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

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

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

]]> http://organicgardening.com/blogs/theaccidentalfarmer/2013/02/baby-radish-whimpering/feed/ 2 http://organicgardening.com/blogs/theaccidentalfarmer/2012/12/wings-of-desire/ http://organicgardening.com/blogs/theaccidentalfarmer/2012/12/wings-of-desire/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:30:58 +0000 MBenson http://organicgardening.com/blogs/theaccidentalfarmer/?p=647 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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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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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

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