In this unusually mild winter where it’s looking a lot like it’s not going to freeze after February (actually, February itself is starting off in the 60s day and 40s at night), my recent attempts to clean out the beds so they can be prepped for early plantings has taken on a bit of urgency. Moon is waxing (rising) for the next 8 days, so I’ve been folding newspaper pots by the dozen while sitting here at the desk.

Waxing moon is for above-ground plantings, so I’ll be starting peas, collards, bib lettuce, spinach and kale over the next week. The little pots fit tightly into glass cake pans, which makes it easy to evenly water from the bottom, which encourages early root growth. These will go onto shelves built to the big south facing window in the library. From there the seedlings can go straight into the ground (paper pot and all) by mid-february. If it freezes after that the pea cage can be covered with plastic at night, and milk jugs with the top end cut off fit nicely over the new greens. A new rush of peas should be planted as soon as the moon turns waxing again.

Once the moon has passed full it will be time to plant seeds for root vegetables. Which for early spring are beets, bunching onions, leeks, potatoes, carrots and radishes. Now, radishes are best planted to ‘mark’ rows of direct-seeded crops beginning in April because they grow so quickly and can be harvested early as the primary seedlings get established. But I like to grow a row of radishes for the spicy little seed pods they produce after flowering, so those I’ll start in paper pots indoors and interplant in the bed with leaf lettuces around the first of March.

Now’s a pretty good time to start the summer’s tomatoes and peppers as well, so the seedlings will be sturdy, well-leafed and quite full by the time they go into the cold frame in late March to early April. I’ll wait another six weeks to start the cukes, squashes, beans and pumpkins, as they don’t go out until May. Won’t need many new seeds this year, just carrots and more beets. Going to try Johnny’s “Atlas” carrots this year because long carrots tend to come out of the ground looking like man-roots in my soil, and the Atlas carrots are short and round like beets.

As for beets, I have to say I’m impressed enough with the hybrid “Moneta” I planted last year. Nice red roots that peel and slice easily and greens that are excellent in salads or as side greens. They also keep well and are vry juicy. In these days of leftover radioactive contamination from Fukushima, beets are about the best food-derived blood tonic anywhere. And since the blood/lymph system is where radiation does its most immediate damage, that’s something to think about. High in antioxidants, vitamins A, C. B1 and B6, beets are reported to have anti-cancer properties and also contain ample amounts of iron, magnesium, potassium and calcium.

Beet juice is also a fine health drink, always with a sweetness that is very palatable. I’ve been slicing those and the leeks I finally finished harvesting last week for drying, as they’re too old to make good side dishes or salads. I’ll powder the dried slices when I powder dried leeks, celery, carrots and tomatoes to use as soup broths and veggie-based table salts. As they are sliced I’ve been popping them into a bowl of cold spring water with ascorbic acid (powdered vitamin C) until I’m ready to line them up on the trays for drying. The water turns the most gorgeous shade of deep red, and I’ve been using that water to make lemonade (from bottled lemon juice). It’s redder than cranberry juice, but pretty and the sweet allows me to use less sugar. So far nobody’s complained, and it just makes the juice healthier than it otherwise would be.

Because so much of the garden was allowed to go fallow last year due to a constant excess level of fallout from the Fukushima nuclear accident’s plumes, I’m hoping to make good use of the extra months this year. Will plant twice as many beets and peas, spring and fall. More leeks, more bunching onions, more carrots and squashes. And yes, I am going to once again attempt eggplant and artichokes, even though that never seems to work out well. You never know what the weather’s going to be like, and global warming isn’t making things any easier to predict. But a peach tree ‘volunteered’ from the compost bin last year and is already over 10 feet tall, I’m hoping it’ll bear this year. Apples, pears and grapes all suffered miserably in the heat last year, I didn’t get enough out of any of ‘em to bother harvesting. If the peach does fruit I’ll get more, along with plums and figs.

And it’s not just me. The USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] just last week released a brand new Plant Hardiness Zone map (pictured above) which reflects changes due to warming climate. I’ve gained a whole zone, so peaches and figs should do fine. If I gain another one I’m going for oranges!

Do check out the new zones for where you live [Map Link], because for many of us this represents a whole new plan for how we go about growing our food. We can start relying on the extra weeks and/or months of growing season to plan our crop rotations, and even choose different cultivars we may have always wanted to grow but couldn’t.

Since this is one of the warmer winters in many regions, get busy right now making those plans. If I waited until 6 weeks prior to last frost in my old zone (May 10), I’d lose 10 entire weeks of growing time. So Happy Paper Pots all you homesteaders out there! Let’s make 2012 a super-abundant year for our yards, gardens and croplands in the hope that this year, none of our neighbors – far and wide – go hungry.

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.”

I’ve written quite a bit about how much I like drying food from the garden rather than canning. Which is a hot and expensive way of preserving things. But this time of year my handy-dandy home-made solar dryer is fairly useless, there’s just not enough hours of sun to make it work. So I use the oven, which can also be a relatively expensive proposition. Still, good craisins are expensive from the store in those little brand name bags, so it works out fairly. Even better, if you make your own craisins at home you can do some pretty spectacular things with them flavor-wise.

This year I’m doing the “Double-Dry” method for orange flavored craisins. It’s easy enough – just dry the craisins in single layers on flat baking sheets in a barely warm oven – I use the lowest setting, 150º – and keep the door propped open a couple of inches to allow the moisture to escape in natural convection. Takes awhile, and many of the berries retain their size and shape until they’ve cooled completely and wrinkle up into the ‘usual’ raisin-like form. I put these into a glass bowl and cover them with hot orange juice. Then cover the bowl and let the berries reconstitute. Then dry them again.

You could use any type of fruit juice to flavor your craisins, even wine or brandy if you want. Just be sure to label the containers you put them in so they don’t get mixed up. They are wonderful additions to holiday cakes, breads and cookies, or just as handy snacks. If you want your craisins to be sweeter, just thoroughly dissolve a tablespoon or two of sugar or honey in the reconstituting juice, it will get absorbed.

It’s cranberries this time of year, but drying and double-drying fresh fruit works any time of year, whenever the local harvest has big lots at the farmer’s market. I haven’t yet double-dried apples, as dried apple slices go so fast as snacks around here that it seems the hoards just stand around drooling to get them as fast as they can be produced. But if ever I did happen to have dried enough for, say, a Thanksgiving pie, I’d probably reconstitute them in spiced juice (mulled cider or even wine) just before putting them into the pie crust, using leftover juice as part of the filling. Just add sugar and corn starch to thicken.

Cranberries don’t grow in my locale, but blueberries sure do. I’m planning to dedicate several terraces on the upper yard slope to the ridge to blueberries, once I find a good source of thinned bushes I can get for free. Say, 4 100-foot rows of good producers, which works out to ~25 bushes per row spaced at 4′. Good producers will return ~5 pounds of berries per bush (some will give 10, but I’m being conservative here). Once they’re producing at that level, I’ll be getting an average crop of 500 pounds a year! That’s big enough to supply my family and friends as well as the local munchy market. Besides, blueberries come in high summer, which would let me use the sun instead of expensive electricity to do the drying.

My daughter went a little wild this year “trimming” back the grape vines that wandered over the fence that badly needs repair (rather than simply repairing the fence), so diminishing the ripening fruit that we got basically nothing from them this season. Ah, well. Happens every so often. They should be back in bulk next year, and I’m fixing the fence over the winter so she won’t be tempted to prune out of season. What she didn’t manage to trim into oblivion this year are the wild roses (sweet briar) bushes on the up-ridge side of the driveway. They can get out of control pretty easy, and always want to drape down into the driveway to cause scratches (and sometimes blood) to people who park too close.

So I’m the one who did the pruning this year, and I was very careful to hardily discourage growth on the driveway side, while encouraging growth on the ridge side. That allowed for a pretty good haul of rose hips this past weekend by my grandson. In previous years I’ve simply put the little hips – sweet briar hips are about half the size of dogwood berries, not the fat wild persimmon sized hips of garden roses – into a jar in the freezer to add to teas made over the winter. Especially the colds/flu tea we drink a lot of to keep the viruses away. But this year we made rose hip syrup, and I’m definitely a convert as I drink my morning coffee sweetened with it.

Rose hips are sort of a concentrated multi-vitamin, with an average of 20 times the vitamin C as oranges. They don’t turn red (and soften up) until after the first frost, which occurred on the up side of the hill weekend before last. They’re difficult to harvest, as they must be pulled from the branches carefully in order to avoid battle scarring from those pesky thorns. So I must say I was very glad for grandson’s volunteering to do that job, I usually wait until November to harvest and end up looking like I’ve been handling an ill-tempered badger. Rose hips also contain appreciable amounts of vitamins A, D and E, making them a very good wintertime tonic.

You can make a jelly out of them, but it seems to me that the heat of jelly processing is probably not the best way to preserve the vitamin content. Whereas steeping them for tea doesn’t expose them to high heat for extended periods. Always keep them whole prior to processing, as once they’ve been cut or ground they begin oxidation immediately. A good rule of thumb is that it takes ~1/2 pound of hips for 1 quart of syrup, though you’ll want to use half-pint jelly jars for the final product. Be sure to sterilize them as well as the lids. They do not require actual canning, but you’ll want to seal them while still very hot.

Some people who use the big garden-rose hips cut off the tops and tails, but this would be silly with little bitty wild hips. To remove as much of the long-dead petals and hairs at the top end, I simply rub a small handful between my hands to loosen it up good, before spray-washing. Once washed, put the hips into a grinder or blender and process to a kind of sticky pulp. Put this pulp into 2 quarts of rapidly boiling water, remove from the heat, cover, and let steep for 4-5 hours or overnight.

Strain through an unbleached coffee filter or jelly bag, try to get all the liquid you can out of it. Put this into a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat while slowly stirring in 1.5 cups of packed light brown sugar. Make sure your sugar is natural brown rather than dyed, as in natural form it retains quite a bit of the good mineral content. Reduce heat to a bare simmer and keep uncovered to reduce the liquid by about half, so that it’s quite thick. Pour this into the sterilized jars and attach lids. Allow to cool on the countertop, then keep in the refrigerator to preserve the vitamins C and A.

Use this syrup like honey to sweeten coffee or herbal teas, or just take a spoonful a day as supplement. You can mix this syrup with strong elderberry tincture if you have a cold or get the flu. It makes the tincture a little easier to swallow, but sugar does affect the potency of the tincture a bit. I prefer to use the syrup by itself as a tea sweetener, it adds a little bit of tart and a lot of sweet, especially for blackberry and mint teas.

And don’t forget to throw a few dried dogwood berries into the teapot when you’re steeping, these are also excellent sources of vitamins C and A. Here’s hoping the viral season is light this year, and that we all spend as few days under the weather as possible.

Some Helpful Links:

Foraging: Making Rosehip Syrup
Katey’s Rosehip Syrup recipe
Rose Hip Jelly, Jam Recipe

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.

It’s called Goldthread, and it’s a CSA they say should properly be called a “CSM” because it offers community-supported medicinal herb shares. The Goldthread farm is located in western Massachusetts, and its herbal preparations are made in small batches at the farm in Conway and an apothecary in Florence. A share basket may include a combination of carefully dried bulk herbs, small bottles of tinctures, essential oils, herbal honeys and compounds, often accompanied by fresh culinary herbs and garlic.

“Grassroots medicine” sounds like a good idea at this current point in history, as my ‘customer’ base has only been increasing over the past few years as western medicine’s allopathic treatments have become far too expensive for most people to use, joblessness has stripped what little insurance coverage people once did have, and the state slashes Medicaid to the bone so that no one new gets on the roll until someone dies. Last year my elderberry tincture (for colds and flu) saved nearly a dozen people – one of them an ER nurse – from work and time loss due to viral respiratory infections. My ginseng tincture hasn’t been made yet, but three new ‘customers’ have requested some, asap. If I had money to invest in some cute little dropper bottles and labels, I could probably make a little income on the side just with those. Then there’s the black cohosh, the Japanese honeysuckle, the goldenseal, the dogwood and spiceberry tonic, and MUST get started on the autumn end of my skin lesion salve that takes a year to produce…

Problem is, I use those little quotes around the word ‘customer’ because I’ve just never charged anybody real money for my simples and remedies. People have long said I could, but all of my herbalist ancestors believed – and taught – that doing it for money was antithetical to the effort at healing. That was so ingrained in me that it’s been difficult to even begin thinking about charging money. But now that my grandson has put so much energy and effort into learning from me, and helping me greatly in managing the medicinal crops, I see that earning a little money on those efforts isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Now that grandson is in ‘business’ with me as apprentice-in-training, making a bit of money for his college tuition is where I’m aiming my thoughts for the next year. Both in producing the concoctions and in planning for more medicinals next growing season. We’ve already transplanted what will be an entire grove of elderberry that was threatened by a road-widening project, and nettle so we’d have our own on-property supply. We’ve transferred the ginseng to new, deeper beds much better protected from deer and tromping disc golfers than where they were before.

We probably won’t be a CSA like this farm in Massachusetts is, as there are plenty of needful folks just here in our area who tend to trouts the old herb-lady more than they trust whatever allopathic doctor’s on duty today at the urgent care center for $400 a pop just to walk in the door.

So wish us luck, and I’ll be sure to report back on whether or not this change of heart on the healing plane works out. Stay tuned!

Link

Goldthread Herbal Apothecary
The Kitchn: Goldthread Article

The current collapse of the world financial system has revealed some structural problems in our national economy that have flourished over a period of decades as corporate interests bought politicians and lobbyists to craft legislation to remove legal roadblocks to mass theft and market manipulation. And despite some changes in the D.C. political landscape, our government remains apparently helpless to do anything about corporate malfeasance on any level. With all the bad economic news dominating the public consciousness, some issues in the food supply sector are having a difficult time being properly correlated and attended to despite the serious level of danger they present to public health.

The food supply issues didn’t begin with the market manipulations on Wall Street and from there to exchanges all over the world. Though for many people the first alarms went off as the CDS fraud crashed the economy in 2008 and the financial players went looking for other markets to wreak havoc on. They seized on commodities – staple foods from the agricultural sector increasingly dominated by multinational corporations like Monsanto, ADM and Cargill. As a traceable beginning in 2008 to what this year became the “Arab Spring” movement across North Africa and spreading to the Middle East and southern Asia, food riots broke out in Egypt and Syria and portions of India as well as elsewhere when people could no longer afford to feed themselves and their families. Things have only gotten worse in the years since, and Americans are slowly waking up.

In 2011 a full quarter of the U.S. population are dependent on food stamps. As unemployment keeps on rising, the government strangely keeps slashing the food stamp budget to appease nutty Republican radicals who insist those hardest hit by the Great Recession are just “lazy” and undeserving of aid that might require corporations and billionaires to pay taxes. Why one of the political parties in our nation believes that Americans will quietly and without complaint starve to death in the streets in order to protect billionaires from paying as much of their income in taxes as their chauffeur does has never been explained by the financial sector’s pundits at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Major cognitive disconnect.

But serious food supply issues encompass much more than just market manipulation and governmental paralysis. Consider some of these issues while attempting to get a picture of how dire the overall situation is…

Honey Laundering: China’s at it again – Adulterating pet and human foods with melamine wasn’t bad enough – though one corporate scapegoat was executed by the Chinese government hoping to save its place as cheap ingredients supplier to the world – the latest food scam involves honey. Not just fake honey in those little bee-shaped plastic bottles, Chinese honey brokers are creating honey by mixing sugar water, malt sweeteners, corn/rice syrup, barley malt and a variety of unrefined sugars. Failure to police storage requirements has resulted in heavy metal contamination as well, primarily lead.

If you’ve been thinking about beekeeping for honey (and handy pollinators), this is the year to get busy on it. Extension services in many rural counties offer literature, evening classes, and instructions on building hives. Agents often know who in the area builds hives for sale, and aren’t shy of giving out that information. Many people who are trying hard to eat better and healthier are being taken in by the Chinese honey scam, and big food processors using that fake honey in their supposedly ‘natural’ food lines are risking their markets. Grow your own honey or buy locally from someone honest.

Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector – Late July brought the second largest tainted meat recall so far, when Cargill’s meat packing division recalled ~36 million pounds of ground turkey products tainted with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella. The biggest recall was in 2008, when a slaughterhouse in California recalled 143 million pounds of beef due to allowing downer cows into the mix. The dangers to public health from e.coli, salmonella, listeria and other bacteria, and from adulterants and contaminates are high, yet our government doesn’t give the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] the power to force food recalls. Companies have to do this voluntarily, and they don’t often volunteer until people start dying and CDC tracks the source down.

If your family eats meat, now is the time to seriously consider raising your own or contracting with a neighbor who raises meat animals. A side of beef from a calf pastured for a year, dressed whole chickens raised happily free range, maybe rabbit stew meat, a slab of locally smoked bacon and/or ham… buying from known sources or doing it yourself could easily save your family’s lives. The more that control of our commercial food supply gets concentrated into the greedy hands of a few, the more danger is present overall. Avoid it like the plague it truly is.

The Nation has a good article looking at How change is going to come in the food system despite united resistance of the big corporate players to cater to public demands for better, less adulterated and far less fattening foods. There is a lot of good information in this article’s analysis to arm yourself with when next you try arguing with a friend, relative or acquaintance about the importance of healthy food and the severe shortage of it in our commercial food supply.

And finally, the good news. The New York Times informs us that vegetable gardens are booming in a fallow economy. We homesteaders have of course known this all along – and have done more than our share to get more people digging and grow the local markets – but we should always welcome mainstream coverage that helps to spread awareness. Recent movement in many states to allow the use of food stamps at farmer’s markets and bulk purchases straight from farmers are helping more people to get more and better food than they could purchase in the grocery store.

Many localities are also sponsoring seed exchanges through the Lions or Ruritan, sometimes through local Chambers of Commerce, 4-H and FFA clubs at high schools. These have committees in charge of getting open-pollinated seeds from local gardeners and farmers, packaging them, and then distributing them free in the late winter and early spring to local residents planning their season’s garden crops. Local schools and civic clubs are offering gardening classes and contacts to suppliers of tool exchanges, equipment like chicken coops and bee hives, and farmers who sell chicks, calves, kids and kits to those wishing to raise their own meat animals. Local butchers are making a comeback, and in many states the Extension Service offers classes all the way up to Master Gardening certification. So get busy, and get your neighbors busy making best use of all these developing local alternatives to Big Ag and Big Food, Inc. We will be a much happier and healthier nation for it, and probably much smarter as a people for our awareness and direct involvement in this most important aspect of everybody’s lives.

Links:

NYT: Vegetable Gardens Are Booming
How Change Is Going to Come in the Food System
Time to re-engineer the meatpacking sector
Honey Laundering: tainted and counterfeit Chinese honey
Risks of tainted food rise as inspections drop

Bags and boxes and baskets of tomatoes. Romas and Abe Lincolns and some other determinate heirloom I forget the name of. All ruby red and threatening to rot if not processed immediately, no human being can eat enough tomato sandwiches to dent the load.

So it’s been days’ worth of boiling water to loosen skins, a quick cold water bath, peeling, seeding coring, chopping. Having to do it in shifts to give my hands enough time to recover, hoping they don’t turn permanently wrinkled from the effort. Putting up quarts and quarts of tomato juice for drinking just because I can, and we love straight, watery tomato juice. Other boiling pots containing onion ends, the last of last year’s dried leeks and celery, fresh spices, some cuke ends and peels, pole bean pods and such, the accumulated compost of a vegetarian household added to those tomato skins and seeds and cores and trimmings to make broth for soups and stews and greens and those big wintertime pots of beans. Then to can it all in jars and put it away for later consumption.

Canned quarts of quarters. Frozen bags of chunks. Fresh tomato basil soup and tomato sandwiches and good ol’ ‘mater pies… it’s a wonder we haven’t all turned into tomatoes ourselves! And for the bulk of the gleaned harvest (the field entirely organic), drying. The solar dryer has been full of tomato quarters and chunks for days now, as much as that very nifty south porch unit can hold. The sun dries them just enough to move indoors in the evening when the sun goes down, into the oven on its lowest setting of 160 degrees, propped a little open with a spare canning ring, to finish the job. Meanwhile flats of fresh quarters and chunks get prepped for the solar dryer when the sun comes up. Start the whole process over again. Ripest fruits first because this sort of thing takes days and these babies are indeed very ripe.

Perhaps some of my readers don’t know that a full bushel of romas dried crispy can fit into a single ~2 pound plastic coffee container. And the saved container doesn’t have to be sterilized or sealed in boiling water – dried fruits and veggies require nothing more than a clean and dry container with lid. Crispy dried foods don’t need refrigeration, will keep literally for years (though none ever last that long around here). Tomatoes especially lose volume when dried, as they are primarily water to begin with. When the water’s gone, they hardly take up any room at all. And the best part is you don’t have to parboil and skin tomatoes that you dry. Still have to seed and core, cut to quarters or chunks, but leave that skin on. Lots of vitamins in those, and once they’re turned into powder or rehydrated and cooked they do not present that pointy fresh skin problem that led to parboiling and skinning preserved tomatoes in the first place.

At the end of the processing I’ll grind the crispy-dry tomatoes into powder for all sorts of uses, and it’ll fit into a single recycled 12-oz. pickle jar. Which I keep in the freezer just because I can (doesn’t take up any real room in the door shelf) to add spoonfuls to soup bases and pasta sauces, or to sprinkle on salads and sandwiches, or to make flavored table salt for Thanksgiving guests. All one need do is remember that there really is the equivalent of an entire bushel of tomatoes in that jar of powder – it’s potent, you don’t need a whole lot.

Much of the rest of the harvest will only be half-dried, put into freezer bags and stored frozen. These can be used at any time for pasta sauces and some fancy dishes, pre-soaked in a marinade that rehydrates them and gives the marinade flavor to them. Half-dried they will take up twice as much room as the crispy dried, and must be frozen or refrigerated because there’s still enough water in them to cause spoilage. But again, they need no sterile jars or lids. Half-dried tomatoes can also be packed into jars of olive oil, and those need not be refrigerated because the oil will keep them from spoiling for a few months. Such jars (never more than pints) of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil with added rosemary or basil make excellent culinary gifts my family and friends look forward to during the holidays when so much feasting is going on.

I’m down to just a couple dozen tomatoes as I write this, they must be finished up tonight because I’m having to cut off whole sections that are beginning to rot. It’s definitely a lot of finger-wrinkling work, but this ample harvest should provide my family with tomatoes enough to get through the winter. Canned or frozen you get the plump body of tomatoes, but much of their abundant vitamin C content has been lost. That’s another great thing about dried tomatoes – they retain almost all of their original complement of vitamins without loss in processing or storage. Such things can be very important during the colds and flu season, when too many people don’t get enough C.

Here’s hoping my fingers survive without permanent wrinkling, and that your tomato harvest is every bit as abundant and busy as mine has been. Oh… and because my hubby and one of my grandsons have complained that my regular ‘mater pie has too many chunky tomatoes in it for them to really like as much as they should (they just don’t like the consistency), I did an on-the-fly recipe alteration this week that has worked out extremely well. Can’t keep those pies long enough to refrigerate and enjoy for breakfast (my favorite). I’m calling it “Fresh Tomato Custard Pie,” recipe below.

Fresh Tomato Custard Pie

• Enough skinned, seeded, cored and chopped tomatoes to provide a full 4 cups (per pie)
• 3 tbsp. corn starch
• 3/4 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
• 1/2 tsp. dried basil
• 1 cup shredded mozzarella or mixed Italian cheese

Puree everything except the cheese together thoroughly in a blender or food processor until smooth and thick. Stir in the cheese and mix well. Pour this mixture into a prepared pie shell. You can cover with crust or leave open for pure custard pie. If you don’t have a top crust, sprinkle more shredded cheese on top.

Bake at 350º for 1 hour, or until the filling is semi-firm all the way through. If the crust isn’t golden by then, finish at 450º for another few minutes. Allow the pie to cool and set, at least 30 minutes. It is delicious hot (though a little runny), but I like it better cold and well-set. Excellent for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Enjoy!

For those of us fond of The Clash and their music, these past few days of London Burning for real have been… surreal. Pushing austerity to its most absurd limits, the government has slashed educational funding, jobs training programs and basic welfare – including for food – across the board just as is happening in this country with radical right-wingers holding the nation hostage in order to secure massive cuts to all forms of social aid – including medical access – in order to keep our several resource wars going indefinitely without having to tax the people making the most money off those wars. Rioting in Greece over austerity measures, in Israel over hard right-wing policies, and the “Arab Spring” that has so far brought down several governments in the Middle East and North Africa while getting NATO involved in Libya, the now 3-year old meltdown of the world economy has things on hair trigger in some rather surprising places.

Americans have not yet hit the streets violently, though things economically show no signs of easing up as markets plunge and hunger raises its ugly head all over the place. ABC News offered a rather amazing article August 8th touting Dumpster Diving as a way to get no-cost food – featuring New York City – that raises far more questions than it could ever possibly answer. Is dumpster diving okay? Is it a threat to public health? Is it acceptable for people to be getting their food this way? My God… what have we come to in this country?

ABC makes it sound like a voluntary “movement” among people who just don’t WANT to spend money on food. But for those of us who have some real idea of the actual time and energy expended in a “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, this new version doesn’t suggest that these people have any actual money to be saving by raiding dumpsters all day long. In fact, despite ABC’s portrayal of this “Freegan” lifestyle as some sort of “movement” to be weighed for existential value, it would appear by their own admission that these people have no means of transportation aside from their feet and maybe an old bike, are “squatting” in old buildings without indoor plumbing or electricity, and are long-term unemployed in one of the most expensive cities on the continent.

I cannot imagine having to raid dumpsters just to eat, though I have in my life picked up aging produce from the back of the grocery to feed to my guinea pigs and rabbits. I’ve gleaned fields of neighbors with larger, more mechanized farms for leftover potatoes and other veggies I could preserve or donate to the food bank. There’s a big tomato field near my sister’s place that is literally rotting in the sun right now because the illegal immigrants who used to pick the produce have all been deported. I’m taking a few baskets and boxes down this evening to gather what I can for preserving. Heck, I even accepted a couple of bushels of old onions from a passing truck once when we were camping on the Rio Grande. He was going to a dump, the onions didn’t look that bad to me. Spent the entire afternoon cutting out rot and slicing the rest into a water bath canner pot over a wood fire, and cooked up the largest pot of onion soup anybody’d ever seen. As campers smelled the bounty and wandered over to see what was cooking, I soon had carrots and potatoes and celery and herbs and some stewing meat and a few other things to toss into the pot – which quickly grew to two pots – and by dinnertime we had a grand community feast and told stories well into the night.

…but it’s not what I’d care to do for a living. And I’m sure you wouldn’t either. We who have chosen to live outside the urban danger zones and have committed ourselves to being as self-sufficient as possible cannot sit by and presume things won’t get very, very bad in our cities and towns too when people come to the end of their cut-off ropes and find they have nothing left and nowhere to turn. Things will not be getting better for the foreseeable future unless fundamental changes occur. And fundamental changes are not going to come from D.C. or from our state houses, where the political game of high dudgeon is played primarily for cash contributions from corporate lobbyists and we the people count for nothing.

Here in the Wise Living Journal’s hunger archive there are quite a few articles about hunger in America and how homesteaders can escape it themselves as well as help out their neighbors. A 3-part series titled Feeding The Hungry lists and describes some innovative anti-hunger programs we can not only contribute to, but could expand to include our friends and neighbors to help out regional food banks that are currently running very low on food, and supply feeding programs in our larger towns and cities where people don’t have the means to grow their own food.

We can be part of a new way of seeing things, helping to change a harsh and hopeless reality bottom-up. Politicians will come around eventually if we go ahead and make necessary changes for ourselves. Or be left behind when new politicians from among the ranks of the people rise to prominence by virtue of leadership in making those necessary changes.

A word to my homesteading readers, rural, semi-rural and urban: Don’t you dare neglect to harvest everything you possibly can this year. If you can’t use or preserve it, get it to someone who can, while it’s still fresh. Volunteer to glean neighbor’s fields, and get that bounty to those who will give it away or preserve it for later. Sign up to teach a preservation class to others in your area. How to can various things, how to build solar food dryers, how to use the preserved food. Education is always useful to those who don’t know what you have to teach. And please don’t neglect that fall garden this year just because it’s a lot of trouble. Chances are that the price of fresh food is going to go through the roof this fall and winter as the conditions that have led to entire fields being abandoned such as is happening in my area hit the market with drastic shortages. A lot of people will be going hungry. Even more are losing their means to prepare foods or even stay warm when winter hits as those subsidies are stripped systematically as well.

Don’t wait for the politicians, they are doing just fine and their families aren’t hurting at all. It’s going to be up to us to help our our neighbors and communities, and we need to spread the word. It’s bad enough that people in this country die every year because they have no access to medical care (45,000+, and the figure is growing). Do we want to live in a country where they also starve to death or freeze to death if disease doesn’t get them first? It’s up to we the people because our leadership won’t do anything to help. We need to get down to business right now.

In looking around for more information about edibles we can gather without having to grow them in our fields and gardens, I was again reminded of that voracious “Vine that Ate the South” – kudzu. We hear about how the leaves and tender vine ends are high-protein greens either for animal fodder (goats especially love it) or for pot likker greens you can make for dinner. There is usually a sort of side note whenever you read about kudzu that says the root starch is used in China and Japan as “food,” usually unspecified. Those of us who homestead in the south where kudzu has managed to claim millions of acres all for itself, should probably learn about all the ways this plant can be consumed. Not just greens, flower jelly and flower wine.

Originally planted as an ornamental, government and railroad workers planted it across the south in the 1930s for erosion control. It can grow up to 2 feet a day, cover everything in its path, and no known herbicide is ultimately effective against it. The roots can weigh as much as 200 pounds and extend underground to a depth of 10 feet, no topical herbicide is going to kill something like that. All parts of the plant except shallow, bark-covered smaller roots are edible, but it’s unlikely any homestead could consume enough spring shoots, vine ends, leaves or roots in a year to keep it from taking over valuable fields. A herd of goats is about the only thing known to actually keep it under control.

Kudzu has a long history in herbal medicine and shows some promise as a treatment for chronic alcoholism, high blood pressure and as a systemic alterative for colds and flu. But this doesn’t override its value as a wild food source. Roots are dug in the winter, after the kudzu has died back for the season. That annual die-back leads to a thick accumulation of fine compost that can be gathered at the same time and used as a garden amendment. Just be sure to sift first through a screen to remove seeds so you don’t introduce kudzu to your beds. Roots are best dug with a fork like potatoes. If you find a big one you may have dig out around it with a spade. You want the fat, deep roots. If all you can find are the tree root like shallow ones, remove the bark first and only use as powder.

Kudzu root can be used as a general root vegetable in soups and stews, stores well without drying in a good root cellar with your turnips and rutabagas. Or it can be sliced and dried, stored in jars like other dried produce. Once dry it is easily powdered in the usual manner to be used as a thickener for stews and soups, pies and quiches, or as a high protein vegetable-based flour.

It is the root flour that is most often used in Asia for a staple food item. In Korea and China it is mixed with arrowroot powder and made into pasta/noodles. Both the kudzu powder and arrowroot are starches, so cornstarch should work as well. The noodles are nearly transparent, highly nutritious and can be fortified with wheat or rice flour, potato or bean flour, etc.

Making your own pasta and noodles is quite the operation, but well worth it in the fall and winter when it’s not so hot and humid. My family likes home made herbed pastas, veggie pastas made with powdered dry tomatoes, greens, beets, etc. and such. Well dried home made pastas will keep just like store bought pasta, or can be frozen. This year I will be making noodles with kudzu as well.

“The Vine that Ate the South” offers us a highly nutritious staple food we should not overlook in our efforts to live self sufficiently off the land.

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.

Because of this quality, milk thistle has been used as a treatment for the liver conditions of alcohol abuse, including hepatitis and cirrhosis. It is also used in the treatment of viral hepatitis (particularly hep-C), and support in cases of mushroom poisoning which affects the liver directly. Some studies have suggested milk thistle may have anti-cancer properties, but this is as yet unproven and anyone with hormone-related cancers (breast, uterine, prostate) should avoid it. Double blind studies have demonstrated reduced mortality in cirrhosis patients, and biopsies demonstrated clear improvements in liver condition.

Milk thistle seeds can be made into extract, or munched dried, or steeped into decoctions to sip. The tinctures are stronger, so consider these a potent ingredient to be taken somewhat lightly or added to salves.

So, in case you have grown milk thistle too (or did in previous years and let the volunteers go ahead and grow just because they’re so pretty), here’s a basic how-to for making the extract that is so good for your liver and skin, and thus can be added to mixed tonics and such for your purposes…

Milk Thistle Seed Extract

Separate the seeds from their spiny flower calyx and dry, mix it around a bit to loosen it from the whispy aerial flight fluff. That fluff can then be threshed by tossing from a basket and letting the breeze carry it away. Good seed that you wish to market or store should be threshed so there’s not much waste matter. Drying should be open air (not in full sun), not done by heating. Stored seeds should be kept whole in jars kept in cool, dark and dry places until preparation.

Grind the seeds to break them open, either by blender or a bit at a time with mortar and pestle. Put about 3/4 of a cup of broken thistle seeds into a pint size canning jar. Mix in 1 cup of 100 proof vodka (get the organic stuff), or blackberry brandy for a bit of flavor. Cap the jar and swirl it around to mix well every day or two for 3-5 weeks.

The longer the seeds steep, the more potent the resulting tincture will be. Always make sure the alcohol covers the seeds completely, add more if necessary. DO NOT let them mold, as they will if they aren’t fully covered. After steeping for the period of weeks, strain the tincture into a sterile bottle (or several), preferably bottles of green or brown glass with tight lids or cork stoppers.

Dosage

Always check with the doctor if someone already under treatment wants tincture from you. Milk Thistle can affect the potency of pharmaceutical drugs, including anti-psychotics, drugs for various ‘nervous’ disorders, etc. Be on top of any reported side effects like nausea, abdominal cramps or diarrhea. Adjust dosages accordingly.

For general purposes a dose of 20-40 drops of tincture (straight or in water) 3 times a day is good for most purposes. That works out what I always start with, which is a solid 1/2 teaspoon 3 times a day, 1/2 teaspoon being equivalent to 30 drops. You want to spread this dosage out to 3 times a day to get a the best benefits of timing, but for those who just aren’t capable of keeping up with such a regimen (as for some alcoholics I know), half a tablespoon once a day will work but may cause more stomach upset.

At any rate, milk thistle is one of those beautiful and very useful plants that are both marketable and useful for herbal remedies that grow great in and around a garden and assorted sun-drenched homestead plantings. They will hurt if you don’t wear gloves when dealing with them, though, as the spines are cactus-sharp. They grow with no tending, they’re good to eat in salads and with pot likker at dinner time, and the seeds are precious. Those seeds when ground to rough powder also make very nice defoliating material for homemade soaps and cleansers, and are particularly useful for clearing up acne and rosacea.

So if you happen across a nice natural herb shop selling milk thistle seeds by the gram or ounce, pick some up and sow them in a sunny spot where the kids and dogs don’t hang out much. You won’t be sorry!

I harvested some red russian kale this past week. Planted it in late March along with collards, bunching onions, spinach, beets and salad greens, because March is the best time to plant such things here unless you’re going for a fall crop. So fresh and tender, red russian doesn’t need to have the spines removed like collards and the blue curly kales do. Must break out my solar dryer this weekend, we can’t possibly eat it all before it gets rangy, but I did find a trio of excellent recipes I’ve just got to offer.

I’ll write them as I made them, though we all know the best cooks tweak their recipes and ingredients here or there. So I certainly expect my readers to do the same, bearing in mind what their families like to eat.

Breakfast: Kale & Onion Bake

1 bunch of red russian kale
1/2 onion, chopped
1/2 tsp. minced garlic
1/2 tsp. brown mustard
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp. soy sauce
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1 cup grated cheddar cheese (or mix with parmesan)
6 eggs, beaten
Lemon pepper & herbs to taste

Wash, dry and chop kale into squares. Heat oil in a skillet, add onions and saute over medium-low for 3 minutes. Add garlic and continue to saute for 2 more minutes. Then add the kale, saute for ~5 minutes stirring regularly. If it gets dry before the kale is dark green, add a little water.

Beat together eggs, soy sauce, bread crumbs, cheese, peppers and herbs in a large bowl. Add the sauteed greens and onions/garlic, mix well. Pour into a sprayed baking pan, even out the depth and bake for 20-25 minutes at 350º. Cut into flats and serve with sour cream and/or salsa.

Lunch: Kale and sage chips (side to sandwiches)

These aren’t at all complicated. Only tweaking I can imagine is in what you dust them with – I use powdered sea salt, but you could add chili powder or a mixture of onion and garlic powder or something else. Just wash and dry the kale and basil leaves thoroughly. Cut or tear the kale into chip-size pieces, throw a small handful of mixed greens into hot vegetable oil and fry for a minute or two. Drain well and turn out onto paper, dust with salt or your other flavorings. These chips are delicate but delicious, my family will consume all I can make as soon as I make them. Perfect side to any kind of lunchtime sandwich.

Dinner: Colcannon

A traditional Halloween dish in Ireland and Scotland, where symbols of fortune are sometimes included in the servings. This dish is rich, my family loves it so much I usually have to double the recipe. We eat it as a main dish with a side of freshly baked bread with an herbed olive oil dip. It’s fancy enough for company, and if there happens to be leftovers (never happens at my ‘stead), you can add broth later to thin and make a fine potato-leek and kale soup.

1 lb. kale
1.5 lbs. potatoes
1 stick butter
1 cup finely chopped leeks
Salt and pepper
1/2 cup finely chopped onions
1/2-3/4 cup milk or milk & broth

Wash, trim and blanch kale, spin dry pat with paper towels and chop small. Set these aside. Peel and boil the potatoes in salted water, then mash (or make a foolish 4 servings of instant mashed potatoes in a large pot). Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a frying pan and gently stew the leeks till tender. Add kale and saute over medium high heat, stirring occasionally until moisture evaporates. Turn heat to low and add 2 more tablespoons of butter, cook 5-10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Heat the milk and/or milk/broth mixture and whip it into the potatoes along with the kale and leeks, with 1 tsp. salt. Mixture should be smooth and firm. In a small frying pan brown the chopped onions in the remaining butter. Mound the potato/leek & kale onto a hot dish, put browned onions and butter into a depression on the top until they spill a bit over the sides.
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We don’t eat meat, but if your family does don’t ignore kale (or other dark green leafies or mixed greens) as a frequent side dish. Almost any kind of meat with a side of beans is complimented well with greens cooked in broth. Don’t overcook, serve them in a bowl with an ample amount of the broth to be soaked up with fresh baked cornbread – pot likker!

Kale is a sturdy, frost-tolerant crop. Go ahead and leave the snow around and on top of them when the temperature plummets, they’ll survive and some people believe frost actually improves the flavor. Always harvest outer leaves to keep the plant producing, as near to the time for prep and cooking as possible. Wash carefully, especially the curly varieties, as they tend to harbor grit.

The nutritional value of kale is high, and it has powerful anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. It’s high in vitamins A (beta carotene), K and C, lutein, and calcium. It’s also a source of indole-3-carbinol, which boosts DNA repair and appears to block the growth of some cancers. Kale is great steamed or blanched in broth, sauteed or stir-fried, topped with raw or crispy fried onions or slivered almonds, topped with pepper vinegar or a balsamic vinaigrette, tossed into pots of beans or vegetable soups, even young leaves added to salads are a big vitamin boost.

You can grow kale in the spring or in the fall through the winter, the plants will keep producing if you just harvest the outside leaves. You can grow it in a fairly sheltered area of the garden, in window boxes or in pots on a sunny porch. The ornamental kales – often planted by landscape gardeners for a bit of low-lying color – are very pretty and just as edible as any other kales if you refrain from pesticides and such. This pretty leafy veggie is so easy to grow and so packed with nutritional oomph that it’s something no homestead dedicated to healthy, independent living should do without.