New Tractor in the Woods

Today the implement company delivered our new to us 2004 New Holland tractor - we will try it out for a few days and make sure it will do the tasks we need it to do. Darling hubby is so excited, he is going to take tomorrow off so he can get some things done. :-) The old Oliver was just getting too fragile, and whatever is the matter with it now seemed like it was going to require a major overhaul, so we are experimenting with moving the farm into the 21st century.... Having a tractor payment makes it even more important to make the farm self-supporting and sustainable. One possibility is growing more fruit - the blueberries and raspberry crops this year have been great, due to the lack of a hard late frost and all the moisture. The apple trees are doing well too. I've been looking at various schemes for intensive fruit management but if it worked so well, how come more people don't do it?

Wholeness Unfolding in the World

Here's an except from an interview the mystic architect, Christopher Alexander, did with Tricycle Magazine a while ago.... "In the grass there were a very small number of flowers, rather sparse. I think there was one blue flower and a few white flowers, but mainly it was grass. I was lying there looking at this, and the perfection of it gradually began to impress itself on me. There was a faint sense of light in each of the bits of grass. It wasn’t a revelation in any literal sense, and yet as I was looking through these grass stems, myself almost part of the grass, suddenly the thought came to me, So this is what you’re trying to do! What the grass does: it is effortlessly creating a beautiful and complex environment. And it isn’t just capable of it, but it is doing it, everywhere, and every day, and so easily. I was comforted, because the grass found it so easy. So there’s nothing for me to worry about at all. Even if I fail in my lifetime, it is so obvious. Surely people will understand it sooner or later. Alexander's 15 Universal Design Properties 01 Levels of Scale (a range of sizes) 02 Strong Centers 03 Boundaries 04 Alternating Repetition 05 Positive Space (no leftover bits) 06 Good Shape (e.g., well-proportioned fans, circles, squares) 07 Local Symmetries 08 Deep Interlock and Ambiguity 09 Contrast 10 Gradients (gradual changes in size, fine lines) 11 Roughness 12 Echoes 13 The Void 14 Simplicity and Inner Calm 15 Non-Separateness" Great stuff!

August in the Woods...

Wow, I can't believe it is so long since I have been here. The summer has been really busy. We went to Wyoming for 10 days in May. In June I taught some week long art classes to kids, which I hadn't done before, so this required some preparations ahead of time and evaluation afterwards. Then there was an intense summer retreat two weeks ago. Now I feel like I need to get very organized and catch up on all the things there are to do around the place. It is a little overwhelming, actually. On my way back from turning the ponies (who are bored and need to be worked) out this morning I checked the vineyard for grapes.

The previous owner planted a few grapes in a poor location, lower on a little slope, with lots of trees around so the air is pretty still and the vines only get sun for 7 or 8 hours. The vines were overgrown, with lots of oak saplings coming up in the row, and weeds, and part of the supports were broken so the vines hung on the ground. In February, I pruned back the vines unmercifully, and have whacked back the little saplings and weeds a couple times since the growing season started. Now, it looks like my efforts have paid off to some extent. In previous years, the little grapes all got some sort of fungus - they started to form up, and then turned brown and looked like little raisins without ever make grapes. Today I see the vines now have many clusters of nice fat grapes, and many of the clusters show no sign of disease! They are hard and green and the size of small marbles - hopefully they will be able to ripen so we can eat them. I don't know what sort of grapes they are. But it is exciting to see. Now I will do some in house chores - folding laundry, and then go out and weed the garden some. I love summer.