Last year at this time I got into a bit of a kerfuffle with the local Pole Circle Police regarding the legality of foraging elderflower in the park. Turns out these ill-informed armed guards were under the impression that foraging was illegal. It was a typical win the battle, lose the war moment and facing imminent arrest and not much in the mood to lose the war that day, I did something very unusual for me in a threatening authority situation. I shut the hell up and let the gendarmes finish their harassment shtick.

In order to further boost my burgeoning sense of moral superiority on this foraging issue in all future kerfuffles, I’ve started a personal elder-planting campaign; in the DemoGarden, in the park itself and nurturing little elders in nature. This year I harvested enough of the powdery perfumey flowers from my own sources (and the neighbour’s) to make 20 liters of syrup! And they’re all still blooming away.

My signature drink to make from elderflower syrup is a fermented, floral, lightly bubbled kefir.

To make 1 liter of Elderfower Kefir mix the syrup 1:4 with water and add a few spoons of your water kefir crystals. Let the bottle sit on a sunny windowsill for 3-5 days. Taste, and when it’s a little sweeter than you would normally drink it, put strain out the kefir crystals (the culture remains), bottle the liquid and keep in the fridge a few days.

Placing the bottles in the fridge for a week or so really gets the carbonation going without the drink becoming sour or yeasty. It also prevents the bottles from exploding. I have taken to using the Dutch milk bottles with screw tops. They leak - which is great, because they don’t explode.

The kefir crystals, like all SCOBY’s, are a community of beasts. I’ve found that fermenting at changing temperatures makes for a tastier drink with a nicely textured bubble. The shift from room temperature to the fridge is all the (elderflower) kefir needs.

Find flowers, fruits and greens in Dutch UnFortch!

Elder Flower Syrup Recipe / Basic Stuff
(makes 3,5 - 4 liters of syrup)

You will need:
5 liter jar
3 kilos sugar plus 1 kilo for later
3 liters water
Elderflowers a’plenty, plucked, unwashed, bugs and all

The flowers:
Fill a 5 liter jar ½ - 2/3 -full with elder flowers.
Flowers only, no stems.
Absolutely unwashed, bugs and all.
Remove snails and birdshit, if applicable.

The syrup:
The minimal ratio is 1 kilo sugar : 1 liter water.
If possible, add more sugar.

Approximately 3 kilos white sugar
(or as much as will dissolve)
Approximately 3 liters water
(just warm enough to dissolve the sugar)
Pour the sugar, and then the water.
Stir until clear.

The time, the taste:
After 5 days, start tasting the syrup. It should taste clearly of elder flower. The entire kitchen should smell of elder flower and when you leave the kitchen you can still conjure the smell of elder flowers in your head. If the flavour is too weak, let it sit a few more days. Depending on the weather and kitchen conditions it may even ferment slightly, that is to say become lemony without the addition of lemon juice.
This is ok, if not desirable.

When you’re ready to call it ready, wring the syrup out of the flowers and discard them.
Decant the syrup through a series of fine sieves and cloths to filter out Vitamine Beast.
Don’t worry if a bit of Vitamine Beast remains because… it will simply remain.
It is vitamine B12, a cause for celebration.
Store bottled syrup in a cool and dark place, or refrigerate.

The preservation:
Elder flower syrup is a seasonal product. Enjoy the yearly ritual of harvesting these flowers and getting completely dusted with pollen because it is a supreme joy. The syrup should be used generously and given away freely as a floral sweetener when it is in season (in NL, May – June). Even when refrigerated, it does not preserve well for more than a month or two, and preservatives like ascorbic acid change the flavour considerably. Though elder flower syrup can be reboiled with even more sugar to preserve it for a longer period, beware! You are treading on dangerous territory. Instead, why not avoid all preservation issues by simply using this flowery syrup in season and by giving it away to people you like or whom you want to like you.

Remember, the sugar is the preservative that keeps this mixture from transforming. If you don’t like sweet things, dilute the finished syrup in the foods to which you add it. If you are using elder flower syrup as a sweetener in a ferment (e.g. elder flower kefir) just let it ferment a little longer so that the beasts can eat up the sugar. The sugar is not for you, it is for preservation process.

Use:
In general use elder flower syrup diluted at a ratio of 1:4 with water, or to taste.

Soon to be related links:
• On kefir making.
• On love of bacteria and yeast.

The lettuces in the DemoGarden haven’t even come up, yet this is the sort of salad that we’ve been eating for the past 3 weeks. All 18 of these vegetables grow spontaneously in our permaculture garden, most of them sown more than 3 years ago. This bouquet-eating abundance is a testament to why we need to transform our cities into resplendent edible landscapes.

Ingredients: spinach, red orach, chard, smokey fennel, ramps leaves, ramps flowers, chives, chive buds/flowers, mystery speckled red lettuce, purple frills mustard, yellow mustard, raspberry leaf (plucked by accident, tastes wonderful), broccoli shoots, mint, ground elder, sorrel. Not pictured, garlic mustard (alliaria petiolata).

We’re dipping these amazing leaves into our own lapsang souchong kombucha vinaigrette, also fermented from wild yeasts.

Edible bouquets, we walk, we pluck.

We talk about how lucky we are.

Thanks for bringing those most tasty and juicy pears to the food co-op last pickup day. We bought 4 kilos and the next day had already eaten an entire kilo! The last 3k we dried because they were threatening to go soft. Just look what they turned into! Golden, chewy, hint of vanilla, sticky, full of flavour!

Please let us know if you’ll be harvesting again soon, because I’d love to go with you and help pluck. Of course I’m happy to dry a bunch for you as well; dried pears bring a huge amount of happiness into the home.

Merçi, verheugnis alom en tot straks op een pluk dag,

Debra

What an exuberant spore print, probably of an agaricus arvensis, or maybe an agaricus campestris, possibly an agaricus bitorquis, or if I’m lucky, an agaricus silvicola. They’re all edible. Still, most likely it’s a horse mushroom, agaricus arvensis. I found it along the bike path, cutting through the woods, near the border of some grassland.

Ruling out the poisonous possible doppelgängers, it’s unlikely to be an agaricus xanthodermus. Why? Because it’s flesh is not turning yellow when bruised or cut, and because it doesn’t smell of creosote. It smells of anise, and of sweet leaf mould, like the woody path it came from. It smells like it’s going to be delicious fried in butter and served on toast at lunch.

And there’s at least one more…

At the moment my fridge is filled with the bubbling product of home-fermented foods, lots of home grown and a visit to milk lady at the farmer’s market. A few days earlier Mark Menjivar’s photo essay about what can tell us, popped up on my radar again. The first noticeable difference between my fridge at harvest time and all but one of Menjivar’s subjectsis the lack of packaging. An ever earlier Autumn and ’tis the season for pickle and sauerkraut making up here in the Polar Circle, for salting and sugaring food away. That coupled with a penchant for making (dairy) kefir that has been enlightening on many levels; the amount of milk it ‘costs’ to keep a culture happy, the numerous uses for kefir and whey, and the discovery that in the olden days all of these cultured products probably kept just fine without a fridge. Apparently it’s all the rage… The ship contains the shipwreck once again.

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables. | 2008

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily. | 2008

Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War | 2007

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Short Order Cook | Marathon,TX | 2-Person Household | She can bench press over 300lbs. | 2007

Six years ago my fridge was a different place, yet vodka and lime juice still feature prominently.

• 
  A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, “May I photograph the interior of your fridge?” to asking someone to pose nude for the camera.

  Each fridge is photographed “as is”. Nothing added, nothing taken away.

  These are portraits of the rich and the poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, members of the NRA, those left out, the under appreciated, former POWs, dreamers, and so much more. We never know the full story of one’s life.

  My hope is that we will think deeply about how we care.
  How we care for our bodies. How we care for others. And how we care for the land.

Dutch text below is not a direct translation.

Imagine this: you’re an internationally recognised Dutch cultural institution of art/design/media culture. You have a substantial collection; media art, landscape art, but also paintings/ sculptures/ installations/ photography/ film/ design objects/ and artist-activist works in the public space that regenerate your city’s ill-planned urban areas. In short, you host a platform for innovation representing the entire gamut of your discipline. Over the past decades you have made substantial cultural impact in your field and thus you are considered to be a driver of culture. The artists/designers/architects whose works comprise your collection and fill your programming are also recognized internationally, and they often represent the Netherlands all over the world, in biennials and important exhibitions.

And then one day you receive a letter from the new Dutch Ministry of Culture that your funding will be completely withdrawn as of January 1, 2013. What do you do with your collection? Your staff? Your buildings? Your publications? The rest of the year’s programming? What will the artists/activists/designers/architects and your engaged public do, now that they no longer have access to your platform?

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the total Dutch national budget. Miljard = billion.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending compared to the total budget of EU spending. Miljard = billion.

This Sunday and Monday the Dutch cultural sector will gather and protest en masse the unspeakably ill-informed budget cuts proposed by Secretary of State Halbe Zijlstra. These cuts are not simply across-the-board austerity measures taken from all sectors, but represent the destruction of Dutch cultural heritage in one fell swoop. Aside from the radical and sometimes COMPLETE obliteration of budgets for new media culture, design, art in the public space, and architecture, Zijlstra’s proposed budget, which ignores the advice given by his own advisory panel, will also severely and negatively impact spending in the areas of science, health care, and the environment.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the annual amount of Dutch spending on Christian holidays.

Shockingly, though not surprisingly, the proposed cultural sector budget erasures represent a proportional drop in the bucket of overall national spending, less than 1%. By comparison, a 1% reduction in our annual asphalt budget alone would make cuts in culture in these areas unnecessary.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the budget for the Joint Strike Fighter.

The Dutch cultural sector has produced a counter proposal which you can read here.

Here is a list of actions we can all take before June 27 that will likely impact the parliamentary debates on Monday:

1. Sign our petitions. 10.000 signatures to support Dutch media culture, art in the public space will make an enormous difference.

2. Occupy with us. On Sunday from 11-17:00 hours we will join together to occupy the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

3. Wear sensible shoes and walk with us: Sunday evening we will march en masse from the Boijmans Museum to the Hague in a Civilized March Mars der Beschaving.

4. Attend our demonstrations: Here is a complete list - in Dutch infortch - but you’ll be suprprised how well you’ll manage it.

5. Vote correctly and encourage those around you to do so as well in all future elections. Do not let the undereducated populists ever come to power again.

6. And if you’re a believer, we urge you to please pray the rapid disintegration of this embarassingly shortsighted MINORITY cabinet.

A no less less emotional (Dutch) version of the above post below I have excerpted from the Sonic Acts. On their website is an even lengthier and impassioned English version - a worth read for those trying to inform themselves about the current political situation in the Netherlands:

Aanval op de kunst

Read more here:

Saturday 7 May at 16.00h, is the closing event of the Farming the City exhibition at ARCAM. URBANIAHOEVE’s phytoremediation installation on ARCAM island, titled ‘The Shipwreck’ will be dismantled and distributed to guests. Do not miss the only opportunity to taste 6 week old hyperaccumulators fed on Oosterdok water and to take home a big block of highly polluted spinach.

Planting phytoextractors, phytostabilisors, and vegetal caps at ARCAM Island

From the Ancient Greek phyto, for plant, and the Latin, remedium, to restore balance, phytoremediation bridles the natural properties and chemical dynamics of specific plant families to repair polluted sites and soils. Used properly, it is considerably less expensive, less dangerous to the environment, and ultimately more effective than the practice of digging out ground material and resituating it from one site to another.

T=spinach, H=mustard, E=clover, S=phacelia, H=spinach, I=clover, P=mustard, 3 techniques

A complex web of interconnected traits and characteristics ensures that that the stationary chemical factories we call plants, get what they need where they are. While some plants excel at accumulation, others do not. For example, distributing toxic metals from their roots up to their fruit is not what fruit trees do. One urban agriculture solution to heavy metal contamination can be to heavily plant orchards and thoroughly carpet their beds with nectar-rich groundcovers.

Certain plant characteristics can restore soil health over time by generating enzyme fields that spawn flurries of microbial activity around their roots. Just two (of many) phyto- techniques used to repair polluted ground with living plants are: phytoextraction and phytostabilisation. Urbaniahoeve contributes a new technique to this list, which we have named, The Shipwreck Contains the Ship, in which we recontextualise urban soil pollution as a means to its own solution. Our contaminated urban soils provide both the necessity and the opportunity to implement city-wide urban agriculture. No baby, no bathwater. The shipwreck contains the ship.

• Saturday May 7, ARCAM 16:00h

  ARCAM, Amsterdam Centre for Architecture

  Farming the City

  URBANIAHOEVE: The Shipwreck Contains the Ship

  SUPER FAST video of how we built the Shipwreck installation
  

Watering the Shipwreck with polluted and semi-salinated water from the Oosterdok

Foodscape Schilderswijk: kids initiating the planting of the Wellington Hof Plum Orchard

In the past year I started a foundation for urban agriculture in Amsterdam and the Hague called URBANIAHOEVE, Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture. URBANIAHOEVE, for short. We’ve been producing a gamut of projects (and pilots) that are working examples of the kind of urban agriculture that we want in our cities. Small but real food-system infrastructure, foodscapes built on existing green infrastructure by the existing social infrastructure.

Foodscape Schilderswijk: Planting a future foraging forest in the Wellington Hof

With locals, schools and organisations we are producing orchards and edible landscape architecture right in the public space of a Hague neighbourhood.

DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies: tamped earth ovens barely outta beta

After its successful pilot last summer, we’ll soon be implementing our playful and public urban kitchen infrastructure at 4 Amsterdam locations, complete with a monthly programme (this fall) that will introduce different constellations of folk to DIY outdoor oven technology.

DIY Mmmmusem of Oven Typologies: kids monopolizing and/or owning the ovens

URBANIAHOEVE’s projects, like all urban agriculture, require a huge amount of work produced by a devoted and almost indefatigable team, by numerous project participants, developed with, and supported generously by inspirational partners.

Foodscape Schilderswijk: Harvesting herbs in the public space

Though our work is ongoing, finally I can begin the satisfying process of reflection and reporting on what we’re doing. By ‘we’ I really do mean WE. The URBANIAHOEVE blog will report tersely in project copy in Dutch and English, but Culiblog will be the place where I can still dish the real dirt on urban agriculture.

• Foodscape Schilderswijk is an URBANIAHOEVE project developed in collaboration with Stroom, Hague Centre for Art and Architecture as part of their multi-year manifestation Foodprint, Food and the City.

To encourage success in completing difficult, unrealistic New Year’s resolutions (like daily blogging and yoga practice), I tend to spike my list with easily attainable, readily achievable, things that happen anyway. Usually these resolutions occupy the esoteric slash culinary realm, like learning to brew beer (2011), or the domestic slash procrastination realm, like learning to knit socks (2010: time consuming yet enlightening). Sometimes my resolutions even occupy a strange category of ancient and exotic craftsmanship, no longer of any real value in the modern world. (Yes, in 2008 I did in fact improve my handwriting, but only for that specific year, and in 2009 I resolved to quit this archaic practice forthwith.)

A recurring favourite, easy as falling off a horse, is the resolution to taste each new fruit and vegetable that crosses my path, somehow still unbeknownst to me. Not even two weeks into the new calendar and I’m already done. This year it’s the citron, bought from a roadside vendor here in Sicily. A bit of rooting around and I discovered that this variety is the Diamante not deemed fabulous enough for use as an etrog but delicious none the less.

The citron (citrus medica) has in the past been popular for all manner of pharmaceutical, beveragological, confectionary, and perfumerical uses, here il cedro is thinly sliced and sprinkled with white sugar, which draws out the sweet and sour juices of pith and pulp. After allowing time to marinate a bit you eat the slices for dessert. It’s the combination of the green melon-like fleshy pith, the citron’s ragion d’essere, with the hyper-aromatic essential oil infused outer rind, and the juicy sweet and sour pulp, that makes it such a refreshing pleasure to eat. Our friends here keep telling us that it’s heavy on the digestion, but I am learning to occasionally disregard the questionable culinary authority of vegetable torturers and obsessive compulsive pasta eaters.

And inadvertently it seems that I’ve made a blog entry, though I dare not utter which category of New Year’s resolution that this action occupies. 2010 was an incredibly busy year spent initiating the project of my dreams in the realm of urban agriculture. 2011 promises more of the same, but I begin yet again, with the best of intentions to afford myself some time each week to reflect and write about the work of URBANIAHOEVE; Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture, which is hopefully interesting to the remaining readers of this blog.

Happy New Year!