MeInMaine Blog

Tag: maine family farm

  • Sometimes Something Smaller Can Be Pretty Big.

    The Ordinary Household Items Your Parents Used Growing Up Are Extra Special.
    The Bottle Used To Sprinkle Water Ironing To Rid Those Clothes Of Wrinkles.

    When you settle a Maine estate and have to go through the house hold items of a loved one passed away, the small things are the most valuable.

    The items you remember as a kid that in a garage sale would be pretty valueless. Passed over or not fetching much of a price.

    I remember my Mom using this bottle pictured above. To sprinkle water on clothes being ironed to help remove wrinkles. Before steam irons, before permapress clothing. I can see her like it was today when all triggered by this particular bottle. Because it was the one she used. Not one like it, not one from the same era. This very one.

    To anyone else, it is just an old Pepsi bottle with a stopper on it.

    One vivid time I remember it in use back in November of 1963.

    I grew up on a Maine farm. The home has a long driveway and after being dropped off by the yellow bus late one November afternoon I walked in to the house hearing the television news announcer loud and clear. The President had been shot, assassinated he informed us. The news anchor visibly shaken, removing his glasses and I knew this was serious. As the words sunk in on what he was telling us. My Mom ironing, looking up and watching a black and white telecast with Walter Cronkhite providing the tragic news from Dallas Texas.

    Grisly details about President John Kennedy’s death. What happened in the back seat of the convertible 1963 Lincoln Continental and subsequent events. I would be eight years the next month. Sensed from a kid’s perspective my Mom was upset. Concerned like the rest of the nation, the world as I reflect back now to how the news must have hit, affected other adults back in 1963.

    So now my parents are gone. The household things divided up among my three older brothers and myself. And life goes on. I have moved up a notch in the family hierarchy.

    And the older I get, the more it is the little items I cherish the most.

    Because of the person that used them.

    Mom’s love of flowers continues. I look forward to spring at the farm when so many flower beds bloom because she started them years ago. Appearing right on time, like clockwork.

    Also have a Santa decoration too who is holding a Christmas light. Smiling broadly that always appeared like magic in the farm house kitchen. Like the Pepsi bottle ironing sprinkler, that too has the same priceless value to me.

    To anyone else, they see a cracked, well worn plastic red and white dime a dozen decoration. With lots of miles on it from years of holiday visits to the Houlton Maine farm home. That Santa was there during fun, family Christmas holiday celebrations as a kid with my brothers, Mom and Dad. He is still here, and part of distant memories. Bring alive, providing some of the holiday magic as I remember viewing hime through a kid’s eyes.

    Maine, families are close, working side by side on farms, other local businesses and active in their small vibrant communities.

    Maine, a place where the people, families matter most.

    We are all connected and make the state up here in the right hand corner so special. To add to the pure and simple four season’s natural beauty.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker207.532.6573info@mooersrealty.com

  • Maine Summer Weather Superb, But Irrigation Helps Farm Crops.

    The Maine Potatoes, Spuds Are Thirty This Summer
    The Maine Potatoes, Spuds Are Thirsty This Summer

    Day after day of sunshine, cobalt blue skies and summer weather that could not be improved on for recreation, for growing vegetables, fruit.

    But lack of water, a drink for the potato plants of Aroostook County means irrigation is part of the farming exercise this summer. A family farm I own in Houlton Maine has two ponds that came in handy for Michael Hagan who farms potato and grain on this homestead.

    This is what the irrigation of the Maine potatoes, spud fields looks like at sunset on the farm.

    Those two Maine farm ponds provided lots of extra water pumped at sundown to get maximum sustaining power without the hot sun’s evaporation robbing the plants of moisture they are crying out for, need. This farm field, land outside Houlton Maine on US Rt 2, the County Road. Other Maine Flickr photostream images to enjoy.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com

  • On A Maine Farm, You Grow Up But Never Lose The “Farmer” Part.

         My full time job for the last thirty years has been listing, marketing, selling Maine real estate.

         Before that, I was a broadcaster. Working in high school at the small local AM station called WHOU that at the time was owned by Howdy Doody, who was pretty big in black and white early television with his kids’ show. In college for a broadcasting/film degree from the University of Maine at Orono, I worked my way up the commercial radio station to one owned by horror writer Stephen King. But to leave Maine, and continue the climb in my broadcasting career and consider raising kids outside of “Vacationland” put me at a life Saratoga point. Real estate became the logical next step and producing videos for my job and local community fit right in with my “former life”. Here’s the video highlights of how I ended up where I am now. This is the guy who hunts and pecks the MeInMaine blog.

          But before the career path of broadcasting to real estate and then a blend of the two, I grew up on a Maine potato

    Working The Land In Maine Is Sacred, A Privilege To Be On A Farm.
    Working The Land In Maine Is Sacred, A Privledge To Be On A Farm.

    farm.

    The days of the local Maine family farms are waning and fewer of the land smaller spreads exist. 

    The trend of less farmers, bigger farms. How do I “feed” that childhood involvement of the farm experience that is in my system, part of my inner GPS and value system?  The hunger to work under the son on the same equipment my dad, his uncle did?

    I am lucky to own the tractor I spent a lot of time on as a kid on that farm. The 1953 Farmall Super M tractor, older than I am, is a piece of equipment I have the utmost respect for.

    One, because I depend on it starting next week for the yearly bush hogging of the farm I bought that myself and three older brothers grew up on. Most of the farm is rented to an area potato farmer with rotations to grains every other year. Other sections are in the soil bank  Conservation Resource Protection (CRP) program whereby that farm section is seeded down with special seed to promote a healthy “rest” from the farming cycle, over a ten year span. $50 an acre is receive as payment to put that soil in the soil bank, to keep it a farm field and help pay the property taxes. The rest of the farm not rented out, not in the CRP program is hayed and this year, with all the rain, haying has not been an easy operation.
       

    The second reason I respect the heck out of the antique Super M tractor is because my dad, his uncle were farmers and roamed the same fields on the family farm.

    When I am bush hogging, I can see what I have done that Saturday afternoon, or for a few hours before sunset. I know my family has maintained, worked hard on this same farm and are now gone, leaving the job to me. Something to pass on to my two sons who are home from college this summer. The two daughters did not get as exposed to the farming experience for which I am sorry. This farming heritage is in my blood but not the way I make a living. I am a pretend farmer because real estate is a jealous master…requiring most of my wits to keep up with changing technology and new ways to deliver information on property, on the local area events.

         This Super M will run all day on five gallons of gas. In its earlier days, the gas it gulped was leaded, to help the

    Work ethic, budgeting your time learned in the Maine potato field.
    Work ethic, budgeting your time learned in the Maine potato field.

    valves in lubrication. Now it does not pull plows, discs, harrows or a hay bailer. It does not pull a drain drill, a potato digger, or cultivate and hoe a crop. But I have all that equipment, could shift to the inbred farming skills and planting thru harvesting a crop. Or to raise cattle, beef if need be.

    That is a secure feeling, a sense of being able to feed my family, and for members of my family to continue to feed their kids, my grandchildren and so on. It may come to that with world affairs and this 300 acre family farm intact, is now a hobby but could be a livelihood. But farming is no picnic, being dependent on the weather which is unpredictable, and sometimes cruel. Farming in Maine is hard work, but the haying, planting, harvesting of potatoes is a labor of love, something I have always known, that my parents, my brothers did growing up. 

         So I am excited. My hobby, the Maine farm, needs to be bush hogged. The operation starts this weekend and I am anxious to climb on the tractor, head out to the fields.  I hook up the tractor battery, change the oil, grease the joints and head out to the back forty.  Over the next week in my spare time and with the help of my two sons the farm fields will be mowed, trimmed and groomed.  There will be immense satisfaction. A sense of stewardship, of history. 

    My parents are gone, dying in their 80’s but I feel they are sharing my joy, approving of the Maine farm care I continue that they passed on to me.

    As I bounce along on that Super M approaching a Maine sunset, the sight of a white tail deer watching me, eating wild apples from a distance is serene. The hawk flying in a circle overhead. Looking, scouting for a mouse to sample. That scurries from the freshly mowed grass behind me. Makes a fatal run for it.

    And the sunset, view of the hills hits me deeply. I think of my dad, my brothers, my great Uncle Finley who owned the Maine farm prior to 1959 and back into the teens, watching, smiling, approving. They enjoyed the same sunset..just a few decades earlier and the experience is spiritual for me. I know I am on the earth for a short time, and to enjoy, savor it. Being a steward of this family farm is an honor. And my kids may need some of that land to survive, to feed their kids and I hope it stays intact. Watch a Maine potato picking operation video…hear it, see it, experience it.

    Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers