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

(Comic: “You’re passionate about salad, aren’t you Miss Allen? Ballard Street)

For all of you worried about where your salad comes from, and what you should or shouldn’t put in it, and how often you should eat it, and if you should eat cold salad in the winter, and where you might get your vitamins if you don’t eat cold salad in the winter, and what kind of dressing goes on it and whether to splurge on that avocado or not (and granted, I fall into just about all of these categories) -

I’ve been working on a few bread projects lately: sourdough starter, and the no-knead focaccia-style bread recipe from the NY Times last year. Today, I completed a successful merger and the result? Only half a loaf left, after my parents & I were through with it at dinner.

The no-knead recipe goes something like this: wet dough + long time to rise = big air bubbles. Home-bakers tend to be more familiar with the opposite kind of bread, that is, a very elastic, kneadable dough, that rises for 2-3 hours, and gives a dense, fine-crumb loaf. You could come home from work at 4 and still have challah for shabbos at 8 kind of thing. But the air bubbles intrigued me — who doesn’t love french bread! and so I’ve been experimenting.

An article in the San Francisco magazine this month discusses “eco-worriers” – people who can hardly make it through the day because the polar bears are drowning. In fact, there are now eco-therapists who specialize in dealing with people who feel guilty and anxious—simply for doing things they have to do to live in a city, like turn on lights. For some, it’s just never enough. One woman, who walks to work and buys local produce,

“still gets plenty of ribbing when someone learns that she eats meat (once a month) or drives a car (a Toyota that gets 37 miles per gallon). “People get really pissed off and tell me I’m not going far enough. I want to say, ‘What do you mean, far enough? Do you want me to kill myself so I don’t produce any greenhouse gas, except for the methane I produce when I decompose?’”

The article suggests that in San Francisco, where people are so ecologically minded (ie — check out this article about supermarkets in today’s Chronicle), it’s almost a question of theological faith: when you worship the earth, and draw strength and meaning from your relationship to it, what do you do when your god, your earth mother, is sick – under siege – dying?

Perhaps the deepest reason for our distress is that we don’t just love Mother Nature—we worship her. In places like the Bible Belt, where the End of Days is not necessarily viewed as a bad thing, some might see the coming apocalypse—if they even believe it’s coming—as God’s will, and they take comfort in that. To them, our existential panic about snowless winters and 120-degree summers must seem almost meaningless. Yet in the Bay Area, where environmentalism is practically its own religion, global warming isn’t just killing the world, it’s also killing the thing we look to for inspiration and solace—in effect, our God. What are we supposed to do with that? What is the outlet for all our fury and sadness and fear?

I’d like to put in a good word for the DIY folks. DIY (do-it-yourself) might simply conjure images of people who turn sweaters into skirts, make t-shirts, pave their patio with mosaics from old china, or make their own candy bars. But in fact, these people approach the world with the attitude that if the thing in question can be cooked, grown, built, or otherwise pulled off by themselves or a few of their friends, then it’s something they out to be involved in. I’m not sure whether Judaism is inherently DIY—but I do think there’s room for it.

The prevailing philosophy seems to be one of narrowing. Specialize in your field. Corner the market. Find the best possible place to grow blueberries then plant eight thousand acres of them. But actually that attitude is disempowering, because it implies there are so many thing that others can do better than me, I shouldn’t even bother (and, by extension, if there isn’t something I can do better than anyone else, what am I?)

So instead I’d like to suggest a philosophy of dabbling.

It’s winter in Vancouver — wet wet winter. Yet after just finishing a plateful of jerusalem artichokes, harvested this afternoon from my mom’s vegetable garden, sauteed with garlic from Stephen Gallagher (the amazing farmer who’s working with the Tuv Ha’Aretz site at Har El in North Vancouver) — I realized this isn’t the first meal I’ve had this winter where the food was fresh-picked.