Tendril

Definition: 1) Thin plant part attached to support: a modified stem, leaf, or other part of a climbing plant, usually in the form of a thread that coils around and attaches the plant to supporting objects; 2) delicate twist or coil: a thin, wispy, curling, winding piece of something, especially of hair.

“One of the most striking characteristics of each ‘depression period’ is the tacit acknowledgement of city dwellers that ‘the farm is the safest place to live;’ for though there is each year a migration from the country to the city and a counter movement to the suburbs and a less pronounced one to more agricultural environment, the movement becomes an exodus when business takes a slump and employees are thrown out of work” – M. G. Kains in Five Acres and Independence

Every year I plant seeds, slips and tubers in the soil. Every year I revel in the discovery that they grow into plants. They’re different every year, these plants. Sometimes it’s sweet potatoes or okra or artichokes or Egyptian walking onions. But each season, the seeds are planted, and the wonder and mystic that they will ultimately produce food gives way to the reality that they finally do.

The hoop houses are chockablock full of lettuce, radishes, peas, beans, arugula, mesclun mix and head lettuce, kale, mizuna and spinach. A veritable garden of Eden, twisting and coiling and erupting in the warm soil of this freakish April. The days ahead seem to be more fitting of the season though; people are tired of me saying that it always snows on my birthday as we go into a series of 30 degree nights.

In the fields, the kale that survived the winter is yielding bushel after bushel of beautiful foliage. The spinach and bunching onions are giving us early delights; a sign to indicate what will soon come, when the milder nights and warm days wake up the farm and send it headlong into planting madness and then harvesting chaos.

I picked two bushels of kale and some nettles today while Sarit and Anna weeded the Hoop House East. It was a cold, long day for us, but it ended with satisfaction, having prepared for the upcoming farmer’s market, as well as rounding up all of the sheep to sequester them inside the warm, dry barn for the next few days. The sheep and the new lambs can handle the cold when it’s sunny out, but cold and damp are miserable and even deadly, and that’s what’s apparently ahead ( it is April in Vermont, after all).

Most years, we don’t have apprentices until the end of May, which usually coincides with school ending. This year has been different, with some of the apprentices from last year returning to help lamb (Greg, Shannon and Tali), and then Sarit starting in the middle of March (she didn’t want to miss anything) and Anna in the end of March.

Sarit, especially has seen the farm come to life by helping to anchor bits and pieces of it together: she helped me sort out all of the receipts from 2009 to complete the taxes; she helped shovel out the sheep pen with its winter’s full of manure. She stacked the wood from the tree Kyle cut down over the winter, and helped him inspect the honey bee hives that have survived; all not glamorous jobs, but necessary ones that make a whole out of this endeavor.

Yesterday, she and Anna made winter squash bread from the frozen squash that Tali and Janet harvested and froze last fall. She couldn’t find the nutmeg. That’s because I don’t have ground nutmeg; I actually have the brown seeds and a miniature grater to grind the nutmeg fresh. “Shut up! That’s not nutmeg! Why didn’t I know this was nutmeg?” I ask her if she knows that cinnamon is actually bark from a tree. “Noooo way!” How about the fact that coriander is the seeds from the cilantro plant. “Stop it!”

Kyle plowed a big chunk of the Cloverfield North garden today; the soil is already dry enough to work- about 8 days earlier than last year and 12 days earlier than 2008. He taught me how to move a round bale with the tractor to the paddock to feed the sheep. We have a new tractor-driven rototiller, so we won’t spend so much time using the ground driven, hand operated one. Kyle picked up a day at the park in Woodstock where he works as the ecologist; Bradford needs braces, and we don’t like tons of debt. I actually am working more on the farm as the result of not working at the animal hospital anymore, so I am trying to learn how to do these mechanized jobs that aren’t as appealing to me but are crucial to the farm’s existence.

The root cellar is completed, and the garden shed Kyle built that sits on top of the root cellar’s cement roof is done except for the windows. It looks fantastic. Now for that shop remodeling…

In all, the farm is held together by a zillion little threads, linking the mundane and the magical together to create a sense of security that I’ve only felt when I’ve worked on the land. It’s empowering at the same time that it is intimidating and daunting. Unpredictable, surprising, twisting and changing. A mish-mash of tendrils, all working to support living on the farm.