The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon September 17th, 2007

We’ve been focusing on getting ready for winter at our house. The kids are watching various animals in our neighborhood making their preparations, watching the beavers rebuild their house, feeling the dogs’ coats thicken and watching the squirrels gather beech nuts and acorns. And of course, we’re collecting our own acorns.

As our homeschool focuses on “how we get ready for winter” we’re splitting wood and canning tomatoes, replenishing our supplies of basics like soybeans and popcorn, digging potatoes and onions and picking apples by the bushel at our local orchard. Mom and Dad both knit when we’re sitting quietly, and 3 1/2 year old Isaiah has started his first scarf and brought in his first pumpkin. The older boys take (heavily supervised) turns with the axe.

Now some of this is the weather. If you live in cool places, there’s something about shaking off the lethargy of summer and beginning the transition to winter. Some of it is necessity – our heavily local diet means that if we don’t preserve food, we’ll have a very boring selection of foods all winter.

Some of it, of course, is worry. It was less than totally cheering today to open my inbox and see that there was a run on a major, first world bank. I admit, that’s not something I’ve seen in my lifetime:
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/comment/article2964436.ece. I don’t think there’s a lot of doubt that the recession so widely predicted is going to happen. The question is how hard, and how fast, and how our own situation will play out. Untenured faculty and writers aren’t exactly raking in the dough, and the less I have to buy in tough times, the better.

But most of it doesn’t have anything to do with that at all – it has to do with the restoration of our connection to agricultural cycles. Most Americans have lived most or all their life in a society where thinking ahead to the future is not much required, but that was not true through most of human history. The reality is that for most of human history, life was cyclical, not immediate. You didn’t just eat seasonally, you lived seasonally. So in autumn, one was thinking not just of curried root vegetable soup tomorrow, but of what we would eat in the springtime, before the first crops began to come in. In May, one was thinking of next winter’s meals. And for northern folk, the whole of the world worked around one reality “winter is coming.” On some level, each season, from the spring planting to summer’s haying and canning to autumn’s harvesting was preparation for the space in between, for the dormant, quiet time in the middle.

A friend of mine who works at a historical reenactment museum says she hears almost daily “you left your beans too long…” or “those beets have gotten to big…” She observes that even those who clearly garden often don’t realize what is required to feed yourself through a winter without bananas and broccoli from Chile. Those beets have to be large to last, the beans are drying to be eaten that way in soup, and a percentage of all the crops must be left on the vine to provide seed for the next year. But we’re not in the habit of thinking in those terms, when so much is so readily available to us.

Right now, one of my jobs is to figure out where my spring crops will go – I have to plant the new garlic soon, and figure out which beds will get wood ashes over the winter and which won’t, because they’ll have tomatoes in them. So even now, as it gets cold and I bring in the cabbages, half my mind is in the springtime, and on next fall’s harvest. The turkeys go to the butcher next week, and the space is already reserved for the spring turkeys, and perhaps more geese. The barn is rebuilt for the milk goats I plan to add, and if we want to get them this fall, we must get the fence in the ground before it freezes, or we’ll wait until spring… It is an endless cycle.

I have wondered for some time if one of the reasons we as a society don’t seem to be able to look far ahead to a future that isn’t immediately visible is because we’ve gotten out of the habit of thinking further ahead than tonight’s dinner. I can’t prove it, of course, but I occasionally suspect that if we could just grasp again the habit of cyclical thinking, perhaps we might be able to see a little further on the horizon.

This of course, is merely speculation, the speculation of a squirrel in pursuit of her own nuts.

Sharon

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Sharon September 17th, 2007

I’d planned to write this post sometime in early October, but the cold front that brought temps down to the 20s and 30s in the north and frosted out some of my tomatoes made me think that it was time to talk about how to reduce energy costs and usage while keeping cozy.

The first goal is to wait as long as possible to heat the house at all. Now my house is divided into two parts – a well insulated newer addition (small) and a large, old drafty farmhouse (big). But even in the drafty farmhouse, we haven’t felt any need for the heat these last few days. Yes, it is quite chilly in the am, but with daytime temps in the 50s or higher and sun striking the house, we can count on warming things up during the day, opening the windows when the outside air is warm enough, and sealing the air in when it gets chilly. We simply dress warmly and cuddle up together – it is actually quite pleasant. We play “heater chicken” all fall, and try and see if we can go longer this year than last year. The goal is to reduce the heating season from Nov. 1 to April 1 – we usually end up fudging on one end or another, but we try to get closer each year.

We also don’t heat the bedrooms. The temps here in the hills of upstate NY have dropped to minus 30 degrees a few years ago, and routinely get to minus 20, but we’ve never heated our bedrooms. Ambient heat from the stoves and household drift upstairs through a couple of vents in the floor, and our bedrooms have been reinsulated so that even at their coldest, the temps are in the high 40s. We dress the children for bed in double layers – warm long johns covered with footed fleece pajamas (Lands End makes these up to size 14 kids and Big Feet Pajamas makes these in adult sizes, if you care – my crazy-tall 7 year old son is now almost ready for the smallest adult size), and have plenty of warm blankets. When we had young babies, they slept in the warmest room in the house (never dropped below 50), in the same outfits plus sleeper blankets. Even an infant over 10lbs (the weight at which they can maintain their own body temperature) can sleep in a cool room, and in fact, rooms in the low sixties or below have been found to reduce the risk of SIDS.

Our goal is to use the oil heat (mix of forced air and radiant floor) as little as possible and to use as little wood as possible. We do this by mostly living in the well insulated apartment during the winter, except when we have guests, keeping the heat low (50 (lower when the woodstove is going), 55 when we have guests), and by dressing appropriately. That means layers, long johns or tights under pants or skirts, t shirts under turtlenecks, under sweaters. In the early fall, after acclimating to summer, even 60 feels quite chilly. After a winter of shovelling snow and hauling water jugs to the poultry, 55 inside feels pleasantly toasty. The key is to acclimate.

We are in the process of reinsulating the older part of the house but this is an expensive proposition, so we’ve chosen cheap ways of dealing with this, including heavy curtains (you can make your own out of blankets or pretty quilts, or buy insulated curtains – we have a mix of both – there’s a great article here on window quilts: http://www.manytracks.com/Homesteading/winquilt.htm). We also have used free bubble wrap from packages on windows, and I’ve heard of people stapling the bubble wrap into wooden frames so it can be reused year after year.

If your walls are leaky, consider “tapestries” – they were the classic insulation of the past. Either make quilts or hang blankets. If you are cold at night, create an enclosed space that can be heated by your bodies – a four poster bed was not a mere decoration – the top and curtains meant that your body heated the space to a cozy warmth and kept the heat in.

Keep blankets around the house for when you sit, and a shawl is not a mere nicety, but a truly useful thing. Keep spares for guests, and perhaps extra warm slippers and a few sweaters to share. Drink hot beverages – my kids think a cup of herbal tea under a blanket with Mom while we read stories is a huge treat. Even a guest who isn’t used to the low-heat house will find themselves comfortable when offered a lap blanket, a warm sweater and a cup of hot chai.

Insulation doesn’t have to be expensive, if you do it a bit at a time. Replace old windows when you can, fill in cracks and otherwise, keep the house comparatively tight, while still allowing for good ventilation. But mostly, it is easier in many ways to acclimate and insulate yourself than to keep your house perfectly warm. A nightcap on your head, or a hat in the house will keep a good bit of your body heat in.

Most of us will find that we can tolerate a lot more cold than we’ve become accustomed to – it will take time and practice, but it is well within the realm of possibility. If we keep our houses heated to 70 or more, we’ll never allow our bodies to acclimate fully, and thus, we’ll never really appreciate how warm and cozy a fire in the stove can be, even in a cool house, as long as you are busy and working or playing.

Sharon

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