Essex Farm: Muddy-Sweet

Mark Kimball (healing) in a field at Essex Farm (Credit: Kristin Kimball)

Enjoy this Essex Farm Note from Kristin Kimball at Essex Farm, in Essex, NY!

Can you feel the sap rising in the trees? It’s the source of that hopeful itch that makes you want to pull on your mud boots and dance in puddles. Most years, this energy goes to good use, as we stomp snowshoe trails in the woods, and collect the heavy buckets of sap. This year, with no sugaring, it is a frustrated joy. The animals seem to feel it too, cooped up in the barn. Yesterday, Jane and Miranda and I went out to the barn to watch David Goldwasser drain the abscessed hematoma on Juniper’s side. (This sort of thing is Jane’s favorite farm work. Despite the heavy and penetrating smell of infection she got in close and watched David with grown-up stillness.)

Gem the orphaned lamb followed us into the barn, and the eight yearling heifers, who have yet to meet any sheep, stared at him through their gate with their heads low, a new creature, a new smell, an alien. They are penned in the northwest quarter of the barn and they used Gem as an excuse for a contained stampede. They galloped the length of their enclosure, bucking, executed synchronized sliding turns, and galloped back. I bet they dream of grass and sun, and a pasture big enough for all the life in their gangly limbs… (Continue reading Kristin Kimball’s Essex Farm Note.)

About Essex Farm

In 2004 Mark and Kristin Kimball founded Essex Farm in Essex, NY. It was the first full-diet CSA farm formed (as far as they know)! Kristin wrote her memoir, The Dirty Life, chronicling her transition from city girl to farm wife and the first year of life at Essex Farm. Since then Kristin continues to chronicle life on the farm on her blog, which we give you snippets of here on the Essex on Lake Champlain Blog.