Down on the Farm

What a long strange trip it's been!

Well, Waverly's first really big trip seems to have been a roaring success. She has already made several trips to Boston (3 hour drive one way) to visit Maryellen's parents, but our Thanksgiving itinerary called for traveling on four consecutive days -- a 4 hour drive from VT to CT, a 2 and a 1/2 hour drive from CT to NJ, a 1 and 1/2 hour drive from NJ to NYC, and then a 6 and 1/2 hour drive from NYC to VT. As new parents we were nervous about this plan, but everyone seems to have held up great, and we had a good time.

Here we are arriving at my Mom's house in the woods of Connecticut for Thanksgiving Day turkey.

Waverly's cousin Lois was there, as were 24 other people, including her cousins Michael, Emma Rose, Margaret, Derek, Brett, Heather, Peter, Liza, and Will. Waverly got so excited she projectile vomited (in a way that she never had before) at about 4 p.m., and the three of us spent the rest of the day taking it easy, mostly out of sight of the big crowds.

The next day we made a namesake tour of NJ. Maryellen's grandma and cousin are both named Winifred, and both live within a quarter mile of one another. So on Friday Waverly Winifred had fun with both of them.

Three generations of Winifreds.

Maryellen's Grandma has these big bay windows that Waverly loved to sit in front of and just watch the trees sway on the edge of the lake upon which she lives.

On Saturday, we visited my Dad, who lives on the Upper West Side. The shame of this whole trip is that we didn't get a usable picture of the view from his apartment window. He looks out over the Hudson River and all day long you can watch boats, helicopters, planes, people, cars and clouds go whizzing by, one way or another. Again, Waverly had plenty to watch at in wonder.

Saturday night we stayed in Brooklyn with our friends Mark, Tam, Julie, Uther, Dakota, Tazi, Izzie, and Larry. Plus, there are four beautiful fish that also live there, and since I don't know their names, I will just call them Sparkle Motion (TM) for now.

Here is Mark's hair in the morning. This photo alone may be enough to get the plug pulled on this blog. Since Mark controls the server, I can never be sure where his line is between benevolent Obi-Wan-like computer mentor, and wrathful techie taskmaster.

Here are Uther, Dakota, Larry, and Izzie.

And here is Wavo getting her tummy rubbed on the kitchen table. Plenty of good eats in Park Slope. Mark made us a spaghetti dinner, and on Sunday morning we had real, honest to goodness, bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches on Kaiser rolls from the Bagel World around the corner.

We are glad to be back in VT, where there is snow on the ground, and all seems right with the world. But we had a great time, and we have lots of gratitude for such nice family and friends, all within a long drive of home.

The world is full of wonder

We are hitting the road for the Thanksgiving holiday. Tomorrow Connecticut is on the schedule, then New Jersey on Friday, Manhattan on Saturday, Brooklyn Saturday night, and hopefully back to Vermont on Sunday.

But Waverly will be bringing her camera with her, so she should be able to get some shots of that big, beautiful world out there for you.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Babies are funny

Waverly is now getting to the stage where she can really see things, and she is so excited about this development, that sometimes she is too distracted to feed or sleep or do much of anything except look around at the world. The other night we were lying with her on the bed, trying to see if she would go to sleep, but she was just looking at the wallpaper pattern, and then she would turn to us with this expression that said, "Can you believe how cool this wallpaper is?" And then she would look back at the wallpaper, and then at us, and then the wallpaper, and then at us, and then at the wallpaper, and then at us . . . you get the idea. Needless to say, the wallpaper was so exciting that none of us got much sleep.

That same night, I was talking with my little brother on the phone (who I guess isn't so little anymore) and I heard some noise in the background. My brother explained that his 14 month old daughter Lois had found a 9 foot piece of molding from their renovation supplies, and was thrusting it under the couch, and with each stab she would yell, "Hiiii-Ya!!!" Geoff said she was clearing the monsters out of the living room.

I guess the wallpaper only holds their interest for so long.

Beautiful night

Tonight after Maryellen and Waverly had gone to sleep, I stepped out onto the front porch. About 25 degrees tonight. Not a cloud in the sky. Clear. Crisp. No moon. Just stars as far as the mind can imagine. Damn, but it is beautiful up here.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night wondering how we are ever going to make this farm work. But the moments like tonight, standing on the porch, more than make up for the occasional pang of doubt.

Long time, no post

Sorry about the scant posting lately. After a very wet fall, we have actually had a few days of nice weather -- highs in the 40s, and even low 50s, and sunny, sunny, sunny. As a result, the ground has thawed, and I have spent every moment I can outside getting done any work that requires digging in the ground. I finished cleaning the witchgrass out of the big hoophouse, and I sunk some posts and began framing out an addition on the small hoophouse. I also spent some time cleaning up the last of the field crops.

It was also an exciting farm week because I went to an all-day board retreat for NOFA on Tuesday. The other board members and the NOFA staff are truly an inspiring mix of talented people who are all passionate about organic farming. Although I am a little pressed for time these days, I am glad I took on the board commitment because these people are fired up about ensuring a safe, ecologically sound, local food supply. And as solitary as farming can be, it is nice to be around other people who share the exicitement.

I also went with my friend and mentor Richard to a meeting of the Deep Root growers cooperative. Deep Root is a group of about 12-15 organic vegetable growers who market their product to wholesale accounts up and down the east coast. They have a part time employee who co-ordinates the sales, trucking, and grower payouts, and they move a lot of product. On the way to the meeting Richard and I visited the farm of another Deep Root grower and he has 120 acres of vegetables. By comparison, the most we probably will ever have in production at one time is 15-18 acres.

Anyway, Deep Root is another bunch of very inspirational people -- a bunch of farmers who came together to achieve more than any of them could individually. While we will never be as big as some Deep Root growers, we may try to grow one or two crops for them, which would allow us to diversify our markets, and to better utilize the acreage we have.

All in all, a very exciting farm week.

Baby faces

Off topic

Not much to do with farming, but my younger brother has digitized a couple of old family slides. Here, he and I receive instruction from our Mother on ancient Griffin sock burning rituals.

Hard to believe I was ever that small. But being a dad now makes me realize that everybody is somebody's baby.

The exciting life of farmers

So it is Saturday night and I am reviewing a stack of materials for the NOFA Board retreat on Tuesday. After that I might do some farm bookkeeping. Lookout Vermont!

But to break things up I decided to take a break and look at one of my favorite websites. What do I find there, but an article about blogs.

Chillin'

Today I helped our friend Kurt work on the 3-bay equipment shed he has been building over at his place. He has already built most of it -- he just needed an extra set of hands for a few tasks. He is also a forester and knows all kinds of stuff about wood and trees and building stuff. I always learn a ton when I hang out with him.

But it was a beautiful early winter day -- sunny, about 25 degrees, and windy, windy, windy. It is supposed to warm up again a little this week, but winter is almost full bore upon us.

Some people may not like winter that much, but I actually like this time of year a lot. Winter is unambiguous up here. You get snow and a lot of it. You get cold and a lot of it. Not much of that slush/sleet/wet snow/rain stuff. This time of year, the gray, barren leafless trees of fall are replaced by crisp, white snow -- but it is the kind of snow that allows you to go out snow shoeing, or cross country skiing, or to simply work on an equipment shed if you bundle up a bit. Winter can actually be kind of fun up here, especially if you just pretend that it isn't strange to have three and a half feet of snow on the ground.

And there is a relaxed, hibernation vibe to winter --- how much can you actually expect to accomplish when it is 8 below zero? Today for example, I was tired when I got home, not because we worked so incredibly hard, but because we worked hard and our bodies had to work just to be outside for 4 or 5 hours. But it is nice to be tired at the end of the day, and to be inside a warm house, in front of the woodstove with a full belly.

Plus, the holidays are coming up, and everyone is all excited, and it is nice to have wintry weather for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The only time winter gets to me is around the middle of February to the middle of March. That's when I have trouble remembering if the world was ever anything but cold and snow and ice.

But by then, I am already looking forward to spring and the next farm season, and you can notice the days getting longer. And before you know it, you are wondering if the water is warm enough for swimming yet.

Snow art

We had these crazy winds that blew the snow around all last night and during the day.

The front porch could sure use some sweeping.

Skiing for Thanksgiving

Well, it looks like the forecasted 1-3 inches last night ended up being more like 6-8. That tends to happen up here. Maybe it is time to bring the Adirondack chairs in off the porch.

At least the ski places will be psyched.

Update: Boy, was I right. I was just listening to the lunchtime weather report on Vermont Public Radio, and they said they had 18 inches of fresh snow at Jay Peak, and 17 inches at Stowe last night. They also said there were wind gusts of 68 m.p.h. in Waterbury Center (which is about 45 minutes northwest of here). Yikes!

Keep Out (at least unless we know you)

Tomorrow is the first day of the real, rifle deer hunting season. Up until now, it had been bird season, bow season, black powder season, etc. But tomorrow starts the real thing.

For the past couple of weeks I have seen guys I don't recognize (some with out of state plates no less!) cruising slowly on the road through our part of the world, scanning from side to side looking for places to set up once the season starts. More than one pickup truck has come to a dead halt in front of our property, as the driver (sometimes with binocs or a scope) salivates over the 20 acre open field behind our barn.

Our dilemma is that the field the hunters like is the field where I have my crops and winter cover crops, where the hoophouse with the five-year plastic is, where I plan to be cutting some cedars over the next few weeks, and where Maryellen and Wavo like to go for walks. Needless to say, I would be seriously bummed if some hunter inadvertently wounded a member of our family, shot a hole in the five year plastic, or drove over our vegetable fields.

So what to do? In Vermont, unless you post your property, it is open for hunting and fishing. On the other hand, there is a subtle anti-posting ethic -- it is considered somewhat un-neighborly, especially if your neighbors (like ours) like to hunt.

The solution I arrived at yesterday was to post along the road, so the out of towners (hopefully) don't get any ideas about coming onto our property. At the same time, I called our neighbor who I know hunts further up in our property, and I told him that he, and anyone he was willing to take responsibility for, could hunt up there. Our neighbor is a former dairy farmer, a responsible individual, an integral part of our community, and he knows what we are trying to do with the vegetables. So I am not worried about him or his sons or grandsons being up there. But we could do without the guys who we can't necessarily hold to account.

I'll let you know if this strategy works.

Slippery when frozen

We had about an inch of snow today up here. Just enough that when I had to drive somewhere tonight, I needed to keep my wits about me due to the ice on the road. Thank God for the Subaru (all wheel drive) and for our Finnish snow tires! Combined, they make winter driving up here semi-tolerable. But it made me think that we are getting to the time of year when you have to add a little bit of time to your travel arrangements to account for the weather and the roads. Just another little sign of the changing seasons.

Bloggers of Vermont, Unite!

Uh, at least all 3 or 4 of us.

Say hello to our new friends Jessamyn and Greg. They live part-time in this wicked cool dairy barn in Topsham, one section of which has been converted to living space. They spend the rest of their time in Bethel. We stopped by their place in Topsham the other day on our way to the NOFA meeting, and drank some coffee around the woodstove. Nice place, nice people. It is getting to be a regular Silicon Valley up here.

Not Only Farmers Association

This past weekend we went to the annual meeting of the Vermont chapter of the Northeast Organic Farmer's Association (NOFA). It is really a pretty incredible organization. While NOFA has been a pioneering organization in its work to support and encourage organic farming, it has also broadened its appeal to include gardeners, and consumers, and anyone who cares about organic agriculture and the future of a sustainable farm economy in Vermont.

The website says it all:

The Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) is a non-profit association of consumers, gardeners, and diversified farmers who share a vision of local, organic agriculture. Through education and member participation, NOFA-VT works to strengthen agriculture in Vermont.

NOFA was originally founded in Vermont and is the oldest organic farming association (1971) in the United States. . . . NOFA-VT projects include the certification of organic products, an agriculture education program integrating agriculture curriculum into elementary schools as well as organic produce into school lunch programs, a Green Mountain Revolving Loan Fund to provide low interest loans to organic and transition farmers, promotion of organic products, an Apprenticeship & Willing Workers on Organic Farms program, bulk order of farm and garden supplies, and a Farm Share Program to provide food from organic community supported agriculture farms to low income families and individuals. In addition, we hold on farm summer workshops and an annual Winter Conference in February of each year.

Anyway, the big news from the annual meeting is that I got elected to the board of directors. For me it will be a great opportunity to be of service to an organization I believe in, and it will also help further integrate us into the organic community up here.

If you are as excited about organic agriculture as we are, you should join NOFA, or make a large charitable donation in my name!

Dreams can come true

The other day I was yearning for a couple of different farm implements. Well, this weekend, one of the things we needed kind of fell into our lap. I saw an ad for a used set of cultivators, and we snapped them up. This set up may not look like much, but the metal is solid, and the clamps, standards, and tines are all in good working order.

Cultivators are basically different shaped pieces of metal that you set at certain widths, and then drag behind the tractor at a very shallow depth (like maybe, 1 inch deep). The result is that the different shaped shovels or sweeps that you drag through the soil disturb or uproot the weeds in your vegetable bed, while your rows of crop plants pass through the gaps you have left in your set-up. This is how vegetable farmers controlled weeds before the advent of large scale herbicide use, and cultivators still have some applications in conventional vegetable production today.

The problem of course, is that while there is a niche market for organic vegetables, there is not really a cost-effective market for small scale farm implements, like these cultivators. That is why the new implements I linked to last week are so expensive. We were very lucky to have found these used cultivators -- I almost never see them advertised, and when they are advertised, they don't last long. Plus, of course, these cultivators cost only a small fraction of the new stuff.

Now I can't wait until spring to break them in.

Silly daddy

Waverly asleep on my lap

A boy can dream

I should put up one of those Amazon wish list buttons that I see on some blogs. Do you think Amazon sells these or these or these? Sigh.

But what I really need is to find some of this gear used and cheap, so if you any of this stuff for sale used, or if your neighbor does, or if run across any of these items at your local garage sale or something, drop me a line. I actually think I may have a lead on a used mulch layer, but we'll see. . .

It's the little things

Today totally kicked butt.

First, the camera came back home in the mail. Thanks Lori!

Second, a guy we hired to do some re-grading around the house came today and he totally moved the home/barn preservation project forward a ton. Everytime it rains hard, we have water running into our basement and under the barn, which really stresses me out. He basically re-graded the ground so water will run away from the buildings rather than right into them. I can really see how the work he did today will prolong our structural longevity around here. It is a big relief to have this work done, and I will sleep well tonight, even though it is raining.

Update: Tues. a.m.

It rained pretty hard last night and there are no rivers in the basement this morning. What a warm, dry feeling.

String results

My two favorite string search results resulting in hits to this site for the month of November (so far) are: "coarse ear hair causes" and "you gotta know when to hold em know when you fold em know when".

Struck Out

Didn't find anything to buy at the auction on Saturday. There were a few brush hogs at the end of the auction, and there was a nice, old Farmall Cub that we could have used as a culitvating tractor, but we didn't end up taking anything home. I mostly just drank a little bad coffee, and tried to guess the purpose of some of the more exotic pieces of equipment. Not a bad way to kill a couple of hours early on a Saturday morning.

Tunes for tots

I have heard people say that playing classical music for your baby makes them smarter by aiding in brain development. To date, Waverly's favorite CD is "The Best of ABBA", which Maryellen bought me for my birthday this year -- especially, the track "Waterloo". So I guess babies really do respond to classic rock, I mean, ABBA has got to be as classical as music gets, right? We are such smart parents . . .

Beautiful day

It was medium-cold and rainy today, but I had a gas throwing some wood, trying to fix the gutters on one section of the barn, and chipping away at the soil prep work in the hoophouse for next year. I like farming a lot.