Manure!

Yes, folks. This is what I'm doing with my Penn education.

We spent an afternoon at a neighboring farm spreading compost from his oxen (enormous creatures! not at all what Oregon Trail prepared me for. these would never drown in a river) in exchange for all the blueberries we can eat come this summer.

America!

How pastoral: sitting around after a long day of harvest eating apple pie (you'll have to turn your head but it's decorated like Hobbes). The real story? We made pie early in the evening when we still had energy and baked in it in the bread oven. By 8:30 we were all exhausted, laying on the couches and wondering how much longer we had to stay up. Five minutes post-pie and we're crawling into bed, ready for chores in the morning.

Tacos!

Tacos! For lunch!

We're in the middle of our gloomy last harvest day. There's nothing quite like hacking cabbage stems apart in a 70 degree downpour in late October. Sadly today is Nate, our head grower's, last harvest before he leaves us for a new farm near Amherst. We're making the best of it by cleaning out the lower barn all afternoon and having lots of fun in the mud.

Friday Night Lights

After one weekend spent in Athol, I was prepared for the lack of nightlife and another evening spent on the farm. Luckily, inspiration struck in the form of the Athol High School football game. Go Red Raiders! We pulled out a win against the Red Hawks (hometown unclear) and didn't win the 50/50 raffle while drinking hot apple cider. Can't wait for the next home game!

Clutch

Dear Clutch,

Guess which one is an acceptable place to sleep.

My bed:

The chair downstairs where no one ever sits:

Sincerely,

The folks whose room you've taken over because their door doesn't latch

PS: if you were Hobbes or Pippin we wouldn't care.

PPS: please keep your dead mice habit outdoors.

Our Own Starbucks

Emily, Kiyoshi and I woke up early to be ready to start milking at 6:30 this morning. After bringing Pride, our dairy cow, in from the field, we set to work. Milking is incredibly difficult to do quickly when we have little to no experience so it take us over an hour between getting everything set up and finishing. During that time, we were hankering for a pre-breakfast coffee so I popped into the house for two mugs. What better than filling the rest of the cup with steaming warm milk? We found out that if you add enough quick enough, it froths at the top and tastes better than anything a coffee shop could make. We're getting rather spoiled with our fresh milk supply. We even had a chicken come in to supervise.

Newport!

Theo and I just got back yesterday from a very successful weekend in Newport. Reasons for the success? 1) amazing Philly beer 2) PR in a 5K 3) seeing friends from Philly 4) the pork. The weekend got docked some points since Levi was not in attendance.

We started the weekend with Sarah and my 5K which was great, followed by a day wandering around Newport, a dinner of braised pork and vegetables from the farm and Jamie-Lee and Aaron's half marathon the next morning. And when I write Jamie-Lee and Aaron, I really mean Jamie-Lee and Duff-Man.

Thanksgiving

It's fun to see my Thanksgiving dinner running around the farm. Turkeys are incredibly strange creatures. They're reminiscent of dinosaurs and sound about the same (I imagine). They move as a group and run really fast so that taking pictures can be difficult. We're slaughtering them soon so I can triumphantly carry a turkey I've killed myself to the table this November. That'll be much more of an adventure than providing the pumpkin, I'm sure.

Chickens

Shoot! I hate when I put all my eggs in one basket!

We each have chores that rotate every week and this week, along with Emily and Kiyoshi, I have chickens, horses and pigs. Our two draft horses are wonderful and easy and the most exciting thing they do is eat carrots we pull out of the garden. The pigs are some of my favorite animals on the farm. If they can't reach the troughs (mostly cause they're growing bigger every day) they bite each other's butts until one moves. Lots of squealing ensues. Chickens are also awesome. They get excited every time you walk over since they think they're getting more food. Collecting the eggs is quite fun since they're often warm and it's cool to see how many you get each day. What's not so fun is the chickens who peck your hands and make loud chicken noises at you. We also have the duck (pictured a few days ago) and guinea hen who both showed up here and have never left.

Next week I'll be moving the beef cows to a new pasture each evening and milking in the morning. There's nothing like the fresh milk we've been getting here! Delicious.

Levi

We'll miss you, buddy,

One of These Chickens...

One of these chickens is not like the others. Our little friend showed up one day and hasn't left. Identity crisis, perhaps. Or running from the law.

Fun at the Farm School

There isn't much to do in Athol, MA but we manage to keep ourselves entertained:

Sheep!

Here are the sheep videos that I couldn't upload yesterday. The first one is here and the second one is here.

Sheep Could Qualify for Boston

Today, I found out just how fast sheep run. Very, very fast. We had to move them (after they escaped) so I got to run with a bucket of grain, trying to stay ahead of them. Didn't work so well. We did get them into their new pasture but next time I'm going to get some jet-powered shoes to keep up.

Here's a clip of me beginning the sprint and Justin walking after Rudy, our 'special' lamb. I'm trying to add more sheep videos but it's not working so well.

Food!

I think it's quite impossible to make bad food here. For instance, this morning began with homemade granola, raspberry pancakes (the berries fresh from the garden) and scrambled eggs with vegetables also from the garden. Lunch was lentil soup with kale and apple salad. Dinner was pasta with tomatoes, chard, onions, garlic and chicken all from the farm along with a butternut squash soup. We went to pick the produce for dinner from the fields. A lot better than where I used to grocery shop, for sure.

The Great Calf Escape

We were minding our own business weeding and reading beds for the last planting of the season when we all looked up to two calves romping across the not yet harvested crops. Not so good. We had heard plenty of stories about animal escapes, some funny, some that I hope never to repeat, and we jumped up from the dirt to chase after them. For the first escape of our year here, it was quite anticlimactic. The calves acted like teenagers caught doing something they knew was wrong and hurried back under their fence to their pasture. We found where the fence had shorted out, aiding their path to freedom. Patrick, who had been overseeing our planting assured us that the animals aren't that easy every time so I'm equally nervous and excited to see what all these cows/sheep/pigs/goats have up their sleeves.

Where we live

This is our second bedroom which is looking much better now. We even attached the bookshelf to the wall so it wouldn't fall over! Pedal, the gray cat who lives here and who is a bit crazy, has moved herself in and we're not so sure that's ok. The door may be remaining shut all year so that we don't have to clean up after her.

Our bedroom, which luckily faces south and is one of the only warm rooms in the farmhouse. Warm being a relative term, of course, since I already sleep with two comforters and am going to be adding a third soon.

Our rooms are on the second floor and these are the stairs heading down into the dining room/kitchen area and front door. Sophia got that sewing machine working. Pretty cool.

The living room.

Our pantry where we each have a hook, two shelves and tons and tons of food.

Our kitchen! We just got a new stove and dishwasher this year so we are quite lucky. It's also big enough that five people can be in it before it starts to feel crowded.

Food scraps! There's nothing better than watching all the pigs come running when you walk down with their bucket.

Our farmhouse. I took this on one of the only sunny days we've had so far.

The view from the kitchen.

The barn.

Chickens eating cabbage scraps from when we made sauerkraut.

Cows from Massa-mooooo- setts!

The view up from the barn towards the house.

Motor

I had wanted to write something cheerful today about our first day of work in the fields but Motor, the orange tabby who lived here and who had been sick since the summer, was put down this morning. We were talking at lunch today about processing the chickens and pigs. Olivier asked us what parts of the pigs going to slaughter in November we wanted back and we all asked for the marrow and tongues along with the fat to render lard. Yet we took time out of our lunch break to bury a pet cat and Emily picked some hydrangeas for his grave. It's certainly not logical but is perhaps important to stop and think about the animals we raise for food and those we raise for companionship.

Motor was born down the road in the house where Patrick and his family live and he moved here with the first class of student farmers years ago. He had been on the farm longer than many of the staff. We all woke up to him crying, for lack of a better term, from a seizure early this morning and by the time we sat down to breakfast he was on the way to the vet. We buried him at lunch time under the perennials Jen, one of his biggest fans, had planted this past summer. Nate and Andrew shared some memories and I couldn't help but feel that he was cheated in that our new class of student farmers hadn't gotten a chance to know him. Those students who just left and those before them had a much deeper connection to him. Regardless of who was there today, he will be missed by many.

Cooking!

We spent the weekend cooking which was a blast and ended in a huge dinner for the whole staff tonight of chicken, chicken, chicken (and some salad, pumpkin soup and the first chocolate chip cookies of the year).

We started the morning by drying some rosemary and tomatoes. Andrew, the second year student who is in charge of our farmhouse, food and helping us out, brought out the dehydrator.

Theo and Sofia cut the meat and skin off pig backs that we then rendered for lard.

We made 10 gallons of sauerkraut and kimchi. It took most of the day to draw the moisture out of the cabbage by mixing it with salt and pounding it. It will last us for most of the winter. You can also see that I dressed as a farmer today in my nifty new red plaid shirt.

This is how the sauerkraut ended up: cabbage in blue water. Delicious.

This is the kimchi spread all over the table as we mix in all the other veggies.

Our very first chocolate chip cookies of the year! The farm egg yolks were bright orange and really changed the color of the dough. They came out as delicious as always.

Chicken fried in the rendered lard.

After 15 chickens, lots of herbs, oil, vegetables harvested from the field, two days and lots of dishes, we are very tired, full and glad to have leftovers.

We start our normal schedule tomorrow so more to come about that!

Before Farming...

Before there were farmers, there were hunter-gatherers. Theo and I have successfully joined the latter (having not yet had an opportunity to do more than walk around the farm and get a sense of the place). When we turned up here to an unfurnished room and a second room with a bed and a chair, it felt rather nice to have so few belongings after moving all of ours. That lasted until this evening when we found out that the attic was a furniture graveyard of past students who hadn't packed their room's contents when they left. We got: two bedside tables, a dresser, a bookshelf (homemade by the looks of it), two mattresses arranged as a couch and two lamps. A bucket of dirty water, four rags, one huge spider and an ant colony later, we are much more moved in and beginning to hang up pictures and imagining when our first guest will arrive to sleep on our couch/bed.

The farm is huge and amazing and really rainy- I found out today that my rain jacket failed its most simple task of being waterproof and keeping me dry. While standing looking at the cows I watched the rain bead up on the shoulders of my fellow students while it slowly seeped through my jacket, my sweater and my shirt beneath it. Needless to say, it was a chilly and damp three hours walking around the fields. I at least had boots, courtesy of my mom as her 'going to school' gift while I think Theo's feet resembled prunes in his sneakers. Gone are the days of dashing from building to building in the city while it pours. Instead we talk about how sandier soil is much dryer than heavier, clay types and what that means in drought years like this one. This has been the first rain here in months and the crops and fields have been feeling it: the cows and sheep can't remain on pasture much longer without exhausting the grass and the raspberry plants are feet shorter than they would be otherwise.

The good news is that the pumpkin crop was a good one and after exchanging some with a brewery, we have pumpkin ale with dinner tonight when we meet up with the rest of the farm staff for a BBQ and games.