Hard Red Spring Wheat and Millet

Alvin in the Millet

Alvin, hard red spring wheat

(It's all combined and harvested now!)

Livestock auction and Red Cabbage

Things have been busy busy since Jess and I returned from CBI in Helena. We checked out of CBI a bit early so we could go to the Art walk in Bozeman on the way home...and ended up staying with Rose Marks ! A friend of mine from highschool who has been going to Montana State U in Bozeman for a year. Rose showed us a good time and we ate sushi at Dave's Sushi and it was the first time Jess and I had gone out in a while (not really any restaurants in the Dive..). We saw lots of good and bad art and drank free wine all over town. Bozeman is a kind of upscale place, it turns out. Very funky but a bit yuppie and expensive, Rose said there's a lot of "gearheads" which translates to a lot of young people who only care about hiking, climbing and skiing and live to do those things.

We had a really great time but had to book it back to Glendive for the Dawson County fair! (We picked up 150# of purple hulless barley on the way though) As soon as we got back we were in Fair mode...we ran the Farm-to-Table booth all day saturday until 10:30pm and then again on Sunday until 5:00 pm. Met lots..and I mean LOTS of interesting people. Some whackos too. Got to talk to a variety of locals about farming and local food and what they believe in. Saw my first ranch rodeo. Ate funnel cake and hamburgers. The best part for me was the livestock auction. Do we even have this in VT? Everyone is dressed up for the fair, cowboy hats, cowboy boots, tucked in collared, ironed cowboy shirts...topped off with a giant belt buckle of course...and at the auction an MC stood in the center of a ring and spewed off numbers so fast I couldn't tell what he was saying let alone determine what language he was speaking. I found out that he was selling beef by the pound. "one dolla, dolla fifteen, dolla twenty, SOLD dolla thirtyfi" SO FAST and everyone had these cards that they kept track of what was being sold and how much etc. Pigs, Cows, Lambs. The deal with the livestock auction is that kids from 4H have raised each one of these animals from birth so they bring them out to the ring, walk them around and then the bidding begins - it's a sort of charity because the animals go for way above market price and people bid because they want the animal, they want to support the kid or both - if they don't want the animal they can resell it on the second go around for market price and the kid gets the money either way. It was very cool. Does Bennington even have a county fair???

Jess and I were kind of tired from the fair since we worked all weekend but we had to get ready for our first party at our house on Monday night - Erin, the extension intern, was finishing up her term so we had a combo goodbye barbeque/housewarming party at our place. Jess and I made sushi and she made steak and around 15 of our news friends came by with beer and food and strawberry daquiris and rhubarb wine, homemade vino and peach cobblers...a lot of foodies and their husbands/wives, kids - we felt like such little adults, throwing a bbq in our backyard with everyone sitting around the fire, socializing (not many people were under 30). Our bosses came (it actually feels weird to even call them our bosses but thats what Bruce and Peggy are I suppose) and everyone was just SO helpful, it was like we didn't have to do that much work at all. It's kind of strange the neighborly-ness of everyone. I guess I'm just not used to people being selfless and helpful basic strangers or something..

The party was super fun - we got emails the next day thanking us, so cute - especially from one of our favorite new friends Jessica Beacom, the dietician who we want to be BFF's with us. She's a super cool, foodie mama with an equally cool nurse husband (long red ponytail) and their kid, Lily - they moved here from Alaska and told me and Jess that they were psyched to have some young blood in the food scene here in Glendive...I'm hoping to work with Jessica B on my Eat-In and local food in schools program!

Yesterday I grinded flour and made my first ever radio appearance on the local stations as an advirtiser for the "First annual Glendive Tomato festival" (I was kind of nervous but they let me record it 3 times to get it just right). The Tomato fest is tonight! And Jess is entering a green tomato cake in the tomato contest...

We also made more sauerkraut last night, this time with Alvin's cousins - lovely people - beautiful evening of kraut making, beer drinking, truck bed riding.

Pictured here is: Alvin in the hat, his friend Lisa from Family Farmers coalition, Jess, Alvin's cousin Neil and myself. That wood thing is the cabbage shredder, a very cool invention designed just for kraut. Alvin warned me not to make any "red cabbage" (aka shredding my fingers.)

Out to the field and down to the pasture

The last couple days I learned the ins and outs of Western Trails food and essentially how to operate your own food company. Check.

I mixed flapjack mixes in the measuring room and organized orders for Jess and Bruce's trip to Helena. Western Trails doesn't have a distributor, this means that we rely solely on people volunteering to drop off our products around the state whenever they go west. For five years it has worked because, as I'm learning more and more everyday, Montana is like a small town despite its size. Anyway, Shirley (our elderly volunteer paid by a federal program) and I ground flour and measured out rolled barley flakes and beans and flax seed, sealed bags and stamped sell by dates. Shirley is a wonderful woman, mother of 5, great grandmother of 2, her husband died of asthma in North Dakota 15 years ago - and she is so adorable and funny, really funny - anyway, Jess and I have been enjoying her quite a bit recently.

Today we got up early and picked raspberries at Sue Price's in Savage (so many) and then back in Glendive I mixed bags of rolled barley and flax seed with Shirley (we wear hairnets, labcoats and rubber gloves, it's great). Then Alvin called me to come down to his farm for our tractor driving lesson/onion pulling fest and I told him I had all these raspberries but didn't know what to do with them (seriously so many...jam? pie? wine?). When I got to Alvin's, he had prepared two pie crusts for his wife Dena's Raspbery Cheesecake Cream pie...ohhhhmaannnn. The rest of the afternoon went as follows:

Tractor lesson. (I drove a combination automatic/standard John Deere around Alvin's field, down shifted, up shifted reversed! The whole deal! Alvin is a great teacher and LOVES explaining things in painstaking but necessary detail, very patient and thorough in the way that so many farmers are...detail detail detail - encouraging, safe)

Raspberry mashing.

Onion de-weeding.

Irrigation channel fixing.

Pie making, cream cheese mixing, pie filling

Sheep herding, beer drinking, shit shooting

Bed Sleeping.

Listening to Jess play my banjo in the kitchen - of course she's never played the banjo before but that doesn't stop her from picking it up and immediately strumming away, clinking plucking dinging in a way I have never been able to even after a year. Some people are just talented.

Monday morning meeting: lasted for over an hour as Bruce, Peggy, Erin, Jess and I gushed ideas and talked about the future and exciting things while we tried to talk about what we were doing for the rest of the week...picking raspberries early tomorrow!

Weeded onions at Alvin's in the morning, the field had been irrigated so at least the weeds were easy to pull up. The onions are in the most serious trouble - last week Bruce said he was just going to "spray em with roundup" and I convinced him to let me weed them instead. Alvin came by and showed me how to set up the irrigation channel for the millet and we moved the irrigation dams and fixed the channels. I like him. a lot. He couldn't help but continue our political gush-session from friday and started in on reagan again

"..aw man, them republicans, they were smart to pick that Reagan, I mean OH BOY he was a poster child"

and then I told him about the Eat-In school lunch campaign I'm going to start (via Josh Viertel, Slow Food because he asked me to and their campaign was missing Montana and he kind of guilted me into it...in the best of ways I'm sure) and Alvin leans over to me and whispers, even though we are in the middle of millet field in the middle of nowhere.."I know who you can talk to on the legislature in town...a little secret, 95% of the courthouse is on OUR side" and he winks. Yes, I really like him.

After lunch I worked on getting together the Eat-In and brainstorming about what it would entail, watered the sweet potatoes at the community garden and weeded the other potatoes and then I started making/painting a huge "welcome" sign for the community garden. It's kind of ugly...yellow and purple...but we have all this free paint in the basement and I just got so excited to use it and and and...

Some exciting things that happened today:

Jess and I got our food stamp cards and we each have about $120 EACH to spend on food a month. omgomgomgomgomomg

I got my health insurance card

I got reimbursed by Americorps AND my first stipend (aka I feel richer than I have in MONTHS)

Jess made me go on a wild goose chase after work today...let's just say we ended up at a pet store/adult entertainment store/head shop in a trailer park. Kind of scary. Definitely smelly.

Peggy, our boss, invited Jess and I to her LAKE HOUSE this friday. omg. We're going. Obviously.

Jess is making fried rice because we were craving chinese food and just couldn't let ourselves do it so we'll see how this vegan version turns out, it'll be no Ollie's but a girl can dream.