Touching Your Food

I'm sure some readers are picturing me eating those windfall apricots off the ground and thinking, "ew, gross". And others are retching at the very thought of eating something (even apricot preserves, twice boiled and THEN carefully processed with the Boiling Water Bath method) that a squirrel had held and even nibbled. After all, squirrels could carry rabies (and there's probably a deadly Squirrel Flu going around that hasn't hit the media yet).

Those are food boundaries that each person has to set for themselves. And we need to respect one another's boundaries. Just as someone being vegetarian or vegan doesn't offend me as an omnivore, someone not wanting to eat something a squirrel has nibbled on doesn't offend me. If you ever eat at my house, you are welcome to ask what has touched your food, and I will give you the most honest answer I can, and try my best to serve you food that doesn't push your boundaries. But I do invite you to consider your boundaries mindfully, and see if there are perhaps some inconsistencies in them. Most of us let inconsistent boundaries needlessly limit our possibilities.

I've been thinking about the issue of touching food a lot lately, because of a situation at Farmer's Market a couple weeks ago.

I plant my lettuce varieties in separate beds, because they grow better that way. Each one needs harvested a little differently, so I like to give them individual attention. I harvest them separately (usually) and display each variety separately at Farmer's Market, complete with variety names. Folks enjoy the names and the colorful display--you can really appreciate the different textures and colors in a row of 5 or 6 tubs of red, green, smooth, frills.

I harvest the lettuce into net bags (dollar store laundry bags, to be specific--there, a trade secret!), and plunge the filled bags into cold well water to rinse off any sand and to remove the"field heat" from the lettuce...an important step when picking in 80-degree weather. A 15-minute soak, then stacking the dripping bags in mesh crates in the shade, is all the refridgeration my lettuce gets. You'd be amazed at how well it freshens up and keeps that way, even if it's starting to be a bit "tired" in the garden by the time I'm picking the last variety on a hot morning. At any rate, it's hardly a careful washing--just a good dunk and swish.

I sell my lettuce by the pound, mix and match, often with interesting non-lettuce options available for adventurous salad-eaters. The customer "takes what s/he likes and leaves the rest", and I put it on the scale and calculate the price. Other vendors mostly sell pre-weighed, pre-packaged "large bag/small bag". Some customers like that they don't have to buy an entire "small bag," which may be quite big to someone cooking for one.

At first, I tried having tongs for customers to use. They proved clumsey, damaging to the lettuce, easily broken, and easily lost or left behind at home. After some thought, I just dispensed with the tongs. Now, customers are invited to use their hands "as a reminder that you need to wash it yourself when you get it home...I can't give it the careful attention you can when I'm picking so much."

I've observed that very few customers handle any lettuce but what they put in their bag. It's not a crop where one sorts out a particular size or shape (as with potatoes), and it's already sorted by type. The customer's hands are likely more clean than my own, since I'm handling more money as well as all the vegetables and wool products. Normally customers are perfectly happy with this arrangement.

But one customer stopped in horror when she was asked to use her own hands. "You mean people have TOUCHED this? Oh, I CAN'T buy it!"

I went through my "you need to wash it anyway" spiel, but that did not mollify her.

"No, I just can't shop at your booth! Here, I don't want these green onions after all." She dropped the bundle of onions, dirt still clinging to the roots, back onto the pile as if it were contaminated, shuddering in horror at the thought that someone might have touched food she had been hoping to eat.

"Yes, perhaps that would be best. You might want to try Dillons or HyVee." I tried to be gentle and friendly as she walked away, still muttering and shuddering.

I tried to think of vegetables never touched by human hands. Vegetables grown in factory-like conditions, with automatic sprayers and waterers and harvesters and packagers. Maybe organic, but industrial organic.

And THAT is the sort of production environment where the disease-tainted spinach came from a few years ago, and was shipped all over the country!

Many veggies are hard to harvest by machine. In thinking of conventional large-scale vegetable crop production, one must picture an endless monoculture field, rows upon rows of some crop dotted with workers bending over the rows picking. They are touching your food. Maybe they are in a foreign country where there is little regard for sanitation. Maybe they are very poor and not very healthy. Maybe they have Tb--migrant farm workers aren't required to be tested. Or some other contagious disease. Maybe toilet paper and hand sanitizer aren't part of their culture. Maybe they just finished spraying a crop, or smoking.

But you don't see it. It's remote, removed. All you see is the nice, uniform stacks of veggies in the supermarket--how pretty! The stocker tends the display, turning the most beautiful pieces up, fluffing and organizing, handling your food. Customers come there, too, and paw through the stack, touching your food.

Just personally, I want my food to be touched: by a farmer who loves growing it, and smiles into my eyes when I buy his/her gorgeous labor of love. By myself, gratefully picking out the perfect pieces I'll enjoy eating. And yes, by another customer who loves fresh veggies as much as I do, if that happens by chance. I think the people in my community are better qualified to touch my food than strangers half a world away. And the squirrels are part of my community, too--so the apricot thing doesn't bother me.

If the shuddering lady would rather have her food touched by a malnourished, uneducated child laborer in a far-off land, I guess that's her choice. But I pretty much guarantee many people have touched her food.

I hope she doesn't give it too much thought, and stop eating entirely.

Apricot Answers

God is wise. I am not so wise. I think I'll keep working on trusting His wisdom even when it doesn't mesh with my ideas.

Thus I am up at 1 a.m. typing this.

I've been reflecting on God's subtle and infinite wisdom as I washed up the almost inconceivable pile of utensils after rendering apricots into puree and putting it in bags for the freezer.

Last year, we had a bitterly hard freeze in late April...the legendary "Easter Freeze". It killed ALL local (and regional) fruit except for a few raspberries, grapes, and persimmons. How sad a summer (and fall, and winter) without apples!

But last year I was a year younger, a year more stressed, a year less experienced a bus driver, a year less adapted to balancing the work of the farm with the work of driving AND with taking care of myself physically, emotionally, spiritually. And I had a lot less of a support community around the farm to help me balance things.

As much as I chafed at not being able to make applesauce last year, I now soberly realize that I COULD NOT have tried to do any food preservation (beyond throwing tomato chunks in the freezer) and stayed sane.

THIS year, this year that is blessed with the most bountiful fruit crop in Pinwheel Farm's history, I CAN balance all this...after a fashion. And this year is the first, in about 5 or 6 years of production, that the squirrels have left any apricots for me.

It's a "Sweetheart" apricot--bred so that the usually-inedible pits can be eatenlike nuts. The squirrels did not have to read the Stark Bros. catalog to figure that out, right off the bat. Usually they strip the tree bare of fruit while the 'cots are still hard and green, throwing little chips of green flesh onto the ground and eating the nuts. Before this year I had eaten exactly HALF an apricot from it...and that was salvaged from the ground, dropped by a clumsy squirrel.

This year there are many whole, ripe windfalls--even ones without worms! They are incredibly delicious! There are also a LOT of large fragments of fruit that the squirrels are discarding in their quest for the nuts.

I had asked God if please maybe I could get enough apricots for one batch of jam, please, evenif the squirrels had the rest. Just one?

As I picked up windfalls the other night, I kept looking at those lovely big seedless chunks. I started picking them up--a little brown on the edges, but otherwise fresh-seeming. An idea started to form, and I called to consult with Mom: Would YOU let all that apricot rot, or would you pick up the pieces and stew them half to death and make jam with them? Mom gave the go-ahead.

So I carefully trimmed the bad spots off, and boiled up the scraps with some windfall green apples. Sweetened to taste, WOW is that ever good! I ended up with 4 1/2 pints, which is already being shared with the main farm volunteers.

Tonight I just trimmed, cooked, and pureed the harvest of scraps, and put three bags (= 3 batches of jam = about 15 pints) in the freezer.

God MORE than answered my plea for apricots, but I had to be willing to accept His terms: His squirrels eat, too. I'm so grateful that I was able to see that there was enough for all of us...it would have been so easy to think they had gotten all the fruit again.

I'm also accumulating black raspberries in the freezer for jam. By freezing fruit or puree, I can do the hot, steamy work of making and canning jam when I WANT the heat and humidity, not when I'm running the air conditioner. And I can do it around my work schedule more easily.

It's a lot of work. But so satisfying. And SO delicious.

Directions to Pinwheel Farm

Two events at the farm this week: The Reading of Names, on Sunday morning, and a hands-on work day for an Environmental Anthropology class from KU on Thursday. Directions to the farm are located at http://pinwheelfarm.blogspot.com/2007/12/directions-to-pinwheel-farm.html.

We'll try to have the circle drive open, and shady parking available, for both events. Entrance to the circle drive is from the main house drive, as normal. It just makes getting out easier if there are a lot of cars. Please always park so as not to block the driveway, so that other vehicles can still get in and out. Thanks!

What's the Fuss?

I had just posted the last entry, when Luna started barking furiously, and I heard the unmistakeable screaming of a chicken in dire distress. I jumped into shoes, grabbed a light, and ran to the chicken coop. The desperate screeching and squawking continued unabated.

Normally (yes, this is a "normal" "everyday" experience in some seasons, I'm afraid...and around the full moon it's usually worse...) the squawking would have moved across the field as the fox or coyote ran off with its bounty, or it would have stopped with the bird's demise. But this time the squawking just went on and on, from the coop.

As I approached the coop, I could see that several birds were in the outer pen, acting agitated. All the sheep and the guardian llama were gathered close outside the chicken pen, watching. Eventually I got to where I could see into the coop. A chicken was screaming and beating its wings frantically, upside down, near the roost.

WHAT THE ?!?

Somehow the poor bird had gotten ONE toe caught in a wire lining the wall of the coop, about 3 feet off the ground, and was hanging very unhappily by that toe. I quickly cradled her body, taking the weight off while I worked the toe loose. She flapped away into the yard, apparently unharmed.

How DID this come to be?

I ran the light around the coop, looking for clues. A shadow in a nest box rated a second look...no, not a shadow but a skunk, huddled in a lower nest, staring back at me without blinking. He was so motionless, I thought I might be able to run back to the house for the camera. I laid the light on the floor, to encourage him to stay put. When I moved the light to floor, the hens all panicked and flew at the walls of the coop. Evidently the skunk had scared them in a similar fashion, resulting in the stuck bird.

Mr. Skunk was still there when I returned with the camera, as still as a statue. He remained motionless while I boldly crawled under the roost to get a close picture. I actually was holding the camera about 2 feet from the nest box for the above photo, and he never moved.

It was very late. I was tired. I decided to just go to bed and let Nature take its course. The skunk could choose either chicken food or chicken for dinner. I mean really, what was I going to do about it? Pick the skunk out of the nest box and throw him over the fence, and say "Bad skunk, go home now!?"

The chickens were all fine in the morning.

When J. and E. came for the livestock seminar on Thursday, they expressed concern about our potato planting activities. They had come Wednesday while I was at work, to plant a few more beds of potatoes in between the recently-planted tomato rows. "What's up with the southwest block in the southwest quadrant? Did YOU plant there, and forget to write it down on the bed map?" J. asked.

"No," I replied, puzzled. "I'm very careful to write things down...and I haven't planted any potatoes this week. What makes you think I did?" (The bed maps are our only record of what's planted where, so we keep careful track. The maps also include information about planting dates, varieties, sources, soil management, etc.)

"It looked like someone had dug all along the row, just like when we plant potatoes through the mulch. But nothing's marked on the map."

I thought for a bit. "Maybe the skunk?" I replied. I'd noticed skunk diggings in several of the mulched blocks. They like to look for grubs under the mulch.

"But they're in perfectly straight lines, right down the marked rows!" We all puzzled over that for awhile. Why would the skunk dig in straight lines?

Then I realized that was a block where we'd put very rich sheep pen waste only along the planting bed area, and mulched the paths between the beds with "unsheeped" old hay. Evidently the grubs were in the manurey sheep mulch, and not in the plain hay, and the skunk knew it. We all got a laugh!

All in all, I have a soft spot for skunks...have had, most of my life. Among other things, I like the looks of black and white animals...one glance around the farm gives you a clue about that!

When I was little Mom read us "Jimmy Skunk books" as bed-time stories, over and over again (M., does this surprise you?). There were many wonderful animal characters in Thorton Burgess's nature stories, but Jimmy Skunk was my favorite by far. Thorton Burgess really knew his animals, and in personifying them he vividly portrayed the natural animal's temperaments as a key part of the stories. (Sadly, his books have fallen out of favor, because his animal characters also portrayed racist and political stereotypes of his times.) Pushing the camera into the chicken coop skunk's face was thinkable mainly because Jimmy Skunk made it very clear when I was little that skunks are slow to anger, and would just as soon walk away from an argument. Treated with respect, they show an indifferent, detached, benign tolerance of just about anything. I have even brushed agianst them in nest boxes, gathering eggs in the dark, in the past!

My first (and pretty much last) childhood stuffed animal was a skunk. Mom sewed it out of velveteen for me for Christmas when I was about 5. I loved that skunk! Alas, it was left at a picnic area while travelling between California and Tennesee, and the loss was not discovered until many hours down the road. Probably the greatest loss of my childhood was the loss of that beloved velveteen skunk.

But now I've got the real thing. And he may be even cuter.

Past Entanglements, Present Tense

It's ba-ack....

One knows the inflection of that phrase from hearing it in common use, in so many contexts, even if one doesn't even know what movie it's from. Such is our culture.

Last year, we only discovered one tiny plant of dodder, in a fallow area.

This year, suddenly there was a large, vigorous clump of the eery orange tendrils strangling one of our precious Pink Wink potato plants. EEEK!

At least it was a chance for apprentice J. to examine this pernicious parasitic weed. We carefully gathered up every fragment, pulling up the weeds it had attached to. We treat dodder and affected hosts as biohazard waste...which it is. We pulled it ever so carefully off of Pink Wink, and left the plant. We'll watch to see if it truly does regenerate from material remaining in the host plant vascular tissue, even though we've removed every external trace. (Sorry, I have not been able to figure out how to rotate photos since a computer revamp changed my photo viewing program.)

This parasitic plant became established on the farm while the tenants were here during my sojourn in Canada a couple years ago. Instead of doing some research and doing everything they could to eradicate it, when it started taking over patches of vegetables they just ignored it! They allowed it to seed, then they ran a rototiller through the contaminated bed and spread it all around! It was also allowed to seed prolifically on the pasture, and spread by animals dragging fragments of the tendrils onto host plants. It can regenerate from a small fragment that falls on a host plant.

Favorite hosts in the garden include tomatoes, potatoes, and onions...some of our favorites, too. In the pasture, it favors the best legume forages--red clover, for example. Though it's not supposed to attack grasses, it certainly seemed to be inserting itself into the vascular tissues of the foxtail grass in the potato bed.

It has no clorophyll. It has no roots. It draws all nutrients from the host plant. It wraps around the host, inserts itself into the host's tissues, and draws all water and sustenance fromt here. It isn't affected by herbicides because it doesn't grow like a plant; you can, however, use herbicides to kill it indirectly by killing the host. Not much gain there, if it's in a crop!

Where it attaches to a host, it can send out up to 25 tendrils, seeking other hosts to attach to. each attachment point can grow those 25 tendrils at a rate of several inches a day. Small severed fragments can attach and grow if they fall on a host.

The one plant-like thing it does is reproduce by seed. Thousands of seeds that can stay viable in the soil for 30 years.

This plant is one serious reason for not wanting the City to run construction euipment through our farm to build the pipeline. If seed is transported to our neighbor to the east, it could be a real disaster in his soybean field. Even one seed from my farm could result in a totally infected field, if he fails to notice that seed establishing a colony. He doesn't walk his soybeans nearly as frequently as I walk my pasture, and likely woulnd't notice a patch before it seeded profusely.

Where did this plant come from, to begin with? At first I suspected vegetable seeds. But then I discovered that dodder seed is banned--zero tolerance--in seeds offered for sale in all 50 states...the only such plant. Now I suspect it came steathily in a bale of hay, nearly-ripe seeds entwined around a bit of alfalfa.

Like the snapper, a bit of biodiversity I wouldn't mind doing without. Even if it is extremely fascinating, in its own creepy way.

Feeling Blue

Finally getting a bunch of photos out of the camera and into the blog. When I get a bunch backlogged in there, it's hard to have time to sort through them. Not that I have time now...but sometimes I just have to get out the shoehorn and MAKE time!

This is a sad photo. The subject's name will be read with a different, more solemn inflection that it would have been read a month ago, because now I have seen this one dead, and I know its form in death more intimately than in life, and I know the weight of the thing in my hand.

The indigo bunting is one of the greatest avian joys of the farm, to me. Never before the farm have I definitively seen this gorgeous creature the color of a South American butterfly. They are birds of the woodland margins, the edges where the meadows meet the trees. They frequent the shady spaces...I see them most closely along the west sheep pen lane. They are not given to perching on telephone wires in neatly mowed right-of-ways along highways.

In death, this one proves all the more beautiful for being able to hold it in my hand and turn it this way and that, seeing the light play on its incredible azure plumage. The colors shift from intense sky blue to deep violet-indigo. And the diminuitive size surprises me--it's smaller than a sparrow, about the size of a tame finch. In life, they seem larger.

I am comforted that there are others on the farm...I saw one later that same day. I might worry about why this one died--West Nile Virus? Bird Flu?--but realize that there are many reasons for a small bird to be dead, and that an isolated death is not cause for alarm.

Thank you, little bird, for your beauty in death as well as life.

Snap Decision

I'm weeding along like a maniac in a fallow bed, hastily pulling big morning glory vines out of it so I can plant the last of the leek transplants (special for M., one her favorite veggies), when a clod of dirt starts moving.

This is not really that unusual, even though it's disconcerting every time. After I jump, I'm excited and curious.

Usually it's a big fat toad, well camouflaged by speckles and warts. We love seeing toads (hm...none so far this year, but the weather is still quite cool.) This time it was a baby snapping turtle!

We have not found a snapper on the farm before. Usually they hang out in ponds and streams, going cross-country mainly in the fall as they seek out wintering spots. This one had probably been wandering around in the ubiquitous mud, thinking the whole farm was a wetland, and ended up just outside the chicken coop.

I treat snappers with extreme respect. They are dangerous animals. They can grow very large, and they are very strong, and when they bite they don't let go.

But this little guy wasn't very active...seemed like he had had a hard day for some reason. Maybe he had been IN the coop, and the chickens had tried to have him for breakfast? And he WAS only about 4" long...shell the size of the palm of my hand. So I picked him up gingerly by the tail, and went to show him to M., who happened to be talking to the tree service guys bringing in a load of wood chips.

One of the tree service guys was captivated. I don't think he'd ever seen one before. "I'm a biology major at Haskell (Indian Nations University). Let me take him and I'll release him in the wetlands (on the Wakarusa River, near the Haskell campus...a beautiful place)."

I debated. Normally my policy is that creatures found on the farm stay on the farm...aimed at preventing enthusiatic 5-year-olds from dragging home hapless frogs, etc., to unimaginable, unintentional torture. Also, well...this is their HOME! I don't want to be dragged off to some strange place, either! Microbial compatibility between the critter's destination and its original habitat is also something to consider. Moving across town, to a different wetland, might be the turtle equivalent of going to Mexico and having to drink the water.

But in this case I relented. Though I'm excited to be aware of a wider diversity of reptiles on the farm, snapping turtles are not high on my life of good neighbors and esteemed community members. It's bad enough that garter snakes and herons go fishing in the stock tanks, depleting our populations of essential mosquito-larvae-eating goldfish. But at least they are not likely to seriously bite hapless fingers cleaning muck out of a tank. Sort of in the same class as ticks...part of a diverse ecosystem, and I'm sure God had SOMETHING in mind when He created them, but I'm not "getting" it.

And, I'm sure snappers are like mice...if you see one, you have ten. This guy was hatched this spring, I'm guessing, and probably had quite a few littermates, so I doubt I've decimated the population by contributing this youngster to the young man's education. I'm also pretty sure Haskell wetlands already has LOTS of snappers, so we're not likely to introduce anything new there, unless he had hitchhikers like leeches. He looked pretty clean, though...I've seen big ones with whole water gardens on their backs, including various "pets". Turtles can be significant vectors for spreading other life forms between bodies of water.

His name...as much as I know of the names that scientific humans know him by...will be read in the Reading of Names.