It's Only Going to Get Busier

It was a wonderful week spent with my friend Beth.  She got along with the animals, except the Ram that I named Noodles cuz he keeps on Ramen me.  Beth also took lots of cool photos of various things posted on facebook.  Check it out!  She is a great photographer so check out some of her other albums as well.

This past week has involved discing and harrowing soil to prepare beds for the potatoes, winter squash, and onions.  I drove Millie and Karl(?) to do that.  Karl is out of shape and it was a hot day for once so he sweated up a storm.  Karl actually sweat so much that Millie was licking him for moisture and salt.  Sexxxy.  On a related note, the horses and sheep look much, much better after being put out on pasture.

One of these days I will take a picture of the pasture and how we graze them.  It's cool setting up fences and making daily decisions about how much pasture we will give them in order to graze the grass efficiently and evenly while not sacrificing the animals' nutrition.  Talk about intensive management.  Try managing how much an animal eats!

Other work included seeding tons of winter squash by hand and hand-transplanting about 50 trays of onions (about 30,000 individual onion plants).  It took the work of up to 4 people at a time over 3 days to finish the transplanting.  I did a quick calculation and it came out to around 50 hours of labor.  It would have been much longer if we hadn't used this system that Jeff found in a 1930's USDA publication about transplanting onions.  Basically we laid the seedlings in trenches made by a wheel hoe plow and plowed the soil back into the trenches after they were laid down.  As Jeff sang, "Wheel Hoe Power!"

Pow!

Well, that's all she wrote for now.  I must be off to knit for a special someone who is coming to visit for a week in Maine this coming Thursday.  Real men knit. 

We’re already a third through May!?!? Whoa.

As many may guess, it has been a busy month for me.  Needless to say, I am fully engrossed in agriculture of the sustainable variety.  I have learned a lot in the past few weeks about agricultural concepts in general, how hectic farm life can be, and that no matter how happy you are, seasonal allergies don’t give lick.

About 2 weeks ago, Jeff and I took many, many soil samples to send to Cooperative Extension.  This task is so complicated that I will put it in list form:

1.     Use a shovel to dig a profile of the soil 6-8 inches deep.

2.     Dump said profile into a bucket.

3.     Mix this soil with other soil from the same field.

4.     Walk in a zig zag pattern while repeating steps 1-3 until the field is covered.

5.     Put well-mixed soil in a baggie/extension box.

It is actually very monotonous but important to test your soil to determine what nutrients, micronutrients, and minerals it may be lacking.  What is, or isn’t, in your soil can make or break whether you have a good crop or bad crop of any given veggie.  Furthermore, a plant lacking in some nutrients will be less healthy and therefore more susceptible to disease and pests; just like us! 

However monotonous soil testing may be, it did give me an opportunity to get to know the farm better.  I could see which fields and pastures were rocky, which were heavier (have more clay particles), which were lighter (sandier), and which had more or less weeds.  All the information about soil structure, its previous use, and slope will often strongly determine what you should plant in each bed since the character of the soil may suit one crop over another.  For example, you wouldn’t want to plant carrots in rocky soil because they will turn out all crooked and gnarly looking.  They may taste fine, but won’t be marketable.  As a matter of fact, carrots like “muck,” which is a finer soil that is very high in organic matter.

More exciting that soil are the 18 lambs we had born from 10 ewes within a week and a half of each other.  All 18 were born without trouble and are pretty darn cute.  Pictures will be up soon (probably will be up courtesy of my childhood friend Elizabeth who is coming up this weekend and is an excellent photographer).  There are plenty of booster shots, extra vitamins, and supplements that we feed them to make sure they are healthy.  I had the privilege of giving them some shots as well as giving them a single earring.  These earrings are tags we put on them so we can tell each lamb apart and identify them quickly should something happen.

Tomorrow we will be training the lambs to the electric fence so they don’t hurt themselves and shock to death if they get caught in it.  Sound terrible?  That’s why we are training them to a small section of fence and monitoring how they interact with it.  What with how they like to chase each other around and hop in the air, they could easily goof and get caught in the fence.

Jeff and I have also been using the horses to pretty regularly work the soil with either a disc or a harrow.  These implements loosen the top 6-8 inches of the soil while ripping up or pushing aside any weeds growing on the surface and exposing them to the air, stopping their growth and killing them (hopefully).  With this harrowed soil, it’s easy to rake out beds and either seed, or transplant veggies.  I will describe harrowing in greater detail next update.  My allergies are telling me to sleep so that I will do. 

Real Men Wear Suspenders

I’m sitting across the street of Reny’s at the Maine Coast Book Shop in Damariscotta.  Reny’s is a sweet local department store that sells lots of random stuff including Carhartts.  I ended up not getting any pants, which I probably could use, but I did buy a pair of red Carhartt suspenders for myself and also for Jeff so that we can match.  They’re pretty sweet and practical; especially when you have to wear a belt all day and it gets uncomfortable and sweaty.  Plus you get more circulation in your undercarriage.  That is all.

 Update:  Jeff and I have worn our suspenders together on several occassions and people have commented on it.  I've begun the assembly of the official Buckwheat Blossom uniform.

SpottieOttieDopaliscious

The title is the name of an Outkast song that is both high quality and hilarious.  My good friend August reminded me of this song this past weekend while at Kate’s parents house for a bonfire.  More about that in a bit.  I’ve been on an Outkast kick for the last few days.  Listened to them all day Friday when I washed eggs by myself in the greenhouse, cleaned up the leeks, and even while splitting wood later that afternoon.  As much as I enjoy the outdoors, listening to woodpeckers and other songbirds, and the relative quiet of rural Maine, I also get tired of hearing the chickens and rooster once in a while.  Thus my Ipod came of great use.  Listening to music while chopping wood actually got me into a pretty good rhythm to the point that I didn’t realize I had been chopping for about 3 hours and had blisters on my left hand.

This past Monday I went to a farmer potluck and speaking event by Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute.  He is well-known in agricultural circles, particularly the sustainable ag movement.  The Land Institute is a non-profit organization devoted to researching perennial grains that are suitable as replacements for the current annuals we utilize for grain such as wheat, rice, and corn.  Perennials are much healthier for the environment since they don’t require us to basically create soil disturbance to plant new grains each year and they also grow significantly deeper roots that help improve soil fertility by pulling up nutrients that other otherwise in accessible deep in the ground.  It’s always nice to meet other like-minded people and pull some inspiration from good, well-intentioned individuals.

As for the rest of the week, I mostly did some seedling work including succession plantings of peppers and mustard greens.  For those of you unschooled on the agricultural arts, succession plantings are repeat plantings of the same crop so that you have, say broccoli, maturing over the course of a few weeks rather than having to harvest and sell all of your broccoli in one time period. 

Jeff and I also removed row covers from the garlic on Tuesday.  Row covers are plastic sheets that allow most of the light reaching the ground to pass through while acting as a blanket that keeps the soil underneath a few degrees warmer.  It doesn’t sound like much but those few degrees could mean the difference between the wind and frost killing your plants.  The downside to using the row covers is that they are not easily reused and in that way are a bit of a waste of oil.  Later that day we cultivated the garlic to give them an extra head start over any weeds that will inevitably start popping up.  The tool for the job was a wheel hoe on the outside of the rows and two-handed hoe that you use like a broom to gently disturb the surface soil and cut any weeds growing.  When we get more into weeding I hope to have some pictures of the wheel hoe in action.

We also started putting together a moveable greenhouse on skids, which involved further securing the skids together with big bolts, and assembling the bows; the metal ribs that hold up the plastic.  It is amazing that a semi-permanent structure like a greenhouse can so easily be put up.  And there you have it!  Plant, animal, and human shelter!

Quick personal update for those of you interested in the farmer social life.  My ladyfriend Kate and I have birthdays 5 days apart so we had a celebratory bonfire at her parents’ house.  The cornbread I made was a hit, and there were plenty of tube meats and beer to be consumed.  I got to hang out with cool farm folk there as well.  Another highlight of this past week was the dinner and the carrot cake that Kate made for my birthday.  Fiddleheads are delicious sautéed in garlic and butter.  It didn’t hurt that I had a t-bone steak as well from one of Jeff’s cows.  Mmmmmmmm.  Ok enough about that. 

I hope that everyone enjoys the spring weather, and eat in season!  Pretty soon (maybe already available for places south of Maine), there will be asparagus available for a several week window.  If you eat asparagus at any other time of year that isn’t April/May, chances are you are buying more oil and refrigeration than you are asparagus as it will almost definitely be coming from South America somewhere (Courtesy of             Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent book on farming for her family for a year called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I highly recommend this book if you want to learn more about food).  The quality, and consequently flavor and nutrition, of these cosmopolitan vegetables declines the longer they are harvested without being eaten as they are still alive and consume the stored sugars and nutrients contained within them.  The same can be true of tomatoes during the winter and of course tropical fruits.  So don’t complain about the price of oil when you continue to use it up just so you can have out of season food!  Fight the power!  Here’s a beautiful Pablo Neruda poem that Kate put into my birthday card.  Dunno what the title is…Peace!

Yes: I knew that your hands were

a blossoming clove and the silvery

lily:

your notable way with a furrow

and the flowering marls

but

when

I saw you delve deeper, dig under

to uncouple the cobble

and limber the roots,

I knew in a moment,

little husbandman,

your heartbeats

were earthen

no less than your hands.

Turnip, Leek, and Cheddar Omelet (Serves 1)

As a belated birthday present, Jeff and Amy gave me today off so that I didn’t have to go to market.  I only had to do animals chores this morning.  I decided to treat myself to a nice breakfast this morning and what a treat it was!  My taste buds went off like fireworks at the delightful mix of sweet turnips, mildly pungent leeks, garlic, and of course melted cheddar.

·       ½ tablespoon of butter and ½ tablespoon of lard or oil

Melt a ½ tablespoon of butter with either lard or oil in a pan on low heat.  The butter is key to enhancing the flavor.

·       One small or half of a medium turnip, chopped into small pieces

·       One small leek, chopped

·       One clove of garlic

Add the chopped turnip (a brassica in the same family as broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, rutabaga, and cauliflower) and leeks to the pan until the turnips begin to soften and the leeks become translucent and tender.  Then add the garlic and cook for another minute or so.

·       2 or 3 eggs, well-beaten

I learned this trick in some video on cooking I found on the internet.  When you’re ready to pour the eggs into your pan, keep the fork you used handy.  After gently pouring the egg in, once in a while just sort of break the cooked egg bottom up with the fork.  This technique allows you to thoroughly and evenly cook the egg without turning it too brown on the bottom.

·       ¼ cup of grated or chopped up cheese of your choice (can’t go wrong with cheddar or even feta in an omelet).  This might make it too cheesy for your liking so add as much or as little cheese as you want.

Last step!  Add the cheese as the egg comes close to being completely cooked and allow it to melt.  Fold the omelet as you please (tri-fold is easier and less professional, but really who cares as long as it tastes good?).  Salt and pepper to taste and you have a breakfast fit for a person who gets up early on Saturday to do animal chores a.k.a. a king!

Escuchela, la ciudad respirando

Ah, Blackstar how I enjoy your lyrics.  Hello citizens of the internets.  It has been a busy time since I last wrote.  Alas, my body continues to breath, sleep, and of course eat as the winter’s sluggish grasp releases itself from the northern hemisphere.  This of course means more daylight, more sun, more temperature, and more fun!  For the most part things have continued as they have on the farm.  We still pull logs out in the morning when the ground is still frozen.  In many ways this is a race against time; specifically the time it takes the mud to unfreeze.  That doesn’t take very long on a sunny day.

Seedlings are continually monitored and planted as we gear up for transplanting into the soil in the coming months.  Now the tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, and spinach have sprouted into some more green company for the numerous, grassy onions.  Watering has become a daily task and an important one at that.  Seedlings are like babies.  They are finicky and need things just right.  The right temperature, the right amount of sunlight (generally a lot with a few exceptions), not too much or too little water.  Get these things wrong in the early stages of growth and you can delay harvest by weeks, which could mean the difference between having a bountiful harvest and perhaps a complete failure.  Just as a baby would not grow as tall or intelligent as their potential allows if not properly fed, the plant responds similarly to poor growing conditions.  So take care of those seedlings!

Other random things I have done lately are to build 36-foot long skids for a moveable greenhouse out of boards we milled from trees cut earlier this year.  It took a lot of cutting 12-foot boards, squaring them, measurements, and probably 200 screws to hold it all together.  I also consolidated things into one storage room for more efficient cooling of what we have left of produce and canned goods.  It’s a lot of work to keep food fresh and stored.  Good thing I loooooove eating!

Off farm adventures include visiting another horse-powered farm on Monday in Whitefield owned by Donnie and Kathy Webb.  Their whole family is extremely warm, nice, and hard-working.  I hope to work their horses a few times in the coming year as per Donnie’s invitation.  Jeff and Amy bought Bill and Perry from the Webbs once upon a time. 

I also got to go whitewater canoeing with my friend Kate and her family this past Sunday on the Kennebec River.  The water was not exactly raging but was moving fast enough in sections to be exciting.  We spent three hours canoeing and taking in the forests and farmland bordering the Kennebec.  They also provided snacks, which I devoured ferociously like White Fang (I just read it in a day while I was sick on Tuesday and Wednesday; thanks Frank!).  If you haven’t read White Fang, like dogs, would like to be a dog/wolf but don’t have the means or imagination, want a quick read, or all of the above, I highly recommend it.  I spent all day today imagining what the farm dog April was thinking whenever I saw her.  Then I imagined how she would act if she were a wolf instead of a dog.  However, I digress.  I can’t wait until we have asparagus; I daydream about those as well.

For those of you intrigued by the delectable dealings of cornbread, have a try at the recipe below.  I promise you won’t regret it unless you burn your house down in the process.  You may then regret it a little until you eat some.  I use the recipe below minus the corn and the hot chilis since there are not really either of those in abundance right now.  They are superb additions to an already pleasant treat.

Corny Cornbread a.k.a. Cooooooooornbread (from Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert)

Don’t have this without butter or honey.  It’s the bomb.

·       2 cups cornmeal

·       ¼ cup sugar or honey

·       1 teaspoon baking soda

·       1 teaspoon salt

Combine in a large bowl.

·       2 cups milk, yogurt, or a combination of both (I found that a half cup of yogurt and the rest milk makes the cornbread nice and moist while not too soggy or expensive)

·       3 eggs, beaten

Mix in.

·       2 cups corn

·       1 teaspoon hot or mild chilies minced (optional)

Mix in and pour into a greased casserole dish or large, cast-iron skillet (I prefer this).  If you use the skillet, it helps to put it in the oven while preheating it.  Place into a 350 degree preheated oven for 40 minutes or until a toothpick placed in the center comes out clean.

Make sure you have butter or honey at hand.  Seriously.  Goes good with some chili.  I dare you not to eat half of it.  I dare you!

“This instant is the only time there is…”  - The fortune cookie fortune in my wallet

I love Maine, cornbread, and peanut butter.

Just finished making some cornbread.  Butter, honey, and cornbread are a winning combination in my book.  I will also be trying a no-knead bread recipe that was published by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a few years ago.  Apparently it has spread in popularity amongst people who include baking bread in their repertoire of things they like to create.  Knowing conditions in the yurt, the yeast won’t rise because it’s too cold most of the time and the stove is mostly too hot.  My bread is consequently hit or miss in terms of quality.  My appetite, however, will not be deterred by doughy bread.

In other news, apparently things are not going well in Japan with their nuclear power plant.  I still don’t know what to make of nuclear power, but every source of energy has its positives and negatives.  One way to look at it is that nuclear power is willing to accept the risk of immediate damage while continuing to burn fossil fuels is putting off the risk to our health and environment to future generations.  What selfish little capitalists we are!  Of course this is one view and there are many others; the point I guess I’m trying to make is that the world is complicated place and in my own selfish way, I’m happy living in the bubble of the local farm world.  Despite all this, Wiscasset has a dismantled nuclear power plant called the Maine Yankee and therefore also has spent fuel nearby.  C’est la vie…

This Saturday I went to another Richard’s forge near Brunswick to try my hand at blacksmithing.  You’d be surprised how easily your arms get tired from hammering hot metal.  It requires finesse, accuracy, and power at the same time, the proper amounts of which constitute the word “technique.”  I managed to emulate a model of a round hook that Richard made with decent accuracy.  It’ll be fun trying to make useful, nice looking, tasteful pieces of metal out of iron/steel rods.  One day I hope to make my own knife as well.  Although it is fun and pretty cool to make things out of metal, I do have intentions of using the skill to work metal in my future as a farmer.  There are always things that need repair around the typical farm and the more you can do on your own, the more resources you can divert and stretch for use elsewhere on the farm.

Farm activity update

Status report: Normal

Weather: Good for maple sugaring (warm days, below freezing nights).  I went to a few farms to participate in Maple Sugar Sunday, an event taking place on farms all over Maine that draw sap from Maple Sugar trees (think Canadian flag).  It takes 40 gallons of sap to create what we call maple syrup.  None of that fake, high fructose corn syrup Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth crap.  It was a totally sweet event…pun intended.

Wind: Windy

Sun: Raising its angle in the northern sky so that each day we are receiving more solar radiation, thus warming this part of the world.  Oh, yeah the Spring Equinox just occurred last Sunday, marking the day that the sun’s most direct radiation occurs at the equator, creating equal days and nights at said equator.

Horses: Logged on Wednesday and Friday with them.  I will truly miss logging once it gets beyond muddy here.  However, that also means we will soon be able to have the horses work the ground, starting with discing and harrowing.

Seedlings: The onions just started showing their delicate, green shoots on Friday, a week after we planted them.  Excitement is abound in the greenhouse!  This is just the beginning of an over three month process of growth that will result in the beautiful, tasty bulbs that ubiquitously color our plates in an endless number of prepared dishes.  The thought just makes you think how amazing it is that an object the size of a pinhead, which is alive by the way, can grow into an edible, spicy, crunchy, sweet, baseball-sized onion.  Truly an unceasingly amazing process shaped by evolution.

That’s all my sleepy body’s got for tonight.  I bid you all a happy spring with opportunities and growth (but not unchecked) aplenty!

Mashed Rutabaga Potato Supreme (from Farmer John’s Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by John Peterson and Angelic Organics)

Serves 4

We have lots of rutabaga left and big ones at that.  Some of them are almost two pounds!  I got tired of roasted rutabaga and turnips since that’s mostly what we have left of the root crops.  No more onions…the humanity!  So I decided to try this recipe to use a big rutabaga.  The rutabaga just adds a little more comfort to the idea of mashed potatoes as comfort food.  I had to give some away to prevent myself from eating almost half of a big pot of it.

Ingredientes

·       few pinches of salt

·       ½ large rutabaga (about 1 pound) peeled, cut into ½-inch chunks

·       ½ pound potatoes, any kind, peeled, cut into ½-inch chunks

·       1 medium carrot, chopped

·       ¼ cup milk (they also say that you can substitute some of the water you boil the veggies in for the milk)

·       3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

·       ¾ tablespoon salt

·       ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

·       ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1.     Bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Add a few pinches of salt and then drop in the rutabaga; cook for 10 minutes.  Add the potato and carrot; cook until everything is tender, 15 to 20 more minutes.  Drain (reserving some of the liquid if you wish to use some).

2.     Heat the milk in a small saucepan, but do not boil.

3.     Mash the rutabaga and potato with the butter until smooth, adding a little of the warm milk at a time until the mixture reaches the consistency you like.  Stir in the salt, nutmeg and pepper to taste.  Serve caliente.  Goes well with the manure factory we call a beef cow.