Dear Folks,

Well, the puppy’s name is Emmett. We arrived at that name after two weeks of trying out a hundred or so others, suggested by all members of the household and many visitors. We tried exalted names, such as Solstice and Wendell Berry. We tried plain doggy names, like Buff. There were names that popped out spontaneously in the course of dealing with him, like Snerdly and Skeezix. Scot, away in Seattle, communicating by email, never having seen the puppy, resolutely favored Emmett, and over time the pup began to look like an Emmett to us. Emmett is just a man’s name. None of us knows an Emmett. It suggests a tough, gnarly, no-nonsense New Englander, and that’s what we hope he’ll grow up to be.

How can I describe the delights and trials of Emmett? I guess I’ll ration myself to just one paragraph on this subject. (Is it OK if I make it a long paragraph?) He is adorable, of course, soft and golden-white, round when we got him, lanky now after a month of rapid growth. Big paws, droopy ears, black nose, liquid black retriever eyes that melt the hardest heart. He is a full-blown puppy, chewing on everything, jumping on everyone, not to be trusted on a good rug or near a chicken or in the garden. He’s learning very fast. He mastered the dog door the first day, so he can go in and out at will. After a few hisses and scratches he learned not to mess with cats. He knows “sit” and “stay” and “come” and obeys them most of the time. He can walk nicely on a leash if he’s not too wired up, and he sits by the edge of the road when a car goes by. He was scared of the brook at first, but now he’s learning that it’s a wonderful place to play and that he’s a natural swimmer. He attacks rubber balls and bounces on sticks and gets himself in fixes and makes us laugh many times a day. He is allowed only on our big screened back porch and in the kitchen, so he can’t damage anything valuable. Every night he pulls down the pile of garden boots and shoes we keep by the back door and sleeps with them. He’s perfectly toilet-trained except at night and every once in awhile during the day.

(Small second paragraph. I cheated. Sorry. Felt like a paragraph break just there.) He’s going to be a great buddy. Marcia and Chrissie have signed him up to go to puppy school next month, so he will be civilized. It’s such fun to have a puppy again, after 12 years. Our old dog Basil is accepting Emmett with resignation, snapping at him when he gets too rambunctious, keeping him in line. Sometimes Basil even gets into playing puppy games again, for a minute, till he remembers his dignity and his stiff joints.

Marcia and I are running the farm alone for a few weeks — or should I say running the Foundation Farm Bed & Breakfast? This weekend is the first time in more than a month when we’ve had two days in a row without visitors. I guess I can blame this phenomenon on the gregarious people who live here, including me, each of us with lots of friends and relations who want to stop by for an hour or a week. Perfectly timed, too, just as one bunch pulls out, the next rolls in, as if they’d planned it that way.

Let’s see how many I can remember. Aromar Revi from India, a Balaton Group member. Paula Hendrick from the New Road Map Foundation. Chrissie’s parents and her sister Lisa and Lisa’s 18-month-old twins (and on one special day another half-dozen Robinson relatives). Evy MacDonald from the New Road Map Foundation, plus her Nebraska parents Donna and Ray (who got right into the gardening and freezing and canning). A vanload of Balaton members from Thailand and Austria and Latvia and the Czech Republic. Carlos Quesada from Costa Rica and his beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. Derk Bossel from Germany and his wife-to-be and two kids-to-be. Matt Eddy. Liz Krahmer. Jan Wright from New Zealand. Annamarie Pluhar and her fiance Tracy. Cam Webb and his bride-to-be Kinari, who showed us her just-completed wedding dress. I’m sure that’s not all, just all I can think of at the moment.

Live on a New Hampshire farm, see the world! As I think back on this list and the chains of love that connect us to all these folks, I feel grateful that we have this big, spread-out farmhouse to welcome them. We have needed a lot of people, especially kids, to wear down the puppy. And as Marcia says, what would we do, if they didn’t help us eat all the veggies coming out of the garden? We’ve had discourses on modern Sufism and on the best way to can tomatoes. We’ve had people tell of their spontaneous healing from deadly diseases and people help us dig out burdock and move sheep fence and put up a TV aerial (in a sincere, but unsuccessful attempt to bring in a third channel, though we never watch the two we do get). We’ve had an evening of hymn-singing and we’ve heard reports on how to purify water with ultraviolet light, and on an energy-efficiency display that moves around Thailand on six remodeled rice barges. We’re blessed with all these people, all those ideas, all that love.

That’s meant as honest appreciation and guarded invitation. Having people here is what the place is for. I’m never happier than when the house is buzzing with activity. But it has been on the edge of too hectic lately, too busy to fully take in everyone who comes. It seems there are limits to how much we can absorb at one time, even of blessings.

There are no limits at the moment to zucchinis. They’re still gearing up, but already overwhelming us. Marcia is baking four loaves of zucchini bread as I write. We’ve also been loading the freezer with peas, peapods, broccoli, chard. Jars of gooseberry and black raspberry jam are going down cellar. This week we dug new potatoes and picked the first tomatoes. The early corn has just tasseled out. Marcia and I had a glorious multi-colored supper last night –yellow-squash-and-carrot soup, red beet-and-walnut-and-garlic salad, and peapods and beet greens, stir-fried with ginger. We eat these incredibly healthy and delicious meals and sit back and sigh and feel immensely rich.

One reason the garden is doing so well is that the slugs are nearly gone. I’ve seen only a scattered few. (Last year there were, no exaggeration, MILLIONS of them!) I would like to credit our three garden ducks for this miracle, and so I will. They are on constant slug patrol, but they also gobble down unprotected tender greens — lettuce, spinach, chard, beet greens — they know what’s good! So I have to keep the greens rows covered with Reemay (a white row cover, made of very light spun plastic, which lets in sunlight and rain, but not ducks). It looks funny to have parts ot the garden draped in white, but it seems to work. We like having the ducks for company. They quack and chirp and parade around and keep us amused as we hoe.

I shouldn’t give the ducks all the credit. Two other changes this year could account for the decline of the slugs. One is that, for the first time in my gardening experience, I haven’t deep-mulched everything with hay. The second is that we’re having a drought.

I have never seen dryness like this. For the last three weeks of June, with the sun at its solstice peak, we registered only 3/4 inch on our rain gauge. If we hadn’t watered the garden every day, we would have lost almost everything. (Come to think of it, our watering blows the theory that the slug decline is due to the drought!) We couldn’t water the 12 acres of newly planted pastures, so we had to watch our sweet little clover and grass seedlings come up, wilt, and die. That was $4500 worth of seed and plowing and harrowing, all of which now has to be done over again.

The one piece of good news in this disaster was Chrissie’s insistence on using organic fertilizer. I was going to use soluble commercial fertilizer, because it’s much cheaper, because it was the only kind I could find, and because I wanted to give the seedlings a fast start. Chrissie said pointedly that she thought this was an organic farm. That caused me to slow down and search further. I found North Country Organics, which actually could deliver organic fertilizer by the ton. It’s made of less-soluble, less energy-intensive stuff — ground up phosphate rock instead of super-soluble superphosphate. Potassium-rich greensand rock instead of soluble KCl. Cottonseed meal and dried dairy whey and other organic sources of nitrogen, instead of soluble ammonium nitrate.

The secret is in the non-solubility, or rather very slow solubility. Organic fertilizers release their nutrients gradually, as the plants grow, instead of in an immediate burst. They’re much bulkier, and way more expensive, but they last a lot longer, and they don’t produce flushes of nutrient-laden runoff into ponds and streams. So here’s the good news — the one expense I won’t have all over again when I reseed the pastures in the fall is the $2000 worth of fertilizer. It’s still there, some of it taken up in the cover crop of oats that has managed to grow in spite of the drought, but most of the nutrients still in the ground. And a wash of soluble fertilizer didn’t run off in the one rain we did get, to pollute our sadly diminished pond and stream.

That’s the bright spot in an otherwise painful picture. When things go wrong on the farm, I discover how much of my consciousness is spread out on the land, like nerve endings, sensing and feeling. When the land hurts, I hurt too.

So for weeks now I’ve been in pain, watching an ecosystem dry up. I’ve been beset by both practical and impractical worries. What if Ruth’s established, deeper-rooted fields dry up, how will I get the sheep through the summer? (They did dry up — for the moment the sheep are eating the oats and weeds that grew instead of the seeded clover on my own fields.) How can we water the brook garden, too far from the house for hoses? (Chrissie brought down water in buckets by the truckload.) How far will the water table drop? What if the pond gets so shallow that the ducks and geese aren’t protected from foxes any more? Will we lose our well? As the brook dries into puddles, what’s happening to the trout? As the mosquitos disappear, what will the barn swallows and bats eat? Will the wild lilies bloom? At what point will the big trees start wilting?

I worry, and the sun pounds down. There are parts of the farm I can’t bring myself to look at any more. Big dark clouds come over and spit at us contemptuously and blow away and I shake my fist and curse at them, the fakers. Lightning splits the sky, a storn dumps three inches of rain in the next county, and I groan with frustration. I wake up in the morning, look out at a sparkling clear sky, and can’t stand to get up. Fortunately, I have a puppy to play with, and ducklings and chicks growing, and water for the gardens near the house (though always, we are aware, at the expense of the dropping aquifer around the well). So there are happy things to rejoice in, plenty of veggies to eat, few slugs, reasons to be grateful. But the countryside is slowly dying. I hear its agony every minute. It’s torture.

Last week, finally, we got a full inch of rain. Not enough to keep the water table from going on dropping, but at least enough to ease the pain of the growing things for awhile. There’s a forecast of scattered showers today. Maybe we’re through the worst of it. And maybe we still have two hot, dry summer months to go.

While we’re on the subject of heartbreak, there are two to report that are more long lasting than this drought, which we have every reason to expect is temporary. This month we have lost two beloved readers of this newsletter. One was Carroll (Curley) Bowen. He was Anna Pluhar’s “gentleman friend” and a friend of this farm after Anna’s death, a farmer himself in Rochester, Vermont, also an editor and publisher, a businessman, and a stately, kind person. He had been up irrigating one of his high fields (he was dealing with the drought too), came back to his truck, got in, and dropped dead. That’s the way he would have wanted to go, I’m sure, but some of us think it happened much too soon. He was 69.

And on July 4 we lost Jack Meadows, my father-in-law. This loss was expected; he had been fighting cancer for some time. It was as noble a fight as I have ever seen, waged by the whole Meadows family with sense and serenity and love, and by Jack with his never-failing sense of humor. In fact Dennis, when he called to inform me of Jack’s death, stopped to chuckle at one of Jack’s last jokes — he was joking right up to the end. I guess I should actually call Jack my ex-father-in-law, since I am divorced from his son, but heck, when you start to love a person you never stop, and the same happens when you love a whole family. Jack was a force for decency and practicality in everything he did, a solid citizen, a gentle, loving, laughing man. I’m one of many, many people who will miss him.

Now that I write all this, I’m realizing that there has been an unusual amount of pain and sadness this month. A bit of loneliness too, in spite of all the visitors, because Scot is gone on field work for 2 months, and Chrissie’s gone for 3 weeks to join him. That’s why Marcia and I are running things. We’re doing a fine job, I must say, in spite of the difficult weather. I’m amazed at how Marcia in just a few months has become a farm woman, quietly taking on chunks of responsibility (watering, ducks and geese, weeding and harvesting — and changing the sheets for all those visitors!) It’s an immense relief to me not only to have tasks taken off my shoulders, and not only to have the tasks often get done better, but most of all to have my mind freed up. The farm feels like an 80-ring circus sometimes, in addition to the 80-ring circus of my writing and Balaton-coordinating and other sustainability work. The limiting factor, the place where I crack, is in my ability to keep track of things. Marcia is helping enormously there.

And she has brought a special talent to the farm, a talent for community. Marcia watches and listens and quietly suggests that it’s time for a house meeting, time to talk about some underlying issue, time to get clear on our purpose. Community takes polished skills and constant work, just as marriage does, just as family does. Marcia’s a pro in those skills and that work. I wonder how we ever got along without her.

Well, the sky has clouded over and is spitting down some small, scattered drops. Mount Ascutney is only half visible, which means there’s half a chance for some real rain. I’m at the desperate point where I believe that every drop requires my personal enthusiastic cheering in order to reach the ground. So I better go out and see if I can summon up a rainstorm.

Love,
Dana

P.S. If you need a list of puppy names, I’ll gladly share ours.