Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

This year for Earth Day (a Day I don’t usually…observe), I gave a talk on small-scale organic farming for an audience of three in the airy designer meeting room in the Upstairs at Loblaws zone. Here’s the view from…upstairs (this is the same super-sized supermarket mentioned from another recent trip to town). It was fun! To be more accurate, though, this wasn’t actually an Earth Day event, it just happened to fall on it, as part of an on-going series of talks and cooking classes and stuff that happen all the time, an effort of the giant Loblaws chain to be more community-oriented, engaging, one-stop. A veggie customer at the farmers’ market had suggested me for one of the slots way back last September or so, they called me up, I said OK, and a few months later… Yesterday, the coordinator called to say there were only six sign-ups (it’s free registration), so I could cancel if I wanted. Apparently, at least at this location, attendance can be low, with as little as one or two sign-ups for some, and 15 is a crowd. Since I had no expectations in the first place, I made my I-don’t-drive transportation arrangements and there I was. It was actually really interesting, talking to people who weren’t as predisposed to organic food and…greenness as most everyone who tends to shop at the stand at the farmers’ market or sign-up for CSA. I’d decided no presentation, just questions. It only took a minute to get things rolling: I asked everyone (all three), why they’d come and what they were expecting (”to learn more about organic food…”) and took it from there. It was a non-stop extended conversation, lasted 90 minutes without a pause or signs that any of us had had enough, until I took a natural exit point and casually wrapped it up. It was kind of a live, concentrated version of this blog: explaining what I do, giving what larger contextual background on agriculture I have—all directed by the flow of questions. The cool part was seeing another first-hand example of how people don’t seem so much PROGRAMMED to be driven consumers, as not given any CONVENIENT alternatives, like cheerful, enthusiastic, interesting-sounding, first-hand info, delivered to them live and direct (I had briefly considered bringing in a bag of partially composted cow manure to provide a bit of…flavor)! At one point, talking about how tiny farming and local food seem quite workable, and also ENJOYABLE for everyone involved, all people have to do is try, I said it’s like the audience in a movie theater: everybody watches the screen, it’s the easiest thing to turn around and look elsewhere, but even when the movie’s terrible, no-one bothers to look away because there’s usually nothing better to see… Does that mean that good tiny farming is at least one part entertainment?! I guess so… ;)

The first harvested dish of the year here usually comes from early lettuce, but not usually from lettuce still in plug sheets. With my ambitious timing, and the way colder than hoped for weather, transplanting to the greenhouse was delayed by a couple of weeks, and the lettuce seedlings stayed in trays and went crazy. Today, I started thinning them heavily for the move, and ended up with a healthy portion of baby leaf salad! This is a mix of Simpson Elite, Granada, and Two Stars. The colors are still indoors pale, the taste and texture delicate. With a simple olive oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper dressing…delicious! And still a couple more bowls to go…

Took a trip to town today. During the winter, I get in once every 3-4 weeks, so it’s a bit of a novelty. This time in, we checked out an agricultural show, 28th year, filling the new fairground’s 45,000 sq ft of indoor exhibition space. It was quite busy, geared to the bigger conventional farmer, with aisles and aisles of heavy equipment, commercial seed, bank financing,… Outside, some even bigger machinery, like the combine harvester in the pic—it’s set up for soy—that could run over my entire garden in about 10 minutes (although the wraparound view from that air conditioned cab looks mighty inviting for a hot summer’s day in the field!). Inside, it’s mostly men in and around their 60s, with some wives scattered in. These guys were here with their fathers three decades ago, discussing new gear as family farms passed from fathers to sons. Now, the sons are the old farmers, and the next generation is nowhere in sight. Quite odd… Oh well, on to the super-sized supermarket, a Loblaws’ Wal-Mart killer, a huge deal with a produce court half the size of my market garden (not literally, but it’s pretty big), bakery, meat and fish counters, endless aisles, automated mini-bank, wine shop, tobacconist, full pharmacy, a whole section of clothing and housewares, and acres of convenient parking outside. It’s the old General Store, scaled up! I seldom do the grocery shopping for the farm, so when I do hit a supermarket, I head straight for the veggies first (I still kinda laugh at myself doing a “professional” veggie appraisal, this is the LAST situation I would’ve imagined myself in not too long ago). I bought some groceries: a bit of “fresh meat”, “fresh-baked bread”, a tub of mixed baby salad greens (and mine so soon to come!)… Only $200! Then, a quick fast food stop at A&W, not a guilty pleasure, or even a pleasure, just an old habit, a town routine… And there it was, a trip through the OTHER local food chain, 12 miles (19km) and a whole world away from the tiny farm. It’s a little surreal. Back to the seedlings… ;)

This morning, there was a phone company tech at work on the junction box at the top of the drive into the farm. I’m not sure what the guy and his logo-truck were up to exactly, but the picture made me think about tiny farming and the Web. Right now, Bell and an independent telecom company are in an extravagant, introductory-offer battle for subscribers to the newly available DSL broadband service. High speed Internet access has been in this area for years, in towns and even villages, but dial-up was the only easy, painfully slow connection for most farms (we’re on the edge of a village, so we’ve had cable modem all the while). Now, word-of-mouth is that people are signing up for DSL. This could be interesting because, out of 30+ vendors at the farmers’ market, I think this farm is still the only one with a web site. An odd situation, considering that online is really the only practical place for small producers to let people know what they’re up to. With the novelty of DSL, maybe more farms will finally get around to getting online, which is probably a good thing, because it takes more than a few people to make a local market thrive. Just as Tiny Farm Blog has rapidly become embedded in my farming life (BTW, TFB isn’t the farm site), maybe this technology, where you sit in front of a screen and TYPE, is what it takes these days to hook people up in the communities where they actually live… I suspect, in some ways, to at least some people, you’re not all that REAL if you’re not represented online… Even if you’re practically next door! A little weird, but whatever works!

While a bit of a tradition of leftover turkey crepes were being cooked up for brunch this morning, I was eying the leftover boiled beets. It was something about shapes and the muted, earthy shades of purple, and maybe the bowl helped along the effect. Soothing. Mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop staring. Guess I’ve got veggies on my mind… These were beets from the basement, roughly cut up as you can see, a mix of red (probably Scarlet Supreme) and white-with-red-stripes Chioggia, which were colored by the red beet juice. Boiling this time round was easier, though baking is the favored way to cook ‘em. Anyhow, possessed by the beets, I brought them out into the light to take a picture, grabbed the first suitable surface to stick in the snow (a wooden bushel basket, upended), and took a pic. The color is sort of as I saw it, but you really had to be there for the full effect. Stare into the beets… Like I said, veggies on my mind! :)

My local toast—this morning’s breakfast slice of whole wheat from local baker Barb, along with a tall glass of supermarket-orange-juice-not-from-concentrate-with-pulp, and all-from-the-store orange pekoe tea with cream and sugar. The toast is spread with industrial peanut butter (smooth!), Gloria-Jean’s Sundae in a Jar (strawberries, raspberries, sugar, pectin, from the farmers’ market…mmmm!), and expensive transfat-free margarine. Altogether not so local, and nothing from this farm, but the bread is delicious… Some things I’m compelled to plan, like changes to the market garden. But when it comes to eating local, there is NO WAY I’m going to sit around with lists and notes, calculating food miles, looking up arcane food processing ingredients, interrogating local producers and the like. “Planning” my diet and, uh, FOOD STRATEGY to be Local would reduce the pleasure of eating to a chore, and that’s not fun! My personal preference for local food seems to be emerging as a natural extension of tiny farming and eating what I grow, which is cool. My instinctive approach to local food is…laid-back, figure it out as I go. Let’s see what happens!

Today was the farmers’ market’s annual winter market, held indoors in town. It’s supposed to be local produce and locally made crafts, no reselling of manufactured stuff, and for the most part it is. I go to hand out CSA flyers. On the food side, there are storage veggies, like potatoes and carrots, and lots of baking, condiments and preserves. So I did some shopping. Every Saturday during the market season, I buy from other vendors, but winters I’ve trailed off. This year, with the small but purposeful start on the way to a CSA root cellar, my mind’s more on personal, year-round “eating local”, and I’m doing something about it. One way is to stock up when you can. I bought half a dozen bottles of a really fine maple garlic mustard that I’d tried before, and a variety of preserves (we’ve been eating local jams and jellies almost exclusively for a while). I’m also trying a Scotch bonnet hot pepper sauce (it has a slow, steady burn, gonna get a six-pack!). There’s two liters of pure maple syrup (I’ll check out the farm it comes from, down the road, when the sap is running this spring!). I also picked up several loaves of whole wheat, multigrain and Ezekiel bread, which I’ll slice and freeze (and I can order a minimum of four or five loaves from Barb, custom baked, for pick-up when I’m in town). With the stored veggies in the basement and in the freezer (like the simple, tastes-like-summer tomato sauce), it’s a pretty good start. And local food feels excellent. I absolutely look forward to the taste of everything or I wouldn’t be eating it! From reading and from watching the garden grow, I really do believe in the superior nutritional quality of non-industrially raised food, even if it’s something you mightn’t SEE on the day-to-day. And the satisfaction of knowing my food right to the people who make it and the raw ingredients they make it from is deep and really fun. This to me feels like luxury, and it’s only getting started!

With the farmers’ market over, time to turn to fall-and-winter things. This year, I’m for the first time organizing a proper veggie selection for storage (it’s about time I started…training for that future CSA root cellar!). Instead of the usual bushel baskets of this and that, casually left around the barn to take their chances with temperature and location, now, there’s a bit of plan. For a root cellar, the basement of the farmhouse, the side with a dirt floor that used to be filled with potatoes when this was a fully working, big family farm. For the veggies, today’s haul has a mix of potatoes, assorted winter squash and pumpkins, various carrots, onions, garlic, plus apples picked up at the market. It’s a first step, there’s still lots more in the field: beets, spinach, collards and kale, herbs, and more carrots to go… Harvesting isn’t history just yet!

In my continuing series of small, curious steps backward, yesterday, I acted impulsively on an idea that’d come to me a couple of days earlier. Instead of the usual junk food “treat” that’s become a Saturday afternoon ritual on the way back from the farmers’ market , we stopped in at a local, independent butcher and bought small portions of beef, pork, chicken and four types of sausage, and at the mega-hardware store, a cheap, old style barbecue ($20CDN). Back at the farm, the meat got skewered, along with farm onions, mostly hot peppers, and three types of zucchini—a prepared rub on the meat, salt, pepper and olive oil on the veggies—and then it was over the coals instead of the usual propane treatment. There was enough to do it all over again late this morning for…brunch, to feed four. It may be a little silly, enjoying every turn to the seemingly simpler, like doing away with fast food and propane tanks in favor of a marginally more basic cookery, but it feels…good. I think this is tiny farming-induced behavior. Demand simplicity!!