Category: Kitchen Garden

Gardening, Farming, Cooking, Recipes, Local Food, Everything that goes into meal production.

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Talk about Frost

Backyard Apples
Backyard Apples

LAKE MACBRIDE— We are from a week to ten days from the first hard frost. Suddenly it’s time to clear the garden, make a brush pile, and cover the ground with what mulch there is. We’ll make a gleaning pass over the plots, and bring in everything that is ripe or can ripen to use this fall and winter. Cookery gradually turns from fresh and local to working out of the pantry and stores. There is a happy and sad part of the change in seasons.

The happy part is found in being born a city person. Working indoors part of the year comes naturally. As a child of the 1950s, reading, media consumption, writing, email, and social media fit in with a general outlook of being on an island in a complex sea of society. More than 60 years later, after a career in a competitive business, my core values are unshakable. They are a platform from which I can view society and plunge in when the time is right to engage in fights worth our blood and treasure.

The sad part is over the years, in our compound on the lake, I have become an outdoors person, and spring through fall is the best part of the year. That was particularly true this year when farm and yard work kept me outside much of the time. The outdoors part of the year is not finished, yet winter’s approach is unmistakable. Its time to roll up the garden hose in the garage and make sure the automobiles are winterized.

The season’s home canning is almost finished with 18 pints of “fallen apple butter.” After the recent storm, I picked up the fallen fruit (three types of apples and some pears missed during the harvest) and made them into a commemorative apple and pear butter. The only thing remaining to can will be some hot sauce with fall peppers (on the stove now), applesauce and perhaps some more canned tomatoes or a garden ends relish after the gleaning. Come November, it will be another plunge into the vortex of the holiday season, then starting anew in 2014.

The seasonal farm work is also winding down. I am finished at one farm, wrapping up at another on Thursday, and the work at the orchard ends after two more weekends. The time is right to consider what’s next in the cycle of life on earth.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

The Corn Harvest has Begun

`Setting Sun
Setting Sun

LAKE MACBRIDE— Combines are in the field, just beginning the corn harvest. There are a lot of brown corn plants standing in the field… another sign that winter is coming. The Farm Journal reported that 11 days ago, so this is not news. It is just that to read something in the media is one thing, and to see life actually unfolding is quite another.

There is a lot to write about from the farm, and then again, there isn’t. Working on a vegetable farm has been a rich experience. It has been a month since I began working most weekdays, and it is physically and mentally rewarding work. There is an endless succession of visitors and workers to the farm, and always something going on in the neighborhood. On Thursdays I deliver directly to our customers in North Liberty. When we talk about farm to market, there is no middleman and they see the face of the farmer as it is with soil from the field stuck to my clothes.

Last night I dreamed about where we spent my preschool years. The Clifton Hill area of Davenport has not changed much since the early 1950s when our family lived there. It is a scrappy neighborhood where people don’t spend a lot on education, and spend more disposable income on tobacco products than anything according to one survey. The crime rate is high compared to the national average, with rape and assault being the most frequent. On the plus side, the number of murders scores below the national average.

Clifton Hills is a blue collar neighborhood, but since the time we lived there, the blue collar jobs fled the Quad Cities, and 65 percent of those employed are now white collar workers. It is past time when the type of work is designated by the color of shirt a worker wears, as it is a meaningless appellation.

The home where I grew up sold for $58,000 in 2010 according to the assessor’s office. Visually, it hasn’t changed much, and in dreams and memories my recollections of life there are clear. Why I would remember last night’s dream of the old neighborhood, when my life is so different, is hard to understand. Nor is it important to remember. I accept the origins of my life in society. It’s just another thing in the cycles of time. Not unlike the corn harvest, it comes on schedule when conditions are right.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Pick a Peck of Peppers

Hot Peppers
Hot Peppers

RURAL CEDAR TOWNSHIP— Part of Thursday’s work was to harvest the hot pepper row at the CSA. We have Anaheim, which is not really hot, Hungarian wax peppers, jalapeno and Serrano. The peppers looked very nice, and the work prepared me to discuss them with customers at the drop site later that afternoon. I am ahead of myself.

The day started by picking kale, as it does on delivery days after the plants mature. The customers like kale, especially young children who anticipate it will be turned into baked kale chips for snack. For every leaf put in the cooler, two are discarded in the field, so there is a lot of marginal quality kale that returns to compost.

On a vegetable farm, there is a lot of marginal food generally: not quite good enough for customers, yet still a fresh and delicious food ingredient. Some is offered as seconds to customers, the farm workers take some home, and some returns to compost. This year I am experimenting with a bartering business of processing labor traded for a share of marginal food. A crate of peppers with bad spots becomes cut pieces in bags to be frozen. This operation included broccoli, tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers and eggplant, resulting in a more than adequate household supply for the coming winter.

I harvested eggplant after the kale and before the hot peppers. There is a lot in the field. Eggplant is a global favorite vegetable, but in Iowa a person can only eat so much of it. We offer half a dozen varieties of eggplant, and customers take it with their share. The eggplant from my weekly share was aging, so upon returning home, I baked off half of it and removed the flesh to make babaganoush, some for now, and some to freeze for later.

While I was working, others were bagging potatoes, picking lettuce in the high tunnel, harvesting tomatoes, collecting herbs, counting onions, preparing garlic and doing all that is required to get the Thursday deliveries out to customers. It’s a day in the life of a community supported agriculture project.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Letter to the Solon Economist

To the editor,

National Farm Bureau’s spokesman Mace Thornton was recently quoted by David Biello in Slate Magazine, “we’re not convinced that the climate change we’re seeing is anthropogenic in origin. We don’t think the science is there to show that in a convincing way.”

That a large national organization with strong Iowa roots would assert such a thing is ridiculous.

First of all, farmers experience the effects of changing climate directly. If they do not connect the dots between the increasing use of fossil fuels and the warming planet, it is the talk of bureaucrats and paid analysis not grounded in the science of the greenhouse effect and its relationship to climate.

Secondly, whether farmers are convinced that climate change is anthropogenic (i.e. caused in part by human activity), has become increasingly irrelevant. The USDA has already begun to incorporate climate change in its projections and outreach. According to Biello, “many American farmers— even those who would question whether climate change is man-made— are already doing exactly what efforts to combat climate change would require: precision agriculture to cut back on fossil fuel use, low or no-till farming, cover crops, biodigesters for animal waste, and the like.”

Climate change is real, and it’s happening now. If you would like to hear more about the science of climate change and what you can do to help remediate its causes, please attend a public meeting with me and Senator Rob Hogg on Monday, Sept. 30 at 6:30 p.m. at the Solon Public Library. All are welcome.

Footnote: Slate Magazine, July 16, 2013, Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? by David Biello. Link to article here.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Work Life

Rain and the High Tunnel

Western Sky at Sunrise
Western Sky at Sunrise

LAKE MACBRIDE— After arriving at the farm, I took this photo and headed to the high tunnel to plant lettuce. The western sky was illuminated by the sun, a harbinger of rain, which came, along with lightning and thunder, within the hour. I continued planting while the drops pattered against the heavy gauge plastic and nature’s light show played in the distance. We need rain, but not much fell. There are only three more weeks in the CSA and already we are preparing the farm for winter.

Part of the work was setting up irrigation in the high tunnel, repairing the drip line where it leaked and making sure it aligned closely to the rows of newly planted seedlings. It is more time consuming than one would think. When people depend on a vegetable crop, there is no choice but to irrigate when drought comes. It is difficult to budget for the extra labor of irrigation— one more uncertainty in the life of a farmer.

Using a margin trowel, I dug five or six holes in a row and then planted seedlings, covering each over the top of the soil block. By the end of the day, my shoulder was sore, so one flat remained from the job— perhaps tomorrow on that one.

There was a sense of connection today. Not only to the cycle of planting and harvest, but to everyone else. While I may have been alone, the presence of everyone I have known was with me. It’s hard to explain, but being protected from the storm in the high tunnel was part of it as I labored in the field of an indeterminate future— hopefully one with lettuce.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Waning Days of Harvest

Foxtail and Compost
Foxtail and Compost

LAKE MACBRIDE— The abundance of this year’s local food system has been remarkable. The more than adequate spring rain, combined with a late growing season, had everything producing, including the author. The term “local food system,” in this context, means how an individual home cook acquires and produces food for the table.

This year, our food was mostly organic, and if we grew celery,  lemons and limes here, we would have little reason to visit the produce aisle at the grocery store, except to compare our produce with theirs.

But the season is ending. Talk turns to cover crops and preparing the fields for winter. Gleaning will begin soon, plot by plot, uprooting the plants and taking the last bits of produce. The gleaning process wrecks the garden, making way for a fall turning of the soil. Seldom have I gotten the garden plots turned before winter arrives. Maybe this year, but I doubt it.

The red delicious apples are ripening, not ready yet, but soon. And so begins the vortex into fall’s final push into winter. Working four part time jobs has been a grind from multiple perspectives, not the least of which has been the wearying effect on my bones and muscles. Four more weeks at the orchard, maybe a job or two at one CSA, and work into October at the other. The four to five hours per week at the newspaper is the only constant: I complete two years there in October.

Whatever the challenges of this life, they are much better than the office work I did for so many years. The sense of creation, and contribution is tangible, even if the pay isn’t adequate to live. There is more work to do before this harvest is closed. I relish its opportunity and the life it engenders.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Then Rain Came

Carmen
Carmen

LAKE MACBRIDE— A co-worker and I were talking about the weather on the farm. For city-folk readers, people who work in agriculture do that a lot. I asked her, “when was the last rain?” Without hesitation, she answered, “in July.” And except for a couple of sprinkles, last night’s rain was the first since then. It was luxuriant.

My job at the orchard is related to the u-pick operation, and the rain meant customer activity would be suppressed after a very busy Saturday of temperatures in the 70s and clear skies. No orchard work for me today, so, to the grocery store to pick up some necessities and soon I’ll be at work in the kitchen preserving food.

There is a lot of food to work on. The first crop of apples is ready to be used today or never, so that will happen. It will either be juice or apple butter. Not sure yet. The pears are also in, so I’ll use 4-5 pounds to make a batch of pear butter while the rest ripen.

I have half a gallon of Concord grapes, from which I will make jelly.

From the aging hot and bell peppers, I’ll make pepper sauce with onion, tomato and garlic. Anything tomato-y or onion-y will get added to the pot. It is a variation on my traditional hot sauce mix, and designed to use up produce in the refrigerator. This will be run through the food mill and processed in pint jars.

Tomatoes are everywhere in the kitchen and garden. Some will be canned, some cooked into a batch of chili, and not sure what else. The vines are really producing this year, in my garden and at other local food sources.

So with this tentative plan in place, off to the kitchen and the work of sustaining a life on the Iowa prairie.

Update: 9:19 p.m. The stove was on most of the day, and I made chili and fruit salad for dinner, seven pints of pear butter, three pints of concord grape jelly, two pints of diced tomatoes, and six quarts, one pint and one half pint of hot pepper sauce. Did two loads of dishes and cleaned all the pots and pans before retiring to bed.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Writing

Water and a Farm Worker’s Dinner

Farm Worker's Dinner
Farm Worker’s Dinner

LAKE MACBRIDE— Hydration is important while working in the field, and water is the preferred beverage. Water drawn from the well at one of the hydrants on the property. What else would it be?

Once in a while, I stop at a convenience store in town, and buy a plastic bottle of sweetened soft drink. It’s a very expensive treat. I drank so many this year that two bags of empties accumulated to drop at a local octogenarian’s garage where they are process for the bottle deposits and donated to a local non-profit organization. I’d rather stick to water for a lot of reasons.

Why would first lady Michelle Obama catch flak for saying, “water is so basic, and because it is so plentiful, sometimes we just forget about it amid all the ads we watch on television and all the messages we receive every day about what to eat and drink. The truth is, water just gets drowned out?” Drinking more water, instead of sugary drinks, is something we just do on the farm, albeit things are different in the city, where most people live.

When I got home from deliveries for the local CSA, I made a farm worker’s dinner of caramelized onions and peppers, potatoes with rosemary and garlic and scrambled eggs. For beverage, a glass of chilled tap water, without prompting. It’s just the best thing to drink.

Categories
Kitchen Garden Social Commentary

At the Farm Bureau Annual Meeting

Resolutions
Resolutions

NORTH LIBERTY— Craig Hill, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation president, spoke last night at the annual Johnson County Farm Bureau meeting. What he said was surprising. He acknowledged that the lack of adequate regulation of air and water quality in China was problematic if people wanted to breathe and drink clean water. Specifically, he pointed to the pollution of coal-fired power plants in and around major population centers. He also commented on the poor water quality. He didn’t go so far as to say more regulation was needed, but for him to acknowledge these problems with this audience of anti-EPA folks seemed remarkable to me. One can only ignore the pollution of our air and water for so long, until action eventually will be required. If he didn’t say it that way, it was only a matter of degrees of separation of our positions.

The annual meeting is the only place I go where we take time to hear introductions of an organization’s insurance sales staff. They all seem nice, and competent, but seriously, there is only so much time and so much to do, why this? The answer is that my health insurance premiums through the Iowa Farm Bureau are the single biggest household expense we have. It is important to tune into what the organization is doing at least once a year. There is also a free meal, which is distinctive in its roots on Iowa farms. Too, as the years add up, I am getting to know more people who attend this event. Attending the annual Johnson County Farm Bureau meeting has become a part of living in rural Iowa.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

Climate Changed Locally

Seedlings
Seedlings

RURAL CEDAR TOWNSHIP— A co-worker was asked when the last rain fell. The answer was July. In a community supported agriculture project, there is no option other than to irrigate when drought comes, and that means a series of hydrants spread throughout the farm, and frequent draws on the underground reservoirs. So far, there has been enough water.

In the list of 2014 legislative priorities recently sent to our state representative, I wrote the following paragraph,

Once again Iowa was short on rainfall, especially the last 6-8 weeks. If the dry weather and drought continues, there will be pressure to irrigate row crops in a place where traditionally we have had enough rainfall to do without. In late July, I traveled to Chicago and along Interstate 88 they are already irrigating corn. Water use will be a key issue for Iowa going forward, and if irrigation of Iowa corn and beans starts, I’m not sure how management would be structured, but more attention to water use would be needed. The legislature should play a role, in evaluating the science, and taking appropriate preventive action. Evaluating the science doesn’t mean just calling the folks at Farm Bureau, asking for an opinionaire from their members.

That there is a connection between human activity, climate change and the current drought can be a matter of some discussion in Iowa. For the most part, industrial agricultural producers see the climate changing, but do not attribute it to anthropogenic origins. It is just another thing to deal with while farming. Those of us more familiar with the science of climate change see the direct connection. The two positions haven’t yet been reconciled.

June 2013 was the 340th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. 2012 was the 36th consecutive year with a global temperature above the 20th century average. On a local level, here in Cedar Township, this translates into wanting rain and wondering what would happen if the well runs dry. The answer to that question, is farmers may give up, especially small scale local producers like the one where I work.

There is a connection between the global climate crisis and extreme weather events like this year’s drought. As global CO2 levels have increased above 400 parts per million, global temperatures rose in tandem. As temperatures increase, the atmosphere can hold more water vapor. This makes rainfall and flooding more frequent and intense like spring 2013 was in our area.

The effect of global warming, and the hydrological cycle’s absorption of water vapor, also creates longer intervals between rainfalls, making droughts even worse. Because of the atmosphere’s increased capacity for hold water vapor, the land can become parched without irrigation.

People who live from the land, have to do something, and in Iowa we have relied upon abundant rainfall to grow crops without irrigation. As climate changes, that means considering how to make the land productive absent the conditions that led us to be what we are. It requires us to to adapt to the changing climate, and take action to mitigate the causes of this year’s flooding and drought. Before we begin large scale irrigation, Iowa should consider the consequences of increased water usage.

Locally, the climate changed, when we least needed or expected it. There is little to do now, other than adapt and mitigate the human causes of climate change.