Outstanding in the Field

We have been asked to participate with the group Outstanding in the Field this year!  We are thrilled, as we have enjoyed their amazing cookbook, and have been told over and over that we should host an Outstanding in the Field event.  We will be partnered with Steve and Lara Atkins of The Kitchen Table Bistro in Richmond, which we're thrilled about!  Not only are they one of our favorite restaurants to work with, they were just nominated for a James Beard Foundation award (the Oscars of Food)!  The Outstanding in the Field event at Half Pint Farm will be on Friday, August 14th, 2009.  It promises to be an amazing event with incredible food!  Tickets go on sale this Friday, March 20th - the first day of spring.  If you think you would like to attend, you can look at the schedule here.  We'll see you at the farm!  

In other Half Pint Farm event news, we are going to host a Vermont Fresh Network Farmers Dinner as well!  No date has been set for that, but we'll post something here as soon as we know when it is!  Thanks for your interest in Half Pint Farm events!  We're excited to host and share our farm with everyone!  Now, back to the greenhouse to start growing some food!

Slow Food Awareness!

A million thank yous to all you Vermonters who came out to support the Slow Food meeting I organized today.  It was an amazing sunny Spring-like day and over 50 folks came out of the sun to Pauline's Cafe to learn a little more about Slow Food and how us Vermonters and particularly us Burlingtonians would like to organize ourselves.  THANK YOU!  What was particularly interesting was the sentiment that there is a definite need for an organization that supports the consumers' (in Slow Food parlance, that's co-producers) quest to understand and get a new appreciation for food.  There was such an enthusiasm for: educational potlucks (learn how to cook something specific together - recipe sharing, etc.), as well as not creating a new chapter, but galvanizing an effort under the current Vermont chapter.  Also, a nice voice arose from people looking to identify with a food community.  Such powerful stuff, and oh so motivating!  The other overarching feeling coming out of this meeting was, "Let's have more events, and let's have them now!"  I must say, I was also impressed with the level of folks' commitment to helping make events happen.  WOW!  What a difference a change in season, some sunshine, and some terrific company with like-minded foodies makes!  It was a pleasure to meet so many amazing folks with such great ideas.  I can hardly wait to start working with them!  I also gained the awareness of a local food blog I did not know about previously: Hippo Flambe!  Check it out not just for the super duper cool name, but some inspired recipes and captivating food stories.  Thanks, Robin!  

We got home from this great event just in time to thaw a chicken we grew last Spring for dinner.  Spencer spatchcocked it and grilled it.  We had a side of Anishinaabeg Manoomin wild rice with that amazing chicken - and it was the most incredible rice I've ever had.  It had a deliciously smoky taste that went perfectly with the grilled chicken.  To top it all off, we had glasses of our homemade carrot wine we made with Arethusa Collective Farm's 2007 fall carrots.  Absolutely perfect meal...  All of this would have been enough - just another Slow Food dinner in the Welton household; but then there on 60 Minutes as we were eating, was a report on Alice Waters and her influence on Slow Food in America!  

Couldn't have planned it better myself!   Enjoy the video - interesting, and timely.  Also timely was the article in the NYTimes this past week about Michelle Obama's efforts concerning good healthy food.  It's a great time to be involved in food, people!  So let's invite someone over, make a meal, pick up our forks and enjoy each other's company - conviviality.  It's where it's at!

Planning, New Directions, and Battle Royale!

I can't believe that I haven't written since January!!  What happened?  You know - I think my blog posting schedule has been ruined by Facebook!  I feel like I've been writing nearly everyday, but really what's going on is that I'm sucked in to Facebook to update my status!  Lame.  From now on, it's only meaningful blogposts for me!  Well...maybe I'll only sneak onto Facebook to check on my friends' status updates...  

Besides getting sucked into Facebook, things have been busy here at Half Pint Farm.  Our days have been replete with my daily trips to the gym to get into shape for the farming season (transplanting requires about 500+ bad-form squats each day in the Spring!), walks with the dogs to try and keep the cabin fever from getting too out of control, discovering new recipes, organizing a new Slow Food Chapter here in Burlington, AND (of course!) we are busy planning our farm season everyday.  

We're busy in the sense that we've been doing a lot of the cerebral work of our farm for 2009.  Our main goal during every growing season is to completely avoid any thinking.  I know this sounds crazy, but it is a system that we've been using since we started our farm, and will continue to use; it works extremely well for us.  What we do is we make up tons of spreadsheets that function as field seeding schedules, farm maps, lists, order sheets, greenhouse seeding schedules, etc.  What we do once we've made all of our seed selections is to list them all, and then look at our maps and see where everything fits in.  Spencer is very good at this job, and

 really does most of the initial work pencil-ing in the various crops and their rotations on printouts of our farm layout that are detailed down to each bed that is available on our farm.  We are able to pencil in every rotation of every crop that we grow.  Once this job is done, I sit down and transcribe it into our computer spreadsheets.  We then go over it together to make sure there's no mistakes.  We do the same kind of detailed sheets for the greenhouse seedings.  What they enable us to do is to look at the week of seeding in the greenhouse at a glance, and we will immediately know how many trays we'll need to fill with soil and what seeds need to be with us that day.  They make our seeding life effortless - it really helps to concentrate that kind of detailed thinking process to the time of year when we have time - the winter.  These sheets are our bible through the season, and we consult them every Monday morning while we walk around the farm making the "to do" list for the week.  What all of this slightly obsessive planning does for us ultimately is free our minds during the season to make decisions about day-to-day things that come up, not crucial seeding issues that should have been thought out already.  We also find ourselves being a lot less stressed out about our day-to-day farming lives, because all the major things have been thought of already - we can spend our time concentrating on the growing part (how to make a better trellis system, what needs to be staked?, how about mulch?  should we weed today?, etc.), which requires so much of our attention during the season that we honestly don't need to be thinking about what should be going in the ground this week - we can just follow our plan for the week that we laid out in March!  A nice system, if I do say so myself, and one that we'll be talking about at the Farmer to Farmer conference next week in Saratoga Springs, NY.

We've got some exciting new directions that Half Pint Farm is implementing for 2009!  We have decided to expand our Food Club CSA this year to accommodate more hungry Burlingtonians!  Be looking for our brochure in upcoming posts!  Also, we have decided to add some animals to the mix!  Last year we experimented with some heritage breed chickens, and really enjoyed it.  We'll be doing many more this year, along with some cornish game hens and some quail!  Another pretty exciting development is that we'll be getting some new employees - they come in sixes and will be 6 pigs (rototillers), 6 geese (weeders), and 6 ducks (insect eaters)!  This is a new direction that we're going in to try and close the nutrient cycle loop on our farm.  We have been researching how best to manage and house these critters, and think they'll fit quite nicely on Half Pint Farm.  More as we move in that direction - Christmas goose, anyone?  

I can't end without mentioning the palpable battle royale currently being waged between Mother Nature and the gigantic axis our world spins on.  With daylight savings time coming and the recently beautiful sunny mornings making it feel like Spring, we remember how quickly things can change - just started hearing the sparrows in our hedges last week, I'm beginning to think I've shoveled the driveway for the last time this winter, there's more grass than snow showing, and there's more of a trend towards rain than snowflakes.  I didn't wear a coat at all today, and kept thinking...Spring?  I can dig it!

Food Musings Part Two - Virginia, The Press Room

As mentioned in the last blog post, we traveled a bit over the holidays. Our travels took us to Virginia for the first time to speak at a conference at the Airlie Center, which was an honor and so much fun! We also took the opportunity to visit with good friends of ours, Shawna DeWitt and Attila Agoston and their baby Ruby. They farm at Mountain View Farm at the Blue Ridge Center in Purcellville (just outside Harper's Ferry), which was gorgeous the first morning we woke up there - an ice storm had coated the world in ice for the first few hours of the day, and it was beautiful. They have a CSA, and farm with some pigs (super cute small wooly black guys), chickens and goats as well as growing vegetables. We spent the time at Shawna & Attila's relaxing, exploring their surroundings, and eating. One super-fun bonus to the visit with them was that they have 3 dogs, one who looks just like Bullet! Her name is Critter, and the two hit it off like long-lost cousins! So much fun! Spencer and Shawna went to middle school together back in the day - who knew that these two kids from the Park Hill neighborhood in Denver would become organic farmers? It boggles the mind, but it was so fun to reconnect and learn about each other's different paths to farming. One really great thing we did was go out to dinner at The Press Room in Shepherdstown, WV. It was a phenomenal eating experience - it was a little upscale, but so accommodating to us four hungry adults and 7 month old infant. Our waitress was amazing and was able to recite all of the specials (there were several) and take our orders (with no mistakes) from memory. Nice level of professionalism, and very rare from recent experiences. Now, on to the meal itself.
I must pause here to admit to you that I have been watching many episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations recently. On top of that, I just finished Bourdain's book, A Cook's Tour. It was this book that was dancing in my head as I perused the menu at The Press Room. The platter of a variety of oysters on the half shell was calling my name. It was the experience of eating an oyster in a fishing village in France as a child that made Bourdain interested in food. He still waxes poetic about that experience to this day. I wondered what all the hullaballoo was about. I have come a long way from the girl that once "warded off all bivalves" back in college (vegetarian days). We ordered them and loved every slurpalicious one of them! The Virginian ones (chincoteague) were particularly fantastic! I have never eaten oysters on the half shell, but I gotta tell you, it was a seminal experience for me. They are not remotely fishy, but instead they essentially are the distilled elixir of the ocean. I can't describe them any differently. The image that popped into my mind unbidden as my first oyster slid down my throat was that of a beautiful mermaid beckoning me to try more. Weird, but true. After such a great appetizer, my hopes were piqued as I uncharacteristically ordered something as pedestrian as spaghetti and meatballs - it was one of the several specials of the night, and like that mermaid beckoning me to try more oysters, all I could hear in my head was Gordon Ramsay berating some second rate chef on his show in a recent episode we had watched saying, "Every good chef knows how to make a good batch of meatballs, and you can't even do that, you idiot!" I wanted to see if this chef could make a good batch of meatballs, I guess. First off, the platter came with 3 gigantic meatballs (we're talking small clementine orange sized!) and the best smelling red sauce ever poured atop a pyramid of spaghetti. I thought for sure there was no way that my stomach would allow that much food inside of it. Well, I was wrong. I thought for sure that I had never tasted something so satisfying as these meatballs in my life. The sauce was nice and garlicky, but not too chunky, either. In a word, perfect. I was really enamored with the texture of the meatballs - fluffy almost, but savory and meaty as well. MAN! They were soooo good! I have been thinking about those meatballs for the past three weeks, and so you can imagine my joy when we returned home finally from our travels to find my January issue of Gourmet Magazine with a delicious picture of spaghetti and meatballs on the cover! I took the obvious cue last night and made them. I made the whole recipe, too - the recipe made 70 meatballs! I figured, why mess around? Let's do this thing for real. Let's make a gigantic batch of meatballs! I checked our well-stocked freezer for the meats, and I had ground beef, veal and pork from Boucher Family Farm, so we were in business! We still have garlic and onions from our farm as well, not to mention the 5 quarts of stewed tomatoes that were required for the recipe. The result? Incredible meaty yumminess! One change I would make is that I broiled the meatballs in the oven on a baking sheet - frying them seemed a litte too oily to me, but I would actally fry them next time. I think the overall browning would have been better and made the flavor a little deeper. I would also cut the pork in half - they were just a tad too porky for my taste, and the salt should be cut in half throughout the entire recipe. These really are minor changes and the recipe is incredible. The texture is what I had hoped for, even with broiling them. We didn't eat all of them, though we shared the meal with our friends Doug & Jennifer and their kids and still had enough left over to split the batch between our families for freezing. You mean we can have meatballs more than once in a while? What a treat! I have the link here to the recipe page at Gourmet, if you wish to try your hand at this quintessential comfort food. I hear the recipe is easily halved, so you don't have to commit to having 70 meatballs in your house, though it's a great excuse to have a house full of friends! I certainly am glad to have this recipe in my reperetoire now. Thanks, Press Room for the inspiration, and the reintroduction of bivalves to my diet!

Food Musings Part One - Mexican

We often get asked what our favorite places to eat are, and specifically what do we like to eat when we go out.  Recently we've been away (hence the fewer blogposts) to Denver to visit family for the holidays, and then driving on the way back home, we spent some time in Virginia - visiting good friends of ours in Purcellville and then speaking in Warrenton at the Airlie Center.  Well, busy travelers still need to eat, and dining out happens to be a favorite pastime of ours, so the research began and so, if you're ever in Denver or near Warrenton, VA - we've got some fantastic finds that we were pretty excited about!  This first installment is on one of our favorite all-time topics, Mexican food.

In Denver there are 4-5 main restaurant stops that must be made by us to ensure a good visit home: Las Delicias, Tommy's Thai, Ethiopian Restaurant, Saigon Bowl or New Saigon Restaurant.

Being from the southwest and being weaned on beans and chile, going out for Mexican is a no-brainer.  What is a challenge, though, is finding a great consistent restaurant that will be around for generations so that you can share it with your loved ones in years to come.  This is food memory at its best.  Where we come from, it is crucial to have a good Mexican restaurant in your back pocket to return to time and again so that you can order that good old standby: for Spencer and me it's always the bean burrito, smothered with green chile, topped with lettuce and cheese, occasionally with a side of a single chile relleno.  For Spencer's dad it's always the Mexican hamburger, for my dad it was always a bowl of green chile with 2 warm tortillas and a side of guacamole or bean tostadas.  The pitcher of house margaritas is also something you want to be able to count on.  Nothing is worse than going to a restaurant that you know and love, get addicted to a dish, and return to find that something has changed.  In the words of Mario Batali, "As a chef, it's important to be consistent.  If you choose to be an inconsistent cook, then you are a d*ck."  My father lamented the loss of a good Mexican restaurant like a bad breakup with a girlfriend that he was sure was "the one."  One case in point was the iconic Denver Mexican restaurant standby La Hacienda.  

My dad ate there with his dad.  He grew up on that food.  It was a divine pleasure for him to be able to take me and my siblings to La Hacienda as soon as we could be trusted in a restaurant.  This was done with reverence, there was an expectation that we would love all the same dishes he loved, and perhaps there was a chance we would order something the grandpa we never knew had once ordered.  It was possible, it was genetic.

One of my dad's favorite sayings was, "No wonder we both like it, we're related!"  We 

were always striving to connect through food.  I'll never forget the day that we went to La Hacienda for our youngest sister's first La Hacienda experience.  There was so much hope and expectation built up for my dad, he could barely contain himself.  "Ooooh!" he'd say, "Maybe she'll like the bowl of green chile like me" or "I bet she'll really like tostadas!"  What he didn't expect was that there had been some major menu restructuring since the last time he'd been there.  It began with the new menu arriving at our table, "This looks different" my dad said quietly.  There was a moment of panic when he couldn't find his favorite dish on the menu, but then found it in the a la carte section, to everyone's relief.  The meal took a turn for the worse when the margaritas came, and after dad's first sip, "Something's not right here, a little watery maybe".  When the waiter brought our meals, my dad got a very sad expression on his face as he looked at his bowl of green chile.  He could tell at the first glance that the recipe had changed. "There's not enough chile in here".  

What started out as a jubilant feast of hope and possibility ended in the saddest meal I've ever seen my dad eat.  There could have been a country song written about it, or better yet, a mariachi ballad with lots of sobbing and mentions of "mi corazon". 

 I always saw it as my dad's personal mission to keep the Mexican restaurants in Denver honest.  

One that comes close to his impossibly high standards for us is Las Delicias.  Consistency is their main commodity, that and the Special Nachos.  This is the Mexican restaurant of Spencer's childhood - he's been eating there since he could eat solid food.  With the demise of La Hacienda, I latched onto Spencer's family tradition and so we go there every time we're in town.  I don't think my dad liked Las Delicias very much, apparently their beans weren't up to his liking, but we like them just fine.  Las Delicias has those traditional great Mexican restaurant markings: murals on the walls, a velvet painting or two, dusty old sombreros hanging on the walls, plastic pseudo-straw baskets for the chips, and the classic, ubiquitous red plastic tumblers for your water or pop, preferably with the Coca-cola logo emblazoned on it; yep, it has all of these things as well as crowds at all hours of the day.  While we're socked away deep in winter here in Vermont, and Spencer wants Mexican food, what he really means is that he wants Las Delicias' Special Nachos.  Of particular fascination for me is the popularity of the place.  They have 5 locations all over Denver, and the beauty of the thing is that the Special Nachos are identical at every single location! 

 This is culinary wizardry in my book!  That kind of thing is reserved in my mind for places like fast food chains.  However, at every Las Delicias location we've frequented, we swear it's the same family working there with the little grandmas in the back making chile.  Amazing.  And pretty darn delicious!  The last time we went to Las Delicias, we had a brief "freak out" moment when the menus came, they were different.  Slicker.  Updated.  Flashbacks to my dad's La Hacienda meltdown were dancing in my head.  But, no worries, the Special Nachos were still special, and the waitress still asked if I wanted lettuce and cheese on my burrito.  But, more importantly, it tasted exactly like it did last time!  Yum!  Click here to check out their homegrown website to see their 5 locations.  Next time, some new favorites in Virginia!

Inauguration Day Metamorphoses

It is a big day for change so how can I help but think of Ovid as we enjoy the spectacle of swearing in Barack Obama, our first NF personality president!  (I am obsessed with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, and am an Idealist INFJ.  Mara is an ISTJ Guardian.  Read More here)  We were discussing these personality and change relataed issues on our long drive back from Denver for the Holidays and while visiting friends in Virginia.  We also spoke at a conference at the Airlie Center on January 9th and as always enjoyed thinking about our farm goals and activities in a different light.  With all the talk about economic crisis and the many comparisons with the Great Depression, I keep trying to think about our farm in a historical context.  I think that the comparisons with the Depression of the Thirties are rather disingenuous, at this point.  The level of poverty and desperation at that time is far beyond what anyone is experiencing today.  Over 90% of the American workforce at that time was in agriculture, compared to less than 1% today.  It seems that the economic crisis today means that money is no longer available for free with a home equity loan or an overpaid white collar service job.  But all the talk of crisis makes me think of the peasants who have been the ones who weather the economic ups and downs of nations for centuries.  I don't know if the U.S. has an equivalent to the peasant population of ancient Rome, but in many ways we have a similar misty-eyed reverence for our hard-scrabble, live-off-the-land ancestry.  While studying Classics at the University of Colorado, I was often frustrated by the lack of context in which the scholars viewed both the Roman peasant and the Roman view of their peasants.  We know very little about peasant life from the historical literature.  Like today, the practical life of poverty was something to be escaped from and yet admired from a distance.  As Mara and I talk about our farm's emphasis on gourmet and specialty vegetables, I can't help but notice that much of what we grow and sell are likely the foods that the peasant would have access to.  Our vegetables are labor-intensive, but the home gardener would not be as likely to calculate the labor cost of her own produce.  As we pour over the seed catalogs and cookbooks and cooking magazines at this cold time of year, I come to the conclusion that what is now gourmet and specialty is mostly a return to the peasant foods of our agricultural past.  Only now, in the economic age of calculating the cost of our labor, we find that these foods are in fact worth so much more than they were originally given credit for.  As one piece of evidence, I turn to Ovid's Metamorphoses.  In book VIII, there is the one story, that of Baucis and Philemon, in the whole work that describes a meal in a peasant home.  This is a rare glimpse in Latin poetry into the life of the poor Roman household.  I started thinking about how this story would be translated in the style of a travel story in a modern day cooking magazine.  Here is my attempt to describe the meal.  

  "The old man pulled up chairs for the visitors and invited them to sit and rest, Baucis threw a coarse cloth over the seats and then adding bark and leaves to yesterday's fire, fanned and blew on it until it caught fire.  She then took brush and twigs that were hanging from the roof and added them under her small bronze pot on the hearth.  Philemon gathered some fresh vegetables from the well-irrigated  garden and Baucis prepared them, stripping off the outer leaves.  Meanwhile, Philemon lifted down a smoked pork back from the blackened rafters and cut off a small piece of the precious meat, adding it to the bubbling soup, and boiling it until it was tender.  As they did this, the old couple talked welcomingly with their guests, to keep them from noticing the wait.  They took a beechwood bowl, hanging from a nail by its curved handle, and filled it with warm water for the guests to refresh themselves.  For the meal they set a cushion, stuffed with soft sedge grass on a couch made of willow wood, covering it with their finest linens, which even so, were old and cheap, matching the quality of the couch.  The guests took their place for the meal.  Baucis set the table and pushed a shard of old pot under one of the legs to keep it from shaking, then wiped the table off with stalks of fresh mint.  The first course was semi-ripened brambleberries, wild cherries preserved in wine, endive, radishes some cheese, and fire-roasted eggs.  These were served on clay dishes and wooden cups lined with beeswax.  The soup, hot from the fire was next, and a young wine was passed around.  Finally, there was dessert, nuts, figs and wrinkled dates and prunes, plus fragrant apples in wide baskets, and freshly harvested black grapes.  In the middle of this was set a shining honeycomb, but above all, there was a cheerful atmosphere and a skilled and rich goodwill."  Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 638-678

This scene is one of my favorite stories of all Latin poetry, a moment of elegy in a long epic poem, a grounding in reality.  It is easy to imagine with all the travel and food shows and articles out today, a glowing description of this scene as a food writer journeys through the Italian countryside.  I am still working on the big picture lesson from this, but meanwhile, even in the midst of economic crisis, it is good to have an example of living well with less.  Yes, we can.

(For the 1 classicist out there who may read this, I am aware of the commentary and context of this story and the typical tone of the Latin poet idealizing the Golden Age.  I have much more to say on that, but will not say it here.  The translation takes some liberties.) 

I Present to You, Our HayGrove Hoophouse!!!

Well, here she is in all her glory!  We only have a few more tension wires to put in - we'll be doing that this Friday, but for all intents and purposes, we have a 1/2 acre hoophouse at our farm!  This has been a long road for us, as you blog readers know, and we couldn't be happier!  The next major challenge will be putting the plastic on, but we have several months to figure that out!  Meanwhile, we wait for the oat cover crop to die off, the snow can come and saturate our soils, and we will plan.  We are receiving so many seeding catalogs everyday, our lists of crops for next year are already long, and we have entered that annual process of circling everything in the catalogs - then the crossing off of so many that don't make the cut for so many reasons.  Then, finally, in January the final cuts are made, we await the crops and we prep our seeding plans.  I love the rhythms of our year, so predictable but full of plenty of variables.  Well, we have the HayGrove, and here we present to you, the process so far!  Enjoy!  Particularly enjoy the wonderful timelapse videos Spencer put together!  They are so fun and say so much in just a few seconds.  We welcome all your comments!

Here's their company truck.  The crew came in from PA, that's where the East Coast office is.  They come on-site and bend the hoops to fit the size of hoophouse you have bought.  In our case, each of our 3 bays is 25' wide, so the hoops need to be bent to make sure they span that distance.

As one might be able to imagine, that takes some precision, and after the guys got the bender off of the truck, level, and at the position they thought it needed to be, they bent a hoop and it was too long.  They made some adjustments and still the hoops were being bent too long.  This process took 1-1/2 hours.  Did I mention it was raining and sleeting?  Did I mention that I had a crew of my own that had come to help out of the kindness of their own hearts and were standing around unable to do anything while the adjustments were being made?  Well, that's how it happened.

However, this is one impressive piece of machinery, as you can see here.

Since this piece of the day took so long, we decided to just go ahead and bend all the hoops, put up a few on the end, and stabilize it with the windy end kit (basically a bunch of cross-beams holding it in place) so that the hoops don't bob around in the breeze unfettered.  We dismissed our intrepid crew and worked with the guys to get the first windy end kit up the next morning before leaving for Boston for Thanksgiving.  They showed us how to secure the ends with tension wire and a sweet little tool called the Grippler.  It's a fun word to say a lot, and I've been finding many excuses to use it!

So, the crew left, we finished the rest of the windy end kit ourselves (much faster!), and headed to Boston for a Thanksgiving that couldn't be beat.  

Back in VT and out to the field on Tuesday to put up the other windy end kit, which was challenging with 2 people.  That, and the van kept getting stuck in the mud.  We have realized that we have bald tires on our van!  We also realized how nice it is to have help, and called on some friends to help us today, Wednesday.  

We were able to get up every hoop, and the wire tension setup for each row.  We're going down tomorrow or Friday (weather permitting) to do the top wire, star wire and anchor wires.  Should be fun!  The end is in sight!  One more major day of work on this and then we can relax with these crazy building projects until Spring!

I love garlic!

On Halloween day this year, we did one of my all-time favorite tasks; planting garlic.  This is such a fun job that, each year, reminds me why I farm.  It's a 9 month process that begins in October with the planting, and ends in July with the harvesting.  Some would say that the garlic ritual begins in July, really, when we harvest out all the garlic, and set it up in the greenhouse to cure.  After that is complete - sometime in August or September, we set aside the heads that we want to use for seed garlic.  We have been growing an unknown variety of hard-neck garlic for the past 5 years, and we've been selecting the seed for large cloves - this has resulted in heads with mostly 4 mega cloves each!  They are fantastically mild, easy to peel, and store relatively well - we make it through about April or May before the quality of the cloves starts to deteriorate.  This year we set aside an estimated 3000 cloves for planting.  We are re-orienting our fields to run East-West next year instead of North-South; this will allow our beds to be shorter and easier to manage.  A couple of the beds got some straw for mulching, but for the first year ever, we've got no straw to mulch with and will not be mulching the other rows.  We've talked with many farmers that have not mulched garlic and had fine crops.  So, we'll see!  

First, we separate all the cloves in the heads.  We sure had a lot!

Here's the size of these amazing cloves!

Spencer used our BCS walk-behind 30" tiller to prep the beds.  The soil was so soft and fluffy that we didn't need to poke holes to plant the garlic into, we were able to just shove them in!

We have 5 beds, and about 3000 cloves that will turn into big beautiful heads of garlic next year!

Spence throwing straw onto the beds.

One of my all-time favorite garlic recipes here for your dining pleasure (I know basil is not in season, but you can sock this great recipe away until it is!):

Holy Basil Chicken

Serves 4

• 10 cloves garlic, minced
  
• 6 fresh Thai chiles, thinly sliced crosswise
  
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  
• 2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 1-inch pieces
  
• 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Asian fish sauce
  
• 2 teaspoons soy sauce
  
• 4 1/2 teaspoons sugar
  
• Freshly ground pepper
  
• 3 cups loosely packed fresh holy basil leaves, plus more for garnish
  
• Sticky or steamed jasmine rice, for serving

1. Mash together garlic and chiles using a mortar and pestle or the flat side of a large knife. Heat oil in a wok or large skillet over medium-high heat. Add garlic mixture. Cook, stirring constantly, until garlic is just golden, about 20 seconds.
2. Add chicken; cook, stirring often, until chicken is cooked through, about 4 minutes. Stir in fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, and 1 1/2 teaspoons pepper. Add basil; cook, stirring constantly, 1 minute. Season with more pepper, if desired. Serve over rice. Garnish with basil.

More HayGrove Pictures

Thank goodness Travis from the Intervale came down to check on our progress last Thursday - he took some great pictures of us doing the final job of the day - drilling in the anchor posts around the perimeter of the structure. This was fortuitous, since our camera took a dive off of the tractor and erased all the pictures we had taken on that day! He was kind enough to share, and these pictures that Travis took really capture the scope of the structure better than the others, I think. We spoke with the HayGrove guys today, and they're solidifying a date to bend the hoops for hoop placement day. If you'd like to help us out on that day, keep an eye out for a post on the date, which we'll post as soon as we know it. Enjoy these couple of pictures:

Here's the view from the east end of the field.

Here's another east end view.

A view from the west end of the field. You can see the rows of posts, and us working on placing the last anchor posts.

Hip Hip Hooray HayGrove!

Pictured at left are (l-r) Adam, Linus, Mara & Spencer, and Sully (Linus' dog). We are smiling because we just finished erecting the first stage of our HayGrove hoophouse - you can see the posts behind us in the picture. We spent yesterday and today drilling the posts for the 3 bays (4 rows of posts). It took us 3 hours each day to do the drilling of the posts, we placed 86 posts each day. Each row took us about 1.5 hours, and then at the end of today, Spencer and I drilled in the anchor posts, which took us about 40 minutes each side, so another hour and 20 minutes for that job. All told, I'd say this phase of the project took us 10 hours to accomplish with 4 people (though three could do it you had to). I only have pictures from yesterday, as the camera fell off of the tractor today and lost all of today's photos! Sorry, Josh - thanks for taking all of our pictures today, though! We appreciate your help driving the tractor today, too! This will necessitate some more picture taking soon so that you can see the full extent of the project. So, on to some pictures!

So. As you'll recall, this whole project was held up for a year while FEMA, VT Dept. of Agriculture, the City of Burlington, the Department of Historic Preservation (DHP) and others worked to try and figure out if a 1/2 acre hoophouse was in violation of anything. FEMA decided that our hoophouse, which was custom built for one field had to be re-oriented to coincide with the direction of the Winooski river, so in the event of a major flood the water would flow in one end and out the other, causing minimal damage to others downstream. Illogical or not, we have to comply, so one other piece to the puzzle was that DHP wanted to do an archaeological dig since the arbitrary OK digging depth in their eyes was 18", and our posts were going to be sunk 30". Also, the Intervale is considered a site of "archaeological significance", so documenting interesting artifacts is in their interest. So, once the site was dug and catalogued, we'd get the OK. That happened, as you can see here, last week. This is the UVM archaeology crew that came to survey the site - 20 holes dug to 90 cm (about a meter), offset to where our posts would actually be going.
They dig a pit, toss soil into a screen, shake the screen, look for artifacts, then do it until they've reached the depth they are shooting for. Here John Crock, the lead of the dig shows us where there are old plow lines, also lines that indicate past flood events. It was quite fascinating!

Here you can see the flags running all the way down the 300' length of the hoophouse. What did they find? Nothing. Not a single thing. Not even an old horseshoe or nail! Sooooooo.

We start building!!! Here Spencer is pounding in our first stake to set the perimeter of our house.


Here we attempt to measure the distance. It was very windy and cold on this day. NOT FUN! Also hard to really measure accurately with all the wind flapping the measuring tape around.

Ah! Perfectly square and ready to go!

This field belonged to Full Moon Farm this season, and before they left, they seeded a nice thick cover crop of oats. Thanks, Dave! I mowed swatches of it down to make the laying of Lumite down much easier.

Here's our beloved Lumite the Landscape Fabric. This is laid before drilling the posts because once the hoophouse is all constructed, we never want to have to weed around each post!

Once all the Lumite is in place, we start marking where each post will go. We created a plumb bob from a bunch of landscape tacks, and marked each post spot with a bent landscape tack.

Here I am measuring the required 7'3" between each post.

Once they are all laid out, we cut a slit at each tack to make way for drilling in the post.

OK! All marked out and ready for action! We finished this project just as the sun was going down at 4:30 pm!!! Ah the north.....

Next day, I loaded up the tractor and wagon with the posts while Spencer went to pick up the 2 man auger that we need to use to drill it in. It turned out that we needed to modify the bit that was sent to us to make the drilling possible, and so we had to take it to a metal shop and ask them to essentially rebuild it so that we could do the job. And, becuase they had the right tools, they accomplished this in all of 20 minutes, and then we were in business. Of course, the running around to see who could do this for us gobbled up 2 hours! So, instead of starting at 10 am, we finally really got going at 1pm.

This was our setup: tractor to pull us, wagon to hold all the posts, picnic table on the back of the wagon to hold us up high enough to get the auger on top of the poles! Felt unsafe at first, but it worked REALLY well.

Here's Adam - the post leveler and stabilizer.

Here's the beast! It weighs about 40 or 50 pounds! We had to get a PTO extension (the red piece), and that shiny piece on the bottom is the "bit" we got made and used to connect the auger to the post.
Linus drove the tractor forward most of the day. This was a HUGE help - so we didn't have to jump down, move the tractor, then jump up, drill, jump down, etc. Glad we didn't skimp on help!
I would watch for our post markers to appear under me as Linus drove forward, then I'd yell, "Stop!". Sometimes I'd yell, "Back!", sometimes I'd yell, "Forward a little!" Our vocabulary was reduced to these words and when Spencer and I would drill, we'd use words like, "Ready!", "OK!", "Good!" Felt very cavemanlike, but it was so important to be clear - we're dealing with a big, heavy, unpredictable machine, here, people! Be clear.

Here is what a complete row looks like! Notice the undulations with the landscape. This is what HayGroves do - conform to the natural undulations of fields. I think it will look like a caterpillar when its got its plastic on!

Here's a video that Spencer tried to take of what the process was like.

More pictures to come soon!