Gray, Noel, and the current WWOOFers Liz and Tanya gathered apples from our tree, loading up a couple of giant coolers. From there the apples went to a neighbor’s shop and into a janky old cider press. Our neighbor Kathryn started everything off with a quick wash down of the press.

The press is another neighbor’s (Ned) machine. He told that he bought it for $300 thirty years ago. According to a handy inflation calculator, that would be about $800 today. Oh, and it was used when he bought it, so who knows what it originally cost.

Ned oversaw the first few rounds of pressing, staying just long enough to collect a quart of raw cider.

Gray did most of the first pressings, and I took over after that. In the humidity and falling sun, the work was sweatier than it would be in the Fall when folks are pressing their storage apples. Along with all the grass clippings, twigs, bugs and leaves that ended up in the press, I’m sure we added a few drops of sweat during the work.

The way the press works is pretty basic. You load the hopper, a motor drives some metal plates together and crushes the apples into an open wooden bucket. The bucket is made up of spaced slats of wood. The full bucket is moved down to the press, which is cranked down onto the apples. The juice runs down into a small container at the end of the press.

From there the cider is filtered, the smashed up apples removed from the press and the process started over again.

I think we did about 25 gallons that night, finishing up after the light of the day had been and gone.

By then it was time to drink up some samples and head back home.

Kristin and I took our friends Monica and Nick down to Wilmington with one of our “missions” of the trip being the collection of vast quantities of berries. This wasn’t meant to be.

A recent rain had knocked what was left of the ripe berries to the ground for the ants to carry off. What little was left were slightly under ripe and tangy, not worth more than a few pops here and there. The people had invaded and stripped everything else away.

At least it was a nice day – cool, sunny, perfect just for being outside and walking around. The focus quickly changed from the blueberries to the downtown farmer’s market and to fig gathering at the beach.

To date there are active Crop Mob groups in 22 states in the US, 99% of which formed after the end of February of this year. At some point the originators of this new model of agrarian community building have to let go, get back to our work in the present – in our own community – and let evolution do its thing. And it is evolving; it is debatable how much leadership this idea needs on a national level. There is no doubt that a solid foundation and at least a minimum operational framework is needed. After that is established, all we can do is look on as the roof goes up and the furniture is moved in.

Crop Mob is a very sexy idea right now. As such it is subject to an intense scrutiny of its methods, its participants and its goals. “White, hipster slackers participate in a real life Farmville” might as well be the new media headlines. From what I have been reading lately, you would think that what started as a way to get young and landless farmers together has turned into just another urban fad for the fixed gear bike crowd. This is untrue and utterly ridiculous. Is there anything that a group of young people can do that can’t be turned into something that it is not?

Some recent comments on the online version of a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (‘Crop Mobs’ thrive in farmville):

Hipster doofuses. Your parents play Farmville now, on to the next thing.

…there is more to experience than diggin’ in the dirt in a garden. I am just wondering why this hipster/feel-good activity is news.

Farmers do not get enough freebies from the government, they also get FREE Labor from the idiot taxpayers that subsidies them in the first place….WEIRD. People are stupid.

The best part is they do it once and they never come back. Instead, they run back to their homes in the city and wait for more government handouts. There is no such thing as hard work anymore.

Small farms are great, but do we really need a story about hipsters who have never done real work in their lives going on a feelgood, look-at-me fieldtrip? There are great stories of small produce farms (many of them owned Hmong, Mexican or Somali immigrants) who are providing much of our local produce…

Look at me! I’m “farming”. More hipster douchery.

…typical nonsense from the fringe that will disappear when the next fad is discovered.

WOW. I wish I had so much time on my hands that I was so bored I wanted to go work on a farm.

I honestly don’t know where the hate for this idea comes from. I wonder if the detractors tear apart every other volunteer activity that is discussed in the media? Are we really the only group that has to examine our privilege every time we set out to do a crop mob? Do we really have to take note of every participant’s motivation for showing up?

No, we don’t have to answer to anyone but the farmers we are working for and the community we have formed. The media eye will move on but we will not.

In mobs we trust…

Transport happens with the Safety 1st kid carrier and the farm bike. The kid carrier has hauled a wide array of items – food and tools on the farm, groceries in the city. I picked it up for free in Wilmington a billion years ago. It, like me, has seen its share of work.

After unloading, Kristin and I shared the view from the barn doors on the upper level.

And I got to act like I was jumping down to intercept Brother…

Mullein is a fascinating plant. It easily colonizes disturbed areas, but its growth requirements prevent it from becoming invasive. Too much shade and it is all over for this plant. Rapid succession from other plants will crowd it out.

This early succession plant can actually make itself less viable by its own presence. A study in the Journal of Ecology conducted in our area concludes that as the years progress, the plant will become smaller and smaller and seed production will drop off significantly each year. According to the study, the first generation produced five times as much seed as the third generation.

Our friend Nick came over, so he and Kristin decided that we should go out to the spot and harvest some of the mullein leaves.  These first generation plants had some giant leaves, meaning less time harvesting and more time picking the ticks off our legs.

Mullein has many medicinal properties – it can be made into a tea or smoked to battle a cough. Sounds counterproductive, right?

The plant is also referred to as Nature’s Toilet Paper, but the irritating hairs that cover the plant make me think that you would need to be in some dire need to use it for that purpose more than once in a while.

The dried stalk contains many oils that supposedly make it a good torch.  I am going to try it out this Fall after the stalks are up.

It is busy here. Transplanting is brisk; up-potting is tight. The turkey poults arrived in the mail yesterday and are chirping under the red light of the cardboard box brooder. Radishes are ready for market as are transplants and eggs. Our CSA starts on Tuesday.

With added plant and animal life at Circle Acres comes added stress.  Some of the things I worry about are late frosts, hail storms and loss of power to the brooder lights. None of these things come under my control.  My livelihood is not exactly on the line, but the livelihoods of my pack certainly are. So I worry about pests and plant diseases and stray dogs.  If we could fast forward to a time in the future where we are just living and working at Circle Acres, taking care of our community and ourselves, I wonder if I will dwell on these same worries as much.

Living that ascetic life is never far from my mind.  I live among a pack that yearns for that life and lifestyle.  Yearn might not even be strong enough.  Ever reach for something so much that you come into a sickness for it, that unattainable abstract that you wish you could have but get physically and mentally pummeled for moving towards it? If I could think of a word for that then I would like to use it.

For an easy life it sure is hard to get there.

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Crop Mob was about to move a big piece of dirt.

That dirt was me.

One of the reasons Kristin and I moved out of the city was because we felt that we had exhausted what we could do in Wilmington. The city was and probably still is unreceptive to the kinds of things we were tying to do. Most of what we started got some traction early on, but once we set them out on their own, folks quickly lost interest and things folded.  We became babysitters when what we wanted to be were peers – peers empowering other people to step up and get things done.

Worst of all was becoming a disappointed babysitter, cleaning up the messes of people who knew better but continued to act as if anarchism meant you never had to be responsible.

So yeah, Crop Mob came and got me and shook the Wilmington right out of me.  I simply had to tag along, give it all that I knew how to do and watch as other strong people filled in the holes, making the project a fluid and replicable and respectable entity.

And with the strong people comes the strong growth and with that comes the growing pains and the discussions about how best to proceed with this entity that we have created.  For better or worse, all the media attention will fade.  When that happens, some of the sexy will wash off and we will be left with a few fronts to engage.

1 – The original work area of the original Crop Mob group.  Do we split into individual county groups or do we continue to function as we have as a three county group?  My take has always been that we stay together as a three county group.  The camaraderie of engaging with my peers from Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Pittsboro is enough to make me hold out and not want to dissolve into smaller groupings.  Crop Mob events are some of the only times I get to interact with this larger agrarian culture, and I feel like the benefit to the group of this mixing outweighs the slight possibility of the group becoming watered down with long distance commuters.

2 – The rapidly expanding Crop Mob universe.  We are looking at facilitating the creation of at least 20 new Crop Mob groups in the US.  As these groups get established, more will follow from their examples.  How do we best maintain the core principles of the idea and replicate it without micromanaging every aspect of each groups’ formation? Again, for better or worse, we have to let the idea evolve on its own and accept that sometimes it won’t work out in the ways we might want or expect. We have to trust that we, by our own boots-in-the-dirt examples, have created an idea that needs minimal governance and minimal tweaking in order to accomplish work and build a community.

The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. ‘People are interested in authentic work,’ he said. ‘I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.’ At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57. But as people of all ages become involved, he said, ‘what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.’

Full story – Field Report: Plow Shares by Christine Muhlke

This year there is a new shelter, a scavenged bamboo and baling twine number that I built over the course of a few days.  It isn’t much to look at, but it is dry and, more importantly, lightweight.  Moving last year’s pig house was a nightmare.  It was heavy and unwieldy; I cursed it, the pigs destroyed it as they aged, knocking out the floor and the walls.  Now its shell sits with last year’s scarecrow along the forest edge, waiting for new purposes and locations.

The new house is basically a tent with one open wall.  It can be staked down after moving in case it is windy.  But that is all boring stuff… Who wants to see the two day old piglets!

Five weeks from this coming Saturday the piglets will be weaned (according to the Animal Welfare Approved time line).  Shortly after that, the pigs will come home and join the rest of us animals.

Crop Mob is simply an innovation in farm work and organizing.  Taking the old idea of community labor, a small group of farm interns created a new model, a model of organizing that takes experienced and novice farmers (and other interested folks) and puts them in a shared space at a particular farm at a particular time. Within this space, the group tackles a set of tasks using the directions given by the host farm and the experience each person brings to the space. At the end of a few hours of work they share a meal.  Along with the meal is the extended value of a shared experience, an experience unique for each farm and to each participant.

According to sociologists, there are five stages in the adoption or rejection of any innovation (called Diffusion of Innovation).  The first step is the exposure of an individual to the idea without them having any prior information about the idea. This was basically the mindset of the originators of Crop Mob and anyone who comes upon it without ever hearing about it beforehand.

The next step is the individual actively seeking out information about the innovation or idea.  This can be asking another participant, doing web searches, emailing. Through this information the individual proceeds to the next step, which is making a decision to accept or reject the idea.

This step is worth exploring, as I feel that misinformation about Crop Mob really affects this stage. With any innovation there is skepticism, there is doubt, there are wildly off-the-mark perceptions.  One of the most frequent is that Crop Mob is a magical free labor pool that simply appears at your farm or garden and runs through the to-do list.  The Crop Mob is sometimes also misconstrued as an idealistic gang of urban lefties, off to do their good deed in the country and shed some of that built up liberal guilt.

Yet another amazingly false idea is that Crop Mob is a group of inexperienced idiots who don’t know one end of a shovel from the other. They will wreck your years of careful farm planning and layout, damage all your equipment, let your chickens out to the swarming wolves and hawks, and destroy all your saved seed by mistaking it for lunch. I personally feel that this misconception is keeping the Crop Mob from interacting with some of the more established sustainable farms in our area.  I know there are many of these farms that would like to share their experience with young and new farmers but are afraid that we just don’t have what it takes to restrain ourselves in their space.

The fourth stage of the process is execution or use of the idea. Folks show up and work with the mob for the day, using their experience to further evaluate the idea for themselves. If they don’t like it, they won’t come back and do it again.  It is hard to evaluate how many people have chosen not to come back to Crop Mob.  There is no way to really measure their reaction since we are not setup to do exit interviews with every participant.  Reasons for not coming back are probably extremely variable – not feeling welcomed, the work was too hard or too easy, the weather was horrible, expectations were not met.

Again, many of these reasons should be explored.  How can we as a group be more hospitable? I think an easy way would be to ask mobbers who have been to several mobs to look for new faces and make sure they are properly introduced and welcomed. This does not mean to inundate them with hugs and handshakes, but rather make sure they are oriented and introduced, make sure they are comfortable with the task they are taking up, and, if they are inexperienced, make sure they are partnered with an experienced group or individual. Through this single task, I think we can get more returning mobbers.

The final stage is a confirmation. The users of the Crop Mob idea return to use it again or set off to start their own mob in another part of the state, country or world. The idea becomes known for its viability and ease of use.

Scavenging also includes gleaning scrap lumber from neighboring demolition projects, concrete pieces (urbanite), old greenhouse plastic, bamboo, hay twine, nails, and irrigation drip tape. Combine all those elements and you get a really decent and basic greenhouse.

The process started with a bamboo harvest – this ingredient was necessary for putting together the top framing as well as the side ribs.

The ends of the greenhouse were built with downed cedar trees that we pulled out of the woods as well as scrap lumber from a demolition up the road from us.  There were also a few pieces from a recent gutting of a few rooms in our house.

The plastic came from an organic farm near the NC coast as did the drip tape that was used to staple through and hold the plastic to the framing.

Photo from Danielle

Total cost for this greenhouse (not including labor of course) is somewhere between $5 and $15 depending on who you ask.  I think the staples were at least $4 for the box, but calculating how many nails were purchased versus how many were scavenged is difficult.

Regardless, the greenhouse is ready for seed flats and a jump-start on the season.  Anyone interested in our CSA?

Gray seeds out some flats

Scalding a chicken before plucking

Filming a music video with anarchists

Madeline framed with a fence under construction

Jack

I thought it would be fun to look through the photographs I took during the last year, the ones that weren’t posted here on Cricket Bread as part of an essay.  These photos don’t necessarily tell a story all together. That said, there is no particular order in time or in theme.

Noel focuses on starting a fire with primitive tools

Mike Slaton prepares for Diner Night

Jamie hula hoops at the Pittsboro Pepper Festival

Kristin relaxes in Denver

Dance party in Pittsboro, North Carolina

Kristin destroys a door frame

Danielle, Noel and Gray cook dinner in the Wolf Den

I am vowing that this coming year the mowing will be minimized.  Going in are perennial beds, hugelkultur mounds, insectory plants by the hundreds and a kitchen garden for fun.  The front yard outside of mine and Kristin’s door is the first to fall.  Step one is to kill the grass or otherwise remove it. Well, actually step one is to figure out where the beds will go and do some measuring and flagging.

A few years ago I attended a workshop at the annual CFSA conference presented by Susana from Salamander Springs Farm. The workshop was all about building no-till beds on top of grass.  I finally found the notes in one of the piles of notebooks that I have only recently brought together into one pile.  The notes spell out a no-till “Layer Cake” garden bed recipe:

Step one – “The Plate” consists of large sheets of cardboard laid over existing pasture or lawn.

Step two – “The Cake” consists of several inches of manure or compost.

Step three – “The Frosting” consists of mulch such as leaves, old hay, shredded paper and straw.

Step four – “The Baking” consists of letting it all settle and rot for three to four months.

Step five – “The Eating” consists of pulling the mulch back to put in plants and replenishing the mulch as the plants grow.

For our cardboard needs we almost always head to Siler City.  The dollar stores’ Dumpsters are usually a nice jackpot for all sizes of box, not necessarily a requirement to fit most mulching needs.  For larger jobs we would hit furniture and appliance stores.  The boxes are bigger and thicker providing more grass and weed killing power.  For uniformity of boxes, the local ABC Liquor store would be perfect.  Most folks hit them up for packing boxes.  For wax boxes, hit the grocery… Since this particular project was just a piece of a front yard, the dollar store cardboard works well.  The only problem is the tape.  There is a lot of tape to remove and dispose of.

While peeling off tape, you get to see where all the crap products come from and come through.  Most of the importers seem to be in New York City of New Jersey.  The origins are India, China, Korea, Vietnam.  None of the boxes were made from recycled material (no notices on the boxes), so I will probably be mulching with cardboard descended directly from trees, most likely trees from Canada.  That is a long way to go in order to get into my front yard.  The boxes also have loads of staples, fabric tape and heavy duty packing tape holding everything together.

The value of the boxes and its associated connectors is probably higher than the value of the stuff inside the box. I know the value of what I am about to grow on and through those boxes is higher than the box plus the stuff inside.  And then some – mostly because so much comes from the cardboard.  Earthworms tunnel under and through it; pill bugs, beetles and earwigs make their home in the crevices between the layers; fungal mycelia run like branching rivers throughout the whole bit.  All of this activity leads to the decomposition of the still useful organic matter and carbon that is nestled within the cardboard.

What would have taken years to happen with the use of a new log, the loggers, grinders, pulpers, pressers, importers and exporters have made into a readily available haven for all sorts of micro and macro interactions. But the folks at the end of the box-chain would have just thrown it away or possibly recycled it into more cardboard that would eventually be thrown away (nothing against recycling cardboard) whereas we at Circle Acres have really recycled the box and returned it to its rightful place – rotting on the ground and being digested by those who can do such a thing.

The only drawback to this system is that it takes a really long time to build.  For one person, by hand, estimate at least two hours to go twenty five feet.  Then of course there is the “baking” part, but after three or four months the area should be grass and weed free.  It will also be a nutritious place to start off new Spring plants for Summer harvest.

I knew that the stories of how that big buck came to be dead would be floating around the house until they could be recited, with all the groan inducing embellishments, by people in the house who were trying hard not to listen.  I could probably dig deep enough to remember one or two of those stories, but who gives a shit really?

My grandfather also told stories, the ones that I have forgotten, the ones about how the deer tricked him or showed him up or maybe never even existed.  He never seemed to be about the perceived glory of shooting something in the face; when a deer was in the freezer before December he seemed satisfied with the knowledge that, with the deer’s help, he and his family would have food for the Winter.  He didn’t regale in the winners and losers of what most sane people would see as a wholly lopsided conflict heavily subsidized by civilization and its tools – a heavily armed human against an unprepared, unwilling and unaware opponent.

My grandfather’s task was brutal regardless, but maybe less so as there were no mounted heads on the walls of his home like there were in our home. The need for those stuffed and preserved reminders is something that I couldn’t explain back then, but know now is an indication of small mindedness, a dedication to the outward projection of dominance when you know that you are inescapably weak inside.  You are a collector with no sense of how to interact with the dead or the living, both phases of life simply reminders of inadequacy, weak interpersonal skills and low self esteem. If you have a deer head or a stuffed fish on your wall, go look at it and ask yourself what reminder it serves that could not otherwise be captured by a photograph or poem. Is it there to show your friends and family what a hero you are?

When I was younger, I volunteered twice to travel with a New York DEC deer ager on their rounds.  For fourteen hours we visited deer processing places as well as any house that had a deer hanging in the front yard.  My job was to write while the ager examined teeth and called out the ages of each dead deer.

I think it was during this time that I became permanently desensitized to the sights and smells of dead non-human animals.  At each processor were dozens of barrels and drums and tarps full of various parts; piles of legs next to buckets of guts and tails; lines of deer carcasses waiting to be disassembled by hacksaws, band saws and reciprocating saws, mostly frozen in rigor mortis or by the depth of cold in the evening air.  Steam escaped from some of the recent arrivals, a sign that they were less than an hour dead.

*****

There can be nothing more brutal or common or necessary than taking a life in order to eat and sustain a body. Non-human animals do it without question, without any perceptible remorse or hesitation. What makes our actions so much different?

We pull carrots from the soil, ending their run from gravity, ending their gathering of sugar and all the processes that made them a living thing. They may not scream or run or struggle much, but a carrot is a living thing nonetheless and we must kill it in order to eat it.

Eating a carrot is nothing like eating an animal, which is why many choose not to eat the latter at all. I respect that choice; it was a choice that I had once made as well. As with eating it, killing a carrot is nothing like killing an animal. Animals articulate their disappointment in our choice to kill them in blood gurgles, screams and the twitches of ending nerve impulses. We destroy them in order that we can live; we destroy them for other reasons as well, reasons that have no bearing on survival. If you do not believe that then you deny that your meal had any previous life beyond its packaging. I apologize, but I can’t let you do that.

As the busy day of butchering ended, those who drink bourbon were entitled to their sips.  Sips turned into larger sips and those sips turned into songs and poetry and stories about Henry Hudson and the Catskill Gnomes.  A fire maintained through a little lingering drizzle as people kept nibbling from the tables full of pork.

There was a ragu with trotters, braised belly with apple cider and tenderloins melting in their dishes.  And there were people from the city connecting with the farmers and the farmers connecting with their butcher.  It was an introduction to food sources that will continue beyond the empty bottles and fire warmed feet, beyond the apple orchard and the muddy ruts.

The next morning it was back to work on the pork, cutting up the remaining pieces and getting the fat ready for sausage making.  Fat was also rendered for frying apple fritters and doughnuts, greasy little snacks that went well with the monotony of grinding the sausage.

When the work was done I took the train back to Manhattan, carrying a package of sausage for a friend in Jackson Heights.  We ate some for breakfast the next day.  At that point I was at the pork threshold and could eat no more.

I didn’t know a whole lot about butchering before this workshop.  I still don’t.  Trying to take good photographs of the event led me to miss most of what was said about certain cuts.  I know where the bacon comes from as well as the chops, roasts and ribs, but I am still a little fuzzy on the tenderloin and the various cuts from the shoulder.

There was a lot of reverence for the pigs during the butchering sessions.  We discussed their habits, their escapes from the farm, their food choices.  We also discussed how they were not named, a tradition that I do not adhere to.  I was very close to my pigs and couldn’t conceive that they would go through life without someone calling their names.  They didn’t get to pick their names, but how many of us had that opportunity? But they also didn’t choose to come live with us and eventually to die unnaturally either.  I will get into that in a future post.  For now I will let these pictures tell the story of the first day of butchering…

Day one for me was actually the day before the workshop.  I arrived at Smithereen Farm via an Amtrak train out of Penn Station then via a car ride with Severine and Anne from the Greenhorns project.  Our first stop was an antique farm store called Hoffman’s Barn Sale, a large, wood-stove heated menagerie of rusty farm implements, old style canning jars and mid-70s classic rock albums.  It was like a flea market except the store was filled with useful shit, not just beat up boxes of doll parts or piles of messed up Dokken tapes.

The mission at the Barn Sale was to pick up some last minute cooking implements.  These implements included – what was described to me at the time – a pot big enough to fit a pig’s head.  Not in itself all that interesting until you start to talk about what that means and why it means what it means.  Yeah, we’ll just boil this pig head for awhile, you have a problem with that?  It reminded me of a page from the Sandor Katz book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved about processing pig heads -

We found that pot along with a giant stock pot, some Pyrex casserole dishes and a Dutch oven.  Scattered among the purchases were the echoes of Severine shouting from every corner – “Anne, we need this.”  Not having been in this dynamic before, I wasn’t sure if this was just how shopping with Severine was or if indeed we did “need this”.  Severine also reminded us that her mother always told her to buy Pyrex when she could.  So we did.

Back at the farm it was a breakfast of fresh eggs and coffee and toast with plum jam.  It was playing with kittens and listening.  It was coloring salsa labels and organizing stuff.  It was digging a pit and splitting wood for the slow roasting of a pig side.  It was getting the first sniff of a weekend’s worth of wood smoke.  It was meeting new folks and trying to be a talker.  It was a warm wood stove and giggles from grown ups.

It was the start of a pretty immense undertaking, this crash course in butchering and sausage making.  I ended the day tired like I usually end my days, but this tired was an out-of-town tired. I didn’t worry about it much and prepared myself to go to sleep late and wake up early, getting back to work and getting back to tired.

Hardly recognize simple things anymore
I don’t want to be defeated

What else is there to do
But go outside and look around*

*Lyrics taken from Bed for the Scraping – Fugazi