Spring Inspiration--"It all turns on affection"

Photo by Pam Spalding

I cannot believe it has been almost 3 months since I last posted on the blog; especially since I should be using the blog to promote the fact that I still have CSA shares available, see website for details.  I have had all kinds of inspiration for potential posts, its just been a very busy spring--full of garden work and events--so difference from last year when the long cold winter kept me indoors pining away for warm dry weather.  This year is just the opposite, instead I am counting these recent rainy days a blessing.  I am have be longing for the excuse to be inside and catch up on paper work and farm promotion.  Plus, until very recently, the garden was dangerously dry. 

But enough about the weather.  What finally prompted me to post on the blog, is the wonderful Wendell Berry.  Not a surprise to anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis.  I am a huge fan, and so often incorporate quotes or poetry into my posts, that it has become sort of joke around the farm.  This however is a special occasion.  On Monday, Wendell Berry delivered a National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Speech at the Kennedy Center entitled "It All Turns on Affection"  click link to watch speech or if you prefer to read it click this link.  It begins around minute 11.  The speech is sober, studied, timely, inspirational, and brilliant.  I was tearfully humbled to be part of the local food economy he referenced in the speech.  If you have an hour, I strongly recommend taking the time to watch it.  Turns out I am not the only Wendell Berry fan--click here to read Mark Bittman's recent piece for the New York Times.  Like Mark Bittman I believe Wendell Berry is a true American Hero.

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever,” [Margaret] said. “This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest upon the earth.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910)¹

Reduction Resolution

Photo by Kelly G

"We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?" - Wendell Berry

Whereas the Holidays are all about indulgence and excess; the New Year ushers in a time when many seem to focus on reduction. Whether it is cleansing and detoxifying, meditating and exercising or cleaning up our homes and offices—it seems like many are making the all important connection between the health of our bodies, spirits, and environment with the simplification of our lives. Reducing waste related to our eating and cooking habits has been the subject of numerous articles recently and I thought I would share some links of interest. 
Links:
Yes Magazine’s Ten Tips for a Zero Waste Household

Alternet’s Compost Cuisine: Amazing Ways to Make Delicious Food Out of Garbage

Mother Earth Posted this article on their Facebook site recently about how to store fruits and veggies without using plastic

Nourishing the Plant posted this article on reducing food waste

Here at Inverbrook Farm we compost our garden scraps. If you are a member of the CSA we offer to take your food scraps, that way if you do not have a home composting system we can do it for you. If you are interested in signing up for the 2012 CSA Season (a great way to keep you diet resolution) please check out the farm website. We are offering a special $50 discount for those who sign up before the end of January. Best wishes with your New Year Resolutions.

April is National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month and I recently had the good fortune of attending a lovely poetry reading by Christianna Hannum Miller and Diane Herrin at the Kennett Flash. It was a fitting start to this month-long celebration of the importance of poetry to us all. Christy had done a similar type of event a few years earlier, first alerting me to the existence of National Poetry Month. You can read all about that evening in a posting from the Kennett Farmers Market Blog.

The local Philly band The Great Unknown is also celebrating National Poetry Month with the release of a new EP and participation in a special concert at the Apollo Theater – the 4th annual poetry slam to benefit the America SCORES Foundation. Last winter the Great Unknown traveled to inner city schools across America facilitating poetry-to-song workshops; a project directed by the collaborative program of ASCAP and America SCORES. You can read more in a New York Times article that appeared last December.

Below is a video from one of the workshops. The band's goal with this project was to reinforce the importance of each child’s voice, that individuals have something important say.
The results really are quite magical. I encourage you to check out the rest of the videos from the winter tour at The Great Unknown Video Page. The Great Unknown will be performing at the WHYY Studios this Thursday, April 14 and also participating in this coming weekend’s (4/16 and 17) Philadelphia Book Festival click here for more details.

You might be wondering what connection poetry has to farming. Besides the fact that I love to include poetry in my blog postings, I can confidently say that the single most influential entity in my decision to become a farmer has been the writings of farmer-poet Wendell Berry. His essays, short stories, novels, and most of all poetry has been a guiding force to many a new farmer (and local economy advocates). This year Wendell Berry was given a National Humanity Award by President Obama, giving him the opportunity to acknowledge the First Lady’s local food advocacy. I leave you with his “instructions” for being a poet.

How To Be a Poet
By Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Happy Thanksgiving--the true Pleasure of Eating

Happy Thanksgiving! I thought I would put forth one of my favorite Wendell Berry excerpts--all about the true pleasure of eating. Thank you all for your support--from turkeys to salad greens, from farmers markets to CSAs--you should feel proud of your connection to the land and community that is embodied in this very special meal.

An excerpt from Bringing it to the Table (2009, Counterpoint Press):

" The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health if the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. ..."

(Wendell Berry from the 1989 essay "The Pleasures of Eating" as republished in Bringing it to the Table, 2009.)

The Passing of our Matriarch

My grandmother, Ida Kerr Lofting, more commonly known as Nana, passed away peacefully on December 31st--the blue moon--a fitting earthly departure for such an amazing women. She was active and lucid right up until the end, no small feat for a woman of 94 years of age. To read about her memorial service, including pictures and words from her family click here.

Nana was extremely supportive of the farming operation-- besides allowing me to farm her property, she was my first (volunteer) worker--picking beans like no one else could. When bending down to harvest became a little too much for her (this happened around age 90), she continued her support with egg boxing, chicken delivery, and allowing poultry sales in her kitchen. She was a fan of the Kennett Farmers Market, sticky buns and sweet corn were some of her favorite Market items.

From her I inherit my love of acidic tomatoes, roma beans, and swiss chard. I learned how to french beans and score corn for freezing, how to prepare rhubarb so it tastes just right on warm buttered toast, and how there is nothing better than her strawberry freezer jam. Her simple but delicious cooking gave me an early and concrete taste for the virtues of farm fresh ingredients. I will miss her greatly, but know that her spirit lives on at Inverbrook. She will be with me forever, strolling around the garden with the dogs. I can here her voice in this poem from Wendell Berry's latest book of poetry Leavings.

VIII.

I tremble with gratitude
for my children and their children
who take pleasure in one another.

In our dinners together, the dead
enter and pass among us
in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

~2005~

A sense of place-recent blog postings

Sometimes I spend way too long searching the internet for recipe inspirations, photos, and folklore about the produce I feature in a particular week's share. Well I have yet to find the perfect daikon radish link, however I found this wonderful posting on Grist.org about Apples and a sense of place. I love the sentiment, and as a farmer so enjoy the opportunity to explore a deeper connection to history, culture, and what it means to create community, not to mention the fact that I am a total sucker for any Wendell Berry reference, also one of my life's inspirations, my person guru so to speak.

Speaking of a sense of place, check out Happy Cat's lastest posting (I will add a little warning about Punk Rock Farmer's language, not for the young or sensitive reader). Nothing like foraging for your seed source!

The Apple Tree
by Wendell Berry for Ann and Dick O’Hanlon

In the essential prose
of things, the apple tree
stands up, emphatic
among the accidents
of the afternoon, solvent,
not to be denied.
The grass has been cut
down, carefully
to leave the orange
poppies still in bloom;
the tree stands up
in the odor of the grass
drying. The forked
trunk and branches are
also a kind of necessary
prose—shingled with leaves,
pigment and song
imposed on the blunt
lineaments of fact, a foliage
of small birds among them.
The tree lifts itself up
in the garden, the
clutter of its green
leaves halving the light,
stating the unalterable
congruity and form
of its casual growth;
the crimson finches appear
and disappear, singing
among the design.