The Open Gate Farm On Camano Island, Washington

The Open Gate Farm

269 Russell Road

Camano Island, WA 98282

August 31, 2011

 Ripening Tomatoes at The Open Gate Farm

 Dear Friends:

We are occasionally presented with an idea or item which folks think we should sell at our stand.  Usually we decline for various reasons but recently two stellar products have come to our door which we would be remiss if we did not take on.

The first is Brother Timothy’s sourdough bread.  This great neighbor and super friend has the gift.  Those who know sourdough know what we mean.  It takes a real gift to produce a good loaf of this finicky flour and he does it.  It will be around after 11 or so in the mornings on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.  Next week he’ll miss because a son is getting married and that always trumps making bread.  But keep an eye out for it.  That and his caramel pullapart buns.

The second is a more commercial looking product, Rain City Crunch.  This gluten free treat is nothing short of incredible.  We are having a hard time keeping our hooks out of the free samples we’re supposed to be putting out for you so you can try it.  At only $6.50 a bag, it is a great item for your health conscious table or as a hostess gift when you head out to dinner at a friend’s.  Give it as a gift.  You will be remembered.

We’ve had a number of folks stopping by the stand who are despairing of getting any red tomatoes this year.  Their yearning is echoed by the chickens who have been peering through the fence at ours, hoping the huge green orbs will soon turn red and they’ll get a few treats of ones not good enough for the stand.

They do that a lot around here.  They stand along the outside of a fence, hoping to see a lettuce or kale or bean plant jump up and come over to within reach of their eager beaks.  If you look carefully, you can even see where they have stuck their heads through the grid of the wire fences and rototilled up the dirt with their beaks as far as they can reach.  Fortunately, that’s not far.

We humans do much the same, don’t we?  We look through a fence at what we do not have, yearning for it, hoping against hope for it, and pretty soon find our lives centered around that unreachable object.  Like a chicken staring at a green tomato, we can’t see the crunchy lettuce waiting for us just a few feet away.  Learning to let go of what we can’t have is not easy.  So we stick our necks out in some silly manner or other and rototill up some ground, pulling worms out as far as we can reach but dreaming of the tomato while our mouth is full of tasty worms.

And we never run out of tomatoes to wish for.  If we become mature and stop wishing for things, we start wishing for relationships.  We start wishing the perfect person would come in to our lives who would delight in supporting our self-centeredness.  We start wishing a son or daughter would drop everything and pay attention to us.  Or perhaps we wish our parent would stop trying to run our lives.  Or that a sibling would get a life.  Or a spouse would listen, really listen to what we are trying to say.  Or that pay raise for all your extra efforts. And those are probably only the tips of icebergs.  We have lots of wishes.  But until the tomatoes get ripe, none of that will happen.  Just ask the chickens.  They can confirm that.  It will take a while for your tomatoes to ripen, but maybe the chickens can show you some crunchy lettuce, just around a corner, until then.

Happy Hoeing,

Jon and Elaine, the tomato planting farmers, Snickers the tomato sniffing dog, Mystery the tomato free cat, Ben and his flock of tomato yearning chickens, and the Parson Dudley Brown and his flock of tomato ignoring ducks, all of whom live joyfully at

The Open Gate Farm

269 Russell Road,

Camano Island, WA 98282-8512

360-387-4449

Open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 9 to 5, now until the end of September

August 16, 2011

Oversights at The Open Gate Farm

Dear Friends:

Every day feels like a holiday here at The Open Gate Farm.  But only Fridays are a “Challaday”.  Those braided beauties of the bakery are blessing many a table with the kind of looks that draw families together.  If you want to start a great conversation Friday night, take one home and ask everyone to guess how many lumps are on it!

This week saw the Slow Food Port Susan board meet out here in the shade of the big fir tree by the grapes.  The bread pudding (secret ingredient = cinnamon rolls) was devoured and great decisions made.  Stay tuned!  Another general public potluck is in the wings!

And if you don’t have August 27^th and 28^th on your calendars, you should!  The Slow Food and Roots Music Festival out at the fairgrounds will be a dandy.  Two stages filled with music and laughter from 10 in the morning until late at night.  Healthy, local food.  We’ll be there with a booth for your lettuce buying pleasure, along with some other local farmers.  Promises to be a fun time!  You can find a link to them at our web site, www.theopengatefarm.com.

Until then, take a look at what’s ready here, starting tomorrow and lasting clear until Saturday night!

Woke up in the middle of the night the other night to a bright light shining in our bedroom window.  This has happened before, but it’s been so long it took a minute to recognize the moonlight for what it was.  It was then we realized how long and grey this year has been.  To actually see the full moon!  What a treat!  Another little jolt to remember that the daily duties can blind us to what lies beyond the clouds of life.

Then this morning we realized your farmer had forgotten to close in the ducks and chickens last night.  Panic was in our hearts while we rushed about counting the beaks we could find…all the chickens were there.  But what about the ducks?  “One, two, three, four…”  Quackers and Cheese and Scooter were missing!  So the duck hunt began.

We checked all the paths and roads for feathers and signs of mayhem.  No clues.  No one had heard a thing until Ben crowed about 4 this morning (to our new woofer’s surprise).  No muffled screams, no flapping and thrashing.  Nothing but quiet around here all night long.  And now it was too quiet.

Peering under the office building, looking under the trailer, walking quietly around in the raspberries produced no quiet quacks.  It was not until we parted the daisies, that big clump by the nursery, that we heard a muttering.  “Nuts”, we heard a familiar voice say.  “They found us.”  And so given a little persuasion, two naughty ducks strolled out of the flowerbed and waddled across the lawn to the swimming pool.  Quackers and Cheese were back with the flock. But what about Scooter?

That little terror of the fence lines who leads the innocent astray…where was she?  Well, we never found out.  But it was only a few minutes later that she showed up at the pool for a long drink of water.  She looked pretty frightened.  It had been a sleepless night, she said, and she was sooooo glad to be back with the flock.  She promised never to leave them again.  At least not until next time.  Did you know there are things that walk around making twigs snap at night?  Enough to scare any duck into going to bed early tonight!

That’s how it is around The Open Gate Farm.  When anyone is missing, we drop everything until we find them and unity is restored.  We are not called to live lives of separation and isolation.  We are called to live lives together.  We are called to keep our hearts tender, to not become callous towards one another, to forgive, to search for each other, to find and to celebrate that what was lost is home again.  In a word, to live wholy and completely.

It calls to mind that great meditation by John Donne, “No Man Is An Island” which your farmer memorized in the summer days of youth.

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

It is what we put in our hearts when we are young that guide us all our lives, isn’t it?  So in a very real way, what John Donne wrote in the 1500’s got written on the heart of a young man in Michigan in the 1960s and resulted in some ducks getting found in 2011.

What did you put on your heart way back when?  What did you memorize that has carried you through dark and stormy and frightening times?  We hope there is something, a few words perhaps carved into the tree trunk of your being when young that gives you a signpost now when you feel the way is lost.  If not though, don’t despair.  There is still time.  And if you need a suggestion for something to memorize, just ask one of the wayward ducks.  They would be glad to help.

Happy Hoeing,

Jon and Elaine Stevens, the duck hunters, Snickers the sniffing dog, Mystery the peering cat, Harley and his flock of wondering chickens, and the Parson Dudley Brown and his flock of drifting ducks, all of whom live joyfully at

The Open Gate Farm

269 Russell Road,

Camano Island, WA 98282-8512

360-387-4449

Open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 9 to 5, now until the end of September

Great taste, sweet and shining white currants!

We made some white currant jelly tonight!  Simple and fast.  Found and followed the recipe at Delia’s for red currant jelly.  There’s plenty of pectin in the fruit so it’s just fruit and cane sugar and about 30 minutes!  Here’s how…

This recipe is taken from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course and How to Cook Book Two.

Method

The first easy thing is that there’s no need to go through the tedious business of stripping the currants from the stalks. Just place the washed fruit – stalks and all – in a preserving pan, bring slowly to the boil and stir, pressing the redcurrants to break down the fruit and release the juice.

As soon as the fruit is cooked (about 10 minutes), add the sugar, stir until absolutely dissolved, then bring the mixture up to a rapid boil, and boil for 8 minutes. Meanwhile, place a large nylon sieve over a bowl and line it with a double layer of gauze.

Then, when the 8 minutes are up, tip the whole lot into the sieve and let it drip through. If you don’t mind not having a completely clear jelly, you can press to extract as much as possible.

Then pour the jelly into the jars, which have been washed, dried and heated in a moderate oven for 5 minutes, cover with waxed discs and seal while still hot.

We hung the old pillow case material from a cabinet door with some binder twine (hey, we live in the country where every real kitchen has a ball of binder twine) and let it drip.  Poured the melted parofin over the top of the filled jar to seal and then it was photo op time!

Ready for the toast!

Yum, yum!

One of our great teachers!

Dear Friends:

Got some garlic harvested and braided today.  It needs to dry a bit more, but you can do that as easily as we can!  There are a dozen bulbs to a braid and what we had in our caramelized onions (over hamburgers) tonight was outstanding.

Saturday night at 7, we’ll be at the Snow Goose Bookstore in Stanwood to chew the covers off that great book, “The Town That Food Saved”.  Given the discussion we had at the Blackbird last Friday, this is one session of the “Food For Thought” series you won’t want to miss.

While you are waiting for the return of summer, come on by and enjoy some great eating.  The cinnamon rolls are rolling out of here as fast as we can bake them and the bread is not far behind.  If you want a particular bread on a particular day, just let us know and we’ll see if we can make it happen for you!  Oh my!  Molasses cookies this weekend.  Grab that coffee and start dunking!

A fellow can get a real education here at the farm.  Especially when he’s the farmer.  And the biggest one lately has been the education that comes with the WWOOFers.  These young men and women from around the world arrive in ones and twos for their two week stay and bring some baggage with them.  Normally that word would have a slight negative skew, but not so this time.  This baggage is the training from their parents and pastors, teachers and leaders, coaches and classmates.  It is fascinating to watch as it gets unpacked.

When they first arrive, they are a bit guarded and cautious, which is appropriate.  This is a new and strange situation.  As one observed, what right minded adult would be welcoming strangers into their homes and onto their farm and trusting them to do mission critical work?  But after a couple days, they relax and we all start having a lot of fun.  They learn about how soil and plants work together to feed us and we enjoy the results of their labor in the tidy gardens and healthy meals we share together.  And sometimes we learn that what we thought was mission critical really wasn’t.

You see, when we pause and look closely at their baggage, we discover that they also bring lessons for us.  Each one has taught us so much.  One set a working schedule example so firmly in place it made us realize how relaxed and lazy we’d become.  Easy to do, as anyone who has worked from home for long knows.  Refrigerators have doors for a reason and who knows what food inside needs a closer inspection!

Another would race us to the stand to wait on customers, making us pick up the pace of our responding to an arrival.  Several have shown us new ways to arrange the lettuce on the stand to better advantage.  We had become locked in to having a certain look, sort of a checkerboard of red and green and they, well, they just made it look more attractive.  And don’t forget our marketing major and accounting major friends who persuaded us to open on Wednesdays.  It has made a world of difference.

Then there is the drainage ditch out by the corner.  It got cleaned of weeds and eroded topsoil twice as deep as expected. But that’s o.k.  Now we’ll go ahead and backfill with rocks from the collection out behind the barn and put a layer of cement over the top and really do the job right instead of just enough to get by for a couple more years.  It seems this is the kind of thing which happens when you take an eager worker and just point them to a project and give them their heads.  It’s wonderful!

There is a delight in turning someone loose on a project, explaining the goal and letting them use their best judgment on how to get there.  Their ideas may actually be better than ours, but we never will find out if we tell them exactly how to do it.  We are learning that when we do let go, it changes the face of the farm in charming and wonderful ways.  This farm is no longer limited by our own vision.  It is becoming bigger than that.

It’s a lesson for parents too.  We micro manage our children and then as they grow try to slowly pull back, releasing freedom to them like a prize for good behavior.  It’s a tension filled process for everyone.  The kid knows they don’t need the direction and the parent knows the kid will crash and burn without it.  Hey, we’re the ones with experience and a better view of the disasters which might be waiting around the corner, aren’t we?

But when we stop trying to manage their every move and instead just let them live as they will it can get very interesting.  Trusting your son or daughter can make life interesting and sometimes even more beautiful than you ever dreamed for them.  The lives they will live will produce fruit of a kind you may never have known even existed.  But it can be tasty and healthy and change the face of the farm of your family as well.  And your children will not be limited by your vision.  You may not see them as much, but you will probably see them better.

Happy Hoeing,

Jon and Elaine, the learning farmers, Snickers the ditch digging dog, Mystery the rock collecting cat, Ben and his flock of dirt digging hens, and the Parson Dudley Brown and his flock of hustling ducks, all of whom live joyfully at

The Open Gate Farm

269 Russell Road

Camano Island, WA 98282

360-387-4449

Open Wednesdays through Saturdays, 9 to 5, until the end of September or maybe October.

An elderly friend...

Dear Friends:

Time to let go of some beauty around here!  The hanging baskets are going on sale now for 30% off until…well, until either they are gone or we put them up around our own house.  This includes that huge white one!  Still plenty of gorgeous blooming plants in the nursery, both annuals and perennials to freshen the look around your gardens now.

Beets are back in spades!  We have lots of wonderful red beets at last, so come, grab a couple bunches and fill your freezers and shelves with that great beet flavor.  And the Divina lettuce is delighting hearts all over town too.  Grandpa Admire’s?  Well, we are thinking “Crunch” is his middle name.

Time to get your kids ready for school.  Nothing could look better than sending Junior off to his education in an Open Gate Farm T-shirt.  Colors are easy on the eyes and the logo tells the world they know who their farmer is!  A new order is in and new colors are here.

Friday night at 7 we’ll be in town at the Blackbird Bakery and Café chewing on “The Town That Food Saved”, a great book about the little town that could.  The size of Stanwood, they added 200 jobs.  Come learn how and see if we can do that here!  Then we’ll have another discussion on the 13^th if you miss Friday’s.  That one will be at that fine literary emporium, Snow Goose Bookstore, up at the other end of the street.  Seven p.m. there too.

Until then, come on over and pick up some of the following…

This morning when we went to harvest lettuce we found a large, elderly butterfly in the garden.  It was in the sunlight on an old grey burlap coffee sack and was fluttering about gamely trying to take off.  But it couldn’t.  Holding a hand down in front of it, this lovely winged creature crawled onto your farmer’s finger and then up his arm to hold on tightly to the fabric of the rolled up sleeve.  Close inspection revealed weak and damaged legs on the left side.  Without those for a good jump start, the poor fellow was not able to lift off and soar from flower to flower collecting nectar and passing pollen along.  We’ve put a picture of it on our web site, www.theopengatefarm.com if you want to see it up close.

It was a beautiful creature, though elderly and tattered.  Something your farmers could identify with.  A couple dings on the trailing edges of the wings from some hard landings, most of the color torn out of the bright orange eye that used to be near the tail to confuse predators, a rip in the right rear wing which needs only a small patch to repair, and dusty scales that had pulled loose all showed this one was nearing the end of the runway of life.

A butterfly’s colors are from these scales.  Blacks and browns are from melanins in the scales themselves.  All the other bright and beautiful colors are from the sunlight striking specially shaped cells in the scales.  Rather like a prism, it seems.  To look at one of these gentle insects up close is to appreciate the complexity of life in detail and in general, to reflect on how by seeing a pot we know there is a potter and by seeing this butterfly, we know there is a maker.  It is a moment when we can come face to face with another facet of the divine and that always is a good time to pause.

As the life of this butterfly is coming to an end, this gentle creature seems to be pausing too.  It is probably remembering many things…a May morning when it crawled from its cocoon, dried its wings in the sun and took its first flight.  Perhaps it is remembering its first taste of sweet pea nectar.  It may be thinking of all the beautiful blossoms it has visited over its lifetime.

We too, as we are aging, find ourselves pausing in our takeoffs now, remembering when we took our first flights from home, when we drank deeply from the cups of life in our youth, and thinking of all the kind people we have visited over the years.  As we pause and consider, it helps us to know that there remain many beauties to share, many places to go, things to do, and most importantly, people to see.  And each one is the nectar of life.  While the butterfly may have taken its last flight we certainly have a few more takeoffs and landings in us.  We hope you do too!

Happy Hoeing,

Jon and Elaine, the tattered farmers, Snickers the colorful dog, Mystery the butterfly watching cat, Ben and his flock of fluttering chickens, and the handsome Parson Dudley Brown and his flock of well grounded ducks, all of whom live joyfully at

The Open Gate Farm

269 Russell Road

Camano Island, WA 98282-8512

360-387-4449