A long Time Coming!

Well if tomato fungus and snow where my 2 main crops this year I would be whipping a new Benz, but we did have a great year without tomatoes and with all the snow. Our potato crop and greens where killing it this season. But it is 58 degrees outside today and we have 20,000 veg transplants in the greenhouse getting ready to roll, so here is a nice tomato jam for the plants and all the hippies out there.

Our house in about 28" of new snow.
A plow truck here at Winterthur!
One of 2 lectures at this years Farming for the future conference at PASA this year. It was on saving seeds but I worked Yoda into it.

I will post the entire video of the lecture someday.

We also had a great article in the March Grid Magazine and our

farm grown seeds are selling like mad, more on that in the next post.

Later

Made me smile!

Photo by Mike Siegel, The Seattle Times. Jake Harris, left, with his Cascadian Edible Landscapes partner Michael Seliga, grows chives, basil, zucchini and other vegetables in a parking strip outside his home in the University District

The Seattle City Council is working to increase availability of affordable, locally grown food. One approach: allowing folks to grow vegetable gardens in parking strips — the no man’s land between sidewalk and curb

By Maureen O’Hagan
Seattle Times
July 25, 2009

We’ve all heard the foodie mantra: Eat Local.

It’s going gangbusters in grocery stores that increasingly tout local produce. Now, area government has gotten involved, too.

No, the City Council isn’t pushing expensive arugula. Instead, it’s trying to increase the availability of locally grown food, especially for those least able to afford it.

“I think there’s a real transformation happening,” said Branden Born, assistant professor of urban design and planning at the University of Washington.

Some of this shift involves research projects and nonbinding resolutions, which are essentially invisible to ordinary citizens. But for tangible evidence — actual growing evidence — you need look no further than the lowly curb in front of your home.

It used to be that planting anything but grass in the strip between the sidewalk and the curb required a permit, even if it was just a spray of flowers or a few carrots. For hardscaping, like steppingstones or raised beds, fees averaging $225 were attached, too. Would-be gardeners routinely called the city to complain.

This year, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) changed its rules. Now, no permit is required for parking-strip vegetable gardens. While hardscaping still requires a permit, it’s easy to get and free of charge, said Rick Sheridan, spokesman for SDOT.

Last year, the city issued 22 permits for parking-strip gardens. This year, they’ve issued 52, and that’s for hardscaping alone. There’s no telling how many people have taken advantage of the new no-permit rules for simple vegetation.

“We get the sense that people are really embracing it,” Sheridan said.

‘Eat your yard’

Gardener Jake Harris, for one, couldn’t wait, and immediately planted a veritable cornucopia in front of his University District home. In addition, Harris’ company, Cascadian Edible Landscapes, has installed raised beds for a half-dozen other Seattleites eager to capture the unobstructed sunlight that parking strips offer.

Harris says his mantra is “eat your yard.” And the demand in Seattle, he said, is “pretty huge.”

“We’re looking for every way possible for people who want to plant food to be able to do so,” said Rob Gala, an aide to City Council President Richard Conlin, who is leading the charge. “And the closer it is to their house, the better.”

Parking strips, however visible, are just a small part of larger changes, Born said. He sees hope in the research projects, grants and policy decisions that are aimed at broadening the local food movement.

I can read

No really I have time to read books, not just the New Times and Blogs, but real books.

The Jungle Effect by Daphne Miller M.D, this book started out like about 8 others I have read about the topic of food, but it is so well written and looks at such interesting cultures. Like the Tarahumara Indians of the the Copper Canyon. These native people of Mexico are so cool, as also in Born to Run by local runner Christopher McDougall. The book that lit a fire under my ass and got me running again. I did not read it by played it in the car, I am one of those people that does not count that as reading.

I also finished The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella. I am also looking forward to his new book on American Bison. I told my Buddy Steve that I want to come out west and a Kill a bison with a spear on horse back. He said that sounds great and he can't wait to come to my funeral.

The last book I just finished was Fat of the Land by Langdon Cook. Just a awesome book about finding your own food in the woods. This was my favorite of the lot, A wonderful read about eating his way thru the coast of Oregon. I really have to do more fishing.

Later

Ramp it up.

Great crop this year over 1.7 pounds of seed.

You may think that I am only a farmer here at happy cat, but you may have also noticed that I have a tendency to always be out foraging for edible plants. I am not much of a killer, so you won’t find me out there clubbing chipmunks over their little heads. But if someone where to wrap one of those little suckers in bacon and stuff it like a squash blossom? Maybe.

I grow up in the woods and I was always eating things that I found. My parents got me Euell Gibbons books when I was like ten.

So when I found my secret ramp stand I almost fell over, it is the size of 3-football field.

If I harvested all the ramps at once I would be taking Arugula to market in an Enzo Ferrari, for real.

Ramps Allium tricoccum are a native edible plant that is foraged for it’s wonderful spring bulb and leaves. Ramps grown from seed germinate in 6 to 18 months. 6 if the fall is warm and 18 if not. This year I am putting the ones I potted up into cold frames to get them some fall heat, hope I can get the 6 month window, but if not, cool gardening is all about patience.

What’s that? Patience, it is not being an over entitled self-centered prick, and boy the patience team could use some serious help.

Check out my Local Harvest Store it if you would like to buy some, or just ask me at the Kennett Square Farmers Market, I probably have some in the bottom of my pocket. You will not find them on our website, but be on the look out for a new web page in the near future, that will blow you mind.

Just be patient.

p.s. I got Lyme Disease out crawling around collecting these seeds and felt like something from a Hieronymus Bosch Painting for days and could not drink beer for a month.

where have all the tomatoes gone?

Me stealing Amy Goldman's thunder at the Terrain Heirloom Tomato Fest, Just kidding we had a great day and it was wonderful meeting Amy and talking to her about her books. I lectured about seed saving.
Chef Dave Berg of the Styer's Cafe @ Terrain is an amazing chef, he used 30 #'s of black krims and Tim's Black Ruffles (gay name and all) to make tomato water to poach this fish in. BOOM.

Above all things I am a tomato farmer.

That is a big statement; I am a lot of things (some good, some bad) we just don’t grow tomatoes we live tomatoes. This year we started with 174 varieties of love apples from seed. Seeds that we saved from the year before, seed that we sell and also turn into tomato plants, 20,000 of them this year, and we sold almost everyone of them. We also planted somewhere north of 1000 plants. So with some quick math, I figure I am responsible for close to 100,000 plants hitting the ground this year. Most years that makes me feel great, but this year, OUCH!

Have you ever heard of the Irish Potato Famine? The Irish feel in love with the easy to grow tuber, but the problem was that they only grow one type of potato, The Lumper, I still grow this one today, and it is a great potato. But an entire country growing on type of anything is a bad thing. (Think Kansas, 99% of all corn in this country comes from 3 kernels of corn) Biodiversity anyone.

Maybe it is my own fault, when I had my planting party we put 660 plants in my one field. I told my bubby Jacob, I think I am going back out and plant 6 more, you know just to keep farming evil.

Bad karma.

So maybe it was a large grower how sold sick plants to a national chain on a year with a wet and cold spring, that’s sounds pretty evil, right?

We started cut plants out of the fields in mid July, when I should of started to harvest the first cherry tomatoes, to date we have lost about 100 plants of the 1200+ we have put in, the others, well they look like shit. Some of the varieties don’t even look like them selves this year, shape and colors are off, it kills me.

So what happens now, well you pay more for tomatoes. You eat fewer tomatoes. We could be in a 5 years cycle of this weather. (I will move)

So please go the your local farmers market or road side stand and hug your farmer, they could use it.

This is where it all begins.

We slept in late, I am on vacation, then we went to Blue Hill to a great place for lunch. It is the sister restaurant of Cleonice called Table a Farmhouse Bistro. O my God. I had the Ploughman's Lunch (thought that was fitting for a busman's holiday) The Mackerel pate was out of this world.

This is where is all began.

After lunch we head to the 'Good Life Center' Helen and Scott Nearing place on the Maine Coast on cape Rosier. For me this is a true pilgrimage I read the Good Life when I was just 17 and was hell bent moving back to the land.

Hand built walled organic veg garden.
Helen and Scott's home that they made by hand.

Then we went to see uncle Elliot. Elliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch, have changed my life more than any other persons I can think of. From there TV show 'Gardening Naturally' to the many books and lectures. We visited Four Season Farm

Elliot's wonderful 10 acres of organic greatness.  Sheer Mecca.


This is hard to see, but it is a wooden fist raised in defiance. What else can I say.

VIVA!

Later

Eating local in Maine

Wow, the bounty of the Maine coast in summertime is amazing. The season is so short that everything seems to come to life at the same time. Peas and new potatoes grow next to the first cherry tomatoes. We toured a great farm yesterday, darthia farm was really great and I saw a porcupine in the tomato patch, I never saw that before. But Maine in the summer is really about foraging for me, and man the hunting has been good.

                                               Clams are everywhere, just make sure your cove or bay is not over raked and claming is banned. I had to walk along the coast until I got to the next township (about a mile) to rake them.
                                             Oysters are everywhere, wait for the tide to go out and walk out to the kelp covered rocks and boom.
Snails, they are on every rock and just cover the beach. They are called wrinkles here and if you get a chance you should eat at. Cleonice

I ate there last night and it was really really good, that and Elliot Coleman of Four Season Farm produce in on the menu. Maybe because I Elliot has been God like to me for decades (just look at his hair.)

The Chanterelle's are insane, they are just covering the ground. Slice and fried with some browned butter, then in go the local eggs and it makes a great side dish for our fresh foraged blueberry buckwheat pancakes
If you feel down up here (or down east ?) chances are you would end up with a blueberry in your mouth.
The last cool thing I found where these coastal cranberries, just about as sour as sour gets, but I wish they where growing outside my house.
Word from Pa. is that the farm is doing well and Late blight is not spreading. I miss the work and the landscape, but I did see a 65 acre farm with 4 greenhouses for 220,000 thats dollars, WHAT?

Later