March 2009
Monthly Archive
Tortillas!
Posted by garth on 31 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: deliciousness, eating
So we had dinner last weekend at the eminently awesome and equally crowded Carta de Oaxaca restaurant in Ballard. It was, as ever, *really, really* good. And we sat at the bar and watched a woman spend the entire hour or so we were there doing nothing but crank out tortillas. By the end of the meal, we’d determined that we needed a tortilla press and some masa flour.
And then I found a new blog and ran across the following post about growing your own corn and turning it into tortillas. Man, I’m jealous of that climate. Where we live, corn is pretty hit or miss so growing our own isn’t a reliable option.
But in the meantime, I’ve got some beans and a beanpot waiting for that tortilla press to arrive. I love my beanpot. Also tortilla. And beans.
Pot O' Beans.
links for 2009-03-30
Posted by Lauren on 30 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: links
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Notes on what sorts of things you need to do to get a garden started.
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Extensive notes on growing tomatoes from seed.
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Tiny Farm Blog folks trim their onion and leek seedlings so the lights can stay low over them.
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A roundup of some of the how-tos from the Sunset magazine one-block thing, including how to make your own vinegar!
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Preparing for butchering poultry.
Busy weekend after a busy week
Posted by Lauren on 30 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: farm updates, planting
Lots done this weekend, despite a super-busy week for me with both work and socializing. Followed it up with a busy weekend full of farm chores and seedlings! Yay.
The greenhouse is not yet done, but it is serviceable, so we moved four seed trays out into it. They are under lights but not on heat mats. We rigged up a rack to hold four 48-inch light fixtures, and each end can be raised and lowered independently, so we can have older, taller plants at one end and younger at the other end. I moved the two Meyer lemon trees and one fig tree from the laundry room, where they overwintered, to the greenhouse, and also brought the two blueberry bushes in. All the above are in buckets. Then with the new space on the inside seedling shelves, we started one whole tray of onions, one with lots of leeks and lots of parsnips, and one with a whole bunch of random things, including cabbages, sunflowers, Imperial Star artichokes, and more. I also stuck a row of Mexican Strain tomatillos in the tray that got tomatoes last week, since that tray is on a heat mat and the others aren’t.
Meanwhile, Garth prepped the beds that were tomatoland last year and got ready to put hoophouses on them. Four rows mixed radish seed, four rows Olympia Hybrid spinach, three rows red carrots (Red Samurai), three rows purple carrots (Purple Haze), four rows orange carrots (Mokum). And then we set out the last of the Feb 21 greens, mostly chard and some kale, and also some of the bigger lettuces from the same date.
Upcoming this week is planting potatoes, more peas, getting another table and bank of lights in the greenhouse, and starting to prepare for ducklings (April 15) and turkey poults (early May).
links for 2009-03-25
Posted by Lauren on 25 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: links
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Trapper Creek's notes on seed saving.
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A non-comprehensive list of Seminis (now Monsanto) varieties.
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Several examples of seed-starting setups, including various ways to rig up lights.
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Notes on growing hops.
Winter is dead! Long live Spring!
Posted by Lauren on 21 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: eating, holidays, pictures
In honor of yesterday’s equinox, I hurried home from work and Garth and I cooked dinner together, with a bit of prep done by him while I was still at work.
I had previously purchased some lamb chops from Skagit River Ranch with a spring celebration meal in mind, so Garth thawed them and rubbed with fresh rosemary and thyme from the garden, and some basil from a pesto cube that I had put in the freezer in September or so. When I got home I took out some bread dough from my new bible, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I started cooking some of our homegrown Scarlet Emperor beans for the delicious scarlet runner beans with farro risotto and saffron.
We went outside and picked a few leaves from each of our lettuces that overwintered. We also got a nice tall leek that was a fall planting that survived the winter well, and some Merida overwintering carrots (but none as nice as this one). I sliced up the leek plus some farmers’ market garlic for the risotto, and while it was pressure-cooking (I even mostly followed the recipe!) we assembled a lovely salad of lettuce from our garden as well as that from another Kitsap farmer, with our carrots, plus a homemade dressing of olive oil hand-imported from California with vinegar and farmers’ market garlic.
Equinox salad closeup, apparently, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.
The lamb chops rested while we ate salad, and then we had the farro & homegrown beans in a bowl with chops on top.
Welcome, spring! We missed you.
links for 2009-03-19
Posted by Lauren on 19 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: links
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Laura of (not so) Urban Hennery's seed starting chart. It's pretty awesome.
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On parsnips.
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Intercropping and succession planting, including lots of good ideas for pairings.
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Notes about how she handles seedlings in the (unheated, I think) greenhouse — moves them off the mat at 2 weeks, keeps them under plastic still, etc.
Sprouting fava beans in a dish of water
Posted by Lauren on 15 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: pictures, planting, spring
Local food friends Anne & Ryan got us a packet of crimson-flowered fava beans from Seed Dreams, a small seed company in Port Townsend. Yay! I have put them in water to chit, also known as pre-sprouting.
On Farm Workers
Posted by garth on 10 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: tools, washington
So, thanks to a great post at Civil Eats about Petaluma, CA, I became aware of a tool called a “short hoe.”
Stolen shamelessly from the Smithsonian.
The short hoe is a particularly brutal piece of equipment that forces a farm worker to bend double in order to use it for weeding.This offends me on a number of levels.
As a gardener, I’m pissed off because Cesar Chavez’s hoe (the one shown above) is a piss-poor design of a hoe that’s no good for any sort of weeding. As a human being, I’m pissed off that someone would willingly force their employees to use a tool that is so debilitating and cruel. What do you think is going to happen when you force a grown person to work bent double all day? And that’s an agricultural day, not a white-collar day.
I remember when I did two-and-a-half years of a four-year stretch in Walla Walla (what others would call my undergrad) and I saw farm workers bent double in the fields cutting asparagus. I have never since been able to eat asparagus without thinking about the labor that it takes to bring it to my table. And I’m extremely privileged. I don’t eat asparagus until it’s locally available and, in all likelihood, harvested by a hard-working upper-class graduate of Evergreen University’s excellent agriculture program. But still…
In our neck of the woods, the farmers’ markets have started handing out bumper stickers that read “No Farms, No Food” which is absolutely true, but at the last Tilth Producers of Washington conference I saw a bumper sticker that read “No Farmworkers, No Food,” which might be even more true. We owe the food that we eat to the mostly Mexican, mostly immigrant people that labor for our food. The business plan that Lauren & I have right now doesn’t involve employees, but if we do have to hire someone it’s going to be a real challenge to do right by her.
links for 2009-03-10
Posted by Lauren on 10 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: links
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Leaf miner is indeed what our chard had last year. All infected leaves must be fed to the chickens; darn.
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She starts pinching basils when they are still very small.
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Notes on low beet germination, and how to recover from it.
links for 2009-03-08
Posted by Lauren on 08 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: links
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What grows well in the shady parts of the yard.
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Using boxes of manure compost as passive greenhouse heat (plus compost factory).
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More seed starting notes. She uses heat mats in her greenhouse but no extra lights (in Oregon somewhere).
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Chitting potatoes (part 1).
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Notes on starting seeds.
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Hand-squished tomato bread soup
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Discussion of earwig removal methods
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Roundup of resources for cheesemaking.
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Solar food dryer made of cardboard boxes.
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Fried Green Tomato BLT — yum!!
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Using milk on the squash to treat powdery mildew
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Non-toxic bug spray made of garlic, pepper flakes, soapy water. Can not be used on chard.
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How to harvest your dried luffas.
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An excellent chicken breed chart with lots of data.
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Wood chips: Nitrogen stealers, or no?
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Farmers, don't forget to get your tetanus shots!
Newses
Posted by Lauren on 07 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: chickens, farm updates, greenhouses, lists, planting, tools
Mundane news
- Neighbor Claire brought over some rhubarb roots today; she was dividing and moving her patch, growing mostly unattended in the middle of the yard, to her new garden area. The rhubarb we transplanted last year didn’t take, sadly, so we were happy to have some new.
- Started some herb seeds today — seven cells each of sweet basil, Genovese basil, cilantro, dill, oregano, and scallions (I know, not an herb, but my last cells didn’t germinate yet so I tossed some more in this batch).
- I made pasta from scratch for the very first time today. Proof-of-concept pasta, we are calling it, because it wasn’t super wonderfully delicious, but it was good, and we both decided it’s worth learning to do better. We tossed it with homegrown leeks, homegrown Brussels sprouts, and homemade sausage, and garnished with imported parmigiano reggiano and the zest and and juice of an organic, non-local meyer lemon. (I can’t wait for my lemon trees to start doing things and making lemons for me.)
Proof-of-concept pasta, with homegrown leek and Brussels sprouts, and homemade sausage, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.
Fantastic news
- When we were considering moving here, a friend told us about the Trust for Working Landscapes, which manages some city-owned designated farmland that has been waiting for people to farm it; that possible opportunity was part of our decision to move here. So, a few weeks ago we met with some of the board members from the trust, and last Monday we finally turned in our application. Wednesday we met some board members out at the proposed site. Apparently, the whole process seems to be more informal than I thought, because instead of having a several-week process to review and approve our application, we spent an hour putting stakes in the ground where we wanted the corners of our plot to be. We also got the go-ahead to start buying equipment and seeds, so I guess it’s a go? I guess. Yay! If all goes well we will be selling veggies, maybe eggs, and maybe chickens at our farmers’ market and maybe at an unstaffed farm stand.
- As part of the aforementioned equipment-buying, Garth promptly went out and bought a BCS 720 walking tractor. I don’t really understand it completely, but as far as I can tell it is pretty awesome.
- Araucanas are coming in at our feed store this Friday, so we’ll be getting two more chickens, for an even twelve total, ten laying brown and two laying blue/green.
Amusing top-to-carrot ratio
Posted by Lauren on 01 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: carrots, pictures
I was picking carrots for dinner and I thought “Oh the tops are all small, I’ll gather several” and then I pulled up this tiny carrot top and I got this huge lovely carrot. My six-inch santoku knife included for reference.