Pigs and Pumpkins

By Nancy P. Weiss.

New England farms conjure up images of Robert Frost poems with 0 bending birches and stone walls between neigh- hors. Some farms in Connecticut closely resemble the popular impression. My husband and I own an 87-acre farm in Pomfret, a small town in the northeast corner of Connecticut. Built in 1790, the farm hugs a hillside and is reached by traveling up a long dirt driveway lined with maple trees.

Come Spring, the maple trees are tapped. While sap buckets are picturesque, at our farm they have been replaced with plastic tubing which conducts the sap down the hill to collection vats. Maple syrup is but one of several sources of either revenue or crop for family use which is produced on the farm.

Our choice to live on the farm was made deliberately and at considerable cost in many respects. Jim's jobs take him to Hartford each day, a distance one way of 49 miles. In Hartford he works as a stockbroker for a large investment firm and serves as the state legislator for seven rural towns. The legislative district, based on population, is geographically one of the largest in the state.

Our personal experiences on the farm have helped put Jim in closer touch with the problems of many of his constituents, who are either commercial or part-time farmers. Through farm ownership, we have worked with various USDA agencies and participated in a number of programs. The insight gained through this first-hand experience is far more educational than learning of the work of the agencies through committee hearings or constituent contact.

I work for the Cooperative Extension Service as Assistant Director of the 4-H Program, in Connecticut. Our lifestyle requires that I commute at least 20 miles each day to the University of Connecticut campus in Storrs where my office is located. Although I was brought up in a rural area, my family did not farm. My work with 4-H has provided me with experiences and an appreciation of farm life that is reflected in our choice to live on a farm.

Some days the juxtaposition between our professions and our farm is amusing and quite perplexing to non-farm people.

Last year during the legislative campaign, I was often forced to call a halt to planning meetings or sign-painting parties while the volunteers helped me chase our wandering pigs back into their pen. Poor fencing was the problem, and highly intelligent pigs made quick use of our inability to take the time to properly fence them. News reporters laughed in astonishment when we dashed out the door of the partially restored farmhouse to call the hogs back to their pen.

A tea party was disrupted one hot summer day by the exhaust from a faulty diesel tractor stuck in the hayfield.

Early fall mornings saw us up at dawn to spray the pumpkin patch, our first effort at commercial growing, only to find that the harvest, nearly the entire crop, had rotted on the vine from heavy rainfall for several weeks. Our small, peppery Scotty dog killed all of the chickens one morning .all that is, that were left following an attack by a ravenous fox. Finally, a pet billy goat died from eating nightshade after two weeks of hand feeding him and $61 in veterinary bills.

Bean Smash

The disappointments have been great, so we have tended to stress the successes. A bumper crop of green beans brought income from a roadside stand which more than paid for the investment of seed, fertilizer and plowing. An added boon was the sight of a freezer full of home-grown produce, which easily meets our family requirement for vegetables, provided we don't become too sick of green beans, broccoli and snow peas.

The land, long depleted by intensive growing of corn and poor soil conservation practices, is being slowly brought back into good condition. An abandoned apple orchard bore much fruit after several Saturday mornings of pruning. The woodland, once scorned as useless, provides wood for three fireplaces and a woodstove.

Most of all, there is a great sense of satisfaction. In restoring our house and a small half-house, used for many years by the farm help, we discovered beautiful hand-done stenciling, a wainscoted "keeping room" a central room of the house, wide pine board floors, and a long-abandoned bake oven.

Although the investment in money has been larger than we had hoped, much of ourselves has been put into the farm in the year and a half we have owned it.

As we pry ourselves out of our cars after long days and long commutes from work, we both feel a surge of energy that comes straight from the land.

Several winter evenings while we sat snowbound in the house, we spent our time planning better and more efficient ways to use the buildings and improve the land.

Nancy P. Weiss is Assistant Director, 4-H and Youth, Cooperative Extension Service, The University of Connecticut, Storrs.