Author: Elizabeth

How to make granola

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

Let’s be honest, there isn’t a whole lot new to say about granola. It’s not as though I’ve come up with some shockingly revolutionary way to make it, or some secret superfood ingredient that makes all granola healthy. Instead, I’m here to explain my simple three-question decision-making process for making something instead of buying it. It definitely applies to granola, and hopefully, you’ll apply this theorem to your own cooking and baking.

The three questions are as follows, and can be applied to pretty much any food or drink item, in my extensive experience:

  • Can I make it cheaper?
  • Can I make it healthier?
  • Can I make it taste better?

Certain items, like bread or jerky or hummus or jam or yogurt, are an automatic yes, at least for us. Others, like kombucha or crackers, might get two of three (cheaper and healthier), especially if there are specific storebought products you really like. And then there are the tricky ones, the ones that take years to master, the ones even I don’t tackle. This list is intensely personal, but for me it includes high-level precision fermentation: most ripened and aged cheeses, plus beer, wine and liquor. Yes, I could theoretically make any of these, but other people are doing it better, and I’d rather devote my kitchen experimentation time to other things. I’m happy to leave these to the professionals.

Granola 01 sml

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Farm update: December 3

/ Elizabeth / 15 Comments

And somehow, it’s December. It’s quiet here at Quiet Farm, and we have no complaints. We’re deep in the trenches of our home renovation – sometimes, it seems that painting is all we do – and we’re hoping to unveil some amazing new floors and a wicked cool bookshelf sometime soon. But for the moment we’ve got our heads down, our music cranked, our soups simmering and we’re gunning hard for an entirely livable house – with furniture, even! – by the end of 2018. Will we make it? Stay tuned!

QF Snow 01 sml

We got our first real snow here at the farm, and it was lovely. Everything seemed to snuggle under a crisp white blanket – and we don’t even have to shovel here! (Take that, City of Arvada!) Later in the season we may well question our lack of a snowplow when trying to get out of our quarter-mile driveway, but for the moment we’ll stay cozy and warm indoors.

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Cooking with winter squash

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

I may not love the excesses of the holidays, but I do love cooking this time of year. Ideally the weather is chilly enough to make us crave warm, earthy dishes, rich in the nutrients we need to sustain ourselves through the cold, dark winter. There’s a lot to be said for eating seasonally – not only does it make more sense to eat what’s available right now (or to preserve it for later), but nature magically gives us exactly what our bodies need. In the case of winter squash, that’s a lot.

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A large component of our winter storage pantry.

Edible squashes are in the curcubit family and essentially fit into two categories: summer and winter. Summer squashes include the thin-skinned varieties, like commonly available green zucchini and yellow squash. Winter squashes don’t ripen until late summer and early fall, then must be cured for extended storage. Most winter squashes are encased in a hard, protective skin, allowing them to be kept for months without refrigeration. As with other long-keeping vegetables (onions, potatoes, root crops), this comes in handy when there isn’t much else around to eat and you can’t just run to the store.

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Farm update: November 19

/ Elizabeth / 16 Comments

Hi there! Is it cold and snowy where you live? We think everyone in the world is getting lots of snow except us, but really that’s fine. It has been remarkably chilly, though, so most of our activities and projects are indoors these days.

Fall CSA wk2 01 sml

Nom nom nom.

We are loving our fall CSA share; each week we receive delicious vegetables that we’d never find in our grocery store. Those sweet, colorful carrots were devoured raw; the delicata squash was roasted and served over the arugula, and the tatsoi went into a spicy stir-fry with local pork. We highly recommend joining a CSA in your community if you have the option.

Paint Sprayer 01 sml

Like a Roomba, only better.

Our new pet looks like a Star Wars extra, but when you have this much painting to do, a sprayer makes things a whole lot easier. There is a learning curve with a paint sprayer, but once you’ve mastered set-up and clean-up it saves hours. Pro tip: do not skip the cleaning and storage instructions. If you store the sprayer without cleaning it properly, you will regret it. Trust us on this.

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A helpful guide to Quiet Farm wildlife

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

Fuckin' Deer 02 sml

Lots of people move out to the country to escape from society and get closer to nature. (We did.) This is all well and good, but more often than not that human-wildlife interface becomes difficult for both sides. On the Front Range, for example, dozens of black bears are killed by wildlife officials every year because they show little or no fear of humans and are regularly caught breaking into homes and businesses to scavenge for food. Many more are hit by cars. Mostly, this is because we continue to encroach on the bears’ territory, and because ignorant humans continue to place unsecured trash in places where the bears can access it.

Fuckin' Deer 03 sml

Here on Quiet Farm, then, one of our biggest challenges will be how to live in harmony with our local wildlife, rather than against them. For us, deer pressure will absolutely be the largest issue we face. There are thousands of deer in the nearby area, both whitetail and mule; we’re also surrounded on three sides by apple orchards, which attract deer and lots of other creatures who love fresh, crunchy apples, too. As we plan our vegetable beds for next season we’re still debating how best to protect those vegetables from the deer; these animals can do thousands of dollars of damage in one hungry night and we have no interest in opening an all-you-can-eat salad bar.

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Farm update: November 5

/ Elizabeth / 13 Comments

Fall Colors 01 sml

Looking west down our land, with the Grand Mesa peeking out in the back.

Autumn has thus far been quite fickle here at Quiet Farm; we’ve had blue-sky days of close to eighty degrees, and we’ve had misty, rainy days filled with murky low clouds. We’ve had a couple of hard frosts, but no snow as yet.

Doorknobs 01 sml

These will be even more gorgeous once they’re back on our original doors.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we’re trying hard to maintain the original spirit of our 1901 home during our renovation. To that end, if it’s old and we can salvage it, we’ll do so. N has diligently hand-scraped layer upon layer of carelessly slopped paint off these doorknobs and plates; it’s a tedious project, to be sure, but the results are spectacular.

Fall CSA wk1 01 sml

So much possibility here.

We’ve joined a local CSA this fall and are excited to share photos of our bounty each week. This first pick-up we received leeks, garlic, potatoes, daikon radish, spicy greens and celeriac (or celery root). We believe firmly in the CSA model and also believe that CSAs make everyone better cooks; you’re often compelled to use ingredients you’d never have selected at the grocery store. Hearty, warming fall soups, roasted vegetables and intriguing salads are on the menu at Quiet Farm this week.

Mud Room 01 sml

The “before” photo of our light-filled sunroom, which will eventually be a home for plant starts and a sewing corner, too.

On the to-do list this week: install flooring in our sunroom. This is our first attempt at installing what everyone calls foolproof click-lock laminate. This room needs to be waterproof, dirt-proof and easy to clean, so we’re giving this wonder material a shot. We’ll report back on our successes and our failures learning opportunities, dear reader.

QF Fog 01 sml

Atmospheric, no?

Up next: monumental painting projects (but we bought a sprayer!). More flooring. Stripping and refinishing vintage doors. Storing irrigation pipes for the winter. Never a dull moment around here, friends. Have a great week!

A crash course in irrigation, vol. 2

/ Elizabeth / 4 Comments

Hello, could everyone please put on their interested faces? We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of learning how to run ditch water on our farm, and we know you won’t want to miss a single moment.

We ordered our water two weeks ago; today is the final day of the season we can have it. We’ve called for half a foot for two days, the minimum we can request and hopefully enough for us to test our gated pipe and our repairs. There will be no more testing this season after this run, so we need to learn all we can.

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At the headgate before sunrise.

The morning of the irrigation call starts with a pre-dawn alarm and a drive to the headgate (about a half-mile north of our farm). On the stile post we find a metal tin with the day’s water requests: where the water is going and in what quantity. The paper below it lists which households are on which ditch lateral (west or south).

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This is the Stevens and Linder ditch ticket; there are four requests with the totals listed (names underneath ours removed for privacy). All four of the day’s requests are located on the west lateral so the first task was to shut the headgate to the south lateral, thereby directing all the water to the west.

The ticket shows the quantity of water requested by us (.50 or half a foot), the corresponding gauge chart conversion (.47) – to be remembered to help set the flow gauge on our property – and lastly the water shrink to be expected due to ditch loss (6%). Requests three and four on the ticket won’t suffer the 6% water shrink because they’re on decree water and it doesn’t apply. Those folks have senior water rights which allows them decree water (free and separate from their water shares) even at the end of the season. For almost everyone else this season, there was no decree water at all; the reservoirs are too low to allow it. We’re supposedly in a hundred-year drought, but even that is a misnomer; we’ll almost certainly see a drought this severe or worse again in our lifetimes. Extreme drought is the new normal here, and learning how to properly manage our water rights will be key to our longterm success.

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Farm update: October 22

/ Elizabeth / 13 Comments

Panorama 01 sml

We are enjoying spectacular sunrises and sunsets here on the farm as the weather seems to settle comfortably into true fall. The days are crisp and the evenings are chilly – but we finally figured out our tricky gas stoves, so we’re staying toasty when we’re inside. We don’t have a furnace in our farmhouse, so we keep warm with the stoves plus lots of layers. A near-constant simmering soup pot and frequent bread baking help too.

Garlic 01 sml

I’m pleased to report that next year’s garlic has been planted in the arugula (and grass and thistle) bed. Garlic is a fall-planted crop in our climate; we typically plant it in mid-October and harvest it the following July. Our good friend and farming mentor Lara generously donated this seed garlic to Quiet Farm; one of the many cool things about garlic is that it adapts to the microclimate in which it’s planted. This means that within a few years Quiet Farm will grow entirely unique garlic, which we’ll then pass on to other farmers. (If you live in the Lafayette/Boulder/Louisville area, you should join Lara’s CSA next year. She’s an amazing farmer and has taught us so much, and she grows truly spectacular vegetables and herbs. We think the world of her.)

Hallway Floor Contrast 01 sml

Look at our gorgeous pine-and-fir floors!

The Quiet Farmhouse Major League Very Serious Renovation Project is kicking off with a vengeance, and we started by refinishing some vintage hardwood floors. We were disappointed to only find salvageable floors in a small part of the original 1901 house, but we opted to save what we could. The floors had been dark stained and then used as a careless dropcloth for later painting projects, and they were in rough shape. We’re so pleased with how the sanding and refinishing turned out, but now comes the difficult decision of what sort of flooring we’ll install in the rest of the house.

NRCS 01 sml

Government paperwork is good for insomnia.

Another task on our to-do list recently has been to apply for a season extension grant through the NRCS. There is lots to learn about applying for grants as a small start-up farm, but we’re hopeful that this grant will assist us in building hoop houses (also called high tunnels) to extend our growing season. We’re quite lucky because, unlike many other programs for small farmers, this grant will still be funded whether or not our government manages to pass a new Farm Bill before they go on yet another unnecessary vacation or campaign trip or whatever it is they do while not doing their jobs. (And on that note, please could everyone remember to vote in the upcoming midterms? Astonishingly, only 37% of eligible voters managed to make time for this in 2016. Your small farmers thank you.)

Brittle 01 sml

Pumpkin spice what?

While avoiding the news I’m diligently testing recipes for my “Fall Treats” class this week at Broomfield Public Library. Though I’m not at all a fan of sugar, especially the quantities consumed in the average American diet, I think an occasional homemade indulgence might be permitted. This here is a chile-spiced brittle with pecans and toasted pumpkin seeds, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you. We’ll taste curried pumpkin soup and other delicious fall things, too. Not registered yet? Go here!

This week I’m in seed school and N is painting our walls. We hope to have positive irrigation news for you next week, and I hope to see many of you in class on Wednesday evening!

 

 

The Farm Series: Western Culture

/ Elizabeth / 6 Comments

Western Culture 01 sml

Now that we actually have a farm, we can get a bit more serious about researching where we’ll obtain our animals. We plan to raise dairy goats and laying hens, with the intention of producing enough milk, cheese and eggs to supply our own kitchen as well as our cooking school. Because healthy animals produce healthy food, it’s essential that we know exactly where our animals come from.

Western Culture 07 sml

We still have a lot of work to do on both our chicken house and our goat barn to get them ready for animals, and we don’t plan to purchase any until next spring. We want to make our reservations now, however, so that when we’re ready we’ve got animals waiting for us. Small dairies especially need to know in advance how many animals they can sell during a given season so they can plan their breeding program.

Western Culture 11 sml

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Farm update: October 8

/ Elizabeth / 10 Comments

Hi! How was your weekend? We survived our first Applefest and we think we’ve made all of the necessary repairs on our irrigation system so that we can call for water in two weeks (more on that soon). I made yogurt, but I’m still searching for a source of truly local milk that I can get basically straight from the cow. Most of the cattle around here, however, are raised for meat, not dairy, so I’ll keep on looking. Here a few other things we’re up to:

Storm Clouds 01 sml

It was all very dramatic here for a time.

We were thrilled to have nearly a week of cool, damp weather (the mesa got its first snowfall!). This is such a rarity over here that you could almost hear the valley’s farmers cheering when the rains came. The high winds destroyed our flagpole (N rescued the flag) and the heavy rains helpfully identified some heretofore unknown leaks in our house, but we are still inestimably grateful for the moisture. Even the pasture came back a bit, with tiny green sprouts everywhere. Water is life, make no mistake.

QF Seedlings 02 sml

Quiet Farm’s first official crop! I’ll sell them as fancy microgreens and charge a fortune.

Speaking of tiny green sprouts, I attended a women’s farming conference last weekend in Estes Park and I planted some arugula before I left so that I could say in all honesty that I’m a farmer! Spicy, peppery arugula is one of our favorite greens, and it grows so well, especially in spring and fall, that I used it to test the soil fertility in an existing makeshift raised bed shoddily constructed (not by us) from cinderblocks. The arugula sprouted beautifully – along with tons of grass and possibly some thistles. Since there is no grass (or thistles) nearby, I’m at a loss to explain this, but now I have to painstakingly weed my tiny arugula. Pro tip: know your soil before you plant. This is not a good use of farm time.

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Local sunflowers drying for seed harvesting.

This spring I attended a seed saving class, and I’m looking forward to participating in an even more intensive teacher training in a few weeks. Saving seeds is an important part of food sovereignty; if we really want to opt out of our industrial food complex, we need to own the seeds, too. So we’re working on building up our own Quiet Farm seed bank, and we’re collecting, drying and storing seeds whenever we can. Once we grow our own vegetables, grains and herbs, seed saving will become an even bigger task each fall.

QF Compost 01 sml

Our compost pile. It’s not pretty, but it’s so valuable.

Just about any gardening or small-scale farming book you’ll ever read will extol the virtues of compost, and we’ve got ours started. We identified an otherwise unusable plot about equidistant between the kitchen and the future raised beds, so it’s easily accessible to all. We began with lots of old straw bedding and manure from the animal pens; we’ll need to clean the pens out anyway before we purchase our goats and it makes a beneficial addition to the pile, especially since the manure is well-aged. All of our kitchen waste, leaves, weeds and other organic material go in, too. At the moment we’re watering it frequently because it’s been so dry, but we’re hoping for a long, wet winter and it will be perfect for building up the fertility of our raised beds next spring. As a rule, never let even a scrap of organic material leave your property.

This week we plan to tear up the oddly rumpled carpet in our sun porch and replace it with some durable and water-resistant flooring, since it will shortly become a mud porch. We’ll repair two broken window mechanisms and patch our newly discovered leaks. We may take down a couple of dead trees, and hopefully establish our woodpile, too. Thanks for reading, and have a lovely week!