Supporting the Middle Man, Too

For every $100 spent at a chain, only $13 remains in the community;                       $45 remains when spent at a hometown business

Marla Petersen in front of the co-op's wheat grinder, stocked with Wyoming wheat

As a downtown business owner, I have an up close view into the interdependent web of the Laramie family. I sell used books, a recycled commodity, nothing I farm from the good earth, mind you. I’m a middle man, rifling through boxes to separate the wheat from the chaff, so that what makes it onto our shelves is worth the browsing. That’s all I offer: discriminating taste. I do what I can to keep my prices reasonable, but I guess a part of me recognizes that I’m relying on the goodwill of my fellow Laramie-ites to make sure I stay in business. I’ve had many customers tell me they come to me first before they try Amazon or another chain (which will remain unnamed, like Lord Voldermort), and it’s that kind of loyalty to local that I feed my family on.

So I can’t help feeling a twinge of irksomeness when I stop into Whole Foods or Vitamin Cottage on one of my tri-annual forays and see their giant, fancily-fonted signs proclaiming how many millions of gallons of local milk they use in their bakery a year. It’s a complicated problem because I’m glad to know that the local dairy is selling so much they will compete with national brands at the regional level. But when the Fort Collins Food Coop, which has been selling that same brand of local milk since the early 70′s, is only staying in business because they own their own building, something is not right in Denmark.

In trying to understand the economic trickiness of “buying local from a big box,” I chatted with Marla Petersen, the manager of Big Hollow Food Co-op. The co-op is another example of a local middle man business, except in their case the business is owned by some 500 members. Their mission, Marla says, is not to make sure everything in the store is certified organic, but that they connect as many local food producers with as many customers as possible. “For local foods, we have a very small, and in some cases no, margin because we want to be able to offer these goods to the public and be able to give producers what they need to make so they can continue to produce….We have not raised the price on many items in the store, even when the cost from suppliers has increased. An example of this would be our Morning Fresh milk and our local wheat. These prices have been stable for more than three years. We want people to be able to count on them.”

Marla explains that she doesn’t have the same flexibility to keep prices stable when it comes to the general stock that comes from the same distributor that the chain stores use. “Like many small businesses, we struggle to compete with large ‘corporate’ businesses who are able to negotiate better prices from suppliers based on their buying power. A good example of this would be Vitamin Cottage; they have negotiated a deal with UNFI, our primary supplier, for the best buying rate in this region. It might be even better than Whole Foods. Comparing Big Hollow to them is like comparing a mom and pop grocery store to Walmart.

“We opened with a small amount of capitol that was raised by selling memberships,” Marla says. “Since then we have lowered our margins two times…. [But] these decreases in prices are not always easily recognized since the cost of goods is always increasing.”

And also because, as consumers, we have been conditioned to believe things are significantly cheaper at big chains, when often they aren’t. Frequently, I’ve seen local products, such as eggs or milk, are quite a bit more expensive at big chains, not to mention the cost of gas to drive to a nearby city which should be factored in to the price of goods. The choices for local products at the chains, especially meats, grains and fresh produce, are also limited compared to the co-op or Whole Earth Grainery. Local meats, in particular, are mostly absent from big box stores with most freerange meats shipped in from the California or the East. And in buying beef and bison from local sources such as the Butcher Block, we are preserving the way of life of our own neighbors. The more we support our local middle men, the more diversity and better prices they will offer us since their loyalty to us as costumers is infinitely stronger.

Laramie Locavore

Brewing Micro-Beasties

The more skilled we humans have become at killing germs, the more we’ve begun to miss them. Call it the anti-antibiotic movement. I recently came across an interesting article in the November 22 issue of The New Yorker (“Nature’s Spoils,” Bilger, p104) that declared, “Nearly all the DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our own cells nine to one.” We are, essentially, the sum of our microscopic parts. Bacteria in our bodies plays all sorts of vital roles, from triggering sleep to processing nutrients. And it’s for this reason that lots of people are learning the fine art of brewing their own fermentations to help the body increase its “good bacteria” in the form of homemade kefirs, yoghurts, kombucha or sauerkraut.

My husband and I first concocted our own yoghurts while living in Spain. Our friend, Joe, scribbled the recipe out on a scrap of paper and we’ve varied our recipe only slightly since then.  His directions were, “Take a cup of store-bought yoghurt to use as a your starter, add it to four cups of body-temperature milk in a glass jar, shake it up good, wrap the jar in a towel and sleep with it! In the morning, you’ll have nice, firm yoghurt to eat with your muesli.” (Joe was strangely enamored with muesli.)

Okay, we don’t sleep with our yoghurt for incubation anymore—although, yes, we did try this method successfully more than once. My sister-in-law kindly gave us a 32 oz. yoghurt maker for Christmas one year and we now use cream-top milk from Morning Fresh, a dairy in Fort Collins (available at Big Hollow Food Coop), to make rich, creamy yoghurt with an extra tang of live enzymes you don’t get in store bought yoghurts.

A friend also gave us a kombucha mushroom recently and we’re now brewing our own kombucha drinks, wrapped in a towel, Joe-style, on a warm shelf near a heater. Don’t ask me where a person might purchase such a fungus; it seems to be like a sourdough starter, something that wanders into your life through a long and enigmatic providence. The kombucha fungus is given a cup of sugar to ferment in a one gallon mixture of room-temperature tea (four green tea bags and one black. I use a green chai to give it a little spice).   Leave to brew in a glass gallon jar–I use a sun tea dispenser–covered with a thin cheesecloth or other fabric for two weeks, only touching the kombucha with wooden or plastic utensils, no metal.  You can heat the water in a metal pot, however.  Add one cup of its “mother” or starter, and leave for two weeks to flourish. Pour the mixture into tightly sealing containers and refrigerate for a few days to create carbonation.

In our family, we can’t help but think of our kombucha as a kind of unobtrusive pet which we must separate from its offspring regularly and fling in the compost (or, less cruelly, gift to a friend to start their own kombucha with). Many thoughtful dissertations have been written about the wonders of kombucha on the digestive and immune systems. I find that when I drink it just as I’m feeling illness sneak up on me, I can shorten a cold by a few days.  And when I drink it regularly, my digestion functions more comfortably too.

My next foray into the complex world of fermenting will be vinegar-less sauerkraut, made with water and salt alone, its own bacteria springing to life when sealed in an anaerobic container.

Now I just need springtime to come along so I can grow the cabbage.

Laramie Locavore

Everyone needs a Guru

Everybody needs a guru and Jonas Slonaker is mine, a man who has made it his mission to eat almost entirely local in Laramie, Wyoming. Jonas has been gardening since he was old enough to keep carrot seeds in his palm, under the guidance of his grandparents who were Pennsylvania dairy farmers. “I can’t imagine not growing food,” he says. As an adult, his dedication to eating close to home came when he was diagnosed with cancer. “I was vegan for awhile but I didn’t feel warm enough in this climate. So now I research where [my meat] comes from, that it had a good life.”

Jonas and his partner, Bill, figure they grow about 50% of their vegetables in their small backyard. Their eggs are local and they drink raw milk they obtain from a local source which they use to make soft cheeses and kefir. Jonas did some research about Tillamook cheeses and found they obtain all their milk from small family dairies and grass-fed cows. And 100% of Jonas’ meat is purchased locally. “When you live in Wyoming, there’s no reason to get meat anywhere else,” he says

“For the holidays, we’re getting a free range turkey…. I looked up the farm up so I could see pictures of the animals’ lives, that they were happy. Unfortunately, it’s from California.” Grant Family Farms, a nearby CSA that he is a member of, sells heirloom breeds of turkeys but with a high price tag and Jonas is always looking to eat ethically, but on a budget. Jonas is disappointed with “how the grocery stores sell turkeys…that have had no sunshine or air. They sell them extremely cheap so people will buy [all their holiday foods] there.”

But not Jonas. He has plans to celebrate with friends with a baked winter squash from his garden that he’ll prick and bake upside down on a cookie pan, then turn over to melt butter in with a sprinkle of cinnamon before scooping out the flesh and whipping it smooth. This year, Jonas enjoyed a fruit share from Grant Family Farms, a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) near Wellington, which provided him with Colorado-grown apricots, peaches, apple cider, plums and more. Right now, he’s floating in apples and plans to use them in a recipe he invented for apple cake. Here’s the recipe, plucked straight from his head, no written notes to help him remember:

“Slice your apples and put them in the bottom of a big cake pan and sprinkle them with cinnamon. Then mix together three cups of barley flour—it makes a really moist cake—with a half teaspoon of non-aluminum baking powder. Set the dry ingredients aside and mix one cup of honey or cane juice (the stuff that’s golden colored because it has minerals in it) together with a whole stick of melted butter, and a cup or so of kefir or milk, and two eggs. [Mix the dry and wet ingredients together] and pour it over the apples. Bake it at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.”

Jonas is a great model for the discriminating, budget-savvy locavore, someone who discovers with his own eyes where his food comes from, insuring there’s wisdom and heart in every bite.

Alfred’s find

Hey cool sweater!

Laramie Locavore

Preparing the Garden for Winter

In preparing for my first winter with an unheated greenhouse, I knew I’d need some expert advice on putting my garden beds to sleep and I knew just the folks to turn to. Celeste and Gary Havener, a.k.a. High Horse Farms (and the masterminds behind Laramie’s farmer’s market), have been gardening successfully on fifty acres near Albany on the backside of Sheep Mountain for going on three decades now, the last eight using high tunnels.

And, okay, I wanted to see this almost mythical mountain farm that somehow single-handedly supplied me with all the pear tomatoes I needed for a winter’s supply of sundried tomatoes.

Laramie Valley is known for its gaps, the places where winds funnel through at 100 miles an hour sometimes. Driving toward Albany, the first snow clouds bunched up in the gap between Sheep Mountain and the Medicine Bow Range. I drove up a steep little driveway to a barbed wire gate, three horses on the crest of a hill, their manes twisting in the oncoming weather. I let myself through, passing a wood crow sentinel as I descended into High Horse Farm. Celeste and Gary’s house is a hobbit hovel, a 12-sided log structure they built by hand into an earthen berm. Celeste met me at the gate, her long red braid twisting in the wind like her horse’s tails, her jeans patched neatly on one knee and a big wool sweater over her hands against the wind. She brought me in for a cup of tea before taking me on a tour of her farm.

The first thing she told me was, “Yes, I must admit, we’re blessed with good soil.” Not what you expect to hear about sagebrush land. But with a master’s in soil biology, Celeste is someone who knows the science of dirt. She explained that their acres are part of an eolian deposition in which the winds pick up the topsoil of their neighbors and deposit it on their land. This crest of good earth creates a wind break, as well. But residing, as they do, in the center of a gap, they still contend with powerful winds. Which is where high tunnels serve a double purpose; not only do they retain heat, but they also protect tender plants from the desiccating wind.

As the first autumn flakes began to fly, Celeste took me out to see a strange sight—a Wyoming garden still sort of flourishing in the second week of October. “There’s not much winter preparation for you to see yet,” she apologized, picking me Japanese truffle tomatoes to take home. Nasturtiums and squash blossoms bloomed orange and the ceiling of the high tunnels hung with bounties of pear tomatoes. Outside, potato plants had frozen off and then regrown new greenery. Same with the sweet peas.

“But this week it’ll all freeze,” Celeste predicted, “and I’ll bring in the rototiller and turn all these plants under.”

“Is that what’s called green manure?” I asked.

“Yes, because in Europe the poorer farmers who didn’t have horses or manure still needed to put nitrogen and organic material back into the soil.”

But the Havener’s have plenty of horse manure to spare. They will pile everything they have through January into a heap and leave it until spring to age like a good wine. “I can’t say good enough things about horse manure.” But they also compost with red worms in wood boxes inside the high tunnels and a compost heap outside, too.

“Fall is the best time to get gardens ready,” Celeste said. “Especially for people starting new beds.” She showed me a bag of alfalfa cubes she’d purchased. “I’ll mix these in with the soil to add organic material. They don’t have seeds like a bale would and so you don’t get weeds.  Plus, they attract worms.”

She’ll cover her strawberry patch with straw for the winter and then let the two feet of snow accumulate for extra insulation. She’ll also wrap her apple tree with hardware cloth so it doesn’t touch the bark, deterring deer and rabbits. Celeste pointed out a thriving row of raspberries of two varieties. “I’ll mow all these down this fall and then cover them with cardboard and straw to protect them. I know it sounds weird but it works!”

But far from weird, Celeste’s insights into high plains gardening are a kind of wheel of wisdom, season after season of experimenting and honing. “There’s a seasonality to my life,” she had said over tea. And I had noticed a wet painting started on an easel in blues and pinks, telling me the season had come for indoor work.  “The spinach replants itself in the high tunnels. And on Valentine’s Day, I’ll start my tomato plants. Because their my little heart fruits,” she said.

I got into my car with a paper bag full of her heart fruits with every intention of saving her seeds for my own Valentine’s Day planting.

Laramie Locavore

Putting Food By

On September 6, Laramie had it’s first freeze, illustrating exactly why so many people believe it’s impossible to grow your own food in the Laramie Valley. But, in my opinion, our little cold snaps make us more industrious gardeners. The night of September 5, I harvested my entire basil patch, muttering apologies as I snipped. Once de-stemmed, I had 12 cups of basil leaves and had to quadruple my pesto recipe.

In batches, I food processed 3 cups of the leaves together with 2 garlic cloves, ½ cup of walnuts, ¾ cup of parmesan cheese and a ½ cup of olive oil, salt and peppering to taste (of course, keeping good bread handy for this purpose). I scooped the pesto into recycled plastic containers to freeze, all except one to eat immediately in dollops in soup and on pita pizzas. I now have three large containers of fresh basil to last me until…maybe January? A friend mentioned that she froze basil leaves with a little water over them in ice cube trays and says they work well to thaw and use in sauces.

I invested in frost blankets this year, large fabric sheets that allow light, air and water to flow in, adding an extra ten degrees to the ambient temperature of the garden. This kept the tender zucchini leaves from frost bite pretty well, allowing my little veggies to grow a few days m

Kai with the zucchini as big as her leg

ore. Meanwhile, I harvested them as they grew large enough until one drawer of my fridge was stuffed full of zucchinis. One zucchini was the dimensions of a football with a soft core, not the best for stir fries.I food processed it into shredded heaps and froze it without blanching in 2 cup measurements, the quantity I use for muffins and zucchini chocolate bread. The smaller zucchinis I cut into ½ inch discs, blanched for three minutes, then allowed to freeze on cookie tins before spatula-ing them into a freezer bag.

At the farmer’s market, I invested in bushels of peaches and pear tomatoes and dehydrated them. The dried tomatoes soaked in garlic, basil and olive oil make great homemade sundried tomatoes. Now, all I need is a winter’s worth of acorn squash. We’ve eaten one already stuffed with couscous, apricots and pistachios, but I have a good dozen half grown in the (cold) greenhouse and can only hope that they will get up to size before the next freeze. It’s supposed to be a low of 38 degrees on Thursday. A little close for comfort.

To learn more about putting food by, plan to attend a canning workshop on October 17 from 1-4 p.m.. To sign up, email: jholland@uwyo.edu. There’s a $5 fee. All jars and produce provided!

Laramie Locavore

Chokecherry Jam

“Chokecherries so furre the mouthe that the tongue will cleave to the roofe, and the throate wax hoarse!” Early settler, 1634

When I bought my house on the West Side, the young woman who sold us the place got teary when she told me that she remembered her grandmother making chokecherry jam from the tree in the yard. I assured her I would carry on the tradition. But it’s taken me six years to get around to making jam from the black orbs that hang in clusters in the late summer, attracting birds and squirrels to gorge upon them. But finally I decided my children were old enough to tackled jam production and this year we did some research and tried it.

Chokecherry bushes grow all over town and are a common riparian-loving bush in our mountains, growing fragrant, drooping racemes of flowers not unlike lilacs. The flavor of the berry explains their name, it’s tart acidic juice puckering the mouth instantly. Native tribes ground the berries and pits together and ate them in dried patties. Pioneers invented chokecherry jam and it’s one of the great pleasures of mountain life and an easy fruit for high elevation gardening.

It took my children and I all morning to pick the cherries. We climbed a ladder high into the inner world of the tree and picked every one we could reach, collecting about a half gallon from our 10-foot tall tree. Then we spent most of the afternoon de-stemming. Yes, making chokecherry jam was time consuming but not so terribly unlike climbing Medicine Bow Peak, except there was toast and jam at the top instead of a view.

I used my handy Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook by Darcy Williamson for the recipe. To make the jam, I had to fine tune the cookbook’s recipe to fit my half gallon of berries. I also used the recipe on the back of my freezer jam fruit pectin for measurements. First, I washed the berries and cooked them in three cups water for fifteen minutes. While they cooked, I mashed them thoroughly with a potato masher. Meanwhile, I mixed together three cups of sugar and the pectin. I started with two cups of sugar but when I tasted the jam later, I knew an extra dose of sweet would balance the tart and added a half a cup of sugar at a time until I had the right balance. The wild food cookbook emphasized the need to ring every drop of pulp from the mash and suggested pouring the whole vat into an old pillow case and twisting the juice out. I put the berries and juice through a wire sieve and used the back of a slotted spoon, but wasn’t satisfied. I ended up picking up handfuls of berries and pits and squeezing the liquid out like a sponge in my bare hands. This worked marvelously without sacrificing my linens.

My half gallon of berries made exactly the four cups of liquid required for the pectin recipe. I mixed the pulp together with the sugar and pectin and poured it into clean jars and plastic containers. It made enough jam to give away as gifts and to eat the whole winter through. Afterward, the kitchen looked a little like we’d been inflicting murder and mayhem, smears of blood red on floors and cabinets, but that only made me think how many antioxidants we must get from the jam. I’ve already been thinking of Thanksgiving recipes to use it with. Chokecherry jam over baked pumkin? Bring on autumn.

Laramie Locavore

Sharing the Bounty

Rhonwyn with radishes in front of greenhouse

The radishes in my garden are bulging red under their prickly leaves and I know it’s time for them to be served in a salad with the last of my green leaf lettuce before it goes to seed. But my family aren’t the avid radishes lovers I am. They haven’t learned the pleasure of sneaking out to the garden with a bowl of salt, washing a red orb under the hose and eating them wet and spicy straight from the earth, the way I did as a girl growing up in Walden. Nowadays, I mostly plant radishes to deter the earwigs and other pests who don’t care for the spicy flavor they bring to the rest of the bed. Needless to say, I now have a few too many radishes.

So for last Friday’s farmer’s market, I harvested several bunches and delivered them to the Sharing the Bounty table down in front of Grand Newsstand. Along with Anddee Gilliam, Gayle Woodsum and Laramie Local Food Group, I’ve been helping to organize a table to accept excess bounty, like my radishes, to be donated to Soup Kitchen, Interfaith Good-Samaritan and, later in the fall, to Headstart.

This last Friday’s donations were bountiful indeed. Our baskets burgeoned with fruits and vegetables people had harvested from their own gardens, or bought at the farmer’s market especially to donate to our cause. We had bags of potatoes, a jar of Wyoming honey, a mighty harvest of homegrown tarragon, one lovely peach, carrots, onions, cabbage and more. We also received a very generous cash donation to help us offset the cost of the canopy and other supplies we’ll need.

The donation table is part of a growing interest in all things foody, whether its the quality of meals served in nursing homes and schools, the importance of reducing the amount of fossil fuels it takes to deliver our foods to our tables, or educating the public about how to prepare fresh fruits and vegetables at home. Gayle calls this new trend a movement toward “food equality” in which it is considered a human right to have access to good food. You’ve probably seen the TV chefs visiting the most unhealthy sectors of our country and teaching children how to garden and cook. When it makes it to reality TV shows, you know you’ve got a full blown trend on your hands.

We’ll be accepting donations at the Sharing the Bounty table every week through the farmer’s market season. Stop by and share your gardening stories and recipes.

Melodie Edwards is a local writer and a member of Laramie Local Foods, an organization dedicated to growing, harvesting and eating locally grown foods. She can be reached at laramie.locavore@gmail.com.

Laramie Locavore: Patty’s Poultry

Laramie Locavore

Patty’s Poultry

The Chicken Coop

I’ve made a bit of a project of taking my children to visit the places where their food comes from. I took them out to the shady spot under the cottonwoods to meet the Morning Fresh cows in Laporte and took a hayride to see the Grant Family Farm many vegetables grow. So when I went to visit Marla Petersen, manager at Big Hollow Food Co-op, my first question was, “How do I get in touch with Patty?” The co-op has several local egg producers but because of her dependability and price, and maybe because I know her by name, I always reach for Patty’s eggs.

Laramie is unusually blessed with egg producers, thanks to the co-op. Marla says they haven’t sold commercial eggs in over a year. “Once you’ve tried [local eggs] you can’t go back,” Marla said. She’s right, and it’s not just the flavor that makes them better, but they’re more nutritious, too, with a third less cholesterol, twice the omega-3 fatty acids, more vitamins A and E and seven times the beta carotene, which gives them their lovely orange-y yolks.

All Patty Eats are Eggs!

All of this good news was no new news to Patty Ranz, the 23-year-old chicken, duck and rabbit farmer living on her great aunt’s ranch near Harmony. “I hardly ever get sick,” Patty says. “Thanks to my eggs, some fish oil and good sleep.” When you look in her fridge, it does appear that eggs are all she eats, nothing much else in there but cartons of the morning’s egg collection. “I just wash them here at my kitchen sink. I don’t use egg soap because I don’t trust the warning on the label,” she says. She washes each one by hand with a little Dawn, the same tough but gentle stuff they’re using to clean brown pelicans in the Gulf.

When I asked how she got into chicken farming, she says growing up in Laramie her backyard was a zoo, “but my parents let me follow what I loved…[Raising animals] is a source of joy for me.” She was a shy kid but participating in 4-H showing rabbits gave her confidence. However, she didn’t learn to raise chickens in 4-H. That, she says, is in her blood, all the way back to her homesteading grandfather who gave up practicing law to move to Rawlins and raise chickens. She has taught herself everything by trial and error, with the help of a few good books. (One of her bibles is Incubating: A Guide to Better Hatching by Janet Stromberg.) This summer she’ll be building onto her pens to enlarge her flock as well to build an egg mobile, a cart with nests inside that will allow Patty to tour her older layers around the ranch to help her mow down weeds and bugs. With the egg mobile, the older hens will continue to provide a service even when they are laying fewer eggs. Before winter, she also needs to get a wood stove in the chicken coop. “Winters are hard,” she says. “The power went out last year when we had those 45 below temperatures and I lost all my rabbit litters. I’m too dependent on electricity. It’d be sad to lose everything just because I’m not prepared.”

“Who’ll help you build all this stuff?” I ask.

Patty shrugs, a slight young woman with waist length brown hair and a quiet smile. “I’ll build it myself. My dad taught me carpentry as a kid.”

The Duck Puddle

She shows my two girls and me into the chicken pens past the ducks sitting around their puddle. “Duck eggs take a while to cook,” Patty tells us. “But they’re great for baking. They make everything really poofy.”

Inside the chicken house, the roosters and hens are singing at the top of their lungs, perched everywhere on the highest points in the coop. “Someone laid an egg,” Patty yells over the racket. “They’re all very proud about it.”

After the din dies down, she tells us she has about 80 chickens currently but is incubating another 20 or so and intends to keep growing her business. None of her chickens have clipped wings or beaks and when one stubborn hen insists on roosting up in the rafters, Patty provides her a box up there. “The recession came along right when I graduated from LCCC and I was out of work. But Marla said something that got me thinking. She said, well, you’ve always got your eggs to fall back on. And it’s become a passion. It’s my goal to utilize every part of the animal.” She even wants to figure out how to compost the bird poo to sell.

After leaving the chickens, we head back out into the mosquitoes (the chickens keep their pen free of them) and meet Patty’s guard dogs, a friendly collie and a rescued malamut/shepard who ran away from everyone else but who chooses to stay on with Patty, chain-free.

Other than the animals, Patty’s only company is her 88-year-old great aunt. “She gets around the house alright,” Patty says. “But I help her get to bed and eat right. She’d eat ice cream for supper if she could.”

Patty Ranz in Front of Her Aunt's House

Patty walks us to our car and we say goodbye. My girls and I know that every time we drive past Patty’s place, we’ll wave at the chickens that give us eggs and think of Patty out there, putting in her wood stove, the raucous songs of proud chickens all around her.

To arrange your own visit to see Patty’s chickens, make an appointment at 307.761.0804.

Melodie Edwards is a local writer and a member of Laramie Local Foods, an organization dedicated to growing, harvesting and eating locally grown foods. She can be reached at laramie.locavore@gmail.com

Proper Love of Money: Sell in May (or June) and go away

Our final episode until the Fall.