Ramps and Fiddleheads

I'm entering my 4th week at Remembrance Farm in Trumansburg, New York. It's a largely mechanized, Biodynamic, Organic vegetable farm. Nathaniel, the owner and operator, mainly grows root vegetables, salad and cooking greens, and soon eggs. Our chickens haven't arrived yet, but soon... SOOON there will be 500 little hens doing the Egyptian around the pastures of clover. In the mean time we've been working on a big ol' chicken house. It's really just a hoop house on skids, but we've been building perches and roosts on the inside, so it will really only be a hoop house in structure. Last week we started planting onions with a transplanter. The transplanter is a little implement that pokes little holes in the soil while also putting a dab of water in that hole. Two people sit in seats attached to the back and shove onion plants (or whatever you're planting) into the holes like 10 year olds playing whack-a-mole at the arcade! We planted around a 150,000 plants in a week, which is not bad for three guys in a week. It was hard to feel too proud of ourselves, because the Amish were goin' to town on a new addition to the work barn and a new machine shed for the farm. They've only been going for a week, and it's just a few days off from being finished! Those guys build like maniacs!
When I got home today, my lovely lady suggested we go forage for some spring goodies in the woods, so we did. We came back with a fist full of ramps and some fiddleheads which we promptly fried up to tide us over until dinner. For those of you who aren't familiar with either of these spring delectables, Ramps (on the right) are wild leeks that grow in the forest mainly, and Fiddleheads are the curly little sprouts of the fiddlehead fern. The long one in the photo is too mature to eat, I picked it to show how the plant looks at a later stage. It is really satisfying to find such tender little green treats this early in the season. I'm already looking forward to garlic scapes and the first of the cookin greens!

Adam