It’s surprisingly cold now, in late November, although dry and clear. As always, we’d love for some of the snow blanketing other parts of the country (hello, six feet in Buffalo!) to bestow its generosity upon us here, but nothing shows in the forecast as yet. Days are crisp and blue, and nights definitely require extra quilts. The sunroom is still full of cardboard trays of slowly ripening tomatoes and peppers; this unheated room works perfectly for cold storage and allows these vegetables to ripen slowly with sunlight but without so much warmth that they’d rot. Certainly something is sacrificed in terms of flavor when crops aren’t allowed to ripen outside, but we have a reasonably short growing season here so we have to work with what we have – and it’s a lovely treat to enjoy our own fresh tomato salads well into winter.
Those cardboard trays are slowly transforming into rustic, delicate ristras and canning jars of salsa and sauce; seeds are mostly dried and packed away. The winter squash bounty hasn’t been tapped into yet; that will carry us through the coldest months and into fragile spring with warming soups and curries. New planting rows for next year have been plowed and filled with compost. The plants we pulled out have been mowed into bits to break down into compost over winter; the beds have been mulched with spent straw and next year’s garlic has been planted. In all ways, our season is gradually winding down and we’re more than ready to tuck ourselves in for a couple of months of much-needed rest.
We’re still reviewing our season, cataloguing our successes and noting what changes and improvements we plan to make for next year. This year certainly had its challenges, but it definitely offered wins, too! Read on for more about the 2022 growing season.
Here we are, dear friends, and yet again I’m singing songs of love and devotion to beans – specifically our own 2022 harvest! My total and complete adoration of dried beans is no secret. Not only are beans one of the most inexpensive yet nutritious whole foods available, but as nitrogen-fixing legumes they actually improve soil. They grow well in our tricky high-plains desert environment, they don’t require much water and they’re very low-maintenance. There can hardly be a better edible crop to grow! Plus, as the world gradually starts to realize that a meat-centric diet for nine billion people simply won’t work, beans (and other nutritious legumes and pulses) will become ever more important as plant-based proteins. We’d like to get ahead of that curve and start cultivating more edible legumes on our farm, for both our own health and our soils, so this year we planted a test crop.
Mid-October and still no hard freeze here yet…not even a frost. We had such a late start to our growing season this year that I can’t really complain about the extended warmth, but it’s time to wrap things up. The forecast for this coming weekend shows that we might be in for a big downward shift in temperatures, and we are ready. But! Before then, there is much to do, including harvesting everything and collecting all our seeds for future planting.
And to that end, I am teaching a free class on seed saving at our local library on October 22. We’ll talk about how easy yet how important seed saving is, and you’ll learn how you can benefit our local foodshed’s seed sovereignty as well as help the library’s seed bank! The class is free but advance registration is required; more information here, if you’d like to attend. No matter where in the world you are, please consider saving and sharing your seeds!
Hello there. It’s been a minute, no? This growing year has presented a new array of challenges and learning opportunities. We will shortly mark the fall equinox; like most (all?) farmers, we pay close attention to these seasonal transitions and how the gradual changes in light and warmth impact everything we do. Things are winding down here and we can tell that our bodies and minds are ready for the natural rest offered in late fall and winter. Humans may think they’ve evolved ‘beyond seasons,’ but the truth is, we are still agricultural beings at heart, and paying close attention to those shifting rhythms benefits everyone.
Before the much-welcomed slowdown, however, there is still lots of preserving to be done for the (hopefully long) winter ahead! And to that end, I’m teaching a free canning and preserving class this weekend at our local library. More information can be found here. If you’re in the area, please come out and say hello!
We’ll be back again soon with tales of our growing adventures, book recommendations and project highlights. Wishing you all a safe, healthy and pleasant fall.
Hello, friends. Here are a few things we’ve been up to on the farm lately, if you’d like to see.
Look! Asparagus!
We are excited to announce our first official asparagus harvest. ‘Harvest’ is likely a bit of a misnomer, as virtually all stalks were snapped off and consumed fresh in situ, but still an event worthy of note. Asparagus is most commonly planted from crowns, which are often purchased at two or three years old and therefore more expensive; we started asparagus from seed two years ago (with a replant last year) which is markedly less costly. Starting from seed, however, is definitely not the way to go if you’re looking for rapid results. We now have eight healthy crowns and they’ll continue to produce for at least ten years, if not longer. Next year we’re very much looking forward to harvesting enough asparagus to actually use in a salad or pasta!
Spring “branch-breaker” storms do so much damage to precious trees.
If you grew up on the Front Range, you’re probably familiar with the old adage to “plant out on Mother’s Day.” The idea was, of course, that any chance of a hard frost was past, and delicate warm-weather crops, like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplant, would be safe for the summer growing season.
If you’ve lived and gardened in the Denver area over the last twenty years, however, you know the very idea of planting on Mother’s Day is pretty laughable. This year, the holiday occurred as early as it possibly can – on May 8. Between Thursday and Friday last week, the temperatures in some Front Range areas plummeted from the high eighties to the low forties, with heavy, wet snow and overnight lows well below freezing. If you chose to “plant out on Mother’s Day” and your plants weren’t carefully protected or relocated indoors, you’re likely headed back to your friendly local garden center (hi Anne, Dave and team!) to replace your summer vegetables.
Obviously, Denver weather is known to be erratic, and these massive diurnal shifts are one big reason (after overdevelopment, of course) why the Front Range no longer has a commercial fruit industry like we do on the Western Slope. But while Denver was in the grip of a monster late-spring storm, the East Coast was broiling under record high temperatures and excruciating humidity. Locally, our area has seen more than its fair share of severe weather recently, including unseasonal hard freezes that absolutely crushed peach and cherry growers. A certain number of extreme weather events are to be expected, of course, but it is no longer possible to argue that they’re the exception. They’re now the rule.
In less than a decade, Colorado has experienced two “hundred-year weather” events – the devastating 2013 floods and the scorched-earth Marshall Fire this past December. That stunning fire, of course, was precipitated by bone-dry conditions and hurricane-force winds – and followed a few hours later by about ten inches of snow. Too late, obviously, to prevent the loss of a thousand homes; the Marshall Fire quickly enthroned itself as the most expensive “natural disaster” in Colorado’s history. Is it even accurate to refer to these disasters as natural, since they’re entirely our fault?
The point is, it is no longer feasible to expect the weather to act the way it’s always acted. It is no longer possible to change the trajectory that we’re on as a population and a planet; there is absolutely no hope of achieving the 1.5 degree warming limit by 2030 and it’s foolhardy to pretend otherwise. All we can do now is adapt to our rapidly changing climate – stop building in wildland-urban interfaces, create a resilient and regionally-adapted agriculture system and learn how to live with the ‘new normal.’ Hundred-year weather events should be expected every ten years, if not more frequently, and we need to ready ourselves for these, instead of acting shocked and horrified and surprised every time they occur. We cannot continue to behave as we’ve behaved in the past and expect that the weather will accommodate us. Also, we should really, really stop irrigating the desert to raise cattle and lettuce (looking at you, Arizona) and we should outlaw Kentucky bluegrass – actually, lawns in general – in the American West. (We can’t even hide bodies in Lake Mead any longer!) The sooner we accept our harsh new reality and learn to live with it, the better off we’ll all be.
Hello, friends. It is the busiest time of the year on the farm and we have ten thousand different projects on at the moment. Here are a few things we’ve been up to lately, if you’d like to see.
Tomato starts before splitting.
The sunroom is packed with hundreds of starts, mostly warm-weather crops like tomatoes and peppers. I’ve started seventeen different tomato varieties this year, some new and some tried and true classics, plus thirteen different peppers ranging from mild and sweet to incendiary. After last year’s pepper bounty, I’m committed to expanding our production of the larger bell peppers; I believed that our growing season was too short for the full-size peppers but 2021 certainly proved me wrong. As always, the vast majority of the plants we grow are from saved open-pollinated seed so that we’re protected from the vagaries of the seed market. That said, I tried starting ‘Sungold’ tomatoes again this year; they’re a hybrid but if you’ve ever tasted these incredible gems, you know exactly why people go mad for them. I’ve obviously grown thousands of tomato plants and consider myself a pretty experienced grower, but three years in a row now my purchased ‘Sungold’ seed has failed to germinate. I contacted the seed company – a reputable Front Range outfit – about the poor germination and have yet to receive a response. Frustrating situations like this are exactly why we save our own seed, because we cannot rely upon companies to provide our food.
We will ship you a free kitten.
We live in an exceptionally impoverished county; a direct consequence of that is an absurd population of stray dogs and cats, because people do not spay or neuter their animals. In late March we unfortunately discovered that a feral cat had chosen our hay barn as a warm, protected nursery; now we have one adult cat and six kittens. While we’re happy to have some assistance in controlling the mouse population, we definitively do not keep any household pets so fate will run its course with this lot. An apocryphal quote attributed to Gandhi reads, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” In this (see also: CAFOs) and in so many other respects, the U.S. is failing entirely.
So pretty! So aggressive! So invasive!
If 2021 was The Year of the Goathead, 2022 looks to be The Year of the Thistle. We’ve written before about cotton thistle (Onopordum acanthium), which is hugely invasive in our area and produces massive, thorny plants that are dangerous to humans and animals. As we work on spring cleaning and tidying around the farm, Thistle Patrol is a key task. If we can dig out the plants by the roots when they’re small, we can prevent them from becoming these treacherous four-foot monsters and of course from spreading seed to produce even more thistles. We travel around with a small shovel at the ready, prepared to vanquish our spiky foe wherever it might be found.
All the little blue tape pieces mark areas that have to be repaired. Sigh.
We are also at work on The World’s Lengthiest and Most Tedious Tiling Project, involving a complicated and not particularly interesting tale of obtuse angles, poorly manufactured countertops, a rickety garage sale tile cutter and many, many other challenges, surprises and obstructions. When (if?) we ever finish this project, it will hopefully look incredible; the road to reach that lofty point, however, still appears long and winding. Also someone in all those DIY YouTube videos should really mention that charcoal grout against white tile shows every chip, imperfection and error. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know” has never seemed so apt; we’ll chalk this one up to hard-won learning.
Will we harvest any fruit this year? Time will tell.
And finally, we’re excited to see blossoms on most of the fruit trees we planted in our first full season here. We of course live in the heart of Colorado’s commercial fruit territory, but the changing climate means that no plant is guaranteed survival any longer. Of late, we’ve endured punishing fifty-mile-per-hour winds plus overnight temperatures in the 20s; the big propane-fueled fans in the surrounding orchards have been on a few times recently in a desperate attempt to save their year’s harvest because these frigid temperatures are devastating for the fragile blossoms. The cherry trees in our area are likely gone for good, thanks to last year’s freeze. Many growers have started culling their delicate peach trees in favor of hardier apples; though peaches sell for far more per pound, the risk of losing the entire crop is also far greater. We are doing our best to adapt to a drier, hotter, windier place and to keep our plants (and ourselves) healthy while doing so.
And with that, we’re back to work! Wishing you a pleasant week ahead.
“We are bewildered at what can happen out in the world in such a short time. We are not qualified to make heads nor tails of it all, and it is humbling to be able to do so little in response. However, we do our work of peaceful and close-to-home living as best we can. Try not to depend too much on the larger greedy systems that perpetuate war and its profits. The daily points where our bodies remain connected simply and physically to the Earth still need looking after – food, shelter, warmth, family – the seeds sown, the wood chopped, the flour ground, the dough mixed. It’s a blessing to be given the time and space to do those things, thoughtfully and with humility.”
-Barn Owl Bakery, Lopez Island, WA, March 2022
Kale: strong, resilient, nutritious. The plant I aspire to be.
Hello there. We are here, and we hope you are, as well. In a world that feels ever more suffused with madness each passing day – e.g., the IPCC thoughtfully released its latest report three days after the invasion, thereby guaranteeing we will all continue to ignore the existential crisis staring us right in the face while we focus instead on a pointless and devastating and intentionally distracting war – we are planting seeds, tidying winter debris, plowing new beds and generally readying ourselves for another productive growing season at Quiet Farm. Collectively, we’ve careened wildly from one catastrophe to the next over the past two years, and we are all exhausted, drained, sad and anxious. Once again, getting our hands into the soil and quietly producing something real, substantial, edible and nourishing seems far and away the most useful response to the ever-increasing chaos out there.
We hope you, too, will plant something this year. We’ll be back again soon.
What are you reading these days, friends? Compelling non-fiction? Page-turning thrillers? Autobiography? Historical fiction? Escapist trash? Here are a few books I’ve read recently, if you’d like to see:
The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger
I read this autobiography on a whim and absolutely loved everything about it. Robert Iger was CEO of Disney from 2005 through 2020, and remains executive chairman as of this writing. It’s easy to dismiss The Ride of a Lifetime as just another one of thousands of business leadership books, but it is ultimately so much more than that. Mr. Iger comes across as thoughtful, smart, humble and exceptionally hard-working, and the book’s insights are relevant even if you’re not running one of the world’s largest entertainment companies. The Ride of a Lifetime is excellent for many reasons, but “The Ten Principles of True Leadership” should be required reading for every leader, no matter the size of the organization. Absolutely one of my favorites of 2021.
Bravey, Alexi Pappas
“It’s like when you are in a race. Racing is very painful but we are not what we feel in any single moment and just because I’m in the hurt box now doesn’t mean I won’t feel better in a few more laps. Racing is about understanding that pain is a sensation but not necessarily a threat; the best thing you can to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
More than a year and a half into the pandemic, it’s becoming ever more obvious that collectively, we are suffering from severe mental health issues. Thanks to athletes like Simone Biles and books like Bravey, more and more people are finally acknowledging their struggles and opening the doors to tough conversations. Alexi Pappas is a champion runner and filmmaker who lost her mother to suicide at a young age and faced down a severe bout of depression after competing in the Olympics. This funny, heart-wrenching, gorgeous memoir will ring deeply familiar to anyone who has ever felt the black dog lurking just around the corner.
Win At All Costs, Matt Hart
This book’s subtitle – ‘Inside Nike Running and Its Culture of Deception’ – tells you everything you need to know. By now, it should come as no surprise that Nike is composed entirely of mean, vindictive, competitive jerks who will do anything to win. (The corporation has now had to rename three buildings on campus, which is perhaps an indication that they like to hitch their wagon to the wrong stars.)
For all the promise of exposing the dark underbelly of competitive running, however, this book is surprisingly bloodless. It’s ostensibly presented as objective sports journalism, yet the book’s primary characters, Kara and Adam Goucher, are quite clearly friends of the author and therefore everything they claim is taken at face value – and their stories contain some fairly vast credibility gaps. This book may have helped bring down Alberto Salazar, but he had done most of the damage himself prior to publication. Overall, an empty book that shows up a bit too late to provide any new information. If you want to read an excellent work about doping in professional sports, pick up Wheelmen instead.
The Midnight Library, Matt Haig
The concept of the book is brilliant – for each of us, there exists a ‘Midnight Library,’ where we can experience all of the lives we might have had we made any one of ten million different decisions along the way. Protagonist Nora Seed arrives in the Midnight Library after a suicide attempt, because she feels that there is no point to carrying on with her life as it is. With the guidance of an off-kilter librarian, she visits a variety of different lives that might have been hers, whilst trying to determine what makes a life worth living.
The theory is fascinating but the execution of this compelling premise is decidedly weak. Nora is a dreary, bland and entirely uninteresting character, accurately described in one review as “the world’s largest wet blanket.” She doesn’t seem to really want anything, and her lack of passion renders the book –which could have been bright and colorful and interesting in the right hands – flabby and boring. This book received a great deal of praise, and after finishing it, I’m left wondering whether that praise was less for the book itself and more for an interesting idea about our unlived lives, an idea that we’ve likely all considered.
This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan
I really enjoy Michael Pollan’s work and have read all his books, some more than once; I believe The Omnivore’s Dilemma to be one of the most important and relevant books ever written on food culture, politics and policy. His latest is a short work in three parts, detailing his experiences with three plant-based substances that have changed the world thanks to their ability to alter human consciousness: opium, caffeine and mescaline. While most of Pollan’s books root heavily into science-oriented journalism, This Is Your Mind on Plants definitely skews closer to memoir. Each portion contains more of a personal account of his experience with the drug in question, with only brief references to science and culture; more accurately, the book should be titled This Is MY Mind on Plants. (Those of us who remember the formative years of the War on Drugs and the Just Say No campaign will certainly understand the veiled reference in the title.)
The section on opium was originally written in the mid-1990s, with a recent update; most pointed here is the acknowledgement that while the feds were busting home gardeners for totally benign poppies, the Sacklers were carefully building their devastating empire of pain from the ground up. The caffeine portion might be of interest to anyone who looks forward to coffee every morning, which is to say about 90% of us; the analysis of how coffee (and tea, to a lesser extent) allowed for the rise of Western capitalism and contributes to our staggering sleep deficiency is interesting but not revelatory. I mostly disliked the mescaline segment of the book, mainly because while I absolutely agree that psychedelics offer incredible potential for the treatment of many mental health issues, I do not at all support the recent trend towards “psychedelic tourism,” where wealthy Westerners seek out cultures with psychedelic traditions in order to go on their own “spiritual trips.” These drugs are incredibly powerful and likely could offer immense benefits, but they’re not a joke, and they’re not to be taken lightly or appropriated as ‘wellness’ as part of some all-inclusive beach vacation. This Is Your Mind on Plants is written in Pollan’s typical accessible, engaging style, and the book is a decent-enough read, but overall it feels rehashed and thin. This isn’t one of his best nor is it one of my favorites.
The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris
I am painfully aware that I am not the intended audience for this book, so it should come as no surprise that it didn’t hold together for me at all. Not only was the writing weak and the main character weaker, but – ironic for a story set in the publishing industry! – the book desperately needed both an editor and a proofreader. Skip it.
Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford
“This book advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair, and in doing so I hope it will speak to those who may be unlikely to go into the trades professionally but strive for some measure of self-reliance – the kind that requires focused engagement with our material things.”
That quote perfectly encapsulates our life here on Quiet Farm. We want to engage in work that is useful and we want to produce more than we consume. We also want to not own very many things, and we want to understand the things we do own, and we want to fix them when they break (which seems frequent these days). I adored the basic premise of this book – ultimately, that we’re collectively unhappy because most of us nowadays don’t do any sort of actual productive work, particularly with our hands. Most of us no longer build or construct or repair things, certainly not for our full-time employment.
While the argument is sound, and the book in particular presents a compelling case against the “college-to-cubicle pipeline,” the author possesses a PhD in Philosophy and wields it as an intellectual weapon. My favorite parts were passages where he discusses his work repairing vintage motorcycles; while reading this book, I was entrenched in an ongoing battle with my beloved 1960s Singer 600, and could very much appreciate both the challenge and the reward of learning an elegant (and infuriating) machine intimately. Ultimately, however, the book contains too much philosophical musing and too few real-world examples. This is a shame because more than anything, we do need more skilled tradespeople and fewer software engineers – but anyone who picks up this book already knows this.
Circling the Sun, Paula McLain
I love, love, love Paula McLain’s historical fiction; she makes interesting women (whom you’ve likely never heard of) absolutely come alive on the page. Circling the Sun follows Beryl Markham, a pioneering aviator, thoroughbred horse trainer and author who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from Britain to North America. English-born and Kenyan-raised, Markham is also well-known for her entanglement with Denys Finch-Hatton and Karen Blixen. She was smart, independent and spirited and she belonged nowhere but the vast expanse of Africa; Circling the Sun is a brilliant portrayal of a woman who lived life entirely on her own terms even when her choices weren’t at all socially acceptable. Highly recommended, as are the rest of McLain’s books; next up, I’ll be reading Markham’s own memoir, West with the Night, and revisiting Blixen’s Out of Africa.
Pretty Things, Janelle Brown
Standard fiction hasn’t thrilled me much recently, but Pretty Things is a dark, entertaining romp through the intertwined lives of con artists and their marks. Incisive commentary on the social media monster and how we give away so much of our truth for free, yet still desperately try to present lives that aren’t exactly our own while simultaneously whining about our lack of privacy. No one in this book is particularly likable, but my favorite character by far was the narrator’s mother. Overall, Pretty Things can be summed up as readable escapist junk, and there is always a time and a place for that in any literary diet.
Have you read anything remarkable or otherwise recently? As always, we’d love to hear your comments and recommendations.
Hello and what’s new in your world? Here at Quiet Farm we very much wish that winter would appear already. We haven’t had even a dusting of snow since that frost back in October, and it’s barely cold enough to freeze the animals’ water or kill off all the aphids on the kale. Far too warm for late November – but don’t you worry, our trusty politicians are taking care of that pesky climate collapse issue even as we speak.
Our fall harvest has all been successfully preserved; the last of the ripe tomatoes went into the sauce pot yesterday. Chiles are drying in the sunroom, ready to be pulverized into chile powder; pumpkins and squash are neatly stacked on shelves; apples and onions remain in cold storage in our insulated woodworking shed. We are stocked and ready, and we invite Serious Winter to show up immediately if not sooner.
Here are a few more things we’ve been up to recently, if you’d like to see:
Bright, tart pomegranate seeds make these amazing waffles even better.
Obviously we’ve discussedthe waffles previously, but yet here we are again. I made a fresh batch last weekend and since holiday brunches and family gatherings and all sorts of festivities are lurking just around the corner, I must evangelize the waffles once more. Please, dear friends, if you do not make one other thing from scratch this holiday season, please make these waffles. I know this level of devotion to a seemingly innocuous breakfast food seems a bit over the top, but trust me – these are the best waffles ever, and you can stop Googling ‘best waffle recipe.’ Plus they’re very easy to make, and they freeze beautifully – you can just have fabulous homemade toaster waffles any time you like, and you can also stop buying expensive processed frozen waffles with mysterious ingredients! The recipe hails from Fannie Farmer by way of Marion Cunningham’s brilliant The Breakfast Book, which I highly recommend. (But seriously, go make these waffles. Do it now.)
Hot sauce doesn’t have to be just painfully ‘hot.’
Making hot sauce is always part of our farm preservation work each year. Although I’ve experimented with lots of different types of hot sauces, for the moment I’m keeping it simple – one fiery-sweet red version, very loosely based on Sriracha and this Melissa Clark recipe, and one fermented serrano version, a rough knock-off of green Tabasco. The red hot sauce is definitely milder, with a gentle undertone of sweetness from the red bell peppers, while the green is a tangier, sharper vinegar-based sauce, used more sparingly. As a personal rule, I don’t love aggressive, punch-in-the-face hot sauces; I want a bit of heat but would still like to taste whatever I’m eating. Hot sauce is simple and inexpensive to make at home, keeps indefinitely and is a thoughtful consumable gift for anyone on your list who likes things spicy. (P.S. If you buy classic Sriracha, save, wash and reuse the iconic squeeze bottles for your own homemade hot sauce.)
Small part. Big impact.
I don’t in any way fancy myself an influencer, but if I can influence you to NEVER, EVER buy GE appliances, please allow me to do so. We have a full suite of GE appliances in our kitchen – all of which came with the house – and every single one has failed at least once. Most recently we found ourselves without a functioning oven, which is quite challenging for someone who bakes on a more or less daily basis. Some investigation and a few helpful YouTube tutorials later, we ordered a new igniter. (Of course, I foolishly ordered the first igniter from GE and it arrived pre-broken, thanks to their careless packing. The second igniter, from an entirely different company, arrived in perfect condition, but obviously it was now two weeks later. Thanks again, GE. You’re tops.) We successfully installed the new igniter – a five-minute job, though gaining access to the compartment and putting everything back together neatly made it more like an afternoon – and lo and behold, we thankfully once again have a working oven. As always, successfully learning to repair things ourselves goes a long way towards our goal of self-sufficiency.
Crispy, salty, savory and delicious hot or at room temperature – galettes are winners.
And of course with a working oven, we can once again make delicious meals like galettes! Like the waffles above, we’ve extolled the virtues of galettes previously – they can be sweet or savory, hot or cold, made in advance or pulled fresh from the oven – and they lend themselves well to using up whatever odd bits and ends you might have on hand. They’re also beginner-friendly, if you’re intimidated by all the perfect pies you’re seeing right now; galettes are designed to be “artisanal” and “rustic” which – fun fact! – are both Latin for “messy” and “imperfect.” This time of year our galettes are most likely to have fall flavors, like delicata squash, caramelized onion, peppery goat cheese, sage and rosemary – but honestly, you can put pretty much anything you want in one. If you’ve got a couple rounds of pastry dough in the freezer you’re halfway there; galettes are easy to prep for holiday gatherings and perfect as a vegetarian main dish or as a simple, impressive dessert.
Available now as an NFT: “Untitled: Llama and Alpacas at Rest, 2021”
And finally, it’s always nice to observe our camelid herd lounging peacefully in the pasture; if they’re at rest, it means they’re getting plenty to eat. We’re regularly challenged by this rebellious bunch of feral miscreants, but they add a certain flair to Quiet Farm, and we’re glad to have them here.
Wishing you all the best during a tough time of year, dear friends.
Finding Quiet Farm 