Weekend with Boris

Yesterday, H.P. called. Boris was lounging on my floor, and the first thing I did was hold the phone up to the dog’s ear so he could hear H.P.’s voice. Shocking behaviour for an avowed non-dog-person such as me. But then, the volume of pictures I take of Boris is equally shocking, not to mention the fact that I let him hang out in my apartment, smelly fur and all. But what would you do? The weather outside was frightful, and Boris was cowering in the red barn, reluctant to go out into torrential rain and wind. And it’s not like Lorenz or the kids were home. When they did come home this afternoon, Boris felt the need to sulk (in his case, press into me and ignore Lorenz) for a few moments: he was fully aware that, the last two mornings, I was the one who had fed him. He got over it and licked Lorenz’s face quickly enough, but for a minute, he showed how he felt about being ignored for two whole days.

But back to H.P. calling… he made some comment on the red barn troll website not being updated in weeks, was there nothing going on? I came out with my lame excuse which involved sleeping and gardening and procrastinating but mostly working and working some more. And then I babbled on about all that has been going on here of late, and realized, wow, there’s a lot that’s new since the last troll entry and if I don’t write one soon, I’ll get truly overwhelmed by it. So, here’s the scoop:

The triplets are now just one, Sean left on Friday. He’s moved back to Toronto. Justin is sticking around for a while longer, from what I hear. Tara has also decided to move on, she’s leaving Greenfields at the end of the year. Lorenz has hired another Tarrah (good thing she spells her name differently) to cover for the time being. Lorenz himself is going to Germany for most of November, and Boris suspects that something like this is happening and is thus making sure he sucks up to me since Lorenz is unlikely to get him his food if he’s in Germany…

Sean has cured his last bunch of tobacco in the manure pile (in a special box he built for this purpose). He delivered a hand-rolled cigarette to Lorenz, though Malcolm was the one who tried to smoke it. Fortunately, he hasn’t yet clued in that you need to pull air through the cigarette to keep it lit, so it was an ineffective experiment in smoking.

The chickens are laying eggs like it’s their last chance (and in the case of the older laying hens, this is not a bad strategy: their replacements have become productive, so if the old girls weren’t producing, it would only take one van ride for Lorenz to announce that he has soup hens for sale). The old and young hens aren’t allowed to run around the farmyard on the same days – the old hens have had more months to pick up all sorts of parasites which the young ones shouldn’t have yet. Most days, seniority wins the freedom battle, but on days when Lorenz wants the farm to look good, he lets out the young ‘uns, who look much prettier these days. The day the Waldorf school came to visit Emma the donkey (she was her ornery self and wandered away) and the pumpkin patch, the young hens were let free. One of them failed to find her way back to the coop as it got dark, and concluded that my apartment must be home. I had a flying fowl attack my windows! Lorenz flat-out refused to become chicken-catcher (he said something along the lines of long day, bathtub – but that didn’t solve my noisy poultry invader from trying to attack my windows and door!), so I was on my own. I trapped her under a bushel basket, and Tara ended up helping me slide cardboard under the basket and transferring the angry young hen back to the coop.

Me, I’ve spent a lot of my spare (ha!) time in my garden, taking down some junky trees, digging in compost, and removing all the invasive weeds by digging out their roots. I took out the fireplace H.P. built, since we barely ever used it and without it I’ll have room for a picnic table next year. I also dug in about 200 flower bulbs – crocus, daffodil, tulip, alium, lily, grape hyacinth, iris, anemone (though the last two are not bulbs but rhizomes). I’ve re-done my brick path to improve drainage, moved the strawberries, dug up the gladiolus corms and dahlia tubers for the winter, and established a whole new flower bed. Even Lorenz has been spending some time digging in bulbs, though only around the house (he briefly toyed with the idea of tulips for cut flowers at the commercial scale, but the bulbs are just too expensive).

Field operations have been going strong all month. The crew is still harvesting like mad (though with the longer nights, they get started later and thus I have few chances to take pictures of them working). There has been much harvesting of root crops: parsnips, carrots, beets and sunchokes have all figured strongly this month. One day a couple of weeks ago, I saw Justin and Sean bring down a tractor-bucket full of buckets full of parsnips. Sean decided to rudely moon me, but cosmic revenge was swift:

Justin accidentally tilted the bucked a slight bit downward and, when he drove over a bump, all of the parsnips spilled out and the triplets had to spend an extra ten minutes picking them all up again. There have also been plenty of greens, such as late spinach, kale, broccoli and brussel sprouts to take to market. The deer population is higher than it’s ever been – most of this year’s raddichio and much of the lettuce became deer food – and the farm team has put row covers on some of the late greens in an effort to keep it ungulate free.

The markets at Guelph and at the farm have been moved indoors (after the red barn got some major tidying up), and the Friday market is over for the season. Fall took its time arriving (nobody complained): at the beginning of the month, Malcolm was still in shorts at all times and I spent afternoons lounging in a still blooming garden. By the 15th, the leaves were out in full colour glory. As of today, all the leaves have turned and been ripped off the trees. It’s been raining a whole lot, and the days are short so we’ve been spending more time indoors. I believe Lorenz is fully caught up on his Coronation Street watching. And now I’m sort of caught up on the barn trolling…

Oh yeah, we have a recipe site now! Go check it out! Soon, we’ll have a whole new web page, but that means that Lorenz has to scale back on the Coronation Street watching and spend an evening proofing text… (and thus, Johanna gets a none-too-subtle reminder in…)

Vivid Red

You would think Thanksgiving on a farm would be twice as special as Thanksgiving in the city. Particularly so when the farm you live on grows all sorts of winter squash, pumpkins, parsnips, carrots, rutabagas and all those other things you traditionally pile on your plate on turkey holidays. And this farm even has wild turkeys in the fields (though we have to take Lorenz's word on that one, *I* have never seen the wild turkeys). So you really would think, wouldn't you, that, at Thanksgiving, we go for a walk among the fields, marvelling at the unbelievable colours this year. On the way back, we could pick the last few sunflowers that haven't been killed by frost. After that, we might all pile into the house, cook a giant turkey and roast some parsnips and get all thankful for another growing season. And then perhaps we could call a photographer and have our day turned into a greeting card, because it's just so picture perfect out at the farm.

Ha! Clearly, that particular daydream does not take into account that yes, Thanksgiving fell after a killing frost but no, the harvest is not done. True, the weather was great, the leaves are perfect, there were a few last sunflowers and I picked them. I even went for a walk along the fields, marveling at the leaves. But if you really want to know how the Thanksgiving weekend went at Greenfields, you have to factor in 408 bunches of swiss chard and massive mountains of rutabagas. Particularly, you have to consider that the 408 bunches of chard were not bunches on Friday night. I'd fallen asleep on my couch with Boris on the floor in post-belly-rub bliss, and when Lorenz pulled in after an evening of hockey in Orangeville, we both woke up. I delivered the dog to his master, and sat, blinking and half asleep, in his office while he muttered something about getting up early to do chard. It being Thanksgiving and all, I offered to help. Lorenz tried to warn me in his gentle way - "it's not a fun job" - but I ignored it. No, I wanted to help!

So, in the morning, I wandered up to the field to do my helping. Lorenz went somewhere else in the row, and I started making my bunches. My helping in this case was probably much like that of my cousin's little boy, who, when he was three, always wanted to "help" with the dishes and consequently we would step into suds on the floor and there would be a small child splashing away in delight while the dishes stayed dirty. In other words, my bunches - though they took effort on my part - stunk. I somehow suspected that my sad little chard bunches weren't good enough, because I asked Lorenz to look at them when he wandered by with a full crate of beautiful, perfect bunches. Three minutes later, all my bunches undone again, he looked up and said "you shouldn't be watching this". I think he was afraid I'd cry. And then? Then he disappeared! He *said* he was going to go turn the water off in the red barn (he left it running to fill the big wash tub in which the chard would be dunked) and he'd just take what we already had with him. But he was gone for over an hour! I halfheartedly made bunches, annoyed by all the crappy leaves I had to wade through to find a good leaf if I wanted anything less than pathetic looking bunches. I made about a dozen bunches, and then I grabbed my camera and took pictures of vivid red leaves and stuff. Then I got really annoyed - my bunches stunk, the patch of chard I was in was lousy, my hair came out of its ponytail, and... I quit. That's right, you can quit a volunteer job: you can simply walk away from it, saying, this stinks. I don't wanna do it anymore.

Except, of course, I met Lorenz on his way back up when I stalked down the hill and he was all nice and good about it that I didn't want to do this sucky job. He said things like he understood, and he didn't think any less of me. Someone must have given him a tip sheet on how to push my buttons, because I of course lasted all of about five minutes sitting lazily in an Adirondack chair before realizing that the only thing that stunk more than the chard job was my attitude. I trundled back up the hill, not really wanting to bunch any chard but wanting even less to be a quitter. I stuck it out. My bunches didn't stink nearly as much as the ones Lorenz had pulled apart earlier, but I only made one bunch for every three that Lorenz did. I was pretty glad when he said, after we had enough chard for seven cases, that he had to stop because he had to go into Toronto to run an errand, and I left the chard patch to make a pumpkin pie (yes. I made a pie. Hang on a minute, I'll tell you all about it after I finish the chard story).

Fast forward past pie making and movie watching and all that, and now it's Sunday morning and I'm turning the space between the greenhouse and my garden into a construction site - I've dragged all of Lorenz's junk, sorry, important stuff, away from the fence and chopped down the foliage, because I'm digging a trench and filling it with mulch in an effort to keep the weeds which infest the important stuff pile out of my garden. Lorenz swung by to deliver a present into my garden: a live snake that he'd just fished out of the pool. Well, so much for digging in my garden for the rest of the morning - I don't mind snakes at all, but I don't really want to step on one or slice one in half with my spade. And thus, stalled in my gardening efforts, I found myself volunteering to go back up to the field and the dreaded chard. We needed 10 more cases - that's 240 bunches to those of you keeping score at home.

We started on a new patch. I went to the far side, where the red chard ruled. To my surprise, there were many, many perfect leaves with glowing red stalks and very few nasty looking ones. I didn't hate it, nope, as I made my bunches and trimmed the plant (because this patch will be harvested again), I got into a happy little rhythm of bunching. When I carried a full crate to the van at the other end, I passed Lorenz and noticed that I was almost as fast as he was. Hmmmm... I didn't comment on this and retreated to my end of the row. Next crate, same thing - I was more or less keeping up to Lorenz, and a surrepetitious inspection of his bunches convinced me that mine weren't smaller or particularly pathetic relative to his. It didn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out that I was on the good end of the row and Lorenz was working his way through the not as nice stuff, but it also didn't take a lot of smarts to keep quiet about this! I filled my third crate lickety-split, Lorenz said it was lunchtime, and we went down to the red barn with six full crates of pretty nice bunches. It wasn't until after lunch, when Lorenz had counted and announced that we only needed 81 more bunches, that I spilled the beans about how good the far end of the row was. And it wasn't until we were down to 30 more bunches that I casually said, you know, there's lots of good chard where I am, you could just work there too. (Lorenz would like you to know that *his* bunches were prettier than mine. Lorenz has pretty bunches, but then, he's also the man who bragged that he had nice melons. Heh.)

On Monday, I was appropriately thankful. No more chard. And I didn't get silly enough to volunteer to help with washing, trimming and packing the rutabagas. Because, you know, I was busy. I was baking a pie! I had announced my intention of baking a pumpkin pie early in the weekend, and Lorenz immediately informed me that he was all out of pie pumpkins. I came back with the information that I'd read somewhere that you can make a "pumpkin" pie out of any sort of winter squash, but decided to humour Lorenz and turn one of those "French" pumpkins (that's what he calls them - they're really called Rouge vif d'étampe pumpkins, which I think translates to vivid red embossed pumpkin, but you can also call them "Cinderella" pumpkins, according to the seed catalogue we consulted when I wanted to know their "real" name) into a pie. I didn't tell Lorenz, though, that I was making *two* pies - one out of the French pumpkin, one out of a winter squash. And then, the winter squash one would taste just as good, and I would have proven my point.

Alas, the winter squash pie was good, but nowhere near as good as the French pumpkin. Ruth called just as I pulled the pies out of the oven, and, without taste-testing either, I grabbed the winter squash pie and took it to her house for movie night. I thought it was okay, though not great - which is why I was particularly surprised when Lorenz, who had sampled the pie I left on his counter, said he liked the pumpkin pie. This man is not a pastry fiend, and though it's possible he was sucking up to me on account of the 240 outstanding bunches of chard at this point, I watched him eat another huge piece at lunch and he can't fake it *that* well. Clearly, this called for more pie making (we'd already eaten two thirds of the pie by Sunday afternoon, and there was still Thanksgiving proper, with lunch with my brother and all, to come!). And my second French pumpkin pie turned out just as yummy, even my brother ate it! Thus, the red barn troll weblog now turns into a recipe sharing site. Here you go:

Barn Troll Pumpkin Pie

1 Greenfields Farm Rouge vif d'étampe pumpkin (be sure to ask for the "French" pumpkin, otherwise nobody will know what you mean)
unbaked pie shell(s)
spices: 1 tsp cinnamon, pinch nutmeg, plus some cloves and ginger, and some vanilla extract
1 cup cream
1 cup milk
5 eggs
1 cup sugar (half white, half brown, or raw sugar, or the organic sugar that comes in the waxed carton that Lorenz has in his cupboard)

Take the pumpkin, cut it up, scoop out the guts. Peel it (peeling these pumpkins is no more difficult than peeling an apple). Chop the peeled pumpkin into little bits. Boil it until it is soft. Drain. Mash it all up in a food processor or blender. Dump the pumpkin puree into a fine meshed sieve or a sieve lined with cheesecloth. Let drain for at least two hours - the pumpkin mush will reduce to half its volume as the water drains out.

Put eggs, spices and sugar into food processor (or, if you are so inclined, beat by hand). Turn on food processor. Add pumpkin mush. Finally, add milk and cream. When all is smoothly beaten together, put into unbaked pie shell(s) (this is enough for two small pies, or you can do what I did and take a big "flan" dish and make one huge pie). Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour (somewhat less if you have two small pies). Pull out of oven and brag to all who will listen that you made a pie.

And, to conclude the domestic bliss entry, I will also share the kohlrabi-fennel bake recipe that Lorenz conned me into making yesterday (I claim to hate kohlrabi, why would I volunteer to cook it? Lorenz, however, spent over an hour digging through his cookbook pile to find this particular recipe while bragging about how good it was. Then, when he finally found it, he casually said, since you're making lunch, this would go really well with it, why don't I get you some fennel and kohlrabi... and you know what? it was really good! but not as good as my pie!)

Kohlrabi-Fennel Bake

2 large fennel bulbs
3 small kohlrabi
chicken stock
butter, flour, milk
paprika
parmesan cheese

Slice kohlrabi and fennel, and cook until tender. Make a béchamel sauce: melt butter over medium heat, add flour and make smooth paste. Cook without burning for 3-4 minutes, add milk to make sauce, keep whisking as sauce thickens. Drain kohrabi and fennel, put into greased casserole dish. Pour sauce over top. Liberally sprinkle with paprika and parmesan. Bake, uncovered, in 350 degree oven for half an hour.

Greenfields Gothic

"The sunchokes always flower just before the frost". I'm not kidding, that's what Lorenz said not two weeks ago. And they started flowering the last weekend of September. By Wednesday night, we had our first frost - but it was so light that I wasn't aware of it until people asked me how my garden had fared. It was just a touch, and did no real damage, either down here or up in the fields.

This past Saturday night, though, we had clear skies, no wind, and hard frost. I woke up just after seven on Sunday, looked out the window, and thought, "sparkly".

You only get one chance every year to take some of these pictures: perfect vegetables, frozen and frost-rimmed. Once the sun hits them, they turn to limp, black mush. So, even though I had not had my coffee yet, and even though it was really warm under my down duvet, and even though it was Sunday and there was no reason to leave my cosy little cocoon, I tossed a sweater (and then another sweater) over my pajamas, crunched over the grass, did a quick check on the garden (frost only along the edges, like the morning glory vine) and scurried on up to the field. If there was going to be frost-induced carnage, I wanted to see it.

In the grand scheme of things, this is the prettiest carnage I've ever seen. Delicate things like pepper leaves and basil plants turned to frost-rimmed still-life with vegetable motifs. The tomatoes, peppers and egglants looked fine, but Lorenz explained that this is only because they had enough residual heat in them that they didn't build frost on the surface but they are still affected and are pretty much done. Other things, like kale, only get better after frost since the cold sweetens them up (I don't know how this works, but I always think late kale tastes the best too). And then there are things like swiss chard which Lorenz wasn't sure about: he'd "have to see". He wasn't, however, eager to leave the couch and Coronation Street and see the fields beyond the images on my laptop computer before noon that morning.

You can't really blame Lorenz for choosing a soap opera over inspecting his fields on a sunny and pretty (sparkly!) Sunday morning. He's been battling a cold all week and HP was making crepes in the kitchen. Beyond these immediate comfort reasons, though, I suspect that vegetable farmers meet the first hard frost with mixed feelings: though it isn't exactly great that all this produce they worked so hard to grow is now sparkly (and, very soon after that, limp), weather like this also marks the time when things finally start to slow down.

It hasn't exactly been slow here of late. On Friday, I wandered up to the fields to find a frantic tomato harvest in progress. At the same time, Lorenz was motoring down a row of eggplants, filling his bucket with lightning speed. Even with all this harvesting, it was obvious to me that there were simply more tomatoes, peppers, basil plants and eggplants than could possibly be harvested by the crew. And some of these plants would have kept producing indefinitely, it seemed - so the frost sent them signal to stop, we're done with that nonsense now.

Of all the seasons, fall really is a drama queen: the first hard frost makes an entrance that you can't miss even if you're slumbering away under a down duvet. At the latest, you'll notice it when you go pilfering the fields for basil. The brilliant reds, oranges and yellow grab your attention, and don't lose it during the short time that the colours last. Fall, even more than summer, demands "pay attention to me now, I'll be gone in no time". I've already started scoping out the pumpkin patch, looking for that one perfect big pumpkin to turn into a jack-o-lantern. When I ride my bike up the laneway, there is a crunching of leaves under the wheel. In the middle of the afternoon, the air is crisp and the sun is warm enough to lounge in an Adirondack chair and drink cappucino (which is precisely what I did yesterday). When you lose the sun, you start looking for a wool sweater. In the evenings, Lorenz throws some wood into the furnace.

And sitting at her computer the next day, the Red Barn Troll departs from her usual flippant nature and starts waxing on about crunchy leaves, wood smoke, and the late sun on her face, at which point she realizes that she is veering dangerously close to "Greenfields Gothic": by painting this pastoral fall scene, I am reducing a working farm which is populated by real people with real lives into a picture book caricature of Life in the Country with a Pumpkin Patch. So, to interrupt this romanticized little interlude, let me catch you up on three other pieces of news: one, the brakes on the van failed last week, marking the third time this year thet the Turnip has had to go in for repairs, at which time it was discovered that the water pump also needed replacing; two, Minou, my favourite of all the cats in the barn, has disappeared for good. It's a coyote eat cat world out there Finally, sucky number three is that HP has worked his last farmers' market and is leaving us for good this week. Sigh.