“Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!”
—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906
Just in case you weren’t keeping track, as of today less than a month separates us from the first day of autumn in 2018. I can’t help but feel as if there’s something especially soothing about these last few weeks of summer. Even as they furtively steal from us minutes of daylight and ticks off the thermometer, they nonetheless invite us to embrace every balmy afternoon and savor every warm breeze. We would do well to accept that invitation, even if there’s a faint restlessness brewing in our soul for those enchanting days of autumn that loom in the not-so-distant future.
“Ah, September! You are the doorway to the season that awakens my soul…
I must confess that I love you only because you
are a prelude to my beloved October.”
—Peggy Toney Horton
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Morning sunlight filters down through a hazy mesh of clouds, falling upon the warm springtime landscape below where trees at the periphery of the farm are freshly-clothed in leaves. With planting time fast approaching, a farmer guides his tractor in broad loops around the field, churning the soil in preparation for a crop of soybeans.
Although most folks tend to refer to any disturbance of field soil as “plowing”, farmers can tell you that’s not entirely accurate. The tractor seen here, for example, is pulling an attachment called a “cultivator” which turns a much thinner layer of surface soil in a process known as “cultivation”.
Why not just plow the field instead? Plows aerate and distribute nutrients very deeply in the soil, a crucial step for growing crops that produce deep roots. But the soy beans that will be planted in this field produce shallow roots which can’t access nutrients that are buried too deeply. In this case, cultivating rather plowing keeps all of the good stuff close to the surface where it can offer the most benefit to the bean crop.
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Windswept coastal grasslands crowd a weathered boardwalk which ushers us towards the beachfront along the Connecticut coast. Out over the ocean, morning clouds stage a stirring display.
While the unspoiled beauty of coastal areas like Milford Point may be the prime draw for many sightseers, the most essential purpose of these protected beaches lies in providing breeding habitat for migratory shorebirds.
By the mid-1900s, some 120 million acres of waterfowl habitat had been lost to development in the United States. The federal government highlighted that very figure in a 1941 report, noting that “for many years most species of migratory game birds have been in a precarious situation”. Perhaps ironically, bird hunters of the era brought some of the earliest attention to problem, reporting dramatic reductions in available game compared to earlier decades. Luckily, these observations and subsequent studies spurred many early efforts to create a system of refuges to accommodate migratory birds, lest they decline to extinction. The work continues today.
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In my latest piece, “Yankee Farmlands № 39”, dawn breaks over weathered barns beside a chilly pasture where dew-speckled grasses shimmer like a verdant, green sea.
In an era such as ours, when most of us are no longer tethered to our land for crops and livestock, it’s understandable that farming would be romanticized to some degree. An intimate relationship with the soil, bucking cubicles and corporate bureaucracy: sounds great, right?
There are myriad things that can be said in praise of the farming life, but the labor is often hard, the money is sometimes uncertain and the work can be quite dangerous. Consider the bitter case of the Rufus Norton Farm, which is seen in this piece. “Rufus was killed in the 1930’s by one of his bulls,” recalled a Wolcott historian. “His wife kept the farm going by working as a school bus driver.”
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Faint clouds cling to hills and pastures of the Coginchaug River Valley in Central Connecticut. Warm, morning sunlight struggles to permeate the heavy air over a complex of old barns and sheds clad with weathered planks and crowned by sheet metal and shingles. Nestled into the buildings is a cozy barnyard, bound by split-rails and cloaked in shadow beneath a shade tree.
Throughout most of Southern New England’s agricultural past, barn roofs were dressed with wooden shingles. Self-reliant farmers of that era could hand-split these shingles, or “shakes”, off logs harvested from their woodlot, thus eliminating the need to buy anything besides the necessary fasteners. With only a few exceptions, wooden shingles were the perfect solution in those early days, providing a durable, homemade roof which could potentially last two or three decades.
Perhaps the only glaring difficulty presented by wooden shingles was the simple fact that they were highly flammable. Fire could quickly lay waste to timber-framed barns and roofs clad in wood only hastened the destruction. For that matter, farm houses were oftentimes roofed with the same wooden shingles as their companion barns, so if either structure caught fire, all it may have taken was a few stray embers to set the other building ablaze.
Alternatives to the wooden shingle such as metal barn roofing, often in the form of corrugate sheets, didn’t arise until the late 1800s and grew in popularity after the turn of the century. Northern New Englanders, possibly owing to their harsher winters, adopted metal roofing a bit more readily more than their neighbors in Southern New England who instead tended to favor slightly less resilient asphalt shingles.
In “Yankee Farmlands № 37” (above), we see a range of roofing materials that have likely been applied as needed throughout the decades. The largest barn is capped with old, wavy tin sheeting, while a small shed on the perimeter of the barnyard sports a more modern steel roof with patterned ribs. Asphalt shingles have also managed their way into the mix, covering the addition beside the large barn and even capping the old silo.
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