The cat on the lawn lives here. They grow corn. And hay. Plus some veggies. It’s a lovely place.
There used to be many more working farms around here, but the farming families have grown old. Their children don’t want to work that hard. Who can blame them? Farming anywhere is a difficult life, but in New England?
I love this region and this valley, but it’s hard to figure why anyone would choose to farm here. We have terrible soil, if you can call it soil. It’s all roots and rocks.
The “New England Stone Fence” … those scenic stacked rock walls you can find just about everywhere were not built for some special mystical reason. It was just something to do with all the rocks farmers had to take out of the fields so they could actually plow the ground.
A stone fence along a country road.
What thrives here? Apples. Dairy cattle. Horses. Short growing season crops like tomatoes and cucumbers and a particular kind of corn, called locally “butter and sugar” because it’s yellow and white, and sweet as sugar. This is the time of year when you can find it in the local grocery stores. It will be gone in another week or two.
Most of our local farms are organic … sometimes too organic for my taste. I like my milk homogenized and my eggs unfertilized. It may not be politically correct, but I can’t help it. I’m me, un-PC and all.
The farm is lovely and the farmer is a friendly guy, but he’s getting old. When he’s gone, the fields will become sub-divisions, if property values rise even a little bit. Otherwise, as is happening all over the valley, the fields will go back to woods and stream.
Cat on the lawn.
This is one of the few places in the country where wild life is returning. Animals that have been gone from this region for as long as a century are coming back. Fishers (also known as fisher cats, though they are weasels and closely related to mink, not cats of any kind), coyotes, bobcats and now, bears too. Deer are everywhere and moose can’t be far behind. Racoon and skunk, out-of-control chipmunks … we’ve got it all.
Stone fences are great homes for snakes and rodents, but when they meet, the snake usually wins.
The eagles are back, too. We have a nesting pair of American Eagles in our woods.
We had rabbits and squirrels, but the bobcats ate them. Almost all of them. That’s okay. They will be back, but then, so will the bobcats. The circle of life is in our yard.
