Birds!

Posted on May 22, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com
turkey 3-6-12 small

turkey in March 2012

I was hoping to sleep until 7:15 a.m. today, but the pheasant outside my window had another idea. It sounded like he was standing on my balcony and every minute or two he’d let out a tremendous squawk followed by a rapid whirring of his wings. I’m sure it’s very sexy to female pheasants. It  made me anxious. And awake.

These are great — and anxious — days for bird life. It has been lush and green and rainy for the past four days, and the first goldfinches, bluebirds, cardinals and red-breasted everything are like jewels in the landscape.

Tom turkey is strutting his stuff and spreading his tailfeathers. The geese and ducks are coming and going at all hours, not sure where to go and what to do or quite where to set up house. (Not on our pond, please! It’s the pond of death!)

turtle-on-roadThe turtles are also making their way from the lower pond to the upper pond. We moved three of them from the driveway to safe ground on Sunday alone.

But into all this, tragedy also struck. Last Thursday, when I was reading dozily on the screened porch, the chickens started putting up a huge ruckus. Although they are hens, now and then they will crow. But this was unusual, and I almost went out to see if they were OK. But I was drowsy and it seemed like whatever had happened was probably over.

Turns out, one of the chickens was caught and killed by a hawk. When I heard them, they’d rushed to the barn and were safely in hiding. (In fact, the sound seemed to be coming from the area where the bees are, and I was wondering if they were getting in each other’s way.)

chicken-remainsWithin two days, this is all that was left of the chicken. Between the hawk and the crows, they left nothing but the feet and a few feathers. (Making me wonder about people who eat chicken’s feet if they are even rejected by scavengers! Must be in the preparation.)

chickens-may-13The other chickens are still a little stunned, and I spotted three of them standing on the dead understory of a pine tree for hours on Saturday. But every day they venture out a little farther.

Which is to say, it’s a wonderful chaotic time. The fact that it didn’t thaw until May doesn’t seem to have hampered things too badly, especially with the rain helping the plants to catch up. The sand hill cranes, clearly on the nest, are quiet. But the frogs, the birds, the rest of life is at full volume.

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Tomatoes

Posted on May 18, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

tomato plants in wallowater 5-18-13This is the most anxious time in the garden. This year feels especially fraught.

In May we have had a record low temperature (14 degrees on May 2) and a record high (96 degrees on May 15). And it is only May 18. My Wall-o-Waters were useless, as 14 degrees is too low for even them to provide protection (lost two tomatillos and a tomato to frost when I put them out a little prematurely) and then the soil was very warm and the “last frost date” had passed. I still am using them as wind shields for the delicate tomato plants I transplanted outside today. The few I put out last week did very well with this protection against last night’s storm, and hopefully this will help with tonight’s storms.

tomato plants 2 5-18-13Spring storms and high winds are not unusual out here on the prairie. I am always anxious between May 15-June 15 for the little tomato plants. But as weather gets more severe and unpredictable, I am getting worried. Could a day come when I can’t grow tomatoes? Or at least, can’t grow tomatoes without a greenhouse? Hothouse tomatoes are not what I have in mind… but I seriously can’t live without canned tomatoes, let alone a couple precious weeks of fresh ones.

Transplanting the tomatoes is also heartbreaking because of the plants I throw away. This year, the Paul Robesons did wonderfully from seed, but really, I don’t have space or inclination for eight Robeson plants, which tend to produce very little fruit. I managed to give one away and put one in a container (an experiment), and three in the garden, thinking I’ll probably pull one if they all survive. What I would like is eight paste plants, so even though I have four, I might head out and by another four-pack. But if I do that, something else will need to get sacrificed…

For now, they’re all happily planted in raised beds, properly spaced with wind protection. Hopefully they’ll harden off and grow up to produce lots of tomatoes. I will keep up with the watering if there is a drought, and I will keep them well-staked. And I will hope for the best for many years to come.

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Asparagus!

Posted on May 17, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

asparagus plants 5-17-13Three years ago, I had a dream. A dream to eat asparagus from my garden. I obsessively watched Youtube videos, ordered some plants and put them in two of my raised beds.

And for that year and the next, I just watched it grow. Each year, more stalks, and last year looking quite edible. But I held off to let all the nutrients go into the roots and enhance the plant.

Two days ago, I returned to Youtube and typed in “asparagus harvest.” There was only one video, suggesting that basically you just pick it and eat it! The video I did find showed a woman twisting off the stalks by hand and recommended harvesting when the stalks are 6-9 inches high. It also recommended harvesting in the morning, putting the stalks in cold water, then in a bag in the fridge.

I went out yesterday morning and plucked a nice long stalk. And then, I ate it. Raw. It was very tender and very flavorful. It did not need cooking at all.

asparagus on plate 5-17-13I got nine more stalks, rinsed and soaked them in water and put them in the fridge. For dinner, I cut them into pieces and steamed them a very short while with some baby kale (also from the garden). Then I added some more baby greens to the hot veggies. I made some Israeli cous cous medley from Trader Joe’s and grilled chicken thighs. Everything got doused in lemon juice, a little white balsamic and olive oil. Topped with toasted walnuts (pine nuts would have been better) and gorgonzola, it was a perfect salad to eat outside on the screen porch on a perfect late-spring day.

asparagus greens chicken

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Fruitfulness

Posted on May 14, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

prairie-5-9-13Here is that photo of the prairie from May 9th. It is hard to believe how fast the green starts to assert itself after a burn. I do love the look of this photo with the paths running through it. Soon they will green up as well. Last summer the back part was just loaded with rudbeckia, and we’re hoping that most of what is coming up is flowers (not weeds). The front is the more etablished prairie, and it’s possible we’ll see some new things getting established this year. Personally, I’m hoping for a butterfly bush or two.

In the garden itself, I’m continuing to struggle with my ambivalence about growing fruit. I was at a brunch with Brother John Hansen recently, the monk at Saint John’s Abbey who cares for the apple orchard. He said, “There is not a creature alive who doesn’t love an apple tree.”

I’ve found this to be true as well: mice, moles, voles and rabbits all attack it from the bottom. Caterpillars and other insects descend on the blossoms as soon as they appear. Deer that have not so far bothered my garden at all, come out and gobble the tender branches. Because of this, my two apple trees (which I’m sure were on the verge of giving fruit this year!) are dead.

very good compost behind the barn...

very good compost behind the barn…

OK, but there are berries. Raspberry bushes are the obvious choice, since they seem to grow more or less wild. After a few years of trying to find the right spot for them, I’ve got a new cleared space. It ain’t pretty, kind of a hummock filled with rocks, but I brought in new soil and compost and planted nine sticks with roots, as well as four blueberry bushes.  I still have a few plants over with the huckleberry bushes I planted last year. I’m anxious to see if those huckleberries are going to come back (I can’t think of a berry that is not perennial, but it was mighty cold this winter).

raspberry-bushes-5-9-13Somehow, planting sticks feels less hopeful than planting seeds. Even with a little mass of roots attached, they just look so very, very dead.

The ambivalence for berries comes from one simple question: is it worth it to tend them for what you get? I do believe, again, that raspberries are a no brainer. They are not hard to cultivate or care for and the fruit is so delicate that it is best picked close to home and close to eating time.

Blueberries and strawberries, however, I think should mostly be left to other people. I’m considering the blueberries an experiment, but I don’t plan to grow strawberries. There are a number of You-pick places around and for an hour or two I can get enough berries for jam and frozen berries for the year. The cost of mulching, pruning, covering, weeding, and otherwise caring for strawberry plants (and maybe also blueberry bushes), makes this the best option.

So for a while at least I’ll feel foolish watering my sticks, hoping for fruit by August. And then, hopefully, it’s just a matter of not letting the raspberries take over everything else.

IMG_7303[1]

 

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Spring Green

Posted on May 10, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

photoI’m in Chicago for the weekend visiting my niece.  (Part of the purpose of the trip was to deliver these kitchen stools by Steve, and father and daughter shared the paper over breakfast this morning.)

The cold followed me here, but it feels good to be where things are blooming. The tulips are up, the lilacs are out and the rain has made everything lush and green. The line for trees with leaves on them was basically Menomonie, Wisconsin. North and west of there, everything was still grey, but south and east, spring had arrived in all its glory.

There was a woman in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence with me named Annie Lanzilotto who had grown up in the Bronx. When a very wealthy woman in the program (whose “job” was managing her family money to make sure they were invested in socially conscious stocks) said her family money came from oil, Annie said, “My father was in oil, too!” When she received a disbelieving look, she said, “It was right on the side of the truck, Lanzilotto Oil. Heating oil, that is. Annie was very smart and talented and had gotten through Brown University while fighting non-Hodgkins lymphoma. photo (3)

When I told Annie I’d gone to college in Iowa, her eyes widened. “Iowa is where I learned about the colors green-yellow and yellow-green. Those were two crayons in my box of 64 that I never used. But I was on a bike ride in Iowa (possibly RAGBRAI), and everywhere I saw fields that were green-yellow and yellow-green. I’d wondered where those colors were.

photo (1)Well, on the way to Chicago I saw lots of those two colors. And once here, I was treated to a whole rainbow more. Before I left, I put together the e-newsletter for the retreat house where I work. I looked everywhere for a photo of something that wasn’t grey or brown and dead. The day I was going to send it out, I saw that the crocuses had bloomed in a couple little batches along the walkway to our prayer space. And so it begins.

(I’d hoped to post a photo of the prairie coming in where we burned it. It is another very hopeful sign, as after a couple days of rain, all sorts of green sprouts have come up. And walking around, they mostly look like flowers and native grasses, not as many weeds as before… alas, my adapter isn’t working here so it will have to wait.)

photo (2)

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Spring Greens

Posted on May 2, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

spring burn fixedYesterday morning I worked diligently away on the proofs of a book while the classical music station played songs related to May. Ah, May! Glorious spring! Month of full bloom! We can finally put that cruel month, April, behind us.

Interspersed between these gay tunes were weather updates about an approaching snowstorm and the threat of 6 inches or more…

So I should be happy, grateful even, that the prairie still looks like this, black except for the paths, from the prairie burn the day before. All the snow (as much as 14 inches) fell south and east of us. But since it was 32 degrees this morning when I woke up, I’m kind of saving my gratitude for later.

spring greens and parsnips 4-30-13On April 30, however, I did manage– because I was just determined to eat from the garden in April– to get two lovely salads of baby greens topped with shaved parsnips on the table.

And I topped the very generic pasta with sauce from a jar and sautéed brats with some briefly sautéed arugula and sautéed green onions that survived in the cold frame.

I am loving sautéed arugula. I tend not to harvest the stuff when it is still a baby, and it gets too spicy for a salad as the leaves get bigger. Where it would overpower a salad, it does just fine with the main course.

rotini w arugula and brats 4-30-13This year we discovered the wonderful restaurant, Pizzeria Lola, in Minneapolis. My favorite pizza is one with Korean barbecue short ribs, mozzarella, scallions and arugula (with a soy chili vinaigrette) on top. I believe they prepare the greens off the pizza and just top it with them at the end, but I’m not sure. In any event, the arugula makes the dish extraordinary. I never thought I’d like lettuce on a pizza, but in this case, it works! I’m also a fan of this kind of this kind of vinaigrette. Since discovering a recipe for salmon and pea shoots in a sweet chili sauce vinaigrette, I’ve been using that flavor combination a lot more (soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, sesame oil, rice wine…)

So the first dish of the year, coming in late April and early May, is arugula.

 

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Our Shame

Posted on April 30, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

Hardly ever do I see starkly the disconnect between something that really matters and what I’m being fed by the media.suffering servant

Usually my days play out like this: the media (NPR mostly) tells me what is important and what is urgent (always very, very urgent) and then I hear other people: the president, a congressman, a pundit, a historian, an industry executive, a Boston store owner, a spokesperson for the grain elevator, whomever, weighing in on what the media already told me.

Then this morning the president has a press conference and no one knows what it is going to be about. For a half hour while we wait there is speculation. It MUST be about Syria. It MIGHT be about the budget, immigration, the FBI… Already the news shows have their experts on various topics at the ready to discuss whatever he is going to say. What is he going to tell us on one of these important topics about which we already know so much?

And he says he will be closing Guantanamo Bay. And we remember we heard a little something somewhere about a hunger strike, but we couldn’t really listen because of our shame.

And we remember that Guantanamo is still there and he said he was going to close it four years ago but couldn’t and we can’t really think about it because we’re still afraid and we don’t know what to do.

And as soon as the words are out of his mouth, the media has questions– about Syria, about the budget, about immigration, about Bengazi ….

And I feel my shame all afternoon…

photo: “Suffering Servant” by Donald Jackson, from The Saint John’s Bible; http://saintjohnsbible.org

 

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Arrival of the Bees

Posted on April 27, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

assembling boxesSpring 2013 officially began in Central Minnesota on April 26. Yesterday the temperature went up not just into the 50s and not just into the 60s but actually up to 72. And today, we were all ready. I’m actually relieved I didn’t have my camera with me all day. Among other things, on the way to the garden store I stumbled upon a field being plowed by teams of horses, an annual event held at different century farms each year (a farm in a single family for 100 years or more). The day ended with a complete burn of all the prairie on the farm, which is always a great spectacle.

six pounds of bees

six pounds of bees

My day began with a call saying that the bees had arrived and could they come to the farm today? I had time to do a couple hours of gardening before Matthew Willenbring and his helper Jane Scherer arrived to set up the hives.

A few months ago, an acquaintance called and asked if he could set up two hives on our property. I’ve been wanting to learn about beekeeping for several years (bought a book and everything!).  This is a great opportunity to learn about it without making a big investment. (I have to say, it’s the stuff that is holding me back.)

adding the sugar water to the super

adding the sugar water to the super

The friend’s partner in the beekeeping turned out to be Matthew Willenbring from Cold Spring, who I’ve written about before obliquely— he is a young dairy farmer who sells raw milk from his farm.

Hiving the bees was actually a fairly straightforward process. The biggest task was finding a place to put the hives– where they would get full sun (facing south) and be protected from the wind (windbreak to the north and west) within 1/4 mile of water. We put them at the edge of my brother-in-law’s pine grove behind the barns. Pretty much any place on our farm is close to water, and we’re sure the bees will find their way to the ample plots of wildflowers. Matthew assured us that the one time he made wildflower honey, it was the lightest, sweetest honey he ever tasted.

new tray assemblingThe hive boxes consist of a box called a “super” that holds 8 frames where the honey is made. In place of one (in this case two) frames is a feeder frame into which you put sugar water. The bees feed off the sugar water and build out the cells of the hive. The queen will lay eggs in them and when the flowers are ready, the bees will fill them with honey to feed the new bees and the queen.

Matthew also had an old set of frames that still had the honey in them. Interspersing the new frames with these gives the hive a head start, as they can feed off actual honey (the sugar water is still there as a back-up). The real goal is for the bees to produce enough

old frame ready to feed the bees

old frame ready to feed the bees

honey to feed themselves (and their queen, who they will huddle around in an attempt to keep her body temp at 90 degrees) through the winter.

The bees (Italian bees with a Minnesota hygenic queen) are a combination of drones and workers and one queen. They arrive in a cage that is opened and placed into an empty box on top of the box with the trays. The queen travels in her own little cage. Her cage is opened and she is put in the top box off to the side. She will find her way down into the super and the bees will follow her (and/or find their way in through a small hole at the bottom of the frame). The only difficult moment here was when Matthew dropped the queen and had to pry her out. Otherwise, there is not really much interaction with the bees. They do buzz around, but they didn’t seem very interested in us.

looking for the queen

looking for the queen

More supers will be added as the bees fill them with honey, and anything above three will be available for harvesting and eating by humans. Next year, if they survive the winter, they will produce even more– and that’s when there might be enough to share with us, the landlords.

Tomorrow Matthew will come back and take out the cage. All the bees will be in the super by then. He’ll also come by with more sugar water (if they need it) and keep an eye on the progress.

matthew with bees

We finished the day as befits a full and sudden onset of spring. Steve, Tim and Sophia set every inch of prairie on fire for a full burn all around. It’s still smoky as piles of brush burn here and there. They built up through the drought, waiting for us to get a burn permit.

Everything is officially fresh and new. Tomorrow we till the bed for the potatoes and onions…

burn line 4-13

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The Mushroom Farm

Posted on April 25, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

mushroom barnIn 1985, two years before Steve purchased our 80 acres from the Sisters of the Order of Saint Benedict, Kevin Doyle, who was a classmate of Steve’s at St. John’s University, purchased the monks’ old hog farm in Collegeville.

These twin hog farms had been owned by the monastery and abbey (at a safe distance to keep the smell and waste away) and run by resident farmers who raised their families on the land and provided ample pork for the monastic communities and their colleges. However, both stopped farming long before the properties were sold.

When Kevin Doyle bought his land, he had a strong business plan. He had been living in the Twin Cities and a friend in business school asked him if he had an idea for a business they could use for a class project. Kevin had seen a report on a desk that outlined the various kinds of mushrooms you could grow in the United States. It surprised him, because the only kind you could get in the grocery store were white button mushrooms.

mushroom kevin doyleIn the next months, he researched mushroom growing and also found out there wasn’t another mushroom grower in Minnesota. Shitake and oyster mushrooms seemed the easiest to grow, but in order to offer his customers what they’d want, he also went into the business of buying other kinds of mushrooms from other sources. No grocery or restaurant wants to go to five or six different vendors for different varieties of mushrooms. And soon enough, everyone was enjoying different kinds of mushrooms!

These days, Forest Mushrooms in Collegeville is a booming business. They provide 18 kinds of mushrooms (and probably more if they get a specialty request), to food service providers, groceries and other large buyers. Kevin Doyle spends most of his time buying and selling mushrooms, not so much tending to the mushrooms sprouting out of plastic bags in the old farrowing barn.

oyster mushrooms

oyster mushrooms

Mushrooms grow fast. Kevin has eight employees: a full-time driver for deliveries, a couple business people, and four who tend to the oysters and shitakes. They sell something like 2,500 lbs of oyster and 1,500 lbs of shitake a week (I might not be remembering these numbers right, but their close– basically, tons of mushrooms!) They now outsource the preparation of the growth material: sawdust and grain blocks for the shitake and bags of straw for the oysters. They still have to steam, soak and otherwise prep them once they arrive, and then they go onto racks in the dark, humidity-controlled barns. In five days, they’re ready to harvest. (The sawdust blocks can be used four times, the bags only once.)

I went out there on Tuesday with a group from the college, as part of Earth Day/Sustainability week. I mostly wanted to get inside and see the tile barn that is exactly like ours. Kevin said that when he bought the place, all the other buildings had been moved or taken apart. In fact, someone had even gone through and stolen the steel posts out of the current barn.

shitake mushrooms

shitake mushrooms

When this barn was built, in 1938, the monks laid heated pipe in the floor. He said there was some animosity among the local farmers when they showed off their “state of the art” facility.

This was 1938, after all. The locals didn’t have heated floors for their sows.

barn with "compost" mushroom bags

barn with “compost” mushroom bags

Our farm is so different from this one, which has lots of industrial buildings like our machine shed and one house. And Kevin Doyle doesn’t get many days off or take many vacations. The mushrooms are as demanding as cows, and negotiating and sourcing fresh food is quite complicated.

IMG_5642

our furniture shop in the old farrowing barn

Our farm started more as an idea– some Oblates living close to the monastery and living simply, bringing back the prairie and holding some things in common. Over timethe farrowing barn has housed Coco the horse, machinery, storage, some chickens, and now the furniture shop. 

 

It was briefly a social space after Paul took out the feeding troughs and before Steve raised the roof and installed the glass door.

What  goes on in our old tile farrowing barn is more refined than the mushrooms, but less lucrative. What I love, though, is that these buildings are still there and still humming along.

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Terrence Malick Speaks of Love

Posted on April 23, 2013 by susanmsink@gmail.com

TO-THE-WONDEROn Saturday, in part to clear our heads after the media extravaganza that was the Boston Bomber Manhunt Week, we went to the Twin Cities to see Terrence Malick’s new film, To the Wonder. It was lovely to hear so few words and see so much beauty and think deeply about what the heck he’s trying to say…

People who were frustrated or bored by Malick’s Tree of Life should probably skip this one. We loved Tree of Life enough to watch it twice. I thought it was an incredible exploration of masculinity and familial love, particularly the complexity of love between brothers, fathers and sons. The boy wants so much to be good and loves his gentle brother and his hard father. He doesn’t want to be like his father, but something cruel stirs inside him. What is human nature? Why is there cruelty and suffering? What is the nature of suffering and loss?

to the wonder marinaTo the Wonder takes up the question of eros, erotic love, and femininity, particularly the emphasis on feminine beauty. The question here seems to be: Is it sufficient for a life? What meaning does it give? What connection? What is love and are there higher forms? What love does sustain us if erotic love is so fleeting and unsatisfying?

There is very little dialogue and very little of what could be called plot in this film. It is a two-hour lyric. And as with lyric poetry, my advice for reading it is: Follow the beauty.

For Malick, there is always natural beauty, sometimes, as in Days of Heaven and Badlands, one could almost drown in beauty– there is beauty even in every dark moment. Locusts and fire are beautiful, war is beautiful, murder can be beautiful. One cannot help but escape into a garden.

But in To the Wonder there are two very clear sources of natural beauty: the France of the courtship between the Neil and Marina (Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko), culminating in the two lovers alone at Mont St. Michel, and the beauty of the ranch owned by the Rachel McAdams character, Neil’s childhood friend who interrupts the primary love story. But most of the movie takes place in a nearly empty tract home (or multiple such homes) in Oklahoma. In this home the couple doesn’t quite unpack, doesn’t quite move in, seems unable to make a home as they can’t quite make a marriage or family. It is sterile, infertile, unlovely, and insufficient. It doesn’t nourish love and it doesn’t nourish Marina’s young daughter, who ends up going home, where she belongs, in France and into an extended family.

wonder mcadamsJane (Rachel McAdams), however, is fully of this place. Her ranch home is packed with family mementos, the grasses are high and vivid, color-drenched (whereas the treeless suburban yard is a pale thatch of dead grass), full of wild horses and bison. Her clothing, her pearls, identify her as fully of this place naturally and culturally. Her family ties (and grief) have their own burdens, but I like her chances more than those of any of the other characters.

Finally, Javier Bardem plays a disaffected Spanish priest. He cannot fully connect with the impoverished people he wants to reach and even hides in his house from one woman (for good reason!). His sermons are theologically rich but his voice is thin– it is not reaching the people in the pews and it does not even seem to be convincing him. He is also displaced. Just as he seems to have made some connections, with a disabled boy and by touching the hands of the sick and elderly, he is being transferred to a different area and parish. Is it a lack of an erotic life, or just basic human connection? Is it America? Is it that his faith is not embodied– that he shrinks from loving others and in doing so cannot fully experience the presence of God’s love?

In the final moments of the film it seems to me we get a glimpse of a man (from behind– is it Bardem?) walking into a courtyard where there are two small children, who may or may not be his. Has he returned to Spain and made a family or to his family? I have no idea.

I found this to be a wholly satisfying film. Yes, there’s that crazy sea turtle and then the montage of Versailles that seem to come out of nowhere, but mostly the film stays focused and provides a lush scape of images and words that allow us to ask real questions about love and life.

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