Creating Your Community

I am a great optimist. To grow food, you just have to be. Even though I can remember the disappointments - read failures - of last year, I have blind faith that every seed put in the ground this Spring will grow into perfect, beautiful vegetables; that every cow breed early this year will give birth to stunning prize winning heifers in the Fall.

I want to move from just eating locally to living life and doing business locally with a vision to what I want my community to look like. Whole Foods has some great products, but it is a large company, centered in Texas. The idea is every dollar spent is a vote for the businesses you believe in.

This brings me to my friend Stephen. He owns the Vashon Wine Shop a few blocks from my farm. You drive by his store when you come to dinner. All the wine for Sunday dinners comes from his shop. He provides a great service to Cookhouse and I want my community to have small businesses owned by real people working in their stores.

The odd thing is, great people, people that believe in local food, drive to Costco to buy wine. Drive to HomeDepot to buy hardware. All to save a few dollars. Every time the dollar-vote goes to the Big Boxes, the small local store gets a little bit less viable. I was at HomeDepot just this week, but I need to stop.

So, from my soap box here, I recommend stopping by Stephen's Vashon Wine Shop if you are on the Island. He has great wines, not as many as Costco, but certainly what you are looking for. If you live are in Seattle, stop by the small stores near you. Again, I am a great optimist who can see great communities not just maintained but communities that can thrive.

Mea Culpa

I must confess that I have been guilty of acute smugness.

For the past three years, I have stood before you and preached the benefits of eating locally; of growing your own food, of living off the industrial food grid.

Transportation costs are high, global climate change is a huge worry, eating the best possible food you can grow is essential to great health -- these have been my mantras.

The fatal flaw was that on Monday mornings, after giving my homily, I would whip out my cell phone, call my grain supplier in Canada and order pallets of grain for my animals. Pallets. Driven down from Canada. Yes, pallets full.

Surprisingly I was just fine with this for years. The irony never struck me until very recently. I had read years ago about English farming methods of growing fodder crops for livestock. An email a few weeks ago reminded me of this idea -- growing your own food for your animals. What a novel concept. One would think that this would have occurred to me earlier.

So, with the benefit of Google, I managed to locate seed. We have lost this farming tradition here in this country, but Great Britain has not. I found a supplier of large leafy fodder kale in Scotland and a seed company in Dorset that mailed over seeds for mangels (large beets), turnips, chicory for pigs and large cabbages. Open pollinated dent corn was still available in this country and trucked in from Vermont. Tomorrow the field will be plowed and tilled to plant the new crops, with luck by fall there will be a store room filled with food -- local food --- for the animals here.

Accept my apologies. We are all always learning new tricks.

Seasons In The Sun

I went out to the sheep paddock this morning to check on the new lambs and take a picture for today's email. A couple of lambs were born the first week of February, then another 8 were born the first two weeks of March, and now there were twins two days ago. A couple of ewes are still to lamb. It is the first few days of Spring, the grass should start growing soon and the deep cold of Winter has passed us. It is the time that lambs should be born.

By the time they are old enough to graze, the grass will have grown high enough. They will feed through the warm summer months and then as the weather winds down again and the grass ceases to grow, we will slaughter them for roast lamb.

It is a great system, one that follows the seasons and just makes sense. I wish that I could take credit for it, but I think that sheep have been working on this concept for quite some time now.

All has been well and good for centuries until enterprising business came into it all. The problem is that if you sell lambs, you want to sell them more than just for a few weeks a year, you want to sell them as early as possible to get the highest prices and sell before your competitors do.

The answer is to ship in frozen lamb from New Zealand, breed your ewes very early in the late summer and push the baby lambs with grain to fatten them up quickly. It works, people love it but it just seems wrong to me. I like following the seasons; it is easier and makes for tastier food.

The Beauty That Is Winter

It has been bitterly cold this past week in the mornings and gloriously sunny throughout the days. Daylight has returned to the late afternoons after an absence of a few weeks. It is possible to see Spring time on the horizon.

I have come to revel in the beauty that is Winter. The bleakness of the landscape, the chill in the air and the stillness that I never feel in the summer months; it is all so alluring. When I walk through the upper pasture in the early morning to fetch the cows, I watch the sun come up through the trees and I feel as though I was the last man on the planet. I can hear nothing except the cows hoofs, crunching through the ice and breaking twigs as the cows come towards me.

But then it again it is just damn cold out.

The other thing that I have been thinking about it is the precariousness of growing food. Weather is obviously a big part of the growth of vegetables. I was out Friday afternoon checking on the vegetable garden and came across the fava beans. Generally I like to plant fava beans in the fall in order to get a head start on the Spring. They had germinated and grown nicely over the past four months; 4 inches high. When I went to them today, however, they had frozen to the ground, doubled over and wilted. I will plant another batch in another couple of months when I can work the soil and get them to germinate, but we will have fava beans to eat a few weeks later than if they had made it through this week's harsh weather.

It is hard to imagine growing food for survival in times past before the luxury of knowing that the Thriftway Store is just blocks away stocked with produce year around.

Good Cheer

I love this photo of Francesca. Here she is in the pasture this beautiful foggy fall morning chomping on hay with a great expression. When I looked it on the computer it made me realize that none of this is really that serious.

Food miles, global warming, organic, certified organic, locavore, omnivore and that big one...sustainability: we take food so damn seriously. I needed to be reminded by Francesca this morning that it is just food; it comes from the earth, from animals, and it is tasty. That really is the long and short of it all.

Last night the table was filled with 20 people eating great food put on the table by Morgan Brownlow and I. It was loud, with lots of laughter and maybe even some screaming there for a bit. It is what dinner should be -- great food and great people. Period.