Farmer Thoughts: Know it & Love it

By Farmer Becca, Bottomland Farm —

When I was a child growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, I spent many weeks each summer visiting my grandmother and aunts out in the “country.” Getting there seemed like an epic journey: the further we traveled north along the four-lane highway, the quicker the stores and houses melted away into pastures and forests. In reality, this “epic journey” was only about 20 miles and half an hour long, but to someone under ten, that’s forever.

Once I was there, I had free rein of the fields and forests that were part of the property. My cousins and I would play with matchbox cars in the creek or venture to the “big rocks” and see who could climb them first (I sometimes wonder how big these rocks would actually be if I were to visit them now). We poked and prodded the leaf litter, looking for salamanders, and flipped countless rocks in the creek, hoping to find the fascinating creatures that lived underneath.

We had the freedom to know the land, and, in doing so, fell in love with it. The tiny creek, the freshly cut hayfields, and the black raspberry brambles are all where the evolution of farmer Becca began.

This past week, despite the childhood desire to blow off everything and look for salamanders, I spent countless hours in a mad dash trying to get onions in the ground, move meat chickens out to pasture, collect eggs, and start seeds.

But then Friday rolled around, and along with it, a visit from my eight year old nephew, who had the day off from school and really wanted to catch some frogs. And how could I say no to that? 

We spent the afternoon walking from one small pond to the next, looking for frogs and bugs and salamanders and all the aquatic creatures that call these vernal pools home. I was skirting the edge of the ponds, while my nephew was a few feet into the middle, just millimeters away from filling up his boots with the murky water.

He caught a few frogs at these smaller pools, but the real treat was when we visited our larger farm pond and found dozens of Eastern Newts swimming about and laying eggs. I pulled the jellied egg mass out of the water to take a closer look and could see the shape of tiny newt tadpoles, complete with gills, only hours from emerging.

We put them back and poked around a little bit longer, with no particular mission in mind. When it was time to go, he left with bits of an old paper wasp nest in his pocket, a beaver-chewed log under his arm, and some newt eggs in a bucket of pond water to take home. 

So this past Friday, the onions didn’t get planted and the seeds didn’t get started, but instead, we spent the afternoon getting to know this landscape a little bit better. Perhaps it was the start of another farmer’s evolution, or perhaps not. But at the very least, it’s the start of the evolution of someone who will always take care of the world around them because now he knows it and loves it a little bit more.

(Bottomland Farm, located in Berkshire, N.Y., can be contacted via email at farmer@bottomlandfarm.com.)