long days

oh hey guys.

made it in just under the month mark! would it make you feel better if I told you that every time I thought about my blog I felt guilty?

ok.

so. the adamahniks are here! here they are:

I guess we've been working them a little hard. a little naptime never hurt anyone.

let's see, what's been going on? I went to boston again (clay's law school graduation - midnight sailing and some good quality byrnes family time), I went to philly (outdoor block party world cup watching and excellent pho eating and settling), and although it might sound as though I have a glamourous jetsetting life in reality I have no free time!

farm life is busy. I've been shaving goats, making cheese, teaching milking, building things, weeding, making jam, walking fence lines, accidently weeding rhubarb out of perennial gardens and then driving to burlington, ct to trade veggie starts for established rhubarb found on craigslist, making spreadsheets, almost picking up snapping turtles, writing newsletters, obsessively checking the weather, and every once in a awhile I look around and revel that I live in such a beautiful place.

here's a picture of lauren:

"uhm, I have a question about the schedule? I'm in the sadeh, like, every day?"

time's going quickly - I've already been here two and a half months! crazy. I realized the other day that I'll be here until sukkot, which right now seems like a long way away.

now that I'm not in the fields so much anymore, whenever I get out there things are so much bigger. we've got broccoli, kale, chard, radishes, lettuce, peas, strawberries, scallions, kohlrabi, boy choy, garlic scapes, dill, and probably some other things I can't even remember right now. summer is definitely upon us and our veggie and dairy csa's are both up and running.

alright. with that quick update, the daunting task of keeping y'all informed has been put to rest - maybe now I'll update more often. no promises though!

I'll leave you with this, the anticipation of things to come:

back to it

alright, so many things have happened since I last updated, including going to a tractor and chainsaw safety workshop where I got to drive a tractor and a skidsteer and where they used jelly packets to demonstrate why you should wear hard hats, and I saw my first firefly, and went mini golfing, and now it's shavuot and there are about to be tons of retreatants all around, but the most important thing is that I started sprouting!

I got a 'sandwich mix' from the co-op in great barrington and lauren is skillsharing me and I'm really excited about the whole thing. that's a picture from last night, when I started them soaking, and here's a picture from just now, as they've been sitting and draining all morning.

not so exciting yet, but soon there will be sprouts. I'll do a little run down of the exact steps soon.

oh also I went to a biochar workshop last weekend after spending my project time intensively researching it on the internet (taking notes and everything!) and now I can't wait to build a nested retort cooker. more on that later too.

it's lunch time!

in which our intepid heroes kill 2.5 trees

SCENE:


beebe hill. AITAN and JULIA battle mightily to remove parasitic asian bittersweet vines from the cedar trees, using chain, tractor and chainsaw. LAUREN, SHAMU, ELLIE and EMI, taking a break from thinning the carrots, look on. JULIA wraps the chain around a large vine and cinches it; AITAN revs the tractor and pulls. All watch as the tree to which the vine is attached starts to lean and then topples, taking with it the tree next to it and the top of the third one over.

JULIA: Everyone just saw that happen.

AITAN: Were they pleased?



FIN

back on the farm

to start off with:  it's been windy, and dry (with the occasional t-storm) and I've been down in the sadeh a lot, so I've been getting some pretty gnarly boogers. I like to use the time I'm internetting to kinda clean out in there, especially off my nose stud. but I forget that this isn't, like, my personal office. this is a room with lots of windows that anyone could just walk by and see me. "oh look, there's the girl that makes those delicious pickled products. picking her nose." just kidding! I haven't made any pickled products yet.


so anyway, I've returned to the sticks from boston. I had quite an excellent time roaming the city on foot with clay, and I mean we did some serious roaming. I probably walked at least 10 miles over those three days, not that I minded, soaking up the culture and all. we did some really excellent drinking and I watched his rugby game (where they beat some old boston dudes 50-0) and bought settlers of catan and bananagrams and drank beer on his roof and I met some cool new people and it all culminated with sailing on the charles river with some mit phd frat boys, which is just somewhere I never thought I'd be in my life and was really hilarious and amazing. it had been really hot and muggy that day and I'd (well, clay'd) been hauling my duffle bag all over cambridge and getting on the water with that cool breeze was really quite splendid.

then lauren did an excellent job of navigating us back to the farm, despite me not being the best road-trip companion (I had to be picked up, I couldn't drive because I was drunk, and I was late because apparently when you're sailing you have to wait for the wind to carry you back to the dock!), and after her brother fed us toddler-size hamburgers.

oh yeah and there also was this crazy water emergency where we had to boil all the tap water and clay told me after I had already drank a whole glass of it so hopefully I don't have some weird parasite or anything. don't worry, I feel great! oh AND I forgot the most important news of all, which is that I ate an entire ice cream cone for the first time in probably 10 years and suffered no ill effects. so that was exciting, but no need to tempt fate or anything.


so! now I'm back on the farm and getting back into farm headspace. we've been putting hundreds and hundreds of onion, shallot, and leek starts into the ground at the sadeh, which was enlivened today by a controlled burn of stuff that had been cleared out of the woods

I helped set that on fire, which was fun, and despite some initial concern about possible woods-burning-down (mostly on my part), it all went as planned

and that's how you get rid of a big pile of brush and some wood.

emi and I also found a bunch more morels

in our secret spot, some of them quite large

and I think that's all to report for now. it was really warm the other night but now it looks like it's back to two blanket and sock weather for sleeping.

whew. blogging is exhausting.

busy days, and a break

goat update: all the kids have been born, with the last 3 popping out last friday. that brings our total up to 26 kids (13 boys and 13 girls - guess there's something to be said for statistics) and 45 goats total. oy. anyone want a baby goat? 

things are really getting into the swing of . . . things, I guess, around here. days have been full, of transplanting and weeding and mucking and cooking and eating and learning.

a few days ago we transplanted hundreds of bright lights chard starts into the sadeh (our 4 field down on 126, a few blocks from camp). it was really cold and windy, in that I was wearing two hoods and a hat and multiple layers and moving quickly and not getting overheated at all. but we made it through and hopefully they're all happily drinking up the sunshine that's appeared today.

yesterday we finally finished what's been a monumental task over the past month - weeding the strawberries. there's been a vicious annual rye grass interspersed with them, as well as some thistles, which is why some people plant strawberries as an annual, as to avoid this weeding. there were four beds, as well as the paths, but we finally got it down (amidst some more vicious wind) so that's a relief.

I was working in the greenhouse the other day and one of the things I did, along with lauren, was thin some basil. it had been double-seeded, since the seed was old and ellie wasn't sure it would have a good germination, but it did, and almost every cell had two plants. so we thinned and had some really adorable and delicious baby basil to eat - local basil in connecticut in april! who woulda thought.

now I'm off to boston for the weekend, and the forecast is for warm weather and (partially) sunny skies. hooray for a 3 day weekend!

here's a picture of the sunset I spied as I was closing up the chickens the other night (of course the picture doesn't do it justice, but you get the idea).

working, working.

I've been acquiring new skills left and right:

- loading 58 bales of hay on a pickup truck and only having one fall off halfway home

- chainsawing (those things are no joke)

- disbudding baby goats

we can discuss that last one a bit. so the kids are between 1 and 3 weeks old now and their horns are starting to grow in. many farms are going the direction of disbudding nowadays, which means burning their horns off while they're still little. we use a cauterizing iron, which looks something like a curling iron. it gets extremely hot and the actual procedure is quick, just about a minute or so per horn altogether. aitan fashioned a kid-holder (it's a milk crate with a hole cut in it) and we put them in one at a time, sit on the top, and disbud them. I'm not going to lie and say it doesn't hurt them, because they certainly make some noise while it's happening, but right afterwards they bound away and start playing like nothing ever happened, which made me feel better about it. you can think of it like a circumcision, if that helps.

why do we do it? goats with horns ram or gore people, and more often and seriously, each other, which can result in injuries. they also can get their heads stuck in things like grain feeders or fences, sometimes with dire results. when it comes down to it, they don't really need their horns, and it's a much simpler and humane procedure to do when they're babies.

we're also having the back pasture logged, about 4 acres (our neighbor jay is doing it all by himself. he's a beast). with all the tree-felling and the baby-goat-screaming, it's probably better that there wasn't a retreat this week - not really great for the freedman PR.

on a goat-related note, stucco did not make it. it's sad, but perhaps better for her as she was a little damaged from birth and may not have lived a great life anyway.

onward! to other things I have learned.

- how to plant bare-root raspberries (18 inches apart with rock phosphate, kelp and green sand in the hole)

- wild foraging for food!

that one I'm the most excited about. it started yesterday (well, it really started the night before when I was sitting in meg and adam's living room saying, "I want to learn more about foraging") while emi and I were weeding the blueberries. we came upon some mushrooms which I was pretty sure were morels. we got a few independent confirmations and this morning we ate them for breakfast in some eggs. they were awesome.

in the interests of full disclosure, that is a picture of morels that I found on the internet, because I forgot to take a picture of ours before we ate them. but they looked pretty much just like that, except growing out of cardboard mulch and thistles.

then today we were talking about more foraging, which lead to an amazing dinner of pasta with nettle and garlic-mustard pesto and fried fiddleheads. stinging nettles are growing everywhere here out of control and while they sting you when they're fresh, if you steam them for awhile they taste nice and green and spinachy

garlic mustard is also growing everywhere out of control and we just took that off the stem and blended it into the pesto raw.

also an internet picture.

fiddleheads are the immature stalks of ostrich ferns, which happen to also be growing here, not as abundantly as our other dinner content, unfortunately, because they are totally delicious.

those we battered and fried. they came out looking like little fried shrimps and they tasted amazing, fresh and kinda asparagus-y.

then for dessert we made waffles. so unnecessary, and great.

in closing, here is a picture of aitan using the tractor, which I so dearly would like to drive and am so not allowed, to transport his bike.

if anyone's gonna be in the bronx this sunday, I'll be there selling our delicious pickled products at an earth day festival. get at me.

gettin in the groove

back from a weekend in the city (nyc, not sf, nowadays). I had a great time doing many things, including but not limited to:

eating at momofuku (yay!)

buying new shoes (hooray!)

and eating at vanessa's dumpling house (huzzah!).

I did some things that weren't eating too, but those aren't as important.

things are going well on the farm, here. I missed a goat c-section last week, much to my chagrin. ilex was kidding and having a hard time of it, so after awhile aitan called the vet and they cut her open right there in the barnyard, on some pallets and plywood. this while I was having some after-work snacks and cocktails at adam and meg's. dang. everything went well and ilex and one of her kids are doing fine. the smaller kid, stucco (so named by aitan because she was stuck) was having some trouble nursing when I left on friday and having to be tube fed. I haven't been down to the barnyard since I've been back, so I don't know her status.

I'm trying to be more farmy and ascertain things about the outdoors without using the internet, especially the weather. tonight I've been noticing that just listening to the sounds outside can really clue you in - right now I hear some insects and some peepers - little frogs that live around here and make froggy peeps in the evening. that tells me it's not so cold outside as it's been. splendid.

my tick bite site appears to be healing nicely.

time for bed.