This series explores the intersection one of nature’s perfect pairings – music and food – and the artists who are eating well and living HOMEGROWN on the road.

Treat yourself to a hearty helping of The Avett Brothers. Their sound is infectious – spirited, organic, Americana. A sometimes-joyful, sometimes-heart wrenching, always-beautiful, fusion of strings, percussion and vocal harmonies that harkens back to the band’s North Carolina roots. They’ve been on my playlist for years and I can’t wait for their new album to drop!

Image courtesy of CMT’s The Laundry Room

Brothers Seth and Scott Avett founded the band in the late 1990s and are joined by fellow bandmates Bob Crawford, Jacob Edwards and Joe Kwon.  Over the past decade the band released 6 full-length albums, 3 live albums, and 4 EPs. Their latest album, I and Love and You (2009) debuted at #16 on the U.S. charts and they’ve been headlining shows and festivals all over the country, performing at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits and at the 2011 Grammy awards alongside folksy brethren Mumford and Sons and Bob Dylan.

So what does this Americana band have to do with HOMEGROWN, you wonder? Well, it turns out, a whole lot! I dug around and found that The Avett Brothers are also big-time supporters of family farmers and local food. These guys have used their musicality to take a stance on factory farming and genetically-modified crops by playing a benefit for the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. On a day off in Portland, they threw a spontaneous fundraiser for the Terra Nova School, an on-farm program for kids, and enjoyed the food grown and prepared by the students.  But Joe Kwon, the band’s headbanging cellist, takes HOMEGROWN foodie to a whole new level.

Image courtesy of CMT’s The Laundry Room

Joe fuels his on-stage fire with healthy, homegrown eats from local farms and restaurants, and writes about it on his blog, Taste, on Tour: Food on The Road. Joe asks for food recommendations from his readers and hits up every mom-and-pop, hole-in-the-wall dive that he comes across.  He takes his readers on a worldwide food tour through recipes, restaurant reviews and gorgeous food photography (a word to the wise: do not read on an empty stomach). Joe donates any proceeds from his blog to the World Food Programme, a United Nations initiative to end global hunger.

For Joe, the joy of cooking, the pleasure of eating locally and the goodness of sharing meals come naturally to him. Joe and his family “grew up around food and eating together with family…That’s it. We grew up knowing what good food was and knowing that good food is surrounded by good people.”

Joe’s taken those homegrown values on tour with the band, as he recounts to Love in Stereo:

“The blog was kind of a logical thing for me …There’s a lot of towns and restaurants that I want to go to and there’s a lot of restaurants out there that deserve attention…I especially love it when places are getting local resources and putting love into food like we put love into our music. It’s great to see restaurants that get good food from local sources that, in turn, benefit themselves and the community they live in.

I’m a big supporter of the farm-to-fork lifestyle. I have friends [in North Carolina] who are farmers on the weekends and I try to get people interested in their produce so they can sustain what they are doing. I think the things the farmers are doing here are so good for local development and the sense of community I live in; it’s all a very positive thing. If enough people do what small farmers can do for local food procurement it can greatly shift how food is grown.”

Joe also has a deep affinity for pigs and an interest in the “nose-to-tail” concept of eating the whole animal:

“I would say if I had to be personified as an animal, it’d be a pig. I love pig. My favorite meat by far. I think I’ve tried almost every part of it…I would love to be able to learn how to prep a pig, nose to tail. From making headcheese to braised hog feet. It’s an extremely eco-conscious way of cooking, and I love that … I have a hard time with roadkill, so I’m not sure how I’d deal with seeing the slaughter of an animal, but I think I need to do it. I stopped eating pork for a while after I read that Rolling Stone article on the Smithfield CAFOs [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations]. I don’t eat bad meat anymore, meat that’s not ethically raised.”

We’ll end this installment on a poetic note.  Joe’s big on writing haiku on his blog…enjoy:

“The beauty of pig
An extension of my heart
Pork belly come here.”

Check out Joe’s blog, Taste, on Tour and The Avett Brothers’ music. Mix and match tunes and foods for a perfect pairing and share your favorites with us.

“I’m half of YellowTree Farm, an urban homestead that I founded with my husband in late 2008.  Together, we grow vegetables and raise animals on less than 1/10 of an acre in St. Louis, Missouri.  I don’t have children.  I have animals, which is kind of the same thing as being a parent, except I eat my babies.”

People wonder what exactly farmers do in the winter, and oftentimes, they assume there isn’t much of anything for a farmer to do during the cold months at all.  While it’s true that wintertime is the perfect season for farmers to take a vacation, literally (many farmers choose this time of the year to go out of town and have some fun) and figuratively (winter offers a nice respite from the year’s hard work), my experiences of urban farming in the cold months so far have been full of labor.

The weather this year in particular has been freakishly warm in our area.  Our mustard greens and other brassica stayed fresh in their beds as the frosts we suffered were mild in their severity.  Sixty-degree days in December and January meant that we were outside working the soil, installing fence posts, weeding, harvesting, and repairing equipment.

Winter’s also the time we spend doing a lot of research.  Right now for instance, we’re flipping through library books on dahlias and cut flower production.  If we want to grow new varieties of any plant, flower, herb or fruit, it’s necessary that we research thoroughly how to grow it, and anticipate what could potentially go wrong.  After all, we’re not only spending our money on these seeds, plants, tools and infrastructure – we’re also spending our time and hard work.

But is this effort worth it?  The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that it’s not.  They recently released a study naming Agriculture as the #1 most “useless” college degree, with Animal Sciences and Horticulture making the list at numbers 4 and 5, respectively.

I confess that I went to a college with a stellar Agriculture program, but honestly, back then all I did was chuckle at the country bumpkin hicks who flocked to that program.  My attitude now however is significantly different.

While I don’t believe that anyone necessarily needs a degree in a farming-related field in order to successfully farm, I certainly wouldn’t classify studying courses like “Ethical Issues in Sustainable Agriculture” as useless.

Clearly the NACE considers “useless” degrees to be ones in which pay is low and availability of jobs is scarce.  However, shouldn’t measuring the usefulness of an education take into account the actual benefits bestowed upon the person doing the studying?  After all, I can’t think of anything in life more useful than honing the skills necessary to feed not only oneself, but the community-at-large as well.

My friends in college used to call me a Renaissance woman. I was always doing something crafty, creative, or utilitarian. I still am. My focus these days, instead of arts and crafts, has been farming as much of my urban quarter acre as humanly possible. With my husband, we run Dog Island Farm in the SF Bay Area. We raise chickens, goats, rabbits, dogs, cats, and a kid. We’re always keeping busy. If I’m not out in the yard I’m in the kitchen making something from scratch. Homemade always tastes better!

The seed catalogs are starting roll in and with it comes the need to organize and figure out what next year’s garden is going to be like. So with that, I think right now is the prime time to repost some of my garden planning techniques. This first one is how to create a schedule for your plantings. You don’t have to plan according to the moon cycles but you’ll find other helpful information about frost dates and such. I live in a very mild climate with an extraordinary long growing season.I used to just plop things in the ground as needed but nothing ever blew me away production-wise. Then I started reading about growing by the cycles of the moon. It made sense to me. The gravitational pull of the moon effects so many things, why not also plants? Also the moon offers reflective light that can be absorbed by plants.

The first thing you will need to do is determine your area’s average first and last frost dates. Almost all plantings are first based off of these dates. There are several resources online to help you find this, but the most inclusive list can be found here through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website. You want to choose the dates under the 10% columns.

The next thing you want to do is figure out when your seeds will need to be planted. Johnny’s Select Seeds has a spreadsheet that you can download that will help you determine the dates. The downside of this spreadsheet is that it only works for summer vegetables. Now that you have your planting dates for your plants it’s time to determine when during the moon cycles you should start them. For transplants that will be planted indoors or in a greenhouse you can choose the closest corresponding moon phase either before or after the given date on the spreadsheet. If they are direct sown seeds you’ll want to choose the closest moon phase after the date. To find out the moon phase dates you can check the Farmer’s Almanac moon phase calendar.

So what gets planted when?

After the Full Moon

Moonlight is decreasing, but because of the strong gravitational pull, there is more moisture in the soil. Transplanting and planting root crops is favorable during this time.

What to plant:Beets, Carrots, Onions, Garlic, Parsnips, Turnips, Rutabagas, Potatoes, Peanuts, Celeraic, Leeks, Radishes, Salsify, and any other root crop. Bulbs, perennials, and biennials are good to plant now too.

After the 4th Quarter

Decreasing moonlight and gravitational pull make this a resting period. It’s a good time to cultivate, harvest, transplant and prune.

After the New Moon

Increasing gravitational pull and moonlight create equal root and leaf growth. This is a good time for planting above ground crops that produce seeds outside the fruit. What to plant: Broccoli, Cabbage, Brussel Sprouts, Cauliflower, Lettuce, Chard, Spinach, Grain crops (including corn), Artichokes, Bok Choy, Cardoon, Celery, most Herbs, Greens, Kale, Kohlrabi, etc. Cucumbers also like this phase though they are an exception to the rule.

After the 2nd Quarter

The gravitational pull is lessening but the moonlight is increasing. This is a good time to plant above ground fruiting crops. What to plant: Beans, Peas, Squash, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Tomatillos, Berries, Melons, Gourds, Okra, Peppers, etc.