The ground is officially quite frozen – hurrah! With about two dozen hazelnuts displaying beautiful and adorable little male catkins in their very first year (planted bare root this past spring), we couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds for Nutwood Farm. Of the 225 hazelnuts we put in the ground, there were only TWO that seem to have not made it through the season – but even on that we’ll have to wait and see! Most of the little nutkins have 4, 8 or even 12 additional root sprouts around the leader showing signs of healthy and robust shrub development. And with another 200 bare root hazels on order for next spring, we can’t wait for our visions of gorgeously contoured edible hedgerows to start taking shape.
As we transition our energies indoors and as close as possible to our lovely warm woodstove, the work ahead of us can seem fairly daunting. For the most part, we know what we want. Now we need to figure out how to get there. But in Wendell Berry’s essay, “American Imagination and the Civil War,” he writes, “imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same.” So I am reminded, even as I oscillate between daring confidence and bewildering doubt, that all really we lack (other than an egalitarian society) is the imagination necessary to bring these two states of want and have into one. It is a creative challenge indeed, but, with patience, and grit, and sprinklings of self-love, and the courage to do what we are quite aware is not commonly done, our dreams will only continue to come true.
Below are images from our architectural drawings recently completed by our dream team who were willing enough to buck the conventions with us and figure out what it would really take to make our strange and wonderful house concept fully MA building code-compliant. Imagination is the limit! We can’t wait to build this baby!
