It’s that time again: the asparagus spears are poking up from the earth, the early squash is almost ready, and soon I’ll be ready to take produce to the market. If you’re like any of my customers then this is a season that you look forward to all winter long. I don’t blame you. Sometimes on a cold winter’s night, I’ll be counting the weeks until the first home grown summer tomatoes will be ripe enough to eat. With all those months of anticipation, it doesn’t surprise me that some vendors can get away with what I consider a sin: Passing trucked-in produce off as locally grown.

Year after year, you see folks who have a genuine interest in buying locally grown produce purchasing from middleman vendors with produce that has been trucked-in from hundreds of miles away. To me, this is irony at its finest: People go to farmers’ markets to escape the trucked-in goods and end up buying trucked-in goods at their local farmers’ market. You have to be very careful in order to avoid it, but realistically, it ends up happening to most of us. It’s even happened to me!

One year, when we lost our entire crop of plums to brown rot, I stopped at a roadside stand to buy a peck of plums.  A father and son duo was running the stand. There were a few bushels of fruit on the table beside a field of corn. This put me at ease.

“Did you grow these yourself?”
“Yes sir!” the 14 year old boy said.

…and I fully believed him until 30 minutes later when I ended up chewing on a “Product of California” sticker. (This was a good indication that it wasn’t local since I live about 2,500 miles from California.)

“%$@# penhooker!” I said  after spitting out bits of plastic sticker and mediocre plum. I really felt suckered. I really was suckered! (For those of you unfamiliar with the term penhooker, that’s how agricultural producers refer to middlemen pejoratively.)

This brings me to the point of why I’m writing to you. I don’t like to be cheated, and I don’t like to see others cheated. So I jotted down a few simple tips to help you identify and buy local produce. If you believe that it’s important to support your local farmer, keep in mind these tips so you don’t get the wool pulled over your eyes and end up with a mouthful of California plums (…unless you live in California, then that’s okay.)

Determine if your vendor is the producer.  Ask them about their farms. Ask them about how they grow the food. Most of the farmers that I know are tickled pink to have you ask about their farm and will be happy to talk about it at the drop of a hat. If they’re selling you their produce, a real farmer wouldn’t be offended that you want to know how they grew it.

Buy from a knowledgeable middleman.  It’s not always possible to buy directly from the person that grew your food, and this is often the case with very small farmers that produce 1 bushel a week of a single crop and nothing else. These farmers might be represented by a middleman acting as a salesman for 5-10 local farmers. The big difference here: When you ask, the middleman they ought to know the farmer’s name and where his farm is located. The question “Where was this grown?” can be very useful under these conditions. It can also be very telling.

Watch out for this conversation. If you do end up asking “Where was this grown?” and you get the following response, be skeptical!

“Where were these tomatoes grown?”
“Oh I picked those up in ***-ville.”
“How about these onions?”
“I got those over in ***-ville, too”

99% of the time I’ve overheard this conversation the %$@# penhooker in question was gently trying to persuade his patron that the produce was grown locally just a few miles away. The reality of the story was that the penhooker picked up his goods at a produce wholesaler located in ***-ville who brought them in on a truck from Timbuktu and Kalamazoo.  You would not believe how many times I’ve heard this pitch or how many times I’ve seen it work.

Train yourself to do this. The best I can tell from observation and 14 years of being a market vendor is that people love a big pile of produce and lots of color. This is probably an evolutionary trait that kept us from starving in the caveman days, but if you’re trying to buy local produce it can be detrimental at the start of the season.  Seeing a large variety of produce in March or April (depending on your region) is probably an indicator that you’re dealing with a middleman. As I said, that is not always a bad thing, but you should know that your brain is hard-wired to make that produce more attractive because of the cornucopia before you. Train yourself to take a step back and look at the tables with just one or two products. I can almost guarantee that the person standing behind them actually grew those items. (If those two items are asparagus and squash then it just might be me!) When in doubt, I always buy from the person that brought the least amount to market. Not only is this a safe bet, it will encourage that farmer to continue to show up in the early season. Who knows what they might bring next time that you’ll miss out on if they decided it isn’t worthwhile.

Look out for Product of California stickers! If they appear on produce from a roadside stand in North Carolina it’s a dead giveaway!

To end on a serious note, I am personally convinced that buying local produce is the finest thing that we can do to better not only ourselves but the community around us. I hope that you are similarly minded. If so, please remember that there are dishonest people who would take advantage of you if you assume that they are local producers just because they are at a farmers’ market or a roadside stand.

Remember, if we let ourselves be fooled then we’re directing money away from small local farmers who, too often, can not afford our mistake.

From the Farm,

John Goforth

P.S. If you like this article, be sure to share it with a friend and let Brad know by writing him at brad [at] highlyuncivilized [dot] com.

John Goforth is our friend from the east coast who has been involved in agriculture most of his life. He is the son of David Goforth (M.S. in Horticulture and Cabarrus County’s agricultural extension agent) and grew up on the family farm in Rockwell, NC. At age 13, with his father and brother, he started selling produce at the Piedmont Farmer’s Market which eventually evolved into Goforth’s Garden. Today, they raise peaches, blueberries, and an assortment of other fruits and vegetables to be sold at local markets and through their CSA. John’s other interest include writing, whittling, and woodworking.

Good, organic hummus is going for between 3 and 6 bucks at the store for an 8 oz container, high time to start making it myself.  My friend Rebekah sent her favorite hummus recipe to get me started, and it’s so easy I can’t believe I’ve never made it before.

The one pricey ingredient in hummus is Tahini.  If you don’t already have some at home, you’ll want to buy a peanut butter sized jar.  You need 3 tablespoons for this recipe, so it will last a while and you can use it for other stuff too.  I think the can of garbanzo beans was $1.10.  So your total price to make 16 oz. is under $2, versus maybe $4 for an 8 oz. container at the store, or 1/4 the price.

Making your own hummus as a side dish is great because you can flavor and season it appropriately for the rest of the meal, and you can use up other items already in the fridge.  I end up with a lot of peppers during the summer and I can’t wait to try a roasted red pepper version with freshly picked peppers.  And my wife is an olive addict, so we always have a supply of unusual olives I can snag for something like this.

Rebekah included some of her favorite variations along with the recipe.  We made the base, and added olives and a big chunk of fermented lemon, served with organic corn chips.

Ingredients:

• 1 – 15.5 ounce can garbanzo beans
• 2-3 tablespoons tahini (sesame paste)
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2/3 tsp. of sea salt
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice (optional)
• water, as needed

Directions:
In a blender or food processor puree all the ingredients except water. Gradually, slowly add enough water until you reach your desired consistency.

Variations:

ROASTED RED BELL PEPPER HUMMUS: add 1/4 cup of roasted red bell pepper to the mix
SUN DRIED TOMATO HUMMUS: add 1/4 cup of packed sun-dried tomatoes
OLIVE HUMMUS: add 1/4 cup olive tapenade or Greek pitted olives
GARLIC HUMMUS: add an additional 3-5 cloves of garlic
JALAPENO HUMMUS: add 1/2 a seeded jalapeno or add the whole jalapeno for extra heat
CURRY HUMMUS: add 2 teaspoons of curry powder

After we mixed the hummus the flavor changed several times over the next 30 minutes while we made dinner. The next batch I’ll leave in the frig over night to let the flavors mix.  This batch didn’t last long enough.

Thanks Rebekah, and hurray for hummus!

When you look back on traditional recipes you’ll find an incredible amount of fermented food.  Every culture seems to have a version of sauerkraut, or kimchi, and even original recipes for cold borscht are served with soured milk, kefir or yogurt.  Just a century ago most meals in many parts of the United States had one or more servings of something fermented, olives, pickles, relish, corned beef, sour dough bread – all using nature to preserve the food, supplement the nutritional value, reduce the amount of harmful bacteria, and balance varieties of essential probiotics in your body.

fermented ketchup ingredients

Today fermented food has generally been replaced by processed foods that are flavored to taste fermented, which they really don’t, and gone are the live organisms that enhance the taste and increase the food value.  If you ferment food this is old news to you as it is to me, but what I didn’t consider until just recently was how many traditional sauces were originally fermented, including my favorite, Ketchup.

For many years on my ‘healthy’ diet I have almost completely avoided ketchup, filled with corn syrup, processed beyond recognition, and aged to imperfection in a warehouse somewhere.

But what if there were a healthy alternative?  What if I could delight again in the tangy, sweet tomato ketchup taste that I so love?  What if it tasted better than regular ketchup?  Is this possible?  Can it be true?

Oh yes, yes it can.

There are many recipes online for fermented ketchup.  I’m starting with a lacto-fermented version, and I started simple – using almost no spices.  My first batch is just the bare essential ingredients and after a week of sitting on the counter it’s pretty tasty.  You’ll find a more comprehensive ingredient list in this version on Nourished Kitchen, but here is my simple starter.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups organic tomato paste
• 3 tablespoons raw honey
• 1/4 cup whey – extract this from your kefir
• 3 tablespoons raw apple cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

Essentially you mix everything together and transfer the contents to a mason jar.  Leave a tablespoon or two of the whey to pour on top of the ketchup to create a good environment for fermentation.  I left mine on the counter, covered, for about 5 days, stirred it up and did a taste test.  It was very good, but still tasted a little tomato pastey, so I topped it with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and let it go another 3 days before moving it to the frig.

I’ll be working up variations on this theme hopefully for a good many years to come, but the basics of Real Ketchup are Real Easy and Real Tasty.

We make a new batch of mustard every other month or so because it’s just a really, absolutely fantastic addition to food.  Mustard seeds come in black, brown and white, all with different levels of spiciness.  Black is supposed to be the hottest, but I’ve never tried it.  If you buy small  containers of ground mustard or mustard seeds, expect to pay a large premium on price.  But if you buy bulk, from an organic store, online, or from an international food supply like a local middle eastern or indian grocery store, you can really get the price down.  We paid about $1.10 for a cup of ground white mustard, and that was probably too much to pay.  The other ingredients I already had on hand, but probably pennies.  This made a nice tasty jar of homemade gourmet mustard at a fraction of the price of store bought.

Mustard making is an art that many cultures and chefs take great pride in, and I’ve read that the Romans made the best mustard ever, at least according to the Romans.  Recipes abound on google for Roman mustard.  I’ve been eying this recipe on Hunter Angler Gardner Cook, but I haven’t made it yet, and it’s hard to go wrong with the Two Fat Ladies.

powdered mustard

Mustard can be made with nothing but ground mustard seed and water, but you can add all kinds of everything to mustard.  You can add coriander, honey, almonds, salt, different kinds of vinegar, white wine, red wine, almonds, ginger, cloves, garlic, horseradish, beer, turmeric for a more yellow color, many kinds of herbs, ground dates, raisins, anise, cinnamon – and probably an extremely long list of other things.  For this batch I added some of our newly fermented Meyer Lemon along with horseradish and the final taste is layered, complex, and delicious.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup ground white mustard
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• Optional ingredients
• 1 tablespoons grated horseradish root
• 3 tablespoons red wine
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped fermented lemon

Mix up all the ingredients in a bowl, and you are done.  I used this mustard the same night, but normally you’d want to make this at least a day beforehand and let the flavors mix and blend.  My mustard is stored in the refrigerator.  I have read you can store it without refrigeration, but I have not personally tried this.

Besides affordability, great taste, and knowing what is actually in your food, another benefit of making your own mustard is the flexibility to add other ingredients which compliment your main course.   In this batch, the horseradish made a nice addition for some Corned Beef and sauerkraut, and the following night a plate of smoked sausages.

We’d love to know your favorite mustard recipe.  If you’d like to share, please leave a reply.

Lemons can be preserved in salt, and provide that extra special something that goes well with Moroccan food, roasts and fish.  Frankly I don’t make a lot of Moroccan food, but the first recipes you’ll find on the internet for using preserved lemons are for Chicken Tangine.

To be completely honest, I’ve never made Moroccan food, or food from North Africa, ever, but I have it on good authority that you can use these preserved lemons on just about anything.  I’ll be proving that out pretty soon and trying it on everything from tuna salad to grilled salmon and probably some marinades.  A friend just sent me a message that she ate most of her jar of Moroccan lemons sliced with fresh pasta and black pepper Percorino.

To preserve lemons, you will need:

• Meyer lemons
• Kosher salt, sea salt, or fancy salt
• Glass jar with a tight lid

Both methods I read call for using Meyer lemons.  I used Meyer’s for preserving, and just some Plain Old lemons from our other lemon tree to get enough juice to cover them to the top of the jar.  If you already make fermented foods you know what type of salt to use, but basically just use something without added iodine, which inhibits bacteria that ferment food.  In other preserving methods, iodine can also discolor the food you are preserving, and salt with added iodine will likely have other additives like anti-clumping agents that you probably don’t want to eat.  Kosher salt, sea salt, canning salt, and fancy gourmet salt are usually free of iodine and other gick, and sea salt also has beneficial trace minerals.

Take the Meyer lemons and a sharp knife, and cut the lemons into quarters lengthwise, leaving them attached at one end.  There doesn’t seem to be any practical reason for leaving the quartered lemon attached at one end except appearance.  If you cut all the way through you can still use the lemon quarters!

Next, grab some salt and smash it into the crevice of the lemon, and knead the salt into the flesh of the four quarters.  Do this over a bowl and catch the juice and salt that drips out during the process.   I used about 1/4 tsp. of salt per lemon.

When the lemons are salted, please them into your glass jar.  When you’re finished, pour all the juice on top of them.  My lemons were a little dry, so I picked some other lemons from the yard, juiced them, and covered the lemons to the top of the jar.  Leave the jar on the counter for 3 to 4 weeks, turning occasionally to mix the lemon juice and the salt.  The lemons will get very soft.  You can then store the jar in the frig for at least 6 months, one article said a year, and make sure the brine covers the lemons.

All parts of your preserved lemon can be used except the seeds.  Many recipes separate the lemon flesh from the rind but use them both in the recipe.  Some call for preserved rind only, and discard the flesh, but waste not, want not.

So the next time life gives you lemons, preserve them in salt.  That’ll teach ‘em.

Adding garlic to your garden has got to be one of the easiest projects possible.  For almost a year I put off planting because I read so many different articles about when to plant, where to plant, and all the varieties to choose from.  We live about 30 minutes north of Gilroy, California, which may be the garlic growing capital of the world.  Over 600 varieties of garlic are cultivated around the world today, but most of them are selections of only a small number of basic types.

My simple recommendation: Talk to a farmer at your local farmers market, and buy some of their bulbs for planting.

We ended up with two types that grow well locally, a standard garlic like you typically see at the grocery story, and a very large bulb Elephant garlic.  You plant the cloves 1″ deep, 4″ apart, 18″ between rows. I use Elephant garlic for juicing since it’s much milder than traditional garlic.  I also use it for baking, in a small, clay pot designed for baking garlic in the oven.  If you like garlic, it’s hard to beat the taste of a soft, two or three inch clove that’s been drizzled with olive oil and baked all afternoon. The strongest advice from our local farmers was to get the soil as fluffy as possible, so I dug up the area and added about 20% potting soil made for hanging tomatoes. Very lightweight. I also removed all the rocks and such, the entire process taking about 15 minutes.

As best we can tell we live in zone 8b.  The local planting advice is to plant in December, harvest in June.  I planted in January, and didn’t sit down to write this until February.  For planting zones in colder climates, it’s actually recommended to plant in the fall, a couple of weeks before the first frost.  The goal is to have the cloves establish roots but not rise above ground before the first hard freeze.  Of course in the Bay Area we’re unlikely to have a hard freeze, and this year it hasn’t really even been cold.  Because the Bay Area climate is so temperate, it’s easy to “grow things” but in my opinion you must work harder to become a good gardener.  The environment is much too forgiving of mistakes.

But here’s the deal.  Even if I’m a really crappy gardener, I am almost guaranteed to have some usable garlic next year.  First step is to get food growing, next step is to optimize my output.  Don’t let the fear of having absolutely no idea what you are doing stop you.  I never do.

The other goal of this project was not just to have garlic, but to continue planting “hidden edibles” in the front yard.  We are slowly adding edibles in with the ornamentals, and would like them hidden in plain site rather than looking like an actual garden.  Garlic is supposed to be very good for companion planting, and “loved” by roses.  Garlic leaves will look just like any other broad leaf decorative plant in our front yard beds.  On the side of the house that is part of the front yard landscaping we’ve already got a great patch of sweet potatoes going.  The thick green vines grow along the ground and on the trellis on the fence.  There is also edible lavender, and something edible called, “Society Garlic” which is very pretty and fairly tasty.

I am looking for recommendations for other hidden edibles.  Ornamental cabbage is edible, but too obvious.

What do you recommend?

Yesterday I cleaned up some of the remaining gluck from one of the raised beds and netted several nice bunches of leeks and some really woody celery.

On hand in the kitchen I had a giant purple onion waiting for something but I couldn’t remember what. A few other ingredients from the fridge and presto, leek soup.

• 1 nice bunch of leeks
• 1 large purple onion
• 3 tablespoons of chopped parsley
• Butter
• Olive oil
• Chicken stock – I used a 32oz container of organic stock
• Celery
• Celery root
• Minced garlic
• Sea salt to taste
• Organic corn chips, or french bread or toast
• Cheese – I used some cheddary goat cheese

I took the most woody bits of the celery, the celery root, and the parsley stems, chopped them up and boiled them down in a separate pot. You can get some amazing flavor out of celery root, and larger roots are fantastic for juicing.

Clean and prep the onions, leeks, celery stalk, garlic and parsley. Cut all the pieces into chunks about an inch long, and leave some of the onion in long strips like onion rings. Melt some butter in your soup pot and add in all this goodness, lightly browning all the bits.

After browning, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and mix everything up, then cover the pot and reduce heat for about 10-15 minutes to sweat the onions. It doesn’t take very long, so be careful not to burn them.

Next, take the liquid from the celery root pot, strain, and add to the soup pot. Add the chicken stock and a couple of cups of water. At this point, your large soup pot should be about halfway full. Simmer the soup until the vegetables are soft, salting to taste.

Next time I’ll add some potatoes and maybe some shredded chicken. Some of my favorite soup is made with homemade chicken stock. Time permitting, it’s worth it. I served our leek soup in a bowl, over the top of corn chips, and finished with a liberal layer of shredded cheese on top.

To drink, we had some of the chilled, very dry apple cider, which was a bit like a nice, light white wine with a hint of apple.

The last time the Shorty Awards ran my twitter feed was A BUZZ with updates, stats, campaigning, everything you would expect from a respectable internet contest.

I decided to run this year in the Green category when I saw Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus on the nominations list for Green, as well as Music, Actor, and several other categories.

Whether they were there by accident, or because their fans want to see their names prominently listed in every category, it seemed like more Green People needed to be on the list.  As I write this, the current leader in Green with about 270 votes is Ian, an actor from The Vampire Diaries.  I have no idea if he does any Greeniness or not, but right below him is a full time writer for TreeHugger, Discover, and Make.

You need a real twitter account to vote, and it takes really about 5 seconds.  I have votes from cool people who read my stuff, friends, co-workers, another professional Green writer, and a professional Green analyst for Green tech.

Vote for me, or vote for them, or find the twitter ID of some other Green person and vote for them, and fill this category with something other than Fanboy posts for Lady Gaga.

You’ll be happy to know that I’m currently tied for 11th place, far ahead of Justin.

Click here to vote for me.

I still don’t really know, but I like it so far.

I would like to follow you if you have boards related to permaculture, organic and raw cooking, fermenting, sustainable DIY, and more Uncivilized kinds of things.

Please post your info below.

If you want to follow me I am here.

Can the absolute simplest permaculture system change the world?  Paul Wheaton thinks so, I agree, and if you do too, please help!

Paul is the guy behind Permies.com and a really passionate voice for actual change in green culture and permaculture.  He’s not a green fashionista, and he probably doesn’t write articles sitting at Starbuck’s sipping on a Holiday Latte (like me! j/k).  Paul writes articles and makes short videos that can actually change the way people fundamentally think about how we solve environmental problems.  They are not lengthy dissertations funded by a green-washed corporation, they are not fluff pieces to get you to buy some product, and they are not complex, impossible to implement, pie in the sky “if we all lived in a cave and ate bugs” articles.

Instead, they are practical, insightful, useful, innovative and inspiring.

I remember the first article I read, “Organic lawncare for the cheap and lazy” – I was sold.  Paul’s way of thinking reminds me of Masanobu Fukuoka, who wrote The One Straw Revolution and was a pioneer of todays Organic movement.  Fukuoka always emphasized letting nature do as much work as possible, and learning to understand the power of the systems in nature and their inherent ability to fight disease, self-heal, and create abundant, balanced production.  He wrote that Japan’s history showed farmers using natural systems had plenty of excess time to write Haiku and become scholars.  That’s his version of “Organic lawn care for the cheap and lazy.”

Anyway, Paul has an article on Hugelkultur that dumbs it down for people like me.

This has got to be the simplest possible system, rotting wood with dirt piled on it.  Why would you do this?  Because a working Hugelcultur mound might go all summer on a single watering, is self-tiling, creates healthy soil biology, and huge, healthy, productive plants.  It’s a system that helps you divert waste from the landfill, eliminate wasted irrigation, reduce or eliminate even the use of ‘organic’ pesticides, and create another “cheap and lazy” way to a greener, more sustainable world.

I believe that these kinds of articles can really get people to change how they think about permaculture and get past thinking that they only way to feed a starving world is with chemicals and GMO.  Side note, watch this short clip of Greening the Desert, with Geoff Lawton, to see how a similar system confounded the experts and turned an impossibly hyper-arid patch of salty desert into a fertile, date and fig producing paradise.  This demonstrates the real power of these systems, and may make you want to buy some of that $100 an acre land in Arizona and try it yourself.

Back to Paul and Hugelkultur.  If you agree, please spread this article everywhere.  Paul set a goal for 50 million people to see this, with the hope that seeing these simple, natural systems at work will intrigue others, create awareness and interest, and educate.

Here is the Hugelkultur article.  Please share it everywhere.

Thanks for your serious consideration on this one.  Sharing is caring.