In which making a pot of soup takes a lot longer than most folks think

 More than 16 years ago, we started making a pot of soup.

Tonight, we'll have a bowl of it.

Catch of the day:  a parsnip!

Social media algorithms send me a lot of "homesteading" content, often showcasing starry-eyed young women in prairie dresses wafting around a garden or a kitchen.  With the magic of sped-up video, it seems perfectly simple to raise a hundred turkeys for meat, harvest enough sweet potatoes to feed a family of eight for the winter, or cut down a forest with a herring--in about a minute.

I'm here to say it ain't so.

There's a lot of talk about food sovereignty (and lack thereof) right now. It's a powerful thing to know where your next meal is coming from...and even more powerful to know exactly where your food came from. 

If you want to know more about growing food and you haven't already been doing it for years, I'm here to help.

Starting with soup!

Most of the ingredients for today's soup were pulled out of the garden about an hour ago.

November is NOT the classic time to start planting a garden, but it is a great time to start planning it. 

Bonus:  Now is the best time to start improving soil, and that is the first step for making a garden.

Even great soil needs help. Even if you buy Fancy Dirt™  at the Fancy Dirt Store, your plants will need more nutrients as they grow.  So, while November is not the right time to go outside and plant spinach and peas and potatoes in the Northern Hemisphere, it is the perfect time to start building up soil.

The native soil here at Haiku Farm is glacial till.  Remove the scrawny 1/2 inch of grass-root anywhere on our property and you immediately hit gravel.  Great for drainage, totally insufficient for growing food.  

It took us a year to get some workable soil, and about 4 years to get good soil!

Poop to the rescue!

Stall cleanings provide high nitrogen/wet materials (poop!) combined with high carbon/dry materials (wood shavings) : the perfect additive for garden soil.

I start a garden by removing as much grass as I can, and then adding stall cleanings.  And more stall cleanings.  And more.  It's possible to smother the grass and weeds with stall cleanings, but they have to be at least a foot deep!  You can also smother with cardboard and then dump stall cleanings on top of that.  

Whatever you have most of (cardboard, stall cleanings, or time) use that.

To be clear: I am still always dumping stall cleanings onto some part of some garden.  

Fresh stall cleanings are too hot for plants because the biodegrading process produces heat. However, you can dump loads of manure and shavings onto a garden bed, or into raised beds or containers right now and let the rain fall on it. In six months, stall cleanings break down and turn into ideal garden soil.

But what if you lack access to stall cleanings?

If you are local to me, I can hook you up!  If you have a truck, I'll help you load it.  If you have a car, we will put stall cleanings into trash bags and Amazon boxes, and fill up your passenger seats.  

If you are further away, I can still probably help you find a barn where they will give the stuff away.  Really, it's the best shortcut I know.

Here's another one:

LEAVES!  

If you don't have a tree that dumps leaves, you probably know somebody who does.  It's entirely possible that somebody will pay you to haul them away.  Again:  trash bags and Amazon boxes are your allies here.

On a smaller scale:  kitchen scraps (plant-based only, no meat or grease or bones) can become your compost.  Run it through a blender to speed up the process (or don't, it will still work), and then throw it onto your garden space.

No matter what kind of organic material you choose, dump it all directly onto the space where you want your garden to be, no matter if it's a corner of a back yard or three pots on a patio. If your weather is dry and windy, wet down the leaves to keep them in place--you might have to weight them down with branches.  You can even throw cardboard on top (be sure to remove the tape and staples) and let it decompose along with everything else.

You don't need to "dig in" or "turn" your organic matter!  Dump it on top, hose it down if it won't rain in the next few days, and walk away.  Worms will incorporate it all into your soil for you.

If poop and/or leaves won't work for you, try planting a "green manure" like clover, winter rye, or field peas.  Plant the seeds, let them grow a bit, and then chop them down in Spring.  No need to remove the plants, just chop-and-drop.  The vines and roots will biodegrade and feed the soil.

 A pound of clover seed is enough for 1000 square feet of ground, and costs about $11.  If your garden isn't 1000 square feet, buy a pound bag and share with a neighbor or a seed library.

This is the "Un-Bee-Leaf-Able Seed Library" at the Everett Public Library
and I am the Seed Librarian!

Building soil is the first, and most important, step to building a garden and raising food.  You can feed your soil with stall cleanings, leaves, or a green manure cover crop--or any combination of these.  

As with all things, use whatever you have lots of.  

In the next few months, I'll share more information to help readers grow their own food.

But what about that soup?  

Here's my "recipe":

Long-Time-Coming Soup

As usual for my soups, there are no measurements or quantities.  Use what you have.  

Brown in some olive oil:

• Meat if you have some- we started with a big roast from a cow that Ryan raised, because it was in the freezer where I could reach it.  I chopped it into bite-sized pieces.
• Garlic - chop it up
• Leek or onion - chopped

You don't need a giant leek for this soup. 

While that stuff is browning, chop vegetables into bite-sized pieces.  You can use whatever veg you have available.  Soup is an excellent way to turn vegetables that are soft, saggy, or sad into good food.

For tonight's soup I included veg from the garden:

• Butternut squash - I used one that wasn't quite ripe.  Perfect for eating, but it won't store so into the soup it goes!  The rind goes back into the compost pile, the seeds go to the chickens.
• Carrot - I leave carrots in the ground during the winter and pull them up as needed. The Dragon eats the greens as a treat.
• Parsnip - these take a LONG time to grow, and most people eat them before they get huge.  I am not always successful at growing parsnips.
• Potatoes - we are eating a variety called "Makah Ozette", which members of the local Makah Tribe have grown since the 1780s.  They are particularly well-adapted to growing in our Swamp.
• Corn - I grew so much corn this summer that we couldn't eat it all fresh, so we threw a bunch of ears into the freezer. Now we'll thaw them out and put them in soup all winter.

.  

Most gardening books say to plant carrots early in the spring, but I've found that
my carrot crops are best when I plant late summer and harvest in fall.

Soak overnight if you remember:

• dried beans  

If you forget to soak them the night before (as I usually do), boil them for 5-10 minutes
in very salty water, then drain and rinse before adding to the soup.

Dump the browned stuff and the bite-sized stuff and the beans into a big pot.  

Add water or broth, and bring it to a boil briefly before lowering the temp.  

Season with salt, pepper, maybe some turmeric?  A bay leaf is good.  Oooh, red wine would be nice.  

Allow to simmer for at least an hour.  Stir whenever you remember to do that.

If you like creamy soup, add some heavy cream or half-and-half before serving.  

If you're really organized (I am not) you can put this all in a slow-cooker and then go riding.  

How does your family stretch the food budget? Sound off in the comments!