Smoothies for brunch, daiquiris at dinner…
It is strawberry season in New York and it won’t last forever. So if you want to live in the “now,” swing out to your local farm and get picking!
There’s a beautiful crop at Indian Creek this year.
And beautiful people, too! Bring your friends and bring the kids. Thanks to everyone who visited during opening week! See you at the ‘Creek.
We’ve planted 10,000 strawberry plants by hand. We’ve pounded umpteen hundred tomato stakes by hand. We do lots of hard work the old-fashioned way.
Other times we use advanced technology, like this tractor-pulled planter. The metal wheel makes a hole in the bed, water trickles in from the tank, and one of the gentlemen pops a pumpkin seed into the hole.
As you can see in the movie, even when we go mechanized…
This is the speed of farming.
Come on down to the farm! It is time to pick strawberries! You can hand-pick in the Berry Patch, or buy quarts that we’ve picked for you.
Remember those green strawberries we looked at last week? Now they are red, and ready to meet the ultimate fate of a strawberry.
Nom nom nom!
NOM! NOM! NOM! NOM! NOM!
These strapping blokes have installed a sign on Route 96 to remind you that Strawberry Hour has arrived.
You’ll see this rickety little wagon. In 2 minutes flat you can pull off the road, grab a couple quarts of farm-fresh berries, and leave your bills in the slot.
Pick up a quart to drop off at a friend’s house!
Bursting with juice. Make great smoothies!
Want to hand-pick them yourself? Get your quart boxes at the wagon, then follow the signs to the Berry Patch. Hope to see you soon! Weather has cooled, weekend is here, and berries are waiting.
Hey, y’all. Happy holidays! It’s almost time for a bowl of fresh-picked strawberries! I just went crawling around the strawberry field and found something pretty great…
First strawberries of 2011!
Thousands of these! Bam!
Strawberry blossoms.
Of course some of the berries are still at the blossom stage.
Strawbabies!
And some are in between.
Walk this way.
By mid-June, there should be plump, sweet, juicy strawberries to pick. We’ll straighten out our signs by the time you get here! See you at the farm!
Tomato sign in the mower.
Oops, this one got caught in the mower!
Take 6 divine little apple buds, tenderly formed and full of promise…
6 apple buds.
Add 1 chomp by a woodland hoodlum…
Chomped by woodland hoodlum.
And you get zero apples. See, 6 + 1 = 0. Strange but true.
You might remember from Miss Crabapple’s biology class that buds turn into blossoms, and blossoms bring forth fruit. If a branch gets “nipped in the bud,” bye bye fruit pie. Luckily the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells have left plenty of buds, so it won’t be long til we’re sending out fresh crop alerts!
Each of the apple trees below was damaged by a different critter — mouse, rabbit, or deer. Which was which?
1. An impressive clean cut, perfect and planar like a saw blade…
Who did this?
2. Jagged and stringy, as if stripped like honeysuckle…
And who did this?
3. Just plain dead, no nutrients getting through…
And who killed this tree?
(Remember xylem and phloem — more on those another day.)
Which was by mouse? rabbit? deer?
There are a few days in spring when the orchards pop with blossoms. Wind, rain, and biology conspire to make the show short-lived. You have to enjoy the blooms while they last, and get photos on the spot or wait til next year. Had a heck of a time photographing the pear tree in the video; eventually there were still moments and we snapped photos.
Spring on the farm, before the first mowing. The grass is long, dandelions are tall, and everything waves in the wind. Set the camera in an old apple tree, up in the meadow near Stumphenge.
Kind of like Tibetan prayer flags send blessings over the snowy mountaintops of the Himalaya.
Meanwhile, there is some controversy over whether all these varieties are properly called heirlooms.
Oh, well, someone will figure it out.
Everything on the farm becomes a habitat.
Not least the old Ford tractor, because in a bird-eat-bird world, you don’t thumb your beak at an iron-clad condo with sweeping views. The farm hawk, among other predators, isn’t going to divebomb such a fortress, and the dogs can’t reach high enough to bother.
These downy chicks seemed to be craning their necks in anticipation of afternoon snack. I found the soundless exertion creepy, recalling Edvard Munch’s The Scream, painted in 1893—long before the existential panic called Facebook.
At any rate, birds weren’t the sole squatters at Camp Busted Tractor that day. After a couple hours work we cranked the engine, only to recoil at a CLANG! THWACK! BOOM! (Pause.) CRANGGG!
When the blue smoke cleared, Farmer Stephen scratched his head and I muttered some consolation. Stephen disassembled the manifold to find bits of a peach pit which had been squirreled away—rather, moused away—somewhere inside.
A big shard had been suctioned through the system when we turned the key, which fouled the cylinder and doomed the Blue Ford to a season of rehab. That’s a $1,500 peach pit, if we appraise objects by how much they screw us over.
As for the bird’s nest, I got the feeling that Mama was somewhere watching us anxiously. We left the helpless babes alone because the tractor wasn’t moving after all. Not sure what we would have done otherwise. Do we call the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for instructions?
Can you move a nest?
If, for your evening walk, you should like to pass a few minutes untroubled by world affairs, it is best to avoid an encounter with duct tape. Today I was not so fortunate.
Someone, somewhere, is in a bloody fight for something. It is more or less desperate and bursting with heartbreak. There might be winners, but everyone will lose. Heroes will slaughter heroes. The flickering swath told me so.
Most people, even patriots of Duct Tape Nation, probably find the video a real snooze, but I can watch it looping for a good long time. I think it can hold its own in the genre traditionally headlined by faux fire.
Try running both movies at once. Turn up the volume so you can hear the fire within and the wind without. What is your white noise of choice? Crickets? Rain? Distant weedwackers?
Indian Creek Farm 