First firewood delivery of the season, tumbled onto the lawn. This is from a property further north that has an endless supply of downed trees from the wind storm a few years ago, and the more recent ice storm. When you have many acres of woods and no logging operation, a severe tree-felling weather event can create a lot of dead wood. This is some of it!
Off-season
Off-season refers to the time from last outdoor harvest of the fall, to the first seedlings started, indoors, in the spring or late winter. I’m not counting the years when I’ve had winter crops in unheated greenhouses, and gone to winter markets. It’s when I’m not working on crops for open field growing.
Firestarter II
Enjoying the flames and the slowly building heat from starting the wood stove for the night. Guess this is saying goodbye to the semblance of winter we’ve just had. Wood heat and tending the fire seems best enjoyed when it’s so cold outside, you really bask in the indoor warmth and outdoors seems like a harsh alien force trying to get in. This year, it’s hardly ever gotten so chilly inside that a decent sweater wouldn’t offset if you had to make do. Of course, the wood stove did bring a huge level of…comfort! Here, it’s in what I think of as stage two of firestarting. The kindling and smaller pieces have done gotten things started. Now, medium pieces are kicking in. The air vents are at least partially open, so fire burns hotter and faster. After 15 minutes or so like this, it’s burning nicely, and there’s the start of a bed of hot coals. Then the full-size chunks go in, the vents are closed, and another round of wood heating is underway. That’s my method with this particular stove, and it does seem to work!
Food factory
In town today, on my regular supply run every three or four weeks, this view caught my eye. The big food factory, seen through an open lot between two houses. Not sure what stood out, or moved me to take a photo. It’s not beautiful architecture, yet still somehow striking. The huge old Quaker Oats plant is on a whole other scale of food production to the Tiny Farm veggie plot, there’s no real comparison… So maybe the photo is there just to gaze at as the mind wanders through thoughts about food. Anyhow, quite a nice walking around day, for early March!
As the sun sets
You can only come up with so many titles for the same photo, taken every few days, to show the ups and downs of the local weather. The sun is getting warmer, more head-on. That’s normal! Wondering when the fields may dry out enough to start working is still a ways off, six weeks. Before then, even if it seems like it’s gotta be summer, the risk of a cold snap, or a week or two of snow, makes it probably not worth getting such a super-early start. When will they ever get weather forecasting working like we want it to?!?
Upcycled food
On my last stop-in at the luxury grocery discount outlet* around three weeks ago, the “upcycled” on these labels caught my eye. “Certified Upcycled”? Don’t think I’d heard upcycling applied to food in that direct way, but it made sense. It has an automatic eco-conscious, palatable ring to it that “recycled food” certainly wouldn’t. My immediate thought was that it referred to using cosmetically damaged and unsold fruits and vegetables to make things—damaged meat and meat scraps isn’t as appealing, and we already have hot dogs. I imagined the piles of veggies that at times went onto the compost heap on my tiny farm. I took the photo, figuring I might want to know more…
The big number that is hard to imagine is 35% of food goes to waste around the world. That’s the rough figure I see everywhere I look. Sometimes it’s 25% or 40%. In any case, let’s say, a third of all food is somehow made, then not eaten. How does that work? I finish a harvest, then toss a third of it on the compost heap? Every time I buy three bags of groceries, I immediately dump one in a bin conveniently located at the supermarket exit? There’s an oversupply of some food crop and boxcar loads get left unsold by the tracks? There are lots of ways food can get wasted, and they all add up. It’s one of these modern problems we have that’s so sprawled through supply chains, it’s hard to see a big picture of how we got here, let alone how to do something significant about it.
In that mix, we have upcycled food. Here, protein powder and something called Super Greens. Checking out the company’s web site doesn’t yield much info, and no surprises. Seems they gather various unsold crops and…process them. Assuming the nutritional quality is the same as non-upcycled, is the upcycled product cheaper to buy? Or is the main advantage the feeling as a consumer that you’ve done something good for the environment, for the planet? It’s easy, only a search or an AI buddy away, to get more info. For me, for now, I’m satisfied. Upcycled food means companies out there are making otherwise going-to-waste food into…more food. Got it!
*Luxury grocery discount outlet is what I call the local discount food outlet with a line-up that includes an everchanging assortment of big brand names and specialty organic labels. Great deals, around a third of the normal price or even less (I haven’t done actual price comparisons, but that’s what it seems like). Excellent finds aren’t guaranteed, but it’s always worth a stop. One of my all-time favorite scores: certified organic chicken gravy and brown gravy cubes, 50¢ for a box of four. I stocked up on soooo many! (I don’t think that much of the certified organic stamp in general, there’s all the lawyering and lobbying going on by the big food manufacturers to massage the rules, who knows what exactly it represents, but when it comes to processed products, and for 50¢, why not?!)
Somewhat snowy
Back to bit of a traditional great northern winter look after a fair dusting of snow. It looks wintry, but you only get that old time winter feeling when it sticks around for months, with short days of freezing cold. Here, you can still see the grass pushing through. Cosmetic! :)
Firewood heap
The last pile of firewood, hopefully enough to get through the cold weather. There’s more in another small stack, enough for a week or two, then this. It’s a motley collection, cut further north from here, from the zillion trees felled by that crazy windstorm of three-four years ago and hauled over. Different sizes of tree. Different species, mostly hardwood, but a fair bit of too-fast-burning softwood. Overall well-seasoned, lying around dead for years, and then cut and split early last summer. If it looks like “a lot”, you probably haven’t burned wood as a main heat source, when it’s below freezing day and night, the wood stove eats those big chunks like…bite-sized chocolate bars after Halloween. With the crazy weather, colder cold now seems to come only in spells, a couple days, a week at a time, then back to hovering around zero. We’ll see how the heap holds up!