Farming in Flannel, or Weekend WWOOFing

First and foremost, thanks to so many of you for the wonderful comments on my last blog entry. I've never had so much positive feedback on anything I've ever written. In many ways, getting to share my story with you all and receiving so many wonderful responses has pretty much been on par with the happiness I got from crossing that finish line :) So thank you, thank you, thank you. May we all continue to share our stories with one another - and be stronger, wiser, more joyful, and better connected because of it! 

(In the interest of sharing, here's one of my favorite inspiring reads of the past few years.)

Second of all: let's talk about how awesome Vashon Island is. Several months ago, I wrote about Vashon here on my blog and said this about it: A perfect little getaway from the city, Vashon boasts a lively community of folks, including many artists, musicians and, evidently, runners. It's always a treat to visit this rural, small-towny oasis.

The context in which I've visited Vashon (three times, prior to this weekend) has always been for the annual Vashon Ultra in June - my first 50K ever, back in 2010, and an event for which I feel a strong affinity and sense of loyalty. Every year, I've vowed that the next time I visit Vashon, I'd actually spend a decent amount of time there, seeing something other than the road from the ferry landing to the race start, and the 10-mile loop of trails that comprises the race.

This past weekend, I finally made the pilgrimage - with a weekend of work trades set up to structure the weekend. Steve, who's been interested in WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - learn more here), coordinated with a small farm on the island to exchange a couple days of manual labor for a weekend of room and board. I had set up my own work exchange elsewhere on the island on Saturday (thank you, Claudine!) to trade writing/website assistance for an amazing massage/bodywork session - before meeting up with Steve at the farm for a little taste of WWOOFing.

So let me state for the record that I'd be a liar to say that I truly experienced WWOOFing this weekend. More or less, I pretty much just mooched off the labors of Steve. While I was off drinking tea with Claudine and getting a 5-star massage, this guy was hacking through blackberry bushes, shoveling (literally) horse shit and seaweed and grape leaves into compost bins, and assembling a large-scale rainwater-collection system.

I did show up in time to participate in the grand adventure of digging up potatoes. Quite the treasure hunt in the dirt! After much shoveling, we finally unearthed some good ones - which were promptly boiled, mashed, and set out on the dinner table.

Our kind hosts, Scott and Andrea, cooked up a storm for us on Saturday night. It felt like Thanksgiving - with foods that were almost entirely grown in their garden. Salads filled with homegrown sprouts, apples, spinach, cucumbers, tomatoes, and sunflower seeds - all harvested that day (or that week, at the very least). Mashed potatoes, mashed squash. Unbelievably tender pork from a locally raised pig. Berry cobbler for dessert, with fresh blackberries from their yard. Heaven? Pretty darn close.

Scott and Andrea are very focused on simple living - making and building things from scratch, repurposing everything, bartering whenever possible, spending less money rather than racing to make more. At the risk of over-romanticizing the island life, I will say that there was a stark contrast in the pace of their daily life from my own - even just the notion of having time to sit down together three times a day for a genuinely relaxed, home-cooked meal...that was nice. (Surely I can, at the very least, afford to reclaim the lunch breaks I've already begun to lose sight of in my new job? Starting tomorrow!)

The weekend's takeaway, for me, was similar to that of the delightful "Team Sprout", whom Seyeon and I stayed with during our first foray into couchsurfing years ago in Austin: time is money; money is time; live humbly, and you can experience a different kind of wealth entirely. 

Much like couchsurfing, this experience made me hope to someday have a home (and garden!) big, warm, and welcoming enough to host strangers. I love the idea of meeting travelers from all over the world, sharing fresh food and terrific home-cooked meals, learning about one another's habits and beliefs and life experiences. It's an amazing thing to be welcomed into the home of a perfect stranger, and be given a glimpse into their daily life.

In the morning, after a hearty breakfast with Scott and Andrea, we put on our work boots and hit the garden again for a couple hours. I'll be the first to admit: for as passionate as I am about food, I know astoundingly little about gardening/farming. It was awesome to see what broccoli looks like growing on a plant, before it's been harvested. I loved seeing how enormous the beets were in the dirt.

      

The stems of the Swiss chard were such a brilliant pink. 

The tomatoes in their greenhouse, of course, were ten times more flavorful than anything you can find in a grocery store. I wish small-scale food production was part of our educational system. Sigh.

They were kind enough to send us away with bags of fresh greens and vegetables, a big bouquet of hand-picked flowers, and a bottle of wine (which will be eligible for opening in 70 days...) from the Andrew Will winery where Scott works.

We spent the afternoon exploring Maury Island Marine Park (connected to Vashon), which was gorgeous - and even made us feel like we were on a real beach on the ocean, tidal waves and all! :)

Although this entry has been almost entirely focused on food, I've neglected to mention the two other ridiculously amazing dinners of the weekend. It would do my blog, and the meals themselves, a serious injustice to leave out mention of them entirely:

1. Delicious dinner at the Preston household, featuring bacon/mushroom pizza, squash soup, blackened chicken in cream sauce, and creme brulee. My friends got fancy!
2. Sunday shabu-shabu dinner at Deby's house: traditional Japanese hot pot meal with virtually endless bowls of rice, noodles, meat, shrimp, gyoza (dumplings), tofu, and vegetables...all followed by copious amounts of homemade mochi, filled with red bean paste. Yummy.

One thing is for sure: I died and went to food heaven this weekend. It was a bit of a rough transition back to Earth today...

A big thanks, as always, to everyone who made this weekend a stellar one. I shared so many wonderful meals with people I only just met this very weekend, or a few months ago, or in the case of a select few (Cam and Avey, this means you!), a full 3+ years ago now. All of you, in my relatively brief time thus far in this beautiful corner of the world, have become like family to me. I thank you for bringing color to my life!

From Farm to Yitka's Kitchen

Homemade zucchini bread.
This week, something big is happening: I will have my first day off from work (all jobs considered) in TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS. I didn't actually realize how ridiculous my schedule had gotten until I sat down today to look at my iCal, and realized, holy cow...I've been swamped. I'm working full time at REI, tutoring four students, proctoring the occasional SAT at local high schools, cleaning Vera once a week (in exchange for free training sessions), and doing some writing here and there. Though not much blogging, apparently...

I'm pooped. It's exacerbated by the fact that I'm battling some severe bruising (Metatarsals? Bone bruise? Not quite sure...) on my right foot...I didn't even hurt it while running, but it's kept me sidelined from my passion for three weeks and counting now. Bummer. After writing an article on the Eugene Marathon, I registered for it this spring...but it's less than a month away now, and I'm pretty sure my injury's left me in no place to run it. Needless to say, the lack of running during this rather hectic stretch in my life has left me a little stir-crazy.

Nevertheless, I'm determined as ever to always carve out the requisite relaxation time. There definitely hasn't been enough of it lately, but I *have* done some nice bonus activities here and there. I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle", about her family's decision to live on a farm and eat only locally grown food for a whole year. It's a wonderful book - funny, enthralling, poetic, inspiring, poignant all - and one that's been on my reading list since Seyeon and I went down to Austin, Texas about a year and a half ago and I saw it on the bookshelf of the delightful folks from Couchsurfing.com with whom we stayed. That week in Austin was one of blissful vacation in the midst of the only time in my life that I've been even busier and more stressed out than I am now, in the middle of my final semester at Oberlin and 5K-race organization effort. The book went on my "Things I Want to Do/Read When I Have a Life Again" List.

So, having finally read it, I felt (as I'm sure most of its readers have/do/will) inspired to get more in touch with the world of local agriculture. It's kind of scary how out of touch the modern, industrial grocery store has made us with the very thing that sustains us in this world, let alone how much less flavorful and nutrient-rich our typical grocery store fare is today than it was years ago. And all the waste that's involved with shipping food halfway around the world just so we can eat strawberries in January...anyway. A great read that definitely reinforced my desire not only to build my food knowledge but also to work on honing my cooking skills. My first step was to sign up for a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share: a box every other week of fresh, organic produce from a local farm.


My first box!
I did this for awhile with my housemates the summer I lived in Oberlin, but that was back when I was still intimidated by unfamiliar vegetables - so I feel like the CSA was of little use to me back then. But now I'm all about experimenting and learning in the kitchen, so the prospect of a box of new ingredients to explore - or just familiar ones that I don't go out of my way to buy at the grocery store. Like, in the case of this week...zucchini! Hence the tasty loaf at the top of this entry.


Bonus: Chloe gets a boat to play in after I've unloaded all the produce into my fridge.
Other triumphs in the past week:
- Alan bought his own truck, and thus will be able to be home much more often soon!
- I hosted a girls' night/dinner party a couple evenings ago...delightful.
- I bought plane tickets to Cleveland this spring. So excited to see old friends!
- Also finished reading Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Excellent read.
- I played Wii for the first time at Easter at Gale's house (where I also spent Thanksgiving...hooray for Gale's family's sponsorship of orphan holidays) and failed at pretty much everything except WiiFit Hula Hooping...in which I was a "Calorie Incinerator." Awesome.
- I got my first pieces of non-footwear REI gear: my very own packable, 2-person tent and a cozy sleeping bag.


And Chloe approves.

It's a small world.

Anyone who followed my study-abroad+travel blog may recall the fact that I ran into other Obies on three separate occasions during my weeks that I backpacked through Europe - at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, at a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant in Prague, and on my late-January flight back to the states out of Paris (both of us were in the middle leg of our flight connections home; she, from Madagascar on to Colorado, me from Amsterdam on to Kansas.)

Well, it's happening again. As I was walking down a random street in Seattle a few days ago, I passed a quaint little coffeehouse with an outdoor terrace, and there, working on his laptop, was an intramural soccer buddy of mine from Oberlin. Neither of us are originally from Seattle, so running into each other here was rather miraculous. I was in no rush, so I stopped there to have a muffin with him and catch up our respective post-Oberlin lives. Awesome.

He mentioned to me that there was going to be an Oberlin alumni picnic here this weekend. Though he couldn't make it himself, I navigated my way over to the beautiful Lincoln Park of West Seattle on Saturday. I couldn't find the group right away, so I wandered awhile before stumbling across them - and in doing so, determined the park to be my new favorite running/hiking/swimming spot so far.

The water, lined with mountains (difficult to see in this picture, but they're there...), is of course stunning:


And the woods, too:


And everything after that as well:


The picnic itself was good fun. Great weather, yummy food, lots of new people to meet from all generations of graduating classes, ranging from 1951 to recently admitted students who will start Oberlin in the fall. Also ran into at least one old, familiar friend from a brief overlap in Harkness (food co-op) several years ago. Very nice way to spend an afternoon.

Then, yesterday, I drove down to Olympia to vist two of my favorite friends from high school - Kyle and Allison. Kyle is working on an organic farm out here this summer, and Allison's in town with family to visit Kyle. The drive to Olympia alone is worthy of mention: no photos, but my first real look at Mount Rainier was amazing - a huge rainbow crested the top of it for several minutes of my drive, and I'm still in awe of how surrounded the highways are with towering evergreens, mountain ranges, views of the bay...

The three of us drove out to a...house? farm? ranch?...in the middle of nowhere, out in the genuine sticks. A sizeable plot of land, and upon arrival, we were immediately recruited to help bale hay.


A good group of the PSA-ers, as they're known, (Practice of Sustainable Agriculture) was gathering to have a big food-and-feel-good fest, involving all of the following: bread-baking lessons, informal composting demonstrations, vegetable seed planting, chicken coop building, guacamole, chili, coleslaw, and pasta making, cooking fresh jams on the stove from blueberries and blackberries the PSA-ers had picked in wild bogs earlier that day, football in the living room with a giant squash, self-brewed beer and homemade fermented wine imbibing, guitar and bongo drum circles on the back porch, and stargazing.

Aaand...turns out two of the PSA-ers are Obies as well! That was a fun coincidence. (Also, didn't mention it in the blog, but one of Shari's other ranger-intern friends at Glacier was an Obie, too! They're everywhere.) The skies in Washington are huge, like the Midwest, except here they're framed with mountains and trees instead of flat horizon.


The sunset took over the entire sky canvas above us, coloring all the clouds, lacing the tops of the evergreens like gossamer. Once it got dark, thousands of stars were visible, and save the happy din of acoustic guitar and conversation, stillness reigned. It was beautiful!


It was inspiring to be around folks doing the communal-living thing, happy and thriving off the land...knowledgeable about plants and the earth and living sustainably. The local foods movement is exciting to me, and low-key food-making is something I hope to develop more in the future. My first loaf of bread ever sure smelled delicious on my drive back to Seattle this morning!


Days in Seattle with no rain yet: 11

Take that, Northwest-poo-pooers.