Dear Folks,
Such a difference a month makes in New England in April! Especially this April, which has been as warm and sunny and sweet as any I can remember.
Because of the lovely weather, we’re two weeks ahead of schedule. Boy, does THAT ever feel good — and rare in our hectic spring! Stephen and Kerry have their whole two acre garden fenced and harrowed (using the horses) and tilled. They’ve planted 240-foot rows of peas and spinach, and they’ve even got their potatoes in. Their garlic, planted last fall is up several inches. Subscription orders for weekly veggie deliveries are coming in well. Best of all, Kerry, after being knocked out by the horse accident for most of last year, is up and running again, without the slightest limp, tending to a million little seedlings.
Flats of small green things fill the windows in their bedroom and my bedroom and the lean-to plastic-covered greenhouse we attach to the basement. We’ve got the plastic cover up on the big hoophouse out in the upper garden, and Kerry has planted it with beets, radishes, turnips, Chinese cabbage, salad mix. We’re eating salads from the spinach and mache we planted last fall.
In the house garden, which is my responsibility this year, I’ve tilled under the winter rye cover crop and planted peas (four kinds, plus sugarsnaps, snow peas, and sweet peas), spinach, onion seedlings, carrots, beets, chard, leeks, radish, turnips, dill, parsley, and parsnips. I’ve weeded the flower beds and set out lily bulbs and stock seedlings. I’ve pruned the raspberries and trimmed out the brush from my wildflower garden in the woods and started layering this year’s compost heap. Yesterday we took down the glass panels from the big back porch and put up the screens, and I cleaned up the summer kitchen out there, so it’s ready for canning and freezing and pickling and jelly-making.
Not only are the lambs all born, but the sheep are sheared. There were three accidental lambs born in February, you may remember. The others all appeared on schedule in mid-April, the last ones just a week ago. All births uneventful, no malpresentations, no bummers, nothing that required the slightest intervention by me. Kerry’s 12-year-old sister Angelica was visiting and was thrilled to watch, from a perch high up in the hay loft, one little one pop out, get licked clean, wobble onto its feet, and find breakfast. The only problem is that out of 8 ewes, 7 had single lambs. This is a shock; I aim for and usually get twins all round. The only explanation I can come up with is that these babies were conceived right after the freak blizzard we had last November, right after we’d had to hustle the flock out of the pasture and into the barn and forcibly switch them from grass to hay. That could have stressed the ewes a bit, so when they went into their next heat they dropped only one egg instead of two.
Sigh. The best-laid plans. But what am I complaining about? There are fewer lambs, but they’re healthy, adorable, bouncing all over the barnyard, ecstatic with the discovery of the miracle of tender green grass. Because they’re singles, they’ll grow big and strong. The one set of twins, the last lambs to be born, are both black ewes, probably keepers. I try to name keeper lambs starting with the same letter as the name of their mother, so I can keep the family trees straight in my mind. So I have Dahlia, Daisy, Dandelion, and Delphinium. And Tulip, Tillie and Trillium. The twinning lamb this year is Violet, so I’ve named the babies Verbena and Viburnum.
Out in the chicken house, 48 lustily growing chicks are eating me out of house and home. I ordered 25 Black Australorpe pullets to be next year’s layers, plus 6 Aracauna pullets because we like their many-colored eggs (light green, blue, pink — as opposed to the brown eggs of our main layers — in New England brown eggs are what sells; no one will buy white eggs — they think, incorrectly, that brown eggs are more nutritious — or maybe they just like their looks better — as for me, I like the brown-laying breeds better, they’re bigger and more winter-hardy — sorry for this long diversion, I do get enthusiastic about my chickens!).
I also ordered 10 Buff Orpington cockerel chicks, one to be our new rooster, the others to go into the freezer. The supplier (Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa — the newly hatched chicks are stuck in a cardboard box with breathing holes and trucked immediately to the Minneapolis airport; they arrive at the White River Junction, Vermont, post office the next morning — oops, sorry, another diversion) threw in 6 Rhode Island red cockerels and a pompom-head for free, just to be sure the gang was big enough to stay warm for the journey. So I have quite an assortment out there, just beginning to grow tailfeathers, trying out their new wings, greeting me with a racket every time I show up to fill their feeders with grower mash.
The adult chickens have gone on strike. Just before the chicks arrived, we cleaned the chicken house. There’s a trap-door in the floor, through which we shovel the winter’s accumulation of shavings, droppings, and whatever kitchen scraps the chickens haven’t eaten. They fall into the bucket of our front-end loader, then we take the nutrient gold down to the compost heap, where I am now layering it with weeds and old cornstalks and autumn leaves. We put down sweet-smelling new shavings in the chicken house, turned out the winter light that keeps their days long, and confined the grown-ups to half the house, so the chicks could grow undisturbed in the other half. For these indignities, they stopped laying en masse. I was getting more than two dozen eggs a day; now I’m getting two (eggs, not dozen). I keep telling them to stop sulking and get back to work; meanwhile my egg customers are disappointed, because once you’ve tasted our real eggs, you just can’t eat factory-raised supermarket eggs any more.
The ducks and geese are laying too. I put the geese down on the pond the minute it thawed, hoping they’ll lay and nest on the island, where the foxes can’t get them. They are laying there, but not setting yet. I left the ducks in the barn, not trusting them to be smart enough to set on the island, and hoping to keep a mother and some ducklings up in the garden to eat slugs all summer. So far they’ve got two nests with a dozen eggs in each, but again, no sign of setting. I wonder how to trip the hormonal switch that gets them to settle down on those eggs?
All this spring activity is taking place in a setting that’s just astoundingly beautiful. Spring is always lovely in this valley, but somehow this one is especially gorgeous, maybe because I expect it to be my second-to-last on this farm. The thousands of bulbs we’ve accumulated have been blooming in glorious succession — snowdrops, crocus, glory-of-the-snow, scylla, dozens of kinds of daffodils and narcissus, and now the earliest tulips. Forsythia gladdened the view out our kitchen windows; now wild shad blossoms are opening all over the woods. The forests started with the subtle pinks and purples of the maple blooms, now there are delicate tree-blossoms and catkins everywhere and exquisite tiny leaves coming out, in the lightest shades of green. I think the valley is at its most beautiful in its lacy, fragile spring foliage — not the heavy green of summer, not the spectacular blaze of fall. I kind of hold my breath when I look around, knowing how ephemeral this time is.
The birds are coming back, like everything else two weeks early. The robins and killdeer and song sparrows and phoebes were first, coming in waves. When the song-sparrows came through, the valley rang with their trills every morning. Most have gone north, some have settled, I hear their territory-marking song along with that of the robins at the earliest morning light. The yellow-bellied sapsuckers are pounding on the hollow limbs of our locust trees — they purposely pick the branches that make the loudest noise, to mark their territories. One year one of them got the bright idea of pounding on one of our metal farm gates — he must have scared off every other sapsucker in the neighborhood. Pine warblers and myrtle warblers and chipping sparrows have just made an appearance. The great songsters, the wrens and thrushes and most warblers, aren’t back yet — I watch anxiously for their return, because their numbers are dropping, and spring without them would be like a symphony without the clarinets and flutes and piccolos.
Today I have to go over to the new farms and plant five apple trees I just ordered and a butternut seedling as a gift from the old farm to the new. I already put five apples over there last week, which I ordered last year when I thought we could buy those farms, then heeled into my garden when I was convinced we could never buy those farms, now dug up for the transfer, since we actually own those farms! They — and the new ones I’m planting today — are rare, old-fashioned varieties that I think are vastly superior to the ubiquitous, boring Macs and Cortlands and Delicious. Even the names are wonderful: Ashmead’s Kernel, Ribston Pippin, Northern Spy, Esopus Spitzenberg, Belle de Boskoop, Hidden Rose, New York Imperial, Blue Pearmain. It will be years before they’re big enough to bear well, so I want to get them started now, though I’m taking a risk, not knowing for sure where we will decide to put houses and roads. There are some obvious places where we won’t put houses and roads, so I feel safe planting apples there.
I’m planting blueberries and black raspberries over there too. Last weekend, when I was there, Ken Hunt told me about a place off in a corner where there was a lot of old composted cow manure I could put in the apple holes I had dug, and when I went there, I found a protected bank where thousands of wild bloodroots were in bloom! It was like a blessing. Welcome to the new farms, they said.
We had a party over there last Sunday night for our new neighbors, to get acquainted and to tell them what we hope to do there. We deliberately bought farms that are right smack in town, houses all around. Our neighbors hike and ski and snowmobile on our farms and know the land better than we do. So it was good to get together, listen to their stories and ideas about the place, assure them that we want to keep the trails as the town treasures they are, open to all (except maybe snowmobilers and hunters, but we didn’t say that, because we haven’t decided it.)
We had a good community meeting this month, poring over contour maps, trying to figure out how all the flows could go — flows of people, cars, cows, water, sewage, food, garbage and compost and recyclables, energy — so they work together and their adverse effects are minimized. We had a beautiful sunny day, so we took our maps and tracing paper and went out on the land and paced things out. This is hard work! We’re deciding the long-term future of this land! I can’t imagine how developers do it over and over, so quickly and apparently easily.
This week some of us go to the Vermont water regulators, to plead for exceptions. They assume we must provide 135 gallons of potable water per day per bedroom, and be able to absorb that much sewage in a septic system. We’re planning composting toilets, low-flow showerheads, and graywater recovery. Our engineer has metered records a similar house he built in Hanover that uses 55 gallons per day, total for three bedrooms. So we hope to help the regulators catch up to the realities of green design. I have the feeling this will be the first of many battles!
And next week some of us go to meditate and have lunch with the Buddhist monks and nuns at the Thich Nhat Hanh place, half a mile from us on the next hilltop over. I’m really looking forward to that!
Well, to update you on some of last month’s concerns, I am checking my email daily, waiting for news of Wouter’s death. He wrote me a short note two weeks ago, saying he couldn’t go on much longer, he expected to be gone within two weeks. Since then I’ve heard just once from Nanda, and once from Alan AtKisson, who had just visited them. Wouter’s three daughters are there with Nanda, they’ve finally brought in a night nurse, so Nanda can get some sleep, it sounds very near, and still full of acceptance and love — but with rising pain, more drugs, less lucidity. Nanda broke my heart, telling of Wouter, in his wakeful moments, grieving for the state of the world, sorry he couldn’t do more, worrying about the environment and society his daughters will inherit. That sent a spear deep into me; I don’t fear dying, but I sure do fear dying hopeless, having given up on the world. I can see the arrogance in that — if I couldn’t save the world, then obviously the world can’t be saved. But I can also see the deep, deep mourning, the intolerable idea not only that I would die, but that much of what I have loved and served will die. That thought is so painful I put it far away (until it leaped out just now, as I write you — you can see how far away it really is.) But there it was, in the midst of Wouter’s otherwise saintlike peace of mind out came his honest hopelessness. I can only take it as a challenge to me and the whole Balaton group, to keep doing the work.
The organ-playing in church on Palm Sunday and Easter went OK. It wasn’t as good as I would have liked, but it was a lot better than no organ at all. I’ll probably continue to fill in occasionally, as they need me. It is great to be playing an organ again.
And I’m enjoying getting back to the writing. The spring Balaton Bulletin is out, proposals have gone out for the new Sustainability Institute, we have a meeting at MIT next week to work on our commodity study, I’m nearly finished with the rewrite of the Balaton Group’s paper on indicators of sustainable development, I have an article on the economic long wave in press in the summer Whole Earth, and the next item on the list is to get back to the textbook, where there’s actual light at the end of the tunnel.
Kim Christiansen, the newest Foundation Farm resident is settling in, making a jewelry shop down in the basement. Right now he’s out with a chainsaw, cutting up locust branches that fell during the winter. Chrissie and Scot, former residents, now next door, are doing fine; I carpool with them into Dartmouth. We’re about to have our annual early-May birthday party for our dogs — a hot-dog party, of course, with all the fixins. Vegetarian hot-dogs for the people, real hot-dogs for the dogs, who manage to demolish their share in about three seconds. Sweet Basil is about to turn 15, clownish Emmett will be 3, wolfish Rudy is about 3 too. Basil doesn’t move too fast any more, and he can’t hear a thing except the opening of the dog-cooky jar. Emmett is still as enthusiastic as a puppy (a 90-pound puppy), but almost as well-behaved as Basil. Rudy has met so many nice people at Foundation Farm that she’s almost completely forgotten her abusive childhood and her shyness.
Have I left anyone out? Ooops, the four cats, one of whom is sitting on my lap at this very moment. (Simon, who always tries to type in his own greeting to you.) The cats are in fine shape, hanging around the stone wall where the catnip grows, rolling in the greening new shoots.
All us critters here at Foundation Farm are smelling the daffodils, rolling in the greenery, rejoicing in the sun, and running around like crazy, celebrating spring.
Love,
Dana
