Monthly Archives: July 2012

TC’s Tomato Pedler

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Urban-farm grown heirloom tomatoes ready for market.

Traverse City resident and urban farmer, Jill Kiteley, is telling people to “Eat at MANA’s” – that’s because her delicious heirloom varieties are now being used at the restaurant to make their heirloom BLTs this week, served with chips and a pickle.

Kiteley, who established her urban farm, Dream Acres on a third of an acre earlier this spring, is a great example of how local urban farmers can succeed in local markets.

Kiteley’s tomatoes are also being used in various dishes at the Towne Plaza Cafe downtown, and Kiteley hopes to broaden to other markets, including those without a profit-center.

The woman who now calls herself the “tomato peddler” opened her property to a neighbor in need of space for a small garden, and believes the best way to preserve a way of life that encourages local farms, requires a willingness to share knowledge and reach out to others.

Kudos to Traverse City’s tomato peddler who set out to start her own business, trading her lawn for food, and who serves as a fine example for others in the community interested in establishing their own back-yard farms.

To reach Jill and schedule a visit of Dream Acres Urban Farm, please call (231) 651-0340

From grounds to ground, a soil building recipe

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To grow the very best food, you must build the very best soil. This doesn’t mean

adding copious amounts of NPK, but rather helping establish a soil climate teaming with helpful microbes and mycelium to facilitate the continued recycling of nutrients through the system.
To accomplish this task, we build soil, much as the forest does, one layer at a time, alternating nitrogen and carbon-rich sources.
Generally speaking, carbon-rich sources are brown or gold, while sources of nitrogen are typically green (though coffee grounds and fresh manure is considered a “green”).
See a general recipe below to get started building beds to support your long-term food-growing goals.
  • Start with digging up or tilling under the bed (this is not essential, but will help spur bacterial involvement – the bed is no-till following)
  • Pile 4-6 inches of chipped wood/mulch (preferably stems and trunks less than 2in in diameter)
  • Soak the wood with water
  • Overtop, layer 2-4 inches of grass-fed horse-manure (I stay away from cow manure unless I know the cows have been pasture raised)
  • Soak
  • As a weed barrier, lay down non-bleached cardboard or newsprint (most local papers use soy-based black and white ink) – pre-soak these materials
  • Next, layer flakes of green hay, soak
  • Then a layer of coffee grounds, compost, or other green rotters (coffee grounds are free and in abundance at local coffee houses!)
  • Add another layer of wet, heavy paper, then flakes of straw to cover the entire bed (should be appx 2-3 feet tall – will shrink down to 8-12 inches in three weeks time)
  • Over top the beds, add a thin layer of composted coffee grounds and plant peas that have been inoculated with Rhizobia bacteria (available at most garden centers) and leave to bake for the season

This recipe will generate a great, rich soil, but requires patience for best results. It may be used safely after one year, and will produce best after two. To maintain this no-till bed design, plant 25% N2 fixing plants and dynamic accumulators (like comfrey) that may be mulched in place. 

That’s a quick recipe for good earth!

Reinventing invasive

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What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

-Ralph Waldo  Emerson

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Elaeagnus umbellata

The word invasive is thrown about so easily whenever we humans talk about the fragility of our ecosystems. Though the plants many have labeled “invasive” are able to spread prolifically, it is rare that the ability of the plant to thrive has anything to do with a natural process. Rather our own foolish adherence to a desire to “own” and “control” the land through clear-cutting, removal of topsoil, massive monocultures, application of biocides, etc. leave us with a barren soil that invites those “pioneers” with high tolerances and preferences for disturbed soils.

And how we gawk at those pioneers and throw our labels at them with such vehemence for their impressive tolerances to nitrate contamination, ability to digest pollutants, and those incredible deep tap roots able to seek out nutrients despite a lack of sufficient topsoil. The truly invasive species is not a plant, it is a most obtrusive primate.

Up at the Eco Learning Center, where a number of former ELC folk have gathered to learn from an old, well-established vineyard, talk was underway of removing some autumn olive that was now growing amid the grapes.

Walking past these shrubs, I noticed a diverse grouping of plants, all thriving, and considered for a moment the potential for these shrubs to act as trellises for the grapes. Was the vineyard already trying to show us something?

As it turns out, our prolific friend, autumn olive, introduced from Asia where its berries are harvested for both medicinal and edible purposes, is loves our climate. It grows well in disturbed soils and even fixes nitrogen in the soil. Nitrogen fixers harbor bacteria within their roots that convert nitrogen from the atmosphere to useful nitrogen compounds in the soil. As such, this particular N2-fixer is referred to by some viticulturists as a “plant nurse,” a far friendlier label than invasive.

In the vineyard, the vines are reaching out to the autumn olive for support. The short stature of the shrub makes it an ideal trellis for grapes (and we humans hoping to harvest grapes by hand). In addition, the shrub provides a late-season berry, producing well after the first frosts in Michigan. These berries may be eaten, or prepared in a variety of ways and provide an excellent food source for birds and other wildlife.

So, perhaps the conversation might shift from how do we get rid of the autumn olive stands within the vineyard, to how might these stands prove a valuable resource for all? And perhaps, over time, our own tolerances for the consequences we face for having altered the landscape so abruptly will lend itself to a whole new set of teachings from our plant elders. It is this education that represents the very best of the harvest.

The following is a wine recipe from Jack Keller

AUTUMN OLIVE WINE    * 4-5 pounds Autumn olive fruit
* 2 lbs granulated sugar
* 1¼ tsp yeast nutrient
* ¼ tsp tannin
* 1 tsp pectic enzyme.
* 3 qts water
* Lalvin RC212 (Bourgovin) wine yeastPut 2 qts water on to boil. Meanwhile, wash and cull fruit for soundness. Put fruit in nylon straining bag, tie closed, and place in primary container. Bruise fruit by squashing with hands or a piece of hardwood, being careful not to crack seed. Pour boiling water over fruit and cover primary. Combine remaining water with sugar and stir until dissolved–may heat the water to aid in dissolving sugar. Add sugar-water to primary, replace cover and set aside to cool. When room temperature, stir in tannin, yeast & nutrient. Replace cover and set aside for 12 hours. Stir in pectic enzyme and again cover primary and set aside. After 12 hours, add activated yeast and again cover the primary. Stir twice daily until s.g. drops to 1.015 (1-2 weeks). Remove nylon straining bag, squeezing well to extract juice. Allow to settle and rack to secondary and fit airlock. Wait 30 days, then rack, top up and refit airlock. Repeat when wine clears. Allow another 60 days under airlock. Stabilize, sweeten to taste if desired, wait 10 days, and rack into bottles. Age six months before tasting. Improves with age.

The hill

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I must find a man who still loves the soil

Walk by his side unseen, pour in his mind

What I loved when I lived until he builds

Sows, reaps, and covers these hill pastures here

With sheep and cattle, mows the meadowland

Grafts the old orchard again, makes it bear again

Knowing that we are lost if the land does not yield.

-Jeanne Robert Foster

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Up an old farm road, some ways out of town, there’s a place that grows ideas. It’s a little unconventional (thankfully), and as the woman who owns the property has always said, “If you make it up the hill, you were meant to arrive.”

I could drive it, and sometimes I do, but mostly I prefer to park at the base of the hill and trace the two-track up through the still of the forest. A few days ago made the trek on foot and met up with a deer, all the while contemplating the juxtaposition between the system and game that is played in surviving via a new set of rules, versus the simplicity of rules laid out by nature. How one system deprives us of purpose, while the other feeds it to us in abundance.

I digress.

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The hill is my transition in and out. A time for me to process what I have learned, or while ascending, consider all that I have learned that has lead to my return. This farm is where I got my start in permaculture. It’s the place where I was given information, shown how to grow food, how to build soil, how to live and think outside of the melancholy of the free-market system.

A biodynamic farm. What happens here is dynamic, from how we build thematrix of the food web from that which we eat, to that which eats what we eat, to the larger picture of how we relate to the plants, each other, our place within this universe. This is where I first heard the universe described as “one voice, one song.”

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And that word “dynamic” – I love how it feels to say it. How it opens my throat like a yawn. How intrinsic a vocal movement meets definition is this word, dynamic.

We have been asked here to help an old friend restore her vineyard, planted 25 years earlier on a bluff over the bay. The vines are still bearing, though many other plants have joined them and there is much to learn about the ever-increasing intricacies of this now self-regulating ecosystem.

And in returning, we are visiting the ghosts of our past. Walking past echos of ideas still standing. Thoughts pending. Heartbeats rendered through the undulating landscape where milkweed, vetch, and valerian have replaced annuals in the fertile soil. This is a living memory. And to think I felt sadness when I first looked upon it! When it has so thoughtfully produced in our absence! Lifted the roof off the greenhouse, and blanketed the orchard in a cloak of yarrow and gentle green grasses.

We have been charged with more than the responsibility of salvaging a vineyard for harvest.

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That is too one-dimensional and careless a thought. We have been shown a path that will lead to wisdom gleaned from the harvest or from the goal of harvest. And what better way to begin, than to learn about a vine?  A vine that is so careful to root itself in depth and breadth before reaching out to others for support.

We will not be saving a vineyard; we will be saving ourselves.