Dear Folks,

WE’RE GETTING A PUPPY!!!

I’m so excited you’d think I was 8 years old! It isn’t often that we get a new puppy — it’s been 11 years since I brought home the small golden butterball we named Basil.

Now Basil is slowing down so much that he can snore peacefully on the back porch while a raccoon scampers freely over the chicken yard fence, crawls in the little chicken door, sets off a storm of squawking, grabs a biddy, crawls out, and climbs the fence with bird in jaws. (I was the one who heard the ruckus, dashed out, and caught the raccoon at the top of the fencepost. He and I stared at each other a minute, he dropped the chicken and scurried away. The chicken, improbably, lived.)

John has moved out, taking his golden retriever Moses, who was of the same antiquity and lethargy as Basil, and we feel a little empty with only one dog. We’d like Basil, who is a nearly perfect gentleman, to be a mentor to our next puppy. Clearly it was time to find that puppy.

The bad news for us, good news for dogdom, is that puppies are hard to find around here. Marcia and Chrissie and I read the ads and bulletin boards and toured the animal shelters for more than a month. (Touring animal shelters is a dangerous activity, because they have plenty of lovely kittens and cats — we already have three cats, but it was hard to walk away from some of the orphans we saw.) There are quite a few grown dogs who need homes, and we considered some of them seriously. We were open about breed, preferring a mutt with a heritage of bird dog or sheep dog. But in my heart there was only one thing I wanted — another Basil.

So I took one of the cats to the vet the other day and asked, as I have been asking everywhere, if there were any puppies around. The vet said there was a litter of 12 golden retriever-lab crosses coming in for shots next week. I jumped. Basil is a golden retriever-golden lab cross. The puppies, it turned out, are golden retriever-black lab. Six of them are coal black, six are gold. I wish you could see the whole bunch of them together, fat waddly little things, with snub noses and floppy ears and squinty puppy eyes, rolling over each other, nipping and squealing and wagging their little bits of tails. I was a goner, and so was Chrissie when she saw them.

We got a golden male. He’ll be ready to leave his mother this Friday, after he gets his shots. We are preparing his welcome and speculating about names. From the size of his paws and the sturdiness of his build, we expect he will be a big dog, like Basil, who weighs 90 pounds. At the moment he’s the size of Basil’s head.

I’m so impatient for his arrival, I can hardly stand it!

Let’s see, there must be some other news this month.

Scot has left for the Pacific Northwest, where he’ll finish and defend his master’s thesis in Seattle and then head for his father’s farm in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, to scout sites for field studies for his PhD research. He’s asking questions about how trees interact as they grow in a forest, and especially, given the devastating logging around Port Alberni, how to manage a thick secondary forest so it can be an economic and ecological asset as soon as possible. He’ll be gone two months, and we’ll miss him, but Marcia, Chrissie, and I are so busy, and visitors come so incessantly to New Hampshire in the summer, that the time will fly.

This past weekend was a total, but pleasant, wipeout on the visitor scene. It was the 15th reunion of our first Dartmouth class of policy studies majors. The policy studies major was a new, interdisciplinary set of courses invented by some outrageous professors, including a lawyer, a politician, a business school professor, and me. We taught in teams, and argued all the time, so the students couldn’t figure out which professor to please and had to think for themselves. We made the students do their assignments in teams, since we observed that college was structured around individualism and competition, but in our professional lives we were always having to work with others. There are some learnable skills involved in cooperating rather than competing. We used case studies, common in business school but rare for undergraduates — although case studies are the way to make kids see WHY they need to know statistics, or persuasive writing, or whatever. We required papers to be short, not long, and to be free from academic blather. (One of our colleagues gave writing assignments where the students were not allowed to use any form of the verb “to be.”) Our courses were about persuasive writing and speaking, paradigms and worldviews, critical thinking, systems, ethics, statistics (how to recognize when people are using numbers as clubs), organizational theory (how to make things really happen when a bunch of people have to get together to do it), and a final course in which the students simply had to go out together and solve a real-world problem.

We had a lot of fun while it lasted. We were blessed with terrific students. (You had to be adventurous to take policy studies!) The first survivors of that pedagogical onslaught are now in their 30s, with young families and fascinating lives, and it was fun to see them again. We had a party for them at the farm, and they came early and stayed late and returned the next day. Then, since the house was clean and the bouquets were fresh and there was plenty of food, we had another party so some of my dearest friends could meet Marcia and learn about the New Road Map Foundation’s way of reducing consumption and achieving financial independence. (Marcia is proving to be a much-needed missionary in these parts. I am thrilled to see how many people are thirsting for her message — how to live your life, as New Road Map’s Vicki Robin says, so “you never have to suck up to people for money again.”)

That party was just breaking up when the son of a friend dropped in for dinner and a discussion on environmental education. Shortly after he left, one of Chrissie’s best friends arrived to stay for a few days. Aromar Revi is arriving from India next week, and a bunch of Balaton people from Costa Rica, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Thailand are coming for a workshop with Dennis. I expect them to stop by. We’ll see Annamarie Pluhar this weekend. John and Nancy Todd dropped in for a delightful lunch last Friday. Our New Zealand friend Jan will come help us pick and eat gooseberries in early July. (She loves gooseberries!)

It’s pretty easy to have visitors around here. We feed them what we eat, which this time of year is a steady stream of salads and strawberries from the garden. If they stay more than a few hours, they’re likely to get a shovel or hoe put in their hands and be sent out to cut burdock or weed witch grass. If a thunderstorm knocks out the electricity, or the mosquitoes are bad, or a skunk drenches Basil, they have to put up with it just as we do. We have lots of bedrooms and couches, which have a magic way of keeping themselves filled. And we welcome the good conversations and the hugs and the news of the world that people bring. We don’t feel like we’re lost in the country, we feel like we’re a hub of the universe.

We’re picking strawberries every day now. The white bush rose opened its first fragrant blossoms this morning. The bouquets in the house are of peonies and iris and Sweet William and roadside daisies. The weather is finally hot, sending the spinach to seed, so today we’ll have to freeze spinach — a big, green, messy job. Kohlrabi, turnips, and baby beets are just about ready in the garden, and the first peas are blooming.

The garden is a struggle this year, partly because we’ve expanded it to the max, partly because we’re trying to beat the slug problem by not using hay mulch — for the first time in the history of Foundation Farm. Hay mulch has always been my gardening secret. By this time in June I’ve usually piled it on inches deep, snuggled right up to the stems of the flowers and veggies, so I never see a weed again. The mulch smothers weeds, keeps roots cool, keeps water in, and slowly decays and feeds the plants. It’s a perfect system, except that it’s also a perfect breeding place for slugs. For 20 years slugs were a minor problem. I think the toads kept them in check, or maybe we were just lucky. Anyway, the toads have disappeared and we have millions and billions and trillions of slugs. They hatch out small, but now they’re getting big enough to eat up a whole row of sprouting zinnias or beans or cucumbers overnight.

Last year I tried drowning them in beer, but we have about half an acre of garden, and we can’t afford that much beer. Besides, my experience is that they prefer cabbage. So now we are trying three lines of defense. First is no mulch, which means a lot more hoeing and weeding than usual. Second is pyrethrum spray, the strongest poison allowed in the organic arsenal. (Pyrethrum is extracted from the African painted daisy. It’s considered a “natural” pesticide, since it’s made by a plant, but it’s still a poison and I hate to use it. It only slows down the slugs for a day or two, but sometimes that’s just what a sprouting plant needs to get big enough to grow beyond slug height.)

Our third line of defense is ducklings. We put nine of the ducklings we hatched in the incubator into a little house in the garden. We shut them in at night because of the raccoon, but let them roam the garden during the day — not the best plan, because slugs only come out when it’s dark and wet. But in the mornings and evenings and on rainy days the ducklings and the slugs encounter each other. It’s too early to tell, there are still plenty of slugs around, but I think the ducklings may be pulling ahead. They are certainly busy eating something out there. For awhile it was spinach and peas, so we banished six ducklings to the pond, kept three, and covered over the spinach row. The remaining three little birds scurry around happily, sticking their beaks in the soil and chortling softly to themselves. They’re good company when we’re out there hoeing.

We shall provide a full report on the outcome of this experiment later in the summer. Maybe we can go back to mulching next year.

The sheep got sheared, I should report, after my complaints of last month. We’re moving them around with the electric fence; currently they’re up in Ruth’s barnyard mowing down a lush growth of grass and clover. I’m proud to say that we got a solar charger for the fence. We haven’t yet had to rotate the sheep back over any space they’ve already grazed. You can hardly tell where they’ve been, the grass comes back so fast. We’re actually going to have to mow, because the sheep won’t be able to contend with the tall grass. (Sheep like nice short sheepscapes.) We’ve sold off all the lambs except the ones we want to keep, and we’ve loaned four sheep to a neighbor who wants some self-propelled lawnmowers for the summer, so, for a real change, we have more grass than munching power. I tell my housemates that the only solution is to get a whole lot more sheep, but they are unsympathetic to this plan, bringing up practical considerations about the size of our barn and the work of lambing.

Our pastures finally got sowed and are covered with green fuzz. I worry about them, because they got done so late. The hot, dry summer weather can be disastrous for small grass and clover plants. Gordon Wilder my farmer neighbor convinced me to overseed with oats, to provide the little plants with summer shade; I did that, and most of the green fuzz out there is oats. I’m worried that the oats are stealing what little moisture there is from the clover.

A farmer is never done with worries. It’s too early to tell. The pastures are another experiment to report on later. We just pray for rain.

Meanwhile, my professional life is falling into disarray. At the moment I have 40 National Geographic proposals to read, three conferences to organize, two articles to write, piles of letters to answer, and of course a column to write every week, and then there’s that 3/4-finished textbook. I can hardly concentrate on any of it, I can hardly sit down at my desk during this frantic growing season, but starting this week I’m going to have to. Throughout May and most of June the farm moves to the top of my priority list. Now it has to go down a notch. Thanks to the capable hands of Chrissie and Marcia, and the help of many visitors, I think it can do so, and we will still be amply fed and accumulate lots of good things in the freezer and root cellar for the unimaginable winter ahead. (How could winter be real, when there’s such an overwhelming abundance of green all around us?)

God does provide — the land, the rain, the beautiful flowers, the bountiful vegetables and the delightful animals of the farm, including sweet ducklings, goslings, lambs, and PUPPIES. God will provide the time and quiet and concentration I need too, all in its own season. The hot weather slows us down, just as it simultaneously lifts up the corn, ripens the tomatoes, and opens the daylilies.

One day at a time. Take it easy. Let go and let God.

Love to you all in this beautiful summer,
Dana