Most mornings I drink coffee, a habit I picked up in my mid-twenties while driving down California to visit bakeries. Bakers who work through the night drink a lot of coffee. But sometimes I pass by the grinder and walk out the back door instead, cup in hand, to pick my morning's drink. I've been mixing up potions since I was a kid—the witch's brews exploding in the kitchen or fermenting under the back steps of my parents' house; the summer I got a pocket sized dessert book and baked my way through it from jelly roll cake to profiterole; the leaves and petals and bits of seaweed I crushed together, trying to make the perfect colors to paint the garden fairies—taking mundane ingredients and combining them into something magic.

I know nothing about herbalism so there's no logic to my teas. I add a bit of whatever catches my eye: calendula petals, the drying flowers of hyssop or lavendar, echinacea, German chamomile or pineapple weed, a pinch of the lovely chocolate mint we dug from a long overgrown garden, a raspberry leaf. There's much outside the fenced kitchen garden that I have yet to taste—the bright blue flowers of the roadside chicory, the goldenrod like a green yellow flame in the back field, the sour docks and sorrels, the tender spring leaves of plantain and self heal—and more yet I don't know and so pass without notice.

It's good to learn my place by sight. Better to learn it by eyes, hands, nose, and tongue. So I ask the names of plants, watch where the water pools in winter, feel the hard bite of the shovel into dry, summer clay, breath the warm, resinous air under the pine and the soft, cool air under the old apple tree, and sometimes, like a child, I wander through the garden picking flowers and leaves to mix a morning potion.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

The doe is bedded down near our neighbors shed, back legs tucked, front legs stretched out straight. I can see a fawn’s ears poking up from the grass in the back of the orchard. Yesterday we watched a small blackcap chickadee stumble on the ground below the snag where they’ve been nesting. Today she’s gone, eaten or in flight. There’s a woodpecker probing the snag’s bark now. Small, white backed, beautiful. Last weekend six skunk kits came prancing stiff-legged out from their burrow under the concrete slab. White blaze up the snout, white hat, white stripes down black backs and up the tops of their tails. They were fearless and curious and ungainly, dark eyes and noses questing, tails down when exploring and straight up when startled, though they were too young yet to spray. The boldest three discovered Tommy’s leather shoes and followed him up and down the yard till he distracted them with a plate set directly in their path. The wildlife rescue center said their daytime forays meant they were orphaned. We spent Sunday gathering them into a towel lined box. They fell asleep on the drive out to the center.

There’s nothing so interesting as baby animals inside the bakery, but the bread looks lovely today and the pastries are as sweet and buttery as ever. We’ll see you at market.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

There are little brown birds foraging outside the kitchen window. One lands on a leaning dandelion stem and carries the seed head to the ground where he attacks it vigorously, white tufts flying around him. I flip through A Field Guide to Western Birds, left on the windowsill for just this purpose, but can’t match the white striped heads and clay colored backs to any of the drawings. Wren? Warbler? Chickadee? I don’t know. Little brown birds. Seed eaters. I stand admiring them while the water boils.

The chaos of our yard seems to please the animals neighbors, if not, perhaps, the human. There are brush piles, wood chip piles, piles of old cedar fence blown down in winter storms that shelter small, hopping birds and the occasional rabbit. The grass in back has grown long and tufted, well beyond the reach of our second hand mower, and full of bolting weeds. Three does, patchy from winter, wander through most days at dawn or dusk. We chase them away halfheartedly and lean old fence panels across the garden’s unfinished gates. Crows and robins probe the newly forked vegetable beds. There are blackcap chickadees nesting in a knothole at the top of the apple tree—branches too close to the house, the fruit small and mealy—that we limbed, girdled, and left standing as an interesting and unsightly snag. Soon, I hope, the Pacific tree frogs will come hopping back from wherever it is they spend their winters.

Coffee brewed, I return to the window. The birds are gone, leaving behind the murdered dandelion. I carry the mug to my desk and sit to write the morning’s note.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

I wish I had bread rhapsodies for you, or even some photos of the market bake (it’s a good one), but I took no pictures yesterday and with the baking done my mind has turned towards the garden. There are so many urgent spring projects: fencing, brick setting, sheet mulching, planting, propagation, the noxious weeds to dig and dig and dig again.

Last weekend we buried more lawn under cardboard and manure and planted the beginnings of our berry beds with highbush blueberries, black and red currants, and strawberries. A friend delivered a few lingonberries last night, and a German wine grape. Right now, sitting at my desk with the window cracked let in birdsong and the bright morning air, I’m fighting the impulse to go outside and put roots into the cold, damp earth.

But first the farmers market. If I have dirt under my fingernails you'll know I gave in to the green song of growing things and snuck out for a quick dip in the garden before biking downtown.

See you soon.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

We have so many plants! E brought up our Skagit Conservation District order yesterday and this morning, as soon as I post this email, we're biking out to pick up our Whatcom CD order and then we'll be planting and planting and planting our tiny, bareroot natives into hedgerows. I want to jump forward five years, just to catch a glimpse of the hedges filling in and full of birdsong, but being short a time machine I'll have to settle for watching them grow the slow way.

If you missed it on the bakery's social media, I have an interviewed in last week's Rise Up! podcast about the Raven Bakery past, present, and future. You can listen to it from the link above or through your podcast app of choice.

And finally, the Spring Bread Subscription is up and will be 10% off through April 2nd (which also happens to be our first Saturday farmers market of the year!). Pickups every Wednesday in the neighborhoods, as usual. You know the drill, or if you don't you can read about it here.

Happy Sunday. I hope you, too, have a day full of spring promise.

Sophie
Owner | Baker

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