My daughter points to a picture of her brother in a little photo album. He is maybe a week old, held by his grandmother. Grammy is smiling that huge bright smile from earlobe to earlobe and Cosmo is asleep and peaceful. In the background are towering sunflowers.
“And this is Grammy holding Cosmo,” she says. She has gone through the whole book twice now, making sure I know each person in each picture. Most if not all of the pictures are of her on the farm, holding vegetables or worms or sitting on the tractor. Photos we have used in our promotional pieces on Instagram and Facebook. Photos we have shared to advertise our farm.
The photographs chronicle her young life, jumping from time to time through years, through birthdays; a collection of things that happened to her on the farm. And I have this moment of realization where I see our farm from her eyes. Always I see our farm through my own lens; a labor of lifestyle and love, a business, a way to stay close with the people I love, a line of work that pulls a sense of pride from its difficulty and straightforwardness. From its utility.
But when she talks about it it’s not a farm, it’s a whole world. It is a home. Where I see rows of X amount of kale that needs to be harvested into X amount of bins to be washed for this, that, and the other thing, she sees a tunnel where a cat might run, where a mouse might live, where a bird might find material for her cozy nest. Where I see an old Ford with a smoked transmission she sees a castle, where I see a compost pile that needs to be turned she sees a rotten mountain of danger and adventure, and where I see useless stunted eggplant she sees beautiful purple fruits, perfect, ready to harvest. Where I see work she sees adventure.
And so this is the payoff; to mix the dynamics of work and wonder. I see it in your faces too, when you take the blue CSA bag into your hands and say “Wow this is a big one huh?” Or “We have been really enjoying it this year, but wait last week, that red purple thing, what was that?” Or “More potatoes less radish thanks.”
Farming is not unique in this, all lines of work have their wonder and that wonder spills over into family and friends and then, ultimately into memory. We can’t help but have our work seep into our life, seep into our world. But in farming we have found a way to share it with all of you. 
Each harvest, each vegetable, each blue bag of food - they are all bits of our life passed on, and in passing them they become bits of your life. This is why we farm.
Every trip to Conway to bag these up early in the frosty morning, coffee and the radio in the van with my brother. Tom Earle’s place with its sugar house and sheep and rowdy dog Ned really truly in the foothills of the White Mountains, with his partner Ruth up there on that dirt road. Tom never hoarding stories or information and smiling when he tells it. This is why we farm.
Greeting Kyle and Natalie from the Hosac Farm  with their new baby girl and big puffy dog. I can see them out there building things or hiking with the girl on their backs, always moving, always growing, always working with these great big bright eyes. This year they have a quaint farm on the edge of a bog; next year the world. This is why we farm.
High fiving Paul and Katie who make the snowy trip from the rolling hills of Ossippee on their Pork Hill Farm, where they walk, ski, and hike with their dogs and cook their blazing hot chili dishes from the Southwest. The snowtossed land of Pork Hill where they read and dance and teach their way of life to a new breed of interns every year. This is why we farm.
And you, signing up in the Fall, sitting at your computer with a cup of coffee, wondering what fun this might be. This is why we farm.
Thank you for being with us this winter. This frigid winter dominated by virus and mask, by ice and by resolve. People like you give me hope. This whole thing really is a labor of love and we couldnt do it without your support. You are wonderful.
Have a nice spring,
Stowell P Watters



This week, barring frost, you will receive potatoes, radish, cooking greens, carrots, tomatoes, celeriac, onions, collards, turnips, garlic, and frozen peppers. Drive safe, come early, be well.

My great grandfather used this mailbox. The same dull metal and red flag greeted him and his setters with letters from family in Cincinnati, New Jersey, Boston, wherever; his old hands reaching to shuffle the stiff envelopes. He walked up this snowy driveway too, lifted his head to see the Limington house, the West side, the side that faces the sunset and Libby Mountain, the long side, red barn to forsythia. I see him through time as he blinks at the sun, I blink at the sun.
 The greenhouse is a biodome on Pluto; a solar punk hothouse wreathed in hard winter snow. Plants grow fluorescent green and mists rise up in languid heat, as long as Tony the oil guy keeps on schedule. There is a whole lot of energy in there. Ian on the guitar, Pete on the keys, me banging away on the drums, planting collards with Dylan, Spencer up on the purlins looking down at me, smiling like the Cheshire Cat, our two children eating dirt, making mud pies, Marina planting seeds with her mother, cats coming and going.
The biggest trees in the forest grow along property lines, explains my father in law Rich as he crunches through the snow. Good neighbors, hoping to stay good neighbors, have historically found the property line a little ambiguous so they steer clear of cutting trees too close to where it may or may not be. This results in towering pines, hemlocks, oaks, maples, and ash trees in grid lines, sometimes tracking rockwalls, streams, or fields. Rich points up to a pair of oaks that seem piled with clouds - “just look at those big bastards”.
An owl calls in the woods and one thousand coyotes heckle her from the orchard. High in her tree she shuffles through the newspaper and readjusts her bifocals and mutters to herself “how rude….” I pull a sled beneath the stars.
The new tractor looks like two of the old tractors stacked up on each other and painted green. When I was a boy my father had a green tractor, so this feels like a return to form. Through time the tractors meet each other and pass a torch, have a beer. 
Down at the bottom of the woods there is the dinosaur skeleton of my father’s Ford truck. One day it just never made it back up the hill, that’s the way he tells it. Also a tree fell on it. Direct hit. Even when I was a kid it was old and doing the wood with him meant the special pleasure of crashing through the trees in old blue. It was so new to me then but already so old, time wrought in metal, already stuck at the bottom of the hill, already carrying that fallen tree, witness to my father’s thrilling spirit.
A Daikon pulls loose from the earth like a fat tooth. Bright white, a little purple; it is cold to the touch and precious. We stack it up with the others like pirates counting their gems. When it comes time to eat them I feel very lucky, like I am participating in something sacred, but I do not like the taste of daikon so I never eat much. This is something I will work on as I try to grow and become like a real person.
Happy New Year, thank you for being with us. We are all well, languishing in these strange and difficult Covid days, languishing in this non-time between Christmas and the New Year where the food is too rich and the desire to work seems to be lost in the snowy woods. Through time I see myself at this precipice of 36 new years, as a kid watching fireworks, as a college student losing my mind, and now as a farmer happy to flip the calendar and look forward, to look downhill to the coming spring, to be thankful for all that led to this.
-Stowell P Watters

The new share for the New Year looks something like this. Hope you enjoy it all.
Beets, Potatoes, Spinach, Carrots, Kale, Cooking Greens, Turnips, Bok Choi, Daikon, and Garlic.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 
When the rooms were warm, he’d call, 
and slowly I would rise and dress, 
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him, 
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know 
of love’s austere and lonely offices?


There is nearly a foot of snow on top of Mt. Washington. You can see it shining in the morning sun like a great crystal. Chairlifts are chugging, hunters are hunting, and football is on in the living room. Sweatpants weather, coffee weather, book weather, time for roasts and soups and bread, time for family and movies and rest. The verge of winter in New England.
When I was a kid I loved to play video games with my brother. Fall was a great time for video games; too cold to skateboard, not enough snow to ski. We huddled up on one computer, an old iMac, and played for hours. Mom would call us out for dinner. Cauliflower spaghetti, spinach crepes, pesto and corn, lasagna, pork tenderloin, the whole Moosewood catalog; we emerged from the computer room squinting, hunched, two hungry trolls. My dad called it the cave. It was wonderful, comfortable, it was home.
Years later I am still finding those feelings of home but the circumstances have changed. I am a father now and so the role is switched; the comforted now must be the comforter. I chop the firewood and make the coffee like my Dad did when I was young, I even watch football. I get up early and make sure the house is warm, I go out into the cold. We cook, we love to cook and, like my Mom, we have our specialties. Roasted root vegetables, roasted chicken, beef and rice, salmon chowder, pesto and bacon, and lasagna. A rotation of familiar food. A reliable routine that creates comfort and home.
On the verge of winter I find time to think about my new home and the home I grew up in. What unites these two places, what have we brought with us down the halls of time? Books seem a constant in my life, just having them around, strewn about, always cracked in half on the floor or sitting dog-eared all to hell in a pile, most of them half read. A fireplace. Music. The food. The food remains a constant. 
There is nearly a foot of snow on top of Mt. Washington and so we bundle up. The vegetables and meats we eat on the verge of Winter inform the way our bodies change with the seasons. On the verge of Winter we come indoors and find our home waiting for us; warm, comfortable, constant, and familiar. It speaks to us of our past homes, it says: come in, sit down, eat up.

Thanks for being with us this Winter, 
Stowell P Watters
 


the vegetables

beets
carrots
potatoes
kale
lettuce
onions
leeks
spinach
cranberries
winter squash
rosemary
rutabaga

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”
Thorin Oakenshield, JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit


Here comes your first box of vigor. A box of power stored up over hot summer days with the rain falling in great bursts and warm summer nights with the stars wheeling overhead. A box of thunder and lightning and wind and hard work. A box born from deep soils where infinite tiny creatures do infinite tiny things that I barely understand. Dark soils where little fingers of fungus tap and connect, where stones from the old Earth spin and flake over an eternity, and where magic creatures probably definitely live.
Here is your first box of vegetables...well really it's a bag. Thank you for joining the 2021-2022 Foothill Farms Alliance Winter CSA. We are so stoked to have you along for the ride. We have all had pretty trying summers one way or another, the weather, the weather, the weather. It was a tough one. But we put our heads down and worked through the rain and the blistering heat and now, in a flash, it is November. So without further introduction, here are the details and the vegetable list.
First Pick Up is Saturday, Nov. 6th. The times depend on where you are picking up. Pickups are every other Saturday from this weekend until the end of January.

Please bring your own bag if you are picking up at Pork Hill Farm or Earle Family Farm
There are four pickup locations for 2021/2022
-10:00 a.m. to 12:00 The Local Grocer, North Conway, NH
- 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 The Earle Family Farm, 9 Baird Hill Rd, Center Conway, NH
- 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 At Pork Hill Farm, 45 Pork Hill Road, Ossipee, NH
- 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 At Carters Green Market, 18 Elm St, Gorham, ME
Every other Saturday Starting in November
BOX 1 -Saturday November 6th
BOX 2 -Saturday November 20st
BOX 3- Saturday December 4th
BOX 4 -Saturday December 18
BOX 5 - Saturday January 1st
BOX 6- Saturday January 15th
BOX 7-Saturday January 29th

The Veggies
Arugula
Onions
Peppers
Carrots
Kale
Parsley
Leeks
Hakurei Turnips
Salad Mix
Sweet Potatoes
Garlic
 -Written By Stowell Waters of OLD WELLS FARM