Time to change

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It is snowing this morning. The first day of “Daylight Savings.” Daylight Time used to change when Spring was firmly established in flowers and light. Today, ironically, it is still winter. Snow falls straight down in heavy-cotton chunks. Theirs is a quiet, passing beauty. The kind of snow-fall that doesn’t last. Quickly it fades to small flakes and then disappears altogether.

I am thoughtful this morning. Considering changes. Time, weather, place. What to make of unwelcome changes?

Yesterday, driving from Lincoln to Rochester meant passing through most of Iowa on interstate highways. First miles and miles east to Des Moines on I-80 and then up, up, north and north through the “fruited plains” on I-35 until at last the bluffs of southeastern Minnesota gently rise.

About thirty miles west of Des Moines traffic suddenly slowed, came to a stop. We could see the road ahead was clogged with cars and trucks idling in the rain. An accident.  Someone’s tragedy unfolding far ahead; who we would never know. As we approached the standing point, some vehicles were making a k-turn, passing us on the shoulder and exiting the wrong way up the on-ramp. One questioning glance from Anita, and we were doing the same. It was a satisfying crime. A justifiable change of direction. We quickly followed a line of traffic heading cross-country. Along the back roads, we had time to call up Google Maps and decided to follow the perfectly paved Iowa county roads, straight and smooth, skipping Des Moines and Ames altogether.

A map of Iowa hints at its history – a perfect grid of right-angle roads. Rich, black soil precisely divided into sections worth millions. One mile on a side, 640 acres within the square. Farmland that made the lives of men and women who raised crops and animals to feed hundreds of others. Often there is still a stand of old trees on one corner of a section, remnants of a homestead, a house that might still be lived in, if it’s lucky, but the out-buildings –  the out-buildings. All dying, sinking back into the ground. Barns three stories high with an elevator still sitting beneath the haymow door as if one day the farmer was raptured, or died or moved to Arizona. Round barns, barns with graceful cupolas, hipped roofs, angled roofs, stone, oaken, bricked, square, reflecting styles of German, Norwegian, Dutch immigrants.

Iowa barn in winter

Not as many of these places are seen from the heavily traveled interstate, but on back roads they never leave your sight. County after county the quiet is eerie. In the stillness of winter the machines are gone, the land is dark, the buildings are broken, blackened, faded red. Granaries, barns, coops without an animal or human in sight.

Perhaps one reason American factory farming troubles me is because I feel alienated by it. I want to be wholly restored to land and creation. I want us to be careful caretakers of, not just the earth, but of people. I mourn empty places that were once alive with chickens, cows, horses and pigs. I want to repopulate them with children and dogs and tire swings. Restore a garden. Perhaps it is true Home I wait for – that impossible place of meaningful work and unbroken restoration God will bring about one day.

Tomorrow, I will be more settled. More distant from dying places I can’t fix. I will focus on my desk and maybe I’ll think about the small patch of urban earth outside our back door. Flower and seed catalogs are here and we need a few more climbing roses and stone walls for them to thrive upon.

If rabbits ran your farm

Becca of Heartbeet Farm brings the tractor in from the field.

Greenhouse shared by Heartbeet and Easy Yoke Farm.

      Last night we saw a local showing of Greenhorns – a documentary about young farmers around the country who are trying in unusual places and ways to bring nutritious, pesticide-free food to the table and earn a living at the same time. I’d recommend viewing it. These young people are energetic, innovative, educated and very thoughtful about what they’re trying to do. (Is that a little excessive, Margie?)  They are building greenhouses on empty lots in the middle of urban mission districts, reclaiming broken farms, and setting up small shops to sell true artisan foods in the midst of cities. They face enormous financial hurdles, relentless labor, and discouraging government policies. We admire them because we’ve witnessed how they love what they do and we’ve eaten their crops as fast as we could shove shitake mushrooms and potatoes into our mouths.

This was a full-grown rosebush complete with yellow roses sitting on top of the stand

Eaten down to nubbins.

She looks slightly evil as she ignores the radish tops.

     While we were busy watching the film and listening to the discussion that followed, Honeysuckle was busy at home. We had a small rosebush sitting on a stand on the porch. She decided to harvest it before we could transplant it. We never imagined she’d pull it down and eat the whole thing, thorns, yellow blossoms and canes right down to nubbins. On a tiny scale this is proof of what animals can do to your investments if you allow them to run the business. Turn your back for a second, leave the gate unlatched...  just another hazard to factor in if you farm animals.

Corn for our seeds

     In today’s Common Prayer – February 22 – we read this prayer:

“Lord God, extend our faith so that even when we fail to see the fruit of our planted seeds, we may have the assurance that every inch of soil overturned will lead to a harvest some day.”

     Last summer our organic farmer friends gave Anita bag of seed corn that was a year old. Joe and Becca said plant however much you want, we can’t risk low germination from old sweet corn seeds. They also generously gave her space for six 100 foot rows. It has always been her dream to grow enough sweet corn for eating delicious golden kernels all winter. The thing is, you might have a good harvest off the ten to twelve corn plants you put in your small urban garden, but that’s still only three ears per corn plant? Three dozen ears altogether? Unless you have room for a lot, it’s a waste of time and space. So the possibilities of corn through the roof had her hungry-eyed.

     This is what happened. We had so much corn we could have begun a factory farm of feeder hogs. We raved over the sweet, tender ears, we ate them like chainsaws – sawdust flying, protective goggles over our eyes.

     It had reproduced itself five hundred fold with wild energy. We ended up freezing 46 quarts and giving away at least 20 dozen ears. For the first harvest we picked three or four wheel barrels full and pushed it up to the yard where we set up a little canning factory. Anita picked, Denis shucked, I cut the kernels off the cob, and together we heated it to boiling point on a camping stove and then put it all in zip lock bags. Tato, the dog ate cobs as he could and all the leftover greens and cobs were dumped over the fence to the chickens and pigs. And that was just the first picking. It’s almost March and we still have plenty of corn to eat.

     thought a lot about that harvest and everything that had to coalesce under sunny days and warm nights to make it so darn good. This rarely happens in life. Sometimes. But rarely. You invest and invest and once in a blue moon you get to see where that seed went and what it did. The prayer above is mostly how it is. Maybe years later you get a facebook message thanking you for all the pizza you served the youth group and how they’ll never forget listening to Purple Rain and thinking about Ferris Buellers Day Off in your living room. We need to keep stumbling down the row year after year because you never know when the corn will come home. But even if it doesn’t, we are assured by God that he grows a great harvest that will overflow all our wheel barrels and burst our freezers. 

Anita and I picked the first load.

 

Denis did the shucking while I began cutting it off the cobs.

Anita took a turn with the knife while I began blanching the corn.

The Chickens feasted on all the leftovers.

   

We made a huge pot of corn chowder on the camp stove in the yard and ate it with Joe & Becca and all the interns. All fresh - even the milk came out of the Jersey cow that morning.

Quotes from The Dirty Life

          This book by Kirstin Kimball made the Toad Hall Gift List this year, deciding which teaser quote to include was hard. Here are a couple that were too lengthy, so as not to waste them: here they are. Consider buying her book or giving it as a gift.

The following was a discussion I recognize - it was one Denis and I had any number of times, especially during our early years when people thought we were crazy to do what we were doing, too. And sometimes we were.

          When we’d talk about our future in private, I would ask Mark if he really thought we had a chance. Of course we had a chance, he’d say, and anyway, it didn’t matter if this venture failed. In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don’t measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right. This sounded extremely fishy to me. (p. 77)

There is a certain insanity that takes us, for me, it happens when I walk into a yarn shop, or the florist warehouse in Minneapolis, and yes, when the seed catalogs arrive in the spring. I must force myself to turn away or leave if we are going to have money for groceries.

           If it had been left up to me, we would have grown one of everything from the catalogs that year. In the winder squash section along, I underlined twelve intriguing varieties, including Candy Roaster, Turk’s Turban, Pink Banana, and something called Galeux d’Eysines, which the text told me meant “embroidered with pebbles.” The herb sections made me completely nuts. How could you NOT order one packet each of saltwort, sneezewort, motherwort, and Saint-John’s-wort, plus a sample of mad-dog skullcap, which the text said was once a folk remedy for rabies? At a buck a pop, how could you go wrong? The whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be see clearly. Luckily, Mark knew this and had quietly retrieved my list and crumpled it up, so the box that arrived at our door contained the seeds of edible things that are general liked by humans, a reasonable number of varieties, and nothing that ended in wort. We sorted through the packets, separating those that would be direct-seeded in the field from those that needed to be started early, in a greenhouse, in a few short weeks. We did not have a greenhouse, but building one was on the list. (p. 119)

          This is Frieda. She's not from Kimball's farm in NY but, still. She represents another Dirty Life, with our friends at Easy Yoke Farm here, in Minnesota. She's beautiful, isn't she?

Take this tomato and eat it

Today Denis and I made our usual Saturday morning trip to Farmer’s Market. It never gets old – the anticipation, the festive atmosphere, this season of knowing that for the rest of the week I’ll have a fresh supply of choice vegetables and herbs for our meals. Winter will be here soon enough when there’ll be no such thing as a fresh golden tomato. Or the blinding heat of the sun bouncing off the tops of awnings. Baskets, shelves, buckets groaning with mounds of vegetables, herbs, flowers. Vendors selling chicken, pork, beef, elk, buffalo most of it happy-meat. Hidden Stream Farm. Hillside Farm. Veerman’s Ranch. Many Hands Garden. Friendly Acres. The earthy, basil-ly scent in the air is killing, making me decide pesto pasta and fresh tomatoes will be on our menu this week. We pass a stand where they are grilling steak from grass-fed beef and handing out free samples. People of all ages and colors push past arms loaded with produce and bouquets of zinnias.

Denis and I head straight for Heartbeet Farm and Easy Yoke Farm stands. The owners are friends - two young couples – their land and lives connected by the same calling in life – to grow vegetables that are chemical-free and incomparable to anything I could buy at Hyvee. Recently we brought an evening meal out to the farm, and as the sun went down, sending dappled shadows across the yard, - those soft and tender rays that cool the last of the day - Daniel wanted to take us through the lanes to look at the fields and the land where he and Hannah hope to build their home. (Joe and Becca have been at it a little longer and are more established.) Over near that big tree in the pic below.

He showed us the onion field – 10,000 plants. Today I bought  three.

I felt rich, rich as I unloaded all the vegetables to my kitchen counter. The tomatoes – purple heirlooms that Joe says have a slightly smoky flavor, and he’s right! The cherry golds so sweet it’d be easy to think of them as desert. We had eggs, scallions, Hungarian peppers, red pepper, green bell pepper, summer spinach (a broader leaf, tender and mild), celery (intense flavor), a bouquet of basil, two kinds of cucumber – small pickling cucumbers good for slicing with onion vinegar and oil in a simple salad and the long English cucumber for spear eating – and potatoes. Daniel was inspired to plant a few in the forest near the river bottom in the rich sandy soil, so of course: Forest Potatoes and he insists I tell the story of them. They taste real, honest, crisp. Quite amazing.

For lunch we ate a piece of wheat bread layered with Boursin cheese,  thick-sliced tomato and basil leaves. I’m thinking of the same thing for supper.

     

Gone to the dog

Breaking new ground with the team.

We were sad to hear about Joe and Becca’s chickens the other day. The previous week when they returned from their other gardens late in the day and Joe went out to shut in the chickens, (They divide their work between their farm and Joe’s dad’s acreage where the soil is organic and has been farmed in vegetables for years. Most of their own land needs to rest and be organically rebuilt from years of corn and soybean crops that require boatloads of chemicals.) he noticed a neighbor’s dog running away from the yard with a chicken in its mouth. He chased it down and returned it to the owner before knowing the extent of the damage. Back at the chicken house he found carnage. Blood and dead chickens everywhere. A count of the survivors showed the dog must have been on rampage for hours as he killed 95 of the little pre-teen hens. Their babies!! For days they were finding carcasses hidden or buried in the yard. The neighbor’s insurance will cover the cost of the chicks, but not the loss of income that would have come from three years of laying eggs. Here is, “Crooked Beak” one of the survivors. She has learned to eat despite a handicap.


They’ve been using Carla and Kayla to prepare some of the ground to plant potatoes and corn. Joe was very excited about finding a horse-pulled potato planter. (He’s pretty enraptured about all that horse-drawn equipment that’s been rusting for a century in remote pastures around the county.) No surprise that it takes some repair and practice to get it working properly. Recently, Anita, our housemate, was out to the farm for a day to help them plant. While Joe drove up front, she rode on the back of the machine, which with one pass dug a furrow, turned a hopper that dropped a potato, and then covered it with dirt every 18 inches or so. A very pleasing machine. Almost a work of art? She was to make sure the potatoes loaded and dropped at the right intervals. She was to tell Joe when things got jammed up, so at first it was comic and frantic as she kept yelling WHOA, WHOA and the well-trained team kept stopping at her command and getting more confused by the cacophony of voices rising behind them. Joe finally decided Becca and Anita must not talk and laugh so much and Anita must say “Stop” not “Whoa.” Apparently the Amish, from whom the horses were purchased, are pretty much all business as they quietly follow their teams in the field. Who can blame them? This is not a hobby. For Joe and Becca either.

Joe's single bottom horse-drawn plow.

One of Joe’s genius and endearing qualities is how he grasps and warehouses numbers. He knows how much, how long, how far, how many of anything. Thus: 14,000 onion and leeks have been set out in rows. 45 bunches of radish sold by 10 a.m. When I asked him how much potatoes did you plant? he replied, “Well, let’s see, 35 rows at 300 feet each….that’s 1.988 miles of potatoes. Or this: 95 chickens killed out of 172. Down from the original 185, although a few kicked the bucket for other reasons – like eating bits of plastic used to bind hay bales. It was mixed in the straw that originally covered the floor of the barn. They wouldn’t have known except for an autopsy on several that looked healthy one day and keeled over the next. Strings were found wrapped around and warping their little guts. Oww.

Their days are growing longer. Becca might be out in the greenhouse by 6 am with a four gallon spray pack on her back letting the leaf hoppers have it with some kind of “organic” solution. Joe might be out in the field with the girls plowing up more ground for late plantings of corn or cultivating rows of potatoes which are poking through. Often their work lasts until 9 p.m. when the light fades. Just typing that exhausts me. It sure punches a hole in a romantic view of what it takes to run a farm.

You might think, wow, all that great green food right in front of you. Man, think of the salads! How they must eat! Truth is, they’re often too busy to prepare much and might only grab some bread and butter with cheese. That’s where we can occasionally help a little. Last week we took supper out to them.

Becca left some fresh greens, shitake and morel mushrooms, asparagus, and a gallon of jersey milk in her refrigerator for us to add to what we brought. When they arrived home about 7:15, I had made Greek chicken and potatoes; it comes out of the oven browned and crisp when you coat it with olive oil, salt, and oregano. Mmmm. Anita had concocted a wine shitake sauce for the steamed asparagus, and sautéed the morels with mild spices to go atop goat cheese and crackers. I tossed a large green salad with about a million different lettuces and spinach, making a simple balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and honey dressing, and crumbling feta cheese over the top. We had a warm rhubarb crisp with cream skimmed off the top of the milk for dessert. Don’t often get to cook for people who have worked so hard they can afford maybe a hundred times the calories of my body. We all sat around beaming. It made me really happy.

Kayla heads for the barn.

Glory, all glory

On our way to the Yarn Garage today Anita, Sandy, and I stopped to pick up Becca. We ran in for a minute to see her and Joe’s chicks. They’ve got 180 two-week-old peeping babies in a pen in their basement. In about four months they’ll begin laying colored eggs ranging from coffee to chocolate. My favorite might be the araucana’s teal blue egg. Who ever thought of eating so strange, lovely, and nutritious a thing?



When they hear or see a person, they all flee to the far corner, running over the tops of their mates heads, as though we were approaching with an axe.



A continuous chorus of peeping hangs in the air.



Just as suddenly they sit down, fall asleep, and waken to peck at another's eye.


It was worth the hour drive to the Yarn Garage past farms with dairy cows standing in the sun, the fields still dormant in buff and gold, water running in the creeks. I can’t even imagine how this place sprang up in an old farming town just south of the Twin Cities. Who knew? It’s run by a flamboyant designer from NYC, who designed and knitted many of the creations scattered through the store. Crammed and colorful, awed and overwhelmed by choices I stood nearly paralyzed. Corn fiber? Bamboo, wool, cotton?







Becca chooses ochre colors.



Anita likes Japanese Toro and milk fibers.



I thought I could sneak over and try on this amazing red and pink cowl sweater. Hiding behind a small mountain of yarn, I tried to get it on properly and was suddenly surrounded by a crowd giving advice, and a lady, not even an employee, who tried to adjust the sleeves and then the owner arrived, pushed everyone aside to arrange the collar, fussing and buttoning the front “under my girls.” And then yelled, where’s the camera? I think it’s my white hair?



Though I love tones of earth, I’m tempted by glitter so I finally choose these for some little projects I have in mind. Then Sandy surprised us by handing us each a gift certificate right there in the store. (She is moving to New Zealand and maybe we won’t see this dear friend for a long time.)

Feeling creative, beautiful, it’s 50 degrees outside, I think spring may be coming and this feeling may not last. But that’s okay. Just a taste now and then - a precious reminder of impending glory. Tomorrow I leave for Chicago to take care of Aunt Ruth for a week while Marsena works on a screenplay.

Farmers of this kind

The first time I met Joe & Becca I thought they might be brother and sister with their tawny red hair, fair skin, and earth-toned woolen sweaters. They are related, but as husband and wife, not siblings. It’s weird how some people get wired, I mean, just made with certain gifts. Either one of them can do about anything with their hands – music, carpentry, wool-making, raise 50 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and make killer lasagna.


I am seduced, awed, like maybe if I did life over again, this time I’d be them and get a farm, too. A lot has happened in three years since they married, moved to Stony Kill, New York, where for the first season they lived in a tent at the garden’s edge, and for two more seasons continued to manage an organic vegetable farm, saving every penny to buy land in SE Minnesota. Because they’ve been researching, because Joe’s father is also an organic farmer living in this area, and because they know their calling and have prayed so many times for guidance – when forty acres of land went up for sale at a great price, they bought it.









A couple weeks ago Denis and I drove out to see their land. It’s a property with some good sheds, a barn, and a condemned house. The barn floor was covered with freeze dried horse manure. No one has loved this farm in a long time. It’s overgrown with nettles and brambles. Fences are falling down. There junk piles. But hidden in tall grass we found a ray of red against the curse of thorns – a handful of tomatoes, a green pepper, and parsnip – volunteers from some old garden.



This is where their life will begin in December when they return to Minnesota and see the farm in reality for the first time – their work in NY hasn’t allowed any time away before then. The good price of the land allowed them to buy twice what they’d hoped, so Joe will be able to keep horses to help reclaim the soil and begin a vegetable farm. They plan to build a straw bale home next year. They know better than to think this will all be easy, having suffered in ways themselves. But they also know God is pleased when they make beautiful soil and good food from creation.

Next February I will be interviewing them for a workshop at the 2009 L’Abri conference. Hearing their story, their dreams, witnessing their energy for raising local food is a small, but significant push back against a fallen world. Or perhaps it’s a way of listening more intently to the groans of creation.