Dear Folks,
Maybe we won’t need to put a “for sale” sign on Foundation Farm.
Maybe it will sell itself.
As soon as I started talking about putting it on the market, I got three expressions of interest, one from my next-door neighbor Peter Whybrow, one from a nice family in Meriden who have been eyeing it for some time. So this week I’m bringing in an appraiser, then we’ll start bargaining. I’ve told everyone that if we don’t have a purchase-and-sales agreement by June 1, I’ll list it with a realtor.
This is getting serious!
And I guess it’s definite. I’ve told the family now renting the Hunt house that we’ll be moving in there this fall. They’ve been wanting to stop paying rent and buy anyway, so they weren’t upset. They offered to buy the Hunt house, but I still see that as the future Sustainability Institute. And starting next fall we’ll need it as our home, for as long as it takes for Cobb Hill to get built.
Stephen and Kerry are joyous. They, even more than I, have felt stretched too thin trying to tend farms on both sides of the river. Stephen says he wants to give his all to the land he works, and that’s hard to do over here, when he knows he’ll be leaving. I understand. I find myself making decisions in an entirely different way than I made them when I thought I’d live out my life here. Until now what the farm needed, the farm got, preferably in preventive mode, before problems came up. Now I think, “it makes no sense to buy a new stove; let’s limp along with the old one.” Or, “why make compost this year; we’ll never get to use it.” I buy the new stove anyway, make the compost anyway. But I hate those cheap thoughts coming up in my head. It’s like the difference between a one-night stand and a marriage — what you can get away with, versus what you have to live with the long-term consequences of.
So now our minds are turning toward the new farm, while we’re treasuring the last spring on the old one.
As if to break our hearts, it’s the most gorgeous spring imaginable.
April around here can be one long disappointment, clouds and rain and snow and wind and chill. But this year we’ve had one sunny day after another. It would be dangerously dry if it were May, but there’s still so much snowmelt in the soil and so few green leaves to pump water out with evapotranspiration that the lack of rain is just letting us work the soil sooner. I’ve already tilled the wettest, swampiest part of the garden. I’ll plant peas there today. Sometimes I can’t get into that section until June.
Bright sun here usually means a Canadian high, cold air flowing down from the north, so it has been cool, fifties during the day, freezing many nights. That’s good for working, good for keeping the bugs back, good for letting the flowers unfold slowly and last a long time. The forsythia and daffodils have been glorious for weeks. The perennial garden in front is spangled with blue scylla and purple chionodoxa, which spread every year into unexpected places, now even out in the lawn. In the woods and in the front garden where I’ve transplanted them, the delicate white bloodroot blossoms open as the sun hits them every morning.
The trees are at that exquisite, fleeting stage where there’s just a hint of the leaves to come, a delicate green lace, a softening of every hillside. You can still see through them, see the contours of the land, which, starting two weeks from now will be hidden by green screens till November.
Every morning the robins warble me awake at 5:30 when the light comes. The song sparrows and goldfinches and cardinals are in full voice. I saw some white-throated sparrows migrating through yesterday, but they weren’t singing, they’re not on their breeding ground yet. High up in the big locust trees in the front yard the crazy yellow-bellied sapsuckers are pounding out their territorial claims — tappety tappety tappety tap — tap –tap. It’s the only woodpecker around here who slows down as he taps.
The spring peepers are beautifying the evenings, of course. Their sweet song is one of the treasures of New England, as welcome and beloved as the fall colors. I breathe a prayer of thanks when I first hear them each spring. I think of Monteverde in Costa Rica, where climate change has raised the level of the cloud forest and extinguished 20 species of frogs and toads, and I think what a disaster it would be if something like that happened here and there were no spring peepers.
Stephen and Kerry and I have the greenhouses crammed full of little green seedlings. As soon as there’s a rain, I’ll start moving some of that stuff outside. The onions and pansies and celery should be ready to go now, though it was 22 degrees last night, and I was glad I hadn’t jumped the gun.
Forty chicks arrived in the mail the day after Easter. For two weeks they lived in a box in the basement under a 100-watt bulb to warm them. Now they’ve graduated to a screened-in corner of the chicken house, which they’re rapidly learning to fly out of. And this morning I saw three tiny fuzzy just-hatched heads sticking out from under the broody hens I set three weeks ago. I’m not sure how many chicks they’ve got — they won’t let me near their nests.
The lonely gander, Gandhi, the one survivor of the coyotes, has decided that I am his lost flock. So he waits all day for me at the back door, tapping on the glass and pooping on the back step. Then he follows me around, honking loudly and protecting me from all threats, especially from Stephen, for some reason. He’s a total nuisance, and one of us, probably Stephen, is going to wring his neck some day. Hoping to prevent that, we have an ad in the Market Bulletin to give him away to anyone who can give him a goose family again.
Yesterday Jim and I hauled the rototiller over to the Hunt place and tilled up a long bed into which I can start moving perennials. Today we’ll start digging daylilies and phlox and Siberian iris, and anything else I can fit into the truck. I also planted over there yesterday a mock orange, a Dolgo crab apple, three pear trees and three more apple trees. (I planted ten apples there last year, all of which seem to have pulled through the winter.) It occurred to me that we’ll have to face next spring without an established asparagus bed, so I might try to put in some asparagus too, though it will be too early to harvest it next year.
How can we have spring without a garden full of asparagus?
Well, all the more reason to get over there and get that place up to snuff. It will be nice to see some flowers, some care, some graciousness appear at the stark, neglected Hunt place.
Meanwhile, I sing love songs as I soak up the last spring on this old farm where I’ve lived for 27 years. It has its problems, its scars and calluses. There are plenty of times when I’ve cursed it. But I think, as I sit in the early sunlight pouring into the kitchen’s east windows, as I look outside at a feeder loaded with brilliant yellow goldfinches, on a bank scattered with brilliant yellow daffodils, backed by a huge bush of brilliant yellow forsythia, I think, whoever gets this place is going to be SO LUCKY!
And I have been so lucky to be its steward and poet laureate for so long.
Cobb Hill feels unstuck again, at least for now. We had a great April community meeting that started very frustrated and down and ended, to our great surprise, with things in motion. It’s interesting. Sometimes in that group all we have to do is declare our stuckness and wallow in it awhile, feeling really low, and then ideas start coming forth, people start volunteering to take things on, we invent new ways of going forward.
We are now working to hire a construction manager or developer to help us through the permitting, financing, and construction phases ahead of us. It’s becoming abundantly clear that if we try to handle all this as amateurs in our spare time, it will take us 10 years and we will make expensive mistakes. So, though a developer will be expensive too, we’re opening to the idea that it may be our least costly option. We have problems with the very concept of “developer,” but, as if powered by another stroke of Providence, one dropped by my office two weeks ago, one who shares our values, who has overseen a lot of affordable housing projects, who wasn’t looking for a job but just was curious about Cobb Hill — and who immediately won my trust. He even lives right in Hanover! I don’t know if we’ll go with him, or he with us, but even having him to call and answer occasional questions made me feel much better.
The dry weather may be Providence too, when it comes to the well. We decided to try to get Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources to permit the 6.5 gpm well we already have, rather than to do violent things to soil and bedrock to get more water. We were convinced that it’s enough water for us, it just isn’t enough for the regulators — so why pay another $10,000 and build a gravel road over the field to bring in a hydrofrack truck just to please the regulators? After many long phone calls with the hydrologist and regulators, however, I began to doubt that we can get away with this, even to doubt that that’s enough water for 22 families, even families with composting toilets and low-flow faucets and horizontal-axis washing machines and no garbage disposals, no jacuzzis, no lawn watering.
So now we’re going to drill at our third possible well site before we either dump gravel onto our ag field or throw ourselves at the mercy of the regulators. The saga drags on. Stay tuned. Who would have thought this well would take a whole year (and counting)? That’s why we need a developer.
This stuff, the well and the community and the farm, is where my mind and heart and body want to be these bright spring days. Everything else — the class I’m teaching, the writing, the Balaton meeting — is like pulling teeth. But I hang in there.
The class is actually a stitch, it’s such fun to hang out with engineers. Untroubled, for the most part, by economics or politics or ethics, they have such a sweet, innocent, can-do approach to the world. We are trying to figure out how to run the human economy with nothing but solar power and biomass — even using biomass for materials, generated in biorefineries. I am learning about amazing new technologies, such as gasifying bales of switchgrass and running the product through efficient combined-cycle electric generators, or unleashing a carefully selected bunch of microbes on waste wood or wheat straw, to turn it into ethanol or plastics.
All of which is well and good, but I’m the person standing in for the rest of nature, warning the engineers that it wouldn’t be good to turn the entire land into a switchgrass plantation. (They don’t want to, they claim, they only want the 30 million acres of conservation reserve land.) We’re trying to do the numbers to see what we actually need to feed and fuel and supply anywhere from 5 to 17 billion people (the range of the latest U.N. year 2100 populations forecasts). I’m strongly pushing Amory Lovins-type factor-ten efficiencies, and Amory was kind enough to talk to the class for two hours by PictureTel. (Now there’s a great technology — think of how much fossil fuel we saved not having to transport Amory’s molecules to us, only his digitized image.) My secret goal is to use this class to collect the numbers and the technological vision to figure out how to provide for the human economy on about 5 percent of the land area, so we can turn 95 percent back to nature.
One of my ecologist colleagues, when he heard this, said, “That’s a novel approach! Trying to figure out how little we need, rather than how much we can take without going over any disastrous thresholds! Ninety-five percent! I’ve never thought I dared ask even for fifty!”
Meanwhile the Balaton Bulletin needs to get out and the speakers lined up for the next meeting. The Beyond the Limits update is lagging badly, but there’s good news on that project — Alan AtKisson has turned out a first draft of a book we’ve been calling “Beyond the Limits for people who will never read Beyond the Limits.” It’s a lovely book, one that show what the life is like of a person who tries to live according to his planetary concerns. Alan’s life is very different from mine; his talents are way beyond mine, especially in music and writing; but the challenge of that kind of life is one I deeply identify with, of course. And Alan makes it sound like fun.
Which it is!
Though daunting sometimes.
But in spring so full of beauty and joy!
Love,
Dana
