Fat Rooster Farm News

The Power of a Small Storm

2011-08-22T15:06:00.000-04:00

I can’t recall how many times I’ve said this summer; thank god I’m not farming this year. Not in the true sense of the word, anyway, not with apprentices and farmer’s markets on Saturdays and Wednesdays, not filling wholesale and retail accounts on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays.

For one, we’ve had one of, if not the most rainy springs on record. Our fields were so compacted that when we went to dig up the garlic, Kyle had to double dig them with a spade fork, and then I still had to pull and clean the heads. They made it, though, and we’re selling all that we can process, just Kyle and I. It makes for long hours sitting in the dust and chaff of the hay mow, cutting and trimming, then smoothing the outer dried and dirtied skins off. Sometimes Pat the barn cat or Moomee the housecat joins me, sashshaying back and forth, looking for attention. Occasionally, a hen will enter and wonder what I’m doing there, sitting in the dusky light, peeling and humming.

As far as the other crops, most of the gardens have been rotated through cover crops that are intended to suppress weed growth and beef up the biomass in the soil. Our mustard trials look like they did well: they held the dreaded Galinsoga weed at bay while feeding the honey bees and a myriad of other insect life. Then, the plants contributed a ton to the soil, first mowed, then plowed into the earth.

After the mustard, we planted buckwheat for the bees. It’s also a great weed smother crop, but there are those that swear cover crops don’t do anything to suppress weeds.

Which brings me to another favorite topic- the very idea of what is or isn’t a weed. I try very hard to instill in my son the need to remember that destroying some form of life just for the heck of it is not acceptable; the line we draw on what we destroy is a little hard to justify, however. Why, he asks, is it okay to kill a tomato hornworm, bent on destroying the tomatoes, but not the swallowtail caterpillar, eating through the dill and fennel?

Or how about the topic of the “invasives”, those plants considered a menace to ecosystems, like kudzu vine, or honeysuckle or bittersweet. They’re taking over the landscape, changing it, altering the rest of the life there.

Then there are the honeybees, non-natives from Europe, who have almost certainly displaced natives here, but who give us sweet honey. And how about earth worms, also not native, but carried over in the timbers of tall ships from across the seas, that now have permanently altered the soil structure in our forests and pastures and have most certainly added to its fertility.

Today, a thunderstorm has visited us twice. First, with winds so strong that they brought down black locust trees and our fields of corn, just tassled and ready to begin ripening. Hail, the size of marbles pelted the plants and cars and machinery. Beautiful to look at, but not so much if you’re a zucchini plant. Or Nancy, the little Modern Game bantam hen, who miraculously hatched out five chicks and has raised four almost to fledging (independence). At one point during the storm, I looked out and saw her and her brood being swept across the driveway in the wind and driving hail and rain, and screamed to Kyle and Bradford to come rescue them (I have broken my foot and am up to my knee in a cast, so am quite useless). The two boys found the brood, stashed behind a rock here and a piece of wood there and brought them, dripping wet, into the house, to their cockatiel cage, where they reside at night.

Every time a thunderstorm comes, it fixes nitrogen, and thus it’s instant fertilizer. That’s why it looks so green after a thunderstorm. For this, I can give thanks; for my flattened corn, I’m not so happy.

Bradford and Kyle spent the afternoon cutting up the tree that crashed across the round bales of hay . I swallowed a pit inside my stomach, watching my little son, who is not so little anymore, driving the tractor by himself to the pit with the tree’s limbs, while his father carved up the tree.

It’s the little storms that seem to mask the big transitions without anyone noticing. And in one summer, while the farm was at rest, my boy has been growing, fast- forward, toward not being a baby anymore.

Good thing this empty nest needs a wicked good cleaning.

April

2011-04-21T10:56:00.000-04:00

By the time we Vermonters reach April, we’re usually pretty tired of the raw, cold Northeastern weather. Even more so because the weather tricks us with brilliant days of sunshine and temperatures in the 60s, only to fall back down into the freezing cold 20s and blustery winds that accompany. I always tell people that it snows on my birthday (the 12th). Today, it’s snowing, spitting, not quite sure it’s ready to give up the ghost of winter. A winter, which I might add, is one reminiscent of the ones that I remember when I was a child- snowy, cold and long.

The snowplow knocked the entire western part of our fence down, careening mounds of snow from Morse Road into the adjacent pasture. Kyle spent two hours digging and burying new corner posts, just one small step toward fixing the fence that keeps the animals from jaunting down to Route 14. Which is what the calves (I call them the three mooskateers) learned to do, ditching over the downed fence, and running head-long toward the busy road. The ground was frozen when they first learned this game, so they’ve spent the last three weeks tied up in the barn. More work for us, mucking out stanchions, and less sunlight for them. Yesterday, the ground was finally soft enough that I was able to put up portable fencing to make a temporary paddock (I don’t want them out on the fragile pasture just yet), and out they went this morning.

For those of you who’ve never seen a cow cavort, it’s highly unnatural. Cows don’t tend to run for fun; they run if they feel threatened. So they don’t kick up their heels naturally, like a colt or a lamb would, and they don’t know what to do with their tails. Whoever decided that a cow can’t express joy has never seen one who’s been let outside after three weeks of confinement. They bark low grunts and blow foam from their mouths and bend their backs while trying to keep their feet under them (but they can’t resist the urge to splay them this way or that). They hold their tails high up over their backs, wagging them madly back and forth, like some victory flag. The mooskateers play Daytona 500 around the round bale of hay, not interested in eating just yet.

I fully intend to see them blow through the temporary fencing, because the calves have not yet been trained to electric fence, and the moms, well, they’re too blissed out to care.

Most of the lambs went to the Easter market last Sunday. The barn is slowly returning to normal, without 35 lambs running up and down the aisles and the 300 pound barn-bound calves no longer knocking over buckets and shovels and pulling halters off the walls. By this time last year, we had crops in the ground: lettuce, spring onions, spinach, chard and kale. The animals were out on pasture. In 2009, I remember Shannon and Tyler house sat for us while we were in Maine, and the temperatures soared to the 80s. Good thing I’m not trying to grow stuff for market this year!

Instead, I’m spending my time foraging in the woods for fiddleheads and wild leeks. May flowers are out (round-lobed hepatica), and the trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit are peeking up through last year’s leaves. Make no doubt about it: mud season is still in full swing. But spring is trying, and when it finally gets here, I’ll probably kick up my heels and dance like a cow in the sunlight.

mud season

pot hole

wild leeks

Switch Hit

2011-03-23T08:06:00.001-04:00

I teach Animal Behavior at Vermont Technical College. I have to admit it’s been challenging. Not only have I been out of the formal teaching scene for 9 years, but I feel like my teaching style is still back where it used to be: hands-on, visual, non-Power-Point or Blackboard oriented. For those of you oldies, like me, Power-Point dominates the teaching style. It’s computer-based, and a virtual slideshow with hyperlinks and imbedded images. You slap your pen drive into the main network with your class material, and voila, it magically appears on the screen, and the whole class is mesmerized by a slideshow. BORING.

Blackboard, or Moodle are online campus communication systems that allow the students to track their grades and assignments online. People don’t go to the library to read reserved material anymore; it’s on Blackboard that they just magically log into on their PC or tablet or iPhone.

Every part of the syllabus and class is virtually uploadable, so they can see if they’re failing or passing. Of course the input provided by the professor needs to be accurate: it wasn’t until week 9 that I realized I was loading quiz scores as assignments. When I made the switch, the grades changed dramatically. Whoops, sorry students…

One time I went to class and realized that I had attached the wrong lecture on the Blackboard, so they hadn’t studied for the correct material (major grade curve).

Another time I tried to explain the difference between positive reinforcement and negative punishment. Several students had the courage to point out the fact that I had completely reversed them. As a result, we have dropped this subject line completely until I have the gumption to try and explain it again…

Teaching is like farming, in the fact that there is a lot of switch-hitting going on. The difference is that in farming, when your plan falls through the floor, most of the animals and plants don’t know that you just bluffed your way through the day. When fifteen pairs of 20- or 30- something year-old eyes look at you and say: Really?- there’s not much you can get away with (if the corn doesn’t get weeded when you say you’re going to weed it, it’s usually a little more understanding).

Eleven year -olds don’t expect switch hits. In fact, my eleven year-old detests them. He would much rather have a routine than my potpourri of surprises. But I am about to embark upon the greatest switch hit I’ve made since graduating at the University of Vermont with a B.S. in Wildlife Biology. Back then, I noticed a job notice advertising for a volunteer seabird biologist on a remote Hawaiian Island; room board, airfare paid for, student loans deferred.

I lived on Tern Island in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands for almost four years, first as a volunteer, and then as the refuge manager. Five hundred miles northwest of Kauai, on a remnant volcano, surrounded by aqua-blue water and seabirds, seals and turtles, I had an experience that changed my life- for the better. If I had stayed in Vermont and assumed my job as interior decorator in the local store in Middlebury, I think that my life would be vastly different- and boring.

My eleven year-old is wired in. DSL, PSP, Wii, Dish, I can’t even keep up with it all. He doesn’t have any of those things, but I hear about them every day, and how boring his life is without them.

Still- he is ecstatic when the moon is so full and bright that it fills the entire backdoor window. He coos at the sight of the first gray squirrel we’ve ever had on the farm when he catches it gathering nesting material (there’s another squirrel in the area, apparently). His love of birds is growing, and he now has a flock of laying hens that is so productive that we supply a major grocery store in Norwich.

And so, it’s time for me to change it out. I’m taking the summer off from retail farming. Yep, it’s true. No pigs, no meat birds, no 2 acres of vegetables in production. Fallow fields with cover crops and green manures, fallow hoop houses, fewer sheep, and fewer bales of hay. I’m going to construct a Facebook event to barter the cows to a new farmer, with the stipulation that I get something back in the end. No turkeys, no Guineas, geese or ducks. No farmer’s markets. I’ll still have enough for us and for our small CSA, but, nope, nope and nope, I’m spending the summer with my son.

I feel as though I have an opportunity to do something with him for one last time as he changes from eleven to tweenager, and what I’d like to do is hike the Long Trail in Vermont.

Is this crazy? Some people think so. The majority of people I tell look at me, worriedly, like I’m giving up. But I’m not.

I have four freezers full of meat. I have shelves lined with canned vegetables, fruits, juice and jellies. I am farming, but I am concentrating instead on soil-building and conservation.

Is there the chance that I’ll lose my customer base? Yes, but I got it once, and I am confident that I’ll get it again. What I’m not at all sure of is that I’ll have a working relationship with my son for the next five years unless I take the effort to interact with him now.

I’m still a certified organic farm inspector for North Eastern Organic Farming Association, still a vet-tech at VT-Can! in Middlesex, and still a farmer. Just a different kind of one for the summer.

Today the hiking boots that I bid on through eBay arrived. Tomorrow, a high-tech flashlight will come in the mail. I have the tent and the sleeping bags. Now, just to convince the boy…

Who Falls In Love With A Cow?

2011-03-18T09:50:00.000-04:00

Kyle has forgotten that it’s the end of daylight savings time, so he can’t ride the Dartmouth Coach to Logan airport in Boston to catch his plane to New Orleans. He’s headed there for a week-long conference through the National Park Service- the first continuing ed program he’s attended in about 15 years. So I’m driving him there, but right now, it’s 3 am regular (well used-to-be) time, and we’re doing the chores while Bradford sleeps inside the farmhouse.

Kyle comes racing in from the horse barn to the main barn, where I am mucking out the cow stanchions and grabs a flashlight. “Jennifer, come!” he yell-whispers, then puts his finger to his lips, shushing my inevitable “why?”

We sneak out to the horse barn, where the door is open, but the lights are not on. There is an owl, a Barred Owl, sitting on top of the manure heap just a few feet away from us, looking down at the remains of my pet cow, Tildy Anne. We have composted her here, and now, this raptor is taking advantage of her remains. Here, too, congregate crows, starlings and red-tailed hawks in the daytime, and at night, foxes, mice and voles. It’s the little vermin that the owl is most likely trying to hunt in this snowy winter, where all of the animals that are dependent upon ground-dwelling rodents are desperate for a food source that is safely protected under the thick blanket of snow.

Who falls in love with a cow?

There’s no shame in fawning over the family dog, cute stuffed toy in mouth, or in swooning over the antics of the fuzzy, energetic cat as it pounces on the toilet paper roll.

But who falls in love with a cow?

My husband used to fight wild fires. He’d be flown out west, far from our eastern bubble in Vermont, and do “mop up,” not the spectacular sky jumping, but one of the crew that would come in after the blaze and make sure that it was really put out. On one of these excursions, I was left in our newly rented trailer in Vermont. It had taken me nine years to figure out a way back to my birth state and we had finally succeeded when Kyle was hired as the Ecologist for the new national park- the first in Vermont- at Marsh Billings Rockefeller in Woodstock. We found a trailer to live in with our menagerie of chickens, ducks, geese, goats, a horse and three sheep, a dog and four cats. When Kyle left to fight a fire out west, I felt as though I had not a clue what to do with myself. It was 1998 and February, a notoriously brutal month in Vermont, and I was sick of watching Bill Clinton try and lamely defend himself to the nation with his explanation of what sex was.

I had recently quit my job as refuge biologist for the Department of Interior on Monomoy Island , Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My days in Vermont were spent walking miles around the hillsides and back roads in search of a farm for us to purchase. On one foray, I stopped at a dairy farm and asked if the farmer would sell me milk. At first, he was wary, being in his 70s, and having grown used to our litigious society- his generation was built upon bartering and community- he wondered why I was asking. He finally agreed to sell me milk after I explained what Kyle and I wanted to do- to start farming in Vermont. He had three cows- Guernseys, from which he sold milk to neighbors directly from his farm. This was all done underground, because it had become illegal to sell milk in Vermont unless it was bottled and pasteurized in an inspected facility. So, for $3 a gallon, I could walk a mile to the farm and get organic, raw milk.

Back then, I didn’t have an iPod, so I listened as I walked, to the river, cracking its ice during the spring thaw, to the return of the first red-winged blackbirds, to the whish, whish of cars driving back and forth on Route 14 in the rural valleys of central-eastern Vermont.

Kyle would be gone for a little over two week intervals on the fires, but it seemed like much longer, especially in the winter months, when I am at the bottom of my game, because, well, even though I’m a Vermonter, I hate winter and I hate the cold. The walk to the farm was blissful to me.

When Kyle had been away for 9 days, I walked to get milk, and Bob, the farmer, asked me if I’d like a calf. He would breed his dairy cows to beef bulls (by way of artificial insemination) because he thought that they would become pregnant more easily by diversifying the genetics. The calf was a Guernsey-Hereford heifer- a female- and he had no use for her, because being half beef, she wouldn’t be a great milker, and being a dairy farmer, he wasn’t interested in raising beef. Besides that, Vermont farmers tend to frown on raising their heifers for slaughter, because it’s a perfectly good waste of an animal that is slow to mature and then replaces itself at the most only once a year (the boys, on the other hand, are usually expendable).

So I waited for Kyle to call me (this was before cell phones were bought and sold as easily as baseball cards used to be), and I asked him what I should do- I knew nothing about cattle. In true to form style, he said, “Do what you want to do.”

Having lived with each other for almost two decades now, he realizes the weight of these words, and after llamas, rabbits, white-tailed deer fawns and baby woodchucks, I don’t hear them as often.

I stuffed the heifer in the back of my Toyota Tercel, her eyes as wide as mine, and we unloaded at the trailer. I had made a make-shift shelter for her in a shed stuffed to the gills with the owner’s prized possessions that were too valuable to chuck—broken window panes, spent lawn mowers, rusting sap buckets and bent nails. She was 6 days old. I bottle fed her and walked her outside, and by the time Kyle got home, she was halter trained. I named her Fern, but our 90 year-old friend told me that that was no name for a cow- that her name should be Matildy Anne. And so she was.

Tildy was the lead cow of our herd. She’d tell me when the fence was down (by bellowing, but not getting out, even when the rest of the herd was in the garden), she’d be the first to lead everyone back into the barn in November, when the grass had gone, and the days would be spent eating hay in the paddock outside, but the nights would be spent tied in stanchions in the barn. She’d always have her babies on the wrong side of the electric fence, so we’d have to fish them out of the woods or the brook, and she’d be the peace keeper when new cows would join the herd.

Her biggest fault was an insatiable appetite for grain. She could figure out six ways to Sunday how to get to the grain in the barrel inside the barn, and on more than one occasion we had to chain her up and send dark beer down her gullet to kick start her bacteria in her stomach. Not this time.

This time, she knocked in the plywood wall and weaseled her way through the fenced gate to find the barrel. By the time I got to the barn, there was more than 60 pounds of it missing. When I found her, she was down, outside, and freezing cold temperatures were about to arrive after a bout of rain and snow. I could leave her outside or bring her in to treat her inside, running the risk that she would die, and then there would be a 900-pound body to deal with.

If it had been any other cow, not my pet cow, the practical thing would have been to keep her outside, but I couldn’t do it. So after crying on her pelt and pleading with her to get up, she did, and we made it to the barn. After two days of vetting, she crashed, and Kyle and I decided that she had had enough.

The life and death constant of farming is so overwhelming sometimes, especially when it’s winter, when there is no birdsong or no warm bath of sunlight to keep your spirits up. Winter especially brings death: the sickest, the oldest, the inexperienced all succumb.

If I called the vet to kill my cow, he would inject her with a substance that would be lethal to anything that would eat her later, and, although I frequently wish ill-will on coyotes, foxes and skunks, not all of them learn to eat my animals. And what about the red-tailed hawk, which has spent the winter here, perched in the dead cherry tree? Or the bald eagle that came to eat a lamb who never took a first breath? What about the barn cat that feeds on the carcasses of dead animals, or the birds and field mice that pick the bones clean? There was no point in even trying to dig a hole in the frozen ground beneath the three feet of snow, so the only option was to kill her myself by shooting her and to compost her.

Suffice it to say that I consider myself a pretty strong, practical type, when it comes to raising and eating animals and plants. But I have yet to be able to eat anything beef after Kyle and I killed Tildy Anne. Every time I look at beef, I see Tildy Anne, my first cow, whom I knew nothing about, and who taught me that farming isn’t just something I do, it’s something I have to do.

Today the cats and I lounged on the deck that overlooks the snow-covered fields, in the heat of a 50 degree spring day. The three new calves, Martin, Nestor and Fur Ball, are racing around in the paddock with their tails held high up over their backs. Their mothers are chewing their cuds and watching them play. Cider is Tildy’s three-year-old calf, and she is Fur Ball’s mother. She’s no lead cow. It looks as though Ginger, the petite Jersey-Ayshire cross may take over, her head always held high, sniffing the wind for signs. It may be an interesting summer, spent chasing calves and cows back inside fences. Hopefully, Tildy is watching somewhere and will give me a sign when the herd gets into the sweet corn.

Borsch, Borshch, Borscht- Beet Soup

2010-11-08T14:48:00.000-05:00

I made beet soup today, the kind that is often made throughout Russia and Poland. I looked at four different recipes and combined them to make up my own concoction.
Of course, all of the recipes call for beets. Some of them shred the beets, some boil, some hold off adding them until the very end to get the brightest color in the soup.
Another decision is whether to serve the soup hot or cold. I suppose it w

ould be better to puree the soup were you to serve it cold, but I took the more peasant-like approach and match-sticked the vegetables and served it warm. I also added meat, like some of the recipes call for, and sipping cold meat stew is not my favorite.
For the most part, the ingredients were from the farm. I went to the local co-op for crimini mushrooms and a leek. We didn’t plant leeks this year, because I had planned to plant the pencil-thin ones that I had stored in the root cellar over winter. Of course, farming got in the way, and the leeks rotted before I had a chance to plant them in the ground. So when I found that the co-op was out of leeks, I just went to the source, to Luna Bleu Farm, right down the road and dug two out of the ground.
Kyle brushed hogged the gardens today, getting ready for the first official “wintery mix” forecast of 2010. Bradford got three new chickens- black cochin bantams, and I helped the local trapper scope out the best place to set traps to capture the marauding coyotes that have taken a liking to our sheep. They’ve killed two and injured two.
First, it killed a lamb, and Drew and I set about scouting the area every day twice a day. Nothing for a week, and then, at three in the morning, I heard the frenzied calls that they utter after making a kill, when they call in the subordinate members of the pack for dinner.
That morning, the neighbor called and said that another sheep had been killed, bringing the total to two. One of the parents that she babysits for had seen it dead in the field as he drove to her house to drop off his child.
At the same time, Bradford came up from the barn and told us that there was a sheep in the chicken house. I struggled to figure out how this could be possible, since the flock was about a quarter of a mile away from the barn. Where was the rest of the flock?
Sure enough, when I went to check, there was a black yearling lamb in the barn, all by herself. She was limping a bit, and looked frantic. So I set out for the field where the rest of the flock was supposed to be. I carried the .22 rifle with me, but I didn’t really expect to get a shot at the coyote.
In the field, the sheep were scattered, and there was the body of number 46 green. It was the mother of the lamb in the barn. All the other sheep in the field side-stepped the gruesome, half eaten carcass, and were looking at me, I think reproachfully.
I gathered the horse up (who stays in the field to protect them, but has become quite deaf and a little blind in one eye), and led them back to the home pasture. One of the yearling lambs was badly injured, and the entire flock was so subdued, that when Kyle opened the gate, they willingly walked in without protest. The injured lamb stayed behind, dripping blood from her hind leg.
It’s a lamb that has become tame for no apparent reason. She has three freckles under each eye, and when I go out into the fields, she approaches me. She’s not a bottle lamb (one that I have raised by feeding it myself from a bottle), or one that an apprentice has taken a shining to and has been cuddled - just a ewe lamb that decided to be friendly. Good thing, because, had she been wild, I don’t think I could have helped her.
Instead, we gathered her up and brought her in the barn. I laid her on her side, and saw how badly she had been injured. A major artery was spewing blood so fast that it was not even pulsing - just a steady beet-red stream of blood.
While I fetched packing and tape to try and stop the blood, the ewe lay still, not flinching. I used old pillow cases that we use to store root vegetables in and duct tape to make a rough tourniquet. Then I gave her a dose of antibiotics that I have for emergencies and put her in with the llama.
When the trapper came, he looked at where the kills had occurred, and he chose two sites to set bait. He looked like an artist, a skilled painter of a canvas set for a battle scene. He set the traps and told me when to come and check them.
And I will, tomorrow, after this warm night of beet soup and pirozhki.

1 lb ground lamb
4 quarts chicken broth
1 ½ pound beets, cooked (boil until skins slip, then dice finely)
2 cups sauerkraut
1 ½ cups carrots, cut into matchsticks
1 parsnip (about 1 cup) cut into matchsticks
1 cup chopped celery, including leaves
1 cup coarsely chopped leek
1 cup onion, diced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 cup cubed potatoes
1 cup canned, stewed tomatoes
1 cup chopped crimini mushrooms
2 tablespoons red wine or cider vinegar
2 bay leaves
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
4 whole allspice berries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon dill
sour cream

Bring the broth and meat to boil, then skim and set to simmer for 20 minutes. Add all of the vegetables except the tomatoes and mushrooms and simmer for another 25 minutes. Add the tomatoes, mushrooms, vinegar, bay leaves, salt, pepper, and allspice. Cook another 15 minutes. Check the seasoning, and add lemon juice if needed. Garnish with dill and sour cream in the bowls.

-Adapted from the following cookbooks: Bon Appetit Country Cooking (Viking Press 1978), Local Flavors, Deborah Madison (Broadway Books 2002), Great Dishes of the World, Robert Carrier (Random House 1964), The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook (Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2007).

August and Everything After

2010-08-02T20:58:00.004-04:00

One of my most annoying traits is to tell everyone how many now- famous bands I’ve seen before they were famous.

U2 played at the tiny, SUNY, Delhi school in the Catskills, where I attended Veterinary Technology training in 1981, just after they came out with Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Bono jumped off twelve foot high speakers, and I touched The Edge’s hand. The gym held about 400 screaming people.

I saw Ani DiFranco diss obnoxious fans into submission at the Newport Folk Festival, Tracy Chapman launch her comeback at Smith College, Quiet Riot play in Northampton after the lead singer bought a futon from my sister and gave us free tickets to the show, and the Counting Crows the day before they went on Letterman.

The Avett Brothers played the Chandler and brought the crowd to its feet for three hours, much to the chagrin of some of the older chaperones. I saw Steve Earle silence a moody crowd in Burlington as he tried to pay tribute to Towns Van Zandt, when all they wanted was for him to sing songs about his Appalachian upbringing.

Music has always been important to me. It’s one of those wonders that I actually admire humans for. Watching the Random Canyon Growlers play in their hometown at the Chandler, with such pride and skill, thrilled me.

Yet music has nothing to do with farming. Right?

In August, everything becomes a routine. We’ve weeded for days on end, harvested almost everything at least once that we will grow throughout the season; sold, canned, frozen and butchered most of what the farm has to offer. So in August, the challenge is to keep it still in the present, still interesting.

I pull out new techniques as though I’m a parent trying to amuse a child on a camping trip on day five of rain.

Like music, I try to make it familiar and personal, to strike a chord with this farming experience, so whoever is here contributing sweat equity and brilliance to the farm feels as though there’s some reward for the contribution that they’re making- a melody.

In August, coming up with new things to teach the apprentices is tough, especially if they’ve been here for five months. So off we go to Geo’s farm to learn how he farms weed-free, or to Ray’s to butcher chickens, or to Kermit’s to cut and wrap a beef. We pick blackberries and blueberries and weed and weed and weed. We plant the crops that will mature in the fall, and we soak in the waning hours of sunlight, and in the chorus of the crickets and the cicadas: the signs of late summer and the need to fill our pantries chock-o-block full of provisions for the bare season to come: a symphony for sure, in full crescendo.

Cucumber Salsa

This recipe is decidedly vague because you need to insert your own amount of ingredients. I suggest tasting it after the inclusion of every ingredient, and adding more of something if you feel it’s not right. The proportions given here are about right.
1 part cukes
1 part green peppers
2 parts onions
1 or 2 hot peppers, depending upon your amount of substance P (i.e, how much heat you can take)
salt, pepper
1 part vinegar
a little olive oil
½ part chopped cilantro or lovage
3 cloves garlic to every cup of salsa
1 bunch of basil (about ½ cup)
Mix everything together and chill for about 30 minutes before eating with chips, as a side to white fish, or a black bean burrito.

Farming Firsts

2010-07-26T17:41:00.003-04:00

When you first start farming, it’s not only physically exhausting, it’s mentally exhausting. I think this may be because in our mind’s eye, we tend to think of farming as the cattle rancher, lazily gazing over rolling hills at his cattle atop a trusted mount, or as the vegetable grower, gathering handfuls of brilliantly colored carrots and beets, freshly plucked from the fertile soil. Or maybe we think of the shepherdess, tending the flock and watching the lambs gamboling across the lush pasture that is rich with clover and timothy. They’re rewarding visions, bountiful ones. No one ever paints pictures of the calves stranded in the woods that need to be gathered back into the herd (it’ll take hours, and by the time you’re done, the cows are in the wrong grazing area). The long, straight rows of vegetables don’t tell the tale of countless, back-breaking, mind-numbing hours of seeding, then thinning and watering and weeding before the glorious harvest can begin. And the threat of fly-strike, where maggots attack the sheep to eat them alive, or coyotes lurk to shed the blood of the prized ewe aren’t really part of the happy farming bubble floating magically above our heads when we decide to begin to farm. No one can ever prepare us for how hard, tedious, boring, frustrating and maddening it can be. The urge to just fall to pieces and just cash it in for a good desk job are sometimes hard to resist.
One of my favorite summarizations of solutions to the pitfalls that farming can conjure up came from a review written by a “Wal-Mart Associate” in response to the book, Harvest: a Year in the Life of an Organic Farm, by Nicola Smith and Geoff Hansen (2003). He said that the book was depressing and full of death and by god, if he had something killing his chickens, he’d’ve done something about it.
Darnit, why didn’t I think of that? I could have just killed that mysterious thing doing in my hens, and then my cartons would be brimming full with eggs.
I guess if you’re one who chooses to dwell in your disasters rather than count your blessings, it may not be a venue you’d thrive in. I’m also pretty sure that getting rich is not the defacto option for this particular career choice.
But if it’s looking back over years of learning by following the advice of others in the community, by reading farming books, and by making mistakes that fulfills you, then farming is your baby.
The first piece of ground we plowed up to plant to vegetables looked white as snow. Not because it was winter, but because the former tenants had buried their plastic in the ground rather than dispose of it properly. It took us until this year not to plow up pieces of the plastic, or tires or cast-off shoes. Now, the garden, nicknamed the sunflower garden, is being transformed to our perennial beds, where Kyle’s strawberries, asparagus, black currants, horseradish, cranberries, cherries and random Ohio buckeye trees reside.
When I first strung electric fence for our sheep to graze, the pasture was tall with Canadian thistle, burdock, asters and goldenrod. These plants make good bee food, but aren’t much for sheep to eat. Constantly shifting them from one paddock to another all season long so that they grazed and fertilized has eventually transformed the soil into nitrogen-rich pasture that is now heavy with clover and timothy and other forbes. The lambs are strong and their meat is sweet and full of flavor from grazing and from staying with their mothers until they’re slaughtered.
Still, each year, there are pitfalls that I never imagined I’d encounter. Take the corn, for example. We usually don’t direct seed it because the crows eat it all up as soon as we stick the seed in the ground. But without a greenhouse this year, we were forced to plant it. And up it came. On Tuesday, I looked over 8 foot high stalks, laden with ears that are just coming ripe. On Wednesday, what I can only imagine was a tornado (but is referred to as a micro-bore or micro sheer, or some such other insurance lingo) flattened half the corn. Bam, just like that. I was so relieved that the guinea hens and turkeys hadn’t drowned in the 2.9 inches of rain in 58 minutes, that I hadn’t even thought to check the corn. After the storm, sitting on the new deck, the destruction couldn’t be hidden. But what’s even more amazing is that 5 days later, it has almost succeeded in standing itself up, BY ITSELF.
And then there’s this talk of a basil blight that has wiped out neighbor’s crops. Our basil is so strong and lush, that I find it hard to believe that it may succumb, like the tomatoes did last year. The tomatoes this year have been growing up and up and up, setting flowers, but not much fruit. One theory is that they aborted the fruit because of the intense heat we’ve been having. It certainly wasn’t because of too much nitrogen- our soil tests always come back as suggesting to put more nitrogen in the gardens.
I’ve been pickling like a mad woman, beets, beans and cukes. Everything is early. Never a dull moment, this farming thing. And if I think I can predict what’s around the next bend? Well that’s just plain foolish.

Sopa de Flor de Calabaza

2010-07-09T15:34:00.001-04:00

I started a blog entry about a month ago, and it’s disappeared into cyberspace. It was about farming and its vagaries and unpredictability. I guess I’m just not used to Windows 7, which is much easier to maneuver around in than Vista, but still, there’s a learning curve, and the entry is gone. That’ll teach me to go more than a month without posting…
We are diligently scouting the gorgeous tomatoes that are now producing a cherry tom here and there, but are loaded with lush, green foliage and scores of blossoms. Thank goodness for heat and humidity and no rain. On the other hand, I feel like a Georgia field hand sometimes. My friend in Alabama is reporting weather conditions that are mirroring our own, only he’s used to them, and we’re not.
We have the abundance of August already- onions, chard, spinach, bok choi, head lettuce, peppers, artichokes, summer squash, beans. Then, there’s the late spring hold outs that are still chugging along. Asparagus and rhubarb are still around, although we’re not picking the asparagus anymore. The peas have succumbed to the heat, as have the radishes and cilantro. The basil is crazy and smells of summer.
Every year I take advantage of the squash blossoms. They’re so delicate and delicious, like morel mushrooms are. I fry them and stuff them with goat cheese and use them as garnish on refried beans. The best thing to do with them, though, is to make a soup. I have adapted this recipe from my favorite Mexican cookbook by Diana Kennedy (The Art of Mexican Cooking ,2008). It takes a ton of blossoms, so unless you have a farmer who’s willing to let you pick your own straight from the field, it’s a costly soup. But a treat worth trying, at least once a summer. Use the male flowers, not the females, that way, you won’t waste the fruits.

2 tbs butter
4 tbs finely chopped spring onions, greens and bulb
3 cloves fresh garlic, preferably hardneck
2 pounds fresh male squash, gourd or pumpkin blossoms
5 cups chicken broth (can substitute veggie, but it won’t taste as rich)
1 cup corn kernels
1 cup summer, zucchini or patty pan squash, diced
1 tsp epazote
1 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper, to taste
Basil, shredded for garnish
Chile peppers, diced, for garnish

Fry the onion and garlic in the butter without browning (about 3 minutes). Stir the flowers into the pan, then cover and cook over low heat for the next 5 minutes. Uncover the pan, and cook until the flowers are tender and the juice has evaporated- this may take time, depending on how fresh the flowers are (like 10 minutes).
Put all but ¼ cup of the flowers in a food processor and blend with 2/3 cup of the broth until smooth. Put this mixture in a saucepan, then add the rest of the flowers , broth and vegetables and cook until tender. Add the epazote, salt and pepper and cook for 5 minutes more. Remove from the heat, stir in the cream and garnish with the shredded basil and chile cubes. Let the soup cool slightly before serving.

Snowflakes

2010-06-02T02:42:00.004-04:00

April is our month to vacation, it seems. The lambs have been born, and the crops are not massively out of control. There’s still the greenhouses to water, the animals to care for, and the threat of cold nights that require the woodstove to keep burning, but it’s not May and June planting chaos, or July haying, or August harvest. So for the third year in a row, it’s off the farm for four days to stay on the beach.

This year, we had the great fortune to stay in a little cabin on the Cape owned by a friend of Kyle’s named Dave. They used to work together, back when Kyle was the biologist for the Cape Cod National Seashore; Dave’s in charge of everything that has to do with fire in the Park. He also coordinates the forest fire fighters for the Northeast.

Anyway, Sarit agreed to take care of the farm, solo, after being here for only a month, and saying things like “how do you tell the difference between a rooster and a hen,” and “isn’t it a little cruel to roast the lambs whole on a spit, I mean, don’t they feel it?”

Needless to say, she’s like a sponge, learning everything from the difference in comb size between hens and roosters to the fact that the animals are actually dead before they’re skewered and roasted on the fire. She’s already soloed at the farmer’s market, watched her bottle lamb be sold for meat and battled the quack grass in the hoophouse. She’s been stung by an orange-butted bumblebee and slogged through wet snow to harvest wild leeks. She’s a transplanting mad woman, and a mean winter squash bread maker. She’s even making friends with the cats, despite never ever having had a pet.

That everything is new to her and an adventure kind of came home to me on our vacation. It occurred to me, as Kyle, Bradford and I went on six mile hikes into the marsh, or 4 -mile walks along the Atlantic in search of whales, or 13- mile bike rides, that in the two and a half years that I lived on Cape Cod, I did nothing except drive to and from work. I hated the crowds, the cars, the tourists. So I’d go to the remote seabird colony off Chatham and do biology, and then it was back to the house in Wellfleet, in our unheated barn with no plumbing. I didn’t even know that just behind our house was a fabulous beach with gigantic cliffs and far-reaching sand dunes. I mean, when your job is walking miles of beach coast a day, who wants to spend your day off beachcombing?

This time, I watched the piping plovers dig their scrapes and court. I didn’t have to dig holes and post signs and string rope to keep the beachgoers out of their habitat. I didn’t have to find every pair and count their eggs and keep track of their chicks. I just watched them in the warm April sunlight, while Bradford and Kyle looked for rare birds and whales, and threw the Frisbee on the beach.

Back home, a record-breaking snowstorm greeted us. I saw the silver silhouette of a common snipe flying crazily into the snowflakes, and two hermit thrushes, burnt-red against the snow-white branches in the forest. We’ve postponed planting the onions until the weekend, when it’s forecasted to be in the 80s.

Sarit says that when she looks at snowflakes she believes that there is indeed a god. I know what she means. I look at Billy, the peacock, with his ridiculous show of feathers and can’t wrap my mind around the thought that this just happened randomly or for the sake of evolution- I mean why does it have to be so incredibly complex, when a simpler thing could just as easily perpetuate itself into the future? If evolution was the only answer, shouldn’t we all be amoebas?

Anyway, the vacation, and Sarit’s enthusiasm are good reminders for me to keep the joy in the job and not forget about the adventure and the wonder of every day, like a snowstorm in April, or a deserted beach where hundreds of people will gather soon.

Finding Truths- the Beautiful and the Cruel

2010-04-13T21:43:00.004-04:00

“This morning I went next door to talk with the neighbor's yard man, Ben. Ben is a good man, a bit weak when it comes to beer; but a kind man that smiles more than anything. In the past, he would do odd jobs for my parents when he wasn't working for our neighbors. I asked him if he would be interested in driving out to our family land to take a tiller (b/c the tiller wouldn't fit in any vehicle we own) tomorrow morning early. I would pay him for his time and gas. Then Mr. C., our neighbor, came around from his garage and became the old angry white man. I was appalled at how he talked about Ben and to him. He said that he didn't think that Ben would be done with his work there at his place. I said well, what ever makes sense but if Ben wanted to drive out he could be back relatively early to finish his committed job there. I left to go back to our house and while I was picking up some lettuce I had planted in some raised beds, I over heard Mr. C. verbally abusing Ben. He said that "He" told Ben what to do and not the other way around. It was awful - I wanted to walk back down there and knock the shit out of the old man. But what made me the saddest was that Ben just took it...saying "Yes, Sir, Yes, Sir" Damn it. Even writing it right now makes me sick.’

Ah, the varying characteristics of southern culture that highlight the underpinnings of coming home.”

Today was my birthday. Kyle and Bradford wrapped special gifts for me; my parents called and nearly gave me a coronary ( I had forgotten that it was my birthday, and the only other people that call that early are the staff at the post office, telling me that chicks have arrived for my pick-up, and I didn’t remember ordering any chicks). I logged on and found 40 Facebook messages wishing me a happy day- so special, and thank you everyone for thinking of me. Mostly, I had a great time today, planting with Sarit in the greenhouse that our neighbors have loaned us space in to start our field plants.

I cooked fish and chips tonight, much to Sarit’s horror, not because she doesn’t love fish and chips, but because it was foreign to her that, besides reading cookbooks when I’m not working, my ideal birthday is to cook dinner for loved ones.

I am a little worried about how cold it is right now, and about our tender seedlings and the lambs outside, but I think all will be fine.

Bradford passed hunter safety, so he’s ready for turkey youth day in two weeks. He claims he’s going to get me two turkeys and a deer.

The opening quote is from a dear friend, one of our first “apprentices” on the farm. He shows up occasionally with his sleeping bag, and in all weather, and usually insists upon sleeping outdoors.

Prejudices are hard, especially when they’re home-based. I feel like it’s important to stick up for our more liberal ideas, though, even if they’re not popular, even while they’re not the status quo. I’m happy for my friend for realizing that he’s different, and ugly truth or not, this is where his home is, and he, I’m sure, will make a difference in the end.

The truth is, before this recession, people by and large thought that I was crazy for taking up farming. They reasoned that it was something that their parents had done out of necessity, to feed themselves, to keep them out of poverty. My colleagues considered it a waste of time that I had completed my Master’s degree in Biology, when, in the end, I turned to farming.

The reality is that we have not felt the recession on the farm. We are still growing food, still teaching people how to fend for themselves, still able to keep what we have and build upon it. True, we’re not rich. Our idea of vacation is four days on Cape Cod, not three weeks in the Bahamas. I’m not saying that three weeks in the Bahamas would be a bad thing- just not anything we’ve ever considered feasible. What I am saying is that it’s still perfectly possible for us to go together to Cape Cod, when for many, this is, and may never have been, an option.

I watched the Master’s golf tournament the other day. Not because I’m into golf, but because I’m into history. I wanted to see if it really meant nothing to Tiger Woods, to shatter his whole life and the lives of people around him. Could he really pull it off? He didn’t. He couldn’t. Kharma is pretty powerful that way.

So to my friend in the South, who is appalled by the behavior of his neighbors, but willing to fight for what he thinks is right, I thank him for this birthday missive. I’m 47, so it’s no longer a given to conclude that I’m middle-aged. But he’s still capable of claiming this status of being angry with what is considered acceptable. I’m happy that he’s willing to stand out and say that prejudices are what they are, that prejudices are alive and well, and we will encounter them wherever we are, and we should not be fearful to speak out against them.

Tendril

2010-04-10T22:53:00.005-04:00

Definition: 1) Thin plant part attached to support: a modified stem, leaf, or other part of a climbing plant, usually in the form of a thread that coils around and attaches the plant to supporting objects; 2) delicate twist or coil: a thin, wispy, curling, winding piece of something, especially of hair.

“One of the most striking characteristics of each ‘depression period’ is the tacit acknowledgement of city dwellers that ‘the farm is the safest place to live;’ for though there is each year a migration from the country to the city and a counter movement to the suburbs and a less pronounced one to more agricultural environment, the movement becomes an exodus when business takes a slump and employees are thrown out of work” – M. G. Kains in Five Acres and Independence

Every year I plant seeds, slips and tubers in the soil. Every year I revel in the discovery that they grow into plants. They’re different every year, these plants. Sometimes it’s sweet potatoes or okra or artichokes or Egyptian walking onions. But each season, the seeds are planted, and the wonder and mystic that they will ultimately produce food gives way to the reality that they finally do.

The hoop houses are chockablock full of lettuce, radishes, peas, beans, arugula, mesclun mix and head lettuce, kale, mizuna and spinach. A veritable garden of Eden, twisting and coiling and erupting in the warm soil of this freakish April. The days ahead seem to be more fitting of the season though; people are tired of me saying that it always snows on my birthday as we go into a series of 30 degree nights.

In the fields, the kale that survived the winter is yielding bushel after bushel of beautiful foliage. The spinach and bunching onions are giving us early delights; a sign to indicate what will soon come, when the milder nights and warm days wake up the farm and send it headlong into planting madness and then harvesting chaos.

I picked two bushels of kale and some nettles today while Sarit and Anna weeded the Hoop House East. It was a cold, long day for us, but it ended with satisfaction, having prepared for the upcoming farmer’s market, as well as rounding up all of the sheep to sequester them inside the warm, dry barn for the next few days. The sheep and the new lambs can handle the cold when it’s sunny out, but cold and damp are miserable and even deadly, and that’s what’s apparently ahead ( it is April in Vermont, after all).

Most years, we don’t have apprentices until the end of May, which usually coincides with school ending. This year has been different, with some of the apprentices from last year returning to help lamb (Greg, Shannon and Tali), and then Sarit starting in the middle of March (she didn’t want to miss anything) and Anna in the end of March.

Sarit, especially has seen the farm come to life by helping to anchor bits and pieces of it together: she helped me sort out all of the receipts from 2009 to complete the taxes; she helped shovel out the sheep pen with its winter’s full of manure. She stacked the wood from the tree Kyle cut down over the winter, and helped him inspect the honey bee hives that have survived; all not glamorous jobs, but necessary ones that make a whole out of this endeavor.

Yesterday, she and Anna made winter squash bread from the frozen squash that Tali and Janet harvested and froze last fall. She couldn’t find the nutmeg. That’s because I don’t have ground nutmeg; I actually have the brown seeds and a miniature grater to grind the nutmeg fresh. “Shut up! That’s not nutmeg! Why didn’t I know this was nutmeg?” I ask her if she knows that cinnamon is actually bark from a tree. “Noooo way!” How about the fact that coriander is the seeds from the cilantro plant. “Stop it!”

Kyle plowed a big chunk of the Cloverfield North garden today; the soil is already dry enough to work- about 8 days earlier than last year and 12 days earlier than 2008. He taught me how to move a round bale with the tractor to the paddock to feed the sheep. We have a new tractor-driven rototiller, so we won’t spend so much time using the ground driven, hand operated one. Kyle picked up a day at the park in Woodstock where he works as the ecologist; Bradford needs braces, and we don’t like tons of debt. I actually am working more on the farm as the result of not working at the animal hospital anymore, so I am trying to learn how to do these mechanized jobs that aren’t as appealing to me but are crucial to the farm’s existence.

The root cellar is completed, and the garden shed Kyle built that sits on top of the root cellar’s cement roof is done except for the windows. It looks fantastic. Now for that shop remodeling…

In all, the farm is held together by a zillion little threads, linking the mundane and the magical together to create a sense of security that I’ve only felt when I’ve worked on the land. It’s empowering at the same time that it is intimidating and daunting. Unpredictable, surprising, twisting and changing. A mish-mash of tendrils, all working to support living on the farm.

Change is Bad

2010-03-25T15:18:00.003-04:00

This is one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes, from a movie he made back when he was America’s darling, before he cheated on Mia Farrow with her daughter. He used the phrase to argue that where he was, the role he was in, the rut he was in, was better, more comfortable, than leaping into something unknown, something scary and challenging.

I say this all the time, especially to the new apprentices, when they walk onto this farm and there is nothing familiar to them. It’s all new, all change, all stressful and weeding through personalities, both human and non-human animal alike, adjusting to routines, to house rules, to what the other humans living at the farm are used to.

Shannon came up for two weeks and helped lamb. She overlapped with Sarit, who is new, and she filled her in.

I told her about all of the rules, Shannon said. Sarit’s eyes were big. No shoes in the house, nothing but butts in the bench that Kyle built (don’t pile books, backpacks, sleeping cats, etc here), hang the clothes on the line with pins, don’t leave dishes in the sink, wipe up the floor in the shower, clean the cast iron cooking utensils without water when Kyle is around, with soap and water when Jenn is around, put the lids on the Tupperware, don’t leave the tools in the field.

Sarit told the rules to Anna, who arrived yesterday. She asked to arrange the food in the pantry. I told her that she could re-arrange the milkhouse. Really, I was thinking that I couldn’t handle the change, but honestly, the pantry is a mess.

These two haven’t had any farm experience, and yet, after just a few days, they’re planting the farm’s crops, feeding the animals, helping me do the taxes. They’re awesome.

Did the cows get fed three bales of hay? This is a rhetorical question that I am asking, because I can tell they have. Yes, they say. Well, I respond, they should only get two. Sarit gathers the hay up and feeds some to Michael the horse.

Do you hear the sound that the chicks are making right now? That means they’re out of food and water. Sarit, Anna and Bradford give the chicks food and water. The chicks are happy.

So I intend these questions to be teaching type questions, not intimidating or self-deprecating, but I know that Change is also Scary. It means that there’s this person, who is usually clad in the finest velour and other cast offs garnered from the local thrift store, who has an air of authority about her that is sometimes offsetting, that seems, but doesn’t really mean to, question personal ability.

In March, the changes of season are so subtle that I can track them. The first turkey vultures are back. The red-winged blackbirds and common grackles return. The day lilies are creeping out of the ground, and the garlic and wild leeks are growing. The robins are crazily flying and setting up territories, the potatoes in the root cellar are developing eyes (which will later turn into roots when they’ve been planted) and the garlic and onions that have been stored are sprouting. There are hens setting on eggs to hatch them out, and the peacock is displaying his glorious feathers. Change happens every single day in March and April and May.

It happens every month, every week, every day, incrementally more subtle, but change, just the same.

I no longer work for the Country Animal Hospital, after eleven years there. A shock and a serious source of panic for me at first. I honestly never thought that I would leave there. It was a comfortable place to work and I loved the people. I think that I was a little too vocal about recent changes, and the economy has affected this establishment, as it has many, so there was a need to consolidate. I have had an amazing outpouring of support from the community, and I thank everyone. I believe that things are as they should be, though. The animal hospital needs to stay in business, and I was the most expendable.

I just finished up the Joy of Keeping a Root Cellar, to be published by the same company as the Joy of Keeping Chickens. I’m also substitute teaching and working with a friend landscaping. And I have way more time to farm.

So change isn’t bad- it’s change. And here is spring, at our heels, turning these browned fields into green-gold, bringing bird song, rebirth and warm sun.

Happy Spring.

Gorilla Gardeners

2010-01-28T17:42:00.008-05:00

I wanna call Dad, he says to me in a high pitch, after I turn on the tiny solar light, in the corner, near the east window, right where it’s been for the past 20 years. He and Whitney are waiting at the front door until I turn it on. He’s not afraid, he’s full of wonder. He’s amazed, just what I wanted.

At first he protested when I said that I was yanking him from school and going Downeast to Maine, to visit my dear friends Donna, Gerri and Pete. This is the place that I learned how to dig my own well, to butcher a deer, to tan a hide, to can food, to cure garlic for seed, to smoke meat. It’s where I learned how to eat a partridge just killed by a car, how to crack a lobster with just your hands, how to say goodbye to a friend dying of melanoma cancer, just a year and nine months after meeting him. It was a place that was grounding.

Right now, my ten year-old, who just 18 hours ago was in tears at the thought of not having wi-fi for three days, is dragging out skins of cured skunks and Australian possums. Donna’s house is phantasmal. What’s this one, Mom? I think it’s a mink. For those of you who don’t know, Whitney was an apprentice here in 2008, and is probably my closest friend. She’s amazing in her own right, but that’s another blog…

Kyle likes to describe Donna as ornery. She’s done everything, seen everything, and she truly could do anything else. She’s buried a husband and her best friend, she knows how to shear sheep, rake blueberries, preserve any food you can think of, make the best homemade wine you could drink, tan any animal’s hide, make friends with Feds and foes, she’s truly an idol. Right now, she’s working on a collaboration with University of Maine Press to catalog all of the plants on Acadia National Park.

The first night we arrived there, Gerri and Donna had gone to dinner at Oscar’s, a local lobsterman and friend, where I later bought 21 pounds of lobster to freeze at $4 a pound. That they’re gone, and we’re alone in the house gives me just enough time to show Whit and Bradford around. I show them my favorite things: the hand-dug root cellar, right down to granite; the reading lamp made out of sheep’s legs, the sepia picture of Bradford Kausen, whom our son is named after, looking contentedly out onto the water. Whit and my Bradford are rewardingly awed and amazed. This house has been completely constructed by this woman, her husband and her friend’s hands. She is not dependant on anything more than community, friendship and loyalty.

Mom, I wanna come back here with Dad to clean up the Little House. It’s where I lived for nearly two years, helping Brad die, helping Donna, learn to live, with Pete and Gerri and a slew of others. My son gets it. The magic of this place, the necessity of self reliance and close community. What a tonic in this bleak, dormant season of resting.

The Down Time

2010-01-21T09:33:00.003-05:00

I joke about the fact that from December to March is supposed to be what we call the “down time”. Certainly, it’s not in May, with the frenzy of plowing and preparing and planting, consumed with getting fences up and animals on permanent pasture for the next six months. It’s not in August, when the crops are ready to harvest, and so much needs to be dried, canned, and frozen in order to savor summer’s bounty during the dormant months of winter.

I actually use an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, no bird song or bright light to tell me it’s time to rise and do the chores that never go away: cows, sheep, pigs and chickens all need to be fed, even in the winter.

We’re interviewing potential apprentices almost daily during this time. The state of the battered economy seems to have tipped in our favor somehow; just four years ago, there was only one applicant worthy of consideration. Last year and this, there are hordes of qualified people, looking to learn how to be self-sufficient. From entire families to newly graduated from high school, it’s a tonic to see how much enthusiasm there is out there for wanting to learn how to do it by oneself.

I was explaining just last night to Sarit, one of the people visiting to see whether Fat Rooster would be a good match for her to learn some farming skills, that it is a very unpredictable profession, this farming. I like to have a list of tasks everyday, neatly ordered, from most important to least. But invariably, the list will go out the window. Take this morning, for example.

My plan was to head to Central Supplies and buy sawdust for the chicken coop. A writer from Edible Green Mountains, a magazine about sustainable agricultural practices throughout the northeast (there is an Edible series for most regions in the US), is supposed to come and visit the farm and its chickens. I wanted to spruce up the place because honestly, the January thaw has just begun, and the accumulated manure in the coop of the past three months is a bit, well realistic. On Monday, though, it’s supposed to be in the 40’s, so I’ll get to shovel it out when it has thawed. Then, I have this book with a looming deadline, and I really need to sit down at the computer to finish that up.

At chores, I noticed, in horror, that one of the ewe lambs that I kept as a replacement ewe, has permanent nerve damage to her left shoulder. She got it caught in one of the grates in the barn, crossing to the pen where they spend the night. Her useless leg is dragging now, with no hope of repair. So I’ve called the butcher, and he’s on his way to slaughter her so her meat can be used and her skin can be tanned. At first, I thought it was Maple, the lamb who has been promised to Shannon, who apprenticed here last year. Even though I knew how impractical the thoughts were, when I thought that the lamb was Maple, I was devising methods of casting the leg in my head. It’s not her, and for that I am grateful.

After getting off the phone with the butcher, the phone rang again. A little voice asked, who’s this? It’s me, Mom, I say. What’s up? Visions of swine flu creep into my head. He hasn’t been vaccinated, because I think he already had the flu last year before it was a media staple, when I waited up with the bacons, and his temperature raged for four days, hovering at 106. Mom, he says, did you know that today was a half day at school? No, baby, I didn’t. There goes the trip to the farm store for shavings.

So I guess I’ll punt the day, and write this blog, and get the lamb butchered and work on the book. And play a game of cards with my son and make kale and sausage soup.

Soon, the chickadees and starlings will begin singing their songs of spring. The woodpeckers will drum out their secret knocks to keep potential rivals for females away. The sun will warm the sugar maples and the sap will run. For now, there’s skiing and sledding and snow. And chickens in the house, who can’t survive in the barn. Dad, Brad asks. When are the chickens going back in the barn? When we plant the onions, Dad replies. Interesting, I think. Since this year, we’ll be starting the onions from plants in April, not seeds in February.

Yeah, Right

2009-12-14T12:42:00.002-05:00

Yeah right, is my son’s new saying. He’s going to be ten years old in less than two months, and he knows that this is a big birthday celebration for most ten year-olds. I’m pretty much a stick in the mud when it comes to traditional celebrations like this, and I only acquiesce to a birthday celebration because he so loves parties, and I do too. He’s been lobbying the details for two weeks now, fully two months before the big event. He’s outlined plans, favors, games and the menu. So today, we sat down and talked about particulars.

Five kids

Whaat? Are you crazy? Only five?

Yep, five. Name them.

I tap my pencil, while he digests the words, gauging whether I’m serious or not. Finally, he starts. He analyzes his choices, and wonders if inviting one probably-no-show will jeopardize a most-likely-will show. He spits them out, one by one, girls last, because, well, it’s not cool to invite the girls anyway. We settle on eight in the end, because I always give in, and because they truthfully won’t all show anyway.

We talk about the games they’ll play, what the theme will be, the menu (he wants pie, not cake---it’s genetic on the maternal side), the time of day it will occur. It’s kind of fun to plan, because he has real ideas of how it should unfold, and I love party planning as much as he does.

The farm will be very much put to bed by January fourth, his birthday. The sheep will be coming in and out of their nightly pens, basking outside in Vitamin D for at least eight hours of the day. The cows will be in the barn in their stanchions, for the long haul, waiting until May to go out again. We’ll be down to just the laying hens, on their timed lights, providing them with 13 hours of daylight. It cons them into thinking that it’s summer. I use the same hours of light to keep from going into an abyss of depression: no light, cold, hunkered down in the house.

But there will be snow. And crazy ten year-olds, careening down the steep banks behind the house, aiming for the greenhouses on their out of control sleds.

No presents, I announce.

Are you really my mother? Dad, did she really have me?

No presents, Dad reiterates.

You’ll ask for donations to the food shelf instead.

Yeah, right, he says (but it sounds like Yeahhh, Riiiiiight). There’s maybe zero people in this town, and maybe three in the state that need food.

Ohh, ohh. This I can work with. This is something to work on.

He recently did a food shelf drive in school. I was so proud of him, because he came up from the pantry, two bags brimming with food. I picked through it and reduced it to one bag (I can proudly say that we have just recently been relegated to above poverty status and no longer qualify for food stamps).

Oh, he pined (after I had reduced the bags to one), now we’ll never win.

Never win what??? Apparently, the class that brought in the most food for the food shelf would win a pizza party. It had become completely foreign to him why they were gathering food. Then he told me how a classmate’s sister’s class was sure to win, because she (as a kindergartner) was sneaking food past the parents every morning to win the prize.

AHHHHHH!

So this year, after his birthday, on Monday, we’re going to the food shelf with his presents of food. I’m so proud of him that he didn’t pitch a fit, after explaining that, yes, there are hungry people, and yes, we have food, so we wouldn’t necessarily know that there are so many without. He takes it for granted that there should be food but why wouldn’t he? That’s what we do. We may not be rich in greenbacks, but we certainly are rich in greens.

Now if I can only make it through the Sponge Bob theme birthday….

Bacon and Vampires

2009-11-15T18:15:00.004-05:00

New Moon

Yep, it’s true. I can’t wait till the new vampire segment is out. I devoured all of the books, I bought into the fantasy. I love the story. But tonight, I am fascinated by what has been lost in our culture. - the art of making bacon. It has nothing to do with vampires, but everything to do with ecstasy. Who can say (of the meat eating variety) that he or she does not hold a special place in his or her heart for bacon?

It’s just pork, just flesh from the belly of the pig, but somehow, it’s transformed into a delicacy of indescribable sensation...bacon.

Do we know how bacon happens anymore? Is it easier for us to conjure up werewolves and vampires than bacon?

Because I hate what is put into the process of curing a modern day pork belly, I do it all at home now. The pig is killed here, cured here, and last night, thanks to my husband Kyle, the meat began the last process of being smoked here. He made a smoker out of an old fridge. We were lucky, because this was a fridge from the 1960s, metal, ceramic interior, and smokehouse-worthy, so it was well-suited for conversion. There was no plastic interior to worry about, no Freon gas hidden inside its interior to discard.

Kyle spent the day wrapping cabbages in newspaper to store in the root cellar for the winter. They’ll keep in their container until June this way, wrapped in their moist blankets. Kyle asked me what the world would be like when there were no more newspapers, and I had no answer. Will the ability to preserve our food for winter be as wondrous as the existence of vampires? Will bacon be so foreign that it is easier for us to believe that a mortal and a mythical creature can fall in love?

My friend happily signed onto a half a pig for her freezer the other day. She didn’t know that hams and bacon meant extra work. Hams are just roasts unless they’re cured, and bacon is just pork belly unless it’s tended to. Far from pork belly is bacon. She’s
pregnant, so when asked if she wanted it cured and smoked, she said no- savvy to the modern processes of pumping nitrates into the meat to combat botulism, she had no idea that bacon and ham are what they are because of the process they go through- brining, then drying, then smoking, to achieve that achingly good, buttery goodness. Yes, you can cure bacon and hams without nitrates.

In order to finish the bacons in the smoker, I resolve to stay up all night. Bradford has the beginnings of what looks like the swine flu (fitting since I am processing pork), so I have two excuses to stay vigilant tonight. Every two hours, I go out to the new smoker, feed the tinder box with a mixture of dry and wet hardwoods, and fill the reservoir with water. Every two hours, I gauge the fever raging in my son, and swab him with wet wash clothes and prompt him to drink water.

At 3:36 am, after the bacons have turned a golden brown, and I know that I will be awake in just two more hours, and Bradford’s forehead is cool with the sweat of a broken fever, I crawl into bed with two cats and Kyle. It is warm and cozy, and I am soon dreaming of vampires.

At 4:13 am, this all abruptly ends, with Kyle’s shouts of : “ It’s on fire, the smoker is on fire!”

I open my eyes to see flames reaching up to our bedroom window, almost 15 feet high. I run out, with a bowl of water for a grease fire, and throw it on the inferno, only to make everything worse. Kyle appears with the fire extinguisher and gives a mighty blast, then another and another.

In my head, I am still thinking that we can save the bacons. I’m yelling for him to stop with the chemicals, that I can put out this inferno which is now melting the ceramic, with water. It’s roaring. Reaching up and over to the bush that lays next to the propane tank which feeds our cooking stove. “They’re gone, they’re gone, it’s gone,” he says, with another blast. He was a forest fire fighter for years… I am out of my element. I sulk back to the house and try to sleep for two hours before my day has to begin. I don’t know what has gone wrong. Did the grease from the bacons cause the hot plate to fame up? Did the string used to tether the bacons to the hanging wire fail and topple the bacon onto the hotplate?

Kyle joins me in bed after he is sure that the fire has been put out and begins giggling at his poetry:

Autumn, and the smell of apple wood smoked bacon drifting toward the bedroom window. The sun is up, flowing in the south window. Wait a minute- it’s four o’clock in the morning, it’s too early for the sun to be up, and from the south???

Be quiet, I say.
Bacon. Do vampires like bacon? I bet werewolves do.

Gourmet Gone

2009-10-06T17:31:00.002-04:00

“…influence and spending power now lies with the middle class.”
- Conde Nast, speaking for why Gourmet magazine was forced to close its doors.

Huh?

I am saddened and disheartened by the news that my favorite foodie magazine, after 70 years of publication, has been forced to close. Conde Nast sites that a 43% decrease in advertisement forced it to do so, keeping the more frugal Bon Appétit afloat in our stagnant economy.

What this means to me, as a hardcore foodie, is that we have reached a place where it is no longer status quo to drop $700 for a table for two at dinner.

This should make me happy. I have always hated this excess, and I think that the frivolity and wastefulness is somewhat like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand in today’s economy. I know how strongly I feel about these things when my son becomes horror stricken at the restaurant when he can’t finish his side stack of strawberry pancakes, and is inconsolable about the shear waste of food that will not be composted, but will instead by chucked in the trash. I try to explain to him that this is a good thing to feel, that next time he will be more frugal in his choice, maybe share it with another person, or order less. At age nearly ten years old, he understands that waste is ridiculous.

Yet, I thought that Gourmet was really trying to make an effort in a roundabout way. I mean, it was the first publication to link the politics of food with actually eating it. It was the first to discuss the pros and cons, the humane treatment of animals, when considering the boiled lobster dinner, or the finely marbled beef rib steak. It married cultures with food, tracing the ancestory of dishes, of hardships felt in parent countries between the growers and the diners, amidst the elegant descriptions of the foods prepared. It tried to make eating an experience at the same time providing the reader and cook with an adventure and a reality.

Yes, there was decadence. Yes, they spoke elitist. But they also spoke local and sustainable and practical, terms that no other high class, upper echelon publication would dare to broach. Martha brought cool to heirloom tomatoes; Gourmet evoked historical significance with their use.

On the farm, we are experiencing the most support, the most viability and sustainability that we have in the twelve growing seasons that we’ve been here. Support ranges from those who want to barter for their food with work to those who want to buy the best food available, no dollar spared. We have been inundated with qualified applicants for apprenticeships- people willing and eager to learn how to fend for themselves. We have a dedicated following of supporters interested in heirloom varieties of vegetables and fruits, and heritage breeds of livestock. It is an incredibly diverse number of supporters, from all walks of life, not just the middle class.

I am the middle class- we are the middle class. And I for one, will miss Gourmet, where I could transform my cippolini onions (formerly grown by peasants in Italy) my rutabagas (the lowly cousin of the turnip), and my garlic (routinely referred to as the stinking rose) into masterpieces of culinary excellence, thanks in no small part to the folks at Gourmet magazine.

What a waste.

2009-09-26T17:51:00.002-04:00

I’m glad that this isn’t our first season farming. I wonder what I would think if it were. Would I just chalk it up to inexperience? Would I stay up late and blame it on the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing?

There’s a barred owl calling out a familiar sound, in between raindrops, “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” I hear the sheep, noisy in their August voices, mothers calling to their lambs, coaxing them to be weaned, because they themselves have been called into fertility by the waning daylight and turn of the nighttime temperatures. They’re more interested in the attentions of the ram than that of the lambs, almost two thirds the size of their mothers, still butting for milk and attention. Still, they can’t resist their baby’s call to be nurtured, so they answer them back, blatting their assurances.

In the morning, the ancient black locust tree rings shrill with the songs of adolescent Northern Orioles and Solitary Vireos caught up in the crazy dance of migration. The geese do tap dances through the lawn, complete with mock take- offs and elaborate trumpeting sounds of leaving. Of course, they’re domestic, so they can’t take off at all- they just squawk and carry on.

Everywhere, it is Fall, and we’ve only had ten days of summer. Seriously.

For those of you who’ve noticed, I’m pushing the two month mark in not posting this blog. I am overcome with writer’s block, always wanting everything to come out more eloquently, more fit together and perfect. But it’s like this season. Unpredictable and unwilling to be summoned up. Today I found myself complaining that it was too beautiful out to be stuck inside doing farm paperwork. A complaint that I have not been able to have all summer. So I helped Janet and Tali clean out the hoophouse of the waning cherry tomatoes, who have bravely soldiered through the late blight and hornworms, but are now at their end. We ripped them all out, pulled the grass from the aisles and spread compost throughout the house. After being rototilled, it will be planted to spinach and mesclun for December harvest. Between December and February, it is almost impossible to grow anything in there without heat or lots of layers. Plus, it means walking through three feet of snow.

The barn got white-washed today, and it smells and looks sparkling clean, the manure from the sheep pens having long been removed. The chicken pens themselves will be cleaned one more time before the winter months, and a heavy layer of sawdust and straw litter put down.

The pigs are happily rooting about outside, where Dominic, Janet’s friend, has made them a beautiful pen, complete with a wallow and a shelter.

The fact that we had no summer would be overwhelming me now, but I was incredibly fortunate to have spent five days in San Francisco and another 7 in Hawaii just last week. It was a fabulous trip, so perfect that I can now appreciate these crisp, fall nights and brilliant blue sky days. Everywhere, the last of the summer birds are retreating. The trees are turning colors, and the fall crops are ripening. I need to buy a new alarm clock, because the sky is no longer light filled and packed with birdsong at 4:58 am. Dusk is descending. And I guess I’m okay with that.

Chicken of the Woods

2009-07-25T09:06:00.003-04:00

Every summer, I cajole someone on the farm into seeking out one of my favorite wild foods to find with me: wild mushrooms.

Usually, their abundance coincides with the most intensely busy times of the year: morels come when the first farmer’s markets have started and the greenhouse is full of plants that need tending to. Chanterelles come at the height of summer, when all we think of is getting hay in the barn. And my favorite, Chicken of the Woods, falls in between, with nary a specified date in site, dependant on rain and heat to grow into colossally huge arrays of orange, succulent fungi. And usually, everything at the farm is in disarray and in need of weeding or planting.

Mushroom foraging is a luxury, one right up there with having the bed made and the lawn mowed. It’s an extravagance, because, honestly, whoever heard of surviving the winter or even gauging one’s readiness for the bare season to follow summer’s bounty by the amount of mushrooms lardered away. There are several pounds of beans to pick, beets and carrots and Swiss chard to bunch, sheep to move to new pasture before even the smallest of shrooms gets considered.

Today, I have been enticed away from the farm by my sister’s boastings of a mushroom field that even I will not scoff at. She says that she’s harvested three pounds of mushrooms and not even dented its surface.

As a family, we tend to exaggerate, so I am not prone to believe her. We walk through the woods where I used to wander as a fourteen year-old, a place safe enough that our parents would not think to try and find us until dusk set in. Now, there are new houses where horse trails were, but still, it’s not as bad as I expected (I’ve actually refused to walk in these woods for the past 11 years, in fear of what I would find. My sister has finally told me that most of it is still there, the tree shaped like the number four, the sliding hill, the moss rock..). One of the houses is beautifully done. It looks like an old New England saltbox, complete with grey stain, a roof that resembles cedar shakes, and a horse barn finished with old-fashioned windows.

We walk by these places, and I remember what they looked like, void of houses, when I rode on my horse by them many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, maybe 30. It’s fun to be walking with my sister, back down the same roads we did as kids.

The sky is breaking clear blue, and I think about how different the weather is, right now, at this moment, just 50 miles away. I think about the girls, diligently weeding the garden, trying to stay on top of it, doing such a great job despite the deluge. And then we get to the Chanterelles.

There is no way that I can describe what this looks like. There are orange carpets of mushrooms as far as we can see. Everywhere. We start picking. And we’re choosey, careful not to take the old ones who’ve sent their spores, or the very young ones who’ll continue the produce. There are other mushrooms. Frilly corral mushrooms, little ones with bright green caps, burnt orange, sun-yellow, velvet brown. It’s like we’re in a terrarium.

Back home, after absconding with 11 ½ pounds of mushrooms, we are greeted with the news that we have the tomato blight- the one that has been spread by big box stores selling to home gardeners who have the desire to grow their own food, and who have unknowingly purchased and spread the disease- the one spread by a fungus called Phytopthera infestans. What a rough justice that I have spent the bits of time harvesting fungi, when a fungus has destroyed our tomatoes…

We pull up and burn 300 of the 600 plants, hoping that the remaining ones don’t die. Shannon drops the F bomb (sorry Daddy Duffield, but she did), and we all just look, having only ever heard a grunt of discontent from her in the past. She planted the seeds, transplanted the plants in their pots, planted them in the ground after making the holes in the biodegradable plastic and mulching the rows with hay. Staked them, tied them, watched them grow fruits. And today, she ripped them out of the ground and burned them. Guess it’s worth the word.

Tali quotes Godfather lines, trying to keep it light. We all work like mad, to get rid of the spores, to stop it, to protect what’s left. All that we have read points to total failure, but right now, we’re up to accepting this horror, not that one.

At supper, we feast on the Chanterelles, that would not be so plentiful, if not for the rain. We don’t talk about the pitfalls. We just rejoice in what we’ve found in this wet, cool summer- like Chicken of the Woods.

Margaret Suzanne (Peggy Sue), 2002 - 2009

2009-07-12T21:45:00.006-04:00

Nikko Tinbergen pissed me off at an early age. He said that herring gulls didn’t have the capacity to learn. He concluded this because, after throwing a clam down to crack it open, the gull couldn’t determine that it was easier to crack it open if it threw it on a ledge versus the sand beach. He concluded this after observing that the gull had tried seven times, and hadn’t figured it out. Who decided that seven was the magic number? I have friends who’ve gone through twenty years of their life, making the same mistake, attempting the same task, and still, and still…

I have a weird six degrees of separation litmus for most people that I feel that I can relate to. They are: that Simon and Garfunkle are probably some of the most influential musicians in the United States ( also David Byrne and Conor Oberst, to name some of the more non-obvious), and that animals, do, indeed, possess souls. I understand or can relate best with people who not only listen to this type of music, but who can also interact with animals that they are caring for with the understanding that these animals aren’t just on this Earth to please us. They actually have another purpose, and a useful and meaningful reason for being that has nothing to do with us as human beings.

The Polish Crested chicken that became Peggy Sue was a hothead. She didn’t really like people, and she was fairly high maintenance, as far as chickens go. Didn’t like being touched, didn’t really interact with anyone. She was from a fancy hatchery that specializes in heritage breeds, and she didn’t have a lot of maternal instinct savvy. The first year she decided to try and hatch her own eggs, she forgot that a rooster was needed to actually have the eggs be viable. They exploded under her tiny frame, one at a time, until she was a putrid mess of rotten egg. Round two, she decided to start setting on the eggs in early November. When she got off the eggs to eat or drink, they would quickly freeze and crack. The third time at becoming a mother, she partially hatched the chick. I finished cracking him out of the shell, and Whitney named him Patchouli. Peggy was so proud of her accomplishment, that she literally ran that chick into the ground, procuring food item here, there and everywhere. Patchouli tried to keep up, but in the end could not.

On her fourth try, she had 16 eggs under a little tarp in the middle of the hay mow. After candling them (taking a flashlight and shining it through the egg to see the embryo), 11 were viable, and she hatched nine. Shannon, determined that Peggy would finally become a mother, put her on lockdown in a huge dog crate. There, the chicks thrived, and Peggy chilled, realizing that it had finally happened.

She raised every one of those chicks to independence, but also to her detriment. Today, she finally succumbed to the stress. And I’ve lost my little Peggy Sue.

I drove to Burlington with my sister today. Past where I rode with my first “boyfriend” (I was twelve years old) to the river, past the cemetery, past the place where Dad would practice his bow and arrow for deer season (he never got one with a bow and arrow). Past the campground where, as a girl scout, I camped and made potatoes in the fire pit. Through the fields, where the hay has still not been cut because of our horrendous weather, past where my best friend’s dog got hit by a car, all the way to the biggest city in Vermont.

Peggy was with us, because I couldn’t leave her to die at home alone. She rallied in Burlington, raised her head, drank some honey water. We left her in the warm car and walked Church Street, looking at the beautiful people eating in the outside booths, looked for bargains, saw the circus, and bought lots of Asian Market groceries. Bradford came too, and he got new Crocs at a bargain price at Outdoor Gear Exchange. It was a really fun time, the second time to my favorite city besides Portland, Maine, in a week.

On the way home, we took the back road to the farm, to search for Chicken of the Woods mushrooms. I had a tree staked out, where Janet and I had harvested about three pounds the week before. When we hit exit 4, there were four of us in the car taking in the cool air that this summer is giving us. I told everyone to keep eyes peeled for mushrooms. “And that means you, Peggy” She flapped in her carrier when I said her name. And then she died. We pulled over so I could hold her, but she was already gone.

Who gets so attached to a feathered thing? Who attributes so many human qualities to something clearly much less human?

“Mom, did you know that a Flamingo’s brain is smaller than its eye?” It is my brainy child, trying to make order in this confusing world.

“Yes, baby, but can you imagine how much is packed into that little space?”

2009-07-07T17:52:00.002-04:00

Independence Day. It’s the day we closed on the farm property, the day my favorite cat ran away and then was re found and rescued by Kyle, the day, as a child, when I’d ride my pony to the town parade, his hooves painted red, white and blue.

I’ve always stayed up for the sound of distant explosions and the occasional spark of lights (fireworks), but today, I’ve actually just come to at ten o’clock at night, after snoozing so soundly that I woke myself with my own version of explosions: loud snores.

My back has given out, as it does every year, around this time of harvest. So Janet has offered to do a type of massage that is supposed to re-align energy in the body. I jump on this opportunity, because I am a massage freak. Any type of massage is good in my book. It isn’t really massage, though, it’s kind of half Reiki, half pressure points, half what she learned to do on horses. Anyway, it quickly sends me into slumber, and I become blissfully rid of the stress of the delayed harvests, the lack of hay, the predominance of weeds, the blue spirits brought on by these gunmetal gray, cold skies of this particular summer.

Even the normally uncontrollable nine year-old resists the temptation to move lying next to me, waiting for his turn at this massage and energy re-alignment (because he still believes in magic). I am skeptical that anything will work to make me actually want to walk again, but slumber comes in spite of my faithlessness.

The next evening, the iPod is on shuffle. We’ve gone through Kings of Leon, then the Miseducation of Lauren Hill, then the Best of Leonard Cohen, then Loreena Mckinnet, live. Brit is cooking an awesome stir-fry, and Shannon is doing the evening chores. Tali and Janet are cleaning out the part of the barn that we’ve always referred to as the wood museum. It’s a huge room that is largely filled with beautiful pieces of wood that Kyle has designs to make into something later. Every sort of lumber that Kyle has carefully milled and stickered (the art of drying the wood with pieces of wood stuffed in between to make sure that the boards dry). They sort them, according to size and type, trying to make a place of their own to hang out in, away from main part of the house.

The Peonies have finished blooming now. It makes me remember Whitney, who was here last year, and who unexpectantly became one of my best friends. The corn is planted, so it reminds me of Greggy, who was too Dudey for the other farm, and who we got instead. What a gem. It reminds me of Chris, a hipster that re-introduced Bradford to the Clash, from a hipster’s point of view; of Justin, who taught Bradford how to fish, of Marka, who kept the peace here, and of Jeremy, who hated the farm lists, and would set out on his own each morning, secretly protective of the potatoes. Maria, the sweet Bell from the south, who loved Bradford, and would do anything to keep the farm going; Joey, the rescue apprentice, and my crush, who painted the whole house in three weeks. Kate the difficult vegetarian, who ended up raising pigs and turned out to be a cool Mom; Rachel from Brazil, who shelled beans and knitted hats and played music. I’m reminiscing, it’s true, because I feel like anyone who has been here before, who has experienced the intensity of farming and its uncertainty should know how much of a pleasure it is this year to have everything so organized. It’s incredible. And despite the hardships, despite my nearly daily panic attacks about weeds and hay and who of the beautiful ewe lambs I need to let go, and all of the other curve balls this screwy weather is throwing at us, things are good, and they are going well. And tonight, I can walk, and remain in awe of the magic art of touch and healing.

Leaping In

2009-06-24T20:09:00.006-04:00

"...and the theory of relativity occurred to Einstein in the time it takes to clap your hands. This is the greatest mystery of the human mind- the inducive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain." -John Steinbeck

It seems only fitting that the blog has decided to post my photos backwards, from placid sunshine to green growing things to the impending storm and finally to dinner at the end of the day, all in reverse order.

I am fully aware that I've been silent for over a month, overwhelmed with the growing season and all that that entails. Things are good here, though. In this picture, Bradford is in the foreground, leaping into the picture. Brittany is behind him, then Tali, who cooked this fabulous meal, then Janet, Tyler, and Shannon. Tali cooked it while we got some hay in. The weather patterns have sent low after low scudding across the map, from west to east, and each time, our window for haying disappears into a haze of drizzle and clouds. Today was no exception. Shannon tedded the hay- used a machine that scatters the hay all across the field to dry it out faster- then, by the time I came home from the animal hospital, it was ready to rake into rows for baling. Dana and a very pregnant Heather arrived on the scene just as a huge rainbow and accompanying showers passed just to our east.

Here, you can see the blue sky disappearing to our south, and the big storm racing toward us from the north and east. We got all but four bales on the wagon before I hollered that I was cutting and running for the barn with Gertie, the 23 year-old truck towing it. Everyone piled onto the wagon, and we made it into the barn just as the rain really let loose. It felt so good to get the hay in before the rain had a chance to ruin it that we all sat around, stunned and wet from the rain. Except for Bradford, who darted like a frog from one puddle to another, soaking wet from the torrent.

Protected inside one of the two hoophouses are the head lettuces, the bunching onions, and two mammoth cabbages that were wayward strays in the transplanting process, and who we kept out of pity. They are nearly four feet across now, and just starting to head up.

Michael, the 32 year-old horse, is still protecting the sheep. They are doing really well this year. The lambs are beautiful, and it's only a matter of how much hay we can get in the barn that determines how many of them we can keep as replacements. The five cows are comfortably pastured on the hill, and the piggies are growing quickly, thanks to the constant attention of the apprentices. We have squash bugs and Mexican bean beetles. We are struggling to get hay in because of the constant flow of low pressure. We have so much lettuce that we can't sell it all. And still. And still, this farming life is a good thing. It's constant and it's empowering.

Burst Bubbles

2009-05-29T21:30:00.003-04:00

The undeniable fact is that any species’ pursuit of its interests will always have an impact on the rest of the planet’s life-the fox impacting on the chicken population, the flea on the cat, the beaver on the forest, and the sheep on the grass. Living in a bubble, where one’s individual actions (let alone those of one’s entire species) have only a benign effect, or none at all, on other living things, is not an option. Such moral purity simply doesn’t exist. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, in The River Cottage Meat Book. 2004.

I think that the crew is probably about done with my lectures on the hypocracy of veganism; of the complacency of vegetarianism; of the solutions for the world’s ills, based on farming. Well, not done, but, a smile smirks across their faces when I start in, so I know that they know what to expect next from my mouth.

At Fat Rooster, our bubble is always burstable. Like on Wednesday, when Shannon called me at the animal hospital where I work three days a week, and said that that the driving rain had sent the sheep through the fence, toward the gardens. Luckily, the three, Shannon, Brittany and Janet, were able to steer the sheep to the paddock and save the 600 heads of lettuce. Then, when we thought we could begin to transplant wildly—eggplants, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and much, much more, the rains began. We are expected to get a quarter of an inch of rain every 12 hours for the next 7 days. Perfect for transplanting and hardening seedlings, but very hard on the psyche, 7 days of cold and mud, and nowhere to sprawl out and gaze up at fluffy blue clouds.

The sheep pens have begun to get cleaned, and talk about a bubble burster. The barn is not wide enough for a Bobcat to come in and scoop out the three foot high mound of manure and hay that has accumulated during the winter. Literally thousands of pounds of manure need to be pitchforked or shoveled, one load at a time, into wheelbarrows, then carted outside to the manure pile. It is a daunting task. And a challenge. Definitely a stereo is needed to assist in the chore, and as of now, the stereo resides in the greenhouse. The tri-musketeers tackled the project and got about 25 square feet conquered; only 17 times more than that to go…

Kyle made blueberry rhubarb cobbler from berries that we harvested last year and fresh rhubarb. I am sauteeing sweetbreads in gluten-free herbed flour and butter; there is braised baby swiss chard and spinach drenched in minced wild leeks, pine nuts and basil, and a grilled kielbasa to douse in homemade ketchup and relish.

We’re about to watch one of my favorite movies of all times- Strictly Ballroom. Neither Brit, nor Janet have seen it. Nor have they ever tried sweetbreads. Oh, what bubbles …

Predictability

2009-05-13T21:41:00.005-04:00

Harold: Maude?
Maude: Yeah?
Harold: [pulls the stamped coin from the arcade out of his pocket] Here.
Maude: A gift!
[reads the engraving]
Maude: "Harold loves Maude."... and Maude loves Harold. This is the nicest gift I've received in years.
[she throws the stamped coin into the water]
Harold: [gasps, bemused]
Maude: So I'll always know where it is.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is having the laying hen chicks arrive in the mail in the spring. It was the harbringer of everything living returning to our cold clime. I must admit that even though I am a born and raised Vermonter, I hate winter. I hate the cut throat cloudless sunsets and the endless dreary days, to paraphrase Ray LaMontagne, but when the chicks came, it meant an end to cold.

We’ve entered the world of technology. There’s wireless internet throughout the farmhouse, and we’ve changed our email address for the first time in ten years. I have Pandora radio streaming through the computer- it’s playing a playlist that Whit created and emailed me from across the middle of the Pacific, where she lives on an island inhabited mostly by birds, seals and turtles. Does all the information make everything harder or easier?

The swine flu panic doesn’t make it seem easier. You can even Twitter its progress across the globe, tracking every suspected or confirmed case. I woke up with a sore throat this morning and wondered if I have it, when really, if I hadn’t had all of this information, I would have just chalked it up to spring allergies. Brittany, one of the new apprentices says that her friend sent her an email that said,”They said we’d elect a black president when pigs flew; 100 days later, swine flu.” Pretty funny. Also check out the Winnie the Pooh swine flu comic. Just Google it, and there it will be. I spent an hour typing song lines into Google to get the artists from one of the playlists that Shannon gave me…got every song title and artist except one in seventeen tracks.

If I don’t hear from someone within two days, I think that I’m being snubbed. I forget that they have lives, too, and that it is spring, and everyone is whirling around, out of control, trying to keep the threads of progress from unraveling into a tangled jumble of summer…

We’ve had two more ewes lamb, both teenaged mothers, both doting on their tiny little lambs. The lambs are healthy and hardy, but I think I might take them to Strafford, where some of the sheep summer on a landscaper’s farm (the ewes and their lambs are there in the pasture to add to the bucolic scene for potential clients, and the owner buys and raises the lambs for his employees for the fall). Both births were unexpected and a complete surprise and joy, given that they’re both fine and healthy.

Peggy the Polish Crested hen is very close to hatching out her chicks. The other little bantam hen hatched out two of nine (it’s her first time at motherhood), and is in a protected corner of the barn. New chicks arrive in the mail, today, and any minute, I’ll get the call from the postmistress, to come pick up the chicks (it’s 5:30 am right now).

There’s a man and his son here doing lots of foundation work on the barn. I want him to build this enormous deck overlooking the clover pasture, where we could languish in the shade of the ancient black locust during the summer, sipping lemonade or chardonnay. Seven grand is needed, though, so not sure that’s a likely reality. He is reluctant to commit to the deck, because I am asking him to be artistic, to surprise me, to show me that I know he is capable of doing this extravagant thing. I’m not sure that I can get him to do it…

It’s onion planting time. They survived being left out in the 18 degree nights, a careless move by me, underestimating the power of windchill. I’ve planted 3900, and there’s only 11,000 to go. We’ve been harvesting wild leeks like crazy, the push for local food fueling the demand. We need to get 60 bunches ready for market on Saturday. Shannon and I have mini contests harvesting them. I’m faster, but hers are far prettier.

Here are pictures of the onions. They are started in the greenhouse in February, in these big pots. Then, the tops are trimmed, and they are unceremoniously dumped out of the pots and separated so that they are put into the ground, bare rooted. Each one is tucked into this biodegradeable plastic (it’s made of corn!), and then left on its own to survive. Onions are resilient. And they are reliable in the sense that they can surprise you with their survivability. So even though it’s a surprise everytime, I’m pretty sure I can count on them to come through.

This has been a tough day for me, beginning at 5:00 am, because I have to drive to the post office to get the chicks, do the chores, and get our son on the bus. Kyle is quick to assume the duties of feeding him and getting him on the bus. I have to figure out how to get an order ready for a store, do a tour for an elementary school, deliver produce to CSA shares (people who put up money when nothing is available, and we use it to buy seed and animals—maybe pay the electric bill--, then they get whatever is available at the farm), deliver to the retail store, pick up my son, pick up the beef that is ready at the shop, cook dinner for 6 guests tonight. Luckily, Shannon, Dana, Heather and Karen team up and cook dinner, so when I get home, everything is ready, and all I have to do is eat.

Which brings us to the chicks, that I have just checked up on, making sure that the waterer is full, and there is grain scattered on the newspaper.

Driving to the post office to pick up the chicks was probably the most rehearsed of the day’s activities; I’ve done it close to a hundred times before. How the rest of the day was going to pan out- not so sure. I was pretty much fried by the time I got the chicks. Gloria at the post office is so nice; she leaves the front door open, so I can come in two hours before everyone else, and do the secret chicken knock, and get the chicks. I crank the heat in the car and head to the PO. When I get the chicks back to the house, Brad has already gone to school on the bus, and Kyle has left for his ecologist job at Marsh Billings Rockefeller National Historical Park, where he works three days a week. I take the chicks to the barn, in the twightlight of the breaking dawn.

The night before, Linda called me from the hatchery. She told me that they had sent 27 instead of 25 chicks, just to make sure that they survived. So now I sit in the dark of the barn, touching each chick’s beak to the water, to make sure that they know how to drink, as if their mother had shown them how. I count, 25, 26, 27. They are accounted for. But I hear peeping from the box, and I spy some dark little thing in the corner. I grasp it in my hand and burst into tears. It’s a little duckling. It looks at me with mournful eyes: are you lost, cause I’m lost. I have no idea why I am here. Do you know?

In that instant, it comes to me that I’d rather be surprised by what is to come- to wait and not be instantly gratified all of the time- to believe that magic happens once in a while, for no reason, and without real purpose. I haven’t named the duckling yet, but maybe I’ll call him Chance.

Heaven, Hell and Earth

2009-04-26T18:33:00.007-04:00

“I think it’s just as likely that someone could say this place, right here, is heaven, hell, and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.” Trudy, in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle- David Wroblewski 2008

For fours days, we have basked in Maine, unencumbered with the responsibilities of animals to care for and plants to water. When we arrived, the ocean was angry and unapproachable. Bradford tried anyway, and Kyle looked for wayward seabirds. I pretty much read books, walked a lot listening to the iPod, and cooked. By the end of our stay, the ocean was almost glass, and the hawks were migrating. We saw osprey, kestrel, sharp-shinned, broad-winged, merlin, red-tailed, skimming the ocean air currents on their way to breeding grounds. White-crowned sparrows sang “Poor Jo Jo missed his bus,” and yellow rumped warblers flitted after flies. We missed the “fall out,” where the shorebirds arrive, en masse. Probably just another couple of days away. Still, that we had weather fair enough to tan skin is a gift in April.

We ate lots of fresh seafood and lots of homemade candy- anis gummy lobsters, cappachino flavored jelly beans, and a square of candy made from caramel and marshmallow. Yum!

We biked and walked and drove looking at beautiful houses with manicured yards and spring flowers. The boys ate donuts almost every morning. I had rice crackers topped with cream cheese and smoked wild salmon. I really wish they’d make a gluten-free donut.

When it was time to leave, we had been offered an entire extra day to stay by Shannon, who has been taking care of everything in Vermont. Still, on the morning of our departure, we all three, readied the little house for departure, and by 11:00, we were eager to head home.

Whenever we would come home from vacation as a kid, the first thing my sister and I would do would be to leap out of the car and take head counts of the animals. Each chicken would be checked and kissed and cooed at. Today, I try hard to help Kyle unpack the car, but I am really taking mental stock of the chickens, cats, and dogs. Peggy is brooding her eggs. The two hens with chicks are safe. But where is Henry? I search the yard, I search the front of the house. Shannon is inside the barn doing chores, and the first thing that I say to her should not be Where Is Henry? It should be – the house looks emaculate- the planting that you’ve done looks great. The sheep pens are clean!

Finally, I get up courage to go inside the barn where she is feeding the animals. I call hello to her, and exclaim at how big the lambs have gotten since I ‘ve been away these six days. Then, hearing my voice, my giant rooster comes waddling out to me, waiting to be scooped up and cuddled.

Fat Rooster Farm is an anchor, a burden, a choice made long ago to nurture a piece of land and try in some small way to contribute to preserving a way of living that has fallen out of favor in our society as a whole- to farm.

The chores are done. No one has died. The weeds are still nascent. This clearly looks like heaven. Tomorrow I will go in search of morel mushrooms, after I have planted the bok choi and broccoli and harvested wild leeks.

2009-04-22T18:51:00.003-04:00

Life ain’t nothin but a funny funny riddle- thank God I’m a country boy.
John Denver

There may be nothing nearly as scary as listening to John Denver cover Robbie Robertson’s The Weight. It is playing now, as we languish here in this seaside house in Maine, a personally chosen torture, for me, by Kyle. It almost matches in horror the duet that John sings with Placido Domingo, but not nearly.

It has been three years that we’ve ventured anywhere on a vacation together, with no agenda, no family to visit, just to have a break off the farm. In December, Whit let us off the hook to go to Ohio to see Kyle’s family. It was a break, and while it was undoubtedly a gift to get away from Fat Rooster, there was not a chance just to wander throughout the hours of the day, unencumbered.

Ray and Liz, the owners of Back Beyond Farm have extended this opportunity to us in the past- a chance to stay in their beachfront house in Wells, Maine, bordered by the Atlantic on one side, and by Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge on the other. Today, in celebration of Earth Day, we walked the refuge trail, and listened to the first songs of spring. A pair of bluebirds, setting up court in the saltmarsh, a pine warbler advertising his newly found territory. At Biddeford Pool, outside of Kennebunkport, we walked past mansions to East Point to see Common Eiders bobbing in the angry ocean waves. There are dogwoods blooming, as are forsythia and daffodils; the air is laced with spring, but when Bradford and I went to bask on the beach, we retreated quickly back to the cabin and shifted gears to bike riding the two miles into the town’s wharf.

Shannon, raised in New Jersey, and until just recently, employed by a container company, had never even set foot near a farm. On Monday, we dumped the whole thing on her, and fled for Maine. I think she’ll be okay, as the cow that threatened to bash someone’s head in was butchered before we left; the hen hatched her chicks and is safely sequestered in a pen with them, away from the maurading peacock, the last sheep to lamb did so two days before we left, and things usually happen in three’s, don’t they?

My email from Shannon today said that Neil, the hound dog, found the cow’s carcass and vomited blood in the house. Tildy Anne, the matron of our herd of cows, escaped from her collar, and ran loose in the barn until Shannon was able to coax her back to her stanchion with grain. Her dog, Pepper, is too keyed up to stay with her while housesitting, so he is on lockdown at her and her boyfriend’s house while she farmsits.

It could be worse- she could be listening to this John Denver tune…

When we arrived here, we found that there was no phone. In a mini moment of panic, we hopped in the car, and drove the streets with the laptop (Kyle has named the lap pod), looking for unsecured connections to the internet. Bradford found one about a mile down, and we emailed everyone we could think of that we were safe. I then found an actual landline and called home. Everything was fine. The dog had not yet puked, nor had the cow escaped.

Back at the cabin, it took Bradford about ten minutes to find that there was actually intermittent unsecured access in the house, and we have been surviving, without tv, without radio, without telephone, with just a little help on the internet, when it decides to work. Email to Whit, to Shannon, to Mom and Dad, the weather, to eBird, to Amazon to track book sales.

I’m reading a great book- the Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Kyle is reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie. Bradford is reading a Roald Dahl, and hounding us to play endless games of Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and Monopoly. He has been swimming in the chilly Atlantic twice, his face blue with cold, and a smile on his lips that could beat Edward’s in Twilight.

Outside, the marsh lies misty and cold, but a warm front is coming, promising air that will rise to the 80s. It’s wonderful to have this luxury, this chance not to plan each second of the day- to forget, even, what day it is. Tomorrow to Portland, to the fish wharfes. But now, tacos made of carrots from our neighbor’s farm, meat from our cattle, and beans we grew and threshed by hand.

2009-04-17T22:23:00.007-04:00

In two weeks, we will start up our CSA again. For those who don’t know about CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), it’s pretty cool. People sign up in the beginning of the growing season, before the seeds have been planted, before summer’s bounty begins to flow. The great thing for farmers is that it allows us to have a cash flow that is normally lacking severely at a time when supplies for the farm are at the peak of need. Fencing, seeds, money to purchase chicks and piglets, bills for fixing the idle equipment in the barnyard, they all happen before anything really starts growing. There are many variations to the CSA model; people can receive a weekly offering from the farm, packed by the farmer; there can be choices that the individual can take or leave; or in our case, the amount can be subtracted from a database, and people can pick or choose what they want weekly. We felt like this method works best for us, because it is all done over email, and because some people really have a hard time trying to figure out what to do with kohlrabi all of the time.

People can also do a straight barter for work here, where they’re paid by the hour in the equivalent amount of vegetables, fruits or meats. This is great for someone who just wants to do some physical work after being in the office all day, but doesn’t have the time or the space to keep a garden or animals.

Kyle plowed the fields yesterday. He’s watering the raspberry plants that he transplanted. I hope to get them rototilled in time for Shannon to plant the rest of the brassicas—the family that includes cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. There’s lots of spinach to plant, even more lettuce. We harvested both curly and flat-leafed parsley yesterday and sold it to the local food co-op.

We sold 25 lambs already, which makes the burden on the poor ewes a lot less (and the burden on our dwindling hay supply easier to take). There are still about 40 of them cavorting in the barn, being chased by the cranky geese, where both females are laying eggs and trying to hatch them out. There’s a little hen behind the lawn mower who is sitting on about 8 eggs that will hatch any day.

I’m sitting in the front lawn on the old stones that they used around the countryside to attach wire to for fencing, after they’d cut all the trees down and had nothing for posts. Now the stones are the front porch step. The grass is still just a little too wet to sit on.

Amidst the time worn traditions associated with farming, enter technology. I have some rules about the big three that I just feel are a big waste of energy, and there’s really no logical reason behind me choosing them as the big three, save for the fact that I used to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, where energy was not a commodity to be wasted. They are: dryer, microwave, and dishwasher. However, I am certainly not above owning a laptop, or an iPod; and certainly the dsl that arrived last week is okay. And here’s where the technology comes in.

My first purchase was not a car. Nor was it a cell phone (mainly because when I was a teenager, they didn’t exist). What I bought first, after many months of deliberation, was a stereo, complete with dual tape deck and turntable. I still have that turntable, and it works just fine; in contrast, we’ve gone through five cd players in ten years.

I love music. It’s a way to set words to notes, so that the melody hits your brain, and then you listen and feel a verbal and melodic connection at the same time.

I have a weird habit of associating songs to specific events in my life. My friend Kep has quizzed me with different songs, and I’ve countered with what they meant to me, almost like asking someone where they were or what they were doing when JFK was shot, or when people were jumping out of the Twin Towers, both of which I can remember.

Another strange thing about my situation: I am the very last Baby Boomer and very first Generation X, so I don’t really fit into either.

Back to technology. Pandora.com is amazing. Go onto their website, tell them a few songs that you like, and they put together a huge playlist that you can listen to, for free. If you don’t like the song, just tell them, and they erase it from the list and any other associated genre as well!

Why is this so exciting? Because if I could, I’d put speakers all over the farm so that I could listen to music. Art, music, and farming are the attributes that I feel most proud about for being human. And Pandora has opened a huge box of possibility for me to explore.

Here are some soil building pictures for you to enjoy. The first shows what Kyle uncovered from the very first field that we cultivated in 1998: we’re still uncovering buried junk. The next is the succession of manure to compost, and the last is actually plowing the field after manure has been spread. Then, plant, plant plant!

It’s spring. I saw a toad today, and its here. Time to savor every moment, to let things linger, and to languish in exquisite sunshine. Bloodroot and Coltsfoot blooming in the forests; wild leeks and stinging nettles to harvest. It is abundance at its best- on the cusp of having nothing, we are given the most precious green.

Srping Enlightening

2009-04-15T21:58:00.003-04:00

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. Thomas Jefferson

This is the first year in nine and a half years that we have not been occupied with sugaring- making maple syrup- in partnership with the neighbors. I am ecstatic, to be honest. I asked Kyle if he missed it, and was actually surprised with his answer: “little bit”. For me, sugaring involved collecting sap on days when no one else was available, usually in the rain and cold sleet, or worse, sitting for long hours in the sugarhouse as the sap was transformed to sweet ambrosia. I was not usually allowed the task of filling the arch, under which the sap thickened to syrup and the fire raged. I was not allowed to fill the flaming inferno with fuel, the wood that I had help cut and stack that fall. Nor was I allowed to actually determine when to take the syrup off of the pans. Instead, I cleaned the sugarhouse of its fast food containers, plastic cups, paper plates, plastic forks. I changed sap filters, removed the soiled muslins that filter the hot syrup when its poured off, and transferred it into syrup cans. All the while, I was thinking about lambs being born unattended, or greenhouses going unwatered, or gardens staying unprepared just too long to hit the May market with fresh produce. I missed the first woodcock’s song, the first wood frog emerging from his snowy winter cave, the first phoebe singing his song, the first yearling ewe trying to mother her newborn.

I do not miss sugaring at all. I know that I will help my husband in the future, should he decide to venture on his own, and do something small-scale, and I know that I will not be relegated to just filling cans with “syrup”. Till then, I am enjoying the most thrilling part of Vermont’s seasons for me: spring. Blink and you’ll miss it. But really, it’s so subtle, that it’s much longer and larger than people claim it to be:

1) Red-winged blackbirds, followed shortly by grackles
2) Snow fleas on the snow (not really fleas, but living bugs, just the same)
3) Christmas ornaments disappear
4) Lambs are born
5) The air smells damp
6) Wild ramps (wild leeks)
7) Mourning Cloak butterflies
8) Goldfinches turn yellow
9) Mudseason
10) The light returns!!!!

I have been part of a three-way collaborative, albeit a small part, to help a beautiful horse this year. His name is Backstreet Beau. He was a six year-old stallion, and he is recently gelded. I’ve been riding him lately, and having the time of my life. He is a good boy, just a little full of himself. I’ve been trying to introduce him to Michael, but that’s going pretty slowly. I think his problem is that every other horse that he’s met was for a performance purpose, not just a casual get together. He’s beautiful, and Ginny, owner number one, is hoping to use him as the mascot for an animal rescue organization.

Today, instead of filling cans with syrup, I rode Beau down to the house. Bradford really wanted to ride him. I knew that when I left the barn that it wasn’t going to happen, because Beau is feeling pretty good these days.

The onions are hardening off now, and Shannon has almost shelled the last of the beans. We are harvesting wild leeks and nettles. That’s the crazy thing about spring in Vermont—if I don’t blog every three days, the stuff I’ve begun working on to post just 9 days before is old news!

Blackbirds in the Fog

2009-03-28T20:38:00.006-04:00

Blackbirds are flying in the fog. It is fog that I see now out of the eastern windows, as I wake, reluctantly, to my 4:59 am alarm. It’s set at that time so that I can boast of waking before 5 am. Really, there’s a routine involved, of shedding layers of warm covers, of undraping myself from my husband’s warm grasp, of dodging the cat’s paws on my wiggling toes, wiggling to take flight from this resting place, as the blackbirds have done.

There is no greater thrill for me than to wake to the sound of bird song in March. From now until the 19th of July, the birds will sing, announcing their willingness to take on familial duties. Many of us don’t feel the absence of bird song in July since fecundity is at the cusp of excess when it comes to gardens or carefully tended livestock, but the subtle changes of late summer and senescence have truly begun by then, at least here in Central Vermont.

Outside, the blackbirds are puffing up their red wing bar feathers, practicing for the return of the females, who make the journey fully three weeks later, counting on their prospective mates to set up household and procure territories that are bountiful with provisions for the summer of family rearing. When they finally do return, there is a bit of a free for all, as the birds are not monogamous, and the most flamboyant, most impressive males with the best territories are chosen first by the females.

In our hoophouses that were erected two years ago, everything is in order. Shannon has weeded the east house twice, carefully covering the crops that Kyle planted last fall with Remay. It’s a magic cover that warms the soil as much as 10 degrees more, and inside the hoophouse that can translate to 35 degrees, even when it’s 23 degrees Fahrenheit outside. There is spinach, arugula, radishes, Chinese cabbage, spring onions, and carrots all started and growing. We have been eating greens since the middle of February, and we made it through the winter buying just 6 heads of lettuce.

In the bottom picture, you can see the established greens from September in the middle. The lettuce that Shannon planted is on either side. These plants were started from seed in our heated greenhouse.

In the picture to the right, you can see the radishes planted between the rows of lettuce transplants. The carrots are planted underneath the radishes. The radishes will be harvested at about three weeks, just as the carrots begin to germinate and begin to compete for space. The lettuce will be harvested as heads become ready at about the same time as the radishes. A cherry tomato plant will be planted in some of these newly vacant spaces, about two feet apart from each other. Basil plants will flank the tomatoes, and the planting cycle will be complete. At the end of the season, the house will rest over the winter, and early the next spring, it will be used to grow just greens. We rotate the tomatoes from one house to another in an effort to cut down on pests that prey on tomatoes. Some people winter their chickens in the unheated houses to scratch up and remove the larvae that lay just under the surface of the soil. As long as there is plenty of fresh water, the chickens do well in these unheated houses. The added light from all sides will allow more productive egg laying; a chicken’s pituitary gland reacts to diminished light by decreasing their egg production.

Today it was gloriously warm- in the 60s! I put a blanket and a pillow in Bradford’s plastic sled and lay outside in the sun, listening to birdsong. Soon, the sheep will be on pasture, and wild leeks and stinging nettles will add to our table’s bounty. Tonight, we dine on mixed greens- arugula, red mustard, leaf lettuce, cress and kale shoots. The main fair is what I’m really excited about- real Boston Baked Beans from our own Bird’s Egg Beans that we harvested in the fall and Shannon and Whit have been shucking since January. Only 50 or 60 pounds left to go…

In the top picture, you can see that the aisle ways have been mulched with hay. Between the rows of lettuce heads, spring bunching onions have been planted.

Boston Baked Beans

1 small smoked ham hock, about 1 ½ pounds
2 cups dry beans, such as Navy or Pinto (or Bird’s Egg, Cranberry or Goose beans)
1 tablespoon dry mustard
1 cup dark real maple syrup, grade B or C
½ cup dark molasses
Salt and pepper to taste
4 garlic cloves, slivered

Cook the beans until tender, but not mushy. Drain and reserve the bean cooking liquid.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix all other ingredients except the ham hock together with the beans. Add enough of the reserved bean liquid to make the beans soupy. Put the ham hock in a cast iron Dutch oven or bean pot and pour the beans around it.

Bake the beans for four hours; checking occasionally to see that the liquid has not all evaporated (add more if needed). The beans will be done when the meat flakes off of the bone. Shred it into the beans, remove the bone, fat and cartilage and serve with fresh greens and pickled vegetables like beets or dilly beans.

2009-03-24T13:17:00.000-04:00

I will find the bones of buried pigs
And hang them on your clothesline.

listen to the sound of them drying.

I will become a cattle egret who perches on the
memory of cattle
and picks insects from the dark skins.
I will bury myself deep enough

goats’ milk fills in
around my shoulders. Around my neck

I will wear a string of gourds and old farm
machinery,

and in the ceremony
of your work

I will put coal on my ring finger
And tell myself, wait.
I will eat your apples

Because apples are proof
and they have fallen from the trees.

- Molly Bashaw- Letters to a Farm

I love March. Red-winged blackbirds return, the males at first, their fire-engine red wing bars blaring, their cheerful song bursting life into the silent, ice world of winter. Then come the black-green grackles singing tunes that sound like bad ring-tone choices on cell phones. Killdeer and woodcocks follow soon after, and then it is upon us, spring and its swell and hopeful greetings of change. No more bitter cold winds and nights where long-sleeved shirts and four blankets are required to keep warm.

The mud is the worst it’s been in ten years. School was cancelled once already, because the scant three inches of snow on the muddy roads made it impossible for the plows to pass. The $1800 we poured into the driveway is really getting its mettle tested as nights plummet to the teens, and days caress the warm winds of the 40s and 50s. I love mud season. And I love that today marks the first day of spring, which means we have 12 hours of daylight to luxuriate in.

Shannon Duffield started her apprenticeship this week. She applied for a position at Country Animal Hospital, where I am a veterinary technician, and I immediately became intrigued by her. Her resume was spot on, and she had a boatload of charisma. Her only weakness was that she couldn’t offer any length of time past August at the animal hospital without certainty. So when I saw her name on the list of potential NOFA apprentices, I jumped at the chance to have her come meet the farm.

And she is great. She’s already cleaned out the sheep pens that we refer to as the moldy pens, and today, I came home to find the chicken coop spotless. This is good, because VPR is coming on Friday to do a book interview, complete with chicken noises.

She has no farm experience, and I hoped to let her in on the stark realities of this business slowly, but Compaya, my 21 year-old llama died the day after she started her apprenticeship. Then there were two difficult births by yearling ewes (all the lambs and moms are fine), followed by a stillbirth four days later by a young ewe not experienced in the art of licking her newborn dry.

Today takes the horrible reality award though. Petal, the beautiful, sweet, perfect calf hung herself and died today. She was not even two months old. Her poor mother, Ginger, has the rope burn scars, where the halter her calf wore razed a jagged line across her back. I can only guess that a startled Ginger rose, while Petal was lying on the other side of her, and she strangled her own baby.

Shannon bravely handed me water and tools as Kyle and I scrambled to replace the horror of this tragic accident with practicality. Here was a 300 pound milk fed calf that would be composted if we didn’t act quickly. Had we been just minutes earlier, she would have been saved, but now, we had just minutes to save her meat for consumption.

Shannon stayed back as I slit Petal’s throat to bleed her out, then skinned her feet. Kyle got the tractor, and we hung her to skin and gut. We washed her and hung her to cure, and truly, the meat is beautiful. It is perfect veal, like that you would find in any specialty store. The problem that I have in allowing it just to be perfect meat is the tragedy of her death. I wrestle in my brain with why it’s easier for me to accept the local butcher coming with his gun to shoot the grass-fed steer than to accept Petal’s absence. And then, I think that it’s just that. I had dreamed of Petal romping about pastures, raising her own beautiful calves, not dying a horrible freak death.
I am truly thankful that we were able to pull our grief together so quickly and save the meat: although I feel as though it is important to feed the soil, it would somehow have felt like a waste to me.

For Shannon, it was easier to see the carcass without the beautiful hide, the head with its brown eyes, the feet, the tail—those things that make it a real animal. I know how she feels. It may be why I worked so hard to turn the animal that I know and kissed and pet and dried when it was born, back to a carcass. I don’t know. And the starkness of this reality always confronts me as though it’s the first time that I‘ve had to think it through.

So this is my letter to the farm, although not nearly as beautiful as Molly’s. We are at the cusp of fertility, of rebirth, but always reminded of our fragility.

As you read this, Whitney is on a boat to Tern Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where I spent almost four of the happiest years of my life. Reality abounded there, but so did magic. I hope that she finds the same. If you want to follow her adventures, she has a blog called It’s the Sun. I miss her terribly, and I know that she would grieve Petal as we do.

Ge Ready for Your Chicks!

2009-03-04T12:41:00.000-05:00

Time to Get Ready for Chicks!

March 1st—get set, GO! It’s still 10 degrees Fahrenheit at night here, and I’m still wearing double layers of clothes, but it’s time to plan! This is the year you’re going to do it. You’re ready raise chicks, and you should order them now in time for delivery in the spring (I try to time it so that the chicks can go outside in three weeks, and the pen they are in still has a heat source that keeps the air warm in at least one area to about 80 degrees Fahrenheit- this translates to late April in our Vermont clime). Start out with the egg layers first, if you’re feeling squeamish about raising meatbirds. Believe me, I’ve been there.

When I was younger and braver, I worked at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science. We lived in a common house with a bunch of other 20 year-olds. We were all full of life and energy; so much that we knew we had the power to change the world, if only someone would listen.

I worked in the rehabilitation center for raptors, where we took on injured hawks and owls and occasionally rare songbirds. One of our duties was to feed the captive birds. It didn’t bother me when I had to thaw out the frozen rats- I’ve never really had a huge affinity for them, although I had a great pet rat once. We also fed the birds the chicks from local hatcheries. They were excess hatches, chicks that had not been sold and were killed by gassing them with carbon monoxide. They were an amazing source of food for hawks and owls, but it was hard for me to pick up the black plastic garbage bags full of yellow fuzzy forms and hoist them into the back of the Honda.

On the drive back to the raptor center, I usually had the radio cranked as high as it would go. Never country music, mostly stuff like Journey or REO Speedwagon; sometimes CSNY or Cowboy Junkies. On one trip back to the center, I heard a cheep from the back of the car. I pulled the Honda over, and untied the black bag. There, inside, were three live chicks that had somehow avoided being gassed to death.

I raised those birds at the raptor center until they were so fat that they could hardly follow after me. They were so tame they knew their names. The day came when they started interfering with guests at the center, vying for attention right alongside the Snowy Owl display. I was told that they had to go.

My friend graciously offered to do the slaughtering, and I acquiesced. I remember crying for hours after their demise, wondering how I would ever be able to eat them. They sat in the freezer for about three weeks before I got up the nerve to eat them. When I finally did, I realized that I hadn’t tasted chicken that good and well cared for in a very long time.

But you can start with the egglayers…

Get sexed chicks (the ones that are 98% certain to be hens) from one of the reputable hatcheries mentioned in the Resource section of The Joy of Keeping Chickens, and raise them for egg production. By the time you’ve had the birds for two years, you may be brave enough to tackle the next step… using the chicken meat. Until then, here’s a checklist to get ready for your new chicks:

Housing should be draft-free, corner free (so birds aren’t able to pile up on each other- use cardboard to round out the edges of your pen), and warm (suspending a heat lamp about 17” above the bottom of the pen should create a temperature of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The pen can be as fancy as a finished, insulated area in your chicken coop, or as rudimentary as a cardboard appliance container with the sides cut away and lined with newspaper for their first few days and dry wood pine shavings thereafter. Make sure domestic house cats and dogs don’t have access to the chicks. Keep young children supervised around the new chicks, as this stress can also be overwhelming to the babies.

2. Waterers should be sufficient enough so that birds don’t have to crowd around frantically to drink. For very small chicks, place marbles or pebbles in the base of the waterer so that the chicks don’t get in it and drown. A one-gallon plastic waterer per 15 to 25 chicks should be good.

Make sure that you have chick starter on hand. This feed is much higher in protein than the ration used to grow older birds. I scatter it on the ground for the first couple of days before filling feeding trays for the chicks.

Change the chick’s bedding daily if needed. Feces can be ingested by the chicks, and infestations of protozoans called Coccidia can be detrimental.

Listen to the chicks. They should be emitting cooing type sounds that sound like bee bee beep, bee bee beep. Not CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP. Baby chicks are like any other baby. They need food, water and warmth. Adjust your conditions until you hear happy chick sounds!

More later on what to do to transition your chicks to more independence.

Winter Break

2009-02-25T12:47:00.001-05:00

Bradford made a shopping list for me this morning. I had decided to make the trip to the big town 25 miles to our north, because there was a storm calling for eight inches of snow, and I figured that it would be safe to venture out into the metropolis without hitting the crowds that usually frequent on a Sunday. He wanted me to pick up things to make heart-shaped pepperoni pizzas (he was going to make them- he’s an amazing cook at age nine). My hardest task was to find a heart-shaped cookie cutter in the end of February. “They’re seasonally available,” the Wal-Mart associate informed me; “They might be in the reduced items isle.” Instead, I found a plastic, candy-filled heart that could double as a cutter after Kyle had devoured the chocolate inside.

Yes, I shop at Wal-Mart sometimes. Guess what- three bottles of chardonnay, some toiletries and a heart-shaped box of candies for $15 doesn’t break the bank. It was dead in there, and the employees looked nervous at the lack of shoppers on a Sunday in the winter. I mostly do shop at local stores, but the neighbor down the road had just served this $2.99 bottle of merlot the night before which was decent. He said he had purchased it at Wal-Mart. I wanted to see what the chardonnay tasted like. Good- not like Grigich Hills or anything, but good. Certainly as good as the $9.99 bottle at the co-op.

Back home: the sheep are crazy. We’ve had four sets of triplets. My plan of attack this year is just to try and supplement every ewe’s triplets with a bottle of formula, and so far, it has worked-they’ve all survived. The downside is that we’re supplementing seven babies and feeding two without mothers. They drink three, 8 oz soda bottles filled with formula four times a day. To date, there have been 50 lambs born and only 27 ewes have given birth. We have 21 left to lamb!

Some of the lambs have curly hair; some are black and white splotched; there are two that are muddy brown. I’ve only had one mom reject a lamb, ironically, a black ewe that twinned and had one black and one white lamb. She rejected the white lamb. I tied her up so that she couldn’t turn her head around to see who was nursing (called jugging), and she will reluctantly let him nurse, provided that his sister is also nursing. The other exciting thing is that I’ve had to pull lambs (meaning that the birth was not a natural one and had some complication or other) only three times (of course, we’re only about half-way done…). All of the lambs were saved, and the mothers ended up nursing their babies except for one mother, who is destined for sausage, I fear. We’ve named this lamb Bucket, because he’ll invariably have his leg stuck in the water bucket every time we go down there to feed him. Lambs are cute, but they’re sometimes not the brightest bulbs in the circuit.

The little bantam hen that is a mutt, and could be a cochin or an araucana cross, hatched out her eggs two days ago. They are a mix of maple sugar-brown and creamy buff, some with stripes across their eyes, some with puffy cheeks. I was almost certain that Cassie the Silkie was the father, but now it’s looking more like Poopie Poo is the proud daddy. They’ll be travelling to Randolph with me for the book signing at Cover to Cover on March 14th. I think I may take Henry, the enormous Plymouth Rock rooster, too.

My dear friend Ray Williams helped us load the pigs up for slaughter last Tuesday. When he walked into the barn, he looked around and said, “Whoa!”

Billy, the Peacock was in full display. There were 50 sheep and 50 lambs cavorting in their pens. Petal, the heifer calf was bounding up and down the isles. The cows were busily munching their hay, and Poopie, Henry, Danny and Cassie were all crowing at the top of their lungs in celebration of winter’s retreat from cold and darkness.

Ray was the one who helped me get the two llama girls who are now hanging out with the sheep and overseeing all of the new births. He was a little nervous when I told him that the transfer from the former owner’s trailer to his was going to take place in the Seven Barrels Brewery parking lot in downtown West Lebanon. I think he had visions of llamas galloping down Interstate 89 toward Concord.

“The llamas look like they’ve made themselves at home,” he added, watching their snake-like heads weave in and out of the ewes. Ray’s farm is in Chelsea, bordering a beautiful, treeless ridge, and reminiscent of a western valley scene. He and his wife, Liz have beautiful cattle for beef and tomatoes the size of softballs.

So it’s here, this space between winter and spring, when we’re not really busy, but keeping busy. When I still take naps in the new sunshine that streams through the south windows in the early afternoon. I think this may be the last head of lettuce that I have to buy- having only bought six this year, I am quite happy. The arugula, spinach and mustard that Kyle planted in the hoop houses in the fall is thriving, and the greens that Whit and I planted just two weeks ago are looking enticing. Our break is over- the growing season has begun, and I am only too happy to have it wash over me and carry me into what is to come.

2009-02-13T11:10:00.000-05:00

“Every moment before this one depends on this one.”-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I turned down a CAUSE request today.
“You’re so strong.”
I didn’t even respond to a WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU request,”
“Ohhhhhhhhh!”

I’ve entered the world of Facebook, thanks to my friend Geoff. He has been the driving publicity force behind the chicken book that we’ve just published. He called me one night and told me that we needed a Facebook page for it, and I gave him a long, exasperated sigh. Now, four weeks later, here I sit, maneuvering my way through posts and pokes and offers to join various causes. He’s right; the way to reach a mass number is to follow the mass media trends, and this is it. Daily, my question to Whit has been, “guess who just friended me??”

Just three days after I activated my account, I had a classmate from high school contact me, after 23 years of no communication.

Seriously, the premise behind Facebook is a good one. Keep in contact with one another. On the other hand, it’s a little voyeuristic; anyone and everyone has the ability to see what you’re doing and when you’re doing it. I suppose if you’re using it to stalk an old acquaintance, it’s not that great a use of time.

Interestingly enough, it’s been around for years, and only now are people who aren’t necessarily college aged taking advantage of it. The fastest growing demagogue using Facebook are the aged 35 and olders.

“Eliza ate too many cookies today.”
“Lupe is going skiing with a torn MCL”
“Jim is wondering whether he should sit on the couch and kill zombies or go home and clean”

“It’s ridiculous,” Whitney snorts at me. She’s shelling black turtle beans and listening to the Fruit Bats.
“It’s creepy,” she asserts.

Maybe she’s right- I mean if you’re a shooting star, and sailing into the swell of living, who needs that baggage trailing after you? All those painful memories of sitting on the gym benches during the slow dances at school, or being picked out as the one with hand-me-down clothes. Sitting at a computer to write 25 random things about oneself in the hope that it really matters to someone else might be a waste of time...still it’s fun.

“I’m a firm believer that some people should just remain forgotten,” she says.

“Ohh- I have 18 fans for the book now!” Whitney harrumphs and gets up to put wood in the woodstove. “I’m going to check the sheep,” she says in mock disgust, and out the door she goes.

“You still have time left to go back, you know,” she calls after me.

On the more practical side of things, Kyle has ripped up the hall and Brad’s room, and we’re doing renovations that we’ve put off for 10 years. He re-wired the barn, and the driveway has new gravel in it. Pretty soon, there’ll be no time for house repairs and yard work when the growing season begins.

Today we celebrated the sun’s light that still remained at 4:00 pm while we readied the greenhouse we rent from the neighbors for planting. The air inside should have smelled like spring- warm soil and little seedlings unfurling their green heads from their pots. Instead, it smelled strongly of ammonia and rodents. They kept ducks inside of it all winter, and the snow covering the plastic had shut out the light: a perfect petri dish for mold and bacteria. The place is a mess, and Whit and I have spent almost a week trying to get it back to something that resembles a place to grow plants. On top of the ducks, the floor of the greenhouse looks like a watering hole in the Serengeti- there are hundreds of rodent tracks searching for missed pieces of duck grain. You can actually see little rat footprints everywhere. We have to get rid of them before planting anything, because they’ll eat the seedlings faster than the seeds can germinate.

Whitney spent over four hours shoveling the heavy snow and ice off of the greenhouse’s roof, and now we’ve started bringing in the soil to warm and clear off the planting benches.

This weekend marks one year exactly that we’ve known the Red. In case you missed the picture of her, her hair is a burnt auburn, a flashy contrast to her smile and brown eyes. She showed up last year for the infamous interview that we have for our potential apprentices, which isn’t really an interview, but just a chance for us to meet whomever has decided that they want to spend the summer working hard on a farm with little pay and a not-so-private place to stay. In just one week, she’ll leave for an eventual voyage to Hawaii, headed for the chain of uninhabited islands called the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. It’s the same place I spent almost four years as a biologist and refuge manager. Paradise, really- seabirds and seals and sea turtles and shockingly blue water and white coral beaches. Her biggest regret is that they now have email capacity there. At least there’s no cell phone service yet.

I don’t look forward to when they leave, these people who put so much of their time and effort into Fat Rooster Farm. The hope they harbor in this world of doubt, fear and despair is such a tonic to me. Gets me through the dreary winter months.

The first lambs are being born now, and the first calf of this year is thriving. The greenhouse is teaming with onion life. Every new moment I live again is what has come before. And every moment points to now.

Soon will be spring- the blackbirds, the woodcock’s crazy aerial dance, the Barred owls calling out their territorial song. I better get busy and write my Facebook 25 things pretty quick…

2009-01-25T15:31:00.000-05:00

“It’s a fine line between falling and flying”

-Cloud Cult, Hurricanes and Fire Survival Guide

Whit and I went to Boston this weekend. It almost didn’t happen. For one thing, Ginger the cow is eminently due with her first calf, and I, being the control freak that I am, almost couldn’t leave the farm in the capable hands of my husband, Kyle. For another, the sheep are so close to lambing that they need to be monitored at least four times a day. In this arena, I am truly needed, because if they are in trouble, my hands are smaller and can get the lambs out if they’re in the wrong position inside of their mothers. And lastly, Greg, who spent the summer with us and was planning to visit, hit a deer and totaled his Jeep. It screwed up his plans to visit the farm, and he had no way to get from Burlington to Jersey, on his way to a semester abroad in Tasmania.

It worked out, though, and we ended up staying with her friend in a cute little apartment in Newton Center, right outside of Boston. We had exactly 25 hours in the city, exactly 25 hours enough for me, before returning to this rural haven.

I love to people watch, and the T subway system in Boston is perfect for this. In a six foot area, you can hear three different languages and see nine different types of fashion, from Goth to Punk to Prada to Patagonia. There are entire conversations being carried out, like no one else is there, riding along with you, on cell phones and in face-to-face conversation. Ninety percent of the passengers are hooked into music, off in their own world, on their way to wherever.

We took the Orange Line to my favorite part of the city, Chinatown. I love it here-the raw ethnicity of it, the privilege to have access to ingredients that I can’t find anywhere else, even in Burlington, to cook my favorite food and being immersed in an element completely unfamiliar to me. Whit has never seen me in an Asian supermarket before. She’s only seen the frugal me, the coupon budget oriented-justify every penny me. When we hit that market, I was a little insane. We had just fifteen minutes before they were going to shut the door on us. We found another couple of gringos, raiding the aisles rich with sauces and noodles and chicken feet and preserved eggs, and we called questions to each other- “have you found any ginger?” “no- have you found the fish sauce” “it’s near the Sriracha.” “What are these? Fermented lettuce? I’m getting it.”

Whit followed with the cart, and green bean vermicelli, candied ginkgo, ground bean paste, palm vinegar and galangal root found its place in the cart. At the end of fifteen minutes, we (meaning I) had filled the shopping cart full, and we headed to the check-out as the lights snapped off, plunging the store into darkness. I took a breath, grateful that we hadn’t missed the store’s open hours; Whit was grateful that there were only fifteen minutes of misery to have endured.

We searched quickly for a place to eat-mainly because we both had to pee pretty badly. Luckily, we stumbled onto a Vietnamese restaurant that had been listed in the Zaget’s guide. The food turned out to be just plain awesome. We ordered enough food for four people and paid $30. Admittedly, the noodle soup had beef in it that we both didn’t care for (are we just spoiled with the taste of grass-fed beef?), but everything else was spot on. From pickled lotus rootlets to spring rolls in peanut sauce, we ate and ate and drank mango shakes and fresh limeade.

After eating for about an hour and a half, we hopped on the Green line to Whit’s friend’s apartment. I was pretty much ready to pack it in for the night, and I thought maybe that it would be a great idea for me to just go to bed and read so Allie and Whit could talk but Allie wouldn’t have it. Nope, I could’ve done that if I had stayed at home, she said. I was going out with them. Allie, Adam, Whit and I went to a small little bar on Beacon Street called Union City and sat and talked about the perils of having new jobs just out of college and what to do in this economy. Everywhere around us were boutique stores and beautiful clothes, with no one to buy them, all with 75% off signs attached to them. I tried hard not to worry about these people sitting here with me, with their new jobs, knowing how much hope and energy that they were full of.

On the way back out of the city toward home the next day, we sat on the commuter train; Whitney was obsessed with finding a song with the lines “I’m sick of being sick and tired.” She put her iPod on and started searching through the songs. “Is this it?” and then she gives me the one of her ear buds, and I start sharing the music. We’re listening, while outside, Boston is flying by the train’s windows, late winter light streaming in, and the tick of tracks becomes the song’s bass. I feel like I’m in a movie. Like I’m close to flying.

At home, Brad and Kyle are making dinner. I tell them of our adventures, and they listen. Brad asks about the subway doors and the gates to get into the subway and the colors that delineate the different trains. Then, Greg arrives, having been rescued by Whit who has spent yet three more hours in the car to get him from Burlington. All of a sudden, we’re all here, in this one place, laughing, and talking, and wondering where the next adventure will take us. We fall back into a comfortable routine of board games and banter, animals snuggling close, shutting out the cold January winds and chill that surround the house. Silently, I begin planning an Asian feast for the next evening’s meal.

Behind the Scenes

2009-01-13T13:20:00.000-05:00

It’s amazing how much time I spend looking at the posterior ends of things. At the hospital where I work, people are constantly asking me to check to see whether Jill the cat is really Jack, or Thomas the guinea pig is really Thomasina.

On the farm, every morning when I do chores, I scrape the manure from the cow stalls into the gutter. While preparing to shovel it all outside, I’ll glance at the back end of the cows, to look for signs of heat- to see whether it’s time for them to be bred artificially. This usually entails remembering to call the number pasted onto the fridge for the “Vermont calf makers,” where my call is automatically recorded. Magically, a technician will appear, with frozen straws of semen from bulls that live as far away as California, ready to be implanted into the willing cows.

Sometimes, I’ll whisk a hen from the floor of the coop and inspect to see if she’s laying eggs. You can tell, ya know, whether she’s taking a break and just eating grain, or contributing to the daily haul of eggs, just by looking at her cloaca (Latin, for sewer), where an egg comes out the same place that she defecates.

These days, I’m pretty careful to look at the flock of sheep’s behinds, as they’re starting to bag up and get pink back there- at least if they’re ewes. I want to know who’s close to birthing (lambing), so that I don’t inadvertently turn them out into the cold after their night sleeping in the barn, and the newborns have that to face as their first full day of experience on earth. Technically, I’m looking at udders and vulvas, but still…

In the winter months, I also find myself looking a lot back toward the east, back toward the light, and admiring the sunrise, out the back door near Michael the horse’s stall. The cold and grey of winter is tempered by the pink streaks of clouds hanging low along the valley, warning of storms and their chilly winds. It’s beautiful and makes me smile.

Looking back on this year, I can say that we had a good year. I was not burned out going into the season, and I was not burned out in the end. I enjoyed the people who were here helping us farm, and overall, things went well.

We had some downfalls. The hay was not good during the beginning of the season; due to too much rain and too much time in the field before it was cut (the cows are actually staging a hunger strike right now). The second cut is good, though, so I think it will do the pregnant ewes a great deal of good in the nutrition department.

A coyote killed many of our sheep (perhaps as many as 15), and at least four sheep got tangled in old wire and died. The coyote was eventually killed, and the wire removed.

The sweet corn delayed ripening, so that it cross- pollinated with the Indian corn and was starchy and inedible. The cows were happy…

My beloved House Hen died, after at least 12 years of age. For those of you who do not know House Hen, she was attacked by an owl and left debilitated about 10 years ago. After recuperating in the house in a box for about two months, she was put outside. That night, she was on the back step, waiting to come in for the night. Every night after, when she was unceremoniously dumped outside to brave the morning hours, she appeared on that step, waiting to be scooped up and put in her cockatiel cage in the dining room for bed. It’s hard to believe that it’s possible to become so attached to something like a chicken, but it happens and on a farm it’s typically not a great thing to get in the habit of doing.

Everything is always beginning and ending here, at a rapid rate. There isn’t a day that goes by when something doesn’t begin its life or meet its end, from the cherry tomatoes harvested for the market to the newly hatched white goslings, tucked away in the hay barn by their watchful parents.

Chilly for Chili

2009-01-06T13:24:00.000-05:00

During this time of year, when we’re privileged to just nine hours of sunlight a day, getting out of bed at 5 am is a struggle. To make it easier, I do everything in a routine, so that I know that once I’ve done the things on the list I’ve made, I’ll be warm, awake, and caffeinated. My list is something like: Get out of bed. Find clothes before I freeze to death. Walk downstairs and flip the damper open on the woodstove. Start the coffee. Turn on the porch light so that the Wild Child cat will come in from the cold and eat. Feed the woodstove. Pour coffee. Read or write something, usually about food.
Eating is harder for me in the winter, too. A challenge is to eat as much as I can from what we’ve stored of summer and fall’s harvest, but still, there are some key ingredients missing. Like fresh, ripe tomatoes, or a radish, snapped crisp and cold from the ground.
Mom made us this dish for Christmas brunch. It’s milder than most chilies, making it a great addition to the rest of the morning’s offerings. I use some of my canned or frozen spaghetti sauce or roasted tomatoes instead of store-bought stewed tomatoes.

BARACK OBAMA CHILI
Serves 4-6
For Base:
§ 1 onion (about 1 ½ c) chopped
§ 1 sweet pepper (about 1 ½ c) chopped
§ 4 tsp minced garlic
§ 1 tbsp olive oil
§ 2 cups kidney or black turtle beans, cooked
§ 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
§ 28 oz chopped tomatoes or home-made spaghetti sauce

For Meat:
§ 1 pound ground turkey
§ 1 tsp ground cumin
§ ½ tsp ground oregano
§ ½ tsp ground tumeric
§ ½ tsp dried basil
§ 2 tbsp chili powder
§ 1tsp kosher salt
§ ½ tsp fresh ground pepper

For Garnish
§ chopped cilantro
§ chopped red onion
§ grated cheddar cheese
§ lime slices, cut into small slivers
§ sour cream
§ chopped jalapeno peppers

Mix meat together well with spices.
Sauté onions, green pepper and garlic in the olive oil until soft. Add meat mixture and cook until browned.
Add vinegar and tomatoes and cook over slow heat for 20 minutes.
Add beans and cook 10 minutes longer
Serve over fluffy white rice and top with your choice of garnishes.