Put a Sweater On It

Take a right at the end of Main Street in Lyons where the road forks to the mountains and you’ll see it: a catalpa tree in bloom.

But this tree isn’t covered in white, frilly flowers. This catalpa blooms with rainbow stripes and crayon blocks of color, a Dr. Seuss tree besweatered in bumpy, shaggy, wavy, nubby yarns knit around its trunk and limbs. If you look quickly enough as you round the corner, you may even spot a small bear flying a kite from her variegated perch.

Julie’s Little Lyons Bear

What you’re seeing is a “yarnbombing,” a community’s collaborative endeavor to bring knit art to an unadorned corner of their world. Our sweater tree was the inspiration of Sandra DeVries, a Dutch artist now living in British Columbia. Following projects she’s designed in BC, our tree is her first international yarnbombing effort.

Artist Sandra DeVries

A grant from the Lyons Arts and Humanities Council provided yarn and a stipend for Sandra’s creative management and overall design. Sandra knit the blanket-sized piece for the trunk and other interstitial pieces, while Sandra’s friend, the Dutch artist Jakob Leeuwenburgh, a Lyons resident and Stonebridge member, organized knitters here to create individual pieces in specific sizes matched to a limb or branch of the tree. Each knitter had full artistic license over her swatch, using yarn (or, in one case, recycled sweaters) of her choice.

Jakob directs the placement of each piece from Sandra’s design

My piece was 28 x 70 and wrapped the crux of the tree where two large limbs emerge from the trunk. 28 x 70 centimeters, that is, something I figured out after I’d knit 28 inches and wondered whether I was making an afghan. Then I remembered that Sandra and Jakob are Dutch and checked with a friend about the measurements. Centimeters went much more quickly.

Sandy’s swatch before it went on the tree

I chose green eyelash and pom pom yarns from the grant yarns and added my own purple from leftover skeins. To make the yarn go further and the knitting go faster, Jen taught me the drop stitch (wrapping the yarn twice around the needle before making a knit stitch but only picking up one loop of it in the next row, “dropping” it from the needle in a larger, more open weave), perfect on size 13 needles for eyelash yarn that benefits from a looser stitch. In green, that portion of my swatch looks like grass growing in the trunk of the tree.

My grassy swatch to the left of Jen’s fancy yarn collage

Last Friday, all the knitters met to assemble the tree’s sweater. Following Sandra’s diagram, we stitched our swatches in place around the tree and then attached them to each other to create a finished, seemingly seamless piece that looks like a many-fingered glove. Because the trees are slow to leaf out this cool spring, we had an easy time crawling up in the tree to fit the upper branches.

Jen sewing her multi-patterned piece to the tree. You can follow her work at songknitter.blogspot.com

In my knitting, I always think of myself as a color person, but, in fact, I love the textures of yarn just as much. As I started whip-stitching my swatch to the tree, I noticed how the dual texture of tree bark and yarn wool beneath my fingers was doubly stimulating and pleasurable to the touch. Yarnbombing a tree, I decided, would be perfect for children, introducing them to a craft and a natural object, synergizing the values of making something by hand and tending the environment in a way that highlights its beauty and function.

Many hands make light work

As a community endeavor, yarnbombing combines individual artistic vision and skill with collaborative design and implementation. It unites a group of people with a common goal while allowing for personal expression. Sandra DeVries’ artistry helped us see the tree in a new way, but we each contributed our own ideas to the larger creation.

The group assembles the tree outside the Lyons Fork restaurant

Undoubtedly, as with any public art, not everyone will enjoy or approve of yarnbombing a tree, so another aspect of this project’s beauty is its organic nature. Soon a bright green canopy of leaves will integrate the colorful trunk and limbs. As the tree grows and meets the elements, the yarn will fade and fray. Perhaps birds will make their homes in the tree’s branches, unraveling a thread or two for their nests. Eventually, the pieces will blow away or be removed when it gets too bedraggled for public viewing. We’ll see. For now, the tree will get more attention than it ever has before and after its sweater is gone, we’ll remember our tree as the synthesis of art and nature.

 

A Turn to Spring

No deep thoughts today, and no time to compose them if I did. Instead, a few pictures to document the farm’s turn from a long winter to a slow spring. With opening day this Saturday, we’re happy to see rain instead of snow. Thunder’s rolling as I write. Soon, raindrops will fall.

Six days ago, our yard was covered in snow.

Today, a freshly tilled field awaits planting.

The wild plums are beginning to bud. Nothing smells like spring as wild plum blossoms along the ditches.

We lost many of our daffodils to snow; the more colorful varieties bloom later and survived.

A peony unfurls like a tropical flower.

A certain sign of spring is a greenhouse full of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants.

The snow gone, John mowed the yard this morning with my Grandpa Short’s push mower.

And now, the rain begins.

 

New Home for an Old Granary

Out on the prairie, east of Stonebridge where our highway meets the interstate, a granary sat empty for years. Granaries are structures for storing grain, in this case a wooden building once filled perhaps with wheat through a door in the roof. Where I’m from in North Dakota, “granary” is pronounced “grainery,” but there “threshing” is called “thrashing” and a “creek” is a “crick” too. I prefer the older pronunciation, with “an” like “grand”; it lends elegance to the building’s simple construction and mundane use. Today grain elevators have replaced farm granaries but many still dot the countryside in this part of the country. You may have passed one without even noticing.

At Stonebridge, we like making old buildings useful for our needs as a small commuinity farm today. After renovating the few built here a century ago—the chickenhouse turned guesthouse, the hog barn turned community room, the farmhouse refurbished, the barn repaired—we were looking for another old building to restore. We wanted sleeping quarters for friends to visit and writers to retreat, so we asked our friend and scavenger extraordinaire Jon to keep an eye out for us.

On one of his jaunts out east, he found the granary on an abandoned farm sold for development that hadn’t yet reached the eastern edge of its forty acres. The houses are coming its way, though, and we thought we might as well move the granary to our farm than let it be bulldozed for subdivision sprawl. Jon found the owners living down the road and asked their permission to take the granary to a new home at Stonebridge. They’d bought that old farm at the edge of the highway a couple decades ago to try their hand at farming and raising hogs. But as the edge of the city moved closer, they were ready to sell when the right offer came through.

The granary sat empty for years, but it isn’t the worse for wear. The building houses three rooms: a center room for storing grain; a small side area with a ladder for checking the grain at the top of a wall that doesn’t quite reach the ceiling; and a larger storage room on the other side with a chute near the floor on the inside wall for filling grain bags.

Besides the door in the roof through which grain could be poured into the center room, the building has an outside door to the storage room and a small door into the space with the ladder. Despite sitting unused for years, the building is pretty clean. We found some grain sacks and a wooden box, a little dust, and some old lumber. A few mice have undoubtedly made their home inside but no one has bothered the building, graffitied the walls, or been up to mischief there as far as we can tell.

Moving an old building requires a lot of effort. Jon, Joe, and Peter spent hours on cold, windy days in February and March removing the roof shakes and rafters so that the building would be low enough to fit under wires as it came down the highway on a flatbed trailer. While they were at it, they took down 200 feet of old board fence as well, using some of the pieces to panel the outside of the “bluehouse” they reconstructed this winter for growing this spring’s lettuces and next year’s winter greens. They’ll use the lumber to rebuild the granary on its new site at the edge of our meadow too. You can’t buy wood like that anymore, fine-grained and strong without chemical toxins, sounder and safer than the lumber euphemistically called “pressure-treated” today. A couple of the boards may even become a guitar someday.

Roof and beams removed, the granary left its original home last week to make its way down Highway 66 toward the foothills for its new life at Stonebridge Farm. The team jacked the building up on old beams four feet high to allow clearance for the 30-foot-long trailer.

The young man we hired to move it down the highway slipped the trailer underneath and belted the building from top to bottom, making sure each chain or buckle fit snugly around the frame. It was as wide as legally possible without requiring a special permit and, we would soon find, as wide as would fit through the space between buildings on the road at our farm. With the old building secured to the trailer, John and Jon loaded the extra beams into their trucks for lowering the granary at its new Stonebridge site. And then, we were ready to chivary down the highway.

Which didn’t take long. A granary on the back didn’t slow that truck down. I stopped for a picture of it coming west towards me on the highway but had to jump back in the car and speed to pass in the only multi-lane stretch so that I could catch it turning onto the farm. I don’t think anyone gave the granary a second thought, if they noticed it at all. Just an old wooden building coming down the road, not a piece of history moving from times past to a new home going forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our young trucker started driving machinery on his family’s farm at age nine but had never moved a building like this before. Nor had he navigated his trailer through such a narrow path as between our barn, community room, and glass greenhouse. He even stopped a couple times to take pictures of how tight it all fit, but by pulling a few fence posts and turning up the corner of a metal roof just in case, he got granary and trailer through without a scratch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We all breathed a sigh of relief when he pulled the trailer out into the wide meadow, hauling the granary as close as he could to its future site. The crew stacked timbers underneath onto which the building could be set as the trailer moved out and then they jacked the whole thing down onto longer beams newly milled for the foundation. As soon as we can, we’ll move it with the tractor to its proper angle facing the meadow.

The granary doesn’t look like much right now without a roof or proper windows or doors. In time, we’ll clear it out, hose it down inside and out, rebuild the roof, remove the low wall, cut another outer door, add some windows and a porch, and paint it white like it used to be. I think it will be prove a quiet space for writers and friends to relax and work and listen to the birds in the old willows along the ditch at the edge of the meadow. No one will suspect that it didn’t begin its life at Stonebridge, although they might wonder why there’s a door in the roof. We’ll leave that, evidence of its former purpose, to remind us how close we once lived to our food.

 

 

 

Keeping a Farm a Farm

I spotted one again last week, a subdivision with “farm” in its name. Land that used to grow food is now covered with beige houses. I don’t know whether to take offense at the irony of a housing development named after a farm or take comfort that the name evokes its farming past. Once farmland is developed, it won’t be farmed again. That loss affects all of us, not only in the lack of food raised locally, but in the demise of natural habitats for plants and animals. Harder to measure is the degradation of the human spirit as the natural world vanishes from our collective imagination.

The development pressure in our part of the Front Range is intense. More people moving to the area means more homes, more strip malls, more big box stores, more light industrial, and more businesses to assure jobs for the people who move here. And that kind of growth takes land.

At the same time, farming today is a shaky enterprise at best. Costs are going up, the weather is less predictable, yet the physical labor required to farm is still demanding. I don’t know what the figures are in Boulder County, but farmland along the Hwy 66 corridor where we live is disappearing. Older farmers have counted on selling their land to pay for their retirement and who can blame them? But it’s terrible that farms are rarely sold as farms anymore.

At least in Boulder, the county itself is interested in preserving farms and has purchased thousands of acres as agricultural open space. We disagree with the county over the use of GMO crops on that land, but we are glad the county is far-sighted enough to create a new “rural preservation” designation under which our farm now falls.  That means the land can’t be developed for industrial or commercial purposes, at least for the next 10 years and hopefully beyond.

John and I are still in our fifties and plan to farm for many years to come. But we are starting to take steps to ensure that Stonebridge Farm remains a real farm—not a housing development called “Stonebridge Farm.” We’re working with our local officials to foresee and guarantee options down the road. And we have a grandchild on the way who may—we hope–want to farm some day. Still, we know that we are the ones who have to preserve Stonebridge now if the farm is to survive. It’s sad to think we won’t be here forever, but even sadder would be the loss of this land to asphalt and concrete.

In the meantime, we’re farming. Our amazing crew transplanted 10,000+ baby alliums—leeks and onions the size of a blade of grass—last Saturday. That’s the first big push for the farm.

Over the next two Saturdays, we’ll plant thousands of brassicas—cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower—now hardening off in the cold frame. That’s the second.

The third—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and basil–won’t come until June 1^st or so when the soil warms and all chance of frost is past. Last week John started the peppers and eggplant in the greenhouse and today we seeded 18 heirloom varieties of tomatoes, including Stonebridge’s favorites—Brandywine and Tiffen Mennonite. As always, we’re trying a couple new varieties, Black Prince to complement Cherokee Purple and Mr. Fumo, a paste tomato that earned raves with Boulder’s culinary gardeners last year.

Every spring for the last 21 years, we’ve started seeds in the greenhouse and transplanted them into the fields. With the help of our wonderful friends, we’ve watered and weeded and waited and harvested. And with the support of a loyal community that understands the importance of local agriculture, we make it through another season.  Preservation requires actions taken each day, one after the other. Only that kind of care and commitment will keep Stonebridge from becoming another subdivision with “farm” in its name.

Newly planted allium field in the shadow of the Two Guides, Longs and Meeker peaks. We think this is worth preserving.

 

My 53rd in the Rockies

Good advice for a 53rd birthday

Robin Chocolates from Longmont are a great start to more wagging!

Long's Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park

Cleaning up pine beetle kill along the road

Destination: Alberta Falls

Snowy trail--beautiful day

An Oregon hiker in shorts

A small tree dead from pine beetle kill

Cliff at the lower end of Alberta Falls

Before the wind really picked up

Most of the falls were under snow and ice but we could hear the stream as we hiked

Chocolate turtles in their natural environment

A pine squirrel wants to join us for lunch but is told "No feeding the wildlife!"

Same goes for the gray jay

The blue of the Stellar's Jay is startling in the subalpine forest

We were glad to see snow in the mountains; we haven't had any on the Front Range this month, which is quite unusual and a little ominous

Snow trail-packed across a bridge

Bear Lake is just above Alberta Falls

Despite the snow, the winter's been warm enough to warrant this sign--which a teenager had to test for herself

The view from Bear Lake of Hallett Peak on the left and Flattop mountain on the right.

A favorite of the locals near the YMCA camp and a delicious place for a birthday dinner

Heading through Estes on our way home, a quiet morning before the tourists head back up in a month or so.

. . . and get to the mountains when you can!

 

Taos Portrait Found

I’ve been looking for this picture for years. I knew that I had stuck it in a book at some point in my various moves, but I didn’t know which book, although I’d searched through many. The picture was taken in Taos and I knew the book had something to do with that region, so occasionally I’d think I’d remembered the title and searched through the pages of that book. For fifteen years, I hadn’t been right.

And then, when I wasn’t looking for this photo at all, I found it, tucked not inside a book but between two books by Linda Hogan, one of my favorite authors. Recently I’ve been purging my book collection to make room on my shelves for books brought home from my office and for artifacts I’d like to look at from time to time. I was rearranging books by Native American authors when I picked up Hogan’s Dwellings, a book I use in teaching, to place it with Hogan’s other works on the shelf—and there was the envelope between two of her novels. I knew immediately that the picture was there, even though I had forgotten that I’d put it in the envelope at all with others from that trip.

It’s not surprising to me now that the picture was with Hogan’s works. Not only is she a favorite author of mine—I’ve taught her novel Solar Storms in my coming-of-age in women’s lit course for years—but she even writes about losing and finding objects in an essay in Dwellings called “The Feathers.” Here she details discovering that her granddaughter’s umbilical cord was missing from the black pot where it was kept. She searched her entire house, looking several times in a cedar box where she kept other important items, but the cord wasn’t there. After performing a ceremony to call the cord back, she returned to look again in the box, only to find that the feather she kept there was now missing too. Getting down on her hands and knees to look for the feather, she found it pointing toward the umbilical cord on the floor she had already searched.

So here’s the picture, found again, of me in 1996 standing in my blanket coat in front of the adobe church in the Old Taos plaza. Over the last fifteen years, I had remembered the picture differently: in my remembered picture, I could see the colors of the coat (navy, purple, and tan) as my body cast a long shadow across the adobe, and the look on my face wasn’t so severe. I had made the picture in my mind more vivid and stylized than the picture actually was. Call it the O’Keefe effect.

Even though the photograph doesn’t quite live up to my memory of it, I still like this picture of me. This was my first—and for now, only—trip to Taos and Santa Fe, and I loved the area, especially the church I’m standing against. I had never been that close to something that old, that sacred, built out of the earth itself as if it had grown there from the very mud of which it was created. I felt—as the picture depicts—very small standing against the back of the church but safe at the same time, perhaps because the wall seemed so solid and so warm on that early spring day. I’m not casting a shadow because, in the photo, I am the shadow, the only darkness against the light of the adobe, absorbing rather than reflecting the power of that place. I imagined why artists like O’Keefe had been so drawn to the Southwest—the textures, the heat, and the severity of light that draws our eyes to the shadows in relief like the pattern of a Hopi design.

When this picture was taken, I was just starting my career at the university and was about to buy the home where I would raise my daughter. I wasn’t young, but I was starting out once again on a new phase of my life. Now, fifteen years later, that career is finished, my daughter is raised, the home sold, and I’m once again facing new and exciting changes in my life.

This picture reminds me that we sometimes find ourselves in unexpected places that we don’t even realize we’ll remember years hence. Sometimes our days seem so settled, so sedentary or even senseless, that only looking back across our lives tracks how far we’ve come. Perhaps I’ve searched for this picture from time to time because I needed that reminder. Perhaps I’ve found it now because I’m ready for another change.

 

Natural Neighbors

As a photographer, sometimes I worry about crossing the line. I don’t believe the whole world is my subject or that it’s my right to shoot photographs of everything in front of my camera. I try to respect other people’s privacy, even in public places.

But I also find myself unable to resist a kind of rationalization to get a shot I like. For example, if I take pictures of strangers without their permission, I try to shoot their faces in positions that aren’t recognizable, like from the side or behind. I know I feel funny about people using my face—my image—without my permission and I appreciate the photographers I know who ask before shooting. Sometimes, though, asking permission isn’t possible so I have to evaluate what I’m actually “taking” with each shot. What I don’t want to do is take away someone’s dignity or agency. My hesitancy limits the kinds of photos I shoot but also, I like to think, makes me more inventive in the images I create.

I’m also careful about images of other living creatures but in a different way. I don’t hesitate for privacy reasons as I do with humans, but I don’t want to compromise other beings’ habitats or safety. The issue here is my presence, more than my camera and the images I make.

I often say that a farm is a cultivated space on a continuum between wilderness (at least the little bit left of it) and human inhabited areas thought of as “civilization” or urbanization. As an intermediary between these types of spaces, cultivation means not only that the natural world is used in an agricultural way but also that an attempt is made to work in collaboration with the natural systems found there. In cultivated spaces, humans and animals must co-exist, sometimes in managed ways, such as livestock, sometimes as neighbors. And as with human neighbors, sometimes the co-existence isn’t easy, such as when wildlife damage crops.

Here at Stonebridge, we try for neighborly co-existence with the other living creatures who live or travel through this land. We try to take the precautions necessary to protect our crops or our beehives or our chickens from creatures who are natural predators of what we’re raising here. We don’t blame bears for wanting to devour our beehives but we will put up an electric fence to protect the bees—and our honey.

This time of year, some of our natural neighbors are busy raising their babies in nests all over the farm. We hang a few birdhouses around, but we don’t usually get to choose where birds make their homes. Right now, we’ve got starlings nesting in one wall of our Sunflower Community room and wrens nesting in another. They seem to trust that we won’t disturb them as they fly in and out with food for the babies that we can hear chirping in the walls and we trust that the birds will leave as soon as they are able.

The most neighborly birds on the farm are the robins because they build their nests right in the midst of our work, in places we could never imagine nest-worthy, even precarious places that wouldn’t seem safe from our human perspective. I like to think that robins are trusting rather than vacuous but maybe the difference doesn’t matter. Either way, we’ve been entertained by robins’ nesting habits for many years.

The most amazing nest was built several years ago next to the outer wall of the Sunflower Room. John had noticed a flicker trying to drill a hole in the wood so he’d propped the tip of a pushbroom on the edge of a bucket on top of an old desk chair so that the broom’s long bristled end covered the hole. Stopped the flicker, all right, but a robin thought that bristled ledge would make a perfect nesting place.

We couldn’t believe that the nest could balance on that broom, itself so precariously crutched on the bucket. We figured the mud must stucco the nest onto the wall, lending support to the entire nesting structure. But once the babies had fledged and the family flown away, we took down the nest and could see that nothing but the grace of exquisite balance kept that nest in place.

This year a robin has built a nest right on top of a tool shelf—right, in fact, on top of the tools. The shelf is on the side of a tool hut built by a friend from corrugated metal with an old satellite dish for the roof. (It’s the sibling of another disk-roofed building in which we dry herbs and store wood). We have to get tools from the hut so we have to disturb the robin’s nesting. Before the baby birds were hatched, the mother would fly to another branch when we’d come close, but now she’ll just sit immobile on the nest in the hope that we won’t notice her.

Before the fledglings hatched, I wanted to see what was in the nest, but since I’m not tall enough to peer into it, I took my camera and held it up over the nest to shoot. I had to count on my shortest-range lens focusing itself and took many pictures to get a few I like. The photos showed three blue eggs of a color seen only in turquoise stones or the ocean, a rare color in nature that seems odd for eggs. Why such a vibrant color for something that must be protected from predators? I’m sure naturalists have posited a theory about that one.

But should I have taken those photographs at all? The mother bird wasn’t happy with me, I know, because she sat on a nearby branch and trilled her scolding. I worried that those few minutes off the nest might cool the eggs or make them more vulnerable to breaking. I’m not even sure yet whether all of them have hatched because I haven’t used my camera to sneak shots of the babies like I did of the eggs. I don’t want to scare them by getting too close but I will try to get their picture with my longest telephoto lens once their little heads pop up over the rim of the nest.

I’m just trying to be neighborly here, not too nosy but curious enough to care. Perhaps that’s a good rule for photography too.