Bed dressing

We've got a neighbor who keeps sheep. He has about 8 and they like to huddle together in his stables, making the mucking out of them an important bi-annual task. So we made a swap with our neighbor-friend: we'd muck out his stable and he'd give us the muck. Everyone wins.

This mucking out is no easy task... the sheep have been compacting this hay-manure mixture for 6 months now. The floor of the stable was actually 2 feet below the hay line, and the further down we got, the more compacted it was. So it took a lot of pick-axing and forking to get it out of the stable and into the trailer. The compacted hay turned into 3 huge trailer-loads.

We plan on putting this organic material on our vegetable beds in the next few weeks so it can decompose over the winter. Then we'll turn it into the soil come springtime before we plant.

[Note: The purpose of the mask was two-fold: to prevent breathing in dirt and hay flecks and because, dang, the air was full of ammonia.]

The rock is out!

Just an update! We finally managed to pull that HUGE boulder that a bunch of people were working on during our October-fiesta weekend. It took 5 tries with the large tractor, one broken chain, and about 30 feet of strong canvas straps to haul it out. We even got an offer from a neighbor for it - he's got a client who wants a diving rock for his pool...

Ladies working on that rock

Finally out

Recipe with leeks

Braised leeks

Ingredients: leeks, butter, veggie or chicken broth (or water), lemon juice, s+p

Preparing: Cut leeks in half lengthwise. Keep the greens on - after a good braise they are tender and yummy! Place in a shallow sauce pan with butter and just enough 1/2-inch of broth (or water). Add salt if your broth doesn't have any. Simmer over low heat for about 15-20 minutes, until leeks are tender. For last 5 minutes of braise add juice from 1-2 lemons.

Eating: Garnish with some lemon zest and fresh pepper.

Dish history: We made this all the time in Argentina during the rainy winter months when there was nothing but leeks and kale in the ground. It's such a good way to use the whole leek, rather than having to save the greens for stock or compost.

Recipe with carrots

Lentil soup

Ingredients: carrots, celery, onion, tomato paste, lentils, bay leaf, hot peppers (optional), dijon, cider vinegar, s+p

Preparing: Dice the carrots, celery and onion (the more carrots you use, the tastier the soup). Saute in butter or olive oil. Add a few tablespoons of tomato paste and stir into veggies. Add lentils, bay leaf and chopped hot pepper (optional) and water (2:1 ratio of water:lentils, generally). Simmer for at least 30 minutes. Just before serving, add a few tablespoons of dijon mustard and cider vinegar to the soup and heat through.

Eating: A really hearty lunch that also tastes great with sausage.

Dish history: This is a Deborah Madison recipe from my vegetarian college days. The dijon and vinegar make the soup.

Garlic planted: 1st crop of the season

This week the biodynamic calendar and the fall weather told us it was the perfect garlic-planting time. So we popped our seven varieties of garlic ("popping" means separating the cloves from the head), saved the smallest cloves for cooking, and got the large cloves into the ground. We used a dibber (a wooden hand tool with a pointed end used to make holes in the ground for planting seeds or bulbs) to make holes about 5 inches apart and dropped the cloves in root end down. We topped with a thick layer of grass, leaves and wood chip mulch to protect them for the winter. 

Our 3 beds of sowed garlic cloves will hopefully provide us with 1,000 heads of garlic next summer.

Recipe with roots

Roasted root vegetables

Ingredients: root vegetables (carrots, parsnips, turnips, radish, daikon, celeriac, rutabaga, beets, kohlrabi), garlic (cloves with skin on), olive oil, fresh rosemary or thyme

Preparing: Cut root vegetables: cut the ones that take longer to roast (e.g., beets, turnips, daikon, celeriac) in smaller pieces than the ones that take less time to roast. Throw in whole cloves of garlic still in their skin. Drizzle with plenty of olive oil, (could add a bit of broth to the roasting pan for a moister roast), some fresh rosemary or thyme sprigs, s+p, and roast in 400 degree oven for about 1 hour. Test various veggies for doneness before pulling out of the oven.

Eating: As is.

Dish history: Made this for our October-fiesta supper as well. Easy and a great way to showcase all those roots.

Recipe with squash

Veggie chili

Ingredients: kidney beans, onions or leeks, carrots, garlic, chili powder, garam masala (the secret ingredient), chopped squash (crookneck, butternut, acorn, zucchini, any type), beer (optional), tomatoes, s+p

Preparing: Soak your beans overnight. Cook in unsalted boiling water until tender. In a separate pot, saute onions or leeks, garlic and carrots. After a few minutes add 2 tablespoons of chili powder (or up to what you can handle) and 1 tablespoon of garam masala (optional, but the secret ingredient). Add chopped squash of any variety (winter or summer) and your choice of beer. After this boils, add diced tomatoes (fresh or canned), be sure there is enough liquid in the chili, and simmer for hours.

Eating: Always top your chili with fresh accoutrements: grated cheese, sour cream, diced scallions or chives, chopped fresh tomato, matchstick radish, hot sauce.

Dish history: Made this dish for vegetarian, blood type B friends. Also gluten-free, we made cornbread by subbing rice flour for wheat flour.

Harvesting chickens

This morning I harvested chickens. The birds were three-months plump and ready. Farmer friends at a local non-profit farm invited us to help out, and since we plan on getting spring chickens, this was a perfect chance to test my skills and stomach.

The steps to harvesting a chicken are quite simple: catch the chicken, kill the chicken, de-feather the chicken, eviscerate the chicken, rinse and store the chicken. The little tips I learned from the farmers were worth it, e.g., catch the chickens at night when they are more docile, don't feed them grain the day before a harvest so they are cleared out, hold both legs and rest the breast on your leg to calm them, don't cut the head off because you want the brain to keep telling the heart to pump the blood so it drains, and more...

The facilities in this processing room are bigger than we'd ever get: they had a six-cone holder for the jugular cuts, a rotating hot water bath for loosening the feathers, and a large spinner to extract the feathers in 10 seconds. I suppose what we'll be doing next year is plucking those feathers out by hand... but there's still plenty of time to conceive of and build a contraption.

The evisceration comes easier with each bird. There are parts you save (e.g., the liver, heart, neck, gizzard and feet) and parts you toss (e.g., the gall bladder, the lungs, the windpipe). And the clean chicken, standing upright on a small post to drain and dry in the cooler, looks ready to roast (but another tip they told me was to leave it one night in the fridge to tenderize the muscles a bit).

These clinical pointers aside, we can't ignore the fundamental issue of killing a living being for our own consumption. The range of feelings behind this are widespread and often politically- and spiritually-heated. I personally believe that my ability to consume an animal as a human should be tied to my willingness to harvest that animal. And that the harvesting of that animal should be conducted with respect and as humanely as possible. And furthermore, that the full life of that animal should also be respected, which in the case of chickens means protecting them with shelter, providing them with nutritious food, and allowing them to forage in the fields as they would naturally. This is what distinguishes a family or small farm's operation from a modern commercial operation. 

Harvesting chickens? No problem. We'll see when it comes to pigs and sheep.

Tilling with a tractor, but just this once

Our generous neighbor, who loves big machines, took some time out of his busy schedule to chisel plow a new block of land for us. To the south of our 40 double-dug vegetable beds - which took an entire spring and summer, 3 men, many helpers, and several pick axes and man-bars to complete - we now have a 4,000 sq-ft growing space, freshly chisel-plowed. And it took our neighbor a matter of hours. Amazing what big machines can do! I swore those 3-foot metal blades would be no match for our tough sod, clay soil and field of boulders. But, much to our good luck, the machine won.

We spent a large portion of our October-fiesta work weekend clearing boulders, rocks, weeds and roots out of the field with the help of dozens of friends and have continued to clear rocks every time we walk through it. The earth looks amazingly rich, darker than what we tilled up in our double-dug beds. Once we're satisfied with our de-rocking process, we'll form beds, load on manure and leaves, sow some winter rye, top it with mulch and let it sit for the winter. We have high hopes. And we'll never bring a machine on there again.

Many thanks to PD for his love and skillful use of big machines.

Recipe with mushrooms

Sauteed mushrooms in parmesan cheese cup

Ingredients: butter, mushrooms (we used our shiitake that sprouted from our shocked logs), scallions, parmesan cheese

Parm cup w/ mushrooms (with a bite taken out)

Preparing: Make your parmesan cups: Grate parmesan cheese (with the big holes of the cheese grater - works better than smaller gratings) into a small saucepan so it forms one layer. Heat the cheese so it melts together, browning a bit if you'd like. Turn off the heat, and once it's cooled enough to pick it up in one disc, move it to a small bowl, shaping it into the shape of the bowl and let it cool completely there. You now have an edible parmesan cup.
Make your mushrooms: Melt some butter and saute sliced shiitake and diced scallions until tender. I added some white wine at the end and let it boil off.

Eating: Fill the parmesan cups with the sauteed mushrooms.

Dish history: I've always wanted to try the edible parmesan cup. If you use small enough bowls to form the cups, this makes a nice appetizer.

Recipe with turnips

Smashed turnips

Ingredients: turnips, potatoes, butter, cream or milk, salt and pepper

Preparing: Clean and cut turnips and potatoes (I use ratio of 2:1, turnips:potatoes). Boil in salted water until mashable. Drain water, smash with masher, while adding butter, milk or cream, salt and pepper.

Eating: You could add roasted garlic, scallions or wasabi to the smash, depending on taste.

Dish history: We tried this out with a picky eater and didn't tell him there were turnips in there... Mikey liked it!

Recipe with greens

Creamed greens

Ingredients: any greens (spinach, tatsoi, bok choy, mustards, chard), onion, garlic, butter, flour (butter:flour ratio is 2:1), cream/milk, nutmeg

Preparing: Boil greens until tender. Drain and coarsely chop or puree in food processor. Meanwhile, heat a few tablespoons of butter and cook the diced onion and minced garlic. Whisk in flour (e.g., if you use 4 Tbsp. of butter, add 2 Tbsp. of flour - you don't want this to get too thick). Grate fresh nutmeg into the roux and add salt and pepper. Slowly whisk in 1.5-2 cups cream/milk mixture (any ratio is fine; and if warmed it will whisk in better), getting rid of all lumps. Heat through, but don't boil. Add pureed greens to cream mixture and warm through.

Eating: Some might top with chopped hard-boiled egg.

Dish history: Made this for our October-fiesta meal. It is another great way to enjoy a mixture of those abundant fall greens. The nutmeg is a must.

October-fiesta 2011

Thank you to all of our family, friends and neighbors who came out for Longhaul's 1st October-fiesta. The weather cooperated and together in one day we accomplished things it would have taken weeks for the two of us to do.

The red pine field is nearly cleared of brush and fallen trees, ready for our spring chickens. Three vegetable beds are now prepped with wood ash, egg shells, compost, manure and mulch, ready for garlic planting in a few weeks. The apple trees have been picked and shaken, leaving only a few out-of-reach fruit for the squirrels. Gallons of cider were pressed - and consumed after the hard day's work. Our newly chisel-plowed block was pick-axed and picked-through, and we hauled 10,000 pounds of boulders and hundreds of horrible weeds out of our brand-new planting space.

The energy of the crowd was so positive and fun. I saw people laughing as they dug around huge boulders, smiling as they shoveled manure. After the work, we enjoyed a home-cooked meal, desserts and all, and topped the night off with drinks and songs by the bonfire.

Many thanks to all who participated. Looking forward to our next spring 2012 Work-ation weekend...

 

Shocking logs; forcing fruit

Our 1st shiitake

We're experimenting with a few of our mushroom logs to see how colonized they are by the spawn we whacked into them during our first and second April Work-ation weekends. You can "shock" a log into thinking it is spring or a rainy autumn season by soaking it in very cold water for 24 hours. Once it's been soaked, you should see small white "pins" sprouting from the log, the first signs of your forced fruit. Then in a few days, these pins should turn into the full mushroom fruit, ready to harvest with a twist. Forcing the fruit just 6 months after inoculation will result in just a small harvest, because the mycelium haven't had sufficient time to truly take over the felled log. But isn't it exciting to experiment with a few this fall, and leave the rest for the spring?

Cider pressing

Nothing says fall like fresh-pressed apple cider. Since we have some apple and pear trees on our property, and have plans for many more in Longhaul's future, we couldn't live life without our very own cider press.

Our used hand-cranked grinder

We knew we wanted to build our own. Most of the press can be put together with scrap wood - but the most costly and complicated piece of a press is the grinder. On a recent visit up to Kingston we stopped at our favorite junk shop to test our luck. Stan, the man, was about to close for the day, but when we told him what we were looking for he led us all the way to the back of his operation, pulled out a beauty (in this first picture), and sold it to us for only 20 bucks.

Finished product

With a bit of image-browsing on the internet, digging up an old car jack, and a few hours of sketching, measuring and cutting pieces to size, we put together our very first cider press with tender loving care. Next weekend we'll make a run to an orchard and press some freshness during our upcoming October-fiesta with family and friends.

Seed garlic

Garlic is the first crop sown of the season. And because it has such a long growing season, that means it gets planted in the fall for a summer harvest. In our neck of the woods, garlic is usually sown in October - late enough that you don't get too much green growth to be killed over the winter and early enough that the roots have enough time to establish before the ground freezes.

Seed garlic (L) and cooking garlic (R)

Garlic loves fertile ground, a slightly acidic pH, and good heavy mulch to keep it protected from winter's elements. So preparing the earth is a very important task.

Another important task is selecting good seed garlic. When you sow garlic, you plant individual garlic cloves. The bigger the clove, the bigger the head of garlic to be grown. Many farmers who grow garlic will sell their smaller heads to cooking customers and keep their larger heads (about 2.5") for planting. The picture here shows seed garlic and one of its large cloves on the left and garlic purchased at the farmer's market and one of its medium cloves on the right. Besides difference in size, there is also a huge difference in price: seed garlic goes for $15 per pound, while market garlic is usually $3-$6 per pound.

So we sourced our seed garlic from three places: a local farm in Westchester County who sold us seed garlic of the Porcelain Music variety; an organic seed garlic source in Vermont who sold us various varieties (Belarus - Marbled Purple Stripe, Georgia Fire - Porcelain and Killarney Red - Rocombole); and our local farmer's market who sold us cooking (not seed) German Stiffneck. We hope to plant these varieties with friends and family at our upcoming October-fiesta.

Rainy season

Won't this rainy season ever end? Our fields have just drained their standing water and now we've got a week's worth of rain in the forecast. So still no digging, but at least there's time for planning sessions by the fire with some warm apple cider.

Pulling plants

The inevitableness of pulling plants is upon us.

We are hitting cooler temperatures and plants that have been in the ground since April or May are seeing their dying days. We've got a bed of main crop potatoes to harvest before the first frost. Our squash and pumpkins have been pulled - unripe ones are now ripening in the sun rather than sitting in the wet field. Our tomatoes, which went into the ground earlier than in most farms we know of - in the first week of May - are just dry, brown stems with sparse sun-ripening fruit on them. And our basil, which produced and produced for us, is now stalky and browning. 

So, we pulled our plants, forked the land and sowed some fast-growing buckwheat, hoping to get a small cover crop to grow before the days are too short and the nights are too cold.




And there's still plenty to harvest: chard, kale, scallions, chives, parsley, celery, celeriac, Brussels sprouts, leeks, fava beans, radish, turnip, daikon, mustards, arugula, collards, tatsoi, spinach, Chinese cabbage, broccoli (we hope), carrots, parsnip, hot peppers and lettuce.

Harvesting rain

It feels like spring again... not because of the weather, but because of the wetness of our land. We are eager to dig six more vegetable beds before the season is over to get our total to 40, but it would be a mistake to get into the ground right now. The vegetables that have already been planted are surviving this soaking, but we don't want to destroy the soil structure by pick-axing and forking the land.

So as we wait to dig, we are planning our rain harvest system. After witnessing a stream in our backyard, not once, but twice, this year, it pains us to think about how much water we could be storing for the drier summer days (although there weren't too many dry ones this year). A sustainable water system will help decrease pressure on the existing well supply of water, protect against drought days, and treat water as a precious instead of unlimited resource.


The basic elements of a rain harvest system include:

·      Catchment surface: the collection surface from which rainfall runs off

·      Gutters and downspouts: channel water from roof to tank

·      Leaf screens and diverters: components which remove debris from rainwater before it goes to tank

·      One or more storage tanks or cisterns

·      Delivery system: gravity-fed or pumped to the end use

At this stage, we are siting our catchment surface and storage tanks. We hope to build a "rain barn" (for storing tools and fire wood) and use its roof as our catchment surface. The rain barn and storage tanks should be on higher ground than our demand site for water to use gravity to convey water from tanks instead of more expensive pumps. This will require some math, taking land slopes, distance, pipe diameters and tank sizes into account. Then, once we source our materials, we can start digging post holes and sinking them in with our old-fashioned rock-and-crobar method (as opposed to using cement). Let the land dry and the construction begin...

Preserving: Peaches

Peach season is coming to an end, so we took a quick trip up to a local farm and harvested 50 pounds of yellow peaches. Saving some fresh ones for a Labor Day crumble, we preserved the rest. In Argentina we preserved many peaches in the same manner I describe below. They were a perfect mid-winter treat, reminding of us childhood. We even had one jar remaining as we left the farm in Patagonia and managed to take it all the way to Buenos Aires with us (a 30-hour bus ride) so we could enjoy it on our favorite park bench before flying home to NY in January.

First, I make a simple syrup (300g sugar :1L water; ~1.5c sugar: 4c water), adding fresh lemon juice once it boils and then let it cool. We drop the peaches in boiling water for about 20 seconds to loosen the skin, cut them in half, removing pits and bruised bits, and stuff them in sterilized jars. Then we pour the simple syrup over the peaches (peaches maintain their color and texture best when preserved with sugar), seal the jars, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Preserving: Grapes

Labor Day weekend is the best time to harvest concord grapes in the Hudson Valley. So we took a trip to our secret spot, where we found dozens of grape vines crawling up highbush blueberries, hawthornes and lilac bushes. The grapes were perfectly ripe (but oh-so-sour!), falling off of the vines into our hands and baskets. We ended up with 45 pounds of them after 2 hours of picking.

When we arrived home, we got started on preserving them. We made grape jelly, using grapes and sugar as the only ingredients. First, we washed the grapes and put about 1/3 cup of water for every 4 cups of grapes into several big pots. We heat them until they softened and could be strained through a colander to extract the juice and pulp from the seeds and skins. Ninety-six cups of fresh grapes resulted in 46 cups of grape juice/pulp for jelly-making. We made the jelly in four separate batches, adding about 3/4 cup of sugar for every cup of grape. We boiled the mixtures until they jelled (testing it on a cold plate) and ended up with seven 4oz jars, 35 8oz jars, and eight 16oz jars of jelly... I hope everyone likes a good ol' pb+j.

Burning

Just the other day, we burned a brush pile at the south end of our field where we will soon till the land.

The garden, pre-burn in March

Our 2011 season started with a major burn. With a HUGE pile of cleared brush right smack in the middle of our garden-site, we had "BURN" on our first outdoor task list. If you were in the area this past winter, you'll remember that there were feet of snow on the ground until early March, and then a bout of warm weather that melted the ice and snow and flooded many areas with the thaw. So the first day we could get outside, we did. That day was March 15th. We will always remember this because it also happens to be the last day before the burning of brush piles is banned in Putnam County for two months. Nick called the County to advise them of our plan to burn that day, and he got word that we better finish all we could in the next 12 hours because burns were banned from March 15-May 15, a new policy effective in 2011, to prevent uncontrolled fires that could arise from the abundance of dry leaves and leafless, lifeless trees (although if you were walking in our fields at that time, you would have realized there was nothing dry out there).

So, we set to work on a pile that was 50 feet wide by 50 feet long by 8 feet high, full of fallen branches, cut-down thorn bushes, rotten logs, old wooden fence posts, brambles from behind the garden area and an occasional wooden door. I've never worked harder this entire season. We fed the fire for 10 hours straight, desperately trying to turn into wood-ash this huge pile that was potentially standing in our way of digging until mid-May.

Post-burn

But you can see the results in these photos. The pile was as good as gone. And our garden grew.

So this recent burn was a piece of cake compared to our first one. We started mid-afternoon and were finished by sunset. We even managed to save a few cubic feet of wood-ash, to feed our hungry soil with potash.

The garden in July 2011

August burn

Recipe with tomatoes

Roasted tomato soup

Ingredients: tomatoes, onions, garlic, red wine, fresh herbs, water or broth, s+p

Tomatoes ready for roasting

Preparing: Roast your tomatoes (we cut them in half, single-layer them in a pan, pour on some olive oil, peeled garlic cloves and sprigs of oregano, and roast them in the oven for 2 hours at 350, or until they are nice and brown and some of the liquid has baked off). In a large pot, cook your onions and more garlic, if desired, in some olive oil. Add herbs of your choosing. Add and burn off a hefty pour of red wine. Then add your roasted tomatoes and as much water or broth as you want, to desired consistency. We use an immersion blender to make the soup smooth (also good since we leave the skins on the tomatoes).

Eating: Before serving we heat up the soup and add some cream. You could add some crunchy toppings (sliced radish, celery) or some fresh greens (cilantro, parsley, basil).

Dish history: We made this dish for our 2011 garden party, using lobster broth instead of water and serving it chilled. This is a great way to use your abundance of tomatoes. The soup freezes well.

Back to normal

It has been a hectic two weeks. Following our garden party, we both prepped for our first courses of the fall semester, cooked lunch and dinner for 160 people over the weekend at the Restoration Festival in Albany, NY, and weathered the tropical storm that left us without power for five days.

But despite no running water, internet, or lights for too many hours, the garden survived miraculously. Before we left for Albany for the weekend, we harvested any ripe or ripening tomatoes and stored them away in our deposito (knowing they don't like too much water) and we put extra mulch on our crops to prevent run-off. When we arrived back on the farm on Monday morning, every plant was in its place. Our backyard was a mini-pond, and the stream that surfaces only for the springtime-thaw was back running through the property, but thanks to all of our double-digging and mulching, all of our crops were spared.

So we've been off-routine for a few days, which is unsettling. But we have had some amazing community experiences. At the Rest Fest in Albany (a music festival whose proceeds go toward restoring historic buildings in Albany, in this case, St. Joseph's Church) we saw a collective of musicians, artists and friends pull off a two-day music festival in the middle of Irene's fury. Great music, seamless programming, fantastic church acoustics, professional volunteers, bailing out the flooding church, diverting drainage systems, fun times in the green room and getting to see my little brother pull-off such an event were some of the highlights. And on our local front, we had neighbors offering their freezer space, cold beers and generator-electricity to charge computers and cell phones. There's nothing like a community event to bring the community together, be it a planned celebration or one of nature's disasters.

Now it's back to normal... more blog posts, more planting, more fall-time prepping.