Arkansas Traveler Part II-Heifer International

During our stay in Arkansas Naomi and I left the hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas to get some fresh air. We went to the Heifer Village which was just a few minutes away. This was a beautiful complex that clearly displayed green features, from their gigantic water tower which collects rainto their xeriscaping grounds.

For anyone who might not know, Heifer International is an organization whose goal is to end world hunger. They have project throughout the world, but the difference between Heifer International and some other NGO's is that Heifer doesn't just give food. They give people the ability to support themselves through gifts of live stock. Another major goal of Heifer International is the idea of supporting ones local economy, through being a locavore and much more. The Heifer International building is made of materials that almost all came from Arkansas. The steel for the building was made at a steel factory just down the road. The bricks were either salvaged from the old buildings that were on site or bought from a production plant in Forth Smith, AR. The only major material that did not come from Arkansas was the bamboo floor boards. As for landscaping, most of the plants were Arkansas natives. The area that the building was built on used to be a wetland area, so they built what I can only call a "moat" that flows around and through their campus. While there I saw many turtles and dragonflies taking advantage of this new ecosystem.

Along with their dedication to local buisnesses and suppliers, they also have a mission of promoting local food sources. While there Naomi and I looked around in there gift store and found ourselves in book heaven. There were many books on the current status of the food industry, cookbooks, home gardening, green economics, and more. It was then that we decided to make our donation to Heifer International in the form of purchases. Two shirts and eight books later we left the gift shop and headed out the door.

So some book reviews are in the future for this blogger

Arkansas Traveler Part I- Rememberance

This past Saturday Naomi and I took an impromptu trip to Arkansas for a "family emergency". My maternal grandmother came out of surgery and was not doing well. We decided on Friday night to not wait and to head straight down to Little Rock, Arkansas. I can remember from an early age my grandmother spending many summer days canning and freezing as many vegetables and fruit as possible. My grandfather tended the garden and she ensured that there was preserved food until next years harvest. My family still speaks about the jams and jellies that she would make with awe and reverence. And each time Naomi does some canning I can't help but think of her.

She was always finding some way to enlist my cousins and myself into the work of the day. One of my favorite activities was sitting on the porch swing with her and shelling purplehull peas, which is a common crop grown in Arkansas. My hands stained lavender from the shelling, we would sit there and talk about anything that came up. I loved when she would talk about her childhood and my mom's childhood. These conversations would of course lead me back through time to a place when life was harder, but it seemed so much sweeter through her eyes. Then after our work and conversation was finished she would freeze the majority of the bounty and then use the rest to make a wonderful dish.

She died this past Monday and she will be sorely missed by my family and all who knew her. She lived a long, good life and I will forever remember those dog days of summer, in Arkansas, sitting on the porch listening to her stories of days gone by.

You Get What You Pay For

About two weeks ago Naomi, her mom, and I went to go see the new movie Food, Inc. in Highland Park, IL. We luckily ate before the movie, because I do not think any of us would have been up for a meal afterwards. Food, Inc. had a familiar "plot" to anyone who has read any of Michael Pollan's books or read Fast Food Nation. However one of the movie's heroes I found quite surprising.

The movie begins with a casual walk through a grocery store. We see the bounty that is the American diet, however Robert Kernner then invites us to look closer at the true cost of this bounty. It is a cost that many people will have to pay in the years to come. It will come in the cost of heart disease, type II diabities, and much more. This is a movie that can easily overwhelm and scare you. You may wonder how did we get this way? The answer is simple as a society we have become to far removed from the source of our food.

One of the prices that we must now pay for our cheap food are E.coli outbreaks. Yet industry in a moment of terrifing brilliance has developed a way to remove that price from the meat we eat. The solution is simple and of course completely unnatural, "wash" the meat in ammonia hydroxide and kill everything that is living on or in it. The meat will be completely sterile at the end; no bacteria and certainly no taste. Of course the industry could also just feed cows grass instead of corn and this problem would be solved as well. But that would cost more than washing every bit of meat in an industrial washing machine.

So who is our surprise hero of the story, Wal-Mart. Yes the proverbial Satan of corporate America. You see Wal-Mart is an economic juggernaut who gets exactly what it wants. And what Wal-Mart wants is milk from cows raised without rBGH, which incidently is made by using E.coli. Therefore as the CEO of Stonyfield Farms tells us that by dealing with Wal-Mart you can make a significant change. However, I may be a bit cynical and I certainly do not have much, if any, faith in big corporations to do what is best for us. Therefore I can only fall back on a well used quote, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." So in the words of Robert Kenner vote three times each day and make your vote count by buying local food that was raised ethically and organically.

For more information watch these interviews with Robert Kenner and/or Michael Pollan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXmF_erEv1o&feature=related

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-july-2-2009/robert-kenner

We be Jammin', Strawberry Jammin' Part I

Well in my last post I asked what do you do with 20 quarts of Strawberries?

Well after you have made a strawberry pie or two and you have snacked on a handful or so, there is only one thing left to do. Preserve them before they spoil. I am sure that this is a conundrum that has confronted farmers for quite some time. In fact I am sure this problem has been front and center for our species as long as we have been gathering more food than we could eat in one setting.

We have had many different ways to meet this crisis. With meats we would simply salt the meat or drown it in layers of fat. However in the early 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte was concerned about the food for his armies staying fresh enough to keep them feed. He offered a prize of 12000 francs to the person who came up with the best way to preserve food over a long period of time. The person to do this was Nicholas Appert, the father of canning, who devised a way of preserving food in bottles similar to wine. This process was adapted and improved on through out the years by many different individuals.

However in 1858 a man by the name of John L. Mason conceived the idea of the Mason jar or a glass jar and lids that had threads. This allowed for reusable jars and screw on lids. The ease of use and the affordability of this system made canning more popular and the idea spread across the United States to all women be them farmers and homesteaders but also women living in the urban areas. Families began traditions of canning sauces, pickling, relishes, jams, and tomatoes. The name Mason became so synonymous with canning that piratically all glass jars to this day are called Mason jars even if they are made by another company and the fact that the Mason company has been out of business for over a century.

Canning grew in popularity during WW I and WW II. Canning was seen as a way to help the troops from home. As one can probably expect it is not as popular as it once was.

Many other companies made glass jars some with similar systems to the Mason jar, such as the Atlas E-Z jar, the Kerr jar, and the Ball jar. However others were made with completely different systems such as the Lightning jar.

An early Ball Mason jar

The Atlas "Strong Shoulder" Mason jar-The Strong Shoulder is the raised lip just below the lid.

A Ball jar using the Lightning clamp system.

The Ball Mason jar using the "Strong Shoulder" or the raised lip.

All of these jars were a gift from Five Crows who is a good friend and a gold mine of knowledge in a variety of areas.

*Interesting side note Ball jars used to be manufactured in Mundelien, Illinois up until the plant closed in 1981.

PYO Farms

Pick your own is a very interesting idea and I feel that it can only exist in cultures who no longer have a large base of agriculture. It is a way for many people to give themselves or their children of a sense of what it might be like to be on a farm. If farming was only picking and eating. However, I cann't begrudge this idea at all. For one it is a great way for family farms to keep going and to capitalize on a type of industry that Americans do so well; Tourism. I have been to farms that are more amusement park than actual farm. A second reason is that honestly this could be the closest some of these families ever get to the source where their food comes from. If nothing else they will know what a strawberry plant looks like and how to tell when they are ripe enough to pick. Lastly I participate in this phenomenon as well. Buying strawberries by the quart can become expensive from the farmers market($5 a quart), but PYO is less than half the price of the farmers market strawberries.

So it was with this last idea in mind that Naomi, myself, and two of our good friends went to McCann Berry Farm in Woodstock, IL to purchase some strawberries at a discounted price and to help support a local family farm. The McCann Berry Farm was well run and they even had people in the field to help direct you to a row that had not yet been picked. So one doesn't waste their time going up and down rows or sections that have already been picked over. I also found a bit of camaraderie with the other people who were picking. Some helped direct others to where the berries were bigger or more plentiful. By the end of the hour we had 5 buckets of strawberries or 20 quarts. Our Friends Kelly and Kathy collected some peas and also helped us to fill one of our buckets. And we did all of this for just a little over $40 and some time in the car driving through the beautiful back roads of McHenry County.

As for what did we need 20 quarts of strawberries for. Stay tuned to find out.

The Links Between Phenology and Gardening

For those of you who do not know phenology is the study of the changing of the seasons.  Many believe it to be the oldest area of science.  For early humans would have needed to know when nature was changing in order to adjust his/her lives accordingly.  With the invention of agriculture early humans became even more dependent upon the study of phenology.  Signs in nature would have let them know when to plant different types of seeds or when to begin to harvest the crops that they had planted so many months before.  

I found this website http://gardening.about.com/od/organicgardenin1/a/Phenology.htm 

which has some good information that the author has collected over the years and the table below details some of she has collected.

Also for more information on the study of phenology see Naomi the Nature Nerd

Naomi knows more than I could adequately or compentently tell you about nature, phenology, native plants, and much more.  So check out her blog from the link above or from my blog roll at the bottom.

Phenology Clues

Plant peas	When forsythia & daffodils blooms
Plant potatoes	When 1st dandelion blooms
	When the shadbush flowers
Plant beets, carrots, cole crops, lettuce and spinach	When lilac is in first leaf
Plant beans, cucs and squash	When lilac is in full bloom
Plant tomatoes	When lily-of-the-valley are in full bloom
Transplant eggplant, melon and peppers	When irises bloom
Plant corn	When apple blossoms start to fall
Seed fall cabbage and broccoli	When catalpas and mockoranges bloom
Seed morning glories	When maple leaves reach full size
Plant cool season flowers (pansies, snapdragons...)	When aspen and chokecherry trees leaf out
Watch for:
Eastern tent caterpillars to hatch	When crab apples start to bloom
Gypsy moths hatch	When the shadbush flowers
Squash vine borer eggs are laid	When chicory flowers
Mexican bean beetle larvae hatch	When foxglove flowers open.
Japanese beetles arrive	When morning glory vines start to climb

If beef's the king of meat, potato's the queen of the garden world. ~Irish Saying

Just this past week I planted approximately 50 potatoes in my garden.  If this crop does even moderately well I believe that I will probably have enough potatoes for myself and to trade or sell to others.  But as I planted all of these potatoes (8 different varieties) I began to wonder about the potato itself.  For the potato is one of the most commonly eaten vegetables in America, second only to corn.  This seems appropriate since these two vegetables are native to the Americas.  However I think you must look at the history of the potato to truly appreciate its rise to stardom in America.  For a little over 140 years ago the potato was nearly non-existent as a culinary dish in the United States.

Archaeologists have found remains of potatoes that date back nearly 2500 years in the modern regions of Peru and Chile.  The Incas grew and worshiped the potato as a divine gift.  The Incas would have storage sites along their roads.  Within these storage sites potatoes would lie waiting for the hungry traveler who needed their nourishment.  The conquistadors of course invaded and conquered the Americas in the 1500's. In 1565 a Spanish conquistador named Gonzalo Jiminez de Quesada took the potato back to Spain in lieu of the gold that he was supposed to have found.  Although this may not be the first time potatoes were brought to Europe it is the first recorded event of when they were brought back.  The Spanish were so taken with the potato that they kept them on all of their sailing ships.  It should also be noted that on ships where sailors ate potatoes scurvy did not occur.  

However it should be noted that the potato did not receive as good a reception from the rest of Europe as it did from Spain.  It was considered by many to be a weird, poisonous. and evil plant.  In France the potato was thought to cause leprosy, syphilis, narcosis, scrofula, early death, sterility, and rampant sexual behavior.  Many farmers also believed that the potato would destroy the soil where it grew making it impossible to grow anything else where it grew. The town of Besancon, France passed an edict in opposition to the potato that stated, "In view of the fact that the potatoe is a pernicious substance whose use can cause leprosy, it is hereby forbidden, under pain of fine, to cultivate it."  Legend has it that a Spanish ship wrecked off the coast of Ireland and potatoes washed ashore giving the Irish their potatoes. 

However, it wasn't until the late 1700's that potatoes really made a show in Europe.  French military chemist Antonin-Augustin Parmentier won a contest to create a stable food crop that would help stave off famine and offer the French military an abundant source of food.  Parmentier convinced King Louis XVI to allow him to plant potatoes on 100 acres of worthless land just outside of Paris.  He also convinced the King that a group of soldiers would be needed to gaurd the crops during the day and night.  A couple of months after the potatoes were planted he arranged for the soldiers to be absent one night.  As Parmentier predicted the local farmers scrambled across the fields in search of a crop that was so important that the King would set men to guard it.  After this night the potato became a staple crop in every French farmer's garden.  In the 1790's Marie Antoinette would wear potato flowers in her hair.  Because of this all the ladies of France during this era would wear the flowers of the potato in their hair.

Luther Burbank a horticulturist, in 1872, develops the Russet Burbank and with this development the Idaho potato industry begins to take off.  The secret behind the Russet Burbank is the fact that it is close in taste to the Irish potato but much more disease resistant.  

"Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes."

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), American novelist