Gasland

The Moratorium was just passed in NY state! Please everyone go see this film!

http://gaslandthemovie.com/

"Over two thirds of our Senators, including 28 Democrats and 20 Republicans, voted to pass a bill placing a one-year moratorium on "hydro-fracking" -- banning this controversial method of gas drilling while experts study the risks it poses to the purity and safety of our drinking water. These leaders bravely defied the threats of the drilling lobby and stood up for the health of all New Yorkers.

hree weeks ago everyone thought a hydrofracking ban was dead. Albany was caught up in budget battles, and then the State Senate went home for the year. But activists and concerned New Yorkers kept pushing, and we showed our leaders just how much this issue matters to us.

In Albany, singer Pete Seeger and actor Mark Ruffalo joined Frack Action and other leading environmental groups to urge the Senate to come back and pass the moratorium. Over 23,000 Working Families supporters signed a petition sending this same message, and we delivered it to every Senator's office.

Then, in the final days before the vote, we flooded the Senate leadership with calls. For over 24 hours, Majority Conference Leader John Sampson's phones were ringing off the hook. And he listened: He brought the drilling moratorium bill up for a vote, and it passed by a huge margin.

What happens now? According to the Mid-Hudson News Network, "the State Assembly is expected to take up the bill in September." If the Assembly also passes it and the Governor signs it, the drilling moratorium will be law.

There's still much more we need to do to keep our water safe -- but this is a major step forward. With your help, we can keep fighting until we make sure that unsafe drilling practices won't threaten a single New Yorker's drinking water. "

Cabbages in all their glory!

The Cabbage Experiment

The cabbage experiment!

These guys were started from seed in my father's basement. I worried they would not germinate, or make it when transplanted but here they are in all their glory!

more on this to come...

cultivating

City vs. Country

I have a really hard time choosing between two things that I want desperately. I'm not logical in the least and so pros and cons are never scratched down on paper. I always go with gut or heart. Is this what I want to do? Do I feel good about it? Done.

And so, when I moved from the sprawling countryside where I grew up, to New York City, I never thought I was leaving anything behind. My mother was still in the country and I could go there whenever I pleased. My father was at the time living in Los Angeles. I had two escapes from New York City life; a quick zip to upstate New York to get lost in the woods that surrounded my Mother's house, and a longer flight to California to sit by the ocean or dabble my toes in cool pool water. New York friends talked about getting out of the city like it was some sort of science experiment, confusing and stressful but above all else very intriguing.

These same New York friends told me I was lucky to have my family outside of the city and simultaneously so close by. They told me they would love to go upstate and get a break from their monotonous, crazy existence. I was lucky, but I still wasn’t choosing.

My first apartment in New York was a one bedroom on the upper west side with two of my best friends from childhood. We played a game of musical chairs sharing one bed and a pull out couch and talked about how glad we were to get out of that small town upstate. One of those friends and I had taken a break from school and gotten ourselves jobs, the third shuttled back and forth between our cluttered apartment and a New York college life. She made some friends at school. The three of us made friends collectively and invited them to our communal living space perched right above an ornery old spinster who would bang her broom against the ceiling whenever we threw a party. We viewed her as the a-typical stressed out New Yorker and turned up the music.

I commuted to a job in fashion in the meatpacking district working at a desk five days a week often feeling like a slacker. My coworkers sat at their desks well beyond any dinnertime I’d ever known and drank coffee by the truckload. I remember receiving an email from a coworker one evening. She shot me a glance from across the room as I scrolled down my screen reading the words “I’ve got to get out of here!” Who knows if she just meant for the day because she was running late for a dinner date or in life, but I took it as the latter. I sent a lengthy response, that I knew exactly how she felt, that working at a desk 10hrs a day didn’t seem like life to me and so on. She never responded. As we walked out of the office later that evening I brought up the email again, but somehow it seemed that I was now conversing with a different friend, not one who had just emailed me about her lack of zeal for life in general.

“I mean what else is there?” she said. At which point I knew I had over done it.

A few years later my father had moved back east settling with my step mother in Connecticut, just an hours drive from where I had moved to in Brooklyn. I didn’t share a one bedroom with two friends anymore but I still lived in an apartment surrounded by concrete and was awoken every morning by noise outside my window. I was now proud to say I was a New Yorker, as we all are, but in the back of my mind it never seemed definite. I could go back home anytime I wanted.

I still haven’t decided where I want to be, and the conclusion I’m slowly coming to is that I may never really decide. They both feel right. A friend who has moved out of New York for the West coast never really got over this city. Her home in California sits on a beautiful vineyard overlooking a lake with spacious land and animals and peace and quiet.

“I know it’s supposed to be beautiful,” she told me one evening over dinner, “and it is, but it just doesn’t do it for me. Show me a bunch of schoolgirls walking down the streets of New York holding hands, and that to me is beautiful. That takes my breath away.” And I remember agreeing with her, in public and in private, because I did love New York and still do. And maybe I used to feel bad for wanting too much; for wanting the peace of the countryside and the clatter of the city. And maybe, I just don’t want to choose.

The most frequently asked question I receive are these six words: How did you become a farmer?

Somehow, farming has become the career that no one understands. When, in my job as a part time bartender, customers inquire into what I do outside of the restaurant, the reality of my answer never makes sense to them. Their heads tilt to the side and they shoot a glance at a friend wondering if this is in fact a joke. 'You’re behind a bar' I can hear them thinking. There is this huge disconnect: A farmer in New York? A farmer behind a bar? A farmer?

But after initially being taken aback, the most common response is joy and admiration. “Well, good for you!” people say “That’s a lot of work.” I even had a woman congratulate me in a shoe store grabbing my hand with vigor to shake it as if I had just joined the Peace Corps. I’m not complaining. It’s more than nice to be congratulated for something you love doing. And people are curious, the questions suddenly and rapidly falling from their mouths: How did this happen? Where is your farm? How did you get into this type of work? Can we come and help? What kind of vegetables are you growing?

How could a young person living in a city possibly be growing things; and not just as a hobby but as a profession? After much contemplation the answer is…

I really don’t know.

And, to my great relief it is the answer that most farmers come up with after a moment of thought. You begin as a regular person who just wants to grow their own food. Or someone who grew up with a small garden and parents who showed them how to plant beans and trellis tomatoes. And then somehow you wake up one day, an adult, and you’re running an irrigation system or figuring out how to keep aphids away. You’re building a hoop house or thinning beets. You’re waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning to tiptoe down to the garden.

I remember being in grade school sitting at my desk, jamming pencils, telling people how I was going to be a writer when I grew up. I even started a periodical called ‘The Lexington News’ that I distributed to family members. I made up a weather report and wrote a fictional story about a princess that always ended with ‘to be continued…” Like many things when you are that age my periodical fell by the wayside and I moved on to bigger and bolder things. There was college at a small liberal arts school in New York City that encouraged me to do nothing else but write, and a job in fashion that I felt if not avoided would turn me into someone who cared only about myself. And then there was restaurant work; something I’d always done to support myself throughout high school and college and something that as a New Yorker you find yourself doing just to stay alive.

And, despite the negative connotations, restaurant work seemed to be the one thing that encouraged me to have another life outside of the work place; to try other things, to have a relationship with the restaurant but not necessarily a monogamous one. I tended bar but that wasn’t all I did. And so, with College a few months in my past, I ran towards the other huge thing that had always been a part of my life, food. How did you become a farmer? First, it was just about food.

My parents cooked for me: herbaceous, oily, green, healthy food and I learned about it through their own culture and lifestyle. My mother, the mutt, grew tomatoes in the summer, blossoming from the deep countryside earth of upstate New York and my father, the Greek, had citrus trees and a garden beneath his window and next to his swimming pool in Los Angeles. This meant that the food I had been eating all my life had an origin that I, the writer and bartender, wanted to know more about. I started looking at the opposite coasts where I had grown up very differently. I started growing herbs on my fire escape in Brooklyn. They all died within a month and I cursed the heavens and threw up my hands in the air. But, life went on. How did you become a farmer again?

I visited small and large organically certified or practicing farms on both coasts either helping out or just pushing farmers for knowledge about planting, and sunlight, water and drought but mainly, I asked about them. How did you get started farming? East to West it always seemed the same, an accidental career. Brilliant chemists, teachers, parents, artists all with one common goal: to grow food for themselves and their families. Each farmer had known little or nothing about growing. They’d worked multiple jobs in the beginning just to stay afloat. But still they encouraged. “Try new things”, they told me “think outside the box.”

Months later those herbs on my fire escape were revisited and were turned into lush and fragrant bushes. Try new things. Think outside the box. Months later there was land being offered to me free of charge and a friend who I trusted more than myself to sow seeds along side me and to see everything come to fruition.

“Stand here,” one farmer told me when I visited. She guided me onto the property adjacent to her own land. We were standing about a foot from her soil, just past a sprinkling of trees and a property line and we were literally looking up at her farm. The dirt was stacked and almost completely green, trees filling in the spaces amidst buckwheat and green garlic. She had built up this land for nearly thirty years she told me and at first I stood confused..built up? And then it hit me. This was how you became a farmer. You put your love and sweat into land that you truly cared about. You planted cover crops and added compost to build the soil up and create a strong back bone for your plants. You planted things you had never even tasted but threw in the ground just to see what happened. You took chances and learned and understood and gave back. The land next to their property had all but blown away, flat as a cement parking lot beneath our boots. It was a conventional farm, maybe a hundred acres or more and you could see the soil had been uncared for. It was dry and dull not even a sprout could be seen poking from the flatness. You could see the land next to hers, just a foot away, was dying.

Perhaps what I have learned is that it’s all true. Being a farmer is hard work and thus is deserved of every hand shake and congratulatory address. I’m always happy to find people interested even through their booze hazed confusion. Now, I jump at the chance to tell people why or how I became a farmer.

“It’s just that,” I tell them as I pour another drink, “It’s a very long story.”

*I wrote this piece while interning at Hudson Ranch in Napa Valley.