Animal House?

Yes, the old building (inset) has been transformed, at least from the outside.

To the one-time pig house then horse stable, we added windows for light and ventilation, and shutters and cupolas, which serve no practical purpose whatsoever. But, heh, they add character!

The latter is what threw some of the locals, who were certain we’d transformed our animal shelter into a Belushi-esque Animal House, where our two college-bound sons live -- with their togas no doubt! (That was the rumor, anyway, as revealed to us by the local beautician one Friday night at the American Legion.)

Well, not quite on the building, folks. Sure, it's insulated, has electricity, water, and to my mens' delight, a refrigerator. Still, it's not heated and it definately is not housing my teens.

It’s still a shelter for something related to horses -- horsepower!

Visioning a Vineyard

The farm didn’t yet have a name and the buildings and land were still hinting at “potential,” when my sister-in-law, Lynn, came to call. What do you think I should do there, I asked her with an arm extended toward the two-and-a-half acre horse pasture. We had no interest in horses.

Lynn regarded the long narrow stretch of unkempt field for just a few seconds. You should plant a vineyard, she said.

I looked at her quizzically then sent a gaze down the length of a pasture peppered with horse poo. I tried to envision tidy rows of vinifera growing in place of lamb’s quarters and pig weed. But I couldn’t. After all, I’d toured the vineyards of California’s Mendocino County and Russian River Valley. I’d studied meteorology in college. I knew the difference between winter spent in a Mediterranean climate and winter in Minnesota – it was roughly 60 degrees. Grapes didn’t winter here.

I looked back at my petite friend, the woman who’d been my brother’s wife for a quarter century. She had just recovered from a series of radiation treatments to her brain, a follow-up to two rounds of chemotherapy. She was smiling.

Yep. Definitely grapevines, she added.

Within a month, I’d learned that Vitis vinifera, the term used to describe Old World European grape varieties such as those grown in France or California, were not suitable for northern vineyards. But a handful of promising varieties recently developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota were; many were disease resistant and tolerant to cold, even Minnesota cold, 30 degrees below zero cold. Brrr. What’s more, the release of new cold-hearty grapes was fueling a local winemaking industry.

The trouble with planting a vineyard is it takes years before you reap what you sow. It takes four years, in fact, from the time you plant root stock to the point where the plant is established enough to support a full crop. In terms of return on investment, that’s a long time to wait. Who’s got that kind of time?

Lynn didn’t. The cancer never stopped spreading and after it bore a hole in one of her lungs, pneumonia set in and she failed quickly. Lynn passed away a week before Christmas in 2006.

We’ve spent a lot of time this summer alternating between various rounds of tillage and applications of Glyphosate in order to eradicate the grass and weed pasture that used to keep five horses content. The ground is now smooth, flat, and a rich shade of brown. Next March, we’ll begin erecting the first of three, 225-foot by 150-foot sections of vineyard trellis, fourteen rows per section. The first 650 vines are due to arrive in May. There’ll be more after that.

When I look at the clear stretch of land, where once all I could see was ugly grass and manure, I can envision purple and green clusters clinging to quivering leaves. I can imagine how the sun will turn my grapes from green to gold to crimson as harvest approaches. I can picture myself walking between rows of Marquette and Edelweiss, a pruner in hand. And I can see Lynn. She’s smiling.

Four Majestic Trees

You’ll notice the trees from the road. They stand, two pair, like giant pushpins fixing the corners of a picnic cloth. They spread shade over an otherwise sunny pasture; a plot where a few dozen Winnebago Indians once called home. This place was their reservation, briefly. I can’t say who planted the trees, or more importantly, why the four red-cedars form a perfect square when every other coniferous windbreak in this county stretches out as a straight line.

The eastern red-cedar is a sturdy, slow growing tree with fragrant wood and stringy bark. The wood is rot resistant, prized for pencils, fence posts, as lining for closets, and for longbows, flatbows and sinewed bows, which were favored by the native tribes. Because they grow so slow, the trees were sometimes called graveyard trees. Plant one for shade and it will shade your grave! Some eastern red-cedars in the United States are three hundred years old. I don’t know the age of our four cedars. There’s only one way to date a tree for certain so I’ll just keep guessing.

Sometimes, I imagine these four red-cedars to be related to the famed Cedars of Lebanon, my ancestral homeland, where a single stand of one thousand cedars is all that remain of the tree that is used seventy times in the bible as a metaphor for strength. Today, Lebanon’s cedars are fenced in, protected, guarded by handsome young soldiers who wear stern expressions under red felt berets. The trees are surrounded by metal mesh and men with automatic weapons. Don’t even think of carving your initials into these trees, folks.

King Solomon is the historical figure who clear-cut Mount Lebanon. Sadly, sustainable farming practices took a few millennia to really catch hold.

While both the eastern red-cedar and the giant cedar of Lebanon are imposing in their profile against an azure sky and both have limbs that bend and twist, defying gravity and reason, the trees are not at all related. The eastern red-cedar isn’t a cedar at all. It is a juniper. In most forms, it isn’t much more than a shrub.

But not here. Not at Four Cedars Farms. Here, under the craggily limbs of the red-cedars, the spirit of the ancient – the Winnebago or perhaps even the Phoenician – rides the prairie wind into a cool square patch of prairie shade. When that happens and you’re lucky enough to be stretched out in the hammock, it doesn’t really matter if the trees are shrubs, junipers, cedars, or metaphors. They are simply beautiful.

The Dog Days of Summer

Rain. It’s the spindle around which most folks today wrap their conversation.

More specifically, it’s the lack of rain that now keeps farmers awake at night and gives those town folk who pass by fields of shriveled corn and dormant soybeans reason to stop by the neighbor’s place to share their woe. And why not rail on about the weather? It’s really the only topic on which all people – democrats and republicans, professionals and working class, old and young, city bred or rural – can agree. Mother Nature wields her wrath without prejudice. Six steady weeks of cloudless sky will scorch the rich man’s ground as thoroughly as it does the poor man’s. On cracked earth, people can find common ground.

Despite the drought, the soybean field across from Four Cedars Farms maintains the perception of health; the field is richly green and the leaves bow to a southeasterly breeze in supple waves. At the foot of a muggy breeze, the crop looks alive – vibrant. It is a lie. The plants have shut down and unless a significant rain comes soon, this crop will be as worthless as the corn crop that some farmers around the state have already begun to plow under.

And this is farming. You work the ground to ensure the proper nutrients are present for the seed you eventually sow – always with optimism. You fight bugs and weeds and late spring frosts and mechanical breakdowns (which occur more regularly than rain) and then, you wait. And you hope.

Each year the challenges come in different form, but reliably each year, the challenges arrive. This year, the challenge is drought, and the solution isn’t sitting on a shelf at Tractor Supply. This is farming – as seen over the fence at Four Cedars Farms.