Joshua McNichols

Ballard Brewery District gets more love

Guest — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 16:34:39 +0000

Guest (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2013 - 9:34am

Hilliard's Beer is just one of many breweries to have recently opened up in Ballard. The team, from left to right: Adam Merkl, Ryan Hilliard, Todd Garrett

Photo by Jerry Gay

Ballard's brewery boom seems to just keep booming. As we await the arrivals of Stoup Brewing and Bad Jimmy's, KUOW gives a shoutout to our bustling "Brewery District."

KUOW's Joshua McNichol's, a Ballard resident who has contributed a few pieces for the Ballard News-Tribune, produced a piece called "Ballard Brewery District Thrives By Balancing Cooperation And Competition."

Using the curmodgeonly salty dog owner of Maritime Pacific Brewing, George Hancock, as an anchor for the story, McNichols describes the sprouting and flourishing of Ballard breweries. While Hancock used to be the only brewer in town, now there are about ten, with a couple in progress and likely more on the way.

But rather than creating fierce competition, the Ballard brewers have taken to helping each other and sustaining one another.

“It’s a complete camaraderie that goes on between all of them,” brewery marketer Oceania Eagan explained to McNichols. “And I think that is one of the collective energies around marketing. They know that by marketing, not just themselves, but the entire group and the idea of it being a brewery district, it only brings people here to be excited about craft beer in general. That only adds to everyone’s growth.”

Of course, the Ballard News-Tribune wrote about the Ballard brewery boom back in March. In that article, Populuxe Brewing co-owner Peter Charbonnier summed it up his own way.

“The idea that there might be too many breweries in Ballard, it’s a foreign concept to me because it’s like saying there are too many wineries in Napa valley."

Read/listen to KUOW's piece here.

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Backyard Feast: So you want to start a garden?

Guest — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:03:11 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 04/11/2013 - 8:03am

Come to the free April 27th class to learn more about building healthy soil!

Photo by Joshua McNichols

By Joshua McNichols

I heard you wanted to start a garden. I remember my first garden. It was in a P-patch. And if it weren’t for nosy P-Patchers offering me unsolicited advice, I’d probably still be buying bland cherry tomatoes in mid-summer at Fred Meyer. So at the risk of putting my nose where it doesn’t belong, I and three of my seasoned-gardener friends will now lean over our shovels and grant you the same favor.

How to Start an 8x8 Garden

Call The Dirt Exchange and have them deliver exactly one yard of “Vegetable Garden Mix” in your driveway, or even in the street (which is probably illegal so be quick). Next, find a patch of lawn and give it a military haircut. Buy one box of complete organic fertilizer (dry powder) for vegetable gardens from Walt’s under the Ballard Bridge. Then go to Limback’s and buy four 2x6 studs, 8 feet long (avoid pressure-treated) and a handful of galvanized 16-d nails. Flip the studs so the skinny side is on the ground and hammer them into a square on your short grass. Fill that square with your new dirt. Don’t be afraid if it mounds up a bit, it’ll settle. Apply some fertilizer per the box’s recommended application rate and mix in. 5 inches of soil is enough to kill most of your grass and the tiny bit that grows through is easy to remove by hand. Your garden is ready to plant.

How to Make The Most Use Of That Tiny Space.

Some crops rise from the ground and explode into maturity like zombies in a horror movie. Others sit there much longer, like an out-of-work relative with a gambling problem who won’t take a hint. Colin McCrate is the author of Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard. He writes: some plants are “ready to harvest after only a month or six weeks, some will live for three to four months, and some will take all season long to reach maturity. It’s helpful to know how long a plant will be in the garden, so you can plan to replace it with another crop once it is finished.” As a beginning gardener, you’ll have the best success planting lettuces and radishes in spring and fall and zucchini and basil in the summer.

Eat It All

Lesa Sullivan is a chef who teaches cooking classes. Her advice to urban gardeners: consider eating the whole plant! Those plants occupy valuable real estate. Make them work for it. “There’s a ton of produce that I like to call ‘bonus food,’ where you can eat the root and the green, the flower and the fruit,” says Lesa. “My parsley grows explosively. When I have enough, I eat the taproot: I steam it and toss it with some caraway and butter. Beets are another great example: their lightly steamed greens are as delicious as the bulb. Zucchini blossoms, carrot fronts, celery leaves, squash seeds… try it, you might like it.”

Extend Your Season For A Longer Harvest

Somebody really messed up when designing our growing season. It’s not long enough. I’m suing God, but the case has gone nowhere. In the meantime, you can make the growing season longer by using a cloche, says Bill Thorness. “The word cloche is French for bell, and the original cloches were individual glass bells that provided a mini-greenhouse for each plant.” Keeping plants warm outdoors in winter can seem like a big job. But in reality, a cloche can make a crisp fall day feel like a day at the spa. Bill goes deeper into this strategy in his book, Cool Season Gardener: Extend the Harvest, Plan Ahead, and Grow Vegetables Year Round. He says “as the days get shorter and the nights colder, your fall salad greens may need a plastic hoop-house to keep them growing longer into autumn.”

Joshua (that would be me), Colin, Lesa and Bill will be offering a free Gardening 101 Short Course at Sunset Hill Community Association clubhouse (3003 NW 66th St). The intense four-instructor course runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 27. It’s free and will be followed by a seed exchange run by Sustainable Ballard, so bring seeds and envelopes. Books will be available for purchase.

Joshua McNichols is the author of The Urban Farm Handbook. He lives in Ballard and is happy to give unsolicited gardening advice.

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Backyard Feast: Plant Gardens In Spring, Enjoy Nature's Awkward Adolescence

Guest — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:49:14 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 03/21/2013 - 5:49am

Spring Vs. Summer in the garden

Photo illustration by Joshua McNichols

By Joshua McNichols

There is a moment, when a storm has passed you by, when you can stand on the sidewalk and feel the warmth of the sun, even as ten blocks away the yellow-gray storm cloud sits on Phinney Ridge like a hen on its nest. Depending on where you live, there might be a rainbow over Ross Park, or Ballard Market, or the Library. That rainbow is a perfect expression of spring.

In spring, so many variables are just right, neither too much of this, nor too little of that. Spring is between the relentlessness of Pacific Northwest winters and the austerity of late summer drought. In spring, the soil is just warming up enough that the microbes wake up and begin eating and pooping, releasing dormant nutrients to the roots of plants. At the same time, plants aren't stunted by drought: there's water for all, enough that plant cells can stand erect, turgid, like a pressurized garden hose. Yet the intermittent dry days allow oxygen to penetrate the soil, aerobicizing microbe activity like a Zumba class. The resulting soil is a playground for roots, which romp and careen through the loose soil like drunken sailors. And while there isn't enough heat to coddle melons and tomatoes yet, there's plenty of light. Days are becoming longer and longer –- they peak in length LONG before the days become reliably hot.

This season of between-ness –- it has an awkwardness about it, like the first hairs on the upper lip of an adolescent boy, like the mind of a girl who mispronounces words she's only encountered in books. The plants of this season are special. They are youth itself. Ridiculously green and nutritious like kale. Toothy and snappy like new radishes, which you must harvest in large bunches before they toughen over the next week.

The plants of summer are different. Tomatoes, for example, have a zen-like ability to eke out a life from the drip-drip of late summer. They are the monks of the plant world. Around them, the impetuous plants of spring will lodge, collapse and wilt.

But now is not their season. Now is the time to celebrate abandon, vigor, fecundity. Plunge your hands into the cool soil. Take advantage of that moving sunbeam, the odd dry day. Remember when you absorbed, grew and changed in this way. Let the garden inspire you.

Things to plant right now:

Radishes from seed.
Carrots from seed (water them later).
Peas from seed (irrigate them later).
Kale from starts (plant in areas with Southern or Western shade to discourage them bolting when it heats up).

When it gets too hot for these, when you can't keep them from flowering any longer, don't be ashamed of letting them go, letting them become nectar sources for the bees. They are like our children. You can't keep them young forever.

Joshua McNichols is author of The Urban Farm Handbook. He is somewhere between old and young. He lives in Ballard, in the house where former owner Bill Redfern once displayed a sculpture of a skeleton riding a motorcycle in the front yard. Many local children were frightened.

Follow Ballard News-Tribune on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ballardnewstrib

And Twitter at http://twitter.com/ballardnewstrib

gardening

Seattle news

Joshua McNichols

Urban Farmers Handbook

Ballard

Ballard News Tribune

Backyard Feast: How to rebuild urban soils (Diagram)

Guest — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:49:28 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 11/29/2012 - 8:49am

Zoom in for better view of diagram

Diagram by Joshua McNichols

By Joshua McNichols, author of the Urban Farm Handbook

If you've ever gardened in the city, you've probably noticed our soil isn't so hot.

Sometimes you get lucky -- like when the former owner of your house used a mulching mower for 50 years. But more often, we urbanites are blessed with a thin layer of organic matter over compacted clay or sand. New gardens in Seattle sometimes thrive for a year or two, even without being amended. But then, when nutrients are exhausted, there's a year of disease and pests that can throw new gardeners into a funk.

A garden is only as healthy as its soil, and one of the first steps to creating a healthy garden is rebuilding your soil. Above is a handy chart to help you assess which strategies to employ. The first question is: How crazy do you want to be?

If you're unfamiliar with some of the techniques mentioned in this chart, don't fret. (What kind of fertilizer? What the heck is biochar?) When properly built, good soil is like a sponge. It sucks up moisture and nutrients and releases them slowly. It buffers your plants against stressors such as ill-timed fertilizer application and drought. And just as it buffers your plants against the extremes of nature, it also buffers them against mistakes you might make. Over time, the more effort you invest in your soil, the more forgiving it becomes.

Kind of like a marriage. You may choose to neglect it, but if you do, you'll pay in the end. :)

Seattle news

Joshua McNichols

Urban Farmers Handbook

urban farming

Ballard

Ballard News Tribune

Backyard Feast: How one woman built a food community through barter

Guest — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:29:28 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 10/11/2012 - 9:29am

A few items available for barter at a Backyard Barter event

Photo courtesy of Backyard Barter

By Joshua McNichols, author of Urban Farm Handbook

When Creagh Miller moved to Seattle, she wanted to get involved with urban farming. But she lacked certain skills. How exactly does one build a chicken coop? How do you install an irrigation system? Most people would check out books from the library, or take classes through Seattle Tilth. But for Creagh, it was about more than just getting information. She wanted to be part of a community.

So Creagh created Backyard Barter. The organization hosts barter events around town. People trade jam, pickles, jewelry, knitted octopi, homebrew, salsa, goat milk soaps, homemade laundry detergent – just about anything you can make at home.

A few of her ideas didn’t take off. She’d hoped people would trade high end services too. That didn’t happen. It’s one thing to eat somebody’s jam. Relying on someone for legal advice requires more trust. Also, the website she created, where people could arrange trades in advance, failed to thrive. But when it came to good old-fashioned, face-to-face bartering of homemade preserves and crafts– that’s where things really started to happen.

Here’s why. If you’ve ever grown anything in your backyard, you’ve probably experienced this problem: Too much of a good thing. In my yard this year, my plums seemed to ripen all at once. And as much as I enjoy plums, there’s no way my family can eat 20 gallons of them. We made a whole lot of plum jam, gave some away, and fed a couple gallons of rotten fruit to the chickens. Now, I have much more plum jam that we could possibly eat. Yet despite this abundance, we lack many things. I lack the time, space and attention to keep bees on our property. I lack the knowledge and experience to brew our own beer. Bartering allows me to enjoy a wider variety of backyard plunder. It’s like having a diverse farm, but without all the hassle.

Creagh assembled a team of volunteers around her, and over time they’ve learned how to draw bigger crowds. And while small barters have their own charm, it’s the really big events that fetch the most interesting trades. The secret to drawing a crowd, Creagh found, was to give people a chance to check out the barter without committing. So her team began combining barters with other events, like the Seattle Tilth Harvest Fair. After the visitors discover that barterers are normal people - not all survivalists – they tend to jump in. So for Backyard Barter’s upcoming big fall event (see below), Creagh is bringing in classes, jam judging, live music and pie walks.

Creagh believes this kind of small-scale trading opens the doors to bigger trades. Eating someone else’s spicy ketchup is the first step in building trust between neighbors.

Now, Creagh is approaching the due date in her first pregnancy. And like all new parents, she’s probably going to need some help now and then. But when she opens her pantry, she sees dozens of jars of preserves, many of them labeled with the names of new friends she’s met through Backyard Barter. She may not know any of them well enough to leave them alone with a newborn infant. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

Backyard Barter’s Urban Food Fair is Sunday, November 4th from 10AM to 4PM at Seattle University’s Campion Ballroom. Find out more about the group on its facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/BackyardBarter

Backyard Feast: Bulk Produce Buys, a new way to work with farmers

Guest — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:17:58 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 09/20/2012 - 9:17am

Buyers at a Bulk Tomato Buy in Ballard

Photo by Joshua McNichols

Joshua McNichols, author of "The Urban Farm Handbook"

You may have noticed them as you drive around your Seattle neighborhood. They look like garage sales. But on closer inspection, you see those boxes aren't full of old crappy McDonald's toys -- but heirloom tomatoes! That's because this is the season of the "bulk produce buy."

A bulk produce buy is a new way to get local produce at wholesale prices in bulk. It emerged from the strong relationships developing between urban foodies and rural farmers.

Here's how most bulk produce buys work:

Someone -- an unpaid organizer -- develops a relationship with a farmer. They learn what that farmer grows and when it ripens. Around peak season, they find out when the farmer's coming over the Cascades with a load. In the case of tomatoes, buys often pigggyback on a load brought over for Whole Foods. The organizer offers to find homes for up to 2,000 pounds more. The farmers are happy for the extra volume –- after all, the grocery store can't take a whole trailer-full of tomatoes.

The organizer makes a Google spreadsheet, with prices per pound clearly displayed and slots for people to place their orders. In the case of tomatoes, we buy them at half or even a quarter of the retail price. The organizer posts an invitation at the Seattle Farm Co-op's Yahoo Group message board (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/seattlefarmcoop/).

Buyers agree to pick up their produce within a limited window. The organizer often arranges to be at home for a whole day, so that people can pick up. Sometimes the delivery date changes based on the farmers needs, so there's often last minute networking on the website, with people arranging to pick up each others' orders.

There's some risk in the system. The organizers must pay the farmer upon delivery, but the organizer is not repaid until people drift in to pick up their orders over the next day or so. Generally, the organizer doesn't mark up the produce, so there's no financial cushion if someone doesn't show up for their produce. And what would happen to the farmer if an organizer refused a load?

Those risks explain why organizers tend to work with the same farmer year after year. Over that time, trust develops.

If you're interested in getting in on group buys, join the Yahoo group and watch. Buys for winter storage squashes, apples and pears should post in the next few weeks.

Our farmers tell us these buys are an exciting new market for them. We know they made a big difference for our favorite tomato farmer, Skeeter, last year. So much so that he's begun acting as a social hub, helping the farmers around him access our market. Just last week, a farmer called him, saying desperately, “I have a thousand pounds of organic heirloom tomatoes I'm going to have to dump!" Skeeter called us, and our network swung into action. An organizer forked over the money, and within 24 hours we had sold them all.

That's how I ended up with 120 pounds of amazing heirloom tomatoes on my back porch. I'm staying up until midnight almost every night canning, during one of the most important work weeks of my life. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit I love it. I love being a part of this network. I love knowing my farmer, and knowing that I'm as useful to him as his tomatoes are to me.

Seattle news

Joshua McNichols

Urban Farmers Handbook

Backyard Feast: The Sinful Foodie

Guest — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:23:10 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 09/06/2012 - 8:23am

Holy pancakes!

Jenni McNichols

By Joshua McNichols, author of the Urban Farm Handbook

We have our priests, too, we foodies. The Greg Atkinsons, the Tamara Murphys. They inspire our pallets with their sermons on a plate. They give the local food movement a moral backbone. We make pilgrimages to their restaurants.

But am I going to invite a priest over to my house? No. Because deep in my heart, I am a sinner. I proudly tell my friends I see no need for salvation. But secretly I fear what Greg would think if he could look in my refrigerator.

He'd see overly-sweetened yogurts, which I use to bulk up my kid's lunches in a pinch. He'd see sweetened peanut butter, because my son rejects all other kinds. And in the freezer, my son's favorite meal. It steams faintly in autumn light like a smoking gun: a frozen pizza. You'd think I'd given up on him already, this finicky seven-year-old teenager of mine.

But not quite yet. A sudden inspiration hits me at a late dinner, which we've had to push until just before the kids' bedtimes due to soccer practice. I offer a twisted display of manliness that awakens his curiosity.

“How much arugula do you think I can pack into one piece of pizza?” I challenge him. My eyes are wild with enthusiasm. I wrap a tight bundle of arugula, almost 2 inches thick, in a broad slice of pizza. It looks like a spliff God and The Devil could share together. This is my gift to him: moral complexity, unexplained.

And then on weekends, we go to church. That is, we grind heirloom grains sourced from a farmer I admire. We ferment pancake batter overnight. We slather the fresh pancakes with cherry jam from neighbor Kate's bug-infested but still-delicious cherries. For lunch, a salad of backyard tomatoes and cucumbers. Drinking water infused with herbs. Snacks harvested from apple and plum trees. The kids wander the yard all day, eating out of hand, making and freezing homemade slushees from what they find.

If local food is a religion, I'm a convert, for sure. But I can't give my kids moral clarity. Sometimes, I'm nothing but a lowly sinner. Still, when I'm given time, when I'm sharing with them what's really important to me, I'm damned holy.

Holy Pancakes.

3 T plain (not vanilla) yogurt
2 ¾ cups water (let chlorine evaporate out first if you expect to go for sourdough)
1 pound spelt flour (fresh ground or in bulk from many indie grocery stores)
2 to 4 eggs
3 T oil
1 t vanilla
1 t salt
1 ½ t baking soda
1 ½ t baking powder
1 t cinnamon

Night before, slowly drizzle the water into yogurt, mixing rapidly while pouring. Mix this concoction into flour and let it ferment overnight covered on the counter. If you forget it, over 3 days it will gradually convert to sourdough pancakes.

In the morning, turn oven on “warm-hold” and put in a plate. Stir in brown water atop flour. Observe fantastic gluten development! Beat eggs separately, then stir into batter with oil and vanilla. Thoroughly premix other dry ingredients, then mix them into the batter. Make pancakes! Pile them in the warm oven as you fry them. Serve the steaming pile with butter, syrup and jam. Serves 2 adults + 2 teenagers.

Backyard Feast: Take a lesson from Breaking Bad when growing your tomatoes

Guest — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:31:13 +0000

Guest (not verified) Thu, 08/23/2012 - 9:31am

Ripe tomatoes: Better than meth

Photo by Joshua McNichols

By Joshua McNichols, award-winning author of The Urban Farm Handbook

If you’re a fan of Breaking Bad, you’ve probably heard actor Bryan Cranston talk about his character’s gradual transformation from gentle high school teacher to … Scarface. Well, gentle gardener, if you hope to have ripe tomatoes, you must undergo a similar transformation.

I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. After all you’ve done. After you’ve coddled your tomatoes and wrapped them in wall-of-waters to protect them from the spring night-time temperatures. After you’ve watered them during the early summer droughts.

You’re very sweet. And what do you have to show for it? Hulking green plants covered with green fruits. How quaint. Well, I have a hard truth for you. Fried green tomatoes suck. At least when compared to the umami-rush of a red heirloom. When cut open on your plate, it should look like the high-priest’s dinner following a human sacrifice. Open heart surgery.

Happy tomatoes will keep on growing forever. Tomatoes begin to ripen only when they smell the stink of death.

Okay, so it’s a little more complicated: Tomatoes do need a trickle of water, which I expect my tomatoes to get from the subsoil, as I am a miser. They need calcium, which for some reason they can’t absorb if it’s too dry. And if they wilt, you’ve gone too far. But stress, drought – these conditions trigger a chemical change in tomatoes that cause them to release ethylene gas.

That’s the gas that allows you to ripen peaches by placing them in a paper bag with a ripe banana. It’s what factory farms gas their bland, industrial tomatoes with to turn them red for the grocery store. It emanates from rotting things. Once your tomatoes smell it, they’ll want to rot too.

Ethylene fills a simple biological function. It tells plants (and fruits) nearby: “Hey, I’m dying over here!”

The other plants respond with, “There must be a reason he’s dying. Maybe I’m next! I’d better ripen my fruit so it can get eaten or my seeds will never escape this place of death!”

So stop watering already. Next year, stop even earlier. If you have time, remove all blossoms and tiny fruits to break your plants’ spirit. Leave a few over-ripe tomatoes on your plant. Let them spread their gassy message. This year, I’m experimenting with hanging rotten bananas in my plants. It’s kind of like putting a skull on a spike at the entrance to a medieval city.

By now, I hope your tomatoes are quaking in their roots. I hope they’re looking at you like you’re Jack Nicholson in The Shining who just popped his head through the door panel. Because this coddling must end now. You’re never going to see red if you don’t draw a little blood.

Thanks Martha at the Elisabeth C. Miller Library and Laura at the Lawn and Garden Hotline for your help.

Urban Farmers Handbook

Ballard

Ballard News Tribune

Backyard Feast: Introducing home and locally grown food into your life

Guest — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:06:03 +0000

Guest (not verified) Tue, 08/14/2012 - 7:06am

Photo by Joshua McNichols

By Joshua McNichols, co-author of the Urban Farm Handbook

There are some among us who believe this local food obsession will die out when we all get jobs. The garden will go to seed when our free time disappears. We'll return to McDonald's when we can suddenly afford to. Bah! Did my grandfather, who lived through the depression, ever allow himself to spend more than a dollar on a cup of coffee? No! Over half a century later, he stubbornly remained in the car grumbling about highway robbery while my mom ran into Starbucks for a $4 latte. The lessons we learn in times of financial strife stick with us. Many of us began gardening because we were feeling thrifty. Others, for the taste. But whatever brought us to this place, many of us will stay. The memory of a backyard tomato does not fade. In fact, it expands in the mind, like an unstaked tomato plant in late summer.

In this column, we'll explore how you can fit home grown and locally sourced food into your busy life on a budget. And we'll expose new interests you didn't even know you had: from gardening to cooperatively purchasing a cow to fill your freezer, from grinding local heirloom grains to bartering, from foraging to chickens. Reader, we will go there.

So let's begin. It's just about time to harvest this year's first crop of basil and it's not too late to plant a fall crop. I'm going to end this column by breaking the rule that says you can't make pesto in a blender. In defense, I offer only this retort: Bah!

Sacrilegious Blender Pesto

In the bottom of the blender, pour 1 and 1/2 cups olive oil (or a mixture of 1/2 olive oil and another oil), 3 to 9 cloves of smashed and peeled garlic, 2 ounces grated parmesan cheese, 1 t salt, a handful of smashed roasted almond pieces (we couldn’t afford the pine nuts), and 3 T of white vinegar. The vinegar will keep the pesto looking bright green, at least that portion of the pesto not exposed to oxygen. Blend into this as much basil as you can, feeding it in a bit at a time. Eventually the mixture will become so thick it will stop spinning like a whirlpool and start burping “glorp, glorp, glorp.” You can keep feeding in basil if you open the blender and reinvigorate the whirpool with the end of your spatula (don’t go too deep or you’ll hit the blade). At some point, you just won’t be able to force any more basil down the blender’s throat. I can force about a cubic foot of loosely packed basil leaves (removed from the plant) into a cup and a half of oil. Scrape into 3 to 4 half-pint jars and freeze. To serve, thaw closed jar 30 minutes in a container of lukewarm water. Toss pesto with cooled pasta or it will quickly turn brown.