Wednesday, December 28, 2011

tablescape

As we approach the new year, and we think about setting the table to herald 2012, we look back at a few of our favorite tablescapes from this past year.  La garagista-style.  In this case, a picture seems to be worth more than a thousand of our words....



Here's to sitting down at the table.  Happy New Year!

--Deirdre and Caleb

Monday, November 21, 2011

secret gardens







1.: jardin lapin ouvrier, 14th arrondisement

I've always thought of Paris as a green city, meaning there are so many groomed parks with wide lawns and varied borders and little landscaped niches everywhere.  There are allées with arching lime trees and graveled walks. In some parks there is an extravagance of roses, a profusion of asters, or an horitcultural biodiversity.  Not only is this a city of architecturual beauty and grandeur, but one of landscape architecture elegance and grace.

I was in a shop in Montreal.  On the shelf was a little book called Secret Paris.  Knowing I would be in that city in just a few weeks, I flipped through the pages.  The booked opened to a section about Paris gardens.  Not just the beautiful gardens we already knew about in the Luxembourg, or Bois de Bologne, or the King's herb garden at the Jardins des Plantes, or at Rodin's museum.  But social, communal, working neighborhood gardens.  Part of our quest in the city this visit has been to wander through the arrondisements and find these little gems.  Our map has been laid out by www.jardinons-ensemble.org.

-Deirdre

Friday, November 18, 2011

looking for the real BoJo




La Cave des Papilles is on the rue Daguerre, a lively pedestrian street full of cheesemongers, butchers, fishmongers, bakeries, traiteurs, and vegetable shops.  It holds down a corner of Daguerre and a street called Lalande, and is probably one of the most thrilling wine shops I've ever been in.   Bottles upon bottles of wines made by small producers, young and old, men and women, who make their wines in small quantities and hold themselves to both traditional and honest standards.  There are pots of pâté and foie gras, handmade jams from a farm in the south.  There is a tasting on offer tonight, and for that there are beautiful baguettes and a rather impressive loaf of country pâté  as well as a bowl full of rillettes.  Six bottles for the tasting are lined up.  

It's the third Thursday in November, which means that the newest of the new wine from this year's vintage in Beaujolais will be released.  Here in Paris, there is a typical excitement, though excitement might be too strong a word, maybe more of a typical expectation.  It is the day the Beaujolais Nouveau will arrive and it's the same day it's been arriving for the last thirty years, and it's a good day to find cause for celebration.  Café bars and little bistros all over the city have planned tastings.  Most begin at five o'clock in the evening and go till nine or ten, some will go on late into the evening.  Many will be pouring Beaujolais Nouveau from George DuBoeuf, but others will be pouring something a little different.

Beaujolais Nouveau (referred to as BoJo here in the city) has a slightly less than savory reputation.  People seem to like the idea of it, but not really like "it". The wine is so young and so many of the industrialized brands use chaptalization (adding sugar for fermentation purposes when the natural sugar content is low and to back sweeten), designer yeasts (there is a little bit of an "in" French joke going around right now in the wine community about a yeast used to create a slightly banana flavor fro BoJo.  "Want to see my banana?" and all that...), and a heady dose of sulfite to stop fermentation and stabilize.  As a result, what is supposed to be a particularly authentic wine, a real experience of wine ready to drink so close to the end of harvest has become commercially and chemically changed, or like the French word, derangé, deranged.

I've never had real BoJo and have been particularly interested in searching it out as I see so many similarities between the Marquette growing in so many vineyards in Vermont and the Gamay grape.  For the past two years, after our own harvest, our young red wine has been fresh, lively, fruity, and well, rather lovely.  Couldn't we have our own Nouveau tradition? The quest, as there must always be a quest, has been to find true Beaujolais Nouveau in a sea of imposters.

It doesn't take long to find the venue for which I'm looking: La Cave des Papilles (that would be The Cellar of the Tastebuds) which specializes in natural wines.  They are having this tasting of several producers of BoJo as well as a Nouveau from the Loire and 
Côtes de Rhône for comparitive puproses.  They started opening bottles at eleven in the morning.  We think to arrive at around six in the evening.  Music starts at seven.

The tasting itself is everything from educational to intriquing.  The wines, which come from various parts of Beaujolais, have similarities but also strong differences.  The wines are light by nature with fruit and excellent acidity.  They have a yeasty almost nutty element to them.  They vary in texture, some being more ethereal and others almost weighty.  They are curated perfectly, moving from the lightest style to the richest--though rich is never really a word to use with BoJo.  Hints of cherry, tar, iron, and something a little sauvage. The producers shown: Karim Vionnet, Jean-Claude Lapalu, Raphael Champier, Michel Guigner, Christian Ducroux, the Paire family of Domaine de Pothiers (the Loire offering), and Marcel and Marie Marchaud (Côtes de Rhône), all farm organically or biodynamically and believe the less intervention in the cellar the better.  All the wines were fermented on wild yeast, no chaptalization, and little or no sulfite at bottling. 

At six in the evening, there are a handful of gentlemen in the shop discussing how to place these Beaujolais Nouveau in relation to the ubiquitous M. DuBoeuf's selection.  By seven, it is tight standing room only, and a lot of people move out on the street corner with glasses and bottles in hand.  The music, a kind of Klezmer jazz mix-up reminiscent of Dixie bands in New Orleans holds court out on the street.  We meet a Canadian chemistry professor well-familiar with La Cave and in the city teaching for the month.  His brother-in-law lives in Vermont.  We spent the evening talking about Paris, economics, wine, and the woes of the world, the woes greatly tempered by how the wines charm us, and the rousing tunes.

On the street, a series of images pass like a film using the lens of this new wine.  This is why there are people crowded here on the corner--because of the Beaujolais Nouveau.  To celebrate something not quite tangible, to feel--while in this city--the rhythms of harvest and the countryside, to salute your neighbors.  Women walk by in skirts carrying bouquets of flowers, a dog barks in admiration for the music, a scooter buzzes by, a woman on a bike rings a bell.  An older lady hangs out her apartment window from up above.  A man in a wheelchair rolls close to the tuba player moving his head to the sound.  A man kisses a woman on both cheeks in greeting.   

--Deirdre

  

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

How to cook potatoes in a Paris apartment...

Or, ‘This could be the start of something good’

I love the lowly potato, and have no wish to argue semantics about ‘lowly,’ so I’ll stop there and get to the point. You know what I mean anyway, so whom are we kidding? Potatoes just can’t be beat, right? Just thinking about them makes me want to make them so that I can eat them, especially this way, pan-roasted until just ever-golden-so, with a mix of creaminess and crispiness, to put on top of a salad, alongside a leg of duck confit, or a few discreet slices of steak, or even some pickled herring or grilled sardines. You see what I mean? Potatoes! Let’s go people!

The procedure: Like most things done with potatoes, this is a simple procedure, but it requires a little attention, so just read through all the way, then go do it, no peeking back. Then do it again, and again, and again, until you are making the best damn potatoes you could hope to find right in your own kitchen. With practice, you'll know just how many potatoes to use to fit your pan. And invite friends over.

Begin with a few medium-sized potatoes, scrubbed and glowing, and slice them in half, then slice those halves crosswise into slices just thinner than a pencil. Remember pencils? Wooden sticks--with a dark substance stuck down the middle and a number ‘2’ printed on the side-- that we used to use to write clever and frobidden (new word!) notes which we would pass to our friends – or perhaps enemies—in class at school? No? Then put down that knife and go out and find a pencil to refresh your memory, then we can continue… All set now? Ok, keep that pencil close by where you can see it: potato slices no thicker than that pencil. But not too thin, for crying out loud. Keep the slices together, as if the half potato were still in one piece, and pause here to oil your skillet, which you will begin to warm at this point.

I use cast iron, unless I am making these taters in our friend Meg’s apartment in Paris, where she has this unusual skillet with a textured high-tech surface that distributes the heat just so and doesn’t scorch. And as for fat in the pan, I use extra-virgin olive oil, nothing fancy. Unless I have duck fat on hand. (After all, ducks were invented so that potatoes could be cooked in their fat. Confit is just a happy by-product.) If vegetable oil is what you have, or butter, or bacon fat or lard (I don’t want to hear any trashtalk about honest to goodness, non-hydrogenated, lard), then that is what you should use.

Whatever fat it is, use enough to cover the bottom of the pan, and don’t be too skimpy if you can help it. Now season the pan well with a few pinches of salt, and then lay in the assembled, sliced potato halves, and push them over like fallen dominoes, arranging them as needs be if you have to squeeze in the last few slices. (If you have to, just toss the last few slices on top and let them fend for themselves. If the pan isn’t full, either push out the slices to cover more of the pan, or slice another potato. They come out better, usually, if the pan is full.) A couple more pinches of salt over all, and a splash of water down the inside of the pan, then fire it over medium-high heat, lid on, and keep it at a fast simmer for about 12 to 15 minutes. The lid helps drive the heat into the middle of the potatoes faster, but once the middles are cooking, take that lid off or so that the vapor can escape and the slices can begin to get crispy on the bottom. Keep the heat at a steady but quiet simmer and cook perhaps another 10 to 15 minutes until tender all the way through when you test them with a knifepoint. When they are done, you should be able to lift out a whole serving in one piece, so that each person gets a sort of potato accordion on their plate.

(OK, here is where I have to say, in the interest of full disclosure, ‘unless…’) ...unless your skillet and/or stove make it really difficult to slowly pan roast something without scorching the bottom. In that case, put those slices of potato into a small pot of just enough water to boil them, crank up the heat, salt the water well, and boil until the slices are just barely done, or almost so, just don’t overcook them. Drain them and let cool enough so that you can transfer them to your oiled roasting skillet, tediously arranged as described above, well salted. The trouble is worth it, I promise. Finish them to crispy perfection, no lid.

Too many boiled potatoes for your pan? Well done! Store them in the fridge until tomorrow, when you will dress them in vinaigrette to go with your omelet or facsimile thereof. Oh, what pleasure from pennies, my friends, pennies! Potatoes! Let’s go people!

Why ‘in a Paris apartment?’ Because we ate these potatoes at one of my favorite places of all-time, la Tourelle, here in Paris (where I am writing this in the middle of a jet-lagged night), and where I found Meg’s pan and began making them myself, because I just didn’t want the goodness to stop.

--by Caleb

departure and arrivals


Fall has left along with its abundant cultivation and harvest.  Late autumn has arrived and the farm has been put to bed for the season.  Except for the greenhouse which thrives with buckhorn, arugula, radicchio, and escarole.  We are rich with parsely and thyme, and we are suddenly rich with that other Time as well.  We are in Paris which could be defined as a suspension of Time. 

While we have departed from our normal cares and responsibilities, we are still followed by ritual.  And I don't mean only us.  We are all followed, or even haunted by ritual, even when we have detached from our usual universe and landed ourselves somewhere foreign.  We all crave the unknown or the new, yet we yearn for what has been and what will continue to be.  The first thing Caleb and I do when we arrive in this city, for we have had the good luck to arrive here often, is buy flowers.  Paris, of course, is rich with flowers, just like we are rich with parsley and thyme.  For many, it might be ritual enough to just buy flowers, any kind of flowers.  But our ritual also involves what kind of blossoms we procure because they are always the same blossoms: ranunculus.  The only departure here might be the color of those flowers depending on the time of year and the mood.  

I've been buying ranunculus in this city for the last fifteen years, which somehow feels like a millenium.  Maybe that's because in those fifteen years we have crossed a millenium.  And I remember well the origin of this ritual, which was before the end of one millenium and the start of another. Caleb and I had come to Paris together after I had finished graduate school.  After a week, he had to return to work at the restaurant and I stayed on in the city to complete some research.  I watched him wave good-bye with bags in hand and descend down the metro stairs at the Place Voltaire.  The place suddenly opened into a wide plane full of everything and nothing.  Behind me was a flower shop.  I bought a bunch of yellow ranunculus to take back to the apartment I had taken for the month.  Ever since, every sojourn in Paris begins with a handfull of the papery double blossoms akin to both roses and anenomes.

Yesterday, we bought magenta ranunculus from one of the fleuriste on rue Cler. We departed the street with bags of chipoltalas sausages, white beans, leeks, a raw milk tomme, a bottle of wine in one hand, the cone of flowers in the other.  We have arrived.


-Deirdre

Sunday, July 31, 2011

blossoming

This is a year of anniversaries and initiations.  Fifteen years at the restaurant, twenty years of marriage, a first vintage of wine.  First real pruning in the vineyard.  First harvest of our own fruit.  First blossoming.   

My work at the restaurant is to tell the stories of the wines I have curated, tales of the landscape, the vineyards, and the people who tend them.  I have long worked to talk about methods of winegrowing and the work that happens in the cellar and how that translates into the glass, how the wine corresponds in an intimate conversation with the food with which it is being served.  I became interested in making wine because I talked so much about the process of making wine and having once studied forms of dance, I felt that to truly understand the alchemy of that process, I had to physically go through the choreography.  Once I had accomplished that, or rather failed in my first few attempts, I understood better something that I have always believed: wine is made in the vineyard and is a true expression of a complete landscape, that notion of terroir being all that encompasses a particular parcel of land from geology to botany, to the microclimate that embraces it, to the varietals that grow on it, to the human hand that husbands it and harvests it into wine.  Little did I know the desire to understand the rhythms of growing  wine would became much greater than the initially planned experiment of simply physically making wine in the cellar (or rather the bathtub as those first few years attested), and that in a three year period, Caleb and I would have a licensed winery with a fledgling vineyard and be producing our first negociant vintage. 


There have been many firsts on this journey and many surprises.  I have gone many times to other vineyards to taste wine and walk the land, to see the vines, to examine the shapes of their trellising.  But these visits exist somewhat in a vacuum.  For me the process is never fully understood until I experience the actual doing of it.  I am envious of two friends who have taken a sabbatical to work at another friend’s vineyard in France.  While they are a bit stunned by the hard manual labor and the difficulties and beauties of a living in a foreign culture, I crave to learn the repeated motions that they practice every day to the protest of their aching bodies.  While I have many mentors in many places willing to discuss the mechanics of the work I must do, I have no one who stands next to me with years of experience  guiding the way the hand prunes the vine here, ties the vine there, thins the shoots here, pulls leaves there.  I have pruned at this friend’s vineyard in France and had his tutelage working forty to ninety year old vines, but I have never pruned two-year old vines, nor have I ever shoot-thinned vines, or pulled leaves.  I have never lifted wires; I have never hedged.  


I have never watched the buds turn to the smallest looking grapebunch you can imagine, or seen how they lengthen and extend with each day until they become the flowers of this majestic and earthy plant with small threads of white pistils coming out of each supposed grape waiting for pollination.  I have never smelled grape blossoms before, the sweet jasmine of the Marquette, or the white pepper of the La Crescent.  I have never witnessed how these scents might translate into the fruit.  I have never noted when blossoming arrives and how long it lasts and if the sun graces the period or if the rain confounds.  This all happens for the first time here and now in this year. 


And there is some sun.  There is rain.  We’ve had strong breezes.  The flowers seem to have pollinated themselves as the pistils fade and the berries begin to grow.  But there are violent thunderstorms while I hide in our bedroom downstairs that is built into the hillside, hide with two cats fearing that the wind will blow the windows in the house out.  I watch out the French doors the hail, pea-sized and so pretty, ride the wind and drop to the ground bouncing like a broken string of pearls.  I find that I pray.  This is the first hail that I have feared.  


In the vineyard, there is cause for alarm.  This is the first time I’ve understood how dispirited a local orchardist felt after losing all the leaves on his apple trees to hail the size of a snowball; without leaves there is no photosynthesis and the plants will die.  This is the first time I understand why the woman in Bordeaux cried when half her fruit near the time of harvest was destroyed by hail.  This is the first time I’ve seen the sly shredding of the leaves and the gaping wounds even in this smallest of fruit.  This will be the first time I will know if the vines can survive this test, if any fruit will remain after all this brutality.  Will the berries just expire, shrivel and blacken, losing their heart after such a defeat?


But grapevines are absurdly resilient.  Only time will tell over these days that turn into weeks.  Already, after a serious of chamomile, yarrow and nettle teas, the vines and fruit seem to respond putting out new growth to replace the damaged leaves, and the untouched berries grow larger covering the holes in the bunches of the berries lost.  They are now about the size of those hail-pearls that caused the chaos in the first place.


This is the first time we think they will survive, and we will still have fruit for our first at home harvest.  This is not the first time, however, this season we have felt hopeful.  And this is not the first time we are a bit wary of that hope knowing that the next scourge or storm could render us hopeless.  Now, there are black caterpillars with white and orange stripes, and a foul infestation of Japanese beetles.  We pick them off the leaves every day, drowning them in old jam jars filled with water and soap.  We collect them and burn them into dust, their scent, rather putrid, perfuming the air.  But that is yet another story.
--Deirdre    

Friday, July 1, 2011

catching (up)







I am sitting in my newly painted studio which has been physically moved for the fourth time in the last thirteen years we have lived here.  This seems to be the fourth and last time.  Ralph Ward, who’s helped us move it every time, laughs and shakes his head at this.  But really, this is the last time.  We’ve dug a spot in to the ground at the top of the rose garden and covered it all in crushed stone, and have started a retaining wall to surround the building.  There are plans to get some paving stone.  Two potted roses sit at the corners of the front of the little house, tall climbing roses, the William Baffins,  that bloom a deep pink and sneak around the windows.  There are plans to plant the roses in the ground once the hardscaping is finished.  Everything about this move is more permanent, more lasting, a little more serious.  Even though after the previous move, we had planted those self-same roses also, and now they’ve  just been dug up and potted again as if they might be more transient.   As I have to water them almost every day, I promise that this situation is temporary.

This is the room that I write in during the summer.  I wrote my book Libation in this space three summers ago though this little house has gone through some changes since then.  It’s original use was as a shelter for two baby lambs bought by the original owners, a structure to protect them from the coyotes that roam down from the spines of the Chateauguay above us.  This is why it’s been dubbed Lamb House.  Last summer, we bought a pull-out couch, so that we could house extra guests, and when the roof failed while those guests were visiting during a series of torrential thunderstorms last August, we decided to have the roof replaced in the fall which gave Lamb House a whole new look—a single shed that is higher at one end of the building giving it the feeling of a cathedral ceiling on the inside.  Just a few weeks ago, Caleb finished putting a window in that upper story, a window from the old library in our village.  It still needs to be cleaned, but the effect is still lovely.  The top half of the building is shingled and barnboard completes the bottom half, just like our house and just like our barn.  Things look more all of a piece now.  

Out my desk window, I see blooming roses: Belladonna, Therese Bugnet, common Rugosa, Foxy Pavement, blooming borage, catmint, tall spires of Valerian in the distance next to the green house which now has a French blue door to reflect the door of the Lamb House, the door of the cantina, and the front door of the main house.  All of a piece, like I said.  There are also the spent blooms of a million iris that need to be dead headed and pockets of bare ground in the beds that need to be weeded, pots of volunteer raspberries that need to be planted. 
We have taken another long sabbatical from writing here, finding that the doing is precluding the writing.  Everything is about catching up and juggling.  In April, we took a break from the restaurant like we always do and took time to do some early work here on the farm.  When we re-opened the restaurant in May, we thought the season would ease into itself as that’s usually the rhythm in our village.  But the restaurant work started off as if in high season, and it has been that way ever since, and somehow doesn’t seem to get easier even with full reinforcements having come to share the work.  On the farm, all the starts that we got going early in the greenhouse are still getting planted—there are so many!—and there has been the planting of new vines, compost preparations, taking care of the apple orchard, shoot thinning, tying up, weeding, planning for trellising, new fence, new orchard, cleaning out the barn for the tasting room, and the list continues, and while there is the satisfaction of crossing off things that do get done, the list seems to grow-every time one task is completed, three more are added. 

There are many things we’d like to write about here this summer: the first blossoming of our vines, the trials and tribulations of trying to grow radicchio, the dishes we make with the ingredients that we are currently harvesting, the élevage of our first wines in the cantina, what is the meaning of a proper lunch, why do we want to grow natural wine and which winegrowers are motivating us to do so, the surprise of finding nine more bottles of our first cider and the plans for a Sunday lunch under our oldest apple tree that those bottles have inspired.  And we hope to be able to meet you here every week or so with these stories, but farm life coupled with restaurant life is often unexpected.  While it has been difficult to sit down at our desks to write here, we have been very good about “micro-blogging” on twitter, and you are welcome to find us there at @paneesalute.  

Here’s to more time to do everything, and to enjoy the doing—

Sunday, March 20, 2011

after the party


We sit down at the table.  There are six of us: our friends Mark and Gina who helped the evening stay glued together, Eliza who has been the intern at the restaurant and farm for the last nine months, and her mother Trish, up for a visit.  The old-wood table that Caleb built a few  years ago sits in the middle of the restaurant dining room and feels the weight of all the dishes that have been prepared for own after-the-party dinner: crispy pork, a huge platter of garlic beans, shrimp in black bean sauce, tilapia roasted with lemon grass, red-cooked tofu and coconut tofu, bowls of fresh sliced cucumber, bean sprouts, rice, mint, and basil.

Tonight, Caleb cooked Vietnamese dishes, a collection of recipes from our friend Rebecca’s handmade cookbook from a time she spent in that country, a kind of food he cooks for us in the privacy of our home or at staff dinner.  Tonight, he has cooked these exotic dishes not only for our dinner, but this is what we served to a restaurant packed full of guests who were here to celebrate the launch of a new collaboration between myself and our friends Eleanor and Albert Leger of Eden Ice Cider: an aperitif cider infused with herbs that we have dubbed Orleans.  In this name we wanted something French-sounding to evoke old-world bar magic and something that spoke of place.  Eleanor and Albert live in Orleans County in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where they produce their silken trio of winter-made ice ciders: Eden, Northern Spy, and a Honey Crisp for Champlain Orchards.

At the table, we are only missing Eleanor and Albert.  They’ve had to return home tonight, a long two hour drive, as tomorrow they have to stop fermentations, and prepare for Albert to return to teaching for the rest of the semester.  They are just doing the kinds of things that winegrowers have to do all the time.  We understand the demands of being cellarmaster, yet we miss them all the same.

We are a little high and a little tired, or a lot tired as I watch Caleb hit the proverbial wall after his day of cooking all this beautiful food, intricate and subtle flavors that weave in and out of the dishes and paired with the somewhat exotic notes of the Orleans in its three different guises tonight: straight-up, with prosecco and lime, and a slightly racy version of a Ramos Gin Fizz, but with the Orleans as the featured player.  The tastes married with the dishes in such a way as to expand and deepen the experience of the food when you put the two together.  

Mark and Gina, who’ve played this game with us before, are the kind of good friends you can call in a pinch when you are in need, and they are there in a flash.  Mark has even been called out of his bed late in the evening to taxi a table of diners visiting from Holland who had walked a couple of miles into town from their inn and thought they could easily get a cab home in our small town of Woodstock.  The skies had unleashed a deluge while they were dining, and there are no cabs.  We were too busy at the restaurant to spare one of ourselves to drive them.  Mark, donning his Brooklyn heritage and persona played the role well, willingly chauffering the visitors to the inn.

Tonight, Gina washed and washed and washed glasses and dishes and forks as they rotated from kitchen and back out to the party.  She wore one of the blue and white striped smocks that Caleb found in a uniform shop in Rome next to a haberdasher for priests and nuns.  It covers her sleek leopard print top and pants which no one ever gets to see as she is in front of the sinks all night.  I’ve asked Mark to tend bar because the third drink is a little complicated and takes time to make, and I know how these events go—there will be other things for me to do—greet guests, dry glasses and ferry them back to the bar, check that there are enough plates and silverware on the buffet, be the expediter.  Eliza is stationed at the buffet serving and talking about the dishes, and Caleb is alternately cooking and checking on guests.  

Of course, I’ve created a rather complicated cocktail for Mark to wade through with many ingredients and long minutes of shaking the shaker while chatting with everyone bellied-up to the bar plus pouring the other drinks while I’m not behind the bar with him.  I could have designed something simpler, but this was the right drink for the right evening, and I’ve never been one to make decisions because it makes life easier.  I’m sure Mark would be able to expound on this if I let him (this is the same man who thinks it would be far more sensible to buy slews of wine glasses each week and recycle them at the end of each night rather than putting up with all the handwashing and polishing we do…), but he is the perfect choice for bartender and soldiers through my demands with style and flair. 
v
There was a buzz, a tangible frisson, on the floor tonight as the build-up of energy slowly rose as more and more people arrived, some from around the corner, some from a couple of hours away, until the hum of conversation and laughter reached pitch.  It was a party, a true celebration, excitement and expectation were as real as featured guests.  But who doesn’t like to have a reason to celebrate?  But even more so, I think the evening was defined by the need for celebration.  We have weathered through a long and very intense winter.  The larger world is in disarray, perhaps more so than usual, and the transition from winter into spring is often painful and homely in northern climes.  The once beautiful snow becomes crusty and dirty losing much of its sparkle and is not much good for anything besides re-adjusting the water table—too icy for skiing, too brittle for snowshoeing, and sometimes dangerous as it melts and causes rise for flood warnings—all a constant reminder that we still have at least six weeks before things really turn around.   It is hard to embrace Winter when she looks spent and rather used.  But the light has changed, it is more clear, more roseate, and softens the harsh reality of mud and discomfort.  Something else undefinable has shifted—Axes?  Or poles?  Or phases of moons or stars or tides?--which has made us buoyant.   

In the dead of winter, the sun goes down at 4:30, and tonight, the light is still filtering in the windows at 7pm.  All around the restaurant we’ve positioned big vases of branches, recent prunings from our plum trees and they are studded with fat green buds.  With the soft light shafting through the space and candles flickering, the golden colors of the Orleans in the glasses, the bright citrus perfumes of lemon and lime, the leafy greens of mint and basil, the voices ebbing and flowing, the heat in the dining room palpable,  the evening shimmers.

We hold onto that shimmer at our own dinner.  It is dark outside now, and almost time to go home just like everyone else.  We raise glasses and tell jokes and talk about vacations.  Someone laughs with abandon.  It is the Ides of March, a craziness that marks a month that comes in like a lion, and supposedly leaves like a lamb, a month of wind and temperament, but also sun and seduction.   We pour Orleans into our glasses for a final good luck toast, and we pour ourselves into this melting and groaning that will eventually lead to Spring—
--Deirdre  

  



Friday, March 11, 2011

pruning



I’ve waited too long to write.  My memory seems to be not quite as it used to be.  In the glory days of youth, I could remember faces, place names, historical dates, addresses(but somehow, never phone numbers), what I ate, drank, when, where, and why. 

I’m trying to remember that sunny day last week.  Ah, yes, it was Wednesday.  A brutally early morning to run errands and attend appointments, then a return home  to that bright sunshine as if this was the beach in southern Italy, or coastal Florida rather than an alpine enclave that comprises our farm.  Sometimes that word does not want to come trippingly off my tongue: farm.  I can’t ignore it anymore, we can’t ignore it anymore, this is a farm, has become a farm, is still becoming a farm.  I think if I say it enough times, quickly enough, it will become like second skin, not even a second thought.  

I never expected to be a farmer.  I’m not entirely sure what I expected, maybe days at the head of a classroom, and that may still come to pass, but I didn’t know that working the land would offer some of the most grueling, heartbreaking, and satisfying work I’ve ever done.  I didn’t know that the work would actually feel like a second skin, almost like intuition.  And that’s the strange thing, we are still so young in this work as farmers (young as in experience, not necessarily in age…)and there is still so much to learn and understand, that when this farming business feels absolutely right, it takes you a bit by surprise.

The sun is beating down, and this is one of my days to prune in the orchard.  Caleb pruned all last week.  I’m strapping on my snowshoes and have one pruners in my back pocket and one in my hand.  The light is so bright and bouncing off the white landscape, I’m wearing sunglasses.   The trees are big enough to be generous bearers of fruit and usually much taller than me.  But with the two feet of snow-pack, I am that much closer to the tops.  But I’ll still have to use a loppers to get at the highest points.

I’ve never pruned our trees before, other than occasionally stealing flowering branches for a bud vase or a floral arrangement in the restaurant.  This is bad behavior.  To prune during flowering is like tying your dog on a very short chain in a dirty yard with no shade and no water, or forgetting your child in the grocery store and driving on home without a care in the world.  I realize as I look at these trees that I will have to stop that behavior.  At least on our own trees.  I will have to pilfer elsewhere.  But that’s always been my modus operandi:  Rose bushes, hydrangea, and peonies in other yards are never safe from my coveting eye, and my snappy sheers.  

Somehow the real, legitimate pruning of our trees has always fallen under Caleb’s purview before this, and because his domain is already quite full, it hasn’t always been easy for him to finish the work.  This year we’re serious about these apple trees, so we are sharing the work.  I’m already nervous about pruning our grape vines come April, even after the patient tutelage of our friend Emanuel in Burgundy this fall, but apple trees are not the same creatures.  Pruning can make or break your plant, it can be the deciding factor between a good season and a bad.   

I’ve taken some time to look at our handy Little Pruning Book: an Intimate Guide to the Surer Growing of Better Fruits and Flowers by F.F. Rockwell and published in 1919.  It’s been reprinted in the Small Farmer’s Journal, Fall, Vol. 33, No. 4.  (There’s that word again: farm. )  Mr. Rockwell has many good things to say about the process of pruning, but he has four points he says to be sure to always keep in mind, and which I carry with me at the ready, just like the extra pruners in my back pocket:

First: always leave a clean smooth cut.  Careless cutting or dull shears, leaving a ragged edge, means slow healing and increased danger—to say nothing about its being the earmark of a slovenly gardener.

Second: Cut just the right distance above the bud.  If you cut close to it, it is likely to be injured.  If you cut too far above it, a dead stub will be left.  On small branches and twigs, cut from a quarter to less than half-an-inch above the bud.  If pruning is done when plants are in active growth, however, the cut should be made close to the bud, as it will heal almost immediately.

Third: Prune above an outside bud.  This will tend to keep the new growth branching outward, giving the plant an open center with plenty of space and light.  While in some specific case there may be reasons for selecting an inside bud, this holds as a general rule.

Fourth: Cut close up to and parallel with the main branch, trunk or stem.  In removing a branch from a tree or side shoots from shrubs or plants, the leaving of a stub, even it if is a short one, delays the healing or makes it possible for disease and germs to enter, thus providing for future trouble.

So, with a fair amount of trepidation, I start.

I take the pruning branch by branch.  I step away occasionally to look at the tree as a whole with the question: is it balanced?  The work goes both slowly and quickly.  There is a meditative quality to the process and Time seems to be neither moving or standing still.  The sun is hot and bright and feels like a balm to cold bones.  The air is fresh and cold and feels like it must be full of the best oxygen.  After a while, I realize I am already on the third tree and any residual fear is gone.  

The snow-covered ground is littered with fallen branches to be collected in bunches.  Some will come inside to be forced for blossoms in vases (old habits die hard….), others will be evaluated for suitability as cuttings, others will be left to dry as wood for cooking.  (Doesn’t pork roasted over  apple wood sound pretty darn good?)

The trees look airy and shaped liked lacy goblets, arms reaching out and up.   When Caleb returns home, he helps me reach the tops I can’t quite get to.  The sun starts to shift.  It’s already three in the afternoon and we have yet to eat lunch.  We decide to stop for the day and catch a bit of sun on the porch with a glass of wine, some salame, little pickles and bread.   We close our eyes to the warmth on our faces and think of bees humming in blossoms in just a few months time, the the fruit ripe on the trees.

--Deirdre