Author Archives: Jason

Compost Tea & John Rambo’s Cracker Head

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Permaculture, the school of garden design that maximizes outputs while minimizing human and environmental inputs, turned me on a while ago to the idea of compost tea.  This isn’t tea to drink, but rather to be drunk by your plants.  They dig it.  It’s known as a foliant feeder, meaning it juices up your leaves.  Since leaves are the main sites of food production for most plants, healthier leaves translates into heartier plants.

To make the tea, you simply tie up a wad of compost in an old rag or T-shirt (yes, that’s an old pair of boxer briefs), drop it in a watering can, and let it steep in the sun for two or three days like a tea bag.  Shake things up occasionally, too.

(You can see that, having a watering can with a rather small fill hole at the top, I instead steeped the compost tea bag in a giant plastic bear.  This bear once held animal crackers.  Since then, it has been used to transport soil for various Concrete Jungle experiments.  Basically, I dig Continue reading →

Kale Run Amok

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We kept a Ragged Jack Kale plant going all winter in the hoop house.  After uncovering it and leaving it untended for about three weeks while traveling, we returned to find it looking like this.

I’ve never seen anything like this.  It somehow grew seed pods even though it flowers and spreads itself that way.  The other gardeners in our community garden were equally shocked.

Anyone ever seen something like this happen to a brassica?

 

Crunchy Spring Feast

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About six weeks ago we visited Shannon’s parents in Ohio.  Dwight, her dad, has a garden, and the green onions had just come up.  He eagerly informed me of the existence of Onion and Butter Sandwiches.

Neither Shannon nor her mom were interested in enjoying one of these sandwiches, but one was made for my benefit.  I don’t know what I was expecting.  Something in which the whole transcended the individual parts, I guess.  It pretty much just tasted like onion and butter on a piece of bread.  I suppose it tasted like Spring, crunchy and green and all with the smooth glide of butter to add a farmhouse touch.  It was good.  That’s all I’ve got.

Jim and Nick and The Fatback Collective: Fresh Pig at the Food Truck Oasis

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This is probably not the kind of image that comes to mind when you think about Bonnaroo.

This woman, who was as nice as could be, is named Banjo. That's not her christened name, but it's the one Bonnaroo folks gave her when she brought the heaviest Southern accent to Jim and Nick's. She seemed proud to carry it.

But it’s an image I saw my first night there.   I snapped it just after I watched a couple of people saw the head off a hog with something that sounded and looked a lot like the circa-1980 Sears hedge clipper we had growing up.  Off the body, the head looked almost rubber, almost like a cartoon.  Except for the eyes.  The eyes were tiny and wet.

“Ya’ll are sick, taking pictures of pig torture,” somebody next to me said, snapping a picture of his own.  Two guys stuck the end of the hedge clipper into the hog’s neck and started going to town on the ribs.  A man walking by trotted up and licked the head’s cheek.  Thursday night at the Food Truck Oasis.

This was not pig torture.  It was Alabama-based Jim and Nick’s Bar-B-Q taking the lead in the Fatback’s Collective Bonnaroo debut.   The Collective is a community of politically progressive chefs, restaurateurs, and gourmands who really dig their pork.  They share with Bonnaroo, according to Melany Mullens, one of a multiple publicists pushing Bonnaroo’s world of food, “a dedication to sustainability and pork.”

I like this coupling.  It sounds silly, but typed out it reads as simultaneously down-home and high-minded, which I figure is pretty much the point.  Bonnaroo is carbon neutral; it gets 20% of its electricity from solar panels; I could go on.  Bonnaroo is also a champion of the Southern culture of food and hospitality.  Welcome to Bonnaroo’s Tennessee, a land of new kinds of partnerships. Continue reading →

Bonnaroo 2013: Anticipation for Fat Factories and Roadkill Balls

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Bonnaroo!

We’re ramping up our Bonnaroo output this year.  Shannon’s won some behind-the-counter time at Eat Box, one of our favorite food trucks from last year, and we’re really hoping the wilderness survival guru who grew starry eyed when discussing the consumption of roadkill testicles returns.  I have been thinking about my favorite summer fat factory—the Amish doughnuts and butter-dipped pretzels—at least a few times a week for the past two months, and we’re going to spend more time in Tent City this year seeking out far-flung late night delicacies and being propositioned by young men selling pot banana bread.

And, keeping in step with the growing national fetishizing (Spellcheck suggestion: “fetish zing”) of all things pig, the incomparable Rusty Odum of Knoxville’s Blank News is going to be chowing on one of the hogs being roasted in its entirety each day of the festival and give us the low down.  Because we don’t eat them mammals.  We’re also looking forward to drinking Yazoo the only Volunteer State brewer represented, and learning just what is to be learned from the Living Cuisine workshop at the Roo Academy.

Oh, and seeing if every living Wu-Tang member shows up.

We’ll check back in with ya’ll next week.

Lunch at the End of the Line: Cheese Making at the Edge of the Continent

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The ladies of the Qualicum Cheeseworks on Vancouver Island are gushers.

As the momma cows trudged out of the field into the barn, each udder, roughly the size of the plastic bladder inside a Costco box o’ wine, swung to and fro.  I’d been petting the new calves just a minute before, and they were charming, all nuzzle’y with dewy black eyes.  Their mommas were not.  They were massive and slobbery and their black eyes were more dull than dewy.

The crammed against each other at the base of a ramp, knew their routine, were probably eager for the relief of the milking room beyond the door at the top of the slope.  When the young man opened the door to that room—a 25’ X 25’ collection of gates and  hoses and foot-tall glass containers shaped like medicine capsules—ten mommas at a time eagerly waddled in, took their standard places at their individual feed troughs, and proceeded to thoroughly destroy the mix of oats, molasses, barley, and wheat that poured out of from chutes above. Continue reading →

Concrete Jungle: Jay’s Pop-up Tomato Shop, Instructions Included

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The tomatoes I started from last year’s seeds took off.  I fixed a three-bulb lamp about 20 years older than I am with CFLs and kept it on the guys all day for about four weeks, and produced this.

So I was left with sixteen seedlings (Beefsteak, Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, and Hillbilly varieties) that I decided to give away to passers-by on a Sunday afternoon, re-potting instructions included.  It was all so very Golden Age of Brooklyn, what with an ethnic and sexual-preference spectrum that would make a recruiter for a small liberal arts college weak in the knees, and folks ranging in age from about their 60s down to the seven.  Pascal, Naomi, Erin, and Pepe were amongst the takers.  I promised everybody I’d include care instructions.  So….

Caring for tomatoes is pretty easy.  You’ve got some gear you need, but you can DIY  share of it, and once you own it, you can keep reusing it. Continue reading →

Community News: Monsanto Wheat Returns from the Dead and the Rest of the Globe Kicks the U.S. Economy

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In 2004, Monsanto ended its field trials of Roundup-Ready Wheat, the proprietary, genetically-altered version of the grain that would allow it to be sprayed with the company’s Roundup weed killer and survive.  The public was too uncomfortable with the prospect of eating techno-genetic food.  Last week, The New York Times reported that Roundup-Ready Wheat returned from the dead to kick U.S. exports in the shin.

The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, but last week Japan and South Korea banned the importation of the grain – and the E.U. recommended that all 27 of its nations increase testing – because the Roundup-Ready strain was found growing in an Oregon Field.  According to Monsanto’s web site, tests of the grain were never conducted in that field.  This brings up a few points worth emphasizing:

  1. The very fear American farmers have about Monsanto’s techno-genetic seeds – that natural crops cannot be protected from contamination by them – is true even in the case of a controlled field test conducted by one of the biggest and most advanced companies in the world.
  2. When contamination of those natural crops occur, ownership of those crops automatically transfers to Monsanto, meaning that farmers must then pay Monsanto or have their businesses destroyed.  This is enshrined in law by the Plant Variety Protection Act and a recent decision by the John Roberts Supreme Court.
  3. Wheat can, according to Monsanto, linger in the ground for up to two years before germinating.
  4. The company’s GM wheat apparently lingered in the ground for nine years before germinating.
  5. Wheat exports contribute, according to U.S. Wheat Associates, an industry marketing firm, account for between $961 million and $1.8 billion of our GDP.  South Korea imports 2.5 million tons.  The E.U. imports over 1 million.
  6. Countries with large numbers of educated individuals do not want to import GM food.
  7. The inability to control the Roundup-Ready wheat – an inherent component of its design – threatens the U.S. economy and our trustworthiness as world merchants.

And on a final note, Monsanto’s new strategy to introduce its proprietary, fundamental foodstuff into the global food chain is to start selling it to India.