Come the Revolution

Poor Man’s Pesto

There this phenomenon going on around here where the basil in the garden, which gets loads of sun and has been kept well weeded (shocking, I know) is fairly small. The ones on the porch, on the other hand, have light only in the afternoon and are trying to turn into bushes. One of these [...]

Organic Pest Control

We’ve got a good crop of aphid-eating lady beetles in the garden this year. On the one hand, that means we have aphids. On the other hand, it means nature is doin’ its beautiful, balance-keeping thing.

Tomatoes at night

The only thing that could make it better is if we didn’t have to drive home after late nights at the garden. Maybe next year. I find myself thinking often of the farmer from the first farm I apprenticed at. He’s a vegetable farmer, but truly he’s a tomato farmer. I’m guessing 1/4 of his tilled [...]

First Fruit

Botanically speaking, rhubarb is a vegetable, but a clever New York court decreed in 1947 that, since we use it like a fruit, we should call it a fruit. This suits me fine, since it means that even in Vermont (where we won’t have fresh local strawberries until late June at best) we can [...]

The Search is On

We’re ready. And by “ready,” I mean relatively prepared for all the successes and failures that make up a farming life. When we moved to Vermont just over a year ago, there wasn’t much we were sure of. We knew that we had work, from mid-April through October, at an organic vegetable farm; we knew we [...]

Contraband

A co-worker let me know that he was waiting out front for me. I met him and he gave specific instructions, “grab a paper bag, come out to the car, put the jar in the paper bag before you go back inside.” Only a week before I had become aware of this scraggly looking man who [...]

Signs of Spring

One of the joys of seasons is that in the fall, when the mercury dips to 48 degrees, we rush to don sweaters and scarves and complain of the chill; in the spring, when the forecast calls for a 48 degree day, we pull the tee-shirts out of our closets with mad glee and dash [...]

Lent lends itself to living simply

I’m not just of Irish heritage, I’m of Irish Catholic heritage. Also Italian Catholic heritage. That means that even though I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in over a decade, I still think about Lent. And Lent, as anyone reading will likely not know, started last Wednesday after a night of meat eating for most [...]

Opportunities in Farming, 1919

We received a copy of this book — an original edition, no less — as a gift from friends last week. I found this passage especially lovely: There is no home like the farm home. And with the incomparable charm of rural home life comes the infinite pleasure of creative effort and the exhilaration [...]

Not NAIS: USDA issues new Animal Traceability Framework

The federal animal-tracking program NAIS would have been a disaster for small-scale farmers and homesteaders; the grassroots No-NAIS movement turned it into a PR nightmare for the USDA. Last week, Ag Sec’y Tom Vilsack proposed a new, more flexible program. Read on for details. A NAIS history lesson Way back in the day, some people at USDA [...]