A Year in Farming

 My brother, Jim, reminds me often that he cannot believe that I bought a farm. We grew up on a farm, outside of Boise, Idaho, and being 8 years older than me, his experience of the farm was hard work and unrelenting obligations. My own experience was having 42 acres of playground that I shared with my sister, Cyndy. Only 20 months separate us sisters, so we always had a ready playmate in each other.

Shirley Girl came later, just as we were leaving our childhood farm.

But here we are, Dambara and me, despite Jim's misgivings, living on 5 acres of mostly cleared land on Camano Island, and over the past 10 months, we became flower farmers.

Being bordered by Ananda Farm Camano Island, we easily melded into the larger picture of cooperative farmers, sending all of our produce and flowers to market through the Farm, sharing our largess, receiving theirs. It's been a fabulous year, filled with challenges and victories, risk-taking and lesson-learning, moments of despair and days filled with joy.

One of the farm directors, Zach, gave us our assignment soon after we arrived, long before we had soil capable of growing anything beyond pasture, so we had plenty of time to prepare. Our assignment was flowers, onions, lettuce, and bell peppers. Easy peasy.

We spent the first year on the new property making our house habitable. I've already told that story, so you can look back at earlier posts if you're intrigued.

Friends from afar came to help.

Brilliant creativity sparkled along the way.

Many hands made many miracles.

Hot water was a turning point.

We walk on prayers every day.

The farm logo goes up.

Brother Jim made a huge difference.

Professional help from a dear friend.

Finishing touches.

We spent our second year creating planting beds, irrigation systems, a greenhouse, and a plan. That's the story that I'll be telling over the next several blogs.

And now, we're finishing up our first year as flower farmers. The weather is changing; the winds are picking up; the rains are beginning; the temperatures are falling. The time of rest and reflection are upon us, and we welcome the quiet season with a sense of accomplishment and contentedness. And preparation for spring, launching our second year wiser and better prepared. We'll take you there, if you'd like to ride along on this farming adventure.

Sheltering in Place

Last fall, we brought home some bulbs to plant in anticipation for spring blooms. There were some hurdles between then and now, including renovating the house so we could move in, then further renovation to bring out its beauty, then stormy weather, then missing power cords, then traveling to Jerusalem, so the bulbs never made it into the ground.

They were finally planted in some empty celery boxes, which work perfectly, since the boxes are waxed and can stand up to extended moisture. All of the daffodils fit into three boxes, and the tulips went into a fourth box, with the remaining tulips finding a cozy, dank, dark home at the base of our still-potted apple trees.

The boxes of blooms sit in sunny spots, protected from strong winds, waiting it out until next fall, when surely, surely, we'll have the wherewithal to get them into the ground. They are sheltering in place.

Happy crowd

Sheltering in place

Our household has been sheltering in place quite cheerfully. We have each other for company and occasionally spend distanced time with the other farmers. From time to time we make forays into town to pick up supplies. We've been learning how to cook foraged food, discovering great recipes as well as the sporadic not-so-great recipe, who enjoys doing which errands or tasks or projects or chores. Some things get done right away. Other things don't need doing, as it turns out.

We've watched favorite movies, jig-sawed a puzzle, painted, weed-whacked, trimmed, sprouted, and attend almost-daily ooh-aahh tours, to admire each others' progress on the things we're discovering that we love to do. Mixed in there is planning a flower farm, writing a book, renovating a neighbor's house, harvesting farm produce, creating a temple, clearing an acre or so of blackberry bramble, uncovering a chicken coop, which is now our bike shed, and a chicken yard, which is now our firewood storage, and a huge hole in the ground, which would make a fabulous duck pond.

We are dreaming and doing and enjoying and being. And we are not alone.

There has been an impressive array of shelter-in-place projects that have flowed across our screens, entertaining and inspiring our fellow humans around the globe.

Juilliard students and alumni put together a stirring rendition of Bolero.

John Krisinkski, AKA Jack Ryan, reports on Some Good News every week.

Hallelujah brings a congregation closer, at a distance.

You can find makeup advise, from England.

Time travel.

Ski adventures on the floor.

An operatic family.

Animals at home in thick, urban jungles.

And balloon dogs.

Hundreds and hundreds more all speak to the fact that we are an amazing species, that we can get through anything, and that the planet will heal itself, whenever we're able to let it.

And because today is today, may the fourth be with you.

Finishing Touches

Years ago, Dambara and I spent 4 weeks in India, on a pilgrimage led by Asha Nayaswami, David Praver, and Durga and Vidura Smallen. About 35 pilgrims traveled around northern India, visiting places mentioned in the Autobiography of a Yogi, central to our spiritual path. We stayed in very nice hotels because it helped all of us recharge at the end of each day to come back to comfortable rooms, fabulous food, and hot showers.

Many of the hotels were luxurious; some were modest. All of them had one common aspect: neglected edges.

One hotel in particular stands out in my memory. We stayed in Badrinath, at the very northern tip of India, a stone's throw from Tibet, for two nights. It was a bone-rattling journey to and from, in jeeps that clattered along a breath-depriving, narrow, dirt road that was vaguely scratched out along the treacherous steepness of the Himalayan mountain sides. We arrived, drained from hours of terror, and checked into our rooms.

The hotel was very high end, with en suite rooms, tall windows, expansive dining room, and beautiful, marble slabs lining all of the walls, everywhere. But the hotel felt neglected to me, unfinished, untidy. It took me a while to realize that it was because all of the edges were unfinished.

Along the hallways, banquet rooms, dining hall, the beautiful marble flowed down the walls to meet the beautiful marble of the expansive floors. The jagged edges of the walls met the jagged edges of the floors, and those jagged junctions were dusted with bits of rubble, grit, and dust. It felt as though the hotel was still under construction, but it had been in operation for two years. It was finished.

Spring blooms, check!

Years earlier, traveling with a friend through Greece, again and again we had to pick our way past rubble scraped up against the side of enormous buildings; banks, office buildings, apartment buildings. Again, it felt like a construction zone, and yet on closer examination, it was obvious that the rubble had lain there for months, perhaps years. The ornate buildings were opulent, gorgeous feats of architecture, with high-end businesses and residences, but the attention to detail ended before it considered the unfinished edges. There they persisted, neglected and ignored.

Baseboards, check!

Edges are an important part of finishing touches. The renovation at Haven West doesn't feel complete until the edges are complete. The beauty and magnetism of the rooms blossom into being with the finishing touches that occur to one or the other of us.

Toast and bread counter, check!

And as the work spaces become more useful, we come across things in drawers or out of boxes that would make that spot prettier or easier to use. It's a work in progress, a creative process.

Outlet plates, check!

 We continue to surprise each other with creativity and thoughtfulness. Form and function cooperate to transform every corner of the house into spaces that we enjoy using, spending time in, sharing friendship and laughter.

It is a wonderful world.

Spice shelves, check!

Nested Horizons

An artist in Aptos, CA, fills her studio with fabric art. She took her love of fabric and her husband's love of flying small planes and created a plethora of landscapes created with softly colored fabric, layered to portray the view from a small plane. Small planes fly at a lower altitude, so you see more details of the landscape below you. Lower altitudes also are rich in the phenomenon of nested horizons, the vista of a series of receding mountain ridges, colorful and detailed in the foreground, dimming in color and detail as they fade into the distance.

I fell in love with nested horizons in her Aptos studio and experienced them myself when I flew small planes, decades ago. You can also see them driving through the Central Valley of California and from many vista points along highways and hiking trails. Nested horizons speak to the soul of soaring like a bird, freely floating across the landscape, an immersion into something far larger than yourself. Nested horizons can evoke a spiritual experience that soothes your soul and expands your consciousness.

I dabbled with nested horizons a bit when I was doing a lot of watercolor. But I was never transported by the landscapes I was able to create with my limited knowledge and experience with watercolor. The paint dried too fast. The detail was hard to capture. The crispness of the ridge lines was hard to maintain with successive layers of paint. It became tedious rather than transformative.

As it turns out, all that needed to happen was a change in medium. As it turns out, wall paint works wonderfully well.

Nested horizons

In the kitchen at Haven West, we keep our small appliances on a butcher block table, all of them set up and ready to use. The wall behind the butcher block is quite high, perhaps 11 feet. It's a big, blank expanse of wall, or a big, blank canvas, depending on how you look at it. It was waiting for something of interest to display. I was looking for something creative to lift my spirits.

Enter nested horizons.

We had plenty of paint left over from our kitchen-cabinet project, plus some tan and blue left from painting the bathroom. All of the colors were enamel, so they had a soft sheen to them, setting them apart from the flat peach of the kitchen wall.

The colors went up in order of increasing vibrancy, enhancing the visual of receding into the background. The household voted for jagged ridge lines, since the Cascade and Olympic ranges visible from Camano Island are dramatically jagged. It was easy to sketch out and easy to paint, because I could concentrate on the crisp edges without worrying about the paint drying before I could fill in the middle.

Even though it cost me a week in bed with muscle spasms from my craning neck, I would do it again in a heartbeat. It was so much fun and turned out so pretty.

Second coat for the tangerine range

Everyone in the household helped out. Dambara installed the remaining shelves for the wall. Celeste Sophia pulled three, unused cable boxes out from the wall. Vihaan installed baseboards and patched and painted the empty cable-box holes. Celeste Sophia added under-the-shelf lighting and a painted edging for the shelf, shielding our eyes from the lighting and helping the shelf to blend into the nested horizons. She also painted the cord for the lighting and the brackets for the shelf, helping them blend into the background, too. Celeste Sophia and Vihaan tackled the dangling electrical cords from all of the appliances and brought them into coherency and invisibility.  As a final touch, Dambara added Waldo.

We all oohed and awed as the various elements fell into place.

And now we have a beautiful work station for juicing and mixing and baking and chopping. A perfect project for a drizzly week.

Find Waldo

Napkin Cubby

Years ago, decades actually, I visited Paris with a friend, and we ended up having lunch in an antiquated restaurant across from the Sorbonne. A curved countertop in the corner served as wine bar and cashier station. Along the entire arc of the curve, from elbow to floor, ran stacked rows of small doors, each door perhaps 3 inches wide and 6 inches tall, with a petite knob allowing one to open each door. I asked the proprietor about the story of the doors, and she explained that they were napkin cubbies.

A couple of hundred years ago, when the restaurant was a hub for the scholastic neighborhood, regular patrons would supply their own cloth napkins. Between meals, the patron would stash his or her napkin in the assigned napkin cubby, a nicety of the modest dining establishment that allowed a flair of sophistication for the meal. The stacked rows of cubbies provided convenient storage, and the little doors, and the camaraderie of the clientele, provided assurance that your napkin would be waiting for you at the next meal.

I was enchanted. So, of course, Haven West has its own napkin cubby.

Napkin cubby

It's a cute little thing, and it has its own story. But before I tell you that story, perhaps I should explain my preoccupation with cloth napkins.

When I was in high school, way back in the 70s, our principal hired a new history teacher who also taught ecology. No one had heard the term before, but here he was, and he managed to teach all of us the concept of the environment and our role in it. Our senior class project was to plant trees. We knocked on doors throughout the neighborhoods belonging to our high school and asked the homeowners if they would like to have a new tree planted in their parking strip, free of charge.

The city provided the trees and sent a tree-hole digger to all of the addresses where people had said, "Yes, please!" For a few Saturdays in the early spring, me and my classmates roamed the streets and planted the waiting trees into their waiting holes. Mr. Hicks single-handedly launched the environmental movement in the former-orchard city of San Jose, CA.

Needless to say, the concept of ecology and environment made a huge impression on me. And so, when I moved into my first apartment the day after high school graduation, one of the first things I did was to make cloth napkins. I had just helped plant 500 trees. Now my job was to reduce the number of trees that were being cut down to make paper. Cloth napkins helped me do that.

Napkins in Waiting

Fast forward fifty years; I'm still making cloth napkins, and I've persuaded the Haven West household to use them. Our visitors use them, too.

But if you have to wash, dry, fold, and replenish all the napkins after every meal, it becomes tedious, people lose interest, and paper napkins start to creep into daily routines.

Enter the memory of the antiquated, Parisian restaurant with its stacked rows of napkin cubbies. We needed napkin cubbies.

Enter the furniture sale at Living Wisdom School. When first I saw the mailboxes needing a new home, mailboxes that most likely used to live in the school office, I thought it might be useful to stash things for people living in our house as well as houses on the rest of the farm. Forgotten sunglasses and clippers could find safe, temporary lodging in this stack of convenient mailboxes. So Dambara and I brought it home.

Drab, brown, plywood mailboxes

It happened to be the drab brown that old wooden furniture tends to attain, without the beauty of fine wood shining through. It was drab, brown plywood. But! we had paint.

Primed cubbies and hand, as it turned out

Cheerful, leftover paint

There are a lot of cubbies in the mailbox, and as I primed and painted, that memory of the Parisian restaurant kept trickling into my thoughts. I wondered if this could be a napkin cubby for our household. Would everyone roll their eyes or be enchanted?

Enchanted.

So, we have a napkin cubby, with pretty cloth napkins, and everyone enjoys this tiny notch in the crusade to save trees.

Mr. Hicks would be so proud.

Enchanting napkin cubby

Time for Color

Back in the beginning of March, before the world changed, our friend Tom came up to visit, bringing along with him his expertise as a professional house painter. He had agreed to help us paint our kitchen cabinets.

The cabinets were actually in great shape, the one, undamaged feature of the house when we bought it last summer, as is. But they were brown. After decades of bland walls and drab kitchens in house after house after house, it was time for color.

Brown and Drab

We painted the walls last summer, a delicate peachy blush, and the open pantry took on a rich coral, a slice of watermelon in the corner of our kitchen. We had always planned to paint the cabinets; now was the time.

So, Tom arrived on a Sunday afternoon, fresh from his train ride up from Portland, and we strategized a plan, rolled up our sleeves, and started prepping.

Prep, prep, prep

We decided to take off all of the cabinet doors, remove all the hardware, prep all the surfaces, and have everything ready to go, for an early start, first thing Monday morning. The kitchen is quite large, and after setting up a long, folding table, we had enough room to lay out all of the cabinet doors, arranged by their finish color.



Because, it's time for color, and we householders had picked out three, vibrant colors, colors that shocked the Ace Hardware staff, colors that jumped out at us, colors that all of us fell in love with.

We all had a vote, and we came to unanimous decisions for each block of cabinetry. We had paint, brushes, drop cloths, stir sticks, rags, high spirits at the ready, and Tom as our ringleader. Nothing could stop us.

Except, of course, the wallpaper in the half bath that decided to succumb to gravity and stealthily peeled itself off the wall during the dark silence of night. It was that new-fangled, self-adhesive, vinyl stuff that seems to be all the rage nowadays. The trend has shifted toward wallpaper that is easy to get off the wall, and sure enough, the compromise is that it's reluctant to stay on the wall.

So Dambara and I spent a half hour or so unraveling the wadded wallpaper, since it exuberantly sticks to itself, then finessing it back up onto its assigned wall space. Stay.

Meanwhile, Tom's clicking tongue got us scurrying onto our real project for the day, priming the cabinets and doors.

Easy peasy.

Actually, it was wonderfully easy.

Except the primer insisted it needed 24 hours to dry. Two sides to each door; 24 plus 24 added up to too many days, since Tom was heading home on Thursday morning. We only had 3 days. So, we flipped the doors at the end of the day and primed the underside of all the doors, giving both sides overnight to dry.

The priming turned out great.

We had three separate colors for the cabinets. A minty green for the upper cabinets, a bright cantaloupe for the island, and a rich tangerine for the lower cabinets. We set to work, painting the first side of every door, then while that coat dried, painting the cabinets themselves, the kick plates, and the island. At the end of the day, we flipped the doors, put a first coat on the second side of each door, cleaned up our brushes, and called it a day.

Manisha, the helper

Tom, the craftsman

Dambara, the apprentice

It took two coats for the green and tangerine cabinets; four coats for the bright cantaloupe. Who would have thought? Those three days were long days. The camaraderie was cheerful and fun. The colors were amazing. The transformation was. . . awesome.

We all loved it.

Time for color

Bright cantaloupe of the island

Tom packed up his slippers and his paintbrush, waved goodbye from his window seat on the train back to Portland, and had a restful trip home. He left behind happy friends and a world filled with color.

After two months of living in our bright, cheerful kitchen, we can all say, "Thank you, Tom! This is the most beautiful kitchen, ever!"

1, 2, 3

A newly functional room

We've reached the stage in our home renovation where the giant projects are pretty much done, and we're finally able to finish up some minor projects. My brother, Jim, drove up from the Bay Area two weeks ago and helped us install some shelving and the utility sink in the laundry room. That room has transitioned from big-box storage-cave with a narrow passageway wending through, and is now a fully functional laundry room.

Even the towel rack is up.

While Jim and Dambara navigated the shelving and utility sink, I painted and wallpapered the half-bath off the laundry room. After Vihaan put down baseboards, Jim and Dambara installed the vanity, sink, and mirror. That room, too, has transformed, from a gritty-floored narrow-cave to a delightful little powder room.

The best thing about the ongoing nature of home renovation is that we've been forced to live in grimy, icky spaces, and in the case of this house, dog-gnawed door frames and clawed up doors. Each transformative project carries with it immense improvements that we delight in again and again, every time we walk into a room, or turn on a light that didn't exist for months, or a newly useful sink for washing hands or cleaning paint brushes and muddy shoes.

No lights becoming 1, 2, 3 lights.

Speaking of lights that didn't exist, the dining area in our enormous kitchen had no lighting whatsoever. Months ago, we found some pendant lights that we both really liked, so we had them shipped to us, carted them down to Hippo Hardware in Portland for retrofitting from a dangling-chain mounting to a brushed-nickel pipe-mounting, and then they went dormant, languishing on the top of the kitchen cabinets, out of harm's way.

1, 2, 3 oyster-shelled dandelion-heads

Yesterday, Dambara reconfigured his tool belt and started the electrical project of bringing power up from a mystery light switch next to the doorway to span the length of the dining area, and today he anchored, wired, and hung the fixtures. After a quick trip to the hardware store for a dimmer switch, he finished off the last touches, and now we have light over our dining table.

1, 2, 3 lights, all in a row, aglow.

Up next week, Tom and cabinet painting! Our days will be full. Once the kitchen cabinets are painted and the open shelving back in place, we'll be able to step out into spring and focus on the gardens and the farm.

Stay tuned. . .

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