Home    About me    Gainesville Cow Pool    Cow Pool FAQ    Gainesville Food Swap  

Rosemary… Cake?

24 May 2013

2 Comments

There is a rare combination of “interesting” and “accessible” in reading recipes that works on me like magic. Before you know it I’m heading for the pots and pans with laptop in hand. This cake was one of those recipes. Rosemary in a cake? I also thought the cake might be nice topped with the vanilla-balsamic strawberry sauce in the pantry.

And wow was I right. The rosemary in my herb garden has approximately tripled in size in the past two months so I used just-snipped rosemary, which was subtle but there. This cake is moist and good alone, but with an assertive sauce it was fantastic. If you’ve been canning like I have, this cake would be the perfect pairing to show off some of your more-complex jams and sauces.

This simple cake is based on several Rosemary-Olive Oil cake recipes I found around the web, but I didn’t have any decent olive oil on hand and I wanted to use some whole grains. I think that using free-range eggs makes a big difference in the richness and color, so use free-range eggs if at all possible in this recipe.

rosemary cake

Simple Rosemary Cake with Vanilla-Balsamic Strawberry Sauce

4 large free-range eggs
2/3 c sunflower oil or any other cold-pressed neutral oil, or ghee
2/3 c raw sugar
1/2 c oat flour
1/2 c spelt flour
1/2 c unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tbl fresh rosemary, minced
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Line the bottom of a 9″ springform pan with paper, and butter the paper and the walls of the pan. Heat the oven to 325.

Beat together eggs, oil, and sugar until smooth and light. Sift together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into the egg mixture. Beat in with a sturdy spoon or spatula just until combined, then stir in minced rosemary. Scrape batter into the springform pan and tap the pan lightly on the side to settle the batter and get rid of any big air bubbles.

Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until a skewer comes out of the center clean. Let cool for 10 minutes and then remove the sides. Let cool overnight if possible. Serve with Vanilla-Balsamic Strawberry sauce or fruit coulis or preserve of your choice.

By: Andi Houston Category: Eat Local Challenge, Recipes! Tags: , ,

An Observation on Squash Vine Borers

17 May 2013

1 Comment

Here’s a photo of my man-eating, hostage-taking squash polyculture bed. It’s hard to tell, but there are dragontongue beans, cosmos, tomatillos, and a young Fuyu persimmon tree in there too. These are all planted in the center hill-bed. The squash vines have spread 10 feet in every direction.

squash vines1

I thought these were going to be Seminole pumpkins, but they are a mix of Spaghetti squash and an as-yet-unidentified squash or maybe pumpkin with green stripes.

Obviously spaghetti squash.

Obviously spaghetti squash.

And obviously not spaghetti squash.

And obviously not spaghetti squash.

Here’s an interesting observation on Squash Vine Borer management. I planted my “pumpkins” early, the first weekend in March, in straight compost with a little blood meal. In April I found some squash vine borer eggs and squished them. After that I knew I couldn’t get them all, the plants are just too big. So this morning I was checking the plants and saw this. This is obviously where a squash vine borer emerged, but it didn’t kill the plant! It only killed the leaf stem, not the whole vine. I then found five more holes like this on other vines, all fine and growing healthy with fruit on them.

vineborerdamage

My theory is that these vines were old/large/strong enough to withstand the borer damage because I planted them so early. The squash vine borers may have emerged late because of that late frost we had in March. Whatever the factors, next year I will plant squash a week earlier than I did this year and hope for the same results. This means that SVB are not always  instant death to squash plants, older healthy plants can withstand the damage and still produce.

other squash 1

This is a whole ‘nother issue. About half the fruit produced by both types of squash die in this manner, discolored and shriveled but with no visible insect damage and no visible larvae inside. This might be the result of leaf-footed bugs sucking the life out of the young fruits, I killed probably 50 juvenile leaf-footed bugs this week.

I am deeply happy at the success of my developing food forest overall. This patch of ground was weedy sugar sand just a year ago. I will be disappointed if none of these plants end up being Seminole pumpkins, but that’s the risk you take with home seed-saving and planting home-saved seeds. Good thing I like spaghetti squash!

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , ,

The Olive Tree Bed

14 May 2013

4 Comments

Sometimes I look at “before” and “after” pictures of the yard and even I’m astonished, and I’m the one who created the change.

Here’s what I call the Blast Furnace corner. This is the south-west corner of the front yard. This area is in full sun all day and gets absolutely blasted in the late afternoons, the hottest part of the day. This is what this corner looked like for the first year because I just couldn’t decide what to put here. The requisite useless boxwood hedge, a couple of struggling duranta bushes, the far corner taken over by cape honeysuckle (Tecoma campensis) and the near corner taken over by Mexican petunias. The whole area in front of that…

olivebed1

If you take no other lesson from this post, let it be to never ever use weed cloth as a long-term solution in Florida.

olivebed2

This is what happens when you leave weed cloth in place long-term. The really persistent weeds, the ones that are especially tough and hardy? They’ll eventually just grow through the weed cloth, making pulling them impossible. I’d guess this particular weed cloth was in place for several years before we moved in, because not only were the grass and weeds one with the weed cloth, the plastic was disintegrated enough to tear like tissue paper as I tried to pull it out. I worked for an entire morning with a pickaxe, ripping up the ground to take out the weeds, grass roots, and shredded plastic weed cloth. I try very hard to be no-till, but there was no helping it here.

Here’s a wheelbarrow full of this mess.

olivebed3

After ripping it all out we cut the useless boxwood hedge to the soil level with heavy loppers, below the root crown whenever possible. They have an extensive root system and as you can see from the above picture, there is a large orange tree right on the other side of the fence. Orange trees have shallow root systems so ripping the boxwoods out of the ground with their roots, or digging up the roots, would have damaged the roots of the orange tree. The roots will decompose in place and add nutrients to the soil.

After the boxwoods were cut down, chopped up, and taken to the compost pile, we chopped back the cape honeysuckle and mexican petunias. Both are moderately invasive and sending runners underneath the fence. I would have preferred to remove them entirely if possible, but my husband thinks they’re pretty. I may add aluminum flashing as a runner barrier to keep them in check.

Then it was time to plant!

olivebed5

That stick in the ground at the right corner is my baby olive tree. It’s hard to see against the mulch. Here’s a better photo.

olivebed6

Olive trees grow slowly so I can only hope to eat olives off of my own olive tree before we move. Goji berries are a trendy “superfruit” that we can grow. Goji berries are also used in Chinese medicine, Chinese soups and Persian rice dishes like zereshk polov. They’re sold at Chinese and Persian grocery stores for a tiny fraction of the cost of health food store goji berries, but I’m interested to find out how they produce here. I’m not sure how large or productive these bushes will get but they’re already covered in delicate blue flowers. The beach sunflower is a native low-growing drought-tolerant spreading groundcover with yellow flowers that attract pollinators. The only piece missing in these beds are nitrogen-fixers, so I’ll probably add some buffalo clover and/or pigeon peas.

It’s so much more attractive already. Here’s one more photo.

olivebed4

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , , ,

Plight of the Honeybee

10 May 2013

4 Comments

From the NPR blog The Salt:

Beekeepers have a whole list of reasons for why so many colonies are dying. There’s a nasty parasite called the Varroa Mite, which they can’t get rid of. There are also bee-killing pesticides. And there are just fewer places in the country where a bee can find plenty of flowering plants that provide nectar and pollen.

That was especially true this past year. The same drought that left Midwestern corn fields parched and wilting also dried up wildflowers and starved the bees.

That was a natural disaster. But May Berenbaum, who chairs the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that most of the changes in the landscape are the result of people’s decisions about what to do with their land.

I hope this is the wake-up call for commercial orchards to adopt sustainable practices, because commercial agriculture can either choose to change their practices now, or be forced to when there are no honeybees left.

Remember, honeybees are not only an introduced species (there are no native American honeybees!), they are also a monoculture. In the wild trees are pollinated by many species. If one species crashes, the other insects can make up the difference. When you rely on one species only, then if that species crashes you’re in real trouble.

Which is exactly what’s happening.

moving-beesjpg-85f7d55b9e160aa1_large

The honeybees that pollinate big commercial orchards also don’t always “live” in that orchard. Trucks stacked with bee boxes drive from field to field, where orchards can “rent” the honeybee hives from commercial companies. When the trees are finished blossoming, the bees are loaded up and moved on to pollinate another crop. These orchards are also monocultures- the bees can’t live in the orchard year-round because after the trees are done flowering, there’s nothing for the bees to eat. In the wild, there is something flowering throughout the growing season. As one plant stops flowering, another starts.

Despite the lurid headlines that often appear, scientists agree that there is no one cause of the current honeybee “colony collapse disorder”, it’s the whole list of them happening all at once. Drought, pesticide use, stressful beekeeping practices, a narrow variety of available food, the use of corn syrup as a winter bee “food”… they all are contributing factors. Another problem with driving bees from orchard to orchard is spreading pests and diseases from one colony to another.

From Oregon Live:

Life in mono-crop, plantation-style orchards can be trying for bees. The landscape is rich in pesticides and chemically infused dirt. Our bees intermingle with hives from around the country and vice versa, swapping parasitic Varroa and Tracheal mites and diseases like Nosema ceranae — a microsporidium causing bee dysentery — at an alarming rate.

“For diseases and pests, the Central Valley is the proverbial melting pot,” lamented Zach Browning, an Idaho and North Dakota beekeeper who sent 16,000 colonies for almond pollination this year. “We spend the majority of the year preparing the hives, cleaning them up, only to bring them down here to be re-infested.”

Go read the whole article. Why do beekeepers drive their hives from place to place? To make up the lost revenue from honey production, which fell when cheap honey imports drove down the cost of honey. You know, those honey bears you buy at Walmart. And now we know that much commercial honey isn’t even honey at all, it’s cut with corn syrup.

So what can we do?

cross creek honey

1. Only buy local honey directly from the farmer. It’s easy to find. Ask your local grocery store why they don’t carry honey from local apiaries. Ask your bakery where they buy honey. Ask at restaurants, too.

2. Encourage native bees in your yard. There are plenty of guides and websites that tell you how step-by-step. Encourage diversity wherever possible.

3. When you talk with your farmers, ask them how their crops are pollinated. Ask them how they are encouraging pollinating insects and biodiversity on their farms. Spend more money with the ones who give answers you like.

We can change the world with our wallets. We can’t force commercial agriculture to change overnight, but we can encourage more farms to adopt sustainable practices by spending our money with them.

By: Andi Houston Category: Eat Local Challenge, Politics and Movement Tags: , ,

Canning Day and Vanilla Balsamic Strawberry Sauce

8 May 2013

10 Comments

Sometimes home chores can be a kind of moving meditation, too.

Sunday was scheduled to be a canning and kitchen project day for me. The Gainesville Food Swap is coming soon and I wanted to make a few more items for the swap, plus canning several projects in one large water bath saves electricity and time. So I purchased a half-flat of strawberries, several pounds of okra, and hard-boiled two dozen quail eggs the day before.

ripe strawberries

Then Sunday morning we received the news of a death in the family.  There was absolutely nothing I could do for them, being halfway across the country. So I carried on with my plans and spent the afternoon in the kitchen, music in the background, mostly alone. I don’t know if these will be the best pickled okra or pickled beets I’ll ever make. I was distracted by worry and probably missed a couple of ingredients. Fortunately I’ve made this strawberry sauce many times. But these jars are also full of the memories I thought about while I was stirring, and a sort of peace I found through this simple work.

canning day

Swedish Pickled Beets from A Passionate Plate- I added quail eggs and substituted whole peppercorns for the cloves

Pickled Okra from Katy She Cooks- I used whole dill heads from the garden but forgot the chiles

Vanilla-Balsamic Strawberry Sauce

This sauce will not set up like a jam, it’s meant for serving over pancakes or strawberry shortcake. This is an excellent recipe to use bruised and slightly over-ripe berries.

1 half-flat of very ripe strawberries, 6 pint baskets
2 c raw sugar
1/4 tsp salt
3 tbl high-quality balsamic vinegar
2 whole vanilla beans

Trim strawberries and cut in half. Fill your sink with a few inches of water- enough that all of the berries will float. Dump in the berries and swish them around with your hands for a minute or so. Now take a slotted spoon (or your hands) and lift the berries out of the water and place them in a non-reactive pot with a lid. Lifting the berries out of the water is the best way to get all of the sand off.

Add the sugar and salt to the berries. Do not add any water! Cover the pot and put it over medium heat. While the strawberries are coming to a boil, take the whole vanilla beans and make a slit lengthwise halfway through the bean with a small sharp knife. You want to expose the seeds, but not necessarily cut the bean in half. Then cut them in half across the width. Toss them in the pot. Stir and cover again until the berries come to a full boil in their own juices. Stir again, reduce the heat to low, and take the cover off. Adjust the heat as needed to keep the sauce at a brisk simmer. Stir often to reduce risk of scorching.

Let the berries simmer until the sauce is reduced by about 1/4 and the vanilla scent is strong. Take the sauce off the heat and puree with an immersion blender until about half pureed. You can also puree half of the sauce in batches in a regular blender, too. Add the balsamic vinegar and stir well. Let a spoonful cool and taste for seasoning. Depending on your berries, the sauce may need additional sugar.

Fill three pint jars with the boiling hot strawberry sauce, leaving 1″ head space. Process for 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. If the strawberry sauce separates in the jar, just give it a good stir before serving. We especially like this sauce over whole-grain pancakes spread with ricotta cheese.

By: Andi Houston Category: Eat Local Challenge, Recipes!

Eat Local Challenge Goals for 2013

2 May 2013

0 Comment

Yesterday was the start of the Eat Local Challenge. Not only is May a month of beautiful weather here, it also has a wide range of fresh produce since the winter and early spring crops like tender greens and broccoli are at their tail end and the summer crops like okra and peppers are just starting to come in. For the Eat Local Challenge this year I’m going to try something new- tracking what local products I’m eating at each meal. I’ll post a list of what I buy each week and my menu. You can see past menus under “Weekly Meal Plans” and photos of my weekly farmers’ market haul under “What’s in the Basket?” We’ve been ‘eating local” for many years but this year I’m going to try and figure out exactly what percentage of my weekly grocery budget is buying local food.

Another goal this month is to create a recipe archive for this site. I have scores of recipes on this blog and most of them focus on local produce, but they’re hard to find. A recipe archive based on seasons will help you find dishes that use produce growing at the same time.

And then in the middle of the month I’m running the first Gainesville Food Swap!

Have you signed up yet? If you aren’t here in the Gainesville area, does your county or city have an Eat Local Challenge month?

By: Andi Houston Category: Eat Local Challenge, Recipes!

A Butterfly Bed on Beltaine

1 May 2013

7 Comments

I can’t believe how well my mostly-native butterfly bed is coming along only six short months after I started planting. Last weekend was the Spring Native Plant Sale, and I added several new plants. This is the perfect picture to share on Beltaine, all about fecundity and growth!

Here’s where we started in October. A blank slate.

butterfly bed 093012

And here’s what it looks like now.

native bed

There’s a common saying in permaculture books, talking about planting perennials- “The first year they sleep, the second year they creep, the third year they leap.” Here in Florida we didn’t have much of a winter so I think the oldest of these are starting to “creep” already. Eventually this bed will meander along the whole fence, with small trees, native grasses, and lots more flowering vines, and at some point I’ll add a decorative border. I can’t wait to see what this looks like in another six months!

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , , ,

New Annuals Bed

30 Apr 2013

0 Comment

Isn’t it funny when you angst over a problem in your head for weeks or even months, building the problem up to be this insurmountable giant… and then when you decide to just jump in, the answer presents itself almost immediately? It’s like pushing hard against a door and finding it open.

Last fall I asked for advice on the previous homeowner’s bermuda grass-infested raised bed. I tried to sheetmulch the bed last summer and the grass was not only undaunted by my attempts, it subsumed the cardboard in a matter of weeks. Unable to commit to using glyphosate and completely daunted by the idea of digging it out, I just laid thick outdoor carpet over the whole thing and left it alone for the winter.

So a few weeks ago we pulled back the carpet to see what was happening. The carpet trick had worked on the less-grass-infested of the two annual beds, the one on the left. We easily dug out the rest of the grass, filled that bed with fresh compost and planted tomatillos and ashwaganda last weekend. On the right bed the bermuda grass was not much affected. It was yellowed but still growing. I had to do something though, the seedlings were ready to plant out and this is where they were supposed to go. So I pulled the wood frame up and out of the way, cut laboriously all the way around one corner with a sharp spade and yanked… and the whole corner came out of the ground! The grass was rooted through some thin felt-type weed cloth, but once I cut the weed cloth and got a good hold of a corner, it all just lifted right up out of the sand like a mat. I just stood there gaping for several minutes, then ran into the house, hollering for my husband.

annualbed2

Thankfully his additional weight on that sharp spade cut through the grass, roots, and weed cloth like butter. (Well okay, maybe not “butter”, but easier than me balancing on the spade and jumping up and down) He cut the grass into sections in less than 10 minutes. Then I loaded the sections, which were each a foot thick mat of grass, roots, sand, and weed cloth, onto my trusty red wheelbarrow and carted them across the street to my growing weedy compost pile. I cleared the grass, dug out the remaining roots, and raked it all smooth in less than 30 minutes.

annualbed3

After that I laid down a thick layer of newspapers and shredded office paper and wetted it all down. The sky clouded up briefly, as you can see.

annualbed4

Then I filled the whole bed to the top with compost.

annualbed5

And then I planted!  Everona tomatillos, Rose Bianca eggplants, and a few cantaloupe seedlings in the back corners. I’m hoping the cantaloupes will sprawl out of the bed and across the grass to the fence.

annualbed6

Now it’s all mulched with straw and we had a good rain today. I’m especially proud of those seedlings, these are the first I’ve ever started from seeds. I’ve simply moved the piece of carpet over to lay on the spot next to this bed for the summer. Hopefully this will kill back the grass underneath and I’ll add a new raised bed there in the fall. This took about two hours, start to finish. I am so thrilled this is done!

annualbed7

By: Andi Houston Category: Garden Updates Tags: , ,

The Parable of the Betony

25 Apr 2013

4 Comments

Sometimes, this whole gardening thing? It’s not about us.

When we moved into this house almost a year ago (a year!) I decided that the worst “weeds” in my yard were purple nut sedge and Florida betony. I spent countless hours digging the tubers and roots out by hand in my larger beds, pulling top growth constantly. I killed one established rose bush and two expensive golden rain tree seedlings with my vigorous weeding. Then we started sheet mulching, and though the deep sheet mulching suppressed the hated nut sedge, the Florida betony punched right through. There was nothing I could do except keep ripping out top growth- disturbing the sheet mulching layers would invite more weeds and grass to come through. One day my husband, ignorant of the war, commented “Those are pretty flowers, what are those?” when we were walking around in the yard, checking on the plants. “Florida betony.” I gritted my teeth, angry that I had overlooked such a big clump. “Aren’t those native?” says my husband, knowing that I am pro-native plants. I made some noise of assent and we moved on.

Our mild, cool winter caused many of my plants to start shooting and budding early. Then in February we had our first hard freeze, and everything in my yard that was starting to bloom was frozen back… everything except the Florida betony. The Florida betony exploded into rapid growth, blooming like crazy despite the frost.

And the next sunny day, those small purple flowers were absolutely covered in bees. Big bees. Little bees. Bees everywhere.

Florida Betony

Florida Betony (Stachys floridana) blossoms

So I left the betony alone in certain areas- around the front porch, along the edges of the food forest, around the duranta bushes that were struggling to come back after the hard frost in March. I realized that the Florida betony was the only plant of any number blooming in my yard. It was in fact, the major early spring food source for the bees until the citrus trees started blossoming.

I read this essay today by Benjamin Vogt, and this passage struck me as wonderfully Pagan:

Gardening with natives is about giving up certain levels of ownership to your landscape. Life isn’t a battle royale with nature. Gardening with natives is about sharing, about living with the world and not in it; with the world and not against it; with the world and not apart from it. Bridging the gap. It’s about taking a leap of faith that you are this planet’s faith given momentary form, bound to its rhythms, and when you struggle to remake or ignore those rhythms everything seems intangibly off kilter — we suffer higher food prices, eroding shorelines, dirty water and air, new bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

I had been battling Florida betony without learning about it first. I was acting out of harmony with the land, and out of harmony with permaculture principles too, which state “Observe, then act.” I was reacting without fully observing, without fully learning, like the person who kills the spider out of fear. I thought I had learned about Florida betony last year by learning the human uses- harvesting the roots, learning how to cook and eat them. 

floridabetonyroot

A particularly large Florida betony root, which tastes rather like Romaine lettuce and radishes

We name a plant, and then assign it value. “Weed”. That is our judgement against a plant. The plant itself is not bad or good. Our judgement assigns it value, important only to us.  This plant which I assigned the value “weed” and tried to eradicate has a significant role to play in my yard’s system. Now I have to learn how to live with it, how to design with it, how to incorporate it into the overall system I am guiding into being. This is an important reminder as I move towards Beltane and the season of explosive growth. I will slow down and observe the land mindfully and without judgement, living with the land.

The nut sedge, on the other hand, is still a weed!

By: Andi Houston Category: Faith and food, Garden Updates, Permaculture Projects Tags: , ,

Coconut Oil Banana Bread

23 Apr 2013

4 Comments

My kids are active. All three take tae kwan do twice a week. My daughter plays lacrosse on top of that, and my son is on the crew team. My oldest works full time as an electrician’s assistant on a commercial site. So I like to have healthy high-calorie snacks around as much as possible… but they also have to taste good. One of their favorites is banana bread so I pack as much nutrition in my banana bread recipes as possible. I rarely make the same recipe twice, but this whole-grain, heavy-on-the-protein experiment turned out with perfect quick bread texture and big banana flavor. They’ve already eaten half the cake (I may have had a piece, too). Half oat flour and half spelt flour is my preferred whole-grain flour combination, but you can substitute any flour you have on hand.

banana bread

Coconut Oil Banana Bread

5 big soft-ripe bananas
2 free-range eggs
1/2 c coconut oil
1/2 c cane syrup
1 c raw sugar
1 c coconut flour
1 c oat flour
1 c spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Heat the oven to 350. Coat a bundt pan with coconut oil. Place the peeled bananas, eggs, oil, syrup, and sugar in a large bowl. Mash and combine using an electric mixer for a chunky texture. (If you want no chunks of banana, do this in a blender.) Add the flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Stir to combine the dry ingredients and then beat with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula until almost smooth. Scrape evenly into the bundt pan, and then bang the pan gently on the counter a time or two to settle and even out the batter.

Bake until a skewer comes out moist but clean, 45-50 minutes. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes and then turn out and cool overnight before slicing. Serve toasted with plenty of melted butter, or slathered in peanut butter for an after-school snack.

Also, if you’re in the Gainesville area, I am hosting the Gainesville Food Swap next month! Check it out!

By: Andi Houston Category: Recipes! Tags: , , , ,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 »