Dear Folks, I wish I could transport you to Foundation Farm, this beautiful day in May! Everything here is so green, so full of flowers, so bustling with activity.
And so rainy and cold! We’re way behind in our planting, and what we’ve planted is shivering and refusing to grow. But slowly — excruciatingly slowly — at least a week behind schedule — the spring flowers have been opening and then lasting and lasting, as if they were in a refrigerator, which isn’t far from the truth. We have early daffodils overlapping with late tulips. The wild shad-tree blossoms — usually a month ahead of everything else — are just fading as the apple blossoms open. Virginia bluebells are at their peak while lilacs are about to burst open. One eighty-degree day and all sorts of flowers will blow over and drop off, but we are having a hard time just getting up to the sixties. It’s wet, and everyone is complaining, but it’s also stunningly beautiful. When this valley finally decides to go green, it goes brilliant, overwhelming green.
Stephen has a whole acre planted for his CSA garden in the middle of the 3-acre field we plowed up last fall. Oops, I bet everyone doesn’t know what CSA means — “community supported agriculture,” a not-very-good name for a subscription farm. People pay for a farm share — $175 to $400, depending on the size of their family. Then every week they come pick up a bagful of fresh-picked produce, whatever is ripening. It’s a good deal for the customers who get more veggies of better quality than they could find at that price anywhere else. And a good deal for the farmer, because there’s a guaranteed market, money up front, and customers who, as with any family, can roll with the punches, freeze extra beans if the beans come in good, do without cauliflowers if the cauliflowers somehow fail.
Stephen and Kerry have 8 paid-up members for their CSA, last I heard, plus two farmers’ markets to sell at, plus some guaranteed sales to our local coop and to Hawthorne Valley in New York. So, with a little help from his friends, Stephen has put in long rows of onions, potatoes, lettuce, celery, corn. Kerry is down to a walking cast on one leg, still with a below-knee cast on the other. She gets slowly around on crutches, but she can pull herself along and set in strawberry plants, so we find her surprisingly often down in that garden. She’s also working more and more hours at the coop, as her strength comes back. We’re trying not to get too hopeful, to take it one day at a time, but maybe it won’t be too long before she’ll get to see both her legs again — which she hasn’t since the accident in January.
Their garden is a new one, so it takes a lot of work to break up the sod and get it fertile and functional. Stephen and Kerry put tons of manure on it last fall, and I contributed five tons of organic fertilizer this spring. (Our soil is deficient in potassium, so we have to put on greensand or some other potassium-rich rock powder. We also put fertilizer on Ruth’s pasture, where we graze our horses and sheep.) The rest of the land down there Stephen has sowed in oats for green manure, tilling them in with the horses.
Meanwhile, Scot and Chrissie are doing great things with the half-acre or so of brook garden. It will be mostly flowers, including Chrissie’s favorite everlastings, and Scot’s favorite dahlias. Having suffered from a flood there last year, they’ve made raised beds this year, and the soil is showing last year’s diligence in keeping down the witchgrass and knotweed. When you keep a garden well, build up its soil, and keep the weeds out, it gets easier and easier to work.
The main garden, now the smallest one, up by the house, is about one-third full of lusty-looking garlic plants, Chrissie’s big project from last fall. The rest has peas and spinach up, and we’re picking rhubarb and asparagus there, but most of the space is not yet planted. Pole beans and flowers and green beans and cucumbers will go there. It’s time — if it would just warm up.
The hoop house and greenhouse are bursting with tomato and pepper plants, just ready to set out. The front yard, which is about all that remains as my responsibility, now that we have so many other eager gardeners, is glorious with tulips and myrtle and bluebells and blooming crabapples and pears. I’m going to have to do a lot of thinning there — that means spreading perennials, like my mother, gradually planting up the whole world in an expanding radius. (“Well, I can’t throw them OUT!” my mother would say, indignantly.)
Anne, who we thought would be using some of the space in the big new garden, is instead getting ready to move her rare-variety seedlings back to Plainfield, Vermont. Anne came to us in February, you may remember, when she lost her housing. It was an emergency, and she couldn’t find a place that would take her plus dog plus parrot, and we had space, so — that’s how it happens around here. (Whomever God sends.) Anne had to leave several decades of dense networking and friendships up in mid-Vermont, and that wasn’t easy, though she did a great job of beginning to weave a network down here. Just last weekend she played French horn in a rousing band concert, which Mary and I went to see. Now a place has opened back up in her old home-town, and she can have her old garden back, so she’s returning. (Moving, as she says, from Plainfield to Plainfield to Plainfield.) She’s been involved in our community discussions, and we hope and expect that she will join us, when we have a new place.
Meanwhile Mary Williams has moved in. (Now, come on, folks, how come you can’t keep track of all the people, dogs, cats, and parrots on Foundation Farm?) Mary is a Virginia native, who spent a month with us last winter to see if she could stand it and turned out to stand it just fine and to be a wonderful lubricant in our community. (Do you know people like that? People who just somehow help everything around them go better?) She went back to take care of her elderly mother, intending to return for the gardening season, and now she has done so, delayed a little, because her mother recently died and Mary had much to attend to in Virginia. We’re delighted to see her again, and if busyness is a help for grief, well, we’re keeping her busy! As I write this, she’s down loading old posts onto the farm truck, helping Scot pull down the sagging old fence around the brook garden.
The old posts will form the foundation of a new burn-pile. The old one went up in flames last night to celebrate Jan Wright’s completion of her Ph.D. You’ve read of Jan many times here — she’s from New Zealand, she’s been studying at the Kennedy School at Harvard and coming up here several times a year to clear her head by turning compost piles and weeding asparagus and pruning gooseberries and beating everyone at Scrabble. The Kennedy School is not a kind place. She’s had a hard pull and has done a brilliant job. She turned in her thesis last Thursday, and now she’s down helping Scot and Mary and Chrissie in the brook garden.
Scot has a pyromaniac side; he likes really BIG bonfires. So we accumulate brush, prunings, old cornstalks, whatever, in big piles, usually back behind the barn in the orchard. When there’s a good occasion and a calm, dark night, Scot sets it off. These events are always preceded by long, delicate negotiations with the Plainfield volunteer fire department, which has to issue permits for all bonfires, and which has not found all of Scot’s previous conflagrations quite up to code.
I mean serious bonfire here. Last night’s roared as high as the surrounding maple trees and sent showers of sparks way, way up till they looked like stars. Chrissie brought out a box of sparklers (which we last used on her birthday cake) to enhanced the pyrotechnics. Mostly, though, tired after a day of outside work, we just sat around and gazed into the fire, while Scot patrolled the edges and threw half-burned sticks into the middle. Such an ancient, primitive pleasure, sitting around a fire at night, watching the ever-changing light show. Think how many years we’ve evolved around that experience! Way better than TV!
Scot and I had to spend most of the morning yesterday dealing with foot rot. This is a shepherd’s dread. In 20 years of keeping sheep I had never seen it — and I wish I still hadn’t. I think it might have come in with the ram we borrowed last November, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that Scot, who usually helps me with foot-trimming, was gone then, and I had somehow lost my trimming shears, and so I procrastinated with that job. By the time I got around to it, Tulip, who has never had very sound feet, was limping. Something in me knew it was foot rot, but I managed to deny it a bit longer. Finally I isolated her and shot her up with penicillin and bathed her feet daily with Clorox — but by then it was too late. Her daughter Tillie got it, and then, after lambing, as the soil warmed and the bacteria that cause it began to flourish in the barnyard, five of the eight mother sheep began limping.
Now I get to pay for my neglect. Every week we have to round up the sheep, disinfect their hooves and trim them with care (that’s 32 adult hooves and 52 baby ones), give them tetracycline injections and a vaccine, then get them to stand for half an hour in a zinc sulfate foot-bath (Scot constructed a special box for the purpose), then turn them onto clean pasture. This has to go on until everyone is clean, or until we give up on the most badly infected ones and “cull” them, to use the euphemistic term, which I find hard to apply to my beautiful Tulip and Tillie. Not fun. An epic battle. Bottom line — disinfect the feet of any new stock entering the flock, and KEEP THE DARN HOOVES TRIMMED. (In case you’re wondering, wild sheep, from which our barnyard ones are descended, live on mountains and hard rocks, which naturally wear down the hooves. Our flocks, with soft lives on green grass and beds of hay, need help.)
Well, let’s see, what else has been going on? I’ve been writing on the textbook and various newsletters, and working on funding for our new Sustainability Institute’s studies of commodity economics, and looking for land.
It’s all going well except for the land search, which is very discouraging. All over this valley there are utterly beautiful ex-farms. The farmhouse and barn are still there, on a lot of 6 or 10 acres or so, and all around, on the fields and pastures, where the people who lived in that farmhouse used to grow food and earn their livelihood, houses are scattered. In the less beautiful places, they are scattered very close together. In the most beautiful places, they are trophy houses, proclaiming their owners’ financial success, five times bigger than any family could possibly need, sitting smack in the middle of ten acres of prime farmland, now lawn, mowed by snarling rider mowers.
I know, I know, these places are a liberation for people, a rural dream, so clean and quiet and lovely, compared to the city. But when you look at the long-term food situation on this planet, and when you want to find some affordable land to make a living growing food, you see them as a shocking waste of prime land. The developers can make way more money (one time) from them than a farmer can in fifty years of farming. As I roam this valley, following the real estate ads, seeing all the ex-farms, I’m getting sadder and sadder. I guess the only good news is that, when it finally become necessary, all these people can plow up their ten-acre yards and grow themselves a lot of food. Maybe that will be a good thing — except that when that time comes, they’ll find it impossible to heat those huge houses.
This morning I preached a sermon (!!! I’ve never done that before! My Baptist minister grandfather must be laughing in his grave) at the Unitarian church in Hartland Four Corners — half a block from the Hunt farm, which is still, after all these weeks of looking, the obvious perfect place for us. I accepted the invitation because I thought it might be a good way to meet the neighbors, if I should happen to end up living in Hartland. Turns out I already know many of the folks who go to that church, including the music director, so together we planned a service honoring the earth and the farmers. Our musical choices included “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “Inch by Inch, Row by Row, I’m gonna make this garden grow.” It was fun, and it turned out that in the congregation were the head of Hartland’s school board, and people from the planning board and conservation commission. Afterward we had a talk about what we had planned for the Hunt farm — they were very excited and very sad that the deal hasn’t worked out.
You can tell I still haven’t given up, can’t you?
I ought to just go charge over to the Hunts and talk to them all alone, without the help of real estate agents or lawyers or anyone.
Probably would be about the worst thing I could do. Would scare them half to death.
But we need some human relationship here. Some communication.
Not everyone in this world is as into communication as you are, Dana. Some people figure they already have way too much human relationship.
But that is the absolutely right place. The more I look elsewhere, the more I know.
It’s not yours. It’s theirs. They are impossible to deal with. They don’t even know their own minds.
But time is wasting. The minute the Curtises sell their place, the whole opportunity is gone, and that beautiful farm will turn into one more damn ex-farm.
Well, sorry, folks, all that just burst out into this letter. It’s the debate in my mind every day. It was roaring as I drove past the Hunts’ this morning. If John Hunt had been out in the yard, I would have stopped. But he wasn’t. Probably a good thing.
I wish the universe would send me an unambiguous signal here. Or a recognizable opening!
Meanwhile the community discussion goes on, every day on the email and once a month in a gathering, usually here at Foundation Farm. If nothing else, these gatherings, joined by more and more people, is turning into a great learning forum about intentional community. Who knows how many of those who are participating in it will end up in what kinds of communities! For our June meeting we’re going up to Lake Champlain to visit the Ten Stones co-housing community and see their straw-bale houses and constructed wetland sewage treatment plant — and hear their story of how they pulled themselves together. I hear more stories all the time, of successful communities, of failed communities. Every one of the stories is a tale of struggle.
Come on, now, it can’t be THAT hard, can it? Just to live together in sharing and loving-kindness?
Stay tuned!
Love, Dana
