Hopewell Farms

So here we are again, sugaring.

It’s been almost one year exactly since I started this blog with expectations of keeping some kind of journal about the joys and challenges of running a homestead farm with next to no experience in New England with my family. I think I’ve posted about ten entries. Things aren’t always as easy as they seem.

We’re still not done with tapping all the maples, most of the big orchard in the back of the property is still waiting on me and despite that we’ve still got about seven or eight hundred gallons waiting to boil. Plus whatever we collect tomorrow. Right now I have a gallon boiling on the stove and you can smell it in here. My father is down for the week to help out, our oldest son was just accepted at a very respectable private school and only two of my fingers are wrapped in band-aids. You could say that in many ways it’s been a great day and yet I realize that I am right back where I started, one year ago, less about 500 taps and wondering why I couldn’t find the time to write a single post a week. Kunstler knocks one out every Monday morning and nine times out of ten it’s not much different from what he wrote last year, minus the adjectives and arcane references to tattooed tribesmen of the Dark Ages.

So here goes.

I promise to keep up with this blog this year. To me it begins with sugaring anyway. New Years comes at a weird part of the year and doesn’t seem like the right time for starting over, but when the sap runs it feels like the whole world is waking up and getting ready to start over, so I’m going to go with that. The fish are doing well, we have a few steady accounts week to week who act excited about our food and I can see patches of earth here and there beneath the snow. Spring is coming and with it new chores, new projects, new ways to stay excited about the hardest thing we’ve ever done, but now? Now the sap is flowing, the steady plunk-plunk-plunk of fat sweet droplets falling into the bucket out in front echoes across the dooryard and I am jazzed about it. Tomorrow I will probably wind up exhausted again, but that will be then and I will likely have bottled the first thirty gallons of syrup of the year and will smell like taffy when I finally come in for supper.

Until then I will just try and enjoy the moment as long as I can.

Like Brian Reagan says, “you, too.”

One thing about farming that you can’t undo is the endless cycle of birth and death. There are times, plenty of them in fact, where everything seems to stand in some perfect balance around you. The animals are fed, the fields mowed, the equipment maintained and stowed away, and the breeze moving through the trees in a way that makes them sigh. You stand wherever you are and you simply regard the moment. Sometimes you have a bucket in your hand, and sometimes you are knee deep in snow halfway up a hill and your body just stops of its own accord and time has its way with you. And yet all around you the chores you’ve finished doing, the things you’ve put in place, the lives that look so full and vigorous are in some steady state of decline.

We painted the barn last year and several of the out buildings and even so I can see some spots where it’s pulled away from the boards beneath, not much, but enough. Last night it snowed for awhile and then the wind picked up. The snowed turned to rain for a few minutes, a hard driving rain with wind behind it and then I saw a flash. I thought it might be the motion lights out front but far away, twenty seconds later I heard a peal of thunder that rumbled on and on, and following that the sounds of hail. In the morning there was a thick crust of ice on the snow, four feet deep in places now, and embedded in it was the pattern of millions of pea sized balls of ice. How can you fight back against that kind of awesome work? How can you keep it in check?

You can’t. And yet that’s all we do. Every day we clean the filters, stoke the fires, feed the chickens, clean the stalls, sharpen the saws, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, freeze the meat, cut the wood, plant the seeds, drive the posts, check the lines, run the dogs, milk the goats, harvest the bounty- the list is endless, to a point. Some parts of what we do repeat themselves daily, others less often on a schedule that is seasonal. In the end however, is the underlying truth in all of what we do, that nothing will ever be enough to stop the process of chaos. Decay, rot, age and death are as integral in what we do as growth on germination, birth and flower. There has to be something inside of you that believes in the eternal sunrise, in all that is good and clean, an optimism unfettered by reality that propels you day by day into the meat of what it is to farm. I never thought of myself in this way until now. I have never been anything but a cynic, a curmudgeon, a pessimistic stick in the mud who dwells on cataclysm and doom, but surprisingly I get up every day and collect eggs. I talk to the goats and the pigs like we have something in common, I wash out their water buckets until they’re the kind of clean I’d drink from, even though I know they wouldn’t know the difference. I plant things, I thin the orchard. I pick leaves and I make maple syrup. In the milk house there is wine fermenting, in the fish house the fry are growing. I find myself enjoying my trips to the dump because I know there isn’t that much garbage in my bags that hasn’t been cleansed three times over for usable stuff, scraps for the hogs, paper for the worms, etc., etc. And still the guys at our dump go through everything one more time and keep a record of the cost of what the recover for everyone to see on a big blackboard they salvaged from God knows where.

We make things, they get used. Food comes out of the ground and we eat it and it returns again.

In and out, up and down, living then dead, the cycle goes on.

Earlier today my oldest son and I stood out under our biggest maple tree and tossed our heads back until the moving clouds above looked like we were standing still and the branches above us looked like we were moving, spinning on our planet hanging in space. Both of us stood that way long enough to have to speak and when we did we said the same thing to each other, that we were glad we’d done this. He wear shorts now, even in Winter and I wear overalls, even in the Summer, but in some ways we were dressed alike, wearing the same kind of smile on our face.

I wish that I could make a difference in this world and even though I know I can’t it doesn’t mean I can’t keep trying. Pretty soon now, after I post this on the blog and my wife tells her mother good-bye on the phone, we’ll both resume our roles and get back to the feeding and cleaning, to ordering and making all the things that we do every day, whether we feel like it or not, because that’s how we roll on this farm. And outside in the dark the forces that keep tearing down and bringing on ruin will continue to do what they do to everything we touch, whether we want them to or not.

But for now?

We just watch it all, in awe and hope that we’ve done the right thing.

I drove to Cornish Flat today to buy some lambs from a farmer there. He had a really nice farm, bigger than most in this area with some wide open plains on both sides of his place. He told me on the phone, “Make a left on the dirt road just past the General Store and look for the gray barn, you can’t miss it.” He was right. The lambs I bought were Romneys, three ewes and a ram and they were as well built as they were easy to manage. It was obvious that this guy was doing everything right on his place- his two granddaughters were there with their mother helping out with the stock in the snow in their muck boots and parkas, the fields blinding white behind them.

It’s been a pretty good week all around. There was a nice deep snow right after Christmas followed by howling winds and then by nothing but clear blue skies. I’m reading Scott and Helen Nearing’s book on maple sugaring when I can find a free minute and the kids are off from school this week for the holiday. I walked around outside tonight, after dark and at one point I stood near the sugar house and tipped my head back as far as it would go and just looked straight up into the sky for a little while. It was a moonless blue, filled with a wild scatter of stars, twinkling on and off, like in the Christmas carols. No matter how hard you looked up, things came at you from the edges; the silvered tips of rock maples jiggling just a little bit in the frozen air, the film of woodsmoke from the barn stove, the glow of Concord to the south. You could hear Dickie’s son’s hound dogs going at it way up beyond the rock walls in the back forty, probably responding to some further sound of howling dogs out of my range of hearing. I’d put a new cage filled with golden shiners in the upper brook, Ed and I chopping a hole in the ice just before the Sun went down to settle the baitfish in, and when I came back to check with the dogs they caught a scent of something and started in on their own little rant. The ice had started to skin over and you could see that some fish had found their way out of the hand made trap, but the majority of them looked good and darted back and forth in the glow of the flashlight. Up the hill behind the ruins of the old sugar house you could see the trail of footprints in the snow, the galloping tread of black bear moving up and down along the edge of the stream. Maybe we hadn’t missed him by much, maybe that was what the dogs were barking at, maybe not, but he had been there between the time I had lowered the metal cage into the hole in the ice a couple of hours before, in the glow of twilight and now.

We had steaks for dinner, two thick bone-in strip steaks salted and seared in hot oil and thrown in the oven until they were just this side of cool on the inside. Three kids and myself left nothing behind but a few smears on the cutting board and couple of forks in the sink. The two boys played in the snow most of the day and my daughter had an all day visit with a friend from down the road. When I picked her up I gave them one of our last bottles of maple syrup and asked them if they wanted to come by when we sugared in late Winter. It won’t be long now before we start to tap again, so it only makes sense to use up what’s left and to start fresh.

I stopped writing for a long time because farming is busier work than I thought it would be. I also started to get involved with the politics of farming, a decidedly unpleasant kind of activity that seems to be based on the idea that in order to farm, one must beg the permission of a State level bureaucrat to produce food that he or she has never produced before. It’s hard to believe that you have to pay a fee and ask permission to filet a fish or cut a chop from a side of beef and sell it to your neighbor when someone in China or Paraguay can not only do so without oversight, but sell it in our local groceries without inspection to anyone who walks in the door with an ATM card. I suppose I shouldn’t have asked in the first place, but that’s another story for another day.

Today was great.

I love what we do and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I met good people today and I talked about food more than I talked about the economy or what’s going on in the Capitol. People like what we do and they support us and even if it isn’t rocket science, it is important.

Outside right now, somewhere out beyond the hole in the stream where my shiner cages sit in the cold, black water there is a bear not yet in hibernation, banging around in the dark and I understand where he’s coming from.

We are well into our first full month of CSA harvests and the results have been mixed. Sometimes, despite the best of plans, you find that certain things have been left out. When you look down the rows of maturing vegetables you suddenly realize that you didn’t even come close to planting enough of certain things, like cauliflower. Last night I harvested about a third of what I had planted and ate the entire basket full myself for dinner. It was delicious, but now I have none to share because I simply didn’t leave enough space or plant enough seeds or get large enough heads or a combination of all three. Arugula, on the other hand, is coming up in quantities that would likely solve the demands of a popular restaurant and leave plenty to spare. I pretty much eat it with every meal and although I never thought it would come to this, I’m getting burned out on it. Same with kale. You simply cannot cut enough of it to make a dent in the new growth that continually replaces it and some of the customers have begun to hint that they aren’t really kale people.

Note to self: Next year, more cauliflower, less kale.

In other areas our production seems to be going along just fine. The waste water from the tilapia tanks has been used to water the gardens, particularly the conveniently located tomato beds and the results are nothing short of astounding. Large, dark green and lush vines that seem to grow faster than I can keep up with, each one filled with yellow blossoms and small, underdeveloped fruits that promise a bumper crop if we can safely make it past the residual effects of last year’s late blight infestation. The potato patch is equally impressive although for the last two days we’ve spent considerable time and effort in hand picking the Colorado potato beetles off the leaves. They aren’t the kind of infestation that can wipe out a crop if you stay on top of it, but there really isn’t much you can do to prevent one once it hits, you just have to pick them off one at a time and keep doing every day for the two to three weeks of their maturing phase. After that the potatoes underground aren’t affected by the leaf growth above ground and once the flowering takes place, it’s only a matter of time until the harvest.

We’re down to the last scapes and although the usable portions are getting smaller and slightly woody, they’re still delicious stir fried in hot sesame oil and sea salt. From this point forward the hardneck garlic can focus all of it’s attention on building a bigger bulb and soon, maybe in another couple of weeks, we’ll be pulling, washing and drying the garlic heads for this year.

We’re also making our way through the first flock of meat birds. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that the chickens and ducks and geese have a decent life here, free within certain confines to range about and feed on grasses and insects rather than to remain cooped up in wire cages feeding on GMO grains, but the fact remains that we raise them for human consumption and thus slaughter. Whatever people might think of this, chicken do not simply fall apart into little plastic trays for sale at the grocery store. Somewhere, someone must take the time and put in the effort that converts a living, breathing animal into meat. I thought about trying to do all of the birds on a specific day in order to deliver them to all of our customers at the same time in order to be fair, but after a dozen or so birds it dawned on me that there wasn’t much sense in raising animals that weren’t stressed only to find myself feeling that way. Slaughtering chickens isn’t the same thing as putting down a family pet, but it’s got it’s own set of stresses on the psyche, so now I do as many birds as I feel comfortable preparing in a day and leave it at that. One of the main reasons we embarked on this journey in our lives was because we loved food so much we wanted to be a part of it every step of the way, from raising it to the final enjoyment at the table and I don’t want to find myself- as some folks I know in farming do- saying that they simply cannot eat certain things because of the associated memories of large scale slaughters in their past. So we make the process as pastoral as the husbandry phase of their raising was. We set up in the woods out behind the sugar house where the breezes cool the air and we process the birds, after slaughter, in the full and cleansing Sun out on the dock in front of it. By the time the birds are done and wrapped in freezer bags cooling in the refrigerator, there’s not much left to clean up, the waste is already being composted and you’re on to the next chore for the day without feeling like you’ve done something awful. So far it’s working like a charm and let me tell you, the birds taste fantastic.

So into July we head, the greens for the most part will taper off as the ripening fruits of Summer take center stage. I can already taste the fresh salsas, the crisp fresh pickles, the grilled eggplant with basil. Summer is on and it’s worth every minute of the wait.

In 1965 concerned mothers in Japan noticed that a large part of their family food budget was spent on imported products. They began a buying club from a local farmer and the concept of Community Supported Agriculture was born. It was named “Teikei” which translates “putting the farmer’s face on food”.

Ironically- at least to me- is the fact that the first American CSA was organized on the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, NH by a German biodynamic farmer named Trauger Groh. I can’t find any literature to tell me what that first year was like, so I feel like I ought to do my best to describe our first year in New Hampshire as a CSA, to put a face on our food as the Japanese would say.

On Friday we opened the doors to our first allotment- albeit limited to what needed thinning, like Spring onions and the Russian kale that over wintered in the kitchen garden- but it was a start. I am just beginning to be able to remember the names of our first members, not one of my strong suits, but one that has been made easier by Meredith’s ability to always remember and to gently remind me who is coming and something specific about them. The pace has certainly picked up and the related chores associated with the gardens seem never ending, but the rainfall levels have been adequate, the soil conditions are improving daily and the excitement from seeing healthy vegetables and fruits develop week by week is more than enough to offset the fatigue and exhaustion that goes along with a workday that begins at dawn and often ends after sunset. The other night just before dark I paused on the terrace to eat a plate of roasted Nantes carrots and Chioggia beets drizzled with olive oil and sea salt. I am sure I have had better meals in the last half century of my life, but at that moment I couldn’t remember a one of them. The satisfaction of eating something when you’ve earned your hunger, of being able to savor each bite as you survey the broad sweep of land where it was grown, and to do so under the clean and open sky of a place where you feel at home is insurmountable.

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to have a relationship with food, from seed to plate, but it is one that our members seem to have already developed, and for that I am profoundly grateful. I appreciate that they not only made an investment in the health and future of this farm, but in the time it takes to insure that they and their families are getting the freshest foods available locally. They ask questions that show they have thought about not only their own nutritional needs, but the diet of the livestock and the poultry that live here as well. They understand the importance of moving away from mass produced factory foods that travel thousands of miles and countless days since harvest before being served at the table. And in the US, that’s not a thought many of us have entertained. They bring things to our farm that nourish us in return; their enthusiasm for what we’re doing, the energy of their children who take to the farm like a proverbial duck to water and their encouragement when all we have to offer at the beginning is a handful of Spring onions and a carton of multicolored and mismatched eggs.

I can see where this is heading, not just for our farm and the shareholders who have signed on this year, but for the future. I have spent the better part of my adult life as a cynical man who saw our Nation’s headlong rush for more, more, more as inevitable and unstoppable, but now I am not so sure. I think that a momentum is beginning to build, slowly to be sure, one family at a time, but building all the same. There is a growing awareness that some of the things we left behind are worth going back to retrieve and when we start with something as vital as the food we eat to sustain our bodies and nourish our families, maybe we’ll take the time to look around for other things we’ve forgotten as well.

So for everyone of you who took a chance on our farm, we thank you, deeply and sincerely. We look forward to a wonderful Summer of bountiful harvests and delicious meals eaten slowly under a sheltering sky.