soft path farm is the name i gave to the home of these friends of my family who i had the great fortune of spending over a week with in east brunswick. my first day there i was walking around the place and noticed how soft all the paths are. that means there is a lot of living and non-living organic material in the soil! off the beaten paths, and where there is no heavy mulch,there is protective ground cover growing. it is so pleasant to walk on!
there is also a way that the land is worked with at soft path that makes the name appropriate. there is a flexible, nurturing, yielding, accepting kind of relationship between the humans and this 4.6 acre piece of land.
my first day there a friend of the family's, tim, came out to help around the place, and then quentin, one of the sons, and i joined tim to his farm about 25 miles away out in the countryside. he is renting a little piece of another farmer's land for $400/mo. and growing a good amount of vegetables near his trailer home. we transplanted starts of pepper, eggplant, cucumber, summer squash, and a few wildflowers. these starts came from seed tim saved himself. i was told he is somewhat of a seedsman.
after the work at tim's we went to have a dip in a swimming spot he frequents next to a small bridge. he let me borrow some boxers, but they were too big, so since there was nobody else around i decided to take a quick dip in the skinny. quentin was up on the bridge, way up on top of the truss, so when a cop came by he stopped on the bridge to see what was up. from there is could see i was nude, and he told us all to come up to the street.
long story short, i ended up getting arrested for skinny-dipping. i was really scared, and had all these thoughts about how it could interupt my trip and cost money i didn't have... but in the end all i had to do was stay a few days longer at soft path, sit for two hours in the court room (i meditated through some of it), and pay a fine of $133. my kind host peter paid the fine.
while at soft path i fully expressed my love of sharing good food. we ate dinner around the dining room tabel most nights, which my hosts said they rarely use normally. when kelly, the mother, and the daughter petra showed interest in learning, i shared with them how to make the sourdough bread, fermented oat porridge, yogurt, and yogurt cheese that have been staples for me. i also made a couple batches of stock for soup while i was there. the first was with conventionally raised beef bones and the second was with bones from grass-fed beef produced on a nearby farm.
there are volunteer scallions growing in some big patches of the vegetable garden. we used them instead of onions in all our cooking while i was there. they take a lot of work to process, and we were only getting small, secondary bulbs. i'm not sure when shallots are supposed to be harvested... i found one website that said they should be harvested when the leaves die back, before flowering. but the way it is done at soft path is to let them flower, break off the flower top, and then harvest the secondary bulbs. kind of like garlic?
i discovered that many of the bulbils were almost as large as a clove of garlic and decided to use them in the kitchen too. we peeled and added them whole to the roast chicken we made for father's day. 
peter, the father, is a reuser and recycler of the useful materials that others cast off. he picks up bags of leaves, grass clippings, and other valuable organic materials from around the neighborhood. this is the kind of thing i love to do too! we want to see it all used, not thrown away. many municipalities do compost these materials, but many send them to landfills. this reminds me, i got some produce at the farmer's market from chickadee creek farm, which gets leaves from the nearby city of pennington, NJ. it is cheaper for the city to bring them to the farm than to pay someone else to dispose of them. brilliant!
sheet mulching is practiced around this place in a very intuitive way. the materials decompose right in the beds, which is an alternative to composting in piles. even though i love the system already being used, i decided to build some compost bins while at soft path so they could try this method out too. i thought it might save time in some cases when materials are brought back and there seems to be no obvious place for them to be utilized as mulch. food scraps and humanure from their bucket-outhouse can also be deposited in the bins. with the greater mass of materials in the bin, the heat accumulates and can destroy any pathogens in the food or manure. these valuable materials have previously been burried in the ground here and there. in these spots they surely have some benefit, but may not contribute to the fertility that vegetable crops depend on. anyway, it was very satisfying for me to contribute these bins, and the family seems receptive to using them, at least on a trial basis.
i was honored to be taken out on some of the yard care jobs that peter had in the neighborhood. i earned some money for the trip and met some really awesome elders! i also felt it was a really important part of peter and i connecting as friends.
one day towards the end of my stay i participated in taking a pickup load of metal to the recycling center, or 'scrap yard'. i really enjoyed the whole experience, from sorting metal bits to the rush of unloading the scrap metal as fast as possible in order to make way for the next in line. i learned that you can make quite a bit of money with a load of metal. we got over $200 for this load.
another day we moved a bunch of finished compost and created a new spot for storing landscaping rock. quentin is pictured forking up the last of this rich, coarse compost.
the day lilies blooming and blooming!
the beautiful, and vigilant dog nishi.
an old german paper egg i found in a basket of old sewing stuff. it was in need of repair and when i had fixed it (gluing a new piece of cardboard inside so the two sides fit together) i sent my nephew's bithday present in it!
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