crooked row

irene

emily — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:47:30 +0000

Irene is coming. As usual the whole island is aflutter, charging into Cronigs for bread and milk and batteries, filling tubs with water for the upcoming power outages, obsessively checking the weather on iphones. I went home and made this quiche instead.

August is almost over, and with the taste of cooler weather comes that seasonal urge to surface from the sea of the farm’s life, its endless bounty and its endless needs. In September I will turn on the kitchen radio and make tomato sauce for hours, heedless of time, and rejoin the living.

Slow Food Potluck Video

emily — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 11:22:52 +0000

Cleaning freezers, chicken sausage

emily — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:04:32 +0000

Last fall I got an interesting barter proposal from a farmer up the road. He had a small flock of laying hens that was not earning its keep – that is, the ladies were eating lots of expensive grain without producing lots of marketable eggs. It was time to make room in the coop for some new birds. The idea was that I would bring over the IGI unit, we would process the old hens together, and I would receive half the birds in exchange for my help.

Sounded like a bargain to me. I signed on, and ended up with twenty five birds in plastic bags in the bed of my truck at the end of the day.

In November, this seemed like no big deal. There was a long, cold season ahead, and I saw many a chicken stew in my future. But the thing about these birds is that they cook up nothing like the broilers you buy at the supermarket.

Whereas the average broiler lives a fleet eight weeks, putting on fat like there’s no tomorrow, these birds made it to fifty weeks, and spent their lives scratching around the yard and putting energy into eggs. Their breasts are comparatively narrow and bony, their flesh tough and lean. Cooking up a tasty meal with these gamey birds takes a little forethought, a little creativity.

So suffice it to say that spring rolls around, and I’m nowhere near through my winter bounty. I’ve been storing them in a borrowed chest freezer behind the house, but my friend Jefferson of the GOOD Farm, will soon need his chest freezer back, to fill it with fresh birds for market.

I am in a bind.

I decide to make sausage. Lots and lots of sausage.

I go to the local deli and buy a little tupperware full of casings.

I invite people over to eat and hang out and help. Jefferson owns all the relevant hardware, ie a kitchenaid with a meat grinder attachment and a hand-crank sausage stuffer machine, and knows how to operate them, and teaches us how. James breaks down birds. Tim tells stories. Amadine takes lovely pictures. We all drink wine.

I get designated head casing fitter, a job for which I am perhaps ill qualified for, but manage to execute nonetheless.

We get to work. We do about fifteen birds, and between the wine and the tiny kitchen and the other random projects (pates, burgers, salads, etc) it takes almost all day. Here’s a rough idea of what went into the grinder:

chicken
pork fat from North Tabor Farm (sausage needs fat. an 80-20 meat-fat ratio is ideal)
fresh feta cheese from Mermaid Farm
parsley
salt

My goal in making this stuff was just to make sure the birds were not wasted, that they were put to good use. The fact that the sausage turned out to be seriously delicious was a nice bonus though. I tried various types of stews in the winter months, but this project was far and away the tastiest way I found to turn those gamey hens into dinner.

Between the eating and the giving away, we ended the day with full bellies and a few tidy ziplocks that fit easily into my kitchen freezer, lunches and dinners for days to come.

lush

emily — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 14:39:05 +0000

The season is surging here on the North shore. The baby tomatoes look spectacular – verdant, green, ready for the party. Tomorrow I’m kicking them off the light stand into the greenhouse, to sink or swim, overnight lows be damned. April on the farm is always an act of faith. It’s hard to believe that a couple of weeks ago the little suckers looked like this

Delicate, wispy, possibly anemic. And yet here we are.

This spring is colder and slower than last year, a more traditional island season, foggy mornings and cool gray days. But I feel so much better, so even and calm, compared to the crazy energy of this time twelve months ago, during the farm’s first season, the farm’s first year. The work is always demanding, and physical, the fields will always take everything you give and then some, and still, for some reason, I feel ready to see what round two has in store. To act in faith.

goodbye dear girl

emily — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:36:30 +0000

Cranberry has been running a little rough lately. She sounds like a semi, especially puttering over the hills around Tashmoo. So I took her in to see Matt at Vineyard Alternative Auto – I figured she just needed some exhaust work, and settled into a cafe across the street, prepared to spend the morning there working while she got fixed.

Matt called me earlier than I expected, just as I was settling in.

“Come on over,” he said. “I’ve gotta show you something.”

That something was a hole in the frame. Or to be more exact, multiple holes in the frame. Raw rusty apertures you could put your hand through.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen on a Tacoma.” he said. “You’ve gotta stop driving this thing immediately.”

I managed to wait until I was back on the road before I started crying. I think I was too surprised in the shop to do much of anything. I paid cash for Cranberry two years ago and own her outright. She’s the most valuable thing I own, my first and biggest investment in the farm, and given that she’s a Toyota with 90k I expected to get another five years or so together no problem.

I’ve always known that 1998 Tacomas are part of a frame recall. I’d also heard that Toyota was giving people value and a half for their trucks if they qualified. I just never thought I’d be part of it.

After a tense and ragged twenty four hours I ended up in an office in Falmouth, where they told me I’d receive twelve thousand dollars for her, which is significantly more than I paid, and for which they are receiving a truck that isn’t even drivable. They’re also going to give me a free rental for two weeks, while I sort out my next step.

Things have been better since then.

But some part of me, my irrational heedless heart, can’t see this as an unambiguous win. Cranberry was there every step of the way during such a formative part of my life. I know she’s just a truck, but she was my workhorse, she was my partner in crime. I know the next truck I have will be “better.” But I miss her already.

She carried farm stuff all over town – sunflowers, lily bulb crates, flats of tomatoes and bags of soil.

She let me give rides to my friends.

She took me up to central Maine for the Common Ground Fair in the fall, and down to Bee Heaven in south Florida for the winter, where the local reptiles fell in love with her warm metal shell. We covered the whole Eastern seaboard together, one state at a time.

Tomorrow we’ll get on the ferry for the last time and go to the dealership, and I will leave alone. Cranberry’s got a lot of good parts left and I’m sure she’ll be thoroughly scrapped, pieced out to live on in other ways.

As my grandfather would say, goodbye dear girl. You will be missed.

winter web

emily — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:42:00 +0000

The island is cased in ice, but the days are getting longer, and winter is turning to spring. Boxes are arriving at the post office almost daily, seeds and cultivation supplies from far and wide. I’ll start planting this week, onions and leeks on a heat mat in my kitchen.

The biggest project of the season was a new website for the farm. I used a service called Small Farm Central , which specializes in helping small farms build websites. I met their lead developer Simon at the ASCFG conference a couple years ago and thought it was a great idea.

Basically, Small Farm Central takes care of the technical stuff, ie the templates and hosting, and lets the farmer to do the fun stuff, content and design and shuffling pictures around.

In the past few weeks I have become an expert in the art of shuffling pictures around. If this ever becomes a marketable skill, I will be making the big bucks.

At any rate, if you want to check it out, here’s a link:

Bakehouse Farm

boots

emily — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 13:25:07 +0000

In the life of a farmer, boots are a common denominator, the thread through the days. When you work on your feet, you’ll do a lot to keep them happy.

I’m a bean boots kind of gal myself, which is somewhat unusual. Bean boots are relatively cheap, around $60. They’re also basic civilian footwear – no steel toe, no straps or lining or reinforcements. Just plain rubber boots. I’ve tried others. Blundstones are big on the island. But in the morning, rain or shine, when it’s time to get going, I just want my bean boots.

Earlier this month I noticed that, for the first time, water was getting into the footbed on my left side. I tried putting a ziplock over my sock, which helped a little with dryness, but not with insulation. It’s November in New England. If you have cold water in your boot, you are going to have some really cold toes.

It’s hard to explain how attached I am to these boots. They’ve been with me across so many fields, so many places. I hoped that I could salvage them with gorilla glue. But then I saw where the water was getting in – through a long shallow trench in the sole of the boot. It wasn’t a crack. That I could’ve fixed. The problem was that I’ve done so much walking, taken so many steps, that I wore away the actual sole of the boot, which is a deal-breaker.

And so, with a heavy heart, I ordered an identical pair. When the big brown box arrived on my doorstep and I pulled out the new set, I was taken aback by how they looked standing alongside my beloved old pair. Suddenly I noticed how completely faded my boots had become through the seasons, the embossed logo all but illegible, the heel seam a wavy cracked shadow, the color a blotchy bastard cousin of its former hunter green. In this world where consumer goods are increasingly designed to be irreparable and disposable (designed obsolescence anyone?), things that are well made, things that are truly of use, become increasingly rare, increasingly precious.

A seasoned cast iron skillet. A well balanced hand tool. A good pair of boots.

visitors

emily — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:31:49 +0000

Back in the day, when spring was surging, I would go on a field walk every morning, just to see what kind of visitors I was getting. I knew exactly when the cucumber beetles showed up on the tomatillos – they were slow and stupid in the cool hours after night, and I would pick them off with ease. I knew where the rabbits were coming under the fence, and what they liked to eat.

These days, my hours are irregular, and I get surprised easily. I didn’t realize I had cabbage loopers on my red russian kale until they’d munched through the lower quarter of the row. I couldn’t figure out what was pooping in the tomato haus until I randomly caught the neighbors guinea hens in there at dusk a few days ago – they honked in alarm and doddered off down the rows when I closed the door behind me.

The visitors I’m really concerned about are the mice. Up until this point, they’ve been happy to colonize the compost pile outside the garden fence, and I’ve been careful to keep feed out of my greenhouses, and we’ve enjoyed a relatively harmonious detente. But yesterday I caught this absurdly cute bugger while I was stacking pots in the seed starter. He was really too pathetic to smoosh (I relocated him, which is technically illegal) but an obvious harbinger of things to come – as the seasons change, we’re all looking for shelter. I’m going to put off trying to kill them until they actually start eating things I need. Perhaps the detente will stand.

Ditto the black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on my bronze fennel. They are basically my favorite bug in the world. I feel lucky to have like five or so of them. They will probably eat all the fennel by the end of the month. I don’t really care. I didn’t have plans for the fennel. In a life that is so much about production, about the physical objects I bring to the table, to let some of them go is a small, necessary extravagance.

Indian Summer

emily — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:17:30 +0000

September was like endless summer here on the island – hot and dry. This rainy first day of October is the first good soaking we’ve had in weeks. The tomatoes are still flowering, and there hasn’t been a single night chilly enough to required row cover on the field crops. All the trees have full green foliage. Walking through the rows, it’s hard to believe sometimes that it’s ending. I got the fall kale and turnips and lettuce and beets started late, but the indian summer is carrying them through.

In farming as in baseball, there’s always next year, and it’s the dreaming that keeps us moving forward. But it can be hard after the rush of august to focus on the here and now of cultivation, the daily grind of field chores once the almighty tourist dollar has past. I’ve had a little time to swim, to cook, to see friends, to remember what it feels like to just be a human being for a while, and for the first time on my own farm I’ve had trouble clicking in to the task at hand. I just want to lay down in the between the rows and look at the sky.

the other side

emily — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 11:15:49 +0000

Dear friends, it has been too long. Forgive me. August was like being thrown in a blender. I am only just beginning to wake up on the other side.

We spent the last few days preparing for hurricane Earl – moving containers and crates inside, boarding up the greenhouses, lashing wheelbarrows to the fence. The whole island was aflutter, charging into Cronigs for bread and milk and batteries, filling tubs with water for the upcoming power outages. In the end, the storm was a non-event, but it rained almost four inches, and the fall plantings of carrots and kale look perky and new. It almost, almost makes me feel like I have it in me to stand up, gather my wits, and charge ahead into the new season.