I'm Back!

Remember Me?

Just like the little purple crocus flowers forcing their way to the sun this month defying the cold and the snow to announce to the world “we are alive and have made it through the icy grip of winter,” I, too, am shaking off the effects of another Indiana winter and am ready to blog.

It’s been awhile since our last blog post and not much has happened, but I will catch you up anyhow. Sherry has just finished writing two very large computer book projects and is starting a new one, so this has kept her busy all winter. We were also very busy battling snow for several months. We found ourselves questioning the wisdom of keeping any type of livestock through the winter months. It’s a lot of work trudging out into the cold with buckets of water, busting ice out of the waterers and whatnot. The snow even pulled down our chicken’s electric fence netting. So we had some concerns with that, but the animals wintered over pretty well, all in all. We still have 43 chickens and the 2 turkeys.

Speaking of livestock, we have been bumping our heads against the proverbial wall (called the Indiana State Board Of Health) trying to get them to give their blessing on selling our quail eggs to retail businesses. Apparently, they don’t seem to have any experience or codes or anything that deal with quail eggs. The only thing they seem sure of is that they should regulate them (as with everything else under the bureaucratic sun). I, on the other hand, want to see the codes or statutes that would give them this authority rather than just arbitrary rules that, as far as I can tell, are forbidden by law. I want to comply with the law, but no one seems to know what that is. So this saga continues.

Meanwhile, I continue to come up with schemes that will make us millionaires by the time I retire. Sherry just smiles and skeptically shakes her head. The darned government safety rules are starting to shake my confidence a bit, though, with most of my schemes. Thank goodness my father-in-law still has the good sense to know a horse that can run when he sees one, so I am sure he is still right there with me in all of this. Thanks, Pop. By the way, what do you think about miniature diamond farms, Pop? I know, it sounds good doesn’t it?

I have just completed the first of the 2010 garden plantings. On March 20 I planted spinach seed that our friend Tracy gave me last fall. You may remember Tracy from my blog about the Florida weave last year. Tracy’s the one that was sure that a baby white-tail deer fawn had the same temperament as a Kodiak bear. I also planted red Russian Kale, Swiss chard, kohlrabi, collard greens and lettuce. You gotta love those cold weather veggies! People always forget about them and that they can be planted early.

On the subject of planting, we are fully intending to do a CSA again this year. I think this nice sunny weather is necessary to fully convict us into committing to doing it for another year. It is an awful lot of work but we learned a lot last year and think that we can streamline some of the work this go round. I think we are going to take on fifteen shares and would like to get a couple of folks to commit to working shares. A working share is a reduced price share for work in the garden--in other words, a discount for helping in the garden, a barter if you will. So contact us soon for more info if you’re interested because slots will fill up fast.

Well, I’m done talking. --Matt

Chicken in the Bread Pan Picking Out Dough

Or Rooster for Dinner

It’s a cool blustery fall day, one of those days that makes you hunger for a nice dinner of comfort food, so I decided chicken and noodles were in order. Sherry Darl’n has a womanizing, red rooster in the flock that she thought would make a fine companion to the silky, light as cloud homemade noodles that I like to make from scratch using two farm fresh eggs from her young hens. Mind you, these farm fresh eggs have yolks that rise tall above the whites and are the color of the sun that has just risen above the horizon, not the anemic-looking, yellow, flat puddles that pass as yolks in mass-produced, store-bought eggs.

I sat about the business of gathering fresh baby beets small and sweet, fresh from the garden soil. These scrumptious veggies are to be boiled, skinned, and put into a quick pickle liquid so as to be ready for dinner. Many people I know don’t think they like beets, but if given the chance to try a fresh young beet that has been roasted or is still warm from being boiled might change their opinion. I would encourage them to give it one more try without bias. I think they would find a friendlier mouthful than those hideous beets they were forced to eat as a child, straight from a can.

Lots of foods fall into this scenario, actually. One that comes to mind for me is asparagus. I thought I hated the stuff, and it turns out that I do if it is served to me from a can. But I love it fresh and cooked on the grill with olive oil and garlic. I even like it steamed, if it’s fresh. Fresh is the key. It’s the same with the beets and spinach.

Next for the dinner menu--green beans. I got so bored after I picked about four beans that I decided we didn’t need green beans on the menu after all. That’s all I have to say about that.

Next task—potatoes. Tuff and I dug up some very nice Yukon Gold potatoes to mash with cream and butter. Turns out Tuff, our 15-year-old, loves to dig potatoes; he likens it to an Easter egg hunt and I have to say, I agree.

In conclusion, dinner was a success and we are down to one less rooster in the barnyard. You can’t imagine how satifying it is to harvest everything for our dinner from our own yard, from the chicken to the vegetables. It’s an amazing feeling to be connected to your land the way I did with this dinner. There’s something to be said about the benefits the entire process brings to a person’s soul and stomach.

Farmers Market News

The Farmers Market was different this past Saturday. Sherry Darl’n wasn’t feeling well and it was threatening rain so she stayed home and got some much needed rest.

Tuff, my son, was my helper for the day and he did a great job of making change and keeping me entertained. It was a real joy and his first time at the Farmers Market as a vendor. He was paid handsomely for his help and spent it all on pork sandwiches, fancy coffee, and a nice bag of Empire apples. He also argued incessantly--typical teenage modus operandi.

Can someone tell me how teenagers get so smart in the few short years that they have danced on this earth? They can argue about everything! I showed up fifty years ago and am still struggling to understand the complexities of life, but they have it figured out already. Bless their hearts, they do make us think though…. think about how little they really know!

It seemed like the attendance was down at the market and we didn’t sell too much. We didn’t take much of a variety of items and this could have been the reason for the slow sales. I think that we have entered fall festival season so people have other things to do on Saturdays.

Falling into Fall

As for the garden itself, it grows smaller by the day, with the exception of the new Bok Choy and Carrots and Daikon Radish. Other than that, there is not much new growth. First frost will be here soon, like an assassin it will arrive in the night and take the life of all but the hardiest of the plants.

The sounds, and the smells of the farm are changing now, the long shadows cast from a lowering sun all tell of the impending struggle against the weather for man, beast, and plant alike. We will hang on and get through with the thought of distant spring always on our minds. And when it does arrive we will start this roller coaster ride we call farming all over again.

Well I’m done talk’n, --Matt

Dry, Dry, Dry

Man, Is It Ever Dry!

It’s been awhile since I have blogged and to whom (if anyone) this disappoints, I am sorry. For those that may be thankful, you’re welcome.

We have been very busy around here with the CSA and adding the Saturday Farmers Market to the list of things to do has made it seem busier than ever. It seems there is little time to do much of anything else, least of all blogging. However, we’ve had a serious game delay do to the lack of rain here in the last couple of weeks, and this has given me a second to finally blog.

Produce Update

So here’s the latest news from the produce section of the farm…the plants, already tired from a long season of growth and production, are really starting to show the effects of this mini drought. The tomatoes are all but done, with the late blight having been very bad this year. The blight has had quite an effect on the longevity of the tomato plants. Normally we would have tomatoes up until frost. Not so now.

The summer squash have all but given up. Whatever disease they got coupled with the lack of moisture did them all in. The corn, what there was of it, is nothing but a memory. The last of the watermelons will be sent out tomorrow and the peppers are also singing their swan song.

All is not bad news if we could just get some rain. There could be some late rallying of some old plants if some moisture came our way. There are some young plants that have been in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for rain since being planted a month ago. Carrots, beets, baby bok choy, diakon, okra, kale, gia lan, lettuce and turnips all would jump to life with a good, slow, soaking rain of about 2 days.

Poultry Update

Meanwhile, over in the poultry division… the quail are doing fine. The raccoon situation has been brought under control, at least for the time being. My guess is they’re out there regrouping somewhere, cleaning and pressing their little bandit masks in preparation for another raid on the quail hotel. But paranoia can be crippling, so I try not to think about it.

We hatched out thirty-eight quail chicks last week and I just put another load into the incubator, another 109 eggs. This should take us through the winter unless I get an order for adult birds from one of the culinary schools.

The baby chickens we hatched last spring are starting to mature now and have been laying about three eggs a day. This is very “eggciting” for us here at the farm with Sherry being darn near euphoric. I do so hope that three is not the standing record for a days worth of effort from our flock of nearly forty biddies, that would be mighty disappointing, I must say.

The electrified wire netting fence that we have around the chicken’s barnyard is doing a wonderful job so far of controlling land-based varmints from noshing on the resident poultry. I would highly recommend this product to anyone that is having depredation problems (or maybe even a teenage daughter) or has given up on (like I had) the idea of having small livestock due to high losses from outside sources. Turns out this electric wire fence is not just for chickens, but can be used for goats, sheep, wombats, whatever suits you. One of the best things about this fence is that it’s portable; so you can keep the critter of your choice on fresh pasture all of the time. It’s brilliant.

Well, the sun has risen to signal the start of a new day here at the funny farm, so I shall go out and meet it’s challenges head on, fueled by the scripture “This is the day the Lord has made and I will rejoice in it.”

I’m done talk’n, --Matt

Canning and Pondering

Can-Do Canning

The clock has struck 11:00 pm as I write this and it is truly the first time that we have stopped all day… and I have just been told I still have a clog in a downstairs sink to deal with--hooray!

I can’t really put a finger on the moment that we lost control of our life here at the swamp farm, but I still have whiplash from being propelled from 0 to 6000 in no time at all! It has been this crazy for so long I can’t remember when it wasn’t. I suppose it started in the early spring? Or was it after the monsoons of the late part of April and May? Or wait, could it have been when the first chicken eggs hatched or perhaps the quail? I just don’t remember and this frenzied pace has become so much a part of my life now that it seems freakishly normal.

We canned green beans today. We didn’t get near as many done as we would have liked but I did get a real cool burn on my arm and that will surely leave a scar, and that is a very manly thing. When it comes to guy-cool, give me a well-placed scar over having a tattoo any day. Scars just say “I am reckless, that’s right, I reach for the farthest rung on the monkey bars, my car had 5-spoke Cragar wheels and Cherry Bomb mufflers, and I don’t wait no danged 30 minutes after I eat to go swimming.” Scars always indicate a tough man. Or at least a foolish man who hopefully knows better next time?

So back to the beans… Sherry and our intrepid helper Tracy picked, tipped, tailed and snapped what I would guess amounts to 2 bushels of long, straight, thick and tender new-growth Jade-variety green beans. Bless their little hearts! They worked like dogs to the end.

As they worked and talked together at the kitchen table with beans flying right and left, it felt good to me as I readied the pressure cookers. Somehow our farm-life canning activity made me feel like we still have a foot dangling, albeit precariously, in old-fashioned tradition while the rest of us is caught up in the modern world. We as a country are dangerously close to forgetting about the value of doing old-fashioned work together, such as putting food by, tilling the earth, tending some chickens or maybe a pig or two. I fear we will be caught some day with no one left to pass on the skills needed to thrive if ever the power grid goes black. Oh, we could adjust, but it would take awhile and we simply are not set up with the raw ingredients or tools to thrive in the case of a long-term blackout, or worse, a food and water shortage.

We could probably figure out how to make a candle, but what about wicks or the wax? How about a making crock pickles? Could you make corn meal or flour? Even if you grow the wheat and corn, could you grind it? And more importantly, where would you get the seed to even start?

I’m just saying that for me to see those girls keeping a tradition alive, and at this point not a cost effective one, makes me feel our grandparents would say, “Well done kids, you make us proud.”

It also makes me feel unbridled from the mega-marts, big corporations, and to some degree, the government. All of these are, to some extent, enabling us as a nation to be nothing but consumers--not innovators, not producers, not self-sufficient self-reliant citizens. For a brief moment this afternoon I felt unshackled from relying on other resources; I was making my own.

I don’t want to be broke, bridled, and branded; I’m a wild Cayuse and have the burn on my arm to prove it.

Now, where did those monkey bars go? I’m feeling dangerous right now and I’m done talk’n, --Matt

Farmers Market Day and How They Regulate My Hamburger

(Bolting cilantro pictured above)

Our 1^st Farmers Market Day This Season

Last Saturday was our first time this year to set up and offer our wonderfully fresh home-grown produce to the patrons of the Minnetrista Farmers Market over in Muncie, Indiana. There’s so much work getting ready for the event, starting early Friday thru Saturday at noon, it’s like your hair is on fire and you are trying to put it out with a fly swatter. After it is over, though, we always look back and say how much fun it was.

I loved seeing and visiting with customers that we had the good fortune to make friends with last year, and to make some new friends, one of which was Daniel and his lovely family. Food friends are wonderful.

Wondering what we took to market? We offered, for the customer’s consideration, Quail eggs, three types of green beans, baby pattypan squash, Swiss chard, Thai basil, cilantro in two styles; mature with roots and young leafy bunches, tomatoes (cherry and standard red), and some beautiful cut flowers. The cilantro sales always surprise me. I’m taken by how much of it we sell. I think we are the only farmers that sell it at the market! Thankfully, the quantity we grow allows us to pick over an extended period of time.

Cilantro is a bit of a rascally herb to grow. Oh, it starts out simple enough. Just till the earth, throw in some seed and wait impatiently for growth. Normally, growth is a good in the garden, but in cilantro’s case, it’s a bit too precocious about it. It matures, flowers and sets seed way too quickly—in other words, it bolts. Most of the time if a leafy green bolts, like a lettuce, it’s finished, done for, kaput, and cilantro in our part of the world is no exception. You can try to stop it from reaching this stage by pinching it back, but like pimples on a pubescent teen, that thick stalk is returning in no time. This is not a problem in Pan Asian cooking because they often time prefer to use a more mature plant, including the stem, root and all, referring to the herb as coriander. (See, you learn something in our blog!)

If the soil around cilantro’s roots gets to 70 degrees and stays awhile, the plant is going to bolt. If you read this and are not familiar with Indiana summers, let me just clarify that they’re hot, hotter than 70 degrees. Short of air conditioning the soil, I don’t have a clue as how to keep cilantro from bolting, so you have to plant in succession to have young growth all the time.

Anyway, we had a great time at the Farmers Market, and our good friend and CSA helper, Tracy, got to tag along and see exactly how inept we are. It's always a joy to share your fallibility's with others. Thankfully for us, she likes cilantro.

I Just Want a Nice Burger

After the Farmers market on Saturday, we head out for lunch to sit and rest awhile. This time we chose to eat at Scotty's Brewhouse, a restaurant not too far from the market. In general, I have enjoyed all the meals I have had there and this one was no exception. Scotty’s is not a five-star restaurant; you can kind of know that just by their name. Brewhouse, to me, conjures up pub food, not a French Michelin-starred restaurant. The restaurant is clean and the wait staff this day was excellent. I ordered the make-your-own-burger entrée, choosing to partner the half-pound of ground chuck with Jalapinos, onion, BBQ sauce, and mozzarella cheese. I also wanted and could not get a fried egg added on top. (Yes, I said a fried egg. Don't knock it till you've tried it--it's a bit of sunshine on top of your burger!)

Now this is where I could easily start to rant royally, but I shall not. I will spare you in today's blog. But I cannot understand the reasoning behind the answer I was given upon asking my waiter who was so gracious in trying to accommodate my special request. To fry an egg on the same grill as the other food, I was told, is a matter of health regulation, some blather about the transference of salmonella to the food that would follow behind the 1000-degree scorching that this hen egg would have endured. Please correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn’t this heat kill any trace of Sal’s Manilla anyway? And isn’t raw ground beef one the biggest carriers of this and about ten other deadly or at least make-you-wish-you-were-dead bacteria? It must be because I was also told of some other health regulation that I wasn’t allowed to order my fried cow carcass any less done than medium.

So let me get this straight. You can join the military service and let bad guys shoot at you and through you, you can run into burning buildings as a career as everone else is running out, you can make a traffic stop all by yourself out in the middle of nowhere in the silence of the night, but it would be way too foolhardy to let you eat a piece of meat cooked to your preference of medium rare on the same grill after having, horror upon horror, a egg fried at the same temperature as that of a Dwarf Star?

In all fairness, I don’t know whose regulations these are, but I really did enjoy my burger and our server was great and a good sport. But these regulations to protect us from ourselves have got to stop! Enough already. Some folks are going to get sick, some are even going to die, but that’s the thing about life--no one gets out alive. Can the bureaucrats just get out of our way so we can get on with living the way we see fit for ourselves? To say one is “living” but is afraid to put this or that food cooked this or that way in their mouth, well, to me that ain’t living. 

And while we're at it, stop hindering the small farmer with bizarre regulations that are insurmountable for a small scale operation and favor the big corporate operations that produce 100 percent of the food-bourne problems that in turn cause the implementation of all these crazy regulations to begin with! Okay, maybe I did rant a little bit again.

Well I’m done talk’n. Remember, play with your food. --Matt

 

A Rooster Harvest

A Rooster Harvest

Well, more a reckoning, really. Nobody likes a surly rooster, or a surly person for that matter. But for now, until the law changes, here at the Gunter farm it’s only the roosters that pay a heavy price for their I-will-do-whatever-I-want-and-to-whomever-I-want-to attitude. If there was a way for you to smell the aroma emanating from the pot on my stove at this very moment you would not have to be told what that price was!

“Just doing what’s natural” my eye. Let’s see any one of those wannabe Romeos gather 45 hens up in the wild and keep them in a 150 by 50 foot area just for their entertainment. It can’t be done, especially while keeping an eye out for critters that like to eat chickens more than I love a hot dog, all the while trying to scratch out food to keep themselves alive. There’s no free lunch in the wild. And here at the farm, there’s no pinning down and dragging your fellow detainees around the barnyard just cause you can. I learned this the hard way here at the swamp, soon after my marriage to Sherry Darl’n, that this rule is enforced with a heavy hand. The point is--you can’t always act like an ogre just because it seems natural; I’m still writing this on the chalkboard 5000 times.

What started out as one rooster acting out of hand quickly spread to three as it seemed to be a timed event among the boy’s to see which one could tick off the farmer and his bride the quickest. With all seeming equally good at it, I saw no reason they couldn’t all be crowned king, or should I say de-crowned? Had it not been so hot and late in the day we wouldn’t have any singing Casanovas left at all in the barnyard as they are all past due for their date with the freezer for a long winters nap. As it was, only the most troublesome three were dispatched this day.

Moments from writing this, we will be enjoying our first young chicken with noodles and freshly dug Yukon Gold potatoes, mashed and covered with real sweet cream butter. These will be joined with garden fresh Roma green beans freshly picked, tipped, tailed, and broken into bight size pieces, cooked with some baby Cipollini onions and fried bacon pieces and maybe a little lard for good measure, served piping hot with about five squares of butter melted over the top. Six ears of Indiana sun drenched sweet corn should do a nice job of rounding out the plate with a generous slathering of butter, and a pinch of salt and pepper for me, each corn kernel dripping sunshine. Of course we will have to have a plate of vine ripened Indiana tomatoes sliced thick and anointed with salt and pepper. Sliced white bread or maybe biscuits hot out of the oven topped with blackberry jelly will finish things off. Isn't it amazing how one unruly chicken can make such a lovely dinner?

So there you have it, try to be nice to everyone you meet or someone may have you over for dinner, if you know what I mean.

I’m done talk’n, Matt  

Who Cut the Cheese?

(picture from their website)

First, the Rant

We had the opportunity on Thursday to be in the Carmel area and to be more specific, visit the Whole Foods grocery store. Whole Foods is one of the stores with which I have a love/hate relationship. I am, admittedly, kind of creeped out by the whole hippie-vibe thing, the whole “I’m cool, you’re cool, dress however you want at work, if you find your dad’s tackle box open and you see something in there that’s shiny just stick it in your lip or ear or some other excruciatingly painful place” thing.  Under the whole hippie-vibe attitude, it’s team this, team that--no real boss names, just team leaders and assistant team leaders. There are no workers at Whole Foods, just “team members.”

Okay, I get it and I know that some of you are saying “Matt, you are kind of a non-conformist/activist yourself at fifty years of age with kind of long hair, goatee, flip-flops and seeking self-reliance on that little organic farm out there in your swamp.”  I agree. Heck, I came perilously close to getting a very masculine “MOM” tattooed on my arm while serving in the Marine Corps, “Ooh-Rah,” but I can’t stand the look of pain on my face, so I drew the tat on with a Bic and called it a day… that and MOM said I couldn’t get one.

But, here’s the rub for me--why does Whole Foods have to be so danged expensive? You know they’re paying these poor young “I’m just expressing myself,” Mohawk-wearing folks better than minimum wage, but not much. I did some checking and it looks like salaries range from around nine dollars an hour to twenty five dollars, with most falling in the lower ranges.

Someone’s getting rich and it’s not the environmentally-organic-friendly kids who work there. And I think that’s great that someone’s making money, I really, really do. I support capitalism. But it’s not the farmer making money in this grocery store gimmick, and it’s not the young people working there.

Whole Foods has packaged themselves as this earth-shoe-wearing-just-want-to-make-enough-to-get-by, but I’m-glad-to-do-it-cause-I-care-about-the-earth-and-the-people-that-live-in-it organization. To this I say, hogwash--not at the prices they charge. $4.99 a pound for hot peppers? I can’t get by charging a dollar a pound for my peppers. I should be able to get a dollar a pound or more for my peppers because I’m doing true organic growing which does cost more to produce, but I can’t take advantage of people for it, not like Whole Foods can. With real organic gardening you can’t spray for weeds and must spend hours hand pulling them, and you rack up a lot of loss to bugs and others pests and problems. It’s a lot of work. Organic gardening costs more, I get that, but it doesn't mean you can take advantage of people just because of the "organic" label.

Listen, it’s not sour grapes for me. I am a full-blooded-make-all-you-can-capitalist myself. I want to be rich, also. But I don’t want to take advantage of people to do it.

Make no mistake; the people behind Whole Foods are capitalists, too, just like me except I don’t soft-sell it. It’s the same reason I don’t care for Steven Segal action movies. I’m sure Mr. Segal is a wonderful fellow and as tough as a hogs nose, but come on--it questions my intelligence (or is that entalagance?). I have never gotten a gun to shoot 47 times with a 9 round clip. How do you get 47 shots with 9 bullets? And this is just a guess on my part, but if you fought six guys and they all had guns, wouldn’t one of them shoot you rather than go through all the physical activity of kung-fu fighting?

My point is it’s misleading! I hate that, and I don’t think real hippies like it any better than I do. If you’re an expensive organic chain store just say so. If you’re Wal-Mart with a twist, own it.

After having exercised my bottled- up rant by saying all this, I must also confess that I find a lot to love about Whole Foods. Their stores are bright and inviting. The product is stacked and displayed in a very inviting fashion. They have really cool stuff, stuff you can’t really get any place else. And I really dig the bulk bins of grains and cereals. I also like that they employ a lot of people and they pay a lot of taxes. Not that I like taxes, I hate taxes, but if you are going to attack corporate greed, you have to remember how much they contribute to the federal budget in taxes.

On To the Cheese

Now to get to my topic, Who Cut The Cheese. Sherry and I did. Sherry Darl’n and I found ourselves at the cheese counter of the Whole Foods in Carmel, Indiana. Man, what a great place for a foodie! Cheese, cheese and more cheese, and they will let you sample a lot of it. Sample we did, and we bought more than we could afford seeing as how my ship is evidently floundering at sea and hasn’t come in yet. We bought about five very small pieces of different exotic imported cheeses. This group included the following: Asiago Fresco Italian (11.99 a pound, we bought 3 bucks worth), Roth Kase Private Reserve Raw Milk Cheese (10.99 a pound, our cut about 4 bucks), Pecorino Toscano Fresco Sheep’s milk cheese (17.99 a pound, we snagged a chunk at $2.70), Ewephoria sheep’s milk cheese from Holland (17.99, our piece totalled $4.14), and Parrano Uniekaas Dutch Cheese (10.99 a pound, we bought about 4 dollars’ worth).

The next day, we had a little blind taste-test of our pressed and aged curds. We liked them all, loved a couple and wouldn’t you know our favorite was my all-time favorite cheese, the Parrano. Keep in mind this was a blind tasting. Sherry also voted it number one. Parrano has a very buttery, somewhat sharp taste. It dances on your tongue and makes your taste buds sing. If you ever stumble across it, give it a try.

Our second favorite was the Ewephoria. It was not as sharp as the Parrano, but it’s no wimp ether; nice and creamy.

The others were good too, but I don’t think I would buy them again, especially not at that price.

Well, I’m done rant’n and talk’n for now. President Obama, if you’re reading this blog, could I please get some bailout or stimulus money? I made a bad business decision and shopped at Whole Foods, and now I’m broke.  I ate all the cheese, too.

--Best regards, Matt