Early Spring

This may seem a little out of place for a post on "Early Spring," but I can explain. This is the main photo on the Bountiful Gardens seed catalog (which sells specifically open-pollinated, non-treated seeds), and what gardener isn't being inundated with all of their favorite seed catalogs right now? It is bliss, with a bitter twist: you can't try all the new varieties you want. Few of us have that much space. This photo is of the crew in late summer 2008- Dan, Ellen, David, Sandika, Margo and Philip. David and Philip were from (and are doing great work now in) Kenya. Sandika was from Sri Lanka.
What has Margo been up to while I have been toying with grains? She has been devising the garden plan for our coming season. It is based on a diet she planned during our 6-month course in 2006, and has been altered as we found we could not eat so much of some things and wanted more of others. Margo talks about this process as a movement toward a sustainable diet from both ends: a diet design that will provide more of what we actually eat, and a diet closer to what we can actually grow (hopefully someday we will meet in the middle of the two). The purpose of the diet exercise is to figure out how to meet one's caloric and nutritional needs in the smallest area, while growing enough biomass crops to supply the garden with its fertility through compost. In essence, this is the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method. You can see her previous plan, worked up in a 5-Bed Unit, on Ecology Action's website.
This deserves a new paragraph: Margo has also managed to create a crop rotation for the 4000 square feet we are currently managing. It will span something like 16 years, since the area is divided into that many beds, and few of those beds are one entire crop. A few are all flour corn or all potatoes, but not many. This is much more incredible than I can make it sound, not having spent the hours on it like she has. I'll try to come up with some graphic representation for a future post.
I'd like to stick a before-and-after set in here from the willow beds I am working on. As has happened in a few other spots in the garden, someone in the past has removed a bunch of rocks and dumped them all in one area, around a perennial or at the end of a bed. The logic, I think, was that they would make weeding easier and hold water better. Unfortunately, when there is a layer of rocks around something like basket-willow plants (which are only given attention once a year at harvest) the grass grows higher and people forget to water them. And willow needs water. Plus, once you do want to get in and harvest the willow the rocks interfere and mess with the pruners. And need I say rocks, in large numbers, are heavy? Better to put them in a pile somewhere you won't want to move them. Or on your [gravel] driveway. On the left you see a cleaned up bed, with almost imperceptible willow stumps.

Margo and Ellen spent some time two weeks ago pulling up the dead asparagus tops, gathering them into piles, and moving them to a dry spot for use in composting later. Here is the stash...

One last little bit for this post. This being a learning garden, and us all being observant and interested, we keep record of our daily temperatures. Though it might be easier and more informative to have a data-logger hooked up to a computer charting hourly temperature fluctuations, we would need the hundreds of dollars to buy it and would probably never look at the results anyway. Our (relatively) cheap solution to this is a standard min-max thermometer. It is a mercury thermometer shaped like a U, where when temperatures are rising, the mercury on the right raises, and when the temperature drops the mercury level on the left raises. Fun! There are little blue pins inside the glass column, and the mercury pushes them. Where it stops, they stick. A magnet is used to reset the pins, which you do by drawing them both down to the current mercury levels. We check them once a day in the morning, after the low has been reached and the temperature is rising. This thermometer reads a 24-hour high of ~74° F and low of 38° F. The high/low are then recorded on a 6-month data sheet, seen at the left here.

Thus we have records of yearly and monthly averages, highs and lows, nights above 60° F, and anything else we could hope for. Except hourly fluctuations...
Coming up next, the reasons I didn't post this last week!

Cats' O the Garden

Sage advice from people who know. This is a good time to introduce our cats, two of which inhabit the garden, and two of which haunt our front door. I'll start with the one that tempts us to ignore the warning in this brief poem: Marcello. Once a good cat, probably, he has become mostly bad. Definitely the Captain Ahab of the feline world. While I guess we don't know what is going on in his head, we can imagine by how he rubs against you so sweetly then, without provocation, bites you on the elbow, wrist, ankle, shoe, or whatever is closest. He has good days, where he does no wrong, and bad days, when the mere act of walking past elicits a claw in your leg or, if you were wise, your cat-proof pants. Worst of all, in my opinion, he has that deplorable trait of attacking you when you walk away and running when you turn to face him. That always creeps me out in a pet. To sum him up, he's the kind of animal you really want to take to an animal communicator to figure out. We are probably going to send him off to the shelter soon, or find someone who doesn't care about how weird their cat is. Ellen had the good point that, if a dog went off regularly and bit visitors, the sheriff would take it away.

Next up we have Ricky, aka "Ricky-ticky-tum-tum" and "Rickle-Pickle-Pie." As you can see from the picture he is adorable. His most notable characteristic is that he drools slightly when you pet him. Not normal for a cat, but acceptable, considering he catches rodents nearly on demand. Three days in a row I was working in the grain loft all afternoon and he would leave, only to come back ten minutes later with a large, mostly dead vole in his mouth. He would then crunch it up beside me and leave the liver and some other less-identifiable part for me to approve of. Now that is definitely acceptable behavior. It is especially nice that, between he and Marcello (who does catch rodents, too), the grains in full view of any grain-eating animal are kept completely safe.
The only downside to the cats in real terms (since the terrorizing of visitors can sometimes be helpful) is that we occasionally find the head of an acorn woodpecker or a pile of feathers. We bird lovers disapprove severely. We once watched, in disbelief, as Marcello stalked and caught a California Towhee scratching nearby. Cats are fast, even crazy ones. We subsequently chased him all over the garden till he let it go, unharmed, to fly away.
Now for our front-door cats. Vanilla is older, so she goes first. Vanilla initially belonged to Ellen's daughter, and is still supported by her in Vanilla's old age of 19 (or so). This is no small contribution, since Vanilla now scorns hard, dry, tasteless food for that most deliciously palatable of treats, wet canned cat food. We learned from a friend in the Bay Area, who used to work as a meat inspector, what exactly goes into canned cat food. We're not telling Vanilla, though, because then she would demand grade A something. Vanilla, being long-haired, demands some effort for grooming. I am told she used to keep up her hair-care very well, but she isn't so diligent anymore. So Margo and I got a little pink brush to help her out. She hates it, but looks better as a result. Among Vanilla's other oddities is a spot on her head that has never had fur, as I am to believe, though I have never heard why. On a long-haired cat this is a little disturbing. I brought it up to my visiting Aunt who remarked, dismissively, "It's a cat. Leave all the bones in one room and it'll heal." Vanilla is the exception (in the case of this spot of mange, anyway). I'm pretty sure it's karmic. She used to be a hell-raiser, apparently, having once caught a squirrel, killed it, and left its head on the pillow of her young owner. Wow! This is the kind of thing she was capable of back in her time, and this is why Ellen maintains that Vanilla deserves whatever she wants. (This is also why Vanilla does not gain access to our house).
Finally we have Smootches. For the first few months we were here she was known as "Mark's Cat" and assumed to be male. Mark is our neighbor. Poor Smootches first met me when someone had left the door to the attic, which is externally accessed, open, and she went in to live. I crawled back among the rafters and insulation to get her, but she was pretty much feral. We were both traumatized. I left the door open and eventually she decided she didn't want to live there, but still hung around the house and garden. Ellen had fed her at the same place Vanilla ate, because she was there anyway, begging for food. At some point Ellen brought it up with Mark, who said "That's not my cat." That is when we started trying to make friends, and, between Margo and myself we have made great progress. We started feeding both Vanilla and Smootches at our door, eventually coaxed Smootches close enough to touch, then pet, then hold. Our long term plan was to take her into the shelter (because we're leaving in the winter and NOT taking a cat with us), but she was way too shy to come inside, and still very jittery. So we decided to introduce her into the house for short periods of time, but only when Vanilla wasn't around, since we had made it clear to her that we didn't want her inside. (Vanilla can be very demanding). But there is something endearing about timidity, so Smootches is welcome whenever. And she has occasionally caught voles, which makes any cat good.

I'm not a Coward

In my reply to Jay's comment on the last post you'll notice he asked how people dehulled back in the day and, more notably, I gave suggestions that I had never tried and asked him to let me know if he learned anything. This was cowardly, which I realized shortly after posting it. I'll seek to redeem myself with this post, after a day of experimentation.

In her invaluable book on homesteading skills, The Encyclopedia of Country Living (which I would recommend to anyone who wasn't alive during the depression), Carla Emery talks about hulling wild rice. She quotes a description by the USDA in 1885 on the "parching" process Native Americans used to loosen hulls: "It [the grain] is laid on scaffolds about four feet high, eight wide, and twenty to fifty long, covered with reeds and grass, and a slow fire is maintained beneath for thirty-six hours, so as to parch slightly the hull, that it may be removed easily." Wow. Then they would put it in a skin-lined hole in the ground and stomp on it. Commercially wild rice is parched in bushel quantities in big metal cylinders over a fire.

Under hulling in other grain sections she refers to this parching procedure and recommends following this with a once-through in a grinder set at 1/16 of an inch. Garden Manager Ellen says she has often put it through our electric grinder, set wide-open.

This is all I knew this morning.
I started with a very small quantity (~4 ounces) of Perfectly Awnless (but obviously not hull-less) Wheat, and divided it in half. One half I ran through the grinder, set wide open. The other half I parched in a cast-iron skillet over a gas stove, stopping as some of the hulls started to seem scorched and some of the grains started popping. This I followed by putting it in a box with hardware cloth on the bottom and grinding it with my foot. I can say, from trying both, that the grinder worked fine, though it broke many of the grains and ground some flour even though it was set to its widest. The parching went well, and clearly loosened up the hulls, which allowed the grains to leave very easily. I secretly decided right then that I preferred the parching method because, though it required flipping grains smallish amounts at a time, things come out tidier and whole. The fact that the grinder produced flour, cracked grains and whole grains all at the same time seemed a bit sloppy.
This was educational, but it was on too tiny a scale to mimic even the small amounts of grain that we grow, let alone the amount someone would grow for sustenance. So I went a step further. I had a bag of Farro wheat, which has tenacious hulls paired with nasty awns, those pin-like things sticking out of picturesque wheat heads. It was about 24 ounces of material, so I divided it in half and went at it.
Notes:
First of all, each half had a number of grains that had come out during threshing, so I tried to remove as many of those as I could before proceeding. I set them aside (after weighing) as the seed stock to plant next year.
Grinding was frustrating for a couple of reasons. The awns did a good job of blocking the hole, so I had to keep poking at it. Once through the grinder I took the results outside, sifted the flour, then winnowed the chaff. I was left with plenty of broken grain of different sizes, some whole grains, some still in hulls, and a bunch of awns that were too aerodynamic to blow away. After spending a lot of time separating the remaining hulled grain out, I ran it through the grinder again. And then separated it out again. A point about growing your own food: you will never get all the dirt off, and you will consume a few more bugs and a little more fiber than store-bought stuff. I'm ok with that. I'm not sure about 1.5" awns in my flour, but maybe that's good for me too. The thing that would have made this a better possibility is using a hand-powered grinder, since then you can feel the resistance and work with the grain better. Being able to open the stones wider than our grinder permits would have been nice, too.
Parching was not as smooth as with the Awnless, probably because there was more of it. After trying to toast the whole thing at once I divided the batch into two, and it was still a lot. I am not sure I toasted it enough, as it was. When it came to the crushing with my foot many grains came out easily, but some were persistent. I parched these once more and they became easier. The nice thing about the parching vs. grinding was that after parching the awns all broke off completely and became a non-issue. Hooray! The resulting grain looked a lot nicer, because it was mostly clean and completely whole. The parching process took a lot longer than the grinding, but that was because This American Life came on in the middle, and I had to listen intermittently. It would have taken a little less time than grinding, I think, because I didn't need to spend as much time sorting it.
Starting out with 12 ounces of each I ended up with 7 ounces of "grinder-hulled" and 7.5 ounces of "parching-hulled." Not sure what that means.
Conclusion
It seems like it takes a long time to process a little grain this way. I'd imagine that practice and a perfected process would help some, but it is not a speedy thing. Something else to note is that hulled grains store much better in their hulls, so you might do this kind of procedure on demand. Maybe set all those farm kids on it. Also keep in mind that both processes affect the viability of the grains (they won't germinate after being cracked or heated up in a skillet) and the grain will germinate straight out of the hull when planted, so there is no need to hull the seed you want to grow out.
Why bother with hulled varieties, then, if they are such a pain? Because they are pretty and we love them. Also because you'll lose much fewer mature grains to birds, wind, and whatever else, since they are locked in. The last reason was mentioned in the last post, too, which is that some of the hulled varieties have nutritional benefits not available in hull-less varieties.
Whew. I think I'll take a break on grains for a while. They wore me out today! So let it not be said that I shied away from a challenge. I may be silly, but I'm not a fraidy-cat.

You Must Thresh It

A request was put in for me to hit on the topic of grain threshing by some fellow agricultural enthusiasts on the other coast, Ryanne and Jay, who, much more tech-savvy than I, have a website (RyanIsHungry.com) on the theme of sustainability and survival. They came out to a 3-Day Workshop a bit ago. Check out their site and, especially pertaining to our work here, Ryanne's post on their garden. This gardening stuff is addictive and contagious.

Having just put together my class on grains (Amaranth to Wheat, and all points between) and presented it to the folks up at Ecology Action I am both primed full of grainy information and in possession of time to write all about it. While I am now hyped to write a fiery treatise on the transformational power of growing one's own grains I'm going to save that for another time, when my head is clearer of self-righteous grain-cultivating fervor.

Let's talk about threshing instead! Threshing is technically the act of removing seed from its stalk, though it gets more complicated with some grains. The trouble comes with the hull, a protective layer around the seed that, in the case of a few wheats, most barleys, and all oats and buckwheat, is a particular pain. These few grains, once threshed, remain in the iron grip of their hulls.

But let's leave this unhappy bit for a while to dwell simply on threshing.

Violence is the only answer when threshing. I don't know about Dr. Martin Luther King, jr., but I think Ghandi and Jesus would be with me on this one - they were in touch with their agricultural roots. Back in the day grain stalks were tossed on the threshing floor and beaten thoroughly with flails. It is energy intensive, but it works. The importance of this technique is shown by the fact that one of the pharaohs' symbols of leadership was the flail. At this point there are as many ways to thresh as there are grain growing inventors, and since Ancient Egypt people have developed many machines and techniques to achieve one simple result. I am expert in none of them except the marvelous device we use here in the Golden Rule garden. Before we delve into that one, though, I'll mention the other equipment I have used - two small-scale threshing machines. One is foot powered (with a treadle), a simple metal box holding a cylinder which spins on a horizontal axis. The cylinder has metal projections, which do the work of threshing. You get it going and, holding onto the stalks, put the heads against the spinning cylinder. The grain and chaff are, together, knocked out the open back unless you rig up something to catch it.

The other machine is similar in function, except that there is an electric motor to power the cylinder and a fan that blows away the chaff, and there is a chute to collect the grain in one place.

Both machines are produced by CeCoCO, a Japanese company, and must be purchased through an importer. The company is kind of hard to figure anything out about, so if anyone reading this does, let me know. I am told the machines cost around $2,000 and $5,000, respectively. They both look very nice and work well, but I wouldn't buy one because I am cheap. Also because I am completely happy with the setup we have here which is cheap, good and with more tweaking could be even better.

Our thresher was envisioned by a past intern, Tom, and constructed by Garden Manager Ellen and her husband. Patent pending, I'm sure :)

They started with a 4x8' plywood board, 3/4" I think, nailing it to a frame of 2x4's laid flat to make the whole assembly around 2" tall. In each end are pounded two big fat nails, about 1' from the corners.

Next they took a 4x8' piece of hardware cloth with 1/2" squares and sandwiched each end with two pieces of 3/4" plywood, 2"x4'. Finally, they drilled two holes in each end of the sandwich to correspond with the "big fat nails" in the platform. Hopefully the photos will be helpful.

What you end up with is a platform with hardware cloth stretched across and held in place, a state-of-the-art foot-powered threshing device. Spread your grains, imagine playing Dance Dance Revolution, and thresh away! When you are finished, take one end of the hardware cloth off the nails and pick it up to clear off the bigger material, sweep off the grains and chaff underneath, and winnow it to reap the cleaned grains.

Here are a couple of pictures from when friends Shawn and Ryan visited. They were, understandably, excited about grains and threshing. You'll see the feet of Shawn and me threshing Jet Barley and then of Ryan winnowing the chaff from another grain in front of a box fan.

So an ordinary person, especially one who has threshed with a machine, might say "well, that looks fun for a while, but generally is an inefficient use of time and energy." To which I would ask "Where are you getting the energy to power your machine, and what better do you have to do than spend some quality time creating your own fresh food?" But only if I was in a feisty mood. More likely I would say "In my experience, this technique can be almost as fast as one of the machines, when assisted by a couple of friends, and is so much cheaper it's almost funny. Almost."

If I may stand on my soapbox for a moment: Agriculture was never meant to be done individually, and suffers from being done in the fastest way possible. We're talking about food, here. It is work, yes, but can be a joy when done with others. Agriculturally there is nothing more important than creating the highest quality stuff possible. It is not about fast, and when you get stuck in that rut farming becomes a ball and chain.

Whew, I feel better now!

Ok, so now we have hulling, which I have put off to last because I have no easy answers. Similar to threshing the answers all involve either lots of time, money, or ingenuity. Probably a combination of all three. Here is a photo of one of the older varieties of wheat which, though they have less of the protein that causes wheat allergies, also have some wicked hulls. As I said, many varieties of barley are thus cursed, as are all oats and buckwheat. Mind you, all grains have hulls, some are just not as persistent. There are "hull-less" varieties of oats, which are simply a little less difficult to extract from their hulls.

How do we remove the hulls? Often by hand, though not by peeling them. That would be waaaaay too tedious, even for me. Rolling them between your hands can work, rubbing them between pieces of rubber can, too. I have seen some pretty cool hulling machines that have two big rubber-coated cylinders that spin against each other. That's all I know about that, except that you shouldn't try hulling oats with the above-mentioned hardware cloth thresher. They are soft enough that they get ground to a pulp. Very difficult to separate from the chaff...

Sorry about that lack of answer. I have bags of Early Stone Age wheat, Farro wheat, and two varieties of oats that I have threshed but not hulled, saving them for last because I'm not sure what to do with them. I'll let you know when I do.

One last little bit - that grain seed I had in jars? I checked the silica gel three days later, and it had already turned pink. Now I'm changing it out every couple of days until it remains blue and dry.

August 2011 Update:
Ecology Action has begun to put up a series of Self-Teaching videos on Youtube, and the one on harvesting shows the process I use above. The link to that video is here.

Sunshiny Goodness

Willits weather is funny, because it is completely unpredictable. It can rain in the middle of the summer, though it almost never does. It can frost in June, though it almost never does. It can be in the upper 70's for a week in January, though it almost never is. But there are annual trends, strange ones, by which you can judge how relatively odd the weather is, and people will say things like "Huh, this freakishly cool weather usually comes in June, not May," or "Huh, usually this week or so of beautiful weather hits in February, not right now." Which is what our Garden Manager, Ellen, said today. People who have lived here for more than 20 years can talk that way with some amount of confidence. For the rest of us it just seems like someone up there is rolling the dice to see what the day will look like.

As a bit of trivia, we here are apparently on the border of the Alaskan and Hawaiian jet streams, so when one of them has the hankering to go north or south a titch, well, we get unseasonable weather. I have come to think of all of the weather here as unseasonable.

The unseasonably nice weather in the past 5 days and the coming 6 or 7 days has us doing whatever we can in the garden. Weeding takes a high priority at all times, as does harvesting whatever is ready to be harvested. And this time of year, not being able to count on the cold coming back to stay, we prune when it looks like it could stay warm. Which was today.

Here we have Ellen hitting the Asian Pear tree hard, because it went wild last year. In the foreground are two Persimmon trees, one of which is getting the ax this year.

Another bit of garden trivia: two years ago the whole region had an overwhelming fruit year, and some of our trees, not pruned for bounty and not quite watched closely enough, split down to the ground. We lost a couple of plum trees and a peach tree. Or two peaches and a plum. Something like that. At any rate, the remaining trees got a good pruning last year, and then some unseasonably cold weather came along late Spring and took all the blossoms. No one anywhere near us had any fruit besides berries and such. No apples, pears, peaches, plums, persimmons... We were sad. The trees weren't, though, and put all their energy into new growth.
So today in the garden Ellen pruned, Margo weeded, and I harvested willow from our basket-willow stands. And we all watered for the first time this winter.

The beautiful weather came at a difficult time for Margo and me. In the apprenticeship program with Ecology Action we each plan and teach six classes a year to EA Director (and Golden Rule Advisor) John Jeavons and EA Garden Manager Carol. Our next classes will be presented this Thursday, mine on Grains and Margo's on Seed Saving. Naturally we would have preferred cold, rainy, prohibitive weather that would keep us out of the garden definitively. But there we were, in shorts and short sleeves, getting our vitamin D.

To follow up on my last posting about putting all our precious grain seed away in plastic, I got out our store of silica gel and baked it. Silica gel is useful because it absorbs water, but it is fun because it's treated with cobalt chloride, which is blue when the beads are dry and pink when wet. Now I think it would be less confusing if blue was wet and pink dry, but we don't live in a Harry Potter world and cobalt chloride doesn't work that way. All the same, it's a good time, the agricultural version of a hypercolor shirt.

So for posterity I put some crystals in a bowl of water to take a picture. Then I baked the whole bunch of them in the oven for a while at 200°F (that's how you're supposed to dry them) and put them in the bowl for another photo. I made some handy 1 cup envelopes out of paper, which breathes just fine, and am in the process of transferring seeds from plastic to paper. I will sprinkle some silica gel in the bottom of each jar, and watch it for a few weeks. If it turns pink, I'll put more in. That's how we learn, I guess...
Coming up next, by popular demand, threshing :)

Pathetic Offspring

We love our grains dearly, and so when one (or all) of them goes astray it pains us all the more. Especially when the fault can so clearly be traced back to us.

This is what a bad grain year looks like for the Golden Rule (speaking specifically in terms of fall and spring grains, like wheat and rye). Here is the entire grain harvest for the 2008 season. In the photo you have two points of reference, a CD in front and a gallon jar in back. A third point of reference that may be helpful is the area we grew in grains last year (1,318 square feet) together with the total weight of the grains (54.56 lb) and the fact that, subjectively speaking, we usually do much better than that...

Objectively speaking we have three categories of goals for yields in anything we grow: beginning, intermediate, and high. "Beginning" is for if the grower is facing impediments, like lack of experience, poor soils, uncooperative weather, things of that nature. "Intermediate" is what we aim for. We aim for "High" yields, too, but more in the way a child of a past generation might hope for a Red Ryder BB gun. Beginning, intermediate and high yields for these fall and spring planted grains are, respectively, 4, 10, and 20+ lb. per 100 square feet. So in a bed of 5X20' we might expect to get 10 pounds of grain and hope for more.

When you do the math, you see that we got an average of 4.13 lb/100 square feet. Now you would notice if you could see my spreadsheet that our 160 sq ft of cereal rye this year did produce 11.09 lb/100sq ft (of which we are all proud), but it was the clear exception. On the whole, for our fertile soil and doting love, we got abysmal yields.

At which point were our babies led astray? Well, one could point to the wildfires that plagued Mendocino County, despite the firefighters' best efforts, clouding the air with smoke and drastically cutting down photosynthesis for at least a month and a half. We're sure this was to blame for many of the other low yields we saw this year. But the sad truth is that the grains were at their last stages of maturity then, their chlorophyll having departed for greener pastures (ha ha ha).

No, we had no one but ourselves to blame, and let this be a lesson to all of you out there. Reap the wisdom from our thickly sown sloth: weed your grains virtuously! Also your garlic, onions, flax and things. But if you would not be thrown into strings of foolish excuses when your visitors say "Huh, I never realized wheat was so short," weed them when they need it! Grains just can't compete.

I guess I'll follow that up with a nice photo, cause even though they were really sad looking, they were our grains and we love them. Here you see some of them at the end of their lives. That green tint in the closer bed of yellowed wheat is volunteer chamomile, happily prospering. A little information: we plant nearly everything on offset spacing rather that rows. Fall and spring grains are planted on 5" centers. We put stakes and string up around the beds to give them support. The closer you plant grains the better they produce (to a point), but as they cram together they are also prone to "lodging," which is when they meet rain or wind and lose (fall over). Hence the stakes and string.

The winter season calls us to organize ourselves, and I attacked our seed shelves recently, trying to figure out how many species, varieties, and years of grains we had stored for use. There were many jars, bags, or packets from previous years, but since most of the grains were grown last year we can choose to store the freshest seeds. Then I consolidated them, made a list, and stored as much as we might want for seed in the coming years. (I plan to cycle those out when we have harvested and threshed this year). The picture shows the grains all packed in plastic bags inside jars. I just learned this morning from EA's Garden Manager that this is a big no-no. Any moisture in there will wreak havoc on the seeds, rendering them non-viable. So we'll go get some silica gel, which absorbs moisture, and put it in each of the baggies. The rest of the seed goes on the table by the flour grinder, ready to be turned into something tasty and healthy.

Grains are a joy to all of us here, but, lest you think we are more impressive agriculturalists that we really are, I must say we don't come anywhere close to growing all the grain that even Margo and I consume in a year, let alone the community. Grain, even intensively grown as we do it, demands a lot of space. We do it here a little for fun but mainly for experience, biomass for compost (more about these practices soon) and to acclimatize varieties to this region.

I will end this post by parading past you the names and varieties of grains we have in stock, like the abused but victorious personalities they are, proudly marching to the grinder...

• Wheat: Pacific Blue Stem, Red Fife, Kamut, Huron, Lavras, Hard Red Spring, Hard Red Winter, Emmer, Black Emmer, Maris Wigeon, SS791, Square Head Masters, Chidham Red Chaff, Colona Lunga, Turkish Red Winter, Perfectly Awnless, Alaska Spelt, Early Stone Age, and Farro
• Rye: Cereal and Akusti
• Triticale: Pika, Musky and Juan
• Oats: Paul and Shelly
• Barley: Karan 16, Schrene, Tibetan, Sangatsuga, Naked, Ethiopian, Faust, and Jet
  

You Have to Start Somewhere

And this is where it all starts for us - with our eyes on a tasty, wholesome meal. We try to reflect before breakfast, lunch, and dinner on where our food came from, and today we had one of those excellent meals that, except for a little salt, pepper, baking soda and powder and a pad of butter, came from our own garden. We had black bean soup with black beans, veggie broth, cayenne pepper, onions, green pepper (dried), garlic, leeks, cilantro, and lemon juice (from trees in the greenhouse). Our salad had lettuce, carrots, daikon radish, and flax seeds. The cornbread was made with corn (wachicha flint), barley (jet), thyme, and veggie broth for the moisture. It may seem a simple meal, but the background makes it fascinating as well as nourishing.
Our daily life here involves an intimate relationship with food as well as with weather, soil, wildlife, compost, tools, ingenuity, sweat, and every once in a while a forgotten greenhouse tomato, halfway frozen and consumed by mold.
In this blog I hope to record the goings-on of the Golden Rule Garden for family, friends, neighbors and other interested parties.
Now a little bit about the situation. The Golden Rule Garden has two goals in its scope: to meet some of the food needs of the community here, and to provide experience and a learning environment for Ecology Action interns and apprentices that help out. It has been chemical-free (not card-carrying USDA "organic") for its entire history, tinkered with Biodynamic principles for some time in the 1990's, and is now using the GROW BIOINTENSIVE® system (hereafter generally referred to as biointensive) which is researched and taught by Ecology Action. More on that in future posts.
In ~2001 the Garden Manager (whose name I will add when I get her permission) took part in Ecology Action's summer course, and it is since then that the garden and community have been host to EA interns and apprentices. They live on site and, in exchange for helping the Garden Manager grow food for the community, get a section of the garden to manage on their own, practicing the techniques they learn during the summer course. Currently there are two 3-year apprentices here - Margo and myself. The 6-month summer course begins in April, and that is when the interns will arrive.
As the side bar indicates, the garden is in almost coastal California (which means the extremes we experience are about 5 miles away from moderate). The area is approximately 11,000 square feet (about 1/4 of an acre), and is in the format of beds, between 3.5 and 5 feet wide. We get a lot of rain, but none of it comes in the main growing season.
Temperatures deserve their own paragraph.
It gets below freezing, but not far enough or long enough that we can't grow some things like Fava Beans, rye, wheat, lettuce, and the hardier greens through the winter. It can get very hot, with highs peaking at 115°F for a week or more. The fascinating thing is that nights, even during those hot times, rarely stay above 60°. For the folks in the midwest and south (I guess) this gives you cause to pity us. For those heat-loving crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, etc. processes really slow down below 60. So you may be used to coming out in the morning and seeing your plants a foot taller than when you left them the night before, but that's not what happens here. They pretty much pout until the sun comes out and warms them again. Then, when it gets hot in the middle of the day, they will shut down again. Corn, for one, does not like temperatures above 95°F, and will close itself up to preserve water. In certain weather, then, we have plants virtually shutting down twice in a 24-hour cycle in the middle of the main growing season. All our beautiful weather has its limitations, agriculturally.
That's the background, and that's where I'll leave the post for today. Many intriguing tidbits are on the way, and I have pictures to prove it. So stay tuned...