all the pretty milk cows

princess and hemlock. they are our jersey milkers. princess calved just recently and so is producing the most magnificent gallons of creamy milk. milking has become my favorite time of the farm day. 7 in the brilliant fall morning and 7 in the chilled and damp night.

to be that close to a cow. to a sweet large animal like princess or hemlock. to breathe in their mud grass sweet scent with your head resting on their side. to get odd and large muscles in your once delicate hands. to give the first spots of milk to the farm kitten. to sit there and milk and talk and sing with girlfriends you feel like you've known forever. to return to the milk house with gallons of fresh warm milk. to turn that into butter and yogurt and ricotta and mozzarella. all with your own hands. this is the beautiful side of farming. the part that gets me out of bed at 6h while the sun is making her way across the berkshires. all to start the day not with coffee or tea or the paper but with these two gorgeous cows.

we are tent people now

more detailed photos to follow this week. suffice to say it is stellar and was a military issued winter tent made on 15 august 1950.

for now we are harvesting cukes to pickle. the morning's milking is done. breakfast is settled in our stomachs and the early fall sun is warming our cold toes and legs.

milk maid-ing

started milking a cow at sunrise today. and nick learned how to bake challah. firsts all around on the farm.

the boston-side of farm things.

we spent our first day back on a farm yesterday. we went to a farm outside of boston that we will be working on through the winter. they are a non-certified organic veggie farm with over 40 acres in cultivation. we have been hired to introduce livestock to their acreage in the coming year. chickens and pigs most likely. we spent the morning talking cover crops and local predators (a coyote mother who likes to watch them garden from the compost pile). we talked winter shelters for chickens. we talked heat sources and found a great solution from a woodstove in an old green house.

it felt good to talk shop again. it felt less good to spend 5 hours bent over in the hot sun harvesting arugula and kale and potatoes and cilantro. but we had to put in some solid time with their college-infused garden crew. show we aren't the bitter and wizened 27/28 year olds that we appear to be.

and so today, we are headed over to the berkshires. to begin our fall apprenticeship in the hippy hills of western massachusetts. where we will sing a lot of songs. and make a lot of farmer's cheese. and bake a lot of bread. and have general merriment and be generally productive. and be reunited with my rag tag flock of animals.

we don't have internet at this new farm. so i will do my best to communicate to you our goings ons. but a fair warning, that you may be in for a more heavily loaded iphone picture blog in the close future.

wish me luck.

in iphone photos of a friend's farm:
1. happily colored honey bees. doing their job. in their little honey bee village.
2. flowers picked for nick's sister.
3. out of focus photo of ants devouring a melon. 
4. pop-corn.  

holiday-ing farm-ing fools.

24 days into a 25-day holiday from farm work and the guilt of days filled with self indulgent laziness has overtook. well, it overtook about 20 days ago but i was still too dedicated to the holiday to write to you. i asked last week (was it actually 2 weeks ago??)  if farming and holidaying could be reconciled. when i wrote that, i had the inkling it could be...last week i was not so positive. and today i gather Yes and No.

its been 24 days since i've awoken to the rooster's cry. since i've raced the sun across the lower garden to rescue ripened tomatoes and perfectly sized okra, eggplant, and fragrantly screaming melons. over three weeks since i've filled a pigs wallow or combed a donkey's back or packed the v-dub full to hawk our wares at the nearest town.

i grew accustomed to a life of leisure this august with an appalling ease reserved ---one would imagine-- for a woman not seriously applied to life as a Farmer. it is appalling. and alarming. what does it say about our future in such a physically and mentally demanding field if we schedule it as such to be spoiled mercilessly rotten one month every year?

i can say to you that the idleness of holiday, whilst welcome in my bones and deepest muscles, has not stopped my mind from attempting to bring the farm to vacation. we've sought after pigs and cows and chickens and gardens in canada and the cape and now here in boston. i've had mom kayak with me over to the next island with a bag of compost to feed pigs. this morning we had our toe-headed nephews picking tomatoes and chard and squash with us in the garden next door. nick has moved them on to blueberries for this evening's cobbler. we've walked, hiked, biked, and driven anywhere we can to find eggs up to farm-snob snuff.

the time with family has been invaluable. that much is obvious. that much might not be so desperately needed in the coming years now that we live near our most precious people. the time to sleep in, rest bones, think about the evening's cocktails and eat processed foods. the time to spend with your boyfriend, your love, your partner, without worrying and stressing about the farm. it is all welcome. it is all needed. we need to have some measure --however small-- of balance in our lives so that we don't burn out in this life. that may seem like a form of betrayal to the sincerity of this life.  it may seem convenient or spoiled, but i can tell you, from one hard year on the farm that a form of Time Away is paramount. 

but the time away from the animals needs to be done with a more thoughtful execution. nick and i feel such deep gratitude to our family and our friends who have helped us care for our flock this summer. we were so desperate to get out of the hot south. off the farm. into the nurturing holds of our families that we didn't dedicate enough effort to the acclimation of every animal and we paid dearly for our haste. we lost our sweet rocco-cat to the cape and we are culpable. it is on us for dragging him all around. next summer. i will not let the anxiety...the intoxication of the prospect of a holiday overcome. next summer we will take fewer days and do more preparation. because we are Farmers now. and a Farmer cannot take weekends or holidays or sick days like s/he was accustomed to taking. and a Farmer has to remember that s/he is responsible to the flock...to the crops first. rest can come. rest does come. and should come. but it needs to come in different shapes and sizes than it did before.

and so here you have my thoughts. that took me the better part of three weeks to form. that farming and holidaying are not and should not be exclusive of each other but their relationship needs to be reworked and tinkered with, just like everything on a good farm. now to enjoy the penultimate day of vacation.