A Morning at Brindle Hill Farm

You can't see Brindle Hill from the road. You take a left at the feed store, drive past a field that looks like every other field, and then the track turns to dirt and starts climbing. It's forty minutes from our back door, comfortably inside the hundred-and-twenty-kilometre line we keep for ourselves, and I try to go at least once a season.

Odette Brandt was already in the squash when we pulled up. She doesn't do greetings. She hands you a knife and points at a row.

Reading a squash

I used to think squash was squash. Odette taught me otherwise. She cuts one open in the field, right there, and makes you smell the inside before you taste it. The good ones smell faintly of hay and chestnut. The merely fine ones smell of nothing, and nothing is what they taste of once they're roasted.

She grows eleven kinds, most of them ugly. There's a grey one with warts that she says nobody wanted until three years ago. We bought all of it. It has a dense, almost sweet flesh that holds a hard sear, and it's why the lamb on the autumn menu now sits on a bed of it.

The arrangement

We pay Odette directly, every week, on the day the crates arrive. No broker, no thirty-day invoice. She told me once that the first year she sold to restaurants she nearly stopped, because waiting two months for money meant buying seed on a credit card. Paying on delivery isn't charity. It's the only way to keep a farm like hers close enough to drive to.

She also tells me what's coming before it's ready, which is the real value. A text on Tuesday: the late beans are going to be small, don't plan on them. That one sentence saves me a Wednesday of arguing with a crossed-out menu.

Biscuit

I should mention the dog. Biscuit is a thin, serious border collie who has decided the farm's visitors are livestock. He walked me in a slow circle for twenty minutes, nudging my heels until I stood where he wanted me, which turned out to be next to the apple trees. The apples aren't ready. Odette says ten days. But they were heavy and green-gold and I stood there with my knife thinking about dessert.

What I took home

Forty kilos of squash, a bag of windfall quince Odette said I could have for nothing, and an idea that wasn't on my list when I left the kitchen. The fifth course had been a pear thing. By the time we reached the bottom of the hill it was a baked apple, because I couldn't stop seeing those trees.

That's the whole reason to visit. You can read a supplier's spec sheet from your desk. You can't be herded by a dog into the answer to your own dessert.

We'll be back in October for the last of the harvest. If you want to know what it turned into, the stories archive has the rest of this season, and the autumn menu lands in a couple of weeks.