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Rational Urbanism
Home » Posts tagged "Copper Hill Farm"

Tag Archives: Copper Hill Farm

Ajo

Posted on January 28, 2018 by Steve

My wife loves garlic. More than she loves me? It’s an open question. Nearly everything she cooks starts with a healthy amount of onions and head of garlic. Why not a clove of garlic? Might as well just sprinkle on a little garlic powder!

As the garden (“the farm” as friends call it) began to expand out back garlic became one of the plants of choice. My wife started by just tossing some grocery store garlic into one of our raised beds; it grew fairly well but…no scapes! Turns out there’s a difference between hard neck and soft neck garlic…and the soft neck variety doesn’t produce scapes. Good to know.

A few of our earliest, mostly succesful, attempts at growing garlic:

Realizing that for us “growing what we eat” would mean focusing on tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and garlic along with the peaches, apples, grapes, and lettuce we were cultivating, we moved the garlic from some small beds to a 12′ x 3′ bed running along the area our fruit trees occupy: The Orchard. After planting in late fall, green stalks began to pop through the snow and looked healthy and eager all winter. By early summer we had all the scapes we could eat. We ate them tossed into pasta, turned into a pesto sauce, and mixed into butter, or just toasted all by themselves. In late summer we harvested 50 odd heads of Spanish red, and 60 odd heads of German white.

For our first big planting we ordered our seed garlic from Possum Hill Farm in Lakeville, CT. It’s owned by my wife’s uncle, and her cousin is in charge of the garlic. We were thrilled with the results; pounds of garlic from one bed in the garden. We used it all up, so we ordered more seed and planted again that fall in the same bed. Possum Hill had only German white to plant last year so we went with that. It grew well but wasn’t quite as vibrant. Perhaps two years in the same bed was too much, but we got 80 or so heads of garlic and once again had scapes in the early season. 


We knew that we could dedicate our entire backyard to garlic, however, and it still wouldn’t be sufficient for our needs. As it happens, our friends at Copper Hill Farm had some land they weren’t using, quite a bit of land in fact, certainly more than we could use; so we bought 50 pounds of seed garlic from Possum Hill, and spent a day or so “popping” the heads into cloves to plant. I even built a “dibbler”: kind of a thing to make the evenly spaced holes to pop the cloves into. 

The seed garlic:

My wife and I worked together one afternoon; I raked over the soil Greg, the owner of Copper Hill, had tilled for us and I dibbled the holes. My wife planted and covered each clove. We got less than half of the field planted on that first afternoon. We had planned out the prior weekend to spend it together, along with LuLu, planting. But nature had not cooperated: it had rained furiously and the field was too wet. The autumn had also gone from too warm to a bit on the cold side in a flash. We had other pressing issues and so Elizabeth, my wife, had to come back later in the week on her own and plant the rest of the field. When she noticed that there was another patch of land which Greg had tilled but which we hadn’t intended on using, and that we still had plenty of “popped” garlic we asked if we could plant there. Greg said yes, of course, and we went back one last day to plant a bit more and to mulch. 

We lost track of exactly how many seeds we planted. With any luck we’ll have enough to supply our own needs, a few hundred heads to the Copper Hill Farm Store, and to reserve as seed for next year. My wife used two different techniques for spacing in the two separate areas we planted in order to see which will work best for weeding and harvesting.

 

As far as what to grow where the garlic had been, we’re thinking Bolivian peppers. Amazing little red peppers that look like Christmas lights and are comparable to a very spicy jalapeño on the Scoville scale. Here in New England we’ve seen that if you bring the plant inside the purple peppers turn yellow, orange, and red just in time for Christmas. They might make for some really spicy holiday gifts. 

Thinking about the garden, and writing this little post in fact, have raised my spirits a bit. We have space for one more fruit tree, we’re making room for a few more grape vines, and the asparagus bed will be in year two. It’s a mess right now, but I can’t wait to get out there in the spring and set to the work of bringing it back to life.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Copper Hill Farm, garlic, The garden | Leave a comment |

Post-Potemkin

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Steve

From the film Blazing Saddles:

Whatever the truth behind the legend of Grigory Potemkin’s efforts to deceive the empress Catherine the Great with pop up villages and dolled up peasants on her tour along the Dnieper River in the Crimea, the idea of the Potemkin Village is well understood. Whether the ruse involves Russian royalty or Wild West villains however,the intention to create a false impression was a one sided proposition; the beholder wasn’t supposed to be in on the gag.


Heading out to the opening of my favorite local farm’s brand new shop my wife and I stopped at a strip mall to get some materials to complete a dyi project. I was struck by the fake gable endings over the individual stores. It is about as crude an effort of giving a place a village look as I can imagine; so much so that it doesn’t even rise to the level of an out and out deception because there is no possible way that the viewer isn’t aware of the artifice. 

This decades old shopping area has been totally refurbished, not just the structures but from the parking lot and the walkways, to the curbs, and the plantings. everything seems brand new. And the place was packed. Perhaps most of what is being sold here falls into the category of world destroying throw away plastic crap, but the market for that is clearly super hot right now. 

I can’t help but think of Leon Krier’s presentation on the difference between the real and the artificial and his references to “thin-thetic” materials: “Call me a store”. These things are not what they claim to be.

At the opposite end resides the vernacular: Buildings constructed using local materials in ways that conform to the realities of geography and climate. My friend built his store with lumber milled from the trees he cleared to make room for it. He gave the roof an incline to withstand falling snow and whisk water away from customers. The overhang will provide shade on hot sunny days. The bricks for the walkway came from a nearby chimney. No doubt the roofing material and the wiring were made from “exotic synthetics”, but there is a beauty in the simplicity of the design and the materials. The products sold within are and will be locally produced food: pork, poultry, eggs, fruits, and vegetables with some value added products prepared in the on site kitchen up near the farm house.


It does make accommodation for cars, and there are plans for many more features to be added. How the local food movement will develop moving forward I don’t make any claim to know, but I think that it’s worth supporting. One of the benefits of being a region which has seen nothing but anemic growth in terms of population and the economy since World War II is that we’ve been spared the total devastation of our rural landscapes which other regions have seen; when growth is metastatic, stagnancy is the only good alternative. I hope enough land and enough knowledge has been preserved for this region to remain a viable place once food production becomes more localized out of necessity.Helping to grow the local food movement is another of those endeavors which feels rewarding in the here and now and could turn out to be even more significant in the long run.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Copper Hill Farm, Leon Krier, Local Food, Potemkin Villages, Strip Malls | Leave a comment |

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