Very short hair and wide denim overalls on her tricycle, Isabella Rossellini looks like a farm boy. This Saturday in June, the actress and landowner pulls off the feat of escaping the luxurious country look (flowery muslin dress, wedge espadrilles and umbrella-sized capeline) adopted by the other inhabitants of Long Island who met in the garden of Early Girl Farm.
Every weekend, the small farm adjacent to Mama Farm, the farm-guesthouse of Isabella Rossellini and her daughter, former model and culinary author Elettra Wiedemann, welcomes subscribers to the CSA support program ( Community Supported Agriculture), set up by the two partner establishments. For an annual fee of a few hundred dollars, members leave with their arms full of kraft paper bags filled with fruits, vegetables, flowers, aromatic herbs, eggs, honey, cheese or homemade bread, produced according to strict organic standards.
Bamboo teepees and century-old trees
Descending from the steel steed that she uses to roam the plot with her two grandsons (Ronin, 4 years old, and Viggo River, 1 year and a half), installed in a basket at the back, Isabella Rossellini proposes that the we taste the dose, the Indian pancake made from rice and lentils, stuffed with vegetables and cream cheese, which her neighbor Patty Gentry, founder of Early Girl Farm, ritually cooks for her customers around noon.
Sitting at a wooden picnic table, the Italian-American actress praises Patty in perfect French, then speaks in Italian to Ronin, who nibbles on a piece of pancake while drinking the lyrics of “Nonna” (“grandmother”, in Italian). A few meters away, the little boy’s mother, Elettra Wiedemann, 38 years old and a teenager’s physique, chats with visitors without taking off her kitchen apron.
Sunflowers stand in vases next to fist-sized radishes (“normal, these are American radishes! », jokes Rossellini), packets of cereal pasta and sheep’s milk soaps lined up on colorful stalls: a delightful country market, as seen in American TV movies with rose water. In the background, the red and anthracite gray facade of Mama Farm stands out against a backdrop of hundred-year-old trees. Children play around a bamboo teepee, the animals doze in their enclosure… The atmosphere is light, carefree, a thousand leagues from the announcement of the revocation of the right to abortion pronounced the day before by the Supreme Court of UNITED STATES.
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