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.