South of Monadnock Community

Dan and Hannah Bissex share their love of math, music, and north-country living. They were married in 2012, and they moved into the yurts in 2014 with their yellow lab, Daisy Mae. In November 2014, their family grew to include a delightful little girl, Juniper Rae. Dan is from central Vermont, and grew up with a model of citizenship and small community. He is a musician, a computer geek, and he loves to chop wood and build fires. Hannah is from central Maine, and she spent her 20’s exploring radical educational models that brought her all over the place. She loves to cook, work in the dirt, and look at birds.

They found the Meeting School in its final year while Hannah was pursuing her dream of combining agriculture and education in a model that would help students prepare for a complex and changing future. She taught math and science in Bliss House, and house parented with the Jensen family. Dan would visit often and participate in community life whenever possible, even playing with his band in the final coffee house of the year. The experience here was a powerful lesson of the joys and challenges of living in community through quaker process and testimony, and when the charge of re-envisioning this property into new life came they jumped in.

Dan and Hannah are very excited to be building a life on this beautiful property. Dan plans to bring a house concert series to the community to continue a family tradition of supporting local music venues, and Hannah plans to build a new educational program focused on agriculture and sustainability. All the while, they are enjoying the simple pleasures of rural living and the joys of starting a family amongst community. They both look forward to welcoming new families to share the richness of life here in New Hampshire.

Craig Jensen met and married his wife Megan on this property (he grew the flowers for their wedding and she baked the cake). Together they own and operate Sun Moon Farm, a small vegetable CSA.

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 the bread that his wife bakes. He has two goats (Napoleon and Whistlejacket) and a rescued feral cat named Wu and the three of them often follow Craig through the fields and forest when he goes out to write in his journal. Craig also really likes people.

Craig 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. Craig and Megan had their first child, Fox Mitchell Jensen, this winter. Craig has never been happier.

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 simple, accessible 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 she 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 in 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 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 intended return of a school program.  Although sad when 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.

These days Megan is happy to be raising their son, Fox, in a beautiful place, with a community that supports a good, honest, joyful and hard-working way of life.