The Hillsides We Leave Behind

When I was eight and my sister a toddler, our parents bought a farm. It wasn't a working farm, not one that supported us financially, but it had once worked to do just that and it held its farmness firmly in outward appearance. My parents, sister and I embraced it eagerly. It was an old place, 1850s at least, with a huge barn and three-story colonial farmhouse, perched atop a hill with a fabulous view of fields and the mountains across the valley. The house was named "Hillside," aptly so, and I was so proud that my address - back before house numbers were required by the post office - was simply that: Hillside. The house had an identity of its own that we took on when we moved in, and we loved it, each for our own reasons. While my father worked painstakingly on renovating the house and barn, fascinated by the old construction, the artifacts and stories each addition revealed and told, and the craftsmanship of each (rotting, but still solid) beam, the women in the family immersed themselves in everything else a colonial farm could offer.

We kept horses, one for each of us in a progression of creatures that, in hindsight, each reflected the stage of life and personality of its owner. My stubborn first pony when I was a 12 year-old tomboy was outgrown and replaced by a rebellious and ornery colt that took me years to train as I struggled equally through my teen angst. We rode our horses all over the hill, on trails we discovered and explored, on dirt roads that led to hidden parts of town we had never seen from the car. We found blackberry patches that we waded into, long sleeves and pruning shears fending off the brambles, and Mom taught us to make jam and pie with the gallons of berries my sister and I toted home. We trekked into the neighboring orchards and woods for grapevines that we wove into baskets and wreaths. We dabbled in chickens, in ducks, in pigs. We were right-hand daughters as Dad designed and built outbuildings that involved countless hours of planning and instruction and, finally, construction. We learned to rough it when Dad tore the roof off the house to discover a progression of rot that could only be remedied by tearing down the third floor, and then the second below it, until our shower was in the formal dining room and we skirted over boards across a floor-less living room to get to the kitchen. We saw the house rebuilt, and I sat as an heiress, overlooking the kingdom I imagined I would always have. My children would return to this house to play with their grandparents. Someday, my grandchildren would return to visit me while I tended Mom's old garden. It would be my inheritance, the one most important thing in the world to have: this house, this identity. Hillside, which was me.

The imaginings and dreams of a teenage girl seldom come true, and this was no exception. My parents divorced while I was in college, the house was sold, and new lives and dreams competed with the heartache of losing Hillside to another family. Time moved on, and my children now know nothing of that house. My husband has never seen it. Since it changed hands, the old barn - so lovingly restored to its post and beam glory - has burned to the ground and been rebuilt with a modern stable. My father and I went back several years ago and knocked on the door of the house, hoping to see it again, hoping for permission to feel the sense of ownership we immediately felt when we entered the driveway. The woman who answered the door was confused, skeptical, leery of our eagerness to claim knowledge of her home. She didn't allow us into the house. We never saw whether the cherry floors I stood on as Dad screwed them down from below were still there, if the banisters he hand-made still stood, if my old room still had the same view that I remembered from 15 years earlier. She did let us see the new barn and her horses, and she listened graciously while Dad reminisced about the property. We finally left, disillusioned and resentful somehow. It was no longer our home, but we realized we had hoped that somehow it was still our house. Dad moved back to his new home overseas and, I suppose, closed the chapter on his identity as it related to Hillside. I mourned its loss again and moved on, too.

But perhaps I have mourned when I should not have. Hillside the location was not my inheritance, but even if it had been, would not it have changed into something other than what I had growing up? The idyllic memory of my childhood in that place is forever preserved, likely even more glorious in memory than it really was because the place is no longer mine. What have I truly lost, then? The gift of Hillside was not its location, or its beauty, or the notoriety of having lived in such a prominent place in town. The true gift of Hillside was in the grapevine baskets and wreaths that I know how to make with my own children. It was in the love of work that starts early in the day and shows a return by noon. It was in the confidence that I can grow things, build things, make a life out of the land. I am stronger for having had such a childhood of privilege, one full of rough hands and beautiful views, but that is not where it must end; indeed, that must not be where it ends. I understand now that the purpose of living and loving and losing Hillside was in learning to pass it on. People can inherit land and homes, but if they don't continue to teach the lessons those homes hold at their cores, then the inheritance means nothing, and does a disservice to the word.

My husband and I have finally settled on a name for our farm, after several months of trying things on for size, feeling them out, discarding them. A true inheritance is not what we receive in tangible goods, but what we take with us in our souls, what we leave behind in a better state for others to use, to learn from, to pass on in turn. It is not connected to any one place or thing, but it is what my parents - and Hillside - truly did leave to me: the knowledge of how to grow, and build, and love. Hillside will exist long after our family's living memory of it has gone, just as it did long before we had ever seen it. Whatever Sam and I create, and wherever we create it, will do the same, God willing. And so I think back to my teenage self, who sat in awe of all that might someday be handed to her, who mourned its loss when the house was sold, and I tell her: Thank goodness you finally realized that your inheritance has been sitting beside you all along.

The Colors of Fall

Autumn in New Hampshire means colors. Leaf peepers come north in droves to view the trees; I line the shelf with jars. For the leaf peepers, the colors are deep reds, oranges, bright yellows. Crisp. For me, they are jewel tones more suited to a typical summer palette: pinks, purples, greens.

In other words, autumn means jelly.

All summer, I have been putting up berry and peach jams, tomato you-name-its, and beans. But autumn brings the jellies: apple, mint, grape. As a kid I made grape jelly with my mother every year, and I miss the arbor of Concord grapes with their deep, staining skins and sour middles, and the color of the jelly: black until you hold it to a sunny window, when the sun would strike cobalt through the jar. This year the grape jelly is sorely lacking, as there are no Concord grape vines running through my back yard yet, but we did liberate some grapes that were vining up an old maple tree at the local apple orchard. Their seeds are overwintering in the fridge and will, with luck, be next year's baby grape vines, and the future's jars of purple goodness. The mint is running amok through the herb garden and will be put up soon, with its yellow-green topaz color. This week is for the apples.

We picked up a bushel of apples last week through the local CSA, and have enjoyed our fill of pie and sauce. Now that the skins are starting to redden to the point of overripe, it's time for jelly-making. This year's batches jelled in the pot before they even reached a boil, there was so much natural pectin, and the house smells heavenly.

And then there's the color, pretty even today with the rain beating down outside. It's closer to a watermelon color than apple, thanks to the overly red skins. Maybe it's what it represents to me that really matters - warmth, memories of canning with my mother, the promise of fresh jelly through the winter - but there is nothing quite like the color of apple jelly to warm a chilly day: soft pink, translucent, its bubbles suspended perfectly. It's the little things. :)

Chicken Little

I have always wanted chickens. When I was a little girl we had horses, and my mother dabbled in other farm animals: a steer named Moo that we ate the following year, pigs for three years in a row (and I still remember all their names, and how delicious they were), ducks named Mike and Ike that we finally got rid of because all they did was poop in the yard. But never chickens. We tried once. Mom came home with a beautiful Bantam rooster (Henry) and five chicks. I spent countless hours in the barn playing with the chicks as they grew, hoping I could figure out whether they were hens or roosters, convinced they'd lay eggs any second and I'd miss it. Then one morning they were all perched on the barn beams with old Henry, crowing with adolescent voices for all they were worth. Yup - five new roosters. What were the odds?

Off they went to their next home. I don't know where they ended up, actually, but I was so disillusioned by the lack of cuddly egg layers I didn't really care.

The desire for chickens - well, hens - never left. Throughout my adulthood I have eyeballed each place I've moved to, trying to figure out how to coop a few birds. With my transient lifestyle, it has never been practical. So imagine my enthusiasm when we moved in here, with ample barn space, a coop already set up (my mother in law's long-time residents went into the freezer last year after they stopped laying), and the relative permanence to establish a flock. I admit, I went a little crazy, even for me.

We were late into the game. The pre-ordered chicks were already spoken for everywhere I looked. After a month of searching, I had just about given up on having chickens this year when we got a call from Agway. Our first acquisition was a chance set of three guinea keets that Agway had as leftovers. We named them Parsley, Sage and Rosemary, and I spent quite a bit of time gazing at them in their plastic tub. When they were about four weeks old, along came the first of the chicks: a set of five a little boy in the next town hatched from eggs, but couldn't keep. The kids and I named them Barley, Penelope, Puffin, Quiche and Chickadee, and they took up residence with the herb birds. It wasn't long before they all outgrew their little plastic tub, so out to the barn they went, heat lamp and all. There was now space in the brooder box, and my chick mania was in full swing, so 13 new chicks, hatched for me by a woman on Craigslist, went into the plastic box. Colin tried to name them all after condiments, but unlike our first five, who are all different breeds and easy to tell apart, these are all yellow and black barnyard mutts, and pretty much identical. He resorted to randomly pointing and saying, "That must be [ketchup/mustard/relish]." A week later we were in Blue Seal and heard the unmistakable sound of new keets peeping. With our meager flock of three guineas at home, I couldn't resist buying six more. Sam started rolling his eyes. When it rains, it pours...chicks.

About this time, we learned that the coop in the barn needed to go. My father in law is building an office above it, and the keets, as they reached their teen weeks, had started to squawk. Loudly. Beyond loudly. They'd put a construction site to shame for all the noise they could make with little to no provocation. We selected a smaller barn across the property, what used to be the blacksmith shop. It took us most of the summer, what with kids and schedules, but we finally managed to complete a new coop in there just last week. Now the issue was how to move 27 birds, including three adult guinea hens the size of turkeys?

With the help of a huge dog kennel and our neighbor's daughter, nicknamed "the Chicken Whisperer" for her ability to calm even terrified birds, the feat was managed with minimal damage to us or the birds. It took six trips - all the chickens went in two loads, then the six new keets, then one trip each for the three adult guineas, a feat that involved a blanket, a tunnel, and a lot of yelling and patience, and that probably would have won us a Funniest Home Videos award. They now reside in their outbuilding, squawking to their hearts' content. They still haven't been allowed outside, which pains me, but they need to establish roots in their new home first. I haven't built their fence yet, anyway.

left to right: Chickadee, Barley, Puffin, Quiche, and Penelope. Background: Parsley, Sage and Rosemary

Barley and Chickadee

But what is it about these birds? They won't lay for another couple of months, so there really isn't any purpose to them yet. They poop a lot, they are noisy, and they don't like to cuddle - in fact, they're downright alarmed by our presence most of the time. But I love them. I could stand in the coop and watch them for an hour if it weren't for the demands of my actual children. Sam found me last night at twilight, eye to eye with Barley, our one definite rooster, just chilling. We stared at each other for a good ten minutes, and I was loathe to leave. There's a peace in watching them go about their chicken business and act out their chicken politics and drama. There's such simple beauty in their innocent little bird eyes. I love the lay of Chickadee's feathers around her neck. I'm fascinated by the iridescent colors of Barley's tail. Penelope carries her leg feathers like a southern belle's ruffles. I really hope by some miracle the odds will stack the same way they did when I was a kid - impossibly to one side - and we won't have any more roosters; I don't know that I will be able to bear the freezer journey. At least my favorites, the first ones with names, are safe: one rooster, four hens. Perfect.

Winter Gardening

 Living as we do in the heart of New England, the concept of winter gardening involves greenhouses and cold frames, both of which we're keen to work with and get running this winter. In fact, a recent acquisition of four grape plants just went into the garden quite late in the season, so Sam built frames around them and mulched them to the point of live burial in anticipation of an early frost. It's been down pretty low the last few nights - 43 this morning - and in another month we can slap an old window over those newly transplanted roots and hope they'll weather the winter until they can take off in the spring. But a greenhouse is a long way off for us, and anything more than spinach might be a long shot as far as things we can eat from still-in-the-infant-stage garden this winter.

Unless the garden is in the basement.

Sam has been working hard to get our aquaponics system running in the basement in time to have plants producing for the winter. Not a small feat, but give Sam a project and he runs headlong into finishing it...and once again, succeeded. After a month of researching and watching Murray Hallam's videos to the point of memorization, and after weeks of puzzling over construction and siphon issues with his Dad, the system is working.  But now, what to plant?

His parents already had some plants in four hydroponic tubes, and those found themselves hooked into the system and are already doing well, but they were already established. The strawberries I picked up at Lowe's on the clearance rack in July, which had maybe one green leaf a piece, look like this a month later:

Yes, strawberry plants blooming in a basement in September. Woot! And I'm not sure what this plant is that his mother put in there, but it certainly is taking over the works:

But the aquaponics beds - really just 3' x 4' bins filled with gravel and a constant feed of rise-and-drain nutrient-rich water - have been sadly empty for a week or more, waiting for seedlings to sprout. There's not much that's more frustrating to a gardener than a garden waiting for plants that are unwilling to hurry up and be big enough to put in.

On a trip to Blue Seal for chicken food the other day, Sam wandered into the outdoor plant section. This time of year, the highlight is the display of mums, but we're all about edible plants this year, so Sam wandered by. At the far end of the section, he found a table of dilapidated Charlie Brown tomato plants, really nothing more than leggy stems with a few miniature tomatoes trying desperately to reach maturity in a mad gasp for the next generation. He asked what the shop owner wanted for them, and she said, "Take them. They're headed for the dump." Really? Is there anything else heading for the dump? Our ears perked, we peppered her with questions about the other plants out there. She, no doubt relieved not to have a dump run in her future, loaded us up with four grapes (the aforementioned cold frame residents), eight yellow pear tomatoes, two Jerusalem artichokes, a pot of chives, and two rose bushes. I would have taken the other three roses, but we were in the golf cart with the kids and it was all we could do to fit everything in. Jackpot!

Tonight the tomatoes had the honor of being the first plants to go into an aquaponics bed:

They're leggy and spindly, and one still had its fruit (thus the noose to hold it up!), but this is fine. The idea here is that they grow up rather than out, so with luck we will be training them up around the light frame soon. The chives went into the corner of the bed, the artichokes will go into a field that will someday house pigs (they are excellent fodder) so they can spread on their own, and the roses will decorate the new chicken barn.

All in all, a winter garden with some promise.

Back on Track

A lot has happened in two years. Three moves, a new baby, and suddenly we find ourselves back at the site of the original garden (abandoned last year due to a move that took us an hour and a half away), but for good this time, not just to visit. In May we moved into the old section of the farmhouse Sam grew up in, and have made the first push into putting down official homesteader roots.

We dug a new garden in the yard - easier to water and get to, but more Japanese beetles. So far we haven't seen any squash bugs or Colorado potato beetles - perhaps they all stayed in the old plot - but we don't have much for variety that they might like to eat, either. Due to the late-season move and my lack of time to get anything done with a baby on my hip, the garden is rudimentary to say the least. That's okay; it's a start.

Despite a small planting, we have a bumper crop of tomatoes and cukes (I put up about ten gallons of crock pickles before the powdery mildew made off with the late season cucumber crop), and will have a decent crop of soup beans and soy. This year we only planted Dutch brown and Jacob's cattle for soup beans. My goal next year is to increase that to two more varieties, as the beans make such an excellent storage crop. Today's picking pulled in a fairly good haul of green beans along with the first round of dried-on-the-plant brown beans, ready for the kids to shell:
 

Sam has invested a lot of time into permaculture research, and to that end we ordered but have not yet received several varieties of nut and fruit trees. They should be here this fall. We put in elderberry and strawberries already, and hope for a good yield next year.

On the non-garden front, we have started a new flock with 9 guinea keets and 18 chicks. They're still young, and still waiting for us to have time to finish their new coop in an outbuilding closer to the garden (where the guineas will be able to eat all the Japanese beetles they can handle). More on them, and on our progress, in future posts.

Where did six months go?!

We lost track of our blog, it seems. Was it the crazy work schedule? The garden that took over our lives with weeds and zucchini? Our wedding? Who knows. But here we are at the end of the harvest, and no progress updates to show for it.

Suffice it to say, the garden was a huge success. Because we don't live on site, keeping up with the weeds was our biggest challenge (next to the Colorado potato beetles...yuck!). We averaged two trips a week, and each time we went the weeds were right back where we'd found them the first time. It took a good, solid day to weed the whole garden, so Sam started using a scythe more and more. Rather than weeding fully, we opted to "mow" and just weed directly around the roots.

In the end, we had a bumper crop of crook-neck squash; lost all the corn; had more peas and beans than we could handle (and dried & vacuum-sealed most into quart Masons for storage); a late crop of tomatoes that yielded 5 batches of salsa and several of tomato jam (we would have had enough salsa and tomato jam to open our own shop, had the frost not gotten the rest of the late crop); enough carrots and lettuce for several salads (but the matured faster than we could get there to pick them!); and most of the potatoes, although still in the ground awaiting final dig-up, survived the beetles.

A few early-season photos (mid-summer):

Sam shows off the peas (which grew over the top of the trellis and then tipped it over - definitely a prolific variety!):

The pea vines were quite possibly the most beautiful things in the garden this year:

The dragon carrots:

Our engagement photo, in front of the pea trellis:

Things are Growing!

It's been a long time since our last post, but that doesn't mean we've been slacking. On the contrary, we spend so much time in the garden, there's just no energy left to write about it!

In the last month, just about all the seeds have come up. The limas are a no-show, which is a bummer, but we had hopes that a few late-bloomers might emerge. No dice, and at this point we're thinking that they're not going to show at all.  We've had a week of really warm weather and things are sprouting like mad, so if they're not convinced to get out of the ground soon, we'll give up and replant, or turn their bed into something else.

We had a cold snap last week and lost nearly all the Vermont Crans, Dutch Browns, and Bumbles. Thankfully we had bought the seeds in bulk so were able to replant most of what we lost, but there was a bit of a mourning period for our lost beans. Here are a couple of the survivors, who really only survived by being very late sprouters, so they weren't all the way up when the frost took the rest of the plants:

On the other hand, the beans, radishes and lettuce LOVED the cold and took advantage of it to bust out with new growth.

I accidentally pulled a baby radish while weeding, and am very excited about the color and size so far (yeah, it's upside down. The photo won't stay fixed. Grrr.).

Sam has been working really hard to get the irrigation system up and running (some soaker hoses seen in the lettuce and peas), and has finally set up 2/3 of the garden on timers. Every morning the soakers come on in stages, so the beds all have a nice drink before it gets too hot. We still need to get the other side of the garden set up, but so far, so good.

He has also been busting-hump to get the potatoes in. We put an ad in Freecycle for tires, thinking we'd get a few for doing the seed potatoes, and ended up with more truckloads than we can handle. With some of them, Sam has set up eight potato "beds" (which will be stacked as they grow) for next year's seed potatoes; the rest of the 'taters went into the garden in a long bed, covered with shredded paper:

Within days, we had sprouts:

This photo was taken three days ago, before the hot spell; today you can barely see the hose through the sprouts. Yeehaw!

The garden plan has changed considerably as we have worked in the new space, so we need to redo the map. Someday we'll remember to bring paper and pen to the garden and write it all down! We are waiting another week or two to set out the tomatoes and peppers, but in the last couple weeks we seeded the watermelons, pickling cukes, pumpkins, three sisters (corn/crookneck squash/pole beans), quinoa, replacement beans, potatoes, beets, nasturtium, zucchini, and yellow squash. The blue corn will go into the tomato row as soon as I weed the bed. I pulled up all the black plastic and logs that marked the walkways when we set up the garden, and have started mowing the grass along the paths - seems easier than trying to keep ahead of all those weeds, and it should keep them from going to seed and spreading overmuch.

And of course, I must close with a gratuitous dork shot of the garden master-mind himself! ;)