Think you must have a Bessie or two grazing in the backyard to reap the benefits of delicious homemade cheese, yogurt, butter and more?  What you really need is one of Ashley English’s “Homemade Living” series of books: “Home Dairy,” with 40 dairy recipes and even plans for a do-it-yourself cheese press.

Since shifting from medical office work to homesteader, the author’s goal “was to find ways to nourish both body and soul through mindful food practices” which she shared on her “Small Measure” blog. Inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s tale of her family making mozzarella in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Ashley English says, “I was hooked.”

“Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?” – Billy Connolly, comedian

Did you know that even before there were cultivated fields, our nomadic ancestors domesticated grass-eaters like sheep and goats for their milk and meat? After humans figured out the benefits of “putting down roots (plant roots, that is),” cows came into the picture and dairy use “went global.” Since at least 2000 B.C. butter has been on “the global dining table.” Now most cultures around the world have some kind of dairy in their diets, from some surprising milk sources:

• Sheep
• Goats
• Cows
• Water Buffalo
• Horses
• Yaks
• Caribou
• Camels
• Donkeys
• Moose
• Reindeer
• Llamas

“Home Dairy” shares the history of home dairy making with a solid overview of tools and equipment essential to the tasks, a close-up look at the various ingredients, portraits of cheese makers, and lots of recipes that use cow and goat milk for delicious food and luxurious body care.  (No reindeer milking required.)

According to English, today all it takes is “a few gallons of milk and some friendly bacterial cultures” and you’ll “soon be indulging in your own artisan butter, yogurt, mozzarella and more.” No cows or yaks, you say?  Maybe there is a “dairy farmer down the way who’s got milk to spare” or grab some jugs right off the shelf at your local grocery store.

In “Home Dairy,” you’ll learn about starter cultures, needed to replace the vital bacteria missing from pasteurized milk.  Different dairy products call for different cultures: “cool” cultures make buttermilk and cheeses that prefer low milk and curd temperatures like gouda, cheddar and feta; “hot” cultures for yogurt and Swiss and hard Italian cheeses like parmesan and Romano. And like home canners know all about commercially made pectin, home dairy makers can enjoy the time saving technology of direct-set cultures (direct-vat inoculants or DVIs.)

“Cheese is milk’s leap toward immortality.”  – Clifton Fadiman, author

From cultured dairy products to the universal delight of cheese, English tells the whole story.   You’ll learn basic techniques and how to make “beginners’ cheeses” like Queso Blanco, cream cheese, mascarpone, feta, paneer, ricotta, cottage, chevre and mozzarella … and then expand your skills to master “advanced” cheeses like cheddar, Swiss, parmesan and gorgonzola.

Reading through “Home Dairy,” I find my mouth watering at the thought of smooth, creamy homemade butter (spread over just about anything,) grown-up mac and cheese, ice cream, Saag Paneer, chevre spreads, fondues, terrines, and luscious ricotta cheesecake.

And it all begins with the simplest stuff –  milk.

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm

However Didi met Eva, you will be glad they connected. Boston-based Didi Emmons describes herself as a “roving eco-chef, cookbook author, consultant and educator.” And the time she spent near Dartmouth, Massachusetts with the “near legendary farmer” Eva Sommaripa, whose 200 plus varieties of uncommon herbs, greens, flowers and wild edibles enliven menus of many famous northeast restaurants, resulted in the rare and wonderful “Wild Flavors.”

Author Emmons was inspired by their blossoming friendship and by Eva’s Gardens, which she describes as “… like the botanical version of the Louvre, plugged into some greater life force.” Eva, who hasn’t visited a grocery store in over a decade, believes that “…the supermarket is the great disconnect. Like a good relationship, there needs to be intimacy with food.”

Emmons says, “Eva’s creativity and the unusual herbs and foraged foods she cultivated were a continuous revelation.” And “Wild Flavors” is much more than a cookbook, highlighting four of Eva’s core principals, woven throughout the year: salvaging, community, bartering and preserving. The book features 46 plant profiles and 150 amazing recipes, along with important basics like vital gadgets for your kitchen, foraging and preparation techniques, how to best grow and snip your own herbs and just the right time to add them to a dish you’re cooking.

As the seasons passed, “I let the garden speak to me directly,” says Emmons, and “Wild Flavors” captures that conversation in the poetry of botany and delicious seasonal repast.

Rugosa rose. Bronze fennel. Spruce shoots. Calaminth. Juniper berries. Curly dock. Purslane. Goosefoot. Cardoon. Autumn olive. Stinging nettle. Claytonia. Spruce shoots. Chickweed. Sun chokes. I didn’t even realize some of those plants were edible, much less so delicious! “Wild Flavors” offers ways to include these and more humble and sublime elements in your meal planning, plus new ideas about familiar ingredients like beets, cabbage, kale, potatoes, leeks and more. From delicate herb and flower butters to savory soups and gratins, from unusual soups and salads and pasta dishes to “laryngitis tea” and robust stews, even desserts, the book follows one of Eva’s passions: to “not be afraid to try eating a plant in a new way, and to use every part of the plant.”

Emmons’s hope is to pique our curiosity enough so we slow down our hike through the farmer’s market or hillside or fields, that we discover and grow and cook these plants to add a little seasonal “Wild Flavor” to our own dinner tables, all year long.

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

HRH-Prince-of-Wales-On the Future of Food

The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food
HRH The Prince of Wales
ISBN 978-1-60961-471-3
Rodale

If you want to know what’s at stake with our ailing global food system, just listen to a farmer with calloused hands. He knows what its like to try to feed more and more hungry people while fertile farmlands turn into parking lots and subdivisions. She understands the imperative to protect and preserve non-renewable natural resources like soil and fresh water.  They all struggle with dependence on fossil fuels while seeing diminishing yields of staple crops.

And if that farmer just happens to be His Royal Highness Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales, maybe the world will take notice… and take action.

“The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food” is a very small book that tackles the huge issue of how to fix our broken food system.  At its heart is the pivotal keynote address HRH Prince Charles gave to The Future of Food conference at Georgetown University in May of 2011, put into clear context with comments from the phenomenal Wendell Berry, author and journalist Eric Schlosser, and Growing Power, Inc.’s “Farmer-in-Chief” Will Allen.

For over thirty years, HRH Prince Charles has been speaking up about the future of food with “…all the scars to prove it.”  Back in 1985, he converted his Highgrove farms to organic, wildlife friendly practices and has been tireless in his efforts to spread the word about the vital need for a sustainable food system, which he defines as one that “maintains the resilience of the entire ecosystem.”

“We are going to have to take some very brave steps,” he says.  “We will have to develop much more sustainable or durable forms of food production because the ways we have done things up to now are no longer as viable as they once appeared to be.”  As it stands today, HRH believes “… in one way or another, half the world finds itself on the wrong side of the food equation,” with over a billion people hungry, a billion people lacking essential nutrition, and over a billion people overweight or obese.

And if you think things are bad now, just wait until 2050 when it is estimated over 9 billion more people will be crowding the dinner table.  For answers, HRH cites a United Nations’ study that deserves more attention: Agriculture at a Crossroads – International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development.  “The report drew on evidence from more than 400 scientists worldwide and concluded that small-scale, family-based farming systems, adopting so-called agro-ecological approaches, were among the most productive systems in developing countries,” he said.  “This was a major study and a very explicit statement. And yet, for some strange reason, the conclusions of this exhaustive report seem to have vanished without trace. This is the heart of the problem, it seems to me – why it is that an industrialized system, deeply dependent on fossil fuels and chemical treatments, is promoted as viable, while a much less damaging one is rubbished and condemned as unfit for purpose?”

He cautions, “We need to include in the bottom line the true costs of food production – the true financial costs and the true costs to the Earth.”  HRH calls this “Accounting for Sustainability.”  “The point, surely, is to achieve a situation where the production of healthier food is rewarded and becomes more affordable and the Earth’s (natural) capital is not so eroded.”

“The Prince’s Speech: On the Future of Food” has gotten a lot of attention among the choir that often sings about sustainability.  Here’s several links to some of their wise thoughts about this topic and this book:

• Food Politics
• Civil Eats
• Super Chef
• Serious Eats

The Aspen Institute also offers a video discussion on the book, featuring Applegate Farms Founder and CEO Stephen McDonnell, Founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future Robert Lawrence, MD, and President of Slow Food USA Josh Viertel.

Are you hungry for more?  Start by reading this little book, and passing it along to your friends.  Watch the speech by yourself or with a crowd.  And when you’re ready, lets all take action to help safeguard the future of our food.

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

The Wisdom Of The Radish by Lynda Browning

Welcome to Foggy River Farm, where an “aspiring farmer’s suburban girlfriend” trades her Stanford degrees for a pastoral dream and lives to tell the tale. In “The Wisdom of the Radish,” Lynda Hopkins shares “lessons learned on a small farm” through the eyes and hearts of a young couple digging into a growing life near Healdsburg, California.

Hopkins and her beloved co-proprietor, Emmett, are inspired role models in the “Greenhorn Movement” of today’s new wave of young farmers committed to local, sustainable agriculture – bucking the trend of the aging farmer (according to 2007 Census of Agriculture, the average age of American farmers is creeping up toward 60.)

“…Farming is an ancient choice but a fluid line, granting each new generation both heritage and a unique personal challenge,” Hopkins writes. This twenty-something couple started their venture “armed with good intentions” and hands-on experience from organizing educational food gardens, work-trade participation, and working on New Zealand farms in exchange for room and board through WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). They also relied on the Internet, a vital tool for 21st century farmers with “… a decidedly different approach to agricultural problem-solving.”

From a rough start – their first $300 worth of seedlings were over-watered to death – to farmers’ market success, the book follows the couple as they work to make a couple of acres carved from Emmett’s family’s Sonoma County vineyard into Foggy River Farm, a small, diversified, directly-marketed agricultural operation. The first fifty bucks earned at their “rickety, borrowed” card table at market comes from bravely selling bags of the only produce they had – buggy, hole-riddled salad greens. Their entire first season is peppered by problems: beetles, hungry native foxes and raccoons, “nuked” heirloom tomato starts, broken water pipe floods, a corn worm convention, unexpected frost, and a bounty of beans that just won’t quit. Through it all, their farm life (and love) grows, along with the flock of chickens, sheep, goats, alpacas, and a Border collie pup – natural extensions to their farm family. (There’s a special place in my heart for Hope, the chicken formerly known as Penguin, or the one that got away.)

“The Wisdom of the Radish” is a view of the local food system from the front lines, with tidbits of history and lore, fascinating facts and growing tips. It illuminates “the difference between food as sustenance and food as pleasure” with earthy good humor and refutes the “elitist” label sometimes stuck to people who shop farmers’ markets. In the end, there are radishes, and then there are “…fresh, local, heritage radishes, harvested while young and tender by young and tender (and slightly foolish) farmers.”

- Lynn Torrance Redlin

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

Admit it. You’re a little bit in love with farmers these days. Aren’t we all? This “growing” passion is well earned and long overdue.

But for omnivores who also happen to like our beef, pork, fowl, game and more, thank you very much, there are other talented food professionals that have carved a vital place for themselves at farmers’ markets, in restaurants and retail shops: butchers, especially those men and women “inspired by a locally-driven, nose to tail approach” featured in “PRIMAL CUTS: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers” by Marissa Guggiana.

Vegetarians are warned to avert their eyes even from the cover of this substantial book, its title stencil cut over what looks like butcher paper wrapping well-marbled animal flesh. Open it, and you’ll discover that your guides inside “Primal Cuts” are “righteous” and respectful masters of an ancient craft, currently enjoying their own renaissance of respect.

In “PRIMAL CUTS,” Guggiana profiles over fifty free-range farmers, progressive butchers and gifted chefs, sharing their stories and philosophies along with one hundred meat recipes, including step-by-step instructions and hundreds of diagrams, illustrations and full-color photos. Some of the people profiled will be familiar faces and names – “As Seen on TV!” – and others may be only neighborhood legends to locavores … until now.

Author Marissa Guggiana takes her wealth of experience as a 4th generation meat purveyor, food activist and writer for publications like Saveur and Meatpaper and presents an enlightening perspective on how today’s best think and work, sharing many of their signature dishes and family heirloom creations. And she is upfront with the mission they all share: “To make food that is meaningful and that respects the earth and nourishes its inhabitants.”

Otto von Bismarck famously said, “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” Ah, but what if we learned to make them ourselves? “PRIMAL CUTS” covers basics, tools and “trade-secret” techniques for making sausage, cooking conventional and unconventional cuts of meat, making great stock, curing meat, de-boning a chicken, stirring up nice sauces, and more, plus advice on what to do with leftovers (if any.)

Guggiana believes that it requires “moral dignity” to eat meat “in good faith, with a full heart.” “Eating is a daily prayer,” she writes, “an act of care that passes from the earth into our every cell.” Nose to tail, stem to root, can I hear an “Amen?”

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

A Householders Guide to the Universe: A Calendar of Basics for the Home and Beyond

Harriet Fasenfest offers a page-turning seasonal monthly breakdown in her book “A Householder’s Guide to the Universe: A Calendar of Basics for the Home and Beyond.”

With apologies to Douglas Adams and his “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything many modern galactic households are looking for is not 42. Instead, Fasenfest’s “Householder’s Guide” explores and promotes householding as “… the revival of a personal system of resource management, founded on principles of equity, thrift, and stewardship.”

Does that answer resonate with you?

The author’s rising consciousness about global development opened a “new lens” to view how she was living and how she wanted to live in the world. Her “Newton moment” was watching an old Bartlett pear tree drop fruit into her backyard. Fasenfest wondered, “How had I come to take them for granted and leave them to rot? What had turned them into valueless objects?”

Looking at her life through that “new lens,” this self-described “writer, cook, gardener, food preserver and backyard economist” saw a better approach. She became the change she wanted to see, rooted in valuing the growing home-based economy and “reclaiming (once common) skills.”

“A Householder’s Guide to the Universe” invites readers to share the journey. With wit, warmth and down to earth wisdom, the calendar book highlights each season and month’s to-dos and to-think-abouts for The Home, The Garden and The Kitchen.

Part philosophy book, part adventure tale, “Householder’s Guide” covers the basics of householding and also includes terrific resources like planting lists, recipes, information about preserving food, and how to make the tastiest jam in the world – the kind you pick, cook and can at home.

Dedicated to the memory of her paternal grandmother – “Oh, what you could have taught me!” Fasenfest writes – “Householder’s Guide” is heavy on hope and good humor, sustaining and nurturing along the never-easy paths we may walk. Fasenfest shares her family’s personal growth through everyday human “breakage and redemption” with inspiring, heartfelt (and often hilarious) details on every page.

This is a very real human story that clarifies “the odd history we have all inherited and the way the greed of the market has defined prosperity, success, and ‘the good life.’”

What kind of life sounds good to you? What does “home” really mean? In “The Householder’s Guide to the Universe,” “… home is not the place where lazy minds go to die, but rather where the active mind, heart and soul can find their resurrection. That we can practice much of householding in our bathrobes is an added plus.”

Are you interested in honing your householding skills? Fasenfest invites you to turn frustration into action and problems into solutions. Just DON’T PANIC*.

* “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” features DON’T PANIC on its cover in “large, friendly letters.” Writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke said Douglas Adams’ use of “Don’t panic” was perhaps the best advice that could be given to humanity.

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

Carol Deppe, The Resilient Gardener

But what about gardening in “not-so-good” times, when “ordinary trauma and minor disasters” like health problems and family needs trump the to-do list, or make it impossible to do the things our gardens need precisely when they need them? Or the “mega-hard” times that history proves deserve consideration – catastrophic drought, disasters (natural and man-made,) pandemics, energy shortages, economic instability, the ripple effect of war and terrorism?

“The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times” is a personal revelation about “All-American food security,” and a clarion call to action. Author, plant breeder and scientist Carol Deppe offers a bumper crop of clear explanations about why resilience (“An ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change” – Merriam-Webster Dictionary) in even the tiniest backyard gardens matters, along with a ton of practical how-to information about growing, processing and storing food for optimal use. Today, Deppe says, “…we can produce better, more nutritious, more delicious food than anything we can buy,” and learning to reduce inputs like labor and water means “we spend less, waste less, pollute less, and are more sophisticated, efficient gardeners, in good times as well as bad.”

And since we humans need calories and protein, not just salads and herbs, “The Resilient Gardener” focuses on “the five crops you need to survive and thrive – potatoes, corn, beans, squash and eggs” – and presents step-by-step approaches to grow, store and use these vital crops.

Deppe offers a big-picture overview of the diverse “erratic-climate-adjusted style of farming” developed during the Little Ice Age and still seen as a “model for a maximally-resilient farming community,” then invites us to better understand the inherent resilience of our own backyards by exploring its soil, topography and traditional uses by Native Americans and pioneers.

She looks at diet and food resilience, sharing how resilient gardening can help with physical limitations, special dietary restrictions and other health considerations like food intolerances. There’s a real value to the foresight that leads to having a “stash” of staples for our families, “designed to primarily enhance the quality of our lives in ordinary times (and) also enhance personal and regional reliance in hard times,” she says. “The Resilient Gardener” details different growing and storage methods, including best temperature and humidity conditions for 49 fruits and vegetables that keep longer than two months. You may know about keeping apples and carrots, but what about celery? Garlic? Jerusalem artichoke? Kohlrabi? Parsnips? Sweet potatoes and (true) yams?

And any gardener who reads the chapter on The Laying Flock will come away with a lust for poultry (Deppe adores her ducks) that goes well beyond quality eggs, garden fertilizer and a handy (beaky?) outlet for produce leavings.

Deppe’s stated goal is to “encourage more gardening, and more growing of food, especially staples.” She urges us all to expand our knowledge and pass it on to nurture resilient neighborhoods, resilient communities, resilient regions and a resilient nation. “The Resilient Gardener” challenges us all to up our gardening game for maximum flexibility, satisfaction and self-reliance … just in case.

With family roots in the fertile Red River Valley of North Dakota, Lynn Torrance Redlin has been part of the Cooking Up a Story team for a number of years. An avid gardener and home cook, Redlin is also a voracious reader, and enjoys exploring new information and ideas about our food system.

Out of death new possibilities emerge…

Shot on location in an alternate universe between time and space, poetic moments of life are snapped into consciousness; the public market becomes a garden from which love springs forth.

Insalata Caprese: a simple salad from the Campania region in Italy.

INSALATA CAPRESE (12minutes)
Written & Directed by
Jesse Roesler
Executive Producer: David Matenaer
Starring: Matthew Amendt, Val Mudek and Barbara June Patterson

“Nature is the time keeper. It is nature that determines the tipping points beyond which change becomes irreversible. Unfortunately we can’t see the clocks so we don’t know much time is left” —Journey to Planet Earth, 2011

Map of Asia, click to enlarge

If history serves as any guide, from ancient civilizations that suddenly collapsed, our fate may rest upon the collective will to trust our advanced scientific prowess, and individual human strengths, to accurately decipher out of the earth’s daily signals, that an ominous pattern is unfolding. For some have come to believe that time is of the essence to act, and that we do not have the luxury of waiting until the signals become visibly obvious. For then, it will be too late.

In a nutshell, that’s the message that Lester R. Brown, scientist, visionary, and environmental writer spells out in his recent book, and now a PBS film with the same title: Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization available for online viewing (the first 20 minutes) below.

Watch the full episode: through the month of April, 2011. See more Journey to Planet Earth.

As Plan B begins, the viewer learns that sea ice in the Arctic region has been melting at an astonishing rate in recent years. In a 1 week period of time alone, a mass of ice the size of the United Kingdom has melted away. But it is in the mountains of Asia, the glaciers in the Himelayas and the Tibetan Plateau where the effects of climate change are most apparent, and worrisome to some scientists. As these glaciers continue to recede, they are the principal source for feeding the major rivers of Asia during the dry season that run through China, India, and other neighboring countries. The Indus, Ganges, Yellow River, and Yangtse provide the necessary sources of fresh, irrigation water for food production to feed 400 million people.

Glacial Range Over Tibet

We learn that most civilizations that collapsed in the past did so because of a major reduction in their food supply. Brown theorizes that food may be the weak link that as more and more failed states arise, the tipping point between natural and political events leads to the collapse of human civilization; in such a collapse, a loss of 90% of humanity would likely result.

Climate change makes food production throughout the world more precarious, and lowers food supply levels. Today, the world’s food supply is at the lowest level in 45 years. For example, China now accounts for 1/4 of all the meat consumption in the world. As population continues to grow, more people in the developing world will move up the food chain ladder. In the film, scientists estimate that by 2020, there will be an additional 3 billion+ new people consuming meat. That places tremendous pressures on grain production, not only for human consumption, but also to feed the growing populations of added livestock populations. According to Brown, it’s not sustainable. It also places unbearable strain on western food supplies, especially US grain, fueling higher domestic food prices, and around the world. Poorer nations will have to do with less food, and this too will put pressure on governments to address the needs of their people, or like Chad, Sudan, Haiti, and other countries mentioned in the film—be added to the growing list of failed states.

The film outlines 3 competing trends that will increasingly vie for the world’s available food supplies:
Population Growth (current growth is 70 million per year)
Rising levels of affluence- more people move up the food chain ladder
Massive diversion of grain to fuel cars- the amount of grain to fuel a 25 gallon SUV is the amount of grain that could feed one person for a year.

One particularly moving portion of the film, Brown recounts an event in recent history that demonstrates the incredible resolve that Americans have shown under challenging circumstances. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed during WWII, and America had to face Japan, then the largest industrial force in the world. In order to effectively respond, President Roosevelt turned to the automotive industry, and summoned their energy and direction to do something that never had been done before—almost overnight—switch from automobile production to a massive production of wartime equipment: tanks, airplanes, ships, etc., which also meant, no new car manufacturing would take take place during those 2 years needed for factory production. In a matter of weeks and months, America responded.

This is the outline Brown presents for his plan B needed to restructure the global economy:
Cut CO2 emissions 80% by 2020
Stabilize population growth to 8 billion people-through a mixture of education, and economic opportunties
Eradicate poverty
Restore the world’s natural living systems

Will we come to recognize the threat in time, and be able to respond appropriately? That’s what makes this film so important to watch, to ponder, and to decide what each of us as individuals will do. If we get this wrong, and Lester Brown’s warning proves prophetic, no more pages will turn for our children.

And, it would be on our watch…

Q. Being a self-described child of Hippie parents growing up in rural Idaho, are you surprised that you now have your own farm?

I am but I’m not. Because of genetics and conditioning, it does make sense that we do often turn out just like our parents. Like most people, I struggled with that in my twenties, and tried to be anything but a hippie. But now that I’m 36, I’m getting a bit more comfortable with the idea that I just might be a “hippie”. I enjoy growing food and raising animals, eating with friends and family, and building community. If that’s not hippie, I don’t know what is. But I still refuse to listen to the Dead. You have to draw the line somewhere. 

Q. To date what livestock due you currently have, and what fruits and vegetables do you grow on a regular basis?

 I have three goats (two doelings, one milk doe), about six rabbits in various stages of growth, four chickens, and about 20,000 bees. It’s fall now so the main crops are greens like chard and collards, lettuce, and some remaining tomatoes. I love growing winter squash, carrots, beets, herbs, cucumbers, etc. I’ve raised pigs and ducks and geese, and will probably get ducks again, but Muscovies this time.

Q. Do you think you and Bill (Novella’s Boyfriend) will eventually leave “Ghost town”, by a nice house in a better hood and start all over?

Well, we’re squatting on the land where we farm so eventually we will be kicked off the lot and it will be bulldozed to build condos or something. Since I don’t like the idea of living right next to a construction zone, I’m sure we’ll move eventually, but a nice neighborhood? Doubt it. The neighbors would hate us! A friend of mine who was having troubles with her neighbors put it this way: “you’re a hero if you farm in a ghetto, but a public nuisance if you try to farm in nice neighborhood.” we fit in the public nuisance category, I think, because people with manicured lawns don’t like to see goats pooping. So we’ll probably head out to east Oakland when it gets bad here in west Oakland.

Q. I read that you were a student of Michael Pollan when you attended UC Berkeley.  What is the best piece of advice he’s ever given you?

He told me to go to New York City right after graduating from school. Just for a visit, to introduce myself to editors and meet people who might want me to write for them. I ended up getting a book deal. 

Q. What words of advice do you have for a budding Urban Homesteader?

Start small and simple, grow or raise things that you like to eat. For instance, grow some lettuce in some buckets if you like salad, or get some chickens if you like eggs. Don’t overdo it, though, I remember there was that urban farmer in Brooklyn who thought he should just get everything–plants, rabbits, chickens–and then we surprised when things got out of control. Learning to be a farmer doesn’t come instantly. 

Q. What’s more important to you personally, Local or Organic?

Those labels don’t really mean anything anymore so I don’t like to choose one over the other. Our society is so used to picking one thing over another, we’ve been told over and over again that to find happiness (or whatever) that we just have to make a consumer decision. This depresses me, and that’s why I’m into DIY (do it yourself) so you become empowered to grow your own. I can see the eyes rolling out there for people living in apartments, but there is an amazing amount of stuff in small spaces, or if you search out opportunities to get your hands dirty. Like community gardens.

Q. You’ve had your blog for a while in which we’ve been able to follow some of your adventures at Ghost Town farm, when did you decide it was time to write an actual book about your adventures?

The blog didn’t come before the book. I’ve basically been working on the book idea for ten years. I’m a writer, so as I farmed, I always thought the stories would add up to something bigger. I actually used to think blogs are frivolous, but now I look at my farm blog like a new version of an old farm tradition like the farm log or journal. Recording what I grew and how it did. I actually look back at old blog posts from years ago to remember what I planted or how I canned my tomatoes. Diaries and blogs are just a way to store memories. 

Q. What’s next for you? Another Book, a second farm?

I’m working on a proposal for a new memoir. I have a book coming out with Willow Rosenthal that is more hands-on. I’m pretty busy. I don’t have the time or money for a second farm, alas. 

Q. What do you think it’s going to take to get people to take a more active role in where their food comes from?

Pure boredom of the “normal” way of living, buying stuff is so unrewarding, and unsatisfying. Once you start growing stuff, it becomes addictive. We need better school garden programs in schools so kids will learn about growing food. Once that happens, it’ll spread like wildfire. 

Thank you Novella for taking time out of your very busy schedule to answer my questions, I certainly look forward to your next book and continued adventures at Ghost Town Farm. Novella has been on the road quite a bit promoting this great book.

Heather Jones is a wife, mother, freelance food writer, and graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. She has worked for Gourmet Magazine, TV Personality Katie Brown; and the New York based Indian-fusion restaurant Tabla, and a recent guest on Martha Stewart’s radio program. Heather resides in Woodbine, New Jersey (population: 2800) with her husband and two daughters. She is a strong supporter of the Sustainable Food Movement and believes that education is the key to making a difference.