Architecture of a Rose

When I was teaching at the university, one of the pleasures of spring break for me (besides my birthday) was pruning my roses. Now that I’m retired from teaching there, I still prune my roses about a week after the spring equinox when the stems start to show signs of new growth. As soon as the days start to warm, I watch the roses for swelling where the nodes emerge from the green stems. That way, I can tell which part of the rose has been winter-killed and which is still alive. Waiting a couple weeks more, until the leaves have started to emerge, is recommended along the Front Range, but we get busy with farming in April so late March works best for me.

The last couple days, I’ve been pruning my roses. I used to have more roses but the last few years have been very hard on them. I lost some to drought, some to winter cold, and even a few to voles that love to burrow in the thick wood chip mulch around the rose bushes and sometimes girdle the rose completely through. I think all but one of my roses survived this winter, leaving me with three dozen or so, which I can prune in about three hours.  I look forward all winter to my pruning time in those first sunny days in the flower garden taking stock of what’s survived and what needs attention.

I plant exclusively “own root” roses, which means that the plant has been reproduced from a cutting of its own stock rather than grafted onto the root of another, generally more vigorous, rose stock. Grafted roses offer many more variety choices than own root roses but, if the grafted part dies, the shoots that emerge from the roots will revert to the parent stock, which is usually a ubiquitous shrub type of rose which lacks distinction in bloom. On the other hand, own root roses are slower to grow and bloom than grafted roses but, in our harsh climate along Colorado’s Front Range, I find that own root roses are more likely to survive.

During the busy farming season, I don’t have time to baby my roses, so I grow varieties that are relatively hardy. My favorite roses—and the ones that have done the best in my rose bed—are the David Austin varieties. David Austin is an English rose breeder who combines characteristics of old roses—particularly fragrance and shape—with repeat blooming varieties, resulting in gorgeous, abundant, fragrant roses with outstanding vigor, color, and scent.

My own root varieties of David Austin roses (not all DA roses are own root), have taken a while to get established, but it was worth the wait. My favorite rose is Abraham Darby for its cup-shaped, apricot-pink, multi-petaled flower. If you only grow one rose, it should be an Abraham Darby.

Another of my favorites is Graham Thomas with its rich yellow blooms. I often avoid yellow roses because, in our dry climate, they tend to turn brown, but Graham Thomas holds its color well.

Both of these roses are classified as “shrubs,” growing about four feet tall in our climate, so I position them next to short trellises to give some extra support—and I Iike the way their heavy-headed blooms drape across the trellis.

Other favorites are Lillian Austin, Gertrude Jekyll, Teasing Georgia, Mary Rose, and Othello—but be careful of the warrior thorns on that one because it lives up to its Shakespearean name. I’ve got a space selected this spring for another rose, and I’m anxious to see what our local nursery carries for new David Austin own root varieties.

Some people like to cut their roses all the way down to the ground in the fall or early spring to let new stems emerge from the root graft. But because roses are harder to grow here, I like to wait until I can see what’s dead and alive and then prune only what’s needed.

When I’m pruning, I think about the architecture of the plant. I generally leave only the strongest three or four stems, depending on what’s there, so that the bottom of the bush has a triangular or square shape. Next, I decide where to trim the remaining three or four stems to 10 or 12 inches high by looking at where the nodes emerge and choosing a top node that points in the direction I want the new, emerging branch to go. I always want that new branch to grow away from the center of the plant, meaning it should be found facing the outside of the bush rather than the inside.

Once I choose the node, I remove everything about a quarter-inch above it by pruning at a 45-degree angle up and away from the node. Last, I trim any branches from those main stems by again deciding where I want the new growth to go. As I trim, I try to imagine the architectural shape I want to create and prune accordingly.

I hope that this spring’s moisture will mean a less severe summer and more abundant roses. Last season, my roses looked miserable and bloomed sparsely. This year, I’m going to feed them more consistently (using Epsom salts dissolved in buckets of water) and make sure they’re heavily mulched. Already, I’ve done a better job pruning than I did last season and that should help.

The most important thing to remember in pruning roses is to wear heavy gloves and long sleeves to protect yourself from thorns. If you’re pruning roses, you will get scratched. That’s part of rose growing–and it’s worth it.

 

Horoscope, July 2012

I don’t follow my horoscope on a regular basis, but occasionally, I’ll read a particularly unconventional version in one of our local weekly newspapers. Last week’s summarized in trendy terms something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It started by defining a new type of mind/body practice that combines yoga, massage, and acrobatics (so already you see the Boulder theme) and then connected this idea to the Aries forecast: “I’d love to see you work on creating a comparable hybrid in the coming months, Aries—some practice or system or approach that would allow you to weave together your various specialties into a synergetic whole.”

The hipness of “synergy” aside, the idea of weaving parts of my life together is appealing to me because I’m always searching for balance in my busy life. In my yoga practice, I’m terrible at balance—positions like crane and tree and cactus are always hard for me. Maybe it’s just an inner ear problem, but I can’t help but interpret the difficulty of standing on one foot for long as a metaphor for my life.

Right now, balance is particularly challenging because of a wonderful change in my life to which I’m trying to adjust: our new grandchild arrived on July 8^th to our awe and delight. Every moment I spend with him or talk about him or look at his pictures brings me joy.

Everyone with a grandchild has told me that grandparenting is different than parenting and now I know they’re right but it’s hard to put my finger on why. Somehow the passage of time is involved more in my sense of connection with a grandchild than it was with my own child—I sense of his life extending much beyond my own in ways I can’t even imagine and I’m trying not to be afraid for the future he might find. When I hold him, it’s easy to focus on the here and now and not worry about what’s next because each moment feels precious. That’s the word other grandparents exclaim to me over and over and now I know in a new way how much that word is true.

In the midst of this joy, I’m also happily bringing an important writing project to fruition—more on that in the coming months. I’m also spending more time on my photography (see an interview about this on photographer Martha Hughes’ blog, Dragonfly Photography, here). We picked the first eggplant for our farm shares last Saturday, the zucchini are over-running the barn (facilitating the need for more zucchini recipes), the garlic’s picked and waiting in trugs, and the farm season is almost half over with the bulk of the vegetables still to be harvested. Tomatoes slowed down in the 100 degree heat but the peppers will be on soon. The fall garden is progressing just fine and we’ve had time lately to spend celebrating the farm’s bounty with friends.

Is this” synergy”? Does the fact that I wake up happy each morning mean I’m weaving a “hybrid” life? Most days, I think I just about am. I don’t need a horoscope to predict that 2012 will continue to be a year my many “specialties” will coalesce in some new form of family, farm, friends, and creative efforts. Instead of worrying about how they’ll come together, I need to remember to be grateful for all the many experiences and relationships I have in my life and to follow what each brings, day after day.

 

Seems like we’re getting there

I think it goes this way, parallel.

No, the handles have to cross like this.

Got it.

John attaches the hoses while I get the strainer ready.

Have you seen the filters? Oh, here they are near the back of the drawer.

Does it fit like this?

I think that’s upside down. Try the other way. Yes, that’s it.

Okay. I think we’re ready. Let’s go.

Stainless steel machine in hand, we walk outside in the evening’s glow to the shed where Folly and Dancer wait to be milked.

Years ago when John and I imagined retiring from teaching, we knew we wanted to create a schedule that was more farm-centered and focused on the simple ways we wanted to live. That meant many things: driving less, staying home more, and spending less money and more time together. A whimsical, yet practical, aspect of our vision was to milk goats at our friends’ CSA dairy once a week because we like what our friends are doing and we eat a lot of goat cheese.

Last night, we milked two sweet goats for the first time by ourselves and brought home two gallons of milk. We warmed it in one of our largest pots and added the rennet and culture for chèvre. It’ll curdle today and we’ll strain it tonight. Soon we’ll have cheese for eating and cooking and someday we’ll branch out to other varieties.

So Tuesday is milking day and the other days of the week are falling into place as well. We’ve got movement practice for our bodies and writing projects for our minds and farm work every day to keep our fields green and our community strong. We spend more time in solitude, away from the busy-ness of the world, and more time enjoying the company of friends. Some of the dreams we’ve had for years are coming to fruition. And in July, we’ll greet our new grandchild.

This morning as I walked over the stone bridge between our house and barn, I startled a mother Canadian goose and her six goslings swimming three by three at her side in the ditch below me. I’d seen the parents in the water over the last couple weeks and knew the babies must be near. Watching for spring goslings will be part of our seasonal schedule now, another way we measure nature’s passing.

We’ve worked hard to reach this point in our fifties where we have more control over our time than ever before. We’ll continue to work hard, just not at the place or in the way we worked for so many years to get here. Nothing is rosy—as farmers, we struggle with weather, pests, and an unending “to do” list; as activists, we face encroaching development, environmental degradation, and political injustice. We also know that our physical stamina won’t hold up forever. But for now, we’re making goat cheese and waking up each morning to face a new day on the farm, happy to be getting here at last.

 

42nd Earth Day and Still Counting

On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, I was a student in Mr. Osborn’s fifth grade class at Sherwood Elementary. Earth Day was organized by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to bring national attention to the alarming state of the environment through grassroots actions. On Earth Day, people were asked to demonstrate care for an earth whose gifts of clean air, water, and soil could no longer be taken for granted.

My fifth grade class (I'm in the lower left hand corner with knee socks)

Our fifth grade class decided to celebrate the first Earth Day by turning the hard dirt outside our classroom into a beautiful garden of grass and flowers.  All it would take, we thought, were some shovels and a few seeds. We showed up with tools—the girls in pants, which weren’t normally allowed—and worked like crazy all day to get that small square of soil ready for the plants we imagined would grow there. Mr. Osborn even let me run a block home for my wagon to haul away rocks and trash. With rakes and hoes in our young hands, we scratched tiny furrows in the soil to plant our hopeful seeds.  A little water, and we’d have our first Earth Day garden.  At the end of the day we were dirty and tired, but proud to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

 

Around the world, 20 million participants representing thousands of schools and communities organized events like ours from planting trees to picking up trash along highways in what Senator Nelson called a “spontaneous response at the grassroots level.” Earth Day proved that many people did care about the environment, becoming a symbol for the new ecological movement that at that point held so much promise.

Today Earth Day and its message of stewardship is still part of many school curriculums. Children learn about the value of recycling, saving energy, and protecting endangered species.  Since the first Earth Day, stricter standards have been passed for air and water pollution, cars have become more fuel efficient, and many contaminated areas have been recovered.  But 42 years after the first Earth Day, we are living that fearful future of vanishing species, toxic food, oil spills, nuclear disasters, and climate change-amplified weather crises.

To celebrate Earth Day’s 40^th anniversary two years ago, we planted an Opalescent Apple tree at Stonebridge Farm in memory of Mr. Osborn, my fifth grade teacher who had died just a few months earlier.  Many years will pass before Mr O’s tree bears fruit in the old orchard beyond the barn, just as many years have passed since planting my first Earth Day garden. When I tend that tree, I remember how Mr. O inspired us to care about the natural world by getting our hands in the soil. He taught us the Earth Day lesson of working together to care for our environment by visualizing the world in which we wanted to live. Even though the grass and flowers didn’t survive long in the high traffic area outside our schoolroom, it didn’t matter because the real seeds had been planted in us.

Ecology stickers I've saved from fifth grade

This Earth Day we’ll celebrate by learning to forage wild plants on our farm. Foraging lends a new perspective on so-called weeds by showing us that plants we overlook or eradicate can have value. Similarly, Earth Day teaches us that we need to look more closely at the earth’s interconnected ecosystems if we are to be good stewards of this planet.

We’ll plant an apple tree too, one John grafted from the branch of a blush apple tree in our farm’s old orchard. That tree probably came from a seed planted by a bird or squirrel or apple fallen from another tree. Since apple trees grown from seeds don’t come true to the parent tree, until we grafted it, our tree may have been the only apple like it in the world. Now this second Stonebridge apple will bear more wine-fleshed fruit born of this place and bringing the past into a future we hope promises harvests for generations to come. 

In fifth grade, I believed that solutions to the world’s environmental problems would be achieved in my lifetime. How naïve I was to underestimate the economic forces that value profit over preservation and the lack of political will to challenge them. The view that the earth is only ours for the harvesting has led us to disregard its limitations. We should all participate in “green” efforts to plant school gardens, recycle our cans and bottles, or eat locally grown organic vegetables as ways to honor the earth as our home, yet actions like these alone will not save the planet. The changes needed to stop further ecological degradation are monumental and our individual efforts so small, it’s hard to see how the tiny seeds of stewardship planted 42 years ago can still grow.

Celebrate Earth Day on April 22 this year by planting a tree—and then join others in the insistence that the environment must not only be protected for ourselves, but for generations as far as we can count. Together we must create a new vision that inspires fresh seeds of environmental activism, one that looks not only at individual actions but at collective intervention in the mounting crisis of our only earth.

 

Dig Dig Grow Grow

Our favorite tool around Stonebridge Farm is the hori, a 12”-long,  wooden-handled tool with a sturdy blade that comes to a dull point and is serrated along one edge. Japanese in origin, its name hori hori translates as “dig dig,” and that’s one of the tasks this tool is perfect for in the garden when you need smaller holes for transplanting vegetable or flower starts.

We also love a hori for hand-weeding small emerging weeds, furrowing a line for seeds, or digging out the roots of taller weeds like thistles or mullein. At around $35 apiece, horis are an investment but well worth it. Just be sure to wrap the handle with brightly colored tape in case you lay it down in tall grass. When we head out to the fields with a crew, we always bring our bucket of horis because chances are, we’ll need them, no matter what the task.

A heavy rainstorm delighted us with inches of moisture last night, so today was the perfect time for working in the gardens. I used my hori to dig out clumps of grass in the roses, weed small thistles from the herb garden, and transplant errant shoots of spearmint into a sparse bed that winter temperatures and small rodents had diminished.

Late June is wonderful for taking stock of the fields because by now you can see what has germinated, what needs replacing, what needs thinning, and what needs weeding. All the high summer crops—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, cucumbers, and summer squash–have been seeded or transplanted into long beds and are loving the moisture from the rain. That means the weeds do too, but at this moment, with everything green and fresh, even the weeds are part of the verdant landscape and seem less threatening now than in July’s dry heat.

I dreamed recently of watching a tiny plant stalk growing outward, unfurling a new green shoot right before my eyes, like a time-lapsed film but in real time instead. I’ve noticed many such signals lately, all telling me that my decision to quit a job I’ve nurtured for 17 years is the right one. At 52, it’s time to take my hori and head to new fields and interests. I’m digging in fertile ground again, not knowing exactly what I’ll harvest but eager to see what will grow here.

 

A Month Ahead

I’m a month ahead of myself. I woke up on December 1 and made a resolution for the coming year to go ahead with a plan I’d been considering for a while. I know New Year’s is a month away—and resolutions are made to be broken—but I feel good knowing that I’m now willing and able to move in an exciting direction.

My resolution wasn’t actually my first thought upon waking. My first thought was, “Yippee, my daughter and son-in-law are moving into their new house today!” Then I remembered that I had to help them move. Eeek. But then I remembered that I’d finally get to see the inside of the house and THAT felt like opening a great big Christmas present.

The new house had come about because of trees. Since my daughter and son-in-law had bought their first house a couple years earlier, they’d done a lot of work painting, removing wallpaper and paneling, landscaping, and opening up spaces for more light and better flow. They updated a 1960s ranch-style house to a home that was comfortable today.

But then there was the problem of the trees in the backyard that needed pruning. Or removing. And what to do about it.

Tree work is expensive and the trees did offer privacy, but they also shaded any possibility of a vegetable garden in the backyard. And that realization led to some soul-searching—was this really the right house, the house where my daughter and her husband could put down roots?

The answer was no, so they put the house on the market and with all their improvements, it sold quickly. Then they found their dream house, about which they had a clearer idea at this more mature stage of their lives (or at least as clear as one can be in one’s late twenties). And so on December 1, we moved them.

And that’s the day I made my New Year’s resolution a month early toward another change in my own life. Is it a coincidence? Probably not. Sometimes, we have to look at our lives and make decisions that won’t be easy, but will get us where we want to go. At 51, it feels good to be implementing plans for my own more mature stage and to have greater clarity about what I should be doing and what I want to do in the coming years.

And the trees? They’re still standing.

 

No Frost Yet

“How are you?”

“Doing great! We haven’t had a frost yet!”

“Oh. Uh huh. That’s nice.” Acquaintances nod at my nutty weather report. No frost yet—whatever.

No hard frost as of October 21 may not sound like much to non-farmers or non-gardeners but it’s momentous to those of us on Colorado’s Front Range who work outside in the soil.

In fact, we’ve been working joyously in t-shirts this week, doing things we usually do in jackets. I spread compost around the base of the roses to help get them through a predicted dry winter and John tilled compost into the fields in preparation for fall-planting shallots and garlic. A few of my roses are still blooming and I even picked a bouquet of zinnias for a friend’s birthday dinner.

Early last week our county extension agent sent around a frost warning, so we harvested all that we could to give our CSA members last Saturday–except some smaller peppers just in case it didn’t frost.

And it didn’t.

But that’s okay. The tomatoes and eggplant had pretty much given up with the colder nights and we were ready to pull the stakes and store the twine for next year. John picked the last few of the lonely cucumbers, melons, and summer squash a couple days ago and then tilled the vines into the field.

Yesterday afternoon I walked out to the big field to see what was left. Along the bank of the irrigation ditch, I startled a redtail hawk from the limb of a cottonwood. It flew before me over the tops of the trees. Two weeks ago I surprised a great-horned owl from a similar spot but it flew in front and then around me, close enough that I could see the spots on its breast as it spread its wings perpendicular to the ground. I’d never been that close to such a large flying owl before and it took a while for my heart to settle down. The redtail wasn’t quite as dramatic but thrilled me nonetheless.

So what’s left? I found the peppers still ripening on the plants; we can pick them to give this Saturday or next, which will be the last pick-up of the season. A few small round eggplant are still hanging. Maybe they’ll be big enough for one more ratatouille before the first frost really hits. I found one large Mennonite tomato going red and a few pastes that we’d missed in our previous gleanings. That’s it. I picked some peppermint on my way into the house to make the last watermelon/cucumber salad of the season.

But first frost isn’t just about harvesting plants. At Stonebridge Farm we take our first frost predictions seriously. Around the beginning of September, we start the frost pool for bartering members to pick their first frost dates. Whoever wins garners bragging rights and the title of Frost Queen or King, as well as the largest jack o’ lantern to carve at our end-of-season party on the last Saturday of October.

The frost pool’s pretty competitive out here but the best part is that the winning date is so unpredictable. Who would have thought in September that those daring folks who chose October 24th or 25^th would have any chance of winning? Usually the rule is closest date without going over wins, but with no frost predicted until the beginning of next week, the winner this time might be the latest prediction.

We have elaborate rules for what “first frost” means: not just a little nip, but blackened basil and zinnias. This year the frost is so late that we’ve harvested almost all the basil plants already, leaving just a few on which to base the official decision. The zinnias I didn’t pick are pretty faded but we’ll leave them in the field until the frost hits as a back-up to the basil indicator.

Timing’s essential too. Since frost usually comes early in the morning, we date the first frost on the day of the morning we find the blackened basil and zinnias rather than the day of the night before.

Predictions are fun, but most of all, we anticipate first frost because it means our season is almost over. We may still harvest roots and greens that can grow in the cold, but the riot of the harvest is finished—the tomatoes, peppers, basil, eggplant, and squash are a fait accompli. We will have to wait nearly another year for those warm weather crops to ripen again.

A couple days ago, John and I decided to celebrate this long fall by ending the workday early to sit on the patio of a local restaurant, enjoying the late afternoon sun. We were the only people sitting outside, which we found odd on such a glorious day, and, even stranger, the servers were putting away the patio furniture and umbrellas while we toasted the autumn foliage. Soon we were the only table on the patio and we joked that we were the last people to sit outside this year. In this seemingly perennial fall, it’s hard for us to stay inside.

Today we finished the last of the big fall chores: planting 14 beds of garlic for our members next season. With our expert Thursday crew, we cracked the garlic bulbs we’d saved from this year’s crop to plant back the cloves for the next. We started the morning in jackets but soon were in shirt-sleeves as the sun warmed our backs. We don’t always get to plant garlic in sunshine so we welcomed the chance to savor a few more rays before they’re gone.

No frost yet.

But we know it’s coming.

 

 

 

Dying in Orange

The pumpkin vines are dying back, exposing a landscape of garrulous orange. I’m glad we have enough carving pumpkins for all our CSA members this year; I feel like a failure when we can’t give every family at least one. John’s not sure jack o’ lanterns are the best use of field space but he humors those of us who need to carve a pumpkin at the end of October.

They’re more than decorative, I tell him. It’s the ritual that’s important, one that marks the end of the season and is rooted in ancient folk traditions celebrating the last days of harvest before the coming winter. Besides, I tease, we have to grow pumpkins because we don’t grow turnips big enough to carve like they did in medieval Europe.

Last night we watched the PBS documentary The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo and I’m trying to figure out why I’m so attracted to Kahlo as an artist and woman. With the publication of several books on her life, including Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel The Lacuna, and a popular film produced by and starring Selma Hayek, Kahlo has become an icon of feminist self-expression, female sexual liberation, and heroic achievement amidst physical suffering. Her likeness and paintings are found on everything from key chains to matchboxes. She may even have eclipsed her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, in artistic stature.

I was introduced to Frida Kahlo as a college student in the late 70s by my two wonderful professors of Spanish language and literature who were admirers of Kahlo’s work before it was discovered by feminists in the United States.

Like George O’Keefe, whom she met, Kahlo struggled as a woman artist within an art world defined and dominated by men, including her own husband, but she was not a woman to be ignored.  Kahlo used her body as a canvas draped in traditional Mexican dress and flamboyant jewelry, creating an image of herself that never conformed but rather confronted bourgeois notions of female decorum.

But it’s more than her colorful life that fascinates me; it’s the sensory shock of the art itself. Often confined to her bed, Kahlo painted what she saw in the mirror but used the outward appearance of her body to express the inner world of her imagination. Kahlo painted her compromised and exposed body in pain, bloody and wounded, but also in the midst of vivid natural surroundings, tendrilled in lush greenery and vibrant flowers. As Carlos Fuentes writes in his introduction to The Diary of Frida Kahlo, “[N]o matter how interior her work was, it was always uncannily close to the proximate, material world of animals, fruits, earths, skies.”

The documentary examines the influence of Catholic iconography on her work—the retablos of the crucifixion and lives of the saints. But her work also features the macabre element of death, as is found in the skeleton figures of El Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead when families gather at cemeteries to picnic and remember those who have passed to the spirit realm.

According to Fuentes, the Mexican idea of death is not finality but origin: “Without the dead, we would not be here, we would not be alive.” In this way, he writes, Kahlo’s work “had the sense of fooling death, of fooling around with death.” In the painting The Dream, for example, a sleeping figure of Kahlo floats in a bed with Death leering from the canopy above.

It’s the juxtaposition of everpresent death with verdant life that makes her paintings so startling. Her art is beautiful yet frightening, a thorny reminder that death is the part of life that makes us live it more.

Like Kahlo’s art, celebrating the end of our farm season with bright orange jack o’ lanterns allows us to participate in the ritualof life and death with laughter and a touch of the macabre as they wink and grimace and remind us not to take ourselves too seriously.

 

Time for Putting By

Monday morning—the last Monday of August—I started this fall’s first batch of Stonebridge tomato sauce, an act that signifies that the “putting by” part of the farm season has begun.

I’ve already been drying tomatoes from the greenhouse for a couple of weeks, but the first big pot of onions, garlic, peppers, and heirloom tomatoes simmering all day on the stove means I’ll be spending the next four or six or eight weeks—depending on the first frost—putting up food for the winter and early spring. We had sauce on pasta for dinner that night and the rest went into the freezer for a snowy night when we need a quick and hearty meal.

We laugh that our tomato sauce could be called “a delicious blend of vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes”—but that really means “made from whatever tomatoes were left over after Saturday’s pick-up at our CSA.” They are vine-ripened and heirloom, including rich yellow and red Brandywines, green-shouldered Cherokee Purples, pinkish Mennonites, striped Vintage Wines, hefty Amanas, heart-shaped Russian Annas, and pointy Opalka and squat Amish pastes, but they’re usually the least attractive or most compromised of the tomatoes and thus left behind, all the better for saucing.

Today I’ve got another batch of paste tomatoes in the dehydrator, along with the Juliets, which are small, oval cluster tomatoes that we planted in both the greenhouse and the fields. They grow three to a cluster and are perfect sliced in half lengthwise for drying. This is our first year growing Juliets, a variety we picked to complement the cherry Peacevines in the greenhouse, and we’re impressed by their size and productivity. I depend on deep red dried tomatoes for putting by because they’re like a little piece of sunshine in the deep of winter.

At a seed-saving lecture recently, we learned that while Juliets were developed as a hybrid decades ago, their seeds have been carefully selected for so many years, they’re now essentially an heirloom. That means that the big seed growers don’t have to cross-pollinate them from parent plants anymore but can save seed from the fruit instead. Of course, most seed companies don’t want you to know all that or you’d save your own seed rather than buy from them, but we do know now, so we’ll save Juliet seeds to replant next spring.

Seed-saving is part of putting by at Stonebridge, where we save our favorite tomatoes and peppers in little scalloped sauce dishes all over the kitchen table, transferring them to glassine envelopes when dried. Just today a friend dropped by with an heirloom early, cold-night tolerant tomato called Precocibec that she tried for the first time this year. After I save the seed, the tomato will go in the veggie korma, an Indian dish I’m making for dinner with zucchini, onion, green beans, carrots, and potatoes from the garden.

I wish I could capture in words the glorious weather we’re having here on the Front Range of Colorado right now, days in the upper 80s with just a hint of coolness in the air. We’ve had a lot of moisture this summer and some beautiful blue skies canopied with white clouds. Last night we sat with friends after our last softball game of the season and watched as the western clouds gleamed rose-pink over the mountains and one tall cloud in the east was caught in the last of the sun’s rays, glowing white longer than the darkening clouds around it.

When earlier sunsets and cooler days of the receding summer remind us of the coming cold, putting by begins in earnest on the farm. This morning I spent time in our new drying hut, a gift from a friend who built it from reclaimed materials for a music camp in the Rockies as a luthier workshop. We inherited the hut–christened “Egg” after the other bird-named cabins–when the camp applied for heritage status and the satellite disk roof didn’t quite fit the building criteria for the camp’s auspicious history.

This is the third of our disk-roof huts and they’re all useful—one for tools out in the field, one for wood by the house, and now this one for herbs under the shady cottonwoods by the greenhouse. We added an old multi-paned door fitted with doorknobs salvaged from my grandparent’s farmhouse. Inside we store garlic and shallots for our members in the coming months and dry herbs on a discarded window screen set across two campstools. A rewindable clothesline from the 40s stretches from side to side for hanging bunches of herbs like tarragon and rosemary.

I love this little hut. Sheltered under the trees, it’s dry and clean and out of the direct sunlight that can fade herbs. It reminds me of the arched chicken coop-turned-playhouse at my grandparent’s farm where we served tea to our dolls in discarded cold cream and canning jars.

This afternoon I’ll start drying herbs in the hut for our Thanksgiving share—an extra harvest of roots and squash and alliums we’re offering this year for the Thanksgiving meal and more. Thanksgiving is only 11 weeks away and we have lots of vegetables to harvest before then, but I’m happy to start thinking about the end of the season as I put by today’s sunshine in vegetables stored for the winter.

 

As You Like

Our 100-year-old barn is a favorite spot at Stonebridge, our CSA (Community Supported Agricultural) farm. Each Saturday of the six-month growing season, members come to the barn to weigh, count, and bag their weekly subscription of just picked vegetables. Because we’re a “share the harvest” rather than a market farm, members know they’re getting the best the fields have to offer and they’re excited each week to see what’s waiting in the produce rooms.

But often we have vegetables remaining after Saturday’s pick-up that will easily hold for another week in the cool room rather than go to the chickens. Sometimes we harvest the beginning or end of a crop in quantities too small to fill every share, and every week we pick a few “scratch and dent” veggies like sun-scalded peppers, blemished tomatoes, or misshapen carrots that are still good enough to eat but not perfect enough to be counted. So rather than go straight to the compost pile, these leftover, extra, or cosmetically challenged veggies go on the As You Like table for anyone to take. Too many zucchini? Never! The table is always empty by the end of the day. When I clean up the barn on Sunday morning, I’m always happy to see that even the lowliest vegetables have found a new home.

Our members know the value of real food: they know with a little paring, those vegetables will make a delicious and nutritious meal. Zucchini can be grated and frozen for winter breads; even the ugliest carrots and beets can be juiced. But the AYL table isn’t empty just because people feel they’re getting something for nothing. AYL, I think, is a symbol for our farm as a whole.

Stonebridge is more than just a trendy place to get produce. Our members understand that behind each vegetable are people who have planted and watered and weeded with thoughtful intention to care for each other and the earth. Behind that lies the land and all it offers. We work, we wait, and the land gives again. This philosophy is what we call farmgiving–the boundless and bountiful generosity created by placing our lives alongside the land on which we depend–and in our 19 years as a CSA, this generosity has never failed us.

But from abundance, we also learn thrift. If we waste what the earth so generously provides, we not only fail to appreciate those gifts, we miss our chance to be generous with the earth’s abundance in return. We need to think about what we can do with what we have, whether it’s a few vegetables that could create a delicious dinner, or a whole farm that can raise vegetables for many, many dinners. At Stonebridge, we say, “When the community feeds itself, the land and the people prosper.” When we practice As You Like, we all have an opportunity–and a responsibility–to do our best with what the earth provides.