NOTES FROM THE FIELD
In my first season ever farming, a couple of other young farm wannabes and I visited a friend apprenticing on a horse farm in northern Maine. For context, this wasn’t a brand new apprenticeship program, this was a farm that had hosted apprentices for decades. The apprentices stayed in a compact and beautiful woodfire heated home in the woods adjacent to the fields and only 200 feet from a lake.
It wasn’t even October but already it was jacket weather in the mornings and evenings, with the dance of removing layers, and then adding them back on over the course of the day. I remember eating like royalty that weekend, taking ground beef and steaks from the farm’s deep freezer for burgers and then steak and eggs in the morning. And tons of fresh veggies, all from their farm.
We spent the evenings around a fire pit, drinking, eating, sharing stories and playing “Stump.” In this game, we each had a nail standing on a tree stump. When it was your turn, you would flip the hammer in the air, catch it and try to hit other people’s nails into the stump in one motion. If your nail was hammered all the way in, you were out.
Nights like those became a big reason why I wanted to farm. It’s the lifestyle of living in a rural place where gatherings may be a bit smaller but also feel more intimate and meaningful, and connected to the place and its people.
Sometimes when I wake up here in this city, I wonder if I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Other times, I wonder if that’s maybe why I still find joy and motivation in farming here. There’s some experiences that we can be so deprived of in the city and I never even knew that until those evenings.
In a couple weeks, we’ll be sharing a taste of that type of evening on the farm. While we won’t be playing stump (at least not this year), we will be eating, drinking, dancing, and sharing stories around a fire pit. I invite you to join us on Thursday Nov. 12th from 5:30-8:30 p.m. for Fireside on the Farm. It supports the farm while we get to share with you a unique farm evening right in the 2nd Ward. All the proceeds go to helping us bring more food and farmers to Houston. You can get tickets at fire.smallplaces.org
Hope to see you there,
Tommy
What’s in this week’s share
For our full share friends, radishes, sweet potatoes, mustards, broccoli greens, dill, serrano peppers, garlic, zucchini squash, apples, and lettuce.
For our half share friends, you’ll find sweet potatoes, turnips, dill, broccoli greens, misome, oranges, persimmons, lettuce, and garlic.
