Dropstone Farms

The Seattle City Council passed an absolutely lovely resolution about local food incentives and planning policies to encourage urban gardening. Full text is here. Waves at Joe working in the city archives!

The deal with a resolution is that it doesn’t actually *do* anything, but laying out that these are the values of my beloved, troubled, condo-ifing, $6-per-dozen-farmers-market-eggs-buyin’ city makes me very pleased.

In other news, I had a mess of tabs open for a link dump post but my session saver screwed up and I’m digging through my del.icio.us and RSS feeds to put the collection back together.

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Update to say that I have created a new page, About Us & FAQ. If you have paid attention you can sort of do the math to figure out what we planted this weekend. However, since you almost surely have not, I will post later this week with notes on what we did.

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Late last summer, we bought half a flat each of blackberries and strawberries at the farmers’ market, and zipped them up with our handy FoodSaver and froze them. I’m on a clean-out-the-freezer kick lately, combined with a don’t-waste-food-from-the-CSA project, and it has led me to get creative with fruit. The delivery box includes pears, which I am not very good about eating fresh, and Mark Bittman suggested a clafoutis. I didn’t have quite enough fruit the first time, so I dumped in a couple cups of blackberries from the freezer. I didn’t drain them, so it was soupy, but delicious. The next time the pears piled up, I thawed and drained the berries before putting them in. This time I saved the juice and used it to make simple syrup, which is not even work a full-fledged recipe — equal parts liquid and sugar; simmer until sugar is dissolved. I used the blackberry juice and some water to total 2 cups. It turns out to make a very delicious Italian-soda-like drink when mixed with tonic water, soda water, or plain seltzer (is that the same as soda water?).

I also made lemon simple syrup with a few bits of lemon peel when I made lemonade to celebrate the warm weather a few weeks ago. Simple syrup is the cure for gritty lemonade or iced tea or coffee. Sugar won’t fully dissolve in cold drinks, but plain simple syrup in the iced tea/coffee will sweeten evenly and not leave crunchy bits. If you can, put in the syrup and the liquid to mix it with before putting in the ice; the cold makes the syrup thicker and it doesn’t mix quite as well.

I haven’t tried the lemon syrup in an Italian soda yet, but I have put it in a vodka tonic, and it was great.

I’m thinking about getting a seltzer maker so I can make lots of fruit flavors throughout the summer: we have pear, apple, and plum trees, plus blackberries and raspberries, and might get blueberries. Oh, and I’m getting a lemon tree. I thought about getting one of these, but it seemed kind of spendy and big to have on the counter all the time. This one is smaller and cool-looking, but ordering cartridges doesn’t seem to be quite as easy. Seltzer makers in general have been popular on the food blogs lately, to mixed reviews. Does anyone have experience with any of these models?

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1. A secondhand cookstove

2. An extra large garden cart

3. A practice set of Uillean pipes (Pronounce “Illin’”)

4. An iPhone.

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It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth’s messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat — seriously, it was actually hot — to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn’t get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don’t remember which variety it is — the broccoli, that is — but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I’ll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don’t harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it’s “four plants of everything, and six of All Blues.” I don’t know what “everything” means, but I’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

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So, there are benefits to having a wife with a degree in linguistics. It turns out that, as I’ve known for a while, the name ‘garth’ is derived from an Old English word for garden and the name ‘lauren’ means victory. That’s right, when we got married, our names combined to form victory garden.

(image source) This gives access to some pretty cool iconography.

City Farmer News has a nice post about Victory Garden. The comparison has been made that the sacrifices asked of the public in World War 2 included recycle and food production. Our current government response to crisis is, predictable, “go shopping.”

The folks at Dervaes have adopted Victory Garden iconography as well. I have to say, I’m a fan of the graphic style and I’ve got a soft spot for politicization but it might be better to go with “kitchen garden” for mass appeal. I learned that the the medieval French referred to kitchen gardens and the everlasting soup made from the same as “Potage.” I like that. Also, a feature of the potage was a garth at the center. Win.

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Still no love for the bees in the Northwest. Colony Collapse Disorder is still affecting beekeepers. This is problematic in the extreme because, you know, no bees, no flowers. On the upside, bees managed in a non-industrial manner tend to be less affected by CCD. I’m not entirely convinced as the beekeepers on our island are still reporting problem and are responding with Russian bees and, according to the nice lady at the nursery, treating their hives with ever increasing doses of antibiotics. I’m certain that this will not result in hardier mites.

Annnnd, the salmon are dying. And not in the delicious way. Stocks of chinook are pretty much depleted and it looks like the season is going to be called off. “This will be devastating to the communities and families on the coast that rely on salmon fishing for their livelihood,” Oregon governor Ted Kulongoski said. While true, I can’t help but think about how similar this situation sounds to the ecological disasters I read about as a child in even-then-dated books on futurism (remember that?) from the 1970s. Seems like a bitter victory for them long-haired treehugger types, doesn’t it?

The New York Times reports that survivalism is quite the thing nowadays. I can’t say that this is a bad thing, especially in light of the response to Katrina. Anecdotally, I know that at an assembly of librarians in my grad school cohort, five of twenty-five people in attendance were making plans for some degree of social or infrastructural collapse. The winners were Lauren and I and a buddy of mine who’s a big fan of Burning Man.

I am, it seems, a little cranky. Fortunately, we’ve recently added a new book to our library that makes me happy. Also, the chickens have moved outside and having fewer livestock in the house will definitely improve my mood. Also, I got rid of the option to have my browser render all web pages with an enormous picture of Jakob Nielsen to every page I look at. It’s better this way.

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