Back to nature on Taos' Magpie Farms

Living close to the land on one acre 

Tina Larkin

A blue-green egg sits in the chicken coop of Magpie Farms.

The magpies sat in the apple tree that sheltered the corn. They were large and thick and daring. The birds considered us with their ridiculously intelligent eyes.

"They were watching like that in the spring when I planted the corn," said Lee Bentley. "The minute I turned my back they dropped to the ground, picked up the seed and were gone. They are a real problem."


"That's right. You just have to sit and observe long enough," he concluded. "My ideology, if I had one, is look closely."
 Along with the magpie-troubled corn, Bentley is growing tomatoes, chard, onions, squash and chiles.
 His real passion is becoming as close to one with the land of Northern New Mexico as is possible and then sharing that knowledge with the young.
   Taos was like a circus with painted buses, chickens under people's arms in the Plaza, people selling jewelry everywhere. I'd never seen anything like it.

He wasn't looking back.





Homesteading 

The house, last owned in the 1930s, was in ruins and had been written off the tax rolls as uninhabitable.

Bentley was taught how to make adobe to rebuild the house and he was given a crash course in rural New Mexico survival living by  neighbors.

With the aid  of his new neighbors, he set to work on the house and built everything using old Northern New Mexico techniques.

"Thoreau was my guiding north star through it all."
 
"Thoreau was very into building your own house, growing a garden, looking at nature and finding out who you are in the process." 

He wanted to get away from the modern world, mix with the old and find a new way. Go where just being free is an act of rebellion.
 "The beauty of my life is I don't have to do anything. It will come to me. Life opens like a flower and presents itself."
 At that moment, a cat slinked by with a mouse in its jaws and disappeared into knee-high grass....




Read more @ Source:
by Jim O' Donnell
Taos' Magpie Farms: Living close to the land on one acre - The Taos News: Lifestyle

Link: http://www.taosnews.com/lifestyle/article_b46e4dce-14a0-11e2-ba26-001a4bcf887a.html