, there are a lot of chemicals and pharmaceuticals commonly used in bee hives and in connection with honey production: a couple different antibiotics, various synthetic pesticides including one of a particularly toxic class of pesticides called organophosphates, chemical fumigants, chemical repellants, as well as flat out illegal substances never registered for use in bee hives. We use nothing of this sort in connection with our bees or honey. We can’t prove that any of these things is harmful, but we believe there are always risks with these sorts of things, not just for us as honey consumers, but for the long-term health of the bees, for other species in the ecosystems where these chemicals are used, for the people that handle these chemicals, for the people that drink the water downstream from where these things are manufactured, etc.,etc. We strongly believe that it's not prudent to directly contribute to these risks in our own beekeeping.
Some of honeybees' recent problems brought about by global trade (introducing exotic pests and diseases) made it extremely challenging for beekeepers to keep their hives organically, especially when the mites first hit North America, but as with the rest of agriculture, many of the chemicals and pharmaceuticals used in bee hives are used mostly for convenience and marginal cost/labor savings. Butryic anhydride, for instance, is a nasty smelling chemical repellent used to drive bees out of honey supers when taking supers off the hives. Instead of repellents, we place escape screens below our supers a day or two before harvesting. (An escape screen is a wooden board with a built in maze that works as a one-way exit, allowing the bees to exit the supers but not return.) Paradichlorobenzene is a chemical used by beekeepers to fumigate stored supers to prevent wax moth larvae from ruining the combs. It's illegal in some places due to carcinogenic concerns, but it's very widely used in North Carolina and elsewhere. Instead of using PDB, we keep susceptible combs (combs that have had brood reared in them before) separate from our honey combs, and leave the susceptible combs on hives where the bees can keep pests out, or we'll expose combs to sunlight or cold to deter wax moths. These are really pretty easy management practices, but chemical use is the norm, and most beekeepers are so comfortable with chemical use that they wouldn't bother to avoid it. Antibiotic use follows a similar pattern of comfort: many beekeepers simply feel “safer” having given their bees antibiotics (and other medications) than not. Some antibiotics, like for nosema disease, have little hard evidence to even prove their limited usefulness. Other antibiotics, like for foulbrood, are potentially effective, but antibiotic use is leading to antibiotic resistant foulbrood, which is leading to the use of stronger and riskier antibiotics. Foulbrood is infrequent enough that we can pretty easily deal with it through careful inspections and the occasional burning of infected combs and equipment. Even more disturbing than the use of these and other approved products is the use of chemicals never approved or tested for safe use in bee hives. For instance, beekeepers have found that paper towels can be soaked in chemicals used for de-lousing cattle and placed in bee hives to kill mites. Some of these practices have been encouraged by price gouging by chemical companies or the very high regulatory cost of chemical registration. Roach poisons are used in hives to kill small hive beetles. Authorities sometimes destroy foreign honey imports because residues of dangerous drugs are discovered. We're concerned enough about all these kinds of chemical residue problems that we no longer even use beeswax “foundation” in our frames -- something that's been standard practice in beekeeping for well over 100 years -- because it would indirectly increase our exposure to these chemicals. We distrust the whole mess of chemical and pharmaceutical agriculture, and we're committed to avoiding what we see as all these foolish risks.

Organic Window Dressing

2010-06-12T21:45:00.000-07:00

   We've noticed farmers increasingly using the word "sustainable" as a label to say that their farm products are organic without actually using the word "organic." On the one hand, we sympathize with farmers that want to take a less legalistic approach to the meaning of organic but still want to communicate their commitment to organic principles. In an industrialized society industrial compromises of one sort or another are inevitable, and we see real dangers in oversimplifying those questions. We certainly don't like the way defining "organic" by a set of rules has encouraged a race to the bottom of that very limited standard. And we don't like the way third party certification has apparently displaced the need for real knowledge on the part of the consumer: knowing where and by whom and how food was -- and was not -- grown.
   On the other hand, we see farmers and consumers using words like "sustainable" or "naturally grown" or "certified organic" to describe food and farming methods with very little organic integrity. This especially concerns us when such sentiments lead to complacency with compromises, as if a little window dressing were the final answer to the very real, persistent problems of industrialized agriculture. If we know anything about organic agriculture, it's that we as a society each and all have a long, long, long way to go.
   Misuse of organic and pseudo-organic labels seems especially pronounced when it comes to animal products. Hogs or chickens raised on every bit as much genetically modified, pesticide-intensive grain as on conventional farms are labeled "sustainable" or "naturally grown" simply because antibiotics are withheld and they're given some kind of token access to the outdoors. The most important and basic part of what makes an animal product organic would have to be what that animal eats, and yet this is where "sustainable" most often fails to deliver any substance. Conventional farms are fittingly derided as just CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and yet it's hard to see so-called "sustainable" farms as very different when the animals are just as dependent on the very same industrial feed machine.
   To put things in perspective, of the over 30 small farms we know of in North Carolina that sell what's commonly called "sustainable" pork, we only know of two that don't feed genetically modified grains to their animals, and they only accomplish that by replacing grain with milk (in one case with milk from cows fed genetically modified grains.) Likewise, besides our own flock, we don't know of a single remaining chicken flock in the whole state that's fed locally grown, non-genetically modified feed -- what we would consider only the most basic first step toward a separate system of raising animals. (Crops are most commonly genetically modified in order to facilitate expanded options for spraying synthetic herbicides on the crop.) We recently called Whole Foods, the biggest "natural foods" grocery chain, to ask what meat they had from animals fed organic or even just non-GMO feeds: all the pork and poultry and other non-ruminant meats they had, with just one minor exception (some certified organic frozen chickens), were from animals raised on conventional, pesticide-intensive, genetically modified grains. There's clearly a tremendous gap between the marketing talk and the reality.
   We hope that as a first step consumers (and farmers) can confront the realities. The last thing we want is for our customers to indignantly run off and hide behind another empty buzzword. Apart from an informed relationship of trust with the farmer, the only label that we count for anything is USDA certified organic, and we place limited value on that. It's extremely difficult to find value-added farm products (like meat and eggs) with even a small amount of real organic integrity. A big part of the problem is that consumers and farmers have contented themselves with organic window dressing. Certainly window dressing is a lot cheaper than real substance, especially when it comes to foods like pork and poultry. As long as “organic” consumers continue to expect the artificial cost savings of pesticide-intensive GMO grain, window dressing is all they'll get. But simply paying more is no answer either, unless the consumer actually knows what he's paying for. Consumers and farmers will have to work together over time (blurring the definitions of "consumers" and "farmers") to develop farming and distribution systems to replace the industrialized model. We think avoiding genetically modified foods and feeds is a challenging but very important goal -- only a first step to the requirements of the USDA organic system, which itself leaves much more to be desired. There's hope for much better food and much better farming, but that hope isn't hiding conveniently behind any of the buzzwords; that hope surely depends on real knowledge, involvement, and labor.

Eating Local, Organic Fruit

2010-05-31T20:20:00.000-07:00

Here Nora and Paul pit cherries, some we got from our own two trees, and some from a neighbor's tree. We've been freezing and drying them.
A couple weeks ago we began talking about what it would take to really get away from the conventional industrialized food system and all its pesticides, fossil fuel based fertilizers, etc. We want to continue this week talking about fruit and what we would recommend for someone wanting to eat real homegrown fruit grown with old-fashioned organic integrity. What would a person have to do to eat fruit that was grown the right way? As with vegetables, one would have to eat the fresh fruit that was in season and put up fruit for the off-season. Some fruits (notably blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.) can be almost as good out of the freezer as they are fresh. A lot of fruits are also especially well suited to drying/dehyrdating (figs, sour cherries...) Unlike with vegetables, however, switching from grocery store fruit to homegrown fruit would require a lot more changes in what kinds of fruit we eat. The fruits that are sold in grocery stores -- and therefore our habits and expectations as grocery store-bred consumers -- are largely those fruits that have lent themselves best to industrialization: fruits that are good for shipping and that have fairly long shelf lives, fruits that can be grown in large acreages with labor-saving chemicals, etc. We think the kind of fruits that lend themselves to local, organic management are just as good if not better, but they're mostly not what we're used to or what we might go looking for. Obviously, bananas and citrus aren't the fruits to look for, but other fruits that are grown locally, like apples and peaches, are generally dependent on extensive arsenals of nasty chemicals. As much as Eric loves peaches and Melissa loves apples, learning just a little about how the local commercial orchards grow these fruits has made it really hard to feel right about buying them. We do have some hope in growing cosmetically less perfect, disease-resistant varieties of apples, and we did plant a couple peach trees hoping against hope to harvest some edible peaches, but for us eating local fruit means turning primarily to other fruits. There are some familiar grocery store fruits for which there are excellent local alternatives. Even though conventional strawberries are one of the most pesticide-laden fruits there are, it's very feasible to grow strawberries organically. We're just finishing an excellent strawberry year, and we hope you all got plenty these last few weeks. Local blueberries, on the other hand, tend to be a very low-spray crop, even on non-organic farms. (That's not true of some of the blueberries in supermarkets from other areas, whose pesticide residues we've been told have been linked to behavioral disorders in children.) No-spray melons may be somewhat scarcer at farmers' markets, but that's something else to look for. For a fuller variety, though, we think a person would really have to eat fruits that aren't common in supermarkets. Figs have a short shelf life, but they're delicious and very well suited to organic management. Mulberries (the fruit of a large tree, similar in appearance to a blackberry but with none of the bitterness) can also be grown very easily, and we've really been enjoying them lately. Even some of the wild mulberry trees have really good quality fruit. Persimmons are one of our favorite wild fruits -- some trees have lesser quality fruit but there are a lot of very good wild trees -- and they can also be planted. Wild blackberries are more familiar. There are quite a few old sour cherry trees in local farmyards. Although they're called “sour cherries,” some varieties are plenty sweet and are excellent for fresh eating, although typically not as big as conventionally grown varieties. Muscadines/scuppernong grapes fall into the same category as local blueberries, being a cultivated fruit that tend to be very low-spray even on non-organic farms. We've been told that Asian pears (the pears with a more apple-like shape and texture) could also fit into that category. And the list goes on: pawpaws, jujubes, raspberries, tame blackberries, serviceberries, mayhaws... We wouldn't be satisfied simply with the fruit we could find at farmers' markets, but if you can go out into the country and find additional types of fruit, we think one can find a full assortment of fruit grown the right way. If you're motivated to eat good quality fruit, we'd love to help you with whatever know-how we can share.

We Have a Long Way to Go

2010-05-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

   We watched three documentaries about food and agriculture during the off-season: "Food Beware," "Supersize Me," and "Food Inc.," all of which we recommend to you all. We wanted to share some thoughts here that these movies spawned by focusing on the restaurant chain Chipotle. The founder of Chipotle was interviewed in an addition to the movie "Food Inc." We've never been to a Chipotle chain, but listening to the interview and reading about Chipotle on their website, it's clear that they are a leading example of the organic movement. What struck us, though, was how little it takes to be a leading example. We're inclined at first to think their standards are so weak as to be worthless. On the other hand, we don't really know of a restaurant that holds itself to any stricter standards. To gain some perspective on the whole organic movement, we wanted to point out what organic standards like Chipotle's do and don't mean. How would you, as a consumer, evaluate their organic claims? If you want to take the time, to understand better what we're responding to, we'd encourage you to first read what Chipotle says on their website about what they call "food with integrity."
http://www.chipotle.com/html/fwi.aspx
    Here are some things we see. The chickens Chipotle buys aren't given antibiotics and they're given marginally more space than other chickens, but they're still made of fully conventional grains, and they're still crowded in confinement houses. Their chickens are given zero freedom to forage naturally for grubs and worms or anything green or fresh -- this is perversely touted as an all vegetarian diet. The chicks meanwhile come from farms that don't follow any organic practices at all. Their pork is similarly fed fully conventional grains (pesticides, herbicides, interspecies genetic modifications, etc.), and farmers can give the hogs pharmaceutical injections so long as they follow protocols for preventing retained needles. The dairies that supply Chipotle can also keep cows crowded in confinement houses, not eating any fresh grass, use antibiotics, and use hormone injections for reproductive management (just not rBGH.) Separating from the industrial system that dominates American agriculture is incredibly difficult, and Chipotle doesn't claim to have fully arrived, but the big question is where their approach will take us. At the very least we should recognize that there's a very viable marketing niche heading in the same direction as the rest of industrial agriculture, just one step behind. There's no real hope in that. We think we need to be careful and work hard to put more integrity in our cause and to really seek after a more fully separate and self-sufficient system of agriculture. Of course, we have to start where we are, and that's tightly bound and interconnected to our industrial system, but the sheer size and momentum of the industrial system will surely drag us further along with it if we don't pursue real independence seriously.
   It seems to us that the real problem is that various forms of industrialization (mechanization, labor-saving chemicals, pharmaceuticals, artificial fertilizers, artificial draft power, etc.) have gradually destroyed the system and culture of working knowledge, shared community, and face-to-face accountability that is our only trustworthy protection against industrial abuses. It seems good to focus even more on shortening supply lines (for example, eating more home-prepared meals from more locally sourced raw ingredients) and on regaining real personal and community control of our food system (all the way back to the source of the manure that fertilizes the crops that feed our animals.) It seems to us that any other strategy will only come back around to bite us in the rear.

Food Safety Legislation

2010-05-15T07:01:00.001-07:00

Despite the fact that we make our living farming, we only realized a couple months ago that major food safety legislation that will dramatically restructure our farming/food system had already passed the US House (H.R. 2749) last summer and is on the verge of passing the Senate (S. 510). As diversified, organic farmers we see some fundamental problems with the pending legislation,
(1) Diversity is seen as a threat: food safety is understood as keeping animals as far away from produce fields as possible. What that effectively means is large monocultures (where border issues are non-issues) and animals correspondingly confined to feedlots and confinement houses, whose manure then accumulates in tremendous quantities, far beyond the ability of the immediate ecosystem to safely absorb, and thus posing the most serious safety issues (as evidenced by the recent food safety scares, particularly the deadly food poisoning outbreak with spinach, as well as the most recent lettuce outbreak.) Diversified farms, after all, aren't causing the outbreaks we're hearing about and that have energized the push for new legislation; quite the opposite: large, monocultural farms are. Well managed plant and animal diversity is the friend of food safety (as well as the friend of a lot of other good things), not the enemy.
(2) Huge regulatory burdens are placed on the farm use of manure. But what's the alternative? Conventional fertilizers synthesized from Middle East oil. Why should the risks of chemical contamination of produce (and of drinking water and other indirect paths) warrant so little attention? The science certainly isn't there to support, on the grounds of food safety, the hard push away from traditional uses of manure to chemical agriculture, and that's precisely the trade-off. What about synthetic pesticides? Are we supposed to ignore all the risks they bring with them, both to food consumers as well as to water resources, rural communities, and ecosystems? The reality is that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides go together. The only practical way to place all these limitations on the use of manure is to open ourselves up to more chemical risks and proven chemical harm.
Even then, using petroleum-based fertilizers doesn't mean we have any less manure to deal with; it only means more manure winds up in places where it's a worthless waste liability, which is where the greatest food safety risks lie. The sensible question isn't how to avoid manure but how to best incorporate manure into our agricultural system. (We might also ask if ways of keeping and feeding and medicating animals make for less pathogenic manure.) No matter how hard we make it for farmers to use manure productively, the manure still has to go somewhere.
(3) “Good Agricultural Practice” cannot be defined in a one-size-fits-all format, and especially not by Washington. There is zero scientifically proven risk to letting weeder geese into a sweet corn crop (i.e. letting domestic geese eat the competing weeds out from under an immature sweet corn crop), and no reason to even suspect food safety problems, but official GAP would outlaw the practice. What if some people would rather have some goose poop fall three feet under their corn before the corn even forms than to have the corn itself genetically modified and then sprayed directly with chemical herbicides? (Transgenic sweet corn has already found its way into the fields of vendors even at our little farmers' market.) Obviously, the use of weeder geese isn't common practice (at least not nowadays), but there are 10,000 other such innovate farming practices GAP would outlaw. The end effect of a legislative definition of good farming is that a great deal of innovation and unconventional ways of farming will be outlawed, particularly on the kind of small farms that generate the least run-off and waste liabilities, don't rely on illegal immigrant laborers, depend least on foreign oil, provide the most viable, long-term alternative to cost cutting produce from China or Mexico, produce food with the least chemical residues, expose farmers and farmhands to the least chemical dangers, necessitate less highway and air traffic, demand fewer square miles of land be paved over, etc., etc. Have we not gone far enough in pushing these kinds of farms out of business already?

Farm Update

2010-05-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Here's some news from the off-season.
   Winter held its grip without respite until well into March. We've had some unseasonably hot spells mixed in with the near frosts since then. Even last night, with a clear starry sky, we went to bed fearing how low the temperature would fall. Fortunately, at sunrise, it was 41, sparing the hopeful bumper crop of strawberries. We're also looking at an abundant spinach and lettuce harvest. The spring peas are coming on strong, but they're behind schedule. A cold, wet late winter had them planted the latest we've ever put them in. If it doesn't get too hot too soon they should still produce very well. The first of the beans and sweet corn, on the other hand, went in the ground earlier than normal. We're getting ready to set out our 300 tomato plants today.
   The main honey flow has started with the tulip poplars, blackgum trees, and blackberries all in bloom. The air force is hoping for clear, sunny skies to make its crop of honey. The bees came through the winter very well, but the consistent cold delayed their spring population build-up. We're already busy making up lots of mating nucs (nucleus/starter colonies) for next year's honey crop.
   Animal projects, in particular, like fencing have kept us busy through the off-season. We currently have two cows in milk, one of which is feeding a calf that we'll beef at some point this year. We also bought a little jersey heifer we named Dandelion for our future milk supply. The first calf born on our farm is now several hundred pounds of beef steer that we plan to finish on the high energy summer grasses. We're hopeful three of our nanny goats are bred for late summer milking. They and a fourth nanny continue to clean the brambles, weeds, and poison ivy out of our pastures and perimeters. The first of our hens hatched a clutch of biddies a few weeks back. She had been setting up in the hay mow unknown to us. She is successfully mothering her 16 biddies! Other hens have started setting as well. As we seemed to be getting ahead of the demand for eggs we sold down some of our flock. With over 50 hens remaining, though, we hope to have a good supply for the market season.
   The other big news is that we are expecting our third child in mid-July. Fortunately, it has been a gentle pregnancy for Melissa, so we're moving forward with the season pretty much as normal so far. Of course, there will probably be some interruption when the baby arrives.

Low-tech germination

2010-04-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

Until we build our dreamed of greenhouse, we've found old chest freezers to be a great way to germinate seeds. During the day, a piece of glass over the opening can easily send the temperatures over 100 degrees. At night, we shut the lids. Then a 60 to 100 watt bulb below the plants keeps the temperature quite cozey, between 70 and 80 degrees. Here flats of eggplant and pepper transplants enjoy the extra heat.

Hot house tomatoes

2010-04-27T19:28:00.001-07:00

The tomato plants are ready to go out. Every time we check the forecast though, it seems a better idea to keep them safe in their "hot house" a little longer. Tonight there is even a chance of frost. This after 80 degree weather a few weeks ago.
We have around 20 varieties this year. These include our favorites of Amish Paste, San Marzano Redorta, and Akers West Virginia. We have five different cherry types this year. And we're experimenting with a handful of new varieties, always searching for a new favorite.

Surprise chicks

2010-04-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

We've just had the first of our hens go to setting, an exciting sign of spring. Broodiness in our hens is a chicken trait we are glad for as the mother often does a better job of incubating and raising little chicks than we do. So when we see a broody hen, we'll give her about 9 marked eggs and leave her to her 21 days of sitting.
Just after the first hen had gone to sitting the other day, I came in the barn to the sound of cheeping. After some searching I found a hen in the hay mow with 16 chicks! We had thought the hen had just gone missing. In fact, she had been busy sitting. We were thrilled with this first hatch of spring, the most chicks we've ever had from one hen.

Orchard

2010-04-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

Within days of moving to our farm three years ago, we started planting fruit and nut trees. This spring, the orchard is finally starting to look like something. Many of the trees have grown over our heads (except the Asian pear the cow ran over) and some are putting out their first blossoms. This first planting is mostly an experiment to see what we can grow organically. We set out disease-resistant apples, some peaches, an apricot, some cherries, pears and Asian pears, persimmons, jujubes, figs, chestnuts and pecans. Along with these trees, we have grapes, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries. We look forward to someday soon taking an edible walk around the farm.

Crimson Clover - Food for bees, cows, and garden

2010-04-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last fall, we sowed most every open space we had to crimson clover. Over the winter, it grew into a lush green mat, protecting the soil. Then this spring, it burst into bloom. But the clover is not only beautiful, it's a great food source for much of our farm. The bees have been busy working the blooms, collecting its nectar and pollen. In the pasture, Elsea and Mary May have been gorging themselves on it, resulting in increased milk production. We also cut some of the clover for hay, a treat for the girls this winter. And in the gardens the incorporated clover will decompose and provide valuable nitrogen for our garden crops.

KNOWING WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM

2010-01-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

This week we want to share with you all the biggest reason why we believe in local farms, which is also to explain why we do what we do. We believe in local farms because knowing where your food comes from genuinely empowers the consumer, enabling the consumer to make wise and responsible decisions about what to put on the table. Buzz words (like "free range" or "pesticide free" or "USDA organic") on labels of products from far away farms, on the other hand, more often mislead consumers and take advantage of the absence of any direct accountability to the consumer. This not only means inferior food on the table, but it means irresponsible and exploitive farming. We believe the only reliable source of good food is good farming, and we think good farming can only be sustained by wise and responsible consumption. You see, even more than the food itself, we believe in the kind of system that naturally produces good food and that produces it responsibly. Consider these questions: Does it matter at all how much fossil fuel is burned to substitute for natural fertility? Does it matter at all if farming depends on an immigrant underclass? Does it matter at all if insects pests are controlled by broad-spectrum insecticides (meaning they kill a huge range of insects instead of targeting the problem specifically)? Does it matter at all what impact the farm has on the human community that surrounds it? Do fields, pastures, gardens, and forests not have any more value to the local community than the dollars they generate? Does it matter at all if irrigation empties underground aquifers and causes rivers to run dry? The national organic standards, incidentally, say nothing about every one of these questions, but we believe these kinds of questions are ultimately inseparable from maintaining food quality. So the big question is: what kind of system allows a consumer to ask these kinds of questions? We think the answer is a system where the consumer knows the farmer, talks to the farmer, has a basis to trust the farmer, where the consumer knows the farm itself firsthand: sees the animals, sees the condition of the land, sees the farmer at work, etc. We think this kind of system: small-scale, diverse, local farming, naturally tends toward the production of good food. We all know where the industrial system of food production naturally tends. Do we want to naively try to tame the inherently irresponsible and exploitive system of industrial food production, or do we want to build and support the kind of food system that's consistent with good food, healthy ecosystems, and healthy communities?

More buttermilk please

2009-12-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

Bringing Elsea in

2009-11-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

Healthy Eating

2009-11-23T09:33:00.000-08:00

Our vision for healthy eating is quite simply a homegrown diet. We believe focusing our attention on the system that produces our food -- instead of trying to merely quantify the nutritive properties of mass-produced, supermarket commodities -- will lead us to the healthiest possible eating. In other words, we believe the ultimate consumer assisted by an army of nutrition experts and doctors shopping at the "healthiest" supermarket can't assemble a diet as healthy as simple, homegrown food. We also believe that it's absurd to try to separate questions of what's good for us as eaters from the questions of what's good for the land, what's good for the farmer, what's good for farm animals, and what's good for the farming community. Considering these questions as one organic whole is the surest path to healthy eating. Of course, some things like synthetic pesticides, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated "vegetable" oil, Cool Whip, Miracle Whip, or synthetic fertilizers are by their very nature not homegrown, so our understanding of what's homegrown applies as much to what goes into growing and processing food as to where the food is grown. Those are all examples of what a homegrown diet is not, but how would a person eat if he weren't a consumer of those things? It's relatively easy to eat homegrown garden crops during the growing season, but that's only one small part of a complete diet. What about grain products (and the meat from grain-fed animals), dairy, fats/oils, pulses, alcohol, and sweeteners? These and others are all types of food that we're not content to cede to corporate agribusiness. Although grains are perhaps the most basic agricultural crop, the labor-intensive nature of harvesting grains on a small scale has all but eliminated local markets. Regulatory burdens have eliminated community-scaled, commercial dairies. Likewise wineries and breweries. The most familiar tree fruits have been almost entirely replaced by highly chemical-intensive orchards in the quest to meet consumer demands for cosmetically perfect fruit. So how then can a person eat the kind of diet we're talking about? A person certainly can't go to the store and buy it. A truly healthy diet like we're envisioning necessarily requires a lot more involvement on the part of the eater, especially given the infantile development of our homegrown food economy. That kind of involvement would include things like putting up food in season to eat out of season, friends cooperatively purchasing and dividing up shares of meat animals, and city people arranging for farmers to grow things for them in homegrown ways. It would mean paying significantly more for certain kinds of food where industrial and chemical shortcuts have accustomed us to artificially low prices. It would involve a lot more effort and knowledge in the kitchen, relearning home economics -- for example, making one's own mayonnaise or yogurt or vinegar from raw ingredients. Of course, all this, if it happens at all, will only happen one step at a time. It's easy to let oneself become an uninvolved consumer; it's much more difficult to regain the knowledge and skills necessary to a homegrown diet. We're eager to rebuild and to help others rebuild the kind of local food economy that can offer a complete, homegrown diet. We're always glad to share and pass on whatever we can to help in that effort.

WHAT WOULD IT TAKE TO EAT A GMO-FREE DIET?

2009-09-19T03:22:00.000-07:00

Do you know how many genetically modified crops go into your diet? Do you know what it would mean not to support genetic engineering with any of your food dollars? Did you know that almost all animal feed in the USA is made from genetically modified crops? Do you know how extraordinarily limiting it is for us to feed only locally grown, non-GMO feed to our animals?

We're very much opposed to genetic engineering, particularly of crops. Beyond all the unknown risks to the animals and people that eat these crops and to the ecosystems in which these crops are grown -- risks that are as novel and unpredictable as the engineering itself -- we're just as concerned about the extent to which GMO crops take control of our food system that much further out of the hands of the local farming community and leave our fate in the hands of giant corporations that have no particular concern for -- or even knowledge of -- our communities. GMOs only facilitate larger farms with less diversity, greater demands for nonrenewable inputs and dependence on the global economy, greater accumulation of waste liabilities and pollution, and the further disintegration of human farming communities.

The list of GMO crops being grown commercially is presently still pretty short, but it impacts a huge percentage of food items. Corn, soybeans, sugar beets, canola, cotton, and alfalfa are the major crops. (GMO-Papaya and some summer squash varieties have also been released.) You may not think you eat a lot of corn and soybeans, but consider the corn syrup in your tomato sauce, the soy lecithin in your chocolate bar; consider the regular sugar made from sugar beets that sweetens whatever doesn't already have corn syrup in it; consider the "vegetable" oil in your mayonnaise and salad dressing; consider all the additives, the conditioners, "natural" flavors, thickeners, and all the other mysterious things on those long lists of ingredients. And accounting for even more acres of GMO crops, consider all the meat and eggs and dairy products from animals raised on GMO crops. Corn and soybean byproducts typically make up almost the entire diet of poultry (both meat birds and layers) and hogs. Beef and dairy cattle are likewise fed diets heavy in corn, corn silage, soybean meal, and cottonseed meal. Even the alfalfa fed to dairy cattle is potentially GMO. Even farm raised fish eat pretty much the same feed. The biggest difference between different kinds of animal feed is typically just the ratio of soybean meal to corn. That means our local grocery store wouldn't have a single cut of meat of any kind, no milk, no other dairy products, and no eggs that have any real chance of being GMO-free. Even the great majority of small farmers selling "all-natural, hormone and antibiotic-free" meat or eggs have been sucked into the GMO tide; unless they grow their own grain their options are very limited.

In just over a decade most Americans have gone from eating a completely GMO-free diet to eating GMO's with every meal of the day, and quite disturbingly most Americans don't realize anything ever changed. Should consumers really have so little involvement in and say over what they eat, let alone what impact their food dollars have on our land? We see this massive, behind-the-scenes switch to GMO agriculture as further evidence that the corporate food system is inherently untrustworthy. We think consumers would be well advised to do everything they can to regain some control of what they eat: to prepare their meals more and more from scratch, to avoid prepared and processed foods, to grow what they can, and to seek out and support the local farmers that can offer independence from the corporate food system.

Heirloom field corn

2009-09-01T19:21:00.001-07:00

Our heirloom open-pollinated field corn stands high above us on this July day. This fall, we'll harvest the ears and let them dry in our corn crib. We will then shell them and grind them into a delicious old-timey tasting cornmeal.

DOES ORGANIC MEAN SPRAYING MORE?

2009-09-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

The following blurb from an article about an organic apple orchard in western North Carolina caught our attention: "The majority of consumers think 'organic' means we don't spray with anything," Owings [a North Carolina Cooperative Extension agriculture agent for Henderson County] says, "But in fact, we actually spray twice as often, but we spray with USDA-approved materials...That's one of the reasons it's three to four times more expensive to grow organic apples than it is conventional apples. An acre of conventionally grown apples would cost $700 a season for pesticides and fungicides; an identical organic crop's price tag for organic crop protectants is about $3,400."

That example strikes us, first of all, because it's so unlike traditional organic practice. Although we would generally feel better about USDA-organically approved fungicides and pesticides than their conventional counterparts, the model of farmers or orchardists spraying nearly five times as many dollars worth of industrially produced sprays on their crops doesn't especially make organic sense to us. Shouldn't buying organic produce mean retaining more community control and keeping more dollars in the community, not increased industrial dependency?

We have to wonder why all these sprays are necessary at all. Surely apples were grown and enjoyed in North Carolina long before all the fungicidal, insecticidal, antibiotic, etc. sprays became available. What makes that traditional model of organic agriculture impractical or undesirable today? Global trade and the related spread of non-native pests and diseases may have heightened the problems, but we suspect most of the problems with the traditional organic model are a matter of practical choice on the local level. We suspect three changes are chiefly to fault for the demise of traditional organic practice:

1. Consumers generally make their purchasing choices based more on how produce looks than on what practices were used to grow it. Obviously, this is especially true when consumers have no idea what practices were used to grow a crop. Chemical agriculture has set a consumer standard of cosmetic perfection that, particularly with crops like apples, makes it extremely difficult for traditional organic practices to compete.

2. We have shifted in our eating habits more and more to pre-processed food. We buy applesauce instead of canning our own applesauce and apple juice instead of pressing our own cider. One consequence is that most of our processed apple products now come from China, where apples can be grown more cheaply (but with who knows what methods!) Really the only market left for local growers is fresh fruit, and all lower grades of domestic fruit are waste. When processing grades of apples count for zero, local growers will have that much more incentive to spray everything they can to maximize the amount of cosmetically perfect, table grade fruit.

3. Small farms have given way to the supposed economies of scale of large farms. Large farms have a natural affinity for chemical solutions, especially when the alternative is labor-intensive, and so labor-intensive, organic practices have waned. Did you know, for instance, that apples are thinned by means of chemical sprays instead of hand-thinning as used to be done?

So what does all this have to do with us? First, we want you to know how we grow and how we approach the problems of agriculture. We believe strongly in homegrown, low-tech solutions. Spraying nearly five times as many dollars of industrially produced sprays as conventional farmers is not our idea of organic. Second, we want to encourage you to think about your own role in shaping our food system. Do you more often ask yourself how does this look than you ask how was this grown? Do you take the time to process locally grown food at home instead of buying pre-processed food from far away? Do you value small farms and the knowledge and accountability that come from dealing directly with local farmers?

We have a lot to learn about apples yet, but we're keeping hope in a much more traditional model of organic farming, both when it comes to apples and everything else we grow.

New additions

2009-06-30T19:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo of four of the new additions on our farm this summer. The tall one is our helpful intern Michael. The great pyrenees pups were born a month ago and are being trained up in their duty as guardian dogs to our small goat herd.

Mowing the lawn

2009-06-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of Noldi, our JerseyXHereford steer grazing his way around the house.

What's happening on the farm

2009-06-29T21:20:00.000-07:00

We thought it was time to give you an update of what was happening on the farm these days.
First, we have some animal births to announce. Peaches, our great Pyrenees guardian dog, had a litter of 5 pups in late May. It's a favorite chore these days to go feed the dogs and check on the growing pups, the stocky little balls of fur. The guard dogs live in the pasture with our small herd of goats, protecting them from would-be predators. The little pups are being trained up in their role as livestock guardians and we hope to sell them once they're weaned.
Next came the first two goat kids to be born on our farm, twins, one male, one female, from our Saanen dairy goat. At this point the kids are drinking up all her milk, but we plan to milk her after we wean the kids and maybe experiment with cheesemaking. Another of our dairy goats is still expecting, but we're not really sure when!
There was also a litter of kittens recently, Nora's new playmates. These too have a role to play on the farm and we were happy to see their mother training them this morning, sharing the latest catch.
And then there are all the biddies!!! For the past two months, we've had hen after hen go to setting, giving us a continuous supply of biddies hatching. We're thrilled as mother hens protecting the biddies and helping them forage make for the best small farm way to raise up replacement hens and produce meat for our freezer. Lately, though, we can't keep all the broody hens out of our nest boxes! Just today, we had a hen hatch some guinea keets (eggs from a neighbor). We're hopeful for these, as guineas are supposed to eat a lot of some problem insects. And they are just fun!
And then there are the biddies that came through the mail last week. We're raising another 100 meat chickens this summer with the help of another addition to our farm, an intern, Michael Spangler. Michael, a senior at Davidson College, came to us this spring wanting to work on the farm this summer break. He is our first intern and we're appreciating all his help, especially getting projects done that might not otherwise get done in this busy season. The purpose of the 100 meat chickens is to generate some summer income for Michael, so for those of you that have wanted to get chicken from us but didn't want to handle the processing yourselves, this is your big opportunity: we're going to offer these chickens fully cleaned and dressed. They are Silver Buffs, a meat breed used especially by pastured poultry farmers. As with all of our chickens, we feed them only locally grown and non-genetically modified feeds, especially forage from complete free range. We bet you can't find chickens like this anywhere else in the industrialized world! We'll keep you posted on their availability.
Now for a quick crop report. We're very excited to be growing the field corn that we sell as white cornmeal on our own land this year. In the past, we've share-cropped on a friend's land. Growing it here has helped us to take better care of the corn, most notably growing a preceding cover crop of crimson clover. And the corn is looking really good! This open-pollinated heirloom corn originated in the Brushy Mountains. Typically growing 8-10 feet tall with very large ears, it is quite impressive to see. We hope many of you can join us for the harvest day this fall.
All 19 varieties of tomatoes are looking good and we're working hard to keep them trained and pruned. We're about to start harvesting the potatoes in large quantities, hopefully with the help of the tractor this year. It looks like the potatoes have really liked all this rain -- we just hope what's under the ground looks as good as what's above. The green beans are coming on strong, though the Mexican bean beetles seem to be coming on pretty strong, too. These are the little yellow larvae critters that skeletonize the leaves and then move on to munching holes in the beans themselves. We haven't come up with a solution to them except to plant a lot of beans, some 800 feet, and hope for the best. As mentioned in the intro, the cucumbers and squash have been a no show. We did just replant them in the hopes of a later harvest, but they're not fans of intense heat. We planted twice as many sweet potatoes this year in the hopes of having potatoes to offer from fall on into the winter. Eggplant, peppers, corn, okra, and summer peas (crowders, pinkeyes, etc.) are all in the ground and growing.
And finally, news from the bee yard: it was our worst ever spring crop with all the rain. While the weather seems perfect now, warm and dry, and the sourwood flowers are in full bloom, there must be little nectar in the blossoms as the bees are mostly staying home. We haven't given up on a summer honey flow, but as the days go on with no increase in bee activity our hopes decrease. Sourwood is certainly a mysterious tree and a very undependable honey crop.

The garden

2009-06-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

At one point this spring, I thought that someday we may need to get an irrigation system. I haven't thought about it since with all the rain for the past month and a half. For the most part, the vegetables are growing well in response to the constant water. In low spots in the garden though, the plants are doing poorly. A year like this helps us consider water management on the farm to prevent erosion.

FOLLOW-UP ON NUTRIENT RECYCLING

2009-06-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

Several of you all have asked us questions about what we wrote the week before last about nutrient cycles and returning nutrients to farmland. We probably should have been clearer about some of the first steps that can be taken. Much of nutrient recycling is logistically very complicated, and while we can suggest a few initial steps, what we want most of all is to encourage you first to think in organic terms about the problem and then to work with us and other farmers in discussing and developing solutions in the margins of the mainstream economy. We're living in a miserably under-developed stone age of nutrient recycling, so the work we all have to do will be the work of pioneers.
One thing we said last time that may have needed further explanation was our use of the word "organic." We definitely didn't mean to suggest that food scraps, for example, that came from conventional farms shouldn't be composted or included in nutrient cycles. We believe that anything that is or was or comes from a plant or animal (from any living organism) ideally belongs in a complete nutrient cycle. When we talk about "organic nutrient sources," we're talking about the nutrient-containing residues of living organisms. The short-term (unsustainable) alternative to those residues is chemical fertilizers, and that's the only contrast we meant to make.
Some of you all asked us whether we thought specific wastes would be good nutrient sources for our farm, whether we'd like to have food scraps or yard wastes, for instance. Food scraps and yard wastes are potentially good starting points, but the chief trouble with such things is that they're mostly water and air, and it doesn't make sense to spend energy transporting water and air. In order to begin to make real progress recycling nutrients from food scraps or yard wastes, those nutrients would need to be concentrated, presumably by rotting down as compost, before any extra effort is made to transport them out of the city to the farm. A fanciful solution would be for us to build or purchase a composting container at the farmers' market location that you all could dump your surplus food scraps into when you come to the market each week. Realistically, that's probably too challenging an idea for the city and the owners and organizers of the farmers' market, which leaves us looking for ways to help you compost wastes at your own homes. If this is all starting to sound overwhelming, then perhaps you're beginning to appreciate how much work we really have to do to escape our mainstream economy of wastefulness.
So what first steps can we suggest? Eggshells are a nutrient-dense leftover that might easily be returned to the farm. Left in an open container they will shortly dry out, after which they can be crushed. (In a sealed container they'll get nasty.) We could quite feasibly collect at the farmers' market all the eggshells all of our customers could bring us each week. And if you do have the means or the motivation to compost food scraps and/or yard wastes, we can definitely find ways to collect compost from you, even by the truckload if it were to ever get to that point. And if you're ever coming to the farm, we will gladly work with you to properly recycle *any* organic nutrient sources you'd like to bring to the farm. Meanwhile, please continue to seek new and better solutions with us.

WHY VEAL?

2009-05-28T08:20:00.000-07:00

You might wonder of all the kinds of meat to sell why we're raising veal calves. Although once fairly common in Western cuisine, veal is an oddity -- and an especially high-priced one at that -- in North Carolina kitchens today. Moreover, veal is perhaps more closely associated with the abuses of factory farming than any other meat. That's a shame, but so is most of modern, industrialized agriculture. What we suspect a lot of people fail to realize is that what's sensible and economical for a small, low-tech farm like ours often varies drastically from what's most profitable for large factory farms. Chicken, for instance, is the cheapest meat to produce when chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, artificial stimulants, confinement "houses", genetically modified crops, etc. are plentiful; on a small farm, following organic principles, chicken is an especially challenging meat to produce for market, especially in quantities comparable to the amount of veal we can raise. Of course, veal is the same animal as beef, so you might ask why we don't just raise all our calves out as beef. The trouble with beef is that it takes well over a year, often closer to two years, to finish a beef steer. That's problematic because high quality, tender meat depends on a good rate of growth and therefore on nutritionally high quality feed, and the nutritional quality of pastures generally goes way up and down over the course of a year. Factory farms don't worry about the seasonality of grass, because they feed cattle mostly on grain. Grain certainly makes tender meat, but it would be a ridiculously expensive way to feed cattle apart from chemically intensive Midwestern mega-farms. The nice thing about veal is that the cow maintains a top quality feed supply (milk) for the calf, and because it only takes a few months to raise a veal calf, we can raise more calves when the grass is rich and milk is plentiful and fewer calves or no calves at all when the grass is poor and milk production drops. In other words, veal allows us to raise high quality meat in a cost-effective, seasonal way. If you consider other grass-eating animals that are raised for meat, the meat of the young, milk-fed animal is traditionally considered far superior to that of the mature animal (e.g. lamb vs. mutton.) And in comparison to beef, veal remains a gourmet, specialty item. A different logic applies to small, low-tech farms like ours, however, and so we can offer veal at least as affordably as comparable beef. If the logic of organic principles, of small, local, low-tech farms makes sense to you, too, then we encourage you to try veal. Pasture raised veal fed real mama's milk is a small farm delicacy worth enjoying.

MILK AND HONEY SOAP

2009-05-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

This past winter we found ourselves with an abundance of good ingredients for making homemade soap -- tallow and milk and cream -- and so we looked up some recipes and put together the most "homegrown" soap recipe we could. After trialing a few variations, we came up with the recipe for the milk and honey soap we're offering now. We rendered the tallow from the fat of locally raised beef steer. For the liquid we used 100% milk and cream (no water) from our Jersey cow, Elsea, along with a little bit of honey from our bees. The milk and cream, in particular, are supposed to give milk soap its gentle, moisturizing feel. The tallow produces a hard, long-lasting bar. We're excited to be able to replace supermarket soap with soap that we can make with, other than the little bit of soapmaking lye, all local and homegrown ingredients. We'd love for you to try some of our old-fashioned soap enhanced with milk and cream and maybe even let it be a regular substitute for soap made of industrially produced ingredients.

BRING US YOUR NUTRIENTS!

2009-05-21T19:22:00.000-07:00

From a nutrient perspective harvesting is the opposite of fertilizing. Everything we grow and then sell contains nutrients that come out of our soils. When we sell vegetables or eggs or meat, we're exporting nutrients off our farm. If our farm is going to keep producing, those nutrients need to be returned to the soil one way another. Conventionally, nutrients come from mines, are chemically processed with fossil fuels, are applied by the farmer, and the nutrients leave the farm through leaching, run-off, and through the sale of farm products, often polluting waters or contributing to landfills in the end. The organic ideal is a complete cycle: nutrients that leave the farm in the form of food and feed would be returned, however indirectly, in the form of compost and manures and other forms of organic matter. This is where we want to ask for your help. Do you have any nutrient sources, anything organic (in the sense of having come from a plant or animal) that's not getting returned to the soil like it ought to be? If so, we're interested in finding ways to cooperate in returning those nutrients to productive land. Of course, there are lots of things that can make nutrient recycling complicated. Nutrient sources can be difficult to transport because of bulkiness or excess water weight. Some nutrient sources can pose health or varmint issues if not handled properly. Sometimes forms of organic matter get mixed with heavy metals that can be toxic to soils. We want to start with those things that are easy and work toward the ideal. Composting can greatly facilitate nutrient recycling. When organic waste material breaks down in a compost pile bulk is greatly reduced, water weight is lost (thereby concentrating nutrients), weed seeds and plant pathogens can be killed by the heat of decomposition, and otherwise harmful wastes can be effectively sanitized. Grass clippings or leaves can form a good base for a compost pile. Some relatively nutrient-rich things like egg shells can simply be air dried and crushed. If you're asking yourself: can't I just pay the farmer to take care of this for me? Do I have to be involved? The answer is that if you eat, you're already involved in agriculture and in nutrient cycles. The only organic alternative we have to directly or indirectly retrieving nutrients from consumers is to import organic matter from conventional farmers. (For example, we've purchased straw mulch from a nearby farmer.) That's certainly helpful to our nutrient situation but it only displaces the abuse of organic nutrient cycles to our neighbor; the only solution that's ultimately organic is recycling. Hopefully we can work together more and more as stewards of different stages of a truly organic nutrient cycle.

LEGALISTIC ABSURDITIES

2009-05-20T04:55:00.000-07:00

This past winter news broke that something like a third of USDA certified organic farms in California had been using synthetic liquid nitrogen fertilizers in violation of organic rules. The fault lay principally with a large fertilizer manufacturer that was deceitfully using conventional chemical sources to manufacture its fertilizers more cheaply. It was a case of outright fraud that apparently went on for seven years (including almost three years after officials were first tipped off), affecting a huge segment of the USDA certified organic system. Normally, according to the regulations of the USDA organic program, land that has had chemical fertilizers applied to it cannot be used for the next three years for organic production, but with whole corporate networks of farms compromised (like salad mix giant Earthbound Farms), organic certifiers announced that those organic rules would not be enforced. Organic regulators assured consumers that synthetic fertilizers are perfectly safe.
That episode raises lots of interesting questions. It's particularly telling that so many organic farms in California depend on one-for-one substitutes for conventional fertilizers, substitutes that farm workers were unable to distinguish from conventional chemical fertilizer, and that are used exactly the same way with the same results. Are "organic" fertilizers that big companies process in big factories and that arrive in a bottle or a tanker truck, apart from massive frauds, otherwise not organically suspect? What is the ecological cost of such fertilizers? Why are California organic farms so dependent on factory fertilizers? What about the business model of these farms makes traditional, identifiably organic fertilizer sources (like leguminous cover crops) impractical? Why were organic certifiers so eager to secure the status quo following these abuses? How trustworthy can the USDA organic system be -- even when it comes to meeting very limited, legalistic standards -- when it's so far away, so convoluted, and so heavily industrialized? We see the whole episode as a further indication that the marriage between organic agriculture and supermarket-scale agriculture is shaky and ultimately unsustainable.

WHAT'S HAPPENING ON THE FARM

2009-05-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened on the farm since the farmers' market ended last October. Winter set in early and hard bringing a quick end to our late fall crops. We spent a lot of our time this winter working on fencing and other livestock-related projects. Much of what we're doing with livestock is still very experimental and inefficient, but we believe strongly in the importance of diversity to our farm, as well as the importance of reclaiming control of agricultural sectors largely lost to small farms. We added Barbados blackbelly sheep and Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dogs to the farm in December, as well as another Jersey cow in March. We'll tell you more about our plans for our pastures and the sheep another time, but the short story is that the sheep have been a lesson in what doesn't work. (Anybody want to buy a breeding pair of Barbados blackbelly sheep?) All in all the dogs have worked quite well for us, and they've helped simplify the way we manage our dairy goats, but their role as sheep guardians will have to await a different breed of sheep more suitable to our circumstances. Elsea, our first cow, had her first calf born on our farm right before Christmas. It was a bull calf sired by the neighbor's Hereford bull. He's a healthy calf with an easy temperament to work with and is growing very well. By next summer he should be the first finished beef steer we will have raised.
We just finished planting the first crop of field (cornmeal-type) corn that we've planted on our own land. (We've only sharecropped field corn until now.) The remaining strips of crimson clover that we grew as a nitrogen-fixing cover crop are blooming beautifully right now, and the bees seem to be enjoying them, too. The bees have had a rough go of it until just lately. Conditions were very poor for the bees last summer and early fall, and we suffered heavy losses. This spring, in part because of the cool, wet weather the bees have built up very slowly and aren't up to size yet for the honey flow that's already beginning. We're expecting a very small honey crop this year. Meanwhile, we're rebuilding for next year and trying to temper our forward-looking management with lessons learned from last summer's dearth.
The garden crops have been a mixed bag -- as usual -- so far this year. We had unexpected, heavy insect pressure through the cool, wet weather. Seedcorn maggots killed half or more of the 4000+ onion plants we grew and set out, and cutworms have been systematically thinning everything from the cabbage to the radishes to the lettuce to the onions. Neither of those insect pests has ever caused significant damage to our spring crops until this year. Our later seedings of spring crops are generally looking a lot better than the earlier plantings. If it doesn't get too dry or too hot too soon we're still very hopeful for the late plantings of lettuce, spinach, beets, etc. The Irish potatoes are also looking very promising so far. We set out our largest yet strawberry crop last fall. They didn't grow as much and get established as well through the off-season as they normally do, but the plants are looking pretty good now, and there are a lot of small, green strawberries already. Of course, there's lots more happening in the gardens, but that's a little news from the off-season.

Bread

2009-04-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

Baked goods are part of our regular farmers' market offerings. Our specialties are brick oven style loaves and cinnamon rolls.

Dipping candles

2009-02-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

We've been spending these colder winter days indoors dipping our beeswax taper candles. They are 100% beeswax and made with wax from our hives. Our beehives are not treated with any chemicals; many of the chemicals used in beekeeping can accumulate in the wax.

Really Free Range

2009-01-22T18:11:00.000-08:00

If you've been to visit our new farm -- and if you haven't we invite you to make plans to do so -- you probably saw our chickens running around the farmyard. Some people, when they come to visit, comment that they haven't seen chickens running around like ours in a couple generations. As easy as it is to find "free range" eggs in supermarkets, you might expect to see some of these hens that are now supposedly out in the open, but even as farmers interacting with lots of other farmers, we've never seen or even heard about a real "free range" flock that supplies a supermarket. So what does "free range" or "free roaming" mean? Most likely it means only that chickens are crowded in confinement houses instead of being in individual cages. In such crowded conditions, hens typically have to be de-beaked to prevent cannibalistic pecking. You can bet the factory farmers raising such chickens -- or paying the immigrant laborers that do -- aren't relying the least bit on actual forage to nourish their birds, even if, as in the case of "USDA organic" flocks, they're given a token run beside their confinement houses.

When we use the term "free range" we mean that our chickens are completely unconfined all day, free to wander as far as a chicken wants to wander (in the forest floor, in the orchard, in the pasture, around the gardens, etc.), and able to scratch up enough worms and grubs such that genetically engineered oilseed byproducts (and any other sort of so-called "natural, vegetarian" protein supplements) are completely unnecessary. (We go to extraordinary lengths to feed all of our animals without the use of any genetically modified feedstuffs.) We believe those worms and grubs -- not just a square foot's worth but thousands of square feet per chicken -- are the most valuable and important part of free range. Worms and grubs are nature's free (and ecologically benign) gift to chickens and they are chickens' natural source of protein; the industrial alternative is massive Midwest monocultures (almost always genetically modified), using tremendous quantities of fossil fuels to synthesize everything from the fertilizer to the pesticides, causing problems like soil erosion and pollution of rivers and aquifers, and processed by agribusiness corporations beyond the control of any farmer. Nonetheless, free ranging chickens isn't an easy choice. Fewer and fewer locations allow for the successful free ranging of chickens any more. (We used a moveable fence to rotate enclosures when we lived in Wilkes County.) Even now, our farm can naturally only support a relatively small flock. Predators like stray dogs and hawks have taken a significant toll on our flock over the years. Allowing our chickens free range has also required us to invest in fences around our garden spaces and young trees. We believe we're approaching a different kind of efficiency, though, a kind of efficiency not built on cheap fossil fuel and slave-like immigrant labor but on diversification and creation's natural bounty, and we're very proud of the simple yet extraordinary quality of our eggs and chickens.

Growing Under Glass

2008-12-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

These cold frames are full of little onion plants which will be planted into the gardens in mid-March for bulb onions. We'll then plant sweet potatoes into the cold frames to grow our sweet potato plants

Cover Crops

2008-10-27T18:40:00.001-07:00

A cover crop is a crop not grown for the sake of harvesting but rather to benefit subsequent crops. Because we don't use any synthetic fertilizers cover crops are especially important to us for the role they play in "fixing" atmospheric nitrogen and retaining and recycling nutrients from previous crops. Of course one of the most important functions of any cover crop is to keep the soil covered, therefore protecting the soil from erosion. For summer cover crops this year we planted sunflowers, cowpeas, and buckwheat. We really enjoyed the sight of all the cheery sunflowers, and the bees sucked up their nectar along with that of the buckwheat blossoms. Currently we're planting crimson clover -- another pretty flowering cover crop -- and small grains (barley, oats, and rye). Crimson clover, like cowpeas, is a legume and a nitrogen fixer so it is an important cover crop to precede nitrogen-hungry crops like corn. Small grains, in contrast, are great in terms of the amount of organic matter they add to the soil and their general improvement of soil tilth. Small grains also offer succulent winter grazing for our milk cows to enjoy. A neat concept we're still trying to work out is the use of oats as a winter-kill cover crop. Potentially oats can yield much of the value of any small grain in the fall and early winter before dying back to a straw like mulch on the soil surface. This offers the possibility of planting directly into the dead cover crop without tilling first. If this doesn't work as planned, we may harvest some oats next spring.

CAN SMALL, ORGANIC, FAMILY FARMS FEED THE WORLD?

2008-10-27T18:38:00.000-07:00

That's a grandiose question, but implicit in the big question is whether farms like ours are frivolously inefficient or whether they're a model worth supporting because of their better care of people, communities, and ecosystems.
Certainly big, industrialized farms free up/displace lots of workers. Lots of small, family farms would require lots of farmers and that means fewer people doing other jobs. A shift to small family farms might come about in part by farmers replacing workers in pesticide manufacturing plants or global food transport workers or food marketing specialists, but that would only be a part of the shift; small farms can really only become mainstream in America to the extent that mainstream Americans become farmers again.
But what if the workers were willing and able? How much food could such farms even produce? To try to answer that question, we must confront the reality of synthetic fertilizers. In the case of garden crops, which take up very little land, there are reasonable alternatives to synthetic fertilizers, particularly in the presence of all the organic waste materials that our current economy generates. On the other hand, the yields of the crops that take up a lot of land -- the crops that ultimately really feed the world -- depend much more heavily on synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizers allow for supplying practically unlimited nutrients to crops, at least so long as the fossil fuels required to synthesize the fertilizers -- fertilizers are a major part of our entire fossil fuel consumption -- are plentiful. Growing crops organically means the only nutrients available to the crop are what can be recycled (through manures, kitchen scraps, animal bones, mulches, etc.) When it comes to the crops that produce the calories that feed people, crops like corn and wheat and oats and forages for livestock, synthetic fertilizers make a huge difference, perhaps doubling potential yields per acre or even more.
Does that mean small, organic, family farms could only produce half the food as big, industrialized farms (and would be at least twice as expensive)? Some of big ag's proponents might suggest that, but that ignores the great efficiency with which small, diversified farms can make use of land, land that is too sloping, too varied, or divided into plots too small to suit big machines and extensive management. Even vacant lots in large cities have proven fertile ground for small, organic farms and gardens. Our own farm was long ago abandoned by mainstream agriculture as too marginal; yet to us it offers overwhelming potential production. The biggest difference may be that small farms are so much more flexible in terms of how they can convert sunlight into food. For example, instead of growing (and devoting land solely to) genetically modified, herbicide-resistant soybeans for chicken feed, free range chickens on small farms can scavenge 100% of the worms and grubs they need for protein, along with much of their energy needs, all from land devoted primarily to other uses. Hogs, similarly, are wonderful at utilizing what would otherwise be waste: crop residues from the field, acorns and beechnuts from forests, leftover whey from cheesemaking, etc. The dairy goats we bought this spring, as another example, have thrived all year on nothing but unwanted weeds in fencerows and along the edge of the garden. In contrast, industrialized agriculture devotes a majority of America's most productive cropland strictly to growing animal feed. How uneconomical!
Even if a predominantly industrialized agriculture can currently more or less feed the world, one must ask whether current practices can be sustained. What will industrialized agriculture do without cheap and abundant fossil fuels for its machines and for synthesizing its fertilizers? What will industrialized agriculture do when the weeds and insects and disease organisms develop resistance to the current array of synthetic poisons? Of course, the only answer is blind faith in the prospect of newer and higher-tech poisons and machines, meanwhile assuming that the pollution and side effects of yesterdays poisons will prove negligible. As for us, we maintain hope in a different kind of agriculture, a culture of small, organic, family farms.

The Value of Small

2008-10-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

We've been harvesting peanuts lately, pulling the vines out by hand and then hand-picking the nuts off. We gained a little efficiency by cajoling Eric's parents into helping while they were visiting last week, but what took us several man-hours would be accomplished in a matter of seconds by a conventional farmer. Of course, the conventional farmer has to finance hundreds of thousands of dollars of special machinery, along with paying for fuel, whereas all we have invested in harvesting is labor, but more than enough cost advantage remains to have all but eliminated small-scale peanut growers. So why do we hand-harvest peanuts, hand-milk a cow, or hand-pick feed corn? What's wrong with labor-saving machinery? In theory, there's very little wrong with labor-saving machinery, and we use plenty of machines on our farm: a honey extractor, a grist mill, an old tractor, an electric butter churn, etc. -- but where machines have displaced small family farms tremendous harm has been done. We could stand up for the small family farm on many, many fronts, but where we want to focus our attention now is the question of consumer choice. How many other changes have accompanied the shift from diverse family farms to industrial-scale monoculture? If the connection between people and the source of their food hadn't been severed by labor-saving machinery, if communities had retained direct control of how their food was grown, would you have chosen to give artificial hormones to milk cows for a marginal production boost? Would you have chosen genetically engineered corn? Would you have chosen high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener? Would you have chosen to feed chicken litter to your cows? Would you have chosen the fruits and vegetables with the better shipping quality over the ones with better flavor? Would you have chosen to offer the kind of employment fit only for an immigrant underclass? Would you have chosen routine antibiotics for your livestock? Would you have chosen Chinese concentrate for your apple juice? Whether or not you object to these choices that the system made no longer matters, because you're not given any choice. And that's one very big reason to value small, locally controlled farms.

The larder

2008-09-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

Watermelon feasting

2008-09-16T11:34:00.000-07:00

What's happening on the farm these days

2008-09-16T11:24:00.002-07:00

Though the cool weather of the past few days probably isn't here to stay, it reminded us that the seasons are starting to change. As the days get shorter, we've been enjoying the longer evenings, and probably sleeping in too long in the morning! This week we just wanted to give you a glimpse of what is happening at the farm these days.
Our chicken flock is nearly to 100 birds now, many of which are hens and will hopefully lay well come next spring. It is a fun morning chore to let the chickens out, watching them scatter to find some early treats. The mothers and their chicks follow. We have two hens that recently hatched some chicks and there are about four more hens sitting. We continue to have loses due to hawks so these broody hens will hopefully help us keep our numbers up.
The bees have been in survival mode since the summer honey crop never happened. We've lost a few weak hives. The fall wildflowers are just starting to bloom (golden rod and aster) so this should hopefully help them start building up some winter stores. We'll also soon start to collect fall pollen, some of the best tasting we've found. We also will soon start testing all of the hives for mite levels in the hives. We do this by putting a board covered with sticky grease under the hive, leaving it 48 hours and counting the number of mites that have fallen out. This then tells us which hives are in need of mite-reducing manipulations and which should be fine as is.
Our small herd of goats continues to clean up the fence lines and the pastures. This past week, we've also added a new milk goat and a new milk cow to our animal collection. Both are starting to get used to the routine here. Our other cow, Elsea, is due to calf right around Christmas.
Before the rain came, we spent a day watering all of our new perennial plantings. We've lost a few of the blueberries bushes, but most of the plants are growing great.
And the garden is still producing well, so we've been busy preserving much of the harvest, canning tomatoes and freezing okra, peppers, and summer peas. Much of the fall garden is now planted and we're looking forward to those crops as well.
We always love visitors so come out and see for yourself. We'll even put you to work if you'd like!

Summer harvest salad

2008-09-16T11:24:00.001-07:00

We've found a delicious way to enjoy many of the summer crops together in this refreshing salad. Just toss some summer peas with a colorful assortment of vegetables, sprinkle with a vinaigrette and enjoy!

2 cups shelled and cooked fresh pink-eye peas (or other green summer field peas)
1 or 2 ripe bell peppers, chopped (optional)
1-1/2 cups cooked sweet corn cut from cob (optional)
4 large, meaty tomatoes, chopped
4 medium onions, chopped
2 stems basil, cut into strips

dressing:
4 tablespoons vinegar, balsamic or other
approximately 3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
salt/pepper

Organic fruit

2008-09-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Since our move to Iredell County last fall we've been taking advantage of our expanded acreage to begin planting all sorts of fruit trees and vines and bushes and brambles and nut trees, too. Of course, most of these things take a number of years to begin bearing, so we haven't had any new fruit on our farmers' market stand yet, but we're wanting to slowly move in that direction. While there are presently a few other organic farmers around offering a variety of vegetables, organic fruit is a lot sparser yet. We've been able to find blueberries and muscadine grapes locally that are fairly organic, but that's about it in terms of what we've found commercially available. We've grown a small amount of strawberries and raspberries, and we've enjoyed wild-harvested blackberries and persimmons, but that still very much leaves us wanting. Conventionally, peaches, apples, pears, plums, and cherries would round out the array of local fruit, but we haven't found any halfway organic growers of these crops. So what's the local solution to organic fruit? We suspect the best answer lies largely in finding crops that don't, when grown in our part of the world, depend as much on synthetic insecticides/fungicides/etc. Friends' backyards offer some promising possibilities like mulberries, figs, and sour cherries. And although we've never eaten a locally grown pawpaw, Asian pear, or jujube, these fruits have also been recommended to us for organic management. Of course, we really like eating all the conventional fruit crops, but we also recognize that our conventional fruit eating habits are grown out of a dependence on pesticides. Following a desire for organic production will inevitably lead to changes in consumption, and we think, in terms of taste and variety, there's a lot more to be won than lost. We're eager to enjoy all sorts of new tastes that mass production and mass marketing haven't befriended. That's not to say we've given up hope in the conventional crops. We've planted a couple apple varieties, 'Liberty' and 'Enterprise,' that are supposed to be substantially more disease-resistant than the mass-market standards. Some delicious, local, heirloom varieties, like Limbertwig and Magnum Bonum, may similarly fit better in an organic system. So we're trying lots of things, getting all the rootings and seedlings we can from friends and neighbors, and reading all we can find on organic fruit production. We've planted enough of some of the more promising organic fruit crops, like blueberries, Asian pears, pawpaws, and figs, to hopefully be able to offer to you, our customers, soon. Meanwhile we're experimenting with more things than we've even mentioned here with hopes of finding many crops suitable enough to organic management to expand and offer for sale later.

Soil nutrients and fertilizers

2008-09-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

SOIL NUTRIENTS AND FERTILIZERS
A couple months ago when strawberries were still in season we drove by a popular conventional strawberry farm and were struck by how thickly the strawberry plants had been planted. There must have been fully ten times as many plants per acre as in our strawberry patch. Sometimes we forget how radically different it can be to farm with synthetic fertilizers and intensive irrigation. Unlike our plants, the strawberries at that conventional farm didn't have to rely on the fertility of the soil; all the macro-nutrients (e.g. N-nitrogen, P-phosphorus, and K-potassium) could instead be synthesized from fossil fuels and other mined materials and fed to the plants through irrigation lines, limited only by the depth of the farmer's pocketbook and the depth of the mines. The organic ideal, in contrast -- not to be confused with "USDA organic" as legalistically defined to suit big business -- requires that nutrients be continuously recycled through natural processes like excrement, shedding, death, and decay. On the surface those processes may not sound like things we want to associate with our food production. Poop and dead animal parts are things we in our "developed" consumer society pay big business to make disappear for us; they're certainly not treasured nutrient sources. And so we've cut ourselves off from any knowledge of or responsibility for the nutrient essentials of organic agriculture. Meanwhile one of the costs of maintaining the consumer's illusion of disconnectedness from these natural processes is that animals have been concentrated in extremely unhealthy ways. All sorts of pollution to soils, water, and air have resulted. What, then, is the alternative? How can nutrients be recycled organically? There are some first order nutrients that nature can recycle apart from human transfer of materials to the farm: water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and atmospheric nitrogen. Bacteria that live in the root systems of leguminous plants can, for instance, convert atmospheric nitrogen into forms of nitrogen useable by plants. All these natural processes work within limits, of course. Most of the plant-necessary nutrients aren't in the air, though, and so nature on her own has very little means of recycling those other nutrients when farmers sell those nutrients and they leave the farm in the form of produce or eggs or meat. One of the macro-nutrients that's especially of concern to our circumstances on this farm is phosphorus. Everything we sell out of the garden or from our chickens or livestock contains phosphorus, for example, and when we sell those things we're parting with the phosphorus they contain (along with all sorts of other nutrients). We could go on for a while without replenishing those nutrient losses, but the fertility and productivity of our soils would all the while decrease. Therefore we try to bring as much organic matter back to the farm as possible. Plant matter like hay mulch, for example, has wonderful attributes, but plant matter is relatively low in nutrients like phosphorus. Manure contains very roughly ten times the phosphorus of vegetable matter, and animal parts, particularly bones, contain something like a hundred times the concentration as plant matter. Of course, manure from our own animals is a wonderful organic fertilizer, but whatever manure we use in the garden must first be robbed from the pasture, and so as much as we're selling things off the farm we need to be bringing nutrient-rich materials back to the farm in order to maintain the fertility of our soils organically.