It's February, the time of the year when the abundant fall harvest has either been eaten or lost to rot. For a local food eater, the months of late winter and early spring are the most challenging. But here at my household at Riverhaven Farm, the residents are fat and happy. Our pantry is stuffed with amazing homegrown, foraged, and locally-raised ingredients. From the organic pastured pork and wild-caught salmon in the freezer to the overloaded shelves of canned foods, to the sauerkraut and root-cellared apples, potatoes, and squash, to the winter greens that survived the January blast of cold, we are smiling. The many jars of beans and grains are certainly a welcome contribution to our winter food supply as well.

I'm busy preparing for the many workshops and presentations I have scheduled for the winter and spring. I am speaking six times on the subject of growing beans and grains. I am also co-teaching a homesteading series that will cover a broad range of topics. The schedule of talks are as follows: 
GROW YOUR OWN DRY BEANS AND GRAINS
COMMUNITY EDUCATION WORKSHOPS

*February 7– Bellingham Gluten Intolerance Group support mtg - 7pm
*February 13 – Everson Garden Club meeting (WECU Everson) – 7pm
March 7 – Community Food Co-op Class (Cordata Store) – 6:30pm ($10)March 17 – Deming Library (Local Food Works series) – 10am
*April 9 – Lummi Island Gardener’s Network (Lummi Island)– 6:30pm
April 21 – Cloud Mountain Farm (Everson) – 1:30-3pm
   *Non-members please call firstSPRING HOMESTEADING SERIES Location: Riverhaven Farm (Lynden)Sundays from 2-4pm; April 15, 29; May 6, 20; June 3
$85 for the series + $15 registration feeRegister through Whatcom Folk School

Threshing soup peas and garbanzos with friends

Somehow I've completely neglected to blog for over 6 weeks, while meanwhile, the entire harvest season has come and gone. It's been a busy time! Right now I am relaxing in Missoula, Montana, with friends who also appreciate the art of growing quinoa, dry beans, and garbanzos.

The 2011 harvest season was the best so far for BBGP. The late summer sunshine and beautiful dry september was perfect for drying down all of the crops that matured. The cool summer meant that the soybeans and amaranth struggled and didn't mature well, but everything else was primo. The dry beans yielded about twice as well as last year, wildly exceeding my expectations. All of the beans are threshed and the grains and peas are all threshed but needing to be winnowed.

We had a number of successful work parties this year, so I want to give a shout out to all those who came and learned and helped and had fun. It's truly more enjoyable with company! We had a couple of great articles published this summer as well: in the June issue of GROW NW magazine and the October issue of the Community Food Co-op's newsletter. Thank you to the writers/editors for helping to get the word out about what we are doing. Lastly, I was invited by Tom Thornton, of Cloud Mountain Nursery, to have my dry beans and grains on display at the annual Fruit Festival. It was a very exciting weekend and I enjoyed chatting with hundreds of folks over the two days.

My cohorts and I are now busily planning for next season. A collaborative storage foods CSA is in the works for next year, I am putting the finishing touches on an instruction manual for growing dry beans & grains in the Pacific NW, we are planning workshops for winter and spring, and I am gearing up for seed sales, hoping to have everything ready by December. Thanks to everyone who provided motivation, encouragement, and enthusiasm this year. I feel especially confident that this project deserves my attention and passion and I look forward to diving in even deeper.

Happy Autumn!!

It seems like it is going to be awhile before my earliest crops are mature and dried down. The weeding pressure has relented but there is no harvesting to be done yet, so a few weeks of breathing time (camping, hiking, and planning for next year) have arrived. I am anxiously awaiting when the grains, soup peas, and garbanzos are ready so I can have a harvesting and threshing workshop. I think that will be loads of fun.Meanwhile, I have been too busy lately to make more tortillas and I crave them immensely. I had purchased a new Estrella masa grinder a few weeks back at the Mexican grocery store down the street and have been looking forward to trying it out. So I finally spent a few hours this morning making tortillas. I made about 70 tortillas from 8 cups of my Mandan Bride dent corn. Here are some masa-making instructions for those of you who are interested in making your own tortillas:

HOMEMADE MASA
Dissolve 4 Tablespoons of "Cal"/Slaked Lime (can be purchased at a Mexican grocery) in 12 cups of water.

Add 4 cups of dent corn kernels and slowly bring to a boil over a half hour. Let it boil for a few minutes, then turn off the heat.

Let sit overnight.

Rinse the corn until the water runs clear. Use your hands to briskly rub the kernels to assist in removing the cal. Drain in a strainer

Grind in a masa grinder as fine as you can get it (it won't be fine like flour and you will get a wet, coarse dough).

Make the dough into a ball. Add a bit of water if needed for it to stick together. It should be just wet enough to be able to make a golfball sized ball hold together.

Use a plastic bag to line either side of your tortilla press. Put a bit of oil on each side. Press tortillas and carefully peel them off the plastic.

They should be fried in a cured but dry cast iron pan on high enough heat so that they turn slightly brown on each side in about 30 seconds, but the pan does not smoke.

Note: if you do not have a tortilla press, you can make little patties with your hands, or you can press the dough between oiled plastic sheets with a heavy pan or other flat-bottomed object that you can press down on. But believe me, a good tortilla press is invaluable if you are going to do a lot of this!

Good Luck and happy masa-making.

So far I'm enjoying the summer immensely. Working hard, no doubt, but every day brings new treasures and introspections and simple beauties of nature. The field blows me away every time I walk out there. Most of the crops so lush and vital, the peas and garbanzos are thinking about starting to dry down, the beans still vivaciously filling in the paths so that there will be nowhere to walk come harvest time.

I decided to irrigate this year. Normally I've practiced experimenting with dry farming, but a few dousings is what I will apply this year. Last week I helped Dusty move the 40 foot long aluminum pipes to my upper section of field and we ran the sprinklers for 3 or 4 hours. Celt and I hooked up several hoses and ran them from the nearest spigot to the lower field and hand watered our squash, half the wilting buckwheat, and her beans. Everything has responded so well, and the lushness was beautiful to see afterward. The potatoes still struggle, the soybeans have barely recovered from all the bunny pressure, and the corn is tasselling so short. But I'll have my hands full in another couple weeks with harvest. I better go camping now while I still have the chance!

A few friends joined in today for some light weeding and we got a lot accomplished. It feels so good to be able to have fun, gossip, laugh, and be productive at the same time. I love the idea of having gardening partners in my life regularly, growing food is a joyous thing to share, and a key component to my own happiness.

As if we woke up in an entirely new and foreign (and lovely) land, the summer solstice has brought us warm weather and sunshine today, to last all week (we hope). The field is looking amazing these days, with all of the early crops full in their beds and lush. The field feels vital and enthusiastic as if all the crops are feeling content and productive.

Ok, enough of the poetry. We have had some setbacks this year, such as the birds ripping out a whole lot of corn and bean seedlings, rabbits mowing down the soybeans and storage onion tops, and germination issues with some of the seed purchased from seed companies. Heck, this may be a small operation, but my self-saved seed pops up thoroughly and enthusiastically whereas much of the stuff I've gotten from seed companies has been less than reliable.

Despite the setbacks, most of the crops are flourishing. An update to this point includes the following: the soup pea and garbanzo trials are growing fabulously, with most of the peas in flower (the bush peas have white flowers and so far all of the pole peas have two-toned pinkish, reddish, or purplish flowers! The barley and wheat are headed out, I forgot to look at the oats but I don't think it's headed yet (planted late). The lentils are flowering. The potatoes are weedy and could use another hilling up soon, but are holding their own. Sunflowers (oilseed and edible seed) look strong. Transplanted corn is big and robust. Millet is small but germinated well and is filling in the beds thickly.  Amaranth is doing well, still less than a foot tall. Same with quinoa but for the second year in a row, we planted too late and don't expect it to get big enough to harvest. All of the bush beans are starting to take off, pole beans are climbing their trellis.  Soybeans and cowpeas are growing slower but will love the sun and heat this week.
We've been working hard to keep the weeds down, hoping to stick with hand-tools during the growing. I'm out with the wheel hoe at least once a week keeping the paths manageable. The evenings have been idyllic out in the field and it is fabulous to be living at the farm this year so I can take advantage of short morning and evening tasks, when it is so peaceful out.

Our first work party is this saturday, June 25 from 3-6. Get ahold of us if you'd like to come. We will be sharing a home-cooked meal of beans and cornbread (what else?) at the end. Cheers!