No More Hay

We are out of hay. We still have a need for hay - it will be another month before it dries out enough that I can put the animals out on the pasture. At least. This year I tried to keep the heavy hooves off the pasture all winter long - the horses went into the sacrifice area in late October or early November and they haven't been out since (except for a few sunny winter days that I brought them out onto the front lawn). Since we were in Mexico last year and the horses were boarded out, the pasture got a nice little rest. There were only three goats on 2.5 acres - well within the carrying capacity of the land. I wanted to extend that rest and generally start treating my pasture better.

My husband kind of messed up my pasture plans by insisting on a cow against my better judgement (Imaginary Cows). A calf is not as heavy as a horse, but a good deal heavier than a goat, and plenty heavy enough to damage wet pasture. Even so, keeping the two horses off the pasture all winter ought to go a long way towards resting the land.

But it also means we use more hay. Even in the dead of winter, around here there is always green grass to be found, except for a few weeks when the ground is actually frozen hard. Animals out on the pasture will graze. In the sacrifice area, we have to feed 100% hay all winter long, and it adds up.

The best time to buy hay, of course, is during haying time. If you are willing and able to jump in your truck and go pick up bales right behind the baler, you can often get first cut local hay for as low as $3 a bale. Better quality for $4. But this year we had no truck during haying season. An elderly farmer friend of ours saved some twenty five bales for me at cutting time prices until I could find a vehicle, but he is no longer able to help toss hay, being something over 77 years old. My husband was gone (for some reason, I can't remember why now) and I had to do it myself. Now, a healthy 40 year old woman ought to be able to toss 25 bales of hay and then stack them in her own barn without too much trouble. Each bale weighed between forty and fifty pounds. It's hard work, but it ought to be doable.

I, however, am a gimp. At that time, I had very recently blown my anterior cruciate ligament (collateral ligament?) and was barely able to walk. Rowan was pressed into service and between the two of us we managed to collect, transport, and stack the hay but it was one big bitch to do it. I took a lot of ibuprofen that night. That twenty-five bales had to feed two horses and four goats - three of them pregnant. It lasted until early January, if I remember right. About three months.

When we were nearly out of hay, I searched Craigslist and found a source of local, well-priced hay. Sadly, a small local dairy is going out of business and selling off the barn full of hay - having already sold off the calves. Homero and I went out and brought back another twenty bales. We figured that if twenty-five bales had lasted us three months, another twenty ought to last the rest of the way until spring.

But no. As it turned out this year, we had terrible, bone-chilling cold snaps and heavy snow and ice that lasted for weeks. I just read that this february is either the coldest on record in Bellingham or the fourth coldest, depending on how you measure (average daily lows or average daily highs). Also, the hay we bought - while green and good smelling - was for some reason very light. Each bale only weighed in the neighborhood of thirty pounds. I guess it was quite a bit dryer than the hay we bought earlier in the season. The animals went through it at an amazing speed - and today, we are out.

Forty-five bales in nearly five months isn't really so bad. It's only a little over two bales a week. And a total of $250. That does not, of course, amount to what it costs to feed the animals over the winter. Oh no! We also have to buy grain for the pregnant goats, chicken food for the chickens, and alfalfa pellets for the poor half-paralyzed calf that can't eat regular hay very well (for an explanation, see Rosie Pony Update (And Notes on the Cow)). If I figure the same rate of feed - two bales a week - we only need another dozen bales to get us through to the time I can put the animals on pasture.

However, I am once again without a vehicle. Sigh. We have one working vehicle and Homero took it to work. Tomorrow I can get some hay. Today I'm tiding them over with greens from the Gleaner's Pantry and stale bread. For one day, it won't kill anybody.

Snow at Last (On Being Unprepared)

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!

Winter Stores (A Thought Exercise)

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!

The Other Five Acres (The Backstory)

I apologize for the out of place, unintegrated photos - I am having issues with Blogger. The first photo is Mt Baker off the southeast, meant to emphasize how lovely our situation is. The second photo is deer poop in the grass at the "other" five acres. Lots of deer there. The last photo is my very own leg after an hour spent brushwhacking at the other five acres. I'm not sure what my problem with Blogger is, or if it is them or my computer, but in any case when I upload photos or videos, I can't see them, but only large, consolidated blocks of HTML text. So forgive me - I can't even tell where one photo ends ands the next begins, or I might be able to copy and paste them into the appropriate places in the post. Hang with me - I'm sure I'll figure it out!

Two years before we bought this old farmhouse, we bought a five acre parcel of raw land just a couple of miles from here. Our original plan, when we decided to move up here from Seattle, was to build a house from the ground up - a nice, modest, three bedroom house, incorporating as many green principles as possible and using as much reclaimed material as possible and doing as much of the work ourselves as possible.

We spent a happy summer - the summer of 2004 - driving around Whatcom County looking at land. Real estate prices were high, 2004 being three years away from the peak - and quick decline - of 2007. Of course we didn't know that at the time. Still, there was a decent amount of land for sale in our price range. Although I had spent some time in Bellingham here and there and knew it to be a pretty nice small-to-medium-sized city with progressive politics and a gorgeous natural setting, I had never lived in the area and didn't know very much about where exactly we might like to live. Over the course of several months, we narrowed our options down considerably, learning, for example, that we needed to be located in unincorporated county, with close access to the freeway, on land that had no CCR's (private building restrictions). Wow, when I lay all those conditions out in a line, it sounds like we were planning some sort of criminal enterprise, but in fact it was all quite innocent. Many CCR's are incredibly restrictive and dictate such things as minimum square footage on any home or deny any and all manufactured homes. We wanted to keep all our options open.

Finally, we found a fine and private five acre parcel at a reasonable price. The owner was a Canadian who hadn't visited the property in many years, and the land itself was heavily covered with brush - native roses, snowberries, native blackberry, et cetera. About half of it was treed, in mature alder, birch, and scattered evergreens. There were several small pockets of wetlands, thickly overgrown with native wetland plants. While we were there, we saw bald eagles, various species of hawks, signs of deer and coyote, and small animals like garter snakes. There were wild strawberries and wild tiger lilies. We heard choruses of frogs. It wasn't perfect - we had already learned enough to know that the wetlands might be a problem - but it was pretty, private, devoid of CCR's, and in our price range. Plus, we had been searching for many moons, and I was seven months pregnant. I was eager to close a deal - any deal.

Over the next couple of years, we learned, to our chagrin, that building in Whatcom county would be difficult - and building while serving as our own general contractors and mostly our own labor force would be damn nigh impossible. Our property perked for a two bedroom house, but the wetlands delineation report (ka-ching) showed scattered, small, isolated wetlands - each of which required a fifty foot setback, leaving precious little room for building. The county would require a mitigation plan. The mitigation plan would cost a thousand dollars to design and some twenty thousand dollars to implement (ka ching). All in all, the cost of building would be nearly prohibitive - and the hassle would be totally over the top uncontrollable. At least for me - I'm sure a more naturally even-tempered woman would be able to handle it fine, but I am slightly high-strung (stop laughing, dearest husband, I can HEAR you in my head!) and at the time was dealing with being heavily pregnant, a still-nursing and still-in-diapers toddler, and a newly pubescent girl of thirteen. I had enough on my plate.

Tears flowed. A baby was born. We put it on the back burner. Meanwhile, my sister and her family, who lived only a mile from us in Seattle, began to put into motion their own plans to move to the Bellingham area. They put their house up for sale and started the search in earnest for a place to live up north. I hated the thought of my sister moving far away. By chance and bad luck, all three of my best girlfriends had moved out of the Seattle area in the past year and my sister was the only close contact I had left. I was terrified at the thought of losing her, too.

Luck struck! We came into some money unexpectedly, which made it possible to look for a piece of property with an actual house on it. As much as we had learned about building, we knew that it wouldn't be much more expensive - or possibly even less expensive - to buy a property with a house than it would be to build from the ground up. We resumed our weekend drives around the county. As it happened, there was a particular stretch of country road which we had driven many times - it was one of the principle exits off the freeway - and damn near every time we slowed down to marvel at the view. A long, slow incline gave way to a broad, flat hilltop with a commanding view of the Canadian Cascades, behind rolling green hills and glimpses of the water off to the west. Mount Baker loomed to the southeast, and a wide open horizon offered dramatic sky-scapes and a half day's notice of any coming weather. There were a few "for sale" signs here and there along the road and back when we were looking for raw land we would turn to each other and sigh, saying "Man, I wish we could afford something along here." But we knew it was unlikely.

Then one day, we noticed a for sale sign that we hadn't bothered to take note of before, as we had been looking for raw land and this was a house and property for sale. Since we were now looking for a property with a house, we called our real estate agent and set up an appointment. Well, the rest is history. The house had many major issues, which we are still - four years later - working on fixing (http://newtofarmlife.blogspot.com/2009/07/handy-man-is-good-to-find.html). But I for one couldn't care less. This beautiful property is right smack dab in the middle of the best part of the hillside. We have views in every direction and can see the weather coming twenty miles away. People regularly stop their cars right in front of our house to take pictures of the mountains. It's a beautiful setting, even if we do suffer from more severe weather and winds than anyone around us. We live in the epicenter of a quarter-mile circle on top of the hill which receives twice the precipitation and high winds of anybody else just a little ways down the hill in either direction.

We tried to sell the other property - the five acre piece down in the valley below, but we missed the peak and real estate prices in the county fell through the basement. After listing it at progressively lower and lower prices for two years, we decided to pull it off the market. As raw land, it has virtually no costs to us - there is no maintenance, and the taxes are minimal. If we have any plans for it, they are vague and distant - it would be nice to put in a driveway, and power and water - maybe in the form of an RV hookup. But there isn't any money for that in the current budget, and it certainly isn't urgent. In my daydreams, I see one of my daughters living there, some twenty years hence, with her young family. Although it isn't useful today, it will make a dandy inheritance.

Yesterday, I went by there. It had been awhile - we tend to forget about the other five acres, even though it's quite close by. There's no real reason to go there, except maybe for wild strawberries in June. But yesterday, I was driving by,and I suddenly wanted to see if any of the trees we planted there have survived. Back when we thought this property would be our homestead, we did what any intelligent homesteading family does and planted fruit trees. An apple, a cherry, and a plum. Only the cherry survives, alas. The others have been ravaged by deer. The one Christmas tree we planted there is hanging on, but just barely. It has also been stripped of half it's bark by deer.

I was only able to find all this out by pushing my way through acres of thorny brush. The native roses are pretty in season, but an absolute bitch-kitty to try and forge your way through. I have the scratches to prove it. One thing I know from experience is that goats adore roses (they ate all the roses here first off) and so maybe it would be a worthwhile idea to transport the goats out there on sunny summer days to take things down a peg or two. It would be easy to toss a few goats in the van and bring a book and a sandwich, and maybe a blanket, and spend several fine summer afternoons drowsing among the roses while my herd fattens itself on my theoretically useless property.

Yeah, I think I'll do that.

Fears About Future Food

There has been an awful lot of noise in the news lately about global food prices. The price of most basic commodities such as wheat, sugar, corn, soybeans, and oilseeds are near or at historic highs. Global stockpiles are near or at historic lows. The recent events in the Middle East have been partially attributed to the swiftly rising price of food. In fact, food prices never really recovered after the 2008 spikes, though they did ease somewhat, and rice in particular (probably the most important grain, globally) seems to have stabilized for now, which is excellent news.

The factors that led to the 2008 spike are still with us, and in fact are intensifying. Most importantly, terrible weather events in many parts of the world over the last couple of years have drastically impacted regional staple crop production, from last year's drought in Russia and floods in Pakistan to this year's floods in Australia and unusual deep-freezes in the American south. Today, I bought some zucchinis to make a special Valentine's Day dinner, and paid over $7 for three smallish squash. They were $5.50 a pound. And no, they were not organic. I actually thought there was a mistake and asked the checker if that was the right price. She said it was and that the store had received a letter from their wholesalers letting them know that prices on many products would be higher through the season due to the freezes in the south.

Even if you think the weather events are a statistical aberration not likely to repeat in the coming years (which is a foolish opinion, but I'm granting it for the sake of argument), there are other, longer term forces at work which will continue to push food prices higher. There is the growing demand for biofuels - a sad story, which I am not going to go into in detail now. Suffice it to say that market forces have succeeded in turning a potentially brilliant, clean, carbon-sinking innovation into a global environmental disaster. As it currently exists, the global market in biofuels is destructive and helping to cause shortages. That doesn't mean I am against biofuels - I am decidedly for them! But the industry needs to evolve, and fast.

There is the price of oil, which is inexorably creeping upward and on which our agricultural system is utterly dependent, not just for transportation but for synthetic fertilizers. These fertilizers, in turn, mask another long term problem - the failing fertility of our soils. The loss of topsoil to drought and overtilling is only a small part of the soil's sickness. Loss of the biodiversity of microorganisms in the soil due to the long term use of insecticides and fungicides and herbicides has resulted in "dirt death."

Another huge problem - one of the biggest - is the water shortage. I was going to write "incipient water shortage" but in fact, the shortage is already here in many parts of the world. For the first time in recorded history, the Yellow river in China failed to reach the sea last year. All of it's water was siphoned off before it got there. That is routinely the case for the Colorado and the Rio Grande here in the states, as well as many other smaller waterways. I recently read (in a four page agricultural paper sold at my local feed store) that Eastern Washington's gigantic fossil water aquifer is down to about 15% of it's original capacity. The aquifer was not even tapped until the forties, and most of the drawdown has occurred in the last twenty years. They expect it will be totally exhausted within a decade. Then what? Well, my guess is that within another decade or two after that, the mighty Columbia may no longer reach the sea. California's imperial valley (source of a major slice of the nation's fresh produce) is losing productivity due to loss of water rights - water that is now being diverted to L.A. and San Diego. In Arizona, the water table has dropped from about 15 feet underground in the seventies to over 100 feet underground today.

The increasing wealth in large swaths of the developing world, including China and India, is obviously very good news in many respects. But not as regards global food supplies. As people get wealthier, they pretty much universally want to eat more meat. Meat, particularly beef, is the least efficient extraction of calories from the land, and the methodology of it's production - factory farming - is nearly indescribably destructive to the environment, further depleting the future productive potential of a great deal of land.

The largest underlying factor and the most difficult to address is, of course, population growth. By 2050 there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 billion people on the planet, and they will all be hungry. Right now, population is not the problem in a direct, immediate sense - we still produce plenty of food for everybody, if it were evenly distributed. But if all production trends point downwards while all consumption trends point upwards... well, I'm not an economist, but.... I'm also not an idiot.

You may be thinking "what the heck are you talking about? My food prices haven't gone up that much. I've hardly noticed anything." The fact is that we here in the States are well-insulated from food price spikes, for a variety of reasons. Farm subsidies are one of them, but even more, it is because we tend to eat so much processed and packaged food that the cost of the actual ingredients represents only a small fraction of the total cost of the product. When you buy a box of cereal, the cost of the wheat or the rice is only about 10% of what you pay. The rest is packaging, processing, advertising, et cetera. If you go down the aisle and look at the cost of a sack of plain rice or a sack of plain lentils, you will notice that they have indeed gone up. Actually, so has the cereal. Cheerios for $5 a box? C'mon!

Personally, I have noticed big increases in the cost of bulk coffee, sugar, wheat flour, and some fresh produce such as citrus fruits and salad greens. I have also noticed that selection seems to be decreasing in many stores, and I wonder why this is? This is a longer term trend, I think. Ten years ago, I would have no problem at my local grocery finding pretty much any product I wanted, from fresh habanero peppers to, oh, say, savoy cabbage. There were always at least five varieties of potatoes. Lately, I have more and more often found myself looking for something I think of as a basic item and not been able to find it. A partial list - those that spring to mind - include:

-wild rice
-pearl onions
-dried garbanzo beans
-currants
-shitake mushrooms
-spinach that wasn't bagged baby spinach, but plain old fashioned adult spinach.

I'm curious to know, have you noticed similar trends? Are rising food prices an issue for you? What do you think will happen to global food prices in the next several years, and are you making any preparations? I will talk about my own preparations in a later post.





http://peakoil.com/consumption/food-crisis-2011-the-global-food-shortage-has-already-begun/


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-05/global-food-prices-climb-to-record-on-cereal-sugar-costs-un-agency-says.html

Kim Chee Situation (Food Storage Update)

The title of this post is a song title. A song that my talented then-fifteen year old daughter made up to commemorate the day a jar of kim chee exploded in the car. Full lyrics can be found here: The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing). Isn't she just amazing?!

One might think an event like that would put me off kim chee forever, but strangely, it hasn't. I guess the siren song of fermented cabbage is just too seductive to resist. Last year's kim chee - my first foray into lacto-fermented foodstuffs - was okay, but definitely a little too sweet. This year I made it with only the barest whisper of sugar, just enough to encourage things to get rolling.

Here are all the ingredients arrayed on the counter. The awesome gigantic red clay mortar and pestle is a recent score from a downtown thrift shop (Christmas 2009, Thrift Store Edition). Five dollars, and sturdy as a brick outhouse. I already have a good mortar and pestle, of course, a marble one which was a long ago gift, and I will certainly continue to use it; but this one is five times the size. The old one is good for a few cloves of garlic or crushing some whole spices, but this one will work for major jobs like making mole or... crushing the spice paste for a large batch of kim chee!

The other ingredients are:

- one large savoy cabbage, roughly chopped (got it at the last saturday Ferndale Farmer's Market of the year. Sniff!).

- one medium yellow onion, sliced to ribbons

- two bunches green onions, chopped into one inch lengths

- half a head of hot Korean garlic, also bought at the farmer's market

- branch of ginger (I'm not using all that ginger, only about two inches of it).

- hot red pepper flakes

The cabbage was put to rest for about four hours in a strong salt brine (one tablespoon salt per cup water) and then squeezed out and placed in my biggest mixing bowl.

Then I crushed the garlic, ginger, red pepper, and a touch of soy sauce into a rough paste in my new mortar and pestle. This part was fun. If you are feeling annoyed or upset about something, or just tense in the shoulders, it's very therapeutic to bash the hell out of things. But even if you are feeling fit as a fiddle and happy as a clam, it's still fun. Put on some music with a good bass line and thump away.

When you like the look of the spice paste - or your arm is tired - scoop it up in your hands and rub it into the cabbage. Mix it up gently. Make sure every bit of cabbage has a little bit of spice on it. Then pack the cabbage into a large glass or ceramic jar. Make sure there is plenty of room, you don't want it to be crammed in there tight. Put a lid on it, but loosely.

Here is the kim chee sitting on my kitchen altar to ripen. Every day, I turn it over once or twice. Every other day I loosen the lid to let gas escape and to get a whiff of the lovely bubbling stinky fermented smell of it. The kim chee will be ready to eat in four days, but you can let it keep going pretty much as long as you want. Just refrigerate it after the first three or four days.

In my house, I am the only one who likes kim chee. If that's true in your house as well, you might try to make less kim chee than I did (that's a half-gallon jar in that picture). I imagine I'll be eating kim chee all by my lonesome well into winter.

Clearly, I spoke too soon when I said I was done preserving for the year (Canning Wrap Up (Green Tomato Chutney)). Not only did I make kim chee this week, but I also used up a serious milk surplus by making and canning about two gallons of cajeta. All those little jars on the top shelf are full of cajeta, as are the two half-gallon jars on the bottom shelf. The small jars I will probably give away for christmas presents and the large jars are for us. I know a gallon of cajeta sounds like a lot, but you would NOT believe how much of this stuff my husband eats. It goes in his coffee every morning, and he like a ratio of about 1:4 cajeta to coffee.

I am more or less happy with my pantry. In addition to cajeta, there are several quarts of cucumber pickles; some pickled beans and asparagus; several quarts of pear sauce; a few pints of homemade ketchup; and, of course, the green tomato chutney. That's the homemade, local side of things. As you can see, I'm not a purist about that. Costco has also provided many of the items in my pantry, from the fifty pound sack of rice to the crate of soy milk.

I believe, at the moment, that we have a good three to six month supply of food in the house, and that's pretty good. In addition to my dry goods pantry above (50 pounds of white and brown rice, 50 pounds of pinto beans, 12 pounds of pasta, crate of canned tomatoes, ten or so pounds of mixed dried pulses, canned tuna, flour, sugar, salt, etc) there is also the chest freezer and the cold storage. Right now, the chest freezer has one whole goat in it, as well as a few pounds of beef and pork. But I have already paid for a quarter steer and a half hog, which are currently being cut and wrapped. So in a week or so, the freezer will be full to bursting. Also in the freezer are the last of the berries we picked this summer. Not many left - a few pounds of blueberries and a quart of raspberries.

The cold storage has a dozen assorted large winter squash and a big box full of apples. I need a better cold storage system - right now it's just the cupboards out in the shed. This works fine for October and November - and most years, a lot of December as well - but if there's a real hard freeze everything out there would freeze. For now, I just make sure we eat everything up by the end of November. For the long term, I would like to dig a real root cellar.

Going into the cold season, I like to take inventory and make sure we are stocked up. It's not like we are isolated here - we are on a state highway and only ten miles from town - but even so. The weather here is more severe than I was used to in Seattle. Though we are only 100 miles to the north, it turns out that makes a pretty big difference. Add to that the fact that we are on a high, exposed hill that gets the full blast of the wind off the water, and it starts to become a little nervous-making. This year is a strong La Nina year - so I read in the papers - and that means more snow and extreme winter weather than usual. I remember very well the winter of 2008, when we were snowed in completely for a full week.

Of course, preparing for a winter like 2008 requires more than having enough food on hand. There's also the question of what to do when the power goes out. That, however, is for another post. For now, I'm satisfied with my kim chee and my pantry and my half-full tank of propane.

Turn the Page

I was out of town for three days, and when I got back, it was autumn. The temperature dropped twenty degrees and a chilly, saturating rain fell for 48 hours straight. Mud, which we haven't seen in months, manifested itself and the dogs tracked it all over the house. The pears on the pear tree swelled in the sudden moisture and began to fall. When the clouds blew away and the sky reappeared, it was a cold blue that did not seem at all the same as the soft summer sky of just a week ago.

The earliest leaves (the vine maples) had just begun to turn when I left on thursday last. Now, the big leaf maples have started to look yellow and ragged. Driving to my sister's house today, I noticed that the hills south of town have - as a whole - changed color. They now have a rusty tinge and have entirely lost the fresh green of young leaves. School starts tomorrow - or it was supposed to; the teachers went out on strike.

Summer blew by so fast this year. Summer was cram-packed. We went to Mexico for 3 weeks (Remote Post, 7/4/10 (Mexican Fireworks));then Dad came to stay for 3 weeks. I took the kids to Mom's place for a long weekend (Where I've Been....) and then I went to my brother's for another long weekend. And all of a sudden, that was it. It was over. Everything is suddenly all mushrooms and slugs.

Well, I should try to remember, it's only September 6th. Around here, September is usually a very nice month. It could easily get hot again before the autumn rot sets in for good. I hope so. I am just not ready for the endless damp; for the mold and the mildew; for the dark grey days that last a mere seven hours; for the rain that never stops and the mud that could swallow a cow without leaving a trace.

I am not ready for Hecate to take over the world. I am not ready for Persephone to sink into the earth and become Queen of the Underworld. I am not ready for the Dark Mother to make the Earth deliquesce like a pumpkin rotting on the porch three weeks after Halloween. I never even made up the household altar for late summer harvest.

That's probably why I feel unready. I have neglected the sacred calendar this summer. Suddenly I feel a very strong urge to go clean the living room and decorate the altar with the last of the the zucchini (which I picked an hour ago) and the first of the pears (likewise). It is still only the middle of blackberry season - I should get out and pick enough for a couple of pies. Likewise blueberries. There is still plenty of time to go get a bunch more blueberries.

Also I haven't done hardly any canning this year - asparagus in April and pickles in July was about the extent of it. I need to find a cheap source of many many tomatoes and can up a shitload of sauce. No wonder I feel out of sorts and off kilter. I really AM unready, in the literal sense. My pantry is virtually bare, at the very season when it should be bursting with abundance. I haven't done the labor appropriate to the season. I am nervous and unhappy because some part of my brain is shouting at me "you are all going to starve!"

Okay, so I have my work cut out for me. Re-establish the sacred calendar. Clean and sanctify my altar. Get some fucking food in the pantry. Celebrate Demeter amply, lest she transform into the hag of famine. Placate. Placate.

The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing)

we bought some kim-chee in a jar

wrapped it up and threw it in the car

but before we got too far

Oh God, what's that smell?

Have we driven into hell?

I don't think this bodes too well....

We got a kim chee situation!

it's lacto-fermentation!

stinking up the nation!

cancel the vacation!

- rock song made up by my daughter Rowan. Based on real-life events, as they say.

Lyrics notwithstanding, I actually love kim chee. It's not something I thought I would ever make at home, but all the books I've been reading about food preservation talk about lacto-fermentation (think sauerkraut and kosher pickles) as an indispensable technique. There is really a lot that is very cool about fermentation. It's the only common preservation method that actually increases foods vitamin content. It's basic kitchen-alchemy. Along with brewing, wine making, sourdough leavening, and the milk-preservation arts (which encompass everything from yogurt to kefir to Parmesano-Reggiano), lacto-fermentation feels like witchery.

In the best sense of course - women's magic, true old fashioned feminine wisdom. Passed down from grandmother to granddaughter (or re-learned when the generational chain gets interrupted, as it has for most of us). Not-so-secret knowledge of how to make good food that keeps the family alive and healthy. Beyond food magic, of course there are the traditional feminine mysteries of midwifery, herbal lore, sewing and the fiber arts. Horticulture. Storytelling, history-remembering, child rearing, nursing the sick and smoothing the way for death. All essential, all capable of opening up into a lifetime of study and practice.

I'm a generalist kind of person - I'll never be a specialist of any kind. I love to dabble and explore. I adore beginnings, and find it delightfully easy and fascinating to achieve a certain basic level of competence in just about anything - but I hate persevering after it starts to get hard. I'd so much rather move on to the next thing.

This has always been interpreted to me as a character flaw. In our culture, enamored of specialists, I guess it might be. Obviously, we need specialists! Specialists of all sorts. But I think we also need generalists. We need people who have a wide knowledge base, who know a little something about almost everything. People who can make up a story AND cook a balanced meal AND deliver a goat kid AND kill a chicken AND pick out a tune on the piano AND knit a pair of socks AND make a decent half-sour pickle. I'm an utter generalist, but even I have an area of expertise, and it's in the kitchen.

I love being a kitchen witch. I love developing a store of useful, practical knowledge and elaborating it into art. I also, of course, like to eat. I like the feeling of knowing my family can depend on me to put food on the table - healthy, nutritionally balanced, delicious food - day after day. I really really like the process of learning about all the food related arts I've been learning about these last few years. I like being a competent housewife, goddammit.

In the old days, the knowledge of preservation often was quite literally the line between life and death. But even without being quite so dramatic, imagine the difference between a long, northern-European winter with plenty of wine, beer, raised bread, pickles and cheese - or with only cold roots and rusks. I imagine people could make it through to spring on roots and rusks... but would they want to?

I know this is a big extrapolation from a gallon of kim chee, but I am very certain that MY house will be of the former variety in these long northern winters, not the latter.

And I'm proud of that.

Medical Preparation - Mediprep?

Christmas Day, I slipped on a patch of ice on my front porch and twisted my knee pretty severely. Today I finally got to the doctor and the diagnosis (which I had already come up with myself - R.N., remember?) is a sprained medial collateral ligament, possibly with a torn meniscus on top of that. Orders are ibuprofen around the clock until the swelling subsides, rest, ice, compression, and elevation (RICE), wait three weeks and if not significantly better, return for an MRI.

I think it will be fine - well, as fine as it was before, anyway, which isn't great. ("Doctor, will I be able to play the violin....I mean rugby?") But it got me thinking about preparation for medical emergencies. Lately I haven't been writing about it much, but my preparations for a more self-sufficient homestead are proceeding apace. Many of my major goals are either met (reproducing livestock, barns and fences, Homero's shop, biodiesel processor) or partially met (water storage, food storage systems, off-grid heat and cooking capability). Some are still in the planning stage (electricity generation).

Over the past several months I have slowly been building up the pantry, with the goal of eventually having a year's worth of food on hand. It's a gradual thing; an extra twenty pound of rice one week, a case of tuna the next, et cetera. When I hurt myself and it happened to be a holiday weekend with no medical attention short of the emergency room, it occurred to me it would be a good idea to do an inventory of my medical preparedness. One never knows what the future holds, and if it holds scenarios in which professional attention is not readily available (euphemism for "Oh crap, we're goin' down!") then it behooves us all to make what preparations we can.

As in other areas, medical preparedness consists of both knowledge and equipment. Although I am a registered nurse, my training is rapidly receding into the fuzzy past and it would be a good idea for me to take a first aid course. Every adult in a given household should at least have CPR training. Lucky for me I have all my old college nursing textbooks, which make a pretty big stack and include all kinds of extremely useful information. Many used bookstores carry textbooks, and emergency medicine texts should be relatively easy to find. This isn't the forum for a complete course in first aid, but adults should - at a minimum - know how to treat bleeding, recognize anaphylactic shock (extreme allergic reaction), give the heimlich maneuver and CPR.

Building a medicine cabinet is a good idea. We all have a bottle of aspirin in the cupboard, but that doesn't cut it. A good medicine cabinet will have a supply of both equipment and medicines. Here's a list of what's in mine - as a nurse, I have some things that aren't necessary or helpful for the average person, so take with a grain of salt.

Equipment:

Thermometer, band-aids, sterile gauze, tape, moist burn pads, ace bandages, self-adhesive wrap (horse tape), couple of assorted braces (wrist, knee) scissors of various sizes and specialties, good quality tweezers, nail clippers, chemical cold packs (if the power is out, you still want to be able to ice an injury), iodine and alcohol swabs, dental floss, stethoscope, otoscope, blood pressure cuff, blood sugar monitor. Measuring spoons and syringes (no needles). Epi-pen. cotton balls. An eyewash cup.

Medicines:

Not including prescriptions (try to have a month's supply of any prescription meds), aspirin, tylenol, and ibuprofen in quantity, including liquid and pediatric formulations. Benadryl for allergic reactions. Hydrocortisone cream. Triple antibiotic ointment (neosporin, for example). Tums or other antacid. An anti-diarrheal medicine and a laxative. Throat lozenges and spray - I like Chloraseptic, which actually contains an anesthetic. Mouthwash. Iodine. Hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol. Anti-fungal cream for vaginal infections. Nasal spray (good for bites and stings as well as stuffy noses). Epsom salts.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, though I'm sure more will occur to me later. Most of these items can be purchased at a VERY steep discount at Costco. For example, if you buy Ibuprofen in 24 caplet bottles at the grocery store, you will pay about $5.00. If you go to Costco, you can get 500 tablets for about 8 bucks. Same with Benadryl (diphenhydramine is the generic name) and things like band-aids. I think a year's worth of medical supplies is a laudable goal. Not all medications will last a year, but most will. Just keep the cap on that bottle of hydrogen peroxide!

UPDATE: I thought of a couple of items important enough to add. Vitamins and fluoride tablets or drops.

Winter Preparedness

There was a big windstorm yesterday. We didn't lose power here (there are few trees up here to interfere with the power lines) but my sister lost hers for most of the day. She is better set up to weather a storm than we are: she has a woodstove to provide heat and cooking facilities. I've been meaning for years to get a woodburning insert for our fireplace so that we can have heat in an emergency, but of course an insert won't address the cooking issue. Unless perhaps I can find one that sticks out a ways from the fireplace. We do have a wide stone shelf in front of the fireplace that would work. Or maybe I need to get a freestanding woodstove and put it somewhere else. I haven't got it figured out yet. There's also the second fireplace in the playroom we could cook on if need be.

But yesterday's storm did prompt me to go down to the sporting goods store and get supplies for a power-outage kit, which I will put into a plastic tub and slide under the bed. It includes several things that we wouldn't need in your basic power outage, but which might be useful in certain circumstances. I got:

1 dynamo (hand cranked) flashlight/radio/cell phone charger combo

1 dynamo 16 LED lantern/DC adapter (if I can figure it out, we should be able to use this to power our battery recharger and recharge all our

batteries.)

5 emergency rain ponchos

5 emergency space blankets

60 feet of light nylon rope

1 box strike anywhere matches

1 can opener

100 tea light candles

2 small propane canisters

1 burner that screws onto a propane canister for cooking

1 set of camping cooking gear (small pots and pans)

1 swiss army knife

1 10x12 lightweight blue tarp

several pairs "magic" gloves and warm socks in various sizes

I am probably missing something. Well for sure we need to store a few days worth of water. I have a six gallon carboy with an airlock - if I put a drop or two of bleach into it and fill it with tap water we will at least have drinking water for a couple of days.

That's actually my next big homesteading project: some water tanks to catch rainwater.

There's so much to do. Ahhhhhhhh.