Spring is Coming / Sadness and Strife

We’ve been pretty MIA on the internet world these past few weeks. Farming goes on no matter what, but I haven’t been able to dig in and share much from the farm, as it seems so pointless when people and places that you care about are going through hell.

Our sunflowers in the snow, kind of feeling their vibe this month.

I think I started and then erased a dozen posts and more than one blog. I just can’t seem to find the oomph to highlight CSA week or the opening of the greenhouse season amid these insane wastes of war.

From 1997 through 2000, I had many gifts of opportunities to travel and work abroad, ending in the summer of 2000 on a farm in eastern Russia, near the Belarus and Ukrainian borders, where I lived with a wonderful and generous Ukrainian family.

As a young person wrestling to decide what and where to be (that most rooted profession of farming, or working internationally in the conflict resolution sphere that I actually went to school for?), that harvest season in Kitezh magically melded both options.

Even on the grayest days, we often get an afternoon splash of blue sky and sun over the willows

Then that winter, the Middle Eastern study abroad program I worked for was shut down by war, Matt and I met, and then came 9-11 to change the feel of the world around us.

I feel so gifted by this opportunity to be a farmer and the chance to spend my life stewarding a small piece of earth. But I also feel crushed with sadness, frustration, rage, and a sense of helplessness each time a war starts and destroys a place close to my heart (or close to anyone’s heart!).

The fact that it’s been more than one place in the last twenty years because we have so many conflicts in the world is even more devastating.

The days are getting longer, leading to more shadows and new animals moving in and starting denning (I think Beulah is obsessed with the fox that is starting a den in the wetlands. I know where the den is, but for some reason, even with her magic nose she can’t seem to find it…).

Our world is so immense and beautiful and powerful, with surging tectonic plates, battering hurricanes, and the eons of time acting on it. Yet at the same time, life upon earth is still so delicate and fragile and fleeting.

And yet, it’s spring and the season of planting is hard upon us. Our CSA shares start in only 13 and a half weeks. Between now and then lies an insane amount of cleaning and prepping and planting and harvesting and repairing. Even as nightmares go on oceans away, and the case studies of nuclear war games get hauled back out and dusted off, farmers have just one shot to plant each year, and we need to be ready for it.

Two weeks ago we started the first round of seeds for our early spring farmers markets and did something we haven’t done for a decade—the awkward in and out shuffle of flats carried between the greenhouse to the house every night and every morning. This extra hassle saved two weeks of running the greenhouse propane. Matt drove up to New Hampshire to get one of our last big supply orders (since now it’s cheaper to drive and get your own supplies than have them shipped to you!). This week our onions are seeded so the greenhouses are fully on and there’s sparks of germinating green everywhere.

My faithful but short furred greenhouse companion, all of our home walls getting temporarily lined with plant flats (!), and I (Maryellen, and not the real carpenter on the farm) built a thing! (new potting bench!)

The muskrats are trying to build a den in the culvert under the road.

The springtime goose battles over our prime pond real estate began, but haven’t yet expanded into all night shouting sessions.

Forestry work and tree inspection while the ground is frozen, there are SO MANY coyotes hunting our huge rabbit population right now, and Harry the muskrat fighting a losing battle to build his house.

The bulbs around the perennial beds popped up, sharp and green.

The melting snows pulled back in our late fall harvested fields, revealing the detritus of last growing season, filling out our to-do lists with things like “pick up anchor bags” and “pull out trellising.”

Beulah checking out the receding snow—this was the tunnel that lost its cover in December, but we’ll re-skin it in time for tomatoes!

Bombs are dropping and people in Ukraine and in conflict zones across the world are suffering.

And we farmers are over here reliving Groundhog Day, doing the same thing again and again. I can’t decide if the seasonal and daily repetition of farming is contemplative and relaxing, or frustrating and annoying. I just hate this miserable Groundhog Day pattern of another war in another place I love and another vast nation of people whose life will never be the same.