That’s the general idea anyway. We’re really in business now – a farm name, a logo, and signs at the end of the drive. Now if only the clouds would rain we’d have some vegetables to sell! In the meantime, we have a ton of people to thank. continued »
Spring is really and truly sprung here at Circle M Farm. In fact, we’ve enjoyed temperatures in the 80s for several days. Or at least endured. The un-sheared sheep have actually suffered. But today the grass in their turn-out pasture finally reached the height I was looking for, so they have moved on to the new grass and can at least eat fresh greens while they suffer in the sun. We are eating fresh greens, too. And party-colored radishes. Delicious! continued »
We lost the little white chick. Literally, for a day, we couldn’t find the tiny straggler anywhere. And then we did, dead, just in front of the chicken house. continued »
Our homestead’s first chicks of the year appeared today. This afternoon, I went to collect eggs from the henhouse and found our tiniest hen leading a zig-zagging parade of five black and white chicks around the front pasture. continued »
Wild plums are in bloom. The teeny-tiny flowers on these scraggly, thorned scrub trees aren’t much to look at. In fact, the blossoms look best from far away, like a pointellist painting of white dots in a woods. Up close they are so small, so fragile and so non-descript as to be barely there. But they are the flowers of my dreams.
All year long when they are gone I will dream of them, remember them like a mist faintly touching my cheek, search for them fruitlessly on summer evenings and yearn for their return. This humble weed of trees, clumped ubiquitously here in hedgerows and wooded hillsides, carries in its swelling buds a most delicious and rare fragrance. When they suddenly open, the very first tree to flower in spring, the smell is quite literally intoxicating. Something indescribable, really, so light and sweet and fleeting as to create an insatiable longing for more even when you are standing in a grove surrounded by the blossoms. Like the travelers caught in Oz’s field of poppies or the lotus eaters in the Odyssey, the scent forces you to slow down, almost pulls you down like syrup up to your neck, and nearly convinces you to just drop in the field where you are and nap in the sun. Today I might let myself be convinced.
Because there are only a few days left. The entire wild plum blossom season lasts just a week. And if any of those days are windy, you’ll miss the scent, too ethereal to endure even the slightest breeze. The beginning of their week was windy here this year, and I was busy on the next few days, so this morning I will indulge, taking advantage of the still, moist air capturing the perfume in place for me.
Living on a farm situates you where myriad wonders of natural and domesticated beauty are within reach. But farming on that farm paradoxically creates challenges to appreciating those wonders. Wild plum blossoms arrive just when the soil is warm enough to put in most of the early summer crops, in the midst of a frenzy of cultivating, transplanting and seeding. When the plum blossoms are gone, so is your opportunity for planting storage onions that will size up to their full potential before the short days of autumn wither their tops and halt their growth. Of course, the coincidence of these two moments does insure that you’ll be out in the garden planting while the plum blossoms are blooming. You’ll have the pleasure of them while you work, just no time to accept the invitation to bask in their dappled shade.
