A little life on the Farm.
I keep time by what’s in bloom. It always begins with the plums. They flower in March, earlier each year, it seems, and their blossoms are one of the most beautiful promises of what’s coming. As soon as they open, I find myself reaching back, scrolling through last year’s photos to see when they bloomed and whether it was a good year or a lean one. They tend to alternate. This year is shaping up to be a big plum year, and I couldn’t be happier.
The timing has a way of aligning in our larder. Just as the trees begin to blossom, we’re plating pork chops with fermented plum sauce, fruit grown by Jimmy and me, preserved last season as ferments, jams, and mostardas. Three different expressions of the same harvest, carried forward so a bit of spring is always within reach.
Rhubarb has followed a similar rhythm. Right after we put the feta salad on the menu with fermented rhubarb dressing, the plants outside our window seemed to surge overnight, like they were listening.
Jimmy and I live in Canby on a 40-acre property just down the road from Revel’s home base. He’s been here long before me, and among friends it’s always simply been “the farm.” It’s had many lives - pigs, chickens, lambs, a small vegetable project. These days, a neighbor grazes cows and goats in the pastures while we tend a modest garden for ourselves and the restaurant, and keep working toward a bigger dream: growing enough fruit to meaningfully support the menu.
We have about fifteen fig trees, some old, deeply rooted plum, apple, and pear trees, and a younger generation of cherry and peach just finding their footing. Wild blackberries, of course, this is Oregon, and more often than not, the dogs get to them first. It’s hard to be upset. There’s something pretty magical about four dogs eating berries straight off the bush.
We’re not a full-scale farm like many of our friends, but we have the luxury of bringing things into the kitchen on a whim, which makes for a different kind of creativity. Rhubarb, for instance, comes in small, sporadic bursts, perfect for fermentation. Maybe it’s four quarts at a time, but by the end of the season we’ve built up a pantry of something special. That’s how the rhubarb dressing came to be.
Last year’s blackberries, salvaged and preserved, are now a jam folded into fromage blanc and served atop a “cheez-it”, one of my favorite desserts on the menu right now.
The bar has its own kind of fun with it all. We’ve played with fermented tomato powder, tomato vinegar, pickled tomatoes, each one finding its way into savory cocktails. There are buckets of pear shrubs still waiting for their moment. Apples have become butter, vinegar, pickles, more than I ever imagined. This year, we’re hoping to harvest the full apple crop and pass it along to our friends at Little x Little to make a Hayward cider.
I don’t think I’ll ever tire of this place. This morning, between emails, I stepped outside to check the rhubarb, making sure it’s not shading the strawberries too much. I made a mental note to tell Jules and Soren about a planter box overflowing with thyme. I picked from the asparagus patch, just enough for Jimmy and me for lunch.
The greenhouse is filling with starts. Apples and pears are in full bloom, the plums already well past it. The mud is beginning to recede, which means the dogs are tracking a little less of it inside, though I’m sure Jimmy would appreciate it if they found a new favorite toy besides the irrigation system.
