Clagett Farm Notes

Live in Maryland? Write a Christmas card to your Governor!

This is the time of year when our fields are planted in young, green cover crops.  They add organic matter to the soil, retain the nitrogen from last season, and add some more, so we don’t have to spread fertilizers.  Don’t you wish all farmers did that?

Nitrogen pollution is a big problem in the Chesapeake Bay.  Two years ago Maryland committed to improving the 66 largest sewage treatment plants in Maryland. This one action will, when completed, remove close to half the nitrogen pollution entering the Bay from Maryland sources.  Congratulations!

So now it’s the farmers’ turn to reduce pollution from agriculture (another major source of nitrogen in the Bay).  The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (the organization that owns Clagett Farm), is asking Governor Erlich to budget $120 million to help farmers use Bay-friendly agricultural practices, such as planting cover crops in their fields and forest buffers along the streams.  That’s less than one half of one percent of the state’s budget.   That money also includes additional funds for farmland preservation. 

If you would like to read a more detailed description of this proposal, check out

www.cbf.org/mdag

In the meantime, write your Governor a Christmas card!  Ask him to fully fund agricultural conservation programs in the 2007 budget. 

Governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr.
Office of the Governor
State House
Annapolis, Maryland 21401-1925

Our members and volunteers have gone the extra mile to support our little farm, and I’m sure one big reason is that you want to encourage environmentally responsible farming practices and farmland preservation.  Well now is your big chance to tell the Governor what you think. 

Thanks everyone!  This means a lot to us!

Eat your enemies, or make tea out of them

By Megan Caine

Weeds are generally unappreciated; their nutritious value and long histories of medicinal uses, ignored. After a day of hoeing and hand weeding, it would be especially easy to hate the pesky plants that crowd our precious crops, stealing their water and sunlight. Early on I learned that a weed is any plant which grows where you do not want it. Using that definition, and keeping in mind our desire to control what is growing in our fields and lawns, most plants become weeds. Agriculture and modern medicine have allowed us to entirely discount plants that were once depended upon for sustenance and healing.

An abundance of useful wild plants are found in abundance at Clagett Farm. I have been learning about them through asking lots of questions of anyone who might know, from reading DC public library books, and from experimenting with eating and using them medicinally. Here are some suggestions and a bit of information on some easily found plants

Lambs quarters (left) can be cooked or eaten raw as a salad. Related to beets, chard, and spinach, they are high in vitamins A and C. To cook, sauté garlic in olive oil, add just washed, still wet lambs quarters and cook for just a minute and add salt and pepper. You could also add it to whatever you might put spinach in – sandwiches, stir-fry, soup… Lambs quarters are also found in the city and in parks. Another plentiful weed is pigweed (above right). Best eaten cooked, boil it for few minutes, until tender, and drain. Add salt, pepper, butter, margarine, or olive oil.

Plantain (left), which is as prevalent in the city as on the farm, has long been used for its properties in healing skin irritations and wounds. Fresh, crushed leaves applied directly to a poison ivy rash or bug bite are soothing. Young leaves are good in salads and older leaves add nutrition to soup stocks. Another source of relief for poison ivy and bug bites is jewelweed (above right). Break open the stem joints and gently crush to extract the gooey insides, then rub on affected areas.

Most people have especially negative feelings about stinging nettle (left), but its one of my favorites. Young leaves are excellent cooked as you would spinach, and not to worry - the heat kills their ability to sting. The leaves also make a mineral rich tea.

Mugwort (right) leaves make a calming tea, and can be added to bathwater for the same effect. Dried mugwort is often mixed with other herbs in“dream pillows” to promote an active dream life.

One of the herbs I have yet to experiment with, but am fascinated by is Queen Ann’s lace (left). Among other things, in the Appalachia's it was used by some as a contraceptive.

Interesting, huh? Go off and read more! Get ideas and recipes. When you visit the farm, ask us if we know where a particular weed might be plentiful – or wander and discover what’s growing for yourself.

On Volunteering at Clagett Farm

 This post was written by Pat Burke, a shareholder, worksharer, volunteer and dear friend of the farm.

A friend wanted to know why I volunteer at an organic farm. After all, I’m a nurse, and nursing jobs are plentiful. Why would I leave paying health care work for “stoop labor” in the fields?

I tried to explain. My life had changed radically. I had just returned to graduate school, and was taking on considerable debt as well as a double course load. Instead of being outdoors, I was spending my hours sitting in lectures and libraries and hunched over the keyboard. My food was increasingly coming out of vending machines instead of from the organic market. I was stressed out, not exercising, not relaxing, and eating scary things out of cellophane.

When I found out that there was a CSA nearby, and that I could exchange 4 hours of farm work a week for a share of fresh organic produce, I thought it was too good to be true. I could be outside, get exercise, get a break from studying, and afford organic "veg" again! I expected that the work would be tedious, but thought I would give it a try.

To my surprise, the work gave me far more than delicious produce. I met wonderful people, heard great stories, and gained a new appreciation for the work of farmers. The staff and volunteers at Clagett are hardworking folks. They are cheerful when things are going well, and creatively resolute when challenges appear. Time together in the fields yields friends and fond memories.

The farm itself is an oasis of quiet in an increasingly unquiet world. At the farm, the sounds are of birdsong, the drowsy hum of honeybees, the welcoming bark of farm dogs, the murmur and laughter of volunteers sharing stories as they plant, transplant, mulch, weed, stake, hoe, clip and pick.  If you want to be with people, there is plenty of opportunity. If your day requires silence, then you can have that, too.

The work is varied. For those who want a physical challenge, there are plenty. There are many full wooden crates of produce to hoist upon a scale. Or fields of pumpkins or watermelons to pick and load into a van. But there are also flats to be seeded, carrots to be thinned, strawberries to mulch and potatoes to wash and sort. One day the “work” was to pick flowers and bunch them for the Dupont Circle shares.

Farm lessons are for free. Volunteers told me how to preserve abundant harvests for winter. Experience taught the sweet contentment that comes with working with a properly sharpened hoe. I’ve learned that the taste of heirloom tomatoes is indescribably good. That not all weeds are bad. I’ve learned that okra flowers look like hibiscus, and that kohlrabi looks like alien spaceships. And that raw sweet corn eaten in the field is a treat best enjoyed in moderation.

Most of all, I learned that a few hours of volunteering brings so much more than fresh organic produce. Three years have passed since my friend asked me that original question. I’m still volunteering at Clagett, and my life is richer for it. Come join us!

Reflections of a postmodern farm worker

We are grateful for having Hans Friedhoff work for us during the 2004 season. His intellectual curiosity and wry humor combined with a good heart made him a wonderful companion while we toiled in the fields. We asked him to write a piece about his farm experience. Here it is.

In our postmodern world, where pretension and angst are fashionably adorned with perverted moralities, one is sometimes hard-pressed to reflect positively about our experiences. Sullen and brooding always inspires a trendier contingent. Certain brands of twenty-four year olds (myself excluded, of course), enthusiastically press each other for evidence of latent pathologies, self-torture or psychotic episodes; the more twisted, outlandish elements being taken as evidence of a healthy skepticism and a life richly lived over traditional morality and conventionality. So when I announced that I would spend the summer working on a farm in Maryland, reactions frequently hung between incredulity and outright suspicion. A reluctant suspicion among the more traditional, "adult" element, that either I had lost all sense of the progress America had made since the industrial revolution or that finally that twisted liberal arts postmodernist morality had taken me over the edge of reasonable behavior and into bed with the cows. And as for the younger, darker element, the farm was just a touch hokey. So much the better if we were to start in with the cows, surely that would be cooler and more subversive, I imagined them thinking.

Prior to arriving at Clagett Farm, I had been working at an office job in downtown Seattle – a truly mind-numbing activity that, ironically, never aroused the same suspicion about my sanity as has my presence on the farm. The office is a place that helps one breed a darker sensibility and while that may be popular with the cynical twenty-something existentialist crowd, it does not do much toward nurturing a healthy mental space.

Despite being far too positive to have much effect on my more sardonic arguments about the depravity and absurdity of human experience, my tenure on the farm has revived a fundamental curiosity about basic structures that is too often absent in everyday life. Throughout the summer it has forced the question –why this is so? It can sometimes be a difficult question in a culture that frequently forces us to sell ourselves as the final arbiters of truth on matters about which we speak and which, in terms of questions, generally regards simple and stupid as intimate bedfellows. We have long been a society of proud answerers in which humble questions are seen more as signs of weakness or naivete. I suppose that any job has the potential to force this question, but my experience on the farm has had an elemental quality that places that question above others.

There is the sense that one is among basic elements here. Uncovering the shape of those elements means uncovering the answer to essential questions bigger than asking why is it better to hoe during the mid-morning than in the late afternoon or why should we pluck the flowers in the new strawberry field. It inspired in me an itchy sort of intellectual groping aimed at uncovering the essential qualities of those things that we face every day and frequently think nothing more about. It’s a form of discovery more profound than most of us have regular occasion to make and one that has troubled authors and scientists alike. It’s an exercise undertaken by farmers all the time and it’s ironic that as a class they are so often regarded as unsophisticated as they may seem to be. In any case, my experience on the farm has reminded me of the sheer excitement of curiosity and discovery, and that questions regarded as simple generally prove to be the most honest and often uncover the sharpest understanding.

So passed the 04 growing season, light on the angst, not even a touch of psychotic behavior to help us ‘keep it real,’ but all the more substantive for it. Working on Clagett Farm is an experience that I wish was more reflective of the way I have lived. I will always perceive how integral the work we’ve done here is to us as individuals and community. Thank you to all.

Musings of a worksharer

By Tina Shane

The City energizes me with its frenetic activity:

- Careening sirens "rushing" through rush hour traffic

- Trumpeting car horns singing duets with caroling car alarms

- Hands shouting in animated gesticulations

- Schools of people entering and exiting the earth, striding sidewalks and streets

- Buses and subway cars stuffed with sardines

- Conveyer belts of jets rumbling through the sky with bellies full of people

But it is Clagget Farm that nourishes, restores, and soothes my soul:

- Friendly greetings of "Hey! H'ya doin'?" smiles

- Soft murmur and gentle rhythm of volunteers harvesting the bounty

- Canada Geese honking in V-formation overhead

- Birds chattering in top-secret meetings in the trees

- Praying mantis, lady bugs, spiders: all safely hidden in the dark embrace of foliage

- Rain-sound of leaves letting go their docking stations and tumbling through the trees

- Soft breeze cooling the brow

- Pitter patter of rain on raincoats

- Fall sun coaxing brilliant colors from the foliage

- Bowl of sky outlined with soft undulations