July 26, 2008 at 6:57 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, Food origins, Food preservation)
Man, it’s nuts how good I feel when I Get Stuff Done. Highlights from the last couple days:
- Strawberry and blueberry preserves (I wanted to crawl face first into the pint of strawberry)
- Chopped holes in clay and planted 5 tomatillos, 4 tomatoes, and 1 pepper plant that I got for free Friday at an end-of-season sale
- Good yard sale find: down/feather “mattress” or super-thick comforter
- Cut and burned all the Canada thistle that was going to seed in the back (witness the ten thousand minute puncture wounds on my forearms)
- Good-bye and good riddance to the hot tub, my most expensive mistake to date
- Great conversations toward some very interesting consulting work
- Started playing with the Kill-A-Watt and discovered that toasting my breakfast uses more power than leaving the fan running 18 hours straight
- Made sag daal for dinner…oh so tasty! And just for fun, figured out that it costs about 50 cents a serving, including rice. I think I paid $7 last time I had it at a restaurant.
In other news, he doesn’t know it yet, as he’s been out all afternoon, but my sweetie’s first batch of homemade yogurt came out really well. I bent the no-sugar rule to sample one spoonful topped with the cherry preserves I made last week. His assessment of “almost obscenely good” is pretty spot-on.
I did the math, and a quart of homemade yogurt comes to about $2.25 plus the price of homemade preserves. Enough to flavor a quart runs from 35 cents (blueberry) to 85 cents (organic strawberry). A quart of his old favorite yogurt – available only in 6-oz cups – would be $5.50; the price of my favorite just jumped to $6/quart. With the quantities of yogurt we eat in this house, we’ll easily save $20-25/month.
The homemade yogurt and preserves aren’t organic, but they are local (including the sugar) and made with essentially no waste. The milk even comes in glass bottles. The real impetus for doing this was to quit throwing out all those little plastic cups. In addition, his fave is trucked in from California and mine from Pennsylvania. By switching to homegrown, we’ve cut about 3000 food miles per quart.
9 Comments
July 17, 2008 at 6:11 pm (Food origins, Musings, Organic gardening, Starting a garden)
Tags: I'm a loon
Ok, you can blame Patti and Derrick – they asked for it! And I had to do something to keep up with Rob’s amazing garden bed rotation spreadsheet. So, here’s Emily’s Totally Insane Spreadsheet for Planning What to Plant to Live Out Of Your Garden. Also known as “can I feed my family on one acre?” (Answer: Yes. But you might not want to.) And yes, I realize I have waaaaaaay too much time on my hands.
It’s in GoogleDocs spreadsheet format. Click the little orange triangles for comments. Be sure to look at both sheets (tabs along the bottom) and scroll down – calorie crops are at the top and vegetables at the bottom. You should be able to click the GoogleDocs File menu and export it to your own GoogleDocs account, or to Excel or .csv format. Then you’ll be able to play with the numbers, add foods, etc. If you’re as big a geek as I am, this is the fun part.
The basic idea is it takes just short of a million calories to feed a person 2500 calories per day for a year. I’ve looked up the number of calories per pound of food, and the number of pounds of food that can grow in a square foot (using John Jeavons’s Biointensive raised-bed methods). Put in the number of people you’ll be feeding, and the spreadsheet keeps a running tally of how many calories you’ve planted and how many more you’ll need to grow to feed everyone for a year. As you’re planning, be realistic about what you like to eat, what you can store, what’s a pain in the butt to raise or process, and get a good variety so you don’t get scurvy or really, really sick of parsnips.
Even if you don’t intend to live off your 1/4 acre lot, this is eye opening. Think your 1000 sf tomato garden is great shakes? Calorie-wise, that’ll feed one person for two months. I’m growing wheat on a very, very small scale right now, and had been thinking of expanding. But looking at the scale needed, and the work involved in harvesting wheat by hand, makes me think what communities need is a central wheat farm with big machines and individual gardens full of potatoes and rutabagas (swedes).
Have fun kids!
3 Comments
July 11, 2008 at 12:10 pm (Food origins, Food security)
Deirdra Stockmann just alerted me to the Food System Economic Partnership’s Community Food Profile of Southeast Michigan, which she co-wrote. It’s a really nice overview of farming, CSAs, farmers’ markets, and also food processing facilities in Jackson, Lenawee, Washtenaw, Wayne, and Monroe counties. I highly recommend you check out this report, and the work the FSEP is doing to develop a local food economy in this part of Michigan!
Deirdra, do you know how local meat producers will be affected by the new Food Bill regulation that says meat for commercial uses can be processed at state-inspected facilities?
Leave a Comment
July 10, 2008 at 8:23 am (Food origins)
Anyone know if quail eggs can be had near Ann Arbor?
1 Comment
July 6, 2008 at 12:34 pm (Food origins, Food security, Musings, Organic gardening)
Tags: garden, pergola, Wheat
It’s been a beautiful July 4th weekend. The pergola was finished this week, and it’s a joy to have the shades up and not be panting from the heat in the living room. It extends the living space outdoors and dapples the room with shade reminiscent of my favorite forests. My parents and grandma came for pergola viewing and dinner – grilled local sausages – and it was a really pleasant evening.
I’ve been pretty busy this weekend; I planted some impatiens, black-eyed Susans, and peppers in the rock-walled bed underneath. I transplanted seven gray dogwood shrubs to our berm from the yard of someone who is trying to keep them out of her prairie (Thanks, D!). My handy-with-all-yard-things neighbor mowed and plowed under 1200 square feet in the back yard, creating my wheat field. (See more pics.) For now, I’ve planted most of it in a mix of rye, alfalfa, and radishes, and one section is done in field peas. Probably won’t harvest anything from this area – the crops are to add organic matter, crowd out weeds, break up the hardpan, and bring nutrients up from the subsoil. It’ll get winter wheat in October
Or maybe not; turns out he and his dad grow wheat and oats, and I can buy chem-free grains directly from them. Some things really are more efficiently grown at scale like that. But I think I will still put in some wheat, if only to see what it’s like to do all that harvesting by hand with a sickle and thresh it by hand (or foot, as the case may be). They also have nine horses, and therefore an abundant supply of manure, to which I am welcome. They’ll even use the tractor to load my truck. Perfect, because I’m planning on trying sheet mulching for another big garden area, and I need a bunch of manure for that. Maybe next weekend…
Talking with my neighbor really made me shift my thinking. We will never be self-sufficient on an acre and a half; even if we could grow food for 2, we’d never be able to grow heating and cooking fuel. They have 160 acres, parts in a well-managed woodlot, parts tilled, and parts swamp and wild – they are set up for self-sufficiency. But they are also well set-up to be one node of a self-sufficient neighborhood, and really, that’s the goal. As gas becomes more expensive, you’re going to want to meet all your needs within walking or biking distance. So, step 1, reduce your needs, and step 2, divvy up the work and resource production so everyone has something to contribute and barter.
Hmm, maybe instead of wheat, I should try sunflowers…DIY biodiesel, anyone?
2 Comments
July 1, 2008 at 5:20 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Food origins, Food preservation, Food security, nalofoomo)
This is about seven kinds of wonderful. Rena at Locavorious has expanded on the idea of a CSA in some really interesting ways. First, instead of a box of fresh vegetables, these CSA shares are made of frozen fruits and vegetables. All products are sourced locally within a short distance of Ann Arbor, Michigan, from existing farms (either by contract or U-Pick). After prep and freezing, Rena stores the veggies in a commercial-quality “community freezer” until November or December. There will be four monthly pick-ups, so there’s no need to buy a freezer to be able to enjoy locally-grown, frozen foods in the middle of winter. Not to mention the labor savings for folks who don’t have the time to tramp to half a dozen U-Pick places and then process all the food!
One of the things I like most about this kind of business is that it really is helping to build an interdependent local economy that’s accessible to mainstream culture. Let’s face it; most of the current US society isn’t going to cook every meal from fresh vegetables just harvested by Farmer Joan down the road. But they might serve a side of frozen green beans harvested by Farmer Joan and frozen by Rena two months ago.
Shares run for 4 months and will probably yield a total of around 30 pounds of food. The “early bird” price for 2008-09 is $100. Sounds like a great deal to me! I’ve already signed up. See details at http://locavorious.com/Eaters.html
Are there other innovative local food businesses out there that I’ve missed? Please let me know if you know of more innovators!
4 Comments
June 23, 2008 at 10:01 pm (Changing habits, Food origins, Food security, nalofoomo)
Tags: developing local food economy, local food, Scio Township council
As my sweetie and I were eating at our favorite local restaurant tonight, the manager came by. Last time I was in, I’d asked if he might look into getting grass-fed beef for their burgers, if nothing else. He sounded very interested and promised to look into it…but really, what else was he going to say? So I nudged him again this week, and was able to point out to him that Eat Local Eat Natural, which I first heard about a couple days ago, would be moving in right across the street and could supply them with locally-raised grass-fed beef. His eyes lit up and he said, “Across the street? Then we wouldn’t have to pay for shipping!”
This reminded me that the township’s Planning Council meeting, where they were discussing rezoning a parcel of land for Eat Local Eat Natural, would be meeting tonight. And that I wanted to go and voice my support, because no one spoke up for it at the last meeting. (A friend who’s up on this sort of thing tells me no one ever says anything unless it’s to complain, so that’s not much of a surprise.)
So I quickly rescheduled my evening and attended my first township meeting. What’s it like to speak to the council? What’s the quickest way to make friends in a business that you’re passionate about? Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
7 Comments
June 21, 2008 at 5:00 am (Food origins)
Tags: lacal food, new york, oswego
I recently visited a friend in Oswego, New York. I’ve been there several times and always been impressed with Ontario Orchards when we’ve shopped there for produce – they have a really nice array of locally-grown and -produced foods. But I’ve never been able to bring home any of the local fare because I never want to check luggage. (Ok, except the last time I was there I brought home 10 pounds of onions in my suitcase…)
I drove on this trip, though, so I had a whole trunk to fill with goodies. See after the cut for details of the salt potatoes, pretzels, beans, pasta, cider, and cheese I bagged. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments
June 18, 2008 at 2:33 pm (Food origins, nalofoomo)
Tags: Ann Arbor, local food
According to this news article, a new enterprise called “Eat Local Eat Natural” will be opening on the west side of Ann Arbor. Explicitly inspired by The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it will serve as a warehouse and distribution center for local, natural foods – making it easier to get local meat and produce into local restaurants. They will also have a cafe and market. Hooray! The missing link in the chain from farm to restaurant – not to mention much easier local shopping – will soon be here!
2 Comments
May 22, 2008 at 6:04 pm (Cooking, Food origins, Organic gardening, recipes)
This time of year, a favorite meal is to wander out into the garden, snip off anything edible, sautee it in olive oil, and serve it on some kind of starch (often brown rice or whole wheat pasta).
I think I’ve eaten this three times this week already. Am I tired of it? Heck no. Winter root vegetables…now those I’m tired of. 
Tonight’s haul included beet greens (remember those beets I shoved in the ground in March?), spinach, chickweed, and the very first leaves of kale, plus two green onions for good measure. If you harvest carefully, you don’t even need to wash the greens…just tear into bite-sized pieces. Tossed that with some Eden Organic (local to me) whole wheat/parsley/garlic spaghetti and some chickpeas (not local but bought from a local bulk supplier). Yum. Tasty and quick.
Oh. You want a picture? Um…you should have asked before dinner…
2 Comments
