...And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills...

Something there is about springtime that would, I think, bring hopeful thoughts to the most inveterate pessimist. There's a reason Williams Wordsworth was driven to poetry by the sight of a field of daffodils--this season is intoxicating. Lately spring has settled upon Western Massachusetts like a landslide of life: our asparagus is exploding out of the soil, the covercrop of rye grass in our fallow middle field is blue-green and lush, and our seedlings reach higher every day. Our calves frolic, kicking up their heels and all but dancing, as we let them out each day onto new, green pasture. Frankly, I feel about the same each morning as I walk up the hill from my cabin and breath in the smell of sunrise.

At such a time, it seems only appropriate that our CRAFT visit this week was to Farmgirl Farm, a young CSA farm whose grower, Laura Meister, spoke to us about the challenges and successes of her farm's first 5 years. Beforehand, as we stood in a circle and introduced our company of bright-eyed young apprentices, Laura asked us to state whether we hoped to start our own farm someday, and if so how soon. Suffice it to say that we are an ambitious bunch.

Laura came to Farmgirl Farm without such grand designs. She signed on for the farm's first season as a partner to an old friend, whose dream it was to run a small CSA farm. The white lie that she was "just helping for a year" proved "the blindfold that you need for such a crazy thing," Laura laughingly explained. By the end of the year, her friend had pulled out, due to health problems and personal reasons. But Laura remained, took an ag business class that winter, and came into her second season with even more passion than the first.

Driving up, Farmgirl Farm seems petite and unencumbered by the detritus that old farms collect (tractor implements, wood scraps, scavenged miscellany which might come in handy some day). The main fields all fit within a neat, flat rectangular parcel which is bordered by an invitingly clear tributary of the Green River. Part of the reason for this tidy appearance is Laura's lack of heavy machinery. Though she is now growing on 3 acres, she has not yet purchased a tractor and instead hires friends' machines for the rare big job or preps beds herself with a walk behind rototiller. Because her land is all leased and she's not exactly rolling in cash, Laura has intentionally kept her farm lean. She has invested in the fertility of her soil, certainly, but almost everything else--from the greenhouse to the coolers to the irrigation system--can be disassembled and moved, should a better opportunity present itself. She leases another, unirrigated piece of land across the street, and from these two small spaces she feeds a 75-member CSA and assorted restaurant customers.

To young farmers such as ourselves, Laura's model is something that finally feels attainable. Many of us are working on deeply rooted established farms (Caretaker, for instance, was one of the first CSA farms in the country). While such farms are fantastic learning environments, they don't give us much of a sense of how a 25-year-old could ever operate her own farm business. I can't afford Caretaker's beautiful old barn or its 38 fertile acres. But with a little bit of blind insanity and a lot of had work, I imagine like I could do something like Farmgirl Farm. For example, Laura is a brilliant scavenger. She found the frame of her greenhouse standing skeletal in someone's field one winter, sleuthed around for the owner, and bought many of the components for a fraction of their cost. Laura uses bartered CSA shares not only to pay her lease (there were, I kid you not, audible gasps when she revealed this fact), but also to secure legal services, chiropractic care, manure for her compost, and housing for her apprentices.

She gave us practical advice on irrigation systems, marketing, and the value of transplanting vs direct seeding your first year (weeds won't be as likely to choke transplants compared to direct-seeded crops). But what I remember most clearly and have been mulling over since was her humbling and inspiring benediction that "there will never be a moment when you think you know enough." Get out, she said, ask questions, find mentors. Just commit to giving it your best shot, and the rest will likely follow.

Trial By Fire and Ice

When I arrived at Caretaker Farm one week ago, I was hailed by swirling currents of snow flurries as I walked the frozen path to my new home (an unheated, unpowered cabin in the woods). I hugged a hot water bottle like my life depended on it that first night and did my best to think springy thoughts.

The power of positive thinking, however, was not apparently strong enough to dismiss Old Man Winter, who still had a few tricks up his frigid sleeves. Monday and Tuesday vacillated between a snowy drizzle and general overcastness, which prevented us from doing anything plant-related outside of greenhouse seeding. In the meantime, we worked to prepare the farm for spring: cleaning the barn and greenhouse, clearing brush, splitting logs for next winter's wood supply, slogging our way along the fence line and cutting back the thorny multiflora rose branches as we went.

Now to a New Englander, the past week's weather was nothing out of the ordinary. Half-frozen mud is ubiquitous this time of year, and no one expects to wear white summer dresses for Easter. Unfortunately, it is a proven fact that we Georgians lump all temperatures below forty as "unfit for human habitation," while simultaneously believing that all we really need at such times is a warm winter coat. As a cultural outreach gesture, I think that there ought to be a schematic drawing somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line that demonstrates the proper way to dress for winter. It has taken me years to overcome this heritage and comprehend "layering," a complex maneuver that requires more than a simple a t-shirt and a decent coat for winter attire. Since arriving at Caretaker, I have embraced layering to a comic degree, to the point that I am virtually unrecognizable under long underwear, a t-shirt, fleece, winter coats, and rain gear. And since then, I have not been cold.

This may also have been a function of Wednesday's chief occupation, burning the brush piles we had created in the cow pasture and down by the apprentice cabins. Once the wood finally caught and my hair began to frizz slightly from the heat of the flames, I felt a bit like the title character of "The Cremation of Sam McGee". I think I even removed some layers.

While the weather has certainly given me pause (particularly at 5:50 AM, when my alarm goes off and I come up for a breath of cold morning air from beneath a mountain of blankets and sleeping bags), my first week of farming has been splendid, exhausting, utterly satisfying. Caretaker's apprenticeship program is intensely communal: we rotate cooking duties 5 days per week and share the bottom floor of the farmhouse with Farmer Don and his family (the top is theirs and private, just as the cabins are ours). Caretaker is strictly a CSA farm, and the 250 shareholder families participate throughout the season in celebrations, harvesting, and occasional odd jobs around the farm. My excitement for this year is more nuanced that was my bright-eyed enthusiasm last year, when I began at Serenbe. I have a better sense of what I don't know, and a clearer idea of how to augment my knowledge. I'm not so scared of the greenhouse, nor totally clueless when it comes to compost and tractors. (though I imagine that Caretaker's manual transmissions will prove trickier than our deluxe little John Deere at Serenbe was).

Monday night, as I was washing the dishes, Katie and Margaret called me outside to witness the most stunningly complete rainbow I have ever seen. It and its fainter secondary rainbow spanned the farm in brilliant colors against the dusky sky. Were I a more adventurous sort, I would probably have felt compelled to scale the mountain beyond the farm and dig beneath the single fir tree that seemed to mark one end. But I've got more important things to do than chase after leprechaun gold--Spring is peeking quietly out of the fields, and we've got a long, full season ahead of us.

Full Circle

I am a memory junkie. On long bus rides (of which there have been many, as of late), in line at DAS (Colombia's Kafka-esque cross between the CIA and the DMV), or during a lazy afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, I can always count on my memory to entertain me. Like easing into a warm bath, I slowly lower myself into some pleasant past event and wallow in my own private nostalgia-fest. It passes the time quite pleasantly where there is nothing else to do.

I have heard that there is a specific hormone that a woman's body produces after childbirth, which dulls the memory of pain. Apparently, you remember that you were in unholy pain, but you can't remember precisely how it felt. The explains why we are not all only children, I suppose.

Recently, as I was reflecting on this bit of trivia, it occurred to me that the memory of a physical sensation, good or bad, is always at best (or worst) a shade of the actual experience. So while the worst experiences hopefully lose the sharpness of their edges, the good ones gradually become less clear, less intense. The memory of your first love, while quite likely strong enough to bring a smile to your face, doesn't pack the same earth-shaking punch as the actual encounter. You don't need to be flush with hormones for a memory to fade.

Last week I left Colombia and returned to Atlanta. In a frantic few days of packing and visiting, I prepared myself for my migration North, to Caretaker Farm. But before I could leave, I had to revisit Serenbe: to put my hands in the dirt and witness the outline of the season as it comes into focus. It was the kind of true blue dream of sky day that is almost holy in its vividness. I walked between the tables in the greenhouse naming the trays and marveling at the transformation of last years' nervousness into familiarity. I couldn't help but run from place to place, as the whole farm seemed to merit a joyful gallop rather than a sedate field walk. And as I ran pell-mell past the new asparagus beds and the young pear trees, I thought to myself: this is the joy that memory can never fully depict.

I spent the brief hour that I had harvesting spinach, cutting the leafy bunches just beneath the surface of the soil and then stripping away any bad leaves. It was my first task at Serenbe, just over one year ago. I remembered dragging the bin behind me and basking in the spring sunshine. But I didn't spend long in that memory, as I was too busy savoring the present.



N.B.: I still have a lot to say about Colombia...stay tuned over the next week or two for dispatches about the Coffee Region of Colombia, where, I am happy to report, there is a great deal of wonderful organic growing going on.

A Guest Author

I'm not usually a fan of poems named after months (or seasons for that matter), but when it comes to Mary Oliver I'll take anything she gives me. Before May passes into June I wanted to share a poetical morsel that perfectly captures the heady rush of our flowering, fruiting, leafing farm. Would that I could say it so well!

May
May, and among the miles of leafing,
blossoms storm out of the darkness –
windflowers and moccasin flowers. The bees
dive into them and I too, to gather
their spiritual honey. Mute and meek, yet theirs
is the deepest certainty that this existence too –
this sense of well-being, the flourishing
of the physical body — rides
near the hub of the miracle that everything
is a part of, is as good
as a poem or a prayer, can also make
luminous any dark place on earth.

p.s. For those of you who had complained that only registered blog-people could leave comments, this is no longer the case. Comment away and make my day!

What's Cookin' Good Lookin?

It occurs to me that some of you, not having the benefit of daily contact with veggies, may be curious as to what exactly is in season here in Georgia. Most folks could probably match pumpkins with October or tomatoes with July, but what about the rest of the supermarket's bounty? In the grand tradition of 24 hour one-stop shopping and all-you-can-eat, the average grocery offers all "staple" crops and a gracious plenty of the fancier stuff year 'round. Often, the only clue as to seasonality comes from the price--the more expensive it is, the less likely it is to be in season. But even this can be misleading. With countries like Chile and Argentina operating on the Southern hemisphere's upside down seasons, this week's special might be a fruit no one outside of California could actually be growing.

Why would you want to eat with the seasons? The reasons are myriad, and if you've read this far you probably have at least an inkling. Flavor is perhaps the most straightforward reason; I won't even touch a peach (my all time favorite food) outside of peach season as the mealy, flavorless rocks that populate the grocery the other 10 months of the year are altogether useless, except perhaps as projectiles. The degree to which season and freshness affect taste varies from species to species, but it is not a stretch to say that produce always tastes better in its natural ripeness time after minimal transport.

As I put the trays of transplants in the bed of our truck to drive them out to the field for planting, I tell them to enjoy the feel of the wind in their leaves, as the 5 minute ride will be their first and last fossil-fueled journey. If you are the environmentalist type, the carbon footprint of a food increases exponentially as you eat it out of season. If it can be grown here, why not eat it when it is?

On a more philosophical level, anticipation breeds appreciation. After waiting all year long for those luscious peaches to ripen, I want to write hymns of praise to the first juicy orb that crosses my plate. I never do, though, as my mouth is always too full. Barbara Kingsolver says it best in her recent book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:

The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint--virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of the nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they shoud wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait, to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah, blah, blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indescriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.

Though I could go on, I'll get to my point. I'll try to do this semi-regularly, both to keep y'all apprised of what we're pulling from our fields and (I hope!) to facilitate your developing a locavore's palate. If, on your next foray to the grocery, you decide to give this whole seasonal thing and shot, here is what to look for:

• Spinach
• Kale
• Turnips (I'll eat Hakureis like apples; I'm not even kidding)
• Swiss chard
• Beets
• Asparagus
• Arugula
• Spring onions, aka scallions
  
• Lots of cool Asian greens for salads or stir fry: bok choy, tatsoi, tokyo bekana, and mispoona
• Mushrooms

Or better yet, hit up a farmer's market this Saturday and see what treasures some local whiz-farmer has managed to coax from the soil!

Beet it!

I first visited Serenbe in early December: it was a bright, crisp day shortly after the last CSA of the year. I caught the farm as it was settling down for its winter nap, and as a result the fields were appropriately subdued, with green and brown the dominant color scheme. I had trouble imagining the riot of color that would herald spring--it seemed a quiet farm.

Not so, any longer! Each day reveals fresh blossoms on peach trees, strawberry plants, and even our cover crop of vetch. My newly trained eyes catch colors where before I might only have seen a green wash. On field walks this spring I'm forever stopping in my tracks to admire tiny yellow buttercups or the brilliant purple stems of last season's beets. Those tell-tale purple stems in particular have become an obsession of mine, calling me to harvest every time I pass their bed. I can't get enough of the satisfying pop that ushers the beets out of the earth or the shockingly bright colors hidden beneath their dusty skin. Beets seem to me a good season-transitioning vegetable: nourished by the ground as it slumbered, earthy in flavor, but still suggestive (in that stunning purple core) of the colors of spring.

Because we have about bushel of beets still in the field, I'm always looking for ways to use them up. This slightly untraditional borscht puts the humble beet front and center (don't make it unless you like the taste of beets!) but gives them a bit of polish with lemon pepper, scallions, and dill. I served it with pasta, though a heaping beet green and spinach salad would be an equally delicious accompaniment.

Borscht
makes 4 hearty servings; takes just over 1 hour start to finish

4 large beets (I used about 6 medium to small ones)
1/3 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon local honey
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon pepper seasoning
2 cups buttermilk
2 scallions, white part only, minced
fresh or dried dill
plain yogurt or sour cream

Place the beets in a large sauce pan with water to cover. Bring to a boil and let simmer until beets are cooked, 30-40 minutes. Remove from heat and drain, saving at least one cup of the liquid. Set the beets aside to cool.

In a saucepan, cook the oatmeal on low with 1 cup of the beet water until all the liquid is absorbed. Meanwhile, peel and quarter the beets.

Place the beets, oatmeal, honey, lemon juice, and lemon pepper in a food processor or blender and process until smooth. Add the buttermilk and process until blended. Return the soup to the stove and heat until warmed through. Serve with a garnish of the scallions and dill as well as a dollop of yogurt or sour cream.

my thanks to Diana Shaw's Vegetarian Entertaining for the inspiration for this recipe