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.

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.

But this isn’t about dislikes, its about what I like right now.  What I am liking right now.  Here is a photo of this morning’s Joe… Mandyrose’s cup is on the right, mine on the left, presspot by Bodum above, maple syrup from 2008 above left.  Our blend du jour is 2/3 ground beans of French Roast by Coffee Express here in Michigan, and 1/3 Irish Creme Decaf from By The Pound in A2.

Grind it medium-fine, add near boiling water halfway up the presspot and stir well, then add the rest of the water and set the top on.  Wait a couple minutes for just the right combination of caffeine and other goodies to move out of the beans and into the water (and perhaps even some of the ions in our well water to adsorb onto the coffee grounds) and then give it a slow, 30-second press to the bottom of the pot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the hot water has been warming our coffee cups.  Pour those off into the dishwater, and pour Mandyrose’s coffee first (she likes it hot).  Add maple syrup to sweeten a bit, pour in a dose of good (really good, fresh, non-homogenated) whole milk (shake a bit first so it’s not all cream), stir once and serve.  Then pour mine and sweeten, sans milk (ok, sometimes I add the milk too).

Creamy, a little bit Irish, mmmmm.

Now about presspots… there’s just something wonderful and clean about this coffee’s taste that I don’t get anywhere else.  I think it’s because no matter how fancy the machine, you just can’t get access to fully clean every part and hose and pipe that the water touches… or if you can, you don’t often do so.  Hot water with ions leaves residues when it evaporates away… period.  You can’t avoid it.  Distilled water? Maybe.  But not once it gets coffee in it.

But a presspot is glass and steel, with perhaps a bit of plastic near the top for a final strain (but my next one won’t have that plastic), but basically you’ve got hot water and coffee in an easily cleaned vessel, pure and simple.  And the taste of the coffee is all coffee, no residue.

My mother and I have discussed coffee over the years.  I had bought her some better beans a few times, and made my best for her, but she didn’t really like any of them.  Each time I visited I would try some different things to see what she liked, and finally one day she said, regarding a cup of joe I had not made, “Now this is what I’m talking about!”  The common denominator, after all these years, was the taste of the residue from coffee makers.  The particular coffee in question was from one of those enormous church percolator pots, with the big coffee basket on top.  The crew in charge had (fortunately) not over percolated this brew, so it was as good as such coffee gets, but was full of the unmistakable taste of years of hard water + ordinary coffee grounds with a simple rinse instead of cleaning.  Those big church-hall coffee makers are something else in that regard, building a patina of taste that lingers with me from my earliest coffee tasting attempts at church functions when I was 7 or 8 (lots of cream and sugar).  But that’s what Mom likes!  It’s that residue taste that is missing from all my other attempts to introduce her to coffee bliss.  So I just use her coffee in her coffee maker when I visit her, and all is well.

Ordinary coffee makers (of the Mr. Coffee variety) do the same thing, more or less.  Mostly less, of course, but unless you clean the heck out of them, with hot vinegar washes and the works, they gradually build up the same types of residue and produce the same types of extra tastes for you to get accustomed to.  I spent a week recently with a friend who makes espresso in a beautiful machine, a machine fastidiously cleaned… except of course it isn’t.  There are innards that get residue built up, and I could detect something like a residue buildup taste, or at least I believed I could.

But my presspot, it’s just coffee and the glass.  Pure and simple, and repeatable.  Our coffee always tastes the same.  Mom doesn’t like it much, but she doesn’t have to.  She knows what she likes.  We do too.  And with my third little cup finished, so is this post.  Have a good day.  Oh, and Hi Mom! :-)

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.

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.

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.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum

How much can I say about this healthy breakfast treat?  A cup of coffee and a nice piece of Zucchini Chocolate Chip Yum.  Ahhh.  Oh, and that’s my favorite coffee cup, a DaRo design original… Mandy has a handle free DaRo cup with a similar glaze pattern, our morning coffee ritual cups.  Too bad we don’t have zucchini all year round to start the day like this during all our Dragonwood seasons.

Mulch raking in progress

We have two main sources of mulch.  The first, as seen in the photos above, is yard clippings.  This is my harvest.  I mow the yard in patterns amenable to raking, since I have no mechanized way of picking up the clippings…  I rake by hand.  So it takes several hours to mow the whole place, and several more hours to rake down the rows of clippings (after they sit for a couple days).  In a good mowing I get about 10 full garden carts of clippings (about the amount I can comfortably pull up the grassy hill).  Then I spread it out wherever it’s needed, or make a big pile for use later.

Pumpkins like mulch

In this photo we used it to extend the new pumpkin patch farther out into the yard.  The pumpkins are looking happy to have the extra space, here in this foggy dusky summer evening shot.

Our other main source of mulch is wet hay.  When, over at the family farm, the weather doesn’t cooperate and a pile of hay comes in that’s too wet to store and isn’t immediately needed for the horses or sheep, then a trailer full appears at Dragonwood.  We used that in the new pumpkin/corn/potato/squash patch as we sowed seedlings to make a good base for all the pathways between the plantings.  That particular patch (about 16×100 feet) was well mulched to start and has fewer weeds by far than those garden patches we didn’t manage to mulch so thoroughly.  As in the pumpkin photo above, our use of mulch around the edges has expanded that patch to about 20 some feet wide and 120 feet long now, an easy way to grow the field by mulching down the grass on each side :-)

And if you’ll excuse me now, I have a lot of raking to do.

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.