Zucchini Sex

I learned something new in the Berkshires this weekend. There are male zucchini flowers and female zucchini flowers. The males provide the pollen and then drop off the vine. The females collect the pollen and then grow a zucchini.

See if you can tell which flower is which. I’m not giving any hints. I think you can handle it…

female-zucchini

male-zucchini

Blue Hill Farm

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This is the final segment of my anniversary/local food combo platter, which now takes us to Monterey in the Berkshires. In my previous post I mentioned that the chef at Blue Hill Restaurant (Dan Barber) gets his amazing ingredients in part from Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Blue Hill Farm was bought by Barber’s grandmother and has been in his family for 3 generations. They now have farmer Sean Stanton managing the farm, which has turned into a wonderful collaboration with Barber. Stanton works with Barber to obtain the tastiest milk, eggs and meat.

Neil and I figured that Blue Hill Farm was probably on Blue Hill Road. Duh. I emailed Stanton and asked if we could come out and visit the farm and he gave us the go-ahead. Interns (and fiancés) Daniel and Allison were getting the cows ready for milking when we got there, so we took a little stroll to see the chickens. They have 200+ laying hens that are the most free-ranged hens I’ve ever seen.

laying hens free-ranging

laying hens free-ranging

Chicken tractor

Chicken tractor

We then went to see the meat birds. They are in a chicken tractor, which is an enclosed run that is light enough to be pulled over different parts of the field. They rotate their cows to a new pasture every 12 hours. Then the chickens come in and do what chickens love best…pecking and scratching around for bugs. They pick through the cow patties and find nice juicy fly larvae. Yum. The chickens are fat and happy and there are fewer pests flying around the farm. Chickens also love to eat grass, so they are happiest outdoors.

barn

The farm was absolutely picturesque. There were green rolling hills, a beautiful barn, happy animals grazing and bunnies romping around. We headed up to the milking barn, where Allison was handling the milking. Daniel filled a suck-bucket (this is a new term for me and I love how awful it sounds!) with fresh milk for the calves. The calves are raised for veal, and again I couldn’t help but notice how much better their lives are on this farm than on factory farms. They are outside eating grass and drinking milk, which is a far cry from the dark, veal pens one usually hears about.

Calves drinking from suck bucket

Calves drinking from suck bucket

Lindsay really enjoyed watching the milking and learned a lot about the cows. They sell some of their fresh, raw milk right at the farm. It’s in a fridge with a metal box to drop money into. I am excited about a source of raw milk, because I want to work on making cheese this fall and winter.

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So we went from Blue Hill restaurant for our anniversary to Stone Barns and now to Blue Hill Farm. So where is Blue Hill Farm? It’s right across from Beartown State forest, which is where Neil and I got engaged. How appropriate.

Stone Barns

A few days ago I wrote about eating at Blue Hill Restaurant for my anniversary. I didn’t go into the food in depth, so I want to say again that it was absolutely delicious. They used fresh, local ingredients that really stood out with their superior flavor. One course was a medley of vegetables and fruit and we found ourselves picking each piece and tasting it individually and then talking about what we had just sampled. The combination of superior cooking and local ingredients made the meal memorable.

We had a very nice waiter who was able to answer a lot of our questions about what farms supply them, etc. They partner with two farms in particular. Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires. Wait, did someone say the Berkshires?? It turns out that Blue Hill Farm, which was Dan Barber’s (the chef at Blue Hill restaurant) grandmother’s farm, is very close to Neil’s parent’s house. We decided that the next time we went up, we would try and track the farm down.

stone-barns_22

In the meantime, we decided to go to Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture the day after our fabulous meal. We packed Lindsay up after her sleepover and drove up to Tarrytown, NY. Stone Barns is set on 80 acres of gardens, pastures and woods. The mission of Stone Barns, as they say, is to celebrate, teach and advance community-based food production and enjoyment, from farm to classroom to table. We had fun in their impressive greenhouse finding some of the items in our meal from the night before. The different beds made a patchwork quilt effect.

pigs

We wandered through the fields and woods to see their animals. The animals were kept in very spacious areas, and you could see that they move them around to different pastures often. They used portable electric fences that were powered car batteries. There were quite a few pigs that were in the woodsy area doing the things that pigs love best; sunning themselves, sleeping and rolling in the mud. The word transparency kept coming to mind. This operation was beautiful, productive and offered the animals a very nice life. I guess it’s weird to say they have a nice life when they are meat animals, but it is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum from feedlots.

windrows

They even have a big composting area. They compost everything from the farm and the on-site restaurant. There were machines that looked as though they chop everything up into smallish pieces and then lay them out into windrows (long piles of compost). The windrows were covered to keep in the moisture. I read that they were interested inharnessing the heat that the compost produced as a way to heat the greenhouse in the winter, and worked to implement a compost heating system. I love this place!!

bee-hives

It felt as though we were walking through a botanic garden as we toured the grounds. After we passed the laying hens out in their enormous field, we came across their bee hives. I am fascinated with honey bees right now, and have a friend who keeps bees in Brooklyn and sells her honey. I’m still too chicken to make the leap into beekeeping!

I’ve always been curious to try hunting for wild honey. That entails watching the direction bees fly from the flowers they are pollinating and triangulating the path back to their hives, which are often in a hollow tree. I don’t have much opportunity to do that in NYC and I haven’t found a cohort. Plus I think you need to destroy the hive to harvest the honey and I wouldn’t want to do that. Can you imagine thousands of really pissed off bees with no home? Okay, so I like the idea of hunting honey, but not the reality. So when I saw bees (or possibly wasps) flying into a tree during our walk I was really excited. That could be my elusive honey tree!!

bee-tree

At the end of our visit, we had a snack in their little café and peeked into the Blue Hill restaurant up there. It was a fun escape from the city on a gorgeous summer day.

Off for the weekend

View from my in-law's yard

View from my in-law's yard

We’re heading out to visit Neil’s parents in the Berkshires this weekend. It will be nice to catch up, go on a hike or two, canoe, and do some foraging where there are actual, real, live plants in the wild. I’ve packed my copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (see my reading list), which is a fabulous foraging book.

We are also going to go to the free evening dance performance at Jacob’s Pillow on Saturday. It’s such a lovely community program. You sit in the woods with a picnic dinner and watch dancers perform on an open-air stage with the rolling Berkshire hills in the background. The performance is early enough that we can bring Lindsay, who is mesmerized by the dancing.

The only sad note about the weekend is that a friend of ours offered us amazing seats to a Yankees game for Saturday. Sniff.

So have a great weekend and I’ll catch up on Monday. My chickens and I are going to be interviewed on Monday for WFUV radio. Wish us luck!

The 200 Foot Garden

This is a nice story about Patrick Gabridge who took an ugly, unused strip of land in Brookline, MA and turned it into a community vegetable garden. He decided against planting without permission (aka Guerilla Gardening) and got approval from the property manager. He planted squash, cucumbers and lots of other veggies. The little 200 foot long patch of soil (which he had tested to make sure it wasn’t contaminated) will blossom into something much more beautiful than the weedy patch it used to be. Gabridge hopes that the neighbors will help themselves to the veggies as they ripen.

You can read about his project on his blog.

11 Years of Marriage

anniversary-small11 years ago (this past Saturday) Neil and I were married in his parent’s backyard in the Berkshires. We had a beautiful weekend, and 11 years later, we also had a beautiful weekend.

We started the day by going to 2 kid’s birthday parties. Lindsay stayed at her friend’s house for a sleepover after the birthday party, so we had the rest of the afternoon to ourselves. What do parents do when they have some time off? Rest! We watched most of Arsenic and Old Lace before it was time to go for dinner.

We ate at Blue Hill restaurant in Manhattan. When we made the reservations, we didn’t know that the Obamas just ate there. It was difficult getting a table, but Neil persevered. It was worth it. We got the 5-course tasting menu with wine pairings. It was the best meal we’ve eaten in years. They get their ingredients from Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires and from Stone Barns in Tarrytown, NY.

We laughed so hard when they put the first “plate” down on our table. To be fair, it wasn’t part of the 5 courses, but if you were to ever see a spoof of an expensive Manhattan restaurant, they would show what we were served. They gave us a block of wood with many spikes coming out of the top. The spikes made a wavy row on the top of the block. The food was speared onto the spikes as the presentation. So the funny part was there were 2 tiny carrots, 2 tiny pea pods, 2 cherry tomatoes and 2 florets of something related to broccoli. But they were delicious and we didn’t go home hungry at the end of the meal.

highline

After dinner we went to the Highline in Chelsea. I wrote a little about it in this post, but hadn’t gone in person until Saturday. We went after sunset and it was really magical. They have beautiful wild plantings of grass and flowers that weave in and out of the train tracks and the stone walkway. You are raised up, so you have a nice view of the streets and buildings in the neighborhood. We had a nice New York moment there too. The Highline ends rather abruptly around 28th street, where it will eventually be extended to 34th street. When you are at the northern end of the Highline, you are right next to some residential buildings. There was a woman out on her fire escape, who had strung lights up and was entertaining the Highline visitors with her stand-up comedy. She had quite a crowd of people watching her as I’m sure she does every weekend. I love New York and am glad there are still some characters left!

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From school yards to school gardens

BYELIZABETH LAZAROWITZ

Tuesday, July 14th 2009, 9:39 AM

It’s a rural lesson in an urban jungle.

Students at 10 Brooklyn schools will be toiling in the soil this summer and fall, growing vegetables to feed their classmates as part of an effort to get student-grown foods into the school cafeteria.

“We want to eat the stuff we grow,” said Aidan Israel, 7, a student at Public School 107 on Eighth Ave. in Park Slope, who has been helping cultivate peas, kale and basil in the school’s yard. “It tastes fresher than the stuff in the store.”

With its fall harvest, PS 107 – which is in mobile “earth boxes” while its new garden is closed due to a school renovation – will join a program started last autumn by the Department of Education’s SchoolFood department and the state’s Department of Agriculture and Markets.

Dubbed “Garden to School Cafe,” it began with 20 schools citywide – nearly half of them in Brooklyn.

Next year, the program, which lets school cafeteria staffers put kid-gardened produce on the menu, will expand to about 25 schools as part of a broader effort to source school food locally, said Billy Doherty, who heads the program for SchoolFood.

“It’s something that’s important in terms of teaching the kids how to eat better and connecting them to farming, to help them have an overall healthy lifestyle,” Doherty said.

Last week, PS 29 science teacher Tina Reres and a group of incoming prekindergarten students gathered around one of four long gardening beds built behind the Cobble Hill school. They tied up tomato plants, searched for bugs and then lettuce shoots that, if all goes well, will be part of a meal the school’s students will get to eat in the fall.

“It’s a chance to learn where your food comes from,” said Kristin Berman as her daughter Julia, 3, dug in the soil. “City kids don’t really know that.”

Some of the schools – like the Urban Assembly School of Music and Art in DUMBO – are combining food-growing with culinary lessons. Students in the school’s Teen Iron Chef program grew parsley and mint for tabbouleh and demonstrated how to make it, said Lynn Fredricks of FamilyCook Productions, who runs the cooking program. “For them to actually create the food itself is pretty amazing.”

Pesto pasta from school-grown basil was a big hit with kids at PS 29 last fall, Reres said.

But whether getting locally grown foods will really get kids to eat more veggies remains to be seen.

Mia Espinosa, 4, turned up her nose at the peas she had excitedly plucked from the PS 29 garden.

“She won’t eat anything green,” her grandmother, Carmela Panico, said, sighing. “Maybe next year.”

elazarowitz@nydailynews.com

Fighting Chicken Mites

Edie with her beard

Edie with her beard

I’ve been so ashamed to admit that my pampered, pet chickens have mites that until recently I haven’t told a sole. I’ve spent many, many late night hours searching through the archives of backyardchicken.com educating myself on how to spot them and how to get rid of them. There are many different schools of thought, which, although helpful, has added to my confusion on how to deal with the problem.

My battle started a few months ago when I noticed Edie’s luxurious beard getting a little mangy looking. I bought a bag of diatomaceous earth and sprinkled it liberally inside their coop. Diatomaceous earth or DE for short, is fossilized diatoms or a hard-shelled algae. It’s tiny edges abrade soft-bodied animals that come into contact with it causing them to die of dehydration. You use food-grade DE with chickens (non-food-grade is lethal) to kill mites, lice and to deter flies. Some gardeners also sprinkle the stuff around their plants to protect them from slugs. When using DE, you must wear a dust mask and eye protection.

I also read that you need to dust your chickens. What the heck does a city girl know about how to dust a chicken?! I immediately turned to the internet, which has never let me down until this point. I was told to hold them upside down by their legs and sprinkle the DE all over them. Under wings, by their vent (chicken speak for poop shoot) and around their neck. You can put the DE in the foot of a stocking and use it like a powder puff. I thought for sure that YouTube would have a video showing me how to do that, but they didn’t. They have lots of videos of chickens rolling around in the dirt taking a voluntary dust bath in case you are interested in that? No? Okay. I also read that you can put DE in a plastic bag, put the chicken into the bag up to its neck and then just shake the bag. One person on the chicken forum made the connection to Shake N’ Bake and I can’t get that image out of my mind now. Plus I can’t figure out how to do that without strangling your chicken.

We then proceeded to have the rainiest June I can remember. Every time I dusted the chickens (which consisted of me sprinkling DE on them and then trying to massage it under their feathers) and their run it would rain. DE doesn’t work when it gets wet. Gah. Edie started to look mangier and her egg production fell off. When she layed eggs, they were strange – bumps on the shells, soft-shells, no shells. She didn’t act sick, but I knew that there was a problem. I bought some Poultry Protector and sprayed it in their coop and on them. Poultry Protector is a natural enzyme that kills mites, but isn’t harmful to the birds or the environment.

But the rain continued and I didn’t get rid of the mites. Or at least Edie’s neck and eggs still were in bad shape. Getting rid of mites is a bit like fighting an invisible boogey man. I could never see them, but I knew they were there. I decided to use different products. I stepped up a rung on the toxic spray ladder and bought some permethrin. I draw the line at Sevin, which a lot of people use to great success. What killed the Sevin for me was the part on the warning label that says it kills bees. I couldn’t be a part of the collapse of the honey bee population. Permethrin is derived from plants, which makes it sound less toxic, although it too has a pretty long list of warnings on the bottle. I sprayed the coop after I cleaned it thoroughly and I also sprayed the wood chips in the run. I also sprayed a little on the girl’s tushes. I washed Edie’s tush because it was getting a little dirty looking. I was horrified to see lots of missing and broken feathers. See thoroughly gross photo…

broken and missing vent feathers

broken and missing vent feathers

feathers missing on the back of Edie's neck

feathers missing on the back of Edie’s neck

I also bought flea and tick shampoo and powder. My toxic arsenal was getting larger!! They both contain permethrin in their ingredient lists. A lot of chicken keepers have success bathing their chickens in flea shampoo, so I thought I would give that a try. You see, you have to continue battling the chicken mites for a while to break their egg cycle. These products kill the mites, but not the eggs, so you have to do a second or third (or in my case 45th) round to make sure you catch all the hatching mites. The discouraging part is that even though you might kill all the mites in your immediate coop area, some mites can live for 6 weeks off their host and can come back to re-infest your flock.

So here are some photos of Edie after her flea bath. I put her in my daughter’s Lego tub and then lathered her up on the patio. I rinsed her several times with warm water to get the shampoo off of her. You have to make sure when doing this that your bird doesn’t get chilled. Even though it was a very warm and sunny day, I could feel her shivering a bit. I toweled her off and held her in the sunshine until she was dry. As you can see, she was not happy at all about being shampooed.

chicken washing station

chicken washing station

an angry wet hen

an angry wet hen

I also just ordered plastic roosting posts from Omlet as I read that mites can hide in the tiny cracks in wooden posts. When those arrive I will do another entire breakdown, scrubbing and dusting of their coop and run. Edie’s neck still looks very mangy, but I think I see some feathers growing in. I’ve been feeding all the girls yogurt (probiotics) and cat food (protein to help re-grow feathers), which they devour with gusto.

fighting-mites_131

This has been a huge pain in the neck for both me and the hens and I hope I will get rid of the mites soon. Don’t worry about coming over, chicken mites don’t like humans. It’s just the thought of them that makes you itchy. And if someone wants to produce it with me, I think YouTube needs a video of how to dust a chicken.

Update: Since this post, I’ve learned that the mites do in fact bite humans. Many of my readers can vouch for that! And I did find YouTube videos for dusting a chicken. You can see some on my follow-up post here:

http://www.brooklynfeed.com/2011/05/dusting-your-chicken-for-mites/

Wash. prisoners plant seeds for conservation

Sideoats Grama Prairie Grass

Sideoats Grama Prairie Grass

By CALLIE WHITE

THE DAILY WORLD

OLYMPIA, Wash. — When the Nature Conservancy and The Evergreen State College needed a lot of labor for not a lot of money in order to help preserve a pristine piece of wetland, they ended up turning to Stafford Creek Prison, of all places.

It was quite a meeting, said Nalini Nadkarni, a professor at Evergreen.

“One of the things I see as a stereotype is that prisons are black holes for people, money, resources and effort,” Nadkarni said. Of course, as a scientist, she was used to being pegged with a stereotype herself, as the fuzzy-headed Ivory Tower academic pursuing arcane knowledge of little practical value.

Nadkarni’s pilot project has inmates cultivating endangered prairie grasses and so far, it’s been a success.

In a large greenhouse behind the prison’s campus, offenders plant individual seeds of showy fleabane in hundreds of yellow plastic tubes. Other species of grasses are already starting to grow in starter containers in the back of the greenhouse. Near where the prisoners work, a glassed-in beehive thrums with activity.

Volunteers collected the seeds by hand out in the field. Now, inmates are dusting them over lightly with soil.

“They’re so small,” inmate Toby Erhart said of the seeds, which he’s trying to put five to 10 of in each tube. Although the work is “tedious, at best,” he added that it’s a privilege to be outdoors.

Edward Turner, an inmate who says he was an organic farmer from Eastern Washington, said he was “from the old school hippies! In the days before it was popular.”

It was nothing new to Turner to plant seeds that would restore soils, but it was clear that it was a task he particularly enjoyed.

“This is real good for me,” Turner said. “We’re helping in some small way to make the planet a better place. It’s good to bring nature back.”

Once the grasses have sprouted and grown, they’ll be taken to Fort Lewis, where they’ll be planted in meadows that are used as artillery ranges.

“Artillery fields are the most pristine areas because nothing goes there,” said Rod Gilbert, a biologist at Ft. Lewis with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The only creatures that dare to enter are birds, insects and small animals such as frogs and Mazama pocket gophers, he said.

Once the grass patches are established, they can be used for seed collection, so another round of propagation can begin.

Although it is hard to think of grasses as endangered species, it’s a fact, Gilbert said.

“Native Americans used to burn off the meadows with fire once a year,” he said. That both helped the grasses propagate and repressed tree seedlings. But the practice stopped when settlers came to the Oregon Territory and took the land as their own, causing forest to encroach on the grasslands, he said.

This will be the first large-scale restoration project launched from a prison on the West Coast, Gilbert said.

“We’re totally psyched about it,” he added.

This is not the first partnership between the Corrections Department and the Nature Conservancy. Cedar Creek Corrections Center ran a program breeding endangered frogs. One of the offenders who worked on the project became part of the scientific team that published articles in scientific journals about their discoveries, Nadkarni said.

It’s exciting to see the critical thinking and observational skills of scientists develop in inmates, she added.

“For scientists like me, I think it’s important to talk to people beyond academia,” Nadkarni said. “We need to transmit our way of understanding the world.”

The project, which is funded by federal dollars, just couldn’t have been feasible outside of the prison, said Jeff Muse, Evergreen’s sustainable prisons project manager. It takes too much labor, which is extremely expensive on the outside. Offenders make about 45 cents an hour.

More than their wages, the prisoners not only learn the skills of cultivating plants, they learn they can use that skill outside of landscaping and gardening, Muse said.

“It’s green-collar education,” he said.

But Muse, like Nadkarni, sees the program in a much broader light. Making an institution compensate in some way for its use of environmental resources makes a much larger impact than just hoping everyone tries to cut down on creating trash and buys fluorescent lights. He likened institutions such as hospitals, prisons and schools to cargo ships, which don’t turn on a dime, but do gather steam as they head in a new direction.

Julie Vanneste, the Department of Correction’s sustainability coordinator, said Washington is a model state when it comes to sustainability, and Stafford Creek is its model prison for sustainability.

Muse pointed out that sustainability is often cast as a concern of yuppies. He shares Nadkarni’s misson to spread the scientific word to everyone. Global climate change and the rapid loss of species to overdevelopment will ultimately affect everyone, he said. As a scientist, however, he said he realizes the programs may sound great, but he’s hoping to back them up with studies to find out how effective they are.

“None of this will matter unless we figure out how it works or why it works,” Muse said.

Stafford Creek’s sustainability programs don’t start and end with field grasses. The prison composts its food waste and grows its own fruits and vegetables. It has a comprehensive recycling program. And it repurposes old bikes to give to charity.

Reusing and fixing old things isn’t just a skill for the prison, it’s a skill that can start a business. Muse brought Eli Reich, a former Seattle bike messenger who founded Alchemy Goods when he started selling bags made out of old inner tubes, to talk to the inmates about his business. Muse said offenders could do the same once they got out of prison.

“We want them to take what is useless and make it useful,” Muse said.

The same could be said, to a degree, about the inmates. Dan Pacholke, former Stafford Creek superintendent and current facilities administrator for Western Washington, said 97 percent of the state’s 16,000 offenders are headed for release someday, and they need to come out better than they went in. And doing science, which gets inmates to use critical thinking skills and creates a sense of social engagement, is one way to do that.

“I’d like to see science projects in every prison in the state,” Pacholke said.