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Farming | Terraces | Food

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Loss of Bees Can Affect Plants' Ability to Reproduce, Study Finds

Basically, if you kill off some bees, the other ones tend to be less consistent in feeding from the same species, instead choosing to take nectar from lots of different species. This hurts the plants' ability to reproduce.

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"...The flavors that make spices taste delicious are all aromatic compounds. Aromatic compounds are made of molecules that contain a structure known as a benzene ring, meaning they dissolve best in alcohols or fats. You may have noticed this when making drinks. Adding a twist of lemon to a martini adds significantly more flavor in a shorter amount of time than adding a twist of flavor to a glass of water..."

Interesting tidbit from How to Make the Best Chai Ever.

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We made lard!

Well... it's not really the normal way you make lard - we used "lardo," which is a high quality cut of pig fat which can be put straight on sandwiches - basically like bacon except almost all fat. Lard is usually rendered from the extra bits of a pig after all the quality meat has been cut off. We decided to just try to render the pig fat from the cheapest fattiest pig meat we could find.

We boiled it in a few centimeters of water until all the water boiled off. By that time the lardo pieces had separated into cracklings, and liquid pig fat. We poured off the liquid fat into a glass, and put it in the fridge to cool. When cooled, it becomes a sort of soft white paste - exactly what we expected!

We also saved the cracklings - they are like the extra bits left after you fry some bacon. They have tons of fat still in them and taste very... piggy. You can fry stuff with them because they release a lot of oil when you throw them on the pan. We also tried using our rendered lard as a cooking oil, but it tends to actually burn off fairly quickly. More experiments required.

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Mussels! With Pinot Grigio!

We steamed them with some parsley that the guy at the fish stand threw in for free. They are ridiculously delicious... I've eaten mussels that I've personally picked from the rocks on sparsely inhabited islands in Maine, and in comparison, these mussels might even be better. They were also suuper cheap - 3 Euros per kilogram. 

I ground up the mussel shells with eggshells afterwards and fed them to our plants. I'm sure there are all sorts of great nutrients in this mix... I also used the mussel broth left after cooking these to make lentils, which absorbed the salty, sightly oceany flavor of the mussels.

I asked the guy who sold them to me at the fish stand where they came from but I didn't recognize the place - Terragina, Sabauro?

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Lard may be dead in the US, but it's alive and kicking in Italy! (Or at least pig fat sold in giant chunks is)

Basically, lard can be used anywhere you would use butter or any other oil. It's made by heating up the fatty extra bits of a pig to extract the pure fat from them. It used to be a big deal in the US until Proctor and Gamble developed the method of hydrogenation, which allowed them to extract edible vegetable oil from cottonseed oil and basically totally replace lard as the go-to household cooking oil. 

Apparently it is delicious for making baked goods and popcorn, and might even be healthier than vegetable oil. 

According to Wikipedia:

"...lard has less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol than an equal amount of butter by weight.[2] Unlike many margarines and vegetable shortenings, unhydrogenated lard contains no trans fat."

Maybe we should try it! It seems like all we need to do is buy a chunk of pig fat from our local cheese, meat, and wine shop (see above photo), boil it in a pot for a while, and scoop off the clean white fat. I guess this is basically the stuff that's left on the pan after frying bacon in a pan. We used to save this at home to keep it from clogging the drains, but I don't think we ever cooked with it. 

According to Chris at the American Academy in Rome, the meat industry here is much more decentralized and humane than in the US. The pig fat we buy here will probably be from a reasonably healthy and well-treated pig, so it will probably be delicious!

Here's how to render lard from pig fat:

http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/makeyourownlard

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Brekkers with literally-just-off-the-vine tomatoes from our terrace. MMm.

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D'awww... It's a wee weed!

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So our Terrace gets REally hot during the day. So hot, that I can't walk on it in bare feet. So we wanted to see if, as the old legend goes, fry an egg on it. 

Nope. 

But we did learn we have a healthy ant presence on our terrace. A lone patrol must have encountered the dried out egg, and only a few hours after we dropped it, there was already a strong line of ants carrying the nutritious egg home with them.

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I bought plums from San Cosimato again. In fact.. I'm actually buying plums from San Cosimato every day now. They are still cheap and ripe and and delicious. This time I tried a new variety of plums - Susine Gocce D'Oro, (golden plums). At this time, the plums were all 3 Euros a kilogram. Since then, some varieties have gone down to 2.50 and even 2.00 for some small varieties. 

I also got some blue cheese from Conad, and discovered that the golden plums are great when eaten alongside the moldy cheese. The combination of the sharp and milky flavor and creamy texture alongside the slightly sour and sweet flavor and fleshy texture of the plums is a very pleasurable eating experience. 

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First salad with tomatoes from our terrace garden!

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We gave our tomato plant a haircut!

It was super bushy and had lots of suckers and was in general pretty poorly pruned...

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Top 10 Tomato Growing Tips

Here are some more critical tomato tips.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gardening-blog/2010/may/18/growing-tomatoes-tips

This page has some pretty useful tips for how to grow and ripen delicious tomatoes.

Some of the more interesting ones:

-Companion planting works wonderfully with tomatoes. Sow basil underneath as a sacrificial (white fly is drawn to it rather than your toms) or try garlic, nasturtiums or tagetes to repel aphids.

-  ...Tomatoes have two sets of roots: some at the surface that feed and lower ones that drink in water...

- Bring any tomatoes that are still shy of ripeness at the end of the summer indoors and put a banana with them - the ethylene given off by the banana helps them ripen. 

- Don't give yourself a hard time if you pick a few and they taste a little disappointing - tomatoes are notoriously sensitive to place and weather. There are hundreds of sugars, acids and volatile chemicals that we perceive when we taste a tomato, many of which are held separately within the structure of the fruit and mingle at ripeness (with its gentle collapse of cell walls). Judging the instant is a matter of trial and error. So pick one that looks right - if it's wonderful then pick the rest at a similar stage.

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Pinching out "suckers" - leafy shoots on a tomato plant that detract nutrients from the tomato fruit.  

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An interview with a farmer who recently upgraded to a robotic rotary parlour, which is a system used to help automate the process of milking large numbers of cows and sheep. 

It's a major labor-saver, and helps him to manage a large number of cows more efficiently. 

At first, I felt an almost automatic negative reaction to this kind of automation when it comes to animals, but after watching this video, I realized that at least in the realm of massively industrialized dairy farming, robotic milking really makes sense, and might even be more humane if it means that the cows' health is better managed. Then again, I don't think I'm in favor of such huge industrialization of animals in the first place, and I'm starting to think that saving on labor costs might not actually be a very good goal to be pursuing. 

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This is what it's like to work on a dairy farm if you're responsible for running the rotary parlour. 

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In reading about Pecorino and sheep's milk I came across this image. I find it a bit creepy - the haunches of the sheep look scary and sickly - the udders are so swollen and the legs look so weak and uncomfortable. This was taken in what's called a "rotary parlour" in Aveyron, France. 

Rotary parlours are rotating platforms that assist in the automation of sheep and cow milking. They allow a very small number of operators to easily manage the milking of dozens or hundreds of cows or sheep. Some of them even use robotic milking, which basically means complete automation. 

If you're interested in buying a rotary parlour take a look at some of these great vendors:

http://www.fullwood.com/t/rotary-parlour

http://www.westfalia.com/au/en/products_services/proformance_equipment/products/milking_equipment/parlour_frames/rotary_parlours/default.aspx