Consumable Earth – Kamloops

How many of you have dreamed of having a hobby farm? A few acres, a horse, some sheep, some chickens. If you are anything like me and the people I seem to be around then you have. So many of us have the dream and yet so few are able to commit to it or make it part of their reality.

Commune. The word conjures up many different ideas.
Co-op. Again all sorts of thoughts and preconceptions come to mind.

Is it possible for people to work together for a common goal? Do you want to? Because I do. I would love to build something that people could take part in and create with me.

What would it look like for you? What do you need? What would you like to see? Can we make your dreams come true?

For me it would be a large property (there’s 80 acres for sale that is about 15 min outside of Kamloops). It would have water, lots of it, for irrigation of pasture land and gardens. It would have flat areas and sloped areas, open areas and treed areas. There would be a creek with a willow on it’s banks who’s leaves dipped into the water late in the summer.

We would put up fences for our Jersey cows and sheep. We would let our ponies and horses run free in the pasture knowing they would happily come back to us when needed to pull the plow. We would sculpt the earth and fill it with permanent plantings which would feed our families for generations to come. We would camp out under the stars while we built a straw bale house together and dance under the same stars as we celebrated moving in day for the first family.  Our chickens would run free in the yard snacking on our compost and seaweed we gathered from the coast. We would put up a barn and hay shed as the winter winds drew near.

And oh so much more but as with anything worth while doing it requires work. And commitment. And vision. And determination. We can do this all we need to do is commit.

Want to read more about our plan? visit Kamloops Family Eco-Village

With the change of each season there is a new set of tasks and jobs and projects that arises. Shortly before the frost hit my girlfriend and I filled out pockets with paper bags and with a pencil behind my ear we wandered through her yard gathering seeds that will be planted next spring. I’ve come home on more than one occasion now carefully clutching a handful of seeds that I knocked off a flower head while walking the streets of my neighborhood.

Having recently moved into a home that I plan on spending the next decade in I would like to get a head start on whatever I can in regard to the gardens for the coming spring. I’ve been talking to people who garden and filling my head with all the sorts of tasks that I can do now before the ground freezes so that I will be better prepared to get my garden growing next year.

Next up: Raised beds.

It turns out that building and preparing a raised bed is a perfect fall activity. Building them now and filling them with earth, leaves, compost, manure and/or straw will give the soil lots of time to settle before I try to plant things in them in the spring. Fortunately I have a stockpile of wood neatly stacked along one of my fences that I have recently taken an interest in. In particular the 12′ x 36′ cedar boards that I have now decided will be what I use to build my raised garden beds.

There is 15 yards of gravel coming to my house later this week. The gravel will become what my beds sit on. The entire area will be gravelled so that I don’t have to deal with weeds and to provide good drainage for my boxes.

I’ve screwed together 6 3ftx6ft  frames that will become my beds. Each of them is held together at the corners with a wedge of 2×4 (also from the scrap pile) that has it’s pointy part sticking down. The idea is that they will serve as little stakes that keep the beds in place and provide the boards with some support. I guess. I don’t know I just read this all on the internet and copied what people told me to do. I’ll keep you posted about how they hold up.

Next project… indoor winter greens…

Fall is harvest time. There is something truly magical about it and I love hearing about the many ways in which people prepare for the coming cold season. Here at home we continue our path of exploring food storage and choices that we make.

I was fortunate enough to inherit a large box of pears and apples earlier this month. The apples were easy they went into small shallow boxes and in the root cellar. I was then posed with the daunting task of what the heck to do with 50+ lbs of pears! I cold packed and canned half of them, dehydrated half of what was left and the rest we ate. We must have eaten at least one or two pears a day for two weeks. There are still pears in my fridge that I have been told to make pear sauce with. Oh yeah pear sauce is really really good.

Urs Bauman of Quail’s Farm has been so kind as to supply my flour for years now. Fall is when I buy it and the night before I pick it up is when he grinds the grains. I purchase 10kg bags of rye, spelt and wheat flour and then store them in large rubbermaid bins, in my cellar.

What I am interested in sourcing locally is nuts and seeds. Being vegetarians we eat a lot of these and so finding a local source would be beautiful. Currently we order them bulk through a wholesale food order that gets put in twice a year. They get stored in the freezer.

Frost hit rather suddenly this year and I know that a few farmers were hit somewhat unexpectedly which resulted in loss of crops. I remember a recent cold market morning chatting with growers who frantically picked the last of their produce late the day before and what they could salvage that morning.

One thing we’ve loved in exploring food storage is how it is bringing us in touch with where our food comes from. We are also discovering how ‘convenient’ our world has become in such a short time, how we are about to lose an entire generation of knowledge regarding food storage and household husbandry skills that our grandparents took for granted. It makes me thankful that I have had the realization to bring it back so that I might pass it along to my children maybe even living to see a shift in how we all think about food.

I am jealous. I will admit it. This fellow blogger grew her own popcorn. She has a small garden at home and grows as much of her own produce as she can. I have posted in the past about the Dervaes Family who have steadily worked at transforming this ordinary city lot into an organic and sustainable micro-farm. After reading about this inspirational family I dare you to not look at land use in cities differently.

Around here I noticed that corn was planted in a few of the city’s plots I assume for display purposes but imagine if it wasn’t. What if all of the grass we grew and cut down was actually food like wheat or barley? What if we had ‘lawns’ for a couple weeks after a harvest and we played on the lawn for those few weeks as a celebration of the harvest playing games of baseball and soccer. Our yards instead change with nature and it’s course of growth instead of being forced into conformity.

Just a thought… I’m planting popcorn in a block next year.

Until today I used to be able to say that I had never mowed a lawn in my life. And that would be a completely true statement. I grew up on a farm where mowing the ‘lawn’ consisted of getting a horse or pony and a book and laying out on the grass for a couple hours. As an adult either I lived somewhere that didn’t have a lawn to maintain or someone else took care of it and it just wasn’t my deal.

I now live in a house, with a yard, a sad dust bowl weed infested yard but there is some grass. Someday the grass will be replaced with something useful but for now it has to be cut occasionally or my landlord will complain. Not being a fan of noisy mowers or the whole ‘lawn care’ industry in general I have managed to pick up a second hand push reel mower! I was so excited I mowed the ‘lawn’. All 5 square feet of it and it was long.  It definitely took some force to push but the grass got cut. I have nothing to compare it to so I really couldn’t say what the difference is labour wise.

My yard is flat. No big hills or inclines. The person who sold it to me could not say the same for their yard which consisted of several steep grassy slopes. I’ve always thought that lawns were for playing lawn type activities on which sort of negates the grassy hill but I digress. Flat yard with grass + push mower = easy and awesome. Hilly yard with grass + any mower = difficult.

There was a time that you could get a rebate if you purchased a push mower new. I am generally not about the new things and if there is someone out there who can imagine how you might modify a gas mower into a push mower you need to start a business! Until that time go buy a push mower and cut down your grass!

I finally did it. I hung a clothesline. I now have a 40ft made mostly by nature clothes dryer and it cost me $40 whole dollars. It was surprisingly easy to hang also granted I had some help.

First we screwed in two hooks to studs coming off the house and the garage one of said studs was high up so there was some precarious ladder climbing involved. We thread the wire through each of the reels and into the winch tightener thingy. A couple muscular turns and viola! Clothesline.

Hardest part was finding somewhere sturdy clear and safe to string it. Oh and cutting the darn wire wasn’t easy either thank goodness for wire cutters. I’ve read on BC Hydro’s website that you can actually string a wire off a utility pole so long as it is just a hook and someone can unhook it easily if they need access. Best to give them a call first if you are considering this option.

We also have a mini retractable clothesline for in the house to hang the, um, more delicate items. That one was just as easy to install; two screws in the wall for the unit and screwing a hook into a stud for the other end. We don’t actually own a dryer which means hanging clothes is our only method and I am completely ok with that.

I have recently started to substitute honey for white and brown sugar in my recipes. Half of the required sugar is the measurement of honey that I have been using. 1 cup white sugar = 1/2 cup honey

Honey is amazing!! If you want soft chewy cookies that stay like they were just taken out of the oven use honey! Shh…. I bet the cookie companies don’t want you to know this!

I have a cellar! The house that I recently moved into is VERY old. How old I don’t know but pre second world war easily.  And of course as such it has a root cellar as all houses should. I am thrilled. I grew up with a cold room and for those of you who don’t know a cold room is a room that essentially sits ‘outside’ of a houses normal structure and foundation, much like a cellar of old but more integrated into the actual home. I digress we had a cold room and stored lots of good stuff in it.

It has been something that I have missed in all the houses I have been in since. If I wasn’t sold on the charm and character of this home before I went into the cellar the deal was sealed when I went down those stairs.

Now I am enjoying the fact that I have somewhere appropriate to store my preserves. So far in the cellar is a box of apples, a bag of rice and a flat of canned peaches. I will be sure to post a picture at the end of the harvest when it has been filled for winter!

Some future additions I am considering are salsa and dehydrated tomatoes, a huge sack of potatoes and some vegetables I haven’t really thought of what though. I did pickles years ago and failed miserably it seems that all the pickling cukes this year are quite large and just don’t appeal to me. I scored a pressure canner at a garage sale this year so I would like to try some vegetables now that I have the ability to properly preserve them and my soup can be canned now instead of frozen! Hooray!

I love food. It is such a wonderful thing. I love knowing the path of my food and being able to see it. My pantry is filled with glass jars. I hunt them down at garage sales and thrift stores. Apparently here in Kamloops those fabulous huge glass jars I keep finding with the white lids are what the cafeteria food for the hospital used to come in. They would sell them at the RIH Thrift Seller for a quarter. Of course the food no longer comes in these useful containers and instead comes in plastic packaging that is thrown directly into the garbage. I loathe plastic and how ‘useful’ it is but that is another story.

My pantry is actually a series of cupboards in my kitchen and is divided up into the different meals or uses for the things contained within the jars:

Breakfast

• Homemade Granola
• 7 grain Organic Oatmeal
• Honey
• Dried Cherries
• Dried Cranberries

Cooking

• Organic California Brown Rice
• Organic Rainbow Pasta
• Quinoa (I hear you can grow this here…)
• Couscous
• Misc dried beans (from a lovely lady at the market)
• Pearl Barley (from a local grainery)
• Buckwheat (from the same grainery)
• Wheat Germ
• Misc jars of sea weed (some day harvested by me in our ocean but for now from the health food store)
• Potatoes (from local growers)
• Onions (from local growers)

Flours (I dig grains and bread so I have an excess of these things)

• Millet
• Organic Spelt (from a Kootenay grainery)
• Organic Whole Wheat (from same Kootenay grainery)
• Corn (from a very nice Mexican lady in Kelowna who brings it from back home)
• Durum
• Chick Pea
• Flax seed (ground from whole into flour)

(I think that is all for flours but I could have more)

Baking

• Organic Fair Trade Chocolate and Carob chips
• Organic Coconut
• Organic 6 grain flakes (wheat, rye, soy, kamut, barley and…. darn I forget)
• White sugar (I haven’t managed this one just yet but I do try to sub for honey or stevia when ever I can)
• Typical baking staples like powder, soda, cornstarch etc
• Homemade vanilla extract – a bean in a jar of vodka
  (it is that simple and will last for years! Just keep topping it up)
• 100% Canadian Maple Syrup
• Sea Salt from the Antarctic

Specialty and Convienience Items (largely from Costco)
(Ok so I haven’t perfected the whole process and we don’t have 100% whole food on our grocery list, yet. )

• Corn Tortilla Chips
• Cliff Bars
• Sesame seed granola bars (these things are amazing they are seeds and honey. That’s it)
• Suzanne’s flat bread crackers (sometimes I make crackers it all depends on life at that point in time)
• Flat of organic tomato sauce
• Misc ‘Delectable Edibles’ (real, whole food, fast!)
• Sushi makings (a fabulous treat)

Of course that doesn’t cover spices and tea which are food items in and of themselves but that is the jist of our pantry.  We keep additional potatoes in the cellar over winter.  I am constantly rethinking food and our food choices. We struggle a lot with it because of my desire to eat whole food that comes from, if not my own home, close to home.

I love summer. Who doesn’t. But what I love about it is the growing season and how the produce changes as it ripens and becomes ready for harvesting.

The kitchen staples of apples, oranges and bananas are a perfect example of how out of touch we are with where the food we eat comes from. Bananas are terribly cheap, horribly cheap as a matter of fact and everytime I eat a fresh banana I think a little part of me dies inside knowing where it came from. Oranges don’t grow here either so the only thing that we can actually get from around here are apples. I am staring at an apple tree as I write this. For those who come from the Okanagan they know that before there were vineyards everywhere, and the coddling moth, the apple orchards were what sustained generations of farmers and orchardists. They are a fabulous fruit in that they keep so incredibly well. I can buy a 25 lb box of apples, put them in my cellar and be done with it. No additional labour required. Fantastic.

Not all fruits are so simple. Peaches are another thing that grow plentifully where I am from and man who doesn’t love a fresh peach? They are simply delicious but they don’t keep well at all. Which is why I spent 3 hours a few days ago slicing, boiling, peeling and packing peaches into jars for us to enjoy in the coming colder seasons.

Canning is one of those seemingly lost arts. There was a time when not a root cellar in the city would be found without dozens of jars filled with wonderful fruits and vegetables lining it’s shelves. These days cans of food line grocery store shelves and are packed in factories instead of kitchens. It is sad really but I hear that canning is coming back into fashion what with the recession and all.

When I was growing up we also had a food dehydrator. My mom mostly used it to make fruit leather and banana chips, it didn’t really work all that well and I never really thought much of dehydrating food. Until this spring I met a friend who was/is an avid backpacker and recently purchased a food dehydrator. We would talk about all the things he was going to dry and as the fruit started to come into season a big giant light bulb smashed above my head. Dehydrating food is such a perfect way to keep it intact. I dehydrated a flat of strawberries early this summer and they came out magnificently I wish I had done more. We now have the ability to make our own raisins, crasins and chaisns (dried cherries I just made that up think it’ll catch on?). Brilliant.

To sum it up my primary modes of preservation are drying, canning and freezing. Pretty standard stuff.