Sue Eckenfels, taking time out on a Sunday to give us a tour of their farm.

By Lisa Brunette

We purchase most of our meat directly from farms, a practice we began in 2015, when we lived in Chehalis, in Washington state. Back then our beef came from the Olsons, just outside of that small town. Here in Missouri, we had to source meat anew, so we hit the local farmer's market and found two excellent locals: Eckenfels Farms and Farrar Out Farm.

A colorful sign entices you to explore the rolling hills beyond.

We've been buying meat in bulk quantities from both farms for four years now, so I figured it was about time to visit... at least one of them! The Eckenfels Farm is located in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and with that tiny burg's proximity to primo hiking spots (my big draw) and its National Historical Park (to feed Anthony's history obsession), we couldn't not go there. Besides, we just really enjoyed chatting with Bob and Sue Eckenfels at the farmer's market. So we scheduled a trip to charming Ste. Genevieve, and the couple graciously agreed to give us a tour of their farm during our stay.

Eckenfels' herd is pasture-raised.

Eckenfels Farms is a "Century Farm," meaning it's been in the same family for 100 years or more. In this case, the Eckenfels have been farming their 300 or so acres for 170 years. But Bob will quickly tell you of neighboring farms that have been around for 200 years, an important marker, as Missouri celebrates its state bicentennial this year. In a place like Ste. Genevieve, history is a long game. As Missouri's first European settlement, its roots stretch back to at least 1750, and some of the historic homes you can tour as part of the National Park Service site are one of only a handful of remaining examples of rare French architectural techniques.

Pasture stretching down toward a pond at Eckenfels Farms.

A few fun facts about Eckenfels Farms:

• Winner of the beef industry's 2009 Region III Environmental Stewardship Award
• Herd is free-range, grass-fed, with no antibiotics, hormones, or unnatural growth stimulants
• Practice rotational grazing on a mix of fescue, over-seeded millet, rye, and clover as warranted, with native warm-season grasses providing food during the hottest summer days when the fescue doesn't do well
• Raise South Poll cattle, well-adapted to Missouri's heat and humidity
• Animals have continuous access to well water

The herd gathering at one of several wells.

Though it was a steamy day in late August, the temps climbing into the 90s, we enjoyed the chance to get up close and personal with the animals who become our nourishment. The Eckenfels were kind enough to drive us out to see their pasture-fed herd of 50. Their South Poll breed is so docile and easy that we were able to gather around them in close proximity while provoking only curiosity in the cows. 

A cow regards me with what I took to be some level of interest. The South Poll breed is known as the "Southern Mama."

Bob runs a superior operation, as evidenced by the recognition the farm has received, but you can also see it in the health and beauty of the herd. Grass-fed diets are better for the animal and for us, too. Grass-fed beef is leaner, with fewer calories, but it contains more nutrients. "If all Americans switched to grass-fed meat, our national epidemic of obesity would begin to diminish," as the Eckenfels explain to their own website visitors. Grass-fed beef also contains more omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed.  

Bob and Sue on the tour, with my husband, Anthony, staying in the shade in the cab.

Cows are meant to eat grass, not grain, and they're healthier on their natural diet, in less need of medical intervention. Attention is also paid to the pasture itself, as Bob employs several techniques to ensure a healthy pasture environment. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the National Cattlemen's Foundation awarded Eckenfels an award for environmental stewardship, citing the following practices:

Eckenfels plants his crops using no-till, which has proven to increase his returns and minimize erosion. He has utilized rotational grazing by cross fencing his fields using a combination of barbed wire and electric fence to maximize production. He’s also fencing his ponds to exclude livestock. By implementing these conservation practices, Eckenfels Farm provides wildlife habitat and improves pastures. 

Bob and Anthony.

Calling Bob a "progressive adopter of new ideas and technologies that benefit and protect soil and water resources," the industry groups sponsoring the award praised him for a number of initiatives, such as installing ponds and stream buffers, creating quail habitats, and volunteering to educate others on conservation principles and practices. And of course this is a family effort; Bob's son Matt is already a key part of the farm, daughter Kayla can often be found staffing the farmer's market booth, and both of their other children have been involved at one time or another. All four live either on the farm or in close proximity. Eldest Matt has even custom-built a grain silo home.

Farm life is not without its challenges, as you can imagine. The Eckenfels have struggled with a lower water table from which to draw well water. Consolidation in the slaughterhouse industry has led to disadvantages for small independent farms like this one. And while clearly fixtures in the Ste. Genevieve community, you can't actually purchase Eckenfels meat at any of the town's stores, or even find it in restaurants. This strikes me as a sorely missed opportunity, as someone who's used to Seattle restaurants and specialty grocery stores routinely listing just such an "origin story" for their meat as the Eckenfels give in spades. Bob and Sue drive the hour to St. Louis a couple times a week to sell to customers there instead.

Using corridors like this one, Bob rotates the herd to different parts of the pasture, giving it a chance to regenerate between grazings.

It was personally quite satisfying to get my farm fix with this tour, and I thank the Eckenfels for their hospitality and time. While unlike both Bob and Sue, I didn't grow up on a farm, I have often wished I had. Instead, I've had to live vicariously through others as a writer who chronicles this work, whether as editor of the oldest independent fishing publication on the West Coast, author of a book about a century-old dairy farm, or the writing I do as a volunteer for this little old blog. I hope you enjoy my stories.

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A handmade cat toy. Image courtesy DementedDesignsShop on Etsy.

By Lisa Brunette

Let me introduce you to what we around the farmhouse like to call "the leather spider." Now, Chaco has typically been pretty hard on any toy I've ever brought home, usually breaking it the same day the toy arrives. It's rare that any make it past a few days of play. But I don't actually blame Chaco for this; he's just doing what cats do. The problem is, like too many things these days, most cat toys are cheaply made out of low-quality materials. They ain't built to last. 

Chaco's life changed for the better, however, the day our handmade leather spider arrived. It's lasted not hours, not days, not weeks, but MONTHS. Yep, that's right. I ordered it back in February, and it's still good as new. Good. As. Freakin'. NEW. Take that, cheap world of things!

Chaco action shot!

The toy is handmade, the "spider" part fashioned out of leather. The wand is wood, and then there's a string made out of sturdy nylon, with a vinyl cap. Usually with a "thing-on-a-string" toy like this, it seriously takes hours if not minutes for Chaco to rip the thing off the string. But this one's still intact after more than six months of frequent play.

It's high-quality, and I think because the "spider" part is leather, it approximates real prey better than most cat toys. While Chaco has often grown bored with other toys, this one he never tires of, and he asks for it pretty much every day, by sitting next to the closet where we keep it and looking up at it, then us, longingly.

Image courtesy DementedDesignsShop on Etsy.

Now the leather spider probably costs more than the typical cat deelibob you'd find hanging in the big box store, but add up all the deelibobs you buy each year, replacing them when they constantly break, and I guarantee you this one's a better buy all around at USD 13. Besides, you're supporting a small, independent maker of fine quality things when you purchase the toy from Etsy.

You're also supporting this blog and its free content. Cat in the Flock might receive a commission from qualifying purchases of this cat toy. We are happy to turn you onto "the leather spider" and find it actually kind of satisfying to rave about it here. It's a product we personally love, and so does Chaco!

We wish you and your cat hours of ceaseless joy.

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Last Year's Peculiar Potato Problem

Potato onion flower, just beginning to open.

By Lisa Brunette

We made an unsuccessful attempt to grow Walla Walla sweets in 2020 - Anthony grew up in 'the city so nice, they named it twice' - but that arid landscape is quite different than our steamy Midwestern climate. I cast around for an onion variety that would work much better here, and you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon a variety of perennial onions. Most vegetables, and most onions as well, are annuals, meaning you have to replant them as seeds each year to get a new crop. But perennial onions, also called potato or multiplier onions, are the gift that keeps on giving. Reserve some of the bulbs, replant them each year, and they'll multiply into neat little bunches of more bulbs! This makes potato onions a perfect permaculture plant, by the way. 

Here you can see the cluster at the base of the stalks.

We planted a crop of these last fall - on October 25, to be exact, a week before the garlic cloves went in - and we had a decent harvest this July. They're delicious onions, mild and tangy. I had ordered 16 ounces, which gave me 20-30 bulbs, and the yield was... OK. If you're wondering, no, I did not amend this soil with the mix of pine sawdust (soaked in urine) and coffee grounds as I did the garlic cloves. The onions were planted in a bed that had previously been potatoes, though, and some of that matter from the potatoes and their plants had decayed in the bed, which probably helped some, along with the decayed leaf mulch we'd used to sheet-mulch over the grass in that part of the yard. I also amended the bed with compost tea.

What happened before harvest, however, is the strange part of this case: the onions put up flower stalks, forming seed heads.

Potato onions, beginning to form buds.

For the potato onion, this is apparently a rare and special event. Gardener Kelly Winterton has written a booklet on his many attempts to get potato onion seeds, and you can see this pursuit is apparently one with a high likelihood of failure. But it's worth trying for, as the bulbs that form from these seeded plants are much bigger than the rather small clusters of multiplied onions. So it's strange, wonderful, and felicitous that I was able to get seeds on my very first attempt at growing potato onions.

Harvested bulb clusters, and some of the seed heads.

The stalks were battered by several successions of summer thunderstorms, and then we were planning to head out of town (to Walla Walla, coincidentally) right when the seeds would have ripened, so I harvested most of the seed heads when we harvested the onions in mid-July. 

A nice harvest of potato onion seeds.

Close-up of a seed head.

These are now drying in a muslin bag hanging in the basement. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, I don't have a greenhouse or other space in which to start seeds during the late winter months indoors, but my friend Claire over at Living Low in the Lou has offered to grow the seedlings in her greenhouse porch in exchange for some of the plants. With the promise of much bigger bulbs, it's definitely worth it to try. Wish us luck! In the meantime, we'll all enjoy our regular ol' potato onion harvests this year.

What's your favorite onion to grow? What works best in your part of the world? Have you tried perennial onions?

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65 Bulbs of Garlic on the Wall...

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Garlic nestled in among the basement rafters, with hyssop, dandelion, and other drying herbs.

By Lisa Brunette

"Take one down, pass it around..." OK, so we didn't exactly begin with 99 bulbs of garlic, but 65 is a lot of garlic bulbs to have on hand. Our basement smells like a pizzeria!

We harvested this bumper crop just before the 4th of July: 65 bulbs of 'Silver rose' garlic, a soft-necked variety. Soft-necked varieties store longer and can be braided. They also do better in our Missouri climate than the hard-necked. We put the cloves into the ground on October 31 (ooo, Halloween!). The order had been for 60 cloves to plant, so how we ended up with 65 bulbs at the end is unclear. Maybe there were a few extra in the order? At any rate, we had more than a 100 percent return on our investment on that batch.

This was actually only half our garlic crop, though; the other half did not germinate at all. Not a single clove. I had also ordered and planted a batch of 60 cloves of the 'Early Italian' variety, and that crop was an abject failure.

What was the difference, besides variety?

'Silver rose' garlic bulb.

I used a slightly different technique on the Silver rose, and that might have done it. I amended the soil with my secret ingredient: a mixture of coffee grounds and pine sawdust with a little added nitrogen in the form of cat urine. 

Yeah, that's right. Cat urine. Are you appalled? Don't be.

You see, for Chaco's litter box, we use pure pine pellets. It's hands-down the best cat litter I've ever used; it doesn't smell bad, and the urine basically gets absorbed by the pellets, which then break down into pine sawdust. We then truck the sawdust outside to a pot, where it can be used when needed to amend the garden soil. It always gets turned into the soil, where the sawdust breaks down completely, the pine and remnant urine nourishing the soil. Sawdust is never evident on the food part of the plant at harvest. 

Urine is rich in nitrogen, and I know of at least one gardener, my friend Claire over at Living Low in the Lou, who uses her own as a soil amendment, with good results. I'm not opposed to her method at all, as urine is sterile in healthy individuals, but I already have a ready supply of Chaco's urine, and I like the idea of making good use of it and diverting it from the waste stream. I also know Anthony and I don't have the time to devote to collecting and dispersing our own pee.

Garlic almost ready to harvest.

Anthony adds the coffee grounds to the pot of sawdust outside each day when he dumps out his coffee pot from the day before, instead of running the grounds down the disposal or just tossing them into the trash.

I did not use the sawdust-and-coffee grounds mixture on the 'Early Italian' beds, the failed crop. Both beds also received a good dosing of compost tea.

I honestly can't remember if I designed this experiment on purpose or if I simply ran out of the sawdust mix. But we have an experiment nonetheless. At least of sorts. There could be variations in the soil across the different beds, though they were right next to each other. The different varieties alone could have produced the radically variant results, too. Maybe the 'Silver rose' is more suited to my soil conditions. It's a lovely variety, so named for the mottled red-and-pink hue on the inner clove papers.

Garlic at harvest time, when the bottom leaves go brown.

But the point here is we have enough garlic for the winter, and then some, and I've successfully used spent kitty litter as a soil amendment, which diverts it from the landfill and provides a cost savings to me since I don't have to purchase fertilizer. It's a perfect permaculture loop, too, since I'm using what's produced on-site, without any outside inputs (well, except for the pine pellets in the first place).

By now you might be asking, "What about the cat poo?" That gets removed daily and placed in a hot compost, where it breaks down over a minimum of six months. No poo ever goes into the garden, at least not while it's still, um, poop.

Garlic scapes on soft-necked garlic.

One odd thing that happened: The 'Silver rose' garlic grew scapes (above) just prior to harvest, which I was informed soft-necked varieties wouldn't do. If anyone can shed light on this matter, please do so in the comments below. The scapes were delicious, by the way.

A harvested bunch.

One caveat to my garlic success story is that the sawdust/coffee mix isn't a cure-all. Last month I told you about this year's failed potato crop; well, I'd amended that bed with the mix, too, and it wasn't enough to save it. Claire and I are discussing this amongst ourselves, and let's just say that the grand experiment continues!

What grew well in your garden this summer? Any exciting discoveries to report?

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Copper iris, a native to the Midwest that blooms in May.

By Lisa Brunette

There's nothing so hopeful as an early spring flower, defiantly emerging out of the deadened winter landscape and signaling a renewal of life. Here in the St. Louis area, that usually means daffodils. These cheery trumpets sound off in early March to lift our collective spirits.

But as much as Anthony and I like our daffodils around here - and we do, as evidenced by our apparent daffyness for them - we have to admit they don't do much to provide food for pollinators and other insects here in the U.S. Most ornamental bulbs originated in Europe or elsewhere; they did not evolve alongside our native fauna, which tends to find them either outright toxic or regard them with indifference. These bulbs are not a viable food source; they're just pretty little statues, really.

They are awfully cheery.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. A few tulip, daffodil, gladiolus, and other blooms in the spring garden can give you beauty and joy. 

But if you want to turn back the tide on habitat loss - one of the major factors cited in pollinator decline - you should put in more native plants. While a lot of people think of native summer wildflowers first and foremost, I want to turn you on to a few spring bloomers you might not know.

Copper Iris - Iris fulva

With long, slender, light green leaves topped by an audacious tuba spray of copper, this early spring bloom should be on everyone's wish list. Native to the Midwest, copper iris is slow-growing at first, like a lot of native plants, but then explodes in its third year to give you stunning flowers.

It's exciting to see the bud begin to open in late May.

Copper iris bud.

I put in one plant from a nursery seedling in 2019, and it's already divided. The blooms are astounding!

Iris fulva in full bloom.

Ozark Witch Hazel - Hamamelis vernalis

The very first bloom of the spring is something of an oddity. Ozark witch hazel blooms as early as late February, with crinkled orange streamers around a yellow center. Besides the funky-looking bloom, the odd factor comes in two other ways: 1) the early bloom time and 2) the fact that what pollinates this late-winter flower is a bit of a mystery. February is bad timing for most pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, as they tend to emerge later in spring. So what pollinates witch hazel? Perhaps hoverflies, which take advantage of warm winter days to forage for pollen.

When witch hazel blooms, it gives off the pleasant scent of cloves.

Ozark witch hazel is also a rare plant: Out of the entire world, it's found in only five U.S. states: Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. I'm happy to say we've added three Ozark witch hazels to our garden, one from a nursery and two seedlings from the Missouri Department of Conservation (costing only $1 each, yo, through Wild Ones). After some initial damage from our Eastern cottontail rabbits, which found them delicious, all three are thriving, and the one from the nursery, which we planted in 2018, has not only bloomed profusely but is tall and robust enough to support squash vines, which clamber up the branches.

Hey there, squash! Why don't you climb up here and join me?

Witch hazel is a great permaculture plant because of its dual role as a support for native animals and insects and its use as a medicinal for humans. You should be familiar with witch hazel as a traditional medicine cabinet item. You can make an astringent from the bark, and it's historically been used to treat hemorrhoids, sore muscles, coughs, and other ailments. Removing the bark kills the tree, however, so sources recommend using only pruned or fallen limbs. Disclaimer: I have not yet tried to make my own witch hazel astringent, but it's on my list. Second disclaimer: I am not a health expert and am not advising you to treat ailments with witch hazel; I'm merely reporting on its historic use.

Violets - Viola sororia

Regular readers of this blog know I've waxed enthusiastic about violets before, with full recommendations on their many culinary uses, their value as a host plant for fritillary butterflies, and my enduring preference for them as a ground cover to replace turf grass. With so many beneficial aspects, and pretty little white- or royal purple-and-yellow blooms to boot, how could you not desire violets in your home landscape?

In some regions, the violets are likely to show up of their own accord, too. Yeah, that's right; this is one flower you might not have to plant yourself! Our ubiquitous violet ground cover is 100 percent volunteer and lasts from spring to fall. I've used the blooms and leaves to make everything from petal-infused ice cubes to violet sugar and violet tea. 

Violets are host plants for fritillary butterflies.

Violets (and lilacs), ready to freeze into ice cubes.

I hope these three suggestions for spring-blooming flowers you can plant this fall inspire you to the possibilities in your own garden. Happy fall planting!

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