Dear Folks, One week ago the ground here was covered with snow. Today the front yard is full of yellow daffodils and blue scylla, the forsythia is blooming on the hillside, and I’m going to let the sheep out for their first taste of green grass. That’s spring in New England. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then BOOM!
Stephen is busy disking the new three-acre garden, turning in manure and breaking up the plowed-over sod that’s trying to re-establish itself. This coming week a five-ton truckload of organic fertilizer (greensand, phosphate rock, dried whey) will go on that field, and then we’ll start putting out onion sets down there. The greenhouse and hoop house are full of flats — celery, celeriac, leeks, pansies, broccoli, many varieties of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant. Anne has a network of seed-savers who exchange exotic varieties, so she has stuff growing that I never heard of. She seems to have a southwestern soul — her specialties are tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, and potatoes of many colors, including pink and purple, all of which she grows successfully in New England. Chrissie has started all kinds of flowers. She and Scot have set up an elaborate system of soil blocks sitting on absorbent material that wicks up water from an underlying plastic container. That minimizes damping off and seems to be giving terrific germination.
Yesterday was the perfect spring Saturday we’ve all been waiting for. I planted the first peas and spinach in the upper garden by the house. Chrissie and Scot took the mulch off their garlic plantation, to be sure all the eager green shoots could break through. I pruned the grapes and decided to strip and soak all that nice basket material I had just cut off, so today I can sit in the sun and make a basket. We were also preparing yesterday for last night’s extravaganza birthday party — Chrissie’s 30th. Thai food plus mashed creamed parsnips from the garden (some of us LOVE parsnips, some of us can do without them). Anne made hazelnut-chocolate ice cream. One of Chrissie’s friends brought a killer chocolate cake. Scot whomped up sourdough bread. I passed on to him the rye starter I’ve been using all winter, and he is turning out amazingly beautiful loaves. We’re having serious conversations about building a wood-fired outdoor bread oven, but we have to design it so we can move it to a new farm, if we ever get a new farm.
It’s so strange to be in limbo, with regard to this farm. It’s a new feeling. Until now I’ve always assumed I was here forever and planning for the ages. So I never thought twice about doing everything as solidly as possible. Now suddenly we may not be here next year. So I heeled in the seven new apple trees I ordered, close together, not in a permanent spot, intending to dig them up and take them with me. I ordered $1800 worth of organic fertilizer with reluctance — being insoluble, it releases only slowly and lasts for years. But I did it anyway. Heck, fertility in the soil is better than money in the bank, even if it’s not my soil.
The hard decision will come with the well. Blow-Me-Down Brook is enthusiastically flipping itself around down in its floodplain, moving its bed several feet a year, and heading straight for our well, which sucks from the brook’s abundant aquifer. I’ve been watching this advance for years. This is the year I have to do something about it. I could buy a few years at a bargain price by moving the well 10 or 15 feet. Or I could drill a whole new well through bedrock up above the house and while I’m at it, run some freeze-proof faucets to the barn — which would save a lot of winter water-hauling and cost a pile of money. There’s no question what I would do, if I were staying here. I will never recapture the expense, if I leave.
I don’t like this pressure to think short-term. I don’t like to be punished for doing things right. There’s way too much of that in the world. So I’ll probably go for the expensive well. I know, I’m crazy. My life seems to be dedicated to the proposition that ordinary economic incentives are patently insane and should be ignored.
Well, this missive was just interrupted for an hour, while I went out and watched our last lamb for the season enter the world. Dandelion, one of our two-year-olds, just produced a bouncing baby boy, out in the sun, on this beautiful spring day. I helped pull a bit, because he was big, and she hadn’t lambed before, and she was tired. Now they’re both in the barn and she’s slurping up her treat of warm molasses-flavored water. Judging from the baby’s size, I don’t think there’s another one coming. He’s strong and already on his feet, nuzzling around to find his first meal.
It has been a lovely lambing, especially since I have been privileged to watch the birth of every lamb but the first — I came out to the barn and found that first one, a black ewe, from Dahlia, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, half buried in hay, five days earlier than the due date — which is 150 days after we brought in Lester, the Border Leicester ram we borrowed last fall. The morning after that first single three sets of twins arrived at once! That was exciting! Somewhat distracted in the middle of it, I looked around and found Kerry, sloshing through the mud on her crutches, determined to come out and watch the action. She and Anne and I managed to get mothers and babies sorted, dried, and tucked into lambing stalls. The maternity ward was full up.
Every lambing has come at 9 or 10 am on a sunny morning. How could we be so lucky? And every one has been a perfect presentation. The most I have had to do was pull. There has been not a single case of entropion (an inverted eyelid, a birth defect common in my flock, which is easily treated if caught early, but which can callus the eye and blind the lamb if ignored). We did have one bummer and one dumb sucker, but we fixed them. (A bummer is a lamb that the mother mysteriously refuses to adopt. She won’t feed it and pushes it away, sometimes slams it away. A dumb sucker is the opposite — a lamb that doesn’t recognize its mother, wanders away and gets lost, can’t figure out where to get its meals.) Over time we are learning to deal with such problems. But it takes care and watchfulness. Fortunately this year, I haven’t been traveling, I’ve had lots of farm-mates to help, and the lambings haven’t occurred at 3 in the morning. It’s a young, healthy flock, and all is well. The confused mom eventually adopted her bummer, and the dumb sucker is now flourishing without any help from us.
And bouncing! I know every year I try to describe the delight of a yard full of lambs, but I never feel I’ve done it justice. It’s like the glory of the fall colors, beyond words, so wonderful that I forget and get re-surprised and re-entranced every year. During the day the lambs kind of laze. They snuggle up together, they climb onto their snoozing moms, they get up to nurse and to chase the geese and ducks. Then something happens as the light begins to fade in the evening. The lambs form into gangs and careen around the barnyard, going out of their way to jump up on stones and stumps. You can see the mountain goat in their heritage. When they’re going at full speed they snap into their stiff-legged hell-for-leather bounce, boing, boing, boing, as if they were on four pogo sticks. So cute! So funny! I think we ought to sell tickets.
Earlier this month, on the day after all those twins arrived, Kerry and I jammed my Honda full of wool from the last 2 shearings and drove it down to Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney VT, to sell it. It’s the first time I’ve done that. Normally I ship the wool to Bartlettyarns in Maine, and it comes back spun and dyed, and I sell it to knitters. But I’m not much of a marketer, so hundreds of pounds of yarn sit in the attic, enough for about 300 years, even with Kerry, Chrissie, and I knitting flat out. So I decided this year just to sell the wool. And I’ve always wanted to check out Green Mountain. And Kerry needed a break from the house. So off we went.
It was a nice discovery. Green Mountain is a cooperative that grew out of a Quaker-type meeting of some folks with exactly the values we’re trying to imbue into our new community. They’ve been operating for many years now, employing 12 people full time, and producing the nicest yarn I’ve ever seen. They have great old carding and spinning equipment, the kind with belts and gears out where you can see them and fix them (and fixing is a constant). They are extremely careful about quality — David Ritchie went through every one of my fleeces, rejected one, bought all the others, even praised a few. We managed not to spend the whole wool check on more wool. I like this operation so much I’ll continue to do business with it. On the way home Kerry and I dreamed about expanding the flock on the new farm and specializing with Green Mountain in a special brand of organically raised wool, which we would sell in our farm store.
On April 6 the chicks arrived by overnight airmail from Iowa — New Hampshire Reds this year, with a few Aracauna for fun. They’re now several weeks old, feathered out, and on their own on the chick side of the chicken house. Two broody hens have hatched out clutches, and a third is still sitting. One goose is sitting on a nest in the barn, and the second goose is laying, not yet setting. (A goose egg is about as big as your clenched fist and so heavy you think it’s made of cement.) I’ve been scooping up the duck eggs to sell to Chinese professors at Dartmouth, but I’ve just declared a moratorium, so the ducks can accumulate a clutch and start setting as well.
Spring is such fun!
Well, yes, I am also doing a few professional things. The textbook is moving along — I’m back “into it” and don’t really want to do much of anything else. We’re on the agriculture chapter, which is threatening to get way too long, because Diana and I know and care too much about it.
I spent last weekend down at a camp on Chesapeake Bay for a board meeting of the Center for the New American Dream, the organization we established to work on reducing consumption in North America. We now have an executive director, Ellen Furnari, formerly of the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, and an office in Burlington VT, and two full-time staffers. There’s lots to do — start putting out a newsletter, conduct a forum on “how much is enough?”, put together a clearinghouse on the many organizations working on consumption from various angles, from environmental to economic to spiritual. It was a good meeting, and I got to drive, with the Burlington staff, all the way from winter (we still had snow) down south to late spring, and then back again to early spring, because the snow disappeared while I was gone.
Our new community is moving more slowly, now that there’s not a land deal to keep us to a tight and scary schedule. We had our April meeting at another community-in-formation, Derbyshire Farm down in Temple NH, a beautiful place owned by Bruce and Barbara Kantner, out of which a global educational venture called Gaia Education Outreach runs. Bruce and Barbara are quite ready to have their farm turn into a community, and there are other abutting properties for sale. It’s a nice opportunity, and some of our group may follow it. Maybe even me, who knows? Our core group seems to be stuck in the Upper Valley, within commuting distance of Dartmouth. I’m stuck there too. But if the search for farms stays so discouraging (I went out and looked at another one last week), we will start thinking farther afield.
Meanwhile we’ve moved toward a solution to a problem we’ve been having, which is, who is a “member” of our community, and how do we know? While we were bearing down on option payments on the Hartland farms, we had a strictly economic membership definition — anyone who was willing and able to ease our anxiety by plunking down a big enough check. Now that we’ve sobered up, we realize that financial responsibility is just one, and not the most important, of the characteristics we’re working for. The others are much harder to measure.
So, with the help of some Quaker members of the discussion group, we’ve invented a “clearness” process. When anyone feels the readiness, which means moving from joining the conversation, hoping that the others will form a community worth joining, to taking personal responsibility for being SURE this will be a community worth joining, they can ask for a clearness meeting. It will be an open discussion with the other already-committed members, in which we jointly explore all the questions that need to be explored, until all together we know that this person is a member, or might become one under some clearly specified conditions, or shouldn’t be one. The questions are tough, we discovered, when we tried this for the first time. They explore the boundaries of commitment — what can we count on you for, and what not? What will you count on from us, and what not? What are you really seeking, when you seek community? What will you need to take and what are you willing to give? What reservations do you have, and what reservations do we have about you? What would cause you to leave; what would cause you to stay forever?
It was awkward to get this started, because we didn’t have a platform to stand on — no one who had already gone through the process. So we are beginning with the four people who first declared themselves and backed it up with checks. We’ve started with one meeting and need at least one more to finish. It turns out that we are good at asking the hard questions. It turns out that, so far anyway, these can be wonderful meetings.
So, slowly, we learn our way into community.
I’d better quit writing this and get back to work!
Love, Dana
