Farming's Elysian Fields or Remembering the Sheer Foal Joy or Betsey, Belle, and Ben

Sometimes this farmer likes writing about farming more than I like
farming. Other times I don't like writing at all. Those times always
coincide with the sadness inevitable in farming.

Just last month, another of our beloved workhorses passed over to the
Elysian Fields. Less than a year ago, we had six draft horses, which
was a little crazy considering the size of our farm and the size of
our budget. But we hated to send away our four retired horses, after
they'd worked with us so well and so long. We thought we'd have a few
more years together.

But last summer we lost Moon, our funny half-brave, half-timid horse.
Then we lost Clyde, who was steady as a rock. Now we've lost Benny,
who was born on the farm in 2002. He's the only foal we've ever had
the honor and challenge of raising.

Here's a Benny story from my Small Farmer's Journal article of several
years ago, when our herd was three black Percherons, each with a white
star. "Betsey, Belle, and Be-en," we'd call out to them, and they
would come running (sometimes).

One day, after haltering mama Belle in the pasture, and haltering Ben,
in his cute teeny-tiny new halter, my fellow heads back to the barn,
leading Belle, with Ben docilely following. I come a bit after,
leading auntie Betsey on one side, and holding our daughter’s hand on
the other. Our just-turned-two girl, working hard, puffing, hefts an
extra halter and lead rope, just in case she needs to catch a horse.
She is a strong and clever daughter, I am thinking, and I am also
enjoying cute Ben walking nicely ahead in the sunshine, and the
red-winged blackbirds calling.

But suddenly Ben, who is almost a month old now, and certainly cute
but also a little dopey, and who has hardly left his mother’s side,
turns around. He turns around purposefully, leaving Belle, and heads
straight back towards Betsey. And towards me, and towards our little
girl.

Both mothers get into an immediate flap, Belle nickering in distress
and me outright hollering in distress. “Help! Help!” I plumb the
depths in mere seconds, imagining all sorts of kicking, biting,
rearing, stampeding and the like in the immediate vicinity of my
strong, clever, and very little daughter.

“Take your horse back out!” my fellow calls from ahead, and we turn
around, quickly, back to the pasture.

Then we all watch dumbfounded as Ben, Ben the Slow, Ben the Dopey, Ben
the Not Quite Here in This World, abruptly stops short, kicks, bucks,
and proceeds to gallop gleefully in enormous circles, around Betsey
and company, under the electric fence, among the apple trees. We are
all openmouthed, astonished, including Betsey and Belle, their heads
high and alert. Who is this lively and vigorous being? Where has he
come from? Where will he go?

Ben keeps running and running and kicking and bucking in sheer foal
joy until he finally tangles himself up in the fortunately
unelectrified electric fence. We let both mares go; the show over,
Betsey moves immediately to the hay feeder, and Belle goes to Ben,
nuzzling him, while my fellow untangles the sheer foal joy from the
fence. I nuzzle my little daughter, and all we parents relax again,
back into a blissful doting.

Oh, that blissful doting: Benny has been featured in many of my
articles, from his snowy middle of the night birth, to his big feet
that thought lettuce heads were mere trifles, to his collapse from
roaring, a breathing condition, two summers ago. He's been part of the
retired gang since then. We like to think of him meeting up in horse
heaven with his mama and auntie and pals. But we sure do miss him here
on this earth.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, March 5 - 11, 2025

What Do You Do All Winter?

Sometimes people ask vegetable farmers what we do all winter. This is our short answer: we order seeds. We feed the horses. We fix tools. We sleep.

This is our long answer: first, we spend a few days not knowing what to do, once the enormous pressure of the season has ended. We drift around the house and fields, hardly comprehending that we don’t have to harvest or weed.

Then we start imagining what we could do, now that we don’t have the enormous pressure. My travel-loving fellow farmer has some suggestions: “Let’s go to Norway!”

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Norway, and have made trips to Norway unlikely for some time.

For my part, I start noticing all the things we’ve neglected. This year, after the season ended, we fixed the burnt-out light over our kitchen table. After six months, we could see what we were eating!

Then we fixed the broken storm window in our daughter’s bedroom, a project two years overdue. Luckily, the daughter is 24 and not living here full-time, so she didn’t spend every night of those two winters shivering.

Then, since we were on a roll, we asked our clever fix-it-all neighbor to look at our front door, which we’d been keeping closed by using an old sock stuffed in the bottom edge. He put a chink of wood around the latch, and our door closes properly again. What a pleasure!

“It’s almost as fun as going to Fiji!” my fellow says. 

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Fiji, and have made trips to Fiji unlikely for some time.

Buoyed by all these home improvements, we moved on to larger projects: for example, moving the cabinet we inherited a year and a half ago out of the middle of the living room, into its new home against the wall in another room. This really opened up the view of the couch, where we had stacked everything from the kitchen shelves: books, papers, seed catalogs. 

We cleared the shelves when a puppy entered our lives last April, as we came into the full-on gardening season. He had the run of the kitchen as a chewing-a-lot puppy, with only supervised visits to the living room. 

Thus he didn’t chew on things we didn’t want him to, but we couldn’t sit on our couch for the last eight months. Now we can see one couch cushion, and one farmer can relax there. Soon we will clear the other cushion, and two farmers could sit side by side, holding hands, perhaps, as they gaze at the nicely sleeping dog at their feet.

“Just think,” says my fellow. “We could get the dog used to flying on airplanes while he’s young, when we go to Tasmania!”

I laugh. Our new team of horses last spring cost more than a trip to Tasmania, and have made trips to Tasmania unlikely for some time.

The dog would probably like to go to Tasmania, since he is an agreeable fellow. He is not always nicely sleeping, however. It took us a while to realize that our garden season was ideal for a dog, as he was outside with us most all day. But in winter time, we are inside much more often, and this young energetic dog didn’t have quite enough to do.

“Why’s he being so awful?” I would say to my fellow farmer, as the dog jumped, barked, annoyed the cat, and annoyed the people.

“Maybe it’s adolescence?” my fellow suggested, which is partly true.

“Maybe he’s not getting enough exercise,” I say. “Let’s go hike in new places in Chesterfield! And Walpole! And Brattleboro!”

“Yes!” answers my fellow. “It’s almost like going to Norway! And Fiji! And Tasmania!”

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Feb 5-11, 2025

Farmers, Novels, and Bonbons

One of the strange things about farming is that everyone else isn’t farming. In summer, when we are racing around the fields with our tongues hanging out, everyone else is going to the seashore, or to their cabin in the mountains.

Farmers are out of sync in the wintertime too. Just when people are groaning about having to wear fifty layers to go outside to scrape the ice off their windshields and brave the roads to get to work, we are lying in bed, contemplating a day of reading novels and eating bonbons.

Before we get to the novels and bonbons, however, we have to make it through the last two weeks of the CSA vegetable distribution, which are always a big push. We empty the greenhouses and gardens, keeping enough vegetables for our own use. But there’s always a lot of counting: how many leeks divided by how many members, how many Brussels sprouts, winter squash, pounds of carrots, potatoes, onions, etc.

We’ve been farming long enough that we have a pretty good sense of amounts, but there are always surprises. For example, this year we had a banner crop of fall carrots, and we didn’t even realize it. We could have started digging and distributing them much sooner. 

But we waited until the last month of distribution, and suddenly realized we had mountains of carrots. How many pounds of carrots would our hearty CSA members take on harvest day: one, two, three, four, five, six? Every distribution day we upped the carrot pounds. (Five seemed to be the limit, as on the day of six we had carrots left in the bins.)

Our Brussels sprouts were also abundant this year, and a late spinach planting in the greenhouse came on beautifully. We did the best we could with our counting, but after the last harvest day, when we had a moment to breathe, we made one more assessment. Alas, we still had a lot of carrots. We had a lot of Brussels sprouts. We had a lot of spinach. We had way more than we could eat over the winter, and the farmers’ market had ended weeks ago.

It was time for a Bonus CSA pick-up. We sent the word out to our members; our members responded gleefully. We, however, were not so gleeful. It was the grumpiest harvest morning of the year, even though it wasn’t raining, even though there would be only a few hours of work getting the three crops ready.

By golly, we were grumpy, as we harvested and trimmed and washed spinach, as we weighed carrots, as we used our biggest loppers to cut down the enormous stalks of Brussels sprouts.

“I don’t know what my problem is,” I finally said to my fellow farmer.

“Me neither,” he answered. “I mean, not your problem, my problem. I feel really grumpy.”

“I think it’s because we’re supposed to be done harvesting for the year.”

“Yeah! We’re supposed to be lying in bed, thinking of everything we don’t have to do with vegetables today!”

Well, we grumped our way through the harvest, and then there was the nice part of the day: seeing how happy people were about more vegetables, even carrots. Since this was a farm-only pick-up, rather than our usual farm or town pick-up, we even had a few town pick-up members that had never been to the farm. 

The farm tour went like this: this is our garden, where there used to be a lot of vegetables. This is our mushroom yard, where no mushrooms are growing. These are our horses, who are done working for the season. These are the farmers, also (mostly) done working for the season (except for rolling up irrigation, cleaning out greenhouses, and other trivial matters).

And these are the novels, waiting to be read, and the bonbons, waiting to be eaten.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Jan 8-14, 2025

Waste Not, Want Not

 Story #1: Recently this farmer attended a meeting that had nothing to do with farming. But it was harvest day, and in order to make the meeting, I had to rush out of the field, which meant I was in my working clothes.

My working clothes tend to be grubby and ragged, which generally doesn’t bother me, except when I have to go to a meeting of non-farmers. Then I might throw a decent layer over the grubby and ragged, which is exactly what I did.

Unfortunately, the meeting was held in a heated building, rather than a chilly field of vegetables, and I got way too hot very quickly. It was an interesting meeting, so I wasn’t really thinking as I shed my top layer, revealing the grubby and ragged.

At the break, however, a very nice person, whom I had just met, said very nicely to me, in tones of both awe and delicacy, “I’ve just been noticing your coat.” 

I laughed a little, suddenly realizing I had revealed the ragged and grubby. I said, “I’m a vegetable farmer, and this is my farm coat.”

“It’s a great coat,” answered the person. “I’m just thinking about the play I’m going to be in soon, and I need a certain kind of coat, because I’m playing a Scottish tramp from last century, and I wondered . . .”

Well. That made me laugh some more. “Do you want to try it on?” I asked, and he did. He even took the coat to his rehearsal, but alas, my grubby and ragged farm coat did not make its stage appearance, as the time period of the play required a knee-length coat.

Story #2: Recently a CSA member and I had a gripe session about wastefulness. She was mentioning a sustainability program that would assist farmers in purchasing electric tractors. 

Sounds like a great idea, I said. 

But, she went on, one of the requirements of the program is that the farmer disable any conventional tractors. 

We were both flummoxed. There is something amiss in that logic. To wreck a functional tractor? How is that sustainable?

Story #3: I was picking up my daughter from the train station in Brattleboro. It was another cold day, and as I waited outside on the platform, I was glad I was wearing the multiply-patched lined jeans that came from my dad. He wore them for many years of his farming life, and my mother patched and patched them. When I wear them I am warm, and when I wear them I can think of my mom and dad, both of whom I’ve lost in the last year and a half.

So there I was, warm, and thinking of my parents, when the train rushed in, and my 24 year old daughter arrived. “Wow,” she said, “You look cool in those pants!”

I was flattered. I looked cool at the same time I felt warm. Not only that, I was firmly in sustainability mode, which is also thrifty mode, which is also farming mode. 

Story #4: I grew up on a small family dairy farm, with “Waste not, want not” as a byword. I took it seriously. When I gave the rabbits fresh water, I emptied the eighth inch of water left in the bowl into the cow’s bucket. (Apparently, I thought that amount of stale water wouldn’t hurt a cow.) “Waste not, want not,” my mother chuckled.

There is another saying, from the Depression era: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” There is a lot of wisdom in that saying, whether it is in fashion or not.

Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Dec 11-17, 2024