The Long Wait is Over

The day has arrived, ending the longest stretch of my time at the farm without seeing my family... Today is the day-- they'll arrive later for Shabbat, and I can't wait!

Two nights ago we spent the evening at the farmhouse where the staff of Kayam live, about 2 miles from Pearlstone. There's a hiking path through cornfields and forest, though we drove a country road that felt alot like Highway F in Wisconsin.

The farmhouse is actually owned by New York Times garden columnist Ann Raver, so you can only imagine how beautiful the home and the property are. She grew up in the farmhouse, which is charming and right out of the 1940's-- I half expected Dorothy and and Toto to come prancing out! A few years ago, Ann and her partner converted half of one of the huge barns on the property into this amazing lofted apartment where they now live.

Every bit of the property is thoughtfully planned out and elegant-- the ultimate garden tour-- but not fancy or showy. Here's a rosebush planted in the middle of the lettuce beds. Here are the horseradish plants she wrote about for her March 31, 2010 article on the subject. We were stunned at every turn as we picked wild mulberries and blackberries and black raspberries-- we feasted on them...

Ann is a good friend to Kayam, and a good supporter of their work; I'm now a fan of Ann and am reading all of her articles at the Times website; she;'ll definitely be another one of my new garden gurus!

10 million fireflies...

I have never ever seen so many fireflies...

We just walked back in the dark from watching the first half of the Lakers-Celts NBA game 6 at Yakir and Netz's house, and there were more "flashbulbs" going off in the forest than there were at the Staples Center in LA! It's so incredibly beautiful and peaceful here-- can't wait to show Lys and the boys-- just 2 more days!

Okay, speaking of Elyssa-- dear-- I will never ever complain again about what a pain it is to weed the little garden we've got growing in our front yard. You graciously have done that work for years, never complaining. Well, I now have some perspective. Over the last 2 days, I have single-handedly weeded 500 tomato plants, and no, that's not an exaggeration. My favorite new gardening tool is an oscillating hoe:

Me and my hoe (also called a saddle hoe) have gotten to be good friends. (Hey, no jokes, please-- this is serious business!)

It was very rewarding work; it'd be even more rewarding if I didn't already know that by next week, there'll be weeds again, but, such is life...

Had an interesting talk with a forest ecologist today... He took us on a walk around the loop trail popinting out amazing things.

It seems that each expert we speak to makes the concept of sustainability so much more nuanced and complex... Kayam is doing great things with organic farming, but it still uses tons of water (instead of using  water collected when it rains). It's doing incredible stuff with its production, but it's still not doing permaculture, instead relying on the basic style of farming used in most places in the country.

I am determined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good, as Voltaire wrote. Kayam is an amazing place, period, and it represents a growing community of folks concerned about sustainability. AND, I have many more questions to ask. Like everything else I learn in my life, I suppose, the more I know, the more I realize how much much more there is to learn...

The New Moon

Kayam has a calendar garden, with (soon to be) twelve pie-piece-shaped beds arranged in a circle with a sundial in the middle. Each bed represents one of the Hebrew months, in addition to one of the 12 tribes of Israel. Yesterday was the new moon of Tammuz, represented by the tribe of Reuven. In honor of Tammuz, a month that the mystical tradition associates with trial and testing, we planted spicy hot "fish" peppers.

Then tonight was the first clear night in awhile, and we went out with my telescope and looked at the sliver of the new moon with the rest of the moon ever-so-gently lit with earthshine. It was a great way to close the bookend of the day in which we marked the new moon.

The tribe of Reuven is associated with "seeing," and so we challenged ourselves today to really attempt to see and pay attention to what is around us, where we are, and also to where we'd like to be, what we'd like to work on, during our time here. I shared with the group my desire to be more reflective about my experience in life generally, and certainly during this unique experience. I'm not totally sure that I can reflect on it fully while I'm in it, but I am going to try to stop and "smell the basil!"

Happy Rosh Chodesh Tammuz!

Would You Like Kale with That? or, the Suggestive Sell at a Farmer's Market

Had the privilege of staffing the local JCC Farmer's Market today with Alex. Heard I missed a rousing time at the first Ramsey Farmer's Market!

It was a neat experience, even though the "traffic" was pretty slow. It is a market that Kayam started about three years ago, and it's slowly growing. We sold about $275 worth of lettuce, kale, spring onions, sugar snap peas, strawberries, garlic scapes, mustard greens, beets, pac-choi, and turnips-- not too shabby. It was great chatting with people-- a few people knew exactly what they wanted and what to do with the stuff; many others had questions, were unfamiliar with some of the items and how to prepare them, and were even open to the kind of "suggestive sell" I learned way back in my McDonald's night shift days in Madison, WI.

Over the four hours of the market, we experimented with different ways to display the goods, propping bins up on an angle, pre-packaging some greens while leaving the rest for people to see/pick on their own (we think folks liked seeing the stuff loose but almost all preferred to let us actually bag it up. Interesting.). We decided that for next week, we're going to try to make some laminated signs for each thing that would give folks an idea of how to use it/prepare it. Should be interesting to see if that helps at all.

We'll be donating the rest to a local food pantry, which is cool-- our own version of "leaving the corners of our fields." The mishnah suggests actually leaving stuff in the field and letting the poor come and harvest it on their own; not quite sure how or if that could work practically on this land.

Shabbat Shalom or, a new appreciation for the 39 malachot

After a week like this, I can imagine how our ancestors came up with the categories of work that are forbidden on Shabbat. The categories, as listed below, seem arcane to most of us on a day to day basis, because they almost all have to do with farming in one way or another. The rabbis of our tradition have extrapolated from this list to discern all the prohibitions we associate with Shabbat. I have to say that, living in the more basic way that I have been, doing (seemingly) simpler tasks, I appreciate the traditional list much more than I usually do.

Here is a list of those categories with an "X" next to the ones I am aware of doing this week, and a "Y" next to ones I do in a typical week in Oakland, NJ:

1. Sowing--X
2. Plowing--X
3. Reaping--X
4. Binding Sheaves--X
5. Threshing--X
6. Winnowing
7. Selecting--X, Y
8. Grinding
9. Sifting--X
10. Kneading--Y
11. Baking--Y
12. Shearing
13. Bleaching
14. Hackling
15. Dyeing
16. Spinning-X
17. Stretching the threads
18. The making of two meshes
19. Weaving two threads
20. Dividing two threads
21. Tying a knot--X, Y
22. Untying a knot--X,Y
23. Sewing two stitches
24. Tearing in order to sew two stitches
25. Capturing (an animal)
26. Slaughtering
27. Flaying
28. Salting
29. Curing hide
30. Scraping
31. Cutting--X, Y
32. Writing two letters--X,Y
33. Erasing in order to write two letters--X, Y
34. Building--X
35. Demolishing--X
36. Extinguishing fire--X, Y
37. Kindling fire--X, Y
38. Striking with a hammer (i.e. giving something its final touch)--X
39. Carrying (in a public domain, or from a private domain to a public domain, and vice versa)--X, Y

I think I've done 19 of these things this week, and I can say with certainty that I am ready to NOT do them again until (at least) sundown tomorrow night-- I'm exhausted. I can only identify 11 that I do in a typical non-sabbatical week. How about you?

What it feels like to know the farm

It's only been 11 days, and three of those were on the pilgrimage, but I thpink we're all beginning to feel like we know the farm better and better. We know where things are, more or less; we know how to harvest everything when we need to; we know how to prep it for the CSA and for the farmers market.

We know how to seed, pot up, plant, and weed without further instruction. Pretty amazing!

Now it's time that we can pay closer attention to the plants themselves-- get to know what is plant and what is weed-- get to know what weeds grow around what plants. We're getting to know the various bugs that are attracted to each plant, and which ones are beneficial and which ones are pests.

Today was dry and warm-- a nice change from rainy cool yesterday, and it felt like the farm really came alive after some much needed precipitation.

We're definitely all looking forward to Shabbat; I'll be spending time in D.C. with my cousin Debbie, which should be so much fun, and then Sunday morning, I'm taking my turn to staff the Farmer's Masrket with Alex; we'll see how good a salesman I am!

Off to bed, good an tired...

Early Morning on the Farm

Here's some pictures I took on the farm around 6:30 this morning...