Our Local Family Farm

Last year I frequented several farmer's markets. I learned a lot about the need for local family farms after reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and after seeing them week after week, I became rather familiar and friendly with them. It was a really beautiful routine: every Saturday, we would throw Aoife on our back, grab a couple of bags and walk through the farmer's market. Sometimes we would buy a fresh pastry from a local baker or a locally roasted cup of organic coffee, but it almost always included buying our eggs, dairy, (sometimes) beef or chicken, fresh herbs and browsing the farm tables for that week's produce that was picked fresh that morning.

One little stand I particularly liked was that for a goat's milk soap offering. Tasha's Own was the name of the sign in front and week after week I would walk up and smell the really amazing essential oils that came from the neat stacks of bars. One week there was a stack of newspaper articles and following the encouragement of the lady standing at the table, I put one in my bag to read later.

Having located my farmer's market late in the season, I was too late to invest in their CSA, but the article detailed about the goat's milk soap, their goat share, the beginnings of their organic farm and investing the time to teach our children about food and raise a community of people who want to do likewise. I was hooked.

The next week, I put my name on their CSA waiting list. I thought that was the end of it.

The summer ended and fall came, winter came and then my phone rang. Did I still want in? Yes: to the organic CSA, the goat share, and a large stack of really fantastic smelling soap. They had just opened up their CSA list for the season and as Joshua and I had just found out we were expecting, we were only too delighted to know we were going to be getting organic local produce all summer long!

Since we signed our CSA and goat share contracts, we've fallen in love with our local family farm. Joshua went up to hold milk bottles for the newborn sheep and goats, help mend horse fences, and learn about modern homesteading. Aoife loves the animals, especially the dalmatian Great Danes, the guinea hens, the barn kitty and lots of running room! I love the long drive into the country to pick up the creamiest milk imaginable, the warm hospitality and the incredible sense of community.

The hardest part of being connected to our local family farm is driving away. Aoife can't bear the thought of leaving the "puppies" behind, Joshua loves getting his hands dirty and doing work he can actually see the results of and I am still wanting to sit, drink tea and learn all the incredible knowledge that can be gleaned from a mama with eight children who makes her own cheese, homesteads her own farm, homeschools her sweeties and still looks lovely doing it all. (I would move into the barn if they'd let me!)

Don't know where to start finding your local family farm? Check out Local Harvest to jump start your search for farmer's markets, farms, locally-sourced restaurants and co-ops.

Live in Tidewater? Check out Pungo Naturals, Mattawoman Creek Farm, New Earth Farm, and Weeping Radish Eco-Farm for organic favorites!

On the Library List

I've been completely consumed with the topic of food lately. I get the question all the time: what do you eat? "Food" is my standard reply.

The concept that is hardest to define at this point in American cultural history is what is food? I have thoroughly enjoyed the ideas presented in Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, that helped me over a year ago really formulate proper ideas on how to feed my family. Ideas that weren't entirely foreign: I knew to shop the perimeter of the grocery store and skip the aisles, I knew it was important to eat food seasonally (it's cheaper and fresher) but what surprised me was the politics. Yes, the Nixon conspiracy that drove prices down but gave us less real food to eat. I didn't know about the corporate group lobbyists that created the US Food Pyramid or the sugar lobbyists that helped persuade for a higher RDA of sugar in our diets to increase their economic benefit.

As an American consumer, I was prompted to ask, "why don't I know this?" Simply put, I didn't care. I had other worries, the food was there, I didn't care how it arrived there, who had picked it, how long it's been there, what had been done to it to preserve it in near-ripe state... I didn't ask and most people in the market were just like me. I'm learning more about sustainable agriculture, family farms, fair-trade and equal-trade organizations that support farmers and workers. I'm learning about the effects of conventional farming, both on the land, on the air, the watershed, the farmer, the consumer and on the product itself. Most of what I've found has been alarming, but looking at such an overwhelmingly large system of consumerism and apathy, I can't change the system, but I can change what my household eats and how we consume.

I know that every time I purchase something (or choose to not purchase something else) it's a vote. I make a selection with my cash that informs the corporations, my government and my fellow citizens which things are important to me. It's been a year since I started attending pick-your-own farms for local seasonal produce, seeking out farmer's markets, foraging in my local woods, supporting family farms and began reviving the ideas of canning and preserving that I grew up with, into my own home.

This summer, we are share holders into a local organic farm that offers us a weekly CSA of vegetables, fruits, berries, herbs and flowers and cares for our goat, through which we get fresh unpasteurized milk and cheese weekly. We will be increasing the amount of pick-your-own farms we attend this year and I will be more closely monitoring the local growing calendar to choose which weekends I will be canning, dehydrating, freezing or eating the selected seasonal crop. My daughter needs to know where food comes from, and she will learn it by first understanding the food shed that is around her: what grows seasonally, locally and most of all, sustainably.

As I keep pursuing knowledge about food, how we grow it, how we eat it, how to keep it, etc. I started looking to a couple of books to add to my library bag the next time I'm out in town. I've added them to my side bar, so you can quickly click to their Shelfari page and read about them, but I'm including a couple of highlighted texts that I'm particularly interested in.


Sharon Astyk wrote several books that are on my "must read" list, but this one is my "must-read before things start growing this summer" list. Astyk contributes this book as a practical guide to eating locally and seasonally, not just as a fringe movement, but on a community scale. "Independence Days tackles both the nuts and bolts of food preservation, as well as the host of broader issues tied to local diets. It includes: how to buy in bulk and store food on the cheap, techniques: from canning to dehydrating, tools: what you need and what you don't. In addition, it focuses on how to live on a pantry diet year-round...and how to reduce reliance on industrial agriculture by creating vibrant local economies."



Robyn O'Brien is a mama whose daughter suffered a violent allergic reaction and spurned her on to investigate the "toxicity of America's food supply, and trace the relationship between Big Food and Big Money that has ensured that the United States is one of the only developed countries in the world to allow hidden toxins in our food--toxins that can be blamed for the alarming recent increases in allergies, ADHD, cancer, and asthma among our children". This looks like a really great book for information for anybody who eats food in America. It is important for us to be informed instead of surprised when the ails of the system make us ill.



Recently, I took a history class just for the joy of it. The course reminded me of such incredible changes in our landscape in recent past and this book excites me because I forget at times that Americans didn't always eat the way they do now and that for the greater part of our history, all peoples ate locally and seasonally; it wasn't just a hip new concept driven out of California. The tag for this book says it all: "A portrait of American food - Before the National Highway System, before chain restaurants, and before frozen foods, when the nation's food was seasonal". What perhaps interests me most would be any conclusion that Kurlansky would make about the continued effects of globalization and out-sourcing our food. This book would be incredible research in studies supporting regional agriculture.


Kingsolver wrote this book as a nonfiction narrative regarding her year of going counter-mainstream and moving north to start a locavore lifestyle. She chronicles her studies of "you are what you eat" and her journey "away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it". Her focus of putting the kitchen back in the center of family life and non-monoculturing farms back in the center of the American diet makes this a book I can't wait to read!


*Note: Quotes in italics are taken from the book descriptions given on Shelfari.

Recipe: Pumpkin Apple Buttermilk Muffins

Ingredients:
Cooking spray
1 cup organic all-purpose (unbleached and unbromated) flour
1 cup organic whole-wheat (stone-ground) flour
1 teaspoon (aluminum-free) baking soda
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
3/4 cup packed organic dark brown (fair-trade certified) sugar
3 tablespoons unsulphured blackstrap organic (fair-trade certified) molasses
1/4 cup expeller-pressed safflower oil
2 large local free-pastured eggs
1 cup canned pumpkin

2 medium peeled organic MacIntosh apples (one diced, one shredded)
1 teaspoon organic pure vanilla extract
3/4 cup local cultured buttermilk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Coat a 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray.
3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients: flours, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg.
4. In a large bowl, whisk the sugar, molasses, oil and 1 egg until combined.
5. Add the other egg and whisk well.
6. Whisk in the pumpkin, apples and vanilla.
7. Whisk in the flour mixture in 2 batches, alternating with the buttermilk. Whisk just until combined.
8. Pour the batter into the prepared muffin pan and sprinkle with the pumpkin seeds.
9. Tap the pan on the counter a few times to remove any air bubbles.
10. Bake for 20 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center of 1 of the muffins comes out clean.
11. Let cool on a wire rack for 15 minutes. Run a knife around the muffins to loosen them and unmold. Cool completely on the rack.
12. Eat the yummy muffins!!

Pick Your Own: Blueberries

It almost seems natural now, this is the fifth pick-your-own weekend I've shared with my family and it just seems to be a very normal way to bring in our relaxing Saturday morning. We wake up, brew a little organic direct-trade (or free trade if we run low of the good stuff) coffee, serve up a little fruit, pack up the sweetheart, grab our reused plastic containers and drive out to the farm. This last weekend was open season for blueberries so we went to Pungo Blueberries who we found on PickYourOwn.org and happened to have beautiful bushes ripe for the picking. When we drove up there were already about a dozen people in the front fields and there was an attendant directing traffic (to me, never a good sign... I like quiet farms and empty parking lots. Makes me feel like I found it on my own and I'm the only person who knows about it. But I do acknowledge that empty parking lots don't keep farms open, so I'm glad I wasn't alone). I was nervous that the berry bushes would already be picked over but when we got all saddled up and over to the grove, we were really surprised how easy the picking was.The berry farm is only open four days a week and since the farm is open on both Fridays and Saturdays, the attendant was rather surprised we still made out with five pounds. We actually left earlier than expected (after only about forty minutes), Aoife had been woken from her nap to go out to help us pick and well, she wasn't happy about it.

The grass between the lanes was freshly mowed and the dew was still on the leaves when we went out to pick. I was initially a little concerned about the bushes, because I was finding absolutely no fauna. Read here: no bugs. None. Not even little, tiny, I-missed-the-pesticide-plane bugs. We eventually started to see dragonflies and beetles, which allayed my fears about the amount of herbicides and such that were being used, but I still washed our produce very thoroughly.
The plants had perfectly ripe blue-black toned blueberries, red, pink and green as well, indicative of future growth into the picking season. I appreciate coming early in the season and having first pick. The bugs and birds haven't discovered the ripe and rotted fruit on the ground and the bushes aren't beaten and fields aren't trodden bare from crowds. There's something terribly amazing about a pick your own produce experience. For Joshua and I, as urban homesteaders, connecting even on this basic level with our food helps me to feel like we are doing a small step in the right direction.

Instead of my food being picked (usually unripe, so it arrives ripe--or worse yet, picked ripe and then sprayed with a preservative to help it to maintain its ripe state), boxed, sent to a processing location, unboxed, sorted, packaged, labelled, reboxed, put on a truck, put on a plane, put on a semi, dropped at a distribution location, put on a truck, dropped at a warehouse, put on a produce truck, brought to a store, placed on a display in a stale grocery store under fluorescent lights, waiting until it starts to get bad so they put it on "manager special" status and then thrown in a plastic bag and brought home in a car and shoved to the back of the fridge...

Instead of all that, I can take my family to a farm, pick it myself, laugh with my husband as we listen to ornery old female sisters relate stories of their youth in Sandbridge, teach my daughter about fresh fruit and eating in season and I can place my fresh picked, ripe fruit in reused containers, paying below market cost and enjoying that day the fruits of my labor (no pun intended).