I'm Farming Again

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Friday night, with only the robins and bunnies as my witnesses, I crossed back over the line from gardener to farmer.

It is a beautiful June evening, and I am digging in the dirt at dusk, just the bunnies and robins for company. The last rays of sun wink at me, filtering through the fluttering leaves and swaying branches of the twin oaks. I stop working for a moment and think how lucky I am to be outside, to be doing this thing that I love so much, to be in this place that we’re making into something.

It really is something. I am starting to see it now. The hoop house, the big garden, the little garden, the perennial garden, the trees newly planted. Ringed by wild blueberries and errant grasses, dotted with tall oaks and even taller pines. It’s a place, a property, a small (very small) farm, a homestead? Not sure what to call it, but it’s our dance with the landscape we inherited, which began when a terminal moraine from a melting glacier piled up and created Martha’s Vineyard, leaving melting rivulets scurrying down the south side and carving out hollows on the way to the ocean. We live in one of those hollows.