Russet House Farm
This is the name we adopted for the farm after much discussion during a meeting yesterday. There is a beautiful old Russet apple tree near the corner of the barnyard. It is quite possibly a hundred years old, and for many years the original log house was referred to by its owners and people in the community as "the russet house."
Sun Run Farm/Centre was also a good name, but we were looking for a name that was tied in a little more fully with the history of the farm. Renewable energy is obviously essential in any consideration of a sustainable lifestyle, but we didn't see the photo-voltaic (solar energy) system that provides us with much of our electricity as central to our mission or vision, as important as it is.
We feel the new name captures something of the continuity of community and identity in place that a sustainable culture should strive for. Our neighbour, Denton, is in his eighties, and his mother's family settled our farm in the eighteen-fifties. He is a living link to the beginning of the European presence on this land, and knows the entire history of the farm (as a farm) because it is partly also his history. In one of our first conversations he asked me how the Russet tree was doing because he remembered it from his childhood, when the farm was still owned by members of his extended family.
This morning I was walking up to the house from the woods as the sun was coming up. I paused by the northwest corner of the barn to admire the russet tree. It is certainly old, part of its trunk is dead and hollow, but there is life in its branches still, and it gives us good fruit. The wine we made from its apples last fall should almost be ready. In the dim morning light its dark shape was beautifully silhouetted against the rising reddish glow on the eastern horizon.
The American poet Gary Snyder has said that you need to live in a place for four hundred years before you can begin to live there respectfully. A lot of things come into perspective when you begin to think that way. My hope and my goal is that in four hundred years (maybe even less) people will be living a respectful creational relationship on Russet House Farm.