Vegetable Musical Chairs

I'm a planner and a list-maker by nature, one of those compulsive types who sometimes writes down tasks after having completed them, simply for the pleasure of checking them off as done. So you can imagine what the lead-up to this year was like for me: umpteen spreadsheets and to-do lists and timetables and budgets, to the point where my computer ran slow from so many open windows. They are my security blankets, the lists, helping me to keep breathing when too many thoughts crowd my head.

But lists are only as good as the circumstances they organize. My seeding plan, for example, was predicated on the assumption that we would have built our greenhouse in March, and it would be ready and warmly waiting for the seeding bonanza of April. That's not exactly how it worked out. Construction was postponed seemingly indefinitely—first because Brendan and Katia, through no fault of their own,were delayed in closing on their house (and the site of the would-be greenhouse). Then there was the problem of the frame, which we had planned to purchase from some friends who backed out the last week in March. We found a greenhouse company that promised to deliver on Saturday the 3^rd, until they realized that we were in Hardwick Massachusetts, not Hardwick Vermont. April 1 found me without a greenhouse or a place to put it, watering my ever growing number of trays in a shower.

Change of plans. I drove to New Hampshire, loaded up the truck with greenhouse parts, and decided to make it happen. The first step, the foundation, proved the hardest part. Based on our admittedly limited sample set, I'd put the probability of sending a three-foot post into Massachusetts soil and not hitting rock at about 3 to 12. These are neither good betting nor good construction odds. We pried out rocks; we dug holes, and after two days of sweat and tears, we had twelve posts to show for our labor. Erecting the bows and attaching the purlins and ridgepoles seemed like nothing after the first Herculean task, and with Brendan's help we soon built endwalls. We stretched the plastic over the frame and admired our handiwork.

Next we needed heat. An electrician lent us a propane heater, which we rigged up to provide warmth at night. The 200,000 BTU heater proved massive overkill, however, so I slept in a tent next to the greenhouse to monitor for melt down, and we left one roll-up side slightly raised to avoid cooking the plants. All seemed well—my plants were shooting up and my greenhouse finally felt like a proper structure. Until the heater ran out of propane Thursday night. One week's supply had cost $85, so we knew that our jury-rigged system needed changing. Besides, I didn't relish the thought of driving an hour and a half to the propane dealers each week with a 100 gallon tank in the back of the truck.

We called the propane company and asked them to come connect a small heater we had purchased, which promised to be energy efficient, thermostat controlled, and infinitely safer than our first model. But a solution so neat would have ruined our record of near catastrophe, so the good beurocrats of Massachusetts intervened. They've banned the use of vent-free heaters (what we had) as a primary source of heat, and the propane comany's alternative system would run a cool $1200, not including propane. So, without going into too much incriminating detail, I'm headed to Connecticut on Monday in search of “alternative” options.

In the meantime, I'm playing vegetable musical chairs again, carrying sixteen flats of cold-sensitive peppers inside to warmth at night and out to sun by day. I'm constantly commuting between fields and the greenhouse (they are separated by approximately four miles of windy country road) to water plants or work the land where they will ultimately grow. I'm seeding. I'm digging pathways. I'm trying to make sense of all those best-laid plans amidst the hustle of spring.

But Sunday morning, having worked a seventeen hour day the preceding day (which was my birthday), I decided to stop. We went out for ice cream. I ate food while seated. I went for a walk and admired the fresh green that comes and goes so briefly each year. Then this evening I sat down to make my list for the coming week.

The View from Tuesday

Some days (like Monday), chores expand. Milking turns into bottling, collecting eggs turns into cleaning eggs, the walk behind rototiller keeps dying, and watering the animals turns into castrating piglets. Before you know it, 4 AM has turned into noon, and all hands are on deck to finish the chores so that we can finally go home for a proper meal. Days like Monday have their purpose, though, outside of the sheer necessity of them from a maintenance perspective. They make Tuesdays feel wide and gloriously open when, at 6:30, you stop to watch the piglets head butting one another and snuffing around in the sawdust (apparently the previous mornings emasculation was not nearly the trauma that their squeals suggested). Chores are finished; you are free to return to the sleepily quiet house where, through the window, you can see the dew drops on the grass refracting the sunrise as one thousand points of light.

How Badly Do You Want It?

My eyes are bigger than my garden. I think I can attribute this overambitiousness to Eliot Coleman's books Winter Harvest Handbook and the classic New Organic Grower. Eliot Coleman, whose brilliant designs and incredibly efficient systems yield fresh greenery all winter long (in Maine!) can be both inspiring and depressing when you are in my position.

As a farmer striking out on her own this year, I'm building everything from the ground up. I've got visions for implementing and improving on all of the good systems of Caretaker and Serenbe, but right now, I'm about as far from the fine-tuning stage as you can be. I'm still charging forward at full throttle, seeding flats even as I mentally scramble deciding where they will go. I'm watering plants in a shower with a showerhead, toting them back and forth from the bathroom as the sun or the woodstove dries them out. My planting “apprentice” is a three-year-old, whose primary task is to warn me if his one-year-old brother breeches my ottoman blockade and charges my growlights. A friend in Athol is babysitting eight flats of onions and two lettuce trays; as soon as I had sent them off, I seeded beets, cauliflower, peppers, parsley, and chives. My lights are full again.

Meanwhile, my greenhouse is in pieces, finally here, but still far from built. After a shipping snafu delayed what was supposed to be a Saturday delivery, I took matters into my own hands and drove to central New Hampshire to pick it up. For the record, a 17 x 20 foot greenhouse does fit in the bed of a Toyota Tundra—just not very gracefully.

Up at the farm, the rye grass that blanketed my field all winter is beginning to take off: thickening, greening, growing taller every day since the rains let off on Wednesday. I, meanwhile, am itching to till. Rye grass residue naturally impedes seed germination, which is great as a weed suppressant, but not so good when you need to start direct seeding soon. There are strawberries that need to be transplanted, equipment orders still to call in.

Three days a week, as part of our arrangement with Brendan and Katia, I take the 4 AM chore shift: feeding calves, shoveling manure, and watering pigs while someone else milks. Andrew takes three other mornings and all of the afternoons. We're all various states of crazy transition: from winter to spring, from Williamstown to Barre, from a small, cramped house to a new, dilapidated home that would intimidate even the folks of Extreme Home Makeover. Through all of this, we're learning to live together, to respect boundaries, to find time and space for rest.

And it is April. Let the games begin.

Note: this post was written on Monday, but due to a virtual absence of internet, it is only coming up now. Stay tuned for more news on the greenhouse, a lament on the rockiness of New England soil, and an ode to the wonders that are tractor-mounted rototillers. There may even be pictures (no promises)

Secret Family Recipe (this is your only chance)

Breakfast today was a revelatory experience. So good, in fact, that I am considering letting this farming thing fall to the wayside to pursue fame and fortune as the proprietress of a new breakfast cafe: "The Intranational House of Pancakes" All puns aside, I can safely say that this is my favorite pancake recipe of all time. And the weirdest thing? These pancakes have almost no sweetener and zero white flour. Yet they are exquisite: tender, slightly nutty, filling without being heavy. I based this version on a recipe from The Whole Grains Cookbook by Robin Asbell, which I would cook from much more frequently if it didn't tend to call for summer vegetable ingredients or expensive cuts of meat. You can follow my instructions exactly, or do what I did and substitute what you have.

Buttermilk Wheat Bran Pancakes with Yogurt and Blueberry Jam

1 1/8 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 wheat bran (I grind my own flour, so I'm always looking for places to throw this in. You can also use wheat germ, which you can buy at a health food store)
1 T sugar
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
scant 1 1/4 cups milk + 1 1/5 T apple cider vinegar (the original recipe called for buttermilk, but my substitution worked great)
scant 1/4 c olive oil
1 t molasses
2 large eggs, seperated

Mix the milk and vinegar together in a small bowl and let sit for a few minutes. Mix the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Add the egg yolks, molasses and oil to the milk and vinegar and mix thoroughly. In a third bowl, beat the egg whites to form stiff peaks. Mix the wet ingredients into the dry until just moistened, then fold in the egg whites.

Heat a griddle over medium high heat until water drops dance on the hot surface. Lightly grease the griddle and cook the pancakes (I assume you all know how to cook pancakes...)

Serve the pancakes with plain yogurt and jam or syrup.

I would share a picture, but we ate them up too quickly for that!

Miso Soup for the Soul

Lately, things have been a bit frantic in my household. There are approximately 15 million decisions to make (give or take a thousand), and while the days are lengthening, they never seem quite long enough to accommodate my optimistic to-do lists. Some days, I throw my hands up and make a fancy dinner anyway, time be damned.

But on occasion I too want good food fast, and since the closest thing to convenience food in our house are rice cakes, it takes a bit of creativity to make a simple meal in short order. On Monday, however, we stumbled across a formulation that is almost as easy as ramen and infinitely more delicious: miso soup and wasabi peas.

We'd love to make our own miso, and Sandor Katz provides helpful directions in his awesome book Wild Fermentation, but we've not yet acquired the requisite koji grains to begin. Once we do, we'll need at least two months to ferment sweet miso, or a full year to make a traditional salty miso. So until then we are purchasing our miso at the local co-op, where we happened to find it absurdly on sale one week.

Miso is traditionally a soybean ferment, though you can make an unconventional miso out of pretty much any legume or even barley. The koji grains (which, unfortunately, you will have to purchase unless you like next door to a miso shop, where the mold might naturally exist) consists of rice inoculated with the spores of Aspergillus oryzae. Fermentation actually renders soy products far more nutritious to a human digestion system, as it turns complex proteins into simpler, more digestible amino acids. This is why so many Asian soy products--tempeh, tofu, tamari/soy sauce, miso--were fermented. In the West, however, we seem to have missed the memo, as the plethora of unfermented soy products touting great health benefits is long and varied. Considering the fact that the United States is the world's largest producer of soy beans (92% of which were Genetically Modified Round-up Ready seed in 2008), is it any surprise that soy gets stuck into practically anything?

If you'd like to avoid the GMO soy bandwagon, however, miso and other traditionally fermented products are the way to do it. They are not only good for you (miso contains an alkaloid that binds with heavy metals to carry them from your body), but they taste wholesome and healing like homemade chicken soup. And miso is SO much faster!

An important thing to remember when making miso is never to let it boil. Part of the nutrient value of miso derives from the living bacterial culture contained in the miso paste (rather like the healthy bacteria in yogurt). If you boil the soup, your subsequent soup will be dead.

At its simplest, miso soup can be made by mixing one cup of hot water with 1 tablespoon of miso. This is delicious, yes, but not quite substantial enough for me to consider it a meal.

MK's Miso Soup Meal
(serves 2)
N.B.: my measurements are approximations. Taste and add more or less stock as you like.

3-4 cup fish stock*
1 T tamari or soy sauce
2 T miso
1 carrot, finely diced
scallions, finely diced (optional)

Feel free to throw in other things if you have them: Chinese cabbage, diced daikon radishes, seaweed such as kombu or wakame instead of the fish stock, shitakes mushrooms, tofu, garlic, greens, tahini, or a dash of fish sauce. In other words, you can eat miso every day and it never taste the same...

Bring the fish stock to a boil, and add the carrot. Cook until soft. Remove from heat and let the stock cool down a bit. In a small bowl on the side, mix a few tablespoons of stock with the miso until fully combined. Add the miso and soy sauce and scallions back into the stock. Serve warm.

*We got fish heads from Dean and Deluca in New York City for free. And they were covered with extra fish meat, which we were able to pick off after we had made the stock and use late for fish cakes and whatnot. So wonderful, hearty fish stock can be yours for nothing more than a little bit of time and a slightly fishy smell in your kitchen.

Wasabi Peas
Oh man....I used to love those little morsels from Trader Joes: the blast of horseradish heat that fades away quickly into a crunch. But you don't have to buy them, I am happy to report--you can make them yourself in no time at all. Though, FYI, these will not be crunchy. This recipe is from my new Mollie Katzen cookbook The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without, which I highly recommend.

1-2 t unsalted butter
1 cup minced onion
1 lb green peas (defrost frozen peas in a colander with warm water)
salt and pepper to taste
2-3 T wasabi paste (it comes in little tubes at the grocery)
1 T olive oil
3 T water

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook for 5 minutes over medium heat, stirring often so that they don't burn. Add the peas and any salt and pepper and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, place the wasabi in a small bowl and mash it with the olive oil. Add water by the tablespoon until the mixture becomes a supple sauce, pour this into the peas. Stir gently to coat. Turn the heat to low and cover the pan. Cook for 10 minutes.

The longer you let the peas sit after cooking, the more the flavors will milk. Serve warm.

Gone From My Sight

I flew to visit my grandmother Monday; I caught the last flight out of JFK before the snows swept in and put the city on hold. I knew that it would be my last chance to see her, and I worried that I might arrive too late. My father and I woke early to hit the road to Alabama; our car cut through the chilly morning air past grass the faded tan of winter.

When we arrived, my Uncle was waiting to usher us along the corridors and into the small room where my grandmother lay. Suspended in a half-life of oxygen tubes and painkillers, she was not able to speak or greet us. She seemed hollowed out, breaking and broken.

So I did what she would have done for me, what she had done for me since I was a child: I told her stories. I told her about my winter in the north, about making haggis, about the farms where I have worked and where I will work next year. I reminded her of the fourth of July when she let me dye the applesauce blue (I was alone in my patriotic zeal, judging from the leftovers). I thanked her for the gingerbread houses that we made together every Christmas. When I had run out of stories, we sat quietly for a while. She didn't need any more stories distracting her from the work at hand. She needed all of us to let go, to relinquish the ties that were binding her to that room. As I struggled to find the words to release her, I was suddenly reminded of the owl we had caught one fall morning at Serenbe more than a year ago.

When we found him, the owl could only blink at us, his yellow eyes fierce and frightened: Samson shorn of his locks and chained to the temple pillars. In the night he had hunted our chickens, swooping low and soundless. He had found our fence instead—a lightly electrified net surrounding the chicken pen, erected against just such intruders. The nighttime struggle could only have been epic, we surmised, for the owl lay mute and utterly still, swaddled tightly in a straighjacket of his own devising. Upon our approach, he flexed his talons, tight across his chest, and opened and closed his beak soundlessly.

Realistically, we should not have helped this creature to get free. He was a predator, as likely as not to come back for a second helping. But we couldn't imagine any other action than to let him go. We carefully untangled the lines which pinned his wings at odd angles. We unwrapped the cords from his neck and legs. The final few knots wouldn't give to our ministrations, so against all better judgement, we cut the fence. By that point, it took two of us to hold the bird still. We could feel him gathering strength, straining for release. He seemed sound and unharmed despite his night in captivity, so we threw him into the air, watched his wings spread wide and catch against the air. He rose silently, purposefully, without hesitation.

My grandmother died Wednesday morning, some time between the last darkness of night and the first light of a clear day. I will miss her dearly, but I am glad to see her go.

On Serendipity: A Retrospective

I believe in America’s agricultural revival. I’m 23 years old, the product of a small liberal arts college and a bustling, cosmopolitan graduate school, and I’m comparison shopping for work boots and overalls in preparation for my first day as a farmer. I’ll be honest; I don’t entirely know what I’m getting into. I grew up in the city, have never grown so much as a tomato. Call me crazy, but I actually believe that I can do this.

Thus I began this blog, almost two years ago. Not many people actually read those words, however, as I only shared the address with my best friend and only then after oaths of strictest secrecy. For all of my posture of speaking from a soapbox, I was really writing to myself. I wanted to flex my writing muscles, which had finally recovered from the over-exertion of college and grad school. I wanted to remind myself why I had put development work on hold and moved to a farm. Spring was rising in me like sap, and I needed some forum to record my own greening.

At first, I was nervous to let my words loose in the world--what if I offended someone? What if my writing sucked? What if, someday, a stranger showed up on my doorstep professing psychic kinship and asking to stay for dinner? Still, that inevitable writerly urge stirred in me to find an audience. When Paige offered to link to this blog from the farm's website, the temptation proved too much to resist. My first comments thrilled me (they all still do), so when another greenhorn future-farmer from California complimented my blog and asked me for more information about Serenbe, I was happy to oblige.

Ok, so I did think he sounded a little bit over-eager, claiming "we-have-a-lot-in-common". Blogs are like one-way mirrors in that way--but after a few wary emails I became convinced that he was neither a serial killer nor a weirdo. He was planning to WOOFF his way around the US, volunteering on diverse farms in diverse regions in an attempt to discern his own niche within the broad discipline of agriculture. He hoped to come work at Serenbe for a month, before moving on to Florida and then along the Gulf coast. He liked rhubarb and vegetabling off, sure signs that he had at least a modicum of good taste. Paige figured we could use the extra hands in October, and she and Jack were having a very good time calling this person my "online boyfriend," so she hired him.

With that settled, we all moved on with our summers. The teasing settled down (or, to be more accurate, was directed toward other fronts), and I went on several bad blind dates. At the end of September on an early Sunday, I pulled up to the Greyhound bus station in Atlanta to pick up our new farmer. He was a study in reticence, pausing before any reply, thoughtful in the face of my exuberant stream-of-consciousness dialogue. I thought he seemed nice enough, though much quieter than I had expected.

Fast forward to Friday of last week. In the middle of a snowy meadow with a ring he had carved from a Hershey's kiss, Andrew proposed. Best Valentines Day ever? You betcha.

I found out, much after the fact, that he had chosen Serenbe as much for my words as for the farm. As he claims, "I just wanted to meet the girl with the blog." I am grateful that I was not made aware of this fact any earlier, however, as I would have doubtless done everything in power to sabotage his application, had I known his true motivations. In retrospect, I cannot think of a better way to meet your best friend and the person you most love in the world than this: first through the medium of your thoughts best-said, then through toil, working side-by side, and finally in the kitchen: chopping onions, debating politics, washing the dinner dishes before dessert.

Thank you everyone for reading. And most especially Andrew, thank you.