Hello, Dear Folks!
It’s Easter. It’s the day after Earth Day. It’s solidly cloudy, as it has been for a week, and 40 degrees, and bone-penetrating damp. I spent yesterday out in the garden and got soaked through.
Ah, but it felt good! A carton of plants I had ordered arrived, so I had to get them into the ground, and a rainy day is perfect for that. Twelve lilies, two peonies, 25 lilies of the valley for the shady east side of the house where the silver-maple leaves accumulate. A perennial scabiosa, three pyrethrums, a Siberian iris. I spent a good part of the afternoon digging an asparagus trench and filling it with cow manure. (It occurred to me afterward that the last time I dug an asparagus trench I was 30 years younger, and that does make a difference.) I set out 25 asparagus and 50 strawberries.
I still haven’t worked through the box. Today Marsha and I have to plant 9 lilacs (each a different kind) and a pear tree and a hazelnut and two long rows of red raspberries. And this is only the first of the boxes we have ordered.
We are crazy. Utterly mad. Garden fanatics who have just moved to a new farm and find it missing all the essentials of life. Imagine, no lilies of the valley! No asparagus! How did these people survive, poor things? No strawberries, no raspberries, red or black! Not even any horseradish! (That I’ll go transfer from Foundation Farm, where it is taking over the place. I also have to get from there some tarragon, sage, and basket willow, and a truckload of compost. It is impossible to start a whole new garden over here, in this gravelly undeveloped soil, without compost!)
Well, we had none of those things when we moved into Foundation Farm, either. We’ll get there. This week I’ll clean out the chicken house and produce a great pile of wonderful stuff to layer in with weeds to start a new compost pile. This year we will have no asparagus or raspberries or strawberries for the freezer (unless we buy them from someone else, a totally new concept for me.) But next year we should be back on track.
There are four nice rhubarb hills here — I just manured them and divided one to start a fifth hill. There are old apple and pear trees of unknown varieties, probably on their last legs. They should survive long enough for the new ones I’m planting to begin to fruit. We have some old barn hay and a mountain of wood chips for mulch. Art Kirn (who lives with his wife Marie over at the old Curtis house) walked out one day this winter to chat with a crew that was using a big chipper to clear trees from electric lines. He arranged for them to park their rig in the farmyard every night while they were on that job, in exchange for dumping their woodchips here. Now we’re using those chips to mulch the young fruit trees, the lilacs, and the paths through and around the various gardens and the hoop house.
Stephen and Kerry extended the hoop house by one-third when they moved it across the river. Even extended, it is now crammed with seedlings that they’ve been starting since March. Onions, leeks, celery, celeriac, tomatoes, peppers, many flowers. It seems strange that I am not starting all those things, as I’ve done every spring for decades, but I decided to be a field-hand for their CSA this year in exchange for household veggies and some for the freezer. S&K will need help. They’ve got seven acres plowed up, twice as much as they had at Foundation Farm. It looks like they’ll also have at least twice as many CSA subscribers, each picking up a tub of fresh-picked organic produce every week from June through October. They already have 50 subscriptions, and there are always last-minute ones that come in during May.
Stephen says that makes him kinda scared — it’s a huge responsibility to keep 50+ families reliably in vegetables, especially on new ground where we don’t yet know the quirks, the weeds, the wild critters, the weather patterns. He and Kerry have to put in a new irrigation system, a fence to keep out deer and groundhogs and dogs and kids, and, by the time their newly bred heifers calve next fall, a milking system.
They’re plugging away, though, bit by bit. Kerry is nothing if not systematic, so she has a detailed planting schedule, starting new lettuces, radicchio, endive, scallions, mesclun, dill, cilantro every week, and carrots, beets, green beans, broccoli, kohlrabi, fennel, corn several times a summer. Stephen developed a wonderful disciplined calm during his years at Weston Priory. He just goes out in the morning and does what is needed, whether it’s refurbishing an old horse-drawn plow with a finer blade, or repairing fence, or picking rocks. He rigged up the manure spreader with a wooden floor, hooks Mari and Cassima to it, and runs them over the field. The horses wait patiently while he loads rocks, then pull a little farther and wait again. Wagonloads of rocks are piling up behind the run-in barn. Some day maybe we’ll have time to make them into stone walls.
Though I will be full of complaints until we’ve got this place at least as verdant as Foundation Farm, in fact we’re rejoicing already at being here. The forest climbing Cobb Hill has turned that fleeting, delicate pink-purple of the maple bloom, one of the most exquisite sights of the Vermont year. On the warmer nights the valley throbs with spring peepers. It was warm enough last Saturday to hold our first Cobb Hill meeting of the year out on Art and Marie’s screened porch, from which we heard not only the peepers, but also the chugs of mating bullfrogs and, from the woods, the gobbles of mating turkeys. My heart was completely won last weekend, when I climbed into the sugarbush and found it carpeted with blooming spring beauties and hepaticas and bloodroots. We had none of those flowers at Foundation Farm, except for a few I transplanted in and carefully nursed. The soil is too acid in New Hampshire. Vermont’s soils are sweeter — and it is a sweet sight indeed to see a forest floor spangled with spring beauties as thick as stars in the sky!
Stephen told me the other day that sometimes when he’s out with the horses in the middle of the field, he just stops and looks around and listens and smells and give thanks that we’re here. After four different farms in nine years, now he and Kerry are home.
That made tears come to my eyes. Those guys are my heroes. To have helped such good farmers to such a good farm was worth doing, whether all our other dreams for Cobb Hill come true or not.
They will come true. We are in the push toward groundbreaking — and that’s scary too. The group is bearing down on the obstacles. The permits still, always more things to do on the damn permits. (Still haven’t settled with Driscoll over screening; he just doesn’t seem interested in settling. Have to get a plan for barn drains. Have to get the legal subdivision of the Hunt House. Have to hold a final hearing on the water supply.) The financing. (Got pledge letters for our private loan fund out this week. Have to get the lawyers to work on the purchase&sales agreements for the homebuyers. Have to get everyone prequalified for mortgages. Have to negotiate the final construction loan with the bank. Have to send more stuff to the VHCB for the hoped-for affordable housing grant.) The final design details. (A million of these, all now entangled with bringing costs down. Should the building that houses our wood-burning furnace also be big enough to store a year’s worth of wood? Can’t we figure out an electric system that is less expensive? Do we really need site lighting? Can we afford a backup generator to keep pumps working during outages? Could we get by with six inches of gravel on the paths instead of twelve? Are our basement insulation specs too costly? Do we really need washer and dryer hookups in every basement?)
Meanwhile the community is having agonizing, but strangely wonderful discussions about money. Though we keep stripping things out and finding ways to economize, the construction budget never goes down, it only goes up. At least four of our families are going to need help buying in; they will never be able to carry a mortgage, given their incomes and our costs. The other families are hurting too, at least in the sense that the more they have to pay for houses, the less they will have for other necessary things, from repairing the barns to moving the sugarhouse to landscaping the building site. (All the landscaping Marsha and I are doing is just around the Hunt house — think what we’ll have to do when the construction on the hill is over!)
These are painful discussions; a real test of the group’s solidarity. I am comforted by three things. First, every other cohousing group I’ve heard from has gone through the same difficulty with costs; it seems to be part of the development process. Second, I think we’re having these discussions well. We’re able to say tough things to each other. We’re able to hear differing views with respect (though often with frustration). We’re probing for the deeper truths underneath the surface reactions. In a way I hate these meetings, they are time-consuming and uncomfortable, but in another way I’m touched by them. The bravery and dedication and patience and humanity of my Cobb Hill colleagues is just amazing.
Third, though there are necessary, and perhaps unnecessary, and certainly variable limits to our personal generosities, this is a generous group. We really want our membership to be determined by qualities other than the ability to pay off a large mortgage. We have already skewed common costs, to bring down prices for the smaller units. We are talking (and talking, and talking) about equity caps or some other way to keep resale prices down, even if our first buy-in costs must be high. If our grant is approved, we will sell the development rights to nearly all our beautiful land to the state and use the money to subsidize a few lower-income units. Think of the generosity there — protect the land in perpetuity, and use the proceeds to make housing affordable. (I hope we get the grant!)
So, we struggle along. Lining out the tasks ahead, especially the permits, which have built-in waiting periods, it’s beginning to look dicey for a June ground-breaking, though we’ll try for that. July looks more possible. It’s getting tense, because if we don’t line up bulldozers and cement pourers soon, we could lose them for a whole year.
And interest rates keep going up! Oof!
I keep thinking that if we can just get construction started, our problem will be over. Which probably tells you how naive I am about construction — and about the fact that we’ll be living in a construction zone for 15-18 months!
So, let’s see, yes, I have been doing things other than worry about construction loans and lilacs. I made a trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, at the end of March, to speak at the U. Va. architecture school. Normally I don’t do that sort of thing, but put together enough compensating factors, and I can be talked into it. In this case the compensating factors were: 1) I got to talk about Cobb Hill, 2) I got to hear really professional developers talk about green building, so I learned useful things, 3) I got paid well, 4) It was the end of March, and I knew we’d be in mud, while Virginia was in tulips, and 5) Charlottesville is Thomas Jefferson territory, and I hadn’t been back to visit old TJ in years.
I stayed the Saturday after the conference to bring the air fare down, and drove out to Monticello early in the morning to beat the crowds. It couldn’t have been a more glorious spring day. The hills were laced with white dogwood and pink redbud. Monticello was in its glory. I spent hours up there, taking every tour, sitting in the garden, standing by TJ’s grave. I can’t express how I love that place. The gardens alone are enough to hypnotize any gardener. But the house too, so full of his intelligence. The way the farm is laid out (I especially love the underground passage where the horses were stabled, the ice was stored, the wines were cellared, the food was cooked.) The beautiful orchards and vineyards on the south slope. The views in every direction.
Yeah, I know about the slaves. (The tour guides now carefully say “enslaved laborers,” not “slaves.”) And about Sally Hemings. I’ve know that stuff for years, and I’ve read all TJ’s passionate writings about the injustice of slavery. (“I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just.”) I don’t think he was a hypocrite. I see him as trapped in his century’s immoral system, as I am trapped in mine. I rail against fossil fuels and go right on burning them. My passion is real; I just don’t know how to get myself out of the trap I was born into. I figure it was the same for him.
Well, those of you who’ve read this newsletter for a long time know I’ve written about all that. For whatever reason, I feel a connection to Mr. Jefferson, in the soul, the heart, the mind. It was wonderful to be back again at the place where his spirit is still so palpably alive. A pilgrimage.
Last week I did another well-paid speaking trip (in all cases the payment goes to the Sustainability Institute) to another congenial place, Stonyfield Yogurt in Londonderry NH. Stonyfield was founded by two very old friends — Samuel Kaymen who was once a hippie farmer and neighbor here in the Upper Valley, and Gary Hirschberg, whom I know from New Alchemy Institute days. Stonyfield is a big operation now, by New Alchemy standards, though not by General Foods standards. It has 150 employees and an impressive plant. Milk rolls in by the great shiny steel truckload. Like the ex-Ben&Jerry’s, Stonyfield operates in a principled way, paying farmers premiums for milk, turning over a big chunk of profits to charity, caring for its employees, and caring for the environment. It was for the latter purpose that I was brought in to speak to the employees. It was fun. They do good work there. Like Thomas Jefferson, like me, they are deeply aware of the problems they haven’t been able to solve (such as plastic yogurt containers, which can’t, by law, be refilled, and which are just about impossible to collect and recycle.) It was a privilege to spend time with them. And they gave me two cases of yummy yogurt!
And I got 76 miles per gallon driving there and back with my new Honda Insight! (See column.) I did not need and could not afford a new car right now. But my 13-year-old one declared that the time had come. And, I must admit, I am having fun! Everywhere I go, people come up to me, follow me, pull up by me, to ask what it is, or how it works, or where you plug it in. (You don’t.) Without exception, those people are male. Men must have a huge section of brain devoted to noticing cars.
OK, enough of this indoors business. Marsha is out in the garden planting raspberries. I can’t stand it another minute. Lilacs, here I come!
Love,
Dana
