snowwwwwwwwwwww

It's been snowing here for over 50 hours straight. itty bitty stinging snow, big fat snowflakes, super wet snow/rain/sleet snow, you name it. That has driven loads of people into Canto for our hot chocolate. We hear all kinds of excuses: "We just read about it on boston.com" (this is true: http://www.boston.com/thingstodo/family/gallery/boston_hot_chocolate?pg=6) or "I just spent 2 hours shoveling, I earned myself some hot chocolate".

I'm getting to like seeing all the regulars. from the guys up the street who come in and announce "I have 15,000 games on my computer" to the 4:30 order of "Two large medium roast coffees with 2 shots of espresso each (on rough days, it's three shots each), and a large hot chocolate with whole milk". This one gets a tray, hot chocolate in the middle do distinguish it, and tape over all the mouth holes so it doesn't spill on the way up the stairs. The mailwoman comes in for hot chocolate on cold days in the middle of her route, and another guy comes for a sandwich at 5pm - his own special alteration of a sandwich on the menu. There are the folks who live down the block, the guys from the bike place a block over and the policemen from across the street, all mixing here.

This is what a bakery is. In the book I read this fall by Helen Nearing, she describes how she needs a coffeeshop or library or someplace for “fellowship”. It’s what community means to me: a place where, despite the cheesiness, “everyone knows your name”. I feel like it’s harder to create in the city. It’s what I had at the food project, and it makes it harder and harder to leave Boston again. From the bakery I go home to my roommates on Elm, where I know not only my apartment but everyone in the whole house. We borrow food and movies from apartment 2, we have potlucks and barbecues and play scattergories and set. We know an apartment in the next building over in one direction (where we went for new years last year), and now the family on the other side (the mom came over to help us stop a fire alarm, stayed an hour for some wine, finally brought her 5-year-old over so he could meet us and have a safe place to come if he ever got locked out).

Last night I had a dream about the old house in Gaithersburg. I ran up the stairs, jumped up and touched the light in the hallway, impressing my mom. I woke up in a panic because I couldn’t remember where we kept the plates. But I could still remember where the snacks were (in the dream, i found the cabinet stocked with oreo pudding – I don’t think I’ve ever had that). It made me really excited to see my family for Christmas!

Essex Farm

I spent the last week up at Essex Farm on Lake Champlain in New York. it's gotten totally under my skin and i'm heading up there to work in February. This past week I have run like crazy after a heifer on a lead rope (somehow managed to hold onto her. Matt wasn't as lucky: his cow Fox freaked out and started to run, pulling him until he wiped out on ice. she dragged him along as if he were waterskiing until he hit the end of the ice patch, at which point he popped back up and kept running until he faceplanted and lost her). I have never eaten as many pork chops in one week, never cooked as many pork chops (spontaneous dinner we cooked after the bonfire for 14 middlebury rugby players), and haven't laughed that hard in a long time.

Essex is an amazing farm because they make just about everything themselves. they raise pigs, cows and chickens like caretaker - but they do all the slaughtering and butchering themselves. they milk 6 cows for their CSA, render the fatback into lard and make soap. They use draft horses - huge belgians - to work the vegetable land. They're on about 500 acres, and if you walk up to the top of the hill you can look down and see lake champlain.

Saturday I was planning to head down to Hawthorne Valley for a workshop but they got loads of ice and lost electricity, so they cancelled the workshop. that was fine by me - i headed over the Dogwood Cafe in Wadhams (also a "rustic style bakery", somewhat reminiscent of Canto). Susie, one of the girls who works on the farm walked in so we went on a quest to find the town of Lake Placid with her new puppy Oliver. Alas, two missed turns and about an hour later, we decided our mission would be left unaccomplished and we settled for buying beer and smore supplies in Elizabethtown. Sam and Matt had spent the morning building up the bonfire with a bunch of the Middlebury rugby team, so we went to the bonfire for a bit and then made our spontaneous dinner at Susie's - pork chops from the 3 pigs Sam slaughtered this week (3 pigs = a boatload of porkchops), leek-y mashed potatoes, celeriac, green beans, hard boiled eggs, olive bread from Dogwood cafe, and of course plenty of red wine and dark beer to round it out.

Thanksgiving

I think thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it's the only one that is still tied closely into it's original roots. It is at heart a harvest holiday so as I farmer it's one I value most. To consider really where all my food comes from, to be thankful for not just the people that raised it but also the animals and the grass and plants truly lets me sit down with a sense of wonder and a sense of being part of a huge system.

This year at one Thanksgiving we were talking about why Canadian Thanksgiving happens before American Thanksgiving. I said I though it was because Thanksgiving was a harvest holiday. "Oh really?" she said. "I guess that makes sense, I never thought about it.".

I was dismayed. here is my favorite holiday, the one that to my way of thinking is still relatively untainted by commercial profits. The holiday that encourages reflecting on what we are thankful for, which I know I still don't feel that I do enough.

This year, I am thankful for family and friends. For getting a chance to go to Argentina and finding out that my father is not weird because he eats the middle out of baguettes and then sticks sausages in, it's something Argentinians call "choripan." I am thankful for the chance to have my hands in the soil in Argentina, in Massachusetts, in New York. I am thankful for being welcomed into communities which honored my work, supported me and made me laugh. I am thankful for so many rich relationships which made me laugh and made me learn. I am thankful for the chance to start many days this year with my head pressed into the flank of Chloe, the dairy cow, and to end my days looking at the stars.

Urban Sustainability

How do you compromise sustainability when living in an urban setting? I have been facing moral dilemmas every day since I moved back. I can't get raw milk in the city so I settle for expensive organic milk purchased at the co-op. I have been composting despite not yet discovering where I will bring the compost when it is full. I have been eating an incredible amount of non-local guacamole, which i feel is justified by the fact that it will get thrown out from the bakery if I don't take it to a good home. I miss farming desperately - I went up to Methuen to help out with some gleaning last week. A farm up there donated 30,000 heads of lettuce to the food bank and they had to come up with volunteers to harvest it. We spent the morning cutting lettuce into laundry baskets, dumping them onto a tarp and then hoisting the tarp and throwing the rest into the back of a pickup truck to drive it to another farm where they were delivering the pallets and boxes to ship it all into the city. The soil out here is incredibly sandy compared to western Mass, the fields are flat and the sprawl has surrounded the land, but it is still a joy to be outside in these late fall days, getting my hands in the soil and contributing to one part of the growth cycle.



I've started working at the bakery (www.canto6bakery.com) and learned how to make lattes, cappuchinos, sandwiches and how to run the register. I've been back to work on target hunger meetings in western mass and I've been down to Maryland to wait with my mom in doctors' offices. All the while i've been reading Wendell Berry's "The Unsettling of America", bell hooks' "Belonging" and Helen Nearing's "Loving and Leaving the Good Life". All of them are pointing me towards the land, towards overcoming the fear of change and the lack of security of farm life and going for it. I often think of my personal goalsetting through the question "what would i regret NOT doing years down the line?" I am likely to regret decisions I make through fear or lack of confidence in my abilities. I am likely to regret taking the easy road. If I go boldly in the direction of my dreams, I don't think I will regret it, even if my dreams change and I learn that I am actually supposed to be moving in another direction. We'll see where those dreams take me next...

Snow!

It snowed last week. We put straw on 4 beds of garlic and 4 beds of strawberries to keep them from constantly freezing and thawing - it's better if this holds the freeze. We spent a bunch of time digging paths in the flower garden - marking them off with stakes and string so we'd dig them straight and then digging the paths and throwing it on top of the beds to build them up and better define them for next year.

It was also our last week of distribution - and it was busy Friday and Saturday! we moved the chickens back inside the barn and started bring the cows in (they didn't always cooperate - we were out til 6:45 in the dark snow on Tuesday trying to chase down Leche, one of the beef calves that ran through a fence). Jason took Moses, our Brown Swiss foster calf, back to Cricket Creek farm and dried Chloe off for the winter.

We also said a lot of goodbyes - to so many great shareholders who we've gotten to know this year, to Don and Bridget, Sam and Elizabeth, and each other. Driving back into Cambridge was a bit surreal, but I'm back living with Liz, Mel and Emily and spent my birthday surrounded by friends, playing with the dog, going out to brunch and getting settled back in here. I miss Caretaker already - but i'll be back Saturday to finish moving!

orcharding & endings

so we've been having lots of "lasts". Our last harvest, our harvest party, and we're coming up on our last week. It's been a crazy year and i'm not sad it's over, i'm glad it happened. We cleared out the last apples last week. Chloe LOVES apples, so she stands very patiently outside the fence and watches us pick them intently. when we are picking the periphery trees, she gets anything we drop. She's funny to watch - she will look at you as you toss her an apple, but unlike a dog she's still looking at you, not following the apple's trajectory. then when she hears it fall, she goes sniffing off in the general direction. When she finds it, she chomps down on the whole thing.



We had some hard cold rain, especially all day Wednesday. So we spent most of the day canning applesauce and also headed over the Cricket Creek, a dairy 2 miles away to go on a tour. They're milking 31 dairy cows and hope to get up to 44 this winter. We say their milking parlor, their cheese room (they make Mozzarella and a hard cheese called Maggie's Round, and also sell Queso Fresco to MassMOCA), their bakery and their blind 4H calf, Helen. Moses is one of their calves, and he'll head back over there when we dry Chloe off next week. He and Chloe are super affectionate and are often nuzzling each other. In the meantime, I had my last week of milking Chloe which was great. Her winter coat is growing in and is super soft. It's a treat to start off the day nuzzling my head into the little nook between side and her back hip, and watch her chewing her cud as I milk. I taught a class this week on making yogurt and yogurt cheese. so easy! here's the recipe:
heat 1/2 gallon milk (raw or pastuerized) over medium heat until it reaches 180F. cool to 115F in a sink full of cold water. take 1 cup of this warm milk and mix in 1/2 cup of starter yogurt (any plain yogurt you buy from the store, as long as it says it has "live active cultures"). Stir this yogurt mixture back into the milk. Put the milk into a container (we us the big 1/2 gallon Mason jars) and keep it warm (around 70F) for 8-10 hours or overnight. we usually put a down vest over it and put it somewhere warm.

Or to make yogurt cheese: put a colander over a plate or bowl. Line the colander with 4 layers of cheesecloth. Pour in 2 cups of yogurt, cover the yogurt with the edges of the cheesecloth, and allow to drain overnight in the fridge. the next day you can mix in different flavorings. we tried a savory one with cayenne, cumin and salt, and a sweet one with cinnamon and sugar. yum!

We still had raspberries to glean at the start of this week! it's been a great season for them. But by today the farm looked pretty empty. Our cover crops are a beautiful green and we spent much of the week digging the paths in the flower garden. The last flowers are gone and now the only thing we pick from the fields for distribution is the kale; everything else we bring up from the greenhouse or the root cellar.

The berkshire leafpeepers

I almost got in an accident this weekend and it was because of the most terrifying cars on the road: leafpeepers. likely to pull over (or just plain stop) with no warning on the highways out here, I have passed about 50 at a time on the top of one hill into town. But if you can't beat them, you gotta join them. So i took advantage of the amazing weather and the peak of fall foliage this week and hiked up to Stony Ledge, part of Mount Greylock. it was amazing!

This week Grant came by to visit while his sister was checking out Williams. We headed to the Red Herring (the one bar in town) to catch up while the Red Sox lost to the Rays. It's hard to believe there are just 2 weeks left in the season. This marks my last week feeding the animals (although there's little to do - i just feed the chickens, collect the eggs, and try to move the beef cows when they moo a lot). Otherwise we spent the morning "popping" garlic. We harvested the garlic in July, hung it to dry for about 6 weeks, cut the tops off and sorted out the big heads from the small heads. We want to find the biggest cloves to plant, because big cloves grow into big heads for next year. So we are separating the cloves on each head and trying to find the biggest ones that aren't damaged. Between that job and shoveling manure, we've had a banner week for inside jobs that let us listen to the radio - lots of Meatloaf, Billy Joel and U2.

frosty mornings

We've had some cold mornings recently (several light frosts and also a heavy frost). Tomatoes are gone and we harvest more things the day ahead of time. Although lettuce and most of our greens can withstand a frost, we can't harvest them while they are frozen or they wilt into mush. So we harvest them either the day ahead or in the late morning when they have thawed. This morning we harvested the rest of the cabbage to put it into cold storage - super cold cutting cabbage with your bare hands! it's incredible to see the steam rise off all the compost piles...and to see your breath in the cabin in the morning.




A couple weeks ago Michael and I drove down to Poughkeepsie for a CRAFT visit to the Poughkeepsie farm Project. It's a group I've known about for awhile since Kate, my roommate in Lincoln, was their assistant farm manager before working at the food project. They are doing a community seed bank and have been doing a bunch of seed saving with the Green Teen youth group they work with. I got some cilantro seeds from there (I could use them as coriander, but I'm going to save them to start my own thing!) Here's a hawk on top of their meditation garden. Afterwards we went to an Irish pub in town and managed to catch some British soccer. This week we saw the movie "Trouble the Waters", shot by an aspiring rap artist in the 9th ward of New Orlearns during Katrina. Definitely worth seeing. Tomorrow we're going to a Peter Singer talk at Williams. So much happening around here!

beef and bulk harvests

it's starting to get chilly! we've been harvesting the last of our hot crops (tomatoes are all pulled up, and we've pulled all the red and green ones from the hoophouse!). I made fried green tomatoes for dinner last week. the peppers are holding on but we'll probably pull them tomorrow because we're expecting a hard frost tomorrow night. We've been spending other time getting the farm ready for winter. Today we did the 2nd of the "bulk harvests". that's when we harvest everything we planted for a whole crop all at once, and put in the root cellar. so we finished pulling up the rutabagas, putting them in feed bags and stacking them down there last week and today we started on the celeriac. We like to sing that as "celeriac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac...you oughta know by now", so we've had billy joel on the mind all day. plus this afternoon we were stacking wood, so we got to listen to the radio (no "movin out" but other billy joel classics we got were "always a woman to me" and "we didn't start the fire").

Tomorrow the new guy from the slaughterhouse will come for Lina and for the other 4 pigs. I spent a bit of time with her yesterday. She's always been pretty flighty - we all can get close to Chloe and she even "hugged" me yesterday, cradling me between her neck and her body. Lina is very curious and let me get up close enough for a brief pat, but then shies away. When I moved the chicken fence last month she was in the same pasture as them and kept jumping the fence (while it was on!) once she had figured out where the chicken feed was. She's definitely mellowed out a bit in the last couple of weeks. She's still a true advocate for others. when we have Chloe in to get milked or when we put moses in at night (we have to separate him overnight from Chloe or we don't get any milk), Lina moos constantly for 20 minutes. When we're milking she's even figured out how to stick her head through the open window to moo more directly at me and Chloe. We will certainly miss her, and hope that the farm members that buy the beef this fall really enjoy it. It's a really interesting and emotionally challenging part of farm life for me. I value so much eating meat from a farm where I know it's been not just humanely treated, but treated with love and respect. Lina has had a special place in our year here.

Foster calves, chickens and campfires

As Moses, our new foster calf asks, "What's going on???" ahhh...it's been awhile which I will firmly blame on having a cold, but i'm sure that was only one factor. Since the last blog I have helped at Michael's farm on one of their chicken processing days. We started off catching the chickens out of the pens and putting htem in crates. Rich brought the crates down on the tractor while Linda set everything up inside. we got the chickens in just before a huge downpour that lasted the whole morning - Rich said sometimes he couldn't even see the thermometer he was holding in his hand. I was pretty psyched to be spending that morning inside. So they use cones to hold the chickens upside-down while you do the knife work (this keeps them from running around "like a chicken with their head cut off", because they do thrash quite a bit afterwards). then they get scalded (hence the need for the thermometer) for 30 seconds before going into the plucker. Robin took them out of the plucker and gave them to Linda's dad, who takes the heads and feet off and also removesthe scent gland or preening gland from their back. Then it came to me and Sarah to gut them. (I was given the advice: "don't cut the green thing". this is the bile sac and if you cut it the bile will stain the meat, and anything you're wearing). then it goes to Michael and Linda who wash them and tucked the feet under and put them into ice baths to hold. there's lots of time to talk, they played a solid prank on me. when i came in, Linda asked where my hat was, "Michael - you didn't tell her to bring a hat? well go see what you can find in the house then". michael comes back after awhile all apologetic with a hat that looks like I'm a chicken, complete with rooster plume and all. "sorry, it's all i could find". after about 20 minutes Linda says "Michael - you gonna tell that poor girl what's going on?". Michael "oh yeah - we don't have to wear hats". in retribution halfway through the day michael's washing birds and gets one with an extra foot coming out the bottom. "what's this?" Linda: "oh sometimes they grow like that". Michael "you know, for a VERY short second there i thought maybe sometimes they did". I got said foot thrown at me. good times.




Meanwhile at caretaker, last Tuesday was Gabriella's 5th birthday. Geoff made a campfire and roasted "hobo-packs" of potatoes and carrots and onions and cheese wrapped in foil right on the fire, and then we had smores for dessert while Don played Gabriella's favorite song, Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire". she has good musical taste for a five year old!

Last week we got our first frost. it took out our basil and we definitely have frost damage on the husk cherries and the peppers, but they're both still around. we've moved onto doing lots of work cleaning up the farm - cover cropping, pulling out tomato stakes, pulling up the black plastic that was under a lot of the squash plants. It's definitely really strange to look out over the farm and see so much open land now. The leaves here are just starting to turn and I can tell they will be beautiful.

chicken pens & bee stings

Last weekend Michael and I went off on a pretty unsuccessful trip to Home Depot. The idea was to make a chicken pen light enough for one person to move it easily. The plan was to use electric conduit. The question was: should it be welded together at the corners? after talking to some folks about how nasty a material it is in terms of welding and fumes, we decided to see if we could find some joints. We picked up his neighbor Ed, who is always wandering around Cheshire looking for a ride, and heading to Home Depot. 30 minutes later we come back to the car. Ed says "what're you doing back here empty handed? you've been in there forever!" Alas, 30 minutes and two friendly customer service folks later, we discovered that the joints were all threaded although the conduit wasn't, and they were $3 a pop and only had elbows, no T's and no "3 way orthagonal joints" (to use to make the corner of a cube). PVC isn't great, because in the sun it gets really brittle, so maybe the Joel Salatin wooden ones are the best bet. The farm we went to up in Pownal has Joel Salatin pens (so does Homestead, where Michael works). they're challenging to move with one person - at homestead one person rolls the front side with the dolly while the other walks the back side forward.

The whole farm crew just went to visit our next door neighbor who raises chickens and beef. In his set up, he props the pen up on the tire and crate everyday because "about 80% of the chickens i get are roosters, and they're always fighting, so this way if there's a fight they can get outta each other's hair and cool off". He moves the chicken fence every two days, props up the pen in the morning, feeds them so most of them are out of the pen, and then moves it. His cows are the ones that often see our cows across the fence and spend hours mooing at each other. apparently one of our cows jumped over 2 years ago and hung out with his herd for 3 weeks before eventually coming home.



Meanwhile, I went in to harvest plums from the orchard last week and a bee flew right into my hair, starts freaking out, of course I start trying to brush it out of my hair, it stings me on the eyelid, another bee lands on me and stings me on the back of the neck. Another stings katie, we all run out of the orchard. over the course of lunch, my eye swelled more and more. I took some benedryl (and promptly lay down for a quick nap. i woke up and couldn't even open my eye. So Melissa drove me down to the clinic in Pittsfield, where the doctor took one look and sent me to the emergency room. anyway, I ended up walking out with a prescription for an epipen. Just to prove to my mom that I don't only put up flattering pictures of myself on my blog, here's what I look like 10 hours after I get stung by a bee on my eyelid.

darkness, lightness and visitors

Everyday the sun comes up later, and on rainy days now it still seems totally dark when we wake up. this morning when I walked up to start harvesting the light was on in the barn as we got the carts ready to harvest for CSA distribution. After several weeks straight of lots of rain, we had a week of HOT dry weather - until today when we're rained in by Hurricane Hanna. Luckily this dry weather has also coincided with some of our big volunteer groups like Williams "where am I" orientation groups and a group from Kripalu, a nearby meditation and yoga retreat, who are doing a semester-long intensive retreat. So we've been busy doing lots of the BIG harvests - potatoes (red, white and purple!) and winter squash.

Two weeks ago my mom came up to visit for a long weekend. She helped us harvest lots and we cooked up lots of quesadillas for a big friday dinner with the Smiths and Zoati, an exchange student they're hosting from Kenya, and our baker Jenna. Then we drove out Saturday afternoon to meet my Cambridge roommates Liz, Emily and Charlene at Red Fire Farm, where they're members, for the tomato festival. We hung out with the dog, tried 75 different tomatoes, I ran into Amara, one of my old interns from the food project - overall it was a great day. And I got to say goodbye to Beck - he's getting adopted this weekend. Afterwards my mom and I went to dinner up at the People's Pint in Greenfield (always a favorite) and ran into Elise, who used to manage the Food Project farm. So it was a great day for catching up with old friends.

This week Becca and Josh also came to visit! We had a rather unsuccessful campfire (I think the wood was too wet, so we finally resigned ourselves to holding marshmallows over our burning pieces of newspaper until the marshmallow itself caught - not the most farmy experience but the smores were still worth it). and we had lots of ice cream at lunch after working with volunteers.

the stork brings babies, and the heron...

Our volunteers are a great source of new stories, since otherwise the four of us (Katie, Don, Melissa and I) spend a lot of time working together and run into telling the same stories over and over. This past week we've had a great blue heron on the farm - he's been here before but usually just in the pond at the bottom of the fields. But recently he's been walking through the collards, standing between the compost piles and the hoophouse, and hanging out with the cows in their pastures. He's incredibly beautiful. One of the volunteers saw it and told the story of first seeing one just before she gave birth, and how she was convince then that maybe the storks really do bring the babies.

This week Don and Bridget are off on vacation, so it’s a bit of a test run for us apprentices to run the farm. So far things are going pretty well, although we had some very sad news. On Sunday afternoon, I hadn't seen Charlie, the Jersey calf, in a whole day. I asked around but no one else had seen him. Chloe was mooing like she was looking for him. But I checked Chloe, and her udders didn't seem full, so I figured he had to just be lost, galavanting around somewhere, since he had to have drunk something from Chloe recently. But when we still couldn't find him Monday morning and Chloe's moos became more frantic, we knew something was up. So while I was pouring the milk off, Katie and Melissa went looking. They found him dead without a scratch on him. We called Jason and Amy, our neighbors who run a dairy. They came over and looked to see if he had an infection where he'd been elastrated, but found nothing - even said he looked like a "beautiful, healthy calf".

it's been a hard week because of it. Although I know that sometimes calves just die, it's hard when it's not expected and when we don't have a solid explanation. And it's also hard when we have few enough animals that we form a close bond with them individually. It's also been an adjustment in work schedules. Since Charlie isn't drinking from Chloe, we have to milk her twice a day. So this week I'm still milking in the mornings and Katie's milking in the afternoons (ideally we'd milk 12 hours apart; we're doing 6:15 am and 4:30pm). We're also getting twice as much milk (a mixed blessing, since we have half as many folks). so I brought milk for some folks to have at the CRAFT visit to Threshold Orchard, and we've been making tons of dairy products. Monday, Katie made purple cow ice cream (I picked raspberries and we added in chocolate chips). Later that night I made Queso fresco. This must be the easiest cheese to make. you bring the milk to between 185 to 190F, then you slowly add 1/4 cup of vinegar per gallon of milk until curds form. then you strain it in cheese cloth. next we need to figure out the appropriate time to salt it - we tried to brine it (when you hang it from the cheese cloth, you're dipping it in super salty water) but that only really makes the outer edge salty. So we'll see - we're doing another ricotta tomorrow. And tonight Melissa made a vanilla frozen custard with chocolate chips and coconut flakes. This might be our new winner - the eggs really gives it a much creamier texture, and previously our ice creams have been good but a little icy.

Otherwise it's been a great week for us to get the hang of prioritizing and splitting tasks each day. It has also given me a clearer view of just how much Bridget does behind the scenes - from pouring and skimming milk and making yogurt and cheese and washing milk cloths and drying cloths and making breakfast - wow! Between doing all that and milking twice a day we're not getting as much field work done as usual. But distribution is going well and we had a great group of volunteers out today to cut strawberry runners, so we've got things under control. And tomorrow I get to pick up my mom at the airport and show her the farm all weekend!

NOFA!

The Summer NOFA conference (Northeast organic farming association) was last weekend and it was great. We stayed with the apprentices at Brookfield farm just a couple miles away, trading them raw milk for the free place to crash. It was good to hang out with them, the only awkward moment was walking into the downstairs apartment of their house by mistake (luckily, the folks downstairs also work at Brookfield, so they weren’t total randos). I went to workshops on basic homesteader plumbing, where we got to solder copper water pipes together, leasing, where we went through sample land leases, making CSA’s more accessible to low-income folks, where we heard about sliding scale pricing for shares, a workshop on building up a core group to run your CSA (ahhh….volunteers!) and one on raising grass-fed beef, where I heard more about the new processing center for small farmers that will hopefully go up in Western Mass soon. Plus, I got to see a bunch of Food Project folks…like Henry bobbing for apples at the fair. And I got to take Katie contra dancing.

Before we took off for NOFA, Melissa and I sent the beef cows off to be with a bull. First, we had to separate Lina from the group, since she’s going to the butcher in the fall and won’t be bred. We coaxed her into the barn with some grain, I closed the gate behind her, and Melissa led her through and let her out into the barnyard. Whew. Step 1 done. Next we had to get Lukey, Lucy and their two calves Maya and Leche into the barn. We tried grain to no avail. Then Elizabeth came out and suggested zucchini. Perfect – we have tons of extra zucchini. We finally get Lukey in, and Lucy and the 2 calves follow. We close them into the pen where they stay in the winter with a couple more zucchinis for a reward for good behavior. Next we put Lina in with Chloe and Charlie in the house pasture. Chloe and Lina went crazy! We hadn’t thought about it, but they are both usually the “followers”, so now they had to establish who was dominant. Melissa and I watched as they crashed into the chicken fence, then into the fence between the pasture and the flower garden, and finally chased each other around the chicken fence two or three times. Turns out Chloe is dominant. Now that they have that settled, they seem relatively easygoing with each other, although Lina mooes constantly whenever we have Chloe in to be milked. You can see them all in around the chickens (and you can see Charlie by the gate to the orchard – they’ve also found their way into that as well!)

Meanwhile this week has been a big week for melons. We harvest them by tossing from the middle rows to someone standing on the outside row, where we stack them into crates and put the crate in the tractor. Super fun. And melons make a great midday snack in the field – lots of juice when you’re thirsty. We had one yesterday in the midst of the onion harvest. Like the garlic harvest, you have to wait for a dry day and then you harvest them with a big group. Onions don’t hang to dry, instead we spread them out in a single layer over the whole greenhouse. This “curing” process dries them and helps to keep them from rotting. Then we’ll keep them in the cooler, turned off in the winter. (onions are stored best in a cool, dry place. Most of our other crops will go into the root cellar which is cold and wet).

Our chickens have been laying full blast, so we collect eggs when we feed them in the morning and then again at noon. You have to pick up the eggs gently but quickly because the chickens are getting broody (they want to sit on them to hatch them...of course I know that we don't have a rooster so they won't turn into chicks, but I've tried to explain this to them many times to no avail). So they peck at you and cluck and generally make you feel bad for stealing all their eggs. But then you come in with between 6 and 7 dozen eggs every day! we wash them and set them on a towel to dry before packaging them up. there's a huge range of sizes, from tiny little ones that they lay at first to a couple big honkers that will barely fit into the crates for "jumbo" sized eggs.

vacaciones

So I'm just back from vacation, which was excellent. It all started with - what else? - a farm tour. I went to see 2 spoons farm, a new meat CSA up in Pownal, VT. They just started in April and jumped in, with tamworth pigs, chickens (they started them in the Joel Salatin style pens, but moved into doing pastured chicken with movable electric chicken fence, like we do), dairy goats, cows, sheep and a bit of a garden for themselves. I talked to an 8 year old at the beginning about the hanging things on the goat. she said they were called billies, and it was a billy goat. i pointed out the udder and said i didn't think it was a billy goat (from wikipedia: they're called wattles). Gabriella took the picture of me and Michael there.

then i headed to boston where i walked into 69 elm and got a mud mask. most excellent. the week was full of lots of biking, farmers markets, good folks, dogs and good food. My roommates are fostering a greyhound, Beck, so we took him on lots of walks and to an adoption day on Sunday where he got lots of attention and interest. Becky and I rode bikes over to see the city hall market, and I met an awesome farmer at central square - his name is farmer al, he's been selling at central sq since the 70's, and he sells a book called "farmer al's seeds of wisdom". It's got great stuff like "if the water isn't coming out, there's probably a crimp in the hose". awesome.

I also got to stop by the food project and check out the Urban Learning Farm - complete with a new shed (on the left) and a grape arbor in the middle! and the beds look awesome. this year our interns laid out the garden in the winter, with a bed for a salsa garden, a bed to attract butterflies, beds laid out in rows and beds laid out in square foot gardening.

Meanwhile on the farm we did our garlic harvest a couple of weeks ago. Don drove through with the tractor and the chisel plow to loosen them and then we had tons of volunteers who helped us pull them up, put them into the tractor, put them into bunches of about 10, tie a slip knot around them and hang them in the barn. They'll dry up there for about 4-6 weeks.

This week is my distribution week, and it's also when we'll start to get tomatillos...and melons! so exciting! we also had a couple raspberries, I think they'll start soon. Melissa and Geoff and I spent the whole weekend canning and I made cookies. This weekend we're heading to the NOFA conference.

New Calves!

So we now have 2 baby calves from the beef cattle. After a lot of discussion of names, we have finally settled on Leche (for the male calf of Lukey - he's very white) and Maya (for Lucy's baby girl). Now wait you say, all the beef cows have names that start with "L". This is true. but Maya was born on Micah's 2nd birthday, so in honor of that, we gave Maya an "M" name. They are both really sweet, and I hiked up last week to check on the cows and visited with them. The cows have been making lots of noise - not just because of the new calves, but because our neighbor Brian Young has cows too, and at the moment they're right across the fence from our cows. So I will hear all this ruckus and I'll hike all the way up the hill to see what's going on, and it just that our cows are nose-to-nose talking with the cows from next door.

In the meantime, we've been having some crazy weather. I keep waking up to huge wind and thunderstorms in the middle of the night. Katie and I went out for burgers and beer on Saturday but decided to wait a couple minutes when this storm pulled in! Also on Saturday I ushered at a play for the Williamstown Theatre Festival. It was great - it's called Brokeology. Plus as I handed out programs I saw two faces that looked familiar - turned out it was Amy who I went to build Habitat houses with in Georgia my freshman year and her fiance Ben!


Everything on the farm is doing really well. we hit the halfway point of the apprenticeship and celebrated with a big dinner with cider from the orchard, sauteed escarole, baked fennel and spanakopita. Meanwhile, Gabriella has started making salads (apparently, this has been her specialty the last couple of years). Sometimes they have unusual combinations (this wa s adessert actually: lemon balm, mint and marshmallows. pretty tasty). other times they just feature a mix of the veggies we have on the farm. Tonight she made the salad all by herself. We had green beans, baby lettuce and sun gold cherry tomatoes. yum!