Our Visit to the Seed Savers Heritage Farm

What a wonderful weekend we had in Decorah, Iowa!  Our good friend, Gretchen, grew up there, and we've enjoyed her enthusiasm and love for her hometown in dozens of conversations throughout the years. Since Andy and I began gardening in 2007, we have purchased our seeds from a non-profit organization called Seed Savers Exchange,which is also located in Decorah. Each January, the new seed catalog arrives and invites viewers to buy seeds (of course) and come visit Heritage Farm. Biannually in July, Greg Brown visits for a Benefit Concert for the farm. The event's advertisement pictures always look ideal, and wow- ideal it is!

Decorah itself is a little bubble of bliss, and we shopped around on its downtown streets, ate a delicious meal at Rubaiyat, devoured breakfast burritos and iced coffees at Magpies, visited the Wildberry Winery and frequented the Oneota Co-op several times. For the purpose of this post though, Seed Savers gets all the attention. My expectations for experiences seem to always exceed reality -- but not in this case. I fell in love upon pulling into the driveway. Like kids in the middle of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, Andy and I rushed around Seed Savers Heritage Farm with no direction, gawking at flowers and vegetables and trellises and farm animals. It took us a good solid hour before we could explore anything with any sort of organization or direction.

In the front lawn, a variety of  flowers and vegetables reside. If you're a gardener, it's difficult to pry yourself away. Any idealism I had lost with Madison's lack of rain was rejuvenated by the bursting colors and buzzing bees in which I delighted during this visit. I made several trips into the Lillian Goldman Visitors Center to purchase flower seeds for next year. I also got a bit camera happy.

Love-in-a-Mist "Oxford Blue" (bought some seeds!)

Love Lies Bleeding

Spider Flower

A bed of delectables

In the back, you can visit Diane's garden. Diane Ott Whealy is a co-founder of SSE, and she designed a magical garden of flowers and vegetables.

Amaranth, corn, and flowers...hoping to do something similar in our yard

Behind that is the children's garden with willow huts and fences.

And the Heritage Farm even has rare breeds of farm animals. The Ancient White Park Cattle are a sight to behold. Through conversations with some of the Seed Savers staff and from information on the website, I learned that these white cattle traversed on the English Isles since before Christ was born. Now, there are only 800 left, and about 80 of those reside at Seed Saver's Heritage Farm.

Other farm animal sightings included heritage breed ducks, geese, chickens, and turkey. We're told that in the Historic Orchard, there are also pigs, but we didn't have the chance to check the orchard out.

The best thing about Seed Savers Exchange is that the 37-year-old organization's mission is to protect and share the diversity of heirloom seeds and plants.With Seed Saver's leadership, gardeners around the world are able to partake in nature's wide variety of food and flowers and make sure that such variety is here to stay. With large corporations controlling much of what we eat and grow, Seed Savers Exchange and organizations like it are essential to protecting all that the world has to offer.

Greg Brown, accompanied by Bo Ramsey, took time in between songs to discuss the importance of local food and seed diversity. For foodies/gardeners such as us, the setting couldn't have been more ideal: folk music (some of it about food), sunsets and hills, colorful gardens, kind/like-minded people...it was truly wonderful.

And my garden dreams are restored! Look for future posts regarding obtaining ducks (I think I have Andy convinced!), weaving willow fences and shade structures for the chickens, growing flowers and more flowers, saving seeds, and doing more edible landscaping.

Co-op Gift Card: Year Three

The whole spread (minus the chicken feed)

If you've been following our blog for a while, you might remember that one of our most anticipated and useful Christmas presents is a gift card to our absolute favorite place to shop: the Willy Street Co-op. Mr. and Mrs. Claus have bestowed upon us this wonderful gift three times, and each time, I believe Andy and I have gotten better at figuring out how to get the most bang for our buck.

Veggie Burger Ingredients

Before heading to the co-op, we sit down to brainstorm a few meals to make in bulk and freeze - we try to coincide those with our financial and dietary pitfalls. Anyone who knows Andy knows he has a slight addiction to pizza. So,this year, we canned extra pizza sauce, and with our gift card, we bought enough mozzarella cheese to make me reconsider our need to own our very own cow!  Another way that we fail to live sustainably, both in terms of ethical food production and our personal finances is going out to eat during the work week. Usually this is because we don't have the time or the energy to use the ingredients residing in our fridge and cupboard. So, we bought all of the ingredients to quadruple our recipe for veggie burgers. This way, hopefully, when one of suggests going to Chipotle, the other can counter-argue that by pointing out we have veggie burgers in the freezer and potatoes in the cupboard.

Oftentimes, an argument against shopping for whole, organic, local foods is that it is too expensive. This is where being shopper savvy comes in handy. The back of our Subaru is loaded with canvas totes, Ball jars, canisters, and reused glass bottles because we buy nearly everything that we can't get from our CSA or garden in bulk. Local and/or organic bulk foods are surprisingly reasonable. Yesterday, we stocked up on maple syrup, honey, oats, peppercorns, coffee beans, milk powder, a few spices, and chicken feed.

Ingredients for granola

Milk powder for yogurt

A few other necessities...

Our personal New Year's Resolutions involve financial, dietary, and sustainability goals. This co-op trip and the cooking resulting afterward were a perfectly wonderful way to work towards those....for FREE! Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Clause for once again helping us reach our goals.

Defending Family Farms: Tractorcade Protest in Madison, WI



This farmer was rockin' the parade with a trailer of drums.

 Our blog has been somewhat on a hiatus for the past month; we've been protesting at the State Capitol.Both of us are teachers, so we are worried about the future of education as we fear the government is moving education towards more and more privatization, but this blog isn't about that. It's about another set of our values: local food, sustainable living, and small-scale, family-owned farms, during this time of corporate, big business controlled agriculture. Our motivation for writing this entry is not to offend or sway, but simply to express our perspective on how this bill will affect small- and medium-sized family farms.

On March 12th, 53 tractors drove around the Capitol, while over 100,000 protesters shouted, "Thank you, thank you!"  Farmers decided to join in solidarity with other public workers and supporters, in part, because of the following effects this bill willh ave on them:

• Collective bargaining rights are essential for farmers' co-ops. Farmers involved are worried that they will be next on the chopping block. The Vice President of Family Farm Defenders and a dairy farmer himself, Greeno, said, "“Collective bargaining rights are the principles that all of our co-ops operate on. And if they start eroding collective bargaining rights for workers, farmers in co-ops are just next on the chopping block, so if we don’t stand together and defend our rights, we all going to take cuts in turn.”
• Farmers who operate Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs are  concerned that their programs will be cut due to other public workers' salaries being cut. They've noted that many of their members are teachers and other public workers.
• Badger Care and Medicaid programs funding will be put in the hands of the current government administration. Their intentions are to cut the program. Many farmers have Badger Care; it's a taxpayer-subsidized program, and most farmers can't afford other programs. This bill will effectively cut the only insurance many farmers can afford, thereby making it even more difficult for small farms to sustain themselves.
• Sustainable agriculture programs such as Buy Local Buy Wisconsin will be slashed and gutted.
• Wisconsin's farmland preservation program will be cut. At the time the program was created, over 30,000 acres of farmland were lost per year. The cuts will undermine the efforts to preserve farmland from development which would make agriculture impossible and the efforts to build agricultural business on those lands.

All in all, many farmers feel Walker's bill is harmful! And they came out to show their support! Here are some of our favorite pictures from the Tractorcade.

Here's said trailer of drums.

It was an inspirational day. One can only hope that this bill will not impede on all of the efforts over the past years to make small-scale farming sustainable and local eating for all possible.

The Stylish Blogger Award

First, I'd like to thank Heather at  (G)O'Donnell for awarding me the Stylish Blogger Award! It is always such a pleasure to be acknowledged and to know that at least one person reads these blog entries.

Here is how the Award works:

• Make a post + Link back to the person who awarded you this award 
• Share 7 things about yourself
• Award 15 recently discovered great bloggers so we can share the love (I'm going to stick with what those before me have done though and award fewer than that)
• Contact these bloggers and tell them they’ve won

Here is goes! This is a joint effort between both writers at The Backyard Market (Andy and Darcy):

1. We met at a Burger King on our way to a Dave Matthews Band concert. We had mutual friends who were meeting up, and we both were along for the ride. Now, from time to time, we pass that special Burger King, where both of us experienced love at first sight, and are tempted to stop...but then we come to our moral senses and keep driving.

2. In Las Terrenas in the Dominican Republic, we met two sweet, friendly children. We spoke Spanish with them, and they graciously helped us with new words and forming sentences. I mentioned that I liked chickens. They arranged to bring me one to take back to the United States the next morning. Their innocent and charming personalities made it hard to decline the offer.

3. Whenever we travel, we (months ahead of time) research all the local food co-ops in the area where we are going. We get more than excited to search them out once our plane lands or our car crosses the city lines.

4. We can't decide whether to live in the city or the country. We love it in the country, but adore the city. We're here in the country now. Who knows for how long? Andy thinks we should just buy some land in Central Park. Hehe.

5. On our first date, I mentioned that I was an ENFP according to the Meyers-Briggs personality test and that I was obsessed with the test's types. In fact, I felt I could figure out someone's personality code upon meeting them. I mentioned this at the Hilltop (where we were dining), and Andy spit out his code (INFP) like nobody's business. I was instantly in love.

6. I became a vegetarian a few months before we began dating. Andy had just developed what he thinks is his best dish: steak with mushrooms and blue cheese. Bad timing.

7. For some reason, we both have an adoration for songs that use the f-word with passion, in lines where cursing would seem unexpected, and from voices that seem innocent and sweet. Example: Rilo Kiley's "Better Son/Daughter."


There you go! Those may or may not have been interesting, but they're us.

And now...for my awards. Here are a few of my favorite bloggers:

1. Megan at Our Crowded Mantel
2. Ian at Moan Laur B & B
3. Happy Chickens
4. Hitchhiking to Heaven

Graze Resturant: A Pub Serving Local Food, Oh My!

This is my "official" review of Graze Restaurant in Madison: We ate there last night after seeing WICKED at the Overture Center.
______________________________

Madison jumped on the local food movement long ago, but to my knowledge Graze is the first pub that serves all locally grown food (except for the oysters which are from Maine and various fish, including a "Sustainable Catch"). According to their website,

          "The idea for Graze came from Chef Tory’s love of comfort foods. Inspired by the New York  gastropub scene, the menus feature a range of classics executed on a higher level than traditional pub food. We chose the name Graze because grass-fed animals and rotational grazing are important to us. Also, we want the menu to inspire our guests to do just that: graze. There’ll always be a variety of dishes and small plates to choose from – the kind of stuff chefs and foodies love to eat."

The atmosphere is hip, very minimalist and roomy. Andy and I got there around 5, when it opens to serve dinner, on a Saturday evening. We had no problem getting a seat, though by the time we left, the place was pretty full.

On the menu, there is an array of elegantly simple starters and sharers including such comfort foods as a plate of various local pickles, a homemade dish of mac 'n' cheese to share, roasted bone marrow, and a plate of meat and cheese with soft bread. The back of the menu lists the local farms from which each food comes. We opted for the Sassy Cow Cheese Curds, which were the best cheese curds either of us has ever consumed!

Dinner entrees are again, simple in nature, but exquisitely prepared. My husband had a burger made with locally-sourced meat. His side of french fries tasted like a delicacy. Not greasy, just yummy. I had a beet salad, which was delicate and delicious.

The drinks were also, for the most part, local. The beer list was comprised of Wisconsin Brews; they even had a locally-made cider. Plus, they have a unique and fun house cocktail list, including a personal favorite made of gin, orange juice, and a splash of Cabernet.

My only criticism of the restaurant was the lack of vegetarian items. There were a few; it was not difficult for me to find something to eat, but there are so many local CSAs producing great produce - I was hoping to see more of them featured in dishes, rather than as sidekicks to meat.

With that said, we'll be back. I'll have my salad and eat it too. :)