Leaping In

"...and the theory of relativity occurred to Einstein in the time it takes to clap your hands. This is the greatest mystery of the human mind- the inducive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain." -John Steinbeck

It seems only fitting that the blog has decided to post my photos backwards, from placid sunshine to green growing things to the impending storm and finally to dinner at the end of the day, all in reverse order.

I am fully aware that I've been silent for over a month, overwhelmed with the growing season and all that that entails. Things are good here, though. In this picture, Bradford is in the foreground, leaping into the picture. Brittany is behind him, then Tali, who cooked this fabulous meal, then Janet, Tyler, and Shannon. Tali cooked it while we got some hay in. The weather patterns have sent low after low scudding across the map, from west to east, and each time, our window for haying disappears into a haze of drizzle and clouds. Today was no exception. Shannon tedded the hay- used a machine that scatters the hay all across the field to dry it out faster- then, by the time I came home from the animal hospital, it was ready to rake into rows for baling. Dana and a very pregnant Heather arrived on the scene just as a huge rainbow and accompanying showers passed just to our east.

Here, you can see the blue sky disappearing to our south, and the big storm racing toward us from the north and east. We got all but four bales on the wagon before I hollered that I was cutting and running for the barn with Gertie, the 23 year-old truck towing it. Everyone piled onto the wagon, and we made it into the barn just as the rain really let loose. It felt so good to get the hay in before the rain had a chance to ruin it that we all sat around, stunned and wet from the rain. Except for Bradford, who darted like a frog from one puddle to another, soaking wet from the torrent.


Protected inside one of the two hoophouses are the head lettuces, the bunching onions, and two mammoth cabbages that were wayward strays in the transplanting process, and who we kept out of pity. They are nearly four feet across now, and just starting to head up.




Michael, the 32 year-old horse, is still protecting the sheep. They are doing really well this year. The lambs are beautiful, and it's only a matter of how much hay we can get in the barn that determines how many of them we can keep as replacements. The five cows are comfortably pastured on the hill, and the piggies are growing quickly, thanks to the constant attention of the apprentices. We have squash bugs and Mexican bean beetles. We are struggling to get hay in because of the constant flow of low pressure. We have so much lettuce that we can't sell it all. And still. And still, this farming life is a good thing. It's constant and it's empowering.

Burst Bubbles

The undeniable fact is that any species’ pursuit of its interests will always have an impact on the rest of the planet’s life-the fox impacting on the chicken population, the flea on the cat, the beaver on the forest, and the sheep on the grass. Living in a bubble, where one’s individual actions (let alone those of one’s entire species) have only a benign effect, or none at all, on other living things, is not an option. Such moral purity simply doesn’t exist. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, in The River Cottage Meat Book. 2004.

I think that the crew is probably about done with my lectures on the hypocracy of veganism; of the complacency of vegetarianism; of the solutions for the world’s ills, based on farming. Well, not done, but, a smile smirks across their faces when I start in, so I know that they know what to expect next from my mouth.

At Fat Rooster, our bubble is always burstable. Like on Wednesday, when Shannon called me at the animal hospital where I work three days a week, and said that that the driving rain had sent the sheep through the fence, toward the gardens. Luckily, the three, Shannon, Brittany and Janet, were able to steer the sheep to the paddock and save the 600 heads of lettuce. Then, when we thought we could begin to transplant wildly—eggplants, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and much, much more, the rains began. We are expected to get a quarter of an inch of rain every 12 hours for the next 7 days. Perfect for transplanting and hardening seedlings, but very hard on the psyche, 7 days of cold and mud, and nowhere to sprawl out and gaze up at fluffy blue clouds.

The sheep pens have begun to get cleaned, and talk about a bubble burster. The barn is not wide enough for a Bobcat to come in and scoop out the three foot high mound of manure and hay that has accumulated during the winter. Literally thousands of pounds of manure need to be pitchforked or shoveled, one load at a time, into wheelbarrows, then carted outside to the manure pile. It is a daunting task. And a challenge. Definitely a stereo is needed to assist in the chore, and as of now, the stereo resides in the greenhouse. The tri-musketeers tackled the project and got about 25 square feet conquered; only 17 times more than that to go…

Kyle made blueberry rhubarb cobbler from berries that we harvested last year and fresh rhubarb. I am sauteeing sweetbreads in gluten-free herbed flour and butter; there is braised baby swiss chard and spinach drenched in minced wild leeks, pine nuts and basil, and a grilled kielbasa to douse in homemade ketchup and relish.

We’re about to watch one of my favorite movies of all times- Strictly Ballroom. Neither Brit, nor Janet have seen it. Nor have they ever tried sweetbreads. Oh, what bubbles …

Predictability

Harold: Maude?
Maude: Yeah?
Harold: [pulls the stamped coin from the arcade out of his pocket] Here.
Maude: A gift!
[reads the engraving]
Maude: "Harold loves Maude."... and Maude loves Harold. This is the nicest gift I've received in years.
[she throws the stamped coin into the water]
Harold: [gasps, bemused]
Maude: So I'll always know where it is.


One of my most vivid childhood memories is having the laying hen chicks arrive in the mail in the spring. It was the harbringer of everything living returning to our cold clime. I must admit that even though I am a born and raised Vermonter, I hate winter. I hate the cut throat cloudless sunsets and the endless dreary days, to paraphrase Ray LaMontagne, but when the chicks came, it meant an end to cold.

We’ve entered the world of technology. There’s wireless internet throughout the farmhouse, and we’ve changed our email address for the first time in ten years. I have Pandora radio streaming through the computer- it’s playing a playlist that Whit created and emailed me from across the middle of the Pacific, where she lives on an island inhabited mostly by birds, seals and turtles. Does all the information make everything harder or easier?

The swine flu panic doesn’t make it seem easier. You can even Twitter its progress across the globe, tracking every suspected or confirmed case. I woke up with a sore throat this morning and wondered if I have it, when really, if I hadn’t had all of this information, I would have just chalked it up to spring allergies. Brittany, one of the new apprentices says that her friend sent her an email that said,”They said we’d elect a black president when pigs flew; 100 days later, swine flu.” Pretty funny. Also check out the Winnie the Pooh swine flu comic. Just Google it, and there it will be. I spent an hour typing song lines into Google to get the artists from one of the playlists that Shannon gave me…got every song title and artist except one in seventeen tracks.

If I don’t hear from someone within two days, I think that I’m being snubbed. I forget that they have lives, too, and that it is spring, and everyone is whirling around, out of control, trying to keep the threads of progress from unraveling into a tangled jumble of summer…

We’ve had two more ewes lamb, both teenaged mothers, both doting on their tiny little lambs. The lambs are healthy and hardy, but I think I might take them to Strafford, where some of the sheep summer on a landscaper’s farm (the ewes and their lambs are there in the pasture to add to the bucolic scene for potential clients, and the owner buys and raises the lambs for his employees for the fall). Both births were unexpected and a complete surprise and joy, given that they’re both fine and healthy.

Peggy the Polish Crested hen is very close to hatching out her chicks. The other little bantam hen hatched out two of nine (it’s her first time at motherhood), and is in a protected corner of the barn. New chicks arrive in the mail, today, and any minute, I’ll get the call from the postmistress, to come pick up the chicks (it’s 5:30 am right now).

There’s a man and his son here doing lots of foundation work on the barn. I want him to build this enormous deck overlooking the clover pasture, where we could languish in the shade of the ancient black locust during the summer, sipping lemonade or chardonnay. Seven grand is needed, though, so not sure that’s a likely reality. He is reluctant to commit to the deck, because I am asking him to be artistic, to surprise me, to show me that I know he is capable of doing this extravagant thing. I’m not sure that I can get him to do it…

It’s onion planting time. They survived being left out in the 18 degree nights, a careless move by me, underestimating the power of windchill. I’ve planted 3900, and there’s only 11,000 to go. We’ve been harvesting wild leeks like crazy, the push for local food fueling the demand. We need to get 60 bunches ready for market on Saturday. Shannon and I have mini contests harvesting them. I’m faster, but hers are far prettier.

Here are pictures of the onions. They are started in the greenhouse in February, in these big pots. Then, the tops are trimmed, and they are unceremoniously dumped out of the pots and separated so that they are put into the ground, bare rooted. Each one is tucked into this biodegradeable plastic (it’s made of corn!), and then left on its own to survive. Onions are resilient. And they are reliable in the sense that they can surprise you with their survivability. So even though it’s a surprise everytime, I’m pretty sure I can count on them to come through.

This has been a tough day for me, beginning at 5:00 am, because I have to drive to the post office to get the chicks, do the chores, and get our son on the bus. Kyle is quick to assume the duties of feeding him and getting him on the bus. I have to figure out how to get an order ready for a store, do a tour for an elementary school, deliver produce to CSA shares (people who put up money when nothing is available, and we use it to buy seed and animals—maybe pay the electric bill--, then they get whatever is available at the farm), deliver to the retail store, pick up my son, pick up the beef that is ready at the shop, cook dinner for 6 guests tonight. Luckily, Shannon, Dana, Heather and Karen team up and cook dinner, so when I get home, everything is ready, and all I have to do is eat.

Which brings us to the chicks, that I have just checked up on, making sure that the waterer is full, and there is grain scattered on the newspaper.

Driving to the post office to pick up the chicks was probably the most rehearsed of the day’s activities; I’ve done it close to a hundred times before. How the rest of the day was going to pan out- not so sure. I was pretty much fried by the time I got the chicks. Gloria at the post office is so nice; she leaves the front door open, so I can come in two hours before everyone else, and do the secret chicken knock, and get the chicks. I crank the heat in the car and head to the PO. When I get the chicks back to the house, Brad has already gone to school on the bus, and Kyle has left for his ecologist job at Marsh Billings Rockefeller National Historical Park, where he works three days a week. I take the chicks to the barn, in the twightlight of the breaking dawn.

The night before, Linda called me from the hatchery. She told me that they had sent 27 instead of 25 chicks, just to make sure that they survived. So now I sit in the dark of the barn, touching each chick’s beak to the water, to make sure that they know how to drink, as if their mother had shown them how. I count, 25, 26, 27. They are accounted for. But I hear peeping from the box, and I spy some dark little thing in the corner. I grasp it in my hand and burst into tears. It’s a little duckling. It looks at me with mournful eyes: are you lost, cause I’m lost. I have no idea why I am here. Do you know?

In that instant, it comes to me that I’d rather be surprised by what is to come- to wait and not be instantly gratified all of the time- to believe that magic happens once in a while, for no reason, and without real purpose. I haven’t named the duckling yet, but maybe I’ll call him Chance.

Heaven, Hell and Earth

“I think it’s just as likely that someone could say this place, right here, is heaven, hell, and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.” Trudy, in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle- David Wroblewski 2008

For fours days, we have basked in Maine, unencumbered with the responsibilities of animals to care for and plants to water. When we arrived, the ocean was angry and unapproachable. Bradford tried anyway, and Kyle looked for wayward seabirds. I pretty much read books, walked a lot listening to the iPod, and cooked. By the end of our stay, the ocean was almost glass, and the hawks were migrating. We saw osprey, kestrel, sharp-shinned, broad-winged, merlin, red-tailed, skimming the ocean air currents on their way to breeding grounds. White-crowned sparrows sang “Poor Jo Jo missed his bus,” and yellow rumped warblers flitted after flies. We missed the “fall out,” where the shorebirds arrive, en masse. Probably just another couple of days away. Still, that we had weather fair enough to tan skin is a gift in April.



We ate lots of fresh seafood and lots of homemade candy- anis gummy lobsters, cappachino flavored jelly beans, and a square of candy made from caramel and marshmallow. Yum!

We biked and walked and drove looking at beautiful houses with manicured yards and spring flowers. The boys ate donuts almost every morning. I had rice crackers topped with cream cheese and smoked wild salmon. I really wish they’d make a gluten-free donut.

When it was time to leave, we had been offered an entire extra day to stay by Shannon, who has been taking care of everything in Vermont. Still, on the morning of our departure, we all three, readied the little house for departure, and by 11:00, we were eager to head home.

Whenever we would come home from vacation as a kid, the first thing my sister and I would do would be to leap out of the car and take head counts of the animals. Each chicken would be checked and kissed and cooed at. Today, I try hard to help Kyle unpack the car, but I am really taking mental stock of the chickens, cats, and dogs. Peggy is brooding her eggs. The two hens with chicks are safe. But where is Henry? I search the yard, I search the front of the house. Shannon is inside the barn doing chores, and the first thing that I say to her should not be Where Is Henry? It should be – the house looks emaculate- the planting that you’ve done looks great. The sheep pens are clean!

Finally, I get up courage to go inside the barn where she is feeding the animals. I call hello to her, and exclaim at how big the lambs have gotten since I ‘ve been away these six days. Then, hearing my voice, my giant rooster comes waddling out to me, waiting to be scooped up and cuddled.


Fat Rooster Farm is an anchor, a burden, a choice made long ago to nurture a piece of land and try in some small way to contribute to preserving a way of living that has fallen out of favor in our society as a whole- to farm.

The chores are done. No one has died. The weeds are still nascent. This clearly looks like heaven. Tomorrow I will go in search of morel mushrooms, after I have planted the bok choi and broccoli and harvested wild leeks.

Life ain’t nothin but a funny funny riddle- thank God I’m a country boy.
John Denver


There may be nothing nearly as scary as listening to John Denver cover Robbie Robertson’s The Weight. It is playing now, as we languish here in this seaside house in Maine, a personally chosen torture, for me, by Kyle. It almost matches in horror the duet that John sings with Placido Domingo, but not nearly.

It has been three years that we’ve ventured anywhere on a vacation together, with no agenda, no family to visit, just to have a break off the farm. In December, Whit let us off the hook to go to Ohio to see Kyle’s family. It was a break, and while it was undoubtedly a gift to get away from Fat Rooster, there was not a chance just to wander throughout the hours of the day, unencumbered.

Ray and Liz, the owners of Back Beyond Farm have extended this opportunity to us in the past- a chance to stay in their beachfront house in Wells, Maine, bordered by the Atlantic on one side, and by Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge on the other. Today, in celebration of Earth Day, we walked the refuge trail, and listened to the first songs of spring. A pair of bluebirds, setting up court in the saltmarsh, a pine warbler advertising his newly found territory. At Biddeford Pool, outside of Kennebunkport, we walked past mansions to East Point to see Common Eiders bobbing in the angry ocean waves. There are dogwoods blooming, as are forsythia and daffodils; the air is laced with spring, but when Bradford and I went to bask on the beach, we retreated quickly back to the cabin and shifted gears to bike riding the two miles into the town’s wharf.

Shannon, raised in New Jersey, and until just recently, employed by a container company, had never even set foot near a farm. On Monday, we dumped the whole thing on her, and fled for Maine. I think she’ll be okay, as the cow that threatened to bash someone’s head in was butchered before we left; the hen hatched her chicks and is safely sequestered in a pen with them, away from the maurading peacock, the last sheep to lamb did so two days before we left, and things usually happen in three’s, don’t they?

My email from Shannon today said that Neil, the hound dog, found the cow’s carcass and vomited blood in the house. Tildy Anne, the matron of our herd of cows, escaped from her collar, and ran loose in the barn until Shannon was able to coax her back to her stanchion with grain. Her dog, Pepper, is too keyed up to stay with her while housesitting, so he is on lockdown at her and her boyfriend’s house while she farmsits.

It could be worse- she could be listening to this John Denver tune…

When we arrived here, we found that there was no phone. In a mini moment of panic, we hopped in the car, and drove the streets with the laptop (Kyle has named the lap pod), looking for unsecured connections to the internet. Bradford found one about a mile down, and we emailed everyone we could think of that we were safe. I then found an actual landline and called home. Everything was fine. The dog had not yet puked, nor had the cow escaped.

Back at the cabin, it took Bradford about ten minutes to find that there was actually intermittent unsecured access in the house, and we have been surviving, without tv, without radio, without telephone, with just a little help on the internet, when it decides to work. Email to Whit, to Shannon, to Mom and Dad, the weather, to eBird, to Amazon to track book sales.

I’m reading a great book- the Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Kyle is reading Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie. Bradford is reading a Roald Dahl, and hounding us to play endless games of Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and Monopoly. He has been swimming in the chilly Atlantic twice, his face blue with cold, and a smile on his lips that could beat Edward’s in Twilight.

Outside, the marsh lies misty and cold, but a warm front is coming, promising air that will rise to the 80s. It’s wonderful to have this luxury, this chance not to plan each second of the day- to forget, even, what day it is. Tomorrow to Portland, to the fish wharfes. But now, tacos made of carrots from our neighbor’s farm, meat from our cattle, and beans we grew and threshed by hand.

In two weeks, we will start up our CSA again. For those who don’t know about CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), it’s pretty cool. People sign up in the beginning of the growing season, before the seeds have been planted, before summer’s bounty begins to flow. The great thing for farmers is that it allows us to have a cash flow that is normally lacking severely at a time when supplies for the farm are at the peak of need. Fencing, seeds, money to purchase chicks and piglets, bills for fixing the idle equipment in the barnyard, they all happen before anything really starts growing. There are many variations to the CSA model; people can receive a weekly offering from the farm, packed by the farmer; there can be choices that the individual can take or leave; or in our case, the amount can be subtracted from a database, and people can pick or choose what they want weekly. We felt like this method works best for us, because it is all done over email, and because some people really have a hard time trying to figure out what to do with kohlrabi all of the time.

People can also do a straight barter for work here, where they’re paid by the hour in the equivalent amount of vegetables, fruits or meats. This is great for someone who just wants to do some physical work after being in the office all day, but doesn’t have the time or the space to keep a garden or animals.

Kyle plowed the fields yesterday. He’s watering the raspberry plants that he transplanted. I hope to get them rototilled in time for Shannon to plant the rest of the brassicas—the family that includes cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi. There’s lots of spinach to plant, even more lettuce. We harvested both curly and flat-leafed parsley yesterday and sold it to the local food co-op.

We sold 25 lambs already, which makes the burden on the poor ewes a lot less (and the burden on our dwindling hay supply easier to take). There are still about 40 of them cavorting in the barn, being chased by the cranky geese, where both females are laying eggs and trying to hatch them out. There’s a little hen behind the lawn mower who is sitting on about 8 eggs that will hatch any day.

I’m sitting in the front lawn on the old stones that they used around the countryside to attach wire to for fencing, after they’d cut all the trees down and had nothing for posts. Now the stones are the front porch step. The grass is still just a little too wet to sit on.

Amidst the time worn traditions associated with farming, enter technology. I have some rules about the big three that I just feel are a big waste of energy, and there’s really no logical reason behind me choosing them as the big three, save for the fact that I used to live on an island in the middle of the Pacific, where energy was not a commodity to be wasted. They are: dryer, microwave, and dishwasher. However, I am certainly not above owning a laptop, or an iPod; and certainly the dsl that arrived last week is okay. And here’s where the technology comes in.

My first purchase was not a car. Nor was it a cell phone (mainly because when I was a teenager, they didn’t exist). What I bought first, after many months of deliberation, was a stereo, complete with dual tape deck and turntable. I still have that turntable, and it works just fine; in contrast, we’ve gone through five cd players in ten years.

I love music. It’s a way to set words to notes, so that the melody hits your brain, and then you listen and feel a verbal and melodic connection at the same time.

I have a weird habit of associating songs to specific events in my life. My friend Kep has quizzed me with different songs, and I’ve countered with what they meant to me, almost like asking someone where they were or what they were doing when JFK was shot, or when people were jumping out of the Twin Towers, both of which I can remember.

Another strange thing about my situation: I am the very last Baby Boomer and very first Generation X, so I don’t really fit into either.

Back to technology. Pandora.com is amazing. Go onto their website, tell them a few songs that you like, and they put together a huge playlist that you can listen to, for free. If you don’t like the song, just tell them, and they erase it from the list and any other associated genre as well!

Why is this so exciting? Because if I could, I’d put speakers all over the farm so that I could listen to music. Art, music, and farming are the attributes that I feel most proud about for being human. And Pandora has opened a huge box of possibility for me to explore.

Here are some soil building pictures for you to enjoy. The first shows what Kyle uncovered from the very first field that we cultivated in 1998: we’re still uncovering buried junk. The next is the succession of manure to compost, and the last is actually plowing the field after manure has been spread. Then, plant, plant plant!

It’s spring. I saw a toad today, and its here. Time to savor every moment, to let things linger, and to languish in exquisite sunshine. Bloodroot and Coltsfoot blooming in the forests; wild leeks and stinging nettles to harvest. It is abundance at its best- on the cusp of having nothing, we are given the most precious green.

Srping Enlightening

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day. Thomas Jefferson

This is the first year in nine and a half years that we have not been occupied with sugaring- making maple syrup- in partnership with the neighbors. I am ecstatic, to be honest. I asked Kyle if he missed it, and was actually surprised with his answer: “little bit”. For me, sugaring involved collecting sap on days when no one else was available, usually in the rain and cold sleet, or worse, sitting for long hours in the sugarhouse as the sap was transformed to sweet ambrosia. I was not usually allowed the task of filling the arch, under which the sap thickened to syrup and the fire raged. I was not allowed to fill the flaming inferno with fuel, the wood that I had help cut and stack that fall. Nor was I allowed to actually determine when to take the syrup off of the pans. Instead, I cleaned the sugarhouse of its fast food containers, plastic cups, paper plates, plastic forks. I changed sap filters, removed the soiled muslins that filter the hot syrup when its poured off, and transferred it into syrup cans. All the while, I was thinking about lambs being born unattended, or greenhouses going unwatered, or gardens staying unprepared just too long to hit the May market with fresh produce. I missed the first woodcock’s song, the first wood frog emerging from his snowy winter cave, the first phoebe singing his song, the first yearling ewe trying to mother her newborn.

I do not miss sugaring at all. I know that I will help my husband in the future, should he decide to venture on his own, and do something small-scale, and I know that I will not be relegated to just filling cans with “syrup”. Till then, I am enjoying the most thrilling part of Vermont’s seasons for me: spring. Blink and you’ll miss it. But really, it’s so subtle, that it’s much longer and larger than people claim it to be:

1) Red-winged blackbirds, followed shortly by grackles
2) Snow fleas on the snow (not really fleas, but living bugs, just the same)
3) Christmas ornaments disappear
4) Lambs are born
5) The air smells damp
6) Wild ramps (wild leeks)
7) Mourning Cloak butterflies
8) Goldfinches turn yellow
9) Mudseason
10) The light returns!!!!


I have been part of a three-way collaborative, albeit a small part, to help a beautiful horse this year. His name is Backstreet Beau. He was a six year-old stallion, and he is recently gelded. I’ve been riding him lately, and having the time of my life. He is a good boy, just a little full of himself. I’ve been trying to introduce him to Michael, but that’s going pretty slowly. I think his problem is that every other horse that he’s met was for a performance purpose, not just a casual get together. He’s beautiful, and Ginny, owner number one, is hoping to use him as the mascot for an animal rescue organization.

Today, instead of filling cans with syrup, I rode Beau down to the house. Bradford really wanted to ride him. I knew that when I left the barn that it wasn’t going to happen, because Beau is feeling pretty good these days.

The onions are hardening off now, and Shannon has almost shelled the last of the beans. We are harvesting wild leeks and nettles. That’s the crazy thing about spring in Vermont—if I don’t blog every three days, the stuff I’ve begun working on to post just 9 days before is old news!