Wordpress, not for me.

Well, I tried to have a real website on wordpress and I could not swing it. Every so often I would get hacked or some kind of virus and it was just really too much for my limited skills to try to deal with. I have another website but I have not published anything on it yet. I might use this blog there. We'll see.

Chop and Drop!

Check out the newest post

Sensible Design

Check out the latest post over at the new site!

Transitioning to a new site

We are transitioning over to a WordPress site with the blog. This is going to give us a little more flexibility and it's actually a complete website not just a blog. Check out the latest and greatest!

The archived items will stay here.

Interesting Blooms

Here are a few interesting blooms you don't see every day.

The one on the left is a persimmon tree. Not showy at all, in fact it's nearly impossible to tell that it's blooming at all. The blooms all face downward and they are well concealed with leaves. They smell a little like rotting meat too. They must rely on alternative pollinators. This asian "hana fuyu" persimmon is supposed to be self pollinating but it's always better to have multiple trees. At the moment it's the only one we have however.


This is the first time this tree has ever bloomed. It buds on new wood.






Here is an interesting bloom many people may not have seen before, it's vetch. These blooms are very small.

On the right is some volunteer honeysuckle that is in full bloom. Honeysuckle is very fragrant! I wasn't aware of this but it is said to have many herbal actions and is widely used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. It's said to be cooling, so a good thing for fevers.

Here are some links: altnature.com bearmedicinal

The hibiscus overwintered inside and is now beginning to bloom. That's a showy flower! They've got some medicinal/culinary properties too. Hibiscus tea is one common usage for the flowers.

The next bloom is valerian. It has hundreds tiny flowers and a very fragrant licorice aroma. The seeds are very tiny and resemble sea anemones. They float on the breeze like dandelions.

Beebalm or bergamot has a very interesting flower. Beebalm is also referred to as Oswego tea and can be used to make a good tasting tea which I prefer to the usual tea.

Where to begin

If you want to learn more about permaculture the best place to start is with the founder himself, Bill Mollison.

There is a free online resource from Networkearth.org that has Bill's lectures from 1994 in Texas.

There's no better place to start learning about permaculture for zero money!

Link to the new site.

A Sad Day

When I went out this morning there were ten fish floating in the pond. They were gone, it was too late. I didn't think losing gold fish would bother me much but I guess it does actually.

Because of my own stupidity they died. I left the hose running in the pond for several hours and for whatever reason, I think lack of oxygen, they didn't make it.

I'm not one hundred percent sure exactly what the cause was still but I think that since the water level was above the spill pipe the water didn't get aerated properly.

They lived through the winter, and the time that the pond didn't even have a filter. So I'm scratching my head on this one.

Later on in the day I lost one more and one isn't looking good. So there are five left, even though I only put ten in originally. Most of the big ones died.

Chorizo, chickpeas, poached eggs, FFF

Choizo w/ chickpeas & poached egg

This Friday's food forage dish was chorizo with chickpeas topped with poached egg.

The eggs came directly from our own chickens.

I used Mexican chorizo from Pine Street Market.




The chickpeas were our one cheat this week since there isn't a local source for them. We used dried beans and let them soak for a few hours first. Then into boiling water with one cinnamon stick.

Saute a diced onion and then add in the chorizo. Let this cook for a while before adding in the chickpeas. Then top the chickpeas and chorizo up with chicken stock. Let simmer for about an hour.

When ready to serve top with a poached egg. Each egg takes four minutes so don't forget to allow for the correct amount of time.

The greens are going pretty well in the raised beds now. They are on the eastern side of the house and it is about the only place that gets full sun.

Salad with truffle vinaigrette

I made a salad from lettuce growing in a raised bed we have here. This is a very good light and tangy vinaigrette for hot weather.

Truffle vinaigrette:

1 - tspn Dijon mustard
2 - tblspn honey
1- tspn white truffle oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup olive oil
salt
pepper

Combine Dijon, honey and lemon juice in a measuring cup

While stirring, drizzle in some good olive oil to form an emulsion. Add truffle oil.

That's it!

I topped the salad with Goat's Milk cheese crafted locally from Capra Gia.

It isn't local but it's worth getting, Edmond Fallot dijon mustard, nothing can compete.

You can get it from iGourmet.com.

Georgia Olive Oil is made here in Georgia and is available from their online store if you cannot find it locally.











You can always find out what is available to you locally at Local Harvest.

Forest Garden

Now that it's finally spring, here is a short tour of some of the trees in the young forest garden.

Boston Butt w/ poke and turnips

Pork Shoulder w/ Poke Weed

The poke is really getting large now and they won't be worth eating if they get too big, zero food miles.

I boiled them first in a large pot.

Turnips were from Freedom Farmers Market at the Carter Center.

I roasted a boston butt in the dutch oven on 250 for about seven hours with carrots from Straight from the Backyard.

The meat comes from Gum Creek Farms.

I sauteed the turnips and poke in garlic and bacon from Pine Street Market.


Salad with balsamic vinaigrette

I made a salad from lettuce growing in a raised bed we have here.

Balsamic vinaigrette:

1 - tblspn dijon mustard
1- tblspn good balsamic vinegar

Combine both in a measuring cup

While stirring mustard and balsamic, drizzle in some good olive oil to form an emulsion.

That's it!

I topped the salad with Goat's Milk cheese crafted locally from Capra Gia.

It isn't local but it's worth getting, Edmond Fallot dijon mustard, nothing can compete.

You can get it from iGourmet.com.

Georgia Olive Oil is made here in Georgia and is available from their online store if you cannot find it locally.

Strippaggio of Atlanta sells olive oil and balsamic vinegar in their online store, it's very good.








You can always find out what is available to you locally at Local Harvest.

Burgers with poached egg, FFF

Earlier in the week we visited the Spotted Trotter's location in Krog Street Market and bought some of their special secret burger blend. We used this to make patties with for the grill.

They wouldn't say exactly what was in the blend but I'm pretty sure it's ground beef with some pork blended in. There was lots of flare ups from grease. I just had to watch it extra closely. They came out fantastic.

We used eggs from our own chickens and poached them to put over the burgers. We didn't use any bread at all just some Dijon mustard. It was very simple but very delicious.

Krog Street Market is a very happening new market on Krog Street, home of the scariest tunnel in America. Not cookie cutter and not overrun with posers yet it's a cool place to visit.

I even paid $10 for a chocolate bar from Xocolatl! It was good but I'm not sure how anything that has thousands of embodied food miles can be labeled sustainable.

And by the way, Ford Fry's newest restaurant Superica ain't bad either!

Bees

Yesterday about ten thousand new arrivals showed up.

Bees!

In February we attended a beekeeping class and ordered some bees. They let me know they were ready and I drove over there yesterday and picked them up. It's about an hours drive out in the country.

I'm beginning to think that the apple trees didn't get pollinated and I'm positive that's the case for at least one of them. Hopefully having bees on the property will mitigate that. (I should have done it by hand though)

Transferring frames from the nuc

The bees came in what is called a "nuc". So they were bees that already had a queen and had been together. I drove them home in the floorboard of the truck, per the beekeepers directions. They were taped in with a piece of screen. They came with five frames that already had honey and brood.

Today they were coming back loaded with pollen that was bright yellow. I don't know what it is but it might be poplar because I see them going up.

These bees are adjusted to this climate since they are from very close by so hopefully they will do fine. As far as I can tell there aren't anymore honeybees nearby so they have pretty much free reign right now.

Food movies

We've watched a couple of good documentaries lately about food. Eating Alabama and Urban Fruit. They are both available on Amazon Prime.

Swale tour

Friday's Foraged Food

Friday's meal with all local ingredients was awesome!

Duck breast over sauteed pokeweed and hostas with poached egg and goats milk cheese.

Pine Street Market had duck breast in house on Friday and I picked up a couple. I also used their bacon in the sauteed greens.

I always pick up goat's milk cheese from Capra Gia every Thursday at the Tucker Farmers Market.

The eggs came all the way from the side of the house, around 30 feet. Zero food miles.

Hostas

Rounding out this dish was pokeweed and hostas plucked from the backyard. It was a variation on a Fried Poke Sallet recipe that I got here.

I didn't have as much pokeweed as I needed because it is just now beginning to come up. The hostas have already gotten pretty big so I substituted them for what I lacked in poke.

You are supposed to boil the pokeweed in two changes of water before you eat it. But I don't really think you need to do that with very young pokeweed. You only harvest the leaves. Mature pokeweed that is red can make you sick if you don't boil it first. It tastes like spinach to me.

I boiled the poke and then I sauteed that and the hostas in the bacon grease with garlic and soy sauce. The soy sauce was not locally sourced. The hostas wilt down very quickly kind of like radicchio. It eats just like a lettuce. It is very popular in Asian countries.

I sauteed the duck breast skin side down on high heat for a few minutes, starting with a cold pan. This allows the fat to render out. Flip it over and then put it in a 200 degree oven for 6 - 8 minutes. It's best when rare.

Poached eggs are incredibly simple. Bring water to a boil. I like to swirl it before dropping in the egg. Then just crack the egg into the water and let it boil for 4 minutes. Remove it to a bowl of water.

This dish came out seriously good, better than I expected. It's the first time I've cooked pokeweed. I had no idea hostas were eatable until very recently and the yard is full of them. They come back every year whether you want them to or not. Poke salad was a staple not that long ago. Now it's been deemed poisonous by the internet and is fatal to even look at. But I don't buy it. Something so ubiquitous as to have a song written about it can't be that bad!

Paleo

I've been essentially "paleo" for about three years. I don't really worry about adhering to letter of it at all, I just know when I don't feel good and when I do. So it's really been a case for me of cutting out most carbs. No bread, potatoes, rice or pasta. I've also discovered that cream really knocks me down flat. The longer you stay off of carbs the more sensitive you become to them, in my experience. In the beginning I could eat a sandwich with a bun and it didn't affect me much but now it does more so.

There's been a lot of cancer around me lately, unfortunately, and no one has gotten well. They've been convinced by their doctors to undergo certain treatments that to me seem archaic at best and barbaric at worst. The whole point of growing our own food is to maintain health. If you go to the industrial food supplier you are at their mercy. Sickness is a booming business.

It isn't my job to convince people that the food they eat is making them sick, people will subscribe to whatever line of thinking they wish. I can only say what my belief is based on the information that is out there. There's cause and effect, but not everyone correlates it. I gravitate toward the school of thought that sees that we were once relatively unaffected by autoimmune disease in the recent past and then examines why that was? What changed? In my mind it's a foregone conclusion.

With that in mind, I recently stumbled upon the Caveman Doctor who's podcast I really enjoy. I thought his talk about his profession, which is a radio oncologist, was very candid.

Foraged Food Friday's

I've been kicking this idea around in my head for a while, a completely local meal at least one day of the week. Beginning this weekend I will post what our meal consists of.

The rule is everything has to either come from your yard, or has traveled for less than an a couple of hours. Nothing from the grocery store.

A strong emphasis will be placed on foraged food, hence the name. Farmers markets are probably the best way to meet the criteria.

(okay, olive oil, soy sauce, wine are exceptions to the rule)

Thinking outside the food box can be a challenge so to get some ideas there are a few forage related links posted.





Wild Food

Southern Forager

Swales

February

Apr

The swale berms have really greened up. In February we topped them off with some compost and seeded them. It was a mixture of mustard, clover, cilantro, nasturtium, lupine, calendula, dill, chamomile, and
bergamot.

You can get a good idea of the amount of slope they yard has by looking at the fence line in the background. I've only seen this swales full on a few occasions. Water used to race down to the corner of the lot and pond up there. It would stand for a day or two sometimes. It doesn't do that anymore.

Feb

The hugel beds have also begun to green up. After I applied the compost I seeded them, mostly with mustard seeds but also some other things as well. The mix contained white clover, two varieties of mustard, millet, parsnip, echinacea, chamomile, dill and cilantro.

Apr

The real important thing is to get the compost stabilized with roots so that the rain won't wash it away. The mustard seed has done a good job so far. The other things, not so much. They may sprout later on as it warms up. Squirrels took some of the seed, but I'm not sure how much. Without the straw on top birds would have gotten it all.

Spring

I've read lots of books about designing a food forest and its all well and good when it's a diagram, but it doesn't work the way it's written down.

You can plant rye and vetch and clover everywhere in the yard but whether or not it grows where you plant it is a different story. Nature does what it's going to do. We don't control it.

Nature does everything on her own schedule. I've waited so long for seeds to germinate I forgot that I ever planted them in the first place. Nature knew to wait, I didn't.

No food forest is man-made. Nature does all the work plus another million things we can't even imagine. We're only designers and although we be feeble designers at that, it doesn't matter, not when we have the powerful ally of nature.

"If you do something right, it will do a lot more right itself." - Bill Mollison

I read a long time ago that frogs spend the winter on the bottom of ponds. I never thought there was any truth to that but that's exactly where I see them at all the time since I cleaned the pond. There are four or five that hang out there that the dog chases around, even diving in for them sometimes.

Comfrey has erupted from out of nowhere already. It's like it's not there one day and fully grown the next. Plants grow a lot at night.

Nectarine

The peach trees had LOTS of blossoms on them and fruit is starting to set. The asian pear tree bloomed, plum, cherry, apricot, nectarine but I don't know if they have set any fruit or not. Last year all of the cherries shriveled up and died. The birds got all of the peaches. We got one apricot out of two that grew.

There are tons of blueberry blooms. We had a decent amount last year and they grow throughout the year.

Asian pear

There were three grapevines that we put in last year that have made it through the winter. One made it to the top of the fence vertically but didn't get anywhere horizontally before winter. Hopefully, I can get it trained along the top of the fence this year and maybe get some fruit.

I also overwintered four more grapevines in the house that just got planted on the other side of the fence. They are muscadines.

We've had good luck with raspberries so we put in about ten more varieties. We've not had good luck with blackberries however. There are some wild ones in the zone 5 area but they haven't ever produced.

We've had elderberry for several years and it's grown well but never bloomed yet. Most of our gooseberries died from the heat I think. This year I sourced some closer to home that might do much better.

Old Southern Apples

Since I've been delving into the southern apple world lately a lot of information has come to light. It's a shame that we southerners have, for the most part, lost a lot of our heritage in the food department.

"The modern fast paced urbanized South has moved so far from its agrarian past that large parts of its heritage have been virtually forgotten. Southerners delight in restoring old houses and urban neighborhoods, and many city dwellers buy old farms and restore the buildings for a weekend retreat. But our unique southern heritage is more than Victorian houses and heart-pine floors, mahogany furniture and Coin silver; it is also Bloody Butcher corn, Red Ripper peas, Ledmon watermelons, Greensboro peaches, upland cotton, Gold Dollar tobacco and James grapes. These are living threads that lead directly back to three hundred years of southern agrarian past." - L. Calhoun

By some estimates, the south had upwards of 16,000 apple varieties. Today there are maybe five varieties in the grocery store, all shipped in from Oregon, and completely useless for nearly any purpose.

Old Southern Apples is a book written by Lee Calhoun in 1982. It was re-issued in 2010. I just received a copy of it. I'm always amazed when I find out things that I didn't know. This book is truly an eye-opener.

Until lately I've always just assumed an apple was an apple, however that's not the case at all. Depending on the variety, apples have specific uses. Some apples are good for eating whole but most aren't. Some apples are perfect for baking because they hold up well and don't turn to mush in the oven. Some apples you wouldn't want to eat at all but make great hard ciders. Some apples are harder than baseballs and don't seem to be good for anything but become perfectly ripe just in time for Christmas dinner. They call these "keepers". Some apples were grown strictly to feed to livestock. There is also apple brandy, cider vinegar, and apple butter.

In the acknowledgements of Old Southern Apples, Lee thanks Tom Brown of North Carolina for his dedication to apple hunting. Many of the apples listed as extinct in the 1982 edition have been found in the latest edition thanks to Tom. His yearly newsletters alone are worth a visit to his website.

I recently bought 8 apple trees from Tom and I can't wait until summer to order some more from him.

I didn't specify which trees I wanted so I left it up to him. Here is what he sent me. Betcha never heard of these before;

Betsy Deaton
Camack's Sweet
Red June
Red Kane
Fleming
Winter Banana
Magnum Bonum
Jelly Flower

If you start looking for them you'll find lots of websites about southern apples, here's a few:


Big Horse Creek

Century Farm Orchard

Urban Homestead

Vintage Virginia Apples

NY Times article on Lee