If you’re looking for a killer girls’ weekend of luxury shopping, stylish accommodation and the some of the most beautifully-crafted and generous cocktails in the Catskills, go to Roxbury. This weekend would have been the perfect weekend for it: brilliantly sunny, t-shirt warm, a performance by a group of fiddlers and a tasting of the divinely luscious Organic Traveller’s Tea at The Roxbury General Store, where you can also rent bikes.
50F, cloudless and warm in the sunshine at 9.30am, the day warmed up to 60F with the usual brilliant but slightly hazy sunshine and almost cloudless skies.
© J.N. Urbanski 2.34pm 10/12/14
Two Stones’ Barn
“The goal of farming,” wrote Masanobu Fukuoka, farmer and author of One Straw Revolution, “is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings”.
The delicate words of this Japanese maestro echo all over the Catskill Mountains as young people, city-bred and country-born, return to farming in droves. Agricultural courses spring up like new shoots across the Northeastern states to respond to demand. Furthermore, there’s a flurry of articles regularly in the media about diverse people quitting New York City. Young, old, wealthy and those tired of the city’s rising cost of living are all looking to make upstate their home. Homesteading is an art in itself and the Catskills are bustling with creative activity. Small-scale farming, the kind that covers the property’s operating costs, doesn’t have to be an enormous amount of work and new busy upstaters with enough capital can now hire farmers and farmer’s apprentices to run their farms while they continue their existing businesses. City transplants who have made the leap quickly find that there’s an invigorating honesty in land cultivation that is rarely found in city life.
Novice homesteaders looking for an exquisitely picturesque organic farm on which to model their fledgling operation should look no further than Two Stones Farm in Halcott, New York.