Farm Life: Growing Up Organic In Chatham County

BEAR CREEK, N.C. -- Over a breakfast of goat sweetbreads and rice, guacamole, cheese, yogurt, bread and cappuccino, brothers Ben and Abe Harman get their daily marching orders from their mother. Feed the dogs. Feed the chickens. Weed the squash garden. Pick okra. Pickle the okra. Mow the lawn. Cook beans for lunch.

The to-do list is light compared to most days.

"It's her wish list," Ben, 19, says, joking as he eyes the chores written on a small, white index card.

Not many teenagers have to-do lists like that. Few in the Triangle grow up on farms these days _ more likely they live on cul-de-sacs in subdivisions that used to be farms.

While the number of farms across the region has declined, the number in Chatham County has increased since 1987. And Chatham's proximity to the Triangle and relatively cheap land have helped make it an organic farm hub in the Southeast.

Ben and Abe, 16, live on Sustenance Farm, their family's organic farm in Chatham. Their home is a nearly 100-year-old farmhouse with no air conditioning.

The brothers have been helping around the farm since each was about 7, their mother said.

They do their work without complaint, but that does not mean they enjoy the manual labor.

"I like living in the country, but I'm not so keen on lots of work all the time," says Abe, who is a junior at Chatham Central High School.

And Ben, who is back at N.C. State University as a sophomore majoring in nuclear engineering, says he probably will not be a farmer when he graduates.

But both say they recognize the lessons they've learned from life on the farm that their peers growing up in the suburbs don't get.

"They got all these free handouts, but they don't know how to take care of themselves," Ben says.

The Harmans make every meal from scratch. The family doesn't even eat cereal from a box.

The brothers take turns preparing meals with their parents. Mom's the best cook, they said, but Ben and Abe know how to cook something for every meal of the day. And we mean really cook _ not the pull-it-out-of-the-freezer-to-microwave cook.

Ben has been known to make eclairs and shrimp etouffee. Abe is into vegetable stir fry because he can pick the vegetables from the garden. Their older brother Eli, 22, has flown the coop and lives in Raleigh, but he makes a mean borscht with homegrown beets and clam chowder, they said.

Ben and Abe also know how to improvise when ingredients aren't available. Where they live, it's not like they can pop over to the store in five minutes.

Breakfast is the family's main meal and the biggest meal of the day. That's when their parents, Nancy and Harvey Harman, dole out the daily duties. In the summer, the chores take all morning. Then, Ben and Abe have the afternoon to themselves. That's when the brothers, who love movies, watch their latest from Netflix.

It's a recent summer morning, and the brothers, up since 7 a.m., are washing the breakfast dishes.

Their dad has already left for work. Their mother, a midwife, heads out, and the boys put on their shoes _ Ben a pair of flip-flops, Abe a pair of work boots _ and start the jobs on their mother's list.

Ben feeds the chickens. Abe feeds the dogs.

The sun beats down. It's not even 9 a.m., and already it's hot and muggy. The ground is muddy and wet from morning dew, and mosquitoes have detected their fresh flesh.

But the two never mention the heat or the pesky insects. They finish up with the animals and walk about a half-mile to the back of the farm to weed the squash garden.

Ben and Abe work well together _ they have to if they want to be done by noon. They often finish each other's sentences. But they bicker, too. It's nothing personal, they say. It's just a way to pass the time.

"Did you just kill that squash?" Ben asks his brother as he pulls a squash vine up with some weeds.

"No, it's still alive," Abe says.

"It needs to be attached to a vine," Ben says.

Then Ben says they'll need to pick some dill for pickling the okra.

"We're not making any cucumber pickles?" Abe asks.

"No," Ben says.

"Well, that's what you pickle," Abe says.

"You can pickle anything. Pickling is a process," Ben says.

Their father, who is revered in the organic farming community, has passed his knowledge about sustainable farming to his sons.

"There is something healthy about being around plants and animals," says Harvey Harman, who teaches in the sustainable farming program at Central Carolina Community College. "You have a different perspective on life."

He's proud, he said, that his boys have a well-rounded set of skills. Whether they live on a farm as grown-ups, they know how to cook and garden, he says. They're both mechanical and handy at home projects, too, he says.

The boys move on to picking okra.

"You've got to get the okra early, otherwise they get woody or fibrous," Ben says. "And that's no fun."

"And people have enough trouble already with the slime," says Abe, who admits he dislikes the traditional Southern vegetable.

Once they fill up a plastic bowl, they move inside to pickle.

There isn't enough vinegar, but that's not a problem. Ben mixes in some leftover pickle juice.

Abe washes the jars and puts the vinegar mixture on the stove. Ben stuffs the jars with okra, garlic cloves, dill and mustard seed. Then he pours vinegar over the vegetables.

The only thing left on the list is to mow and cook lunch.

Abe agrees to mow.

It's too early to cook lunch, so Ben moves outside to the garden again and takes on an extra job. With a rake, he prepares a row for beet and kale seeds, and looks forward to returning to college, where he only sweats over exams.

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Information from: The News & Observer, http://www.newsobserver.com