Sustainable Eats

I am completely amazed at the response that this giveaway generated and excited to think of all of you gardening with your little ones this summer! But without further ado…the winner is # 23 as verified by www.random.org

Malia!

Please email me annettecottrell (at) yahoo.com to get your prize and begin your child’s garden.

And for everyone who didn’t win please note the handouts are posted for free along with some directions on where to start when putting in a new garden. All you would need to do is buy the seeds.

When you are shopping for seeds you may want to consider buying from places near you that trial them for your particular environment or are committed to saving heirloom, open pollinated seeds. By growing and eating these foods you are helping to preserve them and their genetic diversity, as well as boosting your nutritional intake. Heirloom varieties contain significantly more nutrients than the handful of varieties that make up the bulk of veggies at the store which are bred for looks and shelf life. Flavor = nutrition. Life is too short to eat bland veggies, and the more of them you eat the shorter it will be.

“You can vote with your fork…and you can do it three times a day.” – Michael Pollan.

Some of my favorite seed sources:

Uprising Organics
Territorial Seeds
Peaceful Valley
Renee’s Garden
Johnny’s Seeds
Fedco Seeds
Seed Savers
Seeds of Change

What are some of your favorite seed sources?

We’re in the homestretch now – only a few short weeks to go before the rhubarb and asparagus are up. Things are growing like crazy in my garden and I can imagine the farmer’s markets are starting to fill with some new early spring greens.

My chives are up which is nice since I’m almost out of onions and it’s just about time to plant the last of my sprouting potatoes. The pantry still has 3 jars of spaghetti sauce, countless jars of canned peaches, chutneys, salsas, green tomato enchilada sauce, roasted red chili sauce, 2 jars of pickled or roasted peppers, 2 jars of home canned tomatoes and tons of pickles and jams but the freezer is full of dried tomatoes, fruit and berries so we are in good shape.

Next year I won’t make as much jam but I will can more plums and cherries since we liked those more than I expected we would. I don’t think I made enough applesauce this year either since we use it to make fruit leather in addition to eating. It was a good exercise and I guessed pretty well all in all. Or maybe we are just eating what is there since I don’t shop at the store but it doesn’t feel like we’ve wanted for much and the variety has been all right.

My husband was out of town last week so the kids mostly drove the menu. You’ll see it was heavy on the side of baked goods which I normally try to space out because I feel like it’s replacing junk from the store with homemade junk (minus the chemicals) but still not the nutrient dense food I try to make. It felt a little like IHOP since we ended up eating breakfast for dinner quite a bit in the absence of another adult to cook for. Next week you’ll see way more veggies as I try to eat down the garden beds to make room for transplants and spring starts.

French toast from homemade soaked 100% whole wheat bread made from Bluebird Grain hard red wheat, Lentz spelt, Golden Glen milk and backyard eggs.

Aebelskivor from Lentz spelt and backyard eggs.

Have you ever seen how these are made? In the cutest little pan. If you want you can fill the holes halfway and then add a slice of apple or jam or even something savory inside like sausage and cheese. It’s sort of the original hot pocket. I keep meaning to make little pizzas like this and put in my sons’ lunch boxes for school. How fun that would be for them to find little balls of sandwiches for lunch!

I’m trying to clear out the veggie beds for spring plantings so I harvested the last of the over wintered carrots and some nice turnips. We snacked on them all week.

Buttermilk (home clabbered from Dungeness Creamery milk) oatmeal Lentz spelt scones with home dried sour cherries and dried blueberries. I wanted to add home dried apricots from Rama but that sparked a huge debate between the boys so I scrapped the idea. Too bad because I love apricots!

Homemade cavatelli (from Bob’s semolina since I couldn’t find the Fairhaven duram wheat that Brittney had used last week.)

Cavatelli with Willipa Hills gorgonzola sauce served over my turnip greens with steak from our Cascade Range Beef cow and Edmonds Winery claret.

Ina Garten’s maple scones using Bluebird soft wheat and Golden Glen butter (1 pound of it to be exact.) But the scones are a family favorite. We are trying to clear out the old maple syrup to make way for the Stannard Farms syrup buy I organized last week. 26 gallons of it. That’s a lot of syrup!

Home pickled Loki salmon with Rockridge Orchard apple cider vinegar and a bay leaf off my tree. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to make this. I’ve been looking for local herring and there is none so I finally just substituted salmon. It was delicious and a great quick snack to have around. Pickle Man loved it.

Soaked 100% whole wheat bread using Bluebird grain red winter wheat.

Winter minestrone using my cabbage, home canned tomatoes, freezer corn, frozen chicken stock that I made a few weeks back and white beans from Full Circle Farm.

Black Pepper Plum cobbler with my neighbor Martha’s plums from the freezer and homemade snickerdoodle ice cream using Golden Glen cream, backyard eggs and lightly sweetened with maple syrup. The black pepper lent a depth to the plums that was hard to place and slightly spicy. I wished I had used more but I was treading lightly since I wasn’t sure how it would come out. It was kind of a wacky idea that I luckily pulled off!

Buttermilk biscuits, backyard egg scramble with Beecher’s cheddar and bacon from Akyla Farms.

Home canned Rama peaches, homemade granola and local yogurt! This one was a complete surprise. During an emergency trip to Met Market for kleenex we saw this and had to get it. The kids will only eat store bought yogurt and even my husband expressed his distate for my homemade yogurt. Of course if I put as much sweetener in mine as commercial yogurt makers do they might eat it but I’m choosing my battles carefully these days. I’m still buttering them up to raise turkeys in the backyard this summer…

Next week, onto more veg. Happy Dark Days!

It’s important that children connect with their food and a garden is the perfect way to foster that.

To a gardener the garden is a place of peace and tranquility. To a child the garden is a place of wonder and discovery. Sometimes those two places crash when they meet. Gardening is a process to a child (digging in dirt, playing with water, watching for bugs) while the adult gardener may be focused on accomplishing tasks (getting the seeds in, weeding, harvesting food.)

By creating a destination garden you set yourself and your child up for success in the garden. There are a number of things you can design into your garden to keep your child busy while you accomplish tasks alone, and engaged while you work on things together.

Set aside an area of the garden that belongs to your child. Let them pick out foods they want to grow but help them choose varieties that will do well in your area. If you live in the rainy northwest as I do that may mean growing cherry tomatoes or tiny cucumbers so that the fruit ripens faster with less sunlight.

By letting your child select the vegetables, you are increasing your odds dramatically that they will eat them, especially if they are allowed to harvest them at will. Most kids enjoy carrots, peas, beans, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers. Some kids enjoy basil and lettuce. All kids enjoy growing pumpkins for Jack-o-Lanterns.

If you have room you may want to consider adding strawberry and blueberry bushes, columnar fruit trees, mint and edible flowers like sunflowers, johnny jump-ups, nasturtiums and chamomile. Fresh mint leaves and chamomile flowers or leaves can be used to make teas, mint can be steeped in warming milk to flavor it, sunflower seeds can be roasted for snacking and johnny jump-ups and nasturtiums can grace summer salads.

When it comes time to sow seeds you can make furrows in the dirt then poke your finger or a stick where the seeds should go. Most children will then be able to plant the seeds unassisted. Lettuce and carrot seeds are tiny so let them sprinkle along your furrow then plan to later go back and thin them. It’s important that your child get involved in the planting so they see the process from start to finish. You can let them water with a watering can. A rain gauge will help them to see how much water is enough and give them something to check on after storms.

Print off pictures of garden bugs and make a little booklet that your child can use to identify bugs in the garden. Lady beetles, earthworms, green caterpillars, sow bugs and aphids are all common garden bugs and giving your child the job of identifying good and bad bugs is a empowering experience.

Build a spider orb by gluing popsicle sticks together in a hexagonal shape then tying it in a tree. Your child can check daily to see if a spider has moved in yet. Once a spider moves in your child can check daily progress. It’s very exciting to catch a spider in the act of stunning and wrapping a fly!

Adding a simple water feature will provide your child hours of enjoyment as well as support beneficial insects. This can be as simple as caulking the drainage hole in flower pot and filling it with water daily. Do be sure and change the water frequently though so it doesn’t become a nesting place for mosquitoes.

Let you child harvest with you. Encourage them to use two handed picking so as not to disturb the plant and let them help you prepare the food they grew to feed the family. Jobs like these are important milestones for children and go a long way towards fostering independence and emotional security.

I’m adding the handouts for the child’s garden so that those of you who don’t win the seeds can still use the information. I hope next week to add a new page on the right side for “how-to’s” and these will eventually be there for easier access. I’m floored by the excitement and number of responses! What lucky kids you all have. I wish you all the most amazing summers, remembering how magical gardens were when you were children and rediscovering that joy of discovery with your little ones!

These materials are free to use as you see fit – please just give me credit for the amount of time that went into this.

Here is the seed list, planting and growing tips and seed saving information.

Here is the seed starting schedule and trellis directions.

Here is the planting map. Pickle recipes will be available on my site in a new recipe map which I will create this spring.

Now that you have the materials you need to plan where do you start? You need a 4′ x 4′ bed with full sun exposure. That means at least 8 hours a day. The bed doesn’t need to be a raised bed like mine are, it just needs to be a dirt area amended with compost which you can buy or post on www.freecycle.org that you are seeking.

I want to show you an example of how simple your bed can be. I’m linking into Joe the Gardener who grew a $25 victory garden last summer. I don’t want you to think you can feed your family all summer for $25 because Joe had a huge network of folks who sent him seeds but I love how simple his plan for the garden is in terms of setting up the beds. He found lumber on freecycle, compost through the parks department (or it might have been a city program) and used bricks to build his path so that he wasn’t walking on garden soil. You can find free bricks on freecycle as well. Here is the link to his garden bed episode.

I don’t think you need to buy any fancy tools. A small hand shovel and a pair of gloves are the only tools I really use in my garden. I use an organic fish fertilizer monthly which I apply with a watering can and I compost.

If you are unsure of your soil you can contact your local master gardener program and inquire about local soil tests. Many areas provide them for free. If you are concerned about heavy metals you can mail a soil sample off the the University of Massachusetts and they have soil tests for $9 that include heavy metals.

In the areas where you will be growing carrots you want to make sure you dig the soil deeply and remove any rocks or branches. Carrots send down a central tap root and when it hits resistance it stops and begins to add girth. So in order to get nice long carrots you need nice soft soil for them. Everywhere else you can work down about 6 inches with a standard shovel, breaking up your soil and mixing in the compost. Once the soil is fluffed up you want to be careful not to walk on it. You may want to use some bricks to separate the garden sections and give your little helpers something to walk on when going into the garden area.

When you are planting you want to be sure and put the tallest things at the north end of the garden so they don’t shade shorter plants. The exception to this is lettuce which will want to bolt in the summer sun. I’ve solved that problem by having you plant the lettuce early in the spring and then trellising your cucumbers up in front of it to shade it. You can also interplant lettuce with the corn so that it’s shaded in that way.

Joe Gardener has a great veggie gardening 101 tutorial on his site that is simple but covers a lot.

That’s it! Please feel free to comment on how your gardens are going or if I’ve omitted anything or not explained something clearly. Happy gardening!

At long last I’ve finally gotten up my strength to stay up late one night and design the child’s garden. I’m really excited about this giveaway, just thinking of a child’s excitement and how fun this will be!

Once again using my favorite garden planning tool, www.growveg.com, I’ve designed this garden to be 4 feet by 4 feet and it doesn’t need to be a fancy raised bed, it can literally be a 4 x 4 section of dirt amended with compost. I’ve chosen a handful of things that I think any child would appreciate with some interest in spring, summer and fall. The varieties are all fairly simple to grow.

You will kick off your spring garden with two varieties of dwarf peas which will ripen in succession, as well as two varieties of carrots and some leaf lettuces that will go all summer. You will have one cool season bush bean (provider) that you’ll start early and then succession plant with a traditional summer bush bean to finish out the season. The Provider beans are great to freeze or pickle.

As the soil warms up you’ll plant Jack o-Lantern pumpkins, sweet heirloom corn and mini cucumbers for eating or pickling. I’ll give you easy directions for tying bamboo stakes together to make a trellis for the cucumbers to grow up and shade the lettuce from the summer’s strong sun. Growing vertically like this allows you to get an extra crop into an already small space as well.

I’ve left spots for basil and cherry tomatoes which would do best as purchased starts from your local garden center.

Although this 4′ X 4′ bed is packed full of food I’m throwing in nasturtium, viola, chamomile, sunflower, marigold and borage seeds to be placed in another spot in your yard that gets full sun or interplant with veggies, or these can be grown just outside the veggie bed boundaries. The nasturtiums and violas are fun to grow and beautiful in salads, the daisy-like chamomile flowers are cheery to the eye and make relaxing “sleepy” tea, and I’ve selected the sunflowers for the edible seeds which can be roasted and salted. The borage will attract garden bees and thereby increase your tomato, cucumber and pumpkin yields and the marigolds will help keep aphids and nematodes away.

I’m hoping a child will have so much fun with this 2010 garden that they might begin a life-long journey digging in the soil and eating real food. And even if you are a grown up with a kid’s heart this would be a great beginner’s garden or a nice postage stamp garden for someone with very limited sun exposure or space. I would prefer to limit the actual giveaway to a child since it includes a pair of child’s gardening gloves but you could always buy these same seeds and start a postage stamp garden of your own.

Here are the list of seeds:

Empress Bushy Snap Bean, Uprising Organics (vigorous plants hang heavy with long 6-7″ pods, crisp and delicous, slow to turn starchy or tough. Great for canning and freezing.)

Provider Bush Snap Bean, Uprising Organics (early bean variety, excels in cooler soil, heavy yields with rich green bean taste)

Sugar Ann Snap Pea, Uprising Organics (early snap pea, sweet eating, medium sized pods on 24″ vines need no staking)

Maestro Shelling Pea, Uprising Organics (sweet, productive, resistant to enation and powdery mildew, long pods on 24″ vines need no staking)

Purple Dragon Carrots, Uprising Organics (sweet, spicy full flavor, bright purple skin)

Nantes Carrots, Uprising Organics (classically sweet carrot with a rich full flavor, great as baby carrots or for fall storage, juicing and pickling)

Merlot Red Loose leaf Lettuce, Uprising Organics (deep burgundy loose head, slow to bolt)

Parris Island Cos Romaine Lettuce, Uprising Organics (excellent texture and crunch, vigorous upright habit)

Continuity Butterhead Lettuce, Territorial Seed Company (OP, bronze red outer leaves encase a green head, bolts in hot weather)

French Sorrel, Territorial Seed Company (OP, member of the buckwheat family, perennial with spinach like, lemon tasting leaves)

Alibi Cucumbers, Territorial Seed Company (dependable producer, high yield and disease resistant, excellent for fresh eating or pickling)

Golden Bantam Sweet Corn, Territorial Seed Company (OP, an heirloom favorite, early sweet corn that freezes well on the cob)

Magic Lantern Pumpkin, Territorial Seed Company (vigorous, compact, resistant to powdery mildew)

Empress of India Nasturtiums, Territorial Seed Company (deep regal red flowers will billow and cascade)

Johnny Jump Up Violas, Territorial Seed Company (tri-colored purple, lavender and yellow blossoms will re bloom in the fall and reseed)

Tarahumara Heirloom Sunflower, Uprising Organics (7-8′ tall stunning flower head with fuzzy lime green center. Delicious white seeds)

Chamomile – German (flowers are used fresh or dried to make sleepy time tea, reseeds with abandon)

Borage, Peaceful Valley (beautiful edible purple flowers that bees love. This will help attract pollinators to your garden.)

Marigolds – French Brocade, Uprising Organics (cheery bright yellow button flowers that will help keep aphids and nematodes at bay.)

In addition to the seeds here’s what you’ll get:

Sowing schedule
Printed garden map
Planting directions and growing tips
Recipe suggestions
Pickling recipes for the carrots, beans and cucumbers
Seed saving directions for flowers, beans, peas, sorrel, tomatoes and corn

If the winner is local to me I’ll also provide you with a cherry tomato and basil start but unfortunately I can’t mail those so I can only do that if you are local.

In addition to giving these things away I’m hoping by this weekend to get this information (map, schedule, planting directions, growing tips, recipe suggestions, pickling recipes, seed saving directions) on my site as handouts so if you don’t win you can still plant this lovely garden. Because you will only need a few of each seed variety if you go in with some friends and order 1 packet of each you will save lots of money that you can put towards a nice bottle of California olive oil to dress your yummy salads with.

Please do feel free to let schools, home school units or friends know about the handouts and the giveaway. I would love for as many children of all ages to employ and enjoy these gardening plans as possible!

To enter the giveaway simply leave a comment below by midnight, Sunday March 7. On Monday, March 8 I will use www.random.org to pick a winner. Again, even if you don’t win you I’d be flattered if you used the garden plan, seed list and other materials to grow your own garden.

Good luck!

We finally finished the chicken tractor that I meant to have done last fall. And when I say we I mean my wonderful husband who finally got tired of tripping over the supplies that I had strategically left in the way in the garage. That technique serves me well.

Guess What? Chicken Butt.

Last fall I had planted some cover crops in the beds. One I was really hopeful about because it was billed as chicken foraging blend. although everything died back in December except for the clover. I’m working on my own version now that I know what went into this and I’ll plant it in the orchard and around the backyard where it won’t tie up valuable garden beds and the chickens can free range it.

I also planted some oats and wheat grass. Apparently the oats were summer oats and they up and died at the first sign of frost but the wheat grass is so long now that the girls had a hard time making a dent in it. I had to help them somewhat by pulling it out and laying it on top of the ground so the plants can start to die back and I can work it in to the soil. But of course as soon as I did that it started raining again so even a week later the grass looks just as lush as the day I pulled it out. Plan C may be just throwing it in the compost pile and covering it up or throwing it right into the chicken run and not letting them out for a day or two until they’ve worked it over for me.

I based the chicken tractor on Patti the Garden Girl’s design, making it from 1″x1″s and just the right size to sit inside the raised beds. I love her style and she has lots of interesting ideas on her site.

All winter long I’ve been throwing garden scraps and kale stems into the chicken run. I cover the ground with sweet alfalfa hay once every few weeks which the chickens love to eat and after two weeks that has already broken down from their incessant scratching and turned to compost. They do amazing work! By late spring we’ll let them out once the grass is established again and I’ll rake the top several layers of compost from their run to add to use as the bottom layer of my compost pile.

The compost pile itself is located in the northwest corner of our lot just behind the chicken house. There I put the largest biomass from the garden, chopped up. Things like sunflower stems and brussel sprout stems, large leaves, grass clippings, leaves from our deciduous trees and squash shells. Every few weeks I open the back door of the coop and rake out all the wood shavings and poop right onto the pile. I cover the whole thing with old burlap coffee bags.

Somehow over the course of the winter the pile has shrank way down and the bottom layer is already dirt without any effort on my part. It’s in the perfect spot protected by a thick laurel shrub and covered by a large conifer so that spot stays fairly dry and the layering seems to be the perfect mix of wet and dry for the compost to get busy. In another month I’ll rake that pile aside to finish breaking down further over the summer and start a new 2010 pile next to it.

I also have some small garbage cans sank halfway into the ground with worm holes drilled in. Into these go my smaller kitchen scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds and whatnots. When it gets too wet I put a layer of dry wood shavings from the coop on top to keep the fruit flies at bay. The worms and potato bugs move in to break down those scraps as well, although this seems to take longer but there is less loss from the pile since it doesn’t wash away in the rain. And these are secure so if I have things like tomatoes I can put them in these lidded cans without fear that I am feeding the rats.

Finally indoors I have a worm bin. I meant for it to go under the kitchen sink but then I read that they don’t like vibration. They would have been living just left of the dishwasher and under the grain grinder, which is akin to living right under a train station. I moved them into the living room instead where they live quite happily until I get too close with the vacuum cleaner and then they try to escape. I later find them dried and shriveled somewhere on their way to freedom.

These worms get really small kitchen scraps and travel frequently. They love children and participate in science fairs and classrooms talks about urban gardening. They can’t be bothered for photographs or autographs. They are a little snooty and like to be left alone. The do, however, make lovely dark worm castings. And the chickens find them tasty should they multiply too quickly.

Here some red wigglers are making short work of a tomato.

You can see how many decisions I have when cleaning the kitchen. Do the scraps go to the chickens, worms, dog, small compost or large compost? It makes doing the dishes fun and challenging, but difficult to delegate.

It is my ardent desire (and vague obsession) to build a composting outdoor system for dog poop as well. Someday all “outputs” here will either be useful or at least not fill the garbage can. Now that we have these great compost systems in place and don’t buy packaged food we have such a small amount of garbage that it really is predominantly made up of dog poop which gets encased in plastic bags that I borrow from friends since we no longer have shopping bags. Someday though, I’ll come up with an above ground doggie dooley

I hope you have enjoyed this little tour of worm poop, chicken poop and other scraps that go into the building of the soil for the garden beds. Because remember, one chicken’s poop is a gardener’s treasure.

You know I just realized I don’t even know when this Dark Days challenge is over. I’ll probably still be doing this come summer wondering why there is no pingback. So I’m still sick but I really think I’m on the mend this time. I’m on my second round of antibiotics and hacking less.

Perhaps in another week I can actually get back to some interesting foods again! Although I did manage to push the envelope this week, even for me. I found myself with a gallon of souring milk this week and turned it into a gallon of chocolate pudding which turned out to be more than it sounded like, even with my kids around. So I tried my hand at pudding fruit leather. I had read about it in my dehydrating cookbook but I’m going to guess it was not meant to be made with real pudding. The more I thought about those eggs and real milk being shelf stable the more doubtful I became. It was interesting but not something I’ll repeat again.

Pancake Boy loved it but Pickle Man wanted nothing to do with it. You can’t please all the kids all the time, right?

So I moved on to Pickle Man pleasing burgers. I topped ours with some Little Boy Blue from Willipa Hills. If you haven’t tried this cheese yet you should get to UW farmer’s market pronto. It rocks. And not in a stinky kind of way which I love. It’s a firm, not stinky yet decidedly blue flavor that works great in many ways. My husband likes a tiny bit of gorgonzola but he loves this cheese. And if you like gorgonzola you need to try their version of it. Rocks the socks off the stinky cheese chart – which as I say I could eat all the live long day.

The burgers are from our Cascade Range cow with some home grown roasted garlic from the freezer thrown in.

Egg sandwiches.

Poor little pulled smoked pork sammies from meat that I found in the freezer from our Akyla Farms pig last fall. Served on homemade Bluebird Grain buns that I also found in the freezer and some homemade barbecue sauce, also from the freezer. I love my freezer. We ate these with Charlotte’s saurkraut from Nash’s cabbage (thanks Charlotte!) and lacto-fermented carrots that I had made from Nash’s last winter hurrah.

Taco pizzas from our leftover taco meat. I don’t know why I never thought to make this before. I opened up the last jar of home canned jalapenos (Tonnamaker’s from last summer), used a red sauce base (no longer from my tomatoes), roasted garlic and freezer corn. I can always tell if I have a winner by how many extra pieces my husband eats and how many times he later brings up how much he enjoyed something. This one was clearly in that category. The peppers were spicy but not too spicy and lent a great acidity to the pizza. Even the kids liked it, although I left the peppers off theirs.

I promise this week I’ll get to posting the pizza dough recipe. I use 100% white whole wheat with a splash of whey soaked overnight which makes it easier to digest, unlocks extra nutrients and gives it a great flavor.

Right now I’m working on getting back to 100% and the kid’s garden giveaway which should be hitting your screen this week.

Happy Dark Days!

It’s not often we get the chance to buy directly from a farmer on a food that is well out of our local boundaries so this one is very special to Pancake Boy.

I found a third generation organic maple syrup farmer while surfing Kimi Harris’ nourishing gourmet website. While not many of her meals are local they are traditional and nourishing so I follow it in the hopes that she will post about things that are local to me.

I’m posting some information directly from the farmer introducing his farm and explaining why it really is important to buy organic local syrup versus the least cost stuff from Costco. It turns out he is currently in Seattle studying and selling at the Fremont Farmer’s market on Sundays so if you miss this buy you can always visit him there sometime.

Farm Background
Much of the background story of our farm is on the website at
Stannard Farm Vermont. To summarize, it is a 200+ year old farm in the town of Stannard, Vermont, and has been farmed by my family since the 1940s (when my grandfather bought it from the previous farmers for around $2,000, money from service in World War II). We have been making maple syrup since the late 1970s and today we tap 1600 trees, which makes us a small-to-medium sized Vermont maple producer.

We make around 500 gallons of syrup per year using a wood-fired evaporator (a big stove for boiling maple sap). We also produce hay and raise grass-fed beef for local Vermont markets. The farm is entirely family-owed and family-run – my dad does most of the work, and I take every Spring term off from school (at the University of Washington) to go home to Vermont for maple sugaring season.

Organic Certification
We have been certified organic by the Northeast Organic Farming Association since 2007, which means that an independent inspector has verified no chemical additives contact our syrup, and that we have taken steps to ensure the long-term health of the trees and the land on our farm. You may hear some people say “all maple syrup is
organic.” For the most part that’s not entirely untrue – very few farmers use chemicals to process their syrup (some use chemical defoaming agents to keep syrup from “boiling over”, but most folks just use butter or vegetable oil, which does the same thing).

And it’s almost impossible to use chemical fertilizers in a sugarwoods, and only rarely are pesticides sprayed on sugar maples (usually by the State, to prevent pest outbreaks – sprayed trees can no longer be certified organic). Organic certification with Vermont maple syrup thus means more than “we didn’t put any strange chemicals in this all-natural product.”

It also means that we have worked with professionals helping us to manage our land and our trees in such a way that they will continue producing maple syrup (and providing animal habitat, and erosion control, and other ecosystem services) for decades and even centuries to come. Buying certified organic maple syrup simply means you are supporting a farmer who is going the extra mile to ensure the sustainability of maple sugarmaking.

Markets
In the past we have sold much of our syrup to East Coast restaurants, on-farm (to family and neighbors), by special order (e.g., small maple leafs as wedding favors) and “bulk” in 30 gallon drums to one of the larger Vermont maple distributors.

This past year we set up our first West-Coast accounts with 4 Seattle restaurants – Portage Bay Cafe, the Essential Baking Company Cafe, Chaco Canyon Cafe, and Bastyr University. We are also selling syrup directly at the Fremont farmer’s market – as I said I am currently a graduate student, and spending Sundays under a tent surrounded by farmers and craftsmen is a welcome distraction from dissertation-writing!

Product Availability
We currently have Vermont Grade A Dark and Grade B (Extra Dark) available, along with a small amount of Grade A Medium, all from the 2009 sugaring season. The 2010 season will begin in the next month or so, at which time we will also have Vermont Fancy Grade syrup on hand (very light, sweet maple syrup – less maple flavor but best for candies and confections).

Shelf Life
When storing maple syrup in a sealed plastic or glass container it is good for several months in a cool dark place. Once opened, syrup should be refrigerated, and will keep for a few months in the fridge. Finally, the BEST way to store maple syrup is actually to freeze it – a gallon jug of maple syrup kept in the freezer will last virtually forever. Freezing can be risky with glass containers, but plastic syrup jugs are designed for freezing.

Development of Mold
Finally, if mold ever does develop on your syrup, all you have to do is bring the syrup to a boil and scrape the white foam off the top of the syrup with a spoon. This will almost completely restore the syrup’s flavor, although with darker syrup you may notice a layer of “sugar-sand” form at the bottom of the bottle after heating (these are minerals in the syrup that precipitate out under high heat – sugar-sand is not harmful, but it can look unattractive in a glass bottle!)

In the interest of simplicity I’m going to say that the price is $60/gallon and if you want a part gallon we’ll need to match you up with others to round out a gallon and you’ll need to split amongst yourselves.

If you are interested please email me by Thursday, February 25th so that I can order on Friday a.m. You can reach me at annettecottrell(at)yahoo.com, insert a @ for (at).

There wasn’t much interest in this giveaway but I’m guessing it’s because we limited the area. So here are the winners:

Which means Laura and Beth, you win!

Thanks everyone for entering! I’m gearing up to do the child’s garden giveaway just as soon as my antibiotics kick in and I can once again function normally so don’t nod off too long.

I’m convinced I have the bubonic plague. How else could I still be sick going on SIX WEEKS? And people, I’m not sickly. I’m finally trying to get in to see a doctor this week so hopefully the menu here will pick up soon beyond Met Market chicken noodle soup and homemade breadsticks.

These were made using hard white wheat grown in Dufur, OR. It’s my pizza dough recipe which I don’t think I’ve posted yet but will shortly. I simply roll it out on a cookie sheet press course salt in it and roll it in, cut into strips, then twist and bake. You can bake them until they are soft or leave them in until they are crunchy. It’s nice to have something crunchy to dip in your soup that doesn’t take long to chew when you can’t breathe through your nose.

Garden kale and carrots combined with juiced Tonnamaker apples that I had previously made and frozen made the basis for chocolate breakfast shakes using local milk and freezer peaches from Rama Farms. Of course the cocoa powder wasn’t local and neither was the yogurt.

I made yogurt last year but I had too many fermentation projects in my tiny kitchen and my fil milk, yogurt and buttermilk cultures all married in the same way all the women in a group end up in the red tent together. I may start yogurt up again but while I am sick is just not the time.

A caramelized onion, Willipa Blue and Met Market mozzarella pizza. Just missing pears and walnuts, neither of which I had or it would have been perfection. I’ve taken my whole wheat pizza dough all over the board this winter and finally realized it’s the technique and not the combination of gluten or grain, or how finely you mill the grain that gets you the bubbles. I’ll share my secret when I post my dough recipe later this week since we also had tacos which I forgot to photograph and we have some meat left. Sounds like a taco pizza on the menu for week 15.

The tacos were my standby recipe using Cascade Range Beef hamburger, freezer corn and I had to use canned tomato sauce finally since I had made 2 gallons of tomato ketsup/sauce but overcooked it with the spice bag and it’s gross. Next year I swear I will not buy tomato products! I do still have some jars of canned romas but that won’t give you that saucey-ness you need for a taco or sloppy joe. Rather than make tortillas I stuffed large mustard leaves from the garden and we ate them spring roll style. I was thinking what a great option that would be for someone on a no-grain diet.

Here is my ace in the hole. My plan B for when the recipes don’t work out and I don’t have any little freezer squares to pull out for dinner or tortillas to whip up burritos. My plan C is always eat out but we’ve only had to resort to it once. I won’t tell you how many melt downs I’ve had trying to force a recipe to work or rebundle it as something else for the dinner table. Azure Standard in Dufur, OR grows their own duram wheat and makes their own line of pasta. It’s outside the 150 mile radius for dark days but it meets my personal guidelines by being the closest dried pasta that I can find for those times when I just can’t make it myself. And that’s pretty frequently these days.

I used it to make a quick carbonara using ham from our Akyla Farms pig, backyard eggs, Golden Glen cream and Rumiana parmeson (again out of range but there is no local parmeson and montasio is not an equal substitute.) At least it’s from California and not back east.

I served it with kale and turnip greens from the garden.

And finally, blueberry spelt muffins with nearly the last of the freezer blueberries, backyard eggs, Lentz spelt and home clabbered buttermilk from Dungeness Farms milk. I’m sad to see the blueberries go but hopeful that this summer we’ll have loaded bushes that we aren’t able to keep up with.

Happy Dark Days Everyone!