The Accidental Farmer

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” says local-food evangelist Michael Pollan, and though his books have been translated in at least sixty-five languages including Urdu, Chicken wasn’t one of them. Even if it were, it would be lost in translation on my willful mob. Can you say “Eat food, lots of it, mostly Matthew’s plants.”

Breakfast of Chickens:  The apple blossom special.

My Dilemma with Omnivores is their lack of discrimination. They seem to pick up on the coddled pheromone trail I’ve invested into my favorite varieties an go for those first.  Just when a long-awaited apple,  pear or tomato is heavy with itself, it’s pecked or gnawed into oblivion.

Chickens are über-omnivores:  They’ll sample, trial and taste almost anything, even chicken (don’t ask).  And they’ve become so unhinged lately by the delirium of Spring that they’ve even taken to browsing the blossoms off of fruit trees in the orchard.  Who does that?

I’m not alone, of course.  I just have a larger produce department than most home gardeners, and a few too many fowl wandering the aisles.

Annual Lamium purpurium carpets the orchard. Also known as henbit, it’s chicken candy.

I spoke about “Growing Beautiful Food” at a big garden conference last month in Connecticut, where the Master Gardeners were many, and the Q&A was mostly about predation.  “Yes, it’s all very pretty, and thank you for your lovely presentation, but what about the critters?  How do you keep them out?  This was the idée fixe: Beauty is negotiable,  plundering is not.

And while I implored them to sacrifice a few peonies for eggplant, they couldn’t get passed the loss factor. Though growing things is always fraught with peril, growing food–no matter how beautiful, healthful, and environmentally responsible—is asking for trouble. Of course, in the long haul, not growing your own, or not supporting those who do it locally and organically, is the real worry;  It will be no accident when we just can’t feed ten billion people on chemically saturated agricultural land that’s dependent on a diminishing supply of petroleum. So a few wayward chickens or nibbled greens are the least of our worries.

I’m seeking absolution, I suppose; having come in from the urban cold of not knowing (or caring) where my food came from, to caring deeply and deciding to do something about it.

I came from cities – physically, psychologically. From the bump and bustle of urbanism. No planting, no growing, no harvesting. And yet, here I am in mid-life, an organic farmer, feeding my family, feeding neighbors and CSA members; lost in a headlong swoon for this crazy, sexy piece of earth, and unable to imagine a life without it.

Spring at Stonegate Farm:  One sexy piece of earth.

So I let the chickens have their barter share: They lay, I look the other way. A dilemma resolved by a kind of rural détante.  Sometimes letting go can be the very thing your life needs.  -Mb

Visit the farm @ StonegatefarmNY.org

The greenhouse at Stonegate Farm has been transformed this month from a cool, empty glass box to a biosphere of warm green life, taken over by the bustle of seed starting.

It’s Hope Central for the farm, a strange and wonderful refuge of genetic desire. The greenhouse is where you lay out your floral and vegetal longing in orderly blocks of soil, pinch in an improbable speck of seed and say your prayers.  Ora Pro Nobis.

Thinning seedlings in the greenhouse. The weak shall inherit the compost pile.

Ideas incubate as well here; what to interplant this season, how much of this variety to grow, when to start that. You test plant in coconut coir, or seed start under the cosmic pull of a full moon. You glaze young greens with an emulsion of fish and seaweed and imagine low tide.  It’s all very seductive, to be inside this small ship of hope, when the gray and cold of late March is still clawing at the glass.

You pump iTunes through your brain to give rhythm and meter to the monotony of planting, or a sacred dirge when thinning fragile and crowded cotyledons (yes, even though they have a fetal heartbeat). You meditate on the meaning of growing food for yourself and others and why it matters.

The heart of glass at the center of the farm.

This season, with the first expansion of the farm in five years, it’s a wonderfully crowded house. The cut flowers alone, preening beauties that they are, have laid claim to half the space, while the dozens of new vegetable varieties pack the aisles.  Maybe we should crank some Green Day into the glassy mosh pit?

While I was away from Stonegate this winter, having fled to Europe on an annual Bavarian hajj where my family, alps and mountain huts beckon, these plans were all virtual, scrawled out in journals and circled in dog-eared seed catalogs. My absence always seems to make the farm grow fonder. I miss the weight of organic dirt caked into worn boots, the midnight rustling-up of lost and frightened chickens, the fussy coddling of pears and quince in an orchard.

Even while Sandy and Nemo gave us a climatic battering, and kept me cursing the gods from far away, I couldn’t wait to pick the farm up and start all over again.

Shoveling the Sh*t at the horse farm.

But that’s just part of why we do this. As gardeners, growers, and micro-farmers , we see things as we are, and if we’re joyful, hopeful souls, we’ll always come back, happy to press our wills against the vicissitudes of weather and temperamental plant habit; to fungal disease and the relentless, destructive hunger of insects an critters.

“Though I am an old man, I am but a young gardener,” said Thomas Jefferson at the end of his life, and we will do no better.  We’ll  leave this world wanting one more season, one more heirloom tomato to grow and swoon over, one more squash or melon variety to trail and taste.

For now, we’re in the greenhouse–the glassy, pulsing heart of the farm–seeing things as we are.  -Mb

We have two young farmers joining us this season at Stonegate Farm from Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Westchester, NY, where they’ve been honing (and hoeing) their farm and flower skills.

A fence of farm-fresh baby vegetables at Blue Hill, skewered into submission

As one of the country’s preëminent diversified farms specializing seasonal, sustainable food, Stone Barns makes farming a beautiful obsession. From the exquisite Rockefeller-financed buildings, to the rolling, linear perfection of its field crops and sheep nibbled pastures, Stone Barns sets the sustainable bar mighty high.

They even have celebrity chef Dan Barber’s renowned Blue Hill restaurant on site, which I photographed last year for Tradional Home magazine. A day at Blue Hill and Stone Barns was reassuring (I’m not alone in my OCD fixation on farming as a romanticized ideal), humbling (I’ll never have even the most tenuous ties to a Rockefeller bankroll) and baffling (I shot a small fence of skewered raw vegetables, an appetizer that looked as though the Inquisition had come through and impaled them for vegetal heresy: “how dare you be so delicious and beautiful!” piercing sound, baby radish whimpering).

Stone Barns Center in Westchester, NY, where agriculture and architecture meet on high.

I also photographed a delicious ribboned kale and farro salad, in which vinegar-bathed lacinato kale was tossed with buttery pine nuts, curls of Parmigiano, currants and farro (ember wheat). Yes, we ate the props, down the last delectable chiffonade.

A simple, superlative salad at Blue Hill: Lacinato kale, farro, pine nuts, currant, Parmigiano. Perfect.

In an effort to keep up with the Rockefellers this season (we may not have stone barns, but we have some preposterously large stone gates), we’re going to expand our CSA’s vegetable offerings with more variety and choice, including late season heirlooms, root vegetables, and – most excitingly – cut flowers.

Bouquets of organic cut blooms will be an optional part of the share each week, with bunches of wine and lime toned zinnias, purple gomphrena, nigella, liatris, sweet  pastel snapdragons and sunflowers.  Beauty for its own sake.

We’ll also be offering more on-farm events and workshops, Vitamix mash-ups and barn concerts.  It’s going to be a great season!  You can sign up now for the 2013 CSA share on the website, or simply drop a check in the mail.  Our expanding universe will mean more available shares, but sign-up early to secure a spot.  Spring ahead!  –Mb

A solitary hawk circled above the orchard this morning, cutting loose, slow wheels of menace across the sky.  Chickens crouched under brambles, songbirds muted themselves in thickets.  All the mad, flitting bustle of life on the farm came to an abrupt stop.

Something dangerous this way comes.

A hawk on the hunt is a magical, ominous sight: it’s silent wings, its keen, focused hunger.  And from on high, the chickens are easy to spot; a fluff of life against a monotony of gray-grey grass.

The land below surely looked scrappier to the red tail than it does to us, with our edited, boots-on-the-ground view. Outside of raked and leaf-blown fields, the woods are a mess: an almost impenetrable tangle of limbs scattered by the latest hurricane, paper and mud stuccoed to trunks, swales sodden with leaves and brush, and above them a tree-line torn and broken against the sky.

The farm is a break from the chaos of wildness, and for the hawk it’s an easy place to spot the random flutter of a meal. Without the fleshed-out green of summer to protect them, the hens are vulnerable when out in the orchard each day in winter, with only the spiked bones of blackberry or a vault of primocanes to protect them.

The hawk perched in an oak tree above the stable and waited.  I scurried about like a protective daddy, trying to herd the terrified hens back into the coop, but they had hunkered down under the blackberries, not to be wrangled.  The red tail sat there preening and self-possessed, assuming she’d have the last laugh, or squawk.

Lookouts patrol the snowy roof of the coop.

We lost a few hens last season, taken out by a swift set of talons in broad daylight, and I’ve since sworn a farmer’s version of the Hippocratic oath, charged with protecting all creatures and crops in my charge (the woodchucks, squirrels, chipmunks, and raccoons have sworn at both me and my oath, as they’ve been trapped and shown to the exits).

Aside from keeping chickens enclosed in a run or pen, however (which would counter our free range philosophy), there’s really no protecting against a determined hawk. If you are small and yummy and out under the open sky, they will have you. This red tail, tired of my leery presence, finally flew off, if only to find a predatory perch somewhere else.

We lost a Cuckoo Maran hen  the next day.  She’s been too heavy for the hawk to carry off, and we found her in the back field, her body opened like a book, with an assembly line of eggs still waiting to be hatched.

Maybe I should have kept the hens cooped up for a day or two until the danger passed?  Or just console myself with a dirge-like chorus from The Circle of Life. But in the end, you try and be part of the harmony, and not tip the balance too much; that’s the goal of sustainability.  Hakuna Matata.  - Mb

We’ve been harvesting into the chill of November at Stonegate this year, and the kale, mustards, Asian greens and soil-buried radishes are bravely fending off each successive frost, the mysterious heartbeat of chlorophyll still pulsing in their leaves.

Late season watermelon radishes, with their neon pink centers, have been glowing beneath frost and snow

The farm is usually tilled under and tidied up this time of year, but I was away and returned mid-month to find my greens rallying – even sweetened by their protective conversion of starches to sugars.

Many hearty greens in the brassica family (including cabbages, broccoli, radishes, kale, chard, mustards and brussels sprouts) will sweeten up after a few frosts.  These plants respond to cold by transforming their energy stores into sugars and stashing them in their cells as frost protection. I even sautéed some radishes last week, and watched with delight as the extra sugars caramelized in the pan.

When all else green has given in to the onslaught of cold and dark, it’s a joy to see these stalwarts press on, flaunting their impervious-to-frost airs.

Tangy mustards, mixed leaf lettuce and radishes have all flourished into November, giving up some of their heat for sweet.

Kales are also being Vitamixed, greens eaten in Winter salads, radishes chopped and slivered into soup.  Only the eggs have been absent, as the chickens have been in a molt for the last month, diverting their energy into growing a new duvet of feathers for the Winter.  But they seem content and occupied, ranging under an open sky during the day, fluffing up and burying themselves into straw-padded roosts at night. La Dolce Pollo.

And there’s sweetness everywhere on the farm, it seems: In the transformative miracle of winter greens, inside the soft, clustered hum of the bee hives, in the joy of tending land that’s been put to purposeful use.

There’s nothing like caring for a few productive, sustainable acres to sweeten the starch out of your soul.    –Mb

It’s qvitten time at Stonegate, not only because an early October frost took out the last of the leafy greens and brought a quick end to the season, but because the Quince (or Quitten in German) have ripened to a phosphorescent yellow in the orchard and begun to blette, turning their bitter starch to sugar and rendering themselves finally, and sweetly, edible.

Quince: Lumpy, astringent, unforgettable.

Bletting is a form a decay, really; the same transformation that turns sour and bone-hard medlars sweet and wine grapes into Sauternes.  The French have a poetic word for this metamorphosis, of course:  pourriture noble, or noble rot.  Maybe something similar happens to the lucky few of us as we age – we sweeten!

Quince fruit begins as a pale, pleated blossom in early spring and evolves into an oblong sphere of hard, unforgiving firmness; its fleecy rind, its strange knobs and bumps, its astringent flesh don’t hold much promise until late in the season when they transform themselves.

Or those that haven’t been plundered do. I have a handful of quince that survived the season, but many were plucked early from their boughs by the orchard’s arch enemy: The squirrel.  For a few days in early October, winter-provisioning squirrels sacked and plundered the last of the orchard fruit, but they left me a few quince.  Maybe it’s just too firm and heavy and oddly lumpy for their tastes, or their larder was already full of contraband fruit, so why bother?

I watched helpless as they scampered down from tree-top burrows and leapt in furry, frenetic arcs across lawn and fencerow to the orchard, where they grabbed any fruit they could, giddy and snickering to be sure, and buried it somewhere as a cache for a January pear gelato or sub-zero cobbler.

The apples were the first to go. Small and firm and full of Fall promise, most of them were pilfered by mid-August. So my CSA (Compulsively Sacked Apples) fruit never made it into the weekly shares, and the reliable ebb and flow of dearth and plenty at the farm goes on.

After a plunder by squirrels, only the evocative names remained.  Here, Sucré de Montlucon, an historic pear variety, is nothing but a plant tag and limbs.

The few quince I have I will covet and try to transform into an aromatic jam, jelly, or paste, something that’s been done for centuries.  In fact, quince culture long predates that of apples or pears, other pome fruit in the same family (rosaceae), but somewhere along the way lost favor and are now a rare find.

All the more reason to grow them here at Stonegate Farm, where the obscure will always have a home, where quirky botanical history is relevant, and where the squirrels eat like kings.  –Mb

We’ve begun harvesting late summer sowings at Stonegate Farm of mixed mesclun greens, bok choy, mustard, broccoli raab, and heirloom radish, repeat plantings that bookend a season that began four months ago.

And the blackberries, pole beans and Sun Gold tomatoes have come on in miraculous abundance, their sun-swollen selves dangling like ornaments over trellis and fence.

A Woofer harvest of Sun Gold tomatoes for the weekly CSA, and a Last Tango in Paradise for the seedless Concord grapes in the greenhouse.  They’ll live to dance another day.

By “we” I don’t mean the royal we (Pluralis Majestatis, that would be very sad) but my Woofers and me, helpers who’ve come to the farm from far and wide to sow, harvest, weed, and delight in all things organic. Like the plantings that bookend the season, Woofers tend to keep you balanced and centered; delegating daily chores, managing needs, avoiding idleness (although there’s much joy in idleness).  Without them, it’s possible that things would fall apart; that (to paraphrase Yeats) the center could not hold, and mere anarchy would be loosed upon (my) world.

The anarchy of weeds has certainly been suppressed by the hands and hoes that have been loosed upon them, and far from falling apart, the farm is being re-born daily with their mindful help.

Though there’s still much to be harvested and weeks to go before the farm sleeps, some mid-season stalwarts like the costata romanesco squash and the sweet and abundant greenhouse grapes have thrown in the trowel. The seedless concord that clambers so beautifully beneath greenhouse glass has been pruned back to thick cordons. Its bright purple sweetness lit up shares for more than a month this season.

If Google Maps went micro, local and organic, this is what might come up with a search for Stonegate Farm.  Harvests have been colorful and diverse this season, with deep purple pole beans, variegated eggplant, candy-colored pimento peppers, and bright Sun Gold tomatoes.  Grow, Shoot, Eat.

Long season greens like the kale and chard will be with us until frost. Though they may have lost their novelty by now, the lacinato kale, in particular, is one to “cherish until perish”; it’s just so much more nutritious than any other leafy green, full of omega-3s, calcium, iron, proteins and antioxidants. It goes into our smoothies, salads (and psyches) daily.

Just as we anticipate the first new growth in Spring, and delight in the fresh young arugula, spinach and snap peas that emerge, we should anticipate the season’s end,  savor what we have and value where we’ve been. Sounds like a good life-mantra to me.     –Mb

Flowers are the narcissists of the garden, shouting from far above their lanky stems, or twining on high to get our attention:  “Look at me, aren’t I beautiful!” And they are! We take in their self-loving beauty easily with the eyes. But why not experience that splendor in the mouth, feel a blossoms strange, pleated silk on the tongue. Birds do it, bees do it, why on earth shouldn’t we do it?

Blossoms at Stonegate Farm. Why just look, when you can taste?

We’ve been tossing edible flowers into the salad mixes all season long at Stonegate, no only for only for their loveliness (although here at fuss-pot farm, aesthetics are reason enough to do anything), but for taste and texture. The taste of most flowers subtly alludes to the flavor of the leaf, so the fragile inflorescence of arugula has a peppery bite, while the golden sprays of mustard flower is a three-alarm blaze of heat. Cucumber and squash blossoms are cool and mild and sweetly vegetal, and the blossoms of Asian greens are warm and tart.

When greens go to flower and seed, they usually give up their harvestable selves and get bitter, while vegetables move from flower to fruit, so blossoms are either a beginning, or a post mortem in the vegetable garden, a wedding or a funeral.

Flower Power, from top left: Nasturtium, whose petals and leaves have an aromatic tang; neon orange calendula – light and saffron-esque; mustard is a spicy inflorescent bite; squash blossoms are mild and celery-sweet.

Flowers have been enjoyed in foods for thousands of years:  Romans used to toss mallow, roses and violets into their pots; daylilies and chrysanthemums have been feasted on by the Chinese and Greeks for centuries. And capers, broccoli, and artichoke are all just unopened flower buds.

There are even flowers from the herbaceous border outside the walls of the vegetable garden that are fine to eat, including bee balm (Monarda didyma) 
garland chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum coronarium) 
cowslips (Primula veris) 
day lilies (Hemerocallis spp.) 
English daisy (Bellis perennis) 
evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) 
fuchsia (Fuchsia arborescens) 
gardenia (Gardenia jasminoides) 
and hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis).  Drop the trug and get out the platter!

Tossed with mixed looseleaf lettuces and mesclun greens, edible flowers add punch and beauty to any salad.

If you are a hapless sensualist, as I am, the more dimensional your experience of the natural world, the better. Why take something in with only one or two senses when they can all be indulged?  More is more.

There is something vaguely salacious and decadent about eating flowers, of course.  But that has more to do with culture and metaphor than fact. A flower in the mouth is unfamiliar; without the usual crunch of leaf or vegetable, it takes a moment for the tongue’s rough, exploratory curiosity to figure it out. But once you’ve a binged on a bouquet or two over the course of a season, as we do, the exotic mouth-feel is a gift.  –Mb

The swelter this past week brought out the crazies at the farm.  Woodchucks burrowed manically under fencing to trample and chomp through loose beds of kale, chickens lost their small minds and pecked incessantly at heirloom tomatoes, chipmunks tore heat-swollen plums from young trees in the orchard, mockingbirds stripped and gorged on ripe pearls red currant.

Weather extremes bring out the worst in all creatures, great and small.

Roses rallied, and sent out a sizzle of their own during the heat wave. Constance Spry, an old rambler with a heady whiff of myrrh, clambers over the orchard.

Even a colony of mostly well-behaved Italian bees swarmed off in a cloud of thrumming wings to cooler pastures.  They ended up moving into a hollow in my neighbor’s faux-corinthian columns (they are Italian bees after all – were they pining for the Pantheon’s columns in Rome?).

No one prepares you for the forces acting against your farm, from absurd weather to the persistent and insatiable pressure of critters who think you’ve set a Whole Foods just for them ; it’s empirical trial and terror.

I’ve had to learn from my optimistic folly, and the more I learn the more I want to warn.  To that end, I have a half dozen eager farm volunteers coming to Stonegate throughout the season, from Italy, France, Germany, all primed to experience to agony and ecstasy of small scale organic farming.  They’re coming through an organization called WOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and will apprentice and learn for room and board.  Good for all.

Chickens peck and scratch in the orchard. God forbid they develop an appetite for plums and currants!

Ideally, everyone should have some sense of what it means to grow food from seed (that may be a necessary survival skill once the petroleum food economy collapses),  and have some rich organic dirt under their nails and the deep muscle memory of hoeing, tilling and weeding.

Farming builds strong, resourceful bodies, and feeds the spirit (I was once asked where I “worked out” and I said I didn’t, but I “worked, out” – meaning “outside” where the sweat and strain has meaning).

Bok Choy, Tatsoi, and mesclun greens neatly tucked into their loamy beds here at OCD farm.

Organic farming is also an act of political conscience.  If, as Sylvia Breeland said, “How you eat changes how the world is used,” then WOOFers are interested in political change, to reversing the half-century old plague of proceesed industrial food and the various scourges of GMOs and acres of monoculture dripping with pesticides.

By volunteering on small farms like mine and making organic farming viable, WOOFers are changing how the world is used, one weed at a time.   –Mb

The radish harvest this season has been bountiful and, yeah, kind of beautiful too. More of these multi-colored gems have been planted to keep up with the pretty

The share this past week included yummy English cukes, edible flowers (mustard bloom too!), and pints of black currant. I managed to get invited over to neighbor's (and CSA members) for a black currant clafoutis pie. Words fail me.

We’ve been setting out young greenhouse seedlings for the last week – looseleaf lettuce, broccoli raab, luminous rainbow chard – and organizing them into perfect matrices on the farm; it’s the kind of hopeful symmetry that prevails in the Spring, before the sprawl of Summer growth turns order into succulent mayhem.

Italian Chiogga Beet seedlings, with their candy stripe centers, about to leave the greenhouse.

When you’re not spread out over acres of land, but are farming on limited ground,  your season is defined by meticulous planning and bio-intensive forethought: what can I plant here and harvest early before the space is succeeded by a later season variety?  What could I squeeze into the soft, useable dirt between taller stems, or companion plant so that there’s balance and harmony, not competition?

Of course, balance and harmony are fundamental to organic farming.  Organic asks that you take as much as you give, that you’re attentive to inherent cycles and rhythms, that you consider the farm as a macro organism where all the living parts function in service of the whole. But organic isn’t just a method and philosophy of growing food. The OED defines organic as “denoting a relation between elements of something such that they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of the whole.”

And aren’t we all looking for lives that “fit together harmoniously,” for a sense of order and meaning, for some magical coherence at the end of the day?

Working with the land gives you some of that, it ties you in and proposes that you, in the words of ee cummings, “ask the more beautiful question” because “that’s where the beautiful answers lie.”  When I began to restore this property fifteen years ago, and stood looking at a cluster of worn-out buildings buried beneath bittersweet and at the menacing loom of wild and unruly trees, I started to ask those questions – what if we restored this, or added that, or moved this building here, and built one there, or started a farm?

Greenhouse seedlings of looseleaf lettuce ready for the great outdoors.

The answers have broadened the meaning of organic at Stonegate.  Very little that happens here is out of context:  the work I do as a photographer and writer is all shaped by my relationship with this place and vise versa. Working in magazines, books and television helps give purpose and meaning to the farm, and is an engine of its sustainability ( I’ve even grown my own props for food shoots!)

Some “necessary parts of the whole” lately are the publication of The Photo-Graphic Garden (Rodale, 2012), Urban Farms (Abrams, 2012), a lecture and book signing at White Flower Farm in Connecticut next week on “The Artistic Vegetable Garden,” and a exhibit at FloreAnt Gallery titled “Impermanence and Beauty in the Photographic Garden.” At the center of this media bustle is the farm, the sustainable heart that helps to make beautiful sense of it all.  –Mb

They’re back.  Under the greenhouse, through the barn, into the woodpile.  Scraping and plundering about, eating all that’s new and green, making passionate, squealing woodchuck love in the middle of the night.

I was even jolted out of bed last week at two in the morning to what sounded like a chicken meeting the toothy  end of a fox or raccoon.  After a blind and bewildered stumble out to the coop, pellet rifle in hand, I made a quick tally, and all wattles were accounted for.  Then it sounded again, from underneath the barn floorboards: The horrible yelp and howl of woodchuck sex.

What, me worry?

If this springtime ritual is that painful for them (truly a little death) why don’t they just stop breeding, or adopt a one-pup policy like the Chinese?   Works for me.

They actually tunneled under the greenhouse foundation and up into beds of March-planted seedlings recently.  Of course, they took out the much-coveted kale first; hopeful young shoots, barely into first leaf, gone.  Then the tender loose-leaf lolla rossa lettuce, about to be hardened off, gone. And, of course, my faltering humanity, gone.

I have to admit, I was impressed by their determination and insight.  How did they know the farm season begins in the greenhouse?  That this was nursery of wonders where seed was maturing into soft chloro-filled bites?

After finding their tunnel, I blocked it’s entrance with old bricks and rocks, which they handily excavated around.  I laid down wire and heavy terra cotta pots, which they gingerly pushed aside, with a varmint snicker.  Finally, I mixed two sixty pound bags on concrete, and poured the hole shut at both ends.  I’m just waiting to hear something from inside their cement tomb, like a Tell-Tail heart, or – God forbid – squeals of woodchuck ecstasy.

Seedlings in the newly-fortified greenhouse, ready to fend off another pillage.

Woodchucks are as perennial and unflappable as weeds.  The more burrows you empty out each year, the more vacancy signs dance in their furry little heads.  Like sub-prime speculators, their waiting for the market to open up so they can settle in. Sprees like these can only send agricultural economies South, as a band hungry, ravenous woodchucks can easily undo you as a farmer.

For now, the greenhouse appears to be protected, and seedlings are thriving again, standing tall and brave in their refortified world.  In a few weeks, they’ll move out to live under an open sky of sun, wind and rain, safe behind fencing, as objects of insatiable, four-legged desire.    –Mb

Our old school honey harvest meant using the slow drip method; letting gravity do its thing as open combs were warmed in front of the fire.

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Our bees buzzed off sometime late in the season, so we feared the worst: That the honey stores had been plundered. But it seems our three Russian colonies swarmed like Cossacks, leaving empty hives and all of their hard-won honey.  So we’ve ordered Italian bees and queens this year. After all, a hive of matriarchal Italians is surely going to center around the making of food. Buon appetito for us!

A planet without bees is not just a planet without the miracle of honey: bees pollinate 30% of our fruit and vegetable crops. The imbalance will lead to increased consumption of petro-chemical grains and feed lot protein – already a scourge in our fast food nation.

If the vanishing bees are a warning, their decline may be prophetic. Monocultures made possible by corporate profiteers such as Monsanto, ADM, and Cargill will be all that’s left; acres of GMO produce dripping with lethal chemicals  It’s no wonder we’ve been kicked out of the garden by higher powers.

Einstein wisely said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it,” and small organic farms are on a mission to change consciousness, one bee at a time.  –Mb

It’s March, and most of the prevailing madness at Stonegate Farm these days is focused underground. Besides fretting over tender seedlings in the greenhouse, I’m preoccupied with soil: Top dressing, tilling, broad-forking, sampling. Managing the health and fertility of the land is a strange kind of rural hypochondria, particularly here at the OCD Farm (Obsessive, Compulsive Dirt Farm).

Composted horse manure and worms: the stuff that dreams are made on.

We’re obsessed with dirt because it is mysterious, with a deep and secret life of its own. It’s the most complex and abundant ecosystem on earth; a dark universe of fungi, bacteria and micro-organisms, all interacting with plant roots and rhizomes in a language that’s still arcane to science. In a spoonful of dirt, there are more than a million species of microbes, mostly unknown: a cosmos of dreams beneath your feet.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” said Yeats.

If I had any issues last season, they were largely subterranean, with soil lacking in certain trace elements or nutrients, with water-logging leading to root-rot on brambles in the orchard, with not having rotated my crops and therefore depleting the soil’s vitality.

Black currants catch a nitrogen buzz with a top dressing from the horse farm.

Of course, there’s always the usual flotsam the land heaves up in the thaw of Spring: bricks, metal scrap, cistern caps, tires, carriage linkages, not to mention the constant scree of glacial rock that lies  reliably just 10 inches below my topsoil.  There’s nothing quite as bone-shuddering as hitting a twenty-pound chunk of stone with the business end of a shovel.

It turns out, my farm was, in fact, never farmed.  The collection of 19th century outbuildings were all there to support the lifestyle of estate owners.  Carriage house, stable, ice house, manger, barn, gate house, greenhouse – all there to make life in the 1850s a pleasure for the patrician class.  The cows surely grazed, as did the horses, but the estate’s 35-plus acres were landscaped in a picturesque English style by contemporaries of Andrews Jackson Downing.  Meant to be meandered through by carriage, appreciated in evening jackets and jodhpurs, but never plowed under.

Rural Bavaria: Nobody does it better.

So I’ve been breaking new ground, and my metaphorical back, with my compulsion for agricultural order and fertility.  And this season in particular, after a Winter spent in the Bavarian countryside just south of Munich, where “ordnung muss sein” (order must be), I’m more determined than ever to reign in the wild and scrappy.  Bavaria, with its carefully cultivated farms and fields and charming villages, is postcard quaint; a place where the stewardship and care of agricultural lands is a communal act.  If ever there was an argument to be made for agriculture integrated into community, you’ll find it there.  If I achieve a fraction of what the Bavarians have accomplished here at Stonegate Farm, I’ll consider this whole OCD experiment a success.     -Mb

In a muddy drizzle last week, we harvested the last of the oak leaf and lolla rosa lettuce, tilled under the remaining rain-stunted eggplant and peppers, and yanked out the tangled sprawl of tomatoes in the orchard.

The normally solemn end-of-season ritual was buoyed by some cranking iTunes, although “This is the End” by the Doors didn’t do much to lift the mood.

Antonia and Maren, Bavarian Gothic.

So we wallow in it. We top-dress it with compost, we till in manure, we rake and coddle it into cake flour.  Winter will be here soon enough, and render it as hard and unyielding as stone.

Besides the Fall ritual of soil farming, we harvested some imperfect organic apples this week–blotched and mottled and beautiful. One antique variety, Hidden Blush, had a tart, rose-streaked interior.  Another, Melrose, was the size of a softball, with a complex acid sweetness.

The Downing orchard is planted with historic apples and pears that were cultivated more than 150 years ago by famed landscape architect, pomologist and Newburgh native Andrew Jackson Downing.  The orchard’s references to history and place are important to our mission here at Stonegate. Because the farm is on the National Historic Register, we’re intent on cultivating history as well, from antique apples to heirloom greens.

Some fruit this season was too far gone to be more than cider or chicken feed (five weeks of rain and two hurricanes saw to that!), but growing organic tree fruit will always be an unrequited affair.  As the Beatles said:  “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”

And the love we took from the farm this year was bountiful.  Thank you for taking part.     –Mb

Contact Us: If you have any information you’d like to share, or comments, feel free to drop us a line: Stonegate Farm

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The long, slow fruition of all the heat longing solonacea, who sulked through June’s cool nights, has finally begun to show promise, as clusters of Sun Gold, Lemon Drop, and Black Cherry tomatoes have emerged jewel-like on sprawling indeterminate vines, and peppers and eggplant are standing tall above inter-planted lettuce.

Thalia, our seasonal intern, looking gourd-geous draped in a harvest of cucurbitae moschata.

We’ve been lucky with the weather, too, lately, which has been a reasonable mix of sun and shower, and with the help of hardworking farm hands.  Our intern, Thalia, who came all the way from Texarkana via Oklahoma, is a breed of young agri-ficionados who are not only committed to healthy, sustainable food culture, but to food justice as well: She volunteers at a local food bank feeding under-privileged communities. Her work on the farm this season, bopping around plugged into iTunes, tirelessly weeding and harvesting, has been invaluable. Now I’m hopelessly spoiled.

On a recent book project, I photographed urban farms around the country, and met some seriously passionate young farmers, determined to changed the world by changing how we eat. Just when you thought the planet was at a tipping point of wasteful indifference, a generation seems to have come along that cares more than we ever did.  I wanted to take them all back to the Farm in my carry-on.

Asking for help on the farm did not come easily to me.  I’m not a natural delegator.  I suppose my father’s own frustration with raising chore-averse children has something to do with it. If you want something done, best to do it yourself, was his mantra.  And as a retired diplomat, he’s lived his life in the subjunctive, where desires are indirectly expressed, like a wish. But to delegate presumes a life lived in the imperative:  ”These are the weeds.  Yank them out.”

So I now get applications to intern at Stonegate from all over the country, through the  auspices of NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers  Association), and have become a born-again delegator and mentor (is there a Jesus-fish equivalent when you’ve seen the light of hiring help?).  We’re even turning the old stable into worker housing. The groundswell of interest in organic, sustainable farming is remarkable, as is the character and values these kids possess. For farms and food, the future is undeniably now.  -Mb

My faithful Troy-Bilt tiller, Spiny Norman, is having his engine rebuilt this week.  While the Wheelhorse tractor, which rambled over a few too many stumps last season, has a cracked spindle on its mowing deck, and the greenhouse has three panes of storm splintered glass that need replacing.   I seems I need to set up a triage on the farm.  The thing about older machinery is that it’s worth fixing, worth rushing to the ER (Engine Repair?) for treatment.  Like organic farming versus chemical farming,  good tools presuppose a long-term relationship, not a one-night-stand with plastics and pot metal.

Bones and buildings in Early Spring, before the growth hormones kick in.

I’m not into small engine repair.  Dirt I don’t mind, but all of the petro-gunk that clings to engines and fuels internal combustion has no appeal. I’m partial to external combustion, to the heat of topsoil as it arouses seeds to germination.  I have a neighbor who’s a genius with all things petroleum based, a grease monkey to my dirt monkey.  He tinkers while I till, and keeps me in working machinery, a must-have for farming unless you’re Amish and have seven plain-clothed children who are chore-bound to help out. My kids harvest eggs and tend a few flowers, but it’s all moi after that.

Hundreds of seeds have been planted in the greenhouse, starting their miraculous journey from speck to splendor.

I pick through the soil, which has been coughing up rocks in a consumptive heave of frost and thaw in beds that I was certain were finally stone-free. The tilled earth, before being knotted and bound by weeds, is a relief, as are the vines-less cucumber and squash trellises, the short Winter-stalled grass, the absence of insects. All of the cold season’s fitful tantrums have passed , and the farm seems to be holding its breath.  Then March continues on into April (it snowed on the first, no joke), and instead of going out like a lamb, it sent Spring on the lam, a fugitive from the farm and its desire to unfold and grow again.

There will be a lot to savor this season, including some hard to find heirlooms, like the serpentine Italian squash Trombo D'Albenga.

Happy Spring!   – Mb

As he has planted, so does he harvest; such is the field of karma.  ~Sri Guru Granth Sahib

The new hive supers and brood boxes arrived this week, sent in a backbreaking UPS shipment from Brushy Mountain Bee. Along with a smoker, protective clothing, and a Spring order for sixty thousand Italian bees, we’re getting serious about honey.

Ora pro no-bees. Hive frames scattered with lifeless bees, huddled around their honey stores.

Last season’s colony rallied valiantly against the cold, but the brutal, permafrost Winter this year proved too much for them, and they succumbed. Their stores of honey exhausted, and their thousand fold wing-beats unable to keep the hive at a survival temperature of 94 degrees, they died of exposure and starvation. In December, the hive seemed to be humming along. Bees that were terminally exhausted had clambered out and perished in the snow, which they’re predisposed to do (they’re fussy that way), and I watched workers occasionally cleaning out the hive near the entrance.

All seemed well until mid-January, after a week in the single digits, when the humming and cleaning stopped. I’m not sure If the bees were Neapolitan or from the Italian Alps, but trying to raise internal temps by almost one hundred degrees would take one hell of a furnace, no matter what your origin.

Chickens peruse the frozen food aisle in the orchard for thawing grubs and worms.

When I opened the hive, all of the honey stores were exhausted, and I found a tight cluster of lifeless bees huddled in a sphere around their queen, who seemed to have died on the throne. The bees had needed more protection from the elements, more routine care, and I felt as though I had failed them. Any success in farming is always guarded and qualified, tempered by the humbling reality of caring for living things.

So we’re starting over. In fact, as I was assembling and painting the new hives, a few curious bees showed up and started inspecting the bundles of wax frames. They’re from a small colony that swarmed last season and took up residence high inside the wall of our pool porch. Like real estate speculators, they figure it’s a buyers market, and the porch wall is no match for a brand new duplex.

The new hives will be placed out in the Southeast corner of the orchard, where the glacial snow has finally retreated and the hens are now out and about on the sotted earth, looking to scratch up a thawed worm or two.

New hives waiting for assembly. There will be three new colonies this year of roughly sixty thousand bees.

The farm looks a bit scrappy this time of year, not quite camera-ready, with the swill of Spring mud, the storm scattered branches, the gray wall of leaf-less trees. I feel the onset of that seasonal impulse to regenerate, to make my world good and green again.

In a few weeks, seedlings will be started, one or too hens will get broody and begin set on a clutch of eggs, and Spring onions will pierce the earth with their soft, aromatic spears. All the frustration of Winter, like the interminable snow, will have faded to exuberant green.

It’s hard to conjure green in January. While it dominates the landscape for most of the year, in mid-winter it is a fugitive from the cold, hidden beneath a thick blanket of snow. We’ve just had our third major blizzard of the season here at Stonegate Farm, and only the fence lines now mark the faint contours of productive land.

The chore-worn path to the coop marks the

daily routine of ritual and care.

Snow transforms not only the visual shape and color of the farm, but it alters our behavior as well.  In Winter, we are deliberate. Our days are marked by the lines we make in the snow between outbuildings: feeding, filling water, warming. The woodpile, the coop, the greenhouse, the barn are all tended to. Our chore-worn paths mark daily routines and the ritual of care.

The fence lines that neatly define the perimeter of the farm are the only indication of productive land.

Most of our paths through life are more circuitous and indirect, affected by circumstance. Starting a farm for me was an indirect line, a scribble in the margins of an established career, but it has helped me to discover something fundamental that was lacking: finding purposeful work that’s connected and deeply rooted to place.  If, as John Kabat-Zinn said in his meditation on everyday life, “wherever you go, there you are,”  then I am here, and plan to stay.  Planting an orchard or building barns presumes longevity, after all.

Out in the snow, the footprints of deer and rabbit and cat are present, as is the random scurry of a vole. The finches and sparrows perch like quarter notes in the limbs of crabapples, whose ice-bound fruit is pecked at. The hives hum faintly as bees cluster for warmth. They too have their winter routines.

While Winter is a stern editor of possibilities, routines are sometimes broken by chance encounters with the unexpected:  An old maple, its branches burdened with snow, succumbs in the middle of the night, taking down a stretch of fence line;  the alarming sight of female worker bees, who expired keeping their precious queen warm, scattered in stiff curls on the snow outside the hive.  Even hoof prints along the orchard fence, where deer make their habitual circuit each night, seem deeper and more clustered, as though they’ve begun to nose the the perimeter of the orchard with curiosity and hunger. They could strip the bark off an entire planting of young fruit trees in one fatal, ravenous binge.

The chickens don’t get out much in winter. They don’t like the frost biting at their feet, and with nothing to scratch but snow, there’s not much point.  May as well hang out in the coop, lay a few eggs, crow and squawk a bit, fight over a perch.  I’ll come out and throw them some scratch, or freshen up their bedding with new straw, harvest eggs for the weekly egg share.  I could be the most exciting thing to happen in their day, and that’s not saying much.  At night, the coop glows like an ember with its 200 watt warming light, and inside the chickens are fluffed up and roosting in their brightly feathered duvets.

It’s up tails all as the hens try to make sense of snow.

Before Spring turns down the bed of snow, the boot-stitched lines that mark the back and forth of winter work and the hours of obligation will widen, as will our ambitions.  We know how the growing season will overwhelm us with possibility and choice making.  For now, the winter simplifies, letting our ambitions hibernate too.                    – Mb

October 20th, 2010

The growing season has begun its slow and certain ebb from the farm, and in an almost absurd panic to inhale as much green as possible before a winter of chlorophyl privation, I find myself grazing in the beds like a ruminant. Not on all fours, mind you.  More like a vegan biped with opposable thumbs.

Floribunda roses have unfolded the last of their delicate blossoms, and the sergeant cherry, flamed to brilliant orange, rallied back from its near-death experience.

I’m in among the greens in the late afternoon, and after picking out the last stubborn weeds of the season, and straightening out rows where soil had spilled onto sod, I begin to forage.

I eat the tender inner blades of Toscano Kale right off their ungainly, palm tree stalks.  Their leathered, astringent flavor is full of life, but challenging. I feel like I’m chewing tobacco.  If a spittoon were within sight, or a dugout, I might take aim, but instead I opt for a stalk of rainbow chard. It’s crisp and nutty and mild and puts me back in neutral.

I pull the last of the pole beans from their top-heavy tangle of vines. The sweet snap of flavor is delicious and fun, almost unseemly. Soon I’ve turned the trellis inside out to get at every tender pod. Only an encounter with raw mustard greens sobers me up. Mustards are heat all the way through, from tongue tip to epiglottis. They are the swaggering jalapenos of the leaf world.

I grab some of the last Sun Gold cherry tomatoes to put out the blaze. Their boundless growth has been checked by the cold, so the heat-sweetened flavor is only a suggestion now. I end the forage with arugula and nasturtium, both with their own take on savory: Arugula has a warm, peppery intensity, while nasturtium’s heat is more complex and perfumed; liked the foreign language version of a savory, where you need subtitles to understand why on earth you’re eating a flower.

Savoy spinach is under wraps in anticipation of a late Fall harvest.  Mini hoops made of box-store EMT pipe covered with Remay fabric may add a month or more of growing time.

This close affinity with the food you eat is one of the true pleasures of farming. Only by taking it all off and farming in the altogether could I get any closer to my food-shed. In fact, my wife and I were advised to do just that when we started growing here, as a way to determine microclimates of warmth and cold with our own more sensitive parts. For those of you eating our food, you’ll be pleased to know we never did take on the Book of Genesis approach to horticulture.

This kind of raw grazing is a fleeting grace in the Fall garden.  Soon, only the stalwart kale and those greens given a reprieve from frost with a row cover will be left standing.

In March, winter will have seemed a bleak eternity, and this moment of heightened intimacy on the farm, when you’re eating as fresh and local and true as possible, will have slipped into some lovely, unreachable place.

Thank you for joining us this year.  – Mb

All photos ©2010 matthewbenson.com

The orchard hens have started to lay their pale blue and almond brown eggs as promised. I’ve been finding them tucked here and there under a pear or quince tree, or scattered beneath the brambles, but mostly in the nesting boxes as planned. There’s a large, antique porcelain decoy egg for encouragement, and plenty of praise when they relinquish.

Eggs from the orchard, in shades of earth and sky, have begun to delight us all.

They will get into all and everything, of course: raspberries, blackberries, tomatoes.  I’ve watched them leap 3 feet in the air to snatch a raspberry, or balance on a tightrope of orchard wire to snack on currants, or peck incessantly through fencing to reach a tomato. They will also decide, without much discretion, that your planting of Fall arugula is a fine spot to take an afternoon siesta, so you find your coddled greens flattened here and there by the imprint of a settled hen.

Blackberries, swelling over the orchard fence on long, armored canes, haven’t escaped the notice of the insatiable hens.  They will find a way.

The hens may not know a weed from a-rugula, but little loss of green is a small price pay for the eggs we’re now getting. Compared to a supermarket dozen, and to the USDA’s nutrient data on commercial eggs, our orchard roaming hens produce a vastly superior product. Their natural, free-range diet–including seeds, berries, insects, and greens, along with grain–results in eggs with far less cholesterol and saturated fat, and much higher levels of vitamin A, vitamin E, beta carotene, and omega-3 fatty acids. Is it any wonder they taste better?

Supermarket birds, even those labeled “free range” and “organic,” are usually fed a compromised diet of soy, corn and cottonseed meal, laced with additives, and have limited or no access to the outdoors.  If fresh eggs from the home or farm are not available, pasture-raised are the next best option.

When the child of a CSA member was in the coop last week as an egg as smooth and blue as beach glass was being laid, she marveled at the beauty of it.  In that moment, the value of running a small farm was being paid forward a generation or two.  –Mb

September has settled in on the Farm as a welcomed reprieve from August’s searing heat, and we’ve been busy planting Fall greens – cutting lettuce, arugula, broccoli raab, savoy spinach, bok choy. All of them holding out the fragile promise of an extended, bountiful season. We may get lucky and have a balmy Fall (we are in Balmville after all!), or be dashed to vegetal purgatory by an early frost.

A thinned bed of Red Komatsuna, a cool-season Asian mustard green, or bok choy, that’s delicious in salads or stir fry. We planted it when the lettuce was still too hot and bothered to germinate.  For a few recipes, see below.

Nature is a temperamental master. We’re all Pandoras, of course, clutching to hope with cultivator in hand. There would be no growing without the folly of wishful possibility. Every viable seed has a wish in its DNA. It wants that delicious, life-giving cocktail of dirt, water and light to set it loose upon the world.

In the wild, mercurial nature settles the score, and plants thrive or falter as conditions allow. On the Farm, however, conditions are created to maximize odds of survival.  And as seedlings push their hopeful green leaves up from the dirt, full of potential fullness, most are quickly dispatched as we thin the beds.

It’s one of the most Machiavellian chores on the farm. No matter how careful you are when planting seed, particularly tiny dust-in-the-wind lettuce seed, overseeding is routine, and a type of insurance against spotty germination, so unwanted seedlings need to be culled (put to sleep, bumped off, sent to the green beyond). Seedlings that will be allowed to grow into maturity are spared, and competing siblings that have sprouted around them are yanked out with a quick flick of thumb and index finger.“Now I have become Death, the destroyer of Worlds”indeed.

Cutting lettuce seedlings thinned to conformity and order. We are near West Point, after all.  Ten-hut!

Like their carbon cousins, trees, too, need to be thinned.  Our property, once a forty acre estate landscaped in the picturesque style of the mid-nineteenth century, has an abundance of magnificent specimen trees suitable for an arboretum. But decades of neglect, and no thinning of competing weed trees, has weakened most of the green giants. The forest’s relentless, unmanaged vigor has been its own undoing.

It has fallen upon me – God forbid not literally! – to thin the trees to a manageable few, not only for their own health, but for the health of the Farm. I love trees and have been known to hug them, grope them even, but shade is the enemy of most annual vegetables (excepting lettuce and few others), so this Fall more trees will be come down, destined for the wood pile.

When the wood stove in the barn is sending out its warmth this Winter, and I’m just finishing off the last of the delicious Fall lettuce, I’ll most certainly be grateful for the trees and seedlings that made that moment possible.  –Mb

My wife’s supercilious grandmother used to tell me I had peasant blood, which I took as a compliment.  Better an honest, hardworking peasant than a soft-palmed scoundrel.  Good, physical work, with something to show for it besides tight abdominals (a bountiful harvest, say) is an act of alignment and sometimes even exaltation. It ties us back to the order of the natural world.  Work is what the wild things do–all day long, for food, shelter, survival, maybe even joy.

Last week’s bountiful harvest, the love made visible by work.

Growing food for others is a physical act. “Such hard work!” they say. Yes, but how fulfilling, how joyful. “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it,” said Ruskin.

We have become more capable, more patient, more resourceful, more humble. Work on the land develops deep connective tissue with simple purpose. Something we’re in great need of in an age of tweets and texts.

I bought a new/old tractor for the farm this year. It’s seen plenty of hard work, and it’s in its forties, so we’re peers.  It’s throaty, cast iron rumble is reassuring. No squeaky plastic or pot metal here.  No imported parts. It was built somewhere in the Midwest, back when industry had integrity, and work wasn’t just virtual bustle. It rambles across the property, making a clean cut in the orchard, indifferent to the carpet of twigs and small stumps.

A morning of virtual housekeeping, such as answering emails from clients, or prepping for a shoot, is usually balanced by an afternoon of real physical work, of which there’s always plenty. Without exertion of some kind, my time seems incomplete. I need to feel used up at the end of the day.

We don’t move anything unless it weighs a thousand pounds, the New York Times quoted us saying more than ten years ago when they did a feature on our efforts to restore Stonegate (see House Proud) .  Clearly work was not an obstacle.  After an urban upbringing, among worlds others had created, I needed to build. I needed to move mountains.  I needed to see what I could become by it.

Interiors of the new coop.  There was plenty of sustainable re-use of materials, and a little art for inspiration.

So with new coop now completed in the orchard, my sweet Copernican universe, with the farm at the center of all things and us in perpetual orbit around it, seems momentarily balanced.  I can stand back from the work and feel its value and worth to the farm, despite the near heat stroke hours it took to build.

Hens out for an early peck and scratch in the orchard.

The laying hens have taken to their new digs without a lot of fuss and feather. Even the prodigal pullet rejoined the flock, although at the bottom of the pecking order. They’re now ranging happily in the orchard, tilling and fertilizing the soil, devouring pests, making their most magical eggs. Working hard, without a second thought.  -Mb

The day we decided to resettle the chickens to the other side of the farm began clear and lovely: the luster of the previous night’s rain still visible in the grass, the air luminous and warm.  I weeded early in the orchard and stole a few productive hours before heat and swelter took my energy hostage. The day before, the farm seemed to exist only to absorb the sky, to take in its rain like a sieve. The sky on resettlement day was unburdened by clouds or rain, punctuated instead by temperatures already in the 90s.

Coop and cupola, separated by a century and a half, now occupy the same aesthetic space. Ambivalent chickens just want a roof over their heads.

It was high time to furlough the young hens. They would be freed from their tight hot quarters in the Hell’s Kitchen garden, and moved three at a time to their new coop.  The trip from the kitchen garden to the orchard is a few hundred feet, but to the hens—who had never known the flap of freedom—the journey was pure trauma.

Each hen had to be blindly grabbed through the coop door, and whatever I got my hands on was how they were removed (foot, wing, thigh, tail, giblet), squawking as though about to be slain. They were put into a box and carried to the new hen house.

My first instinct was to excite them about their new space, like any good chicken realtor:  “Look at all these windows, and the closets.  Plenty of space to park your eggs, and room to scratch.  Have you seen those roosts?”  But instead they chose to lie low in the box, head tucked under wing as though resigned to the certainty of a swift end. It took turning the box upside down and shaking them out to get them to check out their new home.

The coop was modeled after the cupola on the barn, with its carpenter gothic detail and pyramidal roof.  When the farm was built in the late 1850s, the Gothic Revival period was in full fancy in the Hudson Valley.  Its advocates claimed, like their gothic predecessors, that steep gables, vertical battens, and skyward finials brought the dwelling closer to the vault of heaven, so as to almost scrape the stars.  All this is lost, of course, on a chicken.

Chickens love routine, and are ambivalent about architecture. To them, any change is loss, even the good changes.  What they covet is the daily pattern language they’ve learned since cracking out of the egg.  Give them repetition, monotony even, and they seem content.  One hen was so put out by the change of venue that she took flight, choosing the perils of the wild wood over unfamiliar routine.  She returned a fallen woman, ready to join the showgirls at La Cage.

Free at last,  Free at last!  The hens take to the orchard and frolic over worms and dirt

After a few days of house arrest, the young hens were set loose upon the orchard.  At first the vast, open sky bewildered them, but they quickly acclimated and before long were actually frolicking (when was the last time you frolicked?). They soon headed down the long alleé of quince and plum to the thicket of blackberries, where they poked and scratched and left thorny brambles between them and the circling red tails.

We’ve lost a few hens to hawks in the past, and their swift, ominous shadows and piercing cries are embedded into a hen’s survival DNA.  My children have witnessed a strike and kill, and after invoking The Lion King, the circle of life, and unfledged hawklings desperately needing a meal, they seemed perfectly at peace about it.  For the chickens, now calling the gothic coop home, the further away from the vault of heaven, the better. – Mb

The loose, lustrous heads of Italian radicchio di Chioggia are inter-planted among the Rosa Bianca eggplant, to the benefit of both: The radicchio keeps the eggplant roots moist, while the eggplant shades the heat-tender leaves of the radicchio.

We don’t grow a lot of dirt at Stonegate. We plant, inter-plant, succession plant, companion plant, Robert Plant.  Dirt is inefficient. If the natural world were allowed to prevail over the imposition of agriculture, there would be no dirt. Every bit of soil would be colonized by something green, seeking purchase and life. A walk in the forest will bear witness to that.

But even with our careful planning, our world was certainly put out by the swelter. We watered twice daily.  We irrigated the orchard.  Our sleep was fitful. Last season, the sound of incessant rain on the roof kept me up at night, anxious that the farm was rotting in a wet slurry of soil and muck. This year, the relentless hum of the air conditioner (a window unit we only pull out during heat waves) has meant shallow, drought-fearing sleep.

And the lawn, which is never watered, went from supple green to scorched earth in a matter of days, its brittle blades piercing the tender soles of children as they scampered across it to find relief in the pool. I could even smell the lawn burning, like someone lighting up a joint.  Now I know why they call it smoking grass.

Even the cats inter-plant themselves among the beds, where the soil is cooler and the shade dappled. “Hey, I’m in chard here.”

So as the climate becomes more and more unstable, more manic-depressive, we may as well throw out the Old Farmer’s Almanac. Its reliance on past weather patterns and cycles seems moot.  The New Farmer’s Almanac might be summed up in a few words: Be prepared for anything.  Frogs, hail, locusts. The planet has always been physically bipolar, now its climate is as well.

Farming longs for some level of predictability; it wants to be scripted, thought out and measured. Planning is at its core, and maintenance is the drum beat.  Now I’m being told the USDA Zone map is even being redrawn to adjust for climate change. Should I be ordering seed for kumquats and Ponderosa lemons?

When the rain finally arrived by week’s end, its cool, wet relief was almost surreal. At first it drummed on the bone-dry ground, which sent the water pooling and running like mercury. But soon the land was guzzling every drop in delicious, life-giving gulps. Excuse me while I kiss the sky.  -Mb

My new hens have outgrown their garret of a starter coop, and have begun to crowd the outside pen like a Parisian café. That’s café, not CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feed Operation), although conditions are rather similar, minus the threat of a looming hereafter. I hear them squawking over food and drink, or the best sidewalk table.

They’ll soon be moving to a new arrondissement in the orchard, where I’ve built a rather ornate gothic revival villa for them, in keeping with the rest of the property. The naming has begun even before the roof is on: The Café Au Lay. Coop de Ville. Das Coop. Why chickens bring out the cheap wordplay in us is a mystery. We just can’t stop ‘till we get an oeuf.

The New Coop will house 25 Maran and Ameraucana hens in great style.
While I was compound mitering the pagoda roof on the coop, my children and friends were in the orchard below, harvesting black currants. Their little hands, pulp-stained to a deep purple, picked the fruit in delicate clusters and arranged them in one pint boxes. This year is our first full harvest, with last year’s having been diminished by the ceaseless rain.

Black currants are certainly an acquired taste. Eating them fresh supposes a longing for complex tartness. The first bite through their supple, sun-blackened flesh is almost sweet, while the finish is much darker. All of life’s complexity in one bite. The Europeans have used them for centuries to flavor jams, tarts and juices, and the French transform them beautifully into cassis.

Daughter Daisy and best friend Hannah harvest black currant. Who needs a Brueghel painting when a canvas comes to life before your eyes?

But beyond flavor, black currants contain the fruit phylum’s highest levels of disease fighting anti-oxidants, particularly anthocyanins, which rage against heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer and diabetes. They’re also highest in vitamin C. For almost a century, production in the United States was banned due to concern over white pine blister rust, a fungal pariah carried by currants. But since 2003, all bans are off. I lift my glass of locally grown cassis to that.

Blackberries, raspberries and Aronia (another super-berry) will follow. The orchard view from the nearly-completed coop roof is lovely, full of promise; the fruit swelling in the heat, the bees traveling to and from, like the bowing of a thousand cellos, the chickens chattering in the distance. Life looks good from up here. -Mb

Black currants harvested in the orchard. Their smoky tartness and free-radical fighting brawn are legendary.

The woodchucks found their way under the fence and into the farm last week.  A whole family was picnicking out in a patch of sunlit mesclun and kale.  Your meclun and kale!  How dare they, and with such insolence!

So I went after them, wielding a hoe like Mr. McGregor on a rage against Peter Rabbit, only to watch them slip under the fence into a large woodpile.  A pile that, by sheer happenstance, I was about to burn the next morning.

The Hadahart trap, ignored as usual, despite crispy greens inside. Why crowd into the bodega when surrounded by a Whole Foods mega store?

At first light the following day, I lit up the pile like a pyre along the Ganges, sending the chucks off to visit Vishnu in a blaze of gory.  My PETA sympathies apparently up in smoke as well.  But there they were the next morning, not put out for a moment.  Either the burn pile was a Summer rental (Fire Island. Three Months. Cheap. Free Veggies), and they were in town for the work week, or these are new crits on the block.

When I first moved out of the city, where anything four-legged and furry that’s not a leash is a plague, the site of scurrying woodchucks was startling.  I was told they had do be dealt with swiftly and without mercy, otherwise huge destructive, orgiastic colonies would form beneath the house, turning foundation walls into love grottos and wiring into dental floss.

Wanting to show my ready-for-rural mettle, I devised plan A:  Set the Havahart (or in this case, Hadahart) trap, then drown the critter in a garbage can.  Plan A, Part 1 worked fine.  Chuck went in the trap, the doors slammed shut.  Part 2, however, resulted in a the trap sitting a third of the way out of the can, and the critter perched on high getting only a tail bath.  Sort of a bidet for varmints.  So the accused was instead lowered into a dark, brick-lined cistern on the property, where he swam about for a half hour before finally expiring.

Hearing him scratch against the cistern walls, trying to gain a last purchase on life was like something out of Poe. The sound haunted my psyche for weeks. And I swore - country bona fides on the line or not – I could no longer be a merciless, cistern-wielding angel of doom.

Where do we draw the line when deciding to dispatch with the small, unwelcome souls among us?  Is a mouse or a vole any less deserving of a full life of scurrying than its exponentially larger cousins?  The line drawn is at best arbitrary. A scratch in sand, smoothed by a random tide.  It seems ambiguity is the only certainty.

Chickens snacking on rose petals.  They’re productive and beautiful, so all’s forgiven.  Where do you think they get those fancy plumes anyway?

For years after, we’d catch woodchuck, skunk, possum, and coon in the Havahart and take them in the truck across the river to the Metro-North station parking lot, where they were released.  We figured with a mile-and-a-half of river between us, they’d just as soon take a train into Manhattan where they could grab dinner and show than slog it back across the tide to Stonegate.

So my recent relapse into mercilessness came as a shock to me.  But maybe I’m now trying to earn my agriculturalcreds, and like any farmer worth his salt or salsify, I have to manage with new prerogatives.  Perhaps they really did survive the blaze?  My humanity hopes so.  -Mb