Shaker patterns

In 2011 we visited Hancock Shaker Museum Farm in Massachusetts, and despite it being a somewhat dreary day, we had a great time among the old-fashioned uildings and their tools and utensils.  What striked me was how in the simplicity of all their handmade things was the beauty of patterns, repeats, and just a tiny bit randomness.  Here are some examples (and more photos here):

The rain is coming soon- April edition

A snapshot I took a few days back, when rain was closing in. Good for me that the April weather is changing fast, the sun came back half an hour later! I am at Barking Dog Plaza of course, for you who knows the place.

Train cars: The Chevy Shot

The Chevy Shot, originally uploaded by ericwill.

We often feature train shots by our friend EW here on the blog, and here is another one.  I don't know the back story, but just look at this - the diesel locomotive running by, the old car from the 1950s, the grain silo and the funnels to release who knows what into sacks, barrels or truckbeds. It is a historical moment, just like so many other moments that pass by us without notice. A photo of America's past, but taken just a year ago. Click on the photo to see more of Eric's fantastic train photos.

Capital scenes (Washington DC)

In May this year I had to travel to Washington DC for a conference and took a few hours to see the sights:


The Washington Monument.  Impressive. 


The White House.  I wonder how many spy cameras that are in the flower beds. 


I wonder if the President ever sends out Secret Service to get him a Polish dog?  This cart was right next to the White House.


This anti-war tent vigil has been going on for three decades, every day, every hour, every minute.  It is right in front of the White House, and is more of a statement than a disturbance.  I wish we lived in a world with more peace.


Outside the US Department of Agriculture they had planted parsley in the flower beds, and it was flowering nicely and greenly. So appropriate and unusual.

Inside the USDA was a small museum about food history, which included this great quote:

 "...the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil." Abraham Lincoln

They also had a lot of old posters from World War I and II.


Don't waste Food.  We need these posters for today's consumers.


Lick the Platter Clean - I remember us kids saying we could lick our plates because our grandpa did it too.


There was also a little tiny exhibit about the old ice trains that transported blocks of ice for refrigeration around the country.  I am glad there are electric refrigerators nowadays, I wouldn't want to get back to a time when you had to handle 50 lbs (25 kg) ice blocks. 

Nature's own planting bowl

germinating seeds inside an old spaghetti squash, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

As seen, here at home...

Stamp of the Day: Three cows

A simple stamp from a couple of decades ago, I think.  Cows, three simple Swedish cows eating grass.  I love the simplicity of it, and the design.  What do you think?

Arrows in the soil...

(LS: A wonderful poem about times past and connections between now and then)


American Life in Poetry: Column 337 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

South Dakota poet Leo Dangel has written some of the best and truest poems about rural life that I’m aware of. Here’s a fine one about a chance discovery. 


Behind the Plow

I look in the turned sod
for an iron bolt that fell
from the plow frame
and find instead an arrowhead
with delicate, chipped edges,
still sharp, not much larger
than a woman’s long fingernail.
Pleased, I put the arrowhead
into my overalls pocket,
knowing that the man who shot
the arrow and lost his work
must have looked for it
much longer than I will
look for that bolt.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©1987 by Leo Dangel, whose most recent book of poems is The Crow on the Golden Arches, Spoon River Poetry Press, 2004. Poem reprinted from A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry, Patrick Hicks, Ed., Pine Hill Press, Inc., 2010, by permission of Leo Dangel and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2011 by The Poetry Foundation.

Free green things

A great article about guerilla gardening in Tokyo, including planting broccoli outside major banks...  It is also about design, food politics, and life philosophy, in the words of David Duval Smith.

Hand-grown avocados

A full-page ad in the most recent Saveur food magazine advertises the 'hand-grown' avocados of a company in California.  Now, last I checked, plants grow by themselves, and they don't add cell walls and have cell divisions because a machine or human make those... the plant is growing independently.  The company also states that all trees were 'hand-planted'.  Now, does that mean that each hole was hand-dug?  Or that each tree was lowered by hand into the hole?  Or that each tree got a nice hug after being put in the soil?  Handmade is one thing, that is something made by hand.  But hand-grown?  What is that really? Just a new buzzword to fool us into buying their fruits because they sound more natural, local, and true to nature?  You know, the fruits could also be hand-sprayed with pesticides.  Who knows. The only thing I know is that for a company to afford a full-page ad in Saveur it can't be a little family farm where each fruit tree gets individual attention, by hand or otherwise.

Those were my own hand-thought thoughts of the day.  Now I am going to go and sleep by hand. No machines involved at all.  And soon my hands will be all hands-off this computer and I will be reading partly hands-free in bed. 

Haha - just found this.  Handgrown in California is an ad campaign from the California Avocado Association. And in 2009, over 440 000 pounds (that is about 200 000 kg) pesticides were used on California-grown avocados (see link here).

The most gorgeous seed packets ever

At the Philadelphia Flower Show a new little start-up seed company had the nicest booth and the nicest seed packets. Hudson Valley Seed Library, I love you!   Every seed packet design (ArtPacks) is made by different local artists in the Hudson Valley and adjacent areas. Hudson Valley is that wide valley along Hudson River that stretches north from New York City up towards the state capital Albany. The packets are unique, gorgeous, personal, and artsy.  You can even buy the packs and use them as nice gifts, or frame them as art to put on the wall.  Wonderful.

All their seeds will soon be locally grown, while many other companies buy seed in bulk and repackage it.  Look at this corn package, isn't it marvelous? Or the spotted trout lettuce above. Things like this makes me happy. A nice thoughtful design for a nice thing based on ethical concepts that involve both nature and culture.

Their showbooth had nice wooden shelves with old rusty tagholders on it, like items reclaimed from an old grocery store or pharmacy.  The whole exhibit and design, from the seed packs to the metal tags on the shelves, looked more northern European than American to me. It was a wind of fresh design air at a show that mostly otherwise was about the biggest, colorfulest, and boldest combination of colors - and that is not usually the best thing.  More design and thoughts like this please!  Thanks Ken and Doug!

Things that are different from home: cows

cattle in evening light, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

The cattle of Central America have ears like sheep and goats, long hanging things flopping around in the wind. They love to graze in the wetlands, for example in Palo Verde National Park where they are used as cheap grazers to keep weeds at bay.

Some amazing and cool Scandinavian style fabric designs can be found at this UK website, Fabric Rehab.  I love this owl print, and it reminds me of late 1960s early 1970s things I saw when I grew up (or maybe it was early 1960s and they were still in style in my part of Sweden?).

How about this dandelion fabric? OK the color is a bit mustardy, but otherwise?


Kristen Kimball, of The Dirty Life fame and hard work, has written an essay on the Oprah website - worth reading.  There is also a great interview with her here, which I don't think I have linked to before from this blog.  More about living off the land locally, on this blog.

And while you are reading all these great things, often building on shared resources and shared commitments and responsibilities, here is one woman who's research is famous for studying this, everyday life around the world and how we share things ethically and honestly: Elinor Ostrom. She got the Nobel prize in Economics for her research, which is pretty remarkable, when you realize that:

"Ostrom’s key idea is that neither the state nor the market is the best manager of our collective resources—it’s us, we the people. The commons concept is catching on in a big way as we look at how to lighten our impact on the earth, live within the means of our natural resources, and navigate the ownership issues of a new digital era."

Read more here, and there is an interview with Elinor here.  I met her last year through work, and the best quote from her that day was: "Shame can be a most useful feeling."  She was talking about shaming people into doing the right thing, like when they had mock trials along the Rhen River accusing big companies of destroying the water of the river with pollution.  It led to the clean-up of the river, quite voluntarily, by several companies who wanted to be known as the ones that do the right thing, not the wrong thing.  The same process can be used when a village manages a common forest, grazing land, etc., but it only works if you have democratic processes in place and if all people care about the outcome.  Her research is most fascinating, and have implications for how we don't manage common resources today like the air, oceans, water quality and quantity, and carbon dioxide pollution.

Book review: The dirty life by Kristin Kimball

Another name for this memoir, The Dirty Life by Kristen Kimball, could have been The inconvenient life or The unexpected happiness in a ditch or under a cow belly.  Kristin Kimball is a New York City journalist when she shows up at an organic farm in Pennsylvania to interview the youngish farmer, Mark.  He was too busy running the farm so he put her to work, weeding, to begin with. During the second day she finally managed to get some answers to her questions, and by then she also had her old interest in farming come alive again (she was always interested in food).  

This book describes the development of her passion for farming, and first her relationship and then marriage with Mark, who is a somewhat crazy hippie-like man.  She is brutally honest, funny, and writes eloquently about everything from her mom's appalled face when Mark shows up with a newly slaughtered turkey in a plastic bag (with the neck hanging out) at their first Thanksgiving, to the feeling of warm, good soil that is just waiting for the spade and shovels and plows.

They move away from New York, trying to find some land to farm organically and 'completely', in the sense that they want to be a self-sustained farm that produces everything a family might need year round: grain, sugar (maple syrup and honey), vegetables, milk (and cheese and yogurt), pork, chicken and eggs, beef, sheep for lamb, and so on. That is a lot complex than to farm just one thing (milk cows or corn for example), but also much more rewarding.

They find some land they are allowed to lease in upper New York State and start Essex Farm.  Mark is a true back-to-old-times person, hating any kind of plastic and waste of resources.  They decide to try to do as little as possible with tractors and instead they buy two draft horses, which will help them to plow and weed and transport manure and maple syrup buckets around, you name it. There is a great interview with Kimball here.

The first year they work all the time, live on nearly nothing except on what they can grow and are worried because they are not sure that the neighbors are willing to become members and get everything they need from the farm instead of from the regular grocery store.  But, if you build it they will come. The neighbors, many of them retired farmers from farms that now are abandoned, help them out with sage advice, ancient rusty but important draft horse equipment from old barns, and a hand here and there when needed.  And they start to sign up as members to get part of what is produced at the farm.

Today, 7 years later, the farm has over 100 members and is thriving.  Kristin Kimball wrote her book on early mornings between 4 and 7 in the fire station, before her daughter woke up and the work at the farm started.  I really loved this book, and read it faster than most because it captures you.  Not only is the story both compelling (and sometimes disgusting) and interesting, Kimball's way with words is beautiful, often poetic.  But mixed with a great sense of humor - she never takes herself too seriously, but she also can be very serious at times.

I am not ready to become a farmer with draft horses after this book, but I sure would love to have a farm like this close-by to get great, real, local, handmade food from.  I am so glad Kimball wrote this book because I hope it will inspire both young people to become farmers and conscious eaters and 'cookers', as well as all of us to think about what it is that we really need in our lives.  Flat screen TVs and the latest world news don't seem that important after you have read this book.  A bunch of hay and a sunset and a well-cooked meal is more real.  So, read it.  It is one of the top ten books I have read in 5 years, and I mean it.  So, grade A+, 5, or *****.

[Disclosure: I did not get paid to say anything of this. :)  Better put this in here so I am not like those corrupt and greedy economy professors in the movie Inside Job, which I recommend the whole world to see, but more on that later.]

Some excerpts:

"A farm is a manipulative creature.  There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die.  It's blackmail, really."

About preparing bull testicles for dinner after a slaughter:

"I peeled off a layer of membrane only to find another layer. Maybe a testicle is like an onion, I thought, and if I keep peeling I will end up with nothing.  So I left some of the white and squiggly purple stuff on until I got to slicing them into rounds and discovered that the true interior of a testicle is light brown in color, with a fine granular texture - more prairie uni than prairie oyster, if you ask me.  I tossed the slices in seasoned flour and pan-fried them in butter, and served them for breakfast along with scrambled eggs and toast.  The taste was interesting, not too far from a very fresh sea scallop, which the slices resembled in shape and size."

"My existence, from daybreak to dark, became focused on the assassination of weeds. Before that first year, I'd filed "agriculture," in the card catalog of my head, in the same general place as "nature." As in many things, I was so wrong. Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war."

"It was September, deep harvest season, days of pulling carrots, pulling beets, stacking hundred-pound bags int he root cellars.  Mark scythed the rows of black beans and kidney beans, dry and hard in their brittle pods, and I forked them, stems and all, onto the wagon, which the horses drew slowly down the row."

"The food at harvest season is so right the less is done to it, the better.  Sunday dinners were exercises in simplicity. Green salad, practically naked. Steamed green beans with butter. Beets roasted in a hot oven, sliced and tossed with a whisper of oil, a suggestion of vinegar, a bit of dill on top."

Book review: American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen

This is one great book: American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen.  One not too thick, not too dense, not too preachy, not too boring, not too silly, not too detailed, not too American book.  American terroir (not terror, not terrier, but terroir – as in the land and microclimate that give wines special flavors, "the taste of place") is a book that takes us on a tour around North America to ten great food products, and their greatness are because of where they are grown and the history and climate of the place.

Rowan Jacobsen writes in a funny but detailed way, giving you an abundance of history, science, and culture in short but dense sentences that never become a chore to read.  In fact, when I fell asleep reading this at night I was unhappy because I wanted to continue reading it, not go to sleep. This is in stark opposition to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (TOD), which I am struggling to finish after a year of trying to get into it.  I ought to like TOD, because I ought to like Michael Pollan and his work for better food and agriculture in America, but I just don’t like it that much.  This book, this little gem of red rowanberries, this I LOVE! 

The chapters deal with the following ingredients and food products: maple syrup from Vermont, coffee from Panama, apple cider from New England and apples from Washington State, honeys from everywhere, potatoes from Prince Edward Island, wild mushrooms and native plants in southeastern Canada, oysters from Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest, avocados from Mexico, Yukon River King Salmon, unusual wines from California, cheese from Vermont, and chocolate from Chiapas in Mexico. 

While reading this book my brain kept constant notes on which people I would recommend each chapter to (coffee to my brother, salmon to my husband, etc.) but in the end, I will have to recommend the whole book to everybody.  There is no best chapter, they are all great.  It is easy reading, but chock-full of great facts and stories. Each chapter ends with a few recipes and a list of suppliers and websites for more information.

Rowan Jacobsen manages to teach the reader a lot of plant genetics, breeding history, soil science, and microbiology without the reader even noticing – we are too busy just enjoying the story.  By highlighting not just the local food and sustainability, but the connection of these foods to the natural places, history of its people, and personal stories, Jacobsen made me want to know more and more about our little corner on this Earth and its connections to the past.

This book was a great surprise and a great find, and I recommend it to anybody – chocolate fanatics, oyster nerds, historians, and food people, grandmothers, teenagers, and husbands, Swedes, and Americans, and any mycologists and farmers out there.  It is just a GREAT book, probably one of the best non-fiction books I have read in 5 years.  (Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham was also great, but this is more mainstream). It seems like many people like this book - I just found some of the reviews here. A new classic, indeed. 

The only thing I missed was a detailed index, please, publishers, don't skip on this.  We need indices! Books on paper don't have Google attached to them.

 Here are some excerpts to give you a feel for the writing style:

(on maple syrup):

"Caramelization is one of those unlikely tricks that reminds you that the world is magical and mysterious. It's the flavor equivalent of using a prism to transform white light into a rainbow. In this case, the prism is heat, which breaks and odorless sugar molecule (sucrose) into a rainbow of delightful aroma compounds."

(on cheese):

"Cheese used to be something that nature did spontaneously, We didn't design the cheese so much as guide it, like an equestrian riding a horse. The cheese powered itself and the cheesemaker gave it some direction."

(on oysters):

"A geoduck looks like something that might owe a lot of money to Jabba the Hutt. A giant clam that burrows so deep that armor becomes superfluous, it maintains a vestigial shell that sticks to its backside like a G-string on a sumo wrestler."

(on apples):

It turns out that, given a choice, people overwhelmingly go for the reddest apple. So growers kept selecting for the reddest. They were not, however, selecting for the tastiest. Eventually, Red Delicious apples eclipsed fire-engine red and reached a color imaginatively described as 'midnight-red'. And most are virtually inedible, with dry flesh and thick skin.  Good-tasting apples have small, tightly packed cells that break apart at first bite, spilling their juice in all directions.  Red Delicious have cottony, dry cells with too much air in between."

Bits and pieces from the internet, there is more...

An amazing train photo fit for Halloween night taken by a friend of ours, Eric Williams

Really nice wooden things from Sweden.

The New York Times writes about vintage tractors.  And Pontiac (goodbye!).

The sorghum crops were taller in the old times.

Leaf blower users, move over: "In the meantime, blower foes can humiliate their enemies by citing a city of Los Angeles study that “showed a grandmother using a rake and broom took only 20 percent longer to clean a test plot than a gardener with a blower.”" Story here.

Tiny green things

Is that a plant in your pocket? 

When food gets scarce...

old Swedish heritage cow breed: Ringemålako, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

... reach upwards.

This is an old heritage breed cow from southern Sweden from an isolated farm who kept the same group of cows (and their calves) over nearly 50 years, thereby preserving their genetics and not replacing them with the high-yielding superbred cow breeds that are common today. So kind of a living fossil. This is the kind of cow that was common in the early 1900s and is shown in the books by Astrid Lindgren. And now this cow is in a living farm museum in Södertälje, Sweden.

Old Sweden...

From Colorado to Sweden in three days - talk about contrast. Language, flora, history, and weather is all very different, and also very different from New Jersey.  100 degrees Fahrenheit in NJ, and then 50 degrees in Sweden.   Two days ago we visited a living outdoor museum on a mountain (Torekällberget) in the city of Södertälje, south of Stockholm.  It has old historical buildings (the typical Falu red paint is on them of course), and also exhibits a living farm with heritage breeds that are endangered now. In the part that mimics a little old cobblestone town you can find real stores with craftsmen making pottery, printing (with old presses), weaving (mostly linen from flax), baking, and blacksmithing.  I bought two really nice kitchen towels, and took lots of photos, which you can see here.  Here are some:


An 200-300 year old Swedish kitchen. Note the crispbread on the poles in the ceiling, and also the two large painted boxes, those contains two beds. This building was built in 1775-1776 and was moved to this museum much later.


An old-fashioned Swedish round pole fence, made from all plant materials and no nails or strings. People still maintain these around Sweden.


I bought the green ones of these kitchen towels locally out of linen. The store is called Axlings Linne.


Swedish cinnamon buns (kanelbullar) is a really Swedish thing. At the bakery they come in many innovative varieties, not just cinnamon.

The best eggs in the world...

...or at least the best we can get our hands on, come from a small farm in southcentral New Jersey, River Birch Micro-Farm, where a flock of hens live their happy life in a chicken tractor and lay 'pasture eggs'. The farmer, who is also a professor, is doing some really interesting research on small-scale farming and especially chicken tractors (read more here if you like on page 43). A chicken tractor is a very neat contraption where the chickens live in a henhouse and movable pen on wheels, so you can move the chickens around in your yard every day while they are still protected against foxes and coyotes. This chicken tractor has about 35 chickens and they have a very happy life picking at whatever flies by or tries to grow up from the ground.

Recently a peacock showed up to join them, and even if the chickens were first a bit apprehensive, the next night the peacock slept next to the chickens (albeit with a wire fence between them). Unfortunately the dog chased it off a few days later. Anyway, these eggs... they taste fantastic, like EGGS, and the yolks are the most yellow you can imagine. You whip up an omelet and at first you are thinking 'wow, it is so yellow, why?', but then you realize that these are chickens that are outside, picking on leaves and bugs and worms, and get a billion more vitamins and betacarotens than the poor chickens that provide store-bought eggs in chicken egg factories on an egg assembly line. If you can get local, free-range chicken from a farmer you know, do it! It will cost you a bit more, but the quality is really a lot better and worth it. Here are some photos and quotes from our 'eggman', courtesy of Dr. Joseph Heckman.
"Peacock likes it here on the farm. When I went out this morning it was sleeping next to the chicken pen with its head under its wing."
"My daughter came out with me this morning not wearing gloves. Very cleverly, she asked get me some warm eggs (body temp, just laid) to hold as hand warmers."
"A photo showing color contrast of a grocery store bought conventional egg (light yellow yolk, bottom) and an egg (orange yolk, top) from my pastured chickens. The color contrast is noticeable even in winter. The difference would be even more remarkable with the hens on spring grass."

Visste du att... (Did you know that..)

Vattenkastanjer är rotknölarna av starrgräs som odlas på vattendränkta fält runt om i Sydostasien. De har neutral smak och har för växter den ovanliga egenskapen att vara krispig i konsistensen även efter konservering och tillagning. Detta beror på att cellväggarna är korskopplade och förstärkta av vissa fenolföreningar, egenskaper som vattenkastanjer delar med bland annat lotusroten.

Läst i ett matmagasin på en hemsida från Martin Olsson, grossistföretag i Sverige.

LS, please translate if you like.

Translation by LS (and I added a photo too):
"Water chestnuts are the tubers of a sedge that is grown in wetland fields in Southeast Asia. Their taste is neutral and are unusual among plants that their consistency is crunchy even after preserving and cooking. That is because their cell walls are cross-linked and enhanced by phenolic compounds, which is also found in the lotus."