Another One by Liese: Nutty Weather

The nutty weather this past two weeks has me reflecting on how precarious our relationship to nature is. In some ways the history of agriculture is the history of manipulating, working around, and bending nature to human needs. We depend so totally on the rhythms and cycles of our environment, and yet often we feel at odds with it, struggling to produce lettuce in January or salmon with eel DNA simply because we’ve judged what nature gives us unsatisfactory to our plans.

I took the first two pictures last January 25th and 26th. We literally crouched inside the low tunnels, under the plastic, to protect ourselves and the plants from wind and sleet. The next morning we still went to market despite the icy roads, and it turned out that the vendors who came were also Yankee ex-patriots. We christened it “White Saturday.”

By the end of that day, the sun came out and melted the ice. On Tuesday January 29th, just three days later, the temperature was in the 70s and I worked on my mid-calf boot tan as I cultivated strawberries. A cold front followed and brought steady winds around 20mph and gusts of over 40mph. At Wednesday around 4pm, both of our high tunnels had been blown over.

In many ways, I think this variability is more challenging than a consistent extreme. It certainly keeps us busy—on top of the usual farm chores like harvest, we had to figure out a way to protect the plants exposed by the torn-out wind tunnels because it froze, again, that Friday night.

Despite another cold market morning, we again saw many familiar faces. There’s our consistent bright spot—good food, great friends.

Guest Post From Liese: Food Is The Reason I Got Into Agriculture

Here's another great post from Liese :) You can access the original post at her blog here.

Food is the reason I got into agriculture. It’s not the reason I stuck with it, but it was a scrappy farmers’ market in Abingdon, Virginia that first inspired me to really think about how food is produced in the United States. (I intend to edit this entry with more informational links. Until I can, many of the arguments I make here are based on research using data from the USDA, found at this link.)

So it’s appropriate that now, living on a farm, I eat more amazingly fresh, delicious food than ever. I wrote a letter to my family about my first few weeks on the farm, and I told them that “we might live like peasants, but we eat like kings.” It’s a conscious choice and effort to eat well—and when I say “eat well,” I want to be clear that while I believe all food has morals and ethics, I am referring in this instance to the money and time we spend on our meals, not that eating the way we do is in any way “morally superior” to the way other people eat. I’ll write about the problems of food ethics in another post. For now, I’m going to talk about the labor and cost and source of the food we eat on the farm.

When I say we live like peasants, I mean that Ben and Patricia and I spend a lot of time talking about what we really need in life to be happy. One of the things we agree on pretty strongly is spending more money and time on our food than most people would justify.

The photos up above chronicle three especially profligate breakfasts: On Sunday, Patricia made Brussels sprouts with bacon (our sprouts, local bacon), corn bread, locally ground grits, our eggs, fried catfish (caught off the coast of NC), and fresh tomatoes (grown in a biodiesel-fueled local greenhouse).

On Monday, I made sausage gravy (local pork) and biscuits served with tomatoes and leftover Brussels sprouts.
On Tuesday—today—I woke up craving salad, so I tossed mizuna, arugula, and butter lettuce with homemade balsamic dressing, baked biscuits again and served them with local mozzarella and tomatoes and eggs.

(Dinners are as complicated, but I am more likely to grab my camera in the morning.)
These are not cheap or fast meals. They require a lot of time and effort to put together (usually Patricia’s) and they cost money. Local meat and fish and dairy, especially, are not cheap—the animals are not treated like factory inputs, and the people who care for them are not treated like replaceable parts.

Many processed foods in the United States are heavily subsidized in both obvious and subtle ways, and many, many people rely upon the affordability and the ease of those processed foods. Given the cost of housing and health insurance in our country, not to mention the steady decline of wages, the increase in hours worked outside the home, and the pressure to spend money on consumer goods, cheap, convenient food makes sense for most people. It’s efficient, after all, right? Fewer hours in the kitchen mean more hours to work.

So it follows that it’s illogical and inefficient that Patricia and Ben and I make veritable feasts two or three times a day. In terms of gender, it’s unfair that Patricia does the most reproductive labor on the farm. If we went out to eat or bought frozen meals, she could spend more time working outside with Ben and I (she definitely wants to!). The farm could make more money if we all worked more, we could all be paid better, and we could buy more expensive food.

Maybe we could invest in someone who would turn local food products into processed meals, so we could assuage some of our guilt about not giving our money to our neighbors. It would be expensive to do that, so we’d have to talk our neighbors into selling their products more cheaply, but perhaps they could just pack a few more chickens into the coop to make up the loss. They could eat a few less of their own eggs, too, and maybe work an extra few hours on the weekend. If their neighbor can’t compete and goes out of business, well, that’s an opportunity to expand and make more money. Never mind if it’s a loss for the community.

Soon our local food frozen meals will take off, and we’ll be rolling in cash. We’ll donate some money to charities to support our neighbors who’ve been forced to sell their farms, but most of it we’ll keep for ourselves. We’ll buy a flat screen TV, and maybe we’ll hire a personal chef to keep making us delicious food. We deserve to be comfortable. We worked hard, and sacrificed leisure time, and it paid off. Right?

While my tongue is firmly in cheek, and this is a highly unlikely scenario, I do think it embodies many of the choices—and lack of choices—facing the middle and working class in America. Is there another option?
For us, we work a little less so that we can savor our meals. We try to share babycare so Patricia can participate more; I am trying to cook more often. We make less money than we could, in theory; Ben says that making money on the farm has as much to do with spending less money than bringing more in. None of us has outside jobs; we don’t have health insurance (we’d sure like it, if buying independently was more affordable).

I like this life. I don’t think it’s without complications or issues—we don’t buy exclusively local food, and I have a chocolate problem—but I am happier with this simplicity than any moment in which I had plenty of money and not enough time or space to enjoy it. Illogical, inefficient, full of love and meaning and intention. I’ll take it.

Lovely Liese

Hi y'all! It's been ages since I've (Patricia) been able to post much about what's going on here at the farm. As you know, we had a baby in July. He's taken up whatever spare time I would normally have for blog writing, hence the break in writing. Unlike most babies, this one hardly ever slept during the day (he's finally beginning to nap!), so I didn't have the usual break I hear about from other mamas. Anyway, it turns out our lovely apprentice, Liese, is writing farm blog posts already, so I've asked her permission to share them here as well (which she granted). You can learn about Liese in the "About Us" tab above. Here's her first farm post, written while we were still visiting family in Germany (you can read the original post here):

I’ve planned out so many thoughtful, creative, official “first farm blog” posts, but I haven’t succeeded at writing them down. So, in the name of words on the screen, I’ll barrel forth.
I moved onto the farm about three weeks ago. The first week was a whirlwind. I had to get my body into the rhythm of early days and nights and protracted physical labor, and my mind into the reality of abandoning familiar surroundings and routines. There’s the shock of leaving behind one of my cats and my dear, wonderful roommate and moving away from friends I used to be able to pop down the hall or next door to visit with. Then there’s moving into someone else’s space, and trying not to be a bother to friends you adore, even though you’re living on top of them. The last year, though, has been pretty constant change, so I was better prepared for the transition—and since I’m planning on living in a yurt, I ought to be amenable to a nomadic life. 

With the help of a lot of neighbors and friends, we got the big greenhouse built AND planted before Ben and Patricia and Elliott went off to Germany. There wasn’t much to do in terms of preparing the farm for their absence, other than giving me a refresher course on the tunnels and a list of chores to accomplish. 
Right before Christmas, Ben allowed a high school student to complete his school project on the farm; C was required to do 15 hours of farm work and write a report about it. Of those 15 hours, he probably spent 2-3 harvesting and 2-3 planting—in other words, about a third of it was what you expect to do on a farm. The rest of the work involved marking beds, pulling up drip tape, stakes, and string from the old pepper and tomato fields (in our defense, the baby was born at the end of pepper and tomato season!), washing and sorting produce, building the greenhouse, building a high tunnel, and weeding.That’s exactly what I love about farming (and what scares me about doing it on my own)—it’s so diverse, and there are constantly new problems to solve. 

While P&B&E (peanut butter and Elliott) have been away, I’ve washed all the produce bins, cultivated carrots, turnips, and spinach, washed racks to go in the walk-in cooler, washed the walk-in cooler, washed and packed eggs, cultivated berries, fed the chickens lots of leftover produce, cleaned the chicken yard, cleaned up the seedling tunnel and watered seedlings, built a low tunnel, raised and lowered tunnels as needed, got my truck stuck in the mud, got my truck out of the mud with help from a neighbor, finished pulling drip take, lay drip tape in the new greenhouse, et cetera! 

I’ve also begun planning out my own agricultural ventures. In addition to helping with what Ben and Patricia have already established, I’m planning on adding flowers, mushrooms, herbs and my own chickens to the mix. I’ve spent quite a lot of time poring over catalogs and dreaming up the ideal chicken tractor—but, as of yet, I haven’t spent any money. I’m waiting to consult with P&B, and I have a very non-agricultural vacation coming up to worry about.

So far, I’m happy. I spend a lot of time laughing at Charlie, the dog, and laughing or yelling at the chickens. (I planted bulbs around the house, and it’s been hard to keep the damn birds away from them.) It’s amazing to spend so much time outside, but also surprises me how easy it is to not notice the nature around me. I have to remind myself to stop and watch for bluebirds or the resident red tail hawk, because I get so caught up in the work.

I’m ready for peanut butter and Elliott to get back. I miss hearing the baby laugh, and I miss waking up to coffee and good company (I’m so, so spoiled). I like hard, dirty, demanding work, but I like it even better when it’s shared with people I love. Being alone is too easy, in some ways.
Thinking of being alone, I listened and watched a few hundred starlings whipping around the sky this afternoon. When I was a child, I watched starlings at the bird feeder with my grandmother; as an adult, they are the subject of one of my favorite poems, “Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver. My family crest tattoo features a starling, for those reasons and because, most importantly, starlings are never alone, and as I watched the starlings today, I thought about how hard it is to be afraid when you are surrounded by loved ones.
- - -
“Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
(Source: writersalmanac.publicradio.org)

 

Sign Up for 2013 Spring CSA is now OPEN! 
Sign Up HERE

WHY JOIN OUR CSA? 

CSA is a mutually beneficial relationship between us. By making an investment in our farm with a CSA share, you become a seasonal farm member who shares the rewards and risks of the harvest season with us, your farmers. This makes you a co-producer. Your investment allows us to afford annual start-up costs, to pay ourselves fair wages, and to share the risks of growing food. In return, we provide you and your family with fresh, healthy, local vegetables, fruits and eggs. Our food not only tastes better and keeps longer, it also helps us all nourish local agriculture, economy and environment.  Taste the difference!

Members Receive:

• About two grocery bags of 7-10 seasonal sustainably grown vegetables and herbs (more for large shares)
• A weekly email with produce information, cooking and storage tips, recipes and segments about life on and off the farm. 
• Access to an online recipe sharing site. 

Members Also Enjoy: 

• Convenient pick up locations and times throughout the week. 
• Access to our farm for volunteering, exploring and relaxing. 
• Invitations to on-farm events, such as our annual OktoberFEAST and Spring planting parties. 
• Making new friends who share your interest in good food and good farming.     

HOW IT WORKS

Join In Good Heart’s CSA by purchasing a share at the beginning of the season. You then visit the weekly pickup site to pack your own vegetables from the harvest table. We will post a guide at the stand explaining what each share contains that week. You will bring your own bags and pick out the produce for yourself “market-style”. The Spring CSA harvest season runs for 16 weeks from April through July.

  

Pickup Sites & Times: We have three weekly CSA pickup sites.

•  Raleigh pickup is Tuesday evenings from 4:30pm to 6;30pm at the Five Points CSA site, 1911 Bernard St., Raleigh 27608.
• We also we have On-Farm pickup is from 4pm to 7pm on Wednesdays at 1000 McLemore Road in Clayton, NC 27520.
• Finally, we offer limited pickup every Saturday morning from 8am to 12pm at the Western Wake Farmers Market, 1225 Morrisville Carpenter Rd, Cary 27519      

Share Sizes: We offer three share sizes.

• Our Large Share ($480) is a suitable amount of produce for a large household of 4+  people, or a couple of hungry vegetarians, to eat for a week. 
• Our Regular Share ($320) is a suitable amount of produce for a small household of 1 to 3 people, or 1 hungry vegetarian, to eat for a week. 
• Our Small Share ($200) is the same size as the regular share, but the pick ups are every other week rather than weekly.

Full Year CSA Discount:
We are offering a 5% discount for folks who would like to pay for their Spring and Fall shares in full early in the year. Please inquire for more details.

Payment and Sign Up: 

Please make checks payable to In Good Heart Farm and mail to: 

1000 McLemore Road

Clayton, NC 27520

You may pay by mail with check or in person with check, cash or card. Your early and full support is important to us. Members who pay in full by February 15th, pay the flat membership fees above. However, we realize that some of you may not be able to pay in full or before February 15th. As such, we offer a payment plan and a late sign up fee of $25 (details are contained within the sign up form). 

To sign up for our CSA, please fill out the form here and send along your payment.  

OTHER INFORMATION

  

Sharing with others: Some members find it enjoyable to split CSA shares with other families & friends. We also like to share food and enjoy such arrangements. If you choose to split a share, please let us know at the beginning of the season so we may avoid confusion.

Communication: Our main mode of communication is email. We will send you weekly emails usually at the beginning of the week. Our emails usually include farm updates, a list of that weeks veggies, a copy of the weekly newsletter, and any notifications regarding pickup.

Please email us at InGoodHeartFarmNC@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns. 

2013 CSA Sign Up Open Monday, January 14th

Happy New Year! We're back from our German vacation and we're getting back to work. The 2013 CSA sign up will be open by Monday, January 14th! Until then, the basics are this:

• The Spring CSA will begin early April and run for 16 weeks through July. 
• We are offering three share size options: large ($480), regular ($320) and small ($200). 
• We will offer three pick up locations: the farm, Western Wake Farmers' Market and Five Points (1911 Bernard Street) in Raleigh.  

Fall/Winter Shares Available

Sign Up for 2012 Fall CSA is now OPEN!

If you are interested in joining our Fall CSA this year, please take a look at the Fall CSA brochure here. If you have any questions, please send us a message at InGoodHeartFarmNC@gmail.com.

Here's a quick breakdown of the info contained within the brochure: 

- our CSA runs for 10 weeks beginning in October

- we have three drop sites (Western Wake Farmer's Market in Morrisville, Five Points in Raleigh, and the Farm here in Clayton)

- we have three CSA share sizes: small, regular and large

Cool season vegetables you will likely receive in your Fall shares include (there will be multiple varieties of these veggies e.g., kale: winterbor and red Russian kale, radishes: watermelon, French breakfast, Easter egg, and black Spanish, etc. - so there is more variety than this list lets on): 

- kale

- collards

- arugula

- chard

- spinach

- sweet potatoes

- winter squash

- radishes

- lettuce

- turnips

- broccoli

- cauliflower

- fennel

- bok choy

- cabbage

- napa cabbage

- tatsoi

- beets

- carrots

- rutabaga

- scallions

- leeks

- herbs 

If you are interested in joining our CSA, please print out, fill out, and mail the brochure to 

In Good Heart Farm

1000 McLemore Road 

Clayton, NC 27520

Please make checks payable to In Good Heart Farm. 

Guest Blog: Life-Changing Vegetables

 Here's a guest blog written by our friend & CSA member, Emily Estrada (we love her enthusiasm!!!):

If I were to ask those who know me well for an adjective that best describes my personality, I suspect words such as dramatic and theatrical would be used often.  I’ve made my peace with this and can admit that from time-to-time I have, in order to (try to..) captivate an audience, presented certain things in a dramatic, theatrical and maybe on occasion, even exaggerated manner.  However, when I write that becoming a CSA member with In Good Heart Farm has been one of the most life-changing decisions I’ve ever made, I assure you that I am not being dramatic, theatrical  or exaggerating in the slightest.  On the surface, one may think, “Really?  Really?!?  Having a vegetable subscription has changed your life…?”  Yes – that’s exactly right – joining the CSA in spring/summer 2011 changed my core, and even deeper, challenged what I thought I knew about myself.  Before you dismiss me, read on. 

            The most obvious (and I suspect common!) change is simply that I eat many more vegetables now.  Before the CSA, I would honestly go days…weeks…and maybe even….months without eating a fresh vegetable.  Today, I average about four servings of vegetables per day (and in some weird way, increasing my vegetable consumption has lead to an increase in my fruit consumption…who would have thought?  It’s like this is the type of food my body was designed to consume...weird  J ).  I was 28 when we joined the CSA, when, up until then I had always resisted eating vegetables.  Think about that: over two and a half decades of thinking one way (1.  Veggies are gross. 2. We’re “suppose” to eat vegetables but could never actually taste good.), changed so quickly by being a part of the CSA.  Actually, it’s best not to think about it; when I do, I become angry.  How is it, exactly, that I resisted eating vegetables for a very long time – without ever even considering how great they could taste (and make me feel!)?!?!  That’s not rhetorical – I think I have some answers.  First, I was not raised in a veggie-centered family.  Although we are all much more concerned with healthy eating today, this definitely wasn’t how it was back in the day.  Growing up my palette much preferred battered, deep-fried meats and (limited) vegetable items.  Thus, as a grown up, eating that type of food feels normal.  Second, moving beyond my family, I recently caught a few minutes of a cartoon on Nickelodeon when my nephew visited us.  In the segment I watched, the “punishment” given to a kid (or baby fairy, actually) was to eat beets.  Beets?!?!?  How, exactly, is that a punishment[1]?  And, more importantly, what message are we sending our children when we tell them eating beets is a form of punishment rather than the wonderfully root-y treat they are?  My point is that growing up in a family that was not veggie-conscious coupled with living in a society that tells children vegetables are gross, and that instead, they need to pick up a bag of those ever-so-cool triple-dipped toxic waste flavored cheese puffs, left me veggie-disillusioned for the majority of my life.  As a CSA member, my wonderment and absolute amazement towards vegetables has been restored.         

Change #2:  I’m eating more diverse types of vegetable; joining a CSA probably introduces many new and exotic vegetables for even those that have been life-long produce lovers.  The more adventurous vegetables I’ve tried through the CSA for the first time include: kohl rabi, leeks, fennel (OMG – fennel – I still get chills when I think about the first time I had it; I was seriously angry that this wonderful, joyous product only entered into my life when I was 29!!!  How did I live before it??), purple potatoes, garlic scape, and Daikon radish to name a few.  But, to express even further the change brought about by the CSA, let me also list the more traditional veggies I tried for the first time with the CSA: broccoli, cauliflower, any type of green (collard, swiss chard, kale (again – OMG – kale chips??  An existential question of the vegetable variety:  can a life before kale chips, really be considered living?), beet greens), beets, cabbage, carrots (alright, yes, I had baby carrots before – but they were those little tooth-pick shaped carrots that somehow get widdled down to stumps…I’m talking about those amazingly beautiful purple, yellow, orange, and white ones that look as though the ground was actually their home at some point), and radish.   Before the CSA I was, flat-out, unequivocally a Grade A weenie when it came to trying all food, but in particular veggies.  The CSA has made me braver[2].  I love getting a vegetable that I’ve never eaten before; even better if I’ve never even heard or seen it.  Almost every week I play the “Name That Vegetable” game with family back in Texas.  I send a picture of the veggie and they submit their guesses[3].  In short, the CSA has made me not only a much more frequent fresh food eater, but a more adventurous one.  I now know first, what the heck kale is, and secondly the difference between Red Russian and Winterbore varieties.  Same goes for radish – I can spot and describe different varities.  Same goes for potatoes…and on and on.  Five years ago, I never would have thought that this discovery and knowledge would have entered my life.  Thank you CSA! 

The last, and in many ways, deepest transformation the I’ll write about concerns the  realization that food is so much more than I ever thought it was.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve always known that food tasted good and, because of this, can make me happy.  But by saying that food is so much more than what I could have ever imagined, I mean that the CSA has helped me realize the natural and social connections betweens the food-production earth, the farmers that cultivate the food, and me – the being that consumes it.  I’ve often joked that until I met Patricia and Ben, I thought vegetables came out of the ground in a can filled with a water solution, is because when vegetables did make an appearance in my family, they usually came from a can.  As such, I cannot express in words the wonderment I felt the first time I saw a carrot pop out of the ground; my life changed in an instant.  Seeing that carrot come out of the ground reminded me that in many fundamental ways, I depend on the earth and, likewise, when treated properly (as Patricia and Ben very much do) the earth depends on us as well.  Because of the modern-day industrial food production systems and messages that we’re surrounded by, it’s easy to forget how food connects us to the natural world and, what’s more, it’s easy to ignore the relationship we have with food, the earth, and the food producers.  Gaining this knowledge – the knowledge that my time on earth is connected to a much larger phenomena – has helped me gain a new perspective on life.

               It’s weird to admit, but one of my favorite things to talk about are vegetables.  When a friend joins the CSA, it’s all I can do to stop myself from wanting to know how they’re going to store their veggies, how they are going to prepare them, and how they tasted.  On the first day of pickup this season, I wanted to take a picture as in “First Day of CSA!” in the “First Day of School” sense.  Next go-round, I think I may actually do it.  

---

[1] UNLESS they ate so much of the AMAZING Raw Beet Salad recipe Wake Cooperative posted on facebook and got a belly-ache like I do, but that’s only because it was super-yummy!

[2] And not only about trying vegetables.  For, I’ve recently discovered a fondness for shrimp – LOVE them.  The old Emily would never even entertain the idea of trying shrimp. 

[3] Admittedly, these submissions tend to be more comical than serious.  The garlic scape elicited a response of “Freddy Krueger herbs” and…well, I won’t tell you what they came up with for Daikon radish.  J