Beans and Harvesting

Fall weather here today for sure! The sun was coming out during my late-morning filbert-picking, but Phil cleaned out the furnace and wood is being burned in the farmhouse today.

I'm enjoying the feeling of not-eating tomatoes, although there are lots of delectable split sungold cherry tomatoes that I'm sorry not to be able to help with.

This tricolor was particularly fun, I thought:

Thanks for your thoughts about natural or non-natural foods. I agree that mostly, we each just have to find what works for our bodies, and then to make that work within the constraints of time, seasonal availability, money, etc.

In addition to the garden, Phil's nephew and his girlfriend were experimenting with growing organic beans for market this year - they put in four acres on the farm and this weekend was their first attempt at combine harvesting! Phil (a lot) and I (a little bit) helped out.

The beans have been swathed (cut down from the vines) and raked up into windrows -

We were harvesting 'orca' beans - a beautiful bean that's lower in the two indigestible (gas-provoking) starches that beans have (raffinose and stacchyose, if you collect names).

A combine harvester is an amazing machine

It's supposed to pick up the harvested plants, shuck the seeds out of the pods, shoot the chaff out the back -

- separate the seeds from dirt and drop them into the hopper -

And then it can shoot the harvest out into a pickup truck, or barn, or whatever -

Considering that it has so many functions, and that it works on such a variety of seeds of very different sizes, from tiny alfalfa and clover through grains to big beans, it's not surprising that it is plenty glitchy and requires _lots_ of adjusting! We all got very dusty. There was lots of trying to shovel the vines into the conveyor belt to make it pick up more effectively -

We picked up lots of beans from behind the combine after it had passed -

- and generally got all tangled up in the machinery -

- and the first lot of beans harvested were mixed in with a great deal of dirt!

There was a lot of clunkiness and trial-and-error - but can you imagine hand-harvesting four acres of beans??? And in terms of the world food market, four acres is pretty small beans. Can you imagine how the big corporations do it?

Really, it's more amazing that stuff gets to market as clean as it does. I'm off to eat some dirt! Seriously, I think that the more we go into mass-production, the more freaked-out people get about dirt, when that's totally unnecessary (although it's also true that the more mass-produced something is, the more likely it is for contamination actually to be a problem.

Allergies are also far more common nowadays, since people have become more obsessed with sterilization. You have an immune system for a reason! Don't leave it with nothing to fight...

Do you eat a bit of dirt?

with love...

A New Week, Back to the Blog! - What is Natural Food? - Big Steep Hike -Tomatoes

After I said in my last post that I wasn't necessarily going to blog every day, I hadn't meant to be mia the whole weekend! I just didn't make it into town to get online at all - there was so much going on at the farm, both chores-wise and visitors-wise.

Today, I'm at the other branch of Corvallis' co-op, which is special, because Phil's sister's husband painted the murals on it. He depicted Phil's mom and dad -

- and Phil's sister with a friend of hers -

They're pretty good likenesses, and it just adds something to visiting this store.

Yesterday afternoon, we also visited with Phil's friend and his twins that visited us in AK in August -

and went on a very steep hike near their home. Phil and John at the top here - the two of them and I were the only ones who went all the way up. It was so steep!

I really wasn't sure I could do it, so I'm proud of myself :) And last time we hiked something that steep (well, even steeper than that, actually), when we went to harvest blueberries that weren't there,

... I was sore for a week afterwards! I was very sore going back down yesterday, but today I'm actually not that sore, and worked with Phil on his timberland all morning today before coming to town to work!

We're trying to protect the young cedars from the deer - trying to make it harder for them to remove the protective plastic tubes and just eat the cedars all the way down to the bark. C'mon deer, you're going to love a big cedar forest in just a few years time, and there's plenty of tender little baby douglas firs and chinquapins for you to eat!

We've also been working the harvest of the garden at the farm - here's the major action, mucho mucho corn and tomatoes but also tomatillos, basil, eggplants, peppers -

Phil's nephew and his girlfriend mostly planted the garden, and they came over and harvested with us, and we made a big batch of tomatillo salsa (tomatillos, onions, peppers, garlic, spices, lemon juice, cooked down quite a lot)

What a beautiful abundance! And here's a corny picture of Phil's mom -

(yes, that is a corn row in her apron)! Phil and I are happy harvesters...

And I have been feeling better since eating no tomatoes at all. I don't know if it's the acidity or what, since these tomatoes are super sweet. But on Saturday I ate no tomatoes until dinner time and was ok, and then had just a few cherry toms with dinner and was back to feeling sick. Same thing had happened Friday. Yesterday and today, no tomatoes and all is well.

This vexes me with the question of our natural foods. Eating local, homegrown food is so important to me. But the longer I've been involved in growing food, and the more I've learned about cultivation and breeding of edible plants, the more I feel that many edible plants are just as much artifacts of civilization as something more obviously 'packaged.' I was getting sick as a dog eating the abundance of tomatoes from the garden, but I already know not to eat any of the equally-abundant corn - does me no good at all. And making smoothies out of green and protein powders with a bit of raw tahini and stevia saved my guts but all of it came out of bottles and jars!                                                                          

I do know that when I get finished getting rid of mercury and lead, and yeast, my guts will be less likely to react adversely to all kinds of things and to develop allergies. But in the meantime, what is a 'natural food'? And is it even a relevant question? Humans are 'natural' too, which means that all the things that we produce are also productions of nature. But a modern tomato, even an heirloom, is so very different from the 'pomodori' (golden apples) that the Europeans were so skeptical of when they were first brought over from the New World. Like many cultivated fruiting plants, they have far more sugar in them now, but still contain the solanins, the nightshade compounds that cause joint distress in all kinds of people.

I'm starting to feel that 'natural' isn't the most important operative term, and am finding myself drawn more and more to the medicine of wild foods and weeds. I'm also having to forgive myself for the 'processed food' thing. Everyone knows that 'processed food is bad for you,' right? It's too easy to absorb, so it's fattening, and it's stripped of its nutrients because it's been so processed from its original, natural state.

Well, wait a minute! I was feeling so much better before we came to Oregon because I was having a Vita-Mix-made smoothie for every meal! When I was feeling sick a couple days ago, I made the closest thing I could with the little blender available to me here. Isn't that a processed food also? I guess the difference is that the smoothie is composed of whole foods, but it is definitely processed. My compromised digestion needs all the help it can get, and if I absorb more of my food, I'm actually less likely to put on weight because there will be fewer toxic byproducts from indigestion that need to get sequestered in fat cells.

So, I forgive myself for the natural foods obsession - acknowledge that it's a far more complex picture, not black and white, and also for eating 'processed' foods in the form of smoothies.

What do you think about natural and processed foods?

A beautiful day to everyone.