Last Wednesday was hay day.  Our spirits have been doing well in this wet summer, but we were less certain about the hay - hay generally needs three full days of sunshine to dry between when it is mown and when it is baled, and Vermont was not cooperating.  After waiting as long as she could, Chantal (the farmer)crossed her fingers on Sunday afternoon and mowed the hay, and we almost made it - we had some sprinkles Tuesday afternoon, but Chantal judged that much of the hay would be usable, and on Wednesday afternoon we turned out to the fields to load the hay bales onto trucks, and unload them into our dairy barn.  It was a day filled with sweat, patience, and mechnical failures, but by the time the last of us returned for a late dinner, the hay was in.  The day and unsteady weather was a blow for many New England farmers, whose farms often rely on the summer hay crop to feed their cattle over the winter.

This week also saw several out-of-camp adventures - the entire camp was hosted by Flying Cloud for their first naming ceremony of the summer, and a vanful of campers travelled with Kuenzi to her family’s farm near Montpelier to see a local vegetable-production farm firsthand.  The farm has an in-house biodiesel production facility, a heavily customized ‘tractor of the future’, and a host of other innovations that allow the farm to flourish in an era when industrial scale agri-business is tough competition.

Trips

Next week (July 17-23) is our trips week, and all 66 campers and most of our staff are heading out for a week of farm service, hiking, canoeing, and unknown adventures.  All of us are excited, both for the trips and for the return next weekend to our beloved farm, warm dry clothes, and the reunited community.

Visiting Day

Visiting day is next Saturday, July 25.  We look forward to seeing the many family members and friends who we hope will come to briefly be a part of Tamarack Farm 2009.  We ask that visitors arrive no earlier than 11 AM; feel free to bring a picnic lunch for your camper if you like, but please bring enough to share with a few campers who don’t have visitors.  After a picnic lunch, we’ll have activities and time to visit in the afternoon and an extended shared dinner.  At 9 PM we will ask our visitors to say goodbye, and will officially kick off the second half of Tamarack Farm 2009.

-Dave

Tamarack Farm (the physical veggie-pumping part) is already filling our bellies!  We’ve been enjoying deliciously prepared meals full of garden vegetables (and one delicious fruit): broccoli, radishes, garlic scapes, swiss chard, lettuce and strawberries!  We’re drinking milk from our own cows, pasteurized in the dairy barn and carried (literally) to our camp’s kitchen.  Meal after meal, we are preparing delicious, nutritious, and as-local-as-it-gets food.

It has been raining a lot, nearly every single day, but spirits are high.  Saturday morning the entire camp went to the garden to give our crops some breathing and growing room.  Our “All-Camp Weed” was hugely successful.  The rows look wonderful and it felt so good to get hands and toes dirty and to get to know new people while working en masse. It might be cliche but it is certainly true that many hands make for light work.  Postum House is Tamarack Farm’s version of a variety/talent show. We are a camp full of musical, dancing, funny, witty, entertaining campers and staff. Awesome to see the talents of those you live with shining and on display as we did on Saturday night.

And Sunday the Sun shone! All day long!  All in all we’re settling nicely into the rhythm of life at TF. We rise early, some of us tend to the animals while others tidy up.  A bread crew has been baking fresh, hot bread for us daily.  We share silence amidst the beauty and bird calls of nature in our outdoor circle for Silent Meeting.  We sing.  We get to work in the morning, out in the garden, in the woodshop, in the kitchen.  And in the afternoons we do everything from exploring the lake by canoe to building kinetic sculptures with what some might call ‘junk.’  All Farm and Wilderness camps celebrated Interdependence Day Tuesday afternoon. Tamarack Farm wowed the assembled with our song and outrageous costumery.

We are off to a good start building a cupola and barn doors for the new Livestock Barn.  The contractors raised the walls this week.  And tonight (Thursday) we are all going to a Naming Ceremony at Flying Cloud.

Summer is roaring off to a good start and we will soon be posting detailed schedule for Visiting Day (July 25 mid-morning to 9:30 pm)
-Leonora

Summer in the verdant Vermont valley. Does it get any better than this? Inspiring, enthusiastic human beings gathered to live simply and well together. A lake for swimming. Woods and fields for exploring and sanctuary. In addition to a superstar staff we’re sharing the land with a milking cow called Strawberry, a dozen laying hens, Halifax the pig, Sapphire the calf and 98 meat birds growing every day.

The year-round crew has tended this land lovingly. We, the 66 Tamarack Farm campers, two dozen summer staff and a cadre of others will reap the fruits of the year-round labors: healthy farm animals, rows of flowers, herbs and vegetables that will nourish us as we tend and cultivate them this summer.

The foundation for a new, more functional, livestock barn has been poured and construction is underway. Campers will build a cupola and barn doors in Work Projects this summer.

It is the campers who make summer camp. It is the community of support with a healthy dose of challenge — dancing on the precipice being stretched while being lovingly held…

that makes Tamarack Farm. Welcome, campers. We’re thrilled you’re here.
-Leonora

Welcome to all the Tarmarack Farm families and friends,

It’s really a pleasure to communicate with campers and families, but it’s not always easy to figure out the best way to do that.  In the summer the pace is so fast it’s hard to find time to reflect.   But this will begin an attempt to be better at it.  Also, within the week, I will be sending a newsletter out to each 2009 family.

This summer is shaping up to be a strong one; we are reinvigorating the farming aspect of our camp…
and we have a strong staff, many of them returning.
CABIN STAFF:
Dana Powell
Lily Swartz
Katy Blackman
Kate Sweeney
Morgan Brown
Kuenzi Wiswal
Tess Hobbs
Even Taylor
Amy Tabakin
Dave Patterson
John Ward
Cody Tannen-Barrup
Thom Stead
Eli Dwight
Adam Walker
Steve Cohen
Ryan Duerme
Alex Bralow

COOKS:
Becca Hebert
Ole Bye
China Camacho

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: Jenna Hsiang
WORK PROJECTS HEAD: Hunter Berryhill
BARNS AND GARDENS HEAD: Leonora Tisdale
FARM INTERN: Stephanie Hall
NURSE: Shannon Carroll

It would be great to get an email address for all parents (perhaps one designated to receive TF emails).  Sometimes the hand-written ones on the applications are hard to read.  You can simply email me (if you haven’t already, if we’ve been corresponding, I have it) at TBarrup@aol.com and I will add you to the list…

be well,
tom’b

Tom Barrup, Tamarack Farm Director

Tamarack Farm 2008 has gotten off to a wonderful start. It’s been a busy week, and we haven’t had time to write a long post here. Happily, we have been able to put a few photos of the first week of work projects at the Farm into the Parent area of the website. If you’re a parent, go ahead and access those. For the rest of you, please wait while we catch our breath and take a moment to reflect on how to describe the beginning of our summer.

Parents of Tamarack Farmers, we want to let you know about how we’re going to use this blog space over the summer. We’re looking forward to sharing some of the experiences of the whole camp, and how a group of young adults build a strong community together, and we’ll use this space to do that. We’re not going to send out weekly mass emails, though; we would like to save email for the person-to-person communications we already share with you. Our general writing will go directly into this area, and we hope you’ll check it when you’re curious. We plan to post new material at the beginning of each week.