Seedy business

Sharing backyard

Sharing backyard website connects people who want to grow food to people who have land!
What a neat concept!



(Wait a few seconds after starting this video. It will say ‘the current item is not currently available’ but it will soon play.)

parting words from David

"I had a spectacular time at your beautiful farm and experienced many "first times."
The food was so good I think I gained a couple of kilograms, not mentioning the fun preparing it. I had my first smoked salmon, caught my first fish, 3 cut throat trouts in the resevoir, picked oysters more than I coould eat and grinded fresh wasabi. I would also make my snail pancakes when I get back to Taiwan for sure.
Besides the food, I learned a lot of organic farming knowledge also. I was excited to see the great wall of seaweed and herring spawn which we eventually collected 2 truck loads for compost. The temperature of the piles went up to 120 F in just a few days while it snowed in this inordinary April. From harvesting to packaging to selling, I gained insight to the farmer's perspective of running business at the farmers market.
I loved the work outdoors with Basil and Jesse around. Speaking of Basil, she was the first dog that I ever played frisbee with, even though we both felt down when the frisbee sunk into the resevoir. Luckily, Lijen found a tennisball right the next day.
I had my first novice mountain bike experience in the trails in Cumberland and had a wonderful afternoon watching my first DownHill race. The picnic and ride we had along the Puntledge River trip was relaxing and adventurous at the same time.
Finally I would want to thank you all for letting me like home for the first time on this journey. I would definitely come back when I'm in BC and have even more great times."

raising lantern event in Cumberland and downhill race in Cumberland

Listen to Vandana Shiva on CBC podcast

This is a link to a podcast episode of a CBC radio show "the Current" featuring Vandana Shiva.

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/current_20090410_14227.mp3

I have posted her on this blog before. Every time I listen to this woman i'm amazed by her power and fierceness, and ability to synthesize.

she talks about how global industrialized farming is practically driving thousands of poor Indian farmers to suicide!
although her message is Indian specific it is also global as well. small farmers around the world are being driven out of their lands by big agri-company, GMO seed/chemical fertilize companies etc.

What we can do very practically in our daily lives to improve this situation?
Answer: to decentralize the food system.
which means: eat local, buy local from your local farmers (organic when affordable), eat whole foods, less meat, less processed foods, grow a patch of garden in your backyard if you can, and very importantly: learn more about where you food comes from because knowledge is empowering and we can't afford to be ignorant anymore, because our collective ignorance has helped the growth of this giant monster that is the unsustainable, industrialized food system that absolutely feeds on fossil fuels and the lives of the global poor

another two great reads to add on to this topic if you are so inclined:

The Omnivore's dilemma by Michael Pollan
Hope's Edge by Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe

The ultimate " Slow Food": Snail Pancakes and Chinese dumplings

We had Ting and Risa over for Easter weekend. They are a lovely Taiwanese couple who own a certified organic farm "Formosa Nursery" (specialize in blueberries now) in Maple Ridge near Vancouver. Sherlene acquainted them at an organic convention in Feb. Being Taiwanese, Canadian and organic, we really hit it off and enjoyed each other's company immensely. They wanted to know more about growing vegetables, so they came to visit our farm and came to the farmer's market with us on Saturday. At the end of Saturday, we laboured hard together for a mouth watering feast that consisted of "snail" pancakes and Chinese dumplings stuffed with lamb and cilantro. The results was well worth the effort!

The making of snail pancakes

step 1: make a dough using flour and boiling hot water. knead the dough into a long rope and use a rolling pin to roll it out into a long, thing, rectangular (ideally), flat piece



step 2: apply vegetable oil liberally on the flat piece, and then sprinkle salt and pepper



step 3: spread chunks of oriental green onions (thicker stemmed ones are better) over the dough. onions don't need to be chopped too finely



step 4: wrap the onions inside the flat piece of dough and form into a long rope-like thing. Be careful not to squeeze out the green onion chunks



step5: start from one end of the rope, roll it into a snail shell shaped round disk





step 6: use the hands to press the snail-shell shaped round disk, to make it flatter and formed more tightly



step 7: put it on an oiled skillet over medium heat. pan-fried about 5-10 minutes each side. cover the skillet with a lid to create a steaming action in the skillet so the pancake is fried and steamed at the same time. We coined this green onion pancake "snail pancake" not only because of it's shape, but also because of the slow process it requires to make it



until it's golden brown and crispy



cut into pieces and serve! it tasted divine! I declare that no body on the face of this earth should not like this pancake (unless they don't like green onions, but even if one doesn't like green onions he should be easily converted into liking green onions by the cooked, savory, juicy and aromatic green onions embedded in this "snail pancake"



Dumpling making party! (a great party/team building idea for any one who's looking for one)



David cooking dumplings. He looked solemn in this pictures, maybe he was just way too hungry



the fruits of our labour: snail pancake and boiled dumplings stuffed with lamb and cilantro



another way to cook dumplings: pot stickers

Go fishing!

Last Thursday Dad and I went for the first fishing expedition (hardly an expedition, since we fished at the pond on the farm) for the season. I don't know if the fish in our pond actually went into hibernation, but they certainly weren't active when the weather was cold. Salmon only come to the creek in our farm to lay eggs in the fall, while trout is the most common kind of fish found in our pond all year round. Clumsy and inexperience as i was, I was able to catch two medium-sized trout in the course of 1 hour (or longer, can't remember....), not bad. How did we eat them? Pan-fried. Simple yet delicious. The flesh was tenor, not very succulent but not dry, either, satisfying enough. It felt very empowering to be fishing for my own fish at my own pond, gut if and cook it myself: being able to fully participate in the excitement and the boredom, the beautiful and the ugly, the stinky and the aromatic process of one species eating another species



we found eggs in one trout

Spring flowers

peach flower in mid March



fields of daffodil burst out of the ground like crazy



flowers of chive

Food we eat

We love food! food is such an important connection! In our farm, we grow food, prepare food, eat food, talk about food, and most of our conversations are had when we enjoy our food.
I'll post some pictures here of a few highlights of the meals we've had recently

Dinner#1


salad green with shredded beets, carrots and pine nut



seared local albacore tuna

Dinner #2 (Michelle's birthday dinner)



top to bottom: grilled lamb leg, baked purple potatoes, artichoke and eggplant antipasto, salad (arugula, defrosted home grown tomatoes and sliced bocconcini )

Dinner# 3

This is quite an assembly of food: salad greens, raw green onions, sliced braised beef shank shin, sauteed burdock root with hijiki seaweed, olives, pickled garlic, green onion pancakes, spicy miso-tahini sauce (I borrow the idea from my friend Michael Fisher. Thanks Mike if you're reading this!), leftover Bangali lentile soup and that's beef broth in the big pot.



I know, there's a lot of random items going on here, but the main theme of the meal is the green onion pancakes. In northern China, people ate flatbread (or flour tortilla, kind of, but thicker) wrapped with raw green onions back in the days when food was scarse. a well-to-do version of that dish is to add some beef into the wrap. This dinner we were having here was our variation of this traditional northern Chinese dish.



Half of the savory green onion pancake (which we sell at the farmer's market), slices of beef, raw green onions, spicy miso-tahini sauce



Wrap and enjoy!

First farmer's market this year!

We're back to the farmer's market! We haven't been selling at the farmer's market since last Christmas. We didn't have much growing during the winter. Now spring has come and all our over-winter vegetables came back to life, lush, green, and packed with nutrients and flavors stored over the winter!

We started harvesting for the farmer's market on Thursday.


Lijen cleaning the harvested celeriac



Sherlene picking corn salad



Francisca (our wwoofer from Switzerland) cutting wasabi leaves



This is a wasabi plant! beautiful heart-shaped leaves and tiny white flowers! the whole plant is edible while the rhizome is the part that's grated into paste to make the infamous, nostril cleansing wasabi! (however, the store-bought tube thingy is fake wasabi. it's made from horse radish)





We're the greenest stand at the farmer's market in early spring! Our greens got virtually sold out! people were just craving for greens!