Winter reading

Well, well. We are finally back in Vermont after a week of visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. First we had company for a few days, and then we traveled to visit family. It was nice to see everyone, but we are also glad to be back in our own beds.

In our travels this week we went to the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut. What a place! Literally, buildings and buildings filled with used books. Plus, cats, goats, a play area for kids, and complimentary doughnuts and coffee.

We purchased several additions to our farm library, including a copy of "Down on the Farm". The subtitle to that one is "A Picture Treasury of Country Life in America in the Good Old Days", and it is just that -- lots of reproduced black and white photos of American farm life from about 1850 to 1930. This book was first published in about 1954, and although I haven't studied the phenomenon, it seems to be one of a genre of books I have seen about the "good ol' days" that were generally published between 1950 and 1970 or so.

My own unscientific theory is that the post-World War II boom in mechanized agriculture, with its dependence on commodity production, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and economies of scale, basically killed the family farm, so that in the 1950s and 60s there was a wave of nostalgia for the rural America that was undergoing radical change. If my little theory is right, it also helps to explain T.V. shows like "Andy Griffith".

Similarly, we purchased three editions of the Foxfire series of books. These tomes, first published in the 1960s and 1970s, attempt to perserve the rural knowledge base from Appalachia, by writing down what were basically oral traditions that were rapidly becoming extinct. The result are wonderful books on all sorts of topics such as small scale logging, food preserving, cheese making, wildcrafting, horse swapping, and on and on.

The funny thing is that these books are now of interest to people like ourselves, who are kind of a second generation of back-to-the-landers. There are ideas in both of these books that we can use and modify for our own small family farm.

Plus, we also bought a book published in 1913 by the Canadian Department of Agriculture entitled "Fodder and Pasture Plants." It has these beautiful, full-page plates showing various grasses and leguminous plants that we have all over our veggie fields and our two overgrown pastures.

Also, we found a book for identifying weeds (if anyone knows of such a book with good color plates, we would be very grateful for that info), and a book by Helen and Scott Nearing about the year-round greenhouse they built.

Plus, we got some parenting books, and a book for our neighbor's kid, and you get the picture -- we ended up with a lot of books. But at least we have stuff to read this winter.