Ragtag March on the Farm

 

We're a ragtag bunch on the farm this time of year. In the winter the farm horses (and the farmers!) are fuzzy and round, and by the summer we''re all sleek and trim. But in March?

In March our horses are patchy and scratchy, shedding clumps of hair, rolling in the muddy-slushy barnyard, itching on the stalls and the posts in the barn, and itching on the farmers too, if the farmers are handy.

We are often handy, in March, since there's not much more satisfying than helping an itchy horse shed. The horses swoon with pleasure when we start brushing; in fact, Molly, our lovey-dovey Belgian mare, follows us around the barnyard, nudging us with her nose. Brush me! Brush me! she says, even if we're merely passing though on another errand, and have no brush available.

But Molly doesn't need a brush for happiness. Itch me, itch me instead! she says. We scratch her chin; we scratch her neck. Nudge, nudge, she pushes with her nose, You've got two hands, why aren't you using both of them?

“Molly's so funny,” I say to my fellow farmer. “she's just like you. So friendly and enthusiastic.”

“And such a hard worker, too,” my fellow adds, brushing Molly's back.

“Oh, indeed.” I scratch Molly under her mane, and she arches her neck, entirely pleased with this double attention.

Moon, Molly's Belgian brother, is standing nearby, and he is another critter entirely. He's a fine horse, too, if not exactly eager for work, and rather reserved. Even in the itchy days of March, Moon is not generally receptive to a free-standing grooming session, though once he's haltered and tied, he relaxes a bit, even allowing that a brushing on a certain spot near his front leg might feel kind of good. Even so, it takes a little while in the spring to get Moon used to the whole idea of being groomed regularly again, as a prelude to working regularly again. Luckily, it is only March, and we have time to take it slowly with him.

“Moon's so funny,” my fellow says, ”isn't he? Kind of reserved, kind of easily offended, kind of hangs back with the work, you know, kind of like . . . ahem . . . kind of like . . .”

“Now listen, my friend,” I look askance at my fellow. “Is that a sustainable, productive way to address one's beloved partner in life and in work?”

“Hee hee hee,” answers my fellow devilishly, and heads toward another itchy horse with the currycomb.

Ben, our black Percheron gelding, is our biggest, goofiest, itchy horse, and he has a funny backward flop to his ears on occasion. Sometimes I am not so sure of big ol' Benny: Is he unhappy? Is he pinning his ears back? Does he like this? Does he not want anything to do with it?

“Let me watch you groom him,” I say to my fellow, “I want to see what he does. I don't know how to read him, exactly.”

My fellow starts a vigorous brushing. Benny stands stock still, with the backward flop with his ears.

“You know, he's so big and goofy, I try not to read him too much,” my fellow remarks, which makes me laugh. And look at that, Benny has his eyes closed, and his back leg flopped out, in the bliss of having his inner leg brushed. His funny black flop ear is perfectly matched by his funny back flop leg.

“Well, he does seem pretty happy about that,” I say, going to Betsy, our black Percheron mare, sway-backed and retired, who is waiting sleepily in the sun for me. Along with the wisdom and calming presence that Betsey has acquired in her old age, she's also developed the incredibly thick and long coat of an older horse.

Betsey is our March poster horse, our most stunning equine example of ragtag March (and April, and even May and June, as she takes ages now to shed out). She has gobs of loose hair hanging all over her body. When she walks, a shower of hair attends her. She itches herself fiercely on manger and post, leaving clumps and mats and entire carpets of hair behind. This is all despite our grooming, which we soon finish for the day with a hairy flourish.

Pleased, we look around at our slightly tidier, for a few minutes at least, herd of four fine work horses. As soon as we leave the barnyard, of course, they will start rolling and itching again. But for now they look lovely, and we farmers?

We farmers are ragtag March all over: muddy and slushy, friendly and reserved, patchy and scratchy, hardworking and sleepy, and, oh yes, covered head to toe with horse hair. My fellow looks me over, and takes a currycomb to my coat, brushing gently in circles.

“There now,” he says, “Isn't this a nice, sustainable, productive way to treat one's beloved partner in life and work?”

“Hee hee hee,” I say. It tickles.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, March 18- 24, 2015

Sappy on the Farm

 

Five years ago, my enthusiastic farming fellow convinced me that making maple syrup would be an ideal addition to our operation. It would be fun, exciting, new!

February and March, of course, would be the perfect time of year for another project, since we were rested up from the last garden season, and not completely submerged yet into the next one. Hauling sap would get the work horses in shape for plowing. Boiling sap would be a great use for the enormous pile of pine, mixed in with hardwood for our wood stove, that had been deposited in our driveway months ago, thanks to a friendly local professional tree-cutter.

Plus, said my fellow, we'll have a handy little money-making enterprise, to go along with our vegetables and herbs and apples and flowers.

The budget and exactly-how-much-energy-do-two-farmers-have committee, me, that would be, was somewhat skeptical, but we finally decided to invest in second-hand taps and buckets, and a second-hand pan. In the overhang of our woodshed, we rigged up an arch with cement blocks and mud caulking and a stovepipe. We fitted our old beat-up cart with a water trough, plastic, and plywood, for collecting the sap with our work horses. Near the barnyard, we clanged and banged and dropped the buckets, and we twanged and tossed the bucket covers, so the horses wouldn't worry about the scary new sounds of collecting sap.

Happily, from the beginning, our team of black Percherons didn't bat an eye at any of this new activity. They pulled that rattly, squeaky cart right up the hill, and waited patiently as we poured in our first full buckets of sap. It seemed miraculous, all that incredible sap, all that abundance from the trees and the world!

It still seems miraculous, five years later, and we have learned many things about making syrup, including: how to burn the pan; how to endlessly scrub and scrape the burn off; how to haul the pan to your neighbor's for soldering, after you've boiled one chamber too dry, and melted the old weld; how to fashion annoying, difficult hooks out of wire, after you've lost the clever, easy hooks that came with the taps; how long it takes a full trough of sap to ferment in the sun during an unexpectedly warm spell; and how our newer team of Belgian horses bat all their eyes and tuck all their tails and wish to gallop all the way up and down the hill with the terrifying sap cart.

But mostly sap gathering is an idyllic hour, when, every two or three days, we hitch up the horses and set out. Oh, the beautiful New England winter landscape, the horse harness jingling, the exquisite drip, drip, drip of the sap in a just emptied bucket! And oh, the sweet cold sap!

Then comes the rattle-splash down the hill, and the lighting of the sap fire, and the first bubble bubble bubble in the pan. That's pretty nice too. The sap fire is a good warm way to spend an extended time outdoors, just when you're feeling February-cabin-feverish.

Extended is the key word here, meaning hours upon hours upon hours, and we know just how long we can leave the fire and the pan before the smell of burning begins. Not long enough to eat supper, for example: we have our suppers on a tray outside by the fire. We also play board games outside by the fire, and we have homework and clarinet-playing sessions outside by the fire. We sample the sap becoming syrup, we listen to the radio, we write in our journals, we fix tools, we read books and magazines. We boil eggs in the sap, make sugar on snow, brew the most delicious tea in the world with sap. And we split pine wood. We tend the flames. We add sap and we add sap and we add sap.

But as the daylight begins to wane, the skeptical, sleepy farmer also begins to wane, and it is the enthusiastic, energetic farmer who is up until the wee hours, night after night, with the fun project. Still, it is awfully tasty, on the other end, to pour that delicious (local, sustainable!) syrup on our yogurt and pancakes and cornbread and ice cream.

And our most important maple syrup learning? No, we do not, in fact, have a handy little money-making enterprise. Instead, we have just the opposite: a fine appreciation of why maple syrup is so very delicious, and so very expensive. As we tally up our little take of eleven or twelve gallons a year, plenty for us, and for gifts too, we humbly bow down to all the stalwart and productive maple syrup makers of the world.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, February 18 -24, 2015

Tending is Not Quite Toiling

There are many pleasing options for a New England vegetable farmer in January. Our harvesting ended in November, and our cram-in-all-the-rest-of-the-work-before-the-weather-gets-too-bad month of December is over. Mostly the January options feature lots of resting, but resting with just enough effort involved to ward off the guilt of not working at full-on-high-gardening-season speed.

Tend to the wood stove: We have to bring in wood from the woodshed, which allows us to admire all the fruit of our past labors of cutting down, bringing in, cutting up, and stacking all that firewood. We have to re-stack the wood in the firewood ring in the house. We have to build the fire. We have to periodically fill the stove with wood. We have to adjust dampers and flues. We have to clear out ash, and sweep the hearth. We have to lie down in front of the stove, and read our books.

Tend to the work horses: We have to feed hay to our four horses three times a day, which allows us to admire all the fruit of our past labors of mowing, raking, loading, and unloading all that hay. We have to break the ice on the water trough. We have to fill the water trough, every couple of days. We have to clean the stalls and as much of the barnyard as we can, of whatever manure that hasn't already frozen to the ground. We have to give our horses little turnip treats, and pet them, and kiss their noses, and enjoy their contented hay and turnip munching.

Tend to the kitchen: We have to plan our meals, and then fetch the ingredients from the chest freezer or the root cellar, which allows us to admire all the fruit of our past labors, all that chopping and blanching and freezing and canning and drying. We have to cook our meals. We have to wash the pots and pans and plates and silverware. We have to eat the meals, yummy meals made from our very own yummy garden vegetables. We have to get our bellies full, and then miraculously, in a little while, they are empty again, and we have to eat another yummy meal.

Tend to the greenhouses: We have to shovel the snow from the sides of our greenhouse, if the piles heap up too much, which allows us to admire all the fruit of our past labors, digging and drilling and hammering and sawing and swearing as we built each greenhouse (including the fourth and final one, completed just this past December 31st). We also have to dig the greenhouse beds, in preparation for next spring. If it's warm enough, we have to harvest and wash and eat some locally, biodynamically grown incredibly yummy and hardy and beautifully green spinach.

Tend to the taxes: We have to do this in January, as farmers taxes are due sooner than other peoples'. This could be an experience which allows us to admire all the fruit of our past labors, entering in and tallying up our accounts faithfully and dutifully every month all year. However, it is more often a wistful, rather painful period of wishing we had faithfully and dutifully entered all our accounts every month all year. Still, we can anticipate how free and gleeful we will feel in April, when we are enjoying the spring garden work, and all those other peoples are gnashing-their-taxes-teeth.

Tend to the seed catalogs: We have to use our mighty farming muscles to extract the catalogs from our post office box, which is bulging full of seed catalogs this time of year. We have to marvel at all the incredible varieties available, as well as marvel at the linguistic heights the catalog people reach in naming all the new varieties. And we have to try not to order too many of these tempting, fascinating new vegetables, in consideration of both our budget and our labor next year, which, of course, in January, are all in the future, and rosy indeed.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 21 – 27, 2015

The Gift of One Not-So-Wise Farmer

We farmers give funny presents.  Once, when a friend was celebrating a birthday in a big way, we brought a five gallon bucket of paste tomatoes and a monster zucchini as gifts. To our friend's credit, he received this gift fully and laughingly.

At Christmas and the winter holidays, we keep it up, giving jars of home-grown and home-canned pickles and tomato sauce and relishes and applesauce and jams and jellies, and pretty baskets of potatoes and onions and beets.  Mostly people seem pleased by our practical farmy presents, and mostly we are very pleased to give them.  But there is one Christmas present that at least one of us farmers has lived to regret.

It sure seemed like a great idea at the time: a wonderful gift for my wonderful farming fellow!  I wrote a note on a piece of paper, decorated it with hammers and drills, nails and screws and wrenches, all festively twined around with wire.  Then I cut up the piece of paper, making a puzzle.  I wrapped it up, and give it to my fellow for Christmas.

It was a tricky puzzle; it took a long time to solve.  But imagine my fellow's delight when he finally read the note: “I will help you solve the puzzle of your tool area!”

The tool area is in a corner of our barn, and it is also where my marginally organized, marginally tidy, highly tolerant of clutter and junk fellow has soared to new heights.

The place is about five by ten feet, with shelves and a bins and a tool bench.  It used to be a jumble of junk, but then a CSA member bartered carpentry for vegetables, and made a lovely new tool area.  I was delighted.  Finally a solution to never being able to find the wire cutters! the locking pliers!  the chisel!  I hung up hammers and screwdrivers and saws in perfect rows.  I made bin labels, in bright colors:  House.  Fence.  Car.  Irrigation.  Plow.  Greenhouse.  Wood screws.  Giant Bolts.  Nuts.  Washers.

Now, five years after the new tool area was built and beautifully organized, it looks like this: a jumble of junk. 

My fine fellow comes home from the dump, thrilled with the metal buckets of loose screws, nuts, bolts, nails, hinges, latches, and who knows what else, that the nice man at the dump saved especially for us.  Or it's time to get the hay in the barn, and the incredible crammer and jammer farmer picks up every vital project he's strewn around the barn floor, and tosses it all into the tool area.  Wooden apple crates to be fixed, bags of torn row cover, cultivator discs needing repair, empty cardboard boxes, broken chairs. 

Thus the tool area is knee-deep, and, driven mad by the disaster, I now refuse to enter its bowels.  I have learned to give my fellow a good amount of lead time when we work on a project requiring tools together.  It takes him a long time to find that hammer and nails, that saw and chisel, those fence tools and staples. 

Even he, generally unbothered by such minor details of disorder, has been known to swear and groan at the tool area.  He asks for me for advice.  I just shake my head and laugh.  He asks a friend for advice.  The friend looks at the tool area, shakes his head and laughs.  “You've got to take it all out, and start over again.”

Now that's the very phrase that got me into present-giving trouble.  It sounded so promising, so perfect for the the more spacious winter months of a vegetable farmer and the winter holidays and New Year's resolutions and the like. 

So I made the puzzle.  I gave my fellow the gift, such a nice practical sustainable you-won't- have-to-spend-three-hours-looking-for-a-certain-size-drill-bit-and-then-drive-off-to-the-hardware-store-in-a-fit-of-despair-to-buy-another-one present. 

But that was two years ago, and the truth is I haven't put a foot into that dreadful tool area since.  I want to do it.  I mean to do it, to give such a nice gift to my nice fellow, even with the full knowledge that the tool area would revert back to a jumble of junk with in a matter of years, or weeks, or maybe even days.

But I stand at the threshold of the tool area, and I tremble. 

No, I haven't yet made good on my present.  But I have given my farming fellow the gift of the perfect non-organizing jumble of junk excuse: “But you said you'd help me!”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 24 – Dec 30, 2014