As the busy day of butchering ended, those who drink bourbon were entitled to their sips.  Sips turned into larger sips and those sips turned into songs and poetry and stories about Henry Hudson and the Catskill Gnomes.  A fire maintained through a little lingering drizzle as people kept nibbling from the tables full of pork.

There was a ragu with trotters, braised belly with apple cider and tenderloins melting in their dishes.  And there were people from the city connecting with the farmers and the farmers connecting with their butcher.  It was an introduction to food sources that will continue beyond the empty bottles and fire warmed feet, beyond the apple orchard and the muddy ruts.

The next morning it was back to work on the pork, cutting up the remaining pieces and getting the fat ready for sausage making.  Fat was also rendered for frying apple fritters and doughnuts, greasy little snacks that went well with the monotony of grinding the sausage.

When the work was done I took the train back to Manhattan, carrying a package of sausage for a friend in Jackson Heights.  We ate some for breakfast the next day.  At that point I was at the pork threshold and could eat no more.

Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads -

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.

Last week I was able to attend a free field day about pastured poultry at Perry-winkle Farm.  After wiping our feet in a bleach bath to eliminate any chicken diseases we may have inadvertently brought with us, we walked to the brooding house where up to 125 chicks are raised for three weeks before going to the pastures.

The chicks are fed a non-medicated feed mixed with molasses, garlic, olive oil, comfrey and cayenne pepper.  After they start laying, the chickens are moved to 17% protein feed to supplement their pasture diet of grasses and bugs.

Perry-winkle averages 250 laying hens in three movable chicken houses.  Each house has a couple of roosters in the mix just to make it interesting.  A dozen or so roosters are needed to get any sort of good fertilization, so a few roosters in a pen may be more of a protection for the flock than anything else.

The first house we visited contained two year old hens that were laying well.  The second year is the best laying year for the hens; after their third laying year they usually end up in stew.

Mike Perry, our host for the field day, said that reusing trailers and campers for chicken houses had mixed results.  He recommended starting with a flat wagon or trailer unless you wanted to add to your work load.  The chicken camper holds 65 birds at a time.

The original idea for the chickens was to get them into the gardens before planting.  The largest chicken house (the Egg McMansion) is situated among the farm beds.  Planting of crops comes behind the chickens.  The Egg McMansion holds over a hundred birds at a time.  As a general rule, one nest box is required for each five laying hens.

The roosters kept busy with their noise during our visit.  One rooster almost fell over every time he crowed just from the extra effort he seemed to be giving for the crowd.

The chickens are kept behind non-electrified poultry netting during the day.  They return to the mobile coop each evening and are closed in to keep them safe from predators.

While at the farm I checked on the pigs that I photographed on my first visit to Perry-winkle.  The pigs were down to three in number, and soon they would all be processed.  They seemed happy and oblivious to their impending change from playful dirt diggers to packaged human food.

Be Your Own Hero Festival Now Accepting Submissions

The 2nd Annual Be Your Own Hero (BYOH) Festival will be taking place in Wilmington, North Carolina September 27th and 28th, 2008. Submissions for workshops, info sessions, skill shares, and musicians are currently being accepted until August 15th, 2008. Volunteers are also needed to help out on the day(s) of the event and/or to join the BYOH Fest Planning Squad.

Please send workshop submissions to herofest@gmail.com with your name, email, phone, organization/collective (if applicable), proposed workshop title & short description, materials needed, and time needed. All other ideas, volunteer availability, and inquiries may also be sent to herofest@gmail.com. We welcome all subjects and we encourage all people to apply, especially those who do not fit neatly into the status quo!

In 2007, Wilmington NC was home to the first Be Your Own Hero Festival, an all day radical Do It Yourself (DIY) Festival held at the Soapbox Laundro Lounge. The Festival included a Really Really Free Market, potluck, workshops, info sessions and live music. 2007′s workshops included: DIY parenting (a radical concept), Basic Bicycle Repair, Truth in Recruiting / Promoting Peace, Social Activism & the Info-Radical, Radical Menstruation, Food Politics, Trans 101: Becoming an ally to transgender people, Unconventional Action: Organizing against the DNC/RNC, and DIY DJ Workshop. Bands included: The Brothels, The Nothing Noise, Gator Country, Prize Winners Collective, NED, and Ghost Mice.

For more information on the Be Your Own Hero Festival and Collective, visit www.beyrownhero.com or contact herofest @ gmail.com.

_______________________

Be Your Own Hero Fest Workshop Submission Form

Email to herofest @ gmail.com by July 31, 2008

NAME:

EMAIL:

PHONE:

ORGANIZATION / COLLECTIVE:

PROPOSED WORKSHOP TITLE:

DESCRIPTION:

MATERIALS NEEDED:

TIME NEEDED: choose from 45 minutes, or 1 hour and 45 minutes

In addition, there will be an eight week beekeepers school starting on March 15th. Here is the info:

For information on other beekeeping classes in North Carolina, check out the North Carolina State Beekeepers Association.

SEEDS has youth programs but is also community oriented with community garden plots, teaching facilities and after school programs. SEEDS has 1 1/2 acres in mixed perennials and annuals as well as fruit trees, large compost facilities, two greenhouses and an outdoor classroom.

The DIG garden is about as urban as it can get without being situated in raised beds on a loading dock somewhere. Nestled near factories and train tracks, the noise of the city was never very far away. There was also the constant reality of “poaching”, which has the potential to ruin a kid’s experience with the garden if the particular crop they had started from seed became the target of theft. While not unique to cities (I never paid for sweet corn, peas, cabbage, onions or pumpkins when I was a kid in the country), it presents a unique problem when working in a non-profit, youth oriented setting. Stealing from acres upon acres of row crops is one thing, but taking all the peppers from a twelve foot row is completely different.

Like the garden’s coordinators, I would turn a blind eye to the occasional person jumping the fence to get some needed food. Sometimes folks have to steal food; as an adult I understand the concept. I might even be the one jumping the fence someday, but I would find it hard to explain it to a ten year old if they happened to catch me in the act of digging up their only row of sweet potatoes. The question that the coordinators are wrestling with at the moment – how to encourage the fence jumpers to get involved in the garden? Anyway, that is a long aside…

Through many years of soil work, composting and mulching, the garden beds have become very fertile. The okra plants in this picture are actually ten to twelve feet high, something I had never seen before. The bases of the plants were several inches around and looked like tree trunks on some of the larger plants.

To maximize space, the DIG garden incorporates some terrace beds where there used to be a steep slope.

A further indicator of the care they give their soil, this chard should have been dead in the summer yet it keeps on producing. The DIG folks have harvested this chard every week since mid-March. The stem bases of these plants were several inches around indicating a constant harvest and constant new growth.

On the other side of the street is the larger SEEDS space with its greenhouses, cold frames and education facilities. The gardeners use burlap coffee bags from a local organic roaster as mulch. The bags break down after a few months.

The outline of the garden is covered in perennials, mostly herbs and fruit trees. The cardoon pictured below was part of a wormwood and rosemary area.

Community members also tend to mushroom logs in a back corner of the garden.

I had visited SEEDS a few years ago under different circumstances. I was helping Kristin corral a few kids from Wilmington’s Community Boys and Girls Club. The kids were on my last nerve towards the end of the visit. They were more interested in picking unripe strawberries, making strange comments and laughing uncontrollably as our guide pointed out the Pussy Willows in the landscape. The garden has changed a lot since that visit and seemed to be more bountiful with more community garden beds and more compost bins integrated into the areas where they would be easiest to reach. The SEEDS project is set to take on another five acres elsewhere in Durham, which will extend its education possibilities as well as well get more kids involved in working on a small farm.

Rather than renting out plots, this garden truly brings the community into “community garden”. Folks work side by side over the entire 1 1/2 acres of current cultivation and share in all of the produce that comes out of the area. Membership is a mere $10 per year and requires two hours of work per week in order to get a share of produce. Member potlucks are held at least once a week after a day’s work.

The variety of cold weather crops was pretty amazing as was the actual garden bed construction. The farm employs the biointensive methods outlined by John Jeavons in his book “How to Grow More Vegetables“. The basic theory is that the deeper, more nutritious and well watered the soil is, the more plants it can sustain per square foot. A healthy soil eliminates the need for the plants to compete for nutrients and more calories can be harvested from less space.

The farm also uses raised beds dug to a depth of at least 18 inches with some beds dug 24 inches deep. Heavy mulches, rotation and use of farm made compost contribute to the bounty of the small farm.

Here is first year asparagus -

Broccoli ready for the first cut -

Brussels sprouts -

The farm’s new off-grid greenhouse -

A sweet looking bibb lettuce variety -

For irrigation the farm uses drip tape, which is a great way of reducing evaporation by getting the water to the soil surface one drip at a time. The result is a penetrating soak that uses much less water than overhead irrigation and gives a deeper watering. Usually this irrigation method is used with mulch for maximum benefit.

For cool season extension, the farm uses floating row covers. Underneath this cover was a variety of head lettuce as well as tatsoi, bok choi, pak choi and mustard.

The Anathoth garden is able to feed many more than its eighty members. It also delivers food to the elderly, to food banks and other community members. Overall I felt this was an extremely well functioning community garden, pulling a great member base in a low population rural area.

Consisting of 36 acres and twelve homesites, this community presents a somewhat unique development model. The requirements for the homes are fairly strict in that they must meet certain energy efficiency requirements and be almost completely solar powered.

Another interesting part of the development is the small farm component. Together with the homes, the developer is also building a three acre market farm to serve the community and also to sell at markets outside of the community. A full time farmer will live in the development and respond to the communities food needs.

Currently there is only one home built. The developer, Allan Rosen, lives here and directs the project on site. If you are thinking this is a great idea for a community, you might be right. Current development models are very devastating from an ecological perspective, and this seems to offer a very strong alternative. However, simply from a price perspective, this project is about as bourgeois as a farm can get. With a two acre home site going for $140,000 and a solar home price tag of $300,000 to $400,000, you would have to be in it for the ambiance and not the politics. Don’t get me wrong. This is a great model, but it is geared towards the upper middle class and is not affordable for most of us.

The farm is divided into several 1/2 acre tracts. The above picture is two of those tracts. Tony Kleese (former CFSA executive director), the farm consultant on this project, has worked to greatly improve what started out as very poor soil. To give an example, Tony has brought the pH up from an average of 4.1 to 6.1. That is a manageable pH if the organic matter content is also increased. The cation exchange capacity, a measure of how readily available the soil nutrition is to the plant, has been increased on average from 2.5 to 10 with the goal of getting all the plots over 10. Calcium was improved from 13 to 70 with a goal of 65. It goes on and on from there. This was in a period over a little over a year.

The future orchard is 1/8 of an acre.

One good thing about the scale of this farm is that there is no need for a full sized tractor. All of the land can be maintained with walk-behind gas/diesel powered tools.

This isn’t a development that I could ever see myself living in. It would have to be a totally different structure. If the lots were $5,000, the biggest house you could build was 1000 square feet, and the farm was run by all the inhabitants, then maybe I could get behind it. As this development stands, it still has a separation of the food growing process from the producer and the consumer. Yes, the farm is in the community but the community is not participating in that farm other than financially.

I have been thinking about doing a presentation about local food, and now, with a new series of workshops, I get a chance to write it and break it out. This will be a good opportunity to start building a local foods community in Wilmington and elicit ideas on what that means to other folks. It will also be a good time to talk about what hasn’t worked with Cricket Bread, what the drawbacks are, where the support is minimal.

Some of the ideas I have for the presentation include defining our sources, discussing regional availability, settling on substitutions, preserving, basic foraging and scavenging, sample weekly menus based on the season, where to buy or find the basics, buying in bulk and my personal experiences with local food. Thanks to April and Jessica for helping me brainstorm a bit yesterday on the subject of “what would you want out of this workshop?” If you all have more ideas, please comment.

There are other short courses in this series besides the Seasonal Eating class. Contact Neal Taylor (info at bottom) about these workshops. All courses are in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Principles of Permaculture – 10/30/2007 6-7pm

This will be a more in-depth discussion of the principles from each of the two founders of Permaculture. We hope to give everyone enough background with this class that you’ll leave knowing some good starting places to implement Permaculture in your own place.

Starting Your Own Vegetable Garden – 11/6/2007 6-7pm

Want to know where, when, and how to get started with a vegetable garden of your own? This course will discuss different ways of building good garden soil, appropriate fertilizing techniques, options for layout and size, and recommendations for maintaining soil fertility.

Seasonal Eating – 11/13/2007 6-7pm

One of the best ways to decrease your “food miles” is to eat foods that are in season and grown locally. In our climate, that also means learning to preserve that fresh food so it’s available at other times of the year. This course will introduce ways to gear your eating habits to the seasons and how to can, freeze, dehydrate, etc. those summer crops that you want to enjoy in winter! (Guest Speaker – Trace Ramsey)

Natural Building – 11/20/2007 6-7pm

With everyone talking about green building these days, why not take it to the extreme? Natural building is sustainable, with low embodied energy, using materials found locally. Whether it’s cob, straw bale, timbers, or thatch, this is a building option that is beautiful and easy on the Earth. This presentation will focus on a straw bale project in Raleigh, with examples from other parts of the country as well. (Guest Speaker – Brent Bishop)

All courses will be held at Tidal Creek’s Community Room, above the Co-op. The topics are subject to change, but I will email everyone a week before each class to confirm the topic and/or guest speaker. The fee will be $20 per class, or $50 for all four classes. Please respond to this email or call Neal with the class(es) you would like to attend so we’ll have the facilities in order. We are also organizing classes and workshops after the holidays for all the other topics from the survey, especially indoor gardening, beekeeping, and passive heating and cooling designs. Thanks again, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Neal Taylor
One World Design
oneworlddesign -at- ec.rr.com