Braddock Farms

Braddock farms was my last stop, but first I attended Power Shift, a youth convention talking about issues of climate change and youth empowerment. I met up with friends, and met some future Oberlin schoolmates. Naturally I went to all of the food focused seminars, discussions and panels. It was all so fascinating.

Plus I was that close to Bill McKibben. How cool is that?

I was housed in hostel that was a converted convent. It was right across the street from a steel mill.

The farm was just down the street from the hostel. Both were in Braddock, PA, which is in the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Braddock had been a booming city because of the steel mill, but in the 1980s a series of layoffs forced 90% of the inhabitants out of the city. Braddock became a ghost city.

    (Graffiti near the hostel)

Slowly but surely Braddock has started to get back on it's feet. They have a new mayor who is implementing positive changes and renovating buildings. He's decreasing gang violence, helping schools and many other great things (including the pictured signs).

While at Power Shift I learned that the biggest rubber duck in the world was stationed less than a quarter mile away from the convention center. Naturally we had to visit.

                                      (Necessary selfie with the duck)

The farm was part of Grow Pittsburgh (a program promoting urban farms). A couple years ago they took over an abandoned lot and turned it into a farm. Right next to the steel mill.

Urban farming is pretty similar to rural farming except that instead of having quiet you have truck drivers honking and whistling while you're weeding... The farm is a non-profit organization run by Marshall. He was gone for the week so I worked with his assistant for the summer, Kristen. Being a non-profit they were able to make their vegetables accessible to the people living in Braddock. They tried to have their (local, organic) vegetable prices compete with Food Lion's prices. We had lots of people come and pay for their veggies with WIC checks. Each check was for $5 and only redeemable at a farmers market. We had people bring three or four (15 or 20 dollars) and we sent them home with at least 5 bags bursting with produce. The program was a win-win for everyone.

The best part about living on my own was cooking for myself. This is lentils, wild rice and kale.

 I made pesto with garlic greens (that I rescued while we were weeding) and spinach.

Curried tofu and wild rice.

Roasted vegetables (mainly from the farm) and swiss chard (from the farm) omlette

The woman who ran the hostel had just adopted a puppy named Colby and he was like the cutest thing ever.

We mulched with aspen shavings, which made the farm so pretty.

Laurel

Goodness Grows

I guess I should finish this off before I go start another adventure. Really my favorite part about blogging is the pictures, so here they are with explanations.

Rob's parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary while I was there, and I was invited to the party. Dawn was in charge of flowers, and she had me gather bunches of flowers and asparagus tops to arrange in to bouquets.

And then I added some to my hair. I put all these in myself, then I asked Caleb to check it. He tried to add a couple more flowers and bobby pins, but somehow I managed to do my own hair better than he could... :)

Tomatilla shells are beautiful.

I picked 55 lbs of tomatillas in one morning, and Dawn picked 22 for a grand total of 77 lbs! That was a cold morning. Ever 15 minutes I went into the house and ran my hands under warm water until I had feeling in them again and could go back out and pick more. Once the sun crept over the hill the picking got a little more pleasant.

Lots and lots of pumpkin scooping.

I got to woodwork with Rob for a couple days. We built these stairs in one afternoon. I got to help cut and measure the supports on the bottom and screw the step parts in. It was quite exciting.

We also built a railing for the steps, and fixed an old railing. I measured, cut and drilled.

And later I put the first coat of paint on the railings (not pictured).

Levi being silly.

Chicks!

Laurel

Goodness Grows Week One

I know I'm a really bad blogger... I've tried to be a good journal keeper my whole life, but I never follow through. I've decided to write a collection of memories/ short stories from my time on the farm. Let's start with the first week:

The bus pulled up beside some train tracks and I was dumped there on the side of the road, clutching my bags to me. I was glad that a passenger had mixed up where she was supposed to get off and was spending a couple minutes discussing this with the bus driver so that I wasn't alone there waiting. A couple older men watched me from a deck a level above me. I clicked the on button on my phone to check the time again. Still 5 minutes early. As I looked down a white truck pulled up with two young men in it. They made a U-turn and the one driving leaned out the window and called, "are you WWOOFing with Goodness Grows?" Yes, that was the farm I was looking for. "Yeah," I called back. The truck came to a stop and both men hopped out and came towards me. I pulled my suitcase over towards the truck. The older one stuck out his hand, "I'm Jeremy." Then the younger one, "And I'm Caleb." I shook their hands informing them that I would probably have to hear their names a couple more times before I got them. "So what do you have to do with the farm?" I asked them as we threw my stuff in the back of the truck. "I'm a WWOOFer, I got here yesterday." That was Jeremy. "I'm Dawn's son. I'm 16." So Caleb was the oldest son.
Caleb showed us around Cumberland. It reminded me of Ithaca a little in the way that it had a commons area. As we walked we chatted. It turns out Jeremy was from Cincinnati and he worked in a factory that made armored cars. He would get laid off for a week or two at a time (because his company couldn't afford to pay all their employees all the time) so he would take that week and go off on an adventure (like this one). Cincinnati and Ithaca seemed to have similar viewpoints and so did Jeremy and I. We got in the truck which was rather tight with all three of us in the front seat. As we got to the outskirts of Cumberland Caleb pointed out the window. "This is my dad's house." Jeremy stopped and out he hopped. I was confused. "He doesn't live on the farm with us?" Jeremy explained that Caleb lived with his dad during the week and on the farm on the weekends. "I guess he's Dawn's son from a previous relationship and then Dawn and Rob got married and had Silas and Levi. Silas and Levi, I thought. I'll have to remember those names.

I made my way down the stairs and over to the smoking corner, under the porch. Dawn, Rob and Jeremy were there, finishing up their after dinner cigarettes. I squeezed in next to Jeremy and listened to their conversation. I tend to be quiet around new people, which was fine, because Jeremy seemed to be happy to ask all the questions. When their discussion wrapped up Dawn and Rob excused themselves to go to bed and I said, "I changed my mind."
We made our way down to the edge of the pond by the light of the moon (and a little help from Jeremy's flashlight, but he liked to keep it off if he could help it). We flipped over the canoe and located the paddles. I willed myself not to think about ghosts. Dawn had told us earlier in the day that someone had died in that pond. In that pond! They had up and blacked out, fallen out of their boat and drowned. The pond had had to be dredged and the body was recovered. I think Dawn had been there that day, and watched the whole thing. The reeds around the pond whispered to me as we pushed the canoe out, then we paddled into the middle with silent strokes.
We craned our necks up and pointed at the stars. "I see Orions Belt!" "Where's the North Star?" "I found the big dipper." "Shooting star at 12'o clock." "I don't really know any constellations." "I only really know three." Each time we spoke was surrounded by silence, but not really silence. I could hear the crickets, and the cars on the road, the reeds whispering, almost like ghosts. I could hear the dip of his paddle and once in a while the sound of an animal on the shore. We decided that the moon was either full or very close, and stayed out until we couldn't feel our fingers and our toes and I had finally seen a shooting star. We pulled the canoe up vowing to return a different night, later this time, so that there would be less traffic to disrupt our stargazing.

"Today we're cooking soil," Dawn announced at breakfast. Why? I thought, but I kept my thoughts to myself. I figured it was something about killing certain things in the soil that could hurt plants. I decided to ask later.
Our first step was to gather the dirt from a big pile of compost (that I think had mostly been mucked out of the pig's stall because I knew that all kitchen scraps were fed to the pigs). The dirt that we were gathering had been sifted the day before by Jeremy, Dawn and the boys, so it was ready to be cooked. We brought our five buckets of dirt down the hill to the big outdoor woodstove (that provided heat in the wintertime for their house, a hoophouse and a large greenhouse by heating water that then ran through pipes, providing the heat) with the skidsteer. The skidsteer was a multipurpose farm implement. It was motorized and had a big bucket that could be taken off and replaced with forks (like a forklift). We built up a fire and stuck a huge barrel into the belly of the woodstove, right on top of the fire. Then we shoveled the dirt from one bucket into the barrel. Dawn explained pasteurization to us while we took turns mixing the dirt with our shovels and checking the temperature every so often. Dawn also explained that yes, we were trying to kill any pathogens or other things that would be harmful to seedlings. We were making our own potting soil.

We were planting seeds. Scooping dirt into wooden flats. "What are we going to do after work today?" Jeremy asked, his clear blue eyes twinkling. "What do you mean?" I asked. "I mean where do you want to go? What do you want to do? We could go hiking or swimming or something." I thought for a moment. It was sweltering in the greenhouse where we stood. I shook a handful of tatsoi seeds over the flat I had just prepared, thoughtfully. "Let's go swimming in the pond."

We undressed by the pond and Jeremy charged right in up to his waist. I on the other hand was slower. That water was cold! I picked my way in, trying to find rocks to stand on instead of the slippery mud. "It's cold!" Jeremy tried to convince me to come in faster. "Come on! Don't make me drag you." Eventually, once I made it just past the top of my maroon bikini bottoms, Jeremy decided that my time had come. He grabbed me playfully and dragged me in with him, exposing me all too quickly to the freezing depths. "It's so cold!" I protested, laughing. "Stop!"
We tread water, shivering as we kicked cold water at each other, or floated on top, trying to stay warm. We stayed in as long as we could, but the water was very cold and the weather had changed from the hotness of the greenhouse to breezes bringing cold air down from the hills.

Dawn sent us off to collect a salad for dinner. She suggested filling it with wild edibles, appreciating our interest in foraging. We set off with our big green bowl and wild edibles book. Levi tagged along, more for companionship than to help us collect. Jeremy and I squatted down, discussing which plants would be best in a salad and swapping plant varieties. Clover, plantain, sorrel (but not too much), mint, a pink flower that Jeremy introduced me to, and some others. From his vantage point on top of the hay bale fort Levi piped in, "We have other plants you know? Ones people haven't stepped on."

We spent one full day preparing a field for a hoophouse. This was a field that had previously been used to store bricks that Rob had collected over his years of being a construction worker. Unfortunately many of the flats that had been used to store the bricks had rotted. This means we had to transfer those bricks to new flats. I knew that bricks were heavy, but I didn't know just how heavy they would be until I had spent a full day moving them. I would estimate that I ended up moving at least 100 times my bodyweight in bricks. Probably more. The next day we went back out and finished up. By noon I literally couldn't move another brick. Luckily that was the day that Jeremy and I had planned on exploring an abandoned turnpike that he had found when he was exploring the area. The turnpike had been abandoned in the 50s and was now used as a biking/walking path. We borrowed some bikes (that were from around the same time the turnpike had been abandoned) and set off in Jeremy's truck. We biked along, enjoying the changing leaves and the beautiful sun. Then we got to the first tunnel. We hopped off our bikes and went exploring.

We biked on. Biking through the tunnel was so scary. The floor was wet and all I could see was what my head lamp was showing me. Maybe I've watched too much Bones, but I was sure there was a dead body in there somewhere. We finally reached the end (the light at the end of the tunnel!) and wheeled our way out into the sunshine again. About a quarter mile later Jeremy stopped. He had a flat. We had to turn around. We walked together some but then I decided to bike on (with his encouragement). I biked until I reached the tunnel, and then I climbed up the side of the hill to reach the top of the tunnel. The view was beautiful.

Here are the pictures:

Cold, rainy day off

What do I do on my cold, rainy day off (with men swarming the house trying to fix the heat that hasn't worked the whole time I've been here)? I curl up in a comforter with a mug of tea (in my recently adopted pink flamingo mug) and finally update my blog.

I lived on a farm in Bedford Pennsylvania for three weeks and honestly I was having too much fun to update this blog. I apologize. I would wake up at 7:30 every day, walk down to the kitchen, find my breakfast of either oatmeal or eggs fresh from the chickens, and sip tea while I watched the sun rise over the hill. Farm tasks started immediately after breakfast and included feeding the animals, planting, watering the greenhouse/ hoophouse, planting, sifting dirt, cooking dirt, clearing large piles of bricks out of the way for a new cold frame, harvesting and various other tasks. We would take a break for lunch and then continue working until about 3 or 4. Dawn would prepare a delicious dinner and we would all sit down as a family to sing a thanks for the food before diving in. After dinner was hang time.

The farmhouse was originally erected as a fort during the Revolutionary War, and then expanded on and converted into a tavern in years following the war. The house was split into two sides. The older side was constructed of large grey stones, and the other of red brick. There literally was a line down the middle of the house. The farmers were named Rob and Dawn and they ran the farm together. Dawn had a son named Caleb from a previous man, and he lived with his father in Cumberland during the week. He was 16. Together Rob and Dawn had two boys named Silas and Levi (11 and 9). Also living in the house was an older man named Stewart (Stew for short). He was a writer, and he was renting a room. My first week there was another WWOOFer named Jeremy. At 24 he was a college dropout who now worked at an armored cars factory (which the boys found awesome). He gets laid off for a week or two at a time (but always gets his job back), because his company can't afford to pay all of their employees all the time. Most of his coworkers hate it, but for him it's a chance to explore the country. He lives in Cincinnati.

There's a little teaser. More details coming soon. :)

Laurel

Highlights from AHHA

The reason I haven't posted in so long is because I've been having so much fun. I'm learning so much (and not just about farming).

AHHA Ranch seems like such a long time ago. Most of the pictures that I took were product pictures for Laura's online herbal products store (https://chooseherbs.com visit it! She has some really nice products up there). I was in charge of advertising for the week, and it was so much fun! I really think I could do well in advertising. Too bad it's such a corrupt business. I got to take a product, make it look nice, photograph it, and figure out how to describe it in an attractive way. I also made Laura an Etsy page to hopefully get some more traffic to her products.

The other things I did included making tea, clearing weeds out of an abandoned garden bed (and we're talking weeds that were taller than me), planted garlic, labeling pear butter and selling at the farmers market.

I grew close with Gemma that week. It's hard, making a connection with someone, the whole while knowing that you're leaving. It almost makes you want to not get attached, but it's hard when you're living with them. I truly might never see her again. At the same time I feel like I'm making friends from all over the place, and that's cool. Gemma and I went on a couple adventures. On Saturday after we packed up from market we drove to West Virginia to go to an arts and crafts festival. I typed the address into my phone, and we let Siri's voice carry us to our destination. We pulled around a corner "you have reached your destination" Siri's voice chimed. We exchanged looks as Gemma slid past our supposed destination. It was a storage space that had been locked off with a fence. "That's weird," we thought. Eventually we followed signs to an entirely different venue, and had a great time exploring the festival. That night we went to their town's "Oktoberfest." I had never been to an Oktoberfest before. It was literally just beer. There were like three beer tents, and a couple live bands. As an under 21 year old I was disappointed. We went home and she introduced me to "Will and Grace" which might be my new favorite TV show. We also adventured to a cute church-turned-cafe and drank chai with cheesecake. They had live music and it was very nice. The band was a family. The mom played hammer dulcimer, while the father switched between guitar and some kind of drum. The daughter switched between harp and singing. They were mostly playing Irish fiddle tunes. It was a very interesting combination of instruments to type of music. It sounded like 18th century jigs.

 (Discovered at the fair in WV)

I finally got a guitar lesson from Jon. It was ridiculous how much I learned in that short hour. I can't wait to try all of it out. I learned a ton of music theory as well as strumming and practice techniques. Jon said that he really wants to see me start composing. I hope to. I really hope to.

Laurel