This used to be a blog, now it's a ghost town

It recently dawned on me that my life is currently mimicking a few of the broader structural trends within U.S. agriculture over the past 50 years or so.  That is to say that in a small-scale, anecdotal, hokey kind of way, when you close up the farm and move to the city to pursue a graduate degree, you in turn are mirroring - and adding to - the continued loss of farms, trends of young farmer attrition, and more broadly contributing to the rural brain drain that for decades has precipitated the cultural and economic collapse of rural america.  The consolidation of agricultural lands onto increasingly fewer and larger farms due to an aging farmer population that has no options of generational transfer - because the kids all moved to urban, semi-urban and peri-urban areas in the pursuit of jobs and materialistic comforts and haven't the ambitions of eking out an existence as their parents did and do - is just one spike on the morning star being used to beat the life out of a sustainable agricultural future.

Then think about the politics of it all, the terribly illogical inconsistency between what our government recommends we eat and what they encourage farmer's to grow, the revolving door between large agricultural businesses, government and lobbying interlocutors, and an ever-growing cultural malaise directed by oft-misguided priorities.  Add to this a venerable russian nesting doll of causes and effects, some smoke, mirrors, and red herrings, and an impotent political structure run by people that lack the benevolence, ethics, and all too often intelligence necessary for governing, and you can start to assemble a lens through which to view the pressing needs for change.

I really can't go on, but thought I would break some of the silence recently embracing this corner of the inter-web.

A final note to anyone paying attention: everything above is an overwhelming oversimplification, replete with any actual justifications, data, or actual literary cohesiveness, but I'll save that for graded work.

And a poem by Wendell Berry:

The Farmer among the Tombs


I am oppressed by all the room taken up by the dead,
their headstones standing shoulder to shoulder,
the bones imprisoned under them.
Plow up the graveyards! Haul off the monuments!
Pry open the vaults and the coffins
so the dead may nourish their graves 
and go free, their acres traversed all summer
by crop rows and cattle and foraging bees.
_____________________________________________
Additional, final note: anyone interested in pursuing a project to plant orchards on graveyards (I read somewhere that the roots will follow the bones of subterranean skeletons leaving the buried memorialized in a wooden cast of sorts, pretty cool), or more broadly an Initiative for Rural Weirding (although I suppose the previous call to interest could fit comfortably within the structure of this second)?  I say this in half-jest.

"Oh, collard greens, what do you do with those?"  "Why do the radishes look like that?"  "Look Jim, have you ever seen a beet like that?"  "Swiss chard, how do I cook swiss chard?"  "What is mesclun?"  "Do you have tomatoes?" "I love carrots, but I can't pay $3 for a bunch."  "Kale?"

This is what our Saturday's have sounded like for the past two months.  And we try to offer comprehensive answers or explanations each and every time.  I love to tell people about our heirloom varieties, how by growing them we are fighting against the collapse of agricultural biodiversity and continuing and adding to an important tale of cultural heritage, and how by purchasing these varieties they are joining in this continuum as well.  I enjoy explaining the ways to prepare kale and I appreciate it even more when we get customers returning week after week for their new favorite green or vegetable.

I will talk food and farming all day with anyone who cares to chat it up.  If they decide to buy something that's great.  If not, who cares.  We will bring it home and eat it or freeze it.  We do this because it is important to us.  For us it is the most enriching, self-gratifying work we can imagine and we are passionate about it.

As Horace Greeley wrote, farming is, "that vocation which conduces most directly and palpably to a reverence for Honesty and Truth."  We deal with both, directly each day.  We are at natures every whim.  Last week a customer asked me if the holes in the swiss chard were bad, to which I answered, "no, you just shared your chard with a few slugs."  And today it finally rained.  Too late for our lettuce which pretty much all bolted in the recent stretch of heat, but nice timing for our tomatoes, which are finally ripening.  Yet, we persevere - because we have to.    

We are earning a little extra money and learning more and more about food each day - growing it, selling it, and cooking it.  I know we are happiest when we are engaged in the community of food and eating it and we've never been more immersed.  Lately we have been pretty damn happy.

   
    

Wedding Catering

This past weekend I had the pleasure of doing the desserts for a friend's wedding.  Held at the Frog Pond in Skaneateles, on the most perfect day of the season it was probably the most beautiful wedding I've had the privilege of attending.  The bride's 'do-it-yourself' aesthetic was executed superbly, like a hip-picnic colliding with Martha Stewart and a burlap sack.  Here's the desserts.

Some Farm Photography

Rain All Week and an important Public Service Announcement

With rain on the forecast for much of the week we've sidelined some of our scheduled plantings affording me a true day off.  Chard, Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplants, Melons, Squash, Cucumbers, Artichokes, and some herbs will have to hang on just a bit longer in their tiny, inch by inch cells.

So, today, while Tamara works, I'm baking and cooking up a nice dinner of Braised Rabbit atop homemade Pappardelle with a salad of spicy arugula and a crusty loaf of bread.  For dessert, rhubarb pie with a mint-infused crust will have to do.

I can't help but feel guilty that I'm not outside preparing the beds, but really working the soil in this weather would probably lead to a good deal of detrimental compaction, so I suppose I can rest easy.  Still I could be picking slugs off the mushroom logs or weeding.  Which leads me to the ultimate conclusion that I can never rest easy this time of year.  Alas, I hope to manage a little self-appeasement this evening through outrageous acts of gluttony.  Who knows?

All that being said - the Skaneateles Farmer's Market starts this Thursday, May 19th back at the old hockey rink on the corner of Jordan and Austin.  So get out and support your community and your health.  We'll be joining the Market on Saturdays when it goes to its twice weekly schedule June 11th.
In the meantime, we'll be trying to help things grow so we don't look like fools on our first day.  I think we'll be alright.  I will be baking a few loaves of bread and hamburger and hot dog rolls to help fill out our stand and we got a really cool stamp in the mail today, so ...

Here are some pictures of recent meals we've enjoyed and some other daily happenings.  If you visit this blog to enjoy my typical biting wit, you'll have to wait for another day.  I'm too busy enjoying a much needed, relaxing day in the kitchen.

ALL WE ARE SAYING ... IS GIVE PEAS A CHANCE

BEES busy collecting pollen

Salad with a nice edible flower

Fried DUCK egg with asparagus, truffled cornbread, and some cheese from the Northland Sheep Diary

Homemade Veggie Burgers with black beans and ramps topped with kimchi 

Plum Blossoms

Tamara watering our young blueberries

Pork Steak with grilled Ramps (thanks the Pig)

Soft Boiled Egg wrapped in bacon and fried (thanks Dan Barber and the Pig and some chicken)

Again

and again

and again, but back in time

Too Busy To Blog

So, it turns out that blogging is an activity better suited for the long cold winter.  With spring here I find myself barely having time to change into clean clothes before work, let alone blog about the minutia of our day to day activities.  With this in mind here is a series of pictures I compiled to explain to the interested minority what exactly we've been up to around here.  Stay tuned for more in depth coverage sometime soon.

raking in some seed for our super-flavorful spicy salad mix

march wasn't great for getting the garden going, but it was nice for sugaring

seed packets of saved heirloom vegetables Tamara packaged up for Olives and Grace

Mali moved into the barn!

I moved into the barn!

aw, dang, Tamara moved into the BARN!

one of our (Tamara's) top-bar hives didn't survive winter, which is sad, but also means we get to steal all the HONEY!

Tamara breaking off comb

some of our finer comb nicely jarred

the extraction device from hell!  next time I'm just crushing the comb with my hands

Mali and Tamara straining the wax from the honey

Damn Ethel you taste good!  Many delicious accidents and a pork chop we raised come together on the plate - a crostini of roasted and pureed overwintered parsnip with dried figs, maple syrup and truffle oil topped with self-seeded, gone wild garlic greens and our very own pork chop from Ethel (the spotted pig) ... so good! 

fortune cookies, boxed up and ready to roll

our growing army of raised beds

rhubarb, that early fruit that acts like a vegetable, or early vegetable that acts like a fruit?

up comes the garlic!