Food as medicine

One of the many deep-seated convictions shared by various presenters at the Acres conference was the strong correlation between nutrient-dense food and forages that are grown and raised on bio-active, minerally-balanced soils, and the good health of the creatures eating them.

It was a primary, underlying message in nearly every lecture, workshop, and discussion I attended.  From veterinarians to agronomists, cattle breeders to seed specialists, this broad gathering of agrarians may have had differing points of view on more than a few issues, but they spoke with one voice when it came to the importance of quality of what they were growing:  it matters more than anything. 

This surprised me a little, and then it saved me.

I fully expected the onslaught of information on building healthy soils, selecting livestock that makes good gains on grass, and developing smorgasbord pastures.  In the Grazing Management course we learned about the feed value of weeds (surprisingly higher than prize-winning grasses and clovers), the value of hedgerows, and the critical role minerals and trace elements play in plant and animal development.  We learned how to identify beef animals that will consistently produce tender, marbled meat on a diet of grass, and we heard from master graziers who have perfected the art of rotating herds through paddocks to grow huge volumes of grass where only scrub existed before.  

Much of what I listened to those two days I’d already encountered in my studies, which was quite affirming.  Hearing it from the sources, with their personal stories and amazingly deep understanding of their subject, was invigorating.

Still, I was surprised.  I did not expect to be surrounded by a group of people so intensely dedicated to improving the nutrient value of what they and their customers eat.  This organic farming stuff, it’s not just about eliminating chemical fertilizers and poisons.  Nor is it just about building and conserving topsoil, or sequestering carbon with permanent pasture plants, or raising food animals humanely outside of cages and factories, although those are vital aspects of this great endeavor. 

But it’s really about the food, and how the food we grow can be much better than what is generally available.  So much better, in fact, that it functions as medicine.  Because food packed with minerals, enzymes, CLA’s, omega-3 fatty acids, and protective nutrients, is incredibly fortifying, and healing.

Food as medicine.  As it should be.

Which was a message I really needed to hear.

A reminder, really.  Nothing I didn’t already know, just truth I’d drifted away from. 

Then during the conference, the holistic veterinarian began his excellent briefing on homeopathy by discussing how proper hygiene – the modification and minimization of noxious external influences on the patient – is necessary to health.  It is a precursor to health.  You can’t activate the body’s innate protective abilities unless the system is clean.

I met a remarkable octagenarian who grows micro-greens in his basement, and drinks a pint of fresh carrot juice each day.  Said his eyesight improved considerably since he began this regimen.  His good health is undeniable.  He is three years younger than my mother would have been, had she not lost her battle with leukemia.

I thought about my degrading night vision, and my lungs and liver challenged by bad habits these past few years.  I thought about all the farming work I have ahead of me, and how much I needed my health and vigor back.  And just like that, the light came on.  And my mind-view changed.

My juicer sits out on my counter now, rescued from the back of a bottom cupboard.  A pound of organic carrots runs through it every night, part of my rescue.  And with every pint of enzymes and pro-vitamin A I drink, my resolve to avoid toxins and improve hygiene grows. 

No prescription required.  Imagine that.

More rain for the winter garden

 The weather-guessers called for another band of rainstorms through here, beginning yesterday, with rain anticipated to fall off-and-on through Sunday.  It’s drizzling now, with hope for as much as an inch in the next couple of days.

My little backyard garden will appreciate that, especially if they are right about the winds being absent.  Monday’s deluge with 40-mph gusts nearly knocked my peas out of their roots.  I tied them up when I looked out and saw the lovely ladies all bent double over their trellises, and they made it through intact with no lasting damage, but I’m sure it was stressful to be blown about like that.

The peas are organic Green Arrow English Peas, from  Heirloom Seeds, first time I’ve grown these.  They dig the cool temps and made good growth despite the short days, climbing to 4 ft high before dressing themselves with jewel-like white flowers.  Now, tiny pea pods dangle like miniature ornaments, promising sweet treats to come.

Gardening in a Mediterranean climate in the winter months is quite extraordinary.  It’s a lot like having a second Spring, with shorter days of course.  I shall miss the luxury of growing brocolli and brussels sprouts, peas and lettuce and scallions, beets and kale, through December and January.  A better gardener than I could have a continuous supply of edibles for the dinner table with nary a gap in harvests, with careful planning and year-round succession planting. 

As it is, I lose track of time, forget to start the next round of seeds, and we suffer the occasional short hiatus from ultra-local, organic home-grown food.  But peas are on their way, two plantings spaced 3 weeks apart, the leaf lettuce is filling salad bowls twice a week already, and I have high hopes for my happy brassicas.

It’s raining lightly but steadily tonight, and the garden is soaking it up.

Rain and sauerkraut

This post breaks new ground for me.  

My week at the Acres USA Eco-Farming conference was both life-changing and reaffirming, and made me realize that everything I do, even here in suburban San Diego waiting for the retirement bell to ring so I can head to Kentucky and get started, is about my farming.  The story has begun, and this part of it, this preamble to the Great Beginning, needs telling too. 

For some reason, up to this point I thought my posts had to be about the farm, or strictly farm-related, in order to be relevant to this blog.  Having told my story to dozens of fellow farmers, I’m seeing it differently now.  My journey to the farm is the current chapter, which includes everything I’m doing here in suburbia to make the transition to farming in Kentucky.  I’ve even taken to calling my curbside homestead “Bear and Thistle West” because it is in all ways my West Coast farmhouse on 1/8 of an acre,  where we eat food grown and cooked by hand, preserve the harvest overflow, make soil, manage rainfall, and build skills and collect tools needed for farming.

The reality is, I am a farmer, whether I’m here on Redlands Place in Bonita, CA or on Knifley Rd in Elk Horn, KY.  At the rate things have been going, these last couple of years will fly by like birds trying to beat the winter weather; every day, then, I am trying to do something that brings me closer to starting my farm.  So I’ll write about that.

As for the conference, my brain couldn’t have taken another day of lectures and workshops; there was so much good material, so many good speakers.  I’ll discuss the high points as I find time, as I have several posts drafted and will work on them as I can.  The conference wrapped up Saturday evening and I escaped the frozen north in the nick of time, heading back to Bear and Thistle West just before the vicious winter storm plowed across the Midwest, closing freeways and causing havoc for travellers. 

Yesterday we finally got a taste of what passes for winter weather here in SoCal:  heavy rain and wind, terrific gusting wind.  My high-tech rain gauge – a widemouth pint mason jar – measured 2.5 inches, quite a lot for this area, and much needed.  It’ll knock down the fire danger for awhile, and the moisture is appreciated by yards and gardens, and farms, too.

Yes, farms, and close by, hallelujia.  Seems we have a new start-up, a local organic CSA farm south of San Diego, nearly on the Mexican border.  I stumbled across Suzy’s Farm website by accident and was delighted to read that they have a farmstand, since my winter backyard garden is just getting going (we garden all winter long here at 32 deg lattitude) and I’m always looking for good organic vegetables.  So I called, and Rodrigo said no, the farmstand wasn’t open, but come on by the warehouse, I could buy there.

So off into the pouring rain I went.  Looking for carrots to juice, mostly, but ready for just about anything.  And as it turned out, carrots weren’t picked, but they had lots and lots of every other thing.  I bagged two bunches of chard, two bunches of long beets, a handful of those lovely purple-necked scallions, a bag of round zuchinnis, a pumpkin (for pie), a buttercup squash, and six cabbages.  Yes, I said six.  Cabbages.   For sauerkraut, of course.

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve made sauerkraut.  Like, 25 years, give or take a few.  I still have my old 5-gallon ceramic crock, which serves nicely for brining turkeys but hasn’t seen a leaf of cabbage for years.  This time around, I had the help of my trusty food processor, which made the shredding of 20 lbs of cabbage a very simple task.  Absolutely nothing to it.  And the giant ceramic bowl I bought in a Fallon, NV feed store, thinking a bowl that large would surely come in handy some day, was just perfect for salting and mixing the mounds of shredded cabbage. 

My hands ended up being the packing tool of choice, and now the crock is filled with kraut, covered with brine and weighted down, and we’re waiting for fermentation to start.  Some books say it will be finished in 3 to 6 weeks, others note that the flavor gets more complex the longer it goes, and 6 months is not too long.  I can’t remember how long my first batch developed, so it’s like I’m doing this for the first time. 

I believe I’ll sample a little over the New Year’s holiday, and pair it with whatever clean meat I’m able to find.  Now if I could only find a local farm that raises pastured pork!

In the company of farmers

It’s colder in St. Paul than in San Diego, as you might imagine.  I wish I had a small space heater in my room, to warm my feet – can’t seem to get them thawed out.  

Other than that, and the minor drawbacks related to travelling alone, I’m having a really good time at the conference.  Being among fellow grass farmers for the first time ever is really gratifying and encouraging.  And the speakers are, in a word, terrific.  We all sat and listened to Jerry Brunetti this afternoon, spellbound, as he moved through nutrional analysis of “primitive plants” (otherwise known as weeds), soil chemistry and mineralization, and the soil-building properties of water.  He spoke with a fluency and passion for his subject I’ve not heard in a very long time.

There are farmers from all over the country and across the globe here, taking this short course on grazing management and livestock genetics prior to the conference beginning on Wednesday.   Some are already in production, others are just planning and preparing, like me.  Old-timers and greenhorns, and a surprising number of women.  I’m glad to see that. 

The fellow to my left at our table is from Wisconsin, waiting to retire so he can start a little grass-fed herd on a piece of land he owns.  He too, wants to have draft horses to help with the work.  The woman behind me, from Missouri, is also making plans to start farming in about six months, and like me, is here to learn and meet others doing the same. 

And the very friendly chap with work-worn hands on my far right manages a 200-cow dairy farm in England; he’s here to learn how to improve diversity in their leys, among other things.  We lunched together today, eating our sandwiches in the noon-time chill and chatting about pasture rotations and the farms he visited in New Zealand. 

I loved every cold minute of it.  It’s nice, very nice, to be in the company of farmers.

Writing The Plan

I must get better at blogging in the present; September’s fence-building trip was ages ago, and I’m still not done writing about it, but there are other things Farm-related that are newsworthy.  Which is the whole point of keeping this blog, so we’re moving on.

You’ll hear about the Big Pencil Sharpener another time, then.

We had a six-month extension to file our taxes this year because of my deployment, and so October was all about sorting through receipts and filling out my Form F, accompanied by more research and reading of tax law relating to sole proprietorships and farm businesses.  Lots of reading.  And finally, the light went on.  Like smelling the proverbial cup of coffee, I got a strong whiff of exactly what I need to do in my particular situation, which is to take concrete actions toward making my farm business a reality.

So, I’m wrapping up an eight-week online course on Writing a Successful Business Plan, and although The Plan is a long way from actually being written, I have the tools and skills I need to write it,  know what research needs done and what needs to be included in it.  It’s a daunting task but, broken down into separate elements, quite doable.  And so I’ve begun.  I’ll share bits and pieces here, as I draft my mission statement and drill down into the details of setting up a grass-fed livestock enterprise.

I also took a huge leap and booked arrangements to attend the Acres U.S.A. Farm Conference in St. Paul, MN.  I fly out on Monday, to attend a two-day intensive pre-conference workshop on livestock systems entitled “Full-Circle Grazing Managment – Cow, Soil, Management, Grass”.   Learning from and meeting experts like Jerry Brunetti, Gearld Fry, Greg Judy, Neal Kinsey and all the rest will be a life-changing experience, I’m sure, along with the opportunity to meet like-minded farmers in all stages of production. 

Should be an amazing week, and I’ll try to journal it here as it unfolds.

 

Postholes and plumb bobs

We dug 12 post holes in all; four large enough for gate posts, eight fencepost-sized.  Not by hand, of course, or at least not entirely by hand.  The PTO-operated posthole digger with a 9- and a 12-inch auger did most of the work, but Kentucky has its share of rock, which resisted the machine’s auger tip and had to be busted out by hand.  The old-fashioned way, with the tools you see here, and lots of elbow, back and arm grease.  Once the buried layer of rock had been punched through, the auger was able to finish the dig.  I’d say of the 12 holes, only 3 were uncomplicated by a 4-inch layer of rock that lies about 12-inches beneath this area.

A few lessons learned:

1) Lining up post holes is easier said than done.  Check them after they’re dug by propping the posts up in the holes and stringing a line across their tops, if you want the fenceline to be straight.  We measured and flagged every one, but they all had to be adjusted before the posts were set.  Posthole diggers are not precision instruments.

2) Body weight helps when using the spud bar to break rock.  Get the guy to do that part.

3) Don’t even think about digging postholes or setting posts without a spud bar.  Tool of choice, nonpareil.

As for plumbing the posts, the approach varied from the textbook version of using a level since our posts weren’t milled perfectly uniform from top to bottom like store-bought posts would be.  Cedar trees taper and are larger at the bottom than the top - how to plant a post plumb then?  Skidder had the solution, learned from prior experience; a stake laid across the top of the post with a line and plumb bob hung from the end gives a vertical reference through the post’s center.  Viewed from two different angles 90 degrees apart ensures a perfectly plumb post.  Worked like a charm.  I’ll plumb all my posts this way from now on.

many ways to peel a log

While planning September’s fence building project last summer, I decided early on to try and use materials cut from the property, and knew I’d need tools to peel logs.  I didn’t know exactly what I’d be up against, so I bought an 8-inch drawknife and a short-handled bark spud, thinking what one couldn’t handle the other maybe could.

They were the perfect tools.  I got lucky, really, getting one of each, as the drawknife couldn’t get into the flutes of the cedar logs like the bark spud did, and using the spud alone would have been murderously slow.  But together, between Skidder and I, we peeled logs like we’d been doing it our whole lives with those two tools.  I was very pleased with how they worked out.

Was it hard work?  Depends on what you consider to be “hard,”  but yes, we worked up a sweat.   Was it slow work?  Again, it depends on what you compare it to.  We caught on pretty quickly and learned how to position the logs against a sturdy picnic table, and let the tools do most of the work instead of our backs.  The last couple of rails I peeled went much faster than the first two.  We weren’t putting up hundreds of feet of fence, so peeling the logs and rails by hand wasn’t a show-stopper for the limited amount of time we had; I’d say it was neither slow nor fast – just right.

Alene and Bobby got back from their trip to Oklahoma two days before we left, so Alene came out to the shop one morning to watch me finish peeling the last of the rails.  By this time I was getting pretty handy with my little drawknife, and thought I was working along at a pretty good clip with very little wasted effort, but I guess that’s all relative, as her only comment was, “You’d think there would be an easier way to do that.”

I just smiled and kept peeling.

Buttoning up for Fall

I will finish the fence-building story soon, I promise.  First though, an update from last week’s trip out to the Farm to button it up for the season ahead.

It was a very short trip:  only a day-and-a-half to transfer utilities, set up and program the inside lights, visit the bank and the Farm Bureau offices, put up some outside signage and secure all the gates, and set the alarm.  I arrived late Thursday night, and got everything done on Friday and Saturday morning except meeting with a guy to talk about mowing the grass around the house and down by the road next summer; he didn’t show at the arranged time, nor did he call, which tells me he wouldn’t have been reliable.  I’ll find someone else. 

I am pleased to report that you wouldn’t know the house is unoccupied unless you read it here.  The lights and radio come on and turn off in the morning, and again in the evening, including porch lights, and in a random enough pattern not to look like they’re on a timer.   Anyone driving by on the state road wouldn’t notice a bit of difference between now and when the folks lived there.  The place looks cared for, inhabited, and snug. 

With only a few precious hours left before I had to hit the road for Louisville to catch my return flight,  I headed up on foot Saturday morning to lock the gate at the top of the road, and check on things up top.  The trees were turning, not flamboyant this year, but colorful enough.  It was a drizzly, blustery day with grey skies, not ideal for landscape photography, so I snapped a few quick pics with my point-and-shoot Olympus and stomped on back down the hill after making sure all the equipment tarps were still secure.  Glad to have a few moments, though, to experience the changing season up on the pastures.

A flurry of last-minute details crammed my final hour at the farmhouse:  shut off water, turn heater all the way down, flip circuit breaker for water heater, turn down fridge and freezer.  Then it was out the door, set the alarm, drive out the gate and lock it for the last time, and a quick detour up the hill to touch base with my next-door-neighbor Mike, whom I’d not met yet.  Pleasant surprise, to find him watching TV with Clarence, my eastern-boundary neighbor, whom I’d not yet met either; we stood and talked a few minutes, long enough to exchange phone numbers and gain an instant friendship with both of them.  Mike will mow the grass next summer, and Clarence offered to bush-hog the pastures if I can’t get to them. 

Both men assured me they would keep an eye on the place and walk over and check things out once a week or so.  Call anytime you need anything, they both said.  We shook hands, exchanged good-bye’s and I hit the road for Louisville, grinning a little, and feeling very fortunate.

fence from trees

Building a fence out of your own trees isn’t the easiest way to do things.

 My li’l ole fence out front along the road has garnered many compliments because it looks damn nice, and really stands out among the pressure-treated, milled lumber, commercially-installed versions in the area; but its true beauty in my view is its humble, local origin.   And that it was built by my own hands.  From my own trees.

Most folks around here probably think that viewpoint’s a little off.  Too much work, nicer materials right down there at Lowes; why go to all the bother.  I admit, it would have been much easier just to call someone out and pay them to slap something up.  It would have met the minimum objectives as well, which was to keep vehicles from driving up to the house and shop building, thus making the place more secure.

But it wouldn’t have been a thing of beauty, or have the potential to last 25 -30 years like this one will, or given me any of the satisfaction I’ll feel every single time I lay eyes on it and remember how we built it from cedars and hardwoods cut off the hill above. 

Arguments for saving time and effort aside, I’m just not interested in paying someone to do work that I enjoy doing and can do well myself, especially on a project that designs itself as it goes; nor am I at all keen to buy mass-produced, trucked-in, chemically-treated materials when I have raw materials in abundance in my own backyard.

Sounds a little pious, perhaps too idealistic, I suppose.  I will readily admit that this commitment to doing my own work and using my own materials as much as possible has its drawbacks, not the least of which is the multiplication of effort and time in any project equation.  But I’m pretty stubborn, and not afraid of slow, hard work, and so I accept that building something from scratch means doing things “the hard way” with hand tools, sometimes, and a great deal more effort than needed with “modern” methods and commercial materials.

I may not be able to take this approach every time.  The porch, for instance, was built with pressure-treated lumber, after much thought and deliberation about the pros and cons of using non-treated lumber in that climate for that type of application.  But my pasture fences will need to be non-toxic, in the big scheme of operating a certified organic farm, and so this small section was a test bed for my ideas of how to use locally harvested, untreated posts in the Kentucky soil without compromising on fence longevity.

What I didn’t know before Skidder and I took that first walk up the hill to survey for materials, was that I had a good number of mature eastern red cedar trees (Juniperus virginiana) at their climax of growth potential, having been overtaken by taller hardwoods and fairly begging to be made into fence and gateposts before their wood began declining as they lost the battle for sunlight, water and nutrients.   And while this tree is not a true cedar, but a member of the juniper family, it does have superior rot-resistance - especially in the red heartwood – not as much rot resistance as black locust, but more than any other hardwood species I might have had to use.

We took four 8 – 9″ gate posts and nine 6 – 7″ fence posts off the south-facing hill just around the corner from the shop.  I believe I felled a total of eight trees, for the posts.  One was quite large, leaving me a lovely 10-foot timber that will make some fine slabs for sign-making and bench-building.  Skidder pulled most of them down the hill by herself while I cut.  We worked furiously in the morning rain, thinking it might go on all day and wanting to get the logs down to the shop so we could peel them inside.  But the rain stopped as we finished, which wasn’t a bad thing. 

Next:  peeling with spud and draw knife.

Progress, unreported

September, nearly over now, was stacked to the rafters with doubled-up activity; a month that should have been two, in all fairness.  It goes that way sometimes.  I dove in headfirst beginning in early August, planning the Farm trip and project, chasing endless details that shifted priorities like dune edges in the wind, trying, as they say, to keep my eye on the biggest alligator closest to the boat.

Added complexity sprang from the background of an increasing workload at the squadron, fueled by end-of-fiscal-year deadlines and requirements.  It really wasn’t a good time to be away for 10 days, but the timing wasn’t flexible for what needed done.  And so we got it done, and done well, but my reporting of it languished horribly.

Thank you Jeff, for checking in to see if all was well and asking for an update.  I am long overdue.

The fence and gate in the picture above are not the whole story but they represent the satisfactory completion of what we set out to do this visit:  make the property secure for the periods of time we will not be there.  It is good we stuck with this objective, as Bobby and Alene made one more trip out to Oklahoma while we were at the Farm, bid on a house while they were there (telling us nothing about that as usual, until weeks later when their offer was accepted) and have finally, finally, decided to move completely out of the area.  Apparently Alene’s desire to be closer to her kids and grandkids won out over Bobby’s preference for remaining in rural Kentucky.  And so it goes.

My sister found time to travel out from Colorado to help me with the fence and gate project, five working days the likes of which I’d not experienced in quite some time.  We were determined to have both gates and at least a section of fence up before she had to leave, and worked like monsters from dawn to dusk – my gratitude is unending for her contribution of time, talent, and extraordinary effort.  Lord knows I could not have gotten the job done without her help.

For the fence and gate posts we found good-sized cedars in abundance on the south slope just up the road from the shop; I cut and she skidded, earning the nickname Skidder in my post-trip photo captions, and so Skidder is how you’ll know her here.  She brought her camera too, so we were able to capture most of the project from start to finish, from laying out the postholes to hanging the gates and building a log rail fence from my own trees.

My better half pitched in with the breaker bar on some of the gnarly holes – Kentucky has more than its share of rock – and helped me punch the six postholes for the stretch of fence alongside the road; but his major contribution was culvert maintenance, both on the road up the hill and at the driveway entrance to the state road, where July’s flash flood had washed things out and nearly buried the culvert to the creek. 

(One of the great surprise discoveries about my husband is his affinity for running a shovel.  You wouldn’t know it to look at him, you’d think he’d be allergic, but he’s taken on this culvert maintenance thing with an impressive level of initiative, for him.  I do not argue, I praise.  And happily go about my building projects, asking for an extra hand only when absolutely necessary).

The house and shop now has an alarm system installed, with a loud siren that goes off when it’s activated, as well as a monitoring service that calls the local Sheriff as well as my cell phone.  We accidentally tested that feature when Derril showed the folks how the system works; he set it off without calling the monitoring company and a cruiser with a big burly deputy showed up in five minutes.  Nice feeling, that.  I apologized and assured him we would call first next time, but it was good to know the response will be there if and when it’s needed.

I will have to make a quickie trip back out mid-October, once the folks have moved out, to set up the inside timed lights, set the alarm, make sure the gates are all locked, and transfer the electric service over to my account.  Since it’s a rural electric coop, I have to apply for membership in person, and I didn’t get that done this last trip.   Bonus for me:  the leaves will be turning, a sight I’ve never been there to see.

I mentioned pictures and this report is only a snippet of all the fun we had; you can see them all on Flickr by clicking on the “more pictures” link at the right, at the bottom of the B & T Farm Photos strip – then select “sets” on the top of my Flickr page, and look for “Farm gates and fences.”

I’m also going to rework the farm website’s  project page (see A Farm of My Own: Bear and Thistle Farm, at right) and post a detailed description there with photos, as it was a huge learning experience for me and I was delighted with how all the tools performed.  This blog post would be enormous if I were to lay it all out here.

More to follow, then.