Farm Life Retreat

A kiss from the summer…by Jules our rockin’ 4 month apprentice!

Monday, January 24th, 2011 | Rolling Earth Times | 108 Comments

Summer Keeps Rolling…

Jules and Ian, and their self-determined big project of sifting and planting an entire root crop bed: kholrabi, carrots, parsnip, beets, lettuces. The bed is overwintering now and hopefully the root veggies are still growing in there!

Hello again!

Time sure flies these days. I’ve finally snagged a quiet moment to write this update, my callused barefoot summer feet propped up on a footstool. My body feels strong from the past three months of farm work. The taste of the first tomato lingers on my tongue. Clay bits stick to my ring from making cob and I contemplate our one broody hen hunkered on top of six unfertilized eggs.

For about 5 weeks straight we’ve been graced with full summer sun and heat, here in Roberts Creek. We didn’t see a drop of rain for the whole month of July, which was a welcome change from the drizzly cold spring,

Yes, July was a great month. Not only for the weather but, in my opinion, also for the fact that we had a wonderful new apprentice: my boyfriend Ian! We took on many of the farm tasks together, getting up early to do our watering routine, dog-walking, chicken-feeding and raspberry picking all before breakfast.

Our two favourite projects: digging & planting the fall root veggie bed and leading a soil-building demo here on the farm.

The Oh So Fine(ly Sifted) Fall Root Vegetable Bed

Sometimes things get so busy around here – with kids, or retreats, or other projects – that we almost forget to look ahead and plan the garden for the coming months. Growing food requires forward thinking, to sow seeds at the right time so that crops are ready to be harvested when needed down the line. I took some time to go through the seeds in Joah’s stash and picked out the packets of varieties that could be planted outdoors in the month of July. Golden Beets, Kohlrabi, Atomic Red Carrots, Parsnips, Rutabaga, Conquistador Lettuce, to name a few.

Then Ian and I took to digging. The bed we would be sowing our root veggies and lettuce was previously a garlic bed. Brett and Ian had just harvested the garlic, cleaned it and hung it to dry. I think we had about 400 garlic bulbs in all. We dug our shovels in about a foot and a half down to loosen the soil at that depth so the roots of carrots, beets could penetrate. As we dug up the soil we used a sifter to screen out the rocks. Our goal was a fluffy, airy soil – if a carrot root strikes a rock, it bends in order to avoid it. This change of trajectory uses up lots of the plant’s energy and you end up with a stubby, crooked carrot. As we sifted we made sure to save as many earthworms as we could and relocated them to worm heaven: the compost heap.

It took us about three days in the high summer heat to dig and sift the whole bed. The result was a gloriously fine soil and we knew the root veggies would appreciate our time spent. Asha and Joah made a dapper looking scarecrow to ward off the peckish birds. Now the little beet sprouts, feathery carrot tops and mini lettuce leafs are popping up, interplanted in alternating rows. The next step is to get down on my hands and knees with some scissors and trim back the competing weeds that have colonized the sifted soil as well. It’ll be worth it for the fall bounty when all the summer crops have reached their end!

The Mulching Way

Ian and I were thinking: if we ever happened upon a piece of land of our own that had poor soil, we would want to know how to build it up to a fertile state. With this in mind we eagerly took to reading up on soil building techniques. We’d heard the word mulch being used quite often – usually referring to a single layer of organic matter at the base of plants to retain moisture in the soil – but hadn’t quite realized the potential of mulch for building and improving soil.

I’ve often come across phrase “No Till Farming” but I had no idea what to picture. All I knew was that by tilling the soil you are apparently releasing nutrients, loosening the soil and turning in weeds. But what I found out is that by tilling you are also disturbing the soil profile, the rich layer of humus that has naturally formed over years and years as the fertile top layer of soil. When you unleash nutrients by tilling the soil, they are used up very quickly instead of slowly being released. Some weeds are not just turned in; they are brought to the surface and thrive from the tilling. When you till you are not adding anything to the soil. It’s a temporary, quick solution so you can plant quickly, but it doesn’t keep the long-term health of the soil in mind.

Mulching, on the other hand, is like giving a bare-naked, underfed person layers of blankets and clothes and water and nutritious food. Layers of mulch upon the soil provide compounded benefits of organic fertilizer and nutrients, water retention, weed prevention and sun protection.

So after doing some research, we acquired various organic materials as mulch layers. Seaweed from the beach for nitrogen. Rotted wood from the forest for carbon, already decomposed and ready to house seeds. Aged horse manure to encourage worms and add fertilizer. Wet layers of newspaper to block weeds. Straw as the top layer to keep the sun from baking the earth.

As a team we all applied the mulch to a garden patch that had noticeably done quite poorly. Slashed down the sad pea stalks and stunted kales that were there and stacked on our sheets of mulch, watering every layer thoroughly. Since we used materials that were all mostly decomposed we could plant the bed right away the next week. Now I stick my finger in and find the soil there super moist – the mulch is holding the water in so well. And the newly planted Swiss chard and spinach seedlings are looking perky and happy as ever.

Here’s another fun fact: you can build soil on rooftops or concrete simply by layering on the mulch, much more heavily than we did to our already established garden bed mind you. Yes, mulching can truly make something out of nothing. Well, soil out of sheets of organic matter to be exact. It’s all about knowing what you have access to in your area and how you can combine carbon-adding and nitrogen-adding materials to decompose on the spot to perform their alchemy.

Now Ian’s back in Nanaimo, but putting his sheet mulching skills to practice in an empty lot beside his house! Just goes to show how we apprentices can take what we learn here off the farm and into our home places. Rock on.

Berries Abound

So berry season has arrived in full swing. We are lucky enough to be able to pick native berries all around our property. First salmonberries then huckleberries, thimbleberries, salal berries and trailing blackberries. In addition, we have an abundance of raspberries in our garden and the blueberries are just turning. All this bounty has resulted in bags of summer berries frozen in our freezer, in jars of jam that are being devoured by the day and also in Joah’s specialty, berry popsicles! The salmonberry-huckleberry flavour sold clean out at the Farmgate market, the answer to a hot Wednesday afternoon. Another variety, lavender-black current was dubbed as the “adult flavour” and was a hit as well!

Fava Beans the Magical Fruit…

One of my favourite harvests of the past month was the fava beans. They plump up when they’re ready to pick, so that when you squeeze them gently they’re firm and don’t give way. The stalks get heavy with them and begin to slowly bow down. The bottom leave begin to turn brown. When you open up a pod, the beans inside are smooth and similar to lima beans. The inside of the pod is fuzzy, downy like velvet.

Fresh, raw favas have a pleasant pea-like taste, just not as sweet. I chose to adapt a recipe from Dan Jason’s book “Living Lightly on the Land” and simmer the fresh favas in butter with onion and garlic. With seasonings and local cauliflower from the Farmgate market, our fava beans made a high protein side dish for a summer meal. And thankfully weren’t super gassy for the belly like many fresh beans can be!

Now, we are leaving the rest of the fava pods on their stalks to dry and save for seed. We planted some of last year’s seed as a ‘green manure’ in one of our garden beds destined for garlic in October. We soaked the beans for about half an hour before we sowed them so that they could have a quick-start at germination. Pretty much all of them have come up and we will let them grow for their 70 day life span, pick the beans as a bonus, but mainly concentrate on digging them under as a fertilizer for the soil. The fava, as with all legumes, is a great nitrogen fixer. Its roots attract and play host to specific bacteria that perform nitrogen fixation, enriching the soil. An incredible crop for a multitude of reasons. Or as we say in Permaculture speak: a plant with stacking functions, baby, yeah!

Cobbin’ It

July was a big month for progression of the cob house here at Rolling Earth. First we took on the task of plastering the inside walls, for smooth appearance and sealing in the cob. Our new friend Keetah offered her skills and expertise as our Plaster guru, gifting us her tried and true natural plaster recipe. It was truly fun mixing it up and applying it to the wall – quite the exfoliant for the hands, with all that sand, clay etc.

Back in May, Karine and I had slept in the cob house for a few nights while a retreat group stayed in the house. While it was very earthen and homey an abode, it proved to be a dusty place to sleep. We’d wake up with a thin layer of dust on our sleeping bags and in our noses! But that was before the plaster. For extra protection against the walls dusting-off, we recently painted the walls with a milk wash. With Keetah’s help we learned how to make the paint by blending milk casein with grolleg clay, natural pigment and a bit of flour paste. Joah, Amanda-Rae and I started off the milk painting dabbling with colours and designs. Then the kids joined us to do their wall: a splatter and streak of pinks and oranges that 4 year-old Solomon called “the sunrise”.

The latest cob project that we are working on is pretty much the final big step: the floor!

Our super fun, knowledgeable friend and neighbour Amanda-Rae and I did lots of reading and brainstorming on how to “lay it down” so to speak. Floors are something we’ve never done before but we decided to let our booksmarts, theories and intuition guide us. After pulling out the makeshift floor of cardboard and old carpets, we laid down some sand as a base on top of the leveled gravel beneath. Next we put down a layer of slip-straw, which is straw dipped in clayey water, for insulation. After tamping this layer and letting it dry, we decided to pour a thick slip over the straw.

Today we began sifting poop for our final layer of floor: finely sifted sand/clay and fresh horse manure! Sounds smelly, but the fresh horse manure is basically straight up grass, just digested by the horse. The digestion process adds that bit of stickiness, but mostly it just shreds up the hay and grass for us to use as the fibrous addition to the floor mix. It’s said to make the floor harder and more resilient. Once the floor is laid and dried, we will seal it with linseed oil.

It’s funny we find it so fantastically novel to build a house from earthen materials here in Canada, while people in other countries around the world have been building mud houses, straw bale houses, adobe houses for hundreds, even thousands of years and are still doing so today as a matter of course. Modern choices of concrete, steel and vinyl siding definitely lack the appeal of the hand-sculpted, of-the-earth look of a cob home. How great is it that the only tools you really need are your hands and feet?!

Two New Apprentices for August

Now we have two new volunteers that have joined us for the last month of summer. Xuan has come from China via Vancouver and Aisha has come from Toronto. There is always lots to be done here so it’s nice to have many hands to help, whether it be to make bread, process the compost, feed the chickens, hang with the kids, pick salads or paint the cob house.

One fun project we’ve done all together was to gather plants from the property to make a medicinal salve with. Joah took us for a walk around, our eyes concentrated on the plants at our feet; the ones that pop up all over the property and many would consider weeds. First we went in search of common Plantain, for its leaves have astringent properties good for wounds. We’d look for the best specimens. No holes on the leaves. No yellowing. Not from a high-traffic area. We also gathered Red Dock, which is said to be good for skin rashes. Its leaves look rashy with reddish dots, living up to the “Doctrine of Signatures” idea that a plant’s appearance can denote its uses and properties. We grow lots of Calendula in our garden and gathered some of the flowers for the salve as well. As we collected the plants we said words and gave energy of gratitude to them.

Then we snipped the leaves and flowers up finely and have been soaking them in oil for two weeks. Once the oils are infused with the plants’ healing properties we will blend them with beeswax and voila! a homemade salve for mosquito bites, cuts or burns.

Well, I’m almost out of breath… so many things to talk about! For now, I’ll leave it at that. One more week here for me! It’s been incredible. Roberts Creek is a beautiful place with inspiring people. Rolling Earth has been a wonderful home and I thank Joah, Brett, Asha and Sorrel for letting me be a part of the family these past months. I’ve watched seedlings grow and I have grown myself. Now it’s on to the next adventure in Victoria for me.

Peace, Love, Veggies and Cob

~ jules

Tags: permaculture, roberts creek, ROlling Earth Farm and Retreat, root vegetables, summer

See ya later Summer and much thanks for all the Bounty

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 | Rolling Earth Times | 62 Comments

After what seemed like an endless summer of new friends becoming old friends through living, sharing, eating, joking, dancing, riding bikes, supporting camps, making medicines, growing growing growing so much food……its over. The 2010 Rolling Earth Eco-Farm Apprenticeship program is now over, and we are SO grateful.

Its just brett and i now, raking leaves, making piles, carving them into duvets for garden beds. Sorrel and Asha still pick the salads, but now they bring it in and scissor it up into kid-sized morsels and serve it to us at the table. The table seats four now – rather than 6 or 7 or 8 or more. But i look around me and the room still is full with conversation and antics and questions and just a hint of anticipation of what 2011 brings.

To Jennifer, Jeremy, Hannah, Jules, Karine, Ian, Aisha, Xuan, Andrea and Ivy – thank you so much for being here. The gardens are still alive and feeding us, BLESSINGS on the Farmers and the Earth!

Tags: apprentice, eco-farm, growing food, harvest, medicine, organic, permacutlure, raking leaves, roberts creek, ROlling Earth Farm and Retreat, sacred suenos, salad, summer, sunshine coast

Pre-Solstice Happenings on the Farm

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 | Rolling Earth Times | 68 Comments

A lot has happened on the farm this spring/ early summer. The months of May and June were marked by the presence of two new apprentices – Karine and Julie (that’s me!). It was pretty cool how things worked out. Karine and I are the same age, taking similar Environmental Studies classes in school. When I first arrived at Rolling Earth from Victoria, a week after Karine arrived from Ottawa, she was cooking up a kale concoction and was quick to ask me lots of questions about myself. Joah and I would come to laugh endearingly at Karine’s self-proclaimed busybody ways. While she was here, she was on the pulse of all the events and happenings in our small community in Roberts Creek. Karine left last week to go back to her native Ottawa to work at a nearby canoe camping camp. Miss you Karine!

It seems fitting now, since the solstice just passed last week and the days are continuously getting shorter from here, that we take some time to reflect and recap some of the happenings pre-solstice on the farm.

colder weather

As I sit in the Rolling Earth Retreat house writing this, beads of rain are streaking down the windows in my room, sounds of pitter-patter blending in with the babble of Clack Creek that runs through the property. My pant legs are still damp from the ferns and young trees along the trails where I walked Taro dog this morning. It’s late June and I’m wearing a toque! That’s what it’s been like this early summer – rainy and colder than usual. Lately the common trend seems to be cloud and/or rain in the a.m. and then a breakthrough of sun and warmth in the afternoon. Hope that holds true today!

In late May/early June I interplanted a number of chickpeas and garbanzo beans and sprinkled some insectory Tansy and Amaranthus flower seeds at the end of the kale and garlic beds. These particular plantings however were followed by at least three days straight of heavy monsoon rains which now appears to have washed out the flower seeds and molded the chickpeas. Just one example of the great effect of weather on successful germination of seeds. Now we are assessing where we need to re-sow, and at this point we must have fall crops in mind. Sun, please stick around for the next 10 weeks!

slug strategies

One thing we try to be vigilant about is regular observation of our garden. If something is not doing well in its location, we consider the surrounding elements and ask why? Something we observed after our spring plant was the big chomps out of the Toi Choy seedlings we planted in a new bed we’d dug and hauled river rocks out of. Slugs were evidently feasting on these Asian greens – more so than any other variety in our garden! Yes, Toi Choy is succulent, juicer than regular old lettuces and spinach. But why else were the slugs concentrated on these greens in particular? Originally we had planted the Toi Choy with a ring of rotted seaweed around the base as a possible slug-deterrent. The rationale being that slugs don’t like saltwater. Well, the rains must have washed off any marine element from the seaweed because it didn’t work. We decided to take the Toi Choy out and move it into the greenhouse as a haven away from the slugs. As I dug my trowel into the earth surrounding the plant and levered it out, I found that the slugs had discovered a haven of their own. We had planted the Toi Choy in their soft brown paper pots, buried into the ground to decompose into the soil. However, the slugs thought this was the perfect home – the gap between the paper pot and the root ball – and hid in there, emerging to nibble on the leaves and stalk of the plant! These were the little white-ish slugs in hiding, not the big European black slugs. Lesson: remove paper pots next time.

A few other tricks we’ve employed to exile slugs: crushed eggshell around the base of broccoli (worked really well, we have Brassicas to boast about); sawdust from our wood-worker neighbour around our lettuces (effect is yet to be determined); and the stickiest of all, dusk slug patrol. We’ve gone out with headlamps when the sun is almost set, to catch slugs in the act… “Put your antennas up! You’re comin’ with me…”

We saved the little slugs for the chicken’s breakfast. We also found that if the black slugs were snipped to let their innards ooze out, the chickies would eat the guts but would still avoid the slimy outer parts. I snipped a few but grew weak in the stomach so proceeded to throw the black slugs into the creek for their exile. Slug patrol works in that you get a first hand, in the moment observation of where the slugs are and when. And you get an idea of how many you’re up against. This practice is key especially when plants are young and their leaves are close to the ground.

bear visits

This spring/ early summer has also been marked by the frequent visits of a couple different black bear cubs. For a while, their interest in breaking into the chicken run and the compost bin never faltered. We had Taro chasing the bear up trees repeatedly, pots and pans clanking incessantly, because the cubs didn’t learn easily. Through my window one morning, around 4 a.m., I heard the compost bin lid slam. That’s strange, I thought in my dream, no one should be turning the compost at this hour. I rolled over and kept sleeping. Another time in the evening I was sending an email to a family member and heard that familiar slam. I peered out the window only to see little blackie sitting on top of the compost bin trying to pry the plastic lid open. More alert than the first time, I bolted down the stairs calling Taro to come outside with me and we both ran at it full speed, Taro barking and spooking the bear back into the forest. Luckily we got there before the whole compost bin was totaled, the bear just left a bum groove in the plastic, but other than that, no mess!

The chicken run is another story. The fence has been pulled down numerous times by the bear (it’s largely made of plastic mesh, for ease of relocation to a new grass patch for the chickens) A couple times we even spotted a bear eating the chicken’s grain while the birds huddled and squawked in the far corner of the run. The rude guest even once took a dump in the chicken run before it sauntered off, full of their grain and food. Surprisingly, the bears aren’t going for the chickens.

Now that the salmonberries and huckleberries are decorating the forest, the bears have been showing up less. Probably also because Taro left a lasting impression.

compost experiment

While we all know there are recipes to make meals, there are also recipes to deal with food waste – compost recipes! Ready to use compost is one thing we’re short on at Rolling Earth, so Joah and I looked up a recipe for fast food-to-soil composting.  It’s important to add lots of layers of various carbon and nitrogen adding elements. We call them browns and greens. Browns include shredded newspaper, cardboard, topsoil. Greens include grass clippings, trail clippings (ferns, salal), seaweed. Biodynamic plants such as red dock, valerian and horsetail can be added to the compost for a nutrient boost as well. We have a garden right next to the compost that specifically houses these plants for that use. Another important ingredient is water. Keeping the mixture moist ensures that it is a prime environment for worms to come in to bust some moves and break it down. Turning the compost mixture every two days to aerate is an ongoing labour but speeds the process along. We’ve also been keeping citrus discards out of the compost because their antibacterial properties kill the good bacterial that are helpful in decomposing. We re-direct lemon and orange peels to the chickens but unfortunately they haven’t taken a liking to the zest.

Two stages of compost. The top section is our ongoing heap where we put kitchen waste in layered with grass clippings, newspaper and water. The bottom section is our compost that's further along... it once resembled a 7 layer dip and now it's looking lots more like black gold soil! Go worms go.

huglekulture

Back in May, Joah, Karine and I experimented with a different style of garden bed called the Huglekulture! The basic idea is the formation of a garden bed from woody debris, rather that just dirt. Woody debris is everywhere here – pruned branches, rotting wood in the Clack Creek forest, random sticks that Taro carries around the property – so for us, using branches to build soil made sense. We had a retreat group from Simon Fraser University participate in the building of the huglekulture by gathering various sizes of branches from around the farm property. Then we stacked them from big to small on top of a layer of cardboard. Once the mound of sticks and wood was in place we dumped topsoil and a bit of leftover manure on top. The dirt settled into the crevices between the branches until it was all filled in. We watered it and let it settle some more for a week, in the meantime gathering plants to put in the bed.

The plants we chose to pioneer the hugle-bed were what many people classify as weeds. We collected comfrey, yarrow, dandelion, plantain, thistle, horsetail and clover from all over the property to transplant into our new bed. Some people may be wondering why we went to all this effort simply to plant weeds. However, these colonizer plants are key in improving the fertility of the soil. They will thrive in a range of conditions and fix nutrients into the soil. Eventually, we will dig these pioneer plants in to further add their nutrients to the soil and then use the ever-fertile huglekulture bed to plant food crops like squash, potatoes or berries. We cleaned up the property and made a new garden bed in one fell swoop! How cool is that?

Jules & Karine after planting biodynamic plants in the hugle bed! Loving the spring rain too...

gathering oyster mushrooms

There are some benefits to all the rain we got this early summer. One evening on a trail walk with Taro, Karine and I spotted some oyster mushrooms scaling several dead alders along the path. Their white flesh leapt out from the browns and greens of the forest. To be sure, we picked a specimen and brought it back to confirm its oyster-ness with Joah, which indeed it was. So the next afternoon I took a wicker basket and some scissors and went back along the trail to collect the mushrooms. There were probably 12 different trees I harvested from. On some, the oysters were fresh from the rainfall the night before. Their gills were in tact and the caps smooth and white. On other mushroom bearing alders, eight-inch banana slugs traced their way up the tree leaving the oysters laced with slime. Yet other trees bore mushrooms that were a bit past their prime, with spots of mold and insect eggs in the gills. Even so, we had a decent harvest and used the mushrooms in an Asian stir-fry with our own toi choy and mustard greens that we took to a beach pot-luck for our friend Shel’s birthday.

farmgate market in full swing

Where can you get locally milled flour, kale chips, kombucha, sea asparagus and seedlings all whilst mingling with familiar smiling faces and bobbing your head to the Farmer Band’s upbeat live tunes? At the Roberts Creek Farmgate Market of course! And now it is officially in full swing – definitely the place to be from 3 -6 on Wednesdays. We are so lucky to have such a supportive and vibrant local community that is brought together by organic foods. One week in early June we decided to make some homemade ravioli (with local Flour Peddler grain) stuffed with chickweed pesto and garlic chives from our garden!

first harvest: garlic scapes … fermenting them into pickles!

Now, as the month of June comes to a close, we have just recently had our first major harvest: garlic scapes! For those unfamiliar with this delicacy, the scape of the garlic emerges from the middle of the stalk as a thin, round shoot that grows long enough to curl back on itself. When the scapes are curled it’s time to harvest them so that the plant’s energy can be concentrated on the garlic bulb beneath the ground instead of the scape (which will eventually flower). We collected about 400 scapes and decided that we would preserve them by fermenting them into pickles. Currently, they sit submerged and sealed in a bucket of salty brine with radishes, dill and grape leaves. Soon we’ll have garlic scape pickles by the jar!

A glimpse into our salty brine solution full of delicious garlic scapes in the fermenting process. We've snuck a couple taste tests - yum! We'll leave them in for a little longer to get extra crunchy.

From here we can look forward to a cascade of harvests – spinach and lettuce greens now; raspberries, strawberries and blueberries soon; garlic, potatoes, tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower to come.

That’s it for now! We’ll update again soon

~ Jules

Coping with winter….in Hawai’i

Friday, April 23rd, 2010 | Rolling Earth Times | 55 Comments

the kids arrived just in time to harvest and eat a pineapple that had been growing for a year at Hedonisia Eco-Hostel

We decided to accept an offer to go on vacation with my mom, her partner and my brother. Little did we know that traveling with children is a completely different experience than being a world backpacker in your 20s.

Off we went, on the much-fantasized-about vacation to Hawai’i. Brett and I hadn’t traveled overseas since before we had children. The first part of the trip in Maui was unbelievably touristic and unsustainable (you know how resorts are – wasteful and full of sun-burnt North Americans).

Maui Ocean Centre: The most responsible aquarium in the world that refuses to hold whales in captivity, rotates small sharks and manta rays between the sea and the aquarium and has a Hawaiian Cultural Advisor bless them before sending them back, and rehabilitates coral reefs. We loved this place.

We spent a lot of the day trapped in our hotel room to avoid getting burnt since we all got burnt within 2 hours of arrival. Without our usual play dates, childcare co-op, and partner routine of taking turns being with kids while the other partners gets work time, brett and i were both ‘on kids’ all the time and didn’t get much of a break the whole time we were on ‘vacation’! Lying in the sun reading a novel? Forget it!

The outdoor kitchen at Hedonisia that inspired the building of our own Eco-kitchen this Spring at Rolling Earth

After the resort, our little family separated from the rest of the relations and went to volunteer and stay at an eco-hostel and tropical farm retreat on Big Island. Hedonisia and Mojo the owner and his volunteer community were fantastic (although they smoke too much). Although children are not usually guests, we were made to feel welcome by most, and we had a lot of fun helping out at the eco-farm home away from home. We also researched and toured other organic, permaculture-based communities and farms while there. After about 2 1/2 weeks living in Puna County on Big Island, we started to find a groove of living life in this different but parallel universe.

Josanna's Garden farmstand

We found that “even in paradise” there are issues with food security. On Big Island, where tropical fruits self-seed and grow and provide abundant free food, a much-larger proportion of the average Hawaiian diet is made up of food, processed food from Mainland USA. There is not a huge selection of vegetables for purchase, and indeed we were told by local farmers that vegetables require a lot of work to grow on volcanic soils which are mineral-rich but very porous. So leaching, coupled with astounding competition from chomping bugs and critters (biodiverse life is hugely abundant in hot lands i am observing), make succulent vegetables a rare commodity here. Not to mention people don’t like to eat veggies grown at ground level because of  “rat lung disease” which occurs when slugs drag their slime over rat poo that is infected with RLD and has caused cases of death and coma. Maybe that’s too much information but we didn’t come across this tidbit when doing our travel research from home!

We did enjoy eating papayas, pineapples, and macadamia nuts from the trees and washed our salad greens very well!

Tags: family travel, food security in hawaii, hawaii, Hedonisia, organic farms, permaculture, rat lung disease, unsustainable resorts, volunteer travel, volunteer with kids

Real, simple bread – no kneading!

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 | Earth-friendly Inventions | 101 Comments

Mmmm right out of the oven. Tempting as it is, wait 10 more minutes before attacking as the bread still cooking, plus its too hot to touch right now!

I’ve been sharing this recipe for crusty, delicious bread that’s easy to make and cheap too. Especially if you buy the flour in bulk. I buy flour from the Flour Peddler that’s guaranteed to be the freshest (milled at Rolling Earth, sometimes minutes before using!) and the localest and organic too. Alternately, I also buy Anita’s Organic flour which is milled within 6 months and the only large-scale processor of organic flours in BC.  Anyway you get it, these flavourful local grains change with the seasons and make a fine and tasty bread!  The recipe is adapted from those folks that wrote “Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day“.

No Knead Seed Bread

• 6 1/2 cups flour (half whole wheat, half unbleached white)
• 1 1/2 tbsp yeast (make sure its not old and dead, you can buy this in a large size and keep it sealed and refridgerated rather than in those little packets that have a lot of questionable ingredients)
• 3 cups warm water (or whey from cheesemaking – more on that later)
• 1 tbsp salt
• handful of millet, sunflower and/or flax seeds
• handful of cornmeal or cornflour

Equipment – these are the things that make this recipe different from all the other bread recipes out there. Home kitchens don’t normally have ovens that get hot enough to bake crusty french bread. Invest in a baking stone (about $25) and a large, lightweight cutting board. You’ll also need a metal baking pan for the bottom rack and a non-metallic large bowl.

Step 1: Get out your bread bowl. Mine is a large ceramic one that’s chipped and worn and homey. I scrape it out after each use but try not to wash it. The small amount of yeasty dough that gets left acts like a sourdough (more on that later too) and adds character and encourages the propagation of yeast in your new dough. Put in the warm water and yeast and stir a few times with a big wooden spoon. Then add the salt. mix. Now add flour one cup at a time. Stirring and mixing. By about the 5th cup, it will become harder to incorporate but stir on! Use your clean hands if you must, but do not knead. Once the flour is all worked i, cover with a damp cloth and set aside in a warm room for 2 hours (or more or less).

Sprinkle the cutting board with the cornflour first and then the seeds. When the bread has risen, take it out of the bowl and shape the loaves on the board. letting the cornflour and seeds coat the dough forms. You can also save half the dough and refridgerate it covered but allowing some air to escape (so you wont have a dough explosion in your fridge!). After refridgeration for 2 or more hours, it will be easier to form into loaves as well.

Now preheat the oven to 450 degrees F, setting baking stone on middle rack. On lower rack set the baking pan.

If loaves were formed right after rising, let sit 20 minutes in loaf form before sliding loaves onto the baking stone. Once that is done, immediately have a up of water ready to pour into the baking pan underneath – careful, HOT!

If you are using the refridgerated dough, let sit for 20 min. then form into loaves and let sit another 20 while oven preheats. do the same with sliding on the loaves and adding water to pan.

Close up the oven promptly and let the steam blast the bread with its super heat right away. then  bake for 25-30 minutes or until bread sounds hollow when tapped. Take out bread and let rest for 10 minutes before devouring – VOila!

Try forming the dough into pizza and cover with your fave toppings – also super YUM!

Being Demeter/Leah

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | Rolling Earth Times | 60 Comments

A powerful story of women asserting the importance of their domain as integral to life

In the winter, I have taken to keeping the hearth fires alive and alight, both in our home, the Rolling Earth retreat house, and in the cob studio. Cob is a material that needs life happening inside it. It needs a fire to be stoked in it every few days, and activity. We found this out when we noticed larger-than-normal size rat droppings and the distinct smell of wild animal piss! Ugh! And in our beautiful cob house no less. Well, we cleaned it up, I burnt some sage to cleanse myself and the space, and Chris the Flour Peddlar needs no more prodding to host regular music jams in it to cozy away the winter nights. But I digress, back to being Demeter and Leah. I thought of Demeter and actually had to consult the the ol wiki….hmmmm nothing about the hearth but definitely considered the Earth Mother, goddess of fertility and grain. Of course, grains and hearth, bread and baking, food and warmth, all nourishing go hand in hand. I, too, have spent much of the winter with my flours and milk,in bread and cheese-making experiments. It’s a tasty way to spend the winter, and a great way to keep the house warm! While it is domestic and fun, for me it’s also about repetition and finding ways to consistently reproduce good quality and good tasting stuff, in efficient ways, that we can share with guests and participants of this upcoming year’s farm camps and farm retreats.

I also dedicated this post to Leah – the wild-eyed Great Mother, first wife of Jacob (the polygamist who had 4 sisters as his flock of wives) who was always nursing & pregnant, and making cheese that never soured and producing all sorts of risen and flat breads for all the family and bondspeople (contracted workers in them old days). I am in the early chapters of reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. A book that has been recc’d to me numerous times, and I can see why. All four sisters are strong and intelligent and integral to the success of their sheep-husbanding family (ha – so sheeps were their husbands! No bad joke – turns out the guys used….uh never mind). The red tent was a gathering place for the women during their shared moontime, during births & deaths, for ceremony, ritual and sharing stories from mother to daughter, woman to woman. Their stories are lost in biblical texts, and found again in delight by me, contemporizing Demeter & Leah (with fewer progeny) for love of food, fires, and a safe planet for my children.

Tags: Anita Diamant, bread-making, cheese-making, cob, Demeter, farm camps, farm retreats, Flour Peddlar, hearth, Leah, ROlling Earth Farm and Retreat, The Red Tent

An Urban Homestead by the highway?

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | Earth-friendly Inventions | 63 Comments

HOMEGROWN the film

The Dervaes family is truly fascinating  - growing 6000 lbs of organic food on a 1/10 acre urban residential lot 15 minutes from Los Angeles. I was amazed how they combined the low and high tech, as cheaply and sustainably as they did. Check out the trailer for the excellent film I saw this fall at the Vancouver Int’l FIlm Fest.

Home Grown trailer

Tags: Dervaes family, Homegrown movie film, organic farming, organic growing, rolling earth farm retreat, sustainable agriculture, urban ag, urban agriculture

Send me your letters supporting food security ….pretty please. Here’s one from me…..

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 | food fight | No Comments

December 14, 2009

Re: Supporting Rural sustainable agriculture and food security aka Bill M 205 – 2009 FOOD SAFETY AMENDMENT (FARM GATES SALES) ACT

Dear Hon. Steve Thomson, Minister of Agriculture

cc.     Hon. Gordon Campbell, Premier

Hon. Ida Chong, Min. of Healthy Living and Sport

Ms. Lana Popham, MLA Agriculture Critic

Mr. Nicholas Simons, MLA Powell River – Sunshine Coast

As a mother and organic farmer living on the Sunshine Coast, I would like to call your attention to the lack of local food security here.  Something like less than 1% of food consumed on the coast is actually grown here. Our agricultural past, is simply that, in the PAST. We live tucked between a mountain side and the ocean, a beautiful place to be, but the best arable lands have long ago been transferred into real estate and other urban developments. However, I am writing to tell you about something positive going on here now. There is a nascent, fertile, and healthy movement towards sustainable local food production here and it is vitally important that you, our government, support us and do what you can to make it successful.

Our family is a typical example of the supporters of this movement. My partner and I have been environmentalists since our teens, but having a young family as we do now – it all hits home and hits hard. We moved to the Sunshine Coast from the city, bought acreage, moved our business here, and started really trying to produce as much of our food as we could. We believe that the planet our children will inherit is in peril, and we can’t wait till their generation grows up to do something about it. It is up to each of us to gain and use the skills NOW, to reduce the impact that we as consumers have on the Earth, the oceans, the land, the water, the forests, and all the species that are too many to know or to name, but on whom we depend upon for our very survival.

I applaud the Liberals effort towards sustainable food security as outlined in your Agriculture Plan (www.al.gov.bc.ca/Agriculture_Plan): Producing local food in a changing world, Meeting environmental and climate challenges, Building innovative and profitable family farm businesses, Building First Nations agriculture capacity, and Bridging the urban/agriculture divide.

I want to see ACTION on each of these key areas, and in a timely fashion – as in beginning in 2010. I want to see the programs, the grants, the policies, the meetings with the public, on these issues to move them forward and increase our food security starting now! Please don’t wait until just before another election – we need help on these areas now! My vote is fickle and will not wait for you if you make me wait!

Furthermore, there is something you can act on immediately when the house reconvenes in the new year. Please support MLA Nicholas Simons’ private bill, Bill M 205 – 2009 FOOD SAFETY AMENDMENT (FARM GATES SALES) ACT, to the Meat Inspection Regulation exempting farm gate sellers from current licensing requirements.

At the very least, the amendment should modify the level of inspection so as to keep small scale processing and production financially viable. There is not a single case anywhere in North America of food contamination when meat has been grown on a small scale and provided to local area residents.

Thank you for your consideration of this important issue.

Sincerely Yours,

Joah Lui

Rolling Earth Farm and Retreat

Me 'n Brett building our soil sustainably by bringing nice and aged horse manure from Betty and Judy's down the road. Their waste is cycled into our gardens thru feeding the bugs, insects, worms, and healthy microbacteria that break up and build soil naturally..

Tags: Bill M 205 - 2009, FARM GATES SALES, FOOD SAFETY AMENDMENT ACT, food security, Hon. Gordon Campbell, Hon. Ida Chong, meat regulations, Min. of Healthy Living and Sport, Minister of Agriculture, MLA Agriculture Critic, MLA Powell River - Sunshine Coast, Mr. Nicholas Simons, Ms. Lana Popham, natural soil building, Premier, rolling earth, rolling earth farm retreat, rural food security, Steve Thomson, sustainable agriculture

Use your grey water for growing food

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | Earth-friendly Inventions | 148 Comments

Sometimes I take a big basin of wash water from my dish duties, and jiggle it out to my container gardens. The tomatoes and flowers don’t mind the second-hand water, in fact they love it because it’s warm rather than cold tap water. The few steps of work make me feel good about saving water. Recently though I’ve been thinking about how to re-configure all the bathrooms and sinks at the Rolling Earth Farm and Retreat Centre (6 bathrooms, 1 kitchen, 1 laundry area, all told!) to drain this second-hand precious resource (grey water) into my gardens instead. In my monthly permaculture class, I designed a bio-treatment marsh, ponds in series, swales, and incorporated our young orchard into a design for filtering and using grey water from the retreat centre.  I hope that one day it can be a reality. I realize that while that is still a big dream away, i want to start with easy steps that build on my one washbasin at a time effort. Check out these great ladies called the Grey Water Guerrillas from East Bay San Francisco for home grey water tips!

GreyWater Guerrilla news clip

SauerKraut Kale

Monday, October 26th, 2009 | food fight | 130 Comments

Brett playing us some tunes while Asha, Sorrel and I preserve away

Hi everyone, my name is Stephanie and I am a volunteer with Canada World Youth. I’ve been staying with the Rolling earth family since September and have been learning so much about food security, organic environmental sustainability and the a-z on food harvesting and preserving. Nikiwe and I help out here on the farm 3 days a week where Joah, Brett, Asha and Sorrel have adopted us like there own. It seems as though everyday we are starting a new project and learning a new skill. Now that we’ve harvested the last of our crop, we are working hard on preserving our goodies.

Kale is an extremely dominant leafy green vegetable that belongs to the Brassicaceae family ( cabbage, collards, cauliflower, mustard, Brussels sprouts and many more) known for being rich in anti-carcinogenic nutrients. It’s a tasty vegetable and its health promoting, sulfur- containing phytonutrients makes it even more appealing. It is easy to grow and works great in colder climates where a light frost will produces an especially sweet leaf. As much as we love our kale, we had to make room to plant the garlic and put the beds to sleep for the winter.

Adding the Fennel

Once we collected a large amount, we washed and chopped it tin fine pieces o start our preserving process. We also added fennel flowers along with some chives and sorrel for added flavor. The main difference between veggies left to rot and delicious fermentation is usually salt. Vegetables ferment best under the protection of brine, brine is simply water with dissolved salt. Once all our kale was ready, we put it in a food-grade bucket and pored our cooled brine on top. In sauerkraut fermentation, the salt is used to draw water out of the vegetable and protect them from bad microorganism growth versus the promotion of wanted growth. So once our brine was added we covered it with a plate and put a heavy sanitized rock on top. The weight keeps the kale submerged in the protection of the brine preventing it from being exposed to air creating mold. However, as you check the Kraut every day or two it is possible to find some mold on the surface. This “skim” is only a surface phenomenon as the kraut itself is under the anaerobic protection of the brine.

We cleaned off the plate and tasted it along the fermentation process. After a few days we could taste the tang and started jarring after 2 weeks, the taste however, will intensify for months. The sauerkraut kale taste great as a side dish with most meals and the fennel really gives it a unique taste. It was a fun process to learn and simple way to preserve a great veggie. Just one of the new skills I’ve learned with the Rolling Earth gang. Bye for now.

ps. big thanks to Sandor Ellix Katz and his book, Wild Fermentation: the flavour, nutrition, and craft of live culture foods

Tags: food sustainability, home preserving, kale, lactobacilli, live culture foods, sandor katz, sauerkraut, sunshine coast food security, wild fermentation