Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Well I guess I haven't posted for awhile. Haven't really had too much of a chance or too much to write for a couple of weeks, but now I think I can squeeze something out. For the past couple of weeks, we've pretty much been getting across the country with a few neat detours along the way.
We did stop at Live Power Farm, a 150 member CSA - biointensive, biodynamic farm. We spent the day there working in their garden. Met some lovely people, there were about 6 interns there and did some garden work. That was pretty alright.
Then we spent about 3 awesome days in Oregon, camping by a river, swimming and hiking the Oregan Coast Trail in beautiful forest along the coast. That was awesome.
Then we drove and drove. Stopped at the Missoula farmers market which was nice, saw a lot of rolling prairie, stopped at a funny, neat little tractor "museum" on the side of the freeway in South Dakota and had a couple of oldster farmers show us a video of a horse-powered haystack loader (a j-fork??) - that was fun.
Stopped in Chicago and hung out with Noah! And also stopped at the Seed Savers Exchange Heritage Farm which was pretty cool. Talk about the wickedest small-scale farming bookstore. Holy. Jeff and I were drooling and had to keep each other from just putting one of each book on the checkout counter.

Anyhoo, now we're at Bobolink Dairy in New Jersey. We just arrived yesterday and it looks like it's going to be a fun month. The farm is in an extremely beautiful area, surrounded by national forest (I think that may be the running theme of this trip - hmm, not bad). 200 acres of small pastures, old farm buildings and a nice dairy and bakery. They make beautiful cheese and wood-fired bread and Jeff and I spent our first day, split up, me in the dairy, Jeff baking bread all day. It's a beautiful farm with a whole bunch of nice people on it and we're making cheese and bread - what could be bad right? Except that we;re dying for our own farm. The longer this trip is, the more impatient I seem to get. But it's going to be a good month, there's lakes all around and cows and trees and fireflies! And I can't really complain when I get to milk cows and make cheese all day.

2 comments:

Jon B said...

Hi Friends!

That's great! All of it! Exclamation point!

Here's a neat article by George Monbiot about how small farms kick large farm ass. With this key point:

"There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield."

Small is Bountiful: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/10/small-is-bountiful/

aislinn thomas said...

Leslie, it sounds gorgeous! I can imagine why you'd be aching for your own farm right now...

As for myself, I am definitely missing your veggies already.

Don't worry, I'll hang in there.

I deal with missing visiting with you guys at the farm by walking by Everett's yard...he's an older fellow who'd yard is a mini farm and who is super eager to share all sorts of information about it. Mostly I like his set up of 25+ rainbarrels, and the upside down bucket strategically placed beside the fence in order to snoop on the neighbours.
He also makes inventions.