Fifteen years later, Chaskey works for the trust, managing, among other duties, the Quail Hill Farm, which has grown to about 175 families and 50 individual members. The Chaskey children, Levin, Rowenna and Liam, all born on the East End, are growing up on fresh, organic vegetables chosen not only for their superior taste, but often for their beauty as well. (They even like Chaskey's favorite spring cabbage, Early Jersey Wakefield, sauteed with olive oil and garlic.)
One of Chaskey's greatest satisfactions has been to revive fields long drained of nutrients by constant rotations of potatoes and corn, and by growing cover crops like oats, buckwheat, clover and bell beans, which add organic matter and nitrogen to impoverished soil. "When we took over farming the field we call Hurricane Hill," Chaskey writes, "there was not a worm to be found in the full five acres." Now, it is like crumbly chocolate cake, teeming with micro-organisms.
Quail Hill Farm is in an enviable position, compared with many CSAs, which are hard-put to find the capital for a new tractor. Its capital expenses are paid by the Peconic Land Trust, which also pays the salaries of Chaskey, a field manager and four summer apprentices.
There is a deep sense of place to these flat, sandy acres, where the rooster crows over the henhouse, nestled in a woods of native beech and holly. It's just about time to plant those 3,000 tomato seedlings thriving in the hoop house (where the free-ranging laying hens peck insects off the dirt floor). The peas, planted in early April, are already marching in wide green bands.
It's the community part that draws many to this farm. "Whenever I go to harvest in the fields, it's like therapy to me," said Gordian Raacke, a longtime member. Raacke doesn't have a green thumb; he's more interested, he says, in "growing the community." He flips the pancakes at the farm's annual breakfast, and helps organize the tomato taste-off in August. "It's a wonderful way for people to meet and learn about organic techniques," he said.
Chaskey has a lot of them up his sleeve. Like adding a half cup of bone meal when you plant tomatoes, or planting carrots in August to get the sweetest crop.
But he also reminds us to pause, as Edgar Wallis did in Cornwall, and listen. "To sense in the natural music of a meadow what a seed or plant senses," he writes, "to feel the interdependence of south wind, granite rock, mist and a robin's chatter."
Now, Chaskey stood into the wind on the tip of the East End of Long Island, and said: "Both are by the sea, at the end of peninsulas. And the light is very much the same."
RSS