Last night a friend said, “When I visit the farm it feels like a prayer.” Early this morning I walked through the raspberry patch and picked a pint of nature’s jewels. Each one a gift in the midst of so much uncertainty and suffering.
The farm season is changing. We are preparing to open for visitors. After laboring in the long hot days of summer, the fruits and vegetables, as well as the farmers, are breathing with more ease. The ripening is here, the bounty of nature. Vines are growing upwards heavy with heirloom tomatoes, others are sprawling across the open field landing here and there with juicy melons, while still others, the underground tubers of banana fingerling potatoes, wiggle in the soil.
The earth is alive and producing.
We will open for pick-you-own raspberries in week or so. All details will be posted on our website along with instructions for visiting to insure the safety of visitors and our farmers. Please check before you come. We will use our website opening page to let you know of daily changes.
The Ripening Begins!
Artists also offer sustenance. Old Frog Pond Farm artists have created new sculptures on the theme of Refuge and our annual outdoor exhibit, Around the Pond and Through the Woods, will be open Thursdays through Sundays, 11-4 pm, beginning on September 3.
Monk, Madeleine Lord, welded steel
We’ve also created a few shady groves along the trails where you can take refuge.
Twenty-six poets have written eloquent poems inspired by the farm on the theme of Refuge. We will not host a ‘live’ plein air poetry event this year: the event draws too many people. Instead, we are publishing an online journal and will host a zoom reading with the poets on Sunday, September 20 at 3 pm. Photographer, Brent Mathison is taking photos of the sites that inspired the poets and these will be pinned at the zoom event. More details will follow, but save the date!
Photo for Cattail Blues, Brent Mathison
Cattail Blues
—Didi Chadran
A cool, astringent wind interrupts
A late Spring heatwave, wafting the cattails,
Which sway, shimmer, sway again, resilient.
Graceful, they bend like blue notes picked, plaintive
On a hollow-bodied guitar. They tremolo and
Sustain in an ostinato whisper.
The call-and-response of Schlieren heat and
Tonic gusts croons of heartbreak and new love,
Release and reinvention, poetry
And commerce. The plants’ lot is to shelter,
Protect, and nourish the reeds’ seedlings and
Model resolve against wind, drought, and flood.
Wafting like fingers apoise on the strings
To bend to the future. It brings what it brings.
Our self-serve farm stand will continue to be open seven days a week through October. Kohlrabi, kale, broccoli, and other fall plants are going in the ground. Long-awaited, albeit brief rains, are finally falling and the earth is a little less parched. The weather beings hear our prayers!
Be well and come visit us!
Can you find the one small worm among all these organically grown tomatoes?