So... I would like to welcome you to our new farm blog at The Grassy Knoll Farm! My name is Teresa, and before I became a part time farmer, baker, mother and now blogger, I was an ICU nurse in a Manhattan hospital. I worked hard and played hard as well. Then, I fell in love with my husband Jason and moved to the country of Northwestern CT giving up my NYC apartment. One day, out for a run in my new neighborhood I realized that I wasn't dodging taxis and sidewalks full of people I didn't know and I was comfortably breathing in clean crisp air. It was a revelation to me- I was an embodiment of "Green Acres"!
The feeling of trading in my heels for muck boots became more real to me when we had secured our first baby piglet in its new home on the farm. My husband went back to doing some work in the garden, and I went out to a store. When I returned to go check on the baby piglet, it was not in its pen. It was so tiny, it had slipped out of the wire hog fencing and was nowhere in sight. My husband and his friend and I split up and all went running through the farm and woods to try to find the lost piglet. I was in a skirt, with my muck boots of course, and I was the first to come across the frightened piglet in the woods. It was atop a large rock, staring at me, and shivering despite the summer heat. I approached slowly and then jumped on top of the piglet and started screaming for help. It may surprise some of you that I jumped on top of the piglet. They are surprisingly strong, all muscle, I knew from trying to hold on to her when we put her in her new home. I knew it would take my whole body weight to hold down the piglet until helped arrived.
My husband and his friend found me laying on top of a screaming piglet, on top of a rock and they started laughing. I was most concerned about the fact that we were NOT going to lose our first piglet, it cost 75 dollars and it was not going to become bear food in the forest. They reluctantly grabbed the piglet out from underneath me and carried it screaming back to the pen. We secured the pen with more wood and fencing so that it would not escape again. I worried for weeks about the piglet until it was big enough to scare our Australian Shepherd, and then I relaxed and learned that despite my tackling it in the woods, and despite the fact that eventually this piglet would be our dinner, we had a deep affection for each other. A friendship that I won't ever forget. Our first piglet, Penelope was a love, and I often tell stories about her.
But why am I writing to you? Now after 6 years of owning and running a farm, and 4 years of running a bakery, I want to share our stories and adventures with you! I have a lot to say about the type of food we put in our mouths (the reason we started an organic produce and fruit producing farm) and the type of products we spread on our bodies (the reason why we started making our own bath and body products and selling them in our farm store), but it is even more than that. I want to share with you how we do what we do, why we do what we do, and how it often turns out. There are many blogs that talk about seasonal eating, cooking and baking, but what about all the time that you WAIT for things to grow and ripen and be ready for harvest? What about all of the TIME that it takes to actually harvest and process and then actually be able to eat the food?
I would love to share with you my family's experiences in growing organic food in northwestern CT, waiting for it to ripen and be ready for harvest and then cooking or baking with the ingredient in our small commercial bakery to bring it full circle. I would love to share with you our experiences in farming and raising animals, including baby doll sheep, goats and occasionally chickens. I would love to share with you how I actually do what I do- spreading my time between a full time job as a nurse executive, raising a 5 year old, farming, baking, being a "stuffed animal maker" (my daughters exact words for my ferocious amigurumi crocheting habit that always envelopes me over the winter) and running a small farm bakery business with my husband, Jason. I would love to share all of that with you and more. Will you join me? I hope so. It has been quite a ride so far, and there are bound to be more stories that give you a sense of farming, running a bakery and the business and busyness of life.
Speaking of waiting, check out this pic of one of our Montmorency Cherry trees! Despite being transplanted last fall, the cherries are growing fast and furious and we are looking forward to a bumper harvest this year from only three trees! Now, we have to wait for them to ripen, and with bated breath we hang tight awaiting the day when we have to quickly cover the trees with bird netting to prevent the songbirds who are also, yes, you guessed it, waiting for the cherries to ripen, from eating all of the cherries, so that we can pit them all by hand (takes an agonizingly long time, but all the while you get to smell cherries, be enveloped by so much cherry juice that you can practically taste the cherry jam) and then throw them in a pot with some sugar to create masterful small batch jam that is so well known by our community! I am honored to share our farm and our trial and error, our success and failure and some pretty cool tasty treat recipes along the way. I hope you will join us!
Waiting patiently for cherry ripening, picking under the bird netting on a beautiful sunny bright morning and a big garden bowl of cherries ready for pitting!