Food Safety – TSL Homestead

August 7, 2019

New Skills and Pickles

The Mad Farmer took a day off from his “real job” and was hoping to get some intensive yard work in on his “day off”. It’s said that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. It apparently started raining sometime during the night. The Mad Farmer’s Strawberry Blonde Pain-in-the-Too-kas, aka the Bane of the Farmer’s Existence, aka the Dog that almost speaks English, sometimes known as … “Sasha”, usually gets the Farmer up sometime before 6 am to “go out”.

In case you are not a dog owner “go out” means “I’ve been inside, cooped up for a while and I gotta go, and I gotta go now (okay I could hold it, but now would be super swell and I’ll whine less – maybe – okay probably not, but maybe, if you would get up and let me outside NOW that would be SWELL). So the Mad Farmer stumbles out of bed, staggers down the stairs, whining mutt following, and opens the back door. Amazing what you don’t hear when you’re not really awake. Somehow the Farmer missed the pitter-patter of a torrential downpour. When the door opened, the driving rain was apparent and the sudden crack of lightning and resulting flash sent the aforementioned Strawberry Blonde hobbling backwards and up the stairs as fast as she could. It appears that safety trumps a full bladder, at least in the short term.

The point of all this exposition is that no yard work was getting done, at least not in the morning, at the Tiny Sustainable Homestead. There were still things to do even though it was raining.

The Family Truckster was scheduled for an oil change (turns out a trip to Polyface Farms from Kansas is far enough to warrant an oil change when you get back).
Miss Mercy had an early morning board meeting (she’s on a lot of boards, apparently to keep from getting bored).
There was coffee to be drunk (the Homestead is super fond of Seattle’s Best #5)
Bird Feeders go empty and need to be refilled, even in the rain, especially with the flying pigs that inhabit the area around the tiny homestead.
Early morning rain induced nap (this was optional, but seemed a shame to pass up).

Miss Mercy returned from her meeting and helped to drink the coffee, she was no help at all for napping – she doesn’t really nap (although she does try on occasion). The Strawberry Blonde was also not helpful for the napping. Turns out, if you’re not spending every waking moment paying attention to the Blonde then Little Miss Whiny whines. Super annoying if you’re trying to nap while hanging out on your porch in the rain. At that point the Farmer had a choice: He could get up, go upstairs and go to bed or, his timeline could fork, and he could get some stuff done (Future Post Warning: The Mad Farmer will at some point share his brother’s theory about naps and going back to bed) .

As much as the Farmer would love to waste a day doing nothing, it didn’t feel like today was that day, so the mental decision was made to get some stuff done. The bird feeders got filled, turned out the birds don’t care if it’s raining. The kitchen got spruced up, the fridge got cleaned out, zucchini chips got dehydrated and peppers and cucumbers got harvested from the garden. It’s been a weird year for gardening in Kansas, last year it jumped from Winter to Summer, giving Spring a miss. This year has been one of the wettest years in memory and so we actually had a Spring but Summer has been a pendulum swing between very hot and very wet – it’s really confused the garden produce. We know people who are having a bumper crop of tomatoes, the homestead has very few. The basil is going gangbusters and we have volunteer squash that have massive vines but aren’t fruiting. So all-in-all, garden confusion.

The one amazing pile of produce we have is cucumbers. Not the Mad Farmer’s favorite fruit but Miss Mercy loves ’em in all their forms. We had way more cucumbers than Miss Mercy could reasonably eat so the Farmer decided it was finally time to learn how to water bath can. A recent podcast from Nicole Sauce, at Living Free in Tennessee, about the 8 Steps to Mastering Canning, inspired the Farmer to give it a try with some cautious encouragement from Miss Mercy.

So we gathered the cucumbers and the canning supplies (the Homestead has been preparing for this for a while) and the Mad Farmer started slicing and dicing and sterilizing and sanitizing and boiling and preparing and all the other things you need to do so start canning.

Turns out it’s not that scary. The Farmer has brewed beer and mead off and on for years. The one thing in common with those processes is you want to make sure everything is clean and sanitary. If conditions are not sanitary you risk contaminating your product and screwing up all your hard work. Cucumbers are naturally high in acid so, like brewing, there isn’t anything that will grow in canned pickles that will kill you. It may skunk it up, make it so it’s not worth eating or look gross, but it won’t kill you so that’s a plus.

Some foods, like meats and soups and green beans are lower in acid content and if you don’t prepare them properly you can introduce botulism. Botulism is found in all kinds of places, the dirt in the ground, on your fingers, etc. The problem with botulism is if you introduce it into an oxygen free environment it geometrically reproduces and produces a toxin that can kill you – clearly not an outcome anyone wants while preserving food for consumption later ( Important Safety Tip Egon, don’t cross the streams and don’t allow botulism toxin to thrive in your canning process).

So all the directions were followed, ingredients were added in quantities according to recipes and accepted practices and pickle packing, lid seating and jar boiling commenced. After the proper amount of time in a big pot under a rolling boil (15 minutes for the recipe we were using) the first ever Tiny Homestead canned pickles were finished and moved from the water bath to the cooling area.

Refrigerator pickles were made at the same time (a similar process, but instead of water bath canning them you just put them in the fridge). The fridge pickles turned out great, even the Mad Farmer who previously didn’t like pickles very much, found them tasty. Common practice, as we understand it, is to let the pickles rest for a few weeks to allow the flavor of the spices and dill included to infuse them with the flavors. Going to be hard to wait that long. As the quote says ” I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”.

November 17, 2018

Food Safety Course

We started the K-State Extension class on Food Safety by going over the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Produce Safety rules. Apparently the FSMA was passed and signed into law in 2015 and has a phased compliance period. There are some exemptions, for instance because I am not yet selling more than $25,000 annually in produce over the last three years I’m exempt. I actually haven’t sold any produce yet, since my first growing season will be next spring but, as our lead instructor Cal pointed out, “If you haven’t been in business you don’t have any bad habits to un-learn”. Primarily the rule covers growers selling between $25,000 and $500,000 a year in produce (can’t wait to get to the upper end for TSL Urban Farm)!

The class is divided up into seven modules, the first being a broad overview of the six to come and the rest covering what produce is covered by the rule and what isn’t, health and hygiene, soil and soil amendments, agricultural water, wild and domesticated animals, growing, harvesting, processing and packing. The amount of information that came at us in an eight hour period really was like trying to drink from a fire hose. The good news is that you can access a lot of resources at the K-State Extension Food Safety website and the instructors are available via email and phone for follow-up questions and consultations if you have questions, which you will.

It turns out that just washing your hands properly and often when handling produce can reduce the possibility of contamination by up to 60%. We also learned that “you can’t sanitize something that isn’t clean”, seems obvious in hindsight but apparently it’s a common problem. Another thing that turns out not to be true is that putting sanitizer in wash water “washes” the produce – what it actually prevents is cross-contamination from infected food, so you get three instances of listeria from a lot of produce instead of 300 or 30,000. I also found out that in Kansas the difference between sprouts and micro-greens are that sprouts have the roots attached and micro-greens don’t. If you are growing sprouts you need a license in Kansas, growing Micro-greens, you don’t.

The best part about the class is that the materials are well organized and presented and it’s K-State’s practice to try and have at least two instructors for each class, one with practical growing knowledge and one with a more academic, scientific focus. In our class we also had a guest graduate student working on his PhD teaching the water modules. We were told that the water section is the least liked of the materials but personally I found it fascinating. I learned a lot I didn’t know about how water is classified and how risks are increased or decreased by the type of water you are using, where you are using it and how you are using it. The worst part of the class is that the instructors are mandated to verbally read each PowerPoint slide, in case there are attendees who don’t read English or read it well. Death by Droning PowerPoint presentation is a personal pet peeve of mine but I can see why they have to follow that rule and the instructors made the best of it.

Overall it was probably the best $20 I have ever spent, at the very least it was the least expensive and most productive of my educational outlays. I’ve attended lots of free workshops and webinars over the years on all kinds of topics and I can say that personally I found this one of the most useful and informative classes I’ve ever attended. I would highly recommend taking it just for the education, even if you are not planning on growing anything other than your own little backyard garden.

On a side note, I’m now signed up to be an Amazon affiliate. What that means is if you click on one of the items I have links to on the right side of the screen you will be taken to Amazon with the TSL Urban Farm affiliate code. You don’t have to purchase the book or item, anything you put in your cart and purchase after clicking through will generate a small percentage of the purchase price that will go towards maintaining the tinysustainablelife.com site and also my TSLUrbanFarm.com site that is currently in the process of being built. It doesn’t cost you any extra to shop on Amazon that way and it will go towards site fees so please think about clicking through and helping the site out with the purchases that you were going to make anyway.

Have you taken a food safety course in your area? What other classes have you taken that you have found informative or useful? I’d be interested to find out what other folks are doing.

November 16, 2018

Food Safety and K-State University

Several weeks ago Miss Mercy forwarded a link to me about an upcoming Food Safety class being put on by the K-State Research and Extension department. Because I’m starting to get the infrastructure in place for TSL Urban Farms it sounded like a good opportunity to find out more about the laws regarding Food and Sale of Produce in the State of Kansas, so I paid my $20 and signed up.

For those of you who might be interested in history each state has a Land-grant university. The Morrill Act of 1862 allowed the States to sell off land and fund universities to perform agricultural and mechanical research. Kansas State University, or K-State as it’s commonly called, was the very first Land-Grant college and was established on February 16, 1863, and opened on September 2, 1863 (see Kansas does have some firsts that are worth noting)!

Anyway, K-State, through their Research and Extension office does outreach, education and training for the community and one of the things they do is put on classes for Food Safety. The location for the class I was attending was about an hour away from where we live and it started at 8 am so I got up, feed our ridiculous animals (two dogs, three cats and a hedgehog in case I haven’t mentioned them before) and as quietly as I could (it was Miss Mercy’s day off) left the house and headed towards the K-State Extension campus in Olathe, Ks. K-State’s main campus is in Manhattan, KS (also called the “Little Apple”) but like a lot of universities they have satellite campuses in several different cities.

The drive was uneventful, which is the way I like it, and when I got to the campus I was impressed with the Olathe campus. Very modern with lots of glass and open space and a pond/small lake with flowing rapids on the grounds. I went to a nice university but clearly there have been some updates to some facilities since I went to school. When I walked in I started to make my way up to the second floor. Perhaps because I was quite a bit older than the average student with a backpack and in the school way early (or maybe because I was trying to walk up the stairs via a magnificent stairway that turned out to lead to the locked administrative offices) I got to have a brief discussion with the security guard. It turned out the instructors had changed the classroom location and he had not seen the memo so once we confirmed everything was properly documented he pointed me in the right direction and I made it to the classroom.

When I got to the class it turned out to be a fairly small turn out. I’m told the typical class size is 20-30 people and for some reason we only had 7 people signed up for ours and two did not make it, so we had the best student / instructor ratio I have ever had in a formal class. Three instructors, one instructor auditing and five students. As you might expect the attendees were a diverse bunch as were the instructors. There was a gentleman in his 80’s who had started growing and selling produce in a Kansas City farmers market when he turned 70, a middle-aged lady who was the marketing and web person for the older farmer, an employee of a local orchard, a community garden organizer, and of course, your humble narrator and start-up Urban Farmer.

The lead instructor came from a generational farming background and the other two instructors were from the academic side of things, including one who had flown in from Texas and had to buy a winter coat at a local store because she had not expected Kansas to be cold. The auditing instructor happened to be Miss Mercy’s boss in from the Topeka K-State Extension office but because I was trying be low-key so I didn’t mention that initially to anyone. When I’m in a class I’m there to learn and so it’s possible I have, on occasion, driven a few discussions towards things that might be more specific to my situation than generic or occasionally gotten into a “spirited” discussion about this or that. I was willing to let MMB (Miss Mercy’s Boss) disavow any knowledge or acquaintance with me but she was too nice to go that route and at one point she did volunteer that my wife worked for her. I hope I didn’t embarrass her too much.

I didn’t really know what to expect from the class, I was figuring a few handouts and some lecturing – boy was I mistaken. At each desk location was a thick three-ring binder, a clipboard, notepad, highlighters, pens and handouts. Turns out we were about to take an actual, fire-hose of information, eight hour class..