a mighty mighty rain

The rain that we’ve been getting all summer? It’s not a plop plop plop kind of rain; it’s fine but heavy, like a block of mist, an image that is almost as strange as the idea of a black hole. All summer I thought there was something weird about it... you’d look up from a meeting or work or reading on the porch and you’d say, 'Oh, it’s raining.' It was a silent rain, almost sneaky. And it WAS different.

Irene’s rain was that fine rain, too, and it started at 10pm on Saturday and finally let up around 6pm on Sunday. We got... what? anywhere from 4.5 to I don’t know, I’ve heard people say... 12 inches? 17?

About 3 in the afternoon I put on a yellow slicker and walked down to where Roaring Brook – usually a brisk and charming little stream – was snarling and biting the air under 140 and leaping at and over – all thunderous brown curls – the railroad bridge and then attacking Otter Creek. The Creek then thundered on, fed by a million Roaring Brooks – doesn’t every town have one? – dug out the approach to Elm Street Bridge and rolled up over River Street, taking out the basements and first floors of houses along it.

That’s when it began to sink in. But it was FaceBook and updates from the Herald and VPR that brought home that Vermont today was not Saturday’s Vermont. Oh my goodness, yes. I mean no. And the theme became – How can we get there from here? We used to be so cut off from each other  but connected by roads. Now it’s the opposite. If we do now live in a dystopian world, it may be happy to the degree that we do not feel alone in our endeavors, in our efforts to stay alive and nurture ourselves. We're all, you'll excuse me, in the same boat. Perhaps we will have to nuance our meaning of dystopia. Perhaps it’s working together in the face of a violent Mother Universe -- for this was no doing of Mother Nature -- this was the outrage of the universe.

***

A few days after Irene, I took a right turn on 103 towards Cuttingsville from Wallingford and felt a faster thrill of the heart – as though we were heading to the edge of the known world! And we were – to roads just barely passable and a farm that had been completely wiped out by a mighty rain.

Kara Fitzgerald and Ryan Wood-Beauchamp of Evening Song Farm came on the Market scene absolutely
gangbusters at the beginning of the season.

 By now you’ve all heard about the seven-acre Evening Song Farm whose lovely little stream-turned-ferocious-monster reduced it to two acres. It leapt from the back of the farm, behind the tree line, to gobble up a 15 foot rise and carry all those acres of soil downstream. It miraculously left the house and barn – in which the summer’s garlic and onions were safely drying – looking out upon an idyllic river beach instead of cabbages and tomatoes. The river has moved. It intends to stay in its new home. I know these words are in vain... you cannot imagine this without seeing it.

Though not quite undaunted, the two twenty-six year old owners – Kara and Ryan – found themselves beached upon a heartening shelf of community concern and activism. Standing with Kara I motioned to men chain sawing log debris and piling a lifetime’s firewood chunks: Friends of yours, I asked? “I have no idea who they are,” said Kara. “People just show up and do what needs to be done.”

Kara and Ryan are so community minded – they often wondered if their vibrantly successful first season working alone was what they really wanted to do – and the Shrewsbury community so helpful and welcoming that I can see another Shrewsbury institution being formed here. Kara and Ryan may be to Shrewsbury Farm what the Sarckas were to Spring Lake Ranch and the Pierces to Pierce’s Store.
Indeed, Ryan wrote on the website, “Our long-term goal when we began the adventure of Evening Song Farm was to create a true community farm over time: to develop deep and meaningful connections with the people who are nourished by our food.” That sounds like it was made in Shrewsbury heaven.

***

If they didn’t lose their very soil, as Evening Song did, many farms lost all or much of their 2011 harvest. Only about 2 weeks ago I attended a NOFA-NY conference held at Kilpatrick Family Farm over in Granville. They had 7 acres under cultivation and Michael Kilpatrick led a caravan of cars into Granville to 4 beautifully planted acres of sweet potatoes and kale and Brussels sprouts. Carrots.

A few days later, when the Mettowee finished its Irene rage, well, here is what Michael Kilpatrick wrote: “During it's watery, violent rampage, it covered our entire Granville production field, tearing through winter squash, cucumbers, and carrots and flooding our beets, Brussels sprouts, leeks, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and a multitude of greens.

“Almost as quickly, by Tuesday noon, the water had receded, but left around (preliminary estimates) $80,000 in destroyed and damaged crops.”

The young Kilpatricks kept the first Rutland Winter Market well supplied with an amazing array of fall and winter veggies back in 2007/8 and again the next year. They have since ceased vending in Rutland, being ultra busy with nearer-by markets.

Closer to home, Yvonne Brunot’s and Ed Safford’s Right Mind Farm in Wallingford was ruined for the time being when Otter Creek, which lies possibly a quarter mile away behind their farm, spread its maw over all their fields and up to the house. Onions and garlic were already harvested, and they’ll be selling those at the Farmers’ Market along with fresh sprouts, soaps, and flowers. Their tomatoes and potatoes and squash – anything that was not harvested yet – is all a loss!


Mort and Mary Brown’s Timberloft farm store in Center Rutland was flooded, almost a total loss, though both were at the Farmers’ Market Saturday and seemed in good spirits. They’ve been through it before, although not perhaps quite this bad, and they know there’s a lot of hard work that they’re intent on doing by themselves at this point. When they need help they’ll ask for it. I bought eggs from them, and some jam and pickles!

***

Jason Martin from Woods Market told me at the Rutland Farmers’ Market Saturday – by the way, very well attended by both vendors and customers – that many people were questioning whether or not the produce offered for sale was safe to eat.

What? I said. Where would they get this idea?

“Well,” he said, “they’re not to blame for asking the question.”

Did some state office or official actually caution people not to eat local produce because it might have been contaminated by floodwater? Or was that the interpretation of a clueless reporter.

“That’s JUST why you buy from your local farmer or market,” said Jason, “and not from a grocery store. Your local farmer knows whether his or her own product could have been contaminated by flood waters – or whatever else is out there – and they would never in a hundred years offer contaminated produce to their customers. You go to your local farmer to get the best and the healthiest. What are they talking about, don’t buy local?

“Sheeshhhh!” he finished.

Well said!

Woods Market Farm is just one of our many farms that were minimally harmed by Irene. We’ve got lots of good fresh produce going on into the fall and winter. So let’s just remember to Buy Local. It’s more important now than ever before.

***

What can you do to help, besides BUY LOCAL.

• Check out Evening Song’s website for the best way to help them.
• Go to the RAFFL  website to find other ways, or give RAFFL a call at (802) 417-1528.
• And this, from RAFFL's website: “The Vermont Community Foundation and Agency of Agriculture have built the Vermont Farm Disaster Relief Fund to help farmers through the current crisis. http://www.vermontcf.org/give-now . If you want to make a donation specifically for Rutland County through the Vermont Community Foundation (it's possible!), please call RAFFL first (802) 417-1528.
• Fat Toad Farm is donating all of this Wednesday's 9/7) on-line proceeds to Evening Song. Their goats' milk caramel is wonderful! Drizzle it over chèvre or burrata. Or peaches.

***

Yes indeed, Irene was a mighty mighty rain. And instead of being a once in a lifetime happening it may just be an omen of things to come, even if we were able clean up our carbon footprint Ps and Qs immediately if not sooner!

For some of us, our whole ability to reside in this world with any equanimity at all depends upon thinking that we are perfectly capable of feeding ourselves outside the jurisdiction of the federal government’s industrial food system. If events even worse than Irene continue to happen, if our rivers rise up in black mutiny and eat our fertile farmland, then we won’t be able to feed ourselves. And you know for yourself, whoever controls the food chain controls the world. I’d a hell of a lot rather it was our local farmer than Monsanto.

an accretion of karma

Once I foolishly spaced some tubers of the orange daylily along the sidewalk in front of my house. Ten years later it took axes and shovels, brute strength and an entire summer to dig them out. Inevitably I missed  a few chips along the way and they are popping up all over the place now. Do tell. The things are hardy opportunists, and plant themselves into the middle of more cherished plants more often than not and, unless you want to ruin clumps of your more esteemed lilies, you are reduced to pulling them out as well as you can.

I put the last of those that I supposedly destroyed in a big, tough, black plastic garbage bag and put that in an out of the way place in the woods. There they apparently ate that plastic and burst from it into a thriving colony.

We can imagine, in a singed, dystopian world, one lonely tiger lily pushing orange through the rubble. First one, then another, until they repopulate the world.

I DID mean dystopia a few columns back when I described a strawberry season from my childhood. Some of you assumed I meant utopian, and one of you sent me an entire encyclopedia page defining utopian, in an email with WRONG WORD? in the subject line. And no signature. Wrong word? Well, No. But that did let me know that I did not succeed in clarity in that column.

Being a young farm-kid in the era of my childhood was every kind of disconnected. For our news of the world we had Gabriel Heatter and Grandpa. Neither one of them inspired a person to feel easy in her soul. You took your joys as they transiently appeared – the first sun-hottened strawberry in your cheek or Grandma coming home from work. Sometimes food is the only thing we CAN rely on – not only can we touch and feel it, but we can taste it, and it nourishes us.

Perhaps the reason so many young people are going into farming  is our new connectedness with the land and with food without – these days –  the disconnect from outside society.  Without “the mental prison of rural subsistence,” is the way Ian McEwan described it in his latest book, Solar.

There is community in farming now that there wasn’t back in that Midwest that I grew up in, where we were reliant on family, which could be a little ingrown, and a very limited community. Now we can be connected by the internet to the larger world, and to an educated local community that helps solve the problems inherent in farming. And that might prevent us from getting too hateful,  perhaps, and narrow, or even too lonely.

When Carol Tashie of Radical Roots Farm broke her ankle recently, the event summoned lots of help from the larger community. When she thanked everyone on Facebook, saying “We are overwhelmed with appreciation,” the answering comment from Solarfest struck my eye. “It’s the good side of Karma,” they said.

Carol and her partner Dennis Duhaime have, all by their ownselves, brought an invigorating sense of community to Rutland over the last several years and now they’re reaping the rewards. And it was nice that they chose Rutland to put their cheerful and effective energy into. Rutland has always been a gritty place, a kind of a show-me place, and perhaps it is now attracting the kind of people who see work to be done here that they can do – not to change Rutland into Woodstock, but to help Rutland reach the height of being Rutland.

This is a matter of accretion – for forty years the farmers’ market has met every summer Saturday, then more recently on Tuesdays, and now for the last few years year-around. It is arguably the most exhilarating market in the state. How did it get there? By perseverance. And accretion.

Kara Fitzgerald, of Evening Song Farm in Cuttingsville, told me how she and her partner, Ryan Beauchamp came to be in the Rutland market. They’d meant to move their very professional operation to Hardwick from Pennsylvania but got sidetracked when they talked to Lindsay Arbuckle and Scott Courcelle of Alchemy Gardens, who had interned with Paul Horton of Foggy Meadow, who had been enticed a few years ago to become a new vendor at the Rutland Farmers’ Market by Steve Chamberlain of Dutchess Farm and Greg Cox of Boardman Hill, two of the oldest vendors. Lindsay and Scott talked of the wonderful energy in the Rutland area – and certainly Carol and Dennis are responsible for some of that wonderfulness – and of the numerous young farmers, of the knowledgeable older ones, and the opportunities for new ones. Kara and Ryan are pretty darned thrilled with their decision to settle here.

Another recent example of perseverance and accretion, if not karma: For years local restaurants kept repeating the mantra of ‘it’s more complicated than you know’ when I asked them why they weren’t serving local foods. Or else they got all paranoid and hysterical when I made a joke of it. But. Guess what? It’s not as complicated as all that now that Roots, the Restaurant has made such a splash by successfully serving, making it a point to serve, local food. Sustainable, at the very least, since not everything can be locally grown and/or produced.

All of a sudden our good tried-and-trues are asking – “where can I source good local meat or vegetables in the amount I need?” The answer is, of course, RAFFL will be sure to help you, and you could always look up on line and talk to some of the farmers. I know for a fact that Greg Cox almost always picks up on his cell phone.

Now, if that’s not accretion, I don’t know what is: It's like sand building on a rock through aeons until suddenly you have topsoil! That's what's made Rutland a big star in Vermont's bright food galaxy.

Rutland resembles nothing so much as those tiger lilies with which we started this ramble: Intent survivors, and beautiful, too. What to do with all those lilies so intent on repopulating the world? Well, you can revert to Rutland’s answer to almost every problem – you can eat them. They are rather delicious as well as pretty in a common sort of way. Eat them all up, but be sure to leave the tiniest chip of them to keep... slowly... propagating.

***

Last year at this time I made a little salad of slices of kohlrabi, mango, Hungarian wax pepper, and tomato sprinkled with sea salt, coarsely ground pepper, and chopped parsley and cilantro, then drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

photo by Janet Kennedy Farmer

This is a properly formulated salad from my friend and localvore Janet Kennedy Farmer. She notes, “Last years empire apples, from local grower, Brown’s Orchard, are available at the Co-op & taste as crisp & delicious as the day they were picked!” She used sweet, crisp, juicy kohlrabi from Radical Roots. Yum.

Mid-summer Salad of Kohlrabi & Apple  

serves 4
SALAD:

• 2 kohlrabi roots, peeled and thinly sliced, the slices cut into quarters
• 1 apple, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 4 spring onions, thinly sliced, including some of the green stem
• ½ cup walnuts
• ¼ cup fresh parsley

VINAIGRETTE:

• ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
• ¼ cup raw apple cider vinegar
• 1/8 cup maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon prepared brown mustard
• salt & pepper to taste

METHOD:
Place all the vinaigrette ingredients in a lidded glass jar and shake vigorously, set aside.
Prepare the salad ingredients and place in a bowl.
Pour the vinaigrette over the salad and toss.

“Great served with rustic bread and a local pungent or sharp cheese,” says Janet.

And I say, in honor of this column, you might garnish the salad with sliced unopened blooms of the tiger lily.

rode hard road food

Driving U.S. Route 81 to Virginia and then to western North Carolina is, for us Vermonters, a little like wood nymphs slipping out of their forest homes to do battle with dinosaurs or giants in an alienating landscape.  We both need a truly imperative destination or else we’d just stay at home nestled comfortably among our tree roots.

But since U.S. 81 divides us from our daughter and other friends, warmer latitudes, and the south – the south as culture and landscape and, inevitably, food – the battle must be waged periodically.

Now look what I just wrote there – that U.S. 81 divides us instead of unites us as is no doubt the proper role of any highway worth its salt. But I’ll stick with my original description, for it is a veritable river of humongous trucks, and not a smooth one at that – up and down it goes – straight up and then straight down again, again and again, over destroyed mountains. Harrisburg. Scranton. Dead deer and concrete fields. Acres of Wal-Mart – distribution centers, headquarters, and trucks. With our wants and trivial pleasures we turn swathes of our earth gray and unproductive.

We come from Vermont, though, where the stresses we put on the earth are comparatively benign, and where WE certainly would not allow acres of our soil to be cemented over for junk storage. Would we? How about Williston? Or, closer to home, Rutland Town?

The first day we drove ten hours so that we would not have to stop until we got to our friend Dana’s kitchen in the serene rolling mountains of Virginia just north of Charlottesville. I’ve been enjoying cooking in that kitchen whenever I get a chance since it was created, maybe 20 years ago. Its centerpiece is an – oh – five foot long well-used butcher block work space, none too level,  and its many windows look out over beautiful productive gardens.

As we’d left Vermont that morning it occurred to me that Virginians didn’t, probably, grow rhubarb, so I’d picked enough for a pie. The next morning I wandered into that kitchen in my pajamas and got my first cup of coffee and started making a rhubarb pie, while partaking of conversation with Leo, who’d already been out birding, and Dana, who was making breakfast. I love that kind of cooking, in a kitchen that accommodates more than one cook and function.

A couple of soothing, recouping days in Virginia and it was off to Asheville, a mere seven hours more of playing games of wit – certainly not of force – with the mega- and mono-liths, the eighteen or twenty-eight wheelers: Pass ‘em on the way up, get out of their way on the way down.
 
But once there, with my magnificent daughter Zoe and her partner Jesse, again we ate from a beautiful garden, under a canopy set up right beside it, accompanied by the chickens clucking in their sing-song soothing way from their chicken tractor, surrounded by the sharp spires of Western North Carolina mountains. We ate eggs sneaked from under those chickens everyday, and those eggs sat right up in the frying pan as though the whites had been molded around that bright plump yolk.


And I got the honor of pulling the first head of garlic out of Jesse’s garden, and it was a thing of beauty.

Zoe was graduating from nursing school, and so there were lots of people and parties and eating. There was the pinning ceremony, a dinner before it at the Tupelo Honey Café, and a couple of gigs that Zoe and Jesse played, and then, all too soon, time to set out on the return trip.


We were making good time until, in the valley between two verticals, the traffic slowed and stopped. There had been a clash of titans on some distant destroyed mountain top, and we peons were creeping through sixteen miles of back-up and incipient pile-up – who knew which of those many smoldering brakes would reach its breaking point and when.

After a couple of hours of this we crept up upon an exit, and Dana – now see, I’m not really a Luddite – was able to guide us over a little road, all hilly and curvy, without a center line or even a name, for about twenty miles, around the pileup. Thank god for cell phones and computers!

We made it to her house only two hours late. She fed us homemade spring rolls, fresh asparagus from her garden, cous cous, and lamb shanks. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have more delicious food. Then I sliced fresh strawberries from her bushes over the ice cream we’d made on our previous visit, and sprinkled it with balsamic vinegar and maple sugar. Not too shabby for road food, eh?

***

Over the course of my travels I missed the first two outdoor Farmers’ Markets in Depot Park in Rutland. I know – this is such an unlikely happening that some of you could not be blamed for thinking I must’ve met my maker. But all is well, and the markets were extensively covered, I found, when I went back over two weeks worth of Heralds. I was especially  pleased to note the new Market Watch column written  by Kris Smith of RAFFL. Welcome, Kris.

Kara is helped by her mom at this market

So this third market was especially colorful and festive to me. As well as greeting all the tried and true friends, I was pleased to see at least two new produce vendors. Ryan Wood-Beauchamp and Kara Fitzgerald from the poetically named Evening Song Farm in Cuttingsville have a burgeoning CSA business as well as attractive booths at several markets. They got off on the right foot with me because they had beautiful broccoli raab for sale!

Then there was Meadow Squier and Josh Brill manning their Breezy Meadows Orchard and Nursery from Tinmouth. They had something I’d never seen before – a snappy pretty little curly cress that is not a watercress. And it’s Yum. We knew Meadow when she worked at the Co-op and also at RAFFL.  Welcome and good luck to all!

It was really nice to see two older businesses with new booths at the Market. I was thrilled to see a Crowley Cheese presence – its extra-sharp is one of my favorite Colbys in the world, and the price was extremely reasonable.  And Jia Indian Restaurant from the service station on West Street was there with some delightful potato and pea samosas, amongst other delicacies.

Finally, I just want to remind you that the celery-like herb, Lovage, is such that no-one should be without and it’s available in the pot at Second Nature Herbs at the Market.

Some of my "finds" at the 3rd outdoor Rutland Farmers' Market are fiddleheads from Radical Roots; a tiny can of smoked jalapenos (chipotles) from Alchemy gardens; a pot of lovage from Second Nature Herbs; salad turnips from Evening Song; a new white balsamic from Gordon's Pond; Broccoli raab from Evening Song; Blue Ledge Farm's plain chevre; half a wheel of Crowley's extra sharp colby; and a bitey little cress from Breezy Meadows.

***

And, this just in::: Happy Seventieth Birthday to Bob Dylan, who said, when we were young and pretty and in good voice and thought we knew everything, 

“Well you know something is  happening/ but you don’t know what it is/ do you, Mr. Jones.”

That's truer, I'm sure Bobby would agree, now than it ever was before.