Country Living for City Slickers

My story begins about ten years ago in San Francisco living on my sailboat in Jack London Square five years after my divorce. Met a lovely lady who taught me how to buy fruit and taste food. Denise would take my cheap peaches and throw them in the garbage asking, "Did you smell them before you bought them?" I'd excuse myself with how cheap they were. Horrified at what she was willing to pay for real peaches I began to reconsider after tasting a real peach if maybe I should be patient and see what other expensive tastes I might discover. We spent our weekends at farmer's markets tasting things and stocking up on "healthy" food and for the rest of the week I found myself rushing to her place after work to eat. Long and short ... I married her. We started shopping at the Berkeley bowl and gradually she advanced me to picking out melons and garlic. I would stand in front of the melon bins reverently holding a dozen melons up to my nose while ladies around drifted into Mona Lisa smiles figuring I knew something meaningful.

Denise was a street artist manufacturing amazing fused glass pendants that she peddled to tourists in the Embarcadero and I was contracting Zen bathroom remodels for Berkeley Professors and when we finally put it together we looked at each other and said, "It's time to go back home." Good choice. I have to say I felt bad leaving the Berkeley bowl behind with it's forty seven choices of melons. When we arrived in New York and stepped into the Carrot Barn in Schoharie Denise got all ferklempt [teary eyed] knowing that the vegetables she was touching came from over yonder. We rented an apartment in the quaint neighboring hamlet of Gallupville and after a year of indoctrination and orientation found a twenty acre farmette at 2100 feet in another hamlet called Summit. Everyone laughed knowing how high the snow drifts are up there, yet the air is so sweet and fresh, and the pristine feeling of white untouched blankets of snow is enough of a wonderland to soften the blow of old man Winter. With many brooks, fields and myriads of colorful foliage and flowers ever changing and renewing their life cycles and stages of growth every day is a new adventure exploring nature and learning about her moods and attitudes. We grow a little more and more each year at the Three Barn Farm. And though this is quite a shift from city mix somehow we began digging it. It's amazing what lives in soil and how life supporting it is to cultivate it. We are even considering bringing in bees this season to sweeten things even more.