Backyard Agrarian

(From Thursday, August 18)

Today was Thursday, the day when my sweetie and I go work on Andrews Family Farm for our CSA Share. We are usually both tired by the time we get there, and try to arrange some sort of nice night together afterward. We decided to make pizza today, so before we left, I quickly mixed up some sourdough starter with more wheat and millet flour, and put it in a tupperware before we zoomed off to the farm to get there in time to help harvest.

We have a working share at the farm, which means we get a discount on our share price, and in exchange, we help out on the farm each week harvesting and doing other tasks around the farm. It's a great arrangement, although it can be hard some times after a long day getting the energy to get out there, but once we do, I almost always am so grateful to be there, and love sinking into the familiar tasks of farmwork.

We are in the high season of farming here, and our shares have been getting bigger and bigger.

The most exciting thing for me (and I think Laura, too) this week, was our huge pile of basil.

After picking up our share, we stopped by the farm stand of Hoot 'N Howl Farm just down Jay Road, and picked our own raspberries in addition to picking up a banana pepper, sungold cherry tomatoes, and some beautiful garlic.

We went home, I spread out and pre-baked to crust, and we added the ingredients...so good! Especially for an entirely whole-wheat and millet crust! Sungolds are my absolute favorite tomato of all time! (Which is saying something, and of course, the tomato I am currently gorging on is my favorite).

Here's a picture of the finished pizza:

Here's what was in the pizza crust: whole wheat flour, ground millet, baked on course corn meal and buttered pan; butter smeared on top of crust. Toppings: sungold cherry tomatoes, banana pepper, and garlic from Hoot 'N' Howl Farm; eggplant, basil, yellow summer squash, and red onion from Andrews Family Farm; chevre from Haystack Mountain (and some parmesan on Laura's side), and some salt from Redmond, Utah...so good!

I had never tried making pizza without olive oil, but local butter worked fabulously. The farthest thing on this pizza was the salt. Boo ya!

Local food, delicious food. Thank you, Colorado family farmers!

-Seth

I just got back from a day and a half of hiking, tubing, and camping, and I had a lot of fun foraging fruit and berries. When I don't have access to all the usual delicious fruits at the supermarket, I am much more keen on spotting and munching any delicious thing I see as I am out and about. Yesterday and today I foraged a delicious diversity of fruits, including a "parking lot peach," (which isn't really a wild food, but I discovered an escaped Palisade peach sitting in the parking lot of Lucky's as I was heading out of town with my sweetie for our tubing and camping adventure and snatched it up), choke cherries and an apple at the park in Lyons, wild raspberries and rosehips along Left Hand Canyon, red currents outside of Estes Park, and wild strawberries, gooseberries, and more raspberries along a trail north of Weld. All in all a fun way to travel. 

I've been getting hungry at work these past few days when I haven't had the time to prepare something and bring it with me. As I work in a grocery store, there are a lot of opportunities for temptation. I have recently turned to buying a loaf of Breadworks bread (which is locally baked, and made with Rocky Mountain Milling flour) and some local cheese (like MouCo's ColoRogue, or Haystack Mountain Chevre), and wolfing it down during my breaks. I don't feel like this is exactly what I was going for when I was planning my month, and feel like it upholds the letter more than the spirit of the "law" of the month, but when I'm hungry, and in a grocery store, it sure hits the spot. I guess partly that it's a quick situation, no preparation, not real difficulty, and no work on my end. Just pick it up, pay some money, and wolf it down. Not very intentional. But effective. 

And I support local bakers and cheesemakers. And local bakeries and cheeseries are institutions that I feel good about supporting these days.

Well, it's getting late now, and tomorrow I must be up early to go work at Andrews Family Farm, where I have my CSA share. I look forward to the harvest, and the eating, and the sharing. Anyhow, thanks for reading, have a great night, and take care!

-Seth

Well, it was a good lesson, this first week. When I began on August 1st, I hadn't really done a lot of planning ahead or stocking up of local staples, so I found myself rather restricted in my diet. 

My first meal of the month was breakfast of wild berries harvested from behind my house on the mountainside, raw whole milk yogurt I made from the raw grass-fed cow's milk I pick up each week from Windsor Dairy in Windsor, Co. A delicious way to kick off a month of local food, and I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself...of course what came next was a feeling of "what am I going to eat next?"

I finally made it down to a grocery store, and it was a peculiar feeling to walk through the aisles realizing "I can't eat any of this." A good lesson, and it really made me re-think my ideas of the locally grown food options even in this natural foods grocery. I finally settled on some Palisade peaches (a little outside the 100 mile radius, but I was hungry!) and some Colorado-grown millet from the bulk section.

One thing that this experience has brought me so far is a re-connection with my love of cooking. When I can't just go grab something in a package, or even trail mix from the bulk section of a grocery store, everything I eat has to be prepared and planned for. This means I am spending a lot more time each day on the process of gathering, preparing, and eating food. I've been baking a lot of bread (sourdough, so no industrially produced yeast, although I am using salt from who knows where), making pancakes, eggs with veggies, and drinking a lot of raw milk and herbal tea with leaves from the herbs on my deck. If I want something sweet, I need to make sure to keep up with getting bulk Colorado honey, and as for oil, I've been using some homemade ghee I made from organic High Meadow colorado butter. I haven't been using spices from far away other than salt and black pepper (and I'm trying not to use much pepper), and have been using herbs from my CSA share and the herb pots on my deck.

Also, I'm realizing that I don't want to/can't really afford to pretend like I have lots of money to spend on gourmet local cuisine. So when I ran out of honey, I put a little sugar in my zucchini bread, and when I didn't have any other oil, I used a little of the coconut oil I had in my cupboard...I've got these things in my cupboard, and my wealth does not lie in dollar dollar bills, so why pretend? I'm going to do my best, but also try to be honest with myself and you about the choices I make and compromises I end up making or not.

A big part of this experiment is an exercise in imagination: imagine if we didn't have access to food outside our local landbase, how would we eat, what could we eat, how creative would we get? If I was strictly trying to make the most sustainable, landbase friendly food choices in the system we current operate within, I would probably be dumpstering all my food. No additional land being tilled, just salvaging the grotesquely abundant leftovers from industrial growth society, a closed loop.

But the imagination part is what I'm working with for this month. Once the month is over, I will go back to salvaging from the free food at the back of the grocery store I work in, saying "yes" to pretty much any food offered to me, making choices for organic, unpackaged, inexpensive food, but for now, this is where I'm at. And also, I don't know what changes will take place within me over the course of this month, so who knows what my food choices might look like on September first.

Okay, culinary highlights of the first week:

• Millet and goatmilk pancakes with crabapple sauce spread on top (crabapples foraged from trees in Boulder, crabapple sauce made from crabapples, ghee, and honey cooked on stove)
• Crabapple and Palisade peach pancakes (with the fruit chopped up inside, and honey drizzled on top, mmm!)
• Wild gooseberries and bayberies with homemade yogurt and honey
• Homemade yogurt and peach smoothie with honey
• Orgasmically ripe and juicy Rocky Ford Cantaloupe straight up
• My homemade sourdough bread

So that's it for now, I'll posts some photos soon of some of my meals this past week. So long, thanks for reading!

-Seth

I just got back from a beautiful concert in Arvada to celebrate a couple of friends' birthdays. While I was sitting there in between sets, a new acquaintance and I were talking about my eating local food for a month (prompted because I had to turn down offers of delicious cake and snacks), and the feeling of overwhelm at the destruction of our world, the feeling of not knowing where to begin...she asked me, right now, where would you begin? And I started talking about the current issues I'm involved or interested in (Nuclear Guardianship around the proposed highway and bike bath through Rocky Flats, the Belo Monte Dam breaking ground in Brazil, the proposed expansion of the Gross Reservoir Dam right here), and then the music started, and we let the harmonies and the night sky wash over me. And I sat with that question, and looked at the moon rising over the amphitheater, and I realized, I wanted to answer that question again.

I thought about this eating local thing, how I haven't really had a clear explanation for why I want to do it, just that I do...and I realize that I've been a farmer for the past five years, living for a number of them in a rural farming community where food is the central part of life, and even now that I'm living in town, I chose to work at a grocery store in the produce department because food is something I love and care about...and I realized that my answer about where to start isn't really about what pressing issue is most important (or at least it's not all about that), but about starting from where I am, finding my power, my passion, and from that place of strength connecting to all that is...

As I tell people I can't eat what they are graciously offering, I think about discipline and focus...how it seems to me that focus can take us in two directions:

The first is to choose something that is important, make that the most important thing in our lives, and begin to see it as the only important thing, that others are clearly mistaken about their priorities, to get until we are focused on such a small piece of the world that we lose perspective. In this way it is about creating a hierarchy of importance, and placing yourself or your beliefs at the top of that hierarchy, in competition with others who don't share your perspective about what really needs to happen. 

The other way is to choose something to focus on, commit to your focus, and to use that intimate knowledge you gain as a way to connect to all those around you, to learn to see the connections beneath the apparent separateness. But this way is so much harder, so hard to get to a place where others' truths do not threaten your own merely by being different, to get to a place where wisdom can flow from a deep connection to the earth and yourself, and you can see clearly how things are and are not.

A teacher of mine speaks about digging wells for water: you can dig a little here and a little there, but if you want to get water, you just need to choose one spot and dig deep until you reach it.  

So I guess what I'm trying to say, is that starting with food works for me, and I think that is a big part of what I am trying to do here this month. Start conversations, really think about why I make the choices I make in my life, to explore further reaches of the dance between what I believe and how I live, and to challenge myself to not fall back on this arbitrary distinction of "local" food as a wall, but rather approach it as a teacher and a way to connect to my surroundings, my beliefs, and my community.

Thank you for reading, and good night!

-Seth

Hello beautiful people, my name is Seth, and for the month of August I will be blogging about my experiences related to my attempt at eating only local food for a month here in Boulder, Colorado. Liz has graciously given me a spot on Backyard Agrarian, and I am excited for the opportunity to write for all of you!

I'm defining "local" as give or take one hundred miles from where I live, although there are some things that might be from outside that area as long as they are grown in Colorado. I will prioritize those foods closest to my home, direct contact with the growers or producers, and food harvested, grown, or foraged by my own hands. I love food, and I look forward to both the challenge and the delight of this venture.

First of all, a little background on myself: I'm a recent transplant to Colorado from Minnesota, where I've lived off and on for the past 8 years. I spent much of the last five years of my life as an organic vegetable farmer in one form or another. I moved to Boulder in March, and am currently living a bit into the foothills by a creek.

As the month goes on, I will be exploring the challenges of creating arbitrary restrictions on my diet, exploring my motivations behind doing so, thoughts about our current food system, industrial society, my relationship with my environment, and the spirituality of communion with the land.

I look forward to sharing, and I hope to inspire you to explore your own paths in your own ways.

With love and gratitude,
Seth