The call comes promptly at 7am.

A sleepy sort of shaky-excited voice says, “I’m calling because your chicks are here!” Twenty-nine new chicks arrived at our post office this morning.  P went to get them while I set up the bin and heat lamp on the porch that will be their home for a week or so until they can transition to an outdoor coop.

These will be next years’ layers.  We tried to restock earlier this summer, and raised 40-some lovely egglayers and meat birds to strong fully-fledged teenagers, only to lose all of them to a huge raccoon attack.  That was two months ago, and it’s still hard to talk about it.  Few can really understand how farmers feel about marauding predators until they see for themselves what animals will do to each other.  Most of us carry a fantasy ideal that predators will only kill what they need to survive.  In my experience, raccoons will usually eat portions of one or two birds, and simply bite the rest of them in the head and neck and leave them lying there, going from one to the next until they kill all they can, or are interrupted.

So that unhappy history is the background to these new chicks.  Our flocks are also aging now, we have fewer eggs coming in, and we’ve lost some adults this summer to either a hawk, a coyote, or a fox, as far as we can tell.  No sightings, just a random chicken vanishing into the thicket here and there.  We also have 9 2-week old chicks hatched out under 2 setty hens, and another hen setting eggs due to hatch in a week and a half or so.  But we can expect half of those to be roosters.  Next week, meat chicks arrive.  Today’s new little ones are pullets - a mix of Aracaunas, Buff Orpingtons, and Black Australorps.  They should be very nice, and we’re excited to start over…again.

We eat veggies for breakfast a lot.  Quite a few people have looked at me like I’ve got a third eye in the middle of my forehead when I suggest having veggies and protein for breakfast, instead of carbs and sugar.  Thought I’d post a few pictures about how to do it.

Not shown - I make hashbrowns first that cook while chopping the rest of the veggies:  grate up a few potatoes, fry in olive oil in a cast iron pan with salt and pepper.  Set aside/keep warm while finishing the veggies.  If I’m in a hurry, I just start adding veg to the hash browns as they are nearing doneness.

The usual vegetable mix is onion or shallot, zucchini, pepper, and tomato, plus whatever else is available.  This time I added broccoli and the first 2 pods of okra of the season.  I chop the veggies in the order that they should cook in - onion and green pepper get the most time, then zucchini. Then greens or broccoli, tomato, or basil get just a quick cook at the end.  Start adding them to a hot cast iron pan in that order, with a little olive oil.  This can be spiced up with some hot pepper if desired, seasoned with salt and pepper.  Cooking is usually pretty quick - 5-10 minutes maybe, and ideally things stay colorful and a little crunchy, not soggy. It comes out of the hot pan, and fried eggs go into the hot pan.  Mix the hashbrowns and the veggies on the plates, top with eggs a few minutes later.  Yum. The only thing here we didn’t grow at home is the salt, pepper, and olive oil.  This is also really delicious with a little feta cheese topping it.

And the idea is that the eggs are somewhat runny, and the yolks run all over the mix deliciously.  In fact, there is little to compare at this time of year with the flavor of salty fresh tomato, basil, and egg yolk mopped up with toast or hash browns.

Yes, those words were chosen to conjure up Margaret Hamburg.

Margaret Hamburg, the Food and Drug Administration chief, was recently featured on NPR as follows, talking about the giant egg recall:

“She also had some practical advice for consumers: Reject over-easy eggs. She said that as federal investigators continue their work with the companies involved, consumers should strictly avoid ‘runny egg yolks for mopping up with toast.’ “  (National Public Radio, August 23, 2010)

Now, I’m an odd bird when it comes to runny eggs.  I’ve gotten nauseous at the idea of eating a soft-boiled egg before… when it was someone else’s eggs.  I won’t touch raw cookie dough because of an experience with getting food poisoning from eating it as a teenager.  But our own eggs, that we know the history of, we know the health of the chickens, and every detail about the eggs every step of the way, are another story.  Instinctively, I prefer them more softly cooked than I ever have any eggs with an unknown history.  And on occasion, I make ice cream, caesar salad dressing, or pasta carbonara with our raw eggs.

It’s a pity that all eggs are castigated in one fell swoop - after all, we can’t hurt the giant factory farms’ feelings by singling them out for criticism in comparison to the health of backyard and small producers’ chickens.  I am wondering what the fallout of this situation will be.  Legislation that punishes the small producers?

Well, time will tell, but in the meantime, I purposely cooked our homegrown eggs even just a little runnier than usual the morning after I heard that NPR report.  Must be that third eye that makes me so contrary.

Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.

Here’s the recipe, to go with the post!  :)

This started as a recipe from The Zucchini Cookbook, by Paula Simmons.  I have modified it to my own tastes quite a bit.

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup olive oil, or less
• 1 1/4 cup sugar, or less
• 2 T blackstrap molasses
• 2 eggs
• 1 t vanilla
• 1/2 cup sour milk (Or 1/2 c milk w/ 2 t lemon juice or vinegar added.  Or 1/2 c yogurt.)
• 1 c white flour
• 1 c whole wheat pastry flour
• 1/2 c barley flour             (So, 2 1/2 c flour total - you can experiment)
• 5 heaping T good quality unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 t baking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1 t cinnamon
• 1/4 t nutmeg
• scant 1/4 t cardamom
• 2 1/2 packed cups grated green zucchini (original recipe called for 2 c, cubed)
• 1/2 cups dark chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9×12″ square cake pan. (if desired, “flour” the pan w/ more cocoa powder.) Cream the butter, olive oil, sugar, and molasses together.  Add eggs, vanilla, and sour milk, and beat until smooth. Fold in the grated zucchini.  Sift together the dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients with dry ingredients, stirring just until combined well.  Pour into pan, and smooth with spatula to evenly fill pan.  Sprinkle the top with chocholate chips, using as many as preferred.  Bake about 30 minutes (?) until toothpick comes out clean.  (Original recipe says bake 40-45 min at 325.  I tend to not watch the time, but

go by smell and the toothpick test.  Sometimes I turn the temp down to 325 halfway through the cooking.)

This cake is really soft and crumbly.  Barley flour gives it a soft heavy density that’s really delectable.

You can just use regular flour, but it will be a different cake.  I like the zucchini grated in it much better (than cubed), and can get more in that way.  If I’m using a big overgrown zucchini, I only grate up the outer portions, not the seedy inside.  Don’t use a zucchini so big its skin is getting tough.

I think I overdid it in the heat a bit today.  I wouldn’t usually work out in the hottest part of a hot day, but several sources told me that severe thunderstorms were on the way for the afternoon.  And I so wanted to get the last of the onions in!  It was a perfect moment for harvesting - after some dry days without much rain on them, a very hot dry sunny day.  Onions have to be cured (dried) carefully in order to last into the winter months.  I’m not planning to buy any onions, so I’m pretty invested in curing ours carefully.  Rain on them in the afternoon would have seriously interfered.   So I went and pulled the rest of the onions, laid them out in the sun to dry, and then didn’t stop there, because there was so much else to do, clearing beds, weeding, harvesting…  It’s amazing how fast you can overheat - working fast so you can be done sooner, feeling the sun on your skin and the sweat dripping everywhere feels kindof good, if you keep moving, keep distracted.  Before I knew it, I was pretty tired, headache starting up, face beet red, vague nausea.  It’s taken several hours of fluids and cooling down again to start to feel better.  And then it never did rain - blue sky all day.

But this post is supposed to be about onions.  Onions are one one of those magical things to grow, to me.  When the bulbs start to fatten up, and you can store them and use them months later, it just seems amazing, when I think of them coming from tiny little seeds, and the most impossibly thin frail little stems.  I grow all my onions from seed now, after years of disappointment with the little bulb onion sets.  I never got decent onions from those, and many of them went to seed and made no bulbs at all.  It made a lot more sense after I learned about what impacts onions’ growth in one of my favorite gardening books - The Book of Garden Secrets, by Dorothy Patent and Diane Bilderback.  When you buy the bulbs, you don’t have any idea how they’ve been stored, and it turns out that exposure to certain amounts of light and temperatures will influence whether the onions that grow from the bulbs go to seed, or produce a food onion.  I can be more sure of what happens to them when I grow them myself, and that has resulted in astronomically better onion success.

We grew 3 varieties this year:  Copra, Redwing, and Varsity.  Redwing did beautifully last year when Copra failed; this year is vice-versa.  Varsity is new to me, and I’m very happy with it - huge perfectly round yellow onions that are gorgeous.  The final test will be to see how they store.

To cure onions well for storage, you are supposed to wait until their tops fall over, and stop watering them at this point.  (This is where the unpredictability of rain comes in.)  When they have been in the ground under these conditions for 10 days or so, you pull them, hopefully on a hot dry sunny day.  Lay them out on the ground in the sun to dry, but only for a day or two.  Next, they are brought indoors and laid out on a screen for finishing drying.  When their stems have no wetness left at all, I braid them into onion ropes and hang them for storage.  And that is our onion supply for the year! If we are lucky, they may last into early March, when the first chives and green onions come in, and the cycle starts again.

One of the interesting parts about doing the farmers market has been observing people, and their funny interactions with produce.

Sometimes it involves little experiments with human nature.  For example, last year, I noticed that as the garlic basket became picked over, people had left one very large bulb of garlic, and were choosing smaller ones instead.  I picked it up to see why - was it broken up?  Was it moldy?  Was there a crushed clove on it?  Nope.  The stem on top that the plant grows out of was twisted around the bulb at an unusual angle.  When we planted it, we probably got the clove headed the wrong direction in the soil, and the plant grew around itself a bit it compensate.  Do people eat the stem?  No!  It’s part of the dry papery coverings that get peeled and (hopefully) composted.  The rest of the bulb was enormous and perfect, but people were scared off by a kinked stem at the top.

So, out of curiosity, as the season wore on I left that bulb of garlic in the mix, and didn’t cut off its funny stem.   The garlic options became fewer and  fewer, smaller and smaller, but still, everyone rejected the bulb with the kinked stem. People were seriously buying garlic half its size, for the same price, instead of settling for a large but slightly unusual shape.  It never sold!  We took it home, and just to complete the experiment, I opened it up and peeled some cloves.  The largest ones were big enough to save as seed garlic, so I kept them for planting.  The rest was perfect - larger than the garlic we usually get to use.  We save the best for seed, sell the next best, and use the smalls for everyday ourselves.

Tomatoes always get a lot of debate and commentary.  We are growing Roman Candle sauce-type tomatoes this year.  One source description reads “… pure yellow banana shaped tomatoes…. very flavorful and have very few seeds. Excellent for making salsa, sauce, and gourmet dishes…”  They are lovely!  Bright yellow, they really do look just like a big strong candle flame.  Wonderful flavor.  Didn’t sell a single one at the market so far!  People ask about them.  They pick them up, exclaim, talk about them, and then say things like the person who asked in a woeful tone, “But what do you DOoooo with a YELLOW TOMATO???”  Or, “Well, my husband would never eat a YELLOW tomato.”

How I feel about all this depends on my mood, and most of the time my reaction is a jovial desire to educate people, tell them about what they could try, how good something is, encourage experimentation, etc.  There’s a bit of suppressing a laugh, grin, or teasing remark.  Sometimes though, I try not to wonder at their families eating FD&C yellow 5-colored cakes, candy, pickles, popcorn, jello, etc….but not, OMG, a YELLOW TOMATO.

To my delight, though, every now and then these sorts of interactions are offset by the really satisifying ones.  The woman who hurried up to the table and excitedly pulled the beautiful white-and-lavender unusually-shaped eggplants out and set them on the scale in a towering pile, for example.  She knew what she was getting.    She wasn’t among the crowd who “just can’t even think of it as an eggplant if it’s not dark-skinned”.

I think maybe I grow for these individuals.  We’re not big producers, and part of the reason I grow my own food is to get interesting produce I can’t afford to buy, or that can’t be mass produced:  The gourmet types, the thin delicate-skinned varieties, the colorful nutrient-rich varieties, the skinny flavorful beans, the finely textured baby veggies, chemical-free.  Not the mainstream.  The mainstream makes the money, I suppose.  But recognizing quality and uniqueness brings an incomparable satisfaction.

On a lighter note, the funniest overheard quote of the day?  Next door to us, the Humane Society had a table display set up.  Behind them was one of Zingerman’s permanent lunch menu advertising signs.  A woman came up to the Humane Society’s table, eyeing the Zingerman’s sign behind them, and asked, “So - What’s your Soup-of-the-Day?”  Grin.

A month and a half now since we last posted.

We talk about writing more, writing our stories, about documenting our farming more.  We have eager readers telling us they love our blog and keep checking for the next post!  We have great intentions.  And then there’s life.

Recently I checked in with some farming blogs I like, and was comforted to find that many of them at times seem not to keep up with regular posting too, like us.  Or they take the summer off.  And then there are the familiar apologetic posts, mentioning how long it’s been, how busy it’s been, vowing to be better at posting…. And I slowly came to the lightbulb moment of realizing that if you’re really farming….you’re often simply too busy to compose an essay about it!

We took a few days off and went away for a break last week.  This has been a difficult year, and I badly needed to see something else…something like mossy boulders, water, sand, silent boreal forest.

We weren’t gone long, actually only had 4 days of not laying eyes on the gardens.  But when we returned at the end of the last day…..the place had turned to a jungle in 6 days.

It taught me how much I do in a day, and how much there is TO do in a day.  Day to day work, chores & activities make it hard to spot the differences we make, and it’s easy to focus on (and feel bad about) the things that don’t get done.

But stop doing any of it for even 6 days, and you really see it.  The weeds are miles high, the popcorn and squashes grew 2 feet.  The tomatoes I didn’t get to staking are horizontal on the ground, and nothing to do about that now.  The green beans were going past, and the chickens got to eat a lot of overgrown zucchini.  But it helps to remember that they were all just packets of tiny dry seeds just very recently. And, but for the invisible daily efforts, they would be still.

In this world, there are so many things and people telling us we aren’t doing enough.  We aren’t giving enough, we aren’t working hard enough.  We aren’t chipping in, going the extra mile, shouldering the pack, showing volunteer spirit, making the deadline.  I almost always feel like one of me isn’t enough.  I often feel guilty even for doing something for myself as simple as writing on this blog - when there are so many people wanting so many things out there.  I treasure these moments of perspective, before diving back in again.

Short list of what we’ll be bringing to The WestSide Farmer’s Market tomorrow!

Eggs - reserved egg orders will be held for pickup until 6pm, and  unreserved eggs available on demand, while they last!

Bagged mixed baby lettuces

Bagged “Wild Baby Greens” mix

Lamb’s quarters -  amazingly delicious-nutritious right now!

Arugula

Head lettuce

Herbs

Rhubarb

Potted tomato plants

The greens are *really good* right now.  They grew fast in the heat, then have gotten juicy and crunchy in the rain.  They won’t last like this for very many weeks.  I have a theory that most people who think they don’t like greens haven’t gotten to taste really fresh, really good, really well-prepared greens.  Give them a try!

We’re so excited to be heading back, and we look forward to seeing you there!  Please come and visit us at the market!!

Home from the offices at 6:30pm, been there all day.  Quick snack, no time for more, gotta use the daylight, when it’s not 90 degrees, or pouring down lightning and rain.  Hurry and gather eggs.  Out to the new garden plot.  Arms are sore from yesterday’s hoeing of heavy wet clayey soil up over the 160-odd feet of potatoes planted.  Carried out 21 more hot pepper plants, and 20 more eggplants.  Hacked holes in the same wet heavy clayey soil, planted the plants.  Mulched, weeded, checked other newly planted plants for bugs, moles, disasters, took stock of what we can sell at market on Thursday.  One branch of a newly planted apple tree is broken in the storms - the tree’s so little, the one branch makes up about 1/3 of it’s mass.  Branch is hanging by a strip of bark, and the leaves not wilted - position it carefully, and wrap it with grafting tape and splint it -it may survive and heal.  On one of the trips to and fro from the house, picked the asparagus and took it in, started pots of lentils and rice on the stove, returned a couple client phone calls.  Pulled up the wires from beds that don’t need row covers anymore, moved them to the other garden to cover the eggplants.  Quickly cut and placed TP tube cardboard collars around each new plant, to protect the little stem from cutworms and rabbit teeth.  Getting dark now, working faster.  P helps place new support wire hoops and cut and stretch and tuck and fasten the rowcover, to keep out the deer and the fleabeetles.  Carry the tools and supplies back to garage.  Run back to house to check on the rice and lentils on the stove.  Grab the salad spinner, hike back out with the scissors to pick lettuce for supper and tomorrow’s lunch.  Notice the slugs returning after the rains, grab the slug-picking container, go from row to row brushing slugs into it.  Now the hips and legs and back are really starting to hurt, end of a long day, kneel, squat, bend, stand, over and over.  Drown the container of slugs in a bucket of water.  Have I mentioned how I hate slugs?  Not as much as I hate chemicals.  P is shutting up the chickens for the night.  Give the lettuce a first washing out in the garden. Grab a fresh young garlic and handful of herbs for the lentils, handful of radishes for the salad.  Pull off the lettuce rowcovers for the night, and the rain.  Run in, check stove, start chopping herbs and radishes.  Was soaking some bean seeds for quick germination that didn’t make it into the ground before dark fell tonight - drain them and pack them to last the night until tomorrow.  Throw together the lentils and herbs and seasoning, a quick salad, pass the asparagus coated in olive oil under the broiler - done, supper by 10pm?

A little-known fresh spring delicacy we love is chive blossoms.  Chives themselves are greeted with great enthusiasm for about a month in the early spring, when we’ve generally run out of onions, gotten sick of dried herbs, and the new onion greens haven’t appeared yet.  Chives find their way into a lot of our cooking and salads in April and May, but by the end of May (especially if it’s been hot like this year) the greens can get a little boring.  And then - the blossoms arrive!

Chive blossoms can be used in any way that regular chopped chives are.  They are subtler on flavor, and beautiful to behold.  They’re especially nice as a garnish on top of salads, noodles, potato or egg salad, sushi, scrambled eggs, etc.

They come as cut flowers, (we’ll have them at Market) and are really easy to use in cooking:  just take the clump of blossoms between thumb and fingers and gently pull them off the stem.  Then scatter over a dish!

Today’s chive blossom recipe for us:

Cold Udon noodles with Baby Greens & Chive Blossoms

Cook the udon in boiling water, drain, and soak briefly in icewater to cool.  Meanwhile, chop green onions, a few radishes, a handful of fresh cilantro, and pull the blossoms off about 5 chive stems.  Make a dressing by combining olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, and a bit of hot pepper oil, if desired.  I never measure - just add and experiment.  Lime juice is good here too.  When the noodles are cooled, drain them well, pour enough dressing over them to coat, and toss with the chopped onion, radish, cilantro, and chive blossom.  Prepare a  bed of greens on the plate, dress it lightly with a stream of the same dressing, and put a helping of the noodles on top.  Today we added an little cold leftover grilled steak and asparagus from last night.  Sprinkle on a few more chive blossoms for garnish, and enjoy!