Farm Blog

“I could really use a beer right now,” says Daniel. I’ve heard this many times during our food challenge year, often after tough day at a program. Our rule is that we can’t have homebrew unless the brewer hand-harvested the grain. So even well-meaning brewer friends have been stumped on how to get us beer. Saskia to the rescue—or at least, she provided a quart of barley seeds gleaned from a field on Lopez Island. With their tough hulls, these seeds are a pain to eat. But

Steam billows out of the big enamel pot as I lift the lid. It’s a gray autumn morning, I’m wearing my blood-stained apron, and my brown is furrowed in concentration as I dunk a dead chicken into the hot water. “Welcome to spa day at Hawthorn Farm,” I tell her as I slosh her up and down. My farmwife humor belies the gratitude I feel for these birds. My husband and I have spent a year of eating only food that we or friends have harvested by hand. This experiment brings histo