Things My Roommates Do

This guy is cool.

So, ok, move to a farm, get all country-living about things, meet some cool farmer people.  Right? 

But no, really, my cool farmer roommates are out of control cool.  They just make stuff.  Just make it.  Crazy, everything, from-scratch-y stuff.  Stuff I didn’t know you could just make, or stuff that I don’t know what it is, or stuff that I almost don’t want to know what it is.  And they do it after a long day on the farm when all I’m thinking about is that satisfying moment in the shower where you blow your nose and get all the dirt out.

This book actually exists.

These ladies’ resources are amazing.  We have this big book about how to do everything essential in life.  It’s like a country-living bible.  (I mean, there are sections on Recipes and Elixirs and Gifts From Nature and Taming Unruly Cats.  Notably there are no sections on managing your credit card debt or making your second marriage work, because country people just have themselves together way more than us other people.  Proof: THEY TAME CATS.)

  

There are also more specialized books on every home-made whatever that you can think of: Food and Mood, The Joy of Pickling, Nourishing Traditions, Humanure.  I am not making this up.  

Yay!

If that’s not enough, we also have the internet, which you may have heard of.  Check it out, Reader, there is lots of information there.  

And I guess we have free time, right after recover-from-the-farm-day time.  So all this mystical stuff just happens at the house.

For example, did you know you can just bake bread?  On your own?  And it’s that easy?  I went into Charleston one night last week to do stuff like get my eyes checked and find insurance and other normal I’m-off-to-live-on-a-farm things, and when I got back one girl had just….made bread.  Two loaves.  She said, “Oh, yeah, we were running out, so I made some,” in the same tone I might say, “Oh, yeah, I was bored so I watched 12 episodes of Family Guy,” or “Oh, yeah, I was hungry so I consumed this entire sleeve of Thin Mints,” or any other perfectly normal every day thing that one might do.  Multi-Grain Loaf.  That’s what she made.  Today we made Rye with Caraway Seeds.  My mind is blowing up right now.

This is where the swamp water grows-
See the fungus thing on top?

If you see this growing in something:
 Do not despair!

And they all make this stuff called Kombucha, which I think is Japanese for “Hahaha you stupid Americans, I tricked you into drinking rotting water!”  It’s made out of black tea and sugar and some kind of bacteria that looks like a weird mushroom sea slug creature and grows over the top of the liquid.  It looks like something that if you found it in some kind of bucket that you’d left outside on the porch in the rain, you would just

Putting fruits and stuff
 into the flavoring jars

throw the whole bucket out.  Then you'd sanitize your hands.  Then maybe you'd look into getting out of your lease.

The bacteria eats the caffeine 

and the sugar and, I don’t know, poops out flavor and bubbles, and then after a few days you drain out the liquid and add more tea to your giant drink-fungus.

Adding swamp water to the flavoring jars

But the drink, it’s great!  It tastes tart, and it’s carbonated (because you're drinking bacteria farts?  Don’t ask me, Reader, I’m learning too).  They add stuff like fruits and spices to flavor it—like we have an apple pie one, and a lemon ginger one.  It does some serious good to your digestion, too, so it’s got that whole “healthy choice” angle down. Historically I make different choices when I’m taking shots of weird stuff that I may regret, but so far I’m loving this stuff. 

Holy crap, people of Japan! This is delicious!

Sauerkraut and okra and green beans, oh my!

My one roommate is really into fermentation and pickling in general.  We just popped open her homemade sauerkraut (which we ate on homemade bread) and she has like 5 jars of okra pickling.  Kefir is a fermented, carbonated milk drink that comes from the Caucuses Mountains and now happens in the 

farm kitchen.  It tastes kinda like yogurt.  (Reader, have you heard of yogurt?  Perhaps seen it in a store besides EarthFare?  Because then, no, we don’t make it here.)

Things like baba ganoush from fresh eggplant and pesto from fresh basil and sunflower seeds just happen sometimes too.  As a counterpoint, when I moved in I brought Ramen Noodles and Coors Light in the swanky new Silver Bullet cans as my contributions to the communal kitchen. 

So now I’m learning about how to do all this stuff.  I’m advocating for hard cider and plain ole yogurt in the near future, but in the meantime I am living large off this amazing stuff that these wonderful ladies just know how to do.  I’ve already contributed to one loaf of bread—soon I may have mystical things of my own that I just do, too.

THIS BOOK ALSO ACTUALLY EXISTS.
THAT IS AN OUTHOUSE ON THE COVER
AND THE BOOK IS ABOUT POOP.
This book is probably going to save mankind.

Raining in Paradise

Week one has finished and I'm into week two.  So far I have survived, though I was in bed by 8:30 last night and it takes me about half an hour to touch my toes these days.  It shouldn't be "Built Ford Tough," it should be "Built Farm-Girl Tough."

(Don't think I can't hear your little internal remarks at this point: Oh, GEE Merrill, you mean farming is HARD WORK, who would EVER have guessed THAT, Princess.  Ok, Reader, you just rein it in-- I'm in transition here.  Have some patience.)

I'm not complaining, mind you: it's wonderful here-- you wake up and start your day in the fields by 7, and spend all day watching herds of sheep walk by or discovering how beautiful eggplant is.  And I wouldn't say I'm there yet, but one day I'm GOING to be a badass with a shovel and a hammer and other tools of the trade.

However I think it's fair to say, despite this being the beginning of week 2, I really don't know what it's like on the farm yet, because it's been raining every day since I got here.  So here are things you can do on the farm, even though it's raining:

Okra are related to Hydrangea - see the flower?

1) HARVEST.  Did you know that Okra is the most beautiful plant ever?  My grandfather has been trying to get me to take okra seeds home and plant them for over a year now, and I always pictured that the resulting plants would look a little like his cute, tiny hot pepper bushes.  WRONG.  Okra gets to be so tall that I have to reach as high as I can and pull the stalk over, and reach as high as I can again to snap the okra off the top.




  They have these gorgeous flowers every day, and these big green leaves.

Yummmmm.....

  And there is red okra, that turns green when you cook it but the whole plant is this deep burgundy color; it's amazing! We have 2 rows of okra growing and going out there is like going in the jungle.  I love it.

There is a bad side to okra, however, which is that it has this weird stuff on the exterior that you can't see but feels slightly prickly and makes you itch.

 Like, ITCH.  And my dumb self was picking and not thinking and swatted a mosquito off my face, then rubbed where I got bit, then wondered how many mosquito bites I could possibly have gotten in so short a time frame, then rubbed my whole face including neck and ears wondering why I was suddenly so sensitive to mosquitoes, then realized I was rubbing nature's perfect itching powder into every piece of exposed skin I had.  Then I freaked out and had to do some serious woo-saa zen deep breathing exercises to just let the itch keep itching without my scratching any more, until it went away.  Lesson learned. Character built.  I still like okra.

2) MAKE WEED BROWNIES
Ok, they're not really weed brownies, but that got your attention, didn't it?  So let me describe this process and show you some pics and you tell me it doesn't look like double fudge brownies for plants (Hence the term WEED brownies.  Get it? I'm very clever, Reader.)

So you get the recipe and it's like, 1 bucket compost, 1 bucket peat moss, a quarter cup of bone marrow, a teaspoon of vanilla and a dash of salt.  You add some water and mix it all in this giaganto trough thing with a pitchfork at medium speed until all the lumps are gone.
Then you stamp this funny little metal thing in it and press out your brownies on a piece of wood or something, and they come out perfectly square with pre-indented little holes in the top, where you put your seeds.

Cover the seeds in, give them some light water, and presto!  You have helped create life, through brownies!

GIVE ME MY BABIES!

 So far I have learned that unpelleted (that is, uncoated) seeds are hard to work with because they are the size of a gnat's eyeball and my clumsy city fingers have trouble dropping only one seed at a time into the little teeny tiny holes.  Also kale seeds look like alien egg pods or something.




3) GET BITTEN BY EVIL, EVIL MOSQUITOES

We all know mosquitoes were invented by Satan to drive us into his embrace through thoughts (and eventual actions) of hatred, rage, and violence.  I know I'm at a big ole hippy organic farm now, and I've seen the Lion King just like everyone else, but I cannot figure out what purpose these wretches fill in the cycle of life.  If you google "irritating or contemptible" in the Oxford English Dictionary you'll see that the definition is Mosquito.  They're evil.  Evil!

Jerk-Face McSuckerson

The particular brand of devil that besets us on our otherwise idylic farm is called Asian Tiger mosquitoes, so at least we're being driven to distraction by a useless being with a name that sounds like a samurai.  That way we get to keep our self respect a little when something smaller than a mouse sneeze makes us want to kill ourselves and everyone else.

Iceman, Goose, and Maverick

This weekend I spent some time looking up what kills these minions of devilry. (Reader, I KNOW about bats-- but these are daytime creatures!  It's a no-go!)  The answer: Dragonflies.  They are tiny killing machines, turns out:  they can't even walk, their legs are for grabbing their unsuspecting prey out of the air during an extreme dive bomb maneuver, then snapping their necks and high five-ing their other dragonfly friends.  They are my new personal hero, and while we already have some at the farm, I WANT MORE.

I also looked up how to do that-- how to attract these heaven-sent killing machines to the mosquito-buffet that is my life.  Answers were a little dissatisfying: build a pond.  A pond?  A whole 20 foot wide pond?  Of varying depths but at least 2 feet deep, with no fish, and gently sloping sides, and little perching sticks sticking out of it so that the dragonflies have places to brag to the damsel flies about how big of a bug they caught or how wide their wingspan is?  All of this I'm supposed to do?  Hm.

Well, we already have a pond (more of a lake) on the property, and I could just fix that one up....EXCEPT FOR THE ALLIGATOR HANGING OUT IN IT.  He lives a tough life, waiting around trying to get big enough to eat all of our chickens.  He's not there yet, but

This guy is dumb.
But maybe he has dragonflies.

regardless, here is how I am NOT going to be spending my weekend: roaming around his lake putting perching sticks in and making sure the sides slope at the right angle.

This could be you, Reader!

I was sort of hoping there'd be some kind of mail order catalog I could just get a bunch of dried dragonfly eggs from and just...throw 'em in the lake?  Or maybe a box full of full grown flies, up and ready to conquer the fields.  So far no good.  Reader, if you come across any boxes of dragon flies, or catch any of your own, please send them my way.

In the mean time, I'm going to shower, see if I can touch my toes again (probably not..) and call my grandfather to tell him all about life on the farm.  Thanks for reading, Reader!

Bye!

Farm living is the life for me...

I've moved to a farm.

"But WHY?" you say.

Well, farming is-

"But you had a JOB!  With BENEFITS!  And a RETIREMENT PLAN!"

Ok, yes, but I found this-

"AND NOW YOU'RE COVERED WITH MOSQUITO BITES AND DIRT!!!"

Which is true.  So let me start at the beginning.

Early this year I started volunteering at Ambrose Farms, on Wadmalaw Island outside of Charleston.  (It's the bomb-- highly recommend their CSA and U-Pick-ANYTHING. http://www.stonofarmmarket.com/AmbroseFamilyFarm.html )  Turns out I loved it.  It was beautiful, therapeutic, and fun.  So I started looking at other opportunities, and getting more into it, and discovered two interesting things.

First of all, the local and organic foods movement is huge and growing (that wasn't a discovery, that's just true). Second of all, there is an urban farming movement that doesn't just grow food, it grows kids and communities.  Check out Grow Dat Youth Farm, or Urban Roots for examples, or just read on to get an idea of what I'm talking about:

So, picture a low-income community, your stereotypical "bad" neighborhood with all the garnish that goes with that.  I like to add in tennis shoes hanging from the phone lines and the occasional abandoned house in for flavor.  Now, because it's a "bad" neighborhood they don't have grocery stores-- because my imaginary low-income neighborhood is rife with all the factors that generally add to the sorts of statistics that keep Publix far, far away.

So to get to the store, you gotta roll up the road-- and in my imaginary neighborhood, people are hurting for money and don't have cars.  So now you're walking to the bus stop, riding up the road, walking to the store, then doing it all again in reverse except with all the food for your family for the week.  My grocery runs involve three trips to the car and it's just me, so for my imaginary family, this basically sucks.

Now, my imaginary family has other options that are closer, and possibly cheaper, namely: McDonald's, or the Hot Mustard Chinese food and hot wings place (which is amazing, if you haven't been.  It's in downtown, check it out.), and Circle K has some pretty sweet microwaveable burritos.

Obviously, for all the normal reasons (for more info, watch any of a number of terrifying food documentaries. I recommend Food, Inc. or Fast Food Nation to start.  You'll be scared straight in no time- right up until you smell a cheeseburger....) these are pretty terrible options, especially if they're your long term dinner-for-the-fam solutions.  You know this, I know this...Look, when I was a teenager I ate McDonald's or Dominoes every night for dinner for about 2 years, and now my sister feeds her baby organic lamb chops or something and my dad is a vegetarian.   It's a changing world.

Ok, so...Enter Urban Farm into my imaginary community.  On about 2 or 3 acres of abandoned land (my imaginary neighborhood has desolation very similar to the real life low-income neighborhoods you may be imagining right now), a naturally grown or organic farm moves in.  To work the farm, teenagers from the community are hired, providing jobs and job skills and all the good things that go along with that like self esteem and less unstructured free time and socialization in a working environment, blah blah blah.  They also learn good environmental stewardship, and start to care about more that just the people in their community, but the physical land itself.

Or whatever, they just care about the pay check, but they LEARN all the rest of that stuff.  I've worked with teenagers for a while, sometimes you have to bribe them into caring about things.

And, they grow things.  Not to get too weird on you but growing things is good therapy-- you bring it to life and care for it and if you do a good job, it is physically, visibly evident.  Very satisfying.  Good for the soul.  But more than that, they things they grow are FOOD, and not for strangers but for friends, family, neighbors, cook outs, Sunday dinners, etc.  That's powerful stuff!

Finally, on top of that, all those friends and neighbors start to care about the farm, cuz 1) they buy their food there, 2) it's in their back yard LITERALLY in what used to be a sketchy abandoned lot, and 3) their kids work there.

See, it's cyclical: kids care about job, start to care about garden, healthy real food goes into community, community cares about farm and kids, kids are proud of farm and selves, everyone is proud of their community.  My imaginary neighborhood is happier and healthier now.

So this is what I am interested in, and it turns out it's something that exists: check out http://growdatyouthfarm.org/ or http://www.urbanroots.org/ or http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/ and then you can get really excited about all this too, and come join me on the farm.

In order to work in places like those, however, I need to know how to farm...and how to run a farm.  I need some agricultural credibility-- so on Sunday I moved out to the country to start my internship.  I'm working with 7 other people to take care of 10 acres of organic veggies.  There are also pigs, chickens, sheep, and cows on the farm (but I don't work with them...yet).  I stay out here in a big, nice farm house with my own room, and we get to eat everything we want from the farm, and get other supplies from the store that is associate with the farm.  It is stupid how good the food is.  It is absurd.  Truly.

And just to capture all the other things that may be absurd, or moving, or intriguing, or weird or whatever about my time here, I'm starting this wacky blog.  Check back and see what's shaking...and if I made any grammatical mistakes, hollar (looking at you, Alix).

I'm going to eat some homemade cookies and see what I can do with dinner: fresh okra, pole beans, peppers, and muscadine grapes for dessert.