Boswellia Tree (photo courtesy themostbeautifulthing.com)

We know the story of the Magi, the wise men bearing gifts, from the historical record, from outside of the Bible.  It was a documented journey with many of the details unclear, and only the main crux of the story handed down to us.

We know from history that a real-life baby was born in Bethlehem, during the Roman census, to impoverished parents; and that real men, great learned men, traveled from Persia and further east to pay tribute to this child.

King Herod intercepted these Magi for questioning, and they explained to Herod that each of them, in their widely scattered lands, had shared an identical dream.  They were told to follow a star to the birth of a child, for this child would become king.

And we know that later, based on this testimony, Herod ordered the murder of all the male children of Bethlehem to ensure that this particular child would never grow up.

The tribute these wise men brought was frankincense and myrrh.  Frankincense comes from Boswellia trees, and myrrh from Commiphora trees.  Deep cuts are hacked into the bark of these trees, and resin oozes from the wounds.  The resin forms tear-shaped drops, at the cuts, and these drops of resin are removed to process into the finished product.

Frankincense Resin (photo courtesy yullysebayang.wordpress.com)

Frankincense was very rare; it was a balm and a sacred oil.  Myrrh was a fragrant perfume, and was also used as an embalming fluid.

The trees that make this product are tough and resilient; they grow in the thinnest of desert soils, and even into the sides of rocky cliffs.  They are not killed by their cuts, but instead they grow back from the cut places.  They regenerate from their wounds.

These gifts were powerful symbols to place at the feet of a child–a foreshadowing of the scars and the pain that loomed in the future of this newborn baby.

It was the most momentous birth in the history of the world, but no one at the time understood this—no one except these Magi.  These learned men walked all the way from Persia and further east, an incredible journey of faith, chasing a star across the desert, until they came to a stable on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

They walked into the stable where a new mother sat among the animals, and these great men knelt down in the dirt and prostrated themselves before the child, the King of Kings, and they worshipped him.  They brought their most precious gifts to present to their new Lord, frankincense and myrrh, gifts they had harvested from their own gardens.

A Winter Sunrise (photograph courtesy Al Past, author of Distant Cousin and other novels)

In South Texas, we get plenty of sunshine—more than enough, even in winter, to grow a lush and vibrant garden.  Ironically, insufficient sunlight can be a problem in many South Texas gardens.

The problem is not a lack of sun, but rather too much shade over the garden.   Thomas Jefferson said that “under the constant, beaming, almost vertical sun of Virginia,  shade is our Elysium.”  And Virginia has nothing compared to the burning heat of a South Texas summer sun.  We adore the shade, and a lawn without shade can be a miserable place.

However, trees, fences, houses and other structures around your vegetable garden can get in the way of the light.  And because of the changing lanes of the sun, a garden that gets enough light during the summer may be shaded out during the winter.

The Changing Path of Sun
Diagram Courtesy Solar Choice

The sun, over the course of the year, travels through different paths in the sky.  On the spring equinox, in March, the sun rises exactly in the east, and sets exactly in the west, and the hours of day and night are equal. Then, through the summer, the sun moves a full 23.5 degrees north of its line at the equinox.  There are more hours of sunlight during the summer, and the sun shines at a more direct angle over the garden.

The sun then crosses back over the line of the equinox and moves another 23.5 degrees south for the winter solstice.

The Changing Angle of the Sun can Create More Shade During Winter if there are Trees and Structures on the South Side of the Garden (Diagram Courtesy DOE)

The winter solstice is today, Saturday, December 21st.  Today, we will have the fewest hours of daylight all year, and the sun will travel through its southern-most lane, its lowest angle in the sky.

The movement of the sun from the winter to the summer solstice represents a full 47 degrees of change each year.  You can measure this remarkable shift of sunlight by standing in your garden today and memorizing the exact points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets.  Then, do the same thing on the spring equinox and once again during the summer solstice.

Farming societies have been intimately familiar with these movements of the sun since ancient times, and it is interesting and helpful in modern times to know these angles of the sun.

A garden should receive at least eight hours of sunlight each day.  A few hours of direct sun at noon, and dappled shade in the morning and evening, is probably not enough light for good photosynthesis.

Insufficient sunlight leads to weak anemic plants that are highly susceptible to disease and insect damage.  Or, your plants, without enough sun, may slowly grow to full size, but produce very little fruit.  Adding fertilizer and pesticide will not help a garden that doesn’t get enough sun.

Today, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, is a great time to study the relationship between the light and your garden, to make sure you are getting the most from the winter sun.

(The following sunrises and sunsets were captured by Al Past, a linguistics professor, photographer, and author of the wonderful Distant Cousin novels.)

Slice ham or shred for “pulled pork”

For the last few years, our ham roast recipe has been the number one ham roast recipe on the internet.

If you performed a Google, Bing, or Yahoo search for “ham roast recipe” or one of many variations on ham, Four String Farm would appear at the top.

In the case of Google, that was first out of more than 7,200,000 results; and for Bing, first of 16,600,000 results.

We didn’t do anything to promote this recipe.  We simply posted it a few years ago, along with an article called Ham is for Luck on New Year’s Day, and the recipe took off.  Incidentally, the article about why ham is lucky on New Year’s Day also ranks very high in searches on this topic.

Since that first ham roast recipe, we have developed numerous other wonderful recipes to cook our hams, including this variation by our friend Kimmi.  However, once a site becomes popular on the search engines, it sort of takes on a momentum of its own.

Now, it turns out that Paula Deen, that honey-voiced maven of Southern Cooking, has taken over first place in hams!  Martha Stewart and her famous hams are still in the running but trailing behind.  We are very honored to be in the search engine company of the likes of Paula Deen and Martha Stewart!

This recipe is popular because more and more people want to know about chemical-free free food, and how to get back to wholesome cooking.  They want to know why wholesome food tastes so much better than inferior conventional products.  Because of our ham recipe, our web site has received tens of thousands of hits from people looking for a recipe, or who are interested in pastured pork, or have questions or information to share with us.

Additionally, I have had requests from folks all over the country, from California to Vermont, asking us to ship them one of our pastured ham roasts.  However, we do not sell our food in this way.  I ask these folks to take the time to find a local farmer who produces chemical-free food, and to shop with that farmer.  Both the farmer and the customer will benefit from that relationship, and the customer will enjoy a continual supply of fresh, delicious, wholesome food.

In South Texas, you can only get your pastured hams from Coastal Bend Health Foods in Rockport.  And Kimmi is offering these beautiful hams for 10% off between now and the New Year.

And please note, we now have new packaging for our pork roasts, ribs, bacon, and ground pork.  We have switched to this superior grade of vacuum packaging to lock in the freshness and to better protect the product.

I invite you stop by Kimmi’s store soon to pick up your ham and to shop for your Christmas and New Year’s dinner.  Kimmi has some recipe ideas for you.  But of course, you can always Google search a popular recipe!

Lard Ad from 1916.

In the early 1900’s, there was a tin pail of lard in nearly every kitchen in America.  Lard was the universal shortening.

The demise of lard began in 1906, when Upton Sinclair published his book, The Jungle, which exposed the gruesome reality of the Chicago meat-packing plants.  Sinclair claimed that workers would sometimes fall into the boiling vats of lard and became part of the product.

The Jungle was a work of fiction, and President Teddy Roosevelt called Sinclair a “crackpot” who was “hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful.”  Nevertheless, Sinclair set the stage for a bold new competitor to lard.

Around this time, William Proctor and James Gamble realized that the rise of electric lighting was about to put their candle-making company out of business.  But Proctor and Gamble made a key scientific breakthrough:  they discovered that hydrogenating the process to make their cottonseed oil candles would turn the candles into a white, lard-like substance.  They called this invention Crisco vegetable shortening (the vegetable was cotton).

Proctor and Gamble launched Crisco in one of the brilliant marketing campaigns of the 20^th Century.  P&G positioned Crisco as a new type of food, clean and pure, a product of science, healthier and safer than lard.

In 1912, P&G released a beautifully-written and gorgeously-illustrated cookbook with hundreds of recipes using Crisco.  This cookbook, The Story of Crisco, was printed in numerous languages to target niche ethnic markets.  Jewish homemakers in particular were early adopters of Crisco as a kosher product.

P&G gave away the cookbook with their product and mailed it all over America, which was a very big deal at the time.  The Story of Crisco was treasured by early 20^th Century homemakers and stands to this day as a monument to food marketing genius.

P&G paid celebrity chefs to lead cooking classes featuring Crisco to establish the credibility of the brand.  The company claimed in advertising that Crisco would instill good moral character in children.  They paid scientists to produce research that supported their health claims.  Crisco hammered away at the health theme for decades.

Crisco was a pioneer of print media during WWI, radio in the 1920’s, and television in the 1930’s.  The dual marketing strategy was to promote the purity of Crisco while subtly undermining lard.

The lard industry, controlled by a consortium of good old boys, mistakenly believed they held an eternal monopoly on shortening.  Lard industry leaders failed to recognize the threat from Crisco in time, or to successfully defend and promote their product.  Lard was demonized to the extent that even today the word lard itself invites disgust.  Eventually, Crisco completely replaced lard in the kitchens of America.

Crisco’s product health claims were seriously challenged in the 1990’s when scientists revealed the truth about trans fats.  Despite numerous product reformulations, Proctor and Gamble divested itself from the Crisco brand in 2001.

The Crisco campaign of the 20^th Century was enormously effective in shaping attitudes and beliefs among consumers.  Lard, a wholesome product that had been loved by Americans for centuries, was utterly destroyed in the marketing arena by an imitation food that was created in a lab and manufactured from cotton.

Modern food companies are even more sophisticated and more effective in their food marketing messages.  We are bombarded constantly with these highly compelling messages.

As a consumer, it can be difficult to know what to believe, to know the real story behind the advertising.  But the closer we eat to home, to local farms, and to our own backyard gardens, the easier it is to know the truth about our food.

(I found the following vintage advertisements for lard on the site ecofriendlyfreckles.com.   It is no wonder lard lost the advertising war!)

All You Need is a (LARGE) Spoonful!

Sunset in the Garden

Scientists have announced a fascinating discovery about the secret life of plants.  It turns out that plants are governed by circadian rhythms, just like people.  And the circadian rhythm operates in plants even after they are harvested—even while the plants are sitting in warehouses, on grocery store shelves, or in your refrigerator.

And not only that, scientists have learned that circadian rhythms have a significant impact on the nutritional value of the plants we eat.

In plants, just as in people, circadian rhythms are endogenous, which means they originate in the cellular memory of the individual.  Our personal circadian rhythms are programmed into our DNA.  Circadian rhythms are also heavily influenced by environmental factors, such as day and night, and the rhythm can be altered with changes in the light/dark cycle.

The peak of a plant’s circadian rhythm is in the afternoon, when plants most require energy to fight heat stress and protect themselves from insect attacks.  The low ebb of the circadian rhythm for plants is the middle of the night, the same as in people.

In the recent study, scientists observed how the circadian rhythm affected the concentration of glucosinolates in plants.  Glucosinolates are compounds produced by plants to strip toxic substances from their cells.  In humans, glucosinolates are cancer-fighting agents that remove carcinogens from our bodies.  To do the most good for our health, we want to eat produce with the highest concentration of glucosinolates in every bite.

Scientists manipulated the light/dark cycle for certain plants to produce 12 hours of light and 12 hours darkness, to simulate the day and night conditions of plants in the field.  They found that plants achieved their highest concentration of glucosinolates during the afternoon, when the plants were at the peak of their circadian rhythm.

In fact, the concentration of these cancer-fighting compounds was twice as high during the afternoon compared to the middle of the night, when the plants were at the low ebb of their circadian rhythm.

It is remarkable to consider how much the nutritional density of plants can fluctuate in twelve hours simply due to changes in light.  And the circadian rhythm is only one of many factors that influence the health and taste of produce.

Scientists continue to learn new information about the nutritional density of our food.  Plants are living matter–living energy–even after the plants are harvested.  This living energy fuels our work, our growth, our wellness, our busy lives.  The quality of the plants, and the quality of the potential nutrition of the food, depends largely upon how it is grown.

To get the most nutritional density from your produce, harvest it fresh from your own garden or buy it from a source that offers locally grown and freshly picked vegetables.  Thanks to scientists, we now know that we can enjoy our produce not only at the peak of ripeness, but also at the top of the circadian rhythm, as well.