Memphis Democrat Column from June 04, 2007

The drop-in visitor I mentioned at the end of my last column endeared himself to us during his visitor period and we have officially decided to make him our newest dog member. Goldie has turned out to be a good companion for Sammy and has the makings of a fine community pooch. We also recently adopted a young female cat whom we have named Sophia, so we now have two dogs and seven cats at Sandhill Farm.

Our human contigent has also grown a bit with the arrival of our newest intern, Thea, on May 21st. She was a member until recently of one our affiliated communities, Emma Goldman, which is located in Seattle. Stan met her last winter when he attended the FEC Assembly there and the rest of us have been enjoying getting to know her the past couple of weeks.

We currently have a student from Westminister College in Fulton visiting us. Jake is a native of Sikeston and is spending time at communities in Missouri this summer gathering impressions for some non-fiction writing he is doing for his senior thesis this coming school year. This Sunday, we hosted our local friends John and Beverly Cole and Joe Neese for an afternoon of conversation and strawberry shortcake on the front porch. Stan made the yummy fixings for the short cake and Gigi made some cool mint and green tea. It was fun catching up on things with the three of them and we enjoyed their stories and reminiscences about the local area. Sandhill folks have had on their traveling shoes lately. Laird and Ma'ikwe are back in the U.S. after their honeymoon in Europe. We have had some nice email exchanges with them since they returned. They also sent us lovely postcards from Italy which have been gracing our bulletin board and it sounds like they had a wonderful time. We are looking forward to hearing their travellers tales when we see them again soon.

Stan was away for a couple of days last week to do some farm inspections in the St. Louis area. He stayed overnight with our friends Joe and Trish at New Roots, which is an urban farm project in the city.That evening, he bicycled with them and some other folks to a Shakespeare performance held in one of the local parks. Emmet was gone for a week on a trip east to visit a friend's family in Chautauqua, New York. There is a large lake there with lots of summer cabins and he said it is a really beautiful area. Michael and I were also on the road last weekend to do a fair in Hannibal. Although the crowds were a bit lighter at this year's Riverfest, we did very well. This fair is an enjoyable one for us because we have Hannibal friends that we see during the fair. We also know a number of the other vendors fairly well, including Jim and Setsuko Nishida-Adams from Memphis. While we were at the fair, the rest of the crew went to a party at Dan Kelly's farm near Canton that Saturday night. It was our friend Cherie's birthday and there was a dance, a potluck supper and a bonfire after dark. Renay, Gigi and Theron went to the roller party and dance celebrating the end of school at the rink in Kahoka. Renay also hosted her friend Chelsea for an overnight visit recently and Rowan from Dancing Rabbit came over to spend the afternoon with her yesterday. He joined us for the strawberry shortcake party and supper. We have been busy with spring planting, both in the fields and the gardens, during the time since my last column. Rory, Amanda and Jason from Dancing Rabbit as well as Chad and Jacob from Red Earth Farms came over to help us get our sorghum transplants in the ground. After those were set out, Stan direct-seeded the rest of the crop. He was somewhat concerned when the rain stopped for a few days, but the recent spell made up for it. The garden crew is in the midst of a push to get the rest of our seedlings in the ground. Tomatoes, sweet peppers, summer and winter squash are in and we hope to get the melons, hot peppers and lettuce done by tomorrow. There is also the never ending mulching and weeding to keep up with. At least the rain has been helping us out with the watering. The flip side of this is the harvest and we are getting an abundance of spinach, kale, collards and rhubarb to freeze, along with a bumper crop of strawberries. The last has been a bit of a surprise, given the crazy weather this spring. We have also been having glorious green salads twice a day. Life at Sandhill Farm is good.