Catch you later, January, this has been a most excellent adventure

Right before I came for my farm visit last year, I was helping to manage a great wine shop in Manhattan's Lower East Side called September. One day I got an email from my boss, who was out of town at the time, asking me if I wanted to do an interview for the young lady who runs this fashion site. This is the resulting video. It now has 62 views on Youtube! They weren't all me, though. I can only watch a video of myself awkwardly talking about wine 50 something times or so. Maximum.


Farewell Darla and farewell January and January's past. Cheers to you February, you've got some big snowshoes to fill. Game on



Important Note:
One thing this video doesn't show is that shortly after the interview was done and I opened the store, Keanu Reeves came in. Being the big "Bill and Ted" fan I am, I was barely able to keep my shit together. I managed, though and although we didn't have the First Growth Bordeaux he was looking for, he was pleased with my service and shook my hand when he left. Celebrities always do. I haven't washed my hands in years as a result, but such is life.



Oh, and Duke sucks.

Winter Break

Saturday was Bugtussle's 4th winter CSA drop-off, though with the weather the way it was, it felt a bit more like spring than late January. January is always good for a tease, though, isn't it?

Snow had kept the family from being able to travel down the last few weeks, so this was our first drop since late December, and the patrons seemed joyful, yet ravenous for some fresh vegetables. Running a farm without electricity, or heated/cooled vegetable storage, never lacks for its challenges. There is a big hill one must first traverse to get out of the driveway and if it is iced-over, your chances of success are slim. Why don't you park the van at the top of the hill, you ask?––because that's what I asked. Well, the sweet potatoes and winter squash are at the bottom, in a green house, trying their damnedest not to freeze and ruin. So if you loaded them first, then parked the van at the top of the hill, they'd freeze overnight and ruin. This sort of conundrum is perfectly reflexive of the type of problem-solving dialogue constantly required to run a farm––off the grid or on––and it definitely keeps things interesting. Luckily, this week, January wore its April face.

And look at this food!

Spinach (not pictured)
Kale (not pictured)
Turnips
Sweet potatoes (Golden Nugget)
Butternut squash
Parsnips
Peanuts (Tennessee Red Valencia)
Pasture-Foraged Eggs

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Slow Food

<---- Flood line on barn. The window on the right is my room.

I remember the day we got the pigs––I mean, are you kidding, I was pumped. It was a memorable week all around, really. The flooding in Nashville wasn't limited to Nashville––many of our farming friends in and around our little wonderland in zone 6 were effected. One friend lost all the topsoil he'd ever built––something akin to losing your life's work in a weekend. There was 11 inches of water in my room in the barn and I kayaked for the first time that day, directly out of that barn. That next week we got the pigs.

We raised the pigs in what will become the 2012 garden for the majority of the summer, then moved them into the forest to finish them on acorns, hickory nuts, roots and whatever slop we had around. I spent a lot of time with the pigs, preparing their slop with the help of fermentation, and trying not to get too attached to them––a grave mistake I made with the turkeys. The pigs and turkeys both have wonderful stories, and I will get to those in the coming months. For now, however, onto the eggs...

The hens are out on pasture, they follow behind the cows and lamb in the Management Intensive Grazing System, similar to that outlined by Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The idea is that you keep the livestock in small paddocks to help concentrate their manure and move them to new grass often. If left to their own devices, cows will happily eat only the grass they like––the candy and ice cream, as Salatin describes it––and hang out in the shady treeline where they will drop their manure and fertilize the living daylights out of their lounge spots, not the pastures. In our system, we limit the space they can fertilize with electrified netting, and move them every 12 hours. Every 3 days we pull our chicken shacks (a roost, a feeder and an egg-mobile) behind. The chickens then spread out the manure in search of nutritious, buggy treats, and we collect the eggs daily.










The plastic on the high tunnel was put up this summer, and it was an intensely hot project. Once done, we plowed and tilled it, then planted spinach, chard, carrots, kale, radishes, etc., and kept it cultivated. What irrigation we need comes from a gravity fed pump, and there is no additional heating. I can't say enough about how amazing this project has been, though––not much is growing these days, but I picked my spinach on Monday.

The last piece to this puzzle is the english muffin, which came from Whole Foods, the uncontested birth place of the english muffin. Naturally.

I guess you could call this a summary. A very extreme summary. A small look at the things it took to make my breakfast this morning. The reality is that this sandwich was no less than nine months in the making. Despite how hard the work is, and how hard it is to justify taking the life of a pig (a very controversial topic within myself), I did my best to do all of that justice. If working on a farm did one thing to me (and it did many), it was give my breakfast a story, one I can't help but think about every time I eat absolutely anything,


Breakfast: a sausage, egg and spinach sandwich on an english muffin. But that doesn't tell any sort of story, now does it?

Dry Ferment

Today in 1838, Tennessee passed the first ever prohibition laws. Of course, it wouldn't be until 1920 that national prohibition went into effect, almost exactly 82 years later (January 16th, 1920), but Tennessee got the damn party started. I really couldn't have begun this blog in any more appropriate of a state (sober and from Nashville). But, in honor of the "noble experiment," I'm going to forgo any talk of sacrificial wine or white lightning for a fermented drink slightly less devil-waterish: Kombucha.

No one is totally positive about the origin of kombucha. Well, I'll bet with 7 billion people in the world that someone is, but for the most of us fermentation nerds, no one knows for sure. What we can assume is that it's of Asian descent, and that since the fungus it's brewed with rapidly multiplies itself exponentially, whoever discovered it told two friends who told two friends and so on until some savvy character discovered they could charge five dollars a bottle for the stuff. It's incredible for your digestion, immune system, and a small burst of caffeine (from the black tea) but we can be sure of little else.

The Kombucha recipe is simple:
+A mother (or cake or SCOBY or mushroom) - ask any friend who you know brews it. You know me, I brew it.
+Sugar 1 1/2 cup
+Black tea 5tbs
+Water 1 1/2 gallon

Take one quart of the water and heat with 1/2 cup sugar until dissolved. Steep black tea for ten to thirty minutes depending on desired strength of brew. Then, strain the quart of water into the remaining water before pouring it over your mother. You want it at room temperature, not hot, thus the reason you only heat the quart (thanks, Beth!). once cooled sufficiently, add the water to your mother and cover with a cloth tied tightly around the top for bug protection. Let ferment in a cool place for 5-15 days, tasting periodically until it reaches your desired flavor. Always go a little less sweet than you think you'll like. Usually about 10 days for me. If it's warm, it may take less. Cold, more. Remember, quality of ingredients, especially the water I've learned, is as important as it is in any recipe.

When you harvest, keep one cup of the previous kombucha for the mother. Then harvest into bottles you can screw or close tight––corks will pop out from effervescence. If you desire the bubbles, let the kombucha rest in the bottle for longer, and it will build up. You might develop some .5% alcohol, so don't drink, like, a thousand pints of the stuff. But don't drink, like, a thousand pints of anything at one time.

Someone last night told me that they make kombucha spritzers with sparkling wine. Maybe I'll do something like that tonight, to celebrate Tennessee's prohibition birthday. Jack and Boocha's? Man, I just had one of those moments where I realize I have way too much free will... Anyway, Happy birthday, Prohibition, cheers to you!

For further reading see "Wild Fermentations," by Sandor Katz. Genius dude.

Ist first blaug!

It was about a year ago, almost to the day, that I first met Bugtussle. I flew in from New York, rented a car and drove the 75 miles it is from Nashville to the farm. To my utter amazement, I found the place, then promptly proceeded to destroy my rental car on the road back to the cabin. I'd seen pictures and watched a video about the farm, in an attempt to learn what I could about what I was getting myself into, but only so much about farming can be gleaned from this distance.



It's a ten minute drive from the mailbox to house, that is, if you want your car to survive. On the road back, I passed the skeleton of a high tunnel and a few of the neighbor's cows lounging in the driveway. When I finally arrived, I was greeted by the family I would end up spending the better part of 2010 working alongside. They offered me the internship that next day, and the rest is history, one of which I hope to occasionally cover here.

Yesterday I went back for a visit. I wanted to see the family and the animals and figured I could put in a little work and maybe get a little food out of it. After nine months of naturally-raised vegetables and meat, there is no food that will quite satisfy you the same. I found out my favorite cow died, Darla, love of my life, and my heart broke a little. But death is something you're very intimate with on the farm and life will continue to plug away no matter how sad it renders you. Right now though, it's lambing season, so the life there is even cuter than usual, which helps in the healing process.





I checked in on my musk melon wine, took a sip of maple sap from one of the many jugs hanging on the trees, then ate bacon, sweet potatoes and beans for lunch. When I left, I left with WAY more meat and vegetables than I could possibly eat, including muddy parsnips, leeks, spinach, pork sausage, lamb and pork roasts, kale and eggs, all thanks to the unending generosity of Eric and Cher.

Essentially, with other potent potables, this is my blog––BLAUG!–– as I wish to keep it. It's about farming and about wine and probably occasionally about basketball, but I'll try and be sensitive to the fact that not everyone equates the three. Oh, and I don't speak a lick of german––kein Deutsch––I just like to pretend I do.


Danke,
Fraust