Hey 2010, it's been real.

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

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

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

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!