The Chickasaw plums are abloom, and abuzz with their halos of pollinators. The peaches and pears and apples and redbuds and maples are jubilant and painted even before they put on their green dresses. The robins are afoot, red-breasted and burnt as the ground. The cranes are leaving their southern abodes and beginning the northward journey – slow, deliberate and raucous. They make great sweeping circles over the fields and their call is a throaty toast to the intrepid spirit that is driving them and the buds alike. Life calls to be rejuvenated, to be reborn.

The sun has nearly reached it’s equinox; the day has nearly caught the night. More hours of warmth, more balm to resuscitate the chilled marrow of mice and minnows. Movement! Growth. Exhalation. March brings the winds, and the winds bring in change. The plants quake with excitement over the warmth of their feet. All life stirs in springtime. We become restless, and our bodies revolt. Illness overtakes us, then gives way to the sweet air after we are cleansed. We sneeze, we cough, our fluids flow, we are rendered sick by the sudden change; it comes so swiftly. Our sap flows like the maples’ and our stagnations are faced and overcome. Who have we been in winter? The flowers effuse their essences, and we inhale their pollen and their fragrances. We breathe in the change, and are transformed…

We have been working to make space for the size of spring. Winter’s plants are huddled up, close to the ground, close to each other. They are loathe to boast in height or girth. Broccoli is perhaps the bravest in this regard, and oftentimes is frostbitten right on its nose for its hubris. In springtime, there is an element of verticality that is expounded by the plants. The sun beckons, and they heed the call. They grow upward, they shed their shyness and open their wings. The garden transcends the two-dimensional state of winter, and sprouts another axis. I look forward to the mystery that is born from this height, the visual screens of trellised tomatoes and cucumbers, and the wildness that comes later in summer, when the squash run roughshod over anything in their way, and the sun and rain conspire to test the northern limits of the tropics. Papayas and avocadoes and guavas race to finish their fruit before the first frosts return as a reminder of our latitude…

I am getting ahead of myself here. It is still March, and was 28 degrees on Saturday night. Still, having inaugurated a farm in the coldest winter on record, I am tempted to indulge this hope just a bit.

Warmest regards,

Noah Shitama
Swallowtail Farmer

3 tbsp peanut oil
2 spring onions scallions, chopped
1lb pac choi, shredded
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp sugar
1/2 cup chicken or vegetable stock
1 tsp cornstarch

Heat the oil and fry the spring onions until lightly browned.

Add the pac choi and stir-fry for 3 minutes. Add the remaining ingredients and stir-fry for 2 minutes.

Butterhead with Sesame Dressing

1 head butterhead lettuce
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon dried crushed red pepper

For Season Shares, both Preferred and Standard, pick up information is as follows:
Day: Wednesdays, from November 3, 2010 — June 29, 2011
Time: 4:00 — 6:00pm
Location: Downtown Farmers’ Market map

For UF CSA Shares:

Day: Mondays, from November 1, 2010 — April 25, 2011
Time: 4:30 — 6:30pm
Location: next to the beach volleyball courts across from the Southwest Recreation Center map

Debi Vance Skaff
Swallowtail Farm CSA Member

Recipes:

Curried Sprouts

1 cup Lentil Sprouts or mung bean sprouts
1/2 cup chopped parsley
finely diced cilantro
finely diced rosemary
1/4 cup mayonnaise or vegannaise
2 Tbs. ketchup or rice vinegar
2 Tbs. olive oil
1/4 tsp. dill
1/2 smallish red onion, diced
1/2 – 1 Tbs. curry powder
salt and pepper to taste

Mix all the ingredients together. For a warm dish mix together in wok or sauce pan and lightly cook in olive or sesame oil.

Couscous Carrots

1/4 cup butter
6 carrots, diced
1 onion, bunch scallions or green garlic chopped
1/2 cup chicken or veggie broth
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups dry couscous
1/4 cup raisins

Heat the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. cook and stir the carrots and onion until the carrots begin to soften and the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Pour in the chicken broth and water, and bring the mixture to a boil. Stir in the couscous, mixing well to avoid lumps, cover, and remove from the heat. Let the couscous stand covered until the water is absorbed, about 5 minutes. Stir in the raisins, and serve hot.

When we get to the farm, Tim gives the sun a proper salutation, while Zach and I start pacing anxiously from barn to greenhouse, to the fields and back, taking notes in our speeding brains, and on completely different wavelengths. Thus far, Morgan seems to just marvel placidly at the hilarity of all of it. Occasionally, a miracle occurs, and when we reconvene to set our tasks for the day, Zach has the same ideas as I do. More often, we see urgent and immediate care required in entirely dissimilar realms. My focus (if it can be called that) is often on infrastructure, or the long view. Zach has the next harvest in High Definition, fairly permanently, and keeps a helter-skelter survey of plant succession. I have a mind for the farm, Zach has a mind for the food. Another way to say it is that I am impractically ambitious, and Zach is frenetically on-point. And so we get to work, often in pairs. This past week, I remembered Morgan telling someone she had worked building stage sets for theater productions and fashion shows, and so I asked for her company in finishing the greenhouse and building benches for the seed trays. Zach and Tim went down into the field to finish prepping beds for planting.

By midday, I usually experience some small private moment of inconvenience that triggers within me a completely disproportionate response, an overreaction. Let me provide an example. In attempting to screw one piece of wood to another, the screw drops to the ground, and suddenly, I feel the world is a tragic and difficult place to be. These moments help me realize that I am hungry. They often take place just before Zach announces he is going up to the house to make lunch. Soon after, we all sit down to pizza and kombucha, a fresh salad, and reinvigorated melees of emotional abuse. It’s the best part of the day, hands down. We made a commitment from the get-go that if this was going to be about food, then we had better go ahead and enjoy a good meal all together each day that we’re working. It’s been the church of our farm, these lunchtimes, truly. We clean up together, maybe share a pot of coffee if there’s an extra dose of lethargy in the air, and get back to the dirt. By the time we had better leave if we want any hope of salvaging our relationships at home, we’re all thoroughly pooped and the ride home is often a bit milder in its tone, a little softer for the transition back to other life. Heck, we might even talk about what we need to accomplish on Tuesday. And after Tim and Morgan have been returned to their saner abodes, and it’s just us again, we’re happy once more to sit quietly and enjoy the smell of earth on our clothes.

What is it that begs us to beat up on one another to show our love? Is it that we’re celebrating the trust that has been forged in the brutal fires of friendship or family? Are we exploring the outer limits of our emotional color wheels as some twisted covenant of solidarity and love? Maybe it’s just that fun.

Anyway, this is dedicated to my partner in farming, my kid brother with a kid, my lunchtime mother, my dream co-pilot, my good friend Zach.

In solidarity, with love,

Noah Shitama
Swallowtail Farmer

Recipes:

Baked Carrots

4 cups of carrots, sliced
½ cup of water
6 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of nutmeg
1 teaspoon of salt

In a casserole dish, mix the sugar, nutmeg and salt with water.
Add the carrots and glaze them with butter.
Bake at 350°F for 10 minutes, stirring after 5 minutes.
Cool for 5 minutes.

Berried Avocado Grapefruit Salad

Butterhead lettuce
2 avocados, seeded, peeled and sliced
2 cups grapefruit sections
1 cup fresh strawberries
Prepared sweet vinegar and oil dressing

Line salad plates with lettuce. Arrange avocado, grapefruit and strawberries over and sprinkle with dressing.

The Saturday before last, it poured rain, and we had a work party at the Garden building a greenhouse for the little ones of spring. I was at the hardware store at 7:30 in the morning, thinking what a bummer it was that the day all of these folks (Ed, Alissa, Wade, Chris, Annie, Zach, Ivor, Aaron, Mary…) were willing and able to come and help, it was going to be sopping wet. But everyone came, and we worked right through the rain, and moved a compost pile and dug posts out and put new posts in and built the frame of the greenhouse in the pouring rain. And we liked it. I think that’s what our grandfolks would have said, anyway. Really though, I wouldn’t trade the comraderie of it for anything.

This past Saturday, Tim coordinated a visit by the Saints for Sustainability, a student club at Santa Fe College. They all caravanned out as early as could be hoped for, and Zach set to setting them to task, though they made short work of his lists, and we ended up just in wonder at the fact that we’re doing something for our living that people are willing to spend their Saturdays helping with of their own volition. Yes, of course we want to spend our own Saturdays doing this work, but when it comes down to it, so much of what I feel that I hope for in life is to be doing something meaningful, that affects the community beyond the work itself, that is a relevant contribution to the positive changing of tides and times, that accommodates the notion of true evolution of our cultural spirit, that is a symbol of our collective and cooperative striving for betterment for ourselves and one another. Something that accomplishes something good enough to want to share; that in fact must be shared to be accomplished at all. Are we so lucky to have found something like this?

Michael Pollan was on Oprah the other day, so I heard, and to me it just served as a symbolic affirmation of my suspicions that the vigor and vitality of this CSA is partly just dumb luck; an accidental miracle of timing. When else has there been a more conscientious (and mainstream!) investigation into the nature of food in any of our lifetimes?

Also, I keep feeling that when we find something that we feel not merely inspired to work toward, but literally compelled to get to work with it, maybe it’s not destiny at work. Maybe it’s not a calling in the traditional, personal sense. Perhaps we are merely ants marching, acting dutifully for the the hill; bees hustling for the hive. Except that we are blessed to have an acute awareness of both our individuality and our purpose. Or cursed, depending upon our take on the situation; if we feel purposeful, if our lives feel meaningful, then it is sweetness. If not, we feel a heaviness that is often unbearable. If we are vigilant, if we maintain an awareness of this responsibility, we are able sometimes to align our daily living with our sense of purpose. And here we can experience something meaningful.

This coming Saturday, the UF Organic Gardening Club is planning a visit. It will be a new moon, and a root day by the Biodynamic calendar. We’ll plant some carrots and turnips and radishes and hopefully cut up seed potatoes for planting. We’ll hoe and weed the roots in the field, maybe layer some compost,. We’ll be working hard, trying to fill the new greenhouse with spring seedlings, and the shadehouse with a final flush of greens and cool weather plants. There will be children and mothers and fathers and grandparents and students, and when we’re done, we’ll have a picnic.

With humble thanks to Michael Pollan and Oprah, and especially to our bee minds – may they guide us well,

Noah Shitama
Swallowtail Farmer

Recipes:

Moroccan Carrot Slaw

10 medium carrots
1/3 cup mayonnaise
pinch of salt
1/4 cup sugar
heavy squeeze of grapefruit juice
1/2 cup raisins
2 teaspoons curry powder
teaspoon minced garlic, clove or green

Wash the carrots, peel and grate. In a large mixing bowl whisk together the mayonnaise, salt, sugar, grapefruit, raisins, curry powder, garlic. Add the carrots and toss to combine. Serve immediately or refrigerate for 1 hour to serve cold.

Butterhead Salad with Grapefruit Dressing

Butterhead Lettuce
Baby Arugula
Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

DRESSING:
chopped shallots or green onions
1/2 grapefruit
1/2 lime or lemon
1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
Spoonful of honey
fine sea salt
freshly ground pepper
finely minced fresh rosemary

Add dressing ingredients to a bowl and squeeze in grapefruit and lime/lemon. Whisk ingredients and let sit. Arrange baby arugula and butterhead lettuce in a salad bowl. Toss with dressing. Slice Parmesan cheese over top. Add slices of grapefruit over the top.

We decided to put our new plow to work, and proceeded to plow a good ¾ of an acre, with a machine whose soil-working width is 12 inches.  We spent literally days on a task that later would be accomplished with a bottom plow (the right tool for the job, as it were) in 2 hours flat.  I think there was something of a notion in our heads back then at the Beginning Time that if we sacrificed our bodies and minds, right off the bat, to the altar of our great Cause, if we demonstrated a fierce and righteous appetite for suffering in our work, we would be rewarded by instant bounty and great farming karma.  We were not.  But we didn’t despair.  We just abandoned the rotary plow, the useless son of a gun.

Since then, we’ve used it here and there to dig shallow trenches, which it is really splendidly good at, and that’s pretty much all.  This whole time, mind you, I’ve been hearing the voice of Joel at Earth Tools up in Owenton, Kentucky, telling me how this plow is an excellent tool for making raised beds, all the while shoveling the paths up onto the beds with absurdly tireless enthusiasm, 150 ft at a shot.  And then, just yesterday, it occurred to me that we had at least eight new beds to make asap, which wasn’t even in the top 5 items on our prioritized farm task list for this week.  Joel started speaking to me again, more or less as soon as I picked up the shovel to make the first bed.  I ignored him for about 45 minutes, and then had a brilliant idea.  I thought we might try that rotary plow to make our beds.  I took the tiller, our exalted bit of steel, off of the BCS, and bolted on the plow.  It took me roughly an hour to form up all eight new beds.

So, yes, I’m a bit slow on the take.  And please don’t talk to me while I’m working, because I’m easily distracted.  Even if it’s about using a different tool.

Here’s to tomtens, and shoemaking elves, and the relentless pursuit of new discoveries of old (good) ideas.  With all of my concentration,

Noah Shitama
Swallowtail Farmer

Ps.  I promised Jane I’d be brief with this one.  So I’d better stop typing now.

Recipes:

Roasted Grapefruit

Slice grapefruits in half at the center, against the grain. Use a spoon to separate fruit from the rind around the inside. Sprinkle with a tablespoon of brown sugar and cinnamon. Bake at 350 in oven for about 10-15 minutes. Enjoy this warm delicious citrus treat over a salad or by itself.

Collard Green Surprise

1 Pkg Cognito Farm Italian Sausage
Bunch of Collard Greens
2 Garlic Cloves
1/2C Glades Ridge Chevre

Cook the sausage in a large covered skillet over medium-low heat until done all the way through, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove and cut into 1/4 inch cubes, setting aside.

Slice collard greens into strips and add to the same skillet, keeping as much juice in the pan as you’d like. Saute over medium heat for at least 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add garlic.

Cover with lid and turn down to simmer for another 10 minutes, until greens are completely tender. Take off the heat, and put greens into a serving bowl, tossing with sausage and crumbled goat cheese. Enjoy!

“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…Give your approval to all you cannot understand…Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years…Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….Practice resurrection.” 

– Wendell Berry (The Country of Marriage)

There is an uncomfortable shuffling of feet that happens around the subject of fertility and what it means to require inputs into the soil in order to grow food.  Whether conventional or organic, the topic is touchy, because there is a certain inevitability of complicity in some unwholesome process of industry involved whenever we begin to use the amounts of fertilizer needed in any scale of farming beyond the home garden.  Let me explain.  In the case of conventional farming, it is a simple and obvious connection.  Chemical fertilizers are created from destructively mined minerals, and synthesized with the burning of inordinate quantities of fossil fuels.  The production of synthetic ammonia alone constitutes 2% of the total energy usage of the globe, and 5% of all natural gas consumption.  If we want to go ahead and be honest about root causes and follow things to their sources, we are then of course brought to consider war, and the itchy truth that wars plague and cling to resource-rich areas (The Middle East, Sudan, Darfur, etc.) like, well, flies on shit.

These are just some of the more abstract motivations for farming organically in the first place, not to mention ecological and human health, and other more immediate and evident issues.  Even so, once we make the natural step of embracing old wisdom and using organic sources of fertility, there is still the question of where all of the material will come from.  The majority of organic farms (commerce is implied here) use chicken manure as their main source of fertility.  Many use nothing but chicken manure.  It is particularly potent stuff, and certainly without thinking too hard about it, it fits effortlessly into our notions of what a farm is, for who imagines Old McDonald’s without hens?  If we are thorough in our consideration of why this is so, however, the romantic picture becomes tarnished readily enough.  Generally speaking, any plot large enough to grow food for market, whether to wholesalers, or to General Mills, or even a CSA, is going to require enough manure that it becomes impractical to collect it, compost it, and spread it by farmer labor alone.   Which means that in most cases, farms have their manure delivered to the farm in giant loads at a time, by dumptrucks.  This necessitates having a big enough pile collected that it can be loaded by a tractor into the truck, which means in short that it is coming from an industrial operation.  For chicken manure, specifically, it means it’s coming from a poultry house.  The implications of this are too grimy to really explore deeply, but suffice to say, it involves inhumane living conditions, hormones and antibiotics, more often than not.

So what are the alternatives?  Well, cow manure tells a similar tale, once we follow it back to where it falls from.  To achieve the volumes that allow for deliverable loads, it essentially means that it is coming from a place where the animals are confined and the manure can be easily collected as waste.  For cows, this means a dairy.  I don’t know how many of you have visited an industrial dairy, but they stink, in more ways than just the one.  And you have the same sad truths of inhumane treatment, hormones, and antibiotics as we have with chickens.

Of course, there are plenty of other types of manure that can be employed for the purpose of agriculture.  In fact, any poop is good fertilizer.  But there are very few other types of animals whose manure is so easily collected, and therefore able to be distributed in an efficient manner.  Horse shit, you say.  Which is almost true, except that virtually no one will deliver it.  Still, it is probably the most abundantly available type of manure that does not derive from an industrial process.  The horses are being treated well, we can assume, and though they are still more often than not being de-wormed and treated with antibiotics, we can easily say with confidence that a horse stable is a healthier situation than either a poultry house or a dairy.  Which means that the main impediment to more widespread use of horse manure is simply the inconvenience of having to go and load it and unload it and spread it.  Working through this process with 6 to 15 tons per acre per season constitutes a large enough pain in the rear for many farmers that it’s just not done often.  By contrast, if you order chicken manure from Lake Butler Farm Center, they will provide the service of delivery and spreading it over your fields prior to tilling for a mere $10 extra per yard.

Bat guano is another superb manure, and we are fortunate to have the resource of the bat house on campus here.  Still, it is only available from the university in 5 gallon bucket quantities at a time, and is therefore really only able to serve as a supplementary source of fertility.  The same holds true for any number of a multitude of other great organic fertilizers, from fish emulsion to kelp, bone, blood, feather, or cottonseed meal, to peat moss and worm castings.  Even each of these has a story to tell.  We should not be afraid to consider what these stories are.  In fact, I see it as a collective responsibility we have, to be aware of how we accomplish things, so that we might be able to refine our ways of living, and improve.

All things considered, it is no wonder that we don’t talk a whole lot about the sources of fertility for the organic food that we eat…  And yet, the downside to organic agriculture is downright cheery in comparison to the damage accomplished through conventional methods.

All of this brings me to a recurring theme of these writings, which is the idea of the farm as a wholistic entity, a living organism that provides its own fertility through the elements of the farm itself.  Now, clearly we must understand that this is an ideal, and that in order to achieve such an ideal, it takes tremendous forethought, herculean commitment, and above all, time. Lots of time.  With this understanding though, we can commit ourselves to the effort of considering what is required to create such a thing.  Animals, for one.  And so facilities for animals, and good composting practices, and so on.  For the moment, we are doing the best we can, which is to say, we are using many of the different types of manures, guano, meals, and worm castings discussed above, in combination with cover cropping and green manures.  We have been very conservative in the use of anything that we feel has a downside, and we have made the effort to go and collect horse manure from good stables.  We are making compost by the Biodynamic method, applying the Biodynamic Preparations to our pile, and using Efficient Microorganisms (EM) to stimulate the proliferation of beneficial microbes in the soil, which helps to boost the photosynthetic capacity of plants.  We plant by the Biodynamic calendar, which takes into consideration the planetary forces, and the relationship of Earth to the cosmos.  We are doing what we understand to be the best practices possible given the newborn nature of this farm.  And we feel good about it.  But I wanted to let you all have a whiff of the complexity of something so seemingly simple as poop for the very reason that it is such a simple thing, and yet it creates so many challenges to our notions of what it is we are seeking to create in our striving for a more sustainable culture.

Hope I wasn’t on the toilet too long.  With love,

Noah Shitama
Swallowtail Farmer

Recipes

Fresh Citrus Smoothie

1 1/3 cups fresh red grapefruit juice, roughly 1 large grapefruit

8 large strawberries

2 medium bananas, sliced

1 (8 ounce) container yogurt

1 squeeze fresh lemon

2 tablespoons honey

1 cup crushed ice

Zesty Carrot Coleslaw

1 medium sized bunch baby carrots, shredded.

1 cup of green cabbage, shredded.

½ cup of red cabbage, shredded.

½ cup of light mayonnaise of vegannaise

1 tablespoon of whole milk.

1 tablespoon of lemon juice

½ teaspoon of sugar or honey.

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste.

In a large bowl, combine the shredded vegetables.

Whisk together the remaining ingredients and pour over the salad.

Refrigerate for 1 hour before serving.