Posts from — November 2009

food for thought

not food for for eating

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/back-to-the-land/

(link courtesy of ml)

Yesterday I packed my truck and left the island for the winter. The fall galloped away from me this year it seems, shaking her head, laughing wildly, always one step ahead. But when it’s time to go, it’s time to go.

After spending Thanksgiving with my family, I’ll be driving down the snowbird path to spend a few months at Bee Heaven Farm in Homestead, Florida, just south of Miami. I thought that I might make a slow jaunt of it, visit friends along the way, but as life on the island drew me in my departure date receded further and further into November. Now it looks like I’ll be doing the whole trip in three days, in order to be there for my first day of work, exactly one week from today.

It was a long, mild fall here in the Bay State. We spent much of the fencing project working in shirtsleeves, eating sandwiches on picnic tables at noontime in November, which is fairly outrageous. But I miss color.

I look forward to farming just for the joy of it, for its own sake, just being a field hand and following instructions one more time under tropical skies. The spring is going to be a tremendous head trip. I am going to be putting up a greenhouse, implementing my own cultivation plan, building from the ground up. It’s my dream and I am unspeakably grateful that I’ve been given these opportunities. That being said, I fully expect that it will be tremendously scary and difficult.

For now, give me someone else’s transplants to put in the soil, someone else’s produce to wash and bunch. I’ll take care of it.

Today, with the help of a few friends, Marcus and I framed and hung the walk-through gate to the garden, put up all the corner braces, and got much of the tension wire set.

It isn’t an enclosure quite yet, but it’s pretty damn close. A day or two more of solid work and we’ll be there. Wrestling with the wire rolls (each of which weighs somewhere around 250 lbs) after a rather damp weekend promises to be somewhat challenging, and I’m not a contractor at heart. I’m ready to return to what I do – pushing around wheelbarrows, cleaning out the flower beds, sowing winter rye. Soon, soon, let the fun begin.

In the spring, I will be growing food behind Scottish Bakehouse in Vineyard Haven, one woman on the little farm-ette. This week we finally broke ground of the deer fencing, and as the posts line up like wooden soldiers along the drive it’s hitting me – this whole thing is real, real, real.

I’ve been so lucky to have the support of other local farmers in starting this project. One farmer I used to work for allowed me to make a trip with his dump truck up to Wellscroft Fencing in New Hampshire to pick up the order, saving us hundreds of dollars in freight charges. Another allowed us to use his tractor for two days to pull brush and till the field. A tractor is no trivial loan – on most farms, it’s the backbone of cultivation, and to risk sending it down the road to benefit a friend is a big deal.

Finally, I’m working on the project with a good friend who’s put up high-tensile fencing before. He’s also knowledgeable and patient enough to let me do some of the tractor work. My feelings toward the mechanical beast are evolving. While they may be expensive gas-guzzling breakage prone prima donnas, it was so incredibly fast and satisfying to clip around the field pulling out large shrubs with the front bucket. Zip, zip, zip.

We were finally able to get our hands on a mechanized auger this afternoon and will hopefully have all the posts in the ground and most of them tamped by the end of the day tomorrow. After fixating for so long on having a place to grow things my way, it is awesome but also vaguely terrifying to watch the infrastructure go up and realize it’s happening. It’s actually really happening.

This fall I’ve spent some time working on a mobile chicken slaughtering crew. The equipment is owned by a local non-profit, Island Grown Initiative, and they rent it out to local farmers and hobbyists who need to “harvest” their birds. While I have yet to knife any chickens myself, I have gotten reasonably quick on the evisceration table. It helps that, being female, my hand is small enough to get all the way into the body cavity, which makes separating and removing organs a hell of a lot easier.

It is fairly common for the owners to offer a chicken to each of the “processors” at the end of the day. This is a very generous custom, given that each bird is fairly valuable (pasture-raised chickens sell for about $20 a pop around here) and we are already paid for our time working on the rig.

For me, it’s lead to a backlog of birds. The pressure to finally do something was becoming fairly overwhelming. In my formative years as a cook, I was a vegetarian, and I’ve just never gotten around to learning how to cook meat. When I think about the life of the chicken, the idea of cooking one inspires borderline paralysis. I think of the bird’s journey from the hatchery in a cardboard box, on the first day of life. Huddling under a heat lamp with all his little buddies in the early weeks. Progressively venturing out on grass, eating bugs and grain, getting fat fast. The days go by.

Each bird is a little world. When I mess up an eggplant dish, it’s kind of whatever. I eat something else, maybe go pick some more eggplant and don’t think about it too much. But to botch a bird is a sad, somehow disrespectful thing. To raise an animal for food, and then proceed to make bad food? I didn’t want to be that person.

But this evening, it was do or die time. I had specific instructions from one mister Tom Palmer, the roast chicken master. And I had a bird in the fridge from Doug, a local farmer/friend. He dropped it off yesterday, because one of his freezers had gone on the fritz and the bird had thawed. Once it’s been frozen and thawed, apparently you can’t refreeze it – texture problem. So I had to cook this thing. Now.

Miraculously, it turned out to be a

MAJOR SUCCESS.

SERIOUSLY DELICIOUS.

EVERYONE VERY IMPRESSED.

the next frontier?

gravy.