Growing Food to Feed Your Baby

Everything is really taking off here at Hook Mountain Growers and the new employee is beginning to demand a taste of the farm. Our new farmer Gabriel will soon be adding solid foods to his diet and we have begun to really focus on what we can grow to satisfy his needs both nutritionally and with attention to his newly developing senses.  Though just shy of 5 months, the little guy has been heavily eyeing us whenever he sees us eat and this is all good timing because in the next month, he will be facing a bounty of food choices that we've carefully planned and planted in our farm.  One thing is for certain, I am not going to start with boring rice cereal for this one. 

He's already been introduced in utero to a wide variety of food and his breast milk has had a rotating flavor menu of various spices and eclectic foods.  He's been exposed to harvesting, meal preparations and delicious aromas wafting in the kitchen.  We hope this is all preparing him to understand the importance of food in our lives. 

In his book, Feeding Baby Green, Dr Alan Greene encourages starting solids with vegetables because they are the toughest flavors to learn to enjoy. Grains and fruits, the most commonly introduced foods, take a back seat because they can be bland or too sweet.  The idea is if you start with sugary flavors, the baby will seek out that sugary taste.  If you give bland food like rice cereal, then addition of flavors and spices later on may be too foreign and not enjoyable.

So what do we have that's on the menu for Gabriel in 2012?

Purple, Yellow and Orange Carrots

Baby Japanese Turnips

Sugar Snap Peas and English Peas

Blue, red and white potatoes

Swiss Chard

Yellow Beets

Kale, Collards and Cabbage

Butternut and Rampicante Squash

Angled Luffa Gourd

Bush Beans, Long Beans, Fava Beans

Watermelon

Apples, pears and peaches

Blackberries, raspberries, and currants

HERBS!

I want to highlight HERBS because I believe baby food shouldn't be bland.  What better way to start introducing flavors than adding them either to the broth the vegetable will be steamed in, or directly pureed with the vegetable.

We're going to puree the Japanese baby turnips with tarragon and the Sugar snap peas as well for the baby, but for us...

RECIPE: Baby Turnips with Sugar Snap Peas

Serves 2 as an appetizer

1 cup sugar snap peas
1 bunch baby turnips, cut in half or quarters
1 Tbs butter or Earth Balance if dairy free
2 Tbs bread crumbs
2 Tbs chives
2 Tbs lemon zest
Siracha hot sauce
Salt

Blanch the the turnips for 3 minutes and the sugar snap peas for 2 minutes.  Heat the butter in a non-stick skillet over medium-high heat and add the turnips and peas and cook for 2 minutes.  Then add bread crumbs, chives, siracha and salt.  Cook for an additional minute.  Remove heat and add lemon zest and serve.

Reclaiming Your Own Locust Trees for Use

The Locust tree has become a common tree weed that nobody wants. It grows really tall. It often has no other branches other than the ones 60 feet up at nearly the top. It drops debris everywhere. It propagates like no other tree. And oh yeah, it is the tree most likely to fall directly on your house right from the base as the entire flat root system rips up from the ground and tips the entire tree over with no break in the actual trunk. I have seen it. It sucks.

When Hook Mountain Growers expanded the growing area it was necessary to remove 4 Locust trees from our property. The "green" part of me felt bad. Not that bad though as I realized I still had about 4 dozen other Locust on the property to prevent extinction of the species.

For the task I consulted with John Wickes arborists. They have been doing this type of work for 3 generations and are the best at it. Before having the trees removed and all proper permits lined up, I did some research on the Locust tree to see what we could do with it. At the time, I figured even firewood seemed like a good idea. I was pretty surprised at what I found.

Locust, especially black Locust, is some of the most structurally sound wood available and has been found to last 80 years. There are stories of farmers who use the stakes in their fields for 30 years and when they wear down they turn the stakes over and use the other side.

The reason for the natural rot resistance of Locust is due to the presence of tyloses in the wood which makes the wood very water tight. There are also natural extracts present which impart an antifungal property to the logs.

So the first step in utilizing the wood on your property would be to discuss with your tree removal team what size pieces you need and if you want them to save the chip for you.
I decided on 6 foot pieces as well as 3 inch thick pieces to use for stepping areas in beds. We also had them save us about 15 yards of mulch after the remaining tree pieces were passed through the chipper.

Here is what you can do with you locust wood:

Large Bed Borders

Steps for stairs down a slope:

Wood Chips for pathway:

Raised bed border:

and if you want to sand and stain the wood:

Hope that inspires some ideas for all us Locust haters!

Compost is Nice

AFTER
For all of us who lug their kitchen scraps outside in the cold and dark....who scour their home looking for brown material (carbon) to match the easier to find green matter...who layer their compost bin precisely as outlined in the textbooks...who turn their pile daily to ensure the proper aerobic bacterial population....good for you. For those of us who simply throw anything we can find into the pile and manage to turn it when the inspiration or energy seems to strike (once a week)....good for us too! For this week HMG has finally produced some really nice compost following the lazy plan.

Compost when finished is a nice sight. Money savings becomes real, a forty pound bag of compost can cost between 5-12 dollars depending on where you get it, plus you have to take time to transport it as well as carry it everywhere.

Using a three bin system, HMG has produced what appears to be about 6-8 forty pound bags worth this season. Adding kitchen scraps, brown vegetable plant branches, occasional leaves (not too many) and a sprinkle of fireplace ash, we have made some pretty respectable looking compost.

We have found with minimal attention compost is really not difficult to make. The most important aspects are to make sure you get some brown matter in there as well as to periodically turn the pile so as to prevent anaerobic bacteria from kicking in. You will know if this happens as your compost pile will begin to smell like takeout fish that was left in the car overnight. If this happens, simply turning the pile over a few times instantly cures the problem. We have found a small pitchfork the best for doing this.

BEFOREApplying the compost to needy beds is definitely a great feeling. For those of us who do this without the benefit of high heat compost, which is usually done with machine turned piles or piles which have air blown into them, we will see a nice seedling bed soon of every vegetable we have eaten for the past 6 months as those seeds have not died in the pile. Obviously this is not desired, although seeing 200 tomato seedlings in a 10 x 4 foot raised bed is interesting, simply raking them in or pulling the seedlings seems to be the best management option....and is there anything more sustainable then making your own compost? I don’t think so!

Charlie

The Man That Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Terraced Growing Area

The slope in transitionIf you stand on your property and find that you have hills, slopes, mountains or just plain bumps in the ground and if you have tried to grow on these areas, you may have realized that Newton’s Law of Gravity was right....all things do go down. Especially the beautiful organic top soil you placed on the hill to grow on. Unless you have perennials growing with a nice root ball holding everything in place, all your good intentioned soil will be found on the bottom of the hill come spring planting time. Here at HMG we too have a little bit of a hill problem. For the past few years we have just dealt with it and once the plantings rooted everything was fine. However the tremendous amount of rain this late winter has once again led to the discovery of a pile of beautiful top soil....at the bottom of the hill. But alas....I will be foiled by this hill no more.

This blog entry will describe a fairly simple terracing system which should allow for hill growing with no erosion of soil. We will utilize raised beds to create steps in the slope with small walkways between each bed.

One can find many formulas on the internet for calculating the slope/rise/run/square root of pi=mc squared.....to calculate how many beds are necessary to make to overcome your slope. I prefer the common sense method. I typically look at the slope, use an old stake....and then try to make it so the front of each bed will be equal to the back of the bed downhill from it.

This job will require the construction of standard cedar raised beds. We have described their construction somewhere else. In summary, you are building a square bed with 2 x 12 inch cedar.

The hardest work in this job will be digging out the back of each bed to sit your raised bed into the earth. The back part of the raised bed may be almost entirely covered with soil depending on the grade of your slope.

What also is important is adding a system to prevent your raised bed from sinking or sliding forward over time. You can either hammer stakes into the ground in front of the front part of the bed or inside the raised bed in front of the back part of the bed. I like to affix the raised bed to the stakes using some outdoor decking screws.

After you have your raised beds set into the ground it is imperative to place a level on the top of it to make sure it is level front to back and side to side. If you skip this step it is almost guaranteed that you will suffer the pained look of your in laws as they question: “Is that crooked?”.



Thats all for now. Good luck with that hill!

Higher Peas, More Peas: Constructing a Simple Trellis

Pre-sprouted Peas. Hopefully they will survive the upcoming hard frosts in the next few nights. Was Phil wrong? Where's Spring?After three seasons of growing legumes, I can say that every time we have planted them I have been the recipient of disappointing glares throughout the growing/harvest season when the plant quickly reached the top of my homemade trellis and the vines began their inevitable gravity fueled trip downwards. This season, I have vowed, will be different.  I will walk triumphantly amongst these fine plants as they ascend towards the heavens.

In this entry I will describe a simple homemade trellis that is both aesthetically pleasing, functional and hopefully durable. Oh yeah, and will cost less than purchasing a pre-made trellis. Oh yeah, and again, will be produced locally, by HMG’s favorite laborer, me!

A homemade trellis can be made fairly easily with the following tools: circular saw, screwdriver, drill, corner brackets, mending plates and screws. First step is to decide how big you want your trellis to be. And yes. I could not avoid saying it.  When it comes to trellises, size does matter. If you build a small trellis, it does not matter how you dress it up....you will lose all your pea plants to a larger, more confident trellis.

Next step is the wood. Obviously I would not recommend using any treated wood as the final product is going into your pie hole and you would not want to put anything that baked in the sun against treated wood into your mouth. That being said, cedar is a great choice as it provides natural rot and insect resistance and should last for years. I went to Beckerle’s in Congers and purchased 10 foot 2 x 4 pieces which they were kind enough to rip (cut the wood with grain-a harder cut unless you have a table saw and a large room where it is located). So I was left with 2 x 2 pieces in 10 foot lengths. The pieces are laid out in an H configuration (with the top having a piece across, so yeah not really an H but how else can I describe it....maybe a square with legs) and screwed together with 3 inch outdoor decking screws into pre-drilled holes. (to avoid splitting the wood). Next another H configured piece is put together. The two pieces are then laid on top of each other and outdoor, rust resistant hinges are used to join the two pieces, or you can just have a one sided trellis which you can affix to a pre-existing fence or wall. After that step, for extra support, outdoor rust resistant corner braces can be placed over every corner where two pieces of wood meet and screwed in to provide extra support.

Ok, so now you have a 2 giant pieces....I left out the size because it will depend on how high you want to go..I chose 8 feet high and 6 feet wide. I was going to do 8 feet wide but in a moment of clarity I realized just as I was going to screw the pieces together that it would of been myself who was screwed when I constructed a trellis in the basement that would not fit out the door. Embarrassment avoided. Next step is your actual trellising material. I use 2 x 4 inch holed outdoor welded fencing wire which comes in many different sizes. Next I lay the wire out over the trellis. Cut with wire snips. Fix to trellis with mending plates and also under the corner braces (so don't put them on till youhave your welded wire cut and laid out over the frame).....and voila....a trellis fit for the neediest of peas.

Thats it for now. I just realized that we need two more trellises.