A couple of young boys, tagging along with their parents and bored out of their minds judging by the fact that their iPhones hadn’t left their hands since we left the barn, snickered. “Green manure? Is that like vegetable poo?” one of them asked, to the delight of the other.
“Nah, the poo came later,” Leo fired back, clapping the kid on the back and nodding toward the iPhone. “You planning on playing on that thing the whole time?”
“Um, no?”
“Great answer. So, back to the poo—”
“Wait, the poo is real?” the kid asked, looking at his friend in disbelief.
“Dude. This is a farm. There’s poo everywhere,” Leo said seriously. Every single one of us did a discreet quick lift and check of the bottom of our shoes. “Green manure is a cover crop we sow to put some nitrogen back into the soil. Clover’s also great for cows, which works out perfectly, since the next farm over is a dairy farm. The owner’s a friend of mine, and we help each other out. I provide the grazing land, Oscar provides the four-legged poo machines, and pow.”
“Poo?” the kids asked.
Leo nodded. “Nature’s way of ensuring a good harvest.”
Everyone nodded like this made sense.
“We usually don’t have so much poo talk this early on in the tour, but every now and again we get someone in the group who can’t let the word manure go by without a chuckle. I get it,” Leo said, patting the kid on the shoulder. “Who wants to see the compost pile?”
Both kids forgot all about their iPhones for the rest of the tour, and I heard them telling their father that Leo was “awesome.”
We hiked up and down hills, tucking in and out of hedgerows and along the naturally worn paths between the fields. We saw rows and rows of vegetables, almost every kind imaginable. Pole beans grew vertically up green wood stakes, teepee’d over frothy catnip plants, designed to deter pests in a natural way. Carrots were planted alternately with leeks, which encouraged growth and discouraged something called carrot fly. We stopped periodically to taste, nibbling chive flowers and the first tiny yellow pear tomatoes, planted alongside bushes of purple basil.
We visited the greenhouse, where trays and trays of seedlings were in various stages of growth. Tiny potato seedlings grew next to enormous heads of butter lettuce. We spent some time out in the fields that were deliberately resting from crop production, but hardly dormant. We were up higher on the hills now, the barns and the main house far below in a sea of green.
Just as we were leaving one of the fields, three tractors appeared, towing what looked like . . . outhouses?
“Perfect timing, here come the chickens,” Leo said, herding us into a corner of the field as the tractors made their way out into the middle. “If you look at this field, compared to the one next to it, what do you see?” He looked at everyone, encouraging the kids to answer.
To my left, a field with sheep grazing. To my far left, a field with the aforementioned borrowed cows grazing. And the current field? As each tractor stopped and disengaged its little towed house there were chickens everywhere. Beautiful big birds with glossy feathers, fat and sassy and tumbling out onto the waving grass. Grass. Hmmm . . .
I looked from field to field. “You’re moving the animals to mow the grass,” I piped up. Leo looked straight at me, his expression lighting up at my correct answer, and a feeling of warmth started in my tummy and spread outward.
“Exactly right: the animals are mowing the grass for us.” He pointed toward the cows patiently chewing their cuds. “On that field we’ve got a tasty cover crop of alfalfa grass, with a bit of clover mixed in. The cows chew it, crop it down to about knee high, then we move them on to the next field.”
“And the sheep move into the first field, right?” I pointed to the fluffy snowballs.
“Right again, Roxie,” he said, walking through the group to stand right in front of me.
For a moment, I thrilled at the sound of my name on his lips. And for another moment, I imagined him saying my name over and over again. And then for a particularly naughty moment, I forgot all about my name on his lips, and just imagined me on his lips.
And just like that, he licked them. His lips, I mean. And that sweet feeling of warmth headed straight between my legs. No longer sweet, no longer content. Just lust.
“So what do the chickens do?” someone asked.
Leo was silent, lost in studying . . . me?
“Why do you move the chickens behind the sheep?” the asker repeated.
Leo’s jaw clenched. I stopped breathing.
“The chickens?” the guy repeated.
I started to tell whoever was so worried about the chickens exactly where to go, when Leo luckily intervened.
“The chickens finish the job the sheep and the cows started,” he said, appearing to ground himself in the familiar material. “And in turns, they all fertilize the field. The chickens help to finish aerating the soil and feast on all the bugs left behind, making them fat and happy in a completely natural and stress-free environment. The chickens produce eggs with yolks so orange you’ve never seen anything like it. And the chickens”—he started off down the hill toward the main house—“are at the end of the tour. Let’s head back.”
The group followed dutifully behind him, and I could hear him telling them about how they could help out in their own community, or join the farmshare if they were local. Were we moving faster than normal? We sure seemed to be, as he hurried us down the hill and back to where the tour began, wrapping things up.