Revealing the Hidden Harvest

These people are my friends. I heart them. They radiate awesomeness. And so does their new project.

"Ensuring Ottawa's fruit and nuts are valued, picked, and shared.

Hidden Harvest Ottawa is a social enterprise launching this spring, supporting Ottawa's urban orchard through planting trees and organizing harvest events.

We will be seeking lead volunteers to organize community harvest events (training provided), as well has volunteer harvesters and tree owners who would like the bounty from their edible trees to be put to good use.

Sign up to be the first to hear when we are accepting applications for volunteers and harvest locations.

Together we will make good use of healthy, local food. We will be addressing climate change with our forks, and building community by sharing our urban abundance!"


If you live in Ottawa, you should check it out!

This is Not an Empty Pot

This is not an empty pot. You wouldn't believe what all lies underneath this steamer basket. There is a hearty stew here, piles of steaming hot, seasoned rice, simmering beans, a nourishing and healing drink to be served to a loved one feeling under the weather, a rich vegetable soup, a green smoothie, your daily vitamin and mineral supplement. Heck, there is even a great, chemical-free fertiliser for your house plants here. And I don't think it's too much of a stretch to tell you there's something for your pets too.

One of the things I learned in my permaculture course was that when a resource enters into a system (like water for example) you want to put it to as many uses as possible before it cycles through or leaves the system. I think about this a lot and wherever possible I try to practice this principle in my life. So whenever I take food out of the oven (in the cold seasons), I leave the oven door ajar allowing the hot air to escape into the room, thus putting that use of electricity to two uses: cooking food and heating my space. I collect my dish rinse water in a bucket and use it to flush the toilet. And when I steam vegetables (which I'm doing a lot of these days) I keep the nutrient rich, flavourful vegetable water left in the bottom of pot and put it to many, many uses.

This leftover vegetable water serves as a base for soups and stews. You can cook rice, beans and pasta in it. Add a splash to your morning smoothie. Season it with herbs, salt and pepper and serve hot in a mug for a nourishing beverage to sip on. I especially like to mix this with my homemade bone broth. I even water my plants with it. And if I had pets I would mix some in with their food. I freeze what I can't use right away. Rarely, a little might end up in the compost. But the one thing I never, ever do is pour it down the drain.

This vegetable water is from a steamed buttercup squash. It's so beautiful and tasted wonderful!

A Lifetime of Quiet Adventure

Well it's official. I completed my permaculture design course! It was such a rich, full course with fantastic instructors and a great group of fellow participants. My brain has a lot to digest over the coming months and years. I recently heard permaculturist and author of Edible Forest Gardens Dave Jacke say in relation to the practice of permaculture that, "we have a lifetime of quiet adventure ahead of us." How lovely is that? A lifetime of quiet adventure. Yes! Bring it on.

Now that the course is finished I finally have time to do all my fall gardening, foraging and harvesting. Everything's getting done in much smaller chunks now that the days are rapidly shortening, but I like the pace. It means I'm home with plenty of time to make dinner and can also spend some time catching up on chores inside the house. Things tend to descend into a state of organised chaos during the summer months when most of my free time is spent outside, but come fall I like to fluff up the nest and give it a thorough cleaning in preparation for hibernating.

I'm planting garlic right now and I'm so grateful for the mild weather we're having. We'd like to double our garlic harvest next year, so the 140 bulbs or so are going in 20 or 30 bulbs at a time in various patches throughout our four plots. In true permaculture fashion I'm stacking functions by harvesting dandelion roots at the same time.

Yes folks, it's dandelion season! I harvest roots in the early spring too, but I find the fall roots have a richer flavour. It's a good time to harvest leaves as well, as the frosts will have taken some of the bitterness out and sweetened them up a bit. For me though, I'm all about the roots. I love roasted dandelion root coffee, and this year I want to harvest enough to last me all winter.

My method is pretty simple. If I see a dandelion growing in my garden beds, I welcome it with open arms and give it room to grow. I'll harvest flowers and leaves and if it starts taking up a bit too much space, I might cut it back once or twice. I make sure to let some flowers go to seed, ensuring a continual crop. Some dandelions I leave for a season to get nice and big. But when it's time to work and plant a bed (like I'm doing now with garlic) I harvest any dandelion roots in the bed by gently loosening the soil around the roots with a garden fork and pulling them out of the ground.

Yes, washing, chopping, drying and roasting is lengthy and labour intensive, but I find it enjoyable work and I know the rewards will be great. Amazing even. It's that good. Here's a nice description of the process.
And some more sources on the awesomeness of dandelion:
Steve Brill on Dandelion

Dandelion: Unsung Heros of the Plant World

Mother Earth News

Speaking of quiet adventure, I borrowed a friend's van and the ADG and I went out last night and liberated about 40 bags of "yard waste" from the neighbourhood and brought them to our plots where we'll use them to mulch beds and create leaf mold. Hopefully, one day I won't need fossil fuels for the job, because the food forest that is in my future will generate its own!

I hope you all are having many wonderful, quiet adventures!

Wordless Wednesday: Winter is Coming

Wordless Wednesday

Wild Grape Juice

On Monday I took all the grapes I had picked the day before and washed them in this big tub.
I skimmed off the leaves and dead, dried up grapes that floated to the surface of the water.

In another container, a 5 gallon food grade plastic pail, I put in about a dozen clusters of grapes at a time. I crushed the grapes with my grandmother's sauerkraut stomper, covered with a plastic bag so it wouldn't get too stained.


When enough juice was released from the grapes I strained them through a colander into the biggest pot I have. I highly recommend doing this part outside and wearing clothes that you don't mind getting stained, because this is messy work. I also wore rubber gloves whenever I had to handle the crushed grapes so that I wouldn't absorb any of the tartrate crystals through my skin, which can be very painful. The seeds, stems, skins and pulp leftover, went directly into the compost.
When the pot was full, I brought it in and strained the juice through my reusable coffee filter and a jelly bag. I repeated this process until the pot was empty.

The containers of juice sat in the fridge for a couple of days to allow the tartrates to settle out to the bottom. You can see the 2 or 3 inches of tartrate sludge in the jar on the left, and about an inch in the one on the right.

At this stage I carefully poured off the tartrate free juice into smaller bottles.

I ended up with about a gallon of drinkable juice and four cups of tartrate sludge that got composted. The juice is drinkable at this point, but it is very strong and quite tart. Diluting it with water or other fruit juices, however, makes for a very refreshing beverage. If you have a sweet tooth you definitely want to add a sweetener. You can also take the juice and make grape jelly or wild grape wine.

I have way more juice then I will go through in the next little while so I put most of this into the freezer to enjoy at a later date. I think some of the apple cider I pressed a few weeks ago with a hit of wild grape juice, sometime in the middle of January, will be a welcome treat!

Viva Vitis!

I was out harvesting harvesting wild grapes and black walnuts with friends on Sunday.
The grapes are prolific this year. The area we were in was full of them.

The clusters were nice and juicy! And tart!

I'm using the grapes I picked for wild grape juice. I'll post about that process later this week, but you can read about how Sam Thayer does it here.

When harvesting wild grapes, be sure you don't confuse them with Virginia Creeper (the small berries with the red stems in the back of this pic) or Canada Moonseed.

Kawartha Ecolgoical Growers

A few weeks ago, the ADG and I travelled to the beautiful Kawartha Lakes area to visit a friend. My friend lives on a farm with two of her friends. Together, the three friends make up one part of a CSA collective called the Kawartha Ecological Growers (KEG). The KEG is unique in that over 20 small, family farms from around the Kawartha Lakes have come together to offer delicious produce, meat and preserves to CSA members in Toronto, all year round. From their site: "Working together allows us to reduce our emissions through shared transportation, build community amongst small scale sustainable growers, and provide a large variety of local, sustainable food to local chefs, eaters and non-profit organizations within 100 miles of the source."
We timed our visit on the weekend of their harvest party for members, friends and fellow farmers. Corn and sausage cooked over a grill. Long tables were filled up with potluck meals. Tents were pitched in the fields. Coolers were filled with ice to chill beverages. Children ran around, giddy on fresh air and open spaces. There was a tomato tasting with about a billion different varieties of tomatoes I had never heard of. The yard was dotted with groups of people chatting and laughing.

The amazing ChocoSol crew were there with their bicycle powered mill, grinding up fresh corn for tortillas and beans. Their specialty chocolate drink was there too. (If you've been to the Hillside music festival in the last few years, you probably have tasted this out of this world, frothy chocolate deliciousness in a cup!)

The party was in part a fundraiser to eventually get this bus running on veggie oil with solar power refrigeration.

Over in another field, an entertainment section was set up, so when everyone had their fill of yummy food and the sun went down....

...we lit the bonfire and the samba band started to play. Everyone shook what their momma gave them rather vigorously. After the samba band, King Roller hit the stage. Their set had to be cut short though, due to a lightening storm. What followed was the craziest, most beautiful light show I have ever seen. The lightening seemed to go on for hours. The ADG and I found a quiet spot in the tomato patch to watch in wonder and awe at what nature can do. The end of the night found people crammed into a tiny shed, dancing until the wee hours to Bollywood tunes. I missed most of that since I was already snuggled nice and cozy in my little tent, listening to the sound of the rain that finally came.


The next day, people slowly crawled out of their tents one by one. Someone put coffee on, more tortillas got made with scrambled eggs and hot peppers. One of the fires was stoked and what corn was left got cooked over the hot coals. More sausage came out. Fresh apples and carrots too. Children ran around and played, small groups of people chatted and laughed. Revelers packed up and trickled out, back to their homes, and the ADG and I rolled on down the country road.

What I really loved about this visit, aside from catching up with a dear friend I rarely have the chance to see, was the sense of joy, celebration and community from a group of people getting together to share food and have a good time. There was a feeling of letting loose after a long season of hard work and a kicking up of the heels for a job well done. It was a twinning of food and festivity the way it should be. There were no big-box, plastic platters of dried out veggies and dip. This was no pop and chip party. All the food came from a place that had meaning for most of the people there. It was food that told a story of farmer, soil, rain, eater and the relationship between them all. It was a kind of experience I never get from the grocery store, and I was so very glad to have been a part of it.

If you live in the GTA check out the KEG's CSA.

This Cider House Totally Rules!

For the second year in a row, I've had the great good fortune of being invited to a friend's cottage to pick apples and press some cider!
There are quite a few apple trees growing near the cottage, so the group went out on Saturday afternoon to gather apples.

The best way to get the apples down, was to climb up the tree and give it a good shake.

A hook over a sturdy branch and apple pickers work well too.

Once our baskets were full we brought them back for cleaning, sorting and pressing, most of which happened on Sunday.
After the apples have been cleaned, sorted and the really rotten and wormy bits cut out, they go into the hopper for grinding. This sweet set-up has a DIY electric grinder, set over a hand turned grinder for maximum crushing action.

The crushed apples go through the grinders into a big, plastic garbage pail set underneath.

Once the pail is full enough, the crushed apples go into the press.

The wooden blocks are assembled....


...and the pressing begins!

Mmm....delicious cider! We all got to take some home and we filled a giant carboy that our gracious host plans to turn into hard cider.

Some of the cider crew.

In between pressings there was time to take in the beautiful view.


What a fabulous weekend with a truly wonderful group of folks!