sesame&figs

Sun 19 May: Chasing Sheep

A lot gets done when you begin work at 7am every day. Walked King on the front pasture, and watched him interact with Teddy (Anthony's dog), trying to guess if they were friendly or hostile. This must be the longest I've ever had to live with big dogs, and I guess I've never thought about animals having individual personalities. I've always had the more 'boring' pets - turtles and fish - or maybe I just didn't care as much. Then I got to bring Skylar's minature horses out to pasture after their hooves were cleaned. Sloane mentioned that they were initially very resistant, but now they've been well-trained. I'm jumping out of chronology here, but Scott mentioned that they brought in Temple Grandin, a fascinating woman with a fascinating story, to consult on how to work with the animals. I cannot help but constantly think about how much planning and detail goes into planning the whole farm. Sloane asked us what we think the real price of food should be, and I think this question will stick with me for awhile.

We moved the hay bales up to the rams, and I met the donkeys and rams for the first time! Also Berlin, who apparently hasn't been eating since her sister died, and that made me think about dog personalities and their sentience a little more. Got to herd the sheep from just the back of the barn to one of the front pastures as well! Sherlyn and I were all ready, like goalkeepers to keep out any strays who wandered off from their designated route, but we ended up getting no action - the dogs did their jobs, the sheep were obedient, and without much fuss they were grazing in the front pasture. We definitely maximized the benefits of their new enclosure, the metal fencing allowed us to lodge multiple milk bottles and feed them all at once! Also protecting our legs from bruises and mud, which was always a plus!

Later we were assigned to clean out manure from the egg-laying hen coops. Pitchfork and shovel in hand, we were put to work - not too bad really, but I think it was that day that I lamented that I'm now pretty familiar with all the distinct animal poop smells. We fed the lambs, then spent the rest of the morning rolling around in the pasture with the lambs. Lying on the grass is not that clever an idea when you have little curious lambs all over your face, I must say. After lunch we collected eggs, and Sherlyn made one particular egg box with the full gradient of egg colors - whoever bought that box (if it's been sold yet) is a lucky bugger...not that most people care what the shells look like anyway.

Sat 17 May: To Market To Market To Buy a Fat Hen

A fairly uneventful day, and Sherlyn took an off day so things were pretty slow. I was introduced to two traditional Pennsylvanian Dutch foods today - Funny Cake & Scrapple. Funny cake was pretty much a pie with a layer of chocolate in it, and I think I had scrapple only later on, but it tasted like like a crispy yam cake, dimsum style. It's pretty addictive.

Fed the lambs, and by now I recognized that lamb-feeding was pretty much going to all up to us. I had to lock myself in a cage with BugEyes today - the poor thing really cannot compete with the other more aggressive lambs. Peter was suprisingly tame today. Then I walked King, another one of the big white dogs (who we're suspecting is not really a Great Pyrenees? I don't know what's going on with that), but he pinned down a chicken. Each of the dogs really have their own personality, which was something I'd never experienced before.

Worked market today, basically sitting with Allison and helping her out in the shop. I learned more about the different vegetables they had (endive, escarole, rainbow chard, anyone?). Two ladies came in (later learnt that they were the cleaning help) and asked me when the chickens were processed, I told them just that Thursday and they promptly declared it wasn't fresh enough for them. Go figure huh.

The highlight of the day must have been when Badger got on the roof! Scott called me, told me he locked her in the garage, but we hunted up and down and couldn't find him! Then we found her on the roof - amazing how she had squeezed through the screen in the window on the second floor - later on I found her hole in the fence in the higher pastures. These dogs are really like Houdinis. 

Fri 15 May: Ten Baby Rats and the Start of My Poopy Adventures

We woke up late (7:30 is late when you usually get up at 6, oops), and it was raining so hard the whole morning, Anthony was nice enough to assign us indoor tasks so we could keep relatively dry. We were tasked to clean out the bunny barn of poop. We pitch-forked and shovelled up manure and piled it onto the back of the Gator. Yup, bunny poop may be pellety, but when it cakes up, it becomes nasty slabs. A few rats scurried away when we removed the rabbit bedpans, and a huge one ran off, frightening me. But we shortly learned that it was a mother rat who had no choice but to abandon her ten babies, which we found wriggling in the bunny poo. They looked a little like baby hippopotamuses, and Sherlyn lamented that they looked like the newborn bunnies, and if only they were born a different species, they could live. They had to die though, and we left them in the back of the Gator under a pile of hay. Bunnies really poop a lot, but I guess all animals do.

In the afternoon we washed chicken crates in the barn - not very exciting. Later we were assigned egg collecting for the first time! We collected >100 chicken eggs from 3 different coops, and they all had different designs. The first design I liked the best, where you would just open up a hatch and you could see the back of the nesting boxes and just collect the eggs. We washed and dried each one individually, and we cracked a few along the way. Sherlyn just shared this with me today, which is a pretty comprehensive guide to the different types of eggs. Some of the shapes were pretty bizarre though, like these long and skinny ones that made me wonder how it was laid. We also had thought we had two eggs from the bantam hens, but I was looking in the wrong place and these two eggs turned out to be unaccounted for. I pointed out that Bantam roosters are the exact roosters we have on the rooster bowls back home. The ducks get to lay their eggs anywhere they want, and as Sloane says "it's an easter egg hunt every day".

Thu 14 May: Blood On Our Hands (or, We Got Down & Dirty)

My first morning on the farm, and I remember that I suggested Sherlyn and I take a picture of us skipping amongst the dandelions to show contrast between the idyllic mental image of farming people had, and the real dirty business we got up to.

We finished pressure-washing the barn, although we kept wondering what the point was because the barn got immediately dirty again. I also resigned myself to wearing the same pair of jeans every day for getting muddy prints on and bruises from feeding lambs. I kicked myself for thinking shorts would be possible. It was only my third feeding, and I was getting visibly annoyed with some of these babies, for being so mean to the others, but it was definitely good training! They got less cute pretty fast.

The real event of the day was the animal "processing" though. Not sure if that was my first time meeting Brandon, the other farm hand, but he and Anthony were basically in charge of the animals, and they were a lot of fun! Not too much older than us, but certainly felt a lot older, and "hardened"? Just more macho, maybe. But anyway, as Sherlyn puts it, that day reminds you of the purpose of a farm - putting food on the table. It was a 4-step process: catching, killing, cleaning and eviscerating them.

We started with the chickens, which were pretty much fully-grown at 13 weeks and weighed in at about seven to eight pounds each. Catching the chickens, I thought, would be hard, because I was having mental images of getting clawed and scratched. But you really just had to corner them and pick them up, then grab them by the feet, upside down. The chickens were then put, still upside-down into these killing cones. Then you would pull down their heads, stretching their necks, and slit their jugular veins. While the blood drains out, these chickens are violently shaking, and honestly I think that's the scariest part of the whole process. They're then transferred to the scalder, a contraption that rotates three chickens at a time in 60°C water for precisely 70 seconds. Their pores are opened and feathers start to fall off, and we commented that this was quite similar to humans in a sauna or steaming the face for a facial. Defeathering them was actually a lot of fun. Chickens were placed in a cylindrical machine that would spin them violently around as water was blasted from above. Rubber "fingers" all around the inside of the machine would simply "rub" the feathers off the chicken when it came into contact, and you had mostly bald chickens by the end. Any remaining feathers were hand-plucked, and the chickens submerged in iced water. Evisceration was interesting to watch - Anthony skillfully removed the innards, pointing them out as we went along (heart, liver, intestines, gizzard) and we also got to see rooster testicles and unlaid eggs. Because they had forgotten that the "processed" chickens were not supposed to be fed their morning meal, they had to remove feed from the gizzards as well. The final step was to ensure that there were no remaining stray feathers, and when we used the tweezers to pluck them, I felt like we were doing eyebrow plucking/trying to squeeze out blackheads. The things we think about, huh.

In total, 15 chickens, 5 poussins (read: young chicken; learning so much new vocab on the farm), and 4 guinea fowls were processed before lunch. Guinea fowls were processed in the exact same way, and the notable moment was when one of them shat as its throat was being cut. And being upside down, you know, it was basically a volcanic eruption. I had imagined the whole process of killing animals would turn me off eating meat, but i was surprisingly excited by the whole process, and the whole time I got hungrier and hungrier for chicken, and settled for bowls of chicken soup for lunch.

When we got back, Anthony & Brandon were in the midst of deskinning a rabbit they had tied upside down from the barn ceiling. That one I was a little "ehh" about, given my love for the little (live) creatures). I'm just pretty glad I wasn't around to hear it scream (if it did, as I know they do when in pain). We didn't get very involved in the process, although Sherlyn did engage in a little tug-of-war with Anthony as they tried to remove the skin from the bunny. We were tasked to clean out the chicken-processing room instead, and by the time we were done, the guys had brought back a freshly-slaughtered one-year old lamb. As it lay on the ground, it started twitching so violently you would have thought it still alive. The muscle spasms were quite frightening, but Anthony assured us it was dead, because when you touched its eye, it didn't close, as it would have if the lamb was still alive. We were really quite in awe when the guts spilled out of the lamb - so much stomach, intestines and innards, (relatively) so little meat. Just the economics of it all make me wonder how inefficient meat is.

On this second day, the baby bunnies were a lot less pink with their white fur coat starting to grow, but you could tell they were growing fast. Life and death - we saw all of it on this farm.

We got back a little early, and Sherlyn decided it would be a good day to go out to purchase some toiletries. Thinking it would be a five minute ride away, I gamely agreed, but I'm a terrible cyclist, so I struggled pretty hard with the foldable bike (which was not very friendly anyway) on the hills, and was being quite whiny about it all, oops. But it was very scenic, what with the vast patches of green and the certainly well-to-do suburban neighborhood. Skylar showed us where his 21-year old brother had carved a heart in the tree for his girlfriend, and he declared this his own work at first, for Sherlyn ;) I'm pretty sure this was also they day he declared he would marry Sherlyn, which was adorable.

Dinner was penne with tomato sauce (with tomatoes from the farm) and sausage meat. We also had spiced rub chicken wings, and despite the day's events, I had three, and wanted more. Yup, I definitely have no issues with eating meat, although maybe if I had been faced with the industry-standard killing machines, I might feel otherwise.

Today is the day after my almost two-week adventure with the Clemens on Quarry Hill Farm, and I'm starting to miss them already. I don't remember who i was talking to about this trip, and they were advising me not to look upon it as a life-changing experience. Sure, it will be a completely different environment, they said, but don't go in expecting too much. I come out of this experience affirming that - it hasn't been life-changing, but certainly thought-provoking.

Credits to Chewfei for popping the idea into my head last Fall after her Turkey WWOOFing travels, and to Sherlyn for popping her head in my room when she learnt about it, and "let's do it" spun into this amazing adventure. On hindsight, there was a lot more that we could have cared to ask - living arrangements, what to bring (boots, jeans and a jacket became essentials & I don't know why I didn't think that before), eating arrangements, but we had a lot of faith jumping into this. It all worked out perfectly though, and though I am not religious, we were definitely infinitely blessed.

I really wanted to document this trip daily the way Sherlyn did, but yes I have no self-discipline, so here goes with the super-long post-trip post! The posts will no doubt get shorter and shorter as the days go by, but hopefully not any less interesting. But I will blog about it, in as much detail as I remember, because I owe that to myself (self-pep talk complete).

Wed 13 May: Farm, Meet Nicolette

I'm really glad we picked a farm so close to Philly (1+ hour by regional rail on the Doylestown Line) instead of going to Colorado as we originally planned, for both financial reasons, and I think for a first experience, I always joked that if I couldn't take it, I could "run home whenever I wanted". In the end it worked out very well because I needed to come back to Philly for a day, but more on that later.

Sherlyn had left for the farm 3 days before me, and I'm glad she 'tested' it out! I was really pumped because her tumblr made it seem like an amazing experience, and I couldn't wait to meet the Great Pyrenees and cats that she raved about.

When I arrived, there was a miscommunication about how I would get from Lansdale to the farm (turned out that wifi > att coverage, so), so I ended up cabbing ($26) there! It was so funny how the cab driver cab asking me "are you sure", and when I told him Quarry Hill Farm was on Quarry Road he gave me a o.0 look, and when he radioed into the taxi company to report his location they also made it sound like I was crazy and literally, taking them for a ride. But by the power of Google Maps, we arrived at Quarry Hill Farm.

After getting barked and chased a little bit by the two dogs at the house (I would later know them to be Rocky and Molly), I finally met Anthony, who was driving the Gator, and he took me inside the house, I dropped off my bag, and we were off to the barn. He handed me a broom, and told me to help clean out the cobwebs off the ceiling of the barn, and I was like okay...and still completely confused about what I was going to do, but I just went with it. After hanging out with the chickens and clearing up the cobwebs a little, Sherlyn popped out of one of the stalls, and my first reaction was like "oh my goodness you're alive thank god" because I hadn't heard from her for awhile and I was wondering what might have happened. I obviously worry too much.

Sherlyn took me to bottle-feed lambs around noon, and I learnt later on that these were babies of ewes that died, or had been rejected by their mothers. I was introduced to Peter, BugEyes (Snow White), Willy Wonka (I later renamed her Brownie because she was well, brown) and 9 others who we ended up recognizing by tag number or distinctive features. The moment you open the barn back door, you hear the bleating, and have 12 little baby lambs run to you. My first thoughts were "aww, so cute", and once they started climbing up my thighs and stepping on my toes, their aggression started to drive me a little crazy. But they were still cute. 2 parts water, 1 part milk powder. I thought the whole process reminded me a lot of when Julian was a baby and how I would watch his milk bottles be sterilized, filled and washed again. My first interactions with the animals on the farm.

I think I also met a few of the Great Pyrenees that day, the dogs that Sherlyn really grew to be very biased towards. Holly, Natasha and Elmo (they lived right by the house), as well as Chloe and Monkey Face, who guarded the sheep. Definitely remember getting pounced on by one of them. It's interesting because I remember reading Sherlyn's post and not getting very excited about them, but as time went on, I really started to like them a little more and try to read them. Holly remains unreadable though, as I will explain later.

Then it was lunch time, and that was when I first met the house. The home office was the only thing I had seen initially, and I hadn't realized how big the place was. I only realized how lucky we were when I saw the bedroom. I mean look at this place! Compared to the other WWOOF listings where you had to camp out/sleep in the barn, I say for the little amount of research we did, we got so lucky.

I will jump in here and say that the Clemens really had a lot of trust in their live-in volunteers. For lunch I had expected to cook for ourselves, but I thought it would be from a limited. Nope, we got to pick out of the same fridge the Clemens did, and by the end of the two weeks I certainly cleaned out (almost singlehandedly) the bag of dried figs on the counter. I wasn't so impressed by the moldy bread that we ate, and the fridge was chock-full of leftovers from forever ago and would never be touched, but these figs (omg they are $21 a bag what, oops), and these crackers have now spoiled me for life.

Later that afternoon Sherlyn and I used a pressure hose to wash the barn. I likened the process to teeth-polishing, with the high-pressure jet of water basically blasting the dirt away. We obviously had to sign our names in the tiles, and yes, we are five. As we blasted water between the cracks, earthworms emerged, and that day I learned that you could really freak Sherlyn out with earthworms.

In the evening I met more animals. Got to feed the calves (George and Barbara), who made very violent jerking reactions I had to brace myself (apparently they do that naturally to their mums to get more nutrients out, ouch). I also met the baby bunnies, who looked nothing more than little naked pink rats in their nesting boxes. I learnt that they would grow to more bunny-like creatures in 10 days, so maybe if I get the time to I'll put together a little time-lapse video of bunny growth. I also met the turkeys (and heard gobbling, for real, for the first time), and the peacocks (who are really just there for show). The barn back door's latch would also fail to close properly from time to time, and we had fun trying to catch the escaped sheep, and put them back outside.

At dinner I finally met the family - Scott, Sloane and Skylar. Somehow in my notes I only mention Skylar, but I think I was simply so intrigued by this 11 year old boy. Skylar sports a lean frame, and a very young face, but his intelligence and confidence really make me think about my own childhood and wonder what the heck I was doing with myself. Skylar goes to the Kimberton Waldorf School, and Sloane shared that Apple executives like to send to their children to this school. Interestingly enough the school has a no-technology policy, which makes me wonder how the kids of Apple execs really function. Skylar has an iPhone for safety reasons, and even a 24/7 busy woman like Sloane has to resist using her phone when in the school. All kids learn blacksmithing, woodworking, knitting, eurhythmy (something I last encountered reading Totto-Chan), Spanish, Greek, and this kid also speaks Dutch and German. They have an organic lunch program, and the kids learn to cook for themselves at various school events. What a school. If only it didn't cost a 5-figure sum every year. It's not just the school though - Skylar only started attending the school a year ago - but hearing him talk about boats, farming, and the confidence he has to speak up, offer informed opinions, make decisions - all these are definitely traits that he learned being an active part of the farm, figuring out the business with his parents. So many things I wonder about, just thinking about this child. For some reason, Sherlyn and I have definitely reflected a lot on parenting and being "real adults" in these two weeks.

Dinner was salmon with pesto, a rice mix, and salad. Started to realize how sustainable it could be to eat salads, and was really intrigued by how conscious this family was of "normal" portions, and wondered what concept of portion size Americans have in general. Had awesome icecream from Oh Wow Cow - honey lavender and maple walnut, yum.

I remember telling someone how much I liked talking to strangers - there's no baggage, no judgement, you can be exactly who you want to be, and oftentimes you choose to be yourself. I realize that while I'm terrible with small talk, sometimes I can have long conversations with absolute strangers. I want to remember these conversations, because people make Philadelphia real to me, and so inspiring every day.

Today I met Tim at the mushroom-growing workshop, and I asked him if he grew anything. Tim's now in the catering business, he's definitely really old (his father passed away at 86 thirty years ago, so he's probably close to that age), and so very passionate about eating healthily and organic.