Farm Week: September 30 - October 4, 2013

Walking down the street to work this week, I can't help making that age-old detour: shuffling through the crunchiest leaves I can find! Besides the satisfying crunching and crackling, there's a certain smell that newly-fallen leaves give off when rustled around that I can never experience without smiling. It's well-known that the olfactory system is closely linked to emotions in the brain, but I'm still always surprised at how evocative aromas can be. Apart from food smells, fallen leaves is right up there with the beginning of a hot summer rainstorm and the first blossoming trees of spring: smells that can't be bottled, and all the better! If I could summon the crunchy leaves smell at will, the effect would be dulled every time. I'll just have to be content soaking it in while I can.

We had a bit of an indian summer this week, with daytime temps getting up to the mid-eighties, and this weekend we're getting a bit of appreciated rain. The fields were getting a bit dusty! Besides our normal harvest schedule, we spent some time chipping away at a big task (weeding the strawberry patch), cultivating our fall greens, and pulling up the outdoor tomato stakes and tilling the plants under. We're still harvesting peppers and eggplant, but the tomatoes are pretty much gone. We have a great fall crop of carrots and beets that we're working our way through, and I'm preparing to make a big batch of beet chutney this afternoon. There never seemed to be enough tomatoes to can any sauces this summer, and cucumbers and zucchini were scarce, so I haven't canned much this summer. Last night also brought a serendipitous good time - I was about to go see a movie when I saw on Twitter that a friend's band was playing in Great Barrington in a few hours. So I cashed in my movie ticket and headed back home to round up the gang. The band was amazing, and anyone on the east coast should look at their tour dates and see when they'll be playing a bar near you. The band is Saint Anyway, from Duluth, but featuring proud New Englander Ben Cosgrove.

Thinking about: ever-filling calendars, visitors, leaf-peeper traffic

Reading: Three more silly detective novels, William A. Owens' This Stubborn Soil, Herman Koch's The Dinner, Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements, Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

Eating: venison and pork chili, local Macoun apples, lots of tea with local honey, tortellini with green olives and Sam and Lisa's first harvest of winecap mushrooms, ham egg and cheese on English muffins

Farm Week: September 23-27, 2013

It was another beautiful week here on the farm - so far fall has been picture perfect. Days are shorter, certainly; it's dark when I wake up now, and daylight fades fast after work. What sunlight remains is more appreciated than ever with the nights and even the days turning cooler. So far, we've been spared a hard frost, and our outdoor tomatoes, peppers, and even eggplant are still producing. The last of our transplants and seeds are in the ground, and we even cleared out the jungle of tomato plants and weeds in the lower greenhouse in preparation for some winter greens. With the cool weather, the weeds have slowed down a bit, and we've moved from cultivation to cleaning up. We're tilling in the remains of old crops, readying the soil for the rye and vetch that will be our winter cover crop. This Monday was another CRAFT visit, this time to a nearby raw milk dairy. It was a nice, if low-key visit, the highlight being the adorable new calves and a really lovely flock of laying hens. Friday night brought another fun birthday bonfire on the farm, which has brought another mellow Saturday. Hopefully I'll be back at 100% by tonight, when we've been invited to a barn dance party. The fun never ends!

Thinking about: warm boots, flannel layers, darning socks

Reading: Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows, Jacqueline Winspear's Pardonable Lies, William A. Owens This Stubborn Soil

Eating: more potlucks, ploughman's lunches, home fries and eggs

Farm Week: September 16-20, 2013

This week back from my mimi-vacation was half vacation continuation and half return to the hard work of farming. On the one hand, the days were beautiful, sunny and mild; the leaves have started changing, and I took a break from my pile of "serious" reading with three perfectly diverting mystery novels. On the other hand, we harvested a miraculously bountiful (and heavy) crop of winter squash, loaded up a delivery of hay into the loft, and slaughtered the bull in addition to our usual harvest and delivery schedule. Not to mention a pair of frosty nights! We brought the space heaters out of storage in the barn, and I dusted off my teapot and travel mug. I also dusted off the old resume, and I've been gearing up to start planning my winter and subsequent farming season in earnest. A few farm visits last weekend spurred me to start the process, and I've been doing some thinking about what I want my winter to look like. It seems like I've been finding myself in this place on a regular basis, where I know almost nothing about what my immediate future holds. I guess that in some ways I've grown used to the annual fielding of the "what next?" question, the packing of the boxes or the backpack or the truck, the journey to the new place filled with new people. In another way, I'll be glad if I can find that place that can meet most of my agricultural-educational needs and stay there for a few years. There are not many places that would fit the bill, and if they won't have me I'll have to continue my patchwork, migratory lifestyle for awhile. Either way, adventure awaits!

Thinking about: lengthening shadows, good friends, big moons

Reading: Martin Walker's Bruno Chief of Police, Jacqueline Winspear's Birds of a Feather

Eating: fried potatoes, beets and onions with wilted chard and eggs over easy; pork tacos with bell peppers, serranos, sweet corn, onions, tomatoes and avocado

Farm Week (Plus): September 9-15, 2013

This week was an abbreviated farm week and a mini-vacation. Apprentices here get five vacation days each, and since it was nearing the end of the season and I had yet to take any, I decided to treat myself to a long weekend in and around Burlington, VT. I took a day and a half of vacation, leaving after the morning harvest on Thursday and narrowly (mostly) beating the heavy rains coming in from the southeast.

First, however, I had most of a farm week. As the busiest part of the season has passed for the most part, the CRAFT visits have resumed in earnest. This past Monday we visited a family-run orchard down in Roxbury, CT, Maple Bank Farm. Although they're not an organic operation, they were one of the first farms in the area to be growing food locally to sell at their very popular farmstand. Besides vegetables, sweet corn, and apples, they also have a pick-your-own blueberry patch and some sheep from which they sell lambs and fiber. While two hours isn't long enough to go into all of the knowledge necessary to run a successful small orchard, we went over the basics of pruning, grafting, variety selection, and marketing. The tour and talk was followed by a lovely (as usual) potluck. As the potluck was winding down, there was a hay delivery, and everyone jumped up to help stack the hay in the barn's hayloft. Dusty work, but it was many of the young farmers' first time even touching a fresh bale of hay and it was done in a fraction of the time it would have taken if we weren't there.

The rest of the week passed mostly like a normal week, and after Thursday morning's harvest was completed with some very far-off but menacing rumbles of thunder I jumped in the car for the five hour drive up to Burlington. The weather wasn't any better two hundred miles north, but it was good enough to walk from the hostel to a beer bar with a book! I spent Friday wandering around, browsing thrift stores, and generally people-watching. Saturday, I took a ferry across Lake Champlain to Essex, where I went on a farmers-only tour of Essex Farm (more on that in another post, I think). In the late afternoon, I drove up to Keeseville, where I had been a few months before at the Greenhorns solstice event in June. I met with some people I'm thinking about living with over the winter, then made it up to another ferry across the Lake and back down to Burlington just in time to fall into bed well past my bedtime. Sunday morning I went on a twenty-mile bike ride along the lakeshore and up to a land bridge/causeway in to the lake. Normally, there's a bike ferry that connects the causeway to an peninsula to the north, but the lake was too choppy to complete the fifty-foot crossing. The wind that I'd not even noticed pedaling north was quite a battle on the return trip. After one quick last shower in the hostel, I hit the road for a beautiful drive southward. On the way back, I stopped to scope out a forest farm where I was considering applying to for next season, which was worth the detour to cross it off my list. Overall, it was a great week and an even greater weekend!

Thinking about: winter possibilities, continuing education, intensity

Reading: Margery Fish's We Made a Garden, Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs

Eating: potlucks galore! farmers officially have the best potlucks! vermont cheese and beer!

 

Farm Week: September 2-6, 2013

Big week here on the farm, in some ways, and a very normal week in others. After a rainy start to the weeks, we had all the sunshine and breezes breezes you could want. It made for a nice week on the farm, and it was a week in which the inmates, so to speak, ran the asylum. Dan and Tracy took the kids on their annual trip to the Rhode Island shore, leaving us in charge of making sure everyone gets their vegetables. We had heard stories in which former groups of apprentices had spent the week throwing harvest bins at each other, so we were interested to see how the week was going to go. As it turned out, we weathered the week rather well. We finished the list of tasks that Dan left for us early in the week, and so we undertook a large project of our own accord: cleaning out and organizing the feed barn. It took us about a day, but the result was worth it. Three dump runs, a family of skunks, and a few sore backs later, we have a clean, tidy barn. Dan was certainly surprised upon his return, but now that we've proven ourselves capable and willing, there might be a few more barns to clean in our future.

Far from just refraining from bin-throwing, we shared a few delicious meals, even after spending all this time together. During the week, Lisa cooked us all pork chops from our dearly departed piggies, which was accompanied by some very buttery mashed potatoes (ours) and a bright salad (also ours). Besides condiments, it was a delicious dinner made entirely from Chubby Bunny bounty! It was also the very first time I've enjoyed a pork chop. I guess I've probably eaten a few pork chops in my life (before and after vegetarianism), but my tastes in meat have always run more towards the peasant end of the animal: cuts meant to add to stew, braised, pulled, jerked, or otherwise cooked low and slow (see last week's buried pork shoulder).

As if that wasn't enough deliciousness and excitement for one week, I also celebrated a birthday yesterday. While I spent the majority of the day knee-deep in chicken feathers (see picture below), I capped off a very full day with a delicious peach pie from Tracy, followed by a trip to the Falls Village Inn with the apprentices. In a stroke of birthday luck, the special was a duck dish, tied with prosciutto with my very favorite meatstuffs! Along with a few local beers, we all shared some delicious fried pickles, the duck, and a delicious beet and goat cheese salad. Between last weekend's ridiculous bonfire, the mid-week chops, and the birthday duck, it was really a culinary week to remember.

Coming up: I use some vacation days to take a long weekend in Burlington, VT and the Adirondacks!

Thinking about: timelines, personal motivation, vacation days

Reading: Michael Pollan's Second Nature, Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows

Eating: most delicious pork chops, duck with redcurrant sauce, fried onions and potatoes with freshest chicken liver, perfect eggs over easy

Big Weekend: Fire & a Fair!

This past Saturday, we had a great bonfire and party with friends and other farmers from the area. For the occasion, we cooked up a picnic shoulder from one of the pigs that we slaughtered two weeks ago. I decided I wanted to try a twist on an underground cooking method used in Hawaii and the Yucatan with the Chubby Bunny twist. After 7+ hours underground, the results were amazingly delicious. Possibly the best bbq-ed pork I've had in my life.  

On Sunday, sufficiently recovered from Saturday night's festivities, we managed to sneak in an afternoon at the Goshen Fair in between thunderstorms. We perused the livestock and veggie tents, ate the fair food (hand-dipped corn dog! sour dill pickle!), and I even made a spur-of-the-moment decision to compete in the skillet toss!

Farm Week: August 26-30, 2013


Barring one unexpected development, this week chugged along as normal. Besides our normal harvests, we seeded still more salad mix, arugula, and spinach. We transplanted a last round of chard, and we have just one last round of flats awaiting transplanting this fall. We finally harvested some outdoor tomatoes and a ton of zucchini, so it felt for awhile that July arrived in late August. That month of rain really set us back, and we still haven't left the repercussions behind. Our late-planted eggplant don't look like they're going to produce much - we've only harvested about one fruit per plant. We only were able to save about 20% of our sweet potato crop from the weeds, and I grudgingly tilled under the weed-choked beds this week.

The big news this week was that Farmer Dan has thrown out his arm from an old recurring injury, and he was in a sling all week. The good news is that it's not his strong arm, but he will be a bit incapacitated for the near future. Not one to take illness or disability lying down, we spent much of the week tssk-ing his insistence on continuing to use his arm against all protestations.

This week also brought a midweek birthday celebration for Ham (apprentice Dan) - highlights included a delicious peach pie from Tracy and a very rousing two-stringed uke performance from Baxter. We marked the holiday weekend last night with a great bonfire, which I'm going to devote a whole post to later this week. First, I have to recover from said bonfire in time to go to the fair! The tilt-a-whirl is out of the question, but I think I might be able to muster the strength for the mandatory corn dog!

Thinking about: impending cold, later sunrises, tradition

Reading: Therese Anne Fowler's Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, Michael Pollan's Second Nature, David Rakoff's Love Dishonor Marry Die Cherish Perish A Novel

Eating: tacos with homemade refried black beans and grassfed local beef, homegrown ground pork with carmelized fennel and wilted greens, freshest ripest peaches

Farm Week: August 19-23, 2013

The week on the farm chugged along like normal this week, after a rocky start in which I chose to mow a whole field full of chest-high ragweed (achoo! covered in yellow dust!). We feel almost caught up on the weeds these days, and we're on time transplanting and direct-seeding more greens for the fall. The boxes lately have been heavy but not quite as full. The only green we've been able to harvest consistently is the old stand-by, kale. The chard is recovering from some weedy weeks and heavy picking, and we haven't had salad mix in weeks because of the weeks of bad weather and fieldwork backups. Next week though, we should be back to bagging up salad mix. In the meantime, we've starting harvesting our potatoes for the shares, and we harvested our entire onion storage crop and stacked them up in the barn. We've also been harvesting fennel for the past few weeks, and the wonderful anise smell just brings my right back to Tuscany, where I spent a few afternoons harvesting seeds from dried wild fennel.

The biggest event this week was the inevitable but still momentous chopping off of all of my hair. For years, I'd been telling myself that long hair was easier to take care of than short hair, because you could always just pull it back. But one day last week, I woke up and just knew in my gut that it was time to cut all of my hair off again. No more long hairs on my pillow and tangled up in my brush! Hair that air dries in minutes! Fits in a hat and stays off my neck at the same time! I'm still getting used to it, but I definitely don't regret it.

Last weekend, I took the trip down to Red Hook, NY to stock up on some brewing supplies. I bought the ingredients for two beers: an IPA using our homegrown hops, and a faux-sour peach ale using beaches from a loaded tree on the farm. I harvested a whole grocery bag full of hops that I'll dry in my trailer before brewing with them tomorrow afternoon. The beautiful weather also means that besides homebrewing adventures, my weekends are full of outdoor activities this month. Two weekends ago, it was a hike up the neighboring mountain to a lake, where I paddled around, read a book, and ate wildblueberries off the shore. Last weekend, I went on a 3-hour hilly bike ride through a few of the neighboring towns and farming valleys. Tomorrow, I plan on hiking a small piece of the Appalachian Trail, which passes through town here. Never a shortage of fun!

Thinking about: comfort, flexibility, self-discipline

Reading: Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller's Live from New York, Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, James Beard's Beard on Pasta

Eating: Chicken and zucchini soup over sourdough croutons, sharp cheddar and green apples, fresh popcorn and homebrewed ginger saison