Pie for Supper!

by Audrey

Here is a follow-up on the sweet potato essay - my favorite sweet potato recipe. I prefer dishes that solidly sweet or savory, and this is a lovely savory pie that makes a great main dish. Serve with a salad (I love the bright colors of the orange pie next to a salad with arugula and roasted beets), and some bread. We had a dinner guest who allegedly disliked sweet potatoes, but had seconds of this pie!

SAVORY SWEET POTATO PIE

2 cups mashed sweet potatoes

1 cup plain yogurt

2 eggs

1/2 tablespoon butter

1/2 cup minced onion

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tablespoon fresh sage leaves, plus 5-6 pretty sage leaves

1 teaspoon salt

a few grinds of black pepper

1 9" pie crust (I like to add some finely chopped pecans to the pie crust)

Preheat the oven to 375 F.
Peel and chop the sweet potatoes, and steam until tender.
Meanwhile, saute the onion in the butter until translucent, then add the garlic and saute for a couple more minutes.
Puree the sweet potatoes (a food processor or blender works well) and make sure you have 2 cups
Add the yogurt, eggs, onion/garlic, salt, pepper and sage. Puree until smooth.
Pour the sweet potato mixture into the pie crust. Decorate the top with the reserved sage leaves.
Bake for 40-50 minutes.

Sweetness

by Farmwife Audrey

Sweet potatoes are possibly my favorite vegetable. They even have a delicious-sounding Latin name: Ipomoea batatas. Its cousins include the showy, and prolific, morning glory. Though a tropical plant from the Americas, sweet potatoes can be grown in chilly New England, and brighten our tables at Thanksgiving and well into the winter.

Ian reporting on the harvest on his tater-phone.

We’ve grown sweet potatoes at Simple Gifts Farm for years, and love to see their beautiful vines sprawling across the field, to harvest them just after the first frost, and to share their carotenous bounty with you.  This year (with a bit of help from a weeding fairy), we grew a nice crop, pulling out about 2 tons from 1/3 of an acre.

However, they do have some fussy post-harvest requirements. Immediately after harvest, sweet potatoes must be cured at high temperature (80^oF) and humidity, conditions that are not typical of October in Massachusetts. Thereafter, the tubers need to be stored at cool room temperature (55-60oF), which is much warmer than the mid-30s that most root crops enjoy.

In past years, we’ve somewhat fudged this part, curing them in the greenhouse. In many autumns, this works reasonably well, with toasty daytime temperatures and moderate nights. After curing, we have stacked crates and crates in our home basement, which is conveniently at just the right storage temperature during the winter. Not so conveniently, our basement (which is also where we send cabin-fevered children and do the laundry), gets pretty dirty, especially when the crew comes through the window to fetch a crate or two for the winter share.

Last year, however, our luck with the greenhouse-loosy-goosy-curing ran out. As house-boss, I was traumatized. I don’t really like to think about it. I didn’t want to write about it, but Jeremy thought it was a good example of how we learn and improve things each year. After last year’s late first frost, it became dismally cold. After ‘curing’ the sweet potatoes in the not-hot greenhouse, the crates stacked in our lovely basement grew horrible white mold all over them. You see, curing literally means that the heat and humidity cure the inevitable nicks and bruises that sweet potatoes acquire when harvested and disconnected from their vines. A cork layer develops, and suberin is deposited (this is for the plant nerds – suberin is a waxy material produced by the tuber’s outer root cells).  The cork layer and suberin act as a barrier to decay-causing microorganisms and to excessive moisture loss during storage. Curing also jump-starts the process of converting starch to sugar, which makes sweet potatoes sweet.

We lost most of the crop last year. Something had to change.

Jeremy, circa 1998, on a farm-built rocket ship.

This year, we have the U-Haul. Jeremy got it for cheap from a guy just over the border in Vermont, who had super-insulated it as a retrofitted walk-in cooler for his yogurt delivery business. The first time we tried, a small space heater got the inside up to 120^oF. Talk about Yankee ingenuity. It is a really ugly truck, but it is awesome.  Jeremy got a $35 thermostat for the space heater, and now can keep the U-Haul a cozy, even 80^oF.  So, we’ll cure the sweet potatoes for a week or so, then turn down the thermostat to 55^oF, where they can happily hang out with the winter squash until we all eat them.  I swear, farmers SHOULD build rockets.

First Frost: A Photo Essay

We rise to greet the first frosty sunrise at Simple Gifts Farm with a bittersweet mix of relief, sadness, and the type of exhaustion you feel after climbing a beautiful and steep mountain. 

We, and the farm, have landed in autumn. Frost is the kiss of death for tender crops like eggplant, but a sweet kiss for hardy crops like the Brussels sprouts and kale.

We were out yesterday evening, double-checking that all our hoophouses were tucked down, protecting our autumn crops. We'll be out this week, harvesting the sweet potatoes.

The clover and rye are unperturbed by this frost, and will continue be a living blanket of green on our resting fields.

Meet the Crew, Part IV. Sam DeBoskey

By Audrey Barker Plotkin

To Sam DeBoskey, farming feels like activism that he can get behind with his whole person. Picking tomatoes, moving cows to a new pasture, and tending the soil are all physical acts, but ones that together move towards his ideal of doing regenerative and positive work.  As we chat (and pick tomatoes) I can hear the philosophy student and idealist in Sam.

"Animals make me happy," says Sam DeBoskey. The cow agrees.

Sam grew up in Denver, Colorado, and first came out to Amherst to attend Hampshire College. He was studying philosophy, sociology and anthropology when he took a summer job on a cattle ranch back in Colorado. Farming manifested the ideas of sustainability and community he was studying, and he returned to Pine Cliff Ranch for three seasons. There, he helped to manage 250 cows on a rotational grazing system. The farmer there called himself a grass farmer rather than a rancher, a view that Farmer Dave at Simple Gifts Farm shares. In fact, Sam first connected with Simple Gifts Farm by interviewing Dave for part of his Hampshire Division III thesis.

In addition to the ranch, Sam worked at the Hampshire College Farm, mainly with their livestock, and on a crew that renovated a 75,000 square foot greenhouse for organic tomato production near Denver. He also travelled through Europe, the Middle East, and Indonesia with a study abroad program visiting intentional communities and eco-villages. Everywhere he went, he was most drawn to the food production aspect of these communities.

At Simple Gifts Farm, Sam is expanding his skill set to vegetable production. He is most excited to learn about soil health, to discern what the soil needs for the plants to do what we want them to do. He also has become much more comfortable using tractors to do a variety of tasks. His main tractor is the John Deere 1010 (our first tractor!) which he uses to apply organic fertilizer with the spinning spreader or side-dresser, and to mow with the brush-hog. Managing the livestock is another role that Sam enjoys here. A couple of afternoons a week, he moves fence to rotate the cows and chickens to new grazing areas. He says, ‘animals make me happy’.

He is also struck by the beauty of the vegetables – a glossy purple eggplant, a Striped German tomato. I think about this later, as I serve up a pile of vivid orange carrots to the gaggle of kids who just harvested them while helping (or is that ‘helping’?) at the farm on this Labor Day. A favorite vegetable is hard to choose, but Sam especially enjoys golden beets (roasted, or grated on a salad) and spinach (in smoothies).

After asking the usual questions about his farming path, I ask Sam if he has anything he’d like to add. He considers, and then says how grateful he is for how Jeremy and Dave hold this place and how they welcome the apprentices as part of the farm. He is glad to get to know the families and communities that tie this farm together (in return, our boys hero-worship the apprentices). It is joy for us, too, to have the chance to be part of our apprentices’ paths, to know their hopes and vision for making a sustainable future for themselves and the communities they build.

Meet the Crew, Part III. Hilary Dennis

Hilary Dennis, with her harvest game face ON

By Audrey Barker Plotkin

On a misty August morning before 8 a.m., I find Hilary Dennis in the full swing of a harvest day, picking hoophouse tomatoes. Over the course of the interview, I am in constant motion to keep up – up and down the hoophouse rows, into the box truck as she drives the crew out to the zukes and cukes, then into the cucumber rows. Fortunately, I’ve had my first cup of coffee.

Hilary studied environmental studies and Spanish at New York University, where she graduated in 2010. NYU, in the heart of Manhattan, isn’t where you’d expect to get the farming bug, and indeed she somewhat backed into farming. First, she became engaged in the local food dialogue in New York. One summer, she had two internships – one promoting a new farmers’ market in her hometown of Grafton, Massachusetts, and the other working on the state Global Warming Solutions Act with the Department of Environmental Protection. She noticed that although the state sought input from local farmers on how farms could reduce carbon emissions, those meetings were scheduled for mid-day during the height of the growing season. This disconnect between policy-makers and farmers got her thinking that she would like to go to law school and become an advocate for small farmers in policy. To start from the ground up in this plan, she decided she should get some experience working on small farms. Well, the grand plan radically changed on the first day farming – she fell in love with farm work and now aspires to some day have her own vegetable farm.

The Farmall 140, with belly-mounted basket weeder

Since graduating in 2010, Hilary worked on several farms in the region, but this is her first experience as a full season apprentice. She greatly appreciates the opportunities at Simple Gifts Farm to build her skills. In April, each apprentice is assigned a tractor, and Hilary jumped at the chance to learn to operate the Farmall 140 – our second-smallest tractor we use for precision cultivating work. This tractor also needed a fair bit of maintenance work (typical for this 50-plus-year-old machine), so Hilary quickly became well-acquainted with the machine, and learned that being handy with fixing equipment is a key part of keeping a farm running.  Six months later, her favorite job is using the 140 for basket weeding, and she is looking forward to continuing to develop her field operations skill-set. When it is her week on the farm lunch rotation, she also enjoys experimenting with cooking up the produce – she even made ice-cream with her favorite vegetable, fennel!

When I ask Hilary what stands out to her about Simple Gifts Farm, she tells me how valuable Jeremy and Dave’s personalities are. Their patience and support to the crew set the tone for good morale. To Hilary, this is why despite the unseasonably cool and wet season, and all sorts of challenges, the crew can work well together to produce an abundance of amazing food.

We are glad that Hilary will join us for a second season, and we think her calm cheer and organization will set the tone for another good year. After she gets more experience managing a farm, we hope to see her (perhaps with her sister, who is also a farm convert) running her own successful enterprise.