| Getting RealHi All, Mark here.”They’re so calm and so healthy looking!” Steve’s reaction to the atmosphere in the barn, while here on a brief visit last week, mirrored my sense of things. The sheep do seem remarkably robust, cooperative, orderly, and affectionate.These days, it’s a joy to be with the sheep. If they are in the barn when I enter, it is entirely predictable that the two closest to my entry door will be Sophie, a four year old ewe, and Doodle, the by now well-known one year old wether. Both were bottle-fed as lambs. Both are positioned to greet me, looking for a nuzzle, a scratch on the cheek, a hello. They are sometimes accompanied by the senior wether, Orhan, middle aged ewes Pepsche or Skunkie, or one or both of the two oldest ewes in the flock, Nilufer and Lale, who are now past breeding age.Lately, before I even clap my hands and yell “Outside”, the rest of the flock pretty automatically files quietly out to the front vestibule as soon as I enter the barn.They know they are supposed to wait there. I shoo my little entourage of sheeply affection out to join them. Then I am then able to refill their water, put hay in the manger, replenish their mineral supplement, and distribute a grain treat in their bowls without them all fighting for access under my feet.Steve speculated that the atmosphere is peaceful thanks to the absence of feisty young ramlings this year. He’s right that there’s little of the chaotic aggression a couple of the young rams evidenced the prior year until they were sent to market.But is Steve describing the cause or the effect of the overall prevailing atmosphere? I’m not sure. There is still ample testosterone flowing in the flock. I don’t always do a fully effective job of banding the testicles of the ram lambs I want to neuter. And there is one fully intact ram, Suleyman III, who I chose to keep as a breeder when he was born last March. Contrary to what you might expect if David Sedaris’s essay in last week’s New Yorker (The Violence of the Rams) is your idea of an authoritative treatise on sheep psychology, obnoxious ram behavior is not absolutely inevitable. Suleyman has a low-key demeanor, with a quiet authority and no apparent need to constantly prove his ramhood.I didn’t say it to Steve, but I like to think that some of the calm atmosphere is conferred by me. Maybe I have unconsciously communicated my own overall contentedness with my life with Eric and my network of good friends to my animals, and it has affected their behavior. Or maybe they are benefiting from my conscious effort to convince them they live in a world of loving security. If looking out from the farm I see chaos, killing, hate and vitriol, then dammit I am going to make sure, for the part of the world I can influence, that order, nurturing and love rule here. And from this, I think, there will be ripple effects in the world at large.I will concede that impartial observers might not see things this way. They might see me as living in something of an eccentric farm fantasy world, and maybe they’d be right. Yesterday, for example, a cloudy Saturday afternoon when I could have been shopping for holiday gifts or insulating windows, I instead, to my great satisfaction, worked in the vegetable garden.The vegetable garden in December? Yup. Just before Thanksgiving, in a spate of house cleaning, I had decided it was time to remove from a hook in the kitchen two remaining bunches of garlic cloves that I had hung there many months ago.These were the smallest bulbs of my garlic harvest, far more trouble to peel and chop than it was worth for culinary purposes. I put them in a colander in the mud room, unsure what to do with them.Yesterday I noticed the colander sitting there. With an unstructured afternoon and relatively balmy temperatures in the 40s, I decided it would be lovely to plant those that still seemed viable. What pleasure: the zen of weeding and preparing the bed; the satisfaction of feeding the weeds to the chickens; the recovery of living seeds from a mess of otherwise compostable waste; and the creation for each clove of a cozy home in the dirt. My mind wandered where it would, which was apparently over my shoulder to pat my back.I gave myself credit in the first instance for not having used the cloves for cooking. To me, that represented maturity. There was a time when I would have carried a single idea — like “raise what you eat” — to such an extreme that I would have tried to use even those tiny cloves. But no, even good principles can be carried too far. Better, I ultimately realized, to use nice fat fresh garlic cloves from the market.Then I congratulated myself on using the uneaten cloves as seed garlic. Waste not, want not. I was saving and nurturing small bundles of life. Here, I thought, was my antidote to the death and destruction we contemplate daily.Feh, as my aunt Jennie used to say. Get real. My little garlic seeds may not produce anything at all. My little speculations on the cosmic benefits of what I do here are probably best understood as escapist fantasy. I think it’s just my way of grappling with a world full of intractable conflicts that prey on my mind, in which the combatants all believe they have unassailably right views and I can contribute no attainable resolution, just anguished doubt.Stick to the basics. The farm produces some food. People need to eat. That much is undeniably good. |
Entourage of Affection: Doodle, Sophie and Pepsche up front, Orhan and Skunkie behind Photo by Mark Scherzer
Recycling my garlic Photo by Mark Scherzer
WHAT ELSE IS AVAILABLE THIS WEEK –
FARM PICKUPS:Email us your order at farm@turkanafarms.com, and let us know when you’d like to pick up your order. It will be put out for you on the side screened porch of the farmhouse (110 Lasher Ave., Germantown) in a bag. You can leave cash or a check in the now famous pineapple on the porch table. Because I’m now here full time, we’re abandoning regular pick-up times. Let us know when you want your order any day between 10 and 5, and unless there are unusual circumstances we’ll be able to ready it to your convenience. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call or text at 917-544-6464 or email.
HEAR OUR SHOWIf you’d enjoy hearing these bulletins out loud instead of reading them, we broadcast them on Robin Hood Radio, the nation’s smallest NPR station. You can find it on FM 91.9, AM 1020, WBSL-FM 91.7 “The Voice of Berkshire School” or streaming on the web at www.robinhoodradio.com, where podcasts of past broadcasts are also available under the title AgriCulture in the “On Demand” section. FM 91.7 “The Voice of Berkshire School”can be heard from just south of Pittsfield to the CT border. You can hear the station on WHDD FM 91.9 from Ashley Falls, MA down through the Cornwalls and in NY from just south of Hillsdale down to Dover Plains. You can hear the station on AM1020 from Stockbridge, MA to Kent and from Poughkeepsie to Pawling to Kent, Goshen, Torrington, Norfolk, and Ashley. Recently added for those in the Route 22 corridor from Ancram down to Pawling is FM frequency 97.5 And of course you can listen in our own neighborhood of Southwestern Columbia and Northwestern Dutchess County, where it is being broadcast from Annandale on Hudson, 88.1 FM.
FOLLOW USThe bulletins may also now be found in written form on line as well, at the Germantown, NY, portal ofhttp://imby.com/germantown/userblogs/agriculture-turkana-farms/
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