Category — Jim’s Thoughts

Student Designed & Built Chicken Coop,
Photo credit: Project H Design, used with permission

The other night, we attended a scintillating presentation that connected three of our continuing interests: community, farmers’ markets and chicken coops. The lecture was part of the Penny Stamps speaker series at the Michigan Theatre every Thursday at 5:10 which is, for my money, the most intellectually stimulating, regularly scheduled free date night in town.

Last night’s speaker was Emily Pilloton, who created her own non-profit when she had only $1K in the bank based on the idea that good, sustainable design could transform the world. But instead of working “wide” her organization aims “deep.” They developed a Design-Build curriculum for Bertie County, North Carolina. Why Bertie County? The superintendent of this poor district read about them in Dwell magazine and invited them, first to build playgrounds, then to develop a curriculum… and teach it. The way Emily told the story was moving and quite engaging, but it’s also nothing that educators haven’t already experienced. Her students were dealing with being single parents, having a record of serious offenses, poor anger control and worse communication skills. Some didn’t know how to read a ruler. Others didn’t know how to read at all. Their Studio-H class was, for some students, the ONLY face-time they had with an actual teacher, that is, ALL their other classes were on-line. (One student was even taking P.E. on-line, however that might work.) She did not romanticize the experience; in fact, she said, with some amazement, that she didn’t realize how difficult working with high school students would be. I believe I chuckled out loud.

The first project was to build a “cornhole” game and to use computers to design the graphics that they painted on the boards. Emily gave some pretty clever prompts to spur these designs, like a limited color pallet based on the colors of the cornbags and a different action verb for each student like “fold” or “stretch.” These boards were auctioned off to fund the next project which was a bit more ambitious. Bertie County is largely agricultural and its largest crop come from mass chicken factories. Their second project was to design a small, family-sized chicken coop. Actual chickens were brought into the class room so students could get to know their “clients” and to better understand their needs. They made several iterative designs with cardboard and sticks then selected models for their full size coops. Some groups used reclaimed lumber. All of them used some kind of MIG welded structure. In the end, all three of the project were delivered to local families for actual use in their yards. The recipients all seemed pleased with the coops but I couldn’t help thinking they might fit even better in a trendy community like Ann Arbor more than rural North Carolina.

Then the flood hit North Carolina. And another flood. And a tropical storm, I think. The class arranged a town meeting to discuss what the town needed, in effect to answer not just how the town could re-build itself back to how it was but how it could re-build itself better. What came out of the conversations was that even though Bertie County is an agricultural community, there is no place to buy good produce. The class proposed a farmer’s market. Again they went through the iterative design process, but this time it involved several community wide discussions. Emily noted that these design meetings created opportunities for folks to talk across lines of race, age, history about something they all care about– the future of their town. Eventually a design was selected that picked up elements of local vernacular architecture, was easy to use both for the vendor and buyer, and frankly looked cool but not “art school.”

Windsor Farmers' Market
Photo credit: Project H Design, used with permission

And then they did what from my perspective was entirely impossible: they built the structure, using paid student labor and no subcontractors. Emily’s architect partner got a contractor’s license. The design passed flood and tropical storm durability approval. The students weren’t directly paid “wages” and there were those pesky safety laws to obey, I gather, that forbid having youth operate certain pieces of potentially machinery. But the building was built. Its opening day as a Farmer’s Market was October 1st, just a couple weeks ago.
One take-away I got was that they used turned a liability into a strength. When they lost protection, they gained flexibility. Four weeks before the class was to start, the superintendent got run out of town due to what Emily called “kindergarten politics.” Their program was so endangered that the only way the school board would allow it to go forward was if it took absolutely no money from the district. And that included salaries. I gather that she and her partner – the “non-profit agency” – funded their programs through grants and a small salary from the community college, where their cross-listed course allowed students to earn college credit. They applied an agile, design-oriented approach to their own enterprise.

And the other lesson was “deep not wide.” Do something, in particular, specific even if it can’t be universalized or scaled large. In a sense it’s the second verb of their motto “Design. Build. Transform.” The relationship between building and transforming was also very strong in the presentation. Her notion of design struck me so strongly I wrote it down verbatim: “interesting solutions to worthy problems.”

Emily Pilloton came into rural North Carolina, far from her native habitat of San Fransisco, and, not only did she make it home, she made community.

Here’s a link to her website: http://www.studio-h.org/about

My mom’s side of the family comes from Michigan’s Thumb region which is known for its growth and manufacture of pickles and relish. Many of my cousins worked at “The Pickle Factory” for their summer jobs, and most of my aunts had a personal variation on a pickle recipe or two.

This recipe is one that Jan and I received on a 3 x 5 card when we were married coming up on 3 decades ago. It was hand-typed but unsigned so I can’t give proper credit. I’m also including the variation I tried this year that uses less sugar but a bit more spice for a hotter, more tart pickle.

Refrigerator Sweet Pickles

4 cups vinegar
1/2 cup kosher salt
4 cups sugar
1 tsp. turmeric
1 tsp. mustard seed
1 tsp. celery seed
5 onions, sliced
Cucumbers –about 9 medium, sliced

Put all ingredients, except onions & cucumber in a pot and bring to a boil. Let cool. Put sliced onions & cucumbers in glass jars and pour cooled mixture over them. Store in refrigerator.

20 Minute Jim’s Hot and Sour Pickles

4 cups apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup Kosher salt
1 cup brown sugar
1 Tbl turmeric
1 Tbl. celery seed
1 Tbl. mustard seed
1 Tbl. hot pepper flakes
3 large white onions, quartered and sliced
10 cucumbers, seven inches long

Follow the same process as above. Makes three quarts. Store in the refrigerator.

Refrigerator pickles are great for beginners because they are fast and easy. We get the pleasure of a pickle without all the fuss and steam of canning– although we are also big fans of canning our bounty. What’s your favorite pickle– spicy, sweet or sour?

This week I harvested garlic from the Raised Bed 20 Years in the Making, a 2 x 3 foot mini-garden we created out of an old shipping crate and filled with compost. Our experiment growing garlic netted a respectable harvest, not overwhelming, but enough to encourage another attempt next year. The yield was roughly 12 ounces of heads the size of a baby’s fist. I showed our harvest to Liz, a gardener friend, and she reminded me that smaller heads often keep better than the larger heads.

We had missed the perfect time for scapes, those curly tendrils that develop on the ends of the shoots. If you catch them while they’re still green and tender, they can be used pretty much like garlic. The scapes on our garlic had hardened into papery clusters like tiny garlic heads. I’m told they can also be used as seed but that they take a bit longer to grown into full heads– 3 years is what I’ve read! We’ll try that experiment next.

Conventional wisdom is to let the harvested heads sit outside for a couple days so they dry out and prepare for longer term storage.

20 Minute Jan tried her hand at a braid of garlic. Not too shabby.

I knew it was time to harvest because the tops had wilted, browned and fallen over. The condition of the tops made it a little difficult to find all the heads. Thus it was quite convenient to have grown the garlic in a raised bed because I was able to scoop into the fluffy soil and then actually sift out the heads using our compost strainer.

We planted our garlic in the mild spell of last November. As noted then, we’d missed the opportunity of using purchased “garlic sets” so instead used store-bought garlic separated into cloves for planting. This fall, we’ll use garlic sets for a point of comparison in our ongoing garden experimentation.

Garlic takes a good 9 months of growing time. We’ll plant more in this same bed in a couple months but for the time being I sowed a second season crop of beets. I hope the beets will also enjoy the soft, stone-free growing bed.

20 Minute Jim says: The up-side of all this rain is that our cucumbers are VERY happy. I’ve already made 3 quarts of refrigerator pickles – with an experimental low-sugar recipe – and numerous batches of tzatziki.

I pick them when they’re 6 to 8 inches long, maybe 2 inches in diameter. They tend to get bitter as they get bigger. My daughter said that this year’s cukes even tasted “sweet” though I am not 100% certain she was referring to their flavor. It might be some kind of young person lingo for approval.

Our experiment with growing cucumbers vertically has paid off, at least so far. Eight plants take up about 16 square feet though they are reaching upward to about 5 feet tall now. They’ve reached the top of the cages… I’ll report back what happens when they continue to grow throughout August!

My friend Karen surprised me last week with a gift. “I hope you haven’t planted all the spaces in your garden yet,” she said. I had to laugh because at that particular moment, absolutely NONE of my seedlings had found their way to the garden. Karen and I share a love of hot peppers. She presented me with two varieties I had not tried: Ghost and Lemon Pepper.

What Karen and I both love about certain hot peppers is that it only takes a couple to season a whole batch of chili or, in Karen’s case, salsa. Karen cans many quarts of salsa that she adapts as needed to the desired level of hotness.

We both also admire how attractive some hot peppers are. Habaneros for instance are every bit as attractive as the purely ornamental “Chinese Lantern.”

A few years back, Karen clued me into the Purira pepper. That summer our garden greenery was profusely dotted with bright spots of red, orange, and yellow, and our salsa was, well, a little hotter.

I’m looking forward to seeing what these gift plants bring to the garden.

Ghost, also known as the Bhut Jolokia, is a wickedly hot pepper, at one time the Guinness Book Record holder for hottest pepper (2007), although it turns out that “World’s Hottest Chili” is a controversial issue. Among its alleged non-culinary uses is as an ingredient in smoke bombs to keep wild elephants at bay.

Karen’s other gift was Lemon Drop pepper which hails from Peru. It is a vine like plant whose fruits are bright yellow when ripe.

“Where ever did you find these oddities?” I asked her.

“The Ann Arbor Farmers’ Market, of course!” was her reply– which is a reminder to explore with renewed curiosity what might have become a familiar spot to discover hidden treasures and find new plants to try.