The Kitchen Garden Company

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, I have been working behind the scene for weeks laying the groundwork for what should be a unique tour of Ireland latter this summer. My plan is for a comprehensive Culinary Tour of the South of Ireland–starting in Dublin.  We will take in all the major culinary centers, with several scenic stops along the way to get a good auld dose of Culture.

My idea is for a unique, bespoke tour to learn about the food and culture of Ireland. We will meet with local producers, chefs and farmers to get in touch with how their food production methods are different from ours and how the Irish Food Revolution’s successes can be applied to our own situations. Along the way we will eat in some of the best, hidden treasures and enjoy some of the freshest, best prepared food in the world. And of course the scenery will be incredible.

As far as I know there is no other tour like this available, and many of the commercial “Dine Ireland” sorts of packages don’t offer nearly the intimate level of  experience I am offering. Please let me know if you are interested as space is limited. The proposed date is tentatively late May/Early June or Mid-July. The trip will be around 15 days long, although the final length will be determined by the group’s desires.

Please contact me if you are interested. I will be happy to share more details with serious inquiries.

Technorati Tags: culinary tour, ireland, irish tours, food travel

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Outside, the weather has been alternately, bitterly cold and rainy. The other night we had a violent gale which left us without much sleep. Between worrying about the power going out and having to find somewhere to move the baby chickens in to where it was warmer (it was about 36 outside) and whether the polytunnel would survive the night I don’t think I slept a wink. Fortunately the storm swung away from us and we we didn’t get the full brunt, but gusts were still up to 65mph. The power never went out, or I think we might have lost chickens. However, the polytunnel did sustain some damage. I spent an hour the yesterday moring repairing two broken ribs so they wouldn’t fly apart and tear the covering. I managed a sucessful repair, even in my sleep deprived state. As the weather warmed into the upper 40’s I was feeling much better about our two pet projects–veggie starts and chicks.

With all the wind and cold there hasn’t been as much activity in the polytunnel as I’d hoped. The tunnel usually manages to keep a 10 degree average temperature difference from outside temperatures, and the soil is much warmer than elsewhere in the gardens, but without much sun it hasn’t gotten above 50 for a week or so. The wind also sucks the temperature right out.

Meanwhile, in where it is warmer we have sprouts in all the trays we started. It’s looking like we’ll have to re-start some of the plants because they got leggy as if it were too warm on the heat mat. The cucumbers rotted at the base after they grew to a few inches tall. Our mistake for leaving them too damp I think.

If the weather continues being unseasonably cold, for out here, we might have additional trouble. We always plant peas around St. Patrick’s Day. The weather has been so foul I haven’t been able to get in to work the soil. This weekend is predicted to be sunny however, and perhaps we can get out and prep a bed or two.

Technorati Tags: seed starting, sprouting, gardening, polytunnel, spring gardening

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It has been hovering around freezing here for over a week, and there has been a mixture of gale force winds, rain and crystal blue skies. But none of that has stopped progress with the Polytunnel. This past week found me braving frostbite to haul in several wheelburrow loads into the tunnel to improve the quality of the soil.

The ground where I built the tunnel has been field for a while. In the past we had blueberries planted there and some strawberries for a while. It has also been used as a chicken run and used to be the path to a compost heap. However the soil wasn’t that great.

After stripping the grass off the surface I was faced with a mix of okay loam and heavy clay. Since the tunnel has kept the ground nice and warm even though the earth is frozen outside, I made my move. Several weeks ago, before the tunnel was covered, I turned in as much chicken manure and compost as I could at the time. This week, to help break up the heavy clay I hauled in 6 wheelburrow loads of sand. For the rest of the tunnel I wheeled in 4 loads–all I had left–of my homemade compost and then 1 large load of all the rabbit manure I could scrape from under their cages. I tilled all this in and raked it over until the soil looked very lush. It is still heavy in places and I have a lot of rocks and sticks to remove, but I am more confident about planting in it.

It is a quicker turn-around than I like. I would rather have prepared the soil last fall and given it time to mature over winter. However, the chicken and rabbit manure should both break down quickly and all the compost, filled with worms, should rapidly improve the soil. The sand has lightened the clay up considerably.

The final thing I did before planting was sprinkle some Bokashi over the surface to help energize the bioactive levels of the soil.

Technorati Tags: bokashi, polytunnel, soil improvement, gardening, spring, planting

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Never ones to miss out on a useful technology we at The Kitchen Garden Company have begun to investigate the world of Bokashi. Although it has been around for a number of years we were surprised we hadn’t heard about it sooner. We learned about it thanks to the Wiggly Wiggler Podcast from the UK.
Bokashi is both a product and a method. Simply, Bokashi is wheat bran which has been inocculated with molasses, water and Efficient Microbes–a blend of yeasts and bacteria which are helpful rather than harmful. These microbes are both aerobic and anaerobic and can stimulate soil vitality and improve digestion in livestock.

This fermented wheat bran is then used in a composting bucket to pickle and preserve the organic matter you place inside. This differs from normal composting methods in that you don’t need to include paper and other fiberous matter, and that you can compost meats and fish, and other things you wouldn’t normally use due to vermin and odors.

You begin by placing a layer of bokashi on the drain grate of a specialized bucket. The drain allows liquids which will turn rancid quickly to be drained away.

You then place in your kitchen, office canteen, or restaurant waste, alternating layers with more bokashi.

As the bokashi is wetted by the organic matter, it pickles it and keeps the whole lot from souring.

By keeping the top layer of the contents sealed off from the air, you help the anaerobic process until the bucket is filled.

Once the bucket is filled, it is sealed up and allowed to fement for two weeks. Ideally you would be working on filling a second bucket during this time.

As the bucket sits you must use the spigot to drain away the liquid every 48 hours. The liquid can be diluted with water and used as a plant fertilizer or poured down the drain–especially helpful if you have a septic tank.

Once the two weeks if over you are ready to bury your compost. Dig a trench in the garden, or place directly into your compost pile. You won’t be able to plant directly on top of the site for at least a month, but if you place the bokashi compost down the center of two rows it will feed the rows as the matter decomposes.

When the contents of the bucket are tipped into the hole in the ground, be sure to sprinkle some more bokashi over the top. Then cover with soil.

Why use bokashi? For several reasons. Mainly, with bokashi and a bucket fermenter you can turn more kitchen waste in to useable compost. Things like meat scrapes, bones, and fish which normally aren’t composted become viable materials. Secondly, the time frame. Rich organic compost and bioactive soil can be achieved within a month and a half rather than 3 or more months of turning a compost pile.

In addition, infusing your soil with beneficial microbes you can combat putrid soil conditions and many of the fungi and bugs which thirve in less than ideal situations.

But wait, that’s not all. . . .The wheat bran bokashi can be used as an animal feed. We’ve just begun to feed it to our chickens with the hopeful results that their excrement will smell less, and break down quicker in the soil. It should also help keep the chickens digestive tracks working smoothly and lead to less health problems which should make them better laying hens–not to mention possible resistence to avian flu. It certainly hasn’t seemed to hurt them any. We’ll keep you informed of how it’s going.

Click here for a full set of photos.

Technorati Tags: bokashi, ems, efficient microbes, gardening, compost, chicken health, bioactive soil, avian flu

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Despite freezing temperatures this weekend, we didn’t let that keep us from preparing for a great gardening season. Although the seeds came some weeks ago, we finally just now found time to sort through them and get some started.

After dividing them into groups based on when and where we were going to plant them we got the ones requiring a long growing season started indoors in trays on a heat mat. Unfortunately we should have started some of the seeds–like the peppers–weeks ago.

Some of the remaining seeds will have to wait until the garden is warm enough to plant next month. However, several herbs and lettuces went straight into the ground in the polytunnel and should be ready for a fantastic Easter salad.

You can find more pictures here.

Technorati Tags: spring, planting, seed starting, seeds, gardening, polytunnel

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  The chicks are growing by leaps and bounds. The Cornish Roasters have doubled in size and already weigh a pound. The laying hens and specialty breeds have also doubled in size but are still around 5 ounces.

This weeks cold weather, however, took its toll and we lost another Buff Orpington chick. All the chicks are growing wing feathers and they love to stretch their wings. Unfortunately this chick flew up and over the draft shield surrounding the chicks and their food and water and spent the night out in the cold of the brooder house. We found it in the morning, but could not revive it enough to help it last.

In order to prevent this from happening again–all the chicks seem to love to fly up and perch on top of the draft shield once I removed the boards I place there to keep the warmth in– we decided to remove the draft shields altogether and let the chicks have a much larger area of the brooder house floor.

This is weeks earlier than we usually do such a thing, but I didn’t want to think of another chick being separated in such a way. The remaining chicks passed the night in the new situation just fine however, and everyone seemed bright and alert this morning. But I am keeping a closer watch on them due to the temperatures outside. Fortunately we should be getting a spell of warmer, rainy weather and our early spring should restart soon.

Technorati Tags: chickens, chicks, farming, raising your own food

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Just in time for weekend baking–Cookies! In this week’s Gastrocast we discuss chicken biosecurity, about sugar and Chef Neal experiements with three flavors of cookies–Apricot Pistachio Cardamom, White Chocolate Macadamia Mango, and Candied Ginger Coconut Lime.
Don’t miss out, Subscribe to the show either in iTunes or your favorite podcatcher. The subscription is free and the each new show will magically appear on your computer ready for you to listen to or transfer to your mp3 player.

Stay tuned for next week’s show where we’ll be cooking the beef brisket we corned in Gastrocast #42. To round out the show we’ll be asking a distinguished tasting panel to rate our home cured corned beef against two commercially made products.

Technorati Tags: cookies, baking, cooking podcast, gastrocast, podchef, food, cooking podcast, chicken biosecurity, corned beef

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Years ago, our current brooding house was a chicken house proper. We had around 50 laying hens and a large yard outside. Meanwhile we used the smaller chicken house as a brooding house, and to house chickens we were raising for meat. There was a problem with the yard to the large house, however, in that it was on a steep hill and in wet weather the base of the hill, between the coop got quite mucky. When we decided to abandon the larger house and move our laying hens–25–to the smaller coop, the large coop was cleaned, sanitized and made into a storage/dumping ground. All the fencing was removed and nature ran wild. Just outside the original yard there has always been a burn-pile. A place to burn rubbish, unrecyclable waste paper, old christmas trees and weeds. The odd cabinet has met its final end there too.

In order to give the new chicks a place to bask in the sun when they are older, I have spent the past few days making a new yard for them. I am not resurecting the old, mucky yard but have instead gone the other direction–into the burn pile. Since we rarely burn waste these days, and when we do, it isn’t much any way I have sifted the old three foot high pile and scattered the ash and carbon over the ground. I also combed out a ton of rusty steel, melted aluminum and unburnt bits of Sears catalogue.

Now, I asked myself how was I going to turn this barren waste land of carbon into a decent yard for chickens which will be providing me food? The easy answer is plant a good blend of pasture grasses including clover–to help fix nitrogen in the soil. But the very problem with this spot is that so much burning has gone on that there is nothing living in the soil to aid nutrition for grass or chickens or bugs.

Enter the realm of beneficial microbes. After preparing the ground like I would have for planting grass in normal soil, all the compost on that I could spare–ie, not much: about 2 wheelburrow loads. Now this is pretty good compost, full of worms but not enough of it to make a dent in the nutrient needs of 600 square feet of wasteland. So I spread the grass seed out and then sprayed on a mixture of Phototropically Enhanced Efficient Microbes–or EM’s, water and a ceramic powder which aids the EMs activities. Now Efficient Microorganisms, or EMs, are a bioactive method of reenergizing soil with beneficial “bugs” to aid in plant growth and soil harmony. I am relatively new to the science of it, and so everything is an experiemnt, but I know others who use it to knock down the odors of chicken manure and treat their soil, so I’d thought I’d give it a try. I am also using EMs in a process involving pickling kitchen waste to turn it into compost through the use of a fermented wheat bran product called Bokashi–but more on that another time.

To be specific, what I did was mix 3 tablespoons of EM solution (with the added phototropic microbes), 1 teaspoon of Ceramic Cera-C powder (good for fighting fungus and activating the microbes) and 2 gallons of water in my garden sprayer. After I spread the seed over the soil, I sprayed the whole lot with about 1 gallon of the mixture. Then I got the bright idea to cover it all with some old, slightly moldy hay I have laying around. It’s been out all winter and is sprouting grass on its own, so why not? As I opened up a bale I was greeted by a bonus surprise–worms, tons of them! So I covered the ground with the damp and funky hay–something I ususally wouldn’t do because of all the weed seed local grass hay has–and then I sprayed another gallon of the EM solution over everything again. The ceramic powder, and the EMs are supposed to help fight fungus, molds and everything bad bug-wise, so I am hoping this will help keep things from getting creepy. The mixture I made was on the strong side because of the lack of microbes present in the soil due to the burning activity. I then dampened everything as I would have for normal grass planting.

Now we shall sit back and wait. I will probably treat the soil/hay several more times at weekly intervals with the EM solution to make sure there are enough microbes to fight the funky hay and help it break down and to give the soil and boost and the worms something to eat. The EMs will also help balance the PH of the soil, which I suppose is overly alkiline due to all the ash. The EM solution in very acid–will harmony ensue? If anything will grow in the spot, then hopefully by the time the chicks are ready to venture outside in 5 weeks they will be met with lush pastures to toddle onto. And if this idea works in this spot I’ve several other areas which lack fertility no matter how much organic material I churn in. Time will tell. In a few weeks I will begin to feed some of my homemade Bokashi to the big chickens for added vigor, better digestion, less stinky waste and a bloom of health stong enough to fight the Avian Flu, or so runs my hypothesis. We shall see in the months to come.

Technorati Tags: EM, Efficient Microorganisms, bioactive, organic farming, Bokashi, chickens, avian flu, brrreeeport

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The weather finally broke enough to warm up and quit blowing. Over the last few sunny days I have ventured out to work on the polytunnel.  You can track the complete progress here. I am glad to have it finally covered so the soil can begin to warm up and dry out enough to work. I can also now head in on wet days to finish picking the rocks and sticks out and complete the final grading.

We should be starting the plants for the tunnel indoors this week, by the time they have sprouted I am hoping to have the doors done and the inside of the tunnel ready.

Technorati Tags: polytunnel, gardening, hoophouse, hoop house, greenhouse, diy, kitchen garden company

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A new Gastrocast is available–We introduce the new chicks, talk about why we producie our own food and cook a fantastic winter dish–Choucroute Garni.

Next week we’ll revisit the Corned Beef experiment.

Technorati Tags: sauerkraut, gastrocast, podchef, cooking podcast, cooking, food, meats, sausages

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