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

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

Farm Week: August 12-16, 2013

It was a beautiful week here on the farm, with nights cold enough to snuggle deep under your covers, mornings cool enough for down vests, and days warming to the gradual shedding of layers. The crops, however, don't seem to have received the memo. Our harvests this week really scraped bottom; we cleared out the beet crop halfway through the week, and Friday's replacement was bunches of fennel that we cobbled from a crop we had written off because of all the weeds. Our greenhouse tomatoes are slow producers this year, and the outdoor crop, 400 plants instead of the normal 2000 planted late due to early season losses, have yet to show us a ripe red fruit. Even zucchini, a crop so prolific it's regarded as something even the faintest of green thumbs could manage, is barely producing this year. Our first planting was so swamped the plants never got big enough to really start producing. The second planting did noticeably better, with only about one third of the plants unhappily wet. Even with the weather as beautiful as it's been this week, we're still feeling the repercussions of an immoderate June. We harvested the onion this week as well, wind-rowing them on top of the black plastic rows to cure. When they're nice and dry, we'll load them into plastic bins and stack them in a nice dry place.

The most momentous event this week was the departure of two seasonal guests, Biscuit and Gravy. In other words, our pigs were slaughtered. Early Friday morning, we gathered by the pigs' enclosure with Joe, a man who has been performing this service all over the area since he was a young man. He used to keep animals himself, and he still makes and sells hay, but now he gets calls year round for his skills as a tidy dispatcher of farm animals medium, large, and extra-large (he's done buffalo!). We were his fifth appointment this week! When Joe does a slaughter on the farm, there's no stress about getting the animals packed in crates or trailers; he just goes right into the field with his gun and waits for the animal to come up to him before he shoots it squarely between the eyes. He bleeds it out with a cut to the neck right after the shot, then hoists the carcasses up on the tractor to move them to a more convenient place. He lays them on the ground to take off the head and feet and skin the underside of the animal. He then opens the cavity with a knife and then cuts the sternum with a bone-saw. He then hoists them up once again on the tractor, this time by the rear legs. In this position, he finishes skinning them, empties the body cavity, then fires up the bone saw again to complete the bisection. With that, we transfer them to the bed of a pickup truck lined with a plastic sheet for transport to the semi-local meat-locker, where they charge by the pound to process and freeze them in serving sizes. The meat will come back to the farm freezer next week for sale to the CSA members and our own consumption. I took one of the jowls to dry-cure into guanciale, and we're planning on slow-roasting a shoulder in a wood fire/coals for a get-together on Labor Day weekend. The bull is supposed to meet the same fate within a month or two, and I plan on more hands-on involvement with the slaughter process that time (minus the gun part at the beginning). Once again, I've come a long way from vegetarian in under five years

Thinking about: life cycles, temperate bike rides, flavor

Reading: Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, Terry Ryan's The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio, Willa Cather's My Antonia (again), The Best American Essays 2008

Eating: homemade Indian eggplant, lentils, and cucumber-yogurt sauce over basmati rice; roasted chicken with homemade bbq sauce; chicken salad on sourdough

Farm Week: August 5-9, 2013

This week brought seasonally apt weather, another CRAFT visit, chickens coming in and chickens going out, and some seasonal sneezing. A nice week, weather-wise, ended with a Friday wet enough to preclude most farm work. So today we finished harvesting some tomatoes from the greenhouse and setting up the CSA pickup room for our members before calling it a day.

Last weekend, we did our second chicken harvest. It went much better than the first, largely because it was much cooler than the first time around, and we also had enough helpers to get an efficient flow going. With the last of the birds in the freezer for sale, I made a trip to the post office on Thursday night to pick up a box of peepers. Fifty-one tiny day-old chickens can sure make more noise than you'd expect. They're the fourth batch out of five, and it seems every time we get new chicks in the mail we're surprised at just how small they are. After making sure the new guys were all cozy in their brooder, I went to a barbecue where we grilled up some of last weekend's chicken in some of my homemade (farm grown) bbq sauce. Since the juxtaposition caused me no lack of appetite, I think it's safe to say I've made the transition from vegetarian to farmer-omnivore pretty completely.

In other news, I've finally looked up what ragweed looks like, but I'm not sure it will help me avoid it. It's all over the farm, and it's not really in full bloom yet. Already, my sneezes are echoing through the valley, so I better stock up on antihistamines before next week!

Thinking about: counter space, histamines, post-season plans

Reading: Melissa Bank's Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Augusten Burrough's Magical Thinking, Michael Pollan's Cooked

Eating: polenta with gorgonzola cremificata; polenta with chicken neck, tomatoes, jalapenos, and homemade farmers cheese; rigatoni with homemade sausage and chard ragu