Life On Some Planet

Suspended Beauty: Signposts of Personality in the Music of Beethoven’s Last Years

2010-07-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

The music that Beethoven composed in the last years of his life is distinctly unlike anything else. It is strange, I think; not particularly shocking to modern ears but unsettling nonetheless, even in its most serene beauties. That it is firmly of a piece with the music of its time and place, sharing its language, presentation and basic architecture with other pieces of 19^th century classical music, makes it even more so. A lot of music written since then, especially from the twentieth century, has consciously explored and pushed musical boundaries. To my ears (not a scholar’s but an attentive and thoughtful listener’s, I think) much of this music has been unpredictable but in a predictable way, if I can get away with saying that. Beethoven’s late works are unpredictable in an unpredictable way.

Beethoven was a master of development, having the priceless and rare gift for successful composition of long form music. He could take a simple four-note motif and have an entire world of forty-five minutes unfold from that meager beginning with relentless (yet surprising) logic, beauty and power (yes I am thinking of his 5^th symphony as the classic example). In some of his later works, however, there was something in this gift of his that he subverted. Much of the effectiveness of good, popular music comes from the trick of creating something that surprises the listener but immediately seems as if it couldn’t have been done any other way. Whether a piece is fast or slow, loud or quiet, giant or small, much of the excitement and anticipation comes from this contrast, this ebb and flow of release and tension. Beethoven did this as well as anybody in the long history of classical music (with the likely exception of Mozart), but as he came into his later years, he pushed and pushed this tension, almost to the breaking point, except he found that there was no breaking point, just an ethereal, invisible and infinite world of notes and form in an unthought-of balance, an otherworldly suspension of beauty and form.

This is most easily seen in his slower works; I think most especially of the third movement of his ninth symphony, which comes as close as I can imagine to the music of the spheres; if I were to be so crass as to imagine a visual setting for this movement it would be the slow, monumental drift of planets and suns between and without each other, with no visible drama in the memory of any human scale of time. The notes drift from one slow, polished, majestic beauty to another without any discernible pace or expected development, free from tension and expectation, until the listener has almost forgotten that he is experiencing a piece of music that is expected to end at all, locked in the eternal orbits and gravities of something else entirely.

I’m exaggerating and simplifying things, of course, in order to make a debatable point. I have no doubt that a musical analysis could show me any number of places in the quoted movement of thematic development, of building tension and following release, of repetition and variation. I hear them too, but I don’t usually receive music in such a scholarly way, and I stand by my previously described impression as a general listener. This just shows that it is nearly impossible to describe in words the essence of why and how a piece of music moves you, why it fascinates, why it surprises, especially with a talent so potent as Beethoven’s. His late works are creations of momentous, ineffable substance.

So why am I wasting words on this at all? I’m not sure, and I suspect I’m really trying to talk more about myself than I am about music or Beethoven, to give people who will read this a glimpse into my own personality. And this brings me to the point I really wanted to make.

One of the more popular dilemmas in classical music history has been how Beethoven could have continued to create such powerful, original and sophisticated music as he descended further into the silence of his latter years. He began to lose his hearing, as far as we can tell, around 1796, when he was 26 years old, and was almost completely deaf by 1811. Many of his most famous works, and all of the works that are considered as being of his ‘late’ period were composed after this time. It must be considered that hearing is among the most essential basic tools for a musician, so how could he have continued on so capably?

To a certain extent, this is easily answered. He was already a very accomplished and brilliant musician at the time he began to lose his hearing, and of course just because you cannot hear things outside your body does not mean that there is silence within the workings of your mind. Beethoven could still imagine and create musical ideas and his musical fluency ensured that he could easily notate them accurately on paper. But as I began to listen to, and became more and more entranced by the mystery and strange character of his later works, I still wondered and marveled at his ability to grow, to explore and develop his musical talents into new worlds of such originality, of such breathtaking scope and variety, of such complete distinction from his earlier works and those of any other musician of that time or time past.

My answer, when it came, seemed obvious yet still was an insight for me of great importance and changed the way I thought about music and art, of creativity and creation and the strange link between a person, his life, his personality and the work he or she makes. Far from being unlikely that Beethoven could have composed this music in his silent years, nobody but Beethoven, in the brilliant, deep isolation that he must have slowly fallen into, battled against, and finally come to some kind of equilibrium with, could have composed it. This is music of the deepest, innermost workings of the human mind and soul, freed from the distractions of the external world and the endless, auditory relationship with reality, free to follow the buried, infinite meanderings of the life within.

Beethoven’s life is the greatest, most moving and strangest artistic journey I know of, and one of the great stories of human spirit, endeavor and perseverance. But that indelible, inexorable link between the shape of his life and the character of his music, also says something equally important about all of us, of the uniqueness of our own lives and the opportunities we have to make something of it that is totally our own. Not many of us have Beethoven’s talent, but nobody can live the life that we do, ourselves, every day of our own respective journeys.

Some Winter images from Greenwood

2010-01-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

Brussel Sprouts

2009-11-05T17:22:00.001-08:00

I was a terrible eater when I was a kid. In particular, I ate almost no vegetables at all until I went to college. I ate tomato sauce, corn on the cob, and lettuce; that was about it. I was always interested in food, though, and even as I started exploring the different worlds of cuisine and cooking in it took me a long time and many small steps to come to terms with most of the vegetables that I now enjoy and used to abhor. Sometimes I wonder at my extreme pickiness contrasted with my somewhat adventurous eating now, but it also makes sense in a way: I think I just have a lot of sensitivity towards what I put in my mouth, which has slowly transformed from a source of fear to a place of interest or exploration. Let’s not explore this psycho-babble anymore, however; what I really want to talk about are brussel sprouts.

Brussel sprouts were one of the last vegetables to move from the ‘fear’ column into the ‘enjoy’ column, but now they are one of my very favorite things to eat. They are one of the few vegetables that, done well, will actually distract me from whatever tasty piece of meat or starch is the primary focus of my meal. I really like them.

I haven’t really tried cooking them too many ways, because they are so good done very simply. Browning/caramelizing vegetables in a black iron pan is almost always a sure shot, but brussel sprouts takes the move to another level. I like to toss them with olive oil and salt and cook them in the pan on low-medium heat for something like a half-hour until they are mildly squishy and nicely browned with even a few crispy bits hanging out. They get so nutty. In fact, my other favorite way to cook them sort of takes this nuttiness inherent in these tiny cabbages and squares it: again in the cast-iron pan, toss the brussel sprouts (cut large ones in half) with a pat of butter and some salt, low-medium heat. When they are maybe halfway there, throw in some pine nuts and let them brown up with the sprouts. Between the caramelized sprouts, the toasted pine nuts and the browned butter, this is a dish of extreme nuttiness, and one that actually finds me making little irritating noises of pleasure to myself as I chew on them.

On the farm, these are pretty much the last things that come into our shareroom, as we only distribute them in the last two weeks of our share (tomorrow is our last day of distribution!). Before harvesting, we break off all of the leaves branching from the central stem, and then we clip them with long pruning shears at the base of the stalk. We give the whole stalks out, and the actual sprouts are easily snapped off.

I recommend that everybody go and eat some brussel sprouts.

Peace and love.

Last Tasks

2009-10-31T09:02:00.001-07:00

All apologies for not writing more recently!

You know that you are nearing the end of the growing season when you can count the remaining major tasks you have to complete on one, or maybe two hands. That’s not to say that there’s not an endless array of things you could do, many of them very helpful (if not necessary in the grand scheme of things), but there are only a few things of pressing importance that really need to be done before the truly cold weather hits.

Before things wrap up, we need to:

Finish weeding the strawberries (almost done, maybe a half hour more with a crew of 4)

Mulch the strawberries (cover the plants with hay to protect them during the winter)

Plant the garlic

Mulch the garlic

Remove the rest of the plastic mulch and drip-irrigation tape from the fields

Clean the tractor implements and store in the barn cellar

One last swipe at cover-cropping the remaining open fields once major harvesting is done

That’s really just about it, ignoring for the moment the fact that we still have harvesting to do for the last week that we are open, the one-time winter share we are offering Thanksgiving week, and a few additional sales to restaurants and local farmstands. Soon, in a couple of weeks, my hours will drop drastically and I will be able to focus on a combination of personal creative projects, farm study and travel with my greatly expanded amount of personal time. I will continue to put in hours at the farm throughout the off-season, and hope to learn a lot and get some interesting projects accomplished.

Some things that I will probably work on at Appleton during the off-season:

Some kind of information database organizing farming knowledge, procedures, schedules and checklists at Appleton.

Field scheduling for next year.

Seed ordering.

Equipment maintenance.

Budget work.

Construction projects (such as a hoop house for tomatoes) and equipment/infrastructure maintenance.

Eventually, the weather will turn a bit milder around the beginning of March and we will begin to prepare the fields with plowing and we will start to plant seeds in the greenhouse. I am looking forward to going through another season with this year’s experience under my belt and gaining whatever perspective and wisdom that will offer, as well as learning some new skills and taking on some more responsibility. In particular I hope to do some of the primary field preparation and plowing with the Kubota tractor and participate in harvest management once the distribution starts up again next June.

Have a Happy Halloweed, everybody. Peace and love to all.

Greenwood

2009-10-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

Here's streaming audio of a new song I recorded, called 'Greenwood':

Or, here's the link to download it to your computer:

http://www.box.net/shared/i63ybph8iq

Have a good day! Peace to everybody.

-Brian

It's cold...

2009-10-17T05:04:00.000-07:00

The first trees I saw that turned to their fall colors, a line of maples bordering a little creek on Appleton Farm, have now lost all of their leaves and stand barren in the chilly October wind. As our deciduous trees shed their colorful cloaks, I am putting mine on, every day a new layer it seems. Yesterday, I wore a full set of polypropilene long-johns, t-shirt, fleece sweater, thick hooded sweatshirt, hooded rainjacket, knit wool cap, also gloves, two pairs socks, boots, work pants, rain pants, gloves, etc. It is cold! We had a genuine frost two or three times this week; one of them was almost more of a freeze than a frost, the temperature having gotten down to (or very close to) 32 during the night. I have no real problem making myself comfortable with all of those layers except for my hands, which of course need to continue working, usually with more delicacy than a pair of thick mittens can afford. So I make do with fleece fingerless, or thin leather, rubber dishwasher, or even surgical, depending on the situation. None of them keep my hands warm. Oh well.

We have pretty much lost our pepper plants, our eggplants, our green beans, our basil, and a few various other things, but surprisingly (to myself at least) most of our stuff that is still in rotation has made it through these severe temperatures intact, including tender-seeming greens like lettuce, arugula and spinach. The heartier fare, like cabbage, collards, carrots and parsnips certainly have nothing to fear from these first cold nights.

My thoughts have turned, finally and after a season of slothful weekends, to putting some food up for the winter. The bulk of this will be simple storage of vegetables that should store well fore some time, either in the pantry, the cellar, or the refrigerator. Potatoes, onions, butternut squash, shallots, sugar pumpkins, carrots, beets, celeriac. I have already started the hoarding. I have also started a bit of blanching and freezing, which I will do mostly with broccoli, cauliflower and spinach (I have already done some broccoli, as well as strawberries and basil pureed in olive oil earlier in the season).

The hard stuff, that I hope to get started on today, is the pickling. I have chosen not to do traditional canning or pickling, but just a few choice recipes of lactic fermentation, which I will describe in more detail at some future post. It is essentially a type of preserving in salt or brine that encourages microbial organisms to flourish that turn the vegetable’s sugars into lactic acid, which sours them and creates an environment preventing spoilage. The most famous recipe of this sort is for sauerkraut. Kim chi is a spicy Korean pickle of this sort. It can also be done with a traditional cucumber-type pickle, dill and all. This method of pickling preserves more nutrients, so I’ve been told, than traditional canning or pickling, and creates a fizzy brine that is supposedly good for digestion.

Anyway, we’ll see how far I get. First I have to go to the Essex Co-op and get some jars.

Peace to everybody.

Cover Cropping

2009-10-09T14:24:00.001-07:00

The farm is in an interesting place right now; we are steadily moving into Fall, with all the things that Fall brings: cold mornings, blustery, clear afternoons, jackets and gloves, red maple leaves, fields of brown, yellow and red grasses, flying V’s of honking geese, roadside pumpkins, early nightfall and late sunrise. The air makes it feel like the farm is winding down and winter is just around the corner, and in fact we only have four more weeks of distributing produce to our shareholders. Yet in many ways we are at the very peak of production; we have never had such a variety and plenitude of good food grown and harvested in our own fields here at Appleton Farms. This last week we gave out New England Pie Pumpkin, Spaghetti Squash, a variety of decorative gourds, white potatoes, yellow onions, red onions, heads of garlic, tomatillos, summer crisp lettuce, oak leaf lettuce, green peppers, colored peppers, Italian red peppers, toscano chard, red chard, collard greens, arugula, mustard greens, tatsoi, spinach, carrots, beets, chard, globe eggplants, purple eggplant, white eggplant, fennel, turnips, daikon radishes, bok choy…I know I’m missing a couple things, and of course that’s not including the pick-your-own fields, which are on the downswing but still offering green beans, basil, parlsey, dill, cilantro, perennial herbs and cut flowers.

Besides harvesting all of this bounty, however, we are firmly engaged in a lot of end-of-season work. One of the biggest projects for this time of year is cover cropping. This is not something that we can leave off until we finish our harvest, as it will be too cold by then to ensure good germination of the cover-crop seeds. On Thursday I got a chance to do some cover-cropping and learn a bit about this very important farming practice.

Cover cropping, in short, is planting a field with some kind of crop after you are done harvesting from that field. This crop will germinate and grow in the fall and the plants and network of roots left intact in the soil over the winter. This is done for two primary reasons, to protect the soil from erosion and to retain and bind nutrients and organic matter in the soil. Many cover crops, such as peas (and other leguminous plants) are able to fix nitrogen into the soil, helping to maintain high levels of this extremely important element available to plants. Strong networks of roots and plants prevent snowmelt, rain and wind from washing away top soil and leaching nutrients below the topsoil.

Sometimes we do very large swaths of land with our biggest tractor, but on Thursday I did just a few smaller patches, maybe an acre in total, with our mid-sized tractor and a hand-seeder. First off, the finished beds need to be mowed to cut down the plants and cut up the thicker weed stems. This had already been done to the fields I was working on. Then I came in with our John Deere High Crop tractor, fitted with a discing implement, which is a set of sharp metal discs that can be lowered into the soil and rolled along to break up the soil and weed/crop refuse. Each bed usually has to be gone over a couple of times to make sure that enough good topsoil is exposed and there is not a lot thick layers of green vegetable matter on top. Then, I went along with a hand seeder filled with rye seed, and with the help of a hand crank spinning a disc underneath the bag I flung seed out in all directions while walking down a disced bed. I was probably able to cover about forty feet from left to right, or about four beds or so, at a time. Then, the seed generously applied, I went back over the beds with the disc again, just once and with the discs set quite shallow, to make sure that there was good contact between the seed and the soil, to ensure good germination.

That’s it; now I am very interested to see the results of my efforts (though I’ve already seen plenty of fields come up in either rye or oats and peas, but this was my first adventure in cover-cropping and I always have propriety feelings over my own personal efforts).

Anyway, peace to everybody.

Farming knowledge, farming futures

2009-09-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

This week we topped brussels sprouts. We didn’t spend all week on it or anything; in fact it just took four of us maybe a half hour to and hour to do all eight or so rows that we have. We each took two rows at a time and moved between them, methodically reaching in to the newest growth of leaves and breaking it off. I guess that this stops the further growth of new leaves (and overall height) on the plant, and stimulates the development and size of the sprouts that we all enjoy. Brussels sprouts will be among the last things that we distribute, giving out a couple of stalks with the sprouts still attached to every shareholder during the last couple weeks of the share, as we come near to Thanksgiving.

Every plant is different, and every plant that we grow for food has slightly or greatly differing needs to ensure its healthy growth and harvest. Tomatoes seedlings should be planted deeply, almost up to their first branching, to encourage thick root growth. Potatoes should have soil mounded up around the base of the plants after they have gotten well started, to smother weeds, to provide loose, easy soil for the potatoes to grow in and for easy harvesting. Basil leaves (and flowers) should be harvested from the tops of the plants to encourage continued growth. Winter squash should be harvested at full size and cured for a couple of weeks before distribution so that the skins can harden and much of the starch converted to sugar for best flavor and texture. Lettuce likes it cool and wet. Eggplant likes it really hot, especially unbroken heat through the night. Carrots like two or three fingers of space between each plant, beets like a little bit more. Watermelons should be harvested when they have that hollow bongo sound, have brown and withered tendrils opposite the fruit stalk, and a bright yellow spot where they laid on the ground.

There are thousands of these little tips and pieces of information. Some of these things are out of our control. Some we have time for. Some we don’t quite have time for. There are plenty of things that we don’t know, and probably lots of things that nobody knows. Some information fits readily into a sensible scheme of common sense, some information is easy to understand with a general understanding of biology, botany and/or ecology, some stuff you just have to learn and remember. As the season winds down (and after it ends) I hope to work systematically through all the things I have learned over the season and make notes about how we did things. For every plant, for instance, I hope to list how we started them out, where we put them, what we did to them, how we weeded them, how we harvested them, etc. And also look at systems and procedures the same way – weeding, tilling, cover cropping, etc. It seems to me almost a little unnecessary right now; almost every task we’ve done this season we’ve done over and over at some point, until it seems almost second nature, but still surprises always show up, and reasons that we do something a particular way often don’t come to light until much later in the season when we are doing our harvest, or an intermediate weeding, or some other procedure that depends on us doing things a certain way when we put the seedlings into the ground.

I’m not sure why I’m talking about this right now, except that as the season nears its ending I am giving thought to what I’ve learned and how I can make the most of it, and make it stick, and build knowledge and experience upon it next year instead of just repeating tasks. To that end I’ve decided that I will probably work at Appleton for a second year, and also take the opportunity to work part-time there over the off-season as well. For the off-season, I think it will be invaluable to get a look at an entire year on the farm, to see the entire process from start to finish, and to get a glimpse into some of the ‘behind the scenes’ activities, so to speak, like budgeting, scheduling, ordering, infrastructure projects, and the like. As to a second season, I think there’s a lot to be said for getting deeper into the reasoning behind the decision making that made up all the tasks that we did this year, why this, when, and how. Also to get the opportunity for a little more responsibility regarding the farm operations, whether it be managing a particular aspect of the farm (like the greenhouse schedule, or daily harvesting, or shareroom distribution, or direct seeding) or just having more independence in doing the tasks that await. I also think it would be very good to see how one adjusts from one season to the next, in part because of what worked and what didn’t in previous years, and also in reaction to new conditions that arrive with every spring.

Though nothing is certain, I would think that for a third year of apprenticing, if I chose to do that and had no managing jobs or personal farming opportunities that I was pursuing, I would go to another farm, to learn a new piece of land and new skills. I think that on any given farm, you can only learn so much about its operations in any given year, hence my desire to work a second year. I also think, and it may be very obvious to say this, that you can only learn so much about farming on any one farm. Even with the exact same business model and crops, every piece of land is different, but I am mostly referring to some things which I just won’t have the opportunity to learn at Appleton, or at least not in any great depth or that I can see. Things such as soil management and composting (which is done at Appleton but not in a manner that apprentices are really a part of), or livestock management (once again, we have a dairy and a beef operation but they are separate departments), or certain techniques like no-till agriculture, or grain and dried bean agriculture, among many other things I might choose to learn about someday, either on my own or at another farm. I’m learning tons at Appleton, but every farm has only so many things they can really do, though I sometimes dream (perhaps unrealistically) of having a farm that at least dips its toes into a little bit of everything.

Well, enough rambling. Peace to all.

Remembering Ellen

2009-09-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

If my family has an icon, it's my Aunt Ellen. She was a larger than life presence in all walks of life for me, and for all of us. She was a hilarious tale teller of her own adventures and misadventures, a lively, confident and gifted cook and organizer at our rambunctious Thanksgiving gatherings, an endlessly energetic host during wonderful weeks of fishing, sunbathing, eating and swimming up in Canada, a knowing and generous listener and giver of support, a powerful fighter with enormous strength, the eldest sister of a remarkably varied and gifted assortment of siblings, the pint-size (sorry, Ellen!) wife of 'the big fella' who nonetheless held sway wherever she was and who usually outshone the rest of the room, the loving mother and grandmother of another remarkable group of people. She was, of course, many more things, and I'm sure any one of us could go on and on as our memories visit and revisit all the vivid times we have spent with her. I have spent much of the last twenty-four hours, when I learned of her passing, smiling at her antics and the good times we had together, and feeling the love she continually spread amongst her family, even as I keenly feel her loss and a sadness welling within me. I hear her laugh more than anything else, a blessing as I can't help but feel my spirits lift whenever I remember it. Her last eight months were very difficult, and she showed an unbelievable resilience and strength throughout. If anybody was going to beat the odds, it was Ellen, and she did so several times, but dust to dust as they say, and all of us eventually make our way out of this world and into another. It is of great comfort to all of us that her last moments and days were peaceful, and I wish her the absolute best in her new journey, and I wish the rest of us and in particular her husband, children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters as much happiness and peace as possible in the days to come. I love you, Ellen!

A New Song

2009-09-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

I've just finished recording a rough version of a new song, provisionally called 'Her Face'. It is, of course, about my sister Esme. I wish I could say that this is a positive look at good memories and shared love, but this one is more about the loss and confusion. I hope to do a better recording at some point, but I felt like getting it out there as I had kind of written it for the six-month's-out time. The link is

http://www.box.net/shared/cv36h9vgvm

where you can download it to your computer.

Like any artist of pretension, here are the lyrics:

Her Face

Kingfisher calls, flies past my bed
Wondering at the things it has said
Under the sun and midst the cold cold rain
Listening through the night for the train

Watching the marsh, clouds on the sea
Wishing that her love, her light will somehow follow me
The skies are bare, the crows keep their watch
Looking for the times we have lost

We wait and wait all year for signs
When we’re alone or thick with wine
We wait for faces in the weathered gate posts
Waiting for the things we love the most

I lie in bed, and turn my head
Hearing through the open window things that she once said
I strain my ears to hear her voice tonight
Saying something good to help me make it through this night

We wait and wait all year for signs
When we’re alone or thick with wine
We wait for faces in the weathered gate posts
Waiting for the things we love the most

Times we had are nothing, anymore
An empty road we drove down long before
Though they’re everything that’s left
The smiles that hide
Behind my eyes
I will never see her face again
I will never see her again

Fall Is Coming to Our Farm

2009-09-11T15:49:00.000-07:00

Though it may technically still be Summer, it feels like Fall at Appleton Farms. We’ve had pleasant, breezy days with temperatures in the 60’s most of the last week, and jackets are now generally worn in the early mornings and evenings. I get the feeling that this is held by most of my fellow farmhands to be the nicest time of year to be out in the fields. We have left (probably) the heat of the Summer behind, yet the ground still gently holds the residual warmth of the sun, and it is just plain nice to be outside. Though there is tons still to do, and much that we should do that we will not find the time for, the crazy-busy period of plowing/seeding/planting/weeding/harvesting is over. We are still doing some weeding, and some end-of-season tractor work and plenty of various jobs here and there, but the bulk of our time now is spent harvesting, which of course is a pleasure and the end result we all seek (well…cooking and eating I guess, really). We can also now see the end of the season, and a well-deserved period of semi-dormancy where we can catch up on whatever personal projects and hobbies we might have ignored over the Spring and Summer.

I’ll tell you what really makes it feel like Fall, however, and that’s the winter squash that we have just begun to harvest. On Wednesday we harvested a few beds of a pumpkin variety called New England Pie, which as you might guess is highly recommended for pumpkin pie. Yesterday we harvested a couple beds of a smaller variety called Carnivale, a beautiful pumpkin of pixilated orange, green and cream that I am told is also quite delicious and sweet. The winter squashes are generally harvested en masse when the bulk of the crop has reached full size, but then are cured in the barn for a period of time, during which their skin hardens, they change to their final colors (pumpkins often go from green to orange) and much of the starch in their flesh is converted to sugar. Mmmmm.

Winter squash is an important crop for us, as it provides a lot of nutritious, tasty farm bounty that stores well for weeks or even months, thus extending the season of eating off of the farm well into the winter (carrots and other root crops like parsnips, turnips and celeriac also store well for quite a while). I love winter squash for its delicious flesh like anybody else, but I really really love it for two other reasons: toasted pumpkin (or squash) seeds, and the absolutely beautiful and stunning variety of shapes, sizes, textures and colors that they come in. Regarding the toasted seeds, my favorite salty snack of all time, I’ll share my recipe (which I’ve shared before) a little late, once we start digging into the properly cured and ripe fruits. As to their beauty, I’ve attached a poor picture of a couple of mutant Carnivales. I now wish I had grabbed a ‘normal’ one for reference; squash varieties intermix very easily with each other (I want to read more about this – I’m guessing that they are dependent on pollinators and if a flower is pollinated with pollen from a separate variety you get a genetic mixture of the two), but I thought these two were particularly interesting to look at.

We will, of course, be harvesting a lot of other varieties as the season progresses, including Blue Hubbard, my favorite of the last few years, popular varieties like Acorn and Butternut, as well as plenty others (spaghetti, buttercup. Delicata, Kubocha are some other names that come to mind – I want to try them all; we’ll see). Blue Hubbard is an interesting one: all the winter squashes are susceptible to ravaging by cucumber beetles (they are related to cucumbers) and Blue Hubbard are particularly attractive to these insects, so we plant them in a border around the entire field of winter squash as a ‘trap crop’, hoping that they’ll fall into the Blue Hubbards and enjoy their time so much there that they never move on to the rest of the field. Hopefully, however, we’ll have a few that survived the onslaught. Their seeds, in particular, are big and juicy.

Adios for now; I hope that everybody is doing well.

More Stuff about Weeds

2009-09-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

This is an interesting time to be on the farm. We are currently distributing the widest variety of vegetables so far, and probably that we will throughout the entire season. In our shareroom this week we have carrots, beets, red and yellow potatoes, chard, collards, mustard greens, arugula, tatsoi, summer crisp lettuce, summer squash, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, watermelon, canteloupe, tomatoes and no doubt a couple of other things I’m forgetting. Also, in the pick-your-own fields, we have hot peppers, green beans and all sorts of herbs, also flowers. Although maybe the diversity will get even broader if a few of these summer vegetables overlap with the fall brassicas, onions and winter squash which are all moving along quite well (we have harvested most of the onions, in fact, but will let them cure a couple of weeks before distributing them).

I also find it an interesting time of year because as so many crops come of age, so to speak, you can really see how different cultivation practices had their effect in the end result, in the vegetables that we are now harvesting. For instance, in one of our fields of cucumbers we had a couple of beds where we let the weeds get away from us, resulting in a thick, high assortment of grasses and tender annual weeds with rather stunted and hidden cucumbers plants vining half-heartedly in the jungle. We have been valiantly going through these beds looking for cucumbers, but they are few and far between, and are often scraggly little golf balls (that nonetheless are quite tasty), with an occasional jumbo pickler thrown in just to get one’s hopes up. They are probably one-fifth as productive as the beds that were thoroughly weeded at the right time.

Other fields the weeding doesn’t seem to make quite so large a difference, but that’s a dangerous assumption to make. We have three beds of celeriac which we really busted hard to get weeded this last week or so (they were really overgrown and in a spot where the wet soil from June had really compacted), but the celeriac plants seemed to be healthy and vibrant, often with good-sized root balls (which is the part of the plant that is eaten) already, though we won’t harvest them until October or so. Who knows what things will be like then, or how different they would have been if we hadn’t done this weeding. In many fields, we stop weeding once the crop is nearing harvesting, as they are already almost as big as they need to get, and we harvest amidst the weeds. Beets and carrots are like this, and they seem to do pretty well.

Other variables and their results will be of more interest to me next year, when I have one year already under my belt. But really, there are so many variables and so many things that change from one year to the next that it is next to impossible to draw straight-line conclusions from anything on a working farm like this. I suppose you would have to do side-by-side, same time, controlled experiments to really get to the bottom of some of these questions.

Anyway, peace and love to all.

Summer Flowers, Summer Bugs

2009-09-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things about summer is watching bees and other insects poke and prod amidst the various blooming flowers. In a well-tended and diverse flower garden, I can sit for a long while just enjoying the hazy cloud of bees and bugs drifting from one little explosion of color to another. This evening, the scene was not quite so extravagant, but in the mid-evening hours I came across a beautiful, large cluster of tall yellow flowers (I'm guessing some sort of goldenrod, but I really don't know) with several interesting and colorfully patterned insects within and without. After watching for a few minutes I decided to get my camera. Enjoy!

Cooking from the Farm's Bounty

2009-08-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

Though I am not cooking quite as much as I had hoped to before this whole farm thing began, bringing our bounty home and making something of it is certainly one of the great pleasures of the experience. Our days are long, and by the time I get home and have cleaned myself up, I can already see bedtime creeping up on me. So during the week there is very little looking through cookbooks for new, unusual and/or creative dishes to cook; I just don’t have the energy or will for it. Of course, I still have to eat and I certainly don’t want to waste the opportunity and just eat convenience food or take out, so I concentrate on quick and simple preparations. Luckily, these are often the best ways to experience fresh, high-quality produce. And there’s always the weekend for something a little more involved.

Of course, I do love to cook, and I’ve often found that what strikes me as a pretty simple, straightforward thing seems very involved to other people. But really, I only have my own perspective to go by.

From the last week, my peak experiment was a dish called leeks vinaigrette. As our fresh bulbed onions (ailsa craig variety) gave out a couple weeks ago, we started harvesting our leeks to fill in the gap until our big storage onions are ready (we started harvesting them this week but they have to cure for a while before they can be properly stored and distributed to our shareholders). I’ve cooked with leeks before and enjoyed them, but I’m getting a better sense of their own flavors and uses now that I'm trying to find a place for them in the absence of regular onions. But they really need to be cooked; that’s one big limitation compared to storage onions. In any case, leeks vinaigrette: cut off the roots and tops of a few leeks (keep maybe an inch or two of the pale green) and boil them in salted water until they are cooked (but short of mushy or falling apart; a fork should slide into the center without too much effort). Let them cool a bit and slice them in two lengthwise and place cut side up on a plate. Make a mustard vinaigrette – equal parts Dijon mustard and red wine vinegar, two or three parts olive oil, maybe a little water for an appropriately delicate flavor or texture, salt and pepper. Whisk and pour over the leeks. Finally, grate a hard-boiled egg over the leeks and eat. Very tasty; somehow it was just what I expected except better, with a fuller, more integrated flavor.

This week we have been delving into fresh salsa as well, one of my favorite things to do with fresh summer produce. Though our tomatoes have had and continue to have great difficulties due to the blight, we have still gotten a few good fruits off of the vine, often green, that have ripened up pretty nicely and have good flavor (though except for our sungold cherry tomatoes which are just as sweet and delicious as I could imagine, these fruits that are ripening off of the vine are not as good as the best tomatoes I have tried in other summers). And now that we are starting to get hot peppers in as well that means salsa. Frankly, this time of year, I rarely stray from that most traditional and ubiquitous of Mexican salsas, pico gallo. Diced onions, garlic, tomatoes, hot green chiles, cilantro, lime juice and salt. Mmmmm. It is such a pleasure to make and eat. This week has also seen a couple major pesto excursions as we have a couple of bed of basil that are going gangbusters (I also froze a bunch of basil pureed with olive oil to keep summer alive later in the fall and winter), and last weekend I indulged in a classic American meal of grilled steak (from our grass-fed jersey cows) with our own yellow potatoes and grilled escarole.

I guess grilled escarole might be a departure of sorts from that 'classic American meal'. Escarole and all the chicories are delicious grilled. For escarole, dunk it in water before dressing and grilling so that it doesn’t burn too easily. Halve it, and toss it with a balsamic vinaigrette, salt and pepper. Throw it on the grill. Keeping it to the sides seems best, to keep it from burning before it wilts nicely, though some char and grill marks are entirely appropriate. The escarole will usually keep some chew unless you get fancy and blanch it a bit first, but that seems unnecessary to me.

And lots of even simpler stuff has been cooked and consumed, salads, boiled beets, steamed greens, scrambled eggs with herbs, etc. It’s certainly a pleasurable time of year to eat, though it is often too hot to want to spend much time over the stove or with the oven on, but we get by alright. In any case, as I sit here writing this it is raining and probably only in the upper sixties, so maybe I should go get a chicken and put it in the oven.

Adios, friends.

Dog Days of Summer

2009-08-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

My deepest apologies for not having written for, what, three weeks? I was traveling, but then I wasn’t, I was back working at the farm, but I couldn’t seem to find the motivation to write. Why not? Don’t know. The weeks have been up and down, but that’s normal. There has been plenty going on.

The name of the game this past week has been survival. Surviving the heat. We had a heat wave, with temperatures in the low 90’s on Monday and Tuesday, very high 80’s on Wednesday and Friday, with Thursday a relatively mild 83 or something like that. As you can imagine, working very long days in this heat, under the sun, can be difficult. We are lucky, between the ocean’s proximity and the open fields around us, to have a good breeze much of the time, but there’s only so much it can do in extreme heat and humidity. Plus, many tasks take us down onto our knees and between rows of vegetables where there is often little wind. Weeding is definitely a challenge. I think the worse task this week, for me, has been harvesting cherry tomatoes. They are prickly and viney, full of mosquitoes, unfortunately full of rotting leaves and fruit due to the blight, dusty and hot with no wind. Though the sungold cherry tomatoes that we are still able to harvest are certainly wonderful. Let them go all the way to their deep orange, when they are ripest, and they are so sweet, so delicious. If you can wait, take a few home, cut them in two and put a pinch of salt on them and it is an awesome explosion of flavor.

Those are really some of the only tomatoes we are getting, along with a few other of the smaller cherry varieties. We have also harvest a number of green tomatoes, which are ripening in our barn, slowly. They are not quite as good, of course, as tomatoes gone to full ripeness on the vine, but it is what we can do this season. The blight is taking virtually our entire tomato crop, and anything of any size that approaches ripeness goes bad. Sad! Tomatoes are such a wonderful part of summer, in particular a summer on a farm.

But other exciting things are happening. We are harvesting cucumbers (including lots of little pickling cukes that I really enjoy), eggplant (one of the most beautiful of vegetables, in all of it’s many varieties), summer squash and zucchini, lots of peppers (including some purple peppers and hot peppers which are just starting to come in), leeks…lots of stuff. Though harvesting can be monotonous, I generally enjoy moving along a bed of vegetables, particularly things like squash, cucumbers and eggplant where it seems every plant holds a little (or big) treasure just a little different than all the others. I enjoy the mild anticipation, wondering if the next plant will have a lot of fruits or if it will be bare, and the little surprise at whatever it has. Surprise is maybe a bit extreme of a word for this, but you get the idea. Eggplant in particular, with its big soft leaves; poking around and looking, suddenly there’s this shiny black globe hiding against the earth below.

We are not the only ones affected by the heat. The heat, and in particular the lack of rain for the last two or three weeks is also difficult on the plants, the soil, and us as we start to worry about them and figure out ways to get water to them, and endless speculation about if and when it’s finally going to rain. I know I (and most of us) complained quite a bit about our rainy, cold June, but it just doesn’t take much temperature in the high 80’s with no water to make our plants very thirsty. Most of these vegetables are mostly water. So moving around and fixing our irrigation systems has been a daily task.

Our irrigation comes from a well that was dug on the farm expressly for the CSA’s use. We have three systems. One is a standard overhead sprinkler system, where a series of aluminum pipes with four foot rotating sprinkler heads are attached directly to the pipe. These can be moved, but are rigid once in place and take a couple of hours to reset for another set of beds. We also have something called the Traveller, which is a single hose with a sprinkler attached, which is slowly (slowly) drawn across the length of a bed by a contraption that is powered by the water pressure. Finally, we have a set of drip tubes, which is a hollow plastic tape attached to a header hose. The drip tapes are run along a row of vegetables, buried in the soil at root depth or just on top of the soil. They are perforated with tiny holes every couple of inches and essential drip water slowly directly into the soil. They lose far less water to evaporation and runoff than any other method that I’m aware of. I like them. We had a few lines that were torn up by the reggie weeder earlier in the season, and I spent a couple of hours today walking the lines, finding leaks or kinds that were preventing the water from traveling the entire length of the bed, and fixing them with fresh tape and connector attachments. It was kind of fun, a bit of problem solving, with noticeable, tangible improvements at the end and the added benefit of being sprayed by water frequently when working on the leaks.

That’s all I’m going to write for the moment; I’m getting hungry. But I’ll try to keep with it a bit more than I have the last couple of weeks.

Peace to all.

Off to the North Country

2009-08-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

I’m off in a couple of hours to the airport, for a flight or two towards the north country, to meet my family for a week of vacation. I call it a dock vacation, as everything we do generally revolves around a dock, boating, fishing, swimming, sitting and reading, chatting, sunbathing, guitar strumming. If it’s not done on the dock itself it’s done within sight of it.

I am looking forward to this very much, and I think we all (my family) need to see each other. I could also use a break from the farmwork, to be honest, mostly from the physical side of things, give my limbs and hands and back time to rest and recuperate. Apart from that, I’m going to miss watching the farm grow this week, after these four months of watching and working so closely with the farm and all the plants we grow, the comings and goings of the birds, the constant change in the wild greenery around us. Though it’s a long growing season, a lot happens in just one week. By the time I get back to work in a week and two days, we will most likely be into our peppers, our eggplant and maybe cucumbers. The big question on the farm, regarding the health of our tomatoes, will probably be resolved one way or another (we are not optimistic right now – we have late blight in several of our beds; these are most likely going to die before their fruit can ripen and the blight may well spread to our other plants soon, if not already).

I am halfway, more or less, through the season, and now would be a good time for reflection on how things are going. As I still need to finish packing, I’m not going to go into any great detail right now, though I have a lot of things on my mind. We have had a great season so far. In particular, the weather of our first two months was spectacular and allowed us to get the farm into great shape for the first part of our distribution. Unfortunately, that period was followed by an unusually long stretch of wet and cold weather throughout June and early July, which has delayed the productivity of many of our summer crops. But hopefully this will just be a delay for the most part – instead of getting them in right now it will be another week or so for the meat of the harvest to really start coming in. We do have concerns about this delay for our winter squash, which have a very long growing season and potentially will back up into dicey weather.

Worst of all, this wet weather seems to have brought the late blight out in great force and much earlier than usual, and the tomato crop may well be a complete or near-complete bust for us and for almost every other organic farm in the northeast. We are contemplating building a hoop house for tomatoes over the winter, which would be a huge asset in the fight against blight. Fungicides would be even more helpful, but are restricted for organic growers. I would like to read more about the fungicides. I don’t think I will ever be interested in going down that road, but it is worthwhile noting that the main dividing line between products that are okay for organic and not okay is whether the product is synthesized or not synthesized. That in and of itself really says nothing about the harmful effects of a product. Residual contamination and harm to soil biota is also considered, but mostly as a way to restrict natural products; if a product is synthetic it is prohibited (note: I may be wrong on some of this; I need to research further) without much consideration for whether it is very harmful or not. In any case, I am interested in moving beyond even organic pesticides if possible, but running a business I would want to balance that with the need to be practical regarding the state of the land I have and, frankly, my own knowledge and capabilities. It is hard to see all of our beautiful tomato plants and not want to use every tool you can think of to save them, but such is the difference between long-term thinking and short term. But in some cases (not this one, thank goodness), what’s the use in long-term thinking when you lose the farm?

It’s a big world, with a lot of big questions and things to consider, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in farming. All worries aside, I love this job and am already looking forward to getting back to it in several days time, but in the meantime, I’m overjoyed to be able to spend some time with my family, who I just don’t see enough of.

Peace to all.

Green Summer

2009-07-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

Your industrious blog host, sweaty, dirty and weary after a day on the farm. Our last two days have really brought us into summer. Today we hit the low 90's, and it felt hot. But you can almost see the eggplant growing; they've been so patient, just waiting for some days like these.

Another portrait, this time with awesome farm hat. It's certainly not the most fashionable, but this thing is lightweight, comfortable, relatively cool, keeps the sun out of my eyes and off of my neck. It's crucial.

Some healthy bulbs of fennel.

Ahhh, tomatoes. If we can just hold off the blight a bit longer, we'll get some of these in. Actually, late blight has come to our farm. My boss found some on our potatoes over the weekend, and mowed all the plants down. The potatoes, however, are still in there, and had reached harvestable size. We'll let them sit in the soil for a couple of weeks to set the skin and hopefully let all the blight on the plant tissue above ground die, and then harvest and store them.

A beautiful little zephyr summer squash; the flower is still larger than the fruit. I love these things.

A tiny watermelon, just starting out, still smaller than a golf ball.

We have started to see a lot of the asian eggplants get going.

A nice looking pepper.

These are the pick-your-own flower beds, a big hit with our shareholders, especially young children. I don't really know much about the different flowers, and certainly wouldn't put them high on my personal list of priorities, but they sure are pretty, and even I will admit a room seems a bit brighter when there are some fresh flowers about. We have a few with edible blossoms, such as borage (very bland), bee balm (sweet and spicy) and nasturtium (my favorite, peppery).

A sunflower.

An unopened sunflower.

Green beans in the jungle.

One of my favorite views of the farm, these are some of our tomato beds, staked and trellised, clover planted between the beds as a pathway and mulch. Most of these are heirloom varieties and some cherry types. Still keeping our fingers crossed. We heard today that a sister farm down south just west of Boston is most likely going to lose all their tomatoes, largely due to the blight.

The crew zonked out after lunch.

Phytophthora and other worries

2009-07-24T17:10:00.000-07:00

Farming is hard! Our Summer that has not really become a summer yet is still hanging on to its cold, rainy miserableness. Today, frankly, was kind of unreal. If it had just been another misty, cool day with drizzles, I would have moaned a bit but not taken much note of it. Instead I arrived at the farm this morning to a heavy, heavy rain that had been falling since late last night, driving winds sustained at 20-25 miles per hour and temperatures that never got above the mid-60’s. This is July! This was, essentially, a northeaster, and would certainly have been called such if it had happened in November. Our sunflowers were bent way over, past 45 degrees in most cases, and our tomatoes looked like they were struggling against the wind quite a bit as well. We had rain nearly every day in June, but this morning was the worst flooding of our fields yet. Several low-lying spots were under close to a foot of water, the young plants disappearing from view. Walking through the beds, harvesting (the show must go on), we had to constantly be careful not to sink too far into the soft spots and possibly lose a boot to the muck.

Truthfully, I have always been an appreciator of wild weather, and even after all this rain, I would probably have enjoyed today’s spectacle if not for my worries about the farm. I want the farm to do well! We have been doing very well so far, and have had great quality and abundance of everything that we have offered to our shareholders. But due to the colder weather and saturated conditions, many of the high summer crops are behind, still waiting for the heat and the sunlight. Still. I know that I’ve talked about this before, but it’s what is on everybody’s mind much of the time. We really, really want a good stretch of hot days, hot nights and sun! We would welcome a three-week (or more) drought, at this point, and would love the opportunity to run around with irrigation pipes and hoses if it came to that.

The cool and wet weather is also contributing to another huge worry this season, that of phytophthora. Phytophthora is a group of molds that affects a lot of commercial plants. In this case, it is phytophthora infestans, otherwise known as late blight, or potato blight. This is the thing that killed all the potato plants in Ireland, creating the potato famine. It also affects other plants related to potatoes, most notably tomatoes. It is always lurking, and is often the agent that finally kills off commercial tomato and potato plants towards the end of the season. This year, it has shown up in the northeast much earlier than usual. It was also unwittingly distributed through plant sales at a number of home improvement and garden centers. One of my co-workers went down to a farm conference the other night in Lincoln (a western suburb of Boston) and there were a cluster of farms there that were seeing mild to severe affects of the blight. They were, understandably, freaking out about it. It hasn’t shown up yet here on the north shore, but it could at any moment. It travels very easily and quickly through the air and once it gets going can wipe out an entire crop in just a couple of days. Organic growers like ourselves have fewer options than other farms, as there are no real fungicides that are organically approved. There is some kind of copper solution that can be sprayed on the plants that does provide some protection, but I don’t know a lot about it yet. I have to do some reading up. My boss really doesn’t want to go down that route but he ordered a backpack sprayer and some of the material in question and we will certainly use it if we think it necessary. We may also take steps such as harvesting most of our potatoes early and putting them in storage (they should last quite a long time if stored properly); unfortunately we cannot do that with tomatoes. Right now we are just hoping that, between some sunny, hot days and the blight holding off our tomatoes get a chance to ripen. I know that I am looking forward to a couple weeks (at least) of greek salads and fresh, spicy salsa, my two favorite things to do with good, ripe farm tomatoes (aside from sprinkling them with a bit of salt and just eating slices).

I suppose I could think of this from a personal perspective, and see that there’s a lot to be learned by going through difficulties like this. It’s definitely part of the big picture on a farm; there are always going to be worries like this lurking at the rear and fore of your mind, and some of them are going to come true. My own personal fortunes are not drawn up with this farm, though a good season could in some way affect future plans or the availability of certain options. We work so hard, though, and watch with such care and daily attention these plants that we are growing, and take such pleasure in the food that we gather and eat and make available to lots of other folks in our community, that it is hard to see things that are beyond our control have significant, deleterious effects. I want our farm to succeed, and do well, for my sake, for the farm’s sake, for my boss’s sake, for our customer’s sake, etc.

As I said before, though, the season has gone very well so far and there is no reason to think that we will not continue to offer plenty of good food. And come fall, we expect good harvests of cauliflower, broccoli, cabbages, all of the greens, carrots, beets and lettuce and more that we have been harvesting up to this point. But still, losing out on a significant portion of our eggplants, peppers and tomatoes would be a hard blow. And our winter squash, an important late-season crop for us (as it gives our shareholders a good amount of food that stores well into winter), is a couple of weeks behind and could easily run up against cold-weather before the fruits get big and sweet if we don’t get enough sun during the summer.

Worries, worries. I still have to hope that we’re going to have at least a couple weeks of summer at some point, and in any case, I am learning a lot and enjoying being part of this farm.

Love to all.

Enter Summer

2009-07-17T16:57:00.001-07:00

I would say that we are in full swing now at the farm, except that we don’t have any tomatoes yet. Tomatoes really are the pinnacle of American farmstand produce (corn could be considered a contender but I really don’t think so) and I really don’t feel like we’ve seen all this farm has to offer until we start getting some juicy, ripe, sweet tomatoes in. It won’t be forever. The plants are full of blossoms and fruits are beginning to develop on many of them.

But we’ve got lots of other stuff coming in now. Not all of it has reached the shareroom yet (next week I think we’ll see a lot of smiles at the expanded variety) but we’ve now got green beans in the pick-your-own fields, broccoli, all sorts of tiny cabbages, golden beets, gobs of carrots (so sweet and crisp, I’ve never eaten so many of them before), and we’ve just harvested our first three beds of potatoes for next week’s share. Tiny to medium-sized delicate-skinned red ones. I took a few home last night and made a nice herbed potato salad with them, a favorite quick summer meal. Boil them until just tender (I leave the skins on but they are a little more enjoyable peeled) and toss, still warm, with olive oil, salt, pepper, and some selection of fresh herbs. Yesterday I did chives and thyme (and a touch of garlic). I ate it with a bit of local cheese, made from a combination of Appleton Farms cow milk and Nubian goat milk, from Valley View Farms down the road. I need to age it a bit further; it was a little chalky (it’s a soft-ripened style like camembert) but should be good in a couple more days. Maybe I’ll leave it out in the pantry (properly wrapped) so it’ll get soft and gooey quicker.

We also harvested some nice summer squash, the long little yellow ones that are my favorite. And we have tons of herbs going, now, including one of my all-time favorites, thai basil. That stuff is awesome. I was lazy the other night and got some take out fried rice from a local thai place, and this evening I jazzed up the leftovers by stir-frying it with some fresh thai basil, summer squash and green beans and adding some fish sauce steeped with a minced habanero pepper (store bought; our chiles aren’t in yet). Quite delicious.

Today we had what I think felt like our first real summer day. It was hot (mid-eighties) and very humid (just shy of 100% humidity), with blazing, intense sun. I am not the most heat-tolerant person in the world, and how I am going to cope with the next couple months has been a concern of mine, but today I did fine (it helps that the open space and proximity to the ocean gives us a pretty consistent breeze, also helpful with bugs). I did have a half-hour pulling up garlic in the late morning where I was feeling pretty miserable, but I took a five minute break for water and felt much, much better. Water is the key, and short breaks when you can’t stand it any more. And a hat. Hats are also key; that sun will get you otherwise. Plus, a hat you can drench in cold water, put on your head and enjoy those cool trickles down your spine. The hat I used today was perfect, it could hold a cup of water pretty securely on my head, and was good for about a minute and a half of nice sprinkling. I think I’m going to make it.

This weekend I am dog-sitting for my boss, and I am looking forward to using it as an excuse to do a lot of nothing and maybe watch a red sox game on television if it is raining (or maybe even if it isn’t). Some reading, some strumming, some contemplation and maybe a little fooling around with his Wii video game system. So bucolic.

I feel like I just wrote a lot of words about a lot of nothing, but I guess that’s where my head is. I hope everybody is doing well. Love, Brian

Is it summer yet?

2009-07-12T07:45:00.000-07:00

What’s going on at the farm right now?

My little welcome to the sun of two weeks ago was a bit premature. We had another almost full week of clouds, intermittent rain and cool weather (60’s) after that. This last week was better, sun on Monday, Thursday and Friday but surprisingly cool all week and heavy rain on Tuesday and Wednesday. Now it is starting to feel genuinely summery, that mix of sun and heat and occasional afternoon and evening showers, but we still haven’t had any really hot weather (I mean in the mid-80’s to 90 or so). Now I would normally welcome this, not being much of a lover of the heat and humidity, but many of our summer plants would really like more than we’re getting. My boss was talking about eggplant in particular, and how they don’t just like the heat but really prosper when there are sustained periods of high temperature, when the nights stay hot through until morning. But it felt very spiriting to work in the sun on Friday; the eggplant’s upper leaves were reaching upwards towards the sun and I felt that we could almost see them growing. There are many plants now with lovely deep blue, purple blossoms and some of our tomatoes are also full of yellow flowers. Some of our summer squash plants already have fruits growing on them; I really enjoy seeing all the produce in miniature.

We took advantage of the drier weather and got the tractors out for a lot of mechanical cultivation this week. Friday afternoon I used an implement I’d never tried before with the John Deere High Crop tractor. They’re called sweeps, and are a set of thin, bladed metal arrowheads about six inches across, and are set at the rear and center of the tractor so that they are lowered into the soil and can cut or uproot most of the weeds in the bed outside of the middle foot and a half or so. We use these just on one-row crops (one row of plants down the center of a five foot width bed – these would be plants that need a bit more space (nutrients and water) to prosper) which include peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, winter squash, summer squash, cucumbers and strawberries, amongst others. It is exciting to see some of these high summer foods developing so well, and makes us all think that our month of rain and clouds won’t end up hurting us too much.

Not that we are without some disappointments. In particular, we have one planting of cucumbers, several bed’s worth, that have all but disappeared. There are probably several factors at work here, but the excessive moisture, cool temperatures and lack of sun probably help them all along by making the plants generally weaker and less likely to survive things like rot and cucumber beetle damage. All of the cucurbits (including summer and winter squash) are very delicate; their stems, especially where they connect to the root growth, are moist and crisp, and break very easily, and if we plant them when they have grown a little too tall (we call it ‘leggy’) they often sustain some damage as well. Most of our other crops have done better, and if they haven’t exactly prospered they’ve held their ground and should now begin to grow in earnest.

We are also now into the stage of farming where we are not just bringing new crops in every week, we are also losing them. Spinach is over a week gone now, peas and strawberries are done, and we are into the very last days of radishes and salad turnips. I don’t think we’ll see much more kohlrabi either unless there is another planting I’m not aware of. We are in the heyday of the smaller cabbages, with beautiful softball (or even baseball) sized green and red cabbages, beautiful savoy cabbages, napa cabbages (my favorite), and a bit of lingering bok choy (I think we have some beds of smaller bok choy coming in soon). The perennial herbs we planted are mostly ready for picking now, mint and thyme and oregano and marjoram. Our shareholders are also harvesting our first plantings of basil, cilantro, dill and parsley.

I made my first batch of kim chi last weekend, and I think it has turned out nicely. I can’t verify exactly how much fermentation is actually going on, but I’m not sure I care as it was a pretty tasty pickled kind of thing even as soon as I had mixed all the ingredients together. I chopped up a napa cabbage into quarters and then into two-inch pieces, salted it with three tablespoons of salt, and let it sit for three or four hours. Then I rinsed and drained it, and mixed it up with minced garlic, red chile paste (I just mixed ground cayenne with some water) and fish sauce. I placed it all in a glass canning jar, and pushed it down, pushing all the air pockets out of the brew and making sure that the liquid covered all the vegetables (you could add a touch of water if necessary, but usually the salted vegetables should produce enough moisture if you squeeze and press them). I was a little unprepared to do the full recipe; next time I want to add pieces of scallion (I think I will salt it along with the cabbage?) and some ginger, and maybe use some chopped fillets of salted anchovy instead of the fish sauce. Once it’s all in the jar your put the lid on, loosely so as to allow any fermentaion gasses to escape, and put it in a cool, shaded place for a couple-few days, then into the fridge while you are eating it. I should get more and more sour and softer as time goes by, and in theory you can eat it indefinitely but I think most people, especially westerners, probably prefer on the fresher and crunchier side. One of my favorite quick, healthy things to eat is a meal of kim chi, rice, a fried egg or two and a steamed vegetable tossed with a little soy sauce, rice wine and sesame oil dressing.

Anyway, I hope everybody is doing well this summer. Adios!

Patterned Light

2009-07-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

A little over a month ago I had a somewhat extraordinary experience. Nothing really happened in particular but there was a startling convergence of weather and light at the house I’m living at, producing a moment of such startling and unexpected beauty that I will never, never forget it. Yet it was so eccentric and strange a moment, almost dreamlike, that I can’t really grasp it anymore, and even felt it slipping away moments after its passing.

I had stepped outside of the house I live at, called Greenwood, for no particular reason; the amazing view we have over the Great Marsh of coastal northern Massachusetts is never anything but stunning and is all the reason one would ever need. But even as my foot was crossing the threshold there was an unusual character to the light I was entering and my eyes perked up. I crossed the line of shrubs and trees that line the side of the house quickly to look over the marsh.

It was late afternoon, and had been a day of fitful winds, sun and high clouds, threatening rain and storms. To the southeast, just beyond the salt marsh and over the dunes and drumlins that border the open ocean was a dark band of clouds and rain, occasionally lit with an erratic line of lightning, rising high into the sky. From behind me the sun shone brightly, piercingly through the clouds, lighting up the new green growth of marsh grass. The grass was glowing, seemingly both from within itself and from the sun, an unearthly shade I felt I had never experienced before. This strange color and transmission of light had seeped even into the interior of the house, and two of my housemates had felt it and came running out to see it as well.

We all stood there, mostly unspeaking, watching the light emanating all around us. The moment stood, locked in time, lingering, my brain trying to absorb it, for what seemed a long period, but was probably just three or four minutes, before a sound came from behind us. I turned around, and saw that giant drops of rain were falling from the sky in the full sunlight, every long globe of water lit up and distinct from its many thousands, maybe millions, of brethren. The rain fell over a green meadow of tall grass a thousand shades of green, each swaying tip grasping the moisture and holding it a full moment before letting it run down its spine to the earth below.

At this point, though it created a rift in the full experience, I couldn’t help but think consciously to myself that it was simply too much, too much to fully absorb, that the beauty was well beyond my capacity to comprehend or even fully acknowledge. I thought of my lost sister, felt her close to me, and thanked her for her love and for sharing this moment with me. Though I have no idea where this kind of thing comes from, it was one of the only things, perhaps the first thing since Esme’s passing, which felt close to the kind of love we shared, and it seemed a gift, and true to Esme’s spirit.

I tried to capture some of what I experienced, visually, in a poem, but it’s a really bad poem. But because the whole point of a blog is to share stuff that nobody is really interested in, here it is:

Patterned LIght

rain,

rain,
patterned light
patterned light
green, green
GREEN

sky
light
LIGHT
grass, patterned light

oh
oh,
rain
again, rain
again,
falling

face,
face
by my face
MY
eyes
this
THIS

this is light
Patterned light.

The photographs are by my housemate Susan, and big thanks to her for them. They are nothing like the real thing, of course, but are very nice to have and I’m happy to share them here.

Love to all.

Here Comes the Sun

2009-06-27T05:13:00.001-07:00

My apologies, I’ve been a little lax on my blog writing lately. We are in the real thick of it now. Farming, of course, is a very seasonal activity, particularly vegetable farming well up in the northern hemisphere. Even within the growing season, which lasts roughly from April through October, there are periods where an extra effort has to be made all over the farm, and of course the need to sell and market the produce. From mid-May through mid-July, in particular, everything is going gangbusters. Weeds are exploding, and every bed needs near-constant attention. The greenhouse is busy with seeding and plants are going into the ground every day. With the arrival of June we begin harvesting and distributing food to our shareholders.

Within a couple of weeks, we will be virtually done in the greenhouse, and the weed burden will start to lessen (slightly) as the days grow shorter. A week or so after that and most of our seedlings will have gone into the ground, leaving just a few plantings of late season greens and lettuce to go. At that point we will spend most of our time harvesting, managing the fields, working with the shareroom, etc. We will surely also still have a good deal of weeding to do until most of the crops are nearing their time of harvest, but the germination of new weeds will taper off dramatically, leaving us to deal with the billions that have already started growing.

Last week and the first part of this week were difficult for us, and for me. I suppose it’s inevitable that sooner or later any job becomes, well, a job, and loses at least some of its day to day newness and romance. And this is hard work; my alarm goes off at 4:50 am, I work from 6 to 5, I’m working physically the entire day and am often uncomfortable in one way or another and continue to be sore and creaky when I arrive home and when I wake up again in the morning. However, I think this time around I (and most of us here on the farm) were mostly feeling the effects of an extremely cool, cloudy and rainy June. We had about three weeks of deeply overcast days with frequent rain and temperatures in the low sixties (mornings in the fifties). Getting through the day in all types of weather is definitely part of the farming experience, but it takes a rare soul to make it through three weeks of that without some downturn in mood. In addition, we worry about our crops. Though that kind of weather is good for our early season stuff like spinach and chard and radishes and lettuce, our shareholders will be deeply disappointed if that’s still all they’re getting a month from now, and we’re going to need hot weather and bright sunny days to get our tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons, cucumbers and squash into gear. Luckily, we turned a corner on Thursday; we started the day out with still more rain but it was noticeably warmer, and by the end of the day we were gooping up with sunscreen and complaining about the heat. Friday was the same, despite a spectacular thunderstorm at dawn, and we can only hope that we transition into a normal summer now, with whatever acceptable mix of hot bright days and hot cloudy days and some rainy days and the occasional cooler day. I’ve regained my equilibrium, anyway, and am looking forward to the rest of the season.

Our shareroom has been expanding; this week we had some napa cabbage, garlic scapes, shelling peas, beets and some new varieties of kale. The spinach is almost gone; we’ll probably have one more week of it, as well as the strawberries (which have unfortunately gotten a little soft and watery tasting in the last week with so much rain and so little sun). Next week the big addition will be carrots; I’ve been pulling them out of the fields for a little snack now and then and they are delicious. The shelling peas are also fantastic; sugar snap peas and snow peas have gotten much more popular over the last few years because of the significantly lower amount of work to prepare them, but I think nothing beats the old-school taste of fresh sweet peas.

I have certain recipes with particular foods that I’ve been excited to prepare when we start getting them in. For instance, with peas, I’ve been planning on making a simple sweet pea risotto. I made it last night and it was delicious. Capping off the effort was a bit of excitement; I went out after eating my meal to put the pea pods in our compost bin, grabbed the lid and lifted it off of the bucket only to see a skunk staring up at me. I freaked out; I don’t know whether to be proud of my reaction time or to be ashamed for being such a fraidy-cat, but in any case I took off as fast as I could in a flash and got well clear of the immediate area, still holding the container of pea pods in my had. After calming down I carefully crept back, making sure I didn’t come across the escaping varmint, and of course was hit with a wall of stink when I got about thirty feet to the compost. That stuff is strong! I am very lucky I didn’t get sprayed directly (or bitten!), and the smell quickly drifted in through open windows throughout much of the house. I believe that I must have left the lid slightly ajar an hour or so before; I certainly won’t make that mistake again (the other possibility is that the skunk can pry it off; I think that’s less likely but I’m considering it – I will be very careful if I go out there and see that the lid is ajar again).

Other special dishes that I’ve looked forward to making and have done so are a chard gratin and garlic scape pesto. Both were delicious, though I think I made the gratin a little too rich, and the pesto is a great change but will never replace a classic basil pesto in my heart. I meant to make a spanakopita with the spinach but I have not done so yet and may have missed my window (emotionally if not actually; I love spinach but have been eating it almost daily for a month and a half now). Special dishes coming up are kim chee with the napa cabbage, a special beet, goat cheese, walnut, citrus and avocado salad and a Moroccan carrot and mint salad.

Anyway, talk to you all later! Peace and love to everyone.

Pictures from our Shareroom

2009-06-21T15:31:00.000-07:00

Here are folks out in the pick-your-own fields, scrounging for sugar snap peas, snow peas, and strawberries. I've made particularly fruitful visits myself to the strawberries, freezing a gallon or so for a few strawberry-less months in the future. Also, with my new ice cream maker I made a batch of fresh strawberry ice cream this weekend, with one of those fancy european-style recipes with an egg-yolk custard base. It's fantastic. Next up, chocolate.

I think our chard might be the most beautiful vegetable out there. We plant a variety called bright lights which comes up in many different colors, red and purple and yellow and white and pink ribs against yellow to green or dark green leaves. The picture doesn't do them justice; I'll try again. This was the vegetable of the weekend; I ate it simply blanched and dressed with butter and parmesan and also in a slightly too-rich but still tasty gratin.

I love scallions, particularly in salads, eggs and stir-fries.

Broccoli Rabe (last weekend's vegetable) and bok choy.

Kohlrabi and beets. Kohlrabi is new to me. I peeled one today and ate it raw, and enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. It tastes somewhere between a crisp turnip and cabbage, a little sweet and very crisp. One of the other fellows I work with on the farm eats them like apples.

Our shareroom, which takes up the front third of our barn. Lots of stuff goes on in here - construction projects, tractor storage and maintenance, farm talks...it's the hub.

A beautiful head of lettuce, a purple romaine.

Stuff that happens on the farm

2009-06-18T16:00:00.001-07:00

I actually had a positive experience on the reggie weeder this week, though still pretty intense. I sat on back this time, operating the discs and tines rather than driving, but we set it up differently, and more straightforwardly, in my opinion, so that we drive down the center of the bed and one disc gets the weeds on one side of the crops and the other gets the other. Mostly, it meant that there was much less likelihood that we would tear up the crops or run them over with a wheel. The main thing to worry about was throwing too much soil on top of the plants, but a little is good as it smothers a lot of the smaller weeds.

Things are falling into a bit more of a routine now with the shareholders coming most afternoons of the week. In the morning we usually spend our first few hours harvesting. This morning, for instance, we head down to the greens and got mustard greens, arugula, salad turnips, French breakfast radishes and scallions. Then one field over to get some kohlrabi and bok choy. Sometime around mid-morning, we start splitting up into a smaller group or two, some still harvesting, one person washing produce and packing it up in the cooler, and maybe another person or two or three getting onto some other jobs, such as hoe and hand weeding in the broccoli, pulling ups stakes and row cover in the cabbages, or tractor work such as cultivation (weeding) or preparing beds of soil for transplanting. There really are many things that could be going on, but these are representative and frequent choices.

At 11 am one person peels off for the kitchen to cook lunch, usually that’s Eric but he’s on vacation and today was my turn (black beans and rice with spinach, tomatoes (canned), garlic and onion, lettuce salad with radishes, salad turnips, scallions, avocade and lime juice dressing, and steamed rice – we generally eat pretty well and pretty healthily). At some point, we get the shareroom swept, set up and stocked with produce. One of us is always around to help out there, restocking the bins of produce – if it’s busy this can get pretty hectic – answering questions, cleaning up, and just helping out any way you can. My day is Tuesday, and I pretty much stay there all afternoon. I think I got about 15 questions on how to cook the broccoli rabe. There are many ways, but the other night I blanched it for 3 or 4 minutes, cut it up a bit and tossed it with lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper. Add some parmesan and a nice pasta and you’ve got dinner.

Apart from the shareroom, once again any number of tasks might be gotten to. We often do a round or two of transplanting in the afternoon (putting seedlings that have been started in the greenhouse into a prepared bed of soil outside). More tractor work, maybe some direct seeding (I did a round of beets, carrots and chard this afternoon before it started to rain), some more weeding (we could spend all of our time weeding and still not keep up if we wanted to), going out and harvesting more stuff that we are running low on (today it was chard), and all sorts of other things.

Okay, gotta go. Good night!

Birds of Appleton Farms: A Few Pictures

2009-06-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

Mallards are pretty common in the sloughs and small ponds of Appleton Farms, as they are throughout much of the country. I often see them flying over our fields as well.

Savannah sparrows make as much use of our fields as we do. I often scare up a bunch of them rooting around in the weeds or furrows, at which point they often fly back to a small brushy area that surrounds an old foundation to perch and give the alarm.

Mockingbirds are conspicuous, aggressive and vocal residents, particularly around the habited parts of Appleton.

Red-tailed Hawks are a frequent and exciting sight in the skies, particularly over the Great Pasture, where one can often see two or three at a time.

I was lucky to get this shot! It is often hard to get my binoculars on Pine Warblers, let alone my camera. They are one of the more common warblers during migration, but choose to spend much of their time at the tops of pine trees. This one came downstairs for a few minutes to say hello.

Bluebirds are almost always within sight, often standing at the top of a fencepost or another similarly conspicuous spot. I enjoy their musical, conversational song.

Chipping sparrows are our most visible (and audible) sparrow, enjoying the open fields and lawns all over Appleton.

Glossy Ibis are an occasional treat, usually seen flying over our fields on their way from one marshy field to another. They have a very distinctive silhouette in flight that is pretty much unmistakable. This is the least common bird on our property that I have been able to get a picture of.

These pictures do not represent the most interesting, most photogenic, most distinctive or even most common birds of Appleton Farms, but just the ones that I have been able to get a usable picture of. I will talk more at some other time about the birdlife of Appleton in a more meaningful context, but I thought people might enjoy a couple of pictures in the meantime.

The Reggie Weeder

2009-06-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

I think I’ve found one of my least favorite jobs on the farm. I’ve done it twice now, last Thursday and this morning. It’s a tractor implement we call the ‘reggie’ weeder, which is some kind of contraction of its model name (which I’m not sure of). It’s an interesting device: behind the tractor is a seat and two handles connected to two rotating circles with semi-flexible thin metal tines coming down off of them. These tines spin and are lowered into the soil, and can be moved to the left and right with the handles. One person drives the tractor, which moves slowly up a crop bed and the person sitting on the seat operates the handles to move the rotating tines around and dislodge or tear up most of the weeds in the soil, keeping the tines away from the crops but as close as is reasonable to get the most mileage out of the operation. I find some of these contraptions and techniques hard to describe clearly, so I apologize if you have no idea what I’m talking about.

Anyway, there are several difficulties. One, the operator of the weeding apparatus has the best view of how things are going, but has no direct control over the steering of the tractor or the raising and lowering of the tines. This wouldn’t be a huge deal except that the tractor has to stay in very specific, pretty tight orbit with the line of crops; too far to the left and you can’t move the left-most weeder away from the crops, too far to the right and the left wheel of the apparatus runs over the crops. I think there’s about 10-12 inches of room, while the row of crops usually swerves around a bit. Which leads us to another problem, which is that the driver of the tractor can watch the line of crops a few feet ahead of the tractor, but not easily behind him, so the adjustments he makes are difficult to calibrate perfectly to the exact place that the weeder actually is at any given moment. He can look behind him and see how far the left wheel is from the crops, but it can be a bit disorienting. And problem number three, which is all steering adjustments have to be made very delicately and slowly, and are best done by anticipation if possible. If the tractor is turned to the right, the first thing that happens is the weeder is thrust to the left, making things worse for a little bit before they get better. And you better make your counter-adjustment back to the left ahead of schedule or you’ll find yourself running over your desirable plants.

It’s tricky! Generally, the person on the weeder will shout up to the driver things like ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ or ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘right! Right! More to the right!” or ‘stop! Stop!’ I find that if the person on the weeder is calling out too much something is going wrong. The driver should be lined up nicely and paying attention and anticipating most problems, but I think it takes practice. I started out as the weeder last week but quickly switched to driving the tractor, and while I don’t think I’ve done too much damage I know we’ve taken out a few plants here and there. I think I’m getting a bit better but the process still feels far from natural, and in particular getting properly lined up at the beginning of a row is difficult.

I wish that the implement was designed so that the operator of the weeder could both raise it up himself quickly and/or have enough room to move it enough left or right so that if the tractor gets off course he could get it out of the way of any desirable plants instantaneously, instead of having to communicate everything to the driver, who often cannot physically steer the tractor in a way to avoid wreaking havoc on a few feet of plants. So far I have just done this on the 1st year strawberries (which we will not harvest until next season), so even taking out a few plants is not the end of the world. These strawberries will send runners out through the soil over time and then will send up many more stalks next spring, filling in a lot of empty spots. Still, it would be better not to take out too many of them! I’m a little anxious about using this at some point (and I’m sure it will come) on some annual plants like broccoli that have been recently planted.

This job, done reasonably well, would save a lot of time weeding by hand or by hoe, and I’d like to get better at it, but right now I think if I have my own farm one day I’ll take a pass on buying this particular implement. I think I’d rather spend a few extra hours with a hoe, and that’s saying a lot when I’m working 55 hour weeks. Of course, I’m not sure exactly what size farm the reggie weeder would start to make sense at, but I think it would be upwards of 10-12 acres (we farm 25 acres of vegetables).

Harvesting

2009-06-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Our shareholders arrived today for their first pickup. Actually, we have over 500 shareholders, and so the pickup days are staggered so that we don’t get overwhelmed (or run out of food) on any one day. It was busy! They started arriving in the early afternoon, often with children in tow. I was out in the fields seeding soybeans, greenbeans, sunflowers, lettuce mix and arugula so I didn’t interact with them too much, but our 'pick your own' fields were full of mothers and children (and a few others) ransacking the strawberries and the sugar snap peas. There’s plenty to go around, though. I think, being somewhat inexperienced at all of this, I tend to get a little anxious about running out of food watching all these people fill their bags up with greens and pack their pint containers full of strawberries. Really, though, we’ve planned very consistently for a considerable amount of extra for most crops, at least for while they are in season. The crop beds are very long, and most people never even get close to the far end of them while picking. So there should be plenty of strawberries left for me.

We spent the morning harvesting a bunch of vegetable, many of them for the first time. We grabbed more of the easter egg radishes, salad turnips, spinach, bok choy, arugula, braising mix (greens), red Russian kale and heads of lettuce. This will be the bulk of our mornings for the foreseeable future, I think, though of course we still have plenty of transplanting, greenhouse work, seeding, plowing, mulching and, of course, weeding, but we'll have to get a lot of that done in the afternoons now.

In the afternoon I was seeding with Theresa, and things were a bit difficult, largely due to things beyond our control, but also due a bit to some less than stellar preparation and a couple of minor mistakes. First off, the tractor wouldn’t start, so we went to get a charger and got it started. Next, we ran out of the soybean variety (and edamame type) we were seeding about a third of the way down the bed, and had to waste time running back up to get another variety. Same thing happened with the green beans we seeded; the packages we had just wouldn’t fill an entire bed, so we had to stop and fill up the rest of the beds with the standard variety that we had plenty of. So maybe not quite as much of the 'royal burgundy' bean as we would like, but we’ll probably have plenty anyway. Then, trying to get the tractor back up after a short hiatus, it wouldn’t start up again. We probably just should have kept it running while we did the switchouts for the seeds and seeding plates, but it’s so obnoxious. I wonder, though, if the battery is nearing its end; it really should have gotten a pretty good charge. Anyway, we went back up to the barn to get the battery out of the other G tractor and put it in the seeding G we were using. Back in business, until a metal implement that makes the furrow ahead of dropping the seed broke in two, so…back up to the barn to get another replacement part. Finally, I mistakenly set the plate hole much too large for the lettuce we were seeding, and it pretty much poured out in a thick stream until I noticed the problem and set it straight. I felt like we were the bad news bears or something.

I think in farming (and many other jobs or activities that deal with a wide variety of circumstances and pieces of equipment) you just have to expect days like this. A little aggravating to be sure, but it was nice to see all the families sporting about and enjoying all the food that we have worked very hard to get going for them. And it doesn’t hurt that at the end of the day I was able to wander through the shareroom and grab a beautiful head of lettuce, some radishes and some spicy greens to round out my dinner.

Adios!

Another Garageband experiment

2009-06-06T18:50:00.000-07:00

I've attached another link to a file of something I recorded on Garageband. This one's of a song called "I Can't Leave Her Behind" by Bob Dylan. It's become something of a meditation for me, for thinking of my sister Esme. I think it's a stunning song, and I learned it from a version in the movie "I'm Not There" featuring Steve Malkmus and Lee Ranaldo, which I highly recommend. The whole soundtrack (2 cd's) is very good, but this is my favorite.

Here's the link:
ttp://www.box.net/shared/sqneh1m83r

Mmmm....

2009-06-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

More tasty foods

2009-06-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

I’m going to try and not gloat too much in my experience of the incredibly fresh and delicious food we get out of this farm, but it will be hard. Especially right now, as we’re just starting to see a bunch of things come into their own, ready for harvesting and eating. I’ll certainly be curious over the course of the season to see how certain foods really shine when eaten perfectly fresh, right out of the ground even, compared to how they usually taste after some time spent being trucked here and there and then laying in a bin at the supermarket. Of course, some foods keep very well and if you have a good quality source there shouldn’t really be any difference. And of course the subjective psychological difference of having helped to grow it can’t be ignored either.

But so far the food I’ve tried is pretty tasty. Today we pulled out a few of the ‘easter egg’ radishes that had grown to their full size and munched on them right there in field five, marveling in how sweet and rich and spicy (very spicy!) they were, and in their playful array of colors. Likewise, the arugula was delicious, pungent and full-flavored without being overwhelming (which it sometimes is for me). The strawberries I’ve already mentioned, and these have become a daily ritual at our snack time mid-morning. Touring the greens field this morning, the mustard greens were very tasty, as was the broccoli raab (which we won’t harvest for a while, until they start growing their little flower heads). Yesterday at lunch Eric made an unusual salad of bok choi, strawberries and toasted almonds, which I enjoyed quite a bit.

I suppose that soon enough I’ll be eating enough of this stuff every day that I won’t feel the need to write about every new taste experience, but right now this is very exciting for me. Next week we’ll also be harvesting something referred to as ‘salad turnips’, which I am told are delicious. I haven’t been converted to turnips yet, but I’m assured these are special, and quite different.

Anyway, I hope that all of you are getting some good, tasty and healthy food in you as well. Peace and love to everybody.

Here Come the Strawberries

2009-06-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

Our shareholders start arriving next Monday to pick up their first weekly share of vegetables and fruits grown on Appleton Farms, and things are really starting to heat up. Anticipation is to the forefront of my farm mind now, as a quick walk about our fields will yield many things that look pretty much ready to eat. We have a couple beds of beautiful bok choy, looking big and bountiful. I snagged a healthy piece of leaf to munch on, and it was fleshy and moist, mildly flavored of the color green with a bit of bitterness. A small, narrow red radish was sharp and spicy. Our lettuce is almost too beautiful to bear, but I haven’t taken the plunge yet (though I did some considerable munching last week on tiny lettuce seedlings as I was thinning out a tray in the greenhouse). I’ve already mentioned our ongoing affair with spinach.

But the most exciting thing right now is the strawberries. A couple of our beds are simply loaded, drooping on all sides with plump berries. Many of them are starting to color, blushing pink. I saw a few today that had a full rosy face looking upward, but the undersides were still mostly yellowish or white. I pulled a couple off to try, expecting them to still be firm and sour, and was stunned to find them delicious, sweet and soft, better than any supermarket strawberry that I’ve had in years. I almost can’t imagine how tasty they will be once they become fully ripe, which at least a handful should be within a couple days. I think in two weeks you’ll be able to just pick a spot, sit down, and eat to your heart’s content without moving an inch.

I think it might finally be time to splurge on an ice cream maker. Nothing beats fresh strawberry ice cream.

Further Thoughts on the Loss of My Sister Esme

2009-05-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

My beautiful sister Esme was murdered on March 7th, 2009, in Cincinnati, at the age of 13. As you might expect, I have constant thoughts about her and many, many other things that touch on her life and death. Being a writer of sorts, I feel a need to write about them, and have been searching for a way to grapple with this event and the enormous repercussions it has had in my life and that of many others. It has been difficult to find an elegant way to do this, so screw elegance. I am just going to write stuff that is going through my head, in simply numbered thoughts, when I feel the courage to do so.

I In the wake of my sister’s murder, the most recurring experience for me is of facing the unfaceable, though it be the one thing my life is forcing me to deal with, with no way out, no quarter given, no breathing room, no softening. It is a terrible wall that I bump into several times a day, that I keep pushing into, trying to get through, over or around, but it stretches as high as I can see and to the horizons on my left and right. And my thoughts are so useless, but unstoppable; I just don’t want this to have happened. Please, can’t we just go back. I don’t want this to have happened. I want Esme back. This is one of the only things in life that is absolutely non-negotiable, and the only thing I can think of right now that I want to change. The wall is still there; I can see it whenever I close my eyes, and then again when I open them.

II I don’t believe there is any ultimate explanation for these kinds of events, or to the organization of reality. I don’t believe in any ultimate purpose or meaning to our existence. I don’t believe that there is any kind of method to this madness which will become clear to me at some point, perhaps upon my own death. The one thing that I have told myself and others again and again during this ordeal has been “it is what it is.” It is what it is. That’s all I can say, all I can see. Though I have been agnostic regarding god and the nature of things beyond what we can see for a long time, I am more doubtful than ever regarding the existence of any kind of conscious, intervening entity beyond the observable. If there is one, I am inclined right now to have nothing to do with him/her/it. I do respect those who have a different relationship and understanding of the world, but I don’t share it.

I don’t think this makes my life meaningless, however. If this makes me a relativist, then so be it, but I do think we can find our own morals, our own goodness, our own purpose in our lives, just as well as we can from traditional spiritual sources. I can look around me and recognize pain, suffering and cruelty, and see many of the things that contribute to these darker pieces of life. By chance, as I see it, the world has evolved in many different directions: toward the beautiful, the unbelievable, the complex, the simple, the frightening, the useless, the mysterious, the enormous, the small, the evil, the ugly, the good. I can see them and find my own way to the things that I hope will make the world a better place and relieve the suffering of some small number of others in the world.

III I have some conflicted feelings about any sort of good that might come from the event of my sister’s murder. Part of me doesn’t want to learn anything from it, and to retain my anger. I don’t want to become a stronger person because of this. I don’t want there to be any good that comes from this, This is all bad, all bad, all bad. You don’t want to ask what I would trade for the happy return of Esme; there might not be anything good left in the world but her smiling face.

But it’s just not true. In my heart, and in the part of me that most shares Esme’s open spirit of love, I do want that explosion of love and light my dad and stepmother talked about in their memorial statement to spread across the world. For myself, I want to be a better person, From Esme’s example, I want to become a braver person. I want to be less selfish with my time and get involved with other people’s lives and in my communities. I want to help others. I want to get involved in my own life and make things happen, make the decisions I need to. I don’t want to mess around any more. I know I’m not likely, nor do I want, to make my life into a saint’s, but I want to keep my eye on the things in life that are important, to me and to the communities that I can touch.

Not more about weeding, please...

2009-05-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

I’m going to mention one more thing about weed control that was discussed at the CRAFT on Wednesday. You should probably get used to here me talking about weeding, because we do a lot of it, and it is central to running a good farm. When you really distill the essence of this enterprise, it comes down to just a few basic principles, each a world unto itself. There is planting, putting the plants you want into the soil, and weeding, which is getting rid of the ones you don’t. There is land and soil management, which comes down to keeping things fertile. Those, to my mind, are the biggest basic areas of operation in farming, but going on there are other things like harvesting, marketing, grounds and tool maintenance and personnel management.

Anyway, back to weeding. When we talk of weed control, we are not just talking about physically removing or killing the weeds that are growing in our crops. In a pristine, beautiful, freshly plowed field without a green thing in sight, there are often millions upon millions of little weed seeds lying there in the soil, just waiting for the right moment to germinate (in Spring, that would be NOW). So weed control has many different dimensions. In the shortest term, the farmer wants to remove the weed from the crop so that it doesn’t crowd out the desirable plants. Also, the farmer should remove it before it goes to seed and broadcasts more seeds into the land. Taking a slightly longer perspective, the farmer may want to organize his planting schedule so that the weed problem is minimized, such as starting a plant in the greenhouse so that when it is planted in its bed it has a head start on any weeds, and in an ideal situation may even shade out the weeds.

Taking the long view, a good farmer will want to take the time and manage his land so that he can eventually remove most of the bank of weed seeds existing in the soil, and thus save immense amounts of time and effort in the future, even if it takes some extra thought and energy right now. One interesting concept I heard about at the CRAFT that seems logical and effective addressing both long and short-term weed problems is the stale bed. In essence, the farmer plows, discs and prepares the bed for planting. Then, he waits a period of time, a couple-few days, maybe. Soon enough, he’ll see uncountable little green propeller blades in the soil, just half a centimeter tall, maybe, attached to a short, slender white thread of root. Now, before planting, he runs over the bed with a cultivator, either by hand with a hoe or a tractor, or something, turning up the weeds into the air and the sun where they will hopefully die (on a wet, cloudy, day the weeds will often just re-root, so this is best done when the soil is a bit dry and the sun is shining). NOW, the bed is ready for planting. If you made an effort to do this to all your beds, repeatedly, and also removed the weeds that got by this effort (many will, count on it) before they got to the seed stage, you would in theory keep reducing the seed bank in the soil and weed control would get easier over time.

We do a kind of stale bed process at Appleton, usually by waiting a bit of time between the basic plowing and the final bed preparation, which we often do with a tractor tool called the Perfecta.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting. I also think that weeds themselves are kind of interesting, and often quite attractive (and even tasty and nutritious) plants, but of course I am happy to get rid of them to make way for even tastier things like carrots, beets and radishes, to say nothing of tomatoes, corn and watermelons.

Peace and love to all.

Visits to Other Farms

2009-05-27T18:19:00.000-07:00

Most Wednesdays, we have the opportunity to go (if we want to) to a CRAFT event. I’m still not sure what CRAFT stands for (if it stands for anything) but it is an organization of farms in the area that sponsors events where farmers can visit other farms and learn something about how things are done there. Sometimes a specific topic is being discussed in particular, such as greenhouse management or poultry processing, or sometimes it is a tour of the farm with a general presentation of what goes on there and the opportunity to ask questions and talk with other folks.

These can be very interesting, and I’ve tried to take advantage of most of them so far, though it makes an already long day even longer and throws in a spot or more of driving into the mix as well. But I’m thinking I may be in this for the long haul, and it’s good not only to learn everything I can but also to meet other people in the business. At this point, I really enjoy just seeing other farms, what the land is like, how big they are, how they organize their fields, what they grow, what kind of greenhouses they have, etc. Having limited practical experience in the field, sometimes the actual questions and discussions touch on things that I’m not very familiar with, and so the information doesn’t really have an easy time rooting itself to my brain. I should really take notes!

Even so, there are usually interesting things discussed that I can understand to some degree. Today we visited a small farm (2 acres or so) with a smallish CSA (110 half-size shares), and the field manager, a woman named Greta, brought up general and specific issues on all sorts of topics, from soil fertility to marketing. In particular we discussed weed management for a time. Controlling weeds is one of the most difficult and endless parts of farming. A lot of different ideas and techniques were tossed around. It is ideal to get control of the weeds in a field as quickly as possible, before they grow up much, to the point where Greta feels that if the weeds have gotten much bigger than an inch or so you’ve lost the battle and you might as well turn the whole field under, crop and all. That seems a bit extreme to me, and if we did that at Appleton we’d turn under all of our food.

There are all sorts of ways to control weeds at that tiny stage, but they’re not easy. One common way is to use a propane torch on the row before the crop plant has germinated but the weed seeds have. You singe just the topmost layer of soil where most of the germinated threads of weed are; the crop seeds are a bit deeper and are unaffected. I’ve been told that we have one of these devices, but I haven’t seen it in action yet. We were discussing in particular carrot beds, and, well, we’ve done an awful lot of hand weeding on our knees in our carrot beds! It’s a lot of work, but not a particularly unpleasant task, and with a group doing it, there are always some interesting conversations that get going.

Another interesting idea brought up was using large amounts of cardboard as a mulch, or cover, for the crop beds, and as cardboard will eventually decompose, it is also a kind of compost. Apparently it will pretty much kill everything beneath it, and somehow (not sure about the mechanics of this) encourages a lot of worm activity in the upper layer of the soil. The farmer who mentioned this said they even used it as part of a no-till approach, laying it directly on the cover crop from the previous fall, and once the rye or vetch was done, they just cut holes in the cardboard to plant through. Sounds kind of crazy, but there are lots of creative ideas like that out there, and exploring them (as well as more conventional ones) is what these CRAFT events are all about.

Weather, weather, everywhere

2009-05-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of farming is being tied into the natural cycles and movements of the planet in a meaningful way. I’m talking, of course, primarily about weather. For the first time in my life I’ve made it a habit to check the weather in the evening before I go to sleep and in the morning before I dress for work. The forecast gives me a sense of what I should wear, or bring, to the farm, and not just how many layers or what kind of jacket. Should I bring gloves? Sunglasses? A hat? With a shoulder brim? An extra pair of socks for later? Rain pants? No more just moving from home to car to work, with only seconds between comfortable, climate-controlled shelter.

And of course the weather means something far beyond my comfort. Rain, sun, temperature and wind all have enormous effect on growing things. Last week we had three hot days in a row, reaching the upper 80’s or even 90 all three days. As we were watching the forecasts while the hot weather approached, Jamie and Melissa started to get worried about the lettuce and the spinach. These are both leafy plants that like cool weather, and both have a tendency to bolt when the weather gets too hot, which means that they will send up flower stalks, at which point their leaves generally get very bitter and are no longer good to harvest.

We did a few things to compensate. We irrigated, not so much for the sake of providing water as much as for the cooling effect (especially in the breeze we have most afternoons), we tried a piece of shade fabric (a sturdy piece of cloth that lets some light through but not all of it) on a small patch, and we harvested some of the spinach to sell to local restaurants and markets just to make sure we got something out of this planting in case some of it bolted later on.

The three days were hot, but not terribly uncomfortable for me. There was always a breeze and as long as I drink lots of water I seem to be okay. In any case, the lettuce and spinach has not bolted yet, though the spinach has grown quite large in the oldest planting, far far beyond the ‘baby’ spinach stage. This is now some good, sturdy spinach perfectly ready for the table. We are eating it, and enjoying it.

The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of planting and sowing. Yesterday we spent the morning putting sweet potato plants in the ground, and in the afternoon we planted eggplant. This afternoon Teresa and I did a whirlwind of direct sowing with the G tractor – green beans, four different kinds of sunflowers, two different radishes, hakurai turnips, arugula, tat soi, red mustard, purple mizuna, red Russian kale, cilantro and dill. And I accidentally popped a wheelie on this ancient tractor driving it back up into the barn. It was quite exciting.

Tomorrow we have rain, according to this morning’s forecast, and cool weather. We shall see what happens but I no doubt will make sure to bring my rainjacket and a warm layer of clothing.

Adios!

Planxty Irwin, The Foxhunter, For Franny

2009-05-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

We'll see if this works! If it doesn't, I'll soon delete this post and most of you will never know it was even here.

I've been messing around with GarageBand this weekend, putting a few things down, and have sort of gotten one small project to a point of some satisfaction. I've mostly been playing around with some fiddle music and a couple old originals that I never recorded.

The first one here is called "Planxty Irwin" and is by Turlough O'Carolan, a blind, itinerant harpist of early 18th century Ireland. He composed many lovely pieces, some of classical influence and some of a more folkish bent. I know this tune mostly from a recording by the great band Planxty, but this one is different, slowed down to a waltz tempo and with some guitar and percussion making it sound a bit more American folk than Irish.

The second one is called The Foxhunter, and it's a quick reel, to which I've added some strumming of the guitar. The playing on both instruments is a bit clumsy, but I sort of like the effect.

The third one is an old original from the early oughts, for acoustic guitar. I call it 'For Franny' because my sister Franny said she liked it.

Okay, clearly I don't understand how to place these songs in my posting with an embedded player, even though the blogger.com instructions seemed straightforward enough. But they're just not showing up. So, I'll just give you the web addresses where you can download them directly if you are so interested.

For 'Planxty Irwin':

http://www.box.net/shared/g99txnqafb

For 'The Foxhunter':

http://www.box.net/shared/s7yqtcf38j

For 'For Franny':

http://www.box.net/shared/gugntt8xql

Hopefully you will enjoy them, and I'll try to post more as I record more.

Another Day, Another Tractor

2009-05-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

I got some good experience on another tractor today, a John Deere model called the High Crop. I had backed it up about 25 feet once before, but today and yesterday I got some real work done with it. There is more going on with this tractor than with the little G from the 40’s, and it has considerably more power as well. I found it a bit intense at first, just trying to keep it all in my head and stay focused and sharp so that I didn’t take out any fences. There wasn’t really too much danger of that, but I won’t say it was an absolute impossibility either.

I was using it to disc a couple of fields. Discing is a kind of plowing that is done after primary plowing. If you can imagine a field planted in grass, first a tractor pulls an implement with a few sharp, curved wedges through the soil, turning it over, breaking up the sod and the soil. Discing, the tractor pulls an implement with two rows of vertical discs that further break up the soil and even out the level of the soil. After discing, another implement smooths it out further in preparation for making the final planting beds.

In any case, the John Deere has more power, more gears, brakes, two separate implements with their own raising and lowering levers, and a throttle, as well as several other controls that I know nothing about. As I started into a row, I would get in gear, ease up on the clutch and lower the discs (smoothly if possible) into the soil and try to move in a straight line through to the other end of the field. The tricky part comes if the ground is very uneven, with big mounds of dirt and depressions and gullies, and if the soil is soft and deep. In the second field I did, I had to continually adjust the level of the discs in order to find the right compromise between getting deep enough to effectively break up the soil and even it out, and keeping it high enough not to get held back in the thick dirt and not spin my tires around too much.

I think I did alright, and certainly the field looked a lot better after I had spent a couple hours on it than it had at the beginning, but I’m sure I have lots more to learn and plenty of practicing ahead of me.

That's all I'm going to pass along right now. I hope everyone is doing well.

Vegetables

2009-05-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

Some of you may be interested to know what we grow here at Appleton Farms. We grow a lot of stuff! Not just quantity (we have over 500 shareholders picking up enough vegetables for a family of four for a week from early June through the end of October) but in variety. Even so, we have some notable things missing from the list, such as asparagus, sweet corn (which we offer to our shareholders in partnership with another local farm) and perennial berries like raspberries and blueberries (in fact most sweet fruits except for strawberries and some melons).

But here’s a list: strawberries (4+ varieties), garlic, beets (3+ varieties including the red and white chioggia), carrots (4+ varieties), shell peas, sugar snap peas, snow peas, chard, spinach, lettuce (10 or so varieties including butter, romaine and red leaf types), scallions, potatoes (4+ varieties including a golden, white baking and red), radicchio, radishes (4+ varieties including the stunning easter egg), turnips, several different cabbages including red, green, napa, bok choi, baby bok choi and savoy, kale (3+ varieties), onions (3+ varieties), parsley, cilantro, dill, lots of different greens including arugula, tat soi, red and green mustard, parsnips, leeks (2+ varieties), fennel, shallots, broccoli, sunflowers, green beans, tomatoes (several varieties, including a plum, cherry and few heirloom types), different kinds of basil, summer squash (several varieties), kohlrabi, canteloupe (a couple different varieties), lots of cutting flowers, watermelon (3 different types), popcorn, eggplant (3+ varieties), sweet potatoes, eggplant (4+ varieties), peppers (several bells and many different hot chiles, celery, edamame, lots of different winter squash (including my favorite, blue hubbard), celeriac, escarole, cucumbers (different varieties) brussel sprouts, collards, cauliflower, perennial herbs like chives, sage, mint, oregano, and rutabaga.

Little Growing Plants

2009-05-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

I've been asked once or twice what I've enjoyed the most about my experience so far, or what I most look forward to during the coming growing season. Other than the very obvious anticipation of cooking and eating all the produce we will eventually be harvesting, I would say that I enjoy and look forward to observing all the plants that we grow, from what they look like when they first start to poke their little shoots and leaves out of the soil to their mature selves, laden with ripe fruits, seeds, shoots or leaves. I look forward to getting to know the plants of the farm, in all of their bountiful aspects, even through and past the harvest to their inevitable fall back into the earth.

A bird's eye view of a healthy lettuce plant of a romaine variety.

Another lettuce in a fascinating shape, somehow reminding me of the Sydney Opera House.

Potato plants. Don't eat these leaves, they're poisonous.

Our garden of perennial herbs.

Young beet plants. These greens are pretty tasty right now, roots and all.

Little carrot plants.

Spinach.

A favorite plant, red russian kale gone to flower.

I have no idea what this weed is, but it's lovely.

A pea plant with one of our first developing pods.

Chives and chive blossoms.

Agave, Bats and Evolution

2009-05-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

Just a quick thought this morning on the interconnections between all things.

I’m reading a book of essays called Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature: Essays in Conservation-based Agriculture, and just finished an interesting article by Gary Paul Nabhan on the agave industry. The sap from the agaze plant is used in the making of Tequila, and as such, it is farmed extensively in Mexico.

There are several different agave species, but just one, the blue agave, is responsible for almost all tequila production, and in fact much of it is made from one particular variety of the blue agave or even clones of one individual plant. This greatly limits the genetic variability in the agaves grown commercially, making them much more susceptible to catastrophic disease. They are also generally planted in dense monocultures, without the disease buffers that intercropping with other row crops would give, and without wild margins or barriers that would do the same. Furthermore, the commercially-grown agave is rarely allowed to flower, thus preventing local bat species from pollinating them, both affecting the stability of bat populations and the ability of the blue agave plants to evolve natural disease resistance along with their pathogens.

This is all fairly straightforward, but what interested me was the way the article framed the relationships between economic cycles and social behavior with not only an agricultural enterprise but also the general ecology of a large part of Mexico and parts of the United States. There was a huge growth in demand for tequila in the 80’s and 90’s (which I personally remember and took some small part in; I am still fond of the occasional margarita) which fueled a boom in agave production. This led to incentives to grow more and more plants in dense, monocultural stands of the quick-maturing blue agave clone. A disease began to spread through the plantations, eventually affecting a large percentage of all agaves grown commercially.

During the boom cycle, growers are encouraged to maximize production as quickly as possible. During the bust cycle, from disease or loss of demand and anything else leading to economic difficulties for growers, there is not the financial ability or will to use more long-term sustainable practices like selecting quality, genetically diverse plants, using intercropping, or allowing some plants to evolve naturally through cross-pollination and natural selection.

It’s sort of like if you win you lose, and if you lose you lose, and every step contributes to the loss of ecological diversity (in wild populations and crops) and economic instability. I would argue that the boom cycles, when things are relatively flush, are the times to get thoughtful about what you’re doing and think of the long-term prospects of your industry and your community, rather than as a time to exploit the cycle for what is often a very brief window of significant growth. This takes education and a sense of personal responsibility to the land and to your community, as well as a long perception of time.

I just wanted to make a comment on the ecology between human economy and natural systems (really we are all enmeshed in one big natural system, in this case from office parties in Manhattan restaurants to bat populations and wild agave species in Mexico) and ended up on a bit of a rant, but that is how things will go sometimes. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting.

My First Harvest

2009-05-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Today I got my first bit of harvesting in. Just a tease really; we don’t have much that’s actually ripe, or ready, yet, and we don’t start distributing shares until June. But as I mentioned last week we have this field that wasn’t sown with a cover crop last year and hasn’t been plowed under yet (that will probably happen in the next few days) that has a hodge-podge of different crop plants that survived the winter and have put some good, new, nutritious growth out there. The most conspicuous is the garlic. When harvested last year, many stems broke as they were being dug or pulled up, leaving the head of garlic in the ground. These, in turn, sent new leaves up in early Spring. At this stage it is called green garlic, and has not developed any kind of bulb of cloves yet, but it is pretty good to eat and quite aromatic.

Yesterday a crew harvested a bunch and sold it to a semi-fancy Greek restaurant in Ipswich (I was told that they planned to grill them) and today I helped harvest some that we sold to a neighboring farmstand (we have no farmstand of our own). Though we were given spades to dig them up, it seemed that they came up pretty well just by pulling them up by the stalks. For reference, these look like very large scallions, sort of, or teeny-tiny leeks. Sometimes the white part of the stalks near the developing bulb curved around in funny ways. We harvested about 50 pounds or so, cleaned them up a bit and bunched them with rubber-bands, and then I drove them over to the other farm to drop them off.

Kind of a little thing amidst a day of weeding, setting up irrigation pipes, thinning seedlings in the greenhouse and potting up tomato and pepper seedlings, but significant in my mind because the harvest, of course, is what we’re all working for and when we get to see the fruits of our labors. No matter that this garlic was planted last year, when I was far away, and has mostly come up by accident anyway, it’s still food, a wonderful gift of the earth, the sun, the rain and a lot of hard work, and it felt good to get it up and out there.

Birds of Appleton Farms: The Killdeer

2009-05-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

Appleton Farms is a great place for birds and for birdwatching. Being an avid birder, I have of course noticed a lot of the birds that make Appleton their home or a stopping off point on the way to some other place, and I hope to write about them from time to time on this blog. The list of birds I’ve seen so far (or heard) is decent, though I haven’t yet gone out on an early morning walk focused just on birds. I’m there early enough already, most days of the week. But I've seen Eastern Bluebird, Cooper’s Hawk Red-tailed Hawk, Pine Warbler, American Pipit, Barred Owl (in the wooded Grass Rides), Barn Swallow, American Crow, American Goldfinch, Eastern Phoebe…that’s just a small selection.

There’s one bird that we, as farmers, have especially close contact with, and that’s the killdeer. The thing about the killdeer is that it likes to nest in the kind of habitat that looks exactly like our fields. Correction - the killdeer likes to nest in our fields. Killdeers are generally found on grassy fields, dirt fields, lawns, muddy edges of lakes or reservoirs, in general just about any open area of grass or dirt. They make surprisingly open and accessible nests by making a shallow scrape in the dirt, sometimes lined with a few rocks. Their eggs are very inconspicuous and look just like stones.

All throughout the day we are likely to hear their distinctive, high-pitched calls, see them flying around our tractors or watch them running between crop rows and through the roughly plowed furrows. I have seen them on a couple of occasions do their famous broken-wing walk, meant to lure predators away from a nest or chicks by simulating an easy meal.

Unfortunately, we are not in a position to just stop what we’re doing and make sure that we don’t disturb their nesting sites. In fact, I am sure that we have, without even noticing, destroyed several nests already as we prepare the fields for planting. It gets me wondering how they make out at all, but they are not a particularly uncommon bird; there are of course many grassy fields and patches of dirt out there that are not intensively farmed. And my guess is that they probably sneak a successful nest or two through on our fields, also. I feel for them, though I also enjoy watching them wing about as I go about my day. I think if I had my own farm I would try and have some enticing corner of my fields that I plowed once or twice a season and keep free of shrubs and tree seedlings but would avoid planting, and hope that a pair of killdeers would make good use of it. How I would get the birds to nest there and not elsewhere is an entirely different story, of course.

An unkempt sort of Eden

2009-05-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have kind of a favorite place in the farm right now. The larger of our two growing areas, called Patch field, has a field that was not plowed and planted with a cover crop last fall. For some reason they let the field go past the date when you can reliably plant winter rye and so it was just left to do whatever it would do. This is not ideal from a farming perspective, as a cover crop keeps the soil stable and enriches it (most cover crops are nitrogen-fixing plants that contribute nitrogen back to the soil) when it is plowed back into the ground. These are often called ‘green manures’. Without the cover crop the soil is left relatively exposed to runoff and erosion and there is little replenishment that happens during the off-season.

What happened in this field, field 3 as we call it, is that an unruly jungle of crop plants and weeds has grown up in it. The last planting of 2008 spinach survived the winter and started pushing up new leaves in early spring, which we have been eating almost daily. It is unusually thick, fleshy and sweet, and it is delicious. I don’t know enough about some of the other plants to know whether they have reseeded themselves or whether the plants from last year have simply survived, in their roots or basal leaves, to send up new growth. There is arugula, which has already bolted with flower heads two feet high but is still tasty, spicy and just a little bitter. There is red Russian kale, a beautiful plant of pale green leaves and light red veins. Not my favorite green in the world, but I have been enjoying it both raw in salads and cooked with scrambled eggs. There are parsnips, roots that were never harvested last fall but have frozen and thawed repeated over the winter but seem still crisp and smell earthy and sweet. I have not tried them yet, but I took a few today to maybe try sometime this weekend. There are several species of weedy wildflowers, including the always bold goldenrod and an unknown member of the mint family with ruby and purple flowers. Best of all, there is garlic coming up, now in its young, ‘green’ phase, with a relatively delicate flavor just barely reminiscent of garlic but full of mild, oniony goodness. I made a sort of alfredo pasta tonight, sautéing minced green garlic and the corner of a habanero pepper in butter and tossing that with grated parmigiano and tagliatelle. A dusting of black pepper made it very tasty indeed.

Some of these semi-wild remnants from last season are still present in rows, easily discernible amidst weedy wilderness, and some, like the garlic, just seem to be spread about more or less at random. This is also the favorite field, as far as I can tell, of the savannah sparrows, who especially like to forage on the ground amidst the spinach and fly to a little patch of small trees next to an old house foundation whenever I flush them up.

I love these kind of places, wild, but with a human story in there too, and even a sort of glimpse of the future, of abandonment and the slow (or quick) re-establishment of unobstructed wilderness into the human habitat.

Peace to all, and enjoy your weekend.

Weeding

2009-05-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

There seem to be many different kinds of weeding that we do on the farm. All of them, of course, have the same general objective, which is to remove unwanted plants from the crop beds. Weeds compete for pretty much all of the resources that the crops need, and keeping them under control is absolutely essential for a successful harvest.

The first kind of weeding I did was with a tractor that churned up the soil between the rows of young plants, dislodging weeds and exposing their roots and bringing weed seeds up to the surface where they are less likely to germinate. We started a large, early round of hand weeding yesterday, removing weeds from the actual rows of crop plants. This is an enormous task! We have I don't know how many beds of crops, but a lot (60 so far? Maybe triple that by the time we're finished planting? These are wild guesses) and it can take a group of 5 of us a couple hours to do a single bed, depending on the crop and the degree of weeding needed (and whether we're thinning as we go along as well). But hopefully, this monumental task would really get us set well for the rest of the crop plant's life; if we can get rid of all the weeds now, the desirable plants will have a big head start and will be able to shade out the weeds later on. But there will always be spot weeding throughout the season and I'm sure many times where the weeds in a bed start to overtake the crops again, requiring another big effort. Last summer when I visited the farm I helped out for a couple hours weeding the green beans; the beans were sizable by that time and getting close to harvesting but the weeds were often just as tall if not taller and would threaten to pull the beans out as you tried to get their roots out of the ground. Tricky!

One of the interesting things is that many of these weed species are edible. One of our most common weeds is lamb's quarters which is a tender green when young. Another one, pigweed, is a type of wild amaranth related to types used commercially for cereal and greens. For that matter, we were thinning out the beets today, and beet greens are certainly edible, and I thought that maybe there are some fancy restaurants out there interested in young 'micro' beet greens. I meant to take some home but, well, I didn't (I did make a simple pasta yesterday with some wild dandelion greens).

I'd like to find a good guide to identifying weeds, and learn a bit more about the things I'm uprooting and throwing away every day.

Learning from Mistakes

2009-05-05T13:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I made a middling mistake; my first goof-up (I think...) beyond very small, insignificant screw-ups with repetitive tasks. I was sent out to do some cultivation (between-crop-row weeding) with the G tractor, and topped it off with a bit of gas first. The cultivation went fine, and I got maybe 6 beds of peas done before the tractor died. I thought that somehow I had misjudged the fuel level and had run out of gas. I opened the cap and gas sprayed out, making me wonder why it had become pressurized. There still seemed to be plenty of gas in there.

I couldn’t get it to start again, and did some hand weeding while I gave it a rest, but it still wouldn’t start 20 minutes later. Finally I grabbed my boss, and to my embarrassment, when he checked the fuel level he lifted up a different cap than I had used. I had topped off the coolant reservoir with gasoline, and had of course just run out of gas. I was surprised (but happy) that the tractor had run so well (and had not exploded) after my mistake.

Today I set about fixing it, and learned a bit more about the tractor in the meantime. I must admit, some good learning often comes from our errors. I read about the radiator system in the tractor manual, located the coolant drain and drained the coolant/gas mixture and flushed it out with water, then refilled it with coolant. Not a big deal, but it felt good to fix my own mistake without wasting too much of other people’s time.

Today we had our first kind of miserable task in miserable weather. It was chilly, windy and rainy and we set about thinning and weeding a long, long, long bed of beets. These beets are sowed directly into rows with a tractor, and are sowed heavily to ensure that enough germinate. Well, plenty did germinate, and we had to thin out pretty much a constant line of plants to one plant or so every one and a half to two inches. This entailed removing about, maybe, ¾’s of the beet plants, along with an equal number of tiny (and sometimes not so tiny) weeds. Both the weeds and excess beets would gobble up resources and prevent the beets from attaining a good size, so this is an essential task, and one that can’t be done by the tractor as this weeding is done actually within the rows rather than between them. It is actually kind of delicate work, and of course requires one to be on their knees for a long time. And we have several more beds to go, and carrots to do as well, and many others…we will do a lot of weeding throughout. Lots. I really don’t mind it so far, but it’ll be bit easier once we thin the crops and they get a bit bigger.

Anyway, it was cold! I thought I had my Trustees hooded sweatshirt but I couldn’t find it when I got to the farm and I got a bit chilled, which of course can affect one’s outlook on things. But I survived, and am happy that our fields got some rain, which will save us from the chore of irrigating them over the next few days (they were getting a bit dusty).

Adios!

Save the Bumblebees!

2009-05-03T10:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was sitting in my house's big screened-in porch that overlooks the marsh. I noticed that there was a bumblebee on the floor. He was buzzing around a bit but wasn't really getting airborn. While I watched, he flopped over onto his back and couldn't get back over to his belly. I wondered if he had been stuck in there for a while and was getting weak.

I brushed him onto a piece of paper and took him outside. He flew off in a quick downward spiral to land on the grass just a few feet from the door. I went over and saw that he was still struggling to move around. So I picked him up again and moved him over to a patch of ground ivy and nudged him near to one of the beautiful little blue flowers. He grasped the stalk with both front legs and pushed his head completely into the flower and remained that way for several minutes, moving not at all. I think he was sucking up all of the nectar he could get. After a while, he pulled his head out and slowly crawled around the plant to another flower and did the same thing. I watched him do this for two more flowers and then walked off. When I came back to the spot he was gone. I hope he got his juices flowing again and flew off on to the rest of his business.

I really like bumblebees.

A Reflective Day

2009-05-01T15:03:00.000-07:00

I had an up and down day today. I got a piece of news that the murderer of my sister, Esme, had recently confessed to two more killings, one of which can be traced to a body and for which he will probably be indicted for as well. This brought the entire experience and reality of losing my sister again to the forefront of my mind, where it remained for much of the day. Esme wanders in and out of my thoughts most days, and I usually have a little chat of sorts with her in the evening, but today she was there all day. Not an entirely bad thing; I was full of love for her today and I was feeling her love for me, but I definitely was aching with the loss of her physical presence and her voice.

The weather was a little different today as well, windy and grey with a few sputterings of rain, and this may have put me into a more somber, reflective mood, though paradoxically I was also enjoying the change as well, the cooler, gentler air and overcast skies a welcome change from the intense sun of much of the previous two weeks. The wind was nice as well, though the dry top layer of soil swirled about into my eyes, unprotected by sunglasses for almost the first time, throughout the morning,

We could use the rain, and are hoping for more than the fitful tease that we got this afternoon. Today we planted the 2nd round of lettuce seedlings and a mess of shallots, and then spent most of the rest of the day in the greenhouse seeding fennel, lettuce and other tasty things. Yesterday I did some field seeding with the G tractor of more spinach and a couple different kinds of radish. I’m excited about the radishes, as they grow quickly and I love them. My favorite salad is a biting, strong, not-very-subtle combination of salad greens, radishes, blue cheese, scallions and avocado (unnecessary but always nice in salads, and provides a bit of balance) in a tart dressing of olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper. The radishes are crucial.

Thus ends my third week here on Appleton Farms, and luckily I’m still going strong and feeling that this is where I should be right now. Next week we’ll start to slowly move to the more intense schedule that we’ll have for much of the season, as we’ll be starting at 7 am on Monday. Only an hour more, earlier, but I have no doubt that I’ll be feeling it, and will have to make an extra effort to get up and get some nutrition in me before I head off to work.

Have a good weekend! Peace and love to everyone.

A Visit to the Bean Farm

2009-04-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

As I slowly get deeper into this world of farming one thing that is interesting is how different various farms can be. Big, small, diversified, focused, intensive, spacious, livestock, integrated, organic, non-organic, commercial, homesteading...these variables only touch the surface. Sometimes the farms have their own utterly unique character, an unpredictable outgrowth of the farmer's personality, resources, luck, land and the irreducible mysteries of life and time.

Today we had another CRAFT visit to a neighboring farm. This farm does a few heirloom tomatoes and vegetables but mostly they grow dried beans, specializing in unusual heirloom varieties like vermont cranberry, soldier, calypso or jacob's cattle. Charlie, the farmer, has a full-time corporate job outside of farming, but found his way into it through part-time farmer friends of his decades ago who were growing beans in Maine. Somewhere along the way he developed a passion for growing many different kinds of beans, often strains that were hard to come by or in danger of disappearing. Now he grows them not only for market but also for seed and sells his beans to many seed companies, helping to perpetuate them and get them into the hands of other farmers and gardeners.

These beans are often very beautiful. Most of the well-known beans we all get at the supermarket are somewhat plain, if not monochromatic, but many of the varieties Charlie grows have startling colors and patterns. I can't remember the name of it but he showed us one that was almost all white except for a small, marbled splotch of deep magenta. Another had rich brown and green stripes along it, another was an unusual, gentle shade of green shading slowly into white.

Charlie clearly also has a passion for old farm machinery and farm auctions. He had several interesting old tractors with various implements, for plowing, cultivation, seeding and harvesting. He even had a couple of combines, a type of machine that we don't (to my knowledge) use on Appleton, as its function is to cut up entire harvested plants and separate the seeds from the rest. This is generally for dried beans and grains, which we don't grow.

It is a very interesting niche that he has carved out for himself. I could talk about it quite a bit more, but I'm ready to read a bit and go to bed. Sorry!

The Discomforts of Farming

2009-04-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

Today we had our first really hot day. I’m not actually sure how hot it got; the weather gods on the internet said it would get into the upper 80’s or even 90. It never felt quite that hot to me but it did feel, well, hot. I spent an hour or two after lunch planting onion seedlings, and if we had been doing that for all eight hours of our day I probably would have been pretty miserable by the end of it. But I spent the morning up on the cultivating tractor, weeding a last bed of beets and six beds of carrots. The carrots at this point are very small, thin, wispy fellows, and I had to take extra care to keep the wire baskets from going too deep and throwing soil on top of the little plants. I had a little elevation on the tractor so I caught a bit of breeze, and it wasn’t terribly strenuous, it just took a certain amount of focus and care.

I spent the last couple hours of the day with Eric mending fences. Our larger field, called Patch field, has an electric fence around it (so does the other field, called Underhill, after our friend Frodo Baggins I like to think) to keep the deer from eating up all our food. Many of the wooden posts holding the wires up were broken, split or splintered, and we were tasked with removing them. This took a lot of messing around and disagreeable contortions of the hands with a pair of pliers and wire cutters, resulting in several minor scrapes, blisters or small areas of pinched flesh, as well as general fatigue to the muscles in my hands.

There are plenty of discomforts in this job. None of them has been particularly overwhelming thus far, certainly not enough to counterbalance the positive experience I’m having learning about farming, spending time outside in a beautiful setting, working with other good, interesting people and working hard at something I believe in. But they are there. Kneeling, bending over, repetitive tasks in strange positions, sunburn, windburn, cold weather (we’ve had little enough of that so far), wet socks, grimy, beyond grimy hands and face, filthy clothes, hot, sweaty days, etc. I’m paying particular attention to taking care of my hands, keeping them moisturized whenever possible but mostly just trying to be mindful and careful with them anytime I’m using them in a way that could possibly injure them. This job doesn’t really seem to have many opportunities for major harm (with a reasonable amount of care and common sense) to the hands but they get a lot of hard, physical use. I’m making sure to strum my guitar or pick up my violin regularly to keep them limber and keep tabs on them.

It’s too early to tell yet whether I’ll get more used to the various discomforts of this sort as the season goes on or whether, really, I just ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I’m starting to get very excited for the vegetables we’ll eventually be harvesting. It’ll still be awhile, but I had a conversation today discussing what stuff the respective we’s were most excited for, and I realized I’m excited for most of it. I suppose if forced to pick something I’ll say: hot chiles! I’m going to make hot sauce. Also, I can’t wait for good tomatoes and fresh oregano for the best greek salads ever in high summer (consult Chez Panisse Vegetables for the formula). And garlic, I’m really excited for that as well. Another high summer treat I’m looking forward to making is salsa, pico gallo in particular, if we have chiles, tomatoes, garlic, cilantro and onions up at the same time. The onions might come a little later, I’m not sure. If I have to buy an onion at the store it won’t kill me, but my guess is we’ll have one of the varieties up in the summer, or I can use scallions or shallots.

Until next time.

Pictures of our CSA in action

2009-04-26T16:04:00.000-07:00

One view of the Great Pasture.

A young member of the white park cattle breed.

Another view of the Great Pasture.

Some nice tree silhouettes.

Cows out to pasture.

On their way to pasture.

A stone lion guarding the paddock area, where we have our lunch on nice days.

Some cows and an old, unusual silo.

Our illustrious greenhouse.

Red lettuce seedlings.

An array of different lettuce seedlings.

The interior of the greenhouse.

The barn.

This is one of the tractors I drive. It has the seeding attachments on it.

Garlic!

Little kohlrabis, one of our prettier seedlings.

A just planted strawberry plant, which will produce a crop for us next June.

The strawberry bed planted last spring, which will start producing fruit in a month or so.

One of our spinach survivors from last year's crop.

A few beds of beets that I cultivated. You can see the narrow rows of beets in-between the wider weeded areas.

A picture I took of one of the farm's little brooks that I think looks a lot like a Monet painting.

These are onion seedlings planted in a kind of biodegradable mulch made out of corn starch.

The same.

A view of one of our fields, with a small crew of volunteers planting onions.

Transplanting, cultivation...

2009-04-24T15:04:00.001-07:00

We had another beautiful day, windy, cool and bright in the morning and still, sunny and (almost) hot in the afternoon. The last couple of days, when I’ve had my hands deep in the soil, I’ve noticed that it iss really coming alive, with worms and bugs squirming about more and more. This, of course, is a pretty good sign of good soil. I’ve seen the soil analysis of the farm, and we’ve got lots of the organic matter that all these critters love. If a person is looking around at different farms that might be for sale or available to farm, good quality soil is the most important factor in farming vegetables successfully. There are many different ways that a farmer can improve the soil, but it is generally a long, painstaking, incremental process. I can see that the future might bring a time when it becomes crucial to re-invigorate millions of acres of that have been farmed exclusively with commercial fertilizers and pesticides and have subsequently lost much of their intrinsic life and nutrients. I would applaud anybody trying to figure out good ways to bring soil health and fertility up, but it would be a hard row to hoe.

Today we did more transplanting of plants that were started in the greenhouse out into the fields. We did some of it with the transplanter, a contraption that is attached to the back of one of our bigger tractors. First these big wheels with triangular spikes punch dimples into the soil a couple inches deep. Behind the dimpler are two attached seats, low to the ground, that a couple of us sit on. Trays in front of us are filled with seedlings, and we take the plants and their attached plug of soil and roots and push them into the dimples and cover the plug with soil. Sounds simple enough, and almost relaxing (sitting down as the tractor moves slowly up the bed…) but for an inexperienced hand like me it can get pretty intense trying to keep up with the (incredibly slow) pace of the tractor. I think they call the different settings turtle 1, turtle 2, turtle 3, etc. Yesterday we did lettuce, today we did cabbages, kohlrabi and onions.

The other major event of the day was I got up on one of the little G tractors again to do some cultivation. In this situation cultivation refers essentially to weeding, running squared-off wire baskets over the soil between the rows of desirable plants, in this case beets. The wire baskets run over and rotate at a depth of about an inch or so and churn up the little weeds that have gotten started and would soon grow up to compete with the beets for space and nutrients. It takes a bit of a delicate touch to ‘stay within the lines’, so to speak, as the space that allows the beets to go between the baskets safely is only three or four inches wide. But the really tricky part was getting the right depth of the baskets, as if they’re too shallow they don’t do much good, and if they’re too deep they tend to disrupt the soil too much, bringing up even more weed seeds from the soil and throwing soil on top of the beets. Anyway, it was kind of intense but a good, new learning experience.

At the end of my second week, I still feel good about where I am and what I’m doing, and am looking forward to learning more stuff next week. I hope to take some pictures soon, but it is tough to get it in during a work day. I may head over there this weekend with my camera and my binoculars to take in a different side of Appleton Farms.

Adieu!

The Great Pasture

2009-04-23T14:38:00.001-07:00

Well, I feel that it’s been an eventful couple of days. Yesterday, we did a couple new things. For one, a couple of us took a thorough tour of the farm led by Wayne, who oversees all operations on the entire property. It’s really quite an interesting slice of land, full of history, scenery and ongoing, vibrant agriculture and conservation.

A few words about Appleton Farms. It is the oldest farm in the U.S., having been farmed continuously since it was awarded as a royal land grant in…1636? 1638? I’ll get back to you on that. It is almost exactly 1000 acres. About 400 are mostly wooded, set off as a place of recreation, with many trails for hikers. Another few hundred comprise the farm, but really are made up of many different operations, from marginal agricultural land that is just mowed once a season and is primarily wildlife habitat, to grazing land for the dairy and beef cattle, to continuously mowed land for hay, and a few extra acres (about 30) for our humble CSA vegetable operation. The remaining land is roads, buildings, houses (there are quite a few houses on the farm, mostly on the perimeter abutting local paved roads).

I think the highlight of the tour was getting a close look at what is called the Great Pasture, which is a 140 acre single block of lovely pasture, apparently the largest whole block of field or pasture in Ipswich. It is rolling land studded with a few gnarled old trees, oaks mostly, and some rocky outcrops. It is home to a herd (is that the right term?) of interesting cattle of the White Park breed, bred by the Romans a couple thousand years ago in Britain. They are lovely, dignified and docile. They remain on the great pasture year round. I’ve also been told that in a month or so the Great Pasture becomes one of the best places for grassland birds in the state, with lots ob bobolinks and meadowlarks (I’ve already heard meadowlarks near the CSA fields). I’m hoping for vesper sparrows and grasshopper sparrows, but Wayne says they have not been documented on the farm, so I’m going to make surveying the pasture a weekend mission a few times throughout the season. We’ll see if we can eke out a grasshopper sparrow somewhere.

Then, after work yesterday, we went to our first CRAFT seminar of the year, which travels to different farms throughout the season to watch some sort of farming practice in action and learn. Yesterday, of all things, was chicken processing, which consists essentially of killing the chicken with a quick cut through the major blood vessels of the neck, a short dip in scalding water to loosen the feathers, a minute in some sort of rotating machine with soft rubber spokes to remove the feather, and then evisceration and cleaning. Due to a time crunch I didn’t actively participate, and truth to tell I wasn’t really in the mood to at the time, but I eat chicken and I think it would be a good thing to learn. In a smaller homesteading farm where you only killed a few chickens a year, a lot of those steps would be done without all those specialized devices. Not that Green Meadows is Tyson Farms, exactly, but I’m sure they do a couple-few hundred chickens a year. They are trying to educate their customer base to buy the scrawnier, ‘chickenier’-tasting breeds that they use, which are hardier and wilder but smaller and having less breast meat.

Today, we planted strawberries, finished constructing the compost station contraption, applied self-decomposing rows of corn-starch mulch to the onion beds, transplanted our first batch of lettuce into the fields (and interesting operation, I will have to describe it more but I’m hungrier and am going off to dinner) and seeded leeks in the greenhouse.

Adios, amoebas. Sorry if this post seems rushed, but I didn't write yesterday and wanted to get something down.

Misty Morning Hop

2009-04-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

So we got some rain today, but holy of holies, we spent most of the day indoors. Greenhouse work, mostly, preparing a lot of seeded trays of various types of lettuce. Red Rosie, Galesse, Sylvestra, Black Seeded Simpson, a few other types I can’t remember. This was our fourth seeding of lettuce. Lettuce grows pretty quickly, and of course doesn’t last forever, and I believe that our shareholders expect to have lettuce pretty much all the time, so we plant lettuce every week. No complaints from me, who also loves lettuce and salads. I also prepared a few trays of beets, a golden variety. I will be curious to try all these different varieties and see what kind of differences I notice.

I was excited to see today that the lettuce transplants I did last week are surviving nicely, even thriving, standing up tall and growing lush, fat leaves. In my observations of other farm folk doing various jobs of transplanting, there is a spectrum of care but a general trust in the plant’s ability to survive a bit of (generally not intentional) mistreatment. These plants, for the most part, want to grow and if they can get their roots in the soil and have a bit of water and light, they can orient themselves nicely. But in any case, I’m glad to see that I wasn’t doing anything grievously wrong.

After lunch, we did some more greenhouse work and then Eric and I launched into a construction project, a fairly basic one, cleaning up the sides of a pallet and attaching a guard rail of sorts around it so that we can put some Rubbermaid bins for compost on it and move the whole thing around on a flatbed without garbage spilling out all over the place.

We also did a fieldwalk in the late morning, with Jamie taking the whole crew around our fields discussing what was happening, concerns, things to remember for next season, and checking on the progress of the plants already in the ground. It’s early enough in the season right now that if, say, the peas were all moldy and rotting and not germinating, we could get another batch planted and still have a nice bunch of peas for our shareholders in some reasonable frame of time. The fieldwalk helps to orient us, know where we stand and what problems might be arising, as well as to keep track of things for adjustment or confirmation in future seasons. I was designated to take notes which I will transcribe onto the computer throughout the year.

Actually, this was a very pleasant, relaxed day, of conversation and decent productivity, and I reacquainted myself with some old skills (very basic skills, really) in carpentry, sawing and screwing and nailing and whatnot. The fields looked verdant and mysterious in the mist, blackbirds, bluebirds and meadowlarks were singing, the red-tailed was hunting, and it almost seemed you could watch the plants grow.

Potatoes, scallions, beets, spinach, carrots...

2009-04-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Today we did some more…potato planting. One’s first week on a new job is by definition going to be a series of brand new tasks, with little opportunity to get bored or tired. But of course many of our tasks we will do over and over again. Seeding, transplanting, weeding, harvesting…these chores will occupy much of our time this season. Of course, with all the different kinds of vegetables we grow, the process is a little different for each one. However, with onions and potatoes, which take some time to grow and that are all planted around the same time (instead of in succession), it becomes a pretty big project to get them all in the ground over the course of a week or two.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. Or not much. It wasn’t a thrill a minute, but I find myself kind of interested in the learning process, even with fairly basic, repetitive tasks. The way I slowly figured out the best rhythm for pushing the potato into the ground and following with a sweep of the other hand to cover with soil. Figuring that when dropping potatoes into the furrows I can stand and drop instead of bending over, and that I have better accuracy if I sort of toss them with a bit of overhand instead of just letting them roll out of my hand. Or when watering the greenhouse, how much more efficient it is to start at one end instead of the other, and to use the spray adjustment to reach more trays from one location instead of moving all over the place. Simple things, but finding little ways to do things more efficiently or better makes the time go quicker and keeps me mindful of my task. The key is to stop and think for a minute or so when something about what you’re doing is irritating you; often just a bit of thought will provide you with a solution.

I got up on the tractor again today, the G, to seed more spinach, carrots (tiny little seeds), and beets, that fancy Italian candy-striped variety called chioggia. That was fun, and after that I went over to join the group of folks transplanting scallions. For this, we had trays of scallions that had got their start in the greenhouse and were in small bunches maybe 6 inches high or so. A tractor had gone over the beds, putting small dimples into the soil. We would remove a plug of scallions from a tray and push it into the dimple and then cover with soil. I found myself a little excited by this, for the simple reason that I really like scallions. In salads, eggs, and stir-fries especially. I think my favorite flavor of omelet is with mushrooms, scallions and swiss cheese.

Anyway, so begins week two of my new life on the farm. Tomorrow I believe we are supposed to get some rain, and as I write this the skies are darkening and the wind is picking up.

So long!

Thoughts on the end of a first week of farming

2009-04-17T19:05:00.000-07:00

We continued with potatoes for some time today, after doing the morning rounds at the greenhouse. We finished up planting the storage potatoes and then started putting some red-skinned variety into the ground. Sorry, I plan to be better about giving out specifics of variety and such but I didn’t ask and I don’t have my crop plan by my side at the moment. I’m in bed, mostly horizontal, tired and sick and I’m not getting up to get it.

Today was our warmest day yet, with full sun most of the day; t-shirt weather really. I am really going to have to watch out for how the elements treat my skin over the coming months. I have this vision of being up here in the country (sort of), close to the ocean and nice hiking, swimming, etc, and doing endless outdoor activities on my weekends. But I can also see enjoying having a couple-day reprieve from the sun and wind! We’ll see how it all works out.

We had a couple of other modest tasks today; Jamie and I took a look at the wash station to try and figure out an easy, efficient system to get water to the two big tubs and then went to a plumbing supply store to get a few fittings. Jamie likes to solicit ideas and input for systems like this, and it feels good to brainstorm with he and the others, though I’m sure he has a much better understanding than I do of what needs to happen and what might work and what might not.

We finished up the day in a bed of chard, putting up thin metal hoops every 15 feet or so over the 5 foot wide beds and then covering the entire bed with row cover material (a lightweight, white, thin synthetic material that lets a lot of light through but conserves moisture and heat). This should help us get the young plants growing more quickly, especially at this early stage during the season of less sun and colder weather. It would be nice if we have as much variety of produce available as possible when the shareholders begin to pick up at the beginning of June.

Thus ended my first week on the farm. I am tired! Good tired, mostly, though as I’ve mentioned I’ve still got my cold and am ready to be done with it. So far the work has been manageable, varied and the days not very long. Reasonably hard work though. It’s definitely going to get tougher.

At this point, I do feel that what I’ve been saying and hoping for over a month now is coming true, that given the devastating, wrenching lost of my sister Esme in early March, I can’t really imagine another way to spend my time that would offer me more in the way of healing my heart and helping me to go on. This, growing good, healthy food in a thoughtful, sustainable manner, being outside in a beautiful place, engaging in varied tasks of physical and mental challenge, learning new things, interesting things, about the world, about plants and animals, about people and about myself, getting to know new friends who share some of these same interests, spending time again in a shared community, a shared household after living on my own for years…It’s only been 5 days, I’m tired and sick, I am anxious about what I will do with myself in the future, I am constantly heartsick, missing my sister desperately and having grave problems coming to terms with a state of the world and of our culture that I see as terribly out of balance, dangerous and ill…but I am happy to be doing what I am now doing.

May all beings find peace and joy in their lives. Love to all.

Planting Potatoes

2009-04-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have a cold, and this is the 4^th time in two and a half months I’ve been sick, and I am getting sick of it.

Nonetheless, this one has been relatively easy on me, and though I didn’t get a good sleep last night the sun was shining today and we planted potatoes. Several small chores started the day, amongst them opening up the greenhouse windows and doors, uncovering the cold frames, and getting the tractor implement that makes the furrows for potatoes set up properly. We then moved on to a rousing set of cutting up more seed potatoes, which we had started on yesterday, accompanied by some silly banter and word-association games.

After that we did a quick spot of thinning and transplanting, working on some flowers called bachelor blue buttons or some such thing. In addition to all the fine produce we grow, we also have some rows of flowers that our shareholders can pick. But this was just a quick fill of lost time, we were soon onto potato planting.

For this the tractor runs shallow furrows into the prepared soil about three or four feet apart (I should know this), or is it five, and we follow along after, some folk dropping cut seed potato pieces into the furrows about 8 inches apart, and others pushing these down into the soil and then covering them up. We finished four long beds before lunch.

These are cellaring potatoes we were planting today, intended for harvest in the fall and a variety that keeps well for long periods of time in cold storage. I should find out what that means in terms of starch content. I think it would be high, and a good baking potato, but I’m not sure.

After lunch Becky, another new housemate of mine who is in her third year at the farm, and I went to the local co-op to purchase some Rubbermaid containers for compost and our washing station as well as to check out some potential hose fittings. A nice store, I’ll check it out again sometime off of the company dime to wander around and see everything they have to offer.

Finally, I did a quick spot of watering in the greenhouse before Jamie (my boss) gave us the go ahead to go home. I should be resting but we’ve been playing some music here at the house, and despite the copious amounts of matter my sinuses have been producing it’s been nice to do a bit of strumming and singing (and a bit of fiddling as well).

But now it is starting to get late and I will be off to bed.

Love to all.

Yet another day on the farm.

2009-04-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

Short and to the point.

Today, I…

Watered the greenhouse. Better to mist from a distance rather than having the hose too close to the seedlings. Make sure the water saturates the entire pod of soil. Morning watering can be heavy, as the heat of the day will make sure it doesn’t stay too moist.

Filled seedling trays with soil. A nice, relatively mindless task.

Helped to uncover the coldframes.

Planted a variety of bok choy (joi choi) into seedling trays. 1 or 2 seeds per cell. The seeds were small and difficult to handle, so sometimes more fell in. Will just have to thin later if they all sprout.

Went on a gas run – took empty gas cans to the gas station and filled them up. Apparently, tractors run on gasoline. Also visited the hardware store and the auto-parts store for various items, drill batteries, hydraulic tubing, tractor battery…

Had a very interesting talk on soil science, samples and testing after lunch. Will talk more about this later, but this farm has really nice soil. The most important things, pH and organic matter, were right in the zone. Other things that come up are nitrogen (also very important but hard to measure reliably), phosphorus, cation exchange capacity, several other nutrients, any pollutant problems.

Finished up the day preparing potatoes for planting, which will probably happen, or at least get started, tomorrow. Cut seed potatoes into chunks, making sure that each chunk has at least one or more good eyes. Small, new potato-sized ones went in whole, big ones would be cut into as many as four separate chunks.

That’s it!

Day 2 on the Farm

2009-04-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

I would like to keep this record of my apprentice as complete as possible, meaning as many days as I can bear to take the time to write something. Inevitably, of course, because of time constraints and other commitments, as well as general fatigue and/or apathy, there are going to be many days when I don’t write anything. But many days, if not most (I’m only 2 days in; I can afford to be optimistic) I’d like to at least take some sort of basic accounting of what I did that day and what I learned, both for my own records and also to give other folks an idea of how I spend my time.

So today…

I started out by helping with a few basic tractor maintenance projects. Again with the little old seeding tractor, the ‘G’, which as far as I can tell was made perhaps 50 years ago. An ingenious, and surpisingly simple, machine. Anyway, we started by checking the tire pressure and filling up the tires to the appropriate amount (12 rear, 15 front). Then we tried to locate all the ‘grease points’ (or grease ‘nipples’) on the machine and pump them full of…grease. Most of these are located at a place where the hydraulic systems drive metal against metal and thus need to be well lubricated. Then I was tasked with a largely fruitless effort to replace the grease nipple at a spot where it had disappeared, but the replacement parts did not thread properly, and I suspect that the threading on the tractor was shot. Anyway, some kind of jerry-rigged option seemed acceptable and we went with that.

Next we removed the hydraulic tubing from a large tractor attachment called a disc harrower, which breaks up the soil into finer bits after the initial plowing. As some of the bolts were rusted shut against each other, this took quite a bit of elbow grease, and resulted in a lot of actual grease spraying out onto my jeans.

After that I got a brief lesson in the initial plowing of a field, with one of the bigger tractors which I have not learned to drive yet. In order to avoid wasted time circling and backing up, to get as much of the field plowed as possible, and to avoid running the tires over the soil too much it takes a bit of thought and planning to get your plowing pattern down so that you can do it smoothly and efficiently without freaking out. So I got a quick lesson and then watched my new housemate Susan do a long circuit around fields 5-8, driving the large, sharp wedges into the soil to turn it over.

Next up I went back to the greenhouse area where we were working on setting up the cold frames. Joe, a local fellow who works on the farm, and I worked to install some brackets to hold some short lengths of rebar that would in turn hold the ends of semi-rigid black tubing that would provide the structure for the plastic sheeting to go over. When that was done, a volunteer class from a local school put out trays of onion seedlings into the frames and then covered them up with the plastic.

Then lunch!

After lunch, I spent the rest of the day on some greenhouse work. Making tray labels (‘4/14 Bright Lights’ – a variety of chard that we were seeding into trays), filling up plastic trays with soil, thinning out trays of lettuce and transplanting some of the excess plants into new trays, and ending the day seeding the ‘bright lights’ chard.

Also, a snapshot of what is already going on in the fields (it’s not as if the farm was idle before I arrived):
There are garlic shoots coming up that were planted in the fall
There is an over-winter crop of spinach coming up again, which will not be used commercially but that we are eating – it is delicious and wonderfully fleshy.
The strawberry plants have been uncovered (they had a heavy layer of straw on them during the winter).
The first planting of peas are sending up shoots.

Actually, there are too many things already happening for me to list them all, or to remember them all. The greenhouse is already a hothouse (pardon me) of activity.

By the way, thinning a tray of lettuce and hoping to transplant them into another tray is a very delicate business! Trying to ease the excess plants (after germination and some root growth we really want only one plant per cell so that they can really thrive) out with their roots intact, and then to put them into another cell of soil, with the roots covered, is a task that I don’t think I really have the grasp of yet. But I understand that I will have some more practice. In the meantime, I have made a mental note of where the trays that I worked on are now located and will be very curious to see how those little plants fare, whether they will sprout a backbone and stand up straight, seeking the sun or if the will shrivel and fall against the dirt. Over and over again, as I gently pulled the little plants up, I would feel the little snap as the main root stem broke. Tricky, tricky. But maybe these plants are hardier than I think…I don’t really know anything at this point.

Anyway, there’s my second day. A nice, varied mix of activities and a gorgeous day of sun with almost no wind. And a short day again, 8 am to 3:30 again. I will be in for a rude awakening the first cold, rainy, windy day working 6-5.

First-day Farmer

2009-04-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

I think that it helps if your first day on the farm is a bright and sunny one, even if the wind carries a chill in the morning. By mid-afternoon, however, it was about as nice a day as one could expect this time of year in New England. This was the first official day of work for many of us, and though we had some general orientation talks regarding the overview of the season, expectations, scheduling, safety issues and other topics, we also dove right in with some work.

Let’s see, what did I do today?

First up we went to the greenhouse where I cut off the tops of onion seedlings with a pair of scissors. This encourages root growth, which helps the plants survive and thrive the replanting process. Then I was taken off of that job to assist with the direct sowing of spinach and sugar snap pea seeds (direct sowing is when the seeds go straight into the fields where they will do all of their growing until harvest, as opposed to starting the seeds off in a greenhouse where they will get a gentle, warm and moist start into this often difficult world).

For this we used a tractor, a unit referred to as the “G” (though I asked and got an answer, I’m still not sure why this tractor is called this), with a sowing attachment on the front. I learned how to attach and remove the hopper, which contains the seeds, and how to switch out and rotate the discs that allow you to adjust for the size of the seed and how quickly they are dispersed into the soil.

The tractor was driven out to one of the fields and Melissa, the assistant farm manager, drove the tractor while Theresa (another worker bee like me) and I followed along on foot to make sure everything went smoothly, to stop the tractor if it jammed up and to check the sowing apparatus periodically to make sure that it was getting seeds into the ground properly. We started with three or four rows of spinach (a popular crop with our shareholders, apparently. I’m not surprised; I love spinach myself). Sowing this way on this farm is generally considered a two person job; one person for the tractor and another to call a halt and clear and/or fix the machinery if something goes astray.

After a nice lunch and some more introductory talks and paperwork, we went back out to the fields to sow sugar snap peas. These are some of the largest seeds we use, and are, of course, just peas, but a bit dried up and shriveled. This time I got to drive the tractor myself, after getting acquainted with the clutch, gear shifter and hydraulics and some general tractor tips and safety issues. For the peas, we would drive down one row sowing, and then cover the same row again in order to sow at a high enough density to ensure that enough seeds germinate to grow enough delicious sugar snap peas for our shareholders.

I will have to get a hold of some serious moisturizer for my hands and remember that the sun can be pretty intense even in April. At least I dressed warm enough! I’ve been out birding in April too many times (or to too many April Red Sox games) to not take the possibility of a nasty, wet chill seriously.

Anyway, it was an excellent first day on the farm, and frankly, I’m looking forward to tomorrow. I have no idea what I’ll be doing.

Scenes from My New Home

2009-04-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

This is the house I now live in. It is an old farmhouse, circa I have no idea, and is connected to the barn at left. You can see the very nice screened-in porch that I'm sure I will sit in often.

This is the driveway out from the house, which meanders between fields, woods and salt marsh for a few hundred yards before coming out onto the nearest road.

This is the old, old farmhouse of the property, a type of house known as a salt box (I will have to take pictures of the backside to demonstrate what makes it a salt box. And I will probably be wrong), which is maintained in all of its historic grandeur for tours.

This is the view of the salt marsh behind the house, at an extremely high tide. Somewhere out there is the main channel of the Ipswich River. I should get a kayak.

The back of my new home.

A wild turkey.

More turkeys, rummaging in the lawn behind the house.

This is a more typical view of a portion of the salt marsh. You can see a slice of open ocean in the distance.

My room. A painting of Esme has the place of honor, on the wall and in my heart.

Spring starts...

2009-03-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

Note: For those looking for Esme Kenney's eulogy, it can be found below, or in the archives dated March 11th.

Today I went out and did a touch of birding for the first time since my sister's death on March 7th. In truth, I largely forced myself to do it; I am still in a difficult place where it is hard to take pleasure in much of anything, and hard to look forward to the future. But I think it is important that at some point I take an active stand for myself and my spirits; there is some selfishness in this but I think Esme would want to see a smile on my face again.

The last couple of days, Sunday and Monday, were exceptionally tough. I do not fully understand why. It feels like part of me is coming out of shock, and I am losing shelter to find myself in the middle of something very heavy with no end in sight. As horrifying as the first couple of weeks were, I had some intellectual understanding that I would come out of it eventually, but this weekend I had glimpses of the possibility that I wouldn't. Which is scary. And the understanding that maybe I would need outside help, even beyond the very close and supportive family I have. I have never really felt that way before.

Also, it rained both Sunday and Monday, and I had been used to reclaiming some basic connection with reality and a modest infusion of well-being from taking in some sun on a daily basis. Last night I had a spot of music (Beethoven) with my string quartet which pulled me back somewhat so that I went to sleep in a better place. And this morning, seeing the sun shining, I made the effort to get out in it first thing, with a walk at Hammond Pond, my favorite park in Newton, and a place I may see very little of in the future, as I move to Ipswich this weekend.

Hammond Pond really doesn't come into its own until mid and high Spring, with copious carpets of ground cover, decidedly varied woodlands and wonderful patches of skunk cabbage in the marshy spots. But there were a few birds frisking about, nothing noteworthy but it was good to hear their song, see their escalating activity and a few signs of nest-building from robins and goldfinches. Common mergansers prowled the pond, a large community of mallards waded and swam through the marsh, downy woodpeckers rapped and golden-crowned kinglets hovered, all to the ever-present symphony of the red-winged blackbirds.

I feel better today, though still a long way from chipper. Love to all.

Esme Kenney, 1996 - 2009

2009-03-11T16:47:00.001-07:00

The following is the eulogy for my sister Esme who was taken from us Saturday, March 7th, 2009.

13 years ago we had the amazing experience of welcoming into the world a new baby girl. I remember the first I held her in my arms, I wondered about this new little being in the world--who she was, and who she would become.

Who was Esme Kenney?

When Esme was 3 years old, she already knew the make and model of the cars of every single member of her family and friends. When I would drive over to see her, as I got my welcome hug, she was usually looking over my shoulder to check and see what kind of car I was driving.

This interest extended into boats, when our family would take our annual summer trips to Canada. Her ability to identify boats was so good, that at the age of 6, after hearing a tinny rumble off in the distance over the lake, she would announce with supreme confidence “Here comes Bob in the 25.” And she was always spot on. And then she would run down to the dock, a welcoming committee you could always count on.

Her biggest dream in Canada was to drive the boat like the big kids. When she finally was granted her boating license, it became difficult to pry the steering arm out of her hands, but if we insisted, she would relent cheerfully – she was a generous soul. And if your boating skills were rudimentary, she would be happy to teach you.

She loved learning and exploring, and her school and friends were immensely important to her. In addition to becoming an expert in the fine art of making scrambled eggs and blueberry pancakes, she shared with us important lessons that she had been taught in school. Once she was asked what she had learned in Kindergarten that year, and she replied, very solemnly, “I learned not to bite and scratch.”

She loved the water, going snorkeling, and had even for the first time last summer successfully gotten up on water skis. She was scared of Daddy Longlegs, but very little else. Animals were her friends, from the baby chicks she raised to her beloved dogs.

Esme was a born artist. Those of you who know her parents wouldn’t be surprised to know that she was blessed with a lifetime’s worth of creativity.

She was a cellist, a guitarist, and a singer. She loved Bach, the Beach Boys, and High School Musical. She grew up surrounded by music and books. We were always reading to her, even as a little baby. Often after the story was over, she could be found outside walking in circles retelling the stories to herself in a million different imaginative ways. Sometimes we were pulled into the story, and played the ugly stepsister to her Cinderella or scullery boy in her royal castle in the sky. As she started to choose her own books to read, her favorites ranged from the Little House Books, to The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Twilight.

It’s apparent, from the number of people here, and the messages from all who came in contact with her. that Esme was a tremendously gifted people person. The bond she forged with the people in her life was truly amazing. I always knew that I had a very special bond with Esme, because we had such a great friendship, and loved to talk to each other and hang out. However I have a feeling that most of us thought that, that we all knew that we were important to her and that she liked being with us. And that was truly a gift, this gift of making us feel special and loved, and it came from the deepest, richest, most essential part of her soul. She loved people. Meeting them, talking to them, learning about them, and sharing with them about herself and her interests. I loved to check in with her with a chat or a phone call, and hear about everything she was up to, what she just did together with friends or family, and how much fun it had been. And it was always fun! She brought a spark to the air around her and if you were hanging out with Esme you were having fun and you were just happy to be around her and share that gift.

That spirit was so infectious - Esme got so fired up, so enthusiastic, about everything she did in life. Esme taught us not to take life for granted. Even the very simplest things were cause for pleasure, such as riding the subway in Boston or programming her father’s mobile phone. She just loved to do stuff, get involved, go visiting, get people going on some activity like a singalong or a board game. Her enthusiasm carried over to the people around her, we could all benefit from trying to live life with more of Esme’s spark.

Esme’s life was full of love, friendships, family and freedom. She was playful, imaginative, and deeply engaged with the people she was surrounded by. She was a family girl, and her family was most important to her.

But Esme taught us that everyone is many things to many people. She was a daughter and granddaughter, a sister, a neice, a cousin, and an aunt, but she was also a friend, a student, a young woman. As her family, we’ve always known how special Esme was from the day she was born, but even so it has been wonderful, and so healing, to hear so many stories from her friends from school about how giving, funny, spirited and kind she was. From how she met Sam and became good friends after he spilled milk on her, how she was always willing to sit with and befriend the lonely kid sitting by himself, how she stuck up for kids being bullied in the hallways, how she made friends all over the school, boys, girls, older kids, younger kids, even teachers. She was better friends with many adults than many adults are with each other.

I know that everybody who knew Esme, even for just a few minutes, could think of 10, 100 or even a 1,000 other things that she was, but the thing we miss the most now that Esme is not here, is not who she was but the ongoing person who Esme was becoming, every year, every day, every second. We were all so excited to see Esme grow and explore herself and the world around her, to see the new amazing woman this girl who we all knew and loved would become. She would have knocked us out.

And this is why her loss is so devastating – it’s not just a loss of what was, but a loss of what could become. A loss of incredible potential. This has left an enormous hole in our hearts. We want her back so badly. We want her back, to see her again, to watch her grow, to grow with her, to see the unique paths this unique person would take.

Faced with such a senseless crime and losing someone you loved so much, it is easy to feel that your world has lost its meaning and to focus on the anger and despair. However, it is important to remember that the sum of a person’s life cannot be measured from their final moments. There are none of us who would trade the 13 years that we had with Esme, that Esme had with herself and the world around her, just so that we could avoid feeling the way we do now. They were great years, and Esme’s joyful spirit was freely given to everyone she met, such that we all became better people for knowing her. Though it was short, we are endlessly grateful for the time and love we shared with Esme.

The outpouring of grief, love, friendship, support, of memories and well-wishes in these days has been phenomenal and inspiring. We all know how special she was to her friends and family but we have nonetheless been heartened by how many friends she had, how special she was to them, how shocked and grieved they are and the extent that they have now come forward to offer their condolences, their grief and their support in this extremely difficult time. It seems that everybody who knew her was touched by her gift and now is deeply saddened by her passing. And though it is very difficult, our memories and the spirit of Esme that we all share have inspired us to a celebration of her life and spirit, with musical tributes, art, poetry, thoughts and remembrances. This is what life is, what love is, and never let anybody ever tell you that there is no real goodness in the world: we have Esme’s life and the love of the people around her as proof of that. Hold that, keep it, treasure it, remember it, think on it every day of your life and bring that spirit to everything you do and the world becomes a better and better place in return.

Scenes from Austin

2009-03-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Our helmsman, Joe.

Kirsten, holding on.

Me again, in my new green sunglasses.

Brian, our master of ceremonies during the sailing excursion.

Skies at the Austin Kite Festival.

Kirsten, John and Josie.

Well, I've now left Texas behind me, but not before a couple of adventurous days in Austin visiting with my friend Kirsten and her family. She just about wore me out, but we had a great time, seeing local (and awesome) band the Gourds, going sailing on Lake Travis in gusts up to 45 mph, biking along Lady Bird Lake to the Austin Kite Festival, where as nice as the kites were the highlight was the chicken sandwich from kebobalicious (something like that), visiting with other college friends Brian, Anne-Marie and Margot and their families and children, and finally topping it all off with a Pretenders show (Chrissie Hynde does rock, definitely).

Austin is almost criminally groovy, and winter seems an ideal time to visit there, not to mention the rest of Texas. There seems to be tons going on, and the weather seems hard to beat, even for someone born and bred in the snow belt and finds the first snow of each season a pretty special time (the last snow is something else entirely, but at least Spring is around the corner by that point). There's a million bands, everybody is biking, hiking or jogging around town, and good Tex-mex food graces every block.

Now I'm back in Cincinnati to visit with family and get a few hometown chores done and get a couple 5-ways at Skyline before setting my sights back on Boston and my big transition to farm life up in Ipswich. I need some boots.

Scenes from El Paso

2009-02-26T17:22:00.000-08:00

Me and my friend Jeff, one of my hosts in El Paso.

A view from El Paso with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, below in the near distance.

A cool string of houses in an older El Paso neighborhood (Sunset Heights, I believe it's called).

An El Paso house with some very cool decorations.

A mural at the El Paso History Museum showing the spaniard El Cabeza de Vaca and other survivors of their overland trek from the Gulf of Mexico trading (desperately, it appears) with an indigenous community.

A dry desert wash out of the Franklin Mountains. We hiked up to the ridge where the outcrop shaped like an elephant is. I saw Canyon Towhees and Black-chinned Sparrows.

A cool thorny plant in the Franklin Mountains.

Lichen on some rocks.

Jeff, intrepid hiker.

A view of El Paso and distant mountains and plains of the Chihuahuan desert from the Franklin Mountains.

A couple thoughts derived from my Texas birding trip

2009-02-24T12:59:00.000-08:00

One interesting thing about doing an extended bit of intensive birding like I just did in South Texas is what you learn about the distribution of wildlife across the landscape, and in particular how birds and other creatures find their places with the context of the human habitat. I think most of us have a good sense by now of how much we have altered the various ecologies of our planet in the course of living our lives and developing our diverse cultures and civilizations. Even the largest tracks of roadless wilderness generally show significant signs of our presence, if only in the fact that most of them require political acts to try and keep them wild.

Large pieces of wilderness like Yellowstone are, in my opinion, crucial, both for the conservation of many plant and animal species that are found nowhere else (particularly large predators) and the opportunities for outdoor recreation and education. And of course many birds are found in places like this, sometimes birds that are not easily found anywhere else. But if you are a dedicated birdwatcher - that is if you spend time seeking out birds of interest wherever they may be rather that just watching birds while doing whatever else it is that you enjoy doing - you will find yourself in a great variety of places and habitats, some exactly what you might expect and others that are decidedly odd and might even by considered downright unappealing except for that elusive blackbird that is hopping around the spilled piles of grain on the margins of the cattle feedlot.

During my recent birding trip to Texas with MassAudubon, we visited around 25 different sites of the course of a week, including:

A sewage treatment outfall pipe leading to a tiny, yet picturesque wetland of running water and overhanging trees (green kingfisher);

An urban pond on a college campus (ringed kingfisher, black-bellied whistling ducks);

Laguna Atascosa, an enormous (and carefully managed) wildlife refuge of wetlands, fields, saltwater bays and woods (crested caracaras, reddish egrets);

A series of exposed tidal flats clustered amidst fishing docks and seafood restaurants (long-billed dowitchers, american avocets);

A suburban front yard filled with hummingbird feeders (allen's hummingbird, buff-bellied hummingbird);

A county park of soccer fields and picnicking families (pyrullhoxia, golden-fronted woodpecker);

A state park of trailer campgrounds and small parcels of exquisite desert scrub habitat (roadrunner, black-throated sparrow, vermillion flycatcher);

A former citrus orchard painstakingly restored to native thicket by the local Audubon society (kiskadees, kingbirds);

The fields lining the runways of a small local airport (northern bobwhites);

A busy strip mall in McAllen (green parakeets).

You get the picture. In almost all of these places, human lives were busily going about their business while hundreds of species of birds busily went about theirs. One might argue that this shows the resiliency of nature and I would agree that there's some truth there, but it is also good to recognize that many of these places, however humble they may be, were carefully conserved by local governments, federal and state governments, or just plain old private citizens. We would all be wise to look carefully around our own neighborhoods, cities, counties and states for the little patches of forest, field, marsh or beach that may hold natural treasures and think about what we might be able to do to help them stay the way they are or even help them out a step or two. Let's remember that birding (and hiking, snorkeling, fishing, kayaking and any number of other outdoor activities) is not in and of itself an act of conservation; to the contrary we who are out in the field enjoying ourselves are putting additional pressures on these habitats, so it's important that we go a extra few steps to help out. Give to local and national conservation organizations, develop environmentally responsible habits and shopping choices, keep informed on environmental issues and speak up when you feel it's important; work to minimize your impact when out in the field, volunteer at a wildlife refuge, help to instill a love of nature in a young (or old) person that you know. Don't forget that people are part of the picture too - balance is essential.

Anyway, that's enough with the harangue. Good birding!

Scenes from the Northwest

2009-02-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

A cool mushroom by the side of the house.

We are ringed by mountains here. When the skies are clear, it is something to behold.

The budding birdwatcher, my niece Gabby. This is what I like to see.

Future mountain-climber, my niece Sonja.

The common goldeneye - you can really see the color of the eye.

Climbing logs with Skyler and Amalie.

The girls and their mom.

Gabby and I.

Nick out over the waves.

Running along the beach.

My favorite bird of the northwest, the varied thrush.

The climber again.

A few more photographs and some colorful moments from Texas

2009-02-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

As you can see, on a trip like this it's easier to get a picture of a skittish bird in the distance than it is to get a shot of a fellow birder's face.

A trio of memorable moments from my Texas birding adventure:

Stopping by the side of the road in the growing pre-dawn light early one day to watch thousands of sandhill cranes stream overhead in long lines and sinuous V's, the wonderful music of their bugling flight calls echoing mightily in the otherwise silent morning.

An ecstatic moment as one of our intrepid leaders, Kathy, gets us on an odd bird cruising along with a bunch of wobbly, drifting turkey vultures and catching in the afternoon sun the thick white band across its tailfeathers, making it the elusive zone-tailed hawk. Cries of surprise and joy erupt from our entire group. Naturalist's note: The zone-tailed hawk is a fascinating bird, appearing very much like a turkey vulture and cruising along with them in order to sneak up on unsuspecting prey who would not normally be very concerned about a vulture.

A crazy end to a long day along a suburban strip of malls and fast-food restaurants, where our leader Strickland lands us right smack in the middle of an enormous host of raucous, colorful, flamboyant green parakeets hanging out in the midst of it all, on powerlines and flying in thick, fast formations, screeching, screeching. One of those moments it's hard to believe you've found yourself in the midst of.

We're in the desert now.

2009-02-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Some wildly thorny and soft yellow flower-laden shrub called black brush.

Wetlands at Falcon State Park.

We do a lot of this.

Beep-beep!

Immature Gray Hawk.

Pyrrhuloxia.

A nest in the thorns.

An awesome desert landscape at Falcon State Park.

Along the Rio Grande.

Just Pictures again, I'm afraid. Good night!

2009-02-09T20:08:00.000-08:00

Santa Ana N.W.R. A lovely, lovely, place.

Santa Ana again.

Common Paraque at Estano Llano Grande. See if you can find him.

Me and some local color.

Plain Chacalaca.

Kiskadee! Kiskadee! Kisdadee!

Curve-billed Thrasher.

Another multi-species picture. A bunch of ducks, basically.

More wetlands at Santa Ana. This place was awesome.

The magnificent Harris' Hawk, courtesy of Santa Ana N.W.R.

More birds and now to bed

2009-02-07T19:29:00.001-08:00

A nice scene in south Texas.

Golden-fronted woodpecker.

Me.

Forster's tern.

The boat trip to Aransas N.W.R.

A red-tailed hawk at Aransas.

A whooping crane.

Another crane.

Some ancient live oak tree. Like 1000 years or so.

This is some intense birdwatching! We get up before the crack of dawn, get moving with a quick motel breakfast and start scanning the roadsides for birds as the sun is rising in the east. Yesterday we started out at a place called Goose Island State Park near Rockport, Texas, where we saw little blue heron, ruddy turnstone, american pipit, clay-colored sparrow, black vultures, hermit thrush and many more. My personal favorite from this location was the inca dove, a small, chunky dove with a long tail and a beautifully textured scaly pattern of plumage. Next up was the big event for the day, a boat trip out to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, which is home to the world's entire wild population of the whooping crane, one of our most endangered birds in North America. There are something like 250 individuals wintering at Aransas. We saw about 18 or so walking around and feeding relentlessly through the grass and dry patches of ex-ponds. They are our tallest bird and are quite striking. There were also many other birds to see, of course, including a bazillion great blue herons, tons of the wonderful forster's terns, a crested caracara (a kind of freakish, giant falcon) cruising over the scrub, oystercatchers, skimmers, curlews, etc.

Then we took off to the south and did a brief stop at a private residence to see hummingbirds visit a bunch of feeders, and had pretty good looks at Allen's, Broad-Tailed and Buff-bellied Hummingbirds. From there we went to a pleasant state park that seems to be popular with families for a stroll along the water and got several more nice birds such as the golden-fronted woodpecker, pyrhulloxia, wilson's snipe, lesser scaup and lark sparrow. Finally, just around the corner from our motel we checked out a tiny little patch of water, a little secluded eden really except for the fact that it was part of some kind of sewage treatment facility, and got a brief but stirring view of the green kingfisher, a tiny kingfisher as kingfishers go with a giant bill.

I'd love to say more but we're up and at them. I just wanted to give you all a quick idea of what I'm doing and what a day of birding on a trip like is is all about. Today we head further south and should get into even more southern and Texas specialties like the green jay, harris's hawk and many more. I'll keep you posted as I can.

Birds, birds, birds...

2009-02-07T03:51:00.000-08:00

Loggerhead Shrike

Tricolored Heron

White Ibis

Snowy Egret

9 species in one shot, maybe more? Black-necked Stilt, Marbled Godwit, Caspian Tern, Ring-billed Gull, Laughing Gull, American Wigeon, Ruddy Duck, Pintail, Redhead

Shovelers!

No time to talk! But I wanted to share just a few photos. We are seeing lots of birds. Bye!

Scenes from Corpus Christi

2009-02-05T17:11:00.000-08:00

Least Sandpiper.

Willet.

Sanderling.

Laughing Gull.

So these aren't scenes so much as just a bunch of birds. But that's what I'm here for, right? Anyway, I promise to try and take a few photographs of scenery to get some context in there. Today after getting in to Corpus Christi I took a quick drive out to Padre Island and on my way back I stopped along the causeway and took a few moments to try out my new camera. It's got a pretty hefty optical zoom which should allow me to get a bit closer to the feathered fellows. Tomorrow I'll meet up with the rest of the MassAudubon group and we'll begin our birdwatching in earnest. I'll post highlights as time and internet connections permit.

The stretch of highway from San Antonio to Corpus Christi was something of a relief after the endlessly congested and overdeveloped distance between Dallas and San Antonio. The billboards and chain restaurants and hotels disappeared along with much of the traffic and it was a pleasant drive through what seemed to this midwesterner to be classic Texas scrub country. Prickly pear abounds.

The Lone Star State, Same as it Ever Was?

2009-02-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

One of the weird things about traveling is trying to decide if everything is totally different in the new places you visit or if everything is pretty much the same. As usual, the truth lies either somewhere in the middle, or at both extremes at once. So far, I suppose, regarding my own journey things seem much the same. That is to be expected as at this point I have mostly kept to American interstate-land rather than any distinct geographical region. Super 8 motels, McDonalds restaurants, billboards and trucks, "country cooking", big green signs with white lettering, the occasional sudden flurry of breakneck traffic and a splash of tall buildings on the horizon. Nevertheless, a few unique characteristics sneak in. Yesterday, south of Louiville, there was a long stretch of road displaying the impressive ravages of the recent ice storm. It seemed not a single tree went unscathed, every branch splintered in half, evergreens leaning over and resting on the ground. Early this morning, I entered Arkansas, a new state for me, and enjoyed the slow metamorphosis from a recognizably southern mix of woods and fields to the unfamiliar, flat brown open scrub of Texas. Now, here in Waco where I'm stopped for the night, things have an almost exotic feel. I took a short stroll along the river and the warmth (for someone just a couple days out of Boston) and the boisterous, tropical calls of the great-tailed grackle served to remind me that I'm not in Kansas anymore. No indeed! I'm in Texas.

Traveling Tips #1 and #2

2009-02-02T06:31:00.000-08:00

#1:

If it's snowing anywhere in the country, Buffalo is sure to get some of it. When I started out on my journey Friday morning, I did a quick check on the expected weather of my route. In particular, I was concerned with Buffalo, New York. I am always impressed with the amount of snow that Buffalo gets. If a snow storm rips across the midwest, it always seems that if Cleveland gets a foot of snow and Syracuse a foot and a half, Buffalo is sure to get three or four feet. Crazy. But the weather reports, which I foolishly trusted, said something about occasional flurries, from a dusting to 1 or two inches. And indeed, I had wonderful weather and a very nice trip for quite a while, my car was humming pleasantly, there was not too much traffic, and the sun was shining. Until Buffalo, where near-blizzard conditions suddenly blew down from the heavens. At first I thought it was just the stiff winds blowing the already-fallen snow around, but it quickly became clear that it was really snowing. I persisted for a while, but visibility kept getting worse and I finally pitched in the towel and took a motel room east of Erie, PA. We ended up getting 8-10 inches of snow.

When in doubt, stay away from Buffalo.

#2:

Steven Reich's Music for 18 Musicians is excellent traveling music. Those minimalist, slowly metamorphosing patterns are perfect for zoning out yet keeping alert, and the time really flies by. A nice, big chunk of New York state passed in a pleasant reverie listening to this music. I wish I had more of the same, maybe Philip Glass's Koyannisquatsi. I'm sure I misspelled that.

Ivory Gull!

2009-01-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

Today I did some serious bird chasing. I know I recently said that I don't tend to do much of this, but there was something in the air today and I couldn't resist. It's not so much that the location I drove to was in any way extreme - it's a place I regularly visit in the winter, only about an hour's drive away. Nor the time; Sunday morning is the best time in my schedule to go birdwatching. It's that I drove through a somewhat nasty snowstorm to get there, in my poor little slip-sliding Honda civic.

But this was a bird I couldn't resist - the Ivory Gull, an extremely rare visitor from the arctic, and as beautiful a bird as I can imagine. This is a gull that everyone can love, a medium-sized bird (close to a ring-billed gull) with absolutely snow-white plumage - not bone white, not ivory like its namesake - beautiful, pristine snow-white, with short black legs, black-pearl eyes and a blue-gray beak tipped in mild orange. My picture above does not do the bird justice; I still haven't gotten the hang of taking pictures through my scope. Visit this site for a wonderful series of photos of this startling bird taken by Len Medlock.

It was found yesterday at the southern tip of east Gloucester, spending its time between a little cove there and the dog bar breakwater that runs out into Gloucester Harbor. It has been reliably found there over the last two days, and has honored all comers with amazing views, even as close as twenty feet. I'm not sure if I can really recommend going up there in this weather just to see a bird, even this bird, but it's made my day, especially now that I'm back home safe and sound. Something about seeing a beautiful bird like this that rarely leaves its home turf above the arctic circle, even in the dead of winter. I don't know why not; the pickings have got to be better down here in Massachusetts. It's continually amazing to think of the birds that survive all season long in the long, cold darkness of an arctic winter.

A few other fun birds were also around, Iceland Gulls, Gadwalls, Buffleheads, Surf Scoters, Common Loons, but I mostly just watched the Ivory Gull to my heart's content and then cut my losses as I was getting soaked in what was a stiff, wet sleet out on Cape Ann. Driving back to Newton, a quick spin on the radio of 'Our House' by Madness lent a moment of fun into an otherwise stressful drive through the snow.

Adios, Amoebas!

p.s. For some perspective on dedication in birders, I met folks at the cove this morning who had driven ten hours through the night, through constant snow, from Ithaca NY, to see this gull.

New Year's Birding

2009-01-04T17:20:00.000-08:00

For those of us who have gone a step or two beyond 'casual' birdwatching, the turn of the year brings an extra pleasure. Many of us keep a 'year' list, a list of all the species of birds that we've seen in a particular calendar year. This would not be quite as personal or meaningful as the 'life' list, but it provides a way of freshening the sporting aspect of it with every new year. For instance, every day as I walk down my front steps to my car, there's a house sparrow perched on the gutters, chirping. This is usually a commonplace observation, essentially unnoticed. But on January 1st, this is the first house sparrow of the year, and possibly the first bird, period, of the year (if I haven't been woken up by crows or blue jays).

I usually make a point to go out to do some birding on New Year's Day, and in general often do a lot of birding the entire month. Not only is winter birding great here in coastal New England, but I enjoy the fun of building up my list again at the beginning of the year, when the birds come quick and easy. First Robin! First Red-tailed! First Chickadee!

Of course there's some artifice to this, like there is to any new year's type resolution. The birds are the same December 31st as they are January 1st. And listing can turn towards an obsession, though a relatively harmless one (some birders have January lists, holiday lists, lists of birds seen on television, etc). But birds are a phenomenon of nature, and they are extraordinarily tied to the clockwork of the seasons, and so the year list can take on greater meaning and interest than just the sport of measuring yourself. The first magnolia warbler that I see in high spring is not just another bird to put on my list but a new arrival fresh from the tropics, one of millions upon millions of little reminders that our great planetary system is still moving along, still working.

I did go out on New Year's Day, but it was mighty cold and I went to a nearby park where most of the activity was well shuttered by the snow. A stiff band of bluebirds and a jittery woodpecker were my best sightings, and I would say that I enjoyed myself until my toes froze. Today I had more success; I went up to a state park on the north side of the Merrimack River's mouth that is known for seabirds, owls and winter finches. My best birds were four white-winged crossbills and extensive looks at a flock of lapland longspurs (lifers for me) foraging in the grass. Longspurs are beautiful birds, with complicated faces of gray and rust and vigorously streaked backsides.

The most exciting moment of the day came when I spotted a merlin cruising through a grove of scattered pines. It came to rest at the top of a tree and after sitting there for a couple of minutes a flock of small finches came by. They must not have had their eyes open. They began to land in the bare branches of a tree right next to the merlin's and he shot like a cannonball into the midst of the flock, scattering them and plunging to the ground and out of sight. Merlins have a certain way about them; they hunt and fly with breathtaking confidence and power and with a little experience you can identify them just from their attitude.

Though I stuck around to catch the sunset I missed the short-eared owls that usually haunt the park in the late afternoon. At the end of the day I found myself standing at the side of the road, gazing over the marshes to the west, watching the deepening colors of the sky and keeping an eye out for the distinctively floppy flight of the owl. None popped out before the dark set in but just before I retired to my car something gave a series of calls from a dense stand of shrubs right in front of me. I listened and I watched as long as I could, but eventually the calls stopped, leaving me none the wiser for what they were. Coyote? Owl? Hell, I don't know.

Goodbye, Sue

2009-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

Recently I traveled to Cleveland to spend some time with my cousin Brad and my uncle Jim. We and a few other family members were gathering to support each other and say goodbye to my aunt Sue, who passed away on December 23rd. While the reason for visiting was a sad one, I think we all had a wonderful time in each other's company, a testament as much as anything else to the love we all shared with Sue and the many, many happy memories we have of her.

Sue was always there in my life, all the way back to my earliest memories of growing up in Virginia where our extended family would gather in the summertime to run about in the fields and woods and float down Buffalo Creek on old innertubes. She had a quiet presence but was always there with kind words, encouragement and a genuine interest in whatever was going on in my life. I know that in my case I've pursued a number of different paths over the years and she was always curious about what I was up to and would listen as I would talk about whatever new hobbies or plans I had, offering advice or just letting me talk.

Sue had enormous strength. We all saw that in the last couple of years as she battled cancer and the difficult, painful complications from her treatment. I won't say that you couldn't see her pain but you couldn't ignore the love she gave to everybody around her and took in equal measure. We saw that strength in other years, too, during difficult times when her love and gentle fortitude kept hope alive when others found it hard to find.

Sometimes it's hard to figure out the lines of kinship and friendship, and maybe not necessary to do so at all, but I do want to say that Sue was not just my aunt who I loved but also a friend, a good friend who I loved and will miss. I will miss her but I'll always have the best part of her with me and I know that I'm stronger and happier for it.

Love to all,

Brian

Tip #2 for Birdwatchers: Keep Your Eyes on the Regular Joes

2008-12-21T04:43:00.000-08:00

Birdwatching is exciting for many different reasons, and one of the most alluring is the possibility of encountering something unusual. Because birds have wings and are highly mobile, this can happen just about anywhere, at any time. Discovering something new, something rare, something seldom seen is a big part of what drives us out into the field, whether to the little park down the road or to the ends of the earth.

It can be all too easy to fall completely into this mindset and start ignoring the normal, run-of-the-mill birds that we see all the time. The robins, the chickadees, the crows, the cardinals. The yellow-rumped warblers, the mallards, the red-winged blackbird. The starling, the house sparrow. It's understandable, of course. We see them all the time, and though we don't exactly dislike them, if we catch them in our binocular's field of view we say "Oh, it's just a robin," and quickly move on.

One of the best ways to increase your skills at finding new and unusual birds, however, in fact the best way to train yourself to recognize them when you see them, is to watch your everyday birds carefully: watch how they fly, listen to what they say, notice where they go in the spring, what they do in the winter, who they associate with, how they're plumage varies, and so on and so on. Keep your eyes on them! Knowing a black-capped chickadee inside and out means you'll be that much closer to actually noticing that one bird or flock that seems a bit off, the call note a little strange, and the color of the cap not quite right, and realizing that it's not a black-capped at all, but a boreal chickadee.

This is particularly useful in the realm of bird songs and calls. Many of our most common denizens have several different vocalizations that can be confusing for years and years, long after you've developed the skill to identify them by sight from two hundred yards away in dim light. Think of the robin, with its variable song, its woodpecker-like whinny, its understated call note and its rhythmic chuffing that follows. Following one robin around and watching it while it goes through its little library of songs is very helpful in making sense of the constant chatter you hear all around you.

Getting in the habit of ignoring birds leads to ignoring birds, period, whether they be rare or common. And beyond that, of course, watching birds closely, any birds, is interesting. They all have unique ways of behaving and interacting with the world around them that will lead to understanding and insight above and beyond identification and bird-finding skills. And spending time watching your most familiar neighbors might just lead to a new appreciation and respect for these fellows that have the resiliency to thrive amidst this very altered landscape that we've created. And and just maybe, that will even lead to insights into...ourselves.

Yoga for Farmers

2008-12-14T17:19:00.000-08:00

Just so I could add a new hobby to the lists, I've taken up yoga.

Well, really, I've only gone to two sessions, one last Sunday, one this morning. That doesn't quite say 'hobby' yet, but the experience has been...interesting. Intense, humbling, rewarding, and...enjoyable? Uncomfortable, difficult, confusing. I plan to keep going for the time being.

Next year I'm going to be a farmer. I'll be serving an apprenticeship at a vegetable farm in Ipswich from early Spring through mid-late Fall, and it should prove to be a very physical job. I expect to spend a lot of time on my knees, bending over, lifting things and generally performing a lot of repetitive manual tasks. I thought that it might be a good idea to try a new program of exercise to prepare myself for the job, and in particular to work on developing my core strength and my flexibility. Learn how to use my body better, more efficiently, develop the strength to do so, and increase my flexibility to help prevent injury and discomfort.

So why yoga? Many reasons, I suppose. There's a recommended studio around the corner, for one thing. Attractive, healthy, interesting women seem to frequent it. But more than that...I'm interested in something that is equipment-free, so I can do it anywhere, anytime (a small, roll-up mat seems a reasonable concession). Something that combines many goals into one, in this case strength, flexibility, mindfulness, aerobic activity, upper body, lower body, breathing. Many yoga folk claim a lot more, such at detoxifying, losing weight (don't need, don't want), spiritual growth, etc; I'll suspend judgement for the time being on some of this other stuff.

I went to a studio in Newton called Prana Power Yoga. Power Yoga is a type of Vinyasa yoga where the studio is heated to a merciless 90-95 degrees or even higher. Vinyasa yoga is also known as flow yoga, as the center of the practice is moving from pose to pose in a dynamic manner rather than holding a pose for a long time (though we seem to do some of that too).

I'll tell you, I flush easily and sweat profusely in that kind of heat and humidity, and I lost gallons in both of my sessions. Today, I think the nice lady who led the group got a little worried about me; she took a moment to quietly ask me if I was okay. I said yes, and then worried that I would make a fool and liar out of myself by fainting. Like I said, it's intense! It's a real workout that seems to hit every muscle; last week I was sore in a long continuous wash from my neck down through my thighs. It's great!

And I also really like the emphasis on breathing, though that part is as difficult as any other; it's very easy to lose mindfulness and find yourself holding your breath or breathing shallowly and quickly, out of sync with your movements. And I value the awareness and relaxation that is integrated into the practice. One thing that our leader, Jacqui, said that really struck me was that we can never get truly healthy if we never give our minds and bodies a chance to really rest. In this context, I don't think she meant resting by letting yourself float along with a book or a movie, or sleep, or any of the things we generally associate with relaxation, but something harder and more empty; it's hard to explain, and I don't really understand it either. My mind is always a whirl, and always looking for something to occupy its cascading, restless energy, but often feels just as cluttered and disconnected as always as I jump from consuming one thing to another, whether it be books or television or hobbies or work or whatever else I do in my free time. But we took the time within the yoga session to stop and be still, to keep our breath steady, to feel the center of our strength and purpose as we lied on our backs, sweating away. It felt good.

So I'll be back, and I'll see if I can't work out the kinks, learn some poses, find my center, and finally grab my toes with my hands.

The Lure of the Lifer

2008-12-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

This morning I had the pleasure of adding a new bird to my life list, a dickcissel. A dickcissel is a sparrow-like bird with a stout, seed-crunching beak, generally found during the warmer months throughout our midwestern states. However, according to Kenn Kaufman's Lives of North American Birds, it is "rarely found...in winter except in the northeast, where a few may spend the season at bird feeders." Right on. This bird was first seen a couple of days ago at a bird feeder in Mount Auburn Cemetery. I had an itch to head out today, but I also had a lot of chores to take care of, and also, it was cold. Though I love winter birding, spending hours up at Plum Island in 15 degree and windy weather seemed a bit much. So I took the dickcissel sighting to heart and drove up the road to the world's most famous birding cemetery and readily found the spry little gal (it is thought to be an immature female) running frequently between a rather wilted and dismal-looking rhododendron and the base of a forest-green bird feeder.

I was prepared for a more difficult identification than was needed. As the bird reported was a young individual and a likely female without all the unmistakable marking of an adult male, I thought I would need to pare subtle facial markings and shades from the assortment of other sparrows and finches that enjoy that feeding station. The dickcissel, however, quickly showed up with a clear and bright yellow wash on its breast and a wonderfully googly-eyed facial pattern. Frankly, the markings were distinctive enough in the full sunlight that I wonder if it wasn't an adult female I was looking at rather than a young bird, though vagrants like this are more commonly immature individuals without a lot of experience navigating their way south.

I don't normally do a lot of chasing after rarities. This has become a very popular manner of birding these days, greatly enhanced by the steady flow of information on the internet as well as networking by walkie-talkie while out in the field. I certainly do my share; I very much enjoy seeing unusual birds, especially if I've never seen them before, but I guess I prefer to go somewhere and get out of the car and see my birds while I'm walking around in a nice place rather than driving from point to point and peering out of the window or stepping out of the car for a couple of minutes at a time. I also don't particularly like gassing up and driving a long distance just for the chance to see one rare bird; it encourages a single-mindedness in me that, frankly, often prevents me from enjoying the experience as much as I should (especially if I don't find the bird). Of course, I'll do some chasing on occasion. Certainly, once or twice every winter, I enjoy taking a day to hit several spots scattered across Cape Anne in northeast Massachusetts; one spot is good for king eider, another for the eared grebe, the state fish pier is great for black-headed, glaucous and iceland gulls, eastern point for black guillemots...I can really put together a fun list for the day if I hit a bunch of spots. But the high point is always Halibut Point where I take a few minutes to walk through the coastal scrub (where you might see wintering hermit thrush, yellow-rumped warblers or chats) in order to get to the spectacularly rocky coast. There I'll see harlequin ducks, eiders, scoters and with some luck a few alcids like razorbills (or dovekies!) winging by.

But with just a few minute's free time on a cold winter's morning to spend birding, the lure of the lifer was just too much to resist. And with my dickcissel now in the bag, I can go about the rest of my day with a satisfied smile on my face.

(The photograph, by the way, was not taken by me, but by Will Freedberg on the day preceding my visit, when it was snowing. It was bright and sunny, though much colder, when I went. You can see more of Will's images at: http://picasaweb.google.com/4mrfish/MtAuburnDickcissel#)

Tip #1 for Birdwatchers: This Is Kind of a Zen Thing

2008-12-04T13:38:00.000-08:00

I thought that maybe I’d try something different here, just for fun. I’m going to institute an ongoing series of tips for birdwatchers. Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m a world-class birder, or that eventually I’ll complete any kind of comprehensive ‘system’ of birding or anything, but I have done my share of watching our feathered friends and have a few bits of advice I could share. Some of them might be technical tips on using binoculars, some of them might be tips for observing and identifying, and some might be more oriented to seeing things in a new way or opening up the experience to something unexpected.

And so…

Tip #1 – This Is Kind of a Zen Thing

If you’re out on your own, find a comfortable spot to sit and be still for a period of time. Try for ten minutes at least, but twenty would be even better. Someplace comfortable, a little out of the way and off-trail, where you can hide from other human trampers and make yourself as inconspicuous as possible. Make sure that your legs won’t fall asleep on you, settle in, shut up and keep your eyes and ears open. Small movements of your head are okay, but try not to reach for your binoculars or that candy bar. Just be still, quiet and pay attention.

We generally make a lot of commotion as we travel about, and even if we don’t frighten the birds away we often change their behavior. Try and get a glimpse of what might be going on when you’re not there! Maybe some shy individuals will finally show themselves, or perhaps resume their feeding or singing. Remember that some birds (especially those active at night) may be almost invisible when they are roosting; you might want to pick a good spot for owls. Once a Great Horned Owl materialized before my eyes after I had been sitting still for fifteen minutes - I had been looking right at it nearly the entire time!

Try to use this time to really see the whole picture – what kinds of trees are the birds in? What, exactly, are they eating? How do they move, how do they perch? Do they interact with other birds? How do their songs change or repeat? All too often we spend the day caught up in our own activity and excitement and catch very few of the finer details of what is really going on around us. As Yogi Berra said, “You can see a lot just by watching.” If nothing else, enjoy the time to yourself and come back to the trail with refreshed eyes.

Fooled Myself, Again

2008-11-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

I tend to trust my instincts when I'm out birding, but the mind does play occasional tricks, often getting the better of me. It happens often enough; a flash of color or the shape of a wing as it disappears into a grove of trees seems unfamiliar, somehow, or wrong - I can't quite put it into words but I feel compelled to take a second look. Usually I end up chasing down a song sparrow, a pleasant, familiar bird with a boisterous song that I see or hear almost every time I step outside with my binoculars. This is a part of the program: knowing all the ins and outs of the relatively common birds is essential to make any headway into the rarities you might encounter. The more you know the song sparrows, red-tailed hawks and herring gulls, the more likely you are to take a second look at that unassuming lincoln's sparrow, distant soaring rough-legged hawk or iceland gull.

I went out the Wachusett Reservoir yesterday, ostensibly to scout it and a nearby river for future fishing expeditions. Wachusett is a pretty big lake north of Worcester, and it has virtually no development along its shores and is closed to boats, swimming or wading. It does allow fishing from much of its shore, and has healthy populations of lake trout, smallmouth bass and landlocked salmon, along with a few brown trout and other fish here and there. I had a short hike in from one of the entry gates and to my delight found that much of the shore would accommodate a fly rod. Whether I might dredge up a fish here and there is another story.

As I walked along the shore in a very cold, stiff wind, I saw a loon. I immediately assumed it to be a common loon, though from the very first I was struck by how light it seemed. I got my binoculars on it and thought that the bill looked awfully bright and yellowish, sandy even. I wondered about yellow-billed loons. I watched it for a little while, thinking to get out my Sibley's Guide and check out the diagnostic elements and the ranges, but somehow I just didn't get that excited about it and continued on my hike.

After watching a paranoid group of hooded mergansers and a soaring bald eagle I left the lake and drove over to check out the Quinapoxet River, which empties into Wachusett. I saw a couple trout swimming along in the startlingly clear water and scoped out the runs, riffles and rocks for likely spots a trout might hang. Then I drove home.

Eventually, I remembered to check out the loons in my Sibley Guide. This is where my head got, well, creative. I saw that big yellow bill. I thought I remember the shape of the bill being somewhat upturned as in a yellow-billed. That lighter, sandy color really spoke volumes to me. I remembered noticing the eye of the bird significantly, and saw that on the yellow-billed it was more separated from the darker colorations of the head. I thought back and said to myself that it was a really, really big bird, maybe even bigger than the common loon's gargantuan dimensions. Of course, I saw that the yellow-billed loon would have been a find of great rarity for Massachusetts, though not unheard of in the great lakes region (though still very, very rare).

But any birder who pays attention knows that crazy things happen, and every year some nutty Moroccan Fish-eating Cassowary finds itself on the top of a flagpole in Government Center in downtown Boston. I have to admit to myself that my ego played some role in this; I thought how cool it would be to find something like that and give the head's up to the New England birding community. First I had to confirm the find. I couldn't get it out of my head, so I drove back this morning.

I quickly found the bird, a friendly common loon in his winter plumage, sporadically diving, preening and loafing about. It's possible that I did see a yellow-billed loon yesterday, and today saw a completely different bird; I put the odds about one in ten million.

Anyway, I enjoyed watching the bird. Loons are comparatively personable for birds; they don't seem very alarmed by our presence and even seem to enjoy keeping an eye on us in a generally curious, relaxed manner. We followed each other along a nice stretch of shore for a couple hundred yards or so before I turned back.

Some Flies I Tied

2008-11-18T18:21:00.000-08:00

I thought that maybe I'd share a few examples of my latest endeavors at tying flies, a particular few that I'm fond of for one reason or another. I have to say that if I ever found that I couldn't fish I would miss having a reason to tie these things, and perhaps I'd go ahead and do it anyways once in a while.

This is a Green Damsel, an impressionistic imitation of a damselfly nymph. This would be a good general searching fly for lakes and ponds.

This is a Stimulator, a big bushy imitation of a stonefly, though it would do for a grasshopper in a pinch. A good fly for getting a big splash from a big trout.

The ever-popular Pheasant-tail Nymph, a good match for many small mayfly nymphs, particularly the ever-present blue-winged olives.

An Olive Scud, a sort of freshwater shrimp. Good for weed beds in lakes and slow stream pools.

The giant killer, a Bead-head Squirrel-Tail Nymph. This one caught my brown trout last weekend.

The Mosquito, a personal favorite. I hope to catch a giant bluegill on this next Summer.

My first trout on a fly in 10 years

2008-11-10T16:33:00.000-08:00

I went up to the Nissitissit River today to do a spot of fly fishing. It was a perfect fall day, maybe a little late in the year for indian summer but very nice nonetheless, in the low fifties with a modest breeze and a cool, bright sun staggered with erratic racks of clouds. After I entered the woods I couldn't quite decide whether to leave my sunglasses on or off, and so they went on, then off, then on, then off throughout the morning. The water was clear and low for the most part, showing the muted colors of the stream bed: golden, quavering yellow beds of sand, flinty gray outcrops of rock, dark green trailing beds of aquatic plants and clear brown water stained of a million decaying leaves.

I fished a stretch that winds through a Massachusetts wildlife management area, and though it was far from any reasonable standard of wilderness, once I was on the water I saw nobody else, I heard no cars, I heard no planes. Which was nice, especially as it had been awhile since I fly-fished a river for trout, and being a self-conscious sort of person I appreciated the seclusion to practice my art. I was rusty, definitely, having trouble with my back-cast snagging in the omnipresent overhanging branches, losing track of my slack line pooling at my knees, throwing knots amidst my fly, weight and strike indicator, fumbling with knots, dragging my nymph unnaturally through the water, making unnecessary false casts over skittish fish; you get the picture. But it was very pleasant and peaceful despite several moments of frustration.

I even caught something. I fully expected to get shut out, but after about an hour I fished up through a short stretch of pocket water and hooked a beautiful, 14 inch brown trout. It took a size 14 beadhead squirrel-tail nymph, a nifty little fly. It jumped several times, coming downstream, almost running through my legs as I frantically tried to strip in the excess line, but somehow the hook stuck firm and I recovered to quickly pull it into my hands. I let it go after a second or two of appreciation for its beauty (this was a catch-and-release only stretch of river).

There is a powerful spell in fishing. Being out on the water, amidst nature, near to something as unknowable and mysterious as this underwater world, an ecology apart, yet engaged with the activity of knowing something of this place, confronting it, interacting with it, is a deeply rewarding activity that prods at many parts of our psyches (for some of us, at least; I know plenty of people endlessly bored by fishing). Our curiosity and wonder at the endlessly intricate and varied workings of the planet. Our culture, the traditions, stories, strategies and tools that we develop to survive.

In these crazy modern days I think it gives us something like a correction, a reestablishing of basic connections with nature and survival that we evolved with, yet have grown to a place where they are largely hidden from daily life (though still essentially there). For most people, in this culture at least, it has grown into an art form, a recreation, a philosophy rather than any kind of essential activity of survival. In myself, I'm afraid that the post-modern state of fishing has led me to some ethical uncertainties. When I was younger I pretty much bought into the whole 'catch and release' philosophy, which to be fair is an essential management tool for preserving a resource like trout from the ongoing pressure of an awful lot of recreational fishermen. But though there are different opinions regarding a trout's perception of pain, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are putting these living creatures through an unpleasant ordeal just for our own fun, and putting them at some risk of life as well from injury or exhaustion. I guess I think that fishing for food is really more acceptable, as long as the habitat can support it.

It's kind of like my thinking regarding zoos. From a reserved, rational perspective, I disapprove of the capture and incarceration of these animals just for our own amusement, yet the impact they can have on children's hearts and minds is enormous, and for many city kids, the only way they have to easily experience something of the natural world that takes them away from the little they know and encounter in their daily lives.

Fishing did something like that for me when I was young, and it still does something important for me now. Exactly what, I'm not sure. I just know that I'm not ready to give it up. I'm not too greedy; I'm usually satisfied with just an hour or two of fishing, and if I catch my dinner in the first half-hour, well, there are other things I can do with my time after that. After all, I've usually got my binoculars with me; I can always go birdwatching.

Childhood Voting Woes

2008-11-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

When I was seven years old, my class at school had a mock election. This was in 1976, and the candidates were Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. Before we actually filled out our ballots we milled around talking about who we were going to vote for. I remember that most of my friends, most of the boys, period, were vocal supporters of Ford. I pretty much ran with the current, proclaiming my decision to vote Ford to anybody who asked.

When the time came to make our final decision, I checked the box for Jimmy Carter. I remember nothing of my reasoning, why I needed to vote contrary to prevailing opinion when I knew absolutely nothing of substance on the candidates or issues. But I checked Carter and slyly, I thought, folded over the piece of paper and waited to drop it into the basket that the teacher was passing around.

A girl who sat behind me, and I don't remember her name but she was big and had tightly-wound pigtails with brightly-colored berets, leaned forward and said "I saw you, you voted for Carter."

I turned and looked at her. "I did not," I said.

She looked around and said, louder, so others could hear, "He voted for Carter!" I just shut up then and turned back to the front and didn't say anything else, hoping that she wouldn't bring any more attention to my political sympathies, my deceit, or my cowardice.

And what is the moral of this story? Well, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "There's no moral to the story. It's just some stuff that happened."

A return to an old obsession

2008-11-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

I have been overcome, for the moment, with an obsession from my past - fly-fishing and fly-tying. When I was in high school and for some time into college, fly-fishing occupied a pretty big chunk of my brain, along with the Clash, H.P. Lovecraft's horrors from outer space and whatever crazed psycho I was playing in the ongoing Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Girls came later, mostly; I was a late bloomer in that department. I spent many an hour during class letting my mind drift along, thinking of mayflies and trout, windswept meadow streams of Idaho, my nimble 4-weight fly-rod connected to a yellow humpy or hare's ear nymph. I wrote wholly imagined stories about getting tangled up with big lunkers that got away and spent hours in the basement poring over books full of fly patterns and tying them up as best I could. My specialty was the 'western' Adams, which took a standard Adams pattern and replaced the hackle tail with moose hair.

We, my dad and I, fished mostly in the West during this time; apart from an unsuccessful trip into Pennsylvania and two trips to Michigan (the Pere Marquette, where we got bageled, and the AuSable, which was very nice) all of our fly-fishing for trout took us close to or west of the continental divide. We fished the upper Green in Wyoming, the Henry's Fork in Idaho, Henry's Lake in Idaho, the Roaring Fork and the Frying Pan in Colorado, the Bow in Alberta, the Brooks in Alaska, the Deschutes in Oregon...I can't remember all the spots (we may have fished the Umpqua, also in Oregon, but mostly I remember the first truly gourmet meal I ever had there at the Steamboat Inn - and of that I mostly only remember that the main course was lamb).

Once I got a bit older and went off to college and did some traveling of my own, I developed a taste for high-country fishing while camping and backpacking in the Uinta mountains of Utah and the Cascade Range in Oregon. Though not the most difficult or technical fishing in the world, I just loved watching little brookies snapping at my fly in a high-altitude lake, and then eating them, dusted in flour and fried.

Anyway, life and my crazy mind drifted along and leap-frogged to other things, birdwatching, songwriting, novel-writing, work, relationships, cooking, snorkling, fiddle-playing, what have you. Over the years I only made fitful attempts to get back into fly-fishing - a trip to the outer banks of North Carolina to try some saltwater fishing (a miserable failure, at fishing that is - otherwise I enjoyed myself) and a couple of days on the Beaverkill in New York - great fun but very modest success (two or three 10 inch trout on a hare's ear). And for the last 8 years or so I've gotten up to the Lake of the Woods in Western Ontario for a week or so's Summer vacation, to swim, read, visit with family and also to do some spin-casting and jigging for Smallmouth Bass, Northern Pike and Walleye.

The last couple of summers we've gotten out my dad's seven-weight fly rod and done some casting, with pretty decent success with the bass and the pike. I guess it's taken a while, but it's been sneaking up on me and now I find myself tying every week, brushing up with some of my trout books (reading the water, rigs and tactics for trout, essential trout flies, etc) and researching local waters. Apparently, there are some nice ones. Closest to home, about an hour away, is the Nissitissit, which I went out to see today. I didn't fish, as I haven't gotten my license yet and wasn't sure conditions would be right this late in the season, but a local fly-shop proprietor (Charlie of the Evening Sun Fly Shop in Pepperell - an excellent shop and a knowledgeable host) told me that it can still be fished up until early or mid-December. So I just might get out in the next few weeks. If not, well, I'll continue daydreaming and tying flies until Spring. Or perhaps I'll get sidetracked and start playing Dungeons and Dragons again instead.

Pictures are: Above: The Nissitissit River. Below: The last of the fall colors, the mighty oak. A muddler minnow I just tied. A few woolly buggers I tied this week.

Pictures from Camel's Hump, Vermont

2008-10-13T14:18:00.000-07:00

I think my favorite of the fall colors is the toasted yellow-brown of the beech leaves.

A view from the top of Camel's Hump with Lake Champlain in the distance.

The loneliness of the long-distance mountain hiker. Actually, there was a bit of a mob scene at the summit, but as you can see, it was possible to get a bit of your own space to gaze and contemplate.

Our crew at the top, digging into the goodies. Clockwise from top (sort of) are Kim, Mark, Chris, Anne, Katy and Karen.

Beginning the descent along a wide open face of rock and alpine grass.

A cool lichen shaped like a trumpet.

Camel's Hump.

Karen and Katy.

A lovely grove of beech.

In the center distance is Mount Mansfield, the tallest peak in Vermont. It is also a stellar climb that I have done in other years.

Another view from the top.

Mount Chocorua

2008-10-06T12:43:00.000-07:00

A big rock with a wonderful patchwork of lichen.

Some cool mushrooms. I have no idea what they are. I didn't eat them.

New England at its best, looking from the slopes of Mount Chocorua towards Mount Washington.

Fall colors and distant mountains.

Me, from the top of Mount Chocorua.

Lichen bullseyes and blueberry.

Looking up towards the top of Mount Chocorua, at 3,490 feet.

A view from the top.

Lisa, Emily and Rob, my hiking companions.

A lone raven, drifting south, Lake Winnepesaukee (I think...) in the distance.

I can't quite figure out (other than to do one at a time, in reverse order) how to sequence photographs in a preferred order. No big deal.

Yesterday I took my first big fall hike of this year into the New England Appalachians, to see the always astounding colors of the leaves spreading in unruly washes across the hills, to visit with some of the wilder elements of this planet, to replenish a part of my being, to exercise my limbs in a long(ish) climb into some of the higher parts, at least for around here, and to enjoy all of the above with a few friends.

The mountain was Mount Chocorua in east-central New Hampshire, one of the storied White Mountains, just a bit south of the famous Presidential Range and Mount Washington, reputed (believably) to have some of the fiercest weather and wind on Earth. You can see snow gracing the top of it in one of the photographs above.

Chocorua is not one of the 40 or so 4,000 footers, as it tops out at almost 3500 feet, but it will easily fool you into thinking it one as it has a long approach with a couple of steep climbs and a wide, spectacularly craggy treeless zone at the top that has stunning views in all directions, and, usually, a fierce, cold wind.

Anyway, these fall colors and aging granite mountains are one of the great treasures of this part of the country, and Autumn is just not complete without a trip amidst them, and so I went, and now share what I can with you. Enjoy!