Happy Mother's Day

I’d like to start this blog update by stating a few things.  I keep thinking I need to make this blog less personal:  more about the business,  more professional.  Those are valid thoughts full of merit and good old common sense.  That said, I don’t think it is going to happen.  Because what I’m doing here on Mineral Springs doesn’t rate a whole lot on the scale of common sense.  Common sense has my butt back over at Durham Tech learning the latest computer programming language and updating my dinosaur COBOL language skills.  Common sense has me doing anything other than growing food on my little 1.69 acre lot in East Durham County while simultaneously raising a house full of kids.   So to hell with professional blog posts.  Buy my produce and read my blog because you see my passion.  Because you love my story.  Because you believe it’s real and good and right. 

With that out of the way, a few weeks back I made a FaceBook post that said “There are few things in this world better than the first sniff of tomato plant in April....”.  My mom responded with a comment about how she’d marked me somehow in those first precious years while as a baby I sat in my bouncy chair watching her weed and tend her flower beds.  We had really pretty flower beds at that house on Crow’s Foot Road.  My mom’s comment got me thinking.  She *did* mark me.  As did both sets of my grandparents.  I was always out-of-doors as a kid:  helping in the family vegetable gardens, helping with yard work, helping barn tobacco, sitting under the porch shelter shucking corn, putting on skits in the yard with my sister while both Grand & Great-Grand-mas shelled peas.  

As a parent myself, I find my kids are *so much easier* to take out-of-doors.  Fussy babies calm immediately when walked into fresh air.  They sit happily in bouncy chairs while the birds sing.  They watch you pull weeds unflinchingly in their Bumbos.  Big kids fight further away while you set out tomato plants.  They even give you a wide berth as they reach the teen years, knowing if they come too close you are damn sure going to put them to work.  Yes, parenting and the great-out-of-doors, it’s a good match.    So as I’ve been kicking this around in my brain for a few weeks, I’ve thought “I really ought to write my next blog update as an ode to Mom … a little Mother’s Day gift in a year I can’t afford to do too much anyway”.  

While that idea has been kicking away in my brain, I’ve also started back at market.  Forgive me Mom, but I’ve realized the post I really need to write is not about you (even though you did mark me in an incredible way); it’s about Grandma.  It has hit me so many times how perfectly full circle my being at market really is.  See, when I was a kid, I helped my Grandma sell food at a curb market.  From middle school through college years I’d help her.  LaMuriel Sutton sold the most delicious home-cooked Southern food every Friday evening at the Goldsboro Curb Market.  As a pre-teen and then teen, I would go every Friday afternoon to help her sell her homemade chicken salad, chicken pastry, collards, turnips, cream style corn, pineapple cake, sweet potato pie, coconut pie, and on and on and on.  Not only would I help her at market, I also recruited my best friends (still my best friends today), Denise and Stephanie to help.  They’d tag along and Grandma would pay them in food.  Their moms wanted them to help because that meant Grandma’s chicken salad in the fridge over the weekend and her banana nut bread for Saturday breakfast.  Holiday breaks from school were spent helping Grandma in the kitchen, stirring that cream-style corn that would stick if not stirred constantly, washing the never ending dishes, icing cakes, folding cake and pie boxes.

 

I remember that once I was in college and Grandma’s health started failing that the family pressured her to quit that darn market.  She didn’t make any money.  Why did she insist on working all week to make just a few hundred dollars on a Friday night?  Her kitchen and house were completely overtaken by this lifestyle:  TWO ovens in the kitchen, mammoth tables built especially for cake assembly lines dwarfed the kitchen, and ridiculous amounts of cooking supplies, quart, pint and half-pint cups, cake boxes and such crowded the overly large pantry built especially accommodate her occupation.  As a college kid, I agreed.  She needed to retire.  It was too much.  The pay off wasn’t enough.

As an adult, an adult who also finds herself at a market, who refuses to look at the hourly wage she is earning because it is too depressing to contemplate, I get it.  Oh man, do I ever get it.  Grandma LOVED what she was doing.  She believed she was making a difference in people’s lives.  She was providing them with wholesome home cooked food when they were too busy with life to provide that for themselves.  She was connected with her customers.  She knew their names, their likes, their dislikes, their kids, their cousins, their flaws, their virtues.   And she loved to cook.  Really loved it.  

Holy crap on a stick:  I am my grandmother.  I really love being at market.  I really love my CSA families.  I love what I do.  I dream about it.  I think about it all day.  I work like a dog and fall in bed with dirty knees, hair full of pollen, and stinky pits only to wake up and do it all again the next day.   It makes no sense.  No sense at all.  And I don’t care. 

So Grandma, Happy Mother’s Day.  I love you, beyond words, beyond sense. 

February in review...

February has come and gone.  The last stat I saw was that we had rain on 14 of 28 days this past month.  That makes prepping rows for seeds challenging, my friends, especially when you have clay based soil.  But, despite the challenge, we did get some stuff in.  As of today I have germination on sugar snaps, arugula, Hakurei turnips, ruby red mustard and Siberian kale. 

We've just enjoyed six consecutive dry days and you better believe I had Eli working the tiller and dirt rake.  Ward too as evidenced by the photo above.  I've been sore and that good kind of tired at the end of the day.  The kind of tired that really couldn't care less about the dirty dinner dishes.  The kind of tired that has eyes only for a hot shower and a cozy bed.

Looking forward to spending the next couple of days catching up on paperwork, home school work, and housework.  Wet, cold weather is rolling in yet again.  I figure I'll use the chance to look thru my planting notes from last year & develop a game plan for when the soil is workable again.  As a kid, I never understood my grandfather's fascination with the evening news and his insistence that we kids be quiet during the weather report.  I get it now.  I'm weather's bitch.

the thin days

The older I get, the less tolerant I become of cold, wet days.  I find the gray seems to somehow enter my bones.  I can't seem to drink enough coffee or put on enough layers to touch the cold in this drafty old house. 

I stay as busy as possible trying to catch up on paperwork and finish household projects left unattended during growing months.  I try to ignore the thinning pantry shelves, the emptying freezer.  During wet stretches, I find myself out-of-doors anyway, rooting in the mud, trying to convince myself that I really can pull those weeds without disrupting too much topsoil only to discover my foolishness after I have thoroughly muddied myself.  I pull out old planting charts and fret over when I can start planting, when I can expect to feel the full abundance of a garden bursting with too much produce to process.  More than enough to can, to freeze, to barter, to sell, to FEAST.  January is a thin month, so unlike July.  Spring seems so far away. 

I find myself looking more for inspiration, for words that help me focus less on the fretting, for words that help me focus on the gift of a slower pace, the gift of enough.  One writer I particularly enjoy reading is Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm. She's a homesteader/writer in upstate NY.  Today, on this gray wet day, I found comfort in these words:

"There's enough food for everyone on the farm today.
There's enough wood for the fires to burn today.
There's friends on the phone to call today.
There's books to dive into and love today.
There's good dogs with full bellies today.
There's a cat curled up by the stove today.
There's snow falling all around me today.

It's all enough, today."
http://www.coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com/

So tonight, I'll tuck myself in, down comforter pulled up to my chin, knowing that today, there was enough. 

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2013

As happens with most folks, on this first day of the year, I'm taking some time to pause and reflect on the year past.  2012 was a great year for MamaSprings.  It was a year full of hard work and sweat, that's for darn sure. 

Last January, I learned of a new farmer's market opening in Durham.  Full of optimism and some fear, I applied, was toured, and earned a spot.  From April to October I was a regular vendor.  Showing up Saturday morning meant working from dawn to dark the other six days of the week.  Friday nights were devoted to washing produce, ironing table cloths, arranging flowers, printing up recipe cards, and packing the van.  Saturday mornings rocked:  talking food, sharing tips for how to sneak those greens into your kids, waxing poetic about the different characteristics of heirloom tomatoes, arranging bouquets of lovely to adorn my customers' dinner tables....I relished every minute of it.  Saturday afternoons were devoted to a big lunch, a beer, and a nap.  My first year at market was hard.  It was grueling.  But it was a hell of a lot of fun. 

From April to mid-December, I lovingly grew, harvested, and packed produce shares for my beloved CSA customers.  These devoted few are my people.   Hearing that the Brodie kids were squabbling over heads of broccoli means I'm going to plant more in 2013.  Knowing Chantel depends on my greens for her daily smoothies and that Joanne devours those greens from her basket first means I'm going to continue my efforts to have leafy greens even in the dead heat of summer. Learning that Julie, a woman who truly takes the old saying "waste not want not" to heart, bartered some pesto made from my basil for childcare makes my inner hippie happy.  I am so grateful for this enthusiastic bunch. 

Lisa, Shelly, Hope, Jacob, Laney, Stella, Daniel, David:  your sweat and effort helped grow something, I believe something radical.

2012 was a year of big growth for my family, as well, as I saw each member step up their own level of personal responsibility to pick up the slack here at home.  I have never been so proud of us, as a family, as on the Friday evenings when we all worked as a team to race against the coming dark in order to finish a harvest.  Kids, one of my sincerest hopes is that we are raising citizens who will produce rather than consume.  I'm grateful that we have such a tangible way to teach and model that goal. 
   
2013 holds many opportunities for refining and improving my work.  After these past couple weeks off to rest and recharge, this old gal is ready.  Happy New Year ya'll!