Adamahniks helping with the sweet potato harvest at Chubby Bunny Farm in Falls Village, CT. Photo by Julia Gazdag.

As we put the fields to bed here at Adamah, we’re looking ahead to next season. We have several staff positions we are seeking to fill. If you’re looking for farm work that feeds the soil and the soul, Adamah is the place for you!

Field Manager: This is an ideal position for someone with 1-2 years farm experience looking for a manager position in an educational environment. The Field Manager will manage vegetable production on the 5-acre Adamah farm, which grows for a 50-share CSA, for the dining hall at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT, and for our value-added products business (pickles, sauerkraut and jam). For complete job description and info on how to apply contact Anna Hanau at anna@isabellafreedman.org.

Flowering zucchini amidst flooded paths

It’s been cold and rainy at Adamah for quite some time now, and on Thursday we started getting worried about the river. I went down to look at the field around 2 — it was high, higher than I’d ever seen, but still about 2 feet below the banks. Dark, brown, quickly moving water, surging down the channel. Mesmerizing to look at. Difficult to believe that this flowing source of life could turn so destructive. But maybe…it wouldn’t rise any higher?

By evening, though, the water had risen to within 6″ of the banks. Where we usually scramble down four or five feet or so to hop in the river, you could practically step right in. So we assembled a crew, and moved the irrigation pump (which perches on the edge of the river) and the row cover from the fields, because if the field flooded the fabric would clothesline all the plants in its path, and collected stray buckets and plastic chairs that could float away if the river spilled over its banks and across the field.

Hi friends! Wanted to remind you all about the ADAMAH BLOG. Adamah is a a three-month leadership training program for Jewish young adults in their 20s that integrates organic farming, sustainable living, Jewish learning, community building and contemplative spiritual practice. Bookmark our blog to keep up with the goings on of a small, Jewish, organic farm. Share our pain as the cabbage in the greenhouse gets eaten, and our joy as steam from boiling maple sap turns into sweet sweet syrup once again. And join us, as we spring into farming….

Spring on the farm means we’re itching to get into the soil: spread compost and nutrients, till in the cover crop, create a level, weed-free seed bed for early transplants. As we get into April, though, I’m remembering one of the things I love about farming and find most challenging: you’re in control and you’re absolutely out of control at the same time. I’m caught between my spreadsheets–which outline the schedule I am to follow if we are to deliver 60 shares of vegetables to the CSA, and cucumbers and cabbage galore for the Picklarium–and the weather, which is neither predictable nor obliging….

Nevertheless, we proceed as best we can.

One of my favorite quotes is: “You know you’re on the right track when your solution to one problem accidentally solves several others.” – Michael Corbett

So it was with glee that I learned about a spring cover crop, which is also a cash crop, which could ALSO — potentially — be used for karpas. One plant, solving three problems: soil erosion & nutrient loss, early spring revenue, and provision of a local/sustainable ritual food. Clearly, this is reason to get excited! However, the halacha must be consulted…

A friend just sent me the link to this picture. The caption reads: New York. October 13, 1909. The Federation of Jewish Farmers of America exhibit at the Educational Alliance building, East Broadway and Jefferson Street. 8×10 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection.

Anyone know anything about the Federation of Jewish Farmers, that was apparently active enough in 1909 to host an exhibit???

I did it!

And it only took two weeks, four trips to the hardware store, five different configurations, one temper tantrum, two phone calls to my carpenter-savvy father, three trips to my local bike shop (LBS) and looking at the photos of other exercise bike grain mills online about three hundred times.

It’s been a fun day of sawing, drilling and screwing. I managed to get the bicycle sprocket firmly attached to the flywheel of the grinder, with the right sized screws so it can still fit through the bars where the bike wheel used to go.

What do farmers do in the winter? Projects!

Since I’ve found myself with a little downtime, I’ve embarked on a really fun project: mechanizing our Country Living Grain Mill with an exercise bike. The grain mill on its own is fantastic — nothing like baking with freshly ground flour. But it’s quite a bit of work, once the novelty wears off. So the thought of using my thighs, which are substantially bigger than my forearms, to turn the flywheel is exciting indeed.

The day before the Hazon Food Conference, I learned how to eviscerate a turkey in less than 10 minutes.

On the day, I was mostly aware of how elated I was at having learned this new skill. It wasn’t the first time I’d done it, but under the careful tutelage of farmer Jim, I really felt that I got it.

Since then, I’ve had the chance to reflect on the larger significance of the day. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who say “Eww, gross!” I’ve read Sue Fishkoff’s great JTA piece on the event, and the rude comments left in response. And in the quiet of the winter after the excitement of the Food Conference has calmed a bit, I have the time to offer some of my thoughts on the subject (other than my glee at my new poultry-gutting skills!)

Last week, Adamah dropped off our first-ever Tuv Ha’Aretz share to Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. It felt somewhat historic (bashert? destined?) to finally bring together the young Jewish farmers at Adamah with Hazon’s Jewish Community-Supported Agriculture program. One of the highlights of the day was driving down to the city in Adamah’s new truck, which runs on used vegetable oil and is emblazoned with the icon above and the beautiful words, “Young Jewish Farmers: Changing the World One Pickle at a Time.”

We’re looking for sources of used vegetable oil to power the truck! If you have connections to restaurants who could donate used grease in Westchester, Duchess or Putnam Counties, please be in touch! Check out more photos of the truck, below.

So, we started planting in the sadeh (Adamah’s field) almost two months ago. Onions were first, tiny green shoots so thin you could barely see them against the soil, but a whole bed of the tiny starts had an unmistakable green haze of growth. Next were beets and chard, with tiny red-green leaves. Then spinach, with matchstick-sized pointy green shoots, and cucumbers, planted before their true leaves are out, with only two smooth oval cotoledons unfolded like tiny clamshells against the ground.

We know that these baby plants will eventually turn into vegetables… but when they are so small, it’s easy to forget.

(Photo by Shir Feinstein-Feit)

It seems a long time since I wrote about seeding onions…and indeed, the past two months on the farm have been a bit of a blur. But we planted the onions over chol ha-moed pesach, with much fanfare and mixed emotions (I’ll explain), and so I felt it would be good to give you all an update. (If you missed the last post, I am the Farm Manager at Adamah, a Jewish farming fellowship program in Connecticut. The sadeh is our 3.5 acre field where we grow our vegetables.)

The sadeh looks beautiful. Right now there are beds of onions (cippolini, red, scallions, leeks, walla walla…), with their thin, oniony stalks the size of blades of grass standing pertly up from the soil; beds of beets, red and golden; and several beds of brassicas, the family of hearty green-purple vegetables that includes broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards and kohlrabi. Only a small percentage of the field has been planted, and the evenly spaced rows of green and red and purple are beautiful against a background of tilled brown earth. The field looks serene, and betrays nothing of the work it took to get it looking that way.

But at Adamah, and likely all across the Northeast, we’re quietly starting up the season.

(Baby kale plants, Adamah, Summer 2007; photo by Jackie Topol)

Farm time is a quite remarkable way to think about the year. Here I was yesterday with Megan Jensen, our Greenhouse Manager, in a sunny, 75-degree greenhouse (we do use oil heat to warm the benches, but when the sun is out, it really heats up), holding a packet of scallion seeds. In front of me was a tray with 200 little square cells. We’d filled the tray about 3/4 full of soil, packed it down a bit, and then the idea was to drop ten of those little baby seeds in each hole. (When you buy a “bunch” of scallions, in fact, you’re buying ten little plants that were seeded and planted and harvested together.) And to look at the tiny seeds, and the tiny soil blocks, and think of all the scallion omelettes, diced scallions in salad, garnishes and other delightful uses of these tasty alliums was kind of a trip, because the warm summer months of harvest time seem so far away.

Adamah is a program for Jewish 20-somethings to live in community, learn about sustainability and environmental issues, and grow food. This year, we’ll be growing food for the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center; for our line of pickled products, which includes half-sour pickles, dilly beans, pickled beets, sourkraut and kim chi; and for a Tuv Ha’Aretz CSA in White Plains, New York. The long term planning that we’ve done ahead of the season has been really exciting.

Since the days of the Bible, Jewish tradition has had something to say about appropriate waste disposal:

“Further, there shall be an area for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself. With your gear you shall have a spike, and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement.”– Deuteronomy 23:13-14