Posts from — April 2009

New cows. Of which there are three. Guernseys, liver and white, a bred heifer and two calves. They are skittish and hand-shy. I feed them kale in the evening on my way to dinner, which may or may not be nutritionally correct. I should probably google that one. It’s just hard to say no to the broad wet nose stretching, sniffing over the gate.

The sheep moved across the road this week, ecstatic to be on new grass. I promptly went and planted yet more peas along their old fenceline – sugar snap, shelling, and snow. The bottle babies, still penned up at the barn, are now more pushy and personable than ever, needing more food, wanting more entertainment than their small pen provides. They’ll be weaned soon and selfishly I’ll miss them, their little voices like a chorus every time I walk by the barn.

We’re on the cusp of May, prime-time for spring transplants. It’s hard to be patient with them. I’ve got itchy fingers. There’s so many things I want to sell, want to eat, RIGHT NOW – crunchy white salad turnips, bitter brocolli raab, spicy red mustard, spoon-shaped spinach. I’ve never been on a farm this early in the spring, and here and now it shows. I feel unproductive, bereft without a harvest. Never mind that it’s not time for a harvest. To put my mind and stomach at ease, I’ve got some pea shoots going on perlite in the greenhouse. They germinated well, little champions, and should be ready in a few day. I’ll be there, knife in hand.

Last summer, while I was working on a large organic farm in New York, I did some flowers for some weddings in August. I had worked on special orders before but I’d never been in charge, and the learning curve felt steep. Wedding orders in particular are emotionally loaded, and a bridal bouquet can be like a freakin minefield. The lady has got to love it.

Fortunately, this one did, and she sent some pictures to Eve recently, who sent them on to me. It’s so wonderful to see the shots because I worked my butt off for an event I never actually saw. I set everything up in the formal dining room, in the cool of the morning, and picked up empty vases the next day. It was the biggest order I did on Long Island – twenty table arrangements, a couple for the altar, multiple bouquets, the whole nine yards. In August, I just felt strung out, inelegant, and dingy, in the height of the harvest season, and I wondered what I put together was really fancy enough. But in the pictures, I see what I hoped to see – not fancy, maybe, but bright, simple, charming. Enough.

A rag-tag band of farm friends came in force to help at milking time, and thus I mostly stayed out of the fray and was assigned the job of udder cleaner. Armed with a paper towel saturated with dilute iodine, I successfully swabbed the udders of all four cows without getting kicked by any of them, not even Moxie, the brown Jersey heifer, The One Who Kicks. Better luck next time, grumpy cow.

Recently, when I sit down to meals in the camper, I’ve been revisiting Eliot Coleman’s book Four Season Harvest. It’s something I bought years ago, when I first got into farming, basically because I felt like it was something I should own to legitimize my interest in farming.

But then I never properly read the damn thing. I kind of had a block about it. It’s hard to explain. The man and his ideas (using cold frames, taking European weeds and reinventing them as super-pricy mesclun mix, overwintering hardy crops for early harvest) are damn near ubiquitous in agricultural circles in the Northeast. I felt like yeah, I’ve heard of all that, I get it, next level please.

And in reading Four Season Harvest, I find that Eliot comes off as a bit of a snot. He waxes rhapsodic about his travels to farms in France with his second wife Barbara (who is pictured laughing with Eliot on the cover and who is, by the way, super-foxy), the clever simplicity of his methods, the superiority of the Continental diet, and so on and so forth.

But the content of the book? Oh man. So worth the hype. Eliot works with nature, rather than emphasizing rigid control, but he’s more a pragmatist than a hippie. The tools he favors are classic and, I’ll admit it, clever. His model is tailored to a small-scale farm, and I’m now working smaller than I ever have, so it seems a fortuitous sort of dovetailing of old ideas and current circumstances.

Eliot’s really not big on tilling. At all. It disturbs the natural soil structure and kills worms. The farms I’ve worked on previously have been relatively high-volume, tractor-driven businesses – low-till or no-till was not an option.

But here, in some areas, it is. Caitlyn has been mulching and fertilizing some of the fields for years – where I’m currently planting, it’s worm city. So, although we’ll rototill some areas, in this first field we decided to cultivate by hand. It’s gotten my back in gear real quick, I’ll tell you that much. And it takes a lot more time than making a couple passes through on the tractor. It almost hurts when I think of it that way. Time is so precious. But we’ve made an investment, and I think we’re going to get some good stuff in the bargain.

Allen will be going off-island tomorrow, so the evening will be my first foray into milking. In the interest of having a clue about the whole thing, I tagged along a couple days ago to take pictures of how things get assembled, used, and cleaned. The contraption pictured above is the claw. I like to think of it as an octopus (note the eight black tubes), but really it’s the claw. Allen has milked the cows so many times (literally thousands) that when he does his routine it seems smooth and doable, but when you break it down stepwise, you realize the complexity. Keeping things clean and consistent is so important, every day in every season – it’s not for the faint of heart. Hopefully I can at least hold my own during amateur hour. I may not be the quickest on my feet, but having grown up with horses I’m not afraid of cows either, and that’s a start.

We now have three lambs on the bottle – one has a mother with mastitis, and the other two were rejected by their mothers. At first, feeding them was fairly laborious. You had to hop the fence, get on your knees in the sheep turds, snag a lamb, secure it between your legs, and coax it to sip from the bottle. The wee ones were not into this, to say the least, and it was hard to tell if they were getting enough. After a few days of this, however, they figured out where the food comes from. Now when somebody approaches the pen they start wiggling their little butts like dogs, bleating enthusiastically, and when offered a bottle they latch on like champions.

Despite a hard frost last night, the greenhouse exodus continues its steady march, with the help of row cover. Last week, broccoli raab, bachelor buttons, and peas got the boot. Also, for the record, those gardening authorities who tell you peas cannot be tranplanted tell you LIES. The ones I direct seeded in March, per the general wisdom, sat dormant and generally rotted in the cold damp soil. So we started the same varieties indoors, and transplanted out three-inch plants along our fencelines. So far, they look pretty good. As long as the hungry bunnies stay away, we should do alright.

I painted my plywood counter this delicious retro green. Stank up the joint a little, but the day is chilly and clear, so I left the door open and rode the bike to Edgartown. Looking at this picture, I’m realizing that the camper is finally beginning to look lived-in. I know it’s all just beginning, but when I do work on it these days I have this sneaky sort of thinking about when and how to sell it. I find it hilarious that I, of all people, might turn some little profit in the whole thing. And I love the idea of the camper, already old, already with its own stories and bulletholes (yes, literally, bulletholes), could have life and value way beyond this farm and this time.

If it was insulated better, hell, I’d keep it myself. Maybe go on a trip with it or something. But here in New England April, I wake up in the loft sometimes and see my breath in the air. At this point, getting out of my cozy purple sleeping bag is this enormously unappealing chore, this nasty thing. I prod myself with promises of a warm truck and hot coffee from down the road, radio blasting, limbs coming back to life. And it happens, eventually. You do what you have to do. But I won’t be this young forever.

This morning I was in the greenhouse, listening to a top 40 countdown country radio and drinking black coffee, working on moving some tomato seedlings into six-packs for a farmer up the road. The doors were closed against the chill gray morning, but I heard some commotion, faint at first, but growing louder. Sheep bleating. The dog barking.

Half the herd was out in the dirt road, milling about near the chicken coop. In the process of getting them back to pasture, we noticed that two more lambs had arrived in the night, both white, a boy and a girl. Babies have been dropping all week, in ones and twos almost every day, in shades of brown and black. This new pair looked impossibly wobbly and pale. One stood apart from the others, still smeared with dirt and sticky afterbirth, shivering pathetically and struggling to stay on its feet, while his sibling nursed by the mother’s side. When I picked him up he felt cool and limp, light and bony in my arms.

We herded all three of them into the greenhouse and put them in a small enclosure, where I took these pictures. Within a few hours, the weaker lamb had warmed up and figured out how to nurse, and looked a whole lot cleaner as well. I look forward to watching them grow.

This morning I had the pleasure of doing a massive greenhouse cleaning spree, while the rain pattered away on the roof. I did it mostly to organize stuff and clear up bench space for new flats of seedlings that I’ll be starting in the coming weeks, and also to get a sense of what goes where. To get anything done, I need to know where to find the tools, and it seems like every five seconds I’ve thought of something else. Duct tape? Rubber bands? Rebar? PVC pipe? I spend a lot of time poking around.

The major event of the day was the completion of the plumbing in the camper. SUCCESS. Oh how sweet it is. On more than one occasion, I was so frustrated with the whole project I thought I might burst into tears, which may have been a good move – purifying, cathartic, you know. Instead, out of fear of being found out as a total weenie, I cleared my throat, pushed harder on whatever it was (the saw attachment on the cordless drill, the stupid wrench, the barbed pipe fittings) until I finally got what I wanted. I got a lot of help with everything, from Allen and from the guys at Ace Hardware, but I also did most of the work myself, and I’m proud of that.

Here’s the front line in one of our big plans for the growing season – broccoli raab. We aspire to be the queens of broccoli raab. Some might say it’s bitter. Even yucky. Maybe kids don’t like it. But we do. And we’re going to grow tons of it. It’ll be one of the first things to move out of the greenhouse and into the field, when it finally stops raining.

Yesterday afternoon, I got this green sweater at the dump and used it to carry dinner fixings I gathered – eggs, kale, a little bit of claytonia and arugula that’s been living in a cold frame since December.

Work thus far has been pretty evenly divided between farm chores (seeding in the greenhouse, mending fences, prepping logs) and getting the camper up to speed. Thus far, I’m all over the propane, ninety percent there with the water, and still waiting on the electricity. A trip to help with grafting apples at a neighboring farm the other day also yielded a loan of the world’s niftiest outdoor toilet, complete with padded seat. I am looking forward to the day when I can stop nesting and begin working in earnest, but am trying to appreciate everything and take it one step at a time. I officially know more about plumbing hardware than I ever thought I would, and who knows when that might come in handy;)