Terra Firma, Terra Farma

We have been gone for a week. We went to South Carolina to see Don's family, and then to Boston to see our daughter, grand-daughter and son-in-law. We had a wonderful trip, a great time in both places. It was good to get away from the farm for a while. She is sometimes an unrelenting task mistress. But after 6 flights in 8 days, I was ready to stop moving. It was good to have my feet on the ground.

The trees had all turned yellow and the grass was disappearing under a carpet of leaves. The garden was put to bed, manure added, leaves piled on top, a half bushel of green tomatoes in the garage.

Compared to spring and summer, fall is going to be a breeze. We brought in the potatoes and popcorn and onions this morning. The garage will eventually freeze and I want everything to be okay. Plus the mice had been at the popcorn and we wanted to save it. The trees are yellow in the sun, the house is full of food, my children are happy, healthy...life is good.

October 15, 2011

Don left for the day, so David raced out to dig up the okra skeletons. Amazingly, they still had blossoms on the top of the stalks that were over 5' tall. Nature wants to succeed. Things want to grow. Flowers, vegetables. . .even children. My children are both grown now and have families of their own. I am amazed that I can still be hurt by the fact that I don't see them as often as I'd like. Especially my grand-daughters. When they visit their other grand-parents I always ask, why can't I see them, too? I am possessive, have trouble sharing. Kahil Gibran said "Your children are not your children. They are life's longing for itself." Well, he certainly got that right.
To take my mind off this, I head out to the almost non-existent garden to pick a few tomatoes. Here's what I came up with on the 15th of October!

Twenty-three pounds of tomatoes! The tomato plants themselves are threadbare and mostly just stalks standing inside their cages. But they are still producing. At the last, we will pick the green tomatoes and have fried green tomatoes and watch football and drink beer.
I planted three oriental poppies in my new flower garden. They came to me all carefully labelled. They better be right. In the past, I've purchased poppies that were in delicious sherbet shades, only to have them spring up wildly healthy and day-glo orange.
October 15th. 50 mile per hour winds outside. My sister is baking wild rice bread and I made cookies this morning. We baked a pumpkin and hope to have pumpkin pie soon. I love fall.

Summer Gives Way

Are you one of those people that drives around the country sometimes? Do you see small farm houses and wonder who lives there and what it would be like if you lived there? Do you sometimes long for the peace of your imagined farm life? I used to do that. My husband used to love driving in the country and looking out over the fields and the farms. He especially admired the perfectly neat farmsteads, where the grass was always mowed, the weeds were non-existent, and the barns were freshly painted. I've never liked driving that much, but I used to gaze out the window and wonder what is was like to live in those places.
Now I know.

This is the view from the windows of the sun porch where we sit having morning coffee, making our plans for the day. It is early October now and you can see the faint reds through the trees. Our trees are still mostly green and I am waiting for all of the maples to turn red or yellow. Every day we get up and have coffee and eat breakfast and decide what we are going to do that day. Finish taking down the garden. Mow the lawn. Again. Put up more tomatoes. Again. Our freezer is overflowing downstairs.

This doesn't even show the door of the freezer, which is also full. So here's one of the secrets about "what it's like to live on that farm out in the country."  It's a lot of work. I guess in my mind I had fantasies about sitting on a lawn chair in the shade, sipping iced tea. And granted there was some of that. Oh the meals we ate at the outside table under the shade of the 300 year old maple! We set the table with table cloths, linen napkins and dishes of food that mostly came from the garden. So there were times when we sat down. But there were also many times when we worked and worked. Plus we were still trying to get settled so we had to continually clean out the garage because things kept collecting in there. My garden gloves had holes in most of the fingertips. The shovels were notched at the tips. Many of the tomato cages were snapped and broken, groaning under the weight of our six foot tomatoes. Most everything grew. And grew and grew. We had a few failures -- the celery, spinach, and lima beans never really came up. But everything else did just fine.
Now we are taking down the garden. Don tills the empty rows. We added manure -- free from our neighbor who had the baby Holsteins. Susan and David have begun to gather the fallen leaves to heap on top of the rows. I planted garlic. It is still warm here. We don't have the heat on in the house yet. But the end of the gardening season is coming. The chores are lessening somewhat. Only the tomatoes and the zucchini and the Swiss chard are left in the garden. The skeletons of the okra are still standing because Don can't believe the okra harvest is over. They look vaguely "Halloween-ish" so I am leaving them.
But winter is coming. It looms ahead of me. What will I do all winter?

September starts....

September is upon us and though it is early, there are already signs that summer is waning. Most days it was still warm enough to hang laundry outside on the new laundry lines that Don and David built. It's me in the sunglasses, my sister in the pink hat.

We look like a couple of idiots, but it was fun and the sheets smelled wonderful after being dried on the line. It was far enough back from the road so you couldn't see anything as you drove by. But pretty much everyone else hung laundry out also, so no one cared.
The onions were pushing up out of the ground. We grew Texas Supersweet, Walla Walla, and some kind called Alisa Craig. I tried to keep them straight, but we were harvesting basket after basket. At the last minute, I managed to keep two different piles. The Walla Walla's made me cry when I chopped them, but the Alisa Craig's were sweet and tearless.

September was also the month of my Mother's visit. She is 87 and slowing down, but came to stay for two weeks. I learned a lot. About myself. About her. My sister and her husband gave up the Summer House and moved back in with Don and me. My Mother managed the 14 steps to the top just fine a couple of times a day. We cooked. We chatted. We took her apple picking. We took her to feed the calves. Mostly I thought about how if I visited my children when I was 87 and they were in their 60's what I would do differently. I would smile more.

Here she is out feeding the calves. Her hair is still red because she refuses to go gray even at 87. Will I still dye my hair? Probably. Nonetheless here she is in her white pants and black sweater and pearls, out feeding the calves.
The garlic also came in the first week of September. I was disappointed because it was so much smaller than I hoped it would be. But I planted it too shallow in the ground and probably the soil wasn't as rich as it should have been. Still, I harvested it and braided it.

I hung it in the garage to try. Later, when we used it, it was rich and sweet and almost nutty-flavored. I wish I had grown twice as much. Something to note if I live through this year, right?
Secretly, however, I rejoined every time we were finished with a crop.

August 2011

August was the month everything came in. And I mean everything. Take a look at this wheel barrow full of veggies and remember -- this is ONE morning's picking.

Our days were a haze of food processing, mostly tomatoes. We put up 50 quarts of tomatoes in the freezer, probably 20 quarts of tomato juice, uncounted packages of broccoli, sweet corn, beans, peppers, zucchini -- I can't remember it all. My sister kept joking that all her clothes were splotched with tomato seeds and we forgot to wear aprons. The daylilies had come and gone. My sister Susan and husband David went out and spent an hour picking all of the browned stems and making the place look better.

We still had so many zucchini and cucumbers that we couldn't eat them fast enough. I googled every zucchini recipe on the net and we made them all. Chocolate zucchini cake, zucchini manicotti, zucchini with parmesan pasta shells -- we ate them all. But for the rest, they went down the road to the baby Holsteins.

"Hey guys!" they shouted when we drove up with the truck. "They're back!" They came running to munch on corn stalks, cucumbers, zucchini, and they loved kale. This last was a blessing because we had so much kale. My sister wanted to grow it. At first it was tiny and we thought, well, this will be fine. Soon it was hip-high and truth be told, I didn't like it that much. It was coarser and chewier than swiss chard (which I loved) and so it grew and grew. But the cows loved it. Especially the one we named Snowflake. Look at those eyelashes.

We finished up August in a whirlwind of more tomatoes. They were coming in at a rate of one wheelbarrow load per day. More than we could eat or process. At the end, my sister read about a way to make tomato paste. We put them through our processor that skins, cores, peels, and seeds them. (This little machine clamps on to the countertop and you wind the handle like an old-fashioned meat grinder. This little puppy saved our lives). Anyway, you wind up with quarts of luscious, pinkish-red seedless, skinless tomato juice. It's relatively thick because all the pulp is still in there. Then you pour the juice into a clean pillowcase and hang the pillowcase over the sink. After about 12-15 hours, hey presto, there is tomato paste at the bottom of the pillowcase. I was a huge skeptic. Didn't think it would work. But work it did and not only did we have tomato paste, but it got rid of huge loads of tomatoes. We took the paste, plopped it onto cookie sheets, and put them in the freezer. Later we took out the little paste plops and put them in a plastic bag. Worked like gang busters.
So August was over. We were tan, we ate everything in sight and stayed the same size, and many of us had sore muscles. My sister's shoulder went out after she weeded the strawberry bed, my husband's back was bothering him from standing over a sink washing tomatoes, and I cut my hand pretty badly on the blade in the food processor and had to have three stitches. But boy oh boy, did we have food in the freezer.

July 2011

How can it be July already? We were working every day in the garden. Raccoons came at night but were unable to get into the garden. They climbed high in the mulberry trees, four of them at once. "Did you shoot them?" asked a neighbor. No, we didn't. They came every night and ate mulberries. And so came the scarlet tanagers, the cedar waxwings, the Baltimore orioles, even my husband. Everyone loved the mulberries.
Next came the tomato horn worms.

Mornings start out quietly. My husband and my brother-in-law are standing and staring at the tops of the tomatoes. Amazingly for their size, the horn worms are hard to see. My husband says this is about pattern recognition. You have to look for something slightly out of the ordinary. So they stand and stare. Every once in a while, they say, "here's one," and they cut off the branch and put the horn worm, branch and all, in a box. This is because I have insisted they be saved. I've read that tomato horn worms turn into hummingbird moths. Since I love hummingbird moths, we save the horn worms. At first, they are alone in the garden. So when I come over quietly, they don't hear me. They are talking the language of men. "Generals aren't as tough as they used to be," one says and the other agrees. Viet Nam Veterans both, they talk with some experience. "It's all political now," the other says and both agree.
About the military I know next to nothing despite the fact that my husband is a veteran and my son was in the Air Force for nine years. The garden is my General. She tells me what to do, when to harvest, when to weed, when to water, and what to pick.
Some things were coming in. We still had great piles of cucumbers nearly every day, zucchini, more tomatoes, lettuce, the beans were starting, and best of all, the sweet corn came in at the end of July.

June 2011 at the Farm

The summer is going by so fast. I am trying to catch the blog up to present time and it's already a struggle to remember what we did in June. Mostly I think we weeded. But we also carpeted the garden.

This is how it looked when we first started. The plants were so tiny you could barely see them. The carpet was free -- taken from a huge van full that all got soaked and they were giving it away. Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, I called it and for the first few weeks the wind blew it around. Eventually it got heavy enough so it just stayed. And it really cut down on the weeding. As it was, the weeding was very intense. My brother-in-law and I spent a half an hour on our knees trying to pick out the swiss chard seedlings from the crab grass.

By the end of June the garden looked like this. The corn was (forgive me) as high as an elephant's eye, the tomatoes were, no lie, well over 6 feet tall, and the winter squash, seen in the center of this photo, was taking over the world. That's Dolly standing in the background. Named by a neighbor, she watches over the garden rain or shine.
At first the cucumbers came in with a vengeance. And believe me, we tried everything. My sister came up with recipe after recipe but as it turns out, there are only so many cucumbers you can eat in a week. We fed them to the calves down the road, we threw some out, we tried to give them away but no one wanted them. The road side signs went from "Cucumbers, 4 for $1" to "Cucumbers, 10 for $1" to "Cucumbers, Free." At the end of June we had visitors, my husband's sister and her husband. We had exactly one fresh tomato from the garden. We held it aloft, a perfect ruby, gleaming in the sun. By God, we had grown a tomato and it was perfect and red and round and tasted like heaven. We were farmers after all.