Kickstarter update

Posted on September 17, 2010 by

The New Blood for the Old Body Kickstarter campaign is amazingly successful, so much so that there is now a second goal.  I posted the following updates on the the Kickstarter page -

Update #1 – Response to this project has been strong right from the start, and I hope that momentum continues to build. If you are considering contributing please be aware that the $600 goal is just the minimum. Funding can go well beyond that – it means more prints on the wall at the show, more support of local farms and more invested interest from you all in seeing this project become a success. It also means the ability to take the show to other locations, which would be amazing!

Update #2 – call for 200% It only took five days to reach 100% funding on my project – I am extremely happy that that has happened. Feels like the support is just getting started and the word is spreading.

With that said, let’s keep it going. Another $600 is another full wall of photographs at the show, 24 more feet of my work on display. That would be immensely incredible as well as immensely humbling, the support of friends and strangers coming together to help me achieve something so rewarding.

As I post this, the project is just shy of the 200% funding goal with 21 days to go. If we make it to 200% by tomorrow I have some crazy ideas for what can come with 300% funding and beyond.

For full disclosure, I will post what this money will go towards. The quick summary is printing, mounting, hanging hardware, postage, promotional materials (postcards and flyers), food and beverages.

Please consider funding this project!

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Posted in biographical, photo essays, young farmers | 1 Comment

Kickstarter – New Blood for the Old Body art show

Posted on September 8, 2010 by

I have the opportunity to do a solo art show at the Hotel Hadley in Siler City, NC. I will use many photographs that you have seen here on Cricket Bread.  In order to pull off this show, I do need to come up with some funding to make it all work out.  So I am asking the community of readers of this blog as well as friends and friends of friends of the young agrarian movement to support this opportunity. Please contribute if you can and also spread the word -

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Posted in biographical, photo essays | 1 Comment

Apple squeezing

Posted on August 17, 2010 by

Gray has Full Tilt tattooed on his knuckles. It is appropriate for some of the activities we partake in including a recent round of apple cider pressing.

Gray, Noel, and the current WWOOFers Liz and Tanya gathered apples from our tree, loading up a couple of giant coolers. From there the apples went to a neighbor’s shop and into a janky old cider press. Our neighbor Kathryn started everything off with a quick wash down of the press.

The press is another neighbor’s (Ned) machine. He told that he bought it for $300 thirty years ago. According to a handy inflation calculator, that would be about $800 today. Oh, and it was used when he bought it, so who knows what it originally cost.

Ned oversaw the first few rounds of pressing, staying just long enough to collect a quart of raw cider.

Gray did most of the first pressings, and I took over after that. In the humidity and falling sun, the work was sweatier than it would be in the Fall when folks are pressing their storage apples. Along with all the grass clippings, twigs, bugs and leaves that ended up in the press, I’m sure we added a few drops of sweat during the work.

The way the press works is pretty basic. You load the hopper, a motor drives some metal plates together and crushes the apples into an open wooden bucket. The bucket is made up of spaced slats of wood. The full bucket is moved down to the press, which is cranked down onto the apples. The juice runs down into a small container at the end of the press.

From there the cider is filtered, the smashed up apples removed from the press and the process started over again.

I think we did about 25 gallons that night, finishing up after the light of the day had been and gone.

By then it was time to drink up some samples and head back home.

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Posted in 100 mile diet, food sources, foodshed | 1 Comment

The missing blueberries

Posted on August 3, 2010 by

The secret, abandoned, out-of-the-way blueberry patch that I wrote about three years ago? Yeah, forget about scoring any berries there anymore.  The patch has blown up, the word leaked out and spread out like the tarps and sheets we used to use in the gathering of those sweet little blue spheres.

Kristin and I took our friends Monica and Nick down to Wilmington with one of our “missions” of the trip being the collection of vast quantities of berries. This wasn’t meant to be.

A recent rain had knocked what was left of the ripe berries to the ground for the ants to carry off. What little was left were slightly under ripe and tangy, not worth more than a few pops here and there. The people had invaded and stripped everything else away.

At least it was a nice day – cool, sunny, perfect just for being outside and walking around. The focus quickly changed from the blueberries to the downtown farmer’s market and to fig gathering at the beach.

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Posted in exploring, food sources, foraging | 2 Comments

The letting go – Crop Mob in the Wild

Posted on June 25, 2010 by

The original message of crop mobs has changed as the idea became a “thing” on its own.  The idea changes a bit in each new area, and, for better or worse, adds new pieces to the developing visage of a developing model. In Seattle, the focus is primarily on the creation of new community gardens. In Atlanta there is a cap on the number of folks who can participate. In Minneapolis there is a “no kids” policy.We set out with a few simple but necessary guidelines, and for the most part these ideas remain intact. As we work on some more specific guidelines for both attendees and the host farms, we must be conscious of more than just the ideals of the original nineteen farmers; we must be conscious of the needs of several thousand individuals.

To date there are active Crop Mob groups in 22 states in the US, 99% of which formed after the end of February of this year. At some point the originators of this new model of agrarian community building have to let go, get back to our work in the present – in our own community – and let evolution do its thing. And it is evolving; it is debatable how much leadership this idea needs on a national level. There is no doubt that a solid foundation and at least a minimum operational framework is needed. After that is established, all we can do is look on as the roof goes up and the furniture is moved in.

Crop Mob is a very sexy idea right now. As such it is subject to an intense scrutiny of its methods, its participants and its goals. “White, hipster slackers participate in a real life Farmville” might as well be the new media headlines. From what I have been reading lately, you would think that what started as a way to get young and landless farmers together has turned into just another urban fad for the fixed gear bike crowd. This is untrue and utterly ridiculous. Is there anything that a group of young people can do that can’t be turned into something that it is not?

Some recent comments on the online version of a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (‘Crop Mobs’ thrive in farmville):

Hipster doofuses. Your parents play Farmville now, on to the next thing.

…there is more to experience than diggin’ in the dirt in a garden. I am just wondering why this hipster/feel-good activity is news.

Farmers do not get enough freebies from the government, they also get FREE Labor from the idiot taxpayers that subsidies them in the first place….WEIRD. People are stupid.

The best part is they do it once and they never come back. Instead, they run back to their homes in the city and wait for more government handouts. There is no such thing as hard work anymore.

Small farms are great, but do we really need a story about hipsters who have never done real work in their lives going on a feelgood, look-at-me fieldtrip? There are great stories of small produce farms (many of them owned Hmong, Mexican or Somali immigrants) who are providing much of our local produce…

Look at me! I’m “farming”. More hipster douchery.

…typical nonsense from the fringe that will disappear when the next fad is discovered.

WOW. I wish I had so much time on my hands that I was so bored I wanted to go work on a farm.

I honestly don’t know where the hate for this idea comes from. I wonder if the detractors tear apart every other volunteer activity that is discussed in the media? Are we really the only group that has to examine our privilege every time we set out to do a crop mob? Do we really have to take note of every participant’s motivation for showing up?

No, we don’t have to answer to anyone but the farmers we are working for and the community we have formed. The media eye will move on but we will not.

In mobs we trust…

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Posted in activism, crop mobs, young farmers | 10 Comments

Bringing in the garlic

Posted on June 9, 2010 by

Gray and the WWOOFers (Ricardo and Cecelia) harvested several rows of garlic from the back field. The garlic was bunched, labeled and loaded into our neighbors barn for drying.  From there, the bulbs will be combed through for next year’s seed garlic.  The rest will go to market, into CSA boxes and into our meals.

Transport happens with the Safety 1st kid carrier and the farm bike. The kid carrier has hauled a wide array of items – food and tools on the farm, groceries in the city. I picked it up for free in Wilmington a billion years ago. It, like me, has seen its share of work.

After unloading, Kristin and I shared the view from the barn doors on the upper level.

And I got to act like I was jumping down to intercept Brother…

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Posted in circle acres, food sources, foodshed, volunteers | 1 Comment

Mullein harvest

Posted on May 11, 2010 by

Last month while chasing pigs through the woods (a story that I will write about soon) I stumbled into a large area filled with Common Mullein – Verbascum thapsus. Mullein likes to grow in recently disturbed areas, and this place was really disturbed – trees uprooted and bulldozed away into giant piles.

Mullein is a fascinating plant. It easily colonizes disturbed areas, but its growth requirements prevent it from becoming invasive. Too much shade and it is all over for this plant. Rapid succession from other plants will crowd it out.

This early succession plant can actually make itself less viable by its own presence. A study in the Journal of Ecology conducted in our area concludes that as the years progress, the plant will become smaller and smaller and seed production will drop off significantly each year. According to the study, the first generation produced five times as much seed as the third generation.

Our friend Nick came over, so he and Kristin decided that we should go out to the spot and harvest some of the mullein leaves.  These first generation plants had some giant leaves, meaning less time harvesting and more time picking the ticks off our legs.

Mullein has many medicinal properties – it can be made into a tea or smoked to battle a cough. Sounds counterproductive, right?

The plant is also referred to as Nature’s Toilet Paper, but the irritating hairs that cover the plant make me think that you would need to be in some dire need to use it for that purpose more than once in a while.

The dried stalk contains many oils that supposedly make it a good torch.  I am going to try it out this Fall after the stalks are up.

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Posted in exploring, foraging | 6 Comments

Crop Mob on UNC-TV – PBS

Posted on May 4, 2010 by

February’s Crop Mob event at Edible Earthscapes was recently featured on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Now. I think this is one of the best presentations on the crop mob that exists – there are some great voices represented in the video and the visuals of a mob in action are great.  Check out the video on the UNC-TV site.

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Posted in crop mobs | Comments Off

What seed, what root

Posted on April 8, 2010 by

It is busy here. Transplanting is brisk; up-potting is tight. The turkey poults arrived in the mail yesterday and are chirping under the red light of the cardboard box brooder. Radishes are ready for market as are transplants and eggs. Our CSA starts on Tuesday.

With added plant and animal life at Circle Acres comes added stress.  Some of the things I worry about are late frosts, hail storms and loss of power to the brooder lights. None of these things come under my control.  My livelihood is not exactly on the line, but the livelihoods of my pack certainly are. So I worry about pests and plant diseases and stray dogs.  If we could fast forward to a time in the future where we are just living and working at Circle Acres, taking care of our community and ourselves, I wonder if I will dwell on these same worries as much.

Living that ascetic life is never far from my mind.  I live among a pack that yearns for that life and lifestyle.  Yearn might not even be strong enough.  Ever reach for something so much that you come into a sickness for it, that unattainable abstract that you wish you could have but get physically and mentally pummeled for moving towards it? If I could think of a word for that then I would like to use it.

For an easy life it sure is hard to get there.

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Posted in biographical | Comments Off

It is just one strawberry

Posted on March 30, 2010 by

My weekends have evaporated into something that I have yet to name.  They have become something that I enjoy – warm, heavy with work and chores, meaningful in the way that objectives are completed. But at the same time, there can be come tedious monotony in the day, a weird existence in blisters and staring down a long row of uninterrupted wild garlic.

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.

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Posted in circle acres, food sources | 2 Comments