It is a bit of heaven here…so much wildlife…there are even two swans that cruise the lake at all times looking Fairy Tale-ish. They come around our shore & into our water lilies at about 9am to feed…so beautiful!  Sometimes I hear a loon in the early morning & we saw it yesterday too; lots of Canadian Geese honking & flying past.  As to edible fowl, I am rooted in the modern agricultural 21^st Century & will leave the wild birds to themselves as we eat chickens raised for the purpose.

I have eaten really well this trip.  A far cry from the days when I brought a lot of my own food from California – raw sunflower seeds, brown rice & such as it was very difficult to make a trip into Kalamazoo where there was a great Coop.  The local market seemed to have only browning heads of iceburg lettuce, some soft red delicious apples, and bananas. Nowadays , it seems that every small town market has rice crackers, organic butter, fruit & lettuce.

Truth is – Great fresh & seasonal local foods have always been available during a Michigan summer – my childhood memories include heaps of corn on the cob & fresh tomatoes in August, peas by the bowlful & lots of squash.  August was always a healthy food month for us.  We tired ourselves out with canning many quarts of peaches, tomatoes, grape juice, and made jams and pickles.  I learned to make sauerkraut with my neighbor too.  The root cellar was packed by the time I started school, and could take a break from being my mom’s “peeler & cutter-upper”

So – back to the barbeque leftovers of yesterday… let’s make some bone broth & soup!

Got your leftover chicken bits?

Making soup stock from those old bones & skin…so good for you too!  The vinegar breaks down the bones into Calcium, releases the nutrient in the marrow. And, all of that “gristle” is also melted & becomes liquid in the hot broth.  Bone Broth is medicine food – a healthy builder of bones & ligament for all of us.

Take the edible meat off of that ole chicken whether baked or BBQ’ed,

Add all the bones, skin & gristle into a pot of water & boil for several hours with any herbs you have – thyme, bay leaf, sage, rosemary.  If you have a bit of wine or vinegar or even some Italian Dressing, add a big spoonful of that too.

Strain out the bones & bits, then add cut up vegetables to the broth…

We still had sliced onion & ripe red tomatoes from the hamburger fixin’s, so they went in.

I also had 4 ears of boiled fresh corn on the cob waiting to be used up, as well as a heap of baked potatoes, sliced summer squash, cut up yellow peppers, and some other crudités that didn’t make it into anyone’s salad or sandwich.  Add a handful of celery, carrots, garlic, if you have it.  Cook it all until tender & add your meat back in.  Salt & pepper to taste.   This soup is so fresh & good!   Mine came out very much like a stew from so many veggies added.  Yours will be a unique reminder of the party you just had.  Toasted Hamburger or Hot Dog Buns are almost as good as French bread with this Summer Cottage soup of the day.

I have been watching movies & reading so many diet & health books lately – trying to get my head around the deeper ethics of diet. Beyond eating for best health – what are the other issues? For one – Food Ethics – finding a worldview that incorporates the rights of humans to choose their food with the rights of all Beings to live successfully in harmony on this finite planet. That sounds simple enough – yet, why the raging controversy? You’d think we are discussing religion or politics! Well, maybe we are…

While studying for the endocrine nutrition classes I recently taught, it became very clear that references & resources are now legion in any one camp of belief, especially with Internet resources, multiple books promoting any one theory, and very few of us capable of reading actual peer-reviewed studies. In fact – my own history of study using peer-reviews in technical journals, is that the studies themselves seem to be funded by a well-off corporation who managed to get some academics to perform the study with an intended result. Am I being cruel? Is there no way out of this entanglement of beliefs & truth?

I can only reach deep inside myself & feel my way out when this happens. The heart “knows” more than the brain when it comes to first perception. I choose from there.

Have I lost you yet?
If not – back to my topic in mind – food ethics – determining what foods humans should choose with full consideration of planetary balance & the rights of all living beings. (Let’s say all of those still alive & those who have died due to our lack of eco-ethics)

Let’s say also that… we need to BE healthy instead of BELIEVE healthy.

What food choices really work for YOU? Can you know now what to eat – in advance of the probably years it will take to see the results… once your health is compromised – or worse – wrecked?

Simple thoughts:
Whenever I can – I choose to eat locally & organically, a variety of foods produced with minimal impact on water use, soil degradation & while also recycling maximum nutrient back into an almost closed loop system. Can we artfully achieve this noble goal in our daily life – replete as it is with the temptations & delights – indeed – the wondrous tastes of foreign foods- rich roasted coffee drinks, creamy chocolate desserts, bananas, blueberries in winter, fish from foreign shores, the entire range at Trader Joes for Gods sake! In order to eat ethically you have to stay home & garden, or shop quickly with a list & get out before your eyes linger on the specialties waiting to grab your attention at checkout. The demons of imported foods are all around us.

Oh, now where was I? (as she eats cute small tangerine & handful of almonds -where were they grown? – during mini-break) I was hoping to at least give you a list of ethical discussions now in print…recommended by me in my own slanted style of current favorites…reader warning – they don’t all agree!
Viola! Finally you come to it….(forget cultural bias, availability, health theory or practice when considering this aspect of food choice)

(a partial list of “Ethical Eating” resources)

BOOKS:

Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats by Sally Fallon, Mary G. Enig PhD (A full-spectrum nutritional cookbook with a startling message–animal fats and cholesterol are vital factors in the human diet, necessary for reproduction and normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels. Includes information on how to prepare grains, health benefits of bone broths and enzyme-rich lacto-fermented foods.)

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability - Lierre Keith (discusses alternatives to industrial farming, reveals the risks of a vegan diet, and explains why animals belong on ecologically sound farms.)

Full Moon Feast – Jessica Prentice (Jessica Prentice champions locally grown, humanely raised, nutrient-rich foods and traditional cooking methods as she recounts her relationships with local farmers alongside ancient harvest legends and methods of food preparation from indigenous cultures around the world.)

Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall (Goodall focuses more on the product of “factory farming” techniques: mountains of waste, nutritionally depleted soil, polluted water, displaced organic farmers, and severely compromised food.)

The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters (the Waters mantra: eat locally and sustainably; eat seasonally; shop at farmers markets)

Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe (eating lower on the food chain -i.e. more grains and vegetables- is crucial the key to ending worldwide hunger, author’s theory is that non-meat proteins are much more efficient and sustainable to produce)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (In a journey that takes us from an “organic” California chicken farm to Vermont, Pollan asks basic questions about the moral and ecological consequences of our food)

How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons (Jeavons lays out a comprehensive guide to growing the most food you can on the least amount of land in the most sustainable way – on an ongoing basis into perpetuity, most healthy both for your family, your land, and the wider world.)

MOVIES:

I am happy to see more and more “good food” documentaries coming out. While I think movies like “Food, Inc.” are important to educate us on food issues, I appreciate the solution based films even more.

DIRT! The Movie, tells the amazing and little known story of the relationship between humans and living dirt. Why Dirt?

Dirt feeds us and gives us shelter. Dirt holds and cleans our water. Dirt heals us and makes us beautiful. Dirt regulates the earth’s climate. Dirt is the ultimate natural resource for all life on earth.

Edible City: A new (more grassroots) film prides itself in showing what people are doing in their own backyards in an urban environment, and with their own resources. It shows the movers and shakers in sustainable ag in the SF Bay Area.

FRESH - Ana Joanes (“FRESH brings more of the solutions and ideas for positive change to the table while Food Inc. focuses on the overwhelming power of industrial ag, its problems and challenges, leaving the viewer very troubled.”) I really enjoyed seeing the film “Fresh” recently on the shift towards sustainable food. It was great to see Will Allen’s Growing Power. He was growing sooo much food on a small urban plot, and loves his composting worms! And I loved finally meeting farmer Joel Salatin.

Botany of Desire: Michael Pollan (takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world – seen from the plants’ point of view – the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato – evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control)

Nourish: Food + Community: (With beautiful visuals and inspiring stories, Nourish traces our relationship to food from a global perspective and suggests the steps individuals can take to create a more sustainable food system and live more healthful lives.)

Want more?
Read some great thoughts…

Lia Huber about Nourish -

Further interesting discussion threads form on this vegan web page – a China Study critique. Vegan insights – yet of course – in support of my current theme of moderate eating of all healthy foods, animal or vegetable – locally grown with closed loop inputs….plus a questioning of the results of our last 10,000 years of agricultural practices & the future of food…

Invite response? Yes! I may be impatient & a poor scientist, but am an eater of food therefore deserve an opinion. Also – as avid debater in the realms of art – in which I have always thought that nutrition & food belonged – I get to enjoy my own my “taste”.

How should we eat? Damned if I truly know…yet. Can we even afford to debate this matter of ethics & choice considering the spiraling descent of food availability planetary -wide? Best to debate it while we work in the garden & rest a moment on our shovels – just in case the narrowing gap between the starving & the well-fed continues to affect more & more eaters, mainly those of us in the USA blessed with choice & variety of nutrient & taste. The debate continues even while the deserts enlarge & the waters are poisoned.

PS For those who are still concerned with the effects of diet on personal health – and I am one of them….the important discussion on health & community should remind us that it doesn’t matter how much conviction these various authorities have on their own theories, if it doesn’t work for you it’s worthless. We’ve each got to find out on our own what we should include in our own diets using the advice of others merely as a framework. Wholeness & Health? Cancer? Perfect energy? Endocrine disruption? Arthritis? Athletic prowess? It’s all around us, let’s perceive with our hearts & choose with our deepest feelings before we say grace over that next meal.

The newest generation to begin farming is making their wave on front lawns, in backyards across America.  It is now very hip to keep chickens in town, and the movable mini-coop (Chicken tractor) that can clean up & fertilize a garden bed is a wonderful invention being built just about anywhere!

Jason Bradford – localization spark plug & recently of my hometown – Willits, CA – has moved to Corvallis, OR –  in search of a wide & fertile valley to farm organically.  His dream is to organize Organic farming for thousands of prime farmland – revolutionize the future of our basic grain crops.  As that bigger dream unfolds, he is making a cozy home with wife – Kristin Bradford – a full time MD & very good baker of scratch German Chocolate cakes, beautiful young mother of 2 extraordinary boys, a Tai Kuan Do student, ballet dancer extraordinaire, and – well – you get it – these are not your ordinary backyard gardeners….but, wait – they are extra ordinary just as are we all, each in our own way.

So find your extra-out-of-the-ordinary time & dig a patch in your front yard, your side patio, your balcony pot of soil…plant a tomato & savor the goodness of the connection to your food.  Meanwhile, you can get inspired & informed by books such as The Backyard Homestead by Carleen Madigan.  

I have learned something new on every page!

Why Planting Farms in Skyscrapers Won’t Solve Our Food Problems

By Stan Cox and David Van Tassel |

Agriculture in America has become an ecological, social and nutritional disaster of sufficiently huge scale to inspire a frenzy of book-writing, filmmaking, conference-holding and project-initiating in recent years. The critiques that emerge are often right on the money, highlighting pesticide and nitrate pollution, soil erosion, the consequences of meat production in feedlots and confinement sheds, the destruction of rural communities and the poor nutritional quality of food. But the solutions being proposed have not, for the most part, been of the same scale as the problems; most would do little more than nibble at the edges of America’s long-running agricultural fiasco.

A striking example of such ill fit between problem and proposed response can be found in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American, where Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health and environmental health sciences at Columbia University, made his case for what he calls “vertical farms,” a vision he promotes through his site verticalfarm.com.

After doing a very good job of describing the terrible toll that agriculture takes on soil, water, and biodiversity across the globe, Despommier’s article lays out a proposal to replace soil-based farming with a system of producing food crops in tall urban buildings-to, he writes, “grow crops indoors, under rigorously controlled conditions, in vertical farms. Plants grown in high-rise buildings erected on now vacant city lots and in large, multistory rooftop greenhouses could produce food year-round using significantly less water, producing little waste, with less risk of infectious diseases, and no need for fossil-fueled machinery or trans¬port from distant rural farms.”

Despommier describes how one of his scenarios-which are based on the use of hydroponic or “aeroponic” methods of growing plants without soil-might work: “Let us say that each floor of a vertical farm offers four growing seasons, double the plant density, and two layers per floor-a multiplying factor of 16 (4 _ 2 _ 2). A 30-story building covering one city block could therefore produce 2,400 acres of food (30 stories _ 5 acres _ 16) a year.” By extrapolating numbers like those and assuming extraordinary leaps in technology, as well as the repeal of Murphy’s Law, he has made such a convincing case for vertical farms that, he claims, “many developers, investors, mayors and city planners have become advocates.” Time magazine has run a generally positive story on the concept. And an Australian architect is currently planning to build the first full-scale vertical farm, in China.

The idea for vertical agriculture grows out of the realization that there are not enough exposed horizontal surfaces available in most urban areas to produce the quantities of food needed to feed urban populations. Although the concept has provided opportunities for architecture students and others to create innovative, sometimes beautiful building designs, it holds little practical potential for providing food. Even if vertical farming were feasible on a large scale, it would not solve the most pressing agricultural problems; rather, it would push the dependence of food production on industrial inputs to even greater heights. It would ensure that dependence by depriving crops not only of soil but also of the most plentiful and ecologically benign energy source of all: sunlight.

The Promise of Biochar

“char·coal” definition: a black or dark gray form of carbon, produced by heating wood or another organic substance in an enclosed space without air.

I have been putting my final charcoal from burn piles & the wood stove into my garden beds for several years, hoping this common charcoal was Biochar… it is  created in a smothered fire & yet didn’t consume like the rest of the logs, fits the description…but, how to smash & screen it into a finer powder, that sounds important!  This year I will do it better…

Ed Burton has been talking about this for years too…& of course, biodynamic gardening has  promoted it forever…time to take it more seriously…

My friend Lee thinks that this will save us when we can no longer get outside sources of fertilizers & amendments…we do live in a forest after all…

So exciting, the little greenhouse is happening!

Now we have dug & laid the paver floor, and are framing it out

…an 8×12 multi-use building on the western edge of the garden…

We have begun to clean up some repurposed windows for the West & South sides,

I have a full set of vintage patio doors & side lights to give elegance to playhouse entrance on the East side, with its “patio for having tea”. I am gong to plant climbing roses on both sides of the doors.

…the back wall is to be a solid wooden panel for hanging tools inside & hiding the handcarts outside.

Actually, it is much more imposing than I had thought.  I am not a builder, and in fact – now realize I cannot envision structures after they have become more than a door & simple walls.  It turns out the doors need “headers”, the roof requires eves, the walls have strong corner posts, all classic construction details that have somehow never come on my radar.

I helped Joel cut some wallboard – was just holding it steady, really, but have given a hand here and there in the process.

My job is more that of the designer of the overall garden space…

How to make best use of the tiny garden we urban folks have…compost piles, beds, fruit trees, nursery or greenhouse, plus a beautiful look to it all, & having fun!!!…quite the challenge!

I love the garden as it wakes up in the spring – the rose bushes look happy, their leaves all shiny & healthy, the early bulbs nod their heads in the breeze, the longer days seem to give everything beauty & hope!

Blessings of Spring to you All,

Annie

LAST CHANCE WINTER SQUASH SOUP

How to eat what you have on hand…
End of winter finds me cleaning out the pantry just like my great gramma did – and indeed – finding a small box of our homegrown butternut squash.  They are all so tiny (4 inches long) & in fact – have no seeds … these little babies were the ones I grew in my only-slightly-successful circle bed of the Three Sisters…beans, squash & corn, the ancient inter-planted companion staple foods for simple nutrition & long storage. Mostly I struck out in that cute little circle bed – no beans to pick, a dozen small, short ears of corn & these few puny squash. Ok – I did have one fabulous and huge squash, but she seemed out of place with the others…

The bed was a converted hard pan walkway in partial shade that I dressed with compost & turned, so maybe I shouldn’t feel too bad – but, still – wished I could have eaten a lot of lovely sweet corn last year!! I won’t be trying corn again with my shade problems & space issues…look out Farmer’s Market!

Back to the cooking…

So, easy to make a dinner with them – after breakfast – as Richard is doing the dishes, I just cut them up slightly, clean out the centers & pop into a slow cooker for a few hours of slow steaming.  By afternoon they are cooked up and soft.  If you are at work all day, you can leave them as long as you need, it won’t hurt the result.

Dinner is almost ready when you walk in the door – 5 minutes to chop one large onion – sautéed until soft in olive oil, then add a scoop of Thai spicy sauce (you could just use Italian seasoning or even simply salt & pepper to taste) and use your handy stick blender right in the crock pot…or transfer everything to a jar blender & give it a whirl!  Leave chinks of squash & onion for texture.  This delicious & hearty soup dish has no protein, but is a perfect serving of slow burning carbs, with very little but high quality fat calories from the olive oil.  With an addition of a cold bean or chicken salad, it is a simple yet balanced meal for the busy cook and her(his) family!

I love squash & pumpkin soups all winter long, and am sad to see the last of them go with the end of these lovely little baby squash from my pantry.

So – DO try making a simple squash soup before it is too late!  Or, plant some of those seeds & by September you’ll be eating this yummy vegetable again… Seeds from my biggest squash are already to sow & start in the  “greenhouse that is becoming”…now, that is an exciting thought!  The miracle of the seed & the harvest, the on-going cycle of nature & the seasons…seed to squash to seed to squash to seed…

Blessings on your Planting and Eating,

MORE yummy squash planted soon – started in my own greenhouse…now, that is exciting & VERY LOCAL!

-Annie

When I compost directly in a garden bed,

I follow this procedure:

1- Make a small hole or depression in the soil & cover the waste with a bit of soil
2- Use a shovel to cut through both the soil and garbage several times…this cuts up whole cabbages, bad lemons, moldy squash, wrinkled apples, etc into smaller pieces ( naughty me for wasting such good food!)
-& mixes the soil into the old food mass, which lays a pattern of bioactive microbes into the center of the garbage. They do the work for you, even in the cold of Northern California Mountain winter ( it gets down to about 20 degrees here)
3- I also pile loose straw on top of the whole thing…then walk away from that area once it is pretty full, and use another part of the bed or even another bed…this takes a month or 2…
4- By spring the straw is still whole and dry on top, but has started to compost where it touches the soil, that gets mixed into the bed when I turn it and dig it…

Now, if you want to be a “no-dig” gardener, (Ruth Stout was my hero!)…this method does not work more than once for each garden bed…so, I am doing it only to start new beds, as I am a lazy gardener and want to double dig (John Jeavons style) only once, and then never re-dig the bed again!!!

There are 2 schools of compost style -
I am a compost “mixer, not a piler/stacker”…as mixing seems to speed it all up, reduce smell, etc…although I am now trying a stack method inside of a “box” made of old pallets this spring…using layers of yard waste, cardboard, newspaper layered with my kitchen scraps, I‘ll report on that in a few months!

What is going on!???? I am probably the “average” person when it comes to understanding the economy…but, when does Wall Street get to be bailed out using MY money????

Upset – yes I am… some rich corporate guys make a big big mistake, and WE, the People have to pay for it? Not fair – I remember a Movie where Chevy Chase’s wife spends the entire family savings in a casino – Chevy tries to convince the owners to give back her money – “It was a mistake”…well, Vegas doesn’t give back lost wages and neither should the stock market be bailed out by the American Taxpayers…those fat guys were gambling, and they lost…

700Billion – that would buy a whole bunch of great houses for the folks who are out sitting on sidewalks after their foreclosures…

Do the math!!

Meanwhile, I feel we are on a roller coaster toward the great crash…I am planting my garden & buying cans of salmon with my savings – how about you?

So – the last few years it has been hard to maintain my weight…anyone else got this problem? I drive to work, sit at a computer most of the day, then drive home – stopping at the store for a bag of lettuce and squash that came from…where?

Turns out – that instead of having others grow my food, doing the labor of love and magic with seeds and water…if I do it myself, it counts as a workout! How about receiving the multiple rewards of tighter abs, flexibility in thighs and shoulders, better nutrition with local, seasonal & organic food – and – a feeling of satisfaction at being involved with the miracle of life!

Regular garden chores can burn anywhere from 250 to 400 calories per hour. Stress relief is another bonus as we are also outside, touching earth, getting sunshine and fresh air – that age old health giving solar friend. This is Healthy Body Permaculture – getting benefits on many levels at once. To repeat – the food is also healthier for many reasons, including calorie count!

To quote Ralph Waldo Emerson – “When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.”

Bye for now – I am off to put on my hat and gloves…