north carolina home

I've been aching for North Carolina ever since we left the summer before last. We had a good life here. It was warm. You could grow well into Winter. We had browned skin and red clay caked to our feet. We would spend mornings chasing pigs.  And spend summer afternoons sweating through the garden's rows. We would spend evenings in cold bathtubs, drinking beers in the mild of a Carolina sundown. We didn't have to insulate a special coop for wintering chickens. There was never enough weight of snowfall to worry about the character of an old barn.  

Nostalgia is such a beast.  Walking through the streets of Raleigh these past days and lapping up the humidity and the (rather uncommon) high winter temperatures I keep turning to Nick with a shouldn't we?....couldn't we?....won't we? look that is certain to drive him to crazy. And we haven't even been to the farm yet. We had our good reasons for leaving.  Proximity to family. An abundance of water. Support for smaller farms. Universal health care. Thank you, fourfold, to the good quiet state of Vermont.

I am so happy with the shangri-la we have found up North. It is a difficult land to farm but an honest one. Vermont will be my forever home, but part of my farming heart will forever lie in the lolling hills of North Carolina. 

This is where we fell in love with the land. This is where we began our lives as farmers. 

All photos are mine and Nick's from days of yore, except for the last which was taken by the good people of Saxapahaw farmer's market. I just don't know "who" precisely. 

Farm, woman! -- The Farm School

It isn't coincidental that 70% of our visits on this road trip are to other farmer friends. We rarely leave the farm and they rarely leave theirs. One such friend is teaching at the Farm School in Athol, Massachusetts. His girlfriend attends the one year learn to farm program. She is in a class of 15 adults (ranging in ages from 18 to 55). They live, eat, sleep, and work, and work and work and learn on a couple hundred acres of farm and wood land. We were looking over her class schedule for the year and became instantly envious. They are learning a little bit of every aspect of the farming business and lifestyle. They learn to milk cows and work with draft horse power. They learn to tap trees and boil sap for syrup. They learn timber framing basics. From how to take apart a chainsaw to how to shear a sheep they seem to have covered nearly everything. Granted, this program is just a year and to intimately learn to shear a sheep many shearers would tell you it will take hundreds of sheep over many months or even years. But they are learning a base of farming and that is what the Farm School offers. 

The price for one year will seem prohibitive to many hopeful farmers to be. It is $18k for a full year, which includes full room, board, and tuition. To prepare somebody for a life that makes little money, it seems almost sadistic. But if you compare that to one year at a private or public college it starts to look more reasonable. They also offer some financial aid and work-study opportunities. And the Farm School staff isn't living large off your tuition. I've seen that up close. That money is going directly into making the farm a better place to learn and grow. 

I thought I would share the school with you as I have had many inquiries about advice for starting to farm from all manner of folks young and old and this is certainly one option. It is not the only option and it isn't necessarily the one I would choose but it certainly has proven itself an excellent jump start for many young farmers I know and is worth checking out. 

Seasoned Quarterly -Winter 2013

This past fall my friend Julie and her family moved themselves from Boston to the seacoast of Maine to start living a life of making their own food. They now rent a house with about an acre of outdoor which, I imagine, must feel like 100 acres after living at the top of a three floor walk up in Boston. Typically moving somewhere North in the fall would intimidate gardeners enough that they would plan to wait until Spring before planting anything.  Julie was undeterred by the impending frost and made a hoop house in their backyard and within weeks had planted their winter greens. She told me over tea in her kitchen during a visit we took to Maine that she was sick of waiting to act and had made a resolution to herself to start doing. 

During that visit she and Craig had also spoken of dreams of writing a cookbook. As they had before. As they have good reason for dreaming of. They are phenomenally inventive cooks. I have licked clean every dish they have ever put in front of me. Nick too. Which was why we had driven the 180 odd miles up and down and through the White Mountains in the VW with failing break pads to get to them. Why we found ourselves in their kitchen on a chilled October weekend. 

After most dreams I hear from friends I smile wistfully into the corner of whichever room we happen to be in. I usually share something profoundly un-motivating like Oh, that would be hard. The subject is hurriedly changed and we conveniently all try to forget the uncomfortable truths of dreams and dreams that will never come true. 

BUT but but but. Once in a great while you get to be witness to the friend sharing her dream and then actually seeing that dream come to fruition. 

Julie and her new quarterly Seasoned is one such great while. Julie has just published her first issue for Winter. It is filled with recipes for winter lunches and dinners and homeremedies for good winter health. It is beautifully done and you can order a digital copy to save some trees or a print copy to keep in your cookery cabinets. All of the proceeds help her to fulfill her next dream; buying and starting her own farm/homestead. 

I've been resting on my laurels of going out and starting my own farm for a while now. Julie's ambition for her own dream's gives me pause as I think about what I want 2013 to bring for me and my family and my farm. There are a good many changes coming for Nick and I this year and I want to be sure I steer those changes in the right direction of where I want to be. 

A good hearty toast of congratulations to Julie and her dedication to the dream. 

**All photos taken by Julie from her blog**

laundry days of yore and a road trip

This weekend we are leaving the farm for three full weeks of road trip. Our dear friends Lindsay and Nick are newly arrived to Vermont and we are heavily exploiting their lack of home into a farm-sitting gig. You really must love friends who are willing to stay in your two-room house and cater to your neurotic cats. You must love them more that they will get up in freezing temperatures to feed your pigs and hay your sheep and cows and keep the chickens safe from the winter fox. 

While they tend to the farm's fires we are headed South for warmer pastures. We have a long list of friends and farmers and family on the Eastern seaboard to check up on having secluded ourselves in Vermont since we moved here last spring. I also carry the not-so-hidden agenda of wanting to be warm-er for just a few days. So, we are trekking all the way down to North Carolina to visit our old farm and see Brent and Melissa in Raleigh. I've been checking daily the forecast of Raleigh, and Maryland, and New York and even Boston to drool over the (slightly) warmer temperatures. My last few posts have heavily featured photos from the spring and summer. It doesn't take an advanced degree in psychology to determine I am making difficult effort of adjusting to the Vermont winter. 

I am having a hard time. I think most people would. It is quite hard to go from the mild winters of North Carolina and California to the full blown 5-month winter of Vermont. Even with smatterings of winter months in Massachusetts and the French Alps between. I have faith in it getting easier.  When we come back we still have a solid two months of snow and freeze and will have officially run out of favors to ask of farm-sitting friends and neighbors. This year I need a three-week break. Next year I am naive enough to think I can cut it down to two. The following will just be a one week getaway and before I am forced into a no-holiday winter global warming should have caught herself up to Vermont and there will scarcely be a cold front to flee from. ---I speak in jest, I pray this doesn't happen as quickly as they fear it will. 

So, we will be writing in from the road in between good sleep-ins and meals with old friends. We aren't taking the VW bus. Despite my well argued platform of why to drive it, Nick's better judgement prevailed. He rambled on about no heat, poor mileage, getting robbed in Brooklyn (an ever present Vermont-mouse fear) and lack of snow tires and 4x drive. So we are driving the ever practical and rather boring Golf. We are only taking Rudy for animal company and I have promised to try not to adopt any piglets when we get to Elizabeth's farm. I can only try. Most of these circumstances fall beyond my control. 

So, I wish good thoughts of consecutive weeks of 25°F bluebird days for Nick and Lindsay.  It gives me constant anxiety to think of them dealing with animals in blizzard, or animals in ice, or animals in muddy melt, or in rain or in arctic winds. They are two wonderfully capable farmers but all I want is for this to be as pleasant a welcome-to-Vermont-winter for them as the weather gods can manage.

Meanwhile, you will find me running in shame from the aforementioned Vermont winter. Somewhere between here and Raleigh, N.C. with my tail between my legs. 

lessons in the obvious from last year's garden

This summer was a tumultuous one for me and the garden. I avoided it until I had friends visiting and quite nearly forcing my hands into the dirt. I felt mostly shame and anxiety whenever I passed her. But, by Labor day Nick and I were overwhelmed and humbled by the amount of food she had produced. The resilience of the garden gave me a good boost of growing confidence. Now that the inaugural year of gardening-on-my-own is safely behind me I find myself anxious (in the very best sense of the word) to start planning this coming year's garden. 

After closing out the garden last year I took some time to write in my journal about things I would and wouldn't do again. Here is a sampling. Most of it will seem painfully obvious so please forgive me my naiveté. 

I will not include eggplant for 2013. We had four lovely plants dripping with purple and white fruits and we didn't eat a damn one.

I will refrain from sowing the entire packets of not one but two pickling cucumbers. The little suckers were terrifically prolific and their stamina outmatched my own by tenfold in the processing kitchen. 

We do not need 9 different cherry tomato plants. We are not a pickyourown free-for-all. We are a civilized home garden. 

I will plant radishes on a pre-determined schedule. This is to avoid being overwhelmed with them one week and searching in vain for a pair the next. 

I will never again conflate the growing season in Vermont for the one in North Carolina.

Thus, I will plan winter squash in early June not in July. 

I will order seed potatoes in the winter and not wait until Memorial Day. 

I will plant more cabbage, more broccoli and more brussels. 

I will write-up an actual plan for a fall garden. 

I will build a modest hoop house for the late fall and winter greens. 

I will not allow the garden's foot paths to go to the weeds. That was a rather poor choice. 

I promise to more faithfully worship the practice of stringing tomatoes. We will cut stronger saplings for stakes instead of the lazy cheap ones they sell at the garden center.

I will plant more flowers, for a purely utilitarian garden is a somewhat boring one to the eyes. 

There now. The 2013 garden can't fail. I'm sure there are hundreds upon thousands of don'ts and dos for the summer garden. I hope my journal will be overflowing with them in a decade's time. For this is  the only way I will meekly progress to feeding my family well. 

I'd be curious to hear if you have any lessons learned from your own gardens this year?