Lately I've been reading more "God-bloggers" for lack of a better term and I'm really enjoying Dan Edelen's blog Cerulean Sanctum. He just posted an awesome list of 100 things he had learned over walking with God for 30 years. Some are beautiful, some are theological, some are encouraging, all are convicting. Well worth a read.
I'm really starting to get fed up with this city. Daley is a crook and he's running the city into the ground. Big shock. His latest budget proposal announcement for next year calls for, are you ready for it, 10-15% increase in property taxes. This while Daley and his cronies channel millions of dollars into TIFs (one of the worse scams on the working man ever), can't keep the cops from breaking the law and hurting people, lets the CTA self-destruct, fumbles around with an ill-advised Olympic bid (I don't think a single one of my friends is in favor of it) and continues to award high-paying jobs to friends so they can sit on their asses all day while my tax dollars pay their salary. What the heck is wrong with this city? If this keeps up, finding another place to call home is looking better and better.
Wonderful, thought-provoking article from Andy Crouch. Andy works on The Christian Vision Project for Christianity Today and runs the CultureMakers web site. He is releasing a book of the same name. Thanks to David Wayne the Jolly Blogger for pointing out this great article.
Culture Makers | The Pleasures and Perils of Fermentation
Some farm shots are up on Flickr, including our trip to First Farm Inn in KY just outside Cincinnati (when we went to the Over The Rhine album release party), a trip to More Than Delicious Orchard north of Chicago and our recent trip to Caveny Farm.
A humorous, but spot-on take on the whole bottled water issue from Garrison Keillor
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sustainability
Last year Kristin and I were having a big Thanksgiving dinner shindig at our place and wanted to do something different for the turkey. After looking at several options, we decided to purchase a heritage Bourbon Red turkey from Caveny Farms and picked it up at the Green City Winter Market. Simply slow roasted with a few herbs and butter, it was like no turkey I'd ever had. The turkey's
white meat actually had flavor and the dark meat was even more flavorful and juicy than usual. It actually tasted like meat compared to a traditional Butterball.
So we were excited a month or so ago to get an invitation to attend a picnic at Caveny Farm put on by the local Slow Food society near Champaign IL. In typical food geek fashion, we like nothing better than getting closer to the source of our food, plus with our interest in farming and sustainability it seemed worth the drive. So we went down yesterday for a visit.
We got there just in time for the tour with John Caveny and learned about how they raise the turkeys and got to see them up close. They were not enjoying the heat wave, being only about a month from slaughter size. Some of you may not know that birds pant to release heat, which I was used to from my days working in my dad's chicken house. These birds were getting a bit warm, but still wanted to flock together. Nobody ever said turkeys were the smartest bird on the planet.
Caveny Farms also does rotational grazing on grass, using the turkeys to graze down the fields and in turn supply it with natural fertilizer (bird sh*t to you). The manure will help the pasture grow for about 3 years before they need to rotate the birds onto it again, which seems like a pretty good return on investment. They are also growing test plots of miscanthus gigantus, a tall sawgrass from Asia that ends up being one of our best hopes for non-corn based ethanol as well as pellet fuel and natural gas substitute. Stephen Long at University of Illinois Champaign has been taking a look at this for awhile now. Very intriguing. It's a rhizome, so it needs to be propagated from root structures and it is taking a bit to get supplies up to the level where it is commercially feasible. They are also still doing research on the best method to convert it to ethanol, but this plant holds a lot of promise. Great yield, low carbon footprint and doesn't need a lot of water or fertilizer. I've been hearing a lot about switchgrass for some reason, but this plant is even better. And once it is producing, it's a better money-maker for farmers as well.
We also got to meet Andrew and Jennifer Miller from Rush Creek Farms who grow Kiko meat goats, a breed from New Zealand. Kristin and I are very interested in the idea of dairy goats, so it was great to talk goats with some real goat farmers. We discovered our research is apparently being fruitful, as they were surprised at some of the things we had already figured out and read about. So I guess that is encouraging. We are hoping to go down again to visit their farm and also to visit one of the large dairy goat and cheese operations that is only about 20 minutes from them. They used to live in the city as well, but decided about 5 years ago they wanted a change of pace. Kristin and I have been thinking a lot about how we can turn our love of food into a second career/early retirement, although that is still a lot of research, prayer and savings away. It's exciting to start looking at various types of homestead farming though and hopefully over the next several years we will start to understand if this is really something we are interested in pursuing. I'll have some pictures before too long.
Radiohead suddenly announced the release of their new album. They didn't sign with a new label, they are selling it themselves. And get this, you can download the new album on October 10th for the price of your choosing, above a certain small minimum. They are also selling this huge download/CD/vinyl package for 40 pounds (about $80 US) that will ship sometime in December. Looks very cool, although a bit pricey for me. Wow, leave it to Radiohead to give a nice big middle finger to the music industry. Something tells me they will be okay.
You can pre-order the album on this site.