This blog is not abandoned.  :)

It didn’t even go off my radar, get forgotten, nor did I take a deliberate break from it. I am a diarist at heart, and most days this fall when I’ve been in the garden, bringing in the harvest, or walking in nature, I have composed a blog post in my head.  The trouble is with the time it takes to transfer from thought to paper or computer.

I thought of a blog post as we wrapped up the final market day, and switched our focus from feeding other people, to preparing our own winter food supply.

Our table last day at the Westside Farmers Market - incredible celery, leeks, and celeriac this fall.

I thought of a blog post as the first frosts hit and we started to say goodbye to the garden, and began to light a fire in the woodstove daily.

I thought of a blog post as we dug potatoes, and more potatoes ….and more potatoes.

Tiredly, I thought often about posting about the sanctuary I felt in the garden, even if for only half an hour of twilight at the end of a frantically busy work day.

Last big harvest before frost.

I thought of a blog post as I walked through a wooded patch, hearing the birds, noticing how green the moss looks after a rain, when everything else has turned into winter browns.

I thought of a reactionary blog post every time I listened to news about Occupy Wall Street, “consumer confidence”, anti-consumerism, and the Plastic Ocean.

I composed words in my head about our harvest as it filled every bin, bucket, and tray we had, as we worked in the rain and by flashlight to bring the last of the perishables in by the first hard frost.

But with all this doing, our hands have been a bit busy for blog posting.  I am continually thankful and amazed by the enormous amount of food two people working two other jobs can produce from a tiny little plot of land.  We grow so much of what we eat now.  Eggs, chicken, greens of all sorts, beans, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, rutabega, squash, popcorn, apples, berries, herbs, onions, garlic, leeks, radishes, carrots.  Our own pickles, krauts, jams, sauces, cider.  So much to write about, and so little time to write!

Remains of the market garden

Some people call us a farm.  Some are amused that we call ourselves a farm.  Some get grand ideas in their head of how we must live and what the garden looks like, imagining an orderly organic utopia.  Sometimes their silence when they come to visit seems to tell of their disappointment.  We are small.  The “market field” is just a big messy garden.   The shutters are falling off the house because most days, we’re too darn busy or exhausted to fix them.  Our furniture is mismatched, and our kitchen needs remodeling.  This is what it looks like to live as much as we can right now from a patch of land, trying to reduce the need to buy, to turn less garbage loose into the world than we might. This is what it looks like to make do, purchase less, grow more, work hard.

Digging potatoes, and immediately replanting the bed with endive seedlings - just barely visible at the top of the photo.

And yet, somehow, we manage to grow enough beautiful produce to sell to others while feeding ourselves.    Somehow, we had an enormous Thanksgiving supper where the only store-bought ingredients I used in the cooking were milk, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, flour, arrowroot powder, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sugar, and wine.  There was so much joy and pride in roasting the 10 lb 3 oz “turkey” chicken who grew running around in our back yard, and so much peace and fulfillment in carrying baskets of greens and roots in from the garden, rather than braving the crowd at the grocery store.

The promoters of monoculture farming retaliate against the rise of interest in local food.  They try to win support by saying we can’t feed the world with small farmers, local produce, and organic techniques.  Yet I don’t see how 7 billion+ people will eat sustainably without digging up our lawns to grow chemical-free food.  I’m thankful for those who grow their own, or support others who do.   I’m thankful for the shoppers I know who are trying to buy less, buy locally, and use less plastic (in all senses of the word).  For me, Thanksgiving is about celebrating what bounty we can produce, rather than what bounty we can buy.  It’s about celebrating the wonder of being able to grow our food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A sweltering day in the garden, a sunflower manages to stay looking fresh

Last Thursday was a hard day at the Farmers’ Market.  In record-breaking heat, we got up and out before dawn to harvest for the afternoon market before it got too hot to pick vegetables.   Usually we get a good chunk of preparation done the night before, but this week we had spent Wednesday night up until 11 pm unexpectedly butchering meat chickens, instead of prepping for market.  They had begun to fail to tolerate the heat wave, and we we lost three of them to it before realizing we just had to butcher them early.  (At least, they have gone to a much cooler place now, relocated to the basement freezer!)

So by the time we arrived at the market, we were already well on the way to exhaustion, overheating, and in my case, salt imbalance from chugging enormous amounts of water, sweating a lot, and eating very little.   The vegetables and herbs were difficult to keep fresh, wilting and heating up no matter the best planned attempts to keep them cool. The pavement was too hot to set the coolers on when we arrived, and one of them toppled from its stack, breaking some egg dozens.  The first potential client of the day, arriving before we’d finished setting up, became fairly disgusted upon hearing the price of a bunch of our basil.  After shaking his head and making some unpleasant comments, he moved on, but only to return shortly, brandishing a large bag of basil at me, and testily telling me that “THIS is a dollar’s worth of basil!!”  I made an unfortunate comment about anybody being able to go pick basil for themselves in 90 degree heat if they preferred, and we went our separate ways.

A bunch of our leftover basil, three days after its appearance at market. We handle it so carefully, it can stay fresh for a number of days after picking. Quality is really important to us.

Sometimes the pricing issues of being a farmer are so saddening and disheartening I wonder, “Why are we doing this to ourselves?”

But that low point was immediately balanced by a glowing new client who had just discovered us and the Westside Farmers Market on the web, and was really excited about it.  Infectiously excited and happy about it, and eager to try our produce.  It was a pleasure to talk with him about how we grow our food, ways to cook it, and so forth.  We were so happy and smiling over someone else’s pleasure and interest, and I thought “This is why we do this…”

One of the few greens I had at the market that day were lamb’s quarters.  Lamb’s quarters this past week sprang up heartily and greenly  with new young growth in some of the replanted beds, and looked too perfect not to take along to market in glorious bunches.  Weeks ago when we had fresh spring growth of lamb’s quarters for sale, a number of people in-the-know bought them, and one customer actually squealed, “Oh you have lamb’s quarters!  I’m so excited!” The next week she brought by a copy of Linda Diane Feldt’s wonderful book, Spinach and Beyond, just to make sure I knew about it.  She was so thrilled that a farmer understood, and harvested and used lamb’s quarters.

The controversial Chenopodial culprit itself, aka goosefoot and pigweed. Succulent, nutrient-dense, and ready for the soup pot.

But this week the lamb’s quarters did not get such a good reception.  Three people insinuated there was something underhanded about trying to sell weeds, and looked at me with a “gotcha” kind of look, satisfied at having identified a fraud.  One spent a good bit of time talking about how she weeded those out of her garden and wouldn’t imagine eating them, because, well, they’re weeds. Often times these are great moments to talk a little, educate people a little.  But the heat must have been getting to everyone, because on this day, people’s responses mostly left me feeling like they thought we were trying to fleece them with the lamb’s quarters somehow (heheheh…I really didn’t intend that pun).  My descriptions of using lamb’s quarters in place of spinach, and claims that the flavor is really very mild, just brought uneasy looks and sidling away from the table.

So, deflated, and feeling rebuked for trying to market something that I hadn’t intentionally planted (therefore a weed), I browsed through some other farmer’s blogs for inspiration and healing.  El at Fast Grow the Weeds came through for me as always, and I felt relief flood me as I discovered that her current post is devoted to “eating one’s weeds” in the form of purslane gazpacho, and (gasp…wait for it…)  ….lamb’s quarters with pasta.  El, I love you.

(Just for fun, here’s another lamb’s quarters recipe link, whose writer begins with with the line, “Now that I’ve discovered them, I may never go back to spinach.”)

Fresh cut flowers - a bright spot in the hot day

And just for closure… later on that market day, a beautiful smiling happy-faced woman asked if we could arrange for me to provide the flowers for her wedding in a few weeks, because she liked our cut flowers so much.  Another little high point, a little affirmation that this is the right path, that there are people out there who put wildflowers on the tables at their weddings, who eat the weeds, who see the value.

Thanks everyone, regardless of your political views on weeds and the true cost of food, for coming to see us in the 100 degree heat last Thursday!

Polydactyl Cat Trowel/Fist

So I started to write a post about the issue of the Dervaes family trademarking the term “urban homestead” (oops, I wrote it).  If you need some background, Agrariana’s Part l post and Part ll post seems, from my limited knowledge on it, to do a good job summarizing and analyzing the situation.

But then, I realized I’m not sure I have the time or the authority to write about this! We’re rural now, so though I once dabbled in urban homesteading, we are now following our personal path to freedom by growing and producing most of our own food on a tiny mini-farm that is not an urban homestead. I can’t take much time to write about this because I’ve got to get busy planting the seeds that will grow the future veggies for our our garden, even though there’s already a riotous homegrown revolution going on under the grow lights in our living room.  Enough said?

Path to Freedom, Urban Homestead, Urban Homesteading, Grow the Future, Homegrown Revolution (and trowel/fist logo) are registered ® trademarks of Dervaes Institute.

Okay, okay, we’ve had our fun.  And I poke fun because it IS so ridiculous on a certain level, to try to own language and concepts that exist without you.  But, even though l’m shaking my head along with everyone else, I think I may have a wee bit of sympathy going for the Dervaeses.  This tiny sympathy takes root in my belief that, if they hadn’t done it, someone else would have.  Seriously.  I truly think some marketing giant somewhere would have made a move to own “Urban Homestead” sometime soon, given its sudden, recent uptick in popularity.  I imagine it to be some slick business school graduate, who probably made fun of the farm kids when he was in grade school.  And I wonder if we’d be so up in arms about it if it hadn’t been one of our own.  If a huge corporation started selling “Urban Homestead” trademark jeans and forbidding others to use their name - would we be this outraged?  Or would we just absorb it quietly like we have all the other words and phrases that have been trademarked by the big guys?  I’m not making any excuses for the grabby Dervaes behavior, either.  I just wonder if it’s as simple as the Dervaes saw coming what I described, and decided to thwart that, without realizing what “if you have a trademark you have to defend it” was going to cost them on this one.  And the mob will take them down, because they’re little enough that the mob can.  Probably wouldn’t have been able to happen that way to Urban Homestead® jeans.

That smorgasboard seems to sum up the week!   On our porch is a chicken in a cage, and two planters full of celery plants.  We butchered 17 meat chickens while enduring a communal cold, and something has been simmering on the stove almost all day every day.  I’ve had a bit of a break from work this week, and tried to use it for autumn catch-up, even while nursing a cold.

The young chicken on the porch in a cage has a broken leg. Total mystery how that came to be, she just turned up hopping on one foot with the other hanging, obviously broken.  Chickens are relentless at picking on someone who’s injured, and her companions turned bullies immediately.  She had to be separated from them to not be killed by pecking.  Between the options of putting her down, or going to the vet and ending up with a $500 chicken, I decided I couldn’t do either, and would try splinting her leg as best I could, and leave the rest up to her and the higher powers.  She has a break right in or above the equivalent of the ankle on a chicken.  She’s been doing great in her little homemade cast for the past week -immobilization made it comfortable, and she rests and eats and seems to be healing.  She is one of our new Aracauna pullets for next years’ laying flock; I was not happy about this damage.

On one particularly cold clammy afternoon, I made myself go out even with a throbbing head and runny nose and dig the celery to save it from hard freezing.  We are not as advanced with hoophouses/winter shelters this year as I had hoped we’d be.  We have a wonderful harvest of celery… finally!  It puttered all through the hot dry summer, but has grown to loveliness now in this last cool but not cold 2 months.  I harvested down as much as I can keep in the refrigerator, dug about 15 of the best plants, and replanted them in planters to bring in under cover.  They will keep on producing useable celery for us for a little while.  You just can’t make really good soup without celery, and yet it is on the list of the most pesticide-poisoned veggies you can get (and not easy to wash or peel!).  It’s so nice to grow our own, but it takes some strategizing to have it available more than only 1/3 of the year.

We’re filling our freezer with 6-9 months supply of homegrown pastured chicken, and traded some of the chicken for half a grass-fed organic lamb raised a few miles away.  I’ve been making stocks from boiled bones, from some organic grassfed beef we had in the freezer, and now from the chicken bones.  It is amazing stuff - lovely color, tasty, so full of gelatin and chondroitin that it gels up strongly in the refrigerator.  Making really good soups while we have colds has been wonderful.  Here’s one that disappeared really quickly…it was soooo good:  That rich chicken broth, our own Snowcap beans, and our veggies, including onions, leeks, celery, wax beans, garlic, and kale.

When the stockpot hasn’t been occupied with broth and soup, I’ve made a batch of quince jelly, and one of Green Tomato Chutney.  The chutney turned out really spectacularly.  Green tomatoes, apple, quince, red bell pepper, hot pepper, onions all get chopped and simmered in a pot with raisins, mustard seed, curry powder, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, and ginger, some sugar, and some vinegar.  I use maple sugar/turbinado/sorghum when I can.  Oh, it was delicious this time!

September was crazy. A lot of things happened.

Digging potatoes in the dusk, the night before the last market.

A lot of sleep lost, a lot of muscles, brains, and heartstrings strained.  Someone gave me a small pendant inscribed with the words, “This too shall pass”.  And so it shall.  September is gone, and here is October.

The market is finished.  Yesterday was the last day - 18 weeks gone in a flash.   We had to miss Week 17, and we are grateful and delighted that so many of you wrote or stopped by yesterday to say how much you had missed us the week before.  It has been incredibly rewarding to work with the folks running the Westside Farmers Market, the other venders there, and the customers coming through.  A huge thanks from us, to all of you.

We will still have available for individual sales:   Eggs, Garlic, Popcorn, limited Winter Squash, Potatoes, and other small items such as herbs, wreaths, hot pepper strings, and other garden odds and ends.  You can contact us here, and let us know if you would like to be added to our email list for delivery/pickup of the goods we will have available.

And here, we move into our season of final garden scavenging and preserving, preparing and planting fall beds, woodcutting, and taking stock of the year’s accomplishments.  And….shhh….we may.actually.have.more.time.to.write.about.it…  Hope springs eternal!

And platitudes rock.