the urban field guide

Well, I seem to be hooked on Etsy this week. Instead of fighting it I think I’ll just go with it. I think a lot of you chicken lovers will appreciate this one! Click on the photo to go to the shop.

Organic Cotton/Hand dyed by Green Girls Global

A beautiful 14 x 22″ print from star shaped press to start off your Monday! Click on the image to go right to their Etsy shop!

Once a year this neighbor prunes their nopal/prickly pear cactus and sets out cuttings which go really quick (thank you mystery neighbor!). This year I was at the right place, at the right time and with the right person – great. I love Nopal. In the city I see it popping up over fences, fruiting and showing off its bright yellow flowers. And in the country I’ve seen it planted as a hedgerow to keep people out of the orchards. If you ever exit off of I-5 in Southern California you’ll see Nopal everywhere. It even has medicinal uses like lowering blood sugar levels, making it a friend to folks with Type 2 Diabetes. The fruit and the pads are both totally delicious and readily available already skinned and diced in many bodegas around here. I’m probably going to baby the section I picked up and mix a soil with perlite that I have left over, but I’ve seen my neighbors just jam it into the super clay heavy soil and it has thrived. I’ve noticed that when people plant with confidence that plants respond by thriving, I think they like decisiveness!

I’ve written about Yes, We Can Food before in one of my very first entries. I’ll share their logo again with you though, because I love it.

They run a series of canning workshops at La Cocina in SF and so far have made apricot jam, pickles and now canned tomatoes. 3000lbs of them. I thought I smelled sauce cooking all the way over here in Berkeley last week! The tomatoes are now available for sale here, so in case you missed out on canning those tomatoes from your balcony garden they are $60 for twelve 34oz. cans. Organic, of course.

photo from Yes We Can Food’s facebook fan page

The workshops filled up early this year, but next year I want to get over there and experience canning on such a massive level. Not to mention that I want to check out La Cocina in person. La Cocina is a non profit organization that focuses on getting low income women into the food business. They offer small business support and classes, as well as access to their commercial kitchen at way below market prices. Then they even help distribute the product at places like the ferry building farmer’s market and Bi-rite. They have a tamale class coming up soon that looks great. You get to not only learn to make tamales, but you’ll take some home, and get to stay and have dinner and drinks too!

I’m sorry for the lull in posts, I snuck in another camping trip even though my acupuncture program is in full swing already. I spent a few beautiful days in the redwood forest up in Humboldt County in Northern California. But that’s not what this post is about, although in a round about way it kind of is.

The closer we got to the city on our return trip, the more and more plastic bags I saw. They were everywhere. Stuck in the trees. Balled up in the meridian. You know, you’ve seen it. Most of us have at least 5 tote bags in the kitchen now to bring to the market. Maybe there’s even a tiny bag that fits in our backpack, glove box or purse. Great, I love that; it’s helping. But then I’m in the store and I’m watching people, including myself, piling beautiful organic produce and bulk foods into clear plastic bags. I usually reuse them, but still they pile up. And they’re plastic. And that beautiful food has now sat in an off-gassing bag. So I want to point out some lovely folks on Etsy that are here to help with reusable & washable bags for your bulk foods and produce. I know there are other ways around this, but I thought I’d share just a few shops with you. Click on the photo to get to their site.

nylon bulk food bags by Kootsac

cotton produce bags by wonder thunder

mesh bags by QwertyO

**QwertyO is offering an additional free mesh wash bag when you order their bags if you mention you saw them here at The Urban Field Guide. Thanks Kristin and Susan! (ps. Kristin is 16, and selling these bags as a way to raise money for college!)

All of  the above pieces are by Pigeon Toe Ceramics which you can check out right here.  They are all hand thrown and are made of porcelain which is notoriously hard to work with. I love how deceptively simple all of these are. Beautiful work! Items are made to order but they also have an Etsy shop for immediate satisfaction which you can check out here. Enjoy!

I know the Daily Mail is pretty trashy, and that – well, this photo is basically tabloid gardening. I know. This is 1 of 10,000 buddha shaped pears that farmer Gao Xianzhang grew this year in Hexia. Let’s just hope he’s reusing the molds and there aren’t thousands of buddha molds littering Northern China! I’m not by any way endorsing the use of these plastic molds, we definitely don’t need any more plastic in this world – I’m more just speechless at how strange we humans are.

For the full article, click on one of the photos!

This morning I came across an article on Grist about a farmer/writer named Gene Logsdon.  Wendell Berry is a big fan, and he’s known for his books, Living at Nature’s Pace:Farming and the American Dream and The Contrary Farmer. This article is a short interview with Logsdon about a book that he wrote in the late 1970s called Small Scale Grain Raising. With the renewed interest in gardening some folks are gearing up to take their patches beyond tomatoes and peppers and see what else they can add to their personal food production, and this book is garnering interest. He calls small scale grain gardening “the pancake patch”, which is pretty cute, right? I love a contrary farmer with a sweet side.

The picture above is unfortunately not an example of a small scale patch, but one I took at Pie Ranch of the wheat they had just harvested. You can see that article here. There was an enormous difference in the taste of the pancakes I had there made from freshly harvested wheat. Delicious and really full of flavor, the taste made me realize how many of the grains I eat taste really flat and flavorless. I of course knew that about my homegrown vegetables, but hadn’t extended that kind of thought to grains.

Here’s a picture of the original cover of the book. I can’t get it to enlarge, but I have to show you because being a child of the 70s, I of course think that all 70s design is beautiful – in it’s own 70s kind of way!

I’m curious if any of you have tried going grain, I imagine it’s as easy as growing any kind of grasses. Was processing the grain really difficult?  I’m putting this book on my reading list!

I’ve been tying up the loose ends of summer this week. Making tinctures, getting ready to press some that I made earlier in the summer, and now I’m starting to collect some seeds. Nigella damascena, affectionately known as love-in-the-mist, is really easy to grow, keep alive and then reseed. Perfect for beginners in the garden. It jumps around the garden, sure, but it doesn’t take over or even seem to travel that far away from the garden’s edges. Don’t confuse it with Nigella sativa, it’s medicinal counterpart, this garden relative is not going to help your asthma or digestive complaints!

I’ve seen this plant grow in the shade or the sun, but it prefers sun. I’ve also seen nigella grow quite large with water and grow to about 3 inches high if growing in a dry crack in the sidewalk. Either way, it still blooms – such a tough guy! My front garden was full of self seeders this year, nigella, california poppy, violets and the persistent pink valerian were all tangled together. I cut the seed pods off for harvesting after I cut them down for the year.

The whole plant in bloom is an architectural phenomenon and the seed pods definitely hold to that perfection as well. Here’s an individual one that’s easier to see.

At the top of the seed pod there are tiny openings that form as the seed pod dries out. They make a rattling sound and are really fun to play with, send your kids out to sow the next crop! (more…)

Dear Laborers Past & Present,

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Sincerely,

The Urban Field Guide