Spring Equinox and Lambing Season

What we are excited about today~~~~

• The cutest set of twin lambs born yesterday morning

• Emma's first ever school dance tonight (complete with a new outfit)

• A Momma's night out for the Opening Night of our dear friend Nicole Chiason's play The Passion of the HausFrau showing through April 11th at the Portland Stage Company

• SPRING

Worm Moon (by Mary Oliver)

1

In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

2

The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

3

because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping --
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

4

Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

5

Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

6

and probably
everything
is possible.

Tea Time in Mud Season

Tea time has always been a ritual here at the farm. Actually, to be specific, the cycle goes like this: Breakfast, tensies, lunch, tea time, cocktails (if we have any wine or beer) and then dinner. We are a bunch of grazers and LOVE to eat. I also think the crew does better with regular doses of blood sugar (and caffeine). Tea time originated with my mom and me when I was little, as an occasion to use my Nana's china tea cups and silver tea pot and sit in the living room. It has morphed with my own family into the opportunity to eat as much sweet stuff as you can handle between 3 and 4PM. The idea behind tea time is that it prevents frequent requests for sweets all day from the kids, piling it all into a one hour block. There is a finite amount of sweets that one can eat during this hour, creating a natural limit. The results are marvelous....I get my afternoon coffee, the kids get a dose of sugar and everyone is fueled to make it through milking and the dinner preparations. In a perfect world, this prevents whining for cookies, candy and other sweets during the day. Emma used to plan her tea time snack out hours in advance. Now, she is our resident preparer of tea time, serving us with fresh baked blueberry muffins and tea with milk in the greenhouse.

Mud season is here, on our boots, our floors, our hands and for the smaller set, usually covering the pants. We are spending our days in the greenhouse, seeding up trays of flowers and onions and finishing the building of the Rocket Stove. Today was the first day of "real" work for the season with our first employee, Connor, joining us. We are thankful to have his help.

The Portland Flower Show was inspiring and delivered us home with armloads of flowers and plants purchased at the Cumberland County Cooperative Extensions Master Gardener Auction. They were auctioning all the plants from the show displays at the end of the day on Sunday. Everyone now has flowers in their room...ahhh, it does feel like spring is near.

Daylight Savings for the Dairy Cow

Unlike the rest of the working world which is trying to catch up on that lost hour, Spring daylight savings allows us to "sleep late" since Brown Sugar, our dairy cow, is more tuned to the sunrise than to the clock. Of course I guess the rest of the working world slept late anyway since it was a Sunday...

Everyone knows that most opposition to Daylight Savings comes from farmers-- dairy farmers to be precise. I am not so passionate about it. If nothing else it just makes me glad about our chosen lifestyle.

On another time scale, it is the time of year that ladybugs, having hidden in the corners of the house over winter are beginning to emerge. The warmer days have warmed the house giving them a head start, but it is still too cold for them to go outside. We are happy to share our rosemary plant with them.

It is far too chilly to set plants outside, or even in our greenhouse. But this is the time of year when we do germination tests. We actually don't do a whole lot of testing on our seeds, maybe its more like stretching our wings on germinating and growing seedlings. A reminder that yes, the miracle still works! Here is our window-sill corn and sister-bean sprouting.

As we go to bed on the eve of another snowfall, we say thanks to the warmth that brought us a long bike ride, a trip to the beach and a momentary reminder of the coming of Spring.

Blessings on the meal-
John and Stacy

Plight of the Winter Mailbox

The most recent dump of snow lulls us into thinking we have plenty of time before spring. The reality is that we have onions, foxgloves and delphiniums germinating by the woodstove and a half built rocket stove in the greenhouse.

The most interesting adornment to all the snow still remains the fresh load of mailbox damage, for which we now have great empathy, making regular repairs to our own box with each passing storm.