Between Planting and Picking - Sandi Haber Fifield photograph © Sandi Haber Fifield

Life on a small farm can be reflective and beautiful. Each season provides a new canvas for natures art combined with a farmers influence.

The end of winter can be trying as the final fits of snow and weather delays the birth of spring. Appreciation of the landscape can be overshadowed by daily chores, worries, and an endless list of things to mend as nature takes its annual toll.

And when I received Sandi Haber Fiflield’s “Between Planting and Picking” photo book in the mail, I was treated to an artful, reflective view of small farm life that allowed me to pause and enjoy her images.

Haber Fifield has found the hidden beauty of  small farms and shares 54 artful images of the time between the promises of spring and the reward of autumn’s harvest.  These are fresh images, most likely familar to the farmer and new to the non farmer.   These scenes are captured from spaces reserved for those who work and relish the work of the land.

The images are best viewed in print, a computer screen can only do them so much justice and the book is a sample of the  gallery show which opens March 3 and runs through April 16 at Rick Wester Fine Art in New York City.

Queen Anne’s lace and parked truck, Nelsen Family Farm, Kerbyville, OR, August 2010 © Sandi Haber Fifield

Haber Fifield’s project began in June 2009 and continued through the fall of 2010. The artist photographed family owned farms spanning New England to the West Coast and the Pacific Northwest. Teeming with the verdant and lush colors of these fertile fields, Haber Fifield made pictures that delicately balance the geographic with the geometric, while using the agricultural landscape to create a complex vocabulary of visual associations. Less documentary in nature and more about challenging her own vision, she finds in the unending cycle of growth and harvest a metaphor for her own image-making.

The monograph includes essays by Dominique Browning and Leslie K. Brown.  Their insight and discussion of the images  put  words to the feelings and emotions captured by Haber Fifield’s work.

Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA writes of the book, “Here are pictures of small farms, where food is grown with integrity, and of simple places that are beautiful because of the work that is done there.”

Harvested pumpkins, Belta’s Farm, Westport, CT, October 2010 © Sandi Haber Fifield

As I turned the pages, I found Haber Fifield’s images combining the order and chaos of a field:  a collection of tools, an improvised electrical box, or tools and chairs, as if the inanimate objects were patiently awaiting their owner’s return.

Her images take the viewer to private places: images of a journal/lunar calendar, a solo goose bathing in a tank, behind-the-scenes wash rooms, and laundry blowing in the wind.  There are no people in the collection, yet their influence is shown and felt with the turn of each page.

Many of the images also include barriers: fencing, crop netting, and make-shift backstops.In real life, these barriers  keep out predators and protect crops  and livestock. In the photographs, they serve to keep the troubles of the rest of the world at bay, while the viewer enjoys the art of the small farm.

There is nothing more fun for me than learning. And when I can’t learn from a person, reading a book or scanning the Internet is a great alternative. I think there are dozens of essential books for beginning small farmers.  Nothing replaces actual experience on the land, and the advice from more experienced farmers, but I think these five books represent a good starter shelf.

5.  Coop Michael Perry’s book on a year of pigs and parenting gives a great first hand view of life and decisions in a year of living on a new small farm.

4.  Gene Logsdon’s Small Scale Grain Raising is a good introduction to how growing grain doesn’t have to be done with a large tractors and gallons of fuel

3. Also by Logsdon, All Flesh is Grass helps understand the need and work behind proper pasture.

2.  Chickens are often a first livestock addition to a small farm and the Storey’s Guides are great quick reference guides to all kinds of farm animals.

1.  If there is a comprehensive book of how-to, Carla Emery’s The Encyclopedia of Country Living is the go-to book here at Two Mile Ranch when I have questions from gardening to dressing meat, to old remedies for cleaning health and life.

If d-i-y (do it yourself) is n-4-u (not for you), a pre-fabricated shed can be an attractive way to live small or build on to your space.

Modern Shed, based out of Washington and featured in Sunset magazine and other media outlets has sheds ranging in concept and size from garden sheds to dwellings.

By coincidence or editing, two articles were forwarded from readers this week about smaller living and both, are from the New York Times.

One article by Michael Cannell of the Times says:

For certain buyers, the shed may be an outlet for baby boomer remorse. Encumbered by mortgages and 5,000-square-foot homes, some Americans of means are looking for ways to reconnect with lost values of simplicity, sustainability and forthrightness — values that seem to be embodied by the sheds’ basic materials and designs.

Parallel to Cannells article in the same week by Steven Kurutz, who quotes our neighbor in to the east in Iowa CIty, Gregory Paul Johnson:

Gregory Paul Johnson, a founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, said that the notion of very small houses becoming popular was “an absurdity” five years ago. “But there are so many powerful forces at work right now,” he added, “like rising energy costs and the mortgage crisis. I think people want small homes because they cost less to purchase, maintain, heat.”

Some shed resources from Amazon – for both people and animals:

“Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways: Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations” (Debra Prinzing)