Head of Tidying at the Farm (HOT AF)

🚜 👩🏻‍🌾 🍅 🥕 🥬 🫛

As many of you who already know (because I never stop talking about it), I spent most of 2021 working at Long Season Farm, a small vegetable farm in Kerhonkson, NY. Since then, I’ve stayed tethered to the farm in various ways and now officially work there part-time.

This year, I’ve been appointed what is truly my dream position: Head of Tidying. Yes, I did come up with the job title/job description myself, but I have been endorsed by my pal Sam who runs the farm. He also suggested I add an “A.F.” to the end so we’ve expanded it to Head of Tidying at Farm, a.k.a. H.O.T. A.F.

I’m currently in what I have lovingly referred to as “Phase One” of the job, which is establishing tidier systems. “Phase Two,” which will start soon, is maintaining those systems.

…there are only two phases.

Part of Phase One has included learning to drive the tractor so I can move pallets of things. In unsurprising news, I LOVE DRIVING THE TRACTOR.

Not sure if I’ve ever been happier than when I sent Grace this photo the other day when I was on the tractor. For my fellow safety nerds, the tractor was not yet turned on. But I did already have my seatbelt on.

A very big project/goal of Phase One was going through the outdoor supply yard. This is where things like metal fence posts for trellising crops, landscape fabric, and irrigation hoses hang out until we need them.

Here’s what it was looking like:

the before!

And here’s what it’s looking like now!

the after!

This area now consists of three distinct sections:

1. Section One: Storage bays made out of salvaged wood pallets that we secured using salvaged metal posts. We didn’t spend a penny! These bays, like compost bays, keep everything off the ground and easy to find. This is where we put things like landscape fabric, sprinklers, and metal hoops. I’ve now become the type of person who says “whoa, that’s a nice pallet” when I see one on the side of the road.

2. Section Two: Pallet “containers” for all of the posts/stakes including wooden stakes (used for peppers, etc.) and metal conduit and fence posts (used for fencing and for trellising things like peas and cucumbers). For these containers, each consists of a wooden pallet with raised corners, almost like tables turned upside down. For these corners, I just cut up one old wooden pallet to make the pieces and screwed them in. The only cost was a box of screws at the hardware store. These containers can get picked up with the tractor if the tractor pallet forks are attached (guess who knows how to do that??..me!!)

3. Section Three: Lastly, not seen in the above photos but visible in the video below, we used some large macro bins for all of the hosing/tubing so Scott, who handles all of the irrigation at the farm, can pick those bins up with the tractor as needed and bring them wherever they’re needed. Scott and I have already discussed how we’re going to better store these next year! Stay tuned…!

Okay here’s that video:

There’s more to Phase One, but I’ll spare you for now…

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I’m clearly loving all of this tidying. It’s so satisfying. And in doing it, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the overlaps between home cooking and tidying the farm, and just farming in general. In other words, the skills I’ve developed over my decades of home cooking are coming in really handy. And that’s the thing about home cooking. It’s not just useful in your kitchen. You can take those skills anywhere.

Here are some overlapping places in the home cooking and farming Venn diagram:

• Just like the actual cooking part of home cooking is just a small slice of it— there’s the shopping, budgeting, inventory management (a.k.a. what’s in the freezer??), the CLEANING UP—farming is also a lot like that. Planting and harvesting vegetables are both just parts of vegetable farming. There’s also the crop planning, the seed ordering, the budgeting, the incubating everything in the greenhouse, the weeding, the pushing the van out of the mud, the writing the signs, the erasing the signs, the fixing leaks in the irrigation, the….list never ends.

• Both farming and home cooking are about resourcefulness. About using what you have on hand. About troubleshooting and problem-solving at every twist and turn.

• Just like keeping your kitchen organized and tidy makes cooking easier, same goes for everything at the farm. Tidying is good for morale!

• Both farming and home cooking are relentless. The following thoughts go through my mind with equal frequency: didn’t I just make dinner last night? and didn’t I just sweep the shed? Didn’t we just weed this field? Same goes for didn’t I just empty the dishwasher and didn’t we just make 100 parsley bunches?!

• There’s a lot of fulfillment to be found in this relentlessness. Home cooking, like farming, is tending to something over and over again. And isn’t that lovely?

Love this photo Anthony from LSF took inside the farm shed. Sam and I did a big job re-organizing it (Phase One!). And now this desk in the shed is home to the green and blue stools that I bought off of someone on Craigslist about 20 years ago. They were in nearly every apartment I lived in and we used them at our house until we upgraded to more comfortable ones. They’ve since been in our garage for years collecting dust and now I’m so glad they have a new life in the shed.

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If you liked today’s newsletter even a tiny bit, I bet you’ll really love my upcoming romance novel DOWN TO EARTH which is a queer love story all about a vegetable farmer!! You can pre-order it right here!! It’ll be out June 23rd.

Here’s the official description: Frankie doesn’t quite know what to make of Paige, who’s just moved from Brooklyn to her quiet Upstate New York hometown with all the pressed-clothes polish of a city girl. Paige, with her eight-year-old son in tow, is seeking refuge from a rocky relationship and is equally thrown by Frankie: Why can’t she stop thinking about this eternally single, charming, gay vegetable farmer? And could the attraction she’s feeling grow into something more?

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Can I help you find something useful?!

• Here’s my teaching schedule for my online cooking classes.

• You can pre-order my romance novel, Down to Earth, right here! It will be out June 23rd.

• My latest cookbook is What Goes with What and info about all of my cookbooks lives on my website.

• Here’s my video library of 130-and-counting! cooking classes.

• Here’s my all-time favorite class: a tour of my kitchen and also my mind! It includes a 2+ hour recording and an incredibly detailed companion document that details all of the tools, ingredients + more I use (it’s over 20 pages long!), plus a ton of tips for day-to-day cooking (lots of mini recipes within).

• Check out my ShopMy page for my favorite kitchen tools, ingredients, and even clothing items — it’s all there!

• And I catalog all of my favorite books right here at bookshop.org.