Snow’s Gone, Time to Harvest

With the snow gone and finally a day without soaking rains, it was time yesterday to replenish the vegetable stores.  Despite our almost two feet of snow last week and the following foot plus of rain, our winter has actually been pretty docile.  Memories of long stretches of bad winter, keep us in the preparedness mode with food and firewood prep during the summer months.  If the weather is mild like this winter, all the better.  We can relax, and if we get a cold snap of some duration, our workaday systems allow us some comfort.

I pretty much know now what works in the winter garden and what doesn’t.  Red cabbage is one of the toughies.  With fall root pruning it holds in the winter garden during our cold snaps.  But remember, we’re in the maritime Northwest, so it doesn’t get all that cold.  Our lowest reading this winter has been 19°F.  Just mostly wet and raw.  I do have to say, though that my green cabbages that I left in the garden (except January King) have succumbed to our light freezes.  The red cabbage is right there next to the rotten cabbage heads, and it’s plugging away in its holding pattern.  My goal with our winter food supply is to keep it simple.  A minimum of care and purchased materials, just harvesting is my goal.

The root supply was getting low, first with snow, and then the rain, I hadn’t dug any roots for two weeks.  I was robbing roots out of Jane’s buckets.

Wha…?

 

The dirty secret of row run is probably a surprise to new gardeners who are used to buying vegetables at the store or farmers market.  It’s not all perfect.  My vegetable harvest each week is a culmination of all the choices I have made with my garden.   Besides being the produce manager, I am the grower too.  I see all the defects in my vegetables and my judgement.  Did I plant the right variety, at the right time?  Did I feed and weed timely?  Did I protect the crops from freezing or did I shrug at the weather reports?  Did I plant enough for the vole and mine?  All the questions get answered each week as the winter harvest calendar marches us right up to spring planting.

We have ready-made root cellar conditions here for root crops that like high humidity and refrigerator temperatures.  Basically the garden is a refrigerator without the electric bill.  There is another bill, though, that of varmints and the elements.  Clockwise, starting at the rutabaga with its haired over slug bites from summer; celeriac with vole damage; parsnip with canker; carrot with a split jacket; beet with vole damage, and lastly a carrot with vole damage.  All of these have edible parts, but will probably end up in Jane’s bucket. Voles are an ongoing problem, that are somewhat under control.  The slugs are the same.  There isn’t or shouldn’t be a garden anywhere with no pests, that’s just part of living in a biological world.  The canker on the parsnip could be avoided with choosing a canker resistant variety.  And the split carrot is the result of leaving a summer carrot variety in the ground after the fall rains have started.  There is no waste, damaged vegetables can go to Jane, or could be trimmed for house use if we were short.

The final list for harvest yesterday was:  carrots, parsnips, celeriac, rutabaga, giant kohlrabi, rutabaga, beets, and cabbage.  Lots of fodder for house and cow.

A Well Equipped Man Comes in Handy

I absolutely hate calling my hubby at work and telling him I got stuck!  Or having my kid backseat driving!  But alas, stuff happens   My girlfriend and I joke that we are a different kind of high maintenance woman…she has a barn full of horses, and I have a pasture full of cows.  Oh well, the driveway needed plowing anyway.  And I don’t get too much grief, because after almost 30 years we both have many memories of bailing each other out of predicaments.

The snow was only up to the label on my Muck boots, but it was wet and slick.  I just had to sneak over the hill a tad and the rest was history.  I was committed.  Luckily I know when to quit trying…

Of course, the cows have to come and watch too, and smirk.

We really lucked out, we topped out at 20″ of snow and by 3 am Wednesday it started to rain, no Columbia Gorge ice, it is forming east and north of here.  We are just getting rain, and our 20″ of snow is now about 3″ of slush.  All that rain combined with snow melt mean trouble downstream from us.  Our power was only out for a day and half and we consider a few broken fruit trees and one mildly stuck pickup pretty good for a storm system this size.  Others have not been so fortunate.

Snow Day and a Parsnip Cake

Gosh, so much for weather predictions, or maybe weather predictions for micro climates.   A few inches of predicted snow turned into a foot by noon today.  I called a friend down the hill in Springdale, and he had none…as I type this it’s still snowing, and piling up.

A good day for baking.  Parsnip cake sounded good, and I’m sure Jane won’t miss a snip or two.

I saved this recipe from the newspaper last winter, and never did anything with it until this winter when Hangdog needed a dessert for his Christmas potluck at work.  I’m posting the recipe directly from the article.  I simplified it by substituting all-purpose flour for almond flour, mixing it with a spoon (no stand mixer here), and I baked it in a 9 x 13 pan.  The cake was sweet enough without frosting, so I left that part out too.  The stripped down cake is delicious, but I have no doubt if you followed the recipe exactly it just might be stupendous   Here is the original article as it appeared in The Oregonian.

PARSNIP CAKE

Makes one 9-inch cake

To create this tender layer cake, Clyde Common pastry chef Danielle Pruett improvised on a carrot cake recipe from Sherry Yard, pastry chef at Spago in Beverly Hills. Pruett serves it with caramel sauce, candied walnuts and a gently spiced ice cream.

Ingredients

Cake

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup almond meal (such as Bob’s Red Mill brand)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled (1 1/2 sticks)
• 1 3/4 cups shredded parsnips (from about 4 medium parsnips)

Frosting

• 1 pound cream cheese, at room temperature
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature (1 stick)
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon rum (optional)
• 1/3 cup whipping cream

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and position a rack in the center of the oven. Spray two 9-inch cake pans with nonstick cooking spray and line with parchment paper; spray the parchment with nonstick spray.

To make cake: Whisk the flour, almond meal, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt together in a mixing bowl. Set aside.

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, blend the granulated sugar, powdered sugar, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla together on medium speed until well combined. Blend in the flour mixture on medium speed until well combined. Drizzle in the melted butter and continue mixing on medium speed until well combined. Fold in the parsnips with a rubber spatula.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pans and spread evenly. Bake until a tester stick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 20 to 30 minutes. Carefully remove cakes from pans and place on a wire rack to cool completely.

To make frosting: In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese and butter together on medium speed until well combined. Add the powdered sugar and mix until just blended, stopping the mixer and scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed.

Add the vanilla, lemon juice and rum, if using, and beat on low speed until just combined. Slowly mix in the cream on low speed until just combined. Once all the cream is incorporated, beat the frosting on medium-high speed for a few seconds. Use the frosting immediately or store in the refrigerator until ready to use. Allow frosting to come to room temperature before spreading.

To assemble the cake, spread cream cheese frosting between the two cake layers. Frost the sides and top. Depending on how thick you like your frosting, you will probably have anywhere from 1/3 to 1 cup left over.

Adapted from pastry chef Danielle Pruett, Clyde Common

Cooking Provenance

I don’t really think about cooking from scratch much, because that is how I learned to cook.  That’s how everyone cooked, although the modern world crept in with my mom working and trading recipes with her cohorts at the Grange potlucks.  What working mom doesn’t want a quick casserole recipe made with a can of soup and other canned ingredients.  The Grange organization celebrated their centennial in 1967, and my dad had died the previous year, so my mom joined up for something to do in her spare time (???)…bring on the casseroles, no one called them comfort food then, although they were comforting, to the cook and the kid.

The other day I was looking at the roasted chicken I had in the fridge, and thinking, “Gee, should I climb out of the chicken enchilada rut and  make something else?”  When you know your way around cooking, a recipe is but a suggestion for some dishes.  I was hankering for some comfort food myself, and the tuna casserole with celery, cream of mushroom soup and chinese noodles came to mind.  I rummaged through my mom’s grange cookbooks and pulled out the Meat edition from 1968.  These grange cookbooks have never let me down for  home cooking.  All the recipes are from grange women who were serious cooks, some recipes are old, some new-fangled, well, at least for the 60′s, and I love the contributors name and grange posted at the bottom of each recipe.  What I was wanting was a taste of nostalgia and some seasoning ideas, I wasn’t really interested in a tuna casserole, since  I don’t have tuna, celery or commercial soup in my pantry, but I did have some crispy Chinese noodles.  I’m weak, I admit it   And I had frozen sautéed chanterelles, celery root with crunchy tops, and the makings of a good béchamel, I figured the chicken could certainly stand in for Charlie.

I think I realized when I opened up the cookbook and a recipe written in my mom’s hand fell out, that the comfort of comfort foods stems from the memories of a meal and the cook as much as the meal itself.  My mom’s recipe had no title and was written how a scratch cook writes up a recipe.  Just ingredients with a few side notes.  Cut up 4# rabbit, 4 onions, 1/3 c vinegar, pickling spice, basil, sauterne wine, flour, butter, parsnips, carrots.  Place rabbit pieces in bowl with first four ingredients, add enuf water.  Marinate 2 days.  Dry rabbit, dredge, brown, arrange vegetables in bottom of dish, add rabbit, and 6 T of marinade.  Bake in slow oven.  Marie

I used to raise rabbits for 4-H and we ate this often in the winter when the parsnips were plentiful.  I never saw her with a recipe, and reading this I can see it came from the local Guernsey breeder, Marie.

I don’t know about you, but when I see a handwritten recipe, it has meaning beyond more than just a list of ingredients and the instructions to go with the list.  I quickly dug out my bunch of recipes that I keep separate.  It’s not because I use them frequently, but more because they are mostly handwritten recipes that have been given to me.  A gift.  A gift in this day of cursors, email and Epicurious.  I love Simply Recipes and other recipe sites in that they give me inspiration, but it’s not the same.  They don’t call it your signature for nothing, IT IS a person’s whole being that I see when I look at their handwriting.  I see our friendship, their skills and life leanings, I see relationships and I remember them instantly when I see the script.  Is cursive dead?  I hope not.

Looking through my recipe gifts, I see my neighbor who shared her granola recipe from the Shaker school in Ohio, she missed home,  the recipe was a connection after moving to west to Oregon with her husband.

I see a newly minted farming friend who shared a chicken recipe with me, she later was murdered on her farm by her own child.  We knew we were going to be fast friends when the first things she asked on a farm visit were, “Where is your milk cow?”  “Do you quilt?”

Some people have passed on in a more normal way, Mary my staunch, and sometimes silly neighbor gave me her roll recipe.  She and her husband performed the marches at Grange meetings in a way that made you want to march alongside.  She shared that being the oldest daughter in a large farm family at the turn of the century meant you always had to cook, clean and tend to the youngers.  My girlfriend and I would ride horseback to her house and snag a roll, and she would be wistful remembering wanting to ride the plow horses to the fields like her little sisters did.  One of the original blue hairs, I never saw her in slacks – ever.  Always a dress and an apron, something on the cookstove, and a quilt in the frame.

Some people just pass out of your life too, a co-worker doled out her French Dressing recipe sparingly.  I was glad to be a recipient.  She was Mormon and worked in the cafeteria, and she saved gallon jars and containers for me – which always brought on curious looks from those around us.  We both spoke pantry, it may as well have been a foreign language.

And there are recipes from the current people in my life too.  A Kahlua recipe from Hangdog written in his distinctive hand.  And my go to roll recipe from a friend I see only occasionally when we buy straw.  It’s not my roll recipe, it is Joan’s Rolls and I use it for everything roll related, and we all remember visits with Joan and her family when I use this recipe.

Cooking is a blend of old and new, tried and true, and spans decades of experience in each recipe that is passed down or shared with friends.  The tips each cook imparts is the passing of the torch so to speak that spans time and connects us all.  And I know even the ladies from another time would have been glad to have the world of recipes at their finger tips if that had been available to them.  I like the internet too, but I love my handwritten recipes, they are comforting.

Feeding Transition

We’ve went from freezing nights and sunny, cold days to snow.  And I have been feeding hay since the first of the month, no more grazing.  We’ll feed hay now until mid-April or whenever the grass is ready for turn out.

Not so cold though that the ice is hard to break on the troughs.  Usually I put a limb in the troughs and that is enough to keep the ice from forming so thick the cows can’t break it.  It hasn’t got cold enough for me to go hunt down the trough limbs…so I just break the ice in the morning if the cows haven’t yet.

I’m being lazy and still feeding outside.  It’s easy and the cows don’t mind, they get more freedom than when they are confined to the feeding shed/sacrifice area.  I will still have enough time to gather ample bedding for composting, and I have to interject here, we don’t really have pugging problems even if the cows stayed out all winter.

A couple of things on our side with outside feeding besides the non-pugging are:

♥  We live just out of the zone that receives the ubiquitous and I might say famous Columbia Gorge east wind, so the temperature reading is the temperature reading.

♥  We also have no babies born at this time, just so we aren’t subjecting birthing mothers or newborns to harsh weather.  Much easier on them and us – basically no worries.  This one factor really harks back to the SCAT post, going against nature is a major attitude problem.  Animals in the wild don’t normally have babies in the winter, unless it is the poor mustangs subjected to our “birth control” experiments.

Driver’s view.

Feeding outside means bringing the hay to them.  Downside – I’m using fuel, but it takes fuel too, to clean the feeding shed come spring.  Upside – I’m getting some nutrient cycling going via hay that doesn’t get eaten along with manure and urine supplied by the cows.

More driver’s view.

Feeder’s view.

I think flexibility is the key.  Planning chore management should include flexibility.  This is a simple way to feed and with a small herd can be done with a wheelbarrow if need be.  Building flexibility or resilience into your operation is a must.  We plan our calving for late spring, we make small square bales so anyone can handle them without equipment, and we go with the flow.  If the weather really turns I can put the cows in, if it stays mild a while longer I can still fall back on old outside feeding habits and enjoy the break.

Wonderful Weather

We’re in for a little snow this weekend, which if they’re wrong on this, I won’t be disappointed – the weather has been absolutely gorgeous.

The sky shows morning and evening have been amazing.

Wolf Moonrise from Chanticleer Point.

Winter Root Slaw

Jane isn’t the only one getting her roots around here.  As good as roasted root vegetables sound, it does get tiring.  I’m not missing lettuce yet, or leafy salads, but I am missing crunch.

Red Cored Chantenay carrot, Brilliant cand Superschmelz kohlrabi

I really like cabbage slaw which I posted about here.  But winter time is different.  Most of my green cabbage has been committed to the kraut crocks and we like red cabbage cooked like this.  But the root crops are abundant this time and year and taste very good made into slaw.

It doesn’t have to be complicated; a simple box grater, a few roots and your favorite vinaigrette  and you have the makings for a side dish, or meal.

I used cider vinegar, olive oil and a little honey for my dressing.  Topped with a few dried cranberries and it’s good enough for dessert!

Have root vegetables made their way to your table?  How do you prepare them?

More Seed Saving

One of our goals/wishes is to grow most of our own food.  To make that task seem a little less daunting, we have certain criteria that we subject potential foods to before they qualify as homestead keepers for us.  Our mix of vegetables that we grow are made up from varieties that my gardening mentors passed on to me, vegetables that allow us to be lazy gardeners, and vegetables we like to eat.  I would have to say Sweet Meat winter squash meets the provenance, lazy gardener, and tasty criteria all in one fell swoop.  I’ve grown it for years from seed I was gifted with, Hangdog and I met at a business built on the old Gill Brothers nursery site (Gill originated Sweet Meat.)  And I like a winter squash that stores until the next summer with a minimum of fussing, not to mention it tastes good.  I take care of the squash during the growing season and it feeds me all winter – it is a vitamin rich winter staple for us, to the tune of 400 – 500 pounds a year.

Sweet Meat Cucurbita maxima enjoyed by a vole.

Sweet Meat is a tough customer.  As you can see the voles wanted the seeds, but didn’t chew through the thick flesh.  They did get a couple of squashes though, so I harvested these and set them to cure.  No point in feeding the wildlife that much.  The damaged squash has been fine in storage, but I am using these first, just in case.  Winter squash of the right variety can really be a survival food, once they are grown (if you are able to grow squash in your area) and harvested, they store very well.  As a general rule, C. pepo doesn’t store too long, that’s acorn, pumpkins, etc., although Delicata seems to keep fairly long.  I just don’t bother with them because they are so small.  C. maxima stores well, that is your Hubbard type squash, some are large and some are small, like Red Kuri.  C. moschata keeps very well too, but in my area the butternuts, as much as I like to eat them, don’t put on a reliable crop.  So Cucurbita maxima is the one for my garden and pantry.

When your saving your own seeds you can afford to pay attention to detail.  Besides evaluating the squash from germination to harvest, I save seeds from individual squashes that keep well, and taste good.  The squash are good at first harvest too, but they do sweeten in storage and there is a noticeable difference between specimens.

Since the squash keep so well, I only cook as needed, no need to process and freeze or can these for a later use.  I don’t have time in the fall anyway and they don’t need it.  In September I fed the squash we didn’t eat to the laying hens.  That’s a keeper in my book.

So each week as I cook a squash, I pull out the seeds to dry, and if the squash tastes good I commit the air-dried seeds to the seed bank.  I guess that isn’t really true, they all taste good, some just taste better than others.  And all the seeds taste good too, some are just better candidates for planting on.

Seed Saving Observations

I just finished harvesting seeds of the naked seed pumpkins.  It’s one of those jobs that takes just a few days, but that I think about all year.  I’m posting about the why of that over at Simple-Green-Frugal Co-op today.  See you there!

S.C.A.T.

Coyotes hang out with our cattle.  When the calves are little, their colostrum-rich poo is a delicacy (to the Canis family anyway), in the summer the cows stir up the grass and roust out the voles for the coyotes.

Seeing coyote scat with cow manure is an everyday occurrence for me, but it is also food for thought, too.  I have had this post stuck in my head since this past summer.

August 17, 2011

Some people ponder the world when they shower, I do my ruminating when I work with the cows each day.  One day last summer while I was waiting for the water trough to fill, I was looking at the coyote scat near my feet, and I thought of our little neighbor kid who insists on calling all poop, scat.  He has stopped doing it lately but it just sounds odd to hear a kid say, “look at all the cow scat Mom, those are big ones!”  I guess it is scat, but normally scat is used to describe wild carnivore poop, not farm animal manure.  Anyway, you see how my mind wanders…when the dogs act like this we call it, “sniff a rock, chase a bird.”  I start out looking at coyote scat and come up with an idea for a blog post titled SCAT to solve gardening and farming problems.  Geesh, talk about wandering minds…this is what I came up with on that warm summer day; some ideas on how to identify the weak link in your gardening or farming.  My farming/ gardening weak link changes from time to time, lately I have realized learned that carbon is my weak link.

S&*t, poop, manure, crap, or scat if you will.
Carbon, in any form.
Attitude.  As in adjustment, if need be.
Time.  We all need more time, or maybe we just need to think of time differently.

S.  The S in my SCAT acronym stands for manure.  A great fertilizer for growing your plants, whether it be vegetables or grass for grazing.  On our farm we spend as much time managing the output from our stock as we do managing their feeding.  If you’re not gathering your livestock manure through rotational grazing (grazing season) or bedding of some sort, deep or removed daily (dormant winter season) that may be your weak link.  If you think my gardens look lush, thank you, but I owe that lushness to my cattle and chickens.  Yes, I do all the other stuff required to grow a garden, plant, weed, harvest and eat, but it is the composted animal manure that makes all the difference, IMHO.

Building compost piles from winter deep bedding.

Winter is the time to be gathering your bedding for future garden/pasture use.  Cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and chickens (or exotics if that is what you have) are all candidates for winter housing and manure gathering for composting.  I’m not too thrilled with the idea of using pig manure in food garden areas, so we try to make sure pig manure goes to the fields instead of the garden.  And not to be too confusing, I think housing pigs indoors in winter with a hoop house or other types of structures are useful, I’m just not advocating using their manure for garden areas.

What came first, the chicken or the chicken manure?

If you don’t have animals and don’t want them, then growing nitrogen fixing cover crops is in order.  Legumes in conjunction with cereal cover crops will improve your soil conditions.

C is for Carbon.  That is my weak link.  It took me awhile to figure that one out.  Until I really started paying attention to Greg Judy and his writings, I wasn’t getting the carbon stockpiling thing.  I was stuck on nitrogen.  Meaning, in my situation, I thought manure was the end all for my pastures, I was grazing too short and too often, and not leaving any carbon.  I’ve come to the conclusion I can never have enough carbon.  I actively grow carbon in the form of cover crops in the garden and stockpiled pasture.

Tall grass mob stocking farmstead style.

We buy also buy carbon in the form of lots of straw for bedding and mulch, and a neighbor gives us their stable cleanings.  It’s a full-time job, that carbon.  Nature builds soil with carbon, but it takes some time.  By combining carefully orchestrated livestock manure with the carbon, you have a win-win situation.  Don’t get me wrong, not paying attention to nature is what got us in degraded soil conditions in the first place, but we aren’t trying to recreate nature on our farmsteads and in our gardens, we are trying to do some faster-paced, somewhat un-natural things.  For the most part, none of us are full-time foragers (don’ t get me started on foraging), we are agrarians, and we patronize other agrarians for our food that we can’t or don’t want to grow ourselves.  So by trying to replace what we take, and re-building our soils we are helping ourselves, of course, and everyone else, too.

A is for Attitude.  Ooh, that’s complicated.  We all have one that probably can use some adjusting at one time or another.  It could be that you’re fresh to farming and thought it was a breeze, and it isn’t.  Or a spouse,  partner or kids aren’t all the way on board.  And a big one I see with people new to farm or homesteading life, they see themselves in a supervisory position and not wanting to really do the dirty work.  This really goes hand in hand too with the manure conundrum.  If you see the manure on your farm as a liability, then the attitude is that you may be too busy, important, good, or above the work of handling that liability.  If you change your attitude about the output from those animals and see the manure as an asset, then maybe you would think about shepherding that manure fertility yourself.  I’ve found I’ve learned a lot from getting up close and personal with all the manure around here.  Just like you look in the diaper to see how the baby is tolerating what you ate, or when you introduce a new food, it is the same with livestock.

Another thing too is that if we hire tasks done, we reserve the right to blame someone else.  If we do it ourselves, we only have ourselves to blame if something goes wrong.  There is nothing wrong with hiring people for projects, but for day-to-day stuff sometimes it isn’t necessary.  Too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the soup.

T is for time.  It seems like there is never enough.  That is a continual weak link in the garden or on the farm.  What you don’t get done today may not wait until tomorrow.  A cow dies, the fruit gets too ripe, the water freezes, the feed runs out because no one ordered it, the cream sours, the animals escape, the weeds grow, the deer get in the garden, eggs need sorting, the greenhouse collapses because you shoveled the barn roof off instead.  The tasks are never-ending.  Some are disasters and some are just the product of too full of plate.  Some things are inevitable, if you make hay it will get wet sometime in your haying career.

We can’t fence time, but we sure can manage it better.  Maybe seasonal farm production is the answer.  The surest way to no down time is a flock of laying hens, or dairy animals.  I like having some time for rejuvenating in the winter.  We still have chores, but they are of the light variety, and they are change from intense, summertime chores.  Maybe it is as simple as timing breeding and birthing schedules, or deciding not to garden year round.  This is the first year I haven’t really tried to have delicate lettuces and other tender greens on the table during winter.  We’ve been “making do” with root vegetable slaws and salads, and to tell the truth, they seem to offer a more toothsome and hearty meal.  And a root slaw of kohlrabi, celeriac and carrot seems more fitting in a deliberate lifestyle.  Green salads day in and day out, smack of the store-bought mentality where we can have everything we want everyday of the year, without any regard to the seasonality of the production or the costs of moving goods from point A to B.   I did the work with those root crops this summer, now I can sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Sometimes too, we need to resist getting in too deep.  The steep learning curve of gardening and animal husbandry is very real and can be disappointing if not downright heartrending.  Building a “farm set” type of farm while an attractive thought, is tough and expensive.  Better to start small with a few animals or types of animals than to go whole hog and be overwhelmed.  The picture perfect, abundant garden in seed catalogs and gardening books really acquire  a lot attention to detail at certain times or the disappointment factor can be, well, disappointing.  I get lots of questions about growing root crops for my milk cow, and my suggestion (which is sometimes not taken too well) is that if you can grow enough winter roots for your family, then expand to the milk cow feed stage after that hurdle has been made.  It works the same for growing meat animals for sale, after you go through the seasons of growing your meat, then try selling some.  That way all the husbandry and processing wrinkles get ironed out.  Just like a chef, taste your food, only when you’re farmer, you’re living your food every step of the way.  You get a taste every day, you want to make sure it is a good one.

Take it slow, think about what may be your weak link, and savor your time, with yourself, your family and your farmstead.