Meet our friend Christopher Totman. He was a successful fashion designer with 2 stores here in trendy Nolita neighborhood and one out in East Hampton. He also had his own factory with 600 employees over in India. He always strived to know his suppliers and provide socially conscious manufactured clothing designs. Unfortunately, his business couldn’t survive the latest economic meltdown, but resilient he is. It turns out his family has been farming a piece of land in the Berkshires that was deeded to them by the King (not Elvis) but the one from England back in the 1600s. Through all these generations, they’ve always kept it intact and available to anyone in the family who wanted to farm it and after the clothing business went belly up he’s moved up there and is working a 10 acre plot of his own and learning to keep bees.
Being an industrious and entrepeneurial sort he met all these neighbors who are growing and making amazing organic products and he’s created a pilot CSA program. There’s 16 of us so far. He’s trying to get 20 total and he’s going to drive down to Manhattan every Tuesday afternoon with whatever’s good for harvest that week. We signed up, since eating in is the new eating out and tonight received our first delivery. He drove down in his tiny little Mitsubishi pickup truck with the tailgate full of coolers and hooked us up with all this great stuff pictured below! He’s running way behind schedule because it’s the first time around and he’s chatting way too much with everybody. You could tell he felt pretty excited about being able to introduce his friends with all this great stuff. Check it out!
That’s raw milk yogurt with maple flavoring, some chive encrusted goat cheese, a pound of grass fed free range ground beef some maple syrup that’s the much coveted light amber early tap style and some south river miso that’s grown using only horse drawn farm implements on a farm that exists totally off the grid!
Then we got two rounds of delicious brick oven bread and fresh “vanilla celebration” granola. The bread came out of the oven at 2pm this afternoon.
The Mesculin was hand harvested at 9am this morning as was the spinach. There’s these cool japanese radishes and then tucked behind one of the two heads of red leaf lettuce there’s these really cool looking red radishes that I didn’t get into the picture. The radishes are flanking a nice bundle of arugula.
The red radishes show up in a later picture. A little blurry in the background but I had to also get a shot in of the GIANT 6 inch round, 1 inch thick chocolate cookie that tasted just like a brownie! (We ate this first.)
Christopher’s bounty is helping to support sustainable farmers in his neighborhood and he’s helping us establish a direct connection to our food which we now know comes from less than 200 miles away from our home. It’s all grown pesticide free, and the Miso farmer is totally off the grid using horse drawn implements. You’ll see more of Christopher as the blog develops because he has a lot of plans for his new homestead. For example he had the mirrors in his store cut up and he’s going to build them into a big solar collector to heat water in the treehouse he’s building out of wood recycled from an old barn they took down on the property (which also provided the sideboards for his raised vegetable beds.)
There’s the whole spread. Week one of Farmer Totman’s “better than organic” farm fresh CSA bounty! Now it’s time to plan some meals.
Hope you guys enjoy sharing in the bounty, if only via pictures! Way to go Totman! Farmer and Energy Anarchist!