Chronicles

long time no blog

2011-11-01T20:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted all summer. But I do have some photos, so I broke them up into a bunch of photo-heavy, text-light posts.

threshing beans (November 1)

2011-11-01T20:18:00.000-05:00

It's time to plant garlic, but we're killing time while waiting for the snow to melt off of the fields (even though you can't see snow in this picture). In the meantime, we're threshing beans.

When we harvested the dry beans, we pulled up the whole plants by their roots, and packed them into bags. Now, Eliza pulls out fist-fulls of bean plants and passes them to Mark to feed into the thresher:

The thresher is a fascinating piece of equipment that chomps up the bean plants and spits beans out of a spout on the side:

It spits mixtures of bean pods, stalks, and stray beans out of three other orifices:

After being threshed, the beans will go through a winnower, which blows the dust off of them, and the picker, which is a foot-powered conveyor belt allowing a person to sort through a steady stream of beans, pulling out the rocks and bad ones.

late fall on the farm (October 20)

2011-11-01T20:17:00.000-05:00

Mark grows some crops on land belonging to his neighbors. In one of those fields, we're growing all brassicas (cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, turnips, rutabagas, and daikon radishes). Whenever we go over there to harvest, we always stop and say hi to the neighbor's cow (who we have named Bessie):

She likes to eat kale or whatever we bring her.

carrots (October 20)

2011-11-01T20:16:00.000-05:00

Carrots are one of our biggest crops. We grew and harvested them all through the summer with successive plantings, culminating in one huge harvest (Eliza calculated 10,000 pounds) in October. Earlier carrots would get bunched for sale at market, but these carrots need to be stored for the rest of the winter, so the tops get snipped off as we harvest. After they're washed, We dump them out on the table in the washroom and everyone helps to bag them. Most get sorted by size and put into 25 pound bags. Throughout the winter, we will open up these bags and re-bag the carrots in 3 and 5 pound bags to sell at market. The carrots are generally sold for a dollar per pound. We set aside "seconds" carrots (ones that are deformed, or snapped in half), and these are sold in 10 pound bags for five dollars.

feeding the chickens (September 14)

2011-11-01T20:15:00.000-05:00

Usually Eliza feeds the chickens and collects the eggs by herself, but we got done with work early and decided to tag along.

One of the escapee chickens, being tossed back in:

Anne cuddling a chicken and trying to feed it:

Feeding broccoli to the chickens:

winter squash (September 14)

2011-11-01T20:14:00.000-05:00

Over the course of a couple of days, we harvested all of the winter squash and pumpkins, and brought them into the greenhouse to cure. I love the variety of shapes, colors, and patterns. I never liked squash, growing up, but I'm learning to enjoy it. My favorites are Sweet Dumpling and Delicata. They're small and sweet.

Long Pie pumpkins. I used one of these to make a pie and two loaves of pumpkin bread:

My favorites, Delicata:

and Sweet Dumpling:

the market setup (August 27)

2011-11-01T20:13:00.000-05:00

I don't work at any of the markets, but sometimes I go anyway, to do my shopping. Even though I'm surrounded by vegetables all week long, I still enjoy seeing them all displayed in one place.

mid-summer farm scenes (August 21)

2011-11-01T20:12:00.000-05:00

Camella's garden, which includes a bed of calendula (the orange flowers) to put in the salad mix:

Sungold cherry tomatoes ripening:

Most of the chickens obediently stay within their fenced off area, but these two escaped every day:

onions curing in the greenhouse (August 21)

2011-11-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

We grew several varieties, including Walla Walla, Copra (the best for storage), and Red Bull. The onions stayed in the greenhouse for a couple of months. As their tops dried, we trimmed them and stored them in mesh bags that each hold 50 lb.

first melon harvest (August 12)

2011-11-01T20:10:00.001-05:00

Farm tour (August)

2011-11-01T19:02:00.003-05:00

In early August, our farm hosted a tour and potluck, and provided the setting for a talk on weeds. Some graduate students brought many different hand weeding tools for visitors to test out.

garlic (August)

2011-11-01T19:00:00.004-05:00

We harvested the garlic at the beginning of August, and put it in the greenhouse for a few days. Garlic does not benefit from being exposed to light, so as soon as we had time, we tied it into bundles and hung them from the rafters in the barn.

walkabout (June-July)

2011-11-01T18:54:00.005-05:00

Throughout most of the spring and early summer, we did a once a week walkabout of the farm, with Mark commenting on upcoming projects while one of the apprentices took notes. It was one of my favorite parts of the week, because even though it yielded a useful to-do list, the two-hour event still felt to me like a luxurious educational experience.

Also, one of the only times of the week where I felt totally unselfconscious about taking photos.

Young tomato plants:

Talking about potatoes, and looking for Colorado potato beetles:

Talking about how high the pole beans are going to grow:

Walkabouts were sometimes combined with beer break:

Healthy young onions:

Garlic scapes:

the early season crew (June 9)

2011-11-01T18:48:00.004-05:00

For the first couple of months that I worked on the farm, the crew was all women. It was kind of nice, and took some adjusting once the males started arriving. For most of the rest of the season, the gender balance was about 50/50.

After finishing a potato-weeding job:

gainful and joyful employment

2011-04-28T17:43:00.002-05:00

I have a wonderful problem. I have two jobs that I really enjoy, and there aren't enough days in the week to work at both of them as much as I'd like.

Late winter started out kind of grim. I had arrived back in Maine after an extended winter vacation, and moved into a room in a house with a housemate/landlord who was a stranger to me, in a new town, with no income. It was depressing. Mark had told me that he would probably have work for me starting in March, but I had no sense of how much work there would be, or how fast it would pick up (to be fair, neither did he--it all depends on the weather). So I basically moped around the house, wishing that I had another job, but hopeful that the farm work would pick up soon. I ended up working Thursdays and Fridays during most of March, and I looked forward to those days all week long.

The first big task was seeding thousands of onions so that they could germinate in the greenhouse. Then there was harvesting over-wintered spinach, forking up last year's beds in the greenhouses, harvesting parsnips, uncovering the garlic beds, weeding and harvesting new crops of baby lettuce and mustard greens. Today, finally, we transplanted the first crops outdoors. Tomorrow and next week we will be transplanting onions. The weather has finally moderated and it looks like I will be working near full time at the farm from here on. Which is bittersweet, because it means I will have to give up my second job.

Sometime near the end of March, I visited the boat shop for some much needed socializing. I mentioned to Bobby that I had seen a sign in Troy for a wooden boat builder, and of course Bobby knew exactly who it was, and told me that I should contact him. So, emboldened by the knowledge that I could name-drop the boat shop, I called him and left a message with his wife. He called back the next day, and while he didn't have any work for me, he said he'd given my name to a nearby woodworker, who happens to be teaching a class at the boat shop this summer. After visiting his shop, Jim asked me if I would work for him for a few hours a week. Four hours became eight, which became two days and then three. The universe smiled on me and I pieced together full time employment at two activities that I love, each within a 15 minute drive from my house. This schedule was really only in place for a couple of weeks, but it makes me happy just thinking about it. Alas, the nature of seasonal work is that it is always changing, and it looks like I will have to cut back on my hours with Jim even sooner than I expected. But hopefully I can still work for him on rainy days, and again in the fall when the farm work drops off. Life is good.

the personal is political

2011-03-08T19:35:00.002-05:00

I wouldn't normally blog about something like this, but I feel like this issue needs a lot of voices speaking up about it.

Last week I went to a family planning clinic for an annual exam, and to ask about getting an IUD. At the clinic, I didn't have to wait; they were ready to see me exactly at my appointment time. I spent time with the intake nurse and the nurse practitioner, both of whom were friendly and made me feel completely at ease. They answered all of my questions, and were helpful with my concerns about cost. Because of my current low income, I fall into the donation category, meaning that they will provide care for free, and I can make a donation of any amount that I am able to. In total, they spent almost two hours with me (and it's not like I was sitting around in the exam room, waiting for someone to show up). I have NEVER gotten that much attention from a doctor, except at another family planning clinic that I visited last year. I'm incredibly grateful that services like this exist, and I would gladly visit them even if I had better health insurance that gave me more options for care providers.

The clinic that I went to was not run by Planned Parenthood, but they provide similar services. Family Planning Association of Maine relies on state and Title X federal funding for the majority of its budget. Like Planned Parenthood, FPA provides abortions, and in both cases, Title X money ALREADY cannot be used to fund those abortions. When low-income women can't afford to pay for an abortion, the clinics use funding from other sources. Under the proposed Republican budget, Title X funding would be denied to any organizations that provide abortions, meaning that Planned Parenthood, FPA, and other clinics would have to severely cut back on their other services, including STD testing, education, and birth control. This is an extremely short-sighted approach that seems more aimed at punishing women than at preventing abortion.

2011-02-27T17:25:00.002-05:00

I spent most of today in the library, sitting at a little desk hidden deep in the stacks. I was sitting right next to a heating vent, and I could hear, from somewhere else in the library, a man trying to help his young daughter to write a report on South American butterflies. He was being impatient and rude with her, and I was very tempted to be the voice of God, leaning close to the heating vent and saying "Hey. Can you hear me? Be kind to her." But I didn't.

house lessons

2011-02-26T18:49:00.001-05:00

Now that I have it in my head that I want to build a house (someday), I'm always noticing details about buildings, and filing them away for future use. The house that I'm living in now is a particularly valuable source for inspiration… and caution. It's a snug little house with an open layout and lots of light. It was built by the previous owner, a carpenter. Living here has made me appreciate what a huge impact good insulation, good windows, and good solar gain can make. Here, we burn maybe six or seven pieces of wood per day, and the house is never below 72 degrees. Contrast with the room I was living in at the creamery, where I used the same amount of wood to heat a single room for a few hours in the evening. Once the fire died out, the heat quickly left, and I had to use an electric heater to keep the temperature above 50 degrees during the night.

The three bedrooms in this house are all on the second floor, nestled up against the roof so that each room has a section of slanted ceiling. My room has only one window, facing East. If there were dormer windows, I could have light from the South. I like dormer windows--I think they look nice from the inside and out, and I generally feel like more light is always a good thing. But they do add complexity and expense, and I wonder whether in this case they would make the upstairs room unpleasantly hot in the summer.

Most of the houses that I've ever lived in have been designed and built by professionals, so I'm enjoying being in this house and seeing what this non-architect builder did differently (and sometimes, wrong). There are some mistakes that seem inexcusable, like building the house on a floating slab foundation, with no protection from frost. Other mistakes are things that I could easily imagine myself doing. For example, this house has two doors, neither of which is on a gable end of the house. The house also has a metal roof. There has been a lot of snow this winter, and when snow slides off a metal roof, it slides off dramatically. And lands in large mountains right in front of the doors. Luckily one of the doors is a sliding glass door, or we might have to climb out the window to shovel a path. And if the door isn't blocked, you still have to be careful when shutting it from the outside, because you could be knocked down by a poorly timed avalanche. So! Things to think about when designing my little dream home.

Norway

2011-02-24T16:40:00.000-05:00

I arrived in Bergen on a sunny day, and having been warned that this was very rare, I thought I should take some photos before crawling into bed for a nap. My mom and dad have bought an apartment in a neighborhood that is undergoing a lot of new development. There are several new apartment buildings on the water, and plans for a boardwalk and shops and all sorts of nice things. Right now it's a construction zone.

Their apartment is on the other side of the building.

Bergen is surrounded by mountains. Actually, it seems like there are mountains everywhere. They're not really that tall, but they look really impressive because they're so steep, and the tree line is so low.

The night that I arrived, we went to see a British pantomime, which apparently is a thing, although I was unfamiliar with the concept except as it relates to charades. This show turned out to be pretty cute. It was a production of Beauty and the Beast, with a large cast of adults and children. We heard that they don't turn away anyone who wants to act in the pantomime, so there was a chorus of adorable brown slugs, and Beast had a pack of Dalmatian puppies running around his castle. Most of the production was in English, but many of the kids in the show haven't learned much English in school yet, so they were singing songs and saying lines that they didn't necessarily understand.

The next day was again beautiful and sunny (in fact, it didn't rain at all while I was there, and only snowed a little). My parents don't have a car in Norway, which is usually not a problem because the buses, light rail and trains make it pretty easy to get around. However, a car comes in handy when you're trying to see several tourist spots in one day. Luckily, two friends in Bergen (one a former student of my dad's) also wanted to sight-see, and we were able to squeeze into Masoud's car. The first stop was Gamlehaugen, which is where the king stays when he visits Bergen. The house is closed in the winter (a common theme that we encountered), but we still enjoyed walking around the beautiful and hilly grounds.

Ice is so beautiful. But somehow it just cries out to be stomped and broken into shards.

We also stopped at a stave church. Unfortunately I don't really know anything about it (it was also closed for the winter), but the Wikipedia article tells me that this church was originally built around the year 1150 (1150! it's made of wood), but it has actually been rebuilt; it was sadly burnt down in 1992 as the "first in a series of church burnings related to the early Norwegian black metal scene."

Our last stop for the day was at Bergenhus Fortress. It's everything I want in a fortress.

This was an opening for cannon.

This photo was taking from some high point in the fortress (studying the map on Wikipedia makes me think it was either called Upper Sverresborg or the salute ground. It had a nice view, but it was also notable for its lack of safety barriers. Kids must be smarter in Norway, or parents more attentive, because apparently the general public is trusted to not walk off the sides of cliffs.

Near the same part of the city is Bryggen, which is where Bergen's fish trade used to go on. Norway's fishermen were able to supply a lot of fish (especially dried cod, or stockfish), but they didn't know much about the marketing side of things, so this district was run by the Hanseatic League, a German trading alliance. The Germans knew which countries in Europe wanted what kinds of fish products, so they were able to act as the middlemen. They were pretty separate from the rest of the city's culture--the Hanseatics were all male, and fraternizing with the locals was seriously discouraged. Each tenement (row of trading houses) in Bergen had an annual meeting to address any rule violations, and if a member was found to have fathered a child with a local, then his house had to pay the maximum penalty: one barrel of beer (which was then drunk by all the other members present at the meeting). I didn't actually get a good photo of the fronts of the houses, so here's one that someone else put on Flickr:

It's a really pretty row of tall houses that extend back away from the street, with narrow passageways separating them:

I really loved seeing the natural knees in these posts. There is currently a major restoration project going on in Bryggen and they're trying to use all authentic woods and hand tools. I wonder if they'll be making more posts like this.

It's hard to tell from the photos, but these buildings are really crooked.

One of the houses has been preserved as it might have been when used by the Hanseatic merchants. All of the beds were built in, which for some reason I really love, even though in real life I wouldn't want to sleep in a dark cupboard.

These are the beds where the apprentices slept. Two apprentices to every bed, and the journeyman would lock them from the outside at night. Cozy.

I loved the old wood floors. They're not fancy, but they're old and smooth as glass, with little hills where the knots are.

Leather buckets.

One disappointment about Norway (and this is probably true of most countries in Western Europe) is that nothing is cheap. It's not like you can get a great deal on a locally made craft. However, it's still fun to look at the beautiful expensive things. The website for this store says that 70% of Norwegian women own a traditional costume (which is worn for National Day, and maybe other special occasions).

Directly across the city from my parents' apartment is a mountain with a tram to take you to the top:

It's a nice view of the city.

We took a train to Geilo and spent a night there. The train went through and around lots of mountains and past lakes and rivers. It was all beautiful, but it looks like a difficult place to live. Part of the trip was above the tree line:

Geilo was beautiful and sparkly. My parents went cross-country skiing, and my mom and I walked around town while my dad was in a meeting. We found out, by chance, that Brusletto, a good Norwegian knife company, has its factory in Geilo. The factory store actually had pretty good prices for the beautiful knives, but really irresistible prices for knife blades. So I bought a few, for myself and friends. Hopefully I'll get around to making a handle in the near future.

On my last day in Norway, my mom took me to a place that restores old wooden boats. I don't really have any information on any of the boats--we just wandered around and took pictures:

cheese success

2010-11-14T17:17:00.003-05:00

This was a week of cheese successes for me and J. I don't think I really realized how complicated cheese-making is until I was several months into my apprenticeship. It's not like you just follow a recipe and if you do everything right, you'll end up with delicious cheese. There are so many variables, such as how old (and thus, how acidic) the milk is, what type of rennet you use, the pH of the curds at different stages in the process, what molds are present in the aging environment, how fast you heat and cool the milk… Given all of these factors, I feel proud but also lucky that J and I managed to successfully make a blue cheese, a soft washed-rind cheese, and a provolone. We learned how to make all of these cheeses at a three day workshop that C sent us to in Vermont last month. There was only one other student in the class, so we got to ask lots of questions, and had a lot of aha moments. All of the cheese photos in this post are from the class, not the creamery, except the one of the hanging provolone.

The cheesemaker teaching the class uses pH test strips a lot, to check on the progress of the curd and determine when it has reached the perfect stage for scooping or cutting or stretching. We don't have pH test strips at the creamery, so when we got back, we did the best we could to recreate some of the cheeses anyway. Blue mold thrives in an acidic environment, so we stirred the curd in its whey for quite a while before scooping it into molds, allowing more acidity to develop.

Stirring the curd for the blue cheese

Adding the Penicillium roqueforti. In class we used a freeze-dried mold from a cheesemaking supply company, but you could also harvest blue mold from bread, or from other blue cheeses (we got mold from other blue cheeses when we made it at the creamery).

The curd has been scooped into molds. This cheese does not get pressed, because you want some nooks and crannies for the mold to develop in.

The washed rind cheese is supposed to be low acid to allow the development of B. linens (an orange bacteria) and Penicillium candidum (a white mold found on camembert and brie). So we quickly removed the whey from the curds, and salted the cheese soon after, to halt the development of acidity.

Scooping the washed rind curd into square molds

We made these two cheeses more than three weeks ago. The blue is still developing, but it looks good, with plenty of mold activity. Soon we will pierce the cheeses to allow air into the interior of the cheese (the blue mold needs oxygen to develop). I've been washing the washed rind cheeses with brine every week. It turns out I probably should have been doing it twice a week, so there are some other molds on the rind as well, but plenty of B. linens and PC. These cheeses looked ready this week, so we tried one, and it was delicious! Soft and stinky and totally unlike any other cheese we make.

The other cheese that we made, provolone, gave us some instant gratification. Stretching mozzarella (or provolone, or scamorza) has always been sort of a challenge for us. We learned in the class that you really have to stretch the curd at the perfect acidity in order to get a smooth sheen and no tearing. Working without pH test strips again, we tried stretching little bits of curd, waiting for the acidity to develop. We never did get a perfect stretch, but this was definitely the best mozzarella we've made at the creamery since I've been here (provolone is basically a low-moisture mozzarella and the differences are in how aggressively you stir the curd, how large you make the balls, and how long you age it). It smells wondefully inviting, partially due to the lipase, an enzyme that we don't use in any other cheese. I'm terrible at describing how cheese tastes and smells. This cheese smells perfect, and is soft and golden and melts beautifully.

Here's the curd draining in class. We're waiting for the acidity to develop.

In class we stretched the curd and just made two large gourd shapes with it.

When we made it at the creamery, we made smaller balls, and are experimenting with hanging them to dry so that they can age for a few weeks.

My mom visited last week and took some pictures while I was milking. Here I'm letting a group of goats in the door (sometimes they come in backwards). Already dark at 4:30pm.

babies

2010-09-15T15:42:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, a broody hen hatched 10 eggs! C said that this has never happened on the farm before (usually they get chicks in the mail). We knew that this hen was sitting on eggs, but C didn't expect her to follow through. It is really cool to see baby chicks imprinted on an adult hen. When you order chicks in the mail, you have to dip their beaks in water to teach them how to drink, and we were discussing whether we would need to do the same with these chicks. C set down a pan of water in front of the little family, and the mom walked over and dipped her beak in. 10 pairs of eyes followed her head down and up, and then the babies started venturing over to try it for themselves.

learning

2010-08-02T18:55:00.000-05:00

Of the three of us now working at the creamery (E, the other apprentice, ended up leaving early), I am the one with the least experience, so it makes sense for C and J to do the difficult (interesting) tasks while I do the grunt work like filling tubs of chevre and washing dishes. Which I don't resent--but I am happy that I'm now starting to get to do some of the more interesting parts of cheesemaking. For this I can thank J (the journeyperson) more than C (my boss), not because C is unwilling, but she's always running around doing ten different things and so it's hard for her to take the time to give start-to-finish instruction on anything. Most of J's instruction has taken place on days when C is gone. Last time she was gone, I learned how to make chevre--which culture to add and how much, when to add the rennet, and what temperatures to heat and cool to. So I could theoretically do it myself, except that C doesn't like apprentices to use the pasteurizers because they are so easy to break and so expensive to fix. But the whole process of making chevre could be done on the stove, except we never do it that way because we're always processing so much milk (about 30 gallons a day).

Last week I learned how to make halloumi, which is an interesting cheese that you can grill or fry without making a big melty mess. The cheeses other than chevre, we make in a big 40 gallon steam kettle, which I am allowed to operate. J talked me through it, but I did pretty much everything myself. Definitely the coolest part comes after you cut the curd into cubes. You have to continuously stir the curd as you raise the temperature over the course of about 40 minutes. The best way to do this is with your hands. So I was up past my elbows in this warm, silky curd, stirring and separating to prevent it from matting. The whole time, more whey is coming out the the curds, so the curds become smaller and bouncier. When they're ready, we scoop them into baskets and press them, and move the whey to one of the pasteurizers and start heating it up. The curds stick together pretty quickly, and we can soon remove them from the baskets and drop them into the hot whey. They cook in the whey for about an hour (and the air conditioner can't be running while the pasteurizer is running, so it gets really horribly hot in the kitchen), and then they come out and go into brine for a couple of days.

And today… J taught me to do cheese maintenance, which always seemed like this mysterious skill, but it turns out it's pretty simple. You go into the cooler and pull out all of the bins of Camemberts and Bries. The white mold that grows on these cheeses gets fluffy and gets patted down and the wheels are flipped. Any cheeses at least 3 weeks old are considered possible candidates for selling, if they have nice mold coverage and are getting a little soft. Then come the tommes, which are wiped down with a cheesecloth outside of the barn (because breathing the mold can be unpleasant). You wipe down the oldest cheeses first, in order to pass along those good molds to the younger cheeses. If they're at least 60 days old, we can sell them, but we usually wait at least 90.

milking

2010-07-15T19:17:00.002-05:00

I decided to try to document the milking process, although it's hard take pictures and milk at the same time. So, not many action shots here. Here's what the milking parlor looks like before the goats come in (I meant to take an after shot, but forgot. Let's just say that it's a lot messier). There's room for two goats on each raised platform, so four goats can be clipped in at a time, although we can only milk two at a time. The goats come in through the sliding door that says "GOAT CHEESE."

The goats can tell from the noises coming from the milking parlor that it's time to line up, so they start jostling for a place on the ramp. The system mostly works pretty well, although sometimes they end up pointed backwards or jammed two abreast. I usually try to let in five milkers at a time, and as many non-milkers as want to come in. But it's hard to control the flow, and once a goat gets her head under the door, she won't back up no matter how hard you push. Once I accidentally let in eight milkers at once.

Once the goats are in, I clip each one into a station. Then I strip the teats of each goat, which just means squeezing out a small amount of milk. It removes contamination that might have built up at the end of the teat, plus it gives us a chance to look at the milk as it goes into a filter cup. If the milk looks weird, we milk the goat separately and discard the milk. Then we wipe each teat with an udder wipe. The goats are very patient with all of this and most of them don't really acknowledge you at all, but a few of them will raise their left foot when you're handling their left teat, and their right foot when you switch. I think it's sweet--it's like they're trying to help make everything easily accessible. Josephine, one of the first-time mamas, sometimes just doesn't want to be touched. She'll dance all over the place, twisting on her tether. When she's in a mood like this, C says to just skip her--she'd rather give up the milk than traumatize the goat.

After stripping and wiping, I hook up two of the goats, and the milk starts getting pumped into the can.

After each goat finishes, I unhook them and either let them hang out and eat more grain, or push them out the door, depending on how well-behaved they are and how crowded it is. Once outside, They have access to hay and water, and they're not able to circle around and come in a second time.

The goats produce an average of half a gallon of milk per milking, so if I milk eight or ten goats, the can is still comfortable enough to lift and pour. When I'm ready to empty the can, I switch off the nozzle things (I was taught to milk by E, the other apprentice, so I don't know the proper names for anything).

Then I take the can and empty it into a filter sitting on top of a bucket which has been sanitized with a bleach solution.

Right now we're filling just over three buckets with the evening milkings, and a little more than that in the mornings. The milk production has passed its peak and is now declining.

While all of the milking is going on, there are non-milkers (babies, retirees, and goats that didn't get bred), who also come through the milking parlor. They can stand at a milking station if there's room, but there is extra grain by the door for them to munch on.

As each goat comes through, we check their names off on the list on the whiteboard. If we notice any health issues (limping, bleeding, hoof needs trimming, etc), we can make a note and C will address it the next time she milks (she milks every morning). Each year there's a different naming scheme; you can see some of the goats from the wine year and the Harry Potter year. This year's theme was bread. Each baby is given a name that fits with the theme, and their name starts with the same letter as their mother's name. So Rowena has Rye, Josephine has Jellyroll, and Paloma has Petit Madeleine.

2010-07-15T11:48:00.003-05:00

Ever since I applied to work here, C has been very excited about my "carpentry background," despite my efforts to lower her expectations. One project that she kept mentioning was a new hay feeder. The old one was too small, and the goats knocked wooden slats off of it on a daily basis. C had downloaded very clear and detailed plans for a new feeder, so I agreed that this was something that I could tackle. It actually went together very nicely--the most difficult part was finding extension cords around the farm. Here it is, with the babies trying it out:

It takes the goats longer to get the hay out through the wire mesh, which is a good thing, because any hay that gets spilled on the ground is wasted. Despite their reputation for eating anything and everything, goats are actually pretty picky--they definitely won't eat anything that is near their own poop. Pretty smart, I guess.

I worked on another quick project with J earlier this week. When we feed grain to the goats during milking, we add sunflower seeds and kelp, but there are lots of other amendments that we just don't have time to mix in with the grain. Luckily, most of them can be offered "free choice," meaning there's no risk of the goats eating too much of them. The problem is how to offer them in a way that won't make a huge mess. C visited another farm with a cool PVC pipe solution, which we copied. It contains things like sodium bicarbonate, lime, and salt with some vitamins added:

One of the great things about doing an apprenticeship is that I get to learn from the mistakes of others. For example, C says, "don't build your goats a nice barn. They'll just eat it." See Figure A below. Those walls used to extend down to the ground.

And finally, here are some happy goat ladies playing their favorite game, king of the mountain (or, queen of the spool).

babies and barns

2010-06-24T19:02:00.003-05:00

This week, we're mucking out the barn. It was last done in March, but I guess it builds up pretty quickly. It actually doesn't smell too bad most of the time, more like ammonia than anything else. But there are some sulfurous pockets. I think it's about 2 1/2 feet deep in the worst spots. Here's E, shoveling some out the window:

We quickly built up some very tall piles outside the windows:

I tried to get the goats excited about trampling down these piles, but mostly they just wanted to chew on my pitchfork:

Goats are so curious that it's hard to get work done when they're around. I went back into the barn after milking to try to shovel some more, but they were all hanging out inside to stay out of the sun. And they're not good about taking hints. So I'll shovel more tomorrow.

I also spent a lot of time with the kids this morning. First I visited Toast and Tortilla, who were hanging out by the hay feeder. Toast likes to lay in the feeder:

And Tortilla enjoyed sucking on my thumb:

Then I went over to the pen with the remaining six kids. I knew that we would be moving them in with the big girls today, so I wanted to spend a little quality time with them. Here's Rye, with her big bunny ears:

Here are the kids after we moved them. Toast is guarding her perch, while the others mill about, scared and confused:

Meanwhile, the other two babies, Jellyroll and Petit Madeline, were ganging up on Josephine and trying to both nurse at the same time:

On Tuesday there was a tour group here. It was a food writer and photographer from the Boston Globe, plus a couple of their friends. They took a lot of pictures, and maybe we'll make an appearance in the July 18th issue. Here's the cheese plate that we served them (and a pretty good representation of our cheeses):

personalities

2010-06-18T18:43:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I did the milking from start to finish by myself for the first time. It was hectic, but overall it went pretty smoothly. I'm making some slow progress on learning the goats' names. The strongest personalities obviously make the strongest impressions. So far I can recognize...

Barbaresco: The alpha goat. She's not the oldest, and she's not very aggressive, but she's big, and she's always the first one through the door for milking. E's fiance calls her "Scratchy-face" because she always wants to rub her forehead against things.

Fay: Small, brown, with a roman nose, which is discriminated against in Alpine goats (there are a few different breeds here, so I'm not clear on whether Fay actually is an Alpine or not). E says she bites, but she hasn't bitten me yet. She's a year old and didn't have a kid, so she's not milking.

Meara: Creaky old lady (seven years old, I think) who gets to do whatever she wants. C thinks that she might have had a stroke, because she seems sort of lopsided. She always comes in last for milking.

Jellyroll and Petit Madeline: The youngest two kids. They are both pure white, and they were the only kids left with their mothers (usually the kids are separated from the moms at birth to get them more used to being with humans). It is adorable to see these two butting heads. They still have soft baby hair.

Toast and Tortilla: The oldest two kids. They are mostly black, but they each have a white patch on their side. Tortilla has one black dot in the patch, and Toast has many. These two were living with the other kids in a separate pen, but they were getting pretty big and were giving E a hard time when she brought in the food and water. So we just moved them in with the mamas, and they've been getting hazed for the past few days. I assume that this is just a normal process by which kids learn the pecking order, but it's kind of pathetic to see these two sticking so close together, maaaaing at us to rescue them. When we took the mama goats for a walk the other day, Toast and Tortilla stuck close to my legs. It was pretty sweet, even if I kept tripping over them.

Peaseblossom: Light brown, kind of shy. E calls her the autistic goat (she says that she seems very sensitive to loud noises and lights going on and off). The first several times that I helped milk, Peaseblossom would see me in the milking parlor and refuse to come in. Last night, she saw me as she was coming up the ramp, and came to a halt for several seconds, but eventually decided to come in.

Josephine: Looks grey at a distance, but she's actually black with some white hairs mixed in. Very pretty. She has a roman nose too; I think she's Nubian. She's a year old and had a kid, so she's still learning to be a good milker. She can be kind of jumpy, although she's getting better. Jellyroll is her kid and it's amazing to see how hard she butts her mama's udders while nursing.

Paloma: Looks the same as Josephine only she's all black. Petit Madeline is her kid.

first day at the creamery

2010-06-15T13:17:00.000-05:00

I made it--I'm at the creamery. I moved in Sunday afternoon and yesterday was my first full day. It's been overwhelming to get so much new information thrown at me (and we haven't even gotten into the chemistry of cheese-making yet), but C (the owner) and E and J (the other apprentice and journeyperson) are being very patient. It's completely different from the farm in Maryland. Of course, there I was being paid by the hour, and here I'm getting $100 a week (plus all groceries). C has been encouraging me to ease into the work, take lots of breaks so that I don't burn out, don't work at a breakneck pace because as an apprentice, my job is to learn.

Yesterday morning I helped E take the hay out to the trough while the goats were being milked. Then we spent some time going over the calendar and talking about who would be going to which farmers markets. There was no cheese being made today, but there was milk being pasteurized, and curds to be drained from yesterday, so we did some work in the cheese room. After lunch, E and I took some of the goats for a walk. There are about 35 girl goats who all live together, and then there are three boy goats and two misbehaving girls who live apart. Here is Guy Noir, who has a very suave-looking lock of hair that is usually covering one of his eyes:

Guy is the son of Mr. Green, who is a dignified old man with an impressive beard:

Mr. Green didn't feel like going for a walk, so we took Guy Noir, White Boy, and the two bad girls, Ida and Fat Nana. Here are Guy, Fat Nana, and Ida trying to reach birch leaves:

It's easy to remember the names of those five goats because they're off in their own pen, but it will take me a while to learn the names of the other 35 girls. I thought I would try to take pictures of each goat and make flash cards for myself, but I found that when you try to take a picture of one goat, all the others want to know what's going on:

There is not a ton of land here, so it's not like the goats are roaming over many acres, but they do have some nice space to explore:

In the afternoon, I helped with some more cheese room stuff, including wrapping some chevre in grape leaves and tying it with raffia. It can then be thrown on the grill:

At 5:00, E and I started the evening milking. All of the goats come into the milking parlor, even if they're kids or retired. It's just a part of their daily routine, and a time for them to eat some grain (they always have access to hay and water).

The walk-in cooler is very full right now. I have a lot of cheese-tasting in my near future.

2010-05-05T05:52:00.002-05:00

We launched the peapod yesterday afternoon:

Man, I'm proud of this boat.

It will be used by Nat Hussey on Matinicus Island, who wants to do some zero-carbon lobstering.

2010-05-02T18:09:00.001-05:00

They say that you need three hands to build a boat, but sometimes more hands (and feet) come in handy.

final touches

2010-04-29T16:19:00.002-05:00

Today we put the final coat of paint on the peapod. On Tuesday it will be towed out to Matinicus Island.

Making the waterline was a challenge. It's supposed to be 4.5" from the bottom of the keel, but with the curve of the boat and the texture of the planks, it's really difficult to get a fair curve. In the end, we used a laser level, and it came out nicely. Viewed from the side, it looks like a straight line:

But from the top (or bottom), it looks like this:

2010-04-19T05:57:00.002-05:00

I finished my knife. It's made of Cocobolo, which is a beautifully grained reddish tropical hardwood, a few scraps of which were given to Kenneth for volunteering at an event at Lie Nielsen Toolworks. Next I need to make a sheath.

On Saturday there was a dovetailing workshop, and around 10 we took a break and watched the sheep get shorn.

deadlines

2010-04-15T20:20:00.002-05:00

It's feeling a little sparse around here. We went from 10 apprentices to 12, then to 8, and it seems like someone is always missing due to injury or job-hunting. Tomorrow is supposed to be the last day working on the wooden parts of the peapod (then comes more oiling, sanding, painting), but Sylvie has left to be with her boyfriend who cut his hand on a tablesaw, and Steve is job-hunting in Portland, and tomorrow is my cooking day. Jonathan thinks I should ask permission to order pizza for dinner so that I can continue to work on the boat. We still need to cut the ends of the floorboards into a nice curve to echo the thwarts, and sand and router them all, finish the oarlock pads and mast step, put knees on the middle thwarts, finish shaping and sanding one of the breasthooks, and leather the mast hole in the bow thwart. It's looking pretty nice though:

The days are long and lovely here, and we've been spending lots of time outside. Last week and early this week everyone joined in bucking up logs, splitting and stacking 16 cord of firewood to dry for next winter. We're working on getting the boats back in the water, sanding them and putting on some new paint. Everything is green and sunny and not all that muddy, and the mosquitoes and black flies are not a problem yet. I feel like there's not enough time to do all of the things I want to do.

next steps

2010-03-30T15:36:00.002-05:00

We finished fitting and attaching all of the planks on the peapod, and took it off the jig on Friday. It's very exciting to be moving on to the next stage. Now the boat is right side up and we're putting in some rivets and a few ribs that we couldn't do earlier because the jig was in the way. Today I counted how many rivets are in this boat. 844.

I found a summer/fall job that I'm pretty excited about. I was looking at farms in the area, and I ended up visiting a creamery that has 30 goats and makes cheese from goat, sheep, and cow milk. It will be way different from working on a vegetable farm, but I'm excited about learning to make cheese. When I visited last week, they were in the middle of kidding, and there were already 40 kids (each goat has 2-3 kids). Some of them were just a day old. So, so cute and soft. Most of the kids will be sold for meat or as pets--the creamery will be keeping about 6 of the females.

looking more like a boat

2010-03-13T09:22:00.003-05:00

The peapod is coming along. We have the garboard planks plus three broads on each side, and in this photo I'm spiling the fourth broad (making a pattern out of thin plywood that will then be traced onto the cedar plank).

Each plank gets riveted to the one before, which means one person stands outside the boat and holds the bucking iron over the nail head while another person kneels under the boat to nip off the nail and then peen it over the rove. It's pretty cramped under the boat, but I moved some of the supports around last week so it's more spacious than it was. In this photo, there are now four broads on each side, but the last one on the right side hasn't been riveted yet:

the latest from the boat shop

2010-02-19T06:38:00.003-05:00

My project for the past week or so has been to make the mast for the Matinicus Island Peapod. Steve and Chris went out and bought a couple of spruce 2x4s and epoxied them together before the project got handed over to me. The mast was supposed to be two inches in diameter at either end, tapering up to three inches in the middle. So the first step was to put the taper in.

I mostly used this block plane because it's pretty wide and doesn't give me blisters.

The next step was to octagonalize the mast. I drew an octagon at each end of the mast, but because of the tapers, it would have been difficult to accurately draw the lines to plane to. So I used a spar gauge, which is a really simple and clever little tool.

Next I went from eight sides to 16 and then to 32.

And then I switched over to using sandpaper. The mast is feeling pretty smooth now, but there are still a few ridges that I'll need to work out on Monday.

On Valentine's Day, several of us went to see the ice harvest at the Thompson Ice House in South Bristol. There were lots of people walking and skating around on the pond as a large rectangular hole in the ice slowly got larger.

Everyone was welcome to take a turn sawing away at the blocks of ice. It was 15" thick this year.

After they're cut, the blocks of ice are maneuvered into a narrow channel that leads up to the ramp.

the blocks are moved up the ramp and down the other side into the ice house, where they're pushed into place. The ice house will be filled to the ceiling, and it will last (unrefrigerated!) until Labor Day.

The peapod is the boat that most of us are working on currently, and it's coming along slowly but surely. There's a lot of painstaking carving-away of wood to make sure that everything fits tightly, and then there are occasional moments of excitement, like when the ribs get steamed into place. The ribs are made of oak, and they're about a half inch thick. In order to curve them into the boat, they first have to be steamed for 30 minutes. Here's Kenneth pulling them out of the steam box:

The ribs cool off quickly once they're out of the box, so everyone has to be on hand to help bend and clamp.

The garboard (the first plank next to the keel) is a little more complicated to steam. We had to scarph together two planks to get one long enough for the boat, and the epoxy joint can't be steamed. So we steam one end of the plank, clamp it into place, and then pour boiling water on the other end and let it soak before bending it into place.

Each plank has a rabbet cut into it so that at the stem ends of the boat, two adjacent planks will be flush.

car accident 1/3/2010

2010-02-11T18:23:00.002-05:00

This accident is old news, but I told someone that I would write about it in a particular order that's supposed to be helpful in getting over the trauma. I feel like I'm mostly over it now, but telling the story from start to finish does upset me, so I thought I'd give this a try.

When I looked out the window of the emergency room and saw Bobby pulling into the parking lot in Hannah's Subaru, I felt like I could relax. Of course, I was still periodically shaking and leaking tears, but I could allow myself to experience this part of the healing process without worrying about insurance, transportation home from the ER, contacting my parents, where the car was towed to, or how Abdullah was doing.

I remember feeling slightly nervous but reasonably confident as I started down Old County Road that morning. It had snowed a lot the day and night before, but the road and the boat shop's parking lot had both been plowed already. Abdullah was in the car with me and I knew he was eager to get to his car to check out the damage. I was going maybe 20 miles per hour as I approached the library. I eased onto the brake in anticipation of the stop sign at the bottom of the hill, but my speed did not change at all. I didn't panic, I don't know why. I realized there was no way I would be able to stop, so I decided to try to make the right turn onto 130 without stopping (the intersection was a T, so going straight ahead would have sent me off the road). But turning my steering wheel had no effect either. I saw a snow plow approaching from the left, and knew that it would hit us. I heard Abdullah say "oh no" and I don't think I froze--it felt like there was plenty of time--but I knew that I couldn't control the speed or direction of the car, so I was at peace with what I knew was about to happen.

"Oh my God! I can't believe that just happened! Are you okay?" I was looking at the airbag leaking smoke on the steering wheel, and noticed that my lap was covered in little bits of glass. I turned and saw a man outside my window (which was now missing). "You just came out of there and it was too close--I couldn't stop! Are you okay?" I said yes, I think so, and turned to look at Abdullah, who was conscious but moaning and grabbing his leg. He didn't answer my questions, but it was hard to tell what this meant, because he didn't seem to speak much English even before the accident. "Hey, do you think you should turn off the car? I don't know if it's important, but…" I turned the key with a shaky hand and the engine turned off and a chime started to sound. I tried, but couldn't remove the key. The next day I realized it was because the car wasn't in park. "I already called 911," the man said, and I thanked him. Then I asked if I could use his phone to make a call. I had lost my phone the night before, but had written the boat shop number on a scrap of paper, which was in my pocket. The phone rang and, miraculously, Bobby picked up. He showed up a few minutes later, at the same time as the first responders. I don't know who they were exactly--I don't think the ambulances arrived until later--but people climbed into the back seat of the car and held Abdullah's head and mine and talked to us. "Where do you hurt?" they asked, which is also what the EMT asked, and then the nurses in the ER. My answers were the same: the back of my head hurts, and my wrist feels burned. No, my neck doesn't hurt. When the ambulances arrived, they pulled the door off my side of the car and put me in a collar before many capable hands lowered me onto a stretcher. The responders were still trying to communicate with Abdullah about his possible injuries, so I went in the first ambulance. They strapped me down tightly, and I thought about asking the EMT to loosen the strap around my chest because I was struggling against it to breathe, but I think that taking shallower breaths helped me to calm down a bit.

Once in the emergency room, the kind doctor asked me questions about whether my neck was hurting or had hurt earlier, and she decided it would be safe to remove the collar. When the collar was off, it became apparent that the back of my head was bleeding. I never saw any blood, and I didn't try to. I'm curious, now, but at the time I was grateful to let other people worry about how to fix me.

When I got home I was tired, feeling greasy from plane flights and taxi rides, feeling shy and full of shame. I minimized my interactions with other people and went to bed with an ice pack for my leg, which was quickly developing an enormous lump on the shin.

After a week of limping around, it became too painful to even stand on my leg. A fellow apprentice gave me Vicodin to help me sleep until I could go back to the hospital the next day. I spent the next two weeks wrapping, elevating, and icing my leg, and limping around on crutches only when necessary. As it was, I felt pretty discouraged and isolated being stuck in my room or the library all day, but the people here made it way better than it could have been. It's been almost six weeks now and I still have a lumpy bruise on my leg, but it's getting smaller, and it doesn't hurt to walk anymore.

2009-12-26T22:20:00.002-05:00

My sister has beautiful babies. And great timing. My niece was born on December 15th, and a few days later I was back in Oklahoma and meeting this little person.

I was warned that, as a newborn, she mostly sleeps and is not very interactive, but this doesn't stop her from being absolutely fascinating.

a lot of catching up

2009-12-22T21:35:00.002-05:00

After the first few weeks of orientation, the ten of us split into three teams for the next six weeks. One team stayed in the new workshop and each began building a skiff on their own. One team went to the sawmill and began turning logs into boards and beams. My team went to the restoration shop and worked on the Republican, a Marblehead gunning dory built in 1960:

It was not in bad shape, as these things go, but we had to do a lot of bunging and pegging holes where the screws had pulled out, refastening ribs, and doing other minor repairs. After all that, there was a lot of sanding, painting, sanding, and repainting.

It turned out beautifully, and we attended the launch party a few weeks ago, on a glorious, unseasonably warm day.

Taking advantage of the launch party, we brought along two of our own skiffs.

The shorter one was built by last year's apprentices, but the 11 1/2' one was built by us in our first two weeks of work. Eight of us were on hand to test her sea-worthiness.

On the Friday before Halloween, I was dropped off on Marsh Island and marooned there for the rest of the weekend. It was a wonderful, strange experience. I'm an introvert and so I find ways to carve out time alone wherever I am, but it's different from being truly alone on an island. I went for walks, and not even the tiniest part of my mind was occupied by thoughts like "okay, I have plenty of time, but I should be back at the cabin by 2 to meet up with everyone else." I had no schedule or obligations at all, other than keeping myself fed and warm. This meant my mind could wander to a degree that kind of disturbed me. I would stop and marvel at moss for 20 minutes. I found it so easy to get lost in my mind and I was struggling against it, paranoid that I was forgetting something crucial--that I'd forgotten to gather wood, or that I'd get caught out in the dark without a flashlight. I wonder if I'd stayed on the island longer, whether I would have come to more of a sense of peace about this. Anyway, I occupied myself by making Andy Goldsworthy-inspired rearrangements of twigs and moss and rosehips.

The next weekend, I returned to the same island with Saul and Adelle. It was an entirely different experience. We again went for walks and when we lost the trail we forged ahead through bogs and across fallen trees, rather than trying to retrace our steps. (There's no reason why I couldn't have done this on my own, as the island is quite small and it would be difficult to get seriously lost. But I didn't--the previous weekend when I came to a creepy forest of dead trees with no clear path, I turned back ). We collaborated on temporary art projects, collecting driftwood and berries to adorn a bleached seal skull, or passing a stick back and forth as we drew designs in the sand. Found tiny starfish clinging underneath the rocks at low tide. We took naps in the sun and read aloud to each other around the wood stove. We curled up together in the big bed and fell asleep while looking at the stars though the skylight and listening to the wind trying to make its way in.

After working in the restoration shop for three weeks, my team switched with the team at the sawmill, and we continued to work our way through the large pile of logs lying in the boatyard.

After learning to operate the Wood-Mizer, the job became monotonous, with just enough danger to keep us on our toes. Usually we were able to roll the logs up onto the sawmill with just three of us, using ropes and peevees, but for the larger logs we called in extra help. For the log pictured above, it took all of the apprentices pulling from one side of the sawmill, and a tractor pushing from the other side.

It felt great to finally get that thing up there, but milling it was almost more trouble than it was worth. It seems that this tree had been the community bulletin board for years, and we ruined three blades running into nails dating back up to 30 years. A lot of time was spent hacking chunks of the log out with a chainsaw.

Two weeks before Christmas break, we switched jobs again. I've been back in the new workshop, putting the finishing touches on the four skiffs that had been started six weeks prior. At this stage, there's a lot of fitting and detail work to be done, which I enjoy and am good at. One of my first jobs was to shape the little triangular pine wedges to fit into the breasthook on Adelle's boat. She had taken so much care with her boat that it was a pleasure to work on, but I also felt some pressure to meet her standards. Luckily, the breasthook (and the rest of the boat) came out beautifully.

I really love working with wood. Learning about the temperaments of different types of wood, grain direction, dryness, and knots. Sharpening the blade of a chisel or block plane and hearing that satisfyingly musical rip as it slices through the wood without chipping or tearing. Watching the character of the wood change as it gets sanded, scraped, oiled, waxed, or painted.

2009-10-28T20:44:00.003-05:00

This is the first time I've lived in a state where same-sex marriage is legal. It's so amazing, and so normal. I didn't even realize it was legal here until I'd been here for about a month. But there's a ballot measure to take away those marriage rights, which strikes me as a darn good reason to stop voting in Oklahoma and start voting in Maine. The election is on Tuesday, but I went in this afternoon to register and vote in person absentee. So I'm done--I voted to keep the status quo, which in this case is awesome.

chicken day

2009-10-11T21:04:00.002-05:00

On Thursday night, four of us captured the 26 meat chickens and put them in crates (when it's dark, they don't put up much of a fight). On Friday morning, we slaughtered and butchered them all. The pictures came out quite well and you can see the rest of them on Flickr, but I'll just put my first and last photo here. I wanted to see if I could handle killing a chicken, and it turns out that I can (and I will gratefully eat these chickens that are now filling a freezer). It was not as traumatic as I thought it might be, although I think everyone took it seriously.

2009-10-02T16:46:00.003-05:00

Almost dinner time, so a short post. We started building two Monhegan skiffs on Tuesday afternoon. One will be 9.5 feet and the other will be 11.5. Today is Friday and we already have about half the bottom boards nailed onto the 9.5 foot one. Once it comes off the jig, we can start the other boat.

Shaping oarlock pads:

This was the last thing we worked on today: nailing on the bottom boards:

Lacing leather onto the oars where they'll rest in the oarlocks:

Boat Shop orientation trip

2009-09-21T18:27:00.002-05:00

Whew. The Boatshop is nonstop--there's hardly been a moment of free time. We're still in orientation right now, so that will change, but it's been a challenge--a fun challenge--to be interacting with people all day, every day. This picture is from our sailing/camping trip this weekend. It's not the best photo that I took, but it does show four of the five boats that we took out. We had two sailboats that each carried about five passengers. There was a motorboat to carry all of our gear, and two rowboats, a catspaw dinghy and a peapod, which were towed by the motorboat. We used the smaller boats to get between the sailboats and shore.

This is where I spent the first morning of the trip:

More photos here.

2009-09-08T23:54:00.003-05:00

My nephew melts my heart.

done with farming

2009-08-24T15:51:00.002-05:00

A few pictures that don't really make up a coherent post:

This is my tomato-scummy arm after stringing tomatoes (I was wearing gloves):

If I don't develop Lyme's Disease as a result of this job, I'll consider myself incredibly lucky. Look how tiny those ticks are! (small dark spot near center of photo):

Nice melons, eh?

Our heirlooms at market:

I did my part to use up the extra tomatoes. I made ketchup and tomato sauce, which is pictured here. It would have been a lot easier if I'd had one big pot:

The corn crib has a unique solution for sewage: a worm bin with drainage for liquids. We also put our kitchen compost in there. But when something clogs the drain and the bin floods, nobody wants to dig it out. After almost a month of no toilet, X and I bit the bullet and shoveled it out. It wasn't that disgusting, actually. I guess the worms had been doing a good job, before they all drowned.

This is so cool. I only find one or two tomato hornworms each time we pick tomatoes, but they've almost always been visited first by parasitic wasps which lay their eggs in the hornworm. Nature, taking care of business:

Beautiful garlic:

Earlier today, G called and asked if I'd like to go out to the marsh with the family in their row boat. The water is quite shallow most places, and the girls like to get out and play in the mud:

Another adorable little swamp moster, striking a pose:

tomato day

2009-08-08T21:04:00.003-05:00

Due to a cool start to the summer, our tomatoes took a while to come in. It was mid-June before we had more than a handful to send to market. But they're definitely in now. We have three plantings of tomatoes. The first planting was three 200' beds of hybrids (regular, round, red tomatoes like the ones you see in grocery stores) and a bed of cherry tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are already finished, and though we're still harvesting the hybrids, it's mostly small fruit now. The second planting of tomatoes is nearing its peak (I hope). It's nine 400' beds total, with one bed of cherries, about three of heirlooms, and about five of hybrids. The third planting is not ready to harvest yet. We harvest large tomatoes on Tuesday and Friday, and cherry tomatoes on Wednesday and Saturday. Today I brought my camera along to document a typical tomato-picking day.

X and I start down the trail to the farm at 5:50 am. It's still quite dark, so I lead the way with my spiderweb stick, waving at any invisible webs that might have been constructed at the height of my face. Down at the farm, we don rainboots and rainpants. Even though it hasn't rained, there is enough dew on the tomato plants to soak our pants and socks. We haven't seen Heinz yet this morning, but it doesn't matter because tomato days always start the same way. We each grab a cart and a stack of ponies (green baskets that hold about 5/8 of a bushel), and head out to the second planting of tomatoes.

X heads to one side of the field to start harvesting the hybrids, while I start with the heirlooms. In spite of all the time spent staking and stringing these plants, the rows are like jungles, with vines underfoot and arching overhead. (my camera seemed to have some issues with bright light this morning)

We harvest and harvest and harvest. The long rows are broken up by several walkouts, so when we've filled a pony, we carry it to the nearest walkout and line it up along the relatively shady west side of the field.

In the photo below, the two ponies on the left are heirlooms, and the one on the right is full of hybrids. Hybrids can stand up to a lot more handling, so we pick them riper and can pile them higher in the ponies. The heirlooms are incredibly delicate when ripe, with skin that can tear if you rub it wrong, so we harvest heirlooms as soon as they begin to change color, and we don't fill the ponies as much.

In the past I've been known to describd heirloom tomatoes as looking somewhat like tumors. I'd like to amend that description. There's a French term that apparently means something like "beautiful-ugly, une jolie-laide, which I think is apt here.

After we finish harvesting, Heinz brings around the tractor and wagon, and loads all of the ponies.

Today in addition to a full wagon, we had three full cartloads with six ponies each. Our most tomatoes yet this summer. It's now 12:30, six and a half hours since we started, and it's time for lunch. I never realized this when growing tomatoes on my back deck, but tomato leaves and stems are covered in some substance that coats your skin. After picking tomatoes, my arm hairs are pale green, and my hands are blackish green with a layer of scum so thick that it cracks around my fingertips. It's hard to wash off, too, requiring several soakings and washings. At lunch, the youngest child looked at me holding my water glass and said, "Seewah, you hans is ditty." But this is about as clean as they get these days:

After lunch, X and I start washing other vegetables while waiting for G to put H down for a nap. When she joins us, we head over to the tomato-sorting room. Here's how it's set up when we sort the hybrids:

At the end of the machine that's back by the wagon, Heinz empties ponies of tomatoes onto a series of rollers covered in brushes, which carry the tomatoes under a spray of water and onto another set of rollers. The furthest tomatoes in this photo are the ones that have just emerged from the washing section. They then pass over the sizing belt, which is the white section with dark holes. Small tomatoes fall through and roll onto the table barely visible to the left. The rest proceed onto the round table where they are sorted into boxes of red and orange (sometimes we have two additional categories: green and extra-ripe). There are ponies on the ground to hold compost and kitchen seconds.

The stacks:

At every step in the process, tomatoes with soft spots or bug bites are discarded and composted. When you add up all the tomatoes we leave in the pathways while harvesting, the ones we pull out when washing and sorting, the ones Heinz pulls out when he re-sorts the boxes on Saturday night, and the ones that are pulled out by the market staff on Sunday, that's a lot of compost.

I'll be making ketchup this weekend.

2009-07-12T21:35:00.002-05:00

2 bulbs/foot x 440 feet/row x 3 rows/bed x 9 beds = 23,760 bulbs of garlic harvested this week. Enough to last through December, at least.

some disillusionment

2009-07-05T09:57:00.000-05:00

I only have about a month and a half left on the farm, but it's going to be hard. Every day this week we weeded potato beds. My hands are acting up again. They're so stiff in the mornings that I have to braid my hair at night because I don't have the dexterity to make a ponytail in the mornings.

And we haven't even started harvesting tomatoes yet. I know the summer will be physically difficult, but I think the biggest challenge will be mental. Heinz can be a difficult man to work for. I'm really glad that I had worked at the farmers market before coming to the farm, because I sort of knew what to expect from him. If I hadn't been prepared for it, the constant criticism would have made me quit long ago. But up until now, X and I have been able to get through it with good attitudes and the ability to laugh together. But it wears me down.

I make plenty of mistakes on the farm, and I don't mind being corrected--I just don't understand why Heinz has to do it with words and tone that suggest I'm either a hopeless idiot or a lazy bum deliberately sabotaging the productivity of his farm. For the record, I haven't made any major, money-wasting mistakes. My mistakes are things like driving the tractor slightly too slowly while others load harvested garlic onto the wagon being towed by the tractor. For this I received an unnecessarily long harangue punctuated with "do you hear me?!" It just stings, and the tone used always seems out of proportion to the infraction.

This, among other things, has recently led me to the surprising realization that this farm is not sustainable. Ecologically, it may be sustainable--as far as I can tell, Heinz really knows his shit. He goes further than many organic farmers in that he doesn't use any pesticides (there are organic pesticides like Bt and diatomaceous earth). He believes that insects attack weak and unhealthy plants, so he focuses on growing healthy plants that are able to defend themselves. The vegetables that we grow here are beautiful and delicious. I have a lot of respect for what he does with his farm.

The farm is not sustainable as currently run because there are no consistent, long-term employees. There have been a few workers who have come back for multiple seasons, but for the most part, I think the farm relies on people who work a single season or even less. Heinz would like to have someone with considerable farm experience who could take over some of the management of the farm, but I have a hard time seeing how that's ever going to happen. So Heinz will continue being stressed and over-worked, getting older every year, with no one sticking around long enough to take over any significant aspects of the operation of the farm.

2009-06-29T08:07:00.002-05:00

A pair of birds built a nest in the shelves on my front porch. I didn't notice them until yesterday when I was trying to install a screen door. One bird stayed on the nest while the other one flew up to the clothesline and watched me anxiously. You can just see the mama bird peeking out of the nest:

The silk on my corn is turning brown, which means it's time to harvest. I've only harvested one so far. It was tiny, about 5 inches long, but it was pretty well filled out with kernels, so I'm happy:

2009-06-22T11:19:00.002-05:00

My corn has corn on it!

If these ears turn out to be edible and tasty, I'm going to be really pleased with myself. I'm already getting edamame, cherry tomatoes, and basil from my garden, and there's a fennel bulb and a head of radicchio that are ready to be harvested. My Job's Tears are also looking promising:

I wish that I had more pictures of what work is like on the farm, but it's hard to carry a camera around with me and still keep it clean. I did bring my camera on Saturday and took a couple of pictures of vegetable prep. Here we have X and R washing cabbages (and removing bad leaves, caterpillars, and caterpillar poop):

crimes of passion in the chicken coop!

2009-06-14T09:09:00.002-05:00

This morning when I took my laundry down to the house, G and the girls were standing around watching Mack and Black and the five ducklings--wait, five? Yes, the sixth duckling was discovered dead in the coop this morning by M. Its head an neck were wet, leading G to infer that Mack is the culprit. He's been in a mating mood recently, and apparently last night, unable to fly up to the shelf with Black, he inflicted his personal version of courtship on one of the ducklings. This involves a little strangulation, which might work on an adult duck, but was too much for the teenage duck.

Earlier this week, Rebecca and I harvested the rest of the garlic scapes (the curly flower stalks), and we've been smelling like garlic ever since. It's kind of sickening after a while. I had to leave my shirt and pants outside. So I put a load of laundry in this morning, and now all of my clothes smell like garlic :-(.

free in DC

2009-06-08T13:37:00.003-05:00

This weekend I went into the city to experience two of DC's coolest free offerings: Artomatic and the drum circle. Artomatic is an art show that happens every year in an office building that is in the process of being constructed or remodeled. It's open to anyone who is willing to pay some reasonable fee for about 20' of wall space, so it's 9 glorious floors of everything from professional, high-quality work to portfolios of high school students or lawyers who like to doodle in their spare time. There's a tattoo parlor, stages with live music, food, and workshops. Almost everyone puts out a notebook for people to leave comments, and some artists incorporate visitors' words into their displays. One example is an artist who documented the long saga of a mouse infestation through collage and painting:

She then left out sticky notes and asked people to share their own mouse and rat experiences. There are notes reminiscing about a beloved class pet, as well as rodent horror stories:

(I Love Mice)

(In the office - he saw the mouse and dropped a phone book on it. We all screamed. One girl cried.)

One display that appears every year contains the dioramas from the Washington Post's Peeps diorama contest. They can be quite elaborate:

After Artomatic, I met up with Kaitlin and Rebecca at the weekly drum circle in Malcolm X Park. There was a loosely organized potluck going on, as well as the usual slacklines, juggling, hula-hooping, capoiera, dancing, and of course, drumming. This really has to be one of the best things going on in DC. It's a carnival atmosphere, but no one is charging money for anything. It's a diverse crowd, but unlike most "diverse areas" in DC, people here are actually interacting with each other. I know I've posted a video of the drum circle before, but here's another poorly-shot video, along with the recommendation that if you're in DC on a Sunday afternoon, go to Malcolm X (Meridian Hill) Park, and follow the sound of the drums:

Rebecca, who works for Heinz at the farmers market, is going to be joining us on the farm for three weeks, starting on Wednesday. She was asking me questions about bugs, mice, snakes, sun, poison ivy, and anything else that she should prepare for. I assured her that I had never found a snake in the house, so naturally, today when I was baking cookies, I sat down on the couch and discovered this guy:

I think it was about 4 feet long. I called Xochi and she bravely used a spatula to flush it out from behind the shelves where it was hiding. Once it was out on the open floor, it started moving surprisingly quickly, but with the aid of a broom and a pillowcase, we prevented it from going under the stove.

2009-06-07T12:30:00.002-05:00

The strawberries are done! We harvested the last few berries yesterday afternoon, and finished the day by 6:15. X and I were so giddy at getting off work early on a Saturday that we decided to go check out Captain Billy's Crab House, which is located near the farm, over the Potomac. We ordered six crabs to share, and the waitress gave us a quick lesson in crab-eating. "Just don't eat the lungs or this yellow squiggly stuff." "Squiggly stuff?" I asked X after the waitress had gone. "I think it's almost worse that she didn't tell us what it actually is." "Maybe she's not allowed to say 'poop'" X mused. Anyway, we had our Maryland crab experience and watched the sun set over the river, and we agreed that it was an expensive and time-consuming way to consume a tiny bit of meat, and we probably wouldn't make a habit of eating here.

What comes next? It looks like the cherry tomatoes are getting ripe...

hanging in there

2009-05-31T12:03:00.002-05:00

It's a Tuesday and I'm in the kitchen making lunch while everyone else is out picking strawberries. It's raining, so the girls are in the house with me. The youngest is setting up a tea party for her stuffed animals, and I'm eavesdropping. As she sets down a plateful of playdoh in front of each guest, I hear her reassuring a teddy bear, "no, no, dis is not tempeh. dis tofu."

The last couple of weeks have been hectic. Harvesting strawberries takes a lot of time, although I think they are, thankfully, past their peak. We pick three days a week. Last Saturday was the most ridiculous: we picked from 2:30 until 9, when it got too dark to see, although we still hadn't finished all of the beds. Then we pinted and quarted all of the strawberries for market, which lasted until midnight (and we had started work at 6am, as we usually do on Saturdays). And then on the following Tuesday, we started picking at 7am and picked until 4. The Tuesday stawberries get sold wholesale, and even at that lower price, we picked over a thousand dollars in strawberries that day. Last night we finished pinting strawberries before 10, so I think it will be easier from here on (until the tomatoes ripen...).

2009-05-17T10:29:00.000-05:00

I guess summer is here, if not weather-wise, then certainly work-wise. Yesterday we started work at 6 am and didn't finish until 9:30 at night. X and I had to borrow a flashlight to get home. Granted, Saturdays are always long, but the big difference is due to the arrival of the strawberries. We harvest on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and then sort, pint, and quart them all on Saturday (in addition to all of the vegetables going to market). Heinz has four different varieties planted in eight 220' beds, with the idea being that they will ripen at different times. So I expect that we'll be harvesting strawberries for the next several weeks. Harvesting strawberries is rough on the knees, and even moreso on the back. When I got home last night it was hard to find the energy to boil pasta; I just wanted to lie draped over the exercise ball to bend my spine back into a more normal position. It's too bad--I have access to all of this wonderful fresh food, and I often don't have the time or energy to do anything ambitious with it.

So strawberries are painful and time-consuming to harvest, but they definitely have other points in their favor. For one, they're beautiful, and it's a pleasure to look down the rows and see thousands of ripe jewels peeking out from under the leaves. And they're also delicious, so delicious. I think it's pretty amazing that the human eye can perceive color differences so subtle that you can look at a strawberry and see the difference between a "will be ripe 6 hours from now" red and a "perfect, at its peak, unbelievably sweet" red. Even the girls can tell the difference. I don't eat a ton of strawberries while I'm working, but I can afford to be picky--it's not at all like buying a quart at the grocery store (or even the farmers market) and getting a mixture of good and not-quite-ripe berries. Eating warm, perfectly ripe strawberries in the field is amazing.

X told me that she thinks I'm getting a tan (on my arms). I think this may be true. Though it could also just be a high concentration of freckles.

muzzles, hats, strawberries, ducklings

2009-05-10T13:54:00.002-05:00

I was wearing a white organdy dress with orange polka dots. Jeanette was wearing a mauve organdy dress with blue polka dots. Linette was wearing a red organdy dress with white polka dots. Mirabella was in a dark corner, wearing a muzzle. Her party culottes were duct-taped to her knees. The nuns had tied little bows on the muzzle to make it more festive.

--Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

I've been reading a book of short stories, and I love this quote, especially out of context.

It is a sunny Saturday morning, and Heinz, G, X, and I are harvesting spinach and baby lettuce. Three happy, naked little girls ride their bikes down from the house. "Girls!" G exclaims, in all seriousness, "why aren't you wearing your hats?"

This morning I went treasure-hunting:

I only found two or three really perfect, ripe, sweet ones, but there are many in the works.

On Thursday, 6 of the duck eggs hatched into adorable, fuzzy, "squishy" (according to X) ducklings. It's amazingly fun to watch the little family. Seriously all I knew about ducks up to this point, I learned from the book "Make Way for Ducklings," and it turns out that ducks are very attentive, protective parents, and the dad is definitely involved in raising the kids (although Mack's ability to help out is limited by the fact that the nest is up on a shelf in the chicken coop, and Mack can't fly, so he has to wait for someone to lift him up). Yes, the ducks have been renamed again to Mack and Black. The ducklings don't have names yet.

and a little video:

I got in!

2009-05-04T11:57:00.001-05:00

I found out yesterday that I've been accepted to the boat shop, so starting in September, I'll be here:

More adventures with creepy crawlies

2009-05-03T12:40:00.001-05:00

Last weekend was hot and sunny, and I was determined to finally get my seedlings in the ground. I used chicken wire to reinforce the bottom of my fence and cover two feet of ground extending from the garden, and I surrounded the garden with another application of Liquid Fence for the deer. As I was working with the chicken wire, I found several ticks crawling on me, and tossed them back into the woods. So I wasn't too surprised later when I took a shower and found one attached to my stomach. Still, I hate having ticks attached to me, so I hurried from the bathroom to my bedroom to retrieve the tweezers while wrapped in a towel. When I arrived, I found myself in the midst of the massive annual mating frenzy of some insect species (termites?). This happened twice when I was living at Cacique, always in the kitchen, but this time, they all congregated in my bedroom. So I'm standing in my room surrounded by a cloud of clumsy, lovesick, and fragile insects that are fluttering around, landing, losing their wings, and scurrying around my floor in little two-car insect mating trains. After mating, they apparently die (I'm not sure whether there's an egg-laying stage that I'm missing, because otherwise the whole thing seems quite pointless). Grabbing the flyswatter that I fortuitously bought earlier that day, I swat a clear path across the room, grab the tweezers, and flee back into the safety of the kitchen. Hours later my room is still occupied by many live insects and growing piles of bodies and wings. Everywhere--all over my bed, my pillow, the glass of water next to my bed, my phone, my laptop, etc. So I spent the night on the sticky vinyl loveseat in the living room, and did a massive cleanup the following evening.

Several weeks ago I noticed a black widow that had built a web in a corner of the bathroom. I magnanimously decided that if she kept to her territory, we could peacefully coexist. Also, I couldn't figure out how to reach into the middle of her sprawling web and trap her without her falling or scurrying out of reach. But anyway, she kept her side of the bargain until this morning. While I was in the shower (why do these things always happen when I'm most vulnerable?), I noticed a male black widow hanging around up by the showerhead. When I got out of the shower to check on the original black widow, she looked much larger than I remembered. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but now I'm worried about massive crops of black widow babies, which surely violates her terms of the deal. So I returned, clothed, armed with a cup and a piece of cardboard, and cleared everything out of the area under the web, leaving a more or less white expanse of floor. I took a couple of swipes at the web with the cup, tearing the strands, and she held her ground. This is going well so far--I thought she would flee when she felt the vibrations. So I took one last brave swipe, felt her body plunk against the inside of the cup, and... I lost her. I have no idea where she fell. Obviously now she is going to find her way to my bedroom and lay her eggs under my pillow, which maybe serves me right if I can't keep track of a giant, black, slow-moving spider on a white floor.

my fingernails is related to a sawmill on my mother's side

2009-04-26T09:25:00.003-05:00

It seems that I am immune to poison ivy, for which I can thank my mom for giving me her lucky genes. I feel like I've just discovered that I have a superpower--one that allows me to wear shorts in the summer.

Earlier this week, G and the girls tracked the guinea hens in the afternoon until they discovered a nest with 9 eggs. She gave two each to me and X. Guinea eggs are a little smaller than chicken eggs, with light brown, thick shells. I had mine fried, on toast, for dinner. I'm not sure how to describe the flavor. It wasn't anything weird; it was like a chicken egg only better than any chicken egg I've ever had. The yolk was a beautiful orange globe (full of protein from the guineas eating ticks and other bugs around the farm).

The weather is heating up now--yesterday was around 90. A lot of the winter greens have decided that it's time to reproduce, so they're bolting and blooming. It's really interesting to me how plants within a family can look so different during the majority of their lifespan, but at the beginning and end of their lives, they closely resemble their relatives. The broccoli, cabbage, kale, collard greens, kohlrabi, pak choi, tat soi, mizuna, cress, arugula, and several weeds are all members of the Brassica family. As seedlings, they are easy to identify because their seed leaves are heart-shaped. And again, at the end of their lives, the family resemblance is clear; they all elongate and get four-petaled yellow flowers (except for arugula, which has white flowers). The flowering red russian kale is particularly striking right now, with dark purple stems contrasting with the bright yellow flowers.

I love discovering all of the pleasant surprises that the area around the corn crib offers as the seasons change. First it was wild onions and daffodils, then some spearmint and catnip that returned to the garden on its own, in addition to a plant that looks like mint but smells like lemons. Now, the wisteria is blooming. I had no idea that there was any wisteria at all until last weekend, and now when I open the door I see a huge, spreading purple haze that floats over sheds and through the trees on both sides of the driveway. The smell is unbelievable.

When I was last at a used bookstore in DC, I picked up a book on American folklore, and have been reading a little over breakfast every morning. Overall the book is not that great, but it does have some choice examples of old style boasting. My favorite so far is "my fingernails is related to a sawmill on my mother's side," which X commented sounds like it could be a lyric in a Tom Waits song.

spring eats

2009-04-19T11:57:00.003-05:00

I'm sure I'll live to regret this someday, but I've gotten in the habit of tasting plants to identify them. I only do this with things I find on the farm, not in the woods. So when harvesting lettuce, X and I will have conversations like this:

X: Do you think this is lettuce, or a weed?
me [chewing on a leaf]: Uh. I think it's lettuce, but it seems to have thorns growing down the ribs. Ow. Maybe it's bolting.
X: So I guess I shouldn't put that in the lettuce mix.

X: What about this? It looks like mache, doesn't it?
S: Yeah. Does it taste good?
X [chews]: No. No, that's not mache.

We've discovered that many of the common weeds around here are edible (such as chickweed, lamb's quarters, and dock), although at this time of year there are plenty of greens on the farm that are easier to find and clean.

Yesterday felt hot, although it was only in the mid-70s. I might have to find some pants other than Carhartts to wear in the summer. Or shorts, even. My hesitation with shorts is that there's poison ivy everywhere. I haven't gotten it yet, so this morning I rubbed a leaf on my leg, just to see if I react. I should know by tomorrow...

Yesterday while we were harvesting spinach, G brought down some jars of kale/apple/cilantro/lime juice for us to drink. I've never had a juicer and vegetable juice has never held much appeal for me, but this juice was delicious and refreshing, in spite of its evil green, sedimenty appearance.

We've started digging leeks again. They're exhausting to harvest and clean, but so delicious. For dinner recently I've had apples, leeks, and salty sheep cheese, grilled cheddar cheese and leek sandwich on sourdough, and scrambled eggs and leeks with blue cheese on toast (obviously I have no plans to become vegan).

Spring is here

2009-03-29T13:07:00.002-05:00

It's not sunny and warm, yet, but cool and filled with gentle rain. My walk through the woods from the corn crib to the farm is misty and quiet. The rotting leaf smell reminds me of Pacific rain forests, although the the types of trees are different, and when I asked Heinz whether there were any big slugs around here, he said yes, and pointed to one that was 3/4 of an inch long. The birdsong gets louder every day, peaking around 9:30 (I think--since I don't carry a watch with me when I work). The bees buzz around us as we harvest spinach, landing on the flowering ground ivy that is a weed, but that Heinz likes to leave so that they have something to eat until the strawberries bloom. There is a weed called Sweet Annie, which was actually planted by the previous farmer to harvest as cut flowers, but it's impossible to get rid of. I haven't seen its bloom yet, but when you cut the plant or pull it out by the roots, it releases a heady, spicy-sweet smell that is so tempting that I tasted the leaves before deciding that it's best appreciated for the aroma.

When I visited the farm in October, they had just acquired a black duck named Bo. He had been raised by a suburban family and was very friendly, but when he started hanging out on the neighbors' porches and leaving poop everywhere, there were complaints, so the family brought him to this farm. (An interesting side note--Kaitlin tells me that ducks don't have sphincters, to there's no hope for training them. They just have no control at all). G worried that Bo would be lonely without any duck friends, so she set out to find a girl duck to bring home. But she could only find a nesting pair of large white meat ducks at a nearby Amish farm, so she bought both of them. The new ducks saw Bo as a threat and chased him away from the tiny duck pond every time he tried to get in the water. So Bo spent more time with humans than with ducks, following us around the farm and allowing himself to be picked up and held.

When I came back to the farm in January, the female white duck had died, and the remaining white duck had become best buds with Bo. Since the white duck shies away from humans, I guess giving him a name had never seemed that urgent, so he is currently called Joe, Gus, Polly, or "white duck" when he's called at all. I favor Gus. Bo can fly so he often roosts in a tree or on the roof at night, while Gus gets herded into the chicken coop. As Heinz has pointed out, it obviously burns him up that he can't fly. Other than at night, Bo and Gus are inseparable. They're fascinating to watch as they slowly make their waddling circuit of the farm, checking out all the mud puddles. Gus is chatty, and always has his mouth open. I've never heard Bo make a sound, but his head is always in motion, in sort of a combination of a nod and a chin-jut. He also shakes his tail feathers vigorously when he's perturbed.

Yesterday, Bo did something very unexpected, for a boy duck. He made a nest in the chicken coop, and laid an egg. I think it's too late to change his name and pronoun at this point in his life, so I'm going to stick with what he's always had. Heinz told us about the egg in the morning, and when I went to peek at the egg before lunch, I saw not one, but three eggs (I checked again this morning and there are four). Once there are a few more eggs, Bo will presumably start sitting on his nest.

The arrival of Spring also means that the work will increase around here. Through the winter, Heinz goes to market every other week, but with the beginning of April, he reverts to going every week, and the market goes back to starting at 9 instead of 10. So there will be no more "easy" Saturdays around here--my weekend will always be kicked off with the exhaustion that follows a long day of harvesting, washing, and bagging. G usually helps with washing and bagging, and handles all of the local special orders, but she's gone to Canada for a month with the girls, so her normal duties also fall to us. Luckily, it takes some time for the vegetables to really get into full swing. Heinz is still taking a half-size tent to market, and he won't start taking the double tent until the strawberries come in, which I believe will happen in April.

Since G is gone to Canada, that means someone has to open and water the greenhouses on Sundays when Heinz is at market. Today, I said I would do it, and since it's a beautiful day, I took my camera along and walked around the farm. Here's what spring looks like for us:

This is where life starts for many of the vegetables on the farm. The flats sit on a bed of wet sand that is heated. This way, the air in the greenhouse doesn't have to be heated.

This is the rest of the big greenhouse. In addition to the sand beds, there are leafy greens grown in here during the winter (mustard greens, arugula, baby lettuce, cress, Italian dandelion greens, and dill). The baby lettuce has all bolted by now, so we covered those beds with black tarps and set up wire tables to hold more seedlings once they're moved off the sand beds.

The little greenhouse is also full of wire tables holding flats of seedlings.

When Heinz saw that I had started seeds for my garden and was struggling to keep them warm in the corn crib, he said I could put them in the greenhouse. They appear to be thriving. This is my corn, and behind the corn is my edamame.

Now, to the fields. We've put up four of these greenhouses out in the fields since I arrived. They're more permanent than a field tunnel (which is just hoops of PVC spanning three beds, covered with fabric), but not as advanced as the greenhouses up by the house (which have plumbing and some amount of heating in the winter). Each of these greenhouses spans three 220' beds. One entire house is designated for ginger (though it hasn't been planted yet).

Some rows of baby lettuce that we've been harvesting all winter. It's looking scraggly now, and we didn't harvest from this bed this week. Not many weeds though (except in the pathways). Each bed is five feet wide. This is not a farm standard--it varies based on how you plan to harvest your crop, and how tall the farmer is. Heinz is at least 6' tall, so he does not find it difficult to lean over and harvest the middle row, while for the rest of us it's more of a stretch. Another farmer who sells at the market has narrower rows, because he's fairly short, and because he likes to harvest while straddling the bed, whereas we harvest while kneeling.

There are several beds of carrots that were seeded in the fall and never got weeded or thinned. Heinz is not sure whether they'll ever get big enough to take to market, but for now, it's a nice place to stop for a snack.

X and I spent several days pruning and training the massive tangle of kiwi vines into something more orderly. I always thought of kiwis as a tropical fruit, but apparently they don't mind a cold winter (several varieties have been developed in Russia).

An electric fence protects the strawberries from deer. The voltage is low enough that it doesn't hurt; it just makes your finger jump away from the wire when the pulse goes through it. I've spent a lot of time sewing up rips in the fence (see the white stitches?). There was one day early on when G mistakenly told me she had unplugged the fence, and I got shocked several times because I kept touching it in disbelief. Call me a slow learner.

We haven't harvested leeks in several months, because the winter was hard on them. They definitely looked more magnificent in the fall, but they're looking good enough now that we'll probably harvest them again soon, if there's time.

I drove the tractor as Heinz and X planted potato sets in these two beds. And then we planted fava beans in the three beds to the right of the potato beds. Here's a sprouting potato. Why am I having so much trouble uploading to Flickr? Sorry, no photo of potato and fava bean beds.

There's a beekeeper who comes periodically to tend to these bees. So far I've had a peaceful relationship with them.

A peek under the row cover at some sweet onions. When we transplanted these, it was my first time driving the tractor while pulling the transplanter.

Walking up the path from the farm, you can see the corn crib through the trees.

There is poison ivy everywhere. I've never been exposed to it before, so I'm nervous for when it starts to put out leaves. Heinz doesn't react to it, so he doesn't pay much attention to it.

It seems there is a cherry tree in my yard.

This is the ramshackle fence about which I blogged last weekend.

The farm, in all its Spring glory.

bits and pieces

2009-03-23T16:33:00.004-05:00

Step 1: Take one third of a drop of poison
Step 2: Dilute the poison with all of the water on earth. Sell sips of ocean water.
Step 3: Profit!

I want to be clear that homeopathic medicine has a specific meaning that is separate from other non-mainstream medical treatments, such as using herbs or massage. I have no argument with using herbs or massage. But homeopathy is quackery, pure and simple. I'm disturbed at the willingness of those on the farm to believe in the efficacy of homeopathic remedies. There's a deep mistrust of the medical establishment and while I don't think that modern medicine and the FDA always have our best interests at heart, I do place a certain amount of faith in scientific evidence. I plan to combat ticks and Lyme disease with something other than water.

I planted some seeds in cell trays a few weeks ago and they've all started to germinate. Sweet corn, edamame, Job's tears, yellow pear and Sweet Baby Girl tomatoes (cherry tomatoes), basil, and Blackeyed Susans (supposed to help keep deer away). There are a few other things I haven't gotten around to starting yet, including hot peppers and some flowers. I've grown tomatoes and basil before, but the rest are new to me. It's so cool to see those little seeds turn into healthy little green plants. X and I put up a sad little fence around part of the garden today, to protect the corn and edamame that will eventually be planted there. Sad because we were using rusted chicken wire and bamboo stakes that were about 3 feet shorter than we wanted. Right now the fence would probably keep out a tumbleweed, if the tumbleweed was particularly stupid. We will continue to improve on the fence.

I've been thinking recently about how my move to the farm has affected me physically. I'm definitely stronger, and I think I've gained a little weight but feel healthier than I did before. My skin is happier than it's been in years. I still end days with sore muscles, but I recover more quickly than I did at first. On the negative side, I've spent quite a lot of time being sick (though I'm not sick currently). I'm not sure whether this means my immune system is weaker, or just that I'm exposed to lots of germs from the girls. In DC I used to take the bus to work every day and just encounter more people in general, but rarely got sick, so I guess I'm leaning towards the immune system explanation, which puzzles me. Another unwelcome development is what Google searches tells me is some sort of rheumatism in the fingers of my right hand. This developed after several days of weeding around trees using hand tools that were heavier and had thicker handles than I found comfortable. I thought it would get better with time, but ever since then, I wake up in the mornings unable to curl the fingers of my right hand without lots of pain. It goes away within 10 minutes of getting out of bed. I'm kind of afraid to consult a doctor because of the really high deductible on my health insurance. One doctor visit might be manageable, but if it leads to seeing specialists, or buying prescriptions, it could get pretty expensive pretty quickly.

In general though, I'm doing okay financially. I take home a little over $900 per month, but I don't have to pay rent, water, gas, or electric. I still have to pay my cell phone bill ($40) and fill up my gas tank to get into town to go grocery shopping or use the internet. I think my grocery bill may have actually increased since moving here, since I try to be more conscious about buying organic. However, I'm never tempted to go out for lunch, which I did often in DC, so it probably evens out.

I made some surprisingly good vegan spanikopita last week for lunch (surprising because I love feta cheese and butter and eggs). To replace the cheese, I mixed up some crumbled extra-firm tofu, nutritional yeast, salt, chopped walnuts, nutmeg, thyme, and lemon juice.

And then I made some quiche for myself, which I will never ever try to make vegan because after replacing butter, cream, cheese, and eggs, all that's left is, like, flour and onions.

Granola! I've been eating granola pretty much every morning, because other cold cereal leaves me hungry before lunchtime. But granola is kind of expensive, and comes in small boxes. So I started making it myself. Why did I not know how easy this is? I thought it was a multi-hour process or something, but no, it's like 45 minutes from start to finish. It's still not that cheap--rolled oats alone are about $1 a pound, but then I add honey, pecans, sesame seeds, and dried cranberries. But it's so good.

mother nature

2009-03-09T11:08:00.001-05:00

All it takes is a few days of warm weather, and nature rears her ugly head, giving us a preview of what's in store this summer. Snapshots:

I'm sweating because it's 70 and sunny and I'm wearing a jacket and leather gloves while hacking away at brambles that are crowding some little trees that will one day form a windbreak. I'm not sure which is worse--the heat, or the threat of ticks, poison ivy, and the rampant thorny brambles. X has already gotten poison ivy and we've both found ticks crawling up our legs, under our pants. My head itches from real or imagined ticks, and I wonder whether I would even be able to detect an attached tick while washing my hair.

I go to my car to get potting soil from the trunk. I open the trunk and see a mouse scurry out of sight. What else is in the trunk? A pair of boots, a piece of packing paper, now chewed to shreds, a pillow and a mattress pad in unsealed plastic bags. I warily sniff the pillow and mattress pad and am not hit with the signature mouse pee odor, so I carry them to the front porch. Then I notice that my mattress pad is not alone in its bag; it is accompanied by four tiny blind eraser mouse babies. I took a picture and then drowned them. This morning there was a mouse in one of the traps that I left in the trunk. Can the mice get from my trunk into the rest of my car? How does one get mice out of a car? I put a couple of traps in the trunk, but that's only going to work as long as I don't move my car, and remember to check the traps every day.

smile

2009-02-28T20:09:00.002-05:00

Heinz gave me positive feedback! I know that his main frustration with me is my speed, and while I am definitely faster at everything now than when I started, my speed still doesn't merit a compliment. However, I can satisfactorily drive a tractor at 0.1 miles per hour while transplanting onion seedlings. I didn't run over the beds or any children, I adjusted my speed when Heinz or Gabrielle were falling behind, and I managed not to swing the platform off to the side when I got to the end of the row. It was not the most exciting work, but Heinz said that I did a good job.

2009-02-28T20:00:00.002-05:00

Relationship with housemates has improved somewhat. The two-week visitor left, and I'm getting along well with the woman who just started working for Heinz. Her husband--I just don't get him, and I don't think I ever will, but he's gone for two weeks, which means I have room in my head to worry about other things, like LYME DISEASE. I found a deer tick crawling on the table yesterday, which caught me by surprise--I didn't expect to see ticks for another few months. I need to do some more reading about Lyme disease, but it pretty much freaks me out. And I suspect that the dog is bringing ticks into the corn crib, which does not make me happy (there have been several ticks found on the dog). Making me even less happy is the talk of using tea tree oil and homeopathic remedies to deter ticks and prevent Lyme disease, respectively. Fine if you want to sleep with your ticky dog in the tea house, but I didn't choose to live with a pet, and if the dog is going to be spending all day chilling in the corn crib while I'm at work, I want Frontline pumping through its veins.

warning... whining ahead

2009-02-18T17:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm feeling more than a little misanthropic today. There are three new corn crib residents, which is most likely a contributing factor.

I had a great a non-misanthropic weekend, visiting friends in DC on Sunday, and inviting the girls up to the corn crib on Monday to make belated valentines for their parents.

Monday evening, the first guy arrived to start his two-week trial period on the farm. Tuesday, a couple arrived--the wife is going to work on the farm while the husband looks for work as a bike mechanic. There's nothing really wrong with these people, but. But. I guess I've gotten used to living alone. I think that's most of it. And now suddenly I have a bunch of housemates, and not ones that I chose. I sort of feel like since I've been living here for a while, I should be able to assert myself better. But this is not really an area of strength for me, so I'll probably just retreat into my room and cede the common space to the more gregarious personalities. My petty grievances of the moment, roughly in order of ascending pettiness:

Two-week visitor runs his space heater all night long, so I can't run mine at all (without overloading the circuit) even though I've explained the situation to him.
shoes and boots in the house--things get dirty quickly

someone borrowed my house slippers to wear outside, and put them back outside my door with wet leaves still stuck to the soles.

everyone seems to be helping themselves to my shampoo, conditioner, soap, lotion, etc. Not that they're expensive brands, but it's nice to be asked.

dog on the couch

dog in my room

dog footprints everywhere

a new dog bed, 4' in diameter, occupying the corn crib's 8' x 5' living room

discussions about how much cooler Carhartt would be if they made skinny jeans, and how it sucks that when you sew the legs narrower, the crotch rips sooner.

punks who refuse to grow up (I realize I sound like a cranky old lady, but how old can you get before nose piercings and a dredlocked rat tail are just ridiculous? I don't know for sure, but I'd say 35 is pushing it).

I can see spring from here

2009-02-08T15:57:00.001-05:00

Heinz recently chopped down several trees, mostly dead but some alive, and my birthday this year was spent splitting and stacking wood (there is a wood-splitting machine that hooks onto the tractor's PTO, but you still have to haul the giant stumps up onto the machine). After splitting, the three-foot, still hefty ("I'm making firewood, not kindling!") pieces of wood get stacked on a wagon. There was a girl doing a farm visit this week and we were able to team up on heaving some of the heavier, sap-filled pieces onto a pile taller than our heads.

My real birthday present was the weather this weekend (high 50s and low 60s--my definition of nice weather has broadened since coming to the farm).

I'm sitting in a wicker chair on the front porch, in the shade but with bare feet stretched out in the sun. On the clothesline are a pair of socks and two scarves that are waving in the wind like banners. In front of me are two not-very-square beds marked off by brick borders. They mostly contain dead leaves and wood chips, but just this weekend I noticed the leaves of some bulbs emerging from their drab surroundings (Gabrielle tells me they're going to be daffodils).

Despite the fact that I work on a vegetable farm, I'm excited by the prospect of having a garden of my own. In recent explorations, I discovered that last summer's residents carved out a 13' x 27' plot on a gentle slope facing west. I immediately started making a list of things that I want to plant. Most of them are things that Heinz doesn't grow (corn, edamame, jalapenos, Job's tears, yellow pear tomatoes, mint) but some are crops that he grows but that don't result in many seconds that I can freely take (basil).

Further inspection of the garden plot revealed that some plants are already coming up. Besides the inescapable chives, I found a few small, gnarled spinach plants (glad they turned out to be spinach, because I tasted them), two spearmint plants/patches putting up new leaves, some dead celery that seems to have some new growth in the center, and lots of little bulbs with leaves thicker than chives. I can't tell if they're going to grow into larger onions or not. I'm going to leave them be for now. Yesterday as I sat at the picnic table drawing out a grid on which to plan my garden (I am my mother's daughter), Gabrielle drove by with the girls and stopped to pick up my recycling. When I mentioned corn and edamame to her, she warned me that I would be competing with deer and groundhogs. As she drove off, a groundhog appeared 30 feet from where I was sitting, slowly and obliviously ambling along. The wind rustled my papers and his amble became a hustle, and he was gone before I could get out my camera. Later, I went into town and bought some Liquid Fence, which is made of rotten eggs, and which is supposed to deter deer.

2009-02-06T20:25:00.002-05:00

Today I sowed the seeds of Revolution. Revolution happens to be a variety of pepper... still, it made my day.

I do not want you to think I am whimsical...

2009-02-01T10:58:00.004-05:00

English is not my boss's first language. I never correct him, because for the most part his meaning is clear, even if the phrasing is unusual. Some examples:

elbow grease = elbow room
tap on the shoulder = pat on the back

and my new favorite, which definitely befuddled me for several minutes earlier this week:

whimsical = adjective form of wimp (wimpy)

confusion

2009-02-01T10:57:00.000-05:00

At lunchtime, there is a discussion amongst the girls about the green monster, which is their version of the bogeyman. The eldest (M) says: "If I see the green monster, I will frow him in the fire and burn him up! Or I will frow him in the lake and drown him!
me (referring to a book that they have): I thought you were supposed to send him all your love.
the mom: Yes, that's right, girls. You just have to send him all your love, and that will make him go away.
the youngest (H): ageikfeia ghiesk edckiw [points to nose]
mom: When you send him your love, a rainbow comes out of your nose?
H: yeah.
mom: So you girls should send all your love to the green monster.
H: And pants.
mom: And... pants.
M: And a shirt! And a hat!
H: And a buhgina.
mom: Vagina.

the ghost of corn crib past

2009-01-26T13:24:00.000-05:00

There's a book on the shelves in the corn crib called "The Sex Lives of Cannibals," which, according to the back cover, is a humorous account of life on an island in Kiribati. I opened it up yesterday. Inside the front cover, it says:

Corncribber - If you are reading this then you must work for Heinz. So, you probably desperately need a laugh. There are many in these pages, so I suggest reading on. - unintelligible signature

I'm touched by this thoughtful gift left behind by some former employee (though wondering if I should save the book for when I'm feeling more desperate). I'm tempted to start a log book, for corn cribbers to pass on wisdom to each other through the years. Tips like where to set mouse traps, which pipes leak, how to pump out the S-trap in the shower so it doesn't freeze, what that freaky noise is, etc. Maybe words of encouragement for dealing with Heinz's tough love management style.

2009-01-26T13:23:00.000-05:00

I had a dream about fractal weeds.

A long day, but a good day

2009-01-18T18:50:00.003-05:00

I've brought my laundry down to the house to wash. The six-year-old is showing me how to use the washer, and the two-year-old wanders over to watch, thumb in mouth. With her free hand, she picks up a pair of my underwear from my pile of laundry and holds it at arm's length, eyeing it critically before declaring, "me like these."

It's been a long day, prepping for market in below-freezing temperatures. I bagged a lot of greens, with the bags freezing to my latex gloves as I went along. When we finished, around 6:30, I went back to the house to collect my laundry. They don't have a dryer, so I needed to hang it up back at the corn crib. Gabrielle invited me to stay for dinner and I accepted. I'm doing pretty well so far with the solitude of the corn crib, but I definitely enjoy spending time with their family. There wasn't much I could do to help, so I sat down on the couch with the three girls and read them some stories. I love this--three little warm bodies sitting on and around me, leaning in close and paying rapt attention to the book in my hands. Each page leads to additional commentary by the girls. The oldest makes sound effects, the youngest points out animals in the pictures and says things that I can't quite understand, and the middle child is mostly quiet, prone to occasionally breaking into a big smile and giving boa constrictor hugs.

After dinner--time to head back home. It's now too dark to see my way on the path, so I ask to borrow a flashlight. The bin with my wet laundry requires both hands, so I hold the flashlight in my teeth as I make my way back up the path through the woods. Once at home, I stand outside under millions of stars and hang my frozen laundry.

Not giving up

2009-01-18T18:50:00.001-05:00

I am sore. Leaning over the sink to do the dishes - hurts. Unscrewing the cap from a jar of applesauce - hurts. Sometime I'll look up the names of the muscles that I'm discovering, but for now I'm thinking of them as lifting muscles and leaning muscles. Last Saturday was a lifting day. We lifted crates of sweet potatoes up onto a truck bed and then down again, and carried them into a cooler and stacked them higher than my head. Then I carried cinderblocks from one side of the greenhouse to the other, swept, and carried them back again. My arms, my thighs, and my butt were sore for the next couple of days--these are what I think of as lifting muscles. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday there has been more harvesting and less lifting. Harvesting, at this time of year, usually means kneeling and leaning forward while doing something with my hands; grasping and cutting baby spinach or lettuce, kale, collards, or digging sunchokes. For the greens especially, I'm trying to reach halfway over the bed with both hands, while keeping my knees and feet in the narrow path and without putting pressure on any part of the bed. The muscles in my back that allow me to suspend my upper half over the bed--these are the leaning muscles.

Yesterday my fingers were so cold while harvesting spinach that I started thinking of them as artificial extensions of my body; blunt appendages that I could roughly control, but without any accuracy. Today, while harvesting baby lettuce and more spinach in a bitterly cold wind, my hands were colder. I was actually afraid that I might slice a finger off with the knife, and not feel it. I wasn't even sure my finger would bleed. I should look up information about frostbite, so I know how cold my fingers can get and still recover.

2009-01-12T14:25:00.002-05:00

There is a flying squirrel living in (or at least visiting) the attic of the corn crib. It doesn't seem to be causing any trouble, so I think we can coexist for now. The mice definitely have to go though. My mom and I cleaned the corn crib pretty well and put out some traps, and have caught two so far. Anyone want to share successful bait ideas? So far we've used cheddar cheese and tootsie rolls. There's not too much new evidence of mice since we cleaned, but I'm sure they're still around, just waiting for their chance.

Some pictures on Flickr. Maybe longer posts in the future.

the wig might have been backwards. or sideways?

2008-12-28T23:22:00.002-05:00

Since moving to Norman, my parents always volunteer at the community Christmas dinner on Christmas day, and I tag along. The past several years we've helped with serving food, but this year we volunteered to help with the toys. After eating, the kids waited in line to get a photo with Santa, and then were allowed to choose two toys from the piles. My dad and I were asked to handle the printing of the Santa pictures. This was basically a fiasco--the printer was taking at least 5 minutes on each photo, and there was no way to change the quality settings. After about 12 photos, the ink cartridge ran out... eventually we gave up and just started asking people to write down their addresses so we could send them the photos. The photographer emailed the photos to me yesterday, and we had them printed and mailed. Now, I wasn't involved in the taking of these photos, but I have to say I'm a little surprised that no one tried to make Santa look a little more... respectable before taking all these photos. I mean, I ask you, would you trust this man with your child? Seriously.

Science

2008-12-11T15:45:00.004-05:00

it works.

The Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History has, among other things, an exhibit on evolution. It's not particularly large or in-depth, but it's a nice exhibit. How sad is it that I was surprised to find an exhibit on evolution in a natural history museum?

They had a drop box where kids could write comments on index cards. I posted pictures of some of them on Flickr. Some of my favorites were:

I dont like the fact that evolution is in the museum, but I guess I can't change that.... I guess....... I like the bats.

Don't belive in the Big Bang. explosions Destroy things. like your chance in going to heaven if u belive ~~this Crap~~ in this stuff!

I like the fact you have things on evolution in the museum, its also very fun. You couldn't possibly tell everyones creation story, me being 1 of over 500 tribes, there isn't just one story of creation. People need to quit taking it personal.

And my favorite, by far:

I <3 the Diatom

2008-12-09T15:05:00.002-05:00

I looked at two cars today. One of them didn't have a working speedometer... the other was arguably worse. Now I'm looking at cars for sale by dealers, and finding listings like this:

1996 Toyota Camry 4 dr auto 4 cyl. Exc. Gas Mileage Silver factory Sunroof all power. GAS SAVER ! RUNS GREAT ! 405-794-0479 $2995 www.BuzzMotorsOk.com We Trade for Anything ! --> Gold coins, Guns, Motorcycles, etc. etc Buzzz Motors 2813 N. Shields Blvd

This is kind of demoralizing.

this might be harder than I thought

2008-12-05T14:40:00.003-05:00

I'm back in Norman, and am starting to look at used cars on Craigslist.

I'm home alone for the weekend with the dog. She's getting really old and is having a hard time climbing the back steps, and I don't like carrying her, so this morning I built a ramp! She did not appreciate it. When I opened the door, she looked at the ramp and froze in fear. She couldn't even back away from the door, she just stood there and trembled. So I had to take down the ramp and shut the door until she forgot about it.

up next

2008-12-01T15:07:00.004-05:00

"Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position."

"Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of the drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines--not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality."

The last book that hasn't been packed is the Salterton Trilogy, by Robertson Davies. It needs to last until Thursday, so I'm trying to go slowly. I liked the two quotes above.

I'm almost ready to go. Most of my possessions have been moved to Joelle's basement for the next month. My furniture has been sold or given away. I'm eating my way through the remaining food on my shelf in the fridge. On Thursday I will fly home to Norman and spend about a month with my family.

In January, I'll be moving to the farm.

Washing and Sorting Potatoes, originally uploaded by heinzandgabrielle.

It's about 50 miles South of DC. Here it is from above:

View Larger Map

The yellow path is my commute through the woods. I'll be living in a little house that has been converted from a corn crib. One of the girls who worked on the farm before me kept chickens, so maybe I'll try that. I'll be earning minimum wage, plus housing, gas, water, electric, and access to any of the food that's grown on the farm. I'll be arriving in the middle of winter, which means I need lots of imaginative ways to eat kale, potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes, celeriac, kohlrabi, collards, lettuce, butternut squash, and sunchokes.

2008-11-18T20:38:00.002-05:00

34° outside means it's time to turn on the heat. I love that the radiator in my room is big enough to use as a bench.

a question of love... DC's answer

2008-11-16T22:27:00.003-05:00

On Saturday, at 1:30pm EST, an estimated 250,000 people in cities in every state in the U.S. simultaneously gathered to show their support for marriage equality. It was triggered by the recent setbacks to gay rights in California and other states, but I think the overall feeling at the march, in DC at least, was that this is a national issue, a civil rights issue, and it's time.

It's ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, that two adults in a loving relationship still cannot be married in most states in this country. I realize that some people's religious beliefs lead them to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and while I don't think history supports that view, I also don't think churches should be forced to celebrate or recognize any unions of which they disapprove. Some churches won't marry a couple when one of the pair is not a member of the church. I'm fine with that--those are issues that can be hashed out within a church, and I don't have any interest, as an outsider, in whether or not a church wants to recognize my marriage or anyone else's. The state, however, belongs to all of us, and it is absolutely fair and right to demand equal access to civil marriage.

The march in DC was a beautiful thing. There were an estimated 5000 people in attendance, and as we marched from the Capitol building to the White House, the column stretched for over a mile. When we were halfway down the Mall, the skies opened and it poured, and everyone got out their umbrellas and zipped up their jackets, or resigned themselves to getting wet, and kept on going. As we marched up 17th Street on the home stretch to the White House, Metrobus drivers opened their windows to honk and wave.

I think this is my favorite protest that I've ever attended, because the tone was so positive. We will achieve equality, maybe not in the next few years, but we will get there.

I didn't take many pictures at the march because my hands were full of signs, and it was raining, so these are pictures taken by others.

We gathered in front of the Capitol building's reflecting pool

Reflecting pool crowd, originally uploaded by Carosaurus.

And we marched from there

We are legion., originally uploaded by Carosaurus.

to to the Washington Monument and then up to the White House

Hey Hey, Ho Ho..., originally uploaded by sssdc1.

sometimes in the rain

Storm Troopers, originally uploaded by sssdc1.

Surrounded by all sorts of wonderful people.

Ted & Wayne, originally uploaded by Carosaurus.

Gay Rights March Washington DC, originally uploaded by sande1974.

Proposition 8 DC, originally uploaded by ToBeYoda.

My housemates and I used paint leftover from my room to make big cardboard signs.

DC "No on 8" March, originally uploaded by ann gav.

PROP 8 PROTEST 11.15.2008, originally uploaded by Pappa91.

, originally uploaded by Carosaurus.

Another housemate showed up at the end and held our soggy sign after we had headed home to dry off.

DC Prop 8 Rally: Gay Agenda, originally uploaded by Saint Plan.

IMG_20081115_0069, originally uploaded by Shaun Bell.

My favorite fennel recipe, and possibly my favorite pasta recipe

2008-11-13T22:27:00.004-05:00

1 bulb of fennel, sliced thinly
1 shallot (or half of a small onion) chopped
8 oz penne pasta
8 oz tomato sauce
pinch of sugar
1 t. fresh oregano (or a pinch of dried oregano, or other "Italian herbs," or nothing at all)
salt and pepper
Gorgonzola

Put some salted water on to boil for the pasta.

Heat some olive oil and cook the fennel and onion over medium heat for a few minutes.

Add the pasta to the water

Add the tomato sauce, sugar, and oregano to the fennel and onion, and simmer for 10 minutes or so, until the fennel is tender.

Add salt and pepper to sauce.

Drain the pasta whenever it's done, and if the sauce isn't done yet, toss the pasta with some olive oil and put it back in the pan with a lid to keep it warm.

Combine sauce and pasta, and top with crumbled Gorgonzola.

Serves 2.

a question of love: five things

2008-11-12T12:17:00.002-05:00

1.

2. "If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it." - Sharon Underwood

3. Share your vision.

4. Find the event(s) in your state this Saturday and go.

5. "Let us realize that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

I thought the water would be colder over here

2008-11-10T21:32:00.003-05:00

This weekend, after living on the East Coast for six and a half years, I dipped my toes in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. The weather in Charleston was perfect, and the city was beautiful, though it does seem better suited for visiting than living. A very good friend married a very good man, and some old Olin friends got to catch up on each other's lives.

I have an important question: where were you raised, and do you say "up the wazoo," or "out the wazoo" (if either)? Preliminary results suggest that northerners favor "up" while 2 out of 3 southerners favor "out" ("the wazoo is a one way street!"). However, the sample size was small and I need more data points before drawing any conclusions.

choose your career

2008-11-05T17:22:00.000-05:00

For a project at work, I'm looking into using some of the isotypes developed by Gerd Arntz in the 1930s. He created isotypes for thousands of different objects, animals, professions, etc. In general they're as simple as possible while remaining instantly recognizable. For example, here are three in the professions category:

And then there's this guy:

Maybe being a mathematician is a lot more exciting in Germany.

but Proposition 8...

2008-11-05T08:16:00.001-05:00

that's really depressing. How much longer will we have to wait?

!!

2008-11-05T00:19:00.000-05:00

I've never voted for a winner before. It might take a while for this to sink in.

need suggestions

2008-11-02T16:09:00.003-05:00

I came home from the market with some bourbon & fennel buffalo sausage today. It's been about 6 years since I've cooked any meat, and while I realize sausage is not difficult to cook, I have no idea what else to serve it with. Can I do something with cranberries? I found some recipes for stuffing, but my cranberries are fresh, not dried. Here's what I have to work with:

fennel bulbs, acorn squash, leeks, potatoes, fingerling sweet potatoes, beets,

arugula, mesclun, raddichio,

apples, cider,

parsley, cilantro, celery, green onions, garlic,

chevre, cheese curds, camembert, a sheep cheese similar to pecorino romano, gorgonzola,

whole and skim milk, eggs

one track mind

2008-11-01T17:32:00.002-05:00

Last night our house and the house next door co-hosted a zombie lurch followed by a Halloween party. Video will be posted later, I expect. I can't think of a better way to spend Halloween (as an adult).

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise, but Halloween parties are messy. I was the first one up this morning, and it looked like a scarecrow got in a food fight with a drag queen. Obviously I went to bed too early. Also, someone took my eggs. There weren't even any drinks in the big fridge, so there was no reason to be rooting around in there, but my whole carton of beautiful blue and brown eggs is gone. Who goes to a party and takes eggs?

Tomorrow is market day, which means today is a good day to use up everything that I still have from last week. So I started by making more candied ginger. Since I'm moving in December, I won't be able to freeze ginger this year, and the idea of being on the farm this spring, surrounded by strawberries and no ginger to mix with them, is unbearable. So I'm hoping that I can use candied ginger for berries and cooking for the next several months. I've settled on a recipe that takes a long time, but produces much better results than the first recipe I tried (which only called for boiling the ginger for 40 minutes).

Wash ginger and cut into 1/8" slices, placing the slices in a bowl of citrus soda and water (I didn't have soda, so I'm using lemon juice and water).

Make stacks of the slices and lay the stacks on their sides in a steamer. Steam for 30-40 minutes, or until tender (although they're going to get boiled for several hours, so they don't need to be all that tender at this point).

Mix half sugar, half water in a pan (enough to cover the ginger). Bring it to a boil and add the ginger. Reduce to a simmer and let it go for 6-8 hours, until the ginger is tender and delicious. If the water gets low, add more simple syrup.

Remove pan from heat and let it sit for 30-40 minutes. Fish out the ginger and let it drain/cool on a wire rack until it's tacky. Toss with sugar and put it on wax paper for several hours to finish drying. Store in a jar.

Once I got the ginger boiling, I made an apple crisp. As I was cutting the slices, I put them into the lemon water left over from the ginger. In addition to the usual sugar and cinnamon, I also chopped up a bunch of the first (mediocre) batch of candied ginger and added that.

Having covered all of the dessert bases, I put together a soup with roasted acorn squash and an unidentified winter squash, curry, onions, garlic, apples, a little bit of cayenne, and yes, ginger.

still haven't turned on the heat

2008-10-31T06:02:00.002-05:00

I wonder whether my room has actually been exactly 51 degrees every morning this week, or whether the thermostat on my space heater just doesn't go any lower.

Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free...

2008-10-12T21:48:00.002-05:00

Spent the past four days visiting a boat shop in Maine, where I hope to become an apprentice starting next September. I was blown away by my visit there and I really want to go back. First of all, the weather was perfect and the leaves were beautiful. It would never occur to me to travel to New England just to see leaves changing color, but I can't complain when I happen to end up there in the fall.

A neighbor adjacent to the boat shop's property recently offered 150 acres of land for sale at a reduced price. The boat shop worked with two local river associations to purchase the land and turn 140 acres into a nature preserve. There is a river just down the hill from the boat shop, which leads to a pristine lake which the apprentices use for sailing, canoeing, and kayaking.

The property contains an organic garden

and several buildings containing living and working areas.

Probably the most breathtaking building is the workshop, which was constructed a couple of years ago. It includes a machine shop, paint room, lots of work space, and a library/meeting room on the third floor.

During my visit I mostly worked in the garden and on two skiffs that were in their final stages.

The staff and apprentices at the boat shop were so welcoming and thoughtful about including me in the various work and weekend activities. One apprentice who was planning on going for a jog before dinner offered to take me sailing on the lake when he realized I hadn't been on a boat since arriving at the boat shop. Two of the staff who are building a house for themselves about a mile down the road invited me along on Saturday to see the progress they had made so far, and go "bushwhacking" with their 4-year-old son. The apprentices were all so interesting--one is a singer from Scotland about whom there is a documentary, and another showed photos from his bike ride from Fairbanks, AK to Ushuaia, at the bottom of Argentina. All meals Monday through Friday are shared around one big table, with people taking turns with the cooking. Each meal is preceded or followed by a blessing, reading, song, or discussion. I'm definitely under the spell...

a week on the farm

2008-10-05T20:59:00.004-05:00

Last weekend after working at the farmers market, I caught a ride back to the farm and have been working out there for the past week. This was sort of a test-drive for me and for Heinz, to see whether employing me on the farm would be a mutually agreeable arrangement. For the most part, I think yes. I'm definitely slower than the other full-time workers, but hopefully some of this is due to inexperience. Also, Heinz puts a lot of emphasis on efficiency (reducing the number of trips back and forth to the storage coolers, setting up an ergonomic work area, etc.), which I think I'm pretty good at paying attention to. I think he's willing to hire me. I still need to think about it.

The work is hard, but it's varied. Heinz has about 15 acres planted with vegetables at any given time, and every day you get to work with 2 to 7 or so different vegetables. Among other things, in the past week I picked okra, tomatoes, peppers, celery, kale, lettuce, chard, cardoon, and kiwis, separated cloves on 80 pounds of garlic to be planted, thinned rows of radishes and turnips, loosened and rolled up black plastic from the watermelon beds, cut down old vines from the yard-long beans, washed and prepped beets, malabar, arugula, cardoon, celery, parsley, leeks, eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers, found two black widows (one in my bedroom), got one spider (I think) bite behind my ear, watched a 2-year-old climbing a tractor while wearing a turtleneck shirt and underpants on backwards and inside out, received hugs and a cold from three little children, and got followed everywhere by a duck named Bo who wags his tail (no kidding).

I'm definitely sore from hauling carts all over the place, but I think the work would be easier to get used to than the living situation. The workers live in an old corn crib that has been converted into a house of sorts. There are three bedrooms separated from the main living area by curtains. The house is not well-insulated so it's pretty cold at night, and there are lots of critters inside. Mostly (big!) spiders and moths, but I saw some evidence of mice as well. Because of the mice problem, everyone has air mattresses. That might be a deal-breaker right there, because one week is about the limit to how long I can sleep on an air mattress. It sounds like Heinz is willing to consider allowing real mattresses if residents can keep the mice under control. Water is acceptably hot, but the pressure is low. There's an extra pump that you can turn on when you take a shower, which helps a bit. Basically, the house needs someone to live there who takes some proprietary interest. Since most of the workers stay for only a season, there's no incentive to make big improvements. I think it could be okay.

Heinz picked me up this morning at 5:30 to make the drive back to DC. I wasn't planning on working the market, but he was short one person, so I stayed. Today was the first day we had ginger at the market, and even at $15 per pound, it quickly sold out. I didn't take any pictures, but here's someone else's picture:

Fresh Ginger, originally uploaded by andreakw.

Before seeing Heinz's ginger, I never knew it could be so beautiful. I took home two large chunks, plus a big bag of all the little bits that were too small to sell. I look forward to putting ginger in everything now. I have a big bag of rolled oats that Heinz pressured me into buying for breakfast for the week, so I looked for some cookie recipes that would use oats and ginger, and found an interesting one that came out really well. I made a few changes, and here it is:

Peanut butter oatmeal ginger cookies

1/2 c. butter
1 c. peanut butter
2/3 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. sugar
2 eggs
1/2 t. vanilla
1 1/2 c. flour
1 t. baking soda
3/4 t. salt
2-3 t. fresh grated ginger
1 to 2 c. rolled oats

Preheat oven to 350. Mix together wet ingredients. Mix together dry ingredients, except oats, separately. Add dry to wet. Stir in oats, adding more until it's a good ratio of dough to oats. Taste the dough and add more ginger if you want. Drop onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. Voila.

I doubt that the debate changed anyone's vote...

2008-09-26T22:57:00.003-05:00

We had a great potluck/debate-watching party tonight. It was a little silly for us to host this--our living room is not that big, and neither is the TV. But we were cozy. I think that there were about 35 people trying to watch the debate, and we learned that only about 25 can see the screen at any given time. So many good people here. I will miss DC.

I got my ballot in the mail today! I love voting.

Palin and Couric

2008-09-26T07:39:00.002-05:00

If you haven't yet seen Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric, seek it out and watch it. Here are parts of it:

both real and American

2008-09-22T19:38:00.003-05:00

Apparently the McCains appeared on Rachel Ray's show recently, and when asked about their favorite TV shows, Sen. McCain replied, "we like the normal kind of shows that are popular."

Aside from being kind of funny and sad, I think it reflects how politicians, I would say Republicans in particular, but really, politicians from both major parties, feel the need to portray themselves as "normal" Americans. I don't get this. Apparently some people like Sarah Palin because they feel they can identify with her. Again, I don't get this. It's not that I don't understand how people identify with her (or with McCain), it's that I don't understand how this makes her more electable. I don't want to be governed by people like me. I want to be governed by people a lot smarter than I am, because I sure as hell don't think I'm qualified to be president. Sometimes while I'm eating dinner, I watch Project Runway or Law and Order. I really, really hope that Obama is not watching Project Runway. If he has time to watch TV, I hope he watches something smart. Like ~~news~~ documentaries. I want my president to be elite. We have 300 million people in this country, and I think our leader should be the cream of the crop. I guess that makes me elitist.

And I'm upset about what we're told about "real," "normal" Americans. If I don't live in a small town, am I less of an American? If I don't believe in a God as defined by any established religion, is that un-American? How about the fact that I take public transportation to work, and think that America has too many cars and that gas is probably still too cheap? Can Real Americans be vegetarian? Can a Real American have a white collar job? I have one credit card and I'm not interested in going shopping to save the economy. Sorry, America. Maybe if I were Real.

Sometimes I find myself feeling sheepish about these things, and I'm not sure why. Maybe I buy into the idea that there is a definition of what it means to be a Real American, and I know that much about my life does not fit into that definition. But I'm living my life in a way that makes sense to me, and I love my country in the way you love your family--even when I don't like America, I love America. So I am an American, as much a real American as someone who lives in a small town, goes to church every Sunday, and enjoys hunting.

I love hardened AmeriCorps alumni

2008-09-18T18:41:00.003-05:00

Last night we finished interviewing potential housemates to fill a soon-to-be-vacant room in the house. The last candidate was the most promising, but unfortunately, as she was leaving, she had to walk past the kid who was being handcuffed on our front steps. Not the best timing. But we offered her the room this morning, and she said yes. Yay!

(There was no violence or anything, as far as we noticed--the kid was probably getting arrested for drinking)

the terror of the border

2008-09-12T19:22:00.002-05:00

I checked out this amazing movie from the library: Die Bergkatze (the Wildcat), which is a silent German comedy from 1921. It features a group of robbers who wear felt cutout skulls on their hats and purses, and seem to mostly steal clothing. They also enjoy being whipped by the girl robber. And then there's the dream sequence with an orchestra made up of Pillsbury doughboys.

Video of robbers (robber fashion at 0:45, and whipping commences at 2:00):

Video of dream sequence (doughboys show up at 1:40):

I finally brought my camera to the market

2008-09-07T18:29:00.003-05:00

Here's where I work, and some of the people I work with, in the calm before the market opens.

One of my housemates, who has started working at the market with me, pinting okra. We share hair.

Pinting potatoes.

Beautiful peppers. I like to put them in rainbow order, but Heinz doesn't. I think it's because the sweet peppers (red and yellow) are priced differently from the rest (green, lilac, lime-not pictured) and if yellow is next to lime, people get confused about where the boundary is. The green leafy bundles up above the peppers are celery. The growing season is shorter here, so they don't get very big.

Another aesthetically pleasing table. Green and purple yard-long beans, lima beans, string beans, and Asian and Italian eggplant.

The former girlfriend of a former housemate, who now also works at the market. It's a popular job. A few heirloom tomatoes are visible in the front right of the picture, and the watermelons are in the back. At this distance it looks like we only have two varieties, but we actually have nine.

I was only able to take one picture once the market bell had rung. It soon got busy. Two weeks ago set a new record for the amount of money taken in, and last week we broke that record. This week wasn't quite as busy, but we almost sold out of watermelon, which are expensive. Here's the view from behind the counter. Underneath you can see the brown paper bag that holds the bread that we munch on while we work. We get herbed goat cheese from the guy next to our stand, and make little bite-sized sandwiches with a basil leaf and a wedge of tomato.

I took home a lot of eggplant today, even though I don't like it much. I was going to use the recipe for Baba Ganouj in the Moosewood Cookbook, which calls for 2 cloves of garlic per eggplant. I compared this with Gabrielle's recipe, which calls for 1 BULB of roasted garlic per eggplant. Guess which recipe I used?

Palin

2008-09-03T21:45:00.002-05:00

Ugh.

how to make friends and influence people

2008-08-24T20:09:00.004-05:00

I discovered today that the most popular person at the market is the one cutting up watermelon samples. Specifically, samples of Heinz's watermelons, which come in a variety of sizes and colors (inside and out) and all of which are among the best watermelons I've ever tasted. I have a blister on my finger from cutting so many watermelons today.

I kept checking with Heinz to see whether I was putting out too many samples, but he says that people are much more likely to buy his melons when they've tasted them. I believe it--so many people wandered by, absently grabbed a free sample and brought it to their mouths while still walking, only to stop in their tracks and turn around to demand more information of me: "Are they all this sweet?" Yes. "How do I pick a good one?" I've cut up 8 watermelons so far today and haven't found one yet that wasn't fantastic. "How much are they?" $1 a pound. $1 a pound is pretty expensive for watermelons, and I've seen people's eyes bug out when their $10 watermelons get rung up (we have a $10 cap per watermelon). But they come back the next week and buy more.

One of the many lunch-sized watermelons that I schlepped home today. I don't know if it's clear from this photo, but the watermelon is about 10 inches long.

Considering that the farmers market is my favorite part of the week, I haven't blogged about it much. I think this is probably because I'm so exhausted at the end of it. But I think it must be said--working at the farmers market is great. I love the people-watching--you can never tell by appearance who is going to exclaim with great excitement, "Oh, honey! They have callaloo!" I love offering samples of Sungold cherry tomatoes to Japanese tourists snapping photos. I love seeing toddlers gripping tomatillos and staring at them with wonder. I love setting up Heinz's display of bell peppers in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, and lilac. I love getting Camembert from the milk people and bread from the bakery, and tearing off pieces to eat while I work. I love the other people who work at the stand. And I really love having access to all the delicious, organic, picked-yesterday produce that I can carry to the bus stop.

After the crucial shower and nap on Sunday afternoon, I've usually recovered enough to do some cooking for lunches for the next few days. Tonight, I made a quiche. There are more pictures, along with directions, on Flickr. I'll just put the start and finish pictures here.

It's not fancy, or really even very pretty, but it tastes good, and it's fairly easy.