Heath Schoolhouse Museum

I live in a ruraltown of 750 souls in the western corner of Massachusetts that sits on the Vermont border. On the Fourth of July in 1981 I happened to meet two other friends at the spinning wheel in the town museum. We were celebrating the holiday, but got to complaining that we never went out to dinner, we  couldn’t afford to, and besides there were no good restaurants closer than 40 miles. Actually there were no restaurants  at all closer than 25 miles. So, on the spot, we invented the Heath Gourmet Club that has been meeting ten times a year ever since, beginning that September. We don’t meet in August because we are all too busy with the Heath Fair, and we collapse the November/December dinners into one.

Gourmet Club Anniversary

Here we are celebrating again. Each month the host picks a theme and lets the other four couples know the entree. Then, Sheila, our record keeper, assigns us each a course, appetizers, bread and soup, side, salad, and dessert, or whatever combination suits the meal. Hosting and courses rotate so we all get a chance to do everything.  This keeps down the individual labor and cost for each meal, some of which have been really spectacular. Salmon Coulibiac, Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourginnone, Mock Turtle Soup (made with muskrat), Peking Duck, and many many more. Spanish, Italian, British, African, Japanese, Indonesian and more, especially French. I love French. Sometimes we have Guest Eaters who feel themselves really lucky to be invited.

Obviously we all love to cook and try new things, but we also like to use local produce. Long before we heard of the 100 mile diet we raised our own pork and chickens and eggs, bought good Heath blueberries, apples and milk. We gardened and grew and put up our own vegetables.

Minestrone

We don’t think every meal has to be fancy, but anything made with good healthy ingredients is a pleasure and delight.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm

We have all been able to buy fresh produce at local farms and orchards, but over the past years the number of small farms has increased selling their produce at farmstands and through this new thing called a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture which allows all of us to share in the risk of farming, the unpredictability of weather and pestilence, and farmer’s markets. This increase in the production of local food is good for the farmers, good for the environments, good for the community and good for us of us eaters.

Seeds of Solidarity Farm is a working farm, specializing in greens and garlic, but Ricky also teaches garden workshops and his wife Deb works to create school gardens, and get fresh produce into institutions like schools and hospitals.

Garlic and Arts Festival - The Festival that Stinks

Along with neighbors, Deb and Ricky founded the Garlic and Arts Festival that takes place the first weekend in October. This is a solar powered, grease mobile run, festival. Who cares if it stinks? After the 10,000 people leave and the field is cleaned up, there is only three bags of trash to dispose of. Everything else is composted or recycled. They have proved that we can live more lightly on the land that we usually do. Then they sell some of the compost at the next Festival.

Organizations like CISA have grown up to help farmers be better businessmen and involve all of us in supporting local agriculture.

Annual Harvest Meal in Greenfield, MA

Every year our larger community celebrates the bounty of our area with a giant FREE Harvest Meal. Farmers donate the produce, restauranteurs donate their labor, musicians come and play and we all celebrate. You can make a donation of course, and that money goes to fund vouchers that are given out at the food pantry, to be used at the farmers market. Everyone deserves fresh healthy food. This year 800 people gathered for this feast, some making generous contributions, and others enjoying the meal freely. $4000 was collected for food vouchers.

And everyone deserves to grow their own healthy food. Just Roots is the new Community Farm that has been form on the site of the Greenfield Poor Farm. This is a wonderful opportunity for many people who don’t own land and who like working with others – who can be a real help with advice.

We are fortunate in our area to have Greenfield Community College which is offering a new course this fall on food systems. It is oversubscribed! Read about that here. It is a joy to see the support given to potential farmers.

We wish our good food fortune to everyone. Bon appetit!

For more about Blog Action Day click here.

Our Frog Pond

Water is beautiful. Our Frog Pond is beautiful. We can’t drink this water, but in July of 1990 it helped keep our house from burning down. The previous owners of our house used Conservation funds to enlarge the pond enough to qualify as a Fire Pond. We are so glad they did. Mostly, though we just use it for fun, swimming, catching (and releasing) newts, and ice skating in the winter.

Water is essential. Out here in the  country most of us depend on wells for our water. Some of us have a gravity feed spring.  This year I nearly ran our drilled well dry. No more watering the garden. I have never watered a lawn. We have become even more careful of our water.

Many people are now aware of how they use water, for economic reasons as well as for environmental reasons. We don’t water our lawns. We have low flow shower heads. We have low flow toilets. I admit that ever since my friend Kari Huus Kaill ranted about people who leave the faucet on when they brush their teeth, I always turn the faucet off. Mostly. Many gardeners are now building rain gardens to keep rain water on  site, and to prevent dirty water from overwhelming storm sewers and polluting our streams and other waterways.

But huge amounts of water are wasted, and cause serious environmental problems in ways we never imagined. I first became aware of the lakes of manure slurry in 1991 when I read A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.  I was horrified but even then did not realize the full implications of this type of farming.

I just finished reading Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind by Gene Logsdon.  Logsdon has many concerns in this book, from the decline in soil fertility because manure is wasted, to how much money is spent to handle animal and human manure, and how animal and human health is affected by the way manure is handled.  There is a push to get humans to use low flow toilets, but before this book I never heard anyone talk about the amount of water wasted when a barn floor is turned into a flush  toilet. Logsdon, who has visited large farms, described how dairy barns are hosed  out twice a day with hundreds of gallons of water, flushing all the manure into a slurry lagoon. The manure loses up to 70% of its fertilizer value,  and when sprayed on the fields it does not help maintain the loamy structure of fertile soil the way composted manure does.

The United States is known for producing state of the art systems, but there is a price when these are copied in very different parts of the world.  Logsdon talks about farms in Saudi Arabia being patterned on California farms.  A desert country? No problem. They dig a mile deep well.  The well does dry. No problem. They dig a two mile deep well. Saudi Arabia is a rich country, but is this the way to build a sustainable agriculture?

We cannot live without water, to drink, to water food crops, and for cleanliness and health. We need to consider well how we get, use and protect our water supply. For more about water logon to Blog Action Day 2010.

Whittemore Spring - a Heath Emergency Water Supply

Our Frog Pond

Our Frog Pond is beautiful. And useful. When our dilapidated barn was struck by lightning in the middle of the night, July 5, 1990, the volunteer fire department was able to pump water to help put out the fire. In fact, the previous owners had enlarged the pond which is stream and spring fed to make it a fire pond. The frogs like it, and so do the grandchildren. So do we. It’s good for swimming and catching newts. Catch and release, of course. We never manage to catch frogs.

Dug Well

We actually have a lot of water on our hill. Some of it we located the day after we moved in right after Thanksgiving 1979. The minute we arrived in Massachusetts from NYC, the temperature plummeted. The pipes in our new old farmhouse froze. We had no water. Our three daughters who were still living at home were not best pleased. The first thing Henry had to do when we woke up was go out and locate the dug well we had been told was in back of the house. It had been covered over and looked like wintry lawn. Henry dug, found it and uncovered it. We admired the well, a miracle of engineering and labor thirty feet deep with beautiful fieldstone walls. We hauled water by hand for several days until we thawed the pipes and got the drilled well in operation. A few years ago we put a concrete tile and cover to top the dug well, making access easier when we used it for irrigation by letting out sump pump down into the well. We never wanted to use water from the drilled well for irrigation. There are enough people in Heath who have had their wells go dry that we are aware of the dangers.

Pasture well

There is also a dug well out in the pasture, about 100 yards from the house. There was a gravity feed pipe that carried water from the well to the house, but it was separate from water from the drilled well that was the main water supply that we continue to use. We used that water for irrigation until it started smelling really really bad.  Henry girded his loins, took a ladder and climbed down the 15 food deep well – and brought up a couple of dead skunks  that managed to get in even though a large stone covered the well. Henry disconnected the line to the house, and we buried the skunks under the Applejack rose. Applejack thrives.

Lawn Bed Well

Ten years ago we created the two Lawn Beds and had our five toddler and infant grandsons plant gingko trees. Those boys are now 13 and 11 years old; the beds have been filled in with shrubs and perennials. One day, about four years ago Henry was helping me dig so I could put in an Alma Potschke aster. He hit a rock. He was always hitting a rock, but this rock slipped and skittered – and went SPLASH!  Upon closer inspection Henry saw that a large flat stone covered another well!  This one was smaller in diameter and only about 10 feet deep.  Again, it was lined with stone. We wondered if it was the first well, dug when the original house was built in the middle of the 19th century. I had great plans for turning it into a fountain, but it only collects ground water and the level varies radically over the course of the year. 

Drilled well

Last year when we had the drilled well in back of the house repaired and added an above ground wellhead to bring it up to code and make it legal, we took the circular cement block that had covered it (and then been covered with sod) and used that to  cover the Lawn Bed Well, that had been much more informally covered. The wellhead is not a thing of beauty, but we haven’t come up with a disguise yet. I do remember my friend Cindy Fisher of Big Bang Mosaics who built a beautiful mosaic bird bath to cover her wellhead.  Hmmmmm.

I have a lot of water on my hill. I am aware of how blessed we are, because wells do run dry, even here in Heath. Even here in Heath we sometimes have to haul water by hand. Even so, we don’t have to carry it far, or we can carry it by car from Whittemore Spring, every Heathan’s emergency water supply.

Snapshot of a Kenya snapshot

I can’t help remembering  when we visited our Peace Corps daughter Betsy on her Kenyan hill town where the women had to carry water from a spring a mile away. One of Betsy’s jobs was to repair a water storage tank at an old British colonial farm house for the villagers to use. She also supervised the laying of a gravity feed line from a spring to a new large water storage tank that she and villagers  built. We were fortunate enough to be visiting in July of 1989 when water was finally available from that tank. Great Celebration! Both tanks brought clean water much closer to the village.

 When we lived in Beijing, the capital city of China, we knew that many families had to share a single tap. The old houses had no running water. Which means no bathrooms. Which means chamber pots or a trip to the public bathroom on the corner. And this was in a modern city in 1989. We have seen how much more work it takes to get enough water for household use in the third world, but where you can at least have your own choo (outhouse).

We have hauled water ourselves, but worse than having to go to a lot of trouble to have water, is living where water is so scarce that the crops have dried up, where the desert has moved in, where people have had to leave their land and where water has to be trucked in their temporary camps.

The talk is all about Global Warming or Climate Change, but I think a more accurate description of what is happening is Climate Disruption.  There are more storms and destructive floods in some places. Too much water. And there are more long droughts in other places. Too little water. Here in Heath we talk about Climate Disruption causing a July with 23 days of heavy rains, breaking weather records, and a very dry September. Local farmers as well as local gardeners suffer. We feel the necessity of slowing and stopping the production of greenhouse gases that cause this problem. We hope our efforts, and efforts around the world, will not be too late.

To see what other over 8000 bloggers around the world have to say about Climate Change logon to the BLOG ACTION DAY site and take your pick. Three of the postings I’ve found valuable are Girl With Pen, Water Is Life and Lil Fish Studios News.

Unfortunately, it is also not obvious to the public that there are many people in our communities who do not share in this abundance. We can see it if we visit local food pantries and soup kitchens. I’ve talked to our local Salvation Army program, the Center for Self Reliance and the Survival Center. All of them report that many new families are signing up for the food pantry, people who never imagined their life would reach this point. The Salvation Army says they have very limited budget for fresh produce, yet they routinely have more than 100 people show up for lunch, often working people who get their lunch there so they will have more money to feed their children supper. And they have to hurry and eat to get back to work at a low paying job.

I am a member of the Garden Writers of America. A number of years ago this organization started the Plant a Row for the Hungry project. Recognizing the importance of food banks and food pantries, and also recognizing the large number of gardeners in our country, they encouraged people to plant and dedicate a row of garden produce to the hungry. The latest statistics on the GWA website show that over 27,000 volunteers have donated 10 million TONS of produce to hunger organizations.

Whether or not we hook up with a Plant a Row group, all of us could dedicate a row of our garden to a local food organization. No donation is too small. I have been assured that no head of broccoli or single squash will be turned away. There is no reason to let our excess harvest go to waste when there are hungry people in our community.

The harvest is pretty well done for the year in our area, but we can plan for next year. In the meantime, maybe we can drop off a bag of potatoes or local apples that we have purchased.

To find out what other bloggers have to say about Poverty and what we might be able to do, go to Blog Action Day.org.