Nice Little Farm Project

My fellow farmer and I have been growing shiitake and oyster mushrooms in a little patch of woods on our vegetable farm for some years now. Although I love eating mushrooms, I never imagined myself growing any. Although my fellow does not love eating mushrooms, he had enough imagination for both of us.

He read books, searched the Internet, and watched documentaries on Japanese mushroom-growing techniques. Then he persuaded me to watch the nice old man and old woman harvesting their mushrooms in Japan. I still wasn’t convinced, mostly because I didn’t want to start any big new projects. Then my fellow started calling it a little project. A nice little project that we could easily do in our nice little patch of woods.

“Hmm,” I said.

“Or how about this,” he said. “Somebody wants me to grow saffron on their land in Vermont.” 

“In Vermont?” I said, as in “Are you crazy?” 

“Did you know saffron is the most expensive spice in the world? It sells for $30,000 a pound. It’s worth more than gold!”

“Why is it so expensive?” I asked, as in “Remember the maple syrup we used to make, that nice little project that we could easily do in our nice little patch of woods, and how we discovered quickly why maple syrup was so expensive?”

 “It’s because saffron is really hard to harvest. You have to collect the stamens from the crocus flowers by hand. You need 75,000 blooms to make a pound. Interesting, huh?”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Or I could prune cannabis plants in Massachusetts this winter. There’s a place looking to hire people with plant experience.”

“Hmm,” I said. 

“What do you think?” my fellow asked enthusiastically.

Faced with a fellow farmer who loves new projects, and faced with the options of a) a farmer smelling like cannabis, an odor I do not enjoy, all winter, or b) a farmer travelling 40 minutes a day to tend saffron in Vermont while the vegetables languished on our NH farm, I chose c) the nice little mushroom project in our nice little patch of woods.

My fellow was thrilled. He knew just where to buy the mushroom spawn, the logs, the tools. “Isn’t this great? We already have the tub we need to soak the shiitake logs! We already have the pond! We already have the woods!”

“Hmm,” I said, somewhat daunted by the start-up costs of the nice little project.

“It’s long-term,” my fellow assured me, “The costs will spread out over time. It’ll be at least a year before we get anything. It could be five years before we’re up to full production.”

I did not find this particularly reassuring. 

But I have to admit that this is one nice little project I’ve come to like. Growing mushrooms is just as miraculous as growing vegetables: dirt and seeds, wood and spores, turning into food we can eat. Plus mushroom growing requires a different set of skills: we learned to drill holes in the logs, inject the sawdust and mushroom spawn mix, brush on wax to keep the logs moist. Then we waited.

After a year, the ends of the logs were turning white from mushroom colonization. We soaked our first batch of logs overnight, and stood them against a waist-high wire in the shady, cool mushroom yard, a nice change from our hot and sunny vegetable garden.

We could hardly believe it when, after a week or so, we had our first flush of shiitakes. There were the logs, studded with rich brown mushrooms, right there in our own nice little patch of woods.

“Look at that!” said my fellow farmer, “It worked!” He harvested the mushrooms happily.

“We can have them sauteed in butter for supper,” I said gleefully.

“Hmm,” said my fellow, as in I don't really like the taste of mushrooms.

I laughed. “You’re not even going to try them?”

"Hmm,“ he said. "Maybe a tiny bite . . .”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Oct 16 - Oct 22, 2024

Money, Fun, Hay, Horses, and Puppies

My fellow farmer and I, along with three chains, a come-along, four bars of various sizes, and an extremely excited puppy, recently spent a morning unloading nine big round bales off a borrowed trailer. The puppy loved jumping up on the trailer. Then he made several valiant efforts to get up on top of the bales, where my fellow was.

“Yip, yip,” the puppy said, “I want to come up and have fun too.” Finally I gave him a boost, and he ran around happily on the bales. Then he got so excited by the project that he started biting my fellow farmer’s shoes, which did not help my fellow to work the bar into the next bale that we were trying to tip off the trailer.

I distracted the pooch with one of his favorite toys – a piece of denim tied in a knot from our mending-jeans pile. First we played tug of war. Then I threw the denim, and he chased it, which gave my fellow and I time to tip off the bale. 

We repeated this process nine times, bar in bale, tip bale, roll bale into barn, up ramp, over to wall, tip bale upright. Sometimes the bales were too big, and we needed the chains and come-along. Sometimes the puppy was too excited, and we needed the denim. But we finally got all the bales in the barn.

This method hadn’t exactly been our plan, but the man with a tractor who was going to stack the bales in the barn for us was frantically working on someone else’s urgent farming project. Since we needed to fetch more hay, while we had the sunny weather and the borrowed trailer, we were left with our own muscle (and some muscle-enhancing tools).

Having big round bales wasn’t exactly our plan either, but we weren’t able to make any loose hay with our horses on our own fields this summer. This also wasn’t exactly our plan, but since we hated to send away our retired work horses, we had six horses instead of four, meaning all the grassland went to pasture, not hay.

It also meant we were buying a lot more hay than usual for the winter, and we have been touched and grateful to receive hay fund help from our CSA members. One person wrote us a thousand-dollar check, another slipped us $40 in cash. Then there was the mysterious $50 bill.

Was the bill meant as a payment on a CSA share? As a donation to the CSA Scholarship Fund, which helps provide CSA shares to people struggling with job loss, or cancer, or young families? Was it for horse hay? Was it for the farmer’s pizza fund? 

Soon we found out, in a phone conversation with a CSA member. “I trust you to do just the right thing with it,” he said. I think the trust meant as much to us as the $50.

Even after twenty plus years of small, sustainable farming, we sometimes wonder if we can trust ourselves: are we doing the right things, making the right decisions? The physical and financial realities of farming can weigh heavily on a body and mind, especially as those bodies and minds edge toward their later fifties. 

Are we crazy to be farming? To be farming with horses? To be retiring our draft horses here, when our margins are already so slim? 

Yet when we look at the alternatives, we still find ourselves saying Yes to this craziness. When we eat heirloom tomatoes all summer long and all winter long, too, from our canning jars, we say yes. When we can bury our horses under the apple trees after good long lives, we say yes. When people trust us, we say yes. 

When the puppy yips to join the fun farming project, we even remember that sometimes farming can be fun. We keep saying Yes. 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Sept 18 - Sept 24, 2024

Farm Puppy: Bad Idea or Good Idea?

A puppy is a good distraction from farming, especially in August, when a vegetable grower has had enough of farming. In fact, our daughter, who loves cats, and who told us that getting a dog was a Bad Idea, has lately taken to saying, “It’s good for you to have a dog. It makes you work less.”

Working less sounds pretty nice. For example, sometimes my fellow farmer is walking purposefully along to do some farming, when he sees a puppy half-snoozing in the grass. The puppy thumps his tail on the ground. The puppy rolls over on his back, ready for a belly rub. My fellow farmer obliges, and soon I find them both half-snoozing in the grass.

For my part, I’ve wished for years to take regular summer walks in our fields instead of always working in the garden or greenhouses. With a dog, I get to walk morning and evening. 

I get to remember what it’s like to be upright, rather than crabbing along on my knees, ripping out weeds. I get to enjoy the wildflowers in the pastures. I get to see the turkeys and their children as they grow over the season. I get to visit the horses, chewing on grass, or snoozing in the woods. I get to watch a puppy run and run.

Also, a farm puppy reminds us that we have to stop working and eat. Whereas a farmer’s hunger results in a generalized grouchiness while continuing to work, a puppy’s specific freak-out about needing his supper is highly motivating, as he escalates from nose-nudging to tiny grooming nips to full-on launching himself at a leg and gnawing on a farmer’s knee. 

Sometimes, I have to admit, when the puppy is all riled up, in an over-bitey way or an over-barky way or an over-bouncy way, I also think having a dog is a Bad Idea. I have to remind myself that I am the mature responsible adult, and that this puppy, is yes, a puppy, and my job is to help him learn to live nicely with humans.

Recently a visitor, a vet of all people, said to the puppy, “Stay down! Down! You’re filthy!” 

Granted, the mature responsible adults, my fellow and I, had let go of the puppy’s lead prematurely, so we were to blame for the jump. But after the vet left, I said, “He isn’t filthy. He’s just a little wet. Aren’t you, pooch?” The puppy wagged his tail in agreement.

In a few minutes, after a vigorous excavation project, the puppy looked up at us. His furry face, his paws, his chest, were all covered in dirt.

“Now you’re filthy,” I laughed, and gave him a good scratching around the ears, as the puppy wagged his tail again.

Another nice thing about this puppy is that he likes people. CSA pick-up days, when members come to the farm for their produce, mean a lot more tail-wagging. The puppy also loves to go to the Farmers’ Market, which is ideal. One, it tires the puppy out tremendously, and he sleeps all afternoon. Two, it means that the farmer (me) who stays at home gets five hours to herself, which is plenty of time to write a farming column, for instance.

Just last week, the puppy was so excited about the Farmers’ Market that he got in the cab of the truck a good hour early, and watched us get everything ready. When I was loading the back of the truck, the puppy put his head out the sliding back window. He put his paws up on the tool box. It was very fetching.

“Yip!” he said. “I want to come back there with you! Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Almost, pooch,” I answered. “All this working less on account of a puppy means we’re a little slower than usual.”

“Yip!” said the puppy, which I took to mean that having a puppy is a Good Idea.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Aug 21-27, 2024

Goodbye to a Good Horse

The farm puppy gallops around, his ears flapping, his tongue flopping. The farm weeds gallop around, seemingly moving their giant selves from one section of the garden to another overnight. We clear out one section, and then the next section is overrun, by the very same weeds, it appears.

Also, the famers gallop around, when they aren’t lying on the ground in the great heat, tongues flopping, watching the weeds gallop.

But there is one who is no longer galloping here, and that is our old horse Moon. 

Moon died recently in the pasture, in the company of our second fully retired horse Ben. Moon and Ben got along well, though Moon might have preferred to be in the company of his sister Molly. One of his primary life goals was to always be with Molly.

But Molly was with our other horses, in another pasture, as we struggled to manage the reality of six horses on a farm that’s only ever had four. We couldn’t bear to send away our old horses who’ve worked with us so well and so long, so we have been juggling horses and pastures, doing the best we could.

Now we have five horses, and Moon is buried under our apple trees, next to our first New Hampshire team of horses. Moon was 29, which is a good old age for a draft horse. He had been semi-retired for years, only doing light work occasionally. But he seemed pretty happy to slide into full retirement, and got even peppier on the other end of the lead rope.

He’s always been rather high-headed while being led, which can make a farmer wish for longer arms. Mostly Moon’s head was high so he could keep track of wherever Molly might be, whether three feet away or fifty. 

Ideally, he would be right next to Molly at all times. The two would graze nearby, and if startled, swing together in perfect turns, in the same way they swung together in harness. Moon always worked best with Molly, though even then he had all the tricks figured out: to lag behind a little on the uphill, so Molly pulled most of the load, or to go ahead a little on the downhill, so Molly held back most of the load.

But Moon also had wonderful characteristics: when Molly and Moon first came here, many years ago, Molly was jumping out of her skin at everything. Moon had the rare and remarkable quality for a horse of stopping when he was worried about a sound or sight, instead of running. 

For a while, in the beginning, we separated Moon and Molly in harness, because Molly was getting Moon unnecessarily worried. Moon and Ben worked together, albeit a little crossly, with my fellow as teamster, while I walked Molly ahead, behind, to the left, to the right, so that she could get used to every bit of strange noise and motion of every farm implement.

Eventually Molly settled down, and was ready to work. Moon let out a sigh of relief: at last he and Molly could work together again, or he, Moon, could relax in his shady and cool stall, while Ben and Molly worked, which was almost as good.

In the paddock or the pasture, if there was ever a line at the water tank or the hay pile, Moon went last. But given a little time, Moon could slip his way into drinking or eating with every other horse, since he grumped at no-one. He was also the official greeter for any new horse who came to the farm, which always surprised us. 

Where’s that boldness come from? we would wonder. Perhaps it came from the same place as his steadiness at new sounds and sights. We hope that steady boldness served him well as he galloped along that mysterious path of death. We think of him now, standing in the wind, head high, eyes bright, calling for Molly, saying, “Don’t worry, my sister, it’s all right. Whenever you’re ready, come and join me.”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, July 24-30, 2024