Beginning Farmers: Learning, Networking, and Connecting to Place
February 8, 2013 § 1 Comment
Check out the article (title above) that I wrote for A Growing Culture! Here’s a link, with the first couple of paragraphs below:
It’s no secret that more and more young people in the U.S. are looking to establish careers in local, organic, and small-scale farming, despite the risk, instability, hard work, and moderate income. Even many well-established career adults are abandoning their corporate jobs to start farms – and writing books about it. Most of these folks are unapologetic about their choices, choosing instead to either shout to the rooftops about why they’ve chosen a lifestyle such as this one, or to quietly go on doing what’s important to them. Yet as much as farmers enjoy their independence, getting started and continuing successfully depends upon a network of support from other farmers, researchers, landowners, and the general public.
Khaiti and Andrew French, who run Living the Dream Farm in Clayton, Wisconsin, were drawn to farming because “of loving good, real food and caring about how animals are raised in agriculture.” They are famous for their duck eggs in Minneapolis circles, and also raise turkeys, rabbits, chickens, and goats. Farmers such as the Frenches, inspired by voices such as Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann, seek meaningful connection to the land, family-centric lifestyles, and practices that are in line with their carefully considered ethics.
Big Snow
December 10, 2012 § 2 Comments
So much snow fell yesterday and into today. 15 inches, maybe?
Imagine you are here. You would slide into long johns and boots and mittens and take great strides through the snow with the dog and me.
The snow came nearly up to Tassie’s belly in some places. It covered our boots. It put tall caps on the beehives.
It is the kind of snow that makes you work around it, that makes you clumsy, that makes you pause and look at how the world around has changed. The kind of snow that makes you laugh and even shimmer a little bit yourself.
I think everyone around here is secretly or not-so-secretly thrilled. I swear there is more spring in our steps, more cheer in our voices. Last winter had scarcely a decent snow in this part of the country, and so this one feels like ice cream long waited for. It tastes sweet.
Milkweed
October 21, 2012 § 2 Comments
The milkweed pods have opened. The seeds blow into the wind.
Have you ever pulled them out, felt how soft and almost weightless they are in your hands?
Throw them into the air. Watch as they ride and twirl through the sky.
Be glad for prairie. Wildflowers. Nature’s wondrous details.
Autumn
September 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
Yesterday I went for the most wonderful drive. Morning, and straight east into red-orange hills. Classical music on the radio, golden retriever in the backseat, a jar of steaming coffee in the cup holder. I was going out to Brett Laidlaw’s place, Bide-A-Wee, to borrow a cider press for our upcoming festival. Brett had come to our brick oven workshop in August, and also happens to be the author of Trout Caviar – both a blog and a book about foraging in the north woods. His two griffins came to greet me; Tassie hesitated and even growled a little at these unfamiliar dogs, but eventually she got over herself enough to run around the acreage and explore their space. They followed her with interest and a bit of determination to retain their territorial rights.
The air was September crisp and the hills were so burning with color that you could almost smell smoke. This is the time for woodstoves and campfires. Brett met me with a smile, we caught up on ovens and farms and projects and festivals, and then he showed me the pieces of the press, how to put it all together, how the apples will grind and press into cold, delicious cider. Bright sun, plaid shirts, vests, boots, cast iron, goosebumps. I shivered in the cold but also the very delicious autumn of it all.
Once we had loaded the press into the back of my truck, we talked about France, which always makes me glad, especially to find someone else who loves it the way I do, and not for all the popular things people love it for (ooh la la!) but also for the countryside, the small gîtes and the regional ciders and the roads winding through woods and hills that look so similar to here. Then back in the truck, me and my girl, to make our way home, my mind full of old memories and future plans, and a sense of the season’s reliable goodness.
Boats & boulders
September 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
We decided to canoe the St. Croix River. My sister, her husband, me, and my best friend. This river keeps drawing me back to where it winds between two of the Upper Midwest’s finest states, Minnesota and Wisconsin. As states go, you might call these two frenemies. Football fiercely divides us. Yet we are variations on a theme.
The small towns here in Wisconsin remind me so much of my Minnesota childhood. The geography of hills and trees, water, woods, and farmland – it’s the same. The snowmobiles. The jetskis. The shabby cafes, the corner gas stations that also sell bait, and the Dairy Queen in every town. Rows of cabins along lakes. Small golf courses. Many small churches and their faithful parishioners. There is one such church across the street. I listen to the bells.
The St. Croix makes for a happy meeting place for me and my Minnesota-dwelling favorite people. So. We found ourselves in canoes on the water.
We love boats.
A small island in the middle of the water simply had to be explored.
Chats with friends in nature are always welcome.
Canoe trips in general are welcome.
I wasn’t ready to be done. Next time, I want to camp overnight somewhere amidst evergreens and stars and the hooting and howling of wild creatures.
Instead, while the other three headed back to the Cities, I wandered around the boulders and potholes on the Minnesota side of Interstates Park.
Creepy.
Then I found a spot on a rock where the river view and the light were just right. I sat there and thought. I read. I journaled. I prayed. I let my spirit get all settled, and the day wound down.
As it should.
Happy sights of the day
August 19, 2012 § 2 Comments
1. A birthday cake (flavor-of-the-week) ice cream cone from Leo’s. Two scoops.
2. Yarns, yarns, yarns, and three ladies watching me sort through skeins and books and then inviting me to their Thursday knitting nights. The textures and colors in that little store just ask for you to take the stuff in your hands and make something of it.
3. An old honey tin, the size of a paint can, advertising an apiary from Thorp, Wisconsin – the very town where our family van broke down on this summer’s vacation. (I laughed, and bought it.)
4. A Corgi named Tillie.
5. A man in a striped shirt guiding a young, merry sounding couple in a gondola down the St. Croix River.
6. Two bi-planes gliding low over that same river, nearly skimming the surface before I lost sight of them.
7. A young man with black hair and a camera case, walking in front of me easy as can be, by himself this Sunday evening. When I stopped walking, turned around, and crouched down to peer under the bridge to where the planes had gone, I looked back to see him, 20 yards away, doing the same thing.
8. Twelve flowers in a glass on the kitchen counter. Zinnias and black-eyed Susans leftover from yesterday’s event. Such cheerful faces.
Washington Island
August 12, 2012 § 2 Comments
I don’t remember that I ever felt especially excited about islands. I gave them a fair level of fascination, from books such as Five Have A Mystery to Solve and of course all of the Anne of Green Gables series. But I grew up in spaces where the land stretched wide away from us, and a far horizon of earth greeting sky was the view to admire, as we watched storms and sunsets and the overwhelming blue of summer.
My father would say, and I would agree with him, that living on an island must make a person feel bound, with the land running out so quickly, cut off by water. Islands had an element of fear, in one’s inability to escape the small society they compelled. No, thank you, I thought. I may visit islands, but I wanted to live where I could ride my horse for miles and miles and miles; where I might get up one day and go as far as I please, and see where I end up.
Oh, but then.
Never say never. Life tends to turn one’s decidedness on its head (or, at least, mine does!). On our Door County adventure, we took a day trip to Washington Island, which is just off the tip of the peninsula, and now I am enchanted with islands, and that one especially.
The island is 23.5 square miles, and while tourism is its main industry (having overtaken fishing and agriculture) it still has a calm, even sleepy feel to it. The houses are primarily older and either cabin or farmhouse or gingerbread in style. There are docks and boats, of course; there’s a fantastic fiber shop/school, and a gathering place called Fiddler’s Green where artists and locals get together, especially in winter, to talk and be and do life in a way that recognizes their interdependence.
One of our first delights was a remarkable wooden church, called Stavkirke, which seems like it fell out of a fairytale. Behind it a prayer path meanders through the woods. We would miss church on Sunday so this gave us a moment of grounding in our faith. Reflection. I spoke blessing over family, and gratitude for this place, softly, but nonetheless with reverence. I think J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would approve.
We visited an older couple on their Scandinavian horse farm, featuring Gotlands and Icelandic ponies and a Fjord. The couple was quiet and kind and their horses were spunky and beautiful. They had a big white dog that looked like a Great Pyrenees, but wasn’t, and an affectionate black cat, and splendidly colored roosters and chickens, and chattery, cheerful ducks. I think this couple, and me, we are cut from the same cloth. This was just the start; as the day went on I began to feel as if this island was full of what Anne Shirley would call kindred spirits. It seemed as if I had discovered a mini, U.S. version of Anne’s beloved P.E.I. I skipped alongside my mother and told her so, and she laughed, and nodded.
For lunch we ate at a cafe run by a Methodist minister with six adopted children and a kayak museum in the back, displaying evidence of her days as a fairly renowned expedition kayaker. If one were to live here, I thought, what other sorts of people would one run into? What draws a person to a quiet island, a half-hour’s ferry ride away from shore? But I knew. The franticness of the rest of American society seemed . . . distant. It didn’t belong here, and it felt farther away than a boat trip past Death’s Door, the watery passage where many a boat has succumbed to the intensity of Lake Michigan funneling into the Green Bay. This is a place for refuge-seekers.
Somewhere in the middle of the island we climbed a tower, to get a view of the farmland interspersed between the trees, and the water in the distance. And there is a Farm Museum, with a lovely barn and all sorts of old implements, snowshoes for horses, old churns and tool sharpeners, memories of a life I sometimes wish I might have lived, and sometimes think I might still.
“Just think,” I said to my father, “for Grandpa, this isn’t really history. Not like it is for us; this was normal life, a lot of it.” My grandfather has been gone for twelve years, but I am still fascinated with his life, a boyhood throughout the 1920s and a teenager during the Depression, a young man during World War II who had to stay home and farm his Dakota land. He ran a team of horses but saw the changes through the 40s and 50s, the rise of the tractor and chemicals and farms getting bigger and bigger. If he can see us from heaven, which I kind of suspect he can, I wonder what he thinks now. Of how agriculture is going, and how his stubborn granddaughter believes, in many ways, that going “backward” is going forward.
After a visit to the little Nautical Museum we needed to go back to the ferry, so we might get back to the mainland for ice cream and a swim. I wasn’t quite ready. And to think we almost didn’t go to the island in the first place! I hope it can stay as it is for a good long time. I hope I can go back again soon.
*Thanks to Kim & Elena Romkema again for many of these pictures, as my camera decided to hit the dust! There was so much more I wish I could have captured from this trip . . . guess there will need to be another!
Door County, Wisconsin
August 9, 2012 § 12 Comments
I am drawn by the water. It stretches far away and it is fresh.
Suddenly having a boat seems the most desirable thing in the world. I imagine living on one. I imagine loving it. I remember the book A Severe Mercy and the boat The Gray Goose, and consider what a wonderful thing it sounds, a life of sailing everywhere and reading out in the open water and knowing the wind and many shorelines.
On the Door County peninsula, between the little towns full of quaint shops and local artists, we find the beaches. This is where we most want to be.
It’s about the blues of the sky, the pale sand, the smooth gray stones, the green of mosses. It’s about swimming and hiking and scrambling.
It’s about sleeping on the sand, and scattering sand particles in your tent as you change into dry clothes. It’s about smelling like the lake, and the campfire. It’s about s’mores and late night coffee.
It’s about all these things, and then, it’s about us.
Family.
Kinds of Honey 