`Maine Farm’ overflows with rich information

MAINE FARM: A Year of Country Life, by Stanley Joseph and Lynn Karlin, Foreword by Helen Nearing, Random House, 192 pages, $32.50.

With disarming honesty author Stanley Joseph sets forth the satisfactions and vicissitudes of life on a 22-acre saltwater farm in Maine. Located on Cape Rosier, a tentative green peninsula projecting timidly into Penobscot Bay, the farm fronts an arc of rock-strewn cove. Tenaciously, his small tract of land retains its aura of isolation despite determined encroachment from ubiquitous developers. The flow of Joseph’s quiet chronicle is enlivened with the graphic dynamics of the book’s 250 color photographs, contribution of his wife, Lynn Karlin, a professional photographer.

Nearly 2,000 years ago Virgil wrote his immortal `Georgics,’ a treatise written in verse about: “What makes the cornfields happy, under what constellation it’s best to turn the soil and train the vine.” This time it is Joseph’s turn, and in his four-season retrospective he describes his hands-on method for starting thousands of vegetable and flower seedlings each spring, muses over the miracle of the annual bird migration — “Three hundred species of birds visit Maine every year”; explains how best to wage war against garden pests, blackflies, deerflies and mosquitoes — “Italian folk wisdom has it that sleeping with a pig in the bedroom protects against malaria, presumably because the mosquitoes will prefer the pig’s higher body temperature”; and instructs how to dry flowers such as rugosa rose buds, lavender chives, yarrow and sweet fern.

The author purchased his farm 11 years ago from Scott and Helen Nearing, celebrated back-to-the-soil pioneers and co-authors of the durable “Living the Good Life.” “In what would be their last project together,” writes Joseph, “Scott and Helen had built a new stone house next door, and we agreed to share their old garden for that first summer while they built up the soil and finished the stone walls for their new garden.” Scattered over the 8 cleared acres of his newly acquired farm were the outbuildings, gardens, pond and 100-year-old Cape house.

“That first summer together, we expanded the vegetable business and started selling wreaths of dried flowers which continues, along with Lynn’s photographs, to be our main source of income today,” says the author. In 1986 their partnership segued into marriage, although even in the book one feels throughout the strength of their continued teamwork, as for example, the related yet independent contributions of Karlin’s camera in depicting the first frolic of a new-born kitten, the blaze of summer flowers dyed with nature’s gaudy colors, carefree joyousness of May Day celebration with the neighbors, hanging kelp on the clothes line to dry, collecting rose hips on a nearby island, and the disorganized charm of their local Fourth of July parade.

There are box inserts galore offering recipes for special farm dishes such as pumpkin pie, clam chowder, sourdough bread, dilly beans, blueberry muffins, and Jerusalem artichoke pickles. Step-by-step instructions are given for building a sauna hut, a tiny sea craft called a coracle, and an efficient compost; to say nothing of how to weave willow baskets, coming to terms with beekeeping, and creating dried-flower wreaths. There are even directions for making blueberry wine, rhubarb wine, and transmuting sweet cider into the headier hard stuff. This handsome 10-inch-by-10-inch olla-podrida virtually overflows with material relevant to a Maine saltwater farm. Joseph’s narrative is limned in prose as spare and down-to-earth as the comfrey salve he tells how to concoct. Igniting it is Karlin’s photography, some of whose pictures fall into the category of fine art.

Forthright, rich in information, reflection and unforced beauty, “Maine Farm” is a rural microcosm to which we have all been invited, there to marvel, learn and come away with a fresh awareness of the value of our link with nature.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”