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.
