Mission, Vision, and Goals. And Construction.

Here’s a little of the stuff that has been keeping me occupied since we started our new urban farming business at the beginning of 2012.

On the business development side, I have now signed an L.L.C. Operating Agreement,  used my U.B.I. to open a bank account, bought fertilizer using an Agrigultural Reseller Permit, ordered business cards, and learned that I have absolutely no idea how to do accounting.

On the physical labor and general ruggedness side: I have been using the heck out of that drill my Grandfather gave me (hey Grampa)!  I now know to ask for self-tapping screws at the hardware store.  I am getting comfortable using a miter saw.  Oh, and I drive a truck now.  That’s a new thing.  I used my new truck to drive 500 lbs of ground limestone, 250 lbs of organic chicken manure fertilizer, and 10 cubic feet of potting soil home from the agricultural supply store in Snohomish.

On the actual farming side, I don’t really have that much to brag about yet.  Haven’t grown anything yet.  But I have been digging around in the dirt a lot, and at this point I can at least fake it that I know what I’m talking about when examining soil as to whether it has a high proportion of sand or clay as opposed to being a silty loam!

Overall, I’ve been learning how to be my own boss.  It’s about finding the right balance between talk and action.  My business partners Noe and Scott and I have been having plenty of three-hour planning meetings where we talk about all the myriad of things that need to happen for our business to move forward into a moneymaking phase.   There are lots of pieces that need to come together, and they all need to be talked through, but if you spend too much time talking about them, you won’t have enough time to actually get them done.  At some point you need to follow up on your planning, turn your talk into action, and then be ready to adjust if/when realities don’t match up with your hypotheticals.

For one example, take a single crop of the 25 or so that we’ve decided we want to grow this year.  Onions – if we want to harvest them in September, we need to start them from seed in February.  Oh wait, it is February.  Good thing we bought those seeds back in January.  But  we need to have a place to plant those seeds where they will germinate and thrive even in the February cold.  We need a greenhouse.  Then it’s about tracing that need back through all the steps that need to happen to get us there and mapping out a plan.  First decide on dimensions and design.  Then source and buy materials and recruit extra hands to help build.  Then go outside and actually build, navigating little hurdles like not enough screws and drills running out of batteries.  Take an extra few days to finish up the greenhouse end walls and create a table for the plant starts to sit on.  And then finally, plant the seeds.  And then follow up!  You’re not done as soon as the seeds are in the ground.  It’s only after planting that you might realize that the greenhouse is not actually warm enough to germinate seeds right now, so now you’re buying heat mats and insulation to add some extra degrees F.  The reward is now, 7 days after planting, the seeds are up and growing.   Yay!  Quick pause to smile and celebrate with Noe as we check on them and see the green needles poking up out of the soil in the trays.  Then it’s on to the next step, keeping those little sprouts healthy.  And starting the next round of crops – tomatoes in a week, brassicas and lettuce a few weeks after that.  And simultaneously prepping the ground that they will eventually be transplanted into so that it’s ready and waiting at the proper time.  We have time to add compost to the plots right now, but Noe and Scott tell me that it’s too early from a fertility perspective — the winter rains will just wash the nutrients down and out into the Puget Sound, nullifying our work and expense and potentially polluting at the same time.  So I, the eager beaver, have to wait until Noe gives me the go-ahead that the ground is warm enough that those little soil microbes will wake up out of their winter slumber and be ready to chew up our added compost and lock its nutrients into the ground for our plants’ exclusive usage.  Or at least that’s what I envision them doing.  This is what’s great about having a team of three.   Each of us contributes a different skill set and background, so although none of us is an experienced farmer, by sharing the little bits of proper management that we each know, as a whole we hopefully have enough smarts to get enough of this farming thing right.

For me it’s super great to be able to draw on both of my prior two years of apprenticeship experience as I feel my way through each farming decision as it comes up.   I am constantly thinking back and remembering, How did Brian do this particular thing?  How did Betsey?  How did the dudes at Oxbow?  Sometimes I go with one mentor’s system and sometimes another; sometimes neither works for our particular situation, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to realize that both past farms did the same thing so I can be pretty sure that way is right  I am also lucky to have those former mentors to ask questions that come up.   For example I mentioned driving my truck to the agricultural supply store.  A month ago we were wondering, where do farmers go shopping?  A quick email to Betsey revealed that all farmers in the Puget Sound region shop at this one store in Snohomish.  They don’t have a website, only a catalog from 2009, and you have to know what to ask for when you walk in the door or else they will look down upon you as a pesky home gardener.   But they will have your greenhouse plastic in stock and very cheap prices on the best quality potting soil.   So now we know.

But I can’t ask Betsey about every little thing.   Making decisions all by myself about things like crop varieties to grow, planting dates, application rates for amendments, etc, is scary the first time through.  But it’s what I wanted.  It’s that step out of the safety net of following a boss’ instructions into the unknown of living with the consequences of your own choices.  I am not good at making quick decisions — my Libra nature can always see both sides! — and I usually spend far too long over-analyzing and deliberating on even the smallest choice between two options.  But the need to move things along with this business is helping me work on that.  I feel good each time I am able to make myself just say “okay, let’s go for it,” even if I am just saying that out loud to Noe and Scott while inside my head is saying “oh but wait, what if we did this other thing instead, would that be better in any way?”   I think working with Scott is helping me with this.  He has a “just get it done” attitude that is a good balance with my and Noe’s general attitude of detail-oriented pre-planning.

As if it were not enough to take on starting a new business, I am also newly elected to my first ever board of directors this year.   I grew up with my Dad always being on one Board or another, and I’m glad to be following his example of volunteering some time out of my life to go “do the people’s business” as he would say.  But it feels like a lot — with a more than half time “real job,” a more than half time farming job, a couple of volunteer organizations to keep up with, and trying to be a contributing roommate/animal husbander at this awesome house I live in, my social life is sure to suffer

But it’s going to be an exciting year for City Grown and for me personally.   So far it has been continually challenging and fun.  I hope to keep finding time to blog about it although I may soon move some of my writing over to a potential blog on the City Grown site itself.  Thanks, blog readers, for reading and commenting.  The point of the City Grown venture is to grow food for our community, so if you’re reading this I hope to see you at the farm!

On being a software engineer / farmer

I recently started at a new job.  The existential crisis I experienced upon accepting this new position, although brief, was a bit enlightening for me regarding how I see myself and how societal stereotypes about career and class influence us all.

Going back in time a bit, I had a quite reasonable phase of career-change related insecurity at the start of my first apprenticeship on Bainbridge.  I wasn’t sure how I would be accepted into that farming community, coming to it as I did as a complete outsider from the completely different world of software development.  I worried that my car was too nice, I didn’t know the farming terminology, I wouldn’t know how to relate to the types of people I might meet.

It turned out that yes, my car was too nice.  :-)  But the other worries were groundless — the types of people I met at the farms on Bainbridge were without exception wonderful, caring, and completely accepting of who I was at that moment.  Who I was was a young person in transition into finding myself.  I wasn’t a farmer and I didn’t have to pretend to be one.  I was interested in learning about farming and that was perfectly fine.  This contrasted with how I had often felt about myself while working software – that I wasn’t truly an engineer at heart and I was kind of pretending to be one.

The next thing that happened was I got more comfortable being a farm worker, but I didn’t know if this was a real transition or just a temporary thing.  I remember going to the dentist sometime in the middle of the Bainbridge experience and having to fill out that sheet that asks you your occupation.  I didn’t know what to put.  And then I started thinking about how they might judge me depending on what I wrote.  If I put “computer programmer” versus “farm apprentice,” would they treat me a certain way?

All of a sudden I was noticing a class divide that I had never really given much thought to before.  A person’s occupation, and the various things that come along with that, are a huge influence in the person’s own life but also in how that person is viewed by strangers.  Insurance or lack thereof, personal appearance, and regularity/dependability of cashflow are some of the pieces that can become apparent to outsiders and can lead them to judge your intellegence, ability, importance, etc. without really knowing anything about you.

Take personal appearance.   I grew up in a quite middle of the road, middle-class family in the midwest, and I have never been a super sleek, manicured and groomed, professional type.  But I got pretty used to being able to blend right in at a nice restaurant, for instance.  As a farmer, (or carpenter, or auto mechanic), your work clothes can tell an outsider exactly what kind of labor you do for a living.  In one example, I go pick up my prescription at Costco in my grubby farm clothes after work.  I don’t have insurance to pay for the medicine, and as I get my cash out I imagine I feel the cashier perceiving me as poor – which I am, I guess.  I want to tell her, “you can’t tell by looking at me, but I’m actually capable of being way above you, you’re cashiering at Costco for crying out loud.”  But there I go, doing exactly what I don’t want her to do.  In my prior life, when software developer Becky went to pick up her prescription for a $10 copay with her insurance card, she didn’t think about these things because there was an intrinsic assumption that I was well off and the lady behind the pharmacy counter was some nameless person with no college education who ate McDonalds for every meal.  Obviously I didn’t think or care about the unconscious classism I was guilty of, until I felt myself on the other side of the equation.

A couple weeks ago my housemates and I had a breakfast table discussion about these exact issues.  Why is it that a certain type of knowledege is being valued so highly above so many other types in our world?   Roomie Lauren’s dad has a PhD in some kind of sciencey thing but has worked his whole life as a contractor builder and a fishing boat captain.  People who meet him based on his line of work are surprised at his level of intelligence and scholarship.   We all do it — make assumptions about peoples’ IQ or level of education based on their job.  An electrician, builder, or plumber is assumed to be less smart than an engineering type.   But would those of us who make these judgements know how to construct, wire, or plumb a house or public building?  These “skilled trades,” like farming, are critical elements of our world, but they are no longer being valued or emphasized in schools or by society.  We view a college degree as being hugely important, and of course I am glad I have one, but maybe you don’t need one if one of these trades is your passion.  These jobs take physical ability and real-world understanding rather than (or in addition to) book-learning.  They are the kinds of things you have to learn at least partially by apprenticeship, watching a mentor, and by doing.

I now feel certain that what I want is to make my living by growing vegetables.  But since I’m not there yet, I have to do other work in the meantime.  I tried to fit software back in as a part-time money-earner, but it’s not feeling right.  I have to give too much of myself to that type of work, and at this point I’m far too rusty at it to be asking a company to give me a special custom-made part-time position.  So instead I started looking to find jobs within the food system, the area that I’m now much more comfortable working in.  I got an interview and immediately got hired at Trader Joe’s.  I should have been thrilled, and I kind of was, but I was also kind of appalled at the hourly rate that was offered – about 1/3 or 1/4 of what I could make at a software contract.  I realized I have this sense of entitlement regarding what I “deserve” to be making.  Another thing I felt was worry about telling my engineer type friends about the new work and having them look down on me.   What kind of stigma would come along with working retail?  This is the kind of job I used to get when I was home from college over summer break.  I have a college degree now; I could be doing way better for myself.  I’m over these feelings now, but they were real and intense when I got the phone call with the job offer.

When I started farming I was afraid that I would seem too white-collar.  Now I have the opposite concern.   As I meet all the new colleagues at Trader Joe’s and they ask me what I did before, I hear myself making sure to mention the software work in addition to the farming.  My ego clings to wanting to project that I am smart enough to do something else but that I am blue-collar “by choice” right now.  It’s silly.  And as it turns out, many of these folks at TJ’s are in the same boat.  Todd is a former psychiatrist.  Robert has a degree in biochemistry.  Many of them have been at Trader Joe’s for 3 or 5 or 7 years because it’s flexible, fun, has great healthcare benefits, and doesn’t consume your life outside of work.

Then there is the related issue of actually living and managing my money in all of these various job personas.  I think my years in the ultra high paying software industry had warped my view of how much money one needs to earn to make one’s way in the world.  I couldn’t have imagined living on a low hourly wage based on my living expenses back then.  I couldn’t have imagined giving up some of the nice things and expensive hobbies that were then easy to pay for.  Then my two years of farm apprenticeship swung me in the opposite direction: my lower-than-minimum wage stipend made every $5 purchase worthy of deep consideration and honed my bargain-hunting and freebie-nabbing skills.  It was really good for me to learn how to live frugally.  Now it’s time to find the balance between those two extremes.  I don’t want to have to postpone going to the dentist until I have more money because it costs $150. But I also don’t want to be unaware of how  much going to the dentist costs because I’ve never had to actually pay for it before.

It is a really good thing for me if I don’t/can’t solve every problem by just throwing money at it.   It makes me engage with life more and live more deliberately.  (Biggest example here is riding my bike to get places in the city instead of driving everywhere.  I LOVE it.  But the price of gas is a big factor in reminding me to ride even when the weather’s not perfect or there is a hill involved.)  Having less money may be the only way to force myself to live more frugally and thoughtfully and creatively.  But on the other side of the coin, it’s nice having some cushion — you’ve gotta have enough money to solve major problems when needed.  I was definitely walking the fine line here when my car got broken into this fall; I was feeling pretty tight at the end of my intern season and to have to unexpectedly replace several even moderately costly items hit hard just then.  It made me realize that so many people in the world live right on this brink all the time.  All those folks working minimum wage jobs, living paycheck to paycheck, maybe with credit card debt, maybe with kids to take care of — one or two little things go wrong and their whole life can fall apart very quickly.  Meanwhile there are software engineers and investment bankers, some fresh out of college, making six figures and spending it on giant big screen TV’s.  And I mean, they earn their money.  They can spend it how they want.  I’m not sure what my point is here.  It’s just things I’ve been noticing as I straddle these different career/job worlds.

Unveiling my new farm adventure

Now that I have a whole two seasons of apprenticeship under my belt, I’m obviously ready to start my very own farm!

I bought a truck, now I’m ready to go, right?

Well, ready or not it’s happening in 2012.  I’ve been neglecting my blog lately because I’ve been busy scheming and dreaming about next season.  I wanted to fill you in a little about my thoughts, but in lieu of a blog post I added this page to the “My Farms” section of this website that is basically a blog post about my new farm, City Grown Seattle.  Click this link to go read it!

Why organic?

I’ve been learning Organic growing practices on my farms these last two seasons.  I thought I should go into Organic a little bit and explain why I think  it’s important.  Many people I talk to seem to have a poor opinion of organic or don’t understand why one would want to use organic practices.  I want to explain why I value organic and would prefer to see organic practices, both at a home gardening level and at a commercial farming level.

First of all, what does organic really mean?  Organic food is that which has been grown without the use of chemical or synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides.  It is also not genetically modified – more about that later.  Fertilizers can be used on organic farms (in fact they are a highly critical ingredient), but they are made of things like ground up mineral rocks, composted animal manure, bone meal, kelp, and etc.  They cannot be petroleum-based or man-made compounds.  There are some organic pesticide sprays as well, made from things like dried flowers or elemental Sulfur.  However, even though these are technically classified as organic, many (most?) organic growers choose not to employ them and instead rely on techniques like crop rotation, trap crops, cover cropping, and fostering beneficial insects as predators, as ways to reduce pest outbreaks.

Organic practices, when used correctly, make the soil richer and a more hospitable place for growth.  The soils are more likely to be balanced, contain micronutrients, trace elements, and healthy bacteria and fungi.  Non-organic chemical pest control tends to kill off all the healthy soil life in addition to the targeted pests.  Therefore land that has been hit with chemical pesticides repeatedly tends to develop *more* harmful outbreaks because there are no beneficials there to protect against them.   Non-organic chemical fertilizers tend to be a heavy-handed dose of Nitrogen to give plants a short-lived growth spurt but they *imbalance* the soil and over time make it a less hospitable and diverse environment.  This is basically what people mean when they use the word “sustainable.”  A blanket statment with lots of room for qualifications is that good organic practices are more likely to be sustainable indefinitely, whereas conventional practices get you good crop once or twice and then require more and more inputs as the soil gets worse and worse.  Think about the meaning of the word sustainable.  Why would we want to do something unsustainable if a sustainable option is there?  Well, because the sustainable option requires more work and the unsustainable option is easy.  Easy, though, for now.  Eventually, following unsustainable practices is going to make for an awful lot of work.  Can we not think ahead and realize that unsustainable literally means it’s not going to work forever.  Can we not buckle down and do the work required to do it right the first time?

Back to organics, though.  The place where fertilizers and pesticides and other growing practices are classified as organic is within the USDA (Department of Agriculture) Organic Standards.  Farms that wish to call themselves Certified Organic must be certified annually by one of several approved certification groups.  They must show various forms of documentation and pay a fee for this certification.

As I mentioned before, many organic farmers choose to follow their own sense of best practices instead of doing everything allowable by the organic standards.  Similarly, many (most?) of the farms that I know of that are following organic practices are not Certified Organic.  These farmers are not willing to pay the money and jump through the hoops required to gain the USDA certification.  They prefer to make their good farming practices transparent to their consumers in the hope that those consumers will buy from them without the official stamp of approval.

On the other side of the coin, much of the organic produce you can buy in the grocery store comes from “Big Organic” suppliers.  These are huge farms, mainly in California, who, in my opinion at least, follow the letter of the Organic law instead of the spirit.  Although I haven’t worked on a farm like this, it is my understanding that the produce may not be all that different from conventional.  It is still industrial-scale, mechanized agriculture.  Grocery store organic, therefore, is good in a pinch but is not the produce I would generally choose to buy.  ”Real organic” (again, my opinion), comes from the farmers market *or* your local food co-op type store.  In Seattle, PCC and Madison Market are the go-to places.  Any store that indicates the name of the farm where items were grown, rather than just the region, is going to be your supplier of the real goods.  I would recommend Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food for a more eloquent description of Big Organic.

Let me take a little tangent now and relate something interesting I noticed when I was home in Michigan last August.  Of course the agriculture there is all corn and soy just like the rest of the midwest.  These are the two giants of the industrial crops – produced for animal feed as well as to be broken down into their biological components and made into food additives like lecithin, mono- and di-glycerides, and xanthan gum.  Yes, these are all corn or soy — I looked them up.   Anyway, I was intimately familiar with Michigan’s corn/soy landscape from my childhood, and I remember being aware that the fields surrounding our neighborhood were sometimes corn and sometimes soybeans.  Crop rotation was being practiced, at least on a very minimal level.  But this time, I noticed something funny – all the soybean fields had scattered cornstalks poking out of them.

Why is this funny?  It’s just last year’s corn coming back as a weed in this year’s soybean field.  Well, the funny – or scary – part is that there were no other weeds there.  The soybeans were growing out of bare ground except for the cornstalks popping up here and there.  I might not have noticed this except for the fact that I am now familiar with how the fields look on the organic vegetable farms I’ve been working at.  There are weeds everywhere.  Nature abhors a blank space, and everywhere vegetables are not, there are “natural” plants (i.e. weeds) coming in to compete.  As farmers it is our job to keep the weeds to a minimum at critical times for the vegetable to germinate and grow.  We do this using hoes, our hands, and sometimes the tractor.  Other times it is our job to make peace with the fact that the weeds are there — as long as they are not outcompeting our vegetables, the presence of these plants shows that our soil is fertile.

In conventional Ag, however, weeding is done with herbicides.  These chemicals kill off the weed plants so the farmer doesn’t have to do it by hand.  How come the chemicals kill only the weeds and not the vegetables?  You might well ask.  They’re both plants, aren’t they?  Well in some cases, the chemicals can be targeted to kill only seeds that have emerged and not unsprouted ones, so these could be applied when the vegetable seeds are first planted and before they have emerged.  In other cases, as with the soybean fields I noticed, the vegetable plants are made to be resistant to the chemicals so the chemicals can be applied while the vegetables are fully grown and will kill only the weeds.   The way they are made resistant is by genetic modification — insertion or deletion of genes from their DNA.  Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) is a term that I’d like you to learn if you haven’t already.

Monsanto produces “Roundup-Ready” GMO corn and soybeans.  This means that the DNA of these plants has been genetically modified — in this particular case it has had a gene from a bacterium inserted — in such a way that it becomes resistant to Roundup (Monsanto’s trademarked name for its potent herbicide composed mainly of the chemical glyphosate).  Are you tracking with me here?  You can now spray your soybean field with this toxic chemical that will kill every type of plant growing there except for the soybeans.   You can buy the chemical, and the seed that resists it, only from Monsanto which has patented both.

Seeing the stray corn plants in the otherwise weed-free soybean fields all across Michigan freaked me out because I was unmistakeably seeing Monsanto’s takeover with my own eyes.  These farmers had grown Roundup-Ready corn the year before in the fields that they were now using for Roundup-Ready soybeans.  When they doused their fields with Roundup this spring, it killed all the weeds and made the soil an inhospitable place for more weeds to grow.  There’s nothing there except soybeans – except for those corn plants that sprouted from last year’s fallen seed and are now growing there as weeds.  They’re GMO’s with the Roundup Ready gene too.

Doesn’t this just seem wrong at a very basic level?  I’m sure there are scientific studies on both sides (and how many of the studies showing Roundup does no harm are funded by Monsanto?) But isn’t it just common sense to think that 1) spraying large quantities of a chemical that kills things onto farmland is probably not good for the land or the people spraying it, and 2) vegetables that have been made able to withstand the spraying of this killer chemical and then doused with it multiple times might be a strange and unnatural thing to eat?

GMO food crops were first planted in the United States in 1996. In 2010 in the US, 93% of the planted area of soybeans, 93% of cotton, 86% of corn and 95% of the sugar beet were genetically modified varieties. (Wikipedia).

Zero in 1995.  Ninety percent in  2010.  Isn’t this unrestrained skyrocket to complete dominance of a never-before-seen organism a little scary, too?  I feel pretty sure that we were growing a hell of a lot of corn pretty darn well before 1996.  The rest of the world is taking a more measured approach to GMO’s.  Other countries, most notably the European Union,  whose governments are not controlled by Monsanto (sorry, perhaps this is the leftist propaganda getting to me), have banned various types of GMO seeds or have banned importation of GMO crops or require labelling, etc.

Not so the US.  If you’re in America eating a non-organic product containing corn or soy, or restaurant food that was cooked in corn or soybean or canola oil, you’re almost assuredly eating genetically modified food.  However, something important that I learned recently is, Organic (basically) Equals GMO-free.  I’m sure there are trace amounts or exceptions or whatever, but the organic standards say that organics can’t contain GMO’s.  These days I really do only buy organic corn chips and tofu because I really have decided that GMO crops is a practice I don’t want to support.

Everything about it just seems wrong — what about the patenting of seeds?  What about the fact that repeated applications of Roundup has now been shown to be creating weeds that have evolved resistance to this killer chemical?  These are whole big issues in themselves.  You can find plenty of information on GMO’s that will make it much clearer than anything I can explain here.   This statement from The Non-GMO Project is a good one to start with.  I like this bullet point from that document:

The scientifically demonstrated risks and clear absence of real benefits have led experts to see GM as a clumsy, outdated technology. They present risks that we need not incur, given the availability of effective, scientifically proven,
energy-efficient and safe ways of meeting current and future global food needs.

I believe that we as a society know what good farming and good food looks like.   We just choose to try to find ways to get around the fact that farming is hard and requires knowledge and skill.  We choose instead to attempt to outsmart nature by using heavy handed agricultural practices like thousand-acre monocultures, government subsidized commodity crops, GMOs and chemical controls.  These practices are not sustainable; they are a shameful mismanagement and misuse of our land and our farmers’ hard work;  and they result in a strange and off-balance food system that has totally perverted what we recognize as food and is making us fat and unhealthy.

Non-organic agriculture has only been widely practiced from the 20th century on.  It’s pure propaganda that calls non-organic “conventional” as it has only been conventionally done that way in the last 100 years.   My grandmother remembers the milkman and butcher coming around with deliveries, for goodness sake.  There’s local, small-scale, organic for you- but it didn’t have to call itself that.  It was just food.  Imagine how different that milk and meat was from what passes for the same items today.  I believe that we need to rescue our food system, not by bringing it back exactly to the way it used to be, but by bringing back a lot of the old time-tested elements and doing our best to ensure that we use our great amount of knowledge and technology wisely.

I believe that changes can happen as more and more people are currently recognizing the problems and making themselves knowledgeable about how to fix them.  I also believe that individual consumers who don’t care to get involved in food politics can still make small changes to their food-buying habits that will begin to have a big influence on restoring sanity to America’s food problem.  See if you can make some small steps; you don’t have to go “whole hog” (as it were) right off the bat.  Here’s what I would say about what to eat, starting with the best options:

1. Food you grow and raise (organically) yourself

2. Food you buy from producers you know and whose farms you have seen

3. Food you buy from any vendor at your farmers market (I believe it’s safe to assume the market management has some knowledge about the producers’ practices, and I support small and local over and above Certified Organic,  so I buy from market vendors even if they’re not Certified Organic)

4. Food you buy from a local co-op type grocery store (These tend to carry a lot of “real” organics and thoughtfully-chosen non-organics, plus are fun to shop at once you get used to them)

5. Food you buy from a restaurant that cooks from scratch and lists local/organic sources of meat and produce

6. Organic food you buy from a supermarket or food you buy from a restaurant that’s listed on the menu as organic (unusual)

7. (If you care about GMO’s): Non-organic food from a supermarket that doesn’t contain any corn, soy, or sugarbeet-derived ingredients.  Food you buy in a restaurant that hasn’t been cooked in corn, soybean, or canola oil.

Whew.  Okay.  Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts, and happy eating.

Love,

B

Thank you, bunnies

As of last Saturday my rabbit experiment at the yurt is over. Successfully concluded for the most part I would say.

Back in April, I couldn’t believe that Alice was talking me into raising meat rabbits.  Now 7 months later, the bunnies and everything that goes along with them feel like a normal part of my daily life.  Alice and I raised our first litter together – they were born in May and we harvested right before Al left in August.  I decided to do a second batch by myself so they were born in Aug and just harvested last weekend.

I remember before my first farm apprenticeship feeling like meat was very mysterious.  After reading books about the industrial meat production system, I wanted to get “better” meat but I felt like I didn’t know how.  I had no real connection between meat and animals.  Over the course of that first season on Bainbridge, just the fact of being inside the farming community demystified meat quite a bit for me.  I got to see some aspects of small-scale meat raising and learned a little about butchery of both mammals and birds.  I am very grateful that my first butchering experience was alongside Betsey.  Watching and listening to her as she went about it and witnessing her respect for the animal and the seriousness of the process  set a very good tone for the rest of my future experiences.

It was a very powerful experience both times we did butchering at the yurt.  Of course harvesting the animals we’d bred and raised ourselves was a bonding and thought-provoking thing for me and Alice.  Additionally, especially this second time around, I felt that I was taking part in an important passing of knowledge.  I learned the method of rabbit slaughter and butchering from Noe, who learned it from Charmaigne.  I assisted Noe a couple of times and then I was on my own to teach others.  I set up my processing station as closely as I could as an exact model of Noe’s and remembered her advice about things like stopping food and water 24 hours before slaughter.  Alice and Remington and I kind of felt our way through the first butchering back in August.  It went well but I felt much more assured the second time around.  This time I had a whole crew of friends who were eager to learn and I loved watching them learn by doing after I gave the initial run-through.  I feel like this type of thing can’t be learned by watching a YouTube video but rather needs to be done with one’s own hands.  As I watched Peter’s hands shaking a bit as he went to make the first cuts, I recognized the same rush of adrenaline and nerves and the heightened sense of focus that I got with the first rabbit I did at Noe’s and that I still get now as I carry the small animal through the steps that make up its final moments.

I am very thankful for the friends that came out to help; it’s a great crew of folks that I met through bike-riding friends in Seattle.  They have all been friends for awhile but are now treating me like one of their own.  One of the ladies, Clair, owns a small farm in Olympia where she raises a lot of meat birds, so these guys often get together to help Clair and Kalen with bird processing.   So for them, coming together for an event that involved killing a batch of animals was nothing new.  For me it meant that I didn’t have to worry about anyone getting queasy when they realized it was more than they’d bargained for.  Having a group of friends who are totally up for the job and who can come together when extra hands are needed is an invaluable resource for the tiny-scale farmer or homesteader like Clair with her birds or me with my rabbits.  It put me in mind of what things must have been like back in the day with barn-raisings and making hay and whatnot where each farmer in turn would call upon his neighbors to help get the big jobs done.

The old-timey feel was very strong in general on Saturday.  After finishing with the 8 rabbits we cleaned up and made dinner in the yurt.   My favorite moment of the evening was when I walked back inside the yurt after having gone outside to change the batteries as we were running low on power.  All the electric lights were off but the soft illumination from kerosene lamps and candles was lighting everyone’s faces as they sat around the woodstove listening to Kalen playing his concertina.  The place was full of rich aromas from the rabbit braising on the stovetop and potatoes roasting in the oven.  The mood was warm and the sense of camaraderie was strong as we had just worked in synchronization on this important task and seen it through to a successful conclusion.  I felt very lucky to be right there right then at that moment.

I now am the proud owner of exactly one rabbit.  Edith, a doe from the first batch of babies that Alice and I birthed, is now 6 months old and ready to become a Mama.  Edith is going to come with me to Wallingford and join the herd there when I move back in December.  I’m pleased that even with the ups and downs of the rabbit scene this season, I feel like continuing on with a bunny in my life.

I really appreciate the support that I’ve gotten as I’ve pursued this little experiment.  Especially from my family — I was slightly concerned about showing you all the cute bunnies when you visited for fear you’d try and talk me out of butchering them or else think of me as a hard-hearted murderer from there forward.  Instead you seemed totally down with the idea and even sent me sharp knives in the mail as gifts when I expressed my need for more reliable butchering tools!  Thanks guys; I’ll bring you some rabbit stew if you think you’re up for it

This rabbit experiment has brought me that final step toward knowing where meat comes from.  I’m not going to only eat meat from animals which I personally raised from birth to death.  But having done it once I feel at least gives me a new perspective on the whole business.

It’s pumpkin bread time of year

I baked pumpkin bread the other day to share with friends who were coming over to help me with processing my rabbits.  (Post about that to follow).  I used an Oxbow pumpkin in place of the canned pumpkin I have always used in the past.  This was obviously much more time consuming as I had to cut up the pumpkin, roast it, mash it, and then use it instead of just opening a can.  But I got some bonuses out of the deal, such as yummy cumin/cayenne/salt roasted pumpkin seeds.  I also cubed a bunch of the extra pumpkin, boiled and peeled it and put the cubes in the freezer for later use.

I used my mom’s practially-perfect pumpin bread recipe from the cookbook she made for me a few years ago as a jumping off point and made a couple little changes.

When I decided to post my pictures and the recipe, I hopped over to Mom’s blog to see if she had posted the recipe sometime in the past so I wouldn’t have to type it in.  It’s an old standby at our house so it seemed likely.  Then, something CRAZY happened.  I scrolled down her posts for a minute, mouth watering as I admired the things she’d been making out of romanesco and farro.  Then there it was!  Pumpkin bread.  November 6th, 2011.  What? Not the SAME DAY that I baked pumpkin bread?  What!  Yes it was.  I mean seriously, what are the chances?  Dude Mom, you and I are scarily in sync from opposite sides of the country.   Or perhaps this is just the time of year when everybody and their mother (Ha! ha!) bakes pumpkin bread.

Anyways, I followed her recipe with the following changes.

- Coconut oil for the fat instead of vegetable oil

- Double all the spices and add a couple teaspoons of ginger

- Use raspberries instead of nuts

- Use 1/4C sugar and 1/4 C molasses.

It was moist and spicy and delicious and we had it with vanilla ice cream for dessert after a dinner of rabbit braised with shallots, roasted potatoes & carrots, and sauteed cabbage & apples.

YUM!  I love food!

 

Everything I know about garlic, I learned from Betsey

Today I prepared my garlic seed for planting tomorrow.  Betsey always saves seed from her own garlic and selects the biggest cloves to plant, thereby improving her stock each year. I was lucky enough to be able to buy some heads of garlic from her last weekend and today I sat down to break the heads up and sort the cloves so that Noe and I can plant them in Wallingford tomorrow morning.  What I remembered about the process from last year was:

1. Paper bags with sharpie labelling
2. Silver bowls
3. A fall tablecloth.

I did my best to re-create the scene from Betsey’s kitchen.

Once I get these cloves planted, it means I will have the first seeds in the ground for my very own vegetable-growing venture. 

A series of unfortunate events

Hey there blog world, it’s been a while since I wrote.  I had a wild few weeks and I needed time to let it all sink in before posting, as it turns out.  Let me begin by sharing what I had started writing on October 8th.

I don’t even want to write this post.  But in fairness I feel like I have to.  My self-congratulatory post about bunny building should be tempered with a writeup of the Universe-smackdown-vs-Becky events of the 2 weeks following that blog.

On a Thursday night I proudly posted those pictures of my bunnies in their sweet little home.  Two days later, after a normal Saturday workday,  I pulled up to the yurt in my car.  A lanky husky dog walked toward my vehicle.  What?  Another big dog raised its head from a little ways away.  Um, what?  My brain registered “dogs in the yard?”  …  “dogs eating something in the yard?” and then my eyes went to the rabbit cages and saw them empty, ripped open by canine teeth.

I screamed at the dogs.  I started crying.  I called Luke and Alice (in Michigan!) and a neighbor and animal control.   The neighbor helped shoo the dogs away and then left me alone to deal with the aftermath.  I cancelled my plans to go to Seattle that night.

The dogs had gotten into the run that I had just built.  Margie and her babies were killed.  Poor little ones;  I am so sorry.  The older pen housing Snuggles and her crew had also been attacked and bent but had been strong enough to protect its contents from the dogs until I got there.  It had appeared empty because Mom and all nine babies were so terrified that they had all crammed inside their little inner wooden house.  After I buried the dead, I sat with them until they came out and I watched Snugs lick and groom the babies.

I had a shitty evening, and everything felt wrong.  By the time I headed to bed it was way past my bedtime.  I had another little tiny cry, then decided to comfort myself with a snack before curling up in the fetal position for sleep.  I grabbed a handful of raisins, which I often do as a way to keep my chocolate consumption down to maybe only twice a day.  For some reason I looked at the handful before jamming it into my mouth.   I don’t even want to write about this.  You know how there are sometimes people that you meet, and you think, “Now you, your life is a mess.  You really don’t have your shit together.  You need to take a step back, clean out your filthy car, pay your goddamn bills, move out of your mom’s effing basement, (etc) and stop the out-of-control spiral that is your life.  Oh, and clean out your pantry because there are BUGS in your FUCKING FOOD.”

Yes, you guessed it.  Insult to injury: I was a little weepy,  going for a comfort snack, and instead something wiggled in the palm of my hand.  I looked into the raisin jar and saw a couple more fruit fly larvae.  I can’t even believe I’m writing about this – if you ever doubted that you are getting brutal honesty in this blog, doubt no more.  If not for my puke-phobia, maybe I would have vomited.  Instead, I HURLED the entire container of fruit out of the yurt door into the yard, sat down in a puddle on the floor and started BAWLING.

I cried it out.  And then I went to bed.  And then in the morning I got up and went to Seattle.  I had things to take care of — you gotta shake it off and resume life where you left off, slightly changed but more or less the same.

A week went by.   I got sympathy from my friends and colleagues about the rabbits.  Fun things happened on the farm and I felt fine.  Then came punch number two.  I don’t even have the energy to tell a good story about this one, although there are funny and crazy parts of it too.  Summary is that I was in Seattle for a wedding reception and my car got broken into.  Window smashed; laptop and lots of other stuff stolen.  Serves me right for carrying all my crap around like a bag lady.  I was staying overnight in the city and working Ballard farmers market the next morning, so I had all sorts of overnight stuff and farm gear with me.   I felt cold, numb, depressed as I gradually recalled each item that had been in the car that carried monetary or sentimental or daily-use value.  Composure so recently regained was again smacked away and I felt fragile, grasping at normalcy.

How intense and at the same time how fleeting these feelings are too.  In the moment in each situation I felt awful, felt mad and sad and betrayed and guilty and utterly off balance.   Feeling like life had just been turned end over end.  Simultaneously telling myself that this was not the end of the world; far from it; things like this and so much worse happen to people all the time.  At first the emotional reaction completely overrides the logical one, but gradually the logical one takes over so much that it seems silly to have gotten so upset and felt so down.  In each case, after a night and a day, I felt silly even telling people because I knew it might not seem like a big deal to them.

So.  On October 8th, Unfortunate Events #1 and #2 had happened.  I got them out of my system into blog form, but I left it as a draft.  I felt that I couldn’t come up with any conclusion, any lesson to be learned from the shit that had gone down.  A factual summary was about all I could muster.  But I really wanted to share the events with an audience and gain some sympathy.  So I stayed up really late (like really, really, late on a worknight) writing.  And then finally went home to go to bed in the freezing cold yurt, disgruntled with my inability to complete a pithy post.

So that’s how Unfortunate Event #3 occurred — at 1:30 in the morning as I was adding logs to the blazing fire in my woodstove as the last thing before bed, I lost my balance and fell toward toward the stove.  I put my hand out instinctually and touched my palm to the stovepipe.

I know the lesson for sure now.

Actually, I know a couple of lessons.  One is that burns really, really, REALLY hurt until they blister up and then they don’t hurt at all.   Another is that Sonja Spinarski will make a really fantastic Mom someday.  Who else would be willing to answer her phone in the middle of the night, talk me through pain, drive out to my yurt, bandage my hand, and tuck me into bed?   Thanks again Sonja.

But the main lesson I realized was: slow down.  Life was moving at a pretty frenetic pace all summer, and things had build up to the point where the fact that I couldn’t handle it all was becoming clear.  While sort of a bunch of random sucky coincidences, the Unfortunate Events were also an indicator that I needed to stop rushing around, take a little time to do things correctly, and take a little time to do nothing at all.  Hence the vacation from blogging — I needed to free up some scheduled downtime.   I have been taking time to read and write in my journal.  I have been consistently taking the time to remove unnecessary objects from my car instead of using it as a catch-all.   You better believe I’ve been taking my time with fire-building in the evenings.

Here’s a quote I often think about from Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins:  ”Rigidity isn’t stability at all.  True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced.  A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”

What I get from this is that you never know what’s going to happen and it’s best to strive to be open to the possibilities and roll with life’s surprises.  I feel like I’m doing a better and better job of this the last couple years.   Even so, I’d prefer to have a majority of my unexpected, disruptive transformations be positive and awesome things like the discovery of farm internships instead of  livestock death, destruction of property, loss, and palm-scarring.  If I can work on myself and my habits to make that more likely, you bet I am going to try.   It’s a pretty basic lesson, really: try to embrace life without undue expectations and handle disappointments and setbacks gracefully when they occur, but also try to learn from mistakes and “live deliberately” to avoid unnecessary troubles.

The end.  Maybe next time I’ll write about some actual farming!  This is supposed to be Becky’s Farming Blog after all, not Becky’s Philosophical Ramblings Blog!  Thanks for reading,  Hasta luego,

~ B

Haha

Saw this on facebook and had to share. Got a real post in the works but not quite finalized yet.. it’s been a crazy couple weeks to get caught up on!

My daughters will be forced to take shop class.

Stress (Noun): The mental state caused by having too many bunnies in too small a space.

They’re fine in the hutch with Mom while they’re still tiny and cute like these little two week olds.  But the litters of baby bunnies hit 4 weeks, and then 5, and my guilt meter at having them all crammed inside there was exploding off the top of the Richter scale.  They needed a new enclosure.  There were too many babies this time to all fit inside the one pen we used with the last litter.  With Alice gone it was up to me to build a duplicate pen so that each set of babies could have its own 6 by 6 foot space to run around in and eat grass.  I moved Snuggles and her nine(!!) offspring out to the one run, and set about building a second for Margot and her six.

In this first picture, you see the state of affairs as I gathered my supplies and examined my model to copy.   I used the table saw in the barn to cut the boards to (approximate) length.

This is how far I got during my first attempt at building:

You’ll notice that not much has changed in comparison with the first picture.  This took me some serious time, and my results were minimal: I got about three 2×4′s shakily screwed together before the drill ran out of batteries and I ran out of long-enough, unstripped screws.  I learned a couple things, though, through trial and error.

A few days later, stress level mounting, I resolved to devote another evening toward bunny construction.  We had gotten firewood delivered to the yurt that day, so after my 9-hour workday I went home to help Jen (my new roomie) move a cord and a half of split logs.   Somehow, after all that, through sheer force of will I decided to continue on in my Carhartts and do the building that I’d planned on instead of changing into jammies and going immediately to sleep.  I brought two drills plus extra batteries, a full set of the kind of bits that drill holes, a magentized-extendo-Phillips-head screwdriver drill bit thingy, a couple clamps, more screws, and the staple gun from the barn out to the yurt.  I resolved to get the bunny house done tonight.  I had my headlamp at the ready.

It was so much easier with my little bit of extra preparedness.  I kept two different bits in the two drills so that I could alternately make holes and sink screws without switching the bits all the damn time.  I used the clamps to hold things up since I do only have two hands, and propping things on my head wasn’t working.  The pieces felt like they were fitting together more solidly and using the drill felt a bit more natural.  It still took time though…. and with it being September 21st and all, it got dark out by the time I even reached this point:

And then I went to put the chicken wire around the outside and discovered that the staple gun was out of staples. But oh well.  I cut the wire to size and made all the other finishing touches.  Sinking screws through the sheet metal roof and attaching the hinged top door were both extremely gratifying tasks.  It felt like building with Legos or K’Nex like we did when we were kids, the way the pieces and attachments just fit together effortlessly.  I was having fun and thinking about future construction projects!

I went to bed.  Then I woke up to this:

Looking out at that breathtaking sunrise gave me a feeling of happiness in my heart.  Similar to the feeling I get when I look out at this:

The completed rabbit enclosure, with Margie and her babies (they’re teenagers at this point, really…) enjoying a newfound ability to stretch and scamper around and eat grass and veggies.

I wouldn’t want to build bridges over the Grand Canyon or anything whose structural integrity was important to the well-being of myself or others.  But if I need to build an animal enclosure or a greenhouse or a wash table on my future farm, I feel like I am on the way to being able to do so competently.   I am learning on the fly.  But I still wish I had seen the value in that woodshop class back in middle school.