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Plant It and They Will Come |
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It Takes a Village, Part 2: The pantry at Hell's Backbone Grill is a five-acre organic farm. |
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Sunday, 20 September 2009 |
20:19 |
Nathanael Spalding takes pride in the produce grown for
the grill: "It really thrills me to go in there at dinner time
and see people taking pictures of their plates." Photo by
Nolan Hester.
It Takes a Village to Raise a Restaurant
"Blake's Acres" was nothing more than a horse pasture when Nathanael Spalding arrived in Boulder, Utah, in late fall 2004 to farm his sister's newly purchased land.
This year, the five-acre organic farm is on track to produce 10,000 pounds of vegetables for Hell's Backbone Grill, the improbable Chez Panisse-caliber restaurant that Blake Spalding and her business partner, Jen Castle, operate in one of the most remote spots in the country.
Beans, corns and squash. Heirloom tomatoes. Thirty rows of potatoes, with names like Austrian crescent and purple majesty. Melons. Chard. Sunchokes. Okra. Asparagus. Leeks. Garlic. A bed of sage, oregano, rosemary, thyme, marjoram and lavender.
In the restaurant, the vegetables star in such dishes as arugula pesto, Zuni sweet potato skillet cakes and puff pastry rellenos with butternut squash and Utah goat cheese. Even in sauces and as side dishes, they can steal the show: Pan-cooked duck breast comes with a cherry-sage sauce, surrounded by impossibly sweet carrots, crisp snow peas and sautéed chard.
"I love to see my food in there," Nathanael Spalding says. "It really thrills me to go in there at dinner time and see people taking pictures of their plates."
Spalding, a slightly built man with mutton chop sideburns and curly hair under a straw hat, moved to Boulder from Flagstaff, Ariz., where he had worked in construction. He was no stranger to agriculture: His chores growing up in New Hampshire, where his father was a master gardener, included picking strawberries and baling hay. But he had never before attempted anything on the scale of Blake's Acres.
That first winter, he read everything he could get his hands on, including back issues of Organic Gardening magazine that he'd inherited from his father. Then he started by planting 3/4 of an acre, plus an acre of forage—grasses, legumes, corn, sunflowers—to feed the restaurant's free-range chickens.
"It's hilarious to see them jumping up and down to get the sunflowers," Spalding says.
Being able to laugh at chickens is the mindset needed to weather farming in this area, where the elements can be unforgiving. Fierce winds tore down his first two attempts to build a hoop house, a simple, unheated, tunnel-shaped green house.
With frosts lingering into June, the straw-
bale greenhouse gives the produce an
early start. Photo by Nolan Hester.
Spalding persevered. He planted 70 fruit trees and 100 landscaping trees. He built up the soil using compost from restaurant left-overs and llama manure from a neighbor's pasture. New hoop houses rose, along with a straw-bale greenhouse.
The flock of heritage breed hens—Rhode Island Reds, Araukanas, Javas, Black Stars—has grown to 75 and supplies a good portion of the restaurant's breakfast eggs. In addition to amusing Spalding, they help him clean up his fields. Using "chicken tractors"—portable, floorless pens—he moves birds from plot to plot to glean the last of the harvest and fertilize the soil.
A newly dug pond is used for irrigating the fields and luring swallows, ibis, ducks, geese and spade-foot toads to help control insects. Spalding is hoping it will also attract gopher snakes.
"We do have a gopher problem," he said. With characteristic humor, he adds: "We just try to grow enough for everybody."
By the end of this season, the farm will provide about three-quarters of the restaurant's vegetables and fruits, except for citrus, which doesn't grow in this high plateau, and potatoes. Even if the farm grew nothing but potatoes, it would still not be able to produce enough; the restaurant goes through 200 pounds a week.
To make the harvest last, the grill does what so many local pioneers did: dry and can (and freeze) as much possible. The preserved fruits and dried herbs form the foundation for the grill's early spring meals when the garden is still fallow. This lets the restaurant shift some of the fall's surplus to the lean spring.
For all the bounty, Spalding is modest about his accomplishments.
"It's still a young farm," he says. "And I'm still a new farmer."
The restaurant buys grass-fed beef and lamb from local ranchers, and additional eggs and vegetables from four or five other local growers. The farm's newly planted fruit trees are too young to produce much fruit (this year, the four-year-old tree produced nine cherries, which Spalding pronounced delicious), but restaurant workers pick fruit from four historic orchards around the town in exchange for pruning and watering them.
Spalding also has the help of two full-time employees and a small army of volunteers, many of whom found their way to the farm through the web site of World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. WWOOF is the dating service of the sustainable food movement, matching the growing number of agrarian activists to small farms in need of labor. In exchange for a place to stay or camp and meals at Hell's Backbone Grill, volunteers from across the country come for a week or two or four.
Brothers Steve and Loren Sweeney , for example, came from Reno, Nev., to volunteer and vacation, interspersing pea picking with mountain biking on nearby slickrock. Volunteer Kelly Beck, who works most of the year at Stanford University's Haas Center for Public Service, returned for a second summer, drawn to Boulder's beauty and to the sense of community working on the farm and at the restaurant generates.
As Spalding put it, "It takes a village to raise a farm."
But in Boulder, a longtime ranching community populated by descendents of pioneers, the question is: Which village?
In the decade since Hell's Backbone Grill opened, this remote, tight-knit outpost has become a mecca for sustainable-food activists. And they're not all just coming for a few weeks to volunteer.
Part 1: Hell's Backbone Grill is the unlikely hub of a slow-food movement.
Part 3: Boulder's transformation to local-food mecca has not always been easy -- or welcome.
See the Farm to Table Slideshow.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 November 2009 06:45 |
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