The Old Farmer's Almanac Farmers Calendar

Farmer's Calendar for January 2021

Promptly on the bitterest winter mornings there appears at my bird feeder one or more, often a pair, of purple finches. They are bright little birds, and their punctuality is reassuring. Yet they fill me with puzzlement: The purple finch has a flaw. Purple it is not.

The purple finch is the color of an overripe strawberry. Am I missing something? There are plenty of misnomers in the world of birds that are related to behavior. A whole family of birds of worldwide distribution, including the whippoorwills and nighthawks, has the odd name goatsucker (Caprimulgidae) because they were anciently believed to suckle at the teats of milking goats. Sufficiently nutty, but not hard to account for: Some Dark Age goatherd with too much mead under his belt discovered a whippoorwill flying around his milking stand, found the nannies dry, and drew a peasant’s conclusion.

It’s one thing for a bird to be mistakenly associated with an event or action, but what am I to make of a system of names that tells me a red bird is purple, a brown one black? It’s the unapologetic falsity of the thing. If I were a purple finch, I would be made quite uncomfortable.

Clues #1 and #2: The room stank with a funky musk, and the cat hunched, its full attention given to the heating vent. When I snapped on the lamp, A-ha! Eye-shine glimmered from the open vent, and then a flash of white as something dashed under the dresser. After extracting the cat and shutting the door, I made an ignominious phone call to someone I’d heard was handy with these sort of predicaments. Hello, I greeted the person and got straight to the point: There’s a weasel in my bedroom.

“Ermine” is the winter word for this creature whose brownish coat has turned pure white, a camouflage in snowy environs. Shouldn’t I have been grateful for a lithe carnivore to feed on the unseen things constantly scrabbling in the walls—Mice? Squirrels? Chipmunks? Every night, I bang to quiet them. Futilely. But whose bedroom is big enough to host both cats and weasels? After the Good Samaritan arrived and set up his trap, I expected a prolonged scuffle—so I closed the door and wished him luck. But before 5 minutes had elapsed, my uninvited roommate was caged and leaving the premises, on his way to a spacious field that matched his hue.

When the new woodstove arrived, it sat unevenly until the deliveryman supplied a quarter and a nickel and stacked them under the stove’s short foot. His 30 cents endures, even as the steady stove’s been dark and cold for months, serving as an overbuilt pedestal for vases displaying the summer’s array, from aconite to zinnias. Once, on an excessively sultry day, I caught the cat draped across its soapstone top. Not anymore: Now orange flames flicker within and both the cat and the dog have succumbed to its heat, basking before it, on the floor. I’m keeping the fire alive by feeding it pages of old notebooks full of my expired ideas and crossed out scrawl. Later I’ll shovel these ashes into a wide tin pail, the one I’ll carry out to the snow-fleeced pasture. There, I’ll scatter and dump these soots to sweeten the grasses’ roots, which will bring on lavish clovers later, when the snow is over and the coin-size Sun again burns steady in the sky and finds me lugging buckets of water out to the grazing lambs. Then an idea might spark my mind and I’ll dash back to the desk beside the chilly stove to scribble new lines on a white page.

“The Pumpking” is what his parents called this enterprising guy, their son, because he arrives on their lawn at dawn and dismounts his ATV to inspect his 6,000 loyal subjects: pumpkins, arranged in tidy rows, like a royal court, a crowd of orange faces. Consider that Ben, in his mid-30s, can say that he’s been sovereign, the reigning monarch of squash in his quadrant of northeastern Vermont, for more than a quarter-century, growing his business since the ripe old age of 6. Now he lives adjacent to his parents and grows 20 pumpkinds, ranging from the diminutive fists of ‘Jack Be Little’ to the chunky orbs of ‘Howden’ to a hassock-size cucurbit called ‘Dill’s Atlantic Giant’. There must be enough raw jack-o’-lantern material here to gratify every kid in a 30-mile vicinity. I am a mere kindergartener when it comes to this business, selling just a few dozen of one variety—‘New England Pie’—from my 5-year-old roadside shanty. Yet Ben and I have at least one thing in common, which is that we refuse to outgrow our love for the round, orange vegetables of Halloween. Nor do we fear leftover inventory—it’ll just mean a preponderance of pumpkin pie for the great banquet at Thanksgiving.

A reclusive neighbor sometimes asks me to tend his pair of elderly cashmere goats. Then twice a day I’ll bike his class 4 road, a single dirt track that runs through hayfields and birch groves, past boulders and ferns, and terminates in front of his remote goat barn. Far more private and wild than our roadside pastures and garden, these fields are where I’ll sometimes startle a doe that goes bounding into the bushes or hear a hermit thrush utter its haunting trill. Once, hurrying along before a thunderstorm, I passed a paw print in the mud of a low spot in the road. As I stopped and knelt beside it, I noted four toe pads. Not a coyote print, nor fox. Not in the dog family at all. No claw marks like a bear would leave, but it was big: I held my left hand out beside it, fingers spread wide—yes, as big. The Department of Fish and Wildlife insists that our state’s catamounts are extinct. Still, locals swear by their sightings, “I’m telling ya, that weren’t no bobcat.” Regardless, doubt prevails. So the next day I dragged my husband right over to the print to prove it, but the creature’s secret remains—by then, the big cat’s evidence lay under a pool of rain.

Most of what we grew, the summer I first worked as part of a crew of farming apprentices, was annuals: carrots, lettuce, peas, watermelons—plants whose entire life span transpires within a single season. We sowed and reaped the “one-time offer” as opposed to a “lifetime guarantee.” But eventually we began to harvest something that we had not planted—garlic, whose cloves are all clones of the mother bulb. The previous year’s apprentices had left us this gift; they’d pressed those individual cloves into the soil, cloves that endured through winter, sprouted in spring, and developed into whole new garlic heads. We grabbed onto each stalk and yanked up this crop, as if taking up a baton left by the previous crew, a baton that was now ours to carry into the barn to let cure throughout the waning summer days. Before we left the farm to begin our winter jobs, we tucked hundreds of garlic cloves in the ground—something for yet another set of hands to recover. It’s been 20 growing seasons since I pawed that farm’s soil. Yet each summer I draw on the one-time memory while harvesting my garlic. For days afterward, my hands remain un-scrubbably pungent.

A nearby farmer swears she hears field corn growing on muggy nights—says it sounds like a drawn-out squeak. In the decade I’ve lived beside 80 acres of it, I’ve never heard its rising stalks sing. Nor, during all those years, did I grow my own corn, for fear of windborne cross-pollination. Recently, the big field changed hands. Now it grows other plants. So we sowed our own kernels in hope of reaping a choir’s worth. While working on other farms, I’d harvested the ripe corn in the morning. Shuffling into its narrow forest, I towed a flimsy sack that fattened as I snapped off ears with the thickest girths. The dewy leaves scratched like a cat’s tongue, and by the time I emerged on the field’s far side dragging a bulging bag, I was scoured and damp and bearing enough corn for an orchestra. But this year I emerged from our stalks with hardly enough for our two-part harmony. I’d under-guessed its ripeness until I spotted one shucked cob dropped on the lawn. Every kernel was gouged. Inspecting the rest of the patch, I noticed that the plants were nearly earless. Robbed, all I could do was feast my eyes and imagine a moonlit raccoon’s chomping.

How pleasing to see the grass thicken and rise until we realize that—yikes!—it’s got to be cut, a task that asks for either loud machines or diligent livestock. I’m partial to a third option: the scythe. This Old World tool looks like a musical notation that leapt out of the score, expanded in size, and, when not in service, abides in our shed beside the retired weed-whacker. I loathed that contraption with its dervish-ing string driven by the sniveling engine. Not to mention the backache that it created, along with its habit of spattering grass across my jeans. Another mowing plan involves allowing the cows and sheep out to feed on our lawn. But as they meander and munch, their work is predictably uneven. Plus they leave behind untouched patches, along with excretions. That’s when I reach for my sharpened scythe to dispatch the tall grass. In the morning when everything’s still wet with dew, I wield my scythe like a kooky broom, swinging its curved blade from side to side, as if sweeping. The undercut stems become instant fringe. So quiet: I can hear anything sing. For as long as the growing season lasts—wherever grass rises, I’ll scythe it.

Months since the crickets quit, followed by a hundred nights with no terrestrial ruckus, we lie awake at night listening for that very first peep. Finally, on an evening slightly more balmy than chilly, it begins. Like the dying battery on a smoke alarm, a single chirp. Did we really hear it? Yes! A soprano note peeps again, serious and ponderous. Then it repeats its query, possibly expressing, Am I alone? For one night: It’s alone. Then: a zany mayhem, as the evening hours fill with the high-pitch cheeping of peepers. Several years ago, when our land held only a damp gulch, nothing croaked or creaked or peeped. Then an excavator clawed us a small pond, and almost overnight a boisterous amphibian orchestra commenced as dozens of frogs—wood frogs, tree frogs, northern leopard frogs, and spring peepers—announced their new residence. Is there no middle ground with these creatures? All or nothing, silence or cacophony? Case in point: Yesterday’s pond was clear; today, it’s clouded by thousands of frogs’ eggs floating in the shallows. Were we sleeping when the pond’s inhabitants released their progeny? This evidence suggests one thing: We’ll hear gulpers, croakers, and another bout of temporary soloists come next year’s unsilent spring.

Growing a potato could make anyone feel like a magician—that is, after the ground thaws. Throughout the winter, a few bushels of our Corollas—the bald, soap-shape staples of our winter diet—lurk in the underground part of the house, the cellar. Each week, I descend and retrieve a shirt-hem’s worth for dinner. About the time I tire of ever tasting them again is when they’re starting to wrinkle anyway and launch spooky white shoots from their “eyes.” To ensure another cellar full of winter fare—pomme de terre, the soil’s fruit—we plant chunks of the sprouting spuds in early spring. From that buried nub a shoot will rear and spread its leaves. Then we’ll mound the soil around them. Even as they bloom, we’ll push more soil against their shoulders, as if trying to rebury them alive. By the time the Canada geese are angling in the sky, all these potato plants will have withered and died, until all that remains is a clutch of slumping stalks. “After you loosen the soil, plunge your hands in,” I once told my dirt-averse mother. She obliged, and replied, “There’s nothing here.” Then, like a girl who’d just won a prize, “Oh, look!” she exclaimed, as she exhumed an enormous tuber.