Know Who Your Enemies Are

I was preparing a bed for a new crop the other day and I found a cutworm:

I immediately heard Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel sing "Know who your enemies arrrre.."

Which Prompted this list:

 Cutworms, snails, Monsanto, deer, fast food, Walmart, gophers, Starbucks, Globalism, agribusiness and government subsidy, GMOs, Drought, Oprah, Alan Alda...

 True, some of these are preemptive strikes. Alan Alda never did anything to me. I'm sure he is not particularly evil, I should scratch him off the list.
          In many cases, this is the best way to deal with enemies anyway. Just ignore them. Unfortunately, when your enemies list includes giant corporations it is hard to know what to ignore.
          These companies buy up all sorts of stuff and the word takes forever to get around. An example, Mars Inc., the candy bar company, owns Seeds of Change. Seeds of Change was a seed company that also had a line of pasta sauce and salad dressings. Now, they are a subsidiary of Mars Inc. which closed the research farm and fired all but one farmer.
       I bring that up because it seemed so strange when I first heard it. I only knew them as a seed company and had no idea they had a line of processed food. I couldn't picture why Mars bars would have an interest in them.
        Similarly, my dad found it strange that companies like Monsanto were copyrighting life and making it impossible for farmers to save seed. He thought all humans had a vestige of humanity. He couldn't picture anyone would have an interest in jeopardizing the entire species by meddling with the reproduction of food crops.
       

         So, what I realize is my enemies fall into three categories: money making decisions instead of people,  agricultural pests or disasters, and Alan Alda.
        I'll make peace with Alan. Maybe, some day, I'll get around to watching M*A*S*H and grow to love him through it.
        I can handle the pests. We have fence for the deer, traps for the gophers, and cutworms are much smaller than I am. I also practice "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and welcome snakes and coyotes. I support bears and mountain lions, at a great distance.
        As far as, money that makes decisions for people, I just don't expect I can abide.


Kellan's enemies list: Scissors on the floor, gophers, Nicholas Cage, and anyone who is mean to my mom, grandma, or sister. I'm sure I have more, but all of these should be self-explanatory.

I'd love to know the lists of anyone who reads this.

Wil.

Eatin' at the Eater's Ball

This weekend local food takes the podium in the Sierra foothills. Nevada County's second annual Food and Farm Conference will be held Saturday January 21st and Sunday the 22nd. $30 dollars gets a general admission seat to see all keynote speakers including none other than:




all the details are here: http://foodandfarmconference.com/

Cure for Mad Mama Pig?

I can't believe the birds haven't started to eat this yet!

Little Black Bean

It has not rained in two months here in El Dorado County, a depressing fact for farmers and pigs alike. The ground is dry and dusty with almost no green stuff growing. I bet if you took an aerial view of the area, it would look as brown as straw. However! It grew much, much colder today, with a hard freeze warning tonight and rain in the forecast for later this week. With this in mind, I am here to report that last week something broke in our sow. She is usually very mild mannered, so much so that I trust her with small children in the pen, but for a few days there, she was a terror.

First, she broke through her electric-net fence at dinnertime because she just could not wait a second longer for the grain to come to her. She was trained on this fence as a piglet and should know better, but the electric net does not have a strong charge right now, possibly because the solar charged battery is getting run down, possibly because there just isn't a good enough electrical ground with it being so dry. Either way, she put her stomach over her training and bust through with two piglets in tow. And then she did it again at breakfast the next morning.

 The solution was to put her inside the 16' by 16' hard wire pen that her house is in, with no free range of the electric fence area. But then she started getting out of that too. There is a T-post in the ground on the outside of each of the panels to prevent big pigs from pushing the panels and escaping. This is what Bean does: she takes a corner of the pen, preferably the one where I would come to feed her, pushes the bottom of the panel up with her snout and simultaneously sneaks the rest of her head under it as a place holder to squeeze the rest of her body through. It's quite a sight. Her piglets do not know what to make of it either.

What to do? She would not stay in her enclosure and if she did, she would pace back and forth frantically squealing and crying for food, not just at feeding times, but any time she heard someone near.

At this point in the story I should share with you a few facts about our sow and her particular situation:
1) Bean's pen is in the front yard, making monitoring her easy enough, but I was finding myself tip-toeing around so that she wouldn't detect me.
2) I love this pig. She set herself apart by being the smallest, most bat-like, and friendliest pig ever. Belly scratches are her favorite thing in all the world. She is somewhat doted on.
3) Her mom was exactly the same way. Loved belly-scratches, but turned mad for food.

So I got to thinking: could she be mineral deficient? I thought maybe all she needed was a day pen on green grass. So I set it up, made a leash out of red ribbon, and began walking her over there. We got three quarters of the way to the grassy day pen (her house is not portable at this time) and she stopped, turned around and started voraciously munching on a Dandelion-looking plant. I could not get her to leave it. Not with grain, not by pushing her, she just wouldn't move. So I let her eat the plant as she liked, until I could distract her enough to lure her up into the pen. It was another hard wire pen with T-posts for reinforcement and all the green grass she could have wanted, but she still went crazy and got out of it at dinner-time.

The next morning I opened the front door with the intent to walk Bean up to her grassy pen again even though she had gotten out it. But she beat me to it! In the time it took to step off the porch, she was out of her hard wire pen and through the electric net with all five piglets streaming behind her. And guess where she went? Straight to the Dandelion cousin! (In reality, it is probably not a cousin of Dandelion because it has no tap root and does not taste bitter.)

After a solid hour of cursing and corralling her around, I got Bean back into her pen with her month old piglets and slammed the door for good. No more trying to parade her in a red ribbon up the grassy knoll so that she can get her mineral deficiency in check; I bring the plants to her now that she's shown me the one she wants. I fed her an armful of the mystery plant yesterday and she devoured it with gusto (her babies did too!) This morning she did not make a racket at breakfast, nor did she break through her pen, and I harvested some more of this plant for her. It seems like she may be getting back to her mild-mannered self.
But as a neighbor always says, "We will see what we see..."

P.S. I'll let you know what the plant is when I figure it out.

This is what the oyster mushrooms look like now.

Mushrooms and local food

We harvested the first of the oyster mushrooms.
Mushrooms are high on the list of things too delicate for the supermarket. They are over 90% water and do not last on shelves. Oyster Mushrooms are particularly short lived. So, on the rare occasion I've seen them in the store--They look haggard. Mushrooms were intended to travel as spores and the fruiting body should not be subjected to cross country semi-truck trips.
              Oysters are a great substitute for meat because they have a firm texture and will absorb a lot of flavor. That is on top of  all the flavor they have themselves--Which is distinctly mushroom and not mollusc.
           

               This afternoon while, Kellan and I enjoyed our lunch of Oyster mushroom, bok choy, and spinach stir-fry with quinoa we perused the Extra.
               Extra is a weekly supplement put out by The Mountain Democrat. In it this week was an overview of the El Dorado Epicurean, a choice of seven four-course meals. Each itinerary includes four local restaurants.Our interests were immediately peaked, we could not wait to see what our local restaurants would be featuring in the way of local food.
               Unfortunately, the first selection  "Crab Lover's Culinary Adventure" does not jive with what I know about our county's foodshed. It's a bummer but, I have not caught a lot of crab in El Dorado County lately. Honestly, I have all but given up.

There are a few other things on the menus that answer the question, "what is wrong with this picture?"
              A few examples: Green beans, basil, and my favorites tomatoes and bananas

          I digress, maybe I am only jealous. Jealous that chefs can get along without us. 
         Or, am I disappointed? Has our local palate not realized that fresh local food tastes better?
       
 A few ground rules I would suggest for future events:
If you hold an event of this type in Northern California in January, there should be winter squash.
Stay away from seafood, unless the west coast drops into the ocean and El Dorado becomes beachfront.
Umm, apple hill? Maybe some apple pie for dessert. 

Most likely, we could not justify $90 for a dinner and this was how we made ourselves feel better. I truly hope this event is well attended and those that go enjoy themselves, their company, and their meals.

           

My Guinea Hogs are Better

The Cowlick Sisters at about 4 months old.

Everyone who uses Craigslist has their routine searches. Among mine are Vws, diesel cars, and American Guinea Hogs. I search American Guinea Hogs on Craigslist because I wake up and feed a small herd of them everyday and am interested in selling some of our piggles (older than a piglet, younger than a pig). I also like to peruse other folks ads.
This morning I searched to see if our ad was still up and found a number of people advertising for American Guinea Hogs in our area. Their ads ranged from detailing farm practices and philosophies to just stating date of birth and cost of the pigs for sale, but one thing was the same throughout: their pictures were terrible. I felt a surge of competitiveness when I saw out of focus pictures of black pigs in mud. I'm not real tech savvy, but I can take some pictures, especially when it comes to showing off my pigs (and trying to sell them).
I've decided to post a few pictures of our beloved American Guinea Hogs, so that I may share with the world the beauty of this entertaining foraging heritage pig.
P.S. These pictures aren't fair--we haven't had rain in two months, so the ground that our pigs are actually on does not look like the lush green grass pictured, but they're not on bare dirt either.

The beginnings of the herd on this property early in 2011. There were six from the original litter (there are two sows and a boar at our other farm) and we traded two girls for a boar. That's who you see here: the boar with his nose in the air on the far left. They were rotated around a 3/4 acre field all winter 2010-11. This space is now planted in onions.

Back in the day (remember these pigs came over from Guinea on the same ships that brought Africans to the U.S. as slaves) used to call them 'yard pigs' because they had free range of the yard and could be trusted not bite or harass anyone (our program follows that any one who does bite or harass, or to the opposite, doesn't like belly-scratches, is eliminated first). These two are as sweet as they get, right here on the driveway in the front yard in 16' hog panels and a little A-frame house to sleep in. There was enough green grass to keep them busy so that they didn't push their panels like they can when they get bigger and bored.

Some Guinea Hogs have great thick black coats, some don't. We like the ones that do. Our boar is an exception to the previous caption and this one, but we keep him around for his baby-makin' material.

New babies! This picture was taken just a few days ago. These piglets are 3 weeks old today and since there is only five in the litter (Mama was bred in her first heat), they are getting plumper and more rambunctious all the time! They are so fun to watch.

Gettin' a snack from Mama Pig.

This picture was taken in October and we still have the bulk of these pigs for sale. They are about 5 months old and come from two litters. For more pigs, meat, or pets, I highly recommend the American Guinea Hog.

Sunny Parsnip Day

We decided to pull the parsnips today. We could tell from the looks of their crowns that there were some monsters in the bed, but we couldn't be sure how much the gophers were dinning on them from underneath, and we wanted to reclaim the space. We planted them in July and five months is plenty more than we like to keep much of anything around for in our tightly managed garden.
Parsnips are special though. They become sweeter the colder it gets and the longer they stay in the ground, so it was a hard decision to pull and store them instead of keeping them in the ground until spring. If you haven't eaten a parsnip before, as I hadn't until last winter, please visit your nearest food co-op and find them. Deborah Madison has a great recipe in Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone called 'Elliot's Breakfast Parsnips' that I recommend, but tonight, in celebration of the harvest, I made parsnips vichy. There is a recipe for Carrots Vichy in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and I added parsnips to it. It's a very simple dish to make and when you try it, you'll feel like you're having dessert for dinner. Here it is: Slice 1/2# carrots and 1/2# parsnips into rounds, put into a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add 2T butter (I used ghee) and 2T honey (I used Stan's). Simmer, skimming frequently, until almost all the water has evaporated and you are left with a small amount of sauce in the bottom of the pan. Season with sea salt to taste. The parsnips will become mush and your loved ones will ask if they're going to be served baby food for dinner, but everyone will love it.

Check out these lovely parsnips! Some of them looked like they were running, or like human roots with arms and legs, and I keep making a joke about Pan's Labyrinth when the girl puts the root in milk under the bed. Creepy, I know.

I Miss You! But I like it here...

So the ranch is great. Everybody's young and progressively minded; up for involved conversation and singing in the field. The work is outdoors, using our bodies constantly and rewarded with healthy food grown here, made by a collective of excellent self-taught cooks. We're also gratified by things like the potatoes we planted in our first week of work peeking up through the soil.

I saw my first rattlesnake last week! It was hiding in an aluminum pipe along the fence line and it's rattle sounded like water leaking out of a hose, so I didn't register it right away (also, being from a place where we never really encounter poisonous/predatory creatures, I'm still working on my snake/spider radar). We ended up picking up the pipe by it's middle so that we could ascertain which end the snake was lurking from. Then we put that end of the pipe through the fence, outside the field, and stuck a hose in the other end to rinse the snake out. Once it fell out of the pipe, it coiled itself and raised it's head--pissed that we had disturbed it's protected hiding place. I couldn't blame it! All I could do was be in total awe of it's beauty and the power inherent in an animal that is designed to warn you before it strikes.