Winter's Tales

I’ve been on hiatus since farm season ended, keeping busy writing grants while I thought about where to take this blog.

I started blogging in the first place to share this little adventure with friends back in New York, and various urban centers across the country. To many of them, my decision to exchange my office for outdoor work seemed both alien and exciting; people were envious but still responded to my plans with the “You’re doing what?” tone of voice that I once learned to associate with extended stays in Africa. But, since at heart I’m still an activist, I ulterior motives. Not everyone has the freedom to do what I did—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get something out of it.

We’ve all become alienated from where our food is from. There are studies showing that urban kids have no idea what a corn plant looks like, or that carrots come from the ground. For the most part, we’re completely cut off from the natural world. In western countries in particular, nature is something to be conquered, bent to our will, rather than something we’re a part of. And we forget that our food, also, comes from the natural world

“So what?” you’re probably thinking. Many authors much more talented than I have addressed that question, but I’ll settle for quoting Wendell Berry:

For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. . .Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

Our health and well-being is inextricably linked with the health of the soils and the air, the animals and the plants, that we exploit for our own food. And as we destroy these things, we are destroying ourselves, with exploding obesity, cancer rates, heart disease, and a variety of other metabolic diseases that are rooted in what and how we eat.

One of the reasons I decided to leave New York and head for the hills was that I thought it was time to learn to live another way, to be truly conscious of my place in the natural world, of the decisions I made every day and their effect on so many finite resources.

As a part of that, I wanted to regain the ability to watch nature’s progress through the year. In New York, I mostly moved from my temperature-controlled apartment to the temperature-controlled subway, got off and walked about a block down a concrete street with more trash bags than trees, and spent the day ensconced in a temperature-controlled office. At my last job, I felt lucky to have a tree outside my window, but my overwhelming view was still the brick wall across the street. I was only barely aware of the seasons passing.

Since we moved, we’ve fallen into a routine during the weekdays. We work from about 9 AM until about 3:30, and then rouse the Puck the Labrador Retriever from his slumber near the window and go for a long walk. We usually wind up either at the cemetery where Puck can swim in the pond, or at the conservation land trust at the top of the hill. (Columbia County has its own land trust.) Since we came here in June, we’ve watched the leaves fall off the trees, noticed the different birds migrating through, and negotiated our way around new streams that rain and snow run-off cut through the forest floor.

Our food life has, indeed, changed. We stay away from industrially-raised food as much as possible, shopping at the newly-opened Chatham coop when we can for local fare, and visiting the Berry Farm store down on Route 203 for most provisions. They’re still running a greenhouse, mostly growing salad greens and a couple other veggies out back. The neighborhood Price Chopper (a huge chain that stretches northern New York, Pennsylvania, and New England) is our last resort. Even though most produce at the Berry Farm store comes from out of state this time of year, I’d still rather give my money to the local guy who’s always ready to engage in a lively discussion about wild vs. farmed salmon and the inner workings of his greenhouse. Try having THAT discussion in the check-out line at Price Chopper!

Since there’s no farming for now, I want to start writing about both these things—first, where my food’s from now that it’s winter. It’s more complicated than I realized; there are huge conglomerates controlling even the food the co-ops buy. (I’m sorry—did you think they got food from lots of little indie food companies?). Then there are all the controversies over the FDA and the food (or food-like product) that’s available in your local supermarket. I’ll also be posting more about natural changes around here, as the seasons march on, the birds migrate out and back, the snow covers the land and then melts away.

Once again, the following post was written awhile ago and not posted. Blame it on the grantwriting work that is piling up on every available surface in my home office. Sorry no pictures this time-- I just want to get this posted and move on to the next topic. This post was written in early November.

While it may be only starting to get really cold for all my friends 100 miles south in new York, here in Columbia County we’ve been getting hard frosts since the beginning of October. Still, that wasn’t the end of the harvest season; while tomato harvest was over as soon as the plants froze, plenty of other vegetables just sat there until we got around to harvesting them—including beets, turnips, carrots, fennel, brussel sprouts, and some greens.

Unfortunately, once they were picked, though, that was the end. In the height of summer, many plants will just keep sending out new fruits to replace the ones we pick. But once it’s cold, everything stops growing, and what’s in the ground is all you’ve got left.

In the midst of the dwindling harvest, we spent much of October putting the farm to rest for the winter. The remains of the tomato plants, along with the stakes that heroically staved off chaos in the field, were pulled out of the ground, along with the irrigation hoses that ran under them. Cover crops—oats and rye—were planted over vast swaths of the farm as the plants that formerly grew there died and were pulled out. (These crops will not be harvested, but were planted to fix the soil and guard against erosion.)

So, as Bob began planning various winter projects and Karyn hunkered down in her warm, indoor office to work on educational workshops, actual farm work dwindled. In an instance of perfect timing, it was at this point that I managed to secure another consulting gig (grantwriting for a Latino community organizing non-profit in New York City), so my days at the farm—at least for this year—are over.

I’m giving some thought to whether I want to continue this blog and branch out to broader food policy issues and talk a bit about the international food relief world that I’ve entered as an employee of Action Against Hunger. More on that soon.

In the meantime, one more story about the ever-entertaining chickens. Last week Karyn and I (along with Nancy, one of the Mexican farm workers, who could probably run the place if her English were better) were harvesting squash out of the children’s garden, which is in full view of the chicken house, when we noticed that, once again, several had flown the coop. Karyn was mystified—there’s chicken wire and netting all around the bottom of the chicken house, so even though they can get outside and peck around the ground under the house, they’re not supposed to be able to escape onto the larger farm, thus exposing themselves to predators and dehydration when they can’t get back inside.

But as Karyn watched, she finally caught one in the act. Apparently there was a hole in the netting, where it wasn’t completely fastened to the ground. This hole was tiny—it couldn’t have stretched to more than two inches off the ground. But the chicken, with a confidence that proved she had done it many times before, stuck her head under the netting and more or less crawled out of the enclosure. (Until then, I was unaware that chickens could imitate crabs.)

Moreover, when another chicken decided it was bored in the big wide world and wanted to rejoin its friends, it stuck its head under the netting and made the reverse trip.

Chickens, as Karyn once again reminded me, are not dumb birds.

Roots and bulbs

Been awhile since I signed in. In a rather exciting (but time-consuming) development, I recently secured a grant writing job with Action Against Hunger-USA, an international hunger-relief organization. Watch the web site on October 16 for the launch of a new campaign to promote Ready-to-Use Foods-- and a lead article in ACF's online newsletter, RESPONSE, that I wrote (with some editing by ACF's communications guru, James). Anyway, below is a post I wrote on the train coming back from a visit to New York City for meetings at ACF:

So who was it that first had the bright idea of eating root and bulb vegetables?

Really, think about it—prehistoric man (or woman) is exploring his hunter-gatherer options and looks at a perfectly innocuous plant growing like any other, and thinks, maybe I should pull this up and eat it. Doing so, he devours the plant stem and leaves—but he’s still hungry. Then he looks at the dirt-covered root —let’s make it an onion-- that he just pulled out of the ground in his haste to get at something edible, and has an epiphany. He could wash this (or maybe just rub the dirt off)—and eat it. Or, better yet, he could sauté it and serve it and add pizzazz and some B-vitamins to that woolly mammoth he just killed.

Somehow I can’t see it.

OK, so I’m getting a little carried away. A day spent harvesting and processing root and bulb vegetables—all of which have to be pulled out of the ground with more than a little effort-- will do that to a person. Seriously, would you ever think that something like this

could be cleaned up and put into a soup? (Those are leeks, by the way, for anyone who thought they were seeing really big scallions.) It takes a lot of people sitting around like this. :

(That's Matt, cleaning leeks.)

In addition to the leeks, we were also pulling and processing garlic (harvested weeks ago, then tied up and cured in the barn), carrots, and celeriac, otherwise known as celery root. That makes two bulbs and two roots, for anyone who's keeping score.

The celeriac was the real challenge—like many root vegetables, it has to be loosened with a shovel before you can even pull it out of the ground. Then it has to be cleaned—which we did sitting out in the field where we had harvested it, cutting off the muddy, hairy roots with a machete, then lopping off the green shoots, leaving ourselves with a big knob that looked quite similar to, but not at all like, a mandrake root. THEN we took the whole mess back to the barn and washed it, using high-pressure streams of water (more or less—this isn’t an industrial operation) to spray the celeriac to within an inch of its life, as the mud slowly loosened its grip and was slurped, not without protest, down the drain in the floor.

The leeks received basically the same treatment, although their roots didn’t provide such a tangled mess to scrape off. The carrots just had to be washed. Since they were bunched up, and the bunches were held together with a rubber band tied around the stalks, we didn’t even have to take the stalks off them.

As for the garlic, it also had its stalk cut off, and was peeled enough so that all the brownish, ugly-looking skin was gone and it, well, looked pretty. (Please remember that the farm belongs to a catering company.)

This post has been yet another attempt to explain why organic food costs so much.

Eat Your View

This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot in the foodie world. Michael Pollan, in a NY Times blog post from 2006, has one of the most elegant explanations for the phrase: "If you want to preserve your view, eat from the food chain that created them." (In the City, of course, this wouldn't work so well. But you get the idea.)

I am delighted to report that the view that I eat is indeed stunning. The examples below speak for themselves:

Katchkie Farm, with the Catskills in the background

The greenhouses

Eggplant

Okra flowers-- and actual okra

The herb row-- lots and lots of basil

Tossing pumpkins

Summer is indeed ending, and with it goes the last of the summer vegetables—the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the zucchini. As those plants yield the last of their bounty, vegetable farmers throughout Columbia County are turning toward the fall harvest.

At Katchkie, the winter squash—pumpkins, acorn squash, butternut squash, and a host of others I’d never seen before—are all in a patch at the end of one of the fields, all planted together and mixed in with each other.

Since winter squash is usually very heavy and very bulky, our normal method of dragging bins around and filling them with whatever we’re harvesting wasn’t going to work so well. (Just picture an attempt to fit pumpkins into a plastic bin that is usually used to collect cucumbers and beets—we’d fit maybe two of them in each. Not very efficient.)

So we spent the day playing “toss the squash”: while Nancy (one of the farm’s Mexican workers) clipped the squash off the vine and then tossed it to me, I stood there catching squash and dropping it in the back of the farm’s motorized golf cart. A little nerve-racking for this ex-geek who could never catch a dodge ball, but I had to admit that it was easier (and infinitely more fun) than the alternative scenario of bending over, picking up pumpkins, and hauling each to the car by our own leg power.

Periodically I also had the distinct pleasure of moving the cart among the squash rows, every once in awhile driving over a rotten specimen that no-one had bothered to move with a sickening, but rather satisfying, splat. This portion of the day further extended the joy of my new opportunity to indulge in childish pursuits.

When the cart was full, we hauled the entire load over to a large wooden bin (probably about four feet square), and transferred the squash into the bin. Then it was back to the squash patch to start the process all over again.

We spent the entire day this way, filling four big wooden bins and then, for good measure, about two dozen vegetable bins with tiny pumpkins. The pictures below do not show those little guys.

Chicken run!

As anyone who has read a farming memoir will tell you, there is no limit to the range of activities that can be accomplished with the aid of a tractor. Various attachments allow farmers to plow, cut grass for hay, haul things, or cut vegetables (such as onions) at the root so they’re easier to harvest. But I arrived at the farm the other day to witness a use that I’m not sure anyone ever thought of before: herding chickens.

Since a laying hen’s life consists of eating, sleeping, making eggs, and, well, eliminating chicken waste, the mobile chicken house is periodically moved to an, um, cleaner place. If Katchkie were a biodynamic farm the nitrogen-rich chicken poop would absorbed back into the farm as fertilizer, a process beautifully described by Michael Pollan in his discussion of Polyface Farm) in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma. But it’s not, and the chickens can’t really be allowed to run free because they’d get picked off by predators. So instead they have their own little chicken condominium, complete with a little run under a trap door in the floor that allows them to get down to the ground whenever they want. The entire condo building gets moved after the ground has endured a few weeks of chicken use.

The trouble is that chickens can get out of the enclosure when the fences are taken away in preparation for the move. When I arrived, Karen, her fiancé Matt, and Bob had already finished moving the chicken house, and four errant chickens were running around free, thoroughly enjoying themselves as they pecked at the bugs in the dirt around the children’s garden.

And, so, reluctant to chase the chickens on foot, Bob decided to employ the tractor. Picture it, if you can: a big, green farming machine—tires with a diameter of approximately four feet, by my very imprecise estimation—coming up behind four running, clucking, occasionally fluttering birds, who definitely have the advantage, as they simply run behind the flowers planted at the edge of the children’s garden and stymie the behemoth in its oversized tracks.

Karen finally managed to corral one of the chickens the old fashioned way—she dove for it. She then carried it, clucking imperiously, back to the enclosure. At that point Bob gave up and drove off to tend to vegetable harvesting. Karen, Matt, and I spent the next half hour or so replacing the fence, during which time two of three remaining runaways wandered back toward the chicken coop to be with their friends, which was really all they wanted in the first place. (Chickens like to form cliques, which anyone who graduated from an American high school will find a little traumatic to witness.)

We caught the other one later in the day, when it was tired, hungry, probably dehydrated, and definitely thinking that the wide world is a little too big.

And the point of all this running around, corralling chickens, feeding them organic feed and oyster shells so that they’ll get enough calcium? They’ve been laying eggs like crazy.

I took a couple home over the weekend and Jeff cooked them into an omelet with fresh parsley I’d picked from Katchkie’s herb garden and—the crowning glory—oyster mushrooms I’d picked up at the farmer’s market. Much to my surprise, I’d learned that oyster mushrooms actually can be cultivated—I’d thought they had to be gathered. But these babies were so far beyond the pathetic button mushrooms that pass for the real thing for most people that they should be assigned another food group all together.

Oysters come in big bunches (see picture), and one full bunch was enough for a good-sized omelet that fed both of us. They were slightly more elastic than most mushrooms I’ve had, and I was surprised at how little water they gave off when I sautéed them. The eggs themselves were, as expected, a darker yellow than you’d expect from store-bought eggs, as most organic eggs have more beta-carotene and other vitamins than eggs laid by feedlot chickens. Just as important, they actually had flavor. (Michael Pollan writes several pages about eggs’ “elasticity”, a quality that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on.)

Combined with the faintly earthy flavor of the mushrooms, this omelet provided the kind of pleasure we just don’t get from food very often anymore—sort of like sex on a plate.

Humming the day away

The tomatoes continue to ripen, and we continue to pick them for processing into ketchup at a plant in Poughkeepsie. Sitting in front of the plum tomato plants the other day, concentrating on finding red ones and avoiding the rotting ones that would explode in my hand as I picked them, I remained vaguely aware of the low humming of bees happily flitting from flower to flower. I’ve gotten used to the bees now and have stopped jerking my hand away every time one comes near. Drunk on nectar (or something), they seem to have judged us neither dangerous nor interesting and generally leave us to ourselves to pull fruit.

Vaguely aware of the distant roar of Bob’s tractor, the hot sun on my back, and the fact that lunchtime was quickly approaching, I suddenly realized that the “hummm” I was now hearing was much louder than the bees’ understated buzzing. It sounded more like an engine. Looking up, I half expected to see a small plane flying across the morning sky. Instead, I found myself staring straight into the black eyes of a tiny hummingbird.












Tomatoes, tractor, sun, and lunch all forgotten, I could only stare as the bird remained suspended above me, beating her tiny wings into a blur of motion that it’s hard to believe exists in nature. It only took a second; I had just enough time to take in her tiny, gray, perfect little body, the curved beak—and then she was gone.

Such fleeting, up-close glimpses are an integral part of the organic farm experience. One of the more disturbing aspects of industrial agriculture is that pesticides, herbicides, and other inputs have left the environment of most factory farms unable to sustain any life aside from the crops that are growing there—no bugs in the soil, and no birds flying overhead, all victims of the chemicals that are considered essential for our food to grow. (For an example of recent stories about pesticide-related songbird die-offs, see here.) Ironic that much of the food that sustains us is actually grown in a dead zone.

But organic farms, with their healthy soils and plants, provide food and shelter for a number of animals (including bugs) that then return the favor by preying on pests, pollinating the flowers on some vegetable plants (including tomatoes), providing other useful services, and sometimes ignoring us and the farm completely. I frequently look up from work to see turkey vultures soaring overhead, or the comical site of large crows being chased by small killdeer birds. (Why they would do this is unclear to me, but they seem to enjoy it and I’ve never seen a crow turn on them and take advantage of its superior size to silence the yippers once and for all. Maybe crows are more patient that I am.)

Hummingbirds often buzz around flowers that contain nectar for them to drink, and tomato plants certainly don’t provide that. But I found some information on another gardening site that suggested that they’re attracted to the color red. There was also some speculation that hummingbirds will hang around tomato plants in order to eat fruit flies and other insects feeding on any damaged fruit. (Thanks to the tomato hornworms, we’ve still got lots of that.)

After some research, I figured that the one I saw must have been a ruby-throated hummingbird, since that’s the only North American species that regularly nests east of the Mississippi. Since it didn’t have a ruby throat, though, it must have been a female, which, like females in most species other than humans, is the less ostentatiously adorned member of the couple. Here's a picture of one, courtesy of wikipedia: