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Heath - A Right to Farm Community Roadside Sign

For more Wordlessness click here.

Sheila of Dell Farmstead

Actually my neighbor Sheila of Dell Farmstead started her cheesemaking workshop at 9 am! Fortunately, she included a beautiful lunch in the day’s schedule. By the end of the day we had made: chevre, a goat cheese; 30 minute mozzarella; feta; cheddar; creme fraiche, soft goat cheese, and a Tomme unique to Dell Farmstead.

Curds and When

We learned that all cheese begins with separating the curds from the whey – with the help of additives like citric acid, and starter cultures including rennet that are different for each type of cheese. Animal rennet is extracted from the 4th stomach of a calf, but vegetarians can use a rennet made from plants like thistle flowers and stinging nettles. We also learned that whey, the liquid that is left after the milk solids are removed is considered a pollutant. That means it cannot go down the drain into a septic system or sewer system. Sheila feeds the whey to her hens or dumps it on her garden where it does no harm.

Heating the milk

The very first step is to warm the milk. How hot it needs to be and for how long depends on the type of cheese being made. A cheese thermometer is vital because it gives small increments. All utensils were stainless steel and very clean. No oil or soap residue can be left behind.

Ricotta?

When the whey has been totally drained, the curds can look like this. I’m not sure if this is the ricotta or the chevre. Both look very similar.

We didn’t make any cajeta which is a Mexican caramel made from goat milk, but Sheila had some ready for us to sample. She also made dark chocolate covered goat milk truffles which you can see us tasting, while one devoted member of the group was deputed to keep his eye on the thermometer.

Luncheon Table

The truffles did not ruin our appetites. We sat down to a wonderful lunch of paillards of chicken with a creme fraiche (that we made)  sauce over rice and a lovely green salad. Sustaining.

Feta Cheese - almost

Feta cheese is not really feta until it has been brined.  for three days.

30 minute mozzarella

I couldn’t believe it only takes 30 minutes to make mozzarella. It uses the magic of a microwave, and some taffy-pulling technique.  Most of the cheese we made used commercial milk, but only Guida and Our Family Farms milk because these two are only pasturized, not ULTRA pasturized which would have killed every single bacteria. You need bacteria, good bacteria, to make cheese.

Cheese Cave

We only made one cheese that will end up in Sheila’s ‘cave’ which made use of an old cistern in her basement. She lives in an old farmhouse.  Many of the cheese recipes we used are in Ricky Carroll’s book Home Cheese Making. Ricky is known as the Cheese Queen and everything you need to make cheese is available through her website. Sheila took Ricky’s workshop nearly 30 years ago – and has been making cheese ever since.

Hoegger’s Farmyard is another company that sells cheese making equipment online.

If you’d like information about a cheesemaking workshop contact Sheila at  sheila@thedell.com. Oh, by the way – we all got to take some cheese home with us.

PS – Don’t forget that tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 14 is the great Winterfare in Northampton. Fresh produce, workshops, soup cafe, and lots of fun all around.

Jim Barry

When I drove down the Greenfield Community College driveway last Saturday I passed ‘my tree,’ a weeping cherry that I donated when I left the College in 1989. I reveled in its good health, parked my car and walked towards the steps. A head popped out of the Sloan Theater door, calling to tell me I could take the elevator up. I called back, “No, no. Step to health. Step to health,” ever my motto as I was always up and down those stairs in my days with Continuing Education. A man right on my heels, asked me if I thought they were just being friendly or was the offer a reference to – and here he brushed his balding, white haired head and made me laugh. I had exactly the same thought, although I had a little more white hair.

My white haired companion turned out to be Jim Barry, Regional Coordinator, Green Communities Division, Western Region, Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources who gave a great talk about what the state is doing in the areas of energy and the environment. His talk made me very happy that I live in Massachusetts. Although more remains to be done.

Shelly Beck

We trailed after a young woman in red to the front steps and met Shelly Beck. She represented Enterprise Farm and gave a presentation about the farm in the “How Can We Scale Up Our Food System?” workshop. These were just two of the ways that the Greening Greenfield Energy Committee found to inform and inspire an energetic group of area residents who were stepping up to action in a whole variety of ways.

I could not attend all the workshops at the Creating Greenfield’s Future: Our Food, Economy and Future conference, and was sorry to miss Youth as Change Makers where young people from the Seeds of Solidarity SOL (Seeds of Leadership) Garden in Orange shared their experiences, or Let’s Divorce the ‘Sick Care’ System that was about finding ways for us to take more responsibility for our health.  There were business workshops and the opportunity to spend more time with Ben Hewitt, author of “The Town that Food Saved,” who gave a thoughtful and engaging keynote speech.

It was the growing, processing and distribution of food that was of most interest to me on Saturday. Margaret Christie of CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) led a discussion that made clear the challenges of our area, rich in land and skill as it is.

The first challenge is to find more ways to put potential new farmers in touch with people who have land available for farming. Start up costs for farming are considerable, especially land. It made me think that although Heath is not an ideal location in many ways, I would love to have some of our acreage under cultivation. I am definitely going to explore some of those linking resources beginning with local land trusts.

The second challenge is the need for more agricultural infrastructure. I know this from my own experience raising pigs and chickens for meat. Over the years we have been here the availability of slaughter houses has decreased – even as more people are interested in raising their own meat, and farmers are seeing a good local market.

Also if more food is produced here, we need more ways to process it to give farmers a year round income, not just during the growing season. That means freezing capabilities and cold storage.

I cannot begin to cover everything discussed, but the CISA report Scaling Up Local Food is available and downloadable on their website, www.buylocalfood.org.

In the afternoon, after a great lunch, I attended the Food Security: A Household Approach workshop. Eveline MacDougal talked about founding the Pleasant Street Community Garden and the benefits that go way beyond growing some vegetables, Jay Lord brought us up to date on Just Roots, the town’s new Community Garden space, Wendy Marsden gave advice about preserving our own harvests in a variety of ways, and Kimberly Walker-Goncalves gave an informative and amusing talk about raising chickens in town.

There are any number of people in town who might be happy to know that it is perfectly legal to have ten or fewer chickens in your backyard. Since I assume that anyone raising a backyard flock is more interested in eggs and the cheerfulness of the chickens, they don’t even have to worry about the lack of poultry slaughtering facilities.

Chickens are cheerful, domestic and productive. At least that is the way I have always thought of them. They are not much trouble, although as Goncalves pointed out, even in town you have to be aware of predators, not only neighborhood dogs but foxes and raccoons. I would add the caveat that you will not save any money, but the eggs will be unlike store eggs, and you’ll enjoy the chickens’ company.

Pigs are not quite as picturesque as a mixed flocked of silver laced wyandottes, barred rocks, and buff orpingtons, but it is legal to have two pigs in your backyard in Greenfield. And remember you must have at least two pigs in order for them to thrive. They are social animals and need a companion, and a little competition at the food trough.

Ben Hewitt

I left the conference to the rousing rhythms of Echo Uganda, but the words that were ringing in my ears were those of Ben Hewitt. “I want more than sustainable agriculture. I want restorative agriculture. Agriculture that restores our health, restores our soil and environment, restores our economy and restores our community.”

Thank you Greening Greenfield for an inspiring day.

Between the Rows   November 12, 2011

Readers often have favorite authors and are not content with reading the author’s books. They want to know where and how the  author lived, what made them the writer, the person they were, what influenced them and what supported them. In recent years, after a tough beginning, I have come to enjoy Eudora Welty’s books. I confess it took listening to an audio book of her stories including “Why I Live at the P.O.” and heard those southern cadences spoken that I was finally able to read and appreciate her fond understanding and delineation of a world that had seemed so foreign to me.

During the past year I attended a concert performance of a one act opera written by Alice Parker of Hawley based on Welty’s book “The Ponder Heart,” read a biography of Elizabeth Lawrence, another southern gardener who was a friend of Welty’s and her mother Chestina, and most recently met Jane Roy Brown of Conway, who, with co-author Susan Haltom, has written “One Writer’s Garden: Eudora Welty’s Home Place.” That book, illustrated not only with gorgeous photographs of the restored garden, but family photos as well, has sent me back to re-read Welty’s wonderful stories filled with unforgettable characters.

Jane Roy Brown found her way to writing and to gardening slowly. It was during a period of unemployment years ago that she took a job working as a gardener in a private garden that she found she loved working with plants. “The work spoke to me. While working with rocks I thought of the Japanese gardens I had visited two years before,” she said. That job led to the beginning of nine years of classes at the Radcliffe Seminars (now the Landscape Institute at the Arnold Arboretum) earning a certificate in landscape design history.

At the same time she was working as a journalist in many different fields, but has specialized for some time in travel journalism, often collaborating with her photographer husband Bill Regan. In 2004 she was invited to the opening of the newly restored Welty garden where she met Susan Haltom, who had worked with Eudora Welty in her last years, and oversaw the renovation. Since Brown is a knowledgeable gardener as well as a writer, she and Haltom soon found a lot of common ground. “We just clicked,” Brown said.

Photo courtesy of Bill Regan

Brown said that Eudora Welty gave Haltom exclusive permission to write about the garden, but because she was not a professional writer she proposed that the two of them work together. “We wrote a proposal and that was a valuable task because it allowed us to get out our ideas. It was a safe place to make mistakes while we got to know each other. Mostly we worked long distance by phone at this stage,” Brown said.

“The University of Mississippi was interested in doing the book right away, and then our work really began,” Brown said. “Susan is a visual person and a big picture thinker. I’m more interested in detail and exploring the historical context.”

Haltom had access to Eudora Welty’s letters and her mother’s garden journals, and both Haltom and Brown had garden magazines of the period to help illustrate the aesthetics and practices of the time. Chestina was an avid and skilled gardener; the garden she created in Jackson, Mississippi is an example of what the typical residential garden in the south looked like in the first half of the twentieth century. Though the garden had been overgrown and the lines were lost, Haltom was able use almost archeological methods to find and reveal the beds and paths of the original garden. Though she traveled widely Welty made the house on Pinehurst Street her home all her life. She always thought of the garden as “Chestina’s garden” even after her death, and exhorted Haltom not to make the garden anything more than it was during her mother’s lifetime.

The story of Chestina’s garden is also the story of a remarkable progressive woman who lived at a time when work outside the home was discouraged, but who found ways to engage with other women and the community, to keep learning, and to support her daughter Eudora in her desire for a different kind of life.

Brown has shown that the story of a garden is also a story of a particular time and place, of social movements and important personal events, both joyful and sad.

Readers of Welty’s works will be familiar with the way gardens and flowers appear in her work and it is clear that the garden inspired Welty and refreshed her spirit and imagination. It is fitting that the restoration of the garden was completed before the restoration of the house which she bequeathed to the State of Mississippi and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

In addition to working on this book, Brown has projects closer to home serving as the Director of Educational Outreach at the Library of American Landscape History which has its office in Amherst. This non-profit organization produces beautiful books like “Silent City on a Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of  Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery” and a new reprint of “Design in the Little Garden” by Fletcher Steele who designed the gardens at Naumkeag in Stockbridge.

Talking with Brown I thought of the way the garden path leads to paths into history, art and culture. Brown has also strolled those wandering paths, personally and professionally, and to the benefit of us readers who will open “One Writer’s Garden.”

Between the Rows   November 5, 2011

The Solar Dancer

The Solar Dancer greeted all those who gathered at Greenfield Community College last Saturday to hear about and discuss our current local food production and food security and the ways that it might be stepped up.

It was an exciting day because we live in a fortunate area that has lots of good farmland, with old (in the sense of established) and new farmers. These farmers operate farmstands and CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and participate in area Farmers Markets. We have the Community Development Corporation‘s certified kitchen which farmers can rent by the hour to process their crops.

We have restaurants and families who appreciate good fresh food that not only sustains them, but sustains our environment – and our economy!

The day was filled with excellent  presentations and workshops, from Jim Barry from the Mass Department of Energy Resources, Ben Hewitt, author of The Town That Food Saved and many local experts. You will be hearing more about this exciting day.

Shelly Beck of Enterprise Farm in Whately, MA

There were so many thought provoking ideas presented, including one by Shelly Beck of Enterprise Farm which has a bold vision of their place in the community. One of the Farm’s concerns is the Food Deserts that exist in the state, areas where (usually) low income communities have no access to affordable healthy food. Enterprise Farm decided to bring their produce to one such community near Boston where they already delivered CSA farm shares weekly. Their answer to the food desert was a bus and a celebration. They bought and retrofitted a bus which brought food to this community for a long season – bringing along a growing festive spirit and activity. This was one of the most inspiring moments of the day for me.

Lyman Plant House at Smith College

Last week I visited the Lyman Plant House at Smith College in preparation for a column and post about the Annual Chrysanthemum Show which begins Friday, November 5 with a talk by Smith alum and author Paula Dietz about the gardens she has visited and written about in her book, On Gardens.

The Smith Botanical Garden and the Lyman Plant House are treasures for the whole community to use. The Lyman Plant House is open every day (except Thanksgiving and the period between December 23 – January 3) from 8:30 am – 4 pm, and the gardens surrounding it are available every day of the year. I was amazed at the amount of bloom.

Actually, I know dahlias are still blooming madly up in the higher elevations. Not only at Smith.

There are lots of labels on the plants in the Botanic Garden, but I could not find one for this beautiful plant, of which there were several wonderful floriferous clumps.  Any ideas?

This plant was another mystery. It looks like a regular daisy flower, but look at that foliage – not daisy foliage. Any more ideas?

As a part of the Rock Garden are a number of trough gardens which I think is a wonderful way for any of us to enjoy a few alpine plants.

There is an iron fence that separates the garden from the roadway, but on the road side of the fence there are plantings. Even those passing can enjoy the garden without entering.

This dramatic red planting is at the doorway to the Lyman Plant House.   Wow!

I was familiar with many of these plants (not all obviously) but I was amazed to see cactus included in the garden. Hardy in Northampton?  I guess so.

One Writer's Garden by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown

Eudora Welty has been much on my mind these last months. First there was a performance of the one act opera composed by Alice Parker based on Welty’s The Ponder Heart, and then I read a biography of Elizabeth Lawrence who was a friend of Welty’s, and then my book club read One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty. All of that is topped off with the publication of One Writer’s Garden written by Susan Haltom who researched and oversaw the restoration of the garden, and Conway’s Jane Roy Brown, journalist and garden historian, whose writing is familiar to many of us.

This beautiful book published by the University of Mississippi tells the story not only of Eudora and her mother Chestina who designed the garden, but of the life and culture of the early to mid-twentieth century and how a garden reflected that culture.  Jane Roy Brown will be at Pages in Conway on Sunday, October 23, from noon til 2 pm, talking about the book and signing on request. The book will be available at local bookstores.

I’ll be writing more about Jane Roy Brown and her book soon. Keep watching.

When I finally visited Cosima I had to agree. Her henhouse is a work of art. She said they built this cordwood  masonry henhouse using Robert L. Roy’s books and that this is actually his sauna building plan. The building has an interior diameter of 9 feet with circular walls that are about 8 inches thick. These walls are comprised of cordwood/firewood, sometimes split, and sometimes as plain logs, plus a special masonry mix. They also created a green roof . They put hay bales on the roof and planted gourds and nasturtiums in a pocket of soil in the bales.  Other plants were carried there by the wind. In this rear view of the building you can see trailing nasturtiums, and if you look very closely you will see trailing gourds on the right.

In addition to the cordwood, Cosima used glass bottles to provide handsome graphic elements.

Hens lay their eggs in these egg boxes inside the henhouse.

But eggs can be collected from the outside.  This type of construction keeps out the wind and is quite warm in the winter. Practical and beautiful. One cannot ask for more.

Althuogh I did not realize it. when I arrived as Cosima’s house I got a preview of the henhouse. The cordwood masonry  mudroom is an addition to the old house, and is also beautiful as well as practical.

This interior detail of the mudroom gives some hint of its charm.

So there it is a week’s worth of henhouses, providing food for thought about designing for practicality and beauty. For more unique henhouses click here, here, and here.

Heath Schoolhouse Museum

I live in a ruraltown of 750 souls in the western corner of Massachusetts that sits on the Vermont border. On the Fourth of July in 1981 I happened to meet two other friends at the spinning wheel in the town museum. We were celebrating the holiday, but got to complaining that we never went out to dinner, we  couldn’t afford to, and besides there were no good restaurants closer than 40 miles. Actually there were no restaurants  at all closer than 25 miles. So, on the spot, we invented the Heath Gourmet Club that has been meeting ten times a year ever since, beginning that September. We don’t meet in August because we are all too busy with the Heath Fair, and we collapse the November/December dinners into one.

Gourmet Club Anniversary

Here we are celebrating again. Each month the host picks a theme and lets the other four couples know the entree. Then, Sheila, our record keeper, assigns us each a course, appetizers, bread and soup, side, salad, and dessert, or whatever combination suits the meal. Hosting and courses rotate so we all get a chance to do everything.  This keeps down the individual labor and cost for each meal, some of which have been really spectacular. Salmon Coulibiac, Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourginnone, Mock Turtle Soup (made with muskrat), Peking Duck, and many many more. Spanish, Italian, British, African, Japanese, Indonesian and more, especially French. I love French. Sometimes we have Guest Eaters who feel themselves really lucky to be invited.

Obviously we all love to cook and try new things, but we also like to use local produce. Long before we heard of the 100 mile diet we raised our own pork and chickens and eggs, bought good Heath blueberries, apples and milk. We gardened and grew and put up our own vegetables.

Minestrone

We don’t think every meal has to be fancy, but anything made with good healthy ingredients is a pleasure and delight.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm

We have all been able to buy fresh produce at local farms and orchards, but over the past years the number of small farms has increased selling their produce at farmstands and through this new thing called a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture which allows all of us to share in the risk of farming, the unpredictability of weather and pestilence, and farmer’s markets. This increase in the production of local food is good for the farmers, good for the environments, good for the community and good for us of us eaters.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm is a working farm, specializing in greens and garlic, but Ricky also teaches garden workshops and his wife Deb works to create school gardens, and get fresh produce into institutions like schools and hospitals.

Garlic and Arts Festival - The Festival that Stinks

Along with neighbors, Deb and Ricky founded the Garlic and Arts Festival that takes place the first weekend in October. This is a solar powered, grease mobile run, festival. Who cares if it stinks? After the 10,000 people leave and the field is cleaned up, there is only three bags of trash to dispose of. Everything else is composted or recycled. They have proved that we can live more lightly on the land that we usually do. Then they sell some of the compost at the next Festival.

Organizations like CISA have grown up to help farmers be better businessmen and involve all of us in supporting local agriculture.

Annual Harvest Meal in Greenfield, MA

Every year our larger community celebrates the bounty of our area with a giant FREE Harvest Meal. Farmers donate the produce, restauranteurs donate their labor, musicians come and play and we all celebrate. You can make a donation of course, and that money goes to fund vouchers that are given out at the food pantry, to be used at the farmers market. Everyone deserves fresh healthy food. This year 800 people gathered for this feast, some making generous contributions, and others enjoying the meal freely. $4000 was collected for food vouchers.

And everyone deserves to grow their own healthy food. Just Roots is the new Community Farm that has been form on the site of the Greenfield Poor Farm. This is a wonderful opportunity for many people who don’t own land and who like working with others – who can be a real help with advice.

We are fortunate in our area to have Greenfield Community College which is offering a new course this fall on food systems. It is oversubscribed! Read about that here. It is a joy to see the support given to potential farmers.

We wish our good food fortune to everyone. Bon appetit!

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