Category Archives: Growing Groceries – Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Upcoming Workshops

Posted on October 29, 2011 by | 2 Comments

I’m trying to keep track of my schedule this fall and it just dawned on me that if I post it here I can find it again (unlike my notes scrawled on envelopes.) Not only that but just maybe some of you might actually come join me if you know where I’ll be!

Inland NW Permaculture Conference

November 4-6; Spokane Falls Community College
http://www.InlandNorthWestPermaculture.com

Workshop #1: Urban Farming.
Is that a goat in your Subaru and a duck in your rain barrel? Find out just how much farming can happen on a small city or suburban lot. Workshop will cover integrating small livestock into your garden, maximizing small-space harvests and strategies for optimizing city light conditions.

Workshop #2: Farmer to Consumer Connections.
Join the growing number of consumers who want to cultivate direct relationships with farmers. This workshop will explain why farmer’s markets aren’t enough to increase local food security or make local, organic produce affordable for the masses. We’ll cover how consumers can find farmers, how farmers can find consumers, and how together they can craft bulk buys.

WSU Country Living Expo and Cattlemen’s Winter School

January 28 Stanwood High School
http://www.Skagit.WSU.edu/CountryLivingExpo/index.htm”
Workshop 1: Integrating small livestock into your garden.

Learn how even the smallest urban farm can integrate livestock to help keep the system healthy. Class will cover how chickens, ducks, rabbits and fish can help you design micro-climates in even the smallest garden, while contributing pest management, manure, soil tillage, and valuable sustenance.

Workshop 2: Grinding and Soaking Local Grains (and What to do With Them).

Learn how to buy, store and prepare local grains.
Class will cover why soaking grains increases their nutritional value. We’ll also discuss local grain farmers, bulk grain storage, home grain grinders, home-milled flour, and demonstrate sifting out large bran chunks to give you a healthy alternative to refined flour. Participants will leave with recipes for whole wheat sandwich bread that isn’t a brick, spelt power pancakes and we’ll be making oatmeal/spelt raisin cookies.

Northwest Flower and Garden Show

February 8-12, WA State Convention Center
http://www.GardenShow.com
Workshop 1: The Winter Vegetable Garden – Getting the Most from NW Edible Gardens in Winter

2/11, 4:30 pm in the Hood room
Maximize your winter yields through proper plant selection and cultivation practices. We’ll cover how to plan and start winter crops during the summer (while your garden is full of summer bounty). We’ll also cover inexpensive low-tech season extenders like hoop tunnels, floating row cover, cold frames, hot houses and cloches.

Workshop 2: The “No-Effort” Edible Garden – Reap a Bounty of Edibles with Minimal Effort

2/12, 3:45 pm in the Rainier room
The perennial and reseeding garden is the perfect solution for those who don’t have the time, desire or ability to actively garden. We’ll explore a long list of perennial and promiscuous vegetables and fruits suited to our Pacific Northwest climate, as well as sources for starts and seeds.

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

A Change in the Weather

Posted on October 11, 2011 by | 9 Comments

This last week things have really shifted from late summer sun to fall drizzle. The days are noticeably shorter and the animals and wasps are feeding voraciously. The bobcat is teaching her young how to hunt and the coyotes are taking down deer around here. I’ve been busy preparing too, sensing the final lap in the food preservation marathon.

Despite kitten-induced bursitis (read, cannot bend knee for several months) I managed to get in all the winter/spring starts from Cascadian Edibles (they are the rocking start CSA that I mention in the book, totally coming to save the day for me this year). Then I realized just how full of slugs my garden was so I moved the ducks out from the poultry area. They have been fairly well-behaved around the starts, focusing instead on slugs.

Awesomest husband finished building the rabbit shelter and I finished building larger cages so they would actually be able to hop around.

Just in time too, because Nibbles had her kits last Thursday just about dark.

This bunny is four days old and just starting to get fur. There are six babies in total. Many people have a hard time understanding how we can celebrate the birth of these small creatures which will one day grace our table. It’s easy to imagine a chicken farmer enjoying his baby chicks, knowing that some day they will be dinner. And if you don’t want to buy factory farmed food, need to keep your food costs down, and want to control the diet, lives and deaths of the animals you are responsible for – rabbits just make sense. Until post World War II rabbits kept many families in protein, but then we became this affluent society too good for our roots. In the forties north of Seattle, my father had the childhood job of working in a meat house processing rabbits. And already in the partial span of one generation they are no longer main stream cuisine. Unless you are a foodie and can afford it from a butcher’s shop that is.

Raising chickens takes longer, costs more, and requires more space to keep them healthy. Here’s some rabbit math for you: a rabbit can breed when it’s six months old. That rabbit can have four litters a year, with six to eight rabbits per litter. It takes 8 weeks to raise a batch to “market” weight, or “table” weight in my case. Baby rabbits nurse for six of those eight weeks so their food requirements are minimal. Rabbits gain weight well year round, unlike chickens that work great when the weather is warm but don’t gain rapidly in our cool winters and springs. And also, rabbits don’t need heat lamps.

One other great thing about rabbits: compost. I’ve designed this rabbit shelter so that it’s elevated enough to have compost piles underneath. I’m still working on those but they will have raised sides so I can pile it up and have some kind of chicken wire cover so the chickens can get at the scraps and some of the worms but not totally destroy my entire worm population. My goal this winter is generating as much compost as I possibly can to regenerate the depleted garden and orchard soils here. Between the goats, rabbits, chickens and ducks I think I just may be able to finally make enough compost. Rabbit’s eat primarily alfalfa so their droppings are nutrient dense amendment without a ton of weed seeds.

The fall weather has me in the kitchen, baking up tons of bread. This is one rare time you’ll find white flour in my kitchen but sometimes you just need some holes in your baguette and whole grains don’t give you that like white flour does.

I’ve been finishing off the last of the tomatoes from the big buy a few weeks back. I’ve fermented salsa, canned salsa and sauced roasted tomatoes until the goats came home. I’m making some cheesy tomato tarts with Beecher’s for the freezer. It’s nice to have something to pull out of the oven and not have to think about dinner on occasion – and especially nice while flipping through seed catalogs in January deciding which varieties of tomatoes to plant.

How about you – what have you been up to this week? Are you putting the garden to bed or planting out your winter starts?

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Posted in Ducks, Meat Rabbits, Winter Gardening

It’s Here!

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | 10 Comments

The first copies are shipping out from the warehouse tomorrow, to those who pre-ordered on Amazon. I got my copy expressed to me a few days ago and had a moment with it, alone, before everyone else came walking through the door and wanted to see their faces in it. Reader, this is a solid book. It’s paperback but it has so much content that it feels like hardback. The charts and lists are extensive and the resources go on for pages. Throughout it all, Harley Soltes worked his magic from behind the camera to bring it to life. Joshua’s producer profile’s are intimate, sincere and compelling. It’s all in here: grinding, baking, growing, sourcing, butchering, sausagemaking, cheesemaking, canning, fermenting, drying, cellaring, eating seasonally, and much, much more.

The amazing thing to me is that it hasn’t even been a year yet since we signed the book contract and yet here I sit with a book in my hand. Most authors have a year or two to write and then there is proofing time and production time. The talented staff at Skipstone managed to guide us through the entire process in less than a year. And we of course wrote like the wind. Somehow Harley managed to get enough creative photos that a reader would not realize our book about gardening was photographed entirely during the fall and winter. It all came together, somehow. And now it can come to you.

So although I’ve been fiendishly networking and promoting behind the scenes and will begin to do book signings (this Saturday at noon I’ll be at Oxbow Farm with some copies) I’m really looking forward to putting that behind me, completing the garden for fall, and getting back to blogging.

You may have noticed a new template which I’ve been working on into the wee hours, with some help from Melissa Plotsky. There are a lot of kinks, and distorted pictures but I’m working through them bit by bit. Thanks for your patience! A while back I announced that Joshua, my co-author, would be doing more posts and joining me on the blog. This new format will help me recirculate older content that is still relevant and help you find things easier.

In the meantime I guess I just want to say, thanks for your patience, and for sticking with me while I tried not to pop for a year. Things will be a little different around here now that I live in the country and Joshua is helping out but together I think we’ve got a little something for everyone. And Joshua is good at reminding me that there are many ways to do things so from time to time you’ll see us blogging about the same thing with two different techniques, such as our Dueling Tomatoes in the book, or our different composting methods. Remember, the only right way to do any of this is the way that works for you.

xo,
Annette

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips

Pesto

Posted on September 20, 2011 by | 19 Comments

I know you’re not supposed to make pesto in a blender but I do. My kids absolutely love it in pasta. I have dreams of using pesto as a way to introduce them to a greater quantity of green vegetables. I can slip in slightly less pureed veggies like kale. Before you know it, we’ll be eating pasta with braised greens.

So this year, we devoted a large portion of the garden to basil. We called it “the pesto patch.” We froze enough half-pints of pesto to have a jar every week all year every other week.

In the bottom of the blender, pour 1 and 1/2 cups olive oil (or a mixture of 1/2 olive oil and another oil), 3 to 9 cloves of smashed and peeled garlic, 2 ounces grated parmesan cheese, 1 t salt, a handful of smashed roasted almond pieces (we couldn’t afford the pine nuts), and 3 T of white vinegar. The vinegar will keep the pesto looking bright green, at least that portion of the pesto not exposed to oxygen.

Blend into this as much basil as you can, feeding it in a bit at a time. Eventually the mixture will become so thick it will stop spinning like a whirlpool and start burping “glop, glop, glop.” You can keep feeding in basil if you open the blender and reinvigorate the whirpool with the end of your spatula (don’t go too deep or you’ll hit the blade). At some point, you just won’t be able to force any more basil down the blender’s throat. I can force about a cubic foot of loosely packed basil leaves (removed from the plant) into a cup and a half of oil. Pour into 3 to 4 half-pint jars. Repeat until your garden is bare.

a portion of the basil crop

I recommend planting basil next year (2012), as it’s supposed to be another cool summer. We found basil thrives in this weather. The trick is to irrigate it occasionally and pick the flower heads off every time you pass. The cool spring made it hard to start the basil from seed – at least I blame the weather for my failure to do so. After my basil seedlings failed to thrive, I bought starts and never looked back. Once established, the plants had no problem with the weather.

By last week, I was starting to worry I had let our basil go too long, as the last few times I’d walked by and picked off a leaf to chew, it had begun to turn bitter. But lo and behold, after a couple cool nights, the basil’s flavor mellowed dramatically, shifting back to sweet! I did not know this was possible – I’d thought once a plant had developed bitterness, there was no going back. So if you’re worried the cool weather is ruining your basil, get out there and make some pesto!

Joshua

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips, Preserving Food

2011 Tomato Buy #1

Posted on September 12, 2011 by | 12 Comments

A couple of die-hard group buy participants.

Ever wonder what 2000 pounds of tomatoes looks like? It’s less intimidating than you’d think. We used my driveway, rather than a church basement, for our drop site location this year. Even though I (Joshua) had to be there all day, I was able to get things done at home during slow periods. And my kids were able to entertain themselves.

Look at those crowds!

If you’d like to host a group produce buy at your house, you’ll want to make sure you have room for the truck to park.  Basically our farmers use a truck about the size of a large U-Haul.

Tomato truck driver Ted brings produce from our 3 farmers.

The tomatoes were mostly gone in a day, though a few stragglers picked up their boxes Saturday morning. Our farmers are impressed that we’re able to move so many tomatoes in one day, and seem to be excited about the emerging market we’re creating for small farmers who don’t yet have a presence in the farmers market.

Next from Joshua: the economics of saucing heirlooms versus paste tomatoes, and what we did with 120 pounds of tomatoes.

While we were selling tomatoes, my 6 year old son Gavin worked with hammer and nails on the wooden pinball machine he’s been refining over the last few weeks. When all the tomatoes were gone, we sat down to play a few well-deserved games of pinball.

Gavin's wooden pinball machine

Joshua

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Posted in Growing Groceries - Plants, Seeds and Growing Tips