Dear Folks,

Warm, breezy summer afternoon, clouds coming up, severe thunderstorm warning. That’ll be par for the course; it has rained nearly every day this month, wonderful for the veggies, disaster for the hay.

Farmers are never satisfied. Dear God, dear Universe, dear Weathermaker, it would be so simple. Four days of bright, warm, breezy sunshine followed by an overnight inch of rain, repeat from April through October, and we’d be so happy.

Fat chance!

Last year by this time we were praying for rain and wouldn’t get it until the hurricanes started blowing through in September. This year it’s a good thing we’re on the well-drained, Hinckley loam of the Hunt farm. Clay soil like that of Foundation Farm would be perpetual wet cement. As it is, we’re off to a slow but good start on all gardens — Marsha’s and mine to the south of the house (peas, parsnips, herb, flowers, raspberries, strawberries, and varieties of potatoes and beans and corn that Stephen and Kerry don’t grow) — and Stephen and Kerry’s six-acre CSA garden to the north of us.

That garden is twice the size of the one they had last year. It has to supply not only the Mt. Tom farmers market and the Upper Valley Food Coop, but also the 62 subscribing CSA families. Weekly CSA distributions have started now, and here’s another difference from the old farm on the other side of the river — 23 subscribing families are from right here in Hartland. We never had so many local buyers in Plainfield, maybe because Foundation Farm was much less visible, not so much in the middle of the village. It’s lovely to have so many of our customers be our neighbors. Thursday evenings, when they pull in to pick up their baskets, it’s like a party. (At the moment the baskets are full of mesclun, lettuce, spinach, radishes, scallions, bok choy, endive — yum!)

To keep up this huge garden, Kerry and Stephen have help not only from wonderful intern Charlotte, but from three Cobb Hill members (Marsha, Susan Morgan and me) who earn veggie shares from weeding, and now Kerry’s younger sisters Rachel and Angelica are here for the summer to help, too. Even with all those workers, at this time of year it’s a close fight between the veggies and the weeds. But even with the close fight, there’s an enormous amount of lovely food growing out there. There seem to be fewer of most of the nasty insects — potato beetle, flea beetle, cucumber beetle — than there were at Foundation Farm, except for cutworms. I hardly ever saw a cutworm in Plainfield. K&S say the cutworms here have probably cut some of the veggies, especially peppers and eggplant, by 15%.

It’s constantly breezy here, so working out in the big garden is a pleasure, even on hot days. Killdeers keen over our heads — KILLDEEEEER! KILLDEEEEER! — and nest right on the ground between the rows — K&S go out of their way to avoid the nests when they come through cultivating with the horses, especially since we read that killdeer feed on mosquitoes, flea beetles, cucumber beetles, and all our other most unfavorite insects. Maybe that’s why we don’t have so many pests — because we have so many killdeer — and barn swallows. Our old barns are alive with swallows, who spend their days swooping over the yard catching blackflies.

The killdeer nests are hatching out now. Though the nests are so well camouflaged that they’re nearly invisible, Charlotte and Kerry and Stephen, who are out there every day, usually manage to see the hatchings. Within hours little fluffballs are running around, moving so fast they’d never be catchable.

We also have savannah sparrows out there, a new species to me, with a high-pitched tsee-tsee-tsee song. They perch on the handle of a parked wheel-hoe and tsee at me as I grub along weeding one of the endless carrot rows.

The peas are blooming.

The thorny bushes Barbie Hunt planted alongside the kitchen door have blossomed into sweet-smelling old-fashioned pink roses.

The long perennial garden alongside the driveway, most of which I transplanted from Foundation Farm, is just finishing its iris phase and moving into tiger lily and daylily.

We have a huge green salad with multiple kinds of greens and herbs every night for dinner.

The three sisters are making pizza tonight. They’vejust made TEN pizzas, most of which they’ll freeze. We’re discussing a business called Three Sisters Frozen Pizza.

Kerry’s pager is crackling with warnings of the coming thunderstorm. She’s a full-scale EMT now and goes hustling out day or night to all the local car crashes and fires and heart attacks. Hanging out with the emergency response team proves to be a terrific way to get all the town gossip.

The sky is darkening; the first low rumblings of thunder are still far away on the other side of Cobb Hill. My half-grown white rock chicks, the ones Marsha and I were building a shelter for last month, are slowly gathering themselves in from the cow yard and going back into their house. They love running around the cow yard, pecking at clover and at the bugs that gather round the cow patties. The lovely Jerseys are way out on the Curtis pasture, but they have a cowpath to the barn. They amble back once or twice a day to take a drink, rest in the shadows, and curiously nuzzle the chicks. Sometime they chase the chicks; sometimes the chicks chase them.

Whoa, it’s here; lightning is flashing and the rain is just beginning to patter down. Gusts of warm, wet wind. That great smell of damp earth; that great sound of a thousand tossing trees. I’m going to move this letter over to my laptop, so I can proceed with batteries if necessary. Don’t you love summer thunderstorms?

Well, enough exulting in summer on the farm. I should be telling you what’s happened over the last month to Cobb Hill and the Sustainability Institute.

Cobb Hill is bearing down in a really impressive burst of teamwork to be ready to break ground next month. Phil Rice has drawn up a computer chart of all the hurdles we have to go through to get there. I haven’t counted, but it looks like about 50 different lines of activity. Maybe half of them are permitting steps. The rest are about money, financing, membership, legal stuff, and a zillion design details. We have committees working on all these things, the heads of which hold a conference call at 7:30 am roughly once a week to coordinate with our architect and our contractor.

You wouldn’t believe how many i’s have to be dotted and t’s crossed to start building a housing project! Phil, the schedule master, calls certain officials almost daily to be sure that the well permit has reached the wastewater office, and the wastewater permit has reached the Act 250 office, and the Act 250 office has received our Motion to Alter Mr. Driscoll’s screening plan, and the lawyers have finished the subdivision filings, and the engineers have updated the maps, and the architect has submitted the latest building revisions to the Act 250 office, and the Act 250 office got out a critical mailing before Julie goes on vacation, and so forth and so on. Amazing. This is what developers do for a living. poor souls.

Slowly but surely we’re marching along the timeline, knocking off obstacles one by one, solving one crisis just in time to be presented with the next. Phil worked out what we hope will be the final blow to neighbor Driscoll, by getting a CAD program to show the view out his second-floor window of our houses, and by planting computer trees in various formations to show that we can give him better screening with many fewer trees using our plan instead of his. (The Act 250 Commission hasn’t approved this yet; we’re in a 10-day waiting period for public comment. 10-day waiting periods are one of the reasons all this takes so long.)

We got approval this month to sell the development rights to 240 acres of the Curtis and Hunt farms (except for the few acres where we’re going to build) to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board for $120,000. We had hoped to get $75,000 more than that from another foundation, but that grant didn’t come through — a big disappointment, because the Cobb Hillians, with great generosity, had decided to use the development rights money to make some of our housing units affordable to lower-income families.

I need to sit on that act of generosity for a minute and be grateful. What the community is doing is preserving the land in perpetuity — it goes with the deed — no one will ever develop it — the lost land value has been appraised at $243,000 — and using the $120,000 we receive for that to bring down (permanently) the price of one house so that a family making something like $24,000 a year can afford it.

We had hoped to make it three houses. We have 3 income-qualified families already out of the 16 that have bought in — so we needed that second grant we had hoped for and more. We’re scrambling to raise other funds now to bring those 3 families in. For every unit we can subsidize down to the point where another $20,000 brings it to affordability price, we can qualify for another $20,000 in state affordable housing funds.

Money. The Big Headache of this project.

We have raised over $2 million in private construction loans from ourselves and our friends (including readers of this newsletter — thanks, folks!) That leaves another $2 million we’ll have to borrow from a bank, and that may turn into our next crisis. Chittenden Bank has a well-advertised Socially Responsible Investment Fund from which we figured we’d be ideal borrowers. They’ve been about the only bank even willing to talk to us, our project is so weird to the banking world. (What? You have composting toilers? And common ownership of the commonhouse and land and barns? And make decisions by consensus? And are selling off your development rights? None of these issues should be of the least concern for a construction loan, where we bear all the responsibility and risk of selling the houses (and are doing a good job of it). But banks are among the meekest and least adventurous of human institutions.) We were on line to get the construction loan OK’d by mid-June, but Chittenden is delaying and delaying. At this point, if they say no, there goes our mid-July groundbreaking as we scramble for some other lender.

Loan documents, purchase and sales agreements, subdivision of the Hunt house (where we now live, which will eventually become the Sustainability Institute), sale of the remaining land to Cobb Hill Cohousing — all these legal things will have to happen over the next few weeks. Meanwhile the community is in deep discussion about siding and stain colors. Next month when nearly everyone will be here for a big four-day meeting, we’ll get into kitchen design and inside details like door knobs and lighting fixtures and such. On and on it goes. Checking out the availability of certified cedar shiplap and the chemical content of stains, weighing the environmental and financial consequences of unfinished boards, which will avoid all that yucky stain and be cheaper, but not last as long, against stained boards, which will require regular re-staining.

I wish we had just decided to build yurts.

All this fuss is about the buildings only, from my point of view the least important part of the exercise, though they are the necessary translation between the two most important parts — the land upon which and from which we will live, and the people who will form the community. Those important parts seem off to a good start. You hear about the land in this newsletter every month, but not nearly enough about the people. Partly that’s because I try not to invade their privacy, and partly because there’s too much to tell. Especially when I work every day with people and grow to love them, I find it hard to simplify their amazing vivacity and complexity by reducing them to words.

Suffice it to say that I find an unusual amount of love and wisdom in these first 16 families. (We think we know who numbers 17 and 18 will be too. 19-22 are still open.) I already feel very close to them, even before living with them as neighbors (except for Stephen, Kerry, Marsha, Phil, Beth, Art and Marie, who are already neighbors). Especially this weekend, when one of our families is expecting at any moment the birth of a child, and another family is mourninng the death of a child, I feel so strongly the interconnections that make a group into a community — including the ability to rejoice, to worry, to feel excruciating pain, to mourn together. It may be simpler and less emotional to live in a more isolated way, but somehow it seems to me less living.

The other thing a community can do is work together. Hal and Susie were up for a week this month, in preparation for moving up from Kentucky next month, and it felt like a brisk wind filling our sails and pushing this farm along. They arrived with their 16-year-old daughter Margaret and a U-Haul full of tools and equipment — they used to be dairy farmers, so these were cool tools and equipment. After we helped them unload the truck, they spent the week organizing the barn, a task that was much needed and much appreciated. They built shelves, gathered tools together, thought about how to make the huge spaces more workable, all the stuff we’ve been meaning to get to as soon as we finish weeding. They energized Ken Hunt to start moving the sugarhouse (which has to be out of the way before we start building.) They energized me to think great thoughts about the Institute.

I should introduce Hal Hamilton and Susie Sweitzer properly. They’ve lived for many years in Berea, Kentucky. Pulling themselves out of that community and away from their land will be even more of a wrench for them than leaving Foundation Farm was for me. After their dairy farming years, Susie became a school nurse, and a leader in the Quaker meeting. She has taught us so much about consensus, about silence, about what Phil Bush calls “Quaker tricks” for helping us function as a group. She’s a natural organizer and leader — even from Kentucky she’s been a force in helping us hold together during these hectic weeks before groundbreaking.

Hal founded a nonprofit called — get this — the Center for Sustainable Systems. It’s main focus is encouraging sustainable agriculture — sustainable both technically and financially. He’s good buddies with all my ag buddies, from Mark Ritchie to Wendell Berry. When the folks in Kentucky heard that he was leaving, they held a testimonial dinner, attended by hundreds, including the current and several former governors, regretting his departure and making him promise to do for agriculture in Vermont as much as he has done for agriculture in Kentucky.

When I heard all that, not only did I rejoice, I proposed that we fold his center and the Sustainability Institute together, and he could direct the whole thing. (The last thing I want to be is an institute director.) He thought about that and decided instead to set up his Center to go on without him in Kentucky, and to find his own proper way of fitting into the Sustainability Institute. I promptly appointed him Director of Sustainable Agriculture, without pay until he raises his own grants. (This is the same generous offer I made when I appointed Alan AtKisson Director of Arts and Culture, an arrangement that has worked out wonderfully.)

It will be so great to have Hal and Susie here full time! They’re so eager to be here that they’re renting a place in Hartland until the Cobb Hill houses are ready. I’m hoping to raise the money to hire Susie as Managing Director of the Institute; she’s so good at organizing things. Then I can just be Research Director, or Director of Newspaper Columns or something. Susie would be the perfect person to manage the fundraising and refurbishing of the old Hunt house as a model of sustainability retrofitting to the new Institute office.

If it sounds like I’m obsessed with fundraising these days, well I am. Other than weeding, it’s all I do. For Cobb Hill we need affordable housing money, money to fix the old barns, money for a Living Machine to process dairy waste, money to set up the milking and cheese-making operations, money for solar hot water systems and for a metering system so we can trace, record, and publicize the throughputs of energy and water. For the Sustainability Institute I’m desperate for money to keep the commodity teams not only working but expanding, as the work and the opportunities intensify. I can’t count how many proposals I’ve written for all these things this year, most of which have been unsuccessful (but that’s how it goes in the proposal-writing game).

All three commodity projects are coming to a two-year conclusion and final papers are being written (see www.sustainer.org for the one on corn — the one on forest will be up soon — the one on shrimp I’m still working on). In two years we’ve come to the point where two of the three models are out creating quite a stir. (The corn and forest models. Shrimp remains a problem, mainly because the industry itself is so full of problems, and so fearful that it doesn’t want to look in a mirror.) There’s still research to do to make all three of the models complete enough for me to trust them.

At the same time, there are already some great lessons coming out of them that I do trust, and that would make a tremendous difference, if people could “get” them. You should see the folks in the forest industry and the Forest Service grapple with the fact that the model shows clearly a 40-year downturn in the New Englnd sawmill sector because of a lack of trees. This is something a lot of people have intuited, but hardly anyone has been willing to talk about. The model helps them talk. One guy in the Maine state forester’s office told us, “No one in Maine is willing to discuss overcutting. Go back to New Hampshire and Vermont, where they’re ahead of us on this.” Then three weeks later, he was organizing three meetings in Maine for us to present our model!

Well, the thunderstorm has passed and it’s time for me to quit and go write more proposals. Enjoy here a poem from Marsha and a cartoon from Stephen, featuring, once again, Jimmy the Fat Cat.

Love,

Dana