I am not a locavore. I love Italian olive oil and cheese, Belgian chocolate, South American coffee, Spanish ham, Alaskan salmon,and wine from all over the place. I am not an extremist about anything, and I think that cutting oneself off from the rest of the world makes less than no sense at all.
That said, it’s a lovely feeling to be able to produce a lot of what you need yourself, with the imports as luxury add-ons for variety. I value the concept of food independence and intelligent localism, and Independence Day weekend is a great time to take stock of how we’re doing at meeting our own needs, and celebrate with a local feast.
My current inventory looks pretty good. I’ve grown vegetables for years, but in my new location I’ve greatly expanded my vegetable garden and added laying hens and a dairy goat. I’m raising a batch of chicks for meat, and I have good local sources of grass-fed beef and humanely raised pork. So far this year, the only vegetables I’ve bought were potatoes and avocados, and not many of them. I can get flour from upstate New Mexico and southern Colorado. Not bad for a desert.
So, my 4th of July will start with a brunch of “yard salad,”homemade bread or cornbread, and eggs from our hens. Dinner is likely to include a grass-fed steak, more salad, and homemade egg pasta made from Sangre de Christo flour and backyard eggs. Midafternoon, we might snack on goat cheese from Magnolia, our “yard goat.” We’ll drink my own homebrewed mead, and drink a toast to our beautiful country and our own joy at being part of it.
This year I’ll ask my readers to consider having a local Independence Day feast, or as close to it as works for you. There are farmers’ markets this weekend, and some time to plan, so please leave a comment about how you plan to celebrate our local abundance.
Posts Tagged ‘yard farming’
21 Jun
Before and after: the first six months
Too often, when I look at my garden I concentrate on what needs to be done or what didn’t turn out as hoped. The recent intense heat spells have been hard on garden and gardener alike, and it’s easy to fall into frustrated negativity. So today, as I look out my front door at the view above, I want to remember what it looked like when we took possession of the property six months ago:
Okay, not everything prospered, but we eat a lot of vegetables from our own yard every night, birds and butterflies and skinks abound, and every now and then I see a neighbor or two hanging over the fence admiring the view. Amazing what compost and stubbornness can do.
Please, please, use the DH oil spill as an opportunity to think about some ways to reduce your own footprint. “Yard farming” is the most healthful and pleasurable way I know to do that. If you grow any food in Albuquerque, please consider registering with the “2012 gardens by 2012” project. Go to www.albuquerquebackyardfarms.com and click the “2012 Gardens” tab. Sustainablity and greater self-sufficiency are great causes.
8 Feb
Tronchuda, and some thoughts on planning urban homesteads
Every year I try a few vegetables that I haven’t tried before, and for 2009 one of the clear winners was Tronchuda, a giant non-heading cabbage from Portugal. I grew only one plant, and it ultimately reached over four feet across, with leaves almost 2 feet from side to side. The leaves were pleasant to eat cooked at any point, but especially good after a few frosts. I used it in the same ways as collards or kale, and also made a soup with sauteed onions and garlic, Spanish chorizo (not the Mexican soft chorizo,) good chicken broth, salt to taste, and chopped tronchuda, all simmered together until the tronchuda tasted good. By the way, this is an overlooked method for determining when green leafies are sufficiently cooked: keep tasting them, and when they start to taste good, they’re done.
I will definitely be growing it again this year, and that’s the real test of any vegetable: is it worth the garden space? Tronchuda delivers. I’ve read that the wide white leaf ribs can be cooked as a vegetable in their own right, but I didn’t care for them and composted them instead, keeping the green parts and the narrow ribs to cook. I recommend it highly for any garden. You can get seeds at Nichols Garden Nursery, a wonderful source for all sorts of odd delights.
Our own New Mexico seed company, Gourmet Seed International, offered seeds for two of my new experiments, rampion (the famous “rapunzel” of the fairy tale) and bladder campion. I’ll keep you posted.
This is the time of year to plan your homestead garden and order what you need. I’m dealing with a brand new property with no planting in place, so I’ll be starting a new mini-orchard, and I would highly recommend dwarf fruit trees for eager would-be urban homesteaders. They produce relatively quickly, look charming, and allow harvesting with feet planted firmly on the ground.
Every yard-farm should reflect what the owner and family like to eat and drink, and with this in mind I’ve decided to plant wine grapes. It will be a few years before I’m making my own wine, but the thought of my very own mini-winery has already given me a lot of pleasure and the vines aren’t even planted yet. In anticipatory value, it’s the best garden bargain I’ve had, and this may be the most overlooked benefit of urban homesteading; you spend so many happy expectant hours. The same applies to my backyard chickens, which are not yet purchased but are already clucking quietly in the back of my mind.
By the way, if you have any interest in adding livestock to your homestead, it’s worth reading Farm City . Author Novella Carpenter created a little squatter farm in Oakland, and it isn’t what most of us would want, but her descriptions of raising and killing animals for meat are accurate and unromantic (but reverent.) If you have never harvested meat animals, this is a test. If you can’t stand to read her descriptions, you probably don’t want to go into livestock. If you do go on to raise a little of your own meat, I can guarantee that you will no longer allow meat to be wasted. Once you really understand where it comes from, waste is not an option. On the other hand, you will understand the fascinated reverence with which good farmers and hunters view meat animals.
My urban homestead 