What Do You Do All Winter?

Sometimes people ask vegetable farmers what we do all winter. This is our short answer: we order seeds. We feed the horses. We fix tools. We sleep.

This is our long answer: first, we spend a few days not knowing what to do, once the enormous pressure of the season has ended. We drift around the house and fields, hardly comprehending that we don’t have to harvest or weed.

Then we start imagining what we could do, now that we don’t have the enormous pressure. My travel-loving fellow farmer has some suggestions: “Let’s go to Norway!”

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Norway, and have made trips to Norway unlikely for some time.

For my part, I start noticing all the things we’ve neglected. This year, after the season ended, we fixed the burnt-out light over our kitchen table. After six months, we could see what we were eating!

Then we fixed the broken storm window in our daughter’s bedroom, a project two years overdue. Luckily, the daughter is 24 and not living here full-time, so she didn’t spend every night of those two winters shivering.

Then, since we were on a roll, we asked our clever fix-it-all neighbor to look at our front door, which we’d been keeping closed by using an old sock stuffed in the bottom edge. He put a chink of wood around the latch, and our door closes properly again. What a pleasure!

“It’s almost as fun as going to Fiji!” my fellow says. 

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Fiji, and have made trips to Fiji unlikely for some time.

Buoyed by all these home improvements, we moved on to larger projects: for example, moving the cabinet we inherited a year and a half ago out of the middle of the living room, into its new home against the wall in another room. This really opened up the view of the couch, where we had stacked everything from the kitchen shelves: books, papers, seed catalogs. 

We cleared the shelves when a puppy entered our lives last April, as we came into the full-on gardening season. He had the run of the kitchen as a chewing-a-lot puppy, with only supervised visits to the living room. 

Thus he didn’t chew on things we didn’t want him to, but we couldn’t sit on our couch for the last eight months. Now we can see one couch cushion, and one farmer can relax there. Soon we will clear the other cushion, and two farmers could sit side by side, holding hands, perhaps, as they gaze at the nicely sleeping dog at their feet.

“Just think,” says my fellow. “We could get the dog used to flying on airplanes while he’s young, when we go to Tasmania!”

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Tasmania, and have made trips to Tasmania unlikely for some time.

The dog would probably like to go to Tasmania, since he is an agreeable fellow. He is not always nicely sleeping, however. It took us a while to realize that our garden season was ideal for a dog, as he was outside with us most all day. But in winter time, we are inside much more often, and this young energetic dog didn’t have quite enough to do.

“Why’s he being so awful?” I would say to my fellow farmer, as the dog jumped, barked, annoyed the cat, and annoyed the people.

“Maybe it’s adolescence?” my fellow suggested, which is partly true.

“Maybe he’s not getting enough exercise,” I say. “Let’s go hike in new places in Chesterfield! And Walpole! And Brattleboro!”

“Yes!” answers my fellow. “It’s almost like going to Norway! And Fiji! And Tasmania!”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 5-11, 2025

Farmers, Novels, and Bonbons

One of the strange things about farming is that everyone else isn’t farming. In summer, when we are racing around the fields with our tongues hanging out, everyone else is going to the seashore, or to their cabin in the mountains.

Farmers are out of sync in the wintertime too. Just when people are groaning about having to wear fifty layers to go outside to scrape the ice off their windshields and brave the roads to get to work, we are lying in bed, contemplating a day of reading novels and eating bonbons.

Before we get to the novels and bonbons, however, we have to make it through the last two weeks of the CSA vegetable distribution, which are always a big push. We empty the greenhouses and gardens, keeping enough vegetables for our own use. But there’s always a lot of counting: how many leeks divided by how many members, how many Brussels sprouts, winter squash, pounds of carrots, potatoes, onions, etc.

We’ve been farming long enough that we have a pretty good sense of amounts, but there are always surprises. For example, this year we had a banner crop of fall carrots, and we didn’t even realize it. We could have started digging and distributing them much sooner. 

But we waited until the last month of distribution, and suddenly realized we had mountains of carrots. How many pounds of carrots would our hearty CSA members take on harvest day: one, two, three, four, five, six? Every distribution day we upped the carrot pounds. (Five seemed to be the limit, as on the day of six we had carrots left in the bins.)

Our Brussels sprouts were also abundant this year, and a late spinach planting in the greenhouse came on beautifully. We did the best we could with our counting, but after the last harvest day, when we had a moment to breathe, we made one more assessment. Alas, we still had a lot of carrots. We had a lot of Brussels sprouts. We had a lot of spinach. We had way more than we could eat over the winter, and the farmers’ market had ended weeks ago.

It was time for a Bonus CSA pick-up. We sent the word out to our members; our members responded gleefully. We, however, were not so gleeful. It was the grumpiest harvest morning of the year, even though it wasn’t raining, even though there would be only a few hours of work getting the three crops ready.

By golly, we were grumpy, as we harvested and trimmed and washed spinach, as we weighed carrots, as we used our biggest loppers to cut down the enormous stalks of Brussels sprouts.

“I don’t know what my problem is,” I finally said to my fellow farmer.

“Me neither,” he answered. “I mean, not your problem, my problem. I feel really grumpy.”

“I think it’s because we’re supposed to be done harvesting for the year.”

“Yeah! We’re supposed to be lying in bed, thinking of everything we don’t have to do with vegetables today!”

Well, we grumped our way through the harvest, and then there was the nice part of the day: seeing how happy people were about more vegetables, even carrots. Since this was a farm-only pick-up, rather than our usual farm or town pick-up, we even had a few town pick-up members that had never been to the farm. 

The farm tour went like this: this is our garden, where there used to be a lot of vegetables. This is our mushroom yard, where no mushrooms are growing. These are our horses, who are done working for the season. These are the farmers, also (mostly) done working for the season (except for rolling up irrigation, cleaning out greenhouses, and other trivial matters).

And these are the novels, waiting to be read, and the bonbons, waiting to be eaten.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 8-14, 2025

Snowshoes, Death, and Taxes

Towards the end of January, I set out to visit my friend SuiSui, over in our horse pasture. SuiSui, our long-time friend and CSA member, honored us by asking if she could have her ashes on our farm someday. Someday came too soon, and that January morning was the anniversary of SuiSui’s death. We loved her, and she loved us, and she loved our farm, and we love our farm, too, mostly.

That morning I felt a little annoyed at our farm, because it was requiring me to gather financial records for our taxes, which is not my favorite thing to do. A nice walk in the snowy fields would do me good, I thought.

But the nice walk turned into a hard slog, as I went knee-deep into snow after breaking through the icy crust at every step. I had to stop three times in a hundred yards just to catch my breath. SuiSui kept waiting patiently for me, and I finally made it, and had a long talk with her about how things were going. 

I was getting chilly, but I wasn’t looking forward to struggling again through the drifts. SuiSui gave me an idea: “Snowshoes!” she and the wind whispered around me, and I perked up, and trekked back.

The snowshoes are an old wooden pair, discovered when we were sorting through the piles of useful farm junk that the previous owners left. The buckles are stiff and contrary, but they work. The last time I used those buckles was when my now-22-year-old daughter was in the second grade, and she had a little pair of orange plastic snowshoes, and there was a two-hour snow delay for school. That snowshoeing was the nicest use of a two-hour delay we ever had.

This is all to say that I am not an expert on snowshoes, and the first time I fell down was when I was trying to get up from the ground after the buckling. Since the streams were still running, I didn’t want to get the snowshoes wet and attract big globs of snow or ice. I decided on the route up to the big-oak field, thinking there would be a narrow stream to cross, rather than tackling the wide stream that led up to SuiSui.

The narrow stream wasn’t as narrow as I thought, and I hugged the snowy shrubs on the bank, leaning over the water, as the shrubs poked me in the eye, and my snowshoes slithered around at an angle. But I didn’t fall in, and I made my slow snowshoe way up the big hill, with side excursions to see a nest full of snow in the bushes, and other nice things. I was happy that I wasn’t breaking through the crust. I got so warm in the sunshine that I unzipped my jacket. I went swaying and clomping along, pleased with my big adventure.

Next I went across the lane to the hayfield, which is the sunniest spot on the farm, but the snow was too soft for snowshoeing there. I had my second fall when I tried to heave me and my big feet over the stone wall. I ended up fall-crawling over the wall into the pine woods, where the snow was perfect, and I heard the chickadees, and where I zipped my coat back up. By then, I was getting a little tired, and fell some more on the rough terrain, when my snowshoes got tangled up with each other.

Then, in a perfectly satisfying conclusion to my adventure, I circled back around from the other side to visit SuiSui again. I cleverly turned my next fall into a roll under the wire fence. SuiSui was very glad to hear about my enjoyable afternoon. She said, Life’s too short for taxes. She said, Well, hurry up and get them done, and then come out again into this beautiful world.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, March 8 -
March 14, 2023

Farming's Wifty Realms

I've been reading a lot of poems this winter.

Lest you think that this farming and sustainability column is going to veer irretrievably off into poetry and other such wifty realms, let me reassure you that, in fact, I read poetry all the time, and still function as a farmer. But this winter I discovered a poem, by Thomas Merton, that pretty much sums up how I feel as a New Hampshire vegetable farmer in the winter.

There are some lovely lines in the poem, such as “O covered stones/ Hide the house of growth!” and “Fire, turn inward,” but my favorite is both the title and the last line of the poem: “Love winter when the plant says nothing.”

Oh, I do love winter, when the plant says nothing. I also love summer, spring, and fall, when the plant says a lot. But winter allows me a period of quiet contemplation that is not worried by the quantity and quality of the harvest, or the quantity and the quality of the weeds, or the quantity and the quality of the farmwork I am accomplishing.

No, winter lets me be. Winter lets me root around in a box so long neglected that I find all kinds of things I'd thoroughly forgotten. You might wonder, in this context, if I am writing of a metaphorical box, but this is an actual box, and I actually found in it, just yesterday: a book of poetry! by Jane Hirshfield!

Hirshfield is another poet I love, and apparently this book had been in a bunch of stuff my sister was trying to rid her house of (oh, get that poetry away from me!), and somehow I missed it. But here is this lovely new book, right in my lap, and now I can think about both Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk/writer, and Jane Hirshfield, the Buddhist poet, at the same time.

Also, if you're still with me in this sort-of-farming column thus far, now I can say as well:

I've been reading a lot of theology, or religion or spiritual kind of stuff, this winter. (I repeat: lest you think that this farming and sustainability column is going to veer irretrievably off into those wifty realms, let me reassure you that, in fact, I read theology/religion/spirituality books all the time, and still function as a farmer.)

And if you're still reading this column, I will also admit to recently reading a 555 page book titled The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie, which is about the four Catholic writers Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, and their explorations of religious faith through writing.

It was a long book, even for someone interested in writing and spiritual matters, and it's possible I might not have read it at all if the library hadn't been closed because of the pandemic, but there it was in my house and I picked it up. It took me a number of months to finish, especially since I started it in the high season of farming.

But finish it I did, and I particularly liked reading about Merton and his monk-life. Merton inspired many people to turn towards a more contemplative life though his writings, and, in his later years, he also found himself with a lively interest in Buddhism, and in the resonances between Christian and Buddhist contemplation.

In his fifties, Merton visited Asia and many of the spiritual luminaries of his day, including Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama of Tibetan Buddhism. As Merton wrote, while in Asia, “There is no puzzle, no problem, and really no 'mystery.' All is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya – everything is emptiness and everything is compassion” (Elie 420).

Yes! Wow! and now I get to go from that beautiful understanding of the world to Jane Hirshfield, and one of her early books called Of Gravity and Angels, which is the book I just discovered in my box, and then maybe I'll go on to Hirshfield's translations of poems written by women of the ancient court of Japan, or her essays on poetry, or her thoughts on Zen Buddhism, or her ideas on science, nature, and environmental issues, all of which are directly related to sustainable farming in my mind, and probably in yours now too.

And what better place to end a farmingish column in winter then with another bit from Merton's poem: “Oh peace, bless this mad place. / Silence, love this growth.”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 13 - Jan 19, 2021