Hello, Dear Folks!

It’s Memorial Day Monday, early morning, cool and beautiful outside. I wouldn’t be inside except that I’ve been out the last two days solid, I’ve put this letter off too long, and I have a minute before Marsha calls me for chicken-coop building.

We have our nice gypsy-mobile chicken house for the layers, but our brood of this year’s chicks are rapidly outgrowing their dark little indoor space. They need to get out in the sun. We can’t put them in with the big chickens yet; they’re too small and would get savaged. So we’re going to enclose an overhanging section of shed roof to make a summer chickenhouse. In September, when I do in the two-year-old layers, we’ll move the new ones, just beginning to lay, into the chickenmobile with the other grownups.

* * *

Five in the afternoon now, because Marsha came and claimed me. She’s a fairly accomplished carpenter with many of the right tools. I’m a total doofus. We both tend to proceed along the lines of “do that which you can see how to do and figure out the problems as you run into them.” Problems such as a door for the chickens to get out. Or how to make the boards come together over there in that tricky corner. So we had a great time today bumbling our way along.

When I left Marsha a minute ago we were maybe halfway along but still had no idea about the chicken door. Fortunately Phil Bush, a CobbHillian who’s far more advanced along carpentry lines than I, stopped in for a visit, so we lured him into our tar baby. As I left, he was getting creative in very refreshing ways.

It has been an amazing afternoon, Cobb-Hill-wise. Seems like just about everyone decided to drop in for one reason or another. Art and Marie ran over twice from the Curtis house — and I promised to drop in at their place later today to help Marie sort out the weeds from the perennials in Jane Curtis’s old garden. Marc Rosenbaum, our energy engineer, dropped in fand gave us some useful chicken house construction advice. Phil and Judith Bush pulled in at the same time as Ann Armbrecht and her toddler Willow. Phil Rice and Beth Sawin walked across the field from their house, as they do almost every day, with three-year-old Jenna, who likes to throw grass to the chickens (which the chickens greatly appreciate). Susan Morgan showed up for a walk up on the hill. Gail Holmes came over to spend the day helping Kerry set out a gazillion flowers — along with Kerry and Stephen’s amazing, cheerful, hard-working intern Charlotte, who works here several days a week and always lightens the place with a sweet light.

Felt so good. Felt like it maybe will feel when a whole community lives here.

Back behind the Hunt house, and in the long perennial row I’ve put along the drive, Marsha and I have been working like beavers, fighting witchgrass, getting in raspberries and grapes and kiwis and potatoes and dry beans and roses and a million other things. Such fun! And the place is beginning to look civilized.

All it took was the month of May, all it took was to claim a small patch of this land and plant something, to make me feel fully at home at last on this new farm. I was amazed to discover that orioles sing in Hartland as well as in Plainfield. Not only that, but there are more of them here, and they come right down to the blooming apple trees by our new garden to do their singing. I didn’t really think Foundation Farm was the only place on the planet where orioles sing, but I did think of the orioles there (probably many generations of orioles) as kind of special and uniquely important to my happiness.

The Hunt farm not only has orioles, it has a new bird I never heard before — a warbling vireo, loudly busy every day in the silver maples trees in the front yard. We have lots of bluebirds here. Up in the woods we have pileated woodpeckers and black-billed cuckoos and warblers I still haven’t figured out. (We also have pigeons and English sparrows, alas, which we never saw at FF. The pigeons have learned to fly into the chicken house and help themselves to the expensive organic grain. I’m threatening to open up a side business in organic squab.)

It’s much more open here, much windier. More stars and fewer blackflies — there have only been a few bothersome blackflydays the whole month of May — that’s a first!

Marsha’s and my new garden is right along Mace Hill Road, which means when we’re out there working we see every passerby, and they see us. A big change from FF, where our gardens were secluded. But not a bad change. Gardens are a way for neighbors to get acquainted. “Watcha plantin’ there?” “Ever see such a cold, wet, cloudy spring?” “Hey, I’m dividing my iris, could you use a few?” “Aren’t the lilacs beautiful this year?”

Hartland is full of grand old lilac bushes. The cold, cloudy spring has made the lilacs stay at full bloom for weeks. The place is purple all over (and white, because there are many old white lilacs too). It smells glorious and looks spectacular. What a beautiful town we have come to!

The Hunt house has only one big old purple lilac, but now I’ve planted a whole row of them, nine varieties, to line Mace Hill Road. Some day they’ll screen the garden from the traffic and add to the beauty of the road. I’ve also planted a line of 14 old-variety apple trees along the top of the gravel pit that John Hunt dug, to bring some beauty to an ugly place.

I had been avoiding going back to Foundation Farm, especially when spring started up, because I thought it would hurt too much. But I went back this month to dig up a few more perennials and herbs to transplant, and you know what I thought, as I pulled into the driveway? “Boy, this place is LITTLE! And closed in. Too many trees.”

I guess we can say at this point that the transfer has taken!

* * *

Just went out to check, and Marsha and Phil have the chicken summer house essentially finished. Just have to screen the door, build a roost, and haul in some woodchips and we can move the little peepers in.

Let’s see. Something other than farming must have happened this month.

It feels like a month of proposal writing, which is good, high time. Sustainability Institute is getting dangerously low in funds at the same time our crew is hitting a great stride with the work. We are going to have to take a summer lull (which Phil and Beth were going to do in any case, because they are about to have a baby).

All three commodity projects — corn, forests, shrimp — have preliminary models that are fascinating and revealing and, though there is more modeling work to be done, ready to be taken public. Last week Drew Jones presented the forest model to the NH state forester and his staff, along with a representative of the VT state forestry office and the modelers who are building the huge US Forest Service model of New England forests.

We’re always a little nervous presenting before other modelers, because there’s such an opportunity for nit-picking and professional jealousy. But so far, with shrimp and now with forests, it has gone wonderfully. The Forest Service model is about tree inventories only. Its job is to keep track of species and age classes as they grow, die, or are harvested all over New England. As you might expect, that takes a tremendous number of numbers. But it is, as one of the modelers readily admitted, “an accounting model.” Ours has a simple section on the trees growing, dying, and being cut, but it is embedded in a complex feedback structure representing the decisions of mills to buy timber and landowners to sell, markets and prices and people’s responses to them, changing mill technologies. So we unfold a picture that is not nearly so detailed on the level of trees, but rich with the dynamics of the unfolding pattern of the forest economy.

The model says that New England’s pulp mills are likely to slowly die (they are antiquated), while its sawmills grow rapidly (as they have been doing for several decades), and overshoot the ability of the forest to supply them. Fifty years from now the sawmill sector will be in a long decline, hardwood forests will be mostly young poles, while pulp trees accumulate — until a new pulp user, such as chip mills or OSB mills comes in to scoop up the resource. There are ways to avoid this future, of course, and the model can test them. But they aren’t simple ways. The system is inherently oscillatory, with 50-100 year long ups and downs, as the forests grow, the mills grow to use them, the mills overshoot, the forest declines, the mills decline, the forest starts regrowing, etc.

New England has already experienced one such cycle and we’re well on our way to the second, if we do nothing about it. When you have one huge and slowly changing stock (mills) trying to stay in balance with another (trees) with no quick, clear signal connecting them, it’s just about impossible (but not totally impossible) to come to a sustainable balance. And most of the things people do to survive in this system — such as inventing technologies to use 7-inch diameter trees instead of 16-inch trees — just make it worse.

That’s the message of the model. NH’s state forester is a smart and nice guy. He was intrigued. Interestingly, he believed the possibility of a 40-year decline in the sawmill industry; what he didn’t believe was that there is any way to avoid it. So we have some work to do there. The modelers in the room — and this has been true in every commodity presentation we’ve made so far — were fascinated with the scope and ease and dynamics of the model. They turned out to be our supporters in the discussion.

This is good work. Turning out better than I had expected, especially now that it’s going out into the public. Just have to write more proposals to keep it funded, until the involved industries and governments see that it’s in their own best interest to pick it up themselves.

I’d better quit; I have to go make a chicken roost.

Love,

Dana