The Accidental Farmer

Flea beetles began to make a loose veil of my eggplant and potato leaves this week, rendering tender shoots a skeletal gauze of their former selves.  This vegetal jihad against all plants in the solanaceae family (including potato, eggplant and tomato) is a fright.  The spring-loaded horrors have no organic pest control, so you stoop and squish, firmly between forefinger and thumb, until the offending speck is no more.

Flea beetles the size of flax seed  feasting on potato leaves.  So destructive, and such a pleasure to squish!

Seems we’ve been discovered by the beasties.  From flea beetles to sawfly caterpillars to grazing woodchucks, my mixed greens have sent the neighborhood critters on a serious bender.

The two forces of evil acting against the best efforts of a small, sustainable organic farm are fungus and insects, the enemies of fruit and leaf. Our cultural practices here at Stonegate are all OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) approved; the occasional clover or purslane weed in your mesclun greens will vouch for that.  But we’re not about to roll over to an onslaught.

Eggplant leaves rendered to a veil of their former selves, redefining Holy War.

I’ve been somewhat lax about control in the past, thinking I’d strike a balance between harvest and loss, but nature is not always so benign and measured, more of an extremist, really (witness last Summer’s Biblical rains and ensuing blight).  But if you build it, they will come (remember Field of (bad) Dreams?). So we spray lime sulfur to control the various fungi, kaolin clay to infuriate the insects, and fish emulsion to send the greens into a nitrogen orgasm.  If you’re ever here right after a spray, it will either smell of low tide or last week’s eggs fooyong.

Young apples powdered up like Louis XIV with Kaolin clay, an organic, topical insect barrier. Makes thebeasties’ bellies hurt.

According to nature, Agriculture is highly unnatural.  A farm is no Darwinian paradigm.  If it were, we’d all be very successful weed farmers (no, not the kind under the grow lights in the basement). We coddle and protect our fragile crops.  A farm without the conceit of intervention, order and control would simply no longer be. There’s no détent to be bartered between us and our enemies. It’s strike or be stricken.

So I find myself out on the farm in the wee, small hours before the heat and humidity rise, pinching tiny, lacquer-backed flea beetles between my fingers and loving every control-freakin’ minute of it.   –  Mb

Pulling a warm egg from beneath a broody hen is a magical thing; the ruffled mummer as she relinquishes; the egg’s perfect, spherical warmth, its bone-smooth promise. And fitting so perfectly in the palm of the hand, as though the relationship between laying and gathering always was.

But when a new CSA member stopped by this week to say hello, to meet and greet with chickens and chard,  I was unprepared for the power and imprint of memory on her visit.

Smooth, magical warmth – straight from the source.

She had grown up on a farm in Iowa, and her connection to that time seemed to rill through her as we did our walkabout.

On the way out, we visited the hens in the Cage Aux Fowl and, on putting a warm egg in her palm, she began to cry softly. Clearly, the evocation was almost too much.

There was some awkward silence as she held the egg – and her childhood – in her hand and struggled for composure. But she seemed grateful for the connection, the coup de coeur, that the experience summoned up.

The connective tissue of memory, even unconjured, ties us to a past when farming and growing food were everywhere and everyone took part. For most people, the relationship between a meal and its source was immediate. Now, in an age of industrialized distance from real food, more depth and awareness is vital. Small farms make that connection.

So I’m becoming an egg doner (The X in my male XY has made me so!) for more obvious reasons here at Stonegate, but if I can offer up the occasional Madeleine, how wonderful. If a farm can serve as a common metaphor for connecting to our past, our food, our deeper responsibilities to the planet, so be it.    - Mb

Our fearless weeder, Jane Savage.  She don’t stop ’till she gets enough.

Carpets of mixed loose-leaf and mesclun greens are getting that delicious ’70s shag.  We can dig it!

Our farm is loomed over by a collection of specimen trees that were born in the 19th century;  majestic, beautiful, senile Victorians.  They seem to wander about in the wind, their leafy green gowns flapped open, trailing a bedpan of debris from their brittle canopies. Gingko, Tulip Poplar, Cucumber Magnolia, Kentucky Coffee Bean, American Linden, Chestnut, Sugar Maple, Black Walnut, Honey Locust They’re all in hospice here at Stonegate.

We wanna take you higher: Squash and cucumber trellises ready to be climbed.

Just this week, A 75-foot limb from a narrow crotch in an old sugar maple fell to the ground on a still, perfect day. It took out fencing and trellis, but didn’t damage a single, fragile leader of new growth in the young orchard.

If instant Karma was ever going to get me, this was the moment.

I had just finished planting a 100-foot row of heirloom tomatoes, laid in a drip line, and was walking towards the potting shed when the limb tore loose and fell from the sky like the sword of Damocles, landing right where I had been kneeling only seconds before.

How did this mass of century-old dead weight fall with such nimble care for living things, sparing my mortal coil, and making a tangle only of inanimate wire and fence board? ? It’s tempting to argue for some benign, protective outer consciousness.  But it was likely just a simple twist of fate that kept me from being pinioned to the orchard floor.

And our own local Methusela, the Balmville Tree, with its cement fillings, artificial limbs, and apparent lack of a decent living will, persists, year after year, a monument to posterity and stubborn intervention.  It, too, will surrender to gravity some day, taking centuries with it.

Heirloom tomatoes, including Pink Beauty, Moskvich and Brandywine planted along the fencerow.

Many trees didn’t make it through the late Februrary storms this year, where snow as leaden as concrete took out limbs and power to so many in our parts.  We even lost a cherished Sargeant cherry in the center of our garden that I planted ten years ago, a child by comparison, and all the more painful for it.  But some determined, bullish engineering has wired it all better again (although the threaded rods holding the trunk together are monstrous; think prunus sargentii var.Frankensteinii.

You’d think all this fear of heights (is there a clinical phobia of tall things?) would favor my moving to the prairie, or at least give me religion (fear of being struck down from above is, after all, primal Old Testament stuff), but instead I’m going to dance with fate.

I love getting horizontal as much as the next guy, but owners of small holdings have to make the most of every inch (grow up, please…), so we’re trellising our costata romanesco squash this year, as well as our gerkin cucumbers to grow up, Please!  The more we can produce on small acreage, in any direction, the more resourceful and sustainable we’ll be.  Watch out for falling cukes!  -Mb

It turns out our dizzy, mop-topped hen, Phyllis Diller, is actually Phil S. Diller, a trans-gender cockerel. He went from dulcet murmuring to an all out strident crow in the space of a week. Give him some Spandex and he’s like a relic from an ‘80s hair band. Chickens are full of peculiar surprises, but this one I didn’t see coming. We put him on Craigs List and a very nice couple from Connecticut adopted him. Apparently they’re into leather.

Phil S. Diller: A bird of a different feather.

A new flock of fuzz (all female, I’ve been assured) arrived via the P.O. today. They, along with these beautiful, warm April skies have put dance back in our weary Winter bones here at Stonegate farm. The sugar snap peas, savoy spinach and  tender varieties of early lettuce have been hardened off and are upright and steppin’ out in the Spring beds (var. ‘Red Fire’, ‘Red Sails’, ‘Black Seeded Simpson’). Other delicious greens such as Swiss chard, kale, broccoli, arugula and mesclun are warming up and waiting their turn to flee from the hot confines of the greenhouse.

The only caveat to such a glorious early Spring is the dark, foreboding lurk of a late frost, ready to take out all that’s in bud or bloom. Like a wolf crossing the property line (if I hear Prokofiev I’m going to scream!) We’re in zone 6B here in Balmville along the Hudson River, meaning our potential final frost date is May 15th, so who knows? Erratic weather seems to be the new normal, and humble resignation to its mood swings is a hallmark for those working the land. To put a spin on an old chestnut: Hope, in Spring, (and Summer, and Fall) must be eternal, otherwise we’d all be in therapy.


Far From the Madding Swarm was where I stood as hive and housing were introduced.

True to our goal of sustainability, and our dogged, hopeful nature, we’ve said Benvenuti to a hive of 12,000 italian bees in the orchard. These insatiable, chatty, free-range pollinators and makers of organic honey (maybe we’ll have some  dripping out of the combs come Fall!) will add viability to both fruit and vegetable crops. Despite our being programmed to fear their Vespa-like buzz, they’re generally ambivalent about us, and have their own Dolce Vita to live.

My Swiss friend Rudy, who’s a pastry chef and instructor at the Culinary Institute in Hyde Park, set up the hive last week. As a master of all things sweet and delicious, Rudy has a fondness for bees. He showed up and built a tower of boxes and frames, emptied the thrumming swarm into them, gave me some bee-keeping-for-dummies fundamentals and told me to hope for the best.  That I can do, eternally.          – Mb.                     

We’ve legalized winter egg production here at Stonegate Farm thanks to a 200-watt red warming light in the Cage aux Fowl, and my little feathered harlots are laying like Madame de Pompadour. Even our virile black frizzle rooster, Gerald, struggles to keep on top of his broody harpies – chasing them about the frozen yard like a manic feather duster.  With eggs galore in mid-winter, the oldest profession has aroused theKavorka in all of us.

The Dutch think they’re progressive, but we have dozens of farm-fresh eggs in our district!

All this fowl balling has inspired the addition of free range eggs to our 2010 CSA shares and Market Garden: we’ve ordered two dozen more hens, full size Marans and Ameraucanas,  that should been laying their deep chocolate and teal colored eggs by Summer.  A new Gothic coop will be built in the orchard, where the birds will feed on insects and fallen fruit and in turn cheerfully fertilize from their feathered ends. Chickens, eggs, and quince, oh my!

In the greenhouse, beds and soil blockers are getting ready to start seedlings in early March.  This year, we will be adding fingerling potatoes, deep purple carrots, gherkin cucumbers, and  – heedful of  last season’s scourge – blight-resistant tomatoes!  We’ll still have the heirlooms and unusuals but have included an escrow of blight-resistance to our insurance policy.  Is any local tomato better than no tomatoes?  We’ll see.

Greens are slowly stirring inside the Winter greenhouse.

Out on the Winter farm, the stalwart Tuscan Kale has been adding frozen, vitamin rich greens to soups, and the cold has only ramped their sweetness; it seems many plants react to stress by converting their starches to sugars – a kind of vegetal survival instinct -  so kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbage and carrots are a sweet wonder beneath the blanketing snow.

Varied greens will be a mainstay again this season.  If I yearn for anything in the bleak mid-winter – and we all need a good yearn this time of year – it’s for all that wonderful, mixed cutting lettuce and mesclun greens.  Call it chlorophyll deficit disorder.  How many starchy root veg can one man eat, after all.

The snow-bound orchard, waiting for Spring to stir it to life.

Besides walking among the orchards snow-bound allées of apple and pear, pruner and notebook in hand, or starting greenhouse seedlings, winter is a long, cool breath, somewhere between quiet reflection and forward drive.  So be it.  Let the lusty chickens frolic.  Apparently, Roxanne, you dohave to turn on the red light.

My critter radar was on high alert this week as two and four-legged wildness, determined to fatten up before frost, showed up in nonchalant numbers to peck and graze.

Where the Wild turkeys roam, using the tall kale as cover.

I don’t mind the odd, unannounced visit – maybe they assume they’re part of the Community Supporting Agriculture – but not to gobble-gobble my few, precious raspberries or tender gourmet lettuce. (Thoughts of Thanksgiving dance in my head, “raspberry-sweetened drumstick, anyone?”).

Dim-witted and ungainly, the turkeys lope about in loose coveys, poking the ground with their bobbled, blue heads. Like deer, they were once rarely seen, but the retreat of the usual predators has thrown Darwin’s natural order into chaos. When we did see a few dozen turkey poults in the Spring, they would be whittled down by raccoons or coyotes to a handful come Fall.

Heading for trouble, this young female has spent the week two-stepping through my lettuce.

To be sure, it’s a thrill to live where the wild things are, far from my urban roots where wildness was a rave on the lower East Side, but I’m still adjusting.  I’ve come a long way from throwing shoes into the trees at four in the morning because a posse of crows squawked me from my bed, but there are clearly miles to go before I sleep.  - M

For my own sanity, I managed to avoid the annualSheep and Wool festival in Rhinebeck last weekend, a sort of season’s end celebration of all things ruminant.  Not only because the fleecy crowds – hand-made and self aware from head to hoof – have begun to overwhelm the grounds, but for fear of falling in love.

Last year I fell so hard for a couple of sweet, Nubian goats that before any practical deliberation could set in, two anxiously bleating kids were on board, and the no-nonsense 4H girls were stocking the truck with bags of feed and formula.

The Salon de Chévre, complete with Empire sofa and edible art. A goatherd I’m not, although I did marry Heidi, dirndl and all.

In my impractical swoon, I built a sort of goat salonin the potting shed, complete with a bucolic Hudson River landscape and a red velvet Empire sofa. The four-by-eight-foot painting had hung in a local grange hall in the 1950s, and the sofa had graced someone’s fashionable front parlor for more than a century.

All these flourishes were lost on the goats, of course. They proceeded to eat half the painting. Only the savory bits, though: the barn and its bales of sweet hay, three outbuildings, the orchard, and an entire cornfield. They had a taste for bad art on good canvas, and had no trouble tearing it off in long, tongue-fluttered strips.

The velvet Empire sofa suffered its own fate; soiled by the constant, anxious incontinence of the goats, it went from velvet to vile in a matter of days.  And because I adopted them on impulse, I had no enclosed pasture for them to graze. I kept them tethered on a 100-foot lead, which they’d tangle around trees until they were snug up against them like tether balls against a post. The concept of counter-clockwise seemed to elude them.

But still I was smitten. I bought a subscription to Dairy Goat Journal. I bottle fed them daily (did I mention they weren’t weaned?!), I took portraits, intrigued by their strange devil eyes –  as oblong as mail slots. But before the week was out, so were they.

I clearly wasn’t ready for ruminants, and I thought of them more as farm props than responsibilities, and so sheepishly (goatishly?) brought them back to their rightful owners.

It seems no matter how well we measure our decisions, we’re always open to acts of ridiculous, blundering folly.

There were moments in the endless rain and blight this season where the idea of farming itself seemed like an act of Folly more than an act of God (it’s easier to shake a fist at God, after all, than yourself). At times, it was as though I was toiling in a medieval Bruegel painting, when what I’d imagined was Cézanne (now those are canvases I could eat!). But I’m coming through, humbled and wiser, planning for a season of plenty next year. Fool that I am.  -Mb

Fall has made its official, blustery entrance here at the farm and the tiller and broadfork are out and about, working over exhausted beds , turning under organic matter before the long sleep of Winter.

Out at my neighbor’s horse farm this week, his ten-year-old appaloosa gelding stood curiously by as a shoveled composted manure into the truck, then brushed his long, warm muzzle against my shoulder, as if to ask “what are you doing with my poop?” I love this horse – his sweet and massive tenderness. Do you suppose if I bring him a bushel of Purple Haze carrots and heirloom apples he’ll make the connection?

My Troy-Bilt tiller, Mad Max, and soil-puncturing broadfork,Spiny Norman. The tines have come.

About four, half-ton truckloads of hay-sweetened soil will top-dress the farm. Years ago, when we had just started working this land, we would travel across the Hudson in a run-down Mazda to gather our horse manure. We loaded up to the roof-line in sturdy yellow IKEA bags and hauled it home, dragging our bumper all the way across the bridge. The first methane-fueled sub-compact.

Now the horses are nearby, and chickens add their high-nitrogen spoils to the mix, although – unlike the horses – they seem perfectly ambivalent about the contribution.

Chicken guano cuffs pears in the orchard with a high-nitrogen blast.

The compost piles will in turn add their sweet, damp crumble of organic matter to the soil - a billion-strong natural order of nitrogen fixing bacteria, fungi, yeasts and molds. This universe of organisms, all dancing in the dark, and so vast as to far outnumber life above ground, is where it all begins.  The Big Bang.

Composed compost.  Corn husks, fava shells, pawpaw rinds, wood ash. It’s all good.  The larger bins, below, will turn all of our yard waste into a fertility bank with no withdrawal fees.  Good ‘ol Yankee, feel-good frugality.

I was up in Maine last week, on a shoot at Four Season Farm. Like pilgrims on a Hajj to Mecca, farmers, gardeners and homesteaders should all make their way to this singular place, out on the ragged fringe of Penobscot Bay.

It is a unique model of organic sustainability, agricultural enterprise, and soil science; an open air laboratory for industrious writer/farmers Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman.

Barbara Damrosch at Four Season Farm.

Coleman has spent the last forty years listening to his land. Like a soil whisperer, he ‘s taken a stubborn slab of forested bedrock and coaxed it into fertility, infusing it with organic life. In the late 60s, when he bought his piece from back-to-the-land guru Scott Nearing (who wrote the homesteading primer, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World), It could barely sprout a turnip. Now it turns out some of the most remarkable organic crops in the Northeast, and year-round to boot!

I came away, as I have in the past, daunted, humbled and inspired; determined to tune in more deeply to the voices on my own small parcel.

It takes years to understand the disposition of a place: the tooth of the soil, the aspect of light through the seasons, the prevailing winds, the frost pockets, the random course of rainwater. All of these inform what to plant where and when, and how make the most of your modest holding.

We seem to have had more trials than Heracles this season, but better to be toughened up early than lulled into some facile illusion of what it takes to farm well. Learning to work your land is a complex dance, fraught with missteps, emboldened by small victories, but doubtless worth doing.

Apparently, we think we can dance. – Mb

Matisse’s Dance. At Stonegate, modesty prevails (at least on Saturdays).

In the orchard of my imagination, well-ordered rows of pear, apple, plum an quince have by now turned delicate spring blossom into sun-burdened fruit; heavy on the branch, swollen by a long, sweet-tempered season.  And, despite all the dire chatter about the difficulties of organic orchard management, my fruit is flawless.

The heirloom apple, Swaar, in fruit at Stonegate its first season.  A tease or a sweet harbinger?

Then you channel surf into the Real World.  Truth is, I lost half my English gooseberries and a third of my hybrid black currants to root rot and anthracnose fungus, and my plums and cherries barely broke bud before succumbing to some scourge or another.

Nineteenth Century Newburgh luminary Andrew Jackson Downing knew something about fruit.  As the author of the authoritative Fruit and Fruit Trees of America,  he championed the cultivation and preservation of heirloom varieties, and would have played Quixote to the bland, shippable selection at most markets.

In his description of the apple Swaar, one of twenty three Downing-described varieties we’re growing here, he says:

“This is a truly noble American Fruit, produced by the Dutch settlers on the Hudson, and so termed from its unusual weight, from the Low Dutch, meaning heavy.  It is one of the finest flavored apples in America, and deserves extensive cultivation, in all favourable positions.”

And cultivate we will, and then some.  New posts and wire have gone in this week to add even more varieties to the mix.  They were purchased from a time-worn, scrappy lumber yard off of rt. 84 with an unshaven proprietor who bobbles about in a golf cart and seems to slink about your ankles as you load up your truck, purring approval at every purchase.

“Great posts.  White cedar, straight as hell.  And the wire’s imported from Germany.  Last you years.”

Then he sizes you up to see how many years you may, in fact, have left.  Orchards presume longevity, after all.


Fall has started to paint the garden.

Supper in the garden, umbrellas on stand-by.

I flew in to New York shaking off the usual thunderstorms, and returned before dawn just as the sky began to slowly unfold, blue over black, and the night-lustered scent ofnicotiana was releasing itself into the still air over the farm.

Wakefulness at this hour is magical. From years of shooting gardens for books and magazines, I’m familiar with the secret, transitory beauty of twilight. The world seems to hold its breath, insect legs stop their determined rasping, and birdsongs have yet to be summoned by any indication of morning.

Then the day comes, and there is the usual damage assessment after a storm: The tight purse of the soil again pummeled into a swill by rain, the folds and clefts made by hoes and thoughtful hands all leveled, the tomatoes in a sad, rain-spilt tangle, the small-by-nature varieties of pepper and eggplant – confused by the inconstant weather – reduced to props for my daughter’s American Girl doll.

And despite all that, a smile. The Buddhists tell you that only by leaving your home can you know it for the first time. Knowing this place, with all of its quirks and provocations, is a gift.

Heidi reminds me of that. She reminds me not to become a grumpy farmer, grousing on about apocalyptic weather and the latest Book-of-Revelations pest that’s decided to stop by, and to find the good light (use a photography metaphor and he’ll understand…)

That night, we tossed a big harvest salad ofmesclun greens and loose-leaf lettuce, sweetened with sun-warmed greenhouse grapes, and made fresh pesto with skewer grilled eggplant and pepper. We ate in the garden as the little hens wandered aimlessly about our feet, and – with little effort – found the good light, filtering through the apple trees. - mb

Whisker deep in the big ruddy

Last week, I sternly accused my cats of raiding the tomato patch while we were away, They took the fifth (clever boys), hired one of those freaky hairless Sphinx cat attorneys, and took refuge. The next morning, our tabby was caught with his whiskers deep in the warm, submissive flesh of a Brandywine. Maybe our soft, tomato-hued cat had found his vine-tethered likeness, and liked it.

Furrowitz, Wiskerstein & Purr, LLP. Cat calls welcome.

In a year of such tomato scarcity, this feline misbehavior is salt in the wound. But maybe they figure they’ve paid their dues.

We were once sacked and plundered by a band of snarky roof rats. They came in from the dark woods like drunken Huns, getting into all and everything edible (sheetrock: a bit dry, but not bad). The cats rose to the occasion with gusto, however, and treated these marauders to an endless gladiatorial round of “toss and swat” (very much like tennis, only with paws, and rats), and we stood around them in a circle, our thumbs in the air like so many Caesars, celebrating each critters quick and squeaky demise.

We had another orange tabby a few years back that had decided to come in from the feral cold and adoptus. We named him “Agent Orange.” He never came too close or asked for too much, but was just a stealthy presence in the long grass. He was an old cat, with all the markings of a life spent in the brush or the dustbin. And the day Agent Orange died, we wrapped him in a linen pillow case and buried him beneath a patiently trained espaliered apple tree in the kitchen garden. The next Spring, the apple was dead. The other painstaking espaliers soon followed. What’s in a name? Intractable fate, apparently, even beyond the grave.

With so many lives in the balance, animal and vegetable, the critters somehow keep you, and your conceits, in check.  -Mb

Our tangled galaxy of heirloom tomatoes has started to glow with color this week, and – barring a love apple apocalypse – we’ll be in fruit until frost. Caught below in flagrante delecto, they seem oblivious to blight, sun-colored and heat-swollen. Yes, there is something remarkable about a warm, unruly ravel of tomatoes, the kind of sensual squalor you don’t get from neatmarshalled rows tied up with string.

Love apple comes from the French (who else?), who thought the pomme d’amour was an aphrodisiac. The Germans had their Liebesapfel, the Italians theirpomi d’amore. It seems this little fruit gets around.

But these are tough times for the pommed’amour, and the plight of tomato farmers across the Northeast has hit prime time: Both the New York Times and NPR ran pieces on the fungusamungus, and Orange County’s black dirt region was singled out at particularly hard hit.

And the big box stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Lowes – where the buyin‘ is cheap – seem to be complicit (surpirsed?).

So we can add a medieval black death of tomatoes to the minus column this year. Here’s a link to the Times article: Outbreak of Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop.

My advice: Savor every sweet, local liebesapfel that crosses your lips this season.

We Go Both Ways

Neat, marshalled rows. Efficient, very German.

The sprawl method: sensual squalor.

Stonegate was restored and designed with the camera in mind, with framable views and an attention to the pattern language of gardens and buildings that create opportunities for image making. It’s been a long process, more than ten years on now, of creating a visual dialogue with this place, and just when I think there can’t possibly be another pixel’s worth, more images get made. Apparently, if you don’t photograph it, it never existed. Spooky.

More Vogue-ing on the gate by Bo-Bear. Notice the slimming 3/4 pose with the turned out ankle. This cat’s got it going on!

You Blight up My Life

It’s here. We’re doing our best to control it, but may lose the battle. I’m putting out the best anti-fungal Karma I can.