The Old Farmer's Almanac Farmers Calendar

Backyard sugaring—if you are factoring in time and energy—is not a rational endeavor. And yet, on a certain day each winter, the backyard sugar-er grabs her cordless drill and stomps into her snowy woods, ambling from maple to maple, standing within kissing distance as she bores a 3/8-inch hole. Then she inserts a metal spout, or spile. Last, she hangs a bucket. Sun warms her shoulder as she trudges between the trees and hears the season’s beginning: plunk, plunk, plunk—like a quickening heartbeat—the first drops of sap plummeting into her newly hung buckets. By late afternoon, the woods sport 100 taps and 100 buckets and she is “tapped out,” an expression that describes the first phase of making maple syrup but is also slang for how she’ll feel in 6 weeks when she’s running on the dregs of her energy, having gathered perhaps a thousand gallons and boiled it late into the night. It takes 40 gallons of sap to distill 1 gallon of sweet stuff. Why bother? While animals shed their winter coats and migratory birds swerve north, perhaps she’s compelled—the urge flowing in her as surely as sap’s drawn up through the trees.

One day while zigzagging around the garden, working alone, thinning carrots, hoeing onions, and sowing more beans, I noticed a collection of bees, hundreds of them, forming a beard-shape swarm along the fence line. For months I’d seen them zip around as individuals, making solo forays to the apple blossoms and the foxglove’s speckled bells and then to the blue bachelor’s buttons and the orange calendula. But now they acted as one organism as they clung to our barbed wire fence until the apiarist arrived in his white attire and snipped the fence so that they poured into his hive. Living in a sparsely populated area, I often wonder what it feels like to belong to a throng, to behave in simultaneity, like a swarm of bees. Then one colorless midwinter day I attended a farmers’ meeting. Twenty of us sat in a circle, until a late attendee stepped in from the ongoing snow bearing a huge sack whose contents he spilled at our feet: The floor filled with hundreds of seed packets, each featuring vivid pictures of flowers—the cerulean cuff of morning glory, spires of purple lupine, deep hues of yellow zinnia and red-orange tithonia—and without thinking, in a simultaneous motion, we all zoomed to our knees.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac Farmer’s Calendar Essays

January 2020

 

The woodstove purrs and spurts, burning through logs from a tree that may have sprouted from an acorn during Lincoln’s presidency. This oak that grew through two centuries of summers warms the house tonight. I knew moving to this 1850s farmhouse meant taking care of a leaky roof and a buckled retaining wall, as well as a pair of trees looming broad and tall beside the driveway. But recently I failed in that stewardship. Sometimes when it rains a lot, Matt Forrester, the aptly named tree surgeon, explained, a tree will absorb so much water that its weight becomes unsustainable and it drops a limb or collapses. And, regretfully, that’s what happened to one of the long-standing oaks: One spring, after torrential rains, the giant closest to the road shed its most gargantuan limb. It raked down power lines, crushed our truck, and blocked the road. Over the following days, a crew extricated the truck and brought down the remaining trunk. We rented a chipper and spent a weekend feeding it branches. Later, over the din of a wood-splitter, we discussed the red oak’s silver lining: Its demise supplied a bonanza of firewood. As I type by its cozy fire, some of the tree’s story keeps growing.

The woodstove purrs and spurts, burning through logs from a tree that may have sprouted from an acorn during Lincoln’s presidency. This oak that grew through two centuries of summers warms the house tonight. I knew moving to this 1850s farmhouse meant taking care of a leaky roof and a buckled retaining wall, as well as a pair of trees looming broad and tall beside the driveway. But recently I failed in that stewardship. Sometimes when it rains a lot, Matt Forrester, the aptly named tree surgeon, explained, a tree will absorb so much water that its weight becomes unsustainable and it drops a limb or collapses. And, regretfully, that’s what happened to one of the long-standing oaks: One spring, after torrential rains, the giant closest to the road shed its most gargantuan limb. It raked down power lines, crushed our truck, and blocked the road. Over the following days, a crew extricated the truck and brought down the remaining trunk. We rented a chipper and spent a weekend feeding it branches. Later, over the din of a wood-splitter, we discussed the red oak’s silver lining: Its demise supplied a bonanza of firewood. As I type by its cozy fire, some of the tree’s story keeps growing.

“Can you tell the difference between a balsam and a Fraser?” Steve Moffatt grills his tree hauler, Seth Johnson, a young farmer. “Yep,” replies Seth, who grows beans and wheat, raises beef and horses, and moonlights as a trucker when his growing season stalls. Together they load the culmination of Steve’s decade of labor—planting, fertilizing, weeding, grooming, harvesting, and baling. Now Seth climbs onto his trailer and begins driving in the bed stakes that will gird this precious cargo. Then Steve hands over the first of 500 eight-foot balsams and Fraser firs. Seth lays them in like shingles, butts and tips sheltering each other, protecting each tree’s topmost branch. In the cold, it can snap like glass, and a tree without a tip, as both driver and grower know, is useless. The cold air fills with a balsam perfume as the Christmas tree layers accrue. Finally, Seth stretches his cables and cinches the load. He climbs into his cab, equipped with his CB radio, Thermos, and Santa hat. As Seth’s truck eases onto Wild Branch Road, Steve watches the results of his labor—the forest he began 10 years ago—glide off in a diesel sleigh.

The rungs had rattled my mind for months, as I wondered what I might see from the silo’s cusp. One night shy of the full Moon, I climbed up. During the growing season, a homesteader is devoted to the ground: trundling hoses, sinking fence posts, dumping manure, stooping to tend everything. And then, suddenly, there is nothing left to weed or harvest and her focus can drift upward. Twice I’d queried the neighbors for permission to scale their tower of corn silage and twice they’d declined. So, what happened next might just be a lie. At dusk, I crept to the silo with a friend who boosted me to the ladder’s bottom rung. From there, I scrambled up to where the view was generous, expansive. At height, the three nearby farmhouses appeared as diminutive as butter pats. The neighbors’ dairy barn seemed no bigger than a mailbox amid the shorn cornfield with its plaid of tractor ruts. As the neighbors’ lights snapped out, my friend waited gamely by the ladder’s start. Maybe I was the highest living thing in our valley? Just then a Canada goose squawked, correcting me, as it soared over the silo toward the Milky Way.

Every fall, I bucket up some apples and haul them over to Dave’s garage to make cider on his hand-cranked press. Whether he likes it or not, I’ve appointed my unassuming neighbor—a careful homesteader who’s tended his forest and fields for nearly 40 years—my godfather in sustainability and simple living. I am perpetually on his doorstep with questions about how to make better sauerkraut or to ascertain how frequently he mulches his trees. He brushes off my studious worship as if I were a fly pesking a loaf of his wood-fired oven–baked bread. Now Dave helps me to fit the crank on the press and I begin turning. Soon the hopper full of apple mash is forced to become juice. At first the cider trickles out, but soon it gushes and fills the collecting pot to the brim. Then we swap in a new pot, until all’s been squeezed from this batch of apples. Before unscrewing the press and emptying the sack of tawny mush called pomace, before we reset the press and begin the whole process again, we each fill a cup and drink a toast: to a good crop of apples, to the revolving seasons, and to my neighbor’s sustaining sweetness.

“A cold pocket” sounds like something a snowman might have. Meteorologically, I live where chilly-heavy air will linger on a breezeless night. Hence, one evening sooner than most, I’ll wake to find the pocket’s white lint—our first deep frost—lining each blade of grass, crystallizing flower petals, glazing pumpkins’ platter-like leaves. Denizens of Zone 5, we expect our first brush with frost to arrive anytime after the second week of September. I can try to avert damage to tender plants by casting blankets across the basil and tomatoes, by swaddling the fragile cuffs of morning glories in hopes of seeing one more bloom, but no amount of bedding will cushion the sharpening truth: Our growing season is over. Soon we’ll have the kind of frigid night that fringes all of our vegetation in a hoary ice. Certain plants’ cells can’t withstand this drastic temperature change. When the rising Sun warms a morning glory’s frozen leaves, its cell walls will break, irreparably. Eventually, the frostbitten garden will be blanketed with flakes. By then, we won’t be able to discern any difference between the snowman’s pocket and his voluminous white coat.

I follow tiny hand-painted signs, each depicting a blueberry, from the paved straightaway of Wild Branch Road onto a dirt road winding through Collinsville. Day, lovers of the small blue fruit travel this route to arrive at Arnold Brown’s gravel drive, sign the guest log, grab a bucket, and traipse into a field teeming with hundreds of mature berry bushes. Last year was a light one, as only 15,000 pounds of berries were gleaned. The year before, pickers hauled out 10 tons! I find, as usual, that Brown’s hillside is abuzz with people; their voices carry easily. I overhear snippets of heart-to-heart conversations, as well as an excited child discovering a “big one!” But none of us could be gathering these sweet surprises if not for an overeager man with a tractor mower. Back in the 1990s, Arnold had just planted this hillside with 7,500 Christmas tree saplings. All was proceeding according to plan until the man hired to cut the east field did Arnold a misinformed favor. He thought: “Arnold would probably like me to mow this field. He just forgot to ask.” So, here we are with our buckets, gossiping across the bushes, harvesting Plan B.

Soon a tractor will rumble up the road, its motorized growl growing louder, as its sidebar mower makes its first and only pass, lancing through roadside grasses. This annual act creates a “before” and “after.” Prior to the mower’s arrival, summer stretches endlessly. The timothy, switch, and orchard grasses have been rising since they first poked through the soil in April. Some mingle with the lowest branches of the maples and apples. Not for long. One pass of that tractor—the tin reaper of summer—and all that growth will cascade back to earth. Sure, its stubble will resume a skyward journey, but it won’t achieve this same kind of height. Since June’s summer solstice, each day’s been snipped of a minute. Night will have lopped off nearly half an hour of light by the time the tractor sidles up in mid-July. Which leads me to anticipate this smooth operator who wields the roadside mower: Is he the tardy barber of spring or the first shearer of autumn? Perhaps it’s the latter, for in the wake of the blades, beneath the flat top of collapsed grass, the crickets’ murmur grows louder, as if they too are whetting their scythes.