Spoons! A Love Affair with Wood.

I've loved wood since I was a child. I got my first pocket knife when I was 7 and for the following years I spent a lot of time carving wood. There is a zen in it for me. It's an interesting combination of the freedom of thought and intense focus that draws me in. I love the smell of wood, I love the texture of wood, I love the feel of wood in my hands.

Spoon at the
end of the class

Since I was very young I've loved watching "The Woodright's Shop" with Roy Underhill on PBS. It's the longest running PBS show and is all about traditional woodworking, the kind of thing that is 100% devoid of electrically powered tools. There is a romanticism in traditional woodworking. You can see in the traditional tools the evolution of man's relationship with it's environment. The burst of activity in the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of our relationship with the forests. In many ways we turned our back on them. We tore forests down to make room for other enterprises and insulated ourselves from that connection with our ecosystem even further.

Finished Spoon
 from the class

Like many things in life, the struggle of a young family and developing a paying career led me to put aside my love affair with wood and focus on keeping a roof over my head and food on my table. Now, however, good fortune has allowed me to dip my toe back into the waters.

My Second Spoon

There is a very talented woodworker and teacher who has been featured on a number of episodes of the "The Woodright's Shop" named Peter Follansbee who did an episode on traditional Swedish spoon carving and I was very intrigued by them. I started following Mr. Follansbee's blog and keeping an eye on his spoon work. It seemed a cheap and easy way to get back into woodworking without too much expense. I didn't take the plunge till I saw a meetup posted on the Greater Denver Urban Homesteaders page about a spoon carving class taught by Drover through the Sarquit Outdoor Living School. The class was fun and gave me the bug to give it a try. Drover was a great guy to learn from and very enthusiastic in his work. When I got home, I decided to order a hook knife for carving the bowl of the spoon and finished the knife. The bug for carving is strong for me so I ordered two more knives a short bladed and a long bladed strait knife. I also grabbed a cheap hatchet for doing rough out and splitting chores.

The Third Spoon

I needed wood for more spoons and when driving by a nearby location I saw what I though was an apple tree, saw a brush pile of wind fallen branches and hiked up with my middle daughter holding a hand saw to see if I could get some good carving wood. Turns out it was a pear tree and we had fun picking some fruit and collecting some branches.

The first spoon that came out of the wood ended up a little more utilitarian looking than I'd hoped but I really enjoyed how easy green pear is to work with. I timed my first 3 spoons to see how long it took to completer using an android app, like a true geek and found it takes around 4 hours to produce one.

Baby Spoon Traded
 for More Wood

My next spoon still didn't turn out to be what I wanted but it was better than the first. With this spoon I really started figuring out more of the techniques and rebuilding the muscle memory for carving. By the third spoon I'd gotten most of the technique down and was really starting to enjoy the art of it all.

The "Haul" and
 My Handsome Nephew

After finishing the third spoon I had a mishap with the hatchet splitting out the blank for the fourth and did some pretty decent damage to my left hand, in fact I couldn't close my thumb across my hand for almost 2 weeks afterwards. By this time I was pretty much out of wood to work with and needed to source some more. I put out a call on social media but didn't turn up anything. So a quick Google search turned up the nearest tree trimmer to my house and I sent as concise and polite an e-mail as I could. Sure enough a few days later I got a response saying he'd trade all the wood I could handle for a spoon for his soon to be born first granddaughter. I set to work with some of the last of the pear wood making my first baby spoon. After marking it out and showing it to my wife, the expert in all things baby, she suggested some changes to the size and shape of the bowl and I went ahead with carving it out. I think it turned out fantastic, in fact maybe the best thing I've ever carved. After a few phone converstions setting up a meet time we got together at a time I could bring my nephew along. He was a great help loading up all the wood and when we got it all back home we both worked on some spoons.

I'm having a great time carving and I think cute baby spoons might be my current muse for carving. I can't wait to crank out a few more to give to new or soon to be parents in my life.

My Latest Spoon

Sour Dough

I've tried baking sour dough before and it wasn't very successful. Without a doubt it came down to not know how to build a good starter. Recently I started listening to the Stella Culinary School Podcast and following his instructions to make sour dough bread.
All I can say is that:

My first loaf

1. Sour Dough requires more knowledge than most cooking techniques and can't just be done with a recipe.
2. Once you understand some of the science it isn't all that hard though.
3. It is super rewarding to make home made sour dough from local wild yeast.

With an Egg Wash

Small business.

Saw this coffee van at my daughter's cross country meet and loved the black board doors.

The 500 Year Farm Manifesto Part 5

Human created climate change is a reality and we are all ready facing the consequences of it. I'm not going to lay down the arguments for it's voracity. I accept this reality even if dear reader doesn't. I feel we have postponed action to reduce carbon emissions in the hopes that some magic technological bullet would be developed to keep us from having to face the reality of using dead dinosaurs to make our modern lives possible.

The modern food systems uses carbon from oil to operate the machines that plow the ground, plant the seeds, harvest, process and ship it to your super market. More carbon is used in the store and by the consumer to purchase and transport it home. Oil derived chemical fertilizers are sprayed on the crops and machinery uses more to spray chemical pesticides and herbicides on the crops. The list seems almost never ending. All to deliver food of dubious quality.

The local food movement is a good start to helping short cut many of the steps involved. By eating local and in-season people are drastically reducing the amount of carbon required to deliver food to their plate. The goal of the 500 Year Farm is to directly market it's food to local consumers and restaurants and to provide nursery stock of locally adapted species of plants and animals to urban homesteaders. This not only reduces carbon usage but insures a more stable and resilient food economy.

Reduction isn't the solution to all the carbon problems, we've gone too far down the road for that. We now need to put carbon back into the ground in order reverse the effects of modern society on the earth. Using the ground breaking work of Alan Savory and his development of holistic pasture management techniques, 500 Year Farm will put more carbon into the ground, doing it's part in preventing and reversing man made desertification, helping restore the lungs of the planet.

Also, taking advantage of technologies that use resources efficiently, like rocket mass heaters, and low carbon building techniques will be employed to ensure the farms long term resiliency.      

Beermiester

I've had a number of friends that have made home brewed beer, everything from one small batch to try it out, to people who brew all the beer they drink and have for years. It's something that I've wanted to try personally for a really long time. For one, it involves science and cooking, two things I've all ready incorporated into my life in many ways. Another reason it interests me is that it uses agricultural products that are possible to grow in my area to make a value added product and that is always something that can help a small farm stay profitable. Even if I don't brew for sale on the farm, partnering with local breweries to make special brews would even be a good idea and with all things the best producers are those that understand the process and appreciate and strive for a quality end product.

Recently a fellow Ingress player helped push me over the edge into trying it out and this post is about my first attempt, and success, at brewing beer.

I started out, at the urging of the aforementioned Ingress player, talking to the guys at Beer@home, a local brewing supply store that is a very short walk away from my work. They were very friendly and helpful. I was very impressed by their knowledge and selection. They had a few different options for brewing gear kits and went over each pro and con without showing signs of getting weary of my endless questions. So I picked the package I wanted and, having some overtime dollars, bought it. The only thing not included in the package was the brew kettle as there are different sizes, I wanted one big enough to do an entire 5 gallon batch so I also bought that.

The kit came with a copy of the book "How to Brew" by John J Palmer. The book is concise and informative and you don't have to read the entire thing to make your first batch. It has a primer section that has just enough info to get your head around the process. If you want to get super in depth on all the techniques and science of brewing it's in there too as well as trouble shooting and other reference materials.

The kit also included a choice of beer kits that include just about everything that is needed to make your first batch. The store had a large selection and after talking with the staff about the types of beer I like to drink I ended up selecting their "Foreman" kit. It's a brown English style brown ale.

I picked a Sunday, the day I keep free for my "projects" or whatever else I want to do, to brew my beer. After getting out all the equipment out and reading the recipe I realized there are two other items that were not included in the kit that I needed. The first was a thermometer and they did mention to me that I would need one but I forgot to grab it the day I bought everything. The second was a muslin bag for the steeping grains. I think this is an over-site of their kits to not include it with them. They also never mentioned it would be needed. After all, this was a partial grain kit so I don't know how you would make it without it. So I drove back down to the store, thankfully open on Sundays, and grabbed the missing items.

The directions where clear for the kit without being overly wordy or intimidating. To start, I boiled 1 gallon of water, per the instructions, put the grains in the steeping bag and added them to the boiling water that was then turned down to a low simmer. The only issue I had was the bag wanting to stick to the bottom of the pan, an issue likely brought about by the sugars wanting to caramelize. In hind sight I should have added enough water to submerge the grains while still holding off the bottom by suspending the bag off bakers twine.

After steeping the grains, I added the full volume of water recommended and brought it up to a nice rolling boil. Because of the volume of water it took close to an hour on the stove top for this to happen. I've seen people use turkey fryers to heat the pot and I suspect that would greatly reduce the time but also increases the all ready expensive costs of equipment. I see the stove top as livable but recommend you allow for this time in your day.

Once boiling, you start with your hop additions at the given intervals. This beer had four different types of hops added at four different times. I use the Ovo timer app on my android phone to time out the intervals. Just after the last hop addition, I added the malt extract that provides most of the ferment-able sugars for the beer. At this point it is called Wort and needs to be cooled as soon as possible to yeast pitching temperature.

Some people use an immersion chiller, a coil of copper tube, to run tap water through and cool the Wort. This was an added expense to an all ready expensive hobby and I opted for the alternative of an ice bath. I filled glass food storage containers with water and froze them to make large blocks of ice. I filled the bath tub with cold water, enough to go within 5 or so inches of the top of the kettle, and added the ice and set the brew kettle in the tub. Then I left it alone till the temp was under 80 degrees. This likely took longer than is ideal, almost an hour, and makes a firm argument as to why an immersion chiller is a good idea.

From this point on anything that comes into contact with the beer needs to be sanitized. The kit includes a product called Starsan that you mix with water to make an acid basted sanitizing solution. In the picture you can see the bucket filled with the sanitizer and all the equipment for siphoning the wort into the fermenter. I drained the the sanitizer from the bucket into the glass carboy, fermenter, and sanitized it. then I drained the sanitizer and siphoned the wort out of the brew kettle into the fermenter. After that I pitched the yeast and set the carboy in the basement to start the fermentation process.
After 24 hours I wasn't seeing much action in the fermenter and was worried I'd messed something up. The worry was for not however, because 24 hours after the the yeast erupted with activity and beer bubbled up into action and was left to sit in quiet, dark silence for two weeks. At this point I'd invested not only quite a bit of money, but quite a bit of time in the process and it was hard not to roll over in my head all the things I wasn't 100% sure I did right. We had a long cold snap that kept the fermentation temperature low, around 59 degrees, most the time. A little online research came back with the same answers time after time. A line from the book that came with the kit, "Relax, don't worry and have a homebrew". So I left it alone.

So, at this point the sugars have been converted into alcohol and it's time to put it in the bottle. A process that is pretty strait forward, sterialize everything again, put it in the bottling bucket, stir in some corn sugar and use the racking cane, a plastic tube with a push valve on the end of it, to fill up sanitized bottle with beer. Then cap it. The added sugar gives the yeast a boost to let it make CO2 and carbonate the beer. It takes about two weeks for this to happen after which the beer is ready to drink.

So...........what are the results?!

AMAZING, it's really good beer. It has a very nice head, a smooth drink with a firmly bitter finish. The bitterness isn't long lasting and is very refreshing. It has a solid mouth feel and honestly I couldn't have asked for a better first beer.

 I can't wait to try my next one! If you've been thinking about trying it and can afford the equipment required, I say go for it. I had a blast doing it and couldn't be more pleased with the results.

The 500 Year Farm Manifesto Part 4

Time to address ethics and how they apply to my philosophy of food production.

Ethics can be a strange beast to cover, especially as they apply to food and food production. Some think ethics are subjective, others think they are part of greater belief systems up to and including formalized beliefs in the form of an organized religion. I want, dear reader, to be assured, that my view of food ethics lay much more in scientific understanding than in a higher power. My own personal ethics stem from how I perceive life and the world around me through the lens of scientific reasoning.

The most ethical food systems, at least in my opinion, are the ones that originated out of our evolutionary history. We didn't appear on the earth out of no where. We are not, as some believe, aliens to this world, who's lot is to throw natural systems into chaos and destruction. We evolved as a part of an ecosystem. We, at least at some point in our history, where as important to a natural ecosystems survival as the grasslands and savannas we evolved out of. Where we went astray, as I see it, was when we stopped participating in the ecosystem and started dominating it with technology. Now, I'm certainly not saying that we need to go back to living in small villages in the subtropical regions of the world, far from it in fact What I'm saying is that we can use our scientific understanding of ecology and biology to create constructed ecosystems that feed humans in as close to balance with nature as possible.

So, if we are to start constructing an ecosystem around humans, we first must identify our role in it. Looking at the conclusions drawn by anthropology and paleontology we see that humans have likely been omnivorous for around 3.5 million years. This means that humans have evolved over that time to eat both plants, mostly succulents and fruits, as well as meat. I have heard some argue that humans began eating meat around the same time we discovered how to create and manage fire for cooking the meat. However, there is no current evidence of this speculation. As far a science is concerned, there is nothing to prove we cooked our meat until around 800,000 years ago. Our eating of meat seems rather to coincide with our use of tools, namely flinted stone knives. To me, this makes our role in our ecosystem as an omnivorous alpha predator and that as far as science is concerned it is part of our evolutionary history, and there for ethical, to eat meat. What I would call the line between ethically eating meat and unethically eating meat is by judging if the animals being preyed upon are living a life cycle that is at least as humane as their natural, wild one would be or, more ideally, better.

Now ecosystems rarely have one predator in them, but rather a few that compete for resources and occasionally prey on each other. Where I would put non scientifically based ethics into my constructed ecosystem would be to say that one rule is that, no humans should die or come to harm in any way from it. That is of course unnatural to evolutionary history but one I don't find much objection to from pretty much anyone. One way we can simulate a more balanced ecosystem, however, is by using domesticated predators, the most common of whom we likely convolved in a symbiotic relationship with, e.g. the domesticated dog. I also see a valuable role for the domesticated cat in this ecosystem. The dogs role is to provide protection for this protected ecosystem from outside predator pressure who's role belongs in a totally natural environment and not this constructed one. The cats role is to prey on non-predatory animals who humans would not themselves view as food. Together these predators round out the closest approximations we can make for a full compliment of predatory animals.

If we are to have prey for our predators, or for the sake of lessening confusion, livestock, we need to also provide, through as natural a means as possible, the sources for their diet as well. An ethical ecosystem as I see it can not rely on inputs from outside sources indefinably otherwise we can never achieve a balance that allows the ecosystem to survive during our hypothetical goal of 500 years.

We do have to make some concessions in order to achieve our goal, there are compromises to be made in order to be realistic but the fewer compromises we make the more resilient and less vulnerable this constructed ecosystems is as a whole.

To summarize this writing, ethical food is one that exists in some sort of balance with it's ecosystem and barring catastrophic outside forces will survive indefinitely.

The 500 Year Farm Manifesto Part 2

In this post I intend to cover the selfish reasons for wanting a farm.

The first and foremost, I want to do something where I can be in complete control of what is going on. I loved that about gardening as a child. I used to take care of most of my parents large suburban yard that included many fruit trees as well as rose gardens and a small vegetable garden. I also did some work with a friend of the family that had goats. I loved the sense of accomplishment and rewarded for hard work.

When I started as a pipefitter I loved he feeling of reward I got from accomplishing something with my two hands and hard work. As my career has progressed I got farther away from that and the sense of accomplishment. As I've grown older I've wanted to do something more for myself, a "be my own boss" sort of thing. I've always though at some point I'd become an entrepreneur and I've looked int o many paths for this. I've always come back to wanting to do the more basic things I love. I love working hard and the feeling of accomplishment just about as much as I like the reward of growing and raising my own food. So, I do view the farm as a selfish act. If we are to dream, why shouldn't we be selfish? After all, happiness is a choice and we can choose to do the things that make us happy.

I wouldn't change anything related to my life up to now, it has giving me loads of useful skill I wouldn't have gotten otherwise and it fed my family. I'm always pushing to learn how to do more and to challenge and refine my world view. I appreciate the people I've met, worked with and learned from very much. I don't think 18 year old me, given all the necessary resources, could have handled all the things required to make a farm successful. I needed to be pushed to learn the things I did in the way I did. What I hope more than anything is that use what I've learned to achieve my ultimate dreams. Namely building 500 Year Farm.