Posts filed under 'organic'
Staying Healthy
I spent most of this week on the farm tending to fevers and sore heads, throats, and tummies. As terrible as that sounds, the farmer was better by day 3, the kids each after 1 or 2 days. We made lots of chicken soup from Kookoolan Farms’ birds with lots of veggies to make a rich, healthy, and healing broth. We sipped tea with some of the elderberry syrup we made at summer’s end for just such occasions, and we took hot baths and rested. In the end, we were happy that it was over quickly and that it wasn’t too bad.
We tend to look to food for our vitamins and minerals and medicines, and I feel blessed to be able to continue to eat fresh, nutritious vegetables through the fall and winter, times when our bodies are called on to fight off the colds and flus that come during this time of year. All growing vegetables and fruits begin to lose nutritive value once they have been picked, and they also will not reach their maximum nutritive value if they are picked under ripe to make it through shipping and handling to stores far and wide. And although each season offers its own set of repeating foods, we hope that with your CSA share you notice a rainbow of colors, from dark leafy greens to bright orange carrots and squash, with red, cream, purple, and white roots. All of these provide a well balanced supply of various vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. There are, no doubt, always many pieces to the pictures of our health, and colds and flus are hard to avoid, but I hope that you are staying well and enjoying the bit of natural medicine the healthy and tasty produce we share together provides!
Add comment October 27, 2009
Looking forward
Greens, greens, greens!! There are a lot of greens in your share today, in true spring veggie style. Everything we are harvesting right now until the first spring planted radishes are ready (next week?!?) was planted last year in July, August, and September!! This is very exciting to us, to even have so much fresh food to eat in this season. Still, as we actually plan for next winter/early spring harvests at the beginning of the year rather than committing to growing year round in the middle of summer like we did last year, we are happy to be able to plan for potatoes and celery root for these harvests next year when they need to be planted rather than way past too late. With a grain restricted diet, we miss starchy root veggies to round out our meals. Still, on the menu last week with the veggies that your share included we had so many great and filling and more than sustaining farm meals. Goat and barley soup with leek tops, salad mix with nettle pesto, vinaigrette, and chopped hazelnuts, braised rack of goat and sauteed rapini, pizzas with nettle pesto and sheep’s feta and with olive oil, caramelized leeks, rapini, and Parmesan, coconut red beans and rice with baby perpetual spinach, oil and vinegar, and feta, falafel and chard cakes, rice noodles with kale, locally fished tuna, and buttery leeks. Spring eating is great, and now that we are harvesting again, and we are on the road to new crops, our own veggie intake gets to go up as we no longer have to wait to pick at the greens we have been wanting to grow more. Greens upon greens on our table, yeah!
But the season will move on, and we have to grow different greens and some not at all in the heat of summer, so we enjoy their sweetness and abundance now! Some of you have asked about what will be coming through the summer so that you can plan your own growing spaces, so this is one thing to consider. We don’t tend to harvest kale, arugula, or mustard and Asian greens in the summer, although you will have them through June, but we will continue to harvest chards and lamb’s quarters in the greens department. Traditionally, we have given out salad mix, which goes through minor transformations through the seasons, every week. We aren’t planning on doing this for 2009 even though our salad mixes have been called the best by many of you (thank you!). We do plan on giving out more heads of different, beautiful varieties of lettuce, and one or the other for each week is the goal. If you are a big salad eating family, please talk with us about adding a bag of salad mix to your regular share. By doing it just for those who have come to really want this every week, we can save some harvest time (our salad mix is very labor intensive). We are growing a lot and multiple varieties of these crops: beets, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, onions, beans, winter squash, tomatoes, and peppers. We are growing the same delicious Italian zucchini we did last year along with a Lebanese variety, some heirloom crooknecks and patty pan summer squashes, and will have loads of these and straight slicing Marketmore cucumbers. The spring will bring radishes and snow and snap peas. We will have pickling cucumbers and canning tomatoes available for u-pick, half price for CSA members. You can also pick cherry tomatoes and a bouquet of cut flowers near the house at your veggie pick up on us, our way to show our appreciation for your support and to make the drive (on top of the veggies) worth the while!
We are going to try to grow small watermelons and muskmelons in a hot spot on the farm with a constant supply of safe greywater in an attempt to get a harvest at least for the family, perhaps to share with members if they would like, but not to sell. Melons like it hot, and they like a lot of water, and to this point we haven’t had any ripe ones in Oregon, but we know it is possible, so we are working on it! Our apple trees may produce this year, but whether it will exceed family needs and suitable for the CSA or only be enough for a market crop has yet to be seen. Our first planting will be three years old, our second, just two, some only one year old, so yields will still be small. That is it on the fruit front for now, our kids will likely eat all the strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries we get this year!
Our whole eggplant planting failed in the greenhouse this year, so we are purchasing just 50 organic eggplant starts from a Beaverton farm this year. Eggplant isn’t a heavy producer here in Oregon, so this will likely only translate to one or two weeks of eggplant harvests for the CSA. If you love eggplant, this would be a good one to put in your home garden. We also will not be growing any sweet corn for fresh eating. This could be the subject of a whole other newsletter since we have many things factoring into this decision. We grow only open-pollinated varieties, and this in and of itself makes fresh corn difficult. OP sweet corn is perfect for harvesting in about a one day window and then good for eating in about a one day window. This is hard for scheduled harvesting and weekly boxes. We also have a neighbor who grows genetically modified corn, so we have been unsure about growing open- pollinated corn for fear of cross-pollination. Now we have gotten variety and plant dates from our neighbor, selected a corn variety that will pollinate within the safe 3 week distance from the GM corn, but it will be for drying, and we will be using a lot of this for supplemental chicken and pig feed. However, we will also batch grind some for cornmeal and polenta for our family, and maybe for the winter CSA! We know that sweet corn is good, but it is also water intensive, space intensive, and poor on the nutritional scale, so this is where we are going with corn. We always buy or receive a few meals worth from other local farmers, and encourage you to enjoy this summer treat from Farmer’s Market or from you own garden! We are growing some Cannellini beans this year too, for fresh shelling and dry beans!
Of course, it is hard for us to know what this will translate to given our last two years…we have had problems with certain crops each year. Yet, there are a lot of things that make us feel more confident that all of these crops will be on our tables in abundance. We have learned so, so, so much in the last two years. So much of when we were just large scale home gardeners hasn’t translated, but we feel like we are learning a lot of what will make us great market gardeners. We now see that as we work to build and build healthy soil and bio-diversity to ultimately deal with pest pressure and plant health, we have to use things like row covers, trap crops, and nettle brew in the foliar sprayer pro-actively to fight pests, and that we have to add to the soil organic fertilizing amendments (compost, granular, and fish emulsion for the greenhouse and transplants). These are intermediate ways to help with the problems, not long term solutions nor our long term goals. Still, we love carrots just as much as all of you (who doesn’t!) and we want at least most of what we plant to be beautiful and harvestable. So this year, we feel like the crops we say and plan to have, we will, and that is a good place to be this year!
Add comment April 29, 2009
This week…
We baked in the sun, but the veggies loved the heat and we could use some more of it to ripen some of those heat lovers out in the field!
Relished the thunder, lightning, and rain that followed the heat and refreshed all of us, animal, vegetable, and human alike!
Spent all of my newsletter writing time yesterday trying to get our truck back home from town because the ignition is not working (Uhhhgg!)
Said good-bye to family as they headed back home for California.
Enjoyed some intensely beautiful sunsets all week and a lovely full moon.
Feasted on the first of our meat chickens. We were afraid to raise the standard chicken breed used for meat because although the cross of a cornish chicken and barred rock chicken produces a fast growing (6-8 weeks rather than 16-24) bird with large breasts, we had heard that these birds didn’t’ forage at all and just sat by the feeder eating feed and getting big so fast that they could hardly walk. However, after a year of roosters raised for a longer period that ended up being so tough that they all became soup birds, we decided to try for some chicken we could roast. We were so pleasantly surprised. We started them in our green house which has a grass floor and had plenty of mustard starts that we weren’t planting. From the beginning these birds foraged for green stuff in addition to eating grain, but never once have they gorged on grain and not ranged for bugs and good green matter. They are healthy in all ways, (they do indeed mature quickly), like every other chicken we have raised the birds are delicious !!
We were one of three farms featured in The Oregonian today in their Market Watch where they did a write up on the McMinnville market!!
2 comments August 20, 2008
White Oaks
Having begun our married life in a cabin high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where the pines and aspen grew thin and the dirt was dry, and moving then to the plains of Nebraska where the sky was huge and the Cottonwood trees shaded us from the hot summer sun, it feels like it has taken these full three years that we have been here in Oregon to become intimate with this landscape. It really has only been since we moved onto the farm last year that the land here took on that familiarity where your natural surroundings begin to be a part of you. And as there have been token natural objects in the past that have connected me to a place….the Platte River in Nebraska, which saw so much of my youthful joy and carried away the tears shed by my younger self and the eyes of the Aspen bark and 14,000 ft summits in Colorado which continually reminded me of the wildness of that place….here too, a piece of the natural world has become a symbol tome of my home, no longer new now that I have found this intimacy.
For me, here, this is the White Oak. Our farm is blessed with quite a few very old and mighty White Oaks. It is funny to me now that these trees have taken on this role of connecting me to this place, for to be honest, when we moved onto the property last year, I wasn’t that taken with them. I complained of their awkwardness. They weren’t beautiful in any picturesque well rounded or elegantly pointed way. They did nothing to provide us with a shady spot to laze under. Of course I appreciated their age, and understood that we were lucky to have them on our property, these old native oaks, But I had a two month old baby and boxes to unpack, so I didn’t take much time to get to know them last year.
As winter came and they lost their leaves, I finally took more notice. Naked, the oaks truly looked like old men, like the wise sages who truly owned this piece of land we had come to inhabit. I began to gain the proper sense of respect anything that had seen the earth for so long deserves. They welcomed our winter bird population with open arms, they even looked graceful holding the snow.
Now summer is back, and even though we have barely put down roots here at the farm, the oaks have taken us in. We have a hard time believing that our property when we arrived had no fruit planted, no shade trees around the home, so little flowers, no herbs, nothing. But we have these oaks, and as our meadow grasses go to seed, all slightly different with hints of purple or pink or gold and the blackberries put on their show of white blooms, I let the beauty of my new place in the world soak through my skin. It feels so good to be a part of this place
2 comments September 7, 2007
Balance
For my birthday last month, a friend gave me a beautiful crafty framed textile piece with the words, “Happiness is the journey, not the destination” embroidered on it. We placed it right beside the door to exit the home, which is right by our kitchen. It felt like something good to read often, as we left the house or as we worked in the kitchen. Clearly our whole lives are journeys; but what I have been contemplating lately is not my life as a whole-my life’s journey…but rather the many mini journey’s our lives are made up of. My journey as a mother, which is such an integral part of who I am, of my life’s journey, has always changed and evolved in subtle ways as our family grew, and my children grew. It now seems to be faced with a new path, one on which I feel my feet dragging a little, while my oldest pulls me on to the parenting of an older boy, not the young babe who transformed me into a mother in the first place. My journey as a writer, something that absorbed me before I had children, then was virtually abandoned, and now find me again in some of these lines I write for your newsletters. But the journey I have been reflecting on most is that which concerns my family and food. As I myself become more and more aware of the myriad of issues surrounding the impact-on numerous levels-of the choices we make when we feed our families, I find that I am continually on a teeter totter, rocking back and forth between a feeling of impending doom and one of resolute hope.
Andre and I both love to cook food, both have spent time working in restaurants, and of course, love eating as well! Food has always been a source of shared joy for us, and we naturally wanted to share this with our children once they joined our family. However, it was also at this time in our lives that we instinctively became concerned with more than just our culinary experience when we ate. We began to understand the deep link between food and health. Even then, when we cooked so much of our own food, we didn’t know how inferior processed food was nutritionally. When we had children, it was natural for us to begin gardening, natural for us to buy organic, natural for us to avoid meat produced inhumanely. We began envisioning our farm, and began to delve into the murky waters of farming practices.
Still, it seemed impossible to find sources of local “organic” food in Nebraska, so we grew our own and ordered through a wholesale natural food co-op. When we moved here, we were delighted to have more access to organic food, but when Farmer’s Market began the first year we lived here, there was no organic food to buy. So off to the health food store we went, and then lo and behold, cheap organic food began to bless the shelves of mainstream grocery stores. It was hard to resist this when we were living on one income, trying to save money to get onto some land and begin farming. It was a blessing when our friends Katie and Casey Kulla moved to town and began Oakhill Organics, because we had just had a baby, were growing our food away from our home on someone else’s land (seriously neglected!!), and Katie and Casey provided organic food to the McMinnville Farmer’s Market at a great price.
Then, of course, we found our property, began preparing for our first season. As we began talking with other farms in the area, we discovered what a wealth of small farms there are in the area, and had a somewhat sobering realization that while we had been so concerned about eating healthier food, we had not dug deep enough, not even as deep as we were getting ready to ask our community to do, and searched out all of these local sources for food. From then to now, we have continually modified our diet and our food purchases as we evaluated what truly healthy, safe, and environmentally sound food was. We have learned a lot in the process, because as a whole, our society isn’t taught about or fed whole foods that grow in a natural setting, that are handled by only a few people before they come to our plate, and that have depths of flavor our taste buds have to learn to recognize.
And the reason I have been thinking about these things this week is because of a post on a friend’s blog, Rich Blaha of Mossback Farm, about food safety, a hot topic these days as more and more problems arise ( http://www.mossbackfarm.com/journal). There has been a recall on some ground beef here in Oregon and Washington contaminated with e-coli; all beef marketed as “Natural”, “Northwest grown”, and Organic. Rich’s point, and one I am keen to hone in on–these labels don’t mean much if the source is just as industrialized as their conventional counterparts, especially when it comes to meat and dairy production. And just thinking about this led me to think about how most food that we buy from the supermarket gets there. It is monocropped vegetables and feedlot or confinement raised animals, wholesaled to a packaging agent, who processes it or otherwise boxes it to sell around the world. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know I have read that when you buy ground beef, it is meat from a whole lot of cows from a whole lot of farms mixed together in a large meat processing plant. And although I really don’t want to disgust you, or sound like an alarmist, the e-coli is in the meat because it is pretty much a given fact that these plants have such low quality standards that fecal matter ends up in the meat regularly. As I researched more, I found out that these plants are allowed to still use recalled meat in cooked, processed products such as canned chili and the like.
It is instances like this that find me on the “impending doom” spectrum of the teeter totter, because the truth is, we are not purists. We have been on a journey of learning and discovery about food and food systems ourselves, and know that just last year we purchased items we wouldn’t purchase again this year, and in the hectic day to day of life, make choices occasionally that would just plain contradict what we have learned. But to slide over to the “resolute hope” side of things again, I remember the amount we have changed in our lives as we have gained knowledge, and the bright future I see when I look at the number of you who committed to this local farm this year. You have become part of our journey, and together, I believe that there is hope that we can all learn and grow more towards a sustainable food system that we enjoy and that nourishes us all.
2 comments September 4, 2007
