The Kitchen Garden Company

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Last week we got a half pig from a local farmer and spent our “spare” time butchering and  turning it into some fantastic ham, roasts, hocks, bacon and sausages. There is no more holistic food experience than taking a once live creature and preparing it for eating and sharing.
The bacons–one section of belly as a traditional dry-cured, unsmoked bacon; another section of belly dressed up as pancetta and the two jowls from the pig’s head as Guanciale: a specialty italian-style bacon–will be ready to come out of the cure tomorrow and get hung in a special wooden drying cabinet we built on the north side of the house to take advantage of the cool bay breezes to dry age for a few weeks.

The sausages–Spanish Chorizo pictured here–were hung to dry for a few days. Because summer is coming on and we don’t have ready access to a smokehouse, the ham is being cured and will probably be frozen for completion at a later date before a celebration worthy of its size and depth of flavor.

You can read more about the adventure here. And have a listen to Gastrocast #56 where I speak about the experience a bit.  If all goes well in the future we shall be expanding our pig skills more and hopefully be bringing our own Kitchen Garden Company reared pork and pork products into the public arena.

Technorati Tags: pork, pigs, butchering, gastrocast, farming, sausages, chorizo

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If you are from the IACP and are here checking out Neal Foley, The Gastrocast or The Kitchen Garden Company–Welcome!

To learn more about podcasting, please check out Franklin McMahon’s wonderful information.

Here is the free Gastrocast, downloadable, PDF Cookbook.

Thanks you for visiting. I have enjoyed meeting you all and look forward to continuing our conversations during the rest of the conference.

UPDATE 04/04/06:

Here is some audio I caught at the conference.

First is the opening panel session on Creativity; note I edited due to sound quality and for length–it’s not all here.

Second, for those who missed it, is the fantastic discussion on The Whole Pig with Kate Hill, Fergus Henderson and Judy Witts.

Also, for those of you who didn’t see Dan Barber and Fergus Henderson in “On Authenticity”–the film playing continually in the hospitality room–here is a link to it. It is very worth a view and the comments are fantastic. It’s unfortunate the audio was not available during the conference.
To keep up to date on all the events here please subscribe to our RSS feed. I’ll be posting more audio in the following days.
All the best and Keep on Cookin’–Neal

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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 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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Welcome to the Kitchen Garden Company Site!

We’re currently working on things to make the site a bit easier to navigate and find the information that you’re looking for. Please bear with us.

If you wish to have a look at the old site, while we make these changes, please visit: http://kitchengardenfoods.com/0index1.html

Thanks!

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