Category: MOFGA Stories

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” On March 3, 2020, an F3 tornado hit my neighborhood of Bells Bend, a farming community west of downtown Nashville. Uprooted cedars rode 150 mph winds across the bottomland, striking and killing cattle.

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” My husband and I lived in Northern California for a decade starting in the mid-1980s. We were young, idealistic and longing for more community. Finding others who shared similar values of living lightly

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” In the earliest days of MOFGA in Unity, there was a landscape committee consisting of volunteers who sought to bring some tree life onto the barren, 35-acre main campus. Ernie Glabeau was the

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” “That’s not the way we do things in Aroostook” was an expression I heard my share of times in the early years. In search of good soil to farm, I’d moved to the

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” Pasture pine, gray birch, old field juniper and poison ivy – all of these “undesirables” managed to survive on a meager 2 to 3 inches of poor topsoil over bedrock shale at the

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” When I first began thinking about what to write for the “breaking ground” theme, I decided to look up what “breaking ground” means. From a quick Google search, the results were: 1. Do

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response to the theme, “Breaking Ground.” Gasping for breath I let myself fall backwards to lie on the ground next to the taut and straining come-a-long. I gave it everything I had but the roots of the stump were

This story appeared in the 2021 spring issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener in response tothe theme, “Breaking Ground.” We bought the land in 2012: a 9-acre field, once sheep and cow pasture, that had fallen into a decade of annual brush hogging. That September, we sowed oats and peas into newly tilled