Life is Short...and So is the Growing Season.

After a long break we're back and ready to blog! I say "we" because Sadrah and I (Mike) have decided to morph this blog into an account of our attempts to grow our own food here in Skaneateles, among the Finger Lakes in upstate NY. We'll both be contributing our thoughts and accounts as we move forward with our project. We hope to become more self-sustainable in other areas of our lives in the future, but for now we're starting with something we both love and feel passionate about: the food we eat.

I hope the blog will actually be much more than that--you can no doubt expect some mid-winter food porn from the head chef--but for now we're actually way behind on our blogging, so I'll try to start catching up.

While I was out on the road with Billy Squier in June, July & August, Sadrah spent the summer as an intern on Monarch Farm, not far from her parent's house in Skaneateles, NY.

All the food on Monarch is ecologically grown, which means they don't use any chemicals, pesticides or herbicides of any kind. It is essentially an organic farm, without the expensive, time consuming organic certification or signing a deal with the devil, er, government. The farm is run by Brendan on land that he has rented for the last six years and staffed by a few rotating interns throughout the season. I got a chance to spend three great weeks there with Sadrah--getting up at 6:30am or earlier, working hard harvesting and processing vegetables, swimming in a secluded pond and enjoying some of the tastiest vegetables I've ever had.

It might sound tough, and it was at times. There were definitely some ups and downs to the experience, but overall it was a invigorating three weeks and I learned a lot. I guess that's not saying much when I didn't even know what swiss chard looked like, but now I can recognize chard, kale, leeks, radicchio, 3 kinds of onions and more! I particularly enjoyed working the farmer's markets in and around Syracuse--it was great to see the smiles on people's faces as the fruits of our labor filled up their grocery bags.

As our time on the farm started to wind down, we both realized we wanted to devote our time to something we could call our own. We comtemplated returning to Philly, guerilla gardening the nearest vacant lot or begging for jobs at Greensgrow and making our own way in the city. But Sadrah's parent's offered us a great opportunity--the chance to use some of their land to garden. They used to keep animals and grow much of their own food when Sadrah was young, so they've been very supportive of our aspirations. It was a tough decision, but we decided to jump in sooner rather than later and see if we could make it out here in the country. Maybe this is where we want to settle, maybe it isn't. Long, cold, hard winter? We'll see! We wanted to go for it and find out.