Last year, after over a decade in Brooklyn, I moved to California to be part of the legendary apprenticeship program at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. I was one of 39 apprentices, who ranged in age from 22 to 68. Each year a similar group arrives from all over the world for a full-time, six-month intensive in the hows and whys of organic farming and its place in the larger food system. Collectively, we ran the 100-member CSA and a biweekly market stand on a farm overlooking the ocean.

When I arrived, I brought with me four Meyer lemons, the thing I’d been most proud to have grown. I’d literally spent years coaxing the golden perfumed fruits from a potted tree in my Park Slope apartment. I felt like some kind of Renaissance-era ambassador, with an earnest desire to bring the wonders of my tabletop orangerie to a foreign land. Upon arrival, I was instantly humbled by an entire row of Meyer lemon trees, branches bending under the weight of their own fruit, lining the path to my new tent cabin home.

When I first got here, I felt beset by this kind of largesse. I was unprepared for the transition from a “junior one-bedroom apartment” (a uniquely New York appellation) into living more or less outdoors with a community of 50 other people.

I was overwhelmed by orchards of things that I had never seen attached to a plant before—avocados, kiwis, persimmons. I’d get caught squatting in the field like an animal, furtively stuffing arugula or peas into my mouth, as if they were somehow going to run off before dinner. I canned with a fury that could only be described as apocalyptic (I am, and almost everyone I know is, still working through that batch of green tomato chutney). In Brooklyn, the ringtone on my mobile phone had been a recording of a redwing blackbird, a sweet reminder of a meadow near my childhood home. Now that I had moved next door to a six-acre field, with an enormous flock of resident redwings, I had the harried, distinctly anti-pastoral feeling that my phone was constantly ringing.

We learned a lot from our managers and each other in the farm and garden. We learned a lot from each other in the kitchen, too. Once a month we’d wake at 5:00 in the morning to work in the kitchen, rather than the field. We prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hungry tribe of a hundred strong arms and dirty hands—all on a budget of about $1 per meal per person. There were a lot of lentils. There was a lot of quinoa. There was also a walk-in refrigerator shoulder-deep in produce that practically gleamed, picked from our fields and served hours, even minutes, later.

I fell in love with this farm, as many do, and I stayed on an extra year to teach here.

This season, we are blessed with three apprentices transitioning out of work as professional chefs. I’m writing this in August, a time of typical California Central Coast magic, when we have both summer and fall crops coming on. We fry up tiny padrón peppers and slice into Summer Crest peaches, then pile up early apples and pears for roasting together if the fog rolls in early and the night feels chilly. These are good days in the kitchen.

I work hard and a lot. I wake up every morning to a view of the ocean through an orchard. I still live and work with 50 people. Sometimes I miss sitting alone quietly in my apartment, eating alone in a restaurant without waitstaff shooting me uncalled-for consoling looks, not having to smile automatically at anyone with whom I make eye contact, and having secrets. Mostly, that life seems savage and a little distant. A steady stream of New Yorkers flows through this program, bringing with them just the right amounts of cynicism and Gorilla Coffee.

This winter I’m returning east, and I know that once I get there I’ll be reconciled with New York in time. I predict a lot of soup. For the moment, I’m helping to coordinate harvest for our market stand and trying to keep up with the beans. A regular who goes by the name of “Vegan Star” has been buying over $100 of our blueberries weekly, because, he tells me, our fruit is “high vibration.” I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I think he might be right.

The post A Year—or Two—Farming in Santa Cruz appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Crossing the Danube Canal from Vienna’s glittering historic center to the city’s less glamorous Second District, I knew I was entering our borough’s “sister city”—my Brooklyn bones could feel the average monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment drop by about 35 percent.

Leopoldstadt, as the district is known, was officially linked to Brooklyn in 2007, when Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and Vienna’s Deputy Mayor Renate Brauer signed a joint proclamation announcing a “district partnership” intended to strengthen relations between the communities. Beyond the multiethnic and historically Jewish heritage that inspired the part- nership, there are other similarities, if you look. Take the Prater, Vienna’s sprawling amusement park (and home to that giant Ferris wheel featured in The Third Man)—it could be an immaculately groomed version of Coney Island, with the long, skinny debreziners at the wurst stands doing an awfully good impression of Nathan’s dogs.

But many modern Brooklynites will feel more at home at the lively Karmelitermarkt, a farmers market at the center of life in Leopoldstadt, on a public square called Karmeliterplatz. Ever since Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner provided the philosophical underpinnings for what would become the organic farming movement in the early 20th century, the country has become one of the world’s leaders in the field; it was one of the first countries to set official organic guidelines, and its government continues to subsidize ecological farming practices. as a result, close to 20 percent of its farms are organic, more than in any other European country (except tiny Liechtenstein).

If you want to see this policy in action, Karmeliterplatz is the best farmers market in the city, a place where you can get a good head of organic spitzkohl, a kind of pointy cabbage, grown and sold by a farmer who can tell you what to do with it. There’s always fresh produce for sale at makeshift farm stands on the plaza, but on Saturday, the market fills out with artisan producers selling wood- oven bread, raw-milk cheeses and speck made from heritage-breed pigs that look like woolly sheep.

Indeed the entire country—which has a population about the size of New York City’s—is something of a real-food wonderland, complete with civic composting programs (jealous much?), perfect pastries in every corner café (they make Sachertorte look easy), and fine locavore vino (Vienna is the only capital in the world with significant wine production within city limits) made by rock-star vintners wearing plastic glasses as big as any you’ll see on the L train. Don’t cross the canal before hitting the cutting-edge restaurants—friendly, chic little spots that reinterpret classic Viennese dishes with a light, contemporary touch—like Shopik and Lohr, whose stately wainscoting is offset by the outsize scribblings of artist Otto Zitko all over its ceiling; or the all-organic Schöne Perle, a neo-beisl (or new-style neighborhood joint) that kept the name (“Beautiful Pearl”) of the Chinese restaurant that used to occupy the space. Just remember to bring your euros—Schöne Perle is cash-only. This is Brooklyn’s sister, after all.

Photo credit:  Rainer Fehringer.

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Everything is illuminated. To inspire other year-round farmers, hydroponic master Lee Mandell uses the majority of his Bushwick apartment as a massive grow room.

Apartment 1D at 1609 Dekalb Avenue stands at the intersection of science fiction and locavore utopia. It might be 20 degrees outside, but here in Lee Mandell’s 1,000-square-foot Bushwick loft hang row after row of tender lettuce, cucumbers, bok choy and basil, all rooted not in soil but in plastic trays hooked up to pumps of dissolved nutrients like some leafy sequel to The Matrix. True, it’s nowhere as lovely as a row of tomatoes reaching toward the summer’s rays, but urbanites have to eat, even in February—and thanks to hydroponic farmers like Lee, they can.

Mandell calls his business—and his home—Boswyck Farms, and it’s actually his second career in tech. The 49-year-old with a curly mop of hair and slightly hippie sensibility was a computer programmer until just three years ago. That’s when an urban farm project at Columbia University got him pumped about hydroponic projects feeding neighborhoods in need. He left the keyboard for kohlrabi.

“Cities grow up,” says Mandell, “and so should our gardens.”

He and his staff of four now help fund, build and maintain hydroponic farms for organizations like the Child Development Support Corporation in Clinton Hill. That project—three double-stacked six-foot wooden shelves in the back of the nonprofit’s office—was funded in part with a U.N. seed grant and now supplies fresh vegetables to their weekly food pantry, even when local markets are a rainbow of roots. And at a nearby Bushwick public high school called the Academy of Urban Planning, Mandell has helped install a modern garden of Babylon: vertical planters that climb 16 feet tall. It’s part of an urban farmette and after-school project for 10th graders managed with help from a local nonprofit called EcoStation.

Most of the year you can also see Mandell’s techniques on the roof of 207 Starr Street, the super-artsy performance space called Bushwick Starr—where a demo project welcomes avant-garde theater patrons with sorrel when they go out for smoke breaks.

Better still is one of the two-hour workshops Mandell runs out of his apartment, which feels like the inside of an aquarium, thanks to the fluorescent grow lights and burbling water pumps. You’ll learn how to make your own kit with a small bucket, clay pellets and plastic tubing—no summer sun required.

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Peter Osofsky had been delivering Ronnybrook milk to my restaurant, Egg, every Saturday morning for almost four years before I managed to arrange a trip to visit the farm. What drew me there at last wasn’t milk but manure: We’d just begun farming our own land up in Greene County at the base of the Catskills, and we needed manure to build up our soil.

I’d mentioned it several times to Peter, and he’d always encouraged me to come and take as much as I wanted. But I had trouble accepting this offer. I knew how precious good compost and manure were. I couldn’t believe that Peter’s offer was quite genuine. “We have tons of it. Literally,” he’d tell me, as I made out the check for the week’s milk, butter and cream. “Just call me and come get it. Anytime.” “That’d be great,” I’d say, “maybe I will”—and I’d head back to the kitchen, nursing a fantasy of creating a loop: their manure fertilizing our vegetables, which we’d later cook in their butter.

It was the middle of our second summer on the farm when I finally decided I’d take Peter up on his offer. He gave me his dad’s phone number, and after some nervous pacing, I called. Rick Osofsky is the younger son of the dairy’s founders, brother to the eponymous Ronny, and I’d been assured he’d be happy to hear from me. But I called with the trepidation of someone approaching a celebrity, afraid to impose, anxious to make a good impression. When he answered, he was quick and terse, a man with a lot to do. Yes, I could come get manure, and, yes, today would be a fine day. But he warned me his time was tight, so I’d need to be prompt. He had a dinner to get to, and he’d need time to dress. I assured him I’d be quick, threw a shovel in the back of my truck and headed out, leaving the ragtag foothills of the Catskills behind as I crossed the Hudson at the Rip Van Winkle and wound down toward Ancramdale.

I had a lot of ideas about what the farm would look like. I’d driven through the hills of southern Columbia County before, in the neighborhood of Ronnybrook: This was the land of the gentleman farmer, the Manhattan refugee who’d cashed in his young fortune for an Eyebrow Colonial and 200 acres to raise a dozen heritage-breed sheep. It’s breathtaking country, full of beautiful houses, foggy valleys, thoroughbreds grazing on rolling pasture. It’s just the sort of arcadian place you’d expect to find milk in thick glass quart bottles, where you get the impression not quite that time stood still, but that the antiques market is strong.

I pictured Rick Osofsky as a kind of Hudson Valley Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, outfitted by Orvis and presiding over a farm that looked like a spread from the French Laundry cookbook. I imagined he’d greet me on his bluestone terrace, tie half-knotted, and wave me in the direction of his pile of shit. I’d head off and shovel while he showered and called for his Land Rover. Rationally, I knew better than to trust my fantasy. But those glass bottles had stoked it pretty vigorously since I’d first seen them, almost 10 years earlier, on the counter of the Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side. I went in to look at doughnuts, but it was the milk that caught my eye. That bottle sitting there, a drip of cream clinging to the glass, inspired what felt like a fever, and though I normally drank my coffee black, in this case I poured milk in generously and watched, thrilled, as threads of unhomogenized cream floated to the top of my cup. I’d had milk like that only once before, at my uncle’s small farm outside Wilmington, North Carolina. He loved to hold up the bottle from the morning’s milking to show off the thick layer of cream that was clotting the neck. Then he’d stick his finger into it and eat a teaspoon of cream and shake his head with delight.

Growing up, most of the milk I’d drunk had come in waxy cartons and smelled of the school cafeteria. Judging from the number of people who’ve run up to us at Egg to show us that the milk in their coffee was bad—“Look! It’s curdled!”—it’s a rare New Yorker who grew up with unhomogenized milk. So if the bottles evoke nostalgia, it’s for a past few of us have ever actually experienced. The nostalgia, in any case, is only window dressing; the milk needs no help making its case once it’s passed your lips.

We get the milk at the restaurant in huge plastic bags, the sort that live inside giant metal dispensers next to silos of frosted flakes at a college dining hall. There’s nothing charming about them, especially when you’re wrangling one in the middle of a brunch rush, trying to direct a stream of milk from its bag in a crate on the shelf into a pitcher in your hand. The bag flops around dangerously; the nozzle clogs with cream and tempts you to give the bag an angry squeeze, which inevitably results in milk spraying everywhere like a wild hose. But there isn’t a person at Egg who would trade it out for something easier. Like most adults, our cooks come in jaded about milk: It’s for kids, coffee and bachelor party cocktails. But drinking Ronnybrook’s milk—taking the last swig out of the pitcher before it goes into the dish pit—changes everyone. It’s like everything else that we’ve gotten used to eating in an industrially processed form: You try it fresh, less fussed with, and you realize how much you’ve been missing. It’s sweet and rich and clean. You can taste pasture. It changes as the seasons change. It makes you start to care again about something you hadn’t realized you’d written off.

The Osofskys started doing their own bottling at a time when milk—and New York’s dairy industry—was getting written off by everyone, including dairy farmers themselves. At the beginning of the 1980s, there were 30 dairy farms within 15 miles of Ronnybrook. But milk prices dropped so low that the government started paying farmers to euthanize their cows. One after another of the Osofskys’ neighbors shut up shop, killing their cows and selling their land, following what looked like the only sane route available. Rick and Ronny wouldn’t do it. They loved their cows and they believed in their milk, and they were determined to find a way to save them. Building their own bottling plant was an unlikely gamble against doom. It meant new equipment and additional labor, and it meant giving up the stability of selling to a cooperative, where their milk would get mixed with milk from dozens of other farms, then homogenized and pasteurized. It would be many days before the milk reached a customer’s cup. But by bottling their own, they’d gain some control over what happened to it. They pasteurized their milk more gently, which meant it tasted fresher and sweeter than commodity milk. It also meant that they could get their milk to customers as quickly as 24 hours after milking.

They began in 1986 and, encouraged by the reception, soon expanded to Greenmarkets in the city. There they caught the attention of the New York Times’s Florence Fabricant, whose praise solidified their standing among city food lovers. Dairy is still a volatile and beleaguered business in New York: Fewer and fewer farmers are making a living milking cows. Of the 30 dairies that Ronnybrook counted as neighbors in 1980, not one is left.

Ancramdale itself was the first surprise on my trip to Ronnybrook. I think I half-expected a milk-themed village, a Main Street lined with ice cream shops and cow sculptures. I certainly expected a sign pointing the way to what I thought of as the town’s claim to fame. I hadn’t paid much attention to Rick’s directions because I assumed once I got to Ancramdale it would be so obvious, but now that I was here, I realized I was lost: I saw a small café, closed for the afternoon; a sign offering rabbits for sale; a post office, also closed. No indication anywhere that this town was home to the region’s best milk. Nor could I find a cell signal to call for help, and though I’d left myself time to allow for getting lost, I was cutting it close. As I made one blind turn after another I began to imagine a baronial Osofsky checking his watch and making up his mind to dismiss me on sight.

I finally found a road whose name rang a bell and drove what seemed like miles uphill before I saw some barns, some calves’ hutches and a Ronnybrook delivery truck parked by the side of the road. I parked in a hurry under a large tree just downhill from an array of solar panels. To one side was a small ranch-style house that might have been staff housing. On the other side stood an assemblage of large blue sheds. A sign over one door indicated the farm store. I tried to look composed and efficient as I headed through it. Someone there could surely point me in Rick’s direction. I stepped into a workroom, and as my eyes were adjusting I heard someone say “You must be George.” I turned, and there he was: a man, dressed as if for milking, a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, whose every movement gave him away as Peter’s father. I shook his hand and unreeled a deferential greeting. “You can just point me in the direction of the manure and leave me to it,” I said. “I know you’ve got places to go.” “Well,” he nodded. “Why don’t I show you the dairy first?”

Suddenly it felt like it would be ruder to rush than to dally. He took me through the bottling plant, which had grown from a 10- by 10-foot room in the ’80s to a full-fledged operation. I saw where the bottles came in to be washed, the machines that filled and capped them. He walked me into a freezer filled with ice cream, and showed me pallets of yogurt. We stood on the loading dock where our orders were stacked onto the truck every Friday night. We were taking our time, ambling from one room to the next, stopping to speak to employees, pausing to admire machinery that had served them for decades. And when we were done with the dairy, we walked over to the milking barn. I never even saw him glance at his watch. I’d seen milking operations before—a friend worked at the University of Georgia’s dairy, where the machinery seemed to be the main event and cows an afterthought. There it was all gleaming stainless cylinders and rubber tubing; vats of sanitizing chemicals and thick hoses; stanchions to hold cows in place as they were hooked up like heart-attack victims on a defibrillator assembly line. This barn looked like an animal sanctuary by comparison. It was clean and tidy, to be sure, but dominated by wood and straw rather than rubber and metal. The stalls were the size of a Manhattan bedroom, thickly layered with dry straw. Over each of the 100 stalls was a cow’s name and the menu for her day’s meal—the mix of supplemental grain and grass she wanted to stay healthy. The cows’ entrance, at the far end of the barn, opened to where pasture rolled out as far as the eye could see: The farm’s 750 acres span two counties and two townships. The milking cows wander in from those pastures twice a day, coming when called, and each cow heads to her stall and waits to be milked. Afterward, they head back out when the weather’s good and spend the day grazing their way through 250 acres of pasture as long as the grass keeps growing. The dry cows and calves are free to roam as they like, going into their own barn when they want shelter and roaming the pasture when they don’t.

In the city, out of context, Ronnybrook can feel like the juggernaut of the artisanal milk business, an almost ubiquitous presence in better food markets and restaurants. They’re in a dozen Greenmarkets, they have a retail store in Chelsea Market, you can even order their stuff through FreshDirect. They make everything from heavy cream to drinkable yogurt to crème fraîche. But all that food begins here, humbly. Most of it comes from 100 cows they know by name, and who are the offspring of generation after generation of cows who’ve lived there. Three generations of Osofskys romp around the farm now, too. Brothers Rick and Ronny still run things. Their kids—Pete, Kate and Daniel—tend the cows, oversee markets and deliveries and manage the office. Rick’s 11-year-old granddaughter has cows of her own, which she shows at the county fair. Pete’s daughter, Maya, tumbles around the farm, too, all of two years old.

It’d been more than an hour since I’d first arrived, and Rick hadn’t once mentioned his dinner date. I was trying to play it cool, but I was getting more and more anxious about making him late. My anxiety was at a peak when he finally brought up the manure. “Let me show you what we’ve got—I’ll just go get the tractor and meet you up there.” He pointed to a barn up the hill from where I’d parked. I drove up and waited for him to come up with his frontend loader. Watching it bounce along the ruts of the drive, I began to suspect that he wasn’t especially eager to get to this dinner—that he might be just as happy to spend the evening here with his cows.

If you haven’t learned to love at least the idea of manure, you haven’t really embraced the food revolution. Manure is where the rubber hits the road, where all of the things we extract from the dirt to feed ourselves begin to get put back in, a reinvestment in our ability to continue eating well—or at all. Rick showed me manure at three or four stages of “cooking,” from fresh stuff (slick and odiferous) to well-composted piles of it that were sweet-smelling and full of earthworms. I opted for a mix, as though I were at a salad bar, and Rick dug in with his tractor. He dumped a load of each into the bed of my truck, which bounced and sagged under the weight. I thought he looked at me a little pityingly then, when he realized my tiny Nissan wasn’t going to hold any more. “I guess we’d better leave it at that,” he said. I thanked him for the tour and for the manure. I wanted to thank him for the milk, the yogurt, the butter that we eat by the spoonful, spread cold against a slice of country ham. But my effusiveness would have been out of place. He deserved my adulation, but he didn’t want or need it. So I kept it short. He shook my hand from his tractor seat and finally—more to my relief than his, it seemed— headed off to put up his tractor and get ready for the evening.

I drove back across the river toward our tiny farm, one nervous eye on my payload. That manure, from cows with names like Amelia and Cassie who were cared for like pets, would help to turn our sparse and rocky topsoil into something that could produce abundant vegetables for years. The carrots and purple beans and kale, which we’d take later that summer to the restaurant and glaze in butter from those same cows, or gratinée with their milk and cream, would complete a nutritional cycle that touched down in three counties: Columbia, Greene and Kings. And at every point in that cycle, someone or something was eating as well as she or it could dream: The cows feasted on clover; the carrots on composted manure; and we on those carrots, sautéed in butter as sweet as summer.

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Flatbush Fig Farm is the perfect triple-bottom-line business, with one small catch: This year they plan to spend roughly half their profits on a Death Star. But never fear—their Star Wars aspirations are Lego in nature, and the other half of their earnings will be donated to the Flatbush Community Garden.

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A Colonial farmhouse stands in East Flatbush, and it smells like jerk chicken.

Tucked between the aromatic Footprints Caribbean Café and the American Best Car Wash is an out-of-place verdant hollow with a small wooden structure, a thriving garden and a very long legacy. This isn’t some installation art or hipster ode to urban food justice. It’s a bona fide historic farmhouse that was built in 1652, making it the oldest building in New York State.

Formally known as the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House, it was built when Dutch and German tenant farmers such as Claesen were establishing the town of Nieuw Amersfoort, later known as the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. For nearly 250 years the Wyckoff family farmed their immigrant ancestor’s 300 acres here, harvesting grains to take to Manhattan markets by ferry. They were not alone: right up through the 19th century, Brooklyn was fertile farm country—and not of the rooftop kind.

The Brooklyn Bridge and Long Island Rail Road spurred the area’s original gentrification, but Flatlands took longer to be urbanized, as Joshua Van Kirk, the director of the Wyckoff House Museum explains: Brooklyn’s south shore didn’t get a street grid until the 1920s, when it became a Levittown-like suburb. These homes, occupied by waves of immigrants from Greece, Italy, Eastern Europe and, most recently, the West Indies, today share their streets with factories, bus depots and the old LIRR tracks. Forget ferries: the neighborhood is now served by the B8 bus (take the B, Q, 2 or 5 trains to connect). There’s little left that looks like New Amsterdam, and even less that looks like agriculture: the Ba-Tampte Pickle plant at the nearby Brooklyn Terminal Market doesn’t count.

But the Wyckoff House still stands. The land might have become an auto parts dealership but because Wyckoff descendants donated it to the city for use as a historic house museum and city park, it remains home to shade trees, garden beds, a sunflower maze and a well-loved fire pit in the farmhouse’s spacious front yard. Under the house’s flared eaves you’ll find a memorial herb garden instead of a sidewalk; if you’re lucky, you’ll also find Sylvia, the farmhouse’s resident cat, sunning herself on the path of crushed clamshells. Are we even still in Brooklyn?

A resounding “Yes,” says Jason Gaspar, Wyckoff’s full-time gardener and creator of the museum’s many education programs for children and families, including the Breukelen Farmers Summer Camp, and the annual Breukelen County Fair, a fall celebration of crafts, music and hand-pressed cider. “Brooklyn is an ecosystem,” Gaspar insists, “at the same time that it is a dense urban space,” and the Wyckoff Farmhouse is in a unique situation to showcase that ecosystem. To this end, he has planted several gardens that illustrate the borough’s Native American and Colonial past, including a “weed garden,” featuring plants widely reviled by gardeners: chickweed, mullein, narrow and broadleaf plantain (also called White Man’s Foot), wild onions and burdock.

“People put poison on non-native plants now,” Gaspar says, “but some of these ‘weeds’ were used to heal wounds. It’s our job to recontextualize them and share their stories.”

A demonstration garden features many heirloom vegetables (and one actual heirloom, a hearty gooseberry bush of unknown age). The only fertilizer is compost, and for pest repellent, Gaspar relies on cayenne pepper (squirrels hate it), homegrown basil (which he shares with the Footprints Café) and the beneficial insects that return to the corner of Clarendon and Ralph every spring. “Ladybugs know they have a home here,” he says with evident pleasure, pointing out that what New Yorkers fetishize as organic farming was once just plain farming.

Children who attend the Breukelen Farmers Summer Camp grow tomatoes, sunflowers and corn, including one ancient variety, Lenape Blue Flour, which likely predates even Pieter Claesen himself. Young gardeners are fascinated by the heirloom yellow cucumbers, while a nearby bodega surprises its customers with farmhouse-grown lettuces and tomatoes on their sandwiches each summer. The neighborhood block association also has a garden plot here, as does Sustainable Flatbush, which is adding a hydroponic system to its beds this summer with the help of Boswyck Farm.

One of this summer’s projects is a “dye garden,” featuring plants used to color cloth, such as Coreopsis tinctoria (mahogany red), indigo, dyer’s woad (blue), Hopi Black Dye sunflower (purple) and the evocatively named Our Lady’s Bedstraw (yellow and red). The garden brings ancient practices to life for 21st-century visitors, but it also serves as a reminder of the neighborhood’s more recent—and more toxic—past, when the Beckers Aniline and Chemical Works plant was across the street, the sole manufacturer of the synthetic Chrome B Blue dye for American sailors’ uniforms during World War I.

The plant’s runoff helped kill the oyster population in Jamaica Bay—bivalves whose ancestors the Wyckoff family once feasted on. Beckers Aniline has long since shuttered, its headquarters now home to a branch of National Grid, but the little farmhouse it once dwarfed remains, its renewed vibrance a testament to sustainability of a different kind.

Photo credit: Emily Dryden

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From Edible Long Island:

The image of tossing and watering seeds in perfectly plump green field, wearing a trendy straw hat and carrying a basket brimming with colorful fruits is enough to turn almost anyone into a farmer. The reality is hair green with pollen, dirty finger nails and an achy lower back at the modest age of 23. Manicures are a memory long forgotten. As Marilee Foster can attest, slender sundresses are but a fantasy when you’re knee-deep in manure on a 90-degree day.

When you go into farming, you leave many luxuries behind. For example, standing upright for the majority of the day. Or perhaps even sitting. Nevertheless, farmers everywhere push through the heat reminding themselves of the satisfaction of the juice of a freshly harvested watermelon dripping from the wedge onto their sun-kissed cheeks. That is, until their moment is ruined by the realization that weeds are taking over the kale patch.

Weeding is one of the wonderful tasks of farming that most farmers are happy to hand over to the nearest willing volunteer. Organic farming, especially, can mean tugging and plucking for hours on end. Most weeds are composted. Many are cursed. Some are even stomped on. However, there are few that are cherished such as vlita.

Greek for amaranth, vlita a nutritious and native weed treasured by Greeks like the Bolkas family of Thera Farms in Ronkonkoma. The bushy 3- to 10-foot plant is a welcome annoyance on their two-acre farm. After hours of weeding and a broken back, you better think twice about throwing away this super weed. Especially if Mrs. Bolkas catches you.

“The Greek people go crazy over this stuff!” she says, sorting through a wilted pile of the red-stemmed greens. “They drive very far to find farms that grow it!” While the vegetable rows may look immaculate, the job of weeding on Thera Farms doesn’t finish until she gets her amaranth.

Amaranth’s highly sought after seeds are high in protein, amino acids, fiber, iron, potassium and vitamins, making it a nutritious substitute for grains. Its edible stem and leaves have healthy heart and kidney benefits and a sweet flavor similar to spinach when cooked. It is easy to harvest and can be identified by its notched green leaves and red color at the bottom of the stem. Simply pull and wash, but don’t trim too much as the red part is tastiest.

Be cautious of the spines on the leaves of some species, but do not fear, for amaranth is not poisonous. It thrives in nitrogen-rich soils, which may leave trace amounts of nitrates in the leaves, so it must be cooked. Mrs. Bolkas recommends boiling, straining and letting it cool and then tossing it with olive oil, raw garlic, white vinegar and salt and pepper for a tasty summer salad.
While you’re probably still not eager to go out and weed for the next day and a half, know that if you do you might stumble upon this famous wild edible. If you can’t find it in your own yard, you can get some from Thera Farms, either at the farmers market or right from the farm. Put on your sunscreen and go get some dirt under your fingernails. There are weeds to be eaten.

The post FROM EDIBLE LONG ISLAND: Eat Like a Greek appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

If you frequent the Grand Army Plaza, Union Square or UN markets, then you may have seen his sprawling stand. If you’ve dined at Franny’s, ABC Kitchen, ABC Cocina, or any of Peter Hoffman’s Back Forty spots, then you may have eaten the products of his labor. On a larger scale, if you care about the local food movement in Brooklyn (or, heck, the whole of New York), then you should thank farmer Bill Maxwell, who has been selling at the Greenmarkets for three decades.

As our own Rachel Wharton reported earlier this week in the New York Times, Bill will retire next month. We’re long time fans of his work and even had the great honor of publishing one of his stories back in 2010.

As he prepares for retirement, we want to express our gratitude for his important and influential work promoting local food systems. Here’s to hoping for more trailblazers like you, Bill!

The post Here’s to You, Bill Maxwell — Greenmarket Veteran to Retire appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Welcome to the polar vortex, folks. We’ve got some single-digit temperatures out there this morning that will somehow drastically swing into the 50s by the weekend if all goes as predicted. Erratic, much?

Many of us have the luxury of sitting at our desks right now, but our local farmers are out there harvesting their season’s best. Curious about what you can expect from nearby farms this week? Here’s what Fishkill Farms based in East Fishkill, NY, has to offer:

Golden Delicious apples (an ingredient in this recipe for roasted parsnip and sweet potato soup with fresh apple salsa from the Edible Brooklyn Cookbook):

Good Eggs  

Red Kabocha squash:

Good Eggs

Pasture-raised eggs (this recipe for April Bloomfield’s deviled eggs is good all year long):

Good Eggs

Cider (our sister pub Edible Manhattan just released helpful suggestions for cider and cheese pairings):

Good Eggs

Kennebec White potatoes:

Good Eggs

Farmer’s Pick Box:

Good Eggs

This post was written in collaboration with Brooklyn-based Good Eggs. You can read more about Fishkill Farms and learn about other seasonal ingredients on their website.

We’re sharing our seasonal stories, too. Check out our “What’s in Season?” section of our sidebar (to the right) for some of the best of our timely content.

The post What’s in Season: January 7, 2014 appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Visiting students investigate a worm bin with City Growers. (Photo courtesy of Cara Chard)

In 2010, the Brooklyn Grange arrived in New York, promising city-grown produce from the previously unharnessed rooftop of the Standard Motor Products building in Long Island City; and then, in 2012, from the roof of Building no. 3 in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, too. And as soon as there were farms, there were hungry and curious city folk clambering to get a look at and a taste of New York City’s first commercial, for-profit rooftop farms. An overwhelming amount of the interest came from community groups and school groups that wanted to show city kids what a farm — especially a farm as urban-minded as the kids themselves — is like.

“We were bringing groups up for tours, but soon realized that we couldn’t meet the demand,” said Anastasia Cole Plakias, the Grange’s vice president and one of its three co-founders. “We realized it wasn’t our wheelhouse — none of us are trained educators.”

Thanks to Grange co-founder Gwen Schantz, now the farm’s COO, who has a background in nonprofit work and development, the Grange secured a grant through the Greening Western Queens Fund. “Enter Cara Chard,” said Cole Plakias, “and here we are four years later, and City Growers has hosted over 10,000 New York City youths on the farm.”

City Growers is the name of the Grange’s nonprofit cohort, its educational program that turns both farms into a “learning laboratory,” said Cara Chard, who is at the organization’s helm. Chard was a school teacher in New York City before delving into urban agriculture, “and [food education] was definitely not happening when I was there [in the schools]… I’m just excited that even teachers are taking steps to include agriculture and urban farms in the classroom. I think it means good things for the food movement, and it’ll help these kids have a better sense of not only environmental education but food education.”

With its two full-time employees leading the charge, City Growers tackles the project of showing New York City students of all ages what farming is, how it works and why it should matter to them. “We give students the opportunity to have experiential, hands-on learning in the garden to reinforce what they’re learning in school — biology, ecology, food systems, nutrition education — and get to encourage them to explore the intersection between ecology and health. What’s good for our environment is also good for our bodies,” said Chard. “We’re trying to get kids to come to their own conclusions, and giving them the opportunity to engage on the farm.”

Thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall, City Growers has grown from two to five programs, each geared toward introducing New York City children to urban agriculture and the relationship between farm and fork: Farm Explorer, a basic introduction to farming; Insect Investigator, which educates participants on farm bugs both beneficial and pesky; Honeybee Education, which allows students to peer inside one of the farm’s active beehives; Rainbow on Your Plate, a farm-to-table education program; and Growing Urban Farmers, a sort of urban farming boot camp.

Chard, a self-proclaimed “bee nerd” and experienced beekeeper, is most excited about Honeybee Education. “We’ll have an observation hive,” she explained of the class. “How that works is that there’s essentially a glass structure that is built to hold multiple frames of live bees. You go into regular hives and pull out frames of bees and place them in the observation hive… In the observation hive, you can watch baby bees being born, which is really cool. It’s cool to share with these little kids.”

Both she and Cole Plakias emphasized the importance of exposing the visiting children to the bees, as well as to other insects on the farm. Awareness, and combatting a fear of bees and other insects, is crucial not only to supporting bees and other communities of beneficial insects, but also to illustrating a necessary and often unseen part of the food production process.

Cole Plakias, who grew up in New York City, remembers being terrified of bees as a kid. “I was really quite scared of bees, thought worms were disgusting and soil was dirty. We can challenge these preconceived notions that New York City kids hold,” she said. “The only insect interactions they have are with bothersome insects in their apartments, like cockroaches. So seeing them interact with the insect world in a positive way is really great — just being in nature in general.”

Cole Plakias also recalled a visiting student in pre-City Growers days who, when asked by Cole Plakias if he was studying the environment in school, said yes before telling a startled Cole Plakias, “That has nothing to do with us. That’s out there in the country with trees and stuff.”

“Their whole lives are sort of in boxes,” said Cole Plakias, “the apartment, the elevator, and lobby, the subway. Over half the youth in the world might have this life where they’re devoid of experience in the natural world. But it’s really important that we stress this experience with the environment. If we can get kids thinking about how urban and natural environments interact and how the effects of that relationship present themselves, maybe we can get them to effect the necessary changes.”

City Growers encourages its visiting students to think outside of those boxes; there’s as much learning as unlearning to be done when the children visit the farms and are challenged to think about the natural world differently. “There are all kinds of little victories,” said Chard, “like realizing that a kid might be a future leader in the food or environmental movement, or there are the victories of getting a kid to put her professionally manicured hands in the soil and realize that it’s life-giving instead of something to avoid.”

And this is what’s at the heart of City Growers’ lessons: “It’s instilling a sense of wonder for nature, for where our food comes from,” said Chard, who feels that this is the most rewarding work she could have dreamed up, and who has seen bug-shy third graders’ delight at worm balls (exactly what it sounds like: a writhing, baseball-sized cluster of earthworms) and surly high schoolers become starry-eyed while working on the farm. “Farm education kind of naturally instills a sense of wonder, but that we’re on the Brooklyn Grange, and there are these absolutely gorgeous rooftop farms with a beautiful skyline — it definitely facilitates that. All kids are naturally curious, and awakening that and celebrating that are our main objectives. We have a lot of problems with our food system, so we want these kids to think of themselves as future problem solvers of these issues.”

Chard and the City Growers team are passionate about being able to provide these programs and experiences for free; a kid’s excitement about agriculture and the environment should not be hampered just because he or she doesn’t have a backyard or a house in the country. Thanks to donations (learn more about sponsoring a class here) they’ve been able to do so, and over 85 percent of the programs’ participants are from Title I public schools, which have particularly high concentrations of low-income or homeless students.

“It’s so rewarding to be able to do this for kids who don’t have as much access to the outdoors,” said Chard. “It’s a way of really giving back, and you can see exactly where your $20 is going: you’re giving kids an opportunity to really dig and to find the worm ball.”

Cole Plakias echoed the sentiment, and is grateful for City Growers’ presence on and relationship with the Brooklyn Grange: “[City Growers] was so close to the heart of what we wanted to do with the farm. We’re not just a production-based organization. We wanted to give back to the community that was so supportive of us when we were starting out.”

The post Brooklyn Grange’s City Growers Program Challenges Kids to Think Outside the Box appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

We first wrote about its farmer Ben Flanner five years ago, when he and Annie Novak were raising (food on) the roof at Eagle Street Farm, blazing the trail straight skyward. They’ve come a long way — as evidenced in this time-lapse video of their first seven months at the Grange.

But as we explored in our current pages, that sky-high project isn’t just growing great food. It’s helping refugees put down roots, too.

Thanks to a partnership with the Refugee and Immigrant Fund, transplanted people with farming backgrounds spend Wednesdays planting seeds and practicing English on a farm that feels familiar, albeit with breathtaking skyline views. And the weekly pot-luck lunch uses many fruits of the farm’s labor but is now also redolent with international flavors, from fish powder to surprisingly sour leaves.

Contributor Kyle Ligman, who reported and co-wrote the story, even cooked with one project participant, whom we call Anna. As written in the story:

Anna is also passionate about sharing her Burkinabé culture through cooking and a recent Wednesday afternoon found her flipping oblong balls of cornmeal with a bamboo spoon to make fufu, a side dish for her leaf soup, kanzaga, named for the vegetable traditionally used in the recipe back home. Now that she lives and farms here, Anna has been adding all sorts of different leafy greens to her soup including bok choy and amaranth.

She says not wasting even a leaf is a sign of respect for the food, which she learned at a young age.

“The food could be older than you,” Anna said they tell children in Burkina Faso. Now she passes on recipes — and the underlying respect — to others. It is a melting pot of culture where innovative ideas can come from surprising places, like leaves that would have gone to waste.

Here are photos of Anna transforming the farm’s overgrown kale and mustard leaves, typically sent to the compost pile, into kanzaga: a slow-cooked dish she learned to love back in her native Burkina Faso.

The dish begins with overgrown kale and mustard leaves…

…which Anna spikes with chili pepper paste…

…slow cooked, the way she learned back in Burkina Faso…

…a taste of home, grown in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Kyle Ligman

The post VIDEO: Learn More About the Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.

Did you know that goat meat is in fact the most popular protein around the world? It’s a lean, nutritious source of meat and has a lower carbon footprint than beef, pork and lamb. But in the US, we rarely eat it. If we’re all having a hard time imagining a cheese plate without goat cheese, we don’t feel like something is missing when there’s no goat meat on the menu.

However, there’s no goat cheese without goat meat. In order to produce milk, a female goat has to have babies. Typically, goats are born as a set of twins — one male, one female. Thus, for every female used for dairy, there’s a male left. Most males in the US get killed at birth because there’s no demand for them and it gets therefore too expensive to raise them.

How can we change this? Our editors have some ideas:

Gabrielle Langholtz
Of all the headlines I’ve written in my decade at Edible, I’m most proud of the one I typed across our op-ed(ible) about the glut of boy goats born on milk dairies: Billy the Kid: Not Wanted Dead or Alive. But when it comes to spreading the goat-meat gospel, I hadn’t expected the staid Economist to beat my wit. Their great little piece observing the recent rise in demand — and the potential for way more — bested my pun. “The Kids are All Right,” they called it. Nice. Plus, being The Economist, they cite stats. Like, “From 1987 to January 2013 the number of meat goats on American farms rose from roughly 415,000 to 2.3m.” I’ll chew on that while tucking into some tender goat chops this weekend. Because, as The Economist so rightly explained, “a young cabrito has a clean, grassy, herbal flavour, sweeter and less greasy than beef.” Such reporting should help convery the neigh-sayers. (Couldn’t help it.)

Eileen M. Duffy
#Goatober is a new one on me, but on the East End, we’ve been writing about goats pretty much since the start of the magazine in 2005. In spring 2006 I visited Karen Catapano, who was one of the first livestock farmers on the North Fork and definitely the first person to raise goats to make cheese. Lucky for me, it was just after the birth of that year’s kids. They were so soft and sweet and Karen loved them. In 2010, I got to meet Lynn Fleming, owner of Lynnhaven goat farm upstate, who was at the old Almond space in western Bridgehampton for a goat dinner sponsored by Slow Food. Chef Jason Weiner made a full goat menu. Fleming was so lovely, and the photo she sent, taken by a worker on the farm, is so expressive of her love for her kids.

Karen Catapano feeding her babies

Lynn Fleming, owner of Lynnhaven goat farm upstate

Eleonore Buschinger
To be honest, I had never eaten goat meat until last week. Tons of delicate goat cheese but no goat meat. I hadn’t actually even realized the fact that there’s no goat cheese without goat meat. In fact, in order to produce milk, a female goat has to have babies. Typically, goats are born as a set of twins – one male, one female. Thus, for every female used for dairy, there’s a male left. This simple but decisive detail was like an epiphany to me: I had to try goat meat. So I went to Trinidad Ali’s Roti Shop in Brooklyn and got a goat roti. The meat was absolutely gorgeous, stewed in a variety of spices with a strong taste of cloves. Next goat adventure: try this roasted goat leg recipe. It’sgoatta be good!

Carrington Morris: The Growing Demand for Goat Meat, The Atlantic
This article points to the beginning of goat meat’s gradual integration into American diets. Described as the “soccer of meat” for its wild popularity in all countries but ours, as with soccer that status has been changing fast. This dream meat is “lower in fat than chicken and higher in protein than beef,” and craggy Northeast terrain is particularly well suited to raising goats. The best goat meat in town I’ve found comes from Consider Bardwell‘s stand at the Union Square Greenmarket, where this time of year, if you’re lucky, you can pick up a goat chop from their limited supply in a cooler beneath their regular cheese stand.

Featured photo credit: Flickr/eviltomthai

The post You Say October, We Say Goatober: Our Editors’ Thoughts on Why You Should Eat More Goat appeared first on Edible Brooklyn.