A large part of farming is pattern recognition, using the five senses. As you first pry open one bleary eye, usually well before dawn, you listen for rain on the roof. You scan the sky for stars from the bedroom window. The scent of wood smoke tells you about wind direction.
The first gulp of air when you head out the door both tastes and smells of the weather. The plan for the day is decided, even before the day arrives. Do you set up waterlines in the high hoops, repot seedlings, or bang about in the machine shop? Or can you spread manure? Cultivate that low field? Walk fence to make sure the critters will stay where you put them?
Once chores are done and the sun is up, you implement Plan A or Plan B. If you start out indoors, you make a lot of banging as a carpenter, a mechanic, a painter, an inventor of tools for the job, all in the name of readiness once released to the out of doors. If you can work a field, you listen to rocks banging against an implement. The noise seems a lot more than necessary for a field that has been in cultivation for years … a fine crop of stones every spring, a project as endless as housework. You wait for the earth to send you its message. Has the ground cover you plowed under done its job? What do the weeds tell you about the pH of the soil? Soil temperature … is it still too early to plant?
To the uninitiated, farming may seem “too hard,” an endless series of thankless chores seven days a week, 365 days a year. It might look like a rut. But to a farmer, the work feels familiar, stable patterns within patterns, soft and comfortable as a favorite flannel shirt. The rewards are subtle and the finances can be tricky sometimes, but farming fits a farmer and vice versa. Come and visit a local farmer (or two or three) at the Presque Isle Farmers’ Market any Saturday morning in the Aroostook Centre Mall parking lot. Ask him or her about the products for sale or about the hands and land that produced them. It is a story well worth listening to.
The Presque Isle Farmers’ Market contact person Gail Maynard, who operates Orchard Hill Farm in Woodland with her husband, Stan. Their phone number is 498-8541 and their email is orchhill@gmail.com.
