May 2023| Practical Self Reliance
Spring in Vermont & Lessons Learned
I know “spring” technically starts in March, but no one told Vermont that. The buds don’t start to swell on the trees until around Earth Day (April 22nd), and we don’t see our first dandelions until the 2nd week of May.
The intervening time, March through Early May, is what we call mud season.
As the name implies, it’s not pretty. It’s a great time to get your car stuck axle-deep on a back country road, and it’s also when the dairy farms spread a winter’s worth of manure on their hay fields. It might not be snowing (or, well, it may be snowing some years), but it’s not pretty either.
May, on the other hand, is a different story.
The whole landscape suddenly bursts to life all at once. Days are full of the sounds of chubby bumble bees buzzing between bright spring flowers, and nights are filled with a chorus of spring peepers.
(For those of you out West, without abundant water features at every turn…the spring peepers are really something else. They’re tiny frogs, about the size of a dime, but they fill every pond and puddle by the millions. Each one sings about as loud as your average songbird…and there are millions competing for attention from the ladies. When I say chorus, I’m not kidding…and we open the windows each evening to hear their song.)
May is when all those spring dresses come out of the closet, and the sandals get dusted off for use.
Flowers come back to our dinner table, and fill the baskets of my little ones as they run around trying to capture every smell (and taste) in the yard.
May is also when the littles start crawling into the pond every time the temps hit 70 degrees (about 21 C), and they start their chorus of, “We’ve hot! How come it’s so hot out!?!?”
Nothing like raising hardy northern stock…they’ll happily do snow angels in tank tops all winter long…but then complain about the heat on a glorious spring day.
Go figure.
They’re already splashing around the stock tank pool each afternoon, and this year, I moved it right in the middle of our raised bed garden so that I can watch their “dolphin tricks” and fuss over my garden beds at the same time.
We put in about 30 raised beds over the last two years, of various sizes, but mostly 8’ x 4’, with a few 12’ x 4’ beds where they’d fit nicely, and a couple of 6’ x 4’ beds where we were tight on space.
Each bed is 2 ft high, made from 2’’ x 12’’ rough cut hemlock picked up in bulk from our local sawmill, and filled with a mix 50/50 mix of topsoil and compost.
Our native soils here are waterlogged clay, and after eight years of trying to make that work…we went all out.
Each bed cost us about $50 in lumber, and what seemed like a thousand years in time, plus buckets of blood, sweat, and tears.
(No, really, it wasn’t all that bad, and it’s A LOT cheaper than a gym membership.)
These beds have been amazing, and now that they’re in, they’re pretty well maintenance-free. The soil has no weeds, and it’s deep enough to allow for good drainage during our wet summers.
Normally this time of year, I’d be frantically cultivating, weeding, and going absolutely nuts in the garden…but this year, I’m walking around wondering what to do with myself. It’s refreshing, really, and I highly recommend it.
It’s the most peaceful spring I’ve had in years!
But, of course, there are literally dozens of projects on the back burner that quickly expand to fill every free minute.
I’ve had time to keep the freeze dryer running non-stop all month, and play with half a dozen new cheesemaking recipes. Spring is when cow’s milk is the richest, and it’s when the weather and conditions are just right for all the best cheeses.
It’s also given me time to think about how nice it is to just live, work and play in paradise. I know that sounds trite, but we’ve spent every waking moment trying to build a life here for the better part of the last decade.
Scrimping and saving, foraging and gardening, and those six cords of firewood aren’t going to cut, buck, and chop themselves…
Finally, we have systems in place and enough infrastructure here on this land that we can take a breath and actually put some conscious thoughts toward recreation.
The animal fencing is secure, the garden beds are built, the fruit trees that we planted in our first years here are all starting to bare, and our perennials are keeping us fed on mountains of fresh fruit and greens.
Now my mind turns to cutting trails and woodland campsites, building fire pits and cob ovens.
It’s still work, to be sure, but of a different sort.
And maybe it’s something we should have spent more time on right from the beginning. It’s actually one of the things we really regret in all our adventures here.
We were so focused on planting and harvesting and building that we didn’t spend nearly enough hours simply watching the fireflies court by firelight, or the salamanders dance in the pond.
Had we started off this adventure by building a wood-fired hot tub, and maybe a cob oven, we could have ended hard days in the garden by soaking our sore muscles and filling our stomaches with crisp wood-fired pizza. That goes a long way toward building morale, for sure.
Burnout in this lifestyle is real.
Trails we build in our first year would have seen foot traffic in all four seasons for the past decade…that’s 40 seasons worth of love (or, roughly 110 seasons, if you go by the local joke that Vermont has a total of 11 seasons).
But, as luck would have it, we’re planning on starting over, and we’re looking for new homestead land to start our adventure again. We’ll be taking everything we’ve learned in our years here with us, along with a cutting from all our favorite perennials…but other than that, I imagine we’ll land on pretty raw land.
And the first thing we will do is cut trails, build a firepit, and meet the frogs and fireflies.
Until Next Time,
Ashley at Practical Self Reliance
Always a great read from you
If you like Vermont, you might like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I grew up on the western end and all of your pictures made me remember watching huge black tadpoles swimming in mud puddles in the spring, catching frogs in the pond, and having hundreds of acres to tromp around in.