We toured the Earle Farm a few weeks ago with farmer friends and some of their summer interns. It was fun to walk the fields. The place has a pleasant familiarity. The farm is large in the acreage it encompasses, and different distant memories slid in and out of my brain as we walked. We started the tour at the sugar shack circling up for introductions. The sugar shack was still under construction when Kyle and I arrived for our first year on the farm. It was mid winter, and our first month or two was spent setting up sap lines and buckets for Tom’s first year of syrup production. We would take the big truck each afternoon, its metal sides squeaking loudly, collecting sap for Tom to boil in the evenings. Molly, the dog, usually ran behind the truck getting exercise, her “sap runs”.
Next we walked up behind the greenhouses to the compost pile. There I thought back to the mid summer hours spent cleaning the barns of their winter animal bedding, the bulk material needed to build the compost pile. The animals live confined mostly to the barns all winter with dropped hay and manure slowly accumulating to form a dense 2-3 foot “pack”. Tom would use the tractor to scrape the middle section out, and Kyle and I would be armed with pitchforks, pulling and prying the pack out of the sides into the tractor bucket.
From the compost pile we headed up and down the trail paralleling Baird Hill Rd,, then down through part of the sugar bush and into the big field. The grass there is lush from years of intensive grazing, and what is known as the main garden sits on the far edge. Tom talks about the field once being entirely garden, and I’ve always tried to picture it, back when the Earle Farm hosted a 100 member CSA. The contents of what was in the main garden when Kyle and I were there are blurry, blending with years of coming back to help with fall harvests, and many subsequent farm tours.
Next we turned down away from the road into the far fields. These two fields are newer, a more recent attempt to turn forest to grass and are populated by persistent fern, sapling, and stump sucker growth. Homer took to frolicking here, something about this field, his favorite since back in puppy-hood. We mostly spent time moving temporary animal fencing around and splitting wood. Homer would disappear, while we were working, bored with our stationary wood duties. Then we’d see the tops of cattails that lined a small stream rustling, and he would come out some time later covered in mud up over his eyeballs, having stuffed his nose into the muck after some intriguing scent. I share Homer’s preference for this specific place, something about its rolling quality still slightly wild, the stone wall dotted with small birch trees dividing the field in two, evidence of it being tamed in the past and hidden from the road.
From the lower field, we walk up the gravel road that runs along the woods and the main garden back to Baird Hill Rd. Each summer when the cows would exhaust the pastures, we’d move them up to the top of Baird Hill into a neighbor’s field. We would funnel them out of whatever pasture they were in, onto the road heading up the hill, and Tom would drive the big truck keeping slightly ahead of them while we ran behind making sure they kept forward momentum. The cows must have had a strong memory of greener pastures, or else it was just the rarity of complete freedom, but they would take off flying up the dirt road, us running to keep up. Usually, one would randomly veer off into the woods with us in pursuit, and then quickly decide the road was the easier place to be. Baird Hill Road goes gently up, then down, and has a final pretty severe uphill climb. The cows would make it to about the bottom of the steep hill at full throttle and then quickly slow to a walk, tuckered out by the run and climb.
We bypassed the upper garden and headed lastly to Tom’s brother and Sister in-law’s house, the house where the Earle Family grew up. The house hold has a pasture outback, and the attached barn was back when we where there the winter home to the cows. Our first winter there, one of the cows “Butternut” had a calf “Maplenut”. The Earle Farm Cows were always a bit unruly and I was determined to milk Butternut and train the calf. I made it my daily chore to groom “Butternut”, while she was in a headlock stand(so I wouldn’t get speared by her giant horns), so that she would get use to me handling her enough to let me milk her. After a week or so of regular grooming, she did allow milking, and I was able to get enough for us to have fresh milk in my coffee and to make yogurt. I did get Maplenut to be initially pretty tame, allowing me to handle her in a halter. Once the cows went out to pasture for the summer, she became a little wild again, and I lost my nerve as her horns grew in. She did keep her love for face scratches, something the other cows in the herd didn’t have, and always allowed me to rub her face or back, over the fence for years after when I came to visit. Maplenut never quite seemed like a cow, she just didn’t fit in with the other cows and I always wondered if my early handling confused her. Was she tame or wild, she just couldn’t quite tell.
In the Share:
Leeks
Gold Potatoes
Eggplant
Sweet Carmen Peppers
Mixed Kale
Baby Carrots
Parsley
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