Circle of Life

Farming is about cycles. You know, “for every season, turn, turn,” that sort of Mother-Earth-with-a-tambourine sentiment. And I have to say, after an initial blush of enthusiasm for the snake-eating-its-own-tail circle of life, I had come to hate the cycles. Spring a time of rebirth and renewal? Yup – but also of killer frosts that occur AFTER the last frost date (which is supposed to be an AVERAGE, so that makes no sense to me), still born lambs, and the arrival of the lovely fluttering white moths (that are NOT peaceful butterflies tipping their delicate wings to me as I garden, the salute of a fellow creature – they are nasty parasites waiting to lay the eggs of their vine borer evil spawn on my squash plants so monsters can destroy it from the inside out and render me, again, the only gardener who can’t grow zucchini).

This spring though, I might reconsider. We are seeing the cycling back of people, and I am finding that more enjoyable than watching livestock die. Green Fence Farm 2.0, Max and Vanessa, are making great progress on their slice of farmland. And not only that, but Max has started working for Tom Hayman of Grains of Sense, a craft coffee roaster located in downtown Staunton. Grains of Sense was one of our tent neighbors when Green Fence Farm sold at the Staunton Farmers Market, but the connectivity doesn’t end there. Grains of Sense shares store-space with Nu Beginning Farm, run by John and Stella Methany, also long-time Staunton Farmers Market vendors. In addition, John worked for a couple of years on Green Fence Farm and was a regular contributor (bread, jam, and vegetables) to our CSA back when we had the energy for such things.

(OK, EVERYBODY! Will the circle be unbroken…)

But I am not done yet. After John left GFF for greener pastures (or, as they are called in agriculture, a profitable business), we had for a season a fabulous intern, James Cooke, who was trying everything he could think of to get out of being an Richmond architect, including taking from us minimum wage and a lot of blow-hardy bad advice on how to make a farm work (Ha! He should have been talking to John). Fast forward three years, and Jamie has escaped Alcatraz and landed in his own business (Black Swan Books and Music) in Staunton, just a couple blocks from John and Tom’s store.

(By and by Lord, by and by…)

Still not done. Tomorrow 5-7 PM we will be hosting a book signing for Nick’s new novel (he writes better than he farms, I promise), Steel’s Treasure, at, of course, Jamie’s store (see the poster for the event below, which was designed by daughter Vivian, who will be around the farm this summer as she returns to her job as a counselor at Camp Mont Shenandoah and her boyfriend Will Root stays with Vanessa and Max and works for the summer on the farm which, if I am figuring this right, means Will will probably be opening a pool hall in Staunton about this time next year).

(There’s a better world a-waiting…)

Of course, John and Tom are invited to the book signing, and Jamie will be there because he owns the place. Viv is attending, as are Vanessa and Max and Austin and Liz, who are staying for the weekend in what has become their vacation cabin, which is the house we built twenty years ago so we would have a place to bring the newborn Viv to experience the cycles of rural life.

(In the sky, Lord, in…the….skkkyyyyyyy.)

Bequia: Where to Eat, Part I

Port Elizabeth, Hamilton, Cemetery Hill, O’car Reform, and Belmont  viewed from  Old Fort Hamilton

[NOTE: I am cross-posting this to my Active Voice (writing) blog and my Green Fence Farm (farming and eating) blog, which means that the 14 of my Facebook friends who signed up for the Active Voice and Green Fence Farm pages will get multiple notices. I’m a little bit sorry for that because I know you liked both pages, not because you actually LIKED them (in that junior high school crush sort of way), but because you felt sorry for my feeble attempts at taming the social media lion and wanted me not to go back to sending you updates, many of which looked like manifestos from psycho-killers, just not quite as well written, typed on my (self-correcting, mind you) electric typewriter from college.  I’m only a little sorry because I do like the impression the multiple posts (of the same piece) gives of great productivity on my part.  And the reason this is ending up on the Green Fence Farm page is that, though I am on an island (Bequia) and nowhere near the farm right now, I am still eating and writing about it.]

When I last wrote, I was pondering the impossibility of ever writing my planned guide to the island of Bequia because I had discovered I was going to have to do research, which could involve a lot of work (THIS is why I know I am destined to be a fiction writer, or one of those essayists who just looks out the window and writes about birds, because I am much better at making shit up than researching, especially if it involves leaving my chair, which I take great pains to put in an interesting place (Look! Birds!) and pillow up adequately).  

This whole research problem reared its ugly head when I realized that my “Where to Eat” chapter was going to involve more than just going to a bunch of restaurants and eating a bunch of courses (something I am particularly good at). No, I would have to taste Nick’s food too, which will be a struggle because one of the tenets on which our marriage is based is a commitment not to share food. I’d have to interview the owner or the chef – who around here is either going to be a native Bequian or a Scandinavian (and I can’t understand either accent) and get some quaint story about how they wanted to continue their dear mother’s tradition of boiling the crap out of stuff in crockpots or how their grandfather always dreamed of coming to the tropics and smoking fish. And I would have to RESEARCH (see? That word again) the hours and addresses of the places.

I know what you are thinking – “you’re going to the places, you must at least already know the addresses” – but you would be wrong, which is why you have not yet written a travel guide (unless you have, in which case, it is why you have not written a travel guide to Bequia). There are no addresses here; there is no mail delivery (see previous post on guy handing mail out of the back of the ferry) and only one main road, which was built, I believe, by the Romans and hasn’t been maintained since (OK, you homeschoolers, don’t write that last part down, I made it up: the bit about the Romans, that is, not the maintenance).

What there are are many, many, many “towns.” Most of these would fit into what we on the mainland would call “a block.” Some would fit into what we would call “two huts and an abandoned rum shack with a goat living in it.”

For example, the main grouping of towns (which the locals refer to, confusingly, as “town”) consists of the following: Port Elizabeth, Hamilton, Cemetery Hill, O’car Reform, and Belmont. There cannot be more than 100 structures total in these towns, and from any place in anyone of them you can pretty much see all of all the rest of them.

The ferry from St. Vincent arrives in Port Elizabeth, which is also referred to as the capitol of Bequia in any tourist guide you can find. So, the traveller coming into the port would assume, as I did, that the groupings of houses and a couple restaurants to your left; the half pedestrian mall, half street (with a boundary that is fluid and the subject of vocal controversy, mainly among pedestrians who have just had their feet run over and the taxi drivers that did the running over), shops, stands, and a government building in front of you; and the waterside cafes and small hotels to your right were all part of the thriving Bequian capitol, Port Elizabeth.

You would be wrong.

In fact, as far as I can tell, Port Elizabeth includes only the port itself; the tourist information building right as you exit the port, the lady selling knitted Rasta hats to its left; the tree under which the taxi drivers hang out and discuss how much they hate the current government and why tourists keep sticking their feet under their cabs’ tires; the government building across the street; and a small canal of festering runoff from the gutters. If you walk from that government building less than a dirt road block to Knight’s Food store, you are in the town of Hamilton. A block to the right and you are in Belmont. A block the left you are in O’car Reform. Cemetery Hill? To the right and up another block from the port, near the cemetery (duh). The whole metro area can be walked in about 10 minutes, 15 if you stop for ice cream.

The Port Elizabeth/Hamilton distinction really tripped me up our first week on the island. We had asked Cass, our housekeeper and native Bequian, where to get groceries. She informed us that Hamilton had a Knights (the Bequian version of Safeway, except without the parking lot, pharmacy, produce section, soda section, meats, or pretty much anything but rum, fruit juice, canned beans, and staples tied in small plastic bags without labels so you have to smell everything to make sure it is salt, for example, and not laundry detergent. Knights deserves and will get its own post later).

Nick did the first shopping trip on his own, and later that day, as we were driving to a restaurant in O’car Reform, he pointed out the store, which is about the size of a White Castle, and I said, “So that is why you came home with only a can of pigeon peas and a small bag of laundry detergent. You were supposed to go to the store in HAMILTON,” which I assured him was no doubt a fabulous marvel of megastore efficiency, with Whole Foods-like displays of local fruits and Starbucks coffee.

Despite the fact that, by the time I had finished saying that sentence, we had arrived at the restaurant that was in O’car Reform – and despite the fact that I knew from Cass that O’Car Reform came after Hamilton – I still insisted that we go the next day to find the real supermarket in Hamilton.

We took the main road over the pedestrian mall, by the port and the restaurant from the day before, around herds of goats, school children, and a guy carrying a fish on his head, persevering even when it really seemed the road had turned into someone’s driveway and finally got to – a dead end at a lookout and a historic plaque about the fort that used to be there (also a couple of old canons, which made the trip not a waste for Nick).

So, yeah, the Knights in Hamilton is the Knights that is 20 feet from Port Elizabeth, and Cass had a huge laugh over us driving “all the way” to Old Fort Hamilton (like we drove from DC to Beckley, WV looking for a Sam’s club). The island communication network being what it is, that story made the rounds pretty quickly, and I think I heard a local guitar group singing a ballad about it a couple nights ago (“Oh the stupid white man and his fat wife, drove all the way to Old Fort Hamilton looking for a store, do dah, do dah), though it could have been Day-o. I really have a hard time with the local accent.

Apologies for my Green Fence Farm readers that I have yet to get to anything about food yet, unless you consider laundry detergent a food, but I will in the next post, at which point you will, I assure you, appreciate all this essential background information.

Next post: Bequia: Where to Eat, Really This Time, Part II

The Green Fence Farm Team Expands

I am learning that blogs are like unwritten thank you notes, full of good intentions and guilt at their lack of fulfillment. Then, if it has been a year or so, you start imagining the creative and convoluted excuse you will proffer, the very cool paper you will fly to Rome to buy, the fabulous thank you gift you will hand craft out of your own hair you pulled out and glued together with your distilled tears of shame – oops now it is two years and two thank you’s undone and you are just hoping Aunty X or Grandma Y will just send you the frosty Christmas card you deserve next go around.

So I haven’t written a blog post since 2010, and I haven’t written a blog post for my other blog since a few months ago when I announced that you could expect a great revival of blog posts from Active Voice starting right then. I’ve been busy; I don’t have the right paper; I had to get a new computer; I had to work, not work, travel, eat, take a nap. Whatever, I am here now, right?

And I am keeping this short, to tamp down any expectation that there will be any new post anytime soon. So read up, this may be all you hear from us until 2016.

First, an announcement: there will be new blood spilled in the annual letting that we call farming on Green Fence Farm this season. To our great delight and surprise, Nick and my daughter Vanessa and her fiancé Max, pictured beaming in a decidedly unfarmlike setting above, will be moving from Colorado to Greenville this April. Both will be looking for work in the area with Vanessa hoping to find a public school teaching job by autumn. In the meanwhile, they will be farming a plot on our land (what we affectionately call, “the crappy rock beds”). They will be joined by our intern from 2009, James Cooke, owner and operator of the new (and incredible) Black Swan Books in downtown Staunton, who will be working the “weedy patch over by the pig pen”. With all that fresh talent, chances are someone will produce something Green Fence Farm can sell this summer, if not in DC, then at one of the markets around Staunton.

The other note for today is to point out a blog we love byIra Wallace writing for Mother Earth on gardening specifically in the Southeast (she has a book on the same topic coming out next month). I saw Ms. Wallace at this year’s Heritage Mountain Festival at Monticello, where she is an organizer and teacher. She talked about how most of the notable writers on sustainable and organic vegetable farming (yes, Elliot Coleman, I am talking about you) hail from the North or North-North, and the rest of us, who so want to emulate their results, read with tears in our eyes (or is that sweat) of harvesting snow-sweetened spinach in September, about the same time we are suffering from heat stroke while trying to beat the grasshoppers off the baked brussel sprout plants. Ira Wallace is going to solve this problem for me.