In restless walks she’ll prowl the night.
May, She will stay…Resting in my arms again…
Arriving on a warbler’s whistle, May is all about beginnings, summer’s infancy. Plant starts are small and healthy. Soil smells sweet and damp. Weeds hide out like older siblings who dare not mess with a baby’s status…perfect, beloved, arrived and much anticipated.
In May, Everything is ahead of us! The first greens are celebrated. Tomatoes promise blight-free perfection. We think, “this year we’re going to do it all, it will be perfect!” Yeah. We put away the snow shovel finally, and out come garden tools: the 5-tined broadfork, the “King of Spades” (yep the best spade made…really a Queen of a Spade!), Dutch Hoe and Hoss seeder…in my case all needing a little burnishing with rasp, steel wool, and oil.
May beckons me also to the woods below the farm’s plateau where damp seeps and streams find their ways to daylight. Watercress is emerald, elfin ears are scarlet velvet. Fern fiddles, ramps, morels, nettles, woodland violets…there’s freshness here, sustenance that grows of its own volition with no help from me. I feel the divide. Farm work on the plateau is our purpose, it’s farming…gardening for harvest. Below in the cooler darkness,
I feel my place on this planet differently. I am happy to be; A sense of having been given a privilege—to be. Where radishes and peas rate my attention, The endless opportunities on the plateau above…exact a toll.
The wet woodland below the farm–the river’s flood plain, is a grandmother’s belly. Dealing with digestion…she and her sister trees interlace their nimble roots to filter the flows of what “we” feed her, good or bad. In our case we work very hard to send as little dyspepsia as possible. Practicing no-till and cover cropping, our aim is to retain water and soil on the plateau, saving the grandmother’s belly from the ache of sediment and the acid stomach of pesticides. So we start another summer. With intention, and gratitude, and commitment. And anticipation of Farm to Table extravagance! So glad you are here!
