New Holland
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When Pigs Fly Farm
I've never liked digging potatoes. It's hard on the back and it's lonely, dirty work. Though I can't say I'll feel the same next week or even tomorrow, I can say that today is a perfect day to dig potatoes. The damp earth alternates between fine crumbles that easily offer their harvest up for the gathering and heavy clods that break apart with the thud of gravity as they hit the row behind me. Digging has hardly been noted the crowning accomplishment of humankind, but there's a solidness, a sturdy strength to kneeling in the dirt feeling the wetness of the mulch hay seep through my jeans into damp bones and feeling the earth inch its way past the ragged denim tear at my knees only to creep down the pant leg into my socks when I stand again to place feet on the potato fork. The weather alternates, too, between the chill wind that makes me grateful for the warmth of flannel and the sun peeking out of the low gray haze to tease my tan shoulders, calling to them as they move hidden beneath the stained white tee shirt passed from the father now to his little girl. Autumn sun is somehow different than summer lighter, cooler, dimmer and yet more clear, drawing things into focus, things never seen in the glaring, sweaty, sunlight of July.
This is what it comes to, me on my knees in the dirt. Quietly accepting the harvest with the hard persistence of the fork forced into the soil, covering and uncovering, knowing and unknowing, gripping the soil and then letting it go. Without judgment, the earth reveals to the nudging of my hands big, round potatoes, misshapen knobby gems and small dots of stored starch. No shiny red apple, bright orange bell pepper, or fat juicy tomato just rusty, dirty white, hues of brown, mottled, grey potatoes. It's a bounty marred by the nibbling of mice, a premature harvest of tunnels and craters carved into otherwise perfect roots and tubers. Strange that when I see the little thief, frightened by the tremors of moving earth, scurrying to burrow into the loose ground, I let him go. In fact, silently I root for him and hope he'll manage to avoid arousing the attentive senses of my sole companion the grey tomcat lounging lazily in the orchard grass one row over. He can run but he will not escape fate for long, like the small grey half-devoured bodies lying in the grass as I made my way through the yard to the potato patch, bucket and fork in hand. And so despite all the damage caused to the precious harvest by his kind, I let him pass.
While I dig solitary and introspective in the potato patch, Mama is inside our old farmhouse painting the windows. Blue. They are new windows, replacing the ones salvaged from demolition years ago. But she is not painting these new windows for herself. She is preparing them for someone else to look through. Someone else with another view, another vision, another dream for this place. She is selling the farm.
You must understand, I do not begrudge her this her vision, her reason for being here died with my father two years ago. Happiness is a thing meant to be shared. Living here alone, constantly fighting the jungle of grass, tending the ground, wondering about the water level in the well, dreading frozen pipes in the winter all too easily reminds her of limits, physical and spiritual, and how much the loss of one person can mean. She must move on. She must find a new home where friends are closer than a country mile away and life is less rugged and tenuous than a hastily stacked woodpile. She will move into the city. I only wish I could take this farm from her, to hold it close for a time and then to pass on to the next in the family, like my father had wished. Like it was meant to be. But she will need money to buy her new place in the city. This will be so hard for her. She is selling the farm.
And with the farm, goes the framework I have known as family for the whole of my life. These oak beams, these brick walls, this worn floor, this weathered barn, this little bit of land is holy ground. Perhaps not to the cars passing by here every day, not to the casual onlooker hurrying past to life, but certainly to me this place is sacred. People are not rooted in a place like trees, they move about freely. My mother, my brothers and I will not wilt and die when this soil is no longer cradling our roots. Still it's strange; I do not know family if it is not centered here. Where will I come home to, if not this farm? I know that all things change, just as I have felt the growing, shifting seasons of this land. But I do not want it. I want just to hold and cherish the old. This is not a thing to be left behind or thrown away. True, it cannot wholly be taken from me. The memories cannot be sold like real estate, cannot be passed on to another like a title or deed. But the loss, the grief is real. I see hollyhocks high by the chicken coop, geraniums red by the front door stoop, wild rose climbing up the pump house wall, but the forget-me-nots don't grow here anymore.
I came here for my Mama. I came here for my family. I came here for me. I came to save this place, to protect it and all that it stands for to me. Two years ago, I put aside the life I had made for myself and I came home to the farm. When Pigs Fly Farm it was a joke, a play on words thrown in the face of some cynical person who said we'd make money farming when pigs fly. I told myself I would live to see those pigs fly. I had hoped to save the farm by working the farm. But too late I realized that the green I work with is the green of soil and sun and seed and rain not the green of banks and taxes and land deeds. In hindsight, it might have worked; there were so many options, so many plans. We would succeed.
The CSA, subscription farming, seemed the most practical, and the market and interest seemed ripe with potential. Eat local. Eat green. Eat organic. Eat your veggies. Know where your food comes from in just two years I have a wait list of more folks than I could have ever hoped. But demand is not the only factor; supply is the limitation. Oh, there's plenty of land and sun and rain, but there's not enough labor to maintain the gardens and pick the harvest. Here in our second season, 12 shares a mere $6000 has proven more manual labor than we can handle. My baggy pants and loose shirts, aching shoulders and tight biceps are evidence of this limitation. The work has made me strong, perhaps stronger than I have ever been. I wish I could remember who it was that said how in life it's important not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong. I do feel strong. But somehow it's still not strong enough.
So, even with the land and market potential for expansion, the additional labor required to grow this project is too daunting to consider. I thought of finding college interns willing and able to help with the bulk of the summer labor in exchange for the knowledge, experience, room and board. But time is simply not on my side. It would take years to earn the money to buy the property from Mama at anything close to a fair price but she must sell now. I don't have $250,000 and, working the farm days and another job at night, I have run through my savings and lack the financial base necessary for a loan.
So the CSA will end. There were so many other great ideas, plans full of potential and hope hatched while pulling weeds among the chard or snatching a handful of strawberries during a break from mowing. Inspiration from the deliberate faith of a volunteer tomato growing where no hand had planted a seed, no one mulched or weeded, a remnant of last years patch declaring with calm determination, "I will grow here. I will live here." That would be me rugged and alive. Sane ideas and crazy ideas like Einstein said, if at first an idea is not absurd, it will surely fail. I could start a bed and breakfast, a community garden, apply for government grants designed to help small farmers and women farmers. I could write a book about my experiences coming home a best seller that would net me enough to secure this land, myself the next Wendell Berry or Gene Lodgson. I could publish a cookbook of family recipes or a calendar of farm photos. I could host a music festival to raise funds an annual event of harvest, music and community. I could write to Willie Nelson and Farm Aid. I could win the lottery or some bizarre sweepstakes I never knew I'd entered prize patrol pulling into the farmyard unexpectedly. (Chance favors the prepared mind, and I've tried to be open to all options, but sometimes the sweat drips down into your eyes and, it seems, seeps saltily into your brain.) Heck, if only 2,500 people gave $100 each, the problem would be solved another family farm saved. Victory might be in the simplest of gestures. Never underestimate the power of a small group of determined individuals, right? Such a simple thing. Such a right thing. But this is not the back-to-the-land movement of the '60's. This is not a hopeful, against all odds, true-life movie made to restore our faith in humankind. This is not a book precisely written to move our hearts and remind us of the inner strength of human faith and perseverance. This is not some song rising and falling with chords that resonate those ancient and almost forgotten remnants of truths from long ago. This is only one life. This happens every day. This is my life and it's here in this dirt.
There are still plans that come to mind even today while munching on a handful of yellow pear tomatoes dusted with the black that comes from using moldy mulch straw. What if I tried this? Is there enough time for that to work? Perhaps that moldy dust is hallucinogenic. Perhaps that is what brings out this overdramatic reaction to the now fairly commonplace loss of childhood home and farm. Perhaps that is what calls me to share with you all this burden that weighs on my heart more heavily than the force of an old potato fork thrust into the ground, a weight that brings me to my knees in the dirt of this potato patch.
I somehow feel that you should know all this. Maybe it's simply that grief shared is grief lessened? But I think it's more than that: some how I feel like you have been here with me. It's silly. We, I, owe you all such thanks. So many of you have no idea what you have done. You have helped us, my Mama and me, in so many ways. Some have cut and carried fence boards to the roadside, mounded the dirt around rows of potato plants, carved furrows for planting, climbed shaky ladders to pick apples, bent backs alongside my own to harvest, crawled into the blackberries, scratched skin with the bales of mulch hay. I want to thank all of you friends from up north who have come to visit and help you drove hours because you knew how much this meant to me. I want to thank our local neighbors who gave us their unused garden space, their support for our crazy idea, and who have stopped in to lend a much-needed hand. Experienced hands cracked and creased from seventy years of weekday labors and tender hands, with only five seasons behind them, fumbling and eager to dig in the dirt, to ride in the red wagon filled with hay, munching on a freshly harvested apple.
So many thanks to our CSA members. Last year and this year, even those on the wait list hoping to be members of our little community, wanting to support us. Thank you so much. To some of you this was simply a transaction you paid us a fee for food. That's true; it was a simple transaction. But so much more, too. You provided our financial base with your dues and more importantly supported this fledgling business with your input, ideas, feedback, sincere kindness and your belief in what we have tried to accomplish. You came to the farm and walked through the gardens with me, listening to our plans and experiencing this place with us. You've been there patiently waiting through the spring's slow harvest and so full of enthusiasm with the bounty later in the season. Seeing your faces coming up the steps to the porch to get your weekly veggies can you even know what your eager smiles and friendly hellos meant to a tired soul after a long, hot day in the garden? Your excitement about a tasty new tomato, stories of your own backyard garden woes, advice on Japanese Beetle infestation, your stories of yummy new recipes gazpacho, salsa, apple tarts, and pizza Margherita no matter how exhausted, it's so easy to love what you do when folks are so grateful and appreciative of your hard work. I cannot say it enough. Thank you.
I had thought I might leave soon. My work here seems done. Two years is long enough. It is time to surrender the fate of this farm like so many farms before. This is not the first family farm to go, and it won't be the last. Our farm has a long history running back to 1829 when Rickey laid the first brick, to the runaway slaves that took shelter hidden in tunnels caved in so long ago, to my own childhood tucked in with my brothers to wait out the blizzard, or out back jumping bales of alfalfa with feet so light and wind in my hair. But it's also in a long line of fading family farms, a pattern of changing landscape. I have done all I can and I leave with that knowledge regret perhaps, but no guilt. It is simply time to go. That may be true, but I can't go. I cannot find it in myself to leave quite yet, even knowing that my days to walk here are numbered, a number no one knows for sure. I will stay as long as I can for my mother, for my father, for my brothers, for all of you who understand, and for myself. I will walk this little piece of land until it is no longer mine to walk.
Besides, there are still potatoes to dig. They have waited all season there beneath the soil silently growing and waiting for this fork to call them up to the surface, to shake off the dirt and greet this day. Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other. Henry David Thoreau. Perhaps I will not see another year here, but I have members who expect a harvest and this season is not over. These last two years have been good for me; for my whole life this farm has been good to me. It has been such a gift. I am grateful. It is good that this is what it comes to, me on my knees in the dirt. And for as long as I can, I will stay right here in this dirt. Quietly accepting the harvest with the hard persistence of the fork forced into the soil, alternately covering and uncovering, knowing and unknowing, gripping the soil and then letting it go. I have today...today is a perfect day to dig potatoes.
CSA Details:
Season: May through October
Type: Single farm
Since: 2007
No of Shares: 15
Full Share: $500/season
1/2 Share: $250/season
Work Req? No
Pick Up/Drop Off Points:
339 Tibet, Clintonville Ohio
Date and time TBD by member demographics and convenience. Options flexible.
Contact: Janelle Carroll
Phone: 740.495.5763
Address: 23770 SR 207, New Holland, OH 43145
When Pigs Fly Farm
Members may opt to pick up their share directly from the farm.
Contact: Janelle Carroll
Phone: 740.495.5763
Address: 23770 SR 207, New Holland, OH 43145
This is what it comes to, me on my knees in the dirt. Quietly accepting the harvest with the hard persistence of the fork forced into the soil, covering and uncovering, knowing and unknowing, gripping the soil and then letting it go. Without judgment, the earth reveals to the nudging of my hands big, round potatoes, misshapen knobby gems and small dots of stored starch. No shiny red apple, bright orange bell pepper, or fat juicy tomato just rusty, dirty white, hues of brown, mottled, grey potatoes. It's a bounty marred by the nibbling of mice, a premature harvest of tunnels and craters carved into otherwise perfect roots and tubers. Strange that when I see the little thief, frightened by the tremors of moving earth, scurrying to burrow into the loose ground, I let him go. In fact, silently I root for him and hope he'll manage to avoid arousing the attentive senses of my sole companion the grey tomcat lounging lazily in the orchard grass one row over. He can run but he will not escape fate for long, like the small grey half-devoured bodies lying in the grass as I made my way through the yard to the potato patch, bucket and fork in hand. And so despite all the damage caused to the precious harvest by his kind, I let him pass.
While I dig solitary and introspective in the potato patch, Mama is inside our old farmhouse painting the windows. Blue. They are new windows, replacing the ones salvaged from demolition years ago. But she is not painting these new windows for herself. She is preparing them for someone else to look through. Someone else with another view, another vision, another dream for this place. She is selling the farm.
You must understand, I do not begrudge her this her vision, her reason for being here died with my father two years ago. Happiness is a thing meant to be shared. Living here alone, constantly fighting the jungle of grass, tending the ground, wondering about the water level in the well, dreading frozen pipes in the winter all too easily reminds her of limits, physical and spiritual, and how much the loss of one person can mean. She must move on. She must find a new home where friends are closer than a country mile away and life is less rugged and tenuous than a hastily stacked woodpile. She will move into the city. I only wish I could take this farm from her, to hold it close for a time and then to pass on to the next in the family, like my father had wished. Like it was meant to be. But she will need money to buy her new place in the city. This will be so hard for her. She is selling the farm.
And with the farm, goes the framework I have known as family for the whole of my life. These oak beams, these brick walls, this worn floor, this weathered barn, this little bit of land is holy ground. Perhaps not to the cars passing by here every day, not to the casual onlooker hurrying past to life, but certainly to me this place is sacred. People are not rooted in a place like trees, they move about freely. My mother, my brothers and I will not wilt and die when this soil is no longer cradling our roots. Still it's strange; I do not know family if it is not centered here. Where will I come home to, if not this farm? I know that all things change, just as I have felt the growing, shifting seasons of this land. But I do not want it. I want just to hold and cherish the old. This is not a thing to be left behind or thrown away. True, it cannot wholly be taken from me. The memories cannot be sold like real estate, cannot be passed on to another like a title or deed. But the loss, the grief is real. I see hollyhocks high by the chicken coop, geraniums red by the front door stoop, wild rose climbing up the pump house wall, but the forget-me-nots don't grow here anymore.
I came here for my Mama. I came here for my family. I came here for me. I came to save this place, to protect it and all that it stands for to me. Two years ago, I put aside the life I had made for myself and I came home to the farm. When Pigs Fly Farm it was a joke, a play on words thrown in the face of some cynical person who said we'd make money farming when pigs fly. I told myself I would live to see those pigs fly. I had hoped to save the farm by working the farm. But too late I realized that the green I work with is the green of soil and sun and seed and rain not the green of banks and taxes and land deeds. In hindsight, it might have worked; there were so many options, so many plans. We would succeed.
The CSA, subscription farming, seemed the most practical, and the market and interest seemed ripe with potential. Eat local. Eat green. Eat organic. Eat your veggies. Know where your food comes from in just two years I have a wait list of more folks than I could have ever hoped. But demand is not the only factor; supply is the limitation. Oh, there's plenty of land and sun and rain, but there's not enough labor to maintain the gardens and pick the harvest. Here in our second season, 12 shares a mere $6000 has proven more manual labor than we can handle. My baggy pants and loose shirts, aching shoulders and tight biceps are evidence of this limitation. The work has made me strong, perhaps stronger than I have ever been. I wish I could remember who it was that said how in life it's important not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong. I do feel strong. But somehow it's still not strong enough.
So, even with the land and market potential for expansion, the additional labor required to grow this project is too daunting to consider. I thought of finding college interns willing and able to help with the bulk of the summer labor in exchange for the knowledge, experience, room and board. But time is simply not on my side. It would take years to earn the money to buy the property from Mama at anything close to a fair price but she must sell now. I don't have $250,000 and, working the farm days and another job at night, I have run through my savings and lack the financial base necessary for a loan.
So the CSA will end. There were so many other great ideas, plans full of potential and hope hatched while pulling weeds among the chard or snatching a handful of strawberries during a break from mowing. Inspiration from the deliberate faith of a volunteer tomato growing where no hand had planted a seed, no one mulched or weeded, a remnant of last years patch declaring with calm determination, "I will grow here. I will live here." That would be me rugged and alive. Sane ideas and crazy ideas like Einstein said, if at first an idea is not absurd, it will surely fail. I could start a bed and breakfast, a community garden, apply for government grants designed to help small farmers and women farmers. I could write a book about my experiences coming home a best seller that would net me enough to secure this land, myself the next Wendell Berry or Gene Lodgson. I could publish a cookbook of family recipes or a calendar of farm photos. I could host a music festival to raise funds an annual event of harvest, music and community. I could write to Willie Nelson and Farm Aid. I could win the lottery or some bizarre sweepstakes I never knew I'd entered prize patrol pulling into the farmyard unexpectedly. (Chance favors the prepared mind, and I've tried to be open to all options, but sometimes the sweat drips down into your eyes and, it seems, seeps saltily into your brain.) Heck, if only 2,500 people gave $100 each, the problem would be solved another family farm saved. Victory might be in the simplest of gestures. Never underestimate the power of a small group of determined individuals, right? Such a simple thing. Such a right thing. But this is not the back-to-the-land movement of the '60's. This is not a hopeful, against all odds, true-life movie made to restore our faith in humankind. This is not a book precisely written to move our hearts and remind us of the inner strength of human faith and perseverance. This is not some song rising and falling with chords that resonate those ancient and almost forgotten remnants of truths from long ago. This is only one life. This happens every day. This is my life and it's here in this dirt.
There are still plans that come to mind even today while munching on a handful of yellow pear tomatoes dusted with the black that comes from using moldy mulch straw. What if I tried this? Is there enough time for that to work? Perhaps that moldy dust is hallucinogenic. Perhaps that is what brings out this overdramatic reaction to the now fairly commonplace loss of childhood home and farm. Perhaps that is what calls me to share with you all this burden that weighs on my heart more heavily than the force of an old potato fork thrust into the ground, a weight that brings me to my knees in the dirt of this potato patch.
I somehow feel that you should know all this. Maybe it's simply that grief shared is grief lessened? But I think it's more than that: some how I feel like you have been here with me. It's silly. We, I, owe you all such thanks. So many of you have no idea what you have done. You have helped us, my Mama and me, in so many ways. Some have cut and carried fence boards to the roadside, mounded the dirt around rows of potato plants, carved furrows for planting, climbed shaky ladders to pick apples, bent backs alongside my own to harvest, crawled into the blackberries, scratched skin with the bales of mulch hay. I want to thank all of you friends from up north who have come to visit and help you drove hours because you knew how much this meant to me. I want to thank our local neighbors who gave us their unused garden space, their support for our crazy idea, and who have stopped in to lend a much-needed hand. Experienced hands cracked and creased from seventy years of weekday labors and tender hands, with only five seasons behind them, fumbling and eager to dig in the dirt, to ride in the red wagon filled with hay, munching on a freshly harvested apple.
So many thanks to our CSA members. Last year and this year, even those on the wait list hoping to be members of our little community, wanting to support us. Thank you so much. To some of you this was simply a transaction you paid us a fee for food. That's true; it was a simple transaction. But so much more, too. You provided our financial base with your dues and more importantly supported this fledgling business with your input, ideas, feedback, sincere kindness and your belief in what we have tried to accomplish. You came to the farm and walked through the gardens with me, listening to our plans and experiencing this place with us. You've been there patiently waiting through the spring's slow harvest and so full of enthusiasm with the bounty later in the season. Seeing your faces coming up the steps to the porch to get your weekly veggies can you even know what your eager smiles and friendly hellos meant to a tired soul after a long, hot day in the garden? Your excitement about a tasty new tomato, stories of your own backyard garden woes, advice on Japanese Beetle infestation, your stories of yummy new recipes gazpacho, salsa, apple tarts, and pizza Margherita no matter how exhausted, it's so easy to love what you do when folks are so grateful and appreciative of your hard work. I cannot say it enough. Thank you.
I had thought I might leave soon. My work here seems done. Two years is long enough. It is time to surrender the fate of this farm like so many farms before. This is not the first family farm to go, and it won't be the last. Our farm has a long history running back to 1829 when Rickey laid the first brick, to the runaway slaves that took shelter hidden in tunnels caved in so long ago, to my own childhood tucked in with my brothers to wait out the blizzard, or out back jumping bales of alfalfa with feet so light and wind in my hair. But it's also in a long line of fading family farms, a pattern of changing landscape. I have done all I can and I leave with that knowledge regret perhaps, but no guilt. It is simply time to go. That may be true, but I can't go. I cannot find it in myself to leave quite yet, even knowing that my days to walk here are numbered, a number no one knows for sure. I will stay as long as I can for my mother, for my father, for my brothers, for all of you who understand, and for myself. I will walk this little piece of land until it is no longer mine to walk.
Besides, there are still potatoes to dig. They have waited all season there beneath the soil silently growing and waiting for this fork to call them up to the surface, to shake off the dirt and greet this day. Good for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other. Henry David Thoreau. Perhaps I will not see another year here, but I have members who expect a harvest and this season is not over. These last two years have been good for me; for my whole life this farm has been good to me. It has been such a gift. I am grateful. It is good that this is what it comes to, me on my knees in the dirt. And for as long as I can, I will stay right here in this dirt. Quietly accepting the harvest with the hard persistence of the fork forced into the soil, alternately covering and uncovering, knowing and unknowing, gripping the soil and then letting it go. I have today...today is a perfect day to dig potatoes.
CSA Details:
Season: May through October
Type: Single farm
Since: 2007
No of Shares: 15
Full Share: $500/season
1/2 Share: $250/season
Work Req? No
Pick Up/Drop Off Points:
339 Tibet, Clintonville Ohio
Date and time TBD by member demographics and convenience. Options flexible.
Contact: Janelle Carroll
Phone: 740.495.5763
Address: 23770 SR 207, New Holland, OH 43145
When Pigs Fly Farm
Members may opt to pick up their share directly from the farm.
Contact: Janelle Carroll
Phone: 740.495.5763
Address: 23770 SR 207, New Holland, OH 43145