Of course now, after all we’ve learned, it would be a shame to quit. In fact, having thought long and hard about it, what kind of people would we be to turn our backs on such good luck as we’ve had? When you really think about it we all have far greater breaks of good luck than of bad.

We could hardly ask for a better community to have chosen or a more life affirming vocation than farming. Things that set us back, whether they be physical or spiritual, have a way of carrying us further along even when we don’t think they are. The old saying ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ is one of the most profound and truthful statements ever uttered and we are firm believers in that principle.

Earlier today an old friend of the farm stopped by with feed for our pigs and we gave him a dozen spent layers in return. He has his own troubles to deal with; his town objects to his farm, he’s just had surgery, he’s an immigrant from another country without a lot of friends, but he has the right attitude and he has his family that loves and believes in him and a piece of land, just like we do. He and I and our sons worked side by side for a little while unloading feed and then loading up chickens and it was easy to work together. We talked about my burned down barn and his operation and we laughed a little bit about it and encouraged each other a little bit more. Neither of us chose to do this because we thought we’d get rich, but both of us are in a different sort of way. His 20 year old talked to my 15 year old about football while they passed hens back and forth across the fence. We tried to judge how long it would be before our sow would farrow (I think it will be tomorrow, he gives it a few days more) and we wondered about the way things would turn out for the sugaring season this year with hardly enough snow on the ground to cover the soil.

I got lost there for a little while, I’ll admit. My broken arm and the burned down barn. The past or the present. Good people who appreciated what we were trying to do and the ones who wished us ill will. Funny thing is that no matter what you do there is always something you could have done better, or not at all. The past, however, is the past and all we really have is what we do from here on out.

So tomorrow I am planning on Spring pigs, even if they come a couple of days late. My oldest boy will drive to the dump with me riding shotgun even though it seems like yesterday that he was small enough to propel into the air with my arms. We will feed the sheep, the goats, the cows and the pigs and we will try to figure out what we should do with that empty space where the barn used to be. We’ll start tapping the maples on Monday even though no one has started that early in over a hundred years because it’s time to tap them even if we aren’t ready.

We’ll keep on farming because that’s the right thing to do for us, and no matter what anyone thinks, no matter what happens to us and we will be grateful for everything, good or bad that comes our way because like they say, unless it kills us, it only makes us stronger.

Looking back over the things that I have written for a long, long time now I find that they aren’t always the truth. I omit the crappier parts of farming; the failures, the losses, the heart breaks, most of which are mine to bear. We write what we know, I have heard, or what we think we know at any given time and we always discover somewhere further down the pike that we didn’t know jack. I feel like that right now of course: that through lies or omissions I have made this life seem better than it is, filled with rewards and halcyon moments in sunlit pastures.  Of course life’s not like that, not by a long shot. Some days are darker than other, some nights are cold indeed.

And so I ask for forgiveness.

I apologize.

Mea culpa.

It’s been a tough six weeks.

I’m sorry for forgetting to tell you about the old ram that died alone in our pond the day after Thanksgiving, drowned because I was in bed with my arm in a cast, broken so badly in a fall that I couldn’t move it more than a few inches for a week. I kept that to myself because I was ashamed to think that I was a poor shepherd, but you’ve heard it here first, I owe you that.  Or that on the first morning of waking up next to my wife in another room in another state, free from the obligations and responsibilities on the farm for one day in the last two years it was also the same morning that I got the call that our barn was on fire. You probably heard about that by now, of course. If only I hadn’t gone away, I’ve thought…

If only I hadn’t done a lot of things…

The barn burned down, the old ram drowned and I broke my arm when I fell down.

Catchy.

Sounds like a C&W tune.

Our lives, last time I checked, are full of false starts and missed cues. As Shakespeare so eloquently put it, we (sic) ‘strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing…’

We put everything we had as a family into this farm, every effort, every waking moment, every red cent we ever had so that we could live a better life. We wanted our children to grow up in a healthy environment, eating good food, learning things of consequence and living responsibly. We wanted to be humane and open and to live like we thought we should live. We tried to give up consumption in order to produce and most of the time we did fairly well at it. We did a lot of things out of ignorance and more than a few out of good intentions but we did do something.

We wound up being the first farm in the state to raise tilapia in closed system aquaculture, the first farm to receive Animal Welfare Approved status for our pigs and goats and sheep and cattle. We were selected as a recipient of the the 2012 New Hampshire Farm of Distinction, restored and rebuilt both a 150 year old maple orchard and sugar house that currently produces some of the finest New Hampshire maple syrup ever made and we reclaimed a unique parcel of rock maples to preserve from clear cutting just in the nick of time.

We’ve farrowed and lambed, calved and kidded. We’ve offered a CSA, sold to restaurants and farmers markets,welcomed visitors to our farm daily, worked with local schools and colleges and done everything that we could think of to improve this land, serve this community and live our lives in peace. And when I found the time to write about it, it was a work of joy.

After the fire was like something out of a movie. By the time I got home the charred remains were still smoking, but already there were people there, unloading hay for our animals, carrying buckets of water by hand to the ewes in the field. The firemen looked as shook up as a I felt and I was so glad to see that our son was safe that I missed the other twenty blessings delivered by people I hardly knew. Everywhere there were helping hands. And every night a hot dish made in someone’s kitchen showed up on our steps so that we could eat upon our table.

How do you say thank you to that?

Where do you begin?

We’re not sure what all of this means yet- the things we’ve done here and the promise of the future is intoxicating when you think about it, but it isn’t something that lasts forever anyway and so we wonder if maybe we ought to pack it in. We are always finding evidence of the people who lived here before us, the “LIFE TIME RECORD” of deer shot by Doctor Jack Maxfield; sex, weight and point count carefully pencilled on a column in the basement of the milk house with the last date being a 196 pound 12 point buck shot in 1955, the same year that he moved away. We found a 1900 silver tablespoon next to a stream with the Shultis monogram and returned it to his great-great granddaughter Sally Harris who still owns the house down the hill.

I find foundations everywhere.

I know every family, every living soul connected to this land over the course of the last century and they know me and no matter what we do now, we’ve left our mark here and I couldn’t ask for more.

Sometimes I am convinced that we don’t own the land, but that the land owns us.

We feed the animals and they feed us.

We make our plans and God laughs…

And so I leave you with what I consider to be the greatest passage in the English language, a green light at the end of the dock…

“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On Sunday morning, January 8th 2012, one of the most heartbreaking moments we have ever faced as a family took place when our barn caught fire and burned to the ground. Making matters worse was the fact that our 14-year-old son was left to deal with that tragic event while the rest of the family was away from home. Within minutes, the first units of the Newbury N.H. Volunteer Fire Department arrived on the scene and began a daylong effort to battle the blaze in high winds and freezing temperatures.

Community Support

Over the course of the past three years since we first moved to Newbury, N.H. and began farming, we have been blessed repeatedly by the kindness and respect of our community, welcomed as neighbors and as a business. Until the fire, we cannot say that we experienced anything other than joy and pride in our decision to start our life over in a new vocation and in a new home.

In the aftermath of that awful day, we have been overwhelmed by the ensuing response. From the hugs and handshakes of well wishers, to the selfless and confident professionalism of the men who saved our house and risked their lives to extinguish the blaze, each day has brought another unexpected barrage of human decency and community support. In the following days, a seemingly endless stream of people arrived at our farm with casseroles and fresh baked bread, pickup trucks loaded with hay and feed for our animals, and countless gloved hands ready to pitch in and to help us try and clean up the devastation left behind. What could have been one of the worst moments in our life has suddenly become one of the brightest. We may have suffered an enormous loss, but we have been given a gift of incalculable value by learning firsthand how much a community means to each of us.

Our Heartfelt Thanks

We would like to thank each person personally but the list would be too long to print, but for those who gave of themselves on our behalf, the firemen of Newbury, Sutton, Bradford, Sunapee, New London, Goshen, Newport, Warner, Springfield, Wilmot and Henniker, the neighbors who provided our meals, the farmers who brought feed for our livestock, the volunteers who gave their time to sort through the remains, the people from UNH Co-operative Extension who have offered to help plan our new barn, the local businesses that gave our requests for equipment and supplies top priority, our children’s schools and their teachers and classmates, our extended family, even those people whom we have never met who sent emails of support, we offer our most sincere and profound thanks.

The Moran Family

The recipients must be commercial working farms that strive to keep their operations neat and orderly.  Equipment must be clean and stored properly, buildings, fences, and hedgerows kept in good condition, and sanitary conditions must be met for all livestock.

We are so pleased with this award. It couldn’t have come at a better time!

up with

and we’ve decided to abandon our CSA experiment to concentrate on producing for our restaurant market and the ever increasing number of drive up customers. We’ve brought in our newest stock of poultry, we’ve got new lambs, cattle arrive tomorrow to take up residence in the lower pasture, the hogs have moved into a newly cleared section of maple orchard for the season and we’ve made it through a long hard Winter with our tilapia stocks thriving. We made it through the AWA* audit to become the first farm in NH to receive certification and I am now Serve Safe certified if that means anything to anyone.

I can’t say we haven’t been blessed with good luck, incredible memories a growing base of friends and supporters and yet I find myself worried about the future. We’ve had some incredible difficulties with the folks at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services Food Safety Section concerning our aquaculture operation. I will likely write in greater detail about the issues at some point if they can’t be resolved, suffice it to say that there are people who do not fully understand what it is we are doing and yet would prefer that we don’t in order to make it easier on them- or that we become something we don’t want to be in order to conform to their previously established set of rules. To us the basic premise is that locally produced foods, done seasonally and with humanity is superior to mass produced foods imported from great distances and processed in mass quantities using questionable practices. It seems to be almost a no brainer, and yet there are folks who think that the opposite is true. They have actually used McDonalds as an example of how to do things properly in a conversation with me, leading me to believe that there are fundamental differences between those with a conscience and those who would seek to limit them from actually bringing their food to market. Of course due to my wife’s belief in giving people every opportunity to do the right thing regardless of how many times they have demonstrated their inability to do so in the past, I am awaiting a final verdict to be issued from the Food Safety Section before saying anything further on the subject. Perhaps it is my own arrogance in thinking that what we are doing is somehow right and moral as opposed to something sanctioned and regulated that leads me to bump heads with bureaucrats, but I know from our past interactions with other departments that there are plenty of helpful and encouraging people who do work for the apparatus of state who have made our journey thus far a pleasurable and positive one.

I just don’t know. Maybe we are entering a time when lines are drawn everywhere, not just in the political and economic issues that seem to divide us these days, but in everything where people actually take some sort of stand to do what they believe in. I am not an end times sort of person, but the way that events and perspectives have somehow seemed to rush together with increasing frenetic energy makes you wonder if maybe something bigger isn’t going on under the surface, something we couldn’t grok if we wanted to, pitting one side against another even as people struggle to remain neutral and above it all.

I think about how we found this place, how propitious and unexpected the discovery of this property was for us at a time when everything was at a crossroads in our lives and how, as we uncovered the bones of the old farm underneath a half a century of benign neglect, we became aware of the efforts of another farmer a hundred years ago who shared an almost carbon copy vision of our own for this acreage. We think we do things of our own free choice and under our own steam, but that’s an illusion. Everything we ever learned, every step we’ve ever taken has been made possible by the contribution of thousands of untold helpers whose hands have held our own, whose words inhabit our thoughts, whose dreams have filled our destiny. We dance to the ancient DNA of our forefathers, sleep under the stars of the ancient past and move through a world populated with billions of others just like us, all of whom move to the same inexorable call of the future. Maybe we don’t have as much to do with our own choices in life as we think we do and maybe how we respond to every choice we’re presented with defines us more than what we do for a living and how much we have or do not have, I don’t know. But I do know that tomorrow will come sooner than I think and with it will be the inevitable chores and motions that define my day, and if I do things right, even partly, even poorly, I will make that day a little bit better than if I wasn’t here at all and that is something I can live with and take pleasure in.

Outside a soft rain is soaking into the soil and the grass is greedily drinking in the darkness. And like the article in Edible White Mountains says, everything old is new again.

* Animal Welfare Approved http://www.animalwelfareapproved.org/

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.