CurtBlog : Gardening

Food and me - a short history (part 1)

skills0 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:04:55 GMT

Introduction

If you've known me for any length of time, you probably know I'm really into food and cooking. Heck, at least half my blog posts mention food in some fashion. I thought it might be interesting to chronicle my relationship with food throughout my life. There are a lot of different experiences I've had that have shaped the way I view food. So I'm going to start a series of blog posts about this whole topic. It will be a bit free-form and I'm not sure when I'll be finished, but hopefully it will be at least somewhat interesting.

Childhood memories

As many of you know, I was raised in a conservative rural Mennonite community. Mennonites weren't the only members of the community, but there were a bunch of us. Mennonites have had a love affair with food (both eating it and producing it) for a long time. The primary focus of most family gatherings was around food, almost all of it homemade and often with ingredients that were personally raised and/or slaughtered. My grandfather was a farmer and many in the family before him. When I was a young child, my dad drove a refrigerator/freezer truck for Burris Foods, but by the time I was in early elementary school he had gone into business as a chicken farmer, hatching eggs to be precise. My uncle was a hog farmer. These were both what I would know call "factory farm" operations, part of the vast supply chain where America gets most of their food. My grandfather, uncle and father also raised typical row crops, like corn and soybeans. My grandfather sold Growers fertilizer to various farmers, not sure if they are still around or not.

As far as food in our house, we always had a big garden every year and grew just about everything. I grew up both loving and hating it, spending many hours weeding, hoeing, picking and processing food. In retrospect I wish I would've paid more attention. My mom was a food canner and freezer, like most Mennonite women. Even during the winter, we would have a decent amount of food that we had grown ourselves. We would also go blueberry picking for a day every summer, bringing home enough blueberries to put in the freezer for much of the rest of the year. We would also pick peaches to be canned in light syrup for the winter. Most summers my grandparents would go pick up a trailer full of bushels of apples and the whole extended family would spend the day making applesauce, apple butter, cider and whatever else they could think of.

We knew where a good portion of our food came from. We would go pull milk out of a stainless steel cooling tank from a local farm. It was fairly normal for us to occasionally get a side of beef from my grandfather and later my uncle. Venison was plentiful, I was the weird boy who didn't like hunting. I did like venison though. We would even have squirrel on occasion.

Once my dad got the chicken house, gathering eggs was a daily chore. Thousands of them. A few times over 5000 eggs in a single day. These were hatching eggs, so there were roosters jumping on hens all the time when they weren't trying to pick a fight with us. If you went out to the chicken house at night most of the birds would be up on the slats roosting and sooner or later some big old rooster would come tearing down the floor of the chicken house attempting to spur your legs. Double yolk eggs were nothing special, we would get triple yolks fairly often as well. Some eggs wouldn't have a shell develop and would come out feeling almost like a rubber ball. Occasionally I would have an egg laid right in my hand as I reached into a nest. The big problem with that many chickens though is that the ammonia was terrible; it was dusty and hard to breathe.

My mom was really into nutrition, so I learned about stuff like wheat germ, carob and sprouts. She would make yogurt and granola, which is probably why it is somewhat comforting that my wife now does the same thing. We also had to eat practically every vegetable known to man (it's only recently I've been able to eat brussel sprouts again), except spinach because my mom hated it. I love it and it was one of those foods that I started eating after leaving home. We started helping out in the kitchen at a fairly young age and probably started baking cookies by ourselves around 10 or 12 years old.

Not that it mattered much as a kid, but there was never any alcohol in the house and almost none of the adults I knew drank. Most of our social engagements were with other Mennonites and we rarely went out to eat. Alcohol was considered a sin of course, so it took me awhile to even get to the point where I could go into a liquor store and not feel guilty. More on that later. My mother's Scotch-Irish background was eventually going to overrule my Mennonite/German father's ways.

In Part 2, I'm going to talk a bit about how I got started working in restaurants and some of my experiences there.

Trying out Square Foot Gardening

skills0 — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:37:00 GMT

Hard to believe after the harsh winter, but it's planting time again. We are pretty excited because last year by the time we got the garden plot created and planted, it was already fairly late in the season. We are back again at our friends place (Keith & Joni) trying to get some stuff to grow in the city for the second year. Partway through the growing season last year, Kristin brought home the Square Foot Gardening (Mel Bartholomew) book from the library. At first it seemed a bit gimmicky, but when I got into it the concept started making a lot of sense. And it seems perfect for the small plot we have to work with, where growing things in the standard row formation ends up only using about 40% of the useable space.

So this year we bought the latest edition of the book and we are trying the basic concept, although we aren't exactly using his soil mix. We are down in the "3 weeks before last frost" period in Chicago (at least I sure hope so), which means we can actually start planting some early vegetables. So this past Sunday I put my terrible carpentry skills to work and built a grid to lay out on the soil, a trellis for vertical growing using electrical conduit and nylon netting (an idea from the book) and a row cover made with chicken wire to cover 8 of the 1' square plots. Last year we had a lot of trouble with bunnies and/or squirrels (or a vegetarian cat) eating our lettuce, chard and other salad greens. So we are going to try to cover them this year and see if it helps. We are also going to try to grow up (vertical) more than last year to try to take advantage of the limited space AND sunlight in a better way.

We got a variety of greens into the ground and also some seed onions and potatoes. Curious to see how things do. One nice thing about the square foot method is you can start cooler season crops like lettuce early and then when it gets too hot later in the season you plant something else in that 1' square plot and move the lettuce further down in the shade. Kinda cool. We have limited space where we get really good sun and most veggies love sun, so we are trying to make the most of it.

Why suburbia is unsustainable

skills0 — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:47:05 GMT

Over the last couple weeks I've run into several folks who are leaving the city for the suburbs and at the same time I'm reading about permaculture, so it's creating some interesting juxtupositions in my head. This morning on NPR they had a story about a lady in the Chicago suburbs who is going around her neighborhood trying to get people to replace lawn with gardens. Their family also recently installed a wind turbine. I applaud her and I'm thankful that some people are making an effort, but ultimately the whole idea of suburbia isn't sustainable long-term, at least given what we know now.

Suburbs are a uniquely American concept, driven by an apparent excess of space, cheap oil and the drive of consumerism to make life as comfortable, private and lavish as possible. Bigger houses, the greenest lawn, strip malls providing all the comforts of the city, albeit in corporate chain stores and cookie-cutter restaurants. But if we really are hitting peak oil, then the current gas prices aren't some short term problem, but merely the beginning of a new reality. Nobody knows for sure, but to borrow an idea from Pascal, I would rather guess we are running out of oil and be wrong than the opposite. Either way, I win.

Some of the power needs of suburbia could potentially be met with alternative energies like wind and solar, but these will take time to ramp up and many suburbanites find the idea of these things in their neighborhoods rather distasteful. That still doesn't answer the question of trucking in all the goods necessary to keep the local economy running, commuting to where the work is and just needing a car to do anything or go anywhere. In Chicago, there is at least light rail to use to get to the city for work, but only major American cities have this option.

In addition, all those huge lawns are a major environmental issue. In addition to using up land that could be used to grow food closer to urban centers, many of them take massive amounts of water and chemicals because lawns are an immature ecosystem in a constant fight against nature. All the plants that are considered weeds in a lawn are simply nature's attempt to take back the soil and turn it into something usable again, to heal the land. If you instead have a diverse variety of trees, shrubs and plants, particularly perennials and native plants, water is conserved, the soil is renewed with all the green matter naturally and you won't need to use pesticides.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what the landscape of America looks like in 50 years. I predict massive moves to either cities or more integrated rural living incorporating alternate energies and food production. Suburbia may end up looking like an incredibly stupid experiment in America's history by the time it's all said and done.

Some quick catch-up stuff about farms and gardening

skills0 — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:24:09 GMT

There has been a ton of stuff going on this summer related to our research into farming and trying to learn new things. I'm getting behind on blogging about it, so here are a few highlights.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited our friends James and Esther our in Boulder Colorado. They work as one of the "live on the farm" couples for Haystack Mountain goat dairy. Haystack Mountain is a pretty well established cheese producer, having products in Whole Foods and other national stores. They make all of their fresh cheese at their main cheese factory and they buy much of the goat milk for that from various sources. James and Esther work on the farm where the artisan cheeses are made from goat milk produced right there on the farm. These include raw milk cheeses that are aged anywhere from 2 - 6 months or more. We got to help out with a fairly large cheese make on Memorial Day, Kristin and I were up to our shoulders in the curds and whey for awhile. We helped out with making the Red Cloud and Queso de Mano. You can see all the cheeses here.

We also got to visit a restaurant we've seen featured in some cooking magazines called The Kitchen. They are one of the most eco-friendly restaurants in the country, reusing or recycle almost 100% of their various types of garbage and sourcing about 80% of their food locally. They have a community night where you sit around a long table and eat family-style with about 60 strangers for only $35/person. It's pretty amazing and we got to meet some cool folks. We also visited the Boulder farmer's market, which has some pretty amazing people producing some cool food.

At home, we had the opportunity this year to dig up the backyard of our friends and neighbors Keith and Joni and create a small garden. While it could use more sun for best results, we finally have a small plot of ground to grow some veggies and herbs. We prepped the ground, some of which was under an old sidewalk that we had to break up, using a deep bed concept. We put some composted cow manure and mushroom soil, along with some blood meal and organic fertilizer in the soil as we prepared it. It seems to be working pretty well for the most part. We also added a bunch of our worm compost a week or so ago and noticed a big growth spurt in a lot of the plants, particularly the tomatoes and squashes. We also have several varieties of peppers, several types of basil, a lettuce mix, a mesclun mix, beets, chard, oregano, rosemary, thyme, leeks, beans, sunflowers and some other flowers to attract beneficial insects. I'm probably missing a few things. All in all, quite a nice mix for a small urban garden. So far the only thing we've harvested is some salad greens. We got a bit of a late start and also started a lot from seed, so we're still waiting for some things to really get started. This is mainly an experimental year, so we are learning a lot about how much sun things need, starting plants inside, fertilizer needs and so on.

We are also participating in a CSA this year with Scotch Hill Farms. We picked them partly because they also do goats and grow a number of herbs as well. It's been a bit of a rough start to the season with all the rain (they are just south of Madison), but we've been getting some good stuff and eating a lot more vegetables which is always good. They drop off at the Southport Green Market which is just south of us. They are a fairly new market and still a bit sparse to be honest, but it's great they are trying to do something in that community. A few weeks ago I got to meet Bob and Jenny from Harvest Moon Farms, another couple who are professionals from Chicago who just started farming a few years ago. So they are kind of a few years ahead of where we might like to be. They grow a lot of organic vegetables, including 15 kinds of garlic and plan to start doing pastured beef soon. They also represent a number of other farmers in the Madison area, so their stand at Southport has items from other farms like cheese, maple syrup, whole organic chickens and so on. We are planning to go up to visit them and help out on our way to a college reunion weekend with a bunch of Kristin's Wheaton friends in July. That should be a wonderful trip as we'll get to visit a couple farms and see a bunch of our favorite people.

Thoughts on "The New Organic Grower"

skills0 — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:14:24 GMT

Over this past winter I've been reading a lot of books related to sustainable/organic farming and animal husbandry. One recent book I can highly recommend is The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman.

The book is chock full of dense, useable information, much of it applicable for even the backyard gardener with a small plot. Coleman focuses on the amount of land that can be readily maintained by a couple or small family, usually 5 acres or less. He is also a big proponent of using good hand tools and small garden tractors rather than buying a lot of specialized equipment that must be depreciated and cost capitalized before the farmer is making money off the equipment. In this sense, he would probably share a lot of views with Joel Salatin.

There are too many ideas to mention, so I'll just throw out a few highlights that really stuck with me.

There is still a lot of innovation in small organic farming techniques in certain parts of Europe, where small farms still account for much of the local food supply. Coleman has visited a lot of farms in Europe and in the rest of the world and has lots of tidbits learned from those farmers. In addition, he points out a lot of resources anyone can use to keep up with the latest techniques from these farmers. Also, farming is still considered a high art here and the farmer is considered a professional, a technician, a highly educated person who takes his job seriously and really has to be good at a lot of things to succeed. Contrast that with many modern North American farmers, where government interference, the incompetence of the USDA, the encroachment of chemical companies hawking fertilizers and pesticides as best practice and the loss of a relationship between grower and consumer has left them downtrodden, lacking passion and vision and barely scraping by.
Crop rotation is your friend. Coleman talks a lot about crop rotation and provides a lot of practical examples and schemes, lots of hints on what plants best follow other plants, the soil impact of various plants and so forth. This used to be standard operating procedure back in the day, but now on today's giant mono-crop farms this idea has been thrown away along with much other practical knowledge. Instead, the soil is treated as nothing more than a growing medium with no value of its own while a vicious cycle of pesticides and herbicides are required for growth. This leaves the soil more and more destitute of nutrients, while impacting the surrounding land and wildlife as well. Not to mention the food just isn't good for you. Instead, Coleman encourages the grower to think of the soil as the most valuable asset you have, one you need to nurture with plenty of organic material and educated care.
Weak plants attract pests. This was a very interesting concept to me. Coleman says that once you get healthy soil with the right balance of pH, organic matter, minerals, etc. and your plants are healthy, pests tend to be less of a problem. Pests typically attack plants that are already on an unhealthy trend. I'm curious to see if experience bears this out some day. It makes sense though, as much of the rest of nature works that way as well. Coleman doesn't say this will completely end the pest problem, but it goes a long way. Part of the reason as well is due to healthy soil with all the good organisms, as well as a micro-culture in the way you grow that attracts birds and other natural predators to help you keep pests under control. One thing I'm still not clear on, what do you do while you get to this state with your soil and environment. Typically you don't start with the best soil (unless you buy a working organic farm potentially) and it takes at least several years to get to where you want to be.

All in all, I quite liked this book and it gave me a lot of food for thought. It will be one I'm sure I'll return to when the time comes that I actually can put some of these principles into practice. In the meantime, I'm going to try some of the suggestions in our small back porch growing area. One thing we noticed last year is we bought some "cured" manure and it made a huge difference in our plants. This year we also hope to use some of our worm compost and "worm tea", as well as experimenting with some soil amendments if we get a chance.

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