Tech Revolutions on a Slow Farm

We practice slow farming here on our New Hampshire place. We have less than three acres in vegetables, and we plow, disc, cultivate, and make loose hay at the speed of Belgian and Percheon horses and antique horse machinery. We plant and harvest kind of slowly too, at the speed of two well- past-youth farmers and antique tools.

Of course, we do have some fine modern items on the farm: our sturdy plastic harvest crates, our recently installed irrigation system, our electric fence around the garden. Plus, when it comes to winter farm paperwork, we have this fine new item: a computer!

It took us a while to get to the computer. In the beginning, we went down to our little local library for an hour every Thursday to use their computer. It was kind of nice having computer work restricted to one day a week, but it was also kind of hard to get all the computer work done in an hour, particularly when a farmer forgets to bring half the things she needs to the library in order to achieve her computer work.

Gradually, we began to acquire home computers, since we aren't very fussy about how old or slow they are. Friends, CSA members, mothers, sisters, all kind of fine folks, have given us computers and printers, too. As one friend said a few years ago, “Wow, that's great! You're in the '90s now!”

Next one of our creative, savvy CSA members made us a website in exchange for a share of vegetables. We've had the website now for 7 or 8 years, but we slow farmers are still amazed when people look at our website, and then send us a check in the mail.

“But they don't even know us!” we say. “They haven't even talked to us on the phone! What if we're a big hoax? What if we don't have a farm at all?”

At this last, we fall about laughing, in the middle of our hoax horses and horse machinery and garden tools and greenhouses and fields.

Once we had the website, we soon realized that posting pictures of our hoax farm would be a lot easier with a more modern camera. Our trusty 35 mm film camera finally gave up the ghost, so we borrowed a digital camera from another sterling CSA member to take farm pictures. The camera came complete with instructions on how to firmly grip the battery cover in order to function, as the camera had been repeatedly dropped by small children. We are good grippers, and we gripped.

We had a technology revolution in our budget work as well. For years we scribbled numbers on scraps of paper, and then wept copious tears when we could not find the scraps, or read them if we could find them. Then we made a great leap: we found a stash of hoarded graph paper from the old days, and suddenly we had grids, column, rows! We hauled out our calculators and cross-checked our figures. Then we only wept when our calculators came up with differing opinions.

Soon yet another magnificent CSA member introduced us to the beauty of Excel spread sheets. Finally our rows and columns added up. Our waterfalls of tears were reduced to small brooks, as we discovered that formulas and numbers have nothing personal against us slow farmers.

We must admit, however, that we have not upgraded our phone technology. The idea of having a cell phone in our pockets as we plow with the horses is painful. First the cell phone would fall out of the pocket, as the farmer bangs on the machinery, and then a horse's big foot would fall on the cell phone. But even if we

were to duct tape the cell phone to our bulging well-past-youth farmer biceps, the real truth is that the idea of having a cell phone at all is painful. We want to be quietly with our horses and our machinery banging or with our carrot weeding and our bird singing.

Plus our phone land line is so ingeniouly configured that we hate to give it up. We have two phones connected together, each of which functions according to its abilities: one rings, and the other does everything else. And, gee, it was another kind and thoughtful CSA member who gave us the second phone and helped us rig it all up.

Clearly, our slow farm technological advances have been in fits and starts, but we have given each of them some thought. After all, we don't want to go too quickly into all this newfangled stuff. Best is that each fit and start has been with the help and encouragement of CSA members and friends and family. It takes a whole bunch of nice people to keep a slow farm going, even a hoax farm, and we slow farmers like that.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, February 15-21, 2017

The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure

My fellow vegetable farmer loves pizza. He claims he could eat it every night for supper.

“Every night?” I say, making a face. I like variety in my meals.

“Well, maybe every other night. We could have pasta in between,” he says, his eyes lighting up at this exciting meal plan.

“You should have been a pizza farmer. Or a pasta farmer. You could have amber waves of grain. What are you doing growing vegetables?”

My fellow grins and shrugs. “I'm halfway to pizza. Look at this.” He shows me a new seed catalog, where he's circled all the tomato varieties he wants to try next season. “See all these delicious tomatoes? They're practically pizza. And look here, onions, and peppers, and spinach and broccoli, for pizza toppings.”

I just laugh. “I'm the one who puts the vegetables on the pizza! You would be happy with cheese!”

“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I want lots of tomatoes, a nice thick sauce. Yum!” He circles some more tomato varieties, and falls into a January-vegetable-farmer-drooling-over-seed-catalogs daze. He is in a tomato-growing, pizza-eating dream.

I, however, am not thinking of pizza, at least not the kind of pizza my fellow dreams about. I am thinking of our root cellar full of vegetables and our freezer full of vegetables, stored for the winter. I am thinking how handy and thrifty and sustainable it is to be a vegeterian when one is a vegetable farmer. And I am also thinking of my digestive system, which seems considerably happier on a vegetable diet, rather than a pizza and pasta diet.

Thus I embark on the Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure. Long, long ago, when my digestive system was young and willing, and my zucchini harvest was overflowing, I tried a zucchini crusted-pizza, a recipe from our dog-eared copy of the Moosewood cookbook. Alas, my penciled notation read, “Yuk! Way too eggy.” The evolution of my tastes and diet is clear through my additional notes: the next one said, “I have learned to like this!” and the third one says, “Very good!”

The recipe calls for eggs, cheese, herbs, a little flour, and two cups of grated zucchini. It was easy to substitute yellow squash for zucchini when necessary, and cornmeal or rice flour for the wheat flour.

But one winter, I ran out of grated zucchini and grated yellow squash. I found another recipe, for a cauliflower pizza crust. Now, I love cauliflower, but let me say that a cauliflower pizza crust is nothing like a regular pizza crust, in my thinking. It really tastes like cauliflower, and cauliflower is not a subtle vegetable. Plus I had to eat it with a fork. “This is not a pizza!” I proclaimed. “This is a casserole!”

“It's a pretty good casserole, though,” said my nice fellow, trying a bite, between slices of his delicious homemade wheat crust regular pick-up-able pizza.

“Huh,” I said. “I'm going to try something else. I have a lot of beets. I'm going to make a beet crust. I love beets!”

And yes, I do love beets, but a beet crust pizza is almost unbelievably sweet. “This is not a pizza!” I said. “This is too sweet! Even if I can pick it up in a slice, and not by the forkful!”

But I did have plenty of carrots in the root cellar that year too. Carrots made a pretty good pizza crust. Carrots and beets mixed together made a pretty good pizza crust. And then last year, when the carrots and beets were all gone, I was reduced to the rutabaga. I hasten to add that I love rutabagas.

My fellow raised his eyebrows. “Rutabaga pizza?”

My dear daughter, who does not love rutabagas, politely turned her head away at the idea.

Undaunted, I fetched my rutabagas. I washed them, trimmed them, grated them, mixed them up with eggs, cheese, herbs, and cornmeal. I baked my rutabaga crust, topped it with tomato sauce, more cheese, onions, peppers. Then I waited.

Ding! Ding ! Ding! went the timer. At last! My rutabaga pizza! The most delicious vegetable pizza crust in the world! Slightly sweet, like a rutabaga, but not too strongly flavored, and it holds together nicely. I even let my fellow and my daughter try a bite. “That's pretty good,” they said, surprised.

“Yum,” I answered.

Now, when my fellow suggests pizza for supper every night, I agree, at least about once a week. The Great Vegetable Pizza Adventure continues: this year, stored in my root cellar, I have lots of daikon radishes, which surprised us very late in the season by their vigorous growth in the greenhouse.

Mmm. Doesn't that sound yummy? Daikon Radish Pizza!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 18 - Jan 24, 2017

Dizzy December on the Farm

 Honestly, there are few things sillier than a New England vegetable farmer in December. A December farmer is prone to tumultuous tears and loopy laughter, prone to giddy gales of glee and riotous roars of relief, prone to alarming amounts of alliteration and crazy columns.  

Why? Because another harvest season has been surmounted! We pulled it off again! Three months of pre-harvest work, followed by six months of harvest work: week after week, vegetable after vegetable, planted, watered, weeded, picked, sorted, washed, and distributed to CSA members and Farmer's Market customers. But now it's over!  

Every bad bug or dreadful drought or foul flood of the season is now in the past; every worrisome weed or irritating irrigation incident or determined deer forcing a fence is just a memory. Now is the time we get to rest and read and revel, wonder and write and wax eloquent (or weloquent, as the case may be).  

Now is also the time when ordinarily vexing things (such as the excessive use of alliteration!) seem charming and delightful. Sink full of dirty dishes? Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to wash them! Laundry room floor covered with dirty laundry! Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to wash it! Bedroom floor covered with clean laundry? Wow! That's fantastic! We have lots of time to fold it and put it away!  

Email inbox overflowing with messages? No problem! We love sitting in front of the computer! School carpool drivers gone traveling? No problem! We'll take an extra shift! (Or hey! Too many exclamation points in one short Shopper column? No problem! We vegetable farmers get the Dizzy December Dispensation!)  

In the same vein, ordinarily agreeable things on the farm become even more pleasing once the harvest season has ended. For example, there are many times during the year when a farmer might come across a draft horse in urgent need of petting under the chin and scratching on the withers. In the gardening season, the petting and scratching is more likely to lead to full-on grooming, harnessing, and going out to the field to plow or disc or harrow.  

But in winter, pleasant petting and scratching just leads to more pleasant petting and scratching, which is satisfying to both petter and pettee, scratcher and scratchee. The horse are winter-warm and fuzzy, and smell so sweet, and they like a good massage very, very much. Especially when it's followed by munching hay out of the manger, which is followed by soaking up the sunshine.  

Sunshine, of course, is another one of the ordinarily agreeable things that are even more pleasing this time of chilly year. Weather, in general, is more pleasing in the winter, when a farmer is not trying to persuade vegetables to grow despite hail or drought or flood. In winter, there's only the snow to shovel from the greenhouses, and the wood to bring from the woodshed. Gosh, what's a howling snow storm or an inch of ice matter when you don't have any tender lettuce transplants or just germinated carrots struggling to survive?  

Darkness, too, is more enjoyable this season of the year. It is always kind of nice when it gets to be dusk in the summer: time to hang up the tools, time to lead the horses out to pasture, time to enjoy a quick salad supper and fall into bed. In December, since it's dusk in the middle of the afternoon, it's all kinds of nice in the dark: a leisurely meal, and a long evening in front of the fire, considering sewing repairs or tool repairs or inside-of-the-house-falling-apart repairs, but not actually doing them. Because it's only December! We've just finished the season! We have all winter! First let's have some fun!  

Even holidays are more vegetable farmer friendly in the winter. In the summer, the world always seem to be going on vacation or swimming or watching fireworks when there's hay to be cut and raked and picked up, or weeding to be done. But in the winter, that same world kindly offers millions of potlucks and parties and concerts and holiday fairs and festivities, just at the perfect time for a celebrating end-of-the-season vegetable farmer. And, as you can imagine, it's especially pleasing, and well-nigh irresistible to a silly, dizzy, wild December farmer, to send this alliterative greeting out to the world: Happy Holidays! Ho! Ho! Ho!

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 21 - 27, 2016

Goodbye to Our Scratchy Bitey Farm Cat

November is a fine month on our vegetable farm. In November, both our Farmers' Market and our CSA harvest days are over for the season, and we revel in the feeling of so much time. Now we have time to finish putting up the last of the vegetables for winter eating, and time to put the machinery away, and time to return our draft horses to their winter paddock. We even have a little time to bask by the wood stove with our stripey kitty, Cricket, who stretches out on the rug and chirps occasionally at us. Cricket is a fine kitty, and we give her lots of pets, both for her own sake, and for the sake of other fine cats, such as our scratchy-bitey black kitty, who, at twenty years old, left us this past summer. It was the end of an era here on our farm. Our black kitty has been with us longer than our New Hampshire farm and our draft horses and our daughter. We, along with friends, relatives, neighbors, and CSA members, all have funny stories about our scratchy-bitey kitty. Most of them, of course, involve scratching and biting. Happily, as our kitty got on in years, he did mellow a bit, tending towards hissing, spitting and violent cursing rather than scratching and biting. He also developed several fine-old-kitty quirks. This last summer, for example, he only wanted to lie on hard surfaces, such as the table or the counter top or the pile of cucumbers we were getting ready to pickle. The day we found him curled up in the frying pan on the stove top was the day we instituted the spray bottle. Our black kitty did not like the spray bottle at all. He would glare balefully at the spray bottle and at the person waving it in his direction, and then leap down. In a few minutes he would be right back again, moving from counter top to stove to sink, looking for the ideal resting spot. He had a strong will, our kitty. In fact, as our kitty got older, he exerted his will on the household by refusing to drink out of any ordinary vessel, be it glass, ceramic, metal, wooden, or plastic. No, he wanted to drink out of the sink. Or he wanted to lick the tiny drops of water on newly washed supper vegetables. Or he wanted to drink from the shower floor, especially when a person was mid-shower, and didn't especially want a cat to hover in the shower curtain, letting the cold air in and the water out. But our black kitty's favorite was the water that he liberated by tipping over vases of flowers on the kitchen table. We tried various vase tricks, such as weighting the vases with rocks, or jamming several vases into a big basket to make them kitty-proof. With the determination of the strong-willed, our kitty knocked over the entire basket of many vases. Then he had a lot of water. We learned to enjoy our vases of flowers displayed on the top of the refrigerator. Our scratchy-bitey kitty was looking pretty rough his last few months, thin and bony, his coat a mess, despite our efforts with brush and comb, and despite many treats of eggs and nutritional yeast and other savories. Like many very old cats, he was partially blind, and completely deaf, and had an enormous howling yowl to express his opinions at odd moments. If it wasn't the crashing vases that woke us up at midnight, it was the ear-splitting yell, which he kept practicing until the end. We never could tell what he was saying, but he said it good and loud, as he made his way around and in and out of the house. His whole life, our black kitty spent a lot of time outdoors, and this last summer was no exception. Our daughter, who was born into the household of the Scratchy-Bitey Kitty, was the last to see him. “I gave him some cream,” she said, “and four different bowls of water, and he drank a little out of every one.” Sometime in the night our kitty let himself out of the screen door, a talent he had perfected. We think he must have found himself a good spot to die, in the woods or the fields, and we think of him often. We think of him, and are glad he lived with us, and glad for his help in our sustainable-farming-rodent-control program, and glad he had a good, long, healthy kitty life. We can keep our vases of flowers on the table again now. But we miss our scratchy-bitey kitty. He sure did love that rug in front of the wood stove on a cold November day. He defended it tooth and claw.   Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 23 - Nov 29, 2016