The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I had high hopes for this book by Barbara Kingsolver, an author who I really enjoy reading. Recently, I’ve been making my way through High Tide In Tucson, a collection of essays that has a nice natural history / personal experience / poetic analysis flavor to it. She’s up there with Annie Dillard and Rebecca Solnit as my one of my favorite authors to read. Plus, with the added bonus of this book being about farming and a year of eating local, it sounded like it would be right up my alley.

In many ways it was — I really enjoyed the stories about the family’s farm, their exploits with an apparently massive garden, and their impressive flock of poultry (chickens and turkeys). I picked up a lot of little tidbits about things I’d been wondering in the back of my mind (there is discussion of root cellaring fall vegetables and braiding up the garlic after it’s been harvested.) I want to try making some cheese after reading about how they do it. The recipes are also inspiring, though I’ve got to say that I aspire to be more of a vegetarian than I can ever pull off. Overall, it was an enjoyable read that had a lot I could identify with and be inspired by.

I guess the problem was that I went into it with really high expectations. I’ve read a couple books over the last year or so that have really affected the way I think about food: Plenty, a book by a Vancouver couple who eat a really strict 100-mile diet for a year, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s comprehensive look at food systems in the US. I had already read all the arguments and I was convinced, so more information about how bad things really are was a little too much. The narrative walking through the rhythm of the seasons was interesting, but the obligatory facts and arguments got in the way of the thing I was hoping for — the inspiration promised in the title. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle… it’s an amazing title, so ripe with promise; honestly, maybe a little too much for the book to live up to. I guess I was looking for more poetry, more magic, and in the end it was just a lot of normal common sense. Which is kind of Kingsolver’s point, as she looks at the world and wonders why it seems so completely foreign that her family would try to eat only the things they grow or buy locally for a year.

There is nothing like an overdue library book to get me to finish something I’ve been working on 5 pages at a time for the last few weeks. With lots of free time over Thanksgiving, I finally finished it off and I have no regrets. It’s a great book, and I learned a lot (and I wish I could have a turkey raising operation, but there just isn’t room). But maybe I will find room for a root cellar in the basement, and hopefully we will come to understand the ways our lives and our food interact. And we will keep putting things in the ground and watching them come up, slowly at first, then exploding in the miracle of great abundance.

Thanks to Kendall for letting me know about this book on One / Change.

Under a month ago we put garlic in the ground, and it is just peeking up. It is pretty amazing — all 32 cloves are now little sprouts peeking out of the ground. Some are up to an inch or two high while others are just pushing through.

Garlic shoots coming up after a few weeks in the ground. Hopefully it

We are leaving town for a few days over Thanksgiving, and, assuming it would be tricky to line up a chicken-sitter who would come over at 7 am and let them out, and then back at 5 to close the coop door, I am working on some improvements to the chicken coop. As you may remember, we got a little lax on security and it didn’t end well for our last pair of hens. So now we’ve been diligently locking them in the coop every night, but it kind of seems mean to leave them in there for 4 days. It’s a pretty small coop (the size of a big dog house, maybe), and it doesn’t get much light.

So I’m trying to make an enclosed area that gives them outdoor access but also keeps them safe from cougars and racoons.

I also installed a motion-sensing light outside, so hopefully anything sneaking around there at night will get a blast of light in their eyes and get scared off. (I have cooled off from my original “racoon poison” Google searches.)

I also installed a heat lamp in their coop. I have heard different opinions on lamps — they keep them warm (even though they all snuggle together when they sleep), the light encourages them to lay eggs in the winter… I don’t know if it’s necessary or not. Tonight was going to be the first night with it on, but after some online reading, I went out and turned it off. I think I need to switch to a red bulb if nothing else; who can sleep with a big bright light shining in your face? Or maybe I’ll try just setting the timer to run from 4 - 7 at night, or maybe 5 - 7 am? Anybody have any ideas?

It looks tight, but it keeps them safe.

I talk to people about this and they look at me like I’m a little bit crazy, but turning the compost really is one of my favorite things to do. Compost basically takes care of itself, but if you want to help it along and check on its progress, you can turn it every few months to make sure it’s not too wet, and to mix everything up.

The compost bins we have make turning it really easy. Essentially, I just move the pile from one spot to another, and mix it up as I go. The bin un-stacks and re-stacks in the new spot.

I mixed in a bunch of leaves from under the neighbor’s tree, plus everything from cleaning out the chicken coop (food rinds even they refused, leaves, wood chips, and of course, lots of poop.) They say to strike a good balance between the brown (dead & dry) and the green (live & wet) in your compost, as Alicia expained in a previous post. Everything in the bin was pretty wet, so it was nice to give it some room to breathe by adding some dry material. Plus, there was about a 4″ layer of rotten apple chips from the cider pressing that needed to be mixed up with everything else, and below that the stringy rotting tomato and pepper plants from this summer.

Everything is looking good — I’m thinking that we can probably use this batch of compost by the end of next summer (there is also a batch that should be ready by the spring).

One again we found ourselves with a barrel of apples to process this year.  The blessing (and curse) of apples is that they can actually sit around for awhile.  This means that its easy to put off getting to them and begin to stress out and/or avoid them. Once we faced this procrastination we decided to do some canned apple pie filling, which we’ve done several times before.  We’ve always enjoyed it and used it fairly quick, but we also seem to be a little cursed by it.  Last time we did it we had problems ranging from broken jars to not enough head space.  This year that pattern continued.  We were using some very old canning jars and had two crack in the water, which of course leads to a huge mess of apple pie filing and broken glass in boiling water.  I don’t really know why this happened since generally in my canning experience its fairly rare.  Additionally our apple peeler/corer/slicer broke unrepairably.  After this we decided to switch to applesauce for the rest of the apples, which is easy enough.  Unfortunately, one of us (he shall remain nameless), forgot that you can’t really process the jars while the applesauce is cold (i.e. straight from the fridge) which led to even more jar breakage.  Overall we did manage to successfully can 6 quarts of pie filing and 4 pints of applesauce, but I have a feeling that next year I am going to procrastinate even more when it comes to processing any apples we acquire.