A Counting Game

    “One for the snail and one for the crow, one to rot and two to grow.” There are many versions to this old planting adage; this is the one I had running through my head last week as I poked the last of the seeds into the warm, damp soil. It was coined in the days when corn was planted in hills. The simple rhyme probably helped young children tasked with the planting (light work on a farm) to get sufficient seed into the hills, which do need a healthy cluster of stalks to make a proper crop. The rhyme probably prevented errors, both by young farmhands eager to get rid of the seed and the job, and those pokey and parsimonious in their allotted duties.

     It is the middle of June, and I was feeling a little tardy, especially since the crop that was to grow from this little hill of pale slivers was not 70-day corn, but 110-day winter squash. Usually, I plant the squashes a few weeks before the traditional Memorial Day setting-out date, in little paper pots. The idea is that the plants will have a jump on the squash bugs and the striped cucumber beetles that are such a menace here at the Village. The little striped cuke beetles are the worst, though small and rather pretty. They seem to appear out of thin air just as the first true leaves emerge on squash seedlings. Cucumber beetles are voracious, and for something so tiny, they can make quick work of the young plants, turning the thick cotyledons and that first small leaf fan into lace within a day or two. They’re quick to evade pinching fingers, dropping upside-down onto the ground and burrowing into the crumbly soil, or taking flight from right in between my menacing finger and thumb. Off they go, disappearing heaven-knows-where until they see I’ve left the area—then devouring, devouring while my back is turned. One for the snail.

     But squash hates to be transplanted. Even in paper pots, intended to make the least disruption from cold frame to soil, transplanted squashes sit there and sulk. Their leaves go yellow. All this time, they’re sending out hormonal stress signals. There’s nothing to draw in the varmints like the scent of weakness. It’s the plant equivalent of bleeding into shark-infested waters. The only thing a squash hates more than transplant shock is cold. Frost and cold soil are the big early killers of squash starts. They mustn’t go in the ground until the weather has settled and the earth is warm. …one to rot.

    While crows don’t tend to pick protein-rich squash seeds out of the ground as they will corn, there are a rooster and his two hens hereabouts who would be happy to find such a prize while scratching their way across the fresh-turned field. …one for the crow.

     If you have planted a garden yourself, you know the seed packet contains an attrition rule of its own: the farmer is instructed to plant “4-5 seeds per hill, thinning to 2-3.” I counted out the seeds—4 per hill, row after long row, to fill the space as best I could. The rhyme and the math seemed linked, and I puzzled over the connection between the charming adage and the more scientific calculus of life and loss.

     Today, a week after planting, the seeds are up. At least, some of them are. Sure enough, if each hill has one, two, or at most, three plants. Where are the third, fourth, or fifth? Have they gone to rot or to snail? Or were they able to count? My turn to burst out, yours to lay low and succumb. Room, among us, for only two to thrive. What would have happened if I had ignored the adage, and only planted the three seeds I would ultimately “need?” Looking at the rhyme and the science bear themselves out, hill after hill, I thought again how gardening is like this: part ancient lore, part science, part experience, and part the pure, glorious chance—the bearing-out of some cosmic plan far beyond the control of she who counts and sows.

April...

 Gentle Reader, if you are out there, please forgive the absence of updates. Don't say you weren't warned: I said from the get-go that my snail's pace existence wouldn't perhaps mesh with the already-near-passe rapidity of the blogosphere... 

If you yourself farm or garden, you will see in this lack of updates the very heart of the nature of mad, mad May as well. Time goes too quickly. Even with the days at their longest, there is never enough time to finish anything before the next project needs attention. More on that in a posting. But for now, let me offer the following as part one to the ongoing saga of "2015: A Challenging Year to Grow Things." Written a month back, when pruning was giving way to the first major round of seed starting. 

“Don’t get depressed,” my boss said to me this morning. “Please don’t, because I am.”

With an array tiny green things sprouting, an amazing draft of warm, moist air rolling out of the functioning hot frame, and artificial rainstorms showering from the ceiling of the hoop house every time the March wind blows, it is easy to allow Boss Billy the monopoly on grimness. But for Pete sakes! It is one day before the end of the month, and this year March has handed out little in the way of spring. This year, it came in like a lion and is going out like a jackal. I won’t say it’s cruel, per se, but geez…

     Still, despite the difficulties, or maybe because of them, this month’s persistent cold and snowy weather has given me a new appreciation for the inexorable nature of nature. No season “arrives,” really; there is a day-by-day change that takes the calendar around its course. Some changes occur with weather, and so know their own timing: Berkshire County maple syrup makers have only just begun their harvest, at about the same week they are often finishing it. Sap rises, or waits, through a delicate combination of day and night temperatures and barometric pressure. The tiny frogs called “peepers” aren’t awake yet; likely the frost is still in the ground where they’ve burrowed, and it will take a prolonged warm spell to thaw both their beds and their voices. Yet other things seem to happen with an inevitability that has more to do with the sun than the temperature. The snow fleas (tiny black dots that hop around on the snow eating microscopic algae and such) have made their appearance in the softening snow on the sunny side of tree trunks and stone walls. The red winged blackbirds are back in the swamp. For the second year in a row, it took exactly even days for them to make the commute from my Great Barrington home North to the Shaker Village (a 30-minute drive). Their first call always makes me glad even before it has registered on me what I’m hearing; they’re as sure a sign of spring as the first robins used to be. A great blue heron has found open water on the Housatonic  River; it won’t be long before they’re back in the rookery behind the cow pastures at work. And it isn’t just the birds that have a clock in their bones. The last of the onions and garlic, even though they are buried under a layer of old quilts in a chilly, dark corner of the house, are pushing up green leaves from their cores (they’re bulbs, just like tulips and daffodils). The temperature in the root cellar has stayed a constant 45 degrees, yet even in total darkness, the dahlia, potato and four o-clock tubers are also wakening, and know which way is up without light to guide them. How do they know?

     Happily, the seeds in the hoop house also seem to require little more than a few warm hours to germinate. The house has no heat, and is too far from a power source for backup electric heaters, so it is impossible to have much control over the day/night temperature. “Germinates best at 60-72 degrees” those seed packets declare—while my decomposition-powered hot frames are ranging from 22 – 92 degrees on a 24-hour basis. But never mind; the onions and leeks have uncrooked and stand grassy and tall; the hardy cole crops are pushing their first set of true leaves, and even some of the zinnias are pushing out of the soil. Even though I’ve witnessed this transformation from sleeping seed to greening plant for more than 40 years, it remains as exciting and astonishing as ever. So I can’t possibly be depressed. There’s too much else to do, trying to make way for spring which happens as it always happens: whether we’re ready or not.

    

Forward, March

Take a look at photos of the Hancock Shaker Village high tunnel houses taken a week ago—March 9— and you may well wonder, as I do, if it is right to dub April “The Cruelest Month.” I guess I need spring as badly as anyone in the snow belt at this point. The day I returned and these pictures were taken, it was two weeks later than I expected. Nonetheless, my first job of the farm year was to shovel a path through the snow between the service road and the door of Hoop House 1, where I start most of the plants for our CSA’s cutting and vegetable gardens, and for the Shaker flower seed garden. I was already at least two weeks behind on starting those first seeds—onion, leek, alyssum, and mesclun to plant out in the other hoop house. It took half an hour to attain the door to this belated beginning—not counting the additional ten minutes it took to chip away enough ice and frozen gravel so I could wedge my way inside.

     Once in, I discovered that the snow building up all winter on the sloping roof was pressing dangerously against the plastic sheathing. The rain predicted for that evening would settle into that snow load like a sponge, and by morning, I feared, I’d be looking at snow banks and torn plastic where the trays of seedlings should already be unfurling their first tender shoots. There’s not room in the budget to replace that plastic— a sheet that has to be entirely structurally sound for this passive solar house to be of any use at all.

     Digging the 75-foot length of the south wall to give the snow someplace to slide, I warmed up quickly. The bright blue sky actually seemed almost spring-like. Almost —but for the steady North wind whipping nearby drifts into sharp peaks and lifting powder-fine snow wraiths twirling into the air.

     March this year has so far been oblivious, indefagitible, harsh, unfeeling. The first warm spell, ushered in by that predicted rain, lasted just a couple of days. It was enough to whet my appetite for the sound of melt water and the smell of mud. But that’s my problem, not the month’s. I’m impatient to get on with the year. March takes her time. But I can’t really charge her with outright cruelty. Oblivion to my needs, maybe; but March is tenacious and keeps a firm grip on a winter which, in its own anthropomorphic sense, was nothing if not firm of character.

      “Cruelty” is something else—a cat-and-mouse teasing that seeks to disappoint time after time. Sure, that first whiff of “Mud Season” has me longing for more of the same. But that’s my own weakness showing. It’s weeks, really, before any of us New Englanders can be justifiably disappointed in—or shocked by—strong Northwest winds, persistent snowbanks and even fleecy snowfalls. It’s another week until the official equinox. So March isn’t meant for hoping, not really. It’s a time of waiting; a solemn Advent of sorts, for the fullness to come. March is Austerity. “Cruel” is the ice storm that coats the crocus, the deep freeze that wrecks even the sturdy daffodils; the storm that leaves the hunched robins shivering and hungry. March is austere, trim and watchful. She makes the final clean sweep (if mud can be seen as clean in its pure, inarguable, elemental abundance). She flattens the last of the old season’s dead weeds to make a smooth bed for the birth of meadow grass. She lays out leafy ice patterns as if for practice; brings down the last dead branches from the pines at night. She primes the canvas for the chaos of spring.

     March is thorough, but also not without her small mercies. There is steaming barn muck in the hotbeds. And there, under glass under plastic, the first seedling flats now smell of peat and damp and new life. Let April hold her name as “cruelest” then; March is really the “Truest Month”. The first seedlings have already sprouted up as green as St. Patrick’s Day. The plastic is saved, and the snowbanks are receding. Spring is stirring. It’s too early, in March, for anything but the perfect optimism of anticipation.

Simple Gifts - The Place where I Farm

Simple Gifts - The Place Where I Farm

      On a late August morning, the dew sits heavy as rain on the thick grass. Dewdrops line the margins of parsley like rows of French knots on fine embroidery. Sunlight catches and refracts the droplets on the row of lettuces, the piercing motes of scarlet and amber gold winking. As the sun climbs, the fragrances of each row hang in the air: nose-wrinkling sulphur from the budding broccoli, warm richness where I brush by the tomatoes; sweet licorice from fennel and the delightful height-of-summer spice of basil. For the past several years, I have had the good fortune to be a farmer of sorts at Hancock Shaker Village, helping develop the museum’s Community Supported Agriculture program. These early morning fields are part of a few acres feeding 80-plus families organic fruit and vegetables each week from May through the very end of October. In addition, these orderly rows of crops, both modern and heritage, support the Village’s mission as a museum to the life of the utopian Shakers who farmed this site for several hundred years. Ours is both a working farm and an exhibit. Thousands of visitors from neighboring Western Massachusetts and from across the globe see in these fields how farming was done, is done, and can be done. Our farm marries old-fangled ideas to the newest experiments in organic and seasonal growing. Like the Shakers who once made this soil bear fruit, we borrow from what works and experiment with what seems ingenious.

     Our visitors speak with Boston accents, southern drawls, clipped East Indian politeness, musical Chinese turns of phrase, thick eastern European consonants. What unites them is what I have come to see as a universal interest in where food comes from. Food engages people. Regardless of their age or background, the elemental wonder of seeing how a broccoli head forms or an onion flowers fascinates our visitors as much as the high-tech gadget they might use to snap its picture. Whatever differences we may have, we all need to eat. And all of that food comes from one simple synthesis between soil and sunlight. Though cuisines and preferences vary, we all eat pretty much from the same palette of foods, however we might alter them between the earth and the plate. Those dew-bejeweled lettuces and fragrant basils also add to the incredible sense of groundedness and serenity that still make this place, as it was known to its original inhabitants, a “City of Peace.”

     Growing food here at Hancock Shaker Village is important. But it would not be possible without the CSA model. Having members who will pay for and use the literal fruits of our labors means we can also afford to turn this ground from a dull sweep of lawn to a living panorama of sounds, smells, sights, flavors, and seasonal changes. We get to farm this land. They get to eat well. It is a good deal all around. 

What? Blogging? Me?

      Today you might say I have entered the modern world. Or rather, as friends, daughters and former bosses might say, I have been dragged there, kicking and screaming. Perhaps the best way to explain this is the weather: lingering at best in the 20s for most of the reviewable past, and dipping as low as -4 at night. This is February, and in New England, it isn't really fair (never mind productive) to complain about the three feet of snow blocking the way from here to the orchard, or the way branches cut like the wood was already dead and the wound would never heal. That's what winter is in the Northern U.S. Even so, it is truly and really too cold to garden outdoors, and a bit too soon to start the earliest seeds inside. So here I sit at the computer screen inside, trying to create a future for my winterbound world. Better to blog my way into that future than to pace at the kitchen window? Perhaps.
     This blog is a new adventure for me. I am not a reader of blogs, or a follower of Facebook, or a Twitterer. In fact, I have a flip phone my eighteen-year-old daughter gave me a year ago, so I could be in touch while at work out in the farm fields. I used it for a couple weeks during a vacation trip; now it sits (undoubtedly uncharged and certainly bereft of Available Minutes) on the kitchen countertop, a few feet from the lovely, wall-mounted, circa 1950s rotary phone I use every day. I'm not a Luddite by any formal profession. But the old ways have always, largely, worked better for me than the rapidly changing, increasingly complex, easily broken and unrepairable modern ways. On my way to becoming a crank about the whole thing, I'm going to make tees for myself and my mom (who has one of the other two working analog models East of the Mississippi) that say "I Like My Rotary Phone." 
    But on the subject of favored slogans, I've always admired "Subvert the Corporate Paradigm." Even as the hippest segments of technology are co-opted and then absorbed by the corporate world, it seems that tech continues to provide the best avenue for subversion outside of being a Luddite, which I've found to be a pretty solitary version of subversion. So here's my revolutionary baby step: create a space to write about some of what matters most to me. 
     Of course there is irony in the fact that the smell of the soil and the quality of moisture in the morning air, or the connection between the tangible world of a row of beans and the intangible one it inspires me to glimpse, cannot have any real connection to my clean white desk and nearly clean white keyboard. Dirt and electronics don't mix. Thoreau, who found this same connection between soil and spirit in his own beans almost two hundred years ago, apparently did much of his writing inside, even though a few dirt smudges didn't matter as much on his media of choice.  I read Thoreau in High School, in the mid-1980s, and felt such an intense and immediate connection to his point of view, it was as if I had acquired not only an extra father figure, but a whole extra world view and century to place over my own. Looking back, it was amusing to note that this was the very same year I studied touch typing. We were led into a room of four big Apple Computers, shown how to turn on the power, and how to boot up the typing program. "If any of you want to learn more about computers," our instructor said, "you're free to come back after school. Some of you might use a computer someday in your job." 
      I didn't go back. I preferred to spend my time hiking, cross-country skiing and foraging for wild foods on our 80-acre farmette. Why did I want to sit in with those humming white boxes? I didn't want a job that used computers. My choices seemed far more relevant to my future. I wanted a life where I would have rich soil to plant things, a place to walk without asking someone else's permission, a dog (and some children) of my own to accompany me (eventually): essentially, the same adult life as my mother. Also, I wanted to be a writer. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte had done this by writing long and clever manuscripts inspired by daily life, popping them in the post, and astonishing everyone by progressing on to brilliant literary careers. 
     See? Even then, my career plans were total Luddite. So, while my friends and classmates were paying attention to the switchover from analog to digital, were learning Basic and first trying their hand at that newfangled "mouse" that translated tiny hand motions onto a screen a foot away, and setting up accounts with America Online, I was learning how to drain the unexpectedly boggy front yard of my first home; how to set posts with a baby strapped to my back; how to keep chickens happy without letting them loose to wreak havoc in the vegetable garden; how to make the young fruit trees I planted bear a crop of edible fruit without needing a chemical dousing. My closest friend and fellow mom used to joke with me (via rotary phone—that's where the third one E. of the M. is: my former home) that we were "Suburban Homesteaders." A familiar term? No one had used it yet. People wanted to know when I was planning to "go back to work." 
    I did go back to paid employment... just as "Every mother is a working mother" and "No Farms, No Food" bumper stickers began to crop up on Volvos around my wealthy New England town. As the new wave of back-to-the-landers ("backyard homesteaders") arrived around me in suburbia with chicken tractors and boxes of canning jars, I was back at "real"work, paying back the debt I felt I owed my spouse for years of "not working" while I tried my hand at the Five Acres and Independence dream I've had since infancy. He had drawn a steady paycheck; I had not gone "back to work." Once more, I began doing something to draw a yearly W-2 form proving my real and actual contribution to things. It became "cool" to drop out: to become a small farmer, to live a life of voluntary simplicity. ...just about the time I was trying to re-learn touch typing and how to rebalance work and family. I'd gotten back on the '80's bus. Except it was 2006. 
        Where is the moral of this admittedly rambling and perhaps self-pitying tale? The way life goes, the most important lessons can't be passed on. We have to learn them by experiencing them. Somewhere in the time I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had children, led a life, raised ducks and vegetables and lawn grass and persimmons (almost), worked as an editor and journalist, got divorced, regrouped, remarried... Now I've pretty much decided what to do with my life, and I realize that my two daughters, aged 13 and 18, are at the place in their life where I still so completely feel myself to be. Time has passed. It keeps passing. Mortality, which always sat pretty comfortably in my sensibilties, seems suddenly more real and not a little frightening. It's time to get on with "It" —now that I almost know what "It" is.
      The comfort comes in knowing I'm also not the first one to come to this same pass. If you are out there, reading this, and you are approaching real middle age (whether that hits you at 35 or 55), you know the point at which I've arrived. 
      Some people use it to buy a red sports car. I'm afraid I might use it to buy farmland. I have the advantage of being married to a very calm, sensible man who has come through the fledging-children-and-sports-car  phase, and while he can't teach me any wisdom I don't have to acquire by undergoing life for myself, he can at least talk some sense into me vis-a-vis arable land purchased with daughters' college savings. So here's what I will do: Enter the strange new world (okay, it's old now. Possibly obsolete. But FREE) of blogging. Here, maybe, I can subvert the corporate paradigm of a fickle and very closed publishing market. I can write about the things I love, and am doing in my life: planting things in soil, working as a farmer, walking in places where I don't need to ask permission to walk (sometimes with a dog or a child of my own to accompany me). And writing. Being What I Want When I Grow Up hasn't looked like what I expected it to, and perhaps for this reason, I haven't recognized my very dreams even as they've come to pass. Here's hoping that this blog will be an example of that: an opportunity to live what I love, to write about it, to be heard and understood. From here forth, it will be much more along the lines of those endeavors. Maybe there's a spot for me in the modern world after all.