Heading out to the vineyard to plant a new bed of strawberries. Strawberries are one crop I can count on to always do well where I live, and I think they might be the best fruit crop you can grow anywhere. They flower and fruit so early in the year, there isn’t time for anything to get to them. They’re also easy to establish and they fruit abundantly a year after planting. In this video I give some tips for moving a strawberry bed and ensuring the plants get a good start in the spring.
This was a pretty good year for organic grapes in my vineyard. We didn’t get a late frost and we had dry weather early in the season, which goes a long way toward ensuring there will be a good crop. That means I have enough grapes to make a significant amount of wine this season. In this video, I take you through the harvest, the fermentation, and the pressing of the grapes.
One of the canned foods I eat most of every year is salsa. In the late summer, I get a bounty of tomatoes and other salsa ingredients pouring in from my gardens and I like to turn them into a good supply of salsa for the year. If you’ve never had real fire-roasted salsa, you should try it sometime. It’s like a different animal from store-bought salsa. So much depth of flavor and a smokiness that liquid smoke just can’t replicate. In this video I take you through the process of making it from scratch.
In this 3 part video we visit with Jack Walter at Yarrow Hill Farms at neighboring Red Earth Farms, where we are given a tour of his livestock operation. Jack uses a mixed rotational grazing system to not only produce food, but to restore degraded farmland to fertility. Continue reading
For a long time I planted small plots of corn in my garden and was disappointed with the harvest. Often the ears wouldn’t fill out properly, missing kernels in spots or not filling out to the end of the ear. This trick helped me get full ears nearly every time and effectively doubled my harvest of food. There’s nothing better that sweet corn in summer, except maybe getting more of it out of the same space.
I started an experimental vineyard 8 years ago at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and have been developing a method of growing grapes organically in the Midwest. Nearly every commercial vineyard in the country outside of the West Coast and Southwest is highly dependent on chemical herbicides and pesticides. Continue reading
