Day of the Dead Celebration!

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
- John Muir

Thank you all for making this season such a bountiful one, filled with good will, friendship, healthy fruits and vegetables, and aimless love. "This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,/I fell in love with a wren/and later in the day with a mouse/the cat had dropped under the dining room table./In the shadows of an autumn evening,/I fell for a seamstress/still at her machine in the tailor's window,/and later for a bowl of broth,/steam rising like smoke from a naval battle./This is the best kind of love, I thought,/without recompense, without gifts,/or unkind words, without suspicion,/or silence on the telephone. AIMLESS LOVE, Billy Collins

Please join us this year at Lavender Lane as we celebrate Day of the Dead by making a huge, end-of-the-season compost heap in the middle or our autumn garden bed. No one escapes the yawning jaws of this decaying pile! Last year it was a fearsome being and when it was finished, there was music, dancing, food, a fire, and cheer. For we all knew, as the great biodynamic farmer, Alan Chadwick knew, "Life into death into life." We will begin putting the garden to bed a 3PM on Sunday evening, 1 November. Please bring a dish to share and friends and family!

Pumpkin Pie from Scratch...

Dear Members,

Time is winding down. Don't forget our Day of the Dead Festival in the afternoon and evening of 1 November. We also want to put the garden to bed that day, so bring your work clothes! 

Thank you for all who have signed up for next year. We are filled up for 2010 and are happy to include any and all on our waiting list.

We have one more week for you to pick up the harvest. Please return any basket you might have then and we will give you a paper bag for your last harvest, if you need one. For this week we have 4 pounds of red potatoes, orange bell pepper, beets (with greens), collards and swiss chard, and a baking pumpkin. Here's a pretty good recipe.

For the crust:

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, well chilled
2 to 3 tablespoons cold water

For the filling:

1 baking pumpkin
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups cream
1/2 cup honey or sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Combine the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut the butter into 1/4-inch cubes and add them to the flour mixture. With your fingertips, quickly and deftly rub the butter into the flour to make a dry, crumbly mixture. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of water over the mixture. Using a fork, rapidly stir the dough until it gathers into clumps. If the mixture seems dry, add more water to hold the dough together. Gently form the dough into a disk. Wrap in plastic and place in the refrigerator to rest and chill for 15 minutes to 1 hour.

Meanwhile, cut the pumpkin in half, remove the seeds, place the pumpkin halves in a pan, shell side up, and bake for 1 hour or until the pumpkin is tender and exudes liquid and the shell starts to sag. Scrape the pulp from the shell and purée it with a fork or potato masher or in a blender. Measure 2 cups of the purée and set it aside. Reserve any additional pumpkin for another use.

Lightly butter a 9-inch pie pan. Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and, starting from the center out, roll the dough to about 2 inches larger than the size of the pan. Loosen the pastry, fold it in half, lift it and unfold it into the pan. Press it into place, trim off the excess dough and crimp the edges.

Increase the temperature of the oven to 425°F.

In a large mixing bowl lightly beat the eggs. Add the purée and the remaining ingredients and stir to blend. Pour the mixture into the dough-lined pan. Bake for 15 minutes and then reduce the heat to 350°F and bake an additional 45 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean. Allow to cool slightly before serving.

"Teeming autumn, big with rich increase"

So, of course, gloriously writes Shakespeare in Sonnet 97. Well, thought I, especially on this cold, drenchingly wet weekend, and when the need to strike up a furnace or fire is rumbling in our bones - what are we going to harvest during this harvest moon? Autumn's especial bounty never fails to astound me. It’s the mass of it, not delicate but weighty: cabbages, big squash, sunflower heads that resemble something unearthly, huge collard leaves, Jerusalem artichokes busting out of the soil, beets going berserk. My weekend fear has subsided, in other words. Wait until you see the Hubbard heirloom squash. These are so big, tough, and bulky that you need a saw or a hammer to break through the shell. But it’s worth the effort. This is purportedly the best kind of squash you can eat. But because they are rather homely looking, supermarkets barely touch them. You will. You will also receive a Bacalan De Rennes Cabbage. Listed by Vilmorin in 1867, this French heirloom was grown in the Saint-Brienc and Bordeaux localities. This late cabbage grew especially well in the mild, seaside climate along the west coast of France. These flavorful, green heads are still grown in France today, and, yes, Copley, Ohio! We’ll give you a break on the collards, give you some candy onions, and a great-looking gourd to grace your nature table.

Fall Basket!

Such a chilly day today! This calls for.....
Warm Beet and Goat Cheese Salad
Steam beets without skin until fork tender. Mash Lavender Lane Sweet Onion and Dill Goat cheese with fork, some lemon, a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, and pepper (perhaps some plain yogurt would make it more sauce-like). Dollop over the beets and sprinkle with chopped celery. Serve with pita or crusted bread.

Please find for your baskets 2 acorn squash, a very large broccoli head, some fall beets, wonderful salad greens, including baby spinach and arugula. Of course there is always our bounty basket area with potatoes, peppers, and the like.

Rudolf Steiner and the Necessity of a Vegetarian Diet

The founder of our premium organic way of farming, which we call biodynamic, stated that he owed his vigor to a vegetarian diet. “I myself known that I would have been unable to go through strenuous activities of the last 24 years without vegetarian nutrition” (Rudolf Steiner, Nutrition and Health: Lectures of the Workmen: Anthroposophical Press, NY, 1987). All of the energizing exposure to the cosmos, including sunlight, starlight, and moonlight, experienced by plants in a garden that can be passed directly to the human being is negated when we eat meat. When the human being eats animal protein, she or he has to break it down into amino acids, urea, and glucose. However, this cosmic energy, so vital to our health and stamina, which we find as a direct source from plants, has been absorbed by the animal that is consumed. How this animal energy is used by the human being then becomes a question. What it boils down to is that, if you want to eat meat, you should hunt it in the wild. The Native Americans, who ate the flesh of animals, maintained a state of health and alertness greater than commonly seen today. Why? According to Steiner, there entered a pact between hunter and prey regarding the transformation of the hunted animal into a level of higher existence through ritual and respect. Going to a grocery store to eat a package of meat from a cow slaughtered in a disrespectful carnage houses could lead to big problems in the realm of aggression, etc. I shall simply ask: could a lot of inner city violence be a result of fast food meat consumption? One anthropologist has suggested the warfare in prehistoric Europe became permanent only after livestock breeding became common in rural communities. And Rudolf Steiner says that, if we look at the physical processes which result from meat-eating: “...we find that red blood corpuscles become darker and heavier and the blood has a greater tendency to clot. Connection with the plant world strengthens the human inwardly. Meat introduces something which gradually becomes something of a ‘foreign substance’ in humans, and goes its own independent way in him. Because the nervous system is thus influenced from the outside it may become susceptible to various nervous diseases. So, we see that in a certain sense, ‘we are what we eat.’ Can you imagine the madness we would see in a herd of cows fed on pigeons? Despite the calm, peaceful nature of a dove, the cow would be simply mad.” Why? The dove has eaten the life energy of the plant directly and the cow would only eat the flesh of a dove that has been denuded of this energy (Rudolf Steiner, Nutrition and Health: Lectures of the Workmen: Anthroposophical Press, NY, 1987).

Eye to Eye with a Raccoon

Last night, I went out to the compost to deliver some leftover greens and such. One of the composts is tied around a tree. I bend over, drop in the goodies over the encircled hardware wire, stand up, and am no more than two inches from what could have been construed to me in the darkness as a holdup! But no, this masked trickster, was a raccoon. He did not tear off up the tree, but rather he or she looks at me with an air of condescension and, how shall I put it (?), saunters up the tree at a most cocksure pace.

In native cultures, raccoon is the trickster who uses his wits to lead enemies astray, leaving them stranded and bewildered. The Cheyenne call him “macho-on” -- “one who makes magic,” and his or her bandit’s mask lends him an aura of mischievousness and wily intelligence. They are connoisseurs with food, preferring to dip food in sauces, spinning it around and around, and chewing to the point of savoring. 

Hats off to these survivors, who have lived practically unchanged on our continent for a million years or so. 

A Bit about Potatoes and Today's Harvest Baskets

The potato was cultivated by the peoples of Peru, the Incas. The Spanish conquistadores found the potato to be a very cheap staple to feed their slaves (as aspect of "discovering America" not always acknowledged). It would yield a huge amount of bulky starch on little arable land. However, this was a food product that was also grown in Europe, first grown there in 1588 by the botanist Clusius. However, it was treated with a great deal of suspicion in Europe where the peasants saw the plant as evil. For a couple of centuries the potato received a bad rap in Europe, blamed for everything from scrofula to leprosy. For forty years, the French pharmacist and agriculturalist Antoine-Auguste Parmentier sought to turn the tide of the French public opinion. The peasantry had hiterto trusted nothing but grain before the Revolution, but after it millions of Europeans abandoned the tradition to take up potato nutrition at roughly the same time. This is a quote from the Austrian philosopher and scientist, Rudolf Steiner, and founder of biodynamic farming: "One can study the development of human intellectual faculties from the time when there were not potatoes to the time after their introduction. Potatoes at a certain time began to play a particular role in Western devlopment. Before potatoes were eaten a great deal, people grasped things less quickly and readily, but what they grasped, they really knew. Their nature was conservative, profound, and reflective. After potatoes were eaten on a larger scale, people became quicker in taking up ideas, but what they thought up was not retained and did not sink in very deeply. Very small amounts of potato find their way into the brain, and can can be very potent; they spur on the forces of abstract intelligence." (K. Castellitz and B. Saunders Davies, Nutrition and Stimulants, Lectures and Extracts from Rudolf Steiner, Biodynamic Literature, USA, 1991.) In Japanese macrobiotic tradition the potato is seen as extremely "yin" (cold, expanded, watery, dark); it needs to be balanced in cooking by fire, sea salt, butter, fennel, or cumin seeds. Baked in their jackets or skin, potatoes give more nutritional value as the nutrients and some protein lie just under this skin. When the peel is removed, any nutrional value of the potato is lost. They are great roasted and served with lots of chopped parsley, garlic, chives and basil and then served with a good crispy green salad. Now, after your potato meal, remember you may be full of great ideas, but don't expect to remember them in the morning!

For your baskets today, please find, yes, potatoes, parsley, swiss chard, carrots, delicious Gala apples and more.