Keeping Guard?

The Farm Dog? (Burping)

Tomorrow, it's back to writing about the budget. Today, April 4, in honor of The Farm Dog's 11th birthday, a few thoughts on farm security.
Let me begin with a recommendation: if you want to protect your crops from woodchucks, don't get one of these (see photo at left). This is a very cute dog: 40-45 pounds of mixed variety shelter dog, containing sheltie without the herding instinct; spaniel without the pointing, flushing or retrieving instinct; basset hound without the  howl; beagle without the sense of smell; and probably some chihuahua without whatever it is they were designed for. Off duty, he goes by the name of Curtis (not sure why: he came with that handle). He occasionally flushes a songbird from the grass beneath the bird feeder, makes a stab now and then at chasing five minutes behind a squirrel, and once he caught a mosquito and ate it. I think he sometimes looks at the deer when they come as close as the back porch. He's a nice guy, and he does a great job of making sure that I, the farmer, am where I am supposed to be (the kitchen, preferably). Since our vegetable garden has a good fence and the deer seem to respect it, that has been fine. There was a resident rabbit for a short time two summers ago, but it came and went. Supposedly there is a red fox in our neighborhood, and so we didn't really need the mad skills of The Farm Dog until the very end of day one of the Pocket Farm endeavor.
     It was about 5:30pm, and after a day of digging goutweed, I had gone inside to shower and make dinner when the Patient Spouse called from upstairs, "Hey! Look out the window!"
     About 30 feet from the house, a giant woodchuck was ambling across the yard, looking, I swear, from me, to the vegetable garden, to the farm-plot-in-progress. He had that fat cat look of entitlement, too. There was a tiny bead of drool on his whiskery undershot chin. He was salivating for locally grown produce. It was the first woodchuck I had seen or heard of in the neighborhood since we moved here four-plus years ago. He or she must have picked up on the optimistic vibes emanating from my seed-catalog-riddled mind on that historic day of groundbreaking.
     Nothing, and I mean nothing, is so deadly to growing succulent annual crops of any kind than a woodchuck. They are ravenous and catholic in their tastes: asparagus to zinnias, they will try it, and they will like it. A woodchuck's life is predicated on the assumption that any crop grown by humans is in all ways superior to that found in nature. They are methodical: they start at the end of the row nearest their two-or-more-front doors and work their way down. They feed at dawn, dusk, all day, and probably at night, too—in fact, I think they do all their sleeping from December through early March, so they can pretty much operate 24/7 the rest of the agricultural year. They can dig and tunnel better than any Marine. Fat as they are, they can also climb fences. Smoke bombs, as far as I can tell, upset my sleep far more than theirs. Trapping and transporting these guys isn't as humane—or effective—or legal—as it sounds. Only a good farm dog can help in the fight against woodchucks, in my frustrating and lengthy experience. I did (prior to Himself pictured above) have a collie who quickly and effectively dispatched three during her lifetime. I called The Farm Dog, and ran outside in sock feet with Chuck in my sights and the Man in Curls at my side.
    He stopped to check a few pee spots on the way. I took off after Chuck, who beat it for the stack of lumber behind the garage, where he (or she) hunkered down like a trembling buffalo robe and glared up at me with slitted eyes. I grabbed a board. Chuck started to chatter its long, ivory-colored chompers at me. Every time I averted my gaze, it lunged.
     A word of assurance to my mother, who is surely reading this: this tale does not get much more violent. The board was used for purposes of physical discouragement, but I am notoriously bad at killing anything, even for mercy or in what might be considered economic self-defense. Most of the five-minute exchange that followed involved a loud verbal discourse (me) and a staring match (both of us). Where was The Farm Dog? He sniffed from a safe distance, caught sight of that pair of yellowy incisors gnashing, and decided woodchuck was on his list of Things Other Dogs Pursue. Granted, this is more help than I received from the Patient Spouse (although he did come outside later on more of a post-war consulting basis).
    Maybe 11 is too old for more than cursory protective services? The neighbor's dog, to whom The Farm Dog is semi-officially espoused and who is of equal antiquity, has a strong instinct for finding and burying all manner of post-decease "prey" (including the cardboard I laid down for mulch), lets no screen door stand in her way, and has been known—in her youth—to keep this small nation-state safe from poultry. Her coloration also makes her serviceable as a stand-in Holstein from time to time. So maybe she had words with Chuck.  He has not returned in the two weeks since this bit of opening-day excitement.
     There are horse-whisperers and baby whisperers, dog whisperers and lately, chicken whisperers. Woodchuck shouters? Maybe that's an unexplored avenue I can monetize. In the meantime, if you're in the market for a farm dog,  I know where you can't get one. But if you see this fellow, wish him a happy birthday (and send him home; he's probably celebrating in at your compost pile.) Hey: Bloom where you are planted.
   

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.