Sunday Dinner

Here at the Farmitage, we have decided to embrace the wholesomeness of the Sunday Dinner. Each Sunday evening we convene to discuss the needs of the crops, take care of business, and harvest the ready vegetables for the evening feast. This past Sunday, we our dinner featured the greens and onions of the bed we lovingly call "Nighthawk." The whole clan was in attendance: the Breach, Koan, RIK, Half-pint, Brooke Fly, and Max B.

For this inaugural supper, Max B. and I, Brooke Fly, took the helm in the kitchen. We harvested butterhead and greenstar lettuce, spinach, and mustard greens, tossed them in a zesty lemon dressing of Max B.'s design, and topped the salad with feta-stuffed hamburgers, banana peppers, and tomatoes. Delicious. To accompany this fresh, yet hardy, salad, I whipped up chinese scallion pancakes with our lisbon bunching onions. You can find the recipe here.



We dipped these golden disks in a tangy ginger sauce. Despite the unusually chilly June evening, we gathered around the picnic table to rejoice in the fruits of our labor, toasting our meal with champagne. Only the best here at the Farmitage.

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Vigorously Till And Sow The Fruitful Earth!

In honor of International Workers Day and the joint government-union takeover of Chrysler, the crew met on Saturday, May 2 for a long day devoted to purifying work. Stretching our limbs in the bright summer sun, we labored long and hard to ensure a collectively bountiful future for our children and our children's children.

With so many tasks before us, we split into three teams to ensure maximum efficiency and control over the means of production.

1. Project Plant the Earth with Many Sprouting Shoots took place in and around Nighthawk, where Brooke Fly and Max B. transplanted onions, lettuces, and spinach from our indoor grow labs.


2. Project Collect the Nourishing Tears of Heaven involved The Breach and Koan rigging a platform for our soon-to-be-online rain barrel system from discarded bricks, slimy clay, and chicken wire.

3. Project Clear the Front Yard of Capitalist Weeds and Sow It Gently With Healthful and Flowering Seeds saw RIK and Half-Pint cleaning, tilling, and planting the front yard ("The Hangar") with Rodeo Oats, Hairy Vetch, and Field Peas.

Photos below the fold.

Behold the 'Tage


Max. B and The Breach are toolsy.

Cassie supervises RIK and Half Pint in The Hangar.

We told The Breach there was a Snickers at the bottom of the barrel,
but it was really an ornery raccoon.


Max B. and Brooke Fly tend with maternal care
to precious baby onions.


"Looks great, guys! Now how do I cross."

RIK commands rain to fall on The Hangar.

Soon, soon, soon . . . .

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Thunderchief layout

The showpiece bed at Farmitage, Thunderchief is 48 sq. ft. of pure vegetable muscle. Here's all you need to know about the Chief:

1. He's prettier than you are.
2. Inch for inch he is the most valuable real estate in Logan Square.
3. If the Chief saw a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk he would NOT stop to pick it up. That's how productive he is.
4. There is only one Thunderchief but if there were two, the plural would be Thunderchieves.
5. Do not fuck with the Chief. Read More...

AWACS layout

Here's an initial draft of the layout for AWACS. The dimensions of the bed are 4' by 7.5'. We made AWACS shorter than the other beds because we didn't want to cover an inconveniently-located sewer cap. Read More...

I Wanna Lay Pipe

Team Farmitage went house on the backyard last weekend, turning a scrubby patch of lead-poisoned soil into a construction site. The plan: construct our first two raised beds (codenamed AWACS and Nighthawk). The materials: garage doors and shadily-acquired fence posts. The tools: a Sawzall and a wicked mallet. The results: see for yourselves.

No, you may not look at my secret blueprints! Can you believe this girl?

Steel garage doors are sharp and rusty and fun to work with.

Behold my handiwork.

Yes, we are growing a Brooke Fly in this cold frame.

Teach . . . you . . . to talk shit . . . about . . . my hammering skills . . . .

Immediately thereafter, Koan whacked himself in the leg and hoped The Breach didn't notice.

RIK and Half Pint lay pipe.

Whenever we doubted ourselves, we looked at our magnificent compost bins for reassurance. We can do this.

Michelle, we love your sense of style. But your miniskirt-and-booties getup is ridiculous for yard work. Oh, and a backyard garden? For sustainable urban agriculture? What a great fuckin' idea! Wish we'd thought of that first! Our lawyers will be in touch.

The entire day is summed up by the look on Max B.'s face: God I love the Sawzall.

RIK and Half Pint construct Nighthawk as Max B. realizes somebody bogarted his wallet.

Sniper!

You guys go ahead and work on AWACS, I'm going to sit down at the table and check out this pale ale.

Goddamn those raised beds look good.

Yes, yes they do.

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Our secret recipes...revealed!

After reading RIK's post about making micro-green pesto, I thought I'd share the two recipes we settled on as the very best (you can see the results of our vigorously nerdy taste-test here and here; good spreadsheets and MSWord tables are, for better or worse, a part of the Farmitage ethos).

As RIK mentioned, we used a food processor to make each of our pestos. The rest of the preparation is pretty straightforward: add the ingredients, one by one, and keep pushing down on that pulse button. The olive oil is usually added gradually, as the final ingredient.

And yes...this is a world wide web exclusive: get in line, micro-green pesto innovators!

Without further ado:

Recipe 1: Roasted Garlic and Walnut Micro-Green Pesto (i.e. "the Pauly Walnuts")
Ingredients:
1. 3 cups micro-greens (ours were a mix of sunflower, daikon radish and broccoli raab)
2. 1/2 cup toasted walnuts
3. 1/2 cup shredded parmesean
4. 1 head roasted garlic
5. 1 clove raw garlic, minced
6. 1/2 cup olive oil
Flavor: The roasted garlic compliments the original flavor of the micro-greens really well. The daikon radish and micro-green earthiness come through clearly, but it still tastes like a good ol' fashioned pesto.

Recipe 2: Sun-Dried Tomato and Minced Garlic Micro-Green Pesto (i.e. "the Vafangu")
Ingredients:
1. 5 cups micro-greens
2. 5 cloves of raw garlic, minced
3. 1 teaspoon lemon juice
4. 1/2 cup toasted pine nuts
5. 1/4 cup shredded parmesean
5. 2/3 cup olive oil
6. 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes, drained and thinly sliced
Special note: Leave all the sun-dried tomatoes and a 1/4 cup of the pine nuts out of the food processor and add them when the rest of the pesto is done.
Flavor: This one had a really pleasant, low-key taste, pretty similar to a regular basil pesto. The mouthfuls with a few slices of sun-dried tomato and one or two whole pine nuts were particularly good.
Attribution: This recipe is suspiciously similar to this one, with micro-greens tagged in for the arugula. Read More...

"There is no room for that beer; the fridge is full of microgreens."

A few weekends ago Max B. and I dreamed about what we'll do when we have excess bounty from the Farmitage. (We hope we didn't get ahead of ourselves.) To explore this ideal, we ran an experiment using extra microgreens produced in the science lab run in the daytime by Max B. and The Breach.

We had about 5 lbs. of various microgreens (radish, sunflower, cress, etc.) to use up--all on the bitter side. What to do when you have excess bitter greens that are best served uncooked? Clearly, pesto! Since pesto is raw and vegetable-based, there aren't really any hard rules which was a plus to the medium. After a search for "microgreen pesto" gave us nothing, we tagged in arugula and had options galore, none of which were off the table, including dubious ones like yours, Robert Love.

Our tools were pretty basic: a food processor (with an engine that smells like burning), a cheese grater, wine, stale baguette, and a few Lyle Lovett albums, most notably Pontiac. The night proceeded accordingly and ended with a classic taste test. Summation: Our hypothesis that microgreens can replace arugula was indeed correct, and roasted garlic is still the best pesto ingredient.

Anyway, I think the pictures pretty much speak for themselves. Enjoy!






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A blog is born

If you find yourself staring at these words, you are probably pondering the normal existential questions: What am I doing here? Why has this blog come to be?

In the interest of enlightenment, I’ll dispense with these questions below.

The Farmitage was born of a fairly simple idea. My roommates and I, who live together in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, have a big, sunny backyard and wanted to start a garden. Meanwhile, some of our other friends were just starting to get really interested in big ideas like sustainability and permaculture.

Conspiratorial discussions ensued, often over red wine, High Life, or rye whiskey. Soon, our plan for a little tomato patch out back had grown into something bigger. What we were proposing, we realized, was an old-fashioned cooperative, something we knew about because one or two of us have hippie parents. The six of us, RIK, the Breach, Koan, Brooke, Half Pint, and myself, would pool our labor, capital and ingenuity to build the best little urban farm we could.

Our main mission is now pretty clear: We want to produce as much good food as we can on a small city lot, while keeping costs low and taking full advantage of free and available resources. Along the way, we also hope to construct something of a philosophy of life. We’ll let you know that goes.

Why the blog, then? We see it as a tool both to share and document what we’re doing and to solicit advice from people who have been there before. Feel free to email us or badger our comments sections when you think we’re doing something crazy or when you just want to say hi. In fact, we’d love it if you would.

Over the next few days, we’ll begin outlining the work we’ve already done, from our first planning and design meetings to the urban foraging we’re up to our necks in now. After that, we’ll try to post whenever we do major work on the garden or learn something that seems worth sharing. We’ll maintain this blog as an up-to-date journal of what we’re doing and what ideas we strike along the way.

Thanks for checking in, and come back soon, if just to will spring into coming a few weeks early. Let's close with a toast: To Farmitage, to springtime, to life! Read More...