Its Gumbo time

I'm not a Louisiana native.  I'm not a Virginia native either, I just wound up here.  I spent a long part of my life, comparatively, in Louisiana.  Again, I just wound up there and then I decided to stick around.  I would still be there if not for 9/11.  Louisiana is a different kinda place.  There is a large European influence, but it is 100% America.  Louisiana had a huge impact on me.  One of the things I miss dearly about the Sportsman's Paradise is the food.  Louisiana food, and I mean South Louisiana food, is very different from other American rural cooking traditions.  The Acadian people who were exiled to South Louisiana from Canada were thrust into an unfriendly, inhospitable region on the deep south.  They managed to make a living and even thrive in the swamps and bayous.  They learned to incorporate the local flora and fauna into their diets, out of necessity, and they turned what others still often wrinkle their noses at into gastronomical wonders.  Gumbo is one of those wonders.  Gumbo is one of those dishes that every Cajun family makes differently.  It is Louisiana's chili, or borscht.  My best buddy is from a real Cajun family in Vacherie in Saint James Parish.  If you've ever seen a picture of Oak Alley Plantation or seen it in the movie Vampire Diaries you have seen Vacherie, Louisiana.  Of course, Oak Alley is a representation of what antebellum wealth was like in Vacherie.  Most folks in Vacherie are simple, hard working, salt of the earth folks, like my buddy's family.  My first real gumbo was at his house.  His family spoke French at home, mostly because his grandmother didn't speak English very well.   I've learned a little about Cajun cooking over the years and I put it to work for me when I make gumbo.  Gumbo is cold weather food.  The major variants include either seafood, shrimp mostly, or fowl and sausage.  Today mine is made from leftover Thanksgiving turkey and andoulle sausage.  Chicken and sausage is very common, duck and sausage is one of my favorites (another reason to start raising ducks) but its not uncommon to hear of whatever meat is available going into the gumbo.  Game meat is pretty common.  Squirrel, rabbit, and robin appear in gumbo, deer sausage is not uncommon.  Gumbo is comfort food in my house.  It reminds me of my adopted home in Louisiana and it tastes great.

American Supremacy

I've read some other blogs and done a fair amount of thinking and reading about the future of this country and how we got into the economic and cultural state we are currently in.  The first reaction is to protect ourselves by seeking distance from dependence on others and becoming more self reliant.  I'm right there with the group of Americans that believe we need to be less dependent on Government, grocery stores and the electric company.  I was in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.  It was an eye opening experience.  People died.  Lots of people.  Government from the ward and city level, state of Louisiana level and federal level all failed.  In the crisis local first responders were unable to respond.  Law enforcement from New Orleans and outside the city seized privately owned firearms from people who had no other means to protect themselves from roving bands of criminals who took what they wanted from the helpless.  The Governor of Louisiana failed to react in time, she failed to decide to send assistance and to ask for federal assistance.  The only entity that provided support quickly and to its full capacity was the Louisiana National Guard.  The National Guard Bureau, the national level HQ for the Guard, reacted quickly and arranged support from numerous other state Guard units, but not until after the Governor got around to asking for help, days later after lots of people had died and the situation was extremely bad.  Those folks who were stuck in the city with no food, clean water and electricity were on their own.  Grocery stores were quickly emptied of food.  Looting was rampant.  Vehicles were flooded, there was little fuel available for those that were running and it went fast.  Price gauging was occurring.  People were fighting for what few life sustaining assets were available.  As I said earlier, there were roving bands of armed, opportunistic thugs.  Some were brazen enough to engage law enforcement and National Guard troops in shoot outs.  When federal "help" arrived it came with Blackwater security contractors.  The same ones who were over-employed in Iraq and Afghanistan and freely engaged in shooting innocents and making the situation worse for those of us who were trying to help establish a working civil government and defeat the insurgents and Al Qaida.  Seeing them on the streets of New Orleans had me seething. 

The nation, as a whole, is not in danger of Katrina-like natural disasters, but disaster is disaster.  Economic disaster, I predict, would look a lot like Katrina.  Military disaster would too. 

American supremacy is the key to continued prosperity and security.  I mean economic and military supremacy, not some cultural/racial/"we're better than you" kind of supremacy.  American economic supremacy means that the USA stays at the top of the world's economic pyramid, a position currently threatened by China.  What a change from the late part of the last century when the USA was the unquestioned economic superpower and no communist entity could ever hope to aspire to our level of economic stability and market dominance.  Economic supremacy is key to military supremacy and both are the bedrock of security.

In the past two decades we have seen the erosion of American economic supremacy.  This is where I get on my soap box.  Throughout human history successful societies have been agricultural societies.  The American economy must be based in economically healthy, sustainable agriculture.  America is an agricultural powerhouse.  I would go as far as to say we are the probably the world's preeminent agricultural producer, producing surpluses of meat and grain that feeds the global market.  Russia produces a lot of grain, but their methods are feeble.  America actually exports rice to Asia.  Many of us on-line tend to disdain the grocery stores and large "industrial" farms.  As a result of large agricultural success in this country the average American of today relies on the grocery store to receive the produce of American (and foreign) farms.  We do not have to rely on growing our own food.  At least, not right now.  That is a positive thing, not a negative thing.  Maintaining the level of economic security that allows us to be lazy enough to buy our food instead of growing our own in something many, many people on Earth envy us for.  Even those advanced, industrialized nations in Europe and Asia that have similar convenience do not have the total security that we have been blessed with.  We may all curse the big oil companies but the fact is Russia is not turning off our winter heat to make a political point.  Germany lives in fear of that.  Energy security is a real issue for them.  Their politics reflect it.  We don't have that problem, yet.  I believe that having a piece a land on which I can grow food is part of my family's rainy day survival plan.  What does that mean?  It means I am learning to be self reliant while I have the luxury of being reliant on the grocery store and the electric company.  I am learning which breeds of chickens are best for my homestead.  Which are the best dual purpose birds that lay in cold weather.  I am learning what vegetables grow best in my garden, which keep best and longest and what I can grow in the off season.  I have learned how to heat and cook with wood.  I am planning to provide my own basics: clean water, healthy food and personal security.  Why? Because history has proven that the government will fail us, the grocery stores will fail us and the people beyond our circle of trust will fail us.  In the mean time we are blessed with the best economy on earth, even with our high unemployment rate, high foreclosure rate and artificial inflation.

Sustaining our agricultural supremacy means sustaining the industries that produce the tools and transportation that keep our agricultural base supreme. Keeping America supreme means owning our own industrial assets that allow us to build the tools and infrastructure to keep our economy on top.  Sending industry to foreign countries to take advantage of lower wages and a lack of union manipulation is the wrong answer.  Moving industry to locales inside the USA where the industrial base can take advantage of lower wages and lack of unions is the right answer.  I hate the labor unions, but they serve a purpose.  I see them as nothing more than a socialist irritant to big business, one that has become an industry all to itself, irrevocably tied to the political left and bereft of their original purpose, which was to protect the American worker from being exploited by the robber barons of early 20th century industry.  Without them, however, and the threat of activism (strikes) and legal action to protect the American worker, we would continue to have the economic exploitation of our dark industrial past.  Unfortunately the AFL-CIO = The Democratic Party, and that makes them part of the problem, but no other non-government entity exists to protect the American worker, and we can expect the governmental organizations to fail.  I believe workers would pressure the unions to get real about wages and benefits when their Detroit based auto-worker jobs are threatened by moving to Arkansas or Mississippi to escape the unions' exploitation of the industry.  The bottom line is America needs to own our industrial base, not be reliant on foreign governments and workers for our economic security.  Industry leaders must be interested in long term sustainability of the critical industries and be more willing to forgo the multimillion dollar bonuses for individuals at the top.  Long term economic security means long term industrial supremacy.  We are losing that one.  America needs to own the global steel industry and we don't.  That is a problem.

American military supremacy is key to long term security.  Being able to produce the aircraft, ships and weapons to project American might against global threats means having the industrial base to manufacture those tools.  Being able to feed the workers that produce the tools that can project American might means having the world's supreme agricultural base.  History has proven that stronger nations will exploit weaker nations.  This is one of the things that makes America so great - we don't exploit weaker nations, we protect them.  If we exploited weaker nations we would own this entire hemisphere and nothing could stop us.  Personal security for me and my family is provided by us.  Because we are Americans we have the God given right to own firearms.  Should the economic situation deteriorate to such a level that we had to defend ourselves against individuals or small groups intent on doing us harm we would be well situated for defending our family and home.  Being a combat veteran, I pray we never see those days in this country.

A good day for Borscht

It's cold again this morning.  I guess winter really is coming.  The wood stove has been a real treasure these past two weeks or so.  By the way, the red beans I cooked on the stove turned our great.  It inspired me to look into other things to cook on the wood stove.  I was thinking about having to using the wood stove as our only source of heat and cooking.  There are a few things that we simply cannot live without, at least not at first.  My first thought was about coffee.  We have an electric drip coffee maker like the rest of world that depends on the electric company.  When I was a kid my dad made coffee on the gas stove in a little aluminum percolator coffee pot.  I used that percolator when I went camping in the woods in Florida as a teenager.  I have no idea what ever happened to that beat up percolator but I know it made good coffee.  I went to Amazon and found a reasonably priced, stainless steel percolator, about $20.00.  I also splurged on the $1.99 glass top for it since it came with a plastic one.  Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I did that, but looks really cool and if you are going to use something you should like it.  I like it with the glass top. I made coffee in the percolator this morning but I confess I did it on the stove in the kitchen, not the wood stove, because I was cooking this morning - more about that below.  The coffee was OK but I need to relearn making coffee in the percolator.  Lesson #1, no matter how much of a good idea it seems like, don't use a paper filter.  Maybe the next pot will be on the wood stove without the paper filter.  I also looked at a bunch of cast iron cookware and came to a startling discovery.  Most cast iron cookware available in the USA is made in China.  That is unsat in the extreme.  There are a couple of cast iron companies in America but they will not be enough to sustain us all if things really go to pot.  The lesson there is: buy your cast iron now. 

So yesterday we did some work in the garden.  I stacked another layer of tire on top of the tire gardens that have the winter veggies in them and we covered the top with re-purposed windows that Steph got from a demolition project this summer.  The long term plan for the windows is a small green house, but we didn't get there this year.  The timing was perfect, we had a hard frost this morning and our tender young spinach, cabbage, radishes and cauliflower were covered.  The plan is that the black tires will absorb heat and the clear windows will allow the sunshine in.  The windows are placed loosely atop the tires so hopefully they will ventilate well without being drafty.

While in the garden I pulled the last of the sweet potatoes from the ground and was pleasantly surprised at the amount and sizes of them.  We had baked sweet potatoes with our dinner last night, have plenty of large ones for another few meals plus a good sized pile of small and ugly ones for peeling, boiling and baking as sweet potato casserole.  Yummy.  The other thing I pulled was the very last of the beets.  With a good number of beets in the frig and the ones I just pulled I was inspired to think of cold-weather beet recipes.  Borscht came to mind.  I've never made borscht but I've eaten a fair amount.  I was totally spoiled a couple of years ago when I went to a friend's house for a Christmas party and he had made borscht.  I learned some good tips from him.  Occasionally someone at work will make borscht and bring it work.  So I looked up recipes and recalled the lessons I learned from Mark, who made it for his Christmas party.  There are as many recipes for borscht as there are little Slavic babushkas.  There is Ukrainian borscht, Russian borscht, Polish borscht and now there is Tacketts Mill Farm borscht.  Otleechna! 

I took my beets, washed and peeled them and grated/shredded them by hand.  That was work, but I hope the extra effort and love translate into extra beety goodness in the borscht.  I also cut the large beets into small chunks because I like beets and the chunks add some texture.  I kept three or four small beets and threw them in whole.  I added sour kraut, a step I saw in a recipe on line, chunked up some small carrots, sliced up a large onion, added the heart of a celery, garlic from the garden, beef broth and sea salt.  It is simmering as I type this.  If it is bad I will be unhappy because I grew those beets myself and hate to waste food.  Mark told me "Borscht is like gumbo," he knows I came here from Louisiana and all good teachers put their lessons into context for their understudies, "you just build on the basics."  So, that is what I have done.  Mark had meat in his borscht.  I do not, at least not this time.  I have a large pot of this beet soup and will doubtless bring some to work for my coworkers, a couple of whom really know their borscht.  I don't think the Manischwitz family has anything to fear from my version just yet, but I guess it is possible I could become a beet soup billionaire if I hit just right.  This is America, after all.

Re-elect Nobody

My favorite bumper sticker from this election said "Re-elect Nobody".  That's pretty much how I feel about it.  I went this morning and did my duty as an American citizen to arrest this country's fatal spiraling nose dive to the left.  I hope the message is abundantly clear to all of our elected officials that we are sick of the same old shit.  My brother described it pretty well.  He explained Obama's election as a reaction to us all being pissed off at George Bush and his idiot cronies running the country into the ground, totally screwing up two wars, letting Rumsfeld destroy relationships with our long standing allies in "Old Europe", etc, etc, combined with Mr. No Personality Except for Grumpy Old Guy McCain - what else were we going to do except lurch toward the charismatic guy who talked a good game.  We came out looking progressive and thoughtful.  He turned out to be a friggin' commie intent to ram his agenda home in spite of wide spread outrage.  I guess he thinks he knows best.  We didn't elect him to know best, we elected him to do what we tell him to do.  Got it?  I hope so.


Don't get me wrong.  I voted for the grumpy guy.

Wood Stove Cooking

Every once in a while I get a wild hair and have to try something new.  Cooking on a wood stove is something I have thought about plenty and even watched a bunch of YouTube videos about.  This morning we got our first real cold temperatures.  When I woke up it was 30 degrees.  OK, that may not be "real" cold to folks in Minot or Anchorage, but here in the Old Dominion that qualifies as cold.  Cold enough to spend the time to get the wood stove going so I could cut the chill in the house.  Our wood stove is a simple little Vogelsang Boxwood stove, nothing spectacular.  The only real modern innovation is the electric heat reclaimer that blows hot air captured from the stovepipe back into the room.  Its a pretty nifty gadget and it works like nobody's business.  I got the stove rocking this morning!  It is toasty in the living room, where the wood stove is located.  As long as I keep feeding it wood it keeps kickin' out the warmth.  So, I was thinking about the slow cooker and my thoughts turned to the wood stove.  I have never cooked on it before and I thought I would try something simple.  I pulled out a blue enameled camp style dutch oven, rinsed out some dried red beans and put that puppy on the stove.  I removed one of the little, round cooking-burner covers and set the beans over it.  It heated up to boiling MUCH faster than I expected, which was encouraging.  I cut up an onion and some dried Anaheim chili peppers from the garden, found that special, big, meaty ham bone I've been saving for some special pot of something, added some water and let her go.  It's been cooking since about 0900 and its about mid-day now.  The smell is tremendous. I took the lid off of the dutch oven to help cook down some of the water I added to cover the ham bone, and the smell of the boiling beans and ham is being circulated around the house by the heat reclaimer.  I'm ready to eat right now!  The good part is this is my proof of concept that if we lose power we can still cook and feed ourselves.  We've been blessed so far that every winter when the storms come we have not lost power long enough to cause a problem.  But now we know, if it happens we can boil some dried beans and veggies from the garden.  Maybe next I'll try that dutch oven bread recipe I saw on YouTube.  I'll let you know how the beans turn out.

Countdown to Firearms Season

Deer season for hunters using modern firearms in Stafford County, Virginia, opens on the 13th of November. I am hopeful that we can put at least one well fed doe in the freezer this season. Turkey season is open right now and there is an abundance of wild turkey around here. Not being properly equipped for wild turkey season, in my own opinion, keeps me from spending any time waiting for a turkey to cross my sights. It is archery season now but I do not own a bow and have never tried bow hunting. I have nothing against bow hunting, but I prefer not to launch an arrow, stick it into a deer and then have to follow a blood trail hoping that it does not leave my little patch of woods and cross onto someone else's property before it drops dead. I prefer to stick to my plan to ambush a deer with my .12ga slug gun and not have to worry about the deer running much at all. I went on-line and bought a DVD on how to butcher deer for maximum meat. I also bought a really good 5" boning knife. I recommend a website called "Ask The Meatman" for anyone serious about learning more about butchering deer, beef, and pork. They have great videos, they sell knives, have recipes and basically everything you need to know about processing your own meat. I think the average American has completely lost a connection to where meat comes from. The closest we come to understanding is possibly seeing a cut chart on the wall of our grocery store butcher counter showing a cow with lines that map out the cuts of meat. Plenty of deer hunters take their deer to a processor/butcher who cut it and wrap it for them. I want a better understanding of the process and I want to control how my meat animals are raised, how they are treated during their lives and how they are killed and butchered for my family's consumption. It only takes a few minutes on YouTube to get a good understanding of how our grocery store meat is raised, (over) inoculated, treated like something less than a fellow created being during their lives, often over crowded, hardly ever given anything approaching a natural life, and then terrorized in their final moments of life, killed by uncaring, low paid employees of industrial meat processing plants and butchered in less than sanitary conditions that barely meet the low standards of the US Drug and Food Administration. Our answer is to raise our own poultry, ensure they have good lives, are treated humanely throughout their lives, not given unnecessary drugs or poor feed and then killed in a humane way and processed in a sanitary way by me, not "some guy" who couldn't care less about the health of my family. There are a number of farms around here that offer pasture raised beef that is slaughtered and processed on the farm by the farmer. That tends to be what we prefer.

Fall is here - at last!

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I love when the long, hot days turn into cool evenings and mornings. Fall always reminds me of Europe, for some reason. I remember the cool days and the Volksmarches in Germany, the walks through immaculately maintained woodlands, the breezes that carried brightly colored leaves to the ground, the smell of the Earth, the warmth of the Sun. We have a great fall season here in Virginia. Halloween is normally a blast because the temperature is just right. Fall is apple harvest season and I cannot wait for our apple trees to begin bearing fruit. It is also pumpkin season. We only got a few small pumpkins this year. Next year I'll plant them later and pay more attention to them than I did this year. One thing that fall always reminds me of is hunting season. I've never been a big hunter but, having worked in the firearms industry for years, I always look forward to fall because the American hunter takes his sport seriously. This year I've decided that, since we have the land and the deer, I'll try to fill my limit. I'm not a trophy hunter. I want meat. So, I took my Remington 870, which was originally intended for home defense, and bought myself a great, used, 24" rifled slug barrel with a cantilever scope mount. Thank God for the Second Amendment and Gunbroker.com. After researching a bit I decided to try the Winchester Supreme .12 gauge, 3", 385 grain, partition Gold sabot slug. I stole the little red dot scope off of my tricked out Kalashnikov and put it on my slug barrel. To make a long story short, I sighted that puppy in at 25 yards, based on my planned kill zone, in only two rounds. I can't wait. The plan is to put a couple of big, healthy does in the freezer as roasts, steaks and ground meat. I LOVE me some deer chili!

Time to start the Autumn Garden

Summer has been busy and productive around the farm. The garden has produced a LOT of tomatoes, to our delight, the corn did really well and is now done for the year. We canned homemade tomato sauce and homemade stewed tomatoes. Beet pickling next. Since we have run the course of the summer garden I have started some more broccoli and lettuce for the fall garden. We will also put in some more spinach, cauliflower, cabbage and green beans. The green beans I planted in the summer garden never really got into production but the super-long asparagus beans I planted were not very tasty and produced small amounts per bean stalk. I won't plant them again.

The bees are doing well, I have added another brood box and a honey super. They girls are really busy during the day and are a joy to watch as they buzz around the hive.

Fresh Corn!

Well, we are definitely doing much better this year than in years past. We have eaten all the spinach, picked all of the broccoli, finished all of the lettuce, harvested the onions and garlic, the beets are ready to be harvested, we are pulling monster cukes from the garden, the first red tomatoes are being picked and joy of joys, we are eating fresh corn from the garden with out super tonight! Man, this is why we planted a garden!

The Pollinators

I installed my bees on the 16th of April and checked on them for the first time this weekend. They are doing awesome! I started with a 5 frame nucleus hive (nuc) from the Sustainable Honeybee Program, Inc, in Loudon County, VA. (www.sustainablebees.org) Since they had to draw comb from foundation I guessed it would be a month or more before they were ready for the second hive body to be added. I was wrong. At three weeks they had drawn and filled the remaining four frames and had drawn burr comb under the hive-top feeder so that I nearly could not remove the feeder. I had to rush back and assemble another hive body to stack on top of the first hive. If they continue at this rate we will have lots of bees to work the garden and fields. When I removed the feeder I had to also remove the burr comb from atop the frames and below the feeder. It has a good combo of larva, pollen and capped honey. I showed the comb to my wife and kids and we all got to taste the honey our bees had produced. It is great. I hated to waste the larva that had already begun to develop, but now they will have much more space to use. I'm glad I checked on them!
This is my second year as a beekeeper. My first was very educational, but it ended badly with the loss of my hive to the cold winter. Much like my gardening adventures, I re-read the reference books I have and tried again, this time with a couple of ideas from other, more successful beekeepers. I had also wanted to have more than one hive, but as it turned out I was only able to secure one nuc this spring. Having two hives is a good idea in case one or both become weak because you can always combine the hives. I am hoping that if these bees continue to grow the colony at their current rate that I can make a split this summer.
Sometimes people look at me funny when I tell them that I keep bees. Most folks think it is neat and some know or have known folks who have kept bees. I think keeping bees is an important part of sustainable agriculture. I like it because it caused me to learn something that I did not know anything about and because I enjoy that place I find myself in when I am standing over my open hive with the bees buzzing, looking at the frames full of bees. It forces me to focus on the business at hand and on treating the bees gently. The smell of the honeycomb and the smoke, the sound of the buzzing, the sight of the bees working so diligently at their various tasks, the sunlight shining into the open cells, the tiny eggs, the various colors of the pollen, the white, capped honey, and most of all I think, the total disconnection from everything else. The stresses of work, traffic and finances are far away and its just me and the bees.

Little flowers

I saw the first flowers on a couple of our plants this evening as I was walking in the garden. Our golden raspberries are blooming. I hope that means we'll get some fruit this year. I also saw the first little yellow blooms on one of the tomato plants. You know what that means - in a few weeks we'll be seeing fresh tomatoes. The bees are doing well. As I was standing near the hive watching the activity one of my cats, Rooney, our first feline leukemia rescue cat, came over to the hive. He was not very aware of the bees. He is now. His tail brushed against the front entrance to the hive and he got a nasty surprise. He had a small number of bees burrowing into the thick fur on his tail to sting him. Poor kitty. Of course, Steph and I tried to remove the bees without getting stung ourselves, which we accomplished but not without a fight. Encountering one bee that is determined to sting you is a serious challenge (and a GREAT adrenalin rush!). Encountering a lot trying to sting you is a hopeless cause. We got away without being stung. Rooney wasn't so lucky.

As an aside, all of our cats are rescue cats that have feline leukemia virus. Feline leukemia is often fatal but some cats survive if diagnosed and treated soon enough. Feline leukemia is responsible for more feline deaths than any other infectious disease. We have two male, orange tabbys and a calico female. We also had the gray and white kitten of our female calico, but she succumbed to the disease and passed away very young. Most feline leukemia positive cats are kept indoors and isolated because the disease can be spread through their bodily fluids to other cats. Once we moved out here we began letting the cats out a little at a time to increase their quality of life. At this point, they are very much like any other cats and you would never know they are positive for feline leukemia. They roam outside and catch mice, voles and birds like any other barn cats.

Coming along well.

We have a garden! So far we have even harvested leaves from the spinach and lettuce for our salads and made a Sunday brunch of spinach and Swiss cheese omelets. Our own eggs and our own spinach. I have to say, it tasted great! The potato plants are going wild. I will soon cover them with a new tire and some more compost, leaving only a few inches exposed above the soil, to encourage them to grow more tubers in the compost. I have read that a 4 tire stack of potatoes grown in this fashion will yield far more potatoes than we can consume in a season, so plenty for storage. The beets are coming up slowly. The onions are doing very well. The broccoli plants are soon to produce and my intent is to cut the early heads off to encourage the heads to split and grow even more heads. I planted some carrots in among the tomatoes and they have real carrot leaves now. Our Silver Queen sweet, white corn is doing quit well also. Silver Queen is a hybrid that is supposed to be the best tasting sweet corn variety. We shall see.

Corn. Now that leads me to another topic. I don't claim to be an expert or even have a complete understanding of the issue of genetically modified vegetables, but it seems to me that Monsanto and the big corn producers are taking it on the chin for producing varieties of corn that require less water, fertilizer and pesticide. With the population of planet Earth growing ever steadily and the demand for food along with it, doesn't it make sense to modify food product to feed more people? Being a beekeeper I understand the concerns about genetically modified plants producing genetically modified pollen, etc. I do not want my bees effected by pollen that could hurt them. So here is my question: What are you doing about it? Me? I'm growing my own food, at least some of it, to reduce demand on global food resources. I hope to make a small dent in that demand by doing so. It may seem inconsequential on the global scale, but it also seems like the responsible thing to do. This appears to be a topic surrounded by a lot of hype and emotion. Where is the science?

Off to a good start.

Well, the garden is off to a good start. We have both white and yellow sweet corn in, cukes, green beans, spinach, five types of tomatoes (beefsteak, cherry, romas, lemon boy and golden hybrids), sweet basil, onions, garlic, carrots, bib lettuce, broccoli, green peppers, banana peppers, Anaheim chilis, and large sweet peppers, beets and of course, Pontiac Red potatoes. We also have watermelon, cantaloupe and pumpkins. We still have to put in the sunflowers, although we have some seeds in peat pots along with the zucchini, yellow squash, more corn for the three sisters gardens and more bib lettuce because I'm sure we'll go through it pretty fast. I started some Blue Lake pole beans for the three sisters gardens as well. I also installed a beehive just outside the wire fence of the garden in hopes that the bees will be happy to help us pollinate the garden. That is a story all to itself. Beekeeping is an awesome past time and super beneficial to both agricultural and natural plants. Not to mention, you get honey out of it.

We are using our companion planting charts to keep our tire beds full. The lettuce shares with carlic, the tomatoes share with basil, peppers, carrots and garlic and the three sisters gardens share corn, beans and squash types including watermelon, cukes, cantaloupe, pumpkins as well as zucchini and yellow squash. Eventually, I'll put some pictures on here, but for now everything still looks pretty small, although we did have our first garden salad of bib lettuce, spinach, green onion and boiled egg. Hard to beat that, at least until the tomatoes are ready.

Round Foot Gardening - or - the Re-Tire Garden

If you are like me and refuse to be defeated by your failures at gardening you automatically seek knowledge from the experts. That almost always includes internet searches and reading books about how to garden. There is a lot of information out there, and some of it is totally false. Luckily you can use the internet to find out what other people have to say about books and information before you invest your time and money in books and DVDs. So, after our first couple of years of unproductive to marginally productive gardens I began my quest for wisdom from the experts. Let me narrow down the vast field of available information to the ones which I found most useful. Notice how I said useful, not interesting, because there is a large amount of interesting but ultimately unhelpful information out there as well. The first should be Mel Bartholomew's latest book, All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow more in less space!. Mel is a retired engineer who decided to start a garden. His failures lead him to rethink gardening in an engineering sort-of-way. Like the designer of the Glock pistol, he took something people have been doing traditionally for centuries and breathed fresh new life into it. I am not ashamed to say that I copied his concept, I just executed it differently. The next is The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. Edward's book is forewarded and endoresed by John Storey, of Storey Publishing. That is a clear indicator that his book falls into the category of pure enduring wisdom and zero hyperbole. Edward and Mel both hit upon the same truths: wide, raised beds, successive planting, companion planting and crop rotations. Mel uses square and rectangular raised beds and Edward uses long, wide raised rows. The idea is the same, deep soil for your plants to grow in and separation from invasive weeds. Mel's book gives us a great concept, Edward's book a similar concept, both books have more merit than these concepts with good, useful planting info for specific plants, using composts and soil, and like I mentioned, companion planting and crop rotation ideas. I took their concepts and combined them with another idea I found for planting potatoes: using recycled, old tires as planting beds. Again, not a new idea. People have been using old tires as planters for decades, I just combined Mel's concept with the use of recycled tires instead of more costly, less durable materials like wood, and Edward's concept of raised beds by raising them into rows of tires. Thus we dubbed our garden the re-tire garden - or - in deference to Mel, Round Foot Gardening. We also decided to combine the innovative with the traditional in an attempt to maximize the positive features of both. That means I planted traditional Native American "Three Sisters Gardens" in our tires, successively. A Three Sisters Garden consists of corn, beans and squash (or pumpkins, melons and gourds). Native Americans were successfully feeding themselves and their families with this mutually beneficial companion planting concept before anyone ever arrived from the Old World with gifts of blankets and many centuries before the phrase "companion planting" found its way to the internet. I won't bore you with the scientific details, especially since I don't fully understand them myself, but suffice it say that the plants feed each vital nutrients through the soil. You start by planting corn as soon as you can, according to climate/planting zone, etc. If you plant different strains of corn you must be careful that they do not flower simultaniously or you risk cross polination and harvesting your own less than ideal "experimental hybrids", which sounds so much nicer than "mutant" corn. Once the corn is up about six inches or so you plant the green beans. The corn will provide the stalk for the green beans to climb. Once the beans are up you plant or transplant your squash/melons/pumpkins/gourds (I'll plant all this year) and those broad leafed plants provide shade on the base of the other plants and deter weeds while also providing vital nitrites into the soil. I'll plant them successively to provide for a continual harvest, the hope being that any overage will be canned for storage.

The tires were free and will be in place in a thousand years when future archeologists discover my garden and declare it a religious temple for the ritual sacrifice of car parts. Having a good relationship with my mechanic shop/Goodyear dealer helped me to convince them that I would carry away their old tires and they would not 1. have to pay someone to haul them away to the landfill, or 2. have to haul them away themselves. They also appreciate the fact that I am a customer and I will keep coming back to them many years after I have fulfilled my desire for their trash. I took the old farm truck (which sounds much cooler than "my battered 1979 Ford F150") down to the tire shop and picked up the tires from beside the dumpster, making two trips and coming away with a treasure that amounts to 40 odd otherwise worthless tires. 40 seems like a lot, but once we finished the plan that is what it amounted to. That includes tires for the bases of our fruit trees and for our blueberry and raspberry bushes. Once we placed the tires on the ground to get a visual of our plan and made our changes accordingly we cut the side wall of of the side of the tire that faces up. That gives us plenty of space for planting. At first we cut the sidewalls off with a folding combat knife, because it was handy. Then, my brilliant wife asked if we could do it with the electric saw. Turns out you can, and very well, with much less grunting and sweating. We covered the ground beneath the tires with a liberal amount of old newspaper, which will deteriorate and cause no harm to the ground we grow our food in while stopping the growth of weeds and grasses from below the tires. We filled the tires with our own compost made from last year's horse, chicken and goat manure and clippings and all things compostable. We then planted, fed and watered our seeds and seedlings. Wish us luck! If I went through all this for nothing I will be closer to garden defeat, but I have more strength left - and a heck of a lot more confidence this time.

Gardening

Everyone who thinks of living in the country also thinks of having a garden. In the Spring of 2008, our first Spring here, we decided to have a garden. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both Virginia Gentleman Farmers like myself, had large gardens. Clearly, it was the right thing to do. Really, how hard can it be? Humans have been growing their own food since Adam and Eve. All manner of ignorant societies subsist on the crops they grow. Gardening is going to be a snap.

Not so. Gardening is the great equalizer. If you don't believe me watch the "The Godfather". If Don Corlioni had not been so enamored of his tomato garden he would still be with us and Michael would never have become so evil. I often wonder exactly how gardening came about since the trial and error method so common to human history and agriculture should have ensured the death of the human race the first winter outside the garden of Eden. Not long after moving to our little place we identified a perfect spot in the yard for our garden. It was a South facing gentle slope that got sun all day long. As we walked the ground we realized that our forerunners on this land had identified the exact same spot many years ago. The rows of a garden were clearly evident. We envisioned long rows of tall corn swaying in the summer breeze, prize winning watermelons, numerous healthy tomato plants bending under the weight of huge, red, delicious fruits. We would be giving away paper sacks of vegetables to our neighbors and friends and basking in the light of their praises. With these visions of cornucopia dancing in our heads we instantly began procrastinating until it was nearly too late to plant anything. At the last minute we dashed to the home and garden center and bought the last few remaining sorry looking tomato plants and some assorted flowers. Having prepared the ground in our "garden" not at all we compensated by buying a few bags of potting soil and some green liquid fertilizer. Having mowed the tops off of all of the ancient rows in the garden with a push mower, which, by the way is a proven scientific process for finding huge, native Virginia rocks and creating clouds of dust where none should rightfully exist, we set out with a shovel and a hoe to plant our garden, just like our pioneer ancestors. God bless our pioneer ancestors! I now understand why one half of my family decided to stay in European cities and put up with German invaders every so often. It seems a small price to pay for not having to dig in the New World's rocky dirt to plant a small number of garden center reject tomato plants. Finally I broke down and went back to the home and garden center to rent a gasoline powered tiller. I quickly realized that tilling the entire 40’ x 40’ garden plot was not feasible with this device so instead I tilled in individual beds across the slope for the various plants we wanted to grow. Then, after removing at least a bushel of healthy native stone, we assaulted the now softened ground in the beds with our garden shovels and bags of potting soil. Soon after we had tomatoes, green beans, strawberries, watermelon, squash and cucumber plants in the ground. Soon we were growing a healthy crop of weeds. The weeds were invasive, they took over the garden, seemingly overnight. Clearly, this garden was not going to work into my schedule of walking into it to survey my wonderful crops every Sunday afternoon. It required work. So, we pulled weeds. In fact, we mowed weeds with a push mower. I learned one important lesson that summer: fertilizer makes the weeds stronger. Another lesson was that tomatoes are weeds. Thank God! They were the only thing we got that year, besides a few handfuls of weak looking green beans. The cukes and squash plants died before producing any fruit, the strawberries suffered predation from some unseen strawberry thieves (we did get one tiny, red berry) and the watermelons kept rotting from the moist soil. At the end of the summer our garden looked horrible. Tall stands of brown weeds dominated. So, we spent the winter reading books about gardening. 2009’s garden was a great improvement. We actually harvested more tomatoes than we ate. We got a few cucumbers, a reasonable number of squash, although our attempts at potatoes suffered and we learned some valuable lessons. Potatoes can be planted in beds with straw covering them instead of deep soil. Notice how I said straw. If you substitute straw with uneaten hay you will have a bumper crop of hay grasses, which will choke out your potatoes and give sanctuary to insurgent insects that will eat your squash and cukes. Ask me how I know.

Farming for Dummies (that would be me...)

A couple of years ago we moved out to Stafford, VA, from inside the Capitol Beltway of Northern Virginia. We wanted to escape the overcrowded, unfriendly feel of "occupied" Northern Virginia and have some room to move around in, be free to raise a few farm animals and generally enjoy the country. We couldn't be happier with our decision. The life we envisioned comes with challenges and rewards. For instance, living in the country does not mean that I can give up my job in the city, so my commute to work went from 25 - 30 minutes each way to no less than 1.5 hours each way. As anyone who has ever traveled up and down I-95 through Virginia and Washington, DC, knows, that commute is one of the worst in the United States. The reward, however, comes once I am home. I can sit on my front porch and enjoy the peace of our little parcel of paradise, watch the hummingbirds at the feeders, stroll through the woods to my beehives, walk through the garden, enjoy the sunset over the trees, watch my chickens scratch through the yard, or even shoot my guns on my own property without having to worry what the neighbors will think or that someone will call the police. My kids go to a much better school than the one inside the beltway. But I assume anyone who reads a farm blog wants to know about farming, so as we go along we will share our experiences with you. Most of what we are doing is relatively new or brand new to us so I am confident that our mistakes will either confound or amuse you. We' re also not too timid to address politics or religion from time to time, so we invite you to join us on this journey of farming for novices. Sit down, buckle up, and hang on!