Nubanusit Neighborhood & Farm residents take a rest after working in the garden.
credit: Clive Russ

OLD FASHIONED FARMING IN A NEW COMMUNITY

By Barbara Michelson

In October of 2008, I drove to Peterborough with my husband, Jim, and two similarly curious friends to visit Nubanusit Neighborhood & Farm (NNF) as a very preliminary investigation of co-housing for our relocation in the distant future. I had long been interested in the cohousing movement, following it through print and Internet stories, but I had never actually seen a co-housing community.

It’s difficult to describe co-housing succinctly since it can take many forms, from urban to rural and all points in between.

Hallmarks are neighborhoods physically laid out to create neighborliness, usually car-free zones, and with homes facing muchtraveled walkways. Although the homes are complete with bed, bath, kitchen and living areas, they are relatively small to conserve personal energy as well as natural resources. Co-housing communities feature a common house with a large kitchen and dining room for shared meals and meetings, and other shared facilities that individual homes may lack, like a dedicated playroom and guest rooms. At NNF there are additional shared amenities including 40 acres of woodland, almost a mile of Nubanusit riverfront and a 30-acre “farm.”

The farm is now taking shape, but on the day we first came looking, there was little more than the frame of a horse barn, two horses and a llama, making do in temporary shed lodgings while construction on the barn progressed. There were several recently cleared and planted upland pastures and a lovely just-mown hayfield.

Shelley Goguen Hulbert, one of NNF’s founders, is a woman who it seems can envision just about anything.When she heard that the dilapidated Salzburg Inn property was for sale, previously used for years as a motel and restaurant complex, she pictured a co-housing neighborhood and farm. She imagined energy-efficient cluster homes with a renewable-energy central heating system, professional offices in a renovated 150-year-old former governor’s residence, and certainly, a biodynamic farm with dairy cows, pigs, chickens, fruit trees, berry plants, an apiary, and vegetable gardens to supply most of the neighborhood’s food. During our brief visit, she readily convinced me that Jim and I, too, were part of the vision.

It seemed clear that after countless hours of meetings and years of hard work done by the small band of neighbors who had joined early in the planning stages of NNF, that the most exciting and fun work lay just ahead. So in March 2009, we abandoned the “five-year plan” and our lives on Eastern Long Island to be part of this interesting endeavor.While Jim and I were improvising, the farm, at least, had an action plan. After a number of years of neglect, the fertile soil needed a year of attention to reduce compaction and eliminate weeds before it could be planted in crops.

Our family’s Connemara pony was the first new animal to arrive in early spring, followed by five just-weaned pigs, as well as ten Easter Egger, ten Isa Brown and 24 Rhode Island Red laying hens, 200 Cornish Rock broilers, and three Muscovy ducks. Shelley’s two lovely Jersey cows, Pumpkin and Magnolia, were impregnated over last winter and moved in to loaf on the lush pasture. Neighbors labored together to create raised beds, and to plant and tend strawberry and raspberry plants and the large vegetable garden. Soil was amended for blueberry plants to be set in come spring 2010. Shelley, with husband and co-founder, Robin Hulbert, erected moveable pens for the many animals and took on the task of soil improvement.

When an individual or family decides to move to NNF, they agree to act as steward of the shared land and commit themselves to using organic and/or biodynamic methods. One of the cornerstones of biodynamic farming for the eighty some years it has been practiced, is a system that is as near closed as possible, and therefore heavily reliant on animal husbandry. In the ideal closed system, a farm produces its own fertilizers and any other needed inputs and doesn’t rely on outside sources for seeds, fuel and other requirements. At NNF, the pigs live outdoors in transportable enclosures, and the job they do so instinctively is to till the soil with their little trotters.

Chickens are put on the tilled land to hunt for insects and fertilize. Some of these ideas are now being embraced by farms all over, as Michael Pollan’s best selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has spread farmer Joel Salatin’s practices on his pastoral Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

This fall we’ll “harvest” the pigs we have raised since they were weanlings and the broilers that arrived as day-old chicks. The animals will be slaughtered on-site, a practice that is considered the least stressful for animals. Neighbors, few of whom have grown up with farming, muse about the psychic impact this will have on us and the neighborhood children who engaged so much with the young animals. It would, of course, be much less stressful for us to continue in denial and buy something shrink-wrapped at the grocery store.

Dairy cows occupy a special niche in the biodynamic scheme, venerated for their spiritual qualities as well as for their valuable manure. Last fall, cow horns were packed with manure and buried to decompose throughout the winter. In spring the composted matter was removed, put in water, and stirred vigorously by hand, to make a preparation that we spread over the fields in minute quantities intended to have a homeopathic effect.

The pastured cows will come in this fall to calve. Neighbors will share the rich milk with the calves in the cool seasons when we, too, will need its nourishment most. Shelley will teach interested neighbors how to milk and make yogurt. Hopefully we’ll be able to spell her at times from the grind of daily milking. In anticipation of this great bounty, Jim and I sign on to learn cheese making, believing that on some days the supply will exceed the demand.

Another important tenant of biodynamic farming is using celestial charts to determine the optimum times for working with particular crops. So far removed are we from observing the skies, that this aspect requires the greatest suspension of disbelief, although it’s a traditional farming method that dates back centuries. If, however, there are ten things to do in the garden and the biodynamic calendar declares today a good one for working with root crops, why not hoe the beets and leave trellising the peas for another day? Unfortunately, the rainy weather plays havoc with this system, and some days we do everything simply because the sun is out and the fields aren’t a swamp. Still a system that asks the grower to think of earth as exhaling in the morning and inhaling at night, exacts a certain sensitivity on the growers’ part that ought to be beneficial.

I spend much time reading about biodynamic farming and examining the many areas in which the mystical beliefs have entered the mainstream through other doors. For example, this business of hand-stirring manure preparations which invites a certain amount of levity from skeptics, is vindicated at a mainstream gardening lecture I attend, in which it is “proven” that aerated manure teas are more effective than anaerobic. The suggested method of aeration, an aquarium air-filtration system, seems far sillier than paddle stirring.

There will be plenty of time to evaluate when the harvest is in and the bounty is on our tables. Meanwhile, I have traveled with the home-field hay to sell to area farmers who know nothing of our methods, and heard them exclaim excitedly about the wonderful quality. And little as I know about either farming or science, when a group of people—bound by affinity and commitment to a shared lifestyle—spreads across a field, buckets in hands, to offer nourishment to the fields they are so engaged in creating, I feel the cosmos could take notice.

Barbara Michelson sold her catering business on Eastern Long Island before moving with her husband, Jim, and Scottish terrier, Mackenzie, into Nubanusit Neighborhood & Farm. She spent the summer learning about animal husbandry, biodynamic farming and finding great food places in NH. She has a Grande Diplome from the Paris Cordon Bleu, enjoyed a 30-year career in food from executive dining room chef onWall Street to market grower in the fields of L.I.

Nubanusit Neighborhood & Farm
Steele Road,Peterborough, NH
603.924.7897
www.peterboroughcohousing.org