Dear Folks, In case you ever get nostalgic for the Peaceful Life in the Country, consider the following scenario:
Your large, friendly, and, let’s face it, very dumb dog decides at 3 AM to play bouncy games with a fuzzy black and white visitor he finds in the yard. Ten seconds later, the dog is rolling in agony on your best Persian carpet, and you have gone from sound sleep to bolt upright, with no part of you having attained consciousness except your nose.
You fumble for tomato juice, find only a can of tomato paste, mix it with a lot of water, and get the dog outside, but not before he has time to roll on two more carpets.
In your until-that-moment-white nightgown, you and the thrashing, whimpering dog take a tomato bath.
Covered in red, he breaks loose, rockets into the house, and rolls on the rugs again.
You drag him back out, rinse him off, rinse yourself off. While you change nightgowns, the dog rolls in all the flower beds where that very day you have lovingly set out tender seedlings you raised for months in your greenhouse. Covered in mud and mangled green tissue, the dog comes in to roll one more time on the rugs.
You lock the dog outside and heave the carpets out onto the front lawn, where a rain is just beginning. Little do you know that this rain will continue for five uninterrupted days. When it is over, your sodden rugs will no longer smell of skunk, they will smell of something more subtle, the exquisite smell of wet, moldy wool.
The dog goes on smelling of skunk for weeks.
There, that should make you glad you don’t live on a farm! Unless you do. In which case you recognize this as just one more of those little dramas God sends into your life to keep you humble and patient and to remind you that the small island of order you are trying to maintain is surrounded by an ocean of Nature, which has its own rules, and which is proceeding relentlessly, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, toward terminal disorder.
June is the month when everything on the farm bursts into life and eats (or sprays) everything else.
The big chickens got out the other day and scratched up the newly planted herb garden. The neighbor’s dog came down the hill and killed four half-grown chicks. Basil, despite his tomato bath, is infested with fleas. The sheep and horses and workers in the garden are being tortured by deer flies. The phlox is covered with powdery mildew. The just-sprouted pole beans are being devoured by something, slugs I think, and the lettuces are being mowed down by cutworms, and the gander pulled up the baby kohlrabis.
So far, however, knock on wood, the fox has not appeared to claim the gander. Because of clever protective action on our part, the crows did not get the corn. We sprayed Safer’s Soap the other day to keep the aphids from getting the apple leaves. I will pull out the biggest guns in the organic arsenal tonight — rotenone and pyrethrum — to try to save the beans from beetles and slugs.
I tell you these things so you won’t romanticize life in the country.
The first few years I lived here I had terrible nightmares at this time of year. Over the spring my consciousness and care would spread out gradually to encompass the whole farm. I had to experience some terrible jolts, as for the first time weasels, potato beetles, skunks, fusarium wilt, codling moths, and foxes became realities in my life. During the day I stayed calm but at night I would dream of standing on a high cliff, watching a tidal wave engulf the farm (quite a trick, 150 miles inland!). Monsters would appear and eat whole sheep and maple trees (we didn’t have pear thrips yet). Small animals would call out for my help, and I wouldn’t be able to find them anywhere. Nature, about which I had had lots of pretty city ideas, suddenly became bloody in tooth and claw.
I don’t have those nightmares any more. I think I’ve reached a balance between seeing nature as friendly and bountiful and seeing it as a massive power that does what it darn well pleases, despite my plans. I’ve learned some tricks to enforce my plans, sometimes, partially. I’ve learned to make less ambitious plans. A lot of things still go wrong in June, but a lot of things go right, too. In fact I think the farm looks better and is running more smoothly right now than it ever has before. I’m mad about the dead chicks and the munched-on beans and the skunk-smelling dog, but mostly I’m proud of what we’re accomplishing here, and grateful.
The flower gardens have been refurbished, and at the moment at least, they’re fairly weedless. Some of the vegetable gardens got planted late, but they all got planted. The lawns are mowed and so is the pasture. The tractor shed, left for years unfinished, undrained, and gradually leaning, has been ditched, given a gravel foundation, straightened, braced, and completed. The various machines are, right now, all functioning. The random leaks have, for now, been fixed. More than half of next winter’s wood is already in the shed. The first radishes, lettuce, spinach, dill, turnips are coming in from the garden. The peonies, bachelor’s buttons, stock, delphiniums are beginning to bloom. Much of the burdock has been rooted out. Most of the fences are fixed. The sun finally came out and dried out the rugs. We have enough money to pay the property taxes.
Hey! We’re doing OK here! It’s even fun, and at this time of the year astonishingly green and beautiful. It’s been cool and rainy, so far, just the opposite of last summer, fine for the garden, bad for the hay. Not a blade of hay has been cut in this valley yet; it’s been too rainy. That will be a problem, if a big crystal-clear Canadian high doesn’t pull in over our heads soon.
A constant parade of blessings and worries and problems and beauty. That’s this farm, winter or summer, especially summer.
I had the fun of seeing a very different kind of farm in a different part of the country when I was invited by Wes and Dana Jackson to speak at their Prairie Festival at the end of May. Wes and Dana founded the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, (right in the middle of the state, in high wheat country), partly as a hippie statement about alternative values, as Dennis and I founded our farm, but more seriously as a scientific venture to study the ecological wisdom of the prairie. (“Anyone can appreciate a mountain or an ocean,” says Wes, “but it takes a real subtle mind to appreciate a prairie.”)
They have a small permanent staff and a bunch of very impressive interns, and they do research basically on two things — one, how the native prairie works, and two, how to apply that knowledge to design a new type of agriculture. The new agriculture is based, like the prairie, on perennial grains, mixed with legumes and other plants. Like the prairie never plowed, never weeded, maybe occasionally burned. Unlike the prairie high-yielding in human food. Right now they’re trying out mixtures of two native perennial grasses (for grain) and one legume (for nitrogen, forage, and edible seed) and a sunflower (for oil).
It’s quite an operation, especially during the Prairie Festival. The festival is essentially a big folksy intellectual picnic. Several hundred people drive in for it, from all over the Middle West. Many of them camp on the place for the weekend. There are tours of the research fields and of the native prairie, and birdwatching hikes and morning meditations and folksongs and a bonfire and a barn dance. And all day long there are lectures (that’s where I came in), held in the biggest barn. (What a nice place to lecture, with seed sacks hanging from the rafters and kids dangling their feet down from the loft and the breeze blowing in through the cracks between the boards!)
Well, I just had a good old time. The folks were my kind of folks, friendly and unpretentious, like the people I grew up with in Illinois. Many of them were farmers. All were committed environmentalists, so I could let my hair down and talk about the stuff I really like to talk about, no holds barred (my role was to connect the prairie with the whole planet or something like that.)
The underlying and ominous theme of the festival was drought and climate change. We got to see firsthand how the Kansas farming system handles drought and how the prairie does. Around us for miles farmers were plowing in their winter wheat, or turning their cows to graze on it. The drought of last summer has continued, and there wasn’t enough water for the wheat to head up — or for the hay to grow to feed the cattle. On the plowed-down fields the prairie wind was raising clouds of dust. I’ve never seen such widespread wind erosion. On the native prairie (there are 70 acres of unplowed prairie at the Land Institute), the plants had hunkered down; they hadn’t grown normally; but they were alive, they were holding the soil, and when a little rain did fall, they popped right back up green again. Perennial roots can go a lot deeper than annuals. Perennials can store up a lot more nutrition against an emergency. That’s the idea behind the Land Institute.
After I got home from that trip I worked frantically for a few weeks to get the garden in, and now things have slowed down to what seems like a manageable pace. I have no more traveling to do until the end of August, which is wonderful. I can just garden and write. (I cancelled out of two other speaking engagements I had committed to this month, and I turn down three or four others a day.) The book is Always There, always a problem, always difficult, but slowly, gradually, it’s coming together, if I just work and work and work at it. When I begin a chapter, like the present one on wilderness and diversity and ecosystems, I feel buried in information, and I have no idea what to include, what to leave out, how to order it. If I can just get myself to not panic and to sit down for hours every day and patiently work it through, eventually things fall into place. It’s like untying a massive knot, painstakingly, day after day after day.
When I’m done with this book, I’ll be glad I did it, but most days I wonder what ever led me into this madness. Well, like the farm, take it day by day. Like the farm, the book is a blessing, a worry, a problem, and it even has some beauty, of the intellectual kind. Whatever I feel about it, it’s what I’ve got to do right now, my Practice, and it’s a worthy enterprise. Maybe someday I’ll even find the grace to be grateful for it, too.
Love, Dana
