I've Moved!

Dear Friends,

Thank you for following me on this journey through experimenting with being a locavore. As you can see from my more recent blog posts, my attention has now migrated to other topics and projects. So I have migrated my blog!

I felt I outgrew the URL desertlocavore as it only encompasses a piece of the journey I am on. However, the title of my blog, Tumbleweeds and a Handful of Seeds, still resonates with my life. I'm still up for the challenge of living here in the desert southwest in the best way I can - clearing the tumbleweeds and planting seeds.

In that spirit, I renamed and upgraded my blog! I hope you'll continue to follow (or start following) me at my new, better site: www.tumbleweedsandseeds.com

Paz,
Christina

The Best New Eco-Practice of 2014 So Far....The Plastic Bag Ban

One particularly windy day on my way to drop off my son at kindergarten, I was forced to stop for several minutes in the road while an extra large dust devil, turned white plastic tornado from all the plastic bags it had caught up, passed through the residential area along South Meadows Road. The bag-nado choked a few birds on its way.

Plastic and birds do not mix as evidenced by this disturbing video about the life of Albatross way out at sea:

I live on the southwest end of town where the wind whips into a frenzy through the spring and into early summer and then again in the late fall and early winter. The result is ugly plastic bags stuck to every fence and cholla cactus within view throughout most of the year. My house borders a large empty County park so I spend a goodly amount of my outdoor time in those windy months collecting the ripped up, useless, discarded pieces of plastic bags from the edges of my yard.

The lifecycle of the plastic bag is a sorry one to be sure. Check out this 4 minute video about it - well worth the watch!

For these reasons and more I am thrilled for the best new ordinance of the new year (so far) to arrive! Have you heard? The plastic bag ban is coming to Santa Fe. I'm so excited!...to see how it all goes down really. I'm excited about the ban too of course as I believe it is good for the planet and people...any step away from our disposable culture is good in my worldview. (Paper bags will still be available as will plastic bags thicker than 2.25 mils, that's a change for another day.) But I am also excited to see how Santa Feans react to this forward thinking ordinance when it finally comes into effect in February.

Santa Fe is not the first city to ban the bag - Austin, Portland, Tuscon, even Los Angeles precede us. However, having read the comments to the SF New Mexican's online article it appears locally it may be a controversial ordinance in practice. One lady said no way to the ban in her post because she didn't want to use those dirty smelly canvas bags - how unsanitary! (Hopefully someone has since told her they that canvas is washable). Some feel that it will disproportionately affect people in the less affluent parts of town. The southside has been specifically mentioned as discount stores there claim they can't afford to upgrade their bags to thicker quality plastic as some of the downtown stores might do to skirt the ordinance and keep customers happy. Less affluent customers then will bear the burden because they can't afford to buy reusable bags. It may be a legitimate concern, but humanity is full of creative solutions when pressed. Here are a couple already in play:

Earth Care's Youth Allies are making reusable bags out of the free fabric they have collected and are distributing them to those that need them. (Kuddos to the Earth Care kids who helped pass the ban in the first place and had the foresight to do something about the potential disproportionate impact).

Natural Grocers on Cerrillos got rid of their plastic bags of their own volition years ago and employed their creativity to keep customers in food carrying containers. (Cheers to them for that BTW). They set up bins to hold different sized cardboard boxes that come in the back door as food packaging and offer those boxes to bag-less customers to take their purchases out the front door.  All stores could follow suit as there is no shortage of cardboard around town.

Since learning about the bag ban I have taken extra care to notice my bag intake. Although I carry a couple of those stuff-able reusable bags in my purse wherever I go, I still consume way more disposable plastic bags than I would like to admit. Sometimes I get a bag out of laziness or passivity. Sometimes I don't always get my reusables out in time before the cashier puts my items in the bag and hands it to me (they are so fast at it!). When I take my items out of the unwanted bag and hand it back to them they more often than not throw it in the trash rather than using it for the next customer, so I usually take the bag with me. At least I can recycle it. I still have eco-guilt every time I leave the store with one, whatever the reason.

Now I can rejoice in the knowledge that the plastic bag ban is coming. I LOVE it when the system works with me to live up to eco-habits rather than against me! It makes life so much more enjoyable and reduces my eco-anxiety (a concept for another blog post).

So SFeans, will you make "carry canvas bags with me at all times" number one on your New Year's Resolution list? Are you getting your camera ready to capture the beauty of a plastic bag-less desert landscape we haven't seen the likes of for over two decades? Leave a comment and tell me what you think about the upcoming bag ban.

For more information, check out these past articles on the plastic bag ban:
The Good, the Bag, and the Ugly, Santa Fe Reporter
Council Passes Plastic Bag Ban, Santa Fe New Mexican

Un-Stuffing the Mind

Lately, spurred on by the recent death of my older brother, I have been examining my life, reviewing the whole thing from start to the present like a movie. Trying to make sense of my experience here on earth thus far. There is nothing like staring the death of a loved one in the face that makes a person question the worth of their life. Or that has been my experience of it. It is as if when my brother took his own life, he knocked over the house of cards that is my life and it fell to the ground in a messy pile. I have been slowly picking up each card and examining it, trying to put the pieces back together in a way that makes sense, and in a way that tells me it has been a good life. While I do this, my brother  stands over me urgently saying - "now make sense of that! Make sure the life you are living is a life well lived. Make sure you are getting all you can from your life. I couldn't figure out how to do it, so now you must. And do it now, don't wait! Death awaits you too in your own time."

One quintessential moment in my life that recently I've been thinking a lot about happened in 2000. I was about a year and a half into my Peace Corps service in a remote village in Panama. I visited home during Christmas time to decide if I was going to extend my term or return home in accordance with the original plan.

During my visit, I found myself sitting on a bench in an affluent suburban mall. Around me people streamed in and out of clothing boutiques that extolled the virtues of clothes made in Honduras, designer hand bags made in China, and other assorted accessories from around the world. To my right, teenagers eagerly awaited a chance to try out a water massage machine - a contraption that looked much like a tanning bed gone haywire - meant to offer relaxation to harried holiday shoppers. And to my left, more teens handed over ten dollar bills at a kiosk selling gourmet doggy treats and chocolate covered espresso beans.

The remote subsistence village I had been living in just west of the Panama Canal had no economic infrastructure except my neighbor's tin-roofed, mud-floor hut out of which he sold essential food staples: sugar, rice, canned meat, and homemade popsicles. In Panama, I had been living deeply connected with what I would consider the "real world." My life was subject to the pounding rains of the wet season, sometimes flooding the village and stranding me in my little home for days at a time; and extreme drought during the dry season when water was so scarce I had to walk a half mile to a natural spring to find some for cooking and cleaning.

The feeling that overcame me as I sat on that bench in the mall was a void of aliveness and connection inherent in a life lived in the American mainstream. The mall is a place that shaped my generation and many that followed in the unending quest to find identity in the American landscape. Generation after generation in the United States is being told they will find their identity in the goods they consume; that the most important decision our lives require is to choose which corporate logo best expresses our personalities.

That message was in stark contrast to the life I had been living in Panama. Although the villagers lived a life labeled by the economic index as "extreme poverty" they seemed no more or less happy than the affluent people of the United States.

The little hut I lived in Panama had a bed with a mosquito net over it, a two burner propane stove, one pan, some food, some clothes (many of them hand sewn), some books on a shelf, some seeds, and a wall with my machete and a few other tools hung on it. And still that was more than some homes in the village had.

The home I am living in now is full of stuff, bursting at the seams with stuff. Furniture, toys, clothes, tools, dishes, stuff to cook with, stuff to play with, stuff to do hobbies with, stuff, stuff and more stuff. The realization that Americans have too much stuff is nothing new to be sure. People have been talking about over-consumption for years, decades, and longer. But the realization of what stuff has done to my life is new for me.

I did end up extending my time in Panama for a few months to finish a project in the village. After my Peace Corps service ended, I took a bus through Central America to get back to the United States. I journaled extensively during that time. As I reread those journals lately one sentence I wrote leaped out at me from the page - "I don't want to become part of the middle-class of the world!"

I tend to take the voice of that 26 year old seriously because I know she was in touch with the real world. Living in a mud-floor tin-roofed hut for three years was a life changing experience, it impacted me on a core level that I had never experienced before or since. I developed an entirely new worldview from that experience. I have been working to remember my life back then so I can understand again the sentiment and impetus for that feeling. In my journal I gave no explanation of it as I am sure my reasons were obvious to me at the time.

The impact of reading that sentence today was that I looked around at my life and my world began to crumble a bit. What has happened was something that 26 year old feared most. At some point in the growing older and raising a family, the accumulation of stuff began to get in the way of my experience of the real world. Sure, most of our stuff is green, eco-conscious, and bought with social justice in mind. But it is still stuff. The spending time buying, ordering, making, using, finding a place for, picking up, cleaning, fixing or replacing and dealing with of, consumes much of my time as a person and especially now as a stay-at-home mom.

When life becomes about stuff, even if it is handmade, local, organic, sweatshop free stuff, it is still just stuff. I feel stuff gets in between me and connecting to the real world. It keeps me separate. I'm sure some would argue that stuff can also connect you to the real world, but overall my experience is of separation.

I went from working in environmental education in one of the most wild places in the U.S. - Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons - to spending three years living in Panama working as an agroforestry volunteer. When living in the shadow of the Grand Tetons I would look out at the landscape and see ecosystems, animal tracks, plant families, and habitats. In the understory of the Panamanian rainforest I would look out at the landscape and see hillsides for planting corn, marshy areas that would make good rice paddies, and patches of sun for growing tomatoes. And while I hate to admit it, but in my time living in Santa Fe, settling down and raising a family I now look our at my landscape (or yard) and see places for a new piece of furniture, a spot to hang a hammock, a kitchen pot that needs replacing, or a need for a new pair of pants to be bought. My lens on the world and the stuff of my mind went from wildplaces to agriculture to consumption. I've truly been domesticated.

Of the many questions I find myself grappling with in answer to Aaron's beckon call to live a life well lived three of them now pressing on my mind are - How did my life become about stuff? And what does an un-stuffed American family life look like anyway? What brings life deep meaning and worth and how can I have more of that instead of filling my life with things?

To answer these questions I began doing some internet searches to see what other people were saying about this topic. One idea that resonated with me most was minimalism as an answer to consumerism. Rather than talking about recycling, reusing, and making your own stuff (which does have its value, don't get me wrong), it is about reduction. Not letting stuff rule your life and your home and most importantly not letting it occupy so much space in your mind means just simply having less of it, dealing with it less, thinking about it less. Easier said than done of course. Especially in this moment of the Christmas season. High time when we are bombarded with the message to consume. I'm not immune to it either - as evidenced by the pile of Christmas presents in hidden in my closet waiting to be put out on Christmas eve after the kids go to bed.

But I am looking forward to starting a new in 2014. I am determined not to let my stuff own me or my life. So far I have managed to take about 5 grocery bags of stuff to Salvation army and give away a set of dishes and some furniture to a friends, things I was keeping around just in case we needed them someday. So that is a start.

Here are a few of the best tips I picked up in my research with a few of my own thrown in on how to un-stuff your mind:

1. Spend (more) time in nature - escpecially when you feel the urge to buy coming on.
2. Cultivate natural habitats - instead of landscaping your yard for your own enjoyment - create spaces for birds, bees, butterflies, rabbits, and even coyotes.
3. Spend low-stress time with friends. Invite people over but don't stress about it. Let them see your mess if need be. Make it a potluck or just for tea.
4. Clear your mind through meditation. Best way I've found to un-stuff my mind it is clear it out completely.
5. Take a nap in nature. Try it, you'll see what I mean.
6. Volunteer. Think about other people make your own wants seem less important.
7. Become and astute observer of your inner consumer. Check out Leo's blog for the great things they have to say about this: http://mnmlist.com/consumerism-vs-minimalism/
8. Nurture your inner minimalist. Cultivate simplicity in your mind and it will eventually show up in your life.

What helps you to un-stuff your mind? Post in the comments section, I would love to hear your thoughts....

Happy Holidays!
Christina

An Ode to Flow, Part I

I respect all forms of yoga and I like practicing many of them.  I enjoy learning from masters of different disciplines. In this way I build a breadth of experience in order to weave together universal truths that then inform my practice. After twelve years of practicing many forms, however, I have come to feel a loyalty and unshakable enduring love for Vinyasa. 

I say unshakeable because more than a few practitioners and teachers of other forms would have me believe that Vinyasa is a shallow, fast-paced yoga for “fitness” only. And that its lack of attention to alignment will result in injury. Thus it is not true yoga.

What is true yoga then? The Sanskrit term yoga translates as yoke or union. And those original Yogis were looking for union with one thing and one thing only…the divine.

Not all forms of Vinyasa are equal. The Vinyasa I know however is steeped in Bhakti (devotion) and offered like a prayer by masters of the breath, flow, word, and yes, the playlist. When practiced in the clarifying light of Bhakti, it embodies the very definition of yoga as “yoking” to the divine. It is a yoke on a very short rope. Vinyasa for me is a rocket ship to God. But it is not just any old Vinyasa that will take me on that rocket ship. It is the unique combination of a full Bhakti-heart, mastery of connecting breath to the flow and the flow of asana to the Rta (divine order) of the universe.

Tapped in to that cosmic order, I unite with the divine. It is from flowing on this devotional mat that I have looked into Shiva’s third eye and been burned to ash, taken up the loyal heart of Hanuman, was reborn like Ganesh with an elephant head, rose up from the churning sea of milk like Lakshmi to sit on the knee of Lord Vishnu, and basked in the dance and maternal love of Shakti in all her forms.

Those who would say that Vinyasa is not yoga because it doesn’t focus on alignment would be missing the whole point. Flow is the point of vinyasa. Union is the point. However you get there.

Out beyond the ideas of wrong-yoga and right-yoga there is a mat. I’ll meet you there.

Spring Chickens

Spring bulbs are up!

The first signs of spring have arrived in Santa Fe.

 Yesterday we got a nice layer of snow to soak the ground a bit and today the sun is shinning, a light breeze is blowing, and the world is beckoning us gardeners to get started.

My family and I are coming upon six years on this land and it's funny how the list of projects never gets shorter. It's like your skin cells, the skin is always there, but the cells change every seven years. In this case, the list is always there but the projects change every year.

This year I have an extra incentive to take the yard work up a notch. Our house is going to be on the Santa Fe Kitchen Garden Tour, along with two of my neighbors in this wonderful little neighborhood La Resolana. This is now an annual event that HomeGrown NM and Edible Santa Fe co-sponsor. Last year was the first year and I gather that 350 people went on the tour. I'm glad the tour is not until July as I have a lot of work to do before they come to inspect my yard for kitchen garden goodness.

Luckily the rest of my family is out of town this weekend so I could actually put together the year's garden plan. This year I am going to focus on only the foods that we regularly eat and that are low-maintenance to grow in this climate. Last year I expanded the garden by about 700 square feet. 150 of that was for Clayton - my then 3 year old son - who chose to plant sunflowers, corn, and pumpkins. His garden is right out my bedroom window so I had a splendid view of sunflowers and lots of birds snapping up the seeds through the growing season. The rest ended up being too much space for me to grow into in one year, a lot of the food went to seed...or actually to the chickens.

Three years ago we decided to start raising chickens and I have to say it has been the best addition to our backyard homestead we have made. I'm pleased to live in Agua Fria Village with Santa Fe County zoning codes in a neighborhood with lax covenants, so almost anything here goes. Chickens, horses, dogs, llamas, donkeys, all a-okay. It's worth the extra 10 minutes to town to have the semi-rural experience and semi-rural rules.

I call the chickens my "ladies." And quite the ladies they are, all 17 of them. They happily live in our front yard in their chicken palace under two juniper trees, an apple tree, and a pear tree. They have a chicken coop which they use almost exclusively for egg-laying as they prefer to roost in the juniper trees outside which provide them plenty of branches and protection. We set up a viewing bench in front of the coop and spend warm summer afternoons watching their antics and trying to remember what we names them.

Chicken entrance

The chicken palace

Under the juniper tree.

My favorite lady is the Barred Dominique. She is smart and sassy, true to her french name. She was the first chicken to figure out how to fly over the fence to get the juicy grubs in the garden on the other side and has successfully fended off two coyote attacks. Plus her sassy french name harkens back to my own french heritage on my mother's side.

Dominique. Isn't she lovely? And smart too.

And of course, I can't leave out a picture of the polish bantams. They make most humans laugh. This one is named Elvis, for his later years' hairdo of course. Not the smartest breed in the coop though.

Polish bantam

All our chickens are heritage varieties: Brahma, Cochins, Wyandotte, Araucanas, Columbians, Mille Fleurs (with the feathers on their feet), and mystery chickens I am still trying to identify. 

And wow can these chickens lay! The best layers are the Brahma hens which we bought as young adults from a farmer in Espanola. They laid their large brown eggs all winter long. We haven't bought eggs for ourselves in over a year. 

Now as spring is beginning and the days are longer (most chickens stop laying eggs when there is less than 13 hours of daylight) we are overwhelmed with eggs. I've started to sell eggs for $4/dozen to help cover the cost of their expensive but nutrient-rich organic feed from the local Feed Bin to neighbors, colleagues, and friends. I know this may seem pricey to some, but it doesn't even cover our costs. My "consumer base" is still less than the amount of eggs we have, but marketing and building consumer loyalty is a bit out of my capacity at the moment. I'll just keep putting the word out there and maybe a sign on my fence "eggs for sale" in hopes that they sell themselves. I'll continue to donate the surplus as hard boiled breakfast to the day-laborers in Guadalupe Park until then.

About a days worth of blue, white, green, brown, and pink eggs. Each variety of chicken lays a different colored egg.

As we don't need any more layers this year, we are investing in the Cochin Frizzle ornamental variety instead. I'm sure you can see why! Purely for fun and because our four year old loves these.

How could a chicken be cuter than that?!

We are ordering twelve baby chicks as last year more than half turned out to be roosters. We are told we can expect the same ratio this year. I hope so, or we'll have to raise the cost of our eggs just to pay for these pretty ladies. Their specialty is being pretty, they don't lay many eggs to earn their keep.

I personally enjoy hearing roosters crowing at dawn (and sometimes at all hours of the day) as it reminds me of the three years I lived in Panama in the campo. However, if you want to maintain good relationships with your neighbors, in a backyard coop, roosters are good for only one thing:

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Rooster Stew!

Rolling on a River of Love

The first Sunday in February 2012. A new year, a new day.

It's been over a year since I've been in this blogging world. As you can see from my last entry, I got a little discouraged by the locavore life attempt. This morning I am reflecting on how my locavore experiment exploded in my face. The experience was like jumping into the icy waters of Lake Michigan where I grew up in the middle of February. The stinging reality of that cold water was just a little more than I could handle. (I'm not a big fan of cold plunges by the way.)

Growing food to meet our needs in the southwest is just REALLY difficult. Way more difficult than doing it in the bread belt of the Midwest where my formative years were spent. Sure, Native peoples feed themselves successfully for hundreds or thousands of years in the southwest on a diet of squash, beans, corn, wild edibles and bison. But the other piece of that puzzle is they didn't do it for very long -- they had a life span of 30-40 years on average. As I am 37, I would be dead or well on my way there with that diet. A fact I could handle if I hadn't already been expecting to live until I am 80.

So what did I learn from my locavore experiment and where am I now with all of this you ask? Let me fill you in...

1) TIMING IS EVERYTHING and DO THE RESEARCH FIRST

My advice for you all is not to start the desert locavore life in Februrary. Get your feet and your pallet wet by starting at the height of the growing season when the successes are many and the research not so hard. Having said that, whatever time of year you start, do the research before you begin being a locavore at all, otherwise it is just an experiment in frustration. Trying to find a source  of local wheat may take you a few weeks, so if you don't want to give it up, or do not yet have the cooking skills and knowledge to work with the limited alternatives, you'll want to know where you can get it before you engage being a locavore. Otherwise you'll get discouraged at how many trips to the grocery store for wheat shipped in from Egypt you'll have to make.

Luckily, I work at an organization where researching being a locavore is part of the work that we do, so I put my staff on creating a locavore guide. Unfortunately, as none of them had themselves dived deeply into bring a locavore, the end product wasn't super useful to me. But we are working on improving it. So, you may want to wait to enter the locavore world in Santa Fe until we publish that guide if you don't want to spend months doing that research yourself. Otherwise, give yourself a couple months to do the research before you jump in. Start by going through your cupboards and deciding what you can and can't live without. Then make a list of those things you need or want. Then start by educating yourself on seasonal availability of foods. Visit the local co-op, see what they have available at any given time of year, talk to the produce and the bulk departments to see what else they might be able to get you on a seasonal basis. Visit the farmer's market and talk with the farmers - especially those that have fresh produce in the dead of winter. Research the farmer's market website for clues on which farmers are part of their network and what they offer. Ask your friends, call local food-related organizations. Keep in mind that condiments and grains tend to be the hardest to source. Learn how to make your own ketchup.

2) JOIN A CSA
There is no substitute for growing your own food as that is really the only way to know where your food is coming from and how it was grown. But, Steve Warshawer of Beneficial Farms now has me convinced that backyard gardeners and local farmers each have a role to play in a local food system -- and we can't, and shouldn't do it without the other. Gardeners can focus on the specialty items they can grow more easily in the microclimates they are able to create in their yards like tomatoes and herbs. Farmers than can be freed up to grow those items that need a lot of space - like grains, protein, etc. Together we might be able to come up with a complete diet a la MyPlate -- the new and much simplified nutritional guide recently released by the USDA. That said, join a CSA that specializes in local food. I joined Beneficial Farms CSA a few months ago. It is a co-op CSA utilizing farmers within 300 miles -- meeting my desert locavore standards for food miles. This has provided me with a supply of organic wheat and quinoa that I had no idea where to get on my own. It has taken the pressure off of me a bit in terms of sourcing local food as they are doing a bunch of it for me and 50 other families at the same time. I highly recommend joining a CSA as part of your locavore package.

3) COMMUNITY

George Strait is singing to my heart this morning from the playlist on the iPod my husband left in my car for me to listen to. I'm in a very different place this morning...rolling on a river of love really. Although there is still no water in the river near our house this year, I have been blessed with a growing connection to my community (specifically my neighbors), lots of learning, and patience. Find a few like-minded home/land owners and plan with them on what crops you can each grow and share with each other. Share bulk buying and split up the consumer research. Enjoy meals together and plan impromptu potlucks from whatever is available in the garden. You'll grow more food and grow life-long friendships in the process.

2) SOIL and WATER

A friend of mine who is an ecology professor at UWC here in Las Vegas, NM believes that the carrying capacity of this desert region won't even provide for the number of people that currently live here. So there is that when considering building a local, sustainable food system. Our two big limiting factors are soil and water. We don't have much of either of those, and without them growing food for a state of even 2 million is challenging. The reality of soil building in Santa Fe at the moment, is that it is entirely dependent upon the input of materials from the industrial agriculture system. Not to mention when you lay it down in the spring, the wind blows it away almost immediately (be sure to cover your compost with heavy mulch immediately). Readily available sources for compost in Santa Fe include horse manure and kitchen waste. Most kitchen waste originates from imported food sources, and horses are fed a steady diet of alfalfa shipped in from Texas or even farther away locations. Part of being a locavore requires going against the grain and being limited by the status quo food system. Get comfortable with compromise and do the best you can.

At this point in time, I am not working exclusively on being a locavore. I'm am attacking the whole sustainable lifestyle one piece at a time. Last month my husband and I had a successful buy nothing month. When practicing buy-nothing, you really have to watch yourself with online shopping. I somehow blanked out that I am actually shopping when doing it online as I am in the comfort of my living room rather than in a store with beeping of the cash register to awaken my senses as to what I am doing.

Working on living sustainably in the United States is a life-time endeavor. My main focus now if to make sure I am enjoying the ride!

I hope you will share the tips and wisdom have you learned on this journey in the comments.

Christina

Dark Night

Obviously, if you haven't already guessed, this little eat-everything-local experiment has been put on hold. What ridiculous expectations I have of this world thinking that one person working full time and raising children can figure out how to eat everything locally. This is definitely where the road hits the wall in terms of individual action. I salute all you radical homemakers out there that have time to sew your own canvas bags for produce, make pizza from scratch on friday nights, and bargain shop at the farmer's market. You know what I want to spend my time doing these days? Sleeping! I'm frickin' exhausted trying to keep up with this silly American lifestyle of career woman, working mom, supportive wife, friend to all. Just getting a moment to weed the garden is a luxury these days. When I decided to expand my garden to grow all my own food - even enough to can for the whole winter - I guess I forgot that the last time I could garden all day was when I was on full-time maternity leave. Although on a positive note my tomatoes are doing smashing. Someone will have to come over and can them all when they are ripe - I won't have time.

Not to mention the cost. We are already living beyond our means - and buying local currently means expensive! Farmer's just hiked their prices a the market. It's almost unbearably expensive. I started looking at Sunflower and Smith's for deals. I will start working part time next month. It'll likely be bye-bye organic, not to mention local then.

It's 11:30 and my toddler just woke up crying for mommy and is now taking every book and toy off his shelf and piling them on the floor. Next he'll pace the floor talking about "grasshoppers coming!" My husband thinks I shouldn't go in there. I say tought doodie hubby. 2 minutes of cuddling and he'll be back to sleep rather than an hour of toddler silliness and crying.


I'm not impressed with the green food movement. We can do better. Makes me want to move back to the subsistence village in Panama where growing your own food actually is a viable option - as long as you like eating only rice for days at a time.

See ya'll later when we all stop trying to lead these crazy lifestyles - I certainly can't do it alone.

P.S. This doesn't mean I am giving up, just lowering my personal expectations - ALOT!

Framing the Cold

My tomatoes have gotten too large to keep on their indoor growing racks. They are starting to bend over to fit on their shelves. So I made a make-shift cold frame out of strawbales and recycled sunroom windows we picked up from the second hand pile behind Brother Sun window shop.

I actually decided this year to follow John Jeavons' (How to Grow More Vegetables on Less Land Than You Thought Possible - or something like that) advice and prick out my seedling plants twice. Once from the flats into small pots and the second time from their pots into the ground. The real test is still yet to come - putting them in the ground. But they are looking great so far. Next year I think I'll do a third round for the tomatoes from 2" pots to 4". They are ready now for that, but since the last frost date is only a week away, they'll have to bide their time just a little longer. The tomatoes that I didn't have pots for transplanting into remain small and spindly as all of my plants were last year. The transplanting makes a true difference.

Arriving Flavors

I love Mondays. I make a habit of saving Mondays from work and using them for weekend recovery. I stay home to catch up on life, sustainable living, and the joys of mothering my son Clayton. And I try to stay off the computer.

We had a fun and busy weekend. Saturday started with an essential trip to the farmer's market (now that we are officially locavores, we must not miss the market), then joined a political puppet parade and pageant for May Day, followed by a few moments in the sun pulling crab grass from the asparagus patch, chatted with a visiting friend from Colorado, and ended the evening with ceremony. Sunday morning we woke up late and rushed out the door for a cheesemaking workshop in Estancia, NM at Old Windmill Dairy, followed by a blessed hour on the couch doing nothing, and another attempt at dinner without a recipe to guide me in preparing the day's local fare.

One of the greatest things I have heard yet this year was when Sir Kennith Robertson asked the audience I was sitting in to consider for ourselves how we are creative rather than how creative are we.  Think into that for a moment, it is quite profound given western culture's view of creativity as exclusive to a gifted few.

I'm a recipe girl. I play my guitar by reading music, I sew using patterns, I do Yoga with an instructor, I follow directions when building things, I check my books often when gardening. My creativity does not flow from practical things until I have year's of experience at it that I can stop thinking about it. My more natural creativity comes from the universe, through the soft spot on my head, straight to my intellect. I create and manifest what is not tangible. I take a vision of the future and make it a reality. But not a practical reality - an educational, social, cultural, political, paradigmatic reality. This necessitates that I keep my hands in the dirt often, otherwise my head gets so heavy it knocks me over.

Cooking is not yet a successful creative experience for me. So, when cooking I prefer to follow a recipe or things turn out pretty bland. My joy in cooking comes when I follow the Joy of Cooking for great tasting meals. The stuff I make up on the fly usually doesn't inspire great complements or sparkling reactions from my pallet or my husband's.

This is turning out to be my greatest challenge so far in being a locavore. For years I really haven't done a whole lot of cooking. I'm only just getting to know how to cook meat after years of being a vegetarian. And while I was a vegetarian I mostly ate grilled cheese and lasagna. Seasonal recipe books for my agro eco-region are in short supply. Most American families don't really study the art of cooking I've noticed. I've thought about taking a cooking class at the college to give me more of a foundation to work with, but I haven't determine where that fits into my full-time working and mommying schedule. So, learning what goes together to conjure up flavorful inspirations without guidance from one of my many cookbooks is a big challenge for me.

As my pallet slowly adjusts to local, seasonal-only fare, I have begun to realize that with local food,  I can rely more on the natural flavor of things. Things that go from garden to plate in a matter of minutes don't need a lot of accoutrement of any kind. My experience with the first asparagus of the season from my garden clued me into that secret kept from me by my global-industrial-food system-adjusted pallet.

That said, local flavors in April are in a bit of short supply thus far in my experience. This Saturday I bought a pound of spinach, seven over-wintered potatoes, five overwintered apples, the first tiny beets and carrots of the season, white radishes, sunflower sprouts, arugula, salad greens, greenhouse-grown heirloom tomatoes, Nativo (all local ingredients) bread, bacon and some  beef.

All good stuff. But not great. Except for the radishes that did surprise me with their zesty spring-time bite. But as for the rest, I have to say I excitedly await July when the full flavor roles in and returns to these sorry step-cousins of the glorious summer time vegetables!

Don't get me wrong. I am grateful we even have a spring time farmer's market in Santa Fe. And I am especially grateful for the heroic efforts our local farmers are making to extend the growing season in this desert that makes being a locavore even a remote possibility. But I LOVE the summer farmer's market and its abundance of flavors. Nothing makes my taste buds ring like Gemini Farm's beets, or the short-lived onslaught of japanese turnips sliced and tossed with their own greens in homemade vinegrette. Yum! It makes being an untrained American home cook a lot easier.

In the meantime, I'll continue to be grateful for the peach colored carrots and the fact that we are still draining my cupboard of leftover non-local items that add a little extra something in a season of arriving but still scarce flavors.

On another note, chesses never cease to fail this time of year. Flavor may change slightly on some dairy farms in winter or mating season (I'll blog later about what I learned at the cheesemaking workshop about why that is). But the high buttermilk content of Ed and Micheal's nubian goats at Old Windmill makes for some delicious chesse varieties anytime of year. Especially the incredibly delicious blue cheese they make. At $20/pound it doesn't necessarily fit into my budget. But given all the challenges and costs of running a small local dairy farm, their seven year-old operation is not even turning a profit yet. The local consumer vs. local farmer buget is a conversation for another blog. Right now I'm happy to give my support and anty up for the flavor rockin' blue as long as I have the dollars in my pocket. It is every bit worth the price.

No Impact Man Southwest

Wow! I am watching No Impact Man. They just switched off the lights. Good for them. They are doing what I learned to do while living in Panama with the Peace Corps. And what my entire village is still doing. And what most of the world is doing right now while I sit here with two computers on - one playing the movie and one for late night work projects (or blogging in this case) - and a lamp and wood burning in the woodstove, refrigerator running, music playing in Clayton's room, little glowing lights everywhere charging mobile electronics and sucking phantom power, wireless internet blinking in the back room, mini-hot tub keeping itself warm on the porch, irrigation timers running on their batteries to water the garden, solar powered lights lighting the pathway from car to door. So all that energy is coming from the solar tracker in our yard, but still. American ways of living lightly are still on a whole other level than the rest of the world. I have grown soft since my return to the U.S.

I also watched a movie called End of Poverty? earlier tonight. (Getting my documentary fix). It's like Open Veins of Latin America on screen. If everyone in the world lived like Americans it would take 5 planets to support us. Okay, so I have heard that one before. But on the other end of the spectrum - if everyone lived like they do in Burkina Faso, we would need 1/10th of our planet. I hadn't heard that before. Measured by mass, there are more ants on the planet than humans.

I like that they did their No Impact project in phases. We're still eating up the non-local fare leftover in our cupboards and freezer. I have one can of pickled beets, half can of peaches, and a few jars of homemade jelly left in my cupboard from last year's garden harvest. Luckily the farmer's market is picking up and the co-op too. The co-op is trying with the 300 mile radius, but they aren't quite there yet. They're still selling stuff from Mexico. I guess that's better than New Zeland kiwi at WF. The co-op selection is improving with the season - more options in the produce section I should say. My peas actually came up! My tomatoes on the growing rack are looking much better than they did last year. I gave them a boost of fish emulsion recommended by farmer Romero for flats.

I'm having fun with this project. I'm very much looking foward to the summer adundance in the farmer's market. And I find myself still wanting to do more and have more time to do more. Who knows, if they economy keeps plummeting in NM I might have a lot of time on my hands. But learning to do this while working full-time is a great challenge too.

Sunday Dinner

Tonight for our locavore dinner we are eating lion's mane mushrooms ($24 for two large bags), asparagus ($4/bunch), fresh salad greens ($8 big bag), radish sprouts (holy cow they are spicy!) ($3) with overwintered carrots ($4) and goat cheese ($5) - all purchased at the Saturday Santa Fe Farmer's Market. Since we are still cleaning out of fridge and freezer the non-locavore fare included:  puerco adobado made by my friend and neighbor Tanya for a Community College Culinary Arts event last fall. It has been in my freezer since - yikes! Thanks T! Shitake Seseame salad dressing (CA), lemons, and olive oil (CA), balsamic vinegar (CT). The butter came from our raw milk butter supplier from Texas. We'll have the popcorn for desert. So dinner is about 90% local. Hmm...the condiments might be a challenge to find locally.

The lion's mane mushrooms is a gourmet treat grown by Desert Fungi. My husband thinks it taste like crab. I think they taste like gourmet mushrooms. We tried them a number of ways (all sauteed):
1) with olive oil only
2) with olive oil and balsimic vinegar
3) with butter and salt
4) with butter and balsamic
5) sauteed with olive oil then sprinkled with fresh lemon juice after out of the pan
6) with butter only

My favorite was butter and balsamic. My husband liked them with the lemon juice. Whatever you do remember Julia Child's advice when you cook them "don't crowd the mushrooms!"

Buen Provecho!

And So It Begins

And so the desert locavore adventure begins. Today we ate our first asaparagus dish of the season. Straight out of the ground, sauteed lightly in the pan with water only and then straight to the plate. No butter or garlic necessary. Delicious. I've never tasted something so fresh. (Especially after a long winter of wanna-be vegetables). I love spring!

Transplant

This locavore blog seems to be turning into a lot of gardening entries. But bare with me, it is that time of season. Spring! The weather outside is lovely, affording me full days of working outside. Getting my own garden plots going and helping neighbors with their ambitious efforts putting up greenhouses and such have kept me away from the Farmer's Markets and other locavore consumer havens. I'm still waiting for the asparagus to poke its little spikes up so I have an official marker to my locavore endeavor.

My next research project is to decide which local CSA to join. There is also this guy Sam who has a backyard garden operation over by the community college and my neighbor has organized a modified CSA with him as well. Last year we got a few bags of produce from him, it was pretty good. Stay tuned for more on local CSAs.

Both me and my plants are not from here. We are growing slowly accustomed to the desert landscape. But transplants take special care and special measures to make sure they survive and succeed.

A couple weeks ago my husband and I built a seedling growing shelf. They cost anywhere from $500 - $800 new. We built ours for about $120 - lights included - in about three hours. A bunch of 2x2s and screws are all it took really. It is great when you want to increase the amount of seedlings you are growing and don't have a greenhouse, sunroom, or otherwise. We found the design online and added a foot of width to support the size flats we are using. Two weeks later the plants are doing great.

This weekend (5 weeks before last frost date) I transplanted tomato, eggplant, and broccolli seedlings from the flats to small individual plots. The survived and are recovering from the move back on their shelves.

I also planted peas, a strawberry patch, and four bushes including Western Sandcherry, Currant, and a third edible bush I can't remember at the moment. (Too much sun I guess). I'm a little behind as last year I was successful in starting peas the first week of March. These were seeds saved from my 2008 garden. I hope they come up.

Back to the work week...onward.

Reorienting

Being in the nonprofit and activist world these days requires a lot of time on the computer. When I was living in Panama working in agroforestry I had callouses on my hands, a dark sheen on my skin, and plenty of room in my lungs from all the laboring on the land. Not anymore. Now my body is soft and underused. The mind is dominant. Exercise is rare. But yesterday began my reorientation and that of my garden. I dragged out the pick, spade shovel, round shovel and rake and went to work. My body aches today. But it is a good ache.

I wanted to reorient my garden beds to a north-south orientation to see if it makes a difference. I also dug paths down 2 feet rather than having flagstone throughout the garden taking up space. This gives me more access across the beds, and hopefully will encourage me to be more efficient in the growing space. In years past I've always had blotches of empty space left after everything was planted. Going for a more intensive garden in an already intensive space.

Here's the result. This is looking out my front/kitchen door.

Gardening in the Spaces Inbetween

This month I had the pleasure of spending some time in Oakland and San Fran, CA. I can't quite wrap my head around San Francisco. I feel as if I am floating everytime I am there. It definitely has something to do with those tall roads that go straight into the sky.

But Oakland definitely has its feet firmly on the ground. While there I visited People's Grocery's urban agriculture sites. First of all you must know I think PG is just about the coolest organization out there. I love their philosophy, strategy, look, creativity, strident adherence to empowerment. It is an inspiration to all of us at youth organizing types.




They, along with City Slickers on the other side of West Oakland, have taken over a number of small to medium sized plots and begun gardening and farming. Using a small staff and lots of volunteers and youth, they are harvesting upwards of 1500 pounds of produce from sites as small as 2000 square feet. They take this produce and sell it at affordable prices to families in the food desert of the urban inner city. That's the basics of their program, with layers wrapped around it like and onion that address food security, poverty, health issues, economic opportunity, and youth empowerment.




I wasn't able to work it out to be there when to help out with the work, but I did drive around a bit and snapped some pictures of the sites. Very Cool! Thanks People's Grocery and City Slickers for all you do and all those you inspire everywhere.

Check out the slideshow to the right.

My first experience of gardening after leaving home was in Minneapolis where I got myself a plot in a community garden. I was living in a basement apartment on the edge of Uptown (a mostly white middle class neighborhood) and the Phillips (a mostly black poor neighborhood). The garden was also poised at the edge of the two and used by people living in both neighborhoods. An urban bridge builder. It was a large and well established garden near the train tracks in what would have been an other wise abandoned piece of land. We had a shared toolshed, well organized compost piles, and organic regulations. I rode my bike there two or three times a week to plant, weed and harvest my 10x10 plot. I inherited a raspberry bush from the previous renter and enjoyed that luxury. I was vegetarian at the time so the garden provided pretty much all I needed for the summer. I remember being there for hours in between my summer classes and job. Enjoying the calm and peacefulness of the place in the middle of a loud urban environment. I would occassionally be there when other gardeners arrived to tend their own plots and we would trade accolades and tips on the specific varities of vegetables we were growing. That summer remains one of the strongest in my memories. I can still smell the tomato leaves and resulting lasagne.

Seattle where I have also spent a lot of time has an incredible network of community gardens. Immigrant farmers from various parts of Asia take over steep hillsides in between roads and houses and farm like they would were they at home in the steep jungle. Youth groups set up by rivers and in parks. Regular folks take over otherwise abandoned spaces. They call them P-Patches.

For the three years I was in the Peace Corps in Panama the women in the village of Cano Quebrado and I worked together to help each other grow kitchen gardens. We literally dug up the land and planted right next to their outdoor kitchens. We grew herbs, peppers, some vegetables. Whatever delicacies that didn't do well in the "monte" - cultivated plots in the jungle. They like to broadcast tomato seeds in areas that retained water all year round and let them grow like weeds or like the vines they really are. And grow they did. We had no shortage of water there, our struggle was fungus from being too wet. Many of those backyard gardens are still there today and the women still rotate from home to home helping with the work and trading varieties of vegetables and herbs.

Thankfully, Santa Fe now has a burdgeoning community and school garden movement. Although I no longer have a need as my own 2 acres keep me busier than I can handle, I am grateful that others are utlizing this incredible resource. The City has pilot gardens in three parks and will be adding a fourth this summer. Youth Allies have a plot in each garden and merrily grow what they need for their free Food Not Bombs meals served fresh and hot twice a months in City Parks.

Everywhere around the world there is evidence of people gardening in the spaces in between. Inbetween full-time work and home life, inbetween two houses, inbetween rich and poor, black and white, one country and another, jungle and kitchen, desert and rainforest, inbetween languages, cultural barriers, wet and dry, long-term and just starting...but we keep on gardening.

Falling in Love with my Tumbleweed Farm

My farm started as a garden. My garden started as a driveway. A severely compacted gravel ridden urban heat island. We moved into our home 4 years after it was built. The previous tenants were renters, the builder/owner had never lived there. The renter did the best she could with the outdoor space. And she took most of it with her when she left, leaving only a few thorny rose bushes, crowded periwinkle, overbearing mint, and zealous iris bulbs for us to work with. Despite the obvious challenge, my husband and I thought this was the most logical place to put the garden given it is right out our kitchen door, southwest facing and in “Zone 1” – the area you walk by everyday, multiple times a day as long as you leave the house. We dreamed of picking sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes not yet hardened by the hot New Mexico sun each morning on our way out the door to work.

He was willing to do the digging, so dig he did one weekend while I was away. I came back to a space of about 200 square feet that he soaked, fought with, broke shovels and axes on and finally dug down as far as he could in concrete slab like clay we were calling earth. What happens to earth when you drive ATVs, construction equipment and cars over it for years. He got about 12 inches down and hit what felt like bedrock. We trucked in a thick layer of compost mixed it with the clay and quickly put in our first garden since it was already July when we finally unloaded our boxes at the house that first year. After a slow start after which we did a soil test and added lots of bonemeal for a needed nitrogen fix, we got a bumper crop of zucchini, and that was about it. I’m convinced that in the wild zucchini would be a pioneering species – the first to come in after a fire, volcano, or other such disturbance to repopulate the area. It does well anywhere! Funny enough, we’ve hardly gotten any zucchini out of our garden in the three years since. In fact every year we seems to get one crop that does better than all the rest, but it is never the same thing from year to year.

We did install a drip system that first year. Most of the water soaked down about 12 inches and then ran off like a sheet of rain on that bedrock– still too concrete underneath for it to penetrate. The downhill side of the garden and driveway got most of the watering that year. But over the years it has worked itself out. I am reminded of the Growing Power gardens in Milwaukee where I grew up. One the south side of the City where it is mostly concrete, they just lay topsoil mixed with compost on top of paved parking lots and grow tomatoes in raised beds. After seeing those big, red bright tasty tomatoes that came from the urban gardens, I firmly believe Nature will work with what ever you have if you give her enough attention, love and care.

The next year I just had just given birth to my son in the spring and was lucky enough to spend 6 months off work home with him through the growing season. During every single nap I plotted, planned, dug, planted, weeded, harvested, and enjoyed my summer garden. When he was awake I would sit him in his squishy practice seat in the middle of the garden. He would reach out for the nearest plant and gum basil leaves, corn stalks, and spinach as I picked through the tomato patch. His first experience of solid foods was from those green leaves fresh off the stalk. From the look on his face, he loved it as much as I love the earthy smell of tomato leaves when you brush up against them in the hot sun. YUM! Breathe deeply. My son and I spent most of our first months of his life together out in that garden and continue to every year since. Even in the winter we play in the garden. Protected by a coyote fence to keep the dogs and rabbits out, it is the warmest place in the whole yard in late afternoon. On a warm winter day, it feels like summer, and an exquisite place from which to watch the sunset.

In year two, I expanded the main garden plot adding about 80 square feet and taking over the front flower beds adjacent to the walls of the house for another 150 sq feet. I added a few key flowers and shrubs to the flower gardens to attract beneficial insects and filled in the rest of the space with kitchen herbs. I love the convenience of reaching out my front door for the fresh rosemary and thyme the soup recipe calls for. No more “I forgot the ____!” runs to the grocery store. The herbs last most of the winter too – I just consider them “dried on the vine” in January and harvest them brown.

We also added asparagus trenches, cherry tomato & basil patches, raspberries, fruit trees, rhubarb, and a few choice wild strawberries in our front yard the second year. This April will mark three years since we planted those asparagus. We are still learning what they need. Every year we have added about 2 inches of new compost, but they are still slow in coming and a few have died off. We are trying to stave off the crab grass that is threatening to take over the trenches. The third year is supposed to be the charm with asparagus. Once they pop their crowns up this year it will mark the start of our year as locavores. Asparagus season. I talked to a local farmer recently about having youth help out throughout the season. He said sure, anytime between asparagus season and blackberry season. His way of marking the start and the end of the natural farming cycle in northern New Mexico. I am planting blackberries this year too so we have a marker for the other end of the season.

The cherry tomatoes were the bumper crop that second year. We had so many our neighbors wouldn’t take any more from us. So we learned how to roast them, dry them, add them to every imaginable dish we could think of. We did manage to eat them all up before canning season came. Roasted cherry tomatoes with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper are irresistible. Once we learned that, we did the tomato patch in pretty quickly. But many did fall to the ground and get squished, only to leave seeds that came up the next year as volunteer plants. They didn’t produce as much the second and third years but they keep doing decently enough.

It seems every year one plant shines above all others, and it is never the same one. The third year of our garden, we only expanded about 20 square feet to add a strawberry patch to the front yard. That year we got a bumper crop of pumpkins. Delicious sweet, round, small sugar pie pumpkins. My favorite. And enough purple green beans to freeze and can and last us into the early winter.

This year we plan to take over another portion of the driveway and turn it into terraced vegetable gardens, making room for more variety and more harvest to last us into the winter with canning and freezing. We will also plan green manures on the southwest side of the house in a fairly flat spot getting it ready for a future grain crop. I also plan to diversify our food forest. Last summer we added four raspberry bushes and 5 egg-laying chickens to the mix in the orchard. This year we will add 4 more chickens to give us enough for all our needs including baking from scratch. Then I’ll expand the wild strawberry patch – which my son treats like a treasure chest of delight!! The berries grow small but they are packed with sweetness. He cherishes them, months after the harvest ended last year he still went out into the yard everyday to check the plant for berries. Plus blackberries, sandcherries, and other native fruit bearing edible shrubs.

I’ve just started my tomato, pepper, eggplant starts two weeks ago. I am working slowly towards my plan of having a 1.5 acre urban farm that can provide us with food year round. We have a 2 acre plot but about .5 of that is too steep to do anything with except nurture it and help it go native again. Maybe plant a windblock on its contours. We will add 3 goats for yogurt and cheese this summer and focus on the food forest. I await the day when I can lie on my little patch of bluegrama grass under the pear tree and pick fresh, juicy fruit while harvesting eggs with my other hand while my son gorges on tamed wild strawberries, and my husband milks the goats. That is when I will have achieved true wealth and abundance in my life.

I’ve been closely observing the land I call mine for four years now. I’ve walked every inch of it, listened and looked closely where the sun falls, how the water flows, where the good dirt is still left, how the wind blows, how it changes over the course of a day. And still I feel as I am just getting a sense of it. The land is responding well. It was so abused, misused, and ignored when I arrived it has been a slow healing process. Working on one eroded, compacted patch at a time. Working on building corridors, stringing together patches that have a bit more vibrancy in hopes that the land in between will respond as well some day and fill in the holes.

I have built a relationship with my land and I love it. I get the sense it loves me too. She appreciates the care, the attention, the patience, the light touch I use. I don’t try too hard to get it to do what I want it to. If it doesn’t want to grow zucchinis one year, I don’t force it. I feed it as much as feels right and as much as I have time for. Every small act of kindness is returned. We have an incredible view of the mountains from my house. When I moved in, I thought that might be as good as it was going to get on that damaged spot. But the land has responded with vigor and vibrancy. There is still a lot more I can do for it. Many more troubled areas being cut open by rivers of water when the rain does fall or the snow melts off, needing to be slowed down and redirected, needing time to soak it in. But we are getting there. Growing together, learning from each other, listening to each others’ needs. I won’t force it to feed me all year long if it is not ready. I won’t put too many animals on it. In this way I believe we will continue to tread lightly but grow deeply together.

The Raw Truth About Raw Milk

March 2010

I grew up in Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland.” Infamous for our cheeseheads, fried cheese curds and weak, watered down beer.

According to a website entitled “Wisconsin by Luke” there are 11 federally recognized tribes in WI today. The name of the state was taken from the Chippewa Indian word "Wees Konsan" meaning the gathering of water. Jean Nicolet was the first European to reach Green Bay in 1634. In 1763 France ceded Wisconsin to Great Britain then Britain ceded it to the United States in 1783. It is also called "The place of the beaver" and also called the Badger State.

Luke, who created his site for a school project, goes on to describe Wisconsin’s important rivers - the Mississippi, the St. Croix, Fox River and Green Bay. The St. Croix flows into Lake Superior which is bound to the north by the Canadian province of Ontario. This web of lakes and rivers is how my great-grandfather came to settle in New Richmond, Wisconsin. He and his brother immigrated to French-Canada settling in Ontario, assumingly got bored there and decided to take a canoe from the Canadian border through Lake Superior onto the St. Croix.

They disembarked on the shores of Bass Lake on the central west border with what is now Minnesota and somehow claimed hundreds of acres surrounding the lake in Dakota Sioux territory for themselves. This part of how my family took the land from the original indigenous habitants – our history of colonization - is not recorded in my family’s history books or memory.

Once there, like many other European settlers who populated the rolling hills of Wisconsin, they began to plant corn, potatoes, alfalfa and raise dairy cattle. Their cows were fat and well fed by the lush perennial prairies and grasslands, shaded by the tall trees of the surrounding forests and a well-quenched by the decent sized lake they drank out of and cooled off in. Outside of being milked in the barn twice a day, they roamed freely all of their days.

My family has since sold off most of the land surrounding the lake to urban escapees from the Twin Cities looking for rural respite, or, sons and daughters of farmers who now make their living by commuting to industrial jobs in the Cities. Their pontoon and speed boats now crowd the lake for sunset parties and water skiing.

I myself spent every summer growing up on and in that lake at my grandma’s cabin. You couldn’t imagine a more idyllic childhood. Me and my 80 cousins spending our summers together fishing, swimming, making forts in the forest, and occasionally helping out at the dairy farm.

I milked a few cows in my days there, but only a few. They were typically cows who had some kind of utter infection and were taken off the machines and milked by hand until they recovered. The days of milking the entire herd by hand were over well before I arrived on the scene. And my mother prefers not to talk about the forced farm chores aspect of her childhood. Mostly we would stand guard of my aunts flower beds as the cows were led from the fields back to the milking barns, or help load hay into the silo at the end of the summer. When I was very little I remember the farm house, no more than 1000 square feet where my Grandpa Ray and Grandma Delia raised five kids followed by my Uncle Dick and his first and second wives who raised eight kids. They since have torn down that teeny villa and built something much larger – more what you expect of a typical American farm home these days.

In the 1997 the farm received a certificate from President Clinton and the White House in celebration of its 100th year designating it a heritage farm. A few year’s later, with none of his eight children stepping up to take over the dairy farm, my aging Uncle Dick after countless triple by-pass heart surgeries decided it was time to switch to beef cattle. We guess it was all the raw milk, cheese, eggs, and other artery clotting food one consumes in excess when you live on a dairy farm. I believe there is a reason the best heart disease doctors and The Mayo Clinic is in the heart of the dairyland.

I remember during those summers on the lake, my aunt delivering raw milk from the farm to my grandma, presenting it to her as some kind of special, coveted treat. Me and my suburban siblings eyed it suspiciously and never did drink it beyond a taste that was quickly spat out. My mother encouraged this suspicion in us. Having left the farm for the city as soon as she was old enough, she had bought only ultra-pasturizied or powered milk since. Like most she was convinced by the urban myths that this was the only milk safe for human consumption. Our young minds, like so many of our young urban counterparts who believed that carrots came from the grocery store, were convinced that raw milk, straight from the cow’s utter, was something not to be messed with. A dangerous warm concoction that at best would make you sick just by smelling it.

As we watched my grandma add it to her coffee, use it for baking those brownies we really loved, or drink it straight, we felt she was taking her life into her own hands. My grandma, the sweetest, hardest working, powerhouse matriarch was really living on the edge in those moments. She didn’t die when she drank it, and for that she earned our everlasting respect for her steel stomach and superpower immune system.

So a few months ago when my husband suggested we join a raw milk group in Santa Fe, I was immediately suspicious. The idea that a farmer in Lubbock, Texas would drive up to Santa Fe once a week with a mini-van full of this forbidden elixir - raw milk, butter, cream, and the occasional side of beef, seemed as equally incomprehensible to me as my grandma drinking from the disease-steaming carafe of milk delivered and living through it.

News of this clandestine activity was whispered to my husband over lunch by an acquaintance after he mentioned he was lactose intolerant. She suggested it wasn’t the lactose, but the pasteurizing that was inconsistent with his constituency. So he signed us up and began bringing home gallons of thick milk with a thin layer of cream on the top.

The first time I joined him in the raw milk pickup it was winter, a dark early evening as we drove through the winding streets of northside neighborhoods following such directions as “one block past the three tufts of beargrass.” It seemed rightfully hidden to me as I was still convinced of its potential deadliness. We pulled up to a suburban adobe home with a line of people, hoods pulled tightly over their heads to keep out the cold, silently standing in line as the farmer distributed the white liquid from the back of his mini-van. My husband got out and went to the back of the line. More came silently after him. I could see him trying to make small talk with the other illegal consumers to avail. It felt like a scene from an urban street. Our drug dealer had come into a big supply and needy users lined up quietly trying not to let their jones get the best of them before they could quietly slip away from wherever they had come to get their fix. And in some ways, raw milk is illegal unless you can weave your way through the complex matrix of food safety regulations the government has created that keeps most farmers and consumers confused about real food.

Even after a month or so of my husband bringing raw milk home from these pick ups, forwarding me emails from the farmer on the successful health inspections they passed, I still felt myself avoiding it in the fridge, thinking it suspicious nonetheless. Not being familiar with its smell I was unsure I would know when it was spoiled. Despite the fact that this milk met my commitment to eating locally, and sustainably from food that is raised humanely, I still couldn’t even bring myself to partake of the cheese he made from this concoction.

Finally after getting badgered too many times because I was still buying milk in the store when there was already “milk” in the fridge, I decided to dig up the “raw truth” about raw milk. Like most things tied to the food system these days it is a matter of wading through corporate spin, urban myths, and getting to the real heart of the matter.

Here are a few things I found out:

• Did you know there is an Annual International Raw Milk Symposium? The 2nd one will be held April 10, 2010. Guess where….Wisconsin.

• What is raw milk? Cow's milk taken straight from animals fed only fresh, organic, green grass, rapidly cooled to around 36-38 degrees F., and bottled. Unpasturized and unhomogenized.
  

A few points on Raw Milk Safety

• Not all raw milk is the same. Look for raw milk from cows pastured on organic green grass their WHOLE lives for the best health benefits to you. Any food can be contaminated depending on how it is produced, packaged and handled.

• To get a “Raw for Retail” permit in Texas your milk is tested for at least three things:

• Standard Plate Count – Number of bacteria in milk, has a strong relationship with the keeping quality of milk and the cleanliness of the dairy; legal limit less than 20,000ppm
• Coliform Bacteria – used as an index of the level of sanitation and/or water quality employed in the handling and processing of milk and milk products; legal limit less than 10
• Somatic Cell Count – used as a parameter to detects udder health and milk quality; legal limit less than 750,000
  

• When kept at the optimal temperature of 36-38° F. (2.2-3.3°C.) you can expect fresh raw milk to last from 7-10 days. Higher temperatures allow the normally occurring lactobacilli to get busy making lactic acid, which gives soured milk its characteristically tangy taste and reduces its shelf life.

But don’t leave it to the government, or me, to make your decision for you, do your own research. Most agree that milk from cows fed a heavy grain diet must be pasteurized to kill bacteria harmful to humans. Know the source of your raw milk and how it was raised, fed, and handled. Start by checking out the information and resources on the website Raw Milk Facts: http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/

And thanks to Luke, whoever you are, for posting your school research project: Wisconsin by Luke: http://www.pocanticohills.org/usa99/wi.htm

Tired nights

A cold winter night in February. A long day at work. A little bit of insomnia. I can see how all this is adding up to dubious thoughts on the viability of living la vida local. It is hard to come home tired everynight from work and feel like making a home cooked meal. Whittle down the ingredients you can cook with based on geography and it is even less fun.

Often with these living-life-alternative-to-the-mainstream endeavors there is a hump to get over and then it gets easier. Once you have done the research and know where you can get/buy/grow/freeze and/or can items and what time of year, things get easier. But it is a lot of research to figure these things out. I'm no longer under the illusion this will be a breeze. Especially so long as I keep spending all of my days at an office and want to make time for a family who doesn't like me to be on the computer when I am home. I'm interested to see how far I can get as in individual before I hit up against the need for more collective action.

Tonight we did manage to take one baby step with a mostly local meal in February. We had mealoaf (local ground beef, onions, spinach still frozen from my summer garden, salt) and celery root mash potatoes (thanks to my friend Indigo for that recipe!) Delicious! And minus the salt, it was an all local meal in February! Yea for small successes. April asparagus season is still a ways off however.

Everytime I go grocery shopping in these food stores that although offer organics, are still part of the industrial, global food system, I see all the things I won't be able to buy if my limit is 250 miles or what's available out my own back door. It's a new lens to look at the world through.

I remember after my stint in Panama I never looked at land the same again. Whereas before my life there I saw wildflower habitat, forests, and various lovely ecozones in which to spend my days naming the plants and animals, after Panama all I could see were good hills to grown corn on and bogs that would make a great rice paddy. In college I remember becoming frustrated with the environmental worldview where all I could see was what was wrong with the concrete landsacape and out of alignment with nature. It gets tiresome always looking at the world from that critical lens.

Sometimes I feel that I just need to let go of the critical mind and enjoy whatever is in front of me no matter what it is or where it came from or what consequences it has. I can sometimes find relief from an impending sense of despair by reveling in man's ingenuity and creativity. At least I can marvel at the incredible genius of the human mind that created all our little inventions and huge global systems. I keep myself going in times of overload by grooving on the idea that if we could just start using nature's design parameters, I am absolutely positive we could design ourselves an incredibly ingenious sustainable, harmonious human world too.

It is a bit difficult to not let the locavore lens become a weight on one's shoulder, but rather keep it a celebration of local delights. Maybe if I was a work-in-the-home-mom and could spend more of my days thinking about my purchases and mapping out a plan of attack for local buying in this City, then the delight part would come easier. I'm sure there are other Santa Feans who have done or are doing this locavore thing - so if you are out there, please send me your research! For example, where does one set about buying a new duvet in Santa Fe at a local store that doesn't cost upwards of $350? This has taken me days of research and still no answer. Do without the duvet you say? Certainly one solution. Learn to knit? Another full time job. A duvet could be considered a luxury, and therefore easily done without. But my locavore challenge is centered around food, not so easily done without. So then, where do I find a local olive oil producer? Do without olive oil? Not so sure about that. That might have to go on the exception list.

In order to keep from going crazy looking at all the things we can't have in the winter-time grocery store and absent from the Farmer's Market, we've decided each Selby family member gets to have 3 exceptions to the locavore list. I'm still pondering mine. So far I'm considering coffee, olive oil, and rice. Although I constructed some mean rice paddy/fish ponds in Panama so maybe I can replicate that here, we certainly have enough mud this week! And if I can wean myself off coffee again, I'd trade it for salt. Clayton will likely keep his string cheese, kiwi and strawberries, and Taylor his date-prune-chickory tea drink thing (ingredients from around the world, he needs a cap and trade deal just for that one so that counts as three items).

I'm signing off now. Need to get some sleep so I can have energy to shop local when shopping is a necessity.

Say Cheese!

So we are now part owners of a cow in Lubbock, Texas from which we receive one gallon of unpasturized, raw milk a week. My husband learned of this through an acquaintance. It acts like a buying cooperative - the farmer drops off the milk at a private home and we pick it up gallon every Saturday at 1pm. What you need to do for real food!

Lubbock is 385 miles away - this will be the most distant product we source for our local year, unless we can find the same thing closer. In the meantime we are experimenting with making cheese, which as it turns out is a lot easier than one would think.

For starters you need unpasturized, raw milk - any old milk from the grocery store just won't do.
Next, you throw a piece of wheat-based bread in it and let it curdle for two days.
Then scoop off the whey, strain it and what is left over is the cheese.
For our first try we used 1/2 gallon and got about a 2x3 inch chunk of mexican-style like cheese.
It is almost that easy.

A great local resource for cheese making classes, recipes and a farm visit is Old Windmill Dairy in Estancia, NM. Their two hour classes cover it all. They also sell their cheeses at the Santa Fe Farmer's Market and through the Los Poblanos CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).

http://www.theoldwindmilldairy.com/_mgxroot/page_10783.html