1 16 2021 (starting to edit again. Written for the Facebook 'Hollis homestead community' )
always hard to get started..
Hi, I'm Louise Wakefield. I grew up in Hollis, on the farm I own now with my husband. We're on Deerwander, near Stony Brook, 'strategically located between ledge and swamp'. Looking at the soil survey, there are actually 11 different soil types here on the farm, only a few particularly fertile 'as is'.
When I was younger, my parents didn't keep animals, nor garden.
I left the state in 1967, finished HS in Ct, undergraduate degree in NY, then graduate work in Colo. I thought I had my course in life figured out- silly me.. Turns out I didn't want a life of research in academia after all- and in 1979 ended up going to WV with my first husband instead.
I had basically come to grips with the fact that if the s**t hit the fan in Denver, supply lines cut and all that, it would be a lot of people starving and a long walk out. I didn't want that. Jimmy Carter was president then..
So, wala, off to Ritchie Co. WV and a very different lifestyle. I didn't know then that I was on the tail-end of what they later termed the 'back to the land' movement.
We built an underground house, I learned to weave, keep bees and cattle, milk, make cheese, butcher, garden, build fences that were anything BUT tight, spent a while as an apprentice midwife.. many many other things.
Lots of miscarriages- but I did have one living child (and now I have an 8-year old grand-daughter).
Life, as had happened before, took another hard left when my first husband left (for the last time)- and on due reflection, in 1989, I went to nursing school..
At the end of that my son and I came back 'home' to Maine. ( got to admit, there's something about it..)
I'd had to sell my cattle in WV and actually lasted 8 years before I got more in 1996. By then my mom had died and I had been fortunate enough to buy her house and land.
So I combined a blended family with emergency room nursing- and farming.
Or- I thought it was farming. I said for years 'I run a farm'- before I realized it is more accurate to say- 'I participate in an ecosystem'. It is as if the biosphere is my working partner, and it is an all-encompassing relationship.
The herd has waxed and waned- the most cows I ever milked at one time here in Maine was 5, and that year I made close to 300# of cheese. Believe me, I've cut back..
It was when my son was back from college and had 2 festivals back to back (vending, food, espresso and filafels at fence-side, music (WAY too loud..) kids, kids, and more kids with partying as their main (only) agenda- that my desire for self-sufficiency blended with my memories of all the self- help books I'd read (Foxfire, Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living.- and then was kickstarted by my realization that I'd like to do something like a handbook for some of the things I'd learned- you know, to share with the partygoers and maybe move things along for them- (ha).
So- er- I designed and put up a website. whatitis1.net .Based on the concept of 'Learn everything you can, about everything you can' (because you never know when you'll want to know how to make a wood-fired oven, or plant grain and harvest it with a sickle, pull out a baby calf, or- or- or-.
So, uh- the website was a total non-success. It's still up.. I can honestly say that there are VERY few people who have looked at it and not- like- fallen asleep after just a bit. I'd started out with the best intentions, but my desire to talk about the farm became subsumed by my fascination with the 'Learn everything' concept- so it's full of what are probably now a lot of out-of-date or dead links on all things *I* was interested in earning, urban and rural. I would talk to my patients and ask them for their thoughts.
When I was doing a section on 'urban self-sufficiency and the homeless', one guy had a great comment. I'd said that when I was working with the American Red Cross, I was giving a class and, following the approved points in the course outline, said something about how difficult it was for people with special needs to cope with disaster. One of my attendees took extreme exception to that and said- 'look, I work with these folks. They cope with disaster EVERY DAY. They are probably way better at coping with a situation where systems break down, than you would be'.
So when I mentioned that to this patient, he came back with this. He said (more or less)- 'I've done this, and I can tell you. They say humans are predators. We aren't predators. We are scavengers'.
Just that. It stayed with me.
Another nurse friend wanted me to write up a thing on coping with drug dependency. And I did that, under the section 'self-help, substance use' etc. I just checked it, and was surprised to see I'd put in a piece I had titled either 'Drunk Driving', or 'Roadkill'. I wrote it in 1999, after a drive home from the ER on Rte 22. When I wrote it, I was in a savage rage after what I'd seen. It was an experience that was a gigantic push to join rescue. Not like' you should', but more like 'you WILL'. So I said ok, ok, I will.
See? Not. About. Farming.
Anyway, present day. Our initial garden I titled, appropriately, 'garden 1' It's now a tree, shrub, and fruit nursery, very overgrown. The gardens have proceeded from there into the next pasture, and we are supposedly up to G10. We don't do anything commercially- I'm way too disorganized for that. But we rotate crops, and animals and activities through the spots.
Record keeping is an issue. I still have to find a better way of expeditiously coding what was where and when.
I save seed. It's worth keeping in mind if you run short, with the proviso that most all crops are jammed together more than is advisable- so squash might be what it says, or it might not. Peppers probably interbred, likewise dry beans (we've got a great collection labled 'oddballs')- and corn?- well, nowadays I try keep the types separate- flint, field, dent, flour, and popcorn. And Mike keeps the sweet corn as FAR away as he can manage from all the others.
Rodents, songbirds and turkeys LOVE this place..
This was supposed to be a brief note. Oh well..
always hard to get started..
Hi, I'm Louise Wakefield. I grew up in Hollis, on the farm I own now with my husband. We're on Deerwander, near Stony Brook, 'strategically located between ledge and swamp'. Looking at the soil survey, there are actually 11 different soil types here on the farm, only a few particularly fertile 'as is'.
When I was younger, my parents didn't keep animals, nor garden.
I left the state in 1967, finished HS in Ct, undergraduate degree in NY, then graduate work in Colo. I thought I had my course in life figured out- silly me.. Turns out I didn't want a life of research in academia after all- and in 1979 ended up going to WV with my first husband instead.
I had basically come to grips with the fact that if the s**t hit the fan in Denver, supply lines cut and all that, it would be a lot of people starving and a long walk out. I didn't want that. Jimmy Carter was president then..
So, wala, off to Ritchie Co. WV and a very different lifestyle. I didn't know then that I was on the tail-end of what they later termed the 'back to the land' movement.
We built an underground house, I learned to weave, keep bees and cattle, milk, make cheese, butcher, garden, build fences that were anything BUT tight, spent a while as an apprentice midwife.. many many other things.
Lots of miscarriages- but I did have one living child (and now I have an 8-year old grand-daughter).
Life, as had happened before, took another hard left when my first husband left (for the last time)- and on due reflection, in 1989, I went to nursing school..
At the end of that my son and I came back 'home' to Maine. ( got to admit, there's something about it..)
I'd had to sell my cattle in WV and actually lasted 8 years before I got more in 1996. By then my mom had died and I had been fortunate enough to buy her house and land.
So I combined a blended family with emergency room nursing- and farming.
Or- I thought it was farming. I said for years 'I run a farm'- before I realized it is more accurate to say- 'I participate in an ecosystem'. It is as if the biosphere is my working partner, and it is an all-encompassing relationship.
The herd has waxed and waned- the most cows I ever milked at one time here in Maine was 5, and that year I made close to 300# of cheese. Believe me, I've cut back..
It was when my son was back from college and had 2 festivals back to back (vending, food, espresso and filafels at fence-side, music (WAY too loud..) kids, kids, and more kids with partying as their main (only) agenda- that my desire for self-sufficiency blended with my memories of all the self- help books I'd read (Foxfire, Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living.- and then was kickstarted by my realization that I'd like to do something like a handbook for some of the things I'd learned- you know, to share with the partygoers and maybe move things along for them- (ha).
So- er- I designed and put up a website. whatitis1.net .Based on the concept of 'Learn everything you can, about everything you can' (because you never know when you'll want to know how to make a wood-fired oven, or plant grain and harvest it with a sickle, pull out a baby calf, or- or- or-.
So, uh- the website was a total non-success. It's still up.. I can honestly say that there are VERY few people who have looked at it and not- like- fallen asleep after just a bit. I'd started out with the best intentions, but my desire to talk about the farm became subsumed by my fascination with the 'Learn everything' concept- so it's full of what are probably now a lot of out-of-date or dead links on all things *I* was interested in earning, urban and rural. I would talk to my patients and ask them for their thoughts.
When I was doing a section on 'urban self-sufficiency and the homeless', one guy had a great comment. I'd said that when I was working with the American Red Cross, I was giving a class and, following the approved points in the course outline, said something about how difficult it was for people with special needs to cope with disaster. One of my attendees took extreme exception to that and said- 'look, I work with these folks. They cope with disaster EVERY DAY. They are probably way better at coping with a situation where systems break down, than you would be'.
So when I mentioned that to this patient, he came back with this. He said (more or less)- 'I've done this, and I can tell you. They say humans are predators. We aren't predators. We are scavengers'.
Just that. It stayed with me.
Another nurse friend wanted me to write up a thing on coping with drug dependency. And I did that, under the section 'self-help, substance use' etc. I just checked it, and was surprised to see I'd put in a piece I had titled either 'Drunk Driving', or 'Roadkill'. I wrote it in 1999, after a drive home from the ER on Rte 22. When I wrote it, I was in a savage rage after what I'd seen. It was an experience that was a gigantic push to join rescue. Not like' you should', but more like 'you WILL'. So I said ok, ok, I will.
See? Not. About. Farming.
Anyway, present day. Our initial garden I titled, appropriately, 'garden 1' It's now a tree, shrub, and fruit nursery, very overgrown. The gardens have proceeded from there into the next pasture, and we are supposedly up to G10. We don't do anything commercially- I'm way too disorganized for that. But we rotate crops, and animals and activities through the spots.
Record keeping is an issue. I still have to find a better way of expeditiously coding what was where and when.
I save seed. It's worth keeping in mind if you run short, with the proviso that most all crops are jammed together more than is advisable- so squash might be what it says, or it might not. Peppers probably interbred, likewise dry beans (we've got a great collection labled 'oddballs')- and corn?- well, nowadays I try keep the types separate- flint, field, dent, flour, and popcorn. And Mike keeps the sweet corn as FAR away as he can manage from all the others.
Rodents, songbirds and turkeys LOVE this place..
This was supposed to be a brief note. Oh well..