by Laura Parker Roerden

(October 17, 2011)

I feel held by the fall. This thought comes to me during my morning run along the River Bend towpath, in the lee of the Voss farm, one of the six other dairy farmers in Uxbridge while I was growing up. The Voss farm is no longer a farm. It is a monument—a state park with a long trail along a river canal that now has no purpose except recreational. The canal once was the latest innovation in transportation, allowing the mills to move woolen goods towed by horses along a straight and clear path through the Blackstone Valley.

No doubt the Voss farm was built before the industrial revolution. Its barn is the same size and style as our own, which likely dates it to just pre-Civil War.  Before the advent of electricity the animals would have needed the drinking water of the Rice City pond—the broad expanse of the Blackstone River upon which the farm backs up to. The barn was built where the land rises on a slight knoll overlooking the water, in respect to the regular inundations of a flood plain. Those Yankee farmers knew how to site their farms, showing deep knowledge for the rhythms of the land that created the best conditions for farming. The rich soil of a flood plain was the ideal setting for the corn and grain planted in fields still open to this day.

My attention is focused on the ground while I run, because that is where the roots and uneven earth is, but everywhere my awareness is brought to the light of autumn. It is very windy and the leaves are animated above me, casting flickering shadows on the ground that remind me of the patterns waves and sea life cast on the bottom while scuba diving. I feel held, even as I try to keep my balance on uneven terrain.

The smell of the air as I breathe in and out, now running harder, is so clean I can feel it nearly reach my feet with each long draw into my lungs. I can hear my heart beating and feel the rush of blood pulsing through my neck. And then it smacks me. I think of my brother and his last moments, as his heart stopped pounding. It’s a thought I try to avoid, but like all grief, it intrudes on the purest of moments—times when I’m not even thinking. My eyes moisten. I continue running, half crying, half held by the light, which now through my tears is making everything blur and reminding me of white sheets snapping in the breeze on a clothesline.

Fall for me has become less about the blazing color and more about a surrender to the reflected light—a half eaten communion wafer offered to us in candle light. The Voss farm is no more, devoured by the Industrial Revolution, one small bite at a time. Our farm, too, dismantled piece by piece. And so too the mills, a tow path rendered useless by the advent of the railroads, a mill in the northeast supplanted by garment districts first in the south and later in foreign lands with cheaper labor. My own brother Dave, who was here last fall laughing, haying, and drinking beer is now returned to the earth as ashes.

It happens so quickly, each turn of the kaleidoscope. It shows no mercy. As kids, we would call out “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” ending the game when the thought of one of us being truly lost in our games of hide and seek became too much to bear. But this march of time forward has no such trumpet call of mercy. There is only this sliding sheave of birth, maturity, decay, and death in spiraling cycles that are too easy for us to pretend are standing still because of their predictable repetition.

The edges of the leaves on the trees are browning and bending in the first sign of decay. Some have already given up and are taking their place among the smoldering matter on the ground. It’s a lie that I will smell this spiced residue every fall. It’s as if I am realizing that for the first time.

The Concord grapes just last month smelled swollen and sweet. But today I notice they are now rotting on the vines and sticky on the path.  I stop running and bend to watch a line of ants marching from a sugary mess, bringing the life giving final energies of decay back to their nests.

This is why I like fall, I realize. It’s more honest than spring, which seems to suggest that life is an endlessly reckless party.  The lines I see on my face, the changes in my body all seem to be mirrored everywhere I look. If there is a blazing beauty to it and equally stunning light it is only that more poignant when the final darkness of winter descends.

That feels right to me, even as I fight against it and strain to integrate it. If there is a redemptive moment when we leave in that final flash of light, I do not know. But I feel certain watching the sugars returned by the ants to their underground cities to feed the roots of endlessly growing and decaying trees that something of my brother remains.

The autumn light spills from a slanted sky in geometric planes. I come upon the gentle fluh-fluh-fluh sound of an impossibly enormous great blue heron taking off.  A single leaf takes a circuitous route to the ground. How is it that the mad tiddlywinks game of life pressing forward appears to be fueled entirely by death and change, and yet, still somehow suggests safe passage?

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by Laura Parker Roerden

My first experiments with preserving tomatoes involved burnt fingers, cuts, and a bloody looking mess of tomato waste everywhere that reminded me of that classic Julia Child SNL skit.

Fortunately, canning does not have to be a horror show. Over time and with the help of my fellow canner and friend since first grade Jane Clarke, I have learned that you do NOT really need a “a very sharp knife” to can like a pro. (Okay, you do need a paring knife, though.)

So grab an apron and pretend that you’re a 19th century midwife on the prairie. There’s a lot of boiling water involved.

Friends do not let friends seed tomatoes.

Here are our Five Very Best Tips for Preserving Tomatoes; as well as the Process for Canning and My Very Own Sauce recipe.

Five Very Best Tips for Preserving Tomatoes

1. Buy silicone gloves, which will allow you to submerge your hands into boiling water. Now that is sort of cool just in and of itself. But really you will buy them because hot pads eventually will get soaked through with water and scald you. It’s the best $20 investment you’ll ever make.

2. Freeze your tomatoes whole as they come out of the garden to deal with WHENEVER you want. When you take those frozen balls of sunshine out in January (when you’re ready to deal with them and heating up your kitchen doesn’t feel like a punishment) you can pour boiling water over them and their skins will slide off faster than a prom dress. (Okay, that’s Christine Gervais’ go-to line, so you can blame her for it.)

3.  Make tomato sauce in your crock pot and freeze or can. This might seem obvious, but I was five years into preserving tomatoes before Raelene Hourany posted on her Facebook page that she uses her crockpot to make tomato sauce and it’s been the Best. Thing. Ever. I can’t tell you how many burnt bottoms of pans in my cabinets mocked me until I pulled that slow cooker out. And you will feel so liberated to be able to leave your house without burning it down while your sauce does it’s slow and earthy dance.  (See My Very Own Tomato Sauce recipe.)

4. Buy a dehydrator. I spent many years trying to oven roast cherry tomatoes and then packing them in oil in messy freezer bags that I later never used. The tomatoes never fully dried; my oven and my kitchen would ooze moisture from leaving the oven door cracked open. Notwithstanding how good all that moisture might be for your skin, I now dry my cherry tomatoes in a dehydrator. They come out tasting like candy–and for a fraction of the energy cost. And you can dry store them for later reconstituting for soups, stews, and pastas.

5. Do not seed. That’s right. As I said to my dear friend Andy Parker when he was seeking advice, “Friends do not let friends seed tomatoes.” Whew! I bet you feel better. I know I do.

(BONUS: And while I can’t actually call this a tip because it involves other work, there is a great benefit to having chickens to feed your tomato peels, cores and discarded remains to.)

Process for Canning Tomatoes

What You’ll Need
a paring knife : )
silicon gloves (see Tip #1 ) or tongs that can hold a full canning jar
a large pan (like a Lobster Pot)
a wire canning wrack
a large shallow baking pan that will fit your sink
pans for boiling water
salt (sea salt preferred)
basil (or any herb from your garden or farmers market—this is where you can be creative)

1. Take a large pan (a lobster pot works great!), put in your wire basket insert for the cans, fill with water to about 3/4 capacity and start it boiling on your power burner. Fill other pans with water to utilize all of your burners and start them on high to boil the water.
2. While you wait for the water to boil, rinse the tomatoes in the shallow pan in the sink. You can pour the water off after rinsing and repeat.
3. Fill the pan in the sink with boiling water to scald the tomatoes. Leave the tomatoes to sit in the boiling water while you do the next step.
4. Fill each glass “can” with boiling water to sanitize. (Or you can do this in your dishwasher, but you’ll less energy if you sanitize the ol’ fashioned way.)

5. Now you can pour off the hot water from your pan of tomatoes–which will be ready to peel. Add some cold water to cool them before touching.
6. Peel, core, and cut off any bruises. You should be able to do this with a simple paring knife.

7.  Pour off the water from your sanitized cans and with your clean hands start inserting the peeled and whole tomatoes into your sanitized jars. Press the tomatoes down as you insert more to fill any air pockets. Plunge a knife down the sides of the jars to push tomatoes into any remaining air pockets. Fill to the rim of the can.

8. Finish with a teaspoon of sea salt and a sprig of your herb of choice.
9. Put the top on your canning jar and tighten with your rim.
10. By now your lobster pot water is hopefully boiling. Remove the canning insert and fill with cans. Wearing your silicone gloves, lower the cans until submerged by boiling water, resting the rack against the edge of the pan.
11. Pay attention to when the water in the lobster pot begins to reboil. From the reboil, time 45 minutes for the whole tomatoes to heat through. (If canning already prepared tomato sauce, heat up the sauce until uniformly warm, and follow steps 4, and 9-11).
12. Remove cans individually from the wire insert with silicone gloves (or tongs). Retighten tops and leave to cool on a counter top. You will hear a “pop!” as each individual can seals. This can take several hours.
13. Tap the lids of your cans. You ‘ll know that you have a good seal if you hear a “ping” instead of a “thud.” Don’t despair if you have a couple cans that still sound “thud” in comparison to the others after many hours of waiting (12 or more). These can go into your refrigerator for first use.

My Very Own Tomato Sauce
garlic head (fresh)
olive oil
fresh herbs (a tsp each of basil, thyme, oregano, and sage.)
20-30 plum tomatoes (or Your Very Own Canned Tomatoes)
1/2 bottle of red wine (something light or medium like a Beaujolais or Pino Noir)
organic carrots
a small onion

1. Drizzle garlic oil on peeled (or not–because they are organic, right?) carrots, a cut-up onion, and about 8 good cloves of garlic. Roast at 325 for about 45 minutes.
2. While you are roasting the carrots and garlic, scald, core, and peel your tomatoes. (Following steps 2, 3, 5 and 6 from above.)
3. Puree roasted carrots, onion, and garlic in a food processor.
4. Combine peeled tomatoes, wine, herbs, and roasted vegetables in a crock pot.
5. Cook on low for 8 hours.
6. With sauce warmed through, can as described above. Or you can simply freeze your tomato sauce for later use.

 

For Lara and all the Garden Moms

by Laura Parker Roerden

(August 28, 2015)

This summer was a long march of loss. Three parents of the kids we grew up with in the neighborhood of the farm died, one after another, as if the branch they were hanging from no longer could sustain them. Each was in their eighties. You could say they were simply taking their place on the ground, though that would be of little comfort.

Last week, it was a contemporary who died: Lara, a 45 year old wife and mother to a 13-year old and the best friend to a close friend of mine. We had all become friends in Boston’s South End when our first babies were born. Several of us had already lost our mothers before our first babies were born. We met in parks and in neighborhood cafes or called out to one another when we noticed infants in buckets hanging from our arms as we awkwardly juggled our keys, strollers, and diaper bags up the long climb of concrete stairs of our front stoops. Our friendships grew quickly, like weeds and the odd flower growing through the cracks in our hearts and confidence.

Lara had been an attorney, a brilliant researcher and lecturer at Harvard Business School. Many of the women in this mother’s group we formed had similar accomplishments under their belts, though once our babies were born our pasts mattered not one bit. We were instantly transformed by this mothering task that required so much resorting of who we were and what was important to us. What we didn’t know about this new role could fill volumes of books. While we sometimes shared tips on feeding or getting our infants to sleep, mostly we simply held the hard stuff for each other while we watched our children grow, like a giant stand of birches holds still, oxygen rich air.

Our small group of moms was called “Garden Moms” for the Garden of Eden, a cafe in the South End where we first met and often gathered. Snowy mornings when the city was paralyzed and no one could work would turn into moments of unexpected joy as everyone walked in the street and turned up at what we simply called “the Garden” for scones and coffee, while snow erased the soot and grime outside of the large windows looking out onto the now quiet street. Other times, we’d run into each other at our neighborhood parks and end up spending the day together.

As the years passed, we split off into smaller groups and dyads—friendships that have stood the test of time, but have remained fluid in their expression, as water in a river clinging to eddies might suddenly make a break to rejoin the flow.

Lara’s passing, like so many of the other younger ones who have left too soon, defy our tidy images of nature’s cycles. It matters little though, since it’s clearer to me as I age that our hearts defy any such logic of loss, no matter how pretty.

The day that Lara passed away, many us received a text from her best friend Maria, who was with her bedside holding her space and dignity. I was on my run at River Bend Farm, where the Concord grapes were just ripening and read the text from Maria near a simple stand of birches. I was listening to Keith Jarrett’s “My Song” while I stretched (strange how the details about those moments when you receive such news can be so easy to remember).  I looked up and noticed that the riverine birches had started to peel their bark, an accommodation to their fast growth that leaves them particularly thin-skinned.

I texted back to Maria an image of the birches, as I had no words to comfort a close friend who was watching her best friend die at 45. I could only bring to mind the heart space we had so many times held for one another over the years, as we left strips of bark from our former lives on the ground.

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8 Reasons Roosters Rule

by Laura Parker Roerden

Should you have a rooster in your small flock or backyard farm? The question comes up a lot. Roosters are noisy, are not necessary for hens to produce eggs, and many ordinances in residential neighborhoods forbid them. So unless you’re wanting to hatch your own eggs, which obviously requires them to be fertilized by a rooster, why would you want one or two (or ten) roosters?

1. Roosters are the front-line of your flock. They not only will aggressively attack any predator that threatens your hens, they will also announce oncoming threats to their flock providing ample warning for hens to take cover. This role is essential whether or not you free range. When we had a weasel during the winter entering our coop every night, we lost nearly all of our roosters first, as they were the ones defending the hens. If not for the roosters, we would have lost another dozen or so hens in addition to the forty we lost.
2. Roosters teach hens where to find food. If you watch a flock free-range, you’ll see group of hens commandeered by a rooster who will sound the dinner bell when particularly tasty treat is found. Interestingly, scientists who have studied this phenomena have noticed that hens will ignore a rooster’s call for food that they are used to finding on their own. They will only respond to calls for novel finds.

   

    

3. The social structure of a flock is often correctly described as the “pecking order.” While plenty of drama is ascribed to the hens in a henhouse, it’s actually the rooster who creates and maintains the social order of a flock. Rooster-less flocks will have a lot more in-fighting among hens for social dominance to fill the vacuum created by the lack of a rooster. Hens in flocks without a rooster have been known to peck another hen to death. I suspect I’ve never had a hen-pecked hen in my flock because we’ve always had roosters to maintain a healthy order.

4. We’ve all read the storybooks: roosters announce the morning so that the farmer  knows when dawn has arrived and it’s time to get up. It turns out that roosters anticipate the dawn, crowing in the dark. Only recently did scientists learn that the famous crow was not light driven, but rather based on an internal, circadian clock. By crowing just before dawn, roosters are thought to be announcing their territory and dominance just as other birds are about to become active. I learned during our most recent weasel-geddon that our roosters start crowing as early as 3:00 a.m.

5. If you want to maintain fertilized eggs for hatching, you’ll need 1 rooster per 12 hens to ensure each hen has been mated with sufficiently. This means for a flock of any size, you’ll have multiple roosters. It turns out that the most dominate rooster of the flock is the first to crow each morning, with the next in line and so on following. A group of hens becomes the favorite of each rooster. This daily roll-call, if you will, helps to maintain the flock dynamics and pecking order, ensuring a well-run flock where all members are accounted for and protected. Researchers also speculate that this helps females sort out dominance in potential mates.

6. Multiple roosters breed increased intelligence and fitness into a flock. Researchers have discovered that submissive roosters in a flock will use clever behavioral tactics to divert attention away from the more dominant males. The more clever the tactic, the more successful the rooster at breeding. If you hatch your own chicks from a flock with several roosters competing, over time it stands to reason you will be increasing the intelligence and fitness of your flock.

7. Seeing the lowering sunlight hit the cerulean and magenta hues of a rooster on a spring pasture is a siren call to the imagination suggesting afternoons lingering on a Mexican patio or dining under a grape arbor in Tuscany. Or perhaps, our roos help us to appreciate and know deeper shades of simply being sure footed about our own slice of here and now.

8. And last, but not least: there is always the quiet thrill of collecting fertilized, warm eggs for an incubator or allowing a broody hen to hatch her chicks as mother nature intended. Watch this beautiful video. You might just want a roo or two (or ten), afterall!

 

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(And other thoughts on eating locally wherever you are)

by Laura Parker Roerden

What does it mean to be here? I mean right where you are at this very moment.

I can distinctly remember the first time I actually understood what being present to where I was meant deep in my bones. Like a lot of my epiphanies, I was eating when I had it.

I was in Positano, Italy, along the beautiful Almalfi Coast. I had sat down at a casual seaside restaurant, which had a patio that looked out on the colorful fishing boats moored in the Gulf of Salerno. I chose the restaurant for its post card view, so my expectations for the food were secondary.

I looked up at the fishing boats unloading and noticed the lemon trees hanging innocently enough above the deck.

My first thought was: “What a nice way to bring color onto a patio.”

Then my food came: il pesce del giorno (the fish of the day)—a delicate white fish pan seared in olive oil with a very simple rosemary and lemon garnish.

I looked out. In the dirt that gathered in the outcropping of rocks that lined the coast, rosemary bushes were moving like fans in the breeze. They were growing wild in crevices and by the side of the road.

Everywhere lines of olive trees were planted in terraces built to stabilize the sharply inclined hillsides prone to mudslides.

I breathed in the sea air and took my first taste of the fish. I could feel the slight spray of salt on my skin—a grandular bitterness rolled on my lips mirroring the salty texture of the wrinkled skin of the fish on my plate. The low earthy note of the rosemary was balanced by the higher bite of the lemon, the soft flesh of the fish in contrast to its crackled skin—each distinct flavor a stitch connecting me more deeply to the very earth from which it had sprung.

I was eating not just any fish, but this particular fish whose giant eye looked up at me and was unmistakenly once alive and moving torpedo-like through the waves as one long muscle only hours ago.

In that one bite, I suddenly understood what it means to be nourished by a meal. How land, sun, and sea intermingle in this a kind of holy communion to sustain life. How we too spring from the salt of the earth.

We read a lot about eating local—how it’s better for the environment and our communities. It’s better for our bodies. But in that moment I understood that eating locally sourced foods is also better for our souls.

Environmentalist David Orr suggests that our modern malaise evidenced by high rates of violence, depression, and other maladies has at its roots our disconnection from nature. “We do not know who we are,” he offers, “because we do not know where we are.” It’s an interesting thought to consider.

Yes, it’s true: we are what we eat. But do you know where you are right now?

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by Laura Parker Roerden

It’s that time again, when the hens become broody and build hidden nests that make morning egg collection a treasure hunt rivaling the White House Easter Egg Roll.

Last spring we found this nest in our calf barn.

Naturally, we left the eggs so that the mother hen could tend to them; though they did not hatch. Nature can be like that, life pressing forward always under the thumb of death, like some mad tiddlywinks game that makes progress in fits and starts.

We take our annual trip to the feed store to “pick up chicks.” This year, we went to Tractor Supply, where the chicks are kept in galvanized steel tubs that call to mind wholesome images of hand-washed clothes hanging on a line.

In no time my youngest son and I had thirty Rhode Island Red chicks settled into brooders in the barn, the chicks lounging under heat lamps like beach goers splayed on warm beach sand. In the morning, chores sound like a busy restaurant, with the clanging of scoops and grains meeting accents of chaos and urgency. Listen here.

At night peepers and chicks compete for the soundscape as the sun sets over the upper pasture, having slid north so slowly over the winter days that I am shocked to notice it no longer sets over the lower pasture.

My nephew Ed Parker opens the upper pasture and the cows move north, too, like some oversized sundial stamping out time with hooves.

Rain from the west crawls along the river valley and comes up our hill as if a legend, depositing rainbows in the eastern sky and worn clay riverlets along our road.

Swollen mud waters the fiddleheads and bluets, which will soon press forward from spongy ground.

Everywhere, life is hungrily feeding or being fed.[jetpack_subscription_form]

(July 5, 2014)

by Laura Parker Roerden

It was a dark and stormy night. . .and we were celebrating the 4th of July and our dear friend Janice Kimball’s birthday at the farm with the Yankee Independence Day tradition of salmon and peas, a gaggle of children, board games, and soggy fireworks and poppers.

We took a break in the action to go see the cows and chickens and ended up in the upper loft of the Big Red barn, where our 8 year-old son found this:

My first thought upon seeing the old half broom extended with wire and the handle of another: “I guess that’s one way to reach cobwebs.”

But an 8-year old mind goes right to Quidditch: “I think that’s a Nimbus 2000,” he stated matter-of-factedly. Our 9-year old disagrees. “It’s obviously a Sidesweeper 100.”

We often find these treasures in our barn, left exactly where they were last used by hands now passed.

I tend to leave them where they were found, so that others too can answer the call of the past to their imaginations.

 

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