9 LOCAL-ORGANIC THINGS FARMERS LIKE US GROW FOR THEMSELVES THAT YOU CAN'T BUY (even if you're a local-food-super-hero consumer)

  If you believe, like we do, that there are lots of important questions -- important enough that they deserve meaningful attention -- that go into growing food and bringing it to the table, and that the cheapest way (with or without any set of rules like those of the National Organic Standards Board) isn't automatically and always the best way (subjects we've previously discussed in more detail here and here), then you may have come to the same conclusion we have: that real power to make meaningful choices in these questions comes by connecting much more closely to the source of your food.  And in that case, if you've considered all the different parts of your diet, you've probably found a very substantial list of food categories for which there just aren't any real options for sale anywhere in our broader area.  In other words, if you live in this area (or pretty much any other area in the industrialized world), there are lots of foods/food categories you just can't buy except from the supermarket system of agriculture.  Obviously some foods, like tropical fruits or new foods like margarine are by their very nature not foods one should expect to be able to source from local farms, but our list below is a list of foods that, although challenging and complicated in various ways, we're fully able to grow for our own use, foods which also were mostly commonly available from local sources until just the last couple generations.  So, first the list of 9 things we're able to grow to the full extent of our own family's needs but which can't be bought from any comparable local-organic sources:

1. Buckwheat (particularly in contrast to rice...)
2. Dry peas/beans
3. Cow's milk, yogurt, butter, ice cream, mozzarella...
4. Goat's milk cheese and goat's milk (and goat meat)
5. A full assortment of local-organic fruits
6. Bread (and pancakes, biscuits, cakes, pasta, pizza, etc.)
7. Pork (and lard, bacon, ham...)
8. Nuts (so far: peanuts, black walnuts, chestnuts, and American hazelnuts, besides pecans we get from friends)
9. Corn tortillas

  This would get too lengthy for our newsletter if we gave even a brief explanation of each category on our list, but there are lots of details to consider.  If you have questions about why we say none of these things is available to purchase from local-organic sources, please talk to us about it further, but we'll summarize by saying that those items which are available locally mostly either involve substantial organic compromises (especially with animals raised on non-local, non-organic feeds and often conventionally medicated as well) or aren't complete enough that we would consider them full substitutes (as with the limited supply of local-organic fruits and nuts.)  We'd also note that we're attempting with our new-this-year Full Farm CSA plan to offer some of the above products to our Full Farm CSA members, but our point is that even though these foods can be grown, none of them is actually being grown for sale to the general public.
  We place buckwheat at the top of our list because, although for most people and for us as well it's not a major staple, it played a leading role in motivating us to more carefully consider the whole range of foods that we had previously contented ourselves to buy from more convenient sources.  A few years ago we had decided that if we were going to buy any foods from the supermarket system of agriculture that we would at least buy USDA organic, but when we ordered a bulk bag of organic buckwheat our bag of USDA organic buckwheat came labeled "Product of China."  For a number of fairly obvious reasons this made it clear to us that the challenges and costs of growing crops like buckwheat, dry beans and peas, a full assortment of grain crops, the feed for our animals... were worth taking on, and for the first time last year, although we failed to harvest as much as we hoped, we did harvest enough buckwheat to meet all our own family's needs.  We hope to learn from some of last year's failures and harvest enough to supply all our Full Farm CSA members this year, but in any case, buckwheat represents many of the common grains and grain products (rice, oatmeal, boxed breakfast cereals...) that as a category are simply left out of the whole local-organic food movement.
  We'd like you all to especially consider that while things like buckwheat and tortillas and the wheat that goes into making bread and the feed that goes into making pork... are things that are easy to overlook when there are lots of exciting local foods to focus on instead, the crops on the list above (and their conventional counterparts) represent a huge part, probably a majority, of the calories we consume and the acreage of farmland we use by proxy.  They certainly represent a majority, probably a very heavy majority, of what practically everyone in the industrialized world eats (regardless of diet preferences) if you add in the foods that our family would like to grow for ourselves but so far haven't yet fully managed, things (and more common counterparts) we've mostly either done without or continued to buy from the supermarket system: very substantial amounts of feed for our poultry and eggs, salad oil, cider, beer, soy sauce, millet, oats, mustard seed, fermented sausages like salami, hard cheese...) [2017 update: we're now growing a full supply for our family of oats and mustard seed, still working to varying degrees on most of the others, except still basically just dreaming about fermented sausages.] In other words, even a local-food-super-hero consumer with unlimited time and money still couldn't eat even half of any kind of normal diet from local-organic sources, particularly not counting by calories or by one's farm acreage footprint.  We also don't see that any notable changes are likely to be made with any of the categories on our list above in the foreseeable future.
  As farmers that likely think about these issues more and understand them more deeply than most of our customers this leads us to think that if we can't do more than the local food movement is currently doing and get beyond the trajectory that the local food movement is currently on and find some realistic hope of tackling the bulk of our diet and the bulk of our farming footprint -- gradually and with time but with some kind of reasonable plan for accomplishing more than minor token changes -- then we might as well give up now.  And that's what a lot of farmers do when they content themselves with selling just profitable niche foods to rich people -- things that make a plate or a menu look good and feel local but that replace very few conventional calories or acres -- or when they resign themselves to quit farming for a living and just grow what they can for themselves.  But we really want to find hope in a real alternative; we just think hope depends on a deepening of cooperation between farmers and consumers.  If we can grow for our family and eat the foods on the above list, even if it's not feasible to sell them to the general public, we (and other small farmers that would eat a full spectrum of the same kind of food they would grow) should be able to find ways to grow a pretty full diet for those customers that share our values enough to want to cooperate deeply with us and let our way of farming re-define how they eat in the same way it has defined what our family eats and our agricultural footprint.  Increasingly this goal is the focus of what we're growing and how we're selling.

In the CSA box this week

Nothing beats a pile of beets!

A cup of tea

   We enjoy a lot of tea here, hot in the winter and cold in the summer.  A half-gallon jar full usually waits for the thirsty on the counter.  Sometimes it's the bright red of roselle (hibiscus) and other times it's the faint green of mint, both lightly sweetened with honey.  For no particular reason, we mostly pair lemongrass with stevia.  And we were excited to add tulsi basil to the mix last year with its licorice-like flavor.  New in the garden this year are anise hyssop, catnip, chamomile, lemon basil, and bergamont.  We are looking for good flavors in tea and these all come recommended.  Our basic method for herbal teas is to harvest a handful of the herbs we want (sometimes a mix), bring the water to a boil and let it sit for just a couple minutes, and then pour the water over the contents in a bowl.  We give it about 5 minutes to steep then pour the liquid through a fine sieve into a half-gallon jar (using a canning jar funnel), then sweeten with honey (if we didn't already use stevia). All of these teas we also dry so we use the same method, just taking out a comparable amount of the dried herbs.  We've mostly been content with teas we could grow, but Melissa still had cravings for black tea.  Maybe it's the cream and honey that pair so well with black tea or maybe it's the caffeine!  In any case, years ago we planted a 4 inch tall Camellia sinensis (Chinese tea), the camellia from which regular black and green tea are made.  C. sinensis, although it sizes up slowly like other camellias, does fine here. It's hardy enough to take the winters and has no pest trouble that we know of.  It's evergreen with small leaves and pretty but not showy white flowers.  Regular harvesting actually helps promote a compact bushy habit.  Our bush has now reached 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide and we were overdue to actually put it to use.  We're a bit hesitant to share our process because we're still very much experimenting.  If you have any personal experience processing C. sinensis from fresh leaves, we'd love to hear from you.  The basic process we followed for regular black tea was to harvest new growth, the youngest two or three leaves.  Then we laid the leaves out to simply wilt for a day.  This helps the leaves become more pliable for the next step of rolling/crushing them.  By doing this, the now bruised leaves begin to darken, somewhat like bruised basil.  We left the leaves out on a tray for another day and then finally put them in the dehydrator to completely dry out.  And the result for us: a light brown liquid with the characteristic bitterness of black tea and for someone who rarely consumes caffiene, a bit of a caffiene jolt!  It was delicious, especially with cream and honey. We're planting more Chinese tea as well as herbal teas and hope to soon be able to help you more regularly enjoy a good cup of local Chinese tea.  In the meantime, be sure to try the tulsi and roselle this year if you haven't already, and, of course, enjoy the mint, too.

Forcing mushooms

  

They call it 'forcing' mushrooms, but this sounds a bit strong. Coaxing, tricking, encouraging, giving opportunity ... these seem more appropriate to explain what we've been doing to our mushroom logs lately.  Normally, good soaking spring rains stimulate shitake logs to fruit and within a week of one of these rains all of our logs will be covered in mushroom buttons that soon expand to lovely brown mushroom umbrellas.  As you may have noticed, though, rains like those have been in short supply this month.  So how are we offering mushrooms for sale?  Here in comes the practice of getting mushroom logs to 'fruit' when the weather itself doesn't initiate fruit set.  Fortunately, it's pretty straight forward to imitate a good rain when it comes to shitake mushrooms.  A simple soak in a water bath for 24 hours can start them on the path to mushrooming. We've tried limited experiments of this in the past but as this spring has come at us hot and dry with no mushrooms, we decided we didn't want to watch a season of unproductive logs.  Shitake logs will last about 5 years, degrading with time whether they've fruited or not.  So we put an old broken chest freezer to use as the water bath and started somewhat daily soakings.  It's not the perfect set-up.  For one, it only holds a half dozen logs at a time at best, limiting the quantities to small pickings.  Many of the logs are too long, which means only half fit in the water and so only that half ultimately mushrooms.  Some of the logs are old enough they've lost most of their weight and therefore float, requiring that we gingerly weight them down to keep them submerged.  And some of them are old enough that the bark is brittle and knocks off easily in the communal bath.  This may indeed shorten their remaining life. Despite the extra effort, it's been with great excitement that we're harvesting a regular supply of mushrooms.  The definition of forcing is to make someone do something against his will.  In this case, the mushroom logs are likely not opposed to mushrooming, they're just needing a little help until the rain returns.

FARM UPDATE

  

It's been a while since we've shared much news from the farm.  One very visible project we've been at work at through the winter has been felling trees.  Our property is over half woods so we're slowly trying to open up land that is closer to the house and barns to convert to pasture.  Of course, livestock require a lot more care and time than timber, so it makes sense to keep the animals closer. We were also motivated to start working on clearing land adjacent to the electric line right of way after the power company came through to do their periodic clearing.  We realized that by clearing land adjacent to the right of way we weren't just gaining more usable land there, but we were also eliminating the need for the power company to run its big equipment through the right of way itself, allowing us to make better use of that space as well.  We generated a lot of firewood from the project which will keep us warm for a long time.  Some of the wood was put to good use inoculated for shitake logs.  And some of the logs headed to our friend's sawmill where he's sawing them into boards to be used for a number of projects on the farm, including better housing for the combine. Other logs, like sycamore, walnut, and cherry we have hopes of selling to furniture makers or possibly doing some fine woodworking ourselves.

  But for as many trees as we've cut, we've probably planted even more.  Eric has a continuing passion for fruits and nuts and continues to plant the farm to edible trees and bushes.  You can't walk far on the farm and he'll point out something he's planted or grafted in place to a volunteer seedling.  Persimmons, figs, pomegranates, hardy citrus, improved black walnuts, chestnuts, mulberries, apples, pears, pecans, jujubes, pawpaws, blueberries (20 different varieties at that!)... most anything that might be able to survive and produce in our climate is being trialed, and we're expanding those plantings that have already shown promise.  So this early spring included walking around to find space for more, and then more planting and more grafting.  The tame (but thorny) blackberries have proven themselves easy maintenance and delicious so we planted a long row of them near the now cleared power right of way.  Figs are a great treat but the chickens think so, too.  So we found a space for more of them in a fenced in garden space. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row now, winter was cold enough to seriously injure the figs, so they've been set back again.

  Another winter project was to finish raising up a hog.  This is the second time we've raised hogs and we were quite encouraged this time especially by how little feed we needed to give him that was grown specifically for him (i.e. grain).  Instead, he feasted on discarded vegetables (pumpkins with bad spots, too small sweet potatoes, over-ripe watermelons...), whey from cheesemaking, the milk from the day the cow stepped in it... enough acorns collected in just part of one afternoon to provide the main part of the feed for over a month... To see our waste turned into lard and bacon was to see the real usefulness of a hog on a farm like ours.  Empty milk glasses and every other dish in the kitchen were first rinsed into the slop bucket for the hog before washing.  (Throwing scraps out on the compost pile doesn't feel as rewarding!)  We then had a group of friends help us butcher him on the farm.  It felt quite like the community butcherings of back in the day must have felt.  Doing it ourselves, nothing went to waste.  We even cooked up the head, heart, trotters, and snout into some of the best tasting scrapple we've ever had - it was pretty much the only scrapple we've ever had!  We rendered the lard which has been a treat to pop popcorn and for frying in, especially hush puppies and sweet potato chips.  Some of the meat we froze and some of it we canned.  And some of it we cured - one ham, the jowls and the bacon.

Just some of one year's seed saving efforts

  Sorting seeds is another routine of the colder days.  The floor of the upstairs room was completely covered in jars and envelopes swollen with seeds as we went through and decided what to grow this year, what seeds to store away, and which were old enough to retire (either to the compost pile or to animal feed or to eat ourselves as with peas and beans).  Germ testing at this time of year helps us decide which seeds are good.  It's a false high to see bean and corn seeds germinating in mid-January!  We continue to hone our seed saving skills and would say we are now planting about 75% of seed we've saved ourselves.  This is extremely rare among vegetable farmers like ourselves.  And it's not easy by any means.  Planning ahead where varieties will go and making sure isolation distances are enough between varieties, not harvesting crops for market because they are for seed saving, making sure to actually get the seed harvested and processed before weather or insects make it unusable... the challenges are numerous.  But when it's all laid out on the floor like that mid-winter, jars of seeds that we've saved, varieties that we've grown to love that won't just disappear at the whim of some big seed company, seeds that have been handed down from people we know... it's all quite the opposite of patent protected seeds owned by big chemical companies.  And it's really nice when the seed order for the whole year is less than $100 (and much of that is for new varieties and new crops that we just want to trial, varieties from which we can save seed if we like them.)
 

Can you guess which one is the goose egg?

The daily winter project is chores, even when winter hits it's most miserable.  Eric likes to say the cow can wait to be milked until it's above freezing, but whether it got above freezing soon enough or not, she still needed to be milked twice a day.  It often takes extra time and care in the winter to make sure the cattle, goats, chickens, geese, and dogs are all fed and watered.

Red corn tortilla chips and salsa

Slicing sweet potatoes to fry for chips

Frying sweet potato chips

   Our winter to-do list is long and ambitious each year.  It's the time of year to build and repair, to study and plan, to clean and organize, to visit and host other farmers.  And of course to eat well.  Come Christmas time the garden crops had frozen out.  But the larder was full: canned goods double stacked on the shelves, freezers jam packed, big bags of peanuts hanging from the ceiling, boxes and boxes of sweet potatoes, pumpkins, squash, yacons, and turnips, and a daily supply of milk and eggs coming from the barn. Yes, we feasted through the winter, but now it's time to earn another year of eating.  We're looking forward to seeing you all more regularly very soon.  Or make plans to come see us at the farm.

New arrival

This broody hen hatched our first gosling of the year for us.  The geese deserve some credit, too!