Getting Ready for Spring

Though the winter started off with wet promises, it has been fairly dry, but sunny.  On Dirt Foot, this has meant a lot more irrigating than usual for winter, but also a lot more flowers!  

We've had a great broccoli season and the lettuce has stayed super crunchy and delicious.  Little Miss Izola has gotten to know her way around the yard and has developed her favorite winter spots: feeding the chickens and plucking the peas.

Speaking of chickens, we're back to collecting eggs everyday!  Seems like last winter it was March before our layers started producing again.  I don't think the days in 2013 are any longer than the days in 2012, so if anyone has ideas about this, we'd love to hear them.

As spring gets into full swing, we'll be ramping up our fruit row.  We've had a substantial strawberry patch for a couple of years now, which continues to spread, and we're hoping to provide the right nutrients to push our blueberry crop this year.  In the dead of winter, we pruned back most of our blackberry and raspberry canes, so now we're just waiting for the new canes to pop out.

Here's hoping for a warm sunny spring!

Still Here

A lot has happened since our last update, over a year ago.  Our new farmer is 13 months old, walking, talking, and teaching her little friends about the best places in the yard!

We now have 8 chickens and are getting anywhere from 4-8 eggs a day.  This summer brought a rat problem in the coop, unfortunately.  Fortunately, the rats haven't disturbed the chickens at all, they just tend to eat a lot of the feed, which only produces bigger, stronger, more expensive rats with higher breeding success.  Ian's de-ratting tactics began with traps, but have led to the borrowing of, then purchasing of a pellet gun. At times it does seem like the entertainment Ian gets out of hunting the rats may be worth the disgust they evoke at other times.  

In terms of crops, we've converted the front row of the farm to flowers, which are looking stunning right now.  We've also taken a more permanent approach to a few of the rows, planting crops that will continue to grow and produce through multiple seasons.  Our strawberry patch has grown on it's own and is producing beautiful, delicious, sweet sweet little fruits that our daughter loves to pick and eat in the afternoons.  More and more of the farm is occupied by native species, flowering shrubs, and grassy patches where Izi can play. All of this has added to the beauty and enjoyment of the space, as having a baby has reduced the amount of time we can dedicate to farm upkeep.  

Wondering if others are having the same strange tomato season we have?  It took a long time for our tomatoes to start producing, but now they are going pretty strong, though not as perfect as last year's batch in sweet flavor and crisp, juicy texture.  Though still delicious, they are a little mushier this year.

Our raspberry patch has been something of a disappointment.  We had a few fantastic, succulent berries early in the season this spring, but most canes have browned already and produced little, if any, fruit.  Not sure the problem, but will try reducing the number of canes and offering a better support structure and more compost for next season.  Looking forward to cutting back canes later in the winter season. 

Also, had a strange experience with the blackberries this season.  Though we were still able to collect a lot of full, ripe, juicy berries, which Izi finds to be the most wonderful aspect of the farm right now, many canes produced malformed or strangely colored berries.  A lot of the berries look almost normal, but have aggregates that are cream-colored or even light brown, and several have hard spots that never seem to ripen.    We're thinking to cut back all of the canes this winter and allow new canes to come up in the same area.

After a realization that we had neglected our soil responsibilities, we added worm castings and compost to the mix last weekend, and seeded for fall.  We've set up large beds of lettuces, kale, broccoli, and radishes.  It seems like we may have an early winter this year, so we're hoping to take advantage by successively planting delicious winter crops.

Thanks for sticking around.  We're hoping to update more regularly again :)

The newest member of Dirt Foot

On August 21st we added another member to the Dirt Foot crew.

Izola Mae Hoernig Patton was born in Hayward at 11:26 pm on August 21st. She came in at 20 inches long and 9 pounds, 8 ounces.

Welcome to the world Izola.

Canning frenzy!

This summer has been an active one for canning and preserving our harvest. Take a gander at the tasty stuff we've been making:

Pickled Dirty Green Tomatoes

We picked green cherry tomatoes and pickled them with garlic, onions, rosemary, and white wine vinegar. Really good and perfect for a bloody mary.

Spicy Pickled Green Beans

Purple, yellow and green beans from the yard, pickled with cider vinegar, dill, garlic and thai chili for some zing.

Homegrown Strawberry Jam

Just strawberries from the garden and sugar. Awesome.

Double Berry Jam

Strawberries and Blackberries from the yard, and sugar. Katie's favorite.

Ginger Lemongrass Pickled Beans

I opted to try something other than dill for pickling these guys. We ended up with beans from the garden pickled in rice vinegar with lemongrass, ginger, nori (sushi wrapping seaweed), basil and garlic with hot pepper.

Quite good and different from other pickled beans I've tried.

Petaluma Pear Butter

Kim brought us two huge boxes of pears from the tree in her backyard in Petaluma. We probably had over 50 pounds total. We cooked the pears in apple cider, then added maple syrup, vanilla bean, brown sugar, and lemon juice. After cooking for hours and hours, the result is a light and mellow spread.

Pear Chutney

We also used Kim's pears for this chutney. This time we cooked them in cider vinegar with crystallized ginger, golden raisins, onion, garlic, serrano pepper, and mustard seed. This stuff is crying out for a pork chop.

So that's what we've been cooking up. We've got a lot so contact us if you want to get your hands on some!

--Ian

Chickens update!

Lot's of chicken news:

Blackula's murder has been solved. Canela, the awful chihuahua downstairs, did the deed. We found out when she tried to return for more chicken blood, but we were able to fend her off, because she is a little shit of a dog.

Also, Cindy, our Silver Laced Wyandotte, died on Thursday of non-chihuahua related causes. She'd been sick with some kind of respiratory thing since the spring, and finally went to the big hen-house in the sky on Thursday morning. We buried her in the raspberries. RIP, Cindy, RIP.

And lastly, we got four more chickens on Friday from Leras Family Farm in Santa Rosa. They've got a really cool operation going on up there: hundreds of chickens, turkeys, dairy cows, and a ton of vegetables. Michael, the guy that runs it, makes cheeses, and sells milk and eggs on Wednesday nights in Berkeley at Three Stone Hearth.

So here are the new ladies:

In the front is Buffy, our Buff Orpington. She's big and friendly, and lays light brown eggs.

On the left is The Bard. She's a Barred Rock (though she might be a Cuckoo Marans, based on the color of the eggs we're getting-dark chocolate brown vs. light pinkish brown). On her right is Princess. She's a Blue Andalusian, is hard to catch, and has taken to jumping over the fence into the garden.

And last we have Reba (on the right). She's a Rhode Island Red and is very friendly. On her left is Red, one of the OG Dirtfoot Chickens, a New Hampshire Red. They must have a back east rivalry going because they don't really get along all that well.

So that brings us up to eight chickens total. We have tons of eggs, so if you have any good recipes send them our way!

-Ian

Freak Egg!

WTF?

Sadie laid a freakishly small egg today. Unless a quail snuck into the coop, but that seems unlikely. Behold:

Preserves and Pickles

We've added a food preservation page to the website because we're doing a lot of it these days.

I'm going to try to keep the page updated with the latest jams and other tasty stuff we're cooking up. If you're interested in tasting some goodness, send us an email.

Here's what we've got currently:

Myrtle Street Plum Butter 7.11.2011

Ingredients: Plums, sugar

Karuna called and told us about the plum tree dropping tons of fruit into their backyard. We went over to check it out, and after an hour or so climbing around, we ended up with 30 pounds of super-ripe plums. We let the fruit cook down overnight and ended up with a deliciously tart and plummy thick butter. We've been eating it with creme fraiche on baguette french toast. Mighty good.

Tilden Wild Blackberry Jam 7.25.2011

Ingredients: Wild blackberries, sugar

Lauren and I went up to Tilden Regional Park to pick the berries for this jam. We collected about 10 pounds, from three different locations, and ended up with 14 jars worth. We'll be back up there later in the summer for another round.

Berkeley Hills Wild Plum Jam 7.25.201

Ingredients: Wild plums, brown sugar, white sugar, vanilla, and lemon

You're wild! Lauren and I found the fruit for this jam while we were looking for blackberries in the hills above the Berkeley campus. I climbed up into a tree and harvested a gallon of cherry-sized plums. We took some to the Berkeley Botanical Garden along with a branch to confirm they weren't poisonous. They told us that the plums had most likely "escaped" and some point, and were now just growing wild on the hills. We made the jam using mostly brown sugar instead of the white stuff, and also added vanilla and lemon juice. The result is a smoother, sweeter plum flavor with hints of caramel and vanilla. We ended up with only 3 jars of this goodness, but we're already planning a return trip to the hills for more plums.

Dirt Foot Farm Homegrown Strawberry Jam

(coming soon)

Dirt Foot Farm Double Berry Jam

(coming soon)

We're looking for fruit

Howdy folks,

Lauren and I went up to Tilden today to pick blackberries for jam and came back with 10pounds of awesome fruit. We also found several wild plum trees whose fruit we'll return for soon. More on that stuff later though...

While we were out there we got to thinking that there is awesome fresh fruit going unpicked all over the Bay, and that we would pick it and use it if we knew where to go. So, if your neighbor has an apple tree or there are plums falling all over your yard, let us know and we'll come harvest the fruit and share the tasty goodness with you.

Oh, but no lemons. Fuck a lemon.

Thanks,

Ian

Plum Butter

We got a call from Karuna last week saying she had hecka plums, so on Saturday, we went to Karuna and Evan's house last week to pick some.

After an hour climbing around in her trees, we ended up with about 30 pounds of fruit.

The plums were slightly larger than ping pong balls and very sweet, with tart skins. We decided we'd make Plum Butter.

The first step is to cook the plums a little bit so they start to fall apart. The recipe called for cutting them in half, but we had literally hundreds of them and weren't about to do all that. We just put a little water in the bottom of the pot and let the heat take care of the rest.

Periodically we'd smash and stir them until they were all pretty mushy. At this point we ran them through our new food mill to separate the pits and skins.

The result was a juicy, pulpy slush. We poured it back into the pot and saved the pits and skins for the chickens.

For each cup of pulp we added a third cup of sugar, then we cooked (and cooked, and cooked) until it thickened up. Once it reached the right consistency we were ready to can it.

After ten minutes in the hot water bath it was ready to go.

It turned out very well. It's tart and plummy, and is great on french toast with creme fraiche.

One piece of advice for all you would-be plum butterers--don't start this process at 7 at night. We didn't finish until 5 in the morning.

--Ian

Summer Harvesting

Quick roundup of what we've been up to out there:

Garlic--we've got tons of it.

Once it comes out of the ground it needs to be brushed free of dirt.

Then it needs to cure for a few weeks. We've been hanging it in the kitchen. It smells great and seems to be keeping vampires at bay.

The onions are also coming out of the ground. We didn't have the best luck this season because of the wacky winter. The combination of lots of water and periods of warmth then cold caused the onions to flower early instead of forming bulbs. We still got quite a few though:

The strawberry plants are loving the hot weather and producing heavily. We're in the process of saving enough to make some jam. We're getting close--Lauren probably picked three pounds of berries today.

The potatoes are ready as well. I pulled out 40-50 pounds today of three different varieties:

All told it was a big harvest today. We got some beets as well.

We also planted winter squashes, watermelons, eggplant, peppers and basil. Oh, and a whole packet of sunflower seeds. The ones we plated earlier are getting pretty tall and some are starting to flower. If all goes according to plan we'll have a forest of sunflowers in the fall.

So that's what's been happening lately. Hope you're enjoying your summer.

--Ian