Bored with bagas
The tonic of choice this winter has been sauerruben made from rutabagas. All the sauerkraut is gone, and we have been eating the last of the cabbage braised – so fermented rutabagas it is.
sauerruben
I wish I had made more two weeks ago – it is delicious. It seems to have a hot taste similar to horseradish, but it isn’t an unpleasant, nasal clearing hot, and the flavor gives way to a mild kraut taste.
Watching the jar dwindle each day spurred me on to dig more roots today.
With a dry day, I needed to haul wood – so hopefully by tomorrow night I will have a new batch brewing. I fermented the last batch on the edge of the cookstove. I guess we keep our house a little cool, it took about 10 days before the ruben reached the right stage.
Can’t live without it, shouldn’t live with it.
Green Arrow, Golden Della
I’m posting about my struggle with taking plastics out of my food preserving over at Simple Green Frugal Co-op today.
Filling the pantry and root cellar is easier if you plan for abundance. My general rule of thumb is to plan for 52 units of whatever I am putting up. And for temperamental crops that I will can, I plan for two years of storage. I know it seems silly to have so much food on hand, but if I can this food in jars it will keep a longgggggg time. We can easily go several years here without apples or pears. So when we have a plentiful crop, I make as much applesauce as possible. Of course, we eat fresh apples from the tree and cold storage as much as we can. My 52 week x 2 plan works on the assumption that we will eat applesauce or pesto once a week. Where my stockpile can grow a little is, all those weeks I just make fresh applesauce or pesto from the garden. The pantry police will come for me if they ever find out that I have eaten 10-year-old canned applesauce and it didn’t really differ from sauce that was 6 months old. I try to rotate my stock better than that, but…just sayin.’
fruit room
So why on earth am I talking about canning now? Because I work backwards when planning my planting. I don’t plant a ton of stuff and then wonder what I am going to do with it all – I plan for how much I want to preserve or store. By midwinter, the fruit room shelves are starting to have empty jars, signifying I really did use up some of that planned abundance. And it is time to order seeds and think about starting them. We use a lots of tomato products – salsa; tomato sauce; V-8 juice; and whole tomatoes. That takes a lot of tomatoes! Whole canned tomatoes are one thing, but once you start cooking them down to sauces, it can be a little disheartening to see a 20# box of tomatoes disappear into just a few jars of sauce. And that doesn’t even count the potential crop failure dilemma. I always have an overlap of preserved goods, and I am OK with that. I would rather have too much than the alternative. And I find if I have a plentiful pantry I am more apt to use that. Home-canned V-8 juice is a great companion with broth for a stew base. And no, I won’t address the raw, fresh food issue any more than to say, I have to come down in the middle of the road. I just recently read an article about carrots – that Vitamin A packed food almost everyone loves. Come to find out, we only can glean about 3% of the carrots’ beta-carotene if we eat them raw, if we cook the carrots, we can garner 39%! That being said, I eat a lot of raw carrots, and I like them cooked too. Steamed and served with a dollop of grass-fed butter, or roasted with olive oil, yum But pressure cook them at high temperatures – I won’t go there. .
Roots for kitchen 2/1/10
Think of your pantry as your total food stores, not just a cupboard or room in the corner somewhere. I can, freeze, and ferment some things, dry storage and root cellaring come into play too. But being lazy by nature, if I can grow something and not do too much to it in the way of storage or preserving. I take the easy route. Our climate allows for storing some hardy root crops in the ground until spring. Not always - I did lose some of my crops this year in December, but that is again where my Plenty Plan comes into play. I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, if I did, I would not be eating any carrots at all now. Two rows froze out in one garden, two rows survived in the other. Do I have less than I planned for? Yes. But, I still have enough. And that brings the question of waste into play, Josh has a good post here about that very thing. Vegetable matter composting in the soil is giving back part of what it took in the first place.
Sweet Meat winter squash
Another no-fuss vegetable we depend on is winter squash. Some varieties keep until May after proper curing. A warm cure, and then cool, and dry storage, like an unheated bedroom is perfect for squash. I just use these as needed. No reason whatsoever to cook these or preserve them in any way until I need to actually cook them for a meal or pie. Their sweetness improves with storage up to the 6 month after curing, and then they start to lose quality. The perfect frugal food, no fancy storage and no energy expended to preserve. I don’t follow my 52 unit rule with these. I strive for 300#’s or so, each squash weighs about 10 – 12 pounds, so about 30 squash… . If you’re not a squash lover that would be a little much – I eat squash for breakfast, so I make sure I have enough to last.
Sweet Meat winter squash
Sweet Meat Winter squash
This post is obviously not an airtight plan for a garden, but it gives you a good idea, just how much food you might need if you really are depending on stocking your pantry from your garden. The best way to save a lot of work when canning and preserving is to not spend much time growing and putting up things your family will not eat. Concentrate on what you really will cook and eat and plant those vegetables in quantity. If good tomatoes are inexpensive in your area, it may pay to buy tomatoes and allot your garden space to other vegetables that are not available. Variety selection is key too, that romantic sounding heirloom tomato with the great taste may only give you 10 ripe tomatoes in a season, whereas a newer open-pollinated variety may give you 50 pounds to preserve. Both take up the same amount of space, fertilizer, water, and time. The only difference will be the yield. If preserving is your goal, make sure the word productive is part of the variety description. I plant two hybrid SunSugar cherry tomatoes each summer, they are crack resistant, we eat them like crazy until we are sick of the glut – then I strip the plants and add them to the last sauce. They are very productive, feeding us all summer and into the winter with their tasty sauce. Do I need them? No. But I want them, and I will buy the seeds as long as they are offered somewhere. But I will warn you, they are a Seminis variety, and I occasionally eat white sugar too and cheap chocolate.
Probably the best advice I can offer is not to listen to me or grow what I grow, but to find out what growers in your area have had success with. Some vegetables and fruits require certain conditions – for instance growing peaches and nectarines here is not a no-spray proposition, too much rain. But 40 miles in either direction are abundant stone fruit orchards. It makes more sense for me to buy those fruits, than it does to try to grow them here. And if I look around at old orchards, there are no trees of that sort nearby. But also don’t be afraid to experiment either – kiwi wasn’t planted here until recently, and it thrives. So be adventurous and cautious if that is possible, and remember, Next Year brings a new gardening and preserving season!
This post is part of Food Renegade’s Fight Back Friday feature. Be a food renegade and peruse the posts there. Great recipes and health news too!
Working at stocking my pantry is something I devote time to every day. I cook our meals from scratch for many reasons. We grow most of our food so we know what is in it. Even though we live a deliberate life, sometimes it is hard to pin down how everything we do leads back to the pantry in some form or another. A minute or two a day picking Della’s stall provides enough manure and straw for a good share of the garden. Milking with my head buried in her flank, drinking her milk, and smelling her sweet breath everyday keeps me in the proper frame of mind to weed her parsnips and carrots on a sticky summer day. Same with the hay, putting up hay is no picnic, you worry about it every stage of the way – until it is in the barn. Watching the cows eat it eagerly is a reward, but so is the excellent meat they provide. Besides being tasty, it is good for you too, here’s an interesting link about the difference in Omega 3 fats. Even working in the woods, cleaning up storm damage is tied to the pantry – because we cook with wood too.
I think in modern life we are isolated from real life or sometimes real work. I know it is work to put our food on the table, cut our wood, milk the cow, or anything else we do. The less we are involved in the daily business of living the more we are letting someone else do our work. And then it is drudge work for them. I can’t put a value on the food we grow, because actually it would probably make me look like a fool. If we can’t assign a $ amount and hours spent on a particular item or task then it is deemed absurd. I am sure there is an Excel spreadsheet to break out the minutes it took me to get those beans stored in the pantry. Why on earth would I spend so much time doing all this, when I could just go to the store. Mostly because I really dislike going to the store. I think we need to value food and our lives more – make our lives more meaningful and useful, by doing work for ourselves and making our life a cycle.
The makings of many lunches throughout the week.
Cooking from scratch is easy if you have an array of ingredients on hand. My “pantry” isn’t just a room in the house, it is dry storage, the freezer, or the fruit room with home canned goods. All gathered from accumulated minutes of work from our farm and garden. Stew meat and corn from the freezer, beans, onion and garlic from dry storage, and spicy stewed tomatoes from the canning shelves.
So where does the chili start? Is it when I clean the barn to make compost or when I plant the bean seed? When Hangdog cuts up limb wood for the cookstove or when I start the beans to soak? To tell the truth I don’t really spend much time thinking about this stuff, it just happens because I did plant the garlic last October for next years harvest, I saved my bean seed for a hopeful gardening season, and I canned those tomatoes. The song has been sung, I am destined to do these things, and I am enjoying every step of the way.
Gardening is a journey. When I worked in town, I had a huge garden, but it was a fun garden (fun for that stage in my life.) I grew lots of flowers for bouquets, and enough vegetables to put up for most of the winter. Sometimes. But if I remember back, the urgency I always feel now about harvesting before winter was mainly centered on digging, marking a packing away my many dahlia bulbs.
I planted my vegetable rows 18″ apart and watered to beat the band. I loved my garden. But it has morphed into so much more than that.
Mom's garden - 1978
As you can see from these pictures not too much has changed, really. This is my mom’s garden, complete with the obligatory dog. My garden is in the upper right hand corner.
main garden - 1978
This is my garden, as you can see it is heavy with dahlias. I probably planted 1/3 of the space to flowers and 2/3 to vegetables. I loved my dahlias, I monkeyed around with drying the bulbs and making dacopa, a coffee substitute and basically I spent a lot of time on those dahlias.
But my garden has gradually morphed into a more practical garden that feeds us. I still get my flower fix by planting some flowers. But, I knew the year I left my dahlias in the ground and did not dig them, that would be the end my affair with dahlias.
Priorities change, and I guess what I am trying to tell you if you’re a new gardener, is that what you plant in your beginning gardening seasons may not be where you end up. But it is a great trip no matter what you plant. Always rewarding.
My interests have turned more to self-reliance from seed companies and the historic aspect of saving seeds of varieties that do well in my area. Below is my saved seed list. These are doable for me. I don’t know if you can actually say this is a money saver since seeds are very inexpensive, in my opinion, but it a very satisfying part of my gardening.
UL – über local, means from just down the road.
BEANS
Veda’s Purple Podded Pole (UL)
Uncle John’s Dry bean (UL)
Maxibel – haricot vert
PEAS
Green Arrow
Sugar Snap
CORN
Abenaki Calais Flint
SQUASH/CUCUMBERS
Sweet Meat (UL)
Styrian Naked Seed Pumpkin
Cocozelle Zucchini
Marketmore 76 cuke
Lemon
National
Delicious melon
CHARD
5 Color Silverbeet
Fordhook Giant
BEET
Lutz
PARSNIP
Harris Model
RUTABAGA
Joan
TOMATO
Costoluto Genovese
Bellstar
PEPPER
Pimiento
Numex Joe E. Parker
Long Red Cayenne
OTHER
Lettuce (too many to list), arugula, chicory, mustards, kale, celeriac, celery, potatoes, onions, garlic, misc greens,herbs and flowers.
I must confess I am a seed junkie. It’s hereditary too, my mom was one. Seeds in pockets, on the counter, in jars or sacks and if I can’t find a platter I’m looking for, I have to look in the bay window to see if said platter is pulling double duty as a seed dryer.
This year though in the vein of frugality, I have decided to weed out my seed collection. This is hard for me, I am a planner and a worrier. What if… is always looming in my mind.
It’s easy to drool over all the seed catalogs that come my way, and for the most part I am immune, but this year I vowed not to spend any money on seeds I know most likely won’t make it to the garden. I can’t shake the feeling that I need to really concentrate on a bare bones garden this year. I feel an urgency to quit experimenting so much, and just produce. I have already decided to cut the garden size down this year, so I will not have much wiggle room.
With that in mind I sat down this week with my garden notes from last year, and went through my seeds. Poor producers, old seeds – out! Some varieties don’t perform well because of poor seed saving practices, so if a seed catalog mentions that, I make a note of it and get rid of that seed.
I don’t always feel the need to purge, so when I do, I have learned to take advantage of that and get something done!
Besides our food, we put up hay each summer for the cows’ winter feed. Mostly from paddocks that are dropped out of the rotation, and a little from a friends place. And of course Miss Della gets the cream of the crop, plus I buy her a dozen bales of eastern Oregon grass hay as a supplement.
We’re bumpkins for sure, small squares fit our program perfectly, my kid has fed the cows since she was well, a little kid. It’s pretty empowering for a kid to have her own knife, and be able to feed the stock by herself. Plus it got her in the habit of daily chores. Never have we ever had to remind her to take care of her horse, or do anything concerning the cows. She knows the good hay from the mediocre and she understands what stage of pregnancy the cows are in and if they can eat a little mediocre hay after they have had their fill of good hay. And an added benefit of making our own hay, she knows the good spots from the weak ones in the fields. We don’t just have a hay field, we hay parts of all the fields, and each year that changes, which in turn benefits the fields by shifting the time and manner of harvest.
Using the small square bales also allows us to observe the cows daily, and really see how much they are eating. And I know if we had bought into the popular larger equipment phase our daughter would not have been feeding the cows at age 5, we would not have felt comfortable having her run the equipment, maybe at age 10, but by then it is a little late and may have seemed like a chore to be shirked at that time. You have to show them what you want them to know – if you want them to be diesel jockeys by all means get the big equipment and big bales, if you want them to be involved in daily observant husbandry try the small squares. Joel Salatin has a great chapter in Salad Bar Beef about hay – read it and draw your own conclusions.
If I win the lottery, I would have my dream barn, until then I have to make do with what is here. But by adapting this pole barn to more than just hay storage has been a lesson in what to do, and what not to do. It’s OK, and will do for now. And I don’t think the cows mind, too much.
Or the dogs either.
Copper Rose
I’m secretly glad Ruthless only got a flower from her Dad on her 16th birthday!
I should get to my comments tonight on the previous post – the sun is out and I got fence to patch!
The long view – animals on the farm or The continuing saga of the Cloverwood Chronicles
Most of the time people have a one track mind when it comes to farm animals. They are only good for one thing. We steal their eggs and milk, and eat their meat. We assume they are dumb when they don’t bend to our will. We are superior and smarter, and we know what is best. And what is best is, eggs every day, only steak, and all the milk so we can sell it or try out all those cheese recipes we have been drooling over. It’s impressive you know, to make cheese, and dine well. We deliberately compartmentalize in our minds that we need the best of everything and leave all the other stuff to “someone else.”
We don’t have steak too often here - always on birthdays, or when we feel we need to treat ourselves. It would be disrespectful to this fella and his place on our farm to only eat his steaks. He was pill for sure, and serendipity brought him here, but he did his part and we had to do ours.
The other huge disconnect in agriculture and our culture these days is waste. I don’t mean wasting food, I mean animals’ waste. And most farms waste their waste. Or worse yet, don’t even have farm animals to complete the cycle. The excuses are many: too much work to clean out the barn, coop, whatever. It stinks. We don’t need it, we can buy fertilizer. And organic farms aren’t exempt either, they purchase inputs to beat the band. I purchase inputs too, but they are used by the animals first. Minerals to help them be healthy, and to heal our pastures and gardens. Straw to bed them to keep them warm and dry and to fuel our carbon needs for compost. Which then in turn is spread around to replenish what we have taken.
If we want to be more sustainable we should close the gaps. Buying in fancy amendments from far off places is no different than buying processed food at the store. It’s convenient, and neat and tidy. But those practices are begging for a closer look. How much different is it really to be using purchased inputs that are deemed OK?
This discussion also needs to address the vegan mentality of farming that only allows for green manures to replenish what is taken by cropping. That is all well and good, cover crops have their place, and I use them in my garden too. But, that isn’t how nature works. Cover cropping only, leaves a break in the thread that holds the farm quilt together. It’s not really a quilt until you have all the pieces and layers put together in the whole. Just like adding a hint of yellow to a quilt to make it pop, adding diversity by way of farm animals is a way to make the land come alive.
But the land will probably won’t wake up if we don’t nurture that manure. It sounds funny doesn’t it? Nurture manure. We giggle when the horse farts, or when the cow poops during a farm tour. Bathroom humor, stuck in the 4th grade when bodily functions are thought to be embarrassing or awful. It never ceases to amaze me how fixated people are with poop in such an odd way. It must not be seen or heard, shoo $hit, get outta here! But really we need to start paying more attention and close the gaps in our farming and gardening processes.
Besides using short duration, high density grazing to place the manure where we want it, we use deep bedding during the winter when the soil is dormant. I know it makes people groan thinking of cleaning out a chicken coop anymore than they already do. But by adding carbon, (in our case a little sawdust and lots of straw) the sum of the manure and carbon parts is more than the whole. The bedding takes on a life of its own, starting the age-old process of decomposition and turning into rich soil.
I need to rotate my chicken coops, which are actually small greenhouses. So yes, I will clean it out by hand, but the material is light, doesn’t smell, and everyone needs exercise right? Not the same as my neighbor’s chicken house which is a dank, dark, crap encrusted cute little chicken coop, painted to look like a little barn. I wouldn’t want to clean that out either.
As you can see, from the last three photos, the top layer is straw, and and you dig a little deeper it is rich soil already. I didn’t do anything but bed the chickens as needed. The hens and the microbes did the rest, and hats off to the earthworms too, my coop has dirt floor so the worms have a field day here too.
So connect the dots, confinement can be OK – the key word is management. We manage all our other affairs, why not our livestock manure. Free range is good in theory, but we need to mix and match a little. If my chickens free-ranged, I would be feeding the wildlife, and not gaining any manure or eggs. Less work, but more worry. Same with our cows, I can build a little fence everyday so the cows can graze or I can sweat bullets making more hay or worse yet, work at a desk so I can buy hay from someone else.
There is gold in them thar compost hills, we just need to build them first!
What do you think, can agriculture survive without farm animals somewhere in the equation?
In our quest for independence from the food grid we try to include our animal husbandry as well. We raise grassfed beef, but we also keep a family cow. A dairy cow is a horse of a different color nutrition and production wise. I do have to feed some grain and buy in some different hay to add to what we raise here on the farm to maintain Della in optimum condition. Optimum condition to me does not mean high production, but enough milk for her calf and for us without shorting anyone, while maintaining health.
I only had to look back in history a little ways to get away from grain. Roots. Root crops for fodder is a practice brought to the United States with Northern European immigrants. Cool climates not conducive to growing grain are perfect for various root crops for fodder. I live in a climate like that. Getting corn to ripen here is not the easiest thing to do. Root crops? No problem. Storing grain or green chop? Ugghhh. Storing roots? Easy.
Now I am not advocating everyone do this, I am just throwing this out there because many people want to get out from under Big Oil’s thumb. Not to mention I want to know what I am eating and feeding to my family. Grain shipped from ? Who knows these days. And if you’re able to grow your own grain and don’t care how much fuel your buying or pig iron you are supporting that’s fine with me. This is just what I am doing. I can’t get all the grain out of our operation since I am still eating poultry and pork but certainly I should make every effort to not feed very much to my milk cow, a true ruminant.
When raising roots for your cow don’t expect the pound for pound analysis to be the same as grains. It sounds wonderful when you’re reading a popular homesteading magazine and someone writes an article stating how pounds per acre mangels will produce compared to corn grown on the same plot. But the difference is the dry matter of each crop. For instance 3 tons of mangels are equivalent to 1 ton of good corn silage. So at first glance roots do not seem worth it at all. Most tomes concerning feeds continually state that growing roots is not economical, but they are written for large operations. Growing root crops requires careful soil preparation and some hand work. Corn or other grains are thought to be a little easier to grow if you are farming. Always read between the lines. The information is there. Look for animal husbandry books written before the 1950’s. Agriculture as we know it is actually quite young in the scheme of things. People were cropping and fattening animals long before tractors with air conditioned cabs came along. And they weren’t growing acres of grain to do it. I want to strike a happy medium if I can. To get out of work and never touch a bale or weed a crop by hand is not my goal.
With that in mind, I have been looking for a root chopper. Luckily a friend had one I could borrow. I have been chopping Della’s roots with knife, but I wanted to try a manufactured chopper just to see if it made the job easier or was like a some kitchen tools. You know – the cleanup takes more time than just wiping the knife… .
So first order of business, dig the roots. Well, actually the first order of business is grow the roots, but you know what I mean.
Next try out the root chopper.
Well, I have to say the root chopper worked great! The dogs were a pain, though. It took a while to get a video without barking and leaping dogs. Once they realized though that the chopper was not killing me and they could sneak a morsel, they quieted down and stayed out of the way of the crank. The real crank, not me 
A chopper this size would have been made for a small farmstead that was feeding more than one animal. It makes short work of those roots. I only feed Della 5 pounds of chopped roots per day, and that only takes about a minute to chop. With the knife about 5 minutes.
10 pounds of mixed roots.
Some small roots do go through without chopping so I check each batch before feeding so I don’t choke my cow. I always feed a mix of roots too, since each is different nutritionally. This winter because Della is dry, I have added rutabagas to the regular menu of carrots, parsnips and beets. Brassicas are a no-no during lactation unless you want cole flavored milk.
Della can utilize the blems and we can cream the crop. I am posting some root uses in the kitchen over at Simple-Green-Frugal Co-op today.
Food Renegade
Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op
