Author: Laughing Frog Farm

Chicken tractor

Laughing Frog Farm1 Comment

It is time to take out a bit of the winter garden. This job falls on the chickens. I built a new lightweight chicken tractor out of PVC and chicken wire. I saw a picture of a similar one at the SSAWG conference last month.  One hour with 10 chickens and they should have run out of things to eat, so we move it to a new local.  Mine is 6′ x 10′ and very easy for one person to move. Now I need to build one the size of my raised beds–4′ wide.IMG_0173

I am also building a circular clam-like pen that will go around a fruit tree and fit one or two chickens to weed and debug all of the fruit trees.  That job should take about 400 hours.

Christmas can be a local event

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

We are striving to purchase anything we can from small local companies or individuals. I go to Repkas Hardware instead of Home Depot, I buy my meat direct from farmers and I get my paint from a company where I know each salesperson’s name and they know mine.  If I spend my money locally and they, in turn, do the same that money will show up in my neighbor’s hand and some of it might get back to me.  If each person in America bought $10 of fresh food every week from their local farmer it would make an impact in their community that would nationally total $150 billion dollars. That farmer can them spend his money locally and so on. It would possibly cost you less than the portion of your taxes that go to billionaire “farmers” under the current farm bill.
If each person in the greater Houston area did the same, the amount to stay here locally would be about $2.75 billion.  Make Christmas a local event.

Pesto

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

2 cups of fresh basil leaves
1/2 cup parmesan
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup walnuts
1 to 3 garlic cloves
salt and pepper

Pulse in a food processor or blender.

Preserve by freezing in an ice cube tray and transferring to a zip lock bag.

Organic should be the normal

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

Those of us who grow the worlds food responsibly are subjected to being certified, inspected, taxed and burdened with a mountain of paperwork to acquire the right to sell our food as “organic”.
Those who use deadly poisons, pollute the water, destroy the seed bank and endanger the health of the people are not burdened with such hurdles because they are normal–they are conventional.
Something is turned on its head.

We need to regulate the ones that cause the problem. A certification should be required to use synthetic chemicals. Inspections should be required to approve the poisons and altered seeds that are part of our environmental pollution. A fee should be levied to help pay for the cleanup of the pollution and to research the health effects of these synthetic herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizers and genetically altered seeds. The mountain of paperwork should document every drop of these chemicals that are put on our food, our soils and our water.
The resulting product should be labeled as an altered, chemically dependent and unnatural food product.
The product we now label as “organic” should carry the label “food”.

Fruit cobbler–easy as pie

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

Four cups of fruit/  I have used blackberries, blueberries, peaches, apricots, persimmons, etc

1/2 cup of butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1 teaspoon real vanilla extract

Melt the butter in the baking dish. (an iron skillet is a good choice).

Lightly mash the fruit with a potato masher to release juices.  If the fruit is tart add some sugar.

Mix the flour, salt, sugar and baking powder in a bowl. Mix in the milk, melted butter and vanilla.

Pour the mixture in the baking dish and pour the fruit and their juices into the center.

Bake at 350˚ for about one hour.

Eat some before the rest of the people find it.

These old hands

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

We recently saw the movie “Mirror Mirror”.  The moral of the story is that the punishment for being an evil woman is to grow old.  We watched as Julia Robert’s hand changed from youthful to looking a lot like ours. Oh the horror!!   If a woman is measured only by her beauty and youth we are wasting a lot of resources.  My grandmother taught us all until she was 95, and my mother at 85 still is a wealth of knowledge.  I don’t remember youthful hands.

Hands like these contribute a lot in this world. Growing old is a reward, not a punishment, and we are proud to be part of the growing movement.  These hands will keep picking and planting.

Wash your veggies, but don’t expect that to remove the poison.

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

I have been reading articles about “washing the pesticides off your produce before eating”. It reminded me of a piece on the radio about cleaning up the radiation at Fukushima by washing. I thought the two had something in common, though radiation is obviously an accelerated way to poison people and the planet.
How much gets washed off?
Where does the pesticide or radiation you wash off go?
The pesticide goes into the sewer or the soil where it continues to be a problem. The real truth is that you only remove a small amount of the poison by washing.  Much of the chemical has soaked into the flesh of the plant.
Pesticide contamination might not be the best reason to eat organic food. More people die of complications from fungicides each year than any other agricultural product. It is not known how these fungicides absorb into the food nor how they might affect your body when consumed.
Herbicides, like Roundup, tie up the nutrients in the soil. Nutrients like copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, iron, and calcium are in short supply or not available at all in plants grown in soil treated with glyphosate. When most of our processed and fast food contain corn and soy from “roundup-ready” grain, we should be having a health crisis in America from the lack of nutrients alone.
Ammonium and potassium nitrate are the primary nitrogen fertilizer used to stimulate growth. Excessive nitrates and nitrates might cause problems in the body.

Synthetic herbicides, fungicides, nitrates and pesticides all work together to contaminate your food and your environment and a little soap and water will not help much with those problems.
All that being said you should wash your veggies. Buy organic produce, wash off the snail residue, the bird droppings or the dirt and eat healthy.

Super bowl nachos

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment
 Saute fresh spinach from the garden in olive oil with garlic.  Cook black beans, mash them with a fork and combine with the spinach. Take organic corn chip, spoon the spinach/bean mixture on individual  chips and top that with local chevre.   Add pickled jalapenos from the summer harvest or pickled green tomatoes if you are not a jalapeno kind of person.  Heat in the microwave or broiler.

*it is important to use organic chips because they are the only ones guaranteed to be GMO free.

Planting your tomato plants.

Laughing Frog FarmLeave a comment

Set out your tomato plants as early as possible.  In Houston that should be about the second or third week of February. It takes about 6 weeks for the plant to be mature enough to fruit and they fruit best when nighttime temperatures are in the 50’s or 60’s. We get very little of that temperature range in the Houston area. Once we start having days in the 90’s with nighttime lows in the mid 70’s tomato production will be reduced or terminated. Your window of opportunity is mostly during April and May. If the temperature drops below 35˚ cover the plant with frost cloth or a sheet, etc.  Dig a hole and add one teaspoon of rock phosphate or bone meal in the bottom. Set the tomato in the ground lower than it was in the pot, even burying the seed leaves.  Sprinkle the ground around the plant with a half cup of cornmeal. This will be fungal protection. Tomatoes need to be staked or caged. Indeterminate tomatoes need a cage or stake at least 5′ tall. As leaves near the bottom turn yellow or brown remove and discard them.  You can spray them every other week with seaweed extract and/or compost tea but do not fertilize with nitrogen until the first flower is set.  Then lightly fertilize with fish emulsion or a prepared organic tomato fertilizer. It is usually advisable to add calcium to the soil at that time in the form of ag bone meal, rock phosphate, gypsum, egg shells or even powdered milk (my grandmother’s solution).  Pick the tomatoes as soon as they start to turn red (if they are a red tomato) and let them ripen at room temperature.  Never put them in the refrigerator.