Monthly Archives: January 2012

My Not So Friendly Back Yard Predators

Posted on January 15, 2012 by AnnieRie

We have lots of wild animals around here. Fox, possum, groundhogs, deer, field rats, mice, vultures, snakes …

… to name a few, but today I am going to focus on the hawks.

I have two or three different types that wander through, and occasionally they decide to stay and hunt. The one above, which looks like a Cooper’s Hawk, has been spending almost every day in our meadow looking for rodents. The weather being warmer than normal means the little mice and rats seem to be active in the fields.

Sharp Shin and Cooper’s are the two most common visitors here. When it snows, they love to buzz the feeders and grab mourning doves. Then I get to clean up the mess of feathers in the yard. When the Blue Jays are around, they will chase the hawk, ganging up and flying behind. The jays and the red bellied woodpecker will come up close and eat when there is snow. It does attract the hawks though, and mostly mourning doves seem to fall prey.

They get very brazen too, and decide my patio furniture is a great spot for resting and checking out the scene. They do sometimes perch on the bird bath and get water.

The circle of life here not that far from the cities. The plans we are making to add chickens here need to take into account the natural enemies that also reside in our woods behind the meadow.

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Winter CSA Week Three and a Visit to Breezy Willow

Posted on January 14, 2012 by AnnieRie

Thanks to Victoria at The Soffritto, I found out Breezy Willow Farm Store is open on Saturdays, so today we went to get flour, cheese, and onions. I think I took the same picture as she did, so I won’t add it here. I emailed Union Mills in advance to ask about the flour and found it to be mostly all local. The whole wheat is from a bit farther away, but does include some VA and PA grown wheat.

I need to add them to our local resource page.

Yesterday, at 4 PM, I heard the cooler being closed on the front porch, which means CSA delivery. I really like getting food delivered to my front porch on Fridays. I could get used to it.

I had chosen:
beets
red potatoes
micro greens
cabbage
collard greens
grapefruit from Florida

We also got: All Beef Franks, and my bi-weekly dozen eggs

The greens looked so great. I used the salad spinner to clean them up, and made a great salad later to have with homemade beef vegetable soup that had been simmering in the crockpot.

I definitely agree with our CSA coordinators that a salad spinner, or two, is the way to go when cleaning greens, and for storing them. Every week I clean up and prep the greens to have instant access to fresh beautiful vegetables.

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Finding a CSA That Fits

Posted on January 13, 2012 by AnnieRie

We just signed up for the spring/summer CSA with Sandy Spring. They use the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative as the source for their shares. They offer vegetable, fruit, herb and flower shares as well as a buying club.

We used them last summer and fall. The summer pickup point was a new one, at the Conservancy where I volunteer. The fall pickup point was down in Columbia Maryland, a little less convenient for us, but the only local option for a fall CSA that fit in the gaps.

We are currently in The Zahradka Farm winter CSA, using a partial share and bi-weekly eggs, and weekly meat. They deliver right to our front porch in the winter, which is very convenient. Winter shares are more limited in items, but do keep me in local eggs and local meats.

We thought long and hard before joining a CSA, with the usual worries. Will we get weird vegetables that we won’t eat. Will we drown in corn or tomatoes or cucumbers. I grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, herbs and sometimes squash. The stink bugs are hurting us and this past year I knew I needed a source that wouldn’t be as susceptible to them.

The local CSAs in Maryland do offer much of the same things that Sandy Spring offers, but with the sheer size of the coop (somewhere between 70-80 farms across the Lancaster area), we took the chance and signed up last March. We were supposed to get 7-10 items every week. We never got less than 10, and some weeks there were fourteen items in the box. The variety was amazing. I did a spreadsheet that showed we had over 100 different items, and none of them more than 9 weeks of the 25 week season. The winners were broccoli and eggplant.

We tried new things, like salsify, and tatsoi, and fell in love with garlic scapes.

We know that many of our friends do not eat enough vegetables to buy a full share. Other local CSAs offer half shares, which are a better fit for someone who eats out often, or who isn’t a big veggie eater. We also see great CSAs that offer eggs, or breads, or specialty items. They work well for those who don’t want to see 12 different veggies every Monday. We get eggs from a friend in the summer, in exchange for tomatoes and other veggies from our garden, so don’t need eggs from the CSA. We buy our meats in the summer at the farmer’s markets locally. We also don’t eat enough bread to get it weekly. We passed on the bread option from our winter CSA.

Doing a little research into the typical items, and the location, date, time and method of pickup will help someone find an option that fits them. And, that supports those small farmers local to your area. We found we almost never went to the chain grocery stores all summer, and that we do minimal shopping there now in the winter.

Next year I intend to can, freeze, or dry whatever I can’t use immediately to minimize my reliance on processed foods.

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At the Most Elementary Level …

Posted on January 11, 2012 by AnnieRie

…knowing where our food comes from.

As a volunteer naturalist at the Howard County Conservancy, I have been lucky to meet and interact with some incredibly talented knowledgeable scientists as well as some amazing individuals passionate about the land and our future.

Next week a presentation of Dirt: The Movie will take place on Thursday night. Additionally, nationally known soil scientist Patrick Drohan will be on hand to introduce the film and lead the audience discussion that follows. Dr. Drohan was instrumental in the creation and design of the Smithsonian’s exhibit on soil, the most ambitious exhibition ever dedicated to soil.

The Conservancy website has all the details.

I have learned so much by attending events and walks at this preserved farm just north of the city of Columbia. This program promises to add more to my knowledge that will help me in making my little farmette more productive, by taking care of the soil.

In my retirement, I vowed to continue to learn and explore, and to give my time to endeavors that I believe to be valuable. It is the middle of winter here, and I don’t intend to hibernate. Hope to see others attend.

Dark Days Week Seven Sunday Dinner

Posted on January 10, 2012 by AnnieRie

Honestly, if I didn’t get the salsify from the CSA the end of December, I would never have found my newest favorite vegetable.

Ugly looking vegetable, isn’t it? But it ended up in a lovely dinner of beef sausage, baked red cabbage and apples, and fritters made simply with the salsify. I do need to work on my photography skills though, as the cabbage and apples had juices running all over the plate. I suppose I can’t qualify for cooking magazine photographer, can I?

The salsify recipe came from vintage recipes and I chose the salsify fritters recipe from the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. I made it using local butter from Blue Ridge Dairy, and the spelt flour from The Common Market Coop bulk foods bin. It was really great tasting, just like described, reminding us of oysters.

The sausages were placed in a small pan in the oven to brown. The red cabbage from the last week of our fall CSA were placed in a deep baking dish with apples from the Leesburg Farmer’s Market (I forgot to record which farm we bought them from), apple cider from Heyser Farms Colesville MD, honey from Baugher’s Westminster MD, and baked with the sausage. Baked it all at 300 degrees, for about an hour to get the beef sausages to caramelize.

Finished it all off with some pumpkin ice cream left in the freezer from our earlier trip to Baugher’s.

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Winter CSA Week Two

Posted on January 9, 2012 by AnnieRie

I am getting used to having someone drop food on my front porch. I like the delivery aspect of this CSA, even though winter food choices get a little boring, so to speak. Still, the meat choices are interesting, and I get eggs every other week.

This week I chose:
French Breakfast Radishes
Celery
Sweet Potatoes
Large Spanish Onion
Broccoli crowns
Grapefruit (the citrus comes up from a farm in Florida, not local but really appreciated)

The meat this week was a heavy pound of Italian style beef sausages. I promptly used them in my Dark Days meal on Sunday, which I will post soon.

I like getting the smaller 6 item share. I alternate what I get week to week. If I had the 10 item share, it could get a bit boring in the winter without many choices of fresh produce available.

The beef sausage are Pleasantville Beef, in Forest Hill MD. Angus beef.

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Adventures in Food and Wine

Posted on January 8, 2012 by AnnieRie

Saturday here was lovely. One of those gifts of a day that you can’t waste indoors. We decided to bag the planned yard work, and the house projects and go for a ride.

We haven’t been to our favorite wineries in ten months. We have been pretty much home bound doing renovations and repairs, and the entire first year of my husband’s retirement had us working here and not playing. We vowed to remedy that lapse of adventures and trips this year.

We chose to travel the back roads to Virginia, and to stop at a popular year round farmer’s market in Leesburg on the way. I wanted to get some goodies from Mock’s greenhouse, but they weren’t there. Bummer! We did get some apples and some yoghurt and butter though.

We then went down to Linden Vineyards in Linden, VA. It is a lovely site just below the Appalachian Trail near Front Royal VA.

We did a cellar tasting of their new individual vineyard designated reds and chardonnays, and sat on the enclosed deck drinking a glass of library wine, the 2003 Claret. Jim Law, the owner and winemaker likes to open old wines in the winter and offer them by the glass paired with local cheeses and sausages. So, I could count this as a Dark Days lunch, but the baguette wasn’t local.

The 2003 Claret — in the winemaker’s words, from the Linden website library section:

Aromas:

Black raspberries and plums, aged balsamic, pipe tobacco and herbes de Provence.

Palate:

Pine resins, candied blackberry, tapenade and cedar; full bright acidity & gripping tannins.

Food Pairings:

Robust meat dishes with reduction sauces.

Vineyard:

Hardscrabble Vineyard (65%), Fauquier Co. on top of the Blue Ridge at 1,300 to 1,400 feet with an eastern to southern slope. Deep, well-drained mineral soils give cherry character and good structure. Vine ages from 12 to 19 years. Glen Manor Vineyard (25%), Warren Co. is on the western slope of the Blue Ridge about 7 miles west of Linden Vineyards at an elevation of 1,100 feet. The deep, fertile soils give roundness. The vines are 9 years old and trained on the French lyre system. Avenius Vineyard (10%), Warren Co. is just 1 mile north of Linden Vineyards at 1,300 feet contributes good acidity and verve. Vine age is 7 years.

Vintage:

2003 was a difficult vintage both in terms of yields and concentration. As the growing season unfolded, it became evident that in order to ripen our red grapes we would have to greatly reduce yields. This is because of a cool, cloudy summer that slowed vine and fruit development. Severe cluster thinning began in July and continued into September. It was not until October that we experienced some good warm sunny weather. Harvest was from October 20 to November 10, 2003. No single vineyard wines were bottled in 2003. All our best vineyard sites were declassified into this Claret.

Winemaking:

Native yeast, warm fermentation and early pressing give the wine its pretty aromatics and supple texture. Aged in 50% American oak, 20% Hungarian puncheons, and 30% French oak for 19 months. 65% Cabernet Sauvignon, 23% Cabernet Franc, 12% Petit Verdot. 1,040 cases produced.
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As you can see, we love going to Linden. Jim Law is a master, called a perfectionist by many, and cares deeply about what he grows, makes and sells. Sitting on the deck and watching the skyline changes on the Blue Ridge Mountains is one of our favorite activities. We also bought some wine to bring home and cellar.

We then wandered down to Glen Manor, sitting just below Shenandoah National Park and the Skyline Drive. From the description above of Linden’s Claret, you can see that Jeff White used to grow grapes for Jim at Linden, but for the past few years has opened his own winery. His setting is even more spectacular, and you can sit outside and watch the cars far up in the hills driving the Skyline Drive.

He makes just a few wines so far, but still some winning varietals. His sauvignon blanc is made in the style of a New Zealand wine, all citrusy and perfect to pair with seafood. We had to indulge in some of it to bring back for a treat for seafood dinners.

All in all, a beautiful day in the mountains just two hours southwest of us.

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Feeding My Fine Feathered Friends

Posted on January 3, 2012 by AnnieRie

The winter feeding site. The place where the birds come when the berries and seeds have all blown away or been eaten. We moved here in the winter and found an amazing array of birds living in our coniferous trees. I have slowly created a habitat that attracts and retains this variety. What does it give me? Birds to eat the bugs that bother my garden.

How do I keep them fed during the worst storms of the winter?

You do have to be prepared. After that storm, I was throwing seed out the door onto the hard snow under the bushes. It brought birds up close and personal.

But my best investment was a thermostatically controlled heating pad for the bird bath. Water is extremely important for the health of the birds. Even with 48 inches of snow on the ground, my backyard birds had water.

Since that series of blizzards in 2010, I have added a few more feeders and kept them topped off when I know storms are coming. And for me, the pleasures of watching them feed are worth the expense and effort to feed them.

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Dark Days Week Six Happy New Year!

Posted on January 2, 2012 by AnnieRie

We ended up staying home on New Year’s Day. We had been out three of the last five nights, and were not in the mood to drive to relatives. We wanted to finish some outside work before it got windy so I decided to make a crockpot beef dinner.

I turned it into a Dark Days Meal. All thrown together in the crockpot. I made:
Local Beef Short Ribs
Potatoes
Leeks
Red Onion
Tomato Sauce
Kale
Napa Cabbage
Carrots

First though, I browned the beef ribs. They were from Triadelphia Lake View Farms, and bought at the farmer’s market earlier this year.

The tomato sauce is from Quaker Valley in PA. I used it to augment the tomato/veggie sauce I had made earlier this week using stuff from my garden and the CSAs that I found in the freezer. It made a rich sauce that coated the kale and cabbage. I placed the beef on top of it all with salt, pepper, cinnamon, garlic, dried peppers (grated), and a touch of local honey. All the veggies were CSA veggies from Zahradka Farm or Lancaster Farm Fresh Coop.