steel-pony-farm-blog

Soil First Farming

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:50:24 +0100

A note that I sent to our CSA program a few weeks ago. It really sums up what I've been thinking about this summer relating to soil health and our responsibility as producers and eaters. Hope you gain something from this.

Mike

Hello Dear CSA members,

It has been so much fun taking this culinary journey with you so far this season. In the garden, we've been learning a lot about production and we've been experimenting. We've tried a few new crops, such a collards, which I have really enjoyed growing and eating. We've also been experimenting with seeding density to find out the best balance between seeding very densely which can crowd out certain plants and create too much competition between plants for resources, but can have the advantage of creating a canopy which shades out weeds and helps to maintain moisture in the soil. I've been surprised by how densely we have successfully been able to seed certain crops such as salad greens and radishes.

I wanted to take a moment to remind you that we are farming completely chemical free. We do not use any chemical fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides. Our choice to do this comes from a deep commitment to improving soil health, which I believe eventually improves human health. Using various chemical concoctions, it is simple to grow beautiful looking food that can be enormous. Generally, folks can use applications of marcronutrients NPK (Nitrogen - Phosphorous - Potassium) to grow food that looks good. Nitrogen is responsible for growing the green leafy part of the plants. Phosphorous helps plants like tomatoes flower and fruit. Potassium is responsible for pumping water and nutrients around the plant. But without the vital micronutrients such as calcium, iron, boron, magnesium etc, these beautiful looking plants are nutritionally compromised and cannot provide humans with what we need to be healthy.

The natural farming method is very different. When we prioritize soil health, our job is not simply to provide plants with what they need to grow, but to make sure that the soil is balanced and healthy. We add micronutrients and biological stimulants that help to wake up and add vitality to what has been named the "Soil Food Web" - the complex web of living beings in the soil. Once this soil food web is alive and vital, organisms such as bacteria and fungi are able to liberate and mobilize both macro and mirco nutrients in the soil and make them available to growing plants in the quantities that they need. Once the soil becomes balanced, plants have a greater chance of becoming balanced and they are better able to resist diseases and pests that would traditionally damage crops.

The practical upshoot of this is that once these plants are balanced, and we - as supporting members of a healing agriculture system - eat them, our bodies react much like the plants. With balanced level of micronutrients in our bodies, we become much more able to resist dis-eases than we would have been if we were eating a diet of plants that are essentially on "steriods".

The process of healing soil does not happen over night. It is long and involved. Sometimes it doesn't pay off immediately, and the produce doesn't look like it does in the grocery store. But so far, I have found that even when the produce doesn't look quite like we expect it to, the flavour is absolutely unmatched by anything that has been shipped from California, Mexico, China or Chile.

I really hope that you have been enjoying this experience so far, and I commend you for supporting a project and farmers that are dedicated to healing a broken food system.

Swiss Chard

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 05:29:29 +0100

Chard is a flavourful yet mild leafy green that can be used like spinach or beet greens. Indigenous to the Mediterranean, chard is often referred to as swiss chard due to its initial description by a Swiss botanist in the 16th century. It is high in vitamins A, E and C and minerals like iron and calcium. Minerals are more readily absorbed from chard than they are from spinach.

Cooking Tips:

Chop leaves and stems diagonally across the leag. Cut stems into 1 inch chunks and leaves into ribbonlike strips. Steam stem pieces 8-10 minutes and leaves 4-6 minutes.
Raw, baby chard leaves are delicious mixed in raw salads
Saute the leaves in garlic butter or with onion
Toss steamed chard leaves with oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper
For soups, add chard stem chunks 10 minutes and leaves 4-5 minutes before soup is done.
Use swiss chard in any recipe calling for fresh spinach like quiches, lasagna, omelets, etc.
Blend cooked chard with plain yogurt, herbs and a dash of salt and pepper for an easy, delicious soup.

Recipes:

Swiss Chard Omelette with Middle Eastern Savour

For each omellete:

1-2 teaspoons butter
3 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup chopped, cooked chard leaves and stems
1 tablespoon currants
1 tablespoon finely chopped kalamata olives
1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts
lemon juice
salt and pepper
A sprig of rosemary, thyme, sage, or other herb (optional)

Heat butter over high flame. Add beaten eggs-they will immediately begin to set on bottom of pan. With a spatula, pull the cooled egg from outer edges of pan toward center. The uncooked egg will spread and cook. Use spatula to spread the liquid egg off top of cooked egg onto exposed sections of pan bottom. Continue to do this until nearly all of egg is set. Reduce heat to very low. Layer the following across the omelette: chard, currants, olives, and pine nuts. Sprinkle with a few drops of lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper. To serve, hold a plate close to the edge of skillet and, shaking skillet slightly, slip omelette onto the plate, either rolling it into a cigar shape or folding it over into a half-moon. Serve immediately (or keep warm in oven while you make more). Garnish with herb sprig.

Enjoy!

from "From Asparagus to Zucchini" MACSAC

Green Collard Workers

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 05:52:39 +0100

Collards

Nutritional information:

Collards are a source of iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, B vitamins, vitamins A, C, E, K and beta carotene.

To Cook:

Remove any thick tough stems, or peel them. You can steam them (which preserves more nutrients) or boil them (which does a better job of preserving color) or stir-fry in a bit of water or stock.

- Leafy Greens, Mark Bittman

Recipes:

The following recipe was posted on the Nourished Kitchen website. I am going to be trying this one with our collards. It looks delicious in its simplicity.

Creamed Collard Greens

Ingredients

2 tbsp butter (preferably from grass-fed cows)
1 large yellow onion (peeled and sliced thin)
1 bunches collard greens (stems removed, trimmed and chopped)
1 cup heavy cream (not ultrapasteurized)
freshly grated nutmeg (to taste)
unrefined sea salt (to taste)

Instructions

Melt butter in a skillet over a moderately high flame until it froths, then toss in sliced yellow onion, frying in melted butter until fragrant and a bit caramelized around the edges.
Add chopped collard greens to the skillet, stirring until slightly wilted, about two minutes.
Reduce the heat to medium-low, stir in one cup heavy cream and simmer for about five to six minutes, until the cream is largely reduced.
Season with freshly grated nutmeg and unrefined sea salt as it suits you and serve hot.

Collard Berry shake

Ingredients

1 large banana, ripe
2 cups collard greens, fresh
1 cup blueberries, frozen
1/4 cup strawberries, frozen
1 tsp of honey or maple syrup
1 cup pure water, or juice

Instructions

Pour liquid in blender.
Place the banana closest to the blade with the rest of the ingredients on top.
Blend until smooth. Serves 1-2

Good Eatin'

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:23:43 +0100

Harvest days are my favourite. We get started especially early to beat the heat of the day and to make sure we are ready to go at pick up time. We fill big boxes with various greens, snip and bundle fragrant herbs, wash, bag and lay our offerings out for pick-up. The plants we've seeded, weeded, watered and prayed over are suddenly food!

But just what to do with them after that? One of the appeals of our food box is that home cooks are challenged to work with interesting new vegetables each week. Pea shoots, beet greens, collards, kohlrabi and sunchokes may be a bit foreign at first but hopefully by the end of the season, you will find you've expanded your palette and cooking repertoire, and feel ever more confident in creating seasonal delights.

I will be posting recipes throughout the season to correspond with what is ripe and ready in the field. Don't be shy! If you have requests for recipes or ideas for a certain vegetable, it gives me great pleasure to share my own kitchen adventures, and I'd love to hear about yours too!

The feature today:

Beet Greens

Beet greens are high in vitamin C, calcium and iron

storage tips:
store greens wrapped in a damp cloth or in a plastic bag in a drawer in the refrigerator. For best quality, use these greens soon after harvested.

recipes

Often, simple is delicious. Beet greens can be used raw in a mixed salad, or simply steamed. Really, beet greens can be used like spinach or swiss chard in any recipe. One of our CSA members posted a mention of beet greens on facebook, and friends jumped to the task of listing suggestions. An agreed upon favourite was:

beet greens steamed with vinegar and water, then tossed with butter and a spritz of lemon or lime.

Try it as a side dish, on a tomato, avocado, hummus sandwich, or on crackers with cream cheese.

Bon Appetit!

Kristen

Edible cultures

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 04:24:35 +0100

Human bodies are like our gardens and communities, they thrive on diversity

Mike has been taking every opportunity he can to share his excitement about soil lately “It’s just so alive!” he exclaims, marvelling at the millions of microorganisms that live in the ‘dirt’. He’s been reading about building soil health- which involves introducing and nurturing millions of microorganisms that inhabit the soil. The vitality of soil is dependent on a multitude of living cells, operating in symbiosis. And the vitality of the vegetables we produce depends on those minute cultures to enable nutrient absorption and plant health.

How neat that human bodies too are operating in synergy with countless microorganisms. A human body consists of more bacterial cells than human cells! And like the soil in our garden, we can introduce and maintain flora that will encourage balance within our personal ecosystem. If you consume a variety of probiotics, your immune system has allies to inhibit the harmful guys. More excitingly, probiotics can make nutrients more readily available for digestion, reduce the symptoms of allergies and intolerances, balance blood pressure, treat intestinal inflammation issues like IBS and can prevent and treat some types cancer.

Food processing, sterilization, pasteurization and refrigeration have limited our intake of beneficial bacteria, yeast and enzymes. But there are natural, easy and fun ways of bringing gut flora back to balance. Right now, I’m most excited about the potential of fermented foods which can be rich in beneficial cultures, super nutritious, and so very tasty. Some common ferments are yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha and kefir.

Making kefir is one of the simplest and quickest ferments to make . All you need is a living kefir culture (called kefir grains) and milk (milk may be replaced with sugar water, juice or coconut water. I even used coconut milk with delicious result). Put the kefir culture into milk and allow it to sit, loosely covered on your counter for a few days as the culture consumes fats and sugars. The result is a slightly fizzy, yogurt-like drink full of beneficial yeasts and strains of bacteria that are likely to colonize and stick around in your digestive system for ongoing benefits. Like yogurt, kefir is digestible for some of those with lactose intolerance.

Edible cultures are good for our bodies and they're good for our community. Some fermented cultures (like kefir) are passed from person to person, serving to connect us to people through the exchange of the physical cultures and the sharing of knowledge. (In our friend group, people talk about their kombucha and kefir like a well-loved pet telling charming 'horror' stories of a batch gone bad, and asking around for best practices.) Consequently, we build a food culture grounded in both self-sufficiency and interdependence. There is also something awe-some in knowing that the very same kefir culture I use today is traced back to shepherds in Russia who carried the culture in animal skin bags, and passed it on to other nomads they met along the path. We are connected to our ancestors and each other through the sharing of food traditions.

My kefir culture was passed on to me from friends and is still pretty small, but as it grows I’d be so happy to share with anyone who’s interested in making it for themselves. Or come in for a sample of some of the other fermented goodies I have on the go (Mike jokes that I’m turning into a witch, and I hope to live up to that label. In my mind a witch is a practicing healer and a keeper of earth wisdom) and we can talk about how to build living culture in which a diversity of living things can thrive. Oh yeah.

Kristen