Dear Folks,
It feels as if Foundation Farm is holding its breath in anticipation of great events just around the corner. The main one is The Wedding, which will take place September 9. Chrissie has found the fine white cotton she wanted but she hasn’t yet made her dress. She and Scot (who has returned from field work in the forests of Vancouver Island) are shopping for the exact right thing for him to wear. Chrissie and Marcia are cooking ahead and filling the freezer with French bread and cinnamon rolls and soup. We’re making lists of what has to be cleaned up and made beautiful over the next three weeks.
It’s actually going to be a simple affair, as weddings go. The ceremony will be up at St. Gaudens National Park, a few miles from here, the lovely house and studio where the Cornish-colony sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens lived and worked. There are sweeping views of Mount Ascutney and wide lawns and little secluded gardens — if we have a day as beautiful as this one, it will be a spectacular place for a wedding. Then the reception will be here at the farm. The number of people coming seems to be somewhere between 30 and 50, most of them Scot’s and Chrissie’s relatives. Quite a few are coming from a long way and will be staying here several days. Nothing we haven’t handled before. But of course a wedding is special, so Chrissie is a bit harried right now, trying to think ahead and make everything perfect.
Wouldn’t it be a relief if the whole human race could give up its fantasies of perfection? Or do you think if we did that, we’d stop pushing to make things even moderately nice? My guess is that we’d make things just as nice, but have more fun. (This from a person who has managed to harrass herself most of her life with the curse of perfectionism.)
I’m going to miss most of the preparations, because I leave in a week for Hungary and the annual Balaton Group meeting. I get back the night before the wedding. So I’m in wild anticipation mode too, trying to get two columns ahead, trying to assemble everything I have to take. I’ve made it a practice to do an extended fast a week or two before Balaton, to get slowed down, waked up, and spiritually prepared for that intense time with so many good friends and partners from all over the world. Today’s the fourth day of the fast, and I feel great. Aside from the caffeine withdrawal headache I always get at the beginning, this fast is going easily. I don’t drink coffee, only black tea, but that’s enough addiction to give me withdrawal pains. To cope better, I cut out the tea several days before the fast begins. Without caffeine I’m a slower and less bombastic person — which is good, because I can get way too rushed, obsessed, and bulldozy. But I always start the tea up again afterward, on a day when I convince myself that I can’t possibly get anything done without a caffeine boost. At the moment, in the middle of a fast, that idea sounds completely crazy. But I know the time will come when it will sound reasonable again.
I have very mixed feelings about missing the time before the wedding. It’s kind of a relief to avoid the chaos. But I’ll also miss the fun (let’s face it, what my friend Joan calls the Vorfreude, the joy of anticipation and preparation, is about 90% of any great event) and I’ll miss the time getting to know Scot’s family and getting to know Chrissie’s family better. And I like fussing around on the farm, polishing it up to look beautiful for guests (and for us) — as if it didn’t look beautiful already. But there are always weeds to be pulled, little unconscious piles of stuff to pick up, spider webs to vacuum. So here I am, feeling a mixture of regret and relief, nothing to do about either. We knew it would be this way when we scheduled all these goings-on.
My Balaton trip will be two days longer than usual, because some of our group is worried about the new GATT agreement and the World Trade Organization and what it will do to workers and to the global environment. So at their request we’re having a two-day intensive workshop after the regular meeting, with about 12 people staying to work on that subject. The topic of the main meeting this year (to which about 50 people come) is Sustainable Consumption — how — really how — the affluent people of the world can free themselves from the treadmill of materialism and lead much more fulfilling lives while putting much less of a burden on the earth. There are great people coming. I’m already excited!
Heck, I’m always excited about Balaton meetings. They’re the high point of the year for me. I just wish they didn’t always come at the high point of the harvest season.
We’re still hanging on the edge of drought. Just after I wrote you that doleful letter last month we had a two-inch rain, and then a week later we had another. That got us out of danger for awhile and — miracle of miracles — it stimulated a great flush of clover on some of those fields I had thought were a lost cause! The high hayfield and the medium-high pasture are now beautiful sights, with clover fixing nitrogen into the soil like crazy. But for some reason the big lower pasture shows no clover at all. It’s solid weeds. So I have to do something radical there, like replow and replant.
And now for two weeks we’ve had less than half an inch of rain per week. The soil is drying up again, the pond and the brook are falling, and the hot August sun is pounding down. This is a summer when I don’t get to stop worrying.
Since we can water the garden, it is in its normal mode of August excess. We’re making pickles, freezing green beans, canning tomatoes, and gorging ourselves on early corn. I made three plantings of corn, each with several varieties of different maturation times, hoping that at least one of them would come in perfectly for the wedding. Some of the corn was 12 feet tall and fell over in a big thunderstorm, so we’re not going to have the ridiculous abundance I had hoped for, but we should still have plenty for wedding guests and freezer. And oh my! the goodness of superfresh sweet corn boiled up right out of the garden! Every year it’s a shock to re-discover how wonderful that is.
The summer Gravenstein apples have ripened, the first time we’ve gotten a decent harvest from that tree. The other apples are coming along well in spite of the drought — we’re going to be able to make a lot of cider and applesauce. The kindred squash is climbing over the fence and up into the yellow birch tree. I’m wondering how high it will go. Won’t it be funny to pick big orange squashes from a birch tree? The early onions are already stored away in the root cellar along with the Russian banana potatoes and a crock of dill pickles. The other potatoes we’re just digging as we need them for cooking — the big potato harvest will come after frost. The tomatoes are infested with fusarium wilt, I’m sorry to say, and are drying up long before their time. This is the third year that has happened and I’m wondering if there’s any part of the garden that’s safe for them, or whether somehow I’m infecting them in their potting soil. Next year we’ll trying moving them way down to the brook garden, where there’s no hint of fusarium.
Yesterday I tilled up the places where the green soybeans and early snap beans grew, and today I’ll plant the fall greens there (spinach, mache, arugula, tatsoi, santoh, and several kinds of lettuce). What space I don’t need for fall greens I’ll scatter with winter rye, buckwheat, and hairy vetch for a cover crop.
Emmett weighed 25 pounds when we took him in for his first rabies shot! He’s a handful, or rather a heavy armload, of wiggling, exuberant puppy. He chews on everything, including the cats (until he gets a claw in the face). He harasses the garden ducks. He nips at Basil. He roisters around the garden, crushing small plants. He jumps up on tables and knocks things down. He discovered a whole unguarded plate of brownies and scarfed them up in seconds. (We called the vet and gave him a gulp of hydrogen peroxide, which brought the brownies back up. He was a chastened pup for about half an hour.) He loves to swim in the brook, and he’s fascinated but a bit intimidated by the sheep. He will come, sit, stay, and get down perfectly as long as he knows you’ve got treats in your pocket. He no longer pees in the house except every now and then. He’s going to be a beautiful dog, shorthaired, looking much like a golden lab.
Marcia and Chrissie took him to his first session of puppy school last week. Can you imagine 20 of these little critters all in the same place? The trainer, April Frost, is a highly opinionated genius with animals, so her puppy classes are quite decorous. We have five more classes to go, after which we expect Emmett to be a perfect gentleman. Until then he’s an adorable hoodlum. Fortunately he has four adults and innumerable visitors to run him around, scratch his tummy, and keep him amused. Every morning he and I do the chores together, and he’s got the routine down perfectly, including the part about not chasing the ducks, as long as I have treats in my pocket.
Andy Sterman, a reader of this newsletter, informs me that Emmett is an old Hebrew word for “truth.” So we like the name even better.
It’s so beautiful here today I wish I could package it and send it to you. We’re in a Canadian high, a break from the summer humidity and heat. It was actually chilly when we got up this morning, and wisps of valley fog were rising before my eyes as a brilliant sun broke through. The chill and the fog are portents of fall — our valley is heavy in fog most fall mornings until the sun burns it off. There’s still lots of growing and ripening going on, the sun when it breaks through is still strong, the afternoons still get hot. But baby birds are showing up in gangs, stuffing themselves on honeysuckle berries and sunflower seeds, building up strength for the coming migration. And the sun is swinging around rapidly to the south, the shadows are lengthening, the days are shortening.
The valley, like our household, is busy and yet holding its breath in anticipation, knowing there are great events ahead.
So next month’s newsletter should be FULL of news!
Love,
Dana
