I meant to get up and write about all the interesting things we’ve been doing this week, but that is going to have to wait one more day. However, I did get up this morning and wander through the tool sheds for pictures of what we have been using for the bulk of our work.
More to come soon!
-Farmer Liz
Another weekend has come and gone, and I’m reeling from information overload, lack of sleep, straight happiness and greens, greens, greens.
Friday was a day of weeding – hook and crooks, stirrup hoes and wheel hoes were out in full force as we traveled around the beds disturbing the soil around each plant and pulling out the bigger, nasty weeds. The onions and garlic down in the black dirt were an easy fix, and then we moved to the peas, lettuces and mesclun. On further inspection Matt and Jay realized that flea beetles have already begun to munch away at our dainty little Lacinato Dinosaur Kales and Arugalas over in the mesclun beds – and so the war against our insect enemies begins.
Our garlic bed will prove to be a daunting challenge throughout the year Some of the soil wasn’t turned as much as it could have been because of an onslaught of rain last fall that prevented too much tractor use, so there are patches of one of our garlic fields that is almost literally more weeds than garlic. We have already dedidcated hours to this fight as a team, and apparently Matt and Mateo had done the whole thing twice before the rest of us arrive. We arm ourselves with wheel hoes and dandelion weeders and hike on out past the compost piles for hours of weed thrashing. Canadian thistle and dandelions run rampant, and there roots are long and thick and a real pain to pull out from the bottom. Quack grass runs rampant between the rows – there are parts I can’t even push a wheel hoe through right now because the grass is so thick. But the garlic is our cash crop, and our babies need some TLC.
And if you’re still wondering what a wheel hoe is, hang on a little longer – we’ll take a tool tour later this week.
Friday afternoon presented itself with a tragic project- replanting shallots that didn’t make it through the first part of the week. I volunteered for this unsavory task before I realized the extent of the damage. I walked out to the bed behind the tunnel to find a massacre. Dozens of holes in the plastic where the shallot had literally been fried in the sun – after 48 hours, there was no sign of the little green shoot we had planted. This was a huge problem in the first band we had planted, apparently because we didn’t widen the holes in the plastic enough. We punctured the plastic with a trowel in four rows down the length of the black plastic, but if the plastic had some give around the hole edges and could move with the wind, it covered the shallot throughout the day and promptly toasted it.
I spent the afternoon sadly replacing our hundreds of fallen little guys, widening holes in plastic and putting rocks everywhere to prevent this mess from happening again. Though the task was sad, redundant as of Tuesday and a little frustrating, I think we all learned what not to do when planting this way.
We used stirrup hoes to work this bed of lettuces. Pretty, right?
The future bane of our existence – garlic fields. But look how nicely weeded this part is!
Throughout the day I scurried off to the greenhouse to water and check on our plants – on sunny warm days I could be over there every hour. Keith showed me how to pull out a plug from a random tray and test the soil to tell who needs more water when. The little cells need it more often because there’s no space for water. The tomatoes need to be watered heavily once a day in the morning, but the Mediterranean herbs prefer less water. Before I water the tomatoes, I take a broomstick handle and run it across the tops of the plants for a few minutes – this is called mechanical stimulation, and it simulates the feel the plant has in the wind outside. This makes for squatter plants instead of the leggy tomatoes that get a lot of length but not width. Pretty cool, right? This is what I’m learning. And I haven’t killed anything yet, which is also a good sign.
I left the guys this weekend and traveled down to my parents’ house for family times. My little sister is moving to California next week so we had a going away/graduation/Mother’s Day extravaganza. Nate bought my mother and me flowers and stole the show, as he does. My cousins all talked to me about the blog and asked me all sorts of questions about farming and living with smelly guys and commented on how happy I look. One of them gave me a stack of farm supply magazines and my dad and I almost convinced each other to drive up and look at an Allis G tractor an hour away. I am already excited to visit Jess out West when I’m unemployed in November. And I took stock of our own tool shed, and while it’s pretty empty comparatively, we are on the right track.
The Wagner Tool Shed.
We got tools! But need more. If you have some you don’t want holler at me.
Glenn Wagner manipulated our drainpipes into this band of four connected rain barrels with a spigot, because his mechanically-minded brain loves projects. It’s really cool.
I also got to tell some of my guy friends from home about my new adventure, which was fun and exciting and is totally off the wall from where they thought I would be. But they want to come visit, and that makes my day. And it didn’t hurt that throughout the weekend the farmers were sending me photos of their banjo-playing, town-wandering exploits and asking when I was coming back.
I’m eating a sweet potato for breakfast while Matt prices out heat mats and Jay ignores his wake up call for another few minutes. Matthew is home in Massachusetts for a few days and the house already feels emptier.
It feels good to be home.
-Farmer Liz
So this morning I woke up wide awake before 5am – Back on My Feet style. I texted my favorite team leader back in Philly, mumbled the serenity prayer and our RWA cheer to myself and hit the grass running. I only put in two miles – halfway a tangled pile of netting up in the herb beds derailed me for some time – but I tried to log some veggie shots and other photos of the place we’re calling home.
Last night I was talking to my friend/wife Sara, and in the midst of my rambling conversation she stopped me to say that this was the happiest she has heard me in years. I don’t know if it’s the sunlight coursing through my veins, the learning, or the work, but I would have to agree.
-Farmer Liz
I have never been covered in this much mud.
It’s soaked into my knees and caked down my legs and on my boots. It’s on my jacket, my shirt, my socks. Inside my clothes. On my face.
We spent this rainy day weeding garlic and planting shallots. The latter is a project we started yesterday, and it’s been increasingly messier as the rain starts to fall. Some of the guys yesterday helped Keith with a plastic layer, which sinks thin plastic into the ground that we plant right into and rip up at the end of the year, but I was with the others stabbing holes into the already-laid plastic (and let me tell you, my rows got a little ugly – the first big disappointing mistake of the season) and planting tray after tray of shallots.
I never knew the name of anything before now. I bought red onions, sweet onions, onions. Now I look and see Redwings, Conservers, Cortlands, Cipollinis and a slew of other words that weren’t in my vocabulary 24 hours ago. I must have held about two hundred saffron shallot seedlings in my hands today, I hadn’t eaten one for the first time until this past February.
Thankfully, we did about seven bands of planting during our brief window of opportunity, and we didn’t do it all completely by hand. Allow me to introduce you to the Water Wheel Transplanter.
Look at how cool this is! I get to ride on the back right because the seat is set for a very short person. Booyah!
The water wheel transplanter is an attachment for a bigger tractor that holds 160 gallons of water in these two giant tubes. Right now it’s set up with two seats in the back against the grounds. Above the seats are two racks for trays of plants. There are different wheels that have these spokes, like wedges, and as the tractor moves forward it digs holes into the ground, dumps some water into each hole, and the people in the seats drop the plants. At least with the onions, two people follow behind and cover the hole. Apparently it’s totally boring for the person driving the tractor in creeper gear for band after band, but riding it is pretty neat.
Matt and I began to set up poles to trellis our incoming peas. We pulled 8-foot fiberglass poles from the upper barn, a 25-pound sledgehammer and an iron post and headed out to our peas. Some antics ensued as I struggled to be manly with the sledgehammer and as we figured out that the only way to shove these poles into the ground for a few feet was for us to both sort of lean and jump on them simultaneously – which much have looked ridiculous because Keith came riding up on his tractor laughing pretty hard.
After some rainy garlic weeding, we headed into the high tunnel to uproot the last of some stubborn lettuce that messing with our ground cover and prepped the ground for Carmens, our Italian frying peppers. Man, I can’t wait.
The guys continue to entertain and inform. Matthew and Matt came back to Philly with me this past weekend as ran Broad Street with Back on My Feet, and they seemed to enjoy themselves. We hit up South Street, enjoyed some Yards and, at my friends’ annual Broad Street Brunch, some Philadelphia Brewing Company. Matt taught me how to make crepes, Jay is sitting here playing some throwback Bright Eyes, and Matthew continues to impress and sustain us with his baking.
They help me out when I’m not strong enough to move a wheelbarrow or too short to reach the top cabinet in the kitchen. They eat vegetables and grains and buy milk in jars but also have me eating eggs daily and bacon and pizza couple times a week. They have given me free rein to be a little bit gross – like not showering as much as we probably should be. Good thing they’re boys!
Today is probably a good day for a tour, right? Check out the photo montage. I wish there was an aerial shot of the property I could show you, but the landscape shots will have to do.
Have you smelled rosemary and garlic bread baking at 6am?
This is my Saturday morning. Woke up, picked herbs, baked bread that Matthew kneaded with herbs last night while I was making some headway through a bottle of white wine. I have a sprig of rosemary in hanging in my window, Matt put lilacs in his cabin this morning and Matthew posted a bouquet of blooming chives in our window. On Thursday and Friday, I learned about herbs.
Look at my darling early morning baker. He’s the best!
I would consider myself a cooking novice, most definitely. Other than basil and some parsley, most of what I’ve put on my food has come from a spice jar. But for people who like to cook, and like to cook well, Keith’s herbs are the best of the best.
Thursday we replanted tarragon in black plastic (which is convenient because it really keeps the weeds out, but we pull it up at the end of each season to reuse and to keep it from deteriorating, which Jay and Matt say is a huge task. Also, we had planted this tarragon without the plastic, but Keith backtracked because not having to weed would save us more time in the long run, – as someone who goofs up, I like to be reminded that it’s okay do it), and mulched, hoed and weeded beds and beds of herbs. Anise, sorrel, chives, garlic chives, more tarragon, winter savory, mint, hyssop and a maybe half a dozen others. As we went the boys showed had me taste everything. Matt smells everything we pass in the fields, and he and Keith explain their uses and popularity at the market.
Matthew and I finally finished our fourth band of potatoes and cut the rest of the spuds. He’s been keeping us up to our eyes in the most amazing breads and cookies, and as the two babies of the crew (1988 Libras, represent!) it’s nice to have someone around who’s also pretty new to this whole thing.
Matt took me to the tunnels and showed me how drip irrigation works. Drip tape runs the length of a row and regulates water dispersion over several hours. You hook it up to lay flat, which is hose that runs all over the place near the tunnels and can withstand tractors running it over constantly. This will feed our rosemary, basil, tomatoes and peppers in the tunnels.
Drip irrigation and Layflat keep our little guys watered
On Thursday I felt the weight of my learning curve. Twenty minutes into weeding Jay realized I was using the hook and crook, a neat little hoe designed specifically for Keith’s garlic, backwards. Womp. And we’re growing a ton of things I’ve never heard of or tasted before – summer savory, sorrel, quince? I was also the fool who left her boots out to dry overnight, which was fine until the 4am thunderstorm. I dumped about an inch of water out of my boots Friday morning.
Friday we went back out in the herb beds to paper mulch, weed, weed, and weed. Planted basil in the high tunnels, thinned tiny basil seedlings, and Keith suggested I start learning the ins and out of the greenhouse and potentially take over that area of the farm duties. More on that later!
Friday is Friday everywhere, whether you’re in an office or on a farm, and we counted down excitedly to 6pm. The boys have been doing pretty much all of our dinner cooking, with a delightful brinner Thursday of homefries, eggs and bacon, and Tacos on Friday. Two of them are coming down to Philly with me for the weekend while I run Broad Street. I’m just feeling good about the whole living situation in general. Plus, living with four guys gives me permission to be a little gross (aka not showering).
At night on the way to the store we pass a bunch of ponds that are alive with spring peepers. Jay found a fiery red salamander in the mulch and held a bumblebee in his hands while it trundled around looking for a way out of the high tunnel. There are garter snakes in the mulch and swallows in the barn. I caught myself just sitting up in the herb beds this morning listening to the birds and the hum of the woods around me, and though I’m excited to adventure into the city with some new friends for the race this weekend, I am also excited to spend more weekends here, wandering property with Kobe and, as Jay said in the tunnel with the bee, just being.
May 2, 2012
Tuesday and Wednesday have flown by in a torrent of projects while I desperately try to keep my head above water.
This rain has been no help, either. We are doing tasks that need to get done, but I’ve wasted three pairs of socks today alone, and the chance of rain drops tomorrow but skyrockets on Friday with a chance of thunderstorms. I’ve always hated rainy days, but this takes everything to a whole new dimension of draggggg.
On Tuesday I got my official work papers and we set to work in the greenhouse. We turned on NPR and listened to the May Day broadcasts as the guys showed me how to seed. At some point I’ll be able to look and know what a 128 flat and a 96 flat looks like (they are all 10×20, but the number of cells in all of them is radically different), but it’s all still foreign to me. We fill the flats -128 for basil and lettuces and 144 and 162 for mesclun) and meticulously dole out 3-4 seeds of red chard, dandelion, lettuces and the greens for our mesclun, some by hand and some with a handheld electric seed separator. Lettuces are left on the surface and covered with a paper towel to help aid with germination, but other seeds are covered in dirt.
Then we started tomatoes in the high tunnels. This will become a huge, beautiful project over the season as we trellis them to the season and they pretty much take flight, but right now we’ve got about 350 tomato plants at their tiniest, and today Matthew and I finished planting and I watered them all. For tomatoes, we added a trowel of 2-4-2 for nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium and a trowel of compost. We planted them in black plastic that Keith will have us pull up at the end of the season and reuse.
In the middle of the day a potential intern named Chelsea came into the mix. Chelsea is from California and has worked on farms previously, and is super knowledge and into farming. Also, because she was spending the night Keith gave us money for our all-day anticipated pizza party. Eggplant pizza with the team? Totally excellent.
Then we headed out into the herb beds to rake, compost and mulch. There’s paper mulch and woodchips and a number of other covering I’ll have to elaborate on later, but it’s been really neat to see how they vary on every crop.
And then, of course, we cut more potatoes.
Wednesday came and I got up at 5:30 in solidarity to my Back on My Feet running group and ran/walked five miles around the property – the roads here are a little too treacherous to run.
I took a couple photos in the gray light of dawn to give you a little better picture of where I am, but of course I’ll have to take a gazillion more really give you the scope of the place.
Home Sweet Home!
Here it is in all its glory – our garlic. About 70,000 of it.
We have several different kinds of soil on the farm – this is black dirt, and last week the boys planted rows of onions in it. Can’t wait to eat ’em.
Today I potted on sage, which means I divided little sage seedlings from big pots into smaller cell flats that we’ll harden off and then plant in the fields. Hardening off is something I’d never heard of before, and it consists of moving greenhouse plants to stands outside where the little seedlings learn how to weather the elements. Makes a lot of sense, right? From here we moved outside and, in the drizzle, composted and mulched a bed of rhubarb (after I finished watering all the tomatoes, of course), and then Jay and I planted marjoram in a neighboring bed. In the midst of this, Keith implied that I should consider taking over greenhouse duties, which would include being around to water the greenhouse plants and learn to take meticulous care of them, which is simultaneously really neat and fairly stressful But Matt assures me it’s easy enough and I’ll be able to pick up some skills quickly, so we’ll see.
After lunch and after marjoram planting we spent the afternoon dividing mint, which meant we had to dig up and separate three different types of mint from some old beds and replant them in new beds. Sounds easy? Think again. It swallowed most of our afternoon. We would pitchfork up huge sections of mint, pull out the root systems and move them into the furrowed plots, which, when we finished, looked a little bit like a valley instead of leveled land. It’s a drag, but I furrowed a hole bed myself, and looking at those dugs rows made me feel more accomplished than anything else.
And now I’m beat. Totally and utterly exhausted. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.
-Farmer Liz
First off, let me just say that if you are new to this story, you should read this quickly for some context. Now, read on!
—
Have you ever walked into a place and felt immediately at home?
I haven’t, not really. I am usually totally neurotic in new situations.
But as I got out of the car tonight with Jay and Matt from a trip through the tri-state area, I felt like I’ve been living here for months.
I must admit, when I showed up Sunday morning and discovered that of the five interns I was the only girl, I was a little taken aback. I had prepared myself for the mix of guys and girls, the awkwardness of sharing a house and all that that entails.
I made it to the farm about fifteen minutes before a class from Vassar College arrived for their Contemplation and Landscape class. Conveniently, Keith showed them around and told them all about the property and its history, so I got a helpful updated tour and got to meet Matthew and Matt, two of the other interns who were lounging around on their day off. Matthew is from Massachusetts and had been here for a week. Matt has returned here for a third season. Jay, who I met later in the day, worked here last year and came back to live and work again. We’re roughly the same age, here for similar reasons and have already taken to eating meals and lounging around after work together.
The guys all play guitar, and Matthew and Jay bake bread. What more could I ask for?
As Vassar students asked us and Keith all sorts of questions about the farm and farming and other subjects I couldn’t really speak to yet, I caught myself staring at one of the students. Of 26 20-somethings in this random class at a college I’d never heard of at a farm I’d just arrived at, I ran into Anna, a girl I went to the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts with for a summer back in high school. When these sorts of random things happen, and they have been with some frequency in the past year or so, I feel like I’m being led by some higher force in the right direction.
Matthew offered to show me around the intern space. He was living with Jay in a small intern house on the edge of the property. Matt and the mysterious fourth intern I haven’t met yet have posted up in the two standalone cabins. And beside the house sat am empty modular home with three bedrooms.
“We cleaned for you,” said Matthew as he showed me into their house and offered me some of his freshly-made garlic and rosemary bread. I didn’t even need to see the room at that point – I was throwing my stuff into the third room of their – our – house.
At some point during all this the boys informed me that Keith had a rooster that needed to go. Though Keith typically only keeps chickens for eggs, this extra rooster was causing strife in the henhouse, and sometime since Matt’s arrival he decided he was going to take care of this.
Long story short, I had not expected anything like the escapade that followed, but the guys caught the rooster, gave it as merciful a death as they could manage (they watched an inordinate number of YouTube videos to prepare for this task), and Matthew and Jay made this fantastic stew we had for dinner tonight.
After a brief chase, the culprit was apprehended.
Rosemary, thyme, potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and yes, our dear rooster. And it was delicious.
I cannot articulate how amazing this was. An honorable end for an honorable bird. And my cook housemates already blow me away.
It was not what I expected on my first day on a vegetable farm. And work hadn’t even started.
I slept straight through the night last night – which is something I haven’t done in months.
This morning we rallied in the greenhouse at 8am for our daily tasks list. Today was potato day, and we spent hours moving half a dozen different types of potatoes from the basement of our house, sorting by size and cutting bigger potatoes into smaller pieces, dunking them in T22 – an organism-based fungicide that is organic and protects the harvest from disease – and planting them in one of the upper lots.
We put 500 pounds of potatoes into the ground today, and that’s only half of what will be in there. I learned more about potatoes than I ever would have expected – I mean, have you ever seen a blue potato? It’s arguably one of the most beautiful blues I’ve ever seen in nature.
This year Keith bought his potatoes from Maine Potato Lady (who is the owner of this particular picture). Beautiful, right?
Today a driver arrived with a 550 pound barrel of fish emulsion. Sounds gross, right? Apparently Neptune’s Harvest is known for its seafood based fertilizers, which will go in the orchard and on some of the crops throughout the season.
Tonight the four of us sat down for dinner – rooster stew, freshly-baked bread and a salad made from mesclun and kale from the high tunnels – and, like I said, it’s like we’ve been here for months. Jay and Matthew sit in the kitchen and take turns playing Andrew Jackson Jihad covers, Matt wanders in and out of the house, they take turns reading, rearranging the furniture and playing Starfox on Jay’s N64. It feels like freshman year of college a little bit, but it’s not an unwelcome feeling right now.
We went for a drive tonight, and it was breathtaking how dark it was after being in the city for so long. I miss Philly, for sure, but the sky out here is incredible, and the air is clear and crisp.
I’ll try to get more technical about the farming as I wrap my mind around all of this. But bear with me as I get my kid giddiness out.
I’m sure things will get tough, rough and dirtier as the season progresses. But right now, I feel nothing but excited.
-Farmer Liz
I’ve been home from the Phillies v. Cubs game for over an hour, but I can’t sleep.
My house is a disaster. Bags of food, clothes, housewares and junk are piled sky high in the living room. I spent my afternoon assimilating my compost into the back alley dirt instead of trying to clean my walls. I haven’t finished moving stuff up from the basement, or taking my pots and pans out of the kitchen, or pulling posters from my wall. I’ve given no thought to disassembling the dining room table or cramming this disaster into my car.
Though maybe not right away, I’m going to miss South Philly. Its sketchy corner stores and wary neighbors have been a part of my life since my sophomore year of college, when Nate was living down here and we were causing all sorts of ruckus. Ricky, our most friendly neighbor and scrapper extrardoinaire, is openly sad to see us go. In the past 48 hours I’ve had my last Tony Luke’s sandwich, Benna’s Open Fire, Noche pizza, La Colombe coffee, Wired Beans baked good, Conshohocken Café wrap and Citizens Bank Park hotdog. Needless to say, I’m feeling more than a little queasy.
This morning I dumped a mess of un-moveables out on the curb that vanished within an hour. I’m meeting up with a friend I haven’t seen in eight years to pass on some furniture in the morning, when Glenn Wagner makes his guest appearance in town for all of two hours. I had my last Back on My Feet Run (and I didn’t cry – though barely), and I stopped by La Salle to catch up with a couple of friends and former bosses. And if I can get this mess from my house into my car and my parents’ truck tomorrow morning, I’ll be ready to roll.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m excited. It’s just that right now I’m feeling a little more melancholy than farm ready. Everyone in my world has been incredibly supportive, and the past two weeks have done nothing but prove that over and over again. At an Adams clan wedding last weekend, about a hundred aunts and cousins shared their excitement and wished me luck on my new adventure. Nate threw me a really sweet going away party with some city friends with similar sentiments.
Last week, I came home from a Sixers game to find this perched on my desk. My darling roommate Olivia, who has been nothing but wonderful despite my leaving, strikes again.
My dear friends and coworkers at Child Advocates had a lovely sendoff for me and our interns on Wednesday. Potluck, ahoy! As I melted into a delicious, starch-induced coma, my boss Frank handed me a bag of farm gifts – gardening tools and gloves, a really phenomenal utility knife and the sweetest words from my coworkers. Sonja sent me off with a bouquet of sunflowers (my unspoken favorites), Chris made me a beautiful necklace, and Sandra presented me with a totally adorable “Farm Chick” shirt that was enjoyed by all.
I was doubly pleased to catch my boy John Cusack as a Stephen King character in this photo - clearly also wishing me luck.
Bob, my wonderful office mailman, also brought me a delightful sendoff gift. Bob is a member of the Pennsylvania Gourd Society – one of the only guys and one of the only Philadelphians. He’s been sharing all this interesting info about the nature of gourds – how the EPA uses them to absorb toxins from sites, and how he grows and crafts his work. So I was totally thrilled when he arrived Wednesday morning with a Mini Martin Gourd vine for me to take on my travels, and a small ornament he’d decorated. Stay tuned for more on this – I will certainly be keeping you updated on our little gourd’s progress.
Best mailman ever?
Thursday night I met up with some of my runner gals, work gals and other friends, and my BoMF friend Sarah gave me the most helpful gift of all – a native’s map and guide to Port Jervis!
Inside the folder are lists of town highlights, surrounding area hot spots and pamphlets and trail maps for hiking. I am totally stoked to explore.
It hurts to leave my amazing second families. I know I shouldn’t really feel that way – Philly is only going to be three hours away. But I didn’t study abroad while I was in school and I’ve never traveled very far from the people I love. I’ll be back a ton, for sure, but something about this move feels more final than the others – maybe that’s why I am sitting here, this close to midnight, unpacked.
So long, South Philly. We had a good run. I’ll be back to visit you soon – with vegetables!
-Farmer Liz
When I finally decided I was going to give this farming thing a go, I had to make sure I knew what I was doing before I told anyone about my plans. Unfortunately, Craigslist doesn’t have a lot of agricultural job postings.
I am notorious for long, wordy, fruitless Google searches. I’ve spent hours searching through listings for the phrase “room into lake” to find this:
So I went into my search for “organic farming jobs” more than a little skeptically. All I knew was that a dear friend of mine from my days at the Collegian had said her friends were heading off to travel and do farm work – and I thought the program started with a W.
As it turn out, I would of course stumble upon WWOOF pretty early in this quest – though not as soon as PASA. The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture offers a number of services for members and folks interested in sustainable and organic farming, which includes job postings. And that’s where I found Snipes farm, where I would have my first interview.
Snipes Farm was appealing for a slew of reasons. It was local (Bucks County), it was huge, it taught farm-to-school programs and summer camps and, on inspection, it was beautiful. The house that the interns lived in was quaint and beautiful, the growing fields were sprawling and diversified, and Brad, the guy who interviewed me and the young Jersey hippie who was also there for an interview, was passionate and engaging about his work.
I was still in the early throes of guilt about sneaking away on the weekends to potentially leave my job, but as we fed the chickens and tromped across the grounds on that unnaturally warm January day, everything about this trip felt right. I texted my roommate, my references, my sister, Nate. I wanted to be a farmer. And while I didn’t get the position at Snipes – they took a couple on for the season, though had they chosen to single folks as interns, I was told I would have been one of them – I had some reasonable idea of where to search next.
I fired another few letters of interest off into the Internet farming abyss and looked briefly into WWOOF – World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. This was what my friend on the newspaper had been talking about. WWOOF is wildly popular network which links licensed volunteers with organic farms across the world. Woofing is a great way to travel. You get to live in cool areas on the short term in exchange for labor, and I’ve met a bunch of folks who have done this to great success. But I wanted something a little more stable, somewhere I could stay for awhile and, if possible, something that paid. After all, I was going to have to look Glenn Wagner in the eye and tell him I was leaving my job for this. Something with a cash incentive would ease that pain.
Then I found NEWOOF. NEWOOF, or North East Farmers on Organic Farms, is a directory similar to WWOOF, but you don’t pay to be licensed. It’s sponsored by the New England Small Farm Institute and lists regional farm apprenticeship placements. I sent away a few bucks for the 2011 directory and found an amazing world I didn’t know existed – in Pennsylvania and in the surrounding states farmers were transitioning land, plowing with oxen and hiring young interns who wanted to learn how to get back to the earth the right way. And Keith Stewart was one of them.
Keith had a comprehensive listing and was engaging and helpful from my first tenuous e-mail. And when I knew I was going to send over an official letter of interest, I ordered his book, which documents his own adventures on his 13-acre vegetable farm. I took another weekend to drive up and spend the day meeting Keith and his wife and learning about the farm, and as we munched away at some mesclun from his high tunnels, I knew this was where I wanted to be. If you haven’t read any previous posts, let’s just say you’ll be hearing more about this farm soon.
That being said, I had heard back from a couple other farms in the meantime, and as Keith met with other applicants and geared up to call my references, I headed out to western PA with my mom to meet Carrie Megginson and Dan Earnest at Buckland Farm, a vegetable and hog operation that also operates a bed and breakfast near Raystown Lake, one of my family’s favorite haunts. Dan and Carrie were lovely and welcoming. We met their friends who come to help out with the farm, their most recent Woofer who was in town for a week, and a D.C. chef-turned-farmer who was taking a sabbatical to learn about the origins of food and to help the farm establish some more ties in the restaurant business.
These folks were relatively new to the farm scene, but their operation was incredible. Chickens ran wild near the house and the barn where over a dozen piglets slept in a giant pile under a heat lamp. This season they discussed planting morels and watercress along the stream for foraging crops. Dan took us through fields that grew a wide range of crops, from hops to salsa ingredients, up to the woods where their grown hogs lived, foraged and looked impressive. The pigs had cleaned out all the extraneous brush from the woods and were looking chipper and enormous.
The cutest little pigs you ever did see. I mean, besides Babe.
I stood petting the 850-pound papa pig and, while thoroughly struck by the magnitude of the project, I knew in my heart of hearts I was too much of a wimp to raise some pigs and then eat them later. Maybe that will change in time, but my head’s not there yet. But at the end of the day, I was humbled by Buckland Farm’s hospitality, and hope that I can someday be as diversified, ambitious and, well, cool, as them.
As I watched this 850-pound guy roll over for a belly rub, I knew I couldn't hack it on this farm - at least not yet. I may have to be a vegetarian veggie farmer for life.
I was on a weekday vacation with Nate up in the Poconos when my references began to text that Keith had called them. I raced us off to somewhere with actual Internet access and sure enough, there it was – an e-mail saying that he would be delighted to have me on board for the season.
And the rest, my friends, is watercress.
-Farmer Liz
At 5:15 am this morning I was racing through South Philly, determined not to be late to my Back on My Feet run, when my father called. My blood ran cold when I saw his name lighting up my phone, and I steeled myself, already ramped up for potential hysteria as he told me someone was dead.
“Dad?”
“Yo. Call your mother and get Dave the Farmer’s phone number. I need to know if the part of the field he didn’t plow is gonna erode into the pond if it rains.”
My end of the line is silent. So, no one is dead.
“I need to know if I should get some hay bales to put around for now, because if it runs into the pond I –WE’LL– get a fine.”
“Dad, it’s five in the morning.”
“Well you’re up, aren’t you?”
My father is unlike anyone else I have ever met. I took a class about Vikings (yes, Vikings – and it was an HONORS class) my senior year of college, and it was probably the closest I’ve ever come to understanding the man who I lived with for 18 years.
This picture may have actually inspired me to take that Vikings class. True story.
Glenn Wagner’s childhood, from what ex-cops and relatives have told me at parties over the years, was full of beating up jocks, sneaking off with motorcycles as a 13-year-old, and maybe or maybe not graduating high school. He rented a welder’s shop when he was 19 to start his own auto body shop, made enough to pay for the building, and to this day works in that shop. He married my mom, put us up comfortably and sent me and my sister off to college on days that start between 4-5am and end, on good nights, between 6-7pm. He still likes to ride motorcycles, go on physically challenging adventures (especially if he can bring Strider, our Rottweiler), work constantly when he’s on vacation, and avoid people whenever he can.
He is, if you haven’t gleaned this yet, the hardest working man I know.
So it stands to reason that I was nervous about telling him of my farm plans most of all. He did not warm to the idea right away – by which I mean, he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of me leaving a stable, paying job with health insurance and benefits and a slew of guaranteed incomes and protections, to go do something that I had essentially no knowledge of. He had a lot of questions, and a lot of cautionary stories – this is really hard work, it’s too hard to make money, how are you going to learn how? Tell me again why we sent you to college?
That all being said, within two days of sharing my intentions, my mom called me after work on night and I could hear him in the background directing her to give me Jeff Moyer’s phone number. Jeff is the farm director at the Rodale Institute, which is an institution that anyone with even a mild interest in green things should check out. He is apparently friends with my dad from way back, and is pretty amazing at what he does. And if Glenn’s kid was going to run off and become a farmer, she was going to need to talk to the best.
I applied to the institute’s Agriculture Supporting Communities intern position, but accepted a spot on Keith’s farm before I heard back. But I know now that Jeff is a phone call away when we have any questions, and I know my dad wouldn’t have put us in touch if he didn’t think I could do this, and do it well. Glenn has since talked to roughly a thousand farmers, figured out which rototiller piece I’ll need to buy to stuck on the back of his backhoe, and has expressed excitement at my departure from an office and, more importantly to him, the mysterious, crowded, loud, trafficked, unappealing city. From ages fourteen through twenty we struggled to speak to each other without screaming, and knowing almost definitively that we have turned that particular corner is worth all the career changes in the world.
My parents bought the farm in Lehigh County to retire to, but they have taken to the idea of us working together with more fervor than I could have ever hoped. I mean, if Glenn Wagner is thinking of buying hay bales so our two-acres don’t wash away on his way to work at five in the morning, he’s clearly on board. And I wouldn’t prefer to have anyone more than him in my corner.
I did call Dave, by the way. He got a kick out of my father’s early morning concerns, but assured us that the seventy yards of grass leading up to the pond will prevent that sort of washout, and as soon as weeds or red clover start growing in that patch, the soil will firm up. So we’re good to go, for now.
This morning as we hashed over Glenn’s pre-dawn projects, my mom said that she felt happier working on this farm stuff than she has in years. Her and my dad run the shop together – she knows small businesses inside and out, and she’s already excited about bailing at the office and coming to work , or at least to hang out and watch me work, in the field. And I have a feeling that Glenn will be right behind her, shovel in hand, probably revved up to tell me what I’m doing wrong, but really there to help his kid.
-Farmer Liz
Farmer Liz 