A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Recent > 2013 > Page 4

Archive for

Burning Ring of (CSA) Fire

Posted on May 17th, 2013

When most people think of retirement, images of relaxation come to mind. For Nancy and Bruce Livensparger of Fire Ring Farm in Portland, CT, retirement means running a labor-intensive non-profit Community Supported Agricultural operation (CSA). Nancy was a career landscaper whose passion for organic food grew as her interest in controlling invasive species in manicured lawns waned. As GMOs became ubiquitous in the American food supply, Nancy wanted to grow as much of her own food for her family as possible. Subsistence farming on any scale is a big endeavor and she wondered if running a CSA might be the ticket to subsidizing her efforts. As an added bonus, it gets a community involved in the natural food movement. Fire Ring Farm was born.…

Categories: Uncategorized

Asparagus officinalis

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Asparagus is a pretty funny thing, when you really think about it. I’ve heard it’s some sort of grass, which makes sense when you see the way it grows. Individual stalks poke up from beneath the dirt, sometimes clumped together with others but mainly striking out on their own, a single minaret growing to seemingly impossible heights. There’s no foliage between the stalks, as one might expect with other plants, just dirt and these towering green fingers. With each day, each hour, practically each minute you can see the stalks reach further toward the sky, making it look appear more like some sort of subterranean being poking up probes to test a new and alien aboveground environment. In a home garden, asparagus is really…

Categories: Uncategorized

Potatoes, Comrade

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Like a dog who thinks he’s people, I was a child who thought he was an adult. This presented a conflict, growing up in a working class Moscow neighborhood where most of the children spent their free time beating each other up in schoolyards and in a large field, seeded with broken glass and dog excrement, an enormous heating plant looming over the proceedings. This hell continued until we left Russia when I was nine years old. (Growing up the rest of the way in a lower middle class neighborhood in Brooklyn presented a whole other kind of hell, at least until I hit high school age.) School was my least favorite place to be; I preferred spending time alone with my encyclopedias and…

Categories: Uncategorized

Taproot

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts; And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me. – Woody Guthrie   I grew up in a small New England town, in the same house all my life, so I always thought I had a good sense of what makes a place a home. Apart from the relative seasonal changes of spring to winter, the scenery didn’t change much and there was a comfort in that. Until one day, in the farmhouse bathroom of a woman I hardly knew, I went to wash my hands and I spotted her soap. It was large and yellow and covered in dirt.…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Tenacity of the Pea Plant

Posted on May 17th, 2013

Thin vines stretch across the honeycomb of air climbing the chicken wire of the garden fence with sticky new fingers in a spiderweb of green. In one gap, where – finding nothing to hold on to – the plant clearly doubted, it encountered only another of its own arms and the two wound round each other and spiraled momentarily toward the sky before pushing away, leaving a perfect coil in the middle of nothing. Despite this near miss, this almost fall, the vine keeps reaching out from its most recent anchor, groping blindly in the mystery of time and space, trusting that eventually it will reach something, if only itself.   I admire the pea plant. It must take so much hope to wake…

Categories: Uncategorized

Worm Castings and Cat Pee: Journal of a Newbie Gardener

Posted on May 17th, 2013

My one adult experience with gardening occurred about 8 years ago. We were living in an apartment complex a few miles away from where I went to college. Each unit had a small plot of dirt in front of it which most of our neighbors filled with cheery aster mums or hyacinth bulbs. For ours, I decided on a row of fun (and functional) pumpkin plants.   Unemployed and in need of a project, I nurtured the pumpkins from seed to plant with loving care. Eventually they flowered and, the very next morning, the complex’s maintenance crew came by and mowed them down with a weedwacker. We left the plot barren for the remainder of the time we lived there and never returned to…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Woods

Posted on April 18th, 2013

The Woods invite you in but they never ask you to stay the graceful couple you’ve always admired and wanted to know better thank you for having us, you have a beautiful home. conversation over drinks is brilliant, revealing; specks of light on the forest floor the children run away to explore the hidden hollows of the house and you are happy to let them. then dinner: modest and memorable only recalled as a collection of sensations rather than as a meal. friends drop by unexpectedly, and hold hushed conversations with the hosts before rushing off the Birds, casual and loquacious, but shy the Deer, you’ve always wanted to be closer to and those more sinister and silent who you never see, but rather…

Categories: Uncategorized

The Mouth’s Delights

Posted on April 18th, 2013

The savor of some favored food: sage stuffing, say. Braised scallops.   The shaping of a spoken word: echo in a cavern.   Your lips upon your lover’s lips: You taste his pulse. It fills you.

Categories: Uncategorized

Wax and Wane

Posted on April 18th, 2013

With a pantry full Possibilities abound I am limitless   With a cupboard bare Promise has been fulfilled I am satisfied

Categories: Uncategorized

Just Make Cookies

Posted on April 18th, 2013

Back before I even remotely knew my way around a kitchen, back when a typical dinner consisted of some item from the vegetarian column of the frozen food aisle, I asked my grandmother for the recipes of some of my favorite things – chocolate chip cookies, banana bread, vegetable soup, and other simple things. “The basics,” I told her, telling her loud and proud I was finally interested in learning how to cook. My mother once made a batch of rice krispie treats that went so badly we had to throw it all out, including the pan (to this day I still don’t know how that’s even possible), and that was about the extent of her cooking skills – but my grandmother, with all…

Categories: Uncategorized