The Great Chicken Dump

The joys of small town life, and my favorite HCN blog to date:

The news infiltrated the High Country News mothership like a cute animal video (which editors Sarah Gilman and Betsy Marston are particularly fond of) and spread through the North Fork Valley faster than a stomach flu. Soon, from the barstools of Revolution Brewing to the ratty couches of the HCN intern house, the Great Chicken Dump was all anyone in town could talk about. More than 100 hens had been found clucking and wandering around a dusty mesa above town, and no one knew quite how they had gotten there.

Not since the infamous 2012 confrontation between the billionaire (Bill Koch) and the hairdresser ("Tiananmen Sid") have the North Fork’s collective feathers been so ruffled.

“THESE CHICKENS WERE CLUELESS HOW TO SURVIVE ON THEIR OWN,” wrote one woman (determined to express herself in capital letters) on Paonia’s unofficial Facebook page, where there are over 300 poultry-related comments and counting. “THE FEW THAT KNEW TO GET INTO THE BRUSH AND NOT STAY IN THE OPEN DIDN'T KNOW TO EAT A RIPE SERVICE BERRY IN FRONT OF THEIR NOSES.” And so a herd of Paonians headed up to the mesa to take matters into their own hands, rounding up the hens and searching in the chicken scratch for clues. For breathless hours, the chicken dumper remained at large....

https://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/paonias-great-chicken-dump-raises-the-question-what-to-do-with-all-those-birds

The case for milkmen

1. The economy is still sluggish, and people need jobs.
2. People aren't eating so healthy these days, and fresh local milk is a good for you.
3. Raw milk products are experiencing a surge in popularity.
4. Locally grown and produced goods are huge.
5. Everything vintage is hip again. Hipsters would love a bottle of milk delivered to their door by a guy on a bicycle. So would most everyone else.
6. Glass bottles aren't just recyclable, they're reusable, which is even more environmentally friendly.
7. People have less time, and are willing to pay for the convenience of delivery.
8. Small dairy farms are going under.
9. Small dairy farms are key to working landscapes and vibrant communities.
10. Having fresh local milk show up on your doorstep is awesome!

When I was 24, I lived in an old schoolhouse on a mountaintop in Vermont. It was the most idyllic place I've ever lived – and I've lived in a lot of places. The 350-acre patchwork of fields and forest was scattered with cabins and outbuildings, and each was rented out by some unique, hardy soul. Ann baked bread and kept chickens. Oliver worked at a cheese farm. Brigham kept bees, Brooke blew glass, Grace had a huge garden, Andy fixed things, Laura made pottery and John hayed and split wood. And then there was Lucy – Lucy worked at an organic dairy farm, waking up at 5 a.m. each morning to milk cows in all kinds of weather. She came home smelling like cows, her Carhartts filthy, fingertips raw, cheeks ruddy. She was a Smith College graduate who was well-read and super smart, but while her job was grueling, something about it satisfied her soul.

Living at the old schoolhouse I benefited from the labors of all my neighbors. Honey, eggs and bread made their way to my door regularly. But the thing I enjoyed most was the fresh raw milk that Lucy brought home in glass jugs.

Later, after several years away, I moved back to Vermont and lived in a huge house in a rough-ish neighborhood in an old industrial town. It was not the bucolic, pastoral Vermont I remembered, but I grew to love it there too. One of my housemates, Karen, worked part time at a dairy farm and, once again, I found myself privy to the wonderful secret of milk delivered right to your kitchen. Every Monday, Karen would bring home a gallon jar of raw milk and leave it in the refrigerator for everyone to share. And again, I had fresh bread delivered to my kitchen as well. On Sundays, our neighbor Birdie would bake loaves of sweet white bread and leave a steaming loaf on our countertop. Slathered with honey with a glass of cold milk to wash it down, it was heaven on earth.

I started thinking about milkmen. Anyone who grew up in the era of milkmen will tell you, with more than a trace of nostalgia, how wonderful it was to wake up in the morning and have jars of milk with the cream still floating on top waiting on their doorstep. In some parts of the U.K., this is still common. In America, it's a thing of the past.

Many of the Norman Rockwell-esque features of bygone America wouldn't work well in today's fast paced culture. But milkmen, I think, can and should make a comeback. Can't you see it? Farms flourishing outside New York City, truckloads of fresh milk trucked into central locations each day, and delivery boys and men (and girls and women) loading the glass bottles into milkcrates mounted on their bicycles and maneuvering through early morning traffic (or up country roads) to bring it to restaurants, homes and businesses. We get our newspapers delivered, and our mail... why not our milk? It would stimulate the local economy, help struggling dairy farmers and develop a strong farm-to-table link while enhancing the convenience and freshness that consumers value.

Learning from the past

Last night, I was searching for something in the depths of my computer and came across a short piece I'd written when I worked for a company that digitized the pages of historic newspapers. I have absolutely no recollection of writing this, except I know that it was done as a personal project, likely when I was bored one day after writing marketing copy for our Texas historical newspapers product. Anyway, I thought it was worth posting here. Though it's important to look to the future and come up with modern, original solutions to our climate and environmental crises, we mustn't forget to look to the past as well. Progress isn't always forward-moving.

***

In the mid-19th century, it seemed to Americans that the world was changing at an unprecedented rate. The American West was opening up. All over the East Coast, people in overcrowded cities and over-farmed land were suddenly struck with Oregon Fever, Gold Fever, a sudden urge to pack their belongings into a wagon and populate this great country from sea to shining sea. 

Smallpox and other European diseases had considerably lessened Native populations in the West, and vast tracts of land were newly open for the taking. Best of all, in the 1870s, places once considered too arid for farming were being deluged with enough rain to grow shoulder-high wheat and basketball-sized melons. Thanks to countless massacres, buffalo populations were decreasing too, and would-be ranchers were tempted with enough space to graze record herds of cattle. Newspapers from the time chronicled a national obsession with progress, with looking ahead to the future and ignoring the past.

“The American people, sir, are a forward going people,” wrote Stuart Perry in an 1841 editorial urging settlers to come to Texas. “The wild geese [here] are very tame... and can be easily killed with your pistols. Oysters are in great abundance... deer and wild turkeys are very numerous... [and] sugar and cotton grow by rattoon. There are many who can testify to four thousand pounds of seed-cotton having been produced in one year from one acre of land.” It would take ten years, Perry added, to produce such bounty in the eastern states. 

What Perry does not mention, however, is that a century earlier, valley soil in the East had been just as fertile as that he describes in Texas. But farmers rarely practiced the crop rotation necessary to keep fields productive over time. Why did they need to? There was more than enough land in the Americas. 

Amidst the mad rush to move forward, a few men looked to history and strove to make their voices heard. Observing the declining productivity of eastern farms and hoping to avoid the same in the West, an unidentified author in the Texan Advocate prophesied in 1848 that “the production of one or two great staples for export, neglecting...a wise rotation of crops, is sure to exhaust the soil, impoverish the people, and depopulate large and once-fertile districts.” The author goes on to admonish the British colonial system, which derived goods “from distant countries” and advocate sustainable local food produced “without impairing the natural fertility of the earth.” 

But as usual, sensational ideas generated far more attention than sensible ones. In 1885, a writer identified as N.A.T. from the Dallas Morning News reported on a new scientific phenomenon known as “rain follows the plow,” which hypothesized that increased human populations led to increased rainfall. “The annual precipitation [in the Texas panhandle] is far greater now... than it was when settlers first came into the country” N.A.T. wrote. The crops planted by settlers “serve as so many pumps, which, by their millions and millions of tiny roots suck up from the subsoil the water which lies hidden there, out of reach, and then by means of their leaves set free the water into the atmosphere.” 

While the notion seems quaint today, it had serious implications in its time. People flocked to the Texas plains, lured by promises of fertile land, easy profits and the ability to conquer the weather. They replaced native grasses with rows of cotton and failed to plant ground cover in the winter. They overgrazed cattle and didn't rotate crops. Nonetheless, for the next century at least, the weather generally cooperated and many settlers prospered.

Here’s where 4th grade history comes in: in 1930s, a natural drought combined with eroded soil and a lack of native grasses began to cause massive dust storms. “Texas in Need of Heavy Rain!” proclaimed one contemporary headline. “Black Blizzard: Visibility Zero at Amarillo as Dust Blots Sun” declared another. While some Texans resorted to prayer—or exploding TNT into the skies in hopes of generating precipitation, a tactic also employed today by the Chinese government—Dallas Morning News agricultural editor Victor H. Schoffelmayer had a more practical solution. He urged farmers to plant vegetative land cover to decrease soil erosion and help curb the effects of the weather, if not the weather itself. But even as devastating dust storms killed livestock and humans and destroyed crops and livelihoods, Schoffelmayer recognized that “to expect farmers to think first of the soil and later of their own interest may be expecting too much.”
However, he wrote, “the time is here when they must think in those terms.” Those words could well be echoed today.

The sun bakes the ground at the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. Much of the arid West was settled during a time of above-average rainfall; now, as droughts become the new normal, cities and farms are struggling not to go the way of the Anasazi, the ancient people who built civilizations among desert cliffs during a similarly wet era and disappeared when the rains dried up.

Serving an 'Overlooked' Population

 
Bradford, Vt. -- Like many of the migrant workers who support Vermont's dairy industry, 41-year-old Rosalia Garcia-Moreno spends most of her time working: feeding calves, milking heifers and caring for her family on Paul and Mary Knox's 800-cow farm on Route 5 in Bradford. She’s the only woman among a group of 10 Mexican workers at Knoxland Farm, and she juggles her full-time job with caring for her three children.

    It's not a glamorous life to begin with, but it's made more challenging by Garcia-Moreno's diabetes, which was diagnosed while she was pregnant in 2004.

    For migrant farm workers, the challenges of managing chronic illness are compounded: many of Vermont's estimated 1,200 to 1,500 migrant laborers lack regular access to health care. Even when workers are made aware of available clinics, scheduling the time off and arranging for transportation can be daunting.

    Not only that, but health care professionals in one of the nation's least diverse and most rural states rarely speak Spanish, making interactions difficult. Also, workers are sometimes afraid to seek treatment: a farm worker suffering from arthritis in his hands may not want to reveal to his employer a condition that could affect his work.

    The challenges standing between Vermont's migrant workers and access to health care are what spurred Dartmouth Medical School students Holly Schroeder and Karl Dietrich to take action. Two years ago, Schroeder and Dietrich applied for a fellowship to bring health care to what Dietrich called a “relatively invisible” and “overlooked” population, and today, the program is starting to take off.

    “We both came into med school with an interest in service,” said Schroeder, a Massachusetts native who speaks fluent Spanish and has worked in health clinics in Latin America. “That's why we got into medicine in the first place.”

    Schroeder and Dietrich, who grew up in Hanover and who also speaks Spanish, received a $2,000 Schweitzer Fellowship to work with year-round migrant dairy workers in Vermont. The two decided to focus their efforts in Orange County, identified as one of three counties in the state with a high concentration of such workers.

    As Schroeder and Dietrich began researching the issue, they caught wind of a Wells River doctor with Little Rivers Health Care, a federally-funded clinic for the medically under-served. The medical students had heard that Dr. Stephen Genereaux was one of the few people in the area who had made an effort to work migrant farm workers.

    Genereaux, who had practiced public health with Yupik Eskimos in western Alaska, said in an interview that he liked the chance to get out of the office and bring health care to “folks that need it.”

    “There's parts of our community that are underserved,” he said. “Some are really obvious, you see them every day, and some aren't so obvious. (Migrant farm workers) seemed like a not-so-obvious group that needed help, needed care.”

***

    But reaching out to migrant populations in Vermont proved difficult because of Genereaux's lack of Spanish skills. That is, until Schroeder and Dietrich contacted him out of the blue one day in 2010.

    “We emailed him and said … ‘Do you do any work with them?' And he wrote back, ‘We've always wanted to and we’ve laid the groundwork, but we didn’t have the manpower to make it happen,' ” Schroeder said.

    Schroeder and Dietrich provided the manpower, the language skills and the grant money. On one of their first visits, they milked cows alongside migrant workers at Knoxland Farm, gauging workers' reaction to the work they wanted to do. It seemed positive, so they continued.

    Now, nearly two years later, the fellowship money has run out, but the program is still going strong. Schroeder and Dietrich (who expect to receive their doctoral degrees in 2013) are recruiting and training first- and second-year medical students, and they hope the program will continue after they move on.

    The team now works with seven farms and more than 50 workers. They visit farms bi-annually to screen for diabetes, blood pressure, body mass index, vision, hearing and cholesterol, and make workers aware of the clinics available to them. They administer flu shots and have arranged dental care. They act as interpreters when workers visit the clinic.

    The primary goal, though, is to develop a relationship that allows farm workers to feel comfortable opening up about their health. Then the medical students can help workers find solutions for treatment.

    “People are really starting to open up,” Schroeder said. “I think they like us and think we're kind of funny.”

    She added that after the first few visits, workers began disclosing health problems they'd previously kept to themselves. Both students agree that their association with Genereaux has been vital.

    “He has an incredible relationship with the community,” Schroeder said. “He goes to people's houses. He's one of those amazing, old community rural doctors. … We believe we need to get along with the farmers as well as the farm workers to have a good relationship with both, and Steve is invaluable. They all trust him.”

    “Establishing that degree of trust has really helped in terms of not making people skittish,” Dietrich added.

    Schroeder and Dietrich don't ask about workers' immigration status. They say they don't want to know, don’t want to get involved. They want to focus only on health care. Officials from the University of Vermont Extension program and the Vermont Farmworkers Solidarity Project say the approach is legal.

    Though the issue of illegal immigrants has lately been making headlines in Vermont -- undocumented farm workers were deported from a dairy farm in Franklin in January, and two others were arrested during a routine traffic stop in September, prompting a public outcry that led Gov. Peter Shumlin to update the state's bias-free policing laws -- Schroeder and Dietrich said they haven't gotten any backlash from anyone concerned that they’re aiding illegal immigrants.

    “The community already knows they're there,” Schroeder said.

    Lifelong dairy farmer Paul Knox, owner of Knoxland Farm, said that the prevalence of Hispanic labor has been the biggest change he's seen in the dairy industry since the 1950s.

    “Initially it was because we were having trouble filling positions,” said Knox, who employs four local workers and 10 migrant workers on his farm in Bradford. “But now it's because I've just never found anybody that will do the job as well as they can. They’re just unbelievably good at observing things and being good with animals. I think it’s part of their heritage.”

    The attitude toward such workers differs across the state, Schroeder said.

    “I think of Vermont as three different regions. The Burlington area definitely has the bulk of the migrant farm workers population. Between Burlington and Middlebury, there are a lot of resources … and a very proactive community supporting them with lots of services,” she said.

    “Then up by the border, it's very dangerous to be a migrant farm worker. People will see someone who looks Mexican in Walmart and pick up the phone (to call Border Patrol).

    “Our region is between that. There's not community-wide support, but there's acceptance that they’re there and without them these farms wouldn't exist.”

***

    One dark evening, in between milking shifts, Schroeder and Dietrich met in a brightly-lit, concrete-floored room adjacent to the milking parlor at Knoxland Farm.

    One of the workers, Leon Gomez -- all smiles under his thick black moustache -- had consistently tested for high blood pressure in their previous visits, and Schroeder and Dietrich were showing him how to use an automatic blood pressure cuff to monitor his condition.

    Gomez was quick to laugh off the potential gravity of his health issues, but Rosalia Garcia-Moreno -- who knows too well the repercussions of ignoring an illness -- just as quickly intervened.

    In Spanish, she told her friend that just because he didn't feel the effects of his condition every day didn't mean it wasn’t serious. “If you don’t take your medicine, you could die!” she exclaimed. (Schroeder translated.)

    “She's a huge resource for us,” Schroeder said of Garcia-Moreno. “She says the things I don't always feel comfortable saying.”

    After Gomez mastered taking his own blood pressure, he began showing other workers who were  trickling in after their milking shift how to use the cuff.

   “It's funny how it's changed things here,” commented Wendy Longmoore, a Newbury resident who works at Knoxland farm. “It used to be all about cows. Now it's about health care.”

    “What Holly and Karl give us is the ability to … eliminate the language barrier plus medical skills,” said Paul Knox. “I can communicate about the cows but I can't communicate technical things about their health.”

    Schroeder and Dietrich hope that as more medical students get on board with their project, they can expand into the Northeast Kingdom and possibly New Hampshire. They hope to figure out how to get federal funding specifically designated for seasonal laborers -- money that drives a similar, more robust program for migrant workers in Maine, but which seems to be unavailable for dairy workers in Vermont. They dream of finding funding to create a mobile clinic out of an RV.

    “It gives me renewed confidence in the world that young, energetic, bright folks like them are going to be doctors some day,” Genereaux said.

    Driving home along dark, empty roads after their visit to Knoxland Farm, Schroeder and Dietrich commented on the nature of their work. They're usually the only medical students who walk into class smelling like a barnyard.

    “That's why people like us,” Schroeder said.

    “It's that irresistible cow odor,” Dietrich quipped.

Unrelated photo by me

 Reprinted with permission from the Valley News. Not to be reproduced or distributed.

Though gardeners and naturalists can find wonder under every leaf, the production of honey might just be the most mysterious and exhilarating in the catalog of backyard miracles.
   As an aspiring apiarist, I spent this spring reading up on the art of beekeeping. I've certainly dipped my finger into plenty of jars of honey, and I've cautiously watched beekeepers in action at the state fair. But when my friend and fellow convert Hao invited me to help out with a hive he was keeping in my backyard, I nonetheless harbored a degree of skepticism. I had no doubt that professional beekeepers knew the secret of coaxing honey from a stack of wooden boxes, but I found it hard to believe that while Hao and I were obliviously going about our business, a swarm of insects was crawling and flying over the backyard, producing tiny miracles one drop at a time.
   Nationwide, honey consumption is on the rise, as is the interest in backyard beekeeping. "Feral" hives have been almost wiped out by parasitic mites and a little-understood phenomenon called colony collapse disorder, and a growing number of hobbyists-- 95 percent of the 175,000 or so beekeepers across the country, according to the National Honey Board -- have taken on the vital task of keeping orchards productive and roadside flowers blooming.
   "If you were to go out today and find bees in a tree somewhere up in the woods, chances are they swarmed there (from a captive hive)," said Troy Hall, president of the 100-member-strong Kearsarge Beekeepers Association. Hall keeps about 100 colonies in fields and orchards from Cornish to Fairlee, and area farmers have been very welcoming. "We're benefiting each other," he said.
   In Vermont alone, the number of beekeepers has grown by several hundred over the past few years, to over 2,000, state apiculturist Steve Parise said. And nationwide, honey production in 2010 was up 20 percent from the previous year, to 176 million pounds, according to the National Honey Board.
   Some of the newcomers are concerned about the environmental and agricultural impact of the loss of wild bees and want to help, Parise said. Others are retirees looking for a new hobby, or casualties of the recession trying to turn visions of back-to-the-land living into a second career. But many, it seems, are part of a burgeoning group of young professionals turning to the do-it-yourself and make-your-own movements so they can decompress after long hours at workplaces that are increasingly driven by technology.
   "I'm probably the youngest person at most of the bee clubs, but more people my age and younger are starting to get into it," said the 25-year-old Hall. "Anything in agriculture, like having a garden or keeping bees or doing something with chickens or cows, a lot of people are rediscovering that. It's like a renaissance of the local agriculture movement, and beekeeping is definitely a part of it."
   I've admittedly jumped on the low-tech bandwagon. Sometimes I feel like some offbeat superhero leading a double life: newspaper writer by day, aspiring 19th-century homesteader by night. In addition to beekeeping, I've taken to sewing, playing banjo and typing letters on an old Corona typewriter. My backyard is home to a flock of chickens and an overflowing garden, and my kitchen shelves are lined with mason jars of jam and pickles.
   Many of my friends are spurning the technology that dominates their workdays as well; if it weren't for our utter dependence on the Internet to keep our hobbies going, I'd be afraid of falling asleep one night and waking up in Little House on the Prairie. My beekeeping partner is Hao Xu, 42, a post-doctoral researcher at Dartmouth who for years hardly lifted his head from his study of brain functions and biochemistry. Then he realized he needed a respite from the lab, and began to explore a litany of interests that could well belong to someone from another century: swing and ballroom dancing, sailing, pottery, origami, gardening, beekeeping.
   "It was a fantasy," said Xu, of his initial interest in beekeeping. He admits that when he got started two years ago, he had no idea what he was getting into, but he was intrigued. "I saw myself going into a beehive -- a beehive being a house," he said, laughing. Nonetheless, he wrote on his Facebook page that he wanted to become an apiarist.
   "I got responses, so that's how I got started," Xu said. He met up with Hall -- who's since become his "guru" -- and tagged along on an inspection one of Hall's colonies. Then he bought a queen and started his own hive. "I got really fascinated," he said. "I bought my hive nine months before the season started, I was so psyched."
   For Xu, beekeeping is an escape from the lab, but it's also an extension of it. He understands what happens when fructose and glucose from the nectar of a flower are collected by worker bees and brought back to the hive; how the molecules mingle with enzymes, break down in a delicate chemical dance and are transformed into honey.
   "I have to say, when we were doing the honey extraction, I felt like I was doing an experiment," he commented. "I had a protocol, I followed the steps, and it came out pretty good."
   Xu's understanding of the process adds to his enjoyment of beekeeping. I, on the other hand, am drawn to the mysteriousness of it all.
   Though I did the requisite research and learned to handily throw around jargon like "swarming" and "supers" and "queen extruder," I'm content to know only what role I must play in keeping 20,000 or so bees healthy and productive, and chalk the rest up to natural wonder.
   The range of engagement levels you can have in backyard beekeeping is perhaps one reason behind its popularity. At the low end of the spectrum, you can keep a single hive, check it every few weeks and largely forget about it until it's time to reap the sweet rewards: up to 60 pounds per season. At the other end are people like Hall.
   "It just kind of started off as a hobby," he said. Over the past seven years, though, his hobby has grown, and he now spends part of his time as a lumber broker and part as an apiarist, tending hives, selling the honey and breeding queens. "They're fascinating insects," he said. "It's just endless, the growth curve. ... There's always something new to learn."
   "I eat quite a bit of honey," Hall added. "Everything I can put sugar on, I use honey."
   Honey is touted as a pure sweetener, a healthier alternative to processed sugars, and beeswax is a popular byproduct for making candles and beauty products.
   But none of these benefits can really explain the draw that entices apiarists. It's elusive. Like canning or weeding, beekeeping offers something almost therapeutic, especially after a long day spent staring at a computer screen with a cell phone glued to your ear.
   "I enjoy watching the bees," Xu said thoughtfully. "There's something magic about it. I can spend hours just watching them coming out of the hive and going back in."
   The moment it became real for me was an afternoon in late July. For hours, Xu and I and a couple of other friends scraped beeswax off the honeycomb and whipped the frames, heavy with honeycomb, around in an extractor, a large plastic bucket with a hand crank that uses centrifugal force to draw out the honey without damaging the comb.
   We were sequestered in the garage on a hot afternoon, sweating, unable to wipe our foreheads because our hands were dripping with gooey honey. Finally, when the entire garage smelled like a vat of warm honey, Xu turned the plastic spout.
   For a moment, no one spoke, then we jumped around and laughed and gave each other sticky high-fives. A thick amber stream gushed from the spout, 20 pounds of it in all. It was beautiful.

hurricane, part two: agriculture

Reprinted with permission from the Valley News.

South Royalton -- In West Woodstock, a pile of 200 dead chickens await disposal outside Thymeless Herbs Farm, decomposing in the heat while the owners struggle to find homes for those that survived. In South Royalton, an 81-year-old man stands on his stalled tractor as the waters rise around him and sweep his cows down the White River. Just down the road, a farmer ignores his own inundated fields to help save his neighbors' homes.

“We're done for right now,” said Suzy Krawczyk, owner of poultry farm Thymeless Herbs, and a mother of five. “We lost a lot of birds. That was a major part of our income.”

Across the Upper Valley, farms and farmers were hit hard by Tropical Storm Irene -- or hardly hit at all.

Koi Boynton, development coordinator for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, said the state hasn't yet estimated the financial cost the flood will have upon Vermont's agricultural economy.

“It's tough to say right now,” she said. “Everyone's still in emergency mode, responding to basic needs at this point. We're waiting for the dust to settle, then going out to make sure everyone’s okay before assessing the real damage.”

Irene did not treat all farms equally. “Some farms have had no flooding,” said Vern Grubinger, a vegetable specialist with the University of Vermont extension. “On the other end of the spectrum, there are farms that have been completely wiped out. That's what's so unusual about this.”

Typically, Grubinger said, flooding is a localized event that affects agriculture in the vicinity of a single watershed. This time, the damage is statewide, though scattered.

Geo Honigford, owner of Hurricane Flats Farm in South Royalton, is one of those farmers who had his farm “wiped out.” Sixty five acres of corn and cabbage, carrots and kale, tomatoes, potatoes, “everything you'd find in a supermarket,” Honigford said: gone.

Plants are bent, swept to the earth in the remnants of Honigford's murky, silt-covered fields -- but they still look edible. The air is ripe with the scent of tomatos on the vine, and tiny green heads of lettuce poke through the mud. But none of it will get eaten. The FDA considers any crop that has come into contact with flood waters to be “adulterated and not to be sold for human consumption.”

“We have sweet corn that's absolutely gorgeous,” Honigford said. “You take a bite and it's delicious. But we’re not supposed to be selling it.

“I have stuff that I picked before this happened,” he added. “Potatoes, onions, shallots. But this is a total devastation of the growing season. It's a kick in the teeth.”

Honigford, who didn't have flood insurance and estimates the financial impact of the flood to be around $45,000, ignored his own obliterated crops to organize a community-wide clean up of his neighbors' homes this week. His own home was undamaged, and he said there was nothing to be done on his farm that couldn't wait.

Asked what he would do with the thick layer of silt that now coats his fields, Honigford had a simple answer: "Farm it. The river giveth and the river taketh away."

For five of his neighbors, though, the clock was ticking. He was trying to help alleviate mold damage before it rendered their homes permanently inhabitable.

After putting in several 12-hour days to save his neighbors' homes, Honigford said he barely has time to think about his own loss.

“It hasn't sunk in yet,” he said. His wife works off the farm, but the couple has two teenagers to support and depend on the income from Honigford's crops. “I don't sleep much,” he said. “I dream about onions floating down the river at night.”

***

“There are losses expected in farming and horticulture,” Grubinger acknowledged. “A modest loss is not atypical. Hot weather during strawberry season can ruin a crop.”

Floods, too, are to be expected. Floodplains are often the most fertile cropland; an occasional deposit of river silt makes for rich soil, and many farmers seek out floodplains despite the risk. Today, though, a major flood leaves behind contaminates from overflowing storm drains, industrial runoff and sewage.

“The extent of contamination is going to vary so much from place to place, depending on what's upstream,” Grubinger said.

However, contaminates left by receding floodwaters in Vermont are largely carbon based, he added, alleviating long-term effects. “They break down over time. I would be a lot more concerned if we were a highly industrial state with chemicals and heavy metals, things that don't break down so readily. Fortunately, we're a very rural state, so yes, there will be some manure and sewage but those things do decompose.”

After a few months, Grubinger said, toxins will be filtered through the soil and crops can be planted again. Contaminates from the flood should not affect organic farmers' certification.

However, farmers do have to worry about the effect of water: “Fungi can grow on corn and can form microtoxins, not from the flood itself but because the corn got wet,” he added.

Wet or silt-covered corn poses a problem for farmers with livestock. David Ainsworth, a fifth generation farmer at Westlands Farm in South Royalton, lost about 10 of his 40 acres of corn meant to feed his dairy cows over the winter. Another 25 acres is now coated with a layer of silt.

“I heard from a friend that used to farm up at the junction of Route 100 that he had a field get flooded,” Ainsworth said. “He went ahead and chopped it, and it broke his chopper. That makes me a little hesitant.”

Ainsworth is hoping for a “gentle rain” to wash some of the silt off. He thinks that if he can chop the corn, he might be able to salvage it if he can vaccinate his cows. A friend might have a few extra acres of cow corn he can buy, too. But no matter what, the flood is going to set him back.

“There's more expense involved, but I have no idea how much right now,” he said, noting that he'll also lose a “few thousand” dollars in sales from his farm stand, because his road is currently closed to traffic.

“We'll keep going,” he added. “We'll come up with some money from wherever we can to get things back up, and we'll try to help our neighbors too.”

***

As the state -- and its farmers -- begin the long process of recovery, Boynton, the agriculture development coordinator, said one of her office's biggest concerns continues to be the plight of dairy farmers, some stranded with no electricity and with access roads washed out.

Duke Perley, 81, is one of those. He's been milking cows on his family's land at Perley Farms in South Royalton for 40 years. Last weekend, Perley was in New Jersey to attend his Aunt Betty's funeral when he heard about the storm racing up the East Coast.

“I told my nieces, let's get out of this storm. Let's go to Vermont where we’ll be safe. Next thing I knew I was standing on the steps watching the water rise.”

From a stalled tractor, Perley watched his cows float away in the raging White River. He had recently suffered a heart attack and had a pacemaker installed, and was so upset by what he witnessed that he became anxious he was having another one. A boat came to rescue him.

In the end, though, after driving his nieces back to New Jersey, Perley was planning to return to Vermont and help the family farm recover.

“I lost a lot of money and a lot of time, but we'll be all right,” Perley said by phone from New Jersey.

Perley's daughter, Penny Severance, said she “wouldn't bat an eye” at putting their losses at more than a half a million dollars. Their house was ruined, farm equipment lost and 25 cattle dead or missing. The family was unable to milk their remaining 35 cows for days, and when they finally received a generator on Tuesday evening, the 620 gallons (5,400 pounds) of milk they gained had to be dumped down the drain. There was no refrigerator and no way to get the milk off the farm.

But as Grubinger, the UVM vegetable specialist, put it, “I think the future for agriculture is bright. This is a bump in the road right now, but we're going to have strong dairy farms. We're going to have strong horticulture. This is a short-term impact and agriculture is going to rebound as it often does.”

“I worked 27 years on the busses,” Perley said, referring to his earlier career. “I got up on the farm when my uncle got too old, and I said, ‘I ain't never leaving.' I dealt with that river for 40 years and this was something that I never expected, but I’m 81 and I’m still going to farm.”

***

Yesterday afternoon, Ainsworth took a break from the clean-up effort to erect signs for the Royalton Farmers Market. The market, he said, will continue as planned. Many farmers were hardly affected by the storm.

At Cedar Circle Farm on the Connecticut River in Thetford, Education Coordinator Cat Buxton said her farm didn't suffer any losses.

“This past spring was the highest we've ever seen the river,” Buxton recalled. After Irene, though: “No bad news to report.” The farm stand at Cedar Circle was running a brisk business on Wednesday morning. Nancy Franklin, at Riverview Farm in Plainfield, said her apple orchards escaped unscathed as well.

At Crossroads Farm in Post Mills, Tim Taylor and his crops also survived. “But our customers didn't,” he added, alluding to the ruined Woodstock Farmers' Market, a major buyer of his produce. “That in itself presents some interesting problems,” Taylor said. “You expect to be able to sell to someone and suddenly, you can't. You have to find other markets.”

Hanover's Co-op Food Stores buys produce from 13 local growers, but spokesman Allan Reetz said maintaining a steady supply of vegetables there hasn't been much of an issue.

“One farmer might've lost two or three important crops,” Reetz said. “Cooking greens, like kale and chard for example. But where one grower lost some of those crops, another grower was also growing a comparable crop and is quickly saying, ‘I can fill this need. I can shift over and we can keep getting this food to market.'

“It's heartening,” he added. “It's a local food system that's not dependent on the demands outside our region.”

Some farmers have also pledged to donate surplus produce to help feed volunteers contributing to the relief efforts, said Royalton resident and State Representative Sarah Buxton (no relation of Cat Buxton).

On Wednesday afternoon, Buxton stood with a yellow steno pad in hand, addressing a group of volunteers by Hurricane Flats Farm. The workers were caked in mud, flecks of it drying on their headlamps, their eyeglasses, in the creases of their elbows and knees. “Royalton has suffered at least $10 million in damages,” she told the volunteers, who were listening intently while scarfing down grilled chicken, pasta salad and sandwiches. “At least five farms suffered severe damage. But,” she added to the hungry group, “someone just dropped off a big wheel of cheese.”

Krista Langlois can be reached at klanglois@vnews.com or 603-727-3305.

sharing the surplus

reprinted with permission from the Valley News. not to be reproduced or distributed.

By Krista Langlois
Valley News Staff Writer

   Enfield -- With home gardening growing in popularity, sooner or later most burgeoning green thumbs face a dispiriting quandary:
   What do I do with this bevy of beets? This glut of garlic? This proliferation of peppers?
   The answer usually begins by offering surplus produce to family members, friends and coworkers. But it seems that every time you step out into the garden, there's more. You try surreptitiously giving away bunches of kale to people at the bus stop, or pawning it off on the unsuspecting receptionist at the dentist's office. But it just won't stop growing. Next comes a frantic Internet search on how to preserve the summer's bounty. Can one freeze squash? How many jars of pesto can a single household conceivably consume? Is there any  room left in the freezer for a carton of ice cream?
   Then comes the dreaded moment: tossing your hard-earned, home-grown food into the compost pile.
   "I hate throwing stuff away," moaned Bob Cavalieri, of Enfield, echoing every successful gardener's nightmare. "But every year I have a surplus and I didn't know what to do with it all.
   "One year, I had 78 butternut squash," he said. "I was eating two squash pies a week and giving away as many as I could, but that's just too many."
   Cavalieri might have found a solution. Three weeks ago, he started the Upper Valley Home Gardeners page on Facebook to connect backyard growers in the region and provide a resource for sharing, swapping or selling extra vegetables. So far, nearly 100 people have joined, and while there's a lot of room for growth, Cavalieri says the response is encouraging.
   "I'm really excited about it," he said, standing outside his garden in Enfield yesterday. "It's kind of taking off. It's a lot of fun and it's a good community service kind of thing."
   Cavalieri envisions an online venue where backyard gardeners like himself -- not commercial growers or farmers market vendors -- can chat about what they have lots of, and what they'd like more of. A post might say something like, "I've got a ton of cucumbers this year. Will trade for carrots or tomatoes, or sell two for a dollar."
   The idea, of course, is nothing new. People have been sharing produce for centuries. But today, a gardener in Norwich might not be aware of her fellow enthusiasts in Cornish, or an Upper Valley transplant from another state might not know who to share his greens with. Setting up a booth at a farmers' market or a farm stand on the side of the road takes time, commitment and financial investment -- something few backyard hobbyists are interested in.
   "I just looked for an outlet, something easy to do," Cavalieri said, noting that he's been trying to figure out for years how gardeners could effectively share their bounty. He considered selling at the Enfield farmers market, but didn't want to pay the fee. He's also posted on the Enfield community listserv, but that limits his outreach efforts to Enfield residents.
   When he used Facebook last year to market his private Grafton Pond campground, though, Cavalieri realized the social network would be an ideal way to connect gardeners across the Upper Valley.
   "I did it out of necessity," he said. "I think it's kind of a new thing with the internet age. It was kind of inevitable."
   Across the Northeast and the U.S., the interest in backyard gardening is soaring as food prices rise and consumers worry about the safety and quality of supermarket fruits and vegetables. The National Gardening Association in Burlington reported that in 2011, consumers spent nearly $3 billion on growing their own backyard food, a 20 percent increase over consumer gardening spending before the economic downturn in 2008.
   Though it seems like a lot of money, that $3 billion still represents a major savings in monthly food bills for most families that take up growing a portion of their own food. Cavalieri, a former bio-tech lab worker who's been gardening in the Upper Valley for 17 years, said the satisfaction and financial incentive of gardening is "wicked."
   "I like filling the freezer," he said. "Never having to buy any store-bought (tomato) sauce is a good feeling."
   The Upper Valley Home Gardeners' network isn't just about sharing food. Paul Hunt, of Bradford, is an avid collector of lilies, daffodils and irises who has never met Bob Cavalieri. But when he saw a link to Upper Valley Home Gardeners on Facebook, he didn't hesitate to join.
   "For me it will serve twofold," Hunt said. "It may be a source of flowers that I don't have, that I perhaps don't even know about that someone is offering up for trade or as surplus. It's also a way for me to prune my collection, if you will. Like so many of us, I have more varieties and more plants than I really need."
   Hunt gave away a purple day lily this week to another Bradford resident, Diane Chamberlain, whom he connected with via the Facebook page.
   "This was an opportunity to free up some space," Hunt commented, noting that one person's weed is another's treasure. "It can only help all of us who do flower and vegetable and fruit gardening," he added. "We can share what we know and we can share our surplus. I think it will be wonderful."
   Cavalieri hopes people will post questions about gardening pests or share helpful knowledge. He also hopes the new service will encourage people to expand their gardens and try new plants. He, for instance, is looking forward to sampling some bok choy for the first time later this week, when a new Facebook friend brings some over to swap.
   He's looking for takers for his beets, too. Beet greens are some of his favorite veggies to freeze, but he's not such a big fan of the tubers that grow beneath them. "I can eat them once," he said. "But to eat them over and over again ... that's terrible!"

Municipal Composting

Reprinted with permission from the Valley News. May not be reproduced or distributed.

By Krista Langlois
Valley News Staff Writer

   Hanover -- Town Manager Julia Griffin's job description does not mention banana peels, coffee grounds or leftover pizza. There's no reference to moldy bread or rotting lettuce. But lately, Griffin has been thinking a lot about these things. She's on a mission to get Hanover to compost.
   "We could really extend the life of the Lebanon landfill if we could pull all the food waste out," Griffin said from her office last week. "Not only can we reduce our solid waste cost and volume, but we'd be recycling the waste going to dumps to food production instead."
   Griffin is perhaps breaking the stereotype of what comes to mind when people picture a compost connoisseur. She doesn't wear Birkenstocks or muck boots to the office, and her work generally focuses on town ordinances and finances rather than tractors and chickens. She's known around town as a woman who gets things done. So when Griffin leans forward in her office chair and talks excitedly about a plan to entice Hanover's downtown restaurants to recycle their food waste, she seems to be driving home a point: composting has gone beyond the realm of farmers and natural-food junkies and made the leap into the world of business and city planning.
   "Our challenge is to make it cost-effective," Griffin said. "It's simple and straightforward, but there's a level of logistics to work out."
   After taking a tour of Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District's composting facility in Montpelier last year, Griffin approached retiring Bernice A. Ray Elementary School principal Bruce Williams about starting a composting program there. Williams, a gardener himself who had already helped implement a school vegetable garden, was immediately receptive.
   "We'd been talking about this for many years," Williams said. "But Julia Griffin and the town of Hanover were really the organizing forces that got this thing rolling."
   Griffin is more modest. She says others in the Hanover area had broken ground well before she got involved: Dartmouth College composts and reuses 263 tons of food waste annually, Kendal Retirement Community also composts, and the group Sustainable Hanover has long pushed for measures to reduce waste. But the kind of successful, large-scale operation that Central Vermont Waste operates is yet to be found in the Upper Valley.
   "We need a force like that around here," Griffin said.
   In the meantime, the most logical place to start a pilot program was with some of Hanover's youngest residents.
   "The idea from the get-go was, you start with the younger children and they'll become advocates," Williams said.
   Though they've been recycling for three decades, this past school year was the first that Ray School students practiced composting, and they've so far diverted more than a ton of food waste. Because each class eats lunch individually, instead of in one large cafeteria, each room has its own bucket system that students flock to at the end of lunch.
   "That makes quality control easier to manage," Williams said. "We make sure we're clean and efficient."
   Behind the school, next to the big green Dumpster and bins of recyclables, a line of clean, trash-barrel-like "totes" stand ready to collect the food waste. Custodial supervisor Brian Lukowitz said that some people were initially skeptical about the hassle or hygiene of composting, but "we think the composting process is actually cleaner than having all that slop in the Dumpster -- boy does that stink!"
   With the compost system, a layer of sawdust (donated by the high school woodshop) is placed over the food waste, and the totes are picked up weekly by Bob Sandberg, who brings the waste to his farm in Corinth and returns the containers clean and ready for the next batch.
   "We don't have any issues with either critters or insects," Lukowitz said.
   Eventually, Williams envisions a system that will enable the school to use its compost in the vegetable garden. But for now, employing Sandberg makes the most sense.
   Sandberg's service makes sense to Emily Neuman, too. As sustainability coordinator for the Co-op Food Stores, one of Neuman's tasks is to ensure the grocery stores in Hanover, Lebanon and White River Junction meet their zero-waste goal.
   "Being a company that deals with a lot of food, we had to figure it out," Neuman said, of the logistical challenges. "There was no other way about it."
   Neuman said that the Co-op stores currently donate about 40 percent of their unsellable food to the nonprofit organization Willing Hands and 20 percent to local farms for pig feed. The remaining 40 percent -- about 315,000 pounds of food waste last year -- goes to Sandberg.
   On his twice-weekly trips around the Upper Valley, Sandberg makes about 40 stops to pick up bins of waste, utilizing Vermont state regulations that allow farmers to compost just about everything, including meat and dairy products. New Hampshire does not allow meat at composting facilities, which makes large-scale composting difficult there, as few businesses or restaurants have time to sort their food scraps, Neuman said.
   At Sandberg's farm, Cookeville Compost, a 30-by-30-foot pile stands about 10 feet tall. Sandberg churns and aerates the massive compost pile regularly with his tractor.
   Heat generated by the composting process reaches temperatures up to 150 degrees -- hot enough to melt snow in the winter. Once it "quits heating up," Sandberg said, he lets it cure for a couple months, and then, presto: "the most beautiful fertilizer you can imagine!"
   Unlike chemical fertilizer, Sandberg said, compost isn't water-soluble, so it doesn't wash away in a heavy rain. And unlike food that decomposes at a dump, the composting process doesn't give off methane.
   About half of Sandberg's compost is sold by the tractor-load to local farmers and gardeners for $25 a bucket. The other half is spread on his hay fields. He hopes to expand his operation in the future: more and more businesses contact him about composting every month, he said.
   Sandberg thinks more and more communities will follow in San Francisco's footsteps and enact mandatory composting laws. "Might as well get a head start now, because we're going to have to do it anyway," he said, referring to the thinking of some of the businesses that employ him.
   In Hanover, "the Co-op became a test (for the town) to see whether Bob (Sandberg)'s program worked," Neuman said. And has it?
   "It has worked perfectly. Bob does all the things we couldn't figure out how to do," she said.
   That includes saving money: The Co-op pays Northeast Waste Service by the pound for its waste removal, so reducing the amount of trash that goes to the landfill results in savings.
   With the implementation of its compost program, the Co-op has halved the amount of waste it sends to the dump. And while there's a cost to Sandberg's services (around $14 per tote), Neuman said that in 2010, the Hanover and Lebanon stores alone saved around $7,000.
   There is one sticking point: No one else in the area seems willing to take on the job of picking up and transporting the food waste.
   "It's a fair amount of work," Sandberg said, noting that an interested farmer would need to apply for a permit, have a truck and a trailer for picking up the waste, and also have a tractor, a pressure washer and the 150 or so totes he keeps in constant rotation to get the business started.
   "The big challenge for this project to take off is to find a site where the food waste can be taken, to work out hauling and to make it easy for businesses to compost," Hanover's Griffin said. Businesses also need a financial incentive.
   Toby Fried, owner of Lou's Restaurant and Bakery in Hanover, said that he tried composting last year and lost money on the venture, because he and other downtown businesses share a large Dumpster. No matter how much -- or how little -- waste they fill the Dumpster with, each business pays a flat monthly rate, not a per-pound rate like the Co-op (which owns a trash compactor).
   "Nobody has individual trash cans," Fried said. "We just dump into one big one and we get billed on a monthly basis whether we use it or not."
   "In theory, if you compost you'd have less trash and reduce your trash bill, but in this case it didn't work," he added.
   Matt Brown, a sales executive with Northeast Waste, said that his company's dump truck picks up 150 Dumpsters daily, including those shared by Hanover's downtown businesses. Weighing each one just isn't possible.
   However, Brown said "there's something on the horizon that will certainly make a difference for the food industry."
   "We just got introduced (recently) to a new machine," he said. "It extracts all the water out of the food waste ... and turns it into steam and evaporates. What's left can be used as a fertilizer."
   Brown said he didn't have any further information about the process yet, but will know more in coming weeks.
   Griffin is open to the idea. Her goal, and that of the town, is to reduce the amount of waste entering the landfill each year. "Whether you're composting in a local farm or doing machinery-based composting" doesn't matter, she said. She added that an estimated 40 to 60 percent of restaurants' total waste is from uneaten or unused food.
   Fried, of Lou's Restaurant, said he hopes the town, the waste companies and downtown businesses will be able to figure out a way to make composting feasible.
   "It comes down to the logistics," he said. "Most restaurants would do it if it made sense."
   Krista Langlois can be reached at klanglois@vnews.com or 603-727-3305.

"An embarassment of riches"

Just a few pictures from the weekend ... feeling thankful for all the hard work that's produced such bounty!

Intro to Wild Edibles

-->
 Reprinted with permission from the Valley News. May not be reproduced or distributed.
Slightly altered.

By Krista Langlois
Valley News Staff Writer

   Mike Hebb and his wife Kathy live in a log cabin on a steep wooded hillside in South Strafford. He built the cabin from a kit in 1971, “because I didn't know that much about building back then.”
  When you meet Hebb, the setting makes sense. There's something in his countenance, his careful gait and quiet voice that suggests he belongs here. In the 40 years since he first laid the groundwork for his home, Hebb, 64, has learned a great deal -- much of it from simply observing as he walks the same paths day in and day out, in every type of weather, collecting firewood, watching the forest grow and die back around him.
   Much of what Hebb does is intertwined with the woods: He handcrafts exquisite violins, lathes bowls and vases and patiently sands cedar canoes in his garage. And he knows a lot about local plants -- especially those that taste good.
   After he posted on the Strafford listserv to remind neighbors that the highly sought after black morel mushrooms were making their brief appearance on the ground in hardwood forests, I asked Hebb if he'd mind going for a walk in the woods with me. The next morning we headed out on his 15 acres.
   ---
   We begin the day sitting at the table in Hebb's cabin, looking out into the woods. Hebb doesn't talk much at first; he's like an old engine that takes a while to warm up. I ask him if he's lived here all his life.
   "Not yet," he says seriously.
   He pulls a small piece of paper out of his pocket. On it, scrawled in pencil, is a list of what he plans to tell me about: fiddleheads, ginseng, mushrooms, dandelions, knotweed, ramps, wild ginger, wild asparagus, spring beauties. First on the list: maple syrup.
   "Maple syrup is the first wild edible of the year. It just takes more cooking than most," he says, noting that he boiled about 40 gallons this year.
  We get up to walk. Just behind the house, a cluster of ferns are unfurling. Though it's only mid-May and the last patches of snow in the shadows and hollows have only just melted, the ferns are already nearly a foot tall. They're the bright, almost neon green that distinguishes plants in early spring from those in August's maturity. Outside, stretching his long legs, Hebb starts talking more.
   "The fiddleheads are mostly gone by," he murmurs as if to himself, bending down to brush aside the feathery plants. "Look, there's one. See that scaly business -- only fiddleheads have those. Some have a furry covering."
   Though all ferns start as fiddleheads -- the tightly coiled spirals that line roadsides and streambanks in early May -- only the ostrichhead fiddleheads are really edible. Steamed, they taste like asparagus. I ask Hebb about the possibility of picking the wrong kind and getting sick.
   "There's no danger," he says. "If you're really insecure about it, try to go with someone else the first few times, or go to the supermarket and observe."
   A book on wild edibles I read recently dedicated pages and pages to warnings so dire it made me afraid to pick even the plants I knew. But Hebb's approach is nonchalant.
   "See, this looks like fiddleheads but it's not, because it doesn't have the little scaly wrapper," he says, pointing to a fiddlehead with fur instead of chaff. "You just have to be observant."
   "There's a lot of edible foods out here -- you could eat the grass if you wanted to," he continues. "But there's a big difference between edible and good to eat. Like when they talk about mushrooms, 98 percent are edible but maybe 5 percent are really good to eat. In the books, they call them 'choice.' But edible just means they won't make you sick."
   ---
   Walking with Hebb through the still-brown woods is like being given a new pair of eyes. He notices things most people overlook.
   "These are spring beauties," he says, pointing to tiny whitish-pink flowers with long, narrow leaves. Once you know what you're looking for, the flowers are everywhere. He picks a bulb about the size of a shelled almond.
   "The bulbs are kind of like little potatoes. They're small but they're a good survival food if you don't know what to eat. They just happen to be there and if you knew about them, it wouldn't take too long to get a few cups."
   Walking up the path, Hebb, who grew up in Thetford, talks about his background with wild edibles.
   "Well, you start as a kid picking berries, and you just go up from there, you know. ... It's a natural progression. You start reading books about it, then you get influenced by other people, just like any other interest," he says.
   Quiet and unassuming, Hebb doesn't seem to care much for talking about himself. If it were up to him, the plants would talk about themselves, and he could stand off to the side and admire them, out of the spotlight.
   "If I lived on a city block I would probably not go out of my way very much to (harvest wild plants)," he says, continuing to walk. "I don't try to make it a big part of my diet. ... But I'm here and they're here, so I try to promote them and they feed me."
   Hebb reaches the spot he was looking for and stops. It's a south-facing slope dominated by hardwoods, morning sunlight filtering through tree branches and lighting upon hundreds of low-lying, leafy plants.
   "These are ramps," he says, looking around with a faint trace of pride. "They can be hard to find."
   He bends down and picks an unadorned, roughly 6-inch leaf off a plant at his feet. He rips it in half and hands it to me. It smells just like a garlicky onion.
   "Now, nowhere have I seen ramps like this." He gestures at the blanketing of plants around us. "Those are all ramps."
   The bulbs of ramps, also known wild leeks or spring onions, were an important food for Native American and white settlers alike, from the Appalachian mountains to Quebec. They can be eaten like any onion: pickled, fried with potatoes, chopped in a salad.
   "They come up like that," he says of the elongated, drooping leaves, "and then the leaves die and you think they're all dead. But couple of weeks later a big stem comes out and a flower comes up on top and creates a whole mess of little black onion seeds. And if you're in the woods when they're in bloom, they'll be just humming with bees all around."
   I ask Hebb how many ramps someone should pick, were they to stumble upon a hillside like this. He thinks for a moment, then answers slowly.
   "If everybody went and picked only 10 percent of what they saw they'd still be gone. There's just no way for the last people to know how many there used to be. So basically I'd say transplant a few and manage your own patch. That way they wouldn't get wiped out in the wild."
   ---
   "Another thing I found up here that's very rare is ginseng," Hebb says, bending over a small plant that he's encased in a wire fence to protect it from deer. It doesn't look like much -- sort of like a small basil plant with toothed leaves. But the plant has been hunted nearly out of existence, Hebb tells me: today, you need a state license to pick it.
   "There used to be big money digging that up. Back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, there were whole families that lived in the woods searching out ginseng. They were called the 'sengers' and the 'sealers' because they went for ginseng and golden seal. They were both pretty valuable back then.
   "The root is generally sold as tea," he continues, noting that it's particularly popular as a stimulant in China.
   The sun is rising and it's turning into a warm spring day. So far, Hebb has talked about wild asparagus: "If you've ever picked asparagus from the garden, those big fern-like tufts, if you're awake when you're driving you'll see them along the roadside and you'll recognize them. Then you come back in the spring and you get them before they get like that because they'll be in the same place the next year."
   He's talked about dandelions: "They could be the most harvested wild edible this time of year. I often see people out off the road, in the fields digging them. Every part is edible, the crown, the leaves, the root."
   But he's only hinted at his knowledge of wild mushrooms. And those are the things I'm most eager to learn about. Apparently, they're his favorite too -- he's been saving the best for last.
   Black morels are said to be comparable to French truffles, a culinary delicacy and a fungi that inspires passion in both nature lovers and foodies. I ask if he can describe what they taste like. "How do you describe a flavor?" he asks, shaking his head. "They're not like anything else."

   Many people who hunt mushrooms as a hobby are protective of where they find them, like surfers defending local waves from outsiders. It's not that morels are inherently better than other kinds of wild mushrooms (though some would argue that they are), but they're the first to poke out from the mat of dead leaves on the forest floor after a long winter, when avid mushroom collectors sit longingly at their windows and dream of the day the snow will stop falling and the scent of morels frying in butter will again fill their kitchens.
   Morels are found in mature hardwood forests. A good place to start looking, Hebb said, is where ash, maple and oak trees rise above spring flowers like jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium and trout lilies. And when? "Usually about the first of May, when you see the ramps, a little later than the trout lilies."
   That's all there is to say on the matter, really. Finding your own morels requires time, patience and a strong dose of interest. Some Internet research or a book or two would help the beginner, along with the ability to identify other plants that suggest the presence of morels.
   Perhaps most important, searchers need a sprinkling of luck. Mature hardwood forests are common. Healthy morel beds, like the one Hebb is about to reveal, are not.
   Walking along a pleasant path carved into a hillside, Hebb suddenly stops. Out of his back pocket come a handful of orange stakes.
   "Stay up there a minute," he instructs, stepping around gingerly like he's dancing, planting the orange stakes in the ground where clusters of morels hide in the brown leaves.
   "OK, now," he says, and I step down carefully. There are morels everywhere: black and buff, maybe 40 of them in all, each about three inches long and perfectly camouflaged to blend in with the crinkly carpet of leaves.
   "These mushrooms are pretty small. Later on they'll grow as much as a foot high, the big ones," he says. "That's unusual, but very usual is eight inches.
   "But they don't all get that big, the slugs go into them and start to work on them within a week. If I see the bugs start to go after them, I'll cut them." He cuts one at its stem. "Smell -- it smells like a mushroom," he said, handing it to me.
   It does indeed smell like a mushroom, faintly pungent, redolent of dirt. Morels have conical, deeply pitted fruits atop a firm, whitish stem. Tilted at an angle, they look slightly comical, like a cartoonist's depiction of a mushroom. And the sight of someone on all fours, nose to the ground, in the moist spring forest admiring a morel specimen might seem comical as well -- until you try one.
   If you become a convert, Hebb said, it's crucial to harvest morels carefully.
   "It's important not to leave a big opening where the stem is cut off, because the mycelium -- that's the parent of the mushroom -- can grow 10, 20, 50, 100 feet underground, practically invisible. They grow very big. And that's prone to infection like any living entity."
   Making a clean cut without leaving a gaping wound in the "stump" of the mushroom will help protect the underground mycelium -- which can be thought of like the bulk of an iceberg hiding beneath the surface of water -- so that the mushrooms we see aboveground will return next year. If a mushroom hunter finds a productive bed, he or she can sell the morels to fine restaurants or local food co-ops. They go for $46 a pound on eBay.
   But most people interested in hunting wild mushrooms don't do it because it's lucrative. The pleasure is in eating something that can't often be bought, and in the thrill of finding something so elusive.
   While there is certainly a danger in picking wild mushrooms, Hebb said, the main thing is to stick with easily recognizable varieties.
   "There is a false morel," he said. "But it's a really ugly thing, very asymmetric with deep whorls, not conical usually, like the regular ones, and they're just inconspicuous. If you've seen morels you'll know it's not one. You'll know it's really questionable. If something is questionable, just leave it alone."
   After admiring the morels for a while, there's little left to do but make our way back toward the house. As I'm getting in my car to make the white-knuckle trip back down Hebb's steep, switchbacked driveway, he calls to me from the porch.
   "I forgot to tell you," he said, pointing toward a commotion in the woods. "One of the best wild edibles is wild turkey!"

industrial gardening.

Here is the beginning of a perfect afternoon. It's early June and my two housemates and I have big plans. GIS maps that identify good soil locations consistently highlight the Connecticut River floodplain, and now we find ourselves living on it, renovating a rambling house with two narrow acres stretching all the way back to the river. It should be on prime agricultural soil, and we're planting a garden, not just for this year but for years to come. We're putting in blueberry bushes and nitrogen fixers and fruit-bearing trees.

“The Connecticut River valley produces the best sweet corn in the world,” my friend's mother once said, sliding another cob onto the plate of a visitor from Minnesota. He believed – ignorantly, of course – that he had tasted good corn from his home state.

But it's early June, and we don't have our garden in yet. Drawn by bright skies and the promise of dropping a palmful of seeds one by one into the earth, friends come over to help. We drink from a jar of cold water infused with lemon balm and mint. Our bare legs grow brown with dirt and warm with sun, shins covered in bug bites and scratches.

“This is the kind of garden I've always dreamed of,” Elizabeth says, pausing for a moment to lean on her pitchfork like a scene from a movie.

I'm digging holes for currant bushes when I strike I different kind of soil. At first it looks like clay, and I think of sharing it with the kids who are chasing each other in the field. I remember being eight and finding a cache of clay in the riverbank, painting it on my body and baking in the sun, then walking around with my arms held out straight in front of me, like Frankenstein peering out through raccoon eye holes.

But it's not clay. It's... what? It's heavy, that's for sure. It's very silvery, gooey. Kind of pretty, almost. It smells... I cough. It smells like turpentine. I show a shovelful of the stuff to Rich and he says it looks like roofing paint, seeping through the dirt.

We've found pieces of rebar in the soil here, rusted railroad ties, disintegrating black trash bags. Hunks of unidentifiable metal dumped long ago. This is not farmland. White River Junction, Vermont has long been a transportation hub, where factories, industry and railroads meet. The tracks still go right by this house, and the windows rattle when the trains pass at 5 a.m.

We feel like we're doing good, returning this land to itself. It's been a dumping ground for years. Birdie, our neighbor, tells stories of drug dealers living in our house, homeless people camping by the river, and others following the river trail to dump their trash into a convenient tangle of celandine, honeysuckle, sumac and weeds as they'd done for decades.

In the fall, weeds died back and fell on top of the trash. Snows and rain fell, and the dead weeds began to decompose. Then more leaves and stems and seedpods fell on top, more rain, and eventually the plants became a layer of soil on top of the junk. Year after year this happened, while the adjacent houses rose and fell; people moved in, worked and had babies then moved away or died. The bannisters in these houses are built so coffins can maneuver the tight stairwells.

This is how the years pass. The world slowly makes soil and buries itself while we scurry over it in fast-forward speed, barely skimming the surface. In my mind I see time-lapse photos of the earth slowly being buried, tombs and cities and artifacts erased like a footprint in the sand.

I need a heavy duty trashbag and a mask to dig this gooey silver mass out of the soil. It burns my nostrils. When I'm finished, sweating, the bag must weigh 40 pounds and the dirt around the hole I've dug still shimmers unnaturally. We put an X over the hole and do not plant in that area.

This house was bought cheap. There's a community of artists drawn to the old industrial buildings and low prices here, the way the late afternoon sun makes long shadows on the bricks. We hardly notice the rumbling of trains. The dealers, hopefully, have moved elsewhere. We stop locking our doors.

Not far from here, there are bucolic hills where cows and sheep graze in the hazy evening air. The land up in the hills, mostly used for farming, was somewhat spared, and I'm drawn to those places. But they'll never feel as familiar as this time-worn valley. Everyone has a river of their birth, and mine is not a rushing trout-filled beauty tumbling down from the Rocky Mountains but the sluggish, brown Connecticut. Untold logs sliced from the northern forest were floated down this river to be made into reams of paper at the Holyoke mills. People along the banks lived and died by the log drive every spring. Now, at the edge of the current with a defunct smokestack rising in the distance, the humid river air wafts up through reedy plants and as it hits my nose, my shoulders drop, my jaw unclenches. I never wanted to admit it, but this is home.

I grew up in this river valley. I remember kneeling in the dirt next to my mother, planting marigolds and finding pieces of pottery, old glass bottles, marbles. These treasures were half the fun of gardening. So when my perfect afternoon is interrupted by a reminder that I'm not up in the hills, where land is expensive and dreams are more easily realized, I'm not discouraged. I put on a face mask and keep digging while my friends plant organic seeds.