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.
Category: Local Food
Livestock: Climate Killers or Farmland Restorers?
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
Trick for Doubling your Corn Harvest
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.
Doing the Impossible: Growing Wine Organically in the Midwest
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
Sustainable Vegetable Starts: Homemade Soil Mix and Pots
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
Southern Maple Syrup: Gathering Sap and Boiling It Down
Sugar often comes from faraway places and requires much processing to get the product we buy in our grocery store, but there are other ways to get sugar locally and more sustainably. Obviously there is honey, and there is sorghum syrup, which was a popular form of sugar in the past in our part of the country. But there’s also maple syrup, which in our southern region can be made from silver maples.
Livestock: Climate Killers or Farmland Restorers?
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
Trick for Doubling your Corn Harvest
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.
Doing the Impossible: Growing Wine Organically in the Midwest
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
Sustainable Vegetable Starts: Homemade Soil Mix and Pots
You can’t always rely on the starts you pick up at the garden center to be sustainably grown, and you never know what varieties are going to be available. One easy way to eliminate the uncertainty around garden starts is to grow your own. Continue reading
Southern Maple Syrup: Gathering Sap and Boiling It Down
Sugar often comes from faraway places and requires much processing to get the product we buy in our grocery store, but there are other ways to get sugar locally and more sustainably. Obviously there is honey, and there is sorghum syrup, which was a popular form of sugar in the past in our part of the country. But there’s also maple syrup, which in our southern region can be made from silver maples.