Agriculture

Last week after I pondered culling my two oldest ewes for the benefit of the rest of the flock, my friend Steve excitedly texted: “I love the sheep trolley problem…. But it doesn’t mean as much if you don’t really pull in each character. Really calculate the consequences. .. Describe the young healthy sheep. What do you owe them? Describe the older sheep. How much do you love them? Weigh their lives in front of us. Let us see it… I say trolley problem the shit out of it all next week.” Steve is passionate about the written word, and has spent most of his working life writing and editing. But he dictates, rather than types, his texts, which sometimes mangles words. The first time I read the term “sheep trolley problem” I figured the software had transformed some complicated word into a nonsensical expression, and that the meaning would eventually become clear. The second time, several texts later, I was still mystified, so I asked “what is being transcribed as trolley problem?” Steve became equally mys

On a cool but sunny late November day, I enjoy observing my flock of sheep dotting the pasture. On the whole, they look sleek, fat and healthy. But the two senior ewes, Nilufer (13 years old) and the unnamed number 45 (12 years old, rear left, behind her chubbier flock-mates, in the picture above) present a somewhat sad contrast. Both have been scrawny for years, so scrawny that for the last couple of years I’ve only had them sheared in the Spring, not both Spring and Fall like the rest of the flock. We decided that with little body fat they would need their full pelt to keep warm; their wool would not grow back fast and thick enough to insulate against winter weather. I had always assumed that the old ewes’ scrawniness was just a function of their age, much as many humans diminish as they get older. Both ewes have hearty appetites; both can keep up with the flock as it moves about; and both lambed successfully last year. These are all indicators of decent health. They are both very people friendly. But se

When friends tell me I’m too old to be going up on ladders, I resist. When the storm windows have swelled over the summer with basement moisture, barely fitting in the window frames, I persist. Yet finally, when I reach the last two upstairs windows, and the 20 lb. storms get stuck sliding into place, and I begin feeling insecure jiggling them free and adjusting them atop the extension ladder, I desist. Resist, persist, desist. The progression of age. I must concede the limitations of my 70 years. If I were still in need of confirmation, it came when I realized that neither of the handymen I would immediately consider calling, both younger than me, were men I would feel comfortable asking to go up on an extension ladder to complete the task. I must now search out a younger, stronger, more agile person, the right man to take on the short but precarious project. I do not yet shy away from physical labor. I was pleased to keep up with the pace of two considerably younger men as two hay ricks worth of

In the fog of a frosty fall morning, I trudge across white crusted grass, brushing past ice-laden mugwort leaning into the path, on my way to the barn. The milkiness of the air seems replicated somehow inside my brain, as I try to break through the hangover of my COVID booster vaccination. For some reason I have reacted strongly to these shots, which makes me both lousy with malaise but happy at the silver lining that my immune system has been so effectively stimulated. As I trudge, it occurs to me that malaise with a silver lining was a familiar theme this week. Election Day I was dismayed to see a Republican electorate so energized, and swing voters so swingable in their direction, while my beloved but politics-wearied Democrats stayed home. How could we have lost Virginia, let alone even more resoundingly the town council races here in Germantown? Could it have been massive voter fraud? The evidence of fraud was just as compelling as in Republican complaints about last year’s Presidential race (the evid

Last night was one of those nights when I woke up at 5 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. On such occasions, which thankfully only occur every few weeks, my mind hums with the recollection of tasks undone. Counting sheep? A calming route back to sleep. Counting undone items on your “to do” list? Quite the opposite. With each additional undone task I imagine more and more dire consequences, until I am certain that I face catastrophic failure, homelessness and freezing to death on the street. Typically daylight casts all these concerns in a new, far less dire light. Usually, by the time I’ve finished my first cup of coffee I realize that I can get back to procrastinating. Those tasks I agonized about just a few hours earlier? Maybe I’ll get to them next month. Not this morning. As my guests for the past week, friends Eric and Paul and Eric’s dog Lillie, packed up to leave, I checked the forecast and saw predicted temperatures for the coming week dipping down as low as 31 at night. October may have been

I felt a sense of satisfaction yesterday as I got in the car to head to the Berkshires to my friend, Tom. Things were going well. Though it was still light out, I had easily lured the chickens into their coop with cracked corn, enabling me to close them in without worrying about predators entering in the darkness. More important, I was bearing with me my contribution to the evening: long, fat, meaty Turkish pole beans that I had volunteered as the green vegetable for dinner. You may recall my difficulties growing Turkish pole beans this summer. My first planting seemed to be doing fine when suddenly, over the course of a couple of days, all the vines shriveled up. The next planting, in a bed enclosed by a fence to prevent rabbits munching on the vines, failed to make it because something larger, I assume a ground hog or raccoon, knocked down the fence and ate the vines. This bunch of beans represented my third try, planted in the beginning of August, in a gamble that we would not have an early frost.

My sheep are not stupid, you know. In fact, they seem to me to be getting smarter all the time. For example, when it’s time for their grain treat, I herd the flock out of the main part of the barn’s big room, either out the east door into the pasture or, particularly in bad weather when they are reluctant to venture outside, into the south vestibule. This allows me to distribute the grain into the bowls without being knocked over in their mad competition for what is essentially sheep candy. When I finish distributing the grain, I generally then first open the east door and then the gate between the vestibule and the rest of the barn, at which time something like the Oklahoma land rush begins. I’ve noticed in the past couple of months that even if they’re all initially bunched up in the south vestibule, some of the sheep will wander outside and around to the east door, in the correct expectation that they’ll get in ahead of the pack. It started with old number 45, who has always been rather independent,

I really didn’t mean it the way it sounded. My near daily call with my friend, George, does not have a set time, though it usually takes place in the 5 to 9 p.m. window . Such was the case last Sunday when George called while I was busy making turnip and sorrel soup in the kitchen. I put the phone on speaker for our conversation and set it out on the counter, allowing me two free hands to work. About the turnip based soup: It was occasioned by my having accidentally pulled up several turnips while weeding to plant the last rows of the year. I noticed that the sorrel, two beds away, was in need of cutting back. It was the garden itself that dictated the ingredients, while the advent of cooler weather suggested that a hearty soup was just the way to take advantage of them. This, for me, has indeed been the summer of the turnip. It’s really the first time I’ve enjoyed this vegetable. I started growing the sweeter smaller Japanese white turnip varieties four or five years ago, but generally focused on

This morning’s breakfast fruit, mixed with yoghurt and granola, included raspberries, Asian pear, Bosc pear, a tasty heirloom apple planted three years ago whose variety I cannot remember, and a very yellow peach, all picked here. There is something lovely about foraging your breakfast fresh every morning. You may recall that I announced the end of peach season several weeks ago. So I believed. But growing things always has a way of bringing surprises. The peach we ate this morning was harvested from what I believed to be a Shiro plum tree. For years, we had two lovely shiro plum trees. We planted them just east of the driveway soon after buying the place. They were abundant producers. These small shiny yellow plums were delicious. When ripe, extremely juicy, but still a little tarty and quite plummy. (Just the way I would hope to be described myself!) Four or five years ago, the plum trees began to develop galls on many of the branches, sort of canker sores. My reading suggested that many tree gal

For those of you not close by enough to know how it came down, please rest assured that tropical cyclone Ida did not flood or damage the farm. Our rainfall total over the course of the storm was, I would estimate, in the high two to low three inch range, less than Central Park got in a single hour, and a fraction of the total rainfall in the most devastated communities in New York City and New Jersey. The Albany Times Union posted a rainfall map that showed the increasing totals going south along the Hudson Valley until reaching Manhattan, which resumed its place, almost exactly twenty years after 9/11, as Ground Zero. There were few discernible water effects here. The pond, which for some unfathomable reason after our rainy summer was about a foot below its intended depth, filled back up. Our sow Possum, months after I prepared it for her and her late companion, Vernon the boar, finally moved to a dryer hut in a better drained pen next to the one they were in. That’s about it. Winds weren’t bad here eithe

Last week I told of my observing my elderly neighbor in Sag Harbor, Mrs. Thayer, waving a white flag for help during Hurricane Gloria, only to find, when I ran across the street, that it was in fact a dust rag I had seen, which she was using to clean her living room. Within hours after sending out the bulletin I got a message from my sister, Jolie, in Pittsburgh. She herself remembered the event vividly, she told me. There was just one detail I got wrong. It was not my partner, Peter, I had consulted before running out. He was not even there. It was Jolie and I who debated whether I should brave the storm to come to Mrs. Thayer’s rescue. As Jolie reminded me, she and her husband (this was before the arrival of any niece or nephew) were vacationing at the house while Peter and I had gone back to the City. Hearing the hurricane predictions, I had decided to go back out to Sag Harbor to help Jolie and Doug batten down the house, while Peter stayed behind in the City. I was embarrassed by my slip, though re

You are going to think I am overly preoccupied with grandmothers, but since yesterday I’ve been thinking a lot about my third grandmother, Winifred Thayer. This grandmother was acquired through adoption, not blood, and unlike in most adoptions, I was an adult and it was not a one way process. My late partner Peter and I adopted her as much as the other way around. My recollections of Mrs.Thayer were prompted first by attending to a long postponed task: packing a motley collection of stuff yesterday to ship to an appraiser, in order to donate it to a museum. All of it was associated with the family of Ephraim Niles Byram, a noted clockmaker, self-trained scientist, technician of navigational instruments for Sag Harbor whaling fleet, and the builder in 1852 of the eccentric Oakland Cottage, in Sag Harbor, New York, which Peter and I once owned. It is all destined for the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, which already has an entire wall devoted to Byram. It includes a daguerrotype of Byram; original deeds going b

Mail from National Grid, my electric utility provider, is never the first letter I open. I don’t look forward to reading it. This week’s communication, however, made me smile. It was an “energy report” which advised me that, as compared with the same period last year, my energy consumption had gone down 34%. Instead of wildly outstripping my neighbors in energy usage, I am now using 1% less energy than comparably sized houses in the vicinity. I loved this energy report. I realize I shouldn’t go too wild patting myself on the back. Paring back to just average in our energy guzzling country is surely nothing to brag about. Also, in the comparable period last year, when we were still in COVID induced semi-lockdown, there were four full time residents of this house. This year there was just me. It would have been outrageous had I not saved energy. But then, I’ve had a constant stream of house guests this summer, so maybe the head count has not been so different. And I’d like to think that my own efforts con

Those of you who have come to pick up orders on the screened porch know the drill. You put your money in the plastic pineapple, make change as required, and leave on the table any items like empty egg cartons that may be re-used. Occasionally I find a surprise out there. This week, it was a plastic bag filled with a fine white substance. No, nobody was trading cocaine for veggies. It was a bag of Marhaba brand Citric Acid (also know as sour salt or lemon salt), with this note on the back: “To keep the memories of our grandmothers alive, Carole.” I knew exactly what this note referred to. The writer had ordered two bags of sorrel, telling me that she was hoping to re-create her grandmother’s recipe for “schav” a sorrel based sour soup. When I was growing up, my family served schav as a chilled iced drink in a tall glass on hot summer days. I associate it with the long summers I spent at our family’s bungalow colony in the heart of the Catskills borscht belt. To be honest, it took me some time to develop

Since last week, I’ve been seeing bad omens. First, my Turkish pole beans, which seemed to thrive for the last three weeks, all wilted and died. Then, over the space of two days, all the leaves on one of my tulip poplars turned brown. Finally, on Wednesday, I had to put down my nearly 16 year old boar, Vernon. Most of you already know Vernon’s story: how he was bred by the Mt. Vernon Lady’s Association to perpetuate the Ossabaw breed that George Washington kept on his estate; how I drove him up from Virginia when he was but puppy-sized; how he grew into a boar with dozens of progeny, one of whom attacked him in a vicious battle; and how I had to spend a weekend in his pen picking the maggots out of his festering wounds, a truly bonding experience. Yet he rebounded to live a full and long life by pig standards. I have been anticipating Vernon’s death for over a year. Rather than grieving, I am grateful he has been relieved of his pain. But Possum, the sow I kept to be his companion, does not seem so ac

Prompted by reading my extended kvetch last week about rabbits eating my pea vines, lettuce, cabbages, brussels sprouts, and broccoli, my old friend Tom sent me the following message: “Colin Thubron, in his little book on Cyprus (pre-invasion), writes about... Read More ›

For the last several days it’s been my delight to have my friend Paul as a guest. I find myself inviting a small coterie of friends repeatedly for extended stays not just because I enjoy their company, but also because... Read More ›

I used to be a regular reader of the CDC’S Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, back in the early AIDS epidemic years. Every seven days, a cold, clinical gut punch which at that time almost always confirmed your worst fears... Read More ›

Writers tend to return to a few themes repeatedly . Maybe it’s because preoccupation with an idea is what drives someone to write, or maybe each person just has room for a few big concepts, the prism through which they... Read More ›

This will be a brief bulletin, as befits the life of its subject , the young doe who died next to the driveway yesterday. Death happens on the farm with some regularity, whether planned or not, and I am therefore... Read More ›