Road trip! Part 4

So I must confess: none of the pictures were taken by me. I never actually get around to taking pictures. But Aunt Judy does. So all of the pictures on the road trip blogs? They came from her. And on Thursday, I went to visit Chaffin Family Orchards in Oroville, CA, by myself. So there are no original pictures of it. Instead I used some of their pictures from their website. Like this one:

This is Table Mountain, and the orchard is just below it. According to Chris Kerston, the farm manager and my tour guide, California is made up of micro climates. Table Mountain is hugely important to them. Why? The rock face soaks up all the heat of the sun during the day, and then that heat rolls into their orchard, helping their citrus, olives, and stone fruits grow. They don't have any hard frosts because of this. It's so cool! It really does seem to be true that in California, you can grow anything.

And they do grow lots of things! Oranges, grapefruits, peaches, apricots, plums, avocados, mission olives, persimmons, cherries, lemons, figs, mandarins (seedless clementines), nectarines, pomegranates. WOW. And the thing is, there really aren't any bugs in California, at least not when you compare with the southeast. Chris mentioned a few bugs they had to protect the olives from, but I really haven't seen bugs or flies since I've been out here.

So the fun thing about their orchard is that they're super smart. Instead of mowing underneath the trees with machines or using pesticides, they let the animals graze everywhere. I'd much rather listen to a goat nosh on some blackberries than put up with a huge mower struggling through the groves. And it makes so much sense! You feed the animals the stuff you don't want there anyway, and they produce eggs or milk or meat. And then from weeds, you get profit, happy land, and happy animals. Awesome.

Another sweet thing is that there are really awesome dogs with the animals. The Great Pyrenees dogs are trained- not by a farmer, but by an older dog- to bond with and protect the animals. Common predators around Chaffin Family Orchards include hawks, bobcats, mountain lions, and bears. Once the dog is trained, he stays with one kind of animal. So Tyler, in the picture to the left, is a goat dog. There are chicken dogs, cattle dogs, etc. For a girl like me who really doesn't like dogs or pets, they're actually pretty cool. Especially since they don't yap. I don't like yapping.

Until I visited this farm, I never knew there were so many varieties of chicken. Of course, there are Rhode Island Reds and Cornish hens, but there are also Speckled Sussex (absolutely gorgeous, really), Buff Orpington,Transylvanian Naked Neck, Australorp, and more varieties I can't even remember. They even have roosters! I didn't know why you'd have a rooster around laying hens since you don't want those eggs fertilized, but having a rooster around calms the hens down. Apparently all that estrogen can get a little overbearing.

After the tour, I got to help Julie out with her chores. Julie lives in Chico and works as a nurse. She plans to move to Missouri, Tennessee, or somewhere around these parts in early spring to continue learning about farming and then start her own farm. We fed and watered the chickens, including the broilers (Cornish Cross Hens), older laying hens (Rhode Island Reds), and younger layers (mix of breeds). If you've never been around chickens, I must tell you that they will eat anything. ANYTHING. If you stand around too long, they will peck you. If a tree drops a lot of fruit, it will disappear. If they get irritated, they will eat their own eggs and peck at each other. If you work with chickens, keep your cell phones close. Goats are nothing compared to these birds. But really, they're pretty great. And they mutter. You gotta love the early morning mutter.

At the end of the day, I left with a bag of mandarins, persimmons that I had picked- both fuyu and hachiya- and 2 thick, beautiful NY strip steaks. Yup, steak! I haven't eaten a steak in... years. I don't know how many years, but quite a few. It just so happens that Matthew, my cousin I'm visiting, is a trained chef. So I took those babies back to his place, and we had a Saturday morning steak breakfast. It was awesome. The NY strip tasted so good that partway through it, I stopped to fry an egg, sunnyside up, to go along with it. It was amazing. I'm happy to have eaten and be eating beef again.

I'm so thankful and glad that I got to visit Chaffin! I knew I respected their methods beforehand, but to see it all in person and experience it was really swell. And I never expected this, but I think I might actually be able to work with animals in a similar context. If there's any manner of farming that I'm interested in, it's homesteading: raising vegetables, fruits, and animals for you and your family/friends. Small to medium amounts, not hundreds of acres to large scale sales. Homesteading seems very whole and nourishing. Whatever I end up doing, I don't want it to be just another form of rat race, which is what commercial farming of any stripe- organic, biodynamic, or conventional- can turn into. And despite myself... I kinda like goats. They're cute.

The weekly log, v. 2: Wednesday

Up & at'em at 5:15! Yes ma'am, I was. We started work at 6:00 a.m. I was eager to do some planting, but instead, Kathleen & I dug potatoes... for six hours. And it wasn't bad really. Our speed apparently impressed our farm manager, Katherine (this does not happen. ever.), so it worked out well. And then lunch at 12:15! When I had planned to bottle kombucha... and it didn't happen then, but I ate loads of vegetables and some salmon, and my body said, "Thank you."

At 2:15 we started again in the greenhouse, processing more onions. This time I had a buddy, Kathleen again. I think we processed 7 1/2 pallets of yellow onions. We were set to get off work at 5:00 in order to make it to Waterpenny Farms for a potluck, but our small crew decided to stay back since we had to get to bed early. But instead of ending work at 5, we kept on until 6:45 in order to get all the tomatoes picked before the rain. Apparently the tomatoes will crack or get otherwise funky if you leave them out while it's raining. They were tasty.

With work finished, I skedaddled to the wash house to take a shower. I was so excited! My first shower since Saturday, and I'm pretty happy about it. I got my kombucha bottled, all 8 bottles of it, and will start another batch brewing before bed. Unfortunately, I cracked my beautiful & incredibly useful 3-gallon pickle jar, so for now I only have a small 1-gallon operation. I'm brewing quick & potent batches, though, by putting all 2+ kombucha mothers into the one jar. I tasted the newest batch, and it definitely seems more alcoholic. The previous batch even carbonated a little! I really want to get a huge jar so I can do the large batches again, but for now I'm too stubborn to pay $26 for an empty 5-gallon glass jar at the local hardware store.

The weekly log, v. 1: Tuesday

Lots of people that I talk to about the farm pose the question, "What exactly do you do there?" And since it's been so long since I've posted, I thought I'd challenge myself by doing one post for each day this week. Here goes!

Tuesday
The first day of the work week started really light for me. I spent Sunday night and Monday in the city, thanks to Z and Soo. I surprised myself by dancing from around 9 on Sunday night to around 4 on Monday morning. I can still do it despite my early bedtime! Thanks to Z for picking me up Sunday, and for the dances we had (more next time, please!). Monday I got to spend some quality time with Soo. I rode around with her while she worked, helped her pick out and move some bookshelves into her soon-to-be new digs, and we saw the movie Up. It was pretty sweet, but I wasn't in love with it like I expected to be. Nick Olinger drove me back to the farm last night, and we got in so late that he spent a night in the barn! There's a spare room now since Lil' Zach left (BIG *sniffle*), so Nick slept in there. This morning I made blueberry-zucchini pancakes and sent him on his way before I had some morning yoga/reading time. It was absolutely wonderful. Good to get off the farm, dance, and see other friends again.

I got this morning off because Zach & Georgia had a home inspection. They just bought a farm & house a little bit south of here (not sure where exactly), so I started work today at 1:00 in the greenhouse, processing onions. We have the onions all laid out on pallets to cure. Basically this means they're drying so that we can process them without having them rot. We take the whole onion, cut the green top and the roots, and then quickly rustle off any loose outer skin. So I did this to four pallets of beautiful red torpedo onions. I really enjoy their spicy, fiery flavor. After clearing out four pallets we had room to finish laying out the rest of the torpedoes and the yellow copra onions. Zach came just as I was sunscreening myself, and we loaded the onions and the compost into his truck.

With 6 crates of onions processed, it was time for me to go and help Dan & Kathleen with the Swiss chard harvest. Though all our markets are on the weekend, we harvest on Tuesday because we supply Potomac Vegetable Farms' CSA with vegetables on Wednesday. So we had to get 150 bunches of chard this afternoon. It was definitely spotty. The first two patches we picked were small and bug eaten, so there was more tending and less harvesting than usual. But by the third row, the chard was looking super nice, dark green, and there were even some large leaves. Daniel went to pick tomatoes with Katherine when we reached 100 bunches, and then Kathleen and I finished the last 50. Afterwards we washed them and made sure we counted correctly (we were 2 short, so I biked out to the field and grabbed 2 more bunches), then put them downstairs in the walk-in cooler. Zach pulled in about this time and we helped him unload all the onions and stack them on pallets. Did I mention my arms are stronger? Crates of onions are heavy, and today - for the first time - I was able to carry 2 crates of onions at once. Boosh!

We finished around 6:45. Kathleen & I closed the deer fences. Katherine stopped to offer me tomato seconds on her way to deliver them to the basement. When you work on a farm, you eat lots of vegetables, and they're nearly always seconds: the ones that aren't pretty enough for market, or have cuts in them, or a bug hole, or are slightly rotten. Sometimes, especially with tomatoes, they're perfectly fine quality, but they just look too gnarly. So I stuffed as many as I could into my backpack, along with the red torpedo seconds, and a bunch of chard, and went along my merry way after I checked out the berry bushes. It looks like the black raspberries are done, the wineberries are winding down, and the blackberries are just coming in. Tasty.

Ah, dinner. There's a potluck every Tuesday night at one of the neighboring farms, and tonight's was at Moutoux Orchard next door. I made a smoky fava bean hummus, and there was also roasted roots, beet & veggie soup, rice, and sausage & onions. Pretty tasty, but I cut out early because I was feeling really out of whack. And I decided to do this blog post, which has taken longer then expected. David and Penny just got back from the potluck bearing a crate of peaches and a pail of fresh eggs. EGGS! We haven't had farm eggs in at least a month, and we just got eggs! It's really really exciting for me since fish is expensive and I don't eat dairy or mammals. But for a farmer who sells eggs, it doesn't usually make sense to give other farm workers a deal on them because at market, people will pay $6/dozen for farm fresh eggs. ??!@*!#**?@! Clearly I don't understand, but I am very grateful to Rob Moutoux for the eggs. And I will tell him the next time I see him.

Tomorrow comes bright and early at 6:00 a.m. Zach went tonight to get 6,000 or 7,000 of the next round of plants for the autumn, which are brassicas: broccoli, savoy cabbage, brussel sprouts, collard greens, kale. Six or seven thousand. And that's what we'll be doing tomorrow, along with harvesting the last of the onions and some potatoes. I really like planting things! It has to be done fast, and it's super intense, and then you look up, and you've all planted an entire block of crops just like that. And that's why I'm going to bed right now.

Farm Life II: Life's an itch

Itch. ITCH! !@#$*?%&*#@!!

Yes, indeed. When you live in a barn, there's a lot to itch about. We sleep on foam pads and mattresses (I don't have a mattress since I was last to arrive- they ran out). I think the bedding has just been living in the barn along with the chickens and all manner of insects. And so now some of the insects live inside the foam pads or mattresses. Yup. Never boring, farm life.


The first foam pad I chose to sleep on left me itching with tons of new little bites. I never saw the bugs or felt them other than their biting. It was infuriating because I'd try to get rid of them, but there was nothing there I could see. Only once there was an ant crawling on my leg under the covers, and he was pretty big and easy to eradicate, but these other bugs... ? I guess they were bed bugs. At any rate, they're not my kind of party. AT ALL. After the 2nd night of sleeping and waking to the rhythm of invisible chompers, I decided I'd had enough. I was beginning to dread sleep and fear my bed, and after doing 9 hours of farm work, that does not fly. So I got another foam pad that was discarded by a fellow worker after he got a mattress. He said he didn't have any problem with it. And lo and behold, I've had a different experience! No maddening chorus of invisible itchiness. Yay!

I still get bug bites, but they're different. I'm pretty sure I have a spider bite on my calf, and my right ear has been bitten so much that it's swollen and red. I may spray the foam pad again with Citra Solv or even Bac Out. If anything will work, it's Bac Out- amazing stuff, that. I'm trying not to think about all those statistics regarding how many bugs you eat while you're asleep... let's just say I'm probably getting a little extra protein. We'll see how it goes. I just changed my sheets again, and this time I'm only using the pillow I washed after the bed bug incident in the hopes that my ears will be able to heal from all the bites.

For now, it's an ongoing experiment in how to avoid as many bug bites as possible as well as a surprise every morning to see what new bumps my body displays. I've seriously considered asking for donations from mattress companies, maybe getting bug-proof mattress pads or something, because we all get bitten. Helpful input is welcomed.
At this point there's an extra mattress up for grabs, but I'm a little hesitant to use it. It would probably be more comfortable and better to sleep on than just a foam pad, but what lives inside this mattress... ? Decisions, decisions. There will probably be more buggy blogs to come...

A change is gonna come...

on May 26. That is the day that I am scheduled to start work at Tree and Leaf Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Purcellville, VA. I'll be working there through October 31, learning everything there is to learn about planting, harvesting, and selling organic vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers. Woohoo!

YES, I am excited! I am on my way to the country, to learn how to farm sustainably and organically, to see whether or not I really want to do this rural farming thing that's been tugging at my heart for years now and that has become more and more insistent in the past 9 months or so. I know it may seem incredibly random, and I don't have a big explanation for it other than... I want to do this. I'm really excited to be moving on, getting out and about to explore new territory and adventure. I have never farmed before. Sure, I've had herb gardens and grown tomatoes, and I can usually figure out what to do with the food once it gets to my kitchen, but I have no clue about farming. I do know that I'm the second generation of my family with no dependance on the land or defining relationship to the seasons or the harvest, but I am keenly interested in living in relationship with the earth. My grandmother grew up in a family of ten children on a farm in during the 1920s. The only things they bought were coffee and sugar, and they had no idea there was a depression going on throughout the country. That's pretty powerful, especially when you consider the economic climate we face today, the rise of small, organic farms, and the unbelievable devilry of Monsanto.

And how does one explain the heart? It doesn't make sense, but the faint tattoo of the country calling to my heart has suddenly grown louder and louder.

This change does bring a lot of questions to the table, like what I'll do with my house and where I'll be in November and beyond.

As for the house, my aim is to rent it out to people I trust to take care of it, enjoy it, and pay rent on time and in full. I have not yet found those people. I did seriously consider selling it, and I met with my realtor to discuss those plans. But after sitting with the idea of selling for a few days, I feel a lot more comfortable with renting it. I know that it could be a huge hassle, especially considering the distance. So I'm aiming to rent it out but am still open to selling it - please contact me if you're interested in living in a gorgeous, redone Craftsman home.

And November? Right now I have no plans beyond work on the farm. A friend and fellow arts educator pointed me to Wolf Trap for possible job opportunities, so I may check that out, or I may winter in Knoxville or DC. I really don't know. I just finalized these plans this week, so I'm still excited about it all and haven't thought much past them. If you have more questions for me, feel free to post them here or e-mail me- I need people to ask me challenging questions since I know I haven't even begun to consider all points of the situation. And that's all for now.

Further up and further in!