Modeling Sustainable Food Systems
Growing, storing and preparing wholesome foods
sustainable gardening takes lots of compost
lots of compost takes a really big mixer
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Growing Skills:
At Windward you'll get to participate in growing an ever expanding range of fresh wholesome foods
in a program that blends traditional gardening techniques with innovations based on four season gardening. An excellent online resource for learning about this type of year-round sustainable food production is the Four Season Gardening Forum.
One program goal is to provide our kitchen with fresh produce year round. We're currently able to do that some eight months a year. Vermadise, our 20'x40' greenhouse optimized for growing earthworms, will boost that to ten months a year, and the solar aquaponics building will take us to year round production.
In 2006, the food growing projects we'll be working on will include:
Sheep overwintering in the main
garden pen to add manure to the soil
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- create a new and enlarged kitchen garden adjacent to the dining hall,
- fabricate slotted covers for the earthworm beds to support containerized growing over the beds,
- install the rabbit cages on top of the earthworm beds so that the rabbit droppings provide nitrogen for the bacteria that digest cellulose and are consumed in turn by the earthworms.
- constructing cold frames along the eastern side of Vermadise.
- plant more apricot trees
- more perimeter fencing as we work to turn all of Windward into one large, diversified sustainable garden
quarts of concord grape jam and zucchini pickles
stored away among the canned goods
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Storing Skills:
There are lots of places where you can learn to grow food, but not so many where you can learn the almost "lost arts" used to preserve that bounty. Windward is such a place.
In this age of fast food and quick trips to the Safeway, it's easy to loose sight of just how much food it takes to feed twenty people for a year, and how much space it takes to safely store that much food. Indeed, it's fair to say that effective food storage techniques are among the most important, and most overlooked, aspects of building a sustainable community.
Sustainable food storage involves:
(1) processing fresh food so that its nutritional value is preserved,
At Windward you can learn how to:
- pressure can fruits and vegetables
- make and can low-sugar jams
- make fruit "leather"
- make and can specialty pickles
- make pasta from fresh ground whole wheat
- make and store cheeses
- make goat milk fudge
- make frozen goat yugurt
(it's so much better than ice cream).
- dehydrate vegetables
- make smoked jerky
- make home-made sausages
Imagine baby red potatoes fresh dug from the garden, boiled up and smothered in fresh, home-made salsa and topped off with fresh goat cheese -- it doesn't get any better than that :-)
(2) storing preserved food for later use.
Once you've grown and processed all that food, the next challenge involves creating enough secure (as in secure from mice) storage to insure that your food will remain wholesome.
At Windward, you'll learn how to utilize a wide range of storage options tailored to the needs of each class of food. For example you'll learn:
new potatoes drying out
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- how to use dry ice and an open top 55 gallon drum to store wheat -- the dry ice sublimes into heavy carbon dioxide gas which pushes the lighter oxygen out of the drum thereby preventing the oxidation of the wheat germ while killing any insects that might be luring in the grain.
- how to construct ventilated racks for short term storage of potatoes, onions and other root crops.
- how to convert an old chest freezer into a secure, underground locker for long term storage of potatoes and other root crops.
- how to construct heavy-duty shelving to store canning jars.
- how to use sprounting to transform whole grains into highly digestible food
- how to build a "Warmerator" for making sprouts, yougurt, cheese, etc.
Cooking Skills
At Windward you'll have the chance to learn to cook "from scratch" in our commercial kitchen using our diverse colletion of traditional and modern equipment. And example of traditional cooking is the pot of vegetable soup that Lynn is about to enjoy. On a cold winter day, what could be better than fresh baked biscuits and hot soup?
New folks start out by watching and assisting Windward folk transform basic ingredients into delicious dishes, and then transition to mastering their own dishes using our library of cook boods and cooking videos such as those produced by America's Test Kitchen (our favorite PBS show).
Sustainable living is abundant living, and no where is that more evident than in the food we enjoy here at Windward. By learning to produce, process and prepare our own foods, instead of relying on the industrially processed commercial foods which form the mainstay of the modern American diet, we are able to enjoy a dining standard that is comparable to what you'd find in a quality resturant, only without all the added salt, MSG and preservatives found in commercial food.
growing cooking herbs in the
kitchen's bay windows
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When you buy food at the supermarket, you have no way of knowing what it's been sprayed with or the quality of the soil in which it was grown. When you grow and preserve it yourself, you know that it's good and good for you.
By working together as a community, we are able to meet our needs far better than any one of us could do alone, and no where is that reality more deliciously realized than in Windward's kitchen.
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