Growing a Farmer

by Kurt Timmermeister

  I never intended this bed of berries to be an experiment, but rather a simple way to secure good fruit. Although all four varieties have done well, grown high, flowered and fruited, the golden raspberry has done the best by far. The black raspberry plants are small and fruit sparingly. The two red raspberries persevere and I enjoy their fruit. As they are all planted in one bed, the golden raspberries are taking it over, spreading faster than the black raspberries can. I expect in time to have a bramble of primarily golden raspberries, with bits of the reds and few if any of the black raspberries. The goldens are simply better suited to this spot and climate, this terroir.

  Similar processes play out all over the farm. This winter one of the quince trees will be ripped out to be replaced by a more suitable variety of fruit tree. The tomato plants that I remember the most fondly from the heady days of summer will be reordered and replanted in the spring. The cow that is easily bred back and produces a beautiful calf is kept on the roster of the herd; she that has trouble being bred will be culled from the herd, replaced with a younger heifer.

  I enjoy this constant refinement of the makeup of the farm. It keeps my interest. It is dynamic, not static. On my daily walk around the property, I pass the different fruit trees, look in on the gardens, the pastures, the orchards. I often touch the trees, feeling the branches, the leaves in my hands. It gives me a connection to the plant. When I can feel that leaf in my hand in summer I can get a sense of the health of the tree. In the dead of winter, the brittle twig tells a story as well. As I pass across the large upper pasture in the late fall, the sun is low, the cows appear to know that their days on the pasture are coming to a close, soon they will be in the barn for winter. I need to go up to each cow and chat with her, feel her hide. The flat, smooth summer coat will be filling out more; the winter coat growing in. Cows that I milk daily are always receptive to the attention, while the young heifers are still skittish, quickly jumping as I come up near them.

  In this way, the farm improves. The best raspberries overtake the weaker varieties. The best cows become the basis for the future herd, the fruits trees that respond the best to this climate endure. The weak are quickly culled once their flaws are revealed.

  There are food items that are a part of the nation’s larder that are never seen here. The item whose absence is most noticed by dinner guests is olive oil. Over the past quarter century olive oil has moved from the exotic to the indispensable in this country. I have encountered many cooks, guests and visitors who find it absolutely incredible that there is no olive oil in this kitchen. Not simply that it is absent, but that food can be prepared without it. They are in disbelief not only that I have chosen to keep it from this kitchen, but also that vegetables can be eaten, meats prepared, pastas served without the golden oil from the warmer latitudes.

  My decision to exclude olive oil from the kitchen is based simply on location. Olives can only grow far to the south of here. Olives would never make it through a winter here. Certainly I could keep them in pots, bring them inside in the cooler months or find varieties that could tolerate the freezing weather of January, but I choose not to. It would be the same as keeping the bad apple tree in the orchard, the one that doesn’t really produce because it isn’t suited to this climate.

  If this lack of olive oil were a great sacrifice I might feel differently, but I never miss it. We have an abundance of beautiful butter from the Jersey cows and excellent, flavorful lard from the pigs. The butter and lard are fats that come from this land.

  I have no recollection, from growing up in the sixties and seventies in Seattle, of olive oil in cooking. Certainly my mother never used it in her cooking. Our fat of choice was vegetable oil: corn oil and tubs of margarine on the table. The large plastic tub labeled Country Crock was our substitute for butter, my mother feeling as I expect many did at the time that butter would lead to immediate heart disease. Butter was also considered too expensive, a luxury that was allowed only on holidays. Although bacon fat was drained off of the frying pan and kept in an old tuna-fish can by the side of the stove, it too was felt to be an unhealthy pleasure. I revel in the irony today that I produce many pounds of animal fat here every year. If my mother realized, she would consider it the ultimate in unhealthiness.

  I am not certain why we collectively came to love olive oil. Health claims most likely contributed to its popularity; the greater ease of travel to Italy and Spain also probably helped. My personal theory is simply that we have culture envy. We have received a view into the world of warmer Italian climates and it is good. In those parts of the world the sun shines often, food is an important part of daily life and life moves at a slower pace. Tuscany was the it girl of the end of the twentieth century. We wanted vacations in Tuscany, we loved stories of moving to Tuscany—think Under the Tuscan Sun; seemingly every restaurant opened in the 1990s had a rustic look with a burnt-ocher palate, and we loved the Italian food and its centerpiece—olive oil.

  Don’t get me wrong, I have fallen under this spell as well. I term it the “tyranny of the Mediterranean.” I think we truly want to believe, maybe actually do believe, that we live in Italy or Spain or at the very least southern California.

  Our culinary traditions have an agricultural origin. The foods that we eat and the way that we eat is a direct reflection of the way people ate on the farm. Today pickles are a lovely appetizer before a meal, but for generations pickles were a way to preserve vegetables that were prolific during the late summer but were not available during the rest of the year. Most of the best parts of our culinary traditions—prosciutto, parmesan, wine, marron glacé, jams and duck confit—are simply ways to preserve meats, milk, fruits and vegetables from before the era of refrigeration.

  Generally speaking, animals and crops are started in the spring, mature through the summer and are harvested in the late fall. The challenge lies in that we need to eat throughout the year, thus we need to level out the peaks and valleys of available produce and meat. Guanciale was not developed to be a cute appetizer for swanky New York restaurants, but rather was a method of saving the jowls of a pig that was slaughtered in the fall and that would rot and be eaten by maggots if not salted, cured and dried. The same goes for vegetables. Cucumbers grow prolifically in the mid- to late summer. Small starts put into the soil become prolific vines stretching around the garden, with masses of beautiful cucumbers hidden under the leaves. Making pickles becomes the order of the day.

  A lot of time is spent in the kitchen here compared to shopping at a store and then cooking. Although the actual preparation of a meal is rather straightforward, making the components that go into a meal requires constant preparation. Stocks need to be made, vegetables pickled, fruits made into jams and jellies. When I have spent too long making a wheel of cheese I begin to understand why people stopped doing this and were happy to buy cheese in the stores. It takes time.

  Life is rather grand here these days. The farm is sufficiently developed. Most of the twelve acres are being well utilized, although I have great plans for making areas more productive. More than enough food is produced each year and preserved to keep the Cookhouse stocked year-round. Enough of the fruit trees have matured to produce a serious volume and variety of fruit throughout the season.

  On my morning walks around the perimeter I often wonder what this farm will be like in one hundred years. The image that always comes to mind is a series of photographs in Michael Ableman’s book On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm. The book is the story of Fairview Gardens, a farm in southern California that pushes on despite being surrounded by ever-encroaching suburbs. I like to imagine a contemporary aerial photograph of Kurtwood Farms being compared to a photograph decades in the future.

  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, in the introduction to his seminal book The River Cottage Cookbook, discusses a continuum of self-sufficiency. On one end of the spectrum is eating entirely from the commercial food production system. On the other extreme of the scale is total self-sufficiency from t
he land. For myself, I strive to inch down the scale toward a total abandonment of produced industrial foodstuffs. Two decades ago, I started with a bag of apples and plums I picked from the fruit trees at the property that at the time of that harvest was not yet mine. I essentially stole that fruit from the people that I would soon buy my land from. I took the fruit back to my apartment in downtown Seattle and relished it. The plums were as big as bulls’ balls, filled with sweet juice, ready to burst. The apples were russeted, crisp, juicy and unlike those that I was accustomed to from my local supermarket. That paper bag with twenty pounds of fruit was my first harvest here at Kurtwood Farms. The next year the bounty was hardly a bounty: a few more apples, bucketsful of the blackberries that ran rampant over this land, a few weeds in the flowers that I cut, thinking them of great beauty.

  It would be more than a few years before I could make a meal entirely from this soil. Only in the past half decade could I leave the supermarket behind, except for that short list of staples I never expect to provide for myself. I am reminded of a recent conversation I had over dinner with a math professor here on the island. Thomas described the uses of calculus and its basic concept. She used the example of going half the distance from A to B, then halving the remainder and traveling that distance, then going half of that distance and so on. The general wisdom is that you will never reach point B; there will always be the remaining infinitely small half remaining. This is known as one of Zeno’s paradoxes. With calculus that total distance can be calculated. We can achieve point B, if only in a theoretical sense.

  What makes this calculus problem all the more interesting is that with each halving of the remaining distance toward self-sufficiency, the degree of difficulty increases. The first big half is fairly straightforward. Most of us can grow tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and peas. The second half of a half is a bit more involved: year-round vegetables, beef cows, pigs, dairy products. The third half of a half of a half is where it gets challenging: grains ample to make it through the year, for example. As we approach that imagined terminus, increasing effort must be exerted.

  It matters how we define the chase to the end of the spectrum: Is animal feed included? Do I need to grow all my own grain for the chickens? Toothpaste—is that a foodstuff or is that outside of the whole project? Is being off of the electrical grid essential or is that just a silly idea?

  There have been a glut of books and blogs recently that make this challenge into a game. A “one-hundred-mile diet” is one premise: you limit your food purchases to those things that are produced or grown within one hundred miles of your locale. I find it all rather silly. The point isn’t to find that final sigma that signals that you are at the finishing line, but rather to head down that path.

  I have run into the odd locavores who smugly announce to me that they are producing their own salt, and shouldn’t I join them in this endeavor. My response, generally in a polite fashion, is to let them know that if they want to row out into the bay and dredge up five-gallon buckets of seawater, bring them back to shore and boil them down to capture a bit of questionable-quality sea salt, that they are most welcome to. I am quite content with my bright red box of kosher salt, thank you. I could apply some cost-benefit analysis here, but it is simply a matter that I find uninteresting. Kosher salt from the supermarket is of high quality, low price and appears to be rather pure. Heavy cream from the dairy case at the store does not pass my same gut-level test. It is worth it to me to drag my body out of bed each day to milk my often unappreciative cows in order to score some lovely cream. Boiling seawater just doesn’t have the same return.

  I have another continuum, another trek that I am moving forward through. In addition to pursuing the best food, the most locally grown food, I also want to create a place, a thriving family, a real community. Whether I knew it or not at the outset, I sought to create a family here for myself. Not a family in the Leave It to Beaver sense, but along more abstract lines. Maybe it is just noise I am seeking: the din of kids running around playing with the dogs, the sounds of friends eating and drinking at the long fir table in the farm kitchen, the sounds of workmen coming and going, their loud trucks and clunky machines filling the air. This farm has become a community of sorts. It is a place where parents can bring their kids to see the young calves, the baby lambs, the huge pigs. It is the place for city chefs to butcher hogs, slaughter calves, press apples for cider.

  Over the years my impressions of fruits, vegetables and herbs have altered little. Certainly carrots fresh from the soil have more carrotness to them than those picked days or weeks prior and shipped across the country. I enjoy my carrots more than commercial carrots; mine are better carrots. I haven’t changed my intrinsic ideas of carrots, however. Carrots are essentially the same as the first one I ate, some forty-plus years ago.

  I cannot say the same for meat. The pork, the beef, the lamb that are raised, slaughtered, butchered and eaten here are of superior quality in my opinion to any other. I am biased, of course, but they are excellent. I can control how the animals are born, how they are fed and raised and how they are slaughtered. The end result is a superior product. Meat is no longer simply a fine product on a plate, the steak at the end of a long work week, the bacon next to the fried eggs on Sunday morning, the lamb on the spit at the summer party. All meat is the result of a life. An animal is born, lives its days and is slaughtered, completely for our nourishment.

  This is a sea change from picking up that flat Styrofoam tray in the supermarket: the small piece of meat lying on the foam pad, covered with plastic food film, a sticker affixed. That meat has no context. There is no animal there, no life. That small sticker may have a cartoonish reference to a farm that exists in our collective consciousness, but it doesn’t refer to an animal itself or to the farm where that animal was raised.

  My great education over the past two decades is just that: meat comes from animals; not from the abstraction of animals, but rather from actual animals. I do not mean to imply that having a hamburger off of the grill in the heat of a summer day should be morose, tearful or sentimental. Rather, that it should be enjoyed, savored and respected.

  I have spent a great part of my years creating and improving this spot of earth and expect to continue on for many more years. It is primarily a selfish and solitary act. I do, however, hope for similar like-minded projects to pop up around the country. I want there to be more small farms, more ways to connect to our food, more links to our cultural past of food raising, preparation and preservation.

  I wouldn’t recommend that every household spend their Saturday afternoons churning butter—it’s time-consuming, tedious and inefficient. Televisions can and should be produced in large factories where it is most efficient to produce them. We can live without TV. Food is different; it is special and unique. A centralized food production system is dangerous and foolhardy. Relying on a distant company to perform an essential skill is problematic. We all need to eat every day. Someone needs to know how to slaughter the pig.

  The state of food, however, should not be clouded by gloom and doom. It is the great joy of eating that makes me get to work on those less-than-sunny mornings. It is how I mark time. I remember a birthday party for the pork roast and tomato pizzas more than the weather or the time of year; the barn-warming was a lovely evening but I can still taste the grilled leg of lamb and the fresh figs; and steak night was all about the large grilled rib eye steaks courtesy of the steer Bruno, as well as the baked potatoes with butter, chives and bacon. Food is what brings us together.

  I like cooking from the land. I look at food differently now, I prepare a meal differently. Previously, cooking was assembling ingredients to replicate a specific dish. The recipes for cassoulet, that Thai curry soup, those potato gnocchis came from this restaurant or that one, from a trip abroad or even from the odd mention in a movie. Certainly I could and would often change an ingredient here or there, but essentially the goal was to reproduce a standard meal already canonized in numerous cook
books. Thai curry with shrimps, coconut milk, basil and kaffir lime was perfectly appropriate and delicious on a chilly snowy evening in January.

  Feeding my guests and myself strictly from this land has changed that mind-set. The meals here must reflect this climate, this region and this culture; they cannot be borrowed from elsewhere and cannot defy the seasons. The cheese that is made at this dairy is of this time and place exclusively. Sure, it may resemble the cuisine of Normandy, for example, but the climate there is similar and presumably the larder stocked with like products. This is not to say that there is only one single interpretation of this spot on the earth. Folks at the neighboring farm down the valley could create an entirely different farm, one without Jersey cows, rows of cider apple trees and a garden of Belgian endive, Chiogga beets, green beans and leafy lettuces. I can imagine neighbors arriving here from Laos, Senegal or Mexico to grow and cook a totally distinct cuisine, all thanks to the same soil and climate.

  This has been a lovely journey, pursuing my goals and heading toward self-sufficiency. Except in the abstraction of calculus, I know I will never reach it and I have little desire to do so. The animals are content in the field, the gardens lush with vegetables, the orchards ever more prolific and most importantly the table, the center of this farm, is filled with food and family.

  Acknowledgments

  When I started this book project, I was a complete novice, with little or no writing experience. Despite this inexperience, one person encouraged me to write a book proposal and then presented that proposal on my behalf. Without Hsiao-Ching Chou, I never would have written this book. She became my de facto agent on a moment’s notice and kept me sane during the early days of my attempting to write a manuscript far more involved than anything I had ever written. I owe her a great debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank my editor at W. W. Norton, Maria Guarnaschelli, both for agreeing to take me on based on Hsiao-Ching Chou’s recommendation and then for editing a difficult manuscript, helping me to see the story when I could not. Any other editor would have released this book in a far more immature state. Also at W. W. Norton, Melanie Tortoroli and Aaron Lammer gave my manuscript the individual attention it needed, to make it readable and cohesive. I am most thankful.