The First Idea

My farm site (and the farm dog?)

 The first idea was —is—to have a farm of my own. I just quit my job as manager of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) at Hancock Shaker Village, the site of a former utopian society in western Massachusetts. I had spent  five years there, launching the growing end of their new CSA program, which turned a few depleted gardens and some neglected herb beds, plus an acre of freshly turned sod and mustard-infested ground into an affordable way to show subsistence vegetable farming at this wonderful, non-profit museum. In my time, I had seen the program grow to feed 80-plus shareholders happily from May through the last day of October. I met wonderful workers from the mentally and physically handicapped to retired farmers to middle-aged volunteers who had never grown a vegetable in their lives but were willing to give it their all. I have gardened since I was old enough to hold a trowel, and have done so professionally and in my own gardening space(s) for all of my adult life. My job at Hancock was the best job I have ever held: I took joy in refining my lifelong knowledge as a vegetable grower, perennial gardener, seed saver and pruner. I got to know the texture of the soil, the turn of each apple bough in the ancient orchard, and the  distinct rhythms of that very special place on earth. All that time, I wished for a farm of my own, and for the full power to make decisions based, not on others' preconceptions, but on the callings of the seeds and soil. Then suddenly, it was mid-March, I was embarking on my sixth year, and I found myself in an untenable situation: work under the guidance of a person I no longer respected, or leave. I left.
      Here is what I came home to. I live on a one-acre plot of land in a suburban area of Western Massachusetts. The house my husband and I bought four-plus years ago was once the barn (pigs are rumored to have lived there) for the adjoining property, which bears the marks of having been the sort of pre-modern place where everyone in the neighborhood kept a small garden and had a flock of chickens and maybe a pig, goat, or other small stock. Uphill, beyond that row of cedars with the obvious browse line, is the more recent history of my community: a row of McMansions that capitalize on the view across the river valley and loom over our modest early-20th-century working class neighborhood like cruise ships moored in a lobsterman's harbor.
     The soil here is an unknown, more or less. It has produced a substantial portion of our freezer fodder (our vegetable garden is downslope of this picture). It also fosters an almost perfectly-curated and complete collection of the biggest invasive plant bullies in the area: honeysuckle, buckthorn, Norway maple, autumn olive, multiflora rose, bittersweet and grape vines shoulder their way into an undercover of goutweed, Canada thistle, fragmites, and garlic mustard. Yup, it's really all there, on just one acre. Gray and red-twig dogwoods are the only natives worth encouraging. The grayish-brown color in this picture is a blend of dead stems of goldenrod and thistle in an area so fearful and depressing, I've done nothing with it since we moved in. It is a haven for fireflies and mosquitoes, a deer path for three resident foragers, and a place to haul brush for burning and cornstalks too thick for the compost heap. But it is also out of the general use of trips to the firewood pile and out of the way of girls throwing softball pitches and toddlers learning to ride two-wheeled bikes. There is ample sun until 3:00 or later. The soil is well-rested and has a nice dark look and feel. Drainage from those golf course lawns and long paved drives in mansionland above makes the soil moist, and it has a heavy texture hinting at fertility-and-water-holding clay of the sort I've always found most conducive to good growing.
    Now: how to turn it into a farm? Follow this blog, and can watch (and learn? and laugh?) as I figure it out: day-by-day, shovelful by shovelful, seed by seed. Whenever I have doubted my choices in life (which have always prioritized motherhood and dirt under my fingernails), my greatest words of comfort to myself—you might call it my mantra—have come to be: Bloom where you are planted. I hope to be able to do just that, at long last, in a very committed way. That's the first idea.