Finally we have closed on the new home and farm. This took a lot longer than I thought it should or would but we have done it and now we have set to work on getting the home ready for us to move in.

Today, Lisa and I went down to the farm to do some detail cleaning and general yard keep up. In the long delay between when we thought the closing would occur and when it actually did the lawn had grown into a rather desperate length of shag and I knew that mowing the 3 or so exposed acres would be one of my first duties upon ownership.

The sellers of this property were kind enough to include the commercial John Deere stand/walk behind mower in the transfer of the house. I had never used one of these things before, it is huge, I was afraid. But determined to be bigger than the new tasks that will confront me with this land I was ready to learn and mow away. Thanks be to You Tube for having an educational video for using the exact model mower that I now had.

I have always hated mowing. My whole life it has been something that I abhor. The gas and oil, the loud, always breaking down machine, the noise, the numb vibration hands, the clumps of matted sickly grass, the allergies, the smell, the bother. When Lisa and I moved into our Starr Hill home in downtown Charlottesville I was glad to be gifted a rotary push mower from one of our neighbors. This was different, no gas or noise no stinking matted grass. Of course our yard was a 20 by 20 plot and easy to mow without power machines. After years of living in Starr Hill and sculpting our back yard into a pleasant flow of garden, flower beds and neat patch of grass I was doing all of the yard work by hand, mowing with my small rotary and edging with a pair of garden shears.

Today I mowed 3 acres with a loud, vibrating, helicopter sounding machine. I had to take 3 breaks, it was a beast. When I got home and began musing on the experience I remembered how Robert Frost spoke often of mowing. He was fond of the process as a quite interaction with the land. I looked up ‘A tuft of Flowers’ one of my favorite poems and read about his fondness for mowing and the harmony of men working the land and then I found this one by Frost:

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

So that was it, no machines, just the soft whisper of the scythe. Perhaps someone will make the buzz and whir of the mechanized mower poetic one day but it will not be a poetics that I kin to.

Our plans for this Farm are to harmonize our husbandry with the specific requirements of this particular land. We have a lot to learn and a lot of work to do and we hope to get as many suggestions and points of advice from the vast amount of small farmers in this area who have gone before us and who have already solved many of the problems.

My goal is for the total symbiotic farm interrelationship. I am not sure if that’s the way to say that but you get the idea. The goal is to faze out the mower in lieu of sheep and goat, duck and rabbit and chicken. I will still need to mow and edge I suppose but I have already eyed the scythe for sale over at Martin Hardware, the big one with the large blade and the small one for detail work. I am still young, I have the energy to start this process and hell, Frost did it and he was no burly day laborer.

It will be a season or so until I can get the softer process going so until then its pull the cord and hold on tight. The next process will be to determine how best to plow.