Black Gold

This was my breakthrough into organic farming.  While living in the city we had built a compost bin and then moved it with us when we came.  It was the starting point for us - from the dirt on up.  I have started and restarted this post about ten times now....not sure exactly why since it is quite possibly the best and most useful thing on the farm and one thing that I am constantly amazed by. But for whatever reason writing about it in any sort of understandable way is hard.  Most likely because it is entirely too simple.

Scraps of anything green and growing or dead and brown
Water
Air

Time

It's that simple. 

This is the recipe for dirt that Mother Earth has known for eons and we have since tried to make a science out of with no great success.  We make it entirely too complex.  You can spend a fortune buying organic compost at any garden store, or you can make it for free using all of the stuff that you throw out every day - the coffee grounds, the potato peelings, the apple cores, the old wilted flowers, the weeds that are the bane of every gardener's existence.  Just about everything that goes down the garbage disposal could be put to a better use as compost. 

Over the decades, since chemical farming came into vogue, scientists tried to figure out what the key ingredients were that plants needed to grow.  They came up with phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium as the three things that plants need to thrive and have since marketed it every possible way.  Nitrogen is the stuff that you see farmers carting around in the spring and spraying all over their fields and a mix of the three chemicals is what you will find in any bag of lawn fertilizer.  The thing they didn't realize is that even though they are supplying the three main ingredients, they are leaving out the micro ingredients that plants also need to survive. Micro nutrients are those small amounts of nutrients that plants (and animals) utilize to put the main nutrients to their best use.  We have slowly been depleting the soil of the micro nutrients for about 60 years now. 

It is similar to saying that all people really need to survive is fat, protein and carbohydrates without any thought at all to vitamins and minerals.  Without these micro nutrients none of the main nutrients get absorbed and utilized properly.  If you want an interesting and eye-opening breakdown of what I mean by all of this, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food is a good place to start or even just typing in the words - "whole food supplements" in any search bar is likely to get you some interesting reads.  We humans try to break everything down to it lowest form, we look for the exact chemical that is responsible for preventing scurvy or rickets, for instance, and once found (Vitamin C and Vitamin D) we take those chemicals in excess to help ward off these terrible diseases without really understanding how they work or what other smaller chemicals might be there to help the system along.   It is like putting only gasoline into a car without any understanding of what oil and antifreeze are there to do.  Whole foods - like a whole orange- has many chemicals in it and many chemical interactions that take place that we have absolutely no understanding of that make it the perfect packet of Vitamin C known and yet we take out the Vitamin C to put into tablets and throw the rest of the orange away.

The same thing has happened to our dirt over time.  We kept the Potassium, Nitrogen and Phosphorus and threw the rest of the beneficial stuff out with the trash.....literally.

Composting is perhaps one of the easiest things to do and one of the most beneficial.  It is the crux of sustainable farming - we pull nutrients, in the form of plants, out of the soil....we need to put nutrients back into the soil.  What better way to do this than to use the used up plants themselves?

Any, and I mean any vegetation or things that were previously vegetation are fair game for a compost pile.  The only rule that I stick to is that you can't put anything meat based in the pile - no meat scraps and no droppings from animals that have been eating meat.  The main reason behind this is that it sometimes takes on a bit of a foul odor and it can definitely start to attract the local vermin to the area.

You need to have a pile of some size to get the whole thing going.  3 square feet is generally considered to be about the right size.  You can hold it all together with a ring of woven wire, or a fancy compost bin....or you can just pile it up in a heap of at least 3 square feet and let it go.

Wet it down until it is about as wet as a well wrung out sponge.  In the early spring, or when it is dry in the middle of summer, I will add about 5 gallons to the pile periodically during a dry spell to keep it going.

Turn the pile every three weeks or so to allow air to mix with the pile and voila!  Dirt!

There are a few things that I have learned to do over the course of several years of producing the best black dirt imaginable. 

• The water is really important.  It may sound crazy to water your compost bin, but it definitely speeds up the breakdown process.  
•  A metal stake through the center of the pile will let you know if it is getting hot enough.  When a compost pile really gets going, the internal temperatures will be around 150 degrees and even weed seeds will get cooked beyond the pont where they will germinate.  My method, using the metal stake, is rather primitive but it works well.  I know that when I pull out the stake and it is too hot to touch, the pile is cooking. 
•  If your pile isn't taking off and getting hot - add dirt!  You will read that you need to go to the garden store and pick up bone meal or compost starter, blah, blah, blah.  Everything you need to get it going is already in the ground - all the enzymes, all the beneficial bugs, everything - just add a few shovelfuls to the mix and it will help to get it going.
• You don't need to mix it into the soil - this is what worms are for and they are good at it!  They will make short work of incorporating any compost that you put around flowers or vegetables into the soil.
• You know when it is done and ready to be used when you can no longer identify any of the stuff that you threw into it.  If you can identify a few things, simply take those out and throw them back on the pile for a little more time.

Over the winter, I let it sit and by spring the bottom stuff of the compost bin is gorgeous and ready to be spread around the flowers.  Then I add in leaves left over from the fall, grass clippings, vegetable scraps from the kitchen, coffee grounds and filters, egg shells and any weeds that have made an appearance in the garden.  Mix it all up and add water.  By the time the potatoes are peeking up in early spring I have another batch of the black gold to be spread around them.  And so it goes all summer long - using left overs to make more soil to make more vegetables which leads to more left overs.  Whole food nutrition for the garden- and not one chemical needed.

Full Strawberry Moon

Every full moon of the year, in the Native American culture, has a name. June's is Full Strawberry Moon.  It is very aptly named.

Every year, around the first of June, the strawberries start ripening and by the middle of the month, I am more than ready for them to be done.  I love strawberries - there probably isn't a recipe that calls for strawberries that I don't like, but my favorite way to eat them is sun-warmed straight off the vine.

When we first moved onto the farm I found five strawberry plants huddled beneath the leaves of the rhubarb plant.  I moved them into the southeast corner of the garden so I could know where they were and not inadvertently dig them up.  I didn't expect much from five little scrub strawberry plants, but since that day they have been quietly attempting to take over the entire garden.  They and their offspring now take up one entire corner of the garden. 

That first year on the farm, since I had moved them, they didn't produce much at all.  The following year, I would get about one cup per day throughout the month, and so on until last night, as I stood amid the multitudes of strawberry plants watching the sun set in the sky and wondering if I would ever be able to stand upright again from picking for so long, I realized that I had easily picked a quart and a half of strawberries, and that same amount (or more) is on deck to be ripe tonight.

I didn't grow up in a family that stored food - my grandma would make jellies and jams in the summer to give as presents, but I never really took part in that endeavor other than to be the happy recipient of those jellies.  The whole canning thing, quite honestly, scared me.  I always had visions of somehow poisoning someone with a bad batch.  Visions of the evening news with a story of a family poisoned with botulism always made me cringe and shy away from anything to do with canning.  But, oh, those strawberries! I hated seeing them go to waste!  We could never eat all of them fast enough and, as good as they are, there are only so many different desserts containing strawberries and that you can make and consume fast enough.

Then,.... my inspiration.  You always find it in unusual places.  I went to visit some relatives and there,  placed on the table at dinner to be spread on the bread, was a small jar of strawberry jam that had been pulled from the freezer.  Freezer jam! It was amazing and I was immediately hooked - no boiling water canner needed, no scary thoughts of cooking it incorrectly and thereby poisoning my entire family!  When the producer of the jam was tracked down for the recipe, she said, "oh, I just follow the directions on the Sure Jell box."

I tracked down this mythical box in the grocery store, found among the canning lids and jars and other various supplies and purchased just one box to start.  The directions took a little getting used to, but eventually I had deciphered them enough to attempt my first batch of freezer jam.  Sugar , pectin, water, crushed strawberries, and a little time and I found myself the proud producer of 5 cups of strawberry freezer jam which, when opened in the deep dark days of January, just about make you cry with the delicious taste of fresh strawberries.

 Our production in the last several years has, along with the amount of strawberries, ramped up.  We no longer make it by the cup - we now make it in pint jars because we discovered that five kids all eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches all year go through a lot of jelly very quickly.   After I had made strawberry jelly, I became braver and suddenly the peaches on the peach tree seemed like a good thing to try in a jam....I actually made some regular jam - the type you have to hot water can because peaches don't do as well as a freezer jam.  After that, the canning flood gates opened and suddenly everything seemed to have a method of preservation that could be handled with a few glass jars, lids and a big kettle.

Is it time consuming? - yep. Is it sometimes very messy? - yep. Doesn't it make the house really hot, standing over a hot stove in the middle of June, July and August? - yes.  Is it really all worth it?  - Absolutely!  I know that it would be very easy to go to a grocery store and pick up a jar of jelly, or a jar of pickles, or a can of pears, or tomato sauce, but there is something about knowing that I did this - I raised these tiny little strawberries up from the scrubs hiding under the rhubarb plants, I picked each one by hand, I washed, sliced, cooked and canned them all. (Well, actually my husband has taken a fancy to doing a lot of it now, so technically I can't say that I did it, but rather we did it, and last night my son got into the act as well).  Is it healthier? - Definitely!  Glass jars are completely inert - no plastics to leach off their toxic chemicals, and we reuse them year after year - the only thing we buy new are the lids so they are sure to seal well.  None of the produce we use has been sprayed with any chemicals which is not something that you can truly know about the canned goods you buy in the stores.  As I am hunched over picking berries, or standing over a hot stove for the third night in a row I think of how good it is to be able to produce our own food - food that will actually nourish the kids and may help to fight or ward off diseases.  Strawberries are one of the best food that you can eat for their nutritional value and health benefits, but due to the amount of chemicals that are sprayed on them commercially, it sort of negates the benefits.... unless you are eating at my house, where during the Full Cold Moon of December we will feed you fresh strawberry jam on homemade bread and dream of being up to our eyeballs in Strawberries in June.

The Helping Hands

Work worn and weary

I mold to the hand I know

Saving tender skin

Plant More, Weed Less

I realized the other day that I haven't written in some time simply because the weather has been too good.  My typical day is to go to work for 10 hours and then come home and drop to the ground and start pulling weeds.   Most of the vegetables are up and growing, but then so too are the weeds.  It rained this weekend and I am quite sure that all the carefully planted and cultivated vegetables grew about 3 inches, unfortunately, the weeds grew 6.

Weeds are the bane of every gardener's existence.   They outnumber us about 6 billion to one and they will survive and spread like wildfire despite our best attempts at controlling them. 

Some people like to use chemicals, but the effects of those chemicals are similar to the use of antibiotics on bacteria....resistance develops and we are left fighting bigger and meaner weeds that are harder to kill.  Not to mention the unwanted health effects such as cancer and other chronic debilitating diseases, or the environmental impacts like colony collapse disorder of bees, fish kills, song bird death, etc...yeah, I know, the government, EPA, and all the chemical producers swear up and down that it is safe to use, but I have seen a few too many farmers dying of cancer and I, personally, don't feel like being a guinea pig in the corporate money making machine that is agricultural chemical manufacturing.   All right, I will now attempt to step down off my soap box.

Some people "weed" the garden by hand or with a hoe or rake.  To some extent I will do this, but I only have so much time in a week - between working full time and raising five kids.... hand weeding isn't going to work for long.  It is, however, a great job for kids to do that are looking to earn a few extra dollars, or who get into trouble and need a little hard work to help clear their head.
 As much as I love growing food, I hate weeding vegetables and I will do whatever I can to spend less time weeding and more time growing and processing food or putzing in my flower garden, so I have started weeding even before the weeds come up (or the vegetables for that matter).  I weed once and then I am done. 

Now I have you wondering don't I?

It requires two fairly easy to come by items - straw and newspaper.

I was blessed with buying a farm that has a very old barn on it that is filled with exceptionally old, but functional straw.  Hopefully, by the time the barn is finally depleted of straw I will have some other source (or possibly my own) lined up, but for now I rely on straw that is probably about as old as I am.   Hay works well too as does grass clippings although sometimes with those two items they can re-sprout and create more problems than they are worth.

The newspapers have never been a problem to find, but it comes down to "know your neighbors" and either have them save up their papers or get to know your local neighborhood convenience store owner and have them give you all the old papers that didn't sell.  I have also periodically gone dumpster diving in the recycle bin for newspapers - especially Wall Street Journals - I figure if all those financial wizards on Wall Street can't improve life for us a little, at least the associated paper can be put to good use.

Armed with this newspaper, straw and a water hose I set out to eliminate all potential weeds from the cucumbers and squash before they even poke their heads through the soil.   The concept is extremely simple - cover all unplanted ground with a thick layer of newspaper, wet it down and cover it with straw and then wet that down.  The only reading that I ever do of a newspaper anymore happens as I lay them down in my garden and I contemplate how quickly the news becomes old  - how earthquakes and tsunamis get swept away in the revolutions that take over the middle east and then those are superseded by upcoming Presidential elections and tornadoes in the Midwest.  I see them all laid out in my garden and then I watch all the news just disappear under a matt of straw.  It is a beautiful thing.  To think that the media is keeping down the weeds in my garden may be the best compliment I am able to give them.

One hour and forty seven minutes later I am free from having to weed my cucumbers and squash for the rest of the summer and slowly the newspaper will break down and next spring I will simply till it into the soil as more organic matter.  One less area to weed leaves that much more time available to plant and harvest. 

Weed less, plant more. 

A Spare Asparagus

Little known fact:  Asparagus is very happy growing in the wild and I am very happy to let it grow in the wild.  Of all the vegetables that we eat routinely, asparagus is one that I do not grow on the farm, but we eat a ton of it during its season. 

This last Sunday, my teenaged son practiced his driving while chauffeuring me around the country roads to pick asparagus that grows wild in the ditches.  The hardest part is simply remembering where it grows so that you can pick it before the buds open and it becomes woody, but year after year, it is always in the same spots and other than having to sometimes brave stinging nettle or poison ivy, it is easy pickings for all asparagus lovers. 

The hunter/gatherer in me is alive and well and happily eating wild caught asparagus.

Happier Than A Pig In......Grass!

Next time you pass a confinement, see if you see any pigs doing this.......



This is a mound of grass that I dug out of my garden.  Pigs are the ultimate processors of grass, dirt, vegetable matter of all kinds.  They rut it apart, eat what can be eaten and simply enjoy the rest. This is what a pig was designed to do.  They weren't designed to live in closed confined buildings with no access to dirt and sunlight - it goes against the very grain of all that is pigness.

When pigs are born and raised in confinement they are typically given iron shots....know why? .....because they don't have access to dirt in a confinement and therefore are iron deficient and anemic.  But, by giving pigs access to dirt they are fine - no iron deficiency.  Pigs and dirt go hand in hand.

**in the background are any number of free range chickens, one crazy fun-loving grey cat named "Tink" and at one point, near the end, Hazel makes an appearance while chasing a chicken.

A Walk In The Woods

Cottonwood

 Across from our five acre lot lives a forest.  It isn't very big and it technically falls under the jurisdiction of my sister and brother-in-law, but it calls to me in the spring.  Fifteen acres of maple, cotton wood, elm, and poison ivy and I love it.  I only haunt the woods in the spring, mainly because during the winter it is too cold to go on a leisurely walk and during the summer I am too frantic with getting things done in the garden to actually take the time for an amble.....but ambling in the spring is ideal. 

There are many of us that get sucked into the wooded lots in Iowa at this time of year and there is one particular thing that many of us are after.....the ever elusive Morel mushroom.

Trametes versicolor

If you have never eaten a Morel that has been sauteed in butter and seasoned with Cavender's greek seasoning then, quite honestly, you haven't really lived.  But only half the fun is eating them.  The other half is the hunt. 

Hunting for a Morel is a definite challenge.  There are many times, while walking through the woods, that I think it would be much easier to hunt animals than mushrooms.  So far this year I have come across rabbits, turkeys and deer, but the mushrooms have been very scarce.  Morels are a fickle mushroom, like many of their fungi friends, they need exacting conditions of temperature, moisture and humidity in which to grow and for all the research that I have done on these mushrooms, no one seems to have a very good handle on exactly what makes them tick.  Therefore, I constantly walk in the woods. 

I usually start sometime near the beginning of April.  Not because I think that they will actually be out yet, it is entirely too early for them to show up, but it is nice to just walk and notice the changes that take place as spring emerges.  There are many times when walking through the woods that I don't actually look down at the ground for mushrooms at all, but rather at the trees and the state of their buds.  I make note of the trees that have fallen during the winter and marvel at the number of deer trails that have emerged like small highways making the paths through the forest that much clearer.  I note the level to which the garlic mustard, an invasive plant, has taken over the woods and I ponder at what point there will come a virus or bacterium that will infest this noxious plant and render it less obnoxious to the forest flora.  I walk with folded arms most of the time to avoid touching all the small twigs of trees that grow two or three feet off the ground for I have learned that these are poison ivy plants that haven't leafed out yet and although they don't have leaves they are still poisonous and will give a person a tremendously horrible rash.  I listen to the song birds calling and to the frogs chirping in the wetlands just to the north of the woods.  The smell of earth and dirt is strong in the woods in the spring - all the slowly rotting vegetation and leaf molds from the previous fall make the earth very spongy under foot.

All it takes is looking down a little closer at all the vegetation and suddenly mushrooms of every kind and color become visible.....all of them that is, except the Morel. 



Trametes versicolor



Puff Ball



Devil's Urn



Morels are elusive.  I picture them being very similar to leprechauns - there one minute, but gone the next.  They blend in with the leaves that cover the ground and they hide in the tall grass or the rose bushes.  I feel sometimes as though I am trying to "sneak up" on them so that they won't know that I am looking for them.  Sometimes I feign nonchalance while walking through the wood in the hopes that they will be lulled into a sense of security and come out of hiding.  When the time is right....they do.  It usually happens when I have decided to take a quick jaunt through the woods without something to carry any finds home in - those are the days that the mushrooms are many in number as though mocking my ability to hold them all on the way home. 

There is essentially something very satisfying about finding edible things in the wild that you know are incredibly delicious and safe to eat - it fills some long distant hunter/gatherer instinct of being able to know, recognize, and appreciate the earth's bounty.  And the walk through a peaceful, transcendent woods gives perspective and hope that there really is a little magic left in the world.





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.