Important news bulletin

Not to distract us from the task at hand, but I am pleased to announce that we've just had our first Ameraucana egg from the young ladies in Chicken House #2. It's a pale bluish-green one. So beautiful! Now, I don't know if the girls are taking requests, but I'd like to see someone lay olive green, if at all possible...

Discuss

Sir Albert Howard, in 1940:

Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves from disease.

I find this quote profoundly interesting. It's from An Agricultural Testament, one of the foundational writings of the organic movement. Yet during the 16 years that I spent as a vegetarian, not a single person ever said to me, "But, Jamie, isn't it impossible to farm in a truly sustainable manner without animal inputs?"

Isn't it?

And isn't the implication that, while vegetarianism is an honorable and morally consistent position (indeed, I would say the only honorable and morally consistent position) for people who cannot stomach the idea of killing animals for food, vegetarian evangelism is unwarranted? Shouldn't humankind as a whole aspire to eat a smaller quantity of meat, raised humanely, rather than to eat no meat at all?

After all, if animals were raised only for milk and eggs and to provide on-farm fertility, what would happen to those animals when they grew too old to produce? Surely it's not economically feasible to keep cows solely for their cowpies?

I will admit that finding inconsistencies in arguments has never been my strongest suit. So help me out here. Is there any way that truly organic (i.e., sustainable) agriculture can exist in the absence of meat production?

Doppelganger

The other day I drove into the next town to go to the print shop. As I left our little village, I noted a police cruiser driving in the other direction. Then, a mile or two down the road, I was startled to see the same cruiser in my rear view mirror.

I looked at my speedometer: Not bad. 57 in a 55 zone. Should be no problem. I slowed to 55 as a formality.

The cruiser followed me for another half mile, then turned on its lights and pulled me over.

A beefy, freckly young officer approached my window. I kept my hands on the steering wheel and tried to look harmless. (I watch a lot of crimefighting shows on TV.)

"Ma'am, do you have your driver's license on you?" he asked.

"Sure, just a second." I rummaged in my purse's credit card pocket until I found it, then handed it to him. He read it slowly, thoroughly.

Then he handed it back to me and assumed a cheerful demeanor.

"You're not in any trouble, Miz ______," he said. I experienced two emotions: First, relief; second, astonishment that he'd pronounced my last name correctly. It's not the sort of last name people have around here, and most locals mangle it or fade into embarrassed silence when they try to decipher it.

He continued: "The reason I turned around is that we have a warrant out on a woman who bears a striking resemblance to you. I just had to check to make sure you weren't her. Have a nice day." He waved and smiled, then returned to his car.

I edged my battered Camry back out onto the road and continued on my way. As I drove, my mind raced: a person who looks like me! And ooh, is she ever in trouble! I wonder what she did? (I told you, I watch a lot of crimefighting shows on TV.)

At the print shop, I told the story to the front desk lady and to the Better Hometown Manager, who happened to be waiting for a fax to go through. Neither of them knew anyone else in the county who looked like me. Very mysterious indeed.

Now I keep my eyes peeled for the Bad Jamie. Is she a Britney-style flouter of traffic laws? Does she deal meth? Did she hire someone to go after her ex-husband with an aluminum baseball bat? We may never know.

I get knocked down, but I get up again

So I've been laid out flat for nearly two days straight, thanks to a stomach bug or food poisoning or something of that stripe. (All I know is, I'm going to be off hot and sour soup for a very long time. But that might have been too much information.)

However, I'm definitely on the mend. This afternoon I managed to concentrate long enough to write a post for the Eat Local Challenge blog. Have a look, and regular programming will resume here soon!

It's still no excuse for being blog-delinquent this long

Guess what the s.o. and I did a week and a half ago, while we were in Las Vegas for business?



If you were going to guess "saw the Ronnie James Dio incarnation of Black Sabbath perform at the Palms, and from really good seats, too" that answer is also correct, but it's not what I'm trying to get at.

Life is, indeed, sweet.

Why September is so much better than August

Late September is prime time for the s.o.'s flower garden. It's close to the road so everyone in town can enjoy it--and indeed, we often get compliments on it. He is always improving it; the goal for next year, I'm told, is "to plant so many perennials that there's no room for weeds." A worthy goal.




And now that the worst of the heat is over, the vegetable garden finally has a chance to revive. These are the very first of the fall produce: a bunch of Jaune D'Or radishes.


The other big plus is that now the nights are cool and foggy. Interesting to drive in sometimes (where IS the road, anyway?), but much easier on the plant life and on the soul.

Bark in the Park

Here are some long-overdue pics of our beloved boy Cairo enjoying a baseball game at Turner Field earlier this month.


A couple of times a year, the Atlanta Braves have a promotion called Bark in the Park where they rope off a section of the upper deck for people with canines. It was fantastic--they had kiddie pools and misters and lots of water bowls and free dog-appropriate frozen yogurt (Cairo, the Dairy Dog, had two).


Amazingly, everyone seemed to get the clue that they should only bring sociable dogs. There was very little disruption, aside from a few outbreaks of excited barking. All the people and dogs just hung out and enjoyed themselves.


We'll definitely go again next time they do it. All baseball games should be dog-friendly. Don't you think?

Hello world

I'm connected to the internet WIRELESSLY, using my NEW COMPUTER!!!! Sweet, sweet, sweet. More to come, as soon as I play with it for a while. Oh, and get some arugula and mizuna planted...

Shot down in a blaze of I/O errors

I've ordered a new MacBook. My trusty eMac had been deteriorating fast--unexplained crashes, weird sparkly "snow," etc. I ran some cleanup utilities and thought it was a bit better, but then it locked up and destroyed 8 hours of work (probably the best writing I'd done in six months). I'm typing this blog post on the eMac, but I'm obviously not using it for anything mission-critical. I'm currently trying to remember the lost article and reconstruct it on my old "toilet seat" iBook. Argh.

On the bright side...NEW COMPUTER! AIRPORT HUB! SHINY!

As soon as I have a computer I'm not nervous about, I'll post some photos of the fall garden, which is coming along quite nicely.

It all comes out in the wash

Previously I complained that blister beetles had ravaged an entire row of my chard--which, indeed, they did. They skeletonized it. I was forced to cut it down to nubs.

But I can't complain too bitterly about the situation, because here's what that row of chard looks like now, after regrowing (click to enlarge):


Maybe those bugs aren't so bad after all. No, wait, they are. They also took out my Dragon Langerie beans (although the heat had damaged the plants pretty badly beforehand). And they've been making tomato-picking a harrowing experience.

By the way, note the young cabbages at the left of the photo. Also note the netted chicken runs in the back, draped with overenthusiastic vines of bottle gourd. On the right of the chard (currently not yet poking through the soil) will be a row of variegated land cress.

The fall garden is in progress. So much more fun than summer.

OLS 10

Another One Local Summer comes to an end. Which, I guess, means that summer is coming to an end, too.

OLS has helped us mark the ups and downs of a challenging season. When it comes to cooking, scarcity is as telling as plenty. What have we got, and what can we make of it?

Kudos to Liz for dreaming OLS up and for making it hugely successful. Ready for next year, my friend? Heh.

This was our final meal in the series:

PORK CHOP:
Pork - Dyal Farm, Cobbtown, Ga. (150 miles)

PANZANELLA:
Tomatoes - ours
Cucumbers - ours
Parsley and basil - ours
French bread - Luna Baking Co., Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Red and green bell peppers - L2's (1/4 mile)
Vidalia onion - Vidalia, Ga. (130 miles)
Capers, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, seasonings - elsewhere

Eat Local Challenge begins tomorrow!

Holy cow...as I was looking at seed planting dates, it occurred to me that September starts tomorrow. That means it's time for the 2007 Eat Local Challenge. The focus this time around is on food preservation, so keep an eye out on the aforelinked site to see what participants learn and accomplish.

This year, there are a zillion different ways to participate, ranging from simple and minimal to big and life-changing. You don't have to be ascetic or hardcore; you could choose, for example, to merely add one local item per week to your repertoire. You could photograph your farmers' market and talk about what you buy there. Anything goes, so there's no reason everyone can't join in.

If you do post something localish, let me know and I'll link to it on the ELC site. I would especially like to see certain bloggers who make homemade wines and liqueurs talk a little bit about the process!

Nice.

Today I managed to clear and fertilize small portions of the garden. Then I planted one row of purple sprouting broccoli and half a row each of red kale and yellow radishes.

Then it began to rain. Gently, yet amply.

Another first

Two quail eggs this morning--our first. I'm amazed that such tiny birds can lay such...well, the eggs are tiny, too, but if you compare them to the birds, they're sort of the equivalent of a chicken laying a goose egg.

I tried to take a picture, but our camera can't handle the smallness. They look just about like the eggs on this page.

I have to take issue with the usual assertion that Coturnix quail thrive in cages. They stay alive in cages, sure. But we noticed a marked difference in the happiness of our birds when the s.o. created Quail World, their outdoor daytime enclosure. They dustbathe and hide in the tall grass and do helicopter imitations. They obviously enjoy it. And it's worth noting that, given the opportunity, they picked a protected area under some branches to nest.

August is...well, just August

August in Georgia has only one mitigating virtue: that from within it, one can just see autumn on the horizon.

The record-setting three-week heat wave seems to have broken, if you are prepared to accept the idea that a drop from the 105 range into the mid-90s represents the end of a heat wave. The one thing that makes it feel real is that we are getting a few refreshing, life-giving thunderstorms.

I think the heat wave may have killed our tiny nascent farmers' market. For three weeks, because the National Weather Service was rightfully telegraphing DEATH DEATH DEATH about the idea of spending any time outdoors, we were forced to cancel. This week, after enthusiastic e-mails to our customer base, we started up again. But we had only one visitor, and she was one of our vendors. That's what you call a small turnout. People are creatures of habit, and the hiatus undid whatever shopping habits we had managed to inspire.

But believe it or not, we are okay with this turn of events. We've slowly been coming to the realization that (a) our town may not be quite ready for a farmers' market, and (b) there are a lot of new farmers' markets in the area, each with not very many vendors. So we spent our idle hours last night hatching some plans for a tiny, just-us-neighbors gardening collective. One entity; a few back yards. Instead of adding another marginal farmers' market to the fray, we'll team up to take our wares to some of the existing outlets. More on that next year, I think.

Meanwhile, it is still the dog days of summer. L2 and I sat, flushed with plans for World Domination via backyard market gardening (or was it the humidity?), and picked out our seeds for fall planting. I ordered them all last night.

Time to start pulling out spent plants and dreaming of cool leafy things. We'll plant as soon as we can get the beds prepared.

One Local Summer, week 9

I never did finish this year's half-pig charcuterie. Many months have passed since January, yet there are still bags labeled "future sausage" in our freezer. (Oops!) So on Friday when we wanted spaghetti with Italian sausage, I had to actually grind meat in order to get it done.

Overall, we're trying to dispatch some of the things lurking in our freezer. We're currently thawing the last of last year's turkeys, which may appear as OLS 10. Part of the reason is that we need freezer space for current endeavors. We're making a lot of changes in the farmyard. Slowly but surely, extra roosters are being yanked from the flock and processed. (Anyone want some standard Light Brahma roosters? They're magnificent, but they're total jerks. And we have four of them, thanks to the fact that they're only available straight-run from McMurray. We've put them in the Market Bulletin in hopes of repatriating them.)

Some boy animals are luckier than others. Instead of killing one of our two gorgeous, sweet Royal Palm tom turkeys, we opted to trade one of them for four little Japanese bantam hens. Making the swap meant a several-county trip, but it was worth it. The woman we traded with was overjoyed with Puff Daddy the turkey; she hopes to breed him. And we're pleased as punch with our new tenants. Now we have six bantam hens total, so we're hoping to get lots of teeny eggs.

Anyway, back to the dinner:

SPAGHETTI WITH MEAT SAUCE:

Tomatoes, garlic, oregano, and red bell peppers - our own
Candy onions - Sundance Farm, Danielsville, Ga. (50 miles)
Pork - Dyal Farm, Cobbtown, Ga. (150 miles)
Bread - Luna Baking Co., Athens, Ga. (35 miles)
Pasta, olive oil, and spices - elsewhere

A stunning discovery

The s.o. just found a native persimmon tree at the edge of our woods. It is starting to drop fruit.

This calls for a search party! Where there's one, there may be more...

Perfect, perfect, perfect!

Remember my "eh" muscadine cobbler from last week? The cloying, goopy one? And how I said I thought the grapes might do better in a clafouti?

I made one, and I was right. It's one of the best things I've ever eaten. WOW. If you have access to muscadines (this means you, my fellow residents of the south), grab your copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Vol. 1 and follow the basic clafouti recipe, substituting halved, seeded muscadines for the cherries. Use brandy (which is, after all, made of grapes) instead of vanilla.

I could eat this whole thing. Mmm.

Another week goes roaring past

Still a heat wave.

Still too much to do and no energy to do it with.

Still a dog in need of extra hugs: Cairo's rear has been healing very nicely, but his first batch of antibiotics made him awfully sick, and we had to take him back into the vet's office to get different ones. He is doing better now--fuzzy and happy and loyal as ever--and thanks you for your kind wishes.

I spent about an hour today floating in L2's pool, which went a long way toward making me enjoy the weather for a change. I should do that more often.

I canned tomato sauce AND salsa on Monday and Tuesday. I made the salsa with Green Zebra tomatoes, so it has an unusual appearance. But if you close your eyes, it's regular hot salsa.

I cooked a lot of local food this week. Unfortunately, none of it was grouped together in a single meal. Local eggplant, squash, and onion shared a plate with exotic tofu. Our own chicken was served, taco-seasoned, with homegrown tomato in storebought tortillas.

So I got to Sunday and hadn't made a single OLS meal. What's more, I couldn't bring myself to make the gumbo I knew would bring it all together: okra! tomatoes! seafood! Carolina Gold rice! So instead, I just boiled some peel-and-eat shrimp. That was it.

I must say these shrimp are pretty special. They're sort of a test run for an agreement that our food-buying club is working out with a Savannah-based fisherman. They're bringing in five-pound bags of freshly caught shrimp--mixed sizes, heads on, straight off the boat. They are really good and fantastically fresh. It's almost like being on vacation, especially if you wear coconut-scented sunblock and mash some Old Bay seasoning into your cuticles.

Here's proof that I grew up landlocked: I had never seen shrimp with their heads on before! It takes some getting used to. For one thing, it's hard to cram all the antennae into the freezer bags; they keep wanting to work their way back out, which is not so good if you're hoping to get a good, tight seal when you "zip" them shut.

A small price to pay, though. I wonder if these people can get us blue crab, too.

A proud moment

I don't know whether to yell "WOOO HOOOOO!" or "NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" Tucker Taylor, one of our most talented local farmers, has been hired away by Thomas Keller.

I met Tucker and his business partner Celia Barss this spring when I profiled their farm for Edible Atlanta magazine. They're supercool people, very dedicated and talented. I hope Celia takes the helm now--otherwise, who'll supply our local restaurants with salsify and sweet turnips? Who'll be the first ones to the market with tomatoes in April?

Sigh.

But what a wonderful opportunity for Tucker!