Fall in Fairytale Land on a road with no name

Marie and I went for a drive yesterday to see the fall colors up on Pea Ridge. We came down Adamson Branch and ended up on a road with no street sign. The gravel was loose, and for a minute we considered turning back, considering we were in my very-close-to-the-ground little car. But life favors the bold, and we pressed on, my front end suspension groaning the whole way. We were rewarded with beautiful views and hand patted hamburgers and Chess pie in Gassaway. Another perfect day in paradise.

Now if I could just get the blog posts to publish pictures in the same layout as in the "preview" view...

Suddenly, it's the end of September and the end of summer

On Friday night I made leek and potato soup with leeks and potatoes from our garden, and I threw in some bacon from Bobby Parker, a local guy who processes his own pigs. He lives near Gassaway, and there are beautiful, huge Tiger lily bushes in front of his house. There are all sorts of metal farming implements beside the driveway leading up to his house. He makes the best fresh sausage I've ever had. When we had our chosen-family reunion this year, I made a vat of sausage gravy and fresh biscuits. There's no kind of fun like making a huge meal with a bunch of friends in the kitchen and feasting with a group of the most wonderful people in the world. All before 9 in the morning.

Briefly, my potato and leek soup recipe: brown bacon in the bottom of your large soup pot. Scoop out bacon, set aside, and lightly fry cubed potatoes (skin on) and white part of chopped leeks in hot bacon fat. Add stock to cover the potatoes and bring to a boil. Simmer until the potatoes are tender, about 10 minutes. Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes, add crumbled bacon, chopped green part of leeks, black pepper, hot paprika, and heavy whipping cream (or half and half or just milk). Bring back to gentle simmer, then turn off the heat and salt to taste.

We suspended the CSA the third week of August and just restarted it this past week. The heat this summer was crazy, and didn't get more than 1/4” of rain at a time for two months. The grass turned brown and crunched under our feet. We didn't equip the garden with irrigation, and we have entirely too much planted for hand watering, even with the hose to do any good. We did try. We planted turnips, carrots, kohlrabi, rutabagas, mustards, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, and beans the first two weeks of August, and we watered every evening only to watch the seedlings pop up and dry out during the passing of another scalding day. Eventually we gave up. Kevin held out longer than I did. At that point, I was kind of avoiding the garden. It looked so sad and droopy. I could almost hear the tomatoes pleading for water. I felt despondent.

I planted hundreds of seeds in flats and set up a makeshift plant baby raising station. We raised some fantastic looking bedding plants. Their vigorous growth kept our spirits up. And hand picking the barrage of leaf-munching caterpillars kept us occupied for long periods of time.

Finally, it rained for three days. It was the perfect rain; gentle and soaking. We got around 5” over those three days, and everything sprung back to life. The trees in the hills that had started to yellow turned green again, and all the blooming weeds towering over the cars on the roadsides and in fallow fields exploded into yellow, purple, white, pink, and red. We rushed out and planted hundreds and hundreds of bedding plants. Lettuce, broccoli, romanesco, mustards, cabbage, and arugula are all now growing like crazy in our beautiful dirt. I couldn't believe how crumbly, dark, and loose our soil has gotten since just this spring. We also replanted our beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, and kohlrabi. Everyone is poking their heads up. It's so nice to see them.

Our CSA has expanded from 4 shares to 13 since May. We have done no marketing. It's all thanks to the newspaper articles and word of mouth. I couldn't believe how understanding our customers were about taking a break. I have no idea how we found such wonderful people to be our customers. Everyone seemed really happy about their first fall share this week, and I felt really good about what we gave them. We're incorporating some produce from other producers right now. There are so many fantastic growers at the market, and they have some vegetables that we weren't able to produce this week. And buying from them using money we earned by selling our own produce helps create a feedback cycle that stimulates the demand for local produce, even if only a little bit. Several people told us how happy they were that we were back at the market yesterday. Customers asked about us while we were gone. A couple of the other growers even told us that they missed us. I almost cried. We couldn't have imagined a warmer community to become a part of.

We left the fallow part of our acre alone (read: I didn't bush hog). I remember sitting in the living room window last year at this time, before there was a window in the rough opening. Where our gray water mulch basin is now, there was a patch of perilla mint in bloom. As it's related to basil, its blooms are exactly like basil's, tall stalks of delicate little purple flowers. I remember almost being able to feel the hum of all the bees going completely crazy in the blooms. I saw my parents' honey bees, carpenter bees, other wild bees, and other pollinators, like different wasps and bugs I can't even identify. So now we have half an acre of perilla in bloom, and you literally can feel the buzzing in the air. I've stood on the edge of the field and seen hundreds of dragonflies dive bombing the tops of the weeds, with song birds flitting back and forth across the field, darting in and out of the trees that border the garden. There are countless bees, rolling around in almost obscene abandon, covering themselves in pollen. It's magical. I thought of sitting in my windowless office, reading in Countryside and in gardening books about leaving wild parts of your farm for the wildlife, a pocket of biodiversity. And now here I am, living in a place that's just exploding with life and diversity.

The mammoth sunflowers we planted this year did grow to be mammoth; they were probably 10' before their huge heads drooped. Now they're a convenient wild bird feeder, away from the barn cats and off the ground. It's a sight to see; the song birds flit from our natural privacy fence, the stretch of 7' tall weeds in bloom along the creek bank, to the drooping sunflower heads. They perch on the top and hang upside to grab a seed and fish out the kernel. The ground is littered with the empty hulls.

I've been taking every opportunity possible to go to the creek during the heat of the day. I just know that our warm days are almost gone for the year. Kevin heard from an old timer that the number of snows in the winter is the same as the number of fogs in August, and it was a foggy August! Some of the locals built a little dam from big rocks and a log, so there is a magnificent swimming hole at Redneck Riveria this year. It encompasses an area where water is gushing up out of the creek bed, at exactly the same temperature it is under the ground, which is cold. The warmer water coming from upstream, heated a little by running shallow over the sun-warmed rocks, mixes with the icy water coming up from the aquifer. You can stand where the warmer water comes spilling over the rocks next to the colder water and feel the two flows mixing together. I take my goggles down there and drift around, caught in the current like so much drift wood, watching the fish pecking at the rocks and the leaves rushing by. Paradise.

On a completely different note, I just finished reading Collapse, by Jared Diamond. I am totally and completely convinced that we are currently living in the beginning of the crumbling of our global society. County lines, country lines, party lines—we are all in this together. I can't stomach what I hear when I do turn on the news. The same paralyzing squabbling here, chaos and suffering out there. “There's coal in those mountains, and as I see it, God put it there for man to take it out.” And we'll all drink the poison that seeps into the murdered streams, that feed the sickened rivers that empty into the despairing ocean, to be lifted back into the sky, cycled through the clouds, and fall back to the ground. Towards the end of the book, Diamond wrote, “Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will become resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice...”

I feel... so completely grateful to be where I am, doing what I'm doing. This is my pleasant way, of my own choice.

a summer day

This morning I worked for six hours in the garden. I planted some mustard, pruned and tied up tomatoes, picked tomatoes, and forked and weeded. When it finally got too hot to be out in the sun, Kevin and I went to the creek. We took a mask and snorkle and held on to the big rocks where the water rushes through little bottlenecks and watched the bubbles glistening in the sunlight, dappled through the leaves of a big Sycamore. I made a tomato and cucumber salad with basil and the vinegar our CSA customer gave us on Saturday. Where the water swirls around, you can feel the warm and cold water mixing. We had the whole place to ourselves for a couple hours. It was like being at a private resort. I found a great geode. I feel so lucky to have such a wonderful life.

We're starting our second 10-week period this week. I planted more chard yesterday, and the squash I planted late last week is already up. Hopefully the bugs will let us have a few more squash before it will suddenly be frost season again. The tomatoes are going crazy; we sold over 30 lbs of tomatoes at the market on Saturday! We also sold all our greens and a half bushel of cucumbers--all by 11am. The mung beans are up, and soon I have to start thinking about cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, rutabagas, radishes, Asain greens, lettuce, more kale...

Back to work!

the dog days of summer

I knew I wouldn't be great about keeping up with the blog. I was right. I'm doing better with our Facebook page, though. A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, and I've been posting lots of pictures.

The Smithville market has been absolutely fantastic. There are some things that don't sell--fingerling potatoes and flowers. But Jason, at Evin's Mill, absolutely loved the fingerlings and wanted more than we have to sell. Everyone seems to love the Technicolor tomatoes and Lemon cucumbers. Delikatesse cucs, not so much. I think they look too much like the cucumbers the other vendors have. We've had several people ask about joining the CSA. We start our second 10-week period next week. So far I'm really glad we split up the growing season into the shorter periods. I'm a little nervous about adding more customers, but I worry all the time and it usually works out, so I'm just going to go for it.

Our Watertown customers make my heart sing. We took my mother to Nona Lisa Pizzeria, owned by Katie and John Smith, our CSA customers, and we enjoyed drop-dead-delicious pizza and a fiddle-accompanied birthday serenade. After that, we caught some world class music at the Blue Tomato, and Mom got another round of the birthday song from everyone in the house. It was great.

As for the garden: the squash are all dead. By next week we will have zero [0] producing squash plants. The vine borers wore us out. Brutal. We're putting in beans and brassicas in the wake of the squash. From my conversations with the other farmers at the market, we are not alone in our losing battle. The tomatoes are starting to pour out of the garden, while some of the cucumbers are beginning to slack off a little bit. Peppers are ripening. Onions and beets are all gone, their beds weeded and mulched, waiting for lettuce and squash to be replanted. The beans are kicking in, despite the Japanese beetles' best attempts. Our pumpkins and winter squash look better than they did a few weeks ago, and they are really starting to grow fast. The Joyners said their blueberries will be in soon. I could never express how excited I am for early mornings in their forest with my mouth stuffed with the best blueberries on the face of the planet.

We've had a heat index over 100 the last couple days, so we've been spending a lot of time at Redneck Riviera.

It turns out all the reading I did has been extremely helpful. However, nothing in any book could ever really prepare you for gardening in Middle Tennessee. This place is nuts.

Everyday I become more convinced that there is no more beautiful place in the world than right here. When I'm driving Glug Glug down Dry Creek and there are puffy white clouds drifting through the blue blue sky past the emerald green of these ancient hills, I can't help but feel like I live in a storybook. The sunflowers look like ladies with big yellow faces wearing green dresses towering over the garden. Queen Anne's Lace is covering all the fallow fields in a lacy white blanket. The Goldenrod and Ironweed are reaching their mature height--7 feet--and will soon be an explosion of yellow and purple. A lot of the rural roads look like paths through the jungle right now.

The garden looked like a jungle until Monday, when a writer from Wilson County came out to interview us about the farm. We were in a tizzy that morning, mowing, weeding, and generally trying to impose some semblance of order over the unruly tangle of green that our garden has become. And then today I got an email from the Watertown Gazette: a second interview request!

Things are going great. We couldn't ask for our first year to be unfolding any better. I am so grateful that this is my life. I love being here. I love farming.

And we still love our lovable loo!

Summertime and the living is...

Our beautiful spring lettuces were a big hit at the Smithville Farmers' Market. We've also gotten people into kale chips and Rainbow Swiss Chard! Everyone loved the garlic scapes. People seemed interested these purple tomatoes we keep talking about.

Spring was magnificent! The trees turned from naked and drab in their mottled tones of brown and gray to sprayed with magenta, orange, eletric yellow and green, ember red. The dogwoods held their white blooms against the crystal clear blue sky like little clouds captured and arrange for the observer's pleasure. There's a van Gogh painting, Almond Blossoms, that strikingly captures the contrast. How lucky I am to live in a place where I go horseback riding through pieces of art people pay to see in museums.

We are eating beautiful foods from the garden now. The colors blow my mind.

By not weeding and not thinning our Touchstone Gold and Early Top beets, we learned that in order to get good beets, you have to thin and weed your beet patch. I was so happy to harvest these Chioggias! This day, we had harvesting help from my long time best friend, Kate.

We had a family reunion. We partied, and we relaxed.

We went caving in a nearby cave with a big reservior in front of it. They used to raise trout here. Now crazy people jump off the baracades into the 56 degree water.

As the members of Purple Maize Farm are also members of the Dry Creek Water Quality Conservation group, we took a few helping helds along for a water testing outing. We found beautiful geodes and creek glass. The water was beautiful and clear with no nitrates or phosphates to speak of. We are so lucky to live along such an outstanding water body!

We also did Indian Grave Point, where the climb down isn't nearly as crazy as it looks, but it is a good thing we have friends to hold up the ceiling. If you trek through the Sea of Mud, you can get to the art room. And the world never looks as beautiful and green as it does during the first moments after you emerge from a cave.






I got to cook my favorite breakfast (biscuits and gravy) for my favorite people. We had local pork, eggs from next door, and biscuits from scratch were a group effort.

We all met Amanda for the first time. She told us this is what it feels like to be dating Hector. Just kidding. She was a champ, and it was lovely to finally meet her!

The house was plenty big for 14 people. Really.

Now it's June, and we have cucumbers tumbling out of the garden. The scallop squashes are promising an imminent explosion of activity. We are loaded with green tomatoes, and the first ripe ones are trickling in. We need to get around to digging potatoes, which we won't be planting in hay next time. Peppers are setting, and the eggplants are finally in the garden and bursting with buds.

I have no idea when I'll get around to updating again, but for right now, I'll say that I couldn't ask for better customers, a more beautiful garden, or a more wonderful life.

love

Words cannot describe how much I love this place. This morning I went for a ride with our friend, Alison. The day started with frost on the ground but warmed up to long T-shirt temperature by the time we got out. The sky is brilliant blue, and spring has the trees in red, orange, magenta, and neon green. The pastures are coming back alive, and the woods are filled with Mayapples. The dogwoods are finally blooming, and their blossoms turn upwards toward the sunlight, like little cups to catch every drop. We saw a turkey fly into the air and soar--literally soar--through the sky, riding the wind racing up the slope of the valley. We spent a morning caving and then washed the first layer of mud out of our clothes in the creek. Marie and I put legit hoops and row cover over our cabbages, kale, and lettuce, all which look beautiful and vibrant. You can practically watch the peas and garlic growing. I had some shallots that spent the entire summer, fall, and winter in a paper bag in a plastic drawer stashed in the barn. I opened the bag, and they were growing, so I threw them in the garden, and they are growing like crazy. The half of our onions planted in the bed that spent the winter under rotting hay is twice as big as the other half the planting that were put into freshly worked ground. Behold, the power of earthworms. The bees and butterflies are back. The barn was practically vibrating with the buzz of the carpenter bees during their mating frenzy a couple weeks ago. They drill holes in the poles they used to hang the tobacco from in our barn, so there are piles of sawdust all around. The spring is full of tadpoles and newts, frogs, watercress, and Mayflies, and the toads had an orgy in my parents' pond. We have found we didn't haul nearly enough manure this winter. The greenhouse is full of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and tomatillos. The artichokes are outside and finally loving life. We hosted a work party, and our wonderful friends finished our house wiring, built us a custom art light fixture, cleared hundreds of Osage, locust, and cedar saplings from our pasture and barnyard, and finished the rock work around the greywater basin. How amazing is that? Kevin is working in a factory from 6pm to 6am, five to seven days a week right now. He doesn't seem to hate it as much as I thought. This is temporary--just to earn a little extra money to have around. We are slowly gathering customers, but not nearly as quickly as I hoped. So we're thinking of taking it easy on the CSA members and seeing how much demand the two restaurants have for us. Marie and I are serving as secretaries for the Dekalb Farmers Market association. Fancy that. See you at the market! AND I found an arrowhead in our garden yesterday. I can't think of a more beautiful place to be.

Notes & Pictures

Warning: The last four pictures include cleaning a chicken - if you're squeamish/don't want to see it, stop scrolling after the picture of the clothesline.

Notes:

• We've been working hard the last week, thanks to all the sunny warm weather – highs in the low 80s!

• Helga taught us how to kill a chicken. It wasn't pleasant, but we earned our dinner. Chicken & dumplings!

• Sophie is getting bigger & bigger – she's a real farm dog now.

• Kevin hooked up our washing machine, & made us a clothesline – yay laundry!

• We went for our first warm weather group hike. The ticks are out! But it was beautiful.

What an awesome week!