White stuff blankets parts of North Carolina

White wonderland near Warrenton, NC

While I realize the snowstorms this week in the Midwest and the Northeast can be dangerous and are not necessarily desired by most people, Wessel and I have snow envy! We love watching it fall and playing in it. (We’ll ignore the driving and shoveling for now.)

So when we came upon this awesome white wonderland outside of Warrenton, North Carolina, a couple days ago, we took a cotton to it. OK, it’s not snow, and it’s grown with chemicals, but ain’t it purdy? North Carolina is fifth in cotton production in the country, and we’re proud of it. (Except for those pesky chemicals.)

This is how your T-shirt starts

If you’ve never seen a cotton field just before fall harvest (most are harvested by now; not sure why this one isn’t), put it on your list. I’ll tell you where to go. It’s quite a sight.

Have cotton envy yet?

Walk this way to way fresh seafood

Diane is ready for Walking Fish pickup

Can you believe that even in coastal towns, most of the “fresh seafood” on restaurant menus isn’t even from this country, much less the county? Some 80 percent of seafood served in America is imported and much of it is harvested under conditions that would not meet U.S. environmental standards. Diners are unaware either because they assume it’s local or they’re told it is when it’s not. Or they just don’t care.

Carteret clams are being steamed

The shrimp we sauteed the other night were recently caught in Carteret County, NC, about 200 miles east of our home in Durham. So were the clams we steamed two weeks earlier. And the flounder and jumping mullet we grilled? Yep, all from Carteret. Towns there include Atlantic Beach, Beaufort, and Morehead City.

Locavore fishavores congregate on Thursdays at Duke Gardens pickup point

We got all that seafood through Walking Fish, a subscription seafood service organized by Josh Stoll and other students at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. They’ve joined with Carteret fishermen/women to launch our region’s first community-supported fishery to sell locally caught seafood to the public. The name is a takeoff of the more common CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture. The CSF is coordinated through Bill Rice, owner of Fishtowne Seafood, a small Beaufort-based processing facility.

Chuck of Fishtowne fills up a bag with fish and ice. Earlier he gave a filleting demo.

The composition of each week’s portion varies according to season and weather. We were told ahead of time that we’d likely get clams, shrimp, triggerfish, spot, mullet, flounder, and black drum. I really appreciated that we had choices — weekly vs. biweekly, half-share vs. full share, filleted vs. do-it-yourself. We chose biweekly, half-share and filleted, for $79. Each share is enough for two people with a little leftover, and we’re getting six weeks of fish, so about $13 a meal-for-two for really fresh seafood. And we’re helping our fishing friends in Carteret.

Duke students said they weren’t sure how the program would go over, but I could have told them it would sell out, which it did (at 400 members!). We’re situated in locavore/foodie/eco central. You should see the Prius drivers pull up at the pickup point at Duke Gardens with their farmers’ market and Obama bumper stickers.

While we’re on the topic, there’s also a wonderful program called Carteret Catch. When you see that label in a Carteret restaurant or seafood store window it signifies that the seafood labeled as local comes directly from the county. Those fish don’t have to walk far.

Big reward for little effort at Great Smokies

Buildings at Mountain Farm Museum

October is a peak season at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most heavily visited national park in the country, with more than 9 million visitors a year. Despite all those people milling about, it’s still amazingly easy to get away from them. Some, of course, don’t leave their cars, and others don’t venture down trails. With only a few hours to spare, we did both, and were majorly rewarded for a minor effort.

Great Smokies' 75th anniversary

We started our afternoon at the park at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, two miles north of Cherokee. It being July Fourth weekend, the place was packed. After a tour of the fascinating outdoor Mountain Farm Museum, a collection of preserved historic log buildings gathered from throughout the Smoky Mountains, we were itching to take a walk, but didn’t want to drive for an hour to reach some of the more remote trailheads.

A ranger told us about the Kephart Prong Trail (a prong is a bend in the river), a four-mile roundtrip hike that crosses the Oconaluftee River six times. Perfect! Oddly, the trail isn’t marked from the road nor is it on the basic park maps, which probably contributed to the fact that we passed only a few other people during one of the park’s busiest weekends.

Tree pose for beginners on footbridge

The trailhead is only seven miles beyond the visitor center. Look to the right for a small parking area on the right, and a footbridge, the first river crossing. The other river crossings were not really bridges but logs, some more secure than others, but all with a railing, so not too much balance was required. That’s a good thing, because no matter how many times I do an erect “tree” pose during yoga, get me on a log over water and I’m like jelly.

Bright red bee balms are found along the Kephart Prong Trail

The wooded hike, mostly along the river, was just lovely, and I wish we could see it this month when the leaves start to change. The trail is an old road-bed, so the walk is quite easy, with only 800 feet of elevation gain, most of it on the way in. It’s an up-and-back, not a loop. Along the trail in the woods are a few remains of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp, there from 1933-42. Turnaround is at a nice backcountry shelter. No one had set up there, so we stretched out on the platforms for a little contemplation of nature. Wessel was snoring in no time.

Water flows down a millrace to the mill

On the way out of the park we stopped at Mingus Mill, a 1886 grist mill that uses a water-powered turbine to power all of the machinery in the building. The mill is operated daily from mid-March through mid-November, with a miller demonstrating how corn is ground into cornmeal, which was for sale there. In a break from tradition, the corn was shipped in from the Midwest. I can think of only one word to appropriately express my disappointment. Shucks.

The kindness (and cooking) of strangers

Good Samaritans and awesome cooks, Steve and Diane of The Ibis in Concord

It was bound to happen. I’m in and out of my car at least a dozen times a day, sometimes double that, while researching my farm-travel guidebook to North Carolina. In a series of events not worth explaining, with only my cell phone in my hand, I locked my keys in the car. ARGH…. I called Better World Club (better version of AAA) and waited for help.

Meanwhile, I was starving. I was surrounded by food, most of it raw, as I’d just arrived at the farmers’ market on the NC Research Campus in Kannapolis (there’s a whole other story to that). But one table really caught my eye, or should I say nose — take-out Caribbean-influenced dishes. I told the woman there, Diane, that I’d be back as soon as I could get my wallet out of my car.

The Farmers' Market in Kannapolis; open May 7 - Oct 29, Thursday evenings 4-7 pm

The market closed before my car was opened. I was so sad. Until Steve, Diane’s husband/partner walked over and said “what do you want to eat?” They gave me two containers full of amazing food — herbed chicken breast with crunchy veggies in a curry sauce, and a bean and meat dish. They refused to let me later send them a check. They said they had had a restaurant in Concord, NC, called The Ibis but that now they were only catering. If you’re in the area, hire them, or visit them at the farmers’ market.

Thank you, Steve and Diane. If I’m back at the market, I’m *buying* your awesome meals to go and giving you a big, big tip. But I know what you really want me to do is pay it forward, and so I shall.

In the Smokies, a magical hike through time

Cook Cabin in the Cataloochee Valley

A “step back in time” is such an overused phrase accompanying many a historic town or exhibit. But in the Cataloochee Valley of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, it’s truly possible.

The descendants of Cataloochee, who have their annual reunion every August, have a rare blessing and a curse. Remnants of their ancestors’ community are frozen in time, preserved as they were when the government in the 1930s-40s displaced more than 1,200 family farms to create the national park, uprooting some 7,000 people. Over the years, descendants have acknowledged that the land would likely have been developed if not for the park, but that is of little solace to the people directly affected.

Diane walks the Little Cataloochee trail

For the visitor, Cataloochee, accessible only by foot, is a marvel. Wessel and I spent a few magical hours there last month. While nature has altered the landscape and buildings, those changes have been gentle, unlike those brought about by highways and bulldozers.

The drive to the trailhead requires some effort. We entered through Little Cataloochee (as opposed to Big Cataloochee) because reaching the buildings we wanted to see is easier at that end. But the road is rougher — about eight miles of winding dirt roads too narrow for two cars to pass. It was quite the adventure, but doable even in our low-slung 15-year-old Honda Civic.

Wessel stands in front of Cook Cabin

Ours was the only car parked at the trailhead on a Sunday afternoon. Using the map in the Cataloochee pamphlet we’d bought from the park service, we headed up the main wooded trail, no doubt a main drag back in the day. We first passed Hannah Cabin, built in 1864 and occupied until national park days. Amazingly, the intact cabin has not been vandalized, at least not to our eyes. We also visited Cook Cabin and Messer Farm, which once housed the apple house for storing the apples that brought valley families much prosperity. (The apple house now stands at the park’s Mountain Farm Museum.)

The 1889 church sits on top of a ridge

The most amazing building here is the Little Cataloochee Baptist Church, built in 1889 on a ridge top and painted white with a gingerbread trim. This is there the annual reunion is held. Cobblestone steps lead to a plain interior, painted white, and guests are welcome to poke around. A Bible at the front was opened to the Book of Daniel. Was this a sign for me? Visitors are allowed to ring the 400-pound bell in the belfry, which, of course, we did, the sound floating off through the woods.

Visitors are invited to ring the church bells

Next to the church is the cemetery, one of several scattered throughout the park and maintained by the park service. Of course the names Hannah and Messer appeared on some of the gravestones.

As we left the woods, we thanked the park service for tending to this sacred ground while sympathizing with the families displaced, as they have been here and during the creation of many other parks in our nation and beyond. Is their loss worth our gain?

Secret location of ‘Secret Life’

Stars from "Secret Life of Bees" buzzed around Watha, NC (photo Fox Searchlight)

North Carolina, which has an active film industry based in Wilmington, has not done a very good job of promoting sites in the state that have been in films. So let me fill you in on one I thought was very cool — the big pink house that was the primary site for the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” The movie, featuring Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, and Sophie Okonedo, is based on the book of the same title by Sue Monk Kidd.

The pink house as seen in publicity photos (photo Fox Searchlight)

I put off reading the popular “Oprah” book for a long time because I thought it would not be “literary” enough, snob that I am, but I quite enjoyed it when I finally got to it, save for the too-tidy ending. The movie, however, was everything I feared the book would be, way too polished. But I love the story line, about a white girl running off with her black housekeeper, only to end up on a peach farm (in South Carolina in the story) that she had a mysterious connection to. Lots of good themes, mainly the wonderfulness of women and the evils of racism.

The house as it looks a year later

So a funny little story about finding the house, in Watha, just a few miles west of Interstate 40. The tourism folks there in Pender County didn’t even know where the house was, and the film folks never told me either! Finally, after pressing Pender, I guess they asked somebody for an address, but the result was quite puzzling. I was already in the area doing farm research, and so headed for where they told me, only to find a nondescript light pink house that I knew wasn’t in the film. I was annoyed. Did someone simply say, “find a pink house for that pushy writer”? Leaving “town,” as it was (which it barely is, with 200 residents), I saw a couple old buildings, and decided to go up the street they were on just for fun. Suddenly I passed by a big old pink house on the main street. Bingo!

The back of the pink house

There was not one clue that the house had been part of a major motion picture. Unfortunately, not until I was home did I find a great article about it by Allison Ballard in the Wilmington Star-News last year, which also mentioned that the stone wall that held the notes the character May wrote was still there, as well as the honey house. Oh well, next time, now that I know where it is. I liked Allison’s decription of the color of the house — “a shade that falls somewhere between raspberry sorbet and Pepto-Bismol.” (I think it’s closer to the sorbet.) Sue Monk Kidd also wrote a fascinating blog entry about being there for part of the filming. According to my GPS, the address is 500 Watha Road.

Another "Bees" location, in Lumberton, and the house Lily lived in with her father

This wasn’t the first “Secret Life” location I’ve visited. My research for “Farm Fresh North Carolina” earlier took me to Geraldine’s Peaches and Produce in Lumberton, where Geraldine and Roy Herring loaned a part of their peach orchard for the filming. The building there was portrayed as the childhood home of Lily Owens, the main character, before she ran away from her father, T. Ray.

True to movie-making form, because the filming had to be done in the winter, peach tree leaves were made of silk and the fruit was plastic.

The address is 10728 Highway 41 North, about 8 miles east of I-95 in Lumberton. The seasonal farm stand is a great one, and if you ask nice, Geraldine will let you drive back and see the house. Tell her I sent you.

America’s most famous farm welcomes you

Polyface is near Staunton, Va., in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley

Want a guided tour of, arguably, the country’s most famous farm? Well, it’s yours for the asking, and for free if you plan way ahead.

Many folks have heard of Polyface Farm, run by the Salatin family. Patriarch Joel has become a broc star (get it? though, OK, it’s not a produce farm) after being one of the featured farms in Michael Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” a critique of industrial farming. Polyface will be known even further and wider with the release next month of the documentary “Food, Inc,” which paints Joel, once again, as a prophet among demons.

Daniel Salatin welcomes visitors to Polyface's first free farm tour of 2009

While I’d read much about Joel and Polyface, only when I went deep into the farm’s website did I see that, along with fee-based tours, they give monthly freebies. Also, visitors are welcome to the farm any day but Sunday to do a free self-guided tour. But that’s not half as fun as being escorted by a Salatin and sharing the experience with 80 or so other devotees, including other farmers, groups of college students, and just regular curious folks like us.

Childhood friend Cindy Quick Wilson (right) joined Diane on the farm tour

I thought the tour would make a great story, and was lucky enough to snag a Washington Post assignment. I made reservations months in advance. We were joined by my childhood friend Cindy Quick Wilson, who lives near Roanoke. That was a very awesome addition to the day. I used to stay on her family’s farm as a young ‘un.

Well, here’s the bad news. After my article was published, on May 6, the free tours for the rest of 2009 filled up. Sorry folks! But if you make a note and in January sign up for a 2010 tour, you’re in!

Some 80 visitors joined the tour

Our tour, the first of the season, on March 20, was led by Joel’s son, Daniel, who was totally engaging and almost as animated as his father is. Joel usually leads these tours himself, but he was off on one of his many speaking engagements. We went from the open-bottom broiler cages to the pig-aerators (exciting!), then to see grass-fed cows in pasture, and, finally, to the brooder (chicken nursery), teeming with 3,000 adorable day-old peeping chicks. In three weeks, these broilers would be out in the fields. Five weeks later, they’d be ready for slaughter. Let us not forget where we are.

If you want to read the Post story, it’s here. Tour sign-up and area travel info is here. If you’re itching to see a  farm photo slideshow by my wonderful photographer and partner Wessel Kok, that’s here (along with a few Staunton photos and what-not). And if you want to tell us about other great farm tours, please do so! If they’re in North Carolina, I’ll consider them for my upcoming guidebook, Farm Fresh North Carolina.  Keep our farms alive!

 

More farm-fresh fun in North Carolina

These signs dotted the countryside

While we don’t suggest that mere mortals try this, Wessel and I managed to visit 10 farms in five hours during the 14th Annual Piedmont Farm Tour in central North Carolina. That’s because we’re seasoned pros. When you’re researching a farm-travel guidebook, it’s all about chop-chopping (time, not vegetables). While I can’t stop and smell the radishes, I hope my research and Wessel’s photos will lead others to go on more leisurely farm visits. Here’s his collection from the Piedmont tour, with captions and everything.

One of the angora rabbits at Avillion Farm

What I loved most about the farm tour, other than the awesome farms and the hordes of curious visitors, was that the route was laid out for me instead of me having to spend a day with Google maps to come up with my own. (Love Google maps, though!) If only every NC region had a farm tour and I could follow their routes! (Many more do now, including mountain regions and individual counties, such as Franklin and Jackson, to name a couple.)

Visitors tour vineyards at Iron Gate Farm

Like the gardens you’ll see in this yearly event, the Piedmont Farm Tour keeps growing and growing. Co-sponsored by Carolina Farm Stewardship Association and Weaver Street Market  in Carrboro, the tour started in 1995 with less than a dozen farms. Now about 40 dot the self-guided route. This year some 3,000 families visited them. That’s a lot of farm fans. A few locations received 1,000 or so guests. Whoa!

The CFSA bills the weekend as “the nation’s largest farm tour,” and while there’s no national accounting of farm tours, their claim is quite credible. Tours include a mix of sustainable produce farms, those with humanely-raised animals, nurseries, vineyards, and educational agriculture projects. This year more than 150 volunteers helped the farmers, who stay busy chatting up visitors. While some of the farms on the tour are always open to the public, this is a chance to view others that typically aren’t. It’s also an excellent way to show kids where their food (and sometimes clothing) comes from, and if you pack a cooler, you can bring some home and cook it up for dinner.

Farmer Roland Walters sports tour T-shirt

Several farmers and volunteers were sporting this year’s awesome farm tour T-shirt, on a dark background emblazoned with bright orange carrots, 100% cotton. Not just any cotton, natch, but organic! Not just organic, but local (!), from TS Designs in Burlington. I haven’t told those guys how much I’ve taken a cotton to them, but they’ll absolutely be in the book. So will nine of the 10 farms I visited on Sunday. So will CFSA and Weaver Street Market, which is selling those awesome T-shirts for $18. As of April 28, they had plenty. Hey, could you reserve a medium for me?

Thanks from the bottom of our sustainable hearts to all the volunteers, farmers, organizers, and fans who made last weekend a smashing success!

The roads traveled are two-way streets

I wrote the essay below for a special travel section in the April issue of Ode Magazine.  It’s on their website as well.  If you don’t know Ode, I suggest you check it out. It’s at a magazine stand near you. (Borders, Whole Foods, Barnes & Noble, etc. Or better yet, buy a subscription and keep Ode alive.  Its tagline is: For Intelligent Optimists. Hey, that’s me! And I’m guessing you, too.

Farmer on Lombok Island, Indonesia, plows his fields the traditional way

The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The Taj Mahal. Only 20 years ago, these were the notches on the traveler’s money belt, which, incidentally, was stuffed with travelers’ cheques. Today we’ve been there, done that. Affordable airfare and Western wealth (yes, we’re still comparatively wealthy even now, in the midst of the credit crunch) have brought travelers to every corner of the globe. We hop on transcontinental flights armed with our debit cards, functional in cash-dispensing machines from Dubai to Denali.

But simply seeing the sights is no longer enough. We want to stray from those beaten paths, dig deeper, get a read on how the locals live, work and play. This can include eating at a restaurant favored by residents instead of Westerners, participating in an outdoor adventure or visiting sites not found in most guidebooks. In industry jargon, it’s called “experiential travel”-travel we live through instead of look at-and it’s never been more popular. It’s popular because it’s typically cheaper than traditional travel; money is tight but we still want to go on vacation, some of us to faraway places. And it’s popular because we want to tread more lightly during our trips, in terms of our impact on the environment and on the people we visit. We want to give something back.

The desire to experience a different culture through activities and people goes deeper than adding another notch to the money belt, though that plays a role, too. It’s as basic as life. It’s our fellow human beings who transcend us. At the end of the day, we recall the burka-clad woman on the train reciting prayers as much as we do the centuries-old treasures in the museum.

Diane's much-coveted gift from locals in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, Canada

When I think back to one of my life’s highlights-seeing the northern lights in the Northwest Territories, Canada, during 2002-I also relive the hospitality of the citizens of tiny Fort Smith, who cooked for me, took me dog sledding and gave me a polar-bear-shaped license plate that hangs in my house today. The most lasting impression of my 11-week backpacking trip to Europe in 1982 is my still-enduring friendship with Federico, who lives in Vicenza, Italy. In my home state of North Carolina, as I travel to research a farm-travel guidebook, the farmers stand out as much as their bounties or the sweeping rural landscapes.

Diane and Federico Lauro in Vicenza, Italy, in 1986. And, yes, they're still in touch.

My reaction is hardly unique. While I’ve done a fair amount of traveling of my own, I’ve also interviewed hundreds of people over the past eight years for a column I write for The Boston Globe called “Where They Went,”  about other people’s trips. Without fail, these travelers will recount adventures, sights, tastes, but almost always add: “The people were the best part. They were so nice, so warm, so welcoming.” Those people’s stories are the ones they recount to me again and again, especially if they were allowed a look inside a community or a family.

These days, even the most mainstream tour operators include experiential travel on an otherwise-standard tour. For example, in the 2009 Grand Circle Travel land and cruise tour “China and the Yangtze River,” participants will not only visit the Great Wall, Beijing and Hong Kong; they’ll tour a kindergarten or senior center and have a home-hosted lunch. “You’ll see local customs enacted first-hand as your gracious hosts prepare and serve a typical Chinese meal,” the itinerary reads. For the traveler wanting a less-staged version of hospitality and sightseeing, many cities have forms of community-based or locally led tourism, which originates with citizens instead of national or international tour operators.

One of our local guides prepares an Indonesian meal during a hiking trek up Mount Rinjani (12,224 ft.) on Lombok.

Digging deeper also requires that we set aside our demands for a money-back-guaranteed quality and “safe” experience. That can be instructive in itself. I recall a community-based “ecotourism” hiking trek my husband and I chose on the island of Lombok in Indonesia. The guides lit our campfires with the help of splashes of gasoline from the jugs they carried and they littered along the way. I later reported these issues to the organizer, who lived in the capital of Mataram, miles and worlds away. He was extremely apologetic, as he’d been trying to get the villagers to understand tourism basics. On the other hand, I saw the real way of life there. It was worth the trade-off. And I was much happier to donate money to people in the village than to an international travel outfitter.

Schoolchildren in a tiny village on Lombok are excited to see two cycling tourists

After hearing me speak about the virtues of getting off the tour bus, one African safari tour operator told me proudly how at the end of his luxury lodge-hopping trip in Tanzania, he takes his clients into the city of Arusha to visit poor neighborhoods and give trinkets to the local children. “Everyone came away deeply moved,” he said. “The crazy thing was, after seeing all that big game, what I heard from them was it was the most memorable part of the trip.” I suggested he consider moving the outing to the beginning of the tour, so it would be on their minds as they met Tanzanian workers along the way. “Oh no, that would be too much for them,” he said.

Perhaps our challenge as citizens of the world is to decide how much is enough-and then go soak it in. Even if the recession has wiped out a quarter or more of our wealth, we’re still rich by global standards. Experiencing how other people live, whether in Appalachia or Addis Ababa, will make us even richer. And likely them, too.

Christmas tree trivia: who earns top star?

Santa knows the answer to the Christmas-tree trivia question

So which US state do you think grows the most Christmas trees? That would be Oregon. But the red-ribbon winner might surprise you — my home state of North Carolina. Oregon harvests 7.5 million trees to our 5.5 million. Santa told me that while Oregon outsells North Carolina, we get a much higher return on investment, making us the top Christmas tree earner. I have yet to verify this, but Santa doesn’t lie, right?

You may wonder why Santa cares. Because his day job is with the NC state agriculture department. He was hanging out last weekend at Pop-n-Son Christmas Trees in Garner, NC, one of the 30 Christmas tree farms I visited this month while compiling research for my book “Farm Fresh North Carolina.”

Diane soaks up the smells of Christmas past from this Eastern red cedar

Here’s what else I learned. A good 90 to 95 percent of all NC tree sold are Fraser firs. They’re shipped all over the country, including to the White House on many years, including this one. Apparently many Americans consider frasers to be the authentic Christmas tree. I beg to differ. I’m a fan of the lacey and softer Eastern red cedar. That’s because when I was growing up in these parts, my parents and I would tromp through the woods behind our house and cut one down at nature’s very own “choose-and-cut” farm. Getting permission from Mrs. Layton up the street was essential too, as it was her land. Now, some 35 years later, the woods and Mrs. Layton are gone, but, as they say, the memories linger.

Some 90 to 95 percent of all Christmas trees sold in North Carolina are Fraser firs

Frasers need about 2,500 feet of altitude to grow, so all the fraser farms are in the western NC mountains, while the cedars, pines, and other species are grown in other parts of the state. The mountains are home to about 200 (!) choose-and-cut farms, where customers pick their still-planted tree and the farm cuts it down for them. (Hundreds more fraser farms are wholesale only.) Many farms nowadays use a “shaker,” a vibrating contraption to shake the dead needles out and a “baler” to wrap up the tree in mesh for easy car carrying. What ever did we do back in the old days?

A fraser fir gets ready for the ride of its life, and a decorated future

I visited 30 choose-and-cut farms, and didn’t even buy a tree. But I did take a lot of notes, get lost on mountain roads, and drink a lot of really bad instant apple cider. (Farmers, consider springing for the real stuff.) From late November through mid-December, about every other car in the mountains has a Christmas tree on the roof and a load of kids inside, dreaming of what Santa will bring. It’s a sweet sight.