Dear Folks, Because I have permission from you to write about where I actually am, wherever I am, because you and I have made this a blessed space where I don’t have to put on a mask, you are about to discover that life on a farm is not always the peaceful, well-manicured perfection ofCountry Life magazine.
Last night I was in a deep, dark, furious funk. I dropped into a hole that seems to lie waiting for me every May. The farm is at one of its two yearly peaks of glory (the other is in early October). The crabapples and plums and pears are just beginning to blossom. The yard is full of late narcissus and early tulips. The grass is blindingly green and spotted with dandelions and full of nutrition for lambs and goslings. The weather is cool enough for work, but warm enough for sandals. It should be absolute heaven, unless your farm work is falling farther and farther behind — which it always is at the end of May.
Yesterday afternoon I left my office early to rush home in case the shearer showed up. Sheep shearers in New Hampshire in May are woefully overbooked, and none of them seems to have an adequate information system. I’ve been trying for a month now just to get this shearer on the phone, much less to get him to appear on my farm on a dry day. Yesterday I thought I might succeed. But as I drove home, rain began to fall. The sheep were out on the pasture. I drove faster. By the time I got home they were so wet there was no point in putting them in the barn, but that was OK it turned out, because the shearer never showed up. (Technical note: you don’t want to do the shearing when the sheep are wet partly because it gets you soaked, partly because it goops up the shears, and mainly because you can’t store wet wool. If you cut it off wet, you have to unpack it on a sunny day and get it dry, which is a major nuisance.)
I was mad, because I wanted to take three cull ewes to the auction on Monday, and now I won’t be able to because they aren’t shorn yet, and furthermore I can’t move the sheep my neighbor wants to borrow to graze down his barnyard, and furthermore I can’t plant my barnyard in corn, because I have to keep bringing the sheep back to the barn every night, waiting for a shearer who is letting his answering machine take all his calls, because I’m not the only desperate shepherd he hears from every day.
So there I was at home with a light rain falling, no shearer, and, I quickly noted, no pasture seed in the ground. Another task I’ve been trying to get done is to plow, harrow, fertilize, and reseed our pastures and hayfield. This is a big deal. We have done almost nothing to our fields for fifteen years, except to put manure on them when we have it. Gradually they’ve lost fertility. The clover has died out on the hayfield, and the pastures are following the rules of ecology (big surprise!) and shifting under constant grazing pressure to plants sheep don’t like — tough watergrass and ragweed and ground ivy. I don’t have the equipment to plow, harrow, and seed 12 acres at a time, and the fertilizer for that amount of land costs two thousand dollars. Furthermore, while the fields are re-growing, I have nowhere to put the sheep and nowhere to cut hay. All this was a knot of unsolvable problems until Scot and Chrissie moved in, the MacArthur Foundation provided me with temporary financial liquidity, and my neighbor Ruth let me use her fields.
Scot studied up on portable electric netting, ordered some, and showed me how to rotate the sheep on Ruth’s fields (which are not otherwise fenced). This is a nifty system. It gives the sheep fresh pasture every week, so they have top nutrition and fewer parasites. Because the sheep graze each enclosure down heavily and then don’t come back to it for awhile, they tend to eat down the less-favored plants too and let the clovers and other good things recover, so the pastures gradually improve. Furthermore, since Ruth’s fields are right across the road, we can actually monitor the sheep better than we can when they’re down on our own pasture. There’s just one small problem; this system is more labor intensive than just putting the sheep down on the pasture and forgetting them for the summer. We have to move them, their fence, their water on a weekly basis and be sure that every piece of pasture we mark out for them contains some shade.
Meanwhile Chrissie, in training as a New Hampshire Master Gardener, learned how to take soil tests and where to send them. Early this spring she and Jan Wright, who was visiting, took samples all over the farm, on Ruth’s fields, our fields, our garden, our orchards. The results showed low potassium everywhere (a characteristic of our soil), and some spot needs for other nutrients (and much less need for lime than I had thought, what with our acid rain). So I called North Country Organics and figured out how many tons of greensand, lime, rock phosphate, dried whey, cottonseed meal, and other lovely stuff I need to spread around.
Next step was to call my neighbor Gordon Wilder and try to schedule his tractoring services to do the field preparation and seeding — and then to coordinate that with the fertilizer spreading and with the rain. Getting it all together has been driving me nuts. We’ve finally reached the point where we’re ready to seed, but the Wilders are as flat-out as every other farm family in May, and they’ve taken to letting their machine answer their phone too. When I got home yesterday, the bags of seed ($400 worth!) — which could have used the wool-wetting rain — were still sitting in the basement. I left another message on the Wilder’s answering machine.
Well, at least I can till the rest of the garden and get the corn in, I thought. I went out, started to till, and the tiller bogged down, its drive belt slipping uselessly the minute the tines hit the soil. Fuming, I got out the manual and the wrenches.
My least favorite job in the world is fixing machinery. I have infinite patience with recalcitrant animals. I can spend hours with tedious garden weeding. But I get impatient if I have to spend five minutes serving a machine. I avoid mechanical tasks, and therefore, of course, I never get good at them.
So, in a bad mood to start with, with black flies swarming around me, with rain spitting down on and off, I tried to tighten the tiller belt. After half an hour of wrestling with stuck nuts and grease I realized that the tightening mechanism was already moved as far as it could go, that the belt was stretched, and that I had to get a new one. Well, I thought, as long as I’m greasy, I’ll fix the other thing that’s wrong with the tiller — when in neutral it tends to slip into reverse, cheerfully backing over its operator.
After an hour of paging through the manual, dropping wrenches, banging, slipping, scratching, and swearing, I started up the tiller and discovered that it wouldn’t move either backward or forward in any gear.
That was the bottom of the pit. I stormed into the house, barked at Marcia (more in a minute about Marcia), and swore off farming forever.
Well, the good news about the bottom of the pit is that there’s nowhere to go but up. This morning Scot called around and found a local dealer who stocks Troybilt tiller belts. He got the reverse gear going. He’s off right now running errands, which will include picking up the new belt. Meanwhile, this morning, a bright, perfect May day, Scot, Chrissie, Marcia, and I worked on the 2/3 of the garden that’s already tilled, hoeing, planting, weeding, picking stones. It looks just beautiful. The peas and onions and spinach and other greens are well up. I’ve declared us past the danger of frost, so I put in beans and cucumbers and flowers. The strawberries are in blossom. I picked a huge basket of rhubarb and some fresh asparagus. Meanwhile, just as we had worked up an appetite, Cam (more about Cam in a minute) finished making lunch.
This is the way things are supposed to work! The sheep still aren’t sheared, the pasture seed still isn’t in the ground, but I have a sense of possibility again. Maybe farming isn’t a completely hopeless enterprise after all.
Cam Webb is a friend of Scot’s, a fellow graduate student in forest ecology at Dartmouth. He has been in Indonesia working on research on tropical forests and has returned for a few months to study for his oral qualifying exam and to get married (in July). Cam is British, quiet, sweet, efficient, and as much of a lover of classical music as I am. The other day he introduced me to Rachmaninov’s “Vepres,” which I had never heard of, and which I’ve been playing more or less constantly ever since. Cam will be staying with us only for this spring, but we’re glad to have him, and we hope he and his new wife Kinnery will be regular guests in the future.
Marcia Meyer is Who God Has Sent to join our household. (That’s our admissions policy — Who God Sends.) Marcia’s about my age, mother of four grown children, and a woman who has been following a remarkable path toward community, spirituality, and service. She’s spent the past ten years at the New Road Map Foundation, the community in Seattle responsible for one of my favorite books Your Money or Your Life. The folks in that community live well on roughly $500 apiece a month, and since they have endowed themselves (at that income it doesn’t take much), their time is free to give to the purposes in life they most believe in. They can go camping in the desert for a month if they want to. (They happen to be doing that at the moment.) They have time to meet twice a day to check in with each other and maintain their human community and quiet down to ask what the universe is calling for them to do next. They put on workshops and put out information on overconsumption and on taking control of your own life, rather than letting advertisers and bosses have control.
It’s powerful stuff, and they’re powerful people. Marcia is bringing the experience of that community to us. She’s adapting quickly to rural life and cruising the rummage sales to find warm clothing — our climate isn’t quite like Seattle’s!
The first thing Marcia had to learn was how to be a duck-mother. I put 36 eggs in the incubator a month ago, thinking what the heck, either they’ll hatch or they won’t, but we’ll learn something. (We’d never used the incubator before, preferring to use mother ducks, but at the time we were overwhelmed with duck eggs and none of the mother ducks was showing any inclination to sit on them.) The eggs started hatching out last Monday, with Chrissie and Marcia the only folks at home. They spent the day paging through the guidebooks, scrambling around for warming lights and brooding boxes, and pressing their noses against the clear plastic top of the incubator, marveling at one of life’s little miracles.
Ultimately half of those eggs hatched. (There would have been more, but I think the brooder was running slightly too cool, because we had it down in the basement.) Two of the hatchlings died, three we gave away to Betty Miller and her daughter Emily, and the other 13 are out in the chicken house in a brooder box. Now we have to figure out what the heck to do with 13 more ducks. (Why didn’t you think about that when you put the eggs in the brooder? one might reasonably ask. Sorry, questions like that are unanswerable on a farm in spring.)
Meanwhile, back at the barn, the geese have hatched out four fine fuzzy goslings, who follow their parents in a little parade around the lawn, singing little twittery songs and mowing the grass. The 35 chicks are growing like crazy. The lambs seem to double in size every week. We’ve sold three of them as feeder lambs and have an ad in the Weekly Market Bulletin to sell some of the ewe lambs as breeders. (We’re keeping two for ourselves.)
In fact, when I get out of my funk, I can say that I can’t remember the farm being in such good shape at this point in the spring as it is this year. The back porch is cleaned off, glass windows taken down, screens put in, and canning kitchen set up for the summer. The barn is swept out, waiting for the shearer. Scot’s great brush-clearing projects have enlarged the orchard, and he has also opened up a nice new area of garden near the crumbled stone wall of the old barn. The orchard trees are beautifully pruned and full of flower buds. Most of the big crops — potatoes, corn, peas, onions — are in, and next weekend the beans, cucurbits, tomatoes will go in right on schedule. The greenhouse is up, and Chrissie has seeded a dozen flats of flowers for her wedding. The lilacs are ready to burst into bloom. And to have the big fields plowed and harrowed and ready for seed is the fulfillment of a dream I’ve had for a long time.
The truth is, this household is working hard and well and showing the normal strains of May, when everything has to happen at once on a farm. The only real problem around here is with my expectations, which can easily soar to infinity when it comes to farm plans. (Scot’s expectations are a problem too — the two of us make a fatal positive feedback loop, as we begin to envision what could be possible here.)
When all else fails, they say in OA, lower your expectations.
John is mostly moved out, so we now have room for God to send us someone else. (I realize that this letter isn’t a very good advertisement!) We really need a couple, preferably with mechanical and carpentry skills and/or farming experience. Since Scot and Chrissie came, there has been an enormous change here, from just barely holding on to making steady forward progress. Marcia will let us make even more progress — one thing she is doing already is stepping into some of my household tasks, which lets me spend more time outside. One more couple would solidify the forward motion, and maybe even make it easy for everyone.
Except in May, which will probably never be easy.
Though this time of year is crazy-making, I can thankfully report that I am taking time, usually in the early morning when I walk the sheep out to Ruth’s fields, to welcome the birds as they return. I try to go down and prowl around the brook and in the deep woods at least twice a week — they are each a very different habitat from the fields and brush around the farm, I’ve seen some new birds — eastern kingbird, white-crowned sparrow, spotted sandpiper. I’ve learned something about some old ones — I finally figured out which song belongs to the myrtle warbler, and I now can see the difference even at a distance between the male and the female yellow warbler. This morning I welcomed back two of the greatest beauties, the scarlet tanager and the indigo bunting.
Even when we’re full of frustrated expectations and self-induced hassles and black funks, God fondly, with a chuckle, showers us with blessings!
Wishing you all love, peace, and lowered expectations, Dana
