Farm Week: July 21, 2014

Besides our usual pattern of harvests, and a brief heat wave, the big story this week is that we harvested our garlic. There’s something very gratifying about harvesting a crop that’s been in the ground since last year. Those little cloves were in the ground starting to grow last October, so they’ve survived from lots of degrees below zero during a very cold winter and mercury approaching 100 just earlier this week. I’ve been slowly making my way through Ron L Engeland’s Growing Great Garlic, and I was insufferable all week quoting “that dude.” Garlic just out of the ground is green garlic, but has to be cured in a warm, dry, airy place for a few weeks before it’s the garlic we know and love. We haven’t quite gotten to the stage where we hang all the thousands of heads of garlic up to cure, but we did take the time to choose the heads to hold back for next year’s seed. “That dude” says that using the very biggest bulbs for seed results in an inconsistent harvest - some very large bulbs and some very small ones. He recommends planting bulbs averaging 2-2.5 inches, which results in a more uniform bulb size at harvest. Mat and I spent about an hour selecting, bunching, and hanging up the seed, which according to him is the most intentional they’ve ever been about it. This time next year we’ll see whether “that dude’s” advice worked in our case.

This week also brought a bumper crop of basil, which when combined with the garlic we just harvested screams out for some pesto-making. Perhaps because our tomatoes haven’t been coming in strong yet, we hadn’t really been selling much basil at the markets, which didn’t really make us eager to harvest all of the basil we needed to to keep the plants from flowering too early. So I had the idea that we sell pesto-making kits with a recipe included. We packed large bags of basil, banded them and attached a head of garlic and the rolled-up recipe. We ended up selling much more basil at the market than we otherwise would have, and I think our customers really got excited about it. It’s this kind of never-ending problem-solving that keeps farming interesting season after season, I think. 

Thinking about: old friends, different paths, the right tool for the job

Eating:  green garlic, homemade pesto, new potatoes, zucchini, wedding cake!

Reading: Roberto Bolano’s 2666, Michael Phillips’ The Holistic Orchard, Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier’s Edible Forest Gardens, Ron L Engeland’s Growing Great Garlic, RJ Garner’s The Grafter’s Handbook

Farm Week: June 9, 2014

Sometimes a beautiful week makes a load of difference, in lots of ways. It certainly helps the plants, which is great. It also gives the weeds a boost, which is less than ideal, but it also provides us with ample time out in the field to fight the good fight. Though we’ve been harvesting for CSA boxes and market on a regular basis, my focus these past few weeks has been cultivation. We have a few big crops that were a bit choked with weeds while we had to devote large amounts of time to continuing to transplant. This week, however, we finished cultivating our onions and put a big dent in our potatoes, carrots, and beets. 

This is a unique part of the season, when we are simultaneously trying to accomplish everything all at once. We still have a good bit of planting to do, we have food to harvest, but we also have to play catchup on weeding so that we can make our harvests more secure in the middle term. I might be alone in this feeling, but I find that cultivation is actually the most gratifying task of all. Sure, when you plant, you get to look out in the field to perfect rows of new plants, and when you harvest you get to wash and pack and share your bounty, but cultivation carries with it a whole range of, well, feelings. When you zip up and down rows with a razor hoe killing weeds in the thread stage, you congratulate yourself on your impeccable timing, knowing how much work you saved your two-weeks-from-now self. Conversely, when you’re in “save the crop” mode, you curse your month-ago self for letting it slide, but the feeling of accomplishment when you reach the end of a task is commensurately more gratifying. More than any other task on the farm, weeding is a mental game. You psych yourself up, you set yourself goals, you push yourself physically, and sometimes you find yourself hoping that your enthusiasm becomes infectious. It might seem like an odd thing to feel passionately about, but if anyone wants to catch the weeding fever, I know where you can get your fix!

Thinking about: surprise visits, stitches in time, connectivity

Eating: homemade pizza with Italian sausage and creamy spinach sauce, homemade pulled pork on ciabatta rolls, delicious, crisp, buttery head lettuce salads

Reading: fine print, Plutarch’s Selected Essays on Love, the Family, and the Good Life

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: June 10-14, 2013

Soggiest week thus far. We've had about 25 inches of rain in a little over three weeks in our little green valley. With only a handful of dry days in between the wet ones, the fields haven't been passable with the tractor of hoe for more than a few hours at a time in the past month or so. We put in about an acre of large summer crops in one day last month, and then the deluge started that very night with a memorable hailstorm. For a look at what 25 inches of rain and a month without a hoe does to a stand of tomatoes, look at the greenest photo below. The fields have standing water (these past two days, even running water!), and a few crops seem to have melted right into the soil. In the next week or two, we're going to have to make some decisions about what crops to try to save and where we'll have to cut our losses.

In situations like this, the CSA model can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you don't stand to lose large portions of income like you would were you relying on farmers market sales. On the other hand, the 250 people who pre-paid for their weekly vegetables are expecting full boxes all season long. Over the past few days and weeks, almost every shareholder we run into around town or on the farm has had the same reaction to the weather: they notice it! Someone picking up their produce at the grocery store might only be slightly inconvenienced by some inclement weather, but our shareholders have been looking forward to fresh vegetables all winter and spring, and were just getting ready to pick up their first share of the season. But as they start to anticipate visiting the farm (or their local CSA drop-off) for their first time this year, they start to notice that it has been raining quite a bit recently. Everybody seems to be thinking about us when it rains these days, out there slogging through mud and rain in our boots and bibs. That personal connection with the farmer is what makes it possible for our members to understand why the box might not be filled to the brim for a few weeks this summer, and that is the beauty of the CSA model.

Despite the weather, this was our first week harvesting a full load for delivery and pickup, and we most definitely improved in speed and efficiency as the week progressed. My stint as the only person who hadn't cut themselves with the sharp harvest knives came to a close on Thursday in the cilantro, and I'm hoping that will tide me over for awhile. I drove the White Plains route again this week, a task that both reminded me of the joys of rural living and provided an opportunity to practice the ancient art of zen traffic-sitting.

Next week, we can only hope for a sunny, dry version of this past week, in which we harvest so quickly and efficiently that we have oodles of time to finally transplant the crops that have been waiting out this weather and to save some of the potential losses from the past month's saturated excesses.

Thinking about: dry heat, time management, trade-offs

Reading: David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, George Saunders' Tenth of December, Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Eating: chicken I personally killed, plucked, gutted, cleaned, and cooked a variety of ways, homemade refried black beans, kale risotto, rainbow chard, small handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries

Farm Week: June 3-7, 2013

In a milder week after much May weather, we slogged through much mud on the farm this week to do an escalating battle with weeds. Monday brought a visit from the CRAFTers, and Dan and Tracy's assigned topic was the CSA model and the finances behind a CSA farm on this scale. The apprentices really appreciated his openness and transparency in talking about the financial realities of running a CSA farm, because so many of them work for people who would never disclose their financial situations, or that came to farming with lots of family resources. Dan and Tracy's start-up story is full of lucky turns, but they relied mostly on their hard work to slowly build a farm at a comfortable scale.

This week brought the first substantial harvest and subsequent vegetable delivery. They organized the CSA calendar in such a way that the first harvest is the only one that week, providing a way for us to learn the mechanics of harvesting all the different vegetables, as well as the routine that takes vegetables from the ground to a box in the back of the van. We started harvesting right away in the morning, wearing our bibs to keep dry in the mud and the dew. This week's harvest included salad mix, spinach, arugula, dandelion greens, komatsuna, scallions, dill, and turnips. We bring big plastic bins out to the fields and fill them with rubber-banded bunches or loose leaves, depending on the crop. We bring them back to the packing shed, where we wash them in large tubs of cold water and stick them in the cooler. After the greens have dried off a bit, we come back and bag them to the appropriate weight before sticking them back in the cooler. The next day, we started in the packing shed, first counting out the right number of boxes (this time 83), then filling them in the right order (heaviest first, most crushable last), moving down the rollers in the packing line and ending up in the back of the van. We flipped a coin to see who would make the first delivery, and I won (or lost, depending on your point of view). I ended up driving down to White Plains, NY, which was a little more than two hours each way. Next week, we'll ramp up to the full harvest schedule, which will be about triple this week's. At the same time, we'll be battling the weeds (now in full force) and the wet weather (which shows no signs of letting up).

Thinking about: pollen, saison yeast, essays

Eating: wraps of all kinds, spicy radishes, sweet juicy turnips, greenest greens, eggiest eggs

Reading: Gene Logsdon's Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, George Saunders' Tenth of December