Rainy day musing

The weather this spring in Utah has been the wettest on record, cooler than usual and seems to just keep going on and on... It's easy, as a gardener, to get disgruntled and wish for the warm summer weather, and for the sake of our farmers I guess I do. I thought it wouldn't hurt though to just kind of accept it for today. It will move on when it's time to move on whether we like it or not. Such is life.
For my gardener freinds:

Rain falls gently on hail beaten earth.
Gardens rise slow in the long, cool spring.
Relish the moment,
blistering summer will shock us awake soon.

P~

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Growing healthy soil with a pitchfork.

When we go about building the soil in our gardens, it's easy to think that we can just add amendments, till really well and fertilize as needed; that's been much of the standard thinking for many many years. It will grow plants, and it does work. The problem is that in our changing world, and by changing world I mean increasing fuel and food costs not to mention the increasing price of those very fertilizers and amendments we've depended on as demand for them increases, that same way of gardening will, and is, beginning to yield diminishing returns on the bottom line.

The way I like to combat this is to spend a good deal of my early season time in my garden working on "Growing my Soil" before I work on growing my plants and my main weapon is to add lots and lots of organic material throughout the year, and primarily in the fall. The complimentary component to adding to the beds in the fall, is turning those beds over in the spring.

This gives a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. In the foreground you can see the remains of the broken down grass,leaves and compost that was added last fall and some earlier this spring (About a month and a half ago.) and the rich soil laying underneath it after it's been turned with my trusty pitchfork. You might think immediately, "How does laying a bunch of layers of organic material over the top of your bed help the soil underneath it?" but I have another secret weapon that helps me to drag all that organic goodness down into the soil...

Worms... and lots of them! Where there is lots of organic material, there will be lots of worms, it's just a matter of fact. And keep in mind, I added this garden bed as a "lasagna garden" only two seasons ago, prior to that there was nothing here but some unhealthy grass. As earthworms feed many species move to the surface to have access to the rich matter found there. A they burrow back down into the soil they bring some of that material with them. They also excrete their castings (manure) into the soil, something often called black gold for it's nutrient rich qualities. A study by the New Mexico Extension Service found that earthworm castings" often contain 5-11 times more nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium as the surrounding soils"

In addition to helping to incorporate nutrients into the soil, worms also serve a valuable purpose in helping to aerate the soil as well. If you look at the picture above, you can see one of the larger worm tunnels bored right through the soil. This helps to connect the sub-surface parts of the garden bed to the air above and bring needed air to the roots of the developing plants. It also makes for great little waterways for moisture to make its way deeper into the soil. Nurturing this web-of-life in your garden beds is a fundamental idea behind organic gardening and is one of the most effective ways of moving beyond chemical additives and fertilizers. Besides, it's cheap!

OK, so you get that I love my gardens earthworms right, but surely there must be more to turning the garden over that just turning in organic material and finding lots of worms? Definitely.

By taking the time to physically turn my soil over, I have a one on one opportunity, so to speak, to take a look at the garden in general. One of the things I am able to take care of at that time is to find weed stock below the surface and remove them before they become a problem. The photo above looks like just a single stray root under the soil.

After breaking up the soil though, I found it to be a network of rhizomous roots from our most noxious local weed, Field Bind Weed. These roots, as you can tell if you look closely at their tips, will throw off tens of side shoots and more rootstock that I'll have to deal with later. Now's the best time to take care of it.

The finished garden bed after being turned over with a fork. Much like discing a field, the soil has been turned and incorporated with itself and is ready for any tillage that it might need.

And finally, the tilled garden bed, ready for planting. It might look like I didn't till it well enough but I left it a bit chunky on purpose. When you till a garden, or a field for that matter, you don't want to till it to the point that it looks like soft fluffy potting soil with no real character to it. Doing that will, over time, break down what is called the "tilth" of the soil, which is to say its actual structure. If you picture a glass of sand, you can imagine how there is very little air space between the grains, that's because the grains are so small. The extreme example of that idea is clay, which has particles so small that they bond almost at a molecular level which is what makes it so hard to work with. Now imagine a glass of various sized pieces of soil; there's a lot more room for air, water and roots to move through it. That's the idea here. Besides, most of the rock looking objects in this photo are actually just dried soil clods that will, after watering and mulching, soften and break back down into the bed. Also, I wouldn't want to go overboard and drive off or kill off all those lovely little helpers I have in the garden beds would I?

Best of luck working your gardens this season and remember, "Grow the soil and the plants will come!"

Paul~

Last minute hail protection

We knew we had a storm rolling in tonight, but as it came in it had all the signs of one that might bring a bit of hail. And it did. For some last minute protection from possible damage to our still tender plants in our garden I called into use some of my stock - my wife would say overstock - of pots.

There's also some glass figurine covers that I picked up at a thrift stores for a few cents a couple of years ago.
I placed these over the plants literally as the storm blew in and was immediately glad I did.

A few minutes later the hail arrived. It wasn't a tremendous downpour but the weather forecast for the next 36 hrs is very unsettled and may include more hail and snow so I'll leave these on just to be safe.
Just some of the things that need to be taken care of in the backyard farm.

Any of you have any other creative ways you like to keep your "babies" safe in inclement weather? Share them in the comments section to help us all out and give us ideas.
P~

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.8

Preparing to plant potatoes

Recently, I dropped by our local nursery to pick up a few additional items that we needed to have. One of those items was another five pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes.

While we were sorting through the 'taters, an older couple was there looking to get some as well and asked us if we'd ever grown them. I was actually pretty shocked, after we said "yes, many times", when they asked us, "what are tubers?" (The sign on the display referenced tubers) I guess I shouldn't be... shocked that is... but I was. I guess our disconnect from our food has been going on longer than I had imagined. We talked to then for a little while, giving them a basic primer in potato growing 101, and went our separate ways. It got me to thinking that this may be a really good time to go over some of the basics of growing potatoes. I Usually have my potatoes in the ground around St Patrick's Day, but this year it's been so rainy and wet - Locally our watershed levels are averaging around 160%-170% of our normal level - that I haven't been able to get them into the ground. I probably could have squeezed them in at some point, but I think I would have suffered from a lot of rot if I had.

First of all, the potatoes themselves are the tubers; and tubers are "...various types of modified plant structures that are enlarged to store nutrients. They are used by plants to survive the winter or dry months and provide energy and nutrients for regrowth during the next growing season..." (wikipedia). Just needed to get that straight from the start.

Potato's are plants in the solanaceae family. That makes them cousins with plants like Tomatoes, Peppers and Eggplants. If you think about the way that those plants bear fruit, you'll have a pretty good idea of the way that potatoes bear their tubers as well. Many folks think that potatoes grow from the roots of the plant, an understandable thing considering the photo above, it does look like they've grown from the roots, But take a look at this photo:

You can see the seed potato that was placed in the ground and can clearly see that the small potatoes are growing from the stem ABOVE the planted potato. Think again about tomatoes... if you pay attention to them they actually grow from a small stem that grows from the main stem. Potatoes are the same, except that they only grow on the stem that is underground. Because of that, they are planted a little differently.

This might look a lot like how you would lay out any other plant before putting it in the ground. The difference here is that I'm not going to plant them into the hills, but rather will bury them a couple of inches under the soil at the bottom of the furrows. I lay the potatoes out so I know how many I can fit in a row, then dig them in and leave them alone. Potatoes don't need to be watered in because the tuber itself is mostly water itself and is designed by mother nature to support this plant as it gets itself established. I let my potatoes grow until they are nearly a foot tall before I ever irrigate them. The spring rains take care of that for me. After the Potato plants have grown up enough to be five or six inches above the ground, I will then rake or hoe the soil from the hills over and onto the plant itself. After this, I let the plant grow further. When it's another five or six inches above ground level again, I will hoe the soil up onto the plant again leaving furrows between the plants that I will flood irrigate once or twice a week.

As the weather turns hotter and the plants are getting taller, I want to keep mounding over the plants as much as possible, and mulching to keep the moisture level steady and weeds down. Grass clippings work great for this. The reason, in case you were wondering, why I keep mounding soil and mulch over the plants is because, as I said, the actual potatoes grow from the stems above the seed potato, but only where it's covered. I want to make sure that there's as much stem underground as possible when the potatoes are growing. So, the long and the short of it is that with a little understanding about the way that potatoes grow and some of the ways that you can coax them along and get great returns for yourself.

Best of luck with your tater growing!

Paul~

I feel the need the need for MEAD!

OK OK, I stole that line from a t-shirt idea that was batted around today at my mead making class, but really.. I do feel the need to make some MEAD! From what I learned today, mead, being one of the worlds oldest fermented beverages, is also one of the easiest wines to make.

It stands to reason that it would be when you think about it considering that it was made, almost simultaneously by the Norse, the Egyptians and the Celts throughout history. They didn't have modern tools and sanitation ability like we do and were able make mead quite easily. Also honey, whick in case you aren't in the know about mead, is the base fermentable sugar in the mead, was one of the few available sugars throughout history.

After spending nearly an hour talking "Mead Theory" with the instructor, we got down to it. The mead that we were to make was of course honey based, but also had added in bartlett pears that would increase the fermentable sugars available, while also adding a slight flavor to the mead, and a certain bouquet in the final product.

The Honey and water wort (The base of the recipe)

After mixing the FIFTEEN pounds of honey into water to begin disolving it, the pears and more water were boiled to break down the cell walls and release the flavors and also to kill off any potentially competing yeasts or bacterias. We want to control the yeasts that will go into the mix so this is an important step. While we milled and added the pears to the wort (The base of the mead.) we began to heat another pot of water with other additives that will affect the mead formation in different ways. Peppermint tea, gypsum (yes the stone) and black tea amongst them. This was brought to a boil and was then added to the wort as well.

The "additives" like irish moss, gypsum and spearmint tea...

After everything was added to the wort and it had been stirred vigorously to fully dissolve the honey and incorporate all the additives evenly through the mixture as well as to aid in lowering the temperature to verynear to room temperature, we learned how to "pitch the yeast". Pitching the yeast is much like proofing yeast before adding it to a bread recipe. A cup or so of the luke warm wort was placed in a separate bowl and the yeast was added to this. It was gently stirred into the wort and left to sit and bloom. And bloom it did. After 15 minutes the pitched yeast looked like a bowl of porridge.

Adding the pears for sugar and bouquet. (If you're going to learn to make mead, you should of course learn from a man with celtic knots on his arms yes?)

We had to stop there unfortunately because of legal reasons surrounding the manufacturing laws for alchoholic beverage or some odd thing, but the last steps were simply to stir in the yeast to the full bucket of wort, add a fermentation lock and wait...

All in all I would say that it lived up to its reputation for being a very easy brew to make. If you've not had mead, it is typically a golden-hued wine with a honey sweetness and slight dryness, depending on the recipe. It can be very mild on the finish or can have a strong back-end almost like a distilled spirit. Any way you can get it though, it is very tasty. I look forward to making some this year, and with any luck, getting some bees next year to provide me my own honey to make it with!

Best till next time all.
Paul~

Union Station Fermentation

After our aforementioned cheese class, A~ and I went down town, Ogden that is, to check out a new store that we had just learned about, the Union Station Fermentation store. While there, we had an opportunity to speak with one of the owners, Nigel; a very cool guy. You may remember back some time when I had my little Mr. Beer home brewing experiment. I was very happy with those results and have decided that this year I will be stepping up my home brewing game to include using fresh hops (Which we'll also be trying to grow in the garden this year as well.), partial mash and really trying to get some good brew going... but I digress. I, along with everyone else in the "north counties", needed to either drive to Richmond (1hr north) or Salt Lake City (1/2 hr south) in order to get their beer making supplies; but no more. Here's the other great thing, they don't just supply products for home beer and wine making, they also have kits and equipment for the home cheese maker. In fact, that's how we learned about them in the first place, through our cheese making class instructor. They carry cheese molds, cultures, wax and other such cheese making stuff. This will come in handy at some point this year when we try to make some actual hard cheese. This weekend however, I'll get to participate in another of their offerings... classes. I'm scheduled to attend a class there on Saturday to learn about making mead. Yep, you heard that right, the ancient honey based liqueur of the Celts and my own personal ancestors... the Vikings! This will be information that I'll add to my knowledge base to keep for future use when we finally put our plans into action to keep bees. They also offer classes periodically on cheese making and both beginning and advanced beer making. I intend to do as many of them as I can. The long and short of it is that the Fermentation Station seems to be the kind of place that we'll be spending a lot of time at in the foreseeable future. If you're in the Northern Utah area and are at all interested in any of the things I've talked about here give them a check out. Here's their contact information:

Union Station Fermentation 274 25th St Ogden, UT 84401 (801) 392-9772

FACEBOOK

Cheese making at home

A~ and I took an opportunity to attend a cheese making class the weekend before last and had a great time. If you're following me on Facebook you may remember me posting something about it. (If you're not, don't delay, I'm making an effort to get more regular posts up there in a timely manner.) Well we had a great time.

Demonstrating the process of making mozzarella

The class was being taught by a man that started one of our very favorite local cheese companies, Beehive Cheese, and was covering the obvious first timer cheese of choice, mozzarella. This was perfectly fine with us since, with summer knocking on the door, we wanted to get a few tricks as to how to make this family favorite so we could add it to our repertoire to enjoy with fresh garden tomatoes this year. The class covered the basics of course, but we did manage to learn a couple of good tricks too. For instance, did you know that even just a couple of drops of milk in normal tap water is enough to negate the effects of the chlorine in it? That's nice to know. Another good tip was to mix your citric acid into a 1/4 cup of water (with a drop of milk in it...) to dissolve it before adding it to the milk. You should also do the same thing for your rennet. The reason for this is to allow the ingredient to be introduced to the milk more gently so to speak. Rather than the shock of a direct hit of citric acid, you can ease it into the milk this way.

Prepping all ingredients. Milk & diluted citric acid and rennet.

Since we were newly educated and wanted to put our new info to use to really reinforce it into out minds we went ahead and made ourselves a batch of fresh mozzarella and ricotta this weekend. We learned a couple of things during this process. 1. If we're going to be making cheese, even just the basic mozzarella and ricotta, we need to get some specific equipment. Namely a large fine meshed strainer and some good quality cheese cloth. (The kind for actually making cheese with, not the flimsy crap from the mega-mart.) 2. The final step in making the mozzarella is to heat the curd and "knead" it until it turns to the silken texture and stiff dough-like consistency of good mozzarella.During this part of the process, there is a time to stop when the cheese has formed... I passed that point slightly and the dough was a little on the rubbery side but still very tasty. I'll chalk this error up to simple inexperience. Overall, I really enjoyed the class and the cheese that we made as a testament to having learned something at it. now I'm looking forward to the lasagna that we'll be having with our fresh cheese! Here's a few pictures of our home cheese making process in the works. Buon appetito!!

First, heat milk slowly to 55 deg... then add citric acid and stir...

Continue heating to 88 deg (F) then add rennet..stirring in.. then let sit while curd forms and increase temp to 98

strain off the whey leaving only curds...

heat curd, continue pouring off whey and knead till silken and dough like...

Separate into serving sizes if you'd like and store in fridge. (or eat right away)

We also made ricotta from another half gallon of milk. The steps are even easier:

Heat milk in a microwave safe bowl until it reaches between 190 - 200 Deg (F), then stir in 1/4 cup vinegar per qt of Milk. This will separate the curds off almost immediately.

After lettin the curd separate for 20-30 minutes, strain off whey and store the ricotta.. BAM! that easy.

The leftover whey from both processes is still a very high nutrient supplement. If you have chickens or livestock they will love it! Waste not want not.

Till Next Time.

good times

I love walking with my sweetheart on beautiful spring evenings...

Amidst all the work we have to do at this time of year, don't forget to stop and enjoy the season!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Building the soil in a (sub)Urban Garden I

When we moved into our current home, nearly seven years ago, the soil we had been dealt was only soil in the very loosest sense of the word. Because we knew we wanted to have a garden, we built raised beds and essentially created good soil right in place. It worked well, and we have been able to use those garden beds for the last six garden seasons with good results.Here's a picture taken during our second spring...

The other thing that we did, while using those beds, was to add copious amounts of organic matter to our soil.every year we mulched the walkways and added manure to the garden beds.in the fall we made sure to add lots of grass clippings, leaves and other available forms of compostable materials to the beds which was then turned into the soil the following spring. This had the effect of, over time, building the soil around our raised beds into pretty good soil as well. In fact, each spring when we've been cleaning out the garden and preparing for the next season, we've been forced to make time to lift our raised bed garden frames to make sure they were still sitting on the surface of our garden paths. If we hadn't done this they would have been buried a couple of years back and the soil inside them would have come over the edges... and I'm not exaggerating.
If you look close at this picture from a couple of years later you can see how the 6" deep garden frames have been buried down to only a couple of inches.

Michael Pollen, in his book _The Omnivores' Dilemma_, mentioned a phenomenon called "uppening" of the soil. I can scarcely think of a better way to describe what's been happening in the garden for these last 6 years. Not only has the soil in our garden become slowly more fertile and friable in our north garden, but the soil has literally gotten taller! Take a look back at that first picture above, see the bottom fence panel? The garden mulch is at about the same level at the bottom of that panel. Then take look at the second picture... notice how the garden level is creeping up the fence panel?

This year, we decided to take advantage of that fertile, friable soil that we've been slowly building in this part of our yard by actually removing the garden bed frames all together and tilling up the whole area.
removing the garden bed frames and getting ready to till in mulched area.

While doing this, we’ll be able to expand our garden area while also increasing the rooting depth of the plants that we grow, something that in our arid climate is a great help to their success. We'll be able do increase the rooting depth because after we double dig and run our cultivator over the garden we will also mound up the soil into loosely formed raised furrows. (I'll have to show that in a later post.)
Digging in fence guards to keep the "uppened" soil in our garden.

After double digging the garden beds, we dug a trench along our fence line and placed 3/4 inch thick 18" wide plywood sheeting between the fence posts to act as a soil barrier because last year our soil ended up actually pushing the fencing in and bowing it. Can't have that.
After cultivating and before mounding the furrows.

By this point we were ready to form up furrows, get ready for spring planting and get on to the other beds.

I've learned through the process of watching our garden evolve, that things in the garden take time. There are seasons not just throughout the year, but also throughout the gardens life cycle. This soil was once "unusable" and it now beginning to become fertile, and healthy soil. I wonder how it will be in a couple of more years...?
How are things going in your garden? Have you had to overcome poor soil conditions. What did you do to improve it organically?
P~

Morning has broken

Take a moment to look around you at the beauty of every day. The majesty of a beautiful mountain morning can hold you over through the rest of the day.
Best to you all
P~

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Collecting Globe Artichoke Seeds

I made an interesting observation this weekend past, let me take a minute to share it with you.

Last year we grew globe artichokes in our backyard garden and they were a great success. The plants that we grew were holdovers from the year prior which had been purchased at a local greenhouse. At the end of last season I decided to leave a couple of the artichokes blossoms to complete their life-cycle. mostly just because my wife and I love the electric blue punk rock looking spiked flower that develops.Those flowers eventually grew dry and brittle and died off as the rest of the plant went dormant for the winter. This weekend I cleaned up that garden bed and collected those last blossoms.
I imagined that, based on the shape and appearance of the final blossom, the spiky pieces (the choke) of the flower head that had dried might contain the tiny seeds of new artichoke plants; similar to a dandelion. I was partially right.
As I peeled back the layers of dried petals and choke, hoping to find small seeds connected to the ends of the choke strands, I did... sort of. What I found much to my surprise were actual seeds, and not even the dainty little dandelionesque seeds I had expected, but sunflower seed sized real seeds tucked right in there amidst the choke. Who knew? Well I assume someone did, but not I. The garden never ceases to amaze me. Just letting Mother nature do her thing so often results in little wonders.

So now what? Will they grow? I would assume that they will, and you know I will certainly try, but I don't know if they will produce true to type. It will definitely be a fun experiment to watch though. I'll make sure to keep you informed.
Have any of you ever grown artichokes from seed? Ever grown them from seed that you kept from your own plants? I'm always open to learn from your experiences.
Till next time...
P~

Supporting the Local Economy

I mentioned a couple of posts back about a Utah seed company that I generally get seed from.

One of the main reasons that I patronized them was because I like to try to support local businesses if I can and to keep those dollars in our state. Well I have a new sponsor to point out to you that you should take a look into for any upcoming seed purchases that you need to make. Hometown Seeds. They are also a UT local company and they have what seems to be a reasonable GMO free policy. You can find a link to them --> right over there in the side bar.

I will add the caviat that I am receiving from them a free herb seed collection and that I have not prior to this ordered from them. I will certainly let you know in the future about my experience, and would love to hear about any input you have.

Support your local companies when you can.
Best
P~

Using the harvest

As we approach the new season, I thought I'd mention an important part of what goes into planning our garden, how we will use our harvest through the year.

This Monday we decided to make some paninni sandwiches for lunch and one of our favorite additions to our sandwiches are sun dried Roma tomatoes.

Here we have a bag of dried tomatoes from August of last year, that I'm going to make a batch of re-hydrated tomatoes with.

The first thing that I do when I re-hydrate tomatoes is to place a portion larger than what I actually want to eat (if you're going to make them, you may as well make enough to enjoy for a while.) and place them in a bowl.
To this I add some luke warm water, but just less than it would take to soak them all because I like to add a bit of balsamic vinegar to add some extra flavor to them too.

After an hour our so, the tomatoes will be tender and you can either eat them then or store them for later. To store the tomatoes for later, we place them in one or two small canning jars and add some olive oil to just cover them. This will store easily in the fridge for at least a week.

Now... to revisit our homemade ravioli recipe... sun-dried tomato and ricotta??? What's your favorite way to enjoy sun-dried tomatoes?
P~

Planning the planting

I dug out the seed storage tonight for a little inventory. A few of the seeds that we have are getting a little old so will need to be replaced, but the bulk of the seed we have should be good to go. This year I'm doing something that I should have been doing all along... making a checklist of the seeds that I have and the plants I want to grow and will bring that with me when I go to buy my seed. I buy most of my seed through Mountain Valley Seeds. I get no support from them, so that's not why I mention them, (although I'm not opposed to it if they want to contact me...) I like to go through them because they are based out of SLC, so they are local, plus I am able to get much of my seed from local vendors or nursarys and save myself and the planet the shipping costs. Also, they do a really good job of marking what is hybrid and what is open pollenated or heirloom.

The plant list for this year looks like this:
broccoli,
broccoli romanesco,
brussels sprouts,
cabbage (red & green),
spinach,
carrots,
peas (shelling &sugar snap),
kohlrabi
green beans,
peppers:
green, red, yellow, jalapenos
tomatoes: roma, heartland,
hamson, hillbilly, amish, cherry
fennel
onions : green, yellow and red
shallots,
eggplant,
zucchini,
Charentais melons, butternut squash,
okra,
artichokes,
dry beans,
sweet potato,
celeriac,
kale (italian &curly),
cucumber,
tomatillos

herbs:
basil,
thyme,
parsley,
rosemary,
oregano,
cilantro,
hops,
tobacco,
chamomile,
echinacea,
mint,
peppermint
dill

It's ambitious for certain, but not really hugely more than we've grown before. There are a couple of new additions though worth mentioning, for instance tobacco which can be used as an organic pesticide, and hops for home beer making. (That will be covered in a forthcoming post.) Either way, after last years miserable failure, we are really going after it this year.

Anyone else getting started with their plant lists or garden planning yet? Planning any new trial plants this year?
Love to hear about it
P~

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Most Local Meat

In a follow up to the last post that I put up, regarding my search for more sustainable and local meat sources I thought I'd share with you one of the most local sources of meat that I have access to. FISH!

Since just after the new year, our local reservoirs and lakes have been frozen over and ice fishing has been good. I grew up in Southern California, and access to fresh seafood was never an issue, but I really hate to buy seafood here in the Intermountain west, because anything that I get has to be trucked in and is never as fresh as it could be and also has a pretty significant carbon foot print. That isn't even taking into consideration the issues of overfishing of our oceans that really needs to be a concern of everyone.

With the lakes frozen and the ice fishing on, none of those things are a concern.

This reservoir is only a half hour drive from our house, and is close enough that within 1 hour I can be on the lake fishing. What more could I ask for? Well, except for maybe actually catching something that is... And I had a little of that luck too lately.

These little guys averaged 12-15 inches and were plentiful the last few times I've been up.

The funny thing, is that I know Trout are a members of the salmonid family, but in the winter it seems they really live up to their family name, look at how orange and salmon color they were.

AND, they were delicious too. No complaints here at all.
Anyone else been out on the ice or bringing in their own "wild" meat sources? I'd love to hear about it.
Take Care.
P~

I almost gave up...

Really, I was this close to it. I'd done my homework, diligently looked for alternative options and had come up short. All but for one option that I thought I'd already covered... bingo! Oh geez, sorry, I guess I didn't mention what the heck I was talking about, let me take you back a little ways in my thinking and this might make a little more sense.

Every year I take a look at my life and try to find the things that I think I really have a chanced at making a difference in with it. One year I decided too really focus on learning about and becoming more sustainable, another I focused on really getting a good yield from our garden and so on. Some years have been more successful than others, but all have enabled me to at least take a good look at how and why I am doing things the way I am. This year was no different, I just haven't had the chance to get online and put it down in writing for posterity.

The thing that I've decided on, or had decided on but wasn't sure was going to happen, was to finally put my money where my mouth is and actually make a concerted effort to consume primarily sustainable meat products. I'll get into the details more another time, but let me first finish what I was saying about almost not even being able to do it at all.

So, as I was saying, I had been looking for options to buying what is essentially factory meats, beef in particular, and had not had a lot of luck. Oh there were products available, but really they were pretty price prohibitive because you generally have to buy them by the quarter or the half of beef, which at $3.00 - $5.00/lb and two to four hundred pounds respectively, is quite an investment. I looked into a couple of local producers that I knew of, combed the web for others and talked to friends that I knew had ordered "good" grass-fed beef before. Still I came up short, and that's where we came in to this whole story - with me about ready to give up on the whole experiment before the first month was over.

If you've been reading this blog for very long at all then you've probably heard my proselytizing about how we can and will receive those things that we believe in and fully expect will come... well, here we go again. Just as I was about to give up on the whole thing, and I mean the day I had really gotten down about it, I had a friend of mine mention that he was in a conversation with a guy the day before who had mentioned that he bought locally raised grass-fed beef from a local butcher that was literally just around the corner from my house. I had talked with that same butcher last year when they opened the shop about this exact thing and had found them, quite honestly, to be what I thought of as very pro grain fed and not very open to the idea of organic local products. I decided that I at least had to check in with them and see if what I had heard was right and lucky day it was! As it turns out, there are a couple of other families that are also coming to the butcher for local grass-fed beef and he's able to get it in regularly on request. While we were in there he did have some very nice pieces of tenderloin available from the local provider so we went ahead and bought a few steaks.

This weekend we grilled them up and ate them with some homemade butternut squash ravioli and roasted fingerling potatoes and they were delicious! Our boys, who are sort of on the fence meat eaters, like to have steak occasionally but really can't stand fat; that wasn't a problem with this meat. The steaks were very tender with just enough marbling to give them good flavor, but not enough to make them fatty. I think we have a winner.

Oh, and by the way, the butternut squash raviolis... delicious! I'll have to get around to getting that recipe up online for ya'll.
Be well.
more to come soon.
P~

Still bottling

Late last spring I started with a little bit of SCOBY that I had started from a small piece of culture that had grown in a commercial bottle that a friend had given me.
That was the beginning of the kombucha start that I've had growing since. its grown into quite a "member" off the family, right up there with our sourdough start.
I've even had to separate it a couple of times.
It's not a drink that I find to be to many peoples taste, but my boys and I love it, especially when we make it with a little bit of grape juice like this batch was. Some batches have more fizz than others but it's always tasty.
Anyone else experimenting with kombucha? If so, what's your favorite way to make it?
P~

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5