"The fresh and crisp air of the country reminds us that our blood surges from of the natural world and how tied we are to the sprung rhythms of earth and sky, weather and season."
~ Kilroy J. Oldster Dead Toad Scrolls
It has been a year now on Fat Hummingbird Farm. We have now completed a full cycle of seasons, a full cycle of 'the farm'.
I have learned a few lessons through the course of this year, a few 'home truths' as my mother used to call them.
1. The value of silence and open space
I am not saying the silence is complete. There are chickens bickering and dogs barking and the sound of the chainsaw in our neighbour's woods. There is the rattle and bang as logging trucks hit the pothole in the road near our house. But I mean the overall peace of things. How the brrr of the cicadas of a warm afternoon lull me into a doze. How the trilling of the peepers in the dark of night act like a soporific lullaby. There is space, land, at Fat Hummingbird Farm. And in that space I can stretch my arms, I can stretch my legs, I can stretch my sight and my mind. And within that space is peace. And, truth be told, if you ignore the occasional sour note, the bickering chickens do actually sing. Quietly, in a sedate muttered timbre. An undertone to the songbirds' constant joyful hymns.
2. The importance of earthworms
Earthworms are valuable to one's soil and are like the miner's canary - lack of them denotes poor soil and land that is in need. As a child, after a rainstorm, I could often be found on the front sidewalk, in tears, vainly attempting to resuscitate drowned earthworms by picking them up and throwing them back into the dirt. Now I am aware of how very important they are to the soil, to our land. I still pick them up and throw them back to the dirt when I find them - racing the chickens so the worms have a chance to burrow back into the soil before they become chicken cuisine. I have learned to squeeze soil in my hand to see how arable it is. If an earthworm crawls between your fingers in the process this is a good thing. I feel, unlike when I was a child, that I am finally saving them - encouraging them to stay and live on our land. Turning our land from needful to thankful.
3. Everything relies on the weather
Weather is one of the greatest unknowns. The seasons are fairly consistent, overall. We will eventually move from one to the other. Intellectually we know this. But this spring was long, cold, and very wet. We (and the farmers around us) are about a month behind in growing. The water from mountain springs dribbles a good lengthy soak down our hayfield making it still, in June, boggy and wet. We have taken to calling it a 'water meadow', as I knew them in England. A field that floods with water when there is a lot of rain - in our case exacerbated by the springs streaming down from the mountains. We check the weather first thing when we get up and the next day's weather last thing at night. It is about the only section of the evening news-hour on TV that we actually watch. Not convinced that either the weather person or our phone weather app is telling the complete truth, we obsessively keep checking for changes throughout the day. We decide on farm chores to be completed on any given day by the 'percentage' of rain certainty or how strong the wind will be blowing. The weather decides for us on what days colourful rows of laundry will hang in yards up and down the roads. The weather dictates how many tractors rumble up and down on the road in front of the house with seeder, or harrower, or thresher in tow. Whether they rumble hurriedly or leisurely.
4. There is joy in small things
Back in the city, sightings of new blooms or such things were, for the most part, inconsequential or unimportant. But I have found that since we have come to Fat Hummingbird Farm, those same things have become momentous. I have been watching the ditches and hills for lupines. They were blooming at the time that we arrived and I was so taken with them. I am looking for them now as a sort of 'anniversary' event. The first tree swallow to come and nest in a neighbour's bird box is noteworthy, as are the arrival of barn swallows to the new barn across the road. The first wood turtle to emerge from the frozen mud is eagerly anticipated. We await tornadoes of chimney swifts and the swoop of bats emerging from winter hibernations. The Black Locusts have been taking their sweet time leafing out and I watch every day to see if their honeyed flowers have yet bloomed. The wild phlox can be depended on, though, and lines our stream bed and ditches with their white and purple blooms. And, of course, the wee creature for which our farm was named - the hummingbirds - were knocking at our windows right on time in May, impolitely demanding that their feeders be put out. So far we appear to have a half dozen of them. Babies abound - calves, lambs, piglets, rabbits, birds, squirrels, racoons, foxes, foals, and fawns. Each sighting of a new baby in a field or pasture or tree is a celebratory moment.
5. Having a farm is a hell of a lot of work
We knew we would be 'starting over', that there would be a lot of work involved in building the gardens like the ones we had left behind. We knew also, at least hypothetically, that we would have more and different challenges to growing things than we had had in suburbia. We have far more stone than we knew. The soil is far more clay than arable. The farm has not been worked in any way for a very long time. Where the plants and fruit trees and flowers may be slow to adjust and grow, the weeds are not. Where we fight the water where it should not be in some places we must come up with inventive ideas to get the water to other places where it needs to be. The front door screen no longer fits the frame after the winter cold and has basically disintegrated and some shingles have disappeared from the side of the house in the winter winds. We have had racoons in the ceiling and squirrels in the walls. We were unable to live trap any of them. Removing all of the deadfall that the spring thaw reveals is a BIG job.
But we have also had so much help. A neighbour helps to keep our hayfield in check by taking the hay off occasionally. He helps to keep our pasture in check by putting his cows and calves on it periodically. Another neighbour shared the cost of a tractor mower so we can have some control over the grass on the couple of acres the house sits on and up around the berry bushes - making tick hunting a little easier for the hens. Yet another neighbour has offered his digger to dig a trench to control the water in the water meadow. Another neighbour has offered their teenaged kids to help with some of the grunt work. Another neighbour plows out our driveway and mailbox in the winter. And yet another brought a truckload of manure for our gardens and, when bringing it, brought along his own work crew of his two sons so all the work of shovelling it into the field did not fall to us.
6. The country road is community
When we first moved here we would walk our country road. We knew next to no one along it; we were strangers who sometimes received a tentative wave from a porch, or were ignored. Now we have a goodly sense of who is in what house, what the history of that house and sometimes the family is. We know a lot of people by name - can lift a hand in a heart-felt wave and have it returned just as heartily. Sometimes we get invited in for tea or, conversely, do the inviting in for coffee. Our porch has become a communication portal. Friends honk when they drive by. And we honk when we drive by their places up and down the road. People call out hellos on their walks, or jogs, or cycles past the house. We can watch the daily habits and chores of other farmers from the front porch. The postman enjoys it when he has an excuse (a parcel!) to come up our driveway; he admires our heritage chickens and always has a word or two about the weather and how often it makes him cut his grass. When we are walking on our country road he waves as he passes us - as does the UPS man. Once a neighbour and friend rode her horses up our driveway just to say hello. When she canters along the track below our pasture she whoops and waves. When we walk the country road now it is a means of communication, of community. We belong.
7. A farm is alive
Fat Hummingbird Farm was part of a land grant that originated in 1784 and has been actively farmed in one way or another since 1872. We live on a farm that was part forest, part wetlands, part orchard, and part pasture. All those parts tell something of our farm's past. We live with animals both domesticated and wild, with plants, with flowers, with a garden. I walk on this land every day and never get bored. Over the course of this year I have seen that there is always something new to see and learn. I sit on my porch, which oversees our pasture, another pasture, and beyond that the river and the valley and watch the cows graze, or the turkey buzzards circling high up in the sky, or the wisps of burning brush on the opposite mountain. Hummingbirds buzz me as they careen from feeder to feeder and there is the constant comings and goings of heavy bumblebees.
The soul-quenching realization that the farm is very much alive - the non-human around us, the flora and fauna, are profoundly aware and responsive. The Black Locust trees talk constantly. They are a favourite roost of the hummingbirds that seem to delight in their conversations. Cows play with each other, they form friendships, and calves even become best friends - seeking each other out first thing in the morning when their mothers send them out to play. Chickens panic loudly if they have misplaced the rest of their flock, calling and calling until they are back together again - a community. Willows can physically move themselves close to water. Seeds can hold themselves back from germinating and then erupt like fireworks when you walk past them. The wind can bring the smell of seashells and salt down the mountain to blend with the heady smell of timothy hay. Birds sing the sun up and peepers sing the moon up. We can't do that.
So . . . just a few of the things I have learned in our first year here. I guess, basically, Place, this farm, needs a witness. I cannot view this place indifferently, distantly, nor without empathy. I cannot just look, I cannot use only my eyes. I must actually behold this farm - spiritually. I must also hearken - not just hear. As we, ourselves, have intent, sense, heart - so does this place, this farm. David Abram, the philosopher and naturalist, said that each place has its own mind, its own psyche - a place-specific intelligence shared by we humans that dwell in this place of Fat Hummingbird Farm. But it is also shared by the coyotes yapping in the valley, by the foxes and the spiders, the ferns and the wild phlox. By all of us beings that live at Fat Hummingbird Farm.
A year at Fat Hummingbird Farm. We arrived just before mid-summer and have come full circle to mid-summer again. Wow, hard to imagine it has been so long already. We are staying. Knowledge of this place and where we are is intertwined with the knowledge of who we are. We are home.
