The Multi-Purpose Mill

It has been a little under three months since we unpacked the GrainMaker mill, and it has not has not ceased to please, or even to dazzle us with its many talents.

Yesterday was a particularly fine one for the GM's facets to shed their ever-multiplying vermilion beams upon my admiring and upturned visage... Ok, I'm overdoing it a little, but read on and see that there is reason to seem so pleased.

The first of two experiences I had was with our 2010 flax crop (flowering flax pictured at right, dried flax plants below left). In its processing I got as far as combing the seed bolls from the top of the plant and bundling the stems together for later fiber-separating. But for the past six months we've had a big rubbermaid bin of the loose bolls rolling around, waiting for me to figure out how best to crush them into seed and chaff. Yesterday I got out one of our sieves, put a handful of bolls in it, and ground them with my thumb, which worked great. For a small amount. But it would have taken me an hour or more just to crush them all, and then I would still have to clean the chaff away.

This is where the GrainMaker came in. I thought perhaps if I loosened the burrs to the point where there was a significant distance between them (enough that the seed itself wouldn't be crushed) I could do the work much faster. I put in the auger that cracks bigger seeds, threw a big handful of the bolls in, and cranked. It worked great! With a little adjustment, and 5 minutes of time, I then translated the whole ~6 cups worth of bolls, extra plant pieces and all, into seed and chaff.

With a little more work to winnow and separate I'll be finished with them! Just in time to flat this year's crop, which was really the incentive to finally get that task done.

The second experience was in grinding peanut butter. I had done this with other mills, and had indeed done it once or twice with the GM, always resulting in an ultra creamy variety. I've never really liked creamy peanut butter, and the only thing that made it acceptable is that I had ground it myself. The long and short of it is that yesterday, inspired by how well the flax bolls did with the burrs separated by as much as an eighth of an inch, I ran the peanuts through. I was rewarded with a fabulous chunky PB, and just in time to spread it on the waffles we were making.

Now I admit that, while hulling flax may be a rare occurrence in the world of grain grinders, making peanut butter is certainly not. It's just that I had never done it to my satisfaction before, and now I do feel quite satisfied, I assure you.

So there you have it, yet a little more shameless praise for the GrainMaker.

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Spring Equinox 2011

Whew! This post marks a little over one year since we moved here, started up the garden, and began this blog.

What do we have to show for ourselves? Well, naturally a few gray hairs. I won't be writing a retrospective of the past year; the blog speaks for itself on that count. I will, however, wrap up the winter and declare our course for the season to come.

First of all, while pictures and an account of Alten have been sadly lacking, he has not been idle. In the past month, really, he has taken up crawling, climbing on things, showing comprehension of some of the sign language we've been using with him and, ta-dah! He has produced two teeth! The latter was especially exciting to us since he seemed to be working on them from around month four. He's been sleeping a little better, took a 2-hour-long uninterrupted nap the other day, and is eating rice like there's no tomorrow. As to the crawling, he says it's only truly useful for getting to things upon which one might pull one's self up.

Equinox was spent visiting my brother, Chris, who had a mishap on his bike a couple of weeks ago (those of you who know him have probably already seen the x-rays on his facebook page). He's up in the hills of West Virginia at the Mountain Institute, which is beautiful and more than an hour from the nearest emergency room. We had intended to walk all over tarnation with him, but he was in some pain, so we hung out and stayed warm instead. The pictures on the site above are bewitching, but they still don't do full justice to the peace and magnificence of the area.

Following directly on the heels of that trip I got in the garden to dig, and prepared 150 ft² for the Kamut wheat we had flatted already and the collection of other spring wheats that we had some seed for. Related to this, I've updated the Garden Stats in the sidebar with this year's figures. The current figure of 449 ft² includes fall-planted wheat, rye, and garlic, and the perennials we started last year, namely alfalfa and clover. I'll finish planting the Kamut today and update the number. It doesn't include all the cover crops that we started last year to keep the soil happy over winter - those will get ripped out in the next month or so.

Last year we finished out at a little over 42% of the total area getting dug and planted. We are already a month ahead of last year, so I am optimistic we'll get it all in, and in good time.
So far we have flatted parsley, celery, wheat, parsnips, leeks, onions, kale, cabbage, lettuce, and probably something else I'm forgetting.

Other projects we have to complete before the season gets into full swing are flat-building, fence-finishing, compost-bin-constructing, and erecting some kind of temporary housing on the site. Each will probably get its own post except for flats, which already got covered in a previous post. I will say, however, that most of our pallet-flats survived well enough to head into a second season. We'll just need twice as many to meet our ambitions this year. Our sister-in-law Rachel came over from PA the week before last to lend a hand tearing up pallets and translating them into flats, so we're full of appreciating for that...

In early March we kicked-off our year's teaching schedule by heading out to California to present at Ecology Action's Three-Day Worshop. We taught classes on sustainable diet design, bed preparation, seed starting, compost, compost crops, garden planning through the Master Charts in How to Grow More Vegetables, and a few others, and John Jeavons taught the rest (for pictures of the one in November see this post). Just last Saturday we taught a class locally on starting seedlings. Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm's Center for Lifelong Learning has a very active education program for children and adults, and we are on the list this Spring teaching the seedling class and a day-long class on soils and compost (which will be April 9, if you're in the area). The seed-starting class went very well - it is always a treat to teach, and I always come out learning more through the experiences participants share. Among other prospects this year we'll be back at Aullwood to teach Fall classes on grains and seed saving.

In miscellaneous other news, the county decided that the bridge on our road (and bordering our property) is not in great shape, and needs to be replaced. See photo at right, where the blotches down the center lane show the surface damage to be reminiscent of tooth decay. Too bad Google Earth couldn't get a side shot - rebar was actually falling out of the concrete underneath. Of course, we'd prefer they just tear it down and dead-end the road, but they weren't interested in our opinion. The upshot, since they weren't going to listen to us anyway, is that they had to cut a bunch of trees down to make way. These were cut into 18" lengths and filled Mom's large pickup truck six times. Thus we have heat for next winter. The workers also ground up the tops and gave us two dump truck loads of wood chips. Sadly, Alten is too young to fully appreciate the dump trucks, excavators, bulldozers and such.

So here we go! It's officially Spring, the days are getting longer, we're getting marginally more sleep, and the garden calls...

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Kamütlichkeit

That would be the state of contentment with one's ancient wheat. We finished our spring grain planting a week or two ago, spotted any damaged or disappeared plants last week, and can now settle in for the joy of watching it tiller and grow. While we're doing everything else, that is. You can find the varieties we planted below in The First Transplant. Next year we will put in some less common varieties of barley and spring wheat that we ordered from Bountiful Gardens to see how they do in our climate.

But back to our featured star. Kamut, like an ancient anything, is kind of a funny bird. Its past, previous to its appearance in the US in 1949, is foggy. A concise assessment of the story can be found here. And a briefer one follows: A US Airman stationed in Portugal was approached by a man who offered him 36 grains of this wheat, telling him it was found in a pyramid tomb in Egypt. He mailed them home to his grain-growing Dad, who grew them to great satisfaction.

It makes for an entertaining story, which could be embellished (but not verified) to a great extent. Without knowing more it could be taken as a complete hoax. But Kamut, compared to modern improved wheat, has a much larger kernal, and despite its 30% higher protein content it doesn't illicit a reaction from many who have wheat allergies. Adding that its DNA is different enough from modern varieties that geneticists have had a hard time figuring out its definite origins, you have a compelling case that it has remained out of breeding circulation for a long time.
(Here are images comparing Kamut with a variety of hard red winter wheat. I would have taken them myself, but, um, we planted all of ours. These are from thenibble.com and homestylemercantile.com, respectively.)

And don't bother looking it up on wikipedia. As of this posting the entry for Kamut looks like it was written by the company that holds its patent. What? It's patented? Yes, I was skeptical too, but I can see where they are coming from. They got the patent in 1990, which made it one of the only 5 non-genetically engineered patented plants (there were already 65 patented GE plants by then). The company gives their explanation on the "Why a Trademark?" portion of their site. And, I have to say, it seems like an ok idea. Especially because Kamut is already in wide circulation, its growing is not in any way prohibited, and the trademark seems to be applied only to the marketing of it. As opposed to Monsanto, who might sue you into bankruptcy for unknowingly having one of their patented seeds in your field. Instead, it seems that Kamut International is trying to maintain the purity of seed claiming to be Kamut. Which is fine by me.

We were aided in our planting by my sister Anne, who was visiting for a few days. As you can see, we were all working together on a strict timeline. That's me, behind, double-digging the bed just before they move their digging board back. Not standard operating procedure. But good, wholesome, community agriculture fun all the same!