Snow fell in darkness leaving a thin blanket of white.
The pin oak tree began shedding last year’s foliage indicating warm weather activated new leaf buds and pushed out the old.
Seems weird to rake leaves in February. More to the point, it’s not normal.
In a couple of hours I return for a fifth season at Local Harvest CSA. The main spring task is soil blocking 72 and 120 cell trays for seed starting in the germination house. Part of my arrangement is keeping some of my own seedlings there. When I’m finished with the farm’s trays, I’ll make one 72 and one 120 tray for myself and seed them with kale, celery and basil. I’m hopeful they will do better than in the south-facing window in our bedroom. Getting my hands dirty with soil is a great way to get ready for spring, three weeks away by the calendar.
Other chores on my white board include doing taxes, computer file backup, cleaning the car, preparing the garden for spring and Belgian lettuce planting this week (traditionally March 2). I made extra servings of spaghetti with tomato sauce for lunches and want to make a batch of taco filling for breakfast on work days at the home, farm and auto supply store. There’s also more writing projects.
During a Climate Reality Project conference call on Thursday, a friend from Waterloo and I decided to work on a project with other friends from Waterloo-Cedar Falls. I’ve done two presentations there and look forward to more meaningful work. We’re planning luncheon, maybe next weekend.
This last lap in the workingman’s race looks to be action packed with local food, environmental and cash producing projects coming into focus.
Night’s snowfall melting in the sun makes way for budding plants in a grey and brown landscape. It is almost time to wipe the whiteboard clean and begin anew.
From: Paul Deaton
Sent: Sunday, Dec. 2, 2012 10:14 AM
To: Farmer Kate
Subject: Processing and other ideas
Kate:
Thanks for the kale and spinach. We had both for dinner last night, and now I have a whole refrigerator drawer full of kale, ready to make something. Very yummy, with the prospect of more yummy-ness.
It was curious that you brought up the food processing idea yesterday, as I had recently been thinking of something along those lines. I think a question you should ask is whether you want to become a food processor or stick to being a grower. The trouble most growers I know seem to have is scaling their operation to meet demand. If you focus on secondary things, like processing, it may dilute your efforts as a grower, and hold you back from getting to the peak earnings potential of your farm operation.
That is not to say you should not have an outlet for farm seconds, or do other things but run the farm, you should. But a different approach might work better for you and your limited staff.
Waste not, want not is John Wesley’s old adage. If you are not getting full yield out of the results your work, look for ways to off load part of it.
First, sell the second harvest (seconds and excess) outright, not worrying about what happens to it. Before we talked, I had been thinking about working out a deal with you and others to buy excess and seconds of produce wholesale. Partly I would stock my own pantry, but if there were a commercialization opportunity, the risk and time of developing it wouldn’t land on your shoulders. The problem of what to do with excess and seconds of tomatoes, peppers and onions, etc. by processing them has been solved repeatedly by others and there is significant commercial competition. As a grower, your income may be affected by that market, but how much direct exposure do you want before the idea is tested? My thought is to find wholesale buyers of your seconds and excess.
Second, find people to collaborate with you on things. The example you gave of someone canning tomatoes and paying you in kind was one idea you brought up. I like the idea, but don’t see how that could be scalable. If anyone ever calculates the work involved in home processing, particularly cost of labor, commercialization of this process seems unlikely, especially in light of commercial organic processors. At the same time, what is the value of this work to people who take part in the cooperative? My recommendation would be to pick a few collaborative projects to try each growing season. For example, if you find a great sauerkraut recipe, you might try commercializing that. Team up with someone who is willing to share the risk, plant some extra cabbage, and do it for one season. See how it goes. Have three or four of these projects during the 2013 growing season.
Third, people like the farm atmosphere. Look at Wilson’s Orchard and their apple turnovers. When people come out for the harvest, develop a “harvest season” event or series of events, and center it around a specific culinary or harvest theme. This may be complicated because of your proximity to Celebration Barn, with its limited number of annual events permitted there, but it is worth pursuing. Again, if you would do something like this, collaborate with someone else who can do the bulk of the work related to such an event. If you did it once and generated several thousand in revenue, would that be worth it?
Anyway, you didn’t ask for any of this, but I hope you find the ideas useful. I am going to do something to earn a living wage in 2013, so if you see opportunities for us to work together, please keep me in mind.
Temperatures are forecast in the single digits and low teens all weekend — fit weather for beginning the year.
My planned tasks include taking down holiday decorations and meeting with my friend Carmen to discuss a role at her community supported agriculture project this season.
I have a pile to take to our meeting: two seed catalogues and the Practical Farmers of Iowa convention booklet. This will be a year to barter labor for produce.
The year’s primary dynamic will be to conserve expenses and seek alternative ways to generate income. Beginning in 2012 I became more active in the local food movement. I determined that unless I devote more time to producing and marketing local food, it would be difficult to make a living in it.
That said, I hope to maximize production in my garden this year and use weekends to sell extra produce at the town’s farmers market. I had the same idea last year but didn’t get it done. It’s a good idea — turning vegetables and fruit into funds — one I want to put into practice as a sustaining way to generate enough money to pay my garden expenses as a starting point, and pay part of my retirement as an end goal.
If I can get to work this weekend, building a blueprint for this next chapter of my life will become easier.
In this final 2016 post it was easier than last year to outline my writing plans.
The work I do to pay bills and support my writing has been tough mentally and physically. To cope with an aging frame and occasionally distracted mind I have had to focus. That meant planning, and then with discipline, working the plan. 2016 was a mixed bag and I expect to do better in 2017.
I seldom post about my personal life and family — at least directly. That leaves issues I confront every day as grist for the keyboard.
There are four broad, intersecting topics about which I’ll write during the coming year.
Low Wage Work and Working Poor
Not only do I earn low wages in all of my jobs, I meet a lot of people who do too. During the last four years I developed a framework for viewing how people sustain their lives without a big job or high salary. A focus on raising the minimum wage, wage theft or immigration status may be timely but most of what I read misses the mark. Stories fail to recognize the complexity with which low wage workers piece together a life. This subject needs more exposition and readers can expect it here.
Food Cultivation, Processing and Cooking
Living on low wages includes knowledge of how to grow, process and prepare some of our own food. My frequent posts on this topic have been intended to tell a story about how the work gets done. I plan to grow another big garden in 2017 and perform the same seasonal farm work. I sent off a membership form to Practical Farmers of Iowa this morning and expect my experience with that group to contribute to food related writing.
Nuclear Abolition
I renewed my membership in Physicians for Social Responsibility. We have a global footprint and as a member I have access to almost everything going on world-wide to abolish one of the gravest threats to human life. The president elect made some startling statements about nuclear weapons this month. The subject should hold interest and perhaps offer an opportunity to get something done toward abolition. The United Nations voted to work toward a new treaty to abolish nuclear weapons. They did so without the support of the United States or any of the other nuclear armed states. In that tension alone there should be a number of posts.
Global Warming and Climate Change
My framework has been membership in the Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Like with Physicians for Social Responsibility we have a global footprint with thousands of Climate Leaders. We have access to the latest information about climate change and its solutions. The key dynamic, however, is how work toward accepting the reality of climate change occurs on a local level. What researchers are finding is skepticism about the science of climate change originates in the personal experience of people where they live. If the weather is very hot and dry they tend to believe in climate change. If it is cold, they tend not to believe. Thing is, climate change and human contributions to it are not a belief system as much as they are facts. Global warming and climate change already affect us whether we believe or doubt.
So that’s the plan. While you are here, click on the tag cloud to find something else to read. I hope you will return to read more in 2017.
It’s Christmas Eve in Big Grove, the ambient temperature is about freezing, and we’re ready to bunker in, finish decorating our Christmas tree and prepare a traditional supper of chili and cornbread.
My Christmas wish is for peace on earth.
Elusive as that may have been during 2016, we can’t give up hope. Not now. Not like this.
As winter solstice brought longer days — increasing light imperceptible in each day’s cycle — it is time again to fly with eagles, gain a broader perspective, and thank people who are always in these written words if rarely mentioned — my wife Jacque, our daughter, my parents and my maternal grandmother.
Reading
I continue to read more on my phone and computer than I do full-length books. Nonetheless I managed thirteen books in 2016, the most important of which were authored by people I know: Connie Mutel and Ari Berman.
Methland by Nick Reding had the biggest influence, by a distance.
Here’s the list of books, most recent first:
Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It by Anna Lappé; My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Haran; Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding; Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America by Ari Berman; A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland by Cornelia F. Mutel; Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester; And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East by Richard Engel; Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865: A History of Human Bondage in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin by Christopher P. Lehman; The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jakob Walter; Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History by Paul Schneider; MiniFARMING: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham; and Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser.
For the fourth year I edited Blog for Iowa while Trish Nelson took a break, writing at least one post each weekday during August. My book review of Give Us the Ballot ran in The Prairie Progressive, a guest column ran in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, and I wrote two letters to the editor of the Solon Economist since the general election. I cross posted Next for Iowa Democrats on Bleeding Heartland, my first post there.
More outside publication is planned for 2017.
Working
Income from five jobs helped financially sustain us in 2016. Work at the home, farm and auto supply store provided health insurance and a regular, predictably low paycheck. In descending order of income were jobs at Wilson’s Orchard, Local Harvest CSA, Blog for Iowa and Wild Woods Farm.
Each of these jobs was good for a reason. Blog for Iowa encouraged me to write every day. Farm work helped me connect with others in the local food movement. The home, farm and auto supply store provided a venue for conversations with low-wage workers. I’ll seek additional income in 2017 and maintain relationships with each of these organizations.
The common denominator among these jobs is interaction with people. As I enter my last year of work before “full retirement,” I seek that as much as income.
Gardening
2016 was another improved year in our home garden. Among many experiments were growing root vegetables in containers (a success with carrots and daikon radishes), growing squash in the unused storage plot, and using sections of 4-inch drainage tile to protect young seedlings. Failures included bell pepper plants which succumbed to weed competition, and loss of tomato yield due to a lack of attention. The best crops included broccoli, celery, eggplant, tomatoes, Bangkok peppers, turnips, basil, sage, oregano and kale.
Ancillary activities included distribution of kale and a few other vegetables to local library workers and friends, and weekly posts about the garden on Facebook.
We raised adequate produce to serve the needs of our kitchen. I also learned a lot through collaboration with friends and neighbors.
Apples
I followed the 2016 apple season at the orchard and continued to develop our home apple culture. Our apple trees did not produce a crop this year.
The last of the 2015 crop is peeled, sliced and frozen, or turned into applesauce and apple butter. We have enough frozen apples left for a Christmas Day dessert. This year’s orchard apples were mostly eaten fresh.
I made more apple cider vinegar. The process was simple: I added Jack’s heritage mother of vinegar to apple cider from the orchard in half-gallon ventilated jars and waited. This year I added an eighth-teaspoon of brewers yeast to each container at the beginning. The benefit was hastened alcohol production and a superior final product. I also learned that a cooler temperature slows alcohol production and this can produce a better result. Today there are two gallons of apple cider vinegar in the pantry and another gallon and a half in production.
Politics
The general election did not produce the result many people, including me, wanted.
At the same time, a lot of acquaintances seek to become active and “do something” during a Trump administration. There is plenty of work to resist the expected rollback of what we value in society. Specifically, work toward protecting the environment, reducing the number of nuclear weapons, and ensuring social justice.
My term as a township trustee ends Dec. 31, so regarding politics, I can be an unencumbered agent of change. The next step is to leverage the opportunity the general election brought with it.
Retirement
The time since my July 2009 retirement from CRST Logistics can be divided into clearly defined phases. First came a period of social activism characterized by work with community organizations. It lasted until the end of 2011. Next was the political year 2012. After that, life found me working low-wage jobs to support my writing. That’s where I am today. In 2016 came a realization that in order to spend more time writing, I have to get past the finish line to “full retirement” as defined by the Social Security Administration. For me that’s in December 2017. I took the first step by signing up for Medicare this month.
2016 was a time to learn, work on writing, and do things that matter. More than anything, I have been writing. Everything else provided a platform or material for it. If 2017 presents significant challenges, there should be plenty to write about.
Anthony Sells built the first sawmill in Big Grove Township in 1839. There were a lot of nearby trees, hence the name. Things changed.
Farm fields, and eventually subdivisions, replaced the Oak-Hickory forest. Except for the state park and a few scattered parcels, the change has been decisive and permanent.
Memory of trees persists as a place to retreat during the end of year holidays.
Like during much of our lives, food is a holiday consideration — special menus using favorite recipes. We secured fresh cranberries, oranges, Gold Rush apples, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cookie ingredients, apple cider, and a frozen cherry pie from the orchard for the season. Yesterday’s purchases included dark roasted Sumatran coffee (Arabica beans), 64 fluid ounces of half and half for ice cream, special crackers and cream cheese. Planned recipes include cranberry sauce, shortbread cookies, apple crisp, and wild rice. It’s a lot of food for a special meal tomorrow. We’ll eat leftovers for days.
There is more to life than food.
That’s where the camera fades to black and a window into my life is obscured.
The idea of old trees now gone provides solace. Outside living memory, there is no going back to the time before Sells’ sawmill. For most who live here, it is already forgotten.
On this ground we make our own history. Because it lives today, it dominates our outlook and activities. The recipe is not specific and we challenge today what we did yesterday in hope of a better tomorrow.
There is something about the trees. Some linger as Sells’ lumber in structures in the nearby town. What matter more is the idea here was once a different ecosystem. One has to ask, “will what we replaced it with be sustainable?”
Holiday tradition in our house includes cleaning and decorating beginning mid-December.
Dec. 18 is our wedding anniversary. This year we plan to celebrate 34 years of marriage with a meal at a local restaurant.
Our wedding anniversary is also when the Christmas tree goes up with decorating to be finished by Christmas Eve.
As we cleaned, I made soup using bits and pieces of leftover vegetables and pantry items. It was thick and savory — the way soup is supposed to taste.
The process for soup-making is simple.
Turn the heat to medium high and place a Dutch oven on the burner.
Drain the juice from a pint of canned, diced tomatoes into the Dutch oven and bring to a boil.
Add a generous amount of diced onions (2 cups or more), three or four peeled and sliced carrots, two stalks of sliced celery, and three bay leaves. Salt generously and steam-saute until the vegetables begin to soften.
Add the diced tomatoes.
Next steps depend upon what is on hand.
For this batch I put a quart of turnip broth from the pantry in the blender and added cooked Brussels sprout leaves, and fresh Swiss chard and kale, all from the ice box. I blended thoroughly and added the mixture to the Dutch oven.
Next was a can each of prepared black beans and whole corn from the grocery store.
I found an old box of marjoram in the spice rack and added what was left — about a tablespoon. They don’t sell marjoram loosely packed in boxes any more so it must have been 20 years old or more.
Peeled and diced three red potatoes from the counter and added them to the Dutch oven. I also added the thinly sliced the stalks of kale and Swiss chard.
From the pantry I took a cup of lentils, and a quarter cup each of quinoa and pearled barley and added them.
I submerged the vegetables in filtered water from the ice box.
The rest of the process was to bring to a boil, turn the heat down to a simmer, and cook until it is soup — adjusting seasonings until it tastes good, and making sure the vegetables are covered in liquid.
The effort produced enough for a meal with a gallon stored in the ice box in quart Mason jars. We’ll be eating on that until Christmas day.
“What do vegetarians have for Thanksgiving dinner?” a colleague at the home, farm and auto supply store asked this week.
The unspoken assertion was it is difficult to imagine Thanksgiving without turkey as the main course.
He noted, being positive, we could still have pumpkin pie for dessert.
We could, but won’t this year.
Our kitchen has been vegetarian since we married. A vegetarian kitchen doesn’t mean we both do without meat. I occasionally consume a meat dish while visiting with friends or at political events.
In 34 years we’ve never stopped at the butcher nor bought anything from the grocery store meat counter. Not even the popular rotisserie chicken has entered our doorway, nor the even more popular pepperoni pizza. By design we eschew meat products at home and haven’t suffered nutritionally.
That’s not to say I don’t know how to cook a chicken. During a stay at our daughter’s apartment in Colorado, I raided her ice box and cooked soup from a rotisserie chicken carcass and roasted chicken breasts with rice and a vegetable for a dinner as the sun set over Pike’s Peak.
My maternal grandmother worked as a cook both as a live-in maid and in the rectory of the Catholic Church where I was baptized. In her later years, she showed me how to bone a chicken. Without practice, it seems doubtful I could do it again without help.
What will Thanksgiving 2016 look like in Big Grove?
This year the CSA where I work offered a vegetable box for $30. That, along with items already around the house, will be the centerpiece for menu planning. Cost wise, that will be our only expense as everything else is on hand. This year’s estimate of the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is $49.87 for ten people, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, so we will be eating well, but for much less.
If we use all of the menu ideas we came up with it will take us five hours to cook the meal and five hours to eat it. Like anyone with an abundant table, we’ll have plenty of leftovers.
The menu is not final, however, here’s what it looks like the day before the holiday:
Beverages: Wilson’s Orchard apple cider, Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider, Belgian beer, filtered water and coffee.
Salad course: Lettuce salad with fresh vegetables, purple cabbage coleslaw.
Bread: Sage-cheddar biscuits.
Main course: Frittata with organic eggs, braising greens, onions, garlic and thyme.
Side dishes: Steamed broccoli, rice pilaf with collard and Swiss chard, Roasted Brussels sprouts, Roasted vegetables (potatoes, carrots, onions, bell peppers), and Butternut squash sweet potatoes.
Dessert: Apple crisp.
No matter how dark the night, there is plenty to be thankful for this year.
Let it begin with a Happy Thanksgiving.
After Action Report Nov. 26, 2016: The actual menu varied a little from the plan and I’ve annotated the changes by crossing off dishes not prepared and added those not listed in italics. I made the red cabbage coleslaw but forgot to serve it.
Garden plot six was five varieties of tomatoes — Italian, Amish Paste, Beefsteak, Rose and Kanner Hoell.
It was an abundant crop — about 200 pounds harvested — but most of the crop went bad on the vine due to an inability to spend time harvesting.
The culprit was a busy work schedule that included four jobs during the prime tomato month of August.
Heavy rain produced large sized fruit. When rain was imminent I hurried to harvest — preventing tomatoes from bursting. I didn’t always make it in time.
Lesson learned and applied this year was to give the plants space between them to breathe. So too it is with us. We need freedom from being cloistered to thrive.
Plans for this commodity plot are up in the air until I take a pencil to the 2017 garden plan. Wherever I plant tomatoes, I will give them even more room between plants. In 2016 this paid dividends that made up for my lack of care.
The ambient temperature dropped to 20 degrees last night — a hard frost.
This morning, while raking the remainders of grass clippings in the yard, I found Swiss chard growing in garden plot five.
Chard will be a centerpiece for tonight’s dinner, most likely in a casserole with rice, onions, chopped chard, garlic, eggs, oregano and Parmesan cheese.
While poorly planned — a place for odds and ends of cherry tomatoes, eggplant, cauliflower, hot peppers and a failed section of bell peppers — it produced early with cherry tomatoes and late with aforementioned chard. I pledge to make a better plan next year.
The section of bell peppers took up more than a third of the space. The seedlings went in fine, with protection from ground threats in the form of six-inch sections of four-inch drainage tile, and mulch. Because of working four jobs in August, it got away from me, producing not a single fruit. I can’t recall a year when my bell peppers have done well. Weeding and watering are two important aspects of growing peppers and I didn’t do either one well. But what do I know? A farmer friend gave us adequate seconds from her farm so we are okay with bell peppers for winter.
Four cherry tomato plants is enough for our household. The four different kinds produced before the main tomato crop and were great in salads until the slicers matured and ripened. The cherries were positioned at the edge of the plot for easy picking from the center path.
The eggplant and cauliflower seedlings were gifts stuck in empty rows. Fairy Tale eggplant is great because of its size and length of time producing. Four plants produced more than we could use. I’ve added Fairy Tale eggplant seeds to my December order and will put them in the indoor planting schedule.
Now that frost has come it will be easier to clear the plot. The plan is to clear it and make a burn pile. It was very windy today, so I’ll save these tasks for another day in this unseasonably warm autumn.
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