Slow Food, Travel, Craft Beer

Some people are born farmers and are born on farms. For others they are born farmers but take a less direct route there. For myself is has taken me a quarter of a century to realize that what I want to do for a living is play in the dirt and grow edible things (I do not mean to belittle the farming profession here). Eliot Coleman was a Spanish Literature Professor and turned organic farmer some 40 years ago and has since, literally, written the book on organic farming.

Eliot and Barbara’s Four Season Farm in Harborside Maine is a fantastic example of how to grow vegetables. Not only how to grow them, but to grow them year-round. The trick is not heated green houses or large buildings with grow lights, it is finding the right vegetable to grow in the right season, and shock, eating seasonally.

While the farm does have one wood furnace heated green house (lovingly called Garfield because it is big and fat, the wood is cut on the farm) there are at least five others with another being built to house chickens. More impressive than the green house collection on the farm were the vegetables. Eliot has developed a reputation for growing high quality vegetables and now I know why. Even before sticking any of the plants into your mouth you can see the quality in the well-tended beds. The plants look full and healthy, there are almost no thin spots where things did not grow very well, and the bed of kale looks like you could just jump in and fall asleep.

When I saw vegetables like this I was a little taken back. He’s growing plants like this…in Maine!?! Then my eyes went past the lettuce leaves, carrot greens, and heads of cabbages to the soil. Fluffy, black, amazingly healthy soil. The kind of soil you think of when you think potting soil, not that you would see