Vermont pt 1

SO after Montreal there was Burlington, Vermont, a college town way nicer looking than the Ontario franchise. We didn't know where we were staying that night but we wandered around the pedestrian mall and surrounding area asking where's good to lodge. We were browsing a camping equipment shop  and asking the staff questions about good secret camping sites when the girlfriend of an employee suddenly invited us to stay with them. The look on her face said she was as surprised as we were. Luckily her boyfriend just smiled, shrugged, and rolled with it.

They were Bianca and Lee, and they took us to their house on a mountain that they share with a few other young Vermonters. Not in the habit of taking in strays, Bianca just had a good feeling about us and couldn't think of a reason not to have us over, which is some crazy luck on our part. She cooked us an amazing dinner involving some home-raised chickens, and we showed them how to play the "Picture Game", a cross between Telephone and Pictionary very popular with my bros and broettes.

We drank and ate and watched a blue graph bar race a red graph bar. The size of each bar, especially relative to each other, was the source of great anxiety for everyone. We all knew that these bars would determine many things about the world. As we all know, the blue bar won, and everyone on that mountain was happy.

The next morning, Bianca and Lee took us for a hike around their property, and we caught a view of the valleys and the mountains capped with snow that make Vermont THE place for winter sport enthusiasts. My enthusiasm for winter sport ended when my face met a fence at the bottom of a black diamond hill in grade 7, so I appreciated the snow from a distance.

We exchanged facebook info and said goodbye to our amazing hosts, and drove further south to WWOOF on a farm. WWOOFing is an acronym, and it boils down to working temporarily for room and board at an organic farm. As happy as we were to hang up our farming hats at the end of October, it turns out I missed the ridiculous food enough to get dirty again. Pictures and more to come!

A Long Overdue Update

Much like the opening chapters of a certain classic literature trilogy concerning a troupe of unwashed males of varying height trying to get a refund for a piece of jewelry, Emily and I found it almost impossible to leave the Shire that is Ontario. The delays were many, but enjoyable for the company of friends and family we'd been missing terribly during our summer of farm. 

Blackie stares us a "Goodbye". 

A day and a half later than we'd intended, we had a packed SUV, its back seats occupied by a pair of Queen's engineering students catching a ride-share from Kingston to Montreal, where they're starting a small tech company. We dropped them off in la Belle Cite and grabbed some happy-hour beers at Foufones with Em's likewise-dreadlocked ladyfriend Zoe. After burgers, beer and some tromping around, we left Zoe and her eternally-guitar-weilding husband Julien at their open mic joint to go meet our Couch Surfing host, Max. 

Max is a bike riding, photo taking, freelance web designer who built his own media shelf out of plumbing using a plan he found online. In the morning he produced a tray of chocolate croissants and cooked us porridge with fixings. Feeling indebted, Emily granted him a pumpkin soup recipe from her repertoire as thanks. Before we left, he gave us one of his photos - one of a dog he met in Costa Rica who looks adorable professionally. Apparently our "borderline creepy obsession with dogs" and their business is obvious after knowing us less than a day.

Uplifting, though mildly ominous coming from a bathroom wall.

(Click to enbiggen)

Max biked off to work while we strolled through the park in search of chiens. We didn't find many dogs, but there were some curious squirrels, including a white-furred monsieur who was happy to pose for us.

Even the squirrels have more style in Montreal.

We checked out the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Art history is a subject I've been wanting to learn more about so it was great to have Emily, a classy educated woman, give me a personal tour while we walked around. We had to get going before I saw everything, which is fine by me as I definitely intend to come back.

From there, we navigated Montreal's labyrinthine highway system and made for the border to 'merica. It was election day, and we weren't sure what kind of country we were going to wake up to in the morning. 

A photoshoot on Lake Champlain

Next time: Vermont, and More Farming

Improvised Toothpaste

Toothpaste is one of those things that hasn't actually improved since it was invented. That's why marketers try to convince you that, don't worry guys, THIS toothpaste is the real deal. That last one was shit, full of asbestos. But this new one, god damn, it's got these computer generated blue spheres that like, clip through your molar and attach to that green foliage that's sticking out of it like shrapnel. Then they both phase out of existence. We're 25 year old models wearing lab coats, so I think we know what we're talking about.

Half of keeping your mouth clean (yes, yours specifically) is just the act of brushing, but you don't need to buy $7 tubes of bubblegum-icecream-vomit coloured paste to make up the last half. You just need:

6 parts Baking Soda

2 parts Water

1 part Hydrogen Peroxide (3-5%)

Dash of Flavor

Add more or less water to get the consistency of paste you like.

I made my first batch with cinnamon. It doesn't taste sweet and minty like commercial brands, but the mixture dilutes when you rinse with water so you're just left with a clean feeling on your teeth and no aftertaste.

The hydrogen peroxide kills most any bacteria or fungus in your mouth. It's the most active ingredient in a lot of mouth washes, and you can get it at any drug store. The baking soda works as an abrasive to help remove cavity creeps, and is also alkaline, which helps reduce the acid that can hurt your tooth fortress.

I've seen some recipes that call for glycerine as a sweetener, but that stuff leaves film on your teeth and I think it does more harm than good. But I'm no toothpaste scientist.

The Drought Has Affected Our Post Crop

We're now deep into the last half of our time at the farm, time that has given us authority on the bigger picture. 

So, just what the hell are we doing here?

On paper, we're working on a small scale (unofficially) organic farm, 5.5 days a week, 10-12 hours a day, for 6 months solid. In exchange we get room and board, a stipend of $200 a month, and a ground-up education in the farming business.

However, it's taken a bit longer to figure out what we are actually trying to do here.

We're here to learn how to do things ourselves. We're here to purge accumulated guilts through hard physical work. To watch that hard physical work turn into a quantifiable product that you hold in your hand and bite into. To feel what it's like to fuck up when you can't talk your way out of it. To see if we can find a way of living that isn't hostile to someone else's.

So I can learn enough handiman-ship to at least build a goddamn spice rack. I once hammered a wood screw into someone's wall (using my "Tools for Dummies" hammer no less), so this is a big deal.

If I look closer I can see some hippie pamphlet slogans too: "getting in touch with food", and "reconnecting with life and death".

I don't know about Em, but I think I've succeeded on some points, failed only two, and simply thickened the plot of most. Bubbles have been burst, perspectives shifted, and The Good is found where I did not expect it to be.

And it's not over.

I'll be updating at least once a week from here on, now that the weeds are clear.

I promise it won't boil down to "my job is so interesting because ______". The food is excellent, the recipes even better, but 75% of the time we just hack at the earth with clubs and knives, so the act of farming is especially uninteresting to hear or read about. 

It's the bigger picture stuff that counts. The context.

It's actually about taking pictures of animals though.

vegan zucchini lasagna

it's been a month or more since we've had rain, but the way the zucchinis have been giving, you wouldn't know it. we've been harvesting them for almost two weeks now, running through the rows daily to ensure we get them while they're small and sweet, not big and watery.

zukes for our CSA members

the other day I found a whopper hiding under some leaves, way too big for our members but good enough for us and especially useful for grilling. that same day, my mom emailed me this recipe. it would have been a perfect use of the rejected zucchini, but I'm short three very key ingredients: tomatoes, large quantities of basil, and a food processor. well, whatever. we went to Todd's, the shitty Hastings grocery store, to get the last block of tofu in the county, a couple of tomatoes, and an eggplant, then spent the evening making lunch while we waited for Brophy to arrive from Burlington.

I subbed the pesto for a tomato sauce I made using canned diced tomatoes and our own herbs, garlic, and onions, but followed everything else pretty exactly. if I were to make it again, I'd use more tofu than the recipe wants; there was barely enough for one layer. also I'd grill the vegetables and tofu using the lemon zest marinade; using plain oil to grill, and then the oil and lemon marinade to drizzle on top of that, makes for an extremely oily dish, even when you consider it's supposed to be served chilled, like a salad.

personally, I do not eat of the wheat, but I know others like a more substantial lunch after six hours of weeding, so I toasted up some garlic bread to have with the lasagna, which I finished off with a liberal sprinkling of nice salty nutritional yeast "parmesan". it seemed to go over pretty well, although it turns out our guest of honor has a citrus allergy. well damn. since he absconded with Chris to Algonquin for the weekend, I guess I'll just have to eat the leftovers myself.

avec du pain, and some of our broccoli seconds steamed with olive oil and fresh pepper

beets: they're what's for lunch

today and tomorrow the Chickabiddy crew - including farm mistress Sherry and her adorable handywoman Gisele - is building two new greenhouses from the ground up. in other news, beets are in season. and what else to feed all those hot and hungry workers? beets are hearty, versatile, and beautiful. last night, I headed out to the garden to see what I could find.

golden beets

I didn't have to change a thing about Isa Chandra's Chilled Golden Beet and Ginger Soup recipe for it to be simple, delicious, and vegan.

what a lot of people don't know about beets is that their greens are some of the nicest out there. I vastly prefer them to chard; they have an earthiness to them that's not found in other leafy greens.

while the beets were roasting, I steamed their greens in a bit of soy sauce, whipped up a quick peanut sauce, and juliened some of our own zucchini, scallions, and the last of the snow peas, then stuck it all in the fridge to chill overnight.

this morning before we got to our construction project, we spent a little while in the garden picking the very first tender, sweet green beans of the season.

haricots verts

way too beautiful to spoil with cooking, right? onto the veggie pile they went. next I scrambled a couple of farm eggs, then rolled it all up to make a perfect side for the chilled soup.

my cold rolls didn't look that pretty but they tasted great

lunchtime!

for dessert, more beets! very un-vegan Red Velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I used this recipe but cut the sugar quantities in half, and no one seemed to mind.

eat me

tomorrow we're building all day after harvest in the morning. hello, eight o'clock bedtime! good night.

on CSA, local food, and Margaret Wente's dumbassery

my dear friend Adeleine posted a Globe & Mail opinion article to my Facebook this weekend which lambastes the local food movement as "the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine" adding that it's also bad for the environment and a rip-off, all in the most condescending manner possible. she asked for my thoughts, and what else are blogs for?

I've noticed this growing trend towards petty controversy-creation in Canadian media - Jian Gomeshi, I'm looking at you - but it's still surprising to me that the once-mighty Globe would publish a piece so utterly unfounded, dishonest, and downright slanderous towards the new farmers' movement. to my pleasant surprise, the comments on the article were largely on the side of Good, but that didn't keep me from composing a few choice words for Ms Wente while I harvested beet greens this morning.

bitch, please. you think cheap food is really cheap? you come by your Californian tomatoes and Mexican avocados and out of season Chinese such and such by way of slave labor, catastrophic environmental degradation, and the condemnation of millions of local people to starvation in the name of cash-crop production for foreign consumption. consider yourself lucky to be choosing local food, Wente, because with people like you and your ridiculous global food system, it's not going to be a choice for much longer.

you know what? food should be expensive. it should be so fucking expensive that people don't waste it, don't buy it and let it rot in their fridge, don't leave half of it on their plates and then demurely decline a doggy bag. all-you-can-eat endless salad and breadsticks? extra value meals, ninety-nine cent hamburgers? fucking Tim Hortons anything? screw you and the privileged white aging Boomer horse you rode in on.

I do not consider myself an "eager young idealist" but we all damn well "work like dogs" to produce nutritious food for people in our community. we charge a fair price for our produce at our local market, and we sell out every week, and I highly doubt that the people we're feeding are buying and eating to humor us.

what Wente seems to be missing about her quaint experience at the local market, looking down her nose at people like us as she buys carrots for a dollar a piece, is that it's not the local food movement ripping her off, it's herself and her painfully narrow view of what local food means. sure it's nice to shop at a market: you can tour around, compare prices, see all the pretty displays, feel good about yourself. but the truth is, markets make tons of money for farmers because people expect to pay more there; and people pay more at markets because they're buying an experience and an image. it's win-win, but it's not the whole picture.

basically, it all boils down to three little letters: CSA. depending on who you ask, they can stand for "community shared agriculture" or "community supported agriculture" but either way they tidily sum up everything I've just said and totally waste Wente and her bullshit.

the concept is as follows: at the beginning of the year, or in a couple of installments, you buy all your veggies for the whole season directly from the farmer of your choice. then, from June til October, you get a weekly haul of whatever's in season. at most places, it works out to be about twenty bucks a week for more veggies than most people know what to do with. some CSA programs include more than veggies, and a lot of CSA farms offer locally-sourced extras like eggs or meat or flour as add-ons. you eat what's in season, and if you really have to you can go to the market or the grocery store to round things out.

our members have been getting their shares for  exactly a month now. over the past four weeks, we've fed seventy something households and two Toronto restaurants: mixed salad greens; several varieties of head lettuce including Romaine, iceberg, and buttercrunch; snow peas, snap peas, and shelling peas; two kinds of radish; three colors of beets and their delicious greens; rainbow chard and black, red, and green curly kale; arugula; beautiful buttery potatoes; five kinds of cabbage; scallions, leeks, fresh garlic, and garlic scapes to cook with; broccoli; a full range of herbs for cooking and drying, from dill and cilantro and parsley to thyme, sage, oregano, sweet marjoram and Russian tarragon; early spring perennials like asparagus and rhubarb; and starting this week, the sweetest zucchini you'll ever taste. over the next week or two we'll start seeing green, yellow, and purple stringbeans, cucumbers, onions - and it's only the first week of July. by the end of the month we'll be into tomatoes, early squash varieties, more potatoes, carrots... and by the final delivery, just after Thanksgiving, our members will need a second person to haul home their bags full of hearty fall vegetables.

it's time to stop looking at food as items on a restaurant menu, ingredients in a recipe. there is a time and season for everything. learn to cook it all, treasure it while it's here, and look forward to it when it's gone. treat yourself to an imported whatever if you want; lord knows I keep myself in tomatoes all year round. but, Wente, do not write down to me from a national newspaper about this shit because when it comes to making food, you and your little back yard of tomatoes know jack shit.

movie night

almost immediately we three interns came to the realization that our wide and varied media tastes align pretty fucking nicely. since our second week here we've been having regular movie nights, where we set up a laptop on the kitchen table, snuggle into the futon with some air-popped popcorn and a pipe of Old Toby's finest leaf, and let Hollywood hit us in the face again and again.

Tara picked first: a comedy by the Napoleon Dynamite people called Gentlemen Broncos (2009), a gem which should be seen by anyone who has ever written or been a fan of sci-fi and genre fiction. we followed that up with Predator (1987) featuring commentary by Christopher Lawson. by film three it was easy to see where this all was going: Aliens (1986), Starship Troopers (1997), a fieldtrip to the Peterborough Cineplex to suffer through Prometheus (2012), and last week a look back at when Ridley Scott knew how to make movies with Legend (1985).

tonight, obviously, it's Independence Day (1996).

midsummer

according to the Farmer's Almanac, it's Midsummer's Day: a rainy evening here in the Trent Hills, perfect for posting to blogs.

not that a bit of rain normally stops us working. lately we've been at it from six to six, through soupy low 40s temperatures and raging thunderstorms that blow up out of nowhere and soak down the afternoon's haze. Josh, meanwhile, never seems to sleep or rest at all. it's June, the craziest time of year for a farmer. this is the push: the cold frames are overflowing with things that need planting, but things also need to come out of the field and get distributed to CSA members, but harvest also needs to be taken to market, but the weeds are coming in cohorts thickened by every drop of rain, but pests are springing up left and right, but beds need to be made for all the seedlings outgrowing their pots, and etc.

even after sixty hours a week of it, I still love gardening. the greenhouse is my haven even on the hottest days, and planting is truly a joy. but it's become clearer and clearer over the past six weeks that farming on this scale, in this style, isn't the life I want, or at least not for a long while. the animals drive me nuts with their neediness and noise and stink. the sheep, with their constant bleating for more food even as they waste and spill and shit in what they're given; the pigs and their frantic squealing, a sound out of nightmare that fills me with a very primal urge to flee them; and oh god, just... the chickens. (more on chickens later, much more.)

Lucy the worried old goose and her three duck flock continue to charm me. they're quiet, polite, neat and pretty. they lay their eggs in carefully woven nests and eat from a wide dish of scratch like perfect ladies. and I cherish what wildlife I've been able to glimpse around the farm and during my morning runs: a fisher, lots of deer, chipmunks, red squirrels, raptors and songbirds of all sorts, snapping turtles, and once, a coyote looming over the chicken coop at dawn.

really, farming is like any other job in that by the end of the work week you're pretty much over it. and by quitting time yesterday afternoon, Christopher and I sorely needed a break from the farm. so he met me in Peterborough after market and we splurged on lunch at the Planet Bakery and drinks at the Only Cafe on its incredible riverside patio, then took in the sights and sounds of the Ode'min Giizis Festival. somewhere between wandering the aboriginal arts street fair, laughing at a typically shitty theatre production, and dancing our dead-tired tails off to A Tribe Called Red well into the wee hours of Midsummer's Eve, we managed to get our heads out of the field.

bring it on, Monday.

Job Description

Farming is sort of like this: You're a traffic cop at a 3-way intersection. From one road, a violent parade of unknowable and radically different creatures are barreling towards you. The other roads are clear. One leads to Death, and the other to Prosperity. Your job is to force each creature down one road or another, but if you send the wrong ones down the wrong road, you don't get paid. Also, your choice concerning any single creature may cause other creatures to try and press their way down one road or another. Sometimes you want this to happen. Other times not. 

dawn in the poppy brake

Christopher among the nearly five hundred eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes we put in today

a list of the tomatoes we're growing this season, in no particular order.

• Bonney Best
• Garden Peach
• Green Zebra
• Black Trifele
• Viva Italia
• Sun Gold
• Orange Paste
• Black Plum
• Boxcar
• Oxheart
• Pink Brandywine
• Charlie Tom
• San Marzano
• Tigerella

Snake's Ram Cave

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Every morning, I find a polar bear of a dog lying at the entrance to my house. We were strangers once. He used to follow behind while his alpha, Josh, led Emily and I around the property, like a mafia heavy protecting his don from a respectful distance while he deals with dangerous rivals.

Now, Buddy guards my house. If he finds me sitting down to take a swig of water, he reassures me with a massive paw on my shoulder and an ear full of snout.

I consider this an official endorsement - we've become family in just two weeks. And I don't just mean that Buddy has extended the offer and I've joined his club. It's mutual. We both live and work here.

Buddy gallops from field to field, barking at enemies either imagined or visible to him only. He barks at seagulls flying a kilometer overheard, warning them away from landing in our turf. It's goofy, until you consider that our lone goose, Lucy, used to be one of a half dozen. That half dozen was attacked in the night by coyotes, and it was only Buddy's valiant charge that scared the coyotes away and saved Lucy's life. 

Buddy guards our door, and he doesn't take it lightly. We're family, for a time at least. I'm here, and Buddy is here, so we're in it together. We'll both hold our end of the bargain - eggs in his dish, no coyotes in my bedroom.

observe the humble potato

Friday afternoon and Saturday morning were spent planting potatoes, one of the more labor-intensive crops in the garden.

right after lunch we filled a wagon with a load of finished compost from the pile in the barnyard. this rich black soil consists mostly of animal dung - combination of cow, chicken, and sheep - and is at five to seven years old no longer actively decomposing, which means all its nutrients and minerals are available to the plant.

farm boss Josh and Jesse (a perennial intern for the past eight years and MD who will be spending her summer vacation here at the farm) went through the intended potato patch with the cultivator. we hand picked out all the weeds that were left behind, then dug four trenches about eight inches deep and a foot and a half apart and stretching the length of the field. the potatoes we wanted to plant were being kept in the root cellar, which was a nice cool place to take a break after all that digging in the glorious hot sunshine. this year we're growing four varieties: Yukon Gold, Purple Viking, German Butterball, and Red Chieftain. we took the twenty kilo sacks of sprouted potatoes and walked the length of the trenches, dropping a spud every foot or so. then it was back to the wagon for a few barrows full of compost, spreading a shovelfull over each mother potato down the trench before burying them all nice and deep.

the mother potato will give rise to both the plant we see above ground, and the starchy deliciousness that will form below. I discovered last season that harvesting tubers is one of my favorite garden tasks: it's like digging for buried treasure that you can boil, mash, fry, or stick in a stew. when you dig up the root system of the plant to get to the potatoes, you can harvest all of them except the mother. she will have been devoured by the surrounding potatoes and the plant, and by season's end will be nothing but a rotten husk.

so, happy Mothers' Day!

misty morning view out our window.

Chick-a-biddy Acres

well, we're here!

we are Christopher and Emily, two new farmers officially one week into a six month internship. here is Chick-a-biddy Acres, an organic farm nestled in the rolling green of the Trent Hills a bit north of Rice Lake, five minutes west of Hastings, eight kilometers south of the Trans-Canada Highway, and 20 or so minutes east of Peterborough, Ontario.

our day starts around six o'clock. we get up in time to make a big breakfast, usually half a dozen farm fresh eggs between us, with porridge or toast, and coffee or chai. we meet our boss Josh and fellow intern Tara on the porch at seven sharp to get an idea of what's up for the day.

on a regular morning, barn chores are always first. we let the three ducks, Lucy the goose, the ewes and their lambs all out into the barnyard and pasture. we feed Snake the ram his breakfast of hay. we check on the chicks and chickens, and collect any stray eggs. and as of yesterday, we tend to four Tamworth weaners.

after that, every day on the farm is different. hell, every hour is. in the six and a half working days we've been here, we've already done a wider variety of tasks than I've ever experienced at any of my umpteen billion jobs in the city. this is, in a nutshell, what makes farming such a rewarding and exhausting way of life.

since it's spring we've spent a lot of time prepping fields for planting. new beds get turned up with the rototiller or cultivated with the tractor, then either hand-weeded in preparation for transplanted seedlings or raked clear of rocks to make way for the seeder. planting seedlings is one of my favorite tasks: laying out the seedlings at their ideal spacing, slicing into soft dark soil, setting the new plant up in its new digs and whispering grow.

today we started several varieties each of lettuce, bok choi, tat soi, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli on their journey to becoming tasty foods; last week we planted so many things I can't ever remember.

the greenhouse gets opened up around nine every morning, and one person spends an hour or so watering all the young plants inside. work in the greenhouse is generally reserved for rainy days, like tomorrow. the four of us will be rotating DJ duty on Josh's boombox as we sow seeds and re-pot seedlings, adding hundreds of new plants to the everflow out, out: from greenhouse to cold-frames to field.