Notes from the Field / April 2024

We’re offering a new monthly writing series called, Notes from the Field, available to read on our website. This series is meant to function as a seasonal farm journal of sorts, detailing the more intimate aspects of our work at Fields Without Fences through a collection of photographs and writings by Lindsay Napolitano. 

“When all the world is green”

We hope the best for April with good cause; silk blossoms have emerged on the rickety skin of crooked branches. There is suddenly soft greenery underfoot where there once was wet muck. Fat bumble bees burrow into every miniscule open mouthed flower. The world is alive with miracles. And that first green of spring, a green so green, the Cherokee gave it another name distinct from other green, is sweeping across the land like the repeated soft strokes of a crayon - faint at first, then thick and waxy, shimmering.

Someone has been slowly turning up the volume on the world. The chorus of birds are more boisterous, more vocal instrumentation has been layered, and presumably the evolutionary directive has been issued, “come now fellas, play it like you mean it.” There is bellowing at the ponds, a lone loud buzz hovers around me in the garden. It drones an infinite hum like the strings of a tanpura, lilting with every bob.

As the world of spring first comes into focus, there is a sense that it might be knowable. That we might name it all, catalog its behaviors and uses, and store it in a jar. But our vessel quickly overfloweth. The abundance is too enormous to behold. The spectrum is too vast and incalculable. We were just admiring the pear blossoms, when we looked down and the tender blades of grass had grown. Now they scratch at our ankles, they fester with ticks. Poison ivy gleams and bounds forth from the forest edges. This is not the world we had imagined just weeks ago while daydreaming the first pale pink redbud flowers. Surely something has gone awry, and surely something must be done about it… And so suddenly, out of earnest duty, someone plugs in the amplifier, and all across the land, out comes the boom and buzz of whackers and mowers everywhere.

Breaking Bud

I find myself engaged in a race with this verdant force saturating the landscape and breaking buds in every corner of the earth. I delicately dislodge last year’s rooted cuttings with focused urgency, and pot them into large half gallon pots. Before that, I fill each of those pots with heavy soil, and carry them out to the nursery pad. Hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of them. I do this knowing I have only until the green grows and the flowers flush to transplant these young shrubs and trees. I do this with my arms, and my legs, and limit any unnecessary cognitive expenditure. “Don’t overthink it baby” is a mantra I whisper between breaths, hauling these pots to and fro.

And in all this momentum, the spirit of the season seizes me, and summons my bones with renewed sprite. I’m up at dawn each morning walking along the corridors of the canyon, keeping pace with the relentless rambling of the creek. I am a tree actively acquiring another coil, poised in upright posture, and my leaves are beginning to grow again. In the exigency and physicality of each day’s work I feel my sap rise and blood move. And in the relentless schlepping of pots, I watch each day as the lignin and tendons of my arms acquire increased clarity and contour.

I am racing with the verdant force saturating the landscape, my buds are breaking.

Fox & Kits

A fox has returned to an excavated den below one of the small barns at Hill Rd. to have her kits. She is cautious but serene this spring in the absence of our beloved Great Pyrenees who passed away last summer. Her newborn young know nothing of large dogs, nor gnashing canines. They prance and tumble in the green grass, they explore, and trot up within yards of us. Their fur is fresh and tufted, their features are soft. My eyes lock for a moment with the angular contours of their mother, standing at acute attention, several yards behind her brood. Here we exchange a silent shared sentiment; I’ve got no business with yours, and you’ve got no business with mine. Part peace offering, part warning.

Up at BIRD, I had no sooner set the flat of fennel out in the hoophouse, and stepped out to the barn, than I returned to find two song sparrows, darting in and out of the production house, pilfering the newly planted seeds. A mouse or a vole, or some equally adept rodent, has disassembled the various sticks and deterrents I have placed around a seed tray of squash and cucumbers no less than three times. And what appears to be the paw prints of a cat have kicked up some chestnut seeds from their sandy seedbox home. The world is alive with something.

There in the perfect sunshine of the day, I am cleaning out dusty nursery pots when a tuft of soil spills out onto my arm. As the breeze moves, the fine grains tickle my skin. But the tickling, my god the tickling, is disproportionate to the tenor of the wind. Indeed, I discover to my dismay, the tickling is not provoked by a tuft of soil at all - but rather a thicket of swarming ants, in frenzied movement, up the walls of my arm.

We enter the world open and curious and learn our separateness; how to avoid a predator, how to hide our seeds, how to shake out a pot.

Earthquake & Eclipse

I was at BIRD to do some nursery work. No, clean the office, or rather, perhaps roam the fields with my camera in hand… I get this way before a storm - shifty and unfocused. A restless anxiety stirs under my skin up until the crack of lightning, whip of wind, or force of deluge breaks the spell. I could see it over there, dark silver clouds looming low in the west, just off in the distance, my ship coming in.

But when the thunder finally arrived it was all wrong. I heard it inexplicably approaching from the north, and waited for the sound to crest over the cliffside - but it never did. Instead, it hung low to the ground - or more precisely it felt, in the ground. Something was amiss. Someone had tipped over the world, and the thunder was now trapped below the earth. One low and lonely grumbling moan like the first note of a didgeridoo. No flash of a bulb, no water in the faucet. I took a photo of a crabapple branch, and put down my camera, unsatisfied. I think I’ll go water the plants now, or fill up some seed trays…

A 4.8 magnitude earthquake erupted from central Jersey on a Friday, and on Monday the sun was blotted from the sky. It’s hard to be certain about anything anymore.

In advance of the big event we discussed driving north to catch a glimpse of the total eclipse. Johann rescheduled a client visit, I ordered special glasses, and we left the day open. But when the day finally arrived it was overcast throughout the northeast, we were tired from the weekend, there was farm work to do, it would be a long drive for Ro… the magnificence of the path of totality could wait another 20 years, we hoped.

That the earth will reliably bring about the new day by circling the sun is a certainty we must hold onto and maintain as mundane, out of necessity. That the world will one day meet its fiery doom by way of that same expanding sun (if not by other means earlier), is a certainty too enormous to live in - too untethered to chase. When the morning finally arrives we must hold fast to terra firma, pay our taxes by the light of day, and eventually seek peaceful slumber by the glow of the moon.

A friend, a self described eclipse chaser, imparts a glimpse of the splendor to us, “it’s not like being on earth, it’s like suddenly being in space.” I’m further convinced we’ve made the right decision. When it comes to pondering our existential position within the cosmos, this traveler requires no further stimulus… it’s already all I can think about.

Come what May

A singular miracle at the start of spring is a revelation. Hoards of miracles heaped upon earth in mid spring inspire to-do lists. Mine is long, and frankly, I’ve stopped committing it to paper. It now lives an untethered life blowing about in the breeze, unchased, and yet returning unto itself. It’s a bit of an open secret that nature generally rewards an abdication of control. Underneath the volunteer cleavers and ground ivy, a tilthy moist soil awaits. The trick is being able to find the miracles, lost in the pile of miracles. I yank them from the ground and sell the robust harvest to a medicinal wholesale buyer, I plant my nursery seedlings in their wake. I never do get to seeding lettuce in the kitchen garden - but having also never gotten to pulling out last year’s lettuce as it flowered and set seed, there are baby lettuce plants to be had everywhere. The path is easy for those without preferences, is a Buddhist trope, or joke, or truth I return to often.

There is the world I imagine, and the world I inhabit. The world I imagine is in soft focus like the first sweeps of a crayon. But, the world I inhabit has sharp edges in places, and the background is fleshed out to the most miniscule minutia. A myriad of full blown beings press their walls right up against one another until they overlap, and their edges dull again.

Is it possible to find quantitative patterns in the field, without attaching qualitative distinction to them? Can things be both a matter of course and all wrong? Can the first green of spring be greener than all the other green, without being better? Is it possible to learn the difference between forms, all the while knowing that as the song goes, “nature’s first green is gold” - that chlorophyll and blood, and bones are all born of the same sun? Don't overthink it baby.

Gazing up at the eclipse in the backyard, there were dark silver clouds festering in the west, absconding the view for long smoky stretches. A smoldering fire backlit the moon. Someone dimmed the lights on the afternoon. The discordant keys of Sun Ra’s experimental jazz, boomed through the amplifier of my mind, “the sky is a sea of darkness… when there is no sun…” It was all wrong, and also, inexplicably, perfect.