It’s that time again, when the hens become broody and build hidden nests that make morning egg collection a treasure hunt rivaling the White House Easter Egg Roll.
Last spring we found this nest in our calf barn.
Naturally, we left the eggs so that the mother hen could tend to them; though they did not hatch. Nature can be like that, life pressing forward always under the thumb of death, like some mad tiddlywinks game that makes progress in fits and starts.
We take our annual trip to the feed store to “pick up chicks.” This year, we went to Tractor Supply, where the chicks are kept in galvanized steel tubs that call to mind wholesome images of hand-washed clothes hanging on a line.
In no time my youngest son and I had thirty Rhode Island Red chicks settled into brooders in the barn, the chicks lounging under heat lamps like beach goers splayed on warm beach sand. In the morning, chores sound like a busy restaurant, with the clanging of scoops and grains meeting accents of chaos and urgency. Listen here.
At night peepers and chicks compete for the soundscape as the sun sets over the upper pasture, having slid north so slowly over the winter days that I am shocked to notice it no longer sets over the lower pasture.
Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.
My nephew Ed Parker opens the upper pasture and the cows move north, too, like some oversized sundial stamping out time with hooves.
Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.
Rain from the west crawls along the river valley and comes up our hill as if a legend, depositing rainbows in the eastern sky and worn clay riverlets along our road.
Swollen mud waters the fiddleheads and bluets, which will soon press forward from spongy ground.
It was a dark and stormy night. . .and we were celebrating the 4th of July and our dear friend Janice Kimball’s birthday at the farm with the Yankee Independence Day tradition of salmon and peas, a gaggle of children, board games, and soggy fireworks and poppers.
We took a break in the action to go see the cows and chickens and ended up in the upper loft of the Big Red barn, where our 8 year-old son found this:
My first thought upon seeing the old half broom extended with wire and the handle of another: “I guess that’s one way to reach cobwebs.”
But an 8-year old mind goes right to Quidditch: “I think that’s a Nimbus 2000,” he stated matter-of-factedly. Our 9-year old disagrees. “It’s obviously a Sidesweeper 100.”
We often find these treasures in our barn, left exactly where they were last used by hands now passed.
I tend to leave them where they were found, so that others too can answer the call of the past to their imaginations.
Growing up, I knew exactly one other dairy farmer in town who had a daughter my age. The other family I knew with a daughter a year younger had moved away to upstate New York before we were teens. Her father had been able to trade his 100 acre farm in Massachusetts for more than 300 acres there. Thinking back, it was strange that the one remaining farmer’s daughter and I, who were classmates in high school, never compared notes about growing up on a dairy farm.
It would take another fifteen years for me to talk about my unusual childhood with anyone other than my siblings or close friends who had grown up playing on our farm. Ironically, that conversation took place on a drive back from New York City with my workmates from my job as a publications director at a nonprofit in Cambridge, MA. Unbelievably, among the five people in the car on that inter-city drive, three of us had grown up on farms. That we all ended up living and working in Boston was not entirely a mystery.
The two in the car who hadn’t grown up on farms were treated to quite the conversation. The rest of us spent the entire four hours trading stories about our childhoods. It had never occurred to me that the childhoods of farm kids—one growing up in NY, another in NH and the third in MA—would be virtually identical.
Throughout the drive we talked on and on about the elaborate forts we had built among the hay bales and our death defying leaps from the hay lofts into soft piles of loose hay. We had all similarly scaled the walls of our silos to dizzying heights, using the thin metals ties that held the boards in a circular shape as our only hand and foot holds. We all remembered being buried in piles of green grass or corn as choppers flung sileage into sileage boxes in which we were laying for simple sport.
We clung to scoops as tractors rounded corners and bounced along fields. And watched countless animals being born, heroic feats of assistance such as chains on tractors being attached to emerging hooves by calloused hands to pull out dying calves from their mothers. These high drama moments from our childhood were coming not from fictional characters in Herriott novels, but from our farming parents.
We all had raised dozens of barn cats, whose seasonal litters took our steadfast attention, as we brought injured or dying kittens into our farmhouses for feeding condensed milk enriched with Karo syrup with eye droppers. We helped out during haying or planting, the sweat that mixed with the dirt or hay chaf bringing sweet relief when the odd breeze finally would blow.
We had commandeered calf barns, straining to hold oversized bottles of warm, sweet smelling milk replacer with two hands while 100 pound calves pulled on the nipples, nearly toppling us with their strength.
We played in pastures and picnicked on massive rocks and rode rough shod on wild, wild horses through the fields and woods. We followed meandering brooks until we were lost and then found our way back again, our sneakers thwukking with muck and water. We’d return with leaches that we’d casually remove and fling in the wind.
We’d graze as we’d go, eating wild blackberries or raspberries or a random cucumber or tomato from the garden. We played among the grease in toolsheds where farm equipment would go to be fixed or explored barns full of a centuries’ worth of old windows, clipped buttons, and saved National Geographic magazines.
We built forts and swings and made up plays singing to untuned pianos long forgotten in old outbuildings. We buried pets and found arrow heads and the stray old bottles in abandoned dumps and napped in meadows with bluettes and butterflies, after soaking our pants cuffs in sulfury muck that smelled of skunk cabbage.
We helped by washing dishes in milkrooms or to clean udders and secure automatic milkers. We swung hammers when fences needed fixing. We collected, washed and candled eggs. We fed chickens and carried water or mucked stalls. We roamed through corn fields, the odd paper cut from the fibrous leaves drawing blood as we emerged hours later.
We watched our parents worry about losing our farms—our family’s way of life—as they fought recessions, energy shortages, rising taxes and plummeting prices for milk, and still somehow managed to make it work.
We knew that the childhood we were experiencing was different, but like all kids, we longed to fit in, realizing only later that our childhoods had been like rare diamonds that would pay dividends as we grew and aged.
Monique showing her Hereford with the Sutton 4-H.
In conversations since that car trip from New York City to Cambridge, I’ve noticed that many of the farm kids I know share similar scars and strengths, though it’s dangerous to generalize. Indulge me while I try to imagine what we have in common, if only for a second.
Research says that we have healthier immune systems than our counterparts. I’d guess that farm kids are generally a resilient and stubborn lot, with a healthy reluctance to give up on anything important enough to throw our attention to. We probably work harder than we should. And forget to ask for help. I know I am sentimental to a fault.
We might be considered reliable, resourceful, and smart and I’ve noticed many of us work in creative or community service-oriented fields. Many of us forget to take care of ourselves, so ingrained is our caretaking of others.
We’re deeply compassionate, having loved too many animals to list, and even an odd tree or brook and rock. But I believe we also are all too able to distance ourselves from the river of loss we have witnessed, as if constantly: still-born calves and favorite barn cats, pigs, and ducks, chickens, the farewell nuzzling of a horse.
James Maranda with “Boss,” the Brahman Bull.
Many of us have a razor sharp ability to read the weather and refer to the cardinal directions like a sailor. We mark time by chores and think of food as a living relationship—a reciprocal sacrifice—where we take care of our food and then it takes care of us. We understand who we are, by largely understanding where we are.
We’re acclimated to smells, and have witnessed outrageously unsavory things up close. Perhaps that makes us stoic or simply able to withstand all manner of discomfort.
I would venture to guess that we are a diverse group, as well, with a wide range of political persuasions, professions and interests. Some of us have become city folks; others are still working on farms or in the country. Have I gotten any of this right, farm kids?
I recently have reached out to other “farm kids” by starting a Facebook group by the same name so that we can keep the conversation going and delve deeper. If you are a farm kid or know of others, please check out our group. We’d love to hear your stories of farm life and how it shaped who you are today.
What are your farm kid memories? What about your farm background most resonates with who you are today?
I spent a fair amount of time in farmhouse kitchens growing up. My dad and uncle would often lend a hand to other farmers and they in turn would reciprocate here.
There were the trips to help out old Miss Green and her daughter Miss Green, farmers in Rhode Island. They had one of the prettiest dairy farms I have ever seen. Their salt shaker farmhouse was from the 1700s and had romantic antique roses planted everywhere. My mom would visit with old Miss Green in the kitchen, while I ate Concord grapes sitting under their arbor, spitting seeds and watching my dad help Miss Green pull a tractor out of the mud or fix a corn chopper.
Or we’d head up to the Bosma dairy farm on Williams Hill, where my dad and Dick Bosma would chat for hours about farm business or exchange a bull on a handshake to improve breeding stock. Mrs. Bosma would invite us inside to visit with her and her youngest children.
Someone would be pressed into playing the organ for us. And then we’d all leave to play on the grain bag and bailing twine swings and hammocks that all of us farm families had hanging from the rafters of our barns.
Looking back, there were the usual homemade cookies or brownies offered and a chance to just sit and talk. In some ways, other than church, that’s what our social life looked like while I was growing up—helping other farmers. This exchange was as natural as my grandmother’s lap work of darning socks or cross-stitching: easy, predictable, a gradual building up of resiliency in our community.
I must have forgotten this about farming, because when I first moved back to the farm, I was surprised by all the help that appeared when we needed it, as if on cue from some hidden stage manager.
There was our neighbor and former farm hand Mike Wojnowski, who 35 years since he last worked here still comes on a text notice to feed the cows and chickens when we’re away or to plow us out when the snow is mounded around the barns in the winter.
There was our other neighbor Marty Goff, who came and spent a day of his vacation visiting family here in Massachusetts, sweating in the sun and helping to replace the corner of the barn, using hand-hewn techniques true to the 18th century provenance of the building.
There was my nephew Ed’s friends showing up with chain saws when trees exploded around us in storms both real and imagined the summer my brother Dave died.
And there has been the parade of amazing young people led by 15-year old Evan Maietta, helping to clean up and restore pastures, feed animals, clean pens, put down bedding, and any number of sundry tasks, which has morphed into a weekly work event we simply call “farm camp.”
Farm campers helping out at Jo-Erl Farm.
Of course, my nephew Ed Parker must be mentioned, who has been the heart and soul of the farm since he was five, when he’d call my father and tell him it was time to fix fences, and my dad and he would go off and swing hammers. And then there’s all the friends of Ed’s and his brother Todd, who have come to help with haying—a subset of the Uxbridge High football team—bringing both brawn and heart. And farm intern Anja Semanco, who gave up part of her summer to this and had to go home to Pennsylvania when she contracted Lyme disease. And Jane Clarke and family, including her brother Ted, who have helped clean out the barn and plant gardens annually. There was Erin Hawkes and her father Peter, local dairy farmers who have shown up with hay and medicine when we needed more than just advice. And there have been more.
Farms belong to not just a farmer, but to communities and we feed not ourselves, but one another.
My grandmother, father, uncles, aunts, and great grandfather gathered at the farm.
It’s a humbling experience to watch people take up a bucket in the brigade and pass it along in service to this idea that farms belong to not just a farmer, but to communities and that we feed not ourselves, but one another.
Perhaps it’s an idea that applies to so many of our challenges today. Our oceans are dying; island nations will be inundated because of global warming; children are starving in Appalachia; the bees are dying; polar bears are losing ground; cancer must be stopped; unwanted pets bound for the gas chamber must be adopted; and still there is more. The list is endless. Devastating stories and problems are stacked up like corpses. There’s no wonder we hide in our houses. It’s easy to feel not quite up to the task.
I do not know how to solve those problems. But I feel certain that what I learned in the farmhouse kitchens so long ago applies. Problems will always be like fires on the horizon threatening our homes. We simply need to be willing to show up together and pass the bucket along.
So for everyone who has shown up for us over these years: thank you. It’s been an honor to stand next to you in the line. And you should know: you’ve carried the water beautifully.
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.
The Japanese peace garden at Holland Park, London.
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.
Groups of gay amorous peacocks
Rend the air with jubilant cries
To hail the friendly rain
And spreading wide their jewelled trains
They hold their gorgeous dance parade….
This past spring, the parade was through our neighboring town of Whitinsville, only there were no floats or balloons. The parade carried our collective grief about a 22 year old infantry man, Spc. John Dawson of the 101st Airborne Divisio, killed in the line of duty in Afghanistan, who was brought home to military honors throughout the streets, yellow ribbons encircling trees along the funeral march’s route. I was late to a dentist appointment because of it, and felt a hot flash of shame at the acknowledgement that someone now lying in a casket because he had signed up to protect our safety had even for a second felt like an inconvenience. Death should, in fact, stop us in our tracks.
We can walk through the collective desert of denial about the violence and hate that is fueling the world’s events or we can awaken to the rain.
I waited on buying peafowl, all summer watching the drought brown our pastures and burn our hayfields, even as my own heart craved the relief of rain and the return of spongy peat to cushion my footsteps. But then, just like a turn of the dial, the rains returned this fall, in fits and starts. At first the rain did little more than kick up dust, but gradually the pastures had started to green again. Life was doing what it does, asserting itself no matter the ruin.
The monsoon rains are revered in India for the renewal it brings, as they flood the alluvial plains that nourish the rice paddies and offer relief from the intense heat. But they also carry a simple message. We can walk through the collective desert of denial about the violence and hate that is fueling the world’s events or we can awaken to the rain. We can use our grief and loss and pain to remember the precious gift that life is. We can choose beauty over despair; love over hate, as this Iraqi cellist did playing in the rubble of a car bomb. We can ask not why he is playing music while bombs drop, but rather audaciously, the opposite.
The peafowl are now four months old. They wear crowns and are ringed in jewel-toned iridescence. Oddly, in their dazzling other-worldly beauty they remind me of the compost hidden in death. They help me to commit to awakening to rain and to remember the suffering of those in distant lands, from which our only separation is our ignorance.
The long shadows of late fall, which ask us to look at things differently.
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We sometimes come home to find handmade gifts from customers—from Richard McCaffrey’s delicious cookies, to home dried sea salt, to preserves and the apron Brenda Marshall made for me for egg collecting. Feeding others is like a long handshake with people you come to care deeply about.
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That chickens can turn table scraps back into food.
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That dirt and poop coexist with the more gentile and lovely aspects of living is no surprise to most people. But to intimately know how things that nurture us are created by the unsavory outputs of living can change your life view.
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Hands long-gone have left barns, stonewalls, manure buckets and other gifts that keep giving.
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The chickens roost at about my head height in our coop. Their disembodied sounds in the dark form a line on both of my sides, which helps me to navigate the dark shoals of the room the way ancient mariner might have used the sound of a particular bird in a fog to know they were closing in on land.
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Hidden treasures such as this clutch of eggs found in an un-used barn remind us that our blessings sometimes go unclaimed.
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Plenty of room at the inn means we can say ‘yes’ to take in friend’s baby goats and rescue an abused cow from an animal hoarder. There is no greater privilege than being in the position to help.
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That people show up in a hundred different ways when we need help, from Evan Maietta and the farm campers, to local farmers, to handy friends, makes me appreciate the barn raising that modern living should be, but often is not.
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Though the work is hard and the pay can be low, in the right light there is hardly anything more beautiful than kneeling in the dirt.
Photo by farm intern Anja Semanco, 2012.
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Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Jo-Erl Farm to you and your loved ones!
Juliette and Juniper have added a lot of excitement to our lives here at Jo-Erl Farm. We’ve been busy getting a winter paddock ready for them, one that will be safe from predators and close enough to the farmhouse for us to keep an eye on them. This is the beautiful handiwork of our ever-versatile and talented carpenter Keith. We can’t wait to paint it white. Right, kids?
2. This past Sunday, we had Juliette and Juniper sheared. Or, maybe they were shorn? “Sheer, sheared, shorn.” Though it says on the official Sheep Shearing 101 site that it’s proper to use either sheared or shorn as past tense. Who knew?
Here are the precious lambs before being sheared.
Here they are during shearing:
Isn’t that table setup cool? The lambs seemed completely secure and comfortable throughout the process, many thanks to our skilled new friend Nancy from Lightening Ridge Farm in Sherborn, who volunteered to come out and help us hopeless novices with this important task.
Notice Junipers’ wool is bluish-black underneath. Isn’t it gorgeous? The mocha-colored top layer of her wool was caused by bleaching from the summer sun.
Here is Juliette and Juniper shorn.
We are all surprised by how tiny they really are underneath all of that wool. (Did that wool dress make me look fat? Of course, not! You were just fluffy.)
It turns out that two lambs can give you quite a bit wool: two bags full!
Next up is washing the wool, spinning it, and dying it. We are dreaming of knitting projects for this coming winter and googling all sorts of felting projects and crafts for the Farm Camp kids.
3. Our annual Farm Camp Friendraiser was held this past weekend at the farm and was a huge success! Over 80 people participated and generously supported the Farm Camp Kids’ fund to purchase a flock guard llama to keep Juliette and Juniper safe from predators when on pasture next spring. Thank you to all who came out! We consider you family.
4. Sometimes tradition gets in the way of progress! As many of you know, back in the day my great-grandparents and grandparents ran the farm as a poultry named Fairview, for the wonderful views of the church steeples in the valley seen from our perch on West Hill. During those days, we’d hand wash the eggs, using water and wet rags as to not disturb the protective membrane that not only keeps the egg fresh, but keeps chemicals and bacteria from entering the porous membrane of the shell. We have continued to do it the same labor intensive way until this day.
Leave it to a kind-hearted neighbor to point out that I could much more easily pressure wash the eggs with a hose through the vintage wire egg baskets we still use from those early days of the farm. It now takes me seconds to wash eggs, a task that used to take hours. Thank you, Nicole Haker! We might not have a very automated farm, but I can safely say we’ve now at least entered the 20th century.
5. One benefit of restoring the calf barn for the sheep is that my father had already set up systems to make caring for small animals easier. One such system is this manure barrel, which makes mucking stalls a quick ten-minute chore. The barrel travels on a rail throughout the center of the barn, so that you can easily reach it with a shovel as you muck. The heavy load is then moved with a gentle push to a porch off of the back of the barn. A simple shift of a mechanism on the pulley and the barrel dumps the manure through a trap door in the floor. Thank you, Dad! So many of your gifts were like this: simple, yet true and everlasting.
6. We are sorry to report that our beloved Farm Camp mascot Mucky, the white silkie chicken, died in September. Mucky was lain to rest in a private ceremony on the farm. We know Mucky’s special brand of magic will continue to inspire us, as has the kind gift of another white silky chicken from recently retired local teacher and farm girl Ruth Bandstra. The Farm Camp kids have lovingly dubbed our new silkie Un-Mucky.
7. And because we don’t want to leave you on a sad note, we are proud to report that our peafowl chicks are nearing the three month mark. They have grown crests and are wearing a necklace of iridescent greenish blue feathers these days. They have an air of mystery and prance regally though the barn or perch in surprising places. They remind me of vintage photos of travelers on cruise lines dressed in their finest, but frozen in a stance of being on their way to someplace else.
On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a chicken in a haystack.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two Ford tractors and a chicken in a haystack.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five sky lanterns, four Hereford cow, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors and a chicken in a haystack.
On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me eleven of Ed’s friends haying, ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me twelve eggs a dozen, eleven of Ed’s friends haying, ten Jerseys milking, nine farm-campers weeding, eight pullet eggs, seven broody hens, six pizza pies, five sky lanterns, four Hereford cows, three guinea hens, two Ford tractors, and a chicken in a haystack.
We’ve had a couple challenging weeks here at the farm. A weasel has been getting into the chicken coop and biting heads off of our newly-raised heritage breed Delawares. Mornings I’ll enter the coop and cringe—another headless chicken lying on the ground, already stiff.
At first, I could joke about it. “It’s either Ozzy Ozbourne or it might be a weasel.” Or “The least they could do is pluck it for me, too.” I’m not laughing now.
One of the birds killed was the smallest of the flock and my youngest child’s favorite. Most days Ben would come off the bus, go to the barn, and come back to the house with this little Delaware in his arms: he called her Lucy. He sobbed when I told him I had found her dead. Ben and I buried Lucy in a driving, cold rain. He made his own little homemade cross to put on the grave.
We’re up to about twenty birds taken, despite five separate attempts by three different men at closing holes in our 18th century barn. “The place looks like Fort Knox,” my nephew Ed said just last week, when he showed up again to help solve the problem. That was three or five chickens killed ago. I’m not sure. I’ve lost count.
Our handyman Keith is here again today, closing up more holes, investigating the crime scene, dusting for prints. It can feel discouraging, like playing Whack-a-Mole. Solve one problem on a farm and another surfaces.
Yesterday, I had our trusty Farm Campers here (ages 8-14), helping to close up more holes and restore order to the coop. Two of the eight year old boys found over seventy eggs hidden among the hay bales for the cows. We laughed as the eggs in the pail mounted as more and more clutches were found: one clutch on the top of the bales; another between two bales; a third beneath the second and then a fourth in a nest of hay on the ground. I think we all have a soft spot for renegade hens, who make their own way in the world.
The Farm Campers left the barn last night confident, having safely tucked the chickens in for the night and turned off the lights. We felt ready for our next challenge, discussing over dinner the lambs we were planning to purchase in the spring and the llama we thought it prudent to procure as a guard animal.
And then BAM, I found another bird this morning behind the nesting boxes, headless, when I went to the barn to feed the cows. Most of the time, I take these setbacks in stride. But this morning, I just couldn’t. I fell apart, my entire body heaving with tears, a new wave of grief about my father and my brother Dave’s passing washing over me. This sort of thing would have never have happened on their watch, I realize, and fresh sobs come. Grief is just like that weasel, finding holes to squeeze through.
Once I had calmed and disposed of the bird, I sent out a text to my gang: my nephew Ed, the farm camp manager Evan, our handy man Keith, my co-farm camp leader Yvette and within moments offers of help came in. One would find a critter cam; another was on his way with a hammer; and a have-a-heart trap was being procured. It can be amazing, just like that, too, this thing called farming.
My tasks for today included sorting through pictures of our recent Farm Camp Friend-raiser, which we held Columbus Day weekend. The Farm Campers, ages 8-16, had pulled off a wonderful afternoon and evening at the farm, complete with old fashioned games like sack races, donut-on-a-string eating, and egg ‘n spoon races; seasonal treats like maple sugar cotton candy and home-made baked goods; tractor pictures; a BBQ; a chance to feed the animals; songs by the bonfire; and an ending paper lantern ceremony with over 80 wonderful friends and family in attendance.
In doing so, they had raised enough money to buy their very own lambs so that they could learn how to run a farm micro-business.
As I opened and edited pictures, my heart filled with gratitude and a sense of a different kind of farm family, the kind that Evan Maeitta referred to when he surprised me with this, “We’re not just farm hands, we’re a farm family” on the back of the Jo-Erl Farm Camp t-shirts.
Yes, it’s true we’re a fifth generation family farm. But we’re also a farm family, the kind that sings around a bonfire, roots out hidden eggs, and does our best to keep weasels at bay.
The Jo-Erl Farm Camp is currently taking new members, ages 8-18 (meeting on Thursdays after school). There is no fee for being a part of Farm Camp, but the kids do run fundraiser here and there to fund their special projects. Farm Camp is currently selling two fabulous items.
Own a Jo-Erl Farm Camp sourvenir mason jar mug (16 oz.) or a grain bag tote bag, each for $10.00. The grain bag totes feature different animals and are a wonderful solution to mounting grain bags that can not be recycled.
Just leave a message here if you’re interested in purchasing either with your email address and we’ll be in touch.
5:30 am (May 8, 2014). I’m awakened by my cell phone ringing and the accompanying chime of a left voicemail message. It’s the post office calling: they have my forty baby chicks. The ones that were not supposed to come for three weeks. (Who knew that the post office opens at 5:30 am?)
I head to the barn and feed and water the grown chickens and the thirty, four-week old chicks, who now have their pin feathers and no longer require a heat lamp. If you listen here you’ll notice the sounds of farming are not unlike those you hear in a restaurant kitchen. Grains are spilled, cascading notes of aluminum and steel clash, voices compete for real estate.
I collect the eggs, separating the warm-to-the-touch ones so that I can notify a customer that the fertilized eggs she wants for incubation are ready are to be picked up. In a modern twist, I text her a simple message: “12 eggs, warm to touch.” Like a summoned midwife, she replies: “I’m on my way.”
My nephew Ed Parker comes into the barn to feed the cows. His head nearly brushes the low ceiling as he stands with a rubber pail full of grain and we talk over the timing of CSA beef deliveries and the awaited cash flow. He heads into the free-stall barn. I can see through the still open door the crowd of expectant cows’ faces awaiting him.
The brooder needs to be cleaned for the new chicks now surprise arrival, so I grab a shovel and wheelbarrow. When people picture farming, they no doubt picture sunrise moments of planting seeds and feeding animals. But the unromantic truth is: farming is 90% poop removal. I hastily prop the brooder door open with the nearest thing available—a hammer. In the middle of this most odious of tasks, my cell phone rings: it’s the post office again. Yes, yes, yes. I’m coming.
In the confusion of grabbing my cell phone, the hammer falls and a two foot line of chicken wire scrapes my face from forehead to chin as the brooder door slams shut on my hand. Fortunately, there is no mirror in the barn, but I imagine I look like someone who has had a run in with a rake. This particular injury must remind me of childhood, because I swear I smell the iodine that my mother would have used on such a wound. I run my fingers over the jagged cuts and wonder if it will leave a scar.
Ed finishes feeding the cows, then heads to the post office to retrieve the chicks, so I can be on site to finish the brooder and sell the fertilized eggs to the woman who is on her way. I hide my face behind my hair so as to not have to explain what just happened.
The box the chicks were shipped in.
The woman arrives and introduces herself; we shake hands, and I hand her the dozen of eggs I have kept warm in the sun. She hands me the money and tells me about her children, grades 7 and 4, and how excited they are to be hatching their own chicks. She had confessed to me when we spoke on the phone earlier that they had lost their previous backyard chickens to predators, but there is no mention of anything in this encounter but the counting of days to the coming of new life.
The handyman who is preparing our Big Red Barn for a paint job shows up and we exchange “good mornings” as he gets to work on the historic windows that need puttying. Swallows, bees, and squirrels are already abuzz around his worksite protesting the disturbance.
I call the local grain store to make sure that they have finally gotten in the fifty pound bags of chick crumbles that they didn’t have over the weekend; then head off to gather 200 lbs of grain. I arrive to find the feed store manager turning over his 10 x 20 garden by hand. With a shovel. He is already soiled in sweat and happy to stop to help me. We chat casually about peacocks and a local man who made some good money selling them.
A big cattle rig from a local farm pulls up as I finish paying for my order. The son of a farmer who my father taught how to dairy farm hops out of the cab of the pickup after having perfectly backed it into the space where the hay will be loaded on. I think of my own seven-year old son, who plays with a miniature rig of this very kind and his own backing into imaginary adventures on the floor of our farmhouse.
Now it’s back to the barn, where Ed has already settled the chicks into the brooder. “How many were dead?” I ask. “None,” Ed answers. Without another word between us, Ed unloads the grain I have just bought, I grab the chick waterer and food tray and fill them. He’s off to his next thing before I come back with the water.
I put the waterer in the brooder and touch the water with my fingers and bring a single bead to the beaks of one chick after another. The chicks come to the waterer like a magnet drawn north. I indulge in a few moments of touching the birds, knowing that their imprinting on me will help in the coming free ranging, as they learn the confines of their world as drawn by the comings and goings of their surrogate parent.
Black australops are heritage breed chickens.
I next prepare a beef share for later delivery to Boston, where errands related to my other job and time with dear friends await. I leave notes for the children, who will later check on the chicks and close up the bigger chickens for the night. Good night, great green field, I whisper as I drive away.
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