Since we settled here, we've been keeping records of natural events like bird migrations, flower bloomings, and so on, with the goal of documenting and better understanding the natural patterns here. Spring is one of the best times to appreciate these records, as so many new things are happening and arriving. So far, our general observations suggest that migratory birds are on about the same schedule as last year, but wildflowers and local animals are behind. This makes sense, as last spring the weather was abnormally warm here, so that local flowers bloomed early, but birds respond to large factors than local weather.
Anyway, here's a few glimpses at the changes (or not) since last year:
Birds (first observation in 2007, 2008):
Woodcocks: 2/27, 3/6
Louisiana waterthrush: 3/26, 3/26
Phoebe: 3/11, 3/13
Towhee: 3/11, 3/19
Snow geese: 3/22, 3/23
Other animals (first observation in 2007, 2008):
Spring peepers: 3/8, 3/1
Young snake (prairie king snake?): 3/28, 3/26
Box turtles: 3/13, none
Bats: 3/13, none
Ticks: 3/28, none
Wildflowers (first observation in 2007, 2008):
Crocus: 3/4, 3/10
Harbinger of Spring: 3/13, 3/19
Redbuds: 3/27, none
Spring Beauty: 3/25, none
Bloodroot: 3/25, none
Soil temperature 6" down (2007, 2008)
February 25 (32, 32)
March 10 (40, 36)
March 24 (none, 40)
These sorts of data will be even more valuable in years to come as we build a meaningful record of long-term patterns, but even now they're fun to peruse. Keeping a simple notebook is relatively easy, and the rewards are quite meaningful.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Signs of Spring
I'm sure half the country is saying or writing something like this right now, but we're definitely transitioning into spring here. The early flowers are coming up, like these bursts of color. Many birds have returned or become noticeable again, including woodcocks, bluebirds, phoebes, wood ducks, snow geese, and more. The spring peepers and other frogs are chorusing at full volume, to the point that standing near a stream or body of water will actually make your ears ring. Leaves are not budding yet, but there is an almost imperceptible greening of the grass, and the ground is finally thawed enough to work.
Our first crops of spring are in the ground and growing slowly. The garlic, which has overwintered from the fall, is looking very nice ( left). We have some early lettuce in the ground, which we start indoors under grow lights and then transplant. There are about 120 plants out right now, with about the same number awaiting transplant later today. We hope they'll be ready for harvest within 2-3 weeks. The early lettuce is growing slowly, weathering cold snaps and an early transplant that was a little harsh on my part. I plan on being more gentle with the next round to go out today.
The Columbia Farmers Market opened this past weekend (March 22) with excellent attendance by both vendors and customers. I had held out hopes of having lettuce ready for this first market, but it's very difficult to do without a proper greenhouse, and we didn't get the perfect conditions we would have needed to achieve that. The straw and plastic cold frame at left helps, but only so much. In any case, we have radishes coming up and many more about to be seeded, many trays of onions about to be transplanted, and seeding of the first spring peas is not far behind.For those who might be wondering, my previously discussed neck trouble has healed up for now, thanks to some muscle relaxants, several weeks of rest, and lots of stretching. I'm back at full capacity, and just in time. We just put in a long weekend of labor, cutting and hauling logs to build new garden beds, continuing the orchard clearing project, chipping more mulch, and generally taking advantage of the current warm weather. Within the next month, we plan to have new irrigation installed in the market garden, up to 20 new 4'x16' raised beds built, a chicken yard and shed built for the chicks that should be arriving this week, fencing and shed built for the goats that will likely be arriving soon, an orchard area mostly cleared so I can sow alfalfa onto it to build and hold the soil, and weekly sales at market of early spring produce. We'll do our best to keep photos and news coming as the busy season progresses.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
"Restaurant mouth"
We don't eat out much. After years of eating meals made at home, scratch-made from fresh, quality ingredients (there are few canned or processed ingredients in our kitchen), our taste buds have become exceedingly sensitive to the taste and presence of preservatives, salt, and other chemicals in most prepared food. Every now and then we'll try a new place that claims to use "only the freshest ingredients", with a chef on hand cooking real meals, only to come home with "restaurant mouth".
This is the term we've coined for the dry, brackish, basically nasty aftertaste invariably left in our mouths after a restaurant meal. I'm not talking about fast food or chain establishments here, I'm talking about supposedly real restaurants with kitchens and "chefs". We've reached the point where we can taste the canned ingredients, low-quality spices, or processed sauces in the dish with the first bite; the preservatives and over-salting are obvious. This pattern is proven by the consistent high quality and lack of restaurant mouth in the few regional establishments that we know for a fact use nothing but real, clean ingredients and have real, skilled chefs and cooks. These consistent winners always prove to us that (a) it's possible to cook real food from real ingredients in a restaurant, and (b) that we're not imagining our negative reactions to other establishments.
Speaking of negative reactions, "restaurant mouth" is often accompanied by "restaurant stomach". We've found that our digestive systems as well as our mouths have become really sensitive to over-salting, preservatives, chemical flavors, and other signs of poor ingredients, because a visit to an unknown establishment tends to produce several days of upset stomachs or worse. We recently had an especially bad reaction to a supposedly high-end place that turned out to be one of the worst meals we've had in years, revealing abundant signs of kitchen laziness, incompetence, and poor ingredient quality. It doesn't matter that your menu offers fancy entrees if they're made with generic ingredients and little skill.
In our experience, restaurant quality is only tangentially related to the "fanciness" of the place or the menu; our safe bets range from higher-end establishments to simple cafes. A better yardstick for restaurant quality is the presence or lack of good vegetarian entrees on the menu (by good, I mean something more creative or skilled than a veggie burger). While we're not vegetarian (at least at home), we've found that the presence of real vegetarian entrees tends to mean that (a) the chef is skilled, creative, and able to use raw ingredients well, and (b) the restaurant is aware enough of food and dietary trends to make that option available to its diners. All it takes is one good vegetarian entree in a menu of 10-15 meat entrees to please the vegetarian in a group, yet so many restaurants don't even bother to learn how to make the myriad interesting, quality vegetarian dishes that are easily within their grasp. And to reiterate the point, I don't mean the standard sops like veggie/mushroom burgers, canned tomato sauce on pasta, or tofu. A chef or cook with the confidence and insight to offer real vegetarian meals is far more likely to know what (s)he's doing with everything else, too. The common thread is real, clean, fresh ingredients, cooks/chefs who know how to use them without the crutches of salt, chemical flavorings, and processed sauces, and an understanding of dietary culture that accomodates broad interests and needs. It's a rule that's rarely failed us in predicting or avoiding restaurant mouth.
This is the term we've coined for the dry, brackish, basically nasty aftertaste invariably left in our mouths after a restaurant meal. I'm not talking about fast food or chain establishments here, I'm talking about supposedly real restaurants with kitchens and "chefs". We've reached the point where we can taste the canned ingredients, low-quality spices, or processed sauces in the dish with the first bite; the preservatives and over-salting are obvious. This pattern is proven by the consistent high quality and lack of restaurant mouth in the few regional establishments that we know for a fact use nothing but real, clean ingredients and have real, skilled chefs and cooks. These consistent winners always prove to us that (a) it's possible to cook real food from real ingredients in a restaurant, and (b) that we're not imagining our negative reactions to other establishments.
Speaking of negative reactions, "restaurant mouth" is often accompanied by "restaurant stomach". We've found that our digestive systems as well as our mouths have become really sensitive to over-salting, preservatives, chemical flavors, and other signs of poor ingredients, because a visit to an unknown establishment tends to produce several days of upset stomachs or worse. We recently had an especially bad reaction to a supposedly high-end place that turned out to be one of the worst meals we've had in years, revealing abundant signs of kitchen laziness, incompetence, and poor ingredient quality. It doesn't matter that your menu offers fancy entrees if they're made with generic ingredients and little skill.
In our experience, restaurant quality is only tangentially related to the "fanciness" of the place or the menu; our safe bets range from higher-end establishments to simple cafes. A better yardstick for restaurant quality is the presence or lack of good vegetarian entrees on the menu (by good, I mean something more creative or skilled than a veggie burger). While we're not vegetarian (at least at home), we've found that the presence of real vegetarian entrees tends to mean that (a) the chef is skilled, creative, and able to use raw ingredients well, and (b) the restaurant is aware enough of food and dietary trends to make that option available to its diners. All it takes is one good vegetarian entree in a menu of 10-15 meat entrees to please the vegetarian in a group, yet so many restaurants don't even bother to learn how to make the myriad interesting, quality vegetarian dishes that are easily within their grasp. And to reiterate the point, I don't mean the standard sops like veggie/mushroom burgers, canned tomato sauce on pasta, or tofu. A chef or cook with the confidence and insight to offer real vegetarian meals is far more likely to know what (s)he's doing with everything else, too. The common thread is real, clean, fresh ingredients, cooks/chefs who know how to use them without the crutches of salt, chemical flavorings, and processed sauces, and an understanding of dietary culture that accomodates broad interests and needs. It's a rule that's rarely failed us in predicting or avoiding restaurant mouth.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
A real pain in the neck
Not long ago, I apparently re-aggravated an old neck injury from several years ago. I'm still not quite sure what happened this time, but coming home from the MOSES conference, my neck and upper back started to get stiff and painful, and it slowly grew through the week. I rested a lot and cut back on my normal work to try and let it heal, but it kept getting worse until I woke up one night in excruciating pain, so stiff that Joanna had to help me roll over in bed.
I went to the doctor the next morning and was given some muscle relaxants and therapeutic exercises. These worked very well, such that within a few days I was back to just a dull roar of stiffness and soreness. In another week I should be able to ease back into my normal routine, though I'm under strict orders not to even look at a chainsaw or shovel for a while. I wasn't able to help at all with the lumber operations last weekend; we're grateful for a neighbor who spent the day helping Joanna haul logs and lumber around.
Meanwhile, I'm spending a lot of time resting and going stir-crazy, watching days go by in which I could be making progress on the myriad tasks, chores, and projects that are looming with spring almost here. At this point, I'm at least allowed/able to cook, clean, and walk around again.
There are some things you just don't think about much until they happen, especially when you're young. Health and injuries are one of them; there are almost 14 million young adults in the US who don't have health insurance. I've never been one of them, having paid for my own coverage since college. I was very grateful for this when my initial injury happened in Virgnia, which cost thousands of dollars in medical bills and left me bedridden for three months. We're now on Joanna's insurance through work, which makes a big difference in cost and quality compared to covering yourself while self-employed.
Experiences like this really help crystallize what's wrong with health care in the US. I'm sympathetic to concerns that universal health care would be an expensive bureacratic nightmare, and my experiences with large government agencies don't give me much hope that such a system would work very well. But right now, with insurance tied so strongly to employment, our system effectively punishes independance and entrepreneurship, particularly in the agricultural world where injuries and health risks are very real. How are young people supposed to start or join farms when doing so means that they'll either have to go without insurance they can't afford, or have a partner with an off-farm job?
Someday, we'd like this farm to be a full-time job for both of us, but the single biggest barrier we see is health care/insurance. Farming is strenuous enough that not having insurance is not an option for us; something like this latest "injury" could wipe us out with the double whammy of cost and lost labor. And I haven't even brought up the issue of hiring employees and providing benefits to them, which is completely unrealistic for most small farms right now. So we, and many like us, are stuck under a hard glass ceiling of outside jobs and no employees, keeping our businesses forever small and limited. If we want a stronger economy, society, and food supply, we have GOT to find a way to spread the costs and availability of insurance/health care over a wider area, to support the small businesses and entrepreneurs (farm or otherwise) who are the backbone of our economy.
I'm fortunate to be in very good health; both the last time and this time, doctors were impressed with how fast I healed, likely due to the fact that I take very good care of myself. But precautions only go so far, and we badly need a system that gives us a fighting chance to live our lives free from fear that a freak incident could put us out of business. Let's hope that 2009 is the year in which that starts to happen.
I went to the doctor the next morning and was given some muscle relaxants and therapeutic exercises. These worked very well, such that within a few days I was back to just a dull roar of stiffness and soreness. In another week I should be able to ease back into my normal routine, though I'm under strict orders not to even look at a chainsaw or shovel for a while. I wasn't able to help at all with the lumber operations last weekend; we're grateful for a neighbor who spent the day helping Joanna haul logs and lumber around.
Meanwhile, I'm spending a lot of time resting and going stir-crazy, watching days go by in which I could be making progress on the myriad tasks, chores, and projects that are looming with spring almost here. At this point, I'm at least allowed/able to cook, clean, and walk around again.
There are some things you just don't think about much until they happen, especially when you're young. Health and injuries are one of them; there are almost 14 million young adults in the US who don't have health insurance. I've never been one of them, having paid for my own coverage since college. I was very grateful for this when my initial injury happened in Virgnia, which cost thousands of dollars in medical bills and left me bedridden for three months. We're now on Joanna's insurance through work, which makes a big difference in cost and quality compared to covering yourself while self-employed.
Experiences like this really help crystallize what's wrong with health care in the US. I'm sympathetic to concerns that universal health care would be an expensive bureacratic nightmare, and my experiences with large government agencies don't give me much hope that such a system would work very well. But right now, with insurance tied so strongly to employment, our system effectively punishes independance and entrepreneurship, particularly in the agricultural world where injuries and health risks are very real. How are young people supposed to start or join farms when doing so means that they'll either have to go without insurance they can't afford, or have a partner with an off-farm job?
Someday, we'd like this farm to be a full-time job for both of us, but the single biggest barrier we see is health care/insurance. Farming is strenuous enough that not having insurance is not an option for us; something like this latest "injury" could wipe us out with the double whammy of cost and lost labor. And I haven't even brought up the issue of hiring employees and providing benefits to them, which is completely unrealistic for most small farms right now. So we, and many like us, are stuck under a hard glass ceiling of outside jobs and no employees, keeping our businesses forever small and limited. If we want a stronger economy, society, and food supply, we have GOT to find a way to spread the costs and availability of insurance/health care over a wider area, to support the small businesses and entrepreneurs (farm or otherwise) who are the backbone of our economy.
I'm fortunate to be in very good health; both the last time and this time, doctors were impressed with how fast I healed, likely due to the fact that I take very good care of myself. But precautions only go so far, and we badly need a system that gives us a fighting chance to live our lives free from fear that a freak incident could put us out of business. Let's hope that 2009 is the year in which that starts to happen.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Logging & Lumber
Throughout the winter, we've been working to clear ground for our orchard and berry/bramble plantings; see area (9) on our Future Plans map. We're focuing on a 1/2 acre area of gently sloping ex-pasture which is currently overgrown in thick cedar trees, a common occurence in Missouri when fields are abandoned. Although it would be faster to just hire someone to clear-cut it, that would also result in tremendous soil disturbance and the wasting of much of the tree material. Doing it ourselves, we sort the logs into small - medium (for fenceposts and raised bed supports) and large (for lumber), and chip most of the branches for mulch, burning some of the larger dead material that is difficult for our chipper to handle. There's very little waste this way, and we save a lot of money compared to buying trucks of mulch and large fenceposts.
We've been stockpiling the larger, straighter trees for milling into lumber, and on March 1 we did our first batch by hiring a local couple with a portable sawmill to come down and do the work. We had close to 30 logs stockpiled, but seriously underestimated just how efficient he would be in getting lots of lumber from each log. After eight hours of work, we had only gone through about half the logs, and had generated a stack of beautiful heartwood cedar lumber about 4'x6'x10' (the accompanying photo shows the stack only halfway through the day).
The lumber, mostly 1"x4"-10" planks and 4"x4" posts, is just beautiful, with the swirled red/orange/yellow of heartwood cedar. We'll use some of it for home projects like cabinetry and tables, use the rougher material for sheds and other outbuildings, and are considering selling some of the best stuff to offset the cost of the milling. But it's also worth a lot to us as wood that came from our land, that we cut and processed, and so we'd rather use most of it for our own purposes than sell it so we can buy generic wood from who knows where, harvested who knows how. We'll just have really nice-looking and smelling outbuildings!
This is just a start, as we still have at least 15 logs waiting and at leats another 1/4 acre of trees on the way. Meanwhile, this first batch is stacked in the barn where it will cure for 5-6 months before we can use it.
 Pushing back the cedars |  Homegrown cedar mulch |
We've been stockpiling the larger, straighter trees for milling into lumber, and on March 1 we did our first batch by hiring a local couple with a portable sawmill to come down and do the work. We had close to 30 logs stockpiled, but seriously underestimated just how efficient he would be in getting lots of lumber from each log. After eight hours of work, we had only gone through about half the logs, and had generated a stack of beautiful heartwood cedar lumber about 4'x6'x10' (the accompanying photo shows the stack only halfway through the day).
 Portable sawmill |  Halfway lumber stack |
The lumber, mostly 1"x4"-10" planks and 4"x4" posts, is just beautiful, with the swirled red/orange/yellow of heartwood cedar. We'll use some of it for home projects like cabinetry and tables, use the rougher material for sheds and other outbuildings, and are considering selling some of the best stuff to offset the cost of the milling. But it's also worth a lot to us as wood that came from our land, that we cut and processed, and so we'd rather use most of it for our own purposes than sell it so we can buy generic wood from who knows where, harvested who knows how. We'll just have really nice-looking and smelling outbuildings!
This is just a start, as we still have at least 15 logs waiting and at leats another 1/4 acre of trees on the way. Meanwhile, this first batch is stacked in the barn where it will cure for 5-6 months before we can use it.
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