Angelica's Garden

It’s been quite a while since my last post. The first annual FESSA Conference in late March was a total hit. Over 40 participants turned out to learn more about how to start their own small-scale on farm businesses from my great friends at LTD Farm, Encore Farm, Very Prairie and myself. Our hope is that the rural revival of the small farm continues to grow and that more folks will be creating high quality foods right off of their own land. I am excited and optimistic!

The growing season is upon us, but despite the early beautiful weather I am too seasoned a veteran to put too much out into the garden just yet. The greenhouse is full of healthy, happy transplants of cabbages, tomatoes and more. We’re in the process of rotating our cattle and portable chicken mobile around the farm to add fertility to the soil and keep the animals well fed. I get a kick out of the monkeying around that the local conventional farmers do with collecting manure from their confined animals and hauling it all over kingdom come to fertilize their fields. Then they have to seed their fields, spray chemicals on them and harvest and haul the feed back to the animals. And many of these animals languish on these harvested rations, because they need diverse fauna in their diet. I guess it’s no wonder the conventional food system is such a mess.  On the other hand, our animals just graze the land, foraging their food (grass and legumes) and their medicine (burdock, nettles, dandelions….) out in the sunshine, creating fertility in the soil. It’s a beautiful, uncomplicated thing.

So, I’ll segway into business now… You may be seeing a few new products on the shelves at yourlocal co-op from our farm. The first is the Beet Kvass which is available now at 3 Co-ops around the Twin Cities and at the Viroqua Co-op. I love this product. Right now I’m using organic red beets out of California to make it, but soon I’ll be harvesting the beets right here for processing. Cant’ wait. It is a health and digestive tonic in the truest sense. It’s a tad on the sour side, but you can always add a little honey or stevia to add sweetness.  Also, you may have seen the Kraut Salad at the Wedge. This is a great accompaniment to any meal. I use horseradish and dill to spice up green cabbage, beets, and carrots. Lately I’ve been hiding it from my husband who’s been known to polish off a jar in one sitting.  On a different note, I’ve had to stop processing Pickled Beets in the winter. It is just not cost effective to offer them year round.  I will keep you posted on when and where they are available when the time comes. I apologize to any disappointed pickled beet lovers out there.

Check back for product updates throughout the summer as I will be offering some seasonal products from time to time.   

 -Angelica

So, I’ve got these farming friends that are about as nuts as I am. One important thing that links each of us is a love of small-scale, organic farming ventures. All of us are earning some or all of our income from our unique farmstead businesses. We recently got together and decided to have a conference where we could inspire a new generation of farmers with our stories of successes and failures. Each one of us had to forge a new path for our farm and business, because when we started noone else in the U.S. was doing what we are doing for a living. I think most city folks and even our country neighbors would be surprised what the income potential is in this kind of small-scale farming. Other organic farming conferences are ignoring this fact. Come join us on March 31 in Stillwater, MN to learn about resources for small-scale on farm enterprises and hear from our over 30 years of combined experience making value-added products for the Twin Cities and Western Wisconsin markets.  Please visit the FESSA website to register.

www.FESSA.org

Yea Haw, it’s that time of the year when we ring in the new and leave the past, the past. Most co-ops that carry my Sauerkraut, Kim Chi and Red Cabbage/Ginger will be offering a new years sale of at least $1.00 off per jar of my cultured products. This may be a good time to stock up and kick start your new year with healthier eating habits. The sale will run for the first 2 weeks of January. After jarring up product for the sale and sampling each batch, all I can say is that this stuff is worth its weight in gold. The kim chi is coming off of a 2 month ferment and is very powerful and tasty. The Red Cabbage/Ginger and Sauerkraut have been on a 3-4 week ferment and the flavors that have developed are just delicious. I get giddy about this food that feeds us.

I also want to say a huge Thank You to each and every customer that has supported Angelica’s Garden in 2011. My hope is that in some small or large way your health and well-being have been improved by adding our foods to your diet. It’s a labor of love and passion on our end to keep these products coming and continue to improve and innovate. The first part starts with feeding and caring for the soil from which wholesome, nutrient dense food grows. The processing and packaging are also done with care to bring you food that feeds and heals. When I run out of our produce, I buy from farms that hold the same philosophy dear of caring for the soil to grow great produce. Like I’ve said in the past too, you are supporting 44 acres of certified organic farm that exists as an island surrounded by large conventional monocropping, confinement dairy farms. These scary farms are part of what motivates me to do what I do, which is to provide real food to folks who need it. And I am humbled and grateful for you and your growing support of our farm; so let’s knock 2012 out of the park by continuing to feed ourselves real food!

-Angelica

 The growing season’s end is upon us here in the upper Midwest. For the past 3-4 months here at Angelica’s Garden work and life have been busy, which has kept yours truly from spending much time behind a computer screen keeping updates rolling on the blog. Suffice it to say that I am still busy, but breathing a little easier these days as I know the harvest is almost all in and most of the crocks are full.

Tomorrow Mike and I will be harvesting out the napa and some green and red cabbage. I think there’s about 1300 pounds of napa in there and I’ll tell ya, it’s sweet and crisp. I already put up 3 crocks of kim chi last week using this stuff and it’ll be my best kim chi yet. I just wish I had 5000 pounds of it! A special thanks goes out to local organic growers that I’ve bought produce from this season including Gardens of Eagan,  Wisconsin Growers and Featherstone, to name a few. When I’m short on produce here, it’s great to be able to draw from a pool of great growers in our region.

I don’t really talk about it much here, but we raise and sell pork and beef on a very small scale. Our cattle and pigs graze together on the same pasture which makes for supurb tasting meat and cheap entertainment. Needless to say, they are a happy family out there. When I go out in the early morning to let out the chickens and feed the pigs it’s a hoot. As soon as I get close to the pig troughs I make noise and look over at the pile of hay in the field that they sleep under. The pigs, camoflaged by the hay, pop up one by one and scramble over to chow down their morning breakfast of soaked barley and sea kelp. We don’t feed corn or soy to our pigs here. In my opinion, that’s poison to those animals. They get fermented veggies weekly and after I finish processing the ferments, the cattle and pigs enjoy cabbage leaves and carrot peels. Next year, Mike and I have decided to take a break from raising hogs to focus more time on building farm infrastucture and enjoying life. That being said, the growth of Angelica’s Garden has made me realize that our side ventures should be limited to our own need (and maybe to a few close neighbors). 

The picture below is of Walt and Charlie helping out in the kitchen. They often ask me how they can help with Mama’s projects (which I think is their alterior motive to get me out of the kitchen so we can go out and play) and I thought I’d start them out with putting on the tamper-proof seals on the jars. They were having a great time last summer doing that when I took this photo.

Lastly, Walter, our little first grader/football player has done Mama proud. Motivated by his own interest in fermenting, he put together a batch of naturally fermented ginger beer and brought it in for show and tell at his school. In all honesty, he did not ask me for help when he walzed around my kitchen throwing ingredients into a jar to brew up his own concoction. And the ginger beer he made turned out delicious. I can only imagine what his classmates and teacher were thinking as he popped open the jar of milky white elixer for them to smell and explained his recipe to the class……..  That’s my boy!!

Keep your eyes peeled as I will be posting information about upcoming sales on Angelica’s Garden products, co-op demo dates and upcoming classes. I’ll be giving a class on kim chi making at Valley Natural Foods in February. Personally, I’m a proponent of learning about crafts like fermenting vegetables from masters, not from novices. If you want to learn the true craft of fermenting vegetable from someone who does it 300 days a year, come to one of my classes. I will be holding classes here on the farm in late winter to early spring on a variety of vegetable ferments. Please check back here for class dates and news from Angelica’s Garden.

-Angelica

Angelica,

Thank you for your website and specifically for this post. I have been battling with fat maldigestion for a year (along with many other digestive problems for many years) so it really resonated with me. I am in good company now, with the wapf and gaps folks, so I feel hopeful. I am curious to know if there is anything else that helps you digest fat better other than coffee enemas, a good diet, and bitter herbs/liver support herbs?

Thanks Mar,

I thought your comment was worth sharing with everyone, because so many of us have problems digesting and more specifically, metabolizing fat. My post several months ago titled “Good Health is Guarenteed Noone” discussed health issues that have plagued me since childhood such as problems with fat digestion. The post also talked about ways in which I remedied many of my own health problems. And as a disclaimer, I am not a doctor, so everything I post is purely from my own perspective as an organic farmer, food processor and a researcher of different healing modalities to heal myself and keep my family healthy.

The liver plays a vital role in the process of fat digestion through the production of bile which emulsifies fat so that it can be further digested by lipase produced by the pancreas. There are many aspects of fat digestion, but without bile, the lipase cannot break down lipids (fat) and render it useful to the body. Now stepping away from that for a moment, bile also serves as a medium for the liver to eliminate the waste that it has collected. The stinker though is that a large portion of bile, as it makes its way through the digestive tract, is reabsorbed in the colon. Thus our liver takes back bile that has been recycled over and over again. It is the contention of Karen Hurd, a holistic nutritionist out of Fall Creek, WI, that this is the source of many illnesses. This bile is called “toxic bile” in some circles. Karen explains the process of digestion in depth and also explains that the more soluable fiber we eat, the more bile we can get rid of, because bile binds to soluable fiber during digestion and cannot be reabsorbed in the colon. (do a search and check out her website) There is much more to explain about this, but farm chores need doing.

So as I see it, along with Karen Hurd and the Gerson Institute, we need to get the toxic bile out of our bodies. This would help out our over toxified livers and cause other backups in our bodies to remedy themselves. The coffee enema is effective, but I don’t have time for it. Eating right is effective, but I don’t honestly have the willpower and time to eat “perfect.” Herbs and bitters will support the liver, however, they will not necessarily move bile out any faster. Once bile leaves the body, the liver needs to make new bile, which has the capacity to remove toxins more effectively and also digest fat better. But if we are constantly eating the wrong fats, we are just making our bile more toxic. Toxic Bile=poor fat digestion=poor digestion=health deterioration.

My biggest ally is my kim chi juice. If you want all the details of that, please read the Angelica’s Garden liver cleanse posted on October 14 of 2010. That gives you all the gory details of how it works. This is the most effective way I get rid of toxic bile and it always works. You could make your own kim chi and try it out. Also, up your intake of soluable fiber. Dried beans and vegetables are really good sources.

But too, we need to avoid bad fats like the plague. Man, my health has gotten so much better since eating mostly grassed based animal products. I tell ya, it’s hard to find them. The co-ops in all of their do-gooding, seem not interested in finding out what each of their local meat producers are feeding their animals. I would have to say that 1,000 Hills Cattle company is the real deal, as is Cedar Summit, with their organic dairy products. These are great grass based sources. But there are a lot of dud animal products at the co-ops, which use the GMO corn and soybean rotation as their feed source. Also, soybean oil for cooking is about as healthy as quakerstate motor oil. In fact I think the latter is healthier. You get the idea.

Anyhoo, Mar, I hope that gets you started. I could ramble on for a long time about this subject and bore the heck out of you. This subject is so important to me, because if determines how well I feel every day and how much work I can get done. If my digestion is off, I am off. It sounds like you feel the same way. Please feel free to add any follow-up comments or questions, or just give me a call if you want to talk further (715-781-4815). Anyone else out there who would like more info, please contact me as well. Hey, let’s all pursue good health to the best of our abilities!

-Angelica

I received a recent message here asking if I had any nutrition information about my kim chi. Nutrition labeling is a subject that I’ve addressed a few times before and it’s worth discussing my perspective in a more thorough way.

Back when I started Angelica’s Garden in 1997 my first product was Zucchini Relish. I was gung ho excited about this product, because it was something I had grown up eating and I loved it. I still love it and make it for our house. In order to get the relish on store shelves back then I knew I needed a professional looking label and I needed to have a recipe that could be scaled up to make larger sized batches. Through good fortune I was able to receive the help from a food scientist at the Agricultural Utilization Research Institute of Minnesota. She helped me scale up my recipe and helped with specifics on my label. When it came time to develop a nutrition panel for my label, we sat down at her computer. She went through each ingredient in the relish and typed in the proportion of that ingredient into a program that would then spit out a nutrition panel. I was completely baffled…. I asked her how the nutrition value of something like a “tomato” could be computed. She replied that scientific nutrition analysis were conducted to evaluate the nutritional profile of a tomato and then that information was put into the program she was using. I was really stumped because in my simple mind I could not understand how a conventionally grown tomato purchased in January (and tastes like cardboard) could even remotely compare to something out of my organic vegetable garden in August. The nutritional profile of each would be apples to oranges.

Ever since this experience I have been very leary of nutrition labels. This has been reinforced by a food processor who claimed to me years ago that nutrition labels can legally be up to 20% inaccurate. It’s kinda scary if someone has a health condition where they need to watch their sodium intake or other things. I have such a customer who asked about the sodium content of my products. Instead of investing in a nutrition label, I told her I’d just disclose the amount of salt in each jar on labels that I will be redoing in the future. I’m not required by law to have a nutrition label for the products because my revenues are below the requirement limit.

I guess what this boils down to is to get to know your food. Ask questions of your farmers and food processors. Where do they source their inputs. I am a staunch believer in soil building here on the farm and know that my produce reflects this. I admit that I do purchase organic produce from other farmers when I run out. My goal this year is to grow 90% of what’s in my products. I’ve gotta have goals! In the mean time I will be posting more about how the growing season is going. And please keep the questions coming!

We’ve got these awsome neighbors that are completely onboard with our style of farming. They along with us are a little island of sustainability in Pierce County surrounded by large confignment agriculture and soil/nutrient depleting farming systems. I am very grateful that they live right next to us and are great customers and great folks. The other day I read one of their Facebook links which was an article about the recent outbreak of e-coli in Germany. The autor of the article explained that the particular strain of e-coli in question was resistant to 8 different antibiotics. He concluded in the article that the chances of this happening in nature were very slim and that this strain of e-coli most likely had been produced in a lab and let loose onto the public. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a true believer in conspiracy theory, which probably stems from my time at the UofM hanging out with poli-sci nutwads.

Anyhoo, the whole possibility of a bioengineered “superbug” e-coli strain got the wheels turning in my simple mind. The author of the article said that if this strain was resistant to 8 different antibiotics, then it had to have been exposed to each of the 8 antibiotics. This ultimate superbug survived these exposures and thrived, rendering it deadly to humans. I think the last count I saw was a total of 30 people who contracted the bacteria and died. Many more have been sickened by it. So, what does this mean for me and my family? Hmmmm…… Well, our farm is practically floating in a vat of superGOODbugs, namely vegetable ferment goodness. I haven’t lost any livestock to illness in years(they eat kraut too), just to fox and other hungry critters. The biggest combatant to bad bugs is good bugs, not anitbugs. If we had an outbreak in our country of this kind of e-coli (or other bad bacteria/virus), I would batten down the hatches and make sure my little ones and folks I cared about had a bunch of my fermented vegetables on hand. Also, I would strongly recommend that customers purchase not only my fermented products, but also other lines of good quality raw fermented vegetables to combat such an outbreak. Each brand of fermented vegetables has a different profile of good probiotic bacteria. It’s this diversity of probiotics that I think would be the strongest line of defense against a serious food-bourne illness outbreak. Fermented vegetables have the quickest results against a bad bug over any fermented food because of quickness of  digestability. What this means for you and your loved ones is to be vigalent about illness, especially when it comes in the form of food bourne illness. Vegetable ferments offer the most powerful line of defense against bad superbugs.  Be well.   -Angelica

I am pleased to announce that there is a new Angelica’s Garden product available exclusively at the Wedge. After much tinkering and ruminating I came up with my own version of the Eastern European/Russian beverage Kvass. Some versions of kvass are made with cereal grains and even bread, however, beet kvass is also a common version.  My kvass is made with beets, apple and ginger. I absolutely love drinking this stuff. It’s also my anecdote to the kombucha craze, which in my opinion is overblown. Kombucha does have health benefits, but folks, it’s made with sugar and tea. Instead, I believe fermenting actual food to create nutrition is the way to go. The raw beets are fermented in a brine and raw apple and raw ginger juice are added to it when it is bottled and allowed to ferment for an additional period of time. This bubbly drink is only slightly sweet and is meant mostly as a tonic to improve digestion and add probiotics to gut flora. All ingredients are certified organic, however it takes my certifier up to 10 months to approve a new product for certification, so certification is pending. If you shop at the Wedge give it a try. If the kvass goes over well, you may see it in your local co-op down the road.

Wow, the thermometer read 96 out here on the farm today. I felt like I was in a frying pan. It’s days like this when you know you’re alive. Plans to be out in the field shoring up planting turned into seeding the last trays of fall cabbages and getting a new fenced in area ready for the 8 pigs we’re raising. I think I’m heading to bed so I can get up when the sun rises, to get a start when the weather is still cool enough. Good night y’all.

Hello Folks, It’s been a while since I last gave news of any kind. The growing season if finally upon us here at the farm. We got our first cabbage transplants in May 17, which is a record. Cabbages usually are planted right at the beginning of May, but due to the cold weather and frost, we held off for a bit. Mike and I were able to get all of the spring planting for the business done by the 23rd of May. We worked hard and got it done in short order. When the kids were done with school at the end of the day, we dragged them into the field to help plant. (Mind you, they are 4 and 6 years old). They would help for a bit, and then get board opting rather to play hide and seek in the rye.

We had a successfull ramp kim chi class at the beginning of May. All participants walked away with their very own crock and a batch of ramp kim chi the class made together. It was fun and a good chance for me to spread the fermentation craziness. Later in May, the students of Ave Maria Academy (where our kids go to school) came out to the farm for a field trip. The kids learned a bit about organic vegetable farming and animal husbandry on a small scale. They got a chance to plant pumpkins, play with the livestock, run around in the rye, and challenge each other and their teachers to several games of tug of war. It was satisfying for Mike and I to watch the kids having so much fun and learning about a different way of farming.

On a serious note, there will be a shortage of some of my products at the co-ops coming up. On the positive end for us, demand for the vegetable ferments and picked beets has gone up considerably in the last 5 months. On the challenging side I’ve been having to throw away some batches of kraut, kim chi and red cabbage/ginger because the texture is too mushy. This problem started last fall and I haven’t been able to figure it out. So we are a little short on supply right now. I am thankful that the majority of batches are very good. Needless to say our livestock has been eating very well with the batches I’ve had to throw away. So I’m trying out some things to remedy the situation. Hopefully the fermenting is back on track soon. I appologize for any inconveniences to customers who need the products and are currently unable to get them at their co-op. All co-ops will have at least some of the products available.

On a positive note, I have introduced a new product at the Wedge. I will blog more about it coming up and leave everyone in suspense. Well, looks like the rain has quit outside…. back to the fields…..  Happy spring everyone!!