Plant Organic Potatoes!

For Christmas Farmer John gave me a subscription to the Magazine Mary Jane's Farm.  In the December/January 2014 issue there is a very enlightening article on potatoes: The Real Dirt on Spuds.

What stood out most to me was a quote by Wendy Gordon of The Wedge Natural Foods Co-op in Minnesota. "Growing potatoes... implies a clockwork schedule of pesticide application."

The article goes on to say that before potatoes are planted, insecticides are spread over the field. Tubers are then covered in fungicide. More poison is applied at "hilling" time and sink into the plant. During the entire growing time more insecticide and fungicides are applied and when harvest comes more chemicals are used. Once in storage the taters are treated to prevent sprouting. Gordon points out that potato farmers wear protective gear to keep them safe from the chemicals.

Really?  How much of that are we digesting?  That is just gross!

And then on top of all that... our wonderful USDA (U.S.Duh as Joel Salatin refers to them as) wants to approve a new GMO potato.  There is even a petition you can sign at www.FoodAndWaterWatch.org telling McDonald's (the U.S.'s largest buyer of spuds) not to go that route.

So while I've been chewing on that info, this video popped up on Facebook.  This lovely, little, third-grade girl experimented with non-organic, supermarket chain organic and health food store organic potatoes. It doesn't get more simple to see which one I prefer to consume. Eye opening!

Good thing I already perused Territorial Seeds new catalog and found that they offer at least 10 organic tuber options (not including sweets).  I plan on purchasing their kitchen garden collection of three different types. Yumminess awaits!

Besides not having to consume gallons of pesticide there is one more good reason to grow your own, which you can read about here.

Anyway you think about it, growing your own organic potatoes is a good investment!

Happenings Around The Homestead...

This is the first year we have ever grown cabbage.  I love fresh from the garden cabbage but do not enjoy it cooked or fermented.  However, my husband loves sauerkraut so we are experimenting with our first ever batch.  It's sitting on the counter as we speak.  We don't have a crock so we are using (re-using) a Costco pickle jar covered with an old t-shirt rag.  It's high tech, let me tell you.  I may (or may not) try some when it's done.  I know, I know, kraut is supposed to be really good for you.

We have also yet to have a frost in my area so the tomatoes are still coming on strong.  The kids are getting good at prepping the tomatoes for canning.  (Apples too.)  When they start to complain, I simply say, "You like to eat, don't you?"

This is a pic of the bag City Girl whipped up in about 15 minutes.  She wanted a certain size and everything we had was either too big or too small so she went down to our "craft" room and created what she needed.  The body of the bag is a bottom leg of a pair of jeans she had made into cut-offs earlier this year.  She merely had to sew one end shut.  For the handle she made a braided rope made from old t-shirts and sewed it on.  We had some iron-on decals laying around and she embellished the bag with those. (The decals were marketed for the back of jean pockets... who wants their daughter wearing kissy lips on her backside? This is a much more tasteful application.)

There are so many possibilities for this bag.  It is really only limited by your imagination.  It is a quick, easy, and cheap project.  Goodwill stores are great sources of jeans and t-shirts!

What have you all been up to?

Alice Waters Helps Me Sneak Veges!

 Chef Alice Waters is brilliant when it comes to vege recipes.  I've been turning to her book The Art of Simple Food for ideas on what to do with my garden bounty.

Tonight we are using fresh tomatoes and making her Simple Tomato Sauce: 2 lbs ripe tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and seasonings.  And I'm going to sneak in some roasted patty pan squash into it too! (Of course I will also put in some ground beef so that my meat loving son will be appeased.)  Served over pasta it will be simple and yummy.

She also has a recipe for raw tomato sauce.  Fresh tomatoes, basil and olive oil!

 

Last night I used some of my chard for her Chard Frittata.  Chard, olive oil, onion, garlic, seasonings and eggs (from our chickens) served on garlic toast. Yummy!  What I love about her recipes is that they really are simple yet cheffy and taste delicious!

If you are not the best "scratch" cook (like me) I recommend this cook book highly!

Eat This... NOT That!

Eat This!

 

Our tomatoes are finally coming ripe fast enough to warrant a bit of canning tomorrow.  I have already pulled out my trusted Ball Blue Book and will be canning a few quarts of tomato sauce.

 I no longer buy pre-made pasta sauces but in the past I have depended on plain tomato sauce for my sauce base.  What is so bad about that?  It's organic right?  Yep, however the acidic nature of tomatoes causes the lining of the can to leak BPA into the food.  Uncool!

Not That!

My budget is miniscule and I can not afford the premium sauce that comes in glass jars but I am able to make my own! I urge everyone to try canning tomatoes.  They're pretty easy and the taste is awesome! Not to mention kicking one more nasty chemical out of the house.  Hmmm... seems our great-grandparents had it good!

Food From The Ground!

My "city daughter" wonders why we can't just buy our food from a store like normal people.  She did not get the "farmer" gene.  I however did and even though my gardens are messy (er, that means tons of weeds) there is just nothing like going out your back door and digging up dinner.  Here is a picture of the bounty we picked just the other day...

 

Zucchini, cabbage, carrots, jalapeno peppers, banana peppers, tomatoes, parsnips, beans, rutabagas, turnips, horseradish, dill, basil, patty pan squash and chard! Oh, and eggs from the chickens! So much more fun and rewarding to harvest your own rather then traverse the tiles of the grocery store under bad lighting!  I was going to say bad music too but then I remembered that the Musak playing now is from the 80's and were talkin' bout my generation!

Cottage Industry: Back Yard Blueberry U-Pick

Blueberries are currently in season in my neck of the woods!  They are one of my favorite fruits to u-pick.  When we lived in our rental place there were two blueberry u-picks in biking distance. This year I was wondering what I was going to do because I really didn't want to drive the 1/2 hour to go pick.  Low and behold, thanks to the sharp eyes of my parents, when they were visiting, a little sign advertising u-pick blueberries went up only a couple of miles away from home.

I went to investigate and was pleasantly surprised to find a little quaint family farm.  I'm guessing they maybe had 5 acres of land and only maybe 1/2 acre to 1 acre was blueberries.  I didn't get to talk to the owners but it seemed a pretty simple operation and an excellent way to make some $$ from your land. Here's their set up:

 Little sign on the corner of the main road. Not even big or fancy. (Sorry it's not the best picture but we had an impatient driver behind us and didn't have much time to snap a picture.)

 Another sign at the corner of their road.  Pretty simple.

 

Sign with hours and phone number in front of their property.  Again not big or fancy.  Their hours are Monday thru Saturday, 8 to 8.

 

Next they had a simple place for cars to park, marked with another simple sign.

 

 

On their back porch they had their main set up:  A sign with instructions, buckets, scale, money box etc.  Some of the buckets were buckets I've seen at other u-pick operations and others were simple recycled ice cream buckets.

 

 

They've done a really excellent job of "cuting up" the property, making it atmospheric and a visual treat.  Red, white and blue are the décor scheme and every where you look there are festive decorative touches.

 

 

 They had amenities to make the experience a little more pleasant too: A shady spot to sit and rest and a bathroom!

It was just a hop, skip and a jump to the picking field from parking and we were greeted by a friendly farm cat.

 

 

In hindsight the cat may or may not be a good idea.  It was cute and my kept my littles occupied but they were supposed to be picking the fruit, not petting the cat.  The farm would have made another buck or so out of us if Reagan had been picking.

 

 

We had a great time.  The bushes were full, the fruit was easy to pick, the price was wonderful,  $1 per pound, and it is so close to home that we can go back and pick any time during the season.  We ended up with five pounds of berries for freezing and using fresh.  There is nothing better then getting great quality local food and supporting a family farm too!

 

 

 

There was nothing overly complicated about this set up and I went away feeling it was something that any of us could duplicate. We have strawberries and blueberries in our vicinity but I have yet to find raspberries, currants or gooseberries in the area so that could easily be something for my homestead, Creek Cottage Homestead, to capitalize on.

 

If you have a little bit of land, good fruit skills and some creativity this could be a good little side biz. (Of course one would need to check with the local powers-that-be for regulations etc. and I'm sure some form of insurance would be a good idea.)

 

One last tip for you:  Make sure to bring something to take home your fruit in.  They did have bags available but not every operation will.

Of Turnips and Rutabagas...

This is our first gardening year on our new property.  We moved in last mid-June and decided just to watch and listen to the property before embarking on any gardening ventures. But while we waited, we planned and for Christmas I gifted my husband with a seed collection from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

 

The collection I bought him was the Large Northern Package (They also have southern packages.) and it contained over 25 types of vegetables/60 varieties.  In other words we got 60 packages of seeds.  Included were some veges that we probably wouldn't have picked on our own like turnips and rutabagas.  But since we know we need to expand our vegetable horizons we planted everything with a vow to try it and use it/preserve it.

 

 

Now it is into summer and the turnips are ready for harvesting and the rutabagas are growing nicely.  But what to do with them?  Of course I've seen them at the grocery store and occasionally at the farm market but I've always skipped over them.  So I consulted my cookbooks and came up with a recipe for butter roasted turnips.  Surprise of surprise they weren't bad.  Now, they will never be a common sight on my dinner table but seasonally they will make a nice change.  Next time I'm going to try roasting them with butter and brown sugar so they carmelize a bit. I also might mash them. 

 

What I'm really excited to do is use the turnips and rutabagas in soups!  Not in the summer, though.  I try to stay away from hot soups during the summer. They are, however, a staple on our table the other three seasons. 

 

There are three ways to preserve the veges.  I can can them but I would need a pressure canner and I do not as of yet have one.  I could blanch and freeze them or I can blanch and dehydrate them.  I'm going for dehydrating.  After prepping the veges (wash, remove tops, peel) I will cut them up into slices, steam blanch for 5 minutes and then dry them in our dehydrator.

 

 

 

As you can see our dehydrator is a dinosaur but it still works just fine and soon I will have preserved turnips and rutabagas to throw into soups when ever I want.  I think they will be a perfect addition to my hearty homemade soups!

 

How do you use your turnips and other root veges?  Anyone willing to share recipes?

 

Removing Garden Carpet...

You know that Ben Franklin saying... "A stitch in time saves nine"?  Yep... truth!  We put off weeding in favor of other farm chores, mainly keeping up with the strawberries and now we will pay dearly.  We have hours of weeding ahead of us.  Almost all of our garden beds are entirely carpeted.  Pretty but not practical.  Between rain, hot and humid weather, mosquitoes and other commitments we just haven't gotten out there to do it.  Now we have no choice.  Our veges are still healthy and growing but I don't want to lose harvest because I didn't weed.

We have chosen to go organic and not use any chemical weed control.  I don't even want chemical fertilizer on my lawn.  We have tried mulching: wood chips, leaves, straw, newspaper... we still have weeds.  There just isn't anyway around it.

I actually find weeding relaxing but my children are not fans and I don't like "whine" in my garden.  That is what makes weeding unbearable for me.  I think today, since it is hot and humid, we will use the 1/2 hour on, 1/2 off method.  I also think my 1/2 hour off will be spent in the kiddie pool or fighting the mosquitoes back in the woods and setting a lawn chair in the creek.  I admit to having elements of redneckness in me.

Despite the weeds we have peas galore, tomatoes forming, squash and beans blooming and basil out of control and tons of greens!  I'm thinking I need to watch Craigslist for a cheap used electric stove to put outside for an outdoor canning kitchen so I can put up the bounty without heating the house up. (We are being frugal and trying to avoid using air conditioning.)

Well, I guess I'd better feed the tribe lunch and head out to "roll up" the "carpet".  I wish it were going to be that easy.

Have a great day!

 Carpeted root crops!

 

 Beans

 

 Zukes

 

Tomatoes 

 

Basil 

 

Peas 

 

Endive, Chard, Kale and some Dill

Flowers and salads!

Last night's dandelion and lilac salad was a success!  I will not be facing church discipline or excommunication. I don't know that people will be rushing to recreate it any time soon but everyone tried it and found it surprisingly good.  Everyone but Farmer John.  Turns out that he doesn't like the smell of lilacs (You think I would know this after 20 years.) and "they taste just like they smell."  After he was finished eating there was a little pile of lilac petals on the side of his plate.  Seems the dandelions were fine for him though.  Next time I'll sneak dandelion greens into it too.  I only did the flower heads last night.

Regular vege salad with the addition of edible flowers: Lilacs and Dandelions.

I also used my available flowers in a more traditional sense.

 Dandelions flower heads floating in a shallow bowl of water.

Lilacs as the centerpiece of the table.

The other in season item I used for the evening was rhubarb from my garden in a yummy rhubarb crumble topped with homemade vanilla custard!

My rhubarb earlier this spring.

 

It is so much fun to "use what you've got" and be creative rather then running to the store and buying something.

The only downer to the night was the over abundance of mosquitoes that chased us off the deck and indoors for the evening.  Bat houses, homemade natural mosquito sprays and itch remedies will be fodder for another blog post.

Friday Read and Write

Yesterday's post was about cooking from scratch and not using processed foods, so I thought it might be appropriate to suggest some reading material for those of you who haven't quite got on the whole/local/organic/non-processed food boat or even if you have they are just great inspirational reads.

In defense of Food, Michael Pollan - Written in a evolutionary world view but still enlightening!

The Vintage Remedies Guide to Real Food. Jesse Hawkins is a whole living expert.  I recommend anything by her and her company Vintage Remedies.

Don Colbert, Eat This and Live!  Simple to follow.

 

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Folks, This Ain't Normal by Joel Salatin

Both Pollan and Kingsolver subscribe to evolution but Salatin presents a Christian World view.

 

Do you have any favorites to recommend?

 

 

 

Cooking From Scratch!

When I was 17 I wanted to live in NYC, have a personal chef and a maid, jet-set around the world, be a big time fashion buyer for Saks or Bloomingdales or Macy's, not get married and not have kids.  Do you get the idea that I didn't gain a lot of cooking skills in my youth?  Not for lack of trying on my mother's part- I just wanted nothing to do with it.  Fast forward to present day (25 years later)...

I've visited NYC, once.  I most assuredly would not be happy living there. I fell in love at 22 and married at 23.  We have 5 children and one more in Heaven (stillbirth). I didn't even enter the field of fashion after graduating with a Fashion Marketing degree.  Can I tell you how down right catty that field is? I have traveled a fair bit- German speaking Europe, Italy, Australia, a good portion of the USA and hope to once the children are off on their own.

As for the personal chef and maid... I have those...their names are Me, Myself and I. My husband does his share and the kids are being trained in these areas as well.  But I am the manager of the home.  It was an interesting ride for me coming from very little knowledge in these areas to where I am now. I remember burning water (yeah- for real!)  I let it boil away to nothing and scorched the pot.  I remember calling my Mom and asking how one mashes potatoes and many other things.

Being a child of the seventies and eighties I grew up with processed food in the house but was lucky enough that my mom was of an older generation and still cooked a lot from scratch. (Though I remember a lot of microwaved meals in the mid-70's/early eighties).  For a long time after I got married I thought I was serving a good meal if I bought pre-made frozen lasagna, frozen garlic bread, and a bagged salad.

Now don't get me wrong! Those things have their time and place but I was serving stuff like that consistently and thinking I was feeding my family well.  I've learned a lot since then and still have a long way to go.  I  also still confess to not liking cooking but as a wife and mother I want to feed my family healthy, whole foods that are tasty. That means cooking from scratch!  Luckily I've found some wonderful cook books and helps along the way. These are my go to's...

 My first cookbook ever. I believe it was a bridal shower gift from my mother.  Oh, how she knew I would need it.  It is still my go to book today.  Simple, basic, from scratch recipes.

 This is a great one for help with seasonal eating and what to do with 10,000lbs of zucchini/tomatoes/ what ever you have too much of.

 Recipes and reasons to change the way you eat. 

 A chef's take on good, simple food- a good primer. Alice was a farm-to-table chef before it was cool.

 Good old country cooking!

The West Ladies also have a DVD for those who want some visual inspiration.

Here's my challenge: Pick one item/meal that you would usually purchase processed and learn to make it from scratch. (Like lasagna, or even just salad.)  You will taste the difference and love it. Happy SCRATCH cooking! If I can do it, trust me, you surely can! (Side note- you don't have to make the ingredients yourself- yet- you can buy the pasta, cheese etc. but one day you might just want it totally from scratch with your own homemade cheese, pasta, and sauce from your own tomatoes. The process  of not buying processed is addicting!)

Happy from scratch cooking!