PREVIEW: News From Friends, Winter 2012-13

 

In the upcoming issue of News From Friends, you’ll read the stories of three alumni: a chef who uses liquid nitrogen to craft five-star meals; a young entrepreneur who is in the business of getting food from the farm to your table; and a grandmother who is managing to live off the land in New Hampshire, despite a very short growing season. You’ll also learn about Friends students, alumni, faculty and staff members working hard to reach their fullest potential—and then surpassing that as they strive to make an impact on the world. Please check back next month to view the full magazine online.

 

There is no question that Barbara Michelson '73 is a country girl at heart. Despite the confining pavement, the nearby vehicle exhaust and bustling foot traffic, the foraging city rats, and the ubiquitous shade cast by adjacent buildings, Barbara, as a student at Friends, attempted to grow potatoes in a small soil bed outside of the Fifteenth Street Meetinghouse.

"I can't report that I was very successful," Barbara said during an interview at her home in Peterborough, N.H.

Since her time at Friends, Barbara has spent most of her life working with food—cooking it, growing it or selling it. When the rural farmland of the North Fork of Long Island—a place Barbara and her family called home for nearly 30 years—became overdeveloped and overpopulated, Barbara and husband Jim began researching the prospect of buying land elsewhere with friends. "We wanted rural living, but I am not very interested in aging in splendid isolation," Barbara said.

So, it was during an exploratory trip to New Hampshire in the fall of 2008 that she came across the Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, the first eco-friendly cohousing community in New Hampshire and the perfect place to accommodate Barbara's passion for farming and cooking and her love for rural, but social, living.

Nubanusit comprises 113 acres of farmland, fields and woodlands with trails, a pond and nearly a mile of riverfront. Just beyond the homes stand a wooden barn and other farm buildings housing horses, pigs and chickens. The manure, meanwhile, is composted and used as fertilizer. A resident farm team manages the land and handles the land use agreements, such as a Community Supported Agriculture vegetable garden that sits on an acre of land near the community swimming hole. There is also a communal kitchen where neighbors gather to make yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, chutney, and beer, and to boil sap into maple syrup.

"We have an unofficial goal of growing 50 percent of our own food on-site," Barbara said. This is ambitious because New Hampshire's long, frigid winters and cool springs can curtail an already short growing season. One solution has been to erect a hoop greenhouse to extend the season.

This form of cohousing and shared farmland began in Denmark in the late 1960s, and spread to North America in the late 1980s. Today, there are more than 100 cohousing communities completed or in development across the United States and Canada. Intriguingly, Barbara said that many of the objectives of cohousing are in-line with Quaker values. Consensus decision-making, similar to that which takes place in Quaker Meetings, is utilized. "It has a very Quaker feel," Barbara said. "We have ad hoc and steering teams like the farm team and the community life team. We have a monthly meeting and make decisions by consensus."

Furthermore, residents are guided by a Nubanusit Neighborhood mission, which includes being stewards of the earth—using organic and biodynamic methods in their farm, gardens and fields. Community service is also important. The community donates portion of the food they grow to a service agency in Peterborough that distributes it to low-income families in the area. Nubanusit residents also provide opportunities for non-residents to learn about farming.

"During our first visit to Nubanusit, we hiked the land with neighbors and saw a child supervising a group of neighborhood kids," Barbara said. "With kids this great, we knew good adults must live here too."

In addition to farming, Barbara's other passion, cooking, began in lower school when she took a cooking class at the 14th Street Y. She later attended Cornell University and also earned a Grande Diplome degree from Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. She has worked in catering in New York City and Long Island and then entered the business of growing and selling to restaurants in New York City at a time when buying local was nearly unheard of. "I've always bounced from cooking food to growing it," she said. "I got to a point where I didn't want to keep shipping away all the pretty foods we were growing. I wanted to cook with them."

With an English degree from Cornell, Barbara likes to write as well and authored a regular food column for a local newspaper in Long Island. She also wrote an elaborate family cookbook for her children, which was eventually hardbound and published. Today, her daughter, Sarah, who lives nearby in the town of Harrisville, raises animals and prepares food for sale at farmer's markets. Barbara helps her cook at a newly-finished commercial kitchen on their farm.

"My love of cooking and growing differ," Barbara said. "In cooking, as a craft, you go to work each day striving to get better, and the unit is one day long. And I love that. With farming, the season is obviously the season, and you know you only have a very finite number of them to acquire the knowledge you need and also to get some luck. So every fall is truly bittersweet."

To learn more about Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, visit: www.peterboroughcohousing.org.