Just Juice It

Many people assume that organic farmers are the healthiest people on the planet.  With pretty much limitless access to organic produce and other products, farmers do have the opportunity to eat a really healthy (and delicious) diet. Unfortunately, even though the opportunity exists to eat healthily, that doesn't always translate into an entirely healthy lifestyle.  Too often, farmers (such as myself), get so caught up in the work of farming, that we actually forget to take care of ourselves.  I can't tell you how many times customers and friends would look at me with concern due to the bags under my eyes, my dirty and often disheveled work clothes, and my sun and wind exposed skin.  The worried glances were warranted because, caught up in the busy schedule of farming, Jeff and I stopped taking the time to care for ourselves so that we could care for the farm and Marley.  Sure, we always ate plenty of healthy, nutrient rich fruits and veggies that we grew and only eat organic and/or grass fed meat, but that's where the self care stopped.  We had to get the work done and if that meant not sleeping, missing breakfast and lunch, not exercising, and working seven days a week, so be it.  I suppose some farmers are able to lead a balanced life, but Jeff and I, we were ambitious and always felt the need to grow as much as possible and make as much as possible so that we could be able to buy our own land and afford the start-up of our eventual farm.  We farmed with a sense of urgency, because we knew that our land situation was unstable and we needed to be able to rebound when it eventually crumbled.

If and when we farm again, we've vowed to not lose track of ourselves.  Farming needs to be sustainable, not just for the earth, but also for the farmer.  If you overtax and poison your soil, never feeding it, resting it, and replenishing it, it will get sick and will lose its fertility.  Just so, if a farmer works so hard that they make themselves sick, they won't be able to produce food any longer.

When last season ended, we felt pretty beat up physically and decided it was time to rebalance and get healthy.  We started exercising more and decided to clean up the way we eat.  Although we've always eaten a ton of vegetables, we also ate our fair share of junk just because we'd be hungry and would end up eating whatever was at hand.  With more time on my hands since we weren't farming, I started doing a bunch of reading and I learned some truly terrifying facts about conventionally grown/produced food (I'll touch on those on a later date).  I realized that it's not enough to just eat organic fruits and vegetables.  No, you need to eat  A LOT of  local (because everything is more nutrient rich when freshly picked) and organic produce and NOT eat conventional grain products, anything with corn syrup, anything with GMOs, and, well, pretty much anything that isn't organic.  To be healthy, we need to limit our exposure to pollutants and toxins, which means we really shouldn't eat food that is grow and produced in a toxic and poisonous way.  So to that end, our family stopped eating our beloved loafs of french bread, switched to organic pasta, cut out the candy, and looked for ways to eat more veggies.  I'd always heard people talk about drinking vegetable juice and thought, "yeah, yeah, yeah...that's a little overzealous."  Nonetheless, I decided to break out the Champion Juicer and try my hand at juicing veggies.  It was a game changer.  I was quickly hooked on my morning "green drink."  Within a week, my vision was significantly and noticeably better, my skin was clearer and healthier, I had more energy, and was even in a better mood.  All of a sudden, I couldn't get my hands on enough kale and beets!  I still can't believe that there had been times farming when we had too much kale and too many beets to sell and I didn't just juice them.

So why is veggie juice so awesome?

The nutrients in vegetable juice are absorbed and accessible to the body immediately.  There's no waiting for your digestive system to separate the fiber from the nutrient filled juice because the juicer does it for you!  Drinking vegetable juice is like hooking yourself up to a vitamin i.v - the effects can be felt instantly. Of course, drinking vegetable juice does not satisfy all your food requirements.  You still need to eat whole veggies for all their good fiber and roughage, healthy sources of protein, and organic whole grains to achieve a balanced diet.  

Drinking vegetable juice allows you to take in a huge amount of nutrients found in vegetables.  The quantity of vegetables in a tall glass of veggie juice is astounding and it just wouldn't be a good idea, let alone very much fun, to eat that volume of vegetables in one sitting.

With juicing, it's easy to incorporate a larger variety of vegetables into your diet.  Beets, kale, carrots, fennel, cucumbers, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, sweet potato, ginger, parsley, mint, cilantro, cabbage, watermelon, apples, oranges, lemons, limes, pears, you name it...you can juice it!  I also find that there are vegetables that I don't really care to eat that often, but I love them in my juice.  Carrots and celery, for instance, are not things that I often eat whole.  But now that I juice, I guarantee that I get at least one carrot and two stalks of celery every day, which are filled with beneficial nutrients and minerals.

Juicing allows you to never waste vegetables ever again!  Juicing is a great way to go through a backed up supply of veggies quickly, ensuring that things don't go bad sitting in the fridge.  The juicer also doesn't care if the fruits and veggies don't look pretty and are a little worse for wear.  Bruised apples, juice them!  Wilted lettuce, juice it!  Adopting a juicing habit will take you from feeling overwhelmed by too many veggies to always wanting more.  I wish I had discovered juicing when we were running our CSA because I could have countered complaints about too much produce with a suggestion to juice.

Basic Green Drink Recipe
Makes enough for two 16 ounce glasses

Note: When juicing, it's important to only use organic fruit and vegetables and to always wash everything before you use it.

1 bunch of organic kale, washed (leave the stems, I juice them too)
2 organic carrots, washed and trimmed
4 stalks of organic celery, washed
1 organic grapefruit, peeled and broken into 4 segments
1 organic orange, peeled and broken into 4 segments
1 organic apple, washed and cut into quarters (no need to remove the core or seeds)
1 organic lemon, washed and cut into quarters (no need to peel)

Optional: Parsley, cilantro, cucumber, beets (roots and greens), and lettuce.

Run everything through your juicer and drink it up!

Big Changes

Big changes are afoot for us.  Last year, we said goodbye to the property where our farm was born and grew up.  Now we're starting a new farm that is going to be all that Redwood Empire was and more.  We're called Tusque Farms.  Tusque is an ancient French word for "old lands," which for us is homage to our focus on staying true to the agricultural traditions of Sonoma County.  We want to grow all the usual fruits and veggies for which we're known, but we're also going to grow heirloom crops that used to be prolific in Sonoma County but have become virtually nonexistent over the years.

To learn more about the new farm, visit our website at www.TusqueFarms.com.

Stay tuned here for the next chapter in our journey as modern day farmers!

Future Farm Girl

In case you were wondering...

Our beautiful little farm girl, Marley Mae, was born on May 23, 2012.

She's making us think about farming in a whole new way.

More to come soon...

In the belly of a whale...

Yes, it's been a long time. I'll admit it. I haven't written or even thought about writing in a couple of months. It's just that we've been on matrimonial leave. Even though we've been working hard prepping the farm for the coming year, at the end of the day, I just don't feel like sitting down at the computer...I'd much rather cook a nice dinner for my husband and enjoy his company while doing something other than shovelling. I'm back, though, so you need not worry about whether we've disappeared.

Our primary task over the last week has been building a new greenhouse. We've been feeling pretty cramped in our first greenhouse and really needed additional space for starting all our transplants. After hashing out a multitude of ideas, we finally decided to just go for it and build another full size greenhouse. We scrounged around the farm looking for needed parts and bargain shopped all around town for the best prices on hardware, spent a few days building, and wham, bam, we had ourselves a nice, new, shiny greenhouse. Now the fun of filling it begins.

Other thoughts...

A couple days ago when we went to Western Farms to buy alfalfa for our goats, we were told they were just about out of it and didn't know when they would be able to get more. Apparently, all alfalfa is being exported to China because the floods they experienced last year meant they couldn't produce their own. To top it off, it's been too wet in our immediate area for alfalfa farmers to cut their hay. I guess a global food system means sometimes, even when there's plenty of local(ish) sources, you still have to compete against halfway around the world for food. Seems like it would be a smart idea to have farms that deal directly with real people in the middle of communities to safeguard against a real food shortage.

I came across some statistics that I found really interesting. Only 1.1% of Sonoma County's agricultural production is in vegetable crops. 72.1% is in fruit and nut crops (think grapes and apples). 13.9% is in livestock and poultry products and 8% in in livestock and poultry themselves. So, even though Sonoma County is very much an agricultural county, hardly any of it is vegetable production. With so few vegetables produced, why doesn't it feel like locals are banging down the doors to buy local produce? Just wondering.

Inspiration from Joel Salatin...

In our business, there are a few voices that stand out from the rest. Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and John Muir have been preaching the importance of conservation, stewardship, and the necessity of maintaining a connection with the land despite the increasing industrialization and mechanization of mainstream agriculture. These guys were/are incredible thinkers and paved the way for much of our modern return to more simple, natural, and responsible agricultural practices. One person, however, now stands out from the rest as someone who is leading in our industry by example and who is standing strong against the tide of sterile, impersonal, unnatural farming.

Joel Salatin is a farmer. He has been other things (most notably a successful journalist), but it is in his simple life as someone who works with the land that he has been most influential and revolutionary. On his properties in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Joel Salatin has created a model for truly sustainable farming, in which the farmer protects and nurtures the land through the raising of animals. Instead of taking from the land and never giving back anything in return, Salatin's system simulates the relationships between the earth and animals that can be seen in nature throughout history. Under Salatin's stewardship, the animals do not tax the land, they help improve it.

We had the pleasure of hearing Joel Salatin speak a couple weeks ago in Point Reyes. I have read most of Salatin's books and we have been fortunate enough to speak to him via phone, so I wasn't sure if I would take something new from the talk. I was delighted, however, to hear a crystal clear new message that, I believe, should be the litmus test for most new innovation in agriculture. Smart farming requires that we only do things in and with nature that we have examples of in the natural world. The disastrously filthy and harmful practices of feedlots, slaughterhouses, and conventional, chemical based crop agriculture are completely unnatural. Where in nature do we see animals being raised without sunlight and with food that is genetically unrecognizabe as nutritious and useful to their development? No where! Where in nature do we see plants thrive when fed with chemicals and sprayed with pesticides? No where! Where in nature do we find the most clean and sanitary spaces to be in closed and confined areas where there is no contact with the elements which are the most effective cleaning agents? No where! Our agricultural system has become so out of whack because we have become accustomed to applying man made, unnatural practices to the natural world. We cannot, without destroying nature, exert our artificial and unsustainable practices on the earth. As Joel Salatin suggests, we have to open our eyes to the intricacies of the medium with which we work. We work with the environment, with soil, with plants, and with animals. If we are aware of the realities and limitations of these things, we can most easily see the natural ways that the environment heals and preserves itself in harmony with the cultivation of plants and animals. Does it make sense to spray chemical pesticides and herbicides (i.e. roundup) around trees that we hope will produce bountiful crops of healthy, nutritious fruit? Absolutely not! If the chemicals are capable of killing the undesirable weeds and pests it is also going to harm the tree we are trying to protect.

The lesson I learned from Joel Salatin this time is that nature is not a petri dish. We cannot look at our agricultural work which occurs in the environment as isolated from the deeper workings of nature. Regardless of where we throw the rock in the pond, ripples will extend throughout. As farmers in today's world, we must accept the consequences of our actions and only do that which makes sense in nature.

A Whole New Year...

So we did it. We got hitched on New Year's Eve and now we're official. Our party was perfect. Surrounded by friends and family, we said our vows and grew together in a way that will never be undone. I had wondered if I would actually feel different after it was all finished and I do. I feel calm, balanced, happy, and ready to apply myself to life and business like never before. This year we will feed more people than last. We will grow more, we will grow better, and we will do everything we can to make the lives of those around us - our family, our friends, our communities - so much better. Thank you to everyone who has supported us and offered their positive intentions for the past few years. Now you get to watch us really shine.

Inspiration

Jeff at the Market Hall in Florence, Italy. Check out those Romanesco cauliflower to his right...inspiration!

I was going through a bunch of photos looking for pictures to put up at our wedding in a couple of weeks and I found pictures of the indoor Market Hall in Florence, Italy. Jeff and I were there two years ago and spent a lot of our trip exploring farmers' markets and market halls all over Italy, France, and Spain. My favorite was a two story indoor market hall in Florence smack in the middle of the train station ghetto. Seafood, vegetables, spices, mushrooms, bread, espresso, beans, pasta, you name it, this place had two or three vendors selling the best and freshest available. We were there in January so there were predominately greens, brassicas, and roots in the markets. At the time, a lot of the produce seemed obscure and different from that in our area. Now, however, when I look at my pictures, I realize that we now grow many of the same things. Many things that we now grow, like Romanesco cauliflower and rapini, were always on our minds to grow, but it wasn't until we saw them proudly grown, displayed, and widely enjoyed, that we had the confidence to dedicate precious planting space to less known crops. Now, as we pick gorgeous, delicious Romanesco cauliflower which will be enjoyed on tables across Sonoma County, I am so glad that we did. It turns out that those random Italian veggies can be enjoyed just as much in California as in fair Italy.