Pot Luck

Tonight's Farmers March on Wall Street (4.00 / 3)

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by: Eddie C @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 04:18:22 AM UTC

One more (4.00 / 3)

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by: Eddie C @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 04:34:21 AM UTC

Great turnout in the afternoon too. (4.00 / 3)

Today's event was at the La Plaza Cultural Community Garden

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by: Eddie C @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 04:55:03 AM UTC

you oughta post these (4.00 / 3)

as a diary - I'll FP it. This is great!

"I can understand someone from Iowa promoting corn and soy, but we are not feeding the world, we are feeding animals and soft drink companies." - Jim Goodman

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by: Jill Richardson @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 06:20:58 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Front paged at Daily Kos (4.00 / 2)

Photos from the Farmer's March on Wall Street

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by: Eddie C @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 03:16:44 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Ooops! (4.00 / 3)

Didn't think it would get so cold here so fast. I was working on some gardening articles and didn't get out soon enough to disconect all the hoses and drain them this evening. Hoses frozen. Gonna have to wait until tomorrow afternoon when it warms up to do that.

Just got back in from the evening feeding and watering and when I went out an hour and a half ago it was 28° in the greenhouse.

Glad I've got plastic on all the tunnels and I didn't have to go out there and open any of them to work today.

It was nice out though. The humidity's low enough that 28° actually felt more like 40° to me. And the stars they were a'twinkling. If I'd had a full moon I wouldn't have even had to wear the head lamp.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 06:29:37 AM UTC

freezing here too (4.00 / 2)

OK, well by freezing I mean 37. And thank goodness for that. I don't think any of my plants would appreciate a freeze, although the peas could likely survive it. The other stuff, no.

"I can understand someone from Iowa promoting corn and soy, but we are not feeding the world, we are feeding animals and soft drink companies." - Jim Goodman

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by: Jill Richardson @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 07:29:33 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

I hear ya on that (4.00 / 2)

we got no upper level winds today which meant that it stayed foggy and/or cloudy all day in Mulino. Skies didn't clear until just before sunset, which I'm sure is why it got so cold so fast tonight. Glad I didn't have to open any of the tunnels today, so what little warmth there was is (hopefully) still in there.

I have to open the tunnels by noon Monday so I can do an inventory for my distributor. Would have been nice to have even an hour of sun by 2:00pm so the tunnels could warm up a bit before the cold hit again. I've got two part trays of radishes in the greenhouse as sentinels for freeze/frost damage, and so far they're OK, even with the greenhouse at 28° at 9:30pm. It gets colder in the greenhouse if I don't leave the lights on, than it does in the tunnels because the volume in the greenhouse is so much bigger and because there's better air exchange there as well. If the radishes are OK, then the micro greens should be OK as far as frost or freeze damage. My biggest hurdle right now is that because things are so cold, all the seedlings slow way down. With the micro greens, it's not so much the day length that affects the growth rate as the air and root temps.

Also, I'm NOT looking forward to dealing with frozen hoses tomorrow. I need to top off all the water troughs tomorrow and I'll probalby have to wait until 2:00pm or 3:00pm to do that, when/if they thaw. If we get another day like Sunday, I'll be breaking all the hoses down and loading them into a bath tub of hot water to thaw and drain them. Then I'll have to pack them all back out, hook 'em all up and top off the troughs, and when I'm done, disconect everything and walk hose to drain them. That's good for a couple three hours work...

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Mon Dec 05, 2011 at 09:02:56 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Yay! (4.00 / 2)

I should be picking up 50# of whole barley today. Had to special order it because the feed store only carries rolled barley in stock. I'll be using the barley for beer making and the spent grains from the mash will be fed to the chickens.

So, for one $15.99 bag of whole barley, I should get between 30 and 50 gallons of small beer (2%-3% alcohol) for drinking and cooking with, plus 50# of feed that will make a nice supplement to the forage that the hens are eating.

A lot of the starches will have been converted to sugars during the malting process, and a lot of those sugars will have been removed in the mash and sparging processes, but there will still be quite a bit of protein and minerals, etc.

What I'm working with is feed grade barley, which, if I understand things properly, will still probably be a 2 row barley, but it will have, for one reason or another, not tested good enough for malting barley.  

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 16:47:47 PM UTC

Good luck. (4.00 / 1)

Have you had successful trials with wheat?

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by: count @ Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 18:42:04 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Well Poo! (4.00 / 2)

My barley didn't come in yesterday. The feed store is going to reorder so hopefully it'll come in next week.

The wheat I've been working with has done wonderfully! I love malting grains. It's horticulture and chemistry all wrapped up into one process. And when I do the pale malt, the grains smell so good when they come out of the oven.

I haven't brewed any beer yet because, even with wheat beers, you want to use barley as well and I'm too cheap to drive all the way into Portland to buy 6 lbs. of already malted barley. I'm going to experiment with dark roasting some wheat and cooking with it. The darker the roast the sweeter the grain. When you go to do a dark roast, at least with barley, as I understand it, what you do is once the grain's acrospire has gotten to the proper length for a pale malt, then you mash it in hot water for a certain amount of time, and then you roast it at a higher temp for a shorter amount of time.

Patience. I keep telling myself, patience.....

I've done some cooking with the pale malt wheat I've made. I don't know which is better tasting, cooked pale malt wheat or wit beer. ;-)

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 23:54:57 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

The number one New York City farm subsidy... (4.00 / 2)

goes to a 12th floor apartment in Manhattan?  

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by: Eddie C @ Wed Dec 07, 2011 at 20:42:06 PM UTC

The next generation... (4.00 / 2)

Hopefully my niece will grow up with much better things to eat...

;)

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by: JayinPhiladelphia @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 12:39:36 PM UTC

What a cutie, Jay. (4.00 / 2)

And I'll bet that sleeve tastes better than you think.

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by: caseyOR @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 14:08:21 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

awwwwwwww (4.00 / 2)

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

"I can understand someone from Iowa promoting corn and soy, but we are not feeding the world, we are feeding animals and soft drink companies." - Jim Goodman

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by: Jill Richardson @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 16:57:57 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

ultra milk (4.00 / 2)

I needed some dairy for my continuing research in the world of egg nog. This morning, I wanted to buy some cream that was not ultra pasteurized. How difficult could that be? Impossible, in my neighborhood. No matter the brand - Organic Valley, Land o' Lakes, Horizon, house brand - everything is ultra pasteurized. No matter the product - skim milk, whole milk, half and half, cream, heavy cream - everything is ultra pasteurized. Once again, consolidation and nationalization means there is no choice in the industrial marketplace.

If everything on the liquid dairy shelf is ultra pasteurized, why do grocery stores maximize customer costs by roosting the stuff in an open (no doors) refrigerator case? It's not only inefficient, it's also useless. The products should be almost indefinitely stable at ambient temperature if the container isn't opened. One more instance of waste in the industrial system, and one more reason to buy dairy from a local farmer, if you can find one.

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by: count @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 14:47:05 PM UTC

That's amazing (4.00 / 2)

Kind of reminds me of an article on the milk industry in Canada that I was reading this morning. Just 3 large processors control the majority of cheese production in Canada. And commercial dairies are involved in a quota system. The government determines how much milk will be consumed in the country each year and allows dairies to produce to specific quotas each year. You can't produce as a commercial dairy unless you have a license and quota issued by the government. And once the quotas are all issued, you're not allowed to start a new dairy. It makes our heavily regulated dairy industry in the USA look like the free wheeling wild west.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Thu Dec 08, 2011 at 23:54:56 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I LOVE EGG NOG (4.00 / 2)

I have really dear friends that celebrate every holiday And I mean every holiday. Kevin was raised Catholic but he cooks an amazing Hanukkah brisket. This year I volunteered to make latkes ( I will be posting recipes Sat) And of course we will start with Kevins home made egg nog. Weavers Way where both of us shop carries a few brands of milk. 2 of the vendors are local MerryMead which I drink.
I'm assuming that both MD and PA require dairies to pasteurize milk?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... RonnyBrook farms which got #1 pasteurizes but doesn't homogenize its milk

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by: LeeN @ Fri Dec 09, 2011 at 11:41:04 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Most states require that milk sold in stores be pasturized (4.00 / 2)

I remember back in 1991, when I got Loiosh, I was able to buy raw goat milk in the store. I don't know if you can get that in the store in Oregon any more or not.

FDA, as I understand things, prohibits the interstate transport for sale of unpasturized milk. Intrastate would depend on the state in question.

I don't know if homoginization is required or not. I suspicion that creameries began to use homoginization to eliminate the cream line from milk. When you buy whole, unhomoginized, milk, you'll notice that the cream line will vary from bottle to bottle. I'd think that in that case, you'd notice that some of your bottles were flying off the shelves (the ones with the biggest cream line) while others just sat there.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Fri Dec 09, 2011 at 13:02:23 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Estabrook on organic ag (4.00 / 2)

Organic Can Feed the World

DEC 5 2011

"We all have things that drive us crazy," wrote Steve Kopperud in a blog post this fall
...

At the top of that heap, Kopperud put Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle
...

"There's a huge chunk of reality missing from Dr. Nestle's academic approach to life," Kopperud wrote. "The missing bit is, quite simply, the answer to the following question: How do you feed seven billion people today and nine billion by 2040 through organic, natural, and local food production?" He then answers his own question. "You can't."

As a journalist who takes issues surrounding food production seriously, I too have things that drive me crazy.

At the top of my list are agribusiness advocates such as Kopperud (and, more recently, Steve Sexton of Freakonomics) who dismiss well-thought-out concerns about today's dysfunctional food production system with the old saw that organic farming can't save the world. They persist in repeating this as an irrefutable fact, even as one scientific study after another concludes the exact opposite: not only that organic can indeed feed nine billion human beings but that it is the only hope we have of doing so.

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by: count @ Sat Dec 10, 2011 at 17:16:18 PM UTC

The beer brewing saga continues..... (4.00 / 2)

I picked up a 5 gallon Igloo cooler yesterday, and picked up some parts to retrofit the it into a mash tun (a container for mashing grains). The cooler's handy because it's insulated and will hold the heat for the 45-90 minutes it takes to mash the grains.

It was fun. I took the spigot assembly off of the cooler this morning and spent an hour going through plumbing parts trying to figure out what I needed to convert the cooler. I purchased a valve and the rest of the fittings and installed them, then did a water test to see that there weren't any leaks.

I also stopped by the feed store and picked up a sack of  white wheat. I have a bunch of hard red wheat that's already malted and now I have 80# of white wheat to malt.

Tomorrow I'll grind some grains and start my first batch of beer. It'll be an unhopped wheat beer. I'm going to have to make it with wheat only and spices because my barley didn't come in Tuesday like it should have. Hopefully it'll be here next Tuesday.

I'm going to be picking up hops and some different yeasts on Monday. I may also pick up some pale malted barley.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Sun Dec 11, 2011 at 06:15:45 AM UTC

grinding (4.00 / 1)

How will you grind the grain?

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by: count @ Sun Dec 11, 2011 at 09:51:09 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

yes.. (4.00 / 2)

is white wheat the same type of grain that King Arthur uses in their White Wheat Flour?

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by: LeeN @ Sun Dec 11, 2011 at 12:09:11 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

What King Arthur uses is no doubt (4.00 / 2)

hard white wheat for bread flour and all purpose. Hard wheat is better for bread making as it has a higher protein content than soft wheat. Pastry four, as I understand it, is more often milled from soft wheat.

I don't know if the wheat I bought yesterday is hard or soft. Or spring or winter wheat for that matter. I've been doing some research on wheat and the white wheat was bred from red wheat. Red wheat has a lot of tannins in the bran coat. That's what makes the bran dark. Unfortunately it's also what makes the bread bitter when only hard red wheat is used. To moderate that bitterness, most wheat breads are made with a mix of whole wheat flour and white flour, a mix of whole red wheat and whole white wheat flour or just whole wheat flour milled only from hard white wheat.

Protein content and differences in wheat are critical to determining the value of a particular farm's crop as well as what the flour milled from that wheat is going to be used for. For instance, there is a noodle lab in Portland, Oregon. Most of the wheat grown in the NW USA for export is shipped through the Port of Portland. An awful lot of that wheat and flour made from the wheat will be shipped out to Asia and used to make noodles. What kind of noodles will be made from a particular lot of wheat will be determined by the protein content of the wheat.

One reason they grow so much wheat in North Dakota is because, due to weather and I suppose soil conditions, N. Dakota grows some pretty ritious wheat. The protein content is higher than we can grow, by and large, here in Oregon, especially in the Willamette Valley. Wheat for noodles is such a huge market that the noodle lab was created to test the wheat and to educate people about the wheat, flour and noodles in general. Fascinating.

I'm learning a lot about grain growing right now as I'm getting into the whole science and art of brewing. When you're doing all grain brewing, like I am going to be, the three critical things are the yeast, what you season the wort with (hops, spices, fruit, etc.) and the grains. Protein content is important in brewing as well as baking. However, when brewing, unlike bread making, you want a lower protein content. Protein can bind the mash and make it impossible for the wort to drain through it properly (then you need to heat and stir it).

Protein's also why 2 and 6 row barley are preferred over 4 row. 4 row has a higher protein content than either 2 or 6 row on average. I've been told that the majority of commodity barley is 2 row, which means that you have a better chance of getting 2 row if you buy feed grade barley for home malting. Malting barley is, if my info is accurate, the premium barley and what the farmer gets the most money for. But even if you grow premium 2 row for malting, you don't get the premium price until your crop tests out properly. If it doesn't, you gat paid for feed grade or some other grade that doesn't pay that high price.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Sun Dec 11, 2011 at 16:33:29 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Right now I'm using the blender (4.00 / 2)

but I also have a pasta machine with steel rollers. I've seen a bunch of videos on Youtube of people who use their pasta machines to grind their brewing grains. What you do is mount the pasta machine on a stand, and place a small bin on top of it. One video I watched, the guy had bult his bin out of heavy card board and duct tape and he's use duct take to hold the bin on the pasta machine too. I saw that and thought to myself - "OMG, that looks like something that I'd built"...

Anyway, then you take a spade drill bit and power drill driver to run the pasta machine (hand cranking is a lof of work and if you have more than a pound of grain to grind it's going to take you all day). The business end of the drill bit fits just like a key into the handle receptacle of the pasta machine.

It's also very simple to build your own larger mill. You use pillow blocks to mount two steel rollers. One roller is connected by a pulley to an electric motor. You can either build the mill so that the roller gap is adjustable or you can make it a fixed gap. If all you're going to do is mill grain for brewing, there's not much reason to have an adjustable mill.

I'm planning on building a small mill this winter (one of my winter projects). I already have a small motor, I think it's a half horse. All I need are the rollers and pillow blocks. I figure I'll be able to build a small mill for $50-$75. That's a lot less than what I'd pay for a comperable mill if I were to buy one.

Normal people scare me.... But not as much as I scare them.

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by: JoanneRigutto @ Sun Dec 11, 2011 at 16:47:28 PM UTC

[ Parent ]