Early summer eating at the urban farm

After cultivating, planting, and then spending a few busy weeks weeding, now is the fun time of summer before the tomato plants become large and unruly and the flurry of canning has started. This is the sweet time when you can really begin eating something besides salad.

Due to my locavore tendencies, I've also been thinking more about reducing food miles where I can and eating what is in season and available in my region. Many of the veggies and fruits we now eat are grown in our own plot of land, and if not here, then purchased from local growers. And food miles aside, this food is ripe and tastes better than much of the produce trucked in from some other time zone.

Things we've been enjoying this week: green onions, broccoli, broccolini, basil, cilantro, parsley, and Swiss chard from the urban farm, and homemade bread made from local wheat and homemade sourdough culture (a real treat toasted and smeared with last week's strawberry jam). I also made my raspberry millet muffins (recipe from February 24) and subbed in local sour cherries. (I may now need to plant a cherry tree!)

Some other foods in photos...

Local bread cheese (Juustoleipa), warmed up on a hot griddle.

This is my second week of enjoying local strawberries. These were frozen on a cookie sheet and then stored in baggies for wintertime smoothies and shortcakes.

On a bike ride with my daughter today we found a patch of wild blackberries. They are tiny but perfect (maybe even more perfect because they were a gift from nature with no work involved).

Our cultivated raspberries are starting to ripen. There were only enough red ones today to pick and eat immediately, still warm from the sunshine, but I'm hoping to be freezing and making jam out of an abundant berry harvest soon.

Until our chickens start laying eggs, we're very lucky that a neighbor is selling eggs for a local farmer this summer.

Our first harvested kohlrabi (German for "cabbage turnip"). Very easy to grow and tastes a little like broccoli.

The community garden plots are producing some very nice beets, which I like roasted or pickled.

Sunshine in a jar

This week at the urban farm I had my first taste of canning. I have always frozen some fruits and veggies (raspberries are my favorite freezable) because freezing is fairly straightforward, even for a novice like me.

We are looking forward to a good raspberry harvest this year. Netting will keep the birds from taking too many!

Reusable netting is good for all kinds of fruit crops.

The world of Ball jars and canning lids has been a big mystery to me. When I was a kid my mom and dad would buy boxes of Concord grapes from the local grape growers and make jelly. The popping of the lids as the jars cooled made my mouth water for a slice of toast with homemade jelly. But that was many years ago, and we now all live far away from the Concord grapes of Tontitown, Arkansas (with its fun and delicious grape festival that feeds festival goers some of the best Italian food around).

In my mind I had originally thought that food preservation would all take place at one time in the fall, but now that I think about it more, canning and freezing and drying will happen at many points throughout the year when we will put away food from whatever plant is producing in abundance. As a food and farming meditation, I have been slowly re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and really thinking about each chapter. This week I'm contemplating her ideas of local eating.

What is local in the upper Midwest?

Here in Wisconsin, if you don't can/freeze/dry some of the harvest, over the winter a local meal will consist mostly of meat and milk products with root veggies. By early spring even the root veggies will likely be gone. Preserved foods are like packets of sunshine in a jar, ready to take out when the days are cold, reminding us that we do produce beautiful food here in the summertime, and giving us faith that the long, warm days of summer will indeed return.

Strawberry season

In the future I hope to have a strawberry patch of my own, but until them I am enjoying the fruits harvested by my local farmer's market growers. I bought two quarts of perfectly ripe, local, organic, berries at the downtown Middleton farmers market (conveniently located at Capital Brewery) and brought them home to make jam while they were at the peak of ripeness. My mom and I canned them using water bath canning, and I'm excited about pressure canning the less acidic foods later this summer!

Starting the process of filling up my pantry for winter.

And just because I like to know the monetary value of things, a half pint of local, hand-made jam goes for 8 bucks at the farmer's market (this seems expensive to me, though I have been known to pay this on occasion because it is so much more delicious than the grocery store variety). For $10 worth of berries, $2 for pectin, and $2 for new lids (I already owned the jars) I produced $72 worth of strawberry jam.

Chickens and compost

Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures of the pullets enjoying the strawberry tops!

It took a while for them to warm up to the berries.

But they figured out that they are delicious and begged for more scraps.

Dealing with the will of nature

Farming is a funny thing. In most modern day professions you can pretty much run over nature and not blink. Even conventional farmers are told they can spray some chemicals, buy GMO seeds, and feel like they have some chance of winning (though any farmer--big ag supporting or all-in organic--will tell you they stay up late at night worrying about what might kill their crops or livestock this week).

On the urban farm I've been running into a few "issues" where Mother Nature really is showing me she has a mind of her own. It's my job to figure out how to work within this system, and since I am using only organic methods, I have to be creative and think about what my great grandparents would have done. (I can also think about how they might laugh at me and my citified ways!) I've learned a few lessons this week.

Lesson 1: Crows have a place in the ecosystem, just not in my popcorn.

This is the point in my post where my great grandparents would laugh at me and then shake their heads in understanding. I have been visited by a murder of crows (yes, that is what a group of crows is called, and the name fits since they have been murdering my popcorn).

In my many years of corn research, I had several unfortunate experiences where I watched crows walk down rows of corn and pull out the small plants one by one, only to eat the seed that is still located at the base of a young plant; a single crow can take out a row of corn in moments. The urban farm is right in the middle of town, so I had never seen this here (or even considered it as a possibility) until this week.

I would feel better about this if the crows would eat the whole plant.

So what would my great grandparents do? They would make a scarecrow, of course! So that's just what I did. My daughter's outgrown jeans, an old t-shirt, and a biking cap make a convincing farm hand.

The scarecrow really freaks out my dog (and if I am to admit it, when I glance outside I still keep thinking someone is out there, so perhaps this will keep the crows away until the replanted corn is big enough to hold its own).

Lesson 2: Cucumber beetles. They love cukes as much as my daughter does.

Can you really blame them? Cucumbers are delicious. That said, a beetle nibbling on my tender, young plants doesn't just put holes in the leaves, it spreads disease and kills plants in a matter of days. In the cucumber patch we have the striped beetle variety, and they spread a disease called bacterial wilt.

Dying cucumber plant.

Cucumber safe under a screen.

I've found two ways to rescue some of my cucumber plants: neem oil and netting. From what I can tell, neem oil is an organic miracle spray for all kinds of fruit and veggie-loving insects. The second way to control these beetles is netting. I had some old window screen that I used, or you could buy something fancy.

Lesson 3: There is a reason that they called a scared person a chicken.

This last lesson isn't so much something I need to correct. It's more just an observation. Chickens really are... chickens. (I suppose it has served them well, being that they are on the bottom of the food chain and every meat in the world supposedly tastes like them. I'd be a little nervous, too.)

I thought it would be a nice treat to give the chickens a watermelon rind.

The pullets spent the day hiding in the corner, jumping on each other in an attempt to escape from the offending watermelon rind. Such chickens! I know some people's birds do eat watermelon. Any suggestions on how to help them overcome their fear?

Wine Country? Starting a midwest, urban vineyard (part 1)

Sometimes the urban farm is just one big experiment. Eventually I can see things settling down into a routine, but I don't really want that. I love trying out new things that may (or may not) work out.

My lovely next door neighbor brought me some grape cuttings from her work mate who had pruned his plants. She thought I might be the right person to take them and turn them into something useful. Of course I jumped at the chance to add grape vines to my collection of perennial fruit crops.

The grapes are a grab bag and all my friend knows about the vines is that they were cut from a mix of red, white and purple grapes originally purchased  from a local garden store, Jung's. The grapes in this Jung's pack are the winter hardy varieties Edelweiss (green grape), Fredonia (vigorous, Concord type), and Swenson Red (table grape). These plants cost about $8 each, so if these cuttings work out, this an easy way to get free grape vines. And as a big thank you, I am planning to share my plants with my neighbor so that she, too, can have a vineyard in her yard. Now we need to find some good wine and jelly recipes!

Rather than following one technique I found, I combined a few rooting ideas that I could do easily in my kitchen.

I chose cuttings that had at least 2 or 3 good buds.

The cuttings were trimmed to 12-14 inches.

Using a sharp knife I trimmed the bark back at the bottom end, about 1/2 inch.

The ends were then dipped into a generic rooting hormone-- my local mega hardware store had only one brand to select, Take Root.

Cuttings were placed into tap water. The water was changed every couple of days.

27 cuttings, and hoping for roots. If all of them work, we'll have $216 worth of grape vines.


Time Passes...3 weeks later...

At 3 weeks more than half of the cuttings have large, healthy roots. The others looks like roots could still be forming.

I mixed up a soil approximately half sand and half peat moss.

I found these biodegradable pots (next to the peat pots) made from cow manure, a renewable resource--living here in Wisconsin where we have an overabundance of cow manure, I'm glad they have another new use for it!

The plants growing separately in pots will give the roots more room to grow.

16 cuttings were potted. After a few weeks in the pot I will transplant them outdoors (if the other 11 cuttings grow roots, I will pot them up as well).

In part 2 of this post I hope to talk about my planting and trellising plan. If anyone has any grape trellis experience or ideas, please leave them in the comments section!