Our new farm sign adorns the barn

We have a farm sign!! Check it out. ‘Nuff said.

The barn

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Beans climbing in the morning light

I love summer mornings on the farm. Once morning chores are done, I love to just poke around the garden and take in the splendor in the beautiful morning light. Here are some pictures from this morning.

Broilers, finished with their morning grain, looking for more

Bee and mustard flowers

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Charlotte and Bea help Julie and Chris cover their garden plot with newspaper and straw.

Spring weekends are never quite long enough–by Monday morning, we’ve begun as many new projects as we’ve completed, and we wish we could keep riding the momentum of two solid days, all of us together, on the farm. Our weekend began with the first flavors of the garden: Saturday breakfast of poached eggs on homemade toast with lightly sautéed asparagus and a drizzle of mustard whisked with olive oil. It was a fortifying meal for a rainy day with a big project at hand–after tending the saplings in buckets packed with wet sawdust for a week, we finally put in the latest additions to the orchard! In addition to our ten (eleven?) established apple trees, we now have two new heirloom apples, three pears, and four high bush blueberries.  In an effort to extend the growing season of the farm, the new apples are winter producers, Frostbite and Black Oxford, and the pears will fruit in succession: Seckel in summer, Bosc in autumn, and Sheldon in winter. The Sheldon is especially exciting because it’s a good keeper, and is said to taste even better after mellowing in the root cellar for a couple of months. We chose heavy producers for the blueberries, to round out our existing patch of wild and high bush plants: Elliot, Bluecrop, and Earliblue.

On Mothers’ Day, we had the treat of picking out a few new plants (Charlotte saved her allowance to buy Margaret a geranium for the front porch), and helping our friends Julie, Chris, and Ada in their garden. Julie and Chris are in the process of looking for land to farm, and one of the most exciting developments at Ten Apple this year is being able to offer them a plot to experiment with in our orchard as they start their farm journey. We all celebrated our hard work with a Sunday supper that included volunteer mustard greens that reseeded themselves from last year and rhubarb cobbler.

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Poached egg with asparagus on toast

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Margaret, Charlotte and Bea gather in the sukkah on the first night of Sukkot.

This essay was originally published in the October/November 2009 issue of The Voice, the newspaper of the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine:

Until my husband Karl and I began Ten Apple Farm, our small homestead in southern Maine, I don’t think we truly understood the agricultural nature of Judaism. On an intellectual level we knew that Sukkot was a festival that celebrated the year’s final harvest, just as, in the spring, Shavuot has its origins in the joy of the season’s first fruits. But in our actual practice of Judaism, these holidays were distanced from their roots.

Before leaving our urban lives for something earthier and more sustainable, we lived in Brooklyn. There, celebrating Sukkot meant buying bundled cornstalks at the corner bodega, propping them on a crude frame over our patio furniture, and inviting friends over for a meal that included stuffed vegetables that, according to several of our kosher cookbooks, signified the harvest bounty. If we remembered in time, we might find a lulav to shake and an etrog to sniff, but with the haze of city lights, we certainly couldn’t see stars through the roof. Read more…

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Charlotte takes new doelings Tonny (left) and Toka (right) for a walk.

Two new doelings arrived today from River Falls Farm.

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