more than food for thought

Folk wisdom in Japan says that one should eat 30 different foods types every day. Counting herbs, spices, oils, nuts and seeds, it is  estimated that the typical Italian diet contains approximately 60 different food groups. The comparable estimate for the typical Western diet is just 20 food groups. So it may not be the high olive oil content and low level of saturated fats in the Mediterranean diet which confer the well-known benefits: it may be the variety as well. This would explain the French anomaly, where the consumption of butter, cream and cheese is legendary, but where freshness and variety of herbs and vegetables are also paramount.

                                Dr  Carole Hungerford. 2009.  Good Health in the 21st Century,  pp10,11.

If I was honest, I would have to admit that there are more than a few days when I would be challenged to eat even that paltry 20 food groups. 

 Note to self - do better for my own sake!

Packing Fruit according to Mrs Beeton

As the fruit approaches the ripe state, nets or mats on short stakes should be suspended beneath, each having a lining of dry moss or lawn grass, not to supersede hand-picking, but to guard against accidental falling. When gathering is to take place, a shallow basket should be selected, covered with a layer of moss or leaves, and each fruit at is removed from the tree should be deposited in it. Packing delicate fruit for short journeys requires much care. Let us recommend for this purpose a box sufficiently deep to hold two tiers of fruit, and no more, and pack these with the following precautions: The box being ready, and a quantity of well-beaten and dry moss, or dried lawn grass in the absence of moss, being provided, wrap each fruit, with the bloom untouched, in a piece of tissue or other equally soft paper, and pack them pretty closely with moss until the first layer is complete, then make it perfectly level by filling up with moss, placing an inner lid over the tier, make a second layer in the same manner, and put the lid in such a way that the fruit, without being exposed to pressure, will nevertheless remain steadily in place.
 

The Best Of Mrs Beeton’s Kitchen Garden, p214   

Thrips according to Mrs Beeton

Tiny insects causing silvery of yellowish mottling on leaves; these pests can be sprayed with a strong solution of garlic in boiling water plus 1 tbsp horticultural oil, left to cool. Avoid gardening in bright clothing, as this can attract thrips.

   The Best Of Mrs Beeton’s Kitchen Garden, p244.   

The Dirty Life - good enough to eat!

Food, a French man told me once, is the first wealth. Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.

Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life, p 16.

Last night, with The Agronomist away visiting farmers in the north of the state, I crawled into bed early with a copy of The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball and a large cup of tea! Sheer bliss!

The Dirty Life is a memoir of "farming, food and love". It is the story of a love affair between a city girl and a man who wants to farm organically. Organically for this man means shunning mechanical tools such as tractors; it is draft horses for this man! It is also the story of the farm that they rescue and turn into a flourishing business where they supply the food needs of over one hundred local families. This is a cause that is becoming very dear to my heart, and of course the use of draft horses hit a sentimental note for me, as I recalled my Dad’s love for the heavy work horses (the man in my banner is my Dad!).

Essex Farm near Lake Champlain (USA) is crafted into a “whole farm”  where for an annual fee members can each week collect their share of beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, fruits and forty different vegetables that are seasonal.

Kristin Kimball reminds us of something that many of our grandparents knew all too well, and that is that there is happiness and great rewards to be gained from hard physical work, best agricultural practices, good food, a small footprint, and pursuing our dreams and passions.

This is a book not just for those of thinking of a tree change, but more so a book for those people wanting to change the way they eat and the way they view the world around them.

As I wrote, this is something that is a growing passion for me. It has always been for  The Agronomist. We have always gardened as organically as possible, and The Agronomist has always maintained that he would never, ever work for a chemical company, only too aware of what these global companies have been doing to our food and land. I have no doubt that he would allow us to be homeless before he would take that path. So, time to put our actions to our words.

We have a business, Plant Health Solutions and we are making available to gardeners, nurseries and farmers pure, organic nutrient products that will feed that lovely soil that gifts us with our wonderful food. There is also a range of human and animal health products as well. The Agronomist is happy to provide agronomic advice as well.

 The Agronomist has been toiling away on the website for weeks and weeks, and it still needs some tweaking, so if you visit right now, just be prepared for a work in progress sign. Our clients will be able to buy online, from anywhere in the world.

Our growing excitement about this project is indeed making me feel insanely rich, despite being insanely poor right now, if you catch my meaning! It feels good to have a real passion again, and something that The Agronomist and I can pursue together – soil good enough to eat!

Stirring the soil

Gardening for ladies, and, Companion to the flower-garden (1851)

Author: Loudon, Mrs. (Jane), 1807-1858; Downing, A. J. (Andrew Jackson), 1815-1852

Volume: 1851

Subject: Gardening; Flower gardening; Plants, Ornamental

Publisher: New York : John Wiley

The first point to be attended to, in order to render the operation
of digging less laborious, is to provide a suitable spade ; that is, one which shall be as light as is consistent with strength, and whichpenetrate the ground with the least possible trouble. For this purpose, the blade of what is called a lady's spade is made of not more than half the usual breadth, say not wider than five or six inches, and of smooth polished iron, and it is surmounted, at the part where it joins the handle, by a piece of iron rather broader than itself, which IS called the tread, to serve as a rest for the foot of the operator while digging. The handle is about the usual length, but quite smooth and sufficiently slender for a lady's hand to grasp, and it is made of willow, a close, smooth, and elastic wood, which is tough and tolerably strong, though much lighter than ash, the wood generally used for the handles to gardeners' spades.

 The lady should also be provided with clogs, the soles of which are not jointed, to put over her shoes ; or if she should dislike these, and prefer strong shoes, she should be provided with what gardeners call a tramp, that is, a small plate of iron to go under the sole of the shoe, and which is fastened round the foot with a leathern strap and buckle. She should also have a pair of stiff thick leathern glove, or gauntlets, to protect her hands, not only from the handle of the spade, but from the stones, weeds, &c., which she may turn over with the earth, and which ought to be picked out and thrown into a small, light wheel' barrow, which may easily be moved from place to place.
  

   [A Lady's Gauntlet of strong leather, invented by Misa Perry of Stroud, near Hazleraere. ]   

Lady's Wheel-barrow.
 A wheel-barrow is a lever of the second kind, in which the weight
is carried between the operator, who is the moving power, and the
fulcrum, which is represented by the lower part of the wheel. If it
be so contrived that the wheel may roll on a plank, or on firm ground, a very slight pov/er (?) is sufficient to move the load contained in the bar- row ; particularly if the handles be long, curved, and thrown up as high as possible, in order to let the weight rest principally upon the wheel, without obliging the operator to bend forward. When, on the contrary, the handles are short and straight, the weight is thrown principally on the arms of the operator, and much more strength is required to move the load, besides the inconvenience of stooping.
 All the necessary implements for digging being provided, the next
thing to be considered is the easiest manner of performing the opera-
tion. The usual way is for the gardener to thrust his spade perpen-
dicularly into the gi'ound, and then using the handle as a lever, to
draw it back so as to raise the whole mass of earth in front of the
spade at once. This requires great strength ; but by inserting the
spade in a slanting direction, and throwing the body slightly forward
at the same time, the mass of earth to be raised will not only be much less, but the body of the operator will be in a much more convenient position for raising and turning it ; which may thus be done with perfect ease.

Don’t play with your dinner; or how to pluck a chicken!

Chickens roaming the back yard in their chicken tractor is quite the fashionable thing for many a suburban garden these days. We all know how the chickens eat insects and provide us with lovely chicken poo for our gardens.

However, few people stop to think about other uses for these chickens  - chicken meat. Poultry. Sunday dinner.  It is the one way to really know that your chicken is organic!

As I child I was quite familiar with my Dad plucking the chicken that was to be our dinner the next day as my parents kept a chicken coop for most of my childhood. We soon learned not to get too attached to the fluffy little chickens that arrived on a regular basis. Lesson number one : Don’t play with your dinner!

These memories all came flooding back today as I was browsing through our bookshelves and came across a little book titled, Back in the Day by Michael Powell as he devotes two pages to the procedure of plucking a chicken.

Powell starts with a warning that plucking a chicken is “messy and smelly”, and I must confess that I can still smell the chicken and feather aroma after my father had dipped them in hot water. A necessity if one wants to raise chickens for the table  

Procedure for Plucking a Chicken

1. After killing the chicken, hold it upside down by the feet and submerge it in a container of very hot water for between five and ten seconds, making sure that you soak all the feathers thoroughly (any longer and the bird will begin to cook), This loosens the feathers so that they can be plucked more easily.

2. Grab handfuls of feathers and pull to remove. The flight feathers on the wings and the tail feathers are the most difficult to remove, so begin with these and then move on to the rest of the bird.

3. Some birds are easy to pluck and can be stripped back within minutes; others may have many pinfeathers and take longer.

4. An old bird needs to dipped longer than a young bird. When plucking a young bird be careful not to rip its skin, which is more tender than in older birds.

5. Killing birds before the cold weather sets in is recommended as they will have less pinfeathers.

6. Wearing textured rubber gloves will give you more friction with which to grab the feathers.

7. Singe off the most difficult pinfeathers by passing the bird over an open fire.

Powell suggests skinning the bird taking off skin and feathers at the same time as an alternative, but this can lead to a dry chicken when cooking.

Powell provides no recommendations as to how to “wield the axe” to arrive at the dead bird, nor does he provide further instruction on gutting and preparing the bird for cooking.

Some things are best left to the imagination, I think! I buy my organic chicken from the butcher!

Back in the Day: 101 things everyone used to know how to do by Michael Powell, pp54,55.

Observations on Vegetables

“The quality of vegetables depends much both on the soil in which they are grown, and on the degree of care bestowed upon their culture; but if produced in ever so great perfection, their excellence will be entirely destroyed if they be badly cooked. With the exception of artichokes, which are said to be improved  by two or three days keeping, all the summer varieties should be dressed before their freshness has in any degree passed off (for their flavour is never so fine as within hours of their being cut or gathered); but when this cannot be done, precaution should be taken to prevent their withering. The stalk-ends of asparagus, cucumbers, and vegetable-marrow, should be placed in from one to two inches of cold water, and all other  kinds should be spread on a cold brick floor. When this has been neglected, they must be thrown into cold water, for some time before they boiled, to recover them, though they will prove even then but very inferior eating.”

Eliza Acton, The Elegant Economist, page 61

I knew that there were different types of bees, such as bumble bees, honeybees, carpenter bees, and parasitic bees, but apparently they also have nationalities!

Well, at least according to Lady Winifred Fortescue who wrote in  her 1935 book, Perfume from Provence that her friend Monsieur Pierre claimed that,

“           …a friend of his imported queen bees from Germany, Egypt, England and America, The German bees, he told me, always works overtime, and fill the cells of the comb so full of honey that it reaches and permeates the outer wax, thus spoiling the look of the sections, so that they cannot be exhibited. The Egyptian bees work well, but are fierce and uncertain of temper – mefiez-vous! The English bees work well, but only for a certain number of hours; and the American bees are brilliant but erratic, sometimes working feverishly and sometimes taking a day off.

            Extraordinary, I thought, that bees should have absorbed the characteristics of their countries”(p 36)

More interesting to me was a small detail that Lady Fortescue mentioned regarding the Provencal custom of planting two cypresses at the end of a rose garden, as we have two pines planted just outside our front door. The trees, paired as they are, represent La Paix and La Prosperite (peace and prosperity). She wrote that the La Paix cypress did not “prosper as well as its brother” to which her gardener replied that it was “because there is no peace in this world “(48) .

I was left to wonder about this possibility as both our trees have been either attacked by nocturnal animals, or nocturnal mischief makers on more than one occasion, leaving both trees always looking somewhat sad as they try to heal their wounds. Every time the poor pines start to look slightly decent again, they seem to suffer another attack. No wonder we have experienced little peace or prosperity in recent years!

Perhaps I should go and buy some tree guards to safe guard not only the trees’ future, but our own as well!