School's Out For Summer

Where have I been, you ask? For the past month and a half, I've been thoroughly immersed in school, and what suffered from blog neglect paid off with A's for final grades in all of my classes. We're talking community college here, so it's not like it's Stanford, but nevertheless, I was happy to achieve a goal I set for myself at the beginning of the quarter.

I learned a lot in school, mostly how to use Adobe software projects, Photoshop in particular. I incorporated food and chickens into a lot of my assignments, and one week we had to build a realistic magazine cover and put ourselves on it. For that, I used one of my favorite magazines, Hobby Farm Home, and I think it was the best thing I made all quarter, so I'm putting it here so you can see for yourself.

Rama at the Hama Hama

Lissa James can throw one heck of a party.

If you missed it last weekend, then put it on your calendar for 2013. Usually the first low-tide weekend in May, the Hama Hama Oyster Rama* is a day-long fundraiser for the Hood Canal Education Foundation in Lilliwaup, Wash., complete with oyster and wine tastings, a shucking contest, beer garden, a variety of shellfish culinary experiences, cooking and history seminars, trivia contest, arts and crafts, live music, and best of all, the opportunity to dig your own clams and pick your own oysters for less than the sponsoring Hama Hama Oyster Company's retail price.

Arriving promptly at 11am last Saturday when the u-pick started (time is of the essence as the incoming tide waits for no one), Tim and I dug at least six pounds of clams and gathered six dozen more oysters.

One of the guys who checked us out was so impressed with our foraging skills that he said, "Wow. Do you want a job?"

Believe me, I was tempted. There is something about going outside into the fresh air to get food that feels visceral to me.

Culinary Arts and a Coop

It was a very busy week on the "farm," and I can confidently say a lot has been accomplished. Most of the week was spent in Seattle, and while that didn't get a lot of the physical work done, it moved the farm's concept forward in great strides.

I have decided that, if a job (teaching life skills to incarcerated men at Clallam Bay Correctional Center) I interviewed for doesn't come through, I will likely enroll in the Culinary Arts Program at Seattle Central Community College if I can get enough funding to pay for it. Seattle Central is one of a few colleges that still has worker retraining money available to the unemployed for certain programs, and one can still draw unemployment while going to school. I attended an orientation for the program on Thursday, and it was quite impressive. One of my original motivations for choosing this program was to gain credibility as a food writer, and in the orientation the presenter said some of their graduates had gone on to do just that. One part of the program includes summer work on a Skagit Valley farm and the curriculum also infuses sustainable food system practices into the coursework.

This is a very attractive Plan B, but if the job is offered to me, I'm going to take it for a variety of reasons and be content that I can continue to learn about culinary arts through self-study. At the prison, there is a large grassy area in the middle of the surrounding buildings. If I work there, my dream is to make it into a garden and teach the guys about sustainable food practices.

Awesome Asparagus

If you think that I'm developing my mini-farm because I like to eat good food, then you would be correct. I love fresh food. Who doesn't?

Of course I'm excited to get things growing, so it's hard to wait until my entire plot is dug up. Last week, I looked up Sunset magazine's Northwest Checklist February and saw that it's time to set out bare-root asparagus crowns and start sweet pea seeds indoors. I especially love the taste of asparagus and smell of sweet peas, so down to the garden center I went, and home I came with a package of six USDA organic Jersey Knight asparagus crowns from Van Bloem Gardens and a royal family mixture of sweet pea seeds from Ed Hume Seeds. Ed's been a gardening guru around the Pacific Northwest for ages, and he, too, has a blog.

Although I've never grown asparagus before now, it seems like a good place to start this year, not just alphabetically, but because it's almost Valentine's Day and asparagus is supposedly an aphrodisiac. I read where ancient Egyptians offered it to the gods. It's a good source of folate, potassium, and vitamin C, and China, it seems, grows most of the world's supply. In the United States, production is concentrated in California, Michigan, and Washington. Tomatoes are recommended as a companion plant in the garden to repel asparagus beetles.