Memories of Farms I've Loved: Land's Sake

Pie at the farm stand at 7 am - apple, raspberry, rhubarb, blueberry; tomato baseball in late August at Miriam Street; planting squash in early May in the late afternoon, the day a perfect spring blue; countless delicious potluck lunches of astounding variety; the classic farm lunch: tomato-basil-mozzarella sandwiches, made possible by the jugs of olive oil and balsamic at the stand, Erik's bread and cheese runs, and our own unbeatable tomatoes and basil; eating Aunt Ruby's tomatoes like apples in the fields; Sundays in late fall; teatime with Johanna, Emily and Eliza; taking down tomato stakes; harvesting potatoes (and making up silly songs about the gory of banana fingerlings); cleaning onions and garlic under sharp fall skies; spinach, mustard greens, and baby kale under tunnels of remay in late November; tractor lessons; the stand piled high with winter squash, onions, potatoes, and greens; high tomato season; washing kale veined with silver in cold water under high blue October skies; the familiar harvest board; massive July harvests of beans and peas and greens and beets and carrots, lettuce and arugula, radishes, turnips, and eggplant; taste-testing six varieties of corn every morning in August; afternoons alone in the back fields, hoeing onions, deadheading zinnias, hand weeding carrots; the family of wild turkeys; two quarts of berries a day during strawberry season; sunlight on the torch sunflowers and dianthus in the front garden; knowing a place and being known by it.

Early Morning

At five in the morning, it is still dark when I climb down my ladder. There's a pink streak on the horizon, and birds are already singing. My routine is always the same. I come into the silent kitchen, boil water for tea, sit down at the wooden table, and write.

There is something sacred about the between-time, the transition from night into day, this dusky, quiet hour before the house and the world are quite awake. I love being awake to watch the day brighten before my eyes. The color of the sky changes and slowly the shapes of trees appear out of darkness. The sun rises over the fields behind the kitchen, and since I write facing west, the first I see of it is the reflection of light on the birches across the road, all of them bathed in a glowing orange-gold. That's when I put down my pen, take my mug of tea, and go stand by the backdoor to watch the light slide up over the trees and spill into the fields and the house.

On days like today, misty and grey, there is no sunrise. Just a gentle lightening of the shades of grey, the deep blues and blacks slowly fading into white, the day opening softly before me. The house is absolutely still. I walk slowly and quietly, so as not to disturb the magic of the hour. I do my best writing now, at dawn, in the space between yesterday and today, these before-breakfast hours free of responsibilities and obligations.

The changing of the light. Enough time to wake up slowly and fully, to ease into the morning. The company of creatures who don't speak: an orange cat, birds singing in all the trees. It is a great blessing, and a luxury, in these sweet dawn hours before chores, to witness the simple miracle of another day creeping into the world.

Light

This is my future...what do you think?

In our six-week agricultural business planning class, I've been hard at work trying to solidify and clarify my dreams and plans for the future into a compelling, articulate, and practical form (i.e. a business plan). Here's the business description. Does it make you want to come to the Open Hearth for a delicious, welcoming, joyful dinner of roasted asparagus, white bean soup with ramps, and a springy green salad? (You can tell it's the middle of April and I'm pining for the end of May...)

Good Folk Farm and Open Hearth is a small, inter-sufficient community farm and open kitchen that provides public meals several times a week for our local community. Our nourishing, seasonal meals feature our own farm-grown produce, milk and eggs, and meat, grains and dry beans from local farmers. We have no menu; meals are severed family style and change depending on the season. At the core of our philosophy is the promise that everyone will be welcomed to our table, regardless of ability to pay monetarily. We believe that sustainable economies are local, diverse, and support the needs of all community members. To that end, we accept a wide range of payment, including work trades, specific skills, money, goods and services, and volunteer time. We strive not only to provide real food and real nourishment for our community, but to instill a sense of wonder and gratitude in all who eat at our table and to reawaken each other to the importance of our connection to the natural world. Through the simple, meaningful daily practices of farming, cooking, and sharing meals, we act as a catalyst for community-driven social and environmental change.

The Open Hearth is community space. We are open Wednesday through Friday, 7-5, and weekends from 10-5. We serve family-style dinners and lunches three days a week, brunch on Saturdays, and host an open soup and bread potluck every Sunday afternoon. Between sit-down meals, the kitchen is open for self-serve seasonal food: fresh bread and baked goods, soup, salads, and sandwiches, hot beverages and of course, desserts. The Open Hearth is a great place to enjoy a cup of locally-grown peppermint tea and a carrot muffin, meet with friends (or meet new ones), enjoy the sunshine on the porch, or settle in with a book and a bowl of tomato soup. Throughout the year, we host a wide variety of events: skill workshops in anything from food preservation and home cheese-making to planning accessible gardens, dance parties, book groups, lectures and concerts, cooking classes, farm tours and community work days.

Our farm is located on ten beautiful acres, and the land is the center of everything we do. We grow and preserve 100% of the produce we serve in our kitchen, as well as enough to support the small community of adults who work at Good Folk. Though we are not certified, we farm using organic practices, without any chemical inputs. Our dairy cow and small herd of dairy goats provide us with all of our milk, homemade yogurt, and fresh cheese. We raise a small flock of grass-fed Icelandic sheep for meat and fiber, and keep laying hens, which happily follow our cows through the pasture. Our land supports a diverse range of wildlife, native and cultivated plants, perennial fruits, and domestic animals. We envision a dynamic farming system that is self-sustaining, reliant on our neighbor farmers, business-owners and craftspeople, and beneficial to our land and community. Year round, we do everything we can to rejuvenate, rather than wear down, our soil. From planting cover crops and making our own compost, to sustainably managing our woodlot, baking our own bread and sharing meals with anyone who chances by our farm, we are actively creating the kind of world in which we want to live.

Common Farm Things

I love the weight of common farm things - hay bales, a sack of pig feed tossed over my shoulder, April's harness jingling as I carry it from the barn to the make-shift hitching post. I love the way the weight of two water buckets slides up the muscles of my arms like a living thing. I love the solid weight of a good forkful of hay, a full basket of still-warm eggs, dark soil turned with a garden fork, a wheelbarrow full of manure. The milk pail, a full bucket of tomatoes, the warmth of a chicken tucked under my arm. A handful of broccoli seeds, a 3-day old lamb, a flat of onions.

Saturday at Maggie's

I woke up at 7 am, my room, blessed with an east-facing window, flooded with sunlight. These days sleeping till 7 seems late; my body won't let me sleep any later than 8 or so. It's the best rhythm I've ever been on. I get up at 5, with the first glimmer of light. The sun doesn't rise until just before six, but the sky is dusky already at 5, and the pale shapes of trees are visible out my window. It's nothing like waking up in the winter in complete, silent darkness. I'm in bed by 8:30, usually, and I sleep a solid eight hours. I love this rhythm. I'm full of energy all day long and exhausted enough to sleep well at day's end. I feel intimately connected to the sunlight, the morning and evening sounds of animals, the flow of the day through the farm in a way I never have before.

The house is quiet at 7. I make my morning pot of hot water, honey, and lemon juice. We don't have an electric tea kettle at the farm, and one thing I've come to love is the ritual of actually boiling water on the stove. Every morning here begins the same way - filling the kettle, waiting for the steam to rise and the whistle to sing through the house, using the red dishtowel that always hangs on the stove to pour hot water into the waiting pot. This morning, I made fried eggs on sprouted wheat bagels (delicious) and took everything outside to eat on the stone steps in the perennial garden behind the kitchen. I shared my breakfast with copious amounts of sunlight, the morning scuffling of chickens, and the farm's first spring flowers.
The day quickly turned into one of those misty, gray spring days, damp clouds hanging in the sky, rain spattering the fields. Motor and I decided it would be best spent on the couch. I read, Motor napped.
Several chapters and many pleasant cat-dreams later, I decided it was time to do some baking. Slow, lazy weekend days beg for the scent of cinnamon and honey, or buttery biscuits, or fresh bread. After a week without it during Passover, I have been reveling in bread for the past few days, and enjoying my share of bagels, home-baked cookies (oatmeal honey) and, this afternoon, applesauce-spice cake with maple-cream glaze.
While the cake baked (and the house was gratifyingly perfumed with the smell of applesauce, nutmeg, cloves, and toasty pecans), I swept the kitchen floor. I adore simple, rhythmic handwork - shelling peas, shucking corn, washing dishes, grooming horses, sweeping. I don't know what it is about the particular motion of sweeping, but it brings out the silence of the kitchen, and somehow deepens the stillness of the afternoon.

The afternoon passed much like the morning. A piece of spicy, maple-flavored applesauce cake, a glass of raw milk from Chase Hill Farm (the coolest farm we've visited this year), and many delightful pages of Bujold's newest book.

Stella made a delcious pot of lentil soup with carrots, onions, tomatoes and potatoes for dinner. Which was exaclty what I wanted: hardy, warming, and delicious. Now it's time to check on the sheep and shut the chickens in, and I'll still have a few solid hours to read before my bedtime.

A Walk Through the Greenhouse in Mid-April

Our seed potatoes came. We won't be planting them for a few weeks, so for now they are living in the greenhouse. Soon they'll sprout, and then we'll cut them into pieces and put them in the ground.

Dill...and what looks like some Toscana kale. How did that get there?

More potted herbs. This is one of my favorite tables in the greenhouse - about ten pots full of dill, cilantro, parsley, thyme and oregano, all of them studded with volunteer (or accidental) brassicas.

Parsley and scallions.

Napa cabbage and lettuce.

Scallions and parsley again. The parsley looks so good I want to eat it right now, but I'll be patient and wait until it's of a more appropriate size.

We put our onions in the ground today (almost a half acre - our first big transplant of the season) and our brassicas are in the cold frames, so the greenhouse is realitivly empty. Our big planting of tomatoes is germinating on heat mats, along with the peppers and eggplant. Keeping them company are these lush, green flats of parsley, scallions, and letuce, as well as fennel, radicchio, celeriac, leeks, bok choy, assorted flowers for the home garden, and herbs. The greenhouse is a good place to be right now.

And so is the field. We planted what Nate hopes will be between 1500-2000 pounds of storange onions, as well as sweet onions and bunching onions. It was a glorious, warm spring day, the sky deep blue, the pastures greening up, the soil warm and comforting on my bare feet. Halelujah for the beginning of the season of long days outdoors, planting, weeding, hoeing, harvesting, for sun late into the evening and the never-ending, always satisfying work of hands.

A Towering Pile of 'Farmer's Gold'

This isn't nearly all the manure our cows have made for us this winter, but it's a good portion of it. Right now it is sitting in the sun, cooking - next year it'll be lush orchard grass and red clover (which will be digested by one of nature's most miraculous creatures, the ruminant, and turn into beef), beautiful marbled purple eggplants and fingerling potatoes, and gorgeous stands of oats and peas (which provide our fields with free nitrogen and keep the soil healthy over the winter).

This is one of the things I love most about farming - this constant, seasonal cycling of waste and nutrients, this simple process that ties each growing, living thing on the farm to everything else, this endless web of connection, this magical transformation.

April sunshine is glorious.

Forks

Perhaps the most indispensable tool on a farm (an impossible choice - a sharp pocket knife, the ubiquitous 5-gallon bucket, a pair of sturdy rubber boots, a screwdriver, vice-grips...how can you choose?), forks come in many shapes. This afternoon, before we returned to fixing the tongue on the chicken tractor, we sat in the sun with Olivier and talked about the various kinds.

Pitchforks refer to any kind of fork used for moving, scooping, and throwing material (hay, manure, gravel, compost, etc.) The two most commonly used kind of pitchfork are the hay fork, and the manure fork.

The manure fork usually has between 5-8 (and sometimes more) closely spaced tines, which makes it the perfect tool for scooping up manure, compost, and matted bedding.The hay fork usually has only 3 (and sometimes 2) widely spaced tines. This makes it easy to hoist it into a pile of lose hay and gather up a large amount in one forkful. The hay balances on the tines; any more would create too much resistance, and the fork wouldn't easily slide into the pile and catch the hay.
Then there are garden forks, which refer to any fork used to dig and turn soil. These forks are not for lifting. Their short, flat tines (usually 4) work like a shovel. Garden forks are the ideal tool for turning beds, incorporating compost, and digging holes.

Pigs!

Pigs are not my favorite animal, but it has been a pleasure taking care of our piglets this week. We got them at about five weeks, and by now they are almost two months old. They are getting bigger by the day. They (lucky pigs!) get to live in this sturdy, handmade A-frame, where I find all seven of them curled up in the back corner every morning. We built the A-frame with two pieces of corrugated metal roofing, screwed to three pieces of wood (you can just see the bottom one poking out on the left.) The entire back wall can be unscrewed in one piece and the two sides separated, so we can move the pigs relatively easily.

I would probably be curled up with my litter-mates, too, if I were a pig, because even though the days have been gorgeous and sunny, it's been cold enough to freeze their water every night. That's one of the reasons rubber boots are so essential. A few stomps and their water is free and clear. (Although even though we change it three times a day, it never stays clean. Pigs love sticking their faces in the mud!)Pigs love rooting. They've only been in this enclosure a little more than a week, and they've already uprooted all the grass. We're using them to reclaim this area. it is very wet, and full of shrubs and brush. As the pigs move down the strip, tearing everything out, we'll be able to much better manage the (hopefully) field. Later in the summer, we're going to fence them into a big section of scrubby woods at the end of one of our big pastures. Having them in there will help clear up some of the debris. Farmers are using pigs, and their innate love of sticking their face in the dirt, in some pretty cool ways.Eating, of course, is a very serious business with pigs, and just about anything will do. Which is convient for us, because, sharing a house with ten other people, Tupperware of beans, roasted root vegetables, and leftover mac n' cheese inevitably get forgotten in the back of the fridge and are discovered weeks later covered in mold. Luckily, we live on a farm, where practically nothing is wasted. The pigs eat up every last kitchen scrap we toss at them, and next fall, the new students will be eating bacon for breakfast.

Lag Bolts vs. Lag Screws

Top: lag bolt.
Bottom: lag screw.

Please don't interrupt me.

I've decided to implement a zero-interruption policy for myself. It seems like a small thing, but I think interruption is a more serious problem than most people realize. If you are having a meal with a big group of people, or are at a meeting - pay attention to how often a person can finish a thought before someone interrupts. Here at Maggie's, it usually doesn't take more than ten minutes before five people are talking at once.

I've been trying to pay close attention to my own interrupting habits over the last few days. I tend to interrupt most when:
1. I think I know what the other person is going to say.
2. I am excited about what someone is saying and am impatient to respond.
3. I am thinking about what I am going to say instead of listening to the other person and can't wait to say it.
4. I know the same piece of information the other person is sharing, and, for some reason, want to say it myself.

So, in the interest of building community, being kind, paying attention, taking up less space, learning from the people around me, engaging in real conversation, slowing down, and actually listening to people, places and creatures, I am not going to interrupt anymore.

I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Useful Stuff

Ever wonder what the difference between a lag bolt and a lag screw is? I thought so!

A lag screw works in the same way a regular screw does - the threads on the screw bite into the wood and keep it in place. Like a bolt, it has a head on top, usually a hex.

The threads on a lag bolt do not catch the wood. Instead, you pre-drill a hole, slide the bolt through, and sandwich the bolt with nuts on either side. The threads are only there to hold the nuts in place.

Will and I spent the morning repairing the tongue on our mobile chicken tractor. It was originally made with wood, which broke last season, so we are replacing it with metal. The design is simple: today we cut two metal plates and drilled holes in them. The plates with be welded to a metal tube (the body of the tongue), and we will attach the plates to two-by-fours on the frame of the coop with...you guessed it...lag bolts!

We are about a third of the way through this process. Tools involved so far have been: an impact driver with a ratchet attachment, a hammer, two pairs of channel locks, a monkey wrench, a drill and two different sized bits, a skill saw with the metal-cutting blade attached, the wire brush, and a hand-held grinder. We haven't even gotten to welding yet.

It takes a lot of different bits and pieces to run a successful farm!

One Million Things I Love

Last summer, I made the somewhat rash announcement that I could name one million things I love. My housemates thought this was an impossible feat. I decided to find out. The point, I realized, is not to write down one million things I love, but to revel in detail. It is an exercise in paying very close attention. So here they are, numbers 1-25.

1. Aunt Ruby's German Green tomato
2. 100 Years of Solitude
3. apples and honey
4. ekutus (Ghanaian oranges)
5. really good roast chicken with garlic and herbs
6. jars of home-canned tomato sauce on wooden pantry shelves
7. baked onion and cheese soup
8. Ave Verum Corpus
9. yellow onions in the sunlight
10. fresh sage
11. sunlight on wooden floors
12. a pot of Russian caravan tea in the late afternoon
13. hard cold October rain
14. apple cider
15. the first planting of the season, and the sweet soreness in my muscles afterward
16. drinking beer and listening to the Red Sox on the porch in early summer
17. fresh black ink drying on white paper
18. The Old Man and the Sea
19. homemade pumpkin butter
20. the cottonwood tree at Knoll Farm
21. roasted red peppers
22. cumin
23. fresh-caught grilled bluefish
24. A Moveable Feast
25. napping in the sun in early spring

I love farming!

Isn't it obvious?

Detail

The weight of cold water in two buckets, the familiar ache in my muscles, every day, the sun just up, walking down the lane to the edge of the woods, the clear cascade of water into the pigs’ trough, their little grunts, the trees behind me orange with sunlight, the sky diamond-blue over Tully Mountain, wind in my face, the scent of spring hay and old barn, chickens talking, cows eating, early morning.

Photos

Spring at Maggie's.

A Partial List of What I've Learned This Year

How to slaughter and eviscerate chickens, how to water a greenhouse, how to plow the driveway with the tractor bucket, how to sharpen a knife, how to build a hot bed with horse manure, straw bales, and plastic, how to prune raspberries, blueberries and grapes, how to tie a sheet-bend and a bowline, how to rearrange a poorly positioned lamb inside the ewe, how to pick a horse's hooves, how to ear tag, administer a subcutaneous injection, and dock and castrate lambs with an elastrater, how to take an animal's temperature, how to hand milk a cow, how to harness, hitch, and unhitch a team of draft horses, how to make butter in a mason jar, how to make mozzarella cheese, how to trim sheep hooves, how to fell, buck and limb trees, how to seed peas and spinach with a tractor, how to attach and detach tractor implements with the three-point hitch, how to approach animals without scaring them, how to make lacto-fermented sodas, how to read a soil test, how to sharpen a shovel.

The difference between first, second and third cut hay, what cation exchange capacity is, the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in a healthy compost pile (30:1), what to do if you wake up in the middle of the night and one of your ewes is dead, the ideal pH for growing most vegetables (between 6.2 and 6.8), that even after spending a month in Italy, I still think New England is the most beautiful place on earth, why you sometimes find brown, rotted-out spots in the center of otherwise healthy-looking broccoli (due to a boron deficiency), that goats can escape from almost any fencing set-up, and how to get them back (spend an hour at least chasing them, calling them, and attempting to lure them toward you with grain), why no-till and limited-till systems are good for your soil (less compaction), that insulated muck boots are worth every penny of the $70 I paid for them, what a hoggit is (a yearling sheep that hasn't been bred before), what it means when a farmer says a cow is about to freshen (give birth), that it is not easy to age Camembert cheese in a Tupperware container in your basement (but worth trying), that raw milk is 100 times more delicious than pasteurized milk (it actually has flavor!), why it is so important that a mama ewe licks her baby immediately after it is born (not only to warm it up and dry it off, but because the licking actually stimulates the lamb's instinct to suckle), the proper depth for planting seeds (twice the width of the seed), how important it is to sweep the kitchen floor daily, and that my favorite hours of the day are between five and seven in the morning.

To be continued.

Spring!

Spring is on its way. Our first planting of peas and spinach are in the ground, and both have germinated. (A discovery made after a couple minutes of digging around in the soil looking for the seeds. After he found a few fat green pea seeds with little roots trailing off of them, Nate said we should probably be patient and let the plants do their own thing. But digging around in the soil is one of the best things about farming!)

Our greenhouse is full. Lettuce, fennel, radicchio, celeriac, lots of flowers, peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes! And our cold frames are full, too - beautiful leafy brassicas (kale, collards, kohlrabi, broccoli, cabbage), swiss chard, and lots lots of onions, slated to go into the ground at the end of the week.

We have eleven lambs tumbling around the barn. If you haven't seen a week-old lamb jump a foot in the air just for the hell of it, you owe yourself a visit to Maggie's and a hour in the sun with these small, sweet, perky creatures. Their names, in case you were wondering, are: Buster Baker, Sugar Magnolia and Garcia (first triplets born a few weeks ago now), Henry and Pearl (the biggest, healthiest, funniest little white lambs we have), Birch and Ash (black and white twins), Lucy and Lana (black twins), little Athena (whose poor mama had a difficult birth - first i had to rearrange the lamb inside her, and then it took two of us pulling with all our strength to get her out), and Rose, the sweetest newest addition to our crew of lambs.

We still have three ewes hanging on to their babies, and we've lost one. Though you wouldn't know it to watch the lambs frolicking in the sun and nosily suckling on their mamas, we have had our share of hardships this season. It stated when #30, our oldest ewe, had a bad vaginal prolapse. A prolapse is when, due to an enormous about of pressure on the cervix, the tissue of the vagina is actually turned inside-out and falls out of the ewe. I happened to be on chores when this happened, and twice I pushed the whole mess of tissue back inside, but it kept falling out, so we called the vet, who stitched her up. #30 gave birth to three healthy babies, who are doing great, but she prolapsed again a few days later, which is very uncommon. She's still stitched up, and we're hoping she'll last through the summer, but the poor girl is in rough shape.

One of the problems with sheep is that they have been overly domesticated, and over hundreds of years, overbred for certain qualities: to have two or three (or four) lambs, to have big babies, and to to have good carcass quality. All this overbreeding has led to more complications during pregnancy and birth, as well as the tendency of mamas to reject their babies and not let them suckle. Luckily, there are a some wilder, less domesticated breeds out there, such as the Icelandic, who tend to have less of these problems.

The worst thing that happened this season was losing #32 and the babies (at least two) she had inside her. I woke up in the middle of the night to voices in the hall, and went out to the barn expecting a birth. Instead, there was a ewe lying on her back, dead, with all her intestines spilled out on the ground. Needless to say , it was a terrible, shocking hour. It took four of us to lift her up and get her out of there. In the morning, Jennifer called the vet, who said most likely what happened was that one of her lambs, kicking, actually ruptured the wall of the uterus. This is rare, but it can happen when a mother is carrying so much weight in lambs that the uterus gets big to accommodate them all, the walls thin out, and when a lamb kicks, it can puncture the whole organ. When this happens, there is nothing you can do.

Farming is not easy, or comfortable, and it certainly isn't always fun. But there are chives up in the garden, daffodils blooming already, and the peepers are singing at dusk. Yesterday we raked the mulch of the strawberries to let the light in, and I've been eating almost all meals on the porch. Mud season is just about over; the cow paddock is walkable (sort of). Last week we heard the ground thawing, water moving under the soil. The forsythia is greening up, and the maple buds tint the forest red. Best of all, our garlic is up! A half-acre of tiny green shoots poking through the straw, who, like us, have survived a long winter.

No, farming is not easy or comfortable. Springtime brings death along with the mess of greenery, the frisky lambs, the longer days. But spring on a farm is the best place to be. And if you're lucky enough to be me, being on a farm is always the best place - the only place - to be.