Thirty Minute Podcast

When my mother and I went to a national sustainable agriculture conference in April, they asked us to make a podcast.  We sat at a table across from each other with a big microphone between us, we had a list of questions that we could answer so that we weren't just blithering -- it was something like StoryCorps, but 15 times as long.  We had no trouble finding things to talk about.

If you have 30 minutes sometime, you could listen to us complimenting each other on how well we have managed to run our lives and the farm. I notice that we failed to mention that we have husbands. We failed to mention a lot of things but we still talked nonstop, and mostly in complete sentences.

Here's the link:

https://www.sare.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Our-Farms-Our-Future-Podcast-Creative-Succession-Planning

If that doesn't work, you can go to www.sare.org and find the podcasts that came out of the conference, Our Farms Our Future.  Ours is number 004.

Mother's Day

In my family of origin, we do not observe Mother's Day. Our mother never acknowledged the holiday, so we didn't either.  But just by chance this year, all of her children had chosen that day to gather and go on a sibling retreat together. It takes us about two years to find a date that we can all agree on -- by now the destination doesn't even matter as much as just finding the time. 

As fate would have it, our brother had to change his plans at the last minute.  For a few moments, the rest of us thought we would just go to work as usual and try again later to find a new date.  But then it dawned on us that we could go without him, and invite our mother instead.

When we got in the car, we knew we were headed for Lancaster County, PA and we had reservations at the Red Caboose Motel.  We chose that hokey location because Lani had driven past it many times and had been intrigued.  Lani goes up to Lancaster a couple of times a month -- she makes about ten stops in 15 hours, shopping at various businesses to stock her general store with Amish-made goods.  She picks up chickens for the store and her flock, she gets 100 "fry pies" at the bakery, she loads up on barrels and sleigh bells.  But she never gets to be a tourist.

The Red Caboose Motel is one-of-a-kind.  Almost 50 years ago, someone thought it would be cool to make a motel out of a collection of train cars, and so they did.  Each room is in its own caboose. They are all lined up around a parking lot/courtyard, parked on some dilapidated rails.  It is not shiny and new -- the paint is weathered, the wheels are rusty.  But our room was clean and the heater warmed it up quickly.

After a brief nap, we got up and went touring, driving slowly in any random direction we wanted, admiring the fields of tiny corn plants, watching the horse-drawn buggies roll down the two lane roads, noting that the drivers were often children.  The area is a mix of Amish farms, Mennonite businesses, agricultural supply stores, tourism.  Big fields, long views, lots of cows and horses.

It was Sunday night and cold and rainy so there wasn't a lot going on.  We decided to go back to the motel and eat in the train car restaurant.  The salad was unremarkable but the crab risotto was yummy. Our waiter was charming and not from around there -- when we said we were excited to see tapioca on the menu he said, "I don't get why anyone likes that." We explained that it was something you had to grow up eating, you would never learn to like it as an adult.

The high point of the evening was the movie, though.  At 7:30, the receptionist locked up the office and went outside to the barn so she could turn on the movie.  We asked her if it was cold in the barn and she said, "it's not heated." It was a real barn, with horses downstairs and lots of stuff stored on the second level. The horse smell was strong, probably because it was so wet out and probably because they were directly below us.  We made our way to the hard-backed chairs and chose our seats (we were the only ones in the audience until another family came in a few minutes after us).  We settled in to watch "Up."  Mom was the only one who had never seen it before, but we all loved it. Halfway through the movie it started to rain really hard, so we were in a cocoon of noise, under a metal roof, thunder outside. 

When we went to bed (at about 9:30) the storm was still pounding and flashing outside.  When the lightning and thunder happened at just about the same moment, Anna's feet came over the edge of the top bunk and she abandoned her post by the ceiling, climbing into Lani's double bed for the night.

On Monday morning, as Lani had promised, we saw that it was Wash Day.  Clotheslines with pulleys on the ends, filled with plain colored, plain made Amish clothes, way up high, the line attached to the barn on one end and the house on the other.  The clothes were sorted by type and color, with all the black pants together, all the dresses together, the linens next to each other.

Our first destination was a restaurant supply store.  We were just going to see what was there so we could send Lani back later to pick up an order for us.  But we wandered through the aisles for a long time, maybe for hours, and filled up a shopping cart with all sorts of useful items. We shopped for the wedding, for the Common House, the general store, our own kitchens.  Later we spread it all out on a picnic table and sorted out the receipt (and found two mistakes that required us to go back and get a refund from the nice cashier...no problem).

That's basically how we spent the day, shopping at stores that do not exist near us. 

That was about the most memorable Mother's Day we can remember, even though we weren't technically observing the day. We just got to spend 30 hours with our mother.  Now that we have Google at our fingertips, we can get lots of questions answered as we drive around and see things we don't understand -- Lani even figured out why there were dozens of cars parked along a highway, waiting for an event. It was the 29th annual Make A Wish Mother's Day Parade, with kids riding in fire trucks.  There was no end to the excitement in Lancaster County.

Lani wanted to spend one more night because the next movie was "Finding Dory." Anna wants to go back and stay in some cabins that look like Tiny Houses in a campground near an antique mill.

We headed home in the afternoon and by the time we were almost back to Loudoun, there was a severe storm warning (our phones were blaring alarms) right in that region so we dumped Lani out and drove home as fast as we could.  We listened to the radio and heard that conditions were just right for a tornado (so we texted everyone at the farm and told them to take cover).  We stayed ahead of the hail and the winds and scooted into our houses in time to watch the storm hit.  There was no serious damage, although there were tornadoes reported to the west and south of the Loudoun farm.

Our only regret is that it was too wet for the horse teams to work in the fields, so we didn't get to see farmers driving eight horses, plowing.  We will have to go back -- our work as tourists is not yet done.

Small Thoughts While Weeding

I was already an adult by the time I ever tasted a parsnip.  This seems funny, now that I think about it, since I have been surrounded by vegetables, including many relatively unknown types, for my whole life.  Lilah cooked and served the first parsnip I ever ate, and it was so delicious I became obsessed.

So why are they so rare, in my experience?  For one thing, you need to plant parsnips in March around here.  Well, conditions might be appropriate for planting a small seed in the ground in March on about two individual days, and you never really know when those days might happen.  The soil has to be just warm and dry enough and it has to be ruffled enough to welcome and host a very slow-growing seed.

Let's say you do find a day that works.  This year that day was March 29 here on our farm.  Of  course, we couldn't get the G started on that one magical day (the G is the little 1950s tractor that we use to mark the rows so we can later cultivate using the same tractor...cultivating is taking weeds out mechanically by driving down the rows with little shovels that tear out the weeds between the rows).  This has happened before, of course, and Carrie and I are not too proud since we are not the mechanics in the group -- so we hooked up a tractor with a chain and towed the G down the bed, marking the rows.  We looked so ridiculous that people took pictures as we drove past them in the field.

Once the rows were marked, Carrie used a walk-behind push seeder to plant the parsnips.  Then we had to cover them by hand because the soil wasn't quite as good as it had appeared at first.  It didn't really flow.  Too wet. Luckily parsnips like wet soil and apparently they want to be wet for their entire growing time.

On April 29, the first tiny plants appeared.  Most seedlings of other plants pop up between 3 and 10 days after planting.  30 days is a really long wait. You begin to wonder if the seeds were actually viable.  Of course, weed seeds are always viable so there were plenty of weeds covering the bed.  It was too early to try to cultivate because the parsnips were way too tiny to see, so first I hoed the edges of the bed just to give Carrie a prayer when she got going with the cultivator.

A week later, the parsnips are still germinating.  We have hoed the whole bed once by hand.  But it takes about SIX MONTHS for parsnips to get to full size. And right now their leaves look almost identical to a kind of ground cover that only grows in that field (I suspect my Grandma Newcomb planted that ground cover in her yard 75 years ago because that is one of the few places I have ever seen that type of plant.) so that makes weeding a job for only the most experienced weeders.

And this is precisely why I had never eaten a parsnip before.  It is almost impossible to think of a  price for parsnips that people would be willing to pay and that would even begin to cover the costs. I only know of one farm that has ever sold parsnips at the market -- and that farm is managed by two former managers of our own farm.  So I ask them when I want parsnip guidance. It's a very long, slow learning process. You only get to try the experiment once a year, basically.

I used to think carrots were the high bar but now I know there is a much higher bar.  Parsnips make carrots look really easy.

Lilah served carrots and parsnips, grated together and sauteed in butter. It was divine, and now I know it was also incredibly special.  Where did she get those parsnips?