Post-collective agricultural fields in Sepsiszentgyörgy, Transylvania


Last Friday, rain sprinkled the day in fits and starts. A Bald Eagle sat in the top of a Douglas Fir and a Harrier sat on the wall outside the kitchen window. The Hazelnut catkins are in bloom and the large swathes of warm gold orchards crouch against evergreen and lichen dappled hillsides.

We ate chicken posole for lunch and saved China's cornmeal cake for after the hard work of digging roots. We'll stand in the kitchen, eat cake and drink tea.

The section of row where the gobo grows is dense from a higher percentage of clay. The clay holds water unlike a sandier soil. We dig deep trenches on either side of the gobo row, leaving a wall of roots between. The dense soil is hard to dig. As the gobo gives way, I note a markedly different harvest from those over the previous two months. The plant is coming out of dormancy. The snap of the roots is livelier and the cold soil, redolent of minerals, exhales. The hard freezes of December have ended and the slime from last years foliage gives way to new leaves. Small worms move through the fine root hairs and soil on the vegetable. They feed on the flow of micro-nutrients released by the gobo as it comes out of winter dormancy and into spring.

Natural History prevails at Ayers Creek. While working, we chatter about the Tundra Swans, the hunters across the lake, and the various discoveries each of us make in the fields. A few months ago, Anthony found a Giant Pacific Salamander in the chicory row. A full grown six inch long brown Dicamptodon enstatus in a vole tunnel. We watch the change in the atmosphere, soil, and plants. Organic food production is at the mercy of natural systems largely beyond human control. Mastery comes from years of observation and experience with a multitude of variables including human emotions. Like most things, the more time invested the greater the return and the more resounding the rhythm of production. The land heaves worms and casing, bushels of beans, and gasses. It delivers root vegetables up and draws the long toed cornstalks deep. One year echos another years glorious success, which in turn, absorbs the disappointment of and anemic production in another field.

In Pig Earth, John Berger writes about the peasantry. Now, in the 21st century, this class seems easily replaced by the farmer. He writes,
"Peasants live with change hourly, daily, yearly, from generation to generation. There is scarcely a constant given to their work lives except the constant necessity of work. Around this work and its seasons they themselves create rituals, routines and habits in order to wrest some meaning and continuity from a cycle of remorseless change: a cycle which is in part natural and in part the result of the ceaseless turning of the millstone of the economy within which they live.

And so, memories of cornfields explode upon my tongue as I eat a bowl of warm cornmeal mush sweetened with milk and honey this cold January morning.

A birthday greeting from Peyrusse Vieille.

Field Tamales

What began as a conversation about how to move corn from the field through a drying, into a simple chemical process to access valuable nutrients became a lovely experience for the mouth.

Fresh ground hominy from slaked corn and sweet new lard. whipped nixtamal, filled with beef tongue or pumpkin and dried grapes. Steamed.

Pig Kill

2008
Romania
I am in the Unitarian villages of Transylvania. It has taken another ten years to work a kill back into my life.

The pig arrives in a metal crate; front loaded onto the village forklift and delivered to the cultural center on the fair morning of the kill. She comes from a barn in the village. At ease but hungry she pushes her snout through the bars of her confinement, nibbling the October grasses that edge her boundary. Her assertive rooting unlatches the cage and she is free in the enclosed yard. She is hungry and rambles about, nibbling on living greens and fallen apple. She wanders while the men arrange and pace themselves, their tools and rituals before the kill.

First, shots of palinka are passed about. Locked eyes and shared drink weave the threads of many kills. Denes-bacsi stands with palinka in one hand and the orange plastic “pig-rope” used to bind the pig’s feet dangles from his left hand. This killing, like any other, follows the same communal passages from before into now. Little has changed. There is joy and celebration in the familiarity of the work. There is no disquiet here.

A placid flow of life runs smoothly over the soft rounded morning. The pig’s stress lies dormant until the edges of the men’s intent throws boulders in her way. The energy in the enclosure shifts quickly as the men tighten their circle round her. She darts, annoyed at the interruption. For the men, a merry chance ensues throughout the yard. Her tail is caught tight in a grip. She is guided onto her right side by the smells and voices of men she has known her whole life. Voices that have greeted her, talked to her, fed her. Hands, knees and shins hold her to the grass. The pig-rope whips around three feet immobilizing them and leaving the left foreleg free. The hands upon her are gentle and firm, guiding her from an easy life in the barn to a quick end. She screams and struggles briefly against the men before a quick stick in her neck. The incision, enlarged by the pressure of her heavy flowing blood has tipped Denes-bacsi’s right fingers red. Using her heart, her leg, and her deep exhales; Denes-bacsi empties her life into the red enameled bowl, all the while, soothing her and coaxing her life away with gentle assurances. Denes-becsi has refilled her emptiness with silent gratitude. She has moved quickly from alive to meat.

Another round of palinka. Poised like a sphinx in the grass the carcass is covered with hay, doused in gasoline and set a fire. The hair is singed and the skin seared. The pig is scraped, washed and scrubbed until the pink pliant and animated creature is now a 30-minute memory. The skin, with its yellow crackle, is clean. The body, still life warm inside, is lifted onto the multipurpose wooden table and the butchering begins.

Another round of palinka and the hooves are knocked off, the trotters removed and the hocks jointed. The teats and tail and ears are taken and dropped in a red bucket. Another round of palinka and the first bites of crisp skin and warm raw flesh are eaten. Attracted by the warmth and protein of the carcass and sugars of the sweet palinka, the slow angry yellow jackets arrive. The pig is forty-five minutes from alive. An incision, behind the ears, down through the jaw joint and across the palate leaves the lower mandible intact. The head goes into a red bucket. A long cut is made down the back and the spine is splayed bare. The fat on the back is three fingers deep and the men nod and smile happily and congratulate each other as they think of the szalona, a cured and smoked fat, they will eat this winter. A parallel cut is made, a cleaver severs the rib cage from the spine, and the entire length of the backbone is peeled away from the body revealing the full abdominal membrane holding every organ. Carefully, the membrane is opened, and the heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and spleen, revealed and removed, are sent to the women in the kitchen. A separate basin holds stomach, large and small intestines.

Next to the heart, a small muscle is gently pulled away, wrapped in plastic and hurried off to the village veterinarian who will test it for parasites. The butchering continues. Two hours from alive in the yard and hams, fat, skin, scraps and roasts are sorted. Bones are scraped and boiled for stock. The women make a meatball and sour-cabbage soup with carrots and parsnips for lunch and cleaning intestines for stuffing. After lunch they’ll be make blood sausage, kielbasa and liver sausage for the large dinner that night.

It is difficult the whole day to find my place. I am at ease with the men, drinking palinka and eating the crisp skin and raw meat. I am a woman and belong inside. I want to lay my hands on the warm meat and work along with them. I never idle well. And I hope, in my life, that I will stick a pig, catch its blood, break it down and feed my friends and family. What higher compliment can I pay them, knowing what I am.

Linda's World

I spent hours and days on my knees in a particular patch of rows this spring and summer. Sweet potatoes, melons, edamame, bitter melons occupied my mind, my hands, my feet and legs. One afternoon, the farmer arrived with a grin and a twinkle in his eye. At the end of the patch row he pounded a sign with the words "Linda's World".

The sweet potatoes occupied most of my time in my world. I cut and propagated slips in May. I planted and re-planted slips in June. I ate the tender young sweet potato shoots in August and I walked the rows in September looking for signs and dreaming of tubers clusters below the ground.

On October 2nd, after lunch when the weather was warm and the soil was dry we began harvesting the sweet potatoes. First we dug the mixed slips at the south end of the east row and collected trial tubers for next years crop. Then we moved north and began to unearth and harvest again. The vines were cut back leaving a thick 5 inch stem above the soil. With each of us standing on either side of the furrow, we wedged the harvesting fork at barely an angle and together upheaved a mass of soil and sweet potatoes. This north end of the row was a mixed planting for market. Up came red, purple, white, yellow and orange bouquets of tubers. As we worked our way down the row, I looked back at the distance at the newly dug bundles which would eventually amount to tonnage.

In town, I look daily at the "camote" patch. In general the leaves at The Little Land are slow to turn. The sweet potato vines are not yet yellowing. The pole beans are still green and every day I harvest a few more. Mid summer heat delayed the flowering and now the ripening of the beans and peppers. I have only harvested one red pepper off my 5 plants. The peppers I brought back from Transylvania are beautiful in color and shape but they are not red and I wonder if they will eventually ripen in the house, drying and coloring from the ceiling. I hope so.

The 2009 baseball season has accompanied me for many harvest and preserving hours. Now, the pennant race punctuates the games with the sweet potato challenge; how to cure sweet potatoes for a week at 80-90 degrees in a house that is 65 degrees and has with closed rooms or closets.

It's October 22 and I finally harvested the sweet potatoes at The Little Land. I have wondered and fretted about them. Will they amount to anything? I try to anticipate the possible responses; disappointment, excitement, assessment, and satisfaction. When I arrive at the Little Land, it takes me an hour of filling my time with other tasks before garnering the courage to clip the vines and begin to fork the tubers free. I pull and coil the irrigation tubing. I photograph the peppers I brought back in a dirty kleenex from Romania. I dig the former squash bed and prepare it for garlic. I trim back the sweet potato vines. Feeling the soil through the ends of harvesting fork I move into the loose and moist soil. The long and proportionately large tine cuts through the soil and strikes one of the few tubers. I back off and reset the fork, lifting and shaking the soil from the small but gratifying bouquet. My heart soars.

I have about 10 pound of modest sweet potatoes in yellow and orange and white. There are a surprising number of "rat tails", the long skinny guys that seem like probable tubers had time, sun, heat and local been different. The two beds I used were a bit challenged. The first needed more sun. The second, more space. I make my notes and move on the the garlic bed. In go two rows of Brown Tempest, one row of Bogey and two rows of GxH along the south edge of the bed. The soil feels right, the clove seeds slide easily down and away from my thumb. The garlic planting takes the edge off the slight disappointment of the sweet potatoes and my renewed optimism has me dreaming, with a bit of impatience, of where I will plant them next year.