Kristin and Mark Kimball own Essex Farm on the western shore of Lake Champlain about an hour south of the Canadian border in upstate New York. Kristin is also a wonderful writer and Tina and I first discovered their adventure of starting Essex Farm by reading about it in Kristin’s bestselling book, “The Dirty Life.” A really great read, by the way. We fell in love with Essex and when the opportunity presented we visited and stayed on the farm for a bit, and now we count Mark and Kristin as friends.
Essex Farm is a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) which means people pay a membership subscription in exchange for weekly crates of fresh food direct from the farm. There are hundreds of small farm CSA’s across North America—most supplying weekly vegetables—but Mark’s dream was to go several steps further and establish a farm that could provide all of a family’s food needs—vegetables, fruit, herbs, dairy, meat, grain, and even specialty items like maple syrup. Through a lot of unbelievably hard work that’s exactly what they’ve done. The Kimballs are two of our heroes. I know no one who works harder to care for soil than Mark. If you ask Mark he’ll tell you soil is his job, and if he does his job well, the result is healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, healthy humans and a healthy planet. There is something incredibly centering about that idea that I find irresistible.
Kristin writes a weekly farm note, updating friends and members to the goings on at Essex. This week’s note captured the spirit of what I’ve been sharing with you over the last couple of days so I thought I’d share a snippet of it with you …
“Mark called on the walkie Wednesday evening, just as the rest of us were getting dinner on the table. “Come out! … Bring the girls and the dogs! I’m taking the mulch off the strawberries. It’s beautiful out here!” Now that I’ve crossed over fifty I know—really know—that our opportunities for beauty in this life are not infinite; the number of sunsets we’ll see on a soft evening at the outset of spring is alarmingly small, the number that will be shared all together as a family, smaller still. So we turned off the burners, put the milk back in the fridge, pulled on our boots and drove to the other side of the farm.
Mud season (aka: the front edge of Spring) is a time of danger and opportunity for the soil. It’s fragile right now so we keep off of it as much as possible. On the other hand, this is the moment when we can plant some beneficial seeds without disrupting the soil with tillage. On the next frosty morning when the ground is just firm enough to walk on we’ll seed this field with clover by hand. Frost covers the ground, but it also lifts its surface, and when it thaws and settles again it will bury those tiny clover seeds to just the right depth for germination. Clover’s superpower is its ability to draw nitrogen from air, fix it in the soil and improve its capacity without added fertilizer.
So we got to the field as the sun was inching down toward the horizon but its warmth was still in the soil, radiating up from the ground. We found Mark in rows of strawberry plants using a pitch fork to remove the blanket of wet hay we cover them with to protect them over the winter. It was one of those special moments. The strawberries looked healthy and well-rooted. Mark looked healthy and well-rooted. The girls, the dogs, and I, all healthy and well-rooted. That good smell rising up around us, of old hay and spring soil – half rot, half life – reminding us where we are in the big circle, in our brief moment of light.”
That was the news from Essex Farm this week. I share it with you because every square foot of soil under your care can express that same kind of beauty. Half rot, half life – reminding you that YOU are in the big circle too, that your opportunities for beauty in this life are not infinite in your brief moment in the light, and … if I’ve...
