Growing Food

Olive Trees along the path


Passion fruit from the farm

So the best part in living on a farm is all the amazing produce. Israel is similar to a Californian climate where you can grow a huge variety of foods. I also must state that Israel is basically where agriculture started thousands of years ago. And those traditions and foods still hold true today.

With permaculture our goal is to grow not just one field or plot of a particular plant. But we create habitats that sustain multiple varieties of plants that naturally grow well together. When working with nature you create cycles of plants that become hardy to the soils and animals in that particular area.

Right now in Israel we are in the month of Adar, which is the beginning of spring. The almond trees have blossomed, it’s the end of the root vegetables and broccoli season and the sage is blooming. We are beginning the spinach and cabbage harvesting now. Israel’s climate affords lots of hardy leafy vegetables throughout the year. So we can grow a variety of lettuces in winter even though the nights are frigid.

At the end of the week Thursday (Shabbat is Friday and Saturday) we decide a weekly schedule of cooking. For each day two people are chosen to prepare breakfast and dinner for our Eco group and another person is chosen for Yom Hava and works with a Shin-shin in preparing lunch for the entire farm, including visitors. So in a typical week I cook once or twice.

Harvesting is a normal part of the maintenance of farm so we are always gathering food. The harvest produce gets divided up between the Israeli’s and the Ecos. This food is substituted with food bought on weekly market trips to Modi’in for staples like peanut butter, rice, beans and flour. But a typical meal includes 65% farm grown food. The farm is vegetarian but we do eat cheese, yogurt, milk, and eggs. All the dairy is goat and is provide to us by a local dairy farmer.

When cooking we try and use what was recently harvested but we are always going out into the plots to add other foods to the meal that are growing nearby. Cooking vegetarian has not been easy for me. As I use a lot of meat/fish and parmesan cheese while cooking. Learning to cook with new spices like Zatar and vegetables that I’m not familiar with has been a challenge but very gratifying. We have a lot of Middle Eastern flavors and Indian spices in our kitchen. The first stir fry I made for my group I mistakenly put a plant in that had an extremely woody stem and it was not so easy to eat. But I’m learning. In fact I made my first challah yesterday and it turned out delicious.

We have a mud oven and cooking in the oven only happens once a week on Friday for Shabbat. Because wood is a scare commodity the oven is lit pretty infrequently. Everything is made from scratch here. And ingredients I’ve always taken for grant it like olive oil and butter are rare. In fact we don’t get butter but on occasion someone will go on a mission and steal it from the kindergartener’s fridge...lol. But overall we eat very well. The food is obviously as fresh as you can get and so tasty. When I leave the farm on the weekends I crave the veggies from here.

My new favorite things to eat in Israel are Zatar spice, tahina, and the meatballs from the Shouk in Jerusalem...yum