Tag: Hardscrabble Farmer

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

In the days after I put down Midnight I gave the herd some space, checking on them from a distance as they grazed on the late Summer pasture. I sold her bull calf to a farmer over on ragged mountain where it would get a chance to bring in some new blood and not be left as a reminder of our loss. I have written about the dynamics of cattle herds before so I won’t go into excruciating detail again. Theirs is a matriarchal system and one cow dominates the others, known as the boss.

Her immediate circle are almost always her offspring followed by the herd mates from her generation. She leads them to pasture when let out of confinement, she chooses direction during the course of the day and she leads them back to the loafing shed to ruminate at the end of the day. None of it is done with force, but for whatever reason the rest of the herd follow along with her cues and when something special comes up- when I ride out to the field to bring them a treat or when I fill the totes with water, she is always front and center until she gets her fill, the loyal lieutenants on either flank while the rest of the cows wait patiently for their turn.

Continue reading “Politics Of The Herd”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

When I came downstairs just before dawn my son was in the kitchen making final preparations for his departure. I helped him carry out the last of his things, tucking a few bottles of syrup behind the driver’s seat next to the bags of potatoes, onions and the cooler filled with meat. The two of us stood together in the cool air and watched as the golden glow of sunlight appeared in the east transforming the barnyard into something magical. Down in the front pasture we could hear one of the calves calling and the herd lowing in response. There was a column of blue vapor rising from the surface of the trout pond and so we agreed without speaking to walk together one last time, down the hill, quietly, side by side long shadows cast behind us.

Continue reading “Summer Song”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

The apple trees are loaded this year, the red blush spreading across the sides of the fruit that face the Sun so that the trees themselves seem to glow like a bed of coals with each soft breeze breathing life into the orchard itself. It was something I’d never noticed before, thinking that the hue of each apple was simply the result of it’s genetic predisposition rather than an actual change brought about by effects of the environment. It’s like that these days, the things noticed that become a steady accumulation of knowledge that feeds us in advance of our hunger.

Last year there were so few apples that we never got to press any for cider, made no vinegar and now are forced to buy it in to make pickles with the overflow of cucumbers that reproduce faster than a family can eat them, even though we give it our best shot every day. The maples too are so weighed down with samaras that the ends of the branches are bent as much as they have ever been and tinged gold where the wings of each pod have bleached out, delicate veins tracing the periphery of each whirly-gig, seeds swollen, expectant.

Continue reading “Take Shelter”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

In New England there is an annual tradition that goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War called Old Home Day. The original idea was to welcome back the veterans and their families who had moved off of the rocky soil to seek a better future out in the vast prairie lands of the Midwest driven in part by westward expansion that followed the conflict but also to escape the memory of seeing the elephant, leaving the dead to bury the dead. When the young leave the old behind there isn’t much of a future left to be hopeful about, so some clever resident in his dotage came up with a plan to try and lure them back, if only for a while, to reconnect the generations on common ground.

Continue reading “Old Home Day”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

All of the big summer storms come in from the west. They build up their energy somewhere out in the middle of the country and as they move the moisture is drawn up from Lake Champlain before it has a go at us. You can feel it coming for hours, the barometer drops, the birds fly lower across the barnyard and the crows take up positions on the west side of the piggery, sitting hunched up on the split rail fence squawking to each other as if they were making plans. The dogs come in from the lawn about thirty minutes in advance of the first drops of rain, perhaps they can hear the distant thunder as it echoes through the Connecticut River Valley up around Walpole just over the last ridge of hills.

They hunker down in a hidey hole under the barn and stay there until the storm has passed, every time. The first peels of thunder reverberate along the Mink Hills, a low rumble that goes on and on, echoing against the granite ledges and steep hillsides along the lake. It’s always a good sign to pick up the tools and make ready for the approaching front. We always sit out the heaviest part of the storm, watching the lightning strikes as they pass overhead, counting the seconds between the flash and the report to judge just how close it will come.

Continue reading “How We Learn What We Know”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

I took my first shop class in the 7th Grade. The teacher was a short Austrian with a missing finger on his left hand and an accent that struck fear in the heart of a thirteen year old. On the first day of class he walked us around the meticulously kept room naming each machine and giving a brief description of its use while we followed dutifully in a tight knot of boys dressed in dungarees and T-shirts.

When he came to the joiner he told us about the importance of being aware of our surroundings, of paying attention to what we were doing at all times and then he described how he had once stood fascinated by the shavings that came out of that machine one day a long time ago and how for just a second he forgot what he was doing until he saw the bright red spray of his own blood stain the pile of sawdust at his feet and looked at his missing digit in horror. He held his stump up in front of our faces and said the phrase I have never forgotten, “This is what you get for inky-dinkying around.”

Continue reading “How To Read A Board”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

We spent the better part of the day cleaning up the sacrifice, one load after another of manure piled into windrows for composting in the warming air of May. The smell is powerful, but filled with promise, like the scent of bread rising, cider fermenting, meat roasting. What they produce isn’t waste, it’s essential to the life of the farm and once the bacteria and oxygen get to it the temperatures rise and with each lift of the bucket columns of steam escape the mounds of dark brown carbon filled with fragments of straw, hay stalks, wood chips, and shavings.

By late afternoon I have begun to repave the area with fresh bank-run sand carved out of the face of the eskar down by the stream and all the while the cows have been keeping an eye on me, jaws working on the green grass of new pasture. Only one calf has joined us so far this season though the rest of the cows are swollen to the point of exhaustion and they groom themselves and each other in anticipation of their own calving. The new heifer calf, the only Hereford born on this farm with an all brown face, has taken an attachment to me and follows me as I make each pass on the tractor. Her mother, the second generation born on the farm, has always been affectionate towards me and I wonder if there isn’t a little bit of genetic pass through in their domestication.

Continue reading “HOME AGAIN”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

It only takes a few nights after the last frost for the grass to shake off the cold. The spikes rise up from every beaten down tuft and hummock as if armies were being raised across the landscape, emerald green spears held aloft against the dew. The chickens come out earlier now in the dim light of dawn and wander in wide arcs across the lawns with their beaks down plucking at the thatch before moving on to wherever it is they are going. One by one the birds sound off in a roll call; robins, red necked grebe, sandpipers fifty miles from their summer home, Clapper rail and chimney swift, Say’s phoebe and the red-eyed vireo- one after another.

The sky has been clear for two days and with it the ground has taken as much moisture as it could extract from the last drenching rain and responded with an equal level of growth, unchecked, burgeoning. The side of the eskar was gray only last week and this morning it is draped in a cloak of little blue-stem and fox-tail barley. The forsythia broke in a riot of canary yellow, paler this year than last but dropping under the profusion of blossoms that crowd every branch from the roots to the tips.

Continue reading “THE RISING”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

When the snow has finally melted off and you begin to make your way around the lawns and the gardens that surround the farmyard you will often discover an egg that has been laid right out in the open. It happens right around this time every year- the chickens are excited by their new found freedom, they wander further away from the henhouse and when it is time to lay, rather than return to the nesting boxes where they have deposited their eggs all winter long they simply drop them where they are; under the trampoline, at the edge of the foundation, at the base of the split rail fence posts.

I ask the kids to grab an egg basket and round them up and for the next half hour or so as I go about my own work the children make a game out of it, seeing who can find the most. It was only after seven years of watching this annual rite before it dawned on me, that this was the likely origin of the Easter Egg Hunt, a form that followed a function. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d certainly be willing to bet on it. So many of the traditions and habits that we carry with us are based on things that are hidden in plain sight. In world divorced from nature and focused on all things modern and linear we often lose sight of the origins of our own behavior, rooted firmly in the cycles of the past.

Continue reading “What We Find”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

It snowed all day yesterday and when I woke up this morning there was still a steady, downward fall of flakes the size of moths. There was close to a foot or better rising straight up from the surface of whatever remained out when it began. The branches of the white pines down along the wetlands bowed so low under the weight of it it gives the impression that the trees are trying to lay themselves down at the end of a very long Winter. Around here the common lore tells you that it’s best to wait until the middle of May before you plant anything in the ground.

One of my neighbor’s delights in telling me the story of the Mother’s day blizzard of 1977 so I have tried very hard to mimic his activities and routines as he goes about the business of farming his place year after year. When he hangs his first sap buckets I go home and start putting mine out, and when I see him prune his apple trees in the neat little orchard that runs alongside of the Old Sutton Road I go back to the pole barn and get out the gray oak Stoke’s ladder and get to work on my own. Thus far I have been able to keep up with a great deal of the seasonal aspects of this calling absent a lifetime of experience.

Continue reading “Mr. Arable”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

ORDER YOUR SYRUP NOW!!! OPERATORS ARE WAITING – HARDSCRABBLE

Please contact me either by phone or email @ (603) 938-2043 or [email protected] and we’ll box up your order as soon as the last pint is boiled.

It has been a while since I have had a chance to write anything more than an email. The sap has been running off and on for the past several weeks, we continue to tap the existing runs further and further up the side of the mountain, extending them as time allows and then collecting the buckets and pumping out the holding tanks and transferring all of it to the sugarhouse to boil.

We’ve also had guests coming and going, visitors from all over the country who have read about what we have been doing and who decided to come on up and see for themselves and lend a hand for a day or two depending on their schedules and for that we are very grateful. Last week two young couples from Portland, Oregon showed up and worked alongside of us for three days and at the end, before they headed down to New York City for a couple of days of sightseeing, we bottled up some of the syrup they’d helped us make so we could ship it home to them to share with their friends back in the Pacific Northwest.

Continue reading “Knock Wood”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

We live on the southern flank of a mountain. Over the course of time, you lose track of that fact because you can’t actually see it from where we are. When I drive over to my neighbor’s place on the other side of Andrew’s Brook and look back towards the farm it is impossible to miss, rising like a dark animal from the forest of hardwoods that spread around its base. You can catch glimpses of it from various angles as you move around the valley but it always catches me be surprise, knowing that we live right up on it without ever being aware of just how close it is to our lives.

The reality of our day to day life is tied so closely the place where our story unfolds that it is almost impossible to separate the two. And so we farm our side of the mountain in the way that fish swim through water, immersed completely in our place without having to consider it consciously. It takes perspective to understand where you’ve come from and to see where it is you are heading.

Continue reading “Why The Narrative Failed”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

There is an old photograph that we have hung in our home that shows my Great-Grandparents on their wedding day. They were married in a double ceremony; Mamie and Nellie, maternal cousins and their two new husbands, Harry and William, names that have been passed down to both my father and my youngest son. They are dressed formally; simple white gowns for the ladies, dark suits for the men and all of them wearing gloves.

My Great-Grandfather looks so much like my oldest son it is almost scary, more than a century between their births, but it is the hands that stand out to me, huge in comparison to the hands I see on men today, from work, no doubt, but inherited I assume from generations before him and so much like my own. He wears a look of sober intensity that I have tried to emulate all of my adult life but which now comes to me without effort.

Continue reading “In Our Hands”

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

Well, you have certainly had one heck of year, haven’t you? I can’t imagine how it must feel to be you right now. This time last year you were yucking it up with your buddies in the White House about how Obama was going to ram through as many executive actions as he could to push the immigration debate into the ‘win’ category. How’d that work out for you? From there you went right into a National Lampoon-style daily snark against the guy you said didn’t stand a chance of winning and that went even better, right up until November 8th.

Continue reading “Mainstream Media: The Buggy Whip of the 21st Century”