Change of (Beverage) Seasons

It’s been a few years since we last broke out the old cider press. This is the same machine my family used to press apples when I was a little kid growing up on a three acre hobby farm in Woodinville (years before the Microsoft campus transformed it from a sleepy, far-out Seattle suburb into software-mogul wonderland). My mom gave it to me when we first moved up here and started planting apple trees. 

Our apple trees have met various terrible fates. Some were eaten by goats, other run over with riding mowers when they were but tiny saplings. We do have one beautiful, well grown apple tree that I planted specifically for the purpose of making hard cider. It’s an antique variety called a golden russet. But it’s a late apple, best after the first frost, and also I don’t drink alcohol anymore, so it’s of minimal use on a warm September day when we feel like making cider. 

Therefore I invited my good neighbor Hilde and her family to make cider with us. They have a large old orchard with several different kinds of apples. We all traipsed out to pick apples, and her sharp-eyed daughter saved us from a fate worse than death by spotting this horrendously huge hornet’s nest hidden in one of the trees.

Carefully avoiding the tree of mayhem, we gathered several large totes full of apples. Hope kept asking “do you think we have enough apples?” and didn’t believe me when I told her we manifestly had more than enough apples. Like I said, it’s been a few years, but I can still do 5 gallon bucket-to-gallon jug conversions in my head. 

It was a lot of work, as cidering always is,,but we all had a great time. Hilde’s kids had never made cider before and they were excited to turn the crank and pass the apples hand to hand and pour the juice through sieves and funnels. 

And we made SO. MUCH. CIDER. As usual, the weak link in the cider-making chain is finding enough jars. We filled up all my half-gallon mason jars, which means it is truly the end of milk season (the goat is almost dry anyway). Luckily Homero rooted around in the recesses of his shop and came up with this 3 gallon skull-shaped beverage dispenser. It doesn’t have a lid, but we just put a plate on top of it and will dispense cider at will for the next few days. 

Operation Trampoline Rescue (From the Blackberries)

My youngest daughter is turning 18 this weekend (I am

brushing right past this fact quickly cause otherwise I’ll cry), and she asked if we could possibly get the trampoline into a usable state before her party. 

The trampoline, a very expensive and fine Rainbow brand trampoline with a 1,000 pound weight rating and zero springs, was the first recreational object we bought when we moved here. The kids have jumped on it pretty much since they were old enough to jump. 

But it hasn’t been used much in recent years, and the blackberries did what blackberries do to inert items left in one place for too long - they ate it. Not entirely, no. In fact they were mostly confined to the underneath part of the trampoline where we couldn’t mow. But over the years the vines got very tough, thick, and woody, and made it impossible to jump on the trampoline at the risk of doing your self a major injury. Actually, I guess the risk of major injury is kind of intrinsic to trampolines, but y’all know what I mean. 

The trampoline is too heavy to pick up and move. Only the occasional 80 mph wind gusts we get up here can do that. As proof against just that, several years ago we pounded some fence stakes into the ground and chained the trampoline down, so it’s EXTRA immovable. And of course it was also lassoed and tied to the earth by innumerable blackberry vines. Moving the trampoline to mow underneath it wasn’t an option. 

Papa to the rescue. I suggested using  the forklift to lift one side of it but he said the forklift needs to be on concrete or it will just tip over or sink into the ground. But he said the tow truck would work. And it did. Once he used the truck to pry the trampoline up on an angle, it was pretty easy to hold it up there. 

The Stihl has a branch-cutter attachment, so homero basically used a chainsaw on a stick to cut all the gnarly canes underneath while Paloma and her boyfriend held the trampoline up. Then Paloma went underneath with a rake and pulled out the cut vines, and I gathered them up with gloves on and put them in the wheelbarrow and hauled them over to the compost. 

It was about an hour’s work for four people. Some of the vines had grown through the net and had to be carefully cut from both sides and extricated, but we got it done. The trampoline is back in action.

The Rains Are Here (Hallelujah)

Third straight day of rain, hooray. 

The smoke is gone. I don’t think the forest fires are actually put out yet, but it won’t be long. The rain is supposed to continue for a week, at least. Who knows, they might continue until May of 2023. 

Alas, I think it’s too late to see any fall flush of grass. Temperatures have dropped precipitously and we won’t see much sun for a while. But without the cow (now in the freezer) we ought to have plenty of hay. 

Time to buy some propane, I guess. 

Yard work (Before and After)

This past week, the first week in April, has had typically schizophrenic weather. Bright sunny days alternate with gloomy, freezing days - and the occasional hailstorm thrown  in for fun. 

Last night there was a windstorm that blew frigid air into the house under the doors and -seemingly- right through the windows. But this morning dawned bright and clear, and warm enough that I felt like working outside.  It was cold, but not so cold that a few minutes with a hoe wouldn’t warm me up. 

The farm is a mess. I mean, it’s always a mess, kind of, but in early spring the accumulated detritus of winter really stands out. There’s work to do anywhere I rest my eyes. Today I decided to spend the day doing something about it. 

Turns out, “a day” for me means about four hours, and that right leisurely. Nonetheless, I did manage to make a noticeable difference. 

I cleaned up two small garden beds, each about two by ten feet. I dug out the buttercup and the grass roots, raked, and brought over fresh compost from the pile. I had a few plants in pots I wanted to get into the ground, so in one bed I planted a sage plant and some lemon thyme, and in the other I sowed scarlet runner beans. 

The trampoline has been overrun with blackberries over the last few years. It took me a solid hour with a pair of pruning shears and a pair of gardening gloves (not thick enough - need leather) to get it cleaned up. 

The cut blackberry vines went over the fence into the hot yard, where the goats were very happy to see them. There are still blackberries growing underneath, but I can’t get at those without loving the entire trampoline, which is staked down against the wind. That will have to wait. 

I did a good enough job for Paloma, anyway. 

DQ51 - State of the Farm

The pink dogwood in bloom. 

It’s an absolutely unbelievably gorgeous day. It just could not be more perfect. I think it’s about 72 degrees, the sky is a clear, glass-of-water blue, and the grass is finally long enough to ripple and glint in the gentle breeze. The mountains are out, still snow capped, decorating the horizon to the North and East. 

The girls and I spent an hour cleaning out the mama barn in preparation for the goats’ kidding, which ought to happen within a week to ten days. This year, we have three pregnant goats: Polly, Christmas, and Lilac, who is a first freshener this year. Polly and Christmas have both thrown quadruplets in the past. I hope they don’t do so again, but if they do, Paloma is eager to take over bottle-baby duty. Hopefully Lilac will just have one. It’s always a bit of a gamble with a first freshener, whether she will take to being a mama well or not. The truth his it usually works out better if I stay hands-off and let the mamas figure it out for themselves, but it’s always a challenge to do that. Watching baby goats try to stand up and nurse is probably the single most frustrating thing on the planet, and the urge to interfere is strong. 

The garden is going well. The first salad greens and radishes are just about ready to harvest. It’s almost time to move the chile plants out of the greenhouse, which will make room for tomatoes. Maybe even melons? My cucumber starts have not done well, though, and I don’t know why. I may have to buy a few starts, and if I want to do that, I’d better hurry up because vegetable start season is almost over. 

We are expecting the farm store to call us any day and tell us  the turkey poults we ordered are in. I ordered half a dozen “mixed rare breed” turkeys. I’ve never found raising meat chickens to be worth the expense and mess, but turkeys are both profitable and delicious, if we can keep them safe from coyotes. 

Life feels almost normal - to me, anyway. This is the best time of year on the farm, and the best time of year in the Pacific Northwest. May days like today - sunny, serene, flower-scented - are the reason we suffer through the long, dreary months of November through  February. More than usual, I feel the need to pause, recognize my blessings, and appreciate the ordinary beauty of my corner of the world. 

Hope and I were talking today about the state of the nation, about the disruption and the uncertainty, the fear and the despair for the future we are all feeling. She said “these are shitty times.” I agreed with her and said “yeah, compared with five years ago, these are shitty times indeed. But compared with almost every other time in all of human history, these are wonderful times. Look around you.” 

Look around you. 

Look. 

DQ8 - Alone With the Chores

Since my last post, the governor has increased restrictions, banning all gatherings, public and private, including even weddings and funerals. He has told all non-essential businesses to close and all non-essential workers to stay home. 

The list of essential workers and businesses is long  - long enough to invite skepticism, as did his inclusion of retail marijuana shops and their workers. I don’t know if he included liquor stores. Both Homero and I are considered essential workers. Homero still had work, but all my appointments for the rest of the week have been cancelled. All routine visits and follow-ups have been suspended to save PPE and reduce strain on health care workers. I heard from a nurse at the clinic on my last day in that even cancer treatments have been suspended. I hope that’s not true. 

So I’m at home with no valid way to avoid chores. Today Paloma and I transplanted the snap peas and I tackled this mountain of laundry:

DQ6 - Visit From Rowan

Our oldest daughter Rowan came by today. She’s been in isolation for ten days already, because she had a cough and a sore throat. No fever though. Chances are it’s her regular seasonal allergies and post-nasal drip, but nobody’s taking any chances these days. 

She and her roommates are also putting in a bigger garden this year, and she called to ask if we had any fencing lying around she could use to keep the dogs out of the garden beds. As does any good farmstead, we have a few rolls of chicken wire kicking around, and I said she was welcome to come get some. 

When she arrived, Hope and I were in the garden laying down cardboard and anchoring it with rocks that Hope and Papa gathered in the pig pasture. That’s where all the rocks are, but we were afraid of the pigs and thought they would bite us if we went in there to gather the rocks. Papa said “I’ll go” and it turned out the pigs weren’t interested in trying to bite anybody. Ten minutes yielded enough rocks to hold down all the cardboard I had brought home from gleaners. Gleaners is a basically unlimited source of cardboard, and I ought to bring home a lot more. 

Rowan looked at the old strawberry bed, which is pretty much just lawn at this point, and suggested we dig up any strawberries we could find and transplant them into the second of the old claw foot bathtubs. We have two, and the first one was planted with spicy salad mix yesterday by Paloma and me. 

Eight clumps of strawberries were rescued and transplanted. There is room in the bathtub for another four or so; I may pick some up at the farm store tomorrow. We also cleaned up another raised bed and prepared it for transplanting our snap peas in a few days. The snap peas are currently germinating on the kitchen table in five egg cartons. As soon as we can prepare enough space, I have radish seeds and beet seeds ready to go. 

Today I also sent out a message over Facebook that if anyone was in need of eggs - I hear they are scarce in the grocery stores - I have five dozen I am happy to donate to families in need. We have thirteen laying hens and this time of year we are drowning in eggs. Three people messaged me and we made arrangement to meet up. 

It’s very odd to go to the grocery store and see empty shelves. That’s never happened in my lifetime. I’m so used to abundance and variety that it seems almost to be a natural American right. Shortages? Long lines? That only happens 

in other places - poor places, “socialist” places - not here. 

Not in AMERICA.  I was at Fred Meyer yesterday. The produce section looked unchanged, thank God, but there were long stretches of bare shelving in the toilet paper aisle, the cleaning products aisle, the pet food aisle, and the liquor aisle. American priorities, amiright? 

DQ4 - Garden Notes

I haven’t bothered with a garden in years - beyond my perennials; rhubarb, raspberries, fruit trees - because I can get unlimited free produce from the gleaner’s pantry. This year, however, things are so very uncertain that it seems like it can’t be a bad idea to try to plant a few things. So far, gleaner’s is carrying on, but if the governor issues a shelter in place order, as so many others have, then I assume it will have to come to a halt. 

Our old garden space is a mess. The beds are entirely gone - just grass. Homero took a weed eater to the canary grass and Paloma clipped the blackberries. I hauled a few buckets full of compost and topped up one of the bathtubs. Then we planted a couple packs of spicy salad mix. 

A few days ago Paloma and I planted five egg cartons worth of snap peas, and they are germinating in the kitchen table. I’ll have to prepare a bed for them soon. Also sorted through some drawers and found seed packets of years past - most of the seeds will still sprout. I have cylindrical beets, radishes, and green beans. Also nasturtiums. No place to plant those though, until we do a lot more work. 

We have the time. Nothing but time. 

Snow Week (Indoor Chores)

The past week has brought frigid temperatures and a fair amount of snow - nothing like last year’s two and a half feet of snow, but enough to close school since Wednesday. And Monday being a holiday, we have quite a long stretch of being mostly home bound.

The first couple of snow days are always exciting, with a feeling of playing hooky. We play cards, break out the board games, watch movies, and play in the snow. But as the week stretches on, boredom inevitably sets in. The girls are used to three hours of wrestling practice six days a week, and they get antsy and irritable without exercise. The snow goes from pristine sparkly white to dingy grey, and my husband leaves gritty puddles behind him wherever he treads. The house starts to feel stuffy and stale, and we’re out of fresh food and snacks. There’s nothing to do. 

Time to get on top of some indoor chores. My mom used to answer every complaint of “I’m bored” by telling me to go clean something, and I guess I must have internalized  it. 

My New Year’s resolution was to clean out one cabinet or drawer per week. This old farmhouse has a truly absurd amount of storage; every room is lined with built in drawers and cabinets. Which is great, except that for the past thirteen years, whenever I find myself standing in the middle of a room with an object in my hand that has no designated location, I simply opened the nearest drawer and put it inside. Now every single one of my drawers and cabinets is basically a junk drawer, and all of my stuff is indiscriminately jumbled together and evenly distributed throughout aforementioned ridiculous amount of storage. 

So far I’ve cleaned out the silverware drawer and the spice drawer. It’s not as simple as removing extraneous stuff - kitchen drawers and cabinets somehow acquire a sticky layer of grime that needs to be scrubbed off. In the case of the spice drawer, there were enough spices embedded in that layer to make a medieval peasant rich for life. Today, I think I’ll tackle the beverage cabinet. That’s the place where I keep the coffee and coffee accoutrements, tea, chocolate, etc. 

Right now its cluttered with empty boxes, crumpled up coffee filters, dusty expired tea leaves, and random bits of kitchen equipment that I haven’t used in years. 

It’s also “tend to the ferments” day. Find the neglected jar of kefir in the back of the fridge, strain and wash the grains, scrub the jar and fill with fresh milk. Peel the crust off the sourdough starter, add some new flour and water, and set it in a warm place for a while. Sort through the jars of various fermented experiments that have gotten shoved to the back of the fridge and decide if any of them are worth keeping or if it’s time to give them all to the pigs. Start a few new jars with the vegetables that need to get used up. I found cabbage, carrots, and cilantro, ergo I’m making curtido. 

Also a good day to make slow food, so while I clean the cabinet I will be accompanied by the smell of beef bones roasting for the soup we will have for dinner later. My youngest child is keeping herself amused by teaching herself “Two Guitars” on the piano, and my other daughter is in her room attempting “Purple Rain” on her guitar. A homely cacophony as background noise. 

Snow days aren’t so bad. 

Snow for Days (Sno-Crastination)

It’s a repeat of 2017 - snow up to the roof. This picture actually taken yesterday; it snowed more overnight. It’s been snowing on and off for a week. It’s still snowing right now. Or at least I think it is - the wind is high, so maybe it’s just blowing the same snow around. It’s hard to tell.

The drift outside Paloma’s sliding glass door is taller than the dog. 

It’s hard to guess how much snow actually fell, because of the incessant wind. There are bare patches, and there are shoulder-height drifts. That same wind makes it RAWTHER unpleasant to go outside. So, we aren’t playing in the snow or making forts or having snowball fights, we are huddled inside around our eletronic devices. 

Other snow-day activities: Downton Abbey marathon; bread baking, making valentine’s day cards with scissors and glitter glue; teaching the kids to play gin rummy. 

Snow-day activities I ought to do but most likely won’t:

Clean the fridge; fold laundry; sort the snack drawer and cabinets; take pantry inventory. And the biggie - taxes. 

I will have to go outside of course. The animals need liquid water and more hay. Our new turkeys are shut up inside the mama barn and they need food and water. The goats need more hay. I’m not looking forward to chores this morning. 

Update: My wonderful husband did the chores

I must be old. I’d much rather watch the snow through the window than go out and be in it. 

Apple-anch, 2018

It’s apple season again, which means I’m too busy to write about it. These lovely specimens were part of a farm glean courtesy of the Gleaner’s Pantry. I’m hoping the weather holds and we can haul out the press this weekend, but in the meantime I’m dehydrating, making sauce and pies. 

Enjoy fall!! 

Preserving Log Update

Surely one of the very best smells in the world is that of a bubbling vat of apples, enriched with cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and sugar. Doesn't hurt to throw in a quart or so of freshly picked blackberries, either. 

Yesterday I went to a neighbor's house - a person who is becoming a very good friend - and took home two shopping bags full of transparent apples. If you, like my daughter, thinks a transparent apple is an apple you can see through, read and learn. Transparents are yellow apples that ripen early. They are specifically sauce apples, being good for not much else. They are too mushy to eat fresh, and too mushy to juice. But they make wonderful sauce. 

I had invited myself over to pick apples after noticing, as I was driving by, a transparent tree that was dropping it's apples already. I asked if I could come collect some and she said "Please!" Once there, i realized that she actually has a serious apple orchard - about twenty trees of many varieties, and most of them are positively loaded with (as yet unripe) apples. I suggested that I ought to lug over my apple press later in the season and we should devote a day to cidering. That idea was met with enthusiasm. 

Today was given over to making applesauce. Good thing I was recently gifted so many canning jars, or would have had to go buy a dozen quarts. A dozen quarts is what I ended up with - though I actually canned only nine of them, because that's as many as fits in my largest kettle. The other three are in the refrigerator. One will go back to my neighbor as thanks, and the other two we will eat quickly. 

I've made some jam recently too. So the preserving log update is as follows:

9 quarts apple-blackberry sauce

6 pints blackberry jam

1 gallon dried apricots

State of the Farm, Late Spring 2017

Nettles in the weeds

The long, horrible, wet "spring" of 2017 is finally giving way to some warmer and drier weather. I read in the paper that this past wet season (the period of time between October 1st and May 1st) has broken the all-time record for precipitation in western Washington - a record set just last year. Even with my week long break to Arizona, back at the beginning of April, I was going slowly crazy from sun deprivation and from the constant rain. I hate the mud, and still dealing with it in May has been dispiriting. 

More important than my mood, however, is that fact we haven't been able to get much work done around the place. Anything that needs dry weather - setting new fence posts in cement, planting trees, tilling the garden - has had to wait. Then when the weather is good, we all feel a sudden urgency to do everything at once. Luckily, I have found a new farm hand. He comes recommended by a neighbor farmer, and he lives very nearby. Although only 17, he has proved a hard worker and can handle a shovel with the best of them. Hereinafter referred to as "Farmboy." Today he planted three trees and made a temporary pen for the cow. 

The other day I walked the pasture and was disappointed with the state of it. In a normal year, the grass ought to be well over knee high by now. But what with the cool weather, the lack of lumens, and the number of animals on it, the back pasture's grass is only ankle height. This is despite the fact that I kept the cow and the pony in the sacrifice area for much longer than usual. We went through twice the normal amount of hay last year, due to that and due to the multiple prolonged cold spells and feet of snow. I have been moving the animals around, trying to maximize use of all the grass growing areas one the property. I bring the goats out into the front yard to graze anytime I am home and it isn't raining, but that's only half an hour here and there, and I don't think it takes much pressure off the pasture. The pony and the cow have been in the orchard for a couple of weeks, which was great until I noticed that the cow is eating the smaller trees. I didn't want to put the cow back into the main pasture with the goats both because of the grass situation and because she has become a terrible bully since her horns grew and she has actually injured one of my goats. Have I mentioned that I hate cows? 

There is one area where the grass is doing well - a boggy area about 60 x 200 feet behind the blackberries and adjacent to the small pasture. We have never made use of this area because it is wet, and also because there is a lot of debris and metal and concrete pieces in the ground left over from when the previous owners demolished their dairy barn. The grass growing there is lush, bright green, and shoulder height - but it is Canary grass. Canary grass is a non-native species that flourishes in our cool, wet climate. It has mixed reputation - most people (and certainly the noxious weed board) consider it an invasive nuisance that crowds out better forage species. Canary grass hay is the lowest, cheapest variety of hay, and lots of people won't use its at all. Other people, however, especially people with low,wet pastures, actually plant Canary grass on purpose. In general, the literature tends to say that it is tolerable forage, although most other species of pasture grass are preferable, and most animals will ignore it if better forage is available. 

Myself, I wouldn't buy any hay that had much Canary grass in it, no matter how cheap. I will, however, try to encourage my animals to eat it when it is abundant and other forage is not. To that end, I had Farmboy use T-posts and cattle panels to make an enclosure 32x32 feet. That will keep the cow busy for a few days and when she runs out we can just pound two more posts and move the cattle panels to close in another, similarly sized area. This will keep the cow fed and away from my goats. For a little while. 

The trees that Farmboy planted today were two lovely little Asian pear trees that Homero gave me for mother's day, and last year's Christmas tree, which has been sitting in it's pot on the porch since New Year's. I am not very fond of Asian pears for eating, myself, but both Homero and the girls love them, and I like them because they can be pressed for cider like apples (and unlike European pears). 

Other new developments: we bought six turkey chicks from a neighbor farmer, and Haku immediately killed two of them so now we have four turkey chicks. We also bought six golden sex-link pullets from another local farmer who said she just got over-enthusiastic at the farm store and realized, after raising them for a few weeks, that she didn't actually need thirty of them. It's nice to find pullets instead of chicks, that doesn't happen too often. Now we need to make repairs to the chicken coop. 

I'm not putting in a garden this year, expect for a handful of snap peas. It was too cold and wet to plant anything until last week, anyway. 

Overall, things are fairly copacetic around here. The baby goats are growing like weeds. I have plenty of milk and cheese season is in full swing. It's a gorgeous sunny afternoon and I think I will grab a book and go let the goats out. 

Farmhand Frustration

My oldest daughter, Rowan, moved out last December. She was twenty-two at the time, so I can't really blame her, but we miss her around here. Not only is she simply fun to be around, funny, cheerful, and smart as a whip, but she chucked in a good deal of the hard physical labor around here, and we miss her muscle as well as her wit.

A few years ago, Rowan used to have a boyfriend who I called "P." on the blog. For a while, he lived here, and he paid us rent in labor. P. was (and is) a quality young man, friendly, hardworking, and kind. We all liked him, and we still do, but alas, he is no longer around to be our farmhand. I have to say, I could really get used to having a strong young man in his twenties, with seemingly boundless energy, at my beck and call. It's a good thing for my daughters that the days of selling them to a suitor for a few years of hard labor are over, because I would be SORELY tempted.

Today, Rowan came back for a visit, and she helped us get some work done. It has been raining non-stop, seemingly for months. I know that I am constantly bitching about the weather this time of year (okay, really, when am I not?) but it has, in fact, been an unusually late, wet spring. I've just spent ten minutes trying to add an image, a chart showing triple normal precipitation for February and nearly double for March, but my computer is not being cooperative. See here if you don't believe me.

The farm is more or less underwater. A constant shallow river is pouring out of the driveway and into the roadside ditches. The pastures are more puddle than grass. And the sacrifice area - where all the animals still are - is a disgusting swamp of mud and poop. My poor goats are so desperately unhappy. Goats hate the wet. I finally told Homero that he simply HAD to muck out the barn (recently vacated by the pigs, who have been processed) so the goats can get out of the mud and slime. They are pregnant, poor things. This afternoon, he and Rowan spent a few hours mucking, laying down lime, and then spreading a bed of straw in the barn. The goats have been transferred. They look very happy to be dry. They are going to have to live in the barn itself, however, because we have not yet been able to fix the gate that closes in the main pasture. We need to set a new post in cement, and we can't do that until it dries out a bit.

Remaining in the sacrifice area are Rosy Pony and Nettles the Cow. There is not enough room for them in the barn with the goats, so they are going to have to deal with it a while longer. They have a field shelter, which keeps the rain from falling on their heads, but which does nothing to keep the wet from seeping in from underneath. Even under the roof of the shelter, the ground is soggy and poopy and gross. It needed bedding.

We do, in fact, have a ton of hog fuel, thanks to my brother-in-law and his tree service. Whenever he has a job nearby, he will stop here and dump the chips. Maybe fifteen yards are piled up alongside the fence.  But there is no good way to move to around. Homero's Case loader is broken (it's normal state of being; the Case has basically replaced the Murray lawnmower as his personal mechanical nemesis). We have a big, deep black rubber wheelbarrow, but its tires are flat and it is in the playroom full of a bunch of Homero's heavy power tools. No good way to spread any hog fuel, other than plain old fashioned elbow grease.

Rowan and I spent a half hour or so in the driving rain this afternoon, expending aforementioned elbow-grease laying down a layer of chips in the field shelter. I filled five gallon buckets with chips and passed them over the fence, and she trudged through the mud to the field shelter and dumped the chips inside, kicking them around to cover the space evenly. It was a stop---gap measure, to be sure, but at least the cow and pony will sleep dry tonight.

I need to find a farmhand. I was never very strong, but nowadays I can not even make a pretense of being able to do things like muck out deep litter. Last week, Homero and I cut apart the old calf--hutch that was ruined and ripped by windstorms, and I was at least able to help him drag the big awkward pieces of plastic through the field. That was tough. I cannot spread fifteen yards of hogfuel, or turn the compost pile, or mix cement. We need regular, if sporadic, help for that sort of thing, as well as for placing cattle panels, turning the compost pile, making dump runs, planting trees, et cetera.

Yesterday I placed a plea for help in a Facebook farmer's group. I gave a description of what I needed, and offered $15/hour plus transportation, tools, and lunch. I have had several responses, and a couple of them even come recommended. Here's hoping one of these young people works out.

Spring Cleaning, Part One

A beautiful day in earliest spring, notwithstanding a stiff, cold breeze and two inches of new snow on the ground when we woke up. Now, in mid-afternoon, the sun is warm and bright and the sky is very blue. The snow was all gone by the time I got home from church. I felt like getting some work done around the place.

First things first. It was clearly past time to take down my winter altar and put up the early spring altar. Ordinarily I would do this around Imbolc, but it so happened this year that there were two feet of snow on the ground at Imbolc, and it did not feel at all like the season of emerging had yet come. I left up my storm trees, and then I sort of forgot about it until today.

I can't put up a new altar until I've cleaned the old altar, and as I was preparing to do that, I looked around and saw how awful the whole house was. Really, a clean altar needs a clean room. And one clean room in a dirty house is just a sham. So I started cleaning. I put on a disc of old time Boogie Woogie piano music and scrubbed and swept and opened all the windows. I can't say the house is actually CLEAN clean, but I got it clean enough lay a new altar. The cool wind blowing in through the open windows did as much or more as I did to freshen the place up.

Then I went out to the barnyard. The goats are due to kid within three weeks or so - I think; I'd better check the blog for when they were bred - and the Mama barn is a mess. Paloma came out with me and we stuffed all the empty feed bags full of trash - empty plastic bags, mainly. I bring home so much bread from the gleaner's pantry that the bags really pile up. Also many many yards of orange plastic baling twine. We've gone through a hundred bales of hay this winter, so there are at least two hundred strings. Paloma is braiding some of them into a string leash for Haku. We will also reuse some of it tying up the cattle panels where they are sagging. But there always seem to be a surplus of orange strings, getting into the compost pile or buried beneath the bedding, sometimes a loop sticking treacherously up to snag a passing ankle. Pulling it out when it is well and deeply embedded in old bedding is a chore.

Taking another empty feed bag with me, I walked the soggy pasture to pick up more trash - more bags that have blown away and gotten strung up on the fences, or entangled in blackberry bushes. Long shards of corrugated plastic that were once part of the roof on the chicken coop, and which were shredded in windstorms and blown away.We re-roofed the chicken coop with corrugated tin, but it, too, has been crumpled and shredded by the wind, and is now curled up in long strips and makes a fearful racket on days like today. I don't know what we will do next for the coop roof. I think it needs an actual framed roof. However, as there are no longer any chickens (except three skinny roosters) it is academic. I don't know if I mentioned that the chickens have all either disappeared or been caught and eaten by our horrible pigs.

The horrible pigs are dead. The butcher came friday. We will keep the meat from the smaller one, and the bigger one has been sold off in halves. I am very very glad they are gone. No more pigs for the foreseeable future.

There is still a great deal of cleanup and repair to do before it gets much later in the season. One of the gateposts to the main pasture rotted through, and half of the gate fell down. We haven't replaced it yet, because its been so wet and awful, and the animals are still eating hay in the sacrifice area anyway. But it needs to be repaired before we can let the animals out to graze, obviously. The calf hutch, which we have had for about eight years, finally - yes, you guessed it - blew away in a windstorm. It had a few cracks in it already, but now it is a twisted wreck washed up against the back fence line. Theres no way I can move it, that will require Homero and another man.

No sign yet of nettles or daffodils. There are some pale green spikes sticking out of the ground near the highway, though. I think I will go take a look at the willow out by Homero's shop and see if there are any pussies (?) on it yet. If so, I will cut a few wands for the altar.









   

Doing Chores in Winter Wonderland (Too Old for this Shit)

It is snowing. It is snowing sideways. It has been snowing sideways for the better part of four days. There is a foot and a half of snow on the ground and more is coming down every minute. Some of the drifts are three feet high. All the sliding glass doors are iced shut. School has been cancelled again, and the children are stir-crazy.

I feel like Gene Wilder in the old version of Charlie and the The Chocolate Factory - just picture me with my hair standing up and my eyes bugging out as I intone, in a voice that slowly rises to a shriek, "It is snowing, snowing, SNOWING... and it shows no sign of SLOWING... there's no earthly way of KNOWING... just how long it will keep GOING...."

I am old as dirt. I am rickety and fat and I have a nasty head cold. My knees sound like a bowl of rice krispies even just walking around indoors. I am getting too old for this shit. I just went out to feed the animals, and what is ordinarily a ten minute job is a half an hour slog, beginning with putting on my socks - not as easy as it used to be - and carefully stepping into one gum boot, and then the other, holding on to the wall because my balance ain't what it used to be either. Then I have to pick up the five gallon bucket full of slops for the pigs (kept inside the playroom so it doesn't freeze) and there's no handle on this bucket so I have to hug it with one arm and try to open the sliding glass door with the other while my giant, idiot dog leaps around me like a deranged jack in the box.

On the sixty-yard walk to the barn, I had to set the bucket down to rest three times. I am more out of breath than usual, due to the aforementioned nasty cold. The snow is heavy and has an icy crust on it. Haku runs lightly over the crust, but I break through and sink up to my knees with every step. I haven't put on a hat and my hair is whipping around, blinding me. The snow hits my face hard enough to sting, flying at me sideways from the north-east. Finally I make it to the field shelter, where Haku is leaping up against the fence, barking at the ram. The ram is charging the fence over and over again. I yell at Haku and he runs off to bother the pigs. I throw the goats and the pony and the ram two loaves of bread and then give the pigs the slop bucket.

There are very few chickens left. The chicken coop came unroofed in the last storm and we haven't been able to fix it yet. The chickens took to roosting in the main barn, but thats where the pigs are - and the pigs caught and ate several chickens. Horrifying. I've never had a pig do that before (although once a pig chased a mama hen off her nest and ate up the day-old chicks). We are down to three chickens. Some of the others have just disappeared. Hopefully, they have found their way over to the neighbors, who has a nice, cozy coop, and integrated themselves into his flock. We are going to have to address the chicken-attrition at some point, but not today.

The hose is frozen, so I am watering with buckets. I can't lift a full five gallon bucket over the fence, so I have to fill it halfway and pour it into the trough over the fence and repeat several times. There is an ice slick around the water pump. On my third or fourth trip I slip on it and crash, landing heavily on my hip and - though I don't notice this until later - cutting my arm on the sharp crust of snow. In my slippery gumboots, it takes me several tries to stand up.

The last job is getting hay for the pony and goats. I grab an armload of hay from the mama barn and trudge towards the field shelter, eyes closed as much as possible to keep out the flying bits of hay. I am in a whirlwind of snow and hay particles. I really ought to go into the sacrifice area and put the hay inside the field shelter, but I can't open the gate because it is stuck inside a frozen drift of snow two feet high. So I heave my armload of snow over the fence and at least a third of it flies right back at me. "Fuck it," I think, "They'll live until tomorrow."

My dog has disappeared. He's white, therefore pretty well camouflaged. I yell for him all the way back to the house, and then stand there yelling until he finally comes prancing through the curtain of snow into visibility. By the time we both make it into the house, I am exhausted.

Days like this I want to give up. I want to just throw my hands up and say "it was a good run, eight years of farming, it's time to retire." But of course I don't really want to do that. The goats are pregnant and in a few months all will be green grass and flowers and baby goats. I'll be milking and making cheese and loving life.

Besides, I can't give up. We need this farm now like never before! Our new commander in chief is determined to start a trade war with Mexico (among other countries) and they provide forty percent of our winter fruits and vegetables. If the Trumpster succeeds in antagonizing all our major trade partners, it won't be long before we all feel the results in the price of food. And that's just the beginning. I think the possibility of something awful happening to economy - like hyperinflation maybe - within the next several years is not out of the question. It could get pretty Mad Max around here before too long. I'm putting in a much bigger garden this year, and planting more fruit trees. Homero has taken his sustainability projects up a notch as well.

So there's no rest on the horizon. I better start taking care of my knees - maybe I can schedule surgery on my other knee while I still have health insurance. Inshallah.

Is There Anything as Good as Apple Cider?

Oops, that's a picture of bowls full of cherries. When I selected the thumbprint, I thought it was buckets of apples. Oh well - doesn't matter. I didn't take any pictures of the first - and probably only - cider pressing of the year, because I was too busy pressing cider!

We didn't make any cider at all last year, and I missed it. Cidering is very hard work - even if you can convince other people to bring you apples so you don't have to pick them all yourself. But it is so, so worth it. There's almost nothing as good as that first drink of fresh apple cider after the sweat and the aching back of cidering.

Things that are not as good as fresh apple cider:

- finding a twenty dollar bill in the laundry

- coming home to an unexpectedly clean house

- seeing a movie you thought was going to be dumb but it turned out to be really good after all

- losing five pounds somehow without even really trying

- (average) sex

- a phone call from an old friend

- when you thought you were wrong in an argument but later you read something and find out you were right all along


Things that are almost as good as fresh apple cider:

- getting a handwritten letter in the mail from an old friend

- finding a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk

- surprise bouquet of your favorite flowers from the husband AND an unexpectedly clean house

- discovering a really, really great new author

- that dream, that one dream, swimming effortlessly underwater like a mermaid in a coral garden

- the hot bath you take after a hard day's work on the farm

- baby goats


Things that are better than fresh apple cider: 

- only you know the answer to this one. We each have a different answer and I'm not telling mine.

Work Pile

There is so much work piled up around the farm that I figured I had better make a list. Not that I'm likely to forget what needs doing, since it's mostly all of the variety that you SEE when you LOOK AROUND, but even so. Lists are helpful. Helpful in putting off the actual work.

Since the weather turned about two weeks ago, we seem to have regressed back into late winter. After a sunny, dry February, we have been not-so-much enjoying a cold, wet March. It's back to mud boots and puddles, and I am feeling smugly superior to all those people who gave into temptation and planted their garden a month ago, only to watch it all rot in the ground. I can afford to feel superior, because I have been those people, every year except this one.

Mud boots and slickers; gloves and hats are once again required gear for venturing out. So, most of the outdoor work has to wait for a dry spell, but here we go, in no particular order:

1. muck out the barn. The animals don't like the rain, so they spend all day in the barn, which means it quickly gets disgusting. I ran out of straw a week ago (subheading

                 a) get more straw

    and so the barn floor is a thick compressed four inches of poop and old straw. It will soon be too                 compacted for me to move, so either I do it soon, or add it to Homero's list of chores, which is far longer than my own.

2.  Repair chicken coop. This is actually a fairly small job, although difficult for me as it involves climbing onto a roof. We just need to pick up the shattered remains of the plastic corrugated roofing (blew apart in a windstorm) and replace with corrugated tin roofing - already bought and stored right in the coop itself. Without a roof, the coop is just a swamp and the chickens have been roosting in the hayloft. Which means I have to convince a child to climb the ladder into the loft to gather eggs about once a week. I no longer climb into the loft. Not until we get a better ladder, anyway.

3. Dump run of historic proportions.  Homero recently cleaned out his shop. In a big way. In addition to removing the enormous stack of wood and building materials that are all that is left of our cute little cabin (story for another day), he also removed approximately 7,000 hefty bags worth of trash and assorted refuse, much of which is stuff we stored in the shop when we lived in Mexico a couple years ago (NewtoMexicanLife.blogspot.com) and never brought back into the house. Mostly books and clothes, but more than likely a few valuable items like photos and journals are also now mouldering in the rain alongside the fence, which is where the 7,000 hefty bags are resting, awaiting their final transport to that great refuse heap in the sky. Or, you know, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. 
   
       
4. Strawberry Patch - as mentioned above, I have done almost nothing in the garden this year so far. I have some starts going in the greenhouse, but no work has been done outside. A few days ago, a good friend gave me a trash-bag full of strawberry starts, and I would like to get them into the ground soon.  My garden space is slowly undergoing a transformation from a regular mostly-annuals kitchen garden into a perennial garden, full of raspberry canes, rhubarb, artichokes, asparagus beds (soon), and strawberries. Hopefully the rain will let up soon and we can get the strawberries into the ground.

5. Hoof trimming. Seems like it's always hoof-trimming time.

6. House projects - this is really Homero's purview, but my part of this work is to keep a running tab on what needs to be done; to budget for it; to gently remonstrate with Homero, and to prioritize. I'm not even going to go into that list here (plumbing projects, rot-repair, weatherstripping repair, etc) but just say that this list takes a psychic toll on me because I usually eventually have to threaten to call professionals and try to balance the relative importance of marital harmony against, oh, say, a working shower.

7. Fencing. I still have most of the cattle panels I bought last fall when we had some cash. We did the cheap and dirty thing by just using some of them to patch droopy spots in the field fencing. One of the larger projects that awaits drier days in actually removing and re-positioning all the cattle panels so as to make a real, continuous fenceline.

That's enough for now. Right at the moment, my regular daily work awaits - I need to move the ponies, milk the goat, and make dinner.

The Worst Job on the Farm (Disbudding)

Meet the littlest baby goat. Flopsy gave birth just a week or so after Polly, who lost both babies
( Sad Day (Breeding Gone Awry)) because we didn't know she had got pregnant so early and also because she can apparently hide twins in her belly and still look like a caprine supermodel. After that sad day, of course I kept a sharp eye on the other goats, and so we had plenty of time to lock up Flopsy in the warm, dry mama barn when she began to show signs of impending labor.

Surprisingly, she only gave birth to one baby, this fine spotted buckling you see above. Flopsy has thrown triplets more often than anything else, although her first baby was a single buckling as well, the inimitable Storm Cloud. It seems that whenever a goat throws a single, it is always a big buckling.  Iris once  had a single buckling, Clove, who was so big and vigorous he was trying to stand up before he was all the way out.

It may be that this little guy is our only baby goat this year. If Iris is pregnant it will be quite a while yet - she is thin and shows no udder development at all. At nine years old, her fertility may be declining, which is fine by me. Iris has given us many beautiful babies over the years and produced an awful lot of milk. She has earned her retirement. I don't mind if we don't get more babies - the market for goats has been poor for years now, and we often end up eating them instead of selling them. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it wouldn't bother me to take a year off from butchering.

I'm going to try to sell this little fellow as an intact buck. He has a fair chance, I think, because of his lovely spots. If I knew for certain he were destined to be a meat animal, I wouldn't bother with disbudding him, but there is absolutely zero chance anyone will buy a buck with horns. Nor should they; a full grown horned buck would a dangerous animal during rut season. So, today we disbudded him.

Disbudding baby goats is a terrifying procedure carried out with a red-hot iron (or actually, copper, as seen on the model above). I used to pay the veterinarian to do it under anesthesia, but that became prohibitively expensive as the price I could get for baby goats declined. Also, the vet killed one of my babies by accident ( This One Really Hurts (Bad Year for Baby Goats)) and I figured if anybody is going to kill one of my babies, it might as well be me.

Homero built me a kid-containment box out of an old bookshelf and I bought a disbudding iron off the internet. Last year I borrowed a friend's iron just to see if I could handle the procedure, and it turns out I can. It's horrible, but I can do it. Last year I disbudded three babies and they all turned out fine - no brain damage - and as far as I know they never grew any scurs, either. This year's baby buckling is now disbudded and back with his mama, seemingly none the worse for the experience. I'll watch him carefully and check him early in the morning for any signs of brain injury, but I think I have successfully added disbudding to my list of farm tasks that I can competently do, unpleasant as it is.

We're Having Authenticity For Dinner (Tepache)

tepache in the garage

We are having a pretty simple supper tonight: pan fried trout, baked potatoes, and braised red cabbage. It smells wonderful in my kitchen right now (even though I haven't fried the trout yet) and I thought I'd put up the recipe for the red cabbage. But when I started to compose it in my mind, I realized that this recipe - and those for the other components of dinner -is actually very involved, and interesting, if I describe it correctly.

It's apple season. I love apples, and I love apple season, but we still, after seven years here, do not have our own apples. I have a beautiful old cider press and every year I go in search of apples to feed it. Two weeks ago, a lovely older couple from church told me they would be happy - nay, grateful - if I would go to their house and pick apples from their six trees. Every year the apples fall all over the yard and they are getting rather elderly and stiff to be picking them all up. My sister and I went together and picked something like three bushels of apples, and spent a few minutes picking up windfalls as a thank-you.

Then I pressed cider with a neighbor, who also brought a few bushels of apples. Fresh cider is wonderful, and we drank as much as we could as fast as we could, but even so, there was a three gallon carboy leftover that fermented gently in the garage. A week after the pressing, the cider in the carboy was fizzy and delicious, lightly alcoholic (probably one-and-a-half percent, so weak that I let the children drink it), and beautiful over ice on a warm September afternoon. Now, two weeks after that, it is edging into apple cider vinegar territory.

It isn't quite vinegar yet. But neither is it cider anymore; what I have now is a couple gallons of tepache. Unless you are Mexican, and a rural Mexican at that, you probably don't know what tepache is. Tepache, along with pulque, is a quintessential rural Mexican beverage served at festivals and rodeos and birthday parties back in the hill country, and out of clay jugs on market days in small towns. It can be made from apples, or peaches, or plums, or various Mexican fruits that don't grow around here, such as ciruelas and tunas. Basically, it is a weak fruit beer. It's impossible to get drunk on tepache, but if you quaff enough of it on a hot Mexican day while watching a parade, you can get a small but pleasant buzz. The tepache in my garage is fairly far over onto the vinegar side of the spectrum. It's still tasty, but I wouldn't want to drink a pint of it. There is still a gallon and half of it, however, and I have to do something with it, fairly quickly.

Today was a gorgeous day, sunny and warm. The garden has been neglected lately, and it was past time to get out there and pick what was left to pick, dig the potatoes (which was a chore, since the plants died back ages ago and the weeds grew over), and do general cleanup. There's not a whole lot left, but I picked a quart of cherry tomatoes and dug a few pounds of potatoes. There are six red cabbage and I picked two, leaving the other four in the ground for later. I ate the last of the overbearing golden raspberries as I worked. The hubbard squashes, which did not do well, have died back already and I brought in the two small blue squash. My chiles dried on the plants ion the greenhouse and I picked them all as well. I am by no means done putting the garden to bed, but at least I made some progress.

Carrying in my potatoes and cabbage, the outlines of dinner came to me. Several weeks ago, my daughter Hope's best friend came over to spend the night, bearing a dozen beautiful little trout she had caught with her grandfather, already cleaned and frozen. I took the trout out to defrost and sliced the potatoes to roast in a shallow pan with olive oil and salt.  I wanted to give the cabbage a German/Eastern European treatment, braised with bacon and spices. I looked up a few recipes, and all of them called for apple cider vinegar. Well, of course I have some apple cider vinegar in the house, but I thought tepache would serve beautifully.

Except for the spices, everything we are eating tonight came from either our own garden or a neighbor. Everything is local to within a few miles. Everything was procured with our own labor and knowledge, or our friend's labor and knowledge, and grown in our own dirt.

Once, years ago, when I wrote a post about the importance of being able to produce my own food, my brother told me he didn't see the difference between producing your own food with your own labor, or using your labor to make money and buy your food. It was kind of an "if you have to ask, you'll never know" moment, but I just thought of an analogy he might get. What's the difference between writing a piano concerto yourself and playing it on a piano yourself, or paying somebody to write and preform a concerto for you?

Braised Red Cabbage

1 medium or two small heads red cabbage, from your garden. 

1 large red onion, ditto

1/2 pound bacon, preferably from your own pig

1 pint homemade tepache

1 tsp caraway seeds

1 tsp black mustard seeds

6 allspice berries

1 tsp black peppercorns, crushed

1/2 tsp salt

In a medium saucepan, fry chopped bacon over medium heat to render fat. Saute sliced onion and sliced red cabbage. When vegetables are beginning to soften, add spices and fry for a few minutes more. Add tepache and bring to a fast simmer. Cover and cook until cabbage is very tender, about 30 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.