2007 in words and pictures…

In January I started four shelves full of flower seeds for a May reception.

I usually use my light racks for veggies, but this year was different. I don’t have much experience with flowers, some of them died or bloomed prematurely, but the end result was great.

In February we sold off The Peanut, a 1980 Mercedes 300TD that I had converted to run on used vegetable oil. We sold it on Ebay to someone in Europe. It was a weird transaction what with customs, certifications of various natures and dealing with the company that would eventually put the car on a ship and send it back to the motherland. The mileage when I handed off the keys was 305,000.

In March I ditched my beard-o look. Here I am, pre-cut.

In April we purchased our long sought after piece of land.

Our idea of building a self-sufficient life becomes concrete on this twelve acre spot in rural Chatham County. Once we make the big move, I envision scaling the local diet down to twenty five miles, with most food coming right from the farm.

The picture above is where the goats, chickens and guinea hens will live. The picture below is the property line as it enters the woods.

On May 26th, Kristin and I held our commitment ceremony.

We led a bicycle procession to the reception. It was kind of like a Critical Mass ride except that we dressed up all fancy-like.

In June I started the Cricket Bread project and set out to discover my foodshed. That month I also sold my 1981 Volkswagen Dasher, another car that I had converted to run on used vegetable oil. It was the first car I had converted. The odometer stopped working years ago and was stuck on 224,000 miles.

In July I bought an old camper to put on the land in Chatham. Code named “The Wolf Den”, we have spent many a peaceful night in its confined comfort. The camper gets horrendous gas mileage, so it will sit on the land and not be a road cruiser like in its past life. It gets to be a simple home…

To pay for the camper, I sold my last vehicle in August. A 1985 Chevy Silverado diesel with 196,000 miles on it. I hated to see it go, but sometimes you just have to make the hard decisions.

We are now a one car family (Kristin bought a 2003 VW Jetta diesel), and I am a 100% bicycle commuter. I was bicycling pretty much everywhere anyway since the Dasher had a messed up axle and the Chevy’s batteries were dead, but with them gone there is no excuse not to ride everywhere. Plus no more insurance payments, fuel costs, upkeep, etc.

September was Be Your Own Hero Fest here in Wilmington. Kristin was a lead organizer.

Hero Fest consisted of a Really Really Free Market, activist workshops and live music.

In November I attended the Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham, NC. I had considered running for a board position with Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, but changed my mind after realizing all the stuff that I had going on already.

Also in November, our landlord let us know that we had to move out by the end of the month. Just what you want to hear at the end of the year. We also met with a home builder in Chatham County and signed off on a contract to build our new (small) home.

In December we moved to a house across the street. Kristin and I celebrated five years together. I decided to write a book. I have asked some friends to do cover artwork and also do some illustrations.

Things are coming along…

This past week the store started carrying meat from Rainbow Meadow Farms, a family farm right at the 100 mile mark in Snow Hill, NC. The first delivery consisted of a dozen pastured turkeys. I brought home a fourteen pounder to cook for a holiday meal.

This would be the second turkey I have ever cooked, and the first truly local one. Last year at Thanksgiving I cooked an organic bird from who knows where. I missed an opportunity to get a local turkey this Thanksgiving, but was glad Tidal Creek finally got a delivery system in place for Rainbow Meadow.

I cooked both turkeys “upside down”, meaning the breast faces down in the pan instead of the traditional way of roasting the bird with the breast up. The effect of cooking the turkey breast down is that all the juices from the roasting flow down into the breast. This is a good thing.

1 - Let the turkey sit out (in its wrapper) for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees near the end of the hour.

2 - Wash the turkey, remove the neck and innards and pat the turkey dry. I don’t eat the innards (yet), but I saved the neck to make some soup stock later.

3 - Get the turkey into the roasting pan. Rub it with salt and either butter or olive oil.

4 - To the inside of the bird, add a couple chopped carrots, leeks, garlic, basil, thyme and rosemary.

The leeks and carrots are from Oakley Laurel CSA, the garlic from Black River Organic Farm and the basil from my garden. The other herbs were from the dumpster.

5 - Tie the legs tightly together so that the veggies don’t fall out.

6 - Flip the turkey breast side down, rub with salt and butter/oil and sprinkle with herbs.

7 - Here is how my turkey baking time came out - 400 degrees for a half hour, 350 degrees for two hours and 225 for one hour and fifteen minutes. I also turned the turkey over for fifteen minutes at 350 to slightly brown the breast. The two important cooking times are the 400 and 350 degree times. The 225 degree time will vary by the size of the turkey. Use an instant read thermometer to be sure. The temperature in the deepest part of the thigh should be over 165 degrees when fully cooked.

8 - After removing from the oven, let the turkey rest for at least fifteen minutes before carving.

9 - My method of carving is to just randomly cut pieces off. I really can’t give anyone advice on how to do it since I really don’t know what I’m doing. As long as good chunks of the meat come off, I’m happy. The rest can come off in soup.

There are still three of these local turkeys in the frozen meat section at Tidal Creek if anyone is interested…

Sometimes you just have to push the boulder uphill and like it. The Fowler Street garden had several strikes against it even before Noel and I got started on it. First, there was no water source. Second, I was going to be leaving town for a summer long road trip just as everything was getting started. Third, we thought that maybe the asphalt shingles and roofing tar that we dug up had contaminated the soil. (A soil test for heavy metals showed that the soil was fine.) Starting the tilling led to the discovery of a forth strike - an infestation of kudzu that took several days to rip out and contain.

The land had been a roofing and plumbing company way back when. This became obvious as the pile of debris - tires, piping, shingles, nails - started to build up.

Noel did the tilling for the whole space. We measured it as just under a quarter acre, and the whole process of tilling took several days.

Next came another few days of actually forming the raised beds. We built three-foot wide beds, forty-five feet long.

We ended up with seven rows, but only really used five. For the garden, I grew about a hundred tomato plants and sunflowers as well as several dozen summer squash plants. Basil plants were scattered among the rows. The goal was to make this a market garden and sell the produce at the recently opened downtown farmers market.

After everything was planted, we realized that water was going to be a major problem. Every other night at my house, Noel and I would fill a couple of 55 gallon drums with water and drive them over to the garden. From there we would fill watering cans and try to saturate each plant by hand. The whole process took several hours.

From hand watering, we moved to drip tape attached to upright barrels. We would still haul water to the site, but instead of using watering cans we would use a hand pump to transfer the water to the barrels and turn on a spigot. The water pressure was not enough to get water all the way down the row, so it was largely ineffective.

I’m not sure how much produce came out of the garden since I was absent for most of its productive time. The lack of steady water supplies led us to the conclusion that this project wasn’t going to work. So, after one season we moved on. I ripped out all the plants in late August when I was back in town, cleaned up the site as best I could, hauled off the barrels, pots, twine, stakes, drip tape, buckets and whatever else we had there and called it a day.

The land is flat again, and to my knowledge it hasn’t been used as a garden space since. We did learn some new skills and figured out how to do our best when the situation was never going to be optimal or even very manageable in the long term. We also came up with the name Circle Acres here and considered Fowler to be its first incarnation.

The subtitle of this blog is “Thoughts on a local diet and other things in Wilmington, NC…” I have the local diet thing down, but in the past week or so I have become engaged in some “other things”. This other thing is something I am very excited about even though its completion and implementation is fairly far away. I have decided to put my other project, Quitter, into book form.

It seemed like a logical way to conclude the first five issues of the Quitter story, five fairly different pieces of writing. I have no idea if the demand is out there for this obscure personal zine, but I am confident that I can break out of the zine world and into a larger audience. These are stories about me and my experiences; will they resonate beyond those that know me? I think I can say yes at this point, three years on…

I meet people, randomly, who have read the series but have no connection to me personally. I have learned that people pass on their copies to friends and family, and this gives me the inspiration to put Quitter out there with some sparkle to it (read: glossy cover and ISBN number).

Cricket Bread reaches around the world instantly. It has grown more than I ever thought and it is just getting started. The emails I get from readers are inspiring. Folks are getting something out of my experiences, and they are enjoying coming along with me as I discover my foodshed. If I was just talking to myself, I wouldn’t need all *this*. But folks also like somethings to be tangible, which is the draw of printed material. This is why Quitter is not available electronically. That is not the format it needs.

Quitter has never made any money. Any zine writer will tell you that hundreds of dollars go in and a fraction of that comes back. It is an art, not a paycheck. I expect to price the book with a minimal return just so that it can be affordable. Hopefully, as the publication date gets closer, you all won’t mind me making a couple pitches for the book.

Until then, back to local eating…