Two entire seasons have passed....

So much has happened, so much has changed.

One of our new projects was our high tunnel.

We built it to extend our growing season here in zone 5A,

and to grow winter greens.

We toured as many local hoop houses as we could find in our quest to learn,

and we read every book we could find.

Eliot Coleman's books were our major inspiration...

The first year was filled with lessons.

I planted the house full of tomatoes, various peppers, summer squash, tomatillo's, watermelon, cantaloupe, and pickling cucumbers.

We pickled so many cucumbers. The tomatoes over grew everything, and we are still getting hot and sweet peppers in October, not to mention the best watermelons I have had since I was kid. They just don't grow these melons for market anymore.

What a delight.

This summer was hot, humid, and rainy...

unusual for our climate here.

Most of our best food came from the house. I think if it hadn't been for our hoop house I would have been extremely disappointed with a lot of our food production this year. The heavy spring rains caused moldy strawberries, lots of summer rain led to bouts of late blight on the tomatoes and potatoes in the field...

and then there were the deer, my poor pea crop disappeared.

We have had a few hard frosts already. All of the remaining Brassica are doing great in the field. In the hoop house, all is well. The cantaloupe and cucumbers are wilted but the peppers and tomatoes are doing fine, and still producing.

Early on in the season we tied up all of the vining plants. It worked out great. Next year I will prune back the tomatoes and grow fewer of them! I am still making my roasted tomato sauce now... I have been making it for over 4 weeks. I didn't get many tomatoes in the field at all this year and it seemed to take them so long to ripen. My window sill is full of green field tomatoes.

My sister-in-law turned me on to a great recipe.

I roast sliced, whole tomatoes (skin, seeds, and all) with garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper in a 425 degree oven for about 35 minutes. I drain some of the water from the tomatoes and let them cool. Freeze them flat, put them into a freezer bag, and store them in a stack in the freezer. I add other ingredients like basil or peppers too.

Very delicious and always so yummy in January.

I hope your summer was wonderful and

healthy!

So much to share, so little time...

Our first sunflower of the summer...

My neighbor Emily brought me some glads. Her father raised them and they are the same tubers from his garden. Emily is 78 years old, the glads are pretty amazing for being that old...

I had to blog about this amazing bean... I bought the seeds from Seed Savers, Fin de Bagnol. Wow. They were slow and tempermental to germinate in this summer's climate (hot, humid and then cold, rainy and then hot, humid) but once they got going, wow. The plants are a bush variety and produce so well. I have been picking them since mid-July. I pick them when they are tender and small. They get long and lean and fill the bush, they are so tasty! I highly recommend this bean. Boutique bean for sure...

We love them lightly steamed with butter, sea salt and Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar...

All I can say is, wow.

I get a ton of Fin de Bagnol

beans off of a tiny bush and every two days I get a huge bowl.

It doesn't look like much in this dish as leftovers, but what a wonderful dinner it was.

Frittata!

I used 9 duck eggs, 3/4 cup of half and half, 1 1/2 cups of wonderful cheddar, salt, a bunch of chard, 3/4 cup squash, 3/4 cup zucchini, 1 onions, 3 garlic cloves, and 1/2 of a small sweet pepper from my garden lightly sauteed and then a large sprig of fresh cut basil, I sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan and Asiago over the top. Baked in a large dish at 350 degrees F for 35 minutes and a wonderful dinner...

Garlic.

Nantes.

A bunch of yummy.

A basin of life.

A bounty from one picking...

Life is good.

Summer!

Livin' the good life. Ah!

A sandy beach in Maine.

Beauty in motion! Two little bumblebees, a few seconds later we had three!

Three sisters, bug's eye view.

A very, very big spider... my son thinks it could be a Yellow Orb spider.

Glad I am not a bug....

Me and the girls...

taken by our staff photographer.

Our staff photographer/proof reader/editor/resident spell checker (thank goodness).

Handsome fellow

My son and I rescued a handsome fellow from a very busy street. He was just sitting in the middle of the road, pulled in and scared. We stopped to help him along and something told me to pick him up. It turns out he is a pretty good sized male 
Wood turtle, Clemmys insculpta.

My violin teacher, Jane, alias, 'turtle freak',

was so excited when I told her why we were late for lessons.

He is so beautifully colored. Males have a concave shell and longer claws. Wood turtles have shells that look very engraved and pyramidal. They don't usually get this big, they typically grow to 5-8 inches. They eat berries, tender vegetables, insects, grubs, worms and snails. Their shells aren't hinged so they can't pull their legs or tail in too far. You can count the scutes on a wood turtle to calculate its age, just like the rings of a tree. Our guy is 13 or 14 years old. The place that I found him is being rapidly developed so we decided to let him go on our farm. We have the perfect habitat, slow moving, sandy bottomed streams, woodland fields and only one or two cars a day, at most!

Jane said that she has seen two in all of her years. Bob, our mountain man friend who spends weeks in the woods has never seen one his whole life....

They are considered a friendly, nice turtle. Not feisty like a snapper... When Jane and I were flipping through some books we read in the Anna Botsford Comstock's book, "This is one of our most common turtles." She wrote her Handbook of Nature Study in 1911. In the E. Laurence Palmer, Fieldbook of Natural History written in 1949, it said that they are not as common as they once were and now, the NH Fish and Game considers the Wood turtle a species of special concern...

One handsome guy made it.

Living the good life.

We got our little baby broiler flock last Sunday early. We drove to Vermont to pick them up! Thirty-five little, fluffy babies. It is our second year, I know the routine. I give them love, very good food and lots of grass and bugs and they give us meat. It is the reality of our food. My husband and I decided last year, the night before the harvest that if we couldn't do this we HAD to be vegetarians... some one else is doing the harvesting somewhere and at least we know that our babies are raised humanely, with love, good food and no stress or pain. We rarely eat beef and we try to only eat fish that we have caught in a river or lake that we know... and I have to say that our chickens are the most delicious we have ever eaten.

Our mobile chicken coop, totally made with beg, borrowed and recycled material. Not too cute, yet. A little green paint and oh well, you know, I will make it cute! We are going to move it out behind the horses in the field. We are trying to be good grass farmers and have the pasture well divided. So to keep the field healthy, I bought an old scythe last winter and we plan to cut/save some grass for the geese the old fashioned way this summer. And for the chickens we use our electric webbing fence that just sticks into the ground so that we can protect our flock and they can move around freely!

Have you ever read Small Farm Journal?

We want to wean ourselves off of corporate, industrial food. We try to eat like localvores, it helps being so close to Vermont and all of these farmers up here. It is like stepping back in time to live in New England, they are very proud of their farming, small town heritage. It is truly amazing and wonderful, especially for a flat lander like me. So every summer we are getting closer and closer to our goal of living simply and feeding ourselves for the entire year. We are hoping to build a root cellar in our basement this summer and green house out back... fingers crossed. So far we have a big chest freezer, a dehydrator and natural drying box.

Here are two of our four baby turkeys, two Bronze Breasted and three White Breasted. We hope to start breading the bronze and Narragansett next year too. This is our first year raising turkeys.

My darling holding one of our two lovely, sweet, kissable, huggable, Toulouse geese. He is holding Flory, Toulouse is in the pen. We got these two just as pets, no foie gras... they make great watch dogs and they are the cat's meow....

We hope they will keep our lovey goose company this winter...

And me, farmer girl, in clean clothes, such a rarity these days... you can't see the dirt on my hands, always have them in the earth these days! Life is good....

"Do the best that you can in the place that you are, and be kind." Scott Nearing.

Ah, my mantra.

The first wild strawberries...

This is a small sample of the little treasures hiding under the grass in fields right now. Millions of them. They are much smaller than our cultivated crop but each tiny jewel is more succulent and sweeter....

I was imagining Helen Dodge in the mid-1800's out picking berries after a long winter. What a wonderful gift.

I was in competition with the ducks this morning as we all raced to find the biggest, ripest fruit. The ducks kept looking over at me as if to say, "How did you know about our secret?"

Progression...

Monday, May 24th, I started mulching with old, bad hay from winter. Tied up the peas with baling twine. Finished the cucumber bed. The carrots, leeks and celery in the patch are from my winter cold frame. Eliot Coleman is right, the carrots are oh, so sweet.

Sunday, May 30th, my neighbor's old tractor.

They tilled up the yard for my "new" garden. Emily is 76 years old and still digging B I G rocks out of the soil with me. Notice all of the rocks I dug up in my border bed? It was part of an old foundation wall and I found lots of treasures in the earth.

Tuesday, June 1st, new garden and new chicken yard is getting closer to being done. The rest of the asparagus is in, lots of seeds. This is the week to plant the seedlings up here in New England.

The old bath tub is a gift from Emily, my neighbor, it is going to be my water feature....

New raised beds. The sawyer cut the boards from local hemlock, they are very sturdy and hold up in the cold winter freeze and thaw.

Progression towards filling our freezer with our own food,

from 6:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m, every day.

I have let everything else go, especially housework! I promised myself I would heed Scott Nearing's advice and take a day off every week. It is raining today, guess I will take that day off today and let the garden grow.

We smelled the fires from Quebec all yesterday morning. It was smokey and hazy... our poor, dear planet earth is fighting to make it with us on her back. We are like viruses spreading out and touching every stream and valley.... I was thinking the other day while digging a deep hole in rocks that there is an easier way to do this without a shovel and sweat but what is the cost? We do use petroleum but we try to use it sparingly, and for big jobs. It is a challenge being post 50 and late 40's doing this hard work alone, no big family of boys or large community willing to barter labor... Re-building a farm infrastructure from scratch is very hard, exhausting and expensive. We try to do our very best every day, in every way, in every decision we make, knowing that we are touching the earth with our "progression".

The moments of my day

The moments of my day seem to drift in and out of my awareness.  I haven't touched down in a few weeks.  I have been a flutter of activity, of dreams fulfilled, struggles realized, relationships changed, growing, constricting, like my breath of late.  I have been whirling around in the top of my head with goals and expectations.  Not having to go to Boston has freed my schedule and so I filled it with visions of my garden, my sewing room, my son, the girls, the animals, my husband, my family, the projects - the many exciting projects.  Just what you would hope summer should be, the ideal feeling you hope for in the snowy February landscape...unfurling before my eyes.

Henry's peonies, they are already in bloom.  They are on the southern side of his house, sheltered and growing along a dark blue wall in full sun.  Or is it just Henry's touch?

I took a walk to my neighbor's house, a stones throw across the dirt road.  Henry just celebrated his 95th birthday and his 70th wedding anniversary.  A life time and more...he still cuts his grass, weeds his garden and plants his vegetables.  He planted the Iris' about 40 years ago or so in an old cistern that was used to water cows.  A pipe ran into the cistern from the spring up the hill.  I love that Henry just lets things be, lets them grow the way they will, rust, lean, weather without emotion, just acceptance.  There used to be a huge cow barn where the Birch are now.  

Henry has lived here in this house on the edge of the hollow for 50 years, he visits his wife every day in the home and comes back to his little house.  He gave me a collection of old hat pins his wife had tucked away.  He told me she loved going to yard sales.  He smiled a sad smile and said, "Poor Jenny".  Life changes, the world around us changes, sometimes the change is unrecognizable or unnoticed or seemingly unimportant until one day we find something to measure that change.  

My life is so completely filled with ideas, dreams, projects, people, activity, movement.  I sometimes see Henry take his quiet, slow stroll down the road a bit and turn to come back.  He walks in the yard or sits in his old chair under the barn and listens to his radio while I flutter around in my yard with the animals or in the garden.  Life is so different for him.  He lives alone, his house is very quiet, very still.  It seems a luxury to me to have time to sit and read a book or listen to the radio just to hear it.  When does that change happen?   The change from busy to quiet?  The change from not having enough time to waiting for something to happen?  Henry tells me it is lonely, I try to visit him every day.  I hug him deep and full every time, it has become our ritual.  Fill his world with touch, with embrace, my tiny, meager effort to fill some of the space.

When I lived in California I had an elderly neighbor, he had lost his wife just a few years before and lived alone.  He often left his door open and I would wave to him while I bustled by with all my stuff.  I started visiting with him on Wednesday evenings and we talked for hours about his life, about the old days, about his lovely wife.  He told me he left his door open in the hopes that he would see someone pass by.  He spent most of his time waiting.  Waiting for the meals he would take at the buffet down the street with his friends.  He would wake early, read the paper, meet his friends for breakfast, take a nap, go back, meet them for lunch, mill around, leave his door open, listen to a ball game, sleep, dream about his wife and wait for Wednesday evenings.  Sweet Harry Anderson, my dear friend. 

Simplicity, that is what life is about, beauty, peace, love, friendship and 

it is oh so sweet.

An ancient Butternut tree.  Henry said the squirrels planted it in the wall, it is still hanging on and still producing nuts.  Life is funny that way.  It would seem impossible that such a big tree, such an old tree, growing crooked and half fallen on its knees could still unfurl its leaves, reach up to the sun, grow new branches and yield sweet fruit.  It is fitting that it grows in Henry's yard, his friend for so many years, leaning to the south, still yearning for the sun and feeding the world around it.  Henry feeds our hearts.

The rain just started, it is a percussion of sound with cool air....