beer, benadryl and bacon, what a good time it's makin'.

i remembered this on my way to work this morning, for no apparent reason, since i'm off the benadryl. a few years ago ed was at grand street and all doped up on the benadryl while i was writing a paper for school and we were both drinking beer. he waltzed into the kitchen, snagged some leftover bacon from breakfast, and uttered the above phrase- which i thought was so funny that i typed it in my word document only to forget about it and turn in my paper with "beer, benadryl and bacon, what a good time it's makin'" written at the bottom of a paper about stalin.

funny thing on the way to work, part two:

inflatable incredible hulk riding in the back of an el camino. awesome.
....ok, it's not an el camino. but definately a 70's something in stylish brown.

matt's wild

i just realized today that i've had teh wrong grammatical impression of matt's wild cherry tomatoes. i always thought of it as "matt is wild and here are his tomatoes" but, duh, it probably means "some farmer named matt came up with this variety of tiny ass cherry tomatoes that are a pain in the ass to pick- they're wild! matt's wild!"

obsessed with squash

my whole life revolves around winter squash.

i'm the resident squash handler at the red wagon winter squash emporium. i take home bunk squash and eat it. i arrange squash in nice piles. i move it around a lot. i consider how many things i can make out of squash [breads, soup, curry, baked delisciousness, pie, mash, stuffed, drenched in maple syrup]. i plan to dry them and make birdhouses out of them. i carefully avoid the bees that swarm around the piles of squash. i tell people how to cook squash. i take pictures of squash. i dreamt about squash last night.

turnip for breakfast

my reward for being late to work today was getting to eat the best damn turnip i've ever had.

i got to the field half an hour late because i was up all night trying to ignore the swollen itch spot on my arm from the bee sting i got yesterday while picking cherry tomatoes. (the bee was 'resting' on my shirt. i put my arm down and "motherFUCKER!" rang out across the field, followed by a long series of grumbling curses that, thankfully, no one heard because i was all alone on the field ). the night was spent trying various remedies to stop the bee poison from spreading any further through my arm. none worked. ice bags, benadryl, cortizone, sticking my arm under cold running water. insidious little stinger.

so i got to work late and was in a rather annoyed mood due to the lack of sleep and continued pain in my arm. it's strange how arriving at the field can almost instantly change your perspective. it's just fucking beautiful- the mountains now have white caps from the snow last weekend and everything is dewy and bright and the geese are happy to be flying around honking. and there's stuff GROWING everywhere that you get to PICK and EAT.

after picking a load of spinach (yes, e. coli free.... that's something i could go off on btu won't just yet) i was coming around to being in a better mood. wyatt was showing me the bok choy i was to pick next- it was right next to a big beautiful patch of white turnips, of which i previously had no interest in whatsoever. since when have i wanted to eat a turnip? ever? have i ever actually HAD a turnip? think about it. when was the last time you dined on turnips. they're turnips. he lifted the row cover to show off the white turnips and i was sort of feigning interest - "ya, those look good. ooo, white"- and before i knew it wyatt had shoved a fresh-from-the-ground, whpied off on his shirt, gleaming white turnip in my hands, demanding i try it. great. um ya, i haven't had breakfast, but don't really, um, want a turnip. fine. i'll try it.

DElicious. i don't even know how to describe how yummy it was. sweet and rooty and crunchy yet soft. what a little turnip!

benadryl spaaaaaaaace out

use for eggplant #3: take out of cooler and put on upper arm for cool relief from bee sting. it's like a steak on a black eye for vegetarians.

gray stables

samuel palmer's trees


my trees


they looked exactly the same in my imagination.

is this by any chance the year of the horse? i saw the white horse leaning against the barn again today. he so needs to be rescued.

good advices

i hereby declare that all slavic languages have no place in my blog. i have my reasons. i could go into them here, but some of you already know why and the others might think they know why but really don't. so there.

and now, to outline the great pony rescue program:
ok, there's not a plan just yet. just climb over the fence, get on the white horse- who i swear was LEANING against the barn the other day, as though enough was enough- and leap over the fence in a fantastic display of liberty and honest american individualism to ride off into the sunset together. then we'll part our ways- he'll go on his pony self-realization trek through the rockies and i'll probably walk back to the farm to dutifully start work the next morning and share my mystic journey with farmer dan. friday morning dan found a lone cantelope remaining in the field and we breakfasted like kings.

now comes the time that i dig around the pile of yarn i have and make plans for winter gifts. make your favourite colours known now!

peach madness

what's going on here, russians don't capitalize the days of the week?

i have three peach projects going on at once- ok, one isn't really happening right now, but needs to be done sooon. i'm making peach jam, peach crumble and the peaches in reserve are designated for peach butter. i think. maybe more jam. i need mroe jars. ed's kitchen is turning into ashley's canning factory.

i also have to do something with this insane blue banana squash i brought home last night. the thing didn't look that big at the farm stand- it was the smallest one! but on the counter it seems ridiculous, and i'm not really even sure what to do with it. roast it! a.m.i.'s standard answer to all questions of what to do with root vegetables and squash- "you roast 'em". curry, i think i'll make curry.

ok, out of desperation i just made two QUART sized jars of peach jam, cause i'm out of little jars. so someone is going to receive the family-size jam for christmas....

and i don't really like the look of portuguese, so i'm switching to cyrillic. just for fun.

truman died and i'm depressed.

switching to portuguese

cause recent news makes me annoyed with polish.....again. and i want to go to south america.

there's another cricket in the bedroom. i killed the first one last night. in my HOME. where my wife sleeps. where my children come play with their toys.

the cricket must die

i am at war with a big black cockroach-like cricket living in the apartment. it sits underneath the dishwasher and last night woke me up at 3 am with high-pitched chirping. i was so annoyed and half asleep (dangerous combination) that i sprayed windex under the dishwasher with the hopes of giving it a slow death. i thought it worked, until half an hour later when i was JUST geting back to sleep- resurrection! it's having some kind of mating or temperature crisis now and chirping constantly. HOW do you kill a cricket underneath a dishwasher? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah it won't shut up!!!

extermination.

is it the equinox?

there are two things that i have a very hard time dealing with when regular occurences: wind, especially cold wind, and disorganization that is not my own. both have been featured at the farm stand for almost a week, and had the mass disorganization not come under control today i think i might've tried to strangle something. this afternoon a trailer piled with pumpkins arrived, but we didn't have our tent roof replaced yet and there was already a mass of winter squash piled in disarray all along the north side of the not-a-tent, which i had been digging through in an attempt to put into like-squash piles, but then the whole thing was fucked by the arrival of still more squash. i was noticably irritated and my boss offered to buy me some gelato as appeasement, but i declined and started to unload pumpkins and bitch with rachel instead. i'm not sure what happened- maybe lightheadedness as a result of picking up and putting down pumpkins, or the inherent beauty in a big pile of orange, but by the time we were done i was in a much better mood. until i ran my leg into the trailer fender where the metal was split and sticking out in a dangerous rusty way, and ripped open my pants. i got a hammer and bashed the hell out of it so as not to injure anyone else. had i not been wearing long johns today i would certainly have problems, but as it is i'm developing a bruise that will no doubt reign supreme as the most bad-ass bruise i've ever had, far and above the dagger-shaped one elsey gave me int he river this summer. after the unloading of the pumpkins we mustered eight people from the farm and engaged in the colossal task of raising a 300lb tent canopy, thus making our farmstand look a little less ghetto. till today we had the former canopy wrapped around a corner pole in a red and white tumorous bulge and disgruntled employees, in silent protest of the continued lack of overhead protection from sun and rain, had temporarily given up on making things look tidy. boxes of compost were piling high and, since we lost a lot of nice, artful, laminated price signs in the wind, most things had torn pieces of cardboard clipped to them with not so artful writing. we tore the cardboard because the damn scissors handles broke in the wind (flying scissors- bad), so instead of throwing them away we;ve been trying to cut things with a bit less leverage and therefore pissing ourselves off needlessly. the circus-like quality of raising a new farmstand tent did not go unnoticed. oh, but then we got to stick around till 7:30 to wait for a truckload of straw bales to arrive. i mentioned before that moving straw bales is not the first thing you want to do in the morning- it's also not the last thing you want to do at night.

the wind came back strong today and tomorrow will bring cold weather and rain, possibly snow. i keep looking at the forecast in disbelief- the high tomorrow will be 48.

i think someday i'll write a tribute to great missourians.

oh, and jenny, i pickled the beets with you in mind, so prepare for nine pints of beets. the tomatoes, on the other hand, might be frozen. i'll see tomorrow.

no compassion

i worked my first boulder farmer's market today- really there were only two 100% , fortified freaks spotted. the first was this woman wearing goggles and a face mask while perusing the produce. (thank you p). she had a funny little walking stick- not used in its traditional manner, but to thwart the germs that hovered around her. at least that's my guess- i made sure i didn't actually have to talk to her. the other was a seemingly nice young man that turned out to be crazed about honey for roshashanah (that seems like it has way too many h's in it), which was fine, until he started trying to get me to describe the way our bees pollinate our flowers. not in a 'i want to know about bees' kind of way. oh, and there was a guy that spent about ten minutes picking out a bunch of beets. what is it about people that they can't make a decision about what fucking bunch of beets, or which bag of chiles- they want. i had a housewife have a near emotional meltdown in front of me the other day as a result of there being 4 types of chiles to choose from. "i... i just don;t know which one to get."

summer things on the farm are dying. the tomatoes are somehow still producing, but the leaves are all shriveled and frostbit. the squash plants are also strangely putting out new blossoms, but the plants themselves seem pretty dead. the basil is gone. it's sad. so i picked chard- cause we've got loads fo that- with farmer dan today and wowed him with my recanting of this morning's chapter on harry s. truman. while i have yet to make a fully-informed opinion of what kind of man truman was, dan is pretty sure he's solely responsible for the dropping of the bomb and is therefore evil. i asked him about how he developed this opinion and he produced his source, right there on the field (well, it was in the rat car). howard zinn. ok, good enough, you hippie.

despite the death of summer vegetables, it's good to know that we have more winter squash than we know what to do with- wait, we know what to do with it! pick it up and move it. put it in the truck. dump it off at the farm stand. rearrange it at the farm stand. put it back in the truck. move it around a lot! i don't care whatever man. ...damn, what is that song..... talking heads.... anyone. that's going to drive me crazy. checking collection....... can't. find. song.

help!!

maybe... we have a contender.... waiting....
no. blog title is not song title.
(and cheers to anyone that's noticed my 'out' in using song titles for awhile).
god fuck.

AHAHAAAAAA- "warning sign." aaaah. much better. i can go to bed now.

beets

mental note: never go into bed, bath and beyond on an empty stomach.

and if you like beets, by all means, pickle them. if you're iffy about beets, then WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU SPENDING YOUR EVENING PICKLING BEETS. i don't know why- i think i've got this food preservation gene kicking in lately because i want to can or jam or freeze or pickle everything in the field. so i brought home 15 pounds of beets the otehr day and am now pickling them. anyone like beets?

arg

it's past midnight- does this count as a monday post? whatever... this be the post.
post post post post post

is it really talk like the pirate day again already? my, how the time do fly. it's drivin' me nuts.

weekend pictures

this was friday- chiles and tomatoes in the afternoon sun.


and this is an hour later on friday, when we all decided to go to the bar. for some reason i though taking a picture of our feet was compelling at the time....


and here's the tent coming apart yesterday- cause when calamity strikes, we fillmers grab the camera first, then figure out what to do. in this case, though, there was nothing i could do but stand around and watch cause i wasn't about to try to grab onto one of the flapping straps, lest i get carried up into the air (which i think was entirely possible in those winds- imagine me hanging on for dear life while being tossed around in the wind) or thwacked on the head with one of the buckles.

in the end we took the roof off the tent and shut down the farm stand for the day. tent failure and cooler door destruction=close the damn farm stand. soon after the tent started falling apart i was attempting to open the cooler door very carefully, but it only took two inches for the wind to catch the door and blow it open, almost knocking me over (but thanks to my catlike reflexes i managed to get out of the way). the hinges broke with that gust, though- one of them snapped in half and the other's rivets busted- so that's when i decided that i wasn't doing any more work and went to the bike shop to have a moment out of the wind to collect myself before going back out to deal with the mess. there were cherry tomatoes everywhere, price signs and tent straps littering the field, and fifty cases of peaches waiting to go in the doorless cooler, along with all the stuff they didn't sell at market because of the winds. two vendors lost their tents there, and we lost one wash tent at the farm (reports were that it was upsidedown in the creek, but when they got there it was up in a tree). felled tents and frazzled workers- a small price to pay for not having any infrastructure in your business. i feel like we fared pretty well, considering.

wind

we lost the tent today. and the door of the cooler blew off. and a table fell apart. and a box of plums flew across the tent and created a plummy mess. wind has been going through my head- i think it's literally been going through my head- all day long.

truman. my man.

i got a slip in the mailbox today saying i have a package!! could it be that someone has sent the pencil sharpener?? won't find out till monday...

beatles

i'm having a moment with my dad. he says he could happily go several years without hearing a beatles songs again. and THEN he says that hearing people COVER beatles songs is REFRESHING. i disagree wholeheartedly and... don't know what to say. we were talking about this earlier and now there 's a cover of 'across the universe' on the XM by.... oh man, it's fucking fiona apple. ok, i think she's an all right musician, but i honestly have no patience for 90% of beatles covers because all they only ever result in is me wanting to hear the original. hey, but the song is followed by one tree hill- originales. i think ed is just exercising his opinion before venturing off to germany tomorrow, where he'll be thown into serious political/social debate for two weeks. we've been having unofficial practice conversations the past few nights, wherein i actually feel like some of my grad school education has worked, if only as evidenced through my ability to be reasonable about world issues. i guess.... i'm probably just as hypocritical as the next american.

but i DID purchase a 'good' magazine the other day. called... 'good'. it's their first issue and, even though i don't normally buy magazines (cause, i mean, you can read them in the store or get a subscription for lots cheaper) i felt that somehow i was making a historical purchase. not that this didn't deter me from inserting my immaturity when thinking about the cover: it says "______ like you give a damn" and i think you're supposed to insert a progressive verb and feel all hopeful about the world, but the first thing that came to my mind was "fart like you give a damn." not sure i care to think about it any further, but it still makes me laugh. "vote like you give a damn" or "fart like you give a damn"- you decide.

holy shit, now there's a cover of "sweet emotion" on XM. whoa, by leo koetke and mike gordon. still... this song always reminds me of working at clary's and being tormented by classic rock radio all day, to the point that we changed all the "you"s in songs to "jews", "blue" to "food" and "love" to "lunch". "feels like makin' lunch!" "tangled up in food" "i want jews to show me the way" .sweet emotion was changed (by me, no one else seemed to think this was funny) to "sweet emulsion". come to think of it, i used to always get "she is leaving" in my head at that job by changing the lyrics to "sheeeee.... is leaking...." i can't remember why.

headphones are now required to combat XM.

oh, and sufi ben has quit the farm! he was sooo close to getting his ass fired. last friday (major harvest day- usually 12 hours) he got all whiny about work at about 6 o'clock, then started fake-working, where people stand next to someting they're supposed to lift and sort of touch it then move it a couple of inches before going to stand next to something else they're supposed to move. then his girlfriend showed up and he had to leave and we all snarled at him while continuing to wash tomatoes. no more ben, though- he quit. hoorah.

go get your eggplant!

sometimes a pony gets depressed

well, the beer consumption just starts earlier every day. i was feeling a little cranky-pissy when i got home, but just wait! watch as my mood changes throughout the post! like magic!

i think i can blame my boss on the funk i'm in- some days it really doens't matter what you're doing, he can find something wrong with it. today i was just about getting ready to tell him to piss off for telling me how to do things differently (which usually contradicts what he told me the day before), but then he left to go somwhere and was spared the wrath of shley. i could just as easily bitch at him for being crazy and disorganized as he can bitch at me for being not-so-crazy and organized. usually i refrain. unless he's in one of those moods that he you to fight with him- ugh, moody fucker.

so i drive past a horse-riding school to and from work everyday and it always makes me feel weird about the animals there. they have about 20 assorted equines- horses, a donkey or two and some ponies, and they all seem like they have the most annoying life. i don't know much about horse-psychology (whether it's a made-up field or not), but it really seems like these horses are depressed. they stand around in small, fenced enclosures all day and bicker with each other- at least i think that's what they're doing. there is this one white horse that is always biting the donkey when i drive past, and yet they have to share a space together all the time. and there is one larger paddock that always has a few horses standing around a dirty mound of hay. don't horses want fresh grazing? and they're all dirty all the time- muddy feet. aren't they supposed to be groomed, isn't that part of equestrian culture? and there's never anyone there learning how to ride..... maybe that has to do with the time of day i drive by. i don't know- i just feel like they don't have the happiest horse life they could, tromping around in the dirt all day and getting annoyed with each other. maybe i'll start tossing apples to them as i drive by- horses like apples, don't they? i eat the occasional apple at work when, despite the fact that i'm outside and really have nothing to complain about, feel like all i do is move things around for the suburbanite foodies and bicker with my boss. me-ta-phor. sometimes a pony gets depressed.

on a positive note, we've found a new use for the excess of eggplant- it is a perfect dog toy. maple likes to run down the fatty italian eggplant and rip it apart. layla, the most nonchalant dog i've ever met, likes to play fetch (only once or twice before she decides it's too much work) with the japanese eggplant. so we throw eggplant out in the field and let the dogs go after it, then ask them "where's your eggplant? go get yur eggplant" which always makes me smile. "go get your eggplant, layla" i think they like the way their teeth sink into the eggplant- at least that's what i would like about it if i had sharp teeth. nice soft eggplant skin.

that is all.

nothing

i have nothing to share. i'm tired and it itches where i was stung.

fanfare for the comman man

if wyatt could scale the staff down to me, himself, farmer dan, and a couple other choice people, i think he would- and we would all work all the time and be in a constant state of giddy stress. we had a weird sick/irresponsible staff domino effect today that resulted in me working 13 hours between the farm and farm stand. all was well until the last fiftenn minutes of work, when a bee somehow made it into my sleeve and lazily stung me. i say lazily because i think this bee must have been asleep (do bees sleep?) for a while before he woke up and thought "shit where the hell am i better sting something"- so it didn't really hurt so much as it was annoying. how he got there in the first place is unknown, cause it's not like i had big bell sleeves going on- elasticy cuffs! wearing the shirt all day! how does a bee get into my sleeve?? this happened right as a couple waltzed past my "we're closed, piss off!" security rope around the tent and started asking what everything was. it's a fucking eggplant. those are chiles. you eat them.

i hate aaron copeland. trautmatized by high school orchestra arrangements.

dairy air

my friend lives next to an organic dairy farm- here's what he wrote me the other day:

so, some of the more brave hearted bovines staged a prison break the other night -- and
consequently everyone in the neighborhood has an overabundance of cow pies. one of
the cows even went for a swim in our neighbors pool -- the guy said he herd (a bad pun or
bad spelling??? i am not even sure myself) a moo and a splash only to find good ol bessy
doing the breast stroke. anyway, the dairy farm dude felt really bad and has given everyone
some ground beef to placate us because he believes in that old adage "good burgers make
good neighbors"



i spent a month or so living next to this dairy farm myself- the most memorable part about it was not the stinky wafts of cowness that came our direction, but the night... the night of the cow. last full moon we were out around midnight walking the dog and commenting on how insanely bright the moon was when we noticed some strange noises coming from across the field. at first it sounded like drag racing in the distance, but the more we thought about it the more we realized that it must be the cows. so we make haste to the dairy farm to check out the cows, and all the while they're getting louder and more persistent in their mooing. we get to the dairy farm to discover a whole paddock of cows having a right moofest under the mooooonlight. (sorry- arm sorry). what is the meaning of this mooing, we ask? they don't normally moo at midnight. not like this, anyway. the only explanation is that it's a full moon and this appeals to the cows on some level, inciting them to moo like crazy.

keep the customer satisfied

RLS- do you lay in bed at night with an urgent need to move your legs about? does your need to move your legs keep you awake? you may be suffering from restless leg syndrome.
i heard this on the radio today and kept waiting for it to be a joke, but it wasn't. there's a clinic. oh my god, people can suffer any affliction.

winter squash. we're going to make signs at work that say "these squash are not gourds" because everyone keeps looking at our beautiful galeux d'eysines and blue hubbard squash and saying "oooo, look at those gourds." by the way- galeux d'eysines means "embroidered with pebbles from eysines" or, if you're not feeling figurative, "scabious sqaush". we're also going to make a sign that says "please refrain from telling ashley the same story every time you come in to buy peaches". one woman ALWAYS reminds me that she has a bad wrist. which i can relate to- i myself have some wrist problem- not restless wrist syndrom or anything, but definately something wrong, perhaps the beginnings of arthritis or something. lame wrist. another woman hangs around for fucking ever when she comes in and tells us all about how she works as a food sampler at sam's club. today she asked me the date so she could write a check (um, it's september 11, didn't you KNOW that?) and she says, "oh, this is that day, that day that they.... now what did they do with the planes and the buildings?" i wasn't quite sure how to respond to this woman not knowing exactly what happened on sept. 11- i mean, do i fill her in?? or do i realize that she's probably got some mental problem and let her work it out for herself. yes, i did the latter. through talking to herself she managed to remember what happened with the planes and the buildings and i got to go back to my peaceful world of peach-eating without having to give her a history lesson. which people generally don't like hearing from a farm stand employee- sometimes i get stuck at the cash register for long periods and, after getting annoyed that people aren't absorbing my 'lessons on organic farming' spiels with rapt attention, i resort to entertaining myself by asking people if they know what significant event happened on the date that is the total of their bill. $10.66- come on, people. $18.61- anyone?? $14.53 is a little harder. i also have to refrain from treating people like 3 and 5 year old english charges by saying "yes, please" when they forget their fucking manners.

tomatoes. at times they can be very gratifying to pick. like today- i went out for an hour and a half to get some tomatoes for the farm stand and was absolutely loving my picking experience. it's like hunting for tomato gold- only two rows (out of something like 15) are trellised, so this makes for a lot of crawling around on the ground to find the hidden ripe treasures underneath the brush. perhaps the novelty will someday wear off, but now i'm still excited to find the
perfect tomato every ten minutes or so. maybe five. there are a lot of perfect tomatoes. there are also a lot of tomatoes with "black ass" or "bottom rot", so they look perfect on top but when you go to grab it you get a handful of tomato guts. it was made known to me today that i have the habit of making sound effects for picking said rotten tomatoes. my excuse is this: i'm often wearing headphones while tomato picking cause it takes so long and, since i can't hear the tomato exploding when i pick it, i feel the need to provide the possible noise myself and make squishy sounds with my mouth. cause i'm a weirdo.

other times tomatoes are downright annoying to pick, which is why there are mexicans working at the farm, cause they'll pick the hell out of anything with no need for an ipod. except when it rains. then they're outta there like a mexican in the rain.



luggage. my dad brought my old suitcase (with god knows what inside) to me from springfield today. this suitcase was trustworthy for a number of years until last february when it exploded on the train platform at southeast station in new york. i had some zipper failure for about a year but managed to get the thing open and shut with a pair of pliers and well-executed swearing, but it finally burst open while getting off the train and the most embarassing stuff spilled onto the platform. no, not my undergarments- my bright pink book on chocolate, my "wedding slinger" toy (which works like a mini-catapult that launches little bride and groom miniatures- apparently this is something someone thought i needed), and... i don't know- just not the kind of stuff that normally pops out of luggage. anyway, i feel like i should've taken my luggage failure as a sign way back in februrary, and yet i ignored it and bought new luggage instead, which turned out to be a piece of crap. the material possessions in my life are trying to tell me something.

i guess that's enough rambling for one night.

ping island/lightening strike rescue op

any time i want to feel like there is something literary going on in my life i listen to music from a wes anderson movie. i'm thinking i should write mark mothersbaugh and ask if he'll do a shley soundtrack...

i've got it

"i'm not afraid of you and i will beat your ass" -sounds like an album i can get behind.
just found out that yo la tengo got its name from people fighting over catching a pop fly.

wyatt thinks i should just give up and open my own restaurant and name it the glue de ew.

last night i delivered emergency cherry tomatoes to a restaurant in denver called duo. the chef goes to the boulder farmer's market every saturady to get his order for the week, but this saturday had some kind of farmer's market overload, freaked out, and left the market without his cherry tomatoes or invoice. so i am volunteered to take the tomatoes to him on my way home, which puts me in the restaurant at 8 o'clock on a saturday night, carrying two bins of cherries between crowded tables, sure that i'll drop everything and cherry tomatoes will go rolling through the dining room in slow motion. thankfully, i managed some grace in my task and got them back to the kitchen so that the mexican dishwasher could spill them instead. i was rewarded for my efforts with a free glass of wine from the owner and some lame conversation with bobby, the career bartender of duo. he was okay- just kind of a dork and not a very good bartender. i ate their 'summer vegetable gratin' because i was pretty sure i'd touched most of the vegetables that went into it at least once before. see- a good percentage of farming is just moving things around a lot. take, for example, the average japanese eggplant. it has a life span of about one week, during which time i might handle it about, i don't know, 15 times. i pick it, wash it, pack it for farmer's market, unpack it from farmer's market and put it into a box at the farm stand, take it out of the box for display, put if back- repeat a few days- then finally toss it in the compost. poor little eggplant.

and now, a question for the foodies: what does one do with scorzenera? a.k.a black salsify and/or oyster plant. i've looked it up and can't come up with anything that sounds even remotely good- especially since there is conflicting information about it's possible toxicity and deliciousness. anyone? scorzenera?

it's my day off and my body is loving me for not busting my ass working, and yet i'm restless and feel like i need to go lift something heavy. so i'm going to go do that....

the greatest

vocabulary victory is mine! the squash is in fact a galeux d'eysines and wyatt must now cower in his seed catalog misremembering. so rare is wyatt's defeat that i must glower. bwa ha ha.

if ben franklin had his way and the turkey was the national bird, i feel like america would be much different place. too late now to change the national bird? who do we share the eagle with- germany and poland are the first two countries that come to mind. one experienced national fervor that was scary bad, the other can't hope to get it together to organize long enough to get anything done. they have twins holding office- twins that were once CHILD TV STARS. nice one, poland. way to ELECT.

galeux d'eysines

my dinner was exactly this: one piece of chicken, one piece of bread, one beer, salt shaker. i didn't eat the salt shaker. but did use more salt than i ever have before. apparently this is all i now require at the end of the day, and i really can't believe that i'm still awake after my salty protein fix.

dan talks to the leeks while he digs them.
i forgot to mention that the pudding used for wrestling was VEGAN.
mexicans don't work in the rain- no exceptions.

our farm stand will is going to be converted to a winter squash freak show. we have a very odd assortment, including one called the 'chicago warty hubbard,' and the biggest fucking pink banana squash you've ever seen, and i know you've see a lot of them. this thing is at least 2 feet long and bigger around than me. there is also a variety that wyatt calls (phonetically) the 'glue de ew'- it's an ugly warted thing that is supposed to taste pretty yummy, but i looked it up and the closest thing i could find was the galeux d'eysines. um- i don't really know french pronunciation, but i think wyatt got the second part a bit wrong.

peach, plum, pear

worst farm stand ear worm ever. but i can't wear headphones there to rectify the problem because every ten minutes someone asks me whether we have pickling cucumbers and i have to explain that they're too fucking late to make pickles. i've had this song in my head for the past couple of days simply because we have peaches, plums and pears all sitting next to each other.

i am le tired. moussaka knocked me out. because i didn't have the energy last night to can tomatoes, but i did have the energy to undertake the multistepped process of making moussaka. oh, but it was delicious. and i felt some small joy in using three of the hundreds of eggplant we've grown. god, they're everywhere.

moussaka said knock you out!

here's something:
"A Swiss man caught speeding on a Canadian highway has blamed his actions on the absence of goats on the roads."

various stages of undress

hoorah for the forgotten box of winter clothes i found in my dad's garage! but, being that i don't have a dresser, this only means that i'll have more piles of clothes spread around ed's apartment. i think he must secretly be going insane having his tidy existence disrupted by his dresserless daughter- he's at least traumatized by how dirty i get at work. the other night he stopped me in the garage, went to get a towel and insisted that i undress before coming inside. i felt like a wet elsey being stopped at the door for towel attention on grand street. forlorn look and all.

messiness aside, i'm glad to have more than one long-sleeved option for wearing on the cold mornings at the farm, especially since they'll just get colder through wrzesien (that's september po polsku- everyone been paying attention?). it's been pretty chilly in the mornings, so we all show up wearing sweaters and stocking caps (except me, sniff sniff- don't know where my hat is and am too lazy at present to knit a new one). as the sun rises there appear little piles of abandoned clothing all over the field. it's always fun to find a sweatshirt that's been forgotten for a number of days hidden in the tomatoes. and someone keeps leaving their nasty socks hanging on the tomato trelesses- what the fuck. we think it's sufi ben. he has this bizarre need to take off his clothes at random times. he shows up fully clothed, takes his shirt off after about an hour, when it's still pretty chilly, mind you, then puts it back on, then decides he's hot and takes it off again, then puts it back on, and then, when the sun is high in the sky and it's actually hot, he puts on more clothing. today i was walking down the road that goes through the field and looked up to find ben with his pants around his ankles, just sort of standing there. he pulled them up nonchalantly and i was lost for a viable explanation as to why he'd dropped trou in the middle of the field. i mean, it's not like he had some other option he was trying out- he was just standing there in his boxers. we don't pee in the field- or at least we're not supposed to. i think he just likes revealing himself- as evidenced by the fact that he seems to think peeing in his co-worker's company is ok. no discretion. we have unofficial pee-zones around the farm, but ben is too good for them. one afternoon he walked over to the creek from the wash station (a length of about 15 feet) and let it go right there- he even addressed his awkward proximity by pointing one hand into the air disco-style and doing this little "i'm peeing right in front of you" dance, while peeing. and yesterday morning i pull into the field- circa 6:30 am- and ben's standing there in the road about 20 feet ahead of me. we are the only people at work so far. he waves, then turns around and whips is out to relieve himself in the middle of the road, as though to welcome me to work. thanks, ben. the guy's got issues.

i brought home 20 lbs of tomatoes today with the intention of canning them, but have absolutely no desire to do so now. too tired.

king of carrot flowers

farmer dan learned us all about shoulderless carrots and umbels today. we were bunching carrots and he pulled out one whose root was skinnier than the foilage coming out the top. "it doesn't have any shoudlers and you don't wanna eat that one because it's..... it's all woody and pithy inside. ya, you don't wanna eat that one. ya man, i threw that clown right outta the farmer's market." (said in farmer dan voice- a nasal oklahoma pitch that really carries over the field- you can hear farmer dan from a few hundred yards. usually he's having a conversation with himself. he's told the clown story every time i've worked with him for the past week, and usually it comes straight on the heels of any other topic- like carrot umbels, for example.)

-gots to get the johnny cash old timey album. it's being featured on ed's xm radio right now. one of the few worthy songs on this station, which is otherwise rife with "adult contemporary hits", whatever that means.

anyway, if a carrot stays skinny like that, that means it's going directly to seed instead of developing its root. it will sprout an 'umbel'- which is the round, spindly flower that you see on dillweed and fennel when it goes to seed, and this is where you get carrot seeds from. one plant can develop a few different umbels, but will usually have the 'king umbel' that is biggest and, i don;t know, has the most seeds, i guess. it's the king of carrot flowers.

ed and i have just decided that if george w bush were a character on deadwood he'd be farnum.

and a honey extraction update: farmer dan reports that all the bees in boulder county are in wyatt's backyard. as a result of the no-system-in-place-organizational-honey-extracting-failure, the hives sat in the backyard all night and into monday, allowing lots of time for the few bees that were there sunday to do their little bee dance for all the other bees in the area. bee party! but i guess the project was finally completed (save for pouring it into jars) and we ended up with 28 gallons. that's a lot of honey.


today i picked cherry tomatoes for a number of hours and ate every one that split, which turned out to be a lot. i then went to look at apartments with green tomato plant dust all over my arms and blackened hands.

da honey

so, a word about the honey extraction experience. first and foremost, honey is mesmerizing- i found myself staring at it dripping out of the extractor, completely entranced. the bees like it, too, but take it one step further and try to land on the honeyfall, only to be washed down into the bucket of honey and certain sticky doom. i personally watched about 20 bees meet their maker while staring at the honey flow. i tried to save a few but it was hopeless- imagine being covered in goo and trying make your wings fly. nope. there was a layer of pulsating bees on top of the five gallons of honey we got out while i was there- pretty creepy, actually.

secondly, there really needs to be a system in place to make the best use of honey extraction time. this is a system wyatt did not have in place. which resulted in me being annoyed at the lack of organization and taking off early to avoid getting into it with him about best how to do things, which happens enough as it is to not want to deal with it on my day off/volunteer honey project day. my boss's lack of organization combined with poor honey extraction machine design = ashley having to leave early to avoid blowing a gasket.

the honey extractor works like this:

first, you steal the honey comb from the bees. wait, first you accept the fact that the hundreds of robber bees from the neighborhood aren't going to fuck with you because it's not their honey. then you get the combs out from the hives and take a hot knife to scrape off the wax caps from the comb. then you put the comb panels into this contraption (seen above) that will spin around centrifuge-style, making the honey fly out to splatter on the walls and drip down to collect in the bottom. then you open a spout and let it drip out into a strainer where the beeswax bits and dead bees are removed and- voila! you have delicious honey. sounds pretty simple, yes?
-a few problems. one: we only had one extension cord in wyatt's backyard, so we couldn't use the electric hot knife and the honey extractor at the same time, thus creating a lot of stand around time while we're waiting for one or the other to get to a stopping point. 2: we don't have anything to put the uncapped comb into while it waits to be put in the extractor, so honey is dripping all over the yard. 3: the honey is initially too cold and not dripping fast enough through the strainer, so we have to close up the spout and wait for honey to strain- meanwhile, the bees are all excited about the honey collecting in the bucket and landing in it, thus negating the use of the strainer because all the strained honey now has bees sinking into it. 4: and finally: the honey extractor is poorly designed.

i might have to start a list of poorly-designed appliances that piss me off, and with it, a call to all inventors to redesign said appliances to make my life more tolerable. the main problem with the honey thing is this: it's a vat made to hold as much as 100 pounds of honey comb and spin, and yet it is two feet up in the air on three little legs with tiny feet, and therefore unable to spin without moving around violently like an unbalanced washing machine. bad design! furthermore, wyatt's got the feet screwed into a piece of plywood, as though THAT will help, so we all have to stand on the plywood platform thing to try to quell its shaking. this doesn't work very well when you have two small girls trying to outweigh a centrifuge. no. i convinced him to screw it into his deck- even though this resulted in him having a minor freak out because he'd left his drill at the farm.

all in all it was prety frustrating.
but damn tasty. finger lickin' good!

and, in the time it took to scrape beeswax off the comb, i got to hear about how my little elfin lesbian coworker went to a party the previous night that unexpectedly featured naked pudding wrestling. she was clearly traumatized (who wouldn't be?)

bees

extracted honey today. was sticky the whole drive home.

torte

at least we think it's a torte. what else could this fudgie cake creation be?

i'm celebrating the end of 11 days in a row of farminess. sooooo tired and soooo satisfied with the food i eat. i have a peach for breakfast, even when there's a cereal option. cereal denied! cheese and veggies for lunch, along with some bready thing; then protein- oh, delicious protein, for dinner. yum. it's a lifestyle.

i'm looking forward to sleeping many hours.

and.... that's about it.

fiery arms

lesson of the day: wear long sleeves and gloves when picking squash for any length of time, lest you end up with scratched-up, red, itchy arms with weird leather-like green stains on them. i think a layer of my skin has peeled off and been replaced by squash scum residue. ow. it didn't seem to be a problem until i was driving home and the feeling was coming back into my arms after spending several hours with my hands immersed in cold water cleaning shit. it was itchy when i was picking squash, but i went straight to washing after that and sort of forgot that i was developing horrible squash rash. now my forearms are burning.

other highlights of the day include:

sufi ben getting taunted by a saint bernard while doing tai chi. he stopped working at about 3 o'clock, fell asleep in the sun for about 15 minutes, then strolled over to the creek to have his new age moment. i'm all for whatever relaxation/focusing techniques people find useful, but not in the middle of a busy day whey there are clearly many things to wash and bunch and pack and move and agh! what are you doing standing around with your tai chi bullshit while we're all working? maple, the insane 2-year-old st. bernard that has been known to pick up whole pumpkins in her mouth and destory them in seconds, apparently thought that ben was being stupid, too, because she promptly started barking at him while he was doing his zen thing. a nice steady bark- go ahead and focus now, dipshit! i guess maple thought he wanted to play with all his arm movements... nobody told her to stop barking.

ami with an i went to get us all hot coffee at some point this afternoon- that was a godsend.

i picked and bunched 40 pounds of chard, dealt with a whole lotta zucchini, green tomatoes, and lots of easter egg radishes. i then cleaned LOADS of cipolinni onions. for hours. onions.

and then, when the end of the day finally came, after 11 hours of being outside doing laborious farmy things, after 4 hours of the temperature steadily dropping and the drizzle factor steadily rising, after a good hour of everyone being outwardly grumpy about becoming wet and cold- after all this, the red wagon staff experience a true farmy/hippie moment and trek back out to the field, in the drizzle, to pick.... flowers. yes. we could've gone home. we could've hopped into our cars and cranked the heat and taken off our wet shoes, but instead we decide to tromp through the mud and gather bouquets of zinnias. it was a beautiful and ridiculous thing. the only bummer thing about it was listening to everyone go on about how their boyfriends/girlfriends would be so happy to get flowers. i think the only single people working at the farm are me and farmer dan..... so i brought my flowers home and gave them to my dad. aw.

man my arms hurt- i think this is the sort of thing balms are for. i need a balm.