FALLS VILLAGE — Spring is springing and for Janna Berger, field manager of Adamah, the farm division of the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, that means getting ready for the fifth year of its CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. “We’re planting in greenhouses and in the fields,” Berger said. “We’ll grow vegetables, fruits, herbs and salad greens — all certified organic — for about a hundred ‘share’ customers.” Berger has worked on similar farms for seven years and is in her second year of managing the one at Adamah. She is excited about the farm’s new tool, an antique tractor, originally built in 1949, that will allow them to work the acres more efficiently.Adamah offers vegetable shares that must be paid for in advance of the season, and which come in baskets that can be picked up, once a week, from the retreat’s refrigerated lockers. The cost works out to $25 per week for a 23-week season, approximately what a small family would spend on produce at a supermarket. People who have taken past shares cite the quality, consistency, variety and cleanliness of each week’s haul. The produce ranges from arugula to zucchini, with about 40 other vegetables, fruits and herbs. These include old standards such as lettuces and peppers, and a few veggies that most supermarkets do not carry, such as kohlrabi, which looks like a vegetable octopus and is used raw in salads and cooked as a side dish, and small spring turnips that taste very different from the larger, more fully grown turnips found at most groceries. Berger reports overhearing the child of one “share” couple asking her parents what sort of “treasures” they would obtain in their next trip to Adamah. Last year, fewer than a dozen local shares were bought; another five dozen were taken by families in the Hartford area, to which Adamah makes weekly deliveries. Berger hopes to expand the number of local shares, which go for $575 per season, and can be purchased at www.isabellafreedman.org/adamah/csa. “Whatever is not picked up each week, we donate to local food banks,” Berger said.Adamah’s farming practices are beyond organic. “The certification of ‘organic’ allows things we wouldn’t do,” Berger averred, such as the use of certain pesticides. Pest control at Adamah’s 10 acres is done through pre-treating the soil with compost and cover crops that produce the right amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients. “Well-treated soil usually deters pests,” Berger pointed out. “So does planting a large variety of seeds — the bugs prefer monocrops.” Should insect pests become a problem anyway, Adamah resorts to a “clay spray” that encases stalks and leaves in pottery armor, which foils the insects. Adamah uses a sophisticated computer program, developed through years of work by CSAs around the country, to direct the planting, feeding, fertilizing and harvesting of its produce. When there is a big problem — floods, last year, severely cut into the production in the fall — Adamah works collaboratively with other CSAs to fill in the gaps and provide enough quantity and variety for its weekly boxes. The farming program is integrated into the other programs of the Isabella Freedman retreat on Johnson Road. At “farm days,” twice a year, city folks and even some locals are introduced to organic farming, the cultivating of goats and pickling. The farm’s popular pickled beets, green beans and cucumbers can be bought as a separate share, or individually at local supermarkets; the goat dairy products are also available at Adamah as a separate share. New, this year, are June and August farm stays, in which the retreat essentially becomes a farm-based B&B. Although Isabella Freedman is a Jewish facility, Adamah produce shares are taken by people of all faiths and degrees of love of vegetables. There are other CSAs in the Northwest Corner and in nearby New York and Massachusetts, such as the Chubby Bunny Farm, also in Falls Village, and farms in Cornwall, Goshen, Wassaic, Sheffield and Great Barrington, all of which offer shares to the public at approximately the same season price.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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