It’s Tu B’Shevat – Happy New Year to the Trees

One of my favorite trees, Camellia Tree flowering in the snow

(Note: This piece originally ran on 1/24/13 in the Washington Jewish Week). Did you know Tu B’Shevat coincides with Shabbat this year and starts tonight?  A January Tu B’Shevat is one of the first signs that the Jewish holidays will come early this year. You may have heard that the first night of Hanukkah will fall on Thanksgiving this fall. We will have to stay on our toes and keep our Jewish calendars close at hand in 2013.

It’s not just the Jewish calendar that seems to be coming fast this year. Spring is on its way to Washington early too. Friends are already reporting bulbs emerging in their gardens, rosemary plants flowering and even a purple crocus.  While some years we really have to use our imagination to envision flowering trees on Tu B’Shevat, this year we can be a bit more literal and find actual signs of spring in our area.

Tu B’Shevat is the New Year of trees in Israel and the time that the almond trees burst into full bloom and many people plant trees.  Tu B’Shevat is a great time to think about what trees offer and to teach children a little bit about ecology, gratitude and Israel. Trees hold soil down to prevent erosion, clean our air and provide fruit, habitat for animals, shade and beauty. Here in the Washington area, it is too early to put tender saplings in the ground. We can still have plenty of snowy weather ahead. But it is a great time to go outside with children, search for signs of spring and do some tree related activities.

Some people recommend planting parsley seeds on Tu B’Shevat with hopes of using the parsley as part of the Passover Seder.  This is a very nice idea, but as a farmer, I know that parsley is very difficult to germinate even with a professional set up. It might be more rewarding to plant seeds that are more likely to offer instant gratification by sprouting quickly.  Green beans or sunflower seeds are favorites for planting with children.  Young children will enjoy labeling their plants and checking on them every day.

On my family’s farm we have a very young fruit orchard that always needs attention this time of year. Some of the trees need to be tied up and others need to be mulched.  Since the holiday falls on Shabbat this year, we will not work on the orchard. The holiday will still be a good time to take a walk on the farm and inspect the trees. As of now, they are predicting a cold day for Tu B’Shevat, we might even have snow on the ground. That is good, because locally our fruit trees need a minimum number of cold days and nights before they can flower and set fruit.  So if it is too cold for a family hike, remember it might be just the kind of day fruit trees need.  Weather you get to synagogue for a full Tu B’Shevat Seder or just manage to appreciate the trees around your neighborhood, I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful holiday.

The Fiscal Cliff and the Little Farmer

The following is a piece I wrote for my the Maryland Organic Food and Farming newsletter.(MOFFA).  If you live in DC or MD, come to our winter meeting (the 22nd annual!): details below.

Maryland Food and Farming Association

At the very end of the year, in the midst of fiscal cliff madness, Congress passed a controversial farm bill extension. Maybe you saw headlines like this one from the the Center for Food Safety, “Congress Passes Damaging Farm Bill Extension in “Fiscal Cliff” Package”. The extension of the farm bill contained many disappointments and has left the sustainable and organic agriculture community with lots of work to do.

Programs that were left out include funding for organic research and organic cost share. While this was a huge blow to activists working to improve the farm bill, it does give us an opportunity to get organized. Since the extension only goes 9 months, groups will get to work immediately to make sure the real 5 year farm bill extension is much better. Personally, I have to admit I was pretty surprised by the news. We know that public opinion is so strongly behind organics and local farms, even our awesome First Lady is advocating for healthy foods and gardens. As a country, I thought we were making clear progress. But until public opinion is reflected in national legislation, progress for organic farmers will slow to a crawl.

I think it is time for MOFFA to get serious as advocates for organics nationwide. I know we are all super busy and our organization is volunteer led, but I think we have to figure out how we can do more. There is grant money out there and many other statewide organic organizations manage to have staff. We are closer to Washington DC than most other organic agriculture organization. We don’t have to do it alone. We can form coalitions with groups like Future Harvest CASA, PASA, NOFA and MOFGA to develop a stronger voice that we can deliver to Washington in time for our next chance to influence the farm bill, which, by the way, starts now. Let’s talk about this at the winter meeting.

Meeting Details

22nd. ANNUAL MOFFA WINTER MEETING
Saturday Feb 16, 2013
Maryland Dept. of Agriculture, 50 Harry S. Truman Parkway, Annapolis

Babka Inspired Challah

This past Shabbat was cold and it was also sadly the end of Winter Break, so I felt we needed an extra sweet challah.  I bake challah almost every week, although I tend to slack off quite a bit in the summer when it seems wrong to turn on the oven.  But during these cold months, it is definitely high season for Challah.

I had been thinking about making a traditional babka based on this amazing looking recipe from the Smitten Kitchen which emphasizes the key to babka is the combination of cinnamon and chocolate (plus lots of butter).  I took that inspiration and tried a challah with plenty of cinnamon, chocolate chips, and extra sugar.  Otherwise I used my regular recipe and 100% whole wheat flour, so it was sweet and healthy too.

I will definitely be making this again, and I recommend it to any other bakers out there.  You just might have to be careful of little hands reaching in before you have said the blessings.  I don’t have recipe specifics, because when I make challah I sort of pour the ingredients into my mixer until it looks and feels right.  But you can start with any basic recipe and pretty safely wander off with additions!

I wish you a sweet week and thanks for reading!

Hurricanes, Elections and Croup (oh my!)

I want so much to make this little blog shine but I seem to be stumbling and falling over dozens of distractions and writing hurdles, large and small.  I will have to develop new strategies to keep writing even when it gets hard.  No need to leap hurdles gracefully when there are ways to crawl underneath, sneak around, or knock them down.

Here are 7 reasons my blog has been so quiet this fall:

1) We all had colds by many names: croup, regular colds, bronchitis, possible sinus infections. I lost lots and lots of sleep and spent what would have been my “writing time” googling my spectrum of concerns from “unnecessary antibiotics” to the very spooky sounding (tuh,tuh, tuh) “walking pneumonia,”  and “can you break a rib coughing?” (answer surprisingly yes, but I just pulled a muscle).

early in the day when she still thought her plastic pumpkin was for leaf collecting!

2) Somewhere in there I pulled together some pretty silly Halloween costumes at the last minute.   I am happy to have neighbors who plan elaborate parties, just showing up in costume seemed like enough effort this year.

Halloween was extra spooky this year with Hurricane Sandy and the election hanging over our shoulders.  But the costumes were cute.

3) Hurricane Sandy actually passed us by and we are so grateful that our hoophouses and farm were spared any real damage.   But there was still at least a week lost to preparing, fretting and battening down the farm, especially the hoophouses which continue to remind me of land ships that need to secured for rising tides and waves.  I learned that having Halloween candy in the house and worrying about an impending monster storm is a really bad combination, I ate way too many mini-chocolate bars.

Post Election Day Cake Miracle (Do you see the U.S. with a prominent Florida? Kind of, sort of? Stay with me here.)

4) Oh, yeah. The election happened, so I spent my writing time making calls for President Obama, praying that Nate Silver was right, fussing over the latest polls and eating yet more candy. What a happy election night it was for us!

5) I wrote a SARE farmer grant  for experiments with commercial scale low tech food dehydrators.   I spent other potential writing time immersed in amazing, brilliant design ideas from the past 50 years like this 1940′s model from UC Davis for a dreamy community scale dehydrator.  Think of all the kale chips you could make in here!

Organic Dates and Olive Oil from Israel

6)  My husband and I got caught up in some giant pre-Chanukah synagogue sales for our small business supporting farms in Israel.  If you want to fry your latkes in the best organic Israeli olive oil, you know where to come, just saying.

7) The moment I hit “new post” to write this piece a neighbor called to tell me there are horses loose in the road  by my house.  I don’t own any horses, but of course I got right up from my little writing station to rush out and see if I could help, even though I would have no idea how to handle a loose horse (here, horsey, horsey, horsey?)

SURPRISE BONUS ADD ON

8) And strange but true, I was ready to end my list at the lucky number 7, but my doorbell just rang. I assumed it was about the horses but for the first time in about 10 years a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by with just one question: “If you could ask God one thing what would it be.”   I told them it was a personal question and sent them on their way,warning them to drive slowly due to loose horses. Really, what’s next?

2012 Season in Review

bumper crop of blue bachelors buttons
(we dare you to say it 10 times fast)

By Jug Bay Market Garden’s Farmer in Chief,  Scott Hertzberg

This season was shaped by global warming more than any previous year.  We have never started the CSA so early. Prior seasons, we started in mid-May but this year we started in mid-April. Because the heat did not really kick in until late June, we were able to provide the CSA with weeks of spring crops.  We broke a record for how many straight weeks of head lettuce we harvested (8) and grew some of our best radishes, onions and potatoes.

winding row of spring onions

Everyone’s Favorite Chandler Strawberries

While climate change helped us have an extended spring, the changes had an overall negative impact on summer harvests. Because of the relentless heat, the squash and cucumbers came on early and heavy but the harvests did not last as long as in the past. We picked some crops for two or three weeks instead of four or five weeks. It was not hard to see what happened to the cucumbers.  We had three lush beds of them. For two weeks we picked hundreds of pounds of them and then the fruit got sunburned because it was not possible to give the plants enough water for the leaves to remain turgid and shading the cucumbers on the ground without watering all day every day.

Fortunately the other summer crops did better than the cucumbers but they all were stressed by the extreme heat.  As long time CSA member and meteorologist Jonathan Kesley pointed, the high night time temperatures were an even greater problem than the day time temps.  The true miracle of the season was the tasty tomatoes we grew in the unheated greenhouses. According to the agriculture extension both the day and night time temperatures were too hot for them to set fruit yet they somehow produced ample yields.

early and later summer crops

By August, the heat relented and we had a normal late summer and fall by the standards of the old agriculture extension planting schedules. We took a risk and planted the bulk of our greens in mid-August on the early side of the suggested planting window instead of waiting until early September when there would be less chance that high temperatures and insects would be a problem. The gamble was rewarded with timely rains, mild temps, few bugs and plentiful greens and root crops.

Every season is different in the Mid-Atlantic but I think what we saw this season is the new normal for our growing area. The good news is that we are going to have extended springs and fall harvests. The bad news is that most years the torrid heat is going to make things very difficult during late spring and much of summer.  The best thing to do seems to not fight it too much, get off to an early start and take breaks during the worst of the summer, just as we did this season.

Over all, we feel we did a good job this year and probably had one of the best seasons in the past five years. Sure there were some crops failures but we grew a great deal of produce each week.

This year we partnered with only two other farms. In addition to our produce the shares included vegetables from Ronald Zimmerman in the spring and Joe Goldsmith in the summer. We have been working with both for a long time and find their farms good fits with ours.  Like our farms, they our true small family farms with parents and children doing nearly all the work.  Also like our farm, both farms are truly local, situated well within both the metropolitan economy and reach of sprawling housing development. We are a mere 19 miles from Christ Church on Capitol Hill. The Goldsmiths are 22 miles away and Ronald in the Mennonite Community in Saint Mary’s County is 40 miles away.

There is of course room for us to improve. Next season we will strive to provide an average of ten different vegetables each week instead of an average of eight. We want to concentrate on growing more beets and sweet potatoes and even try carrots. We also want to grow way more watermelons, cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes and basil. We’ll grow a lot of garlic again like in other years.  Another big goal is to continue to mechanize by getting more skillful at planting and weeding with tractor equipment.

We hope you enjoyed the CSA season and look forward to reading your comments about what you like and how we can improve for next season. Thank you for participating in the CSA this year. We know there are a lot of options for seasonal produce and we appreciate you choosing the CSA. Below are a few pictures and final observations from the 2012 growing seasons.

watermelon harvest

pretty baby pole beans

multicolored turnips

Most plentiful crop:  Potatoes by far.  The most we ever have grown. Maybe some people tired of them but considering that we have had a few years with few potatoes we welcomed the abundance.

Best new grow: The fennel we grew this spring.

Worst new crop:  Some of the new suggested tomatoes varieties from Johnny’s seeds, namely Indigo Rose. Nice name, rotten tomato not worth picking for people to try.

Best new piece of equipment:  The hatfield transplanter.  Yes it is a hand tool and conflicts with our plan to mechanize more but it was a big time saver.

Greatest Improvement to Comfort in the Field: The cheap Coby ipod knock off which let me listen to NPR and music non-stop.  I had been relying on old fashion sports radios that are useless once you knock off the antenna. I purchased many of these radios and may have been the last American to buy them. The Coby has an internal antenna that actually works, better late than never.

Top First Aid Lesson:  Poison Ivy does get worse with multiple exposes however I think the reaction go down the if you manage not to touch it for a few years.  Also Techno really works to prevent the rash and the Techno scrub gets rid of the rash fast.

Most Desired Piece of Equipment for 2013:  A basket weeder to mount on the Farmall cultivating tractor.