There is a saying about needing to break a few eggs to make an omelet – well we are breaking lots of eggs here at Cranberry Meadow Farm. The beautiful rectangle stone garden and lawn area to the rear of the inn is now total chaos thanks to Bob Taylor and his crew! That’s a bit of a joke because Bob’s team does such an amazing job of creating stone walls to match the ones here that are clearly hundreds of years old. We met Bob and his team out at a stone quarry to try to choose some steps last Saturday, and it was an incredible experience to climb through towers of granite blocks that had been cut in the 1800s. There was even a very sheer wall where granite had been cut, leading to a very deep pool where apparently a large building crane and several other interesting items have plunged over the past many years. I learned from one of Bob’s team that local kids (including him) would sneak into the quarry during high school and go swimming and diving – just like in the movie called Breaking Away.
After a trip to London and Basel, I returned to Cranberry Meadow Farm and met Carolyn after she had spent several days organizing our affairs at our former New Jersey home. It is a challenging time emotionally for both of us, but when we are here in New Hampshire it’s always inspiring and peaceful.
My mother is here now for her first visit, and we have had fun exploring the property on the John Deere Gator and enjoying the bounty from our garden – peaches, kale, broccoli, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, lettuce, asparagus, nasturtiums, blueberries, raspberries, and more. To compensate for half of our chicken flock that fell victim to a rogue raccoon, we picked up 6 new Ameraucana chicks yesterday, which apparently lay blue and green eggs. It will be a few months of keeping them in the shed under a heat lamp before we find out what they produce. And finally, after a challenging morning yesterday involving a trip to the emergency room, I took Mom fishing on the Contookook river for a few hours. The water was fairly shallow but we did end up with a few fish for dinner. -Charlie