Monthly Archives: February 2011

Buried Farm

Posted on February 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

The farm on a gorgeous, cold, bright day in February. Even under two feet of snow, you can still see the shapes of the raised beds. It reminds me of the way waves make patterns on sandbars.

Almost buried kale. These plants looked like mini palm trees in the fall, standing almost two feet high, with wide crowns of leaves and sturdy stalks. The winter has done what winter does – shrunken, frozen, rotted them. When we go to clear these beds in the fall, the plants will slide easily out of the soil.

We spent hours and hours making beds last summer, along with some pretty awesome volunteers. Here they are, such gorgeous lines of them, even in winter under all that snow. There’s also whole broccoli plants, carrots, beets, and arugula under there. The arugula will be easily tillable dead plant mush by spring. The broccoli plants will come flying out of the ground when we pull at them. I wonder, though, if we might be able to snack on a few sweet carrots come thaw, protected all winter by the deep, insulating layer of snow. We’ll see.

The farm under all this snow is beautiful. But I’m ready to get my hands in that dirt. I’m not rushing things along, or tempting a too-early spring. Let’s just say, when it comes, I’ll be ready.

Laura

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Root Cellar Revisited

Posted on February 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Last week I did something I’d been dreading for a month at least: I cleaned out our make-shift root cellar.

I’ve been stashing away squash and onions for years, but this is the first winter I’ve stored anything in a serious way. The trick with storing root crops, alliums, and tubers over the winter is finding the right environment. They all last well given the ideal temperature and humidity, but, especially in modern houses, such an environment is often hard to find. Last year a box of potatoes lasted till March in our basement, and we stored onions and winter squash in our pantry until we ran out, sometime in January. This year I was determined to do a little better.

I found, to my delight, that we have a set up steps leading from our basement out to the bulkhead door. There’s a wooden door separating these concrete steps from the rest of the basement, creating, while not the perfect environment, a colder, wetter home for the roots that like it near freeze and really humid. Last fall, we packed boxes full of dirty carrots, beets, rutabaga, parsnips, and beets and stacked them on the cold steps. In the basement proper, slightly less cold, we stored winter squash, onions, potaotes, and sweet potatoes – all of which like a slightly warmer temperature.

It’s not the perfect storage situation, but it has been working. We’ve been steadily going through our supply of roots. I’ve known for a while that there was some root going on – as can be expected – but I didn’t actually get around to cleaning and reorganizing until last week. I thought almost everything was going to be rotten. I was pleasanlty surprised.

Our biggest problem has been mice. When I opened the box full of beets, which I hadn’t used in a while, it was a pink mess of chewed up beets and mouse poop. Yuck. A few of the potatoes were nibbled as well. We lost a whole bag of potatoes which had been sitting in a plastic bag against the wall – they rotted when it rained earlier in the winter, and the water dripped in from the leaky stone walls and into the ventilation holes on the bag. Other causalities included a few frozen carrots – the carrot box had been right up against the wall as well, and the carrots on the very edge of the box had gotten too cold, and frozen solid.

On the whole, however, I was impressed by how well everything is keeping up. Other than the few carrots on the fringes, we’ve still got a box of gorgeous, rock-hard beauties. They are incredibly sweet and crisp. The rutabaga looks like it was harvested yesterday, and the parsnips, while a little soft at their tips, are firm and sweet in their centers. I culled a handful of soft onions, but nothing oozing, and a few delicatas gone fuzzy that we didn’t eat soon enough.

For the most part, it’s working. And I’m learning as I go – to use boxes with covers so that water and mice can’t get in, not to stack them right against the wall where it is too cold. Which kinds of squash to use first and which seem to last longer, same with potatoes. Having some control over temperature and humidity is the best way to ensure quality storage – but when you can’t have that, you’ve got to figure out how to move vegetables around within the environment you have to make the best of the natural variations in temperature.

Like most everything in farming, root cellaring is best learned by doing. Every winter I learn a little more, figure out new systems that work better. And every time I go downstairs to grab carrots for soup, or potatoes to roast, or a handful of onions to refill the basket that hangs in the pantry, it feels like a little gift from last summer. It’s one of the best things about seasonal eating – every meal, summer or winter, is a gift, a reminder of all the work and love and sweat that went into growing and storing it. Eating with the seasons sweetens the joy of sharing food, and sharpens my gratitude.

Laura

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Over and Over Again

Posted on February 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading blog posts from last year. Around now we were building our chick brooder, collecting tools, crop planning. This year things are quieter. The crop plan is done, the seeds are here, the barn is already clean and organized. There’s time to read and bake and visit. There’s something comforting in looking back to where we were at this time last year and seeing that things are pretty much the same, only a little different around the edges.

What I’m trying to say is that I love this, that I’m ready again, that being ready again amazes and comforts me. I was exhausted in November. I wanted the winter to last forever. I wanted to curl up in the deep snow and sleep and sleep and sleep. Now, three months later, I’ve spent a lot of days cooking and reading and napping, walking out in the sunshine and visiting friends. I’m not so tired now. I  love the winter absolutley, and I’m glad we’ve still got a few weeks before our first seeding, and much longer before we get out onto the dirt, but I’m ready. I’m ready to do it all over again. Spring seemed impossible back in November – all that work, again? All those long, sweaty days, endless weeding, endless planting, an endless to-do list, all that love and worry, again? Back in November, looking beyond the quiet wall of winter just made me want to go to sleep for a long, long time.

Spring’s not here, not even close, but farmers are already whispering to each other, when are you seeding your onions, when are you starting your leeks? The days are getting longer. You can feel the sunlight strengthening, glistening on the snow, turning your face golden. I’ve got a lot of lazy bread-baking afternoons, a lot of skis still planned, a lot of pots of soup ahead of me, before the season starts again. But I’m ready. I want to do it all over again. I can’t wait for the surprises this season will bring, for its particular challenges and sweet, unexpected bounties. I want to do it again and again, every spring, every summer, every fall, for the rest of my life.

Last year at our garlic planting, a smart and fantastic four year old, one of our younger CSA members, asked her mother, “do farmers hibernate in the winter?” It was an incredibly sweet question.  “Sort of,” we answered her.

I think the truth is that the thing that hibernates most during the winter – at least for me – is this feeling of readiness, the joy I take in growing things, the absolute knowledge that I want to do it again. It’s not like I decided, over the winter, that I didn’t want to be a farmer anymore. But for a few months, I wasn’t ready to face the season again: the part of me that is eager for work was hibernating. I let it rest undisturbed. I’ve been doing other things: reading novels, playing with my nephew, visiting friends.

And just like I knew it would, like it always does, with the first, faint, far-off scent of spring on the wind, with the return of the sun, it’s back, the part of me that just wants to work and work, that can’t wait for the season, that knows this is what I’m meant to do, this is what I love most of all. It’s like falling in love again every spring, something springing back into place, and I know that this is how I want to spend my days, and I want to do it over and over again, every year, for as long as I possibly can.

Laura

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Tomatoes in Winter

Posted on February 4, 2011 | 1 Comment

We’ve got somewhere around three feet of snow, and the chickens aren’t sure what to do about it. It’s deep winter all right, and that means…tomatoes!

Yup, tomatoes. Mountains of tomatoes. Dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, whole tomatoes, tomato soup, tomato salsa. We’ve got a pantry and a freezer overflowing with tomatoes. While I’m not eating quite as many tomatoes as I do in August (three meals a day!) – I’ve been eating a lot.

Simple, old-fashioned pasta with tomato sauce makes an appearance almost every week, as does tomato soup with good bread and cheddar cheese. Those are my go-to meals on cold nights when I don’t feel like cooking, when all I want to do is curl up with something delicious and warming. A bowl of summer in the middle of January is warming, all right.

Beyond the old standbys, the uses of our preserved tomatoes are endless. Whole tomatoes go in everything – stew, soup, chili, dal. This is the first winter I haven’t had to ration out whole tomatoes, trying to make them last until spring. We have enough that I can use them whenever I want, throw them white bean soup, or mix ‘em in with lentils and garlic and ginger, or add ‘em to a pot of black beans, along with some frozen corn and peppers.

Then there’s the salsa, which I used in everything. We usually have a jar open in the fridge, and it goes on eggs, on black beans, in quesadillas, with tortilla chips, in cornbread and collards pie, in enchiladas.

Dried tomatoes are my personal favorite. I use handfuls of them constantly: on pizza, in pasta with pesto, on a sandwich with some good cheese, mashed up with garlic and spread on baguette. I toss them with kale, throw them in salad, or mix them with roasted sweet potatoes and frozen corn (another essential winter standby). I also eat them plain, as a snack, like raisins. I dried a whole bunch of different varieties, and they’re all slightly different: the juliets are chewy and plump, while the taxis are crisp and sweet, like tomato crackers. They are all delicious.

Eating seasonally is about eating what’s available, what’s fresh, what’s really good right now. But it is also about learning how to make the most of vegetables even when they’re not in season. I haven’t eaten a supermarket tomato in years; they’re just bad. I don’t crave fresh tomatoes during the winter anymore. Partly it is because I love other things, because on cold snowy nights I want hardy food – squash, root crops, garlicky s0up. But it is also because I eat tomatoes in so many other forms. Whole canned tomatoes, dried tomatoes – they do not taste like fresh tomatoes. But they’re good in winter, in their own right, not as a substitute for something else. Unlike a tomato you buy in the store in January, my jars of whole tomatoes and tomato sauce aren’t trying to be fresh. They are their own thing, and to me, they signify winter as much as a Brandywine right off the vine signifies summer.

Eating local in January is hard work in August – I spent hours putting up all those jars of tomatoes. But having a pantry full of basil-infused roasted tomato sauce and golden-yellow taxi tomato soup makes winter as bountiful as summer, in its own and very different way. For me, that’s been the true joy of eating seasonally – loving each month for what it brings, and taking pleasure in the natural variations in the food that tastes best right now, whenever right now happens to be.

Laura

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