Dear Folks, I think of May as the month of most stellar beauty around here. October is always a knockout, of course. I love the crystalline splendor of February. But I keep forgetting about August — high summer, when the cornucopia of the garden runs over — and really, that’s not fair. This is one of the most gorgeous months of the year.
August is when the heat breaks. We’ve been having nights in the 40s, and in the foggy mornings we sniff fall coming. But then the sun takes us into the 70s, day after glorious day. Good weather for working and for sleeping. The pasture grass appreciates the coolness and starts growing again, especially now that the rains have returned. The sheep and horses spread across the green meadows, happily munching. The ducks and geese celebrate the rising water level in the pond. (The ducks have been crawling through the fence and crossing the road to snack on Pooh Sprague’s newly sprouted cover crop of winter rye and field peas. We plug the holes, but they find new ones. I’m afraid some day Pooh is going to turn them into roast duck.)
There are flowers everywhere, especially sunflowers. We should call this place Sunflower Farm. Stephen and Kerry have long rows of them in the CSA garden, Chrissie and Scot have sunflowered one whole end of the brook garden, and last year’s sunflowers seeded themselves in the house garden, Stephen lined the barnyard with sunflowers, and the chickadees and blue jays plant them around randomly, taking the seed from the feeders. We have hundreds of sunflowers in bloom right now, not just yellow ones, but deep red, orange, striped, bronze. They make the most spectacular bouquets.
The CSA and farmers’ markets are going gangbusters. It’s a steady routine now. Mary, Stephen, and Kerry pick Friday morning for the Saturday farmers’ market, and Monday morning for the CSA, and in between for the Upper Valley Food Coop. The rest of the time they weed and irrigate and plow under spent rows and plant for fall. My only role is to deliver tubs of veggies to customers in Hanover every Tuesday morning. The tubs are getting heavier and fuller every week — tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, leeks, celery, beans, chard, carrots, and now sweet corn. The customers see this as a weekly grab-bag full of delicious surprises, they’re eating healthier than they otherwise would have, and they’re delighted..
Sales are going so well that Stephen and Kerry are thinking of at least doubling the CSA garden next year, to two or two and a half acres. It seems clear that we should stay here for at least another year, ideally two, until the houses are built over at the new farms. We have organic certification and a happy customer base here now, we know the soil and growing conditions. We hope to keep the new farms in cover crops somehow and begin their transition to organic, while we continue to maintain everything over here. (No small order!) It’s quite a production to move a farm. We’d just as soon do it gradually. We’ve already established a beach-head — Stephen and Pooh Sprague took a knocked-down greenhouse over to Hunt’s the other day. We bought it used from Pooh, who’s a really big-time vegetable grower, and who is investing in new ones. To us it seems a HUGE greenhouse — it will be wonderful when we get it up and running to start seedlings for the first time over in Hartland.
August is a great time for parties. We can hold a lot of folks on our big screened back porch, they can spread across the pretty lawns, and we can feed a multitude right out of the garden. Stephen and Kerry gave a beautiful party for their CSA subscribers last Sunday, complete with a display of the draft horses harnessed up and pulling an old tire for practice. We’re having a party tonight to celebrate the purchase of the new farms. The Hunts and the Curtises are coming, and the realtors, and the local members of the new community. I’ll roast two legs of lamb, Mary’s making a huge potato salad, Stephen’s making a green salad, we’ll have sweet corn, of course, and Chrissie’s baking a zucchini-chocolate cake. Mmmmmmm.
ZZZZucccchini Chocolate Cake (from the Hornby Island cookbook)
Cream together 3/4 cup butter and 2 cups sugar.
Add 3 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 cups grated zucchini. Stir.
Work in 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda, 1/2 cup cocoa, 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt.
The recipe says bake in a greased tube pan at 350 for 45 minutes. But Chrissie bakes it in 3 layers for a fancy frosted cake.
August means it’s time to think about winter, because if we don’t do certain things now, in the garden we’ll lose our chance, and in the economy we’ll be in long lines come fall. So I have a huge list to accomplish before I take off for Balaton. This week I dug in the sheep manure I had spread in the hoop house and planted mache, spinach, lettuce, arugula, tatsoi, radish, dill, scallions, and parsley — which, I hope, we’ll be harvesting in November, after we put the plastic back up. I’ve got in the heating oil (our tank can hold a 3-year supply, or 5 when we use the wood-fired part of the furnace), and the chimney cleaners have come, and part of the firewood is in and stacked, and I’ve scheduled the car for oil-coating. We’re all working on filling the freezer. Chrissie and Mary will probably be happy if they never see another green bean. Alan AtKisson (who was visiting) and I picked about 20 pounds of blueberries and froze them last weekend. The green soys are about ripe and ready. Last night I picked the early apples, the Gravensteins and Wealthys, and froze applesauce.
We also put in a new well. Now THAT was a cliffhanger!
We’ve had an endless supply of water from the aquifer of Blow-Me-Down Brook, where Dennis put a shallow well about 20 years ago. The well was an effort to put in, especially the long, long pipe that comes up to the house — its channel, which has to be six feet down so it won’t freeze in winter, had to be dynamited through bedrock. That well has never failed us. But the brook, which is a big, tough one, especially in winter and spring, coils around down there like a lively snake, and one of its loops has been heading steadily toward the well for about 15 years now. I’ve watched it with an impending sense of doom, wondering when I was going to lose the well and what I was going to do about it.
I tried planting willows to stabilize the bank. The brook laughed and swept the willows downstream. I had long discussions with soil conservation people about rechanneling the brook or lining the bank with riprap (big broken hunks of rock). That would require a series of permits I didn’t want to contemplate (though there are plenty of examples in town of mysterious midnight riprap appearing alongside this fractious brook). Anyway, I kind of approve of letting brooks go where they want to go.
This year I finally decided to bite the bullet. There’s just about 15 feet left between the brook and the well, a jump the brook can easily make in about two spring floods. I didn’t want to leave this problem to the next owners, and the realtors told me banks won’t give mortgages any more to places with shallow wells. So I called my neighbor, Jay Wragg, the well driller.
Mary bent up some wire coat hangers and went dowsing. Pretty soon she had the whole household dowsing. The trouble was, everyone came up with different places. The other trouble was, the ten-wheeler behemoth truck the drillers use can hardly go anywhere there isn’t pavement. And Jay Wragg was not only unamused by dowsing, he said it doesn’t matter where they drill any more. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I get water 99% of the time.”
So they drilled where it was convenient, in the front orchard, right next to the line coming up from the brook, so they could use the same ditch. Mammoth truck, big drill tower, lots of noise. Grind, grind, grind, down and down, 100 feet, 200 feet, 300 feet. A trail of fine granite dust came out. They hit ledge 8 feet down and had nothing but solid granite from then on. 400 feet. 500 feet and they quit. A quart a minute they said. I had just spent $4000. “So am I the lucky 1% of the time when you don’t hit water?” I asked Jay.
“Hold on,” he said, “now we bring in the hydro-frac. It’ll just cost another $1200.” Hydro-frac is Jay Wragg’s ace in the hold. It’s super-high-pressure water that forces open the seams down there and brings water in from a 75-foot radius around the well. It’s guaranteed to increase the flow by at least 1/2 gallon a minute or you don’t pay. “Great,” I said to Jay. “For $5200 I get 3/4 of a gallon a minute.”
There wasn’t much choice, so in came the hydro-fraccers. (<=That may not be spelled right.) They have a much smaller truck and make much less noise. They hung around for a Saturday afternoon and disappeared without a word. All day Sunday I was bemoaning the waterless granite shield that holds up this farm.
Monday morning I called Jay. “Congratulations!” he said. “Five gallons a minute!”
So we have a new well, the water a bit cloudy and mineral-tasting at the moment. We still have the old well, too, and we can switch between them, until Blow-Me-Down Brook finally decides to take the old one out.
The community-in-formation, having secured our land, is swinging into Design Mode. This is the fun part, also the scary part, because now every little concrete aspect of our dream has a price tag attached. On a hot, muggy Sunday a couple weeks back we brought in architect Bruce Coldham to play the Timeline Game with us. That’s basically a long table covered with newsprint marked with stages to completion — secure land, finalize design, get financing, contractors pull in and start building. Then Bruce has about 100 cards with the individual steps to getting there, and we put them down in some semblance of the right order, and talked about how to do them. Yellow cards were for membership activities (get 15 committed families by September 1998). Red ones for legal activities (incorporate homeowners association). White ones for design activities (send out RFP to architects). Blue for finance (pre-qualify members for mortgages).
That exercise was eye-opening and daunting, especially to me. I care an awful lot about the land and almost nothing about the buildings, as long as they stand up straight and don’t take too much energy to heat. Fortunately, there are others in the group who really get into buildings, so they’re forming the design committee and surging forward. (That’s what community’s for — handing off each task to whoever has a passion for it.) That leaves me free to worry about financing (no one has a passion for that, but I’m interested in learning, so I took it on) and land management. Stephen and I are heading up the land management team.
It’s amazing and touching to see the core group not only lean into the many tasks that must be done, but to see it expand as things get more concrete. Wonderful, capable people are coming to us. I think it won’t be a problem to have 15 committed member families in a year. (We already have 6, going on 8, with at least 30 in the larger conversation.)
I’ve been in my office more than I should be during such a beautiful summer month, writing proposals for the Sustainability Institute, working on my book, answering hordes of email messages (the community has a very active listserv for sharing in between meetings — and that’s just the beginning of my email day), and getting ready for Balaton. I leave Tuesday for Hungary, and then two more weeks in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. More about that next month!
Even before I sell Foundation Farm, there are big changes happening on Daniels Road. My dear neighbor Ruth Whybrow moved this weekend to a much smaller place in Lebanon. (Now there would be reason enough for me to move away. Ruth and I have been neighbors for over 20 years.) Her ex-husband Peter has it in mind to keep the place as a second home and retreat, but he lives in Los Angeles, and we have grave forebodings about what will happen over there without Ruth to maintain it. We already keep and work the fields, but the big house is a chore. Chrissie and Scot will move soon over to the little house on that property, to help watch over things. But Scot takes off for 3 months of field work in the forests of Vancouver Island on the day after I leave for Balaton.
It’s inconceivable to me not to have Ruth next door, and also not to have Chrissie’s and Scot’s lovely energy and companionship right here in the house every day, as they have been for three years. But they’ll be real close. (Emmett already runs over to that little house at least twice a day for a visit.) They do need more space, and, as Scot enters the last throes of his thesis, a bit more quiet. They will almost certainly not join the new community, but will go back to Vancouver after Scot graduates, although I always hold out a small bit of hope.
So there’s an opening at Foundation Farm. We’d love to fill it with another farming family for the new community.
I’d better quit; I have to clean the house and cook the lamb, and Scot and I have to throw the sheep, trim their hooves, and give them worm medicine.
The newsletter artwork this month is courtesy of Kerry Gawalt, who is walking around now with no crutches, only a cane. Won’t be long before she’s back to being her unstoppable, energetic self.
Love, Dana
P.S. It’s now the next morning, and I just have to put in a little report on the beautiful party last night. The Hunts and the Curtises have not been on the best of terms for, oh, about 10 years now, ever since the Hunts turned the 13-acre field on the Curtis’s southern boundary into a subdivision. One of the difficulties in our negotiations was navigating between the hard feelings there on both sides. But last night they were all here, laughing, hugging each other, and telling old farm stories, many of them about how they helped each other out in the old days. They are thrilled that we will keep the farms in farming — “we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with our places,” they said. It was an incredible healing moment. Jane Curtis called me this morning and told me that she finally believes in miracles.
I’m so happy about this, I could cry (which is what I do when I’m happy). This is exactly the outcome I have hoped and prayed for. And it’s so perfect for our new community to be born through the healing of the old community and with the blessings of the people who worked the land before us.
