AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Mark writes:
We’re coming into summer’s longest days. In the early evening twilight, I sit alone in a state of blissful exhaustion on the screened porch, quietly enjoying a dinner of pasta with wilted lambs quarters and fresh green salad from the garden. There are occasional calls of a catbird, once in a while the cry of the peacock, and, at long intervals, the bleat of a lamb grazing in the front pasture in search of its mother, followed by the reciprocal call of the ewe who has lost track of her lamb. But the overwhelming sense of the moment is the silence of a world coming to rest. This, at least, was my sense last Tuesday, as the oppressive humidity of the previous days broke, and it felt as if the natural world I looked out on was cradled in the comforting arms of a benign force. A friend once told me that I should take five minutes each day to savor a moment, a personal pleasure. Peter has a particular talent for doing something like that, stopping in late afternoon for a quiet drink in the shade garden overlooking the pasture, or on the willow bench overlooking the ornamental pond, with our cats, Cornelius and Missy. He calls it the Kitty Cat Cocktail Hour, but as much as communicating with the cats he seems to be absorbing the view over the fields and simply contemplating. I think it’s one of the ways he keeps centered. I am more compulsive, and less apt to take such breaks, especially when I’m in the City. But sometimes, particularly on days like this when Peter has been called into New York for an appointment and I have tackled the sorts of farm chores that leave my every muscle feeling stretched and worked into an almost delicious soreness, I have no choice but to take that slow moment of reflection. I savor it, and feel lucky to feel at home in it.
The placidity and sense of well-being of I experienced earlier this week was all the more remarkable as the weather had changed only hours before through a series of electrically charged storms with high winds, wild enough to frighten our yearling steer into jumping a fence and take to the barn for safety. As I looked to my left from the porch, I saw our once perfectly proportioned magnolia tree, or more precisely the third of it that remained after having been splintered and shattered in the late October snow storm of last year. The tree fought back, blooming this spring on its remaining branches, only to be hit by a late Spring frost that turned all its blossoms black. Only in the last week or so have the belatedly emerging green leaves given this survivor the aspect of a living entity rather than an arboreal cadaver. But its leaves are sadly diminished. That same spring frost, our neighbor Bob Rider tells us, probably reduced his cherry crop by about half and his apple crop by three quarters. I've heard the same story from others. Elsewhere in town, the frost decimated the grapevines. The radio reported today that Senator Gillibrand has requested a disaster declaration from the federal government for 34 New York counties affected by the frost, where some farmers had their full year's production wiped out. Though we are far more laissez-faire than Bob about our fruit trees, it’s hard not to notice, as I walk around our place, that our single cherry tree and the row of apples have virtually no fruit. Ditto the peach, plums, mulberry, and the Clapp and Asian pears. The major and pervasive damage that can be done by a single extreme weather event is striking.
Luckily, we are not monoculturists. We have some quince coming in. We also have berries. The regular rains we’ve had for the past several weeks seem to have done wonders for our blackberries. Though they also took a beating in last October’s snowfall, they bounced back with a vengeance, have been covered with white flowers, and we now see an ample Illini blackberry crop taking form. Similarly thriving are the gooseberries and currant bushes, with the gooseberries seeming likely to be ready to pick well ahead of their usual late June/early July harvest time. What we will lack in fruit I hope we will make up in berries. In the vegetable garden, meanwhile, we’ve been taking in a steady stream of produce that we were surprised could so successfully winter over, even in last winter’s warm temperatures. Spinach, coriander, lettuce, mustard greens, collards, and chervil joined the usual overwintered leeks, parsnips, sorrel, rhubarb, and scallions in rejuvenating for a spring harvest. Only in the past week or two has the balance of the harvest shifted to what we sowed this spring.
In the late spring evening, I stir myself to saunter down toward the chicken coop and close the door on our laying hens, who have put themselves to bed as the sun hit the horizon. On the way, I meet what I call our commuting chicken, who somehow has figured an escape route from the coop and exits each morning to lay her egg somewhere. (For a while she used a readily accessible nest of rope in the garage, but in the last week or so she has shifted to an undisclosed location.) Every afternoon or evening, in what has now become a ritual, she meets us in the driveway and walks ahead of us a little past the chicken yard gate. We open the gate, and she reverses course to re-enter. The comfort and predictability of this little ritual is one of those elements that imposes a sense of order on the farm and helps us to avoid feeling that we are at the mercy of an untamed and chaotic natural world. Is this sense of enveloping serenity, safety, and order a mere illusion, a mental device to help us screen out the world’s uncertainties? I don't think so. Daily routines are ubiquitous, with the power of an ordering force. Regrowth and repair are natural processes, just as much as natural disasters and setbacks are. The broken branches from the fall storms are soon masked by this season's new leaves. Conditions that destroy some crops promote abundance in others. Reveling in peace, order, beauty, and serenity is not simply a matter of wishful thinking, but also of appreciating the real order of things. — Mark Scherzer
