Bookmarked: Farm Blogs

One of the things I miss about belonging to a community supported agriculture (CSA) program was the newsletter that came with our bi-weekly produce box. The newsletter detailed all the little things that the farm had done to get our food to us that week — how the weather had impacted the crops, or how a broken tractor affected the farm’s ability to harvest in time. It put my food in a larger context.

But I’ve found that I can get that same insight into life on the farm by reading farm blogs.

I get to see what crops look like when they are newly planted and also when they are harvested. I can see how the animals are raised and what the animals eat. I get a true appreciation for the work involved in producing food.

Reading about what it takes to grow food and raise animals also offers a much-needed reminder that the farms we imagine, Old MacDonald’s farm from nursery school, diverse farms with animals on pasture still exist.

Here are some of my favorites:

Eatwell Farms

Eatwell is a truly diversified and progressive farm near Davis. Their blog is updated daily and covers everything from what they’re planting and harvesting to how they are irrigating their fields — even how the farm puts San Francisco’s compost to use.

Eatwell seems to always be working on something new to bring to the market and the blog is a way to hear about what we can look forward to. After all, this is the farm that brought locally grown wheat and a grinder (!) to the Ferry Building so we could grind our own flour. From the blog, I learned that the farm will have new grain CSA with fresh, local cornmeal, barley and other grains.

Riverdog Farms

I didn’t know much about Riverdog Farms until facing a 172 pound Riverdog hog at the Fatted Calf’s Basic Pig Butchery class. Riverdog doesn’t come to the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market, but they do bring produce to the Saturday Berkeley farmers market.

Given the Fatted Calf class, I know firsthand how delicious Riverdog pigs can be but their Hog Blog showed me why their hogs taste so good: they’re on pasture, they eat well and their pigs are crossbred with a truly freakish looking wild boar.

Riverdog’s chickens have their own blog  Coop Scoop. The gorgeous pictures take you through a day in the life of a Riverdog chicken, from pecking around in the oat grass to their mobile super coop.

Ghost Town Farm

Eatwell and Riverdog are established farms with acres of agricultural land. They both have CSA programs and go to many farmers markets. But Ghost Town Farm is different: it’s in Oakland, in a truly urban environment. It’s not a business as much as it is a way of life for Novella Carpenter who details how she becomes a farmer on her blog. Her new book Farm City is on my summer reading list. I can’t wait to read more about how she got started, and what she’s learned about farming in a city.

Rave: Tamra Davis Cooking Show

You can buy a ticket to see your favorite band perform, but how often do you see your favorite band in real life?

Beastie Boys fans are lucky. Thanks to Tamra Davis and her online cooking show, we don’t have to resort to stalking the Beastie Boys in order to see what their lives are like off stage.

The point of the show isn’t the B-Boys, of course, it’s cooking. Most of the meals Tamra prepares for her family and friends are organic, mostly vegetarian (some include fish) and kid-friendly. But while I’ve picked up some new recipes from the show, I admit that the real reason I tune in is for the glimpse of my favorite band in their natural habitat: whether its backstage on their European tour or on vacation, eating fresh fish in Hawaii or making crepes in the Hamptons with their famous friends. The whole Beastie clan shows up for a barbecue in at Mike and Tammy D’s place in Malibu. Ad-Rock hangs out with Mike’s kids while MCA makes lemonade and Tamra prepares grilled fish sandwiches.

I should warn you that if you aren’t a Beastie fan, you may not be as enthralled with the show as I am. (I know Mr. WholeHog finds it boring.) But for me, even in the episodes that don’t include the Beasties are worth watching to see woman try to balance all the things she loves in her life — filmmaking and motherhood, cooking and yoga, good music and good friends.

Bookmarked: Wedding websites

I committed early on not to let wedding planning get out of hand. And so far at least, I’ve been mostly successful. I haven’t looked at a single wedding or bride-related magazine,  but confess that I have spent more than my share of time on websites devoted to weddings.

It started for practical reasons (I swear!): an annoying part of trying to find a wedding location is that most places are only shown Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm. Which is to say, during work hours. I tried to get around this. One Saturday in June, I attempted to peek in the windows of a place only to find that — duh! — there was a wedding going on.

So to avoid taking time off work or crashing someone else’s wedding, I turned to the internet. I googled. I flickr-ed. And I discovered a plethora of wedding websites that posted pictures of other people’s weddings, giving people like me the chance to see pictures of possible locations while sitting at our desks, pretending to be hard at work.

I should have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead, I kept looking at wedding websites, bookmarking ideas and pictures as I bounced from one wedding website to another.

Eventually, I stumbled on A Practical Wedding, one of the few places on the web to escape the Marital Industrial Complex (Meg, the writer behind A Practical Wedding, calls it the Wedding Industrial Complex, or WIC). She highlights atypical weddings — picnic weddings, brunch weddings and dinner party weddings — and she celebrates couples who do what works for them, whether that’s having a budget wedding or not.

But what keeps me coming back to A Practical Wedding are Meg’s posts about planning her own practical wedding. Often, she writes about something I’m also thinking about or struggling with, like her post about making decisions that are “not always the cheapest option, but it’s the option that keeps us sane.” Just reading this blog has helped me feel sane (so far) through this strange rite of passage.

I may think that Mr. WholeHog and I are planning an untraditional event, but Off Beat Bride shows me just how untraditional weddings can be. The brides here often don’t wear white, they may have a goth or punk theme, and many are “inked”, that is, tattooed. I don’t necessarily relate to all the weddings featured on Off Beat Bride, but I love (and often need) the encouragement to take liberties with the whole wedding concept and to make our wedding whatever we want it to be.

New Type of Waffle

The best thing I’ve found online today: a waffle iron fashioned out of a typewriter!

Now I’m craving a waffle with a space bar.

Photo from www.superuse.org

Bookmarked: Etsy.com

I’m becoming an Etsy addict.

Etsy.com is an online shop dedicated to “all things handmade.” It’s where independent designers, crafters and artists sell their wares. It’s part flea market, part trunk show.

There’s always something I like – a card, a pillow, a pair of earrings, a kitchen towel. Each visit brings a new find, like these hilarious re-fashioned vintage plates I came across recently, or these lovely hair pins.

The sellers are often really talented, their prices are totally reasonable and often shipping is free or just a few bucks.

For the last couple of months, I’ve had something arriving almost weekly. It started with this great t-shirt of the SF skyline made by someone, oddly enough, in Philadelphia. Then there were cards that I bought even if I didn’t yet have a person or an occassion for them.

Lately, I’ve been on a vintage earring kick. My initial pair perked up every boring item of clothing in my closet, so I bought a second pair and I considered purchased a third.

The charm of Etsy continues even after your order’s been placed. Many sellers enclose a handwritten thank you note with your order, and often, like in the package I received yesterday, there’s an extra thank you gift as well — a second pair of earrings, perhaps, or another card.

Bookmarked: Dad Blogs

I meant to write something for Father’s Day. But I ended up spending Father’s Day with my dad. Instead of writing a post, we went on an SF neighborhood walk.

Neighborhood walks are one of my favorite activities and my dad loves anything that is outside and might count as exercise. The idea is to head out in any direction with no plan in mind. And what you inevitably find is streets you’d never heard of, laden with what may be examples of your new favorite (or least favorite) architecture. Ideally, we happen upon a new view of the city or one of SF’s famed stairways, but if nothing else, we usually end up surprised by how all these little pieces of the city fit together. We ended our walk near his favorite SF taqueria where we loaded up on carnitas tacos.

When my parents went home, I sat down to write about my dad and ended up with pages and pages of text that wasn’t really in any publishable form. I had lists of the funny things he’s worn (fanny packs), the funny things he continues to wear (netted hats), and a list of words or phrases he’s repeated endlessly to mostly his own enjoyment — this list includes quotes from Pulp Fiction, a commercial jingle or two, and a few Neil Young imitations. (This list is also now posted on my fridge and it makes me laugh every time I look at it.) But I didn’t end up with anything that I felt adequately represented my dad.

I’m thinking about dads a lot again, a few weeks after Father’s Day, because I’ve started reading a few blogs written mostly by stay at home dads. Head on over and drink the parenting kool-aid:

Cry It Out chronicles the adventures of an SF dad. I should admit that a good friend of mine knows this couple quite well and I think I’ve met them once, pre-child. But the blog makes you feel like they are your new best friends.

I started reading a bit of Sweet Juniper a few months ago when the family’s super-modern Detroit apartment was featured on a design blog I like (Designsponge? Apartment Therapy?) but I come back to this site for a hit of the parenting stories.

These are no ordinary dads. Mike learned to sew so that he could make his daughter clothes (following a mortifying experience of his daughter appearing at the playground in the same ironic $30 onesie as another kid). Dutch makes his daughter cardboard cars per her request and he responded to her request to see a list of people (real and fictional) pooping (this is by far the best thing I’ve seen today!).