Works & Days Farm

Welcome to the virtual location of Works & Days Farm and flower company in Shoreham, Vermont, USA. This is not a blog, sorry, just a point of reference, or proof of life. We are delighted, however, that you have visited our page.

We raise sheep mostly: Dorsets for the past 20 years but transitioning now to a hair sheep breed. (No more shearing.) We sell lambs wholesale to markets in New York and Boston. We also raise Scottish Highland beef, chickens for eggs, manage a maple sugarbush, and have been known to dabble now and then in bees, pigs, and goats.

We were not to the manner born. We learned on the job and built everything ourselves from scratch —-- house, barns, fences, outbuildings —-- without a mortgage, and without a trust fund. We farm 100 acres, most of it reclaimed from scrub. Our three children, now flourishing adults, were born and educated at home. If you ever have reason to contact us, we can tell you the whole story.

The name of our farm comes from the title of an ancient Greek poem by Hesiod (8th century BCE) about the times and seasons of the agricultural year and the value of honest work. Mark is a Classics professor and author of several books that you can find here. Caroline is head gardener, and a fine shepherdess. We think we make a great team.

In many ways Hesiod prefigured the outlook of art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, whose aesthetic, political, and moral ideals align closely with our own and are enshrined in this passage from The Stones of Venice (1853): “We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”