Brian Boucheron

Cream Cheesy Bagels

2012-05-04T21:32:00Z

There is something perversely satisfying about spending an excessive amount of time recreating commodity food items at home. I know I’m not alone in this affliction, as one of my favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, seems to excel at making her own oreos, graham crackers, pop tarts, marshmallows, and so on. Thus, having confirmed that I’m in good company, I decided to fritter away yet another Sunday in the kitchen, this time making cream cheese and bagels (sorry, no lox (yet)).

I’ll have to give bagel details at a later date, lest your eyeballs glaze before you make it to the glamor shots at the end of this post. If you simply cannot wait, I’ve got some photos of the bagel process in my bread products Flickr set.

First step! Lay all your utensils and goodies on the counter in a neat and fussy arrangement. Get up on a stool and take pictures. Express thanks for a kitchen with a nice wood countertop right next to the lovely light of a large, north facing window.

You may notice the counter is pretty bare. Compared to the last time I made cheese, this is going to be relatively simple. Hooray!

Step two: warm up the milky bits. I used half and half. You can probably use straight-up light cream, or even heavy cream if you’re a crazy cheese daredevil. Seventy-five degrees is your target. Precision isn’t terribly important here, we’re just trying to make the bacteria cozy, and they do tolerate a range of temperatures.

One slight complication: there’s a twelve hour long step coming up, so you’ll probably want to start this the night before and let your microbe friends work while you slumber. Plan ahead!

Now that we’re up to temperature, it’s time to add our bacterial culture. This comes as a packet of powder, which you keep in your freezer in order to prevent its inhabitants from waking up and hulking out in your pantry or other such inconvenient location. Snip the packet with the scissors you’ve previously sanitized (you sanitized all your equipment, right?), sprinkle it on top of the milk, and mix it in thoroughly.

Now, here’s where my various cheese books disagree. Some of them tell you to add rennet as well. So, I did. I’m starting to think that’s unnecessary/cheating. The lactic acid produced by our bacteria should be able to curdle the milk on its own, given enough time. It sounds like the result would be lumpy curds floating in whey, instead of the uniform gel that I got, and I suspect that would be more authentic. I’ll try it the other way next time, if I’m feeling lucky and adventurous.

Either way, we now need to keep our pot o’ milkstuff warm for twelve hours. In my yogurt making days I learned that a cooler and some warm water will keep things toasty for quite some time. So put your pot in a “cooler”, pour in some warm water, close the lid, call it a “warmer”, and go to bed. How much water to add—and at what temperature—is an experiment I’ll leave to you. I try to err towards more water at a not-too-hot temperature, so there’s enough thermal mass to last through the night.

All of this assumes that you’re not making cheese in a balmy climate. If you do happen to roost where “room temperature” is between seventy and eighty, just leave the pot out, taking appropriate precautions re: marauding cats and curious primates.

I did these first steps at about five in the evening, so needless to say, twelve hours came and went before I rolled out of bed the next morning. No worries. I got to it at eight or so. Poking around in the pot with a washed finger revealed that our experiment had indeed firmed up overnight.

Step one million. Make yourself some tea, line a strainer with muslin, and grab an old-timey slotted spoon with a handle that’s quite likely covered in lead paint. Scoop and plop. Gather up the cloth to make a nice hobo sack (optional: contemplate “hobo cheese” for a bit), then hang it over a whey receptacle for about six hours while it drains.

And there you have it. It should be firmed up and dried out a bit. Add some salt and you’re done. It’s never going to have the same texture as the cream cheese you get from the store, as it’s not full of odd gelling agents and fillers, but once you cool it down it’ll be nice and creamy and spreadable. It should last at least two weeks in the fridge.

Or rather, it shouldn’t spoil for at least two weeks. Whether it lasts that long depends on how many bagels you have on hand. Out of a half gallon of half and half I ended up with about 1.8 pounds of cheese, or—at current rates of consumption—about two dozen bagels worth.

Unlike all the other cheeses I’ve made so far, I’ve actually tasted this one! I think it came out really well. Pretty tangy and creamy. Maybe a little drier on the mouth than store-bought cream cheese, but at the same time a bit fresher and less gummy feeling. It’s probably not something I’d make terribly often (too many other cheeses to try!), but I’ll call it a success. It has certainly gotten good reviews in my limited test market of one.

The whole process of making cream cheese reminded me of making a strained yogurt cheese, and indeed I’m feeling like the final result is quite similar (though a bit richer). Soon I’ll document the idiotically easy process of making said yogurt cheese, for those of you unwilling or unable to sacrifice so much time in pursuit of cultured dairy products.

Fail Cheese

2012-04-23T07:46:36Z

Making cheese seemed like a pretty simple process when I laid out all the tools above. A pot, some spoons, milk, cultures, a thermometer, a knife to cut the curd. Of course, throughout the day I kept having to root around the kitchen for all the things I forgot to include: measuring spoons, a big stirring spoon (lots of spoons involved here, I’m noticing), a pH meter, all sorts of bowls, ice, twine, gloves, a whisk. Yeargh!

Last Sunday really turned into an annoying day in the kitchen. I started at around noon, and didn’t have cheeses in the brine pot until nine or ten that evening (much of this time is just spent waiting around for microbes or enzymes to do their thing, admittedly). On top of that, I messed it all up during the very last step, so I cleaned up and went to bed with a mild case of the grumps.

Oh well. I’ll now step you through the process of making provolone, with too many pictures and too little explanation. It will look complicated (sortof) and time consuming (yup!), but if you’re interested in making cheese, there are many easier recipes you can start with (parmesean was really easy, if you don’t mind waiting six months to eat it), so don’t let the following mess dissuade you.

First step, sanitation! Every homebrewer’s favorite task, and just as important in cheesemaking. I gather all my utensils, and anything else that will touch the milk, and boil them for a bit. While that’s happening, I try to clean and scrub the entire kitchen as much as is practical, and then I kick everybody and everydog out of the room for the day. That always goes over well.

After the boil, I arrange my “clean zone” next to the stove, and fill the emptied pot with milk. I’ve been trying to get milk from the public market here in Rochester. Some folks from Ithaca show up every week with yummy cream-top milk, so I get two gallons for whatever silly cheese I’m making that weekend.

I don’t have pictures of adding the cultures and the rennet. There’s not much to look at, as the milk just stubbornly continues to look like a pot of boring ol’ milk. But, after bringing the milk up to ninety-seven degrees or so, you sprinkle in a powdered bacterial culture. This one was a buttermilk-ish type of culture. Others are more like yogurt. Their basic function at this point is to produce lactic acid… pH is really important throughout the cheesemaking process. This is intimidating to hobbyist cheesemakers, so most of the intro books completely ignore pH except when absolutely necessary, instead relying mostly on timing and crossed fingers to get things right. It seems to work out, usually, so no worries there (for now).

After the bacteria drops the pH a bit, we add in the rennet. This is the enzyme that actually curdles the milk. Stir it in, and then go relax for a bit. Forty minutes maybe?

Wash your hands and give the curd a bit of a pokey-scoop with your index finger. If it looks like the picture above, you’ve got a “clean break” and you’re ready to cut your curd. I use a knife that I believe is designed for cutting roasts. It works well enough. Of course there are specialized curd knives… but you could probably even just use a long thin metal frosting spreader.

The goal here was to cut three-eighth inch cubes of curd. Getting your curd sizes even is pretty important (it’s mainly a moisture thing), and I fail at it every time. Things still work out well, but it’s something I definitely have to improve.

After cutting, the curds rest a bit. They are delicate little things at this point, and giving them a break lets them start to firm up before we jiggle them around with our stirring. Failing to do so could result in us bashing precious milkfat out of the curd structure and into the whey. Your whey should be a clear yellowish-green color, and if it’s clouded up, that means you’re guilty of curd abuse. Sinner.

Now we can stir! We raise the temperature up vewwwy vewwwy slowly (half a degree per minute in this case) while stirring with some regularity. Our goal is to expel more and more moisture from inside the curds. Going too fast can result in a “rind” of sorts forming on the curds, which would trap moisture in the interior. No good.

Having heated, stirred, rested, et cetera, we now drain the curd, seperating it from the whey (which we reserve for use as a brine later, though normally I would feed it to my imaginary pigs). It is then put back in the pot and held at 104 degrees or so for hours. The main goal at this stage is acidification, although we’re also expelling more and more water from the curd. In the case of provolone, mozzerella, and other stretched curd cheeses, pH is extra critical, as it is a big factor regarding whether the curd will stretch or not (it also heavily affects meltability).

I failed to document myself fumbling around with the pH meter. It probably took four hours for the curd to drop down to pH 5.2 and thus be ready for the next step.

Drain your curd. Again. Then cut it up into cubes. We’re now ready to heat these cubes up and mush and stretch and pull them. Unfortunely, in this case, we’re also at the step where I totally failed. Well, not totally. Mostly.

The curd cubes go in a bowl, and hot whey or water is poured over them. We need to get the curd up to 170 or 180 degrees. This was my problem, I think. My whey was hot enough, but I don’t think the curd ever got up to the right temperature. I had bits that were stretching well, interspersed with unstretchy bits. At the time I thought my pH was off and I just soldiered on. In hindsight, I should’ve put the whole gloppy mess back on the stove until the curd came up to temperature.

Oh well. I stretched as best I could. You’re supposed to pull it out two or three times like you’re making saltwater taffy (because, you know, everybody has done that, right?). Meanwhile, you’re wrist-deep in 180 degree whey, and your stupid Good Housekeeping approved neoprene gloves are not quite as insulative as you had hoped. And you didn’t take off your stupid thermal before starting, so you’re frustrated and hot and you spent nine hours making two pounds of this stupid fail cheese you’re such an idiot…

…aaaand deep breath. And relax. That doesn’t look so bad now. After streching a few times, you shape it into a ball or two, or a sausage shape, or a “jug” shape, or a gourd shape. Apparently provolone can be whatever the heck shape you want it to be, so that’s exciting. Next time I’ll be sure to make a mobius strip or a klein bottle. This time around I made a ball, and a “jug”.

Because of my aformentioned problems, not only didn’t the curd stretch well, but it also didn’t knit back together so hot. You can see on one side it seems like a smooth and shiny ball, but on the other side—let’s call it “the butt”—it simply wouldn’t gather back up into a smooth surface. I’ve got tons of cracks and crevices in both cheeses because of this. Surely these will cause me mold and cracking issues during aging. I think we’ll eat these as fresh as possible in about three weeks.

The cheese above that looks like a lab specimen is actually floating in an icewater bath. You need to cool down your hot cheese in order to firm it up in whatever dysfunctional shape you’ve massaged it into. After doing so, we make a brine out of the reserved whey and some kosher salt, cool it to cheese cave temperatures (fifty-five degrees), and let the cheeses sit in it for a day.

And finally, twine it somehow, and hang it in a fifty to fifty-five degree fridgecave for three weeks. After that, you can eat it right away or age it for up to a year under more typical fridge temperatures. You can also smoke provolone pretty successfully, but I’ve decided to cut my losses and put no further effort into these particular cheeses. Maybe next time. Just remember you’ll need to cold smoke them, otherwise you’d end up with a delicious provolone puddle.

So that’s that. Believe it or not, there are more pictures in my cheesemaking set on Flickr, if you’ve not had enough already. And stay tuned for more cheesemaking adventures, because nothing says “summer” like spending the weekend inside, standing over a hot stove. Yay!

Making Cheese

2012-03-31T12:44:26Z

I’ve been making cheese a bit lately, and that’s somewhat interesting I think, so I decided to dust off the ol’ blog and camera for proper documentation and dissemination. You can find more photos of the actual making of these cheeses at my cheesemaking photoset on Flickr, and I promise to be more proactive next time I spend a Sunday in the kitchen, stirring curds.

First off, why the heck did I start making cheese at home? Who knows. I like to make things that have to age for years before I can eat or drink them, and I enjoy making foods that involve bacteria, fungi, or yeasts. I’m sure some of my interest was also stimulated by the summer I spent milking goats (check the scrollback for more on that). Any way you slice it, for some reason I bought a book called Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll, and I flipped through it really quick, and then it sat in the book pile next to my bed for about a year, slowly creeping its way towards the floor as other books became a higher priority.

I finally dusted it off this January and decided to make cheddar, and thus began three straight weekends of kitchen toil. I bought some rennet and cultures from Ricki Carroll’s site (this reminds me, I did try making cheese a few years ago, using grocery store rennet, but it turned out pretty terrible, so I guess I purged it from memory). I then made a special trip to the public market, hoping to get some good milk from the Ithaca dairy guy that usually attends, but alas, he was not there. I was more successful at the hippy food co-op, where I believe they carry the very same milk.

That was a Saturday morning. I then spent the rest of the day mentally preparing by reading and rereading the recipe (no, really (I do this a lot)), and gathering the equipment I’d need to perform this feat. The next day was a long day of cleaning the kitchen, cleaning it more, cleaning utensils and pots and pans, and then the precise heating of milk, along with additions of cultures and rennet and lots of waiting for said items to do their magic. I probably spent six or eight hours creating the cheddar. The other cheeses were easier and quicker. Again, next time I’ll document better and give you a bit more of a step by step.

So that’s the thousand foot overview. The next weekend I made parmesan. And after that, romano. I needed a place to age these. Above, you’ll see my kegerator, which was a free find on craigslist (woohoo!). Since I don’t make beer often enough anymore, the kegerator has turned into a trusty cheeserator (ahem: “cheese cave”), providing roughly the right environment for turning new cheese into old cheese.

With any luck, I’ll need more shelves in there soon, but for a quick retrofit it works pretty well. That’s a cutting board resting on top of some canning jars to keep it out of any moisture that might collect on the floor of the fridge. The thermostat on the fridge didn’t mind going up to fifty-five degrees, so I thankfully didn’t need to go get an external temperature controller ($$$). The humidity seems to want to be at 75% or so (that’d make a good humidor, I hear), so a pan of water or two does a good job of bringing it up to the 80–85% that I’m looking for. I’ve been running it a little dry lately to keep the mold at bay, but in doing so I’m risking some cracking of the cheeses.

Some day I’ll wire up a hygrometer and humidifier with some overengineered elctronics for more precise control over this particular variable. In the meantime, I’ll reflect upon some frequent advice from the homebrewing world: “relax, don’t worry, and have a homebrew”. I’m sure it’ll all work out.

This is the parmesan, cheese #2. It’s about one and a half pounds, and two months old. In a few weeks, I’ll probably rub it with olive oil to keep the rind from cracking, or I might bag it up and vacuum seal it. I haven’t decided yet. I do like the idea of natural rinds, full of texture and mold and “character”.

Romano! It had a bit more yield than the parmesan, probably two pounds. Of course it’s also softer/wetter, so I’m sure most of that is water weight. It’s drying and aging nicely. I could probably slice it up and eat it soft in a few months, but I’m planning to dry it right out for a nice grating cheese.

And here’s the first cheese I made… good ol’ cheddar (obviously this one has been waxed, next time I may try a natural rind of some sort). There are many ways to take shortcuts making cheddar. They all involve trying to avoid the two or three hour process of cheddaring, which basically consists of holding slabs of curd at a specific temperature while they expel whey and acidify. The curds require some tending during the process, so it definitely made for a long day in the kitchen. But, I wanted to try the “real” way at least once.

So now I continue to wait for these cheeses to age. They’ll all be tasty around a year from now, but I might slip up and sample them a bit earlier. I guess that depends on if I get down to making some fresher, less aged cheeses to tide me over in the meantime. For obvious reasons, I’ve been searching around for a good bucheron cheese recipe for a while now. Bucheron is a ripened goat cheese. Basically a chevre with a bloomy (white mold) rind that you age for four weeks or so. It’s really really tasty (I’m so glad my namesake cheese is so yummy!). I finally found a recipe for it in the second cheese book I bought, Artisan Cheesemaking at Home. There’s actually lots of neat and creative recipes in there… cheeses you’ll not be finding in the grocery store any time soon, so stay tuned for updates on those (and if you’re in Rochester, or on my Christmas list, maybe you’ll even get to taste some)!

Transitional Species

2008-08-31T12:00:06Z

Well. I find myself missing the above pictured critters, as well as the goats, oxen, yaks, and farm folk. I left the farm mid-August, in order to get home and take care of some pressing matters. I guess things were getting pretty routine by that point anyway, and it made me itch to get home and start doing something… finding some land, developing some freelance work, learning some newly-important life skills, working on some different farms. I’m not sure what I’ll have to blabber about on the blog now, but you should be warned that some of it will probably be 1000% more nerdy than before. We’ll see.

Right after I got home, Rachel and I zipped off to Maine to laze about for a week at her parents’ place. That certainly delayed my settling-in phase here in Rochester, but made for a great transition between two very different worlds. I still get up fairly early, but I am creeping later and later each day, and I stay up too late. I’ll have to work on that, as I enjoy getting up at six and having the quiet morning to myself. Also, it is odd to have too much free time and too little hard labor. I’ve contacted some local farms and hopefully will find a place I can visit and work at between my job and freelance and other pursuits… the garden just doesn’t cut it.

We happened to be in Maine on my birthday, and Rachel & her sister made me a yummy farm-themed cake. They managed to cover all the important animals from the farm, except the yaks. There was even a team of appropriately colored oxen, munching on the coconut and frosting “grass”. I managed to milk the birthday event for almost a full week… eating too much, drinking vast quantities of yummy beer, and lazing about reading books and taking naps. Whee!

But now it’s back to reality-land. First on the to-do list was to set up an office here at Rachel’s place, which I guess is now “our place”. Having done that I am now ready to dive into some freelance work, and have indeed already talked to the bike shop and started some materials for next year’s Tour de New York (the first, I suppose). Soon I will return to my prior job part-time as well, and also try to work in some internships, with any luck. So maybe there will soon be more variety here, instead of all these tiresome pictures of farm animals! Who knows!

Garlic Harvest

2008-07-17T20:45:21Z

I had visitors last weekend. Somehow only one of them managed to get photographed. Rachel drove to Rome, and hitched a ride the rest of the way with my parents, who were on their way to Vermont to meet up with other Volkswagen Bus weirdos. So they got in fairly early on Friday, and we put her to work rather quickly after the folks left. For some reason we were a little behind in the harvest. Oh yeah… because a goat had a broken leg and there were vet visits and such to worry about. So Rachel and I harvested together whilst everybody else was off at the vet. We bunched up kale, beets, carrots, and lots of herbs. Probably some other stuff I’ve forgotten about as well. (Oh yeah! Two kinds of cucumbers and three squashies.)

So, it was nice to see her, and even though we couldn’t manage to chit-chat while harvesting and counting bunches and such, it was a nice plump weekend of activities. Too much walking to town and back though… I was getting more tired on my days off than during the week.

We took a short ride to Shelburne Falls, and wandered around there like touristy folk. There is a bridge of flowers that we walked along, with Rachel telling me what they all were and me forgetting them promptly. It was quite lovely, and I managed to take zero pictures. We got a frozen hot chocolate at a cafe, and it was delicious and not at all like a chocolate milkshake thank you.

The parents came back Sunday evening, and we went out to dinner at a local bar, of which I didn’t get the impression of “fine eatery”… but it was really quite good. I made everybody eat some mussels. And the desserts were fantastic looking, so we were all fatty-fats and pigged out. Then we came back and drank some beer and played pitch.

And then, everybody left me on Monday. Poo. Then it was back to the same old. Wednesday was a little different though… we harvested all the garlic. Not sure how much, we never did end up counting bulbs. It was about fifty pounds of seed garlic though. So we pulled it all up, laid it out, filled up a cart, dragged it to the barn, bunched it up, and hung it on strings. It was kindof my first blister-causing activity. My hands are a mess, which made it hard to weed and trellis tomatoes today.

It smells rather delicious walking through the barn now… and of course I’m making some hilarious vampire jokes.

The wee Guinea Fowl are one week closer to ugliness. Look at that elongating neck! They’ve been moved inside with their surrogate mother. Now they reside in an old playpen, and thankfully still make only cute chick sounds. I anticipate they’ll be out and about before they learn how to be more obnoxious. I wonder, will they act somewhat more chickenish then the other Guineas? Will they all get along? Probably not… they’re known for finding at least one of their own to pick on and excommunicate. Heartless poultry. I think I shall eat one of you after all.

Baby Noisemakers

2008-07-09T21:36:10Z

Spring is long gone, yet we have some new babies on the farm, as of yesterday. We’ve had some guinea fowl eggs stuck underneath a broody hen (chicken) for what seems like months now (probably four weeks really)… so I decided to poke around underneath her and see if there was any activity. There was!

As you may be able to see, I discovered a guinea chick peeping around underneath the hen. Broody Hen (that’s what we’ve taken to calling her) quickly got used to everybody poking around underneath her to get a look, and now doesn’t even peck at you as you root around under her warm blobby broody body. The chicks are up and about today, pecking at some mash and getting wee baby drinks of water.

So that’s what passes for excitement around here. Entertainment, really. I realize I may have spoken poorly of the guineas in the past, but they’ve really grown on me this summer. They eat a lot of ticks, and don’t eat the vegetables in the garden. They run much faster and more elegantly than the fat chickens, have some level of personality (mostly “stupid”), and roam far and wide on the property, often stopping traffic in the road and exploring the neighbor’s yards. Plus, they can actually fly a little bit, yet choose to stick around and roost in our half-dead apple tree. How sweet. So in summary, I’m happy we’re growing up two more, and I hope they make it and I probably wont even try to slaughter them and bring them back to Rochester in freezer bags.

In other news, we’re catching up with our weeding, sortof. It was a long day in the tomato patch today, and my grab, twist, and pull muscles are tired. I reserved enough strength to do the evening milking, and now I get a rest. I suspect tomorrow will involve some weeding of the melon beds. And the winter squash. And the corn. And the pumpkins. Blah. It is rather hot and humid here, and today I considered becoming one of those people who complains about the weather (a retiree?)… but, anything under ninety and I refuse to change out of my work pants and into shorts… so no bellyaching. There was a nice breeze today, but apparently not at ground level. The trees whooshed and swooshed, yet there was stillness down in the weeds. Hot days make me wear sunscreen. Obviously that’s stupid, as the quantity of solar radiation apparently has no bearing on my application, just warmth. I guess it correlates pretty well. I’m rather tanned, but still feel I could get pinky after a long day in the sun.

I’m babbling. It is time to shut in the chickens and chicks, and then head to bed. Much visitor preparation is needed tomorrow, along with weeding and laundry and on and on.

Status Report

2008-07-06T22:01:58Z

I suppose a little bit has happened since our last chat. There have been a lot of harvests, a lot of markets, and a lot of weeding. Blech. We’ve finally moved on from just greens, with some beets and carrots and squash now showing up on our market tables. That feels nice. I’m not sick of salads, but will enjoy the added variety nonetheless.

We’ve also blown through all of our garlic scapes in the past few weeks. What a lovely product. Waste product is more like it, as we would cut them off even if nobody were willing to buy them. But people do, and as they should because it’s quite the nice delicate garlic taste right when everybody’s garlic braids are running out from the previous season. Soon we will start harvesting fresh garlic for the CSA, and then I’ll get to see how we harvest and dry the rest, and perhaps even try my hand at making some braids.

I had visitors, many weeks ago. My parents came out for a few days in their Vanagon… and they dragged Rachel along for the ride. In fact, they will be doing the very same thing next weekend on their way to Vermont for some crazy Volkswagen meet-up they seem to be attending yearly.

We went on a tour of the Berkshire Brewing Company while they were in town. It was quite the nice tour, with an ample amount of free tastings and an entertaining tour guide… rather in depth and fun.

I think the folks had a good time here at the farm. They brought plenty of beer and crackers and cheese and Rachel and I helped them consume it whilst playing Pitch around the wee table in their camper. Mom hopefully got enough pampering in, bringing fixings for dinner and breakfast and also some cookies and the like.

We also went out to a flea market, which was not quite a bust, but close. We showed up late due to poor directions, and it was a semi-cloudy-rainy day anyways, so people were packing up and heading home. I got a good camera tripod though, so that’s good. And afterwards there happened to be a good brewpub on the way home, so we stopped there for a late lunch. You can perhaps see a theme developing here.

This past weekend I went to the Northeastern Permaculture Convergence in Holyoke. I haven’t got the brain capacity right now to explain what permaculture is… perhaps someday. But it’s somewhat involved in designing agricultural systems, if you will. Anyways, it was an interesting weekend, and I’m still processing things in my head. I met Dave from Rochester there, who has a blog I’ve been reading for a while now. So that made it pretty worthwhile. We didn’t talk a ton, but he seemed great and will no doubt be a valuable resource upon my return. He has some connections within organizations I’m interested in, and also is tinkering with his own permaculture garden/yard which I hope to view someday.

I guess there were around 100 other people at the convergence. I didn’t talk to many of them. I’m antisocial, and suck at events such as this. But I did meet a lot of nice folks, and picked a few brains. Mainly I enjoyed touring some farms, gardens, and nurseries. Of course I didn’t write down the scores of cool plants I saw, but I feel like I’m not at that stage yet, and have the names of some books to obtain that should point out the highlights at least.

So, it feels good to be back at the farm. Things were a little weird when I got back, with the oxen getting out of their pasture once again, apparently a problem all weekend. That’s pretty frustrating. And there are many animals that need moving in the morning, which I don’t entirely look forward to. But. Being away made me appreciate many more things about this place, so I shall not complain.

Misty Morning

2008-06-08T20:28:42Z

It has been rather warm and moist here lately. I woke up today (Sunday, my “day off”) at around five, with the sun peeking in the hayloft doors (which are now permanently open to ventilate the goat butt barn scent). I’m not sure what compelled me to bound out of bed and take pictures. Perhaps my lack of doing so for the past two weeks. Or perhaps because the sun had a particular hazy, diffuse quality that I knew would be gone pretty quickly.

So off I went. It was my first t-shirt-only morning… plus muck boots, dress pants, suspenders, and my camera bag. I guess I got some ok shots.

Anyways, the point of all this was that it is rather pretty here, I’ve found. Yesterday after the market I took some detours on my bike ride back. Various dirt roads deep into dark dark woods smelling slightly acidic and decayed. Some were shortcuts between more civilized roads. Some went beyond my means of locomotion, with steep descents that I didn’t feel like tackling in the opposite direction.

There were lots of hills.

It was all quiet and beautiful, with woods and cows and barns and fields and streams and gardens and an old round brick schoolhouse and a beehive on somebody’s porch roof (bearproofing, I suppose) and hills and valleys and misty bits and clotheslines and nice views and nice smells. I will have to do more exploring, at more photogenic times of day and with my camera on board.

All this mist and haze is, unfortunately, because it is durn hot here. Only low nineties really, but it doesn’t feel nice. We went from steady rain and a flood warning Thursday night and Friday morning (when I got soaked through my “rain suit” while moving the sheep) to the nineties on Saturday, and through the next few days it seems. Last night was quite interesting, clear skies overhead and clouds with silent lightning off in the distance (I guess you may call it heat lightning, but it’s really just a normal storm you can’t hear due to distance or refraction of sound waves (says the internets), so let us just call it lightning, ok?).

In wildlife news, I saw a black bear a few nights ago, with two cubs close behind. They were basically at the tree line you can see in the pictures above… which is rather too close to where we have the boy sheep currently. They freaked out a bit. Doggie inspection revealed no bears in the woods shortly after I spotted them, so maybe they were just passing through for a dip in the stream (something that has crossed my mind recently).

Derek found the guinea hen’s nest, with something like twenty eggs piled up in there. A few were placed underneath the broody chicken hen in the coop, so we’ll see if anything hatches. I guess most people will remove the eggs and store them until the hen is ready to sit for a while… because they don’t start sitting until they’ve got them all out. I guess that makes sense. I’ve taken to liking the guineas, even though they’re obnoxiously loud. They don’t eat the crops and keep me from getting ticks. They can stay for now.

First Market

2008-05-26T21:51:36Z

Last Friday was our first harvest day, in preparation for the Ashfield Farmer’s Market Saturday morning. It was pretty exciting to finally be able to snip some edible bits off of some of the plants we’ve been staring at for more than a month now. We mostly had salad mix and spinach from the beds in the greenhouse. I remember preparing some of those beds my first weekend here, back in April. It feels like everything is growing sooooo slooooowly, but I think I just have unrealistic expectations. It sure is nice though, to sit up in the barn loft and look at the fields, with rows upon rows of thin green lines (some red and purple)… I can’t wait until they’re all thick green lines.

We also pulled up some onions that had overwintered in the field across the road. Their existence wasn’t really intentional: it was a bed that had been lost to weeds last year and mowed down to nothing before winter. But they came back, and upon pulling them up they had some nice white bulbs attached. So we made up about 35 bunches of those, which involved cleaning off the gunky layers, snipping the roots, bunching them up, and washing them off in a bucket. A lot of labor, but worth it because nobody else had fresh onions at the market. Rounding out the selection was bunches of chives, a few bunches of tarragon, and that’s it. All of this was packed up and ready for the CSA members to pick up at the market. We don’t divvy things out into boxes and drop them off anywhere, instead our members get a canvas bag with a pretty Sangha Farm logo on it, and they just come to the market and fill it up. It certainly makes things easier on us, and I think is good for the customer, as they can pick and choose only the things they want (although there is something to be said for being forced to try the new fruits and vegetables you find in your CSA share).

In addition to our meager selection of produce, we had a ton of vegetable starts to bring to the market. The van was quite full, with multiple tiers of precariously stacked flats of delicate plants. Luckily the market is only about one mile away. We got there at seven and were just finishing setup by eight thirty when the market opens. As of right now us interns don’t really have to work the market, so after hanging around and helping out a little bit, I wandered off and sat under a tree to write letters. It was a beautiful day, and tons of people came out. The market is much smaller than Rochester’s main public market, and much more social. In the center of all the tents was a constant four hour meeting of neighbors and friends (and dogs). A man in a bowler hat and bow tie came and played cello for a bit. Another man brought two tiny donkeys and walked them around while being followed by eager donkey-petters (they were amazingly soft (the donkeys)).

After writing letters for a while, I wandered to the post office and the hardware store, and got back in time to see the ice cream truck pull up in front of the town green where the market is held. It’s an old converted school bus, out of which is served locally made organic ice cream. Of course I had to sample some, and indeed the butter pecan was quite delicious.

Ooh! I forgot about the cheese. We finally got our license to make and sell cheese. What an amazingly bureaucratic process that is. I’m sure I didn’t even really hear about half of it, but from what I did hear it’s no wonder there are very few small-time dairies around.

But, we made it through all the hoops, and Maribeth cranked out as much cheese as possible before the market. She had a sample tray all set up and received many complements and sold out of everything she made. That means there will be two more does joining us, and the two does with kids still nursing will be separated at night so we can steal the morning milk at least. More milk! Unfamiliar teats! Yikes!

Visitor From Another World

2008-05-21T22:03:28Z

Ack! It’s already Wednesday night and I haven’t written about last week or this past weekend even! Even now, at nine o’clock, I feel bad because my typing is probably keeping Adam up, and really I would enjoy sleeping very much. We’ve shifted our schedule around, so now I’m getting up at five thirty, eating breakfast and attempting to slowly start the day, and then out and working by seven. I guess that’s not crazy early. It feels it though, especially when you have to milk in the evening and aren’t really done working until eight thirty. I’ve taken to making lunch a quick sandwich, so that I can sneak off and catch a little nap before we get back to work.

We’ve been planting like mad for the past week, and all of this week. Onions onions onions leeks cabbage cabbage cabbage broccoli and other stuff I readily forget. We had a little frost scare a few nights ago, but it never materialized. The only vulnerable thing in the fields was the zucchini, so those got covered up for the night.

Most of the things we’re planting were started in the greenhouse last month. Radishes, beets, carrots, lettuce mixes, and a few other things are all that have been directly sown. The seeder is a mildly amusing little device that is filled with seed and run down the beds as its wheels churn and it digs a trench, meters out seed, fills the trench, and tamps it down. All of the rows I’ve done are far from straight. Nobody else does much better, actually. The only reason it matters is that it stinks when a hoe wont fit between the two rows due to somebody’s sloppy driving.

I had a visitor last weekend. Rachel came out from Rochester Thursday night via train. It was a rather nice visit, which we started out by hand-weeding a bed of mesclun mix. That took most of Friday actually. I milked Friday morning, just so my personal photographer could record the event and prove that I’m on a farm and learning things.

We’re finally settling into a semi-routine as far as moving all of the animals is concerned. We moved the chicken coop a few days ago, and for two or three days the hens weren’t really able to find their way back at night. So that was a chore… waiting until they were sleeping on a fence somewhere before grabbing them and putting them into the coop. That has finally stopped. The girl goats are being moved to new pasture every day… boy goats every few days. The sheep are finally out for almost a week at a time. The oxen are chewing on possibly five days of pasture per move, but are still being punks and getting out of their fence too often. Time to up the voltage.

Oh! I almost forgot… we got llamas last Sunday! Llamas have a funny looking name, and are funny looking creatures. Everything about them is weird and they scare me and they smell and I really really dislike them. Llamas sure do spit when agitated. And perhaps you think “Gee Brian. Getting spit on isn’t too terrible, is it?”… and I say yes. Yes it is, because this is llama spit and LLAMAS DON’T BRUSH THEIR TEETH, OK? It is a foul substance that you could only simulate by fermenting the essence of dog breath with a touch of vomit and moldy sock.

I’d have photos here of said llamas, but I really don’t feel like getting my camera all smelled up. Maybe I’ll risk it soon, just so you can see the freak show yourselves. Until then… I require slumber.