Our annual tomatofest kicks off September, which is a month filled with labor: tomatoes, the honey harvest, poultry butchering, potatoes and squash, winter garden fit in somehow, fruit, and we lose our farm hand (Jay's daughter) to school. September is also eat local month:
- http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com/
- http://www.locavores.com/
And our local eat-local group pushes an eat local week:
- http://www.rogueflavor.org/
(September 9 to 16) with lots of activities to encourage eating local. It's a good time of year to do it, there's so much food out there, all fresh and delicious. Since we grow so much, rather than a 100-mile diet, I'm thinking of a 100-yard diet; only eat food that we produced right here on the farm. Given the realities of trying to get the harvest in, while keeping our day jobs, and not causing upset and consternation amongst the stock and pets, and good taste, we'll make some exceptions, like coffee, animal food, salt, etc. The most challenging part are the starches... We like rice, and I've grow only a few pounds of wheat... what we have lots of is potatoes, and I don't know how well I'll do on mostly potatoes for a week.

So this year we (Jay and I) are going to take the week-long challenge and eat all our own food, with a few exceptions, and I'm going to try to blog about it, what we eat and just how local the food items are and what energy went into producing them.

The Omnivore's Dilemna is written in three sections. The first covers industrial agriculture, most specifically corn and the meat animals that eat it. The second is organic agriculture, starting with the integrated polyculture small farm, then looking at industrial organic. The last section is hunting and gathering, with some musing on vegetarianism.

The first section was the most interesting and illuminating for me. I find Polson's best stuff is looking at industrial production; he's about the one one I've read who approaches these topics with an open mind (I'm reminded of the potatoes chapter in The Botany of Desire). The problem facing farming is that it has become business, and our current paradigm requires growth; a mere 2% growth is standing still. Using hybrid corn varieties, lots of chemical inputs, and now GMO, we have increased production amazingly. But that's only half the problem: the population grows slowly in the US, and we can only increase our eating so much. One result is we are getting fat. We also eat more processed food, since we pay more for the same calories in a highly processed form.

There's a lot more on how miserable cows and chickens are, and all the industrial processing for cereal, etc. and how the system is systematically set up to stick it to the actual farmer - but for this I'd recommend the book "fast food nation" and the film "The future of food".

The second section starts with his visit to Salatin's famous pastured poultry setup. I find his enthusiasm about Salatin's integrated small farm to be a little over-the-top; I don't really like cheerleaders, honest skeptism is more interesting and educational. But I agree it's a great system. The discussion of industrial organic and the evolution and co-opting of the organic movement is also excellent; I knew that it wasn't all Farmer John with his hoe, but laser-leveled fields so specialized tractors can automatically cut hundreds of acres of baby greens is farther than I had imagined.

I don't hunt, nor am I a big fan of mushrooms, which may be one reason why the last chapter didn't do much for me - it was all driving hundreds of miles to hunt wild pig and find gourmet mushrooms (chanterelles and morels) and prepare grand cuisine. Perhaps you can justify it by his allusion to this being a meal from the forest, rather than from annuals (corn) or perennials (grasses eaten by cows). But he doesn't seem to notice in his all home grown or gathered meal that he's got wheat in his bread and pasta and garlic and sage (perhaps he grew them, he didn't say) and butter and pepper, etc, etc. All together it comes across as elistist and irrelevant. It's deeply satisifying to eat a meal all of food you grew yourself, it gives a feeling of connection to the land that can't be described, but while his meal was doubtless far finer than the simple meals we eat, our meals are much more real.

The discussion of vegetarianism, speaking as a ex-vegetarian who raises her own meat, was very well done. There is a dilemna between caring for animals and eating them, and I especially like this quote:

"Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, 'Why Look at Animals?' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away."

We do feel honor for our animals and appreciation for them, in spite of having cared for them and then having had them killed. The sheep butchering is a solemn moment. And somehow eating them does not seem wrong or bad.

...

Besides my impressions, there's another blog review of this book I recommend; it has a rather different perspective: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2006/06/omnivores-dilemma.html

I started almost 300 tomato plants (for about 18 people). Previous years it was in the 100 range. 300 is over the edge where the transplant-twice system works, and with so many people and so many varities organization is key. I'm organized, but not organized enough. I started starting on March 1 and the last ones were started on April 5. The early starts are nice and big, the late march ones are wimpy, the april 5 ones are teeny; although it's still some days short of the traditional tomato-safe day which is May 15. But I think for me, first week of March is ideal.

I ran out of pots (of course), so I tried newspaper pots again. Last time I wasn't too impressed. But this time I had lots in newspaper pots and pushed them close together, and the tomatoes did very well - I think since the newspaper stayed wet. The roots came right through the pots! I don't really like the official potmaker - I still need to tape the bottom about half the time. So any old jar will do just as well.

This year, like last year, I didn't have enough onions started. I started seeds in flats as early as January. Some of the early plantings were last years seed and didn't germinate well (onion seeds are like that). I think I need to start in December or something, though, if they are going to be large and robust by April.

"longkeeper" tomatoes lasted until April 1, at which time I said forget it and gave the rest to the chickens. Amazing.

For some reason the earwigs are late this year, and the chard is nice looking. We're eating a lot of chard. Well, to be honest, we're eating a lot of pizza, since we don't have time to cook :-) but when we do cook, there's just greens (and frozen, canned or dried stuff). There are a few potatoes left (getting sprouty) and some squash. We've had a couple of stalks of asparagus, but our bed is still young and the first shoots are like knitting needles (size 5). The first non-leafy-green I generally get is kohlrabi, which is just the stem of a green; we might be just a couple of weeks away for that. It takes forever for the carrots and beets to be ready and the peas are still only about 6" high. And there's rhubard, but that's not a proper vegetable.

I make a lot of chevre. It's very easy; just add culture and rennet, let it sit for 24 hours, then drain. It's rather dull by itself, we try adding it to quiche and pasta sauce, but it remains plain. It really needs to be made into cheesecake :-). To get over the plainness, I've been experimenting adding garlic, herbs and things to it; Jay's a big fan of the garlic. The other type of cheese I can make reliably (well, usually - todays isn't looking good - if you forget to add the lipase before the rennet, just give it up...) is feta. I have been experimenting with a cheddar recipe; I'm not happy with the way my cheese press works, so I've not been even trying to get something I can age for 6 months! But every so often, my not-pressed-enough, lightly aged cheese is really delicious. I'm rather taken aback when I cut into one of the many rounds in the fridge and find a tangy, creamy, delicious cheese that works on a sandwich.

I used to make mozzarella a lot, but I haven't done it lately. I'd need to find time to make lasagna to use it up...

Last year I tried making butter from cream from our goat's milk. Goat butter is pure white. It also has very little flavor. It was like crisco, and there didn't seem much point in it for all the work. But the chevre often has a buttery flavor, so I added some chevre culture so some cream (just spooned off the top of the 6 quarts that went into the unlucky batch of feta), left it for a few hours, and the resulting butter actually has a buttery flavor! It's still stark white, but we can learn to live with that.

I finally took the official PDC (permaculture design course) last year, in 2005. This did change my perspective quite a lot.

Since then, I've had some seemingly endless discussions about what permaculture actually is. It's kind of like arguing with myself before I took the course <sigh>. Some things about permaculture, or at least the culture surrounding permaculture, really bothers a lot of people. And some of the techniques sound great, but it's unclear how practical they really are if you just want to feed yourself and others. And I can understand all this, since these same thing used to bother me. Now I can ignore the sillier suggestions, and ignore the "culture", and just apply permaculture and use the skills, in as many ways as I can.

Permaculture is a way of looking at the problems and working on solutions that are nature-derived and inspired (water flows downhilll, bugs eat plants); rather than the rather determinisitic, authoritarian way that is embedded in our culture (the water will flow where I want it, or else! Kill all the bugs, no matter what the cost!). There is a simple ethic; and some principles (between 10 and 50, depending on who you listen to) that are useful thinking points (like each element should perform multiple functions, or edges are the most diverse and productive parts). That's what I use of permaculture. There are also any number of ideas and techniques, and many people seem to associate these techniques with Permaculture and insist these techniques are the by-all and end-all of it. But if that was all, well, they are fine and grand ideas but they must take quite a bit of tuning to get the technique actually working right.

It's been a year since my course, I was helping with registration for the 2006 course that's started, which has got me thinking about what differences the course might have actually made, on the ground. Most things are about the same, frankly - the biggest change was involvement in community, we met a number of interesting people who have similar interests, which is wonderful. I started a website for the local permaculture group (the siskiyou permaculture resources group): http://www.sprg.info; and a yahoo mailing list (sprg). I've tried a few more techniques, with indifferent success :-) Planted a lot of trees and plants in hedgerows. I feel more strongly about eating diverse plants and that weeds may be edible too. More encouraged to leave areas wild, rather than neatening everything up. I examine and care about various individual weeds. Some has been validation and deeper understanding of why some of the things we're doing already is good. The most useful part has been in thinking about the layout issues - deciding where to put the garden, where to put rainwater cachement tanks, how to handle drainage ditches, is easier with some design criteria.

And I'm more aware of this particular place, of Fairweather Farm, as an entirely unique place, not like any place described in any book, so I should observe carefully and consider what I see and experience as more important than what I read in books or find on the web. Who knows our soil, who knows the wind here, who really understand how dry it gets in summer? Even other parts of Ashland are quite different in soil and water and wind. We all have to observe our own gardens, and learn from them, there is no book or teacher that can replace that.

It seems to be much worse in the US than other countries; other countries have wisely rejected or required labelling on GMO foods. I think we are so out of touch with where food comes from, and have had our taste buds dulled if not killed outright by fast food (I read recently that one quarter of all meals in the US are fast food), that we are more vulnerable to the transformation of our food supply into something that does not fill the needs of healthy support for our bodies, nor healthy support for the land, and utterly ignores the future in favor of making a little cash today.

I strongly recommend everyone try to see this documentary, although it's pretty depressing. We all need to be aware of what we eat and vote with our food dollars against this evil.

One of the big seed suppliers has recently been bought by Monsanto:
"...Celebrity, Big Beef and Sweet Baby Girl tomatoes, North Star, Red Knight and Fat 'n Sassy peppers, Mars and Candy onions, Yellow Doll and Jade Star watermelons, the Seneca squashes—all are Seminis varieties. ... In January 2005 Monsanto announced that they were buying Seminis for 1.4 billion in cash and assumed debt. Noted for its aggressive advocacy of genetically modified crops and its dominance in biotechnology, Monsanto will now have a major presence in thevegetable seed business for the first time..."

And Mars corporation owns Seeds of Change.

I love to try out new seed suppliers and varieties and give my business to small seed companies. And of course it's better to grow seeds and plants that come from nearby places, so they will be more adapted to your local climate and soils. To help people in Ashland or on the west coast, I'm giving my lists and reports of the small local
seed and fruit tree companies I've found; people in other places, I encourage you to find, buy from, and publicize these types of companies too.

This problem of scale goes for things like onions and potatoes - many (most) people have no idea how many onions or potatoes or garlic they actually eat in a year, and how much that is; yet if you want to grow your own, you need to think on that scale. And that means some awareness of how much you planted last year, so you can tell if you should plant the same next year, or if you need to plant more. And of course, even then, things change from year to year - our potato crop was low this year, my guess is that after replanting tubers for some years we have built up viruses. So new seed potatoes this spring (from Ronningers - organic heirlooms from a family business).
And we are already getting low in potatoes to eat - we're having to eat All-Blue potatoes (which did very well) in the chicken noodle soup, and the potato pancakes, making some dishes look a little surreal (they really are blue - very funky with carrots). We're also low on onions (I saw this coming in June, but the later planted onions did poorly - and interplanting with tomatoes didn't work, the tomatoes ate the onions for breakfast). Fortunately, we do have what appears to be a vast amount of acorn and sweet dumpling squash (from just two hills!). We also have plenty of garlic. Oh, and the jerusalem artichokes, there's no end of those . All we need, really, is the right recipes.

I'm not sure if assuring an even stream of vegetables, without the feast-or-famine, is even possible when gardening, or if someday I'll have that kind of skill. Partly it may be accepting eating the less appealing foods when the good stuff is gone (like those tasteless tomatoes ripening in the pantry, "Longkeeper", and the jerusalem artichokes). But thinking ahead, learning how much you eat, and planting it in spite of how much it looks, is a set of hurdles to overcome or skills to acquire in the process of taking control of your food supply.

This is a garden blog site, but one thing we grow in our gardens is sheep, which we eat. Now that the garden is resting, and there's not enough grass left in the pastures for all the sheep, it's butchering time. We have it done; cutting up meat is quite a skill. But when the mobile butcher normally takes away the "guts" for discard, we try to use as much of them as we can; it honors the sheep to allow him to provide more value to us. At least, this is how we think. To a ex-vegetarian who's never been much interested in "variety meats" it's a real challenge; I have enough trouble with roasts, never mind hearts. So there's a lot of parts that still don't get used (tongue?), but we do our best.

First, sausage casings are really made of well-cleaned intenstines. It's laborious but not difficult to clean them. I have a new sausage stuffer, so we made some sausages (defrosted some ground rooster), and fried them up. Amazing to make your own sausages - lamb casings make small sausages, the diameter of a thumb - and the sausages look good and are delicious!

Then, haggis, though I chickened out from using the actual stomach of the sheep. The stomach is impressive to see but not appealing to use for food. Proper haggis contains the liver, heart, and lung, along with oatmeal, onion and spices, and steamed. Traditionally it's cooked inside the stomach, but I used a foil-covered bowl. It's not bad, but not that great, either; a fluffy, spicy, dark colored meatloaf with a liver favor. But I don't like meatloaf that much - Jay does, and he liked the haggis a lot.

Last year we sauteed liver and onions, and used heart and liver in shepherd's pie, both of which were fine. We still have a liver and a heart left, and four kidneys. Steak and kidney pie?

Another thing that comes from sheep butchering is the skins. We salt and dry them, then send them off to the Amish to be tanned, and get back sheepskins with long, wavy fleece, very soft.

I wish sheep were made entirely from steaks and chops, but they aren't, and eating meat means taking responsibility; for us "variety meats" are free food that would otherwise be thrown away (commercially they mainly go into pet food), it's highly nutritious, and most traditional cultures have highly esteemed these parts.

Our deep thanks to Baa-52 and his half brother.

The early tomatoes tested this year were Stupice, 4th of July, Polar baby, Silvery Fir Tree, Early Pick, Oregon Spring, and Red Robin - all red tomatoes. The best find was Polar Baby - wow, it's early. It's unclear which of 4th of July, Stupice and Early Pick we'll grow; Early Pick and 4th of July have better flavor, but Stupice is open pollinated. Silvery Fir Tree and Oregon Spring are out. Red Robin only if I'm inspired to experiment more in containers - it wasn't really worth it.

The Data:

(note on dates: we had an exceptionally late, wet, spring this year - lots of rain in May and June. With our cold nights and clay soil, it takes tomatoes a while to get started and most production is in August, September and October. Official last frost is April 30, locals say May 15 is tomato-safe, but last couple of years we've had killing frosts in late May. This year we had no frosts after April 25 or so. And the killing frosts in late October were right on time - though we were spared the usual regular light frosts earlier in the month.)

Stupice (OP/Peter's Seed)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/20
Small red salad type. Very sweet ("too sweet"). Productive for a long time.

4th of July (Hybrid/Burpee)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/20
Small red salad type. Great flavor, much more flavor than stupice but not as sweet ("too sweet"). Productive for a long time. tends to crack.

Polar baby (OP/Peter's seed)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 4/30
first ripe 7/2 (maybe before, I wasn't checking!)
entered in county fair 7/16; won first in "red tomatoes"
Very small plant. Tomatoes were small, red, sweet but not much flavor - only worth it since they are remarkably early, several weeks before any others. Gave up producing in midsummer.

Silvery Fir Tree (OP/containerseeds.com)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 5/14
first ripe in august
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. Nice foliage. Terrible flavor in our trail. Not productive, had disease problems.

Early Pick (Hybrid/Burpee)
seeds started early March, planted in garden 5/14
first ripe 7/29
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. Lots of flavor: more flavor but less sweet than stupice.

Oregon Spring (OP/Pinetree)
seeds started early March; planted in garden 4/30
first ripe mid-july
Medium-small tomatoes, larger than salad type. more acidic, less flavor, consistency not great.

Red Robin (OP/containerseeds.com)
seeds started early March; planted in pots in late April
First ripe late June
entered in county fair 7/16, won first in "cherry tomatoes".
Very small, compact, designed for containers.
In container outside: very small, very flavorful tomatoes. In greenhouse: much larger, watery and bland. Haven't tested in the ground.

Besides Top Ramen (which I'm embarrassed to say we do eat from time to time) the main thing we make is what I call Vegetable Surpise. (I think the name is funny, since it's not a surprise - but no one else thinks it's funny; just humor me). Here's the "recipe". You can make as much or little as you like by adding more vegetables, but when vegetables are the main part of the meal you need a surprising amount - I rarely manage to cook up enough for leftovers.

Vegetable Surprise
- onion (one small or 1/2 large)
- garlic ( as much as you like; I use a big spoonful of that canned chopped stuff, or 2-4 cloves fresh)
- oil
- vegetables (such as cabbage, kale, collards, chard, gailahn, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, beets, dried tomatoes, peppers, jerusalem artichokes, green beans, snap peas, zucchini, winter squash, kohlrabi) cut in bite size peices.

You may need to parboil beets and winter squash; it's hard to get them soft enough in saute.

Chop onion and garlic and saute in medium hot oil. After a couple of minutes, add vegatables in order of hardness (hard to soft). Cook vegetables until done to taste (we like them undercooked, but then, we're hungry at this point).

Serve over pasta and top with grated hard cheese such as parmesan or pecorino romano (or any cheese, really - gorgonzola is good, cheddar works)

Or serve over baked potatoes and top with cheddar.

Or add a couple of eggs with the cooking vegetables, and some soy sauce, and serve over rice.

Or add a lot of eggs, let cook for 10min, flip over and cook on the other side, and call it a frittata (we usually add sliced potates to the vegetables when we do this)

Or only cook vegetables halfway, remove from heat, add a lot of beaten eggs and a little milk, and pour into a pie crust and bake, call it a quiche.

Or you can add cream (after the end of cooking to make a cream sauce), or ricotta; but these require more sense of adventure and having some leftovers that need using up.

Fresh tomatoes don't generally work, they release too much liquid when cooked so you get a runny, sloppy dish. However, if you add cut up small fresh tomatoes shortly before serving, so they just get barely hot, it's particularly delicious over pasta with grated cheese.

The "Long Keeper" tomatoes we keep in the pantry in the house; last year we had fresh tomatoes until February. (they were terrible, but Jay ate them happily). And there are still peppers growing in the greenhouse - I don't know what I'll do with them all - we don't grow that many, really, but we don't normally use that many. And I have *got* to dig up the jersalem artichokes - last year I never got to it, which meant a 9' jungle; they grow into a reasonable stand if you do carefully harvest them all. I haven't been happy with the dishes of jersalem artichokes lately - maybe peeling really is necessary.

We picked the last of the melons in the greenhouse last week, just before the frost. This is the first year we had a decent crop of melons of any kind - they hate heavy clay and cold nights, which is what we have. This year we tried ha-ogen in a large planter box in the greenhouse, trellised on a tomato cage, and they grew lushly and produced perhaps 5 or 6 fragrant, juicy, perfect melons - I knew they were ready to pick when I would go into the greenhouse and the fragrance filled the air.

And lastly, surprising observations: yacons are not at all frost hardy, hopefully the tubers are okay. But chickpeas didn't seem bothered by the frost. Of course there are about 10 actual chickpeas in the patch, so it doesn't really matter...