Notes from the Field / March 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. 

Crocuses

March has arrived as March often arrives, in blustery fits and false starts. A sunny mirage disappears beneath silvery overcast clouds for days. A warm breeze beckons only to become fearsome wind nipping. That the most tender of iridescent petals should be the first to emerge into this rugged terrain is a reoccurring mystery. A heartening mystery, and surely a sign that the god of spring must hold a jaunty sense of humor.

It has been three full seasons of fits and false starts for me. Not quite a dormancy, but an extended hibernation of sorts, initiated by a pandemic and sustained by a pregnancy. My son is in nursery school now, and I’m back to work tending the farms with long lost focus and regularity. I find myself here at the start of March, peeking out from the accumulated debris with tender petals whipping in the wind. A bit sparkly and bewildered, having just awoken from a very, very long winter.

Out in the field, the daffodils and crocuses are swelling in the understory of the forest garden. I can barely remember why I planted them - but I can fully remember when I planted them. It was in the fall of 2019, with the help of our apprentices at the time. The sun was hanging low in the autumnal afternoon sky, already sinking into winter on a warm October day. That was before we moved to the new farm; before the world settled in for a long rest; before the cicadas rose out of the earth and swarmed; before layers of sod and soil piled upon the buried bulbs.

It was a full year before the earth turned and my compass started spinning wildly, then landed and held fixed on the gravitational force of one miraculous creature. A creature I call my son, soft skinned and dazzling, nested in my arms, and surrounded by the pale debris of everything that came before.

Feather Prisms

An Eastern Bluebird perched on a naked persimmon branch in the forest garden a few days ago. In a few month’s time the birds will be like apparitions, rustling and darting invisibly behind the cover of leaves and grasses. But, at this moment, in the nakedness of the hunger month, they are like bright jewels adorning the otherwise muted landscape. 

Fascinatingly, unlike other feather colors, there is no blue pigment within blue feathers. The color blue arises out of a kind of structural prism that separates out the white light of the sun, and in turn reflects a blue hue into our eyes. I make a note: things are not as they appear… I make a sub-note: things are as they appear, to the beholder.

The songbirds are stirring and will begin nesting soon enough. Emissaries of the forthcoming color of the world, ceremoniously depositing thin skinned, soft hued eggs upon tufts of pale matted grass. They will nest in the reeds around the pond, in the upper branches of the crabapple, in the elderberry shrubs in the field. In a few short months their brightly-hued feathers will be joined by shimmering blossoms taking their turn in the sun. It is then that the Red-winged Blackbirds will emerge suddenly from the background, flashing their fiery shoulders in protest of my treading through their breeding grounds. The screeching and swooping within inches of my head, a not so subtle reminder that the earth belongs to no one, when everyone is just passing through.

Yesteryear Orchard

We are firmly settled on the new farm. Dust has already accumulated under the carpets. The barns have been re-sided and the driveway re-stoned. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid March, I determine on a blustery whim that it seems like a fine day to plant the lower orchard field. The orchard, while installed on an impulse, has been thoughtfully and thoroughly imagined. Future plantings have been flagged and staked in relation to the earth’s contours since last summer. Species have been selected for their tolerance to chill and blight and ordered in the fall. I have time traveled to the first apple harvest to happily report back, “pleasantly tart, and not too sweet.”

This is to be a future orchard of yesteryear proportions, with spacious plantings on mostly semi-dwarf root stock. The kind of orchard that will require years to mature and a ladder to harvest. An orchard of peaches and plums, and apples and pears my son will pick. On the outermost reaches of an old fruiting branch mottled with lichen, a bright new bud will emerge. This is the promise of spring.

All these trees are naked and bare rooted and will be planted one by one into their new home. Johann rides the small tractor alone into the field between nap and dinner time, piled high with wood chips, young nursery trees, and a spade shovel. The newly dislocated nursery trees are hacked off at the roots. 

We’ve not consulted the gods on this planting, nor the Maria Thun 2024 Biodynamic Calendar resting uncracked on my desk. We’ve consulted only the finite presence of an afternoon in March, unabated by clouds, whipping wind, and rain. Making a home anywhere takes time. These roots will be blessed with a sunny day to start, and the patience of seasons to settle in.

Collecting Moss

Back at the old farm, the forest garden farm we call BIRD, the propagation tunnels still stand as they always have. I’ve been seeding new flats of wildflowers, herbs, and shrubs from the pods and fruits I collected in the fall. Anise hyssop, rattlesnake master, blazing star, swamp mallow, and shrubby Saint John’s wort unfurl from the cosmos into earthly being right there before my eyes. I wince at the greenness of it. There is new growth on the old growth too. Last year’s rooted cuttings are being potted and moved onto the nursery pad. Everywhere I look the nursery is filled with unfinished business. An old unplanted tray of over-wintered mint has grown green fuzz. “Nice moss operation you got going on in there,” Johann quips after stopping in to water the flats at my request. What was that old proverb… something about moss on a rolling stone?

Is it possible to grow and move in place? The forest garden offers a decisive yes. Here the trees stretch further toward the sky gaining more girth and grandeur. Spurs of new black raspberry have wrapped themselves into thick unmanaged tangles in the understory. And in the same old bathroom mirror - in the farm office, where we once lived cramped and off kilter years ago - my face has changed. Does the new spring ever ask, how is it I find myself here, at the beginning again?

We will be bringing back our herbal teas in the fall, I announced into a microphone in front of a crowd of sixty people at the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Conference this winter. I will have the plant nursery back up and running by next spring, I hedged at the dinner table last Wednesday. I call up an old wholesale buyer excited and slightly unhinged after a years-long hiatus to say, I will have medicinal plants for you again this season! I send an urgent note to a florist - I’ll have an abundance of woody cut florals available soon… The god of spring is drunk with cheerful anticipation. Old as time, and as buoyant as a newborn.

Copses

Some years back now, many years really, I began cultivating swathes of copse interspersed throughout the forest garden. Black willow, yellow willow, and red osier dogwood lopped off at the base year upon year, continually sending up irreverent and multiplying new shoots. I harvest the spurs at the end or beginning of the season, and collect them in brightly colored bundles. Their colors are saturated - glowing, soft and pliable with the bespoke spirit of newly embodied growth.

Underneath the soil, buried below the surface debris, old roots rumble through the earth, become saturated with water, and as provoked by some unknowable impetus, erupt with new growth year upon year. Two sides of something. As above, so below. So on, and so forth.

Wabi Sabi Weave

I have been weaving a fence with the willows and red osier for three full seasons now. A short fence around a sizable kitchen garden just off the porch at the new farm. In the winter of 2021, I cut down the cedar trees for posts with my son still waxing in my belly. I waited months for seasons to change, and the ground to warm, before driving them into the earth. I weaved and weaved as the fence grew and weathered, and my son napped, for years. The bark began to peel off the posts, the twine began to disintegrate. I thread new twine, I wrap brightly hued spurs of new growth around a decomposing core. Each year, layer by layer, a course is laid, then threaded back upon itself. The fence lives in a mutually co-existing state of decay and renewal. 

I live this way too. 

It is March again. I exchange a jaunty wink with the crocuses, and toast my cup to the god of spring.