Gleaning

Sometimes it seems that the decision to become farmers is a selfish one. We get to be outside under the sun all day, hang out with cute animals, play in the dirt and eat delicious food. Luckily, the farmers we work for are not going to let us get away with having this much fun without also giving back to the community.  But, besides selling at the farmers’ markets, what can farmers do? They’re poor!

Actually, farmers often throw away a huge percentage of their crops. Jonathan Bloom quotes farmers who do not sell between 25% and 50% of their crops in his book American Wasteland. So our farm is organizing a “Gleaning” project which aims to reduce waste of this valuable food. Not only are we committed to sending our excess crops to the local food bank, but we are also coordinating with other local farmers so that we can harvest their excess crops and bring them to the food bank too.

The project is still in its infancy, be we’ve already seen some success. One of our farmer friends called us last week and said they didn’t know what to do with a whole greenhouse full of spinach. Our little team of four farmers went over the next day and harvested 32 pounds of the nutritious green. It only took an hour and then a quick run to the food bank. Now, our community members who cannot afford to buy all the groceries they need, will be getting healthy, organic greens.

Most of us love to hate on vegetables, so maybe this doesn’t seem like such a wonderful donation. But I have thought for a long time that the “organic” movement is an elite one. Only those with money can afford to eat healthy. As farmers, I realize that it will be very important to help make nutrition accessible to everyone.

Many of you may be familiar with the amazing San Francisco Food Bank, where there is a huge variety of fresh vegetables available every week. We do not have anything like that here in Connecticut. Our spinach was the only produce available that did not come in a can at this food bank. Hopefully we can up the bar a bit more over the course of the year.

The End of an Egg-Eater

Collecting eggs is usually an easy and peaceful job. It’s as simple as opening up the backdoor of the mobile chicken coop, scooping the eggs out of the empty nest boxes, and putting them in a basket. A gentle pat on the backside of any hen who decides not to get up when I open the door is usually enough to get her to move for long enough to grab the eggs she is sitting on.

From time to time, I come across the odd hen who decides that she is not going to move, no matter how many times I gently nudge her on the backside. They are prepared for war, and they make sure to land a peck or two on my hand before I have what it is I have come for. It can be a bit sad to take those eggs. In this weird way, it kind of seems like kidnapping.

I have less patience for those chickens who have figured out that their eggs taste pretty darn good. Every once in awhile, a nest box will have a broken egg or two, and it’s clear that it was no accident. Some little chicken got hungry for eggs.

Realizing you have an egg-eater is the easy part. Catching the egg-eater is where it gets difficult. After all, there are better things to do than sit in the chicken coop all day waiting for someone to get hungry.

Some people claim that egg-eaters can be reformed. When the livestock manager here realized that someone had developed a taste for pasture raised eggs, he tried two of the tricks that supposedly can cure a wayward hen:

1.     Putting golf balls in the next boxes. Perhaps this will convince the egg-eater that their previous experiences were aberrations. The hope is that they will begin to think that eggs are actually solid and not full of delicious yolk.

2.     Putting curtains over the nest boxes. If they can’t see the eggs, they can’t peck the eggs.

These tricks of the trade failed to convince our chicken to turn over a new leaf. So, last week, when I saw a hen hunched over a nest box containing a broken egg, yolk dripping from her beak, something told me this might be our egg-eater. Luckily, at that moment, I remembered a lesson Greg and Maureen taught me during my first week at Gentle Giant. If you are trying to catch a chicken, screaming and running at it full speed is not an effective technique.

After I captured the egg-eater and placed her in the most spacious jail cell ever, an abandoned horse stall, with a bit of water so she could wash down her snack, I alerted the livestock manager to my discovery. After thinking it over, he uttered the words I was hoping to hear: “Do you feel like chicken this weekend?”

Lesley and I were both excited to practice the butchering skills we had learned from Greg this summer. It’s not that we have a thing for killing chickens, but we wanted to make sure that we still remembered how to do it properly. 

After the egg-eater’s sentence was carried out on the chopping block, Lesley held her upside down to make sure she bled properly.

This summer, Greg’s mechanical chicken plucker could remove nearly all of the feathers in around 15 seconds. We didn’t realize how good we had it! It took us more like 20 minutes doing it by hand.

Here is our chicken moments before we put her in the stockpot. For two years, she provided the farm with countless delicious eggs. For one week she provided us with several chicken sandwiches and four quarts of rich and tasty stock. She is gone, but not forgotten.

Maple Sugar

 
If you’ve ever read Little House in the Big Woods, there are a couple of things that have probably stayed with you:

1.     How adorable it is to read about little children playing with lead bullets and then sticking their fingers in their mouths

2.     How much fun maple sugaring is

Needless to say, when Lesley and I discovered that they make maple sugar at the farm, we were pretty excited. We were only a little nervous when people expressed doubt about this year’s maple sugar harvest because of the mild winter. We knew the ghost of Laura Ingalls Wilder wouldn’t let us down.

Just about every morning when we get done feeding the animals, we make our way around the farm collecting the sap from all of the buckets. Before we came here, we knew that you have to boil the sap and evaporate a lot of water to make maple syrup, but we were still a little startled to learn that it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple sugar. If it took 100 gallons of sap to make a gallon, it would still be worth the effort because maple syrup is amazingly delicious and farms can also make around $100 per gallon. So if a farmer is lucky enough to have maple trees, it can be a nice source of income during the winter months when there isn’t a whole lot else to sell.

All of the sap we collect gets taken to another local farm that has an evaporator. Yesterday, we dropped off around 200 gallons of sap along with bottles to be filled with maple syrup. We got to spend some time in the sugar shack learning more about the whole process. 

With all of the maple syrup that we’ll be surrounded by for the next five weeks or so, it is hard not to find excuses to put it on everything.

Getting ready for Spring

It sounds crazy, but I can already feel my internal clock adjusting itself with that of the farm animals and the sun. Every night we have to close the doors to the chicken coops so that predators can’t eat all our egg layers.  But, we cannot accomplish this task until all of the chickens have already entered the coop on their own volition (It is nearly impossible to herd chickens). This only happens as the sun goes down. So now, I notice the most minute changes in the time that the sun sets. It seems much later now than when I arrived on the farm, although it’s only been 3 weeks…and about 15 minutes change in sunset time.

With that said, as the days get longer, the farm managers, plants and animals begin to anticipate spring. Here is what we’re doing around here to prepare:

 

We have separated all of the pregnant sheep from the rest of their flocks. We keep the mothers (called Ewes) grazing close to the barn so that we can monitor them for the next 5 weeks or so for signs of anything abnormal that might jeopardize their big day. In March, hopefully we’ll have between 10-15 little lambs running around!

The big white sheep are called Texels and the little brown sheep are Shetland sheep.

Derek and I have been pruning apple trees for the last few days. We clearly have no idea what we’re doing.  But, it is important to prune off all the dead, unnecessary, or just-plain-ugly branches so that the fruit on all that’s left will flourish. This needs to happen before the tree begins to show any spring buds. We cheer each other on when we make “Decisive Moves”, which means we cut a HUGE branch off that may or may not have been a “Smart Move”. And I think we are slowly learning how to do this right. 

Derek and the livestock manager have built a summer home for the pigs! The pigs will be moving to a new pasture in the spring and need a shelter. During this process Derek learned the basics of building a log cabin. I will use this as leverage one day when I want a log cabin: “Don’t you care about me as much as those pigs?”

And finally, I have been working with our garden manager to get the year’s calendar and garden map together. We will be planting about 100 different varieties of vegetables on about 1 acre of land. It’s trickier than I imagined trying to get the timing and placement right for seeding, transplanting and rotating of all the crops. This is our map of the garden so far. 

So, although it’s still wintry and slow right now at the farm, things are going to be picking up really soon.

 

 

Morning Chores

The word “chores” has all kinds of negative associations, but I have to say that morning chores are one of my favorite things about being on the farm. Every morning at around 8 am, Lesley and I slip on our boots, and head out to feed the pigs, sheep, llamas, chickens, and miniature pony.

The pigs are always especially happy to see us, and before we even have the chance to scoop their grain into the feed bucket, they poke their heads out of their little hut and begin grunting with excitement as they hurry toward their feeders. 

After feeding the pigs, we make the rounds, giving the sheep and llamas some fresh hay and letting the chickens out of their coops. When it is cold like it has been, we also break up the ice in the water troughs and scoop it out so the animals can drink all the water they want. Sometimes they enjoy a little morning back scratch. 

I love this little sheep in particular. Every morning, we put hay in the side of the feeder so Tina, the guard llama in the background, doesn’t have to bend down too far to get something to eat. This little sheep refuses to eat from the lower part of the feeder where all of the other sheep eat from and gets up on its hind legs to eat from the side.

Last but not least, we feed Coco, the miniature pony. She was once the companion of a full-size horse who recently moved to another farm. While the owners are looking into getting another miniature pony to keep her company, she is spending her days with a small flock of sheep.

It’s a pretty basic routine, but it is such a contrast to my mornings as a teacher when everyday I repeated the same frantic routine of running from the train station to the bagel shop to the copy machine to my classroom just as the late bell was ringing.

Eating

Well, we are not in the Bay Area anymore. No more running out for an easy and delicious burrito or pizza just a few blocks away.  So we’re trying to take advantage of this new situation. 

Since moving to the farm a number of factors have contributed to our desire to change the way we eat and prepare meals, but our greatest influence has to be the slight obsessions we’ve developed for Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House books. We started reading them last year, and now that we’re growing food, like her family did, it seems like a good time to pick up some of the other homesteading skills that were so important way back when.

Here are some of the changes we’ve made so far:

We have collected cast iron skillets and a dutch oven, which we plan to season regularly and keep for many years to come. Laura Ingalls’ mother had to  deal with the heavy unwieldy utensils and so will we.

 

We are determined to buy only whole chickens and use the bones to make stock every time. We’re also using beef bones for beef stock. This has proved to be delicious and is an old-time remedy for whatever ails you. 

Derek can no longer simply walk to Walgreens to get a pint of Phish Food and is learning how to bake his own sweet treats from scratch. (After two attempts at cookies he is yet to be successful. We have thrown the too-crumbly dough and flat over-cooked cookies to the pigs and they seem to think Derek is an excellent chef)

We’re eating farm fresh eggs grown right here on the property almost every day. Just like Laura, if the chickens don’t lay eggs, we won’t eat any. 

We’ve also made lamb stew with home grown lamb, froze a whole lot of amazing home-made burritos for later use, and saved and used the fat from our bacon to cook other meals. And I have finally discovered that bacon fat is amazing!

Living where we work also gives us more time for all this cooking, so don’t worry, we’re still asleep before 10pm almost every night.

 

Meet Ravi

Whenever I talk about the farm, I always bring up Ravi within the first few minutes. I mention the fact that he is a guard llama, and most people always ask for me to repeat myself at least once. The idea of a llama guarding something seems so absurd that people refuse to let the phrase enter their consciousness without it being spoken slowly several times. I first heard of guard llamas this summer at Gentle Giant, and at first I thought Greg and Maureen had decided to see how gullible I am. 

They weren’t lying. Guard llamas do exist, and there are two of them on this farm. It’s their job to protect the sheep from any coyotes who get too curious about all of those cute sheep they might’ve spotted from the woods. While there are two llamas here, they each watch over their own flock of sheep because llamas do better solo.

Tina watches over a flock of about 40 sheep. She is alert and protective, but she also refuses to let me or Lesley pet her. She keeps a close eye on us whenever we enter the sheep pen, but she’s made it clear that she won’t be coming to our place for dinner anytime soon. Ravi, on the other hand, is a hyperactive little fellow who loves attention and can be quite affectionate.

While I was doing research on guard llamas, I came across all kinds of studies that demonstrated their effectiveness as livestock guardians. There is something quite wonderful about seeing graphs and charts that analyze the performance of guard llamas, and I’ve included one of my favorite pie charts below. It is taken from a survey of 145 farmers who use guard llamas.

We're here!

Welcome to Farming with Ravi! This blog will be documenting our journey as beginning farmers over the next year. Ravi, the llama, will have a formal introduction in our next post.

Last week we arrived at a beautiful farm in southwestern Connecticut. We will be apprentices here for about 10 months.  During this time we will be learning about livestock management, growing produce fit for the finest restaurants, and the business and marketing side of farming. We’ll also be learning how farming can be a vehicle for social change through the farm’s gleaning project, which we’ll talk more about later. 

One of the animal chores we do every day is to check the chickens. We have been letting them out of the coop in the mornings and closing them back in at night so the predators don’t get them. We also ensure they have food and water. This pretty little chicken coop can be moved from pasture to pasture so that the chickens always have fresh ground to roam on and find bugs to eat. 

Everything has to be timed for maximum productivity. Derek is “renovating” this raised garden bed. Lettuce had been harvested from this garden bed the day before and so Derek and I helped to prepare the bed for the next planting, which happened the very next day. 

 

I learned how to transplant young lettuce plants into the greenhouse beds. It took a couple of hours to transplant everything, but it was a great time to chat and gossip with my coworkers.