Stranger/Angel

After three wonderful weeks, we said goodbye to Coyote, our first WWOOF volunteer to arrive on foot. As with every one of our WWOOFers, the farm is better for Coyote's contributions: potatoes started in barrels of soil and seaweed, fruit trees gently pruned, (and the budded branches saved in a vase for forcing), blueberry bushes well-mulched, animals well-fed and tended, fenceline cleared...not to mention some serious sourdough bread-baking, ukulele-strumming, and a couple of epic scrabble games.

Our first year as WWOOF farm hosts has been the best sort of adventure. Yes, there are risks. Perhaps it takes a certain temperament to open one's home to strangers, to gently negotiate shared space, to relinquish a measure of privacy, to build trust...yet the people who have chosen to travel here have truly blessed us. We have welcomed their widely varying stories and experiential wisdom as much as their energy and willingness to work.

On this Easter morning, as the Piper played the sun up and--gathered at the town landing at daybreak--we heard the story of angels at the empty tomb, I looked over at Coyote, face to the water, perhaps pondering leave-taking and the next leg of a personal pilgrimage. The quilted patterns on Coyote's poncho hinted strongly of wings. Why not? If the risen Jesus could be mistaken for a gardener, why couldn't a travelling farmhand come with wings? There are deep reasons why, in many wisdom traditions, angels and strangers are closely intertwined...

So, on this day of resurrections and possibilities, may we all be surrounded by winged strangers and shining gardeners. May we all be open to winds of change and wild gusts of blessing.

A CELTIC RUNE OF HOSPITALITY

We saw a stranger yesterday.
We put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place,
& with the sacred name of the truine God,
[They] blessed us and our house,
Our cattle and our dear ones.
As the lark says in her song:
Often, often, often goes the Christ
In the stranger's guise.

--Traditional

The Gael Who Cried WWOOF

Actually, this post has nothing to do with crying. We are dancing joyful jigs, here on the farm, even if we do have only three knees between the two of us.

Back in November, the Piper hurt her knee while shifting a bag of "pig bread" on uneven ground. Ever since then, it's been a challenge for her to manage the daily farm chores. Physical therapy provided a brief respite, but pain and swelling have continued and even the knee specialist confessed some measure of bafflement.

In between my part-time job and a several-month stint as a hospital chaplain, I wasn't much help to the Piper at Wounded Knee. The young couple who stayed with us during the winter helped somewhat, but their hearts were full of their own farm dreams and they moved on as soon as they found a place of their own. (That move occurred right at Beltane-- May 1st, the traditional start of the outdoor work season.)

So, what can a couple of farmers do when they have one bull, two cows, six pigs, eighteen chickens, twenty-four garden beds and three functional knees? It was time for these two Gaels to cry, WWOOF!!!

The WWOOF program counts as part of our Celtic/British agricultural emphasis, as it began in the U.K. about forty years ago. (WWOOF stands, variously, for "Willing Workers On Organic Farms" or "World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.") Essentially a networking system, it allows member farms to seek assistance while allowing "WWOOFers" to seek hands-on education in sustainable agriculture. Farmers and volunteers arrange the details of each informal internship--everything from a single weekend stay to full-season or full-year engagements. While details vary widely, the program's generally accepted standard is that each half-day of volunteer labour is compensated by a full day's room and board at the host farm.

We signed up with the program in April, as soon as we confirmed our Winter couple's departure date. Inquiries started to reach us a few weeks later. WWOOFers tend to embrace opportunities for travel; our first month's inquiries included folks from Quebec, Tennessee, New York, Taiwan and Seattle. We sent e-mails back and forth, trying to ensure the best match between what we could offer and what others might want to learn. We realized we would be educating ourselves, too--expanding the range of skills needed for task-sharing and delegation. We began to brainstorm. We made lists. We talked with other farmers about the specific challenges of hosting volunteers. We invested in extra blankets and pillows. We developed our own list of questions for potential volunteers and began sending them out as e-mail inquiries appeared...and then we chose our first WWOOFer and the real fun began!

So far, the program has been everything we hoped, and more. Our WWOOFers have pitched in with enthusiasm, demonstrated a wonderful eagerness to work and learn, shown good humour, flexibility, and stick-to-itiveness. We've been fascinated by their wide range of life experiences, their travel stories, and the range of things they've seen and learned on other farms as they WWOOF their way around the world. They're not perfect--they do come to learn, after all, and occasionally a tool gets left in the rain or a veggie plant gets pulled instead of a weed--but overall the experience has been genuinely lovely. Each one comes with their own delightful surprises, too--One WWOOFer turned out to be an absolute wizard in the kitchen and helped us work on a new website for the farm. Another has a great way with a camera and has captured our creatures in some wonderful images and videos. A third came along to the farmers' market with a typewriter and raised money by creating custom poems for market-goers on the spot--an effort I'm doing my best to carry on. Shared evenings around the table are another side benefit--we've found the kind of camaraderie, diverse perspectives and wide-ranging discussions on which we thrive.

WWOOFing may not work for every farmer. We have to relax our expectations and give up some of our perfectionism. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that these folks are still learning; many of them love the idea of farming but are unfamiliar with foundational concepts and basic skills. Others come with tremendous skill AND enthusiasm and we have to reign them in a bit, as we lack the resources to tackle the range of projects they ask to undertake. It's a balancing act, to be sure, but isn't that true of farming and life in general? Might as well meet new folks, share what we know, and make new friends along the way!

So here we are, in all our three-kneed glory, dancing. With each new WWOOFer, we learn a new way to move to the music, a new way to dig the beat (beets?) and enjoy the grooves (furrows!) of this land. The WWOOFers complete our broken circle and help us keep in time as the season calls the tune.

Agricultural Alchemy

Forget lead-into-gold. We have succeeded in an alchemy far more precious: sunlight into earth, earth into bacon, and bacon magically transformed into...fresh shrimp!

Okay, so maybe we had a bit of help with the first part. The Great Golden Orb's radiant energy was captured and held in earth, solar energy coursing through each element of the ecosystem. Next, we brought piglets into the mix: greedy little earth-gobblers, leftover-lovers, four-footed fertilizers. They rooted for us, and we rooted for them.

Then, one day, the pigs came home in little white packages. That was another kind of magic, to which we shall merely make allusion. You could say it was an act of slice...er, slight...of hand. Six roisterous, boisterous hogs had been divvied up, cooled down and gift-wrapped.

Next, six little piggies went to market. Our farmshare customers bought most of the meat, ordering animals by quarters, halves and wholes. (Two other pigs were otherwise processed into traditionally-cured products we'll have to wait months to taste. We trust it will be worth the wait!) We ended up with about one pig's worth of meat for our own freezer, plus lard to be saved for cookery and soap.

Well, that freezer was stuffed mighty full, so yesterday I took a few extra white packages with me when I went to the Winter Farmers' Market. There, in the cooler, underneath all our beautiful farm-fresh eggs, sat a pound or two of nitrate-free bacon, some ground pork and some chops: the original countryside currency.

Standing at a table across from me, the Live Lobster Lady lilted a lament. "Meat!" She cried, "My family's so hungry for meat!" I listened with ill-disguised delight. Too much seafood on their table? How fortuitous! In our house, it just so happens that we're tired of pork and eggs! I took out a pack of bacon and sallied forth across the aisle. That's when the alchemy happened. One hand to another, a shared smile and a few magic words, and the bacon disappeared, to be replaced by two packets of fresh-caught hand-picked shrimp meat.

The shrimp meat was transported home with much fanfare. A little lime juice, some garlic and peanut butter and olive oil, a bit of egg and some rice noodles, and more magic happened: Pad Thai! (I would have taken a picture, but we "disappeared" it too fast.)




I'm enjoying our experiments with agricultural alchemy. Maybe next week, I'll go looking for that other transformative substance: the fabled Philosopher's Scone.

Common Ground 2009: All's Fair in Love and Chore, Part Two

Here, as promised, is the second installment in our "film strip" from Common Ground Fair. Rose Freedman and Justin Lander of Modern Times Theater (an outgrowth of Vermont's venerable Bread & Puppet Theater) teach us about the word "Chore", the art of farming, and how to strike a blow for freedom.






"Chore lives high on the hog, low on the hog, and makes soup from the rest of the hog."

(I regret that the details of their hand-painted posters don't show up as well as I'd hoped due to the low resolution at which I was filming. You'll still have a pretty good sense of the images they're indicating, however.) If you ever get the chance to see these two brilliant buskers in person, I highly recommend it!

Failte! Welcome to the Tir na nOg Farm blog!

Strange it is for a Luddite like myself to go a-blogging, but here we are, and here we go!

Like many women farmers, we are "undercapitalized." We are careful to manage our debts and strenuously avoid taking on any more. We own few pieces of farm equipment other than a gloriously inadequate assortment of hand tools. Our lack of a tractor, in particular, provokes much eye-rolling and head-scratching from the non-female farmers hereabouts. (Admittedly, it provokes some occasional hand-wringing from us, too, but we delight in the related lack of payment books and fuel bills!) Without a tractor, we are forced to use other tools: the telephone, our wits, and our computer. These tools allow us to banter & barter for the services of others in our local agricultural economy.

Poverty and isolation have always dogged those who choose the farming life. Celts have always struggled to balance a love for the land with a hunger for exploration and innovation. We look forward to flexing some new "connective tissues" as we test this particular tool. A computer may not be able to harrow a field, but it can help us plow through possibilities. A blog may not scatter or secure a crop's worth of seeds, but it may scatter a few useful ideas and help them grow... (I hear it's pretty effective as a manure-spreader, too.)

The original Luddites did not reject technology altogether. Rather, they resisted those technologies which would harm, rather than contribute to, a healthy & well-lived life. Now, I'm not sure how the "carbon footprints" of computers and tractors compare. I'm also not sure we'd resist the purchase of a tractor if an affordable, easy-to-maintain model showed up. In the meantime, the computer is the one piece of serious farm equipment we have, so we aim to use it as best we can.

With that, my friends, we welcome you to Tir na nOg Farm and our farm blog. Bear with us! Enjoy the adventure along with us and all our lovely Celtic creatures. Watch for pictures and see how the farm takes shape, the gardens expand, and the animals grow. Step out into the field and dig your own roots alongside us as we explore Celtic cultures, traditions, and ideas. You never know what might turnip...

P.S. Our Scottish Highland cattle would have preferred a presence on MooTube, but they found videography didn't really behoove them.