Sandhill Farm
By Chris
A large homemade calendar hangs in the kitchen here at Sandhill Farm.
This month's calendar page features outsized honeybees crawling along
the edges of a honeycomb-shaped weekly grid. If you've ever wondered
how anyone here remembers what has happened over the last couple
weeks well enough to write this biweekly column, you often need look
no further than this calendar.
The bee theme has been an appropriate one for May. Yulia, the Art
Director for Communities magazine (which Chris edits), drew those
bees and honeycomb while attending the magazine's staff summit in
April. Little did she know then that we'd be using a photo taken at
our May 2 natural beekeeping workshop (presented by Apple and Stan)
on the cover of our Summer 2010 "Education for Sustainability" issue.
For a magazine focused on "Life in Cooperative Culture," few images
could be more apt than the large bees crawling around the border of
its cover (much as they crawl around the border of our kitchen
calendar). We spent some of the past week finalizing the layout of
this issue (removing typos and adding a photo essay marking the
one-year anniversary of Dancing Rabbit's "Great Mustache Escapade"),
which will be available in June (it can be ordered through
communities.ic.org or picked up at the Milkweed Mercantile).
In more on-the-ground bee work, Apple, Stan, and Owen have kept busy
with our hives here. Recent highlights include the addition of
another top-bar hive, and the capturing of a swarm that had gathered
on a dead branch just barely above tractor-bucket range on the edge
of the bee yard. While Apple positioned the tractor and raised the
front-end loader, Owen and Stan balanced in the bucket, threw a rope
over the branch, and shook the swarm into a bee box. Amazingly, the
bees fell but the beekeepers and bee box didn't, and we ended up with
an extra hive. Things couldn't have gone better, unless we'd also
been able to capture the additional swarm far up out of reach in
another tree.
Bees weren't the only cause of animal-related excitement. The day
after the bee workshop, our terrier mix Biscuit (aka Little Dog)
acquired a splinter in his paw which caused much painful three-pawed
locomotion and awkward hopping about. Here's how the calendar tells
the story: "May 3: Biscuit gets splinter. May 4: Apple, Sara, Owen
try to get splinter out. Instead Biscuit squeals like a pig! May 5:
Biscuit's splinter removed. 1.5 ccs of white lightning and no
squealing!" The splinter, a quarter-inch long, is taped to the
calendar on that same date.
The peak of human-related excitement occurred on our Land Day,
Saturday, May 8, when we celebrated Sandhill's 36th anniversary. A
crowd variously estimated at 80, close to 100, or "a whole bunch"
attended the festivities, enjoying a May Pole dance, an abundant
potluck, a contra-dance, and general camaraderie (plus, for some,
additional music-making and/or a sweat lodge). Gigi had promised
there'd be no work parties-this was a day, after all, to relax and
celebrate, not conscript our visitors into labor-but the weather had
other plans. With frost approaching, a dozen or more people
volunteered to mulch all our tender potato plants with additional
straw-a good thing, as the temperature plummeted to around 33 degrees
F that night. With 100 people waiting to go through the potluck line,
this impromptu work party actually helped ease the flow across our
porch and probably preserved some of our lawn from additional erosion
at the hands (or toes?) of impatiently shuffling feet.
When the weather has allowed, Gigi, Emily, Owen, Sara, Kurt, and
Chris have been busy tending the gardens. Sometimes the soil has just
been too sopping wet for cultivation, or the downpours too intense
for puttering in the garden, but we've found other things to do.
We've been appreciating our harvests of asparagus, radishes, kale,
collards, walking onions, and diverse salad greens (plus shiitake
mushrooms from our inoculated logs), and anticipating other crops
that are further from being ready (those currently being weeded,
thinned, coaxed along in the greenhouse, seeded, or just thought
about). We also brought produce, plants, and musical instruments to
the Scotland County Farmers' Market, which started May 11 and will
take place every Tuesday from 3 to 6 pm on the Memphis town square.
We're looking forward to more sun.
Apple and Stan have also been engaged in other farm work, including
peach thinning, field work (moisture levels allowing), landfill
filling, cheering along this year's sorghum, packaging and sending
out last year's sorghum, fixing broken things, and the like. Stan
gave a field tour on May 9 after dinner, and this time the truck
didn't get stuck in the mud on Canada Road as darkness descended.
Laird was here for a while, before departing on a 41-day trip, which
will include, by the end of it, 9090 miles traveled through 29 states
on eight different major Amtrak routes. He'll be attending meetings
and conferences, doing consulting work, leading a workshop or two,
and in general helping others in their quests to live and work more
cooperatively. As he points out in his blog, he'll also be doing his
best to keep Amtrak solvent.
We've had a number of visitors, including members of a community in
Iowa, friends, family (including Apple's mom Molly and sister Kate),
and some of the neighbor's dogs. Molly and Kate came over with us
last Saturday for the afternoon Ultimate Frisbee game at Dancing
Rabbit. Molly cheered while Kate made several successful passes to
the end zone and the rest of us Sandhillers, Dancing Rabbits, and Red
Earth Farmers slid around in the mud, occasionally threw or caught
the disc as intended, and had a week's worth of fun all crammed into
one afternoon (we'd been rained out Tuesday and Thursday). Renay
joined us in the game, and proved once again that there's nothing
quite like youth for registering a high skill-to-age ratio in
Ultimate.
Tony and Rachel (from Dancing Rabbit) and Chris took a field trip
early on May 8 with Pete the ornithologist to Thousand Hills State
Park outside Kirksville, where Chris finally learned what a Tennessee
warbler sounds like. He's now assembled a list of 80 birds seen or
heard here in the Sandhill neighborhood since he arrived in early
March. The members of the tri-communities birders' club are still far
outnumbered by the members of the tri-communities' bird population,
and we want to keep it that way, but we're enjoying comparing notes.
For her part, Rachel's been monitoring nests over at Dancing Rabbit,
including one that contained actual rabbits.
There's always more that could be written, but for now, this seems as
good a place to end as any.