SHF Grounds
A year ago, I didn’t know I’d be living at Spirit Hill Farm. I was visiting from Boston because Carolyn had invited me to fly out and stay in the guest house for a week so I could finally see her beloved property after hearing about it for years. A week away from Boston winter […]
This morning the chickens looked, well, morose. Maybe it’s all the social distancing. Maybe it was the frost. Maybe they are still incredulous over the fact that they molt and look bald just as it starts to freeze outside. Maybe they miss laying eggs during this molting season. Maybe they are still in shock over […]
According to the vegetable garden, summer’s over. The squash plants look like they got cooked, and the parsley looks like it fell asleep. Secretly, the frosting and subsequent toppling over of the garden is a big relief to me. I worked hard all spring and summer figuring out how to get plants to grow. (As […]
“This place is like a second home to us,” a guest said to me recently as he and his family were getting to leave after another weekend at Spirit Hill. I asked him what he liked best about the place, and he told me it was how it made him feel. “It’s so Zen here,” […]
What Happens When Pulitzer-Prize Photographer Anthony Suau Stays at Spirit Hill Farm? First of all, he falls in love with the chicken coop. Who wouldn’t? (One day soon it might even have a chandelier inside. The chickens are going to have to learn to say please and thank you first or at least pretend to […]
Everything was set. I even hired an extra gardener to come and rake the walkways. We’d come through the fire scare, and I wanted to thank the universe by celebrating Spirit Hill, giving it a big thank you shine. We had guests arriving Friday afternoon to celebrate a major birthday, and so I paid special […]
You need to be careful what magazines you look at when you’re a farmer-in-training. If you look at magazines that have recipes, for example, this could end up being a lot of work for you and mayhem for your poor, unsuspecting already-established plants. I was reading the Spring 2020 issue of Edible: Marin & Wine […]
I had no intention of falling in love with the chickens. I try to be a good person, but I have to tell you that I think chickens are weird. If I’m totally honest, I think I was partly scornful of them because they are my shadow selves running around freely: easily frightened, scared of […]
The edible gardens here at Spirit Hill Farm have a story and the story is this: I’m the kid in elementary school whose desk was always a mess. I tried to keep track of the plants as they went from seeds to sprouts. It mostly did not work. For a while everything was marked dill. […]
Today I pulled a weed, and a long carrot came out instead of the tangled roots I was expecting. The carrot had grown underneath the arm of a tomato plant and I only saw it because I was trimming off the lower stems as my friend had suggested. She told me it would make the […]