About the Farm
This land was locally know as the “Thomas Farm” from the late 1780s through the early 20th century. In 1957 the farm was purchased by The Meeting School, a co-ed boarding and day school guided by the principles and practices of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers
The school's academic and residential life programs were grounded in a belief in the inherent worth of every human being, the dignity of physical labor, and the recognition that each individual can enrich the community as a whole. The school upheld this property's long history of agriculture by integrating the farm into class work and community life, and by growing a good percentage of the food that the school community required.
Megan and Craig met in 2003 while working for the Meeting School. In addition to growing food, Craig and Megan served this community as teachers, house-parents and cooks. Following the closing of the school program in 2011, we have worked to keep a part of the school's spirit alive by connecting with a wider community through our vegetable CSA.
By continuing good stewardship of this land and developing relationships with a whole new population, we hope to continue living into the Quaker testimonies of community, peace, simplicity, stewardship, and integrity that were at the heart of the school's mission. As we begin another CSA season, we are also working hard to re-establish a vibrant community on the property in the form of a small cohousing neighborhood called The South of Monadnock Community. On October 1, 2011 we were married here on the farm. In 2015 we had a baby named Fox Mitchell Jensen.
About the Farmers
Craig Jensen
Craig grew up in a New Jersey suburb, went to college in Worcester, MA, and moved here in 2003 to work for the Meeting School. For two years he was a farm apprentice at Gorzynski’s Ornery Farm in the southern Catskills and spent those two winters living at the Pendle Hill Quaker community in Wallingford, PA.
Craig likes board games, books and comics and the bread that his wife bakes but his son, Fox, is his most favorite thing in the world. He has two goats (Napoleon and Whistlejacket) and a rescued feral cat named Wu and the three of them often follow him through the fields and forest when he goes out to write in his journal. Craig also really likes people.
He likes that the farm keeps him usually close to home, always busy, and often with his family. His father is a regular volunteer during the harvest season and his younger sister is a CSA member.
Craig grows lots of garlic and dahlias and would like to spend all of his winter making toys for Fox and other friends.
Megan Jensen
Megan Jensen co-farms Sun Moon Farm vegetable CSA with her husband, Craig. She is a bread baker, a simple-foods cook, and a dabbler in visual arts & crafts, enjoying printmaking, embroidery, paper mache, and other accessible simple media.
Megan came to this property as a farm intern for The Meeting School in 2005. She fell in love with the farm, the community, the long Quakerly meetings, and a co-worker named Craig, and stayed to serve as faculty Farm Manager, house parent, teacher and community member for three years.
After leaving the school to pursue broader experiences as apprentices for a vegetable farm in rural New York, property managers for a beautiful land trust & community gardens on Ogunquit, Maine, and resident students at Pendle Hill, in Pennsylvania, Megan and Craig were ready to find a place to set down roots for family, farm and community connection. They pursued membership in a forming cohousing community in Belfast, Maine, but when way opened to return to The Meeting School, they were drawn back to join that lively and deep place again.
When the school closed in 2011, with a hope to re-open within a year, Megan and Craig offered to stay on, to keep the farm going in readiness for the possible return of a school program. Although sad that the school could not re-open, they felt called to the opportunity and obligation of joining with others to help the next good thing grow out of this fertile place.
Now Megan looks forward to raising their child in a beautiful place, with a community that supports a good, honest, joyful and hard-working way of life.