What’s better than something you do to help create a more sustainable earth and life? Something you simply stop doing; especially if it’s a chore in which you had previously invested time, money, and effort.
It turns out that the late fall chore of removing your leaves is not only bad for the earth, it’s bad for your lawn and gardens. Instead, hang up your rake and sit this fall out.
Simply do one last mowing of your leaf-littered grass. The mowing will mulch the leaves into tiny pieces that will provide several benefits to your lawn and gardens over the winter:
As the leaves decompose they will add nutrients back into the soil, eliminating your need to do fertilizing come spring.
Leaf litter provides cover for wildlife including chipmucks, turtles, and pollinators like moths and butterflies, whose larvae is also attached to the leaves.
This ecosystem of micro-organisms, insects, and larvae within the leaf litter is an important base of the food chain that desirable backyard wildlife like song birds and butterflies rely on.
Your IN-action, in this case, will help the earth in several other ways. Fertilizer run-off from land, which enters rivers and ends up in the sea, is responsible for dead zones in aquatic ecosystems. The extra nutrients of the added fertilizer causes too much algae to bloom, which as it decomposes takes oxygen out of the system, causing fish kills. More than 33 million tons of waste in landfills is simply bags of discarded leaves, which when wrapped in plastic, are unable to provide any nourishment to the ecosystem. You could say, that leaves discarded are entirely wasted, as nature prefers recycling and always relies on cycles of death feeding resurrection.
Fall is such a beautiful, if fleeting, time of year. Instead of the many hours of raking and bagging your leaves, use this new found time to go apple picking or drink cocoa in front of a fire outside with your loved ones. Or simply sit and watch the lengthening shadows and enjoy a kaleidoscope turn as wildlife from late fall are replaced by winter’s.
We leave our leaves, and just this weekend I noticed a family of 9 stunningly bright eastern bluebirds enjoying the fruits of a chokeberry bush on the edge of our lawn, who as they competed for the berries sent off flickers of indigo like a single jewel with many facets.
Price Comparison: Save $50-$100 in Leaf Bags and Fertilizer plus 3-6 hours of Labor
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My family decided we would cut back on our plastic pollution recently and have been slowly replacing plastic items with real ones. The health risks are real–plastic is entering our waterways, the ocean and our food webs, concentrating dangerous chemicals in the food we eat. So we took a look at it together. What were we doing well? What could we improve upon?
One of the worst offenders for single-use plastic in our home was yogurt containers, which in many places are not recyclable. We love yogurt. I’m the daughter of dairy farmer, so I tend to like all milk products. Yogurt, in particular, has undeniable health and immune system benefits. But we were throwing a mountains worth of plastic into our recycling bins each week and spending a small fortune on it.
One day a friend, Women Working for Oceans founder Barb Burgess, mentioned that she was making yogurt at home after a French neighbor had said to her with astonishment, “You don’t make your own yogurt?” Perhaps to the French not making your own yogurt is like buying a plastic-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The whole point is its simplicity. Well, okay then! If it is that easy, then why not try it?
Turns out it’s true: not only is it easy and cheaper to make your own yogurt, but making it yourself feels nurturing and homey. The whole process conjures up images of clay crock pots and cotton towels, of French countrysides, and wooden breakfast tables with the first light of morning where families connect before heading off into their days.
It reminds us of a time when we understood food as a reflection of the land and where fermentation was a necessity of economy and safe storage; and we had a healthy co-habitation with the bacterial engines that drive life. Barb told me that she makes yogurt with her husband Bill every night for their morning breakfast, creating a nice ritual of togetherness.
Making your own yogurt can even engage you and your children’s ingenuity and problem solving skills, as you search for simple ways to maintain a several hour heat source between 110 and 115 F for 5-10 hours. Some people achieve this through their oven; others by buying yogurt makers. But there is an entire culture of rogue solutions to this task including DIY wooden containers with light bulbs; use of an already heated oven from making dinner (simply shut off the stove, but keep it closed overnight); repurposing crockpots and food dehydrators; heating pads; microwaves; placement over radiators; to even cuddling in bed with a jar and a hot water bottle. My own kids suggested our chicken brooder to incubate yogurt, but I don’t even want to talk about the cleanliness implications of that idea!
I have a healthy fear of bacterial processes run amock (farming will do that to you) so I favor the stable temperature approach of a commercial yogurt maker or oven. But you’ll be nothing short of delighted if you spend some time indulging on Pinterest on home-made yogurt incubation ideas: people’s creativity will make you believe there is indeed hope for humanity.
Home-Made Yogurt Recipe
Milk (whole or skim, depending on the consistency you’d like)
Yogurt culture (this can come from commercial prepared plain yogurt, just save a little for use in this recipe) or you can buy cultures online. I buy cultures, as they tend to be of higher quality of the immune system enhancing live bacteria than commercially-prepared yogurt and more consistently perform. They are also inexpensive and do not involve buying more plastic.
Candy (food) thermometer
Oven-safe pan with cover
Ice for a bath that will cool your pan
Safety Note: Be sure your equipment is clean and sanitized. Right out of the dishwasher should be sufficient if your settings are hot.
Heat milk on stove to just around a simmer of 180 F degrees for 30 minutes. You can transfer the pan to the oven for this stage if you don’t want to babysit the maintenance of temperature on the stove top.
Cool the pan quickly to a temperature of 115 F degrees in an ice bath. Add yogurt culture (follow directions on packet) and stir.
Incubate: Keep the yogurt at 115 F degrees for 5-10 hours. You can do this safely by keeping it in the pan with a lid on it in the oven at temperature. Or transfer to clean glass containers in a simple yogurt maker and plug in.
If you incubated in your pan, transfer to clean glass jars (small mason canning jars work beautifully) and store in the refrigerator. This is where you can add fruit preserves at the bottom.
Fruit and toppings can be added at any stage, but I’d recommend making plain yogurt the first time to add toppings later, so that you’re aware of the thickness you are working with before adding thinning ingredients like fruit, which contains a good amount of water. You’ll need to experiment to do this in a way that finishes with a result you like.
Since we make fruit preserves anyway, I’ve had best results by putting a little fruit preserve in the bottom of the jar for the incubation process, before pouring the milk on top. The times I’ve added sugar to fruit and cooked it down, then added this quick preserve to the milk for throughout flavor coverage have resulted in much too thin yogurt for my taste (though I will say blueberries work better than strawberries.) You can always add gelatin to thicken at this stage, but that just sounds too fussy to me. The goal is simplicity.
Price Comparison: 3-9 X More to BUY
$4.56 gallon for homemade yogurt
$38.40 gallon for commercially-prepared yogurt (if bought in 6 ounce cups)
$14.08 gallon for commercially prepared yogurt (if bought in larger containers)
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Each Friday Salt from the Earth will feature a best investment in sustainability for your family, farm, or homestead. We believe that the best targets for sustainability in our lives should be:
less expensive,
earth and health friendly,
soul-satisfying,
easy to do!
Inspired by the Shakers, who first married form with function, the solutions we will offer in this column will be small changes you can make that deliver big dividends in all criterion.
Let sprinkles of salt, or sustainability, add spice to your life!
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This morning, I awoke to a simple pale orb moving in a confused pattern in the window of my bedroom in the farmhouse. Bits of morning were reflected in flashes off wings like patches of hope in a stretch of darkness. I must have rubbed my eyes too hard in a dream, I thought, and tried to refocus. The white patches of light, or an angel, or whatever it was, failed to settle.
I watched it then and now get caught in the folds of the curtains, rising from the ridges as a scar might rise from delicate wound. Something in its movement suggested freedom. A moth, I suddenly realized, was caught between the window pane and sheer white curtains. Two sources of light were dueling it out for the moth’s attention: one from the window and the other from the room.
I have read that moths move in a perpendicular line to a light source. As nocturnal insects, the source of light is usually the stars or moon, a source so far away as to be reliably stable. But caught between the window and sheers, this moth kept turning and adjusting its angle to the light. Instead of freedom, it found instead a hall of mirrors, where no clear path home could be plotted. The moth, once seeking to orient to the light, now was being led astray by it.
This old farmhouse frequently has guests of the insect and rodent kind. It’s nearly impossible to secure a 200-year old home to smaller wildlife. Lines of ants leave their nests to follow chemical trails left by others in a bizarre reversal of the old bread crumb trick for finding one’s way home. Bats hang innocently enough in attics, causing us to pull up sheets more tightly around our necks when jokes about vampires raise the hair on our necks. Webs are left by spiders in corners everywhere, appearing as if left by magic or perhaps in a sinister plot to dirty a house just then brushed clean. Mice scurry away into the darkness when lights are turned on after cleaning off treats left on cans and glass in the recycling bin. Mosquitos and flies mark the seasons and bring out our worst: irritation and loathing and, at times, violence.
There is a temptation to wage war on these intruders. Suburban homes, newer and better homes, we are told, are built air tight. There is no place for intruders in them. But an older home audibly breathes: inhaling wildlife and exhaling heat and new life, in a near constant exchange. Older homes are alive.
A spider web from a barn, where we tend to leave nature to its own devices entirely.
Nature is at once part prey, decay and promise. We can not forget our roots in such a home; where our days unfold with the background of nature’s effort to reclaim even us. There is never any doubt how the story will end. If we aren’t afraid to fully awaken from our dreams of perfection and refocus, we will see, in truth, that’s the grace behind nature’s beauty.
War is certainly an option for this old house. You can try to close up holes, place poison along the perimeter; buy swatters and high-tech gadgets. You’ll then awaken to a steady stream of dead mice or flies on your counter top now legs up. Spiders will be smeared on your walls. New holes will be chewed where wood and stone meet, until foundations threaten to crumble.
Professionals can be called in for more reliable removals, but no good can come from seeing pollinators and detritivours as the enemy. You’ll instead inhale poison. Flowers won’t bloom. The luscious tomato you’ve waited all year to eat might never ripen. Mosquitos that find their way in through your own innocent passage will be unmet by spiders and bats, who once did the dirty work for you. Remnants left in trash will rot in their plastic bags, never feeding an endless circle of life. Fragments instead will be left, where once was the suggestion of integrity.
There will be unintentional consequences, too, that spill out of your home and into the woods and your streets: other wildlife will eat poisoned prey and fall victim.The war we wage in this old house is always, in the end, oddly against ourselves.
I’d rather accept the steady exchange between inner and outer; the reminder of nature’s final grip on our lives; the attempts to coexist and find balance that I wish to become reflected in my and my family’s manner. I’m grateful for this old farmhouse that has stood sentinel to a time before the Civil War through a muddy river of imperfect time.
Just recently a tiny field mouse was caught in our sink, unable to climb up the watery walls. I awoke to find my 11-year old son Ben standing at the sink with a mason jar, trying to coax the afraid mouse into it. He leaned with intent and compassion over the sink. Each time he positioned the jar, the mouse would try to scurry up the sides of the sink and end up wet and shivering on the bottom. Instead Ben grabbed the mouse gently by the tail and like a helicopter directly airlifted him to safety into the jar.
As he started to walk to the front door, Ben asked, “Mom, where can I put him where he won’t be cold?”
I suggested finding a pile of leaves in a patch of sun, but thought better of adding “away from the house, so he doesn’t come back in.”
And just like that Ben was off to find his rescue a better home.
Decades of living in this old farmhouse have changed me. I now welcome visitors as common as stones, whether or not they are invited.
Ocean Matters Executive Director Laura Parker Roerden
This summer’s cinema blockbuster Finding Dory has rightly set off alarms in the marine conservation community against an anticipated spike in blue tang sales for private aquaria, which would decimate wild coral reef populations. But there is a deeper conservation message, simmering just below the film’s surface (if you will pardon the bad pun.)
Dory poignantly suffers from memory loss, which makes it difficult for her to find her way home. Like disconnected puzzle pieces, she must use the small recollections as they surface as her compass— an aural memory of the words “Jewel of Morro Bay;” the shells her parent’s lovingly placed in the sand to point her way home; and other flashbacks along the way.
Recent studies of more pristine coral reefs far from the affects of man in the remotest corner of the Pacific poignantly point out that we, too, have suffered amnesia. It’s only in the past decade that we’ve learned just how much we’ve lost in the ocean. Our former vision of a healthy sea was, in fact, already a damaged one. Our baseline for “normal” had indeed moved.
You do not have to do this work for long to see the destruction of our oceans with your own eyes. When Ocean Matters returned to Grand Cayman in 2012 after more than a decade away, we were gobsmacked by the lack of big fish on the reef. Favorite scuba sites like the coral canyons of Eden Rock and Devil’s Grotto once replete with nearly human-sized tarpon, groupers and jewfish and shimmering with thousands of silversides at a time now offered no more than algae on coral skeletons with only the smaller coral reef fish visible.
Like Dory, who once lived on a coral reef populated by life, we arrive home to “Morro Bay” to find little more than mud and rocks. The story we are forced to tell about the ocean is one of loss. Those of us in the marine conservation community working on the problem are no fools about how difficult the task in front of us is and how important it is to offer hope as we ask others to join us onboard. We pepper these stories of loss with stories of hope that rise like islands in the long stretches of a sea of problems. We fling ourselves on these stories of hope like castaways finding land.
Our islands of hope include Marine Protected Areas, single-use plastics that have been banned, victories in reducing our carbon footprint, legislation that protects keystone species or stops nitrogen runoff, and the list goes on. We’ve organized into groups: each focusing on different problems and their solutions.
The story we are forced to tell about the ocean is one of loss.
It’s true that all of these initiatives are critical to our success. They are like operations offered to patients in triage: send this one off for legislation to reduce seismic testing; this one needs a global agreement about carbon reduction; this one requires new fishing regulation. And on and on we work. We know what must be done and done now, so we get the word out and engage others in helping us to do it. Our work is nothing if not earnest.
Like everyone in the theatre, I found myself giggling when Dory arrived at the Marine Life Institute where Sigourney Weaver’s disembodied voice announced their mission of “rescue, rehabilitation, and release.” But as I reflected after, I found myself wondering just as the movie’s guiding mantra asked, “What would Dory do?” about the daunting task in front of us to stop the destruction of our seas. And just whom, in fact, are we rescuing?
Throughout the film, Dory feels her way back to home relying on her friends and an uncanny ability to be truly in the moment, a previously unheralded gift of her disability. There is no villain in this story, but our own limitations, which can be turned on their side to be our strengths when seen with a new lens.
We hear a lot about how the ocean suffers from what is glibly called the “tragedy of the commons”—short-hand for the reality that no one nation owns international waters, promoting a winner-takes-all attitude towards it. I have always had a faintly uneasy feeling about that phrase.
What would it take to shift the paradigm in marine conservation? What would it take to truly bring others on board in a way that feels like everyone has more?
In my work with young people in Ocean Matters, we do an activity from Educators for Social Responsibility (now called Engaging Schools) where all the participants are given instructions in pairs to assume the pose of arm wrestling on a table with their partners. They are then told that for each time that one’s hand hits the table during a three-minute time period he or she will be given a Hershey’s chocolate kiss. A buzzer sounds and the participants begin.
Usually, the pairs begin arm wrestling, with little progress being made and few arms hitting tables. Somewhere one of the pair is overpowering the other and counting enthusiastically, while the other frowns. Very little kisses are distributed. Then gradually, one pair will discover a simple truth: by negotiating to cooperate rather than compete the pair can move their arms like windshield wipers, hitting the table multiple times and mounting numbers of chocolate kisses that are so plentiful they can be easily shared. Others notice the first pair strategic shift and reaping the rewards of piles of chocolate kisses, and join them. The cooperative tactic moves like a wave across the room. And everyone has more.
What would it take to shift the paradigm in marine conservation? What would it take to truly bring others on board in a way that feels like everyone has more?
Perhaps the story we should tell is not only one of loss; or a triumph of hope. Perhaps instead we should focus our narrative on connection. Our efforts to heal the ocean might feel more like a quest, as Dory’s is, to find ourselves. As environmentalist David Orr posits, “The sum total of violence wrought by people who do not know who they are, because they do not where they are is the environmental crisis.” This is a different call to action. In this call to action, we are like marriage counselors, not surgeons, helping to repair the relationships between our own selves and the ocean.
While triage is still necessary, let’s also acknowledge and seed the hope spots whose mission is to connect us back to the sea—the Blue Mind initiative, innovative visual art and poetry programs like From the Bow Seat, hands-on marine education programs like Ocean Matters, experiences like those offered by Women Working for Oceans where members create marine art, and those of Operation Surf and others who are working on stories of connection to the ocean.
Ocean Matters’ students in Hawaii enjoying a break together from their service learning project on the coral reef.
Our efforts to heal the ocean could feel more like a quest, as Dory’s is, to find ourselves.
Research confirms the importance of connection in nurturing social responsibility. Shelley Berman, author of Children’s Social Consciousness and the Development of Social Responsibility looked at the research on activists and found that pro-social action was “less about moral principles and more about a sense of self as connected to others and to the world as a whole.” Moreover, the studies also point to “an additional motivator of activism: a sense of meaning and a sense of place within the larger context.”
Perhaps we won’t repair the ocean because she’s broken; we’ll heal ourselves because we reunite with her, and in reuniting we will have the foundation on which to stand to save ourselves.
As Ocean Matters student Josh once wrote reflecting back on the significance of his experience working on the coral reef on a monitoring project for five weeks on scuba when he was a teenager:
“I think the ocean has a much stronger voice in my life today. Depending on the day of the week or the situation, it’s the voice of practicality, the voice of kindness. Sometimes it keeps me from doing something I might want to do. . .other times it makes me feel good about what I’m doing.”
In this story, the sea is our heart’s home. Our stories of connection to the sea can become like the shells left by Dory’s parents, a pathway to help us find our way home when we collectively lose our way or forget who we.
Each spring we increase our flock with new heritage breed chicks. This year we added all-heritage breed Buff Orpingtons and Araucanas. Buff Orpingtons, as their name implies, are buff-colored hens that lay tan eggs. Araucanas come in a array of colors, my favorite is almost cerulean; they lay different shades of blue and green eggs that suggest paint chips with earthy names like iron washed, sea salt, blue dusk. It takes the birds about five months to sexually mature and lay eggs.
We order our chicks for arrival in April and May. This past year we welcomed about 70 new chicks to our farm, keeping them in brooders that are off the ground, protected by chicken wire, and warmed by heat lamps 24/7. The brooders are separated from the grown hens by a half wall and chicken wire, so that the hens and chicks can see one another.
At about 8 weeks old, we move the chicks from their brooders into the larger coop with the mature hens. Because the hens are familiar with the chicks, and vice versa, combining the chicks with the mature hens is without the drama that other farms sometimes report.
At first the smaller birds elect to stay in the flocks they’ve been with since hatching, nesting in bedding on the ground. But gradually as the weeks wear on, they start to act like the older hens, blending in when they eat, roosting at night, and eventually by mid-summer venturing outside for small periods of time along with the bigger girls.
You can watch as the roosters introduce the younger hens to the various places around our pasture, barn yard, and farmhouse gardens where the best bits of insects and worms can be found. By the early fall, the new hens are outside all day free-ranging on our thirty acres, returning to roost with the rest of the flock at dusk.
Waiting for first eggs can feel like waiting for a pot to boil. The days shorten, the shadows lengthen. Just as darkness descends, the eggs arrive in a blast of nature’s promise of spring.
Second year hens lay larger eggs; the first year hens medium sized. And this year’s hens first eggs arrive as tiny pebble-sized eggs called pullet eggs.
Our eggs are EGG-cellent. All natural; all heritage breed hens; all free-range and pasture-raised. Free-ranged hens who are pasture raised in the fresh air and sunshine have all of the benefits of roaming healthy grassland eating as nature intended birds to eat. Their large dark orange yolks even LOOK healthier, because they are healthier. Their color, flavor and texture are made distinctive by high amounts of Vitamin A, D, E, K2, B-12, folate, riboflavin, zinc, calcium, beta carotene, choline, and tons of omega 3 fatty acids, including DHA, EPA, ALA, and AA. A pasture-raised egg is a true superfood.
Last winter, my doctor told me that I had to take Vitamin D because folks who live at our longitude do not receive adequate amounts of sunlight to maintain optimal amounts for healthy immune functioning. I insisted she do a vitamin D blood profile to find out if I did, indeed, need nutritional supplements. I think she was the only one surprised when my labs came back on the upper range of normal for Vitamin D. Even the lab report said, “Stop taking your nutritional supplements.”
When did we begin accepting that our food can not give us what our bodies’ need?
We are now able to accommodate more local egg customers. So if you’re interested, ask for details to be emailed to you in the comments below.
Any local eggs are better than the grocery store, but I think yours are better than our other local options—both in terms of humane practices and also the health benefits of them eating free range. —Monica Waugh, Jo-Erl Farm egg customer
My first experiments with preserving tomatoes involved burnt fingers, cuts, and a bloody looking mess of tomato waste everywhere that reminded me of that classic Julia Child SNL skit.
Fortunately, canning does not have to be a horror show. Over time and with the help of my fellow canner and friend since first grade Jane Clarke, I have learned that you do NOT really need a “a very sharp knife” to can like a pro. (Okay, you do need a paring knife, though.)
So grab an apron and pretend that you’re a 19th century midwife on the prairie. There’s a lot of boiling water involved.
Friends do not let friends seed tomatoes.
Here are our Five Very Best Tips for Preserving Tomatoes; as well as the Process for Canning and My Very Own Sauce recipe.
Five Very Best Tips for Preserving Tomatoes
1. Buy silicone gloves, which will allow you to submerge your hands into boiling water. Now that is sort of cool just in and of itself. But really you will buy them because hot pads eventually will get soaked through with water and scald you. It’s the best $20 investment you’ll ever make.
2. Freeze your tomatoes whole as they come out of the garden to deal with WHENEVER you want. When you take those frozen balls of sunshine out in January (when you’re ready to deal with them and heating up your kitchen doesn’t feel like a punishment) you can pour boiling water over them and their skins will slide off faster than a prom dress. (Okay, that’s Christine Gervais’ go-to line, so you can blame her for it.)
A freezer drawer lined with paper makes a great basket for picking your tomatoes and can be put directly into the freezer.
3. Make tomato sauce in your crock pot and freeze or can. This might seem obvious, but I was five years into preserving tomatoes before Raelene Hourany posted on her Facebook page that she uses her crockpot to make tomato sauce and it’s been the Best. Thing. Ever. I can’t tell you how many burnt bottoms of pans in my cabinets mocked me until I pulled that slow cooker out. And you will feel so liberated to be able to leave your house without burning it down while your sauce does it’s slow and earthy dance. (See My Very Own Tomato Sauce recipe.)
4. Buy a dehydrator. I spent many years trying to oven roast cherry tomatoes and then packing them in oil in messy freezer bags that I later never used. The tomatoes never fully dried; my oven and my kitchen would ooze moisture from leaving the oven door cracked open. Notwithstanding how good all that moisture might be for your skin, I now dry my cherry tomatoes in a dehydrator. They come out tasting like candy–and for a fraction of the energy cost. And you can dry store them for later reconstituting for soups, stews, and pastas.
5. Do not seed. That’s right. As I said to my dear friend Andy Parker when he was seeking advice, “Friends do not let friends seed tomatoes.” Whew! I bet you feel better. I know I do.
(BONUS: And while I can’t actually call this a tip because it involves other work, there is a great benefit to having chickens to feed your tomato peels, cores and discarded remains to.)
Process for Canning Tomatoes
What You’ll Need
a paring knife : ) silicon gloves (see Tip #1 ) or tongs that can hold a full canning jar
a large pan (like a Lobster Pot) a wire canning wrack a large shallow baking pan that will fit your sink
pans for boiling water
salt (sea salt preferred)
basil (or any herb from your garden or farmers market—this is where you can be creative)
1. Take a large pan (a lobster pot works great!), put in your wire basket insert for the cans, fill with water to about 3/4 capacity and start it boiling on your power burner. Fill other pans with water to utilize all of your burners and start them on high to boil the water.
2. While you wait for the water to boil, rinse the tomatoes in the shallow pan in the sink. You can pour the water off after rinsing and repeat.
3. Fill the pan in the sink with boiling water to scald the tomatoes. Leave the tomatoes to sit in the boiling water while you do the next step.
4. Fill each glass “can” with boiling water to sanitize. (Or you can do this in your dishwasher, but you’ll less energy if you sanitize the ol’ fashioned way.)
5. Now you can pour off the hot water from your pan of tomatoes–which will be ready to peel. Add some cold water to cool them before touching.
6. Peel, core, and cut off any bruises. You should be able to do this with a simple paring knife.
7. Pour off the water from your sanitized cans and with your clean hands start inserting the peeled and whole tomatoes into your sanitized jars. Press the tomatoes down as you insert more to fill any air pockets. Plunge a knife down the sides of the jars to push tomatoes into any remaining air pockets. Fill to the rim of the can.
8. Finish with a teaspoon of sea salt and a sprig of your herb of choice.
9. Put the top on your canning jar and tighten with your rim.
10. By now your lobster pot water is hopefully boiling. Remove the canning insert and fill with cans. Wearing your silicone gloves, lower the cans until submerged by boiling water, resting the rack against the edge of the pan.
11. Pay attention to when the water in the lobster pot begins to reboil. From the reboil, time 45 minutes for the whole tomatoes to heat through. (If canning already prepared tomato sauce, heat up the sauce until uniformly warm, and follow steps 4, and 9-11).
12. Remove cans individually from the wire insert with silicone gloves (or tongs). Retighten tops and leave to cool on a counter top. You will hear a “pop!” as each individual can seals. This can take several hours.
13. Tap the lids of your cans. You ‘ll know that you have a good seal if you hear a “ping” instead of a “thud.” Don’t despair if you have a couple cans that still sound “thud” in comparison to the others after many hours of waiting (12 or more). These can go into your refrigerator for first use.
My Very Own Tomato Sauce
garlic head (fresh)
olive oil
fresh herbs (a tsp each of basil, thyme, oregano, and sage.)
20-30 plum tomatoes (or Your Very Own Canned Tomatoes)
1/2 bottle of red wine (something light or medium like a Beaujolais or Pino Noir)
organic carrots
a small onion
1. Drizzle garlic oil on peeled (or not–because they are organic, right?) carrots, a cut-up onion, and about 8 good cloves of garlic. Roast at 325 for about 45 minutes.
2. While you are roasting the carrots and garlic, scald, core, and peel your tomatoes. (Following steps 2, 3, 5 and 6 from above.)
3. Puree roasted carrots, onion, and garlic in a food processor.
4. Combine peeled tomatoes, wine, herbs, and roasted vegetables in a crock pot.
5. Cook on low for 8 hours.
6. With sauce warmed through, can as described above. Or you can simply freeze your tomato sauce for later use.
This summer was a long march of loss. Three parents of the kids we grew up with in the neighborhood of the farm died, one after another, as if the branch they were hanging from no longer could sustain them. Each was in their eighties. You could say they were simply taking their place on the ground, though that would be of little comfort.
Last week, it was a contemporary who died: Lara, a 45 year old wife and mother to a 13-year old and the best friend to a close friend of mine. We had all become friends in Boston’s South End when our first babies were born. Several of us had already lost our mothers before our first babies were born. We met in parks and in neighborhood cafes or called out to one another when we noticed infants in buckets hanging from our arms as we awkwardly juggled our keys, strollers, and diaper bags up the long climb of concrete stairs of our front stoops. Our friendships grew quickly, like weeds and the odd flower growing through the cracks in our hearts and confidence.
Lara had been an attorney, a brilliant researcher and lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many of the women in this mother’s group we formed had similar accomplishments under their belts, though once our babies were born our pasts mattered not one bit. We were instantly transformed by this mothering task that required so much resorting of who we were and what was important to us. What we didn’t know about this new role could fill volumes of books. While we sometimes shared tips on feeding or getting our infants to sleep, mostly we simply held the hard stuff for each other while we watched our children grow, like a giant stand of birches holds still, oxygen rich air.
Our small group of moms was called “Garden Moms” for the Garden of Eden, a cafe in the South End where we first met and often gathered. Snowy mornings when the city was paralyzed and no one could work would turn into moments of unexpected joy as everyone walked in the street and turned up at what we simply called “the Garden” for scones and coffee, while snow erased the soot and grime outside of the large windows looking out onto the now quiet street. Other times, we’d run into each other at our neighborhood parks and end up spending the day together.
As the years passed, we split off into smaller groups and dyads—friendships that have stood the test of time, but have remained fluid in their expression, as water in a river clinging to eddies might suddenly make a break to rejoin the flow.
Lara’s passing, like so many of the other younger ones who have left too soon, defy our tidy images of nature’s cycles. It matters little though, since it’s clearer to me as I age that our hearts defy any such logic of loss, no matter how pretty.
The day that Lara passed away, many us received a text from her best friend Maria, who was with her bedside holding her space and dignity. I was on my run at River Bend Farm, where the Concord grapes were just ripening and read the text from Maria near a simple stand of birches. I was listening to Keith Jarrett’s “My Song” while I stretched (strange how the details about those moments when you receive such news can be so easy to remember). I looked up and noticed that the riverine birches had started to peel their bark, an accommodation to their fast growth that leaves them particularly thin-skinned.
I texted back to Maria an image of the birches, as I had no words to comfort a close friend who was watching her best friend die at 45. I could only bring to mind the heart space we had so many times held for one another over the years, as we left strips of bark from our former lives on the ground.
Should you have a rooster in your small flock or backyard farm? The question comes up a lot. Roosters are noisy, are not necessary for hens to produce eggs, and many ordinances in residential neighborhoods forbid them. So unless you’re wanting to hatch your own eggs, which obviously requires them to be fertilized by a rooster, why would you want one or two (or ten) roosters?
Roosters are the front-line of your flock. They not only will aggressively attack any predator that threatens your hens, they will also announce oncoming threats to their flock providing ample warning for hens to take cover. This role is essential whether or not you free range. When we had a weasel during the winter entering our coop every night, we lost nearly all of our roosters first, as they were the ones defending the hens. If not for the roosters, we would have lost another dozen or so hens in addition to the forty we lost.
Roosters teach hens where to find food. If you watch a flock free-range, you’ll see group of hens commandeered by a rooster who will sound the dinner bell when particularly tasty treat is found. Interestingly, scientists who have studied this phenomena have noticed that hens will ignore a rooster’s call for food that they are used to finding on their own. They will only respond to calls for novel finds.
The hens were brought to these tomato skins, which were discarded after canning, by the white rooster in the foreground.
The social structure of a flock is often correctly described as the “pecking order.” While plenty of drama is ascribed to the hens in a henhouse, it’s actually the rooster who creates and maintains the social order of a flock. Rooster-less flocks will have a lot more in-fighting among hens for social dominance to fill the vacuum created by the lack of a rooster. Hens in flocks without a rooster have been known to peck another hen to death. I suspect I’ve never had a hen-pecked hen in my flock because we’ve always had roosters to maintain a healthy order.
This story-book moment accurately depicts a rooster’s attempt at dominance by finding higher purchase to crow from. But interestingly, I have never seen our most dominant roo do this.
4. We’ve all read the storybooks: roosters announce the morning so that the farmer knows when dawn has arrived and it’s time to get up. It turns out that roosters anticipate the dawn, crowing in the dark. Only recently did scientists learn that the famous crow was not light driven, but rather based on an internal, circadian clock. By crowing just before dawn, roosters are thought to be announcing their territory and dominance just as other birds are about to become active. I learned during our most recent weasel-geddon that our roosters start crowing as early as 3:00 a.m.
5. If you want to maintain fertilized eggs for hatching, you’ll need 1 rooster per 12 hens to ensure each hen has been mated with sufficiently. This means for a flock of any size, you’ll have multiple roosters. It turns out that the most dominate rooster of the flock is the first to crow each morning, with the next in line and so on following. A group of hens becomes the favorite of each rooster. This daily roll-call, if you will, helps to maintain the flock dynamics and pecking order, ensuring a well-run flock where all members are accounted for and protected. Researchers also speculate that this helps females sort out dominance in potential mates.
This medium sized Australorp is currently our most dominant rooster, commandeering a flock of 120.
6. Multiple roosters breed increased intelligence and fitness into a flock. Researchers have discovered that submissive roosters in a flock will use clever behavioral tactics to divert attention away from the more dominant males. The more clever the tactic, the more successful the rooster at breeding. If you hatch your own chicks from a flock with several roosters competing, over time it stands to reason you will be increasing the intelligence and fitness of your flock.
A very unique scene of a group of juvenile roosters together.
7. Seeing the lowering sunlight hit the cerulean and magenta hues of a rooster on a spring pasture is a siren call to the imagination suggesting afternoons lingering on a Mexican patio or dining under a grape arbor in Tuscany. Or perhaps, our roos help us to appreciate and know deeper shades of simply being sure footed about our own slice of here and now.
8. And last, but not least: there is always the quiet thrill of collecting fertilized, warm eggs for an incubator or allowing a broody hen to hatch her chicks as mother nature intended. Watch this beautiful video. You might just want a roo or two (or ten), afterall!
(And other thoughts on eating locally wherever you are)
by Laura Parker Roerden
What does it mean to be here? I mean right where you are at this very moment.
I can distinctly remember the first time I actually understood what being present to where I was meant deep in my bones. Like a lot of my epiphanies, I was eating when I had it.
I was in Positano, Italy, along the beautiful Almalfi Coast. I had sat down at a casual seaside restaurant, which had a patio that looked out on the colorful fishing boats moored in the Gulf of Salerno. I chose the restaurant for its post card view, so my expectations for the food were secondary.
I looked up at the fishing boats unloading and noticed the lemon trees hanging innocently enough above the deck.
My first thought was: “What a nice way to bring color onto a patio.”
Then my food came: il pesce del giorno (the fish of the day)—a delicate white fish pan seared in olive oil with a very simple rosemary and lemon garnish.
I looked out. In the dirt that gathered in the outcropping of rocks that lined the coast, rosemary bushes were moving like fans in the breeze. They were growing wild in crevices and by the side of the road.
Everywhere lines of olive trees were planted in terraces built to stabilize the sharply inclined hillsides prone to mudslides.
I breathed in the sea air and took my first taste of the fish. I could feel the slight spray of salt on my skin—a grandular bitterness rolled on my lips mirroring the salty texture of the wrinkled skin of the fish on my plate. The low earthy note of the rosemary was balanced by the higher bite of the lemon, the soft flesh of the fish in contrast to its crackled skin—each distinct flavor a stitch connecting me more deeply to the very earth from which it had sprung.
I was eating not just any fish, but this particular fish whose giant eye looked up at me and was unmistakenly once alive and moving torpedo-like through the waves as one long muscle only hours ago.
In that one bite, I suddenly understood what it means to be nourished by a meal. How land, sun, and sea intermingle in this a kind of holy communion to sustain life. How we too spring from the salt of the earth.
We read a lot about eating local—how it’s better for the environment and our communities. It’s better for our bodies. But in that moment I understood that eating locally sourced foods is also better for our souls.
Environmentalist David Orr suggests that our modern malaise evidenced by high rates of violence, depression, and other maladies has at its roots our disconnection from nature. “We do not know who we are,” he offers, “because we do not know where we are.” It’s an interesting thought to consider.
Yes, it’s true: we are what we eat. But do you know where you are right now?
Simply do one last mowing of your leaf-littered grass. The mowing will mulch the leaves into tiny pieces that will provide several benefits to your lawn and gardens over the winter:
We leave our leaves, and just this weekend I noticed a family of 9 stunningly bright eastern bluebirds enjoying the fruits of a chokeberry bush on the edge of our lawn, who as they competed for the berries sent off flickers of indigo like a single jewel with many facets.
