Garlic planting time

October brings cooler weather, and that means it's time to plant garlic.  We love the stuff, and use it in our cooking every day.  Which means we need to plant a lot of it!  

There are many varieties of garlic, broken down into two subspecies: hardneck and softneck.  Hardneck garlic has a stiff stalk that emerges out from the narrow tip of the bulb and becomes the tall green scallion-like plant above ground.  Some of the varieties we grow here are Music, Romanian Red, Polish Hardneck, and Georgian Crystal.  Hardneck garlic is a cook's delight, in that each bulb grows four to five large cloves, which are easy to separate from the stalk and quick to peel.

Scapes on the way to market, June 20Softneck garlic has, you guessed it, a softer stalk; these varieties of garlic have many small cloves covered by a silvery thin skin. (We grow Silverwhites and Inchelium Red.) Softnecks last longer in storage, and can be planted mechanically, two reasons why supermarkets carry that type almost exclusively. Hardnecks take a little more labor, as they have to planted by hand in a particular way, and their "scapes"--the curly green tops that appear only for a short while in spring, and that taste like garlicky scallions--have to be pulled by hand.  

And here's the genius of garlic:  you take a bulb of garlic, and break it into its cloves, let's say there are five.  Then you plant each of the five cloves in the ground, a few inches deep and six inches apart.  Next spring, you'll have five bulbs!  It's like magic.

So, to plant hardneck garlic:  using some kind of implement, dig holes around four-five inches deep and about one-two inches wide; there's a tool for that called a dibble (the wooden tool in the picture to the left).  The holes should be about six inches apart.

Eight little cloves, ready to sleep for the winterThen you simply place each clove, root end down, in one of the holes.  The pointed tip should be about 2 inches from the surface.  Finally, tuck the cloves in with some dirt and cover the whole area with mulch.

And then you just have to wait until spring.  

This year is the first year that the farm grew enough garlic both for seed and for our use (70 lbs!)--which is the key to farming, I think--taking care that we have sufficient stores for the winter, and making sure that we'll have a plentiful crop next spring.  I am learning to think in three timeframes, not simultaneously, but imagining back and forth in time to balance out the wishes of the present moment, the needs that may come in the deep winter, and the plans for next year's crops.  It's good mental exercise, and I find that I'm pretty sorely lacking in knowledge about how much food we'll need to get through the winter, and how many seeds we should plant or save for next season...The Sisters here are remarkably able to move forward without too much worry, there's no sense of hoarding, or incessant calculating, or spreadsheet madness.  I'm trying to put my own tendencies to plan and chart and count aside, and gently slip into the stream of faith that they so easily seem to swim in...

speeding by

Life on the farm is packed: early morning singing in chapel, caring for our animals, harvest and food preservation, noon chapel service, a community lunchtime meal, afternoon break and more work hours.  Then evening prayers and a light dinner.  The days and weeks just speed by...

But on Sunday afternoon, after our "house meeting" when the Sisters and other residents discuss and make decisions about farming projects, events, and day-to-day schedules, Anne and I stole away for an afternoon walk.  And I think I'll have to make a practice of it, because to stroll through the woods acquaints me with a whole other part of the farm, slows me down, and makes me appreciate this place even more.

The Community's property is about 23 acres, and we cultivate less than one acre (which makes our harvest, and the fact that we sustain ourselves primarily from our own crops, all the more impressive!).  Throughout the property there are about 300 maple trees, which the Sisters tap to make our own maple syrup. 

This photo is of an area that separates the farm and a playing field used by the Melrose School, a dayschool that shares the property. The ground is fairly bare, with few shrubs or mid-sized trees.  From what we've been learning about edible forest gardens, the forest would probably be healthier if it had a wider diversity of species to help protect and nourish the soil. 

A few years ago, one of the Sisters began planting fruit trees in the meadow below our main garden, which abuts this part of the forest.  We currently have at least two varieties of pear trees, apple trees, and a peach tree, as well as hazelnut trees in the nearby vineyard.  We're thinking about how to cultivate this lower meadow with a wide variety of fruit and nut trees and other edible plants.  If we can successfully "build into" this transitional space between the garden and the forest, we will be able to harvest many foods and materials without the intensive labor required by farming.

In this photo, Anne is looking down upon the playing field and the woods beyond.  It's such a serene place.  I can just imagine building a little strawbale house near this field, in the woods on the periphery...and the snowy silence down here in the wintertime.

Walking back up to the farm, up the winding road that takes you to Farrington's Pond and then into Connecticut.  It's a bit of a shock when SUVs come barreling around this corner, rushing on their way, totally out of sync with the pace and peace of this area. Sans traffic, you hear the wind, the leaves falling, the chickens clucking, the sound of shovels hitting soil.  And then a big noisy car or truck will drive by, and you realize that we're living cheek-by-jowl with suburbia.  Or, really, that suburbia is speeding by us, oblivious to the quiet beauty and slower rhythm of this place.

I think that all those lovely manicured lawns that you can see on your way down the hill, when you get into town, would make great vegetable gardens.  Imagine if we were all growing a little bit of food, we could share seeds and tools, and have the pleasure of eating food we've planted and watched mature...imagine if we all were connecting with our neighbors around the activity of growing food.  Rather than spending big bucks on lawn care, and the costly and toxic pesticides that are part of that whole operation, we could use our yards for food.  This idea of "yard sharing" is becoming a reality, organized through new media--check out this site that connects people who have yards with people who want to garden.  

There's something about getting your hands in the dirt, about shuffling in the leaves on the forest path, about imagining new life in a plot of land that gets us to slow down, to see the way the light falls, to be creaturely.  I'm grateful for Sunday afternoons, and how they help catch me from just speeding by...

of shaggy manes and garden giants

In August, I had the good fortune to be able to attend the NOFA (New England Organic Farming Association) conference in Amherst, MA.  It was a bit strange, going back to a place I had lived soon after college, when I worked for the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group.  Back in 1994, I rented a big old farmhouse with Shannon and Kim, two friends and colleagues, and in the little spare time we had, we'd admire the fields surrounding the house or drive out to the Peace Pagoda, a Buddhist shrine dedicated to peace and non-proliferation.  It's a sacred spot, and one I knew the Sisters would enjoy, so after the NOFA conference we made a quick visit there.

Being back in Leverett, just north of Amherst, was a bit of a reawakening for me--or, perhaps better, a reminder that I have long loved wooded areas, big tall towering trees, and quiet spaces. Somehow I had forgotten these affinities of mine during my years in the city, and so it was striking to find myself back in western Massachusetts, and to realize that the farm where I now live is an awful lot like the farmhouse I lived in 15 years ago...that I've returned to an aspect of myself that has been dormant for a long time.

But that's not what I meant to write about tonight.  Mostly I just wanted to jot down a few words and post a few photos about mushrooms! But, wait!  Don't just think of the mushrooms you eat, for what's really mindblowing are mycelium, those delicate webby networks you sometimes see in the soil or in piles of decaying woodchips.  Mycelial networks are actually the more prevalent stage of mushrooms' existence, with miles of mycelium in the ground underneath your feet, digesting organic matter into the soil and making it more fertile.  What we think of as mushrooms are actually the "fruitings" of mycelium, happening only under certain conditions.  At the conference, we were enthralled by Paul Stamets, a big name in the field of mycology (see his talk on TED which is fascinating, esp. his work to combat pollution and disease through mycelium), and his presentations spurred us to integrate mycelium into our farming. 

We learned from Stamets that mycelium work together with (alongside or actually interwoven into) plant roots, channeling nutrients to plants.  If you can help encourage the flourishing of mycelium in your garden, you can help your plants become more robust and plentiful.  So one of the first things I did when I returned from NOFA was sit down to read his book Mycelium Running, and figure out how we could best incorporate mycology into our farming efforts.   In short, we decided to dust our seeds with mycelium spores before planting, and to start up a few mushroom patches that would get garden vegetable-friendly mycelium networks growing in our two biggest gardens.  We decided to do this in combination with rock dust and other soil amendments, in order to replenish the minerals and nutrients that have been depleted in our soil from decades of farming.  Happily, these two efforts are complementary, because mycelium break down larger mineral nutrients into smaller particles, making them available to plants.  We won't see the impact of these efforts for a year at least, since the rock dust takes time to break down and the mushroom patches take a year to fruit...but we are hopeful that these actions will help nourish the soil over time.

The mushroom patches are great because they not only help build better soil, but they also (eventually) provide you with food, so that's double the fun.  Anne and I created "beds" of various organic matter for the mycelium to feed upon, with a couple inch layer below and a couple more inches on top.  The "Garden Giant" mushroom apparently prefers woodchips, while the Garden Oyster snacks on straw.  And the Shaggy Mane is not too particular, but happy to be mixed in with compost or mulch or whatever you've got on hand.

Here's how we went about the process:

First we cleared an area about 4'x8' (this was a little larger, because I wanted to leave a border around the actual patch). Then, we "broadcast" (sprinkled around with wide movements of our arms) rock dust (in the white bucket) to increase the nutrient level of the soil, and then lay down woodchips on top of the whole patch.  It took three full wheelbarrows to lay down the first layer of woodchips.  You're basically making an edible home for the mycelium to devour, so that the bed can really flourish.  Once the bed is well established, you can take some of the woodchips and put them in other areas of the garden to get the mycelium running there, as well.

Then, we sprinkled the myceliated spawn that we had purchased from Stamet's organization, Fungi Perfecti, on top of the layer of woodchips.  What you see in the bag in this picture is sawdust and a few woodchips that have been "inoculated" with mycelium and allowed to begin developing mycelial networks.  Some of the handfuls I took out of this bag were nearly completely white as the mycelium had intensively colonized the wood; other handfuls were less developed and more granular. 

When all the spawn was put to bed, we covered them up with a nice thick layer of organic material.  In the case of the Garden Oyster mushrooms, we used straw, their preferred comestible. Here's a picture of Anne, distributing the last of the straw to tuck in the spawn in their new home, in and among the asparagus forest.  Asparagus is a spring vegetable, and when it goes to seed, it develops tall delicate fronds, which provided great shade for our farm cats, and now, hopefully, will be a good habitat for our new mushroom allies :)

So that's all for the mushrooms at this point, at least in terms of what we can do to help them along.  This is one of the aspects about farming that is a good practice for my life in general: learning to let go.  You do what you can, but at some point, you realize that it's no longer in your hands.  There's a whole host of variables outside your control, and maybe the best thing you can do is just bow your head to the soil and the microbes and the fungi and the worms, say a little prayer for them to all flourish, and then turn and head back to the barn or the hearth, to dream of mycelium running...

pausing

I am delighted every day, whenever I remember to pause. It's all too easy to get caught up in a task, or start thinking ahead to the next thing that needs to be done, and not even really see what's surrounding me. Sometimes being "in the flow"--when you're totally engaged, learning something new or problem-solving, when the hours just fly by--can be exhilarating in itself. But other times, I can find myself (especially in front of the computer) just jumping from one thing to another and before I know it, the day is over...

On the farm, though, I'm finding it easier to pause, to look around myself, and to breathe deep. I think the rhythms of the day help: morning harvest is usually a quiet time, and the stillness of the garden can make me just stop and take in my surroundings, and smile.

With my harvest basket in hand, I will look up, stretch my back straight, and catch a glimpse of beauty...

Morning glories climbing the fence...




 

The geometry and grace of a squash blossom, its spiraling shoots and vines, the tiny little hairs covering it....

The amazing colors and shapes of our harvest, spread out on the countertop...

Zucchini, Ichiban and Green Goddess eggplants

Annelino beans (curly green beans)

Anaheim and Cherry Bomb peppers

Sun Gold and Cherry Tomatoes

Yard-long and Indy Gold beans...

Taking time to pause and appreciate is part of the culture of the farm, too.  Living in community, with six other adults who have a range of interests and responsibilities, means that other people are always doing something wonderful when you aren't looking...Walk into the pantry, and find that of the Sisters made a whole batch of Jalapeno Dill Pickles (YUM!)...walk into the yard, and see that someone has been busy planting and mulching, and there's a whole new bed of beets just bursting forth...go into Chapel and there's a beautiful arrangement of flowers gracing the altar...There's berries freezing in the freezer, eggs in the refrigerator, wood chopped and fences repaired, tidy guestrooms prepared for friends and visitors, and, always, delicious clean water brought from the building across the street. 

It's a symphony of sorts, one played in many parts and at different moments, and there can be bumps and scrapes along the way.  But the abundance of gifts that is the manifestation of this symphony is breathtaking: a perfect cherry tomato, in a season when most tomatoes in the northeast were devastated by blight.  A parade of ducklings, marching to their morning bath.  The collective happiness about the homecoming of a cat thought lost.  The enjoyment of shared work, shelling beans and beans and beans.

There's Hidatsa Red, Black Coco, Arikara Yellow, Black Turtle, Hutterite, Edamame, Kidney, Cannelini, Vermont Cranberry, and Scarlet Runner beans, for starters.  These are all "dry beans," and that means we let them ripen and dry on the vine, waiting as long as possible before we harvest them.  With all the rain, we need to be careful about them sprouting, as those can't be stored for the winter.  (The little white bowl in the upper left has some of the sprouted beans we found, in and among the others.)  Much of our work is in preparation for the winter, though the weather makes it hard to believe that it's already the end of August...

And although we are preparing for the months to come, what strikes me again and again is how much this community is living in the present.  Every day we pause, at every meal, to say what we are grateful for.  It's an amazing exercise, to stop and think about what you can give thanks for, and I find it makes me much more aware and appreciative of all that I am experiencing.   

Every day we pause, to stop and stretch and look around, to check in with the cats and the dogs, and the ducks and the chickens, and even the bees, to see how everyone is doing.  And these pauses are nourishing, enlivening, filling.  I hope that everyone can find moments in which to pause, to look around, to breathe. 

love and cooking

In the last few years, I've developed a passion for cooking--for the smells, tastes, colors, textures of food, and for the delight that people can experience eating food that is prepared with love and creativity. There's something both meditative and artistic, I find, in imagining a meal and then bringing it into being.

I think that my love of cooking and my desire to become healthier were the two driving forces that brought me to begin farming, though that journey has taken a couple of years. Earlier on, the idea of buying organic food seemed like a luxury and a hassle at once. My local corner grocery store didn't carry much fresh food, and the vegetables in the produce aisle cohabited with the owners' cat. Trekking into Manhattan took time. I managed to become a pretty decent cook with canned and frozen items, but we ordered in quite a bit, too! Then, a few years ago, a grocery delivery company started delivering in my neighborhood. It was great, for awhile, until I became completely disgusted with the amount of plastic packaging used...Every week, we were throwing out a seemingly endless sea of containers. And while that company offered many freshly prepared foods, they were expensive.

Last summer, I realized that I'd been going to the gym for about a year, given up smoking (again!), and wasn't seeing many changes. I switched to a new trainer, who had me write down everything I ate, every day, and show it to her. This was an invaluable activity--it really made me notice food. I was already eating pretty healthily--yogurt and fruit, veggies and pasta, lean meats and grains and salad--but just writing everything down made me think about my body as a whole complex thing, about the relation to what I took in and what was happening as I strove to build muscle and improve my cardiovascular system. I started thinking about my health differently, about whether I really wanted to take certain things into my body...

When the economy started to crash this past fall, I got hooked on the idea of "recession cooking"--using low cost, healthy, and often out-of-fashion foods and making them as wonderful as possible. Around the same time, it seemed that everyone I knew was reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and other similar books (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver; What to Eat by Marion Nestle; Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlossberg).  And Mark Bittman, whose recipes I've long loved, was writing for the NYTimes in his "Bitten" blog about conscious eating and healthy foods (in early 2009 he published Food Matters: A guide for conscious eating).  So I started experimenting with sweet potatoes (grating them into hash browns with sage, roasting them and then baking them into muffins, steaming them and eating them plain), black eyed peas (great for soup with sausage and greens), cauliflower (amazing roasted, with a little olive oil, curry powder and garlic), and cabbage (tasty when briefly wilted in bacon fat and then baked with yogurt. Tomatoes, long roasted with cinnamon and garlic. Squid, braised with artichokes.  I began searching out recipes on blogs, from The Kitchn; Cheap, Healthy, Good; Food Renegade...the more I read, the more I became interested in and aware about the ethics of food, the problems with "industrial food", and how "pastured" animal products (grass-fed butter, milk and meat) is much healthier for us.

And as I became more attentive to the origin and quality of each ingredient, thinking simultaneously about cost, environmental/pesticidal issues, packaging and waste, and health/nutrition, I found that I wasn't satisfied unless I knew a lot about the food I was using to cook with. I wanted the food I used to meet a number of criteria. I wanted to support local farmers, so my food didn't have to use an airplane or a truck to get to me. I wanted to eat fresh, clean, healthy food that was nutritious to me and didn't harm any of the people who were producing it. I wanted to limit the amount of waste I generated, both by avoiding excess packaging and by using every bit of every bit. These all were related, intertwined.

And the more I thought about these issues, the more convinced I became that the cost--in terms of time shopping, time cooking, and the sometimes higher prices--were all worth it. The meals I cooked, and served to the love of my life, to my friends and family, and to myself--these meals are acts of love and faith. They say, to myself and to the world, that I believe in particular set of social and environmental concerns, that I am acting on and embodying my beliefs to the best of my ability.

I know that I can't always be totally ethically satisfied in my food shopping--sometimes you need to buy a certain thing, and it's out of season and so has to be imported from California or Mexico. And I know that sometimes you need to take a shortcut and have to buy prepared salad dressing rather than make your own. But I also know that once I devoted spending all day Sunday to cooking for the week--making a roast chicken or a stew, making 15 burritos and freezing them, cooking up some greens and some rice to last for the next few days...those Sundays were days filled with love and creativity, meditation and singing. Those were days that I was feeding myself and my wife, caring for us and thinking about the days ahead.

Perhaps it's a bit ironic that my journey deeper into my love of food and the ethics of food production has led me to move to a farm and away from my partner, who is still working in the city. We will see each other on weekends, and I'll come to the city for a "date night" every week. But I don't feel separated from her at all, and I think it's important for me to find a new path, a new profession that can feed me, and us, for the long term. So, for now, I'm learning about farming, about squashing pests by hand, about making yogurt from raw milk, about mulching and compost and mycelium, and about the wider networks of people and organizations interested in food, farming, food politics, and the future. I'll be writing about all of these topics in the weeks to come.

For now, I'll leave you with a taste of my cooking: zucchini fritters, cold curried cucumber soup with minted yogurt, and spicy string beans. All, except the olive oil, from our garden.

Zucchini Fritters--if you've grown zucchini, you might know this already. Apparently it grows in leaps and bounds, and some people get sick of it! So I've been looking up new recipes to keep the Sisters happy about their crop of zucchini, and so far, we've been loving it. I'll write about the raw zucchini "pasta" successes another day....

So, for this dish, I used a recipe from a blog that's new to me: Whipped the Blog. I had to tweak it, because we have two people here who are gluten intolerant. So I used two cups of white beans, which I mashed into a chunky pasty mass, and four eggs, to act as binding agents. And rather than grating the zucchini (because here we typically are cooking for eight people, and I had a lot to do) I just chopped the zucchini into 2"x2" size pieces and then pulsed them in the blender until they were little bitty bits. The key in this recipe is to salt the zucchini bits well, and let them sit for 1/2 hour, then squeeze them well. Zucchini holds a tremendous amount of water, and you need to release that so the fritters hold together.

Take that squeezed zucchini and add to it mint (or dill) and lots of scallions, salt, pepper, and either breadcrumbs or smooshed white beans, and some egg. Then form into patties and fry in a little bit of olive oil. Voila!

As for the cucumber soup with minted yogurt, I got that from a Mark Bittman book that you can see on the web thru GoogleBooks...but it's super easy, and you could make it with many variations. First, take some yogurt and some chopped mint and mix them together, vigorously, for a few minutes...basically, you want to infuse the mint oil into the yogurt. Then remove the mint by straining the yogurt. Refrigerate that until you're ready. Then, take a bunch of peeled cucumbers (though you could use the peels, I suppose!) and pulse them into little bits, remove a third while it's still a bit chunky, and then process the rest til it's smooth. To the cucumbers, add some salt and a couple teaspoons of curry powder and lemon juice (or you could use chili powder and lime juice).  Let rest for two hours, if possible, so that the flavors can blend well.  Then, when it's time to serve, put some of the cucumber stuff in a bowl, then create a little well and put the yogurt in the middle.  Garnish with chopped mint and toasted nuts... Yum!  

The spicy string beans were an attempt at Chinese cooking--they came out great, but I probably will make them a little crunchier in the future, by reducing the simmer time.  I used this recipe here, but we didn't have Hoisin sauce.  That would have made it even better!  

The string beans didn't really "go" with the Mediterranean flavors in the fritters and soup, but I chose them for balance: they added some crunch and some spice to a meal that had a lot of soft, savory, and cool.  Whenever it's possible, I try to create that kind of balance, to engage as many senses and tastes as I can.  I would have preferred green beans to yellow beans, for the extra color, but yellow beans are what we picked that morning, so there you go!