On Cairncest Farm in Plainfield, two brothers, Edmund and Garth Brown, have resolved to eat only what they raise/grow/forage/hunt themselves for an entire year. Edible Finger Lakes is carrying biweekly updates from the Brown brothers as they embark on this food journey.
Food for a Year: May 1-16
It feels like we hardly had any spring. At least we didn’t have our usual months of slow warming. Instead, the temperature went from winter to summer almost overnight. It’s not even June, and already the first seed heads are beginning to form on the orchard grass. The cows are grazing, and all of us are trying to catch up on the hundreds of chores that inevitably come to mind with the warming weather.
Much effort is inevitably going into the garden, but it will be another month before it is really producing a lot of food. We still have adequate stores in the root cellar, but the rutabagas and parsnips have started sprouting, and it’s only a matter of time before they turn to mush. For the first time we are planting tomatoes and peppers and even some melons in a small hoop house. The weather here is not consistently hot enough to ripen really good tomatoes, at least in our experience, so this will hopefully address that.
Even though the dietary selections available have not radically increased, just adding some asparagus and fresh kale makes a big difference. Also, with so much work to be done, there’s no time to get bored of eating rutabagas. –Garth
Brothers Edmund and Garth Brown are owner-operators of Cairncrest Farm in Plainfield, New York. They produce and sell grass-fed beef and pastured pork. They blog about their 2015 homegrown challenge here.
Read the last Food for a Year post here.
Photo by Alanna Rose
