Hello Young Farmers

Tiime Flies

2011-10-09T11:34:00.001-07:00

Oh geez. Talk about a season getting away from you. Not only is it not spring anymore, it's not summer either. Luckily fall in the Northeast Kingdom is lovely. For the moment we've got chilly nights and warm days. Soon the ground will be covered in snow, but for now I'm enjoying the lovely weather.

A lot happened this summer. Too much for one blog, really, but I'll try to give a brief(ish) snapshot of what we've been up to since May.

The last week of May/first week of June my parents, Peggy and Warren, came for a visit. I think I'm safe in saying a good time was had by all. Activities included: stopping by Harvest Hill, checking out a crazy old cemetrey, making risotto, hosting a 'Meet the Parents' potluck, going to the Shelburne Museum and eating dinner in Burlington, having my lovely friend, Therin, over for dinner, checking out the Hardwick Farmer's Market and doing a lot of work in my community garden plot. Truth be told, most of the work was done by my parents as I had to go to work at the Co-op. They made my weedy plot look fantastic! Their trip was far too brief, but much enjoyed and appreciated.

Here are a few photo highlights:

Warren working in my garden plot.

The four of us at Pho Hong in Burlington.

This was part of an awesome paper art exhibition at the Shelburne Museum.

This too.

The rest of June was moderately mellow. We hosted a 'Hardwick Scavenger Hunt' that was real fun and a little out of hand. We had 3 teams of 5 people. Everything on the list was worth a certain amount of points and those points could be tripled if you did the item without any pants on. Who knew so many folks would be willing to drop their drawers? It was a photo scavenger hunt, so all the activities had to be documented. In the end we gathered back at our house and had one of the best slideshows I've ever seen. Definitely inappropriate and definitely hilarious. Some sample items: making a human pyramid, getting 5 or more subarus in the same photo, eating a maple creemee with gravy on top, finding "local celebrities" and getting pictures with them, finding a Monster Energy drink logo on a person, buying hot sauce and condoms at the same time.....the list goes on. I'm not gonna post any photos of this event, but let it be said that it was one of the highlights of the summer.

Our friend Jen hosted a 'Tequila and Tattoos' night. The tequila was tasty and the tattoos were henna. It was a great combination. Some pretty awesome tattoos were put in some pretty awesome places. For the next week or so it looked like there was a secret society walking around town. I had Jen draw a Bitterroot flower on the inside of my left forearm. It looked awesome and if I get another tattoo, it will probably be that one.

In July our friends Katie and Alex came up from New York City for the 4th of July weekend. It was a quick trip, but really nice to have them up here. We hiked to Cheever Falls, went to the Bread and Puppet Museum and hosted a 3rd of July BBQ.

Katie and I playing smooshy face at Cheever Falls.

Mark and Maggie bonding.

A few days later Mark tore his MCL playing Ultimate Frisbee. He was in pain for quite awhile, but luckily he didn't need surgery. Now it's fine, except for the occasional twinge, but it did put a bit of a damper on the summer.

A couple weeks later our good friend Devin and his girlfriend Carrie came from Portland, Oregon for a wedding in Burlington. It had been almost 2 years since we'd last seen Devin and it was so nice to have them up here. They are having a baby in January and I hope we get to meet the little guy/girl before it's a teenager.

Devin looking hip in Burlington.

The first weekend in August, Mark and our friend Matt made their dream of having a taco stand a reality. They sold tacos at this funny music festival called Bonestock. Though the music festival wasn't huge, they actually sold quite a few tacos and had many repeat customers. I think it was a good learning experience and it made them all fired up to really get the stand off the ground next summer. The plan is to apply to farmer's markets and also work the festival circuit. Tacos. Yum.

On August 11th, Mark and I celebrated our 4th Wedding Anniversary. We went out to dinner at Kismet, in Montpelier. It's a really good restaurant that focuses on serving high quality, local foods. Here's a photo of us four years ago:

We still love each other.

Near the end of August we took a 4 day trip to Maine. We met up with Katie and Alex in Machias for the Beehive Collective's Black Fly Ball. If you don't know about the Beehive Collective you should check out their website. They draw intricate black and white posters detailing various environmental and social issues. One of their original posters was 'Plan Colombia' and their most recent is 'The True Cost of Coal' about mountain top removal. We bought a poster and I'm still discovering new things every time I look at it. The ball involved 3 stages with different bands. One of the stages was built on a pavilion over a waterfall. I only wish I had a photo. We spent 2 nights camping at Cobbscook Bay State Park and on the 3rd night headed down the coast towards Rockland. We went hiking, ate lobster, visited a boat building school and slept outside.

I love Maine.

Katie, Alex, Mark, Maggie and Lucha at the Easternmost Point in the U.S.

Praying MANtis?

Katie and boats.

Sub-arctic bog. There were pitcher plants here!

The last weekend in August I had my very first canning experience. Mark had bought 2 crates of peaches and after eating a ton and freezing even more, we still had 1/2 a crate left, so I made peach jam. It was way more labor intensive than I thought it would be, but ultimately not as intimidating as I had imagined. I was so un-intimidated, in fact, that a week later I made and canned peach chutney. I also made pasta sauce from fresh tomatoes and froze about 4 quarts. We bought a chest freezer and it currently holds pesto, blueberries, peaches, 3 turkeys, kale, blackberries, pasta sauce, peppers and soup. We're planning on buying a whole lamb from our friend Jonah and hopefully half a pig from our friend Dan. If anyone wants to come for a visit, I guarantee you'll be well fed!

We discovered something amazing in the North East Kingdom this summer. There's a museum in someone's barn off of Route 16 called 'The Museum of Everyday Life'. Our friend Dan talked us into going one day and it was really awesome. This summer's exhibit was on matches and one part of the exhibit featured instruments made entirely out of matchsticks. The man who made them was in prison for 20 years and the only wood available to him was matchsticks, so he made a banjo, 2 violins and a mandolin. And they work! But the real treasure of this museum is that underneath the museum, in the old dairy barn, the owner has set up a bowling alley. We spent a ridiculously fun night there bowling. Could I feel anymore country? Probably not.

Museum Entrance. That's not a real bear. But Jon is real.

Mandolin made out of matchsticks.

Entrance to the bowling alley.

Bowling! Amy looks skeptical, but she had fun.

Clearly this was not regulation bowling. But there was a disco ball.

In mid-September Mark's good friend Mikal came up for a visit from Austin, Tx. He was only here for 2 nights and 2 days, but we packed a lot into a short time. Activities included pizza and beer at Parker Pie, a farm tour, a hike to Cheever Falls, at trip to the Museum of Everyday Life and the Bread and Puppet Museum. The main event during Mikal's visit was the Chili-Cook off that we hosted. 10 chilies were entered and almost 40 people came to taste and judge. All in all, I'd say it was a huge success. We're contemplating a 'hot dish' cookoff this winter.

Mark and Mikal just above the falls.

Maggie's good about staying hydrated.

Our latest adventure was at the end of September and involved another trip to Maine. This time we headed to The Common Ground Fair with our friends Jon and Claire. Common Ground has been going on for over 35 years and it's pretty much the best. It's an agricultural and sustainable living fair and exhibits and activities there included multiple craft tents, an amazing border collie demo, tons of great food, two farmers markets, a manure toss, animal exhibits, 3 music stages, lectures, classes, veggie exhibits....too much to take in all in one weekend. We volunteered at the manure toss so we got free camping, free admission and one free meal. Here are a few photos.

On our way back to Vermont we hiked Tumbledown Mountain. It was a little sketchy on the way up, but totally worth it. We were met at the top by gorgeous views and a much easier route down.

Don't Tumbledown. It will hurt.

Halfway up Claire and I were feeling like this:

Then I almost got stuck here.

But we finally made it to the top!

Jon was pleased. And warm.

From the top we hiked down to this little lake and took the less steep, less sketchy route down.

Other adventures that are currently or soon to be happening include the 6 week pottery class Mark and I are taking, a trip to NYC at the end of October, a visit from our friends Nic and Sarah for a week over Thanksgiving and a trip to Montana from Dec 17th-28th! Fun times ahead.

Ch...ch...changes!

2011-05-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of changes since my last post. For starters, Mark and I are officially townies. We moved to the thriving metropolis of Hardwick on April 15th and we're loving it! Since most of our friends live out in the boonies, our place has become a central meeting spot and we've already hosted a number of potlucks and dinner parties. Our place is 2 blocks from the Co-op, which means my work commute takes about 3 minutes. It's also kitty corner from my other job, meaning that work commute takes about 35 seconds. Awesome. It's also only 3 blocks from the Community Garden, where I have a plot this summer. Since I'm not farming, I figured I should probably still have a space to get my hands dirty. It's been raining pretty steadily this week, but on Tuesday I managed to squeak in between rainstorms to plant some brussel sprouts, rainbow chard and kale. My plot is next to our good friends Jon and Amy's plot, so we spent the afternoon weeding and prepping beds together. Hopefully next week will bring sunshine and the opportunity to get more seeds and starts into the ground!

Mark finished his long winter of seed packing and is now back at Harvest Hill this summer working as a crew leader and Bill's right hand man. The interns have arrived and they all seem awesome. I worked there for a day last week and helped transplant a bunch of brassicas and lettuce into the fields. It was fun to be out there, but I'm glad I'm not farming full time this summer. However, I do hope to be periodically called in to help out. Mark loves it and is feeling super optimistic about this season. He already brought home a giant bag of spinach and I scored some starts for my garden.

Even though I thought it would never happen, winter is finally over! The snow lasted until almost the end of April, but now the grass is green, flowers are blooming and the trees are no longer naked!

An excellent homage to this change of seasons was celebrated on May 1st. Every year in Montpelier there is an 'All Species Day' celebration. It starts in the park and then a parade shuts down the streets and wends its way from Hubbard Park to the state capital. Here are a few photos. It was a gorgeous day full of tons of great energy (and hippies!)

Opening circle. A few of our friends are in the dance. They had this great body paint on and since it was so sunny, they all got these crazy awesome tan lines.

Mark and I in the parade.

My friend and co-worker William, one of the masters of ceremony for the event.

Show at the statehouse.

It was a beautiful day and a nice kick off to the start of spring. I know the calendar says it started March 21st, but up here in VT, it took a little longer! Though I didn't feel this way in March, I can now honestly say it was worth the wait.

Speaking of things that take a long time, I finally finished the baby quilt for Penelope Ray Prinbeck, lovely daughter to Cosmo and Gwenn, that had been consuming my life for a good 6-8 months. It was a fun project and it felt amazing to finally send it on its way. I first silk-screened some of Mark's jellyfish onto plain pieces of fabric, then cut out more squares from various patterned pieces. I machine sewed them together which took no time and then spent the next 6 months hand quilting. I had had the best of intentions to get it done and sent before Penelope was born in December...but as always happens, I forget how long my projects tend to take. However, it is finally with it's rightful owner and as the family is moving to St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands at the end of the summer, it turned out to be a very appropriately themed quilt!

Finished project!

Mark's jellyfish. My hand quilting.

Closeup.

Other things that have happened since my LA trip include Mark taking a trip to Austin for SXSW. He saw lots of great music, ate a bunch of breakfast tacos, saw a grip of good friends and generally had an awesome time. He spent the week walking around in shorts and a t-shirt in the 80+ degree weather. The night I picked him up from the airport, it snowed over a foot. Oh Vermont...

Mark turned 29 and had an epic dress up potluck/dance party/freeze tag dodgeball game to celebrate. Our friends braved mud season and turned out in force.

Oh, what's mud season, you ask? It's a disaster! Once the snow starts to melt, all the dirt roads turn to mud. I didn't realize how serious this mud was until I sunk up to my axles on Noyestar, unable to go backwards or forwards. My tailpipe was a mere quarter inch above the squishy mud. Luckily at the third house I tried a family was home and a very friendly stranger grabbed a giant tow chain, hopped into his truck and proceeded to pull the poor little subaru out of the giant mudhole where I had lodged her. He then followed me back to the pavement, just in case I got stuck again. You can never underestimate the kindness of strangers. Mud season lasts for over a month and makes every trip down a back road an exciting, occasionally terrifying adventure. Until I experienced it, I never got the joke that Vermont has 5 seasons, the fifth one being mud season. Now I get it.

Maggie and Hank have both adjusted to city living with ease. Hank is busy staking out his territory and therefore comes home with various cuts and bumps, but it hasn't dampened his spirits. My boss and friend Maggie McGuire has found him in her kitchen more than once, via the cat door. Maggie (the dog, not my boss) doesn't seem to notice much difference between town and country, possibly because she's getting the best of both worlds. Mark takes her to work on the farm, so she gets to run around and then when she comes home, she gets to go for long walks most of which she spends peeing on every imaginable surface. Looks like she's staking out her territory too. When she's not peeing or farming, she's generally doing this:

Or this.

At least she's not bored, right?

Well, that's the spring update. Look forward to more adventures in the coming months, including a visit from Peggy and Warren. I hope wherever you are flowers are blooming and sun is shining!

City of Angels

2011-03-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles is amazing. For my entire life I have always had negative thoughts and feelings towards LA, but I had never actually been there. That all changed a month ago when I traveled to LA to visit my friends Ivy and Sierra. As the pilot came over the intercom to tell us that we were descending towards the Los Angeles metropolitan area, this was my first view. Already I was feeling more positively towards LA than I had imagined I would. Who knew LA had mountains? I didn't.

Of course as we descended further, I saw the inevitable rows upon rows of houses and buildings. However, after having lived in rural Vermont for the past 10 months, the sight of all those buildings, freeways and concrete was surprisingly exhilarating. It felt like you could fit the entire population of Vermont, and all of its buildings in one square mile of LA. Who knows, maybe you can. My friend Ivy picked me up from the airport and we spent a relaxing evening eating thai food and reminiscing.

The next morning my friend Sierra came to pick me up and we spent the afternoon at The Getty Museum. Sierra had a conference call that she had to be on for work, so The Getty was the perfect place to wander around while she took care of business. The original museum was run out of J. Paul Getty's house, beginning in 1954. An oil tycoon, he had purchased many works of art that he wanted to share with the public. Eventually his collection became too big and in the early 70's he built a replica of an Italian villa on his property to house his art collection. The Villa opened in 1974 and is still open today. After Getty's death in 1976, the museum was turned over to the Getty trust. In 1983 a 110 acre site was purchased in the Santa Monica Mountains, surrounded by 600 acres of untouched land. A 24 acre campus was designed by architect Richard Meier and took 13 years to complete, finally opening in 1997. My four hours there were barely enough to scrape the surface. I spent a large portion of my time wandering around the artfully landscaped gardens. After months spent starting out at 4 feet of snow, flowers were a sight for sore eyes.

A shot of The Getty from the freeway.

The central garden.

Oooohhhhh.....bougainvillea!

Friends!

Cactus and succulent garden.

Our evening was spent going to Sierra's work meeting, hitting up a happy hour in downtown LA that gave you a token for a 35 cent(!) first drink, walking around Little Tokyo and stopping at a super tasty restaurant for a dinner of ramen. Rest assured, this is no 25 cent grocery store ramen. It was brothy and delicious and involved pork. Yum.

Day three in LA dawned gray and rainy and our plans for a hike in Griffith Park were foiled. Fortunately, Sierra always has back-up plans. We wandered around a Mexican market where the main language spoken was Spanish, then headed to a local place for amazing fish tacos. After throwing out a few ideas for afternoon activities and hemming and hawing for a bit, I finally asked Sierra if there was anything she'd been meaning to do since moving to LA but hadn't gotten around to and she immediately thought of the Watts Towers.

The Watts Towers, also known as Simon Rodia's Towers were built by Simon, an Italian immigrant, over a 33 year period, 1921-1954. On these 90 foot towers he used no ladders, scaffolding, bolts or welding. The entire structure is made from metal and concrete and covered in mosaic from re-claimed and found materials. In a short documentary film we watched about him, it shows him climbing up the towers with a bucket and some tiles to work on the top of one of the towers. The structures were amazing, every square inch mosaiced and beautiful.

Sierra and our tour guide, Howard.

After our tour around the towers, we went into the Watts Towers Arts Center where artist Dominique Moody was having an exhibition. She happened to be leading a small tour around the gallery, so I latched onto the group while Sierra made a quick work call. After the tour, Dominique invited us down the block to the house where she is doing a 2 year artist in residency.
A 3D artist, she is legally blind and only sees in 2 dimensions. Her next project is to build an 8x20x12 foot cabin on a trailer bed which she will then, with the help of her brother, pull around the country, stopping at various art spaces and communities. She is an amazing woman with incredibly warm, positive energy and both Sierra and I felt lucky to be able to spend a couple hours with her.

After our adventure in Watts, we sped down the freeway to Norwalk, where Sierra's boyfriend, German, lives. The evening was spent eating incredible Peruvian food and catching a late night movie at the $2 theater.

Sierra and German sampling my tasty Sangria.

Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny and though both Sierra and I tried valiantly to sleep in, we only made it to 8am. Luckily, it was the perfect day for a hike in Griffith Park. Griffith Park is gorgeous, a lovely oasis in the middle of the madness that is LA. Originally when Griffith J. Griffith gifted the 3000+ acres of land to the city in 1896, the city council was reluctant to accept the gift as they weren't convinced that people would travel all the way to the park, which at that time was a mile outside of the city limits. Of course, as the years went by, LA not so slowly crept towards the park and today it is smack dab in the middle of the city. Good thing they took a gamble and accepted the gift as it is now a major center of outdoor activity in LA. The park has over 53 miles of trails and is a beautiful place to hike, jog or ride horseback. We saw a boyscout troop at the top learning "wilderness skills". I thought it was funny and tried to snap a photo, but then felt creepy, so unfortunately there is no documentation. Sierra and I had a lovely hike and I, of course, took a billion photos. Here are a few of the best.

Nature.

It's windy up here on the hill...

Birds of Paradise!

There was snow on the tops of those mountains. People were excited.

The Griffith Observatory with the LA skyline in the background.

After our hike, we met up with German and headed to Hollywood! We were there the day before the Oscars and got to see all the preparations. German had worked security for the Oscars in the past, so he had the inside scoop and gave us a great tour. The next day he and Sierra were actually going to be in the bleachers outside of the Oscars. You can read all about it at her fabulous blog Soooo....Cal. Here's a photo record of our day in Hollywood:

The setup begins.

Of course Cher wore stilettos!

Marilyn was super chill about having her picture taken with us. She didn't say much, though.

This gentleman was outside Ripley's Believe It or Not, letting people staple money to him.

With a staple gun.

What this photo doesn't show is the finale when someone stapled a $20 to his forehead.
Ouch.

Of course I knew he was an actor before he became president
(mainly due to Back to the Future III)
but I was awfully surprised when I came across his star.

After our adventure in Hollywood, Sierra and German took me to In-N-Out Burger, which is as great as everyone says it is, and then we stopped by Roosevelt High School in East LA to check out this awesome mural. It wrapped around the wall under the fence surrounding the school and the whole thing was 2 blocks long. Amazing. Here are a few photos:

There were some pretty intense scenes in it and it was refreshing that it was on a school. Often the school system tries to sugarcoat history and in this mural, there was no sugarcoating.

After our mural viewing, they drove me to Hermosa Beach to meet up with Ivy. After bidding Sierra and German farewell, I settled into the beach house Tom and Anna, Ivy's parents, were renting for the month. It was in a great location and I spent the next 3 days eating, walking on the beach, biking around, playing dominoes and generally just having a great time. We rode the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier, checked out the scene at Venice Beach, wandered around the Venice Canals and took lots of long walks.

The Miller's at the beach house.

Venice Beach. The guy in white was dancing up a storm.

Ivy and I on the Hermosa Beach pier. It's good to see she's representing the home state.

Ivy and Josh at the Venice Canals.

The view inland from the Manhattan Beach pier. Those houses go all the way back over the horizon.

The lovely Pacific.

Ferris Wheel!

My trip was far too short and so much fun. I can't say enough thank you's for the wonderful hospitality from Sierra, Ivy and the Miller's. I also now appreciate why people live in LA.

It's fantastic!

Of Snow and Soup

2011-02-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. I don't like X-C skiing. I want to like it. I've tried to like it. But I just don't think I do. Here's how I wish x-c skiing made me feel:

Here's how it really makes me feel:

Granted, I've only been twice, both times at the same location and with the same type of skis. Perhaps if I went out in the woods on some super fat, well-edged skis, I might feel differently. One thing I do know is that super skinny, edgeless skis made for speed are not my bag.

Here's why I want to like skiing: Mark loves it. Most of my friends love it. When I tell people I'm still a little apprehensive about winter, they all tell me to go x-c skiing. I like to exercise and be outside. It's a good way to get out into the woods in a season that I normally stay locked away inside.

Here's why I don't like skiing:
I can't steer myself. I definitely can't brake and my current stopping method is to just fall over and/or try to steer myself into deep snow, hopefully avoiding trees. I don't like things I'm not good at and skiing definitely falls into this category. Everyone else loves it and I still have a bit of my contrary teenage nature buried not so deeply inside myself that wants to not like things that everyone else likes.

Fortunately, something I do like is snowshoeing. It's slow, I don't fall over and I can definitely steer myself and stop on a dime. Granted, it can be kind of a drag when I'm knee deep in snow and Mark goes gliding by on his skis, but not being miserable far outweighs any fleeting jealousy I may feel as I watch him cruise downhill. Last weekend we skiied/snowshoed to Cheever Falls. I hadn't been there since this summer and it was fun to see the falls frozen in place and covered in snow.

Here's something else I like. Making soup. Last week I made a giant pot of Black Bean Soup with sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, corn, lemon juice and cilantro. I made it up and it turned out even better than I had hoped. We ate a quart and there are 4 more in the freezer waiting for those nights that neither Mark nor I can be bothered to cook. Two weeks ago I had an incredibly productive day that involved finishing my book club book (more on that later), doing laundry, writing a letter to my grandma, washing my hair, deep cleaning the kitchen, baking cookies, co-facilitating a Mother-Daughter group through our local Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault prevention program AWARE, and baking bread and making soup from the cookbook 'Love Soup'.
Love Soup is a great cookbook by Anna Thomas that my Mom bought for her friend and then wished she had a copy for herself, so I bought her a copy for X-mas last year and then wished I had a copy for myself so she bought me one for my birthday this year. It focuses on soups, but also has some small sections devoted to side dishes and baked goods. On my super productive day I made a loaf of her multi-grain bread and 5 quarts of her Orange Ginger Carrot soup. Her recipes are easy to follow and taste great. If you can get your hands on a copy of this book, I suggest doing so.

Other news.....I started a book club! Our first meeting was January 22nd and we read the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I hosted and made collard greens and black-eyed peas. Katie made cornbread and Lindsay made buttermilk biscuits. Amy brought over her and John's projector and we watched the movie on the 'big screen' which was a somewhat crinkled bed sheet nailed to the wall. Though we didn't do much discussing of the book and only 3 of the 6 people in attendance had actually read it, it was a good excuse to get together with friends to share a meal and a film. Our next book is Like Water for Chocolate, hosted by Katie.

In future endeavors, Mark has decided to work at Harvest Hill this upcoming season in a more managerial role. We'll be moving off the farm to an as of yet unknown location in April to make room for the 3 interns Bill will be hiring to work with him and Mark. I will continue working at the Co-op as well as working for Maggie McGuire and hopefully picking up some other odd jobs here and there. I've also started volunteering with AWARE, so that'll keep me busy as well.

In beer news our first beer was a success! The Chinook IPA was full bodied and bitter, but with a pleasant, flowery after taste. We brought it to a number of gatherings and people appeared to enjoy it. We're storing 5 bottles to taste at various intervals to see how it changes as it ages. We bottled our second beer, a Scottish Ale last weekend and it should hopefully be ready in a week or two. Here are a couple bottling and capping pictures.

Bottling.

Capping.

Our next brew is a Black IPA. Mark and a co-worker ordered some kits from Northern Brewer the place we ordered our starter kit and Chinook IPA kit from and it should be here by Monday. Though all the sanitizing can be a bit of a drag, brewing beer is fun and it's awfully rewarding to pop the top off something you made. There's also a great local brew store in the area, Local Potion that we have been frequenting. The owner made up a Scottish Ale kit for Mark and in the future we hope to buy grains from them and start to head away from the kits and more into the DIY realm.

Tonight we're heading to Barre to see the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They're a trio of 20-somethings that trained with an 80+ year old fiddler named Joe Thompson who taught them how to play in the style of the southern, black string bands. Now they've taken that training and blended it with their own, modern style. It's bound to be a great show and I'm pretty stoked. Other adventures include my trip to LA, which is rapidly approaching, Mark's trip to Austin in March, and hopefully a shared trip to NYC in the not too distant future.

I hope you're all doing well.

Heart.

The Joy of Cooking

2011-01-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

For the past 4 or 5 years, one of my New Year's resolutions has been to cook more. Each year I plan to cook one new recipe each month, and in ambitious years one new recipe each week. I would always start out all gung-ho, making shopping lists and browsing through my cookbooks for new exciting things to cook or bake, but inevitably, my resolve and excitement would soon wear off and I would be back to either:

A. Not cooking ever or

B. Making pasta with red sauce and pesto every week or two and calling it good.

I could always get away with it because I tend to live with people who both like to cook and are very good at it.

However, it looks like things are changing. For Christmas this year, my parents gave Mark and me the 'Joy of Cooking' and it turns out, cooking can be a joy. So far this year I have made: Banana, walnut, cranberry muffins; Hoppin' John (for good luck and a prosperous New Year); apple, cinnamon, walnut muffins and chutney turkey burgers. Currently, I am making Hoppin' John soup, as I made a ridiculous amount of Hoppin' John and it's time to diversify its flavor profile. Maybe, just maybe, I actually like cooking.

On the list of things I thought I didn't like but am actually starting to, right underneath cooking, we can add Winter. Much to my surprise, I'm kind of digging it. Perhaps it's being surrounded by people who moved to Vermont because they love winter. Perhaps it's the beauty of a snow covered landscape. Perhaps it's because, as Mark has told me over and over, Winter isn't that bad if you dress appropriately, get outside and keep moving. Whatever it is, I'm glad it's affecting me. I just got back from an hour and a half long walk with the dogs out in the woods and I was reminded of one of my favorite childhood winter activities: walking on top of the frozen snow for as long as possible before falling through to the powder underneath! I love the challenge and anticipation of avoiding a boot full of snow.

The next thing I hope to add to my list of things I thought I didn't like but actually do is Los Angeles. I've never had a desire to go, but now 2 close friends, Ivy and Sierra live there and it seems like it's probably time to check it out. I've always bagged on L.A. but until I've actually been there, I guess I don't have the right to. Though I'm a little wary, I have complete faith that Ivy and Sierra will both show me sides of LA I never knew existed. Plus, the idea of sitting on a beach in February and all the amazing Asian and south of the United States food Sierra has promised to take me to leads me to believe that this trip will be awesome. Granted, it may not be warm and sunny in February, but I bet it will be a hell of a lot warmer than Vermont!

Hey 2010, it's been real.

2010-12-28T13:02:00.000-08:00

Not too much has happened since my last post. We do, however, have a new member of the family. Everyone: meet Hank.

Hank appeared on the farm sometime in July. He skulked around for a few months, living off our trash and probably some small animals, but never getting close enough for any of us to catch him. Mark started feeding him in November and in December, when it got really cold, we finally lured him inside. Turns out, he's a super affectionate, super friendly cat. I'm not much of a cat person, but I am a Hank person. Maggie is still getting used to not being an only pet. Most of her time is now spent staring at Hank, either from across the room or an inch from his face. Hank doesn't seem to mind. We're currently dog sitting for our friends Therin and Ellick's dog Ruby. Ruby has jumped right on board with the cat staring and she and Maggie spend quite a bit of time trying to herd Hank around the house or staring at him from the couch.

On the 11th, Mark and I brewed our first ever batch of beer. It's a Chinook IPA and should be ready sometime in February. On the 25th, we siphoned the beer into a carboy to begin the secondary fermentation. In 2-3 weeks we'll bottle and then about 2 weeks after that, it'll be ready for the tasting. Here's Mark siphoning the beer.

Another exciting late December event was a visit from our dear friend Katie. She was here for about 5 days and we did our best to convince her to move to Vermont. Though I don't think we succeeded, we did have a good time trying. Key persuasion techniques involved long walks in the snow, a visit to the Fairbanks Museum, watching 'Love, Actually', a trip to her cousin's bakery 'Elmore Mountain Bread', a giant Solstice bonfire, a trip to 'The Alchemist' a great brewery/restaurant in Waterbury where we ended up running into her cousin just hours after we left the bakery, a Christmas tree lighting (with real candles) and carol singing event at a co-worker's house and lots of reminiscing. The night before Katie left, our buddy Jake flew into Burlington and made the hour and a half drive to come see us here in Walden. It was great to have some of the old crew back together.

Though Mark and I don't really celebrate Christmas, I have still hung onto the idea of homemade raviolis with red sauce and pesto on Christmas Eve. For as long as I can remember, that's been my family's tradition and I have no intention of giving it up just because I'm not big on Christmas. The past few years I've made do with homemade pasta, but as a Solstice present this year, Mark gave me a ravioli press. The filling I made was from a little cookbook that my Great-Aunt Ada gave my Mom year's ago. It involves a number of different animals, lots of garlic, egg and cheese and it's delicious. I also made red sauce and we broke out some of the pesto that I made back in August. Here's a photo of Mark with some of the finished product. I made both spinach and regular dough. The dough was a little sticky at first and it turns out that a wine bottle, though it does work, is not quite as efficient as a rolling pin, but everything turned out tasty in the end.

One of my favorite presents this year was a lovely, felted bag, made by my very own mother. It was her first felting project and as far as I'm concerned, she did a fantastic job! Thanks Ma.

In closing, I'd like to share some of my favorite things I experienced in 2010. In no particular order:

1. Purple viking potatoes.

2. Music. More specifically: Gorillaz-Plastic Beach, The soundtrack to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Pete Bernhard-The Things I Left Behind, Langhorne Slim, The Devil Makes Three, Grateful Dead-American Beauty, Broken Bells, Of Montreal, Old School Freight Train.....and so many more, but those are definitely some of the top faves.

3. Visiting Nic and Sarah in Bozeman, MT.

4. Both writing and receiving letters. Having pen pals is one of the best excuses to buy fun stationary and note cards.

5. Farming.

6. Road trip! Montana to Oregon to California to Colorado to North Carolina to Virginia to Vermont. Why not? Even better than the freedom of the road were the lovely friends and family we got to visit along the way.

7. Spending a few months in my hometown. This involved being in Annie (that's right, the musical), working at Chapter One Bookstore again, spending time with friends, having Katie, Audrey, Nic and Sarah come visit, walks by the river, darts and drinks with Ryan and Britany, some winter hikes and lots of crafting.

8. The Pacific Ocean.

9. Hiking. East Coast, West Coast, No Coast, it was all pretty.

10. Finding a new/another place to call home, full of friendly, like-minded people, a gorgeous land base and opportunity. Vermont, I see some good times in our future.

I hope all of you have as good a 2011 as I did a 2010.
Happy New Year.

Welcome Winter

2010-12-07T08:02:00.001-08:00

When I say, "Welcome, Winter..." I'm trying to be sincere. However, I'm still having trouble getting as excited as everyone else seems to be about the 4-6 months of winter peering over the horizon. Mark is having no trouble getting super amped about the snow. He already bought Cross Country ski's and is looking into getting some snow shoes. He has also already been invited on two winter camping trips, both of which I have declined to attend. I am slowly getting ready for winter. I bought some heavy duty snow boots and I was gifted a pair of snowshoes by a wonderful woman at our local bookstore. A friend and co-worker also offered to give me a free snowboarding lesson. Seeing as it's been about 12 years since I last strapped my feet to anything designed to take me quickly downhill, it's probably time to give it another try.

We've been busy since I last posted. Mark and I each took a week-long vacation. Me to Montana for a wedding and he to NYC and then North Carolina for the wedding of friends Dan and Julie, who he met doing E-corps in Austin.
Most of Mark's trip was spent in transit: a train from Montpelier to NYC, then a bus to New Jersey, then he and his friend Eric drove from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Then he repeated that in reverse. Luckily, he did get to spend some time in both New York and North Carolina, not just in transit. I had a great time in Montana. I attended a beautiful wedding of a childhood friend and her British fiancee' (now husband.) Hamilton was full of British folks and it was fantastic! I also saw a number of other friends and generally had a great time.

When we both returned to VT, we worked for a few days and then Mark's Dad and Step-Mom, Joel and Deb, came for a visit. We all had a great time touring around, looking at the leaves, making and eating tasty food and looking at pictures of Mark's new nephew who Deb and Joel had visited in Wisconsin before coming to Vermont. It was a fun visit and I'm so glad they got to see where we spent our summer and where we'll be staying for at least the next 2 and a half years. It's a somewhat arbitrary number, but we made the commitment to ourselves to stick around Vermont for at least 3 years. After all the moving we've done in the last three, it seemed like a good time to settle down for a bit, get to know a place and solidify some friendships, all things that are hard to do when you move every 6 months.

The end of our season consisted of harvesting and washing literally tons of root vegetables. 38 rows of potatoes, 12 rows of carrots, 4 rows of beets as well as a number of above ground crops all had to be harvested before the ground froze. We managed to get everything out and spent days and days in the barn, shoveling veggies into the giant barrel washer and then sorting and packing them as they rolled out onto the long tables we had set up. Overall, it was a really good season and a definite opposite experience from farming in Texas. Whereas a good 1/4 to 1/3 of our time in Texas was taken up by irrigation, we only had to irrigate once in Vermont. Whereas in Vermont we don't have the bull nettle, fire ants and rattlesnakes that abound in Texas, we do have many diseases, mostly associated with the cool, wet weather, that would never have survived in Texas. Mark and I are both very glad we ended up in Vermont. It's a pretty awesome place. Here's a photo of Me, Mark, Maggie, Bill and Brandon near the end of the season. Brandon left right before Halloween and though we miss him, Mark and I have settled nicely into life without roommates.

So, now that farming is over, we sit around and eat bonbons all day, right? Nope. As soon as the season ended, Mark started right into his new job as a seed packer at High Mowing Organic Seeds. They're a local, organic seed company, located in Wolcott. Their website is pretty great, especially if you're into farming/gardening. Just think, if you order seeds this year, they may very well have been packed by Mark.

I started off November working a few days for Bill here and there. I also started working in the produce section of the co-op two nights a week as well as working for a wonderful woman I met at Community Dinner, named Maggie McGuire. Community Dinner is held every Thursday, from noon to one in Hardwick. It's a free lunch and most of the food is supplied by local farmers, the co-op and the food bank. Robin Cappuccino started Community Dinner back in 1992 and has been spearheading it every Thursday, except for the 2 months that he is in India, working with his parents organization: Child Haven International
A few weeks ago we attended an Indian dinner and Sari fashion show benefiting the organization. It was well attended and helped to remind me what an unusual and interesting place in which we have landed.

In early November I applied for a collective position at our local co-op, Buffalo Mountain, and I was hired on the 18th. Buffalo Mountain is unlike any other place I have ever worked. It is an actual collective, meaning no bosses and no hierarchy. I'm still working in produce and now I am also the re-stocker for a large amount of the grocery items. For a small store, we manage to pack a lot of items onto those shelves! My first collective meeting is this Wednesday. I'm excited to be working in an environment where we can all make schedules and decisions that work for us, where decisions and policies are not handed down from a higher authority, but come from the folks that are actually doing the work. It's an eclectic crew of people and I'm stoked to be a part of it.

Aside from our new jobs, we've gone on a few hikes, worked on some art projects and had dinners and brunches with friends. A few weeks ago we hiked the highest peak in Vermont, (Mt. Mansfield elev: 4,393ft) with our friends Matt and Emiko.The wind at the top was incredible! I could lean into it and be held up solely by the wind pushing me back. Emiko and I studied abroad in Ecuador together back in 2004 and she recently moved to Montpelier after farming in Bozeman, MT all summer. I am excited to have her around.

For my 28th birthday, one of my favorite singers, Langhorne Slim, came to Burlington, so Mark and I headed to the big city. We had hot beverages with a friend, Mark bought XC skis, we ate great Vietnamese food and then danced our asses right off at the show. All in all a great day. Another exciting thing happened on the 1st, my friend Katie Hollingshead Meek had her 2nd baby, Asher Allen Meek. What a lovely birthday present! Here's a photo of the pillow I made for him and the two stuffed animals I made for his very proud older brother, Eli.

In other news, Mark started and Etsy shop: Mumbledown where he's selling silkscreened patches. Check it out!

Well, I'm sure there's more news, but can't think of anything at the moment. To those of you who made it all the way through this blog, thank you! Hopefully in the future, now that we have
internet at the house (!) they will be more frequent and shorter. Enjoy the transition into winter.

Hello Fall

2010-09-19T16:15:00.000-07:00

Well, here we are, days from the Autumnal Equinox and I have finally acknowledged that I have let the summer slip past and with it all my stories for Hello Young Farmers. Here’s the thing about farming, when there’s stuff to write about, you’re too busy and tired to write. Now it’s been so long since my last post that the idea of doing a summer long re-cap is too daunting. Perhaps I can manage to keep this short, yet wildly fascinating!

The season has gone well. The weather has been all over the place, a week of highs in the 40’s in mid-July and then a few days in early September where it was in the 90’s. These days it is settled into a fairly consistent pattern of lows in the 40’s and highs in the 60’s as we head into fall. When the leaves began to change colors the third week of August I was dismayed, imagining snow by Labor Day. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded.

This summer was full of fun and hard work. The seeding, transplanting and weeding of May and June quickly gave way to the non-stop harvesting of July and August. Here's a photo of Mark watering a trailer full of seedlings right before we transplanted them into the field. The crops that needed to be harvested every other day and subsequently took up an enormous amount of our 40 hour work weeks included peas, beans, zucchini, summer squash and tomatoes.
Other crops that were harvested less frequently, but still a few times a week were carrots, beets, radishes, broccoli, kale and chard, among others. One thing we learned when harvesting carrots is that there are some pretty racy vegetables out there. When we weren’t harvesting, we were washing and packing the harvest for our wholesale orders, CSA members and Farmer’s Markets. The weeds in the fields grew waist high and some crops were almost lost until Bill hired a giant weeding crew to work for a week to get the fields back under control. This season I have been in charge of putting out our weekly CSA newsletter for our 91 members. It’s been a steep learning curve, but I’ve come a long way from the 1^st issue which took me nearly 5 hours and didn’t really fit within the borders of the page. I’ve grown to enjoy it and I now look forward to the 2 hours each week where I get to reflect back on the previous week and tell our members what we’ve been doing to keep ourselves busy.

Along with farming, this summer has consisted of some lovely hikesa visit from my parents, visits from our friends Adam, Nicki, Eric and John, exploring small VT towns and back country roads, fishing and various artistic pursuits. I’ve done some sewing for myself and others and Mark has painted a few silk screens, including this one for a farm t-shirt, and just today finished the first draft of his book, My Best Friend Dave. We look forward to the next week in which I will be flying to Montana for a wedding and Mark will be busing to NYC to visit friends and then road tripping to North Carolina for a wedding as well. In early October, Mark’s Dad and Step-Mom will be coming for a visit. We’re hoping that the gorgeous fall colors stick around long enough for Joel and Deb to enjoy them.

Vermont has been good to us so far and it is with excitement and nervousness that I look toward this winter. We will be staying at Harvest Hill through the end of October. Most of our work time will be spent harvesting and washing thousands of pounds of carrots and potatoes as well as cleaning up the greenhouses and fields for their winter rest. Starting in November, Mark will be working at High Mowing Seeds, an organic seed company based in Wolcott, VT, packing and shipping seeds. I have just begun the job search and have yet to nail down winter employment. Whatever I do, I plan on leaving enough free time to volunteer with local domestic violence and sexual assault organizations. Vermont winters sound daunting with their freezing temperatures and limited daylight, but locals assure us that if you pick up an outdoor sport, the winter goes by a lot quicker. I’m hoping that X-C skiing will be my new favorite past time once the snow starts falling. Hopefully with the end of the season, we will have more time to update HYF and reflect upon the past season as well as giving you all updates on our Vermont lives.

Happy Fall!

Part of the onion harvest

Maggie, ready for the work day

Mushroom Mania

2010-06-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about working at Harvest Hill is that every so often we get to go on field trips to other farms. Bill knows a lot of other farmers in the area and is committed to taking us on outings to learn about types of farming that he doesn’t do, such as mushrooms, herbs, and orchards. He wants this internship to be an educational experience as well as a taste of what running a functional farm entails.

On May 26^th, we went to Wild Branch Farm to learn about mushroom and mycelium cultivation. It was awesome. What some people may not know is that mushrooms are only a small portion of the organism known as mycelium. Mycelium is the main part of the organism and mushrooms are just the fruit of the mycelium. Glenn and his wife Cathy have a diverse farm involving vegetables, cows, goats and mushrooms. You can check out their website at www.wildbranchmushrooms.com The mushrooms they grow for market are oyster mushrooms, but Glenn is also interested in cultivating mycelium that will aid in environmental clean-up. As both primary and secondary decomposer, mycelium is effective in removing harmful elements from the surrounding area and consolidating the toxic elements it removes.

Glenn cultivates his mushrooms from wild mushrooms that he collects. Once he finds a mushroom he likes, he brings it into his lab and shakes it in front of this fan system while holding a Petri dish underneath to catch the spores. The Petri dishes are then left to grow more spores.
Once he has grown a strong enough culture, he then uses the spores he has grown to inoculate more Petri dishes and continues this cycle.
If the spawn is fully grown, but not immediately needed, it can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a year. Once he is ready to grow mushrooms from the cultures, he soaks barley or oats in hot water. Once the grain has cooled, he packs it into a vacuum seal-able bag and adds mushroom spawn. He then seals the bags and lets the spawn feed on the grain for approximately a month. Below are three pictures of these grain/spore mixtures in various stages of growth.

Once the spawn has fed on the barley for long enough, it’s time to add this mixture to straw. The first step in this process is to steam straw in a wood-oven fired steamer.

The straw is steamed for 4 hours and then left to cool for about 30 minutes. Once the straw is cool enough to handle, it is pitchforked onto a stainless steel table and mixed around to get all the hot pockets of leftover steam out. Next, the bag of spores and grain is opened and mixed into the straw. The grain has a very earthy, fungal smell, somewhat of a cross between tempeh, mushrooms and good soil. You can see Brandon partaking of the smell in the second photo down.

After the straw has been thoroughly inoculated with the spores, it is stuffed into giant bags made out of thick, greenhouse plastic. The straw is thoroughly compacted as too much air will cause the straw to grow bacteria and spoil the mushrooms. Next, the tops are tied off and small holes are cut in the bags to allow the mushrooms to emerge. It takes about two weeks for the mushrooms to poke through the bags and then another 5-10 days to become fully grown. Oyster mushrooms grow best at around 60-70 degrees with 90% humidity. Though many mushrooms can grow in the dark, oyster mushrooms need light to grow.

Glenn built a special room connected to his greenhouse for the mushroom bags to be hung. In the winter the room is heated by a wood stove, as is his greenhouse. He also set up a special drip line that drips water onto the walls, which helps control the humidity level in the room. The bags are hung on stands made out of rebar and left until the mushrooms mature.

Our afternoon at Wild Branch was great. Aside from learning about mushroom cultivation, we also got to see baby sheep and goats and Mark and I bought some of the best ground beef either of us have ever tasted. Glenn and his family have 200 acres and only 9 cows, so the free range cows have all the grass they could possibly want. There also seems to be something about meeting the farmer and seeing where the animal or plant lived out its days to make the food taste that much better. As an added bonus, Glen gave us a mushroom bag that had already fruited twice to bring back to the farm with us. As I write this, the bag has just started producing mushrooms again. Soon enough, we will be eating some very local oyster mushrooms!

Welcome to Harvest Hill

2010-06-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

We finally made it. After 2.5 months on the road, then 4 months in Montana, then another month on the road, we arrived at Harvest Hill farm in Walden, VT on April, 17th. When we arrived, the farm looked like this:

With snow still on the ground, I was skeptical that there was any farming to be done, but 2 days later, our job started. The first weeks of work involved lots of seed starting in the greenhouse, transplanting seedlings into bigger trays, and eventually transplanting tomatoes from their trays into 5 rows in the greenhouse. We also did some outside work, primarily preparing the fields for planting. Bill even let me drive the tractor on day two! It was a little scary and I kept picturing myself somehow rolling this $28,000 machine or ramming it into a rock pile at the edge of the field. Needless to say, I did neither of those things and emerged from the day unscathed.

Our housing at Harvest Hill is a giant leap up from Montesino. Instead of living in an airstream trailer or a construction zone, we inhabit an old farmhouse that was built in 1919 and has a great view. Though it has its quirks, there is a working kitchen and indoor plumbing and all in all, it’s quite cozy. The house is heated by 2 woodstoves, one in the kitchen that can also be used for cooking and one in the basement. They are both excellent heat sources, putting off more heat than I would have imagined possible. Our first few nights here we really loaded the wood into the stove and managed to get the house up to 90 degrees before finally figuring out a good balance to keep the fire going all night, but also keep the house at a reasonable temperature.

A week and a half into our stay we got a surprise in the form of 16 inches of snow!

Maggie had to take bounding leaps to get anywhere and the snow was over the top of my mud boots.
The snow was picturesque and somewhat magical to behold. After a fairly dry winter in Montana, it was nice to see a little moisture.

Our first weekends were spent exploring the surrounding areas. We went to a great brewery, Trout River, which serves pizza on the weekends and took in a movie at the Catamount Arts Center in St. Johnsbury. We also familiarized ourselves with the local Co-op, Buffalo Mountain, and got library cards. Vermont is unique in that it has many functional, self sufficient, small towns. Most towns have a grocery store or co-op, library, post office, gas station and at least one good restaurant. One weekend we went into Montpelier, which is the smallest of all the state capitals, weighing in at around 8,000 people. Our boss, Bill, also informed us that it is the only state capital without a McDonald’s. While in Montpelier, we took in the opening day of the farmer’s market, went to a ‘Greenup Day’ festival and finished the evening at a craft brewery festival.

One Sunday we decided to hike Wheeler Mtn. Loop. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous hike, but it afforded some nice views at the top.

We also ran into our waitress from Trout River Brewery on our way back down. Vermont is a small state in more than one sense.

In the beginning of May, our co-workers and housemates, Brandon and Miranda and Miranda’s dog Cookie showed up. After a few days of Maggie making a great show of being the dominant dog, she and Cookie became good friends. On their 2nd day here, we all went for a walk in the woods surrounding the farm and Cookie met a porcupine. We think he must have tried to bite the porcupine, because his whole muzzle and nose were covered in literally hundreds of quills, as well as his paw and the inside of his mouth. The rest of the evening was spent holding Cookie still while Mark and Miranda pulled quills out with pliers. Cookie was a trooper, but finally enough was enough and he started biting any pliers that came near his face, putting an end to the quill extraction. The next day Miranda had to take him to the vet to get the rest of the quills removed. It turned out to be a good thing she did as there were quills stuck down in Cookie’s throat that we never would have been able to pull out while he was conscious. After a week or so of limping around, Cookie was back to his happy self. It’s been over a month and he has yet to encounter any more porcupines, so hopefully he learned his lesson. He is, however, still afraid of pliers, tucking his tail and slinking away any time one of us wields a pair.

The last month has been filled with transplanting, watering and weeding. 3 weeks ago we planted 13,000 onion plants in two days. Now we’re hand weeding those 13,000 onions. We spent a morning planting 1,700 pounds of potatoes. A good yield is 7-10 pounds of potatoes for every pound planted, meaning that we will be harvesting anywhere from 12,000 to 17,000 pounds of potatoes, come fall. Other veggies we have planted into the fields include broccoli, cabbage, head lettuce, lettuce mix, carrots, radishes, beets, kale, chard, brussel sprouts, peas, beans, corn, basil, winter squash, summer squash, artichokes, peppers, cherry tomatoes, eggplant and sweet potatoes. We have also spent countless hours, weeding, pruning and mulching blueberry plants and transplanting flowers.

All in all, we really love Vermont and our experience at Harvest Hill so far. Bill is a good boss, our location is gorgeous and the surrounding communities are welcoming and lovely. For such a small population, there is a lot going on, including Vaudeville shows, puppet troops, 5K races, agriculture/sustainability fairs and lots of farmer’s markets. It’s good to finally be here. I will leave you with a few more photos.View from Route 2, near the farm.

A storm rolling in over the greenhouses.

The onion patch before we planted 1,300 onions.

The view from our front porch.

Fast Forward

2010-05-22T10:15:00.001-07:00

Truth be told, I’m tired of writing about adventures that happened months ago. I’m ready to start writing about new, Vermont farm-centric adventures. However, I feel that the past 6 months should at least be touched upon, so here’s a condensed version.

New York City was even more fun that expected. We walked all over the place, ate great food, saw good friends and took in our fill of the big city. We walked from Brooklyn to Manhattan, via the Brooklyn Bridge, went to Central Park, took the subway to Coney Island, walked all over Brooklyn, saw old friends and decided that though New York was great to visit, we definitely aren’t city people. However, we are both glad we have friends who live there, because it’s a great excuse to go back someday.

After leaving New York City, we headed south, hoping to make it to Charlottesville, Virginia to get our car fixed at the same mechanic who fixed our clutch. It became apparent rather quickly that this wasn’t in the cards. Our heat gauge was all over the place, mostly in the red, as we crossed through New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. We made it to the tip of Virginia when the heat gauge hit the top and refused to go back down. We pulled off the interstate and were lucky enough to be 2 miles away from Prince William State Park. We limped the car to a campsite and settled in for the evening. The next day we called a mechanic who sent out a tow truck. The car was in worse shape than we thought, so we ended up renting a car for the week it was in the shop and spent some time with friends in Charlottesville and then headed out to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for some rainy adventures and finished out the week in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After our car was back in working order, we headed to Iron Station, North Carolina to pick up some things from my friend Therin’s house before heading west for the holidays.

Our route west took us through Kentucky where we stopped at Mammoth Cave National Park. Here are some pictures:

After Kentucky, we headed to Wisconsin to spend 5 days with Mark’s brother Eric, his new wife Crystle and her 2 year old son Ian. We spent some quality time with the three of them and I got to see my first Great Lake. I knew the Great Lakes were huge, but until actually seeing one, I had no idea how huge! There had been a Salmon spawn sometime before and there were dried fish everywhere.

After saying our goodbyes, we struck out through Minnesota and into South Dakota. We slept at a rest stop just outside of the Badlands and went into the National Park early the next morning. What an otherworldly landscape.

After South Dakota, we crossed into Montana, landing at our friend’s Nic and Sarah’s apartment in Bozeman. We spent a few fun filled days in the excessively snowy town, cooking and eating great food, going to Norris Hot Springs, lounging and generally having a great time. Our next stop was Hamilton, Montana where we would remain for the next 4 months, kind of on accident, kind of on purpose. I got my old job back at Chapter One Bookstore and my parents were house sitting up in Missoula for most of the week, leaving their house empty for Mark and I to house sit. While in Montana, Mark did a lot of writing for his blog that he plans to turn into a book in the not too distant future. You can check it out at http://mybestfrienddave.blogspot.com He also did some embroidery work and made an excellent winged buffalo.
We spent Thanksgiving at my Cousin Alison’s house where we got to meet new baby Bennett and I finally gave him his baby quilt that I’d been working on since January, but due to my obsessively tiny stitches, it took me 11 months to complete. In my defense, it’s difficult to get excited about sitting around with a quilt on your lap, hand quilting in the Texas heat. One good thing about driving across the country is it leaves lots of free time for quilting.

We went back to Bozeman two more times to visit Sarah and Nic, our friends Katie and Audrey dropped by on their way across the country
and we spent a fair amount of time with Hamilton friends, eating good food and playing darts. Mark also went home to Colorado for 3 weeks and got in a lot of good family and friend time and went on some outdoor adventures.
The main focus of my winter turned out to be the musical Annie. Our local theater was putting it on and on a whim I tried out. It turned out to be very time consuming, but fun. I discovered a whole new group of people I never knew existed in Hamilton. I had 4 lines and a 5 word singing solo. As a homeless person and Annette the servant, I spent a lot of time on stage, but mostly in the background. While I was off becoming a star, Mark went on a bunch of hikes and went on a solo backpacking trip. He also encountered a grip of wildlife including a moose and a wolf. I made another quilt, this time for Eric and Crystle’s new baby, my new nephew, Brock.

Three days after the final Annie show, Mark and I left Hamilton. We had spent the winter applying to farm jobs all over the East Coast and had decided to spend the season at Harvest Hill Farm in Walden, Vermont. We left Hamilton on March, 17th with a month to make it to Vermont in time to start work. In logical fashion, we headed west to go east.

First stop on our eastbound road trip was Portland, Oregon. We spent a lovely week there, enjoying the spring weather, exclaiming over the flowers and spending time in parks with our friends. We also hit up some of our favorite Portland locations, such as Powell’s bookstore, Mt. Tabor, a number of our favorite restaurants, specifically Asian ones as we were skeptical of the abundance of Asian food in the Northeast Kingdom. One of the highlights of our Portland experience was seeing ‘Back to the Future’ on the big screen at Laurelhurst, our favorite beer theater. I also, personally, drank way too much good coffee. After saying farewell to our Portland friends, we headed to the Oregon Coast to visit our favorite beaches. We stopped at Arcadia, Hug Point and Oswald west, before cutting inland to spend the night in Corvallis with our friends Cosmo and Gwenn. They gave us a tour of their newly remodeled home, fed us tasty food and took us on a lovely evening walk. The next morning we continued south to Medford, Oregon to spend some days with our buddy Ross. The night we got there, ‘The Devil Makes Three’, a raucous bluegrass band was playing in Ashland. The show was a great way to start off our Medford portion of the trip. A lot of relaxing was done in Medford. Picnics were went on, hikes were taken, movies were watched, hot springs were soaked in and the balmy weather was enjoyed.

From Oregon we crossed the border into California where we spent time in both Wilits and Ft. Bragg, visiting our friends Katie and Alex and Nora. Though wet and chilly, Northern California was gorgeous. We spent a lot of time outside, both inland and on the coast and took way too many photos.

From California we finally started heading towards Vermont instead of away from it. We spent 10 days in Berthoud, Colorado visiting Mark’s family, but on the way there we managed to hit 3 different snowstorms in 3 different states. Passes in California, Nevada and Colorado were all determined to dump ridiculous amounts of snow in the path of the poor Subaru. At least we got a break in Utah. Berthoud was nice and relaxing. We spent a lot of time with Mark’s family and friends. The time felt too short, but then again, it always does. From Colorado we booked it through Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee to make it to North Carolina in two days. We reclaimed everything we had left at my friend Therin’s and loaded up the car all the way to the front seats. Maggie still managed to find a little niche to crawl into. We spent a few days with Therin and she and Ellick even talked us into going to Hot Yoga. Mark loved it. I, however, was not cut out for an hour and a half of yoga at 94 degrees and only made it through a little over half the class before going out to sit in the lobby to avoid passing out. At least I tried.

After North Carolina, we made a stop in Charlottesville, Virgina for a few days. We stayed at my friend Jed’s house and he and his roommates were once again incredibly accommodating and fun. These southern folk know how to have a good time. From Virginia, we headed north and made it to Vermont in 12 hours. We slept at a rest stop on Interstate 93 and the next morning met up with my friend Emiko in Montpelier. Emiko and I studied abroad in Ecuador together and it was great to see her again. We went out to Kismet, a great breakfast place and then hit up the indoor Farmer’s Market before bidding her and her friend Matt farewell and driving the last 45 minutes to the farm.

Here are a sampling of photos from our road trip East:

Next post: Welcome to the Northeast Kingdom. Get ready for some gorgeous Vermont photos!

Road Trip Edition: Chicken Slaughter, NYC and a little fender bender....

2010-03-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

After bidding farewell to Acadia National Park, we headed south, back to Tivoli. We took a slightly more direct route than on our way up to Maine and managed to make the drive in about 8 hours. We rolled into Tivoli around 10pm and had just enough time to grab some pizza before setting up camp on the living room floor. We slept in the next morning and grabbed a cup of coffee before heading over to Hearty Roots farm to watch the great chicken slaughter. KayCee and Owen started a farm named Awesome Farm two years ago. Their farm focuses on raising lambs and chickens for slaughter. Today dozens of chickens were going to meet their end, to be sold the next day in NYC, to customers who had pre-ordered them weeks before.

When we got there, the slaughter was in full swing. Owen was in charge of the actual killing. By the time we got there, he had it down to a rhythm: pull 2 chickens out of a crate, turn them upside down and place them each in a killing cone, cut off their heads, repeat. I should note that the following pictures were borrowed from Awesome Farm's Facebook page. Thank you KayCee and Owen!

He let the blood drain out of each chicken and then placed them in the scalder. The scalder had water that was close to boiling and the chicken carcasses would spend a couple minutes rotating while their feathers loosened in the water. After their bath, they were placed in the plucker. The plucker is a crazy machine that works much like a washing machine on the spin cycle. It's a cylindrical tube about 2.5 feet across and 3 feet deep and has a bunch of rubber "fingers" that pull the feathers off while the chickens are bounced from side to side. After the chickens had been de-feathered, they were handed to Devin who was in charge of cutting off the feet and necks. Maggie was the lucky recipient of a number of chicken feet that day. At the end of the slaughter, we found her fat and happy, sprawled out on her side, a half eaten foot next to her head. Next, the chickens were passed to Dana and KayCee who gutted and rinsed the chickens before placing them in a tub full of cold water to be weighed and bagged later that afternoon.
All this equipment was rented from a farmer in Massachusetts. He bolted each piece to a trailer, making a portable slaughterhouse. It's a brilliant idea, allowing small farmers like KayCee and Owen to slaughter their chickens on site without having to purchase expensive equipment or forcing them to bring their chickens to a slaughterhouse and paying someone to do it for them. It amazed me how quickly the chickens went from living, breathing, squawking, creatures to the chicken we're used to seeing in the grocery store. The difference with these chickens, however, was that they lived a free range life, eating bugs and food scraps, wandering around in the open air before they ended up on someones plate. They lived out in a field, in portable pens that were moved each day to allow the chickens access to the freshest grass and everything that comes with it. This is not only healthy for the chickens, but for the future consumers as well. You are what you eat and the healthier a life your food led, the healthier in turn you'll be.

The day after chicken slaughter was our friend Devin's day to do the Hearty Roots CSA drop in New York City. We woke up at 4:30am and drove to the farm to meet Devin. He had been there since 3am, loading the truck with all the vegetables needed to fill the 250 CSA member shares that would be picked up in various locations around Brooklyn. The first drop was at 7:30am so we hit the road at 5:00am. All the drops were done by 10:00am. The way Hearty Roots runs its CSA is that there are 5 places where they drop the veggies. At each of the 5 locations, a few members are in charge of helping to unload the truck. They set the bins of vegetables on tables and are given a list of what each member gets that week. They load up the crates from the week before and then we are on our way to the next drop. This is very unlike the farm Mark and I worked at this summer. A large portion of our time was spent washing all the veggies we harvested, to make them look pretty, packaging them in containers, bags or bundles and then filling up all the bags that were going out each day. Then, one of us would go to the drop spot and personally hand each member their bag. Though our veggies did look beautiful, were well presented and it was nice to get some face time with our members each week, a ton of time was lost to beautifying veggies, that could have been spent in the fields...Hearty roots leaves their veggies mostly unwashed and then each member picks through the crates to grab the food they have coming each week. Though it's not as pleasing to the eye, it frees up a lot of time and energy for the farm employees to spend on other areas of the farm. In the time it would have taken Mark or me to do one CSA drop, Devin had dropped off at 5 places and we had all partook of some amazing bagel sandwiches and taken a walk in the park. It's interesting to see how other farms run their CSA's. The rest of our day in the city was spent walking around a few different neighborhoods, stopping by the store where KayCee and Dana were distributing the chickens slaughtered the day before and then going to a lovely afternoon lunch party. We left the city in the early evening to make the 2 hour drive back to Tivoli. After our early wake up, we were exhausted and gratefully fell asleep soon after getting back to Devin's. It was inspiring and only slightly terrifying to watch him drive a gigantic moving van through the tiny streets of Brooklyn. It made us think that if he could do it in a huge van, we could probably navigate those same streets in our little Subaru.

We spent a couple more days in the Tivoli area. We went on an awesome hike in the Catskills, saw the famed town of Woodstock, took in the fall foliage on back country roads and did some serious lounging before saying farewell to our friends and heading to Connecticut. In Connecticut I reconnected with some relatives that I hadn't seen in close to 10 years. After 2 days in CT, one with my Mom's cousin Dede and another with my Great Aunt Alba, we decided to brave the streets of New York City to go visit Mark's friend Sheila. We set off the morning of October 15th. The plan was that I would drive us to the city and then Mark would drive in the city. Somewhere along the route of our road trip I had decided that it was a good idea to try and drive like a New Englander. I was wrong. In Winston, CT, less than 20 miles from the New York border, I managed to rear end the woman in front of us. In my defense, it was raining and the roads were slick. I may have also been following a little closely....Her car was fine, with only a few scratches on the bumper. The poor Subaru did not fare as well. Our entire front end was crunched in on itself, but the car was still drivable. The police officer, seeing our Oregon plates, took pity on me and didn't issue a ticket. Instead of trying our luck in the city, we decided to head back to Auntie Alba's to regroup before heading into the city the next day. Though it turned out to be an expensive lesson, I finally learned that when one is from Montana, she should not try and drive like a New Englander.

Acadia National Park!

2010-01-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

Acadia National Park!

Acadia National Park is not big, but it packs a lot of beauty into a small space. It gets approximately 2 million visitors a year and 1.8 million of them come between June and September. Being there in October, we managed to miss the crowds of people and shared the park with a minimal number of retirees and European travelers. When we entered the park, we decided to splurge on the $80 National Park Pass. The pass gets you into all National Parks, Wildlife Areas, Monuments and Federal Recreational lands for free. This proved to be an excellent decision as we used it a number of times on the rest of our road trip. We rolled into Acadia around 4pm and managed to squeeze in a short hike before sunset. Acadia was originally a get away for rich New Englanders (well, first it was home to various Native American tribes, but they left the land unchanged, except for shell heaps). Families such as the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Carnegies spent time in Acadia, then called Mt. Desert Island, building large houses and carriage trails through the woods. It was on these carriage trails that we hiked. An interesting history of Acadia can be found at their website: http://www.nps.gov/acad/historyculture/stories.htm After roaming around on the carriage trails, we drove to the campground and set up our tent in the dark. Mark made dinner while I started a fire. Even though it was only October 5th, the temperature dropped into the low 40's and the fire was much appreciated. We stayed by the fire until it was only coals and then headed to bed early.

Our first full day in Acadia was spent driving around the island and taking as many short hikes in different parts of the park as possible. We brought the camp stove and Mark made mac n' cheese on the beach for lunch. Yum! The water up here was much rougher and colder than the coastal waters of Connecticut. The waves would crash into the rocky shore, sending up sprays of salt water that grew increasingly higher as the tide came in. For such a small park, the terrain was quite varied. One minute you would be driving along the coast and then the next you would be plunged into a dark forest. If you kept driving, minutes later you would be deposited on a rocky outcrop at the top of a mountain with an incredible view, like the picture at the top of this post. We continued to explore until it was too dark to see. We reluctantly headed back to camp and proceeded to have a feast of fancy hot dogs grilled over an open fire. The night was cool again and the fire was a welcome addition to the evening.

The next morning we awoke to rain soaking through the seams of our supposedly waterproof tent. Not a morning person under the best of circumstances, I was poorly equipped to deal with a leaky tent before 8am. After much grumbling and a slight breakdown on my part, Mark managed to coax me into the car to go get coffee and check out Acadia through the downpour. We threw a tarp over the tent and put our non waterproof belongings in the car before heading into Bar Harbor. In town, we did a bit of shopping and then went to a coffee shop to write postcards and wait out the rain. The rain refused to stop, so we got lunch and then went to a whale museum. Finally around 2pm the sun showed it's face. We hopped in the car and raced down to the beach before the clouds came rolling back. Our plan was to do a hike that started on the beach and then worked its way up the mountain, but when we reached the trail head, we saw that it had been washed out by all the rain. There had been a fairly sizable lake just past the beach, but all the rain had caused it to overflow its banks and before our eyes all the freshwater was rushing down the beach to meet the ocean, eroding the beach along the way. Here are some photos:

We spent nearly an hour watching the beach erode. You could stand right at the edge and then step back as you saw new cracks appear in the sand, moments before another chunk would go crashing into the water. We stayed on the beach until right before sunset and made it back to the car just as the rain started up again. Not wanting to try and make dinner in the rain, we decided to head back into Bar Harbor for pizza. We got it to go and then ate it in the car. We finished the night with a few cribbage games and then crawled into our slightly soggy tent. We woke up the next morning and after checking out the weather forecast, decided that though Acadia was wonderful in nice weather, it was not as wonderful in the rain and since rain was predicted for the foreseeable future, it was time to head south again. We packed up the car, grabbed a quick breakfast of sausage and egg biscuits from the local health food store (both the eggs and sausage were from local farmers) and headed back to Tivoli to spend some more time with Devin and co.

Here are a few more pictures:

Tivoli, Portland and Norway

2010-01-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

After two, fairly expensive, fixes the Subaru was running like a champ. We drove North, ticking off a few new states on the way. Virgina? Check. West Virgina, Maryland, Pennsylvania? Check, check and check. Since we left Charlottesville at noon, our plan was to drive until we got sleepy and then pull over at a rest stop, making it to New York the following day. Sleepy caught up with us in Pennsylvania, but all the rest stops had fairly menacing signs warning travelers that anyone caught hanging around for more than 2 hours was subject to prosecution. No matter how slim the chances of actually being caught were, we decided not to risk it and pushed on. Luckily, the first rest stop past the Pennsylvania border into New York was menacing sign-free, so we pulled over for some much needed rest. It amazed us that in a shorter amount of time than it had taken us to get out of Texas, we were able to cross through 4 states and into a 5th, and the states were only getting smaller the farther north we headed.

We woke up the next morning to more traffic than we had seen in quite a while. Welcome to New England! Since it was a Wednesday, our buddy Devin was working. We decided to check out Connecticut before heading to Tivoli. We powered across southern Connecticut in a sprint to the coast. If anyone ever feels like going on an unpleasant and unscenic drive, I recommend I-95. Fortunately, we were able to turn off of it pretty quickly, as we opted for the slower, but much more scenic Hwy 1. We found a state park on the coast and Mark got to see the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. He and Maggie went for a swim as I settled onto a large boulder and watched the gentle waves rolling into shore. The Connecticut coastline is primarily made up of the Long Island Sound, so the water is much calmer than the Atlantic we would see later on the coast of Maine. After taking an accidental detour into Rhode Island, we headed west, across northern Connecticut. The leaves were beginning to change and we passed some beautiful farms on our way back to New York. We made it to Tivoli around 9:30pm and were pleased to find out that Devin's roommate KC and her partner Owen were fans of Top Chef and were about to head down to the local pizza place to catch the show. What better way to spend our first (non-rest stop) night in New York than with friendly people, tasty pizza and our favorite reality show?

Tivoli proved to be a blast. Devin had a multitude of wonderful farmer friends. The Lower Hudson River Valley was gorgeous and our days were spent driving around, taking in the fall colors and going for short hikes. Our nights were filled with fun people and activities including a spades dress up party, a goat feed (the goat fed us, we didn't feed the goat), and drinks at the local bar. After 3 short days in Tivoli, we decided to continue north to Maine.

Tivoli to Portland is 4 hours if you take the fast route. We are generally averse to the fast route, so we took the scenic route which lead us from NY, into southern Vermont and then up through New Hampshire, before hitting southern Maine. 7.5 hours and a short detour to the Maine coast later, we rolled into Portland and the waiting arms of our friend Audrey. We first became friends with Audrey in Portland, Oregon, so seeing her in Portland, Maine was awfully exciting. Two Portlands, two coastlines, one great friendship.

Portland turned out to be different, yet quite reminiscent of the "other Portland." When we first started walking around I kept getting excited by all signs and fliers mentioning Portland. I had to keep reminding myself that we were in Portland, just not the one with which I was familiar. Though it has a population of only 40,000, it is the biggest city in Maine and it feels like a proper city. It has everything you could want from a city, just on a smaller scale. It was also awesome. We ate great food, went to the beach and walked all over town. One of Mark's E-corps friends from Austin, TX was a native Maynard (Mainian? Mainite?) and after working in Texas had moved back to Maine. We spent an evening with him and his girlfriend and became thoroughly convinced that we should move to Portland immediately. However, the call of the open road was still too strong and after 3 lovely days exploring the city and surrounding area, we headed north to Norway, to stay with 2 of my Mom's college friends. They lived in a beautiful house that was backed by a 25 acre lake and they happened to be heading out of town that weekend. They offered us a dog/house sitting job and so we settled into Norway for the next 5 days. In the area they live, all the towns are named after foreign locales. Here's a picture of a sign just up the road:

And the lake that we were babysitting. Mark went fishing every day in the canoe and we had some tasty fish dinners.

The area we were in was lovely. Norway is a super cute town with a great health food store and a couple good bookstores. It was also home to the New Balance outlet and I got some new kicks for $20! We went for a few beautiful hikes. One thing we learned about Maine is that just because a hike is short, it doesn't mean it's easy. All the hikes we took ended up taking us straight up the mountain. There were no switchbacks like we were used to in the West. Here's the view from the top of Mt. Pleasant. The mountain is quite aptly named.

After the hike, we went to the best beer bar either of us had ever been to, the Horse Brass Pub in Portland, Oregon included. We actually saw someone in Ebenezer's with a Horse Brass Pub t-shirt on. Ebenezer's had the most extensive beer list I have ever seen. They even had a bottle of aged Belgian beer for $275! We opted for some slightly cheaper beers..... Here's their website if you want to take a gander at the beer list: http://www.ebenezerspub.net/ It's definitely worth a look.

Two of Mark's and my long term goals are to visit every state and National Park in the U.S. Since we were already in Maine, it made perfect sense to keep heading north to Acadia National Park after our house sitting gig was over. On October 5th, we bid farewell to the 2 goofy, chocolate labs we had dog sat, and their wonderfully hospitable owners, Kate and Glen, and hit the road once again.

Road Trip Edition: Sweet Virginia

2009-12-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest rock songs of all time starts out something like this:

"Wading through the waste stormy winter and there's not a friend to help you through. Trying to stop the waves behind your eyeballs. Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues."

Whether Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote this song about a woman or the state I can't say. I'm definitely leaning towards the latter, mostly because I cannot believe the lack of songs written about Virginia. I don't think I'm alone in this feeling of being kept in the dark. Maybe Virginia, with its majestic autumn colors, Shenandoah Valley, its old friendly towns and artisan bacon is just one of the better kept secrets the East coast keeps from the West.

Supposedly the drive down I-81 from Asheville to Johnson City, Tennessee is stunning. It was a little past 9pm when we did it and Marisa and I couldn’t see a thing. We were planning on pushing through to a rest stop just outside Roanoke,VA. My good friend Dan grew up in Marion, VA so we stopped to fill up the tank there and take the opportunity to get a glimpse into his childhood. We must have taken the wrong exit to this small town because the only thing we glimpsed through the dense fog was the county jail. The most extraordinary aspect of the beginning of our journey into Virginia was the rain stopping immediately after we crossed the border. We pulled into the rest stop after midnight and fell asleep within seconds.

The next morning I woke up, used the rest stop bathroom and let the mutt out to stretch her legs. By the time Marisa woke up we were pulling into Roanoke in search of a decent breakfast and a much needed cup of coffee. Our original plan hadn’t gotten past us getting out of North Carolina's rain. Marisa was flipping through the road atlas and I assumed she was probably just looking for a National Forest we could pitch a tent in for the night. Then I noticed her measuring out the distance on the country map with her finger tips.

"New York isn’t very far from the northern part of Virginia" She said.

"Oh yeah......I guess everything is closer on the east coast, especially compared to Texas." I wasn’t really sure if Marisa was suggesting something or if she was just being informative.

"We could visit Devin," she said, her voice half joking, half quite serious.

Devin is a close friend of ours from Portland. He had been farming in the Hudson Valley of New York all summer. Originally I had my doubts about driving to New York, but then I compared it to our current plan which didn’t get us past the end of the week. I glanced at the clock and picked up our cell phone.

"Devin! Hey man, did I wake you?"

"No, no, I needed to get up anyway. What's going on? Where are you guys?"

"Virginia. What are you up to this weekend?"

"Nothing, come on up."

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah man, come on up."

"All right We'll call you when we get closer."

I shut the phone off and turned towards Marisa.

“He said come on up,” I said.

“Really? Just like that,” Marisa said with a smile.

“Yeah, pretty much, just like that. Devin's great....so yeah, I think this will be good. We’ll visit Devin, hit the outer banks on our way back and then buckle down and get jobs in North Carolina.”

Marisa was still looking at the atlas. “You know, it looks like Portland, Maine is just up the road from New York. We could go see what Audrey’s up to.” This time she had a lot more humor in her voice.

“Yeah, right, and Wisconsin is just another day to the west. We could visit my brother and meet his new wife.”

We stopped at a wonderful farmer’s market and picked up some sausage biscuits and blueberries. This market looked like the same famers had been coming to this exact spot for fifty years. We briefly discussed moving to Roanoke after we get back from New York. The Subaru was 1500 miles overdue for an oil change and more miles than I care to say overdue for a tire rotation .We took the car into a local place to prepare for our journey. The attendant mentioned that we are in desperate need of new tires. I pretend not to hear this for now.

It wasn’t until we pulled onto the Blue Ridge Parkway that Virginia showed up on our radar. The mountain views have so many layers. The first layer is filled with all the reds and yellows of Appalachian fall. The furthest layer is covered in a oceanic blue haze. Everything in between blends gracefully from focused to blurry. Just as were falling in love with Virginia, the car began acting a little strange. It had a lack of power going up the hills. We chalked this up as the car being tired from the long drive out East. Luckily, there were plenty of places to pull off and let any driver that wanted to go more than 20 get by.

We stumbled across a little dirt road. There were old farmhouses on the side of the road and deep pine forests. We were exploring camping options when I noticed a trailhead sign. We decided to stretch our legs and let Maggie run around. The sign was labeled with the legendary AT symbol. We had come across the Appalachian Trail which for me was kind of like going to Mecca. I’ve done trail work before and Marisa and I have been talking about hiking the AT in its entirety for years. I can’t even express the feeling of walking on a trail that goes all the way from Georgia to Maine. Comprehending that distance on foot is truly mind blowing. The trail is part of the reason we’ve traveled to the Southeast. We walked up and down the trail a bit and it was nothing short of gorgeous. I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods of the Rockies, Cascades and the great Northwest but this forest had a totally different appeal. I dunked my head in a cool stream and we went back to the car fully rejuvenated.

As Marisa started her driving shift, things seemed to get much worse with our car quirks. The tachometer was all over the place and the steeper the hill, the more we began to think, “we’re not gonna make it…” The Subaru was struggling, sometimes at less than 5 miles per hour. I was constantly checking for a pulloff, possible places to spend an indeterminate amount of time. We checked the atlas and found a rest stop on I-64, just outside of Charlottesville. The only reason we decided that this was our best option is that it seemed to be the only sure route anywhere that was primarily downhill. I took over as driver and forced our poor car the extra 6 miles to the I-64 on ramp. We coasted to the rest area. I have to say this was the most beautiful interstate rest stop I had ever seen. We even saw a Peregrine Falcon while we were walking Maggie. I popped the hood and pretended to know something about mechanics. Everything looked alright, so I shut her down. Originally the game plan was to hang out at the rest stop until Monday morning and then coast into Charlottesville and find an honest mechanic. The problem was it was 4pm on a Saturday when we made it to the rest stop. We had a stove and plenty of pasta, but after we noticed the security guard giving us funny looks while we were preparing dinner, we started to get the feeling it might be a long 40 hours. We informed Devin of our dilemma via cell phone and had Marisa’s parents, Warren and Peggy, do some research on the Car Talk website for us. After dinner we played a game of cribbage and crawled into our sleeping bags shortly past sundown.

The next morning it was painfully obvious that we couldn’t live at the rest stop much longer. I scrapped plan A and immediately decided to coast to Charlottesville. Marisa wasn’t ready to be awake when I headed for town, but I hadn’t gone a morning without a cup of coffee in 2 and ½ years and didn’t want to find out how strong my caffeine addiction had really gotten. Charlottesville is an amazing small city. Brickwork covers everything and Main Street is covered with thriving, locally owned businesses. We ate breakfast at a little café that reminded us of Portland, Oregon. I ordered the special and I still think about it to this day. It was an egg in the hole with farm fresh pulled pork covering the top of it. The pork was from Polyface Farms, featured in Michael Pollan’s book, ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’. We explored the pedestrian mall downtown and discovered the visitor’s center. Marisa grabbed a bunch of maps of the area and the nice man behind the counter let us know about a KOA campground just outside of town. He also confirmed that the mechanic Peggy and Warren had found for us was great and his own mechanic as well. After checking out the restaurants and markets we were pleased to discover that this part of the Shenandoah Valley has a solid local food movement. If you go to the Chipotle mexican restaurant (the fast food chain) all the pork comes from Polyface farms, some of the best meat in the country, and even the peppers and onions are often sourced from local organic farms. There were a number of other restaurants and stores we passed that proudly listed the local farmers they bought from in their windows.

In a matter of hours we had accidentally fallen in love with Virginia and we owed it all to our broken down vehicle. Being a child of the west, I was swept away by the area's history. The Shenandoah Valley was pivotal in the Civil War. There are battlefields everywhere. Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, is just outside Charlottesville. We walked Maggie for hours in what we later began to refer to as the “Maggie Mae Pees Across America” tour and then caught a movie downtown to kill the hours before dark. The car managed the 7 miles to the KOA campground. It was mostly downhill through rolling farmland. The Charlottesville KOA is truly beautiful, despite their blatant misspellings of Kabin, Kampground, Kamping and Kamp which nearly drove Marisa insane. At the KOA there is a small trail that leads to a pond and a variety of mushrooms peek their heads up through the leaf litter that covers every campsite and the forest floor.

Marisa called the mechanic the next morning to see if he worked on Subarus.

“Subarus? Yeah, we work on Subarus all day.” Yet another reason that Charlottesville feels so much like home. I thought we weren’t going to make it up 4 or 5 of the hills on the way to town, but luckily we did, although I’m sure we made a dozen people late for work in the process. The guy behind the counter was a real character. He was decked out in brand new Washington Redskins gear. He at least had the hat and jersey and may have been wearing the pants too, it was hard to tell. We gave him the keys and then carried on with the “Maggie Mae Pees Across America” tour. We explored Charlottesville some more while we waited for the damage report. We were downtown when we got the call. “Your clutch……it’s bad. You got a bad clutch.” Just like that. The way he said it was hilarious, which was great, because the $700 it would take to fix it wasn’t funny at all. We were issued an old blue Volvo to borrow for the night. The thing had 294,000 miles on it and it felt like it took a full 10 seconds to cross an intersection. It did manage to get us back to the KOA in one piece, and that was the important part. After eating some veggie bratwursts, we fell asleep in our tent.

We spent the next morning checking out the surrounding area. At the time we were convinced that we wanted to live in Charlottesville. The countryside was phenomenal, especially with all the fall colors. Thick woods, small farms, old red barns, the whole place felt so timeless. For a brief moment we thought about giving up the New York trip and staying there, but since all our stuff was (and still is) in Therin’s crawl space in North Carolina we figured Virginia would still be there when we inevitably came to claim our possessions. We grabbed some tasty Thai food and our newly functioning Subaru and headed north to New York.

Road Trip Edition: On the Road Again

2009-12-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

Marisa and I hit the open road towards the middle of September. Farming in the Texas hill country has taken its toll in more ways than one. Working outside for the summer with more than 70 days in a row over 100 degrees definitely wasn't a highlight. Texas hill country hadn't seen such a brutal summer since 1929. Lucky us. Neither of us were particularly heart broken to find our selves untethered. It wouldn't be polite to get too far into it. However, I will say this, the farm we were employed by has become far uglier in reality than it appears in photographs. We loaded our poor 95 Subaru legacy to the brim with everything we own. A sewing machine, 3 re-curve bows and arrows, half a dozen finished and unfinished art projects, our little cattle dog Maggie Mae, a big box of fabric, boxes and boxes of books, cookware, bags and bags of clothes and camping gear. First stop was my good friend Mikal's in Austin for a couple days to pay our respect to an amazing city and say goodbye to some friends. We partook in some authentic Mexican food and imbibed a few Lone Stars for old times sake.

The car handled like a tank with all the extra weight. We spent most of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama listening to old "This American life'' episodes and trying our hardest to ignore the random grinding, popping and clunking sounds coming from the front wheel on the passenger side. It sounded worse in the early hours of the trip. I glanced at Marisa to see if it woke her up, then told myself that if it wasn't loud enough to wake some one up it probably wasn't bad enough to worry about too much. By the time we got past Atlanta and into South Carolina the noise was unmistakably something that had to be addressed. We were on our way to Iron Station outside Charlotte, North Carolina, where Marisa's friend Therin has been living. The basic game plan at this point is to move somewhere in North Carolina but the details are still to be determined. Neither one of us had ever been to the Southeast and all we know is the farming is good, the Appalachians are amazing, the outer banks are awesome and Asheville is a nice place for people like us to hang out.

Twenty-seven hours after we leave Austin, we roll into Therin's driveway, relieved that the car didn't break down in the middle of our journey. It feels great to straighten our backs again and get outside of the car. I'm amazed that our wheel didn't fly into a ditch in Georgia with everything else close behind it. Therin takes us out for dinner in Charolette. We do laundry for the next 2 days while watching 'Top Chef" marathons and commencing a general regrouping. Things we need to do:

a) Get the car fixed
b) Locate a town to live in and a house in that town to occupy
c)Get jobs

Sounds simple enough. We figure we have a couple hundred miles left on the axle before the sound manifests itself into a roadside tragedy. The decision is made to go check out the scene in Asheville and get the car fixed there. We unload everything into Therin's crawl space. The idea is to get settled in somewhere then promptly return for our stuff. We bring enough cooking and camping supplies to spend a couple nights around Asheville. At the last moment we grab our social security cards in case some one feels obliged to hire us immediately and some contact info for an honest mechanic we looked up on the car talk web site.

The drive through the mountains is gorgeous. The trees are just beginning to change into their fall colors and even the interstate rest stop is breathtaking. We pull into Asheville and it's a lot bigger than it was in my head. I was expecting old timers playing banjos on unpainted wooden porches on every corner. For lunch we found an all you can eat Indian buffet. It was delicious. The characters downtown and in the restaurant seemed all to familiar; like people we'd met in Austin or Portland. The couple dining next to us even asked if I was the guy that had moved next door to them a couple weeks earlier. I guess I looked familiar too. Where are the accents the boiled peanuts and shirtless overall wearers? Ashville is what some of our friends refer to as a circuit town, meaning a city that attracts people that are drifting from state to state. Places where misfits fit in and it's completely acceptable to have face tattoos and ask for spare change outside any locally owned coffee shop in town. For example: Austin, Athens, Arcata, Boulder, Madison, Eugene, Portland etc...Asheville is fun and beautiful, but we were feeling like we had been on the circuit a little too long. It is nice to not be the only long hair in sight, but this just wasn't what we were searching for. Problem is, we didn't know where we were looking for.

We explore the surrounding landscape and settle into a state park outside Brevard for the night. Falling in love with Appalachia is easy. I saw 20 different kinds of wild mushrooms in the first day. It was so nice to get out from underneath the cruel Texas sun. This little corner of North Carolina seemed fitting for us on a scenic level. Marisa really appreciated the change of atmosphere and being back in proper woods. The air felt like it had more oxygen in it, like being back in the North West.

After a night in the woods, we headed back to Asheville to suck it up and deal with our car problem and spend another day walking Maggie around downtown. The nice lady at the front desk refers to customers like us as gypsies. The people that don't have an address to write down on the form or a work phone number. She didn't seem too surprised by our predicament. We weren't the first drifters to break down on this part of the circuit. There were a few hours to kill while the car got worked on. Our first stop was the local library to take a glance at Craigslist, just to make sure there weren't any amazing job opportunities in the area we should jump on. Next, we searched the area for a slice of pizza and a couple locally made beers. Fortunately, we found a brew pub that had an 'all you can eat slices' deal. Asheville seems to be the home of the killer lunch buffet. Who knew? The waitress called us out on being out of towners. Maybe it was how long it took us to select our I.P.A' s.... She offered us her back yard if we wanted to pitch a tent until we found a place. She also gave us some tips about a national forest nearby where we could camp for free.

Dark clouds filled the sky as our cell phone rang. Our car was ready, thankfully. It was five o'clock on a Friday and I'm not sure what we would have done if hadn't gotten fixed before the shop closed for the weekend. It cost us around 800 bucks to silence the Subaru and ensure our own safety. The credit card took its first major blow since we got it, but at least we were racking up frequent flier miles! As we where heading south to our new potential home in the woods, the sky grew darker and darker and the rain came along with it. We cautiously cruised down the forest roads that were more mud than dirt at that point. I cursed the crappy windshield wipers and made another mental note to replace them soon. It was nice not to worry about the wheel falling off out on those country roads. Marisa and I discussed the possibility of setting up camp for a couple weeks while we figured out what we wanted to do. The camping was free so maybe we could cut our losses from the mechanic bill. Finally we found an open campsite about 10 miles down the road. It was perfect except for one thing; it was downpouring so hard we couldn't imagine putting up a tent.

The sun set and the rain started to come down in buckets. We busted out our battery powered lantern, a deck of cards and the cribbage board. The rain let up a little bit around the time Marisa beat me for the second time. I made my move quickly, setting up the tent, putting on the rain fly and getting our thermarests and sleeping bags in, all seconds before the rain came back in full force. It was trampling down on me by the time I got back to the driver's seat. I could tell by Marisa's expression that she was having her doubts about our new living arrangements. Even Maggie had a look of discontent in her eyes and on her muzzle. I reached into the back seat and grabbed a newspaper off of the stack of free press we had been accumulating to start camp fires. I was in the midst of explaining my new idea to Marisa when I reached the weather section.

''I was thinking since we don't know exactly where we want to live in North Carolina anyway, maybe we should explore the rest of the state. Maybe find somes town where it's not raining like this."

I think she could tell by my face when I looked at the paper that the news was bleak.

''Well?'' she said.

''Well, paper says heavy rains all across the state until Tuesday and it looks worse on the coast than it does here." Imagining losing a hundred more cribbage games while being a prisoner of this car for 4 days didn't sound great. Not to mention most of our food has to be cooked and Marisa will never let me use the stove in the car.

''What about Virginia?" I asked

"Paper says it's not raining in Virginia."

We looked at each other, nodded ever so slightly, raced into the pouring rain to take down the tent and then hit the road for Virginia.

North Carolina!

2009-09-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

Hello friends,

Well, a bit has changed in the last 2 weeks. We had planned on staying on the farm through the fall season, but were informed while we were on vacation that the farm budget was not large enough to keep us on staff. As we no longer had a job and consequently a place to live (that's the problem with living where you work...if you don't have a job, you don't have a home), we decided to pack up and move to North Carolina. When we first decided to move away from Portland, our original plan was to go to NC, so it seemed like a logical place to go after being unexpectedly and unceremoniously let go. After a few days in Austin hanging out with friends and saying our goodbyes, we drove our fully loaded subaru 1200 miles in two days across the south to the lovely east coast. Having never been to the south outside of an airport I was excited for the drive. Louisiana and Alabama were both much prettier than I expected. Mississippi went by in complete darkness, so I can't really comment on the landscape. Georgia and South Carolina both went by quickly and had a surprising amount of trash on the highways. Then, we reached NC. We came in through the bottom, western corner right into the Appalachians and they are gorgeous! Our last few days have been spent in Iron Station, with my good friend Therin. Tomorrow we take off for a couple week trip to explore the state and figure out where we want to live. Chances are we'll end up in Asheville, but we figure a little exploration is in order, just to make sure we end up in the most awesome place possible! We'll certainly keep ya'll updated on our whereabouts and life plans as we figure them out.

Oh, as an addition to our 'Organic farming just got a little more dangerous' post, our friend Adam's hospital bill came to $16,000! Each bag of anti-venom cost $3,000 and he had to have four bags. His ER bill alone was $4,000. The scary thing is, his snake bite was supposedly a mild one. Wow.

Two weeks

2009-08-20T03:37:00.000-07:00

It's 5:30am and David and Melody drove off a little over an hour ago for a 2 week vacation, leaving the farm in Mark's and my capable hands. I'm excited and a little nervous. I can't sleep, so I figured I would take this pre-dawn hour before I need to go cut flowers and transplant and water and direct seed, etc, etc, etc, to write a short blog entry. As I was walking from our house to the barn I happened to glance up and noticed that the stars are brilliant before the sun comes up. I should probably get up early more often. There are a million little things that are going through my head right now about what needs to get done on the farm, questions we should have asked before David and Melody left, lots of 'what-ifs', but ultimately Mark and I have been here for almost six months and we know what needs to happen to keep this place running. And as long as we remember to water them, the crops will keep on growing! Ok, it's time to go drink some coffee and start the day. I expect that my afternoon plans will involve a nap, but until then, it's go time.

Organic farming gets a little more dangerous....

2009-07-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Before I get too far into the events of the day the farm got more dangerous it's about time I introduced some of the characters we have been sharing this experience with over the season. Adam, the main character in this story, is soon to be 27. He comes in on Monday and Tuesday to give us a hand. He worked for the farm last season, so he has insight into the details of cultivating our specific piece of land. On top of that he has an amazing sense of humor and great taste in music. I learned recently that Adam is very stoic and can take a joke, even when the situation doesn't warrant laughter.

The day started off pretty typically. Marisa and Melody (our farm manager and friend) were a little more tired than usual. The clouds hung a little thicker than we're used to, but other than that, a normal morning. We all met in the barn at 7am and divided the harvest duties needed to fill our CSA bags, due to be dropped off that afternoon. Marisa, Adam and I teamed up to harvest the summer squash. It's a task that can take three hours singlehandedly, so it's nice to have the company. Adam and I were working down the same block, lifting runners and peeking under enormous, spiky leaves. We were tediously clipping and collecting every baby patty pan, gentry, magda and yellow zucchini we could find. We were almost an hour into our day, discussing Adam's experiences at previous Gwar concerts and complaining about the endlessness of squash season, when minor tragedy struck!

I saw Adam leap back in a very animated manner. I didn't think anything of it at first glance. I have worked alongside Adam for quite a few harvests and the guy could be the poster child for making unnecessary contact with bull nettle (see our previous post). Originally he had the same perception of the event that I had. I'd like to say that I heard the rattle over his cursing, but I didn't. Adam was about 6ft away from me when we realized that he had just been bit by a rattlesnake! Initially the situation was a little surreal, mostly because Adam wasn't reacting in any way I would have thought. He was still very much alive and wasn't foaming at the mouth even a little bit. I am admittedly no snake bite expert, but I expected more. I sprinted to the barn to grab a bag of ice to hopefully slow the venom. I heard this trick from Crazy Rick down in Costa Rica. He is the only other person I know to have been struck by a deadly snake. I blazed past Melody as I attempted to calmly ask her to google rattlesnake bite on her iPhone. Her reaction to the situation was a little more drastic, as it should have been.

I placed the 15 pound bag of ice on Adam's shin, who was now sitting next to Marisa's and my former residence, an airstream trailer on the edge of the squash row. He was lying down and had on an icepack. Other than sucking venom out of the top of his foot, my snakebite knowledge was exhausted. Adam was very determined to not have any mouth against his dirty foot. He was also very set on not going to the emergency room. This was a problem because Melody had dialed 911 to get a game plan. Instead of a game plan, the operator ordered an ambulance and the only free advice we got was "Get help immediately and stay away from the animal". He didn't want help at all, initially stating that his foot didn't hurt very badly and he wasn't sure the venom even got in. I can't blame him. I hate doctors too, or at least doctor bills. Melody called off the ambulance. Adam now stated that it felt like an anvil got dropped on his foot. Not a good sign. So a compromise was made after some cell phone research confirming that no cheap clinic has anti-venom and without it the effects of the venom will spread up his body as soon as he starts moving again. Melody borrowed our Subaru and shuttled Adam down the road to San Marcos, 20 minutes away.

I jumped at the opportunity to use my McLeod, a tool that looks like a massive hoe on one side and a thick metal rake on the other. Marisa got it for me for my birthday to satisfy my nostalgia of working on trail crew, the only job these things are used for besides fighting wildfires and now...REVENGE. I am firmly against hunting a predator. I feel that it goes against the food chain and the natural order of things to use technology to take the life of something that would otherwise murder me. I, however, have realized two exceptions to my rule: 1. protecting my friends and family and 2. revenge. Like Dwight Schrute says, "Sometimes a farmer has to do what city folk can't." I am a farmer and as much as I wanted to hold up the headless body of that snake so that we could all gather squash with a sense of comfort, I didn't find it. I went back to the barn simultaneously relieved and deflated when I ran into Amilcar. Amilcar is from Guatemala and he doesn't speak much English, or he likes to watch me struggle with my Spanish. I told him what was going down in Spanglish mixed with a lot of sound effects and graphic hand gestures. Over the last 5 months my Espanol has gone from infant to caveman; a milestone, but when I really need to use Spanish, I have trouble pulling it off. Thankfully, I have patient teachers. Imelda, his wife, works in the fields with us, so he took the situation very seriously. He asked me where the snake was and my Spanish wasn't good enough to do anything other than walk the 1/4 mile to the spot and say, "Aqui."

I grabbed my trusty McLeod and Amilcar, being the superhero he is, grabbed a small 2ft stake labeling the ayote (that's Spanish for squash, most of our farm signage is bilingual). We patrolled the block of squash, all 5 rows of it, and the tomatoes and eggplant next door as well. Very carefully we grazed our weapons against the weeds and crops in attempts to flush the snake out. Hunting the hunter. Our dialogue was mostly "mira, mira, ayote, serpiente, serpiente." At one point I tried to use some Spanish vocab on Amilcar. I said "El serpiente es peligroso." Meaning, "The snake is dangerous." However, I accidentally inserted a question mark. "The snake is dangerous?" Amilcar looked at me very concerned as if to say, "What is this gringo doing? Adam is hospitalized, we have been searching for this creature for 45 minutes and he doesn't know it's dangerous?" I realized my mistake, but didn't have the vocabulary to take it back.

While Amilcar and I were calling it quits on the serpent crusade, Melody was catching up on 'The View' and the happenings of last January, according to Time magazine, in the waiting room. The nurses were monitoring the swelling by tracing the creeping bulge coming up Adam's ankle with a sharpie every 30 minutes. They had to make sure that the bag of anti-venom that he was receiving intravenously through an IV was sufficient. Anti-venom is very expensive and dangerous if one receives too much. From my understanding, Adam also received some lectures from the staff at San Marcos Hospital for farming in flip-flops. The lessons I have learned from all this: 1. Rattlesnake bites are a serious deal and no matter how tough you are you should never attempt to walk it off. 2. Ice slows down the venom flow in your blood, however, unless you plan to sit on your butt with a bag of ice on your leg for 3 weeks, you should probably just go to the ER. 3. Don't ever cut into someones leg to suck the venom out. It's gross and doesn't actually work. Never has. 4. Getting bit by a poisonous snake is painful and very expensive and although it's a cool story, it's probably cheaper and easier to go to Thailand for a month.

Adam came back at 2:30 in the afternoon, 6 hours after he had left for the hospital. He was in good spirits when I last talked to him although he did say that it hurt to walk and putting on a shoe was excruciating. When I asked Adam if he was going to wear shoes from now on, he just shook his head sadly and said, "No...I don't think so, it's just too hot."

Miss Mae's Duck Addiction

2009-07-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

As a preface to this blog post, I would like to introduce our dog, Maggie Mae. For those of you who aren't acquainted with Maggie, she is our 9 year old border collie, black lab, pomeranian mix. We adopted her about a year and half ago from a rescue organization in Portland called The Pixie Project. If you are looking to adopt a dog or cat in the Portland-Metro area, I highly recommend them. The first month that Maggie lived with us, she spent 95% of her time hiding in a cardboard box in our living room. The other 5% was spent eating and going for walks. Little by little she came out of her shell and we were able to discard the cardboard box as she eventually opted to sleep on some blankets next to our bed. Maggie was a pretty good city dog. She was mindful of cars, got excited about but didn't chase squirrels and was great at running next to a bike without a leash. Maggie was a good city dog, but what we learned after moving to the farm, is that she is an awesome country dog. And a duck addict.

One of my favorite parts of the day happens between 9 and 9:30 in the morning....Duck Time! Letting the ducks out of the duck house is hilarious. They have been cooped up in their house for 12-13 hours and they are ready to be out. As soon as they hear me yell, "Get the ducks, Mae", the quacking starts. Maggie and I make our way into the duck yard and I walk up the ramp to the duck house. At this point, the quacking has become deafening. I yell a loud, "Good Morning" to the ducks and throw open the large, metal door. The stampede begins. It's duck insanity for 30 seconds as they pour out of the duck house. Feathers flying, ducks barreling over each other, ducks flying into the metal guardrail, ducks crash landing on the grass...and then it's quiet again. The ducks settle into their morning routine of chowing on bugs, taking a dip in the pond, waddling about and ruffling their feathers and I can begin the egg hunt. We have approximately 50 ducks and on any given day I will collect between 8 and 35 eggs. Each nesting box is checked by hand, sometimes revealing one egg, sometimes seven eggs and sometimes all I come out with is a handful of duck poop. Ducks are some of the dirtiest creatures I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. More than once, I have seen a duck jump into the feed box, poop, jump back out and then turn around and eat it. Same goes for their watering troughs. Poop doesn't phase ducks one bit. After my morning egg collection and feeding of the ducks is over, I'm done with them for the day, except for occasionally yelling, "Get the ducks", to Maggie and watching her sprint frantically towards the duck yard and then stare, crazy-eyed, through the fence until we call her off or something more exciting, like a cat, walks onto the scene.

Sunset brings another round of duck action. Maggie barrels out ahead of me as I head towards our duck friends. She sprints the fenceline as she waits for me to open the gate. Once the gate is open she runs inside and begins herding the ducks. I go about my business of re-filling the water and food and doing one last egg check. Then, it's Maggie's time to shine. I step out of the duck house and watch as she does her very best to herd the ducks up the ramp so I can close them in for the night. 20% of the time she does it all by herself. The other 80% I am obliged to jump down and assist her by running around, flapping my arms and yelling various, helpful, phrases to entice the ducks to hurry up and get into their house so I can go back to mine. And then they're in! Depending on how quickly and easily they were put up I either slam the lock shut and yell "Lock Down!" or I sing them a little song, much like I used to sing to my chicken, Bernadette. Maggie and I bid the ducks a good night and head for home, already anticipating the fun to be had when we start all over again tomorrow.

The Taste of Tejas (Part 1)

2009-07-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

Taste of Tejas quiz:

1. What is queso (other than the Spanish word for cheese)? Be specific.

2. True or false: Over the last decade small businesses have realized just how horrible styrofoam is for the environment and thankfully the product is a thing of the past.

3. True or false: The best Mexican restaurant in town is rarely found under the same roof as a corporate gas station.

4. How far must one travel to get the "Best BBQ in Texas"?

5. How many varieties of tea are commonly found while dining in a restaurant in Texas?

6. What is the most common thing to order for breakfast in Texas, especially while on the go?

7. How many languages must one know in order to order migas in Austin, Texas? Sub-question, What are migas?

8. What can commonly be found in the meat case at Fiesta Mart?
A) A whole, skinned cow head, eyeballs intact
B) Pigs legs with the hooves still attached
C) Foot-long cow tongues
D) All of the above

An ounce of queso has 300 calories. At least the queso found at Mikal's work. Queso is very popular in Texas. If you are reading this from north of the Mason-Dixon line, I should probably tell you that queso is really just nacho cheese, similar to what you would find at the 7-11, only taken much more seriously. I would like to dedicate this blog entry to the experience of dining in central Texas.

Before I get too far into it, I would like to take a step back to the previous entry 'Death, Destruction and Diatomaceous Earth'. I participated in the slaughter and preparation of six ducks a couple months ago. I decided to go with the Beatles 'White Album'. My only logical explanation for this is that it is two discs and de-feathering a single duck takes well over an hour, at least for a first timer. Anyway, back on track to "The Taste of Tejas!"

Styrofoam is a thing of the past, right? I mean, it will be in the landfill and on ocean beaches for well over the next 1.5million years, but no one in their right mind is still using it, right? Fair warning: if you order take-out in Texas, from Chinese to fine dining, expect a styrofoam clamshell style box, usually three-times the size of your meal. What's worse is you can even expect to get styrofoam when you order for here, especially ice tea. It seems odd to me to be in a place that takes so much pride in its landbase, sipping from a styrofoam cup. I'll find myself eating a hamburger under a massive Texas flag, staring at the eye sockets of a longhorn skull looking back at me. The waitress brings me the state beverage. Three cups of tea and six cups of ice, all mixed together with ample amounts of sugar in a 64oz thick, white, styrofoam cup. Sometimes I want to say, "This is the wild west, yo, can't I drink out of a rusted tin can or at least something made out of glass?" Marisa usually has the foresight to bring a quart or half-gallon jar for her restaurant beverages. As for me, maybe I'll start building a fishing vessel of some sort with all of these durable, otherwise useless, containers. Usually I just wait to get my afternoon caffeine fix after lunch. The upside is you can take your gigantic cup into almost any restaurant in town and get a free refill, because every one's to-go cup is exactly the same. The Nalgene of the south and it comes with a thousand lifetime guarantee.

As far as restaurant culture is concerned, there are three main aspects represented in Texas, Barbecue, Mexican and Tex-Mex. Finding the "Best BBQ in Texas" is easy. There is usually one restaurant in every small town that boasts the title and at least four or five in every city. The best BBQ I've had in Texas was in a little town called Lockehart. This place is timeless. I don't think a picture has been put up or taken off the wall since 1950. The fire they cook on is close enough to the cash register one could accidentally fall into it if they are not careful. They sell their fully cooked links, ribs and brisket by the pound, plus you have your choice of fat brisket or lean. The lean is actually quite fatty. They also offer a few slices of Wonderbread with every order and/or a half a packet of Saltines with the white plastic still on. The meat is served on two pieces of brown wax paper. The dining hall is made up of 8, enormous, cafeteria style tables. Pickles and jalapenos are complimentary and for a couple extra quarters you can purchase a whole avocado or a chunk of cheddar cheese from the nice ladies in the dining area. The sauce is served cold and a poster that shows all the old courthouses of Texas is framed neatly in the center of the wall, covered in dust. Even the prices seem to be timeless. We got three meals out of our order and paid less than seven dollars. It would seem the only way to get away from styrofoam in central Texas is to go somewhere that hasn't changed its business plan since the invention of plastics.

Stay tuned for part two.....

The hot, hot, heat.

2009-07-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

Hi friends. Many of you probably know this, but for those of you who don't, or who aren't aware of the excessiveness, I'm gonna let you in on something; Texas is hot. I'm not talking about dry heat, either. I am talking about hot, humid, blazing sun, drink 3 gallons of water a day and never go pee because it has all exited through your pores, type of heat. Yesterday the high was 107. The low was 82. I have never felt so dependent on air conditioning for survival. The problem with AC, however, is that your body never really adjusts to the heat and every time you step outside it's like walking into an oven and then being wrapped in a slightly damp, hot towel. Ick. A few weeks ago, when it was only in the 90's, I decided to become Zen about the whole blazing heat thing and just take it in stride. I accomplished my goal for about 3 weeks and the heat didn't bother me all that much. Then the mercury began creeping up into the 100's and my Zen attitude evaporated, much like all of the water we put out into our fields....This week I hit the wall and my positive attitude crumbled. While working the Farmer's Market on Wednesday from 2-6 (the hottest part of the day), any customer or CSA member foolish enough to greet me with a "How ya' doing" or a "hot enough for ya?" was met with a look of dismayed contempt, with just a hint of desperation buried underneath. Needless to say, my customer service was not at an all time high, but I did the best I could under the circumstances. Everyone assures me that this is an unusually hot summer and Texas isn't generally this hot until August. A fat lot of good that does for me now! But, enough complaining about the heat. It's not going anywhere until at least mid-September, so there's not much point in dwelling on it. At least that's what I try to remind myself every time I start on the downward spiral of despair over the temperature!

Let's talk about patriotism. Nothing says patriotic like a 4th of July parade. We were fortunate enough to participate in our town's parade last weekend and it was amazing. This may not surprise anyone, but small town Texas is way into America's birthday. Our farm entered a float in the parade and by my biased judgement, out of the 60 entries, we were definitely in the top 3. We managed to wow the crowd not only by having an awesome float, but also by throwing vegetables into the crowd. The sugar addled kids were generally either unenthusiastic or just plain confused by the vegetables, but the parents were way into it, often instructing their children to "go get another onion" or "grab some more peppers." Mark made the mistake of handing a melon to someone when we were stopped and all of a sudden our float was enveloped in a crowd of folks clamoring for melons. All in all, it was a blast and I think we generated a lot of community interest about the farm and hopefully attracted new customers. Cross your fingers.

Many times throughout the parade I had the almost overwhelming urge to jump off the float and snap some pictures. Turns out, our town is very patriotic. There were, of course, the obligatory American flag themed camping chairs and the older women sporting red, white and blue visors. Some people, however, went above and beyond. On one section of the parade route there was a crew of over 30 people sporting t-shirts that said 'Freedom isn't Free' on the front and 'Freedom estb. 1776' on the back. Each of them was waving at least one American flag and some of the more ambitious ones were waving two. My absolute favorite show of patriotism was a miniature poodle sporting a sequined red, white and blue tank top and a headband that had two sequined stars at the end of spiraled wires, causing the stars to shake every time the dog moved. It was awesome. I haven't felt so patriotic in a long time, possibly ever. Living in Portland for so many years made me forget that most of my fellow Americans take great pride in this country and its policies and influence over the rest of the World. I talked with my Mom on the 4th and she mentioned that for the first time in 8 years she had decided to put out the American flag for the 4th of July. She said that this was the first time in a long time she has felt our country is headed in a positive direction. Let's hope her feelings are right.

Death, Destruction and Diatomaceous Earth

2009-07-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

After we first arrived on the farm I tried to capture the feel as much as possible. We briefly left 85% of our music library on the back burner and listened to mostly country and bluegrass for the first month. At one point, both Marisa and I could recite all the words to John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy". Today is 4 months to the day that we started working here and now I listen mostly to Wilco, Spoon and an hilarious podcast called 'Jordan, Jesse, Go!', unless of course, the workload calls for something a bit heavier.

One of the biggest surprises I faced when becoming an organic farmer were the amount of hands on killing one has to do in order to save the crops from weeds and insects without the use of toxic pesticides and herbicides. One of these insects is the harlequin beetle which in the south is referred to as a stinkbug. They are reminiscent of a lady bug, but about four times bigger, with larger spots and a flatter back. Harlequins have a taste for braising greens. My first week on the farm I was instructed to strap on a backpack tank full of propane and connected to a blowtorch and torch an entire 300 ft row of infested kale. This sounded like a fun enough job. However, I had never attempted to burn a living vegetable before. It took an excessively long time. The kale immediately changed colors when the heat hit it. It looked surreal, cooked, yet still in the ground. The beetles jumped off the kale and crackled in the air. After 5 minutes of direct heat, the kale finally began to burn and I could move on to the next one. Kale being one of Marisa's favorite vegetables, she was horrified. It was a little difficult for me to have to do this in front of her. After all the romantic idolizing I did over the beauty of organic farming, I never thought once about mowing, weed whacking, spreading deadly earth based insect irritants and most of all, torching kale and a beetle of which I had never even heard. Luckily, I'm flexible. After the first 30 minutes I decided I needed to change the mood, so I reached down deep in my pocket and began scrolling the I-pod for something more appropriate than bluegrass compilations. I started with Jay Z's Black Album, then moved on to some random songs by Tupac. Nothing seems to epitomize the merciless annihilation of a beetle population, coupled with destroying perfectly good vegetables, than some gangster rap.

A couple of weeks later I was "asked" to spend 18 hours a week on a weed whacker. The whining roar of a two stroke engine and the thrashing of biomass just begs for headphones with the volume cranked up. When it comes to slaying just over half of the plants on the farm, I enjoy a little 'Appetite for Destruction' by Guns n' Roses. When I have to chop down an amaranth plant taller than myself, it feels appropriate to hear Axl Rose scream, "Welcome to the jungle baby, now you're gonna die!" I also find the intensity of Slash's guitar solos cover up the obnoxious ruckus of the task at hand quite nicely.

If you are looking for a chance to feel like the bad farmer in the animated classic, The Rats of Nimh, I recommend cruising between the rows on our lawn mower. When crushing habitats that the local rodents and lagomorphs have created in the few weeks since someone last mowed, I suggest either Merle Haggard or AC/DC. You may even have the opportunity to watch field mice and little bunnies run for their lives after the triple blade action transforms their residences into mulch. When I'm sabotaging fire ant holes with molasses and orange oil, I listen to 'This American Life'. It takes a great podcast to alleviate the long and boring job. I am also not entirely convinced that anything kills fire ants, so I don't need music to set the mood. Plus, I hate them and could probably slaughter a million of them while rocking out to Cat Stevens. More on fire ants in later posts.

The one action I do on a regular basis that I have not been able to find a fitting soundtrack for is spreading diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth (referred to as DE in our field) has the consistency of talcum powder. DE is made out of tiny fossilized water plants. To insects, it is a lethal dust with microscopic razor sharp edges. These edges cut through the insects protective covering, drying it out and killing them when they are dusted. If they ingest the DE, it will shred their insides. Sick? Yes. Brutal? Definitely. Effective? The jury's still out. The softness of DE and its flower white color make me feel more like a baker than a farmer. It gets all over my hands, arms and face. When it's over 100 degrees and I am inevitably sweating out of every pore, it doesn't take long before I am covered from head to toe, like an Aboriginal holy man engaging in a ritual involving other realms of consciousness. This seems appropriate, being that at the moment I am a harbinger of death to thousands. I play the part with a constant sidestepping and squatting from plant to plant, while simultaneously shaking a magic powder in circles around eggplants and squash. Perhaps the missing piece in our music collection is something more indigenous.

Let's talk about....Bull Nettle

2009-06-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

Hello friends. Please allow us to introduce one of the most beautiful, most unpleasant plants Texas hill country has to offer: Bull Nettle. Bull nettle is gorgeous. It is a vibrant green, reminiscent of that certain shade of moss found in the Cascades and is almost as neon as a Goodwill clearance price tag. It produces soft, crisp, white flowers that resemble the texture of a brand new, ultra-firm pillow. It also produces nasty, translucent spikes filled with poison. If you so much as brush up against one you will have an itchy welt for days and days. First, bull nettle stings. Then it burns. Then it itches like crazy! Quite frankly, bull nettle is the jerkstore of the plant kingdom. If bull nettle were personified, it would be that dude that goes to the bar just to start a fight. Whether alive or dead, its thorns get under your skin and stay there for days, leaving you with an itching, throbbing welt that makes every action painful. Bull nettle also grows rampantly across hill country. A good day for us is managing not to brush up against it before 8:30am. Tying 65 bunches of beets together under the hot Texas sunrise is hard enough without having to take the time to curse out a weed. Bull nettle has a way of vanishing in the undergrowth and jumping under your hand, just as you grasp and pull out a leek, like a deadly, miniature ninja hiding in the shadow of the squash plant.
Bull nettle also has an amazingly thick, complex, deep root system. When you pull it out, it just grows right back in a matter of days. The only way to get rid of it is to dig out the entire root system of every plant...an impossibility when you're also trying to run a working farm. This is just one of nature's many ways of punishing organic farmers. Coming soon.......fire ants, sunscreen and the best and worst aspects of living and working on a farm.

Bienvenidos

2009-06-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome to our blog. We hope you find it entertaining and at least slightly informative. The title came from the subject line of the first e-mail that my step-mom, Deb, sent us after we arrived at the farm. We thought it was quite fitting. Deb has encouraged me to write a blog for years and so I dedicate the first entry of this blog to her. At this point Marisa and I have been farming hill country Texas for just under 4 months. It's late June and the daily high has been hovering around 100 degrees for the last couple weeks and the daily low has not gone below 75 for at least three weeks. It is discouraging to learn that the peak of summer is close to 8 weeks away... However, I cannot even begin to describe how beautiful this place is and how boldly this experience has re-shaped our bodies and our perception of farming. I now find it very funny that so many people I meet think that our job couldn't be more relaxing. Although the setting out here amongst the live oaks and gentle breezes fits the perception, the work load does not! We are never entirely done with anything because there is always something to do. It would seem that nothing is really ever finished on a farm except for maybe the season. Our muscles are tired and sore and we fall asleep exhausted. Countless insects take nips of our flesh as we labor underneath the blazing sun. The heat causes delirium. Occasionally in the heat of the day it feels as if I step outside of my body and watch it as it continues to hoe and weed. Summer in Texas creates a lot of blank stares on peoples' faces and no matter how much water I drink it is never enough. The weeds never stop and on top of that we have ants from South America whose bite feels like a bee sting. But all and all, I think we can both say that it's the best gig of our lives.

Hi Everyone, it's Marisa. To be quite eloquent, ditto to everything Mark wrote. I never thought that I would be one to have a blog, but we've had enough people asking us if we have one or have ever thought of writing one that it seemed like we probably should. One thing I have learned down here is that Texans and Texas are two very different things. Texans are incredibly friendly and hospitable and all of them say "oil" and "soil" in a way that I love, but have not managed to replicate. Texas, on the other hand, is a beautiful yet cruel place. There are droughts, floods, hail, blazing sun, lightning strikes, fire ants, bull nettle, weeds with thorns that stick in your fingers for days, the kind of wind that makes a person feel crazy.....and yet, I still love it here. It's not the state that we plan on living in forever, but I feel lucky to be spending time here now. Another thing I have learned in the last 3.5 months is the incredible misconception I had about farming. I had this romantic idea that we would spend approximately six hours a day in the fields, 4-5 days a week and then I would have tons of time left over (and an excessive amount of energy) to continue all the hobbies I had in Portland and pick up new ones. This is incredibly false. On average we work 9 hour days, 5-6 and sometimes 7 days a week. And that excessive amount of energy I would have for all those hobbies? Nope. It's all I can do to eat the dinner that Mark makes and then watch a movie or some Office episodes. I did manage to sew my mother an apron for her birthday, so that was quite the accomplishment. I have also signed up to volunteer at the local Domestic Violence shelter and I also attended my first sign language class on Monday, so I'm doing things besides farming. All in all, I wouldn't trade what we're doing now for anything.