Sprinting Into Spring

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.  ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

Spring is a crazy time.  It is like taking off from the starting blocks after the "spring" gun has been fired.  Nature has it down pat - knows the order of things that need to be done and does them well.  Myself....well, ...not so much.  I have to make myself a list of specific things that need to get done during my days off or I will simply stand around outside and marvel at all the amazing things that have popped up in the last four days.  That, or I get so overwhelmed that I start scampering around like a squirrel from project to project without ever really accomplishing anything at all.

Planting - that is the typical "to do" project at this point, especially for cool season crops - those that do best when the weather is cool and rainy, and lately, it has been very cool and rainy. 

Thus far I have managed to get the following planted in between rainy days:

• Peas - always the first in the ground as they will grow when it is miserably cold and rainy

  

  Peas

  .
• Spinach - I started this one really early mainly because I was curious as to whether or not my seeds would germinate - I am happy to say that they did.
• Lettuce - of course this gets planted about every 3 weeks so that we will have a constant supply of it during the summer.
• Carrots - again, one of many plantings
• Potatoes - most of them are planted, still waiting on a few to sprout before dropping them in the ground.
• Onions - they like the cold weather as well and I need them to be ready for making marinara as soon as the tomatoes are ready.
• Leeks - Potato soup wouldn't be the same without leeks
• Arugula - a friend of mine had too much planted so she handed some off to me
• Fennel - same friend planted too much fennel

  

  Fennel

  
• Broccoli - this I had planted in-doors weeks ago and it needed to go outside because it was becoming to "leggy" in the house
• Cabbage - also outgrowing its pots in the house. Needed room to grow.
• Corn - my 6-year-old corn fanatic helped me drop in the first round of corn
• Garlic - this has actually been planted since last November and has been growing since March, but for the sake of completeness I include it here.



Spinach



Making a list like this always makes me feel better on cold, rainy days such as this when I find myself pacing around the house thinking that I should be outside doing something - I can look at it and feel as though maybe I can take a little time off to enjoy a few of my other favorite things such as reading, writing and puttering in the flower garden. Planting, I always have to remind myself, is the easy part.  Planning where things will go, tilling up the soil, raking and planting is relatively straight forward and there will be a small lull in the action as everything germinates and takes hold, but then the weeding and mulching begins. 

So, crazy as it is, I am trying to enjoy this chaotic time of planning and planting because it really is one of the easier times during the course of the growing season.  Soon the days wills will stretch late into the evenings and my squirrel like scampering will become a daily activity as the weeds all outdo themselves to be the tallest and deepest rooted in the garden and threaten to bury my vegetables alive, and  then the crops of fruits and vegetables start rolling in and need to be jellied, pickled, frozen, dried, and canned.  There will come a time sometime in deep August where I will long for frost if only to catch my breath,  but for now I will sprint on and try to keep pace with Mother Nature if only for a while before she leaves me in the dust.



Dear Earth,.....Happy Day!

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.  ~Native American Proverb

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.  ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.  ~Juvenal, Satires

Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together.  All things connect.  ~Chief Seattle, 1855

 

Unplugging The Kids

We move entirely too fast in society. We spend so much time with our technical devices - cell phones, computes, televisions, ipods, Wii, PlayStation....you name it and every house has at least one or two of these devices if not all of them. We are entertained at the simple flick of a switch and push of a button, but are we really any happier? Does watching movies, television shows and sporting events fulfill our lives, or is it merely a way of filling the time that we have in which we have nothing else to do? And if that is the case is there really nothing else to do?

When I think of the times in the last week of my life that I have been happy they are times that I have spent talking with people - face to face. Interactions with facial expressions, laughter, tears, hugs, and handshakes - not status updates or text messages. I think about these moments and then I consider the world into which my kids will grow up - how will they relate? and where will they find their happiness?

My daughter asked me the other day if television was around when I was a kid. Other than feeling somewhat old, I was sort of brought up short....when I was a kid we had one black and white television that we watched which quickly (during my childhood) was replaced by a color T.V. I remember fighting my brother, not for the remote, but for the "knob" that controlled the channel turner. You had to actually walk up to the television to change the channel and if we wanted to be sure that the other person couldn't change the channel, we stole the knob and hid it in the couch cushions.....juvenile, I know, but effective.

I don't remember computers being a big thing until I was in 4th grade and that was the year that my parents brought home the first "personal computer" upon which I loved to play the one game that we had which consisted of some very bad graphics of a plane that was to be shot down.

When I think of how far technology has come in the last 25 years, it is very cool and also very frightening. My kids, if left to their own devices, would love to play computer games all day, or watch movies....they would literally live in my room which is where both the computer and the television currently reside.

We do what we can to discourage this behavior.

We don't have cable. Last time I checked we get something like 5 television channels, 3 of which are PBS. We don't have a Play Station, Wii, or any other gaming system in the house and probably never will. The computers have a set time limit for the kids to be on and we do our best to limit that amount of time to an established amount based on the age of the kid. Being that the computer resides in my bedroom, all kids know that you simply do not wake Mom up on a day that she is trying to sleep in or you (and all siblings related to you) will suffer the consequences.

I have been known, when the weather is nice and I am sick of playing "screen time police" to simply switch off the breaker to my room. There is nothing quite so entertaining as seeing puzzled looks on the faces of five kids as they come out to find me and say, "Mom! The computer just stopped working! And the television doesn't work either!" To which I have to give them my most surprised look and say, "Oh, that's too bad! Maybe the electric company will turn them back on later. Why don't you go ride your bike instead?" It comes down to a simple phrase that my kids have heard entirely too many times...."Lack of options clears the mind".

There was a study done sometime recently that stated that the people that will influence you the most and shape you into the person you become are your siblings. Not your friends, not your parents, but the big brother that stole the knob to the television and then sat on it. Siblings are the testing ground upon which kids learn how to get along with others, how to share, how to fight, how to apologize, how to laugh and have fun. It wasn't clear where, exactly, that left kids that had no siblings, but in those cases friends and the siblings of friends seemed to play a bigger roll. But what about kids that now spend most of their day in front of a screen of some kind? I suspect we may find out in the next several years as those kids grow into adulthood and have to start making their way.

In the meantime, I do my best to unplug the kids. I love watching them play in the gardens, argue over who gets to play the part of the princess this time, and recently my favorite activity that the girls came up with was playing pioneers with their own covered wagon. Watching my oldest daughter, playing the part of the horse, pull the other three over the hill and then turn suddenly which led to a rather rapid capsizing of the entire wagon with three pioneers inside was, to say the least, rather entertaining. After the different body parts of the occupants of the wagon were sorted out and it was discovered that no one had been seriously injured, they went back to playing, but all three decided that they would now be the pioneer that walked next to the wagon instead of riding in it while they were on a hill. Many lessons were learned in that little adventure - how to make a cool wagon using woven wire fencing and a feed bag, how to travel in tight quarters with family, horses (even if they are your own sister) are not always reliable while pulling things, and the effects of gravity. None of which can ever be truly learned from a computer or television screen.

Eyes Up On Good Friday

Good Friday is quickly coming. I only note this because it is a big day on the potato calendar. Where the tradition ever got started to plant them on Good Friday is beyond me....mine will be going in slightly earlier than that if the weather holds out.

Potatoes - one of the first, and most labor intensive, crops to go in during spring planting - are very much worth the work. From the mighty potato comes such wonderful things as: french fries, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, home fries, fritters, hash browns, new potatoes with rosemary, and potatoes stew with pot roast to name just a few. A tuber worth its weight in gold....especially Yukon Gold.

I ordered the Yukon Gold seed potatoes from Seed Savers this spring since we didn't have any seed potatoes left over from last year. Last year's crop didn't fair so well - a combination of bad type of potatoes and excessive apathy on my part led to a short supply this winter. So, we start again with new seed potatoes which is probably a good idea anyway as potatoes are susceptible to blight....just ask any Irishman.

Potatoes are uniquely programed to start growing when the time is right - regardless of where they are. The conditions have to be favorable, but even in less than ideal circumstances, potatoes with yearn for the sunlight. I discovered this when I kept a crop of potatoes over winter in our root cellar and it became a little warmer than usual toward the end of winter. When I went down to get the potatoes to start planting, I found bags that looked as though they had been attacked by thin-armed octopi - there were eyes sprouting from every potato in the bags and they had grown right out the top and were headed "up" regardless of how much concrete and wood stood in their way.

They truly are one of the most "determined" crops, which makes them fun to grow. My seed potatoes came on a day when I had company over and they were anxious to see what the seeds of potatoes looked like. "Well, they look a little like potatoes" I said with a smile as I brought forth the bags of small, round beautifully kept spuds. "That's the thing about potatoes, the end product is also the starting point." The hardest part, that I have found, is keeping them in the right conditions so that they don't start to sprout too early in the spring.

The seed potatoes that I had purchased needed a little help to get started because they had yet to start producing eyes. I put the bags of seed potatoes into brown paper bags and put a small piece of apple in with them. Then.....I left them alone at room temperature in my kitchen where I would check on them every few days to see how well they were progressing. Why the apple? There is something about apples that makes a potato just want to start sprouting - whatever chemical signal it is, it works well.

As soon as a few eyes appear, I gingerly remove them from the bag...you don't want any eyes to pop off if you can help it. The sharp knife comes out and the carving begins. There are only a few requirements for cutting up seed potatoes - they need to have a little chunk of potato (I think the suggestion is 1 inch square) and they have to have at least 1 or 2 eyes that are starting to sprout. If they are small potatoes, they are best to leave whole. After they are cut, you have to let the healing begin. I typically will either place mine back in the brown paper bag, or I put them on a tray and tuck them somewhere dark for a few days to let the cut surfaces heal over.

The hardest part I have found around here is trying to find new ground upon which to plant the potatoes. They should be rotated to new soil every year and avoid any areas where they have been planted for the last three years- this makes for some interesting shuffling of crops around here, but we can typically carve out an area that hasn't housed a spud for a few years. The soil should be loose and sandy with lots of organic matter - this is where having horses around really comes in handy. A few loads of horse manure and a little tilling and we are good to go.....except for the trench digging.

Digging potato trenches can get to be a full work out. I typically use it for whatever kid is misbehaving the worst on any particular day....it is the farm equivalent of the "hard rock pile". Six inches deep, shovel width wide and don't stop until you run out of room or potato pieces.

The actual planting of the potatoes is a snap.....set them in the trench about 18 - 20 inches apart with their eyes up.

This last part is important. My first year on the farm, I couldn't remember squat with regards to gardening and I am pretty sure that I planted them all with the eyes down, thinking that they were the roots....not so....the eyes are part of the plant that will emerge above ground in a few short weeks. Thankfully, as I mentioned before, potatoes are a determined crop and I think that at least some of those originals did still make it to the surface eventually and the rest are probably still busy growing toward china.  Eyes up - they have to look where they are going.

I will then typically cover the potato pieces with approximately 4 inches of soil and wait. As they start to sprout above ground they can be further covered with another 2 inches of soil and compost to encourage more potatoes. After they are fully sprouting above ground and I have covered them with as much dirt and compost as I can stand to cart around, they get mulched with a thick layer of newspaper and straw to keep out the weeds.

As I write this now I have planted somewhere near 100 potato pieces that, if they produce as they have in the past, will lead to somewhere between 100 and 200 pounds of potatoes at the end of the summer. We will live well on potato soup, home fries, fritters, frittatas, baked potatoes, hash browns, mashed potatoes - you name the dish and a potato can probably be used to make it better. Knowing that they are planted snug in the ground only to be resurrected again in the fall will truly make this a Good Friday indeed.

Welcoming Hazel

Our little farm has added a new resident!

Hazel

We were tooling around Kalona collecting our yearly pig supply from an Amish farmer we know, "One-armed Marvin" - as though being an Amish farmer isn't difficult enough already, he does it all with one arm- we asked if he had any connections to someone who might have a heifer calf for sale and he recommended his neighbor whose cow had just dropped the first calf of the season on his dairy farm.

Her crazy calf antics and exuberance in taking the bottle have brightened our days and hearing her high pitched "Moo" from the corner of our barn makes us smile every time. My daughter is mastering the fine art of teaching a calf to lead - I explained that she had better start now while Hazel is still only 85 pounds because when she is several hundred pounds it will be a lot more challenging. Right now they are pretty evenly matched.

Can't say that buying a cow was ever on the radar, but now I find myself plotting and planning three years down the line when we could potentially have milk, butter and cheese all produced here on the farm.

I know the jury is forever out on the whole "raw milk" issue, but if examined logically it makes sense to drink raw milk rather than highly processed milk. Processed milk has had many of the good benefits destroyed in the pasteurization process which, assuming milk is contaminated, is a good thing. The main reason that milk was originally pasteurized was to eliminate most of the "bad bugs" that can live in milk - brucellosis, tuberculosis, listeria, e-coli, etc. But with the advent of testing, culling and vaccinating many of these diseases are becoming much less common. Not to say that it isn't a risk, but in general drinking raw milk is not quite as dangerous as most of the USDA would have a person believe.

Once again, it is because we are maintaining dairy cattle in less than ideal habitats, we force them to eat grain to maximize their milk output with complete disregard for the fact that they are herbivores that were designed to eat grass - eating processed food just isn't in their genetic vocabulary and it leads to health problems that then require even more medications to correct. A healthy cow out on clean pasture eating grass - it is a good bet that the milk she produces will be excellent. Having two parents and four grandparents that all grew up drinking raw milk is also a good indication that it can be done without the threat of instant death from listeriosis.

Eating processed food isn't in our genetic vocabulary either for that matter. We - like most species of animals - were designed to eat things.... and by things, I mean just about anything that our ancestors were able to scrape up. Humans are omnivores - plants and animals. This puts us in the same category as dogs, possums, raccoons, and pigs to name just a few. Yes, that's right....we are made of essentially the same parts and components as those dirty animals, but somehow we have come to the conclusion that if it isn't "sterile" we humans shouldn't be eating it.

The gastrointestinal system was designed to tackle bacteria of all sorts. Our stomach contains acids that are in the pH realm of 1 - that is highly acidic and this allows us to kill off most of the pathogens. Those that aren't killed off there go through to the intestine where the pancreatic enzymes change the pH to a more basic level of 8. All throughout the intestinal system there are ways that the body has worked out the most efficient system of getting nutrients from a food while simultaneously restricting the passage of bacteria and other germs - there are "tight junctions" in the small intestine to keep larger particles (like bacteria) from crossing over, there are lymph nodes that send out the warrior white blood cells when a threat is perceived, there are smooth muscles to help keep things moving through. All-in-all, a very complex system and yet we waste most of it because we insist on eating only "clean" food.

Our systems like to do what they were originally designed to do - it keeps them healthier and happier. There has been some discussion that diseases such as Crohn's disease comes about because the body's immune system has nothing better to do than to attack itself and, in some cases they have found that if they infest people with swine whipworms (an intestinal parasite of pigs) people with Crohn's have gone into remission -the immune system now has something better to work on other than itself. Our gastrointestinal and immune systems were established to handle unclean food and typically working with nature, rather than against it, is a good way to go.

There really is no 5 second rule at our house, nor do we use "anti-bacterial" stuff if we can help it. We are becoming a species that is entirely too clean and then we wonder at the increased incidence of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. All of those are signs of an over active immune system that is out looking for something to attack. Like a bored child, if the immune system doesn't have something constructive to work on, it will cause problems.

Polio is a good example of how being a little "dirty" can pay off. Polio was a disease that would often attack the clean, well kept children...why?....because they could afford to stay "clean". Increased sanitation led to a decrease in natural exposure to polio and then when the infection did occur it was more likely to lead to the paralytic form. The grubby kids in the dirt were more likely to be protected due to small doses of natural exposure.

Now that isn't to say that it doesn't pay to wash food and wash hands, but I don't think it is necessary to make everything sterile. I think about it this way: We are so germaphobic, we use anti-bacterial soap on just about everything these days, but if you read the label and see that it supposedly kills 99.9% of bacteria that leaves 0.1% bacteria behind with a clear field upon which to grow and thrive. And these aren't the weak bugs - these are the tough ones and now they are everywhere! I hate to break it to people, but there are bacteria and fungi everywhere all the time - and they are supposed to be there. They are commensal organisms and, in some ways, protect us from the other "bad" bugs by simply holding their turf and limiting the space upon which the pathogenic organisms can thrive.

I have digressed a long way from the fun and excitement of new baby calf, Hazel, but her residence here on the farm is a starting point from which we can further launch into self sustainability and getting back to a more natural way of doing things. Milk - unpasteurized, unhomoginized , unprocessed. Of course I am putting the cart slightly before the horse on this one - she has to grow up for a few years and then be successfully bred before we will see any milk, but a person can dream. And either way - a calf is a very nice way to start a cow.