— Chapter Nine —

Farming the Dead Things

I’m definitely the support person here and Julie the

farmer. As a suburban boy I always saw farming as a choice rather than a
calling. And after I looked at the numbers when we first settled in Barre,
farming in New England was clearly not a very realistic choice if I hoped
to make the living I wanted for our family. But Julie was going to farm no
matter what I thought about the idea, and I liked the idea of us eating well.
From the early days of our small garden in Dorchester, it was apparent
that I did not enjoy working with tiny seedlings and pulling weeds. Julie,
however, would go out after supper to weed for the pure fun of it! But
when it came time to build a rabbit hutch or a cold frame, she was all
thumbs. After some discussion, therefore, we arrived at a decision about
how to share leadership on the farm: If something was alive, Julie (and
increasingly the kids, as they were able) would deal with it. If it was dead
(nonliving), however, I (and increasingly the kids) would deal with it. This
split of the farmwork and responsibilities has served us well for forty years.
The “alive” tasks cover all animal care, as well as soil prep, planting,
transplanting, mulching, weeding, harvesting, and packing of vegetables.
The “dead” tasks include buying and fixing equipment and tools, putting
up fences, installing irrigation, keeping the machinery going, and lots and
lots of building—hoophouses, range houses for livestock, storage sheds,
and a barn. Much more was involved on both sides, but you get the idea.
As with most rules in life, our dead-versus-alive jobs split had one excep-
tion. Despite the fact that they are quite alive, I take a special interest in
our tree and vine crops. I manage the fruit tree pruning, thinning, and
grafting because I love fruit so much. We both were involved with the
farm finances: setting prices, creating a budget, tracking expenses, and
eventually hiring staff.

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Help from Peter the Finn

An invaluable helper as we worked to establish our farm was our neigh-
bor Peter, the retired Finnish-American farmer who helped Julie revive
the Barre Farmers Market. He and his wife, Impi, had farmed, but now
lived in a trailer and still kept chickens and pigs with a small orchard and
garden. We bought our eggs from Peter for a year or two, until we built
our chicken house.
Peter was available to consult with us about most everything. Short
and squat, he would slowly walk our land, peering at things and mutter-
ing to himself. I would follow him around as I would a holy man, waiting
for a kernel of wisdom to drop. Occasionally he would stop and point
out a problem.
Electric fences were brand-new technology to me then, and the one I
installed in the woods to corral our pigs seemed to work only intermittently.
One time we arrived home to find the pigs escaped and happily rooting up
the grass on the front lawn. We managed to get them back in, and Peter
came over the next day. He pointed out to me the places where the electric
fence wires, strung on insulators nailed into trees, were too close to the
heads of those metal nails. Raindrops from the previous night’s downpour
had bridged those gaps and caused the fence to short out.
I had read that good New England farmers, often from the old country,
would build their barns first, before their houses. The livestock needed care
right away, and the family would live upstairs in the barn until they could
afford their own accommodations. I didn’t want to do that, obviously, but I
felt that we would not be true farmers until we had built a barn. Peter just
laughed at me.
“Build sheds instead,” he said. “It will take years until you can afford a
barn. If you need space now, build a shed!”
He had a number of sheds around his trailer, so he knew whereof
he spoke.
The advantages of a shed are many. First off, you don’t need to procure
a building permit or pour a foundation. Simply throw up some posts, put
a roof over them (walls and doors are optional) and you’re done. You can
do it yourself (although a spouse or a kid eight years or older can be a real
help), tools are minimal (shovel, measuring tape, saw, hammer, nails, and
ladder), and materials (posts, planks, and roofing shingles) are cheap. Best

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of all you can put off the big barn decisions until later, when you have more
time and money and a clearer idea of what you need and where it should
be situated. Barns are permanent, sheds are not.
In our first few years, we put up two woodsheds, a chicken house, a
brooder house, a toolshed, an implement shed, and a hay shed that was
later extended into three adjacent sheds.

Keeping Livestock Secure with Pasture Pens

In addition to our sheds, we also built (and still are building) movable pas-
ture houses for animals. Anyone who keeps animals knows they want to be
outside. The sun, fresh grass, clean air, and wind make them happy. There
are a few days of sleet and ice in the winter when they will voluntarily stay
indoors, but those are the exceptions.
In New England, the woods are full of hungry four-footed varmints
and the air harbors sharp-eyed raptors. To stay in business while raising
animals, a farmer has to be creative. Our solution is to raise animals on
pasture and regularly move them—cattle and pigs from one fenced area
to another, birds within a pasture house that has a roof and wire walls but
no floor. The roof and walls protect the poultry from being preyed upon
by owls and other raptors. No floor is so they can graze all day. (The wild
ancestors of domestic chickens and turkeys, of course, survived by eating
plants, bugs, and worms. Domestic poultry in a pasture house eat those
things too, but will seldom fatten up or produce a lot of eggs unless the
farmer supplements their diet with grain.)
Our houses are generally eight by twelve feet and it takes two people to
move them. Each house can accommodate two dozen full-grown chickens
or about a dozen turkeys. Since we raise more than 450 chickens and
100 turkeys each year, we need twenty or so houses. We move the pasture
houses, with birds inside, every day to new pasture, as well as collecting
eggs, providing feed, and changing water.
Our poultry is a big investment of resources, and we know that the
birds in pasture houses are still vulnerable to varmints who can dig in
under the wall of a house and raid the pen. This is where the dogs come
in. Every night critters of all sorts come to the edge of the woods, drooling
and peering into the field where the portable poultry houses are. Their
smell is enough to alert our two or three mutts who sleep outside. They

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start barking and baying, alerting the varmints that their mission will not
be a piece of cake (or chicken potpie) tonight. Mostly it’s a standoff, but
occasionally in the morning we find the remains of a chicken outside a
house or the carcass of an opossum, a large rat, or some other furry critter
dragged back to our yard for seasoning.
We have had many phone calls from people wanting to keep chickens
in the country and have but one message. It goes something like this:
Caller: “We heard you keep chickens. My wife and I lost a whole flock
of them last night and she wants to quit. But I don’t. The coop had an
electric fence and solid walls, but they dug a hole underneath and came up
through the floor. How can we . . . ?”
Me (interrupting): “Do you have any dogs?”
Caller: “Sure, two of them. They are really cute and love it here.”
Me: “Do they sleep inside or outside?”
Caller: “Inside with us, of course. They each have a bed. . . .”
Me: “That’s your problem. Put them out every night, a little bit hungry.
You may still be able to break their bad habits and make them working
dogs! Let me know what happens.”
I hate to be so unsympathetic, but it has happened many times. Once
in a while I hear later that the dog advice helped. Usually, I hear nothing.
Pasture pen management is a wholly different kind of farming from a
conventional broiler operation where the birds are crammed inside a dark
and stuffy enclosure as tightly as possible and never see the out-of-doors
their whole life. We think their happiness is well worth the extra space and
care. Of course, we do have to charge more for animal products raised this
way. Our customers seem to understand.

Burning Wood
Although trees start out alive, the way I relate to them on our farm is
usually with a chain saw. (I try not to do that in the orchard, of course.)
After that, they are dead and enter my area of management.
I don’t think any of the previous owners of our land had much use
for the woods. So they let the trees grow wherever they wanted, which is
anywhere that gets any sun. For me, however, managing the woods was one
of life’s constants. Since we burn twelve to fifteen cords a year to heat our
house, make hot water, and cook our food, that equates to about sixty trees

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a year which must die, be cut into stove-length pieces, and brought into
a woodshed to be split and stacked. Cutting down and processing sixty
trees is not a big deal if you are a professional logger clear-cutting an area.
But if you are a homesteader trying to manage your woods, keeping them
productive and sustainable, it is a big deal.
Managing the woods means first not letting any wood go to waste.
They say a good manager can get up to a full cord of wood per acre just
from the natural death of trees and tree parts. I think that is probably true
if you start with a well-managed woods and keeping it that way is your
top priority. For that to be the case, however, you need to spend time there
regularly to harvest the dying trees before they drop and start rotting on
the ground, and you must have access to all of your woods via roads, or at
least paths to tow logs out.
For me, however, woods time was limited. During winter there was
snow covering the ground, and hauling wood by truck was impossible (this
is one job we really wanted a four-wheel-drive tractor for). In the early
spring the soil was too wet, and then from late spring to Thanksgiving the
farm needed my every spare hour. So, it was only when the ground was
frozen from Thanksgiving until heavy snow fell in late December that I
could turn my full attention to the woods.
We originally had no access roads to our wood’s acreage. Because of
that, over the last forty years, I have selected trees to cut based on their
being in the way. That includes trees at the edges of a field. I cut them
down if they are edging back into the open field, or I remove a single limb
if it is casting too much shade over a growing area. For the most part,
though, being in the way in our woods means trees standing where we
need to put in a woods road.
Managing our woods involves scouting the terrain for level ground,
finding a way around boulders, seeking passage through wet areas, and
laying out a route for vehicles in usable loops to avoid the need to back up
to turn around. Once that is done, whatever trees need to come down must
fall. If the road goes right over them, of course, the stump must be cut right
down to the ground—pretty tough on chain saw blades.
In my lifetime, I estimate, I’ve put useable roads through about half of
our wooded acreage—the easier half, of course. The temptation now is to
continue harvesting in the woods that are accessible and take more trees

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there than is wise, rather than continuing to put in access roads to the rest. I
figure, in another generation the job will be done, if we can resist temptation!
The kids were a tremendous help with wood as they grew up. They
hauled and stacked firewood from as young as age three (I blush, but
we needed their help!), worked with axes at age six or seven, and mauls
at nine or ten, and graduated to running a chain saw just before adoles-
cence. They worked hard and were proud of every truckful that went into
the woodshed.
Paul even developed an artistic interest in wood’s natural growth
variations and saved burl wood, making it into beautiful cups and bowls
on a lathe.

Building Our Markets

It took us a long time to get there, but after ten years on our land, we felt
ready to build a barn. What drove that decision was marketing. Selling at
the Barre Farmers Market was a great way to meet people and fun for the
kids, but on a dollars-per-hour basis, it wasn’t sustainable. In small-town
Barre, customers look for bargains, not for the latest fancy lettuces.
We considered starting a farm stand, but our location on a dirt back
road, although an ideal place to raise kids, was not so good for attracting
drive-by customers to stop and shop. For a short period, we sold produce
to the chef of the quaint, touristy hotel on the Barre common. He could
pay reasonable prices but soon got fired and then the hotel burned down.
A small health food store in Worcester, twenty-some miles away, really
liked our produce. Frank, the manager, was a savior! He sought out local
organic growers and paid them decently. The problem was the store’s small
size—an order had to be at least fifty dollars for it to be worth making the
delivery run. But that didn’t happen every week. Their business alone was
not enough to sustain us. Fortunately, we found a steady source of demand
from an unexpected source.
Barre is home to an internationally known Buddhist meditation center
housed in an old brick monastery building. As mindful vegetarians, their
clients were naturals for our produce. We slowly developed a relationship
with the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) that has stood us in good stead.
Whenever they had a retreat, they would order quantities of our lettuce,
kale, and chard. With the IMS orders, we were able to keep the farm alive.

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Our big break, though, on the marketing front was the rise of
community-­supported agriculture (CSA). At that time in the late 1980s,
the model of consumers buying “farm shares” was first tried in Germany
and Japan. Word of it spread rapidly to the United States. In the CSA
models, consumers pay farmers upfront for a share—a season’s worth
of superfresh organic produce picked up weekly from spring until the
frost comes. The cost of a share varies depending on how much produce
the farm gives a shareholder each week; it might be as high as several
hundred dollars.
There are many benefits to the CSA model: It reduces the amount of
time the farmer needs to devote to sales. Your shareholders receive what
you have to offer. If your rutabagas fail one year, it’s OK, you just give them
more of what grew well. The price your customers pay is roughly what they
would pay in a health store for the same produce, but you don’t have to bear
the costs of delivery. This arrangement sounded pretty good to us!
With our other market channels, we had been able to pick and deliver
the produce in a timely fashion; we didn’t have to worry about keeping it
fresh postharvest. For the CSA, however, we would still pick crops in the
morning when it was cool, but many of our customers couldn’t pick up
their produce until after their workday ended. That meant we would have to
keep their bagged produce fresh through hot summer afternoons—perhaps
as many as fifty bags of freshly picked vegetables, herbs, and fruit. The only
way to keep that much produce cool on a hot day is in a walk-in cooler.
But since new coolers cost many thousands of dollars, we felt we couldn’t
afford the investment.
We were familiar with walk-in coolers from our days in Boston, when
we were members of the Mission Hill Food Co-op. It operated out of a
church basement in which an ancient cooler had been set up for the pro-
duce. It was seven foot square and had a cute display window on the side.
I certainly do not deserve a smile from heaven, so I have always chalked
it up to Julie’s good nature that we received one. About the time we were
pondering our marketing problems, we received a phone call from the
co-op coordinator. “Bad news!” she said. “We don’t have enough members
and we’re disbanding. The church says we have to get rid of the walk-in.
(pause) We heard you were selling produce and hoped you might know
someone who could use it. It’s free for the taking.”

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We allowed as how we just might be able to help them out. The next
weekend, with all six of us in the cab of our stake body truck, we rattled off
to Boston and retrieved the cooler (disassembled in parts). It has given us
great service for more than thirty years.

Building the Barn

We needed a barn to house the cooler and had already picked a building site
near the house and our water hydrant. I had already given much thought
to how we would use the barn and how traffic would flow around it. We
needed a ground-floor area where we could prepare the CSA shares, and
the tractor we were going to buy when we could afford it would need space
on that level too. We needed an upstairs with a big floor where squash,
garlic, and onions could be spread out to dry and an attic to store supplies. I
wanted a traditional timber frame barn—six-by-eight-inch posts and beams,
notched, fitted together, braced with diagonals, and then pegged—with no
metal anywhere in the frame—not even nails. Fortunately, a local sawmill
a couple of miles from our farm could supply the unusually thick and long
posts and beams that we needed.
But the work was immense. Just creating the mortices and tenons (the
proper terms for the interconnecting notches in posts and beams) with a
handsaw, drill, and chisel took most of my spare time that summer. We
would fit the beams together into a series of “bents.” Each was two horizontal
crossbeams, one eight feet directly above the other, supported on two thick,
eighteen-foot-tall posts as legs. Erecting the first bent was tricky without a
winch or crane, but we managed it with ropes, a truck, long two-by-fours,
and a lot of people. Once up and temporarily stabilized, the first bent
provided stability for raising the second, and so forth. When the six bents
are locked together with “girts” connecting them, they make an incredibly
strong and rigid structure. After we raised the bents and connected them,
we assembled the cooler on the ground floor, then added the barn walls and
roof. As a builder, I don’t know which I felt prouder of, the barn or the house!

Our Underground Utility System

Another problem at our growing farm was that the utilities got in each
other’s way. We needed water for transplanting seedlings, pasturing ani-
mals, and irrigating crops during dry periods. We had set up a network of

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hoses to carry water from our well all over the farm. We also needed elec-
tricity to run the electric fences. That came in the form of a high-voltage
but low-amperage “shock” generated in the barn by an electric instrument
called a “fencer.” This shock was grounded at the barn but carried live
through heavily insulated wires to the moveable fences in various areas.
It reached a point where when we tried to lay out a new hose or new
wire, other hoses and wires were already crossing the desired route. Even
worse, weeds and grass grew up around the hoses and wires. More than
once, inattentive tractor drivers would mow right over them, cutting the
hoses and tangling the wires into incredible knots, making a mess that
took hours to sort out and many dollars to repair. After one too many of
these calamities, I made a decision.
“That does it,” I stated, sounding as emphatic as I could. “Dan, you and
I are going to put all the systems underground!”
The whole family blinked at me, not understanding. I think Dan
was the first to finally catch my meaning. His face paled and he gulped:
“Everywhere?”
“Yes,” I said. “Everywhere.”
We drew a map of our fields and woods, locating places (I think we
identified eight) to which we wanted to bring water and electric shock
capability. At those key locations, we would install a post, and the buried
hoses and wires (encased in a flexible one-inch-diameter PVC pipe) would
emerge from the ground and terminate in a faucet for water, or metal ring
for electric shock, attached to the post. When we needed those utilities, we
could just go to the nearest post and hook up a hose or short wire.
This would be a major improvement if we could manage it, but it
required digging hundreds of feet of trenches that would start at the barn
and hydrant and branch out to all the various posts. We couldn’t afford a
backhoe to dig a deep trench, so Dan and I used shovels to dig trenches
just a few inches deep. It also meant buying over a thousand feet of pipe
for shrouding wires, as well as numerous posts, junctions, weather-proof
electric boxes, and fittings of all types.
At one point the trench had to cross the road to service two of our fields
on the other side. Fortunately, it was a dirt road at that time. Later, when
the town got around to paving that part of the road, I was able to dig up
and sleeve that section in a rigid pipe before the hot pavement was applied.

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Tending the Fruit

Perhaps I like working with trees and vines because they are perennials,
and I hope that work done once will have a lasting effect, but more likely
it is because my passion for eating fruit overcomes my natural lethargy.
The prospect of growing fruit crops is certainly what enticed me to want
to have a farm.
Fruit is a little more difficult to grow than vegetables, in my experi-
ence. The high sugar content of ripe fruit is attractive to almost everyone,
including microbes and critters with wings, as well as those with two, four,
six, and eight legs. So be prepared to share.
Fortunately, nature is nothing if not generous. Once fruit plantings
have grown to maturity you will have more bounty than you can eas-
ily handle. We have a hundred trees (apple, peach, pear, plum, cherry,
hazelnut, paw paw, shipova, persimmon, and mulberry), four dozen
blueberry bushes, forty or so grapevines, several hundred feet of bram-
bles, and the odd Aronia, hardy kiwi, elderberry, and honeyberry bushes.
These ripen from June (strawberries) to November (persimmons), with
the peaks being July (berries), August (peaches), September (grapes),
and October (apples).
Those are welcome loads, no question. But they don’t grow unaided
each year. We prune virtually all our trees, bushes, and vines each winter.
Different types of fruit thrive under different pruning strategies, so you
have to know how to treat each one.
Some plants, particularly peaches, tend to overproduce even after a
good pruning. Thus, we thin the crops in June, after fruit set (the time
when flowers are fertilized and their wombs begin to swell with tiny fruits).
It is torture to pick off half or more of the pea-sized green peaches on a
tree. But I have learned that if I don’t, in August excess heavy fruits will
bend the frail branches down just in time for the tail end of a hurricane to
whip the branches up and down wildly until they break.
Harvesting all that fruit is a problem, too. Some farms adopt pick-your-
own systems to reduce the labor required. However, most of our trees are
so tall that the fruit must be picked from a ladder, and that’s not suitable
for a pick-your-own operation. Thus we end up hand-picking all that fruit
ourselves. It is a lot of work but also a joyous time. We all eat as much as we
want of whatever is ripe, particularly sun-ripened peaches bursting with

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flavor. Each day, whatever fruit makes it back to the house is processed, as
Julie described in chapter 8.
We market much of our fruit as part of the CSA. The berries and small
fruit have been popular, but the peaches when perfectly ripe are often too
soft to survive even one day in handling and transit. The tree has designed
them to reach maximum flavor just before dropping, and we have a hard time
picking them even a half-day unripe in order to survive until they get to the
member’s pantry. We are learning how to do that better each year, though!
We include apples in CSA shares, and our members are also learning how to
appreciate our pears, despite some minor bug bites on the skin.

Reaching Traction
By this point, of course, a dozen or so years after moving here, our finan-
cial distress had mitigated. Our NOFA jobs earned us a frugal living
working for a cause we believed in, our farm provided fresh organic food
for us all year round, and all the work produced capable children. As the
farm gradually became more productive, we added CSA deliveries to
nearby towns and ramped up our sales to Living Earth and the retreat
center in Barre.
Those sales enabled us to hire staff and gradually pay them better, enlarge
our fields and orchard, and make long-term improvements in buildings
and equipment. Between what we originally saved from my game business
and put into land and the house and what we earned later from working
for NOFA, we have never felt we needed to raid the farm for income.
We were also finally able to buy a good tractor for snow plowing and
moving heavy loads. It was a second-hand Ford 2120 with four-wheel
drive and a large bucket—a find on Craigslist, which I had to drive deep
into New Hampshire to test—but it has been a workhorse for us ever
since. Also, we ventured into the world of hoophouses, which Julie had no
experience with but Dan was enthusiastic about. At first, we were given
a small one, but after trying it for a year we realized they were a great
resource for New England growers and started adding them to our fields.
Used twenty-four by one hundred foot ones were available for reasonable
prices from landscapers in eastern Massachusetts, who were on the next to
last stop as they transitioned land from dairy farm to truck farm to horse
farm to landscaping business to housing.

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The path we took to success at farming was slow and certainly required
another income to sustain us. But we grew the operation at a comfortable
speed with no debt, no constant stress, and no marital breakdown. Of
course, it did require an Energizer bunny of a spouse to manage the rest of
the farm—the living part!

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