I spent a lot of time in Eastern Kentucky growing up, it’s where my paternal grandparents, Aunt and cousins lived and where we spent vacations no matter where else in the country (or elsewhere) we were living at the time (Navy brat). I’ve no more relatives there, the last of them died a decade ago and none of us siblings chose to live there for raising our own families or even retiring in our old age.

I do recall several very nasty UMW strikes in the mining region around Harlan, and I recall the black moonscape on the Green River near Paducah’s western shipping point that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions, the coal tailings having turned a lovely rolling greenscape into utterly depressing nothing. I also recall learning to shoot my father’s beautiful pearl-handled six-guns at the abandoned strip mine near Laurel, and one touristy adventure in a no longer operating underground mine where we rode through in one of those little coal rail cars as if it were an amusement park ride.

These days they do things a little differently, as the deep seams get harder to work (and miners become more rare, having been decimated by Black Lung) and the easy seams have all been stripped. Now they’re going for the mid-seams, the last of the stored coal, by simply blowing up the entire mountain to get to it.

It’s called Mountaintop Removal mining, and it’s utterly devastating the southern Appalachians in the traditional coal mining regions of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. It’s a horror even worse than Mister Peabody’s tailings outside Paducah. It’s destroyed ~500 whole mountains so far, it’s polluting mountain streams that contribute to the primary water supplies for millions of people downstream, and it’s killing the abundant biodiversity these mountains are so very famous for. Most of all, for those of us who dearly love these gorgeous mountains, it’s very, very tragic. Some of the mines are as big as the Island of Manhattan.

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As we homesteaders begin to rake in the summer produce (while planning for yet more), it may be time for some good advice on how to make sure that the produce you’re buying at the grocery store, at the farmer’s market, and off that farmer’s truck by the side of the road fully safe for your family to eat in this age of imported food, bad farming practices and bacterial contamination.

I am presuming that homesteaders know enough about the critters in the soil (and compost) to be regular produce-washers and cooks who know how long to cook a hamburger or egg so as to preclude any possibility of e.coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella poisoning. But with recent news of e.coli contamination of fresh produce - everything from “pre-wahed” lettuce and spinach and scallions to tomatoes - it’s good to review the basics.

Most of us who can our own produce as well as cook our own food also know that contamination like Salmonella and e.coli can be easily transferred from one food to another if we’re not very careful with the cleanliness of our working areas, cutting boards and utensils, and equipment. Sure, we can kill the critters with high enough heat and processing times, but as a semi-vegetarian, who wants to eat dead bugs either?

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During the very hottest portion of the year I get really very sick of lemonade and regular old iced tea. Worse, I find that I can’t actually drink iced tea after noon if it’s been brewed honestly because it has even more caffeine than coffee. Plus, I live in the south where “regular iced tea” comes complete with about a full cup of white sugar per glass. I don’t like my drinks to be sugary, but I get pretty sick of plain old water too, despite having the Planet’s Best Mountain Spring Water right here in the tap.

So I make some cool summer teas from the first plants in the garden and the last to die out in fall - the mints. In fact, cool summer teas are the #1 thing to do with all those exotic mints - like apple mint, pineapple mint, chocolate mint and lemon mint (as well as good ol’ peppermint). To these I like to add a bit of rose hips, just for the tart flavor and excess vitamin C. I harvest those when they turn red in the fall, then freeze them in a jar for later use.

Now, the very name of the mints tells you all you need to know about the specific taste undertones you get out of them. I like to make my tea fresh, as making it of dried herbs requires less material and no simmering (I use the dry for hot wintertime tea). So in the following recipe, use your mint of choice!

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I have no nut trees on my property other than the oaks from which I get acorns in the fall, and hickory nuts that you need a hammer and rock to crack. But my son-in-law has four walnut trees on his property, from which I collect sacks of walnuts both in the summer (when they’re green) and in the fall (after they’ve fallen).

So in case you’ve a source for green walnuts, I thought I’d offer a recipe for walnut ketchup that can’t be beat!

Walnut Ketchup
About 100 immature walnuts, shelled and crushed
2 quarts cider or malt vinegar
1/2 cup kosher (non-iodized) salt (can substitute 2/3 cup dark soy sauce)

Put these ingredients into a crock and cover, stir it daily for 8 days. Sieve out the liquid and put into a large pot with…

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Mustard, for instance. Like most people around here, my garden grows great mustard. As a weed, not a crop. When the flowers are done and seed pods are set (late April or early May), I pull up the whole plant prior to preparing the bed for whatever I’m planting there. I put them head-first into brown paper bags, tie around the roots and hang upside down in the shed to dry. Sure enough a couple of weeks later I rub the seeds free and sift them through a sieve - the seeds are small. I grind those in my little Braun coffee grinder. That doesn’t exactly powder them, but it does get them grainy. If you like your mustard smooth, you can mortar-and-pestle them

I like fresh ground peppercorns (red, white and black) some cinnamon and bay leaf, but anise, fennel, caraway or dill seeds can also be used to flavor up a good mustard. If you’ve got half a cup of ground mustard seed, simmer all your other spices in a half cup of water, covered, for about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and add the mustard. Replace cover and steep for an hour. When that’s done, blend the whole concoction until smooth. If it’s too thick add a little cider or wine vinegar to thin. Put this into sterile small jelly jars. Keep refrigerated or water-bath can it with new lids for cabinet storage.

You can use pickling spices in mustard, or anything your family likes a lot. Honey is good as well if you like a sweetish taste, and white wine is good as well.

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Part of homesteading in the country or in the city is to become familiar with the land and make it work for you. We grow as much of our own food as we can, and many of us will also (attempt to) grow as many useful plants as possible for various medical and/or income purposes. In the two terraces beneath the grape vines at the top of my garden we grow culinary herbs. The perennials have their beds and spots, the annuals are usually scattered in amongst the vegetables farther down the hill.

But there are other useful plants growing elsewhere on the property. There is blue flag growing at the edge of the driveway and bordering the disc golf fairway (orris root). There are large thickets of wild roses above the cabin and trained to a welded rebar ‘tree’ in the back yard (rose hips). There are small flower beds sporting yucca and yarrow, joe pye and wild sunflower. Our forest is thick with dogwood, tulip poplar and maple, growing in the shade in rich forest loam are ginseng and goldenseal and black cohosh and Mayapple. I can gather purslane and chickweed and cleavers galore, all are great in a muslin bath bag for a hot soak, soothes and moisturizes skin.

Becoming familiar with the useful plants that grow on your property - whether they grow wild or are managed, or you plant and tend them in beds, is a long-term project. You should know how to identify them in all stages of their growth through the year, as well as what parts are most useful when, and for what. For instance, the poplar buds in spring are known as “balm of Gilead” and make a fine ingredient in skin salves for cuts, scrapes or just dry, itchy skin. The winds of March blow them down by the basketful from the tops of 100-foot trees, I gather them as soon as the wind stops blowing. In fall the dogwoods sport bright red berries that are excellent tonic ingredients, rich in vitamins and flavinoids but only available in the fall. The wild rose hips have to freeze before they finally turn red and are ready to harvest, usually in November. Mayapple roots are best gathered in May, they’re pretty much invisible and impossible to find after that, once the above-ground plant has died back to nothing.
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I’ve been drying some herbs my youngest daughter requested from me to make some good-for-breast feeding tea when she was here with hubby and 2-month old daughter Sunshine for the Memorial Day weekend. Seems she’s tried to stay as ‘natural’ as possible while living in the city and being a new mother, and has been steered a bit astray by the not-so know-it-alls at her local herbal/natural food store, who have supplied her with some useless, some highly questionable, and some downright dangerous herbal teas that have of course had their poor effects on the baby’s digestive system. She named a few, I was horrified!

She doesn’t need milk thistle or motherswort or black cohosh or rue. My goodness, don’t these herb dealers have to do ANY homework before prescribing? A couple of these are downright dangerous to hormone levels, and because Sunshine’s a baby girl, will of course affect her as well. I tut-tutted and promised a nice batch of dried herbs that will actually work to help the quality of her milk as well as her (and Sunshine’s) digestion and sense of calm.
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At last, we come to our current hunger project, begun some years ago and still going quite strong. It’s not something governmental or bureaucratic, it’s not something designed to guard food against anyone deigned to be “undeserving,” and it gets a lot of help here and there from community groups. All without publicity, without bragging, without self-importance, without insults to the hungry, without too much time and trouble by anyone. It’s just a project people here know about and many of them contribute to in their own quiet ways - a bit like stashing bags of food (then also clothes and toys and blankets) behind the dumpsters in a sneaky sort of way so the Dumpster People were taken care of and nobody talked about it at all. It just happened, because…

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

We call it “Shares.” Because sharing is really what it’s all about. Our personal end of it only works in growing/harvest season, the off-season stuff is handled by actual community groups (Chamber, Ruritan and a few church-lady groups), but still quite informally. They took that over all on their own, and I’m just fine with that. Heck, I never told them not to make it formal, they figured that out on their own too. They just wanted to keep it going through the winter and spring, so did.

The way it was conceived to work was to simply enlist the aid of the people in our area who always grow a nice veggie garden in their ample yards. Here along the slow end of the Blue Ridge it seems like everybody gardens, some more than others, in or outside of town.

At first I approached my immediate neighbors, nice folks who live this far out in the woods as I do on purpose. The leave us alone, but are always on hand in emergencies (blizzards, forest fires), and not stingy on good advice about what to do for apple blight, what’s eating the grape vines, the best heirloom tomato seeds, etc., etc. After the county locked up the dumpsters I approached 4 neighbors the following spring and asked if they’d add a row to their normal garden, seed it with any extra seed they had after planting their usual rows, and donate the produce to my “shares” project.

I told them I’d collect the food, bag or box it, and get it to those I knew in town (at that little grocery store) who could get it out to poor families. I wasn’t really surprised when they enthusiastically said ‘yes!’ but I was quite encouraged that this might work. The really amazing part is that I didn’t actually have to do the organizational work at all, even in the first year! Before spring was over those neighbors had convinced more neighbors, who convinced more neighbors, who got the word out in town, which started the little old church-ladies going, which got the Chamber involved, and the extension service jumped right in with both feet and started donating seeds - just pick ‘em up, free to all. It sort of just made so much sense that it took on a life of its own.
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Welcome to Part 2 of this series on feeding the hungry in your neighborhood. Before I get into the current homestead project, my family has been involved in some rather innovative hunger projects over the years in a number of places, both urban and rural, local as well as international in scope. We’ve found that while it’s nice to volunteer once or twice a year at the local soup kitchen or deliver Meals on Wheels to homebound and elderly folks in your town or city, there are things you can be doing on a constant basis that don’t require a lot of paper-pushing, government approval or desperate efforts to convince the hungry to swallow their pride.

And that last issue is one that homesteaders should understand better than most. There is a certain amount of shame attached to poverty and hunger in our society, so it’s a sure bet that formal programs are not going to reach all the people who are actually going hungry during any given week of the year. We’ve found that an individual approach, and an attitude of joyful sharing will reach more people than any amount of scary bureaucracy can. It’s just crazy how hunger programs can get so bogged down in trying to make sure nobody who might be able to afford food doesn’t ever get a bite of free food. THAT seems positively designed to thwart good efforts and leave way too many people out in the cold. Our current project manages to get around this pretty well by simply NOT means-testing anybody who comes for food. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t need the food, so who the hell cares? But more on that in Part 3.

First, our background is that we had become involved in a grant-funded hunger project out of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1983 called “The Whole World Family Supper.” We were the promo team and designed the brochures, wrote the letters, maintained the contact lists, etc. for the project. It didn’t get that far before the grant ran out (and we moved away), but my favorite aspect was that it chose a day - Thanksgiving - and enlisted missions/NGOs in many countries and depressed areas of the US to sponsor a giant pot-luck get-together on that day, the price of admission being a dish for the meal and at least two “guests” who could not afford to feast.

When we moved from Tulsa we located in northeastern Florida. There we became fast friends with a retired Air Force officer who maintained a boatyard in Saint Augustine. He loved the family supper idea so much that he became official host for the Thanksgiving pot-luck every year, setting up sawhorse and plywood tables end-to-end the entire length of the roofed dry-dock shelter (which made the spread at least 100 feet long). He also pit-roasted three huge turkeys and two ample hams every year, which were donated from two local grocery stores and the owners of the boatyard. The crowd was always colorful and culturally diverse, the smorgasbord piled with vegan dishes, every kind of vegetable dish you can imagine, more pounds of mashed potatoes and yams than should be allowed by law, veggie and turkey gravy in two-quart pitchers (constantly refilled), rolls and homemade bread loaves by the dozen, cranberry sauce and fruit dishes by the bushel, one 4×8 tabletop completely full of piled pies of every variety, and enough tea, lemonade and fruit juice to quench an army’s thirst! Again, price of admission was at least one dish of food and at least 2 people who otherwise would not eat a feast on Thanksgiving. There were often well over a hundred people present, and the feast lasted the whole weekend (lots of campers in the yard).

Thus for us, getting good food into hungry people’s mouths is sort of a “personal mission.” This is America, there’s just no excuse for chronic hunger. Thus shortly after we moved to the mountain I was appalled to discover one day while taking the trash to the county dumpsters that in this rural area where almost everybody’s got a garden going and there are always trucks full of produce in summer in parking lots or by the side of the road, there were whole families of “Dumpster People.”
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This will be a series over the next few weeks about a subject that too many of us try hard not to think about, and which too many believe does not impact their immediate neighborhood or region. People in America are going hungry, and for a number of reasons from apathy to pride to a real shortage of government funding, are not being fed. If you don’t think it affects you or your town or county, you’re sadly mistaken.

This series is about ways to tackle that problem head-on, and perhaps build a network of friends and neighbors who will help. Not a church-based group, or a government program, or something officially sponsored in ways that can end up harming the effort over time. Just people - the more the better - making sure that no one inside their sphere of influence goes hungry. The very BEST people to spearhead such projects are homesteaders, primarily due to our strong and energetic commitments to our own self-sufficiency. We’ve lots to offer, and everyone can benefit.

My family homesteads in the deep countryside, but not all successful homesteaders are rural dwellers. There is a huge urban homesteading movement that has been growing steadily over more than a decade, from the days when old inner-city neighborhoods full of boarded-up, badly neglected but once gracious homes were offered for sale for practically nothing to upwardly mobile Yuppies who would fix them up and turn the neighborhoods around. In many cities this movement has revitalized neighborhoods dramatically, and their mixed race and income status has not hampered efforts to form neighborhood solidarity and outreach.

On that level we rural homesteaders seem to be somewhat lagging behind, as we simply don’t have a lot of close neighbors and tend to be quite a bit more isolated, at least in the early years. I’ve been trying hard to promote the idea of changing that by networking with like-minded neighbors as well as old-timers, getting involved in local school and community projects, volunteering here and there, joining the County Chamber, offering extension courses, etc. Sure, we’ve more miles to travel (and with the price of gasoline lately, that can be a significant barrier to physical networking), but we’ve also got more skills and resources to offer than your average city-dweller.

Food issues are increasingly coming to the political foreground with food shortages and riots spreading across the world, increasing costs, poor farming practices, etc. Worse, many of those issues overlap energy issues - costs of fuel, transportation, chemical farming, pollution, etc. So I’m going to devote some posts here to those issues, and have added some food links to the blogroll that specialize in the broad overlapping political issues as well. I hope my readers will visit those sites regularly and get involved as much as possible in designing solutions from the homestead (urban or rural) that will help to address those issues.

For my part, I’m going to open Part 2 of this series with a description of hunger projects I’ve been involved in through the years, the better to promote my current project later in the series, one begun as one of my very first networking efforts after we moved to our mountain homestead 16 years ago.

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

Posts to This Series:

Feeding the Hungry - Part 1
Feeding the Hungry - Part 2
Feeding the Hungry - Part 3