New Calf!

Serious “circle of life” moment this morning on the farm when I was driving back from picking up one of our bulls from the butcher shop and spotted this brand new calf in the pasture. Their mama is our herd matriarch, Elsa, and has now given us 3 calves! Glad she waited until it wasn’t negative 19 like a few days ago!

Thistles

Thistles! I hate to cut down flowers, but you have a legal responsibility to control non-native thistles on your property. People have been sued for these. They reseed easily and the cows won’t eat them so they have to go. These are musk (nodding) thistles. Native thistles look A LOT like these so it’s good to know the difference because they are important for pollinators.

Our Garden Sanctuary

The world is... exhausting, but here is our sanctuary. This is the place where we feel peace and joy, where we sacrifice our sweat and time to this great cycle that’s been going on since before recorded history. I’m thankful for the sun, the rain, this soil, the planet, our home. The people on the other hand...

Review: ONE MAN'S WILDERNESS by Richard Proenneke and Sam Keith

In 1968, Richard Proenneke went into a remote section of Alaska, built a cabin, and lived there for the better part of 50 years.  His journal and photographs from that first year were edited by his friend Sam Keith into the book ONE MAN'S WILDERNESS: AN ALASKAN ODYSSEY, and printed in 1973.  Since then it has become the rare book that appeals to both the back-to-nature hippies and the folks who venture into nature mainly to find things to kill.

Proenneke's account is a pleasant read, though at times the exact cataloging of his various building projects can be a tad tedious.  He is at his best when exploring the inner lives of his animal neighbors or ranting against the modern world ("Funny thing about comfort - one man's comfort is another man's misery. Most people do't work hard enough physically anymore, and comfort is not easy to find. It is surprising how comfortable a hard bunk can be after you come down off a mountain.”).

However, what I found most interesting about the book was Proenneke's obsession with documenting as much of his life as possible.  Not only did he keep a journal and take photographs, but he also recorded the construction of his cabin, and much of the surrounding nature with a video camera.  His footage and journals were so complete that it was cut into a four-part documentary for PBS called ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS (you can watch some of it HERE).

Proenneke's story reinforced something I was thinking about while listening to a segment on the local NPR station about technology in our National Parks that sprung from a  similar National Geographic article.  There was some handwringing going on about people using cell phones to take and share photographs while in nature, and whether or not this distracted or added to the "authentic nature experience."  It seems these conversations always forget that humans use stories and storytelling as a way to process their world. Whether we're drawing bison on a cave wall, shooting 8mm footage of our in-progress Alaskan cabin, or posting selfies at the Grand Canyon online, we are all simply trying to make sense of our lives by telling stories about our experiences in the world.

REVIEW: Ben Hewitt's HOME GROWN

This isn't so much a traditional "How To" parenting book as it is a series of interconnected personal essays about childhood, school, and learning throughout various points of the author's life. But in these essays, Hewitt lays out the basic case against the traditional education system, and why his family homeschools.

"...the more freedom and autonomy I allow my children to follow their passions and to learn on their own terms, the more passionate and eager to learn they become. The more engaged they become. And, inasmuch as I grant myself the same freedom and autonomy, the more engaged I become. The more I learn."

Hewitt writes beautifully about his family, their farm, and all the things he has learned while enabling his children to learn. I adore this book, and my copy is filled with underlined passages and scribbled annotations.

"What if the point of an education is to imbue our children with a sense of their connectivity, not merely with other humans, but also with the trees and animals and soil and moon and sky? What if the point of life is to feel these connections, and all the emotion they give rise to? What then?"

Although I do not agree with everything Hewitt writes (and who would agree with everything someone else thinks?), the spirit of giving his children the tools and opportunity to live and learn for themselves is what I strive for in my very own children.

"We shortchange our children's sense of responsibility and confidence by 'protecting' them from the tools and activities that build these very qualities. To learn how not to bend nails, they had to bend some. To learn how not to pull up beets, they had to pull some."

Even if you don't live on a farm, or even if you prefer traditional learning systems, this is a great book for thinking about how much responsibility and freedom we afford our children.  Could not possibly recommend this book higher.

HOME GROWN by Ben Hewitt. 2014 Roost Books

Ben Hewitt also writes beautifully about farm life on his blog.

COMIC: Portion Control

COMIC: The Color Purple

COMIC: Lee's Inferno

COMIC: I Burn Easily

Farm Lesson #27: Never Underestimate A Chicken's Curiousity

Broccoli seedling doing well in one of our raised beds.

Unfortunately, the one thing we most desperately need these days is the one thing you can't grow on a farm: time.  I was already behind in the vegetable garden when our free range chickens discovered the tender young lettuce and broccoli seedlings. To preserve the plants we kept the chickens locked in their run this past week while I hustled together a 250 foot permitter fence around our kitchen garden.

Normally we only confine the chickens to the run once a week or so when we know that no one will be home all day to watch them, but it was preferable to loosing all our veggies.
It was my fault for assuming the chickens would have enough space to roam that they wouldn't venture all the way to the other side of our property where the garden is located. So all the time I could have been using to get our peas, cabbage, and rhubarb in the ground was spent on the fence. Not to mention the tidy sum of cash required for all those posts and that much chicken wire.

At least while I was throwing a fence together, Bethany was hard at work planting the 130 trees we received from the Missouri Department of Conservation.  We are in desperate need of a wind break on the hill where our house sits. I think Bethany is getting tired of picking up toppled rocking chairs on the porch.  Bethany also planted a heavy dose of native fruiting trees like choke cherry and service berry around the chicken coop to supplement their food in the summer.

Now that the garden fence is finished I hope to catch up on planting, but there's always things on and off the farm that require our attention. We'll do what we can when we can, and try not to curse time we don't have.

Spring Chicks

This weekend was the stuff of our farmstead fantasies.  After a momentary cold spell early in the week, our early Spring continued with weather warm enough to move 30 chicks out of the brooder boxes in our basement and into the coop with our older laying hens. The chicks spent the first day isolated in the run while we prepared a well-shielded and insulated brooder box in the coop to keep the young birds warm in the cooler nights. There are supposed to be 10 Barred Rock, 10 Buff Orpingtons, and 10 Rhode Island Red pullets, but it is notoriously difficult to sex young chicks and we might have a few cockerels in the mix (which would be fine as we have been without a rooster since our move).

These are the first chicks I have raised since I was a teenager, and I made ample use of Harvey Ussery's excellent poultry book in all decisions. Mr Ussery's book has been invaluable since we began keeping chickens 3 years ago, and we would certainly recommend his "deep bedding" method for the coops of anyone thinking of raising chickens.

Once the chicks were comfortable enough outside to begin pecking and scratching in the grass, we moved on to catching up with the garden. We finally transplanted our broccoli and onion starts into the garden, as well as planted potatoes, lettuce, and carrots. We were also pleased to see that 75% of the blackberry bushes we transplanted from my parent's farm survived the winter.

We still have six younger easter eggers in an indoor brooder box, and several varieties of tomato and pepper seedlings doing well. So far we haven't noticed any problems with the older hens picking on the younger chicks in any extreme way, but the chicks have been giving the older girls a very wide girth. We'll keep you updated on how they progress.

What have you gotten started in the garden yet?

REVIEW: The Third Plate by Dan Barber

I haven't felt compelled to properly review a book in some time, but I had a strong reaction to Dan Barber's The Third Plate. On one hand, Barber has written an entertaining and compelling book about his imitable farm-to-table restaurants and the farmers with whom they partner.  But on the other hand, his book represents a world that is completely foreign to the one in which I live. I found large swaths of his book to be un-relatable at best and off-putting at worst. A lot of books have similar problems, but the problems in this book demonstrate just how far apart the cutting edge of the sustainable food movement is from the diets' of many Americans.

The point Barber makes throughout is that is that eaters and consumers need to look past local, organic, or sustainable.  Those movements are not enough unless we begin to eat everything that grows on farm and completely flip what is expected in a meal.  Risotto made out of traditional cover crops like rye, plankton sauce, and carrot steaks are just a few of the novel ideas Barber employs at his restaurants.  This is all admirable, but he assumes the local and sustainable food battles are already won, but here in the rural midwest, what he takes for granted is seen as naive at best and heretical at worst.

Even when Barber is championing a worthy cause like the elevation of lesser cuts of meat in haute cuisine, he seems completely detached from the meals most Americans are eating outside his five-star restaurants.  For all of its faults, the one thing the industrial food system does well is make use of lesser cuts of meats.  It's not like those chicken nuggets and compressed deli slices are the choices cuts.  Barber's aristocratic tone is not helped by the considerable amount of space he allots to foie gras, and his championing of celebrity chefs as the gatekeepers for sustainability in a very top-down model.  Five-star chefs have their place in the food movement along with farmers, writers, filmmakers and other. But anyone who claims that something as complicated as a social movement works in a linear fashion is oversimplifying.

If the reader is able to look past Barber's chef-centric view, The Third Plate is a nice new addition to the sustainable food literature.

The Third Plate: Field Notes On The Future of Food by Dan Barber © Penguin Press 2014

COMIC: Eggs and Turds

Sketchbook: Cooper's Hawk

This weekend the chickens were picking through some freshly tossed kitchen scraps just outside their coop when a cooper's hawk swooped out of the large pecan tree and perched atop a nearby fence post.  The hens scrambled back inside, excited but safe.  The hawk glided down into the grass and briefly inspected the chickens' treats before taking off back into the tree line.
Cooper's Hawks are beautiful birds with slate gray feathers on their head and wings, and a red barred pattern on their breasts and bellies.  Though often confused with the slightly smaller Sharp-shinned Hawk, our visitor was on the larger side.
Our chickens have been truly free range at the new place over a month now, and this was the closest we've come to losing one via predation or otherwise. As egg production begins to pick up after the stress of moving we hope to have eggs for sale again soon.

Sketchbook: Great Blue Heron

I painted this Great Blue Heron several months after we first moved down to the farm. The construction process for our own home was going much slower than planned thanks in large part to several layers of bureaucratic red tape required by the county.  On a particularly aggravating morning I stepped outside to get some fresh air and clear my head.  As I leaned against the pasture fence in the golden morning light I saw the silhouette of a Great Blue Heron still as a statue in the shallow waters of a nearby pond.  Quick as death, the heron's long neck snapped the sharp beak into the water and pulled out a small frog.  The bird shook its head violently as it strode to shore to quickly swallow the frog whole.  I watched the display as quietly as I could for as long as I could, but when it finally took to the sky with several flaps of its great wings, it flew directly overhead low enough that I could see individual feathers on its wings and belly.  It was an important moment for me, and one I revisited often.  It would all be worth it for a lifetime full of moments like that for me and my family.  All that was required was a little patience.

Adjusting to Change

We now live on the farm full time. We've sold our home in the suburbs, and settled nicely in the basement (and several other nooks and crannies) of my parents home. Moving down here wasn't difficult in itself, but life has become challenging since the move. Shortly after moving here my 3 year old son was severely bitten by a dog and had to be carried off the farm in an ambulance before spending the evening having two surgeons put him all back together. It was a terrifying ordeal and has scarred me as a parent. As we were recouping from this incident and watching my son as he almost magically healed, my husband's father experienced what became a fatal stroke. Losing him much too young and so suddenly has shifted our priorities even more. We will never be the same people. Everything seems to mean more.

I helped my father put up hay for the first time in many, many years. As a girl I sometimes drove the tractor for him while my brothers and cousins threw square bales on the wagon I was towing. This seems like eons ago. Now he has a driver follow him in the truck while he lifts round bales with his tractor and dumps them on the wagon. Towing the wagon in an air-conditioned truck as an adult is a very different experience than the heat of my childhood days on the open-air tractor, completely unaware of the real workings of the beast of a machine I was driving. Working with my dad, each of us in our own vehicles, communicating with vague hand signals, felt somehow more intimate than much of our day to day interactions. It was much needed after losing my father-in-law.

We're adapting to our new lives on the farm with more purpose. We've expanded the chicken coop and I watched as my husband pulled multiple snakes out of it over the course of a couple weeks. I've enjoyed watching my eldest daughter gather eggs, and helping my mother pick beans in the garden. We've taken hikes to the far corners of the property and dragged back skulls and interesting rocks, while trying to identify the native grasses and flowers. My baby girl finally has said "mama" and is getting close to walking now that we've celebrated her 1st birthday. We bought her a beautiful red wagon, and now that I can tow her and her brother around in it as I go about working in the garden and checking on the chickens, it at least appears as though we have melted into farmlife.

When I Knew.

The day I knew we would be moving our family to my wife's childhood home to help maintain the family farm was a dusty Saturday in July.  I'd spent the morning helping Bethany's father, Frank, and her brothers work cattle. That entailed herding the near 100 head into a large corral, separating the calves from the heifers, and then working them all through the head gate for fly tags and vaccinations.  It was hard, dirty work, and we were all thrilled when my mother-in-law, Mickie, called everyone in for lunch.

Over the clatter of kids chasing their cousins around the living room, we recounted some of the more amusing moments of the morning's work while washing up at the sink.  How wonderful it felt to finally sit down and noisily gulp ice water at the kitchen table.  As everyone gathered around for lunch, Bethany showed off the bags of sweet corn one of the neighbors had asked them to come pick, and how she'd improvised a baby carrier out of a checked tablecloth to get the job done.

And that's when it happened. Three generations came in from working on the family farm to have lunch together.  Sometimes the most natural things in the world can also be the most extraordinary.  Bethany and I had been searching in vain the last several years for a small piece of land to call our own, and here we were too preoccupied or short-sighted to see that the best fit was a place Bethany never thought she'd call 'home' again.

Box by Box

The biggest part of changing scenery is the actual moving. Packing up our lives and transporting them from here to there is more challenging than it should be considering how little we actually need. This mess in my garage is a fraction of what can be found in our house. We're shuffling around and hopping over tennis rackets and hole punches, puzzles and party hats. We've discussed the merits of juggling sticks and rarely played with toys, how many cookie sheets and DVDs we need, and which figurines are actually worthy of our precious shelf space. The more I pack the less I want. We are not "hoarders" but I have decided that our culture tolerates a high amount of packrat-ism before throwing that label around. We are slowly filling my parents' basement with our lives. Box by box you can start to piece together who we are. Two trashbags of yarn and 200lbs or fabric? What does this say about me? A hand-carved wooden hand with "Join the Grand Army of the Republic" painted on it. A small pewter girl feeding chickens. A complete collection of C.S. Lewis novels. Obsessively complete baby books. A Conan the Barbarian replica sword. A bust of Shakespeare. A beautiful and heavy tortilla press. A cross-stitch of a Laura Ingalls Wilder quote. A watercolor painting of a castle in Scotland. Piece by piece it goes into my car, journeying to its next stop. Where they will end up no one knows. We only hold these pieces for our short lifetimes. These things might finish their lives with vastly more interesting stories than I will ever tell. Stuff can be a chain around our necks but it can also be a catalyst for adventure. Packing is forcing me to make choices about the future potential of my things. It's rough, and the disruption of pulling belongings out of their "spot" creates chaos that I find challenging to live with. This is worth it though. Getting out of our suburban desert is the highest priority now. Simplifying is a necessity. It's becoming more real now, as I watch my walls and my shelves slowly empty. If I close my eyes I can see it all turning into vapor like a time lapsed film. Soon this house will be bare, staged strategically like a hotel, waiting for a new family to hammer nails into its walls and stub their toes on its baseboards.

Beautiful Inconvenience

The first argument I had about moving to the country was entirely about convenience. Living so far away from “culture” and “events” was almost a deal breaker for me early on in our conversations about rural life. Over time though I came to see that living out of town wasn’t going to change my life as drastically as I once thought. I’m a homebody by nature, and the few activities I cherish are not so far of a drive from our future farmstead as to be impossible to still do. As I write this I have a terribly sore throat. Sipping water feels akin to drinking broken glass and even though I live less than 3 minutes from my doctor right now, I am no more inclined to go visit her than I would be if I lived an hour away. Why? Because that’s just me. I’ll go if it becomes clear that I truly need to, but otherwise I’m content to let my body heal itself. I would make the drive from the country into the city for the same reasons, and have no reason to think I’d go to the doctor less. I wouldn’t go to fewer plays, or to the art museum less because these are things I only do a few times a year anyways. The convenience of having these options close to home hasn’t dramatically increased my use of them. As a child on the farm we made the trip to the city to go to the zoo, the mall, festivals, and lots of other events with as much frequency as my suburban self now does. 

Why this fear about inconvenience? The past couple years I’ve slowly began allowing inconvenience into my life, and my survival is what I lift up as evidence that it’s okay. I started with cloth diapers. I never fully abandoned disposables, but the slight inconvenience of laundering and drying cloth diapers actually felt nice. It touched on something within me that made me feel more connected to my grandmothers. We tried starting our garden plants from seed instead of relying solely on buying plants. This wasn't a universal success, but the seeds we did get to grow and thrive were excellent producers and I love that that we can claim that victory. Our tomato crop was superb! Sure it is easy to say that what you grow yourself tastes better, but as subjective as taste is I feel more comfortable saying that psychologically eating what you've grown yourself feels better. It's the very inconvenience that gives it more value. Another hassle I've taken on is cooking from scratch more. Preparing a meal made from basic ingredients gives me a sense of satisfaction that I can’t get from packaged meals. I also love to sew and although buying a dress is far easier it can never compare to making one. At some point convenience has taken the art and creativity out of living. We've forgotten that problem solving can be fun! I enjoy challenges, I enjoy frugality, and I enjoy nature. For me, having this in abundance can’t be seen as inconvenient. Living in the suburbs has removed me from the challenges and open-air independence that I need. I’m ready to face the challenging world and all the risks that such a venture entails. First on my current list of nuisances is preparing my house for sale so that we can take the next step towards the blessed inconvenience we seek.

There's No Place Like Home

Once my husband and I decided we had to move we began the process of fixing our house up for sale and looking for our next one. This was a huge undertaking. We chose to paint the exterior of our house by ourselves and spent an entire summer climbing ladders to finish the job. Our suburban home is a trendy split level with a walkout basement making 3 of the 4 sides very high. I got over my fear of being on the ladder quickly but to this day when I look up at the house I’m shocked I ever talked myself into doing it. We fixed siding, replaced appliances, cleaned carpets, and painted the interior, all while keeping our 2 children occupied. The thing is that getting our home ready to sell didn’t mean there was one ready for us to buy.

We looked at several different homes, mostly in rural Kansas. We visited several small towns, drove hundreds of miles of highways and other roads that are definitely not highways. We checked out little manufactured homes plopped down on large acreages, beautiful old farmhouses, bungalows, and one-of-a-kind houses that seemed more like mazes than homes. We daydreamed about chickens and goats, barns and bonfires. A couple these homes really spoke to us.

One was an old farmhouse that someone began renovating but left unfinished. It was a bizarre mix of old and new with some questionable additions that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Why would someone build a huge living room onto an old house but not fix the very shaky foundation? Why are there so many ceiling fans? Why the very expensive wood floor in the kitchen when there are obvious leaks in the ceiling that need attention first? I was willing tackle it though. I wanted to. I wanted the wrap-around porch and crumbling silo, and the acreage surrounded by farmland. After a little time the price on the house suddenly dropped surprisingly low and we put a bid in on it immediately. Our bid was accepted but within a few days we discovered an issue with the well that our bank declared was a deal-breaker. We walked away, sad, but only for a short while. Change happens even when you think your life just got put on hold.

When I found out I was pregnant with our third baby we were surprised. All of my ambition for moving disappeared as I saw a future household in boxes and transitional living. We took our house off the market for the holiday season and regrouped, deciding if we couldn’t sell it quickly after the holidays then we would just wait until after the baby was born. The stress during this time wore me down and suddenly my dreams of living in the country seemed insignificant compared to my dreams of bringing my new baby home to an established house. But we kept looking for a new home anyways.

The last house we gave a piece of our hearts to was a two-story box painted robin’s egg blue. No covered porch. Nothing outside to make it exceptional or architecturally interesting, but it was genuine. It was surrounded by miles of grassland and fields, with no windbreaks other than a couple ancient trees, but walk inside and there were wood floors, and a beautiful wood stove, a happy dining room, and a single bathroom that spoke to an era when one bathroom was a luxury most folks longed for. We walked the land around it and character crept out of the seemingly barren landscape. My daughter ran into a dried up pond bed and found shells that are still in her fish aquarium. We could see ourselves planting an orchard and discussed how we could make the small house fit our growing family. And the price was right! It was a very good deal because it was so far away. Too far away. We left the house realizing that we needed more than a cute house and some land. We needed a place that captured not only our imaginations but our loyalty. The houses we visited were special but they left a hollowness in me that I couldn’t define or explain. I convinced my husband that we should take our house off the market and wait.  And it’s a good thing we did.