This weekend my fiance Matt and I were provided a wealth of occasions to enjoy, learn from and consider for the future.

We were invited to visit Toluma Farms, a 200 acre goat dairy in the small coastal town of Tomales (about a 2 hour drive southwest of Sacramento). The drive provides views of sun-baked rolling hills (and pleasant cloud cover), plenty of cows and the smell of eucalyptus to fill our lungs.

 

 

Tomales consists of 204 residents, a cute deli and bakery, a couple churches, post office, an inn and general store. Mostly it seems to be a coffee stop for folks traveling through on their Bay Area weekend excursions.

A view of half the town of Tomales

Toluma Farms is another two miles off the Tomales main drag. The Farm offers one internship opportunity about every 6 months; my interest in this internship is the reason we made the visit. There we met Eric, who lives on the farm, is the goat herd manager and general caretaker. He has a BS in Animal Science from UC Davis, so it is no accident that he is the manager of this expanding farm. We also met Anne Marie who was recently hired for her cheese making skills – pending permits from the county, Toluma Farms will produce and sell their own cheese.

Only a small portion of the 200 acres is currently used for the goats; a good amount is rented out for cattle running and dry potato farming. There is a large barn packed with straw for the goats, an outdoor penning area in which the goats commit mischief, a machine milking parlor with a milk storage tank and a building soon to be converted into a creamery. There are approximately 200 milking goats (not all milking at the same time) and the Farm has recently added a flock of ten East Frisian dairy sheep – right up my alley and the same type of sheep I have hand milked (really one of the only kind of dairy sheep available in the United States).

An internship at Toluma Farms appears to be an exceptional opportunity for me to increase and acquire skills in dairying small ruminants and cheese making.

The nearest city to the Farm is Petaluma, a rural, rolling 30 minute drive. We spent some time wandering around their Old Town. One of the neatest businesses we visited is the Seed Bank which sells 1,200 varieties of heirloom seeds out of the historic Sonoma County National Bank building. The Bank is part of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company; I am happy to say we have some heirloom melons grown from their seeds ripening in the garden as I write!

 

 

Besides these most agreeable tours of farm and city, we also enjoyed a folksy, mellow rock concert by Fleet Foxes at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley - a cool outdoor Acropolis style venue. The stone steps throughout the venue provide good views for the vertically challenged.
 

 

All in all, a successful and full weekend ... I look forward to whatever opportunities and challenges the future brings.

Here’s another batch of great seed catalogs for your consideration.  I’m  shortening the length of these reviews because I’ll never get to them all with the level of detail I gave you in my first review. I’ve been preoccupied with researching biblical herbs, culinary herbs and spices for some new posters.

Many readers are familiar with Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds which has quickly positioned itself as one of the premier heirloom and open pollinated seed catalogs, in addition to creating a veritable heirloom seed industry. They’ve gotten a lot of media attention and deservedly so because they are doing a lot to promote and conserve heirloom seeds. Their catalog is impressive to behold, weighty and thick and filled with lots of photos. You might even call it a bit indulgent with lots of gloss and full page photo spreads, and this serves as a excellent photo resource yet with a down home feel.

It’s not always clear from their descriptions what’s an heirloom and what is an open pollinated variety and there is plenty of information in the descriptions.  Clearly they have made a great effort to include many rare and historic varieties. The listings of  cucumbers. eggplants, tomatoes, squash, watermelon, melons are outstanding and there’s even some species melons included. Other well represented vegetables include okra and cowpeas (usually waste of time in my Zone 5) beets, carrots and oddities like the tropical winged bean or Solanum sisymbriifolium, a nasty thorny tomato relative that’s interesting to sample, and clearly they liked the fruit a lot more than I do. There’s plenty of flower seed selection at the back of the catalog. All in all Baker’s Creek is a treasure trove of heirloom and other seeds 

If Baker Creek is becoming the big boy on the block then the Seed Savers Exchange must be the Dad.   This non-profit’s decades long seed preservation efforts created new awareness for the value of our food heritage and helped sprout other seed savers and programs. Their catalog is filled with many rare and historic categories and I’m pleased to see extraordinarily rare items I was growing ten years ago are available commercially.  For example in peppers there’s Maule’s Red Hot, a variety I reintroduced, which was available from only one seed bank I Europe, and Napolean a great sweet pepper. Particularly notable is SSE selection of melons,  squash, watermelon tomatoes, peppers, lettuce cucumbers eggplant and beans. They offer a limited selection of transplants, potatoes and garlic including a few of my favorite Bogatyr, Chesnok Red, Georgia Crystal and Siberian.  There’s also a good selection of  flowers and some prairie seeds although their geographic origin is  not clear, which is useful to know for native plantings.

Southern Exposure Seed has been actively preserving southeastern varieties since the 1980s and has maintained its environmentally friendly non-glossy catalog.  Their offerings are full of unique varieties, especially from the southern region that may not do well in northern climates—although always worth a try. This includes great selections of okra, peanuts, cornfield pole bean varieties, southern dents and flour corns. cotton, and cowpeas.  They have a number of Cherokee corns and beans.  Their selection of other vegetable types is excellent including tomatoes, summer squash melons and watermelons.

One of the most delightful parts of their catalog descriptions are they make it quite clear when something was introduced, thus leaving no doubt  as to the age/lineage of a variety. This is very helpful. SSE has broadened its offerings to include many modern open pollinated selections, and at least one hybrid onion. They have a good selection of potatoes and garlic, culinary  and medicinal herb including roots and rhizomes of ginseng and goldenseal, flowers, books and more.

An outstanding heirloom seed catalog is produced by Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson Arizona. They probably carry more unique varieties of seeds than anyone else. This outstanding organization has been preserving rare Southwestern Native American seeds for decades and working with tribes to reinvigorate their traditional agriculture. This includes new world seeds and some old world introductions like melons and sorghum, long cultivated in this region They do not routinely send out their catalog preferring you to go online, and for a couple of bucks they’ll send you one.  These days it is in color and still on plain newsprint paper.

NSS varieties are not going to replace  selections from a more “typical” seed catalog offering a wider range of vegetable crops.  This catalog is exclusively dedicated to varieties that are grown by traditional people of the region. Thus many of their selections will not do well or mature fully in moister, colder, and shorter season areas. That said try some and see how they do.  However for example  if you live in the north and have space for one dry corn variety then I encourage you to grow a northern regional variety and not Hopi Blue corn.  Their selection of beans is astonishing, including  heat loving tepary beans, and black eye peas. They offer about 25 chilies, 50 corns including wild teosinte, gourds, melons, sorghum, devils claw,  tomatillos, sunflowers,  and 30 varieties of four squash species. They also have a nice selection of hard to find Southwestern foods including teas, chilies, cornmeal, and mole powders—just the thing to lend some authenticity to a southwestern/Mexican meal.

Lawrence Davis-Hollander is an ethnobotanist, former director and founder of the Eastern Native Seed Conservancy, author of Tomato: A Fresh from the Vine Cookbook president of botanicalposters.com, the artwork of his wife Margo. Additional blogs can be found on http://botanicalposters.com/blog and http://simpledailyrecipes.com. 

As we’ve been contemplating ways to make our life both more homemade and more old-fashioned, my wife, LeAnna, and I decided to scrap our CSA farm share and strike out on our own. We had no complaint about our farm, we loved it pretty dearly despite its incomprehensible fascination with tatsoi. But we decided that really what we wanted was not just a tangential connection to the land our food grew on, but we wanted to be the ones out there getting dirty and making it happen. So we planned to dig up half of our backyard and forego the usual impatiens in our front borders and see how many vegetables and herbs we could squeeze into our tiny, urban lot.

The problem with marrying someone very much like yourself is that it can really cut down on the chances of having a voice of reason enter into your marital decision making. Before we knew it, we were not only growing all our own vegetables and herbs, but we were also planning to start them all from seed. And furthermore, we were going to use open-pollinated, heirloom seeds so that we could save seeds this fall for next year’s crop. And, because the houses in our neighborhood are packed so tightly together that our windows receive little direct sun, we’d have to come up with some kind of grow light and seed starting system to make all this possible. You can see how these things snowball!

In for a penny in for a pound, as they say, I decided that if we were going to honor our rural roots, we’d have to do this up right. Even if we could have afforded it, running out and buying a fancy seed starting system was just out of the question. Mercifully, we’ve owned our home long enough to have accumulated an attic, cellar, and garage full of potentially useful junk and castoff construction waste. As I began planning for my seed starting rack, I realized that I had never gotten rid of the horrible 1970s fluorescent light fixture that used to hang in our kitchen. It had been hard-wired, but, I thought, I bet I could rewire it with a plug. I also had a bunch of old lumber in the cellar that my father had dropped off after he disassembled my late grandfather’s wheelchair ramp. Before you know it, we had a perfectly functional, if not entirely attractive, seed starting rack with an adjustable-height light – and all we had to buy was a pack of screws.

Having set the rack up on our back porch, we set to planting seeds. In ordering our seeds, we made some pragmatic choices – paste tomatoes for sauce, basil both for pesto to freeze for the winter and to eat fresh with sliced tomatoes and homemade mozzarella, marigolds for companion planting, red peppers for our toddler, and so on. We also made some whimsical choices – attempting to start plants like caraway, strawberries, huckleberries, and lemongrass (a very pleasant herb popular in Thai cooking).

A couple weeks in, we don’t have 100% germination, but we do have at least some of everything sprouted. Since they’re on the porch and we’re in New England, they do a nearly daily shuffle inside to avoid the still-cold nights as we wait and long and plan for the day when our tiny plot will finally be warm and ready for planting. The agricultural life is, on some deep level, a life of faith – that seeds will grow, that Massachusetts will finally warm up, and that life is better choosing against mainstream culture and opting for homemade. Even now, with our little sprouts not much more than a hint of a promise, we believe.

Winter is an excellent time to sit down, click on the computer and surf the internet discovering items of interest and tidbits of knowledge. Of course, I have my stack of books and magazines nearby – most on gardening and country living and I find myself flipping through pages as I envision my future plans.

A grand decision was made recently that came about after reading other GRIT blogs and researching. I came upon the website The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and found a listing of animal breeds and their existence rating ... ranging from critical to recovering. I plan to raise chickens, possibly a few turkeys and ducks and the guinea hogs look quite interesting. I will learn all I can about housing, feeding and where to purchase these different breeds as the winter weather whirls around outside. The poultry can be mail ordered and arrive as early as March.

Last year as we visited the new farm store down south they had a few cages of baby chicks and geese for sale. I only briefly checked them out since I knew if I spent too much time watching them, I would end up purchasing some and I am not quite ready.  I need to be somewhere permanent, not traveling back and forth. ... PLUS, I have to do my research!

So the decision to raise heritage breeds has given my life in the country a new meaning. I will carry on that which our ancestors were about and leave something for the future generations. Many of our heritage animal breeds and rare seeds (heirloom) are disappearing simply because no one is raising or planting them.

There are organizations such as Seed Savers that work on preserving heirloom varieties of seeds; like the heritage animal breeds, some are on the verge of extinction. I find seed saving very therapeutic and have been giving away Free Seeds the last few months from my website.

Recently I sent out an envelope to a high school that just constructed a new greenhouse and will be sending seeds off to a jail in Iowa for their Inmate Agricultural Program. Many individuals have been very appreciative sending sincere thank yous. I have high hopes that all receiving the seeds will enjoy the process, learn and pass the knowledge on.

I have created a Garden Forum that should help with questions and offer advice. I will be concentrating my efforts on heirloom varieties for the coming garden season so these are not lost and forgotten. Of course, I have my seed saving books and sites to help me along the way.

So Heritage Breeds and Heirloom Seeds is on my agenda for research this winter!

[Also check out GRIT's Guides to Animal Breeds, or, if you're like me and like to hold a book in your hands, for breed research, the Grit Staff highly recommends Storey's Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle and Pigs. – Editors]