Book review: Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard

efore I begin my review of Gaining Ground, allow to me to make a quick disclaimer: I am not an objective reader. In fact, I have worked for Forrest at farm markets every weekend for over a year now, in rain, snow, wind, thunder and tourist season. Before Smith Meadows came into my life I was largely vegetarian in order to avoid sponsoring the horror stories I read about the papers and books like Omnivore's Dilemma and Deep Economy. Then, through a boyfriend's friend's sister's best friend I found Smith Meadows, the perfect local farm with all the practices and principles an idealist could hope for.

Forrest Pritchard is Smith Meadows' farmer, its steward and practically a part of the soil he has worked so hard to nourish from the sad state it was in after years of overuse. As it turns out, lush pasture is easily achieved through a combination of patience and well planned herd rotation, switching between cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep, letting each fertilize and refresh the soil in turn. "Easily," of course, is a relative term when one is reading about it all from a comfy chair with a nice cup of tea.

In truth, it took not only years of hard work but decades of failure for the Pritchard family farm to turn around and produce a profit (as well as valuable land, animals and a sterling example of good farming practices). Gaining Ground recounts the journey Forrest took his entire family on when he realized that farming might be more of a calling for him than teaching (though writing is clearly still in his repertoire). As a bit of a book connoisseur, I did note that the book itself has a good looking, glossy cover, the text is printed clearly on nice feeling paper and the photos are incredibly helpful in placing the reader right there on the farm.

Gaining Ground has a good flow that kept me impatient to turn the page for the next adventure or roadblock, even though I knew exactly how it turned out. Forrest's anecdotes are sometimes touching, often hilarious, and range from rampant hogs to very confused market customers to a couple of completely baffling exchanges with a butcher. Pedro the goat, for instance, accompanied by Travis the humming farmhand, has a highly amusing adventure with some marigolds, in true goat-style.

As somewhat of an insider, I also know that there is a lot left out of this 317 page book. There were more adventures with goats, some ducks, more about Nancy's pasta business, a food truck and many more humorous stories from market and the farm. One hopes there will be a second book in the works... I, for one, would have enjoyed the inclusion of Forrest's other writing, perhaps the poetry he mentions sending off to literary magazines early on. The book stands at the right length and breadth to be a reasonable and fun read (One of Publishers Weekly's top 10 summer reads in nonfiction), though the prose could have dug a little deeper into the emotional underpinnings here and there.

The other members of the family receive occasional mentions, but the elder Mr. Pritchard has a fair share of the spotlight as he does his best to support his harebrained son through the snafus and disappointments of starting his free-range, grass-fed meat business. Mr. Pritchard's declining health provides a backdrop that Forrest puts to use in framing the problems with the commercial food industry and how we think about food in terms of cost, taste and enjoyment. On the whole, Gaining Ground is a good story, not an essay on farming practices, and it is this difference that will help readers to understand on a personal level what it means to buy local and why they too should work to save the family farm.

I did have one customer at market ask if Gaining Ground was a collection of recipes from Smith Meadows Kitchen, and when I passed this along to Forrest he said, "Sure, it's a recipe book. There's a real important recipe in there, they'll just have to read all the way to the end."

Gaining Ground is available on Amazon.com, in hardcopy and Kindle editions, and on IndieBound, as well as at your friendly local DC farm markets listed here. If you bring your copy to Smith Meadows farm day on June 1, Forrest will be happy to sign it for you. He may even sign copies brought to the Arlington and Takoma Park markets where he usually can be found on weekends. I will be putting my signed review copy in the Little Free Library for which I am co-steward. Pass it on!

Garden Variety Anxiety

uch to my dismay, Twitter has trained me to only have witty, entertaining thoughts in 140 character spans. This makes writing blog posts a humorless and rambly process, especially if I don't crank out a post immediately when inspiration strikes (whaBAM).

So now here I am, three weeks after starting an ambitious yard rehabilitation project (it's impossible to phrase that in any clever or alliterative manner. Cookie to anyone who can) trying to remember what I wanted to say about it.

I guess the first thing would be "hire a dang landscaper with a backhoe," if you can. The yard I'm working with is (according to Zillow.com) 0.13 acres, maybe half of it taken up by the house, but with a good sized front yard and considerable backyard. When we moved in, all but maybe, maybe 20% of the backyard was either underwater or overgrown. I wouldn't want to lose the topsoil by having heavy machinery rip out the overgrowth, but regrading would be easier, nay-doable with something more efficient than a shovel.




Anyway, having thrown my back out doing too much of that by hand (and the upcoming birthday doesn't make me feel younger, either), I'm going to wait for it to actually rain again before reevaluating the drainage situation. I improvised a rain garden with existing daylilies and added irises, bee balm and a willow stick which will hopefully sprout (they always do when I don't want them to...) and a little slope and dip for water to accumulate in.





Mostly, the rest of the work is ripping out vines (english ivy, poison ivy, virginia creeper, roses, that variegated purple flowering thing and whatever else) and hopefully getting grass to grow. The new lawn needs to be tilled and aerated, but there are so many roots and bricks (which is great, I'm planning a patio, too, but at 30+ bricks randomly strewn around the yard under the grass...) I'm not sure a rototiller is a good idea.  So for the moment, turning over a new garden bed, an existing one and getting my seedlings in will take top priority.



After all of that, I'm (understandably, I hope) anxious about getting everything to grow. The addition of (free!) composted horse manure that I lugged up from Lorton (yes, by myself, in contractor bags, in my little honda) should be enough to improve the soil and feed the plants. For exciting realtime updates, just follow the hashtag: #gardenvarietyanxiety. ¹

1. Note that because twitter is stupid, the hashtag isn't searchable. Yet.

Another ode to bicycling

here must be a storm out at sea, on the bay, over bigger water. The field at Gravelly Point is speckled with seagulls, round white spots on the lush green (it's already been raining)(like golf balls). A single gull hovers in the wind over the trail, bored with picking through the grass. Every once in a while one of them cries out, that sound that puts me on the beach, on sand, in salt breeze. The roaring silence of wind in my ears is harshly broken by the roaring noise of jet engines overhead, a larger bird taking off, banking against the wind. Some of the gulls startle and scatter into the air en masse to land a few feet away. False start. A lone jogger jogs by, similarly startled to find this place so differently populated. Il n'y a pas des gens aujourd'hui, seulement les mouettes et le vent.

Biking the Capitol

I bike to work, and I run across huge flowing tracts of tourists, guys who look like they're prepared for the Tour de France, secret service SUVs tailgating each other across town, thousands of folding chairs piled on the mall, new traffic stops in new places every day, and occasionally fellow bikers who will chat as they pedal alongside.


I've been biking the ~6 miles each way for a couple of months now, and feel secure enough about the whole business to invest in a few bike accessories. Being pretty abysmal at any form of decision making, this is a slow process, but I'm heading in the right direction. My bike (a er, Raleigh SC30 (specs), approximately 10 years old by now, and dark green [my colour preferences don't change much]) has collected the following things I find quite necessary to happy cycling:

-A water bottle holder (transferred from my previous bike), which is a bit of a tight fit between the bars of my "girl bike", but holds:

-A small 16 oz water bottle (BPA free, FWIW) from REI, which also comes into work with me and gets hourly refills from the water cooler. Yay hydration.

-A rack over the back wheel (loaned from a friend until I muster up one of my own) upon which I bungee my hulking "purse" which is really more of a satchel and is fairly unique at this point. (see photo). Someday, I might like real saddlebags (panniers) but then there's the issue of carrying something that's clearly a bike bag when I use my bike to go out places. Not terribly fashionable, but socially acceptable.

-Front and back lights, which strobe and are detachable. The back one conveniently clips onto other things, like a belt, or the back of my bag which covers the bracket the light normally sits in. I use at least the rear flasher on overcast days, and the front light going home in the evenings.

-I even went so far as to replace my old helmet, which I had gotten with the bike years ago. A friend who used to work in the REI bike shop told me they should be replaced every three years, and while this may in part be a marketing ploy, 10 years is probably quite enough. I'm self-conscious enough to feel a bit dweeby in a helmet, but heck, even I think the stylish-looking people who don't wear them are incredibly foolish.

-A bike lock (yoinked from a friend) that reaches both wheels and whatever I'm locking on to. I don't leave my bike anywhere sketchy, and most of the time it's right near a police perch, so I don't worry much. Nonetheless, I do want my bike to be there, so I lock it up all the time. It lives in my living room when I'm home, which is a bit awkward, but better than outside.

-I've had a little computer that keeps track of mileage, time and so forth as long as I've had the bike, and it's well worth it. There's nothing like assigning numbers to something to make it more fun! (or to impress coworkers with how far you ride each day)

-And just today I finally found an acceptable pair of shorts to wear. Most bike-specific shorts are rather expensive ($50+) and have schmancy wicking, padding, muscle-supporting technology, all of which is rather more than I really need. So I ended up at American Apparel getting some nice, plain cotton work out shorts.

Despite all the potential for looking like an idiot while biking, I actually feel wonderful about it. I'm not wrecking the environment, I'm getting a decent amount of exercise almost daily, and even if it doesn't make a huge impact on my body, I feel pretty good about myself physically. I don't even feel bad showing up damp and out of breath at work every morning (although I will need to find the shower in my building if I want to continue this summer). Bookending my day with half-hour bike rides makes the 8.5 hours of work more bearable (don't get me wrong here, I like my job, but it's a lot of sitting inside with no window).


View Biking to Georgetown loop in a larger map

<> So yesterday I rode from home to Georgetown, parked, shopped, discovered I had bike grease everywhere, biked the rest of the way across town to the National Gallery Sculpture Garden, listened to jazz until there got to be too many people and not enough picnic to offset the crowd, biked up to Young Chow, biked back down to the Botanic garden and listened to the Army band on the West Front, then biked back home just before dark. A note for the future: biking at dusk bites because all the bugs come out and form clouds over the trail. ~15 miles, casually. < /brag >

This makes me sad::

I wonder sometimes if writers read other stories in their own papers. The New York Times earlier this week published articles about veganism and the healthfullness of organic, local farming, promptly followed by an article on Saudi Arabia buying up Ethiopia for arable land. Half the time one writer elucidates a problem and suggests a solution and then another writer publishes something on a similar topic that ignores the first writer's exposé completely.

*sigh* It's just really been getting on my nerves. I may have mentioned before, but it was listening to NPR for an extended period of time that made me really acknowledge how much I want to disseminate information amongst the masses. Also known as being a librarian/information tech etc. It was the hour or two of listening to people reporting on misinformation and rumor and not covering all the points that could have been very relevant that put me over the edge. Point being, I make it my personal goal to educate as many other people about as many things as I can. Hey, a blog's not a bad place to start trying.

The entire point of this post, however, is to present the ironic juxtaposition of two articles on tonight's Washington Post (online) lead page. On the right we see a picture of some icebergs near New Zealand which have broken off of Antarctica and are threatening ships in the South Pacific. Right next to it is an article entitled "Skepticism on Global Warming: Percentage of U.S. that believes in global warming dips from 80 to 72."

...

Icebergs? anyone?* Part of me wants to be fair and say that perhaps science *is* a belief, maybe I worship the all-mighty laboratory gods instead of Allah, Zeus, Vishnu, whoever. But then my degree in biology comes over and kicks me and makes me repent my blasphemous words against the doctrine of Fact. Am I any better than a TV evangelist if I go around saying "Yes! Convert to my way! Science is truth!"? While pressuring others to take up your own beliefs is a questionable practice, the facts (cough) remain: science is tested, true and tangible, and I'll be damned if those ice caps aren't melting.

*To be fair, these things do happen as the result of local shifts in weather and temperature, and may not be linked to global warming. The irony stands.