One thing new that I planted this past fall was Early Purple Vienna kohlrabi. I had never even tasted one before, and wasn’t entirely sure what it was. But it seemed interesting in the seed catalog – exotic even – and was a cool season vegetable. So I was game.

I sowed the seeds in early August directly into a bed enriched with manure and peat moss along with the turnips and the rutabaga seeds. Because I’d never planted rutabaga before either, and because we had a lot of heavy rain that moved all the seeds around a bit, when all the seedlings first started coming up I found it really hard to differentiate between the three. It wasn’t until they started to look like this that it became obvious to me which was the kohlrabi.

When it comes time to harvest them, kohlrabi are really hard to get out of the ground. You have to cut through the stem at the base of the bulb, and it takes some effort. There’s also a lot of prep work just to get at the goods. There are all the leaves and stalks to clear away, and they have to be peeled, a task to which with their octopus-like arms present something of a challenge. Why bother?

Well, here’s my reasons:

1. They are really easy to grow. Pretty much all of the seeds I put in came up.

2. They grow really fast – 55 days from seed to table.

3. I never saw a single pest or pest egg on them; not so much as a bug bite out of the greens.

4. You can eat the bulb raw like an apple, slice it for crudité or shred them in salads like a radish.

5. You can eat the greens.

6. They are good source of vitamin C and potassium and are low in both sodium and calories.

7. They are a supposedly a good root-cellar vegetable, though I did not end up growing enough to find this out first hand. Kept in the proper conditions, cold (32-40 degrees) and moist (packed in damp sand or sawdust) they will last for a few months, though not as long as carrots and potatoes.

8. They grow in spring and in fall.

9. Kohlrabi doesn’t have a particularly distinctive flavor of its own. It’s a member of the Brassica family (Brassica oleracea gongylodes), which you can almost infer by the comparisons used to try to pin down its taste. I’ve read it described as having a mild “turnip-cabbage” taste, a “radish taste” and “a crisp turnipy texture and a sweet cucumber taste.” But when I taste it raw it tastes more like a broccoli stalk to me, but less sweet. The real beauty of the kohlrabi is that cooked it has kind of the consistency of a potato, plus they tend to absorb the flavors of whatever they’re cooked with, which makes them an excellent potato substitute in stews and soups. In fact, according to Rebecca Wood’s The New Whole Foods Encyclopedia they were “a key staple in eastern Europe until they were deposed by the potato.”

10. They’re really beautiful. You can’t beat them for adding color and character a sense of real richness to a harvest basket.

I’ve got some plans for the kohlrabi this upcoming year. I’m going to plant it in the spring and in the fall, and I want to do some serious succession planting this year to try to keep a steady supply of fresh veggies coming in the house for as long as I possibly can. I’ll plant the Early Purple Vienna seeds this spring, and I may plant a few in the fall too for fall eating, but for fall storage I’m going to take the advice of Mike and Nancy Bubel (Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables) and plant either the Grand Duke or White Vienna variety if I can find them. If not, then I’ll scan the seed catalogues for a variety that’s particularly suited for storage. I would like for the kohlrabi to help bridge the potato gap a bit ... giving me a potato substitute for a month or two in the spring until I can start harvesting my banana fingerlings. We’ll see how it goes.

I received a copy of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a birthday gift, and this past week I finished reading it. The book is divided into three sections, Industrial: Corn, Pastoral: Grass, and Personal: The Forest. The book led me from a farm growing industrial corn in the Midwest; in and out of feedlots; through my local Whole Foods store; to the “beyond organic” Polyface Farm near Staunton, Virginia; hunting for wild boar; and finally out to forage for wild mushrooms in California. It was a long read; not because it was difficult, but because it was like reading a complex novel with lots of characters and plots whose stories all eventually culminate into some sort of abstract epiphany. It was also a long read I think because at one point I became so dispirited by what I was reading that I finally had to take a break. This book is a disturbing call to action to take control over the foods that we eat, not only the choices we make but the nature of how that food comes into being. It’s also a fair depiction I think of our own existential helplessness.

Health is a very big concern and motivator for me. Despite my ignorance in many areas, I’ve been conscious of some of the dietary dangers out there for quite some time now. I went through my kitchen and threw out everything with “partially hydrogenated oil” on the label somewhere around 1996, and I haven’t (knowingly) bought or eaten it since, though ubiquitous as it is, I’m sure that in spite of my efforts I’ve still managed to ingest plenty of it over the years. I ditched the microwave almost a decade ago. Over the years I’ve added corn syrup, palm oil, preservatives, artificial colors and flavors, hormones and antibiotics to my list of things to avoid. I try to buy organic, and, as I’ve talked about in this blog, I’ve started growing my own food. My dietary concerns were a BIG motivator in my decision to begin gardening like I mean it.

So it came as something of a shock and dismay to realize that I, like many people, have been deceived by the lure of “organic.” The noise that’s been made over the use of antibiotics and growth hormones in the production of meat and milk has obscured the fact that these “organic” meats may not be intrinsically any healthier for us to eat if the cows (and chickens and pigs) are fattened on “organic” corn that is essentially otherwise inedible. And to find out the extent to which almost any processed food that we eat contains corn in some form or another, well, the whole thing was just downright horrifying to me.

I don’t even really like corn.

This past week I had to go out of town for the day, and on my return trip I took the long way home, down through Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In his chapter on foraging for mushrooms Pollan describes the “pop-out effect”: “When we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we’re hoping to spot – whether it is color or pattern or shape – it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command.” I experienced something not unlike this phenomenon I think on my drive through the Eastern Shore farmlands, and in my case what was “popping out” was evidence that some of the most disturbing things that I had read in Pollan’s book were happening right here, in my own state, before my very own eyes; and that I was regularly grabbing it off my local supermarket shelves. Not everything I saw was disturbing. I drove past one place where a big house was situated at the top of a high hill; the front yard was a fenced pasture sloping all the way down almost from the front door to the road I was on, and grazing on that hill were a dozen or so black cows. I couldn’t really see whether there was any “managed intensive grazing” going on because the cows were way up the hill near the house. They may have been temporarily contained up there, or they may have had the run of the whole field. Either way, the sight of cows out to pasture at all was reassuring to me.

Not a quarter mile later, though, I drove past what seemed a relatively small dairy operation. There was a low-lying neutral colored building, and penned up in a small area between the building and road were groups of cows standing in a dark muckiness that looked for all the world to me like “a grayish mud that, it eventually dawns on you, isn’t mud at all.” There was a small sign out in front of the place, and I craned my neck as I drove past to see what it said. And I’m glad I did, because it was the name of a popular and ubiquitous brand of organic milk and dairy products which will remain nameless, but which I have regularly purchased – falling, no doubt for the cute cartoons and beguiling “supermarket pastoral” stories on the labels. I know that huge industrial companies contract out the work of raising animals to small farmers. But until I drove past this small operation, I had never really thought about it all. Even reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as eye-opening as it was, couldn’t bring home its truths in quite the same way that driving past this small dairy farm did, where there was an ominous lack of green grass, and the cows were up to their hooves in something that looked suspiciously like their own manure.

As I have been a number of times over the years, I’m once again at a loss as a shopper. I no longer want to avoid just ultra-pasteurized and, if possible, homogenized milk products (the sale of raw milk for human consumption is illegal in Maryland); I can now no longer trust that “organic” means what I think it should mean; that I am avoiding any evils by buying “organic.” I mean, I always understood that “organic” junk food (cookies, crackers, chips, etc.) was still junk food; but I had believed that it meant something different, something more significant, in a product like, say, milk. The “omnivore’s dilemma” is explained by Pollan this way: “When you can have just about anything nature as to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you.” Granted there’s a difference between the cumulative effects of consuming antibiotic and hormone-pumped, corn-fed, ultra-pasteurized dairy products and eating the mushroom that kills you more or less on the spot. The real dilemma, I think, is trying to eat in such a way that death as a consequence of eating food does not have to be on our radar screen at all.

I drove on. Past fields with little green and white signs along the roadside that said “organic farm; do not spray.” Past an Amish girl pedaling off down a side road on a bicycle in the direction of the coming evening gloom. Through small towns, with old houses right up on the street, that reminded me of the article in the latest issue of GRIT about how one needs to behave to get along successfully living in a small town. What would it be like to live here – in Galena (population 504) or Cecilton (population 474) – maybe all of one’s life? I can’t even imagine. I’m an army brat. Even as a child I remember having the thought that if things didn’t work out here – if I didn’t make friends, if I didn’t do well, if I wasn’t happy – it wouldn’t really matter, because in a year or two I would be somewhere else. I live in a modestly sized town now (population about 3,700), but it’s situated outside a military base and is part of the ever-expanding cloud of suburban bedroom communities outside of Washington, D.C. What struck me as I made my way South on 213, was that eating “local” – buying meat and eggs from a farmer that’s about 20 minutes away from me; accepting an invitation to participate in a cheese-making group; going to farmer’s markets – draws lines between myself and a few others that knit us together into a community that may in fact stretch across ten or twenty “small towns,” and that this community of food producers and eaters all have in common the necessity to preserve relationships almost above all else, or else the “community” that we comprise will dissolve. Eating local means meeting local. But to some extent, “local” is a relative term.

I do not eat 100 percent locally. It’s not because I don’t want to. But it’s really difficult to find all of the things that one might want or need locally. To some extent, every single product is a distinct investigational project. It’s exhausting. And the more I learn, the more changes that I want to make. I’ve done a lot this year towards getting my produce needs met out of my own back yard. And I’ve got the local egg thing worked out. Until I can get my own chickens installed, I get them from the same local farmer that’s letting my Tamworth hog get fat on foraged acorns even as we speak. I feel good about eating his eggs because I know his chickens are free range – and I don’t mean “supermarket pastoral … literary” free range; I mean that they walk up to greet me when I arrive, and I have to dodge them with my car when I leave. The yolks are orange. And a dozen eggs can contain double-yolkers, the tiny eggs of new layers, jumbo eggs and every conceivable size in between. I can also continue to get broilers from him, but no more until spring. I’m willing to try eating rabbit because he raises them for meat and because I trust that the meat of any animal that he’s producing is better for me than anything I’m liable to get in the supermarket. He’s going to start raising cows in the spring of 2010 and I want to get my grass-fed beef from him. But it’s a long time between the idea and the day that the particular cow that’s destined to fill up my freezer gets led to slaughter. Where am I supposed to get good grass-fed beef in the meantime? I used to feel like I could go to a local supermarket or to Whole Foods some 30 to 40 miles away and get a decent product for the interim. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve found a place that I can order grass-fed beef from. They’re in Arizona. Getting it shipped to me is decidedly un-”green,” and I’m reminded that the reason Michael Pollan visited Polyface Farms in the first place is because Joel Salatin refused to ship him a steak – the very concept of such a thing being against his principles. But then, my health and the health of my family is my first priority. And anyway, it’s an interim solution because I know where I can get it locally eventually. I just can’t get it locally any time in the near future. And seriously, a person can only eat so much pork.

It’s a dilemma indeed.

But every step, choice, every act in the direction of the goal counts, and I’m taking a number of steps these days, so for the moment I’m not going to beat myself up about ordering the meat. I acknowledge that it’s not the best of all possible choices. But it’s the best choice that I can dig up today.

In the end, making a move towards healthier, more sustainable eating is like making any other change. For one thing, it’s a process. It’s a series of small gestures that become something almost without one realizing it. I suspect that these small gestures matter, that the quality and composition of every mouthful that we ingest surely figures somehow into the final equations of our lives. Or maybe I have to believe this, because it seems like small gestures are all that I am able to reasonably make. I don’t know. But at the end of a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, one is either closer to one’s goals as a result of small efforts or not. The time is sure to pass, either way.

 

On a recent Sunday, armed with my newly purchased copy of Nourishing Traditions and two gigantic heads of cabbage from a local farmer’s market, I set out to make my first ever batch of lacto-fermented sauerkraut.

The recipe I used was for making the sauerkraut in glass quart jars, a good thing, since I didn’t have any kind of crock at the time. I started out trying to shred the cabbage by hand, and then I thought, “What, am I stupid? Use the food processor!” So I dug out my blades, set the thing up, turned it on, and started shoving chunks of cabbage down into it. It became clear really quickly that I wasn’t shredding the cabbage though; I was mincing it. Still, it didn’t seem like a major problem, and I’d already gotten started, so I figured what the heck. It would be sauerkraut relish. When I had enough to fill a large bowl, I added the ground sea salt and the caraway seed. Then I dug in there and mixed it all together. I had ten minutes of pounding ahead of me to get the juices flowing. Then I was supposed to put it in the jar, make sure the juices were all the way to the top, and close the jar tightly so that no air would get in. According to the recipe, after three days at room temperature, this stuff would be edible.

To the casual eye, the ingredients in sauerkraut are simple enough – cabbage, salt and caraway seeds. But sauerkraut is more than the sum of these three things. It is what they combine to become and what, as a result of their combination, comes into being. This is an actual biological fact. But like so many other actual, biological facts, it has metaphysical implications.

Lacto-fermentation – both as a vocabulary word and as a concept – is new to me. Lactic acid is a natural preservative that inhibits the growth of bad bacteria. The surfaces of vegetables and fruits are covered in lactic acid-producing bacteria, and lacto-fermentation is the process by which we can encourage these bacteria to convert the starches and sugars in vegetables and fruits into lactic acid. The presence of large amounts of lactic acid in fruits and vegetables makes them more digestible and makes the vitamins in them easier to absorb. Also, eating lacto-fermented vegetables as a condiment makes it easier for our bodies to extract nutrients from and to digest other foods, most notably, meat. [See “Sauerkraut: What Makes It Sour?” for more on lacto-fermentation and sauerkraut. – Ed.] Lacto-fermentation is a very old process that has been used by Greek, Middle Eastern, Asian and American Indian cultures for many centuries. The Greeks called the process of lacto-fermentation “alchemy,” and as I was pounding my minced cabbage with the end of an old wooden rolling pin that used to belong to my paternal grandmother, alchemy was very much on my mind.

In a previous post I approached the issue of the relationship between our inner and outer lives, and I’m not sure what, if anything, that I accomplished. But the question is nagging at me again today, because the sauerkraut strikes me as a kind of metaphor for something that I’m still struggling to understand. If the cabbage and the salt and the caraway seeds are the regular old things that I see around me every day as I go about my business, and the sauerkraut is a finished product – an end, a commodity, a success – then what occurs in between, inside that sealed jar, invisible to the naked eye, is the mystery of creativity.

And when do we ever “see” creativity?

It’s easy to think of nature as something happening all around us and outside of us. We tend to separate our own consciousness from the spurts and sprawls, the wilts and rest and rejuvenation that are par for the course in the natural world. It’s hard to place ourselves squarely into the center of things that are outside of our control because that means that we are not entirely under our own control. And yet I can’t think how often I’m listening to an interview on NPR with some writer, or film-maker, or actor, and hear some reference to characters taking over a story, or to a story “writing itself.” It seems a common artistic observation that the creative process takes on a life of its own that we can’t exactly see. We only see its effects. All of which is to say that perhaps the same alchemy that’s going on in nature is going on in us.

Twenty-four hours after setting the sealed jars aside, I check back on my sauerkraut. It does not appear that anything is happening. I had read that the color would gradually change; that the cabbage would appear less green and that it would take on the tannish color that I’m used to seeing in sauerkraut. But at this point I can see no evidence of this.

After 48 hours, one of the jars has started to leak. I can also see that all of the liquid seems to have moved to the top of the jar. The leaking concerns me. Lacto-fermentation is supposed to be an anaerobic process – no air. Does the leaking mean that air is getting in? Or only that the pressure in the jar is getting to be so high that the liquid is forcing its way out? It occurs to me to wonder if the jars might explode. My husband suggests putting them inside of a cardboard box in case they do explode. That seems like a good idea, so I do it, which is when I realize that there are two jars leaking.

At the 72-hour mark, I definitely have three jars leaking; one of them copiously, and I’m seriously fearing an explosion. According to the directions, this stuff is supposed to be ready to eat. So, remembering a recent Foxwood Farms post about opening their lacto-fermented salsa (“What Harvest Means to Me”), I hold one of the jars over the sink and give the lid a twist. And it’s a good thing that I do, too, because first comes all the fizzy liquid, and then the sauerkraut itself rises up about two inches out of the jar in a column … and stops. And that’s it.

So, there’s the issue of leaking which makes this sauerkraut suspect. And there’s the unfamiliarity of it all. Is it any good? Will it make it me sick? I mean, “bacteria” is hardly a word with a positive connotation in our society. Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions assures me in her section on lacto-fermentation that if the process goes wrong it will smell so bad that nothing could induce me to eat it. I can’t smell anything from a distance, so I put my nose tentatively towards the jar and…

Let me tell you something, this stuff smells good. I mean, it smells really good. It’s the very scent of freshness. That’s the thing, it smells FRESH. Like a spring morning. It makes me think of grass. And far from worrying about eating it, I feel as though some ancient human instinct has kicked in, and I really want to eat it. The desire to start shoveling this stuff into my mouth comes on like a craving. It’s almost overpowering. It’s like I’m programmed to eat this stuff.

And it’s delicious. We have it for dinner with beef short ribs, cooked slowly for hours with garlic and rosemary. And the whole thing is just DE-LI-CIOUS.

Since then I’ve made roasted turkey and cheese sandwiches with it. I’ve eaten it with lamb. I’ve eaten it with cheese. I’ve made a sandwich with sauerkraut, hardboiled egg and butter on toast (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it). I’ve stopped by the fridge and eaten it by the forkful out of the jar. Supposedly the flavor improves over time, and maybe that’s true if I hadn’t opened the jars, but as I said there was some serious pressure building up in there, and I felt I had no choice. To me, nothing compares to how it smelled and tasted on that very first day. I will definitely be trying this technique with other vegetables.

What I am reminded of by the process of making the sauerkraut is that it takes time for things to combine in such a way that something new comes into being, and that this is not a process that we can control, because it is in both our physiognomy and our natures that we cannot ever fully see or understand or maybe even grasp everything that is being combined. Any control that we might claim in the process is an illusion.

I am not one of those hard-core, literature-to-the-exclusion-of-everything-else-in-life type writers. My philosophical position, developed perhaps out of necessity, is that it is not a temporary evil for a novelist to hold down some type of job in the “real world” but a moral necessity. It keeps one’s work in the world and provides that connective tissue through which others can approach it. When I was younger I wanted to be a hippie-bohemian-artist type. It seemed necessary. But over the years I’ve come to realize that I am not that type at all.

I am a fairly conservative, sometimes depressingly responsible, traditionalist type. I like to take my time, proceed with caution, and hedge my bets. I don’t tend to get into trouble until I start trying to live days or weeks or months or even years ahead of myself. And this is exactly where and how and why the pleasure of writing a novel slipped away from me for awhile; because at some point a few years back I stopped letting the novel do it’s own work, and I started becoming obsessed with achievement and success – with “having done,” instead of with “doing.” But “having done” is not a place where a person can live.

For many of the fourteen years that I was working on my recently finished novel, the process of the work had a very particular character. Much of that novel was written in fits and starts across many dated notebooks worth of bound pages while I was engaged in the practice of various professions. Pieces of the manuscript are interspersed with lists for groceries I need to buy, people I need to call, chores I need to complete. The novel developed alongside me as I went about the business of living. It bore the daunting responsibility of a child who has to be something other than its parents without ever really being able to escape them. Our discoveries overlap and dovetail. The work brought a level of meaning and spirituality to my life. To paraphrase the words of a writer and a publisher that I know, writing is my way of processing and participating in the world. To add my own sentiment: Writing belongs to me. “Having written” belongs to whoever might come along behind me.

With that thought in mind, I set aside a little time this past weekend for returning to myself. I took an hour or so and I flipped through my notes from the past few weeks. I opened up the outline for my new novel and I composed a paragraph or two. I revisited a little of what I had already done. It was both restorative and luxurious; a lacto-fermented condiment to the meal of my day; part medicine, part pleasure, part aid to help me digest and make sense out of the immensity of life; a reminder that even when we can’t see it, even when it doesn’t seem so, that something is happening.

What on earth is this?

If your answer is a giant Daikon radish you’re only partly right. The answer that I’m looking for is: “It’s evidence.”

Of what, you ask?

It’s evidence that I planted a crop this fall that I a) don’t really like, and b) don’t really know what to do with. Which is why I never harvested it, but let it keep growing, and growing ... after awhile it kind of became a game. How big would it actually get? It got even bigger than it looks. I broke off about eight inches of it trying to pull it up out of the ground.

Enough already.

I’m at the end of my second full year of gardening – I’ve done two spring/summers and two falls – and I think that I’ve moved beyond planting a particular kind of seed just because I know that it’s going to come up. It’s time to get serious. Getting serious means making plans. Making plans means making lists.

We’ve been giving this a lot of thought. We’ve had a lot of conversations about it. What exactly is it that we’re trying to do around here? What do we hope to accomplish? What’s the best way to build upon our 2008 and 2009 successes? Lately we’ve been trying to move beyond our usual broad, sweeping, philosophical statements and write down some discrete, concrete and measurable goals. We’ve argued the virtues of this crop over that one. We’ve observed what we eat a lot of, what we only eat occasionally, and what we don’t eat that much of because for the most part only one of us is eating it. After my recent rye revelation I’ve been reconsidering my position on growing grains. My husband would like to devote some land to growing crops dedicated to experimenting with biofuel. We’ve debated whether or not and how to save seeds. We’ve tried to over-winter plants indoors with varying degrees of success. We’ve dabbled a little bit in an awful lot of things.

Obviously, we need to get organized.

So here it is, our 2010 goals, broken down into the following categories:

1. Our staples – what we want to grow a lot of

2. The mid-list – what we want to grow in moderate amounts

3. The low list – what we want to grow in small amounts

4. What we would like to grow, do or make if we can

5. What we will not try to grow, do or make

Our Staples

1. Potatoes. I had great success with banana fingerlings and Beauregard sweet potatoes this year. In 2010 I want to up the ante a little bit. We’re planning on banana fingerlings (12 plants, same as this past year, to give us new potatoes in early summer); a variety of potato that will supply us in the summer (12 plants); a variety of potatoes suited particularly for storage to keep us in potatoes through the winter (at least 12 plants, possibly more); Beauregard sweet potatoes (24 plants, same as this past year).

2. Tomatoes. I was very happy this year with our variety of heirloom tomato plants. I would like to grow 6 heirloom plants again. But this year I want to grow a lot of red tomatoes too; at least 6 Roma plants and 6 of something else, Beefsteak maybe, since I have seeds. I want to produce enough tomatoes to keep us in sauce, stewed tomatoes, salsa, ketchup, BBQ sauce and enchilada sauce ideally through the following summer. I’ll set some definite canning goals at a later time.

3. Onions. I’m thinking of planting a variety that is particularly suited to storage, and shooting for producing at least 52 onions, one for every week of the year. I don’t know if they’ll keep that long, but we’ll see.

4. Garlic. Same deal on the garlic. I did plant garlic this fall, but I already know it’s nowhere near enough. Next year I want to plant more with plans to dry and store it for use through the year.

5. Peppers. Boy, did we enjoy our peppers this year! We really miss them now. I didn’t really preserve any of them, but I plan to do that next year. We’re shooting for 3 jalapeño plants, 2 Serrano plants, 1 habanero plant, 2 bell plants, 2 Anaheim plants and 2 Carmen plants. And in 2010 I won’t dig them up prematurely in a useless attempt to move them indoors. Seriously. I swear. I lost months of productive time eating wonderful peppers because of that little trick.

6. Carrots. This year I’m going to do succession planting of carrots in the spring and fall, and hope to have plenty for fall storage. I’m still working out the details of how to store fall vegetables…

7. Beans. I want to grow the regular green beans, and maybe some exotic 8-foot long bean, and I’ll throw the peas into this category too. But what I’m really talking about here is beans that can be dried for storage for use during the year. I’m shooting for a total of 12 quarts of dried beans; red, black and white.

8. Broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. These are the main vegetables that my husband will eat. I have had great success two falls in a row with broccoli, but I still don’t have it down. I have never successfully produced a head of cauliflower. The verdict is still out on my first year with the brussels sprouts, but at least one plant out there seems to be trying to make little heads. I’d like to grow all of these in spring and fall in 2010. The past two years I’ve only grown them in fall. I’m aiming for 6 plants of each, each season.

9. Fruit. I’ve had success two summers in a row with melons. I would like to grow a little more variety in melons. This year I also want to get some berry bushes installed. We still haven’t purchased any apple trees for installation this fall ... Our fig tree is still hanging out dormant, but hopefully this coming year we’ll be able to harvest a few figs too. My fruit goal is vague. Whatever I can get to grow and harvest this year works for me. I will also make a greater effort to get to farmer’s markets and buy what I can to preserve to make up for what I’m not producing.

10. Last but not least, the eggs, of course! I have made a deal with a local lady to tack onto her upcoming chick order this spring in March/April. When the chicks arrive I am going to let her keep and brood them for me along with hers, until they’re about 18 weeks old, point of lay. I will then pick them up, pay her what it cost to feed them, and bring them back here to thier new coop. I am excited about this arrangement, because, 1) It’s a good time frame. It gives me until about June or so to get the coop ready, and since we’re under construction around here, and trying to focus on one thing at a time, summer chickens will work out about right; and 2) I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew the first time out, and I was a little concerned about having to raise the chicks. But they will be raised around lots of people, and socialized with people and other chickens, and I'll get to visit them while they're growing up, get to know them, etc. They’re going to be Golden Comets, from Mt. Healthy Hatchery – a “quiet bird” that lays brown eggs. Perfect!

The Mid-List

There are a number of vegetables that we like and eat, but which I wouldn’t call a “staple.” If I dedicate a modest amount of space for these things and do some succession planting, we should have more than enough of all of them. The mid-list veggies are: lettuce, turnips, rutabaga (by the way, bugs LOVE rutabaga. If you don’t get them out of the ground soon enough, the bugs will hollow them out and leave you with a rutabaga shell!), kohlrabi, beets, celery, asparagus, cucumbers, eggplant, spinach, zucchini, cabbage, leeks.

This list represents some real challenges. I’ve never grown celery or leeks but I understand they can be difficult. Asparagus is expensive, and I believe it requires some time to establish a bed before harvesting. I have yet to eat an eggplant off a plant I have grown, and not only because my daughter developed a fondness for plucking off the babies ... I did get spinach to come up from seed this year, but it’s not very prolific. Every summer I have lost my zucchini to vine borers. I also have a huge bug problem with the cabbage. I hope to do some research about how to prevent this for the upcoming year this winter. I think I’m going to have to cover them.

The Low-List

Basically, these are the vegetables that only I eat, or only my husband eats. Also, for the time being, I have put the herbs and other condiment-type things here. The low list consists of kale, collards, chard, radishes, yellow squash, winter squash, corn, peas, ginger, horseradish and herbs.

What We Would Like to Grow, Do or Make

There are a number of things that we would like to do around here, but for the time being we’re not setting any goals to do them in 2010. If we do get them done, that’s great. If we don’t … well, we’ve got enough to do. They are below in no particular order.

1. Keep a sheep for milk and cheese (I think they’re nicer and easier to handle than goats). I also suspect we don't have the proper space or zoning on this piece of property for this, so I doubt it'll happen any time in the immediate future.

2. Build a smokehouse. I'm pretty sure I have a neighbor with a smokehouse.

3. Make cheese and butter. Or at the very least find someone locally around here that makes cheese and butter and get it from them.

4. Make cleaning products.

5. Develop my own recipes for crackers, cereal bars, and croutons (these are practically the only processed foods I still buy).

6. Preserve whatever is in season that I can get my hands on as it becomes available, time permitting.

What We Will Not Try to Grow, Do or Make

We’re energetic and ambitious, but we have to draw the line somewhere. So here it is. We will not be getting involved in any of the following:

1. Growing grains, except for possibly small amounts of specialty things like quinoa, etc.

2. Pasta. I can and occasionally do make pasta from scratch, but I will continue to keep a variety of dried store-bought pastas on hand.

3. Honey. I have no intention of getting into bee-keeping.

4. Yeast. Where does yeast come from? Who knows? I will totally just buy it and not worry about it.

5. Rice. With all the rain we've had around here of late I suspect that I could grow rice outside right now, but I’m not going to try. I buy rice in bulk and keep it in 5-gallon buckets.

6. Popcorn. I’m not thrilled about growing any corn at all. I’m not going to knock myself out over this.

7. Dog food. I have 4 dogs. It is expensive to buy them quality dog food anyway, but more expensive and time consuming to make it myself (though I do make my own dog treats). I will continue to buy dry dog food.

8. Raising animals for meat. I don’t think we have the property for this, and it’s not something I am anxious to get into, especially as I can get good quality naturally-raised meats from a local farm. My Thanksgiving turkey was truly the best I've ever had, and sometime this month I'll be filling up my freezer with hog …

So. There you have it. To sum it all up – in 2010 we’d like to pretty much grow all our own produce.

Obviously, this is going to take some planning, and a heck of a lot of work. I believe we have the space for it. I have drawings from this year detailing where everything was planted in spring and summer so that we can make sure that we’re rotating things properly. Deciding where everything will go, and when it will go in, will be my big winter project. That and reading to try and learn as much as I can during the down time.

But for now, I think I’m going back to bed. Just writing all of this down has exhausted me.

So, we’re sitting on the sofa the other night, and my husband says, “Oh, so and so told me that you have to be careful with rye not to let it mold. He said that if you let it mold then it becomes poisonous.”

“What?”

“He said that mold on rye has an LSD-like effect if you eat it.”

“WHAT?!”

“So-and-so #2 has heard about it too.”

Well, I hadn’t heard about it. I am SO not eating the rye. Why is it that it seems like there is nothing you can do these days that isn’t going to rearrange or damage you, that is, if it doesn’t kill you off entirely???

I suggested that we just let it do its job as a groundcover for the winter, pull it up in the spring, and be done with it, but my husband resisted. We both want to get the most out of the land we have, and if we’re going to grow something we prefer that it be something that we can harvest or eat.

“What about green potatoes?” he countered. “Aren’t they poisonous? You didn’t stop growing potatoes when you learned about that.”

“But it’s easy to see if the potatoes are green. I just threw the green ones away.”

“Well it’s easy to see the mold on the rye too. If we have any moldy rye we just won’t eat it.”

“Can you see the mold on the rye?”

It would appear that some research is in order.

In fact, the mold on rye issue is not the first thing that I have had to research regarding the safety of the food that I am growing, and it’s not my first garden safety panic. This year I learned about solanine in potatoes, the chemical that’s present in them when they are exposed to the sun during their development. When I saw similar greening on a sweet potato, I was concerned, but apparently sweet potatoes don’t produce solanine. And I read something about how parsnips don’t start out poisonous (not during their first growing season or even if left in ground and over-wintered), but apparently at some point in their life cycle they become poisonous. This is too much risk for me. What if I don’t get it right? So we didn’t grow parsnips.

In fact, it’s crossed my mind to wonder about everything that I’ve grown this year that I have never grown before – could this be poisonous? Could some bizarre, hitherto unheard of cross-pollination have occurred that might have made this variety of kale that I have never seen in my life before take me out?

Oh yeah. I am super paranoid about these things.

But I’m learning.

It may seem like this is trying to be an informative post about one aspect of growing rye, and it is, but it’s also something else. It’s also a segue to a philosophical revelation – that we get a false sense of security in the modern world that the things that we eat are not only safe but that they’re supposed to be, that safety is a quality that is somehow inherent in the world, and that we are somehow entitled to it.

At least it used to seem that way. In these days of melamine in dog food and baby formula, toxic red paint on kid’s toys, off-gassing Chinese drywall and the barrage of chemicals assaulting our food under the guise of being “ingredients,” the innocent faith of my youth on this issue has pretty much been lost.

Safety isn’t inherent in the world and we are not automatically entitled to it. It’s taken who knows how many thousands of years for human beings to determine and catalog and pass along information about what can be eaten safely and what can’t. When it comes to plucking a food right off the vine, or out of the ground, or from a tree, most of this knowledge has been lost to most of us for quite some time. But it is recoverable. And anyway, I wouldn’t touch 90 percent of what’s available in a supermarket these days with a ten foot pole, because it’s not harmless either. What’s inherent in nature is danger; and death is inherent in life. We each only get so much time before we’re sickened by solanine (if we eat almost five POUNDS of green potatoes at one sitting – an unlikely occurrence) or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (after how many years of consumption – twenty? Thirty? Forty?). All we can do is to learn as much about ourselves and the world around us and how to use it as we can, and then try to make smart choices, something that it’s getting harder and harder to do these days, since we’re surrounded by BAD choices pretty much all the time.

My choice is this: As much as possible I want to produce and grow my own food. And as I said a few posts back, the biggest garden pest is ignorance, so that’s the one I’m going to fight. Here are the facts on the rye:

First of all – yes you can see the mold. It looks like black kernals where golden kernels should be.

Second, ergot is more common on rye than on other grains, but does appear on other grains – wheat, sorghum, millet, etc. So this is something to look into with any grain that we might consider planting.

It turns out that rye has an amazing history. I believe that the information passed on to us about the hallucinogenic properties of mold on rye are because it was from rye mold that LSD was first produced by Albert Hoffman in 1948, who was at the time looking for antibiotic substances in fungi. But that does not even begin to be the whole of the story.

Ergot of Rye is a plant disease that is caused by the fungus Claviceps purpurea. The proportion of the compounds produced varies within the species, which means that you might live through consuming it – or you might not. There are two types of ergot poisoning, convulsive and gangrenous. With convulsive ergotism, the victim suffers from nervous dysfunction, characterized by writhing, twisting and contorting their body in pain, trembling and shaking, and the fixed twisting of the neck. There can also be muscle spasms, confusions, delusions and hallucinations. Gangrenous ergotism causes gangrene by constricting the blood vessels leading to the extremities, where infections occur, accompanied by burning pain. Once gangrene has set in, the affected body part becomes mummified, and will eventually fall off.

Nasty, huh?

Rye wasn’t cultivated for food until sometime in the early Middle Ages. The first major outbreak of gangrenous ergotism was documented in 857 A.D. in the Rhine Valley – though at the time they didn’t know what it was, or what caused it. Numerous epidemics followed, because of the continual consumption of rye – rye being the staple crop of the poor. It wasn’t until 1670 that a French physician, Dr. Thuillier, asserted that the condition was not in fact an infectious disease, but was due to the consumption of rye infected with ergot. And in 1853, Louis Tulasne, an early mycologist and illustrator, worked out the life cycle for the Ergot of Rye. It is theorized that Ergot of Rye has played a role in the outcomes of wars, in the effects of the bubonic plague, and most fantastically, in the persecution of people for practicing “witchcraft” (i.e., the Salem Witch Trials). Even in the 20th century there have been outbreaks of ergotism, with the last known example occurring in August 1951 in Pont-St. Esprit, in Provence, France.

Apparently ergotism is now rare, and there is a floatation method for cleaning rye seeds. The ergot stage is buoyant and any seeds infected with the fungus will float to the top and can be skimmed off. Additionally, to minimize the amount of ergot formation, after the rye has been harvested, the field is deeply plowed to prevent the germination of the ergot, and a crop is then planted which is not susceptible to ergot, which will break the cycle of any ergot that may have survived the previous year’s plowing. There is no variety of Rye that is resistant to ergot.

Rye bread, anyone?

So, now that I am armed with some actual information, I still think that this potential issue is probably more than I want to deal with. My husband is disappointed. He was looking forward to making our own rye bread. To him it’s not a problem. Our new-found awareness alone is enough. If we can see it – and it seems that we can – then we don’t use the black grains. To me, it’s not so clear cut. To what extent is that ergot there before it becomes visually obvious? I’m not sure. How much do you have to consume before it actually is an issue? It seems that part of the thing about the outbreaks in the middle ages was that people ate it all the time. They also ate it completely indiscriminately, because they didn’t know that there was anything wrong with it. Surely that must make a difference. And I don’t have any way to use potassium chloride at home to float the infected grains. And if I have to float them, rather than just picking them off because I can see that they’re infected, then I may be right in my proposition that just seeing the infection may not be enough. I haven’t been able to find any advice on how to grow rye at home, and how to ensure that you don’t accidentally ingest any ergot, plus since it will live in the soil and return the following season if I don’t plow deeply enough and rotate my crops properly, at this point, growing rye to eat seems, well, risky – and I am risk averse.

Totally.

So we’re talking about it. I’ve known and been friends with my husband since I was thirteen years old, so he is well-acquainted with my anxious, paranoid, freaked-out side. He’s being gentle. But I’m pretty sure at this point that the rye is going to be relegated to the role of cover crop/green manure and that it’s getting plowed in in the early spring, no harm no foul, to make way for something that I can grow in total confidence. I have some quinoa seeds I want to try this spring, so you can bet I’ll be researching that.

Stay tuned.