Garlic Scapes. I’m not sure you quite understand me if I say we have a lot. A LOT. It is indeed quite the surfeit of scapes, a superfluity of flavor that now dominates our mealtimes.
Are you familiar with this adventuring curlicue of the renowned garlic plant? The scape is the strong yet tender shoot rising from a garlic plant, destined to become a flower. By cutting the scape before the flower can bud, the plant’s energy is redirected towards growing a large and healthy garlic bulb. The scapes, meanwhile, proffer a subtle garlic taste a month or two before the bulbs are to be harvested. What a treat!
Here at D Acres, however, the problem of abundance is upon us. You’ll reliably find garlic scapes in ‘bout every dish for the next month. From pizza toppings to stir-frys and sautées, from eggs, quiches, & frittatas to fritters & vegetable cakes; from salad dressing & pesto to marinades and so much more, culinary creativity is in high demand come this time of year.
Try as we might, our gullets can’t quite absorb such a glut of the good stuff. We therefore have our means of distributing such quantity through the cooler months. Garlic scape pesto is made by the gallon, while pickled garlic scapes have commandeered a whole section of basement real estate. Garlic scape puree now dominates a corner of the freezer, while brined and fermented recipes are being sought as I write this.
Also as I write this, scapes are being moved from field to fridge. Ours can only hold so much, though, and so I do propose: that we move them into your fridge. Yes, we need to move our succulent scapes. We need ya’ll to be curious. We need you to see that these are the very best things that you’ve been missing all along. You see, we hear this all the time, at dinners here or food fairs out and about:
“Can I buy this?”
“Do you sell this?”
“How much can I offer you?” and on and on.
So now the opportunity has arrived. D Acres Prized Pesto is available for sale here at the farm; Pickled Garlic Scapes can now be purchased here at D Acres as well as through Local Foods Plymouth (www.localfoodsplymouth.org) - this is what you are waiting for. Really.
Need one more taste test to convince yourself? Join us this Thursday, July 21 for pickled garlic scapes, pesto, and fresh bread at the Plymouth Farmer’s Market 3-6pm. If that snuck up on you too quick, swing by downtown Plymouth next Thursday, July 28 at one of two locations: first, look for us in front of Peppercorn Natural Foods 1-3pm, then find us at the Farmer’s Market once again 3-6pm. This is sampling that you don’t want to miss!
We will also continue to sell fresh scapes (need I mention kale, collards, and chard?) until their season has passed. Check out our website for our pickling recipe, or pop on in to visit – you, too, can preserve some flavor for the coming months. Enjoy! We’d love to hear your garlic scape favorites.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Driving Dirt Uphill: In Partial Praise of Fossil Fuels
"A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself." Thomas Jefferson
So reads the sticker on the rear bumper of one of the farm trucks, not the one, unfortunately, that I am driving to town on the Saturday town run. I'm headed into town in the Ford pickup as part of a thrice weekly ritual. Every Monday, Thursday and Saturday someone gets to escape from the usual farm work and drive to town to collect the mail from the post office in Rumney, and then continuing on to Plymouth, to run errands, and most importantly, to collect ingredients for our perpetual project of soil rebuilding in the form of waste food and cardboard. This is precious organic matter we add to the compromised soils up here in the hills to help rebuild the complex ecosystem of a healthy soil.
The original rich forest soils were washed downhill and out to sea long ago, as a result of a couple of hundred years of poor management practices. Did the first white settlers here realize that they were in effect mining the immense wealth under their feet when they clear cut the forests, tilled the cleared ground, farmed the fields to exhaustion and then brought in sheep to finish off the last of the vegetation? At this point it is impossible to tell, but the legacy of these practices is all too evident in the thin, sandy soils dotted with large chunks of exposed granite covering these hills. In the years that have passed since the sheep pastures were abandoned, the land has slowly been recolonized by forests and new soil is beginning to accumulate as the exposed rock weathers and organic matter in the form of dead leaves, decaying plant matter and the occasional deposit of moose droppings or coyote scat pile up. Natural soil rebuilding happens very slowly, however, in the range of inches of precious, life-sustaining topsoil per decade at best. So if farming is to be feasible here without dependence on artificial fertilizers, we have little choice but to rebuild the soil by carrying tons of organic matter back up hill. We'd like to avoid the use of artificial fertilizers, and not just because "organic farm" sounds so sexy.
Yes, organic farming is often looked at as a niche market, a trendy idea for many mainstream Americans, but there are some pretty good reasons to adopt organic practices, like building soil rather than applying fertilizers. Conventional agriculture makes liberal use of artificial fertilizers, and treats the soil as little more than a place to put plants which are kept alive by the application of fertilizers (not to mention herbicides and pesticides) a practice fraught with problems. Even if the standard issue ammonium nitrate fertilizer does provide plants with needed nutrients in the short term, its use has far reaching negative effects both before and after it is used. Since it is water soluble and easily washed away, it tends to be over-applied with the excess not absorbed by plant roots entering streams, rivers, lakes and eventually the ocean. In all of which places it leads to the process of "eutrophication" -- the sudden flush of excess nutrients in a body of water following a storm causes algae to grow rapidily and then just as quickly to die off once the nutrients are depleted. As the dead algae rots, the water in which it has temporarily thrived is stripped of oxygen and all aquatic life suffocates. As a result of the use of artificial fertilizers throughout the immense Mississippi River basin, to take the most dramatic example of this problem, a dead zone devoid of aquatic life about the size of Texas appears in the Gulf of Mexico every year during the growing season and only partially recovers every winter. This is a pretty serious problem and one that organic farming practices don't create. Good on us organic farmers!
But even before it is sprayed onto fields, artificial fertilizer indirectly causes another form of damage to watersheds all over the country. This is because the primary feedstock for the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer is natural gas, and natural gas is increasingly being extracted from shale deposits through a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." After the initial well bore is drilled into a bed of shale, it is pumped with high pressure chemical soups designed to fracture the "tight" shale rock containing natural gas, allowing the gas to bubble upwards to be collected at the surface. Unfortunately, fracturing the rock also allows both toxic fracking fluid and natural gas to enter water wells and to poison springs. We watched a film last week here at D Acres called "Gasland" which has some pretty stunning footage of people lighting their formerly drinkable tap water on fire. Everyone laughed, but it was still pretty depressing to see how damaging our efforts to scrape up the last natural gas under our soils can be.
Even if we just ignore these problems with using and producing artificial fertilizers, spraying them onto fields does nothing to restore the health of depleted soils. It only serves as a temporary solution to the problem of exhausted soils. Sometimes, like when I am digging a hole and hit rocks two inches under the surface of the soil, it is hard to imagine that the natural prairie and forest soils of North America were among the richest ecosystems on the planet. They have all but disappeared as a result of the last two centuries of careless use and abuse. If we have any hope of living in greater balance with such ecosystems on which all life depends and without relying entirely on a tightening supply of fossil fuels, we'll have to rebuild the soil fertility that previous generations have unknowingly squandered.
So we drive tons of waste food uphill, along with cardboard for sheet mulching, as well as mountains of horse manure, barrels of bird and rabbit poop and truckloads of hay from local farms. The waste food is fed to the pigs, who seem to love it when they get buckets of old cafeteria food dumped onto their heads. Nobody intends to dump it on their heads, but they just won't get out of the way, especially when cheese sauce is involved. The oxen prefer less sloppy meals, so they get old corn, squash and apples along with their hay. We use ungodly amounts of cardboard to suppress weeds on the edges of garden beds, where it slowly rots into the soil and keeps the weeds at bay for a little while at least. The manure we truck up here is mixed with soiled animal bedding in our compost piles and then applied directed to garden beds. It is hard work loading and unloading all of this material from the farm trucks, turning manure piles with a manure fork, stacking bales of hay into storage areas and carrying five gallon bucket loads of compost over rock walls into the fields where we grow crops. But it is worth every sore muscle and drop of sweat since we are rebuilding the soil's capacity to sustain the lives of worms, insects, fungi, microorganisms, and as a result, the plants and animals we eat. Healthy soils cycle nutrients effectively from plants to animals and fungi and back again thus enabling plants to effectively capture the solar energy that drives the entire system. We are using fossil fuels to rebuild our soils with the goal of freeing ourselves gradually from their use. Conventional farms, on the other hand use fossil fuels as a replacement for the lost functions of healthy soil in a never ending battle against the ill effects of their own poor soil management. And it is kind of fun loading the trucks with as much hay as possible -- so far the farm record is 128 bales on the Ford pickup and its trailer.
So, in spite of our use of hand tools for many jobs that fossil fuel powered machines might do for us, we still do admire these potent sources of energy. And they are pretty astounding substances when you think about where they came from. We sometimes forget that coal, oil and natural gas are essentially super-concentrated solar energy, millions of years worth of energy from the sun stored up in plant matter that was trapped under swamps and slow cooked in the earth's crust over many more millions of years. It is also astounding to think that we have spent just about half of these millions of years of solar energy savings over the last 250 years or so. No wonder modern life moves so quickly compared to the lives humans lived ever since we emerged from caves or trees or wherever we came from. The half of the fossil fuel legacy that is left, such as shale gas, deep water oil and the tar sands of places like Alberta, Canada is increasingly difficult, expensive and environmentally destructive to recover. So we may as well use what is left in projects like rebuilding the capacity of the land we live on to make effective use once again of the slower and steadier rhythms of the rising and setting sun as the seasons slowly roll by. Time to unload what other people call waste and feed it to the soil. Do the people who are giving us all of this good stuff for free really know its value? Shhh, don't tell them.
== George Matthews ==
So reads the sticker on the rear bumper of one of the farm trucks, not the one, unfortunately, that I am driving to town on the Saturday town run. I'm headed into town in the Ford pickup as part of a thrice weekly ritual. Every Monday, Thursday and Saturday someone gets to escape from the usual farm work and drive to town to collect the mail from the post office in Rumney, and then continuing on to Plymouth, to run errands, and most importantly, to collect ingredients for our perpetual project of soil rebuilding in the form of waste food and cardboard. This is precious organic matter we add to the compromised soils up here in the hills to help rebuild the complex ecosystem of a healthy soil.
The original rich forest soils were washed downhill and out to sea long ago, as a result of a couple of hundred years of poor management practices. Did the first white settlers here realize that they were in effect mining the immense wealth under their feet when they clear cut the forests, tilled the cleared ground, farmed the fields to exhaustion and then brought in sheep to finish off the last of the vegetation? At this point it is impossible to tell, but the legacy of these practices is all too evident in the thin, sandy soils dotted with large chunks of exposed granite covering these hills. In the years that have passed since the sheep pastures were abandoned, the land has slowly been recolonized by forests and new soil is beginning to accumulate as the exposed rock weathers and organic matter in the form of dead leaves, decaying plant matter and the occasional deposit of moose droppings or coyote scat pile up. Natural soil rebuilding happens very slowly, however, in the range of inches of precious, life-sustaining topsoil per decade at best. So if farming is to be feasible here without dependence on artificial fertilizers, we have little choice but to rebuild the soil by carrying tons of organic matter back up hill. We'd like to avoid the use of artificial fertilizers, and not just because "organic farm" sounds so sexy.
Yes, organic farming is often looked at as a niche market, a trendy idea for many mainstream Americans, but there are some pretty good reasons to adopt organic practices, like building soil rather than applying fertilizers. Conventional agriculture makes liberal use of artificial fertilizers, and treats the soil as little more than a place to put plants which are kept alive by the application of fertilizers (not to mention herbicides and pesticides) a practice fraught with problems. Even if the standard issue ammonium nitrate fertilizer does provide plants with needed nutrients in the short term, its use has far reaching negative effects both before and after it is used. Since it is water soluble and easily washed away, it tends to be over-applied with the excess not absorbed by plant roots entering streams, rivers, lakes and eventually the ocean. In all of which places it leads to the process of "eutrophication" -- the sudden flush of excess nutrients in a body of water following a storm causes algae to grow rapidily and then just as quickly to die off once the nutrients are depleted. As the dead algae rots, the water in which it has temporarily thrived is stripped of oxygen and all aquatic life suffocates. As a result of the use of artificial fertilizers throughout the immense Mississippi River basin, to take the most dramatic example of this problem, a dead zone devoid of aquatic life about the size of Texas appears in the Gulf of Mexico every year during the growing season and only partially recovers every winter. This is a pretty serious problem and one that organic farming practices don't create. Good on us organic farmers!
But even before it is sprayed onto fields, artificial fertilizer indirectly causes another form of damage to watersheds all over the country. This is because the primary feedstock for the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer is natural gas, and natural gas is increasingly being extracted from shale deposits through a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." After the initial well bore is drilled into a bed of shale, it is pumped with high pressure chemical soups designed to fracture the "tight" shale rock containing natural gas, allowing the gas to bubble upwards to be collected at the surface. Unfortunately, fracturing the rock also allows both toxic fracking fluid and natural gas to enter water wells and to poison springs. We watched a film last week here at D Acres called "Gasland" which has some pretty stunning footage of people lighting their formerly drinkable tap water on fire. Everyone laughed, but it was still pretty depressing to see how damaging our efforts to scrape up the last natural gas under our soils can be.
Even if we just ignore these problems with using and producing artificial fertilizers, spraying them onto fields does nothing to restore the health of depleted soils. It only serves as a temporary solution to the problem of exhausted soils. Sometimes, like when I am digging a hole and hit rocks two inches under the surface of the soil, it is hard to imagine that the natural prairie and forest soils of North America were among the richest ecosystems on the planet. They have all but disappeared as a result of the last two centuries of careless use and abuse. If we have any hope of living in greater balance with such ecosystems on which all life depends and without relying entirely on a tightening supply of fossil fuels, we'll have to rebuild the soil fertility that previous generations have unknowingly squandered.
So we drive tons of waste food uphill, along with cardboard for sheet mulching, as well as mountains of horse manure, barrels of bird and rabbit poop and truckloads of hay from local farms. The waste food is fed to the pigs, who seem to love it when they get buckets of old cafeteria food dumped onto their heads. Nobody intends to dump it on their heads, but they just won't get out of the way, especially when cheese sauce is involved. The oxen prefer less sloppy meals, so they get old corn, squash and apples along with their hay. We use ungodly amounts of cardboard to suppress weeds on the edges of garden beds, where it slowly rots into the soil and keeps the weeds at bay for a little while at least. The manure we truck up here is mixed with soiled animal bedding in our compost piles and then applied directed to garden beds. It is hard work loading and unloading all of this material from the farm trucks, turning manure piles with a manure fork, stacking bales of hay into storage areas and carrying five gallon bucket loads of compost over rock walls into the fields where we grow crops. But it is worth every sore muscle and drop of sweat since we are rebuilding the soil's capacity to sustain the lives of worms, insects, fungi, microorganisms, and as a result, the plants and animals we eat. Healthy soils cycle nutrients effectively from plants to animals and fungi and back again thus enabling plants to effectively capture the solar energy that drives the entire system. We are using fossil fuels to rebuild our soils with the goal of freeing ourselves gradually from their use. Conventional farms, on the other hand use fossil fuels as a replacement for the lost functions of healthy soil in a never ending battle against the ill effects of their own poor soil management. And it is kind of fun loading the trucks with as much hay as possible -- so far the farm record is 128 bales on the Ford pickup and its trailer.
So, in spite of our use of hand tools for many jobs that fossil fuel powered machines might do for us, we still do admire these potent sources of energy. And they are pretty astounding substances when you think about where they came from. We sometimes forget that coal, oil and natural gas are essentially super-concentrated solar energy, millions of years worth of energy from the sun stored up in plant matter that was trapped under swamps and slow cooked in the earth's crust over many more millions of years. It is also astounding to think that we have spent just about half of these millions of years of solar energy savings over the last 250 years or so. No wonder modern life moves so quickly compared to the lives humans lived ever since we emerged from caves or trees or wherever we came from. The half of the fossil fuel legacy that is left, such as shale gas, deep water oil and the tar sands of places like Alberta, Canada is increasingly difficult, expensive and environmentally destructive to recover. So we may as well use what is left in projects like rebuilding the capacity of the land we live on to make effective use once again of the slower and steadier rhythms of the rising and setting sun as the seasons slowly roll by. Time to unload what other people call waste and feed it to the soil. Do the people who are giving us all of this good stuff for free really know its value? Shhh, don't tell them.
== George Matthews ==
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Sweating for Spuds
It was, of course, one of those hot and sunny days when you can’t unstick your clothes from your skin, and when clods of dirt turn to mud pies on your sweaty legs. Corners of shade were a treat worth hustling to get to, and jugs of water didn’t stay full for long. The bugs, in moderate and not-quite-vicious abundance, set the pace. Head down, with legs walking, arms lugging, and hands mounding compost all as rapidly as possible, the bugs couldn’t distract the focus.
Potatoes were earning my full attention this particular Thursday in June.
Here at D Acres, you see, potatoes are an integral component of our forest-to-garden conversion process. The work alluded to above, is the hilling of our special spuds. This happens once a month during the summer until the harvest is upon us. And let me tell you – the more hands the better.
This year we planted 295 pounds of potatoes; the task of hilling is not a quick one. With Josh, Regina, and I, plus our powerhouse of seven interns, it was a day and a half affair. Even promises of an end-of-the-day, oh-so-sweet, what-could-be-more-refreshing swimming hole trip couldn’t make it happen any faster. It’s a physical task, and there is no appropriate preparation for eight hours of carrying, emptying, and re-filling five gallon buckets other than buckling down and doing it. But we’ve made it through spring training, so to speak; our July hilling should be all the easier…
In my own mind, trudging between rows of green leaves and paths of clover, history offered a helpful perspective. Access to this particular pasture is limited, surrounded by a stone wall of yore. It is - wonderfully and inconveniently - in a fine state, necessitating the hauling of each compost-laden bucket up, and over, and down the sturdy stack of rocks: the compost could only be driven so close to one side, the potatoes only so close to the wall’s inner edge. So each bucket covered a path of history, a testament to the work that had once created this pasture, a reminder that it’s interim as forest and it’s present return to field is just one more cycle of history.
As we contribute our farming acts to this unfolding chain of land use, potatoes provide an agricultural re-initiation for the field. Potatoes, and their preference for growing in dirt mounds, make them an excellent first crop. To hill them, we shovel truckloads of home-grown compost into five gallon buckets, then mound this (and large quantities of mulch hay) around our blossoming plants. This process, while increasing the productivity of the potatoes simultaneously creates raised beds along the contours of the field. By the end of the season, we are rich in organic matter just where we need it most.
Step by step, plant by plant, bucket by bucket, we are returning richness to the soil. Each addition crosses the stone wall, a stoic witness to much change, and an ode, perhaps, to what once was and what may be once again.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Potatoes were earning my full attention this particular Thursday in June.
Here at D Acres, you see, potatoes are an integral component of our forest-to-garden conversion process. The work alluded to above, is the hilling of our special spuds. This happens once a month during the summer until the harvest is upon us. And let me tell you – the more hands the better.
This year we planted 295 pounds of potatoes; the task of hilling is not a quick one. With Josh, Regina, and I, plus our powerhouse of seven interns, it was a day and a half affair. Even promises of an end-of-the-day, oh-so-sweet, what-could-be-more-refreshing swimming hole trip couldn’t make it happen any faster. It’s a physical task, and there is no appropriate preparation for eight hours of carrying, emptying, and re-filling five gallon buckets other than buckling down and doing it. But we’ve made it through spring training, so to speak; our July hilling should be all the easier…
In my own mind, trudging between rows of green leaves and paths of clover, history offered a helpful perspective. Access to this particular pasture is limited, surrounded by a stone wall of yore. It is - wonderfully and inconveniently - in a fine state, necessitating the hauling of each compost-laden bucket up, and over, and down the sturdy stack of rocks: the compost could only be driven so close to one side, the potatoes only so close to the wall’s inner edge. So each bucket covered a path of history, a testament to the work that had once created this pasture, a reminder that it’s interim as forest and it’s present return to field is just one more cycle of history.
As we contribute our farming acts to this unfolding chain of land use, potatoes provide an agricultural re-initiation for the field. Potatoes, and their preference for growing in dirt mounds, make them an excellent first crop. To hill them, we shovel truckloads of home-grown compost into five gallon buckets, then mound this (and large quantities of mulch hay) around our blossoming plants. This process, while increasing the productivity of the potatoes simultaneously creates raised beds along the contours of the field. By the end of the season, we are rich in organic matter just where we need it most.
Step by step, plant by plant, bucket by bucket, we are returning richness to the soil. Each addition crosses the stone wall, a stoic witness to much change, and an ode, perhaps, to what once was and what may be once again.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Friday, June 24, 2011
Trimming the Yard
Today was my day to take out the lawn mower. Sort of. Here at D Acres, our team of oxen - Henri & August – takes the place of large machinery. No pedals, gears, nor spinning blades, just a goad, plenty of practice, and time-earned respect.
Fact of the matter is that a neighbor’s threat of a real lawn mower (the dandelion has been getting away from us, granted) has imbued the task with urgency. You see, what “lawn” we have here at the farm is kept up, not by gas-powered gadgets, but by hungry oxen and by the careful use of a hand scythe. Allow me to explain myself, please. Each morning, the oxen are walked about the property, trimming the edges of liminal areas, munching the clover, plantain, dandelion, and assorted grasses into temporary submission (these are their favorites of the daily selection, however, they’ll mischievously snatch at apple trees or a paw-paw leaf if you’re not careful…). The sides of paths and walkways, the edges of gardens, the field space we use for tents…each of these grow quickly. The oxen provide a check and balance to the system. Not only do August & Henri keep things looking presentable for us, they glean significant calories from the land. This daily hour-or-two walk provides a lush and reliable source of food for these large work animals during the summer months. For us, it’s about using all the available biomass that presents itself. The sun’s energy and the soil’s nutrients regularly produce a wealth of rogue weeds and persistent grasses. Our temperaments are much better off if we see this cornucopia of growth as free fodder, rather than troublesome invasives attempting to ruin our gardens’ growth.
That being said, there are certainly nooks and crannies on the property into which the oxen can’t reach their sizeable frames. They are also picky, and obstinately turn their broad shoulders on patches of barbed grass and milkweed. The pigs and chickens, though, are not so discerning. Therefore, for these lower-grade weeds and hard to reach places, we make use of a hand scythe.
A hand scythe is an excellent tool for edging. With a sharp, curved blade, a hand scythe is like a weed-whacker specializing in accuracy and precision. Using this tool to cut grass and weeds is part of our daily summertime chores, enabling us to feed significant quantities of biomass to our numerous pigs and many chickens. Not only are we converting the sun’s energy into “free” food, we’re also utilizing it in such a way that accelerates it’s conversion to a nutritive soil additive. As the animals eat through such “weeds,” they are actively transforming this biomass into a nutrient-rich compost. Thanks to this animal-powered conversion, we can then spread such compost back to our garden beds. By cutting these vigorous grasses and weeds, we are encouraging a healthy albeit controlled growth of these plants, ensuring that we will continue to have nutrient-packed fodder for our many animals while also guaranteeing that nothing goes to seed. (While that still leaves us to fight wily against the ever-expanding root system, it does, at least, prevent an all-out re-seeding of this not-to-be-cultivated flora in our garden beds). Farmer’s tactics, if you will.
We are striving, as in most of our endeavors, to employ the resources we have at hand for as many uses as possible in a holistic, cyclical system. Thanks to our animals, we are able to turn less-than-useful lawn space into an integral component of our edible permaculture landscape.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Fact of the matter is that a neighbor’s threat of a real lawn mower (the dandelion has been getting away from us, granted) has imbued the task with urgency. You see, what “lawn” we have here at the farm is kept up, not by gas-powered gadgets, but by hungry oxen and by the careful use of a hand scythe. Allow me to explain myself, please. Each morning, the oxen are walked about the property, trimming the edges of liminal areas, munching the clover, plantain, dandelion, and assorted grasses into temporary submission (these are their favorites of the daily selection, however, they’ll mischievously snatch at apple trees or a paw-paw leaf if you’re not careful…). The sides of paths and walkways, the edges of gardens, the field space we use for tents…each of these grow quickly. The oxen provide a check and balance to the system. Not only do August & Henri keep things looking presentable for us, they glean significant calories from the land. This daily hour-or-two walk provides a lush and reliable source of food for these large work animals during the summer months. For us, it’s about using all the available biomass that presents itself. The sun’s energy and the soil’s nutrients regularly produce a wealth of rogue weeds and persistent grasses. Our temperaments are much better off if we see this cornucopia of growth as free fodder, rather than troublesome invasives attempting to ruin our gardens’ growth.
That being said, there are certainly nooks and crannies on the property into which the oxen can’t reach their sizeable frames. They are also picky, and obstinately turn their broad shoulders on patches of barbed grass and milkweed. The pigs and chickens, though, are not so discerning. Therefore, for these lower-grade weeds and hard to reach places, we make use of a hand scythe.
A hand scythe is an excellent tool for edging. With a sharp, curved blade, a hand scythe is like a weed-whacker specializing in accuracy and precision. Using this tool to cut grass and weeds is part of our daily summertime chores, enabling us to feed significant quantities of biomass to our numerous pigs and many chickens. Not only are we converting the sun’s energy into “free” food, we’re also utilizing it in such a way that accelerates it’s conversion to a nutritive soil additive. As the animals eat through such “weeds,” they are actively transforming this biomass into a nutrient-rich compost. Thanks to this animal-powered conversion, we can then spread such compost back to our garden beds. By cutting these vigorous grasses and weeds, we are encouraging a healthy albeit controlled growth of these plants, ensuring that we will continue to have nutrient-packed fodder for our many animals while also guaranteeing that nothing goes to seed. (While that still leaves us to fight wily against the ever-expanding root system, it does, at least, prevent an all-out re-seeding of this not-to-be-cultivated flora in our garden beds). Farmer’s tactics, if you will.
We are striving, as in most of our endeavors, to employ the resources we have at hand for as many uses as possible in a holistic, cyclical system. Thanks to our animals, we are able to turn less-than-useful lawn space into an integral component of our edible permaculture landscape.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Sunday, June 12, 2011
In Praise of Hand Tools
The sickle is a tool with a flat inward curving blade a little more than a foot long, sharpened on the inside edge and tapering to a point at the end. The blade is held by a wooden handle about twice as long as your hand is wide. It works well for cutting small clumps of grass or weeds. If you hold onto a clump when cutting, for ease of collection if you are cutting feed for the chickens or pigs, it is a good idea to wear a work glove on the hand that is holding the clump. Otherwise you risk grievous injury, especially if you do as you should and regularly sharpen the blade of your sickle. The sickle does roughly the same duty as the gasoline powered weed whacker -- edging, mowing small areas where the lawn mower (or oxen) can't or won't go, and general cleanup of messy and weedy garden areas. It is mostly familiar as a relic, known more for its iconographic use in that equally old and obsolete political and economic system known as socialism than as the commonplace farming and gardening tool it once was.
The scythe is a much more serious and daunting tool, but is ultimately no more than a large two-handed sickle, with its long curving blade ranging from less than two to almost four feet in length mounted at right angles to the end of a long and often elegantly curved wooden handle. Scythes often have two short and stubby offset hand holds attached to the handle, one roughly halfway between the blade and the end, and the other near the end. In using the scythe to cut tall grass or larger patches of weeds the trick is to sweep the blade smoothly above and parallel to the surface of the ground. This requires more a rotation of the hips than an isolated movement of the arms and shoulders. As with many hand tools its use is difficult at first but becomes far easier with sufficient practice. Solid footwear is recommended since the long and somewhat heavy steel blade, kept well sharpened of course, can do very serious damage to an errant bare or thinly shod foot. It too, like its smaller cousin the sickle, was long ago rendered obsolete by the gasoline or diesel powered blades of machinery ranging in size from the gas lawn mowers and riding mowers of suburbia and the countryside to the giant, GPS directed, air conditioned cab equipped combines which follow the wheat and corn harvest northward every year in the vast open farm country of the Midwestern and Central Plains states.
Why should anyone be interested in these museum pieces except as quaint relics of the hard labor farming practices of days gone by? And why on earth is their use being embraced by more and more small scale and even some commercial farmers, even as many Amish farmers upgrade from horse drawn to gas powered mowers and tractors, albeit usually with steel wheels rather than rubber tires? Why do we use them here at D Acres? The answer is, literally simplicity itself. They are simple tools with few parts to maintain, fix or replace and they require nothing but human power to operate. That is, they are efficient in ways that our familiarity and comfort with power tools obscures from view. Unlike weed whackers and lawn mowers, sickles and scythes don't have ignition assemblies to break, spark plugs to foul, fuel filters or carburetors to clean, blade adapters or cutting cords to wear out and break. And they do not require filling with gasoline, or the gas/oil blend burned by two stroke engines. They do not waste energy in the form of hot exhaust systems, noise, vibration or incompletely combusted fuel which lingers in a gray greasy cloud long after the engine has cooled. Once a certain skill in their use has been acquired, they do not cut what the person wielding them does not want cut and they do not inadvertently kill or injure whatever wildlife may be lurking among the weeds and tall grass. It is easy to ignore all of these inefficiencies of the use of power tools in a world in which cheap and abundant fossil fuels can be taken for granted, a world in which economic and political systems are resilient and responsive enough to allow for the smooth functioning of global supply chains for delivery of parts and fuel, a world in which natural systems are robust enough to serve as reservoirs of biodiversity off of the farm.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that our world may no longer be such a world. Something has been happening in the last few years that has been slowly but surely bringing back the sickle and the scythe in places where they were only known as relics rotting in old barns or as dusted off and over-priced decorative items in antique shops. Likewise with the two-person crosscut saw (AKA, the misery stick), the hand felling axe, the draw knife and many other hand tools of the past. What has been happening is something that most of us simply haven't noticed, even as its effects have become part of our reality. This is partly because we have been, understandably, preoccupied with our daily lives, and partly because it has been too big and slow in onset to qualify as a newsworthy event along the lines of earthquakes, tsunamis or blowouts on offshore oil rigs. What has been happening is that growth in our energy supply has slowed and stopped and we are currently heading into a period of declining available energy, dubbed by at least one recent author as "energy descent." Until fairly recently (some observers claim the year 2005 as the watershed, others 2008, and a few insist that it is still to come) energy supply has increased in response to increased demand and prices remained relatively stable. Of course there were temporary fluctuations due to political revolutions, war, natural disasters and so on, but the overall trend in energy production and use has been upward. Or at least it was upward until it wasn't anymore. And for no immediately apparent reason, even as oil prices soared to record levels in the summer of 2008, sending the global economy into a tail spin from which it has not yet recovered, growth in energy supply has not been able to keep up with increasing demand. The reason for the slowing and then stopping of energy supply growth is simple in the sense that all finite resources exhibit a similar pattern of growth, peak and decline in supply, and complex in that the resources in question are distributed across the globe and their supply is affected by many factors. The large scale trend is apparent, however -- we have entered an age of limits. Not only are we limited by the amount of new energy supply available to the economy and to all of use who depend on it, but we are also limited by the lack of space to put our wastes, solid, liquid and gaseous, by available farm land, by fresh water availability in more and more places, by sufficient "left over" habitat for the survival of many species of plants and animals.
In an age of limits the sickle is back to stay. This is not necessarily a bad thing since using a sickle brings us literally and figuratively closer to the ground beneath our feet on which we depend for sustenance. Crouching down among the weeds, bugs and worms of a healthy soil, methodically working along the edge of a raised garden bed, is one of the best ways to get reintroduced to the place where we live and to learn to appreciate once again the slower rhythms of birth, growth, death, decay on which all life depends.
[- George -]
The scythe is a much more serious and daunting tool, but is ultimately no more than a large two-handed sickle, with its long curving blade ranging from less than two to almost four feet in length mounted at right angles to the end of a long and often elegantly curved wooden handle. Scythes often have two short and stubby offset hand holds attached to the handle, one roughly halfway between the blade and the end, and the other near the end. In using the scythe to cut tall grass or larger patches of weeds the trick is to sweep the blade smoothly above and parallel to the surface of the ground. This requires more a rotation of the hips than an isolated movement of the arms and shoulders. As with many hand tools its use is difficult at first but becomes far easier with sufficient practice. Solid footwear is recommended since the long and somewhat heavy steel blade, kept well sharpened of course, can do very serious damage to an errant bare or thinly shod foot. It too, like its smaller cousin the sickle, was long ago rendered obsolete by the gasoline or diesel powered blades of machinery ranging in size from the gas lawn mowers and riding mowers of suburbia and the countryside to the giant, GPS directed, air conditioned cab equipped combines which follow the wheat and corn harvest northward every year in the vast open farm country of the Midwestern and Central Plains states.
Why should anyone be interested in these museum pieces except as quaint relics of the hard labor farming practices of days gone by? And why on earth is their use being embraced by more and more small scale and even some commercial farmers, even as many Amish farmers upgrade from horse drawn to gas powered mowers and tractors, albeit usually with steel wheels rather than rubber tires? Why do we use them here at D Acres? The answer is, literally simplicity itself. They are simple tools with few parts to maintain, fix or replace and they require nothing but human power to operate. That is, they are efficient in ways that our familiarity and comfort with power tools obscures from view. Unlike weed whackers and lawn mowers, sickles and scythes don't have ignition assemblies to break, spark plugs to foul, fuel filters or carburetors to clean, blade adapters or cutting cords to wear out and break. And they do not require filling with gasoline, or the gas/oil blend burned by two stroke engines. They do not waste energy in the form of hot exhaust systems, noise, vibration or incompletely combusted fuel which lingers in a gray greasy cloud long after the engine has cooled. Once a certain skill in their use has been acquired, they do not cut what the person wielding them does not want cut and they do not inadvertently kill or injure whatever wildlife may be lurking among the weeds and tall grass. It is easy to ignore all of these inefficiencies of the use of power tools in a world in which cheap and abundant fossil fuels can be taken for granted, a world in which economic and political systems are resilient and responsive enough to allow for the smooth functioning of global supply chains for delivery of parts and fuel, a world in which natural systems are robust enough to serve as reservoirs of biodiversity off of the farm.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that our world may no longer be such a world. Something has been happening in the last few years that has been slowly but surely bringing back the sickle and the scythe in places where they were only known as relics rotting in old barns or as dusted off and over-priced decorative items in antique shops. Likewise with the two-person crosscut saw (AKA, the misery stick), the hand felling axe, the draw knife and many other hand tools of the past. What has been happening is something that most of us simply haven't noticed, even as its effects have become part of our reality. This is partly because we have been, understandably, preoccupied with our daily lives, and partly because it has been too big and slow in onset to qualify as a newsworthy event along the lines of earthquakes, tsunamis or blowouts on offshore oil rigs. What has been happening is that growth in our energy supply has slowed and stopped and we are currently heading into a period of declining available energy, dubbed by at least one recent author as "energy descent." Until fairly recently (some observers claim the year 2005 as the watershed, others 2008, and a few insist that it is still to come) energy supply has increased in response to increased demand and prices remained relatively stable. Of course there were temporary fluctuations due to political revolutions, war, natural disasters and so on, but the overall trend in energy production and use has been upward. Or at least it was upward until it wasn't anymore. And for no immediately apparent reason, even as oil prices soared to record levels in the summer of 2008, sending the global economy into a tail spin from which it has not yet recovered, growth in energy supply has not been able to keep up with increasing demand. The reason for the slowing and then stopping of energy supply growth is simple in the sense that all finite resources exhibit a similar pattern of growth, peak and decline in supply, and complex in that the resources in question are distributed across the globe and their supply is affected by many factors. The large scale trend is apparent, however -- we have entered an age of limits. Not only are we limited by the amount of new energy supply available to the economy and to all of use who depend on it, but we are also limited by the lack of space to put our wastes, solid, liquid and gaseous, by available farm land, by fresh water availability in more and more places, by sufficient "left over" habitat for the survival of many species of plants and animals.
In an age of limits the sickle is back to stay. This is not necessarily a bad thing since using a sickle brings us literally and figuratively closer to the ground beneath our feet on which we depend for sustenance. Crouching down among the weeds, bugs and worms of a healthy soil, methodically working along the edge of a raised garden bed, is one of the best ways to get reintroduced to the place where we live and to learn to appreciate once again the slower rhythms of birth, growth, death, decay on which all life depends.
[- George -]
Friday, June 10, 2011
Working with the Sun
The days are long, lushness dominates the gaze, weeds are reaching for the sun with vigor, and the black flies have arrived to offer their daily commentary.
Summer has begun.
Here at D Acres, we leap at the chance to utilize the power of the sun during these short but vigorous few months of our northcountry summer.
For one, the sun offers a tremendous opportunity to heat water free of fossil fuels, electric lines, and excessive burning of wood. We recently re-constructed our solar shower, now perched beneath the old apple tree and behind some young asian pear trees. It’s complete with a dressing room and shower stall, hot and cold water taps (in the opposite order, just to be a little different…), and watercress transplanted into the greywater system. The ambience is tremendous, but the simplicity of the science behind the operation is even more tantalizing. With this system upgrade, we now have two batch heaters harnessing the sun’s sunny-ness to be sure we dirty farmers and our cleaner guests can achieve a par excellence for hygiene upon exiting the experience.
The batch heaters, mind you, are comprised of retired refrigerator tanks, black paint, old water heaters, and a pane of glass. Peruse the junk heap and you, too, can solar power your Saturday night bath. To be clear, the black paint covers the inside of the fridge box, creating a heat trap for the sun’s rays. The water heater is set inside, with the appropriate plumbing running to and from the tank. A glass pane over the top seals the deal, and the heat. Curious? Come on over and check it out!
Beyond heating water, we also make extensive use of our solar cookers during these long summer days. While the sun ovens, as they’re called, can function most of the year if the sun is out (well…let’s say March through October for best results), these long, hot days with the sun high in the sky definitely improves their capacity for quick and effective cooking. Again, it is a fairly simple science that can solar power your next meal. You can build it yourself, or purchase a pre-made model. A box lined with reflective material operates as the oven, while a (plexi-)glass cover creates the greenhouse effect for the contraption. More reflective material surrounding the oven’s door helps to trap more of the sun’s heat. The oven box is then set upon an adjustable stake. As the sun rises or sets across the sky, the angle of the box must be modified. A ninety-degree angle, facing into the sun, is ideal. In no time at all you can cook just about anything from beans to bread, and casseroles to chicken soup.
Of course, the sun also heats up our favorite swimming hole. So come on over to check out our latest solar-powered efforts (we have additional hot water projects, greenhouses galore, solar panels, and solar dehydrators, too!), perhaps share a solar-cooked meal, then we’ll point down the road and share another of our joys, a dip in nature’s best pool. Summer may be short, but my oh my it is a verdant and abundant few months.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Summer has begun.
Here at D Acres, we leap at the chance to utilize the power of the sun during these short but vigorous few months of our northcountry summer.
For one, the sun offers a tremendous opportunity to heat water free of fossil fuels, electric lines, and excessive burning of wood. We recently re-constructed our solar shower, now perched beneath the old apple tree and behind some young asian pear trees. It’s complete with a dressing room and shower stall, hot and cold water taps (in the opposite order, just to be a little different…), and watercress transplanted into the greywater system. The ambience is tremendous, but the simplicity of the science behind the operation is even more tantalizing. With this system upgrade, we now have two batch heaters harnessing the sun’s sunny-ness to be sure we dirty farmers and our cleaner guests can achieve a par excellence for hygiene upon exiting the experience.
The batch heaters, mind you, are comprised of retired refrigerator tanks, black paint, old water heaters, and a pane of glass. Peruse the junk heap and you, too, can solar power your Saturday night bath. To be clear, the black paint covers the inside of the fridge box, creating a heat trap for the sun’s rays. The water heater is set inside, with the appropriate plumbing running to and from the tank. A glass pane over the top seals the deal, and the heat. Curious? Come on over and check it out!
Beyond heating water, we also make extensive use of our solar cookers during these long summer days. While the sun ovens, as they’re called, can function most of the year if the sun is out (well…let’s say March through October for best results), these long, hot days with the sun high in the sky definitely improves their capacity for quick and effective cooking. Again, it is a fairly simple science that can solar power your next meal. You can build it yourself, or purchase a pre-made model. A box lined with reflective material operates as the oven, while a (plexi-)glass cover creates the greenhouse effect for the contraption. More reflective material surrounding the oven’s door helps to trap more of the sun’s heat. The oven box is then set upon an adjustable stake. As the sun rises or sets across the sky, the angle of the box must be modified. A ninety-degree angle, facing into the sun, is ideal. In no time at all you can cook just about anything from beans to bread, and casseroles to chicken soup.
Of course, the sun also heats up our favorite swimming hole. So come on over to check out our latest solar-powered efforts (we have additional hot water projects, greenhouses galore, solar panels, and solar dehydrators, too!), perhaps share a solar-cooked meal, then we’ll point down the road and share another of our joys, a dip in nature’s best pool. Summer may be short, but my oh my it is a verdant and abundant few months.
~Beth
as published in North Country News
Friday, May 27, 2011
The Flavors of Summer
We have finally finished off our last meal of potatoes, had our final round of baked squash, and are savoring the last of our carrot stick crunches. Salad has replaced sauerkraut, and shiitakes are now flavoring our foraged greens. We are on the cusp of the season of fresh produce. Oh the flavors, the lushness, the beauty of summer! Fleeting and fantastic, these are the months to savor the richness of local products.
Fortunately, our area is rich with local producers. From a plethora of fruits and vegetables, to eggs, dairy, meat, and baked goods, local farmers provide quite an array of goods to our region. And on June 4th, join us to celebrate this remarkable selection at the 2011 Pemi-Baker Local Food Fare. Held at Prospect Hall on the Plymouth State University Campus, 10am-3pm, this community event will be the season’s foremost opportunity to meet area farmers and sample some of their tastiest morsels.
And not only that, the crew at D Acres will be handing out the fifth edition of the Pemi-Baker Local Goods Guide. D Acres began publishing a local food guide in 2007, the beginning steps to cultivating a thriving local food network. Since then, we’ve expanded the guide each year, now totaling 42 farmers. New to 2011, we’ve included 31 local crafters, artisans, and pre-loved/second-hand retail shops. The guide also includes a map pinpointing farms, studios, galleries, and shops listed in the publication, as well as information on summer and winter farmer’s markets throughout the Pemi-Baker region. Stop by the Local Food Fare June 4th to pick-up your free copy!
Why such excitement over local foods? Well, for one, we at D Acres are remarkably interested in food. Everyone needs to eat, and the better the food, the better the health and the well-being of both people and land. Local food specifically increases individuals’ connection to a region and its landscape, while decreasing dependency on national and international systems of production and distribution. Furthermore, strengthening local food networks is a direct means of providing local income to local people, a means of investing our money within our own community. To quote farmer and author Wendell Berry, “without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.”
So knowing your farmer is vitally important, and not just in the summer. Eating is a year-round endeavor, and so is buying food. Do your part to strengthen our community! Join us June 4, 10am-3pm, at PSU’s Prospect Hall and meet your local farmers (admission $3-10 sliding scale). Pick up your copy of the Local Goods Guide – a sustainable community starts with your next meal.
~Beth
as published by North Country News
Fortunately, our area is rich with local producers. From a plethora of fruits and vegetables, to eggs, dairy, meat, and baked goods, local farmers provide quite an array of goods to our region. And on June 4th, join us to celebrate this remarkable selection at the 2011 Pemi-Baker Local Food Fare. Held at Prospect Hall on the Plymouth State University Campus, 10am-3pm, this community event will be the season’s foremost opportunity to meet area farmers and sample some of their tastiest morsels.
And not only that, the crew at D Acres will be handing out the fifth edition of the Pemi-Baker Local Goods Guide. D Acres began publishing a local food guide in 2007, the beginning steps to cultivating a thriving local food network. Since then, we’ve expanded the guide each year, now totaling 42 farmers. New to 2011, we’ve included 31 local crafters, artisans, and pre-loved/second-hand retail shops. The guide also includes a map pinpointing farms, studios, galleries, and shops listed in the publication, as well as information on summer and winter farmer’s markets throughout the Pemi-Baker region. Stop by the Local Food Fare June 4th to pick-up your free copy!
Why such excitement over local foods? Well, for one, we at D Acres are remarkably interested in food. Everyone needs to eat, and the better the food, the better the health and the well-being of both people and land. Local food specifically increases individuals’ connection to a region and its landscape, while decreasing dependency on national and international systems of production and distribution. Furthermore, strengthening local food networks is a direct means of providing local income to local people, a means of investing our money within our own community. To quote farmer and author Wendell Berry, “without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.”
So knowing your farmer is vitally important, and not just in the summer. Eating is a year-round endeavor, and so is buying food. Do your part to strengthen our community! Join us June 4, 10am-3pm, at PSU’s Prospect Hall and meet your local farmers (admission $3-10 sliding scale). Pick up your copy of the Local Goods Guide – a sustainable community starts with your next meal.
~Beth
as published by North Country News
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
