The blur that is the supermarket...

I have come to realise that supermarket shopping for me has become a blur - I honestly couldn't tell you everything that you can find on those shelves anymore. I used to enter and go straight for the cheese, 1st straight aisle right, which is no longer necessary now that I get our own Fairview and Daleview selections, see website. And I use my own kefir instead of cottage cheese and I'm planning to progress to making our own mozarella and feta (as soon as I have grown more arms). Next stop is fruit and veg. Or shall I just say fruit, because I don't have to buy veg. Then I head for the far left corner, oblivious to whatever else I'm passing, in order to get to the meat counter. Then straight across for milk if I run short of the unpasteurised I get on a Thursday and because it doesn't last long enough. No more yogurt and butter purchases for me now that I make my own, then to the far right hand side of the shop for cleaning stuff and up the second-last aisle from where it is easy to spot the shortest till line. While traversing the front I can grab some tea, coffee or toiletries if needed. And that's me done!

So why am I telling you this mundane personal anecdote? It is because I am so happy I am free to allow the rest of the supermarket to pass by me in a blur of nothingness. I just watched a documentary this week called 'Fed Up', and the conversation is headed up by Bill Clinton at the behest of a live-wire lady whose name I forget, and its about the obesity epidemic that has hit the USA. The information I gleaned from this doccie is too much to include in one volcanic effort to you, but the supermarket is a good start. Produce is preferably not sold in its original form any longer, because if it has been value-added (read deconstructed, processed, and sugar added) it sells for so much more. And if one can claim 'just add' something or another and sit down and eat, your overworked mother/housewife/working lady is happy to grab and go, if it means she doesn't have to peel veg and slave to put dinner on the table. It's just that if anyone took the time to tell her the price she is paying is her health and the health of her family, with medical bills added, I bet more than 90% would be just too happy to rather go to the farmer's market and cook their own darn dinner!

Just a few stats which raised the alarm bells for me once again: Of 600,000 items available on supermarket shelves in the USA 80% have sugar added. They tell you 'with half the fat' or 'half the calories' (compared to what?) and while making the comparison, they don't tell you they never reduced the sugar as well, because the sugar barons have succeeded in labelling to simply contain 'sugar' in the list of ingredients, without stating how much, which is mandatory for everything else. And then they furthermore disguise the s-word by calling it fructose, glucose, lactose, dextrose and a myriad others which I can't even remember. Research furthermore shows that all the fake-sugar sweeteners have exactly the same effect on the endocrine system as if it was refined sugar you are ingesting!

The second alarm bell raised for me is what they've done to grains. Everything is sugar coated, the cereal boxes have action men and popular tv characters on and in and efforts to stop them advertising to children have been met with cries of interference with freedom of speech... but what I didn't know is that the metabolic effect of a processed grain is exactly the same on the body as when ingesting refined sugar. Even if you astutely eat your sugar-free kelloggs with just milk, there's no health benefit. In the words of the nutritionist-doctor interviewed: "Whether you eat your weetbix or whatever it was he called it, without sugar or you eat a bowl of sugar without the weetbix the effect to your metabolism is identical and the metabolic diseases resulting from the intake of processed foods and sugar are Diabetes, Heart disease, Lipid problems, Strokes and Cancer (there were more) because they all cause an overproduction of insulin.

The overproduction of insulin makes you think you're hungry because it blocks the brain from receiving the 'full' impulse. And most notably diabetes caused by an overindulgence of sugar and fine processed carbs is no longer called 'Adult onset' diabetes, it is now just referred to as Type 2 diabetes, because it is ocurring in teenagers and even in children as young as 9 years of age.

This is the one doctor's mantra, which I shall repeat in the weeks to come, while I write more about nutrition and the scourge of our age which is processed food:

Detox on food which looks like it came from nature as opposed to a box or a can with a list of ingredients printed on the outside.

The thing about nutrition ...

I am having a total mindshift, over a period of years and counting, about what constitutes proper nutrition. I can't help but remember our ancient forebears who didn't have the knowledge and access to the variety of foods we eat, yet they lived, farmed, married, had children and fought wars ... with their bare hands so to speak.

I am becoming more and more convinced that what one can get from the land around or near you, as fresh and as little travelled as possible, without the involvement of chemicals of any description, is good and satisfying and nutritious enough to keep one in good health. It isn't the variety that's available to eat that feeds us better - proteins, sugars, vitamins and minerals are widely present in all manner of produce. The crux is whether the produce is fresh, not through treatment and refrigeration, but rather through recent removal from its position of growth, and whether the meat is from an animal that lived well and was treated with kindness and respect. That's a big mouthful and begs reams of articles I know....

But take the Christmas lima beans of which I only have a precious few packets on offer this week... I can be far from home in the lands and feeling woozy and hungry, and if I shell two of those pods and eat the 4 or 5 beans inside, I feel fed and satisfied and can keep going for hours again, sometimes all the way to dinnertime. At other times it may be ordinary green beans or peas, or a carrot pulled from the ground, the effect is always satisfaction, and hunger that stays away for hours. That's got to tell you something about nutritional density. We have become so used to eating heaps of food before feeling well fed, and we confuse the full feeling with a fed feeling. That is because manufacturers have to be so careful what they supply us with especially when it comes to fast foods, that the bulk of the food has little or no nutritional value so even if we eat our fill, our bodies are still telling us it needs something more.

Its no wonder people from ages past could go on long journeys with just their sourdough bread in a sack, which although it gets hard it doesn't grow mould, and cheese which was possibly quite hard and strong, and then they lived off the land, foraging along the way, because a little handful goes a very long way... By the way there's a few bunches of heirloom carrots the monkeys have spared us so far... they are more earthy in taste, and pretty on your plate!

I am starting to spend less time cooking and more time foraging... and thinking of how I can help my customers have the same benefits I have - bringing the farm and farmhouse kitchen to you through www.farminabox.co.za! Just click to see what is on offer this week.

And I am grateful for technology which allows me to write this on a laptop sitting in the kitchen watching many litres of cream churning to become fresh butter - I had to tell my kids last week to buy their own because I had sold everything I had. They were not so miffed about having to buy, as about not being able to enjoy the fresh farm taste of the farm butter! Mindful of baking and babies, I have added unsalted butter to the list, and some with garden-fresh herbs added.

I floated a website...

In January this year, 2016, my website for selling my farm produce went online.   To say that it took me two years to get to that point is not an exaggeration.   What you see is not all there is, it is the tip of the iceberg.   I took photographs during every season, researched masses of recipes and nutritional benefits of the produce, and populated a not-so-simple template for a website that I can use for orders online and it took months of hard graft.   Everything is not available all the time so that most of what is there is not visible until I enable it when the appropriate time comes for bringing it online.

All this blurb is just to say, don't wonder why I haven't been blogging.   And the other sentiment is, although there were so many times I decided it was all too much work for nothing, those hours are paying off now because next time a broccoli head pops into view, I can just go to the website, enable it and voila, it is available in all its glory, picture, description, recipe's and nutritional info all at once!

Check it out (orders only get delivered to Barberton, Nelspruit and White River, sorry!) but it is still interesting and useful for anyone in the mood to cook their own dinner!   More about this as we go...

www.farminabox.co.za

Animal, vegetable, miracle

is the most inspirational book I have read in a long time.   Author Barbara Kingsolver has been a favourite since I first read The Poisonwood Bible yonks ago, but who knew?   She is also a consumer with a conscience!   I almost feel as if she should be classed as a non-consumer, having read how they as a family pledged utter self-sustainability for the period of a full year, and the delightful results of said pledge.  

After six months of non-blogging I have been driven to my computer to continue blogging, if that will make a difference to anyone's life who may come across the articles and read them (all the future ones I now have in mind especially!)

I am sure that having come that far, living off the land and by one's own means for a full calendar year, it becomes second nature not to look to supermarket shelves for sustenance anymore, because whatever you are looking at has been grown from hybridised or GM seed, so that it will outlast transportation and the inordinate time spent in packing sheds being washed and handled, and on supermarket shelves, with little regard for taste.   And then it has either been processed, transformed into something different and sometimes unrecognisable (try chocolate coated olives!) transported 100,000 miles, radiated or otherwise preserved, with even less regard for nutritional value than taste.   Having tasted one's own produce, grown from honest seed which is true to how that food looked and tasted 100 years back, and having experienced the energy boost from ingesting such food, and the obvious health benefits, there is no going back.

What am I saying?   I am now more than ever convinced it is the right thing to source and grow heirloom type vegetables, I am looking forward to this year of change, and of growing the old so that it seems brand new...

A pumpkin story to keep me humble ..

.. happened when two years back I decided to plant pumpkins right alongside the house to keep an eye out for the monkeys which made it impossible where I had them before.   I was so in love with my pumpkin patch I couldn't stop taking pictures of it.

The leaves became like the seat of a chair so big, and eventually one couldn't see these stakes, the plants were so huge... but I didn't take a picture then because I was devastated...   Not a single pumpkin was developing on it...

Last year on the other hand, I decided to make camps in the chicken enclosure because they had decimated the entire camp although it was way bigger than the prescription for free range chickens.   The camps they didn't have access to quickly recovered and seeds left there from our kitchen scraps developed in the loose soil where they had also left their droppings which fed the soil.   This is half the crop of pumpkins we harvested there, where we hadn't cleared, hadn't planted, hadn't driven stakes into, hadn't done anything whatsoever to deserve the harvest ...

I think there's a lesson hiding in this tale somewhere....

I always believed that I couldn't grow vegetables.

Having been a successful grower of ornamental plants for many years, I had been unsuccessful with vegetables most of my life.   Some years back a neighbour's pensioned father worked here at the farm, and seeing my dismal attempt at growing a few veggies offered to do it for me, which task I gladly relinquished.   I observed what he did, and then the penny dropped.   He majored on compost.   Well-aged horse manure (any other would also do) was mixed into heaps of broken down humus found in the compost heaps on the farm.

It isn't so much that I didn't know that, or that I hadn't tried it... it was the copious amounts of the stuff that he used.   And the age.   Everything had been aged very well.   The mix was placed mostly above the level of the soil, and watered and planted.   Our annual rainfall is high, so in areas with less rainfall and especially sandy soil, building the beds up so would probably be counter-productive.

The veggies grew and the harvest came, and then so did the diseases and insects and that was when we crossed swords.   My pensioned helper didn't care how poisonous a substance was, and whether I even knew he had sprayed it on food I might harvest that weekend or not, as long as his veggies looked stunning he was happy.   My stomach turned and I became very suspicious of everything, not wanting to poison myself and my family.   We had many arguments and he disdainfully dismissed my notion of wanting my veggies to be chemical free.   It led to the parting of the ways, but I had learned.   Lots and lots and lots of organic material.   Therein lies the success of growing vegetables, and the phrase 'organic vegetables' jumped to mind.   I had an epiphany, the first of many:   The concept rises and falls on the strata they are planted in.

I abandoned the tainted plot and moved the vegetable project into a tunnel that had housed plants before, and where nothing had been planted in the ground.   The luxury market of ornamental plants was failing to deliver and we needed to diversify.   Tractor loads of compost was brought in and beds built up above soil level.   The structure of the soil itself had been compromised with compacting feet and heavy plants for years

so I had no confidence in it, preferring to raise the beds above it.   The first seedlings went inand in spite of a number of prophets of doom, we had a measure of success.   When disease hit, if I didn't have an organically sound manner of dealing with it, the plants were removed and discarded, the beds rebuilt and fresh  seedlings planted.

The second year it seemed as if the plants grew better and were more resistant to disease.   We had also physically dug up and eliminated cutworm in such large numbers they seemed to have been beaten, with a little resurgence now and again.   This didn't go down without losses, because it is only when you see a plant lying flat on the ground with no roots, that you know the cutworm is there.   Checking the beds first thing in the morning became the norm, because that is when you catch them just there, resting after their meal.

We started selling at a monthly farmer's market,

and also boxes of fresh veg to our home town of Barberton.    We called it Farm-in-a-box.

By the third year I knew it was not my imagination.   The vegetables just kept on improving, growing bigger and better, and more naturally disease resistant.   The soil had been conditioned over and over again without the digging and subsequent damage to the structure.   The more I planted the more I learned.   Not only are there earthworms that aerate the soil, that we all know exist where organic practices are observed.   There are also micro-organisms that tunnel around, making it possible for the little hair roots of the plants to follow where they have dug, all of which comes to naught if the soil is turned and dug over, let alone ploughed (my personal bugbear).

During the three years we were doing our trials and selling good vegetables already, we had a kindly rep from a chemical company regularly paying us visits and trying to convince us that if the container says you can safely eat the vegetables after such and such a number of days, it meant there was no residue of that chemical left on that plant after that time, or it was so insignificant it made no difference and would certainly not poison anyone ingesting it.   We didn't bite - pun unintended.

FJ found our rep standing at the entrance to a tunnel the one day, just looking.   When they had greeted, he said to FJ:   "You know son, I have been growing vegetables for 30 years in this valley, but I tell you the truth, I have never grown vegetables this good in all that time."

He hasn't been back.

God planted a garden east in Eden

and put man to work in it.   That's what we read in Genesis ch 2.   A garden.   Think fruit trees, herbs, seed plants..  today we call it permaculture.   Everything grows together with everything else, living off the soil which never gets ploughed to damage the structure thereof, worms and microbes can grow, feed and aerate the soil, and the biodiversity of the garden prevents the prevalence of one insect or pathogen or nematode over the other.   The whole works like a well-oiled machine, dying where they grow, dropping leaves and turning into humus for other plants to grow on.

This is not Eden I know, but there is a lot of food for thought right there in that tiny piece of scripture which immediately pales in significance beside the rest of the story which is about the snake and the fruit and the woman.   What we also seem to miss is how God went on to say that everything that was in the garden was for man's consumption (for free mind you), the berries and the fruit and the herbs and everything bearing seed etc, because we home in on the one tree they were not supposed to eat from.

This is what I tried to teach budding pastors at Back to the Bible Training College for a couple of years, until my own vegetable project became so huge I had to give up teaching there.   Nevertheless, without a tractor, without fertiliser and without one drop of insecticide, just replenishing the soil with veldgrass mulch and horse manure,
                                                                                    take a look at the size of the

cauliflowers and chinese cabbage we produced..

This is ONE plant!

We had fun

  Would-be pastors learning about farming

God's way

My theory is this, that if one person could be found, only one, out of each extended family in Africa, who would be willing to plant a garden no matter really how small, from which to also keep 10 chickens fed, healthy and contained, there needn't be hunger anywhere in Africa.   Four or five tomato plants, two runner beans, 20 onions, 30 beetroot, 30 carrots and 5 cabbages repeated every month, a lemon tree, an orange tree and a nut in the back corner to share with neighbours, some papaja and banana along the back fence for privacy, and sweet potatoes on the sidewalk will keep a family in perpetual supply of good nutritive vegetables.   

A rooster in the back with 10 hens will provide a minimum of 6 eggs each day, and if each of the hens sat on 12 eggs only once a year and produced 10 new chickens, that's 100 chickens for slaughter.   Each year.   That is about 2 chickens a week...!   The eggs and chickens come virtually for free, given the excess from the vegetables that they can be fed on, together with cooked foods like rice and porridge and so on, which they love.   In return the chickens will provide manure for feeding the vegetable garden again - speak of the circle of life!

One of the pastors-in-training took the concept to our local township Umjindini, where he ministered at a church on Sundays.   When the unemployed youths got together and planted a garden, they not only had fun doing something together and looking after it, they had heaps of fun harvesting it and handing it out to the aged in the community.

The kitchen team harvesting at BBTC.

There is something to be said for planting a garden.