My First Post-Divorce Christmas

This is a story that my family has heard many times, and my brother has encouraged me to write down.  So I did.  I also will attest here and now that I am not making a word of this up.  This really, really happened. 

The year was 1983.  I was living in upstate New York, completely against my will as a California native.  After a long, dragged-out divorce, my ex finally moved into his own apartment which I had to rent for him (so now you know at least one of the reasons for the divorce).  I was alone – at last – with my 3 ½ year old daughter, Jenn.

Our family tradition every year was to go out to a Christmas tree farm in the country, find the perfect tree, and haul it home.  It was a beautiful tradition, one that I was bound and determined to continue in my newly single state.

Two weeks before Christmas, it was a cold but clear morning as I bundled Jenn into her snowsuit.  Now, for you west-coasters, a snowsuit is de rigueur for the northeast.  It is a one-piece snow-proof thing inflated to bursting with insulation and hopefully a young child somewhere in its depths.  When donned and zipped up, the child’s cherubic face is all you can see as he or, in this case, she stands looking for all the world like a giant gingerbread cookie – legs apart, arms sticking straight out, unable to bend.  Add some boots and a scarf, and she is ready to go.

Go we did in my little Subaru sedan.  Over the hill, through the woods, to a Christmas tree farm not far from our house.  We were the only car there on this weekday morning, so the farmer gave us a tree saw and pointed across the field to where the trees were.  This also was a “low key” (read “cheap”) Christmas tree farm — no Santa’s helpers in cute hats, no sled to bring the tree back, no plastic netting to wrap it in and help put on top of your car. Nope. “The trees are over there,” and back in the house he went.

The field road was frozen, so the ride was slow and bumpy but the little Subaru made it.

As soon as we alighted from the car, Jenn announced she had to pee.  Jenn “announcing” things would shake the earth to its depths – “I HAVE TO GO POTTY!!!” she screamed, her words piercing the frozen air like icicles. 

Okay, among the many drawbacks to snowsuits is they are impossible to get off once on.  I unwrapped the scarf, pulled off the hood, unzipped the front, pulled down the suit, pulled down her pants, and proceeded to instruct my little girl in the fine art of peeing in the woods. 

Which she managed just fine.  All down the front of her snowsuit.  She was soaked, and it was just below freezing out.  So, back to the car we went.  I told her to wait in the car while I went to get our tree, put the saw on my shoulder, and headed down the hill to the trees.

I wasn’t alone.  Jenn’s screams had brought the farm dog around, who was jumping and barking alongside me as I looked for my tree.  (Forget the “perfect” tree – at this point, any tree remotely round and green would do.)  I could hear Jenn too.  She had rolled down the window in the car and was “announcing” that she was cold and wet and wanted to “go home NOW!”
I found an acceptable tree and started to saw it down.  This was not as easy as it had looked when my husband had done it in years past.  I sawed and sawed and sawed, finally realizing the farmer hadn’t sharpened the saw in years.

But, with a sharp kick, the tree came down.  I put the saw on my shoulder, grabbed the trunk of the tree, and started for the car.  I got about 5 feet and realized the tree was a whole lot heavier than it looked.  And bigger.  I couldn’t lift it, so had to drag it with two hands back up the hill to the car.

Sweating, struggling, swatting at the barking dog, serenaded by Jenn’s continuing wailing, I finally got back to the car.  There was Jenn, standing on the front seat, totally naked, with the window wide open, yelling at the top of her lungs.  I tried to put the tree on the roof of the Subaru, but it was too heavy to lift. So I stuffed it into the backseat.  It wouldn’t fit, of course, so I had to leave the back window open with the trunk of the tree between the front seats. 

I put my sweater on Jenn, started the car, put the heater on super high, threw the car into reverse, and ran over the farmer’s dog.  Actually, just its leg.  I jumped out, put the bleeding, yelping dog on the floor of the car next to the naked, screaming three-year-old, and gunned it back to the farmhouse.

Except the field had thawed.  I left the wailing dog/screaming kid-filled car in the mud and ran to the farmhouse to get help. 

The farmer was not surprised to hear I ran over his dog – “that dog is always getting underfoot” – but he was surprised to see the naked kid standing in the open window of the car.  “She always like that?” he asked politely.  While I tried to explain the snowsuit thing, he got behind the car and pushed it out of the mud.

Back at the farmhouse, we transferred the dog to his car to get it to the vet, I gave him money for the tree and my phone number for the vet bill, and Jenn and I headed home with our fresh-cut, farm-raised Christmas tree.

Back home, I gave Jenn a warm bath, put milk on for hot chocolate, took the fresh-baked cookies out of the jar, and went to get the tree out of the car. 

Except (and I know you KNEW this) I had put it in backwards.  You NEVER put a Christmas tree in trunk-first, silly, no matter how much easier it is that way.  I pulled, I pushed, I got the saw out and cut off lower limbs, I pulled some more, cut some more, and finally just pulled as hard as I could through the open side window it was sticking out of.  Limbs broke, needles went flying, bark shredded – by the time I got it out of the car, it was the ugliest tree I had ever seen.

I put it up, put the lights on, hung the ornaments, poured a very big brandy, and the following year went to a tree yard and had a good-looking guy put a perfect tree on top of my car for me.

Merry Christmas from our house to yours.

 

The S.A.D. Facts About Winter Fat

This may not be a popular post. I’m going to suggest that is just darn okay to add a few pounds to your waistline in winter. In fact, it’s a very natural thing — and has little to do with Aunt Jane’s pecan pie or Uncle Joe’s eggnog.

I am not a nutritionist, but I know that I unconsciously (and unfortunately!) want to add a layer of fat as the weather gets colder. Give me calories!

If you watch animals, many naturally gain weight in winter. For some, it’s because that is often when they are pregnant. For others, it’s part of the storing of fat to hibernate or survive long, snowy winters with little food. This was probably vital to survival for our ancestors too. Extra layers of adipose tissue on the body protect against the cold. It is then used as fuel in the late winter and early spring when food stocks would historically be very low due to the now melting frost.

At the same time, the lack of daylight caused by the shortening days during late fall and winter can bring on seasonal affect disorder (SAD)* or winter depression. A quick boost to energy levels and emotions comes from eating high carbohydrate foods like chips, cookies and cereals that give us a fast blood sugar ‘fix’.

But there’s an alternative!

If you’re paying attention to seasonal eating, you’ll notice how your body requests and responds to different foods in different temperatures: cool, crisp, juicy things in summer, and denser, meatier, sweeter things in winter. Sweet equals carbs equals calories. And endorphins. Which may be what allays seasonal affect disorder.

And what vegetables are loaded with “sweetness”? Kale, collards, chard and broccoli actually taste noticeably sweeter in winter than they do in spring and fall. Winter squash, as opposed to summer squash, is really sweet. Roasted beets, Brussels sprouts, potatoes and carrots all bring on the endorphins. If you’re interested in the biology, in warmer months, the energy absorbed by plants converts easily into fruit and seed production, giving us the juicy ripe food of summer. But shorter days and colder nights cause plants to stick with the basics of leaves and roots. Fortunately, when that energy concentrates in the leaves and roots in cold weather, it also converts starches to sugars, making winter vegetables sweet and tempting.

So, instead of reaching for the pastries or a pint of chocolate ice cream to chase the winter blues away, add more of the naturally sweet winter vegetables to your plate. Eating seasonally appropriate foods (and tolerating a slight weight gain in winter) might counter-balance cases of seasonal affect disorder.And don’t worry so much about the little weight gain. That’s natural too. And natural that you’ll lose it quickly when spring brings a renewed level of sunlight and activity. 

*Seasonal Affective Disorder, known as SAD, is a mood disorder affecting approximately 10 to 20 percent of the population in the United States. It is a type of depression that occurs during fall and winter as the exposure to sunlight is reduced. Sunlight not only assists in producing vitamin D in the body, a vitamin essential for calcium absorption, but it also assists in releasing endorphins, elevating mood, vitality and overall health.

 

SAVE OUR SEED, SAVE OURSELVES

I witnessed a pretty amazing thing this past week. We were vendors at the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, sponsored by Baker Creek Seed (the “Seed Bank” in Petaluma). People from all over, from all walks of life, from all political, religious, and social persuasions, came together en masse to taste and talk about heirloom vegetables.

Alice Waters was there. Dr. Vandana Shiva was there. And so were hundreds of school kids, college sustainable agriculture students, moms pushing strollers, and old men who remembered (and wanted to share stories of) what a tomato used to taste like.

The message? Heirloom vegetables — those magic things that taste like their beautiful photos, that produce seed that you can save to plant the following year — are under attack. Monsanto, makers of RoundUp and other noxious pesticides, now owns almost 40% of all the vegetable seed in the US, and nearly 100% of all the corn, cotton and soybean seed in the world. In other words, they control our current food system.

The economic impact alone is staggering. Their genetically modified (therefore patentable) seed must be purchased by farmers year in and year out. And they just announced that they are raising the price of their corn seed 5 to 10%. No reason given.

If you care about the ability of farmers and backyard produce growers to plant a seed that is not genetically modified, that can be saved and planted again the following year without having to pay corporate royalties, that is a true representation of its parent in taste and flavor, and that can be sold to consumers as a pure, unadulterated food, then please learn what you can to help control this disaster. If a company can control a seed, they can control our food — it’s that simple.

Here is a list of seed companies that carry seed owned by Monsanto:
* Territorial Seeds
* Totally Tomato
* Vermont Bean Seed Co.
* Burpee
* Cook’s Garden
* Johnny’s Seeds
* Earl May Seed
* Gardens Alive
* Lindenberg Seeds
* Mountain Valley Seed
* Park Seed
* T&T Seeds
* Tomato Growers Supply
* Willhite Seed Co.
* Nichol’s
* Rupp
* Osborne
* Snow
* Stokes
* Jungs
* R.H. Shumway
* The Vermont Bean Seed Company
* Seeds for the World
* Seymour’s Selected Seeds
* HPS
* Roots and Rhizomes
* McClure and Zimmerman Quality Bulb Brokers
* Spring Hill Nurseries
* Breck’s Bulbs
* Audubon Workshop
* Flower of the Month Club
* Wayside Gardens
* Park Bulbs
Park’s Countryside Garden

 

Summer Solstice

Farm Tales     This is the week of two momentous events: the summer solstice … and my birthday. (Thank you, thank you!) Yes, that’s me a few years ago, starting out my farming days with watering the concrete sidewalk at my Auntie Mabel’s house in Pasadena. I made mudpies too — that was my favorite. (Do kids even DO that anymore?)    Back to the other event. The solstice marks the winding down of the year, light-wise. I always find it a bit sad (if my birthday wasn’t the next day, I’d be sincerely depressed). Just as the weather heats up, the sky is big and bold, the flowers are a-bud, and the crops are growing like, well, weeds … we start turning down the sun. What’s with that?    Here’s what the HuffPost said about it last year: Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, the shortest night, and a tipping point: from here on out the days get shorter and the nights get longer. The solstice, sometimes called midsummer because by now farmers have long done their planting (Editor’s note: MOST farmers), is technically the first day of summer. It both ushers in the warmest season, and reminds that the season is short, slipping away day by day… Honoring the solstice can remind us just how precious each day and season is, because the truth of its passing away is also acknowledged. Gifts need to be appreciated, not taken for granted. Okay, okay. But I am thinking about real estate in the southern hemisphere so I can have summer, and the summer solstice, twice a year. It’s only fair for someone who farms.

 

2011 Trend: Growing Young Farmers

For years, young people have been leaving the farm. Today, the USDA estimates the average age of the American farmer is 57, with more than 25% over age 65. However, while the trend is too new to quantify, USA Today reports that there is an emerging movement in which young people, “most of whom come from cities and suburbs,” are taking up organic farming on small-acre farms throughout the country as an “honorable, important career choice.” Three factors have made these small organic farms possible: a rising consumer demand for organic and local produce, a huge increase in farmers markets nationwide, and the growing popularity of community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, says USA Today. The National Young Farmers’ Coalition is a new organization created by and for young and beginning farmers in the United States, and a soon to be released documentary, The Greenhorns, explores the lives of America’s young sustainable farming community. Also, an international volunteer organization, Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, since 1971 has been connecting young workers with organic farms all over the world, where they gain hands on experience in sustainable farming. The invested energy of youth is a promising bonus trend indeed for the future of sustainable food.

 

ITALY 2010

It’s been awhile since I last posted here. But I intend this to be a more active blog this coming year, starting with my return from Italy last Tuesday.

I was honored to be chosen as a delegate to Slow Food’s Terra Madre (http://www.slowfood.com/), an international gathering of some 5000 people who are passionate about good food — growing it, eating it, supporting it. This antithesis to fast food seeks to educate consumers by showcasing small farmers from around the globe who are working the soil every day to produce food that is “good, clean and fair.” (Want to see us riveted by the workshop? Click here!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgtrMINk6TQ&feature=player_embedded#!)

While Terra Madre and its exhibition sidekick, the Salone del Gusto, were interesting, they overwhelmed me. I’m just not into sensory overload when suffering from jet-lag and a plane-induced head cold.

So my traveling partner, Jennifer Hainstock, and I sought out quieter parts. Our first stop (pre-Terra Madre) was Bellagio, on Lake Como. This is Lake Tahoe meets Cinque Terra, with amazing villas ringing flowerbox-lined shores. The weather was just perfect, and it was a great start to the trip.

After leaving Terra Madre in our little bitty rental car loaded with four of us (we weren’t the only ones overwhelmed) and thousands of pounds of suitcases and gear, we headed to Alba and the truffle festival. Tiny but mighty describes this one. I eavesdropped on a couple looking over truffles with great deliberation, so I assumed they knew what they were looking for. I don’t speak Italian, but I have a capacity for understanding what people are saying when I don’t understand a word they speak. So I learned all about truffles, and bought two white ones as gifts for our soon-to-be-hosts. We had lunch (dinner?) in a tiny restaurant that again proved what I’ve always said about Italy – you simply cannot have a bad meal there. (Unless it’s at the Holiday Inn Express in Torino, thank you very much.)

By day four, Jennifer and I were headed to my friend Nora’s farm in Tuscany. Nora is a transplanted New Yorker who has lived in the Chianti region for over 20 years, raising the most gorgeous cashmere goats in the world. (www.chianticashmere.com) She was my inspiration for getting my own cashmere goats 10 years ago.

Here’s Nora with the goats:

Well, Jennifer fell in love. With the goats, with Nora, and with her dogs. Oh, the dogs …

Okay, I liked the goats too …

We spent 5 days at Nora’s – logging and photographing goats, giving medications, moving them from one field to another, feeding them, and basically helping Nora in any way we could. And staring off into the hills to admire the beauty of a place that is like a postcard everywhere you look.

Here is a view of the farm:

And here is the guest house we stayed in:

Here’s our kitchen and dining/living room:

Jennifer did most of the cooking as I got a cold on the plane and was coughing and sneezing the entire trip:

As you can see we had beautiful weather while we were there.

Thank you, Nora, for an amazing time!

Then it was off to further adventures in Umbria at another farm, this time a sheep farm owned by another friend, Marjatta Camazzoti, and her charming husband, Pasquale. The weather wasn’t as cooperative for this visit, but Marjatta’s delicious cooking kept us happily inside!

Our last night was spent in Rome, with a downpour complete with thunder and lightening. But it didn’t keep these intrepid travelers inside – oh no! We walked through St. Peter’s Square, across the Tiber River, and around the streets and parks in a vain search for more wine and an open restaurant. Instead, we retreated to our (ABSOLUTELY GREAT AND CHEAP) apartment a block from the Vatican to enjoy pizza and wine in bed.

Buona sera from Italy.

 

Healthcare Reform Begins on the Local Farm

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

–Michael Pollan, in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times Saturday, September 9, 2009.

 

If you have junior high or high school kids, no doubt you shop for their food and know what they eat.  Or do you? 

Have you ever driven past their school as it lets out for lunch break or at the end of the day and watched what happens?  I did last week and I was shocked. Large (and I mean that in every way) groups of kids strolled away from campus right to the local c-store.  A few minutes later, out they came with cellophane bags full of orange things and cans of Red Bull or liter bottles of soda.

High-fructose corn syrup is, of course, the main ingredient of that lunch or snack. A large bag of Cheetos holds 9 servings. At 140 calories per serving, half of which is fat, that’s over 1200 calories!  Add the 400 calories and 108 grams of carbs in the soda, and that child is headed for size 15 designer jeans and Type 2 diabetes in a couple of years, as are more than half of the kids in Sonoma County today.

More than half!   According to the Sonoma County Health Department, “For the first time in recent history, the life expectancy of children today will be less than that of their parents, largely due to health risks associated with overweight and obesity.” What will become of any healthcare system if this is its future?  Fat kids become fat adults, hooked on junk food and unable to exercise properly because of their weight. Inertia sets in. You know the physics law that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. We are raising a whole generation of people destined to be couch high-fructose corn syrup addicts.

What does this have to do with farming? Everything. Growing healthy food, healthy young farm workers, and healthy attitudes to vegetables in kids (and adults) has been my passion for over 8 years. I see first hand what the good food does for their moods, their energy, their strong bodies, and their minds. They are believers because they can feel the effects of eating sunshine, soil minerals and pure well water every single day.

Vibrant, healthy, vital, glowing. Not your typical patient in the ER or doctor’s office. And not your typical junior high or high school student either.

So, think there’s a connection?  Tell Mr. and Mrs. Obama. Let’s turn our schools, our hospitals, our doctor’s waiting rooms, our family dining rooms into healthcare centers that focus on real healthcare reform — what we’re feeding our own and our children’s bodies.

 

Food Inc.

Every once in awhile, farmers go to town. Saturday, it was both literally and figuratively for us. The literal town was San Francisco for the premier of the new film, Food Inc. And figuratively, we joined a whole theater of people “going to town” about the food crisis.

What food crisis, you ask? I’m not surprised, because it seems that every week there’s a new scare about food and its contaminants, from E. coli O157:H7 to Salmonella to Streptococcus A to . . .

Food Inc. shows us why. It is an eye-popping look behind the “veil” of the food industry, where nearly every product on supermarket shelves contains high-fructose corn syrup or soy. Why? Because those two commodities – corn and soybeans – are controlled by the USDA and farmers are paid money to overproduce it, thanks to the Farm Bill. It is cheap, readily available, and deadly. More than half – that’s right, half – of California’s school children are obese.  Here is the report for Sonoma County (http://www.sonoma-county.org/health/prev/heal.htm). For the first time in recent history, the life expectancy of children today will be less than that of their parents, largely due to health risks associated with overweight and obesity. And the culprit is high-fructose corn syrup in everything from bread to pasta sauce to Coke.

Do I sound angry? You bet!

So is Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of Food Inc. After the film Saturday, he stood up from his seat in the front row to address us and answer questions. The woman behind me was one of the first to ask a question. She was there with her young daughter, who kept saying things throughout the film like, “Mommy, that’s YUCKY!” and “This movie SCARES me.” (This is NOT a movie to take kids to, no matter how enlightened a parent you are. It IS scary.) The mother asked what she could do about her daughter’s school that would not allow her to send food from home because she was on the subsidized school lunch program.  “They feed my daughter hot dogs and pizza! I work really hard to feed my daughter healthy stuff at home – why can’t her school?” That’s our government at work again, folks.

So many other images from the film, all of which demand that we do something:

Farms forced to house chickens in massive henhouses only to watch them become deformed from force-feeding antibiotic-laden corn to fatten them for market in a record 48 days with breast meat that is twice the size of normal chickens. The free-range initiative passed in Sonoma County does nothing to change this – only getting rid of the massive subsidies for corn will. And demanding (and paying more for) local chicken from humane farms.

Eighty percent of the meat in the US is produced by just four companies. If you think they treat animals or workers as anything but another line on the balance sheet, watch this movie. If you think what is shrink-wrapped and available in the meat case at the local supermarket is cheap, watch this movie.

Genetically modified seeds are everywhere already. (Have you ever taken your kids to the corn maze just of 101 in Petaluma? Curious why there are no weeds in the corn patch? GMO RoundUp Ready Corn from Monsanto is the magic answer!)

I sincerely hope you can see this movie. And I sincerely hope it can do for the food industry what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming: at least we’ll all know.

 

Where, oh where?

Where have I been, where have I been?

Planting, of course!  Those 6 ½ acres don’t plant themselves you know.  (Actually, they do – with weeds.  But that’s another story.)

 So what are we planting this year? 

 All the usual suspects – then some very unusual ones.  I love experimenting with new things to see if a) they grow here, b) people like them, and/or c) we like them.  So here’s some of the new things we’re experimenting with:

Emmer  

 I first discovered my love for emmer in Italy.  There it’s called farro.  Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite cookbooks that I bought in Tuscany titled Piano, Piano, Pieno (translated, “slowly, slowly, full”).

Emmer (farro) grain

Farro is an ancient grain said to be one of the first ever cultivated in the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of modern agriculture.  It was used by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, but in the last century it fell from fashion in favor of modern, higher-yielding wheat varieties.  By the 1960s this grain was all but extinct in Tuscany, cultivated only by a few stubborn growers in the remote mountainous corner of the region called the Garfagnana.

 Today farro from the Garfagnana has been awarded an IGP, an Italian designation of protected geographical origin.  It is a tender pearled grain similar to rice, with no need to presoak.  It has a nutty flavor that I love, and is perfect in soups, salads, risottos and I’m sure other recipes.  If only I can find them!

Agretti  

Another Italian vegetable, agretti is something I haven’t tried eating yet but I couldn’t find it in stores or farmers markets here, so I decided to grow it.  Of its culinary value, Frances Mayes has written that “Spinach is the closest taste, but while agretti has the mineral sharpness of spinach, it tastes livelier, full of the energy of spring.”  WOW!

Agretti

Very tender agretti can be used raw as a component of tossed salads; simply rinse and dry, then break or cut up the tender parts and add to the salad. More usually, the edible stalks are separated from the root, rinsed and blanched for up to ten minutes, then drained, drizzled with oil and lemon juice, and served as a green or warm salad.

 Ramps

This is one of my failures.  I read about ramps in Bon Appetit and then googled them to discover recipes galore – all of which sounded yummy.  Where had I been that I hadn’t had them before now?  Well, seems they don’t grow well in California (perhaps this is the only vegetable that doesn’t!) – they grow wild in a wooded, damp site covered in snow.  That’s not Two Rock.  Sierras anyone?  If you want to see what all the fuss is about, read this blog.  And if you find some somewhere, let me know!

 

The Latest Buzz at Canvas Ranch

American as Honey-Sweetened Apple Pie

Seems everyone has something to say about the Obama’s White House veggie garden.  As American Farmland Trust characterizes it, it’s like weekly plot updates to your favorite soap.

The latest is the delivery of a beehive.  Yep, the natural pollinators have taken up residence on the south lawn to show Washington what a little give and take teamwork can accomplish.   (In case you’re wondering, seems the only ones concerned about bees and bites and stings, oh my, are the Secret Service agents.)

New Beehives at Canvas Ranch

Not to be outdone, Canvas Ranch has its own newly placed beehives.  We’ve got a number of hives that were in the Davis area pollinating almond trees earlier this spring.  Now they’re going to town on our fruit trees, herbs, lavender garden, and flowers.  As soon as the plants are up and flowering, they’ll move into action there too.  Hopefully soon, between our hives and those of our neighbor, Claire Macelroy, we’ll have honey for everyone to enjoy.