Winter Reading

Chalk it up to being raised by a librarian. No matter how busy, tired, or overextended I am, I'm always reading at least a book or two or five or six. Even if it is just a page or two in the last few bleary, half-conscious minutes before I fall asleep, reading happens almost every day.

Reading is sort of a basic element of life for me, like eating well or getting enough sleep. And I'm talking about reading books, though I spend plenty of time reading things on the internet tubes too of course. My bedside table has always been more of a bedside book cascade, with stacks of novels, poetry, and nonfiction piled up for my reading pleasure.

In recent years, I've read a lot more nonfiction than anything else - essays, practical guides to everything under the sun, books about politics and history and food - but fortunately my sister Mary keeps me supplied with fiction. She works at a used book store. Can you sense a theme in my family?

My mom is a retired librarian who reads voraciously. She read to us all from the time we were in utero, and someone once described entering my childhood home as "being in danger of being hit by a falling book."

Even though I've been ridiculously overextended with off-farm work these days, I've squeezed in some really satisfying reading lately.

Here are a few recent favorites.

The Resilient Gardener

Carol Deppe

I love this book. Carol Deppe's quirky, opinionated, and garden-geeky personality comes through on every page. Her informal, conversational tone and cheeky attitude make for a quick and enjoyable read. I felt like I was chatting with the author in her kitchen while she popped up some popbeans (special strains of garbanzos she's selected for their ability to pop like popcorn). Or maybe hanging out with her in her garden watching her flock of Ancona ducks chow down on banana slugs nearby.

I don't agree with all of Deppe's methods or opinions, and some of the approaches she discusses are geared toward the particular climate of the place she lives (Corvallis, Oregon). But I came away from her book with immense respect for the author's perspective. She has spent years experimenting and meticulously documenting her experiments. The level of detail in her book is amazing. I have read a lot of gardening books over the years that make vague, grand claims about various techniques and methods without getting down to brass tacks.

Khaki Campbells on our farm: slug-eaters extraordinaire....but how?

For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've heard people talk about using ducks to control slugs in the garden. But how? How do you prevent them from eating all of your greens while their hunting for slugs? How do you get them to stay in the garden if there's somewhere they'd rather be? What about their high-nitrogen manure - how do you avoid a projectile application of duck manure to every plant in the garden? Ducks in the garden are a nice idea, but as we've spent more and more time with our small flock, we've begun to question how practical the idea of using them in the garden really is.

Enter The Resilient Gardener. Deppe begins her section "Ducks for Garden Pest Control" like so: "That ducks are supreme for garden pest control is widely recognized and mentioned in many books and articles. Exactly how to use the ducks and still have a garden left afterwards never quite seems to be mentioned. This section is a summary of my experience." She describes her method of using portable fencing to create temporary duck pens adjacent to the garden or even just near the garden to control slugs. With years of experimentation and careful observation under her belt, she offers the most detailed and helpful overview of ducks in the garden that I've ever seen.

Deppe's basic premise is that we need to garden not just as a hobby but as a way of life, and as a way to prepare for hard times. She points out that many gardeners (and garden blogs and garden writers, I might add) are focused on expensive inputs, equipment, and gadgets and what I would call "glamour crops" rather than learning to grow basic, everyday food to support themselves and their communities.

She puts it this way: "Traditionally, gardeners have played a major role in sustaining themselves, their families, and their communities through hard times of many kinds. Would you be able to do likewise?"

After investigating that question herself for many years, Carol Deppe has a wealth of highly-detailed and practical information to share. From growing your own feed for chickens and ducks to soil fertility and seed-saving, The Resiliant Gardener is packed with useful information. I know I will be referring back to this book for years to come.

I also appreciate Deppe's perspective as a gluten-free gardener and her insight as a plant breeder - she manages to weave these aspects of herself into her book in a way that seems to make perfect sense. She thinks of special dietary needs, for instance, as a personal variation of "hard times" - and continually returns to the framework of preparing for hard times. She mentions climate change, peak oil, natural disasters, and economic instability, but doesn't dwell on the catastrophic possibilities.

Instead, she places her faith in gardeners:

"I believe that the potential role of gardeners...is more important today than ever before. In times past, a large portion of the population knew how to grow and preserve food and could survive on what they could grow and preserve. In the United States today, only about 2 percent of the population farms, and they farm largely in ways that are totally dependent upon imported oil and gas, electricity, irrigation, roads, national and international markets, and an intact financial and social infrastructure. In many kinds of mega-hard times, those farms would not be functional, and the knowledge of how to farm in those ways would be useless. In...the future, what food we have may be the result of the knowledge and skills of gardeners. I challenge all gardeners to fully accept their role as a source of resilience for their communities in mega-hard times, and to play and adventure in good times so as to develop the kinds of knowledge and skills that would most matter."

You can visit Carol Deppe's website for more....I just signed up for her newsletter and am looking forward to following her further adventures in resilient gardening.

A Nation of Farmers

Sharon Astyk & Aaron Newton

A related book that's been on my bedside table for about a year is A Nation of Farmers. I've been dipping into A Nation here and there over the months, but got inspired to get serious and really read it when my friends on the staff and board of the Organic Growers School started buzzing about it.

My friend Ruth Gonzalez wrote a great piece on A Nation of Farmers for the Organic Growers School e-newsletter recently with some fabulous old-timely photographs of front-yard farmers. I'll keep it brief here and refer you to Ruth's more in-depth article.

A Nation of Farmers proclaims itself "a call for more participation in the food system" and draws a clear distinction between "farming" as it is mostly practiced today and the kind of farming that the authors believe can transform our food system and thereby "stop the harm industrial agriculture is doing."

Astyk and Newton envision a food system made up of small-scale polyculture, with millions of small farms, homesteads, and gardens raising both animals and vegetables, providing for community needs. Calling to mind the image of a farmer that most children have, they point out: "What you dreamed of, if you were anything like most children, is the kind of small, mixed farm that hardly exists anymore. It would have some animals, a big garden, pasture, orchard, and fields. This is the farm of children's books, the farm of stories, and 75 years ago, this was the farm of reality. But gradually, as we all grew older, such farms disappeared from the landscape." In contrast, the authors point out wryly, "you probably didn't imagine yourself debeaking chickens, building a hog manure lagoon, or riding in a giant tractor while spraying Roundup."

The premise that the authors return to again and again is that "It turns out that the old sort of farm, the one we dreamed of as children, really is the best way to feed the world. Small-scale polyculture that mixes animals and multiple plant crops together is vastly more productive that industrial row crops."

In a way I see Deppe's Resilient Gardener and A Nation of Farmers as espousing the same message, one that's dear to my heart: gardeners can save the world. The line between a small farm and a big garden is a fine one, and I believe that Deppe's "gardeners" and Astyk and Newton's "farmers" are the same people - those of us growing food on a small scale for ourselves and our communities all over the world.

Nation is more about the politics -- the why-- while Resilient is more about the how. I recommend them both as good companions to one another.

Meat

Simon Fairlie

On the subject of small-scale polyculture farm systems that raise both animals and plants, another book that's rocked my world recently is Simon Fairlie's Meat.

Its cover, which looks like a somewhat cheesy hippie cookbook or maybe a children's book of the sort A Nation of Farmers references, belies the dense, academic nature of the book.

Fairlie's work is deeply detailed, thoughtful, and meticulously researched. He challenges some of the long-time core assumptions of the food justice and ethical eating movements and answers the question, "should we be farming animals" with a resounding "yes."

In my own transition in the past few years from vegetable grower to small-scale poultry and dairy goat keeper, seeing the ways that animals and vegetables are complimentary parts of a small farm or homestead system, I've experienced a dramatic shift in how I think about domestic animals that have been traditionally raised for food.

My experience as a producer of both vegetable and animal foods has given me a very different perspective on food, and in particular on foods from animal sources (milk, eggs, and meat). Producing vegetables, I've witnessed how animal inputs are essential to organic vegetable production, and thought about the fact that vegans eating only plant-based foods are quite possibly eating plant tissue that was fed with animal inputs (blood meal and manure, to name two). I've also killed thousands of insects as a vegetable grower, which has contributed to my shifting perspective on killing and food production. My experience producing eggs and milk has helped me understand the way that small-scale meat production is related in an essential way to sustainable dairy and egg operations.

Reading Fairlie's book was perfectly timed for me. I started reading it the week that I ate my first chicken in 22 years. After 20 years of strict vegetarianism and 2 years of adding fish back into my diet, I bought a whole, pastured, organic chicken from my friend Val's farm and ate it. I expect I'll write more on this subject soon, but suffice to say: it has been a big transition in my life back to the world of the omnivore. Simon Fairlie's respectful, careful, and thoughtful book has been a real gift in this transition. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the ethics of food.

The Small-Scale Poultry Flock

Harvey Ussery

Speaking of eggs and meat, I am thrilled in my first year of chicken-keeping to discover Harvey Ussery's amazing manual, The Small-Scale Poultry Flock.

This post is already on the extra-long side, so I won't go into great detail about this book, but suffice to say it is thorough, detailed, funny, smart, and grounded in immense respect and care for the animals that he's describing.

Ussery wastes no time in dispensing with the myth of industrial "organic" and "free-range" eggs and chicken and then gets down to the business of detailing exactly how to raise your own small flock. He covers topics I have never seen in other poultry how-to books, and like Carol Deppe, allows us to benefit from his many years of innovation, observation, and experimentation with poultry.

Not for the faint of heart or for those more on the "chickens as pets" side of the divide that runs through the chicken-keeping world, Ussery's book includes detailed (and graphic) information about butchering and processing chickens.

Returning to the theme of Fairlie's Meat, Ussery's book reminded me that we are not really being honest with ourselves if we think we can have eggs without chickens dying. Chicken lovers ordering day-old chicks from hatcheries are either contributing to male chicks being killed at the hatchery (if ordering pullets only) or will have some extra roosters to deal with down the line (if ordering "straight run" or unsexed chicks). In terms of true sustainability with farm and homestead systems, the issue of culling has to be addressed. We can either outsource it, which is what we're doing if we buy female chicks from a hatchery, or we can be responsible for it ourselves.

There's a lot more to say on this subject, a topic for another time, but for now I will leave you with a hearty recommendation of Harvey Ussery's book and the website he maintains with all sorts of interesting information, updates, and articles (The Modern Homestead).

So that's my wrap-up of my winter reading list...with a big thank-you to Ann Trigg for cultivating in me a love of the written world, and for some really great Christmas presents this year from Chelsea Green.

On the Unexpected Rewards of Falling Behind

Volunteer potato

For the past few months, I've been bitterly lamenting the fact that our garden has been neglected to the point of chaos because of goats, plant sales, and off-farm work. Last fall, my life was consumed by managing a political campaign. Then our amazing interns finished their summer garden commitment, decreasing the garden labor available substantially. And it's only gotten worse since then.

In the Spring, our business selling heirloom plant starts exploded, and we grew and sold thousands of seedlings to gardeners in Asheville, Hendersonville, and Black Mountain. Plus our goat herd expanded (and will continue to, as pregnant goat bellies swell). All of this farm business was wonderful, but was only possible at the expense of our own garden.

By the first of June, the garden was totally out of control. Weeds were as tall as me in some places, and thick. We had a dense cover crop of ragweed and poke. We were planting annual vegetables at least a month later than usual--in some cases two months later than we had intended. As two Virgo first child overacheivers, and as a household that relies on the garden for all of our fresh produce and much of our food year round, we were getting pretty depressed about the whole situation.

The last of last year's mixed heirloom dry beans

I kept reminding myself of something that a friend said to me in the past few years along the lines of "Everyone's always in such a hurry to get their plants in the ground in the Spring, but it's really no rush - we have such a long growing season here, and there's plenty of time."

Dry beans and winter squash that need 100 days to maturity still have plenty of time before first frosts here, even being planted in early July. Which is a good thing since I just planted the last beans and squash today. Of course the pests get worse and worse the later in the summer it gets, but c'est la vie.

So now to the part about unexpected rewards. Last fall during campaign season, which was also goat barn-building season, we did a thing that we tell the students in our gardening classes never to do. We left almost all of our permanent raised beds exposed - no cover crops, no mulch, nothing but whatever was left of the straw mulch from last season. The only exceptions were the beds we planted with fava beans and garlic in the fall for spring harvest.

I was cursing our negligence as I pulled 5-foot tall Queen Anne's lace and dock from the beds to clear them for my ultra-late bean and squash planting. Until I realized this: we had a whole unexpected crop of volunteer potatoes. Pulling weeds was like hitting the potato jackpot in those ten or so beds. Each 40-foot bed that we weeded yielded about 15 pounds of potatoes. (yesterday's haul from weeding two beds pictured above).

And: there is nothing like volunteer potatoes to aerate a raised bed. The soil was so loose and ready for planting by the time the potatoes were all dug out that we were able to skip the broadforking that's usually part of our no-till bed prep regimen. All and all, it worked out pretty well.

I'm not saying that I ever want to do it again (fight an epic battle with weeds and still be planting beans in July) but I am saying that it's a really good lesson for me that sometimes there are unexpected rewards for not doing things according to plan. Last night we dined on potatoes au gratin made with new potatoes from yesterday's harvest and fresh raw goat milk. Even when things don't work out as planned, sometimes they really work out.

Green Tomato Ginger Marmalade

In my ongoing quest to not waste food from the garden, I have been processing my way through pounds and pounds of green tomatoes picked before the first hard frost. I've been chopping and cooking and canning up a storm over the past week, and suffice to say that if you receive a holiday gift from me this year, it will probably involve green tomatoes.

My first experiment was a couple of huge pots of green tomato apple chutney yielding 38 half pint jars of sweet-sour chutney deliciousness. Next up: marmalade. Marmalade?! Yes, marmalade. In the search for creative green tomato uses, I came across this one and had to try it. And it turns out it's amazing.

This recipe is modified from one I found in Marilyn Kluger's classic food-preservation reference and recipe book, "Preserving Summer's Bounty", which is an indispensable resource in my kitchen. I added the ginger and some notes about how to process the lemons.

Green Tomato Ginger Marmalade

• 6 pounds unpeeled green tomatoes
• 6 lemons
• 1 cup water
• 6 cups honey
• A generous handful of coarsely chopped crystalized (candied) ginger
• 1 tsp powdered ginger

1. Wash and chop the tomatoes. I used a food processor.
2. Slice 6 lemons into thin slices, removing seeds and retaining as much of the peel as you want, depending on how bitter you like your marmalade
3. Boil the lemons in the 1 cup water. Strain off any unwanted peels and seeds that you may have missed and keep the water, lemon pulp, and as many ribbons of peel as you want to retain (they're beautiful floating in the finished product)
4. Stir the lemony water, honey, tomatoes, and powdered ginger together. Cook slowly, stirring constantly until the mixture is thick and clear. This takes a long time. I kept the marmalade on a low simmer for several hours, stirring every so often, and it reduced considerably and became more and more marmalade-like as it cooked.
5. Add the candied ginger and cook for a few more minutes.
6. Pour hot marmalade into jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space, adjust lids, and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

What an unexpected and fabulous coping strategy for green tomato overload. So good I could eat it with a spoon (and have). The perfectly melded flavors of honey, lemon peel, and tart green tomatoes are a delight, and the ginger gives it an extra snap.

I still have five bushel baskets full of green tomatoes to process, even with all of the marmalade jarred up and cooling on the counter and enough chutney for years to come. So, dear reader, expect more green tomato recipes coming up!

Pausing for Gratitude

This time of year, marked with harvest festivals in many earth-based cultures, is a time to pause from the garden frenzy, take stock, enjoy the fruits of our labor, and be grateful. In the ancient Celtic calendar, one of the four major festivals of the year was observed at the beginning of August, called Lá Lúnasa, Lughnasadh, or Lammas, which was in that part of the world at that time the beginning of the main harvest season.

In years past, we have celebrated this time of year with fanfare; this year Lúnasa came and went without any vegetables being launched down the Swannanoa river or harvest altars being constructed, but I have been taking time to pause and give thanks for the garden this week.

I spent some time this week in the garden taking photos and feeling immense gratitude for all of the labor that created this bounty, and for the Earth's incredible abundance.

Here are a few shots from the past week in the garden and at market. Happy harvest!

Zinnias and Purslane

Black

Swallow-

tail

Moon & Stars Water-

melon

Cherokee Trail of Tears Black Beans

Edamame

Bush beans, edamame, and lots and lots of pole beans

Depp's Pink Firefly tomato - a gorgeous and delicious Appalachian heirloom that has been a heavy producer for us this year.

Tomato jungle in the hoophouse...

Cucumbers and Globe Amaranth

Sweet potatoes, squash, and pole beans

Edamame surrounded by pole beans

Cardoon flowering

Magenta spreen lambsquarters

Love-Lies-Bleeding and Autumn Joy Sedum

Moonflower climbing

Our tomatoes for sale at the West Asheville Tailgate Market

Italian heirloom frying peppers at market

Cherry tomatoes at market. We are growing the varieties White Currant, Peacevine, Sungold, and Black Cherry.

More tomatoes! Two of my all-time favorite slicers. The green-ripening Emerald Evergreen and the beautiful Flame/ Hillbilly.

Orange Banana, Pearly Pink, and Cream Sausage tomatoes

Cherry tomatoes, sunflowers, and zinnias in the garden...plus some found- object garden art!

June in the Garden

Elecampane in bloom

Summer Squash gets its groove on

Cucumbers and Globe Amaranth

Bee Balm and Wild Mint with Honeybee!

Echinacea tennesseensis and pennyroyal

Balloon flower - a Chinese medicinal flower with edible roots.

Tomatoes ripening

Cardoon about to bloom

Edamame.

Black Futsu squash with pole beans

Medicine garden.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans.

So long, Spring, we hardly knew you

An unusually cold winter followed by an unseasonably hot spring has made for a strange start to the warm-weather gardening season.

Temperatures have been holding steady in the high-80s to low-90s for a couple of weeks now, and there is no end in sight--very unusual for western North Carolina. We're all a bit peaked and many plants that usually bloom all summer (foxglove, valerian) are fried.

Summer Solstice was on Monday, and yesterday I took most of the spring peas off of their trellises (one of many wheelbarrow-fulls pictured above) to allow the cucumbers to bust a move. It felt like a fitting garden transition for Solstice time.

It's summer for sure now. Squash. Cucumbers. Green tomatoes and peppers on the vine. Wilting, bitter lettuce. Browning peas. Blown-out arugula and mustard all gone to seed.

I'm learning how not to hang on too tightly to the things in the garden that have slowed their production or passed their peak. It's such a straightforward lesson from the garden, one that lends itself so easily to allegory: the things we can't let go of start to taste bitter and feel tough in our mouths. Time to sweep out the old and allow room for what's next. In this case: cucumbers.

Kind Words and Pretty Pictures

My friend Dana put up some beautiful photos of our place this Spring (including this one at left) and some very kind words about our homestead on her absolutely delightful blog, "Dana-Dee," which I regularly read aloud to Christopher in the evening.

Ms. Dana Dee has an incredible eye for beauty, a fabulous way with words, and all kinds of useful and unusual skills (hide tanning and bird taxidermy and choreographing dance routines to be performed in unexpected public places all come to mind). She is an excellent cook, a knowledgeable herbalist, a gifted gardener, and a general all-round star. Tender-hearted and whip-smart and goofy as all get out, she is one of the funniest people I know and a very fine singer and dancer.

Here's the link to Dana's sweet-as-pie post about our place with lots of gorgeous pictures of little details. I sure am grateful to Dana and to Ashley at Small Measure for their words and for taking the time to capturing images and impressions of this place, especially since I've been neglecting my documentarian duties since in the frenzy of garden work and general Spring madness.

I so much appreciate the perspective I gain when friends and family visit -- their presence reminds me to pull my head up out of the weeds and seeds and look around at this beautiful place that I am so lucky and grateful to call home.

Bustling

I have been spending as little time as possible inside these days, hence the lapse in posting.

Thanks to Ashley over at Small Measure for picking up my slack and documenting some of the happenings here at Red Wing Farm! It's such a complement to see glimpses of our little homestead featured on Ashley's lovely collection of writings on "homemade living."

Pictured above: Blauwschokkers - Dutch Blue-Podded Peas. Seeds available from Seed Savers Exchange and Local Harvest.

The garden is lush, with something new bursting into bloom or shooting out of the ground every day. Some early spring vegetables are already past their peak (winter greens) and others (peas!) are coming on strong.

And we've entered the period of what I think of as "vegetable ephemerals" -- those special treats that are only available for a short window of time. Garlic scapes. Fresh fava beans. Sugar snap peas. And soon, since the first potato flowers appeared yesterday, there will be new potatoes.

Lettuce and borage.

Sugar Snap Peas.

Celery, purple onions, mustards, arugula.

It's also an exquisite time of year for the medicinal and culinary herbs and perennial flowering plants, which are in full leaf by now with many starting to flower. The medicine garden is bursting with blooms: valerian, foxglove, chamomile, feverfew, thyme, yarrow, meadow arnica, rue, columbine, Chinese red sage, skullcap, peonies, lavender, rosa rugosa, motherwort, and love-in-a-mist.

Rue, meadow arnica, and elecampane.

Feverfew and chamomile.

Skullcap.

Chaste Tree and Love-in-a-mist.

Foxglove.

May has just bustled right along with tailgate markets, teaching gardening classes, farm interns moving into their quarters and starting work, and lots and lots of planting.

I look forward to more time for writing and documenting things once the spring rush is past. Perhaps this is a fantasy since my day job is ratcheting up as political campaign season gets underway. I always feel like there is a slower time in my life just around the corner, but it rarely works out that way.

This evening will be a nice respite, though: our intern Nicole is "coming over" (walking down from the schoolbus camper) for a dinner of risotto with homegrown fava beans and garlic scapes, wild lambsquarters, and homemade hibiscus mead. Mmmmm, spring!

Looking into the garden...

Volunteer magenta spreen lambs- quarters