It Stopped Raining!

Posted on March 31, 2011 · 4 Comments

Monday we were blessed with clear skies and record heat. I woke up that morning blessed with being sick with something that seemed to be a cross of the flu and a cold. So it wasn’t until this morning that I feel somewhat OK. I still am lacking in the energy department and whatever I had has moved into my chest, but at least my fever is gone. It just puts us further behind schedule. I have tons of plants that need to go in the ground now. And yet we’ve got lots of plants that just aren’t ready to be harvested.

Oh, and did I mention the rain is coming back on Saturday? And even if it doesn’t, Daisy is due that day so I foresee myself being busy with her even if it’s raining. So I have tonight after work and tomorrow afternoon to desperately try to catch up. I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen. Maybe I’ll get some peppers and tomatoes repotted. Maybe I’ll try planting some carrots…again. Maybe I’ll replant the seeds that the seedcorn maggots destroyed. Either way, the next two days are going to be a rush.

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Filed Under: Farm Diary

The Seed Debate

Posted on March 30, 2011 · 4 Comments
Calypso beans, an heirloom seed

My friend, Yolanda, sent me this article from the NY Times renewing that old debate about heirloom vs. hybrid seeds. So I figured I’d give my opinion on it here. Remember it’s only my personal feelings about the debate. No one is wrong, we all have very good reasons for choosing what we do.

The pro-hybrid side in the article seems to be mostly supported by companies that make a lot of  money from proprietary hybrid seeds – Burpee, Johnny’s, Fedco. I choose not to buy from Burpee and Johnny’s actually. They purchase seed from Seminis, a subsidiary of Monsanto, which is a whole different can of worms.

 
I only grow heirlooms and open pollinated varieties here. I have several reasons for doing so.
1. Preserving biodiversity in our food. If a disease or pest comes through there will be plants that survive and you can save the seed from those for the following year. Each year you replant you can improve that variety by choosing seed from the plants that thrive the best, thus creating plants that are perfectly suited for your environment. You can’t save seed from hybrids.
2. Preserving our heritage. So many of the varieties we once had have been lost to time and profit.
3. Being more self sufficient. You can’t be self sufficient if you have to rely on a large seed company to supply your seeds. Saving seed is the best way to stay independent.
4. The interesting varieties. Heirlooms offer so many cool varieties that you just don’t see with hybrids. Hybrids seem to be mostly developed for big ag, where the money really is, so they go for qualities that will increase profits (uniform sizes and shapes to aid in packing, easier to ship, longer shelf life, etc) and odd shapes and colors are not part of that.
 
So that’s my take on the heirloom vs. hybrid debate. I know people prefer hybrids but these are my reasons for not using them.
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Filed Under: Gardening, Growing Tips

Flickr of Inspiration – Chicken Crates

Posted on March 29, 2011 · 1 Comment

Nepal 2522, originally uploaded by Poundyroundy.

Stunning agriculture related photos from Nepal taken by Joshua Roundy whose wife, Kristin writes the blog Roundy Rounds.So go over and say hi!

Joshua very kindly sent me links to his photos so stay tuned for more of his beautiful photos from Nepal!

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Book Review and Giveaway

Posted on March 28, 2011 · 24 Comments
Your Farm in the City: An Urban-Dweller’s Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals

We were recently sent this book by the publisher. I was just expecting one, but was happy to find two so I could offer a giveaway of the second copy.

I have to say I find this book very thorough.  It discusses pretty much everything you need to know about how to start urban farming. I do find it more geared towards beginners though. Most of the info in the book I already knew. However, just because I know much of the book’s content does not lessen it’s value. And it did have info in it that I hadn’t learned elsewhere, such as why you might have certain weeds and what you can use those weeds for. Little did I know that the reason we’re infested with bindweed and dock is because we have acidic soil. I also learned that both are actually edible.* Imagine that! Makes them not quite as evil as before. Don’t get me wrong, they are still evil, just not as much. 

I also liked that they pointed out that everyone planning on raising food in their backyard should make sure to get their soil tested and to also not rely on those at-home soil tests that are quite inaccurate and unreliable.

I found the book easy to read. It cuts right to the chase with bullet points rather than having a monotonous tone.

I think my only disappointment in the book is the paper it’s printed on. It’s a bit thin, which, in my opinion, won’t stand up as well to being a go-to reference guide, especially a reference guide that will be used outside.

Overall though, I would have bought this book if I wasn’t sent a copy.

If you’d like a chance to own this copy just leave a comment below by midnight Friday, April 1st. I’ll announce the winner on April 2nd. Unfortunately for our international readers, you have to be in the U.S. to win a copy.

*Update: Always research more than one source when determining something is edible. As pointed out by Anne, Field Bindweed (Convolvulus avensis) can be mildly toxic.

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The Best Lasagna Ever

Posted on March 27, 2011 · 4 Comments

My name is Jessa, and I am a planner.
You know the type: I’m an organizer, and I like when things are set up ahead of time. Yes, this is because I am totally OCD as well as being more than a little bit neurotic. Having plans in place is comforting, because then I don’t have to think about it anymore. I like to know how things are going to go before they happen, and I have a very hard time with surprises.
But this is nothing new – we all know I’m off my rocker.

So I figure, why fight it?
I have learned, over time, to embrace this part of myself and find ways that this seeming flaw can be used for good. For example, I am very skilled at meal planning, and I always make extra servings to bring to work for lunches during the week. In this way, I can free up my night and morning times for important things (like blearily bumbling about in the kitchen trying to make tea to wake myself up, or a luxurious 15 minute hang out with the heater vent before heading out into the cold).
So imagine my surprise when I made a giant pan of lasagna to serve as an after dinner (read: mid-band rehearsal) pick-me-up, and the 4 of us managed to eat nearly the whole pan! So much for my glorious intentions of lasagna lunches. That said, it is a testament to simple food, done well: comfort foods like lasagna, casseroles, and pans of enchiladas just make people happy.
Even if they’ve already had plenty of food.

This lasagna is paramount in my comfort food arsenal. I do not skimp on cheese, and I use many, many spices and flavors in the slow-cooked sauce. I do not drain the sausage meat before I add it to the sauce. This is not diet food, by any stretch of the imagination. It is rustic, it takes all day to put together, and it gets many pans dirty. It uses up all the excess chard growing like mad in our early-spring garden. It is recklessly rich and massively easy to eat too much of.
It is everything a lasagna should be.
Namely, it is gone in one sitting. I couldn’t have planned for better praise than that.

Wild Boar Sausage and Chard Lasagna
(makes one MASSIVE pan, with some leftover sauce)
for the sauce:
1 lb sausage meat (if you are using cased sausage, remove it from the casing and crumble it)
1 large yellow onion, peeled and diced
2-3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 large bulb fennel, cleaned thoroughly and sliced
about 1 c white button or crimini mushrooms, chopped
1 large can of diced tomatoes (about 4 c, or 8 diced fresh tomatoes plus 1 small can of tomato paste)
3/4 c red wine (I used the last of a bottle of zin I had sitting around)
1 bay leaf
2 tsp fennel seed, either fresh or dried
1 tsp each dried basil, oregano, marjoram, sage
1 tsp red pepper flakes (or about 1/2 small dried red chili, chopped)
1 Tbsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste
for the lasagna:
1 Tbsp olive oil
pre-made sauce (see directions below, or try my oven-roasted heirloom tomato sauce recipe)
1-2 large bunches of chard, stems removed (about 8 c, loose)
1 lb mozzerella cheese, sliced into thin rounds
1/2 c shredded asiago or parmesan cheese
12-15 lasagna noodles (pre-cooked to al dente and cooled in a water bath)
In a dry pan (a large sautee pan or stock pot would be fine, as would a deep frying pan), brown the sausage. If it’s sticking, you can add some oil.
Note: I used some wild boar sausage that we made with friends last fall from a pig one of them had hunted. It had some added garlic and spice (some sort of red pepper/vinegar hot sauce was used). To up the fat content a little, we used some heritage pork butt in there as well. Unfortunately, it either didn’t get mixed long enough, or the fat wasn’t cold enough, or something went wrong, because the cased sausages were very grainy when they were cooked. This recipe is, in part, due to my attempts to use up this sausage (removed from the casing) so that we have space in the freezer to try sausage-making again.

Once the sausage is browned, remove it from the pan. To the remaining grease, add the prepped onions, garlic, mushrooms, and sliced fennel, and cook until tender. Add the bay leaf, fennel seed, and spices (but not the sugar).
Let this all cook down for a bit (the mushrooms will weep quite a bit of liquid, which will then start to evaporate back out). Once the pan is getting close to dry, pour in the wine to deglaze the pan, followed by the tomatoes and all their juices. If you’re using fresh tomatoes, mix the contents of one small can of tomato paste with about 1/2 c of warm water and add it in too.
Season with 1 Tbsp of sugar (trust me) and salt and pepper to taste. Add back in the sausage, and any cooking juices that have sweat out, stirring to combine everything. Let this simmer on the stove for at least an hour – it only gets better the longer it cooks.
In the meantime, pre-cook your lasagna noodles. Yes, I suppose you could use those fancy “cook in the sauce” ones, but I prefer the organic ones I get in bulk at the local coop grocery store. They are very thick and need to be boiled before use. When the noodles are cooked to al dente, place them in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking process. I often prep enough noodles to make a few lasagnas (especially now that I know how fast they can be eaten!), storing them in a gallon zip-top bag with about a Tbsp of olive oil to prevent sticking. Then I can throw together a lasagna in a very short amount of time.
At this time you can also cook the chard. After a thorough washing (our garden can get a little muddy during the rainy season, and it’s always good to check for sneaky bugs hiding out in the curled-up leaves), I remove the stems and tear the leaves up into pieces about 2″ square. These get tossed into a steamer pan (I bought it at a yard sale – I think it’s actually for steaming pork buns and the like, with one section for the water and another perforated section on top where the cooking happens) until they are soft. If you don’t have a steamer, you can easily cook down the leaves in any pan with a lid – just add a bit of water to start the wilting process. This will cook down a LOT, and you’ll have about 1 c of cooked greens at the end.
To assemble the lasagna, coat a cake pan or casserole dish with a bit of oil. I use my 9 x 13 pyrex baking dish, as it has a fancy rubber top which makes storage or transportation a breeze once the lasagna is baked. Lay down one layer of noodles (it takes three to cover the bottom of my pan). Ladle on enough sauce to coat the noodles thinly – a lot will seep underneath them. Layer on about 1/3 of the steamed chard, and enough mozzarella that there will be some in each bite. Then place on another layer of noodles, and repeat the sauce, chard, and cheese. Continue doing this until you have used all of the noodles, or have run out of the other ingredients. Top with a final layer of sauce and top the whole thing with mozzarella (sometimes I add some shredded asiago or parmesan to the top as well).
Bake at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, or until the cheese starts to brown. Longer cooking (without burning) is good here, too. I love the crunchy baked cheese on the top!


Take my word for it – make two. At least.
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Filed Under: Main Courses, Meat, Recipes Tagged With: , ,

Weekend Chores – Rain Again

Posted on March 25, 2011 · 3 Comments

For most of this coming weekend we’re going to have rain. This is our big end of frost weekend and so we had planned a bunch of planting but that might not happen now. Our yard is still a complete mud pit. I may just transfer some seedlings into bigger pots and fertilize them.

What we did get planted this past week after work between the rain storms was onions and beets. I’m glad those are finally in the ground, though they should have gone in a long time ago. I need to start thinking about starting bean and corn seeds but I’m not sure where now that I’ve got seedcorn maggots in the mini greenhouse. I may just wait until the weather warms up a lot more before planting them – mid to late April.

We do need to start working on the barn extension for hay storage, but I’m not entirely sure when that will occur.

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We Got Our Pig

Posted on March 24, 2011 · 6 Comments

It was a mighty pig.

We decided finally to not actually raise one because we didn’t want to anger our neighbors. They already put up with enough from us. I don’t think there are enough eggs in the world to make them OK with us raising hogs here.

So instead we took a trip out to an organic dairy farm out in Petaluma. You’re probably wondering what an organic dairy has to do with hogs. Well, it turns out a farmer that raises dairy cows for Clover Stornetta has some side projects including a raw goat cheese making operation and raising hogs. Raising hogs on organic grain and milk.

I would have preferred pastured hogs, but beggars can’t be choosers and these hogs were a fantastic price. Let me just say, for the record, that we can’t estimate a hog’s weight to save our lives. I’ll blame not spending enough time around them to actually know. The last hog we bought live we thought was around 100lbs live weight. Turns out we were about 50lbs off. The hog we chose at the organic dairy we though was probably around 250lbs live weight. We totally missed the mark. The hang weight ended up being 287lbs. The ham we are looking to cure and hot smoke for April’s Charcutepalooza challenge weighs 27lbs!

I was kind of bummed that we didn’t get a lot of what we wanted from the hog. The butcher didn’t give us the fatback, leaf lard, feet or jowls. Next time we’ll know to specify exactly what we want prior to the slaughter rather than after, when many of the things we wanted were discarded before we could request them.

Next time I want to be more involved in the butchering so I can make sure we get all the parts we want.

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Seedcorn Maggot, We Meet Again

Posted on March 23, 2011 · 4 Comments

After last year I thought I had learned my lesson dealing with seedcorn maggots. We didn’t plant out corn, squash and beans too early. Actually they aren’t even started yet. We put down compost and manure in the fall rather than the spring to make sure there wasn’t too much organic matter out. And I’m not direct seeding anything right now.

Apparently that wasn’t enough. They have gotten into my mini greenhouse and eaten my pepper, tomato and herb seeds. I was wondering why some pots weren’t sprouting at all. A closer look revealed the culprits. So now I’m stuck. What to do? Do I treat the pots with some chemical? Do I give up? Do I move the operation indoors and hope that my cats don’t eat the sprouts?

I think I’m just going to start over. I’ll pull out any pots that have germinated, dump the old ones, sanitize them and refill with new, clean soil and have another go at it. Of course this puts us even further behind schedule…

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Filed Under: Farm Diary, Gardening, Growing Tips, Pests & Diseases

Flickr of Inspiration – Thai Basil

Posted on March 22, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Here’s another great photo from photographer Heather Hoxsey. You can see more of her incredible photos on Flickr and buy some of her work on Etsy.

Unfortunately this is the last photo that she shared with us. If you have a photo you would like featured email us and we’ll post it with links to your website or web album.

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Coccidiosis – (Un)Welcome Back

Posted on March 21, 2011 · 2 Comments
Mindy playing last weekend
Photo by Lori Eanes

I noticed a couple of days ago that Mindy seemed a bit depressed. It’s been raining a lot so the kids haven’t been able to get out and play, but even so Mork is up and about and hopping up on things and being active – his latest goal is to become a pirate goat by climbing onto my shoulder much like our pirate cat, Jack. Mindy, however, simply spends most of her time sleeping. And then I saw it – a bit of bloody poo on her butt. I know what that means. Then I also noticed that she was standing on her own with her back hunched – a sign of the dreaded illness, coccidiosis.

Coccidiosis. I’ve lost chickens to it. I’ve saved chickens from it. With our chicks we have a specific management protocol for dealing with it as organically as possible – meaning we don’t feed medicated feed to control it, but rather expose them to it as soon as possible so they develop some immunity to it early on. We do this by keeping the brooder in the barn area where our adult chickens have frequented and having the brooder floorless so they are on the ground from day one. If they do start to show symptoms then we treat with Sulmet in their drinking water.

Coccidia, which causes coccidiosis, is a protozoan parasite. It’s naturally found in the soil and I know we have it. Different animal species their own coccidia species that only affects them (though sheep coccidia can affect goats). So the coccidia that has affected our chickens won’t affect our goats. That said, most goats carry it anyways and only when it causes illness is it something that really needs to be dealt with.

Fortunately the treatment for chickens can also be used for goats so we have it on hand and were able to start treating her immediately. The only primary difference is that we drench her full strength Sulmet so we can control the dose. For more info on treating coccidiosis you can visit this page.

So far she’s responding well to treatment. Her poo is no longer bloody, though it’s still a bit softer than it should be. She’s a lot more active too. She has just a couple more days of treatment and should be all better. We will then treat both her and Mork as a preventative on the schedule from the above linked page.

As much as I hate all this rain, it’s helped force us to pay extra attention to what’s going on with everyone so we were able to catch it early.

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Filed Under: Chicken Health, Chickens, Goat Health, Goats, Livestock Tagged With: ,
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