Himanee Gupta-Carlson, a writer and professor with SUNY Empire State College, is writing a series of articles about moving the farm she and her husband Jim Gupta-Carlson own and operate from a small piece of land in Saratoga County to a much larger parcel in Washington County. The articles reflect on the journey as well as the couple’s commitments to cultivating food security on a regional level through regenerative agricultural practices and participating in food sovereignty movements worldwide. This article — the fifth in the series — marks the first full year of living between two farms.

Suddenly, it is fall. The harvest moon — the full moon of September — rose the night after I began this writing, and the autumn equinox was approaching. My husband Jim and I marked our one-year anniversary of buying and blessing a historic 48.5 acre farm that sits on Mohawk lands amid another historic moment: the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The long days of summer came and went with epic rains and scorching heat. One result of this unusual weather — which scientists increasingly attribute to climate change — was the growth of grasses taller and thicker than I ever could have imagined. The grasses filled our garden, a sign in some ways of the soil’s fertility. We planted more than an acre of vegetable crops — broccoli, greens, garlic, onions, peppers, and tomatoes, among other crops — and left ample spaces between seedlings and rows for the plants to grow strong and produce healthy fruits. Nature filled in those areas with wild oats, clover, purslane, and other so-called weeds.

At first, the weeds were like any weeds: a nuisance that anyone who grows even a backyard garden must learn to deal with. Over time, they became the bane of my existence, tripping me up as I walked, leaving welts as they brushed against my bare arms and legs, and submerging sections of free space where we had earlier harvested lettuce, chicories, and garlic and where we had hoped to start fall crops. They blanketed our rows of vegetables and each day that I arrived at the garden to harvest I feared I would find they had snuffed all growth out.

But the weeds also proved to be beneficial: They shaded many of our vegetables from the most intense summer heat and sheltered them from the sudden torrents of rainfall our area experienced. They held the soil in place amid flash flood warnings, and provided areas for the beetles, snails, and cabbage moths to feed on. As protectors and as deterrents, they seemed to help our vegetables grow strong and healthy. As I made attempts to pull the tall grasses out, I would find such plants as okra, sweet frying peppers, and cauliflower that I knew Jim had sown but I thought we had lost to the deluge of weeds. They would emerge from the grasses, blinking in a way that only plants can, happy to see sunlight and asking me what took me so long to find them.

Wholesome Harvests

Every day that I go out into the fields to work, I thank Nature for gifting us with abundance. I try to model my expressions of gratitude on the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving blessing but usually end up simply folding my hands in a namaste, looking up at the sky, and saying “thank you for all this,” under my breath. Over the summer, I have been picking greens, peppers, garlic, onions, and tomatoes in quantities like I never have had before. And in the generous motherly spirit of filling one with food, Nature’s response has been to give us even more. With overflowing bins and an overworked body, I have discovered that I cannot keep up with Nature. I do not have the time or energy to harvest it all, let alone the space to store it.

Jim reminds me that it is okay to let some of it go. And so I leave what I cannot collect behind, reasoning that the birds and bugs can have their share. I also have stopped getting upset when some of the plants go to seed..

We ate lightly in the summer’s heat, but as cooler nights have returned, we are enjoying sumptuous meals from the garden. Our cooking facilities are scarce because we are still living between two farms, but my favorite evenings are when Jim lights the grill to roast some vegetables and cook one of our chickens or some goat chops. I use an electric skillet plugged into an outdoor outlet to steam collard greens, chard, or kale, and saute some eggplant or zucchini with onions and garlic. The meals are simple, flavorful, and packed with nutrition.

I also did my best throughout the summer to donate some of our harvest to local food pantries. To my frustration, however, I found that the time it took to harvest and prepare goods for market left me with little availability to do extra. In the past, we had always had plenty of extra items which we could easily donate after our markets. This summer, with threats of COVID-19 still rampant and shortages in food supply chains continuing, demand for fresh local foods at our farmers markets was higher than ever. Little was left at the end.

The markets energize me. While I often do go to the Saturday and Sunday markets on three or four hours of sleep, the conviviality of the markets quickly wakes me up. Jim and I chat and joke with the vendors around me as we sip coffee and set up our booth. When customers arrive, I smile and say “thank you” as they express delight in the beauty of our booth. As our sales figures have climbed, I have felt elated. We are not in this to make a lot of money, but after seven years of market farming it feels good to be doing well. Bill Elsworth, a longtime farmer who produces our animal feed, once told us that a farmer’s goal was not to make a profit but to break even. I won’t know until I tally the year’s expenses, but month by month it does seem that we are at least achieving the farmer’s goal.

Adapting to ‘Home’

Despite the success our farming efforts enjoyed this past year, calling the new farm home has been hard to get used to, partly because it is not entirely my home yet.

Jim lives on the land, as he has for nearly a year, staying in the rustic and increasingly crowded two-room living space he and some friends built in the barn. This space which we call the barndominium is one wall and a door separated from direct contact with the chickens and ducks. The geese honk outside the entry in the mornings, and if Jim forgets to close the door, a goat might amble through. We moved our cats into the barndominium last May, and now they have fully acclimated to the new farm. Each morning, they head outdoors, eager to hunt and explore.

I still live at our old place in Greenfield Center, in a large house that is now mostly empty. Since July, I have been packing boxes. Just after Labor Day, movers took nearly all of our furniture out of the house. Even the large king-sized bed that we had thought would never be able to be removed from the house went down our short, narrow, angled staircase on the shoulders of two strong men without a hitch. The movers transported our goods to the new farm, placing them in a storage unit we have rented on site. On the last day of summer, we met with a real estate agent and agreed to have the last of our items packed up and the house cleaned up so it could go on the market in three weeks.

Amid all these shifts, we decided I should stay in the house until it is sold. We don’t want an uninhabited place to fall prey to vandals. We also remain a bit wary of neighbors who did not like our regenerative agricultural practices and filed the complaints that ultimately compelled us to leave. We also still need a place where we can shower, and wash and prepare our eggs and vegetables for market, as well as an area where I can carry out my college work.

This means that both of us drive an hour and a half round-trip between our house in Greenfield and our new home in Easton several times a week. Jim comes to Greenfield to shower and change clothes. I go to the farm in Easton to harvest and gather up eggs that Jim collects during the day. I bring the goods back to Greenfield to clean and prepare for market. I store the market items in the refrigerators that remain in Greenfield.

Slow Changes

The house that sits at the farm in Easton remains a work in progress. It has limited electricity but no running water, let alone things that I used to take for granted such as a stove and refrigerator. Many of its windows have broken, and much of its interior is in a state of demolition.

When we blessed the house and land a year ago, I dropped a spoonful of my homemade Indian sweet dish halwa on the basement floor, as a symbolic feeding. It fell into a puddle of accumulated water. The house was built in 1805, and most old houses have problems with deteriorating foundations and leaky basements that homeowners can manage to live with. In this case, the foundation was in such bad shape that the structural integrity of the house was in question. We decided that rather than demolish such a historic home, we would have the house lifted off the foundation and repair it from below.

That work was to have been done in March. Contractors put it off first to late June, then mid July, and now sometime in October. Jim has been using that time to knock out the interior walls and remove junk and other debris. He does this work amid many other farm tasks, but the cost of renovating the house weighs heavily on our minds. Amid supply chain shortfalls, the cost of building materials has soared. Labor also is in short supply. The cost of what it might take to make the house livable worries us a lot.

I am grateful we still have our home in Greenfield but know that paying two mortgages on a professor’s paycheck and farmers market sales cannot be manageable for much longer. Plus, Jim and I agree the round trips we each drive between the two farms are wasteful, of our time, our energies, fossil fuels, and money. We agree that we need to get the house on the market as soon as we can but wonder how and where we will find shelter for both of us this winter. I sit on a thin futon mattress I have placed atop a tatami mat in a now empty bedroom and wonder as well where and how I will teach online and grade student papers if I do not have easy access to a desk.

Sustaining Farm Life

Three or four days a week, I drive out to the farm to work in the fields. I bring a thermos of coffee, bottles of water and snacks to sustain me through the day. I also keep extra socks, changes of clothing, muck shoes, sneakers, and sandals in the car. In August, I began adding a swimsuit and towel.

Before we began farming in earnest, I loved the long days and the sunshine of summer. Summer meant swimming in lakes and the ocean, taking part in triathlons, late night barbecues on the deck, long walks and runs, and travel. This past summer has felt like around-the-clock work. I would rise with the sun, but that was never early enough. By the time I would get to the fields, the sun would be well above the horizon, making harvesting hard as the crops heated up. I worked as fast as I could, often forgetting to eat and drink water. Then, on one very hot day, I went back to the old house to take a shower and nap, and did not wake up for another 10 hours. I was exhausted and dehydrated.

I made a quick decision to skip the weekend markets, reasoning that rest and recovery were more important than the income we would lose, and upon my doctor’s suggestion went to an urgent care clinic to get the rashes the weeds had been leaving on my arms and legs checked out. The urgent care staff checked me out and administered a COVID test to be on the safe side. Fortunately, all was well, and I returned to the fields after a couple of days refreshed and ready to harvest again. But the brief bout did help remind me that while I could work with Nature, I could not outdo Nature. I could not pull all the weeds. I could not plant all the seedlings. I could not save all the plants from dying. I could only do what I could do, and pushing to do more was out of sync with the balance of life.

Since then, I have tried to make sure that even as I work hard, I make time to relax, too. I go for short swims and have started to plan more outdoor dinners with Jim at the farm. Fall’s coolness and earlier sunsets also put an earlier end to the work day, giving me time to appreciate what we have.

“Someday, this will be a beautiful place to live,” Jim often says as we eat dinner outside near the gardens and goat pastures, watching the stars twinkle and the moon rise.

“It’s a beautiful place now,” I respond.

His mind is on the work that lies ahead in making the house livable and getting our old home sold. “You know what I mean,” he retorts.

My mind is on the natural beauty of the hills and river formed valley around me, the mama duck who recently hatched eight ducklings in the garden weeds and has been refusing to leave the area, the frisky fast-growing goats that were born between mid-May and early August, and the cats who defy Jim’s calls to come in at night but for whatever reason come running toward my outstretched arms.

“It’s a beautiful place now,” I say again.

It is a beautiful place, and a good life.