RAW MILK THANKSGIVING

SHOULD I SERVE MY THANKSGIVING GUESTS FOOD MADE WITH RAW MILK?

My daughter is the new and proud owner of a cow share.  Last month she came home from LaCrosse with a glass jar of milk from her friendly, neighborhood family farm.  It was filled with the familiar white liquid, and the cream was rising to the top.  I tasted it curiously, and found it delicious.  Since then I have been on a rapid learning curve about what I used to think was a fringy food.

Pure, clean milk. (photo credit: tambako the jaguar Flickr)

I’m finding that raw milk is verifiably safe, but that the network of family farmers who provide it is not.

Right now, here in Wisconsin (AMERICA’S DAIRYLAND) bureaucrats in the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) are actively working to shut down family dairy farms.

...Making milk. (photo credit hans-s' flickr)

Raw milk is legal throughout Europe and in many states.  In the Dairy State, as well as a handful of others, farmers who want to sell raw milk and people who want to buy it from them have had the option of circumventing the pasteurization requirement through cow shares.  Farmers are legally allowed to drink the milk from their own cows, so the answer was to sell cow shares – then the fellow-owners of a cow can drink her milk too.

At this moment, government officials are moving to stop this.  For example, Oct 16, 2009, the Trautman Family Farm, a raw milk dairy near Stoughton, was required to surrender all documents related to its sale of raw milk, (including customer lists—even though buying raw milk is not illegal), and they were ordered to stop “selling or distributing raw milk or raw milk products.  This is happening all over the state.  (If you are interested in local Wisconsin issues, Sustainable Times has a good article about this.  part 1 part 2

Both farmers and their customers are protesting.  See this post from someone who recently attended a (DATCP) hearing to speak out.  Read about it here

IS RAW MILK DANGEROUS?

Detractors claim that raw milk is a health hazard.  Yes, it is.  So is crossing the street.

Why focus dwindling resources on shutting down family farms who offer raw milk when there are so may more serious health hazards?  According to an article in the Boston Globe last year, (their article is a great intro into the world of raw milk.  Check it here. ) the U.S. Centers for disease Control counted only 1,007 illnesses and 2 deaths from raw milk or cheese consumption in the 7 years between 1998 and 2005.  This is a drop in the bucket of the 76 million cases of foodborne illness from many other sources each year.

Keep in mind also that the “sick” most people  get from raw milk is simple gastro-intestinal distress.  A stomach ache and the runs for a day or two is not a national disaster.

(photo credit: smoodysarah flickr)

The reports coming in on health consequences from factory-farmed herds of animals stuffed full of antibiotics and producing oceans of waste is so much more dire.

IS RAW MILK HEALTHFUL?

The general line is that heating to pasteurize makes milk safe and healthy,  but research is starting to find that raw milk is full of beneficial enzymes, vitamins, proteins, and bacteria – most of which are altered or killed when it is heated during pasteurization.

The Boston Globe article noted that a just released study of 2,217 raw milk drinkers in Michigan suggested that raw milk can be consumed by most sufferers of lactose intolerance, which may affect about one in 10 Americans.

I’ve just started to explore raw milk.  It is the logical next step for a locavore  — and what I’m finding is making me afraid – of mass produced, pasteurized milk.

ECONOMIC POTENTIAL OF RAW MILK

According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy and research group in Washington, D.C., with local chapters around the country, about 500,000 Americans – or about 5 percent of milk drinkers – regularly consume raw milk. The foundation believes that the number is growing exponentially.  A wealth of information available here.

Raw milk is a boon to family farms and the people who want to support local agriculture.  Family farms that offer raw milk are truly sustainable both economically and environmentally.  On top of that,  modern cleanliness technology makes contamination dangers well within tolerance.

Buying raw milk is like getting your vegetables at the farmers market.  It’s the way that you get to put the money right into the farmer’s hands.

A RAW THANKSGIVING

So I have decided to put my guests at risk on Thanksgiving.

I am going to use raw milk to make this year’s Thanksgiving feast – but that’s not what worries me.

Every year I host a Thanksgiving feast of vegetarians and meat eaters.  The centerpiece of the meal is Polenta Dome Flambé, which both vegetarians and meat eaters happily gobble up.  (I’ll report on our veggie thanksgiving feast next Friday.)

To accommodate those guests who feel they must eat pieces of a certainbird to properly give thanks, I have always provided slices of turkey breast from the butcher’s counter at our local food coop, and I’ll do it once more — even though my research has revealed they are 10 times more likely to get a foodborne disease from deli meat than raw milk.

...The quintessential wholesome snack. (photo credit: Idhnys-f flickr)

GREENS IN THE GREENHOUSE — ALMOST THERE

In the background of this photo of our just finished hay stack, (see my post Stacking Hay) you can see our barn and the attached greenhouse.

Having a greenhouse has been a dream all my life, and when we designed our barn, the attached greenhouse was on the drawing board from the beginning.  Building it has frenzified our falls for the past three years.

...Building the frame in 2007

The first year after the concrete foundation was poured, timber frame was in place and oak siding attached, we built the greenhouse frame with its tricky angles of uncompromising oak and then stapled a double sheet of plastic to it.  That project was completed in the dark and in a blizzard.

Last fall we replaced the plastic sheet with insulated polycarbonate panels that are actually made in our neighborhood.  Another step forward.

...Fitting the polycarbonate panels in 2008.

This fall we are adding the growing beds along the barn wall made of cedar decking boards we got on sale at Menards.  While Doug builds the boxes, I have been building the soil.  Working on the hard, flat surface of our bonfire circle, I have perfected my recipe:

1. 1 power wagon full of the clay-hard soil that was removed from the building site where the barn stands.  The wagon holds about 4 wheelbarrows.
2. 1 bag of peat moss (May God have mercy on my soul—I am so sorry, bogs of Canada.  I won’t do it again now that I understand.)
3. 2 wheelbarrows of the composted horse manure I have been cooking up thanks to my horse-boarding neighbor across the road. (See my post on the glories of manure, )
4. 40 pounds sand for good measure.

To get these four materials evenly mixed takes me about three hours of working with a shovel blade to chop the clumps of clay into ever-smaller pieces that are coated with organic material.  It actually reminds me of making pie crust when I mix the butter (clay) with the flour (see 2-4 above).   I’ve never been that good at mixing pie crust, but I’m starting to feel like a real expert at mixing this growing medium.  By the time both growing boxes are complete, they will be bulding with more than 30 full wheelbarrows of this fluffy, friable mix, which I hope plants are going to love.

Very early next spring, we will start cold loving greens followed by tomatoes for our first greenhouse crop.    We don’t expect this greenhouse to function in the dead of winter because we are not going to heat it, but we do hope to greatly extend Wisconsin’s growing season.

...First of two growing boxes complete in 2009

I would love to hear from any of you who have built and operate greenhouses.  We based this plan on all the reading material we could get our hands on, and it is definitely a work in progress.  Since we designed it we have walked in the greenhouse of Roald Gundersen (Roald’s work was recently featured in the New York Times.  Read article here and see slide show here

I love our first greenhouse and have high hopes for it.  It is built to last, has recycled doors, is earth sheltered, and our initial temperature records look positive.  But if we ultimately build an additional greenhouse, it will probably be different and better, based on everything we are learning as we go.

The constant learning is what I like best about digging in the driftless.

Well, it’s just what I like best about everything.

...Greenhouse built by Roald Gundersen

OCA: ONE TINY PIECE OF OUR BIG PUZZLE

This week UW-Madison ethnobotanist Eve Emshwiller taught me to care deeply about oca, a funky little tuber that I will probably never see.

Botany seems like a conflicted field to me.  Some researchers are working to develop “perfect” varieties of plants that can be grown in vast monocultures, while other botanists are scrambling around the world trying to protect as many different varieties of plants as possible, no matter how “imperfect” they may appear.

Emshwiller described a wheat variety that was collected in 1949 in Turkey. It was called a “miserable” specimen that was not robust and made crummy bread.  Fortunately this pitiful plant was saved in a seed bank where 15 years later it was able to provide resistance to stripe rust that was decimating crops of mainstream monoculture(not “miserable”) wheat.

More recently, the U.S. got a wake up call in 1970 when the Southern Corn Leaf Blight wiped out much of the corn growing in this country.  Some states lost half their crop.  Again, fortunately there were different varieties stored in seeds banks that were resistant.

The list goes on.

And on.

That brings us to Emshwiller’s own botanical underdog – Oxalis tuberosa, native to the Andes in South America. (learn more at the International Potato Center site here.)

...Oca in all its glory. (photo credit: International Potato Center)

Oca looks like a potato at a costume party, and even Emshwiller says that it is an acquired taste.  One type is described as having the sweet, sour, tart flavor similar to baked apple.

The other traditional type has so much oxalic acid ( a toxic substance often used as a rust remover) that it must be soaked in a stream and then dried in the hot mountain sun and frozen in the cold Peruvian nights, till the shriveled remains look like something you pick up when you walk your dog.  Its best attribute is that it stores well in this dessicated condition.

You have probably never tasted one, and you probably never will.  Emshwiller had tried to grow oca in the UW greenhouse, but oca only produces in the precise light found in the Andes.  No one exports them from South America.  They don’t even show up in local Peruvian markets.

Peruvians use oca as a rotation crop with their staple, potatoes.  Because you can’t keep growing potatoes in the same soil year after year, they alternate with oca.  It’s a system that has worked for thousands of years.

...Peruvian mountains (photo credit First Rooz at Flickr)

You would think oca would be safe in the remote mountain valleys where it is cultivated.  But Emshwiller has seen disturbing evidence that even obscure little oca is being threatened by urbanization and the changes introduced into village life from distant and “developed” countries.

Emshwiller is working with the International Potato Center in Peru to study and maintain the varieties of oca that are being threatened.  It’s not easy.  Because oca reproduces clonally and not by seed, you can’t stick seed samples in a Doomsday vault somewhere.  You have to grow new plants from old plants every year, or the line vanishes.

Artist impression of entrance to Doomsday Vault on a remote island near the North Pole. Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of Santa Claus. Have we been good little girls and boys?)

Emshwiller remains hopeful that oca in at least some of its varieties will not be lost to South America.  She said The International Potato Center has been hosting biodiversity fairs and other projects to encourage people to hang onto oca’s  lumpy, bittersweet possibilities.

Aldo Leopold said, “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.”  We have already thrown away so many pieces.  I hope we will save the gnarly little tubers that have been helping to support a tiny population in South American cloud forests for 10,000 years.

STACKING HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES

When we lived in the Netherlands, we often watched village-dwelling  farmers wearing wooden shoes  bike out to their well-tended fields  carrying some long-handled tool over their shoulder (yes, really).  The Netherlands is a food exporting country, demonstrating that monster-sized agribusiness is not the only productive game in town.   Those Dutch villagers were onto an ideal and timeless way to farm.

...Haystacks immortalized by Monet

Last Saturday as we made the 40-minute drive from Madison to our land, we planned the next steps toward farming we could take that day working on the greenhouse growing boxes, and by the time we pulled off the big road a few miles from our place, we knew exactly what we would do.

But that brilliantly sapphire-skied, balmy day was a play-hooky day, if ever there was one.  So I’m not surprised that a new and compelling project occurred to us out of the blue.

We slowed down along the quarter mile of our property that fronts the county highway,  talking again about the recent pass and heavy hand of our township’s mowing crew.  All the grasses and wild flowers lay in sad, drying  drifts.

Then we  had a sudden shift of perspective.

The  plants  that the Township had chopped down were now a potential crop.  We could stack it and use it for mulch this fall and next spring on  beds that are starting to appear around our barn.  All summer we had scythed out of the unwelcome plants along the road just because scything is so much fun – and after all,  it is our “front yard” — so this free hay is  also free of weed seed.

We have raked up piles of  plant material before, and it tends to turn into a moldy mess.  The solution?  Build a hay stacker like the one we saw at our friend Larry Cooper’s place.

Larry is a blacksmith  who makes and loves to use traditional hand farm tools.  Check out this you tube to see his wonderful broad fork in action.

We have learned a lot from Larry, and two summers ago, he showed us his hay stacker.  It had a wooden base to keep the hay up off the ground and dry, and four poles that teepee together at the top to give loose hay structure.

Building projects can be a wealth of scraps that almost spontaneously grow into new projects.

We were thinking of Larry’s stacker as we turned into our drive and flashed on the exhilarating fact that we had all the materials we needed to build a stacker on the spot, right then and there.

(Take a number and get it line, growing boxes.)

Both the wooden pallets on which our metal roof had been delivered and a stack of supple trunks we had thinned out of our tamarack grove last winter were piled beside the barn within a foot of each other – like they were destined to work together.

So Doug sawed the pallets in two.  We stacked them to make the base and tied up the tamarack poles.

...Recycled base

Then I started raking up the pre-mowed grasses and hauling them up the hill with our wonderful little Power Wagon (see its praises sung at my post on the tractor question here).  I can roll the power wagon downhill without turning on the motor and then use just enough gas to get me and my load back up hill.

We made a little progress on the growing boxes in the last hours of day.  Then the sun set, and we had to stop and watch the show.

It will take me many more Power Wagon trips to the road to collect a full stack,  so I’ve modified the plan again.  Now that I have looked at a hay-making you tube Larry referred me to by Botan Anderson on Mystic Prairie Eco-Farm, I think I can probably transport hay more quickly (and more greenly) by dragging it on a tarp the way I move mountains of leaves around our yard in town.

...Haytstack at Mystic Prairie

Botan just shared with me that he builds two types of haystacks, at his farm.

He says:  A Romanian haystack, which consists of dried, hay stacked upon a bed of branches (4 pallets would work) around a very tall, central pole, and stacked very high. The outside of the stack is then raked with a hayrake, to form a thatched outer shell. A very high and narrow, round shape, works best for this type of haystack. No need for a tarp covering. If formed and raked properly, the outer layer matts down into a very breathable, weather-proof shell. Hay stored this way, keeps a long time. The disadvantage though, comes when you want to use the hay. As soon as you break the outer shell, and remove only some of the hay, the rest of the stack is then vunerable to the weather. Traditionally, all the hay in the whole stack would be hauled away to the barn, when more hay was needed at the barn.

Botan's square stack

He also developed the tarp-covered, pyramid haystack system, because he didn’t have a barn to store loose hay. “I needed a haystack that was close to my goose and duck houses, I could remove hay from as needed, but that would still protect the rest of the hay,” he says.  “Because of the tarp “roof”, this type of stack works best piled wide and square. I wish that there was some more ecological material (other than plastic tarps), to use for the covering, but haven’t been able to come up with anything yet.”

All Saturday I was almost giddy with joy to think that the pallets, the thinned-out tamaracks and the township-mown grass were coming together with the unsuspected purpose of enriching the hard, clay soil that was left around our barn after construction.  (and I admit it, also intoxicated by that blue, blue sky)

I love these kinds of projects.  We had a similar revelation in July.  See my post Milfoil Mulch: turning crap into crop.

...great beginnings of our hay stack.

When the stacker is full, we will toss the tarp over the top to keep off the rain, and we will be rich in the stuff that makes a farm go.

Now I have truly made hay while the sun shines.

TEMPTING APPLES FROM ANTIQUE ORCHARDS

Michael Pollan’s breakout book (and PBS special) Botany of Desire starts with the saga of the apple.  He calls the apple as important as the axe and the plow to the pioneers.

...A Gravenstein, possibly the oldest and most distinctive summer variety at Wednesday's tasting.

They were not valued as a sweet, crunchy snack but as liquid refreshment. Apples were the easiest source of alcohol available in the new world.  Pollan calls Johnny Appleseed Dionysus’s American son.

...this is my grandpa in the middle. What I wouldn't give to taste one of those apples!

John Chapman carried canoe-fulls of apple seed into the wilderness, leaving a trail of tree nurseries along the paths he expected settlers to follow.  He sold the seedlings to settlers when they arrived, and they were grateful to have a jump-start on the orchard that was integral to every farm.

Exactly what kind of apples they were starting in their orchards, neither they nor Johnny knew because every apple seed is a new combination of apple personality traits.  To get apples that are the same, you must graft a twig from your preferred tree onto an existing tree.

Grafting was already established, but Chapman chose to take his chances with seeds, and in the process spread a vast variety of apples into the New World.  According to Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times this morning,  there were more than 6,500 distinct varieties of apples listed in the U.S. in 1905.  That explosion of apple types was eventually corralled and controlled, and under the heavy hand of agribusiness reduced to the few standards that store, ship and sell well.  Artificial apple-flavor in a crispy package.

Fortunately antique apples are gaining supporters.  They are riding the crest of the heirloom fruit and vegetable boom, and we’re lucky they are.  The more varieties of apples we love and grow, the better chance apples have of surviving the insects and diseases that are constantly evolving to consume them.  The more apples in our pocket, the better to find the ones that can adapt to climate change.  And finally, the more amazing flavors we have to enjoy.

...So many apples. So little time!

This Wednesday in the early dark, I hurried to the lobby of the grand old Orpheum Theater to attend a regular tasting organized by Ferment,  an informal happy hour that brings together Madison’s farmers, cooks, connoisseurs and curious.  This week the subject was apples.  There was not a Red Delicious in sight.  Instead the tables were laden with wonders like Black Gilliflower with its pear-like flavor and conical shape discovered in Connecticut in the late 1700’s, and Calville Blanc d’Hiver,  a classic dessert apple of  France and favorite of Thomas Jefferson.

Two area antique apple growers shared their harvest.

Jim Lindemann apples from this Gardens of Goodness orchard.  Jim’s 120 trees overlook Lake Wabesa, and Jim can see Wisconsin’s  gleaming capitol dome in the distance.

For 20 years Jim has been planting and tending his orchard with the plan to follow in the pioneer’s footsteps and produce hard cider.  That’s why he is drawn to the heirloom varieties that can combine to make a cider to suit the modern American palette.  Because Americans have a notorious sweet tooth, some of his apples register high on the sweet-o-meter.

“Most of my apples are not designed for desert,” he told me as I munched on paper-thin slices of his Gravenstein.  This variety originated in Italy in the 1600s and came to the U.S. via a German ship in 1790.  I’m so glad it did.

Lindeman went on to explain that to make good cider you need sugar for fermentation, acid for bite and tannin for mouth feel.  “Most apples out there today can do sugar o.k., but they are insipid in terms of acid and tannin.  A very small percentage make good cider.  It’s difficult to test but easy to taste.”

“If someone bites into one of my apples and says ‘That’s bitter,’ we say, ‘Thank you!’”

The second pomologist supplying the tasting was Ken Weston.  He operates Weston’s Antique Apples outside New Berlin, Wisconsin.

At 80, Weston cares for trees he keeps collecting as well as many that were planted when he was a little boy.  “I helped my grandparents and my mother and father plant them together with workers from the CCC camp,” he told me.  “We grew up with these creatures.  Of course they weren’t so antique then.”

...Weston's Antique Apple Orchard, where the farm looks as good as the apples taste.

Though Weston sells his apples from a stand on his farm and at the Dane County Farmer’s Market in Madison, he calls it more of an art form than a commercial orchard.  “I see them as solid flowers.  This year we had perfect weather for apples.  They enjoyed the cool, wet weather, and we got colors I’ve never seen before.”

“We have colors and shapes that dazzle the mind,” he continued.  “One looks like a doughnut.  It has an effervescence like sparkling wine and tastes like cashews and honey.  One looks like a pomegranate.”

Weston doesn’t question global warming.  He is seeing it in his orchard.

“We are growing tropical varieties now that didn’t used to grow here,” he said.  “I have 8-year-old Pink Ladies from New Zealand.  It used to be you couldn’t grow them north of the Illinois border, but we are growing them easily now.”

“We’ve got a Turkish variety, Kandil sinap,  that comes from the Mediterranean where it’s hot.  It’s adjusting to our climate.  It’s absolutely gorgeous.  They look like peppers.  The tree has leaves like olive leaves, and it grows straight up like a poplar. It is so easy to digest.  At 80, some apples give my digestive system trouble, but I can eat these all day.  It’s refreshing — like a drink of cold, mountain water.”

Growing antique apples is a challenge, Weston says.  “One is so delicate, you have to pick it with gloves.  Another takes 20 years to get a peck.  And their branches break.  These are fussy old things.  You have to be out there all the time.”

Weston wants see these fussy old things with their dazzling variety and eye-popping beauty and encyclopedia of flavors  cover the countryside like they used to.  He offers classes to spread the word.  Check his website to get details on a pruning class at the end of March, and classes in integrated pest management and grafting in April.

I’ll be making at least one trek to New Berlin next spring.

I remember fondly the orchard on my own grandparents’ 80-acre farm in central Illinois. I have carefully selected the spot on our 44 acres which seems best suited to start a brand new antique orchard.

FALL, FREEZERS AND MY FOODSHED

I revel in all four seasons, and find that my favorite is invariably the one I am in.  That makes fall unquestionably my favorite season for many reasons.

...The glorious early fall color of my tamaracks.

FIRST: things are changing – FAST!

...Two days later -- tamaracks after needle fall.

SECONDLY, the adrenalin rush of the crazed squirrel mindset .

...In progress

There is always a task that must be completed before winter hits, and that task galvanizes the time I spend on my land.

This year that task is completing the growing beds in the greenhouse before the ground outside (with which we are filling them) freezes.

FINALLY there is the whole wonderful harvest thing going on.

This is primal.  It goes all the way back to the beginning of agriculture.  Though I currently live under an urban canopy of oak and can grow very little of my own food, my relationship to harvest has been reinforced by the purchase a month ago of an 11 cubic foot contraption that creates an arctic microclimate in my basement.  (see my post on freezer shopping tips here.) I am slowly filling it with the food I buy at the farmer’s market: rock hard blocks of green beans, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower are settling in next to the strawberries and raspberries and blueberries that were formerly bulging the freezer of my kitchen fridge.

My freezer is embedding me more deeply in my foodshed.

...My experience is get them on the stalk. You will have to go through and trim them either way, and carrying them by the stalk is way more fun!

All summer long I try to eat as completely as I can from my own foodshed, but even with our wonderful winter farmers market, winter has been problematic.  The last two  years, December through May, our major green has been hoop house spinach, and fruit dwindled down to softer and softer apples.  It’s a constant puzzle trying to determine fresh or frozen broccoli leaves a larger carbon footprint on its trek from California.  Winter can make me look longingly beyond my foodshed.  These days  as I trudge back from the farmers market, grinning under my load of perishable produce.  It’s got winter feasts from my foodshed written all over it.

FEELING THE  FOODSHED

Foodshed is a concept that is starting to be part of the common vocabulary.  It’s a great word, based on the concept of a watershed and helps us to visualize where our food comes from and how it travels.  It’s a concept that feeds your body and your soul as you connect – actually connect – with the people who create the food you need to live.

Because my house is in Madison, Wisconsin, I am sitting in a wonderful, rich foodshed, supported by a growing number of sustainable farmers, who are in turn supported by a growing urban population of people who both love the delicious goodness of locally grown food and have put ethics and eating into the same equation.

The Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems at UW-Madison said in 1996, “Recognition of one’s residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native.”

Feeling like part of the foodshed nourishes me in so many ways.

Here are two foodshed feasts happening just this week:

The UW-Madison Wisconsin Union Student Programming Board has begun a new series, Come to the Table (learn more here), where once a month students are invited to attend a themed buffet dinner featuring guided dinner conversation and a presentation by a food expert talking about some aspect of sustainability, and world trends in food consumption.

The first dinner is tonight! I am having dinner with a dear friend, so will have to take a pass on Michael Bell’s speech on “The Merchant is the One Who Gets it All; Food, the ‘Middleman, and the Agroecology of Justice.”  Those gathered will dine on locally grown Rosemary Butternut Lasagna, Organic White Beans, Braised Kale and Pumpkin Pie.

...photo credit: Artifex photostream, Flickr

Wednesday I will be able to attend an event by Ferment Madison. 

In the Orpheum Lobby Restaurant, Ferment will be conducting a tasting session of heritage apples from area orchards.  These will include such exotic varieties as Black Gilliflower, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, King David, and Smokehouse.

Foodshed – a great word.

So is groundswell.

The Heat and the Help: 6 Useful Global Warming Websites

I’m working on an article for a local publication on what climate change is going to mean in this area, and in the process I search through a lot of blogs on global warming.  It’s disheartening.  In the face of incredible advance scientific understanding of climate change that is being confirmed by researchers around the world, there seems to be growing tide of climate change scoffers who listen uncritically to “experts” whose data has no factual basis.

I like to check out two kinds of Global Warming Blogs.  Those that are both carefully researched about what is happening and those where people are putting their heads together to share strategies to make a positive difference.  Here are 3 I like in each category.

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SOME THINGS WE DO KNOW

Dot Earth

The posts on this site are deeply researched at reflective.  Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times science reporter operates this site as part of the NYT.  I was fortunate enough to hear Revkin speak recently (see my post Paul Ehrlich and Andrew Revkin at UW-Madison: Two Speakers – One Topic here .

His premise is that by 2050, the world population may well reach 9 billion.  For those of us who believe that humans may be contributing to climate change, 9 billion is a sobering number.  Revkin’s blog is fresh and fact filled.  I call it a must read to stay current.

The Yale Forum on Climate change & the Media

This is a compendium of reputable information on climate change!  Take your pick from their features: analysis, essays, fact file, international, media, on campus, on the net, policy, politics, profiles, reviews and  science.  You can keep your finger on the pulse with this website.

The Climate Wizard

When you are looking for graphic depictions of the what and where we can expect to see in climate change, a new and very clear option is the Climate Wizard site put together by the Nature Conservancy, The University of Washington and the University of southern Mississippi.  With their maps you can choose a state or country and get leading climate change information and its impacts anywhere on Earth.

SOME THINGS WE CAN DO

No Impact Man

This is a chance to stick your toes in No Impact Man’s waters! Colin Beavan has been blogging about his attempt to live a no-impact life.  This is one urban family’s attempt.  It’s a huge commitment to step this far away from the mainstream.  Very few people would follow them this far, but we need to be constantly rethinking where we fall in this continuum.  This blog offers a guided way to try living no impact for a week.  Check it out here

Lighter Footstep

This is a site chock full of suggestions on how you can lower your impact on the planet.  They break it down into accessible topics like:  family, food, garden, health and transportation.  This is a great site to wander around it and find a way that works for each of us to make our next footstep a lighter one.

350

This organization gets its name from the figure, 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere, which is considered to be the safe limit for humanity.  It’s a number we are trying to get back to from our current 387.  If you are feeling a little alone when you watch main stream media or interface with the people and blogs that deny climate change is important or even happening, this site will let you know you are not alone.  The site currently highlights the efforts organized around Oct. 24, which was international day of climate action.  Even though Oct 24 is past, the group is working to keep the pressure on to get this message to decision makers.

Oak Wilt – Dead Woods Walking

Shortly after we had taken charge of our 44 acres, I asked my husband what was his favorite thing about our land.  Doug said, “That young red oak across from the house site.”  I knew immediately which one he meant.

It was about 15 years old — a robust, teenage tree maybe 20 feet tall, vibrant and full.  It was a joy to behold.  It was a monument to the promise of life. In fall, its leaves had turned a luminous barn red that just made you smile to see it.

The next year, in the middle of a gorgeous August, every leaf on that tree turned paper bag brown.  It was dead, and we were horrified to realize that other, older oaks in the woods on our hill had dying branches.

...Oak wilt strikes on the edge of our woods.

The arborist diagnosed oak wilt.  Learn more here and here.

Oak wilt occurs when a fungus, Ceratocystis fagacearu, gets into a tree’s tubing and plugs up its water-conducting vessels.  An infected tree can’t get water from its roots to its leaves, and it doesn’t take the leaves long to die.  The tree is a gonner.

..Earlier this summer, an oak with wilt on right and (for the moment) healthy neighbor.

And this nasty stuff spreads very efficiently.  If oaks of the same species have roots that touch, they often grow together, so the fungus will move easily into the neighboring tree and from there to the next and the next – like underground dominoes.

...Nitidulid beetles, which spread oak wilt. (photo credit USDA)

Or it can spread through the air.  Within a year after a tree dies, the fungus can produce spore mats under the tree’s bark.  These mats give off a compelling, fruity smell that certain beetles love.  They will tank up on the stuff and fly to another tree.  If they land on a place where the tree has been cut or broken, then the fungus moves in, and if that tree is touching its neighbor’s roots, it becomes a new epicenter of oak death.

It looked grim.  When I learned what was going on, I was frantic.  I was despairing.  But we quickly switched to battle mode.

There was nothing to be done for infected trees, but we could try to interrupt the domino effect.  We could trench and cut the roots.  That took a lot of study.  Infected trees might already have spread fungus to their neighbors, so we had to look at healthy trees and calculate how far their roots where spreading, and then trench beyond them.

...Marked for removal after we trenched. We should have been tougher.

The advice was to cut all the trees within the circle of potential infection, but we had a resistance to cutting seemingly healthy trees that we could not overcome.  We left the outer ring closest to the trench line and hoped they might be spared.  (We have become harder since then.)

The silver lining was that this “pocket” of oak wilt had occurred in the very spot where we expected to build.  Because our land is so hilly, there are very few spots that are ideal for the best solar gain.  We wanted to build on fairly steep land to save the more level land for potential agricultural use, but we couldn’t build where it was too steep, or we would not get a driveway permit.  (After all, the township might need to get a fire truck in there someday.)

We took some comfort in the fact that Mother Nature was clearing a spot for our house.   But, enough is enough, Mom!

Cut to the chase.  Either by root or beetle, the wilt has jumped our trench.  It may yet take every Red Oak on the hill, and most of the oaks on the hill are Red.

...Doug labels a promising youg White Oak.

I did despair.  But I’ve moved on.  Now we are focusing on what will follow these oaks. They are way too crowded for their own good growth anyway (probably accentuating the root spread issue).  What will be left will be a more savanna-like setting in our lifetime, but we can take good care of the trees that survive.  There are a handful of lovely young sugar maples crouching in there, beneath the oak canopy and there is also a smattering of White Oaks.  White Oaks have a better survival record against wilt.

This fall we have gone through the area, looking for little seedlings that we can protect and encourage.  At first that involves just not stepping on them, so we are tying orange tape to them before they become just one of thousands of twigs on the forest floor.

Then we will be protecting their buds from deer browse, and in a few years, their young sapling trunks will need to be protected from buck rub.

Then they will be on their way.  Reaching above our heads and doing their tree thing.

It’s succession.  Although, succession is now being affected by the new kid on the block — climate change (see my post The Heat is On)

I’m starting to understand succession and learning to accept it.   It happens in royalty, and it happens in nature.

...Hope for the future!

The woods is dead.  Long live the woods.

Octuber: The Magic of Fresh-dug Potatoes in Fall

The Dutch word for potato is aardapel, which means earth apple.  Apples and potatoes have long been a staple because both can be stored long after harvesting in root cellars and apple barrels.

...van Gogh's Potato Eaters chowing down on my favorite fall food.

But they are also alike in that, though they remain quite edible, they are beyond delicious when actually fresh.

What a happy combination: potato texture achieving this supreme consistency with flavors so pure and substantial just as the bracing wind, and fall rain make hearty fare like potatoes feel like the ideal meal.

Wisconsin cranked out 2.3 billion pounds of potatoes in 2008, ranking us as the third biggest potato producer in the country.  And when I visit my in-laws in the Stevens Point area, I drive through miles and miles of flat, sandy potato country where most of them are grown.  But I feel very lucky to be a potato lover and not live there.

I get my potatoes in my food share in the Vermont Valley Community Farm and at the Dane County Farmers Market from organic growers who have stepped away from the standard supermarket varieties produced by the billions of pounds.  ( Potato Fast Facts :  34% of the U.S. crop is used for frozen food, 28% for fresh market, 12% for potato chips, 10 % for dehydration and 16 % for livestock feed, and potato seed.)

SO MANY POTATOES — SO LITTLE TIME !

For David Perkins at Vermont Valley, potatoes are just one of many crops he grows for his CSA members, but he still grows several varieties:  Dark Red Norland, big white Kennebec, Adirondack Red and Adirondack Blue, Yukon Gold with yellow skin and flesh, Corolla and small, moist French Fingerlings.
“They all have their own special qualities,” David says.  “But we can only grow so many.”

There are thousands of varieties of potato grown around the world.

...(photo credit freeranglifes-photostream flickr)

“It’s funny that in the U.S. we have gotten used to just a few varieties, whether we live in Main or California – everyone is growing the same white potatoes – Russets or Reds,” says John Aue who grows potatoes at his Butter Mountain Farm near Richland Center and sells them at the farmers market.

John got interested in potatoes when he was in grad school studying entymology in the 1980s at UW-Madison screening different potato varieties for resistance to insects and disease.  “A professor I knew, Doug Rouse, had just done a study for dairy farmers in western Wisconsin who had tobacco allotments,” John remembers.  “He was looking for other things they could grow in that acreage, and found you can grow potatoes on these upland hill soils.  You can grow potatoes  on loam, silt loam or clay loam.  That’s what we have here at Butter Mountain.  I knew it could be done, and I knew how to do it!”

John and his family are always exploring new varieties. Every year they drop the ones they didn’t like and try new ones.  “We are looking to see if there is something unique about their taste that we can use. We settle on about 10 varieties each year that we like, and that seem to grow fairly well here.”  The exception being Rose Fin Apple potato, which John says, “is hard to grow, but it’s so good we grow it anyway.”

...This Purple Viking is a beautiful spud!

When I stop at the Butter Mountain stand at the farmer’s market, it’s never easy to decide.

I am particularly fond of the Purple Viking, which has flesh as pure white as the driven snow but skin of flaking mottled shades of purple and pink that I would like to recreate on a wall.  It is sweet and moist and firm.

I believe teeth were made to bite into a potato like this.  John tells me Purple Vikings make the world’s best mashed potatoes,  but generally I eat them unmashed just for the fun of sinking my teeth into them.

And then there are the German Butter Balls, which run drier and are deep yellow this year.  For other color, there is the Adirondack Blue.  And Butter Mountain offers an odd little deep, blue potato called Purple Peruvian Fingerling.  John doesn’t care for the Purple Peruvian, but his son loves it, and evidently so do some customers.  The list goes on and on.

For the moment, while potatoes are at their peak, I slip them into the meal many times a week.

A favorite is hearty salad entirely from the farmers market:  Mixed greens, microwaved Purple Vikings, and feta cheese, along with what ever else catches my eye in the fridge.   Alas, my dressing isn’t totally local.  I use local sunflower seed oil, vinegar from who knows where, along with local garlic, homemade, but non-local humus and Wisconsin cranberry mustard.  This makes a thick, nutritious coating that I never tire of.

Another favorite is  potato soup simply made by boiling potatoes –  and when they are almost done, I drop broccoli and spinach in with them.  Then I blend it all into a creamy, green goodness and stir in caramelized onions (along with whatever else I sauteed with the onions like carrots or corn or celeriac).  And top each bowl  with grated 6-year-old cheddar from Hooks Cheese .

...(photo credit dr-hemmerts-photostream flickr)

Fabulous local potatoes will stay on my menu all winter.  Vermont Valley offers them in their fall share, and Butter Mountain will be bringing them to the winter farmers market for me every week from their glorified root cellar.  “We dug a hole in the side of the hill and poured concrete on three sides with a dirt floor and put a roof on it.  It’s a passive storage facility,” John explains.

David advises that your home fridge is a perfect potato keeper, in which tubers can last for up to 6 months.  “They actually get sweeter as starch converts to sugars over time,” David says.  “They may not look as pretty, but they taste good. If they feel soft — that’s not bad.”

So some day, as spring nears, I’ll be enjoying softer, sweeter potatoes, but for now, October means crisp, juicy apples and firm, moist earth apples.

What a celebration!

“Potatoes are a magical thing for me,” says John.  “On a late October harvest day, the leaves are off the trees.  It’s all gray, and everything looks dead and brown – and then you pull this harvester through seemingly dead ground, and all these colors of potatoes appear.  It makes you feel good about going into winter. ”

Two Gentians Join the Crowd

Our prairie remnant on a sunny, south-facing slope just off the top of a ridge had been farmed for years and then planted by the owner before us in rows of pine and spruce.  Some of the trees were 5 years old.  Some were nearer 15.  The older trees were starting to knit their branches together to block the sky, and their needles were beginning to blanket the ground when a naturalist walked through them with us and noted a few straggling cone flowers and other prairie stragglers were hanging in there.

Time was when I thought that land just needed to be left alone so that nature could “do her thing.”  But you can’t just let a disappearing native environment take care of itself anymore than you would leave a hit and run victim by the side of the road.

Drawing a line around the acre and a half that had the most prairie plants poking through the pines, we cut down those evergreens (may the tree gods have mercy on my soul), began to burn each spring and waited to see what would happen.

Every summer we walk the remnant repeatedly to cull out the invasives we can identify; surgically removing the wild parsnip and multiflora rose and little pink-handled umbrellas of sumac and Canada thistle and white and red sweet clover – the list seems to grow.

...Autumn in the prairie is a study of possibility.

But so does the list of fresh native faces that are reappearing in what was once a place of prairie as far as the eye could see.

Now that almost all the prairie life has dropped back down into its roots leaving a waving sea of sentinel stalks, we had a double treat last Saturday.

There is a plant that we had been puzzling over for weeks.  I had tried to key it out by its pale lavender color, but no luck.  Then I bought a set of note cards with pen-and-ink drawings of prairie flowers at the UW Arboretum book store.  (Drawn especially for the Friends of the Arboretum by Elizabeth de Boor.  Thanks Elizabeth!) Without the color to distract me, I realized my mystery plant is a member of the gentian family.

...Mystery solved. It's a Fringed-tipped Closed Gentian.

Gentian blooms in the fall, and tend to be bluish purple.  This one was much paler, but clearly a Fringed-tipped Closed Gentian, also known as bottle gentian, or formally as Gentiana andrewsii. (I wonder who discovered this variety.) Check out the details here.  This is the every useful website of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (see my post on  Four Fabulous Wildflower Sanctuaries here. )

It’s a rugged individualist.  Not only does it flower late in the fall, but it plays hard to get.  It’s buds, rich with pollen, never open, and the only insects strong enough to get inside are burly big bumblebees.  This gives the bumblers a special cache of pollen and provides the “bottle” of gentian with true fans.  One of those little win-win scenarios that make your heart beat fast.

This tiny colony of three plants is camping exactly at the point where our trail comes out of the woods and enters the prairie, and I hope it will greet us there from now on.

As we continued our turn about the prairie, as we often do when we first arrive from town, I was feeling almost dizzy with the excitement of discovery when several hundred yards further we saw more purple coming up in the path in front of us.  Yet another gentian species!  Stiff Gentian, or Gentianella quinqefoli.  Check out this website for the dirty details. 

...We found this Stiff Gentian in the trail. We'll be moving the trail

This is the first time we have seen either of these in our prairie, and every new returnee merits emotional fireworks and hypothetical decorated cake.

I have read that Native Americans used Gentian’s bitter root for a tonic.  And Doug always likes to know the Floristic Quality Index Coefficient of Conservatism which is a number from 0 to 10 indicating how likely this plant species is to occur in any spot that was lucky enough to survive untouched since pre-settlement times.

Plants with high C value are very specialized and only found in restricted environments.  Obviously anything that can make a comeback in our much degraded prairie is not likely to be very picky.  I like to think of them as more plucky.

So I was surprised to find that the stiff gentian has a C of 7 and bottle gentian 6.  .  Now that I have found this useful site, I plan to figure out what the “mean coefficient of conservatism” for our little remnant is.  But medical uses and numerical grades aside, my eyes now recognize and will constantly be scouting for and always trying to protect two more members of our prairie family.

Our ongoing restoration of a prairie, a glade and their surrounding woods and savanna sometimes feels like an ark to me.  But that analogy breaks down in that a real boat would be prone to sink – the more species it contained.  But actually, the more species that we can protect, the more vital and safe the whole becomes.

So welcome aboard, my dear Cousins Gentian.  Welcome aboard!