Late November Work

Our friend and fellow Farm School graduate Will came to visit this weekend, giving us the perfect excuse to host an impromptu work day at the farm. After a breakfast of homemade bread, jam, applesauce, and Maggie’s Farm honey, a few other friends arrived at our house, and we all headed over to the farm. The day was perfect – a little warm, maybe, for late November – but gorgeous and sunny, with the sharp smell of fall hanging in the air.

We spent the morning clearing brush from our western hedgerow. An old stone wall runs the entire length of the field, separating it from the woods. Up till now, it has been hidden by a thick hedge of goldenrod, tall grasses, and other brambles After a morning’s work, this beautiful reminder of the agricultural history of our plot of land is visible to all.

Keeping your hedgerows clean isn’t only a matter of aesthetics. Fields are destined to be reclaimed by the forest – if you don’t maintain your field edges, first the raspberries and goldenrod creep in, then the small shrubs and little trees, and before you know it, you’ve lost ten feet of good agricultural land to brush. It is amazing how quickly unused fields will revert back to forest. It is a good practice to walk your hedgerows each year, cutting back brush and branches, keeping the forest at bay.

This particular hedgerow was thick with goldenrod, a weed that will easily (and certainly already has) scatter its seeds into our field. By cutting back the brush, we reduce the number of weed seeds blowing onto our field (minutely). In addition, clean hedgerows let in more light. Even though we didn’t take down any trees, the land already feels different – sunnier, more open. There’s a sense of space that wasn’t there before.

The five of us attacked the hedgerow with hands, loppers, knives, a saw, and a scythe – all tools we’ve collected from friends and neighbors. As we worked, we shed layers in the warm fall sun, the mess of brush along the hedgerow shrunk, and the neat piles of brush we made in the field grew.

Clearing away brambles with loppers.

Working on the stand of goldenrod along the road.

Will in the midst of a thicket of briars.

Hard at work.

It was a lovely morning, and a satisfying one. Now that the farming season is over, and I’m not out on the land every single day, I sometimes forget how delightful and fulfilling it is to spend a morning working hard. We left eight or so huge piles of brush to collect later. We’ll either chop ‘em and add them to our compost, or toss them into the woods to slowly decompose. We still have lots of work to do this fall, and I’m looking forward to every moment of it. There is nothing quite as gratifying as a couple of hours on the land, muscles well-used, a group of good folks, and a hearty, joyful meal afterwards. Thanks so much to Will, Meg, and Kael for their hard work, good company, enthusiasm, and support.

Laura

Winter Compost

I spent a lovely afternoon on the farm yesterday making our winter compost pile. Compost is at the heart of organic farming – without it, it is virtually impossible to grow vigorous, healthy, delicious vegetables. We’re hoping to get a composting system going next spring so that we can feed our fields with own recycled organic matter (vegetable scraps, grass clippings, weeds, cow and chicken bedding, kitchen scraps, etc). a great way to quickly produce high-quality, pathogen and weed seed-free compost is to make ‘hot’ piles – ones that reach a temperature of up to 140 degrees F. The community of earthworms and microorganisms (mostly bacteria) that break down organic matter is more diverse at higher temperatures – there is a whole slew of thermophilic bacteria that thrive when piles get hot. Maintaining hot piles, however, requires some work.

1. The pile must be built all at once. Unlike cool composting (which is what our winter compost pile is), you cannot add to your hot compost pile every day. It won’t ever reach the desired temperature.

2. Hot piles work best at a minimum size of 3 feet wide x 3 feet long x 3 feet tall. At this size, the pile has enough mass to heat up, and is still small enough for adequate air circulation.

3. You have to turn the pile. While turning is an important part of making any kind of compost, it is especially important when making hot compost. (If you simply layer leaves, kitchen scraps and other organic matter in your backyard and forget about it, though, it will, eventually, decompose.)

I’m pretty excited about hot composting, and looking forward to doing some of it next summer, when we have a whole lot of organic matter around the farm. For now, since we don’t have a whole lot of organic matter, and we mostly just want a place to compost our kitchen scraps, the cool pile that I started yesterday will work just fine. Cool piles are nice because they require very little maintenance, and you can add a little bit to them every day without worrying about the overall mass of the pile.

My first step was to pick a site for the new pile. I chose an out-of-the way spot on the edge of the woods:

Next, I raked away all the leaves from the area. One important aspect of composting is the carbon-to-nitrogen ration. A good rule of thumb is 30:1 carbon-to-nitrogen. Matierals high in nitrogen, or “green” materials, such as manure, kitchen scraps, and fresh grass clippings, should be mixed with carbonaceous, or “brown” materials, such as dry weeds, straw, woodchips, and leaves. As we add our kitchen scraps to this pile over the winter, we’ll cover each addition with a generous helping of leaves, which will keep our C:N ratio balanced, prevent the pile from becoming smelly, and deter pests.

With the site prepared and ready to go, I hauled over some old hay bales to make two side-walls for the pile. This will help us keep the pile from expanding. I decided not to actually build a structure for the pile, but having a defined area will keep it neat over the winter.

I layered the bottom with some fibrous brush, to provide air-flow at the bottom of the pile and to act as the first carbonaceous layer:

The next layer: kitchen scraps. We’d been dumping all our kitchen scraps in a haphazard pile on the farm. With a garden fork, I turned and mixed this clumpy pile, breaking up any matted, rotten vegetable matter. I then redistrubred the scraps over the new pile. You might notice a lot of big pieces – corn cubs, Brussels sprouts stalks, even a whole cabbage – in the mix. This is not a great idea. In general, the smaller the scraps you put into the pile, the better they’ll decompose.

On top of the wet layer of kitchen scraps, I covered the pile with a 3″ layer of leaves. The pile practically camouflages itself!

With the basic structure done, this pile is ready to injest all of our winter kitchen scraps. It won’t make the most beautiful compost in the world, and it will take a long time (at least a year, maybe more), but it is a good start. We’ll add to it all winter long, and through the spring. When it gets big enough – about 3 feet tall or so – we’ll cover it with some straw, call it finished, and leave it alone for the earthworms and bactiera to work their mircales.

Happy composting!

Laura

Garlic Sprouts!

Stocking Up, Part II: The Winter CSA

Because next season will be our first, and we didn’t mange to store up enough roots, squash, and potatoes to get us through the winter, we decided to join a CSA for the winter. Combined with the pantry and the freezer, we’re going to be eating quite extraordinarily well this winter. In fact, since we picked up our first winter share at the beginning of November, I’ve been experiencing a feeling that’s usually unique to summer: almost too much food. The bounty in our kitchen makes me want to stay home all day and cook. Luckily for farmers, winter is the season when we actually have some time to spend in the kitchen, and I’ve been doing just that.

We actually joined two winter CSAs. The Red Fire Farm Deep Winter CSA (which doesn’t start until January) and the Shared Harvest CSA, organized by local farmer Gretta Anderson. Gretta works with Jenny and Bruce at Picadilly Farm in Winchester, NH and Rob and Meghan at Riverland Farm in Sunderland, MA to bring us a bountiful harvest of winter crops in November and December. In addition to lots of great vegetables, dried beans from Baer’s Best Beans in Beverly and apples from Cider Hill Orchard in Amesbury are included in the share.

Being a CSA member is an entirely new experience for me. I’ve been farming for six years now, and for most of those years, I’ve been involved in running some kind of CSA. I’m used to being on the other side of a CSA – harvesting, setting up the pick-up area, packing boxes, writing the newsletter, talking with customers. I’ve never actually been a member, an experience with is turning out to be quite educational.

As a farmer, I love the CSA model. I love how it brings customers closer to the farms that grow their food. I love how it fosters a long-term connection between farmers, farms and consumers. It’s a model that works for everyone. My passion lies in the ways that food – specifically getting folks on the land and attached to it – can strengthen our communities. A CSA does just that.

It turns out that being a CSA member is pretty awesome, too. When I walked into the Shared Harvest Pickup, I felt a rush of excitement – so many goodies, and all for me! I am a person who spends most of my time around vegetables; CSA pickups are familiar places. But even so, there was something innately satisfying – and thrilling – about weighing out ten pounds of apples, selecting a bag of local dried beans, and carrying my two wax boxes of heaping with vegetables out to my car. And the excitement didn’t stop at the pickup – when I got home, unpacking those boxes was like unpacking a treasure chest – a comment I’ve heard from many CSA members, but never experienced myself. Now I understand; the appeal is unmistakable.

As a farmer, I’ve always simply taken home whatever veggies I want at the end of the day. So even though I’ve worked on farms that grow vegetables I’m not head-over-heels in love with, I haven’t spent much time getting to know them. Why would I take home a couple heads of radicchio, a bunch of radishes, and a Napa cabbage when I could simply grab a bunch of chard, red peppers and a gorgeous head of cauliflower? Though I’ve had many conversations with customers about what I do with some of the more unfamiliar vegetables (even the ones I don’t cook regularly), I don’t often go home and cook up a feast of radicchio and radishes. I’ve tried, and enjoyed, every vegetable the farms I’ve worked on have grown – but they haven’t all become favorites in my kitchen.

So I’m learning, for the first time, what most CSA members learn during the course of the summer – what to do with vegetables that aren’t part of my standard repertoire.

The gorgeous Napa cabbage sat in the crisper drawer in our fridge for almost two weeks before I used it. I’m used to eating anything green on the same day I bring it home from the farm. Taking a still fresh-looking (underneath the outer-leaves) Napa cabbage out of the fridge was another learning experience. Here’s what I did with it, a recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian. It was truly delicious – next time, I suspect, the Napa cabbage won’t sit so long in the fridge.

Brown Rice Pilaf with Napa Cabbage

½ head Napa cabbage, shredded
peanut oil
1 yellow onion, sliced thinly
5 cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup almonds, chopped
1 tsp. cumin seeds, toasted and ground
½ tsp. coriander seeds, toasted and ground
½ tsp. mustard seeds, toasted
½ tsp. ground cinnamon
3 Tbs. fresh ginger, grated
salt and pepper to taste
3 cups water

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil. Boil the cabbage just until it turns bright green, 1-2 minutes.

In a large skillet, sauté the onion over medium-heat until translucent, about 7 minutes. Add the garlic, almonds, spices, ginger, and salt and pepper to taste. Sauté for another 5 minutes or so, then turn the heat to medium-low add the rice. Cook for five minutes more.

Layer 1/3 of the cabbage on the bottom of a Dutch oven, cast-iron with a top, or other medium-large pot. Layer ½ the rice on top of this, followed by 1/3 of the cabbage, the rest of the rice, and then the rest of the cabbage. Bring the pot to a boil, then cover, turn the heat to low, and cook for 30-40 minutes. Turn the heat off and let the rice sit, covered, for another 30 minutes. Serve warm, alone, or with winter root vegetable stew, chickpea curry, or sautéed winter greens.

Being part of a CSA is only making me more excited to run the First Root CSA next summer – and I can’t wait to pick up the next installment of the Shared Harvest CSA in December, either!

Laura

Stocking Up, Part I: The Pantry

We’ve been in the new house in Concord just over two weeks, and the only room that is entirely unpacked is the kitchen. Kitchens are the heart-centers of houses; everything important – from bread rising and onions simmering in a hot skillet to early morning writing, kitchen-floor talks with dear friends and impromptu-dance parties – begins in the kitchen. The kitchen is always my favorite room in a house; it is the place I gravitate toward when I’m happy, exhausted, sad, excited. This house is no exception, and even more specifically, I love the pantry. So far, our pantry is my favorite place to hang out.

The Pantry: Popcorn, Applesauce, Tomatoes, Dried, Apples, Dried Beans.

It isn’t just the daily work that I love about farming; it’s the way of life that emerges naturally when you spend your days in the soil, under the sun, with cows and chickens. It’s a slower way of life, one where you have to pay attention to every detail of the seasons, from the give of the soil under your boots in early March to the scent of the air in mid-October, just before the first frost. There’s a certain sensibility that comes with living an agricultural life. It has to do with eating what you and your neighbors can grow. It has to do with easily lending a hand or a tool or a strong back when your neighbor asks. It’s about homemade rather than store-bought, working together rather than working alone. It’s about hard, meaningful work and celebrating the smallest details. It’s a balance between modern efficiency and cherished traditions. As I grow more and more comfortable with a life permeated by farming, I begin to realize that the bed of garlic putting down roots in our field is only one part of a long and complex cycle.

Farming, at its most basic, is firmly centered around the home. It embodies the idea that every place carries its own specific story. Every plot of land, whether half an acre or one hundred acres, is different, and to be a good steward is to pay attention to those differences, to treat your land as absolutely unique. The farmers I most respect are the ones that know their land the way you can only know a home, who know its every dip and curve, its colors in every season, the way it responds to rain and drought. As I settle into a new house, and begin to call it home, I am thinking very deliberately about the intimacy that a true home demands, and about how to create that intimacy in my kitchen, in our fields, and in how I chose to live my life.

I’m starting in the pantry. I devoted hours and hours this summer and fall to putting food by for the winter. I pickled beets, froze kale and beans, made applesauce, dried peaches, simmered blueberries and raspberries into jam, and filled the freezer with quarts of creamy corn soup, squash and tomatillo soup, harvest soup with red peppers and rainbow chard. Now the pantry is full to the brim with pickled carrots, dilly beans, dried mint, plum jam, whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, onion chutney, green tomato salsa, applesauce, pear butter, and more. There is popcorn hanging above the door, and the shelves below are heavy with winter squash, onions, apples, and garlic.

Upper: Tomato Salsa, Dried Tomatoes, Whole Tomatoes, Tomato Sauce. Middle: The Jam Shelf (Blueberry, Raspberry, Plum, Sungold, Onion Chutney, Apple Chutney, Pear Butter). Lower: Pickled Carrots, Dilly Beans, Pickled Beets.

The life of a certain place, a certain home, is inside each of those jars. I remember harvesting the beans that are now soaking up garlic and vinegar and peppercorns in glass jars on the top shelf of the pantry. I remember the light in the garden, the sound of the wind, the weight of the beans in my hands as I snapped them from the vine. I remember the scent that filled the kitchen as I cooked down apples and simmered plums into sweet jam. Every jar holds a story that ties me to a place and connects me to the cycle of farming that begins and ends in a hundred places – the soil, the sunlight, the roots of onions and beets, fresh bread on the kitchen table, neighbors bringing in the hay. The pantry is sustenance for the long winter ahead, and not only for the body. Jars of tomatoes and dried apples will warm me on cold winter nights and renew me on early spring evenings when I come in, exhausted, from the first hard day of work. The pantry keeps the stories of farms and people I’ve loved; it is the true heart of the house, the place where everything begins.

Upper: Popcorn, Applesauce, Dried Apples. Lower: Dried Apples.

I’d like to know every dip and curve of the land. I’d like to know I’m home each time I walk through our field. I don’t just want to grow carrots and broccoli and beans – I want to carry that growth through the rest of my life. I want to share with neighbors and friends and local folks the connections between working on the land and working in the kitchen, between the colorful jars in our pantry and the garlic just starting to sprout in our field. I want to live my life as a farmer, not only while I’m hoeing lettuce and milking Pride, but in each moment, as I eat vegetables with story, as I sing and celebrate, as I knead bread and walk the land and offer up my gratitude for the pantry, and everything it holds.

Tomato Sauce, Dried Apples and Peaches, Dried Beans, Winter Squash.

A warming sight: the pantry through the porch window.

Laura

In Memoriam: Robert Butman, 1920-2009

Grandpa at the First Root Farm Garlic Planting, October 16, 2009.

My grandfather, Bob Butman, died at his home in Concord on October 29, 2009. He was a long-time Concord resident, an avid lover of the outdoors, a gardener, and a dedicated supporter of local farms (especially Brigham’s corn). I will always remember his fondness for certain New England specialties – things that simply aren’t the same when they come from halfway across the country – corn, peaches, maple syrup. He loved the land where he spent most of his life – the sunlight, the native trees, the Sudbury river – and was thrilled when he learned that I would be farming nearby on land with a rich agricultural history.

Though First Root Farm was only just getting started when he died, he was already a big fan. Many local folks first heard about the farm from Bob; as soon as I told him what I was doing, he immediately told many of his neighbors. When we sent out our first big request for tools and equipment, he responded immediately and asked if he could send it around to his Conantum neighborhood listserv. Many of the tools we’ll be using next summer come from the generous people of Conantum. Without  his good sense and generosity, they would still be sitting unused in basements and garages.

Grandpa was a creative engineer and an imaginative potter. When I stopped by his place earlier this fall with a truckload of treasures I’d collected from Conantum residents, he smiled, poking through the seeming-junk, asking, “what will you do with this?” or “where did you get this?” He wanted to know how I intended to use each thing. We talked about what I hoped to build (cold frames, a chicken coop) with a truckload of old lumber, assorted hardware, flower pots, and mesh screening (among other things.)

Grandpa stopped by First Root at the end of our garlic planting in October. It was the last time I saw him: a clear, sunny, perfect New England day. He and I walked down the finished bed of garlic together. I explained to him how we planted it and how it grew. I’m grateful he got to see the land that I’ll be working, land that I already love. Next summer, as I plant and weed and harvest, I will think of him there on that golden afternoon, enjoying the company of his family, the clear day, and a bowl of apple crisp.

I feel very lucky to be starting out as a young person in Concord. This isn’t just any town, but the town where my mother grew up, and where my grandparents lived out their lives. Though I have never lived here before, I have roots here. Already it feels right. Everything is familiar: the soil, the winding roads, the old pastures, Walden Pond.

We all miss Grandpa very much. I will especially miss him next summer, as I work land just a few miles away from where he lived. I would have liked to have been his neighbor. But as I create a life for myself in this town, as I put down roots in this soil, as I drive these roads and walk these wooded paths and eat fresh native peaches and high summer corn, I am constantly grateful for my own story in this place, and for his part in it.

Pictures Grandpa took at the Garlic Planting. Upper: First Root Farm Field. Lower: Bob’s grandchildren, grandchildren-in-law, and great-niece at First Root Farm.

Laura

Garlic Planting

A dream of mine is coming true. After obsessively checking the weather every day this week, and expecting a cold, cloudy, rainy morning for our very first work party at First Root Farm, we were blessed, instead, with a bright, clear, sunny fall day. The leaves surrounding our field were red and gold, the sun shone on bales of straw and freshly turned soil, the sky soared blue and clear above us, and the air was crisp and sharp.

Five months ago, when the idea of running my own farm switched from a far-off dream to a very-possible reality, I imagined a place where folks would come to share in hard work and good food. I imagined bringing people together on the land, sharing my passion for soil and sky and seed, and for the simple miracle of breaking bread together after a day of meaningful work. I imagined kids and adults planting and hoeing and harvesting side by side, and lots of laughing in the field, and the kind of gratitude that comes from doing work you love with people you love in dear places.

I had no idea how quickly that vision would turn into reality. Yesterday afternoon, a group of about twenty folks – friends, family, and neighbors – gathered at First Root Farm to help us put our very first crop into the ground: garlic. Some folks came from over an hour away (thank you to our friends from The Farm School) to be with us at our first planting. Others came from just down the road, like Pete Merrill at Codman Community Farm, who came with a dump truck full of gorgeous compost (thanks, Pete). Some folks had never planted a clove of garlic before in their lives, and others had been doing it every fall for almost as long as they could remember. Being out on our land with such wonderful, enthusiastic, generous people is the best beginning I can imagine for First Root.

Garlic ready to plant; straw ready to be spread as mulch.

We put about 680 cloves of garlic into the ground. They’ll establish extensive root systems this fall, and the straw much will keep them warm all winter. Next spring, they’ll sprout and grow tall, and if we’re looking, we’ll harvest 680 heads of garlic next July.

Gorgeous seed garlic from Maggie’s Farm and Land’s Sake

The garlic we planted was generously donated by two farms that are both a part of First Root’s story. Nate, at the Farm School, gave us about 100 heads of seed garlic that Ariel and I planted, mulched, weeded and harvested as part of our year at Maggie’s Farm. Melanie at Land’s Sake gave us the rest. Land’s Sake was the very first farm I worked on, and the garlic we put into the ground yesterday was grown from garlic that I harvested, weeded, planted, and harvested again. What a blessing that we were able to plant garlic with such a rich history, seed that is already a part of the story that ties us to the land and to the community of farmers I count myself lucky to be a part of.

Planting garlic isn’t hard. Here’s how we did it. First, we hand-dug the bed:

Next, we marked our three rows with string:

Then, after a quick demonstration of how to plant:

our hard-working crew of volunteers jumped right in.

Droppers dropped garlic cloves along the string-lines:

while planters buried them deep in the earth.

Just as we finished planting, Pete, from Codman Community Farms, arrived with a load of gorgeous, rich, crumbly compost. A huge thank you to Pete for all his support as we embark on this project. Compost is magic stuff, and all the gardners who helped out yesterday agreed that this was an espeically beautiful load.

We top-dressed the garlic bed the old fashioned way. Some folks filled buckets with shovelfuls of compst, others walked down the bed, dumping it out, and others raked it into the soil.

Finally we covered the garlic with a thick layer of straw. All winter, it will insulate the garlic against the cold and protect it from wind and snow. Next spring, the seeds will sprout and poke through all that organic matter, reaching toward the sun.

Our morning of hard work paid off – a beautiful bed of garlic, mulched and ready for winter:

Hard work and good food are two of my favorite things about farming. We left the garlic alone and headed to the back corner of the farm for a fall feast. It was a true celebration. We ate fresh bread and good cheese, yummy lentil soup, butternut squash salad, lentil salad, roasted brussel sprouts, homemade bread stuffed with leeks, cheese, and broccoli, delicious quiche, golden raspberry jam (not by the spoonful, although we could have), apple crisp. The food was incredibly good, the company was stellar, the day bright. If you could plant gratitude, I believe it would be growing in thickets at First Root Farm.

A heartfelt thank-you to everyone who came to share in our excitment, get their hands in the dirt, and have a great meal. I can’t imagine a better send-off for our garlic seed. It was certainly the sunniest, most satsifying, grateful, and joyful garlic planting I’ve ever been a part of.

To see more pictures, check out Tim Sackton’s flickr page. A huge thank-you to Tim (otherwise known as the official photographer of First Root Farm) for taking such wonderful photos!

Laura

Preparation

Yesterday afternoon, we started bed prep for this Saturday’s garlic planting.

We have not even started our crop plan yet, but we know that our pick-your-own (PYO) will be around the perimeter of the entire crop area. We measured 20 feet in from one side, and 8 feet in from the end where our perpendicular PYO beds will be. We are working on the assumption that we want four foot beds with a one foot pathway between them, and that the PYO beds will be a different size and make up than the rest of our beds because they are on the perimeter. So the 20′ decision came from 4′bed + 1′path = 5′ and then x 4 because we did not want our garlic on the edge of our field or accidentally in our PYO.

We brought out our graduation present digging forks and borrowed 100′ tape from The Farm School (THANK YOU!!), a few stakes (pieces of wood lying around our barn) and string and lined out our 4′ garlic bed.

The next step was to start digging and churning the top soil into itself. Laura and I each took a line and started by pushing our forks all the way into the soil, pulling down to release and turn the soil, and forking again closer towards the center of the bed.

It was an undeniably beautiful afternoon, crisp and clear and we peeled off layers quickly as the work warmed us up.

You may be wondering why in the age of such enormous technology we are spending two hours digging a bed by hand when we could do similar work with a tractor in five minutes.

Some of our reasons in no particular order:

• We don’t have a tractor – they are expensive and so is the gas

• We don’t want to use fuel when we don’t have to

• We love it! Farming by hand feels amazing to us – physically, emotionally, intellectually. Setting out to make growing happen and doing it with our hands and age-old tools and concepts and new ingenuity is incredible.

We finished turning the bed after the sun had dipped below our tree line.

We are far from done – before we can plant our garlic this Saturday we still need to apply and incorporate compost and shape our bed.

It makes me feel so lucky and whole and alive to be able to connect with the land in this way and I want to share it with everyone.

Interested in joining us as we build community through hard work, connecting with land, creating access and sharing good food? Shoot us an email: firstrootfarm@gmail.com

Welcome to our land:

Already changing…

Ready to build community together…

Meet you here!

Ariel

A Good Day’s Work

We spent all day out on the land on Monday – our first big day of work at First Root Farm.

I arrived in the early morning, the sunlight still cool and golden on our freshly plowed fields.

For me, the farm is getting more and more beautiful with each passing day. Every hour I spend there, I notice a particular detail of the land that takes my breath away – the line of red and gold trees hanging over the western edge of the field, the graceful curve of an old stone wall in the back corner, the way shadows fall across freshly tilled soil. I remember the very first time I set foot on this land. I thought – eh, it’s alright, but nothing to get excited about. Now it strikes me as one of the most beautiful farms I’ve ever seen. True, it’s only an acre and a half of semi-overgrown farmland, with a busy Concord road cutting right through the middle of it, but it is already dear, and places that are dear are always beautiful, no matter how ordinary.

So, on a bright fall morning, sunny and sharp, I spent my first hours working up a true sweat and a hearty appetite on this already-dear land. Ben and Patch gracious drove out from The Farm School with a truck full of supplies: the BCS (a walk-behind tiller that churns up the soil and kills weeds), a scythe, and the more modern electric weed whacker. Our big projects for the day included hand-mowing the wet eastern edge of the filed, overrun with tall grasses, and cultivating the plowed section, which was already rampant with a healthy-looking crop of weeds.

Here’s what it looked like when we started:

Grasses think they can take over our field...

And here’s what it looks like after four hours work:

...instead, we uproot them and turn them over!

I thought there was nothing sweeter than sitting down to a good lunch under a clear blue sky after a good morning’s work. It turns out, sitting down to a good lunch on your very own land, (or at least, land you’ve been graciously given to steward for a season), is sweeter. There is something about running a farm – a sense of ownership and responsibility – that makes the work all the more meaningful. It isn’t just knowing how to do the work, and knowing that it’s up to you to do it well – it’s something older than that. It’s the desire to create, to see your work through from beginning to end. It’s the need to root down on land, to plant your hands firmly on a piece of soil and be able to say, those peppers, that eggplant, that stalk of corn – I grew that.

As I walk back and forth across our field, I am already filled with pride, and gratitude, and an outwelling of visions, ideas, dreams. I have never paid attention to a piece of land in quite this way before. I’ve noticed things about the field that it took me years to see in other fields I’ve worked: where the shadows fall on field, and how late in the day they stay there, what kinds of weeds are growing, and where, and how many, and how quickly they germinate, the path of the sun across the soil.

In the afternoon, we took exact measurements of our two plots: the main one across the road, and another strip right behind the farmstand. Together, they are 54,00 square feet – about an acre and a quarter. If we can plow up another 100′ by 100′ square on the eastern end (which we’ve been told is very wet), we’ll be farming an acre and a half. That translates into days and days of seeding and transplanting and hand-digging beds, of weeding in the hot sun and thinning tiny carrots and beets, days and days of harvesting chard and broccoli and tomatoes in the perfect early morning stillness, days and days of eating fresh out of the ground, meals made of equal parts vegetables and hard work and gratitude.

Laura

Handweeding

First Root Field and the Carty Barn: the future home of lots of delcious vegetables...currently home to weeds.

This morning I found myself bent over in the field, pulling tall grasses out of a sea of tall grasses with my own two hands. Ludicrous? Absolutely.

We’ve got a big work day scheduled for next week, and I went by the farm this morning to walk around, look at the land, and take some pictures. A little more than half of our field is plowed, and next week we hope to attack the other half with scythes, weed whackers, and a walk-behind tiller. Afterward, we’ll spread the wetter part of the field with winter rye, which will help suppress weeds through the fall and winter, and then act as a green manure in the spring.

So this morning, after taking some pictures on this gorgeous fall day, I walked out into the midst of the grasses, where we will plant vegetables next summer, and began to pull out clumps of weeds: asters, more grasses than I know the names for, some rather tenacious prickly shrubs…I grabbed it all eagerly in a short frenzy of enthusiasm. After a good ten minutes, I was out of breath, but had made a rather impressive pile of weeds in the middle of the field.

Although a part of me wanted to, I didn’t stay there for hours, hand-pulling every piece of grass. But I was reassured by the knowledge that I could have. In a time when we’re told the bigger the machinery, the better, when our whole agricultural system runs on huge tractors and mechanized equipment, it is good to remind ourselves that the old-fashioned methods still work. There is a satisfaction that comes from doing work with your hands that cannot be replaced by any tool.

Next week, we’ll use all the tools available to us to mow, till, and prepare our field for winter: scythes, loppers, weed whackers (both manual and gas-powered), a walk-behind rototiller and plow, and yes, our hands. No matter how much we rave about modern labor-saving devices, there is no way to replace the moment when you plunge your hands into the soil to plant a tomato seedling, dig up a potato plant, or tear up a particularly large clump of nut sedge. I’ll be glad as anyone to be churning through the soil with a well-oiled rototiller, but I’ll never give up the inherent pleasure in work done with my own hands.

Laura