The Farmhand: News from Sanborn Mills Farm

— Robert Frost,  from “My November Guest”

November… the month that holds both the threat of winter

 a
nd the memory of summer. It is not yet winter, but it is almost not fall — November can be angry or soft, damp or icy, bright or bleak. It sends birds on their w
ay to warmer places, and in tempestuous rages it will snap boughs and trees. 
On cold November mornings at Sanborn Mills Farm, an icy skin
 cove
rs our sawmill pond, stopping work until the ice thaws and logs can again be moved through the pond to the mill. 

This year, an early hard frost in November did not harm the leeks and parsnips in the garden (people say parsnips taste sweeter when harvested after the first hard frost) but we didn’t get to the radishes and celery root in time. It happens — even when you swear the frost isn’t going to beat you this year. We were able to save a good amount of seeds from this fall’s harvests,  and they will be sprouted later in the winter to begin the cycle anew. When the summer garden gives us vegetables and herbs from last year’s seeds, the “farm to table” belief that we hold close at the Farm deepens to seed to crop to food. Now the cycle becomes a circle.  

Our firewood is stacked, the corn is cribbed, the apples are stored. At the main house, the storm windows go up and the wool blankets and down comforters come down from the closets. November brings t
he red polka dots of winterberry and the delicate lattices of bare maple and oak branches. The pastures lay quiet, breathing slow. The stone walls at the Farm seem to take on an extra sturdiness in November, even though some of these walls date back more than two centuries, as if storing up strength to stand fast against one more winter. The walls cannot bend in the wind like trees, they cannot shake off a coat of snow like the oxen. And so in November, the stone walls appear to swell with what they possess most: resolve. 

November at the Farm is a time of planning for the next year, of assessing the projects that can be completed over the winter (including launchin
g th
e new SMF website), of thinking back on what went well and what could use a bit more forethought. It is, for some of us at least, the year’s best month: elegiac yet celebratory, quiet yet noisy, bare yet bursting — and home to the best holiday of the year.