A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

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!

The garden’s a mess.  Torrential rains, followed by extreme heat, kept us back from some of the work we might have done to keep it tidy at crucial times.  Plants are sprawling all over each other, “rows” have run together, and some of the weeds are sky-high.

It doesn’t seem to be interfering with our harvests, for the most part.  Okay, I lost half a row of leeks under some overgrown arugula that fell over on them in a windstorm, because I hadn’t taken the time to pull it out when it was essentially past its prime.  And then I didn’t find the time to pull it off the leeks until it was too late and they were collapsed and rotting beneath it.

But there is an up-side to the disorder - we are seeing record numbers of beneficial creatures and insects.  For several weeks now, it’s been rare to harvest something without finding a praying mantis patrolling the veggies, or frogs jumping out of my path.  And recently, while examining for tomato hornworm damage, we found this:

Interrupted right in the middle of breakfast! A hornworm, covered with pupating wasps, right above the bite-marks it left in the tomato leaf...

Under the cottony white packages, there is a green caterpillar with a red spike on its butt - a tomato hornworm, a fantastically destructive creature.  They blend in perfectly with tomato stems, and are difficult to see until you notice the damage.  By the time you notice the damage, there’s a lot of damage to notice. One worm will have defoliated half a tomato plant, bitten into the developing fruit, and lopped off the replacement buds.  But - they have a predator that stops them in their tracks.  This hornworm is hosting a nice clutch of parasitic braconid wasp cocoons.

The wasps are small, and their cocoons are the tiny white wooly packages dotting the top of the hornworm.  Those aren’t part of the hornworm.  The description of what the wasps do to the hornworm reads like poetry to the organic farmer who has picked her share of hornworms off by hand, and endured their rampages.  In short, the wasps lay eggs in the caterpillar, the larvae feed off the caterpillar’s innards, and hatch out through to its surface to form their cocoons and finish pupating.  Here’s a more descriptive page about it.

Nearby, there was a second parasitized hornworm. The hornworms were literally stopped in their tracks, beside the chewed up leaf they’d been feasting upon.  I watched them for a few days - they were always in the same location, not dead yet, but obviously sick and not moving, and most importantly - not eating!

Last summer, we had record numbers of hornworms, but I found only one of these parasitized hornworms, with just a few cocoons.  I carefully watched that one, and left it in its place.  If you find one of these, don’t remove it!!  The hornworm  is a goner, even while still alive, and you can leave it alone without fearing it will continue to do damage.  It’s important to leave it so the wasp larvae can complete their hatching and become more wasps  that can kill more tomato hornworms.  This year we have had radically less hornworm problems, and at least double the sighted evidence of braconid wasps.

The wasps are tiny, cute even, and harmless to humans.  They are part of why I won’t put anything harmful on my garden.  Not anything.  Not even the organically-sanctioned treatments.  I may have garden chaos, I may lose some things to pests, and I may have holes in some produce.  But we also have an environment.  We have a mini-ecosystem keeping its own checks and balances.  What I use in the garden to kill the caterpillars will also kill or affect the wasps.   And the bees, and the mantises, and the other pollinators and predators.  Not cool, not what we want, not why we are doing this.    The frogs, the mantises, the parasitic wasps, the spiders, and the assassin bugs that find a home in our jungle garden have taken several years to make their way there, and they are integral to the way our garden works.

So the besieged caterpillars stayed on the tomato plants for a few days, until one day they were gone, probably dropped to the ground dead.  I noticed only when I could zoom into the photo while editing, that the little wasps had already hatched from one of the clutches when I photographed it:

Their cocoons have their hatch doors popped up, and the cocoons are empty.  Another tiny army of protectors is out there already, patrolling for us, finding the hornworms we won’t see.

M called me this morning from up the road about 4 miles, and practically shouted “I just saw an eagle!”  There was more to the story, but the sighting was nearby, so I threw on my boots and grabbed my camera and the bird book and headed up there.

I didn’t see it.  I drove back and forth in the area for about 10 minutes and nothing happened.

I was just starting home when, about a quarter mile ahead I did see a big bird wheel across the road.  I marked the spot mentally and slowed the car over to the edge where I thought it should be… and there it was.  Big and brown on a tree branch about 40 feet up, way bigger than a hawk.  I turned on the camera and turned off the car and started the video recording.  I shot just a few seconds then slowly started to open the car door… and saw him lean forward and take off.  So then I jumped out of the car and tried to keep him in the viewfinder, all zoomed up close, and not get hit by passing cars.  I didn’t do too well, most of the 60 seconds is not of the eagle.  But there were a few seconds that were just breathtaking, big swooping sweeps of wings in the gentle snow as he wheeled around and then headed off east.

Juvenile Bald Eagle, near Manchester Michigan, Feb 26 2011. Click for high resolution version.

Click it for the high resolution version.  Here are 13 sequential frames (one big wing flap down and up) starting from upper right.  I cut and pasted these all together onto the background of the first frame.  It seems to be a juvenile bald eagle, from what we can see in the books that we have.  Here’s a single frame:

It was pretty stunning.  I’ve seen eagles before, and they’re always breathtaking, but we’ve never seen one so close to Dragonwood.

We reuse a lot at Dragonwood, far more than we recycle.  We don’t buy much stuff, or even much food, and very little of that food is packaged.  So we don’t actually have much to recycle on a regular basis, and we don’t have much to throw away, ever.  We can go weeks or even months without having to get rid of a garbage bag (garbage never really smells too bad if you compost the organic parts).

Mandy wrote the other day about planting and recycling… which was really about planting and reusing.  She reuses and re-reuses constantly in that process, to the point of going to our local recycling station and rescuing reusable resources that others used only once.  We recycle something once it’s broken to the point of not being able to reuse it for nearly anything.

I’m building a sugar shack.  It’s an extension of our West Flock Coop out in the back yard.  The West Flock Coop construction project was a significant effort in reuse for us… vertical posts and siding were salvaged from a disintegrating barn, windows acquired from Recycle Ann Arbor (and streetside, curb-toss finds) over the years, so only some 2×4s and nails were new.  Even hinges for the coop doors were mostly old hinges, most decades old and kept in old tin cans or peanut butter jars until ready for some project like this.

Oh, back to the sugar shack / woodshed / seasonal storage space project.  It’s been on hold this week in the snow and ice, but I’ll be getting back to it shortly (like tomorrow), so I’ll write a bit about it now.  The Coop is about 7′ deep and 15′ wide with a fence along the east side keeping chickens on the coop side of the yard and giving them free range into the woods, but not into our flower and food gardens.  We’re extending the Coop to the east in order to add firewood storage (partially covered, against the coop) and a covered sugar shack/seasonal storage area.

So far:  we’ve got the four posts in the ground (former barn beams and supports, 100+ years old), and we’ve got the full framework of 2×4s and 2×6s on top and connected to the Coop for roof support.  The 2×4s and 2×6s were scavenged from an urban teardown project where Mandy and friends tore things apart and stacked much used/partially rotted wood and plywood in a trailer and hauled it all back here.  We’ve been using it bit by bit for two years now, and have made small coops and repairs from many parts of the stack.  These are nearly the last of the 2×6s and 2×4s, and I took out about 300 old nails using pry bar,  hammer and vicegrip plyers to get them ready for use.

LEFT PHOTO: View from the front (north), West Flock Coop on the right, and you can see my woodpile waiting to be split (mostly) along the fence that keeps chickens safe from us.  I use that tire on the stump for holding firewood while I split it (another good idea I found on the interwebs).  After the roof goes on, our splits will be stored in the new roofed area next to the coop.  The really wide overhang in the front will get angle supports to help it, and we expect to use the area for summer tool storage outside (rakes and spades and barrow).

RIGHT PHOTO: This view is from the top, looking at one of the old beams now used as a post, and our reused lumber with LOTS of old nail holes.  I do sometimes reuse old nails, but these were worthless and I’m using decking screws from another project to hold things together well.  Chickens are on the other side of the fence in their yard.  Aren’t the new Buff Orpingtons looking great?  They’re kinda like those square cows in old pastoral paintings, in that their shape is so exaggeratedly chickenesque.  Gotta love ‘em.  Elm and ash in the woodpile; we’re still fueling the house from the dead trees killed by foreign pests, Dutch Elm fungus and Emerald Ash Borer beetles.  Yet more reuse, in a sense.

More on this sugar shack (and maple weather) coming soon.

Before tucking in the West Flock for the night, I walked out to the front of the house yesterday to get them some fresh water.  The sun had just gone down, and the view as I waited for the water bucket to fill was a glowing orange all across the western horizon.

I took a picture of it with my phone camera, but it’s not very good, as sunset photos go.  Low light, nearly twilight, and I wasn’t being all that careful to hold still.  So I won’t show it here.

The reason I’m writing is just that…  It isn’t about the beauty of this sunset.  What caught me was the trees out on the horizon.  All along the horizon, trees.  Sharp, needly trees against the orange, as far as I could see.

The view isn’t all that beautiful, if you must know.  We live on a federal highway, and it runs east-west about 100 feet from where I stood, and runs right across my photo of this scene.  A bit closer than that, out in the yard to the southwest, stands our porcine white propane tank (prominent in the photo).  Beyond the highway is a cornfield, a regular old conventionally farmed field corn field that has big harvesters running through it in the fall and runoff flowing into the little creek that flows through the field, and then east into the conservation acreage across the street from us.  The conservation acreage is pretty… but it wasn’t in my field of view at that moment.

What I saw wasn’t really those trees so sharp against the glow, nor the propane tank storing fossil fuels, nor the highway with noisy cars, nor the now-quiet corn field.  Although the trees caught me momentarily, I saw right through those and all the rest.

I saw the skyline, a wavy horizon with trees and no buildings.  No houses, no barns, no office buildings, no lights.  A simple skyline.

I grew up in a city, a small grimy city in the rust belt.  For twenty years that town stayed the exact same size, gaining commuters to other bigger cities for every manufacturing job it lost.  The skyline was houses for me.  Then I went to college and on to bigger cities and universities and everywhere my skyline was jagged and blocky.  Oh I had sojourns in mountains and forests and on the high seas and I understand the nature of natural skylines… I even taught about such landscapes and their meanings, once upon a time, as a geologist.

But until Dragonwood I lived an urban life, and breathed urban airs, and looked on urban skylines, if I looked up at all.  A day doesn’t go by here that I don’t appreciate what we have.  So yesterday as I looked up from my chickens’ water bucket, I cherished our little view, with its propane tank and all the rest.  I couldn’t really capture that view on film, or on a memory chip.  It’s all in my mind’s eye.

A simple view.

Gardening, growing, farming is one of those things where you can spend a lot of money, and create more garbage and pollution burden….or not.  A new plastic flat of seed-starting cells can cost $8.  If you get the shiny new plastic cover to keep humidity levels even, and a drip tray below it, it can be $20…and you’ve consumed that many more pieces of plastic.

There’s another way, one that will let you save your money to buy seeds, and that I feel much better about.  Plant in recycled containers.

If you buy food items that come in styrofoam or or plastic trays or boxes, or takeout food, you can use these boxes to start seeds.  If you really don’t want them hanging around your house for months (or you don’t buy food in them), you can ask friends to save them (there will be no problem getting enough, and you’ll have to stop them at some point!), or you can visit a recycling station and quickly pick from a range of choices.  I don’t buy a lot of these things, so I get them from the recycling.  When I’m finished with them or they wear out, they go back to the recycling.

Here are some ideas:

Styrofoam boxes that mushrooms are sold in. Styrofoam is easy to poke holes through for drainage, and the sides of these boxes are just about the right height.

Plastic lidded boxes that strawberries are sold in. They usually have very wide vents in the bottom and sides, and you would think the dirt would fall right out.  What I do is line the bottom with a layer of dryer lint (another reuse!) and then put the dirt in over that.  (Dryer lint can go in the compost - it will be fine going into the garden.)  It holds beautifully, and you’ve got great drainage already built into the container.  Onions, lettuces, and other greens have started really well in these.  Also celery and other plants with very tiny seeds that need to be near the surface of the soil - they can dry out quickly, and benefit from the clear plastic lid.

Styrofoam and plastic single-use cups. Sometimes there are stacks of these in the recycling, probably after someone had a party.  Single-use packaging is hard for us to avoid when that’s the only way things are sold, but single-use disposable cups are more of a choice people make.  I try to mentally thank them for at least recycling, and feel grateful for the stash of little individual plant pots I have for free.  These are perfect for squash, pumpkin, and cucumber seedlings that need a deeper pot.

Those clear plastic boxes that baby greens are sold in. They are getting bigger and bigger every year, it seems.  Big ones can make nearly a terrarium!  These are perfect for something I sow a lot of, just one time, like leeks and onions.

All the things that are started in these containers need to get picked out of the mass planting and either transplanted to the garden, or to individual containers.  This has to happen before they get too big and their roots get very tangled together.  Some people don’t start seeds this way because it is another job when the time comes to separate and transplant the seedlings.  It can be a little tedious and require a gentle touch. But I start many of my plants this way, in mass plantings, because I don’t have enough space under lights for the amount of cell packs it would take to give all the seeds their own space from the start.  This way, you can really make the most use of a sunny windowsill or a couple of fluorescent lights.  Things like onions, celery, and leeks have to get started in February to get good crops, and they are very forgiving when their roots are disturbed to transplant them.  So are lettuces, endives and other greens.  They’ll get started the same way a little later.

Using recycled containers usually requires poking drainage holes in the bottom - very important not to forget!  I set them on a reusable tray to catch drips - an abandoned lid of one of those big tupperware bins, some old enameled pans, etc, do very well.  If the plants need a humidity cover, a light piece of clear plastic (like an opened bag from bread or a bulk food purchase ) works well.  No, the whole setup doesn’t look slick.  It can look a little messy and mismatched.  But it works well for me, and I feel better reusing what’s going into the environment, rather than adding to it.

Cooking the Chops

Week 3 Menu:

• Smashed Potatoes-n-Parsnips
• Pan-seared Lamb Chops
• Steamed Brussels Sprouts
• Roasted Delicata Squash

“Dark” Days is right.  Each day feels so brief.  It’s dark when we get up in the morning, it’s dark by the time we’re home from work.  Soon it will be swinging back to longer days, but now each day feels so cave-like and hunkered down.

Potatoes-n-Parsnips

Our potatoes are holding out very well.  We are so fortunate that they produced so well.  They are often a carb staple, allowing us to reduce the amount of processed grain we purchase/eat.  We can leave the skins on, increasing the nutritional value, because they haven’t been sprayed with all kinds of things, and they aren’t greened up from sitting in the light in a supermarket.

For this recipe, I simply scrub potatoes, cut them into ~2 inch chunks, do the same with a couple big parsnips, and boil them together in a pot of water until they are soft.  Drain the water, add butter, milk, salt, pepper, maybe some dried parsley, and mash it up with a masher. Simple, delicious.  Potatoes, parsnips, and parsley grew in the back yard.  Butter and milk are locally sourced. Salt and pepper are not. The potatoes are served with a dollop of homemade yogurt from local raw milk.

Pan-Seared Lamb

The lamb is from a farm a few miles away.  It is entirely grass-fed, without any contact with chemicals or antibiotics.  It is simply, quickly cooked in cast iron, with a smidge of olive oil in the pan, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and ground rosemary.  Not local:  olive oil, salt, pepper.

The Finished Meal

Steamed Brussels Sprouts

The brussels sprouts grew in our backyard.  We have a great supply of them, and they are holding out well in storage.  They continue to be a staple, filling the space for greens/salad, although I am starting to seriously miss salads.  They get a light steaming, then a quick turn through a hot pan with some butter (local) and balsamic vinegar (not local).

Roasted Delicata Squash

I am not a squash lover.  This year, with our homegrown Delicata squashes, is, without a doubt, the first time ever in my life that I have craved squash.

These little gems are so so delicious.  We cut them in half the long way, lay them in a pan, and bake/broil them, with a little butter and maple syrup in the hollow centers.  Nutmeg or cinnamon on them is nice too.  Or a little cream and sage.  For this meal, they got the butter and maple syrup, with a light sprinkling of non-local nutmeg and salt.  Squashes grew in our backyard garden.

Eating in front of the fire on a Dark Days Night

I haven’t been going into a lot of detail in these DD postings about “SOLE” - the premise of the challenge: I guess it would just feel redundant when it’s mostly our own produce that we’re eating. That fits the sustainable, organic, local, and ethical description, we hope.  We know we farm organically, although we can’t say that without certification, I suppose.

I wish there was one more component to SOLE.   Maybe it would be “U”, for Unpackaged.  “R” for “Reduced/Recycleable”?  “C” for “Compostable”?  I guess what I’m thinking is that to really do low-impact eating, we have to think about the packaging that food comes in as well, and the trash that we are generating with each meal.  With this meal, for example, the only obvious packaging we will send out into the world as trash was a layer of plastic wrap the lamb chops were packed in at the butcher, and the packaging the butter came in from the store. No other plastic or bags or paper were produced or used to buy, transport, wrap, cook, store or dispose of this meal. No food products went into garbage.  The milk comes in reuseable/recycleable glass. The chickens ate the trimmings from the brussels sprouts, and the squash rinds and seeds.  The outdoor cats got the lamb bones, and what was left after that went on the compost pile.  If you think about it - it adds up.  Grocery bags to bring food home.  Prewrapped/overpackaged foods, even the organic ones.  Single-use cartons and wrappings.  Foil and cooking bags used in food preparation; plastic wrap and bags and foil used in food storage of leftovers.  One single meal can rack up a pretty high cost in trash.   Part of my personal goal for these Dark Days meals preparations is going to be noting the elimination of trash associated with eating and meal production, as well as sustainable, organic, local, and ethical concerns.

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.

So, to follow up my last fishin’ post, here’s a quick photo I took of the bluegill and bass heaven where I caught ‘em.

Bass and bluegill heaven (at least as far as my fly casting is concerned)

Just a perfect spot for fly fishing around the edges without getting your feet wet and (almost) never snagging in anything behind you (thanks sheep and horseys).   Next time I just might wade in to get out a little farther from shore.