Dear Seeders,
Seed Farm we feel a
sense of great comraderie with everyone who has chosen to grow a garden
this year. You know, if birds visit our gardens and thrive, it is a
very good sign. I've seen lots of gardens this year, and lots of birds,
and am feeling hopeful about the gardener's role in helping heal the
Earth. So, I'd really like to acknowledge everyone who has engaged in
this ages-old practice of putting hands to soil--you planters of seeds,
lovers of salad and friends of the birds. By promoting plants you give
us good air to breathe, and by your efforts alone is our diverse seed
heritage maintained. One thing we all have in common is that we work our
crops in the intimate ways of our ancestors. We grow and save our own
seeds, feed ourselves from the garden, and know ways to promote our
personal bodily vigor. We know the feel of the soil as well as the
sweat and thirst of toil. I exhort you all to continue this good work,
to care for the soil in your garden as if it were the breath in your
lungs, the material substance of your body and the essence of your
vitality. In my way of seeing it, it is.
We support your
gardening lifestyle with a nice selection of organic goods. This
includes cover crop seeds (and right up front we're offering readers of
this e-newsletter $5.00 off on any orders for cover crop seed. Offer
expires Nov 1, 2013).
We also provide good basic open pollinated organic vegetable seeds as
well as an eclectic array of medicinal herb seeds, live roots, perennial
plants and medicinal/permaculture vines, shrubs and trees for your
gardening pleasure. We also make by hand some neat tools of
self-sufficiency, including tincture presses, seed cleaning screens
and herb drying screens. We know its all about quality and strive
to provide you with really effective goods.
The fall catalog is complete and available for your viewing as a pdf here.
Those of you who have ordered from us in the recent past have already
received the fall catalog, and those of you who are not on our mailing
list may request one here.
This current catalog is loaded with new seeds, plants and tools of
self-sufficiency. We are excited to support you all on this healing
journey and very much look forward to hearing from you!
All the best,
Richo and the Horizon Herbs family
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Time to Plant Cover Crops
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| The Mosaic Garden |
Time
to pull out those Tomato vines, remove stakes, sticks and
hodgepodge, rough up the surface of the Bean bed, dig up and turn over,
till in the carbon from Cornstalk and Sunflower, and finally plant Peas
and Oats, our friends the cover girls of the cover crop movement, those
that help hold nutrients and nourish the soil through the winter. Hey,
nurturing the soil is nurturing yourself! We offer a fine array of
fall-sown cover crop seed for your continued gardening success and
pleasure. We are offering a $5.00 coupon on cover crop seeds--just type
in the code OCT2013 at checkout (horizonherbs.com) and the $5.00 will be automatically subtracted from your order total. Offer expires Nov 1, 2013
Clover and Poppies Mix (our home blend includes crimson clover, red clover, California Poppy and Flanders Red Poppies)
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Herb Processing Screens
These 2 foot square screens work great for
sun drying fruits and seeds, as food dryer shelves and for herb
processing. Roomy! They can be loaded thickly and will take some
abuse. Sturdily built of clear grade Port Orford Cedar and heavy duty
stainless steel screen at 12 strands per inch, nonreactive to food
contact, easy to clean and resistant to mold and rot.
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Time to Plant Live Roots!
Bloodroot,
Black Cohosh, Blue Cohosh, Goldenseal and Wild Yam: Growing in shade
garden or temperate forest, these are always a welcome sight when they
come bursting out in the spring, and fall planting is the best way to
make this happen! The foundation of the Western herbal pharmacopoeia,
these plants are experiencing a resurgence of popularity and become very
valuable assets. Blue Cohosh (pictured) is particularly vibrant this year, and we encourage everyone to grow Goldenseal, which is a life saving herbal medicine and demands a high price in the herbal industry. Our Bloodroots are ON SALE and are pretty in the spring, our Black Cohosh never fails to satisfy, and our Wild Yam is
as wild as a dragon, and almost as pretty. We really love shipping
live roots and are certain you will enjoy their robustness and quality.
Many other live roots are available at horizonherbs.com.
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A Story from Richo
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| Got the Hots for Hot Sauce |
Countdown to the post office
run had already begun. It had been a fruitful morning of seed work, but
I needed to nourish myself before jumping in my truck to do the mail
run. I stared dejectedly at my bean taco there on the plate. What it
really needed was a splash of hot sauce, and despite much effort put in
that direction, what I had available to me fell somewhat short of the
ideal. Looking up at the shelf where I keep my canned goods, I noticed
splotches of early afternoon sun playing on the jars of tomatoes and my
varicolored row of other jars containing the many failed attempts to
make hot sauce. Adjusting the rainbow colored curtain to throw full
shade on the goods, my eye lingered for a moment on these hot sauce
experiments. There was a jar of dark red relish that had been made by
putting fresh hot peppers in the blender, adding a teaspoon of salt,
covering with apple cider vinegar and blending to a thick mash. Tasty
and hot, but not true sauce. Next to that jar was another that
contained the remains of my first attempt to ferment peppers, which had
trusted the benevolence of ambient yeasts which didn't turn out to be as
generous as I had hoped they would be. A large pick of fleshy red
Jalapenos had somehow been reduced to a thin layer of dark red pulp
floating about two inches up from the bottom of a jar otherwise filled
with a clear substance that resembled river water. Next to that jar was
another, filled with a thin orange liquid that contained part of the
yield from my much researched "try number two," a carefully
controlled lacto-fermentation of Thai Volcano Peppers.
This one was like the old doctor's joke "The operation was successful
but the patient, unfortunately, is dead." I had made the mistake of
pressing out my beautifully fermented peppers in a tincture press, which
gave a great yield of liquid, but unfortunately left behind in the
pressing bag the majority of the pulp of the peppers--a fatal
exclusion. Next to that jar was another of the same color but jellied
to a jiggling mass, the result of my attempt to thicken that same sauce
with Xanthan Gum. I had had no idea how much to use. A heaping
tablespoon, well, it was like, WAY too much!
I lifted the tasteless taco to
my lips, but suddenly a light went off in my head, and I put the thing
back down on the plate (the taco, not my head) and reached back to the
counter where the blender stood clean, empty and ready. "Eureka!" I
intoned, reaching up to the shelf to take down the thick jar of pepper
relish. "You have PULP!" I exclaimed, and spooned half of it into the
blender. Then I pulled down the second jar, decanted the river water
off into the sink and schlepped the bright red layer into my blender.
"You have COLOR!" I then reached up for the third jar and poured a good
measure of the thin orange liquid into the blender with the other
ingredients. A wonderful fragrance arose. "You have TASTE!" I
chortled. Next, I removed the jiggling jar from the shelf and put a
large dollop of pepper jelly in on top of the other ingredients. "You
have THICKNESS," I intoned. Then, feeling excitement rising in my
breast, I put the lid on the blender, flipped the switch, and whipped
the contents into a thick, dark red slurry. This I poured through a
large sieve, disallowing the fragments of skin and seed, allowing a
thick substance to collect in a bowl below. I didn't want to jinx the
process, but hope bounded anyway--it looked like the real thing! There
was an empty recycled hot sauce bottle in the cupboard, which I
proceeded to fill with the finished sauce by pouring it from a beaker.
The sauce was thick, red, and smelled enticingly good. It was all
there! With a sense of great satisfaction I doused my burrito, and
raising it to my lips, proved the final test: tasty and hot! I enjoyed
that taco (it was among the top 10), and so nurturing a pleasant glow in
my belly, proceeded to deliver the mail.
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