Green: Eat Like You Mean It!

It's Raspberry Time!

It's summer in Minnesota, and my raspberry canes are slathered with berries, both red and black. They're ripening now as fast as we can pick them. What a joy to walk out the front door and follow the little garden path to the raspberry patch.

A few years ago, when my canes had spread like ruby wildfire, I sketched out a model for a pyramidical trellis and asked my husband to build a couple for me. He did, and they make my berry-picking life much easier. Once my berries are done for the season, I'll cut back this year's berry-producing canes, leaving the non-producing canes to continue growing and gathering their photosynthetic power! Those canes will be tied up to the trellises and left alone. Next spring, those will be the canes that produce berries, while all the fresh upstarts will grow beneath, gathering steam and bioligical maturity for the following season. And so the berry cycle goes.

As for me and mine, we love all that those scratchy canes (they're related to roses, you see) have to offer. The dried leaves make a lovely tea that soothes the gallbladder meridian and tonifies smooth muscle tissue (like the uterus, making raspberry leaf tea a staple for pregnant women for generations!). What berries we don't stuff right in our greedy mouths while picking end up in fruit salads, on fresh-baked tarts, sugared up and spooned over ice cream or yogurt, smooshed into smoothies, baked into pies (One of my favorites is a mixed berry pie baked with balsamic vinegar and basil! Trust me...).

Today's berries were baked into these lovely little gluten-free raspberry scones.

To make them, I combined Bob's Red Mill All-Purpse Gluten-Free Baking Flour blend with some tapicoa flour.  In I tossed salt, sugar, baking powder and xanthan gum. I cut in some butter, just as if I were making a pie crust. Then I added heavy cream until I had a proper dough. In went the fresh berries. The whole purply mess went out onto a board, upon which I patted the dough out flat, mayber an inch thick. I cut the dough with a pie server, then set my soon-to-be scones on buttered baking sheets. After chilling them for an hour, I sprinkled them with more raw cane sugar, popped them in the oven and waited until they smelled delicious and their edges were beginning to brown.

Big, big, yummy, thanks to the raspberry patch!

--Sheila

Life in the Yard

It's Autumn, the gardens and walkways and streets are covered with fallen leaves. Ochre, ruby, spiced pumpkin--these are the colors of my world now. I love how the world explodes with such a dizzying excitement just as everything is actually dying back, giving up the green, sending sap back beneath the ground and energy back into the Earth. It's my favorite time of year, a time of shedding, of scaling back, and yet, one of gathering and harvesting before things are laid to rest.
It's kind of a mixed-message time of year. If you've got kids, school schedules are ramping up. The winter holiday season is just around the corner, and time, so fleeting, becomes more precious with fewer daylight hours to go around. A new urgency replaces the langorous laziness of sunny summer afternoons. And yet, the Earth itself is pulling back into itself. The impending darkness bids us do the same--to do what needs doing, of course, but also, to spend time with the Self, even time with the darkness, to harvest what we can from our gardens and in our lives and yet, to be willing to sit still and be with what is.

This is not an easy task, at least not for me. With six kids, a job, a new business in the works, poetry manuscripts begging to be edited and submitted, and just life itself needing some tending, where to find the time stick with the season and its bidding? I need to be laying the garden beds to rest, likewise, foraging through my own inner garden to see what's ready to be picked and offered to the world, and what could use some tilling under to fertilize whatever's next (yes, you can be your own "green cover crop!")

There's not much left to harvest in my "actual" garden, which extends from the boulevard out front to the alley out back. The front is largely medicinals, native plants, roses, and naturalized perennials. Some of the medicinals I've planted intentionally (bee balm, lemon balm, comfrey, lovage, hypericum, yarrow) and others have happily invited themselves (shepherd's purse, purslane, chickweed, dock). My yearly harvests are random; mostly, I go and gather only when someone I love needs the support from the plant in question. I do harvest a bumper crop every year of the black and red raspberries occupying the south side of the house. Out back are more roses, more medicinals, and gravel paths leading to a seating area encircling a fire pit, to the pond garden and "fairy forest" (where special medicinals like bloodroot grow), to the chicken coop and beyond.

I often wish I had more edibles mixed into my yard. I do typically tuck in a pepper plant or two, maybe grow some tomatoes in pots out front, grow a few salad greens along a garden border. But I haven't been able, somehow, to give over what sunny areas I have to strictly vegetable gardening. I love my roses and liatris and hypericum and anise hyssop. Likewise the virginiana and the sedum and nepeta. And let's not forget the free-roaming backyard chickens who would be as eager as any to reap a bumper crop of anything succulent!

But I also believe in cultivating the fruits of one's own labors, and of reaping what you sow in the rich, rich earth, as in life. So then I think that, perhaps, I could get a community garden plot in which to grow my veggies. But would I be able to get to it often enough? So far, I haven't resolved my conundrum and have taken no action whatsoever to procure the aforementioned garden plot. I do visit my local community garden plot websites a few times a year, just to be inspired, and ponder the feasibility index.

So maybe, just maybe, this autumn--as the nights grow longer and colder, as energies wane on the outside and the sap rushes to keep roots braced for the long, hard winter to come--I'll plan a new garden. Yes, a garden that includes my own growth--what needs pruning, what needs cultivating--but also a new vegetable garden. I've got bikes with trailers; there's no reason I can't haul the chickens' coop leavings, the bunnies' deposits, in buckets to a local garden site to fertilize a new plot. There's nothing at all stopping me from picking up a few organic starter plants from my local "green" nursery and raising more of what I consume. The most satisfying fruit, after all, is one grown and picked by one's own hand, as long as the satisfaction includes a thankful reminder of the sun and soil and rain without which our labors would come to naught.

--Sheila

Organic Hit or Mis-Feed

I know there's no point in preaching to the choir, but honestly, there's just something I need to get off my chest. Here's the deal:  What's so tough to understand about the benefits of going organic?  Just yesterday, a colleague of mine and I were discussing organic clothing. My colleague said, "I don't care about organic, I just want 100% cotton." Now mind you, I have not yet found myself in a budgetary position to purchase exclusively organic clothing, bedding, etc. I would love to, and am certainly moving in that direction. But even though I don't always have the moola to fork over for a 100% bamboo T, I get why it would be a good idea. The textiles industry is one of the nastiest in terms of chemical use:  The crops are heavily sprayed, the fabrics--once that chemical-laden cotton has been turned into a bolt of something-or-another--are sprayed for bug and mold-resistance in storage, and once that fabric becomes a dress or shirt, the garments are chemically-treated yet again to avoid pest damage in shipping and storage. Once you slip into that 100% cotton T from your local department store, you are covered in nasty compounds you would never otherwise chose to apply to your skin, ingest, bathe in, etc.

But there's more:  Whenever a crop is heavily sprayed, be it a crop grown for future ingestion or sartorial coverage, there are workers somewhere being directly exposed to those chemicals. Conventional corn, cotton, roses, wine grapes...whatever it is, someone, somewhere, is being hurt so we can have "cheap" goods. But they're not really all that cheap. Big Business players who run the larger conventional enterprises receive, collectively, millions of dollars in government subsidies. Companies like Monsanto and Cargill make huge benefit, thereby, of our tax dollars. So we're paying for all that spraying whether we ever purchase the ensuing product or not.

Conversely, the small organic operations aren't receiving million of dollars in corporate welfare. When we pay a bit more for a head of certified-organic lettuce, we're paying for someone else's real cost of raising our food. Someone has to till the land, sow the seed, weed the rows, pick the bugs, harvest, clean and haul the crop. Every organic T-shirt or apple or bouquet of roses we consume is a direct product of lots of hard-working hands.

So what's not to get?  A commitment to going green, to eating organic, wearing organic, sleeping organic isn't just good for you...it's good for the farmers, the field workers, local economies, and the planet. And if more of us are demanding "clean" goods, you can guarantee that supplies will increase and prices will, eventually, come down.

One more word about that:  We all do what we can, when we can, how we can. I'm not trying to be righteous here; my life is not a perfect "green model."  I do feed my family of 8 on a diet that is probably 95% organic. That's where my first commitment has come. Each of us has maybe one or two organic clothing items, and lots of items from consignment and other "second-hand" streams (another good way to not participate in the conventional textiles malaise!). As much as I'd love to own only a fuel-efficient hybrid, I don't have the cash flow to allow it yet. I try to bike more and more and drive less and less. I compost and recycle religiously. I do use organic bodycare products, but don't yet have organic bedding.  And oh yea, about that family of 8:  I"m married, I've born five children and then claimed another last year. Our ecological footprint is important to me and I'm always trying to find ways to minimize it. While I'd love to live in a completely off-the-grid eco-house, I actually live in a breezy 1920s bungalow with lots of improvements yet-to-be-made on the energy-efficiency scale. I have turned my entire yard into hardy perennial, medicinals, and native plant gardens--complete with backyard chickens--which does keep run-off out of the storm drains. But I still have that old Jeep that uses too much gas. Like everybody else on the planet, I'm just doing what I can with what I've got.

--Sheila

Eat Green!

Green is a new food catering enterprise of Beth Timmer & Sheila Weidendorf in Minneapolis, Minnesota, offering organic culinary delights with your green life in mind. We offer a full menu customized to fit your dietary needs. Our offerings include full eats and treats for vegetarians, vegans, and those on wheat-free, gluten-free, dairy-free diets. If you are an organic omnivore, we are also more than pleased to prepare your free-range balsamic-roasted chicken, or pepper-encrusted tenderloin.

Stay tuned for future news, happenings, and recipes from Green!