Farm Valentines

We farmers are neither subtle nor abashed when it comes to Valentine’s Day. In fact, we write to our CSA members every year around this time, saying “Gee, we love valentines, and wouldn’t you like to send us a valentine, and by the way, you could sign up for a CSA membership for the coming year, and send us a first payment at the same time, because pretty soon we’re going to be cranking up the propane heater in the greenhouse, on March 1st, and the heat will come pouring in, and the bills will come pouring in too, and gee, we love valentines!”

This clever method has always resulted in at least one valentine, which warms our ever-lovin’ farmer hearts. Sometimes the valentine plea brings in several valentines in one season, from store-bought fancy valentines to hearts cut out of flower catalogs and pasted on construction paper. “We love the farm!” says one, and “Oh beautiful curly kale, will you be mine?” says another.

Sometimes a CSA member simplifies the process and writes a cheerful Happy Valentine’s Day! right on the CSA membership form, which we also count as a valentine. We feel the love. (Things got even simpler when one long-time, very busy yet very affectionate member had the bank send a check with “Vegetable Valentine” right in the memo line. Honestly, we must have the cleverest, kindest CSA members in the universe.)

But our shining moment came on the Valentine’s Day when we had a hand-delivered valentine, in a paper bag painted red, with hearts, feathers, and sparkly jewels attached. The bag was filled with homemade cookies, sweet red pepper dip (made with our own sweet red peppers, and incredibly delicious, and just the right color for Valentines’ Day), chocolate, and farmer-loving limericks. We were in valentine bliss.

Now, lest you think we depend on our CSA members to fulfill all our valentine desires, and thus neglect our romantic farmer lives, I will tell you what we do for Valentine’s Day. 

This is what we do for Valentine’s Day: we build up a warm fire in the woodstove. We close the curtains against the draft. We spread out a beautiful velvet red cloth. 

Then we lay out every single valentine we’ve ever received, and admire them, one by one. (Well, we put the check in the bank, and we have the CSA forms in the CSA folder.)

Our valentine display also includes a little golden and white wooden box with a heart on top, a heart shaped trivet, a red glass heart, a red beeswax heart, a red felted heart, a tiny red bird, and two red and white handkerchiefs with many many hearts.

We also have a lot of valentine constructions that involve copious amounts of glue, string, paper doilies, and tape, with “Happy Valentine’s Day Mommy and Papa, I love you!” in crayon. Then there are the funny valentines we’ve made for each other over the years: “Don’t squash my hopes, be my valentine,” complete with garden catalog pictures of winter squash varieties, or a “Cheerfulword puzzle” with valentine clues (as opposed to a crossword puzzle, get it?). There are also many charming valentine rhymes, as in “Don’t gallop away, be my valentine today,” featuring drawings of our four horses.

 Then, if we have any chocolate, we eat it, and if we don’t, we make cookies. We give our valentine kitties a little cream, and we give our valentine horses, who are not galloping away, a few carrots. We end our Valentine’s Day with a kiss, of course, and a surge of valentine love: wow, do we love that Valentine’s Day comes in the cold season, and not the garden season, so that we can lovingly make, open, display, and admire.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 9-15, 2022

The Holiday Farm Hustle: Yogurt and Unicorns

Around the winter holidays, we New Hampshire farmers have to hustle. Well, not exactly hustle. We have to get off the couch.

We want to go visit our human relatives, which means we have to set up our cat and draft horse relatives for a few days on their own. The list is always the same. Horses: food, water, fence. Cats: food, water, litter. The cats are easy; it only takes minutes to fill the food bowl and check the various sources of water. First is the actual water bowl, scrubbed and refilled.

Second is the small plastic cooler where we make yogurt once a week. The cats don’t like it when we make yogurt. They like it when the cooler is open, the jars are gone, and the water, which has kept the milk warm enough to yog, is available to drink. 

They are also fond of the leaking tap in the bathtub, a leak which drives a thrifty farmer who wants to practice sustainable water use crazy, and which now has a bucket under it, for watering houseplants. The kitties think the bucket is a perfect drinking vessel.

The litter takes longer, as we lecture the cats on how a proper sturdy farm cat wouldn’t need a litter box at all. Our long-time kitty Cricket finds this no problem, as she is fuzzy and happy to be outside. She says she is only using the litter box because we won’t be here to let her out. 

But our new kitty, who is sleek and not fuzzy, and therefore cold, says I never meant to be a sturdy farm cat. You’re the one who brought me here.

But you didn’t use a litter box at your last house, I say.

I had a cat door, he replies. Make me a cat door.

What if skunks get in, I say.

I will curl up with them, he says. They are warm.

Hmm, I say, as I put fresh litter in the box. At least we use softwood pellets, meant for a pellet stove, which means it is kind of sustainable.

Now for the horses: checking the electric fence is easy. Filling the water trough is easy. Then there’s food: seven meals worth, for four horses, which is a lot of hay, especially when it is in the form of our own loose hay, and not tidy bales. 

One of us forks the hay down from the mow. The other weighs it out on a platform scale, and tosses it into the mangers, which are actually sheep panels tied into a circle, handy for hay when we are away. 

Then the farm daughter gets in the manger too, tromping down the hay, and as the stack gets taller, so does the daughter, until she finds herself looking down at our big horse Clyde, who is helpfully eating out of the manger as we try to stuff it full.

“Look at your daughter,” laughs my farmer fellow, and I stop flinging hay around to look. There she is, standing high above Clyde, braiding his abundant forelock into three braids, and then the three into one, which is so thick it sticks out like a unicorn. 

We all find this most amusing, which will give you the sense of the fun you can have on a vegetable farm while hustling for the holidays. Now all we have to do, before we go, is visit our nice neighbors, and ask them to keep an eye on things for us, bringing them a basket of root veggies as thanks. Plus we have to pet the horses and kitties a while, and wish them a happy holiday, with a little help from more root veggies, and a spoonful of yogurt.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 12-18, 2022

New Fellow around the Farmhouse

We have a new fellow around the farmhouse. He spent his first three days here under the couch. He was so quiet we were afraid he had disappeared.

It became clear, however, the very first night, that he was still present. There was an ear-splitting screech, followed by thuds, growls, and hisses, in the hallway outside our bedroom.

My farmer fellow and I were on the verge of sleep, and we woke right back up. “It seems like Cricket met the new kitty,” I said, over the pounding of my heart.

“Mmm,” said my fellow, over the pounding of his.

Nothing else happened, and we fell asleep. Then we woke up again, for a second set-to in the hallway. “This must be where people get their terrifying descriptions of the shrieks of hell,” I said to my fellow, over the pounding of my heart.

“Mmm,” said my fellow, over the pounding of his.

Then all was quiet. We fell asleep, again. We woke up, again. This time the shrieks of hell were right in the bedroom.

I sat up in bed. “Holy moly,” I said to my fellow, over the pounding of my heart.

“Holy moly,” he agreed, over the pounding of his.

Then the new kitty must have taken up residence under the couch. The next day, Cricket made it clear she wanted to go outside, and fast, and we worried about her, and about the new kitty. After a night like that, maybe he really had disappeared.

But that evening, we had another hallway concert, just one, thankfully. For three nights in a row, we had single hallway episodes, which let us know that our new fellow was still about the house.

Then we began to get glimpses: a dart, a dash, a flash, a streak. A crunching noise in the kitchen. Very welcome evidence, after the first 24 hours, that the fellow was doing his duty, in the appropriate facilities. 

Finally I shone a flashlight under the couch. He was in the back corner, huddled up against the wall.

“Oh, kitty,” said I, which was probably not all that comforting, as I was shining a huge light in his face. I left him some butter on a plate, under the edge of the couch. He didn’t eat it.

But a few days later, we saw him sitting on a chair, right out in the open. We crooned to him, and he listened. If we came too near, whisk! he was gone.

When our daughter came home from college, we had a breakthrough. She sat on the floor, and sweet-talked him, and finally he came creeping over, and she petted him, and he even purred.

After that, he got friendlier and friendlier. Since Cricket was outside during the day, he would come visit us, in the kitchen, or at my writing desk. He learned the kitty call for treats, too, and we finally got a good look at him.

He is a sleek and slinky fellow, mostly black, with white paws, chest, and belly. He also has a white goatee, and a single sophisticated white eye whisker among all the black, and a white lightning bolt on his ankle. Despite being quite a gentleman, friendly and polite, he matches his lightning bolt with a thunderous voice, meowing urgently at the food dish, and the people. 

We, of course, have been entirely charmed by this new fellow.

Cricket, of course, has not. 

Just lately, Cricket looked up at me on the stairs. “Prrt?” she said “Pet me?” and immediately swiveled her head to growl at wherever the new cat might be.

"Prrt? Growl! Prrt? Growl! Prrt? Growl!” she said some more.

I sure do sympathize with our nice kitty Cricket, who did not choose to have this interloper join us on the farm. But it was awfully hard not to laugh.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 15- Dec 21, 2021

A House Full of Garden

Things get a little crazy on our vegetable farm in November. We are so close to the end of the high season that we can taste it. But we don't want to just taste it. We want to gobble it up.

Thus, after a season of my reading material consisting mainly of the Sunday comics my sister saves for me, the Monadnock Shopper News, and overdue bills, I have recently checked out four picture books, two young adult fantasy novels, two adult novels, one spiritual autobiography, a book on pottery, two books of poetry, and a non-fiction book by Terry Tempest Williams, all from three different libraries, one of which is the bookshelf at my new friend's house. 

My new friend, who has many many wonderful books, including a whole section entirely devoted to contemporary poetry, and who is not farming this season, which she both regrets and does not regret, recently invited us to supper in order to “feed the farmers,” as she so nicely put it. She served us a feast of chickpea vegetable casserole, roasted peppers, salad with two choices of dressing, homemade applesauce, and chocolate cake and whipped cream. This after our high garden season of meals consisting mainly of popcorn, salad turnips, pieces of cheese, and in the fall, apples, with the occasional spoonful of peanut butter. (At least we grow two of these!)

In the music department, our high garden season consists mainly of birdsong (beautiful), the horses' harness jingling (beautiful), and in July, the rain, rain rain (a little too much to be beautiful). There were also the sounds of our nightmares: the chewing, chewing, chewing of rodents in the garden and greenhouses. But now, in November, my fellow farmer has just gotten tickets for one, two, three, four live concerts, two of which are happening on the same day. 

“How are you going to swing that?” I ask him.

“Oops,” he says, and looks a little further into his ticket details.

“Yes!” he whoops. “Yes! One is at four! One is at eight! Two concerts on the same day!”

I have also begun to imagine other winter delights. Massages. Making holiday presents. Taking the big pile of donations, gathered last winter, and gathering dust all garden season, to the thrift store. A clean kitchen, regular meals, and, yes, changing the sheets on the bed, so that they aren't nearly as full of dirt as the garden beds.

In other words, we are really, really, ready for the end of the growing season.

But the growing season is not quite ready for the end of us. Though it was a very late first frost  this year, when it came, it came, and we were deluged by the last hoorah of the garden season. Suddenly everything that was in the garden seemed to be in our house. 

In the kitchen we have 200 heads of cabbage, 300 leeks, four trays of troubled vegetables, and eight five gallon buckets of apples. 

In the living room, cozy with the thrift store donations and the house plants, we have 23 trays and six buckets of green and ripening tomatoes.

In the front room, we have five crates of frantically dug ginger and turmeric plants, two crates of peppers, a bushel and two more buckets of apples, five bags of garlic, three buckets of fingerling and yellow potatoes, four bushel baskets of onions, a mess of chard, two trays of hot peppers, a bucket of tiny side shoots of broccoli, and three buckets of tomatillos.

Happily, most of this will clear out in the last two weeks of our CSA distribution season. Less happily, all these baskets and crates and buckets surround our wood stove, and we can't even get close to it, let alone start a fire. 

Ah, well … soon vegetables will turn into feasts, and fires, and music, and books.
 

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Nov 17 - Nov 23, 2021