Thoughts on Food

I thought that I would make a brief departure from the normal blog posts that are here to wax philosophically about food and health. One of my Christmas presents from my children to me (I asked for it and made the purchase but they were quite pleased with the outcome) was a book called One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka a scientist, organic farmer, and philosopher published in 1978. The book is a philosophical book about the act of farming by using natural methods and limiting human inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery) and eating according to season. It is less of a how to and more of a mind set about growing according to place and time. It was a refreshing read and it confirmed a few thoughts that I had about where I was going with our farm production and some ideas that were developing in my mind.
He mentions eating according to season in Japan and how different herbs, plants and animals have a season and they are eaten to accommodate that time of the year. He speaks of consumers wanting food products out of season. He espouses the idea that we should eat in season for healthfulness. One of the examples he mentions is the light levels being insufficient in the winter time to produce certain vegetables in greenhouses so the addition of light must be used. They are grown in the greenhouse to make an early entry to the market to get a better price. His thoughts are that now you will need to burn more carbon to grow the vegetables and they will be less healthful when consumed. Another example he gives is chicken eggs. He mentions that the eggs that are bought in the store are nothing more than a man made manufacturing process. The chickens are not out foraging they are couped up, given artificial light, hormones, antibiotics and nutritional inputs. What we are eating is really all those man made inputs using the biology of a chicken and wrapped up in the form of an egg. How is the nutrition of that egg compared to a chicken that actually sees the light of day and can forage on natural foods? Our eggs have such a different taste and consistency (more yellow and stiffer yolk) than store bought. This is as good an explanation as I can find. They might be slightly smaller but I will pick ours over store bought when they start to lay again.
Fukuoka talks about eating according to time and what the place has to offer. I have been thinking about this for some time. I have been thinking that man co evolved to the place of his origins. Lets take two examples, an Irish man and a Native American in the Southeast. Both places have different food items that are available at different times of the year. Vastly different climate, light levels, mineral make up of soils, flora, fauna, water, etc. If you take a plant from SE US and transplant into Ireland or vice-versa they will ultimately do poorly without the constant manipulation of factors to overcome what it would naturally experience in the new environment. Man however is more resilient and can adapt. But these two men lets say 500 years ago would not travel as far afield. Thousands of years have gone into generation after generation for that man to exist in his own place while eating from his surrounds and cultivating what he could. The plants and animals of the surroundings have also co evolved with the harvesting of fruits, animals, and seeds in season. I find it fascinating that each season and each generation man is slightly influencing his local flora and fauna to some degree and that his surroundings were doing the same to him. I often wonder if man might be more healthy if he returned to his evolved origins and drank the water, ate the plants produced in the soils, ate the fish of his native oceans, experienced the climate to which he had generationally been conditioned. I think this might be why I crave salt on my foods as my origins take me to coastal west Ireland. I wonder if certain minerals, food components, or the right mix of foods are present or absent in diets of humans who have emigrated from home. I know that plants show symptoms when they are not given what they should have where they grow naturally. Maybe man is not that different from other biology. Maybe healthful "original diets" designed according to historical place of origins could make a difference in preventative medicine. Maybe I should eat less salt. Maybe I should not blog after reading philosophical books.

Christmas 2010

Things are still going well but slower than normal at the farm. We still have green tomatoes but they are ripening up with some stem end cracks. The cracks usually occur from the uneven growth of temperature or soil moisture. Most likely it is the variation of temperatures from the 20's to the 70's in a few days. The zucchini are finished which is unfortunate as these seemed to be the best performing zukes we have grown. They were from one zuke that I saved last year. I forget to save a few seeds just in case we have a loss of all the plants and cannot harvest the fruit again. We will have to start back from a purchased variety and save the seeds again.
We planted the lettuce in our lettuce plot and I hope that we have a harvest like we did last year.
I started to plant more seeds out directly in the field to eliminate the soil aphids that have been appearing in the transplants and affecting the performance of the plants. I haven't thought much about not using transplants as there are benefits like you can control the growing environment better in the house until they are ready to go in the field. You also can get a jump on the weeds as the plants are about 4 weeks old when they go to the field. But there would be a reduced cost with labor and materials with direct seeding. There would also be less of a transplant shock. We will see how this experiment goes.

Christmas Comes Early

Steed Farms got our Christmas gift a little early this year. We are proud to announce the birth of the newest member of our family farm. Noah Benjamin Steed was born at 3:13 pm on 12/13/10. He was 8.0 lbs and 19 inches long. He is doing great and so is Jennifer. We are all trying our best to make his arrival wonderful, relaxed, and full of love.

This season has been tough on our warm season plants. Surprisingly most of the tomatoes are still alive and still green. The peppers got knocked back pretty badly as well as the eggplants and zucchini. I am not sure my thermometer is correct but it registered 20 degrees at the farm. I was thinking that it was suspect but I heard a report of someone nearby with a reading of 18 F only about 10 miles away. Maybe we both have bad thermometers! That is by far the coldest I have seen on the farm. The other plants are still growing but slowly. The honeybell tangelos are ready to eat and are looking great. I was reading about them and it says they are the connoisseurs choice of citrus. It is a cross between a dancy tangerine with a duncan grapefruit. I must say, I picked one to try and it was delicious with a deep gorgeous orange color. I hope our members enjoy them as much as I did. The radishes are ready as well. I never liked radishes until Cynthia from the Corner Store suggested I slice them and fry them in butter. Now I can't hardly wait for them to be ready. If you have never tried them prepared in that manner I suggest you give it a try. I am sure you will be amazed.

Brrrr!

We got through another week miraculously without loosing our tomato crop. The peppers, zucchini, and eggplants got hit a little harder but the tomatoes still look great. I was driving out to the farm last Saturday when the low was supposed to be in the upper 30's and there was frost everywhere and I was beginning to panic. I was expecting the worst. When I got to the field all the plants had a very beautiful coat of crystallized ice on the leaves and I really started to panic. My first thought was,"What happened to the upper 30's?" My next thought was, "I have got to wash off this ice and protect the plants." I ran for the hose and began pulling it towards the rows of tomatoes when it got caught on the pipe and it snapped off below ground. Now I've got two major problems; frost on the plants and a ruptured pipe. I am really panicking now. My next thought was turn off the pump (because of the broken pipe) and get the 100 gallon sprayer and spray off the plants with water to melt the ice. I run to get the tractor out of the shop and pull out the sprayer and run back over to the pump and turn it on so I can have water to fill the spray tank. After the sprayer is hooked up I drive over to the spray filler and pull up under the pipe. I look back and the spray tank is not behind the tractor. It is about 50 feet behind me. I drive back around to go hook up again and notice that the pin had come out of the tractor because it had bent out of shape. I get another pin and repeat the process. I get the sprayer under the pipe, fill it with water, and try to start the sprayer. The whole time I am thinking that I need to get the ice off the warm season plants as fast as possible. I pull the starter cord and nothing. I pull and pull and pull and nothing. Now I've got no other back up plan except prayers. I drive defeated back to the shop and park the tractor. I walk back over to the plants and walk among the icy leaves. I reach down to touch a zucchini leaf and it cracks and breaks where I touch it. Now I pray; this is my plan C. There is nothing left for me to do but leave everything to a greater power. This is also the first day of pick up so I begin to harvest. I keep looking back over to see how the tomatoes are doing. The first signs of cold damage are a droopy, watery appearance too the affected leaves. It never shows up. I watch as the sun melts the ice off the plants and it changes into dew. Still to my amazement no damage from the frost. After seeing the amount of frost on the leaves and seeing the zucchini leaf crack in half, I thought we would have extensive damage on the warm season plants.

I learned a few things that morning. Ice apparently can form even if the temperature doesn't get to 32 F. Even if the temperature will be in the high 30's I still need to protect the plants. And most of all I learned that small miracles can occur in our everyday lives to which I am very thankful.

We had a smaller than usual pick up this last week. I started planting a bit later than usual this year to avoid some of the higher fall temperatures we were experiencing and now the cold weather has been slowing growth. The oranges will be getting sweeter by the day now with the first frosty weather. I was able to cover the warm season plants with frost cloth and it has been money well spent. It has done a great job of keeping the plants above the freezing point except where the plants touch the cloth. I pulled it off the tomatoes last week fully expecting massive frost damage as my min/max thermometer at ground level read 24F (I am not sure if this is accurate), and to my astonishment only minor damage to the outer leaves had ocurred. I am hoping that we will be able to harvest our beautiful tomatoes. They are the best ones that we have grown and I would love to see them in our members baskets.

Due to the slowness of growth, we had to skip a week. We should have mustards, napa cabbage, and tomatoes shortly. Our tropical roselle plants are frozen out. This was a trial last summer and they worked out nicely. I am looking forward to planting them again in the spring. I just tried the leaves and they taste great too. I can't wait to throw them in a salad with their cranberry taste and reddish color.

Another week few days of freeze this week and the susceptible plants are tucked into their beds with cloth. I hope we can get through it well.

We are also predicting some exciting news for our next post!