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.