New To Farm Life

What Do You Do With a Drunken Pony?

2012-02-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

The last time the farrier came out, he was unable to trim Rosie's back hooves. Rosie, remember, is my rescue shetland, who has some sort of abuse in her background and is absolutely terrified of having her feet touched.

With much patience and gentleness, my wonderful farrier (Glenn Hallberg of Broken Bit Farms) was able to get to a point where he could trim Rosie's feet with a minimum of trauma. He patiently forbore being kicked in the shins and knocked down into the mud. The last several times, in fact, Rosie was acting almost normally, just needing to be cross-tied.

Then for some unknown reason she went bat-shit crazy. It might have been that she had had a touch of laminitis and her feet may have been a little bit sore. Then again, we had had to cancel a couple of appointments and were running about two weeks behind schedule, and her feet were quite long. Maybe that was it. Also, it being the dead of winter, Rosie just hasn't been handled a whole lot lately and she gets skittish when I don't groom her regularly.

Whatever the cause, Glenn and I tried for over an hour, but those back feet were not getting done. I eventually made Glenn stop for fear he might get injured. She's a small pony, but she can kick like a mule. We decided we would have to have the vet come sedate her.

Both ponies have been in high fettle lately - might be the turning weather, I don't know, but they have been kicking up their heels a lot lately. On the morning the vet came, it took her ten minutes just to get the shot into her, and it was purely a "grab-and-stab" intramuscular injection. No way to fiddle about with an IV.

After fifteen minutes of Rosie prancing about not noticeably affected by the drugs, with the whites of her eyes still showing all around, the vet said "looks like I'm going to have to bring out the big guns." Fifteen minutes after that, we had a pony who was stoned out of her gourd. She stood quietly with her head hanging down and a fine string of drool hanging from her lip. When Glenn lifted her back foot, she didn't seem to notice, but she did list dangerously to the left.

Except for having some trouble staying upright, Rosie offered no resistance at all, and the vet and I decided it might be a good time to make an examination of her teeth (need work ) and also to irrigate her tear ducts, because she has chronically goopy eyes and the vet says they are caused by blocked tear ducts. Did you know that a horses tear ducts open into her nostrils? If you look inside her nose, there is a small opening on the ventral surface of the nostril which is the terminus of the tear duct. The vet used a small syringe to shoot saline up through that duct until it squirted out of Rosie's eyes.

Rosie didn't give a crap.

The most difficult part of the whole event was trying to get Rosie to walk back into her corrall. Her front legs kept crossing and I was pretty sure she was going to go over like an overloaded ferry boat. But no: weebles wobble but they don't fall down. She made it back. The funniest part of the afternoon was watching Poppy check out her mom. She walked up and sniffed her, she whinnied, she nudged her with her nose. Then, a calculating look came into her eye, and she lowered her head and began to nurse.

"Poppy!" I yelled, and threw a clod of dirt at her. "Cut that out!" Poppy is almost three and hasn't nursed in a year. But obviously, she hasn't forgotten, and she must have realized her mama was in no shape to stop her.

Rosie is fine now - trimmed feet, de-gunked eyes, and up to date on vaccines and boosters. But this is not a sustainable solution. The vet's bill was $415. That's an entire year's worth of the farrier's bill. That's an entire year of hay, for all the animals. I can't afford to do that again. In fact, if my husband reads this post and finds out what it cost, I am going to be a load of trouble.

I did ask the vet if she could prescribe me something to put in Rosie's feed before the farrier shows up. "My sister's dog takes valium before he goes to the vet," I said, "And so do I before I go to the dentist. Don't they have valium for ponies?" She hesitated, and then said "there aren't any really good options."

Okay, but are there any options that are better than giving her up as a bad job and sending her to the dog-food auction???

Sharpie Desecration (Or; a Chance For You Non-Parents to Feel Smug and Superior)

2012-02-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

Things That Need to Happen (Before We Can Go)

2012-01-30T22:33:00.000-08:00

As I wrote a few days ago, we are moving to Mexico this coming year (The Big Reveal (What We Want)). We are hoping to be there by September, when the new school year starts. That would be great, but when I start to think seriously about all the things that need to happen before we go, I just can't see it.

1) Rowan needs to be enrolled in University. My oldest daughter, Rowan, will not be coming with us. Unless, that is, she doesn't get her ass in gear and get herself accepted to a decent program. If she doesn't get in anywhere (which will only happen if she doesn't apply, because she is a freakishly talented artist and a grade A student), then she will have to come with us because there is no way I'm leaving her here with nothing to do all day.

2) Assuming she does get in to her first choice, which is WWU's graphic design program right here in Bellingham, then we need to convert the computer room into an apartment for her. It's mostly ready already: the previous owners converted a two car garage into a master bedroom suite with it's own entrance and bathroom. All we will need to do now is create some sort of cooking area and then Rowan will be set. That, of course, makes it sound easier than it actually is. For one thing, we need to clean out approximately two tons of crap from the walk-in closet/cum food storage area in the way-back. Alas, this isn't something I can do on my own. One example of the crap is a full set of racing tires for a Lamborghini Diablo, which my husband bought for the kit car which he is never going to build.

3) Somehow make the house presentable to potential renters. This is such a sweeping generality that I haven't even the faintest idea how to go about describing the particulars. The list of jobs that absolutely must be completed before we can even hold our heads up if potential renters come to visit includes:

a) Remove and replace all the carpets in all three bedrooms. The off-white carpet that was here when we moved in has, let's say gently, outlived it's usefulness (When the Cat's Away (the Mice Will Get Some Work Done)). Not so gently, I can say it is thoroughly disgusting, no longer remotely off-white, and smells strongly of cat pee.

b) Repaint two of the three bedrooms. The master bedroom, where Homero and I reside, may not be exactly house beautiful material, but at least it isn't embarrassing. The little girl's bedroom, on the other hand, has been lavishly decorated with sharpie (Oh I wish I had photos to show you right now. None of you can possibly believe the level of sharpie desecration unless you have seen it.). Homero and I had a very intense discussion about whether or not the girls should be allowed to sharpie their walls (can you guess whether I took the "yea" or the "nay" position?) and the end result is sharpie from here to hell and gone. The other bedroom in question is Rowan's, which most closely resembles a landfill.

When the painter-guy showed up today to give me an estimate, he looked into Rowan's room and said, "so, you'll be ready in like, two weeks?" Yeah - if I go in there with a bulldozer. Otherwise, never.

c) So many outdoor repairs. Probably the main one is the porch. This house enjoys a commanding view of the Canadian Cascades and takes advantage of it with a wrap-around deck that is something like 1,000 square feet. We have totally ignored any maintenance on this deck since we moved in five years ago. Given that we live in the wettest, moldiest, windiest, nastiest part of the state, the deck needs serious attention. There is also the playroom (new carpet) and the main bathroom (new vinyl flooring). There is the situation under the kitchen sink. Oh my God. Hyperventilating right now.

d) forgot the "landscaping" situation. Once upon a time there was actual landscaping: now I just have to hire a strong man, equip him with some serious weed-eating technology and ask him to chop everything down to an even four inches. It'll be green, right?

4) figuring out what to do with the animals. I told Homero that I was willing to sell all of the animals except the dogs and the horses. Rosie was a rescue and she can't be re-homed due to behavioral problems. The only way to get rid of her is to send her to the auction, and I won't. And Poppy, of course, is our pride and joy, our delight and the equine apple of our eye. She's not going anywhere.

However, boarding horses is crazy expensive. Going rate around here is approximately $200/month/horse for full care board. That is just not do-able. I've been looking around and I may have struck a deal with a guy - a rich, retired, Redmond fellow - who has five acres and wants to set up a petting zoo in his old age. We talked about my giving him my small herd of (gorgeous) dairy goats and my large flock of chickens in exchange for care of the two ponies for a year.

By the way - if it works out, that is a smokin' deal. At $200/month/horse, a year's board would cost me nearly than $5,000, not even counting farrier service or any vet care they might need. On the other had, a very good price for an in-milk Nubian goat is about $300. A VERY good price. I have four of them, plus their offspring. If I count optimistically, I might be able to convince myself that the whole herd is worth something like $2,000. Therefore, it's totally obvious that the above deal is smokin', right?

My husband, when I told him about it, said "You aren't going to give him ALL the goats, are you?" Seeing as how he hadn't done any research and didn't know the relative prices of goats vs. horse care. I told him, "Yes, I am, plus all thirty laying hens. Look on Craigslist at least before you judge." He clearly thought I was making a terrible deal and he could have done much better.

5) Renting out this house. After some thought, I decided it might be worth the expense to hire a property management company. There's one in town, and I stopped by to ask about their general rates and if this kind of specialty arrangement (one year lease; teenager in residence) is even something they do. I expected that a management company would charge about 15% (Don't know how that figure got in my head) and was delighted to find that they actually charge 8%. Of course, they charge separately for advertising the property, for the background check on applicants, and for any repairs needed. The fellow I spoke to (extremely nice) answered all my questions and inspired confidence. He said "Have the place ready for us to check out by May; we will tell you what we think it will rent for."

May is only four months away. Holy Crap. There's not even enough time to do half of making it presentable. I did say to the man "There are a lot of nice things about this property, but it is an old farmhouse. There's no getting around that."

Maybe I should stop focusing on things like slow drains and slippery porches, Maybe I should focus on the best freaking view on the entire county. Ok - here's my mantra. Practice this, Aimee. When he says "Your Jacuzzi tub doesn't work" you say "have you SEEN Mt. Baker?"

When he says "there's a draft around the front door" you say "They don't call it Grandview for nothing, y'know!"

A Day in the Life (So Far)

2012-01-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

Homero is out of town. He had to go to Atlanta to help his brother fix a number of cars that have been waiting for Homero's attention. It might seem odd to many Americans that a person would stockpile out-of-order cars until one's brother could come from 3,000 miles away to fix them, but if you do the math, it is actually much much cheaper to pay your brother's airfare than it is to pay for three or four major automotive repairs. Plus, Fransisco came out here last year to help Homero finish his shop ( Top O' the World, Ma!) and it is my husband's turn to return the favor.

So, I am alone for the next couple of weeks. Not entirely, of course: I now have a nearly adult daughter, Rowan, who is incredibly helpful. She is delightfully willing to help out with cooking, cleaning, and childcare. However, I am still responsible for more of the daily chores than I am when Homero is home.

7:00 a.m. Alarm. Crickets. Alarm is set 1/2 hour earlier than usual because I have to teach an art lesson to my first-grader's class today and I have not prepared. I have a stack of materials to g0 through. The artist is Van Gogh and I'm thinking I'm going to talk about color.

8:00 a.m. Get the kids up. Usual routine: help them find clothes, make breakfast, make lunches. Notice that there is not much for lunches. I am feeding the kids carrot and celery sticks, bag of corn chips, a handful of raisins, and a few cubic inches of cheese. Nutritionally, it isn't a bad lunch, but socially, it may get them ostracized.

9:00 a.m. Bundle everybody in the car. Run Rowan down to the bus station so she can get to class at the community college on time. Listen to her beg me to take her all the way down. Give in, because I have to go to the store to buy paper plates for the art lesson anyway.

10:00 a.m. Run as fast as possible through Fred Meyer, looking for the right kind of paper plate (uncoated) and also something to eat that I can hold in one hand while driving. Also, coffee, because I didn't have a chance to make coffee at home and if I don't get some I will be biting the heads off of first graders in half an hour instead of helping them make sunflowers out of paper plates.

10:45 a.m. Spend an absolutely delightful hour teaching six year olds about complementary versus contrasting colors. Most of them don't get it, but they still enjoy smearing fingerpaint around and when I leave, they regale me with an adorable chorus of thanks.

12:00 p.m. Realize I forgot to feed the animals this morning. Race home like a demon on speed and feed everyone. Climb into the hayloft to look for eggs. Curse like a sailor when I plant my palm into piles of chickenshit but find zero eggs. Wonder what is wrong with the chickens.

1:00 p.m. Suddenly remember that Hope is bringing a friend home on the bus today for a playdate. Scramble to make house semi-presentable (who knows, the little girl might report to mama). Try to think of a snack. While thinking of snacks, remember that there is nothing in the house to make for dinner. Check the fridge. No milk. No vegetables except a head of cabbage.

1:30 p.m. Run to the grocery store. Have the intention of stocking up on healthy foods but while there say "oh hell with it" and buy a frozen pizza and a gallon of milk. Think better of yourself and go back for a few pounds of broccoli.

2:30 p.m. Get home. As I alight from the car, notice a neighbor's car pulling in behind me. It's Mr. Duckhunter, with three freshly killed ducks for me. Accept ducks, with thanks. Talk about what, exactly, to do with ducks. Learn a little bit about duck breast jerky. Sharpen knives. Carve out breasts and submerge in marinade made of soy, honey, and chile flakes.

3:15 p.m. Head for the computer. Realize you forgot to eat anything this morning and heat one of the pizzas. Make this post, while snarfing down DiGiorno's.

3:40 p.m. Read over post and berate yourself for being so shallow. Realize you have only thirty minutes before house is overrun by little girls and decide to spend that half an hour in bed reading "The Praise Singer" by Mary Renault, the best writer of historical fiction of the twentieth century.

Goodbye.

The Big Reveal (What We Want)

2012-01-22T21:23:00.000-08:00

I've been sitting on a major news item. My husband and I made a decision a few months ago, which we only revealed to our families recently. Making this decision and dealing with the ramifications has been sucking up an awful lot of my brainspace, which helps explain why I haven't been writing very much.

We are moving to Mexico. Not permanently: for about a year. Ever since we had children, we knew we would do this at some point. We want our children to know their family and their heritage more fully than they possibly could if annual two-week vacations are all we can give them. We want them to be truly bilingual, not just fluent in a a second language as I am and as their father is. We also want them to be bicultural.

That's a weird word, bicultural. Just as neither Homero nor I is truly bilingual, neither are we truly bicultural. Being bilingual means more than simply being able to converse fluently. It means understanding slang, and jokes. It means being able to speak to a toddler as well as a grandmother. It means hearing accents, and being able to infer something from them. It means being able to read poetry. Few people can do those things in a language that they learned as an adult.

Similarly, being bicultural means more than just being able to get along in another country without committing a bunch of ignorant mistakes all the time. Understanding gestures - just gestures! - is complicated. After ten years married to a Mexican and many trips to Mexico I still misinterpreted a simple "reverencia" on our last trip. Manners. Manners are tricky even in one's own culture, of course, and are a subject wide ranging and variable enough to spawn several books on the topic in any given year. Learning the right things to say and do in various contexts in another culture is a process that takes decades.

And - here's where it gets complicated - learning the assumptions and the realities on which those manners are based.... ah! Now we're getting somewhere. As with language - a person might be fluent enough to read the Spanish translation of the Mayan book the Popol Vuh, but still totally unable to comprehend it, because one has no grasp of the symbols, the references, and the feelings that suffuse it.

I remember visiting the Mexican Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City for the first time. Surrounded by art and artifacts that were wholly unfamiliar to me, I felt dumbfounded. I realized I could not appreciate this art - not because it wasn't beautiful - but because I was totally illiterate in the language of symbols it used. I realized that in just about every other museum I had ever visited, the art was based on a symbology - and even deeper, a cosmology - that is part of my heritage as a European. Even when looking at Indian art, or Middle Eastern Art, I can find the marks of Greek, Jewish, and Christian thought. Our shared history makes a path that is easily to follow. I recognize the pantheon of Gods, even if I don't know their names in Sanskrit or Aramaic. I know what the moon means, more or less, all across Europe and Asia Minor.

In Mexico, I knew nothing. Where art and cosmology is concerned, I was as an infant. The symbols slid right off my brain. Americans think of Mexico as a neighbor, and have no idea whatsoever how very different it really is. Even five hundred years of European rule have only left a familiar suit of clothes on the great brown body of Indigenous Mexico.

Octavio Paz calls Mexico a "non-Cartesian culture" and that is true, and also a very hard thing for a westerner to accept. We tend to see all non-Cartesian thinking as simply uneducated, rather than as part of a different tradition of knowledge. Mexico is a communal culture rather than an individualistic one, and that is a very hard thing for an American to accept. Americans who have spent time in other communal cultures such as Japan or the Arab countries will know what I mean when I say we see them as smothering and constricting, and they see us as cold and uncaring.

Necessarily, I am taking a bit of a leap of faith here. I am not Mexican, I am not bicultural, and it is too late for me to become so. I have found a great deal to admire in Mexican culture as I know it, and I love the Mexican land and I adore my Mexican relatives. I want my children to have real, deep relationships with their family, and I want them to be real Mexicans as well as real Americans. I want them to develop the typical thick, tangled web of kinship relationships. I want them to grow up with many comadres and compadres. I want them to grow up knowing deep in their bones that their family will do anything for them, anything... and to feel the equally deep obligations to help out to the best of their ability. I want them to laugh at dirty jokes and speak street slang in Spanish. I want them to be have that beautiful sparkle, that lovely Mexican ability to laugh at fate even as you accept its yoke, to bend in the wind and pop up dancing.

On one of my trips to Mexico, years ago, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was on a boat in a river, and that the a gaudy, gorgeous, colorful Mexican countryside was rolling by on the shore. There were people on land calling to me, inviting me to join them, but I couldn't get off the boat. I could only slide by and enjoy the view.

I want my children to be on the shore.

Winter Haiku

2012-01-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

Hot tea in my mug
winter outside the window
study in contrast

A beautiful sight

winter pulls her cold white cloak

over the mountain

Farm chores in the snow

horse's breath makes warm white clouds

pigs snug in straw beds

On the third day stuck at home, snowed in, tired of playing Scrabble with six year olds and having rifled through the stack of DVD's more than once without piquing my interest, I turn to an older pursuit: poetry. Haikus are lovely - so beautifully easy to write, and so soothing in their single-minded simplicity. I wish I had someone ere who liked them as much as I do so we could sit across from each other at the kitchen table, hot cocoa in hand, and play the game of speaking in haiku for as long as we can.

Three days is too long

to watch TV with the kids

I long for power outage

Snow at Last (On Being Unprepared)

2012-01-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

The "puff-room."

There are about eight inches of snow on the ground right now, and it's still coming down. I don't mind snow - I actually like snow. We've all been waiting for snow this year, and we are pretty happy that it's finally here. The little girls spent most of the day outside yesterday, apparently oblivious to the cold. Whenever they would come inside, I'd ply them with hot chocolate, put their wet clothes in the dryer, and send them into the "puff-room." The puff-room is a tent made by throwing a down quilt over the heater grate. The girls crawl under there with their teddy bears and curl up together, getting warm. As my sister pointed out, it looks like Epcott center, but it really works!

View of the front pasture

For the past two days, it's looked pretty much the picture above: grey skies, with snow falling five minutes on, five minutes off. Homero has been working out in the shop, poor man. We don't have any paying work right now, so he's been making biodiesel and working on the diesel bug, which lately tops out at thirty miles an hour. After several hours out in the shop I'm sure he wishes he could visit the puff-room.

The Dogwood Tree.

I should really make more of an effort to read the weather reports. I can't say the snow caught me entirely off guard, but I had the idea it would be no more than a dusting, not a snowstorm that would have us stuck at home for at least two days. When I find myself stranded at home for even a day or two, I realize how woefully unprepared I am.

Firstly; we are stuck not because the roads are truly impassible, but simply because all the tires on all of our vehicles are smooth as cue balls. We are incredibly lazy (and Homero is incredibly cheap) about replacing tires on time. If the truck had decent tires we could get around. At least down to the feed store, which is pretty important because -

Secondly; there is no chicken food or pig food in the barn. Ran out yesterday. Those damn pigs! They eat like... well, like pigs, but they never seem to grow! We are so tired of having them around (Pig Farming is Not Sexy) and really really want them to be ready for slaughter. To that end, we have been feeding them even more than usual... but it just doesn't seem to make much difference. I don't know if the cold is making them use more energy than they would if it were summer, but it seems logical. Anyway, we go through a fifty pound bag in three days, and that's with all the kitchen scraps on top of it.

Since I seldom have a hundred bucks to drop at the feed store at any given time, I can't really stock up. We're out again. This morning I cleaned out the cupboards and the fridge and found enough stale bread, old cereal, wrinkly apples, limp carrots, and pieces of hard old cheese to tide them over for the morning feeding, but I'm going to have to try to get out to the feed store before nightfall.

Pigs in the Snow.

Thirdly, there's no milk in the house. Or cheese. Or fruit. Or cereal. Or beer, damn it. I really must learn to pay attention to details like groceries and the weather!

Sunshine (Makes Me Feel Like Working)

2012-01-10T17:38:00.000-08:00

It's been an oddly warm winter so far. The forecast, back in the fall, was for colder and wetter conditions than usual due to La Nina conditions (the opposite, not surprisingly, of El Nino conditions, which are warmer and dryer than usual). As it turns out, we haven't had a single flake of snow yet, and not very many days of hard frost, either.

It HAS been extremely wet, however, Rain, rain, and more rain. I get tired of bitching about the mud (New To Farm Life: Mud Patrol (I Heart Hog Fuel)) so I won't go into a tirade. I'll just mention, briefly, that the other day when I had to go into the pigpen the mud came up over the top of my gumboot. It was an unpleasant experience.

Today was the first day since we returned from mexico that the sun was out for more than a few minutes at a time. For most of the day the sky was bright blue and the temperature was somewhere in the high forties. T-shirt weather. The kind of day that makes you want to get out and work.

Here's what I did today:

Let all the animals out. The goats and the horses got to go out on the front lawn and eat to their hearts content. I don't suppose that January grass has a whole lot of nutrition in it, but it's green, and they all seemed absolutely rapturous.

I also let the pigs out of their small enclosure. They were so happy to be out, they started charging around the back pasture like wild animals, snorting and kicking and acting up. After a few minutes, they settled down and began grazing. Really: grazing, just like horses. They were chomping down on the green grass as if it were candy. In addition to their bagged pig food, which is mainly corn and soy, we feed the pigs all the scraps from our kitchen. Those are mainly things like banana peels, eggshells, old greens and limp carrots, rinds of cheese, et cetera. I liked to think that those items added needed nutrients and variety to the pig's diet, but seeing them out on the pasture today, devouring grass like it was crack cocaine, I realized they are probably missing fresh food.

It was pleasing to see how happy the pigs were. Unlike goats and horses, it is totally obvious when a pig is happy. Like a dog. You just can't mistake it. The pigs ran around in circles and then would trot up to me, grunting and looking up at my face as if to say "hey! Thanks, friend!" I walked the perimeter of the property, just generally checking things out, and the pigs trotted along at my heels like puppies. It will be hard to lock them back in.

I tried to turn the compost pile, but it is too much for me. I did put on gloves and pull out about forty hay-bale strings. It's amazing how many hay bale strings pile up on a small property. When I start to count, I realize that we go through some hundred bales of hay a year, and each bale has two strings... it isn't amazing how many strings there ARE, but that every single one of them ends up in the compost pile. You'd think we would gather at least some of the up and throw them away. I consoled myself by imagining that pulling out the deeply buried strings must do SOMETHING towards aerating the compost and providing tunnels for worms.

Then Homero and I planted two Christmas trees. Neither one was from this year: this year we were in Mexico and we only had trees made out of paper ( Speed Christmas (I've Doubled my Trouble)). No; these two trees were from Christmases long past. We had simply been too lazy to plant them and so they had hung about in pots for two years while we scratched our butts. For some reason, I decided that today was the day they would get planted. Then I gave my husband a shovel and told him where to dig. No - I actually dug, too, but I have to admit he did the heavy work. I mostly shoveled the loose dirt in around the trunks after they were planted and stomped it down firm.

That's about as much work as these short January days can inspire me to do - on top, of course, of the regular rounds of shopping, cooking, and tidying up. I am so looking forward to March, when I can get started on seeds and gardening. The seed catalogues are due to arrive in the mail anytime now.

Sign of the Season (Trumpeter Swans)

2012-01-07T17:14:00.000-08:00

The day before yesterday, I saw the first trumpeter swans of the season. Twice a year - in the early fall and then again in the late winter - trumpeter swans pass by as they migrate. I assume, though I really am not sure, that this time of year they are migrating North to their spring breeding grounds.

We are in the middle of the Pacific flyway here and there are many other waterfowl who pass by twice annually - Canada geese, tundra swans, snow geese, and others. The trumpeters are the most spectacular, however. They are really huge, for one thing. When I saw them the other day, they were feeding among the rubble of a corn field along with some Canada geese. Most of you will be familiar with Canada geese - the large, brown and white geese ubiquitous in city parks all over the united states. Canada geese can be scary. They are large enough, and aggressive enough, to intimidate a six year old, for example. Well, trumpeter swans are nearly twice as big.

The field that I pass by is on a quiet country road, and so I stopped to observe the swans for a while. There were about fifty of them, perhaps as many as seventy. Most of them were adults, but there was a smattering of grayish juveniles as well. Many of them were doing a strange kind of dance, dipping their necks and stretching them out, over and over again. I don't know if this was a mating ritual or perhaps just part of their normal feeding behavior.

About thirty miles south of me lies the Skagit Valley, a beautiful, productive, wide flat river valley created by the Skagit river. The Skagit is threatened by runaway development, but still supports some of the greatest abundance and variety of bird life in the entire country. It is, for example, possibly the best area in the lower 48 for observing bald eagles. The estuary supports tens thousands of waterfowl of many different species. In the right season, a person simply cruising along the freeway can observe thousands of trumpeter swans on their annual migrations.

Below, please find a few links to societies which are actively working to protect the Skagit river and its wildlife. Few rivers in the country have as much potential to support wild birds as the Skagit does. Thanks for your support!

Skagit River System Cooperative

The Skagit River in Washington | The Nature Conservancy

The Trumpeter Swan Society

State of the Farm: Midwinter

2012-01-03T14:43:00.001-08:00

Here's a long overdue update on the state of farm, after a long and delightful diversion into the wonders of Mexico, which I hope y'all enjoyed as much as I did. Well, you know, without actually being there.

The house: Not too bad. Everything is about the same as we left it, which is to say, in medium-poor repair and not as clean as I would like, but habitable. I did notice, upon entering the house for the first time in 3 weeks, the smell of mildew. I'm pretty sure the house always smells slightly of mildew during the winter months - and I've already ceased to notice it - but it was unpleasant that the first thing I noticed about getting home was that it smelled funky.

As I believe I may have mentioned (The Demon of Bad Smell (the Plumber as Hero)) we live in a sixty year old, owner built farmhouse in the wettest, windiest part of a wet, windy state. The house has issues - and will, unless and until it is razed to the ground. Faint unpleasant smells are par for the course in an old farmhouse on a working farm. Some people wouldn't live in an old farmhouse, and some people don't mind. I am the latter kind of people.

The Livestock: Once again, not too bad. The ponies are fine, shaggy in their winter coats and muddy about the ankles, but well fed and healthy. They were clearly happy to see me, running up the fence and putting their heads over to be scratched. The field shelter is in serious need of mucking out, but that's to be expected. The hard part is that there is so much mud right now that I can't get a wheelbarrow out there. I'll have to pitch poop into a pile to be picked up later.

The goats are also well- presumably all pregnant. There was a bit of drama in getting them bred this year (New To Farm Life: Unwelcome Drama in the Goat Breeding Business), and one of the girls was at my sister's house while we were gone getting bred to her Angora buck. My girl - Polly - is a Nubian, but there wasn't a Nubian buck available when I needed one, and I wanted her bred before I left. The kids will be designated as meat - unless someone wants them as pets, they are sure to be adorable - and I will still get to see what kind of mother Polly will be. I brought Polly home last night.

Edith, my Nubian/Boer cross, is limping a bit and I think she has hoof rot. Just as with mildew in the house, the climate around here ensures that all the goats will suffer a spot of hoof rot here and there in the wet season, no matter how carefully one trims. But usually it doesn't proceed as far as limping. I need to get her on the stand in the next couple of days and take a look.

Pigs. Ah, pigs. How I loathe pigs. I think we will be done with pigs after this pair, at least until we totally revamp the pig-corral situation. The two pigs seem to be exactly the same size as when we left. These girls have been slow growing, and I don't know why. Maybe it's the breed, I haven't raised these pigs before. They are a cross between a Large Black Hog and a Tamworth Sow. My book says these breeds are known for hardiness and foraging ability, but it doesn't say anything about weight gain. We have fenced them into a fairly large corral for the winter to keep them off the pasture. They have a space in the barn as well as an area approximately 30 x 20 to exercise in. That outside area is a knee-deep stew of cold mud. It's horrible. I am having a terrible time figuring out a way to keep their food and water out of the mud. Any container I put in there they flip over and drag away from the fence, even when I have securely tied it in three places. Even if they can't flip it, they put their feet in and fill up any container with mud. It is so gross I am in a constant state of deep disgust whenever I am out there. Ugh.

Chickens. The chickens are laying well, as far as I can tell. There were two nests up in the hayloft when we got back, each with some twenty eggs in it. Let's see... I have a dozen laying hens and we were gone for 18 days... that's approximately two eggs a day from a dozen hens, or 14 eggs a week, or 2 eggs per week per hen. Not bad for the absolute shortest days of the year. I don't, obviously, have a lamp out there. There is one hen who seems to have hurt her leg, but she is still getting around well enough that I can't catch her, so...

The Orchard: Late in the fall, I planted two hazelnut bushes that a friend gave me. They are both dead, apparently eaten by deer. Everything else looks fine. I want to plant two more apple trees in the spring. We lost three out of the four apples I planted two years ago - two to goats and one to the mower. This time I will buy the largest, well-grown trees I can find instead of mail-order two-foot high sticks.

All in all, I am pleased with the state of the place. As always, there is a gigantic heap of work to do. I love my children, but sometimes I think I would love them more if they were all strapping teenage boys with an excess of muscles and energy.

Mexico Photos (Part Three)

2012-01-01T20:03:00.001-08:00

Agave hearts ready to be roasted (on the left) and after roasting in a pit oven on a small-scale mescal producer's farm (right). Agaves take seven to ten years to reach maturity; then it takes some thirty to forty of the hearts to create a single batch of mescal - we were told that a ton of fermented agave hearts results in twenty to thirty liters of mescal. We bought a liter for thirty pesos - or two and a half bucks. I am sipping some of that right now as I write this post.

Evening in Chiapa de Corzo. Homero bought us a carriage ride around the main square. In an old colonial town like Chiapa de Corzo, there are three or four churches within a two block radius of the main square, each decorated for Christmas. This photo was taken out the back of the carriage, which was driven by an old man in his seventies, who gleefully pointed out all the old points of interest. "That was the movie theatre," he said, and "right there was old mercado, before they moved it." His was the only horse drawn carriage in the area, and patronizing him felt like supporting a time gone by.

Nearly every business in Mexico has an altar. Perhaps in the Christmas season the altars are more prominent and elaborate than usual, but I have been visiting Mexico for some ten years now and I have always noticed the altars set up in every establishment, no matter how humble. The altar above was set up in a gas station: an ordinary Pemex station along the highway.

This picture is from our visit to the limestone caves above the city of San Cristobal de las Casas. As far as I can tell, the caves have no name besides "las grutas" which simply means "the caves." The entrance is located within a beautiful park about ten miles outside of town. It costs ten pesos to enter the park and another ten to visit the caves - about two dollars total for an incredible experience.

El Palacio Municipal (city center) lit up for Christmas with lovely magenta light. This building lines one side of the zocalo in San Cristobal de las Casas, providing one fourth of the gaudy, gorgeous pageantry surrounding the main square. Three bands were playing; couples were dancing; old movies were projected on rolled down screens; and of course dozens of artisans strolled hither and yon hawking their wares.

Tule: the largest tree of it's species in the world. The species is Taxodium mucronatum , a kind of cypress. It's trunk is the stoutest in the world. The tree towers over the church built in front of it. It is a lovely and impressive tree. The town is also lovely and impressive - about fifteen miles outside of Oaxaca, a goof place to visit, to eat at the mercado and but artesanias.

Hope and Paloma enjoying a few moments climbing all over the back side of Santo Domingo Church.

Beautiful and strange art installation in the corredor turistica in Oaxaca. Somone, or several someones, placed hundreds of hand built, unique clay people in the courtyard of Santo Domingo, the grandest and most ancient church in Oaxaca. It looked like a pilgrimage of Morlocks.
I absolutely cannot remember which of a hundred beautiful churches this is.

Chapulines. Grasshoppers, in other words. In pre-hispanic times, insects provided a significant portion of the people's protein. Even today, many species of insects are highly prized as food and command high prices. Chapulines are only one of many. Agave worms, Chinches, and Escamoles are only a few of the bugs one might find in a well-stocked mercado. Chapulines are the most available: the common wisdom holds that if one eats chapulines one will always return to Oaxaca.

It has always worked for me so far.

How to Make the Most Beautiful Pinata (Mexican Photos Part Two)

2011-12-31T19:18:00.000-08:00

The pinata is the universal celebratory item, is it not? I don't know if the pinata is a purely Mexican invention that has spread around the world, or if the idea of the pinata is a kind of cultural universal (I suspect the latter) but in either case, a pinata is a lot of fun and a must-have item for all festive occasions.

My children broke seven pinatas on this trip. That's by their own count. I kind of lost track. Pinata making is a cottage industry in Mexico, and many is the family that makes its living with newspaper and paste. The sad little cardboard factory made things that pass for pinatas here in the states are pathetic by comparison, and I hate buying them. Pinatas in Mexico are truly works of art, even if most of them are based on Disney characters and one might question the tastefulness of beating the little mermaid to death with a stick.

My sister-in-law Temy and her children made the most beautiful pinata I have ever seen - with small help from us. It is in the form of a branch of grapes, and is molded on a clay pot and covered with blown, confetti stuffed eggs. If you count the time it takes to save up so many eggshells, this pinata must have taken months to make. I hope to make one myself someday, so I documented the process. This pinata is truly for those with the Martha Stewart gene, so be warned. But if you want to make the mothers of the friends of your five year old swoon with envy, make this for her birthday party. Just start four months ahead of time.

The girls covering the clay pot with strips of newspaper glued on with a paste made from water and cornstarch. Since you are unlikely to come across an unfired round clay pot here in the states (and may also wish to avoid the risk of concussion), mold your pinata base on a balloon.

For several months ahead of time, anytime you use an egg, be careful to crack it only at the top, preserving as much as possible the shell. Set the shells aside to dry. When you have about 150 of them, buy a bag full of confetti and fill the eggshells with a spoon.

Use small strips of newspaper and paste to cover the openings of the filled eggs. Set the covered eggs out in the sun to dry - this will take a few hours to a day, depending on solar availability in your area.
Turn the pot upside down - or, if using a balloon, cut off a small opening on the top for filling with candy. Then turn upside down. Roll a piece of thin cardboard into a cone and attach to the bottom of the pinata (the top, turned upside down - get it?) with newspaper and paste. Let dry completely. Poke four holes in the rim of the opening and run twine through in a cross pattern. This is to hang the pinata later. When eggs and pinata are dry, use a hot glue gun to attach the eggs, covered side in, to the pinata. Start at the tip of the cone and work your way down on a spiral, trying to cover the pinata as closely as possible. When all are attached and dry, carefully turn pinata right side up and hang with the twine outside somewhere.

Use spray paint to paint the pinata grape-colored. This pinata has leaves made of cardboard covered with green crepe-paper, which is a nice touch. The hardest part is transporting the pinata after it is filled, so if possible make and fill the pinata on the same site where it is to be broken. Once it is turned right side up and filled, a strong person has to hold it at arm's length so the eggs don't break until it can be strung up.

It feels like a damn shame to destroy such a beautiful, painstakingly constructed object. You will not want to. I didn't. But the children have so much fun, they are so delighted with the crash and the shower of confetti and the candy. And there is something both terrible and elating about the violent destruction of beauty, especially of a beautiful object that embodies so much time and effort.

Breaking this pinata is like a tiny lesson in mortality. In all endeavors, natural and artificial, complexity occurs slowly and with effort, but can and will inevitably be reduced in a relative instant. Breaking the pinata is ritually laughing in the face of death, a beautiful celebration of ending. To break the pinata is to bow to the inevitable, but to do so with grace and spirit and joy.

How very Mexican.

Mexico Photos Part One (Shout Out to Rowan)

2011-12-30T17:47:00.000-08:00

The trip home was almost interminable - we were up at 5 am two days in a row - but is it finally over. We arrived back at the farm around two o'clock this afternoon, to some very excited dogs and other animals. Everybody is fine and healthy.

Rowan did an amazing job taking care of the place and deserves some public props. For almost three solid weeks she was fully and solely responsible for feeding the horses, goats, chickens, dogs, rabbits, and cat twice a day. For the first week we were gone, the hose was frozen solid and she had to haul warm water in buckets, a nasty job. She kept the house clean (or at least cleaned it before we got home) and even threw a Christmas party for a bunch of teenage friends without wrecking the place. She dropped us off at the airport (125 miles away) when we left and picked us up when we arrived home. She did a bang-up job, and I'm extremely proud of her. Thanks, sweetie.

According to my iPhone just now, I took 488 pictures while I was gone. This is what happens in the digital age, I guess. I am old enough to remember buying three or four rolls of film before a trip and being choosy about what I photographed. Nowadays everyone - including me - just walks around with a camera raised to their face pretty much all the time. This actually drives me batty, in much the same way that people breaking off a conversation in mid-sentence to answer their cell phones irks me, but I am nearly as guilty as everyone else, so I am ashamed to complain.

However, the compensation for seeing Mexico on a three by three inch screen is that I do, in fact, have a lot of very nice pictures. In the old days, I used to come home and eagerly develop my precious 36 frames, usually to discover that 22 of them were complete crap. I specialized in pictures of my own feet. Now, even though the crap:pleasant ratio is about the same, I have a lot more to sift through and can come up with a few pictures worth sharing.

Here are some of them, in no particular order:

Homero sitting on a wild horse. Not kidding. This was during our trip to Crecencio's village to deliver some gifts to his family (A Visit to La Mixteca Baja, Mixteca Trip Part Two, Take Three, Damnit!). The young man holding the horse's head actually went out into the hills and captured that horse, brought it home, and broke it and trained it himself. He is seventeen. The boy, not the horse.

On the way out to Crecencio's village, we stopped to visit the ex-covent of Yanhuitlan. Passing by, Temy, my sister-in-law, noticed it was open. She yelled "Stop!" Apparently, it is almost never open. It was well worth the delay. This enormous and beautiful temple-complex (I don't know what else to call it) was built in the mid sixteenth century by the Dominicans. Well, actually, as the caretaker told us, by six hundred native Mexicans working every day for twenty five years. I have my doubts about whether a single Dominican priest ever lifted a single stone. But breezing right by that (shall we) it is a place of extreme beauty. To be honest, now that I look at the above picture, I think it is probably not of Yanhuitlan at all, b ut instead of one of the apses in Santo Domingo in Oaxaca City. Hmm. So many beautiful churches in Oaxaca, they blend together after a while. But Yanhuitlan's beauty is austere, and Santo Domingo's is baroque. Well. Either way.

Ahem. Moving on. Below is a very ordinary, typical street scene in central Oaxaca. The streets are cobblestone; the buildings are stone or stuccoed adobe, still habitable and functional after five hundred years. The native stone that much of the city is made of is called cantera, and is usually a beautiful light green, though sometimes rosy pink as well. The building on the left is made of cantera. The small fountain in front is operational, and is a favorite place for young lovers to pass a few minutes "tortorleando." Literally: acting like lovebirds.

Below: street corner on the edge of the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, which is the main central market. Plenty of people still shop there for their daily goods, but it has largely become a tourist attraction. That is not to say, however, that you should pass it by if you happen to be in Oaxaca. By no means! Go! The market is a real experience. It may give you a migraine from the press of people, the competing music blaring from adjacent stalls, the mixed up smells of raw meat, rotting flowers, fresh herbs, copal, and sweat, but if you go to Oaxaca and miss the central market, you may as well not have gone.

Besides, the other option is the Mercado de Abastos, where the majority of city residents go when they want to shop (those that don't go to Wal-Mart, that is) and that place is scary as hell. The Mercado de Abastos is for professional adventurer tourists only. There you can hire a brujo to take a curse off of you, or get a pirated version of a movie that isn't even out in theaters yet, or buy anything from a live chicken to a pair of fake monolo blahniks, but you can also get lost irrevocably in the vast labyrinth of tarp-backed puestos, and I am here to tell you that that is not a fun experience. Once was enough for me: now I stick to the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, touristy though it be. It's plenty colorful enough for me. Look below and you'll see.

Senora Maura's garden. Although her patio is very small - perhaps only 10 by 30 feet or so - she has managed to create a very serene and beautiful haven. The concrete walls are dusty pink, and dozens of terra cotta pots are planted with flowers and edibles. The two trees in the photo are a papaya (left) and a pomegranate (right). She also has a chayote vine (that's mirliton to you southerners) and a chile de arbol. A bird of paradise plant blooms along the other wall, and night blooming jasmine scents the evenings. It was a beautiful place to spend a few hours on a warm December night, chatting and drinking mezcal.

In my experience, if I may generalize, Mexicans have a gift for creating beauty in small, intimate spaces. As tourists, many Americans never have the opportunity to get behind the two-story wall of concrete that lines every Mexican street. From the perspective of a tourist, Mexican towns can seem loud, dirty, and claustrophobic. Those damn unbroken walls of cement! There are no sight-lines - all views are blocked by walls. The noise of unmuffled trucks and loudspeakers announcing God-knows-what at high decibels bounces back and forth against the concrete walls. The walls are decorated with spray paint, much of it artless graffiti or poorly drawn representations of Disney characters.

What the unlucky tourist may never know is that just on the other side of each of these walls is a shady, serene courtyard. Every home, no matter how humble, encloses a central space open to the sky. In the city center, the most gorgeous, expansive colonial homes may have three or more courtyards, gardens, fountains, balconies, trees - but none of that will be evident from the outside.

Mexico, somebody talking about sex once said, is not a prudish culture, but it is intensely private. I think that is true of its houses, as well. Homes which are closed up tight as an oyster yield lush, sensual hospitality once you are granted entrance. There are no people on earth as generous, as fun loving, and as welcoming as Mexicans - but you might not guess that from the impassive faces you see in the street. Mexico has a great poker face. But get it to crack a grin - and it's the most beautiful smile you've ever seen.

Almost Over (Recreation)

2011-12-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

This may have been the shortest three weeks ever. Oour time in Mexico just sped by, we were busy just about every day. Anyone who has moved far from home, but whose relatives mostly stayed put knows that a visit home isn't really a vacation. There are so many people to visit, and the holidays superimpose their own hectic schedule.

Christmas was nice. Homero's grandmother hosted. Abuelita Adelina doesn't know how old she is, having been born in a time and a place without birth certificates, but her oldest child is well into his seventies. Adelina has slowed down, of course, but she is still capable of getting up at six am and making enough tamales to feed a crowd. Dinner was tamales, roast chicken, a delicious and interesting potato/apple salad, and ponche. Ponche is basically a whole lor of fruit - mostly things we don't have at home and that I didn't even recognize, such as tecojote and ciruela and guayaba - thrown into a kettle with cinnamon sticks and boiled for a while. It was very good, especially with a little "piquete."

I used the children as an excuse to go home and go to bed around midnight, but of course the party went on. As it did in the streets all around us. Mexicans love fireworks, the bigger the bang the better they like them. It sounded like Christmas in Afghanistan until about three a.m. Oddly, I've become accustomed and can sleep through most of the fireworks, the packs of howling dogs, and the rediculously loud music. At home, I sleep with blackout curtains and ask everyone to please use headphones after eleven. I am only a few steps away from Michael Jackson, sleeping in a sensory deprivation tank. Truth is, I'd LOVE a sensory deprivation tank. Here, I guess I've acepted the fact that there is absolutely nothing to be done about the noise. I can make my own dog stop barking at home, but a chorus of raggedy ass Mexican street curs? Not likely. Pull the covers over your head and shut it out.

The weather has been pretty much delightful the entire time. The first couple of days was very hot - maybe 90? - and I wasn't careful. I took a long walk and didn't hydrate enough and ended up with the most massive migraine ever. I thought I was going to die, but luckily our resident physicians (my brother and sister in law) went to the pharmacy and brought back something that killed the migraine in fifteen minutes flat. I know the Spanish name but not the English name. I plan to bring some home, if I can. After the first few days, the weather has been terrific. Still hot enough to be aware you are in Mexico, but not can't-move hot.

Yesterday, Mama and I took all four little girls out to a water park some twenty miles out of town. It would be a small water park by US standards - it isn't a third the size of the birch bay waterslides, for example - but it was heaven for us. Three tall waterslides (even though one of them gave some pretty hefty electrical shocks when you first step in) and three pools for swimming. The air was hot and the water was cold and they sold beer and snacks and I had sunblock with me and it was great.

After the waterpark, we went to see some nearby ruins that Mama had never seen before. There are so many prehispanic ruins around here that only the largest, such as Monte Alban, ahve any kind of national or international name. The entire state is covered with medium and small ruins that were once towns or noble houses. This was a heavily populated area before Europeans arrived. The ruin we went to see is called Yagul, and was probably once a pretty good sized town. It has a very well preserved ball court and the remains of a rambling palace that they call the labyrinth. For good reason! We ran around the inside, up and down narow corridors, finding small courtyards and shouting to each other over the shoulder-high walls. we could see each other's heads, but we couldn't reach each other in the twisty passages. The children adored it.

Today we are having a quiet day, relaxing at home and sorting through our luggage preparatory to packing up. Later on this afternoon, we will take the children downtown and take a tour through the city botanical gardens, something I have meant to do on every visit but haven't yet. Tomorrow is our last full day here. We leave at 6 am thursday, first taking a six hour bus ride to Mexico City and then two flights home, with a two hour drive home from the airport on the other side.

I am ready to go home. I miss Rowan, my oldest, who stayed home to watch the farm. I miss the farm. I miss my dog and my goats. And my sister. Not necesarily in that order.

Honeymoon in Chiapas

2011-12-22T13:36:00.000-08:00

Everyone should wait and have their honeymoon after they've been married several years. That's when you will need it. Think about it - before you get married, before you have kids, it's all honeymoon, all the time. A decade after the wedding, when you have two or three kids, a mortgage, jobs... when you have to squeeze making love in between putting the kids to bed and washing the dishes. In our case, we took our honeymoon for our tenth anniversary. It was supposed to be Hawaii, but well, here we are in Mexico again.

I don't miss Hawaii one bit. Someday I'll get there. For now, we had Chiapas. Alas, we only had three days. We could have easily spent a week. Ten years ago, Homero and I and then-seven-year-old Rowan took a week long car trip around parts of southern Mexico, including some of Chiapas. We went to Palenque, one of the largest and best excavated Mayan cities in Mexico. An amazing sight. On this trip, I had hoped to be able to visit another Mayan site, either Bonampak or Tonina. There just wasn't time. Even though new superhighways have sprung up all over Mexico, linking once remote places, the distances are just too great.

As a matter of fact, we spent most of our three day honeymoon driving. It took us eleven hours to get from Oaxaca to Chapa de Corzo, the small town on the banks of the river that runs through el canyon de sumidero. But we weren't hurrying. We stopped here and there to look at this and that, to eat, to take pictures. And we like driving, even on these incredibly mountainous, curvy roads, where every quarter mile there is a litle cross set up to show you where somebody plunged 500 feet to a grisly death. The views are awesome. Once again, I apologize for not having pictures up, but I still can't figure it out. When I get back home I'll put up all the photos at once.

One of the towns we passed, Matatlan, is famous as the world capitol of mescal. If you don't know what mescal is, the easiest way to describe it is as Tequila's countrified cousin. Both are distilled from fermented agave, but the name tequila is restricted to that produced from one species of agave and produced within a certain area, mostly, I think, the state of Jalisco. Oaxaca is where the greatest quantity and variety of mescal is made, and much of it is still made in small family run operations that produce mescal in small quantities, the old fashioned way. We stopped at one such operation, and watched the pit roasted agave hearts being crushed by a stone wheel driven by a donkey. The fermentation and the distillation all takes place on site. We bought a liter of mescal fresh from the still for 30 pesos, or about $2.50. Of course, the good stuff is aged in oak for three years or more, and we also bought a liter of that, for the rather more exorbitant price of 110 pesos, or about 9 bucks.

We packed a lot into our one full day of no driving. In the morning we took a tour through the canyon, which is narrow and very deep. At the deepest point, the walls tower 300 meters above the river. The walls are sheer, just about perfectly vertical, but nonetheless cactuses, aloes, orchids, and even trees grow out of the rock face. We saw four alligators. One of them was about three meters long.

After the tour, we jumped into the car and drove to San Cristobal de las Casas. This beautiful, colonial town has become too famous for it's own good. Fifteen years ago, it leapt onto the world stage as the home of the zapatistas, and ever since it has been inundated with tourists of every description, from well-meaning journalists and anthropologists to culture-vulture hippies and "extreme" adventure tourists. The houses, streets and churches are all as gorgeous as ever, but now you walk shoulder to shoulder with crowds of sightseers.

Nonetheless, we enjoyed it. The zolcalo was lit up for the holidays, and a marimba band was playing. We danced in the street alomg with several other couples. Homero bought us a ride in horse and carriage through the old streets, and the guide pointed out sights of interest. We ate pizza and bought a ridiculous number of tchatkes from tiny children in traditional clothing. It's hard to say no to a five year old selling painted clay animals for five pesos apiece, especially when said five year old has eyes the size of dessert plates.

Some ten miles outside of town there is a park, located in a pine forest (that tells you how high San Cristobal is, to have a pine forest in the tropics). In this park is the entrance to a limestone cave. It is a living cave, and there is a half mile long walkway built inside, with some few and far between lights strung up. They are nothing like the Oregon caves, for example, but still ´pretty impressive. I try never to miss a cave, wherever I am. I love caves. The entire lower half of Mexico is riddled with caves, and I'm sure this one goes on and on beyond the place where the walkway ends.

The next morning we drove back, again ambling along stopping here and there along the way. The children didn't miss us at all, says Mama. They had a wonderful time playing with their cousins and eating as much candy as they could stuff in their faces.They went to three posadas and broke three pinatas and stayed up till all hours. They are probably sad we are back.

Time flies. Less than a week left. Christmas is the day after tomorrow (they celebrate Christmas eve, not Christmas day). Then just a couple more days to pack, buy last minute gifts, and we,re off back home. I know Rowan has been taking excellent care of the place, but I´m still anxious. I want to see Rowan. I want to check out the animals. I want to cook in my own kitchen again. I'd even like some cold air - it's been above eighty every day here, and at night it cools down to about sixty.

More later.

Take Three, Damnit!

2011-12-18T14:00:00.000-08:00

RRRRGH if i acidentally move the cursor I can't get it back it goes to the beginning of the post and I can't move it. Okay here we go I was takking about wild horses.

..... they are not truly wild but they know the touch of man on only two occasions - when they are caught and branded, and when (if) they are caught and brought to the village to be tamed. I was told, though I find it hard to believe, that a man will rope a horse and run it down and grab it by the ears and bring it to the ground. It's true they aren't very big - this one was about twelve hands, and small framed - and also that the men are ncredibly tough, but even so. I can't picture a man wrestling a horse the way they wrestle steer in the rodeo.

This teenager, however, was the absolute picture of an old fashioned Mexican charro. It was a real pleasure to watch him ride. He had a saddle - a gorgeous hand tooled leather saddle, and a bridle, but the bridle had no bit. It was pure neck reining. I have a photo but I can't upload it until I get home.

I also enjoyed seeing the harvest of corn laid out on the houses sroops to dry. The whole year's harvest was piled up in mounds to dry, and soon the people will seoarate the seed coen from the food corn and will twist the seed off the cob. It is very easy to do - I tried it, and also put a handful of seed in my purse. Next year I intend to see if criollo oaxacan corn will grow in northwest washington.

There is so much more to write, and I'm so frustrated with the limitations of this stupid keyboard. Tomorrow morning early Homero and I are off on our honeymoon trip. Three days in Chiapas. We are driving from here to Chiapas de Corzo, and then el canyon de sumidero. If we have time, I,d love to see Bonampak, but that deoends on how the children take to being left alone with abuelita and their aunt Temy.

More to follow!

Mixteca Trip Part Two

2011-12-18T13:44:00.001-08:00

sorry about that folks, im trying to type this on a tablet and i haven't got the bugs worked out yet. I can't seem to go back and edit, so any mistakes i make will just have to stay.

ok, we arrived in San Pedro Nopala at about noon, and were greeted like kings and queens, with tamales and cold beers and wide, delighted smiles. The village itself is not one of the most pictaresque, but it is typical of the region, and the setting is gorgeous. It is nestled into a narrow valley among high, eroded hills, covered in scrub and scattered trees. The earth in that region is very strange, almost white. San Pedro Nopala has a small, stone church with a handsome courtyard planted with roses, and the streets climb the hills at alarming angles.

Up one of these steep hills we were welcomed into a traditional kitchen, separate from the rest of the house, with an open fireplace for cooking, on which a giant pot of tamales was bubbling away. About fifteen people were there to greet us, not counting the half dozen young children tumbling about. After distributing our gifts, we passed the time chatting and drinking beer while the children played outside. A teenage boy, younger brother of one kf our friends, arrived with his horse and gave the children turns sitting on it.

No ordinary horse, this was one of the wild horses that runs in the hills surrounding the village. I asked how many horses there were, and got a vague answer, maybe somewhere around a hundred. They are not exactly wild - there are no true wild horses in North America - but they are a free-running, free-breeding herd that knows the touch of man only on two

A Visit to La Mixteca Baja

2011-12-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

Oh how annoying it is not to be able to upload photos! Bro, if you read this, please tell me again how to do it on my iphone. Doesn't blogger have an iphone app?

Yesterday we went on a daytrip to a tiny village in the mixteca baja region called San Pedro Nopala. Our good friend Crecencio is from there, as is his wife and cousins. When they heard we were going to Oaxaca this christmas, they asked us to bring gifts for their family. This always hapens, by the way. If you know any Mexicans and you are going anywhere in Mexico, expect to be regaled with backpacks and cellphones, jewelry and cameras and such to deliver to your friend's loved ones.

In our case, we were convinced to bring a backpack full of gifts and an electronic piano, which must have weighed a hundred pounds, in a hard case. The relatives would have sent someone to Oaxaca city to pick up the gifts, but Crecencio was excited for us to see his village and meet his parents. "If you think I can barbecue a g

oat, "he said, "wait until you try my father,s barbecue. No, hombre!"

About an hour north of Oaxaca, we turned off the autopista at Noxchtitlan. We stopped at an incredible ex convent that happened to be ooen at a place I can't remember, but it was pretty incredible. The caretaker there told us it was started in the year 1550 and that 600 men worked for 25 years to complete it. Six hundred poor indians, I thought, but did not say. And though I feel terrible for even thinking such a thing, it occurred to me that through force and torture had emerged a thing of eternal beauty and power. Though surely the means does not justify the end, I couldn,t help but marvel at the finished product.

We only got lost once on the way to the village, which lies some twelve kilometers off the paved road. We stopped and asked an old man resting next to his burro in the fields and he set us straight. As an aside, this particular trip was an eleven donkey trip. Whenever we go on a roadtrip in Mexico we count the donkeys we see by the side of the road. There are fewer now than there were a decade ago. When i first came to Oaxaca, this would surely have been a twenty donkey journey.

e a goat," he said, "Wait untik you have my father's barbecue. No, hombre, no hay nada asi."

Arrival

2011-12-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

The trip took 22 hours, but we made it. Well, if you count from the time we left our house, it was more like thirty six hours. We picked up the girls from school on monday and drove down to my moms house, where she had prepared a beautiful Christmas dinner and gave us our present. A very nice present, this Zoom that I'm writing on. Its a little more limited than a laptop, and i haven't yet figured out how to put photos on the blog, so those will have to wait.

After our Christmas with mom, we drove to the airport and found the closest, cheapest hotel we could find, drew the curtains, and set the alarm for 4 am. Our flight left on time, at 6:00, and we had no trouble with security or anything else. However, we had a plane change in Dallas, and it was a very tight connection. In fact, the boarding time listed on our pass was five minutes after the landing time of the first flight! And I had never been in the Dallas airport before, but it is by far the biggest airport I've seen. Of course, the gates were as far apart as they could possibly be. There's a train, but even on the train it took a full ten miutes to get there. We arrived at the second gate sweaty and panting, but in time.

Landing in Mexico City, we were supposed to meet my brother and sister in law, who had driven up from Oaxaca to pick us up. That's a six hour drive. As my sister said, when I told her, "That's like driving from Bellingham to Eugene Oregon to pick someone up at the airport!" Yep. That's what Mexican families do.

However, we couldn't find them. We spent a very nervous half hour sitting on our luggage in the main terminal and fending off offers of "aid'" while trying to decide what to do if they didn't show. Find a hotel and stay overnight? Rent a car? Try and get a bus? We couldn't make our cell phones work and no-one was answering the house phone. Homero was more worried than I was, I figured they were waiting at a different door somewhere. As it turned out, they were circling the airport to avoid having to park and stopping in to check each time they came around to the loading zone. And they found us before actual panic set in.

By the time we got outside of the city, it was sunset, and we had a gorgeous view of the two mountains, Popocateptl and the other one that looks like a sleeping lady, pink and glowing in the hazy late afternoon sky. The drive was long, but enlived by lots of happy talk and gossip, and the batteries on the Zoom held out so the kids were okay, and we arrived at Abuelita's house about half past midnight.

Of course Abuelita had food and cold beers waiting for us, and after we carried the children to bed we stayed up talking and eating and drinking until about two in the morning. Then we fell inro bed and slept like the dead unril noon the next day.

I hope I can figure out how to add pictures from here. If not, I will add them when I get home. We have so many great things planned. Homero and I are going on a short honeymoon for our tenth anniversary to el Canyon de Sumidero (google it, it's gorgeous). Our goat butchering friend Crecencio is from a small village not far from here, and we are going there to bring his family some gifts he sent with us and to attend - what else - a goat barbecue feast in our welcome. That is sure to be interesting.

It being Christmas, there are all sorts of things gojng on in the centro - parties, concerts, shows and displays, church processions, posadas, and of course the night of the radishes. Three weeks seems like a long time but it really isn't. Not when there is so much to do! More later, it isn't very east typing on this zoom thingy.

Speed Christmas (I've Doubled my Trouble)

2011-12-10T17:09:00.000-08:00

In my last post, in which I described a few Mexican Christmas traditions I was looking forward to on our vacation this year, I mentioned that I was relieved to not have to participate, this year, in the frenetic endurance test that is the modern American Christmas.

Ha ha ha, and of course, Ho Ho Ho.

Opting out of Christmas is not an option, even if you will be out of the country. In fact, planning to be out of the country only increases the Christmas related stress, because all your relatives will insist on having a pre-Christmas Christmas with you before you go. At least, that is what happened in my family. So I still had to make, buy, or otherwise scrounge gifts for everyone while simultaneously trying to organize and pack for a three week trip. And wrap them, because there is no greater shame, in my family, than handing over a gift - no matter how expensive or thoughtfully picked out - in a plastic bag. So the annual rummaging-through-of-the-drawers for scissors and scotch tape was held as usual.

Then my children, who are in the prime Christmas years of their lives, being eight and six, became alarmed that they were going to miss out on things like a live Christmas tree and visiting Santa. For some reason, regaling them with tales about the joys of midnight mass did not relieve their longings. While I wasn't going to buy and decorate a real live tree, I decided to resurrect a tradition we had when we lived in the city and had no room to plant a Christmas tree every year. I went down to the Learning Store and bought some thirty feet of green butcher paper, cut it into tree shapes, and the kids and I decorated them with potato stamps and glitter glue. Then we taped them to the walls to make a Christmas tree forest.

Last weekend, we attended an annual event that we enjoy very much - Old Time Christmas at Pioneer Park in Ferndale (City of Ferndale - Parks - Pioneer Park). Pioneer Park is one of the coolest parks around - the city has moved some fifteen original pioneer homes to the park and furnished them with authentic period furnishings - everything from stoves to bedsteads and quilts. In the summer, you can tour the homes with a docent guide for the measly sum of $3 per adult and $1 per child, the best bargain in the county. The park is closed in winter, except for one weekend in December, when the cabins are all decked out in Christmas decorations, there are activities and crafts for the children, and Santa is there to hear your child's wishes. You can even take pictures - for free.

I wouldn't miss old time Christmas at Pioneer Park for a stocking full of bourbon and cash. The kids loved it.

But Christmas before Christmas wasn't over yet. Hope wanted to have a Christmas themed slumber party before we left. Frankly, I just couldn't face that idea, so I haggled her down to a Christmas cookie decorating party. That was today - thank God for sugar cookie dough in a tube is all I can say. I had six children over and we decorated about a thousand cookies. Even now, some four hours later, my kids are buzzing around the ceiling on a sugar-cookie and purple frosting high.

But at least I have something to leave in the neighbor's mailboxes before we go. Green angel with pumpkin seed wings, anybody? Merry Christmas!

Christmas in Oaxaca

2011-12-05T21:38:00.001-08:00

We are leaving for Oaxaca in one week. I have done exactly nothing to get ready. That, however, is a story for another post. Today I would like to inform you all of a few lovely Christmas Season traditions that I am looking forward to. Firstly, I am delighted that the Christmas consumerism we all love to abhor has yet to take hold in Mexico. There really is no tradition of gift giving on Christmas. A couple of weeks later, on Three Kings Day (Epiphany), small token gifts are given to children only.

Given that there are also no Christmas trees or Christmas lights, one might be forgiven for wondering just what Mexicans actually DO for Christmas. Well - and I know this going to be hard to believe - for most Mexicans, Christmas is still a religious holiday. They celebrate the birth of Jesus by following the biblical story. The major ritual that Mexicans enjoy is that of Las Posadas.

Beginning on December 16th, various houses in a given parish will host the nativity. The manger scene is set up in the first home, and then people dressed as Mary and Joseph will proceed from the church to that home, stopping at other homes along the way to sing songs and ask for lodging. They will, according to the script, be denied until they reach the home where the nativity scene is. Of course, as they journey through the streets, they acquire a long train of local families and children who follow along with lit candles and join in the singing.

At the appointed home, the entire train is finally allowed entry, and there is a party with hot drinks and snacks, and perhaps a pinata for the children. This happy scene is repeated at a different home every night until the 24th, when the creche is installed back at the church. The holy family arrives at the church at midnight on Christmas eve, and midnight Mass is spoken.

After THAT, most families go home and have a feast in the wee hours of the morning. The children drop where they may and are carried to bed. On Christmas day everyone sleeps until mid afternoon, which may be a source of envy for American parents whose children wake them up at first light, even if they have to stab them with forks.

Another picturesque tradition, this one unique to Oaxaca, is la noche de los rabanos, or "the night of the radishes." About one hundred and fifty years ago, there began a tradition in Oaxaca of people creating nativity scenes out of various local materials such as dried flowers and straw and displaying them in the zocalo, or main square. The most unusual such material was the giant Mexican radish: a truly gargantuan root that can be as big as a man's leg.

Over the years, local folks have taken this tradition to astonishing extremes, comparable, perhaps, to the fanciful, enormous gingerbread houses created and displayed in the states. For two nights, the 23rd and 24th of December, thousands of people crowd into the zocalo to see the amazing displays made out of radishes.

Some of these displays are really incredible: scale models of the city cathedral; troupes of dancers in native costumes; beloved religious icons.

I am looking forward to Christmas in Oaxaca. Christmas in America is the 800 pound gorilla of holidays - the holiday which must be appeased. For many of us, a great deal of the joy has been leached out, as we run ourselves ragged and spend more than we can afford to give our children an experience which we secretly doubt is even valuable at all. I cannot, for example, bring myself to entirely "deprive" my children of Christmas as they know it - we will be hanging stockings in Abuelita's house, and Santa will stuff those stockings. But I hope and expect that my kids will enjoy Christmas as it is practiced there. That they will experience the kind of joy in family and giving that we give lip service to up here.

Here are a few links to other posts about our trips to Oaxaca, both at Christmas and at other times.

New To Farm Life: Vacation Photos, With Explanations

New To Farm Life: Mexican Fireworks (Videos)

New To Farm Life: Home From the Land of my In-Laws

Unwelcome Drama in the Goat Breeding Business

2011-12-04T13:12:00.000-08:00

For the last two years, breeding my goats was very easy: I had my own buck. Storm Cloud was handsome and healthy, but alas, as with all bucks, his usefulness was only a couple of seasons long (The King Must Die (Goat Breeding and Divine Kingship)). This year I had to look for a buck.

I started out with high hopes - I advertised for a spotted purebred Nubian. Weeks and weeks went by, and no responses, except for one. I lowered my standards and simply looked for a Nubian. Same thing - no responses except for the same one. A problematic response. A response from a person I know, and would rather not work with.

D* is a local, small scale goat breeder. She is, in fact, the first goat breeder I met up here, and she was very helpful, giving me tips on general care such as hoof trimming and which worming medicines were most effective for local parasites. I was grateful. However, it didn't take me long to take a rather sharp dislike to her. I didn't like the way she spoke to her toddler child. I didn't like the way she vigorously badmouthed other local goat folks, people I didn't know. When I visited her home, to bring her a gift for her new baby, I was truly shocked by the conditions she was living in - not just squalid but actively dangerous for small children. And as time went on and I did meet other goat folks, I learned that everyone who has had dealings with her has had serious troubles.

I can't give too many specifics without identifying her, which I do not want to do, but various people told me of dealings with her that resulted in hard feelings, at best, and police involvement, at worst. I also heard that the Humane Society had removed some of her animals. You can see why I would prefer to have my does bred by somebody else's buck.

But I just wasn't finding one! A few people called me with bucks of other breeds on offer, but D*'s was the only Nubian available. Time went by, and I realized that if I wanted to breed my does to a Nubian buck this year, I would have to see D*.

There were immediate issues, but mostly minor annoyances. She insisted on current CAE and CL tests for all of my does (reasonable) but when asked for test results on her buck, she couldn't provide any. We talked about my boarding her buck for a few weeks to impregnate all the does at once (my preference), but I ended up transporting my does to her. She wanted to charge me a $3/day boarding fee for my does, plus a few bales of hay, but when we were talking about my boarding her buck there was no talk of her providing hay. In fact, she wanted to charge me a $10 transport fee, each way!

I ignored all this, because I really wanted my does bred, and the buck was actually quite handsome. Black and white spots, tall and big bodied, just what I was looking for. I brought over three of the four does (the fourth was waiting on test results - which cost me $48). All went well on the first go round, and I brought my does home after about a week. D* was paid the full stud fee for the three does, although of course we didn't know yet if they were actually pregnant.

Just a few days ago, I called D* to schedule bringing over my fourth doe, along with one of the original three, who was showing signs of heat, which would mean she wasn't pregnant. D* told me to bring them by anytime, but that the buck I had used before was no longer available and I would have to use her junior, unproven buck. Turns out, that first buck wasn't even hers, she was boarding him for someone else.

"Um, okay," I said. "That's not what I was expecting. How about a price break on the stud fee?"

"No," she said, "I'm already discounting the fee for multiple does. Take it or leave it. And bring some more hay."

I was pretty pissed off at this point. I felt that D* was trying to gouge me at every turn, and also that it was pretty duplicitous to collect stud fees on a buck that wasn't even yours... although of course I don't know what agreement she might have had with the buck's actual owner. However - it was now December, and goat breeding season is drawing to a close. I really wanted this particular doe bred, because she is a first freshener and already a little old for it. Also she is Storm Cloud's offspring, the only blood of his I have on the farm, and a spectacularly gorgeous animal. I don't want to wait another year and a half to see what she produces.

So I brought the goats. D* wasn't home, but she had told me where to leave them, and I did. I also brought a full bale of hay. The string on the hay broke as I was trying to unload it, and so I had to move it in several armloads, which I piled up on in the barn next to the rest of their hay. Then I went home.

A few hours later, I got an e-mail. It said "You have to either bring me more hay or pick up your goats tomorrow. This amount will not compensate me for my time and labor." Immediately following, there was a second e-mail: "disregard first message. Come get your goats now, we don't want them here."

Well. The woman clearly has issues. Anyone who so consistently creates chaos and strife in all their relationships is more to be pitied than hated. I say that now, after a few days cooling off time. In the heat of the moment, I was furious. I'm afraid I have to admit to firing back a long and ungracious e-mail, in which I told her some of the things I've heard about her in the past, and how I should have listened to those people and stayed far away. I am definitely not proud of sending that e-mail - I should have just shut up, collected my goats, and chalked it up to experience.

Also, as my sister told me, it wasn't very smart to send that e-mail while she still had physical possession of my goats. In any case, we got our goats back without difficulty. I told Homero I wanted him to come with me, just in case there were problems. There weren't: D* didn't come out of her trailer. The goats are back home, still unserviced, and I still have no leads on a Nubian buck.

But I have learned a lesson. I hate gossip with a passion, which is probably why I disregarded so many stories about D*. But when three or more people have similar stories to tell about an individual, maybe it isn't just gossip. Maybe it's worth a little caution. At least, in my case, there was no harm done and no police involvement! I'm counting my blessings.

Fall Photos (Book Review and Old World Roots)

2011-11-27T16:04:00.001-08:00

Just going through my recent photos, I noticed these beautiful autumn images. It's now December, and the gorgeous autumn leaves have long ago turned into compost, but I wanted to share these pictures nonetheless.

This hasn't been a particularly beautiful Fall. Even when it is a particularly beautiful Fall here, it isn't, compared to Fall in some other parts of the world, like Vermont. We in the Pacific Northwest are accustomed to our soggy, brown, moldy Autumns. If we are lucky, and paying attention, we might see one beautiful weekend. Here is our beautiful weekend 2011.

These photos are already some five weeks in the past. Today was the first sunny day in weeks, and I let the goats out to graze. One sunny day does not make up for weeks of rain; I stepped in the ankle deep mud, freezing and clammy. I have simply had to resign myself to the fact that the reality of life, currently, is cold mud, even when the sky is clear blue and the mercury unseasonably tops forty-five degree.

Today, the first sunny day this Fall warm enough to entice me outside to allow my animals to graze, was really lovely. I brought a book: Miriam's Kitchen, a book about a woman rediscovering her Jewish roots, and read it while I relaxed in a canvass chair with an oak-stick resting gently against my knee. The author tells the story of growing up the child of holocaust survivors, and marrying the son of holocaust survivors. All four of her children's grandparents are immigrants, refugees, and formerly orthodox Jews. One side of the family assimilates, and the other doesn't. The author grows up in a "culturally Jewish" family, a family which observes Hanukkah and Passover but doesn't keep kosher. She marries into a traditional family which does keep kosher and which is observant in ways her family was not. The book is the story of her slowly reconciling the two sides, mostly via the kitchen. I highly recommend it for anyone who is attempting to create or maintain a spiritual tradition for their children.

I am fairly certain I will never decide to do the hard work of rediscovering my own Jewish roots. My mother's family were Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated at the beginning of the twentieth century and who lost their traditions over a couple of generations of living in America. My family has ignored their roots to such a degree that much of my own generation doesn't even realize they have Jewish roots to rediscover. All I have left is a better-than-average Yiddish vocabulary and a wry sense of humor.

My sister has chosen to resurrect (ha!) the family's heritage to the extent with which she feels comfortable. I wouldn't presume to speak for her, but I believe that she has found a rich spiritual vein to mine, one that lives and speaks to her. She has chosen the rituals that she practices because they have something to say to her, something she believes valuable to pass on to her children. I have chosen other rituals from other traditions that I believe pass on similar lessons.

Few Americans of my generation were raised in a faith tradition. There are good things and bad things about that fact, and I'm not going to debate them. Personally, I am happy to have the freedom to develop, organically, my own faith. However, I recognize that that freedom comes at a cost, a cost that I can never even fully understand. Most of us, those of us who have no ingrained faith but who nonetheless long to instill a living spirituality in our children, must search our family backgrounds for traces of a tradition hardy enough to resurrect. Or, if our background yields none, then we must search the general landscape, a landscape which is becoming more and more sterile over the years.

I found Zion Lutheran, a small country church with a century long heritage of ministering to local farming families. The congregation is tiny, and elderly, but the tradition is unbroken. In the pews each sunday sit couples who were married in the same nave a half century ago, and every year there are a few funerals for members who were baptized there a hundred years before. Zion offers a beautiful, traditional liturgical service and close observance of a sacred calendar. I joined in order to worship with my neighbors, but I have also found great joy in seeing my children baptized there. On any given sunday there are few children in attendance, and the baptism of young members is a special occasion. I find a surprising amount of happiness in braiding my family into this small local faith tradition.

This is blasphemy in nearly all traditions, I suppose, but the truth is, I really don't care what particulars a faith teaches. I don't care if my congregation worships Jesus or Allah or

Buddha or freakin' Zoroaster. Every faith I've ever studied espouses more or less the same universal values: kindness, love, reciprocity, forgiveness, and honesty. That is what I want for my chikldren: that they be kind, honest, and loving. It so happens that I believe those values are best transmitted through an intact faith system. Or an intact mythology, if you prefer.

I also believe in the value of prayer. I don't think it matters much who one prays to: I have a household altar and many different deities have made an appearance on it. I don't think God cares about names. I think the impulse toward the sacred is universal, and universally valid. Certain images have resonance for me, and I assume different images have resonance for others. That should threaten me? Why?

Here's my prayer for the day: God reaches out towards all people at all times. May all of us recognize the divine when it stretches into our hearts and lives. May all of us honor it. May all of us feel the blessing and the beauty when we reach back out towards God, however God appears to us.

Annual Duck (Harvesting Breasts)

2011-11-26T13:52:00.000-08:00

Our newest Christmas season tradition around here is wild duck for dinner. A very generous duck hunting neighbor of ours (hereinafter Duckman)has taken to stopping by on his way home and dropping off a few ducks for us. I guess he likes hunting duck more than he likes eating it. Also, he heard that my husband really loves duck - which is true. Me, I could take it or leave it, but Homero adores duck. Above is a lovely brace of mallards we were given yesterday.

Duckman showed me, the very first time he gave me some ducks, how to cut out the breast, which is the only part he eats. Last year, when Homero's family was here, Mama and Temy cleaned all five ducks and we roasted them whole, but I am just not up for that. If I could have convinced Homero to get the livers out for me, I would have used them as well, but since I was on my own, I only harvested the breasts.

It sounds wasteful, I know, but seriously, the breast comprises about 60% of the meat on a wild duck, anyway. The liver is another 20%, and the rest of the carcass is pretty much a mass of splintery sharp bones.

The nice thing about plucking duck breasts is how easy it is. No need for hot water, just grab and pull. The feathers come out very easily, and the small fluff left over can be singed off with a wooden kitchen match.

Do watch out for shotgun pellets!

To remove the breast, take a very sharp knife and cut down at an angle as closely to the keel bone as you can. Follow the natural curve of the muscle. It's not difficult at all to get the breast off in more or less one piece, with a nice cap of skin still attached, for roasting up crispy.

These four breasts are now submerged in a mixture of soy sauce, honey, and rice wine vinegar and will be quickly broiled and served over the wild rice and fennel salad leftover from Thanksgiving. Homero usually gets them mostly to himself, which makes him very happy.

Getting Ready to Go (Travel Expenses)

2011-11-21T16:18:00.001-08:00

We try to make it to Mexico to see Homero's family every other year. We used to try to go every year, but travel has simply become too expensive. Ticket prices have more than doubled in the last several years, and we now have to buy FIVE tickets. In years past, we could put a child or two on our laps and save money. This years trip is costing us more than twenty-five hundred dollars in tickets ALONE.

It doesn't help that Homero's family lives in Oaxaca, a relatively inaccessible city. We never fly all the way to Oaxaca - it would double the ticket prices. We fly to Mexico city and take a seven hour bus ride. That adds a day's travel on either side of our flight date, unless we want to bite the bullet and do the whole shebang in one stretch - leave home five hours before flight from Seattle, take two flights, land in Oaxaca, take a cab across the western hemisphere's biggest city to the bus station, wait for a bus, and then ride seven hours to Oaxaca. A further half hour to Mom's house, where we cannot fall into bed, but must first endure the celebration dinner she has prepared for us (it doesn't matter if we arrive at 3 am) and exchange gifts with all twenty-six relatives who are there to greet us. In recent years, I've decided that there will be a night in a hotel somewhere along the way. I'm getting too old for that non-stop shit.

There are more costs than just tickets, of course. We always have to go for a minimum of three weeks, and that is rather a lot of lost income from Homero's time off work. Then we have to make sure the barn is stocked with feed and the propane tank is full and the bills are all paid up so we won't come home to a cold, dark house and a bunch of starving animals. Here, from a past vacation, is a non-comprehensive list of the things I did to prepare for a previous vacation:

Our annual vacation to Mexico to visit family (postponed lo these last three years due to straitened circumstances) are fast upon us. We leave in something like three weeks. I have managed, thank the Lord, to hire a seemingly competent babysitter for the farm (Farmsitters (Just Whose Expectations Are Too High Here?)). Other farmwives will understand when I say there is no level of certainty that will allow me to relax and enjoy the vacation as I should: specters of mastitis, wormy anemia, and footrot will haunt me no matter how far I may wander.

That being the case, all I can do is my best to prepare for the worst. Here is my list of "things that must be done" divided into two categories: House and Farm:

House:

1) pay bills. We don't want the electricity shut off (or the water, or the phone) while our house-sitter is here.

2) Clean the shit out of everything. If I were housesitting for someone, I wouldn't want to discover a moldy refrigerator drawer or a smelly secondary toilet. I would want plenty of clean towels and sheets.

3) Make a set of keys. Currently, I don't even own a set of keys for my own house. 'Nough said.

4) write instructions for everything - how to use the washer and the dryer, the TV remote, et cetera. Plus such things as how much to feed the dogs and where to put the food for the elusive cat.

5) work up a set of emergency numbers - which means contacting a bunch of shirttail relatives and begging them to be available in case of emergency. If they were readily willing to be available, I wouldn't be hiring a stranger, now would I?

Farm:

1) stock up on animal food: full 50 pounds of goat food and chicken food, three or four bales hay, ditto straw for bedding.

2) make stop-gap repairs on barn floor: the floor is totally rotted out but a permanent fix is beyond our means at the moment, so a temporary fix would be something along the lines of:

a) break up and remove rotted plywood flooring

b) scrape and clean out subfloor as much as possible

c) lay cheap-ass treated particle board over studs

d) lay in a supply of straw for bedding

3) set up an account with both the veterinarian and the farm-store, so that any emergencies can be addressed by the farm sitter without a personal outlay.

4) Fix the lawnmower (again - don't ask) and do a final mow of both the lawn and the evil weeds. More to say about the weeds - next post.

5) Trim goat hooves. A long overdue task that haunts me in my dreams.

6) Write a detailed instruction booklet for milking and feeding. I know it sounds easy - "squeeze tits until milk stops flowing" but actually there's just a bit more to it than that. Things like "Goats will most likely jump up on the milking stand alone, but to get them off you must sling your arm around their neck and use the crook of your elbow to haul them down and guide them out the door..." as a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure instructions like the preceding are better demonstrated than explained via the written word, so I should

7) schedule a practice run for the farmsitter (compensated, of course) .

That's about all I have time to think about right now. No doubt there's a great deal more, which I will most likely heartily regret failing to address when I am on the beach in Huatulco and my farmsitter is sending me messages marked "urgent."

And finally, we have to pay the farm sitter. At least this year we don't have to find one: Rowan has finally reached the age whereat she is responsible enough to be left alone for weeks to take care of the farm. I am eighty percent certain she won't 1) burn anything down; 2) move in a bunch of loser friends; or 3) let any animals actually starve. Luckily, my sister and her family are in the area, so they will be an emergency backup.

Vacations are supposed to be relaxing, aren't they? Oh my God, I can't think of anything more stressful than preparing for vacations. But I usually do enjoy them once I get there. For your perusal, here are a few vacation-related posts from the past:

New To Farm Life: To My Farmsitter

Vacation Expenses

Vacation Anxiety

Pig Farming is Not Sexy

2011-11-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to disappoint those of you who were dreaming of a glamorous existence raising a few hogs in your perfectly manicured back yard, but I have got a news flash for you. Pig farming is not sexy. Not remotely. There are no paparazzi, there is no jewelry or red carpets, and there is no fanfare or glory.

There are only pigs, and mud.

this is reality.

Pig farming is not romantic. Piglets are cute, I'll grant you that, for about six weeks. Then they turn into pigs, which are not cute. They are not adorable; they do not make friends with other animals like Wilbur from Charlotte's web; and they are not clean and pink.

this is a fantasy. this is not reality.

Pigs are large, aggressive, pushy animals with teeth. They WILL knock you over, and you WILL land on your ass in a pile of pig shit. Pig shit, by the way, is one of the more offensive types of shit. Like that of other omnivores, pig shit is stinky. By comparison, horse shit smells of newly mown grass. Goat shit is practically invisible, and smells like nothing at all. Pig shit smells like an open sewer on a hot August day. And pigs shit every two minutes, on average.

Pigs are not easy to move around. It is a struggle to get pigs to go where you want them to go (this is also true of goats, but a little less so). Like goats, pigs are escape artists, and like goats, they will ruin your fences. Goats ruin fences by mashing them down from the top; pigs ruin fences by crumpling them up from underneath.

A pig's nose is like a mini-bulldozer. By the time a pig weighs fifty pounds, it is stronger than you are. I don't care if you are Arnold Schwarzenegger on his best day: a fifty pound pig can lift you right off the ground with it's nose. They are fast as deer, too: older folks might remember that county fairs used to have greased-piglet-catching contests. Whoever took that ribbon home earned the hell out of it, I'm here to tell you.

oh, you aren't scared of pigs? really?

Pigs are destructive to pasture and -God forbid - gardens. Ten minutes in your vegetable patch and you can kiss your harvest goodbye. Wherever pigs are, mud is not far behind. Put a few pigs on a major league baseball diamond and in a week flat there will be nothing but brown soup.

There is only one thing that justifies keeping pigs, and you already know what it is. It is their unearthly deliciousness. If a more delicious animal than a homestead-raised pig roams this earth, it hasn't been discovered yet. I pity the person who has only tasted supermarket pork. Pastured pork may be hard on the pasture, but is is heaven on the plate. Pork is one of those few products, like sweet corn or tomatoes, that when raised at home is simply in a whole different league than the commercial product.

In the past, we always raised one pig at a time. Then somebody told me that the pig must be terribly lonely, that more than other animals pigs need the company of their own kind. Also this person said that many of the obnoxious behaviors I complained of, such as screaming and biting, were probably related to loneliness and that two pigs would actually be easier than one.

twice as much bacon; twice as much hassle

This made some kind of sense to me, as I have myself noted that two children are usually easier than one. However, I am sorry to say, this fellow was just flat out wrong in our case. Two pigs are twice as noisy, twice as hard to manage, and twice as scary as one pig.

Here's hoping they will also be twice as yummy.

Cheap, Homely, and Comfortable (Winter Food... OK, and Me, Too)

2011-11-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

"Cheap, homely, and comforting..." yes, those adjectives could be used to describe me just as easily as they could be used to describe the food coming out of my kitchen in these dark winter months. It's true, and I can't deny it.

The average man might be happier to describe his dinner this way than he would his wife. The adjectives "cheap, homely, and comforting" just sound better when applied to a bowl of cock-a-leekie soup than they do when applied to a forty year old woman. On the other hand, the adjectives "Thin, hardbodied, and high-maintenance" don't really sound enticing applied to dinner.

While we are on the subject, there's a small, slightly amusing anecdote I'd like to relate. Before Homero and I were married, but far enough into our relationship that I was shopping and cooking for him regularly, I found myself complaining to my girlfriend about my future husband's atrocious taste in bread. I was - and am - a fan of whole wheat artisan bread, but Homero was - and is - a devotee of Wonderbread.

"He just loves squishy white bread," I told my girlfriend. "All he wants to eat is squishy white bread." She looked me right in the eye and said "lucky for you, sister."

I love you, Char.

Potatoes. Potatoes are the very cheapest and most comforting of winter foods. We still have half of a five gallon bucket full of our own home grown spuds, but those will soon be gone and we will be relying on grocery store potatoes, like everyone else. I don't know about you, but here, at this time of year, we can get a twenty pound sack of Russets for six bucks. Put those out in your cold storage shed and you are good for a month.

Tonight we ate roasted potatoes - our homegrowns are Rose Finns and Russian Bananas - both dense, nutty fingerlings. They are best simply scrubbed, sliced in half in large, and doused with olive oil and a little salt and roasted at 375 for an hour. Ten minutes before they are done, open the oven and add the juice of a big fat lemon, some minced parsley, and fresh ground pepper. It's pretty much a meal in itself, though a wedge of cheese and a glass of beer doesn't hurt.

Apples are wonderful. Apples are nearly free for the taking in a good year - there are so many old, abandoned trees about on the roadsides, you can pick at will. Even if you haven't got the guts for that, there are you-pick farms and roadside stands where you can get as many apples as you like for about $0.25 the pound. A few days ago I picked a laundry hamper full (as much as I could carry) for $15. Twenty minutes work on my part keeps us in eating apples and pie for a month. Once again - a cardboard box in the shed where they will be protected from freezing, and they will keep through January, at least.

Simple Pie:

Buy some crust. I know - it's sacrilege, but if it's the difference between apple pie for breakfast and no apple pie for breakfast, I guarantee everyone will come down on the side of the sacrilege. Slice up five decent sized apples in a bowl and toss with 1/4 cup sugar, a full teaspoon cinnamon, juice of a small lemon, and a full teaspoon corn starch. Roll out the crust into a greased pie plate and heap up apples. Add second crust on top and cut a few vents. Bake at 375 until crust is deep golden brown and apples are bubbling out of vents, about 45 minutes. Serve with hot coffee and clotted cream.

Cabbage is the cheapest green vegetable available throughout the year, but it is actually at it's best in early winter. If you haven't got your own, you can get a nice big firm head at any market for about $2.00. That's enough cabbage to feed the whole family for a week. If you do have your own, store it - you guessed it - out in the cold storage shed. Other members of the cabbage family that are their best this time year include kale, collards, and brussels sprouts.

Real beef is a seasonal product. We recently bought a side of beef from our neighbor, who raises 100% grass fed cattle on his forty-acres. You might not be lucky enough to have beef for sale that you can see grazing out your front window, but nonetheless, almost everybody has access to grass fed beef in bulk these days, through the magic of the internet. A side of beef is a huge amount - we will be passing a great deal on to friends and family. In general, I'd say a quarter of beef will feed a family of four for seven or eight months - as long as it lasts in the freezer.

Grass fed beef is seasonal because here in the northern hemisphere, grass dies in the fall. After the first frost, grass' nutritional content is pretty much kaput. Any cattle that you want to keep alive through the winter must be fed on hay - either purchased or produced on your own land, which, of course, reduces the grass available for grazing during the summer months. That's why slaughter time is October around here, and that's why our freezer is full to bursting.

Carrots and onions, along with beets, parsnips, celery root, turnips, rutabagas, and other humble roots make up the rest of the cheap, homely, comfortable larder of winter. Even if you don't grow any of these yourself, they are among the cheapest foods available in the grocery store between september and march. And the most versatile.

I myself am a big fan of stews. There are many delicious, traditional soups and stews developed ages ago to nourish the family through the long, dark, European winter. Pair a hearty borscht or beef stroganoff with a loaf of home baked sourdough rye and you will feel ready to go into hibernation well-fed. My husband, coming as he does from the sun drenched equatorial lands, has no inbred dread of long winters and therefore no congenital appreciation for the kind of serious food necessary to bear one through the long, depressing months of darkness. He has been known to complain when I serve soup and bread three days running. Silly man. Where do you think you are, Mexico?

Here is one of my favorite compromises: a hearty root vegetable stew that hails from a hot sunny clime and uses plenty of wake-you-spices. I am happy because I have used only seasonal veggies and pantry staples, and Homero is happy that he gets to eat a fiery delight.

Aimee's Peanut Stew, Winter Style:

1 yellow onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, smashed

1 inch ginger root, minced

6-8 carrots, depending on size, chopped

1 Tbsp oil

1 tsp hot red pepper flakes

1 chicken bouillon cube

1/2 cup peanut butter

1 can diced tomatoes

1 qt water

cilantro

lime wedges

salt and pepper

sour cream

In a large soup pot, heat oil and sauté chopped vegetables and spices. Crumble bouillon cube and add to pot, stirring with a wooden spoon. Add peanut butter and stir vigorously until fairly smooth. Then add tomatoes and continue stirring. Add water and bring to a fast simmer. Cook until carrots are quite soft, about twenty minutes. Use an immersion blender to blend until smooth, or use a slotted spoon to transfer veggies to a blender and blend until smooth. Return to pot.

Let simmer gently to meld flavors. Serve in bowls, passing cilantro, lime wedges, and sour cream to garnish.

Small Jobs Add Up (Laziness)

2011-11-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

I've been lazy lately. That's not unusual - actually I am congenitally lazy. I come from a long line of lazy people (not every last one, of course! Relax, industrious relatives. I didn't mean you.). When given the choice between, say, cleaning out the rabbit hutch and watching the newest episode of Breaking Bad, well - let's just say that's not a tough choice for me.

I am so lazy, I have even figured out many ways to work and be lazy at the same time. Most of us, I am sure, have a hierarchy of hatred when it comes to housework. You might not mind laundry so much, but flinch at the thought of cleaning the bathroom. Or maybe dishes are your bugaboo, but you kind of like yardwork. Perhaps you enjoy the satisfaction of really clean windows, but just can't stand vacuuming day after ever-loving day.

I hate almost all of it. God I hate housework. Here is a comprehensive list of the jobs I don't mind doing so much:

Grocery shopping

Cooking (including Preserving)

Goatherding and Milking

Gardening

My "wifely duty" (yes that counts)

That leaves this much larger list of things I loathe:

Dishes

sweeping and vacuuming

scrubbing of any kind

Laundry

balancing the checkbook

paying bills

recycling

mending clothes

PTA meetings

mowing the lawn

All yardwork really

digging

yelling at the kids (yes that counts)

So here's the (transparent) strategy I've worked out... I've elaborated those tasks I actually enjoy into complex undertakings and creative expressions that take utter precedence over everything else. I like to cook: I've become a gourmet home-chef who bakes our own bread (never will storebought bread pass my children's lips), makes our own cheese (don't call it a hobby), and grows many of our own vegetables.

Under the guise of providing for our food security and reducing our carbon footprint, I spend hours in the garden and at local farmer's markets, procuring enough vegetable bounty to spend many more hours preserving food for the winter, like some kind of hyperactive squirrel. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I am also saving us boatloads of cash, because we will be giving our friends and relatives pickled asparagus for christmas. Or maybe beets, if we don't like you much.

As you can imagine, all this industriousness on my part leaves me little time for - say - trimming the goat's hooves, or going to the dump. Cleaning out the refrigerator. Pulling weeds. Setting mousetraps (yes, we have a problem). Sorting through the kid's clothes to make sure they don't go to school looking like extras from the set of Little Orphan Annie.

This strategy works surprisingly well, most of the time. It is only about twice a year that the backup of work that legitimately belongs to me gets so large that I can no longer ignore it. Oh, I try to fight it. Before I will recognize that I need to spend a couple of days catching up, I will try mightily to convince my husband that HE needs to go to the dump... rake the leaves.... turn the compost pile... take the kids to the dentist....

But eventually, I have to give in and recognize that my husband is too busy fixing cars to make us money so I can go to the farmer's market to do all the mundane daily tasks that I am supposed to be doing. Then I have to have a day like today.

Things I did today:

-Sorted a pile of laundry the size of Mt. Kulshan. Threw out a pile the size of Mt. Shuksan.

-Trimmed four goat hooves - long overdue and totally disgusting. Did it without, however, cutting myself, so that's a plus.

- cleaned out the rabbit hutch. LONG overdue and totally disgusting. I had to use the hoe. 'Nough said. Will make nice compost, however.

Doesn't sound like much, maybe, but for a lady as lazy as I am, it's a lot.

Things I Have Seen Lately

2011-11-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

A chantrelle mushroom as big as my hand. I thought I mad missed chantrelle season, but was lucky enough to catch a guy selling the last of the season's chantrelles fro $6/lb. I bought three pounds and ate myself sick.
My daughter Hope washing her face in a bowl of pumpkin guts. She goes crazy every year for pumpkin guts. That child is weird. Next year we are going to empty all the pumpkins into a kiddie pool and have her put on her bathing suit and swim in it.

Lots of fall harvest decorations. This handsome storefront (I'm showing only a small part of a large, gorgeous display) is that of a bakery in Lynden.

Gigantic pumpkins. These were in front of the bank in Lynden and their weights were labelled. Can't remember, unfortunately, but it was in the eight or nine hundred pound range. We tried to grow giant pumpkins this year but they all rotted on the vine before they even hit fifty pounds. Don't know why.

An amazing sunset. We are blessed with great sunsets fairly often, but this one was pull-over-the-car-and-stand-staring beautiful.

That some people are still enjoying grapes. This was actually a couple of weeks ago. I took a long walk through a bunch of alleys in a cute neighborhood in Bellingham, just to check out people's garden. I am a garden voyeur. I was surprised by all the things that were still out - kale and hardy greens, of course, but also tomatoes, grapes, winter squash.

It's still a season of pretty sights. There's still light out until nearly six o'clock. I'm counting my blessings.

Protest as a Way of Life

2011-10-28T14:37:00.000-07:00

I admire the folks who are out in the public squares protesting the ever greater inequality of wealth in this country; the ever greater power of the corporation in writing laws to enrich themselves; the ever lesser power of the people over the political process and over the means of production. I am following the Occupy movement closely and I hold out hope that this will transform over time into a lasting political movement.

However, I am too old and have too many place-based responsibilities to be out there myself. If I were bedding my old bones down on the concrete in Westlake center (ha!), who would be feeding the pigs, milking goats, preserving the harvest? Who would be controlling the means of production at MY house?

In other words, people, there is more than one way to protest. Civil disobedience is awesome and irreplaceable as a means of focusing attention. But the quiet protest of refusing to give your dollars to Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer, Halliburton, GE, and Texaco (among many others) by instead growing your own food, saving your own seed, producing your own electricity, brewing your own biodiesel, and sewing your own clothes is perhaps even more effective.

I'm not trying to say we do all of those things - far from it. But we do many of them. And I am learning how to do more of them. Even if we never reach the point of producing all our own energy, or growing all our own food, having the knowledge base in the community, keeping the traditional wisdom alive is so important. I am quantifiably less dependent on those corporations because I can meet a healthy percentage of my own needs. I have given them a heck of lot less of my money than most Americans (and spent less overall), because I have developed some skills to replace their services.

I may not be out there, visible, but I am a protester nonetheless. And I am as subversive as hell.

Aimee's recommended ways to be subversive in modern America:

1) Maximize your food independence. For some of us, that means growing a lot of food or raising animals. For others, it means learning how to cook from scratch. If you are buying raw materials from your local farmers at the farmer's market, you maximize support of your individual neighbors and minimize your support of the giant agribusiness companies. You also save money and eat better.

2) Buy secondhand. Everything you possibly can. In this way you avoid encouraging the extraction of raw materials and extend the useful life of products. The embedded energy cost in, say, a new car or a new set of dining room furniture - even a new winter coat! - can be stretched over a greater time period and made to serve a greater number of people. For me, buying secondhand clothing is an ethical decision to avoid supporting the sweatshop industry. A subclause to this recommendation is: repair things that can be repaired. Get your fridge fixed a few times before you get a new one. Learn to mend clothes. When was the last time you saw a kid wearing jeans with knee-patches on them, unless they were sold that way to begin with? Take good care of your car. Do all the scheduled maintenance. Learn to do it yourself! Or ask your neighbor.

3) Maximize your energy independence. There are so many ways to do this - we brew biodiesel for our cars. But you might do it with solar panels or windmills, depending on where you live. Or do it by not owning a car and biking instead. Or by living in a smaller house and super-insulating. The sky's the limit.

4) Know your neighbors. Make friends. Develop mutually beneficial networks. Support each other. Lend your tools. Pool your resources. Why should every small-farming family along the same stretch of road own its own haying equipment, for example? That's absurd. Or its own tractor, even? Why shouldn't three or four families get together to buy one tractor instead of four? Does every household really need a chainsaw? No, not if you are on good terms with Bob down the way. And not if you are willing to lend his wife your sewing machine.

5) Most important of all: take charge of your education! Be informed! Get your information from diverse sources. Use your brain. Teach your kids. Go to museums and libraries while they still exist! Buy books (secondhand, of course!). Do not default on your obligation to educate your children, or yourself. It's too important. You can't leave it to the public school system alone. Talk about important issues with your spouse, your neighbor, your kids, your in-laws, your city councilman, your state senator!

6) For the love of God, VOTE!

Milkweed Diaries: Occupy the Pantry. . .

The Food Movement: Its Power and Possibilities

Occupy Your Kitchen

Revolution Begins In Your Kitchen: Occupy Wall Street from Your Kitchen

The King Must Die (Goat Breeding and Divine Kingship)

2011-10-24T16:06:00.000-07:00

I used to have my own buck. Storm Cloud, son of Flopsy, was (and presumably still is) an extremely handsome, healthy and virile tri-color purebred Nubian buck. He is black and white with brown points, tall, big-boned, from excellent milking lines, and also good natured, with healthy hooves, and never had a problem with parasites. Pretty much the ideal buck, in other words.

But even the ideal buck - even the divine Pan, were he to descend to Earth in the form of a buck - is only good for three years, maximum. After that, every doe on the place is either his sister, mother, or daughter. After three years, all bucks must be replaced. Now that I think about it, I am sure that is where the ancient tradition of the Summer King comes from.

For those of you who don't know, in ancient days, in Pre-Christian Europe, pretty much across the continent from Ireland to Asia Minor, there existed a tradition of divine kingship. The details varied from place to place, but basically, a king won his throne by supplanting the previous king, who was put to death.

Usually the reign was set for a specific period of time - a year, three years, seven years - after which there would be a solemn ceremony to replace the old king with a new, younger, stronger king. Sometimes the kings would fight to the death - a battle which was weighted against the old king - and sometimes the king submitted, after his appointed term had ended, to a ritual death of one kind or another.

The best documented of these rituals, perhaps, is that of the high festival of Dionysius, in certain parts of ancient Greece. On the appointed night, there would be an orgy, a great feast and dance, and the king would be celebrated, bedded by all the women he wanted, and gotten totally drunk. Then the Queen and her women - in a divine, drunken frenzy -would take on the personae of Maenads and literally tear him to pieces. His body would be plowed into the fields.

After that, the Queen would accept the new king into her bed and the country would be ritually fertilized for another year - or three, or five, or seven years. The Queen herself would only be replaced when she ceased to bear children.

However barbaric we might think such customs were, it seems to me they were expressing an inescapable biological reality. That is - you can't let one buck rule forever. That way lies genetic degeneration, illness, loss of hardiness, and general weakness in the herd. Inbreeding is bad.

Bucks must be replaced, alas. One might fairly ask, why bucks and not does? Well, think about it for a second: does provide kids and milk, year after year. One doe can feed a family of five with her offspring and her milk, each and every year for some ten years. A buck produces nothing but sperm, and his own meat. And each year, his sperm is less and less valuable. As is his meat, actually - meat from a mature, un-castrated billy goat is not, shall we say, a gourmet item.

Luckily, in a modern age, we can choose to trade bucks and shuttle them around rather than kill them when their local utility declines. I sold Storm Cloud to a lady in Portland, Oregon.

He went on to a delightful life servicing other does, and presumable, when he outlives his usefulness there, she will sell him on. Meanwhile - I need a new buck.

I have had a difficult time finding a buck this year. In my next post, I will detail my struggle - but for I will just say I think it is over. I think I have finally found a decent Nubian buck, albeit at a rather exorbitant price, and that I expect all my does to be pregnant within a month. It is late this year - I'd rather they were impregnated last month, but so be it.

Anyone looking for a great read - a truly wonderful novel, on my all-time top-ten list - which treats the subject of divine kingship in depth would be well-advised to read Mary Renault's The King Must Die. It is both a fabulous adventure story and a history lesson. Enjoy!

Brewing Up a Storm (Drinking and Driving)

2011-10-20T12:03:00.000-07:00

My first batch of hard cider came out great! I can't take all the credit - or even most of it - or, in fact, hardly any of it at all. I pressed the apples, but J. (my homebrewing friend who moved away and gave me all his equipment - see Cider, Revisited) found the recipe and walked me through the beginning of the process with little baby steps.

After pasteurizing the fresh juice, cooling to room temperature, and tranferring into a sterilized carboy, J. "pitched the yeast" which basically means, pour your yeast into the carboy, and added the airlock. A week later, after it stopped bubbling, we transferred the cider - now somewhat alcoholic - into a second clean carboy, leaving the dregs behind. This second carboy bubbles away with an airlock for another week or so, and then it's time to bottle.

Since I was trying to make carbonated cider, I had to add some more sugar to the cider before bottling it. The idea is that the sugar will fuel a second fermentation in the bottle, creating carbon dioxide which provides the fizz. Just like champagne. I managed the final bottling on my own.

Then I was suppoosed to let it mature for several weeks before imbibing, but I was impatient. Of course I had tasted the cider as I was bottling it, and it tasted pretty good. Not knowing how long it might take to develop some fizz, I waited about four or five days before opening up a couple bottles. There was some slight fizziness, but nowhere near as much as in a bottle of commercial brew. The taste, however, was very good - off dry and apple-y. I drank a bottle as though it were beer, and felt quite tipsy. Clearly, stronger than beer, though not as strong as wine. I'm guessing somewhere around 8%.

Over the next two weeks, all twelve bottles disappeared. I think I gave away six, and Homero and I shared the other six. So, no idea how it might have tasted after the recommended six weeks in the bottle. Better luck this batch - it's a five gallon batch instead of a two gallon batch, so there will be many more bottles. I hope it turns out as tasty this time. The fresh cider was not quite as good - nor as sweet - as the last batch of fresh cider. I'll just have to hope for the best.

Homero has been brewing, too. He's had virtually no work these last few weeks, and so has been turning his attention to those projects that tend to languish when he is busy. One of these is biodiesel. It had been a fair while since the last batch, but over these last two weeks he's made several batches, using up our stored oil and our chemicals. All three vehicles have full tanks, and there is still some thirty gallons leftover to refill them again. I think he made seventy-five gallons in all.

The oil is free to us - he has arrangements with a few local restaurants to pick up their used oil with his oil-sucker. The oil sucker is a very cool device he made. Basically it is a fifty-five gallon drum fitted with hoses and valves. He sticks it in the bed of the pickup and goes to one of his restaurants that has a full oil-dumpster. Then he can use the compression of the engine of his truck to create a vacuum inside the drum and suck up oil. I was very impressed. The oil is free, but the chemicals are expensive. Homero did the math a while ago and at that time, biodiesel costs us about $1.40 a gallon, when you figure in electricity. So, filling the three gas tanks cost somewhere in the vicinity of sixty dollars, or about one-third the cost of regular diesel.

Of course, it takes time, too. Homero hasn't quite got the fiddly precise process down, and so he spends many hours on each batch, and it can be quite frustrating. But even so, it's a highly worthwhile endeavor, economically speaking. Much more so, truth be told, than my cheesemaking or cider-brewing. But I get a lot of satisfaction out of my fiddly processes, too.

I am so proud of him. Of us, really. We are just a couple of homebrewers, each in our own specialty. Driving homebrew on his end, drinking homebrew on mine. Don't worry - we won't mix the two. Never the twain shall meet.

The Great Hen Giveaway (It's Not His Fault)

2011-10-15T16:58:00.000-07:00

It's not hard to tell roosters from hens, not when they are full grown. Here; I'll show you.

This is a hen. Hens are female. They lay eggs.

This, on the other hand, is a rooster. The rooster is easily recognized by his many colors, his long feathers and his large red crest.

We had too many roosters - eight, which is six more than we needed. I advertised six free roosters on Craigslist. A man called, and I told him to come pick them up after dark, when they would be easy to catch. As it turned out, I was at the grocery store when he showed up, so my husband caught the roosters and gave them to the man.

Can you guess where this is going?

This morning, I counted the roosters we had left. Four. That means that my husband gave away three roosters and three hens. We still have too many roosters, and now we have three fewer healthy young hens.

True - it was dark. That's true. I'm just going to keep repeating that to myself. And ask the next Craigslist guy to call me personally before he shows up.

Filling Up the Freezer (Great Grapes!)

2011-10-14T17:55:00.000-07:00

It was an insanely beautiful day today - much nicer than late October has any right to be. The sun was out in full glory, and I could feel the heat on my shoulders all day long as I completed various fall chores. This has not been a good year for leaves, and so even though the sky was a bright, washed blue, I did miss the sharp contrast of the yellow, gold, and red leaves against it.

That's an awfully petty complaint, though, isn't it?

I had a productive day. This morning, I went and cut a whole lot of grapes. A neighbor woman was advertising on Craigslist that she had a nearly unlimited amount of concorde grapes, and would sell them for $5 the five gallon bucket. That was the first thing I did this morning - cut grapes. It's a fine task - searching through the thick leaves, just beginning to wither and yellow, for the dark blue bunches. Her elderly pit-bull bitch followed me around the vineyard, occasionally pushing her wet nose into the back on my knee. It took me some twenty minutes to fill the bucket.

When I got home, I washed and sorted the grapes. I soon learned that only the very ripest and blackest of the grapes were sweet enough to eat out of hand. The majority of the grapes were dark red, but still sour. Not knowing quite what to do with them.I decided to juice them and boil down the juice (with added sugar) into a concentrated syrup that I could can and use throughout the winter to make grape juice. I saved out the sweetest for table grapes, and spent the next couple of hours juicing grapes and boiling down the resulting juice. I have to say, I'm not very happy with it. It isn't clear and claret-colored like store grape juice - it's kind of thick and brownish, and not very good looking. It tastes delicious, but I doubt it will make an attractive table beverage. Oh well.

Other freezer-related developments: we butchered the last two baby goats, and I put one of them into the freezer in the form of small, carefully wrapped packages of raw meat. The other was, as usual, steamed for several hours and consumed in the form of tacos. My family, my sister's family, and our friend C. the butcher's family all ate heartily, and there was enough leftover to send C. home with several pounds of shredded, cooked meat; to send my my brother-in-law home with a couple of pounds, and to put a couple of pounds in the freezer as well. According to my calculations, one medium-small seven month old goat can feed twelve adults and eight children, three times over. Or, I guess, thirty-six adults and twenty-four children. That is, of course, with side dishes, tortillas, beans, etc.

Lastly, we bought a side of beef. In years past, we have always bought a side of beef jointly with my sister's family - a quarter for each of us. That has always been plenty of beef. In fact, I think I just cooked the very last roast from last year's quarter last week. We didn't choose to get a whole beef because we wanted more meat. We did it because the farmer (a neighbor) couldn't find anyone to buy the other half of this small steer. Rather than lose the beef, I said we would take the whole thing. My sister's family is splitting their half with various relatives, but we haven't made any plans here. I seriously doubt we can use an entire half, so I'm going to have to look for somebody to share our half with.

Hey - if you live nearby - this is excellent beef, 100% grass raised and grass finished. We've bought from the same folks for four years running and I have never tasted such good beef in my life. I can see the cows out my front window and can personally vouch for the fact that they live happy, natural lives and that the land is beautifully cared for. You can get in touch with me through the blog if you are interested. I figure I have about a 100 pounds of beef to sell, in the form of hamburger, roasts, steaks, and ribs.

The Yucky Season Arrives (October Images)

2011-10-11T13:57:00.000-07:00

Not everything about October is yucky. Apples, for instance. I love apples. I love apple season. I love the smell of the kitchen when an apple pie is in the oven, or the dehydrator is full of apple slices, or I am canning applesauce. I love pressing apple cider, even though it makes my back and hamstrings hurt for days. I love biting into a crisp green apple, juicy and tart, and following it up with a bite of sharp, homemade cheese. I love the amazing abundance of apples - so many forgotten trees, with so much surplus fruit that it falls all over the yard and the roadsides, free for the taking. I like giving windfall apples to my animals - every species loves apples. The horses, of course, but also the goats, the pigs, the chickens, and even the rabbits. Everybody loves apples. Even the apple-mast left over from pressing is useful; it makes wonderful compost. I love the look of apple trees in November, after most of the leaves have fallen but the apples are still clinging to the bare branches, bright red against a frosty blue afternoon sky.

I also like pumpkins. I like carving jack o' lanterns with my kids, and I like roasting the seeds and putting them in the kids' lunches for weeks after Halloween. I like eating pumpkins, too - in almost any form: simply roasted with butter and salt and pepper, as pie of course, and in soup. Oh I love delicious pumpkin-cheese soup with roasted poblano peppers. I like the empty fields, dark brown, bare and bedraggled looking, dotted with bright orange orbs. I love going outside on Halloween eve and looking at the glowing jack o' lanterns lined up on the porch. It makes me feel cozy and safe, remembering that their original function was to serve as guardian spirits, protecting the house and inhabitants from evil forces abroad in the nighttime as the year tips into darkness and death.

I like el Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead. We celebrate it here in the old fashioned way, by dressing the household altar with an ofrenda, or offering. We drape the altar with a bright colored cloth and lay it with fruits and flowers. We set up the photos of our dead ancestors, or if we don't have photos, then we write their names on slips of paper. We light candles and drink hot cocoa and (for the adults) mezcal. The children and I bake sweet egg-bread in fanciful shapes and eat it dipped in the hot cocoa. We talk, tell stories about our dead loved ones, and honor their memories. Always on the altar is a memento mori in the form of a beautiful little Caterina statue (Lady Death). In this way, we teach our children - and remind ourselves - that the end of all life is death, but that spirits live on as the beloved, beautiful memories that we leave behind. This simple ceremony provides surprisingly strong comfort.

So, with all of the things I love about October, why did I name this post "The Yucky Season?" What is it that I dislike so much? Well, there's the darkness, the gloom and the incessant rain; the damp chill that cannot be banished from the house even by blasting the propane furnace; the smell of wet dogs and wet towels and wet shoes. There's the omnipresent rot - rotting vegetation, rotting leaves, rotting carpets in the mudroom. There's the utter lack of light and warmth. But most of all... most of all...

There's mud. God, how I hate mud. Chilly, slippery, stinky, horrible mud. I wake up at seven thirty and by eight fifteen I am liberally spotted with grotesque ordure. All winter long I will smell like.. well, not mud exactly, but mud that is one third mixed-species animal by-product. You know what I mean. There's no way to avoid it - farmers smell like farms, and never more than in the Yucky season.

Oh well. I'll just try to keep a pot of spiced apple cider simmering on the stove all the time, that ought to help.

Selfish Neighborliness (More Milk!)

2011-10-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

At the Second Annual September Swap Meet and Cider Press last week, I met a really cool neighbor lady named M. She brought apples to press, and we made a trade of a bag of (my) raw alpaca fiber for a bunch of (her) canning jars. She also has goats and we talked about that. She also moved here from a city and we talked about that. All in all we spent about 45 minutes chatting and exchanged phone numbers at the end of our conversation, saying we would get together and make cheese sometime.

Day before yesterday, she called me up and said there had been a death in the family and she needed to travel out of state for the funeral. She was sorry to intrude on so new a friendship, but she didn't know anyone else who could milk her goats while she was gone. Having been in a similar situation - not a death in the family, but needing a goat-sitter who can milk - I know how tough it is to find someone you can trust to milk your goats right. Poor or incomplete milking can lead to mastitis, which can kill a goat or ruin her udder right quick.

Of course I said I would be happy to board her goats while she is gone. She has two goats, but only one in milk, a Saanen who is giving about a half-gallon a day. Those of you who raise goats know that this was a fairly big leap of faith, on both our parts. I don't know that her goats are healthy, and she doesn't know that mine are. She has never seen my place, and knows nothing about the state of my fencing or the quality of my feed. I don't know if her goats are jumpers who might destroy my fences and run out on the road and get killed. Without the goodwill and trust that comes with a long friendship, we are both taking a chance that something awful might happen - a sick or a dead goat - and that there would be bad feelings on both sides.

I know that many people would simply say "sorry, but no." While I understand the reasons that would lead them to refuse, I cannot agree with them. My feeling is that human relationships are ultimately more important than animals. It's true that I basically don't know this woman from Eve, and that we may never have a serious friendship, so what do I owe her, you might fairly ask? The answer is, I owe her nothing. Not a damn thing. She didn't offer to pay me, either, and in fact the idea never crossed my mind until just this second.

I'm doing this because it's plain and simple the right thing to do. Yeah, I will get the half-gallon of milk a day that her goat gives, and I'm thrilled about that, since my goats are close to to dry. That milk will most likely translate into three or four pounds of cheese. And I assume that I will get an "I.O.U." to squirrel away in case I ever need a goat-related favor. I also get to feel like a nice person. Don't worry, I'm not going to sprain my arm patting myself on the back for altruism. I'm getting my fair share here.

But I would do it anyway- if neither of the goats were in milk. It's just what neighbors do. I have moved from a place -Seattle- where I lived for fifteen years in the same house without knowing the names of more than a couple of my nearest neighbors to a place where I know everyone. I know their history, I know what grades their kids are in, I know if someone is ill or if someone is widowed. I know my neighbors because they sit in the pew in front of me at church, or check my groceries at the store, or teach my children in the second grade. If, back in Seattle, I had needed to fly off to a family member's funeral at a moment's notice, I wouldn't know who to ask to pick up my mail and feed my cat. Here, I have my choice of a half a dozen people.

The price of that luxury is BEING one of those people for my neighbors, too. You need someone to milk your goat? HELL yes. Want me to pick up your groceries while you are laid up with a broken arm? Yup. Visit your sick mother-in-law? Need some frozen casseroles while you are at home with your new baby? Help with your leaky roof? Yes, yes, and yes.

The truth is, for me at least, that doing these things isn't just a quid-pro-quo; it's a pleasure in and of itself. I adore being part of a community that depends on each other. It makes me very happy to be known as someone who can be counted on to provide a decent lunch, or a ride at a moment's notice, or a shoulder to cry on. I am damn proud of my dependability. And I feel extremely blessed to be part of a web of similar people.

Cider, Revisited

2011-10-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

As I wrote in my last post, our neighbors J. and L., our pastors and friends, are leaving town. In exchange for Homero fixing up their car, they are giving us all of J.'s homebrewing equipment - and a couple of lessons. On saturday, I went over to their house with a few gallons of freshly pressed apple cider to get my first lesson.

Wow, J. has a lot of stuff! He's a fairly serious homebrewer - meaning, I guess, that he brews several times a year and consistently turns out a yummy product. The pile of equipment he is giving us was enough to almost cover their kitchen floor. Three carboys of varying sizes; yards and yards of various types of tubing; airlocks, small buckets, mesh bags, filters and funnels of all descriptions. Large stainless steel kettles. A stainless steel chiller - which is a really cool item that enables to cool down five gallons of boiling mash to room temperature in short order. A stand-up bottlecapper. Bags of bottlecaps. And several boxes of bottles.

the bottle-capper

the chiller

When I arrived, J. had a batch of dandelion wine in the smallest carboy that was ready to bottle. So we did that first, and I learned how to sterilize bottles and tubes, siphon the liquid off the top of the carboy into the bottles and how to use the bottlecapper. We sampled the wine, of course, and it gave the rest of the proceedings a certain golden, summery glow - which I believe is the whole point of dandelion wine.

Some of the equipment...

J. has not actually tried making cider before, probably because he doesn't have a cider press. Believe me, when you have ten or fifteen gallons of fresh cider on hand, turning it into a storable product - a storable alcoholic product - floats to the top of one's mind. Winemaking, let us not forget, is one of the preservation arts, no less than smoking or drying. Originally, in fact, winemaking was most likely a semi-accidental by-product of preserving fruit. The pleasant effects of alcohol were probably a felicitous side-effect, one that was only afterwards studied, harnessed, and turned into an art in its own right.

God bless the internet - in under five minutes, we had located a simple recipe for hard apple cider. We added two cups of sugar per gallon of fresh cider and brought it to a temperature just short of boiling. Then we let it cool to blood temperature, more or less (we didn't use the chiller, because it needs to be well-washed and sterilized), and poured it into the carboy. At this point, before you add the yeast, you want to aerate the product, so we shook it up real good.

Then J. put in the yeast - a champagne yeast which I bought at the Four Corners brewing supply in bellingham, and capped the carboy with an airlock. Today, not quite 48 hours later, he called me to let me know that the cider is bubbling away. In a week or so, we will decant it into another carboy for the secondary fermentation, and a week after that I will bottle it. Probably by myself, since I think J. and L. will be gone by then.

I hope this batch comes out better than my single past batch, which was wholly undrinkable. I'm very much looking forward to adding brewing to my small but growing repertoire of traditional skills. I can think of no other ability that has the ability to add so much cheer to a long dark winter.

I read in the paper today that there is a new La Nina system forming in the pacific, meaning another wetter and colder than usual winter around here. Here's hoping that we will have plenty of hard cider to keep our spirits up!

Good News, Bad News

2011-09-28T12:55:00.000-07:00

I'm sad, because my pastor is moving across the country to be some other church's pastor. Pastor L. and her husband J. are friends as well as spiritual leaders, and we will miss them greatly. I can't even say much more about it, because I don't feel like crying at 11:00 in the morning.

They will be driving across the country, and came to Homero to check out their car and make sure it is fit for a long journey. Homero looked, and found several important things that needed to be fixed. He told them to get the parts and there would be no charge for the labor. Of course they protested, and we protested, and they said "we can't possibly..." and we said "we can't possibly..." and we were at an impasse.

Then J. called the next day and said, "you know, we are selling off most of our stuff, anything that won't fit in the car. Would you be interested in accepting our brewing equipment as payment for the mechanic work?" J., you see, is an enthusiastic and talented homebrewer. We have sampled his product a few times and can attest to it's deliciousness. He and Homero have talked several times about getting together to do a few batches, but it just hadn't happened.

I have had a little run-in with homebrewing of my own (Cider Season) and it was a miserable failure. I've always wanted to give it another go, but making cider is such hard work - picking the apples, hauling the press out of the garage, washing the apples, getting stung by bees, cleaning everything up afterwards - that I just haven't wanted to risk turning the hard-earned delicious fresh cider into disgusting undrinkable sludge. Again.

HOWEVER! If we are to have our very own brewing equipment, and a few lessons from a master before they (sniff) go away, then I am willing to take the plunge. Delighted, in fact.

Only problem - I still don't have any APPLES.

Gotta work on that.

Winter Stores (A Thought Exercise)

2011-09-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

Like many other girls, some of the first books I read entirely on my own were the Little House books. My favorite was the first one, Little House in the Big Woods. And my favorite image from that book was that of Laura and Mary playing with their dolls up in the little attic, stuffed full of food for the winter. They used pumpkins for tables and chairs and had to be careful of the hams and strings of onions hanging from the ceiling.

The whole first part of that book is about preparing for winter; slaughtering the pig, smoking the meat, storing the food from the garden, and waxing the cheeses to last through the cold months. I was always fascinated with all of that. There was something so comforting and cozy about the idea of the family, tucked up snug as bugs in rugs, well provisioned and ready for the long dark.

My family, should we have to survive the winter on what we've managed to produce this year, would certainly die a prolonged and miserable death, most likely punctuated by hideous acts of cannibalism.

Don't misunderstand - actually, there is plenty of food in the house. I don't have the ideal full year's supply, but I'm pretty sure we could get through the next six months without malnutrition. But that's because of Costco and the wonderfully generous amount of storage space in this big old farmhouse. I just can't seem to stop myself from filling every available space with twenty pound sacks of rice and five gallon buckets full of pinto beans. What I meant is - if we had to survive on what we've actually managed to PRODUCE.

Yeah, off this land. Yeah, by the proverbial sweat of our brows.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you've probably already gathered that I don't particularly like to sweat. I am, in fact, sinfully slothful. My idea of hard work is getting the kids off to school with a little bit of something in their bellies, then taking a nap before I do my chores. Nonetheless, I have managed to put by a good bit of food from the garden and the animal pen. If we had to live entirely on the produce of our land (counting both direct and indirect produce - i.e., that which we grew ourselves and that which we traded for with stuff we grew ourselves) this is what we would have:

1) The meat from two goat kids - about fifty pounds.

2) About ten pounds of cheese

3) six dozen eggs

4) a gallon of rendered lard and six pounds of pork sausage

5) some 20 pounds of potatoes

6) eight gallons of kosher dill pickles

7) forty pounds of red beets

8) two freakishly large heads of green cabbage

9) a couple quarts of frozen blackberries

10) five tiny eggplants

11) a half-bushel of pears

12) seven gallons of apple cider

13) some assorted herbs - mint, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, etc

Now the harvest season isn't over - the hens are still laying six or eight eggs a day. The goats are still giving me a collective total of a half-gallon a day. We have the two pigs that will be ready for slaughter in December sometime, and there are even still blackberries to be picked. And again, this isn't representative of the food I actually have in the house. Just in the frozen fruit department, for example, there are several gallons of frozen sliced peaches, blueberries, and raspberries. But I didn't list those because I bought them rather than growing them or trading for them. Likewise, I'm not listing the half-steer that will be going in the freezer come mid-October.

Even the above list looks like a pretty big pile of food, until you start to parse it out. Winter (meaning the date there is no more fresh food to be had) starts in earnest at the beginning of November, more or less, when the last apples fall from the trees. And it doesn't end until March, when the first nettles and fiddleheads appear.

That's a good four months, or sixteen weeks. And there are five of us, which can be expressed as 80 (5x16) mouth-weeks. My handy online conversion tool tells me there are 768 teaspoons in a gallon, which means that each of us would get 9.6 teaspoons of lard a week. Even that sounds like a lot, until you think that it's only about 300 calories a week.

Eggs: 6 x 12 = 72.

72/80 = 0.9 eggs per person per week.

Meat: 50 lbs / 80 mouth-weeks = 0.65 lbs per person per week.

Cheese is even measlier: 10 lbs / 80 mouth weeks = 0.125 lbs cheese per person per week. An ounce.

These are starvation wages, friends. Papillon got better rations in French Guiana (GREAT movie, by the way). And animal protein is the GOOD part of the equation. Plant produce is where it really starts to break down. For starchy staples, all we got is sixty pounds of potatoes and beets. That's less than one pound per person per WEEK.

Even the ridiculous 8 gallons of pickles starts to look less ridiculous when you think it breaks down to about three pickles a week per mouth. I'm not going to go into a whole lot of pointless math, but I'd be surprised if we could scrape up an average of three hundred calories a day per person here. That means we'd be gnawing each other's legs off by, oh, say, the new year.

Not to mention, I'd hate to live through a northwest winter without a drop of coffee. Or a single lemon. Or a goddamn banana.

What's my point here? Thank God for Costco and the global monetary economy? Aimee, get off yer duff and plant a way bigger garden next year? Wow, I'm sure glad I have neighbors who farm and ranch and can supply me with beef and carrots and spinach?

Yes, to all of those things. Yes, I could be doing more - even with what's left of this year, I could be doing more. Yes, I do give thanks for the global system that allows me to have coffee and mangoes and citrus fruits and cinnamon and chocolate. Yes, I appreciate my neighbors and the hard work they do to grow cattle and vegetables and everything that I can't grow by myself.

Most of all, I thank God for all of the hidden systems that operate out of sight day by day and eon by eon to create this fruitful world and to sustain me and my family. The nitrogen cycle! The strange biology of the compost heap. The pre-frontal cortex that allows me to think ahead and plan for winter and write this post. The four-chambered stomach of the cow that turns the sweet green June grass into the marbled meat we eat in December. The mysteries contained in each leaf and seed.

Maybe I don't need to play with numbers, to measure out lard by the teaspoon. Maybe I can count on these beautiful natural processes as well as on my own brain and hands. Maybe I can relax and trust a little bit more, and spend a little less time hoarding and imagining the worst. Winter may be sixteen weeks long, but I know for certain that spring will come at the end of it.

Mabon was a few days ago, and naturally my thoughts turn to surviving the dark side of year. But it is important to remember that the world is round, and that winter is spring's sister. Earth turns, and we turn with her. We ride her broad back through the blackness of space in the black season, and we are cradled on her bright breast in the bright season.

Blessed be the blackness! Blessed be the brightness!

Settling into September (Goatherding and Profanity)

2011-09-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

The weather changed last week. Just a half-moon ago, there was an article in the Seattle Times saying we had broken the record for consecutive days above eighty degrees. Not really much of a record - I think it was eight days. But still - after the longest, coldest spring and early summer anyone could remember, we would take any heat-related record we could get.

And it was a nice stretch; more than a full week of clear blue skies, no clouds in sight, and hot enough to sweat. My garden, along with everyone else's, suddenly decided to mature. Green beans lengthened and curled. Tomatoes plumped and reddened. Even my little bitty cantaloupes in the greenhouse sweetened and fell off the vines. My eggplants swelled and began to look harvestable. The potato vines wilted and dried. It was hot enough for me to curse as I dug tubers and boiled up jars for canning.

Alas, no sooner had I harvested the bounty than the weather turned again. Nights have been downright chilly lately, leading me to speculate about the price of propane. I've broken out the woolen blankets. I've searched through the drawers for the children's sweaters - they can't go to school in T-shirts anymore.

Yesterday, I walked the back pasture and saw that there is just about nothing left for the animals to eat. Well - not quite - there is still plenty of green, but it is the green of thistle stalks, pigweed, dock, tansy, and false dandelion. Plus many weeds I don't know the names of, and can't find pictures of in a five-minute online search. These are things the goats will eat if need presses, but prefer not to. The good grass and the favored weeds are eaten to the ground. Therefore, being extremely cheap, I have started letting the goats out to browse just about every afternoon so as to forestall the day I have to start feeding them purchased hay. Outside of the fenced pasture, there is still an awful lot of good forage: grass, blackberries, and general unnamed herbiage.

Goatherding ought to be a simple task - seems like it should be; after all, it was the job relegated to children throughout history in goatherding lands. Yet, it is pretty taxing to me. It is bloody hard to get goats to go where you want them to go, and even harder to keep them from going where you don't want them to. You can't just sit down in a chair with a book and casually cast an eye over the goats. Believe me - I try. I assume it was easier back in, say, 2,000 B.C., when there were no highways or near neighbors. In those days, all a goatherd had to do was keep a lookout for bears and cougars. There was plenty of time for, for example, whittling a flute and inventing the pentatonic scale.

I keep thinking I can sit down with a book in my folding canvas chair, loosely holding a stick. What I end up doing more often than not is running back and forth across the property waving my stick and shouting terrible oaths.

As an aside: My mother has a mouth like a Russian sailor. There's a family story (which, of course, I can't confirm, seeing as it concerned me when I was less than three years old) that once, during a terrible snowstorm, my pre-school teacher had to drive me home from pre-school. Her car wouldn't start in the cold. After she had tried several times, I, with my wispy blonde hair and gigantic china blue eyes, pointed at the dashboard and let loose a string of profanity the likes of which one seldom hears even today, much less in 1975.

"Aimee!" exclaimed the startled teacher. "What on earth are you doing?"

"Well," I lisped, "That's how my mommy starts the car."

The best part of this story is that years later, when I was in seventh grade, I wrote it up as an assignment. For some reason (perhaps because it was my first year in public school) I thought the story would be more effective if I spelled out the exact words - the words my mother faithfully and unvaryingly used whenever she was highly pissed off.

Today, it gives me great satisfaction to let loose with similar words (I must admit, I've never been able to match my mother in the profanity department) while I come across the back of some seriously delinquent goats with my oak-stick. Cursing hasn't saved the grapevine from marauding goats, but it has relieved my feelings when I see the aforementioned grapevine chewed to shreds.

Maybe somewhere out there is a scholarly paper which answers the question of whether or not my cursing a blue streak spares somebody else a hard right hook. Common sense would seem to dictate that if I can call somebody a craven boot-licking cur I thereby avoid giving him a physical licking. And even if if not, I think it more likely than not that releasing my feelings in the form of heartfelt profanity is good for me.

Why should anyone suffer from high blood pressure, constipation, or anxiety, when they can instead let lose with a volley of colorful language?

Second Annual September Swap Meet and Cider Press

2011-09-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

Last year's September Swap Meet was a flop - but partly that was because I broke three vertebrae three days before the event and couldn't do much of anything. Also, I couldn't quite decide if I wanted a family and friends event or a public event, and so it ended up being not quite either.

I was envisioning a campout and full-moon fest, with music and a bonfire, and so I did an awful lot of cleanup around the property, which was a lot of work (Swap Meet Preparations (Where Does It All Come From?)). Then the event itself was pretty anti-climactic.

One of the people who did come, however, was N., proprietor of the wonderful Custer Country Store (Custer General Store (You Might be a Redneck if....)). As September rolled around this year, she asked me if I would be throwing another swap meet. I hemmed and hawed. As much as I love the idea of getting an annual event rolling, I just couldn't face the amount of cleanup that would be needed.

Yes, things have gotten worse over the past year. It's pretty bad around here. Bad enough that we'll need to hire a few strong young men to help us with dump runs before we can have the public over. "Sorry," I said, "I'd love to, but..."

"You can have it here!" she said.

"REALLY?"

"Sure!"

N. is a wonderfully community minded lady - she has all kinds of cool events at her store, from sidewalk movies on summer weekend nights to organizing the August Custer Daze. She is very into trade and promoting community networking, so I guess this was a natural fit for her. Of course I took her up on it immediately.

So - this saturday, the 24th, there will be the Second Annual September Swap Meet and Cider Press at Custer Store. We still have room on the sidewalk for a few more tables; if any of you locals would like to have some space, just leave me a message here with your e-mail and I'll be in touch ASAP.

You don't need a table's worth of stuff. If you have a basket of plums off your plum tree, or some home canned ketchup, or a backpack full of extra tools from your garage, or a box full of children's books.... come on by! Most especially if you have apples, please bring them! I will be running the press all day long, and taking a share of cider for myself as press-rental. Oh and there will be a service board for swapping skills and services (i.e., "massage therapist needs oil changes.... plumber looking to swap services with electrician.... housecleaning for babysitting...." etc)

ONE RULE: if you bring it, you are responsible for it!!!! NO LEAVING STUFF at the end of the day! Or N. will never let me have the swap meet at her store again, and that would suck.

Let's hope the weather holds!

Double Piglet!

2011-09-15T14:12:00.000-07:00

We acquired two new piglets yesterday. Here they are: two handsome girls, a cross between a Large Black Hog boar and a Tamworth Sow. These girls are quite a bit bigger than the last piglet we raised was when we got him - they are eleven weeks old and have been weaned for several weeks now. The farmer said he likes to leave them get a bit bigger before they head off into the cruel world. It's nice for us, as well- a few weeks less feeding.

It's been quite a while since we had a pig. The last one one has been all eaten up for months, except for a couple of smoked hocks. We thought about getting one in the spring, but when I searched for some, they were all so expensive! The price of weaner pigs has gone up about 60% since our first pig, in 2008. We paid $75 for him (well, actually the first one was a trade - Holy Pork Chops, Batman! (the Backstory on Pigs)), and then the next year they were all $85 or $90. This year, I couldn't find any weaners for under $125.

We might still have sprung for one, except that I learned recently that one pig alone really suffers for companionship, even if housed with other hoofed animals. Pigs are extremely social animals, and a pig farmer my sister knows suggested that my pigs have been so obnoxious, loud, and bitey because they were lonely. Therefore I decided I wouldn't raise just one pig again - and we couldn't afford two. The economics of raising pigs is pretty marginal - you can't raise pork cheaper than you can buy it at the store, but the homegrown variety is so much better, on so many levels. Since we finished off our last pig, we just haven't been eating pork, since I can't bring myself to buy commercial pork and thereby contribute to a number of heinous evils (sorry! No lecture, I promise! Just - Hog CAFOS = environmental disaster + animal abuse + worker abuse and injustice).

Then, day before yesterday, I saw that a neighbor of mine, a guy I know and have traded with before, was selling off a litter of piglets at a discount, to pay off some bills and make room for new litters coming up soon. Instead of $125, he was letting them go at $80 apiece. I took the idea to Homero and he said to go for it. So, a quick repair of the pigpen and off we went! Our neighbor has a great set up, large roomy stalls and big outdoor exercise areas. The piglets were in one stall, and the grown breeding pigs in the next one - enormous animals, somewhere between six and seven hundred pounds. They looked pretty scary to me, but the farmer walked right in and scratched them and petted them.

I hope these little girls inherited the gentle temperament.

Beautiful New Goat (It's a Small Caprine World)

2011-09-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

I went and did it again - yes, I bought a goat. A new doe. And not just any doe - a gorgeous tri-color spotty doeling. She looks just like the one that the vet accidentally killed this spring (Letter to the Vetrinarian), but a year older. It's no surprise they look alike - they are half sisters.

Yes, I bought one of Storm Cloud's offspring. One of my trade partners (I think I used to call her Turkey Girl, because our first trade with her was a thanksgiving turkey for Storm Cloud's buck service) is getting out of goats, and had three does for sale. One of them was Polly (short for Polychromatic), this lovely young thing right here:

Her sire was Storm Cloud, which means that two of my does, Flopsy and Iris, are her grandmother and great-grandmother respectively. I am especially glad to get Polly, because ever since I sold Storm Cloud, I had been lamenting the fact that I didn't keep any of his offspring. He was (presumably still is ) such a pretty buck - good conformation, good health, good feet, and good temperament. Here is a picture of Storm Cloud as a big kid, you can see he's pretty. In fact, these two bucklings are so pretty it looks like a Caprine version of an Abercrombie and Fitch ad.

I'm glad to have some of his blood back in the herd. However, I still don't have a buck for this year! Now I have FOUR lonely, spotted ladies to breed, and no Billy around to do the deed. I've advertised on Craigslist, but so far to no avail. I'm hoping to board a buck for a month or so and get the whole job done at once.

If you know of any stunningly handsome, big-boned, spotted fullbred Nubian buck around the NW washington area, give me a holler!

The Fermentation Files (Daikon Kim chee and Grape Leaves)

2011-09-11T15:48:00.000-07:00

There is a reason I haven't been posting much lately, but I don't care to go into it. Suffice it to say that I have a frustrating, time consuming, but in no way life-and-death situation which is sucking up a lot of my brainpower. Hopefully, this situation will resolve itself one way or the other soon, and life can get back to normal.

In the meantime, Preserving Season waits for no woman. The Great Trade I was going on about last week (Mother of All Trades (?) and Trade Network Update) has morphed into the Pretty Good Trade, but I'm happy about it. Basically, it's a crate of produce, and I get to fill it however I want. That crate isn't here yet, but there is still lots of vegetables coming in the door.

My sister passed me a bag full of daikon radishes and turnips. I like both of those sliced thinly and drizzled with lemon juice and salt, but not in those quantities. So I made kimchee. I have made kimchee a couple of times before, but only cabbage kimchee (detailed instruction can be found here:Kim Chee Situation (Food Storage Update)). Luckily, I save all my old Saveur magazines and I found the one with an enormous section all about kim chee. Basically, daikon kim chee is made the same way as cabbage kim chee, but with sugar added.

My other bonanza of the week was grape leaves. I love grape leaves, both for making dolmas and other wrapped foods (try wrapping fish in them), and also for their high tannin content. Adding grape leaves to kosher pickles will keep them crisp.

My daughter Rowan is babysitting this week for a friend who just so happens to have one of the most amazing small-homesteader type properties in the city of Bellingham, which is saying a lot. She is only renting the property, but whoever originally laid out the half acre did a fantastic job. There are some seven fruit trees - apples, plums, and cherries - sixteen blueberry bushes, a long row of raspberry canes, a truly impressive enormous asparagus bed, four 4x16 foot raised beds for annuals, and two gigantic grapevines.

These are the best grapevines I've seen in a home garden in this area, ever. Not sure of the varieties (alas) but both of them are covered in bunches of large grapes, which are just beginning to turn color and to soften. And did I mention they are huge? Each of them covers an arbor about twenty feet long by twelve or sixteen feet wide. And one of them has grown up into a large maple tree to a quite surprising height. Right away I asked if I could pick some leaves.

"My grapevines are your grapevines," said the gracious friend. So I filled a shopping bag. I decided to pickle them for use further on in the year. You CAN lacto-ferment grape leaves, but I decided to play it safe and vinegar pickle them. Here's how I did it:

Use a sharp knife or scissors to trim the grape leaves of their stems. Set aside leaves that are too small or ripped. You can use these in making fermented pickles, or feed them to your rabbits, if you have any. We do, and they loved them. This is a rather tedious task when you have a shopping bag full of leaves. The glass of wine you see in the middle helped out with that. Stack the leaves to be pickled with their stem-ends together.

Boil up your jars in a big kettle. When jars are sterilized, remove them to a clean towel. Take small stacks of grape leaves - about six or seven - and use tongs to dip them in the boiling water. Hold for about twenty seconds. They will wilt and turn brighter green.

Drain the leaves by holding them up and shaking them slightly. Roll the stack into a cigar shaped bundle and tuck into your sterilized quart jar (you may have to tuck one end under to make them fit). Each jar will fit about five of these bundles. Fill the jars with a basic brine (1/4 cup salt and 1 cup white vinegar to a half gallon of water), leaving 1/4 inch headroom. Add several twists of lemon peel, if desired. Place on sterilized lids and process in a water bath for fifteen minutes.

These make one of the prettier preserves. If I were making them for gifts I would use the quilted pint-sized jelly jars, the ones that always end up as water glasses in our house.

The Hopesicle Life, Part Three

2011-09-07T16:51:00.000-07:00

Hello all - since I can't think of a darn thing to write about (the garden... the goats.... the weather... rinse, lather, repeat....) Hope has stepped into the breach and is offering to introduce her family. She chose all the pictures, and mostly did just fine. I'd just like to point out that I am not actually married to a vampire gorilla. That's a Halloween costume. Without further ado:

Heyoo! This is Hopesicle life part three! Now I am introducing my family.

To start off, number one is my Mom. Her real name is Eleanor. What she likes to do is farm on her farm and read.

Another person in our family is my Papa. His real name is Homero. He likes to fix cars and play with our dogs. He loves to play with Sisa (Ivory).

And there's also my big sister, Rowan. She likes to knit and make fairy wings. And I don't know anything else because she stays in her room all the time. She is seventeen.

My little sister, Paloma, she likes to play with me. And she likes school. Today was the first day of school.

Then there's me! My name is Hope. What I like to do is sleep. I like to read books. My favorite book is definitely... definitely... definitely... I don't know. But I like One Monster After Another and I like The Stories That Julian Tells. And Officer Buckle and the Paperboy.

And..., To Be Continued!!!!!!

Summer in September (Garden Wrap Up)

2011-09-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Well, since winter lasted through the end of March, and the cool wet spring lasted through the end of July, I guess it's only fair that summer is here at last and looks to stick around for a little while longer.

The last few weeks have been hot, clear, and dry. The tomatoes ripened almost at once, which wasn't a problem since there were so few of them. A few beautiful tomato salads, a lot of surreptitiously snatched cherry tomatoes as I walk by the back porch, and that's it! Farewell, tomatoes, we hardly knew ye!

Other hot weather crops are showing mixed results - there's only one cucumber plant, but it's doing beautifully, with several long, curly cucumbers hanging off of it. The tomatillos look great, all covered in little paper lanterns, but most of the lanterns are empty. I've never grown tomatillos before, so I don't know if it's a pollination issue or something I'm doing wrong. Yesterday I discovered that my eggplant plants actually DO have a few eggplants on them, not just the lovely purple flowers. But they are still very small, and I don't know if they will get big now that cool nights are here. My cantaloupe plant, in the greenhouse, has two softball sized cantaloupes on it. I am watering religiously and we'll see if they get any bigger. I intend to eat them no matter what. And lastly the chile pepper plants that survived the cold spring (not many) are pumping out long wrinkly cayenne peppers at warp speed.

Out in the back garden, the pumpkin plant has sprawled over an area thew size of Delaware, yet produced only one pumpkin. It's supposed to be a giant variety. Right now it is almost the size of a beachball. Meanwhile, we are eating all the flowers off the plant and very nice they are, too, stuck inside quesadillas or just quickly sauteed in butter. I picked the last of the cabbages, which also grew to amazing proportions. The slugs got some, but there's plenty left to eat as much cabbage as any one family can eat for quite some time. And it is time to dig potatoes. The plants are dying back. I haven't done it yet because it's been too hot to be out wielding a shovel.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with this year's garden. It has certainly produced more food in pounds than any other garden up here yet! There were a few abject failures (garlic, green beans) but not many. I think I'm getting better.

A little, anyway.

Mother of All Trades (?) and Trade Network Update

2011-09-01T15:34:00.001-07:00

I'm not sure yet whether or not this is going to work out exactly the way we think it is, but there's a possibility of the trade network's most stunning success to date - Homero is replacing an engine for some friends of my sister and her family. These folks - who we can almost count as friends ourselves rather than friends-once-removed, having been to many of the same parties - are organic farmers and have a pretty good sized spread.

Homero offered (at my instigation) to let them pay up to half the labor costs in vegetables, which would be a whole big pile of veggies. There are a few issues - we live pretty far apart, for one, and it's near the end of the season, for another - but as I told them, the whole point of barter is to make things easier, not harder. If it turns out cash is easier than trade, well, we accept that, too. But I'm hoping for veggies. I've not yet come near the limits of my canning tolerance for the year. Theoretically, this one trade could provide us with most of our winter store of vegetables.

At the same time, we've lost our oldest trade partner, Veggie/Oil Man. He has been going through some extremely rough personal and family problems, and in fact seems to have lost his farm entirely. It's a damn shame, and not just for us. V/O Man and his wife have become personal friends, and it's very hard to see them having such a tough time.

I think I also may have burned a much smaller trade partner - B., who traded me berries and greens for eggs, hasn't called me in quite a while, and I'm afraid I know why. There's a very high probability that I gave him a carton full of partially developed eggs, and if that is the case, I can't blame him for running away. There is almost nothing as unpleasant as cracking an egg to find a half-grown bird fetus inside.

There is still S. and her husband, who trade me vegetables for goat cheese every saturday at the farmer's market. But I find that their vegetables, while of superb quality, are quite highly priced. I always walk away, having handed over a pound of lovingly made cheese for, say, a bunch of chard, six carrots, and a bulb of garlic feeling just a bit like I got the thin end of the stick.

September is coming up (oops I mean already here), and if I get moving, there is plenty of time to arrange the Second Annual September Swap Meet. My friend N. at the local store asked me if I would be doing it again this year, and I said I'd like to but that I didn't feel I had the energy to clean up the property, which looks like (to quote my mother) Arkansas in 1934. She laughed and suggested we hold it on the sidewalk in front of the store.

Now THERE'S a plan! Having consulted the calendar, I'm going to suggest Saturday the 24th, and start drawing up a poster.

Fair Photos (Northwest Washington Fair 2011)

2011-08-28T23:06:00.000-07:00

I love fairs. Everybody loves fairs, don't they? I mean, who wouldn't - it's high summer, hotter than a longshoreman's armpit, and harvest season is in it's first full flush. If you are a farmer, you've been busting your butt all year and are just now seeing the payoff - whether it is in the form of the year's crop of young animals...

...or the bounty from the vegetable garden.

Finally, you get the chance to take a day off and go see the results of other people's labor. Look around and see the array of skills that you don't have yourself, but appreciate. My favorite is the quilting exhibit.

This was a style I have never seen at the fair before - I think it is Mexican, although other cultures also use this beautiful technique.

This is a detail of the Grand Prize Best in Show quilt.

There are delightful oddities to gawk at...

...and of course you have to buy a few tickets for the kids to enjoy the rides...

After a full day of walking around in the heat in August, eating corn dogs or funnel cakes or gyros (or possibly all three), you're bound to feel a little tired....

A Couple of Success Stories

2011-08-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

Kosher dill (US)

A "kosher" dill pickle is not necessarily kosher in the sense that it has been prepared under rabbinical supervision. Rather, it is a pickle made in the traditional manner of Jewish New York City pickle makers, with generous addition of garlic and dill weed to a natural salt brine.^[3]^[4]^[5]

Whereas in Germany and Poland dill pickles have been prepared for hundreds of years, in the US at least one New York restaurant was serving dill pickles in the nineteenth century.^[6]

In New York terminology, a "full-sour" kosher dill is one that has fully fermented, while a "half-sour," given a shorter stay in the brine, is still crisp and bright green.^[7] Elsewhere, these pickles may sometimes be termed "old' and "new" dills.

That's from wikipedia. Some people call vinegar-processed pickles "kosher dills," but I'm going with my heart - real kosher dills are lacto-fermented, preserved by the same process that creates sauerkraut and kim chee. Mine turned out fantastic.

After a couple of weeks in the big crock, I tried them. I was at first seriously disappointed - they were almost inedibly salty. I had followed a recipe and used the "correct" amount of salt, but clearly there was a problem with the recipe.

In an effort to save my pickles from the rash heap, I poured off half the brine and replaced it with plain water. Two days later, I noticed that the surface of the liquid was covered with mold. This is, contrary to common sense, a GOOD thing! All sources informed me of the inevitability of mold and of it's harmlessness. Just scoop it off, my sources say. Most likely, the lack of mold before I switched out the brine was an indication of it's excessive saltiness.

The next time I tasted them, the pickles were perfect. Really amazingly good. Absolutely what I was trying for - a near-exact replicatrion of the kosher dills I remember from the New York deli cases of my childhood.

My kids, however, who normally scarf up pickles like there's no tomorrow, were a bit confused and put off by the lactic-acid sourness. It is different from vinegar sourness, no doubt. I explained to them that these were "old fashioned" pickles, and therefore "better" than the ones they were used to. We'll see - if the kids don't eat them, I will do it myself.

I have removed the pickles from the crock, packed them into new jars, covered them with fresh brine, and refrigerated them. The truth is, they were getting awfully sour... -

My other success story is cabbages. This year is my first year growing cabbages - my usual gardening calculus favors growing expensive vegetables like tomatoes and corn, so cabbages haven't rated in the past - and I wasn't expected such success. Eight green cabbages grew to enormous size. We have eaten three, and five remain. It is definitely time to harvest them - the slugs are starting to eat around the edges - but I don't know what to do with twenty pounds of cabbage all at once.

Sauerkraut, I guess!

Canning Tomatoes (Staple Supply)

2011-08-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

My tomatoes didn't do so well this year - a combination of early blight and some more recent malady that causes the vines to wither before the fruit is ripe has severely limited my tomato supply. Not that I would have had enough tomatoes to can in any case - I only planted about sixteen plants, of varying type. But I had hoped to have plenty of tomatoes for eating out of hand. Instead, we have only been able to pick a few here and there. There are lots of green tomatoes still, but I doubt they will ripen, at this point. Whatever I decide to do with the green tomatoes, it will not be what I did last year: Canning Wrap Up (Green Tomato Chutney) Green tomato chutney, while delicious in very small quantities, is not a solution for what to do with several pounds of unripe tomatoes.

However, I did very much want to can tomatoes. Canned tomatoes are a staple on my pantry shelves, as I suspect they are on most people's. Usually, I buy a case of diced tomatoes at Costco and go through the eight cans in a month. I have maybe twenty or thirty recipes in my weeknight dinner heavy rotation, and probably a third of them call for a can of diced tomatoes. Tomatoes are a highly seasonal crop - the only place in the United States that produces winter tomatoes is south Florida, and the conditions under which those tomatoes are produced (Warning, Politics Ahead) are such that I choose not to buy them. You can also get fresh tomatoes in winter from Mexico, but conditions there are almost as bad.

I don't go so far as to try and find out where the tomatoes in my favorite brand of canned tomatoes are sourced from. I might be able to do that, with a few hours on the phone, but I feel I have done my duty if I try my utmost to furnish the pantry with canned tomatoes made from fresh local summer tomatoes, canned by my own hands. Then, when I inevitably have to buy tomatoes in January or February, I can at least console myself with the memory of all the home canned tomatoes I used up first.

Therefore, I ordered a crate of organic romas from my local grower. For $30, I got enough romas to make 12 pints of sauce. More, actually, but twelve pints is as many as I can can in a day (I need a bigger kettle). Naturally, I chose the hottest day of the year to do my canning. Why is it that all canning takes place in August? There must be a reason...

My tomato sauce contains nothing but tomatoes, garlic, and salt, to make it more versatile. There are still about 15 pounds of tomatoes on the counter, which I have neither the time nor the jars to can. I think I will follow my sister's advice and simply freeze them whole. She tells me that washed tomatoes can be frozen whole and then, when you want to use them, you simply run warm water over them and skins loosen and can be easily slipped off.

It certainly would be less time consuming, not to mention less energy intensive. But then, would I really feel as industrious, as virtuous, pulling a ziploc out of the freezer as I do opening the cupboard to see a row of gleaming ruby jars?

Pajaretas (Goat Milk Cocktail)

2011-08-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's goat slaughtering turned into quite a party. It was a gorgeous day but hot, and the men doing the butchering worked up a thirst early on. By the time the two goats were finished (we had originally thought we would process all four but that was just too much work) and one was tucked neatly into a giant kettle steaming away on top of a propane ring, the guys had worked their way through most of a case of Corona.

For myself, I made a pitcher of mojitos - I have a truly splendid patch of mint - and sipped on that while I made red salsa and green salsa, a pasta salad, and the various other accoutrements. My sister and her family showed up for the meal and she helped me out a little with the mojitos. Then our next door neighbors showed up and brought a bottle of whiskey with them.

It sounds like quite the bacchanal, but nobody got too lubricated. There was so much food. We decided to eat outside, and Homero dragged the milking stand over to the fire pit to serve as the sideboard. We simply laid out all the dishes, along with a tall stack of tortillas and some paper plates, lifted the lid off of the kettle, and let everyone make up their own tacos to their specifications. The meat was delicious and tender, falling off the bone. I think I ate six tacos.

Then we laid back in our canvas camping chairs and talked and laughed and drank while the children ran around playing. The hours drifted by. My sister and her family waved goodbye, and sometime later our neighbors walked across the field home. We picked at the food and told stories and threw bones to the dogs. The sun lowered in the west and the mosquitos came out, but nobody cared by that point.

Our friend C. suggested, after we ran out of beer, that rather than drink straight whiskey we try a rustic Mexican cocktail that a friend of his had introduced him to back home in Oaxaca. I have no idea who invented the "pajareta" nor where nor when, but that anonymous Mexican goatherd was a genius. Now I'm warning you, this is going to sound hideous. But trust me, it's actually delicious.

Well, you will just have to trust me, because unless you have an in-milk nanny-goat, you aren't going to be able to try it yourself anyway. C. told me to go get a jar and put a few spoonfuls of chocolate milk mix in it (in Mexico they use "chocomil" or Nestle's quick). I, of course, don't have any chocolate milk mix, but I did have some plain unsweetened powdered cocoa. I used a heaping teaspoon of cocoa and three heaping teaspoons of sugar and brought the jar back. C. added a healthy three shots of whiskey to the jar and swirled it around. Then we brought out the goat and - after clearing the milking stand of the detritus of the meal - milked her straight into the jar. I'd say we aded about a pint of fresh hot goat's milk to the chocolate and whiskey.

Then we divided it up and drank it. It was utterly fantastic ("udderly," ha ha), and no I'm not kidding. Sweet, creamy, frothy, chocolatey, and smooth, with a kick. I know this sounds bizarre, and maybe it is. But it was also the perfect capper for our goat party.

Trust me.

Pajaretas

for three people:

1 heaping teaspoon hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder

3 heaping teaspoons sugar

3 healthy jiggers whiskey

mix in the bottom of a quart jar.

add:

1 pint goat's milk straight from the teat.

pour into three cups and share, preferably around a fire outdoors.

Redneck Shopping List

2011-08-17T12:27:00.000-07:00

This is how much of a redneck I've become: my shopping list for today? A case of beer, propane, and bullets.

It's goat slaughtering day. Our friend C. is here with his family, and all four baby goats are meeting their end today. One will be cooked up for the taco feast later on, one will go home with C. as his pay, and the other two will go in the freezer.

At this point, we've done this enough times that I no longer feel the need to take a bunch of pictures and post about the process. I've listed some related posts which do have photos and musings if anyone cares to get the details.

The Redneck Rubicon (WARNING - GRAPHIC)

Great Goat (Manly Food)!

Farm Folks Are Friendly (Home-style Goat Tacos)

Too Many Roos, and Musings on Meat (WARNING - GRAPHIC PICS)

The Workload (Bitching and Moaning)

2011-08-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I rest my eyes I see a pile of work waiting to be done. I literally can't look in any direction without seeing some kind of mess. Everything goes to hell in a handbasket so much faster than I can maintain it. The grass grows faster than I can cut it; the weeds engulf the garden and go to seed faster than I can pull them; the goat's hooves grow faster than I can trim them. Fences get mashed down, paint flakes, deck planks succumb to rot. Clothes get holey and stained. Floors get sticky and disgusting and dishes pile up with incredible speed.

This house is twice as big as my old house, there's more than twice as much housework, now that we have a farm and a mechanic's shop on premises. Take sweeping, for example - just sweeping. It seems there we have about a half-acre of floors in this house, and I can easily spend thirty minutes or so sweeping. And then, fifteen minutes later, it looks exactly the same.

Where DOES all the dirt come from?

Outside, yes, I know.

And the kitchen - this being August, I am naturally doing a lot of canning and other types of food processing. There is a never ending stream of grubby bug-covered produce coming in the door, and a never ending pile of scraps and peelings going out. There is always a compost bucket full of vegetable scraps on the counter, and the fruit flies are having a heyday. No matter how quickly I remove the bucket, it is never quick enough to avoid fruit flies. Canning plus regular three-times-a-day cooking means that there is almost always something on the stove, and sure as God made little green apples, something will boil over or spill every day. Then we have an oil slick on the floor or a shiny patch of irremoveable jam-laquer on the stovetop, or maybe a quietly stagnating milk-puddle under the fridge.

I make no pretense of being a good housekeeper. Even in my smaller house and with only one child, I was a pretty piss-poor housekeeper. Here in this rambling, sprawling old farmhouse with three kids and a farm, there's just no getting around the fact that I'm in over my head. Let me take you on a little tour:

The compost pile needs turning - it hasn't been turned in so long that it is growing it's own cover crop of weeds. This is heavy work for me. I can do it, but only very slowly, and for a half hour or so. After that, my bad shoulder starts to pain me and I will pay for it for a week or two if I try to push it. Mostly, I leave the compost pile to Homero, with the results you see here.

The lawn, covered in false dandelions and thistles. I don't care much for neatly kept lawns, but I do like to keep at least one small patch cut short and relatively weed free, just enough to toss a frisbee or lay down a blanket for a picnic. I have no excuse, because the lawnmower is actually working, for once. This year, Homero only had to fix it twice - a record. Knock on wood.

Can you find the cabbages in amongst the weeds? Hint: there are at least four.

Laundry on the line - er, the fence. The dryer has been broken for a month now. Since it is high summer, there's been no great urgency about fixing it. However, I find that after the seven hundredth load, hauling a big wet bag of laundry outside and hanging it up piece by piece kind of loses its charm. I've fallen behind. Way behind. How far behind? Here, look:

The laundry room - a month without the dryer has caused a backup that totally overwhelms our hamper-capacity. Luckily, the room has pocket doors and I can just slide them closed when it all becomes too much.

There's so much more that I haven't the fortitude to document with the camera, much less actually do something about.

There's a thirty-foot length of fencing that is mashed to the ground and the goats can get out, although oddly, they haven't yet.

It's time to muck out the barn, which is a day's work - hard, sweaty, stinky work.

We need to go to the dump.

Goat's hooves need trimming.

Time to sort out the kid's clothes in advance of the school year, and get rid of everything that is hopelessly worn, too small, or stained beyond redemption. Then shop for new (I mean, new to US of course. Goodwill is my best friend.) clothes.

I could go on and on, but I feel a wave of lethargy overtaking me. I think I need a hot bath... just as soon as I scrub out the tub!

The Fermentation Files (Wild Pickles)

2011-08-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

I've tried lots of different methods of preserving food in the past four years. I've learned about canning (see last post) and dehydrating; about root cellaring and fermenting. Even the more mundane, mainstream methods - such as freezing - have involved a fair amount of learning. From picking out a chest freezer to buying a half steer, from learning how to wrap home butchered meat for the freezer to discovering how to freeze strawberries without turning them into mush, I found that even freezing isn't quite as straightforward as you might think.

I learned that there's really no reason to buy one of those silly five tray electric dehydrators - it only does what your oven or the dashboard of you car on a hot summer day can do, but slower and less efficiently. Drying is a wonderful way to preserve small, whole fruits like berries and tomatoes, but it's a major hassle to make fruit leather or something like that. I haven't tried jerky. I don't actually like jerky very much. Drying therefore has played a minor role in my food preservation arsenal thus far, but I'm glad to know how to do it right, in case I ever get a truly bumper crop of tomatoes, for example. Also, the kids love dried apples and pears to take to school in their lunches, and I have a pear tree that pops out pears like nobody's business. Dried pears - organic ones - cost somewhere in the vicinity of an arm and a leg, so if you have organic pears falling all over your backyard for free, it seems a shame not to dehydrate a few.

Due to an accident of fate (Mold Monster Update), I now have an excellent cold storage area - a closet with an uninsulated, exterior wall. That is where I keep my dry goods for long term storage (buckets of beans and rice, etc) and where, in season, I store winter squash, apples, and roots.

My relationship with wild fermentation is ongoing... I have had some successes and some failures, just like anything, I guess. My favorite type of wild fermentation is sourdough, and I have become, if I do say so myself, a hell of a breadmaker (Fun With Sourdough). Attempts at Kim Chee and sauerkraut have yielded mixed results (The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing)). And Brewing has been been an absolute, unmitigated failure

(New To Farm Life: Cider Season). I will try brewing again - I just can't let the process of making hard cider defeat me.

Next up in fermentation: kosher dills. I believe I may have mentioned once or twice that we love pickles around here. We do, we do indeed. And I always make a good quantity of pickles - bread and butter pickles, canned dills, pickled asparagus, dilly beans, hot peas, beets - all kinds of vinegar based pickles. I haven't tried crock-cured lacto-fermented kosher dills yet.

But they are, of course, the very best kind of pickle. When I was a child holding on to my mother's hand and peering into the deli case of a real Jewish deli in New York City, it was the pickles that caught my eye and what I would always plead for. They were enormous - great green zeppelins - and so wonderfully sour. A giant pickle was, for me, a better treat than a stick of candy.

Let's hope for the best - I had a terrible time finding enough pickling cukes this year, but finally I scored enough to make it worthwhile, about four pounds. At a garage sale a while ago, I found a marvelous three gallon glass lidded jar, and that's what I used for my pickle crock. A neighbor supplied the grape leaves - they are in there for their high tannin content, to keep the pickles crisp - and the onions and garlic. I'll let you know how they turn out in a week or so!

Fermented Foods: Fermented Pickle Recipe

Wild Fermentation :: Making Sour Pickles

Making Fermented Pickles and Sauerkraut

Controversial Canning (A Confession)

2011-08-04T19:44:00.000-07:00

These last four years, I've done a lot of canning. In past years, before I moved up here, I know I must have canned at least a few times, but I can't for the life of me remember doing it. I just know that when I made my first batch of jam up here, I wasn't doing it for the first time.

So I guess I can't really remember how I learned to can. I do remember watching my mother can when I was quite small, when we lived in Woodinville before the divorce. My dad put in a good sized garden every year and mom would usually preserve something at least once or twice a summer. My memories are vague rather than specific: standing near - but behind - my mother as she peered into a large steaming kettle; the wooden spoon, stained red with strawberry juice; touching the tops of the hot jars to see if they had sealed properly. I certainly don't remember any lessons happening.

Canning is intimidating; there's so much work involved, for one thing. Another thing I remember is my mom all sweaty and angry with her hair hanging down and tomatoes everywhere. Now I know why - dealing with twenty or thirty pounds of ripe fruit is a lot of work. Washing jars and finding lids and carrying kettles of boiling water around is hard work. Forcing gallons of applesauce or tomato paste through a foodmill is excruciatingly hard work. Hot work, too. And it always happens in August.

Then there's the fact that home canning can kill you. If you read a book on the subject (the Ball Blue Book is the best known and the most venerable: Amazon.com: Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving (0797190001428 ...) you will come away convinced that legions of Americans die every year from improperly home canned food. My general impression, when I first looked into home canning, was that the annual death toll from botulism in this country was on a par with, oh, say, traffic accidents. In actual fact, the incidence of botulism from home canned foods between 1990 and 2000 in the united states was approximately one in ten million (Botulism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

Now here's where things get controversial. As anyone who cans, or who has read a book on canning knows, there are two methods for home canning: the water-bath and pressure canning. Water bath canning involves filling sterilized jars with food and then immersing them in boiling water for a length of time. Water bath canning is safe for all high acid foods like tomatoes, chutneys, pickles, and also for high sugar foods such as jams and jellies. Pressure canning involves a pressure canner, which allows the cook to achieve temperatures higher that that of boiling water, temperatures high enough to kill the pathogen that causes botulism.

I have always avoided pressure canning. It just intimidates me. I do OWN a pressure cooker, but I'm not totally sure how to use it, and I think I lost the regulator. Once when I was a child, my mom was cooking beans in a pressure cooker and there was an explosion and boiling beans hit the ceiling with such force that that it rained beans. The stain never left the ceiling. Nor is that the only pressure cooker explosion I know about. In fact, my sister's sister-in-law (got that?) suffered third degree burns over 16% of her body in a pressure cooker explosion. She was in the hospital for a week. I think my brother may also have experienced some kind of pressure-cooker blowout but I'm not sure.

So on the one hand, we have a one in ten million incidence of botulism (which, by the way, has a 4% fatality rate in adults), and on the other hand we have two or possibly three incidents in my immediate experience of catastrophic pressure-cooker accidents, with serious injury. I think I am justified in being more frightened of pressure cookers than I am of home-canned food.

Now to be clear - I am NOT advocating that anyone disregard the United States Government's recommendations on home canning procedures. They are very sensible, free, and you can read them here: National Center for Home Food Preservation | USDA Publications. But I AM saying that I personally am not going to break out the pressure cooker.

That does limit me as far as what I can can. I can can (la da da-da-da-da, la da da DAH- da-da-da, la da DAH-da-da-da dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum...) tomatoes, all types of pickles, salsas, chutneys, and jams and jellies. I can not can vegetables, fish or meats.

But it seems to me there's a little wiggle room there. I know that what matters is the acid level. I should do a little research into what the actual acceptable levels of acid are that permit water bath canning. If you add a tablespoon of lemon juice to your green beans, is that enough? Are you really flirting with a gruesome death if you water-bath can eggplant caponata?

Well I hope not, because that's what I did yesterday. That's a jar of eggplant caponata at the top of this column, and a thing of beauty, too. There was a sale on eggplants at Trader Joe's. They always have the MOST beautiful eggplants there - I don't know why, but their eggplants are larger, firmer, glossier, and purpler than any other eggplants. And cheap, too. I got three for under $5. In the house I had the other ingredients: tomatoes, herbs, and celery from the garden, onions and garlic from my neighbor's garden, raisins in the pantry. Caponata is meant to be rather acid, but to be on the safe side, I added more than the usual amount of vinegar, and therefore more than the usual amount of sugar, too. In fact, I added so much extra sugar and vinegar that I think I can call the result a chutney.... which is perfectly safe to water-bath can....

The fact is, I fudge. I don't follow recipes. I use my common sense, born of experience. Am I an expert? Heck no! But I am a very experienced cook, and I am growing more experienced with canning every year. Also I am a trained nurse, and I know the difference between clean technique, sterile technique, and how to maintain a sterile field. It may be that when I do more research I find I am wrong - hunches are often wrong - but my hunch is that the danger involved in canning comes from inadequately sterilized equipment BEFORE it is processed, and that if great care is taken to sterilize jars, tongs, spoons, etc, then the method pf processing is less important.

In any case, if you are on my Christmas list don't worry - I will only send you absolutely 100% safe stuff like pickles and jam. But here at home I will be eating my caponata. And I may even can chile! Or soup! Hell, I'm a renegade! I already feed my children raw MILK!

But that's a post for another day...

The Rest of Yesterday's Post (Garden Update)

2011-08-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what happened yesterday, but the last few paragraphs of the post failed to appear. I got cut off right in the middle of recounting my garden successes, which are few enough that I really want everybody to hear about them!

Let's see, here's the tail end of yesterday's column: My first crop of potatoes - April - rotted in the ground and I had to re-plant in May. Those potatoes are doing okay but the ones that really took off are the late potatoes I planted in mid June. I thought it would be too late but those taters look better than almost anything else! Other things which are doing well are my celery (slow to start but now taking off); cabbage; eggplant...

... and tomatillos - this is the first year I've tried them, too, thinking they were a hot weather crop, but they've done so beautifully that I think I will plant them every year. Of course, I may be jinxing them, because although the foliage is exuberant and they are covered with pretty yellow flowers, no fruit has set yet.

My winter squashes are also looking fantastic, and the buttercup has about twelve fruits set. We also planted one giant pumpkin vine because the feed store was giving the plants away free if you entered the "grow the biggest pumpkin" contest. Normally when I plant pumpkins I plant sweet pie pumpkins, but a free plant is a free plant. Well, that vine is now enormous, almost scarily enormous. All by itself it takes up a full 4 x 8 foot bed and sprawls out over the grass. No pumpkins yet, though. Lots of flowers. I doubt we will bother with the contest - I'd rather have several smaller Jack O' Lanterns and no one giant.

I planted eight green cabbages in the area my neighbor plowed for me, which is another new crop for me. Those guys are doing spectacularly - giant, bright green, and forming heads. Wonder what I will do with eight huge cabbages? Sauerkraut?

My pickling cucumbers are doing the same thing they did last year - lots of vine growth and lots of flowers but few cukes. Not sure what's up there, must be pollinators, no? And the chile peppers were an almost complete failure. Most of the plants died, after a long period in which they just stayed the same size, which was baffling. For like eight weeks I had small, healthy looking, shiny-leafed pepper plants about four inches high. They never changed. Then they started to die. These were the ones in the greenhouse - the few that I transplanted outside are all alive, though not looking very impressive.

My tomatoes are my biggest disappointment. About half of them got early blight, due I presume to the cold wet spring. The other half lived and have set fruit, but the foliage is dying back already and the tomatoes themselves are thick skinned and refuse to ripen. They look dehydrated, but that can't be. I water them obsessively. My sister says they may be in containers too small for them and have stunted roots.

Anyway - I am feeling pretty good about this year's garden. I have even started my fall garden - about twenty mixed brassicas: kohlrabi, red cabbage, cauliflower. There's not much doubt this will be my best year up here so far. I will never be what you might call a stellar gardener, and I'm so grateful to know good gardeners with whom I can trade animal products for vegetable products, but I do enjoy it, and it's very nice to have a few success stories.

My Garden History (August Update)

2011-08-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

Every year since I was nineteen years old, I've put in a garden of some kind. Nineteen was the first year I had any dirt of my own to work with, and it wasn't much; just a bit of vacant lot behind the old theatre I was squatting in in south Seattle. I planted peas, and come summer I couldn't tell the peas I had planted from the natural vetch that was springing up anyway.

Some years my garden was only a few potted herbs, which usually died sad and lonely deaths of neglect on hot windowsills. After I moved into my first house one of the first things I did was plow up the back lawn and start planting. My mother gave me two apple trees as a moving in present, and those trees are still alive and doing fine. Just the other day, in fact, I drove by the old house and noticed that the trees are up over the roofline and it's high time somebody did some serious pruning.

In any case, I can't take much credit for the gardens in those early years - most of the impetus came from my Dad, on the one hand, and my then-boyfriend, Kevin, on the other. Where I envisioned a polite twenty by twenty plot with a few tomatoes and beans, the two of them went to town with a rototiller and eviscerated the entire backyard. We must have had some decent soil in that suburban yard, because for several years an extremely good garden arose: I have pictures of twelve foot high sunflowers; sprawling pumpkin vines; respectable corn stalks; and exuberant scarlet runner beans.

As a matter of fact, there is a high likelihood that I owe my happy marriage to that garden. My husband tells me that on the occasion that he first spent the night at my house (a few days after I met him - I work fast), he was amazed and delighted to see a good-sized patch of tall corn stalks in a small urban plot. Being Mexican, he must have seen the corn as a good omen. Or perhaps he thought a thriving garden presaged a hardworking woman - little did he know my father was doing most of the work. In any case, that corn was no small part of his decision to ask me out again. So thank you, Chicomecoatl, Aztec corn goddess.

When we moved up here, we were faced with some serious garden challenges. This land had previously been used as a dairy farm, and most of what was available was compacted and highly over-nitrogenated. Not to mention tons of construction debris that had simply been plowed into the ground and left there. This is some of the debris that came out of the ground when we finally hired somebody with big machinery to dig it all up:

My guess is a couple of tons. And there is no doubt more - every time we wield a shovel we hit some kind of twisted metal. But at least we have finally removed enough crap that we can more or less plow and more or less sow and more or less use the land like land is meant to be used.

I have tried a number of different ways to raise a garden here - far too many to go into right now, at eight o'clock of a lovely summer evening. In some future post I may compare in-ground planting to container gardening and write up a review of my new greenhouse. For now, I simply want to give an overview of this year's vegetable based food production:

1) the orchard - the baby goats escaped sometime in June and in twenty minutes did an insane amount of damage. The four surviving fruit trees from last year's planting are just barely alive. I think three will certainly live, and one looks like a goner. But the ones that live will have been put back a full year or more. Damn goats, I will take a grim satisfaction in cutting their little throats come October. Otherwise, the older fruit trees are doing well - no plums on the bum plum tree, but the pears are producing beautifully and the two cherries have provided a small but delicious crop. The blueberry bushes look like they are planning on producing a bumper crop. The goats ate the raspberry canes down to the ground - and it would have been the first year, too! - but at least the canes will survive. All in all, the orchard is a qualified success.

2) the greenhouse - maybe I need to read up more on how to make use of a greenhouse in this climate. This was my first year with a greenhouse, and it is true that (a) it was never finished properly, and never sealed, and is therefore quite drafty, and (b) this was an unusually cold and wet spring, with nothing like normal weather until mid-May. I am sad to report that the greenhouse didn't provide me with anything like the benefits I had hoped for - I may have gained a week or two on salad greens and I still have hopes for some things I would never have tried without a greenhouse like cantaloupes and eggplants, but for the most part, I have been disappointed. Before the rains start this fall, I will try and force my husband to seal the sucker up with silicone.

3) The garden - My early crops (peas, spinach, radishes, arugula) didn't do very well due to the crazy cold wet spring. Even the ones I planted in the green house did poorly, though exactly why I can't say. Many of the things I plant in containers do poorly and I think it is due to the hard, clay-ey soil that sets up like a rock if not watered five times a day. My first crop of potatoes - April - rotted in the ground and I had to re-plant in May. Those potatoes are doing okay but the ones that really took off are the late potatoes I planted in mid June. I thought it would be too late but those taters look better than almost anything else!

Other things which are doing well are my celery (slow to start but now taking off); cabbage; eggplant;

Neighbors And Hay (Stacking: Not as Simple as You Thought)

2011-07-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

It's high hay season. Hay season is somewhat late this year due to unseasonable cold and rain in June. Good weather in mid July set everyone to haying, and we laid in the year's supply and enjoyed the beautiful sights and smells of hay season (Poor Man's Hay Elevator, Hay Season Again).

I had thoughts of haying our small front pasture - the half acre that used to be lawn when the last owners took care of it (The Lawn Chronicles) but which under our policy of benign neglect had reverted to a very nice mixed-species pasture. Several of my neighbors have haying equipment, but I haven't had much luck in approaching them. On one side there is the J. family, with whom we have a long history of marginal relations, for which I take full responsibility. If anyone is so inclined, they can search the sidebar and find a rich and amusing saga of escaped chickens and badly-behaved dogs wreaking havoc on a sweet little old lady's garden. We are utterly and completely at fault for the state of affairs that makes it impossible for me to ask Mr. J. to hay our small field.

The neighbors across the highway, the K. family, have about a hundred acres and haying for them is a deadly serious affair that provides some not-inconsequential share of their income. Their equipment is very large and I doubt their tractor and rake could even turn around in our piddly little field. I'd feel ridiculous asking them.

The other neighbors I know who do their own haying are Mr. and Mrs. B., who I know from church and who I am sure I have mentioned here before as really nice people and wonderful neighbors. Mrs. B. is the lady who just recently brought me fifty pint sized canning jars - just because she likes to see members of the younger generation who still can. When I dropped by their house to thank them for the jars (with a few of those same jars filled with jam and pickles, of course), I asked if Mr. B. might be willing to let us hire him to hay our small field.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't. So many people ask me, and I just have to say no to everybody. If I said yes to anyone, I'd have to say yes to everyone."

"I understand," I said. "Of course."

I gave up. The small field would just have to do whatever it did. The grass grew taller, grew top-heavy with seeds, and then laid down flat after a summer downpour. I wrote a blogpost about grass. I doubt that Mrs. B. reads my blog, so it must be a coincidence that she showed up here the next day, and asked me, "is this the field you wanted hayed?"

"Well yes," I said, "but isn't it a little late? I mean, the rain laid it down flat."

"Oh that doesn't matter," she said. "The mower will cut it just the same. Mr. B. will be here in ten minutes. There isn't any trash in the way is there?"

Quickly I pulled up the extension cords that ran from Homero's shop to the house (a hard job, with the grass grown over them). Mr. B. came by and mowed the grass, and told me if the weather held he'd be back to rake and bale in a few days. "There's not much here," he said, "so don't worry either way."

The weather held - we've had a beautiful few days with nary a cloud in the sky and the mercury hovering near eighty.This afternoon, as I was sitting outside reading a magazine and watching the goats browse on the blackberries, Mr. B. came up the road and turned into the field with the baler attached to the tractor. I waved, and he waved, and he ran over the field and in twenty minutes there were seventeen lovely bales of hay sitting on the grass.

"Do you know how to stack these?" Mr. B. asked me.

"Um," I said, "probably not the right way..."

And in fact I did not. As Mr. B. showed me, there is a right way to stack hay to avoid mold. A bale of hay is a three-dimensional rectangle, and therefore has four long sides and two short ones. If you look at each of the four long sides, you will see that three of them have folded over grass, and only one of them has the cut ends of the grass showing. Stack your hay, Mr. B. told me, with that cut side up. That will allow the natural moisture in the bale to escape. Any other side up will trap the moisture inside the bale and it may rot.

There's so much to learn.

Mr. B., of course, would not accept any money for his time and trouble. I didn't expect that he would, but asking "what do we owe you?" is part of the neighborly ritual. As is the ritual response "Oh don't mention it." I can't, obviously, leave it at that. Last year Mr. B. asked to borrow our apple press, and I leant it to him rather reluctantly - but when he returned it he had serviced it and repaired a few little things that it needed. Today after he refused my offer of payment I said "well, when apple season comes around, just come and get the press whenever you like. No need to call ahead."

That doesn't feel like quite enough. I ran the numbers in my head and the hay off the field is worth approximately $100. It represents one fifth of our yearly hay expenditure. Mr. B. said it was no big deal to him, but it's a big deal to us - quite apart from the monetary value, it just gives me such a good feeling to see baled hay from my own land. I never thought I'd see that - we certainly can't invest in our own haying equipment, nor would it be worth it to do so. But just knowing that push comes to shove, we actually produce enough hay here to keep a couple of goats alive through the winter - well, that's very good to know.

Tomorrow I will put together a thank you basket for Mrs. B. She has been by recently to buy eggs so I know she could use some - a couple dozen eggs, a half-pound of cheese, a big bunch of peppermint, and maybe a jar of applesauce.

Good neighbors are worth more than gold. I have to figure out a way to be a good neighbor to them.

The Hope-a-Lope Speaks

2011-07-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Thank you for commenting on the Hopsicle Life! Here are the answers to your questions.

Heidi: My favorite animal to watch on the farm is my horse, Poppy. Yes I will have a blog of my own. Probably when I'm thirteen.

Uncle Beanzo: I help the chickens by feeding them their food, and keeping them safe from Lancelot (the dog). I walk Rosie around some of the time and I also play with Poppy to make her less shy. The goats my favorite to work with. I feed them and I help mama milk them. The horses are my favorite to watch because they are my favorite animal and they are super cute. My favorite animal to play with are the baby chickies. We catch them and put them in the calf hutch.

Farmer: I know how to juggle really good and I know how to breakdance really good and I like doing both of them but it's hard to do them at the same time, I bet.

Olive: Thank you! And I hope the calf Charlie will have a mummy. Maybe you can buy a mummy who will adopt him! And I like cows they give way more milk than goats. I would like a cow we could milk it for two years and then butcher it. Because I like cow meat, too.

Introducing the Hope-a-Lope

2011-07-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

My middle child, Hope, came to me and showed me her "blog" which she had written on a piece of paper. She asked me to post it here, and I said of course, so here it is. This is what it looks like:

The Hopsicle Life

1. I am Hope, and I like to eat, breathe, sleep, and drink, and watch animals. I am not only weird, but I have many talents, such as standing on my head for a long time; juggling; breakdancing; monkey bars; ice skating; roller skating; I am smart, and gardening, and many other things.

To be continued!

Comments: _________________________________________________________

______________________

So if you have a comment for Hope, my funny, smart, athletic child, please leave them below. Hope will answer any questions you may have for her!

The Lawn Chronicles

2011-07-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

Back when I lived in the city, I never paid much attention to my lawn. Most of it was enclosed behind a tall wooden fence, and the small part that was visible from the street I mostly ignored. About three times a year I cajoled some man into running the mower over it, weeds and all. I'm sure some of my neighbors wished I would do a little more, but as a single mom in nursing school, the lawn was low on my list of priorities.

When we bought this place, the house had stood vacant for a couple of years, and was sadly neglected - but not the lawn! Someone had clearly been taking careful care of it, and it was a thing of beauty. Smooth, velvety, plush, devoid of dandelion or moss, shorn to an even two inches, gentle on the feet and easy on the eyes.

I appreciate the work that goes into a lawn like that, and as much as the next person, I enjoy being able to play barefoot frisbee or lolling about on a summer's day in grass more welcoming than any carpet. There's something uniquely charming about little children turning somersaults on a well-kept lawn.

But I will never have a lawn like that. I haven't the vaguest idea what it takes to maintain such a lawn but I know it involves a heck of a lot of work, and also most likely a plethora of nasty chemicals. I prefer to cultivate an appreciation for wildflowers (aka weeds). Also it hasn't helped that our riding lawnmower turned out to be the most unreliable hunk of junk that anyone ever spent $400 on. Over the course of four years, it hasn't ever worked for more than three consecutive mowings. Murray's the brand; stay away.

Besides avoiding frustration, there are many reasons NOT to keep a lawn, which is basically a chemically maintained monoculture. If you love bugs, butterflies, and bees, be kind to them and let your lawn revert to natural tangle of wildflowers (aka weeds) that can support a thriving insect population. Avoid applying fertilizers, fungicides, and herbicides that run off into waterways and poison all the little critters therein.

Learn to enjoy the sight of a three year old lost in grass taller than she is. It's an easy sight to enjoy.

If you absolutely MUST have a lawn, here's some information on how to have a non-toxic one:

American lawns generate massive amounts of "green waste", waste water, require tons of herbicides, and cost the average homeowner much money and time.

According to the Audubon Society, the average American lawn generates almost 2 tons of clippings a year, and requires 2½-4 times more water than shrubs or trees. Homeowners use 50% more herbicides than they did 20 years ago, spend 40 hours per week mowing the lawn each year, and spend over $8 billion annually on lawn care products and equipment. Read on for more eco-friendly ways to maintain a lawn!

1) Use an electric or manual push mower to cut your grass. Don’t use conventional gas-powered lawn mowers – they pollute air and contribute to global warming. According to Sylvan Garden, "a typical 3.5 horsepower gas mower...can emit the same amount of VOCs—key precursors to smog—in an hour as a new car driven 340 miles. To top it off, lawn and garden equipment users inadvertently add to the problem by spilling 17 million gallons of fuel each year while refilling their outdoor power equipment. That’s more petroleum than spilled by the Exxon Valdez in the Gulf of Alaska."

You can get a push mower from companies such as SunLawn Imports, Inc. (970/493-5284, or Real Goods (800/919-2400 http://www.realgoods.com/shop/shop6.cfm/dp/601/ts/1063505). Mowing with a push mower has an extra benefit--it's a good form of exercise!

2) Use hand tools or electric-powered tools such as hedge trimmer or lawn edger to maintain your yard. Don't use gas-powered tools. Use good old fashioned push broom and rakes for yard clean up, instead of noise and air polluting leaf blowers. Don't use the hose to wash down your driveway or sidewalk, as this is just a waste of water. On the coasts, the leaf and grass clippings end up in the gutter and go down the storm drains, out to the ocean.

3) Diversify your lawn by planting a mix of different grasses--that way, if one variety doesn't do well or dies, you still have grass that can "take over" for the dead variety. If your lawn is hardy enough, you won't need to use fertilizer. If you decide to use fertilizer, use an organic one such as Neptune's Harvest Organic Fertilizer (1-800-259-4769, or go to "Products" at http://www.neptunesharvest.com/.) Read more about organic fertilizers at Sylvan Gardens.

4) Avoid toxic chemical pesticides and herbicides. According to PANNA (http://www.panna.org/campaigns/pesticideFreeLawns.html ) "Every year U.S. homeowners apply at least 90 million pounds of pesticides to their lawns and gardens...pesticides are applied more intensively for lawn care than for farming! One recent survey reported that when informed about the risks posed by lawn chemicals, nearly 70% of homeowners indicate a preference for non-toxic alternatives." Pull weeds by hand, and get information about less-toxic weed control, lawn maintenance, and pest control from the NCAP website: http://www.pesticide.org/factsheets.html#alternatives

5) Conserve water. Water your lawn by hand with a hose instead of using timed sprinklers. This avoids water-wastage from runnoff and avoids watering your sidewalks and driveways. Water at night to avoid evaporation of water before it has a chance to soak into the ground. Avoid hoses made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride). PVC creates dioxins during manufacture, the useful lifetime of the product, and upon disposal; dioxin is a known carcinogen and hormone disruptor. Use hoses made of rubber instead, such as Craftsman, by Sears, or Flexogen, by Gilmour.

If you do use sprinklers, reduce the time they are on to no more than 10 minutes. Turn off the automatic timer during the rainy season in your area--there is nothing more wasteful than having the sprinklers running during a rain! Or do what I do--don't water your lawn at all, and let Mother Nature water it only during the rainy season, and let the lawn go brown or die off-season.

6) Save your grass clippings and use them as mulch for your yard. Mulch is anything that is put on top of the soil around your trees and shrubs to give nutrients back to the soil--grass clippings, tree bark, leaves and other yard "green waste" as well as food waste from the kitchen and even shredded newspapers! The mulch breaks down over time and adds nutrients to the soil. Mulch also prevents soil erosion and hardpan (tough, dried-out topsoil). Make a compost pile and feed it your grass clippings. Read the Organic Trade Association's "Composting for Everyone"http://www.theorganicreport.com/pages/249_composting_for_everyone.cfm to find out how to start your own compost pile using kitchen scraps and green "waste" that would otherwise end up as landfill!

7) Research plants that are native to your area and resistant to pests and drought, and replace some or all of your grass with these low-maintenance alternatives. I've let the shrubs in front of the house, on one side of the yard, grow down to the front sidewalk, eliminating about 24 square feet of lawn. According to the Audubon society, "If each one of us that takes care of our own lawn (49 million U.S. households), replaced just ONE square yard (just 9 square feet) of our lawn with a non-turf alternative, we would eliminate 1.2 MILLION hours of mowing and stop 60,000 tons of grass clippings from ever finding their way to a landfill. In addition, millions of gallons of water would be saved and tons of fertilizers and pesticides never applied." For more ideas about planting native shrubs and trees, see: "Rethink Your Lawn" from the Audubon society at: http://www.audubon.org/bird/at_home/rethink_lawn.html

Try some of these ideas, and you’ll save money, reduce environmental impacts, and have more time to enjoy relaxing in your yard!

Life Is a Bowl of Cherries (Summer Preserving)

2011-07-22T12:31:00.000-07:00

Summer preserving season has kicked into high gear. Since I got back from Ocean Shores monday evening, I have processed many pounds of food, and the table is still covered with more.

Homero had to go to Seattle, and paid a visit to our old blue house and gathered some ten pounds of bing cherries (with the permission of the current occupant, of course!). These have mostly been eaten out of hand, but about three pounds remain, which I think I will pit, halve, and stir into goat's milk ice cream. Ice cream, I've discovered, is a great way to preserve both goat's milk and eggs. I've made lots of strawberry ice cream, rhubarb ice cream, and now cherry.

I put up ten pints of bread and butter pickles. Made strawberry jam. Pickled a pint of garlic. Shelled and froze three quarts of english peas. Awaiting treatment of one kind of another I have a couple gallons of assorted greens - mostly chard - and a few dozen beets, as well as a shopping bag full of summer squash.

It's the summer squash that has me stumped. The greens I can blanch, chop, squeeze, and freeze. Beets I like to pickle (I'm heavy on the pickling, I know, but it's water-bath canning and I happen to like pickles). But what can I do with twenty-some odd summer squash? Some people I know have told me they slice them thickly and dehydrate them, for use in stews and soups later in the year. I know some people freeze them, but I don't like the texture of frozen squash.

I can make several of them disappear into things like chocolate cake, frittatas, and lasagnas, but not as many as I have. But I just had a brain wave. Bread freezes beautifully, and I have a whole lot of freezer space. If I spend one whole day baking, I can have enough zucchini bread to get me through a whole school year's worth of bake sales.

Ok, I have a plan!

Where I've Been (Thank God for Girlfriends)

2011-07-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

I went away last friday, and just got back today. All year long, I'd been looking forward to this past weekend. Some of my bestest, oldest girlfriends and I planned to meet up in Ocean Shores for a long girl's weekend. The list of invitees was fluid, and changed a bit over time, but in the end five of us went, old friends from high school and before.

We grew up together in western Washington, but as always happens, time scattered us around the country. For this weekend, some of us came from far away - central Oregon, east Texas. Some of us hadn't seen each other for as long as three years, and not all of us had been together in one room for many years, if ever! We rented a lovely vacation house nearly on the beach for three nights. All of us brought something to share - mostly booze, of course, but also plenty of food and music. I brought goat cheese and eggs and a big package of grass-fed rib-eye steaks from the freezer.

Ocean Shores is a wonderfully kitschy little town on a long, long spit of land on the south-central coast of Washington. It's a vacation/retirement community of a certain kind. You probably know the kind - the attractions include go-cart tracks and video arcades; all-you-can-eat seafood buffets; T-shirt emporiums and shell-shops; kite flying on the beach, or, equally popular, reckless driving on the beach and getting stuck in the sand so the town tow-truck has to come pull you out. Much of the town has a slightly run-down feel to it, but it's not out-and-out tacky.

I hadn't been to Ocean Shores in about eleven years. Homero and I went with Rowan the first year we were together, and had a wonderful time. And I went as a child, I think with both parents, which would have meant I was younger than eight. It is substantially as I remember it, which is nice. That's not a very common experience.

The weather was crappy most of the time, but the last day was gorgeous. Of course, the Ocean is always freezing in this part of the world, but I didn't care. I swam anyway.

Chainsaw art in some tiny town along the route.

The beach as it usually looks....

Aimee with a mojito... thoroughly enjoying myself.

Hay Season Again

2011-07-12T19:09:00.000-07:00

Our third hay season in Whatcom County. I love hay season. Fresh hay curing in the sun is my absolute favorite smell in the world - better than freshly turned earth after a rain, better than perfectly ripe strawberries, better than healthy pony. The only smell that rivals fresh hay is newborn baby-head.

I've been taking pictures of the hay in the fields around here. Here are a few of them:

It's a Fricken' Chicken' Miracle!

2011-07-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

The hens have not had good luck this year raising chicks. Twice that I know of, a hen sat on a clutch of eggs for the full 21 days (or longer) and then abandoned them when nothing hatched. I don't know why nothing hatched - the roosters have surely been doing their job. A little too vigorously, I might add, with much squawking and flying of feathers. One or two of the hens are looking quite bare about the withers, a sure sign that we have too many roosters for too few hens.

After the two nest failures, I began shooing away any hens I saw sitting on eggs, and trying to collect all the eggs every day. A large percentage of my hens are broody breeds, and unless I break them up, I just don't have very many eggs during the summer months. I hate feeding twenty-some odd hens and collecting only three or four eggs a day. That's just silly.

There was one hen I didn't shoo, because I didn't know how long she had been sitting when I found her. She was up on a high shelf in the mama barn. On the day that we stuffed the mama barn with hay, I thought to myself, I'd better send the kids up there with a pillowcase and get her and those eggs into a better place - but we never did it. All I did was leave a window open so the hen could get in and out to eat and drink.

This morning, when I went out to feed the animals, I saw the mother hen outside with a bunch of babies - tiny little fluffy just hatched babies. A couple of quick counts left me fairly sure there were seven of them. I was extremely impressed - the journey from high shelf to outside cannot have been easy. Alas, I can't find the cord to my camera, so I can't show you exactly how difficult the journey was, but let me try to explain.

After the babies hatched, they had to follow their mama down off the high shelf and onto the tops of the stacked hay. Then they had to traverse the hay bales - a journey across several frightening crevasses that a chick, if it fell into, would be entirely incapable of climbing out of. Upon reaching the open window, the mama hen would have flown out and onto the ground; a paltry drop, for her, of about four and a half feet. But the chicks would have to have hurled themselves willy-nilly out into the unknown and tumbled unwittingly onto the hard-packed earth.

What courage! What valiance! I'm not being sarcastic here, I'm honestly moved by the determination it took for this mother hen to get her babies out into the world. By her endurance, sitting for weeks in that hot, dark barn. And by the beauty and strength of the directive implanted in those babies to follow their mother, come hell or high water. I know it's all instinct, but in my mind that makes it no less awe-inspiring.

The next thing I did, after counting babies, was to open up the mama barn and see if there were any babies left behind. Indeed, I heard a loud peeping emanating from floor level by the window. One chick must have fallen down between the hay bales. Oh no! What to do? On my own, I was totally incapable of moving the twenty or so bales that would have to be moved to rescue the chick. It wasn't even close - there's just no way. I would have to wait for Homero to get home and see what he said. In my mind, I decided to abide by whatever his decision was without complaint - he has been suffering a great deal with his back lately and I certainly wasn't going to insist he hurt himself to rescue one baby chick that would have a very high likelihood of being eaten by a hawk within a day or two in any case.

However, my husband being the man he is, he set about moving hay bales right away. "She worked so hard," he said, referring to the mama hen, "we can't just let her baby die down there." It took him about fifteen minutes to tear down the bales, rescue the baby, and replace the bales. I hope he doesn't suffer for it later tonight, but if he does, I will be there with ice-packs and massages. What a man I married.

Right now, the mama and all eight of her chicks are under the mama barn, where they will be safe from hawks and - I hope - other predators. In past years, we have lost a very high percentage of chicks, mostly, I think, to hawks. I would try to round them up and keep them in a safer place, but I don't really have one available, and that hasn't worked well in the past in any case. I have come to the conclusion that a good mother hen can raise babies at least as well as I can and most likely better.

I wish her luck.

That's not her in the above picture, by the way. As I said, I lost my camera cord, and so I pulled a generic picture off the web. My mama hen is black, and her babies are a delightful melange of colors from jet black to palest daffodil yellow.

Trade Network Revival

2011-07-07T10:45:00.000-07:00

Our best trade partner from years past, Veggie/Oil Man, had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth this year. He stopped going to the farmer's market, and when I tried to call him, his phone was disconnected. Finally I decided to simply throw a couple dozen eggs and a half a pound of cheese in the car and go out to his place and see if I could figure out what was going on.

Luckily, he was home. He's going through some major transitions, and that's why he hasn't been around. However he still has lots of organic produce and he still wants to trade. Yesterday I came home with everything you see above: rhubarb, zucchinis, cherries, and a giant box of english shelling peas - my favorite. It took two hours to shell all the peas, but I put three pounds of shelled peas in the freezer and made a lovely pea and zucchini risotto for dinner as well.

Also look what I found:

Isn't that weird? I thought peas had to be dried before they would sprout. Or at least be released from the pod! Several of the pods had sprouted peas inside.

Today the girls and are going back over to Veggie/Oil Man's house to pick sugar snap peas. Mine didn't do well at all this year, and I haven't been able to get any at the local farmer's markets. They are always sold out before I get there. V/O Man told us to come pick as many as we like for 75 cents a pound, which is pretty awesome. Later on today I will most likely be canning hot peas!

Poor Man's Hay Elevator

2011-07-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

I am so annoyed with blogger. If I didn't have three full years invested here, I would probably quit. It won't let me upload a video, which it used to do. I can't create links anymore; photos show up only as strings of text. Anyway. In lieu of a video, here is a photo of Homero using our new pulley system to get hay into the hayloft.

Our hayloft isn't very high off the ground - about 9 feet - nor very big - it only holds about thirty bales of hay - but it's still very hard to get the hay up there. In the past, Homero just threw the hay up there, but his back isn't quite what it used to be, and these particular bales are very heavy. So we needed a new option. This is what we came up with. Still pretty hard work (look at the sweat rolling down Homero's face) but at least possible.

Now we have hay for the winter. In addition to the thirty bales in the loft, there are seventy bales in the mama barn. In order to get that many in there we had to remove everything else, including the milking stand. So now I am milking in the open air, but I don't mind. It's actually nicer - the mama barn gets extremely hot in the summertime.

Makin' That Jam...(More Good Neighbors)

2011-06-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

Today the kids and I went over to Boxx Berry Farms (on Northwest Road) and picked 25 pounds of strawberries in about twenty minutes. I've been working at the migrant worker camps lately interpreting for some folks, and so I knew that the strawberry harvest officially began on monday. And some of the people I spoke to told me that it's always best to harvest strawberries at the beginning of the season rather than waiting. The quality is much higher. I would have gone yesterday, but it was raining.

Boxx's U-pick strawberries are all organic, and the price is $1.75 a pound - up from $1.50 last year, but still a pretty good deal. There were plenty of beautiful, perfectly ripe berries. The 25 pounds we picked was about three full flats. After eating as many as we could all stomach, Rowan and I lightly washed them - just to get the dust off. These organic berries don't need much scrubbing. Nor can they stand it; anything more than a quick shower and they would turn to mush. Then we de-stemmed them, laid them on cookie sheets, and froze them solid in the chest freezer. I still have to bag the frozen berries. If you are in a major hurry, you can simply bag and freeze, but then they will lose coherence and freeze in one solid lump, which you will later have to break up with a hammer and chisel. Discrete berries are much nicer.

Between eating and freezing, we polished off a flat and a half. We can't eat the rest of them before they deliquesce, so I am making some jam. I've never had much luck with jellies or jam. I just can't get it to jell. I've tried pectin, low sugar pectin, cut up unripe apples, just about everything, and I end up with syrup with fruit chunks in it. This time I am sticking with the good old Joy of Cooking recipe, which calls for strawberries and sugar and nothing else. If it fails to jell, I'll simply turn it into strawberry cordial by the judicious addition of 100 proof vodka and bottle it in small corked bottles for Christmas presents.

Oh I just realized I utterly forgot to write about my good neighbor Mrs. B. She and her husband live down the road and are an old time local farming family, mostly beef cattle. Last fall we bought a half steer from them and were delighted with the quality. Mrs. B. is a fine seamstress as well as a farm wife, a pillar of the local community, and a very nice lady.

This morning she stopped by for a dozen eggs. Normally she has her own, of course, but as it happens this year she started over with new chicks and they won't be laying until about September. I only had about eight eggs, for reasons I shall enumerate in another post (damn broody hens!), and so I just gave them to her. "Take them," I said, "there aren't enough to charge you for."

"Are you sure," she asked, "won't you be short?"

"No, no," I said, "I haven't gathered yet today. I'll have plenty."

"Well allright then," she said, and headed out the door. But she turned back on the porch and asked me, "would you like some canning jars? I have a big box in my garage that I'm not using."

Well, a lady can never have too many canning jars. I have a fair supply, mostly wide-mouth quarts, but like I said, there's no such thing as too many. I accepted with gratitude and now I am the proud owner of some forty small-mouth pint jars. Which is great! Especially for today - you can't can jam in quart jars. Well, I suppose you can, but pints are much nicer.

Now if my jam will ever thicken, I'll be in business.