Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"Most country dwellers in New England sooner or later think about doing a little maple sugaring. About nine-tenths of them never actually get around to it." – Noel Perrin, from First Person Rural










One of the biggest differences between a wannabe farmer and the true backyard homesteader is, well, the farming part of it. When the magic landscaping wand comes along that within three weeks turns my tiny city corner plot into the magnificent spread of the ideal homesteader plot, all quartered and halved and fenced and elevated and chickened and permacultured, I for one would be the first to purchase it from Amazon. Furthermore, how, in modern times, do we get to such an evolved plot starting from scratch? One of my favorite books in the world is A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle, the very book that sort of catapulted what had been (before Europe turned more sour on Americans) a new expat culture, in this case into the south of France. Mayle and his wife decide its time to escape the glum gray skies of London and head to wine country, buy an old country house in the Luberon, and, without necessarily initially seeking them out, meet the neighbors, sometimes head on. The book is all charm. Mayle and his wife play the English speaking stooges to some degree and take French rural advice whether they want it or not. The point of these wonderful little narratives that Mayle creates is that, in the end, they learn to farm, cultivate, drink wine, play boules, and otherwise just live like Frenchmen and Frenchwomen by modeling....they had some step by step assistance, albeit sometimes unwilling. The modern it seems, on the other hand, has books and classes.  We've slowly but surely severed our connection with the rural and now spend our time trying to recreate it from the ashes of something that is lurking in us but its hard to get our hands on. And so we have these wonderful new folk schools that teach beads and metalworking; we have permaculture guild that shows us how to commonsensical contour our property for water flow and edibility; we have kits coming out of our ears for preserving, canning, beering and wining. Quite odd to consider all of the stuff we want to learn that might have been taken for granted two hundred years ago – in an age when we want to think we are all forward thinkers, what is closer to the truth is that we are constantly sending our lines backward, maybe not to the mindsets but certainly to the skillsets and certainly to how we used to experience time.  And so I look at the process of making wine. Only two pages in the homesteader book, so must not be too overwhelming. Until the instructions begin to talk about sanitation, bleaches, tablets, wine casks, tubes, bottles, corks, cracked bottles, cracked corks and then six months of waiting for the maybe, all the while the other wine cellar stocked with the guaranteed good stuff. I suspect the backyard homesteader has to put him or herself on a strict sort of assignment basis with self. How's about this for creating necessity in following through with Perrin's sugaring, or the making of wine: 'you will not have another sip of wine or beer until you make your own!' I can just see now how the eyes might scan the instructions a touch more closely, as if your life depended on it.