Tag: local food

Breeding Season

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date December 4, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— Breeding livestock is as old as dirt and the season for cattle and sheep is wrapping up now. Bulls and rams have begun their fall courtship, and the question remaining is whether or not the ladies are pregnant during the first go-around. Some farmers can “tell” if the females are pregnant, while others consult with a large animal veterinarian. The idea is to impregnate the livestock now for spring lambs and summer calves.

As a flexitarian, I’ve given little thought to where meat comes from since my days of working in a slaughterhouse more than 40 years ago. The animals with which I am familiar now are grass and grain fed and well cared for. While confinement operations are de rigueur in Iowa, in the local food system, we don’t talk much about concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), except to criticize the environmental issues associated with them. We believe our way of managing livestock is better.

That said, my intersection with raising livestock is more tourism than economic activity. I enjoy reading about the complex solutions to cattle feeding involving corn, silage, alfalfa, distillers grain, corn stalks and grass, but wouldn’t want to spend my life in a constant analysis of nutrient values and costs. There is a knack, rather than a science to this, and farmers seem to do what pleases them with an eye to what others may be doing and saying.

At the end of the day, when a person works in the local food system there is exposure to the entirety of things people consume as food. Learning more about livestock this year has been another valuable lesson in sustainability.

Tags farming, local food

Kitchen Garden

Thanksgiving Menu 2013

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 28, 2013

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today, among many things, I am thankful for the readers of On Our Own. Whether we have met or not, having an audience is an encouragement that provides a sense of validity when I write. So thank you.

Today is a family cooking day in our house and we prepared a special vegetarian menu that will nourish us today and feed us leftovers for days to come. Our family is scattered around the U.S. and we’ll be thinking of them all as we prepare this meal:

Relish tray of pickled vegetables, Kalamata olives, bell pepper, young carrots
Deviled eggs
Cranberry relish
Lentils with carrot
Wild Rice
Baked beans
Sage dressing
~~Steamed broccoli~~
Sweet potatoes
Root vegetable stew
Apple crisp
Iced water

Best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving, and thanks for reading On Our Own.

Tags cooking, local food

Writing

The Season is Over

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 27, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— It was pitch dark when I arrived at the packing shed. Driving a 1970s-era Ford Econoline van, the previous three hours had been spent loading vegetables in it and another truck, and delivering them to CSA customers in nearby Iowa City and North Liberty. The wind was cold, but there have been worse, the customers were positive about the final fall share delivery, and the old vehicle served.

Supplementing starlight with my phone’s flashlight app, I found the light switch inside and turned it on to illuminate the area and unload and stack the empty crates and coolers and head home. The CSA season was over.

Proceeding cautiously on the icy gravel road, I made my way to the highway and turned south toward town. An email had reported the community well was broken, so I stopped at the grocery store and bought a gallon of water to use for cooking if needed. Resisting the temptation to purchase a frozen pizza for dinner, thoughts turned to what to make from food at home. The well had been repaired by the time I turned the kitchen faucet on. Dinner was a grilled cheese sandwich, a glass of cow’s milk and some oatmeal-raisin cookies from the store.

Instead of reflecting on the end of seasonal work, or depositing my paychecks, I went right to my queue of movies on Hulu. I started “Bob Dylan and the Band: Down in the Flood” and watched it straight through. I remember listening to copies of the bootlegged Dylan recordings at a friend’s home in high school. Downstairs is my copy of “Music from Big Pink,” purchased the day it arrived at the discount store in 1968. On the computer are tracks from the 2000 re-release of the album… I was enamored of the creative process of that music and that time, and still am. The film called up memories.

Memories are not about the past, but to help us live today… and tomorrow. I retired around 10:15 p.m. wondering what to do with memories from a time of youth, hope and promise. By morning it was clear. There is nothing to do but go on living.

Thanksgiving and the following weeks have become a time to work on a plan for the coming year— true especially after leaving full-time paid work for a corporation. There is a sense of receding into the landscape— a seduction of the active mind. The season is over, but the living goes on.

While youth has flown like a murder of crows annoyed by a brown fox preening in the sunlight, hope drives us toward new seasons, the uncertainty of which is tempered by experience, and a succession of cold nights like last night. Yes, it’s time to go on living.

Tags local food

Writing

My Apple Life

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 25, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— 2013 has been the best year for local apples since I planted trees. Every tree bore fruit, and around the county, everyone with an apple tree had a good harvest if they wanted to pick them. Yesterday I bought half a bushel of Gold Rush apples from the orchard, the last maturing fruit of the season. Because I work at the orchard during the peak season, I got a discount.

As winter approaches, the work has turned to making chunky applesauce a quart at a time with the ripest fruit. It’s delicious, if you know what I mean. The main uses for the bumper apple crop have been as follows:

Apple butter has become a staple for the last few years. I made a batch with the earliest apples, then a big batch of fallen apple butter from fruit knocked down by a storm. I also made apple butter from Dolgo Crab and Cortland apples purchased at the orchard. There was also a batch made from a mixture of 9 different varieties picked at the orchard. With what apple butter was leftover from last year, there is more than a two-year supply in the pantry.

The Sept. 19 storm brought a disappointing end to much of the large apple crop. In addition to apple butter, I made applesauce and apple crisp with fallen apples, and sent a lot of them with a friend who keeps livestock. She returned the favor with fresh eggs from their chicken house. A neighbor had borrowed a cider press and he and his children made about four gallons of apple cider from my fallen fruit. The fruit was all used, but it was a rush to get it done before they spoiled.

As summer turned to fall, I learned about longer keeping varieties, particularly the Winecrisp and Gold Rush apples. We don’t have the refrigeration capacity to keep them cool, but they are stacked in crates in the coolest part of the house and I’m hoping for crispy apples into winter. Since they are around, it’s likely they will all be eaten before going bad.

As December approaches, it will soon be time to prune. I took some photos of my Golden Delicious tree to the orchard where the chief apple officer gave me some pointers on how to salvage the tree. The expectation is that 2014 will be a bust year for home apples, but my four remaining trees have been little pruned, so I have some work to do.

My apple work will go on for a while, but it’s time for closure on a great season. Little by little, gaining an understanding of apples and apple culture has become a part of who I am. I am only just beginning to understand my apple life.

Tags apples, local food

Home Life Kitchen Garden Work Life

Turkey Wrangling and Friday

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 22, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— With the Thanksgiving holiday upon us, thoughts turn to turkey in a lot of households. Unlike during most of our vegetarian holidays, I am dealing with 100 locally grown, free range slaughtered birds tomorrow. Along with others, we are taking delivery from a local farm, sorting and weighing, and preparing them for delivery in the CSA shares next week. I’ve never been a dead (or live) turkey wrangler before, so despite the implications, I am looking forward to a new experience.

We see a lot of wild turkeys near our home. Mostly, they browse in the field near the lane to the highway, or are seen flying over the road. For those of us that remember when Iowa turkeys were an endangered species, it is always a happy sight. But enough turkey talk.

If the farm work has been winding down, it comes to a halt after delivering the final shares on Tuesday. We’ll settle up and settle in for winter. That it’s snowing as I write this post is a sign of the time of year. Confronted with the end of year holidays, it’s time to take stock of home life and work life, and make plans. This year’s planning will be as important as in any previous year.

Home life is patterned by habits formed over a lifetime: more indoor work— cooking, cleaning, writing and reading— and the part of work life devoted to research and development— studying opportunities and determining viability. As with most who live an alternative lifestyle, funding cash flow during 2014 will be a pressing issue, although I am not yet willing to sell plasma to do so.

If 2013 was anything, it was an experiment in lowly paid work, first in a warehouse, assembling kits for Whirlpool, and then on a number of farms. What I’ve found is my aging frame can take the work, but there are limits to how the tendons and muscles can tolerate increased physical activity. I am optimistic about performing physical work in more active jobs.

That said, I don’t plan to return to the warehouse, even though they invited me to return when the farm season was finished. The pay was low, and the social networking not good enough to distill further benefit. So what’s next? That’s the question for answering during the next few weeks. There are ideas, but no plans yet. I am thankful for the ability to be in this position as the snow falls and winter approaches.

Tags farming, local food

Writing

Autobiography, Blogging and Canning

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 14, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— The afternoon was spent making applesauce with the last of the fallen apples from the Sept. 19 storm. They stored well, and six quart Mason jars and a pint are processing in the water bath canner. It’s local food more so than most: they fell about 30 feet from the kitchen window during the storm.

After experimenting with applesauce techniques, I cored, but did not peel the apples, cut each into about 16 pieces, steamed them in a bit or water until they released their own juice and begin to fall apart, and processed them through a food mill. I also made chunky-style apple sauce, using a potato masher before spooning it into a jar. No spices or sweeteners here. They can be added when serving, but this applesauce really needs no additives.

Is the story of my applesauce afternoon worth writing or reading? I don’t know about the latter, but the process of writing helps me understand life on the plains in a way that takes the rough, dull and lonely parts out, rendering it into a sweet pulp to serve to friends and family, and packaged to give as a gift. Seriously. Who wants to hear about the rough, dull and lonely parts of life anyway?

There is the actuality of the time spent and the image above. If that’s all there were in this post, an autobiography of a moment in time, it would not be worth reading. The hope is that by imagining a life, and writing it down, some value can be added, and if we are lucky, an epiphany reached.

According to WordPress, there are more than 72 million blogs on their site. Add in the other sites and there is a lot to read, many thoughtful, some hate-filled, and more than a person could ever consider. For the blogger, it is a way to write, an outlet for expression in a world where only a very small number of writers get read, and even less get paid. We need outlets.

There is a first draft quality to a blog post. A flawed freshness that can be like the life from which it is expressed. Sometimes it is sticky, syrupy sweet or messy, and that goes with the territory. We’re not the Scientific American or Harvard Business Review in the blogosphere. What we hope to be is an expression of the imagination. Taking the desultory moments of a modern life as the ingredients of something better, something universal. Bloggers mostly fail to reach the sublime, but once in a while, things come together.

So there it is, the ABCs of writing in autobiography, blogging and canning. Write about what one knows, do actually write on some platform, and think in terms of a finite product that is useful to someone, to nourish a body, but more importantly, one’s intellect and spirit. There are benefits, not the least of which can be jars of applesauce.

Tags apples, autobiography, local food, Writing

Home Life

Random Notes on a Saturday Morning

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 9, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— Politicians glom on to veterans like there is no tomorrow. Veterans vote, we live in society, and most of us served and left the military behind without comment or regret. Politicians should work to reduce the number of veterans we are creating as a society, rather than glomming onto our service for political reasons. That could be their service, and the nation would be grateful.

The newspaper work is finished for today. The focus will be on home work. The atmosphere is calm, so the brush pile can be burned, preparing a space for planting garlic tomorrow or next week. There are lots of apples for processing into applesauce, apple crisp and maybe some dehydrated apples. That is, once the dried herbs in the dehydrator are removed and cleaned. The last of the fresh tomatoes will be turned into a pot of chili for supper. There are more turnip greens for soup stock, and a drawer full of root vegetables in the refrigerator— plus whatever else is harvested today. There is a whole afternoon of kitchen work.

Having gone to town this morning I hope to remain on the property, or within walking distance. Maybe once the brush is burned, I’ll take a walk on the lake trail, but no further. It’s what’s called living, and we don’t do enough of it. And it’s time to get on with it.

Tags apples, homelife, local food, tomatoes

Writing

Cleaning Onions

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 7, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— Napping when the email arrived, an hour later I woke, read it and made it over to the farm at a quarter to noon to clean onions. It was solitary work removing the tops and roots, and sorting them into crates. It took five hours. While I worked, one person was at a meeting in town, two sorted and cleaned potatoes, and another sorted spaghetti squash. Silent, but communal work in support of our local food system. Around 1 p.m. everyone else had finished and was gone, leaving me with my thoughts and work.

One of the ironies of this year has been that while working a lot of hours in local food production, my time in the kitchen has been limited. I prepared a number of seasonal dishes, but there was little experimentation or cooking for pleasure. Most of the kitchen time was spent preserving food, rather than preparing meals, converting that part of our home to a temporary mini-factory.

Rendering fresh produce into a shelf-stable product is a vital part of summer abundance. This year there are some new items: dill pickles, sweet pepper sauce, and grape and raspberry jam. As fresh cooking turns to pantry cooking, the household is ready.

In the declining light of the barn, something enveloped me. It was as if the world had been shut out as my pile of onions leaves mounted. I returned briefly to youth, and the holiday time. When there were trips to the drug store to see what seasonal offerings were made. There were trips to used book stores, to secure a supply of winter reading material, even though there was plenty to read already in the house. An trip to the liquor store to buy some wine made of German Riesling grapes, or distilled French spirits: Armagnac, cognac and Calvados. The luxuries of plain living all.

When the onion cleaning was done, the sun was setting and I headed home along the gravel back roads littered with fall foliage and deer crossings. For dinner I cooked veggie burgers and served them on buns bought from the day old rack at $1.40 for eight. Condiments were ketchup and a slice of onion, sides of coleslaw and baked beans. Comfort food for a hearty meal.

What did my onion day dreams mean? It’s hard to say, but the actuality of that feeling took me back to a time of less worry, and living in each moment. A time when our potential seemed unlimited as we left home to see what the world had to offer. In some ways, that journey was never completed. Who knew it would end up in a quiet barn cleaning onions?

Tags cooking, homelife, local food

Kitchen Garden

Root Vegetables in November

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 5, 2013

LAKE MACBRIDE— As the sun set on Monday I was washing 75 pounds of spinach at a friend’s farm. The two acres is a community supported agriculture project, and that morning, a lot of food remained in the field. The day’s work was to get as much of it harvested as five of us could. During a nine hour shift, we harvested spinach, carrots, daikon radishes, rutabaga, turnips and beets, loading up a 1973 Econoline van until we tested the limits of its capacity. A second vehicle was needed to transport the produce to off-site storage.

We left three rows of daikon radishes in the field because 600 was all we needed for member shares. Farm workers took home seconds of carrot and daikon, so today at home will be cleaning them and preparing a few dishes.

The season’s farm work is winding down, and as it does, thoughts turn to what’s next. It’s not clear right now. Maybe clarity will come with keeping my hands busy in the kitchen where there is a full refrigerator and all the root vegetables in canvas bags, waiting to become what’s next. Better soup than compost. If choices in life were as simple as making soup from the bounty of November’s root vegetables wouldn’t that be the top?

Tags farming, local food, worklife

Work Life

Last Day of the Season

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date November 1, 2013

RURAL IOWA CITY— Thursday was the last day of the 2013 u-pick season at Wilson’s Orchard. There were a few cars in the lot, and pumpkins displayed outside the sales barn. Out back, the flatbed truck was loaded with a tall pile of pumice left from apples just pressed for cider. Inside, there were five or six types of apples in the cooler, along with cider, apple turnovers and the numerous items in the gift shop. An employee was positioning apples slices on a dehydrator shelf. There was a sense in the air of counting the hours until closing up shop for the season. 2013 has been a great year for apples.

Stopping on the last day is a habit worth forming. It has the potential of being a personal tradition— the kind we build our lives around. I hope to work at Wilson’s Orchard again next season.

The Gold Rush apples are not in yet. They have parentage of Golden Delicious and were cultivated for their long storage properties, perhaps as long as seven months. It will be the first year we tried them, and it is only one of many varieties sampled this year. I’d say they are delicious, but that would be an apple joke. According to a colleague, the chief apple officer will pick them from the Solon orchard next week, and they will be available for purchase on Nov. 16-17 when the sales barn is open for holiday shopping.

During 2013, Wilson’s Orchard was a local phenomenon. People came from all around the area to pick apples, seeking the fruit, but also family entertainment. Being the mapper, and later in the season, one of four tractor ride drivers, I was part of the show and met people from all over, each with a personal story about what brought them to the orchard. It was great fun, and one of the best work experiences I’ve had since leaving my career in logistics and transportation. The intersection of apples, farming, small business management, customer relations and speaking opportunities hit my sweet spot.

At the end of the season, this unique experience stands out, and hopefully will live long in memory. Lessons learned there will be applied elsewhere in a life on the Iowa prairie in a turbulent world.

Tags apples, local food