Community Sponsored Agriculture

This year our family did something I wish we would have done when we moved to Poughkeepsie the previous year: we joined a CSA. For those unfamiliar with the term, CSA stands for Community Sponsored Agriculture. CSAs vary, but they all have some things in common. Generally, you pay a fee for the season and pick up some fresh local vegetables every week or so. As far as I can gather that seems like the one thing they all have in common. From there they can vary a bit. But this one feature brings a lot of great benefits that are relevant to the mission of this blog. I will start with those then talk a bit about some of the great things I get from my particular CSA The Poughkeepsie Farm Project, which in my opinion is a very good one.

The most obvious advantage of a CSA is that it provides you with produce that is locally grown and therefore also in season, as opposed to something that is not in season and shipped half way across the country, or farther. This reduces your carbon footprint and makes you less dependent on the industrial food system. It also supports an alternative local food source and the people working to grow it.

Of course my reasons for joining a CSA are not entirely altruistic. I get a lot of great things from my membership. The produce I pick up every week is a lot fresher than what I can buy at even the best supermarkets. So it tastes a lot better and lasts longer. I also get exposed to vegetables I have never tasted and in some cases never knew existed. Sometimes these are entirely unfamiliar vegetables, other times they are different varieties of a common vegetable. Still, other times it means eating a part of a plant that simply does not make it to most grocery stores for various reasons (garlic scapes are a good example). Exploring new foods puts you out of your comfort zone and will introduce you to new recipes. This can really help you change things up if you find yourself in a rut cooking the same meals every week.

In the context of this blog CSAs do something else great: they get you used to eating what is local and in season. For many americans this presents a challenge. The typical US supermarket has no seasons and you can get pretty much any fruit or vegetable you want year round. This seems like a good idea at first, but when you actually taste a lot of the produce out of season it simply does not satisfy. For example, I have no desire to eat a tomato outside of tomato season and will simply pick up canned tomatoes for a recipe if I need them out of season. Most supermarket tomatoes are picked while they are still green and ripened using ethylene gas, so they don't taste very good. The greenhouse tomatoes they sell are a little better, but still nowhere near as good as one of the tomatoes that comes out of my garden or CSA between August and early October.

Some research shows that our bodies do better eating fruits and vegetables in their proper season. This might explain why I crave salads more in in the summer and roasted potatoes more in the winter. It also makes sense to get used to eating produce in season now, because shipping some agricultural products long distances might become prohibitively expensive in the future.

I feel very lucky that my particular CSA has some great features. It offers working shares which give you a discount on your membership if you volunteer some of your time. I like this because I get to meet other CSA members who generally have common interests. They give the option of several kinds of jobs to fulfill a work requirement, but I always choose some kind of field work because this allows me to learn more about growing food from the farm staff.

My CSA also lets members pick some of their own vegetables. This saves the staff some work and again puts me out in the field where I can see the source of my food. I often will take my two year old son who loves to help pick (and eat) beans, tomatoes, and berries. This provides a great learning opportunity for him. I also learn a lot. While picking okra this summer, a vegetable I don't have a lot of experience with, an Indian woman and an African-American woman from New Orleans showed me how to avoid picking pods that had become too tough (if the tip bends they are good). In general, the CSA attracts people from many cultures who appreciate good produce.

The opportunity to pick my own vegetable also works out very well because it allows me stock up. One week I might be allowed to pick a pint or a quart of something. But during the peak of the growing season I might be encouraged to take as much of a vegetable as I can carry home. I took advantage of this by picking a shopping bag full of green beans, blanching them, and storing them in the freezer for the winter. This will come in handy because the only drawback of my CSA is that, like the growing season for most crops in my area, it is not year round. Eventually I would like to have season extenders at home that will allow me to grow greens in the winter. But for now I'm back to going to my local grocery store and looking forward to when my CSA starts up again in the spring.

I hope you will look into the CSAs in your area and consider joining. I'm very happy with mine.

A note on my absence:  I have neglected this blog for a while due to Theo's irregular nap schedule, other obligations, and poor time management on my part. I hope to keep posting regularly (at least monthly). I'm also very happy to announce that we are expecting a baby girl around the new year. We plan on having a home birth and I will write a bit about the experience. If you don't want to miss a post please subscribe. Thanks.

Back in September

Sorry I have not posted in a while. I have been busy doing the things I write about here. I plan to have a new post up in the beginning of September and will start posting on a monthly basis instead of a weekly one. I have too much on my plate at the moment. If this changes I will begin writing more regularly again. I also plan to submit a story to the space bat challenge, so keep an eye out for that.

Finally, my brother-in-law who is also a stay-at-home dad writes a great blog. He recently lost his daughter to a stillbirth and he has written a very touching post about it. You should give it a read, but have some tissues handy. 

Allergy Tea Recipe

I like going to herbal remedies first whenever I have any kind of health problem. In my experience they work well, don't cost much, and for the most part carry none of the scary side effects we associate with modern pharmaceutical medicines. So this week I would like to give you my recipe for an effective and great tasting allergy tea that I have used for years to treat my seasonal allergies. I tried over the counter and prescription medications when I was younger, but I really did not like them. One stopped working, another dried me out to the point of extreme discomfort, and another made me incredibly drowsy contrary to the claims made on the package.

For a long time I simply suffered with allergies. Then I came upon a great apothecary in Brooklyn. There I found a tea that worked wonders for my allergies without any side effects. I now drink it everyday to deal with my allergies to pollen, pet dander, and dust (a real problem when you have the windows closed during the cold winter months). I no longer live near the apothecary, but after looking at the ingredient list I have come up with my own version of the tea that works just as well. And since I buy herbs in bulk it costs me even less than I would pay for the tea at the apothecary. There are lots of places to find bulk herbs, but I like to order from Jean's Greens. They have a large selection of organic herbs at great prices and they are just up the river from me.

Allergy Tea

1 Part Nettle Leaf
1 Part Golden Rod
1 Part Ginger Root
1 Part Peppermint
1 Part Sage

Steep 1 Tablespoon of the tea for twenty minutes. Then enjoy. It tastes very good especially with some honey. Depending on the severity of your allergies drink 1-3 cups a day.

Note to nursing mothers: Sage can lower milk production. So nursing mothers should omit this from the recipe.

LESS Toys and TV

Some parents might call me a monster for the topic of this week's blog. Others will likely nod in agreement, or even let out a "well, duh". No matter what you think, it certainly makes me feel like a curmudgeon to suggest that kids don't need a fraction of the toys most of them have. This goes especially for babies and toddlers, but also extends upward in age.

Now this does not mean that my son does not have toys. He has lots of them. Though I feel no shame admitting that I have bought him very few of them. Most came in the form of gifts from friends and family. I bought him a xylophone for his first birthday and I have given him some balls and blocks on other occasions. Like I said, he has a lot more toys than the ones I bought him.

But you know what? He doesn't even want to play with his toys most of the time. I can picture many parents nodding after reading this. It often seems like he wants to play with everything but his toys. He find the "toys" that grown-ups play with much more interesting and a few implements from the kitchen will often occupy him for much longer than any toy he owns. So while I appreciate all the gifts that he has received, I don't feel a need to buy him toys. If someone wants to get him a gift I usually suggest something practical (clothes etc.), or a new book.

Some folks might wonder how I occupy him. Well, unless the weather is very brutal we spend a lot of time outside. He runs around, plays with a ball, inquires into the natural world, and attempts to "help" me in the garden. I let his curiosity dictate what we do most of the time. As long as there are no hazards I let him explore indoors and out.

This saves money and keeps the small home we rent from getting too cluttered with things that don't hold his attention for too long anyway. It also prevents us from spoiling him or overstimulating him. I find the latter a huge problem nowadays. How do we expect a child to focus their attention on one thing when we present them with so many options to divert it? Many parents give little thought to this. They plop their kids down in front of the TV with some toys that flash and sing, then they wonder why their child has a short attention span. But to me ADD seems like the inevitable response to a constant barrage of inane sounds and pictures. For this reason and one I will get to in a second, I also plan to keep Theo away from television as much as possible.

I realize that if I want to continue with the LESS (Less Energy Stimulation and Stuff) approach to toys, that I need to keep the child marketing machine from getting its hooks in my son. Limiting his exposure to commercials should help. Except for a few shows via the internet, my wife and I don't watch much television. Theo does not watch television now and we don't plan on letting him watch much when he gets older. We will probably introduce him to Sesame Street after his second birthday. Though I'm still weighing if and how we will do this. I watched a lot of TV as a kid and I don't think it had a positive influence on me. But I don't have a problem with Sesame Street, especially after a recent study that claims the show helps prepare children for school. In any case, keeping him away from TV should help us in that fight, because the demands for particular products usually come from TV commercials. I know that many of the cartoons I watched as a kid were nothing more than thinly veiled advertisements for the show's line of toys (Transformers, GI Joe, HE-Man, etc.). And I know that advertising to kids has gotten more sophisticated since then.

The services we use to watch TV don't have commercials, so we can keep him away from them at home if, for instance, we decide to let him watch some pre-approved cartoons on weekend mornings while we sleep in. But I know that he will get exposed to advertisements elsewhere. So I imagine that I will need to talk to him about commercials and advertising. He will get exposed to some video content. I can see us watching movies together on weekends, especially in the winter. I have looked forward to showing him Star Wars for the first time since long before he was born.

We will also need to pay attention to the influence other children have on him. But that is a subject for another blog. Ultimately, I know that much of the joy of my childhood did not come from my toys. Far more of it came from the little adventures I had with friends and the active imagination that kept me occupied when I was alone. I certainly don't look back and wish I had more toys, or that I had watched more TV.

Rounding Corners

Our culture has an obsession with cutting corners. Marketing and popular opinion encourage us to do things the quicker and easier way. But this approach often gives poor results whether cooking something in the kitchen or building something in the garage. Cutting corners has become synonymous with shoddy products, yet many of us still fall for the marketing that tells us otherwise. Walk down the center aisles of any supermarket and you will see a plethora of products claiming to make your life easier. Pre-made this and pre-done that. This in a can, that in a bag in a box. Usually this "convenience" comes with a big mark up.

I would like to go against the grain of popular thought and suggest the opposite approach. Instead of cutting corners, we should look to round them. By this I mean that we should look to make things ourselves instead of buying them and we should tend towards using older less energy intensive methods and tools.  It might take a little bit longer, but it costs less and usually gives better results than cutting corners. To help understand what I have in mind I will give an example

I recently started baking my own bread. When I did this instead of buying bread, I rounded a corner. It saves money and makes a better loaf than I would buy at the grocery store. Now I have a lot of experience cooking, but baking is new to me. So I buy packaged yeast. But if I learned how to make a good sourdough starter, I would not need to buy yeast. That would save me more money and make a much more delicious and nutritious loaf than the one I make now (I read good things about the health benefits of eating sourdough). I could round another corner if I milled my own grain instead of buying flour. Although it would require an initial investment in a grain mill, over the long run it would be cheaper to buy grain and mill it myself than to buy flour. Freshly milled grain tastes a lot better and has a lot more nutrients, because it contains the entire grain of wheat. The flour in the supermarket, even the whole wheat flour, has had the germ removed. This allows the flour to store for a long time, but you lose a lot in taste and nutrients. If you look very hard you might find freshly milled flour for sale, but it will cost you a lot more than the flour sold at most grocery stores. I could round another corner by growing my own grain.

Here is another example. I like to garden. This rounds a corner because I produce some of my food right at home. But many opportunities exist within gardening to round corners. For example, I don't have a good space to start seeds at the moment, because my toddler can now reach the spot I used last year. So I buy some plants from a local nursery. However, some seeds grow very well sowed directly into the ground (zucchini, beans, peas, nasturtiums, sunflowers, some lettuces). So I rounded a corner and saved some money by sowing these seeds instead of buying seedlings. If I had a better space to start seedlings I could round another corner and start more plants from seed. I could round yet another corner if I saved my seed instead of buying it. This would require me to learn more about seed saving and to have space suitable for starting seedlings, but I could easily do this given the time and space.

Rounding corners saves money and produces a better end product. I like the phrase because I think it communicates the idea very clearly and simply. At the same time it can be applied very broadly. It also syncs with the principle of LESS (Less Energy Stimulation Stuff). You can round some corners now and get to others as circumstances permit. I had the concept knocking around in my head for a while, but I could not find a good name for it. Doing things the more time consuming way and saving money is a major theme of this blog, so I'm glad I could find a good shorthand for this approach. What corners have you rounded? What corners will you round?

Chewy Granola Bar Recipe

I promised to share my chewy granola bar recipe and here it is. I searched for a long time to find a recipe that did not have too much sugar, but still tasted great. I found it on a site called Honest Cooking. I like this recipe because it is open-ended enough to let you choose a lot of your own ingredients. I have some notes on the ingredients I prefer below the recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups (160 g) oats
½ cup (96 g) sugar
½ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. cinnamon or other spices as desired (cardamom, nutmeg, etc.)
2½ cups additions: dried fruits, seeds, nuts, flax meal, bran cereal, puffed rice cereal, crushed pretzels, chocolate chips ... the combinations are endless!
⅓ cup (60 g) peanut or other nut butter
6 Tbsp. (89 ml) olive oil - canola oil, other oils, and melted butter will work here as well
¼ cup (60 ml) honey, maple syrup, or Agave syrup
1 Tbsp. (15 ml) water

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a baking dish with parchment paper, then lightly grease the paper with oil or butter. I use a 9 x 13 sized dish, but slightly smaller or bigger dishes work fine. It will just change the thickness of your bars

Process ⅓ cup (27 g) of the oats in a food processor until finely ground. You want it like flour. I actually use a spice grinder for this. The resulting oat flour helps hold the bars together.

If necessary, chop up dried fruit and nuts. You don't want the pieces too fine or too big.

Stir together all dry ingredients (oats, ground oats, sugar, salt, cinnamon, fruits/nuts/seeds).

Whisk together wet ingredients - oil, honey, peanut butter, and water.

Mix together the wet and dry ingredients, then spread in the pan. Press firmly into the corners and edges so the top is even.

Bake for around 30 minutes, until the top starts to brown. Thicker bars will likely take longer.

Let cool in the pan for at least 20 minutes, then take them out of the pan using the parchment. Let cool completely before cutting.  I like to reuse the other side of the parchment when I make another batch.

Notes on Ingredients

I like to use raw sugar instead of white. I use peanuts, peanut oil, and agave because they are cheaper than most alternatives. But feel free to experiment. For the "2 1/2 cups additions", I use 2 cups of nuts and a 1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips.

The bars stay together very well, but they do crumble a bit. If you want a very solid bar use molasses. I prefer the taste of agave, but molasses tastes good too and the bars hold up better than ones made with agave.

Enjoy!

An Ode to Nasturtiums

Trailing Nasturtiums from 2014

Last year I grew lettuces for the first time. We had just moved into the house we are renting and I had not kept a garden since I moved out of my parents house. The lettuce did better than expected, but I must admit that I did not have the space or the timing to do the kind of succession planting that would have given us a constant supply of salad greens. Luckily another plant in our garden provided an abundance of greens for salads and other purposes. Nasturtiums have become one of my favorite plants and I would like to tell you why you should make a place for them in your garden.

Like many things worth doing, there is more than one good reason to grow nasturtiums. I grew them mainly because they make good companions to other plants in my garden. Nasturtiums attract hover flies which eat aphids, a garden pest that can make swiss cheese out of many of your plants' leaves. So they act as a natural form of pest control.

But I also knew that you could eat the both the leaves and the flowers. I can still remember the first time someone handed me one of their mildly peppery leaves to taste. Some people have compared them to arugula, but I find it much milder. In any case, they go great in a salad and if you include their red/yellow flowers it will look as good as it tastes. The only problem:  at times I had more of them than I knew what to do with. Not a bad problem to have I guess. Still, I found a solution. Whenever you have too much of certain kinds of lettuce and you want to use it before it goes bad, make pesto. When making pesto from nasturtiums you can use the leaves, flowers, and even some of the more tender stems (though I would suggest not to use too many). I will post a nasturtium pesto recipe soon. I have read that the seeds can make a good substitute for capers, but I don't care for capers so I will leave that to others to experiment with.

I found them very easy to grow from seed. No pests ate them. They grow quickly and cover the ground, blocking out weeds and creating a kind of living mulch. All of the nasturtiums I sowed last year thrived and this year's crop look like they will do at least as well.  I have read that if you put them in richer soil you will get more leaves than flowers.

The last reason to grow nasturtiums is because they are simply beautiful plants. Their abundant leaves and flower make them pleasing to human eyes and to the pollinators they attract.