Learn the ropes on drying prune plums and other fruits! Whether you’re a pro at preserving or you’ve never tried it out before, anyone can make these simple and delicious snacks.

The following excerpt is from The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe. It has been adapted for the web.

Prune Plums: Perfect for Preservation

Prune plums are plums of varieties that are especially good for drying. They are also my favorite plum varieties for fresh eating. (‘Italian’, ‘Brooks’, ‘Stanley’, and ‘Imperial Epineause’ are some good prune plum varieties.)

I dry prune plums by picking or shaking them off the trees, then collecting them in monolayers in flat cardboard trays (such as are discarded by grocery stores after they remove the six-packs of soda).

The plums will shake off the tree when they are ready to ripen, but will still be hard enough at the shake-off stage to be quite resistant to bruising. I’ve harvested immense amounts by shaking the trees every two or three days and collecting until the harvest is over. I let the plums ripen to perfection indoors, examining them daily. It’s easiest to tell prime ripeness by squeezing each plum very gently.

The Process of Drying Prune Plums

To process for drying, I rinse the plums (if necessary), cut them in half, and flip the seed out with my finger. Then I pop the backs as I place each half in the dehydrator (cut side up). “Pop the backs” simply means pressing against the skin side of each half to turn the half inside out. No pretreatments are necessary. The optimum temperature for drying is 135°F.The drying takes place from the cut surface, not through the skin. So it isn’t necessary to turn the plum halves over, and they don’t stick to the drying surface.

The same process is used to dry halved figs and freestone varieties of apricots, peaches, and nectarines. All other fruits require additional work to remove cores or seeds and/or to slice for drying. Sliced fruit takes much more space in the dehydrator than fruit that can be dried in halves. And sliced fruit must be turned over piece by piece part way through the drying; plus it sticks to the drying surface. So if you love dried fruit but are as resistant to processing labor as I am, look first to prune plums, figs, and freestone varieties of apricots, peaches, and nectarines.

Recommended Reads

Dried Apples: Two Ways to Enjoy All Year Long

Easy-to-Make Drying Trays

The post Drying Prune Plums (Plus Figs, Apricots, Peaches and Nectarines) first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

The following excerpt is from Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown. It has been adapted for the web.

Recommended Reads

5 Principles of Soil Health

Focusing on Soil Remediation with Fungi

The post The Importance of Planting Cover Crops first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

Cheese is milk’s destiny. And milk is the cornerstone of natural cheesemaking. Be inspired by the celebration of milk, in all its forms, especially the transformation of milk into cheese through fermentation.

“Consider cheesemaking and dairy fermentation a regular ritual to look forward to, acts that feed your soul as much as they feed you, your family, and your community.”

The following is an excerpt from Milk Into Cheese by David Asher. It has been adapted for the web.

PHOTO COURTESY OF QUEIJARIA BELAFAZENDA

Everything begins with milk.

You are holding in your hands a gift, offered to you like milk from mother to child. In the pages of this book you will find all you need to learn to make the most exceptional cheese. Milk Into Cheese defines the theory and practice of natural cheesemaking, providing ideas and tools for makers to transform their milk into an expansive array of delicious and nourishing dairy products in their most original and respectful way.

This book takes a defiant stance against the industrialization of dairying and aims to reclaim the most ecological form of agriculture: natural cheesemaking.
PHOTO COURTESY OF QUEIJARIA BELAFAZENDA

This book explores in depth the four foundations of natural cheesemaking, the philosophies that allow cheese to take its truest, most delicious form: using methods based on traditional cultural practices; using the freshest possible, least processed milk; coagulating with natural rennet from the stomachs of young animals; and inducing a natural fermentation with milk’s own community of microbes. In other words, the cultural (the hand) and the agricultural (the milk); the biological (the rennet) and the microbiological (the ferment).

Natural cheese is transformed from milk most fresh, preferably still animal-warm, and with minimal treatment.

It is ideally made from the milk of ancient breeds (though any ruminant’s milk will work just fine) nourished on fresh pasture or seasonal browse. And that milk should evolve from an agriculture that involves regenerative, organic, or biodynamic practices, and that assures the most ethical and sustainable treatment of its animals, as well as the sanctity of the soil and life.

Natural cheese invokes the use of traditional starters like whey, clabber, kefir, and wood. These cultures cause milk’s lactose sugars to ferment to lactic acid, souring it, developing its complex flavors, and protecting it from unwanted microbes. The starters are carried forward from one day’s cheesemaking to the next, allowing milk to best express its innate and intricate microbiologies. It is a cheesemaking allied with other traditionally fermented foods such as sourdough bread, natural wine, and naturally soured vegetables like pickles, kimchi, and sauerkraut.

Natural cheesemaking is curdling milk with naturally sourced rennet, derived from the stomachs of young animals of the herd, or certain plants or fungi that also cause milk to gel. It’s a realization of the biological processes that are the foundation for all cheese’s many transformations. This rennet is synchronous with the dynamic of traditional dairying practices and assures the most ethical and sustainable treatment of young animals born into the dairy.

And natural cheesemaking is employing techniques that are time-honored and respectful of traditional practices from cultures around the world. It is using natural tools that enable every cheese’s best evolution.It is cultivating the right ripening organisms through a naturally minded affinage, and aging cheeses in a more natural cave. And it is trusting your milk, your culture, your rennet, and your skill as a cheesemaker.

Natural cheesemaking should inspire awe and wonder like other extraordinary natural phenomena: powerful thunderstorms, meandering rivers, oldgrowth trees, and distant galaxies. It’s like working with the forces of both life and death simultaneously—for natural cheesemaking encompasses remarkable forms of biological magic.

This book’s aim is to prove the worth of natural methods in an uplifting and spirited exploration of our beautiful world’s diverse cheeses and dairy ferments.

Milk Into Cheese is a celebration of milk, in all its forms.

Milk is meant to ferment; it can develop into an effective starter culture known as clabber simply with its inherent microbiology.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAX JONES

This book is a deeper dive into milk—a more expansive and explorative look into the subject of natural cheesemaking than my first book, The Art of Natural Cheesemaking—showing how all styles of cheese are interrelated, and how they can all evolve from the same milk, with the help of its exceptional community of microbes and its most appropriate enzymes. It better represents the scope of what I practice and what I teach today.

This time I wanted to take the opportunity to write a definitive guide on the subject of cheesemaking and dairy fermentation, taking the natural philosophy of cheese to an all-encompassing completeness, with the goal of proving the rightness of these techniques for all styles of cheese in all circumstances. It offers a global, universalist perspective on the ways to make this ancient and important food.

Almost no cheese is left unturned in the pages of this book, from the simplest cultured butter, cottage cheese, and kefir, to the most challenging Brie, Comté, and caciocavallo. It includes the most popular cheddar, mozzarella, chèvre, and ricotta, as well as the rare amasi, tomme crayeuse, and cuajada. From the softest and pudgiest to the hardest and most crystalline, the freshest and most heaven-sent to the most decayed and putrescent, this book will help you make them all.

There is a great diversity of techniques within each class of cheese, taking a detailed look at the craft and representing a greater picture of milk’s many possibilities. For example, I include eight or more different alpine cheesemaking techniques (tomme de Savoie, tomme crayeuse, tomme de montagne, tomme de chèvre, raclette, Comté, Emmentaler, and grana).

The techniques are also more streamlined.

The philosophies of natural cheese have continued to inspire and improve my approach, and I’ve realized many ways in which the cheesemaking process can be made even simpler and more elegant with these ideas. Go ahead and add your natural starter and rennet to milk at the same time, for example, and save yourself an hour in each and every make.

On the natural side, I’ve now worked extensively with wooden cheesemaking vats, copper kettles, calf and kid stomachs, and many of the trappings of traditional cheesemaking that I only briefly explored previously or had not even considered. I’ve discussed the nuances of wood and other natural materials with respect to fermentation with coopers, vintners, and cider makers. And I’ve worked with potters and weavers to better understand the nature of clay and reed and their relation to natural techniques.

Pressing cheeses by hand into their forms suffices for alpine cheeses if they’re brought together under their warm whey and kept warm in their forms. Only milled cheeses like cheddar need a mechanical press to knit their firm and acidic curds together. PHOTO BY CHLOE GIRE

I’ve spent many of these intervening years, since my last book, milk-jamming with many other practitioners around the world who have helped me understand the nature and nuance of the cheeses they make. I’ve experimented endlessly with new techniques to understand more diverse cheeses and redefine their makes in a natural way. And I’ve learned about (and tasted) many more, often obscure styles of cheese, and come to understand what each one teaches us about the nature of milk.

There are even techniques that push the boundaries of what’s possible in meat curing, natural winemaking, and cider making, borrowing from the philosophy from natural cheesemaking, which of course borrowed many concepts from these same realms. I’ve come to believe that on the exceptionally wide spectrum of natural cheesemaking, wine, bread, and fermented meats should all be included!

For commercial producers, there’s also much more information (in the appendices) on how to have success with these natural methods in your dairies, based on my and others’ experiences, including how you can prove the safety of keeping natural starters, and even how to use traditional rennet stomachs.

As for the Milk

The milk for all cheesemaking techniques should preferably be used still warm from the udder. If I could distill a single definition for milk that makes the best cheese, this would be it.

Milk is degraded by any processing other than cheesemaking.To make the best cheese, any milk treatment, especially its refrigeration, should be avoided. For a farmer-cheesemaker I therefore recommend twice-daily cheesemaking, always with the freshest milk, preferably still warm from the udder. You will make a better cheese (flavor-wise, nutrition-wise, efficiency-wise, and foodsafety-wise) if you make smaller batches of cheese more often, using the freshest milk with each batch. Some styles like lactic cheeses and barrel butter are effortless and make regular cheesemaking easier—easier even than putting that milk into the fridge!

Fresh milk that’s unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unhomogenized is best for cheesemaking. Any effort to keep milk as milk takes away from its natural ability to respond to the cheesemaking process

Chilled milk, or mixed milk out of a bulk tank, can be used, but doing so will cause problems in the evolution of a cheese, resulting in off flavors, unwanted microbiologies, and possible risks to human health. For reasons that I’ll explain in chapter 2, the longer it’s refrigerated, the worse milk and its cheese gets. Milk refrigerated longer than 12 hours should probably be pasteurized, a technology that’s best avoided. I’m not going to get into the details about it in this book, as it’s entirely unnecessary when working with the freshest milk.

Milk, still warm from the udder, is as good as it gets, and though its sale off the farm is largely illegal (if raw milk can be sold it is generally mandated to be chilled to 4°C (39°F) immediately after milking, damaging that milk), it is worth seeking out for its many benefits. Refrigeration is such a norm on dairy farms today that milking systems immediately chill milk on its exit from the animals, providing no option for a farmer to take out warm milk. Producers typically have to work around their built-in systems to do so, often no easy task.

Find warm milk if you can, by bypassing the industrial system that largely destroys the best qualities of our milk and making connections to get it directly from your local farmers. Be sure to use the milk right away, or within 2 to 3 hours of milking, for best effect.

Any unprocessed milk from any style of farming will work for these techniques: from pastured cows to cows inside on hay and even those fed baleage, silage, or total mixed ration (TMR). Though I hold the practice of feeding fermented corn silage to be among the most destructive inroads of industrialization into dairying, corn-silage-fed cow’s milk still makes remarkably delicious cheese when transformed in a natural way. When working with it I have been surprised to find it respond and ferment the same way as other, more naturally produced milks. It seems to me to be a misconception that milk made with fermented feeds causes cheeses to bloat; the problem is more likely a systemic one.

Use what milk you can get access to and uphold your own ideals. Fresh milk direct from an animal is still milk and will work for all of these techniques.

And for those that aren’t dairy farmers, or cannot source the freshest milk, pasteurized and unhomogenized milk will work well enough for most techniques in these pages. However, you should avoid High Temperature Short Time (HTST) pasteurized milk (72°C [162°F] for 15 seconds) and ultra-high-temperaturetreated (UHT) milk (110°C [230°F] for 10 seconds). Bulk pasteurized milk (62°C [144°F] for 30 minutes) does respond to most cheesemaking methods, but the curds are less responsive and often need more delicate handling and a prolonged stirring to achieve the same result as a raw milk version.

Some techniques work specifically for cow’s milk and others specifically for goat. I do recommend in general that you stick to those particular species for those particular makes, switching things up only by making appropriate modifications. Every species’ milk works slightly differently than every other, and in the milk chapter we’ll explore the different tendencies of each milk.

Enjoy! What else can I say without digging into the meat of the matter—just jump in and enjoy making the most of your milk! 

Recommended Reads

Cheesemaking: An All-Natural, Traditional Approach

How To Make Homemade Fresh Mozzarella

The post Natural Cheesemaking: A Love Letter to Milk first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

Weeds are the bane of every farmer and gardener’s existence. But before you go crusading against the weeds in your garden this year, take a moment to read what author Bryan O’Hara has to say about dealing with these pesky plants.

The following is an excerpt from No-Till Intensive Vegetable Culture by Bryan O’Hara. It has been adapted for the web.

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How to Weed Effectively

Once a bed is shaped and the crop seeded, various tools and techniques can be effective to destroy weed growth, including hoes, flame weeding, solarization, and mulching. Hoes of many shapes and sizes are pulled by hand, pushed (like a wheel hoe), or mounted on a tractor.

Hoeing: An Essential Skill

Hoeing is a skill to be acquired. Speed and accuracy are constantly challenged, and thus hoeing requires not just physical strength but sharpness of mind, and especially speed of decision making to proceed quickly. If these conditions are met, hoeing can be very fast and effective.

Image from No-Till Intensive Vegetable Culture

The usual objective of hoeing is to sever the top from the root of the weed, though some burying of small weeds also may be achieved. Most hoe blades travel about 1⁄2 inch (1.3 cm) below the soil surface when properly employed. It is more effective to hoe on a sunny day, because cut weeds generally are left to die in place, and the sun’s heat kills the cut weeds quickly before they reestablish roots. Hoes are best kept as sharp as possible, usually by use of a grinding wheel. The blades also are best if kept rust-free for a smooth passage through the soil. Another hoeing technique is to throw soil onto the row to smother weeds that are smaller than the growing crop.

Straight, evenly spaced rows make hoeing easier and more efficient. If the rows are misaligned and the space between rows becomes too narrow, a handheld hoe can simply be rotated to have a narrow profile. This is not an option when using wheel hoes and tractor-mounted hoes, however. Mulches and crop residues do get in the way when hoeing, slowing the process. However, with some skill, hoeing can effective to some degree in mulched soil conditions if required.

Mechanically it is generally easier to pull tools through the soil than push them. Wheel hoes must be pushed, but they can be very effective in areas where the soil is loose with minimal residue and the weeds are relatively small. In these conditions pushing a wheel hoe can proceed very quickly with minimal effort. Weed control implements mounted on a tractor can produce results very fast, but only if the field layout has been well planned to accommodate the machinery. Adjusting implements precisely can take much time; to be efficient, large areas need to be laid out with very even row spacing. It also is very easy for tractor-mounted tools to overwork soils unnecessarily, a condition that rarely happens with hoeing. Our use of tractor-mounted implements for weed control is negligible nowadays because of the low weed pressure on our farm and the wide diversity of crops at spacings to take advantage of highest yield and canopy coverage.

Pre-Emergent Weeding: How Does It Work?

Once seed has been placed in the soil, the first opportunity for weed control is pre-emergent weeding. This form of weed control is particularly useful in slow-germinating crops like the umbels (carrot, parsley, and parsnip) and is not practical for fast-germinating crops. In the case of carrot seed, which often takes 10 days or so to germinate, weed seedlings may be dispatched on day 7 or 8. In this way the first flush of weeds is destroyed and the carrot seedlings emerge within a couple of days into a weed-free bed.

If further hoeing is planned and the crop was seeded in furrows, it is important not to disturb the seeds from their furrow spacing. Because of this, shallow pre-emergent hoeing is carefully done parallel to the rows and thoroughly over the entire bed surface. Wide hoes are utilized to achieve this. Solarization (as described in chapter 4) or flame weeders can also be carefully used for pre-emergent weed control. Flame weeding is detrimental to organisms that live on or near the soil surface, so we generally no longer utilize this approach. We have solarized carrot beds before germination for pre-emergent weed control with great success, but this does require appropriate weather conditions.

Surface Weed Control Options

Image from No-Till Intensive Vegetable Culture

After seedlings of a broadcast seeded crop emerge, surface weed control options are basically reduced to either finger-and-thumb pulling, or cutting off individual weeds with a knife. These approaches also work well for in-row weeds in line-seeded beds. (Hoeing is faster for weeds between rows.) Finger- and-thumb pulling of weeds is not appropriate if pulling out the weeds would disturb the crop roots. Once annual weeds reach that size, they are cut off at the soil line with a serrated knife instead.

One advantage of finger and thumb weeding or knife weeding is that the weeds are in hand so they can be collected and removed from the field relatively easily, assuring that there will be no regrowth. Perennial weeds require special consideration—cutting them with a knife is not sufficient for termination, though it can delay seed formation. Perennials have to be pulled out either if their growth will significantly reduce crop yield or if they will further proliferate by going to seed or detrimentally expanding their root mass before the crop is harvested. If this is not the case, then perennials are often more easily dealt with after crop harvest.

If a crop was seeded or planted into straight furrows, then hoeing can begin after germination. Hoeing after crop germination is first done with very small hoes like wire hoes that will not bury crop seedlings with soil. It then progresses to thin-bladed hoes like the collinear hoe that pose little risk of smothering the crop. Later hoeings are achieved with bigger hoes that throw soil to the side as they are pulled and may progress to hilling hoes and equipment meant to throw relatively large volumes of soil toward the crop line. Because vegetable crops are grown at a wide range of between-row spacings, it’s useful to have hoes of many sizes so the entire width of the between row space can be hoed in a single pass. This can be achieved by buying wide-bladed hoes and grinding or cutting the blades to the length of the between-row spacings.

Moving Onto Mulching

Mulching or further mulching row-planted crops after the use of weed control tools can provide additional weed control and soil benefits. If weeds are growing amidst a crop that is close to maturity and the weeds are threatening to go to seed, a machete works well to chop off their tops just above the tops of the crop plants. If the weeds have not produced mature seed yet, then the cut seed heads can be left in the field. But if mature weed seed may be present, the seed heads are gathered and removed from the field. If the weeds are low growing, they can be hoed out and gathered up with pitchforks. The weeds can also be mown and bagged with lawn-mower-style equipment.

The critical goal is to ensure that no viable weed seeds are allowed to fall to the ground in the field.

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Recommended Reads

A Meditation On Garden Weeding: Reflecting On A Day In the Garden

Weed Suppression: Choosing The Right Cover Crops & Living Mulches

The post Weeding: Work Smarter, Not Harder first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

Try your hand at preserving veggies by freezing them! Freezing vegetables is a quick, simple way to preserve them to enjoy all year long.

The following is an excerpt from Many Hands Make a Farm by Jack Kittredge and Julie Rawson. It has been adapted for the web.

A Guide to Freezing Vegetables

Freezing vegetables, especially in small batches, is quite simple and quick. It takes only about ten minutes to freeze a bunch of kale or chard, and that will be the basis of a great winter meal. If you attempt no other method of food preservation, try this. Soon you will want to buy a chest freezer in which to store your bounty.

The Process of Blanching & Freezing Veggies

Blanching (scalding vegetables in boiling water or steam for a short time) is a must for almost all vegetables before freezing them. The fast heating stops enzyme activity that can cause loss of flavor, color, and texture over time.

Here are the most important tips to remember for freezing vegetables:

• For best results, prepare your work area and tools well so you can work quickly and efficiently.
• Cut vegetables into bite-size pieces.
• Wait until the water is boiling to immerse the prepared vegetables.
• Start timing when the pot comes back to a boil. Most vegetables need to cook from one to three minutes in this part of the process. The important thing to watch for is a change to a brighter color.
• Dump the blanched vegetables into a colander in the sink and rinse immediately with cold water. This is easier than fussing with cooling the vegetables in an ice-water bath.
• Squeeze any extra water out of the vegetables when they arecool, and store them in freezer containers that will pack efficiently in your freezer.

This procedure works well for a wide range of vegetables. One variable is how long to leave the vegetables in the boiling water. You can do your own research, though I advise keeping your process simple so that you are more likely to accomplish it.

Tips for Freezing Vegetables

Here are some specific tips based on my experience.

Basil. I puree the leaves with olive oil in the blender and freeze in ice cube trays. Then pop out the frozen cubes and transfer to a plastic bag for longer storage.

Broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower. Due to their chunky texture, these brassicas take around three minutes to properly blanch.

The post Preserving Veggies: Tips for Freezing Vegetables first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

One of the best parts of cooking with ingredients you forage for yourself is discovering how they work on their own to deliver delicious flavors. This is especially true when it comes to making jams and syrups with wild ingredients. 

The possibilities are pretty much endless with wild ingredients — use almost any fresh fruit or juice and a sweetener to create your own custom jam or syrup!

The following is an excerpt from The New Wildcrafted Cuisine by Pascal Baudar. It has been adapted for the web.

Making Jams and Syrups With Wild Ingredients

The post A Guide to Making Jams and Syrups With Wild Ingredients first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

Many of us have been taught that overgrazing, methane-emitting livestock turn green pastures into arid deserts and are responsible for the widespread desertification that threatens precious biodiversity, soil quality, and more. Not so, as Allan Savory explains in his TED Talk, “We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.” You may think it unlikely that these pastured grazers are the soil saviors we need, but it’s true.

Through holistic management and planned grazing, cows can help rebuild soil and restore land to its rightful state—improving carbon sequestration, natural water cycles, and soil fertility and nutrient density.

The following is an excerpt from Cows Save the Planet by Judith D Schwartz. It has been adapted for the web.

Prefer Audio?

Listen to the following excerpt from the audiobook of Cows Save the Planet.

Cows saving the planet?

Why not? An idea that sounds preposterous begins to make sense if we stop to take a soil’s-eye view of our current environmental predicament. To crouch down to ground level—literally or metaphorically—and see how human and animal activity enhances or does violence to that fine earthy layer that hugs our planet. To appreciate the imperceptible animal–vegetable–mineral dance that keeps us alive.

You see, that brown stuff we rush to wash off our hands (or, depend- ing on our age, our knees) is the crux of most biological functions that sustain life. Soil is where food is created and where waste decays. It absorbs and holds water; or, if exhausted of organic matter, streams it away. It filters biological toxins and can store enough carbon to reduce carbon dioxide levels significantly and relatively quickly.

It is home to more than 95 percent of all forms of terrestrial life. In any given place the quality of the soil greatly determines the nutritional value of food, how an area weathers drought or storms, and whether an ecosystem is teeming with life or the equivalent of a ghost town.

Where do those cows fit in?

Cattle, like all grazing creatures, can, if appropriately managed, help build soil. When moved in large herds according to a planned schedule, livestock will nibble plants just enough to stimulate plant and root growth, trample the ground in a way that breaks apart caked earth to allow dormant seeds to germinate and water to seep in, and leave dung and urine to fertilize the soil with organic matter (aka carbon).

The result is a wide variety of grasses and other deep-rooted plants and rich, aerated soil that acts like a great big sponge so as to minimize runoff and erosion. (Cows and their eruptive digestion habits have gotten a bad rap of late—I’ll address the meth- ane question in chapter 1.) The use of ungulates such as cattle in land restoration, a practice called Holistic Management, was developed and refined over the decades by Allan Savory, a farmer and rancher and former opposition leader to then-Rhodesia’s white government. With cows or other grazers operating under Holistic Management across large areas of degrading land, this could mean a great deal of soil created or preserved.

Leaving behind our bovine herd for the moment, another way to build soil is through zai pits, a traditional growing method from Burkino Faso in West Africa. Small holes are dug into a field, and these capture water and hold soil organic matter (compost and such), both precious resources in drylands that depend on seasonal rainfall—about a third of the world’s landmass. Cattle have a similar impact. Rancher and consultant Jim Howell told me that this helped Grasslands, LLC’s, South Dakota ranches withstand the spring 2011 torrential rains while nearby properties suffered losses: The herds left hoof-size pockets in the ground, so water pooled rather than forming gullies and eroding the land.

If you’re wondering why we want to build soil—isn’t there enough dirt out there already?

Around the globe, we’re losing topsoil somewhere between ten times (in the United States) and forty times (China and India) faster than we’re generating it, some eighty-three billion tons of it a year.

Soil is pounded off fields during a rainstorm; it runs down our rivers; its surfaces are over- and undergrazed; when left uncovered it loses its organic matter as carbon oxidizes and enters the atmosphere. Despite our collective societal indifference to soil, we’ve all got a large stake in its fortunes. In an oft-quoted and paraphrased line, “Man has only a thin layer of soil between himself and starvation.” Up to now, we’ve been heedless with our soils. And we’re paying the price.

On an immediate, day-to-day level, the food we eat is only as good as the soil from which it springs. In part because of soil depletion, most food grown today is less nutritious than that of most previous eras. Research from the UK Ministry of Health determined that a steak today has half the iron of its counterpart fifty years ago thanks to changes in what the animals eat. Breeding crops for high yields accelerates the dilution of nutritional content. Over time this can lead to nutrient deficiencies, which a grower may not notice until the effects on the plants are visible, by which point the situation has become extreme.

Remember the adage “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”? Over the last eighty years, the calcium content of one medium apple has dropped by nearly half, and levels of phosphorus, iron, and magnesium have fallen more than 80 percent. So to get the same doctor-avoiding kick, you’d now need four or five apples. And this is fruit straight from the tree; processed foods also lose nutrients en route from the field to box or bottle.

Some scientists believe today’s high obesity rates are, paradoxically, a symptom of malnutrition due to diets deficient in micronutrients. Which prompts the question: Could the declining nutritional content of our food also be a factor in our rising rates of chronic diseases and allergies, particularly food allergies among children?

Fortunately, a host of creatures underfoot are ready to make and enhance soil for us—once conditions are right.

This is where that microscopic choreography comes in; the cows (or the diggers of holes) are only the catalyst. Worms, insects, and microorganisms like fungi and bacteria aerate the ground, decompose waste, exchange nourish- ment (mycorrhizal fungi take glucose from plants and in return help plants assimilate nutrients), and break down rocks into minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc that are essential to our health. The herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides widely used in industrial agriculture kill many of these organisms; from the soil’s or soil dweller’s perspective, chemical additives are not such a great thing.

With zai, the organic matter in the hollows attracts termites. The termites, in turn, burrow around and create tunnels, allowing water to penetrate the ground rather than evaporate. Though usually regarded as pests, termites in marginal lands play much the same role that earth- worms do in greener climes.

In Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, geomorphologist David Montgomery offers numerous cautionary tales of kingdoms, cultures, and empires that squandered their soil and found themselves with nothing left to live on. From the earliest farmers in the Fertile Crescent to the Mayans, Romans, and Easter Islanders, societies have exhausted their land either to scatter and regroup in much-diminished form, or to become lost to history.

Not that people didn’t know better.

Advice about caring for soil has been passed along since the first primitive hoes broke virgin ground. Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, likes to quote this proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.” More recently, in 1937 Franklin D. Roosevelt made the same point with a nationalistic twist: “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.”

Despite history’s warnings, the temptation to plant on fragile hill- sides, clear forests, push yields of lucrative crops, or otherwise try to squeeze more from the earth proves too great. But today we can’t just pack up our tent and move to more promising turf while leaving the damage behind us.

It’s time to start treating soil as the precious resource it is.

This doesn’t mean forgoing its bounty—soil is a renewable resource that can respond quickly to watchful stewardship. Since soil is integral to so many biological processes, nurturing and improving it provides us with many paths toward ecological renewal—with returns far greater than what you’ll see at your feet.

Recommended Reads

Defending Bovines, Butter, and Beef

Why Cows are the Premier Dairy Choice

The post All About Cows: What has Four Legs, Says “Moo,” and Could Save the Planet? first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

“The process of cooking sunflowers is slightly different from that for cooking artichokes, with the result being a unique vegetable with the texture of an artichoke and a strong sunflower flavor.”— Alan Bergo

Did you know that more than just the seeds of a sunflower are edible? Almost every part of this tall, beautiful plant is completely safe (and delicious) to eat when cooked and combined with the right ingredients.

The following is an excerpt from The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora by Alan Bergo. It has been adapted for the web.

The Sensational Sunflower

Sunflowers are more than a seed crop. Drive down country roads in the summer where I live, and you’ll see giant sunflowers towering over gardens, telling you summer is at its peak. If you look at the plants while they’re growing, at the stage before the flowers bloom you might notice that they resemble an artichoke, and you’d be right.

Sunflower vs. Artichoke

An artichoke, is, after all, just an unopened flower caught at the right stage. The process of cooking sunflowers is slightly different from that for cooking artichokes, with the result being a unique vegetable with the texture of an artichoke and a strong sunflower flavor.

There are a few chefs who know this trick. I learned it by watching Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park, but I was also reminded of it by my friend Sean Sherman, who says there was a long history of Indigenous use of sunflower heads. He describes a method for cooking them in his book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen.

Edible Parts of A Sunflower

In addition to their unripe flowers, sunflowers have other edible parts most chefs I know rarely think to use. The leaves, although a bit too intensely flavored to serve as cooked greens, are great blanched and used for things like Roulades Verts or wrapping a delicate fish such as a walleye before it hits the grill.

At the same time you cut the unripe flower, the top 6 to 12 inches (15–30 cm) of the stem can be tender and delicious, peeled and cooked into what I would call sunflower marrow, in a nod to Chef Dan Barber who does the same with kale, broccoli, and cauliflower stems.

Sunflower Growth Season

If you miss the period of growth for sunflower artichokes, the seeds that form afterward, still white and immature, are tender, mild, and delicious in soups, in risotti, as a sprinkle, or tossed into pilafs. Finally, the tubers or sunchokes / Jerusalem artichokes, although from a cousin plant, are delicious and have a beautiful, otherworldly shape. Harvesting them is like digging for buried treasure in the fall.

RECIPE: Sunflower Artichokes

Serves 2 as an appetizer

This recipe is easily scaled, depending on how many heads you have. When choosing sunflowers to harvest, look for the largest ones you can find. Small sunflower chokes might look appealing, but there isn’t much food left after trimming. I think the most interesting thing to consider, though, is what other unopened flowers are still out there for us to discover—and eat?

Ingredients

• 1 large green sunflower
• 5 cups (1.25 L) unsalted water or vegetable stock, divided
• Kosher salt, to taste
• Olive or Smude’s sunflower oil, for serving (optional)

Procedure

Bring 4 cups (945 ml) of the water to a simmer in a tall saucepot, then cook the sunflower head for 3 to 4 minutes. Remove the sunflower from the pot, then transfer it to a sauté pan with the remaining water and a good pinch of salt. Cover the pan, then simmer, turning occasionally, until the sunflower bud is tender when pierced with a knife, about 3 to 4 minutes, depending on size.

Make sure the buds are tender, as you won’t be able to clean them properly otherwise. Allow the sunflower to cool, then transfer it to a cutting board and trim with a paring knife, first removing the outer leaves, then scraping out any flower petals from the inner portion of the bud, just as you would with an artichoke.

Do not remove the base of the stem. It’s delicious—almost the best part of the plant, just like an artichoke. If you won’t be using the buds immediately, transfer them to a lidded container and refrigerate until needed. I like to serve them cut into pieces, warmed, drizzled with Smude’s oil and lemon, and crowned with a sprinkle of sunflower seeds.

Recommended Reads

How to Forage and Store Wild Greens

Daylily Dangers and Delights

The post The Whole Sunflower: Delicious Down to the Stem first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

High temperatures put heat stress on crops that are not very thermotolerant. You can implement desert-adapted practices in your own backyard, orchard, or farm. Become more resilient when the temperatures are on the rise to reduce heat stress and produce food in even the most arid environments!

The following is an excerpt from Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land by Gary Paul Nabhan. It has been adapted for the web.

Breaking the Fever: Reduce Heat Stress in Crops

While I was spending a month in Guatemala in the early 1990s, I became aware of the fact that the concept of nurse plant guilds was well known not only in the Sonoran Desert where I was from, but in the hotter tropical reaches of Central America as well. I had spent a week trying to sleep in the sweltering heat of a multistory concrete apartment in a crowded colonia of a Guatemalan city before gaining access to a palm-thatched palapa hut in the middle of a coffee plantation.

Although the two dwellings were located less than two miles apart and shared the same macroclimate, the microclimate in the coffee plantation was at least a dozen degrees cooler by noon each day. The air-conditioning there was not built into the wall of the cone-shaped hut, but came from the palm thatch of the roof, the coffee trees around the hut, and the dense tree canopy above us.

The Impact of Nurse Plant Guilds

The cultivated tree that provided us such relief from the heat is known throughout Latin America by the name madre de cacao, mother of cocoa. It is a nitrogen-fixing legume known to scientists as Gliricidia sepium. It may now be the woody tropical plant most widely used across the world to provide “shade for cacao, coffee, and other shade-loving crops.”

Although scientists have fostered the spread of madre de cacao as a nurse plant for coffee to the many parts of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, its first use as a buffer against heat stress likely began in the Mayan-dominated reaches of Central America, where madre de cacao was first recruited to provide shade for tender young cacao plants. This must have occurred anciently, for madre de cacao is linked to both chocolate and arboreal monkeys in the ancient Mayan epic the Popul Vuh.

As historians of the Mayan agricultural landscape have written, the cacao plant became dependent upon madre de cacao trees “because it requires a fine-tuned ecosystem to survive: it is wind sensitive, sun sensi- tive, drought sensitive, and nitrogen dependent.” Were it not for the tall, shade-producing, nitrogen-fixing windbreaks and nurse plants of madre de cacao and a close cacao relative (balam-té, protector tree), we might never have enjoyed the pleasure of eating chocolate or drinking hot cocoa.

Diversity of Nurse Plants

Mesquite functions as a protective nurse tree for herbs at Rancho el Peñasco Eco-Lodge in Sonora, Mexico.

While I have been impressed by the use of nurse trees as a thermal buffer for heat-sensitive crops like coffee and cacao in the tropics of Central America, it appears that the diversity and importance of nurse plants is far more striking in the deserts of North and South America. In fact, there are dozens of tree species nicknamed nodrizas or madrinas by desert dwellers, for they are absolutely essential to the germination and survival of a large portion of the edible flora growing in hot, dry climates.

Just how much difference can a nurse plant’s canopy make in protecting an understory herb or vegetable from devastating heat and damaging solar radiation? Collaborating with my Mexican colleague and former student Humberto Suzán, we once gathered a year and a half ’s worth of temperature records in the micro-environments beneath nurse trees in the Sonoran Desert.

Studying Temperature to Reduce Heat Stress

Earlier studies—undertaken well before climate change was so evident—had suggested that the dense shade of a mature nurse tree could potentially decrease the maximum soil temperature beneath it by 20 ̊F (11 ̊C) degrees on a summer day, and raise the minimum temperature by 5 ̊F (3 ̊C) on a winter day. We decided to verify those studies by measuring the soil temperature both within and beyond the understory of the desert ironwood tree, which has a dense evergreen canopy that offers continuous shade year-round.

Compared with the 115.2 ̊F (46.2 ̊C) temperature of desert soil fully exposed to the sun at noon, the soil temperature under the dense shade on the northern side of the ironwood canopy was only 95.8 ̊F (35.4 ̊C), almost 20 ̊F degrees cooler! More remarkably, the temperature of cactus stems under the same ironwood was only 94.8 ̊F (34.8 ̊C), within the range at which even pinto beans could grow and flower. The microclimate under nearby mesquite trees was nearly as well buffered as those under ironwoods, with their temperatures hovering around 98.3 ̊F (36.8 ̊C) at noon in July.

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Reduce Heat Stress: Principles and Premises

One ecological principle fundamental to reducing heat stress in plants and animals is that of establishing a boundary layer between the sun and an organism vulnerable to excessive temperatures and damaging solar radiation. In most cases, the thermal buffer does not lie immediately on the skin of an animal or the surface of leaf, but it creates a layer of air between the “inner surface” of the organism and an “outer surface”—a leaf tree canopy, a latticework of feathers, hairs, thorns, spines, or fibers.

Think for a moment of the black robes worn by Bedouin nomads of the Sinai and Saharan deserts. Although you would at first guess that a dark robe would make a nomad in the desert hotter rather than cooler, the cloth itself is not pressed against the person’s skin, but forms an air space layered between the nomad’s skin and the surface of the robe, which absorbs some heat but insulates and deflects much of it away from the body.

Why Some Species Thrive in Deserts

In a similar manner, black ravens, crows, vultures, and buzzards thrive in deserts, for they have a shiny latticework of feathers that reflects the sun’s rays before they reach the birds’ skin. Similarly, some black-skinned cattle or black-fleeced sheep create a boundary layer that keeps solar radiation from driving them toward heat stress.

A nurse tree does the same, cooling the organisms in its understory during the summer and warming them in winter by establishing its own microclimate within the boundary layer beneath the tree canopy. And yet buffering underlings from extreme temperatures is not the sole service performed by nurse plants.

Benefits of Nurse Plants

A peach tree serves as a nurse plant, shading herbaceous perennials in its understory.

Since the 1930s, desert ecologists have determined that particular nurse plants like mesquite, palo verde, ironwood, hackberry, and acacia provide a wider range of benefits than just thermal buffering to plants and animals sheltered by their canopies:

• Seeds are readily dispersed and accumulate beneath nurse plant canopies in soils where seedling recruitment will be favored.
• Canopy shade creates a boundary layer of humidity. This in turn creates a moist microclimate that buffers the underlings from death by lingering drought, catastrophic freezes, or intense heat spells.
• Organic matter under the nurse plant nurtures seedbeds with greater moisture- and nutrient-holding capacity than the surrounding desert floor, thereby fostering higher levels of germination and seedling survival.
• Shallower roots of nurse plants often inoculate the seedlings of associated underlings with mycorrhizal fungi or, if both the nurse tree and the underling are legumes, with nitrogen-fixing Rhizobia bacteria.
• Deeper nurse tree roots often pump up or lift water, macronutrients, and trace minerals used for building the plant canopy. In addition, as they shed their leaves, branchlets, and surface roots, they deposit them in the litter below the tree, where they are composted and uti- lized by other plants.
• Spines, thorns, or bristles on nurse trees repel browsers and grazers that might otherwise eat or trample developing seedlings, creating prey refugia where underling plants are protected from herbivores.
• Nurse trees provide ideal nesting or roosting sites for frugivorous birds that not only carry seeds or fruits with them, but defecate them out in nitrogen-rich packages of manure.

Some nurse plants, such as honey locust and carob, function well in semi-arid temperate zones, while others provide the greatest benefits when situated in true deserts or in the arid subtropics.

Choosing Nurse Trees to Reduce Heat Stress

A few premises will help you select nurse trees for your specific locale and your own guild of food crops:

1. Not all nurse plants are created equal. Some are better than others at meeting the needs of particular crops placed in their understory. Because some nurse plants are drought- or cold-deciduous, while others are evergreen, the nurse plant guilds or micro-communities beneath them are not simply an amalgam of randomly selected parts. Studies in the Mediterranean of 11 species planted under 16 different kinds of nurse trees indicate that some underlings experience different survival rates depending upon the nurse. The deciding factor for which nurse trees may be best in any case is whether the understory plant needs protection from heat, catastrophic freezes, low soil fertility, low moisture-holding capacity, or from grazing damage by herbivores.
2. The hotter and drier the environment, the greater the need for using older, well-established nurses with dense evergreen canopies that provide continuous shelter for underlings.
3. The higher the risk of wild or domesticated herbivores browsing, trampling, or damaging the plants in the understory, the more important it is that the nurse plants selected have spines, thorns, barbs, or bristles to repel the animals.
4. The poorer the soil, the more important it is that the nurse tree provides abundant leaf litter, fixes nitrogen, attracts mycorrhizae, and pumps water to higher levels of the soil. The permaculture concept of stacking many functions into a cohesive set of plants makes abundant sense when thinking about nurse plant guilds.

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Planning & Practice to Reduce Heat Stress

Most tall cacti in the desert, including this saguaro, begin their lives under nurse plants such as ironwood or mesquite.

Beginning around 1982, I began to imagine how we might design arid-adapted crop polycultures based on the ecological relationships found in native nurse plant guilds in the Sonoran Desert. As in other deserts, Sonoran Desert habitats feature specialized cohorts of plants that typically grow in vertical zones clustered beneath a particular shade-providing nurse tree.

For instance, under a towering ironwood tree, giant saguaro cacti might grow to heights of 15 to 20 feet, with wolfberry shrubs beneath them, prickly pear cacti beneath them, and wild onions or night-blooming cereus beneath them.

Understanding The Species

After first working to understand how particular sets of Sonoran Desert species facilitated the presence of one another in these wild nurse plant guilds, we turned our attention to designing agricultural systems based on certain guilds. Our most ambitious initiative was to use the nurse plant guild concept to grow perennial wild chiles and oreganos beneath the canopies of mesquites, feather trees, hackberries, and wolfberries.

We helped establish one commercially producing plantation of perennial chiles under legume trees between Alamos and Navajoa in Sonora, Mexico, on the southern subtropical edge of the Sonoran Desert. This field yielded an accessible harvest of fiery chiltepin peppers that campesinos mixed into their goat cheese to sell at markets as a value-added artisanal product. The feathery leaves and branches of the tepeguaje nurse trees (Leucaena leucocephala) were coppiced (pruned away) and used as forage for the goats that produced the cheese.

8 Steps to Follow When Planting

For planning and implementation purposes, the upshot of these field trials can be summarized as follows:

• Determine which combinations of understory crops and nurse trees grow best together and produce multiple benefits by evaluating natural systems nearby, or cultivated oases and other agro-forestry systems in climates comparable to your own.
• Draw a matrix of the benefits as well as the drawbacks of growing each species by itself as opposed to those of the entire guild grown together. As an experiment, grow each species by itself in a space of comparable size, and determine whether the polyculture design yields more than the cumulative harvests of the monocultures.
• Pay careful attention to establishing an appropriate height, canopy breadth, and density of the nurse plants before you introduce crops to the understory.
• Ensure that water is reaching the roots of both the nurse tree and its underlings.
• Remember to maintain an optimal density and size of the nurse tree canopy through periodic pruning, or else the understory crops may be completely shaded out.
• Shift your design and management, depending on whether or not small livestock like goats or free-ranging poultry like guinea fowl are present and require shade or forage. For instance, if goats are present, you can select shade-bearing plants whose foliage or seeds meet the goats’ nutritional needs while being hardy enough to withstand periodic browsing or grazing.
• Measure ground temperatures within the understory and outside of the canopy on barren soil each July and December, and compare results.
• Evaluate whether or not you are gaining success in stacking functions within the same space. If you are having only limited success, redesign the spacing or the species composition of the guild.

Of course, nurse plant guilds usually take multiple years to develop, and their success in reducing heat stress is very dependent upon the landscape in which they are placed.

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Recommended Reads

Growing Food in the Face of a Hotter, Drier Land

Hope for a Thirsty World

The post Arid Agriculture: Strategies to Reduce Heat Stress in Crops and Livestock first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.

Looking for something to do with the berries you’ve been growing all season? Try making fruit-infused vinegars!

These recipes for blueberry-mugwort and blackberry infused vinegars allow you to get creative with ingredients to concoct unique flavors.

The following is an excerpt from Wildcrafted Vinegars by Pascal Baudar. It has been adapted for the web.

RECIPE: Blackberry-Infused Vinegar

This recipe should also work well with similar wild berries such as mulberries, raspberries, boysenberries, dewberries, currants, and so on. It’s pretty much identical to the Blueberry-Mugwort-Infused Vinegar process aside from the fact that we boil the berries with the vinegar instead of crushing them, but you can use the blueberry method if desired.

Ingredients for a 1-quart jar (1 L)

• 2 cups (12 ounces, or 340 g) blackberries
• Optional flavorings: I’ve made this flavored vinegar using all kinds of wild savory herbs, such as California sagebrush, yarrow, and mugwort (usually 2 to 3 leaves).
• A small, cracked pinyon pine branch (3 to 4 inches, or 7.5 to 10 cm) placed in the cold vinegar imbued a wonderful savory accent. Commercial savory herbs could include basil, fennel, or dill.
• 2 cups (480 ml) red or white wine vinegar (apple cider vinegar works great, too)

Procedure

Rinse the blackberries briefly under cold running water, making sure to remove any rotten berries. Place the berries and flavorings of your choice into a nonreactive pot (stainless steel or enamal coated), then add the vinegar. Bring the contents to boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for around 3 to 4 minutes. You can simmer for a shorter time when using tender berries such as raspberries.

Transfer the contents into a quart (1 L) jar. Cap tightly and place in a cool, dark place for 2 to 3 weeks. I like to shake the jar once a week.

Strain and transfer the vinegar into clean bottles or a pint (480 ml) jar. Seal tightly and store in the refrigerator or a cool, dark place (below 65°F/18°C). Shelf life for optimum flavors is around 6 months, or up to a year in perfect storage conditions.

RECIPE: Blueberry-Mugwort-Infused Vinegar

The post Fruit-Infused Vinegar: How to Make Vinegar With Blueberries and Blackberries first appeared on Chelsea Green Publishing.