workshops

I'm giving workshops to students interested in sustainable food production. For me that means taking what grows on the farm and making the very most out of it, preserving abundance and appreciating just how much beauty and joy and taste and energy a (fruit) tree creates.

For the student it means spending a day on the farm, in the kitchen and orchards watching, experiencing and learning how to do the things I learned from my grandmothers and from my own trials and errors. The students are all North American or European college students or freshly graduated who are down in Costa Rica to learn more about sustainable development or environmental issues or organic farming. They are fun to work with, armed with notebooks and pens, bright eyed and eager, and surprised and grateful at discovering how easy things can actually be.

We start with harvesting whatever is available in the orchards, it might be charichuelo, carambola, araza, cas, nutmeg - depends. While we gather I talk about the farm, cacao production, what happened when the cacao blight hit, monocultures, big plantations. We walk through rainforest back to the kitchen: perfect opportunity to talk about biodiversity, permaculture and tropical farming. We stop to look for edible mushrooms or pick some edible leaves.

Back in the kitchen we make sourdough bread and talk about making the culture. I have them take care of any sprouts that might be growing: both are such easy excellent ways to begin bringing consciousness into one's eating and living, as well as slowing down one's pace by engaging with one's food. I start soybeans for tempeh while they prepare the fruit we harvested.

It's good to see processes through in their entirety so after the fruit is washed and trimmed we make fruit leather and jam, or blend it to make frozen yogurt, or use it in cookies. Or usually all of the above. It helps when students can see different ways to use the fruit and sample the simplicity of each, basically it's just variation on the theme of banana for example, or pineapple. What I want them to experience is that there is absolutely enough and that with a little imagination and creativity, life can be very simple.

We drink kombucha and talk about cultures, ferments and microbes. So many North Americans are raised being afraid of 'dirt' that they don't know just how good it can be! I talk them around my microbe wall, electromicroscope images of lactobacillus, aspergillus, mycelium, rhizopus - all incredibly beautiful and bursting with energy.

Lunch is our sourdough bread with homemade hummus, tempeh or Miguel's cheese, served with whatever we found on our walk, and fruit. After lunch the tempeh is ready to incubate and there's jam to be bottled, dried fruit to be packaged, and sprouts to be watered again. And cookies to look forward to.

The students have an experience of every part of production, from harvest through preparation, drying, baking or preserving, to packaging and labeling. This is a working farm and we sell what we produce. Sustainable means taking heed of livelihood as well as the environment, and I believe it is important to show that one can live well by living simply with one's environment and making the best of what one can find.

Usually by the time afternoon coffee and cookies rolls around the students are so immersed in jams and jars, molds and yeasts, that I'm the only one eating. My small library of books is well thumbed and recipes and addresses are scribbled down on floury pages, while the talk is all about sustainable agriculture and the future of food.

Tomorrow I have two young women coming, one from France working on her masters in Sustainable Development and the other from the States who's thesis is on Food Security. We'll be making bread, tempeh, carambola chutney, lovi-lovi and carambola jam, cas fruit leather, dried bananas and candied ginger. Oh and cookies.

new arrivals

It's been a week of new arrivals: a friend visiting from the States brought baggage full of wonderful treasures and it's taken us time to sort through everything. Most important were the live cultures and mold spores for shiitake, tempeh and koji, all of which arrived safely.

The shiitake spores are now inoculated into several logs of laurel and macadamia. It was a process finding the right logs - the correct balance of heart and sapwood, the perfect ratio of bark, wood density and age are all important factors in selection. One wants logs which are easy enough to transport, plus the larger the log the longer it takes for the mycelium to fully colonize - and the further away the mushroom harvest. We selected differing sizes to stagger harvest times and to see which type and size is most suitable to our climate and temperature. Trees have anti-fungal properties which weaken as the trees die, allowing nature to take her course and the wood to become home to decomposers. Thus we had to find logs which were dead, but not so dead that they already housed a host of fungi types. Many of the logs lying around here in the tropics are still alive and will sprout new growth from bark or tips: it took time even here on the farm to find suitable pieces. Another issue is finding logs which are termite free - we want our mycelium to feed on the wood, not insects! Finally we had enough for our 300 dowels laden with shiitake mycelium. It was then a case of drilling holes, hammering in the dowels and sealing with wax (I melted down Stockmar beeswax crayons from my former life). Now the logs are sitting below some hefty heliconia plants in good shade just by the kitchen. We'll hopefully be eating mushrooms from them in a few months. Very excited! Cultivating mushrooms will close the circle here on the farm, more on that later.

My fresh tempeh starter is wonderful, and the koji? Well I'm very excited about the koji and look forward to making our own miso and amazake, but the next week or so is very busy with the reforestation project and so my forays into Aspergillus oryzae will have to wait.

Another wonderful new arrival at the farm is our new beagle, Duku. Duku is already 7 months old and super sweet. Right now he is running madly all over, nose to the ground and short legs bounding through the foliage taking it all in. Must be lovely to be a puppy.

new kitchen

We've moved production out of the house and into a new kitchen above the office. It's a beautiful space built from wood sustainably harvested from the farm along with a fine slab of pilon from a friend. We splurged rather heavily on new appliances and so have a spanking new 13 cubic foot fridge, a 3 ring gas stovetop and a small convection oven. We also have a built in incubator for the tempeh and a built in dehydrator for many things. And there's hot water from solar collectors in the roof!! There are many windows - with screens, and I'm right above the nursery and the medicinal garden, quite a lovely work environment. This may well mean that I'll finally get out of the kitchen and back into the dirt, it's been a long while . . .

It's hot and sunny here at last and working in the kitchen is a bit of a bikram experience: with the stove and oven on, the incubator and dehydrator going and the ambient temperature in the 80s, I must be dropping pounds in sweat alone. But it feels really good.

kitchen farm

While the farmer is off doing his thing, today working on a landslide area, I’m working in my kitchen farm, tending all my various shoots, microbes, bacteria, yeasts and fungi. It’s a wonder to be around such basic life forces, to bathe in the abundance of energy necessary for constant generation and growth. Bacteria, yeasts and fungi are the root sources of all life on earth, the parents to us all, and to watch them at work is very comforting. Life goes on regardless of what I think or feel or do. I just participate.

And so here I am surrounded by and happy in my kitchen farm. There are the sprouting mung beans and brown rice grains, smelling a little warm, full of promise and potential. The mungs have cracked their bright green coats and are sending out the first tendril of root, crookedly searching for a place to hold. The rice is just beginning, looking swollen and ready to waken into life.

On the window ledge the sourdough starter is fermenting. A mix of wholewheat flour and water welcoming the yeasts present in the air. It smells good; bubbles are beginning to form, testifying to the yeasts’ presence. What else can it be than magic that calls the yeasts? Every now and again the batter must be stirred to distribute the yeasts throughout the mix to encourage their growth.

Close by the kombucha vats squat. The kombucha is the mother hen of my kitchen farm. We have two vats, one for the market, and another continuous brew for ourselves. The continuous brew is fed daily and her fresh tea cools as we sit down to our breakfast. The market vat is created anew every week, drained and bottled on a Friday night and started afresh Saturday afternoon. The kombucha is not a true fungus, rather a community of bacteria, yeasts and enzymes called a scoby. The scoby feeds off the sugars and nitrogen supplied in the tea. As she feeds she produces an offspring that can be harvested each week, the scoby in our continuous brew is huge, perhaps 2 inches thick and 14 inches in diameter. Soon I will have to peel some layers off or we’ll run out of room for tea!

Below the vats, in a quiet little corner sits the kimchi. The kimchi looks like the sleepiest member of the farm, from the outside nothing much seems to be happening. But inside those big glass jars fermentation is happening at a frenzied rate as the lactobacilli bacteria essentially changes the chemical composition of the cabbage, carrots, cucumbers and homegrown green beans.

The busiest section of my indoor farm happens on the other side of the kitchen, though the process can spread all over the place by midweek. Here is the fungus proper, my dear rhizopus oligosporus. Tempeh. Just now I have two types and a new starter on the go, regular soybean tempeh and a black bean variation. In an attempt to keep my production more sustainable I’m looking for more local sources of legumes, soy doesn’t grow in Costa Rica: the closest place is the southern US. Black beans certainly grow here, though to be really sustainable I would use what we can grow on the farm. I could make tempeh from gandul (pigeon peas), yard long beans or perhaps winged beans, but only enough for home use. Soy has advantages too; it has the highest protein and is arguably the best tasting. But this is off topic for this post. My little rhizopus farm is a cozy place where each perforated Ziploc bag acts as a mini greenhouse for the creeping white mycelium. It takes about 20 hours to grow into harvestable tempeh. For the first maybe 12 hours there seems to be little change to the beans. Then as if by magic they begin to generate heat and thicken, becoming more dense and solid. After about 16 hours the first thin threads of mycelium can be seen, and by the 20th hour the beans can barely be spotted below a thick nap of soft snowy fungus.

The line between good healthy growth and rot is a narrow one. I tried making black bean tempeh from a can of pre-cooked beans. It took a long time for the mycelium to appear despite using extra spores and it never really took hold - other bacteria moved in and began to digest the beans into a smelly slimy mess. I guess I have weeds in my kitchen farm too.

farm chores

Working with Fukuoka’s natural farming method really keeps farm chores to a minimum. With no tilling, no spraying, no pruning we are left with time for other things. That’s not to say there’s no work to be done. There’s fruit and spices to be picked, flowers to be pollinated, paths to be maintained, seeds to be started, mulching to be done, and of course there’s plenty of work in the nursery.

My chores really though are centered around getting ready for the farmers’ market. Each morning I put on tea for the kombucha and while it’s cooling I rinse the mung bean and alfalfa sprouts. Depending on the day I’ll either be milling and soaking soy beans or preparing the tempeh, and checking on how the tempeh is coming along in the incubator. If it’s a Thursday I’ll be roasting cacao. And every other day I’ll be drying fruit, or prepping dried fruit for our fruit mixes. All in it takes about 2 hours each day to complete my chores. Not too bad, especially considering I work at home in a beautiful open air kitchen and navigate my way to and fro between our 4 happy handsome and often sleepy dogs

fermentation fervour

I've been making tempeh for a few weeks now and selling it at the stall at the farmers' market, and to a local restaurant. And of course we've been eating it. It's so good, and so easy to make and really fun to make. I love the idea of things sporulating and bubbling and fermenting in dark corners all around the house and farm.
We got a couple of books to build our fervour:

The Book of Tempeh

Wild Fermentation

so juicy, so worth a look at . . .