Earth Day. Farm Journal Philo, Spring '26

I was holding my iphone aloft, Merlin Bird ID recording songs and calls in the foggy pre-dawn air, bird names unspooling as the app identified them : Violet-green Swallow, Red-shouldered Hawk, Black Phoebe, Allen’s Hummingbird, Hutton’s Vireo, Cassin’s Vireo, Purple Finch, Spotted Towhee, Townsend’s Warbler, Rufous Hummingbird, Wrentit, Western Warbling Vireo, Steller’s Jay, Hermit Thrush, Cedar Waxing. American Robin.

Now Birdsong is beautiful whether or not you have a clue to the identity of bird you are hearing ; I remember thinking it seemed an impressively long list, a fine start to spring. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology app even provides you with a photograph of each bird you are hearing. On that morning the menagerie around me proved to be beautiful, small, distinct, emerald colored. I was frustrated I could only identify three little fellows dive bombing the hedges, beelining across the sky. So much life, above and, come to think of it, below ground. How dumb I was to almost all of it.

That’s when it happened. Standing at the edge of a meadow where our farm meets the forest. I had turned off the app, put the phone down, closed my eyes. I was listening, sightless, to all the life lifting off and landing. And I just ‘stepped off’ as gentle as you please, From listening to all the beautiful life around me, to just …being… in it.

Small word ‘in.’ Ranges from ‘in the market looking for tomatoes,’ to ’in the throes of death.’ We are, always, in life, doing something or looking for something to do. But in that fragment of time before I opened my eyes I went from being a participant ‘in’ my life - woman who needed a coffee, Woman who needed to start harvesting flowers for the restaurant before the sun came up, Woman with aching back, remanent of an Ada Limon poem stuck in her head, to something else. Something I felt no need to name, but deeply felt- as opposed to knew. It was as if the line between my body and the world wavered and then, for an instant, dissolved. Reality slipped a sprocket, and in that space a pure kind of consciousness and a fantastical sense of … belonging. When I opened my eyes the sensation disappeared, but the intricate beauty of everything around me remained. I must tell you the way it all flowed together was astounding. Nature is astounding.

The next day down in Healdsburg I dropped into Levin & Co and bought Michael Pollen’s new book ‘A World Appears.’ Pollen is a wonderful writer. He has been circling notions of what makes us tick, how we think about and moderate the world to suit us as humans and what may lay beyond those fragile connections for his entire career. I’ve yet to get to the part which might help explain where I landed that morning with the birds, more to the point what drives the need we all have to feel true belonging. Irreligious all my life, I’m crap at meditation - my moment with the birds was not casting my eyes to Heaven in search of a spiritual connection; neither was it going deep within, peace through the abdication of self.

Engagement is not the same thing as belonging. In this technologically driven moment it may seem to be the most valuable thing about us as humans - but it’s not. It’s our ability to connect, to truly belong to the living world, to this Earth, emphatically, warily, with curiousity and, hopefully, love.

Happy Earth Day. We hope you have the desire and freedom to get out there into it, to let enfold you. Don’t ‘pay attention, ‘ nor ruminate on anything other than the breath in your lungs, the sweet smell of flowering branch, color that doesn’t need adjusting. Spring has come on fast and furious, this one is a pip.

Above: up here on the ridge, flowering Cherry and Apple trees, Daffodils, Wild scapes, Hellebores, Lilic, Roses, Ceanothus, Ixia, Hyacinth, Iris, Bowl toothed Iris, Peonies, Quince, FavaBean, yarrow, redwood sorrel, poppies, euphorbia, snowballs, tulips, crocus, blue eyed grass, scabosia - and that’s just a shortlist I can identify. Would that Dan was here right now.

Good news: he’s coming!

Read the Article: House & Garden

Read the Q&A: Gardens Illustrated

For those of you who don’t know Daniel Carlson, He’s Lukka’s Partner who has also guided Barndiva Farm’s Garden progrlam for over a decade. We are beyond proud of the name he is making for himself in the UK - thrilled he will now be able to divide his time with us in Northern California going forward. Daniel has had two wonderful mentions this spring in illustrious gardening magazines: Gardens Illustrated and House & Garden. Dan has been instrumental assisting Jonny Bruce on the concept, design and physical labor helping launch Jonny’s The Field Nursery in the Cotswolds. Dan quote in the March issue of Gardens Illustrated says it all: “We need to act in partnership with plants and ecology, and not assert dominance over our plots.”

In the UK House and Garden read about Jonny’s remarkable career at Great Dixter where the Dan/Jonny connection ignited. Jonny is also the guardian of Derek Jarman’s infinitely interesting Prospect Cottage in Kent. But it makes clear it was his experience at the pioneering nursery De Hessenhof which has shaped The Field Nursery,. He is not alone in hoping it will be emblematic of where ‘commercial’ garden centers may be heading as more and more gardeners lean in to designing with plants that are climate and water sensitive, habitat friendly. The Field Nursery will propagate the plants it grows and sells- think slow-grown potted plants and bare root perennials - a return to traditional nursery practices. In addition to reducing the need for plastic, this approach has the advantage of growing plants with stronger root systems while reducing the need for excessive fertilizers. These are adaptive landscapes that encourage insect life, understanding that as prescious as your sweet plot may be to you, what lies just over the fence or in the next field or meadow is part of your - and the worlds - landscape as well.

Throughout history Nature has provided us with food, and solace. She has provided energy, and shelter. Being Human, even before we learned to be civilized, depended upon cooperation, a working together - in nature - that was not built on profit margins so much as shared goals, focused one thing: survival. What does it mean to survive right now? What can it mean - and for anyone with children this is the essential question- to thrive? Conversations Worth Having returns in August. Stay tuned!

It’s not too late!

Come join us for the annual Pink Party and meet the most exciting rosé wine producers in Sonoma & Mendocino counties! 

Use code POSSE at checkout for

discount on 6+ tickets.

Dress code: Think Pink!

Young rabbit with wild morels, fiddleheads, cherries, ramps, baby turnips and blood sorrel

Dish of the Week

young rabbit with wild morels, fiddleheads, cherries, ramps, baby turnips and blood sorrel

What a palaver ~ forget about the difficulty sourcing quality rabbit these days ~ the rush is on for those delicacies that only make a brief appearance in late April, early May. All week this incredible bounty arrived in fits and starts. The indefatigable Charmoon brought in two big bags of wild morels on Wednesday, the same day ramps and fiddleheads appeared. Three kinds of tiny pink and white turnips arrived from our friends at MIX, who also dropped flats of beautiful blood sorrel, so named for the vein of vibrant red that runs down the center (and not incidentally, a curiously wonderful iron bite to the finish). I harvested the Bing cherries at our farm in Mendocino County on Saturday morning, by Saturday evening they were on plates in the dining room.

There's a precarious balancing act with ephemeral ingredients like these ~ the trick is to present them as simply as possible so they play with and not against each other. The rabbit loin was wrapped in ramp tops, then cooked sous vide with the kidney in fragrant aromatics. (Pan sear or grill the kidney and you risk losing that moist pop of meat juice when you cut into it.) The morels were glazed in butter and chives. The ramps and cherries were lightly pickled. The turnips were steamed, then brushed with butter. This is one of Chef's favorite times of the year: blink and you'll miss it. Manage to score a table for lunch or dinner in the next few weeks and you won't!

The "Real" Key Ingredients

Admittedly most of the talk in our blog week after week is about sourcing food, but make no mistake: the most important ingredient here at Barndiva is of the human kind. The front of house is the kitchen's direct conduit to you; but while they provide the most powerful way to communicate the narrative around each dish, great service is a high wire act where one mis-step can reverberate throughout the meal. Some diners like a lot of talk about the food, others want only the salient facts. Knowing the difference is almost as important as knowing the food.

Sincerity is not something you can teach alongside the daily special, but it's the first thing a customer registers no matter how 'educated' their palate. What I love most about the dedicated, smart, food and wine obsessed young men and women that work here is the passion they manage to bring to the barn with every service. We are so lucky to have each and every one of them.

Matt, Kaireesa, Cathryn, Stacie, Mark, Brendan, George

The snap above was taken just before we opened for lunch last Thursday. Servers, hosts, back waiters, bartenders and Brendan, our SOM, often trade day and evening shifts, but the guiding force behind our increasingly popular lunch service is the beautiful lady third from the left, Cathryn Hulsman, our AM manager.

All text and photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski

Wednesday at the Barn Menu..... Return of the Rabbit.........Runway Fashion........

Dish of the Week:  Rabbit Redeux with Spring Vegetable Quiche

Fiddleheads, ramps, nettles, English peas and favas all started arriving in the kitchen a while back, a pretty good auger of Spring, but with all that rain and gray skies it was hard to feel it. Then the white Clematis went into glorious, full bloom over the arbor and Chef marched in to announce the return of the rabbit. This dish is Spring incarnate: bright green color from the favas, peas, chives, and baby greens, sharp pickled ramps, sweet tomato conserve, and just enough heft to the succulent meat and the richness of the quiche to warm the chilly evenings that are part of the beauty of this most precious season.

We are doing the quiche in terrines ~ flaky edges, big chunks of bacon, favas ~ it's almost too pretty to eat. Almost. Rabbit is great stewed whole, but chef’s signature presentation is to break it down and cook each cut separately. A bit more time and labor but you get a perfectly moist sirloin, juicy little rack, whole grilled kidney. Perhaps the most flavorful part of the dish is the rillette, which uses the dark meat from the legs and shoulder. We confit them in duck fat for about four hours, then pull the meat off while it's still warm and falling off the bone. Lots of dijon, sherry vinegar, salt, pepper, chives, and just a hit of minced sweet red onion. Before forming patties the mix is rolled in plastic wrap and chilled, which also gives the flavors time to meld. Taking the dark meat on any animal and making rillettes is worth learning how to do; it's a great way to use the least expensive cuts with the most flavor. In our case we are buying whole animals ~ using everything goes with the territory. Rabbit is only one dish on the new Spring Menu, but it is always a favorite. The flavor is subtle and light, with a hint of grassy sweetness in the finish. Our menus change often this time of year, as delicacies like ramps and fiddleheads have an especially short season. I can't promise how long the clematis will be blooming either. The best part of spring is the worst part of spring: blink and you miss it.

Tickets yet?

They are going fast! Don't miss out on a chance to spend a great 'guilt free' afternoon of drinking, eating, and talking clothes as Studio Barndiva joins forces with the talented folks at Brush Salon to support the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure. Joining us with a wonderful runway fashion show will be four of Healdsburg's finest clothing shops ~ Susan Graf Limited, M Clothing, Outlander Men's Gear and Clutch. Barndiva will be doing the cocktails and food, Vin Couture will be pouring the wine.

The evening also includes an exciting live auction with auctioneer Lucy Lewand, KZST's Debbie Abrams as MC and DJ Fabian.

Come out and have some spring fashion fun while we raise money to help find a cure for diabetes.

•••

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales and Dawid Jaworski (unless otherwise noted).

Dish of the Week.....Local Harvest Festivals.........

Dish of the Week

Saffron Pasta

I’ve never been fond of flavored pastas. Fresh tomatoes are never bitter when you chop them up and add them to a sauce, and you'd be hard-pressed to use too much fresh basil in an Italian dish. But for some reason when the same ingredients are solidified into flour and water more often than not they taste off to me; resinous herbs like rosemary or thyme end up with a slightly medicinal edge.

Saffron is different. All it adds to the taste of fresh pasta is a slight floral note, but more importantly it brings back the glorious color of the egg yolks ~ always doomed to be lost in the white blur of flour, salt and milk. Saffron brings that yellow back to the front, where it belongs. It's also the color of the sun, which makes me think of wheat in a field.

Everything about Italian food references the simple beauties of nature; it is the earthiest cuisine, the most able to satisfy the base comfort I look for in food. I admire French presentation and technique, I crave Indian and Thai, but it's Italian I return to when I've had a bad day or just need that little bit of mama in my soul. To get that splendid color, saffron threads are added to white wine which has been brought almost to a boil, a process called 'blooming'. As the saffron dissolves you cool it over ice water, leaving some threads intact, then add to the egg yolks. We use a classic old machine Geoff rebuilt for us to cut our dough, but we always start by mixing and kneading our pastas by hand which demands time and patience, a good practice in a kitchen like ours where speed under pressure is constantly required. There's also a sound technical reason for making pasta by hand rather than dumping all the ingredients into a big machine. Pasta is all about texture. You need to feel it as you go; to learn to trust your fingers when they tell you more, or tell you stop. Which, in a round about way, brings me back to my comment about nurture and comfort. To have an abundance of both in life, you need to be hands on.

Paul Bertolli, a friend from the early Barndiva days, wrote what I still consider a benchmark Italian cookbook no kitchen should be without called, appropriately enough, Cooking by Hand. Written in essay form with chapters like Twelve Ways to Look at a Tomato,  it's not a book you pick up when you need a quickie recipe, but one you linger over in bed before you fall asleep.  With any luck you may find yourself in a dream where you have miraculously found the time to work the dough, cut the tomatoes, rip the basil, crush the oregano, taste the wine.  Only a few chef-writers capture the magic of why we cook ~ MFK Fisher comes to mind ~ by managing to tap into our culinary soul. Paul finds the magic.

Chef served Rabbit with the Saffron Fettuccine this week:  kidneys, loin, and rack, beautifully butchered then flash seared in butter and garlic and thyme. Wish I could say  “just like the mama used to make,” but with no disrespect to my mother,  I grew up thinking rabbits were girly pets, pasta only came in boxes, tomato sauce only came in cans.  I’ve since learned that it’s usually the time it takes to do things simply that matters most when it comes to food.   Happily, the joy of Italian food is that when you use great ingredients and put your heart into it,  wherever you started on your food journey  you can end up making your own delicious traditions.

Local Events

As it happened I attended two Harvest Festivals this week. The Mendocino County Fair, held in the Boonville Fairgrounds ten miles from our farm, has been going strong for 87 years (we’ve been attending, on and off, for the past 30).  The National Heirloom Expo, held amidst great fanfare (and high expectations) at the fairgrounds in Santa Rosa is brand spanking new.

Besides the fact that both the Fair and the Expo are at heart celebrations of all things grown and living, from inception to delivery they were radically different events. The Mendocino County Fair opens with a rodeo and ends with a parade down Hwy 128 with people and horses in fancy dress; it boasts an impressive collection of award winning animals, rides, cotton candy and hot dogs on a stick. No one cares where the hot dogs come from. It’s simply a fair all about fun, and the folks that put it on, from the 4H and FFA kids who raise the animals to the women who bake the pies from the (fast disappearing) apple orchards of Anderson Valley work hard all year long to make it happen. The fair celebrates their labors and their lives ~ it's not about thinking deeply about farming methods or where the seed they use to grow their food and feed their animals comes from. It's about taking three days off in September to stand back and go, phew, can you believe we made it through another year? Pass the popcorn.

There were no rides at the National Heirloom Expo. There was a mind boggling array of open pollinated fruits and vegetables, food vendors clearly vetted for where they sourced ingredients (not a hot dog on a stick in sight), a giant tower of squash (by the same folks who built the squash tower in Michelle Obama’s White House vegetable garden) and an entire hall filled with non-profit (read: optimistically struggling) seed people. While there was country music and a convivial air in the crowds milling around the fresh produce stalls outside the halls, it was clear from the moment you pushed through the turnstile that unlike the Mendocino County Fair there was a decidedly political bent to this event.

On Tuesday Ryan gave a cooking demo at the Expo in the Hall of Flowers with Alex Lapham of MIX Garden. The bromance these two extremely talented big guys have going, sustained by the superlative produce one grows and the other cooks, is something to behold. They did a reprise of their heirloom tomato and melon salad, bantering non-stop back and forth while I sat snapping away in the first row with Geoff and Chef’s beautiful wife Rebekah.  Mick Kopetsky and Bryan Hohnstein, the other two parts of MIX Garden’s phenomenal success, stood at the back of the crowd grinning madly.

It’s great when you can walk around a fair and connect with people whose livelihood is integral to your own: old friend Kristee Rosendahl was there with her exciting Smart Gardener website, new friends Belle Starr and Bill McDorman of Native Seed/SEARCH were there with their special varieties of Southwest seeds which they'd also brought to Barndiva for us to cook with. On Thursday night we returned to the fairgrounds to hear Dr. Vandana Shiva speak. Dr. Shiva is one of those rare human beings who can deliver a message that is dire, yet manage to take you to a place where you know you are up to the challenge.   If you don’t know who she is, I urge you to go online and find out.

On Sunday we arrived at the Boonville Fairgrounds a half hour before the sheep dog trials began. Sheep Dog trials are my all time favorite spectator sport ~  if you have children trust me on this one, sheepdog trials hold a paradigm for your life. The trials this year delivered big time with great dogs and wonderful handlers (all but one of whom were women). After the trials we toured the animal tents and spoke to some of the kids who raised them, falling in love with a breed of pig we hope to raise at the farm.

What I didn’t do this year in Boonville ~ that I’ve always done in the past ~ was visit the Apple Hall to see the stands filled with boxes of apples in competition. The Mendocino Apple Fair is a cherished part of my life’s traditions (Knowing More and More, about Less and Less) but it’s increasingly hard for me to reconcile the absence of awareness at this event. The organizers in Boonville ~ and 4H and FFA at the national level ~ could use a good dose of fire in the belly that drove the organizers and participants of the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa. This is one case where if worlds could collide we'd all be the better for it.

87 years ago almost all the apples polished to a shine at the Mendocino Fair were grown from diverse varieties, many brought to the valley with the immigrants that came over to work the forests before they settled down to farming and raising sheep. These days less than 10% of all the apples grown in the US are heirlooms, much less open pollinated, thanks to nefarious inroads made by Monsanto to control and limit seed varieties (for their own profit) which ultimately will imperil the world’s ability to feed itself. Much as I’d like to go to the Fair in Boonville and forget for a day about GM, forget about the 'legal' patenting of seeds, forget the damage chemical dependence is doing to our soil, forget about CAFO’s, I can’t get away from the feeling that mindlessness, even for a day, is no longer an option. For those of us whose lives depend upon the soil and the animals reared on it, hell,  for anyone who eats, we do so at our peril, and at risk of losing everything we hold dear.

All text Jil Hales. All photos Jil Hales (unless otherwise noted)

Crispy Rabbit Rillette