We have so many backyard schemes to plant this first winter and spring in the new house: a kitchen garden, a fruit and nut orchard, a native wetland meadow and hedge along the flooding drainage ditch at the bottom of the garden. Big dreams to fill the bakery’s slow season. But before planting there are noxious weeds to dig out (again), fruit trees to take down and buck up (why did someone 1. plant trees with mild and uninspiring fruit along 2. the entire south property line and 3. pollard them once and then never prune them again?), old privacy fences (patched and propped and patched again) to mend or burn, drainage ditches to dig, a deer fence to build. I spent yesterday afternoon mucking through the future orchard, thinking about fruit trees and digging in drainage. The ground squished. The mud clumped on the soles and sides of my boots. The sod was heavy, the clay underneath even heavier. Worried I’d snap the shovel’s loose handle, I lifted the wedges of wet earth out with my hands. My gloves soaked through, and my cracked old boots. By the time E showed up with a chainsaw and began cutting trunk-sized water spouts off a cherry tree it was getting dark and the first ditch was nearly done. It was all great fun: the mud, the hard, wet work, the flicker of slash fires, and the crack of falling limbs. More akin to building waterworks from rock, sand, and kelp tubes—a favorite game on family backpacking trips to the coast when I was young—than to grownup labor. This morning I found the first ditch filling but not yet flowing. I itched to grab a shovel and correct the grade but, still in pajamas and with a half finished mug of coffee in hand, resisted. Tomorrow I’ll answer your emails (sorry!), pay quarterly taxes, research equipment. Today I’m putting on yesterdays clothes (hopefully dry) and going back out to play in the mud.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

There’s a crab spider in the echinacea, sucking a syrphid dry. Last night my headlamp caught the gleaming black backs of beetles eating something I’d rather not step in. The other morning I picked up an apple and found a tree frog clinging to its curve, heart beat in its throat, copper back bright as a penny. A skunk lives under the back shed. Since we cut the long grass the doe no longer beds down here, but she still wanders through to browse the unprotected tomatoes and young apple trees. I’ll spend most of the day pruning the dead wood out of these long-neglected fruit trees and thinking about the habitats we might plant for all our creatures, great and small and humans included, if we can successfully beat back the blackberry and the English ivy, keep the bindweed, tansy, thistle, lesser celandine, and yellow archangel under tight control. If you have expertise, advice, or book recommendations on landscaping for biodiversity, we’d welcome them, because although this plot we bought at the edge of town is now ours to steward, it’s home to many and could have space for many more.

Ezra will be at the market stand from 10-2 and the bread this week is truly beautiful. Every fermentation yesterday was right on point, from buckwheat to wheat to rye. The plum cake is as much plum as cake. The berry scones have the last blackberry harvest of the year, picked from that very blackberry hedge at the foot of our garden that I’m aiming to eradicate. The cookies are crisp and buttery, just the way we like them.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I bought her from a blind sculptor in Oaxaca. I’d taken a colectivo out to one of the valley towns to visit a weekday market and ended up in the local museum. Two ladies, nearly lifesize, smooth and intricate and beautiful, stood guard on the stairs. A docent told me they were made my a local sculptor before he lost his sight and gave me directions to his house.

I remember blinding sun and dusty streets but nothing else of the town. The sculptors house was dark; in the bright yard beyond stood an astonishing crowd of terra cotta figures. They were more roughly made than the ladies at the museum but beautiful still. Every woman had a lunar at the center of her forehead. Para mi esposa, he told me. I spent a long time walking around the yard, and bought a sculpture of a woman dressed in calla lilies without haggling. She was small enough to carry home to the city in my arms.

I had rented a shared room in the house of a Mexican-Columbian couple. It was just big enough for two twin beds with a narrow aisle in between and our clothes stacked on the floor. The rent was outrageous, or at least seemed so to me, coming from Bellingham where I’d paid half as much for a large room of my own, but our landlords were kind and generous and we lived within an easy walk of the city center. There was a little daily market just up the hill where I bought masa, dry beans, cheese, and bright fruits trucked down from the industrial farms in the north. Every morning I ate papaya with popped amaranth for breakfast. Every night I fell asleep to the chorus of dogs barking on the rooftops.

I had come to Oaxaca with three free months and no plans. Whenever I could I went traveling with a couple who taught biointensive gardening up in the Sierra Norte in villages where little was grown but maize and the soil eroded in deep furrows down the slopes of the steep, unterraced milpas. Or I traveled with a couple who ran an arts collective that sent pottery from Oaxaca to customers and galleries in Mexico City, visiting the women who carried on the crafts of their villages while their husbands, brothers, sons, went north for work. The rest of the time I walked the city, took grammar lessons from a tutor who was horrified by my farm Spanglish, and visited the surrounding towns for their markets and art.

I bought too much art. Too much pottery, especially. But I managed to pack it all, wrapped in clothes and newspaper, into a large suitcase that I bought on a street corner. All but my calla lily lady. Her I planned to carry on my flights back to the U.S. Only, when I got to the airport I discovered she was considered a potential weapon and had to be checked. No room in the suitcase. No time to find another before my flight. I had to leave her, wrapped only in bubble wrap and tape. Ten cuidado, porfa, I begged the baggage handlers. And maybe they were, but not careful enough. She arrived neck broken, braids broken, lilies broken. I glued what parts I could back together. I tried standing her inside, but the sight of cracks and missing pieces made me sad, so I took her to the garden. When I moved, she came too, waiting patiently while we turned sod, set the fence, and planted seeds. When the garden was ready, I found her a place, back in the perennials and flowers. She stands there still, my lady of the garden, broken and beautiful, with calendula and nasturtiums at her feet, the fennel at her back, and the sunflowers and amaranth standing tall above her.

TODAY AT MARKET and NEXT WEEK FOR MARKET PREORDER
10am – 2pm, 1100 Railroad Ave

BREAD:
Red Wheat ($7.50 / 750g)
Elwha River Spelt ($8 / 800g) - Elwha River spelt is a new variety released by WSU breeders in 2014 (the year the dam came down) under the Open Source Seed Initiative. It was bred for organic, dryland (no irrigation), low input (no soil amendment) conditions. I'm excited to be using a grain so in line with my food system values, and hope that with practice I'll be able to bake you a truly spectacular dinkelbrot.
Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 800)
Vollkornbrot ($8 / 800)
Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g)

SWEETS:
Gingersnap Cookies ($5 / 2)
Chocolate Chip Hazelnut Cookies ($5 / 2)
Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies ($5 / 2)
Cornmeal Snack Cake with Apricots ($5)
Cornmeal Snack Cake with Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam ($5)
Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz)

NEXT WEDNESDAY PREORDER & PICKUP
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning.
Order by Sunday night.

Red Wheat
Mountain Rye
Toast: ROSEMARY & CORNMEAL
Sweets: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE COOKIES & CHOCOLATE CHIP HAZELNUT COOKIES

It rained all day. I spent the hours hunched resentfully over my computer, wishing I had real work—bread to bake, or deliveries to ride—anything more tangible than the sisyphusian and, I often think, meaningless tasks of sorting and responding to emails, checking the webstore, updating spreadsheets. In the evening, having spent a busy day doing nothing, I went out to the garden to weed. It was a stupid night to weed. The rain had stopped, the sky above me pale blue in the lowering light, but the soil was still wet and soft. Any plant pulled up and not immediately tossed into my basket, and from my basket onto the compost pile, would begin to reroot. By morning it would once more be growing cheerfully skyward.

Ignoring this, I bent over the farthest bed and began to pull up cornfield poppies by the handful. I love these bright, prolific flowers and, planted once, they self-seed aggressively, as any self-respecting annual should. Sometimes I daydream about abandoning the fussy rows of vegetables, with all their pests and diseases and special needs, and letting the volunteer flowers take over, leaving the garden to the poppies and calendula already blanketing the beds, the borage, the red and orange sunflowers pushing up fat cotyledon, the nasturtiums and phacelia sprouting along the fence line, the swath of coriander growing across the bed where last fall we let it go to seed, the amaranth and tomatillos in the back corner. The chives would continue their forward march. The mint, which already makes regular stealth forays towards the lawn, would soon escape it’s brick walled prison and sprawl outward. Snow crocuses would creep in from the grass. The dandelions and bronze, fronding fennel would run riot. In the herb beds, the echinacea, well-rooted now, would grow on unperturbed, thrusting coneflowers towards the sky. The sorrel and rhubarb, too, would carry vigorously on. Only the Mediterranean herbs—thyme, lavender, the spindly sage—would perish, withering in the shade of the invaders.

Even a garden of volunteers needs tending. Left to their own devices, the semi-domesticated annuals soon overcrowd each other, sprouting in spindly clumps that grow into spindly plants, leaves and flowers dwarfed by hunger. So I massacred poppies, even as I daydreamed. But, with visions of a wild and colorful garden blooming in my mind’s eye, I left the bodies lying where they fell.

See you at market in a few hours.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET and (mostly) NEXT WEEK FOR PREORDER
10am – 3pm, 1100 Railroad Ave

BREAD:
Red & White ($7.50 / 720g)
Mountain Rye ($7.50 / 750g)
Vollkornbrot ($8 / 750g)
Seedy Buckwheat ($8 / 420g)

SWEETS:
Gingersnap Cookies ($2.5 / ea)
Chocolate Chip & Hazelnut Cookies ($2.5 / ea)
Oat Scones ($4.50 / ea)
Brown Butter Shortbread ($9 / half dz)
Hazelnut Shortbread ($9 / half dz)

Signups for the MAY BREAD SUBSCRIPITON are up.
A loaf every Wednesday in May.
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.

RED & WHITE subscription ($30)
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription ($30)
TOAST subscription (aka Baker's Choice) ($32)

Next WEDNESDAY PICKUP:
Self-serve pickups in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Address and directions with your pickup reminder email Wednesday morning.
Order by Sunday night.

THIS WEEK'S BAKE:
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: Oat & Honey
Sweets: BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE COOKIES!

It’s harder on these overcast days. The house presses close, and the sky. But still, when I push the window open, creaking in its century-old frame, birdsong spills in. The peas are pressing up in the garden. Along the untended fenceline volunteer poppies, phacelia, and mullen vigorously disregard the lingering cold. Under the woody remains of last year’s growth, the herbs that died back over winter are unfurling: winter savory, oregano, lovage, echinacea, hyssop, and mint. Even the dandelions in the garden paths feel hopeful with their flower buds held close like fists, ready to punch into glorious yellow bloom.

Growing a garden is a solid sort of pleasure. It holds you to the earth, whether that earth is in a handful of pots on your apartment balcony or in a sprawling yard like ours. While the newscycle cries Armageddon and people walk around wearing latex gloves like talismans against evil, new life unfolds in the garden. As the days stretch toward summer, the garden stretches roots and leaves, flowers and fruits, untroubled by news and politics, untroubled by anything but the sun and soil and the the work of your hands. In a few weeks or months, you can eat that love and sunshine for dinner.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Garden resources:
Did you know Village Books is taking online orders? The two most dirt-stained and page-bent gardening books in my collection are Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guild and Steve Solomon’s Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, but they have many others besides.

The Community Food Coop carries a limited selection of seeds from Uprising and High Mowing. If the seed racks are as empty as the grocery shelves, you may need to look online. Uprising Seeds should, obviously, be your first stop since they’re right here in Whatcom. Other great Pacific Northwestern seed companies include: Adaptive Seeds, Siskiyou Seeds, Deep Harvest Farm, and Wild Garden Seed.

You may need to buy some of your own gardening tools, but more likely than not your neighbors have everything you’ll need. Perhaps, in this time of anxiety and isolation, community can grow alongside your garden.

Dear Bread Eaters, I need your help to make the self-serve pickups work. I had to refund nearly 10% of sales last week to customers who arrived to find their orders had been taken by someone else. I don’t want anyone walking home empty handed, nor can I afford the shrink when I’m facing down a second quarter of operating in the red. If you have suggestions for how to make the system (which currently consists of an order sheet with names and orders inside every box) easier to navigate and less error-prone, tell me, please!
- Sophie

How to get bread & pastry:
Place your order in the ONLINE STORE.
Self serve pickups every Wednesday in Birchwood, Columbia, Lettered Streets, South Hill, and Fairhaven.
Orders due by Sunday for pickup the following Wednesday.
Sign up by 3/29 for the 5 week April Bread Subscription.

Subscriptions:
RED & WHITE subscription - whole wheat sourdough
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription - seedy wheat & rye
TOAST subscription - a new tinned loaf every week, perfect for making buttered toast

This week’s bake:
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Toast: Oat & Honey
Pastry: Cardamom Coffee Pound Cake + Gingersnap Cookies

​Back when it was cold, back in the beginning of the week, before the rain, when the chill eased through the uninsulated walls of my upstairs bedroom and I slept curled under all my blankets in a tiny island of body heat, the bed a cold sea around me, I woke to frost. The grass was frosted, and the brittle leaves of kale and cabbage in the garden. The fennel, just tufting up between last year’s dead stalks, was wilted and rimmed with white. The gravel in the drive was frosted, and the cars, the garbage cans, the old leaves scattered by the walk. Ice crunched satisfyingly underfoot.
​
The sun is slow to reach us this time of year. It was late morning before light crept all the way to the back fence. When I walked out to the garden at midday to pick my lunch, I found the deep shadows still frozen. The house threw a long, straight frost shadow. The pine and rhododendrons dappled frost across the grass. The trash bins drew precise, frosty parallelograms, the cars, rounded white rhombuses on the gravel. If I had stood in the yard all morning, watching the little puffed up birds flick between bush and fence as the sun warmed my back, I too could have grown a frost twin: a long, cold shadow self, reaching north towards the dark.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​THIS WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD
Order by Sunday night to pick up Wednesday, Jan 23
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Rugbrød - This hearty tinned bread, made with 100% Whatcom rye, is built on rugbrod recipes sent to me by the Dutch baker Tim van Dalen and French baker Thomas Teffri-Chambelland. The perfect base for smørrebrød (open-face sandwiches).

NEXT WEEK's WEDNESDAY BREAD
Order this week for pickup Wednesday, Jan 30
Red & White
Mountain Rye
Baker's Choice: Famer's Bread - a crusty rye & wheat boule, inspired by the Austrian bauernlaib.

WINTER BREAD SUBSCRIPTION
Sign up to get a loaf every Wedneday through March 6
RED & WHITE subscription
MOUNTAIN RYE subscription
BAKER's CHOICE subscription: a new rye every week

Order ONLINE and pickup on Wednesdays from:
Downtown: Cafe Velo, 120 Prospect, 9am - 7pm
Fairhaven: Shirlee Bird Cafe, 1200 Harris, 7:30am - 5pm
Birchwood: the front step, 8am - 8pm

The garden is wild with last year’s seeds. Cornfield and California poppies, calendula, phacelia, red, white, and yellow clover, wall rocket, fennel, and hairy vetch claim the borders and pathways, grow in flowering thickets over the uncultivated edges of vegetable beds, riot in the corner where the old compost heap lay. Yellow spears of mullein shoot up through the old fishing net we hung as a deer fence.

Ours isn’t a huge garden—ten by ten meters, perhaps—but the wild edges make it feel deep and secret. Were I still today the fairy expert I was at five, I might know those edges differently, but the knowledge of magic is long lost to me. Instead, I admire practical things: the peas trellis heavy with vines, the tidy rows of leeks and lettuce, the bank of self-seeded calendula with flowers in every warm color, from safety vest orange to dusky pink and soft, butter yellow.

I read a book on sustainable agriculture last week that argued that the keys to success in farming were diversity and the elimination of waste, and I thought, these seem like good practices for any business, especially one so marginal as a bakery. Out in the garden in the gray light of dawn, picking my breakfast, my eyes kept sliding back to the poppies, impossible red against the muted colors of morning. Maybe there’s a bakery lesson in this, too, I thought. Maybe a business, too, can have an orderly, productive center, and deliberately uncultivated edges, were imagination and unexpected beauty can grow.

See you soon.

Sophie
​Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + Garden Herb
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Chocolate Cookies
Oatmeal Marmalade Scone
Strawberry Buckwheat Scone
Rhubarb Strawberry Galette
Shortbread

WEDNESDAY MARKET
Red & White
Oat & Honey
Mountain Rye
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Scone, Shortbread, Galette

This time of year, with the dark still a near memory, each new spring day is a surprise. Biking past trees in exuberant bloom, waking up to daylight, stepping out of the bakery after long, fluorescent hours into a bright evening, pressing seeds into the warm earth: each is a new delight.

A ruby throated humming bird has laid claim to the rosemary in the back garden. He comes often. I hear him first: the whir of wings, a tiny cheep, and look up to see the irridescenct flash of his green head. And then he turns, or I do, and the sun catches him full in the throat, and he blazes.

See you at market.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

TODAY AT MARKET
Red & White + Rosemary
Mountain Rye + Vollkornbrot
Malted Chocolate Chip + Bittersweet Cookies
Oatmeal Marmalade Scone
Buckwheat Rhubarb Scone
Black Sesame Buckheat Scone
Shortbread

PRE-ORDER for Wednesday 5/9
(place order by Sunday night for Wednesday pickup)
Oat & Honey ($8)
Mountain Rye ($7)
Vollkornbrot ($8)

PRE-ORDER for Mother's Day
(place order by Thursday, pickup at the Saturday market)
Scones, half dz ($24)

Already, I can feel the earth tilting towards summer. All across the lawn, the crocuses are punching up through the moss and grass, opening the closed fists of their flowers to the sun. Through the leaf mulch and dead stalks of cover crop, the first fava beans are uncurling in the garden. Soon, the daffodils will follow.
​
When I walk the between the vegetable beds, mapping imagined crops with my stride, I daydream of delicate cotyledon and the first true leaves, of muddy knees and muddier boots, of weeds and rain and a riot of new-green growing up from the wet earth. No matter that yesterday I passed children skipping ice shards across frozen puddles as I walked downtown, my jacket zipped all the way to my throat, and my hands held close in my pockets. No matter that we still face five more months of rain. It’s almost time to plant the first peas and greens, to scatter poppy seeds, and tuck sweetpeas in along the fence line. The calendar may call this the depth of winter, but for me, February has always marked the beginning of spring.

​See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

Have you gone out to explore on this cold morning? You don't have to go far. Our back garden is a fairy tale dream, like the Snow Queen swept through in the night on her white sleigh. The mud paths between the beds are crunchy underfoot. Frost rims the leaf mulch, tats lace through the fennel and carrot fronds, and grows in spiky halos around dried seed heads. The cabbage leaves are patterned with a thousand radiating crystals. The white edge of the chicory leaves looks like the fur trim on a fine, dark coat. If I still played with fairies, I would have a day's worth of magic to explore in our little garden. But I lost sight of such magic long ago, so instead I'm off to market. ​

See you soon!

Sophie
Owner | Baker

​POSTSCRIPT: a baker's education

I picked up the most astonishing cookbook through InterLibrary Loan this week. Reading old cookbooks is a fascinating view into the often forgotten history of home life, but Elena Molokhovets' A Gift to Young Housewives is a window into another culinary world altogether. It's just... amazing! Young, Russian housewives are instructed to "cool to the temperature of milk fresh from the cow" or thin to the texture of "red whortleberry pureé." But it's more than cute anachronisms. There are also astonishing instructions like: "stir briskly with a spatula for a long time... a process that will take at least 2 hours" (can you imagine the arms on these girls?); and tricks (kitchen hacks, The Internet would call them) like straining the yeast out of the bottom of the beer barrel to make bread, or sealing a jar with dough. So far I've only flipped though, but I'm looking forward to digging deep into this strange and wonderful book tomorrow!