Potatoes! Tomatoes! Cape Gooseberries! Wedding food! Cyanide poisoning! All these things are just part of life on the farm…
There are so many stories to tell from week one of my volunteering stint at South Farm in Royston, Herfordshire. Firstly, though, our household goods arrived late Friday afternoon! It would’ve been nice to have more than one day to unpack before Chris flew to San Antonio and I made my way (granted, only 35 minutes down the road) to the farm for a fortnight (yes, that word is actually put to use here), but we are just really pleased that everything made it and so far seems to intact. The house already feels way more like home now that we have our couches and bed. We’ll eventually get around to hanging pictures and organizing bookshelves but aren’t really worried about those details quite yet.
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| boxes stacked in the kitchen |
Chris is really enjoying his pediatric short course so far and absolutely loves the 95+ degree weather down there in Texas. I’m crossing my fingers that he’ll actually be on the plane next Sunday when I go to London to pick him up.
It definitely feels more like autumn on the farm. The weather has been about 65 degrees and sunny, which is pleasant for tasks like digging but a bit chilly when the rain suddenly comes down and soaks you to the bone (yep, happened Thursday). Basically, South Farm is a gorgeous wedding venue with its own small orchard, about 6 acres of organically farmed crops that are mainly for the kitchen to use in the wedding food, huge flower and herb gardens, pigs (fewer now than when I started…), about 150 chickens, some runner ducks, a goose, white and traditional peacocks, and a few bee hives. I’ve probably forgotten something, but the point comes across that it’s a pretty diverse little place. I envy any wedding photographer that gets to work there! Katherine was hooked up with them through a volunteer matching service and loved her time there earlier this summer, so I followed suit. Bart, at the ripe old age of 25, is in charge of the entire veggie section of the farm and does almost all the prepping/seeding/sowing/weeding/cropping/watering/etc by his self, so he welcomes volunteers! We’re working on a seeds and/or food for labor kind of deal for the rest of the year and I’m learning so much about what and how to plant around here it’s definitely a win-win situation.
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| runner beans with the patio in the background |
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| South Farm - the main house (400 yrs old!) |
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| curious Angora goat |
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| Angora goats |
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| little spotted piggie scratching his own back on the tractor... very cute |
I’m realizing that you have to be ruthless when farming. Hacking off the majority of a tomato plant’s branches, trashing about 20 pots of gooseberries all of which still had some un-ripened fruit, and pulling up eggplants that were still producing was distressing! But I’m told the tomatoes will produce better fruit, we needed more space in the greenhouses to start new pea and bok choy crops, and the eggplants needed pulling to make room for the carrots for next years’ spring weddings. Even something as simple as harvesting green beans took some getting used to: At first I’d grab each bean individually, hold the rest of the plant, and gently twist off the bean. HA. After an hour that technique gave way to grabbing a handful of mostly beans with some leaves and yanking them off into the basket. Way more efficient!
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| seed tray of Bok Choy |
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| the (newly organized) greenhouse |
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| Golden Crown tomatoes- my absolute favorite |
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| Alfafla (read: alpha alpha) green manure :D |
Most of Tuesday and Wednesday were spent harvesting the Picasso and King Edward potatoes. The potato field actually looked unused because it had been over-planted with green manure called “alpha alpha” (for full comedic effect you have to say it out loud) which I only later realized was a different pronunciation of alfalfa. Ha! Anyway, we harvested the potatoes by dragging a digger-thing behind the tractor, then hopping off to grab whatever potatoes came to the surface, then repeating the process over and over. Comedic relief was in the next paddock over, when one of the angora goatswould start head-butting the piggies, which doesn’t hurt them at all but makes them oink and yell and generally verbalize their displeasure. After six hours there weren’t any more potatoes surfacing, so we called it a day (PS, my back was ridiculously sore) and left the potatoes to dry in the sun. (I tossed a few damaged ones to the pigs because I felt sorry for them.) The next day we sorted the potatoes by size and variety and weighed them. Final weight was more than half a ton!
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| Picasso Potatoes |
I bet most people reading this have glazed eyes by now, so let’s talk about the dangers of vegetables… dun, dun, dunnnnnnn. Did you know that raw lima beans (aka butter beans) break down and produce cyanide in your gut? Crazy! Bart gave himself a nasty case of cyanide poisoning last year by throwing some raw beans into his soup and not cooking them enough. I had no idea of this lima bean danger – is it common knowledge to everyone except Bart and myself? It seems like such an important little tidbit…
Friday morning I helped Andy with the chickens. These chickens have it good – they have a huge pen with trees on one side (chickens like to roost in low tree branches) and a field on the other. We threw a bunch of feed and some beet leaves down (tasty chicky treat) and then Andy taught me how to avoid getting pecked while stealing the chicken eggs literally out from under the hens. Against all odds, the first egg I collected was a ‘rubber egg’, an exceedingly rare occurrence when the egg shell doesn’t develop at all and you’re left with something that feels like a tough little water balloon. Eww. I didn’t really know what to think when I grabbed it… maybe it was just so fresh that the shell hadn’t hardened yet? (That was my naivety – the eggs should come out hard.) The 78 other eggs collected were all quite normal. I took home a half-dozen of these eggs and I swear the yolks are almost a florescent orange. Weird!
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| so mean looking! |
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| feeding the chickens |
Friday we had a meeting with the kitchen about what we needed to harvest for the weekend’s weddings. The math made my head spin! We set out to collect the 300 beet roots, 150 carrots, 80 leeks, 10 kg potatoes, 10 kg tomatoes, and 4 kg of fennel that would go into the guests’ dinner. This farm thing is a lot of work! Luckily for me I get to eat amazing leftover wedding food and/or whatever I want to grab from the fridge or pantry or garden.
There are so many other stories but I'll save them for another day. If I’ve learned nothing else, it’s that growing food can be insanely hard work.
Goodnight! Watch out for lima beans!
Claire (and Chris)
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