Heirloom Harvest

View From Above

Afternoons and evenings around the farm you might see Graham and his remote control airplane looping above the fields. Graham is a former hot-air ballon enthusiast who says that he landed in the fields about 15 years ago at a time when there was no one farming the site.

If you're interested in what the little airplane might see from way up there, this satellite image (courtesy of Google) might give you some idea. To get your bearings: The cemetery one typically drives through is at lower left.

Blog That Frog

I haven't been down to the farm this spring (your editor speaking here) but John tells me that at night, he's hearing spring peepers. (That link will let you hear the sounds of spring peepers, too.)

I am, too, and tonight -- while I was taking out the trash in the apartment complex I'm living in for a while, with my family -- I heard them again. And so I took a flashlight around to the area behind the playground and temporarily borrowed a frog from the swamp. This is Shrewsbury, but the frogs are the same species that are calling down in the Great Cedar Swamp near the farm in Westborough.

Now, spring peepers are not quite the indicators of water quality that something like a caddisfly is. But they mean that free water is close enough to the forest so that the impossibly tiny frogs can overwinter in the woods' shelter.

This is the point of responsible farming, of good food in definitions that extend past taste. The peepers are next to the farm field; the spring is the time that the plants go in but not the time that planting establishes hegemony over the land. The farm is fit into the landscape; the landscape is not subordinated to the farm.

Close Neighbors

Animals are having their impacts. Deer have been an issue. They did find a few crops that I was experimenting with carrying over from the winter season, but all of those things I was trying to carry over were eaten by the deer. We tried to cover them with Remay netting, but the wind caught it and blew it off and the deer moved right in. They ate turnips, not just the tops, the bulbs too. I have never seen deer eat turnips.

There’s also a bunch of squirrels nesting in the old bee boxes in the barn. They’re really not harming anything there - and better that they’re there than nesting in some of the other farm equipment. So we just leave them.