AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week Mark writes. Hi all, Mark here, in a mood of appreciation for the winding down of summer. What I appreciate is not the moderation in temperature nor the shortening of the days. To me, those changes are cause for a certain degree of melancholy. No, what I appreciate is the sense that much of the hard, speculative work of planting seeds and nurturing newly born animals is done, and that the season of reaping the greater part of the benefits is almost but not quite yet upon us. It’s a brief low-pressure interval in which we can actually take some time to revel in that dreamlike state of torpor that summer once seemed to be all about. Take last Sunday. Instead of spending the day working in the garden or doing animal projects, we welcomed Andrew and William to the farm. No, not the royal Windsor princes. The Warmans-Nussbaums. Andrew (7) and William (2 1/2) are my second cousins once removed. They came with their parents (my cousin Melissa and her husband Jonathan) and grandparents (my mother’s first cousin Albie and his wife Harriet).
Albie’s mother, my great Aunt Jennie, had found my parents an apartment in her building in the Bronx when they were first married, and she was a constant presence in my young life, a diminutive widow who supported her two sons by, among other things, operating a grocery during the summer at our family’s bungalow colony (Warman’s) in Swan Lake, deep in the Sullivan County’s Catskills Borscht Belt. She was by far my favorite relative, as close and protective as my grandmother but more full of unalloyed joy and much more indulgent, always singing to me, playing games in which she put her forehead to mine while repeating nonsense syllables, and bouncing me on her knee. The nastiest word in her vocabulary was "feh," her all-purpose expression for anything that disgusted her or to which she objected. Albie, her younger son, used to babysit for me when I was a child. Family occasions were always extended-family occasions and we all spent the entire summer together at the bungalow colony. The close bonds formed then never frayed. Today, however, with families more atomized, it seems we only see each other at formal occasions like bar and bat mitzvahs and funerals. It was therefore a special joy to have a whole long extended and unstructured afternoon together, relaxing in Adirondack chairs under the giant sugar maple, looking out past the shade garden to the pastures, in perfect summer weather, simply to reminisce, joke, and even have moments of silence, appreciating just being alive and together. And of course enjoying a long meal, prepared by Peter, of burgers, potato salad, cucumber salad, and a tomato plate all grown right on premises. It’s the sort of down time we never get to take on our own.
At the same time, showing and sharing the farm with an appreciative audience helps us renew our own appreciation of what we’ve created. And there couldn’t have been a more appreciative audience than William and Andrew. The boys were personable, smart, engaged, and downright thrilled by much of what they saw. They got to visit with the little bull calf born Saturday morning to Daisy II, our friendliest, youngest cow. He was a little guy, not much more than 25 or 30 pounds at birth, who spent most of the weekend resting in the grass where his mama deposited him while she went off to graze. When we gathered around him, Daisy watched attentively from a distance, but as long as we did not pick him up and move him around she was content merely to be vigilant, trusting, I imagine, in our good intentions. The boys also got to converse with the turkeys. This activity, we have noticed, is a never-fail thrill for kids (and a fair number of adults). If you stand in their yard, the ever-sociable turkeys will mill around to check you out. Peter recognized long ago that this was a perfect opportunity for call and response, and if he trilled “Beeeautiful” in a high pitch they would respond with a chorus. Kids are quick to pick up on this game, and to repeatedly test their skills at eliciting the chorus. All the while, many of the toms, now entering adolescence, will take the opportunity to display their array of feathers, looking like the storybook turkeys in Thanksgiving promotions. The turkey encounter turns out to be a high point of most kids’ visits. Somewhere around mid-afternoon I had to pick an order of beans, leeks, and tomatoes and assemble some garlic for neighbors, and Andrew volunteered to help. He turned out to be an excellent bean picker, careful not to pull out the plants with the beans and attentive to size and quality. And we got to do a math lesson, in which he figured out how much to charge for two pounds of beans at two dollars a pound, and two pounds of tomatoes at two dollars a pound. When it came to a half pound of garlic at eight dollars a pound, however, he was quick to remind me that he had learned addition in first grade, but not multiplication or division. I was on my own for that one.
After lunch, the boys had the thrill of picking and eating raspberries directly from the bush. And then Andrew asked if he could hold one of the baby ducks, a wish easily satisfied. And finally, was there an animal they could pet? Our prime candidate for that honor was Yatna, the white eweling who was born in such a contorted state this spring that she could not stand, so that we had to hold her up under her mother to nurse, and whose survival we doubted for the first few days. We adopted the suggestion of our New York neighbor, Sarah Lee, to name her Yatna, Sanskrit for “perseverance,” and the name has proved apt. Petting Yatna just before departure turned out to be a great memory for Andrew, and made me realize why petting zoos, with their opportunities for kids to recognize their fellow creature-hood with animals, are so popular. In some ways, the entire afternoon reminded me of the charming Italian movie we saw last year, Mid-August Lunch. A little bit silly, a great deal of warmth, an event with no larger purpose than simply being together and basking in being alive on a late-summer day. No summer should be without such times. — Mark Scherzer
