Daily bread

(Posted by Himanee)
The days are getting shorter and crisper. With the deepening darkness, our stockpiles of vegetables for winter are becoming richer. Winter squash fill an entire table in our cellar, and cans and cans of jam, tomato sauce, and salsa are resting in a basement room that we hope in the next few weeks to turn a root cellar for storing vegetables like carrots, beets, potatoes, turnips, radishes, and celery. Much of this produce still rests in the soil where it grew along with deep green sheaves of collards, kale, Swiss chard, and bok choy. We're now harvesting dried beans by the boxful, and I anticipate that my down time in November and December will go toward shelling.

This has been an exciting year for our backyard farm, and while I don't want to jinx our success, I do feel as if I'm going into the winter season of rest, restoration, and recovery with a sense of peace and of pride. My husband and I have invested an enormous amount of energy into trying to see if we could live more sustainably off our land by growing food and rebuilding soil, and in our third year of work on this project, the little engine seems to be chanting inside us, "You can, you can."

Still, there is much to learn, and as the 2013 growing season draws to a close I am plotting new projects for 2014 and beyond. Among them are:

1. Raising mushrooms;
2. Adding blueberries and raspberries to a clutch of strawberry plants that were gifted to us by one of the Saratoga Farmers Market vendors last June;
3. Creating a perennial herbal tea garden; and
4. Growing grains.

The last of these four projects is the most ambitious, and might be unfeasible for the amount of land we own. Yet, it is appealing. For the past year, we have been baking our own bread, and I have roughly calculated that we go through about 120 pounds of flour a year. Flour is not expensive -- the brands we get are about $4 to $5 for a five-pound bag. But I don't know where that flour comes from or whether the grain from which it's milled has been genetically modified or doused with pesticides. Having a local source -- and better yet my own -- would be much healthier in my view.

One of the Loca-vore challenges that I agreed to take on was to do a community assessment of the availability of local foods. I wish I had had the time to do a formal assessment because the results would have been interesting to know. Informally, I can say that nearly everything we consume -- food-wise, at least -- can be obtained from local sources at prices that are affordable to most. The main exceptions are: butter, nuts, flours, and items like cat food, sodas, chocolate bars, and teas. Butter can be made at home fairly quickly if one has a food processor such as a Cuisinart, and teas can be produced if you grow the right herbs. While I haven't found a satisfactory solution to sodas, chocolate bars, and cat food, I did do some research on local flours. I found that there are grain growers and some companies that mill grains from these growers to produce flour for a consumer market. But as I feared these locally produced flours are seen more as specialty items and are priced as such. Those prices are a little too much for an already taut paycheck.

The good news, however, seems to be that local farmers who are committed to sustainable agriculture are aware of this dilemma, and are beginning to investigate options for producing what are called "heritage grains" themselves. The heritage grains lack the genetically modified compounds that comprise so much of the commodity flour that goes into making wheat. Some farmers considering the possibilities of growing heritage grains have been wondering if it was the loss of seeds of those grains in the wave of mass produced store-bought bread that has contributed to growing outbreaks of wheat allergies and other ailments. I wouldn't necessarily support this claim without looking into it more myself, but the idea of knowing the source is decidedly appealing.