church or volunteering to be in the mountain to set in front porch forum or two towns on line you can read names of people who are behind all the activities going on but mostly these are just  we are filming this for thanks of the many television and it's you have an interesting story and would you share with us your how you came to underhill and your early days here living with this really neat elderly couple who would look so elderly to me now that name their last name was bold and arthur bald was almost seven feet tall  a family it was known for their their height and edith she was just sort of normal but and so i boarded with them in the house and every day either walked or hitchhiked to underhill flats down the river road and every day that meant i came back and i was staring at this mountain and i became very enthusiastic about underhill it was like it just sort of settled in me that underhill was just a lovely lovely place and i left at the end of nine months and did a lot of other things and now i'm back and i've been back here now for seventeen years do you notice  as you've come back have you noticed every scene oh you connect with some of the same people or some of the has it changed much do you think it's changed hugely it at that time on the river road there was still a string of working farms there was the pollard family who still farm with horses primarily and that that has all changed i mean there's still remnants of it when we came back here in  eighty six i believe it was we didn't know we knew hardly a soul here and nobody on this road and it kind of went that way for two or three years we didn't really meet our neighbors you don't have kids in school we didn't have a dog we walked everyday so we just decided we'd throw a christmas party for the neighborhood and that was kind of the beginning and then bit by bit new people moved in we made sure that we you know where there was a loaf of bread or something like that to welcome into the community and and then i've always gardened and we start our we just start putting our vegetables at the end of the driveway and that really crazed some lovely community the land trust is one interest of yeah i've probably been on the jericho under elantra us for twelve or thirteen years and although time sort of has a way of getting away from you maybe it's been more like fifteen it was just after the mills riverside park was purchased and i had taken a class at u conservation and i was looking to find a way to put some energy towards land conservation and whatever volunteer capacity i could do and so i started attending many meetings and recently i was asked to be on the board currently i'm the land stewardship chair so that organization has grown it's actually it's a very small board has only five people on the boards all volunteer and but we have starting with will from an area that's been used by keeping track for years and years sue mor that was the first property that we actually decided that we would on and i remember that was kind of a scary proposition because we're a small organization with not much resources but we took it on and the beauty of that and our saving grace is that the vermont land trust is the organization that monitors the easement holds the easement so we don't have to worry about that part of it and since something to do with the land then you had some work a lot of work with that under health and her community garden right yonder hill central school which isn't is just a great little school it's just down the road from us here it's k through four two visionary parents in that school carol sullivan and cindy studs came up with the idea they just felt the need to be a garden for those kids and boy i was eager to jump on on board with that so that was four years ago now we've been through a fourth season and a group of volunteers just got together and built raised beds and  some money some how to get some compost for raised beds mix all i can stuff and every year the fourth grade class add something to that garden in it you know a couple years ago it was apple trees and  which is it's kind of a nice symbolic thing for that part in class to give something for that garden and all the produce is now used by the kitchen in a school that was a bit of a hard thing to to start because there was quite a bit of resistance at first but now it's and it's really really rock and what do you think the value with for the kids having the garden well i've seen it because one wonders you know you know all the kids come out of the plant all the vegetables in the spring and then then they're gone to summer come back and fall and every kid in school harvests something in that garden and you wonder where that that's you know what seems like kind of a brief exposure course is sitting there all the time but i was talking to a teacher at the school and she said you know what i've noticed over the last four years is that now the kids actually eat vegetables you know and one of the kindergarten and first grade not so much but once they hit second third and fourth grade they're you know the vegetable powder comes by they're they're digging in but i've always felt strongly that the kids particularly today when we're so divorced from where food comes from need to be associated the need to know how to grow four that the children of that era knew the land differently than the children today i would say so yes they were surrounded by much more small agriculture in fact they probably lived with it you know at least a large vegetable garden and maybe an animal or two also you grow not only from your work in the land trust in the school garden through your own garden and you in baraboo your wife  actively involved in growing produce for farmers markets and all sorts of wonderful thing it's been great so we just moved we had a table moved it out the end of our driveway and i just started putting things on it first i didn't  just said you know donations acceptable can and people rally people were excited and so we did that for two or three years and then and finally we got brave we actually put a price list out there but it's still it's on the honor system that really helped us form a community around here and that's grown now into a full fledged market about a hoop house kit and we build a hoop house and it's unbelievable the amount of tomatoes we started to collect on this thing and and of course another good reason to have the stand because we could never accommodate that number the newest thing we grow actually is some gold tomatoes these little gold cherry tomatoes they have a really high sugar content kids love them there they're like they are a fruit but they're really they taste like a fruit two years ago i decided to act on something that i've been thinking about for you know an eon and that was why don't we have a little farmer's market right here in underhill center and it seemed a bit impractical given the location and all but on the other hand we have that beautiful little park this never really used for much and so i went to the select board and proposed my idea and of course got no resistance at all in fact someone turned to the other guy and he said how come no one's started to saudia before and so we only have enough energy to pull this off once a month but we have had other people you know kind of come out of the woodwork and we have a number of kids who bring crafts we've got a baker now who just lives up the road just starting his business and somebody with grass fed beef mr walker with a syrup he's always there and some people actually have done fairly well in this market and we have partly because we have our camp followers you know all the people when i send out my e mail to all the people that use our stand i say we're not going to stand this week come on down the farmer's market and one of the neat things about it is there are people that live close enough to walk or bike and we usually have music and it's just it's a very lively neat thing and there's nothing like standing across the table from somebody who's looking at your vegetables and having a conversation because it's a product that you have grown you love it you feel good about it and that brings a whole other quality into the conversations you have with people there's a real connection about it food is really a great right around just before the end of world war two they had friends that bought a farm in separate center and the farm next door's for sale and they both wanted to get out of the city and so they they moved to vermont and and i was born here you know luck of the draw it was like heaven for us kids i mean we would just go out the door when you're in the woods you're in the fields or whatever so you were you were close to the land you were close to a family who really believed in a rural existence that sounds like you as a boy yeah i think it was kind of rote you know i think what part of it was was we were not farmers but we were surrounded by farmers and the reserving way in which i began to think of farming as sort of the ideal life i mean i saw how hard it was and i saw that farmers are disappearing and that theme has kind of run through my life i think i'm just aware of sort of the agricultural decay that's happening all around us i remember  a teacher my brother had when we were in bennington i think and he would take us back into these heavily wooded areas and we'd see all these old cellar holes and you know old cemeteries and and all and stuff and i realized from on at one point was all a home with people who are living you know a self sustaining lifestyle growing their own stuff because they had to and then you know historically speaking i guess it was around the time of the end of the civil war and everybody just left in a population crash and the trees came back but there's still that sort of for me that that history of the population of vermont you know having been great at one time and that's that's sort of alive in me i guess and and so in my perfect will world you know i'd love to see actually what's happening right now among which is small entrepreneurial farms starting to be viable again which is amazing you know is there a created there and just i worked with them part time for two or three years and just hanging out with them was so inspiring you know and it what's true of them and people like them is they 're able to inspire other people and it's it's really a powerful thing and so much of your work is also connected to community is that part of the equation yeah when i was a kid we moved a lot but every four years we moved my father was blind by the way and and so he and he was trained as a machinist  and the economy was not good in the fifty's and sixty's in vermont and so he would get a job lose a job and we just had to move you know because he'd find other jobs somewhere else and  i think so i would start forming community and then i would move it would be gone and it was really devastating to me i'm not a good mover and and so one of the things that i've always wanted is the formation of some kind of community where i belong i'm known and i know others and i care about them  and and that's just really been important to me so you think you're going to put up your what's the expression when you're your kick off or something you're going to you know roll over and in the underhill so i owe it yeah probably the you know as long as we possibly can that also i'd love to hear your dream or your image of this community when i look at it underhill ike of course have this historical vision of when i first came here and  there was as i said quite a bit of farming that was going on in this town and i look at what this town has become which is primarily it's just a commuter town anymore and i i i would love to see there be more agricultural value added whatever kind of things going on here more independent small businesses and that's that's where actually cap comes in and you and i have a similar vision i think in least in some ways the community agricultural project which we sort of got off the ground a couple of years ago and to provide some how resources knowledge materials whatever for people to get into growing some of their own crops having chickens whatever yeah i think this area is i think pretty unique just the way it's situated next to the mountain it's remained really rural and it would be great to see it be more vibrant but in a in more of an agricultural way or whatever that's a beautiful image thank you once again yeah you're welcome