My 17 Teams

My favourite catalog came today. Dominion & Grimm: sugar maple dreams and reality.

On the cover, in deep snow, a gorgeous team pulling through the drifts; the archtypal sugaring shed in the background:cosy, productive, newly painted. smoothly drifted.

Inside, stainless steel, magic pumps, reverse osmosis, wood furnaces & evaporators,

Carles and I have two days to finish the Chardonnay and grade the driveway. Just enough time over coffee for me to think about what’s missing from the image: the time spent to groom the pair; to harness them up, feed them, clean the stable at 6 below. All the things the farmer knows welll yet which lack the force require to corrode the older dream.

Chardonnay is the well-behaved grape. No great sprawling masses of shoots and new buds appearing anywhere on trunks and cordons. In fact, quite the opposite. This is the thirteenth pruning and some of the spurs are mounting alarmingly high; if wind or mishap break the green shoot in spring, that spur may have no backup and the architectural harmony demand rejigging. But in the main, the work goes quickly; the snow is gone, there’s little rain and by Thursday the sun is out and its warm: well above 10 degrees.

EC shows up with her neice Annette and fills me in on her family; new babies, new tribulations, new jobs. Her uncle is being remembered in the longhouse and she needs cash for firewood and food and donations. I have firewood–and 3,600 Pinot Noir to prune–so we can come to an agreement. Pruning equals firewood; plus a donation for the memorial. Start on Monday. Next week promises to be good weather. Someone will come tomorrow to assess the trees.

I work through to dusk cultivating the driveway on both sides, expanding it so it will be easier for cars to pass when the summer gets busy.The drive is almost a kilometre and over the years the crushed stone has invaded both verges. I cultivate both sides of the roadway and leave the centre–changing all the curves depending on where the trees sit and the vineyard posts.

Friday I get a late start because I need parts for the grader and a filter for the small tractor. As I cross the big bridge on the Cowichan there’s a goup of young people surrounding an image from the past, a  person covered from head to foot in strands of  woven bark; his face invisible.

When I arrive at the farm, a white car is coming out the driveway near the road. I stop and move over to apologize for the state if the road. It is the promised yarder, Joe. We chat; I’ve promised EC fir, but Joe will take maple or alder. This simplifies things so we start picking out trees. I explain my method of letting the big leaf maples spread out with many trunks so that each year I can take one or two trunks out of seven or eight and let all the underground portion stay healthy to feed the new trunks that inevitably arise to take over the space and use the nourishment from the deep, wide, root structure.

All is well with Joe, who’s not actually going to do the yarding, probably. We select about five alders, a dozen maples and two or three younger firs that are too crowded for the longer term. He balks only at the bent cedar I offer; not because of the distortion–it has the shape of a hocket stick. “I have too much respect for cedar.” he says and there’s a small shift on the conversation, to make sure I understand the importance of what is being said. I recognize him now; he’s not Joe the yarder, he’s JT the councillor; a member of the Duncan Council not normally decked out in such yarder fashion. We chat about how much wood the longhouses need and which ones have moved to woodstoves and which still keep to open fires. He may be back on Monday to help the real yarders cut; he may not. I apologize again for the state of the road and he chuckles. He has seen worse.

For the rest of the day I drive back and forth over the long driveway, turning up stones, bringing the crushed stone out of the verges and shaping the “roof” so we’ll have good drainage when the rains return.

The blue tractor has the cultivator; we put the grader on the small Massey and it runs well, with a single bad moment when it shows its age. Back and forth I go;  back and forth; east and west; zenning out as I burn my allocated 14 litres of diesel. If I had a team, it would take me a week. If my customers had teams, the road could be rougher–but I would have fewer customers. I think about JT and the cedar tree and compare my good luck in having a town councillor who respects even a bentwood cedar with my bad luck in a prime minister who wants to spend billions on warplanes and prisons and tax the poor to pay for it. EC and JT and I would do a better job.

Life is compromise. The Massey runs better with the fuel filter replaced. It’s the equivalent of 17 teams although one good team would do this job. But at the end of the day I’m done. I have time to get the paint and mark the trees that JT and I have dedicated for the ceremonies, or at least for the warmth and comfort of those sharing the ceremonies. The road is done for the day; I turn off the key and admit that I’m happy I don’t have to take off 34 horse collars and hang thirty-four bits and stable thirty-four horses, however handsome and intelligent they might be. However responsive. However eager for their carrots and apples.

 

 

Shavi

Scat Song for Shavi

In the early morning light, coffee warming my hands, with the fields spreading out to fog and sight’s boundary, I sit in my sunroom,  newly painted, and wait for warmth, huddled, thinking of bears.

It has been a cold night. I know my bear came for apples at dusk and again at first light. A young bear, wary of the dogs and light and noise. In the last few weeks I have seen him only twice. At dusk, I saw him and chased him off; a bounding blackness.  At dawn, the dogs told me he was visiting , but I stayed in my warm den: minus three outside.

I have left the culls on the path where he clambers up from the creek–but he does not favour bruise or decay; he prefers  the living branch and the unspoilt fruit–as do we all. So he invades my garden and occupies my mind.

Something deep in me warms to the thought of walling him out, but I say what harm does he do? My cellar is full: Gala, Jonathan,  Macs, Dorset and the unbranded. Why not share? logic respnds. At least until the salmon come? if they do come this year.

I walk outside; hunter checking scat. The ripe apples seem to move through him like grain in a mill;  he must seek only the sugars and leaves the fibre unprocessed in small, neat dumps beneath the trees.  Here, he says, I made you some mulch. Ok, ok, I say; in return I give you a name: Shavi.

It will be a hard winter; we will skate on the pond; perhaps a three week, el nino winter. Here, we record winters by the length of time we are able to  move across the main pond in relative safety. Tasks. Forget skating. Tasks. I know I must complete rebuilding the old roadway down to the flats and the creek and do triage on the fallen trees and select the new culls. These for firewood; these for the birds and the small beasties; these to be stacked for shikati spore.

Soon enough tasks will regain control of my thoughts. I hold the image of Shavi bounding from behind the greenhouse and bounding towards the hill and the creek. I take apples from my cellar; eggs from the fridge; build a fire in the winery so the Foch can finish its ferment before Monday; make more coffee.

Easy tasks; helped by the great sprawl of BC hydro. Task: get off the grid; use  hydro in winter; solar in summer.

Soon enough the day’s tasks will bound in on me, but first one last question: what occupies Shave’s mind? the seven billion of us?  the scarcity of corn this year? the late, late return of the salmon? a battle for a better den?

It will do me no harm I decide to leave one tree for Shiva, those green, tart apples (full laden this year) which no one chooses; if he pulls down a few limbs it will spare me some winter pruning. Share; share or else. When I have bees, will I be so liberal?

Shavi, this is just a truce: a temporary demarcation. You are young; have a good winter rest once the salmon return and give us both the lasty great delight of autimn. For now, wintery nights and crisp Jonathans.

Images: looking for bears: 2010

 

farmlives

Possession of land is an ambiguous phrase, a hazy concept, untrustworthy, perhaps inherently dubious.

Possession by the land, however, is indisputable. Humans can report in many ways how they have been captured by land and landscape; how they define home in terms of specific configurations: rock, tree, soil, sunlight, season; how they can sicken when they lose their sense of being rooted.

Farmlives is an investigation of an instance of these connections: images of  more philosophical farm moments. This space is definitely not for specific reports such as best manure for zucchini or fertilization options for sumac trees and sword ferns. For these kinds of details, see: my farming blog at rootbranchseed.wordpress.com.

Here, we have serious and shaped posts about possessive places and the charms of wilderness.

Thanks for the image, MR.

 

blues in the night

Raison d’etre.

Why do I spend so much energy on “a mere farm.”

Walden Pond in 1845 when Thoreau went to live there was almost the exact size of the Glenora Farm. The pond was slightly larger, by about 1 acre. But all the farm is open to observation and change; it is not just a surface. And I have already had it for 12 years, six times longer than Thoreau stayed at Walden. And I am just beginning to understand its surface.

What could be more conducive to happiness and thought than to live on the land and off the land where half is kept in a state of nature and half is farmed sustainably with a wide variety of crops and experiments? And to be far enough away from cities that you see the stars at night with clarity and hear both birds and leaves during the day.