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ABUNDANCE IS THE MOTHER OF MORNING
A Letter to Begin the Year
Mizmor, the Hebrew word for psalm, describes a hymn that is accompanied by a lyre. When collected as an anthology by a group of rabbis, the text we know of as the Book of Psalms came to be called the Book of Praises. Stephen Mitchell, who has translated or adapted a number of the great religious texts, writes that the dominant theme of the Psalms is "a rapturous praise, a deep exuberant gratitude for being here." I have been reading from the Book of Praises for months now, speaking the words aloud, listening for "the silence beyond all thought."
The King James version of the Bible was published in 1611, 400 years ago, and the words chosen by the unnamed translators are woven into our language as leaves clothe a tree. The scholars who created the King James version sourced a previous translation by William Tyndale who declared that his version should be accessible to "the boy that driveth the plow." I love the grace of the King James psalms, and I read them with respect and recognition: " I am poured out like water...My heart is like wax." But lately I have been reading Stephen Mitchell's adaptations -- the language is concise, crisp, and tender, accessible to the plow-boy:
"Let the rivers clap their hands,
let the mountains rumble with joy,
let the meadows sing out together,
let the trees of the forest exult."
At the end of a long winter, as we near the time to open the ground this Spring, here is my hymn to the Earth; I must ask you to imagine the music of the lyre.
This was a year of change at Quail Hill Farm -- we abandoned the piece of ground affectionately known as Hurricane Hill to the white-tailed deer, and we opened up the field above (Birch Hill) for planting. To prepare this field for cropping in 2010 we lowered the plow into the Birch Hill loam in the Spring of 2009. By August, with the autumn plantings accomplished, and as weed growth tends to be lazy by then, we found time to drag the disc harrow over that upper field, to loosen the sod. "Turn 'im over rough," my Cornish mentor, Edgar Wallis, used to say, "and let 'im weather....."
We did just that. We let the wind and rain settle the soil, and then we disced again. Then we applied lime, at 1 1/2 tons per acre, to correct the PH; then we disced again the uneven ground that had held nursery trees for twenty years. I hitched up my favorite implement, our Perfecta harrow, for the final pass in early autumn of 2009. Now the soil was well prepared for the grain drill; we seeded the traditional cover crop of annual rye, at 2-3 bushels per acre. Within two weeks the rye sprouted, and in the clear late light of autumn the field was red sea of rye. After the seedlings grow to 3-4 inches the red glow turns to green, and root tendrils reach out under the surface to hold the soil for the winter season. Despite the diligent attention of grackles, crows, and Canadian geese, the rye cover crop held the soil until the March thaw, when rye grass traditionally takes on a new life. In April we plowed in the cover crop, and this soil we began working a year previous was now prepared to receive peas, favas, and potatoes.
Because our CPB (Colorado Potato Beetle) population has reached epic proportions (or beyond) in our Town Lane fields, we hoped to trick the insects by planting spuds, unnoticed, into the newly turned Birch Hill field. Our yearly skirmishes with CPBs are now well known and documented. I am on quite friendly terms with Galen Dively, the research scientist who tracks insects and more for the USDA in the fields of Beltsville, Maryland. In 2009, upon hearing of the seasoned talent of our beetles, Galen called to request some samples. His tests verified what we already knew -- our CPBs are 100% resistant to the only organic bio-insecticide available to us. Your abundant harvest of potatoes in 2010 was the result of a long, warm growing season and your farmers' diligence (the beetles still kept coming).
We worried at the start of the season if farm members would object to the long walk to the end of Birch Hill in search of radishes, fennel, or mizuna? So we also seeded carrots, summer squash, cosmos, and zinnias full of sparkle. And, to add sweetness to the harvest of the far field, we planted an eclectic mix of late tomatoes -- Speckled Roman, Cherokee Purple, Druzba, Amagansett Pink, Black Prince, and the prolific Blondkopfchen.
I knew this field would provide some sustenance, but none of us were prepared for what we received. After the first potatoes -- Red Golds and Banana Fingerlings -- were harvested, we disced the field and prepared the soil for fall brassicas. Broccoli heads with plentiful side shoots, and Brusssels Sprouts flourished into late fall. Where early peas matured in May we sowed a beautiful patch of buckwheat to nourish Mary's bees and the soil.
We seeded first oats and field peas, then annual rye again on Birch Hill, from late September into November, to prepare the field for the 2011 season. We keep our eyes open for rain before putting down the grain -- the seeds will sooner sprout to nourish the soil rather than feed our crowd of opportunistic crows.
As you harvested crops in the new field and in the valley, we planted, tended, and harvested leaves, bulbs, and fruit from our Town Lane fields. We suffered some losses -- in May the Bloat Nemetodes (who ever heard of them!) multiplied and spread in my favorite crop, sativum ophioscorodon, a crop virtually trouble free for twenty years, and we lost over half of our 30,000 garlic bulbs. After we diligently hand picked CPBs for weeks from another nightshade, our eggplant crop, the second generation hatched and marched from the potatoes to the eggplant, millions of them, and that was the end of endless babaganoush. Still, and there is ample mystery involved in telling it, this was our finest growing season in over twenty years of tending this silt loam.
Meanwhile, near the back of that field, in a piece of ground known as the "bee garden," Joe was quietly experimenting with wild strawberries, globe artichokes, peanuts, tobacco, and cotton. Perhaps because of the unusual, intense heat he was encouraged to take on the role of a southern gardener, shaded by the hedges of Amagansett. I remember and honor his years of service to our community farm through a gesture I witnessed toward the end of autumn. I came upon him kneeling quietly in a patch of greens, in the process of gathering something up. He rose to show me the prize-thousands of seeds to be saved for the next season, delicately pinched from the seed pods of a row of "wild" arugula.
I don't remember ever pausing for Thanksgiving with potatoes still left in the ground. But this year we returned after the holiday to harvest the last of the crop on Birch Hill. We were lucky to have some sun as we lifted the last ten rows of potatoes planted in mid April. These were the storage spuds: Carola, Nicola, the reliable Dutch Bintze, and a new blue, Purple Majesty. We worked together until the light was dying and our hands ached -- Joe, Josh, Liz, volunteer farmer-friends Jon and Emma. With a brilliant orange sun illuminating the edges of the western sky, in the close and comforting dusk we loaded the 60# bins unto the trucks and heaved and stacked them into the farmshop storage cellar, to keep for the Winter Share, under the earth.
The following morning, in a hollow of the beech woods, under the hollies, Josh lost his life, under the wheel of a tractor. I was on another tractor, seeding rye in the field where 12 hours earlier we had lifted the last potatoes. Liz came to find me, racing in her Suburu, because I would make it right, she said.
I couldn't...he was lifeless when I arrived in the beech hollow, and Jerome met me at the edge of the trees. "Game over," he said, and darkness descended on the morning.
After the accident I stayed with Josh's body until the police moved me back. Standing there among the oaks and hickories, and the human chaos-first responders, firemen, detectives sweeping around -- I was somehow aware of the spirit of the place, identified in these words by the writer, John Fowles: "The wood waits, as if its most precious sap were stillness." Josh, at 6'5" was sometimes likened to a tree. When William Logan refers to "the oak's lessons of cooperation, flexibility, persistence, community, and generosity..." I am reminded of the gentle, enduring qualities that Josh embodied.
"At the heart of every garden is the perennial cycle that I hesitate to name, "it is so near to the heart," of death and rebirth. Mythologies and cottage wisdom have always linked the span of a human life, or incarnation, with the mysteries of seasons and the soil..." (I wrote.....)
As I attempt to reread the story of soil, sorrow, fertility, loss, and harvest, I listen for the precious sap, the conversation that comes from leaves touching in the wind, the gift of friends. John Elder writes: "One of the chief resources we have is what John Muir would call the friendship of the seasons. The world is always turning and, seedtime and harvest, you have given it your warm and hopeful attention and effort....The wind blows, the rain falls, the sun comes out."
At the end of his essay-meditation "The Tree," John Fowles writes of "the strange phosphorus of life, nameless under an old misappellation...It, this namelessness, is beyond our science and our arts because its secret is being, not saying." Searching for understanding through words and the "names of things:" Ilex Opaca, Purple Majesty, Amagansett Peach, Oak, Hickory and Beech, ... I am still adrift this late winter, after a season of farming, shaken or comforted by every wind that blows. I now know -- as all Homo sapiens have always understood, subconsciously -- that within the web of life all is interconnected: the phoebe's song with the red holly berries, the structure of silt with the speed of the wind, our sorrow and joy with the tidal surge of salt water. But, as Fowles writes:
"We still have this to learn: the inalienable otherness of each, human and non-human, which may seem the prison of each, but is at heart, in the deepest of those countless million metaphorical trees for which we cannot see the wood, both the justification and the redemption."
In the days following Josh's death I woke early every morning to look for Venus, the brightest star in our eastern sky -- at the winter solstice twenty-five times brighter than the blue giant, Sirius. This sister planet, revolving around our shared sun, appeared in the sky as the first word of day, a kind of praise:
"Praise him (her), you whirling electrons,
you unimaginable quarks.
Praise her in lifeless galaxies;
praise him from the pit of black holes.
Praise her, creatures of all planets,
inconceivable forms of life.
Let them all praise the Unnamable..."
Words accessible to the boy that driveth the plow. I look toward the space in the eastern sky that held the light of Venus, and in memory the names of things -- seed and soil and fruit swim up, out of a community of shared images, like stars. And out of the silence beyond all thought whose secret is being, after the brightness of Venus fades away into the azure of day, I hear the music of the lyre: "Starlight is almost flesh."
.....When he died
And his influence entered the air
I said, Let my mind be the earth
Of his thought, let his kindness
Go ahead of me.....
Yours,
 Scott Chaskey Quail Hill Farm, March 2011 |
