new home for farm blog

Continued coverage of season 2011 can be found here!

Enjoy the season :)

summer twist

June 1, 2011

High Season Begins

Today, we continued the transplanting frenzy that we’ve been on all week. Tomatillos, herbs, thirty different varieties of hot peppers, eggplant, lettuce, okra, husk cherries – anything we could get our hands on. Towards the middle of the afternoon, we noticed that the sky to the west of us had turned an angry shade of steel gray. The rest of the sky was a beautiful fiery orange, an “end of the world sky”, remarked my co-worker Jackie. It’s best to transplant before rain, and weed afterwards, so we continued our tasks of getting seedlings into the ground. As the winds picked up around us, our hands worked quicker in the soil, pulling dirt up around the stems of each plant to make sure that it stood strong and upright. Even when the storm broke and the first fat drops started falling to the ground, we kept up our pace, bringing the last of the trays out of the greenhouse to be buried into bed-rows.

Finally we decided that it was a good time to stop, and we returned to the house to watch the storm from the porch. A friend called to inform us that tornado warnings had been issued for our area - news to us - but we stayed outside, fixated by the impressive lightning bolts touching down on the hills around our sweet little farm. At one point, a bolt came so close that I thought it struck the tree in front of our house, and I ran inside with a yelp. Without television or the internet, our knowledge about the storm was sparse. The uncertainty of the next few hours was a bit scary, but luckily we came out unscathed (as did our crops, and most importantly, our chickens! I was worried about those ladies being picked up by a gust of wind and flying away forever!). Unfortunately, the residents of Springfield were not so lucky. For more information and videos of the twister that hit that area, click here.

And so, it is as such that we usher in the first days of summer- rather dramatically, I should add. Yesterday, we were sweltering in the fields (until the rain hit) and today I was back in my scarf and hoodie to shield me from cold wind gusts. It's hard to say what this season will bring... Nevertheless, our first CSA pick-up starts this weekend sooo -- welcome to the high season, folks!

Here are some photos to acquaint yourself with the place!

getting remay (row cover) over the cucurbits (melons and winter squash) to minimize pest damage. notice those nice straight lines? yeah tractor work!

a few of the crew (adam in the back, emily and dave in the middle, and me up front)

view from my back porch a few weeks ago - the leaves have since filled out and the grass is about as tall as I am! (Not very tall, some might say. but i'd argue with that accusation.) See the chicken coop on wheels in background? That's the ladies' summer home...

high tunnel in the setting sun

barn glow

That's all folks!

tractor time

This morning, I went on a long walk around a nearby lake and when I returned to the farm, the sky had darkened and a storm was threatening on the horizon. Jarrett was tracking the bad weather on the radar and he said it would only last an hour or so, short and sweet. After a few days of intense heat, this rain was rather welcome, but we had lots to do. Plants were keeling over in the greenhouse, ready to be transplanted from their tiny trays into the wide open space in the field, with lots of room for their roots to stretch and grow, and for their stalks to reach for the sky.

Yes, planting was the priority of the day. But in order to get plants into the ground, we had to get beds formed. For this, we have a bed former, an implement we attach to the back of the tractor. I was a total tractor newbie this time last week, so for all you others who may be as clueless as me about these machines, let me clue you in. Basically, a tractor is a super-powered vehicle to which you hitch "implements" or heavy duty farm tools to do a big amount of field work for you that would otherwise take you your entire lifetime to finish. We have a relatively small farm, only about 7 tillable acres, and even we would find it nearly impossible to get our fields prepared and ready for growing veggies without a tractor. Some of the tractors out in the midwest are GIGANTIC, with heated cabs and cable television! They are also steered by satellite GPS because those fields are so enormous - thousands of acres! - that they need more perfect precision than using just their eyeballs can provide. It's hard enough to go in a straight line for 200 ft, I can't imagine conquering those mondo fields of grain out in Iowa and South Dakota...

So anyway, back to Belchertown. The field that we call the "barn block" had already been plowed and disc harrowed over the weekend, so it was ready for bed forming. Basically, this field had been in "cover crop" all winter; a combination of winter rye and vetch had been planted in the fall as a cover for the bare ground (better not to leave soil bare because of erosion and nutrient loss) and would be tilled back into the soil in the spring (now) to add organic matter to the soil. As an added bonus, vetch is a "nitrogen fixer", meaning that it removes nitrogen from the air and stores it in nodules in it's roots. When that plant dies and decomposes in the soil, that nitrogen is released and becomes available to other plants - free fertilizer, without the nasty chemicals!

First, a plow goes over the field of cover crop and essentially picks up a strip of soil and turns it over, displacing the organic matter that was growing on top of the ground and covering it with dirt, beginning the decomposition process. After that, the field gets "harrowed" by an implement- in our case, a disc harrow- that breaks up the lumps of soil and levels the field. After this step, which I have done on another occasion with much difficulty, the soil is ready to be made into neat beds into which you can transplant veggie crops from the greenhouse.

Now, the bed former is not as difficult to use as a disc harrow or even a plow because by the time you get on the field with the bed former, the ground is level, making everything much easier. The bed former pulls soil from the sides and flattens it into a bed, and a rolling mechanism in the back makes holes at certain intervals for easier transplanting. All you have to do is plop the implement down at the end of a bed and gun the engine and try to make it to the other side in as straight of a line as possible.

Let me tell you one thing, folks. Driving a tractor in a straight line is no easy task. And these beds I was forming were actually double the length of a normal bed, making my task even more challenging! Oh and not to mention the rain, the lightning! Farming is so hardcore, can't you tell? Haha. For all my complaining, the beds came out just fine (well, generally decent enough) and I didn't get struck by lightning and I felt like a complete badass, as I do anytime I'm driving the tractor (I really should give him? her? a name). Also, it's a great feeling of accomplishment afterwards, looking at my lovely lines of garden beds, just waiting for us to dig our fingers in and free these plants from the confines of their trays, to let them roam free in the field!

I always joke that the plants are living the cushy life in the greenhouse, getting watered everyday and babied by our greenhouse queen, Emily. When we put them out in the field, there are no more frills. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the fight for survival isn't always easy. It's going from the penthouse apartment to living out on the street.

Today, we brought sweet potatoes, watermelons, and waltham winter squash out into the real world. Let's hope they can hack it.

Happy memorial day!

springtime on the farm!

Hello lovely blogworld folks, so sorry to have been completely MIA for several weeks? months? I have no good excuses this time, just good old fashioned busy-ness/laziness? Since the last time we have "talked", I've road-tripped up the eastern seaboard and am currently living in a barn in western Mass. Wait, let me explain. I moved back up here to work as an apprentice under farmer Jarrett, owner and manager of Stone Soup Farm, and I'll be here all season - from mid April til Halloween! I am one of 3 budding young farmers to be sharing this awesome experience, and so far, the job has been going exceedingly well. The weather has generally been holding up quite well, with the exception of nearly 2 weeks of nonstop rain. (The sun has since come back out to play - whew!) I have developed a strange yet beautiful affinity for driving tractors, more specifically the John Deere 1050 --

which I will get into at a later date. My biceps are growing by the day and no amount of handwashing is able to remove the dirt from underneath my nails, and I like it that way. Life is good, I can't complain. A bounty of organic veggies at my fingertips, most still in their seedling stage, but the potential for deliciousness is huge! At the moment, we've been munching on mostly green things - leeks leftover from last fall, early chives and scallions, spinach galore, and finally salad mix - yes, summer is here! The tomatoes have been transplanted from the greenhouse into the field and we await with abated breath as those tiny yellow flowers will eventually turn into luscious pomodoros - can't wait!

So that's a quick recap on my life at the farm, and hopefully there will be plenty more news updates to come. Stay tuned, and make sure to sow your seeds for summer!

back from the jungle!

Hello friends, I am sorry I have been completely MIA for the past month. To my credit, I was deep in the rainforest for much of that time, about 4 hours by foot (and then another 2 hours by bus) from the nearest computer. So that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I've been back in Miami for over a week now, but it always takes me a little while to re-acclimatize to American culture and gather my thoughts about my time abroad. Life in Ecuador is quite a contrast to the average life in the States; let's just say that we have it super easy, and being in Ecuador always reminds me of that fact. I have returned with a renewed sense of humility and gratitude for simple things, like running water, clean drinking water, washing machines, basically every appliance in our kitchen. I am particularly thankful for my juicer, after watching a friend spend about 2 hours grating carrots and beets, to then squeeeze the juice out of the pulp to make herself a tasty and refreshing drink. I'd love to send her mine- I'm sure she'd get more use of out it than I do! And she'd probably appreciate it way more... All in all, we have a lot to be grateful for!

One appliance that I refuse to use upon my return to Miami is the dryer. Come on, people. We live in South Florida. You can't get more tropical than that in the continental United States. The weather rarely gets below 70 degrees and we barely get any rain in the "winter" months, so why why why do we insist on wasting energy with a clothes dryer? The sun does it FOR FREE.

Okay okay, I'm done. That's my rant for the day.

Of course, Veronica's family hang-dry all of their clothes, and they even have some clotheslines set up on their rooftop for maximum sunshine exposure. Curiously, they have a washing machine in their house, but I never saw them use it once. Washing their clothes by hand is a daily routine for them, and I don't think they can get used to having a machine do the job that they can do themselves. Equally curious is the wooden paddle that every Ecuadorian household keeps in their wash station. Throughout the day, you'll hear them beating their wet clothes with it. I figured it was an anger management tool, but when my clothes dried stiff as a board, I understood the use of their paddle. It softens the fibers!

Next time you do something simple like load a dishwasher, give a thought to those who have to do them by hand, with no running water, by candlelight. A challenge, indeed. I think it's important to be mindful of how good we've got it. Vacuum cleaners, blenders, air conditioning, personal vehicles, food processors (My lifesaver! Have you ever tried making hummus without one? I have, with limited success. Not fun.) - these things make our life easier in ways that we never even realize.

My question is this: what are we doing with these saved minutes of our lives? We shouldn't feel guilty for our good fortune, but rather we should honor the ease with which we live our daily lives by truly making the most of it. My hope is that we are doing our best to be productive and engaged citizens of our country, to live with intention and invest our energy in a positive and meaningful way.

technology! what a miracle!

roasting cacao

de-graining corn

tia maita feeding the chicks

chancho in the yard!

little leslie and i

haircut time for pilli

vero gathering the guineos for the dulce

newborn chick!

carmella +karen+flowers

flora!

rocio with lunch

cacao drying on the roof

my favorite tree

platanos on the terrace

maria gabriella y leslita playing with dollies

the boys with saturday´s load of maracuya to bring into town (14 cents a kilo! next to nothing for all the hard work...)


more to come later!

la finca de la tentación

Hello friends! I am writing you from a far better place (health-wise) than the last time I wrote in here.... On Thursday, I was starting to feel better (and the ultrasound of my upper abdomen didn´t show any signs of wiggling parasites!) so I was finally able to make the trek out to Vero´s family´s farm, or finca as they call them here. Around noon, Vero, her colleague Maria del Carmen who was visiting from Esmeraldas (a coastal town 3 hours away), and I set out for greener pastures.

We left La Concordia by bus and got off about twenty minutes out of town. From there, we set off by foot down a rocky, muddy, hilly road used by the few farmers in the area. For an hour and a half, we walked, passing neighboring farmland - but this isn´t what you North American friends might have in mind when I say farmland. No, this land is abundant with tropical crops such as cacao, maracuyá (passion fruit), palma (palm oil is a big export in the region), plantains, and guineos, the Spanish word for the sweet, yellow fruit we call bananas!

When we got to her farm, we were welcomed by her mother Mariana (Tia Maita to all), sister Rocio, a few brothers, some cousins, a tiny family friend, Leslie, and her constant companion, a squirmy white puppy. After enjoying our lunch and taking a rest, Vero showed us around her farm; trees filled with papaya, avocados, mangos, guanábanas, sugar cane, ciruelos (hard plum-like fruits with spiny centers), arasha (a sweet yellow fruit I had never seen before that smelled somewhat of peaches but taste completely different, and magnificent!), oranges, and grapefruit adorned the land surrounding the house. Now this is my kind of farming! As if the tropical fruit wasn´t enough, there were chickens, a few roosters, a gaggle of geese, squawking ducks, a herd of cows, a family of pigs, four dogs, and a sweet cat named FiFi running around. I could have died and gone to heaven! All that were missing were a few goaties, but still, close enough....

Now, as most goods stories go, the best way to tell this one is through food! There were the yapingachos for dinner made from the yucca we dug from the earth on our walk-through that afternoon. And the chocolate milk the next morning made from cacao harvested on their farm, dried on their roof, roasted over their hearth, and ground into powder to be added to the milk taken from the cows that morning. Also from that same milk, we enjoyed queso fresco, or fresh cheese, that we folded into dough and put into the hearth so that they puffed up and made delicious cheesy bread to be enjoyed for la merienda. The next morning, after the roosters and geese woke us up before the first sunlight, we went up to the terrace and collected a bucketful of guineos which we peeled, mashed, and put on the hearth to cook down all day long until they became a sweet brown paste, or dulce de guineo, which we also folded into dough as a snack for the family. At lunch, a chicken soup for which I was present for the killing of said chicken (a rooster too many) at the hands of Rocio and her ever-sharp machete. For dinner, corn tortillas made from maíz harvested that morning, shucked and ground in the yard with the chickens fighting over any kernels we may have dropped at our feet. Ripe avocados to adorn our plates at every meal. Juices, or coladas, made from every possible fruit, and aguas aromaticas (herbal teas) made from every possible leaves (naranja, guanabaná, menta, toronjíl). Like I said before, heaven. It´s a good thing my stomach started behaving just in time!


I wish I could post pictures of the food, the animals, the kids, the fruits, the flowers (my god, the flowers)- but the computer is being difficult at the moment... So I´ll just let you all paint these pictures for yourself in your mind!

Tomorrow I leave for the Biological Reserve called Bilsa, a few days later than expected, but better late than never! I´ve been waiting to return to Bilsa ever since I was last there, three and a half years ago, so this is sort of a big deal for me. What with all the excitement of the farm the past few days, I´ve barely been able to think about what awaits me. I´ll be back on here in a few weeks with lots of stories to tell... ´Til then, be well!

cariños de Carmella

A few words on being sick abroad

It´s the worst. Well maybe there are worse things in the world, but since I´m a big fat baby, being sick abroad is the absolute Worst.

Last Friday, I journeyed from Baños to La Concordia, where my friend Veronica and her family live. I started feeling a little queasy on the bus ride, but I thought it was just the winding roads and scary hairpin turns that were making me ill. That night, I was up until dawn with shivers and a ferocious fever; not fun.

Now, I´ve been down this road before and I learned my lesson. As much as I WANT the local remedies to work, I´ve learned the hard way that my fragile North American digestive system really needs good old western medication. It´s the sad truth.

(Last time I was in Ecuador, I drank a few cups of chicha at a village celebration - a fermented yucca drink - and immediately fell ill. I drank a tea made out of this concoction for a week without any results. I finally ventured to the nearest city, found a doctor, was prescribed pills, and felt immediately cured. Sad, but true. I´ll gladly accept Vero´s mama´s delicious healing teas of oregano, onion root, mint, and my favorite - manzanilla, or chamomile as you might know it - but I know it´s not enough.)

So, the morning after my feverish nightmare, Vero took me to see the local doctor for the fever and a weird upper abdominal pain. He did some blood tests ("No es dengue!", he told me when I came back for the results. Yay, I don´t have dengue!) and prescribed me some medications for the fever, the pain, and the intestinal infection that I apparently had (have?). I expected the immediate results as I had had previously. Not the case. The pain persisted. A few days pass. Another sleepless night. I tossed around best and worst case scenarios. Maybe I just had a little indigestion. Maybe I was suffering from internal bleeding! What if I had to go home early? How much would that cost? Would I be able to survive the bus ride back to Quito?? In the morning, I was a wreck. I went back to the doctor. I started crying in his office. "I´m scared!", I whimpered;"it hurts." (Remember, I told you at the beginning that I´m a Big Fat Baby). He adjusted my medications. Maybe one of them had given me stomach pain. I don´t know! I´m not a doctor!

This was yesterday. The pain was alleviated most of the day, but then it returned in the evening. Sitting in Veronica´s family´s convenience store, we talked with a friend, Hermann, about my situation. People stopped by and told me what they thought it might be, because their sister once had a similar pain and she drank some papaya seeds in milk for a week and it went away and why don´t I try that. Hermann suggested that perhaps I had Helicobacter pylori, an increase of a bacteria that already exists in our system. I started getting freaked out again, and we decided I should visit another doctor in the morning.

Cut to Tuesday morning, 5am. Hermann comes to pick Vero and I up in his taxi and drives us to the neighboring town, La Independencia. We´re going to see Doctor Henry Olvera, and apparently we´re not the only ones. He only takes the first 10 patients, and we find out that we´re number eleven when we arrive at 5:30. Some people have been waiting since 4. The doctor won´t arrive until 8, but he´ll be there half the day seeing patients before going to work at another location in the afternoon. He only takes ten, but that´s because he takes the proper amount of time with each of them, somebody explains to me.

I woke up with minimal pain and it doesn´t look like I´ll get seen that day so I wonder if we should bother staying at all. "Ya estamos aquí." We´re already here, Veronica tells me, imploring me to wait a bit longer. We shoot the shit with our fellow patients, one of whom is the young mother of a 2 month old baby with a runny nose. She´s number twelve, but they say the doctor usually makes exceptions for babies and small children so hopefully she´ll get seen.

An hour or 2 passes, and Veronica and I go to sit at the front entrance of the clinic. She knows where the doctor lives so every so often she goes to look and see if he´s coming. A few minutes later, I see her coming up the path with the doctor, explaining to him very rapidly my situation. He shakes my hand and continues to walk briskly towards the clinic. We walk past the group of waiting patients and he motions me into his office. It´s 7:30am. I am astonished by my friend´s take-charge attitude. "Eres mi heoína," I whipser to her as we sit down. You´re my hero, Verito! He looks over my blood test results, assigns me a few more tests, pokes me a bit, asks me more questions, and it´s over just as quickly as it began.

live light

Hello blogging world! I created this blog several months ago in hopes that I would start writing more, but it has been dormant ever since. Now I am traveling through Ecuador for a few weeks and being abroad always brings out the journaler in me, so I´m going to give this blog a go!

My name is Carmella and I hail from the capital of consumerism: Miami, Florida! Oddly enough, my main interests lie far from that world and within another one, the sphere of sustainability. I think a lot about issues such as environmental education and the importance of integrating nature into a child´s upbringing and education. Since graduating from college, I have been trying my best to acquire skills that I deem important to sustainability, such as the knowledge of how to grow my own food, keep bees, stay healthy using medicinal herbs, or how to process veggies for storage. There´s a lot to know, and I´ve ony begun to scratch the surface.

Traveling is another passion of mine (I blame it on my parents!); I just can´t seem to shake my crazy case of wanderlust! I mainly travel for work (my father is the captain of a sailboat so sometimes I go abroad to do some work as a crew member),visiting far-flung family and friends, or volunteering. Currently, I am in Ecuador to volunteer for an organization called Jatun Sacha Fundacion who do environmental conservation all over the country. In a few days, I will be heading into the Choco rainforest (one of the top 25 hot spots of the world due to its high levels of biodiversity and endemism) to plant trees on land that used to be primary rainforest and has since been razed and converted into plantations and livestock grazing or logged for wood. It´s amazing to see the changes that they have made in just a few years. They have converted land that was a barren wasteland back into a vibrant rainforest, complete with the incredible biodiversity of all sorts of animals and insects. Walking through the forest, you can hear howler monkeys high up in the trees or see the famous long-wattled umbrella bird! They also have an enormous diversity of hummingbirds (colibri) and frogs!

Okay sorry, I´ll stop nerding out about nature...

So anyway, back to the blog! I invite you to join me on this journey, whether it be off the beaten track in a remote corner of the rainforest planting trees or back in my crazy hometown fighting traffic. This may sound like a rather self-centered venture, but I hope that this can turn into a space for discussion and community rather than just me spewing my thoughts. Please feel free to comment, argue, share ideas, etc. We all have so much to learn from one another!

I look forward to sharing this space and these experiences with you all. Should be quite the wild ride!

cheers, Carmella