Hebron Hollow Farm
In July 2005, we moved to a farm, not because it was a farm, but because the farmhouse and buildings were sitting on 96 of the most beautiful acres we had ever seen. There are rippling hay fields, a towering pine forest, a serpentine stream, two ponds, and wide-angle views of Vermont’s Green Mountains. There are deer, turkey, woodchucks, rabbits, and all manner of birds and rodents and bugs. There were also a lot of run-down barns, and an 1840s homestead in which not one room was habitable.
Geoff and I imagined fixing up the house. We did not imagine that, one by one, our children would become farmers. We did not imagine that, one by one, the barns would prove crucial to our kids’ ongoing operation. We did not imagine that helping our kids realize their dreams would propel us along in the direction of our own. It is a story I tell in Family Planting.
At current count, we have a rooster, two cats, two working steers, two milking cows, three heifers, eleven laying hens, and a horse named Marvin. Our oldest three children, Jordan, Jessica, and Kyra, do the majority of the outdoor chores, including milking the two cows. Geoff and I wash buckets and process milk; buy grain, help with fencing, and pay the vet bills. We all tend the garden.
Every day offers an adventure, whether it is a hoof landing in the milk bucket, a calf ducking under the fence, or two barn swallow chicks appearing on the manure pile, blown out of their nest by a nighttime storm. This morning Kyra added worm-retrieval to her list of chores.
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