Farm & Field
The Vineyard Conservation Society Winter Walks Program will feature a guided walk at Thimble Farm in Tisbury on Sunday, Jan. 13 at 1:30 pm. Andrew Woodruff, an Island farmer with 25 years’ experience, will lead the walk.
About 24 years ago, a group of Vineyard gardeners with no place to garden began to brainstorm. The dilemma: how to have a working garden when life leaves little time or energy to do so? How to garden when the backyard is too small? And how to spread the gospel that food grown at home tastes better? The solution: provide a community garden.
What use is tradition if it cannot be passed on to younger generations? Since 2000, the FARM Institute in Katama has been teaching the rich Island tradition of farming to younger generations. Through hands-on experiences, the farm staff ever since has churned out hundreds of young farmers and informed little eaters. The institute recently kicked off its fall program, rich with diverse opportunities, and is inviting students of all ages to stop by.
Heidi Feldman dreams of dirt. “If you have dirt, you can do more farming,” she said this weekend. Ms. Feldman is picky about her dirt.
The breeze in the air on Friday, the last day of August, brought with it a hint of fall. The afternoon was clear and warm, but the wind felt cool. So it was a comfort to walk into the kitchen of the Magnuson home in West Tisbury, just shy of the Chilmark border, where the sweet autumn smells of cinnamon and cooking apples filled the air. Behind their house, Debbie and Eric Magnuson run one of the Island’s only commercial orchards, growing apples and pears that they sell from their home and at Morning Glory Farm.
Now a genetic study of the skins of scores of heath hens, all of them from the Vineyard, shows that the Island bird, although it looked and behaved much like its supposed parent species in the Midwest, was a wholly distinctive creature. Genetically it was more different from the greater western prairie chicken - that supposed parent species - than the Midwestern bird is from any other family member in its genus, which includes the lesser prairie chicken, the endangered Attwater's prairie chicken of eastern Texas, and even the sharp-tailed grouse. It is possible that instead of being a subspecies of the prairie chicken - which scientists have considered it to be since it was first typed in the last years of the nineteenth century - the heath hen might have been a species unto itself.