by Laura Parker Roerden

(September 24, 2015)

Fall 2014 the young people (ages 8-15) of our Farm Camp raised enough money at our annual Farm Camp Friendraiser to purchase two lambs to begin a fiber arts project. The idea of raising wool at Jo-Erl Farm is a symbolic nod to our beloved Blackstone Valley’s storied past as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution and the textile mills that still punctuate our river-ways today.  It’s also an opportunity for the young people to run a micro-farm business, balancing both the economics and responsibilities of raising animals on the true razor’s edge that is known as farming.

This weekend,we will pick up the lambs we’ve purchased. It has taken an entire year to be ready! Like all good adventures, the point has not been the destination, but the journey.

The young people started the year by researching the merits of various breeds of sheep and doing presentations to one another. Mother nature’s key design strategy is a bit like a game of Monopoly. You might boast excellent rental return if you own Park Place and Boardwalk, but not have the cash flow after purchase to develop them. Nature is a similar game of trade offs. A fast growing sheep might have lower quality wool than a slower growing one. A prolific breeder might have thinner wool than a less prolific one.

The kids had some interesting conversations at our meetings as they tried to juggle and prioritize multiple selection criterion including price, lambing ability, cost of food and maintenance, quality of wool, temperament, etc. What would be the best lambs for us, as young people just starting out, to learn from?

A vote was then taken with spirited calls from one camp for Dorsets, while the other camp jockeyed for position with an alternate breed. There were closing arguments made, ballots created, and a final count and recount demanded by the dissenters in the group. In the end, the vote was nearly unanimous for Polled Dorsets and every child in the room at the time could describe why.

So we set out to find at least two females to purchase, while we attended to the issue of where to home the animals on the property. What would be the pros and cons of housing them with the cows? Should we house them separately? What sort of protection could we provide? How would we separate them for lambing and shearing? What fencing would we need? What sort of winter quarters would we need? We went back and forth about where to home them on our farm, which gave us the option of several outbuildings. At one point the front runner was to house them in our free stall barn, but an exploration of the costs of  garage doors to be installed to create adequate protection and shelter led us to abandon the idea as too difficult and expensive.

All along, we were eyeing our old calf barn, which lay unused, yet requiring a daunting amount of love and work to bring back to life. Fifty years of living has taught me one thing; when in doubt choose love. We chose the calf barn, though this is what greeted us when we opened the door.

In the meantime, our search for high quality Dorset lambs at the right price was proving unsuccessful.Yet fate has a way of intervening in these matters. Like finding Mr. Right when you’ve finally sworn off dating, our Misses Rights were found on Craig’s List by Farm Camp student manager Evan Maeitta (age 15) when we had near given up in exhaustion: two Leicester Longwools in Connecticut. Who could resist this lovely lamb with the name Juliette?

Leicester Long Wools date back to England in the 1700s and are considered one of the purest breeds of sheep remaining. Furthermore, they are a breed designated as Critically Rare by the Livestock Conservancy, so they more appropriately fit our heritage and endangered breed focus here at Jo-Erl Farm than the Dorsets. How did we not think of them to begin with? Everything about them fits like a glove with who we are and what we want. And clearly they are so stinkin’ adorable—which is really the most important criterion of all.

Here’s Julliette’s dark haired flock mate, whom we are also purchasing (still un-named.) I think someone is going to be knitting a striped sweater come next winter.

Now about that abandoned calf barn.

“Many hands make light work,” “many hands make light work” was our mantra as we attacked the barn cleanup and renovation with an enthusiasm fitting of our deadline. (We had already made a deposit on the lambs, so we had a month in total to get it ready.) Just three, four-hour work sessions and many splinters later the group of young farm campers had the barn cleaned out. We sorted the materials jamming the barn into keeping, recycling, and burning piles. Only ONE bag of trash came out of that building. My father was an efficient up-cycler before the term existed.

Two weeks later, our handyman Keith had ripped out any rotted walls, dealt with a huge granite rock from a stone wall falling into the building during the process (who knew the rock was resting on that wall?), restored antique windows, added a transom for additional natural light, and retrofitted the barn to its original functionality and beauty. Now we await the lambs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Laura Parker Roerden

Someone recently asked me over a glass of wine in a busy bar why I had gotten peafowl. I fumbled to answer, as the response was not neat or tidy. It was all somehow entangled with grief, a long drought, and my place in a decisive turn of the wheel of time. As we reflect on the violent tide rising everywhere—Beirut, Baghdad, Kenya, Paris and most recently Aleppo—I find myself again returning to her question.

We received our peafowl chicks a short few months ago, but the thought of  peafowl came up two decades ago when visiting an old, dear friend Valerie Quercia in London, who was living there as an expatriate during the first Gulf War, the one simply called Operation Desert Storm. I remember at the time I had lit a single candle in my window in Boston during each of the evenings of the aerial and naval bombardment of Iraq. I was horrified that innocent children might be slaughtered in the name of my country while we ate dinner and went about our daily activities in the U.S.

During my visit, Val had taken me to the British Museum, London Tower, the beautiful Albert Bridge, Kensington Gardens, and other British icons that were monuments themselves to survival beyond war. But it was this one tiny park in her neighborhood that stood out to me at the time: Holland Park. The park had itself been heavily bombed during WWII, but was since lovingly restored, complete with a theater built on the rubble and partial foundation left of the original Holland House.

While in London, I had seen original manuscripts from Charles Dickens marked up in his own hand at the British Museum, yet this paled in comparison to the peacocks and bunnies roaming Holland park, a living Beatrix Potter book, complete with garden gates and misty meadows. This park was a partially manicured landscape with a large portion of its confines still wild, like a piece of art that continues to breathe and grow.

While Europe felt at peace and my visit like a Sunday picnic, just across the Mediterrean allied bombs were lighting up the night sky in a display named “shock and awe,” as if it were a carnival ride and not thousands of bombs dropping over the span of five weeks on 1,000 targets in Baghdad. Estimates of casualties have varied, but conservative accounts put the Iraqi deaths from the combined air and ground campaign at more than 20,000. Baghdad had been shattered.

When my brother Dave died of a heart attack at 52 in 2011, my own heart too had splintered like a glass window thrown a rock.  We had only a few years earlier moved from Boston to our fifth generation family farm when my mother and then father had died in close succession. Claire Corcoran, a dear friend of ours in the city, explained our move away to her three small children, who were at the time the same ages as ours (ages 5, 3, 1), as our generation’s turn at the wheel of the farm.

My brother Dave, who lived next door, was the real farmer. The plan was that we would only need occupy the farmhouse like some sort of ghost or tenant. Claire had been right: we were simply taking our place in a river of time that my family had been carried by for a hundred years. Yet once Dave died,  the broken rubble left felt more like a tumultuous river strewn with stones too distant apart to navigate across safely.

In an attempt to pick up the pieces, I had committed to figuring out how to make the farm economically sustainable without my brother. It was something I could control.  I visited farms across Connecticut and Massachusetts and talked to farmers about what was working and not working for them. And while many of the farms had found clever combinations of ways to use their land and their outbuildings for everything from events to vegetable CSAs, there was a resounding win in the game: perennial flowers and peafowl. It conjured up the most lovely of images to me, peacocks roaming fields of lavender and sunflowers, like some vision Van Gogh would have had in Provence fueled by his singular love for the light.

As the once temporary War on Iraq settled into a second decade and expanded fronts, I learned more about peacocks and created rudimentary budgets where income from fertilized eggs, hatched peafowl chicks and dropped feathers helped defray costs of other farm activities. I read about Flannery O’Connor’s disdain for her peafowl noise or how they ate her mother’s flowers. Yet it was a well known fact that O’Connor loved her peafowl. She often wove images of them into her writing describing the peacock’s tail as revealing a “map of the universe.” In The Displaced Person, O’Connor had longingly written of a peacock and how “tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head.”

I learned in my research that blue peafowl are described in the art of its native India as symbols of “love, rain and separation.” I turned those words around in my heart and felt something shift back into place. Sanskrit poets wrote about the clouds on the horizon as not threatening, but having eerily similar colors to the peacock, bringing hope back to the sun parched land.

In a Sanskrit poem by Kalidasa in his Round of the Seasons the arrival of monsoon rains are announced by a peacock.