Posts from — April 2010

At long last, and just before the rain, the eighty foot tomato haus is complete. I am a pseudo-carpenter no more. This day could not come fast enough. I pushed through construction of the first one on adrenaline and this rather manic desire to start seeding, desperate to avoid falling behind, eager to prove that I could do it.

But the second one was different. It wasn’t problem solving, really, it was just execution. Hours at the table with a dull hand saw, hours kneeling in the dirt sinking screws with a dingy cordless drill I got off craiglist. It wasn’t exciting anymore, it was tedious.

It’s not going to win any beauty contests – the plastic is a little baggy in places, the framing is a little wonky. But if I were offered the chance to magically receive a perfect building in exchange for a day or two more work on it, I wouldn’t bite. It’s good enough and it’s over. I am so ready to move on.

I’m going to give the soil a week or so to warm up, and then will start planting tomatoes around the first of May. For the next month or so, the aisles will also serve as overflow space for the other greenhouse.

In closing, I present to you the salvaged back door. Which, in cutting it down to fit the frame, I made rather more suitable for hobbits than people.

I often get asked why I do not have chickens. It’s a good question. Chickens are great. But a fifty pound bag of grain ain’t cheap. Hay on the island is ten bucks a bale. As one farmer friend likes to say, be careful. The animals will suck you dry.

But I can’t do without Homer Palmer. Granted, he’s an even less justifiable expense. He offers no return on investment, or input of any kind really, except treating my like the most exciting human being alive when I walk in the greenhouse in the morning, bouncing around in his run until breakfast is served. He’s a little ridiculous. But a farm with no animals to speak of just isn’t quite the same.

It worked!

Would I do it again?

Probably.

I used this recipe – it’s pretty much the first thing that pops up when you google “chicken feet.” Good recipe, simple, easy to follow. I had some nice veggies.

But I’ve gotta tell you, that first step, that initial boil – it’s pretty foul. It made the whole kitchen smell like slaughter. Maybe it’s because I’m familiar with the smell of the scalder, with the scent of singed feathers. But to sit there smelling it boil, and then having to peel the stiff yellow skin from the pale grey feet – it was gross. And this is coming from a person who has an exceptionally high tolerance for gross.

The resulting stock, however, is beautiful. It smelled unbelievable while it was reducing and gelled up right away.

Worth it?

We’ll see. I haven’t eaten any yet.

Thus far, Mother Nature has been kind. The weather has been mild. The winds have been gentle. The only bugs I find in the greenhouse are spiders. Many of them. Big ones. They love it. And they of course can stay.

All the landscapers out here say the gardens are a week or two ahead, and despite the late start I got in potting my tomatoes, they are sizing up like champions. It seems like every morning when I peel back the row cover, they are bigger than when I left them. It’s amazing. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – I’m so glad I did not choose to start a farm last year, in the time of blight and rain. I’m not ready to bust out the party dress just yet, we still have pretty much the whole season ahead. But a month like this? I’ll take it.

The season has started for the island’s mobile poultry processing crew. Now Sunday mornings are spent listening to Kool 102 and separating chickens from their insides – first the intestinal tract, followed by the liver and kidneys and heart, then very carefully the lungs – in the chilly Katama wind.

But there are worse things to do on a Sunday morning. Besides the chill and the stink, for me it’s pretty much good people, good times.

And there are some fringe benefits to being a poultry processor.

Such as chicken feet.

Which apparently you can make into stock. Stock which real cooks insist is the only kind worth eating, the kind that’s full of gelatin, that will actually form a gel. Never mind that my current chicken cookery repertoire consists solely of “roast chicken a la tom palmer.” Never mind that my to-do list at the Bakehouse might as well be titled “hustle or die.” I took some chicken feet from the bucket yesterday. I’m going to figure it out.

Long ago, in a land far away, there was an unfortunate incident. It involved trying to tie up hundreds of pounds of steel with a few wisps of baling twine I found blowing around in a field.

“This will never work,” my dad said.

“But look!” I said. “We have enough pieces!” In this sense, I was right. The number of twine scraps was indeed sufficient.

“It won’t work.” he said. In this sense, he was right. By the time the box truck made in to the top of the hill, our neatly stacked and tied hoops were in a giant tangled mess on the floor.

It was a miracle we made it to the top of the hill at all. As anyone who had to suffer through my nerves in the weeks leading up to the move can tell you, I was not confident that my rented box truck, hauling over two tons of equipment, was going to make the climb up this washed out logging road a few days after an historic rain storm. In fact, I thought we would get stuck.

We almost got stuck. Twice. We bounced around in the cab like little pieces of popcorn. The whole time. But we made it.

Back in Milton, we tied all the hoops back up, this time with proper rope, but there was some damage done. The hoops were never identical to begin with, and after the fall they were even less so. I don’t really have the equipment at my disposal to rebend steel hoops, so I am going to work with what I’ve got, but between that and the slight grade on the site, the second hoophouse looks a little like a kindergarten construction project made of popsicle sticks. I can’t wait to get the plastic on it so i can stop staring at those uneven metal ribs.

But it’s functional. And it’s mine. And that’s enough.

Last week I spread 800 lbs of soil ammendments, by hand, in one day, using a coffee can.

I would not recommend this to anyone.

Ever.

But it had to be done. The soil test from the fall came back indicating rather serious acidity. Having a pH reading a little south of seven is desirable for vegetable production, but this was pretty bad. So I got five hundred pounds of high calcium lime through the NOFA bulk order program, as well as two hundred pounds of greensand and 100 pounds of bone char.

As I walked through my Sisyphean task, one coffee can at a time, the soil began to look like the surface of the moon, or a sinister cupcake, pockmarked and powdery, synthetic, suspicious.

It was necessary, but ugly, upsetting. I yearned to see and smell the clean uniform brown of loamy tilled earth, to see the slate wiped clean. So I got to the garden early the next morning and fired up the BCS.

The BCS is made in Italy. Those Italians are very fussy about their terminology and insist that the machine they produce is not a mere rototiller, but is in fact a “walk-behind tractor.” They may be fussy, but they also kind of have a point.

I’m pretty much in love with my BCS 732, and I have little regard for machinery. I don’t drive stick. I didn’t learn to operate a tractor until I’d been farming for five years. I just don’t like machinery, I don’t have an affinity for it, it makes me nervous.

But I feel like the BCS is playing on my team. After reading the manuals and pulling the start cord so hard I fell on my ass, the engine sputtered to life, and it puttered up and down the rows in first gear for hours, churning through chunks of sod and throwing out rocks like a champ. The wheels turn independently, so the turning radius is pretty much zero.

Don’t get me wrong, it was hard. It wasn’t that fun. The handles are awkwardly low and the machine is very heavy, so navigating back and forth across my bumpy uncultivated field was exhausting. But I did it all by my self. I didn’t have to call a man to help me. The field is tilled and I did it on my own. And that, my friends, is priceless.

I took this shot last week, and already it’s clearly the past – with the sunny weather we’ve been having on the island, the greenhouse is full and thriving. Strong germination rates, happy plants. I did the math this morning and I have something like twelve hundred tomato starts, which is borderline insane. Everything you see to the right of the center aisle? Tomatoes. Jet Star, Brown Berry, White Cherry, Pink Beauty, Big Beef. Over 400 Sungolds. More heirlooms to come. The plan is to sell almost two thirds of them. Even non-gardeners like to have a tomato or two.

Now that the seed starter is full and humming along, the project for this week is building greenhouse number two, the tomato house. At eighty feet long it’s almost twice as big as the seed starter, which is kind of a headache, but I learned a lot the first time around and I think this one will actually feel easier. My friend Emily helped me lay out the heavy anchor timbers this afternoon with the Vermont Cart, which is perhaps the best wheely tool known to man, and after working up a sweat we took a break at the Black Dog with iced Chais. Hopefully, tomorrow, the hoops go in.

Starting a farm is a young person’s game. You want to be a farmer? Before you have kids, before you have a mortgage, before your back hurts too bad, when you can eat sleep breathe your work, strap on your boots and go.

Last night on the phone with my mom I apologized, for appearing to drop off the face of the earth, dodging phone calls and watching my inbox crest and overflow with unanswered queries. I rise before dawn these days, around five or so, propelled by this borderline manic productive energy, and still there are not enough hours in the day. My housemates think I’m slightly batty. They’re right. But I can’t help it. The long hours, the bumps and bruises, the imperfect angles and broken tools and daily frustrations, it all feels so different when it’s your own. It’s more than worth it. It’s everything.

After a week of carpentry for non-carpenters (yours truly), the seed starter greenhouse is done. It’s not perfect but it’s all mine and i couldn’t possibly be more proud of it. in the morning i’ll begin filling it with flats of seeds, onions and peas and bachelor buttons, dreams of spring, dreams of here and now.