Odds and Ends... I mean, Important Things Happening

1. I wrote another guest post for the Frugal Hostess about my preparing coq au vin for a dinner we hosted a couple of weeks ago. You can find it here. http://frugalhostess.blogspot.com/2009/12/lefix-concoqs-multinational-incident.html

2. We lost one of the hens today to one of our neighbor's marauding dogs. Rest in Peace Big Momma.

3. I am giving a workshop on small scale composting at the Georgia Organics Conference on Friday February 19th. Gonna be a great conference!

That is all.

A Brief History of how The Funny Farm Came into Being

When Robin and I first got married 36 years ago we had no real intentions for our life together. We loved each other and that was enough. Some how or other we stumbled onto Organic Gardening Magazine and Mother Earth News. We rented a house in Scottsville, Va and started our first organic garden in 1974. We read Frances Moore Lappe's book Diet for a Small Planet and became vegetarians. We joined a food coop. This was near the end of the hippie era when the mantra was turn on, tune in and drop out. That sounded pretty cool to us.
I got a job at a nursery. I liked the work and I quickly figured out that I could do a better job than the people I was working for so I went back to school to study ornamental horticulture at Va. Tech. I had always been interested in science so it was really fun for me to study all the different disciplines that are involved in growing plants. Entymology, soil science, organic chemistry; all were fascinating to me. One of my professors was a landscape architect. I had dealings with some landscape architects when I was working at the nursery. They spoke a language of design that was intriguing to me. I had dabbled in art all my life. I thought landscape architecture would be a good path to follow so I went to graduate school at the U. of Massachusetts. I was very shy back then and did not have a whole lot of self esteem. I was intimidated at first by being among a group of really smart people in what seemed almost like a foreign country to this naive southern boy. What if I couldn't measure up? I held my own and found my place. My professor Joe Volpe became my first mentor. He taught us a process of thinking through problems that can be applied to all of life's situation. Formulate goals and objectives. Analyze, synthesize, develop solutions. This process has become second nature and has served me well.

During my years in school we always had a garden and maintained our vegetarianism. After graduate school we had to figure out what to do next. We knew we did not want to move back to Virginia. We had some friends living in Atlanta so we decided to move there. We rented an apartment, got jobs and got caught up in city life. It was during that time that we lost our way for a while. We had no place for a garden. We were both working long hours. so fast food for lunch and bar food for dinner quickly became the norm for us. We had great fun going to see bands and drinking with friends at the bars. We bought a little fixer upper house in the city. We worked on fixing up the house. I designed and built a nice garden over a number of years. Once the garden was finished I wanted to move so I could build another garden so we bought a bigger house a mile away. That house had recently been remodeled so I concentrated all my efforts on the garden. After a while, we began to sense that something was amiss. I hated my job working for a landscape contracting company. I was the production manager. My job consisted of managing people, materials and frequently broken down equipment. I was becoming depressed. I finally quit. I felt the the best thing I had learned during that time was how not to run a landscape company. Again, I was sure I could do the same thing only better.

We had been talking about the idea of starting a business of some kind near where we lived. We were both tired of driving out to the suburbs every day to work. One day I drove by an empty lot a mile from our house when the proverbial light bulb came on in my head. That would be a good place to start a garden center, I thought. I spent 6 months working on a business plan. I visited all the local garden centers to get ideas for what not to do. We searched fo funding, found none. We scraped together what money we had and jumped in. That was the beginning of the Urban Gardener in 1998. Robin continued to work at her job selling advertising for a local newspaper while I built the business. After a couple of years we felt that the business could support us so Robin came on board to run the retail arm and I started the design build arm. When I was planning the business I wrote a mission statement as everyone did back then. Part of that statement was that we would be stewards of the planet. That was key to our decision-making. In the beginning organics was not really on people's radar yet. I searched for products like fertilizers, pest control and other things we could sell but there was not much available that would work for retail. We sold lots of a soil mix called Complete Landscape Mix which I had been using in landscape work for a while. It includes compost, worm castings, and granite sand. We carried Espoma fertilizers that were mostly organic. That was about it.

We were still spending a lot of time at the Earl, our favorite local watering hole. One night we were sitting at the bar when a loud, boisterous young woman yelled across the bar to us, "who the f**k are you people? ". So we went over to talk to her. During our drunken conversation we discovered that she had lived in the same small town in Virginia that we had lived in only 20 years later. She had a big organic garden there too. We immediately bonded. We said we were the same person. I guess that makes me the only person in the world who has been reincarnated while still living. Her name is Jennifer. This was in the fall of 2002. The following spring was when the second light bulb came on in my head as I was walking up the alley next the the vacant lot that was adjacent to the garden center. This time the thought was, "we should start a community garden on the vacant lot". I have no idea where that thought came from since I had never even seen a community garden. I called Jennifer ( who wasn't doing anything much at the time while she waited to start graduate school in the fall) and asked her if she wanted to help me start one. She said sure. So I started work on the physical plan while she did the research on how to manage it and reach out to the community to get the neighborhood involved. So she and I got to work starting a garden. We got lots of volunteer help through Fred Conrad at the Atlanta Community Food Bank. We recruited other gardeners, got a load of Complete Landscape Mix donated and the Urban Gardener Oasis Community Garden was born. It sure was great to be growing food again.

Interest in organics was picking up steam that year. Products were being produced in retail packaging. At our annual employee meeting at the beginning of the following year I proposed to everyone that we should go completely organic. No more pesticides, chemical fertilizers, only organic seeds. Everyone was totally enthusiastic about the idea so we became the first all natural garden center in the Atlanta area. We started carrying more vegetables, herbs, fruit plants and lots of native plants. Our customers totally embraced the idea as well and business was booming.

It was during this time that a young woman named Holly started working at the garden center. She had been a farmer at several organic farms in Georgia and Tennessee. She was really good at scouting for insect pests so pest management became her job in the nursery. She took a plot in the community garden too. She and I started traveling the country to increase our knowledge about organic production methods. We went to Oregon and took Elaine Ingham's soil food web and and compost tea workshop. We went to Milwaukee and took Will Allen's workshop at Growing Power. We went to Washington state to study mushroom production with Paul Stamets at Fungi Perfecti. We applied what we learned in the business and shared it with the community through classes at the community garden.

All these new and exciting goings on rekindled the dreams Robin and I had when we were first starting our life together. We starting thinking about getting some land outside the city on which to grow vegetables. Robin had mentioned this to our friend Charlie who lived in the suburbs east of the city. She would call us from time to time about some property she had seen, but nothing met our needs. One day in late June of 2007 she called Robin and said her angel had told her to turn right instead of left that morning and she passed by a property for sale that she thought we might be interested in. We made an appointment to visit the property the next day. We drove up to a rather plain looking ranch style house with an immaculate bermuda lawn in front. We were not particularly impressed. We rang the door bell, walked in side and we both gasped as we walked into this huge space with a 20' cathedral ceiling with giant south facing windows that looked out to a big barn and a 1/2 acre pond. A barn! and a Pond! We could barely contain our excitement as we dutifully went on the tour of the house with the agent. We wanted to go outside! We walked around the property by ourselves and talked about all the possibilities it offered. Gardens, fruit trees, mushrooms, aquaculture, animals! Woohoo! Just what we had been dreaming about. We put on our poker faces and told the agent we would get back with her soon. The next day we put an offer on the property. It was accepted. So all we had to do was sell our house in the city and we could move to our dream home. Well, the real estate market in the city had slowed down a lot recently so we were a little concerned. We called our real estate agent friend Brian and put our house in the market. Within a week we had a good offer on the house from a developer who was also buying the house next door to us. We were excited. However he was not able to get financing so the deal fell through. Oops! But Brian, being the super agent that he is found us another buyer within a week. So in less than a month we sold our house, packed up all our stuff and moved to Stone Mountain.


Georgia had been in a severe drought for a couple of years by this time. The powers that be decided they needed to do something to protect the drinking water supply. Their solution was to ban outside water use by the citizens. As you can imagine this decision was devastating to both our retail business and landscape business. We wanted to keep our crew intact, hoping for some improvement in the fall so we brought them out to our new place and started to reshape the property to meet our needs. We chopped and graded and tilled. We killed off the front lawn and planted a cover crop. We built a bunch of worm bins in the barn based on Will Allen's methods at Growing Power. We converted a former goat pen in the back of the barn into a chicken coop. We started our first small vegetable garden. It was the summer of 2007 when Holly and I took Paul Stamets' mushroom production workshop. That fall we held our first workshop one shittake mushroom production. It was a big success with about 25 people attending. The Funny Farm was starting to take shape.
The drought and water ban continued into the fall. We were forced to make the hard decision to close down our business. We stripped down the garden center, moving everything we thought we could use to our new place. Robin and I were at a loss as to what to do next. She had seen a vacant store front in East Atlanta village that she thought might be a good location for a small garden shop. We looked at it and decided to reopen the Urban Gardener on a much smaller scale there. Again we scraped together some money, built out the space and opened up early in the spring of 2008. We were fortunate to pick up a couple of good landscape jobs to help us limp through the continuing drought. Out in Stone Mountain I got to work that spring planting vegetables.
After we shut down our garden center the fate of the community garden was up in the air. We were living far away and had our own garden at our new place. The community garden no longer had access to water which had been supplied from the garden center. It ended up being abandoned. I dug up all of the fruiting perennials and insect attracting perennials and moved them to Stone Mountain. We had some fruit trees left when we closed down the garden center so we planted them in our new garden too.
Then in September the bottom dropped out of the economy. That, combined with the ongoing drought spelled the end of the Urban Gardener. We shut the business down, moved more stuff to the Funny Farm and pondered the future. Our friend Charlie, whose angel found our new place and who is a bonsai expert, was going to work with the monks at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit it reinvigorate their bonsai nursery. She recruited Robin to work with her at the monastery.
We had built a reputation as experts in sustainable and organic gardening techniques through our work at the garden center and the community garden. We were connected into an expanding network through our work with the local Bioneers group and with Georgia Organics. Once we decided to close the Urban Gardener for good I decided to capitalize on that and I offered a 6 week comprehensive workshop on organic gardening starting in February of 2009. It quickly sold out. We offered it again in the Spring and it sold out again! Some of our neighbors found out we were growing vegetables and asked if we could purchase the excess. Of course we said yes so a little market garden business sprouted. We were growing lots of vegetables so we started selling them at the Decatur Farmers Market. Robin was making jams, jellies and pickles that we sold there too. I was still getting some calls to do design and garden construction work from clients and friends of clients. We kept the Urban Gardener website going to help attract business. We were beginning to feel like we were going to be able to keep the Funny Farm going after all. Whew!
I was reminded of a couple of things during this ordeal. One is that tomorrow never comes and the other is that the future we imagine may never come. That is not to say that we should throw up our hands and do nothing, We need to plan for both, be adaptable and make contingency plans as well. When we moved to the Funny Farm we had 3 goals: Grow as much of our own food as possible; Earn all of the income we need from the farm; Develop a model of suburban permaculture that we can use to teach others how to grow their own food and to live their lives in a more sustainable manner. We have made good progress in reaching those goals. We produce all of our own vegetables now. We earn an ever-increasing portion of our income from the farm. We plan to have Robin working full time on the farm in the next couple of years. Our workshops are successful and our network is building. We will be hosting an introduction to permaculture workshop in March put own by our friends Isabel Crabtree and Bob Burns with the Central Georgia Permaculture Institute. I am doing a workshop composting at the Georgia Organics Conference in February. I am also a mentor in the Georgia Organics urban agriculture mentorship program.
We will continue to advance these goals as best we can. We will continue to focus our efforts on expanding our circle of influence and not concern ourselves about the things over which we have no control.
Life on the Funny Farm is good!

January Workshops

We are having a series of workshops next month. Start your garden season off right with our Garden Planning workshop on Sunday January 10th. The time to begin you early spring planting is coming soon. Join our Starting Plants from Seeds workshop on Sunday January 17th. There are still a few spaces available for our 6-week intensive organic gardening workshop starting on Sunday January 31st. You can see a list of all our upcoming workshops on our website www.funnyfarmatl.com .

Funny Farm Stuffed Broccoli Leaves - a new Southern Tradition

Last spring was the first time i heard of people eating broccoli leaves. It makes sense though, for a couple of reasons. The first is that they are tender and delicious, tasting like a cross between kale and collards. Also, it provides an additional crop for farmers to sell thus using more of the broccoli plant than just the flower bud. The flooding rains this September washed away or caused root rot on much of our first planting of broccoli. We re-planted but it was really too late to get large crowns. We hope the winter will be mild enough that we can get them through til spring when the crowns will finish filling out. In the mean time we are thankful that we can get some food from the crop this fall and early winter.

We offered the leaves for sale last week and sold some and we brought the rest home for us to eat. We found that some of our customers did not know what to do with them so I decided to create a recipe or two to share hoping to boost sales.

We've had stuffed cabbage leaves a time or 2 when I was in grad school in Massachusetts where there is a large population of people of Polish decent. I figured why not make some stuffed broccoli leaves. Typically cabbage is stuffed with some type of meat, rice and egg mixture and topped with a tomato sauce.

I started with some steamed medium grain brown rice i got for Massa Organics whom i met on twitter. They are awesome! They live in a house they built out of their own rice straw bales. We love ground buffalo because it has great flavor and buffaloes eat grass so i browned it with some garlic and some Indian spices to give it some punch (depth of flavor in foodie-speak). I mixed the rice and the buffalo together in a bowl with an egg from our friends at Carlton Farms up in Rockmart Georgia. The sauce i made from some organic ketchup, balsamic vinegar, a little ground chipotle pepper (kicking it up a notch ala Emeril) and a couple of splashes of carrot hooch into which i had added some sliced lemons and pickled some carrots. You probably don't have that handy in you fridge so you can substitute fresh squeezed lemon juice.

The first time i tried to make stuffed cabbage leaves i didn't know that you needed to blanch them first to soften them up enough to be able to roll them up. This time i put the broccoli leaves into the rice steamer after the rice was done and steamed them for about 5 minutes. They came out beautifully bright green and pliant. I spooned some of the filling and started to roll the first one up. Those fu..(um sorry Joyce. (my mother-in-law)) guys are not the easiest things to roll. Kinda like when you are first learning to roll a joint, practice makes perfect. The key is to not put too much filling on the leaf and put it in the center so you can fold the sides over the filling first, then press the filling back tight against the end of the leaf and roll it up so that the filling stays inside. This will allow you to create a beautiful presentation when you go to plate the dish (foodie-speak for spooning it on the plate).

About a year ago Robin went to an estate sale at the neighbor's house after the old lady who lived there passed (Southern for died). She came home with a pile of aprons (she loves aprons) and a box full of casserole dishes. As she was unpacking the dishes i saw one that was exactly like the one my mother used to make macaroni and cheese in. That was about the only thing my mom cooked that i liked (or anybody else in the family liked for that matter). You see my mom got a degree in home economics but she was a terrible cook. She could turn a beautiful beef roast into shoe leather. I asked her one time why she cooked it so long. She said she could not stand to eat pink beef. She had to compete with her mother-in-law who was a great country cook. Grandmama Marcus could make the best pies and yeast rolls, and apple sauce and head cheese and all kinds of stuff. She never made it past the 4th grade in school but man could she cook.

So anyway, i used that red dish to cook the broccoli in. Green broccoli leaves, red casserole dish; how very festive.

Here's the recipe: Funny Farm Stuffed Broccoli Leaves

INGREDIENTS - pre-heat oven to 350º

3/4 lb. broccoli leaves ( about 24 leaves)

Stuffing
1 cup dry brown rice
1 cup chicken stock

1 tablespoon olive oil
4 garlic cloves
1 lb. ground buffalo (or grass fed beef)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon garam masala
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon tumeric
1 large egg
Tomato Sauce
1/2 cup chicken stock
1 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground chipotle pepper
juice of 1 lemon

Preparation
Steam the rice in the chicken stock until done. In a cast iron skillet saute´ the garlic in the olive oil until tender. Add the ground buffalo and brown.

Cut off the stems of the broccoli leaves and save for stock or juice or compost. When the rice is finished steam the leaves for 5 minutes to make them pliable and bright green. Run cold water over them to stop the cooking and make them safe to handle.

Combine the tomato sauce ingredients in a sauce pan and simmer gently while you stuff the broccoli leaves.

In a large bowl combine the rice and buffalo and taste to see if you need to add salt. Add the egg and mix everything well.

Lay a leaf face up on a cutting board with the stem end pointing toward you. Spoon about 1-1/2 tablespoons of filling onto the leaf just above where the stem met the leaf. Fold the sides over the filling, press the filling tightly back into the leaf and roll it up as tight as possible. Place in an oiled casserole dish. Continue until all the leaves are filled.

Spoon the sauce over all the stuffed leaves. Place the cover over the casserole dish and bake for 45 minutes at 350º.


Deelliiisssshhhuuussss!!

I am Thankful for my Neighbors' Hard Work

Every once in a while I am glad my neighbors grow grass. Say what? Well for them to grow good grass they have to rake up all the leaves that fall from the big oak trees in their yard. They very conveniently (for me) put them in paper bags and line them up on the street ostensibly to be picked up by the county and hauled away.
When I was coming home from working with my friends on preparation for our annual winter solstice celebration yesterday I passed by a long line of bags full of brown gold waiting for me to pick them up today and use them to mulch my garden for the winter (should we have winter this year). It took me 3 trips to get all of them, 45 bags total. I laid some cardboard on the path and dumped a bag, laid the empty bag on the path, dumped another bag and so forth until I finally ran out of cardboard. Luckily at the Monastery where Robin works they have lots of cardboard so she brought some home so that I can finish the job in the morning.
I also spread the leaves among the broccoli and cabbages where they will begin to be broken down through the winter by my army of workers in the soil making nutrients available to the current and future crops. In the paths the cardboard and bags will help to smother the weeds so there will be less work for me to do next season. I was able to heavily cover about 2/3rds of my front food - not - lawn garden.
I sure hope the squirrels get to work on all the acorns or I will have the beginnings of an oak forest really soon.

Winter 2010 6-week Intensive Organic Gardening Workshop

We are proud to announce that our new 6 week organic gardening workshop. Registration in now live.

This is a hands-on workshop Whether you are a beginner or an experienced gardener wanting to convert from conventional to organic methods, whether you have a sunny townhouse patio or a 3 acre lot, this class will put you on the path to taking control of your food future.

Classes meet every other Sunday from 1-4 p.m. Starting January 31st & ending April 11th

Topics covered

• Make compost and manage your soil using free, local organic inputs

• Grow vegetables from seed

• Put biodiversity to work to reduce or eliminate pests

• Use perennial vegetables and fruits as part of a permaculture garden

• Use mushrooms to recycle nutrients and produce high quality protein

• Harness the power of worms to turn your kitchen scraps into nutrient rich worm castings

• Plan your garden to get maximum output of nutritious food

A detailed outline is available here

The workshop is limited to 10 people so register today.

What do Social Media and Baking Crackers Have in Common?

I started on Facebook a few years ago because a couple of my friends did. We did the poking thing and played the games that went around. After a while as more of our friends joined it became a good way to communicate with others about subjects of mutual interest, like where and when the next party was going to be. Soon we were using it to spread the word about causes we supported or were against. It became a way to become engaged in building the community we aspire to. More friends came on board, then friends of friends, then people we met ( at the Earl mostly), then people we don't know but who have heard about the work we do.

I started this blog a little over 2 years ago to share our experiences as we went about developing our suburban permaculture model. Slowly, very slowly, the readership has increased as I have learned how to attract people to it by using other forms of social media.

Like Twitter. I joined twitter about a year ago but never did anything with it until I went to an LRBN workshop led by Lady Rogue of Rogue Apron fame (whom I first learned about on Facebook). She taught us how to utilize twitter to make useful connections. So I jumped back into the twitterverse with my newly learned skills. I began to make connections with people with whom I share common interests (but don't always agree with) and I began to learn things. Soon I was sharing my knowledge and experiences with them as well. Again it has become a tool for building community.

I found out about other online communities such as Foodbuzz.com where people share ideas about food. Through Foodbuzz I connected with some really good food bloggers who write about nutrition, cooking, local food systems and share great recipes. All of these networks are interconnected so often I can't remember where I connected with some one first.

So what does this have to do with baking crackers? It goes something like this. I connected with a guy on twitter @theoliveoilblog. He is a self-described "4th generation olive oil producer from Sicily." He tweeted that he was getting started on Foodbuzz and he would send a bottle of olive oil to the 1st 3 people who buzzed him. I jumped over there and buzzed him up and last Monday I got a bottle of fine single estate extra virgin olive oil. I was excited to try it out. But what to make first?

Saturday I was ready to do something with the turkey left over from Thanksgiving so i made some chili and some stock. That put me in the mood to cook more stuff. It was a literal cooking frenzy the rest of the day. I made cheese straws (recipe on Foodbuzz). I decided to make some chicken liver pate´with the chicken livers I got from Natures Harmony Farms last summer. (they have been in the freezer :p). I figured I needed some crackers to the eat the pate´on so I made sesame olive crackers with the new olive oil. They turned out great (recipe below). I updated my facebook status

Duane Marcus making pickled radish, chickn liver pate´, cheese straws, turkey chili, turkey stock, racking blueberry hooch, rockin out to my fave tunes

I got a facebook notification that a friend had made a comment about my status.

Need your pate recipe - post on Funny Farm??? Or guest post on The Frugal Hostess?

She was referring to her blog The Frugal Hostess which is my most favorite blog of the many I read regularly. I jumped at the chance to do a guest post on her blog because I greatly respect what she does and I thought it would be really fun to emulate her totally whacked out style (it was) and because she has way more readers and followers than I do so it will be good exposure for me and my blog. This post links to her blog and my guest post will link to this post and the community gets bigger and stronger. I'm not sure from which social media channel i first discovered her because she's on all of them too. We are now personal FB friends and when she replied to my email after i sent her my guest post she said she heard through the grapevine that i frequented the Earl and that we had some friends in common. So we are planning to meet at the Earl soon for a beer or 3 and get to know each other in the physical world which is what really matters, right?
Oh, yea. If you want a really good chicken liver pate´recipe check out my guest post on The Frugal Hostess blog :)
How 'bout them crackers!

Sesame Seed Olive Oil Crackers
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups semolina flour
1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (or all-purpose flour)
1 teaspoon fine-grain sea salt
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1 cup warm water
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

Directions:
Whisk together the flours and salt. Add the water and olive oil.

Mix together and then knead by hand on a floured board or counter-top until all ingredients are well blended and a good dough is formed. The dough should be just a bit tacky.

When you are done mixing, shape the dough into a large ball and coat with some olive oil. Cover with a clean dishtowel and let rest at room temperature for 30 - 60 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 450F degrees.

After the rest period cut the dough into quarters. Roll a section out on a floured board or counter top about 1/8" thick. Use a knife or pizza cutter to cut the dough into what ever shape you want. You can also use a biscuit cutter to cut round crackers or various cookie cutters to make other shapes.

Place the crackers on a lightly floured cookie sheet and bake about 10 minutes or until golden brown. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Store in an airtight container after they cool.Makes a 24-36 small crackers.