dreams and doings of a young farmer

When people ask if I am doing the farm behind the Bakehouse, I say yes, but what I mean to say is that the farm is doing me.

Last week I stabbed myself in the leg with a utility knife. I was cutting pipe for irrigation. It was around seven in the morning – I had already been at work for an hour or two, watering the greenhouses and assembling drip tape components. I was tired and blurry and frustrated. I was using my leg as a cutting surface.

Any eighth grader who’s been to shop class can tell you not to use your leg as a cutting surface. But there I was. And then the obvious thing happened.

I knew right away it was bad. I hobbled to my truck and went to the er, where the doctor on call supervised a visiting medical student as she put three neat stitches in my left thigh. By ten am, I was back in the field, frustrated that I had lost most of the morning. I didn’t bother to change my jeans.

I couldn’t believe I did that. I just wasn’t thinking. Being beyond exhausted is a profound impairment, and it can make you do some pretty stupid things.

It’s hard to accept that my body is a resource with limits. There’s so much I need to do, so much I want to see done. But if I want to have a life in farming, I have to farm in a way that is sustainable not just for the plants, but for myself, and that’s hard to sit with.

Last night I cancelled my plans, stayed in and drank tea and slept. It’s a start.

thank you, ms meredith, for taking my vague and inarticulate directions (pretty, bold lettering, some sort of image) and somehow manifesting exactly what I wanted, when I didn’t even exactly know what I wanted.

not just an artist, but a mind reader as well. nifty lady to call a friend.

Yesterday my friend Marcus tilled down at the glassworks, where I will be growing cut flowers.

It was a really pretty morning, warm and clear – we’ve had a true spring this year on the island, daffodils and all, which is so glorious after the washout of 2009.

The soil there is gorgeous, dark and loamy, smells just right. I’ll have to make a pass or two more with the little bcs to break up the clumps, and then the bachelor buttons are ready to go in, soon to bloom in electric blue.

Fortunately, in a first year plot, I don’t have to contend with to many of these.

The sod keeps sprouting anew, even after two rounds with the tiller, but there are worse things. Such as pigweed. And mugwort. And nutgrass.

Over those, I’ll pick out clumps of sod any day of the week.

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.