Best Thanksgiving Perk: Cranberries

Thanksgiving is just over a week away, which means one of my absolute favorite fruits are now being sold fresh in bags – often on half price sale – at grocery stores everywhere. For Thanksgiving I use just one of those 12-ounce bags to make my famous Crackberry Sauce (regular whole cranberry sauce with a bag of frozen blackberries added). But I buy as many as I can afford when they go on sale so I can dry them as “craisins.”

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Another New CSA and a Change of Herbal Heart

Autumn has come to the mountain just as spring did – one ay it was perfectly clear, close to 80º and comfortably into the mid-60s at night, the next it was barely up to 60º at mid-day and into the high 30s at night. Not only are we seriously behind in the necessary wood supply for heat, I’ve been having to scramble to bring in the remaining peppers and last of the tomatoes. Poplar leaves are already yellow and dogwoods are getting a ret tint on their leave to complement their quickly ripening bright red berries, and the crisp air fills with leaves whenever the breeze blows.

Luckily autumn is my favorite of all seasons. In three weeks from now the lush greens of summer will have turned into impossible corals and day-glo oranges and deep reds and yellows bright enough to light up the night. The smell of leaf-fall is heavenly even though it means endless raking in November, a necessary task to ensure resistance to spring fires. And of course the usual foot-deep winter covering once I’ve cleaned out the garden terraces and tossed the remains of their summer bounty on the compost pile. But it’s raining right now, so I’m shivering inside not daring to use any of the scant locust we have left from last year’s wood supply before nightfall, when it’ll really be needed.

In my last post I talked about a new centralized organizational outfit for connecting CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture farms] and ass orated organic suppliers with customer bases in their area via the internet, for promoting healthy, local food and food products and changing the way we eat. In my wanderings about the web, I discovered another kind of CSA that sounds like something right up my alley.

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Disrupting the Way We Buy Produce

Straight from the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, a new internet-based project to greatly expand the CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] movement into places where it hasn’t been before. It’s a project designed to connect community organizers – volunteers with a group of friends and neighbors who want to get in on farm fresh produce and other fresh foods – to buy in to local suppliers in the usual CSA manner and set up a drop-off point in their area for deliveries and for members to pick up their weekly food items. The company, farmigo, acts as the middleman to negotiate directly with growers, coordinate deliveries and scheduling, and handle the nitty gritty of the business end. It also maintains the web-based platform for people to manage their accounts, order food, and pay the fees. To support this effort, farmigo receives a 2% fee on food sold and collects this from the producers rather than from the customers.

The idea isn’t entirely new, as CSAs in some regions have already set up their local businesses through websites, and even pooled with other suppliers to make for convenient ordering of variety items and coordinate deliveries. Farmigo is pretty much the same type of thing, but on a much larger scale and including big city dwellers. The farmers, fishermen, butchers and bakers who offer products through the service still get to set their own terms and commitment periods. When you check into the website you can click on a map to receive a list of suppliers in your area with links and information on already established drop-off sites.

Farmigo also facilitates one-time ala carte purchases of things like eggs, flowers, meats, seafood, baked goods and other things that will be delivered to the drop-off point on your usual days, so the customer isn’t limited to whatever crops are being harvested at any given time on their CSA’s farm, but isn’t corralled into long-term purchase contracts with those other suppliers. This also saves the member/customer the trouble of driving around to several different drop-off points to get their food allotments. Some suppliers will even deliver to your home, depending on where you live and the nature of your orders.

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Fall Plantings: Garlic

With the Harvest Moon just a couple of days past, the last of the summer crops will be coming in over the next month to be properly stored and/or preserved. The big pears are finally falling, providing more than enough for as much pear butter as I can possibly make even as the deer and turkeys work hard to eat more than their share before I can gather. The pumpkins are good and orange now, but can stay on the vines until first freeze warnings before I have to harvest and process. Winter squash is looking to be a good harvest at the same time, and the peppers are quickly turning red in rushes. Grape tomatoes are being sun-dried to “tomaisins,” as many as I can fit into the solar dryer at a time and always many more waiting to be picked. They’ll keep right on coming until first freeze.

At the same time, as the beds are cleared from harvest they must be prepped for fall plantings. More kale and collards (which will keep going all winter into spring with plastic tenting on very cold nights), peas, lettuces and spinach, and of course garlic. Today I’m talking garlic, because it’s one of our most favorite garden goodies.

Garlic is a member of the onion [allium] family. It has powerful antibiotic properties, and is well known as a “blood purifier” and digestive stimulant. Legend has it that garlic is an effective vampire and werewolf repellant, but I haven’t heard that it will prove to be all that useful during the coming Zombie apocalypse. For that, you should follow the advice in The Zombie Survival Guide instead.

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Livestock: A Rabbit In Every Pot

I’ve been looking into the various classified ads locally for livestock I want, to get an idea on budgeting first for proper quartering and actual animals. Chickens are of course a first choice. Also want bees, been looking at hives and queens for sale. If I can site them properly, bears shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Goats are sometime in the future, will need more fencing than we’ve got.

On those classified pages I discovered an awful lot of meat rabbits for sale, and remembered some homesteader friends in Virginia about 25 years ago who were big into meat rabbits. At the time we’d recently become vegetarian and I rejected the idea for our just-started homestead, but all these years later I think the ease of raising rabbits might make them an excellent livestock choice… so long as I don’t have to be the one who slaughters and prepares them for sale. There are surprisingly ample markets locally for good rabbit meat, especially organically raised. Even including some of the high-end eateries and B&Bs who are my regular fresh organic herb and sauce customers.

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Milk Thistle Harvest – A Powerful Herb

Today I managed to get out into the garden before noon for a little clean-up and prep. Took out the last of the early peas and radish pods from their nifty PVC tent with twine, the peas being well past done and the pods perfect for harvest. I’ll need to clean out the bed thoroughly to replant with pole beans, and I will replant radishes down below in a bare well-composted spot next to the potatoes (which are blooming great guns!).

I also donned leather gloves and de-headed the milk thistle [Silybum marianum]. They were as tall as me by this time, falling over from heavy heads to make it difficult to get past them to the rest of the garden. Those dry pods are spiny like you wouldn’t believe, as if the leaves weren’t bad enough, but all spring the leaves make great additions to salads and pot greens, very pretty variegated thick foliage you have to trim the spines off of before adding to anything. The flower heads – the usual pretty purple thistle flowers about the size of a golf ball – produce seeds that are readily marketable to herb dealers in our region, but we end up using most of them ourselves for skin treatments, general systemwide cleansing, etc.

This stately and strikingly pretty plant has been in use for more than 2,000 years as a remedy for all sorts of ailments, most notably liver and gall bladder problems. There have even been medical studies of milk thistle as a remedy for liver damage caused by pain medications such as acetaminophen. Its flavonoid Silymarin is antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, and its action on the liver appears to be stimulation of new cell growth in that organ.

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Annual Planning: New Realities, New Markets

My homestead isn’t the only one spending these frigid, snowy January nights making plans for the coming year. Those of course include an assortment of building, maintenance and development projects that never seem to all get done, which is why around here the very definition of “Homestead” is “a perpetual work in progress.”

But with the seed, plant and equipment catalogues coming in almost daily, it’s garden planning that helps me get through the mid-winter doldrums. Sadly, the ongoing – and in many places, worsening – economic depression is not looking to get better any time soon. And an interested observer in all things political/economic will also have noticed that there are new bubbles inflating as bailout money is being jealously hoarded or just funneled straight into newer, more lucrative derivatives and speculatory gambling casinos. Whenever recovery (on Main Street, Wall Street’s doing just fine) threatens to break out, something happens to further impoverish those who still have homes and jobs. As if just to make sure no “little person” gets a break. It’s winter, so of course the cost of fuel oil and coincidentally all other petro-products shoots through the roof. Gasoline is near $4 a gallon in my neck of the woods, diesel is already there.

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Is It a “Fish Farm” if I Stock the Creek?

Now that the weather’s turned officially cold and the wood stove is going all day and night, there’s time to reflect upon the year and make new plans for the future. I’m still working on how to get “free range” chickens that won’t get eaten by the many foxes and coyotes that haunt our cove, sans the serious fencing we can’t afford. Also working on finding some metal fence poles for the garden fence through our local Freecycle network, nobody’s willing to come off any so far.

I find my mind once again drifting toward renting a backhoe for a week and dredging down in the creek so I’ll have a set of three tiers of pond that I can stock with rainbow trout. So I’ve been looking into the whole aquaculture thing, the issues with pollution and antibiotics and quality of feed, cost of fingerlings from the state, etc. What kind of engineering do I have to do to my creek? What kind of pollution controls? Who gets to police my little trap-falls?

After two days’ worth of homework, I’ve decided that my plan doesn’t fall under the regulatory purview of the state beyond their “stocking rivers and creeks” section. Yes, since it’s private land I’ll have to pay for the fingerlings, but because these pools won’t be anything but slightly-dammed hold-backs the size of my back deck, there should be no issues about waste pollution or anything like that. I will probably need a permit from the state in order to get the fingerlings, but once they’ve determined the operation is so minor as to not really qualify as “commercial,” it shouldn’t cost that much. Sell a few dozen fish a year.

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Farm Bill Up for Vote (and Veto)

What’s In It: Good and Bad

Here we are nearly halfway through 2008, and the 2007 farm bill is slowly but surely making its way through House and Senate disagreements on its way to the chamber floors for vote this week or next. The final compromise, USDA chair Ed Schafer bluntly informs us, will be vetoed by President Bush.

If farm legislation doesn’t directly affect many of us rural and semi-rural homesteaders, it’s a sure bet that it will affect our neighbors who do farm on a commercial scale. Thus it’s something we should be paying attention to. According to lawmakers nearly 3/4 of the spending in this bill over the next decade will be for feeding the needy. Another 16% goes toward commodities, crop insurance and disaster relief. Increasing nutrition spending (feeding the hungry) 8+% over the previous farm bill is reasonable given the worsening food crisis both in America and world wide.

This farm bill addresses biofuels diversion of food crops (like soy and corn) by providing more than a billion dollars to expand alternate use of biomass (like switchgrass and algae) and crop by-products (cornstalks, wheat straw, etc.) rather than diverting the grain itself. It also tightens payment limits, eliminating the “three-entity rule” that the previous bill contained as justification to funneling most ag payments to huge agribusiness concerns rather than smaller farm cooperatives or family farms. It limits subsidies to anyone making more than $500,000 in non-farm adjusted gross income [AGI] per year, and entirely ending direct payments to anyone with an AGI of more than $750,000 from any source. This will effectively put Big Agribusiness in the business of actually doing business instead of simply sucking up free corporate welfare as smaller family farms disappear.
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Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop

Back when the country was new, its beloved “father” and gentleman farmer George Washington advised…

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” [1794]

It was the #1 cash crop in the 13 new states just as it is the #1 cash crop in 50 states today. As a fast-growing “weed” that requires no pesticides or herbicides and very little fertilizers or irrigation, the close-packed stands of 8-9 foot tall plants provided more biomass per acre than any other crop ever discovered, bred or engineered. Its fiber content is 2 to 3 times as great as cotton per acre, and is both softer and stronger than cotton. Hemp paper lasts hundreds of years and can be recycled more often than tree pulp papers.

Hemp’s high cellulose content is a fine base for plastics – composites made with hemp are now used by Mercedes Benz to produce auto bodies and dashboards. Hempseed oil is both more nutritious and more economical than soybean, peanut, sunflower or canola oil. It burns brighter than any other plant oil, and can be used to produce non-toxic diesel fuel, paint, varnish, detergent, ink, home heating oil and lubricating oil. It is as easily converted into ethanol as corn, but can be grown in a much wider range of climates and conditions.

News organizations warn that we are facing a worldwide food shortage in part brought about by the diversion of staple food crops to ethanol and biodiesel fuel production, worsened by reliance on unsustainable agricultural practices and chemical pollution of once-rich “breadbasket” farmland. Our reliance on foreign oil has caused 2 wars in this first decade of the 21st century and killed more than a million people with violence. America alone has sacrificed more than 3,000 soldiers and left some 30,000 returning veterans with life-crippling injuries. Pollution from fossil fuel burning contributes to another few hundred thousand premature deaths worldwide every year. Global warming, if unchecked, will eventually kill tens or hundreds of millions more.

The answers we seek for the future may require a re-examination of our past. Perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were right. What might be accomplished if we did NOT spend 4 billion dollars a year trying to prevent farmers from growing industrial hemp?

Links:

Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says
1997: Canada Repeals Hemp Prohibition
Energy Farming in America
Hemphasis: Hemp as a Fuel/Energy Source
Vermont House Approves Hemp Bill
Hemp-based biodiesel, NOT ethanol