Our working bunny
A white rabbit with pink eyes moved into my garage this week. He’s a working fool. Everyday Cottontail (he came pre-named) commutes to work in the back of my daughter’s silver truck. When he gets to his workplace, he’s put into the fields and ordered to eat. He eats all the grass and weeds poking up through the holes in his cage and is then moved on to another spot when he’s finished. In this way, he is both mowing and fertilizing... Read More
What we’re missing
Sometimes I wonder what we’ve done to ourselves. This week, I was in a local farm stand in Virginia, where the strawberries are already ripe and abundant. While leaning over them salivating, I heard a young woman say, “And, look, they even smell like strawberries!” Good grief, she was right. So right that when I started thinking about all those huge, odorless strawberries I’d been eating much of the rest of the year, I became very sorrowful. Summer’s... Read More
I’m thinking about pig tonight
There’s a pig at the Farm Institute that recently had a litter of thirteen pigs. When I saw her this week, she was resting while all her cute piglets burrowed into a pile of hay, climbed over each other, and every once in a while clambered back to mama for a little nip. When they’re born, piglets have teeth, including some sharp incisors that must make the mother very uncomfortable. The teats of some nursing pigs get so sore that they bleed;... Read More
Fresh produce
Summer is coming. My daughter is getting ready to transplant her seedlings to the outside. Morning Glory Farm has plowed the fields across from the farm stand and will open in May. Beetlebung Farm put up a new greenhouse. Flowering baskets are for sale at Stop and Shop, and gardening centers were mobbed on Saturday. Thanks to Alan Muney for this photo, reminding us that soon the tomatoes will be fresh, the eggs local, and the streets clogged. (And... Read More
Home
I find “home” a loaded word. You can either walk into a place you call “home” that you haven’t seen for a while and feel delighted or chilled. You can feel trapped or freed. You can feel old resentments well up or a great letting go of bad ones. I returned “home” yesterday after two months in Mexico. It was cold and rainy, and I’m a little sick from having traveled for roughly 36 hours. (Nothing like the trek to the Vineyard to make... Read More
Beauty, Part 2
I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes. ~e.e. cummings Read More
Birthing pigs
My daughter, Lily, is a farmer. So is my son, Christian. This more or less came out of nowhere – the last farmers in my family…well, there were no last farmers in my family that anyone remembers. My dad and mom kept a big garden, which I hated working in, so perhaps the love of dirt jumped from them to my son and daughter. I’ve told Jim and Debbie Athearn of Morning Glory Farm that they more or less hijacked Lily several years ago, when she... Read More
Vineyard innocence
One of the things I really like about the Vineyard is its sense of innocence. You encounter it specifically in all the flimsy metal lockboxes you find around the Island, with jars of change and instructions for how much you should pay for eggs or flowers or yogurt. (I say metal lockboxes, but once I came upon a child’s cash register; push one of the big, brightly colored buttons and you instantly had a magical place to deposit your dollars and... Read More
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