New milk stand with recycled materials:  reused 1×4s, old metal base from the basement’s concrete washtubs, and our daughter’s old table’s top.  It is wider than it needs to be:  I intend to sit on it to milk her.  “Scootch over, sister!”

I got an interesting technology request the other day from a reader.

She’s trying to do more things herself, whether it’s growing or preserving or just looking at lifestyle choices.  Considering that many people reading this blog are on a similar path, I must mention that where she is making this quest is a little different:  it’s in a now-peaceful, war-ravaged country, and she’s not completely at home in the language.  She doesn’t have the liberty of being able to choose which big-box store to shop in for her greenhouse plastic or her canning jars or gardening equipment.  She can’t just go to the local library to read up on these things.  And simply ordering goods over the internet is not exactly something one can do in a not-fully-operational state.  Even considering her circumstances, though, there are many parallels we can draw to our own quests:  sometimes it’s money that’s the limit, sometimes it’s time, sometimes, it’s know-how.  But always, we should consider what’s appropriate.

The great equalizer, thankfully, is the internet!  So much information found “out there,” some of dubious value certainly, but if you have your own bullsh*t-o-meter pretty highly tuned, you can find some gems.  What I recommended to her is that she’s got the great good fortune to be living in an area that’s not as cold as Michigan (!) so there is a lot open to her, greenery-wise.  You don’t need a lot of technology to grow your own food:  a hoe, a shovel, maybe a garden fork and a decent hand tool can be found in any corner of the globe.  Seeds are cheap.  And compost happens everywhere….even north of the arctic circle.

So grow more of your own, and try to grow it year-round.  Build your own cold frame or greenhouse to extend the season.  Use scraps!  There’s no shame at all in recycling; you’re making a better environmental choice by reusing what you can find.  My first cold frame was a transparent plastic sweater box, frankly, the first winter I lived here:  that’s where I sprouted my first salads and hardened off my tomato plants.  And you don’t need to can things if you can try to figure out a way of growing year-round.  Swear off tomatoes for half a year if you have no way of preserving them, but…drying the small ones is something most people can do in their ovens or on the roofs of their buildings in the summer sun.  Pickling, lacto-fermenting, and salt-curing are other methods of preserving one’s harvest.  As is a root cellar:  that could simply be a box in your basement or garage, it doesn’t need to be a proper cellar.

I think so much of this…whatever it is I am doing (homesteading? DIY?) is simply a mindshift.  I could not duplicate what I was eating before, so I switched our diet.  (I can no longer walk to get sushi, for example, or a cappuccino, or that delivered-to-my-door CSA, or get Thai food delivered; but I can get fresh eggs and fruit and garden produce.)  It’s not the same; it’s different.  And it takes longer, and I have less time.  (I am a parent now too so I’m dividing that time pie into pretty thin slices, come to think of it.)  But I am far happier for learning these new skills, for choosing to live this life, financial challenges, failed harvests, blisters and all.

Here’s a few sources of decent information:

• Organic Gardening
• Vegetable Growing Guide from Cornell University
• Mother Earth News
• Backwoods Home’s articles by Jackie Clay

The only thing I had to buy was the hook and eye to keep the head gate locked.  This was her maiden voyage so I hadn’t set the eye yet.  Appropriate technology:  no milking machine, just me and a bucket and a milk stand.  Oh and a goat!

Serious child minding the crepe.  It’s a glorious, wonderful, spectacular day when your child becomes tall enough to reach the stove unassisted!  It also means she can turn on the kitchen faucet and load the dishwasher.

Illness has visited our house this week, so Saturday night it was just the girl and me eating solid foods.  And, as is typical, I revert to my vegetarian ways when I don’t need to feed my husband, so…the girl and I made crepes.  Crepes are wonderful.  They can be savory, they can be sweet, they can be in-between.   And they hide all manner of leftovers, should you have them.  Leftovers, or food failures, as was the case with the feta I made this week, which came out decidedly unset and lumpy (oh it tasted fantastic, the texture was off), so melted with a little butter and milk, it became the topping for the crepes.

Menu:

• Whole-wheat crepes (milk share milk, our eggs, Ferris Organics wheat berries, Michigan butter)
• Choice of fillings: our leftover oven-roasted chicken with sauteed Bleu de Solaize leeks for the girl; Grex beet greens/Bleu de Solaize leeks/white onions for me
• Feta/cream sauce topping (milk share milk)
• Big greenhouse salad (carrots, turnips, lots of arugula and mache; homemade yogurt/shallot/parsley dressing)
• Applesauce for dessert (our apples, Michigan sugar)

Cropped photo so you can’t see the unpretty feta sauce

I have blogged a bit of a theme this week:  how to plan my spring garden according to what I will eat next February.

By looking into shortcuts (and take them where I can), and by doing a tally of this February’s stored goods, I can see what needs to go into the ground this spring.  But I have not mentioned one very important piece of this puzzle:  eating out of the greenhouses, and eating out of the outdoor gardens.

Yes, it’s February on 42N, 86W point of this globe, so indeed the gardens are covered with about a foot of that white frozen stuff.  And the earth remains unfrozen but by no means warm inside the greenhouses.  Still:  I am pulling fresh produce from these two plastic-covered tunnels daily.  Other than my lettuces which I continually blah-blah about, it’s the root and cole crops that shine in there now.  And outdoors I can likewise dig up a rutabaga, carrot, or a leek at my leisure, it just takes me a bit more work.

So here’s a partial list:  at least 30 types of lettuces; sorrel, chard, beet greens; endive/escarole; lacinato and red kale and savoyed cabbage; leeks, onions, scallions, shallots; beets, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, turnips, rutabagas; celery, par-cel cutting celery, parsley; and some herbs like thyme, sage, savory, and rosemary.  AND:  they’ll all be eaten (excepting the perennials like the herbs, the sorrel and scallions) by the time the peas are ripe.

Can you see how I avoid the grocery store?  Even in winter’s cold depths?

Spooky dark basement storage

A big part of garden planning involves, for me, checking the State of the Stored.  Here it is, the first week of February:  how are my supplies doing downstairs?  Do I have enough tomato sauce to last me until this year’s harvest?  Salsa, chutneys?  How are the dried and canned beans doing?  How about popcorn, frozen green beans, jams, canned peaches?  How about pickles?  Applesauce, veggie broth, canned chicken broth?  Frozen fruits?  Ketchup, barbecue sauce, garlic jelly?  And the all-important apples, onions, garlic, shallots, potatoes, winter squash?  A quick check of my stash tells me what I need to plant this year, and what holes need to be patched.

All seems swell downstairs:  my general approach of “put away more than you can eat in two years” has worked well.  Not that I am a pessimist, but better gardeners than me tend to make a big harvest as insurance against a bad year.   Had the late blight hit my tomatoes last year (it did not, but took out half the school garden’s crop), I would still be in pretty good shape, except for ketchup and barbecue sauce.  As it is, canning twice the normal year’s amount frees me, somewhat, from the drudgery of canning every crop every year.  (This doesn’t work for frozen things, but canned goods:  check!)  And pressure-canned stuff is “good” for a long time.

Calico popcorn

Always, though, there are certain experimental things that I wish I had made more of (apple/pear moutarde, green apple/tomato chutney) but this can backfire too if I make a lot of something and it’s not quite so tasty (gooseberry jam).  But even failures can have second lives.  My calico popcorn, which I adore, is not the best at popping (hardly any homegrown one is: it has to do with moisture in the kernels and timing harvests perfectly…which requires a hydrometer, not something I am willing to spring for) but ground-up as a meal for cornbread or polenta?  Hooeey!  Hand me the honey!

A pretty summer cabbage, from seed started in February

February!  Hark, I hear the swoosh of the swing of the season!

Admittedly, this is wishful thinking on my part.  We’re a long way off from spring, but we’re not far at all from spring planning.  And most gardening folk are thinking about the upcoming growing season, myself included.  I am about two weeks from stringing up the basement lights for early onions, for example; exciting, but also…the worst part of my own garden calendar.  I abhor indoor gardening.

No, I am thinking about how much less work I can do this year.  Every year, it’s my goal to bite off less, to realize the value of my most precious resource:  my time.  I will say that the longer one gardens, the more shortcuts one finds.  One needs to pay attention, though.  If I don’t want to weed, I must mulch; if I want to maximize the harvest out of one bed, I must be merciless about pulling plants and reseeding/replanting.  It becomes a bit of a game.  And games can be mastered.

So I am trying to master the game that is the onion family.  I seeded three greenhouse beds with those little hard black seeds yesterday:  leeks, red and white and yellow onions.  I placed them between the green sprouts of the rows of garlic.  If all goes well, this one step will save me days of anxiety pampering those damned indoor seed trays.   They’ll take longer to grow, but the conditions in the greenhouses are both out of my control and perfect for seed-sprouting, if you happen to be an onion seed.

I will of course plant them indoors, too, but, if it’s a successful experiment, then next year the basement lights will only come out for the tomatoes and peppers, and maybe celery/parsley.  And THAT will save me lots of time.  And swearing.

Bean carnage

Let’s just say our meal this week is terribly…beany.

Gosh, I think I have even posted about beans, what, twice before for this challenge?  Three times, maybe?  We do love our beans, it is true; probably one dinner a week is Beans.  That leaves six other meals per week that I could choose from that are Not Beans, pretty good odds!  I have a couple of things to say in my defense, though.

Mainly, it’s a bit of a crazy week.  Our daughter turns 6, and every day, it appears, there’s something else to be done to aid the celebration.  There are at least three meals that are directly birthday-related (food is love) and sadly not all of them will be Dark Days-worthy…or they would be if Michigan grew chocolate.  But!  My husband wanted to cook (is the sky falling?  was that just a pig I saw flying?  did hell freeze?) and he said he wanted to make some beans.

A LOT of beans, it turns out!  And:  I was so shocked I forgot to photograph it.

Menu:

• Cuban Black Beans: our Black Turtle beans, Turino red (sweet) pepper, Hungarian (hot) ground red pepper, Copra onions, garlic, nonlocal cumin/pepper/salt, and greenhouse thyme and my friend’s greenhouse bay leaves.
• Baked Beans: our Navy beans, Copra onions, garlic, Golden Self-Blanching celery, smoked pork belly, local honey, and a friend’s maple syrup.
• Biscuits: home-milled hard red spring wheat, butter, home-made yogurt from our milk share.
• Greenhouse salad with homemade, homegrown yogurt dressing (yogurt, shallots, apple cider vinegar, parsley, applesauce with Michigan sugar).

Last week’s (top) and this week’s yogurt made from our milk share

Over the years my husband and I have had a bit of a tussle over finances.  This of course is the typical marital story.  Defining our particular story is my yen to DIY, and almost every little project I undertake, financially, has a big start-up cost.  It has a start-up cost (mainly in materials) that almost always requires no huge outlay of later cash…no bubble, as it were; only maintenance money.  So I have been able to persuade him that my *needs* are, well, inexpensive if you amortize!  At this point he trusts me.

The things I am thinking of are the chicken coop, the chicken tractor, the greenhouses, the goat(s), the (so far unfinished) masonry oven.  Smaller things likewise can be considered:  the pressure canner, the grain mill, the chest freezers, the tiller.  The orchard.  Raised beds for the gardens.  All of them have paid for themselves or will do so within the first year or so of owning them.  And any of my kookier ideas also have an out, financially:  2010, to name one example, will be the first year I don’t have to order chicks because we have roosters and a tom turkey, thus, self-sufficiency in egg and meat birds.

But cheesemaking.  I mentioned a while back how I found life as a single vegetarian to be much less expensive than omnivory…mainly because I almost never bought cheese!  I adore cheese, but it was rare that I would shell out for it, despite my love of the stuff…good butter being the one exception.  NOW there’s a goat in the shed, and she’s bagging up quite nicely, and within about a month I will don the bonnet of Resident Milkmaid.  And fresh milk means cheese.  And homemade cheese means…damn, another start-up cost!

A few years back when the homemade cheese bug bit me, I purchased a starter kit from Hoegger Goat Supply.  It’s served me nicely and I haven’t gone back to that well, but then again, I didn’t try to make hard cheeses or aged cheeses.  Now, though, now I have printed out little plans for my husband to build me a cheese press (he likes to feel handy) and now I have finally purchased and read Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making.  And I am discovering that that woman is a pusher.  Seriously:  is she any different than the guy on the corner who’s giving you a little taste for free so you can keep coming back to feed your habit?  I read the recipes and I think:  hmmm, thermophilic culture, I need that; how about a bag of penicillium candidum, and might as well get a bag of p. roquefortii while I am at it.  And then, well, use it up and keep coming back for more.  Yogurt sure doesn’t have this problem:  make it once, always have it (like sourdough).

Man!  What would Ma Ingalls do?  She’d culture her own.  Something else to figure out, I guess…stay tuned.

Farmyard fashion.  Caprine couture.  Goat glam.  Dairy duds.  Ruminators’ raiment.  You get it.

Forever, it seems, I have wanted to own a couple of goats.  I have always considered them singular creatures, intelligent and goofy at the same time, regal and clown-ish.  Dairy goats figure in quite well with small farms like ours, too.  Their needs are few yet their byproducts are many (bedding for the compost, milk for us, and kids to sell or to add to the herd).  Unlike sheep, goats don’t think you’re always going to kill them; unlike cows, you don’t need acres of pasture for their sustenance; unlike non-draft horses, goats are actively contributing members of the small farmstead.  T-bell is a friendly, happy soul, and I feel terribly lucky to have her.

I found her on Craigslist, if you can believe it.

Our goat girl is a sundgau-colored French Alpine.  She’s kidded before, twice; both times unassisted…in point of fact, she kidded before the family could get there in time to assist her: her kids were there in the straw!  She is in every way very much what they call “an easy keeper.”  I found a housecall-making vet who specializes in goats and sheep and she has confirmed that T-bell is in great shape, AND pregnant (yay!).  And, the vet confirmed she’s free of a certain disease that is fairly common in dairy goats…this was a big concern of mine, as it would require that I sterilize the kids’ milk (it seems convoluted, but I will milk her to bottle-feed her kids).  Heating colostrum (first milk) is tricky because it wants to turn into caramel!  (No disease = no need to pasteurize the milk.)

At her previous home, she spent much of her time indoors, so her coat is not as thick as those hardy Michigan goats kept outdoors.  Like people, they’ll avoid going out into the snow if they can help it…wouldn’t you?  Anyway, my vet and I were concerned.  Her new home is draft-free, but it’s an unheated, concrete-floored shed.  She’s in deep bedding in her pen but we figured a little goat coat wouldn’t hurt.  And my mother-in-law loves to sew.  (Oh:  and the kids will need coats for their first week or so…depending upon the weather.)

Look at the header to see how much plumper she’s getting

She’s due Feb. 26th.

All my dabbling in cheesemaking will soon find some purpose.  And the gardens can’t wait, frankly, for the additions of this great bedding…just think how I’ve doubled my compost quantity by adding one animal.  And I keep having dreams, too, about the birth.  My daughter thinks she’ll have four kids.  Two is more like it, but, well…let’s hope for at least one little doeling!

It’s all about the poop you know

It was another sunny day yesterday, which prompted me to spend my lunch hour in the greenhouses.

Normally, the greenhouses require zero active gardening attention between December and February.  This is a time of harvests only; it’s rather freeing, I must say.  But December through February, in this hemisphere, are when a gardener misses gardening most!  Luckily, I am a succession-planting fool.  I’m not “required” to garden, but garden I do.

Cute little babies!  YES, things grow through the winter, albeit very very slowly.

I threw down a whole bunch of Red Sails seeds on a 1′x3′ patch in one bed in November.  I was putting seeds away, and noticed that a mouse had decided to make her nest in the paper bag where I was drying this particular lettuce’s seeds…it was quite pee-filled and disgusting.  No way I could’ve saved those seeds.  So I tipped out the bag to let the baby mice “escape” to the waiting jaws of Penny, Little Edie and a few chickens (hey: it’s recycling) and then I stomped on and shook out the remaining seeds and fluff into this bed.  They’d be fine to transplant in January, I thought, and I was right.

Each lettuce bed has a few holes where the resident plants died due to the cold or an overzealous harvest.  I plant two baby lettuce plants per hole.  They’ll be in shock for a bit but they’ll start puffing up when their neighbors wind down.  I expect to eat lettuce out of the greenhouses until late April, just about the time when I transplant little lettuce seedlings and plant lettuce seeds out of doors.  Mangia!

And then, it’s harvest time:  July-seeded Scarlet Keeper:  insane size, but…look at the one to the right center!  “What did you have for dinner last night?”  “A carrot.”

I’m cheating this week by showing you something I made for dinner last week.

Oxtails:  The majority of Americans just have never eaten them, despite their high overall beef consumption. As a newly-returned carnivore, I was shocked by how much meat cost, even the “cheap” cuts of meat!  Sixteen years of not having a “meat tax” on my budget…let’s just say life as a veg was cheaper.  S0 as a carnivore I’m predisposed to be cheap, or, rather, thrifty. Well.  This means I’m not afraid to try new-to-me cuts, and oxtails were a revelation.  So much flavor!

Of course by cheap I don’t mean cuts from cruelly treated feedlot animals.  Nope.  We buy our beef and pork by the quarter and half, respectively, from small farmers who pasture their animals, raising only a few per season.  By ordering these quantities, you can usually have your say about how you want the meat processed (lots of chops, say, or more ground) AND if you are adventurous, you can request the odd bits that the butcher usually just takes as his, er, cut of the cuts.  Like oxtail, which is simply the tail of a steer.  In my last beef order, I asked for it: and got all 3!  It seems nobody else wanted it so the farmer sent all the tails to my order, gratis.

So maybe Americans don’t eat it much (hey: more for me at the butcher), but leave it to thrifty folks like the French (indeed) and Koreans (among others, of course) to really know how to use oxtail.  Pot-au-feu is a double dish:  a beef broth, then a meat dish; pho, likewise, often utilizes oxtail to give it its strength.  Many French recipes do suggest oxtail be used for two meals.  Gotta like THAT kind of meat thrift.

Singularly unattractive photo

Menu:

• Gnocchi in Oxtail Ragu: Russet potatoes, winter white flour in the gnocchi.  Roasted cut-up oxtail, braised in red wine then stewed in our tomato sauce with our celery, onion, garlic, and herbs.  Recipe very loosely based on this one.
• Mokum Carrots, julienned and pan-roasted in brown butter and thyme
• Greenhouse salad
• And the rest of that red wine, a Meritage.

Yum!

Congratulations!  8lb, 1oz and 18 1/2″ long…pink banana squash!

One astute commenter noted that my family’s probably not hurting for Vitamin A in our diets, what with the monster winter squash harvest this year.  And it’s true, we’re awash in the things.  It’s okay, really it is, especially since the school garden’s squash patch was a bust (deer predation) so I have a…somewhat willing population to whom I can feed the things.  AND:  happily:  all our animals (except T-bell the goat) eat squash.

Surprisingly easy to slice, especially when you have a great hand-made chopper like this one

I do love squash, always have.  But I find that, as a gardener, my esteem of any one vegetable goes up or down in direct proportion to how well it grows for me.  Squash is quite the flatterer, so…I love it.  I’ve got a very fox-and-the-grapes attitude about things that don’t grow so well for me (i.e.,”bah, Brussels sprouts, who needs ‘em) and it proves to me that if nothing else I am terribly…human.

The now-indispensable food mill.  Usually reserved for separating tomatoes from their seeds and peels, and stewed whole apples during the saucing sessions, I realized how handy this thing was once I killed my immersion blender.  It’s now out all the time, especially to cream hot soups and hot squash.  And, unlike the damned hand-held stick blender, I could never break this thing.

But my family is on the “likes” squash part of the spectrum:  it ain’t “love.”  I therefore only feed them one squash per week, if that.  Mostly, we love creamy squash soup (with a splash of curry), but it also finds its way into baked goods.  Only butternut is tolerated in other forms (pan-roasted, say; or candied) and luckily I planted plenty of those, too.

5 cups of puree for us people!  The basement worms get the skins, the poultry and bunnies vie for the seeds and pulp…a true no-waste food.

Sunday, though, I brought out one of the pink bananas.  They were one of the first escape artists of the squash patch (up and over the fence, 16′ away) and one plant put out, what, three squash total of similar size to this one.  They’re really easy to cut up (bonus!) and I found the chickens and turkeys appreciated the seeds and pulp if I chopped it for them.  I baked these, cut-side down, arranged diagonally across my two largest rimmed cookie sheets.  Scooped, run through the food mill, and sweet!  Its great advantage appears to be its readiness to be cut into rings, and baked a la most acorn squash.  It did take a bit longer to fruit out than many of the other winter squash I had, and Fedco says it is not terribly reliable in really short summer areas but, well…if you like winter squash, you might want to try to grow this one this year.

World events can rock you pretty hard, but surprisingly so can little things like crummy weather.  I’m telling you:  weeks of snow and no sunshine can mess with even stalwart seasonal affective disorder naysayers like me.  All that bright snow outdoors, which otherwise perks up the darkest day, can wear you down!

Enter, sunshine.  Time to run out to the old greenhouse for some personal light therapy.

Doesn’t look very bright and cheery, but it was 75 degrees in there.  Can you find Penny?

May as well throw back the covers to see what’s growing.  Here, mache has self-seeded and is crowding out the resident lettuces.

Here’s a closeup of the mache.  I couldn’t help but nibble.

And speaking of nibbling, I might as well bring some of the greenhouse’s celery to the bunnies.  I wonder if our heretofore picky goat T-bell might like to try some.

Hmm:  what do you have here?  Hey, that’s rather tasty…

Burp!  (Excuse me!)

Looks like the bunnies will need another bundle.  And:  I feel a lot better.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and be sure to support The International Committee of the Red Cross/Red Crescent or find out how else you can help through The Center for International Disaster Information.

]]> http://fastgrowtheweeds.com/2010/01/15/on-the-other-reason-to-get-a-greenhouse/feed/ 15 El P1020417 P1020407 P1020409 P1020429 P1020426 P1020428 http://fastgrowtheweeds.com/2010/01/13/dark-days-week-9/ http://fastgrowtheweeds.com/2010/01/13/dark-days-week-9/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:45:40 +0000 El http://fastgrowtheweeds.com/?p=4175 ]]>

Throughout this Dark Days challenge, I never go into each week thinking:  Tonight’s dinner is IT!  Time to post! Nope; it’s more like, what’s photogenic? I have, quite honestly, tried very hard not to show off for this challenge.  No real food pyrotechnics or frankly anything terribly difficult for someone with less-than-average kitchen skillz; what’s the point?  There’s enough to do just growing all this stuff, people!  AND:  that’s what I am trying to get you all to do:  get out and GROW IT!

bread and buttah

Tonight’s fare is, again, very simple.  This morning, I started the bread on a fast no-knead schedule (normally, 12-18 hours, I went with 6: just up the yeast!) so I could take advantage of the sprouting spelt berries I had growing on the counter.  Thinking, “what goes well with bread,” I retrieved a can of “bean starter” from my stash of canned goods and started some soup.

I’m always so happy when I can my dried beans for quick meals:  there are jars of black bean/carrot/onion, black bean/tomatoes/peppers, lentil*/kale/carrot/onion, and white bean/kale/onion, as well as just plain jars of beans downstairs.  I canned them in my pressure canner:  I would make the bases when I was making some other bean-y dish; I would chop a whole bunch of stuff and then, in a couple wine-besotted evenings with a friend, canned them all.  All I need to do now, then, is harvest something to augment one of those jars, or…open more of my own cans to create soup, chili or whatever.

Makes dinner really a no-brainer on those days I have no brain.

Menu:

• No-knead loaf: half winter red, half winter white wheat ground up in my brand-new mill (!!) with sprouted spelt berries
• Stew-y soup:  Black bean/carrot/onion starter, canned from our produce last October; one Mokum Red carrot, one Chantenay carrot, Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale, Par-Cel cutting celery and one Bleu de Solaize leek, all from the greenhouses; garlic from storage; homemade red wine vinegar to finish, with butter.
• Salad:  Lots of reds in this salad, mostly lettuce.  Vinaigrette made with our vinegar, herbs, shallot; nonlocal olive oil (duh!) and mustard.  Nonlocal but home-sprouted alfalfa.

*Lentils are the only thing not home-grown.  With only 2 beans per pod, good golly who has that kind of time to shell them!

Alfalfa sprouts

I’m making edible sprouts again:  it must be snowy outside.

Everything we eat here has a season.  With the exception of frozen meat* and the seemingly unending jars of tomatoes, every other food item has an on and an off period…everything has its season.  Lettuce cannot be found from mid-July to the beginning of September.  Potatoes are only found from July to March.  Stored garlic (sniff!!) winds down just when green garlic winds up.  And so on.  All of these things are seasonal by the fact that the calendar makes them so.  There are some harvests, though, that have me to blame for their seasonality.  Sprouts are one of those things.

I posted a while back about sprouting things. I find I have a higher tolerance for the sprouting process when two things happen:  1.  when it’s abominably cold out and 2.  when I don’t have vegetables growing under the lights downstairs, and thus am sick of seeing seeds.  So, in other words, the season of edible sprouts is a short one:  from December to February, usually.  I do tend to sprout wheat year-round, though, because I like sprouted wheat in my breads and pancakes etc….but that’s an exception.

And I could get all wackadoo and tell you the reason why I think sprouts are so very important…but I won’t.  Suffice it to say I think raw, living food is a very important part of our diets (and by “living” I mean sprouts, but I also mean yogurt, kefir, krauts, and of course my insistent salads); I feel their lack when I leave home and have to…you know, fend for myself!  To my gut flora’s** sincere dismay, I might add!

*Frozen meat has a season, too:  I “harvest” our birds, and we order meat shares (1/2 hog, 1/4 cow) and when the harvest happens, the freezer fills.

**Gut flora:  The human body, consisting of about 10 trillion cells, carries about ten times as many microorganisms in the intestines.