I’m still new enough to farming that almost every part of it is exciting. But today was an exceptionally awesome day at the farm.
1. Baby carrots!
2. Baby beans!
3. Baby melons!
4. Baby heirloom tomatoes!
5. Baby butternut squash!
6. Baby broccoli!
7. Baby cucumber!
8. Ready-to-make-a-baby popcorn!
9. And finally, the height of my day, a sweet little frog chilling in a squash blossom.
Can we get a close-up?
Farming has got to be one of the least defined career paths out there. You can go to school for it, you can grow up with it, but you certainly don’t have to do either. Still, I can’t imagine many farmers out there have gone about it in such a backwards fashion as me. I’ve been running my own little farm (though really, I hesitate to even call it that — usually I tell people it’s between a big garden and a very small farm) for almost a month and a half now, but before that I’d never even had a garden before. No, really. I worked at a farm for a year and a half, most of that time as an assistant manager, helping plan and make decisions, but I’d never seen a plant through its whole life cycle before.
When I got started with my big garden/small farm a few weeks ago, there were several anxious days in which I was sure that none of my seeds would grow. I was amazed when almost everything came up without problems.
It’s been 44 days since I put the first seeds in the ground, and I’m sure I’ve learned at least one new thing each of those days. I’m listing some of them here hoping that someone will find them useful, or at least that I’ll get a real kick out of reading this after I’ve got a season under my belt.
Speaking of that last one, I’m collaborating with a few friends to open up a produce stand starting next month. Chris, Ernie, Julie, Megan, Ingrid, and I will have all our goodies up for sale outside of Ernie’s Tin Bar on Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll post more details here once we figure it all out.
(A quick update: I left my job at that other farm last week, and after a few days of downtime, have started farming on a little almost-quarter-acre field on my friend Ernie’s property.)
Today I:
(Don't worry, we drove nice and slow.)
I also sunburned my lower back, forearms, and face. I have cuts and blisters on my hands, and my palms are so sore that it hurts to high-five. Of course, everything else is sore too. And I’m tired, so tired. Two days of farming has totally kicked my pansy, used-to-parking-itself-on-a-padded-chair-all-day ASS.
But today when I walked into my favorite diner, my favorite cashier said, “You look happy!” I am SO happy, I can’t even tell you. I’ve never had a job where I was so elated at the end of the second day. In my last job, I read dozens of intern applications that waxed poetic on the soulful joys of farming. Now I’m finally feeling it.
On tomorrow’s to-do list: another irrigation errand run (I fear that this is going to become a theme), rolling out drip lines, planting (popcorn, dry beans, green beans, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, muskmelons, lettuce, more beets, and spinach) double-digging half of the next bed. And most importantly, visiting Mark and Velma, who I’ve barely seen in the last year and a half — largely because I’d been working so hard for a pretty crappy company. Hooray for my new independence!
If everything unfolds the way we’re hoping, by the end of spring Chris and I will be renting an acre of farmland in Petaluma from our favorite bartender. There’s still a bit of iffiness to that if, but … well, that’s not going to stop me from dreaming.
I’ve been reading Gene Logsdon’s Small Scale Grain Raising, and the more I learn about home-grown grains, the more I long for the freshest flour in the world. Imagine: freshly ground cornmeal for polenta, wheat for bread, and all manner of whole grains for rich, nutty pancakes. Mmmmm.
And Chris keeps acquiring books on beer brewing and whiskey distilling. His face already lights up with pride when he hands someone a well-made Manhattan – but if we grew the grain, harvested and threshed it, and made the liquor? Wowee, that’d really be something.
Over the last year-and-a-bit I’ve learned to have a greater respect and love for vegetables and eggs by getting involved in the production of them. I’m hoping that home-grown grains will leave the same impression. I get the feeling that compared to veggies, growing grains takes much more work, and is much less profitable. But I’m planning on setting aside a quarter of our little acre for corn, wheat, oats, barley, and other grainy goodies.
(Oh, we’re also going to plant tons of veggies for a mini/starter-CSA. Pretty soon I’m going to start soliciting for subscriptions — consider yourself warned.)
I just made seven pints of spicy pickled carrots with wild fennel, and I’ve got a box of rhubarb waiting to be preserved in syrup tomorrow. Setting aside some of the harvest is a big part of eating locally, and it’s fun! I’ve hardly done any preserving before, but now that we’re past the peak of summer production, it suddenly seems too important to put off.
I’m hoping to get a pressure canner in the next couple weeks so I can get low-acid goodies canned in addition to the pickles and jams. Just thinking about it has got me day-dreaming of a winter full of colorful jars.
A list to ease my excitement:
Yum. What else?
Our farm is underway.
Just about a year ago, Chris and I left San Francisco to begin our farming adventure. It amazes me to think of our mindset back then; we were sick and tired of working crappy jobs that barely paid the rent for our equally crappy basement apartment, so we took off. We had heard of WWOOF through several friends, and figured we’d travel around and do farm work just to get by.
At that point it seemed like something we could handle, and maybe even something we’d enjoy, but I don’t think either of us expected to be totally sucked in by it. But halfway through our first semester at Green String interns, before the winter was over, it became clear that farming was IT for us.
Since we finished our internships in May, we’ve been f’real farm employees, working long hours six or seven days a week, and fantasizing about having our own little farm someday. We’re living on one of our boss’s properties, and part of his offer to us was that we’d set up a little market garden here, and get a mini-incubator farm going. But between our long hours (and resulting exhaustion) and a couple broken rototillers, it just hasn’t happened.
Well, it *hadn’t* happened. Now…
Now it’s happening! I can’t tell you how excited I am. We picked out the garden spot (maybe about an acre out of the 110 of the property) almost as soon as we moved in, and Chris has been watering it ocassionally to soften up the hard soil.
We’re going to get the rototiller out here next week (finally!), but I’m also doing a little experiment. I’ve planted part of the space this week with turnips (Chinese red round, Japanese shogoin, and French navet des vertus marteau, ho ho) and Italian sugarloaf chicory, because I have it on good authority that turnips and chicory plants will not only thrive in hard soil, they’ll actually bust it up! I’m going to plant another section with cover-crop varieties of daikon radish and chicory, which will probably do a lot more work on the soil but also won’t be particularly edible. The remainder of the garden will be tilled and planted with non-experimental crops — lots of brassicas, greens, root veggies, and herbs — and we’ll go from there.
If all goes well, we’ll start showing up at the Sonoma farmers market on Friday mornings with some goodies to sell. If it goes really well, we may start up a CSA by spring. Whatever form our little garden takes, we’ll be calling it Lazy Fox Farm, in honor of the adorable little bastards who ate our roosters — and probably watch our every move from the shadows.
It’s difficult to find the time to work on our own project when we’re so immersed in our jobs, but heading out there at sunset to rake, seed, and water doesn’t feel like work. Right now, those 8 rows of seed sitting in our beautiful, sweet-smelling soil feel likes new world of possibilities.
*Sigh* I wrote this on Saturday, back when they were all alive. Since then three (including my dear Bowie) have been dragged off by a fox — all in one night! — but the two that remain are being safely guarded, I assure you. Anyways.
We got chickens!
Hylla (the chicken lady at Green String) has been complaining about these five young roosters for a couple weeks. They were *supposed* to be hens, but 5 out of the batch of 75 day-old chicks we got in April turned out to be boys, and they’ve been harassing the poor ladies ever since they got their combs. When you walk into the henhouse where their group lives, you see lots of bare butts and feathers absolutely everywhere. For the first time, Hylla suggested to Bob and Ross that they harvest some chickens.
She wanted them gone right away, but they’re still so small! In another few weeks, they’ll be respectably sized roosters with a heck of a lot more meat on them. So yesterday, Ross, Katrina, and I loaded them into the truck (well, really I watched while Ross and Katrina did all the work. I still haven’t gotten the hang of catching chickens) and drove them up to our house. Ross helped Chris set up a makeshift home for them, and suddenly Chris and I were the proud owners of five beautiful young roosters!
Four of them are a local hybrid (egg and meat) breed, Sonoma somethingorother. When they’re big enough, I’ll finally learn how to kill, pluck, gut, and cook a chicken. Yup, I’m planning on interrupting my 11-year stint as a vegetarian soon. Just for these guys though. I really have no interest in eating meat, but I *do* know a ton of people who do, and I have a lot of interest in supplying people with healthy, decently raised birds. The commercial poultry situation is so sickening, even with a lot of the supposedly organic and sustainable local companies. I’d like to be part of the solution to that.
Besides, living at Green String for six months changed the way I think about a lot of things. We saw a bigger part of the circle of life and death there than suburban kids like Chris and I usually do, even though it’s mainly a vegetable farm. Animals die all the time, whether they’re going to be someone’s dinner or not, and it’s a heck of a lot more useful for everyone involved if they can be dinner. And as I try more and more to only eat what’s grown locally and sustainably, and as I do real work more often, I feel less and less like I can meet my body’s needs through grains, legumes, and veggies alone. I haven’t had tofu in months! The eggs and dairy that have become a necessary part of my diet are locally and well-produced (and all the more delicious for it!), but they still have some death implicit in their production. What do you do with a hen who’s a few years old and has stopped producing? Wait until her sisters peck her to death? Or slaughter her a little earlier, throw her in the stew pot, and put her to good use? And what about the calf born to each dairy cow every year to keep her producing milk? How unsustainable (in the literal sense) would it be to to try to keep every one?
Anyways, back to our new chickens.
The other guy is a barred rock, and there’s no way we’re going to eat him anytime soon. He’s beautiful! My previous favorite rooster at Green String was a barred rock too. (See the story of his death for more on why I’m okay with killing chickens.) This guy looks a little bit like a hen, with his androgynously dinky comb, so we’ve named him Bowie. When we get hens, he’ll be the one in charge of fertilizing eggs and protecting our little ladies. But for now, he’s just the pretty one.
So we loaded them into a big cage that the previous tenants had left close (but not too close) to our house. Ross and Chris wrapped the three sides in some sheep fencing, since some of the gaps between the bars are a bit too wide. This held them for about an hour.
I went to check on the guys, and one of the little whiteys was cruising around outside the cage! I thought he must have squeezed through a gap, so I re-wrapped the sides with a roll of chicken wire I found, and resolved to catch the son of a bitch. Chris and I chased him around and around for half an hour, and when we finally got him close enough to the cage, I held the door open while Chris walked him toward it. That’s when the second rooster got out.
We tried in vain to herd them for a little while longer, and then decided to wait until it got dark for a second attempt. Chickens get so calm once it’s dark that you can pick them up easily and they’ll only cluck a little. We went back just after sunset, and one of the roosters was perched right on top of the cage — but the other one was no where in sight. We searched for the missing guy until we couldn’t see anymore (no flashlights, d’oh!), then shouted into the darkness that he was on his own, and returned to the cage.
I thought I could grab that one sitting there. He looked so peaceful! In fact, when I reached out to grab him, I was so surprised that he hadn’t reacted that I fumbled, and by the time he did start freaking out I could only grab his tail. He was flapping around like crazy, trying to run away, and I was holding onto his tail feathers. Unable to get a better hold, I let go (afterward, I realized I should have held his tail in one hand while I grabbed a leg in the other), and we lost another chicken to the night.
We did another quick walk to look for the two, and right before bed I checked for them again, but we couldn’t find them. I felt horrible for losing two-fifths of our flock within the first few hours, and was sure that between the mountain lion, bobcats, foxes, and other nocturnal predators we have prowling our woods, neither of them would survive the night.
At 5:30 this morning the sun came up, and holy CRAP were our roosters excited. Chris didn’t wake up, but I sure as hell did. I guess during the week it’ll be nice — we’re supposed to start work at 6 most days, so if we’re still in bed by the time the roosters get started, we’ll know that we’re running super late. For Saturday though? Ugh.
Luckily they calmed down quickly and I went back to sleep. Two hours later I was properly awake and went to check on them. I laughed as soon as I saw them.
The escaped roosters survived! And they came back! It looked like the two of them were visiting their brothers in jail. We’ve since let all of them out to roam for the day, figuring that they’ll come back when it gets dark and we can just let them in without having to herd and chase and catch the little bastards.
I’m looking forward to taking care of these funny little creatures, and it feels good to have animals again, even if they can be a pain in the ass. After the harvest we’re going to get a few hens so we can have our own eggs — and that’s the really exciting part. These guys are just practice.
I’m not much of a cheapskate by nature (I don’t raise an eyebrow at the price tag on a well-made skein of yarn) but I sure am when it comes to basic necessities that are made very cheaply by gigantic companies. Spending five dollars on sliced sandwich bread with scary ingredients, or buying a box of bandaids, or even spending a couple bucks on pasta makes me feel cheated.
I’ve been slowly but surely dispelling some of my own ideas of what “basic necessities” really are, and in every instance, my cheap, made-from-scratch solutions have been better than the purchased versions. No scary ingredients, no trips to the big box, no packaging to try to recycle, and, best of all, no gigantic corporations benefiting from my inability to provide for myself. Well, less, at least.
Of course, there’s a reason most people have allowed these things to pass from the realm of homemade to pre-made: it takes time! And making certain things, like clothes, requires serious skill. But for those of us who enjoy craftiness and practical applications for creativity, why on earth would we opt for convenience?
So here it is, Jenny’s List of Shit I’d Rather Make Than Buy, and How To Do It (part one).
Use a tiny scrap of paper or cloth (the size of the cut) and a strip of masking tape. The tape will stay on when wet far better than a bandaid, and doesn’t hurt as much when you take it off. I also like that you can make the perfect size bandage depending on what you need, instead of maintaining a ridiculous supply of pre-made ones.
Now that I’ve been making bread fairly regularly for a couple months, I can’t imagine going back to the supermarket crap. I do still like the occasional loaf from a local artisan bakery, but it really doesn’t get better than homemade. I can’t decide what it is about homemade bread that I like best; the money-saving, that there’s no crap in it (just look at the ingredient list of your next supermarket loaf), the act of making it, the taste and smell of it, or the smug satisfaction and total ego-boost that comes when I pull two perfect loaves out of the oven. Homemade bread is just magical.
I’ve come to think of white “all purpose” flour as being special occasion flour—I use it for some desserts and specialty breads like challah and popovers, but that’s about it. For day-to-day bread, muffins, quickbreads, and pancakes, I just use whole wheat flour. (And none of that “half all-purpose, half whole wheat” bullshit that so many cookbooks recommend. If you have a good quality, relatively fresh whole wheat flour, you don’t need to dilute it to get good texture.) Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food convinced me that refined grains, like white flour, ought to be the exception, not the rule; we simply haven’t evolved to handle the white stuff. Besides, whole wheat flour really does taste better for most applications—try some yeasted whole wheat pancakes and you’ll see what I mean.
Like so many skills I’ve picked up, I didn’t have an experienced baker to teach me. Certain books have been indispensable, though. The Tassajara Bread Book has a gajillion recipes, nearly all using whole wheat flour, but the best part is the 40-something page illustrated guide to the basic method of bread making. It covers how to mix, knead, shape, and slash the dough, plus everything in between. Their basic “Tassajara Bread” recipe has been my go-to since I started baking in earnest.
The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book was one of the first tomes of whole wheat baking, and while I despise the ethereal writing style (what exactly does the dough look like when it “sighs”?) and have had exactly zero luck with the recipes, it’s packed with information that will help you understand some of the science of bread making in an approachable way.
Last week I picked up The Bread Bible at the library, and within a minute of flipping through it, I knew I had to buy it. It is incredibly precise, incredibly informative, and incredibly thorough. My only complaint is that the author is far more exact than I would ever want to be in my own kitchen, but that problem is easily remedied by not following instructions to the letter. I’ve only made two breads from this book so far—a loaf of braided challah and two loaves of cinnamon swirl bread—but both have been exceptional. I’m looking forward to trying dozens more.
This has got to be the best one yet. Since Chris and I have been making our own broth every few days from kitchen scraps, I’ve looked back on my years of buying vegetable broth with shame. How much money have I wasted— hundred dollars? Two hundred?—on underflavored, overpriced, overpackaged broth?
The recipe is so simple: take all your vegetable scraps that you think might taste good, and put them in a big pot. Fill the pot with water and some salt, and put the lid on. Bring it to a boil. Then simmer it. When it looks pretty and smells insanely delicious (anyone who walks into the kitchen should breathe deeply and say, “Ohh, what smells so good?”), turn it off. Strain or scoop out the solid bits (great for worm compost, once cooled) and put the liquid in mason jars. Use it for everything: soup, rice, quinoa, sauce, bread, muffins… now that I’m not shelling out big bucks for packages of broth, I feel free to use it to flavor everything, and my cooking is all the better for it.
I once read instructions for broth-making that warned against using scraps, reasoning that if you wouldn’t want to eat it, you wouldn’t want to make flavor-juice out of it. When it comes to scraps that are truly past their prime (like, if they’re fuzzy), sure. But leek tops? Carrot peelings? Completely dead, wilted celery? Papery onion skins? These are some of the best broth ingredients around. Prolonged boiling can coax flavor out of even the most pathetic looking veggies, and since you’ll take all the solid stuff out anyways, it doesn’t matter what the texture’s like.
There are some guidelines though. Unless you want a bitter broth, I’d stay away from brassicas entirely (e.g. cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kale). Any kind of leafy green is just going to get limp and bring no flavor to the party—unless it’s good and herby like basil, of course. And make sure you get all the dirt off your veggies before they go into the pot, unless you don’t mind relinquishing the last inch or so of your pot o’ broth—I often don’t bother, since we have so many vegetables around here, and whatever we don’t manage to eat will go to the chickens or the compost.
The best part, of course, is that you can turn waste into deliciousness. The second best part, though, is that you can throw out the one-flavor-fits-all mentality of packaged vegetable broth and get into customizing. Imagine a vegetable broth made to complement its intended dish! Chris made an amazingly savory broth last night out of dumpstered mushrooms and wild fennel, and I can’t wait to find the perfect application for it. I’m thinking of trying an earthy, herby pilaf… or maybe turnip soup?
Supermarket eggs are downright nasty (and useless) compared to the good stuff. Pastured eggs cost a bundle, but hens don’t! Seriously, now that I’ve gotten used to having a chicken coop in the yard, I can’t imagine going back to store-bought eggs. Having your own chickens is super easy (most days it they take less time to care for than kneading a loaf of bread) and incredibly rewarding. You can’t beat it for freshness, and properly pastured eggs (i.e. eggs laid by hens who get to eat plants and scratch around for bugs and grubs) are more nutritious, flavorful, and easier to cook with than the industrial versions. Besides, most egg-laying chickens in commercial settings live horrible lives. (Yes, even organic, vegetarian-fed, so-called “free-range” ones—check out chapter nine of The Omnivore’s Dilemma if you don’t believe me.) And who wants to support that?
No, Best Foods ain’t the best. Homemade, mayonnaise is actually edible, believe it or not. And easy. If you’ve got a whisk and a bowl, you’re already halfway there. Read my previous blog post on making mayonnaise.
Homemade pasta is even easier to make than homemade bread, with many of the same benefits. It’s dirt cheap. It tastes about a million times better than anything you can buy. And there are no mind-boggling ingredients! Granted, it takes way more time than dumping a plastic bag of factory-made stuff into a pot, but it’s very nearly always worth it—especially if you have farm-fresh eggs.
My last tube of Aquafresh ran out a few weeks ago. I thought I’d experiment with using straight baking soda, and I haven’t looked back since! Two dollars for a new tube every few weeks is hardly an exorbitant amount of money, but it’s still my money that’s going to GlaxoSmithKline, the second largest pharmaceutical in the world, and that tube still has some ingredients I’m not so sure about it. Of course, Arm & Hammer isn’t exactly a mom and pop operation, but two dollars of baking soda ought to be enough for a year’s worth of clean teeth.
Using it is just stupid simple: rinse your toothbrush, dip it in the baking soda, and brush. It took me a couple days to get used to the slightly salty taste, but now I prefer it to the artificial, tongue-deadening faux-mint flavor.
The other night I couldn’t sleep because I was lying in bed running through all the things I have to and want to do. In an attempt to stop freaking out about it, I wrote down everything I could think of in one ginormous list. Damn.
I’ve already done some of it though.
The year’s off to a lovely start.
The interns’ New Year’s Eve party was very fun and somewhat grown-up. Nyte joined us, as well as three of Melissa’s friends and one of Julia’s. Rigo and Pedro came out too. Andrea hosted, for the most part, and made three kinds of ravioli and three kinds of sauce. I made lentil soup and Julia made amazing (and colorful) beet latkes with yogurt sauce. We had tirimisu and quite a stash of Christmas candies for dessert while we opened our Secret Santa presents. (Andrea and Julia had wrapped up cabbage and squash in newspapers and ribbons so that our guests would have gifts too.)
A minute before midnight we lit the bonfire that Andrea had set up earlier — a mountain of curly willow branches and a broken chair, that Andrea assured me was tiny compared to a true Italian bonfire. It was ablaze as we did our countdown, and then screamed, banged pots and pans, drank champagne, and ran and skipped and danced around the fire.
Yesterday was a singularly lazy day. It started with mango mimosas and tiramisu at a quiet breakfast table. Nyte stuck around for most of the day. Jeff and Andrea worked for a few hours, helping Bob refinish the big wine-tasting bar at Jacuzzi Winery.
Today’s starting with the same laziness. I made pancakes after chicken duty, and am just now finishing some oak-leaf/rose-petal/lemon verbena/oregano (for cramps, on Melissa’s advice) tea while we wait for Bob to show up. It was raining hard earlier, but it’s mostly stopped, so we’ll be sheet composting around our house and maybe learning about pruning some more.
I couldn’t be happier. Our fellow interns are all such fun, warm, and smart people. I can’t imagine a better place to find myself at the start of a new year.