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.