The Work That Looks Like Rest

I haven't written here in a while. Not because the farm went quiet — the opposite. The season got loud all at once, the way it always does, and the writing was the thing that waited.

I don't have many pictures to show for it either. But the few I have say more than I expected them to.

Here is the greenhouse at the start of a morning, before the day has decided what it wants to be. The seedling trays are lined up the length of the bench, the hanging baskets are just beginning to throw out their first vines, and the light comes through the poly soft and undecided. This is the part of the year that is all promise. Everything in that house is a sentence not yet finished.

And here, in the tomato tunnel, is the end of that same sentence. The plants have climbed their strings nearly to the top now, leaning into each other down the whole length of the row. A few weeks ago they were the small green things in those trays. Now you can lose a person in them.

In between those two pictures — the trays and the jungle — is all the work nobody photographs. Which brings me to Cathy and Gabe.

If you glance at these two, you'd think they were taking a break. Gabe sitting back on the landscape fabric with a grin, Cathy on an overturned crate in the middle of the greens, hat down against the sun. They look like they've stopped.

They haven't. They're weeding.

That's the thing about this stretch of the season. The planting is mostly behind us and the harvest hasn't fully landed, and so the work that fills the days is the close, low, patient kind — the kind you do sitting down, hands in the row, pulling what doesn't belong so that what does can have its space. It is the least dramatic work on the farm and very nearly the most important. Nobody comes to a farm stand asking to see the weeding. But there is no full tomato tunnel without it.

Thirty-five years in, I've come to love that this work looks like rest. Maybe that's the part I most wanted to say after being away from this page so long. Some of what matters most is quiet. It bends down low. It doesn't ask to be noticed.

Cathy and Gabe were noticed today, though. By me, and now by you.

More soon — once the rows let me sit down for a minute myself.

On this Earth Day

Some photos from years past.

 

First Lettuce Day

 

There's a morning every spring when you walk out and the air has shifted. Not warm exactly — not yet — but softer. The frozen ground has given way to mud, and the mud has given way to soil, and the soil is asking you a question you already know the answer to.

We put the first lettuce in this week.

It's not dramatic work. You kneel, you dig a shallow hole with your fingers, you tuck a seedling in and press the earth around it like you're tucking a child into bed. You move down the row. Your knees get wet. Your back starts talking to you around row three. Somewhere a red-tailed hawk is circling and you forget to look up because you're watching the spacing between plants, making sure each one has room to become itself.

Thirty-five years we've been doing this, and I still can't explain why it moves me — these tiny pale-green starts that spent weeks in the greenhouse

suddenly out in the open air with nothing between them and the sky. It feels like trust. Theirs in us. Ours in the season.

The farm looks bare right now if you don't know what you're looking at. Brown fields. Bare oaks. The house up on the hill watching over everything the way it has since 1909. But look closer and there's green everywhere it matters — in the greenhouse trays, in the rows we just planted, in the garlic pushing up through last fall's mulch. Spring doesn't announce itself here. It whispers first, then gets louder every day until suddenly you're in it up to your elbows and wondering where March went.

I've learned not to rush it. The season sets the pace. We just show up, kneel down, and begin again.

Life on the windowsill in February

 

Spring is already stirring at Barberry Hill Farm.  The tomatoes have their own timeline.

CT Grown Spotlight: International Year of the Woman Farmer (Sharing Barberry Hill Farm’s story — and celebrating women in agriculture across Connecticut)

 

This year, Connecticut Department of Agriculture and CT Grown are spotlighting a woman farmer each week as part of the International Year of the Woman Farmer. I’m grateful they included Barberry Hill Farm in the series.

ct.grown 

✨International Year of the Woman Farmer Spotlight✨
Kelly Goddard, Barberry Hill Farm

🍅 How many years have you been farming?
30+ years

🍅 Briefly describe your farm operation.
Fifth-generation family farm running a farm stand from June through December, and over the years we’ve sold vegetables, cut flowers, and seasonal fruit through our stand, CSA shares, and farmers markets. We have practiced soil-health-focused farming for decades and recently participated in the Ecdysis Foundation’s 1000 Farms Initiative with strong soil health results.

🍅 What inspired you to become a farmer?
A desire to keep a historic piece of family land alive and meaningful—not just preserved, but working. In the mid-1990s, we built a farm business around a simple idea: grow food, sell it directly to our neighbors, and create a place where community happens. Over time, feeding people locally became more than a job—it became my purpose and the center of how I raised my family.

🍅 What advice would you give to other women considering a career in agriculture?
Start small, stay consistent, and build your operation around what your community truly needs. Find mentors, learn your numbers early, and don’t be afraid to diversify income while the farm grows. Protect your body—farming is physical—and protect your time by setting clear boundaries. Most of all: be proud of the leadership agriculture demands. Farming requires vision, resilience, and problem-solving every single day.

🍅 Describe a challenge you face as a woman farmer. Did you overcome it? How or why not?
A constant challenge has been carrying the responsibility of keeping a farm viable in a high-cost coastal area—while raising children and meeting the relentless labor demands of small-scale agriculture. I overcame it through persistence and creativity: I took on additional work outside the farm when needed, built strong relationships with customers, and leaned on community support and help over the years—including hosting WWOOFers for sixteen years. The challenge never disappears, but you learn to adapt and keep going.

👉 Follow Kelly at @barberryhillfarm on Instagram or visit barberryhillfarm.com

What I love most about this series is that it makes visible the work so many women do — season after season — to feed their communities, care for land, and keep farms viable.

If you’d like to follow along, CT Grown is sharing a new woman farmer story each week. I hope you’ll read, share, and support these farms however you can.

Thank you to everyone who shops our stand, joins the CSA, and helps keep farming possible here on the Connecticut shoreline.

The Healing Power of Winter: A Meditation on Impermanence

 

"There is a kind of silence that only comes in winter on a farm.

The fields rest. The soil sleeps. And if you are quiet enough, you can hear the land breathing—slowly, deeply—the way we all need to sometimes.

Here on the Connecticut shoreline, where this farm has stood since 1909, we have learned what nature teaches those who stay long enough to listen: there is power in the fallow time. There is healing in the quiet."

In winter, the farm strips down to its bones. The stone walls that have lined these fields for over a century emerge from the summer tangle. The old trees stand revealed. Everything non-essential falls away, and what remains is honest.

This is what the land teaches, if we let it: there is beauty in the fallow time. There is purpose in rest. The pause between harvests is not emptiness—it is preparation. It is the ground gathering strength for what comes next.

A farm is a long lesson in impermanence.

Seasons turn. Crops come and go. Helpers arrive and eventually move on. Barns that stood for generations come down, their wood stacked and waiting to become something new. Children grow up and scatter into their own lives. The hands that do the work grow older.

And still—the roots hold.

Perhaps impermanence is not the opposite of home. Perhaps it is what makes home possible. The coming and going. The planting and harvesting. The holding on and the letting go.

The maple buckets go out on the old trees each late winter, just as they did for the generations before us. The sap rises. The cycle begins again. What looks like stillness is actually quiet preparation—the trees gathering what they need, the soil rebuilding itself beneath the frost.

Even the compost steams in the cold air—warmth rising from what is breaking down, becoming the foundation for next year's growth. Decay and renewal are not opposites. They are the same gesture, made with open hands.

 

With the turning of the seasons, the land teaches us there is beauty to be found in change, impermanence, and in letting go.

We think we come to a farm for the tomatoes, the flowers, the harvest. But maybe what we are really seeking is this: permission to rest. Reassurance that the fallow times are not failures. Evidence that the land endures—not unchanged, but continuous. 

Rooted. Still here.

 

Walk outside today if you can. Let the winter air fill your lungs. Notice what is still standing. Notice what has been let go.

The fields will wake again. The seeds will find their way to the light. But for now, there is grace in the waiting.

There is medicine in the quiet.

Rooted in Madison since 1909, Barberry Hill Farm stewards the coastal land our family has cherished for five generations.