Thanksgiving

Around here, Thanksgiving is occasion for a week long celebration. Kim began the preparations for the feast on Sunday, and continued right up until noon on Thursday. The feast lasted most of the day, course after course of the most amazing food. Leftovers and recovery last at least three days afterwards. I guess we have a lot to be thankful for, and it just takes a lot of eating to celebrate it all.

Looking out over the fields, we can see a lot of work yet to be done: garlic and herbs to mulch, waterways to seed down, fencerow trees to turn into firewood, fences to replace. And on the farm at large, we still have a barn to repair, toolshed and shop to organize, hayfields and apples and grapes and so much more to plant. Still, we have come a long ways since we landed here in July of 1999.

When we moved onto the farm, the house was “unlivable”. We installed new windows, fixed the pipes, replaced the faucets, insulated the attic (“living” here all the while). We built greenhouses and harvested our first crop in March. The next year we built another greenhouse, and began farming in earnest; a two acre garden grew rapidly to a five acre farm. We built a walk-in cooler, and then a packing shed. We moved the potting shed out of the basement (our first year, we carried each flat of seeds down to the greenhouse and set it in the paths between the crops). Another greenhouse and more acres turned our little venture into something quite large. We cleaned out the granary and the barn, hauling away dumpster after dumpster of farming detritus, and turned the granary into a tool shed.

Each year, we have tried to do something to improve the farm, rather than just the farming operation. Transplanters and tractors are relatively temporary compared to the land. Some of the projects have been small, like removing old fences that are sinking into the land. Others have been quite large, like seeding the land across the creek to hardwood forest in 2004, and revamping the farm’s entire infrastructure in 2006. Just before Thanksgiving, an earthmoving crew built a water diversion above one of our lower fields and installed drainage tile to quickly remove any water that does gather there. They also repaired the driveway, which had become almost impassable following August’s rains (the neighbors tell us it’s need fixing for more than twenty years.)

Truly, we have much to be thankful for. A beautiful and productive piece of land. A wonderful family. Wonderful, appreciative customers. Good neighbors. The chance to spend the little time we have on this Earth to be living here and working the land. Thank you.