I went, I saw, I got wet -- Backyard Farm Tour Day Two

With my own duty as official backyard farm host completed last Saturday, I set out the next day to see what others had growing.  Most of the tour stops on the second day were closer to actual farms than backyards.   I only made it to three before getting rained out, but they were pretty cool.

The first was a garden in an alley, behind a row of traditionally (boringly) landscaped newer homes on fairly small lots.   There are no backyards in this neighborhood, just an alley leading to garages.  The gardener, Natacha, fills every patch of dirt in the alley, and along the narrow spaces on each side of her house.  Here's the view from the entrance to the alley.   Can you spot it, beyond the second fence on the right?

first hints of something a little different:

Hey, look at that.....

Natacha's farm!

What these photos don't show is a long row of raspberries along one narrow side yard, and a packed potato patch filling the other, along with a couple of rogue zucchini plants hiding amongst the standard shrubbery in the front.  Birdfeeders, fountain and a big deck with planters full flowers and herbs complete the space.  Every square inch is edible.

With a thunderstorm looming overhead, I headed east to look at two herb 'farms'.  The first one, tucked into the back of a 1/2 acre lot (though it seemed much bigger), is still being created.   At one side is a newish vegetable/herb garden with a small greenhouse.

Across the yard stands a 50 foot hoop house, with sod clearing underway for a second house.   Are you sure this is only a half acre?

Under showery skies, I drove just a few blocks to another herbary, this one on a rocky, full acre lot.   A longer-established garden included raised beds, cloches, a large enclosed area for ducks and chickens, various sheds and greenhouses, all interwoven with native juniper trees and sagebrush and grasses.

I love seeing what other people plant.   Kale, strawberries, chard, and tomatoes are standard.   Along with the green beings, there were other denizens to be seen.  Chickens....

Bees .....

And my fellow tourers....

By this time thunder and lightning were right over the top of us.   After spending 15 minutes huddled under the porch of the house, I headed back to my car, parked nearly two blocks away, when the rain let up.   Before I got even halfway there, the storm redoubled its efforts, and despite my best sprinting form, I arrived at my car battered by hail and soaked to the skin.

At that point I decided to give up on the tour.  I was hungry and the storm cell covered miles and looked like it was here to stay (according to the next day's news reports, the storm generated over 7000 lightning strikes in our area that day and evening.)

  Besides, I had one more errand before I headed home.  

A special sale of fine pianos, onstage at the Tower Theatre downtown, needed visiting.  Pianos needed testing.  To a piano lover, even a wet one, there is no prettier sight than a crowd of shiny grands under lights.

 

They came, they saw, they asked questions -- Back Yard Farm Tour Day One

The 2013 Bend Backyard Farm Tour is history.  On a beautiful sunny Saturday, I had over 100 visitors to my 'farm'.   I was so busy I never had time to take a break, and didn't get 'lunch' until the last guest departed, a little after 4:00.

I was so busy I never even took out my camera, so I have no photos of the day -- sorry.  Just for the record, though, here is some of what they saw, under this morning's cloudy skies rather than the bright sunshine of Saturday.

The entrance to the back garden

leads to a large selection of nursery pots, full of perennials waiting to be transplanted into the front yard.   I think most people just thought they were colorful container gardens.   Shhhh

I will say that I was surprised by some of the questions I got.   I always expect to answer questions about tomatoes

and dealing with deer -- which I did.   A large percentage of my visitors each year are newcomers to Bend and/or gardening in general.  Most newcomers arrive from balmier and/or wetter areas such as Seattle, Portland, or California, and I share the usual caveats 'frost is possible any day of the year' 'add tons of organic matter, the soil here is mostly sand' and 'choose varieties for short season maturity'.   This year, though, I had a most unusual experience, when I got to tell newcomers from Paisley, Oregon (south and east of here, even drier and colder and higher in elevation than Bend), 'hey, you'll love it -- it's warmer and we have a longer growing season'.  

But I also found myself expounding on such random topics as:  why the big old weeping birch trees are dying all over town (they are being stressed by rising temperatures), the need to water trees and shrubs, especially newly planted evergreens in the winter (they frequently die over their first winter because when the cold, dry air dries out the foliage, the moisture cannot be replaced via the frozen soil) ...... best non-bee-attracting annual flowers for restaurant window boxes (how would I know, since I plant everything I can that attracts bees?!  ..... what to do for aphids and powdery mildew on lupine cultivars (take 'em out and plant native varieties which are never touched by either).   It's amazing what knowledge you pick up in 40+ years of gardening.

Of course I answered lots of questions about chickens,

 including 'what do you do to keep them warm in winter?' (nothing -- they have feathers and down that will protect them as long as they are dry and out of the wind), 'what kind are those spotted ones' (Speckled Sussex)

and 'why is that chicken in prison?' (because she has gone broody).

Also, does your cat attack the chickens?  (no, but they definitely keep an eye on each other)

Every year there is one plant in particular that for some reason intrigues people, and everybody asks about it.   One year it was asparagus -- most people have only seen the early spring sprouts that appear magically in grocery stores and don't recognize the beautiful ferny leaves of the mature plant.   Another year it was borage, which I allow to go to seed because I love the blue, star-shaped flowers, and so do the bees.

This year people did ask about the borage and the asparagus, but the big surprises were fruit trees ('you can grow fruit trees here?!')

and my favorite question:  'what is that flower that looks like an artichoke?' (it's an artichoke).

Overall, it was just fun to talk with a bunch of really nice, curious and often well-informed people, many of them experienced gardeners themselves.   Although there is a healthy locavore movement, and a recent crop of small farms raising vegetables and herbs locally, it seems many people still don't know much about how to raise their own food and are eager to learn.  I hope some of them went away with a spark of an idea to try a few kale plants this fall and next year.

Uh Oh. They Are Coming...

No, not goblins and a cave troll.

Visitors.

People who have bought the booklet and, clutching their maps, are touring the local area to look at backyard farms.   Which apparently I have one of.   Who knew?    All these years I thought I was planting a not very organized vegetable garden and tossing in a few random flowers to go with the weeds.   It has never fully lived up to my fantasies expectations of a proper vegetable garden, which tend to come from photos in books and Martha Stewart-type magazines.

But times have changed.   There are locavores.   There is urban farming.   And there seem to be a heck of a lot of people living here who have either never gardened at all or have never planted as much as a radish seed in their lives, but who are worried about GMO's in their food and tired of the pink golf ball tomatoes found in ye olde giant grocery chain market.

Add to that the built-in challenges of growing many of the most traditional food crops in our short-season, cool night, frost-can-happen-any-day-of-the-year climate, and you have a lot of newcomers and even oldtimers who are interested in seeing what can be grown on a city lot.

If the numbers are anything like the visitors in these photos from the 2010 backyard farm tour, I may have a lot of people.  The tour this year has a majority of larger gardens, including several actual farms, rather than smaller ones in people's backyards.   I suspect the average person is more interested in gardens on in-city lots, and since I am designated #1 in the tour booklet, I am expecting a deluge of guests.

Along with recently having become the subject of a Beatles tune (see previous post), I have come to realize that I actually am a genuine 'oldtimer'.  Sadly, along with the vast knowledge of useful oldtimer gardening tips and tricks, has come a bit of arthritis and weariness of limb.   At least I can now blame the weeds on that.   But that isn't going to stop me from tearing the heck out of a few last patches today, before the hordes show up tomorrow.   Tomorrow?!!!!!!    Help!

Come to think of it, the goblins probably wouldn't notice the weeds.

Dark Days Challenge 2009-10 Week #3

Since I only found out about the challenge and joined on Tuesday, this is my first week, but since everyone else is in week 3, that's my title too. I will try to do a couple of extra meals in the next week to catch up.

I made this meal on the same afternoon I signed up. I was excited, so I decided to just go for it. I had no time to do anything fancy because I was working (at home) all day and didn't have time to go to the store for any ingredients. I already had a pot of chicken stock cooking up from the carcass from our Thanksgiving chicken, so I did a very simple dinner using that, some vegetables from my garden and a couple of seasoning bits. I guess I could just call it

SOLE Soup





From my garden: (distance traveled, about 50 steps -- damn! that's LOCAL!)
Kale -- a volunteer, probably Red Russian
Potatoes -- Colorado Rose and All Blue
Onion -- volunteer, probably a multiplier onion

Chicken bones for stock -- Pine Mountain Ranch, Bend (less than 10 miles)
Additional chicken broth -- Pacific Natural Foods, Tualatin, OR (approx 150 miles)
Salt -- oops. Here's where the 'local' fell apart. I got out all my salt and realized that, although I am no foodie, I seemed to have 4 kinds, most of it not even remotely local. I had salt from New Zealand, France, Spain and Utah. I selected the 'Mormon Salt' as being the closest to local. How far is it to Redmond, Utah? 800 miles? Good thing we get to have exceptions.



To top it off I added a spoonful of Eberhard Dairy (local, natural but not OG) -- Redmond OR (18 miles) sour cream I happened to have lying around the frig. Oh yum.

Dark Days Challenge: Second Thoughts

Within 15 minutes of my signing up for the 3rd annual Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Food Challenge (or DDOWELFC for sort of short), it began to snow. Next my sweetheart walked in and when I told him of my fun new project (already looking less fun with the snowfall), he exclaimed: "Whoah, that's going to be tough!" ...... and all of a sudden I panicked. I quickly realized that one of the reasons for my panic was that, always the purist, I had automatically started thinking: local should be 40-50 miles, no more. And preferably, grown by me, personally. Great.

I mean, there just isn't much commercial agriculture around here. Short growing season, dry air, cool nights even in summer, sandy soil, and less than 10" of precipitation annually, most of it falling as snow. What local farmers there are grow things like garlic, peppermint, alfalfa for hay, grass seed, and a few sugar beets. We do have some good local beef and other meat animals, and some dairies. Other than that, it's sagebrush tips, juniper berries and maybe some bambi. Smudge sticks, gin and venison -- not too satisfying.

Most of what we think of as 'local' produce, especially this time of year, comes from the verdant Willamette Valley on the west side of the Cascades, which is out of our more reasonable 100 mile 'local' limit. Heck, that won't even get us to the nearest large city, Eugene, 120 miles away.

Discouraged but curious, I got out our trusty road atlas and turned to the map of Oregon. Then I located a protractor and drew in some circles, for 50, 100 and 150 miles. Aha! I realized that Eugene and its nearby agricultural bounty, was 120 miles away by ROAD, but in pure geographical map (crow) miles, it is less than 100. YES. So we get Eugene, Coburg, Corvallis, Lebanon....





And when I reread Laura of DDOWELFC's instructions, I saw that she suggests using 150 miles as 'local' for wintertime. Oh so excellent. That means we get Hood River and Medford (pears, apples), Dufur and the plains of north central Oregon (wheat and other grains), a good chunk of the Willamette Valley (hazelnuts, berries, wine, and a lot more) and a large portion of the central coast (oysters! salt water fishies! salmon! ). We get Klamath Falls, so I can keep eating my blue green algae. And can I count Dagoba chocolate, which is undoubtedly grown in some far distant, tropical clime, but is packaged in our very own Ashland? Oho, this is looking good.

More to the point, what I am discovering as I look at this map, is that, except for a few basic and obvious things, I have no idea what all even grows in Oregon. I know there are a ton of small farmers over there, in the Valley and in the Coast Range, because they bring truckloads of beautiful food over to our farmer's market during the growing season. But where they are, and what else might be out there, I don't really know. So this will be an interesting project.

Dark Days Challenge

I've accepted the Dark Days Challenge for the first time. Started by Laura at the (not so) urban Hennery website, the goal is to cook one meal each week between mid-November and the end of March (The 'Dark Days of Winter') , of SOLE food (Sustainable - Organic - Local - Ethical), then post about it on one's blog, with photos. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go further than our back garden, since all that's left standing is some frosty kale and chard, and that won't last much longer. But we have sources for good local produce (definition: 100 miles) and I have my closely-guarded wee stash of tomato sauce, potatoes, etc. Here's more info and the web address if anyone of you are interested in signing up. Too bad we already ate these:



3rd Annual Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Challenge. Whew! That’s a mouthful. We just call it Dark Days for short around here.
Hope you’ll join me! Hope you’ll invite all of your friends to join us! Can’t wait to see what we all cook…

Dates
Nov 15, 2009 – Mar 31, 2010

What’s the Challenge?
Cook one meal each week focused on SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, ethical) ingredients and write about it on your blog. It’s really that simple, but at the same time, it can really be that hard.

To keep things interesting we’ll have theme weeks throughout the winter, with polls to choose as we go.

What does local mean?
Traditionally, local food challenges call for a 100 mile radius. Winter time is more difficult in many climates, especially if you’re new to eating locally, so my default definition is 150 miles. You can choose to make your radius smaller or slightly larger as you need. Typical exceptions are oils, coffee, chocolate and spices. If you’re making fewer or more exceptions, please note that on your first post.

What if I can’t find every ingredient locally?
That’s why this is called a challenge! If you can’t find every ingredient, or heck even most ingredients, please still post your meal each week. This is just as much about what we learn, the obstacles we find and the decisions we make as it is about cooking with SOLE ingredients.

http://urbanhennery.com/09-10-dark-days-challenge/