Of Bears, Opossums, Asapargus and pH

What with the confrontation between dogs and bears and the opossums eating the chickens, it was a very busy week for farmer Lee Hauter.

An unholy row forced Lee out of bed one night. A bear he recognized from last fall apparently had risen from its long hibernation and approached the farm looking very skinny and hungry. Lee's two big Pyrenees dogs, fierce defenders of the property, rushed to inform the bear he was not welcome.

Fortunately, dogs and the bear were separated by a fence. After some fierce gnashing of teeth and viscious snarling, the bear departed back into the woods.

Then on Friday night Leigh awoke from a dream in which raccoons were eating his chickens. He shook it off and went back to sleep. But now he regrets not following his inner voice. That night with all the rain a section of the movable electric fence that surrounds one of his chicken broods collapsed. Opossums--not raccoons--took advantage and killed five of Leigh's chickens.

Wait. Opossums eat chickens?

"You can tell it was opossums," Leigh said, "because they suck the innards right out."

Good to know.

Besides these flirtations with the wild animal kingdom, Leigh did have some business to take care of--like the hoop houses that needed building, and bees that needed feeding, the 600 asparagus roots that needed planting, the 300 raspberry brambles that arrived and the 100 horseradish roots.

I was particularly interested to hear about the asparagus because my wife and I have our eyes on a patch of yard where we plan to put our own asparagus. Of course Leigh works on a much larger scale. About four years ago he planted 1,500 roots for Bull Run Farm's CSA subscribers. The 600 he ordered this year were meant to replace some plants that had been lost in the intervening years.

For the asparagus, Leigh pulls a bottom plow behind his tractor creating a trench about 10 inches deep. In the past he would toss horse manure into the trench and lay the asparagus roots on top. Asparagus can also be grown from seeds. But most growers prefer to buy the root stock. It takes about three years for the asparagus roots to become firmly established before you start harvesting the delicious stems.

Horse manure sounded familiar. That's precisely what my wife had proposed to do: dig a big hole and fill it with horse manure to rot while the asparagus was establishing itself. But Leigh says his grower now advises very firmly against horse manure or even compost until the asparagus is actually growing. Leigh says the issue is creating a soil that is too acid. Asparagus prefers a pH in the range of 7 to 7.2. So instead of tossing horse manure into the trench he added some bone meal.

"Bone meal is more expensive than lime," Leigh said. "But I'm going for the extra nutrition."

Leigh said that over the years he's become especially aware of his soil's pH. A soil's pH--a measure of less than seven indicating acidity, more than 7 indicating alkalinity--governs a plant's ability to take up nutrients through its roots. Some plants, such as blueberries and potatoes, like an acid soil. Other plants, such as cabbage and other brassicas, prefer a more alkaline soil. Most vegetables, in fact, prefer a soil that is slightly acid--somewhere in the range of 6.5 to 7.

"I test the soil around the farm all the time," Leigh said. "I'm a lot more concerned than I used to be."

What really focused Leigh on soil pH was a particular field on his farm that never seemed to perform up to par. No matter what he planted there, the yields were never good. "It always seemed to look parched," Leigh said. Finally he sent some of the soil off for analysis and learned that it was too acid. The lab gave him a specific recommendation for how much lime to add to balance the acid.

After that, Leigh stopped at the farm supply and purchased his own pH measuring tool. "I spent a couple hundred bucks on it," Leigh said. Apparently, that would be $200 well spent.

Don't Wait for a Community Garden Plot!

We don't publish many guest posts here at The Slow Cook (this may be the first). But this story was too good to pass by. Nat West, of Portland, Oregon, got tired of waiting for a community garden plot. So he went to Google's satellite map, located a vacant lot near his home and turned it into his own CSA urban farm.

By Nat West

I live in urban Portland Oregon on an average-sized city lot of 5000 square feet. That's 50 feet by 100 feet. My house takes up almost 1000 square feet, my garage another 750 square feet or so, and an always-shaded driveway about another 500. Throw in a grand old cedar tree on the southern neighbor's property, a nice deck to relax on during summer months, and I find myself happy to have squeezed in about 250 square feet of raised beds.

Now 250 square feet of good dirt produces a heck of a lot of zucchinis, cherry tomatoes, peas and lettuce, provided I plant intensively. But I'm one of the lucky ones because of the orientation of my property, the placement of the house on it, and the surrounding neighbors' structures and trees. Some of the properties on my block could not grow anything more than a few tomatoes in pots, no matter how much grass they gave up.

After a few years of growing on 250 square feet, I decided it was time to expand. I never had the room for voluminous crops like cabbage, winter squash, pumpkins or corn. And I would frequently prune my yellow crookneck squash to a single vine. I've even tried trellising beans, peas and tomatoes, but once I decided to seriously grow food for my family, not just pretty summer fruits, I simply had to expand.

So I did what most urban gardeners do when they find themselves in a similar situation. I found the closest community garden owned by the city and put my name on a waiting list 18 months long.

After mulling it over for a bit, I realized that an "18 month waiting list" is worse than a "twenty minute wait" at a swanky restaurant. The maître d' has no real idea how long it will take to get me seated. She's just guessing that table 22 will get up soon. But unlike eating a meal, gardening never "ends". After all, why would it? There's no forced-eviction after a couple years so everyone gets a chance. You can rent a plot forever, or even sublet it like rent-controlled apartments in New York. The likelihood of getting a plot is even slimmer since, in recent years, many home garden seed suppliers are selling more than they've ever sold before. Those seeds have to go somewhere, and I haven't notice people razing houses and chopping down trees in my neighborhood.

I concluded that I could not wait for a community garden space to open up. I had to find my own garden space.

The first thing I did was to think about my neighbors' yards. Some of my neighbors had patches of relatively unkempt grass. Would they mind if I killed the grass, tilled the dirt and planted vegetables? I would have to share some produce, but they also get out of mowing. And of course I would have to use their water for irrigation. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to put together three or four small parcels, each about the size of my own garden at home.

But as I thought about the daily effort and workload of managing multiple plots, and dealing with multiple people, I realized that it might turn into a lot of work very quickly. What if a neighbor cut me off in mid-season? Or what if a neighbor ate everything, thinking they were entitled? How many sets of hoes, shovels and wheelbarrows would I need to buy? I realized that these issues would have to be dealt with no matter what, but it was in my best interest to have the fewest number of plots as possible. Which meant that I needed to “go big” - find the largest contiguous plots I could.

Other than riding my bike around the neighborhood and keeping my eyes peeled while on walks, I used Google Maps’ satellite view, in high magnification. Starting at my house, I made concentric circles, searching block by block for empty lots or very large back yards. Using this strategy, I was able to quickly identify a number of potential sites that I would not have found had I been searching on foot.

Now that I had a list of nearby large yards and empty lots, I used Portland Maps, an online database of property records. Navigating through the maps, I was able to find the name and address of the owner of each property. The same information could have been found using public records at the county courthouse, but I saved an immense amount of time. In some cases, I also cross-referenced them in the phone book since the address on file with the county is oftentimes not a current address, especially in the case of empty lot owners.

I planned to contact them in person if I could not find the mailing information for a particular lot. I sent an introductory letter to the landowners, explaining who I was, where I lived, and what I wanted to do on their land. I got one response, for a full empty lot directly across the street from my house. 5000 square feet of flat, full-sun dirt, absolutely perfect.

The landowner had recently received a nuisance complaint from the city about the buildup of refuse on the lot. She was elated that I would clean up the lot and turn it into a garden. In exchange for the use of the land, I am providing her with approximately one CSA share of produce for 16 weeks. We drew up an agreement, and she promises to give me as much advance notice as possible should she decide to sell. She also offered me a lot four times the size of this one, about 20 blocks away, which I hope to use next year.

Eventually I came to the realization that my new lot is much better than a community garden plot. I did not have to wait 18 months, or for that matter, 18 years for a small plot. I pay no rent for my 5000 square feet, but I would have to pay rent for a fraction of that size in a community garden. Also, I get to manage crop rotations, soil amending, and pest management holistically.

Community plot gardeners have to either work together or more often than not, grow weaker crops beset by pests because they are surrounded by crops grown using different practices, oftentimes on depleted soils. Working to encourage more collectivism of community gardens would solve some of these problems, but why wait? I’m sure there are usable, empty lots around your neighborhood.

For another ingenious approach, read about Murray Hill Row-by-Row, an urban CSA started by a school teacher in Annapolis, Maryland, who got 22 neighbors to share their back yards to grow food. And for even more stories about how the food system is changing, check out "Fight Back Friday."

The Farmer's New Bees

Very delicately, and while getting stung only twice, Leigh Hauter this week started 10 new bee hives on Bull Run Farm.

Leigh is acquainted with a man who travels the country with his bees, pollinating crops, and also sells bees on the side. Even though the thermometer barely registered 40 degrees, the bees Leigh ordered had arrived and it was time to transfer them to their boxes in the fields.

The process works something like this:

The bees are sold in cages--one cage for workers, a separate cage for the queen. First a queen is lowered into the box in her cage, then a group of workers--about three pounds of them--are released around her. At one end of the queen's cage is a stopper made of sugar. The worker bees begin to gnaw on the sugar. It takes them about three days to eat the sugar, during which the queen releases all kinds of pheromones that bond the bees to the queen and to each other. When the sugar is gone, a hole is revealed in the cage allowing the queen to escape and join her hive.

Leigh first got involved with bees about 20 years ago when he received a bee hive as a wedding present from his farmer father-in-law. "I didn't know the difference between a bee and wasp. I only knew they stung and I was terrified," Leigh says. But the father-in-law promised that if Leigh learned to care for that hive, he'd get another 100 hives plus the farm. Leigh did eventually inherit the farm, but now his hives number only between 20 and 30, enough to produce about 600 pounds of honey each year that he distributes to his CSA subscribers.

Bees are fascinating creatures, much more organized, sociable and responsible than humans. Raising them used to be a cinch, but times have changed. "The bees are so stressed out from what’s happening to our environment," said Leigh. "When I started out 20 years ago it was easy keeping bees. It was called being a 'bee haver.' Now you have to do a lot of work."

When he first started tending bees, Leigh said he might lose five hives out of 100 in any given year. "Now I lose half of them. It’s pretty typical even for a professional bee keeper to lose 40 or 50 percent of her hives," he says.

We've all heard of the "colony collapse" syndrome that has been devastating bee populations around the world for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Leigh said the deaths in his hives are caused mostly by tiny mites that infect the bees. One type of mite invades the bee's trachea and is considered life-shortening, but not devastating. It first appeared in the U.S. around 1984. Some bee varieties, he said, have been bread to resist the trachea mite. A second type of parasite, the vorroa mite, sucks the blood from bees and can wipe out a hive. It also appeared in the '80s and although they can be treated chemically, Leigh decided not to risk the chemicals getting into his honey.

And then there are bears.

"I lost seven hives to bears last fall," said Leigh. "They just took them out and ate them before I put up electric fences. We had a lot of bears move in through our valley last year. I saw one the night before last."

The bees do not become active until the temperature reaches around 50 degrees, and then they will be gathering most of their pollen for only a brief period, from late April to to early June when the tulip trees are in bloom. "Virginia is not really a great place to raise bees," he said.

So what do the bees do the rest of the summer? "The bees fight with each other," said Leigh. "All those worker bees become soldier bees and go and attack the weaker hives."

For the farmer, bees are work, but also a great source of pleasure. "I could sit there on a nice summer afternoon and just watch them come and go," said Leigh. "Especially if they’re nice, gentle bees."

A Farmer and His Garlic

As part of his annual crop rotation scheme, Leigh Hauter over the years had planted garlic just about everywhere he could on his farm except for this strip of land on the slope just below his greenhouse.

The previous owners of Bull Run Farm had not done much in the way of erosion control. "There was very little topsoil left on that slope," he said. So he spent at least five years building the soil again with applications of compost made from horse manure and straw and the droppings from his chickens.

This year, Leigh and his farmhand disagreed over whether the soil was ready for garlic. Leigh said no, the farmhand said yes. "I was never really happy with what had been growing up there," Leigh said. "I didn't want to risk putting my garlic all in one place where it wouldn't do well." Eventually, though, the farmhand prevailed. Garlic it would be.

Leigh prefers a German porcelain variety of hardneck garlic. "It's done better for me, and it makes a larger bulb," he says.

Garlic is divided into two types: hardneck and softneck. They are both grown exactly the same. But the hardneck has a determinate number of cloves (sometimes as few as four, but large) and produces a "scape," a stalk from which a seed head grows. The scapes--tasting of garlic and delicious as food--are harvested before the seed head forms. Softneck garlic, meanwhile, is the kind most often found in stores with an indeterminate number of cloves--often layers of them--as well as a thicker skin. Because of its thicker skin, softneck garlic stores longer.

Garlic typically is planted in fall, then overwinters in the ground. Around August, Leigh orders 400 pounds of bulbs from a commercial grower in New York State. These will produce about 12,000 plants, resulting in 12,000 bulbs to be distributed to Leigh's 500 CSA subscribers.

First Leigh tilled the soil on the slope, adding some more compost. Then they planted the cloves--pointy end up--using a mechanical device pulled along behind his tractor. Two people ride on the device feeding cloves of garlic into a wheel that inserts the garlic about three inches below the soil surface, several inches apart, then covers them over. As long as you're driving the tractor straight, the method will create neat rows of garlic.

The final step is to cover the garlic with a thick mulch.

Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds. The mulch keeps weeds down as well as retaining moisture in the soil. Leigh uses hay from one of his neighbors who raises hay along with beef cattle. In exchange for selling some of the beef to his CSA subscribers, Leigh gets whatever hay hasn't been sold at the end of the season--typically 50 to 75 bails of it. The garlic field is covered over with a layer of hay about six inches thick, enough to block any sunlight that might reach the soil. "If the weed seeds don't get light, they can't grow," says Leigh.

The garlic, however, has no problem pushing its way through the hay after it sprouts. By spring the unmistakable garlic leaves--slender and pointy--are already several inches long. Leigh won't need to water the garlic much at all. "Even that drought we had a couple of years ago when I was worried about the garlic, it did okay." Nor will he be adding any additional fertilizer. Garlic likes lots of organic matter. But you don't want to feed it too much or you'll get too much foliage and not enough bulb.

When the scapes come up, sometime in June, they'll be cut and sent to subscribers as a treat in they're CSA boxes. Cutting the scapes also redirects the plants' energy toward making bigger bulgs. They'll be harvested when about two-thirds of the leaves have turned brown, usually around the end of June.

Schools & Community Gardens

Walking my daughter to school each morning, I often looked wistfully at the huge expanse of yard next to Cardozo Senior High School and thought what a wonderfully productive garden it would make. All that space with a clear southern and western exposure. What a shame to pave it over with grass that no one ever used (except to fly a kite sometimes).

Well, the flattest part of the yard, actually a complex of asphalt basketball courts, recently was turn into a parking lot. Too bad. But there's still plenty of yard that could be gardened. Come to think of it, after the federal government, the District of Columbia school system is one of the largest property owners in the city. There are dozens of large campuses and hundreds of smaller school yards all over town. Why do we plant them with grass? Why not turn them into food gardens? Even better, why not turn them into community gardens that everyone could use to grow local food?

For the last couple of years I worked with an organization that was all about promoting school gardens and trying to integrate gardening into school curricula. It was a tough slog. But I think it might be more successful if, instead of trying to organize gardens strictly within the school, the efforts were expanded to bring in the entire community. Turn school gardens into community gardens.

Of course, someone's already done it. And here's an excellent article about a group in Petaluma, California, that is bringing community and schools together to establish gardens and a CSA to help feed the hungry. They also work with a group that focuses solely on gleaning, or collecting unharvested fruits from people's back yards.

Humans can be so resourceful when they put their minds to it.

How the Farmer Plants His Seeds

Imagine trying to get 10,000 tiny seeds from seed packets into these growing trays. Now imagine 70,000 seeds.

That's what Leigh Hauter has been working on the past week--getting a jump start on the crops for his CSA at Bull Run Farm. So far, Leigh and his helper have 20,000 seeds planted and the broccoli and cabbages are sprouting. Now just 50,000 more seeds to go.

I get dizzy thinking about planting just a few hundred seeds. That's because I use my fingers. Fortunately for modern farmers, there are some mechanical aides to make the process a bit easier. But let's not jump too far ahead.

Seed starting for Leigh Hauter actually begins in January when an 18-wheel truck arrives with pallet-loads of organic potting medium. The road to the farm wasn't designed for an 18-wheeler, so the bags are dropped at the end of the driveway. Leigh has to load them into his pickup truck and deliver them the rest of the way to the greenhouse.

Waiting at the greenhouse are many hundreds of plastic seed trays in which the new year's seeds will sprout and grow until the last frost date passes and they can be transplanted into the fields. Some growers forgo manufactured seed trays and make their own "soil blocks" in which to sprout seeds. But Leigh says he usually gets several years' service out of a plastic tray. He orders about 200 new ones each year to replace the ones that wore out or were "mishandled" the previous year, meaning run over by the tractor.

Leigh's strategy is to give his seedlings ample room to grow in the trays, so he chooses trays with 50 cells. Other trays have 72 or even more cells, because the cells are much smaller. He also likes to add some fertilizer to his growing mix--a little compost, a little bone meal, some kelp. "I know some growers like to transplant their seedlings into bigger pots and fertilize them at that time," Leigh said. "But that would be too much work for us. I could not see us doing that. So having a little bit of fertilizer in there now saves us work."

Leigh and his helper pour the starting mix into the trays in assembly-line fashion, then tamp it down with plaster molds that match the shape of the seed cells. Now comes the fun part: getting one seed into each cell. Leigh's helper is stubborn. He still uses a simple manual seeder that drops one seed at a time into the cells. But Leigh has graduated to a vacuum device that delivers five seeds at a time. It has different-sized nozzles depending on the size of the seeds being planted. Some growers use similar vacuum machines that can plant an entire tray, each seed placed precisely in the middle of its cell. But these cost thousands of dollars. Leigh is content to deploy his own time and labor instead.

Once the seeds are placed in their cells, more growing medium is poured over them and tamped down. At this point they are watered. There's a hose with a watering wand that hangs from above in the greenhouse. Until they sprout, the seeds may only need to be watered every two or three days. But once they turn into little plants with leaves and root structures, they will need to be watered as much as two or three times daily. In the past, extra hoses and sprinklers made watering easier. But Leigh said the greenhouse was moved from another location and the more elaborate watering system fell by the wayside.

Planting and watering all day in the greenhouse doesn't exactly fire the farmer's imagination. But Leigh says it's pleasant enough work. "Better than being outside in the cold shoveling snow or something." With its wood-fired boiler, the greenhouse stays toasty. Last week when temperatures climbed to 60 degrees outside, Leigh had to roll up the sides of the greenhouse. "It would have been 110 degrees in there."

I was curious where Leigh buys his seed. In my own case, I've narrowed seed purchases to a few distributors: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, located in Virginia; Johnny's Seeds in Maine; Heirloom Seeds in Pennsylvania. I like the idea of buying seeds from people in our area who work organically and focus on open-pollinated heirloom varieties. Leigh says he also buys some seed from Southern Exposure and from Johnny's, but his favorite seed company at the moment is E&R Seeds in Munroe, Indiana (sorry, they don't have a website). "Johnny's seeds are very reliable and they've got a great catalogue, but they've gotten expensive," Leigh says.

So for now at Bull Run Farm it's fill trays, plant seeds and water. And don't forget to keep the fire in the greenhouse boiler burning. "Yesterday we were out cutting firewood," said Leigh. "We've got about 100 acres of woods and lots of trees the gypsy moths killed a couple of years ago." What the gypsy moths killed will soon be heating water that runs in copper tubes under all those seed trays. Peppers and tomatoes can't be far behind.

This is the second in a continuing series of articles about Leigh Hauter and the methods he uses he grow remarkable organic produce at his farm in The Plains, Virginia.

A New Season on the Farm

This is the first in what we hope will be a regular series of articles about Leigh Hauter and his CSA operation at Bull Run Farm in The Plains, Virginia. Leigh has been farming in the Washington area for 15 years, first at the Cheseapeake Bay Foundation's Clagett Farm in Prince George's County. He was involved in early efforts to bring a farmers market to underserved residents of the District of Columbia east of the Anacostia River. Leigh now has about 500 subscribers to his CSA. His wife Wenonah is executive director of the advocacy group Food and Water Watch.

Signs of life are beginning to appear on the farm. For Leigh Hauter, that means ramping up the heating system in his greenhouse--fixing leaky pipes, lighting the furnace and planting seeds.

A constant temperature of at least 70 degrees is necessary to prompt germination in thousands of pepper and eggplant seeds. Leigh has a fairly new, high-efficiency furnace fired by the wood that grows on the farm. The system runs hot water--90 to 100 degrees--through copper pipes under his seed trays, giving the seeds a nice warm bed in which to sprout and keeping the greenhouse toasty when nighttime temperatures dip.

Leigh is aiming for a last frost date of April 15, so he's planting things now that typically require at least eight weeks in seed trays before they can be safely transplanted outdoors. That means peppers and eggplants by the thousands. He's planted at least eight different varieties of bell peppers--red, orange, purple, white among them--and more hot peppers than he can count. That will mean plenty of visual interest when subscribers open their CSA boxes later in the year.

Leigh is also starting to plant tomatoes. He hopes to be shipping two varieties of cherry tomatoes--Early Girl and Siberian--as early as the middle of June. This is also onion planting time, but Leigh does not plant his own onions. He purchases thousands of plants in bunches from a firm in Indiana. They'll be planted in the ground later.

Also at this time Leigh is planting broccoli. His customers like broccoli and unlike some other brassicas, such as cauliflower, broccoli will withstand a bit of frost. He's planning four successive crops, aiming for 1,000 plants in each spaced one week apart.

Leigh used to start his CSA deliveries in May, but at that time of the year the crops available for harvest are mostly greens. "People don't like six weeks of greens," he said, "so I'm giving them three weeks." Asked if he wasn't including spinach among his early crops, Leigh said, "I have a hard time finding spinach that doesn't bolt in this season." We have the same problem with bolting spinach. Spring in Washington gets too hot too fast.

Leigh Hauter is a former English teacher whose introduction to the farm was keeping bees at the urging of his father-in-law. Leigh sold the honey at farmers markets and has since managed to make farming a full-time occupation. We'll be checking in on him on a weekly basis so that kitchen gardeners in our area can see how a professional grows beautiful, bountiful produce.

The above photo is of the greenhouse seed starting operation at One Straw Farm in Baltimore County, taken last July.

Dark Days: Ghitarra Pasta with Pesto

We had so much fun making pasta on the ghitarra at school that I decided to try it at home. Daughter was happy to help. We took turns rolling the dough through the pasta machine, then pressing it through the ghitarra.

We keep a big Ziploc bag of pesto cubes in the freezer that we don't use nearly enough. At the end of the summer season we harvest all of our basil (usually much more than we really need) and turn it into pesto sauce with plenty of garlic and pine nuts. Then we freeze the pesto in ice cube trays for storage.

My pasta recipe--half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat, and three eggs from our farmer friend Brett--makes at least twice as many noodles as we can possibly eat in one sitting. So when our friend Shelley called to check about Easter plans we immediately invited her and husband John for a casual, impromptu dinner.

The pasta pot was ready to boil when they arrived. As cocktails were winding down, I dropped the noodles in the salted water to cook for just a few minutes, then tossed them in a bowl with about four cubes of defrosted pesto and a little of the cooking water.

Our CSA box arrived on Thursday with a bag of salad mix. It was a perfect way to finish our simple meal, but I had to add something besides my own vinaigrette. The answer was shouting at me from the herb garden: rosemary blossoms.

One of our rosemary plants is in a riot of bloom at the moment. We've never seen anything quite like it--hundreds of tiny, bluish blossoms that on close inspection are quite intricate in their architecture. I gathered a few dozen and sprinkled them over our salad. They do have a faintly rosemary flavor, something to nudge us gently into the new season.

Chicken Giblets for Breakfast

High on my list of personal foibles is my lack of fortitude when it comes to dealing with chicken organs.

You know what I'm talking about--the little bag of body parts--neck, heart, gizzard, liver--that comes with the chicken, usually stuffed inside the cavity. Our farmer friend Brett takes great pains to include a Ziploc bag with chicken parts when he sends one of his chickens with our weekly CSA box. I carefully remove the bag, place it in a small bowl and put it in the refrigerator with a promise to myself that I will--this time--find a use for my chicken offal very soon, to make good on all the work that went into harvesting them.

Days pass. I glance at the bowl of chicken parts each time I open the refrigerator. The promise to myself turns into guilt. I try to put giblets out of my mind, pretend they're not there. But soon they take on a metaphysical weight--a real presence in my thoughts--like something out of an Egar Allen Poe story. The beating chicken heart...

Eventually, my wife will complain of an odor eminating from the refrigerator. I pretend to not know what it is, and bury the chicken parts in the trash at the first opportunity when no one is looking. At this point, the guilt has become HUGE.

Well, I just hate to waste food and I keep telling myself that I will never collect enough chicken necks to make a stock. By now, if I had saved all those necks, I would have enough a couple times over. So this week after receiving another chicken from Brett, and the bag of organs, I was more determined than ever to make good use of them. Since I know no one else in the family will have anything to do with chicken offal, I decided to have giblets for breakfast with some of Brett's pastured eggs.

Here's what I did: First, place the neck in a freezer bag to finally start your collection. Put the bag in the freezer. Nex, cut the gizzard and heart into small pieces and sautee them in a hot skillet with extra-virgin olive oil. Season with salt and black pepper. When they are cooked through, spoon them onto a plate and set aside. Now cook the liver in the same skillet, either whole or cut into two pieces. Be sure to brown it on all sides. When that is cooked through, remove it to a cutting board and when it is cool enough to handle, cut it into small pieces.

Let the skillet cool a bit off the heat, then return it to the burner set to moderately-low and pour two farm-fresh eggs, beaten, into the skillet where the eggs can pick up all the brown bits off the bottom. Scramble the eggs as you normally would, mixing them around with your favorite usensil, and when they're about half-way cooked add the chopped giblets and mix them well with the eggs. Season with salt and pepper as needed.

Serve this immediately on a warm plate, perhaps with a piece of toasted, rustic bread. If you have any leftover giblet gravy in the fridge, now would be a good time to use that as well. We had some fresh chervil in our CSA box this week, so I chopped some of that to garnish the eggs.

I happen to like strong, gamey flavors, so this is a dish I could easily wake up to on a more regular basis. But my advise is, do this early in the morning before the rest of the house wakes up, so you don't have to listen to all those disapproving voices telling you how much they can't stand chicken giblets.

Where Food Comes From

Why does real food cost more, you ask? Take a look at the man on the left, down on his kness planting onions by hand. That's Mike Klein, a farmer friend from Bandywine, MD, who is planting crops for his summer subscription service.

I paid a visit to Mike and his wife Michelle yesterday to see what they were up to. This is a busy time for farmers, preparing fields and planting. The Klein's spread comprises about 11 acres 35 miles south of Washington, DC. They bought the place a few years ago to fulfill a longtime ambition of getting closer to the earth. Originally, they had studied aqua-culture in California.

Well, Mike is very close to the earth these days. In fact, he has his hands in it most of the time. When he's not out in the fields, he's working in his germination room or in the greenhouse, starting tomato plants and eggplants, peppers and a variety of herbs.

I told Mike he could have me for a couple of hours and he put me right to work planting onions. That's what you see him doing here with a bag of Stuttgarter onion sets. The field we're planting is about 50 yards long and consists of three rows that Mike has "disced" with his tractor. The tractor pulls a set of eight saucer-shaped discs that turn the soil, breaking the crusty top layer and creating eight shallow groves or furrows to plant the onions in.

"How's your back?" Mike asks me.

I'm not sure exactly why he asks. But I soon find out. Shortly I am on my knees as well, reaching into the bag of small onion sets and pressing them, one at a time, into the narrow furrows about three inches--or "three fingers"--apart. Reaching across all eight grooves is too much, so Mike advises working down one side of the row, then tackling the other side, planting four grooves with each pass.

It's reach into the bag for a handful of onion sets, turn, stretch to plant one groove, pressing each small onion into the soil just far enough for the root end to make good contact. Then turn, reach into the bag again, start with another groove and repeat the process. You have to position your feet so they don't disturb the onions already planted in the neighboring row. Twisting, turning, reaching, bending. No wonder Mike asked about my back.


My wife has been threatening to sign me up for yoga. All I have to say is, Honey, yoga ain't got nothin' on planting onions.


I ask Mike if there aren't machines to do this kind of work. "There probably are," he says. But his onion crop isn't big enough to justify the investment.

After 30 minutes or so, I'm starting to feel the pain in my back. I shift positions, leaning more to one side, then another. I try sitting on my butt. I find that I can plant the two farthest grooves perched on my knees, then gain some relief by sitting back on my hindquarters to plant the closer two grooves. I look up: After an hour's work, I've planted about a 2o-foot length. Only about 130 feet more to go.

Mike, who's been working on another project in the barn, comes over to check my progress. He grabs a few onions and starts planting opposite me, on the other side of the row. I can't help noticing that his planting is about three times faster than mine. "I have a vested interest," he says.

Later he will cover the rows of onion sets with hay to hold down weeds and retain moisture in the soil.

We chat about the price of fuel, about how urban sprawl is sucking up so much farmland. New homes, what we call "McMansions," are popping up just down the road from Mike's farm. The cost of land makes farming close to the city an expensive proposition. The last farm inside Washington's famous beltway recently gave up the ghost. Mike and Michelle are lucky they bought their land when they did. They might not be able to afford it now.


To save our backs, we call it quits on onion planting for the day. Mike has another project for me, helping remove the black plastic from another field. Last year the plastic was serving as mulch for several rows of tomato plants. The plastic sheets are about four feet wide. Grass has grown over the edges so densely that there's no removing the plastic by hand.

Mike switches out appliances on the back of his old International tractor, replacing the furrowing discs with what looks like a pair of huge fishing hooks. Mike's plan is to run the tractor straddling the rows of black plastic. The hooks will dig into the soil, cutting through the grass and loosening the outside edges of the plastic.

My job is to come behind Mike and pull the plastic free of the soil.

The plastic runs in long, continues sheets. So I am pulling and shaking off clods of soil and hunks of sod and pieces of dessicated tomato vine. Tug a little, shake a little. Most of the plastic comes loose. Sometimes it tears into ungainly pieces. It's dirty work. Dust and sod fly everywhere.


We finally remove most of the plastic. It lies in big piles next to the planting rows. Mike hands me some empty chicken feed bags and I walk to each pile, stuffing the plastic into the bags. Fortunately, this plastic is pretty lightweight and stuffs easily.


We had planned to get a bite for lunch. But already the day is slipping away. Mike has a long list of chores. And I want to get home before rush-hour starts.


"Maybe next time," Mike says.

He hands me a small paper bag of onion sets. It seems Mike always has a bag of something to share. Now I can show my 7-year-old daughter how to plant onions in our garden at home.

If it's Thursday...

...it must be delivery day for our box of goodies from the farm.

Let's see. What do we have here...

...a gallon bag of mesclun...some Siberian kale...tender collards...a Ziploc of salad mix with tat soi and Asian mustard greens...English cress. And, for us "Yes-eggs" subscribers, one dozen eggs from Brett Grohsgal's brown chickens. A veritable riot of produce, and it isn't even April yet.

I've mentioned the subscription from Even' Star Farm so many times I thought you might like to see it. Brett gets up--oh, about 4 in the morning--usually on Thursdays to make the almost-two-hours drive from his 75-acre spread outside Lexington Park, Maryland, and drop off more than 100 of these boxes to clients in and around the nation's capital. We drive about 15 minutes from our home in downtown D.C. to fetch our box off the front porch of a "neighborhood coordinator" in Chevy Chase. (You get a big discount on the subscription if you coordinate your neighborhood.)

We are among the "winter" subscribers, a season that runs from early November into May. Brett loves his brassicas, hence the profusion of cresses and collards and tat sois and arugulas. We've come to love them, too. But there's so much in one box that we share the subscription with my sister and her husband. The cost: $311 per couple for the season.

As good as the vegetables and the eggs--and sometimes jams and spice mixes and flower arrangements--are the notes Brett sends out each week telling us what's on the menu. Who knew a person could write so much, and so vividly, about the contents of a box? Brett's missives are written with such gusto and precision--they are so detailed--that I've saved every one going back three seasons now as. As well as providing evidence of every seasonal thing we have consumed for the past three years, Brett's e-mails are a window into the mind of a truly impassioned philosopher-farmer, someone who cares deeply about the land and how we feed ourselves. I'm not sure you could just bind them all together into a book. If you did, it would constitute a kind of encyclopedia of brassicas and the life of a subscription farmer, the kind of book I imagine Alan Davidson--a man of equally intense interests, and author of The Oxford Companion to Food--might write.

Brett also operates a summer subscription. But by then we will be swimming in the produce from our own front-yard garden here in the District of Columbia. We also like to see what the local farmer's markets are offering.

Now to figure out what to do with all this stuff. So many greens, so little time. Salad? Vegetable saute? Or, could there be a frittata in our future? A little goat cheese, anyone?