Locavore Superbowl in NW Lower Michigan

What do locavores eat in February? A lot! 

By February we have finally caught our breath and can enjoy visitng other farms and can finally turn those frozen berries into jams and pies.

Creation Pharm is only ½ mile away but you’d think it was in another state! We’ve started a tradition of watching the Superbowl together and sharing our stored treasures over a meal. We provide the meat and let Mike do the cooking. This year we had Beef Ribs with a Honey-Habanero-Cumin glaze; Meatballs and Home-made Heirloom Tomato Sauce served over local spaghetti; a nicoise- inspired salad and Frozen Tart Cherry (North Star Organics) Margaritas. For an appetizer I made a goat cheese onion dip for potato chips. 

So what else do locavores eat in February?

Root vegetables, potatoes and squash stored from summer harvest

Greenhouse greens, kale, chard from the winter farmer’s mkt.

·         Canned, frozen veggies from last summer

·         Dried mushroom and herbs

·         A bushel of local fall apples stored in the basement

·         Frozen, canned or dehydrated berries and fruits

·         Frozen or canned juice from backyard orchard, grapevines, or farmer’s market

·         Local honey and maple syrup

·        Custom raised grassfed beef, lamb, pork or chicken from the freezer

·        Venison or other wild game

·         Fish caught from Ice fishing

·         Farm fresh eggs

·         Hazenuts, chestnuts

      Milk yogurt, ice cream, butter and cheese from your own goat, boarded at the May Farm 

·         Low pasteurized milk and cheese curds from Cream Cup Dairy, Bear Lake

      Leelanau Raclette Cheese, Leelanau County

      Light of Day Tea

      Home brewed Kombucha or Kvass

Local wine, beer, ciders, root beer

It's not as hard you think and you get better at over time. 

It's a holistic life style thing...

Farm Food Fun Facts

It's April already and I failed to post a March blog. We have been busy collecting pre-orders for the spring and finding the right pasture to lease. I'll have more to say about that in a later post. I'm keeping my lip buttoned until we sign the dotted line. I have also been getting my Master Gardener certification in preparation for a future Jr. Master Gardener program.

In March, we attended the Farm To School Conference. Tony Geraci was the key note speaker. He has a fully operational school farm that made me drool. Find out more about Great Kids Farm at http://baltimoreurbanfarming.blogspot.com/. 

Our friend Chelsea was able to go to dinner with him the night before, and has been obtaining blueprints of his eggmobile and chicken tractors, which were built in the school shop class. We named a kid goat after Chelsea. By the way there are 15 new kids on the block. Come see!

If I would have posted a blog in March I would have dazzled you with this magic trick. An egg will stand on it's end at the exact time of the spring equinox. You may have to test it on the hour and have a clean up rag ready. Don't trust the calendar: Trust the egg!

I will leave you with some other fun facts about farm fresh food. Refer to this the next time you question the price tag!

A study by Pennsylvania State University found 3 times the omega-3s, twice the vitamin E, and 40% more vitamin A in the eggs of chickens on pasture compared to conventional confinement.

A recent study funded by the USDA shows meat from chickens raised on pasture contained: 21% less total fat, 30% less saturated fat, 28% fewer calories, 50% more vitamin A, and 100% more omega-3 fatty acids.

A study conducted by James Madison University found bacterial contamination to be lower in pastured poultry: 133 colony-forming units per milliliter (cfu/ml) in pastured poultry compared to 3600 cfu/ml in conventional poultry.

Signing off for now.

Permaculture PDC

I am sitting in my Permaculture Design Course and digressing at the moment. I need some goofing off. Wayne just gave a working definition of the term: the conscious placement of plants, animals and humans and how they live and what they do in functional relationship in the landscape. Works for me.

WHODAT?

I should be in bed right now. This week was intense as I tried to tie up loose ends before leaving tomorrow for my 8 day Permaulture Design certification course. I've had studying and webinars to do in preparation. I slammed out the numbers and a cover letter for the ag component of a renewable energy /ag grant proposal. If it flies we get to do a feasibility study on running 40 beef and 40 sheep across pasture followed by 1000 broilers in chicken tractors and 500 hens in egg mobiles! A grazier's dream if I ever did see one....[imagine "Cripple Creek" by The Band playing in the background]

But I guess I shouldn't count chicken tractors before they're skidding across the pasture.

This is going to be short and sweet. I just gotta say one thing before I sign off: WHODAT?!

To Everyone in New Orleans is celebrating Lombardi Gras this year!

Research Groupee

Hartman Group , a consumers research group loves the return of the local butcher in their "Big Ideas, Things We Like" report on 2010 trends.http://www.hartman-group.com/big-ideas/view/.

Who'd'a thunk that Farmer Paul was a trendsetter?

Icelandic Sheep Farm Field Trip + Lamb Recipes

We are researching lambs to purchase this spring. We ran into Laurie from The Lavender Fleece at the Small Farm Conference. http://www.lavenderfleece.com/ She raises Icelandic Sheep for fiber and meat. I see a field trip on the horizon. Want to go?

Laurie's website had a link to a cool blog with great lamb recipes. Check out this yummy sounding dish of Onion and Herb-crusted lamb ribs and grilled lamb steaks at http://foodiefarmgirl.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-to-cook-lamb-onion-herb-crusted.html. Great site with links to other wonderful blogs about raising and preparing our own food. Stay tuned as I learn more about how to do that on this site.

The Small Farm Conference

We loaded up the orange toaster (Honda Element) and trekked to Grayling for our annual pilgrimage to the Small Farm Conference. We saw Eric Toensmeier's presentation about Permaculture for Farmers. We saw but only a fraction of his presentation on Perennial Vegetables, but I own the book. There were other equally valuable "conferences" to be had outside in the hallways that were a source of distraction. Eric, an eloquent, thoughtful speaker, espoused the wide variety of low labor/high production native food crops that can be produced by multi-cropping and stacking enterprises.

We held onto our hats during Gary Zimmer's keynote address. He has been clocked regularly at 500 words per minute, with gusts up to a 1000 (his words)! To sum up what kind of force Zimmer is: his formerly Buddhist Vegetarian son-in-law now runs the meat-processing facility. Gary doesn't rule out large or small ag. His approach is to go literally to the root of the matter, soil biology - the ultimate determinant of food quality. I sat next to Chelsea, our Gardening Angel, who would regularly show up with a carload of young adults to pitch in and help out on the farm. 

On the way to the conference we were discussing the need for both sides of the food fence to collaborate on solutions. Too much time is being wasted arguing about who's to blame and it's going to take all of our skills and talents combined to fix it. We talked about creating a network, a diverse talent pool to assemble the tools, talents and resources for helping each other in our start ups. 

During Zimmer's talk Chelsea and I started "joint-diagramming" in her words. She drew a circle representing the conventional/global paradigm next to another circle representing the sustainable/local paradigm. Then she drew an overlapping area in the center between the two circles. In permaculture, the edge where two systems meet, is considered the most productive. I whispered "that's our logo". A few minutes later, underneath the logo, I wrote "Middle Ground". I whispered "that's our name", allthough
I'm not sure exactly what was being named. Stay tuned.