Thursday, December 30, 2010

At least I grew a carrot


See? I really did grow a carrot.  Some of them were what I call ‘paradigm specimens’, what a carrot should be.  And for a four-by-eight foot bed, there were a lot of carrots. The same was true for the scallions, and the curly endive, and for… well, that’s just about where paradigm perfection ended this year in my garden.  Everything else was an exercise in rescue and salvage, once I realized that I had made some kind of mistake, or neglected to do something at a particular moment.  Don’t get me wrong; a lot of great produce came out of our beds, but as the season advanced I began to see that it could have been so much better.  Sometimes things go well in your garden and you don’t know why, but not for me, not in this year of no forgiving.  So, in an effort to begin some catalogue of my lessons learned, for future reference, I offer a list of this year’s mistakes.

1.      1.  I didn’t water enough.  Sometimes it rains with some frequency over several days, or even weeks, up here in the summertime, and a garden can be quite content to hold its own with short frequent rains.  But that’s not what this past summer was like, and I was finding other things to do in the garden by day and thinking that ‘if it doesn’t rain today or this evening, I’ll water when we come home tonight after work.’  After all, watering the garden beds at night is really the best for the plants.  But after service at the restaurant, I would either forget or postpone watering in favor of getting horizontal; and that is the reason I offer.  In return, the plants offered me no excuse.  Instead, they punished me.  The lettuces and chicories quickly took on a tougher texture , and—get this—everything stopped growing!   And when I finally got the message and started watering every day, even just a little bit, and sometimes even in the middle of a frightfully sunny and hot day…by golly, the plants got together and decided that was all right with them, and got right back to growing and looking fabulous.  Amazing, isn’t it?

2.     2.   I procrastinated.  On almost every job, I probably procrastinated at least a little bit.  “Oh, I need to do that over there as soon as possible, but I’m doing this now, and I’ll get to that just as soon as I finish this.”  Yeah. Great. Except that I procrastinated before doing the current task, and the fact is that I am already playing catch-up to my plants.  As my Mom used to say, ‘Get on the stick!’ ‘Don’t put it off!’ ‘It needs to be done!’  Well said, Mom.  I’ll try to do better.

3.     3.  I sowed some things too densely and was too wussy about thinning them aggressively.  Even lettuces need personal space.

4.      4.  I didn’t give the plants that want lots of space enough.  Therefore, my plan for 2011 is to move the zucchini, cucumbers, and other squashes ‘offsides’ to the vineyard side of the moat (the ditch that drains the storm runoff from the road and which separates the vineyard from the yard), in other words, into the field proper, like real farmers do it.  This means I can then use their old space for the greens which need more space themselves.

5.      5. Further to nos. 3 and 4: I need to start more things in flats so that I can use my beds and my time more efficiently by spacing the transplants correctly and weeding less.  This will require no procrastinating.

6.      6. I will learn how to properly prune a tomato plant so that I don’t have to hunt for fruit, and so that the plant can devote more energy to the fruit.  It seems that when I ask the plant to grow longer and produce another bunch of fruits, I am really just being greedy, and then end up with less.

7.      7. I need to be more aggressive about succession-planting the wild arugula.  Cutting it back and asking for more than 2 harvests per season from the same bed just seems to require more time picking individual leaves, instead of mowing a bagful with the scissors in 3 minutes.  Therefore, I will stop procrastinating and sow another 2-by-8 foot space at 4-week intervals, and I will sow the designated 4-by-8 foot space in the hoop house in the first half of August, and another in the first half of September.  

8.     8I will try growing some more potatoes.  The few I tried last year were excellent (once I found them under the tendrils of the Delicata squash vines).

9.      9. I think I am beginning to understand basil just a little bit.  Let me correct that to: “I wonder if...”  My basil plants really struggled in their raised bed in the lower garden.  The last-chance salvage basil I planted in a pot took off and flourished in soil of the same quality, but wasn’t shaded by the pole bean trellis, as the bed-basil was.  Therefore, I will try some more basil in pots this year (for the sake of convenience and ornament on the retaining wall), and I will hold my basil starts a little longer in the hoop house before transplanting, and I will transplant half of the bed basil to a bed where they will have full, and half to the shade of the bean trellis, just to see what happens.  May be I will learn something.  Oh, and I will water more.  This means that I will have to ‘get off my duff,’ as my Mom would say.
  
1..  10.   I pray that I am beginning to understand radicchio just a little bit.  This year I will start more Treviso and Chioggia in flats, and I will transplant them on their correct leaf-day (see the Old Farmer’s Almanac or Maria Thun’s Biodynamic calendar), and I will space them correctly. And! Yes, I will water more when needed.
Well, it’s December 30th, and those are my Resolutions for the New Gardening Year.  Tune in next year for a brutal review of my efforts.  Let me apologize in advance to my Mom for my shortcomings in 2011.  Whoops!  Sorry Mom!  See you in the garden! 

--Caleb

Sunday, December 12, 2010

the end is the beginning




It’s the end of our vacation.  Last day before the realities of running the restaurant during the holiday and winter season.  Tomorrow and the next several days will be full of reservations, returning phone calls, waxing the dining room floor, painting the bathroom, making a soup, preparing ravioli, stocking wine.

But today is Sunday, my favorite day of the week because Sunday lunch is my favorite meal.  Since we’ve been away for three weeks, we are still doing laundry and cleaning house.  This morning is moving things around in the living room, storing china, and polishing furniture.  With the fire warming the house all day, the air is full of the perfume of lemon and beeswax. 
Sunday is meant for slow cooking, and we have a pork roast, almost two pounds,  which gets well-salted , that I prepare with a clove of garlic, two cloves, a soup spoon full of black peppercorns, a good dousing of olive oil, one onion sliced in rounds, a particularly ugly but sweet carrot from the garden also sliced in rounds, a healthy portion of parsley, and thyme still on the stem, and since I don’t have any bay, a clutch of oregano.  Added to it all is about two cups of red wine.  Into the oven it goes until its medium rare and rosy, just like we like it.  There’s a sauce made from a roux to finish the dish made with a little less than a third of a cup of melted butter, a soup spoon of flour, and a good ladle-full of the pork juices, but I get distracted by the phone ringing, and my sauce breaks and cannot be remedied, so I scrap it.
There are potatoes I cook our favorite way too—a la La Tourelle, in the manner of one of our favorite bistrot in Paris.  Sliced into rounds, about half a pencil thick, and then halved again and arranged in a layered fan like a tart in a cast iron skillet, olive oil, salt and pepper, low heat, and a lid cooked for twenty or so minutes until they are cooked through and slightly crispy in the skin edges.

We toss a radicchio salad with olive oil and lemon, and there’s till that half wheel of Bayley Hazen Blue from the cave up north.   To finish, I make a pear flan because pears are what we have.  Into a buttered baking dish, I place the cut and quartered pears, and pour over them a mixture of 1 egg, 1 cup milk, a half cup of sugar, a half cup of flour, and a third of a cup of melted butter, beaten with a  hand mixer.

We eat late, at four o’clock, feeling like this is really more “tea” in the British sense of the word.  A bottle of Madiran from the south west of France is a perfect pair for the pork.  We break after the salad and cheese for a short walk around the meadow before the sun completely sets.  We don’t like these early dark  hours, but take hope from the fact there are only a few weeks left to go before the days start to get incrementally  longer.  The flan is just finished when we return and we drink a coffee while we wait for it to cool.  We think about this week’s new menu, the roast pork recipe looking like a likely candidate, look at cookbooks, and notes from our travels, we read novels, one of us takes a nap.  We think about another glass of wine, or a pot of tea.  We relish our last free Sunday for awhile.

--Deirdre


Wednesday, December 8, 2010

vendanges, vendemmia, harvest
























The tail edges of a tropical storm are decidedly un-tropical as the wind buffets the house and barn and a fine sleet falls, or is this hail?  Could it even be snow? Luckily, the rainy weather this past November happened well beyond harvest.  This year we picked grapes on September 18th, and apples mid-October.  Last year, the grape harvest didn’t happen until mid-October, and the apples, well, we were in the middle of November when we pressed.  Given the current climactic  patterns for the last month, we are glad that the season was early.  Of course, the question is--will this be the way it will be?  Or just an anomaly?

A friend who works for a vineyard in California writes that they were able to blog, twitter, and facebook (I still can’t believe these are verbs…) during their harvest and how thrilling it was to get people far away involved in the process.  Maybe next year we will be able to write simultaneously.  We settle for writing about harvest now, almost two months after the fact, and just like the tail end of this storm, we are even at the tail end of the harvest cantina work.   This was our first official la garagista harvest, the first harvest with almost a thousand pounds of grapes.  In the past, we’ve worked with 50 pounds of each variety, so the jump to a thousand  was quite steep.  And to think, we had been hoping for two thousand pounds.  Since our season here in Vermont was so hot and dry, the yield was lower, and the grower we worked with outside of the small town of Vergennes out near Lake Champlain had to lower our take in order to satisfy his commitments to all his winemakers.  Sometimes things actually do happen for a reason.

The actual processing of the grapes went beautifully—a lovely surprise as we really didn’t know what we were in for.  We picked our grapes on a Saturday morning, working until well after lunch, and then  did a full night’s work at the restaurant.  We took that following Monday through Wednesday, our usual farm days, to get the harvest in.  Thanks to our intrepid volunteers: Eliza, Zanna, JT, Rebecca, Erle, Michael, Todd, Mark, and Gina—Caleb and myself were able to hand de-stem, sort, and crush in three days.  We began on a very cool morning with the white La Crescent which went through our tiny press on its first outing.  We broke for lunch, a simple pasta made of sausage and tomatoes and finished with a beautiful apple tart that Rebecca made at the restaurant for us to bring home.  The work started up again after lunch.  White grapes can be reluctant with their juice, and between the new press and handling white grapes for the first time, it took a long time. 
As evening fell, there were glasses of wine and hearty cookies to keep us warm in the wine garden where we were doing the sorting and pressing during the day, and when it got too dark, we moved the operation inside to the barn.  We broke for dinner inside at about ten-thirty that night having de-stemmed, sorted, and pressed four hundred pounds of white grapes.

The same happened the next day, but with the red grapes.  We spent all day de-stemming and sorting.  In the early evening, when we moved into the barn, the must sitting at the bottom of the white wine demijohns rose to the surface with a whoosh at the same time the full moon rose, the wild fermentation beginning all on its own.  Uncanny, how the natural world behaves.   Later,  Caleb prepared roast chicken that he served in the barn in a steaming black skillet.  There were salume, cheeses, and roast potatoes.  And of course, bottles of wine to keep us warm and up the the task of the work. 

It was the next day that we crushed the red grapes by feet in our half wooden barrels.  This was surprisingly quick, the red grapes being far more happy than the white grapes to relinquish juice.  We scooped the juice and must into the big vat, and a couple of smaller ones too, and here they sat foaming and fermenting for three weeks before going into thick glass demijohns for the next part of their journey.

When I began this entry it was mid-November and all the fermentation was finally complete, and the wines were transferred off the gross lees (the spent grape skins at the bottom of the demijohns) and into new demijohns for their elevage over the winter.  Now, we have returned from three weeks of traveling abroad.  The ciders, which we pressed a couple of weeks after the wine, have finished their gyrations, and we taste everything to be sure all the vessels are on track.  The evolution of the flavors amaze, even at this early juncture. 
Now, is the time of waiting and letting the winter days work their mysterious magic.

--Deirdre

Sunday, November 7, 2010

in rememberance of


First we were cooks and students of wine, then we were cooks, students of wine, and gardeners, then somehow we have become cooks, students of wine, gardeners,  and farmers.   While the restaurant is closed for our ritual November break, (what’s called stick season here in Vermont because all the leaves are gone and what is left are the whites, grays, and black-browns of bark and branches), the work on this farm has expanded. 

The list of preparations for winter is deep like the impending snows, and holds a different urgency.  New blocks in the vineyard for planting next year must be tilled over; land waiting for the following year worked over and re-seeded with an advantageous cover crop; established vines need to be lightly weeded and composted; posts for trellising must be ordered and set; the roses for the vineyard need to be planted at the head of the rows.  The days of November rain confound.  We are thankful the ground hasn’t frozen yet.  

The new wine must be racked and settled in for the winter; the cantina rigged with heat so it can stay cellar temperature through-out the ensuing cold months; the new rose garden needs to be planted with the young Therese Bugnet starts as well as the beautiful damask Belladonna brought by our friend David just over a week ago.   The old rose garden, overgrown with blue veronica, bishop’s weed, and Siberian iris needs to be cut back.  The phlox, the day lilies, those mats of iris bulbs should be moved.  The roses need to be mulched with nettle and fir boughs, the neighbor’s chicken manure.  The green house, expanded earlier this fall, needs new beds to be made, lettuces and starts moved into their new winter home.  The roof on the studio needs to be re-built, the stairs on the porch mended and stained.  If Time were profligate, we would wash the windows. 

Strange how we find ourselves in a season that is winding itself down, yet the work seems to wind up, almost like a last gasp, a last valiant effort to survive what is thought of as a season of loss: the dying back of the flowers, the falling of the leaves, the rotting of fruit, color leaching out of meadow and woods.  But this farming thing provides an alternative perspective.  Observation brings surprises.  Brilliant green ferns have unfurled beneath the fallen leaves, under the canopy of those naked trees near the brook.  The swiss chard and the beet greens look robust and lined with red, still in their outdoor beds.  I’m pretty sure this is not a good thing, but the lilac buds have started to unfurl in that terrific spring green.  

I’ve never noticed the ferns before , or the lilac buds opening in November, so I do not know if this is work as usual or if the relatively warm and rather wet days have confused these plants.  Yet, I do know that this is the time of year that tricks the eye.  We think of this as a dead season, the landscape around us showing us the change from one month to the next, the transition between summer and winter.  But the soil itself is not hibernating; it is suddenly more alive then ever with worms and nematodes and new humus.   

It is true that soon our efforts of cultivation will be over, and we will be covered in a blanket of snow for these next five months.  We will be left to settle for remembering  the rose garden in bloom, the apples picked from the tree, the plethora of tomatoes that went into sauce we served at that restaurant, the first harvest of grapes.  And like the soil doing its hard work while there is nothing like the fullness of summer to distract, we too will be doing the work of memory which serves to sustain, sift, and stir for another season.
--Deirdre      

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

quiet autumn






 A handful of warm days.  It is strange to walk out the door and feel hot.  The cluster flies have resurrected and swarm the sunny side of the house.  While we’ve also had more rain and the ground is inconsistent at best, the air is like tinder next to a sulpfherous match.    Even though the days are slowly becoming shorter, Time seems to be a bit longer.  There is still much to do, but there is not the same pressing need of things growing.  The plants themselves are drowsy if not altogether sleeping now—yet there are still  a few tenacious leaves hanging on trees and those roses still bloom, though their colors are more tea-stained, browned at the edges.  Only in the green house do the small starts of lettuces and bitter greens , the carrots and herbs need to be anchored in their new beds with tilled up soil and black compost.  This will be the winter harvest for the restaurant.

It is quiet in the late afternoon sun slanting through bare maple, bare birch.  It is somehow relaxing to hear only the small finches talk, the rushing water in the brook, the sound of the hoe hitting the roots of the unwanted campion in the vineyard, the burble of voices on the radio in the green house reciting the day’s news full of sensational stories and tragedies which I am frankly glad that I unable to hear clearly.  Much better to get mud on the hands and knees , and think of the hopeful, hibernating plants and the slow inspiration of soil. 
--Deirdre

Sunday, October 31, 2010

relinquish

I sit on the terrace under the pergola in the dying light.  It’s mid-October and we’ve already had the first snow.  I am loathe to relinquish this season, which is why I am sitting here watching the sky darken from color to black and white while the three-quarter moon is only thinly veiled by these ominous and lightly raining clouds.  The coyotes up the hill have been active.  They tune their voices, a series of scales and arias, like musicians at the piano.  It is too dark and too wet now for me to continue planting roses in the new beds.  I have come in from the rain to bring in pillows from the two wicker chairs and the outdoor settee, but I can’t quite bring myself to come inside.  The roof on the balcony above the pergola keeps me dry and I am momentarily shuttled back to the heat of summer and late night dinners spent at the long dining table here set with old china and candles.  I am reminded of another pack of wild dogs who so obligingly howled at the full Sturgeon moon back in August when we ate roast duck finished in a rose syrup I made from the old Bourbon roses in our garden.  That night began with oysters and finished with ripe, succulent peaches poached in wine.  So many long dinners had here under this pergola, and lazy lunches snuck between rigorous hours in the garden and vineyard.  What’s the point if we can’t break the day with a glass of wine and a simple dish? 

But October has another kind of narrative.  After such a dry summer, we’ve been hounded by wind and rains.  We feel lucky that the grape harvest was so early.  We’ve avoided frost, and even that snow two days ago only taunted never really hitting the ground.  But I’ve noticed the past two mornings that the nasturtium leaves have started to curl and shrivel, and the campion that had started to march through the vineyard is all brown husk.  The vine leaves too have started to color or curl or fall, the green stems turning woody just like they should.  But there are roses still blooming and making buds, and the ice pansies I have planted defy the end of season looking bright and sunny in their small pots or the edge of the vegetable beds. 
 
Tonight, as if in preparation for tall tales or rememberances of things past, the black silhouettes of the grapevines climbing up the pillars of the pergola look sufficiently derelict as if I am outside a house which has been allowed to go wild with rose bushes and vines obscuring it.  I can hear Caleb in the recently expanded green house shoveling and moving things in the dark.  I’m sure he can’t see either, but he’s covered from the rain so will keep working until the light is really impossible.  It makes it easy to pretend that the season, like this light, will linger. 
--Deirdre

Thursday, October 7, 2010

hiatus, before autumn


The last time I wrote here it was mid-summer.  It is now mid-autumn.  Good intentions once again gone astray.  Wishing for the magician’s trick for expanding time.  Our silence here may seem like we’ve been on a hiatus or sabbatical.  Would that it were so.  Hands dirty, backs sore, hungry, tired, and delighted.  The most hard-working summer and fall we’ve ever had—and happily we’ve fallen into bed every night.

We have been reduced to single words or short phrases--an apple falls, red clover in the vineyard, sweet buckwheat, a thousand pounds of grapes, hornets, a plate of tomatoes, a clutch of roses, dirty glasses, the scent of woodsmoke.  The thought of writing a sentence is daunting.  That’s another reason one or both of us have not been writing.  The belief that we need to construct a complete thought has hovered and kept us away.  I’ve heard it said that the great winegrowers are poets.  I imagine this notion fits for everything.  An efficiency and rigor of style.  And while I have no pretentions to being a great winegrower, only a hardworking one who lets the grapes tell their story into wine,  I am intrigued by the poet bit.  

So words and phrases it is even if just to keep a record of this extraordinary season. A white butterfly lost, a dog barks incessantly, the crickets hum, blue dusk in the sky, pink-lighted clouds to the west, a house light winks across the valley, the moon rises, the moon sets, the coyotes offer frenzied song, the cats pace the house, a single light in my office, vases full of pink cosmos flaunt, a storm brews, grape-stained hands, grape-stained feet, the smell of yeast and violets, grapefruit rind, the milky tea has turned cold, one grandmother’s tea cup, another grandmother’s white linens, a wall of French green beans, a sea of sweet little carrots, sausages roasted with grapes from the pergola, the raccoon is gone, the flock of turkeys circles the vineyard, the walnut trees have lost their leaves, a hot bath, roast duck, a bowl of soup.

--Deirdre