The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon June 10th, 2009

During the winter, I managed the not-very impressive feat of hand-taming some of the birds that come to our feeders.  The chickadees particularly are both greedy and fearless, these tiny, courageous things that don’t seem to realize just how small they are.  In the dead of cold winter, food is important, and after a few passes, coming to my hand was not all that hard.

The boys, of course, wanted birds to come to their hands.  Isaiah, who is naturally good with animals, managed it once or twice, but the others simply couldn’t stay still long enough to have a bird come to their hand – the wriggles of childhood were just too built in, and when one approached, they would get excited, and begin to jump about.  So we shrugged and went on to other things

This morning, however,  I came out to see all three of my younger boys carefully, silently, in perfect stillness, holding up nectar-rich flowers, and from hand to hand, there flitted a yellow butterfly, sipping from those flowers, which my sons – 3, 5 and 7, managed to keep perfectly still.

After a while, the butterfly wandered off to find new nectar, and I asked the boys how they had kept so very still for the butterfly.  Simon told me that they’d seen the butterfly approaching, and that they knew that it wanted to come to them.  So, as he said, “we decided we’d be flowers ourselves, and flowers don’t move when the wind isn’t blowing.”

I admit, I was a little astonished that my three bouncy children could be as still as plants, rooted to the ground, and I wondered how they knew so certainly that the butterfly wanted to come to them, so I asked.  Isaiah looked at me as if I was the silliest creature ever – “It looked like it wanted to be with us.”

If I were a good writer, I’d make that a metaphor for something, but in a way, I think it would spoil it.  But it is good to know that stillness comes when the moment calls, and that boys and butterflies have much to say to one another.

Sharon

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Sharon June 9th, 2009

I thought y’all might want the grand tour of Sharon’s famous food storage.  So here goes – come along for the ride?  Note – if you are a zombie, come to take my food, well, you probably know how to use GoogleEarth anyway, so whatever.  Just do me a favor, and try not to smash the kimchi jars as you rampage - that stuff stains the rugs.

 Welcome – did you notice the gardens as you came in?  You came down the driveway, past the fenced front yard where the main gardens are, and then in through the side yard gate (we fenced to keep the goats out) into the kitchen garden.  The kitchen garden is an important part of my food storage – many of the raised beds have window coldframes that can go over them, so that I can keep things going through my favorite lazy person’s method – just leaving the stuff there.  Mulch is another great tool – piled on stuff, a lot of the root crops will keep.  But right now most of what’s growing there is for summer eating, so we’ll skip over that part of it.

Yup, those are kids – they are important in my food storage planning, mostly because I always fail to remember that they get bigger and eat more every year.  It is pretty funny how much four really active boys actually eat already – I think the only way I could possibly afford to feed them is to do what we’re doing – buy in bulk and grow our own. 

As you come in the kitchen door, you’ll see that there’s a large black wood and glass thingie sitting on the top of the rainbarrel – that’s one of my solar dehydrators, and at the moment it is full of rhubarb.   I have a bigger one, but I haven’t dug it out yet, since serious preservation hasn’t begun.  I’m still looking for sawhorses to put the big one up on – right now, I’m using hay bales.  I also use them for my coldframe, and after a season’s use, they make great mulch.  Oh, and check out the cool rocket stove – isn’t that great – my friends Larry and Gail made it and gave it to us.  I’m going to make another larger one soon.  The solar oven is usually out this way too, but it is too overcast to use today.

The mudroom, as you come in, is also a good place to dehydrate – it has a lot of glass and gets extremely warm in the summer – I’ve dried burdock root there and also tomatoes.  But to do that right now, I’d have to clean it – always an issue with me.  So try not to look at the mess!  Actually, that’s a good rule here in general, not just in the mudroom.  I always tell people we’re like your favorite little hole-in-the wall restaurant.  There’s no atmosphere to speak of, you don’t want to look too closely at the kitchen and no one will ever give us four stars.  On the other hand, everyone enjoys hanging out there, the company is good, the food is great and if you don’t look to closely, it has a homey feel.

 Yup, that’s the famous wood cookstove. It gets used a lot for preserving in the fall – I love the thing, and love having the whole surface to work with, rather than just a few little burners.  Right now, however, it is mostly too warm for that, so that’s where I’m keeping the bowls of harvested things.

On the left, you’ll see the wall of wood shelves – before that, I had cheap metal shop shelving there for years, but we managed to put in something nicer and sturdier.  Still, the cheapies worked fine.  The top shelf, over the glass doors, holds my food storage equipment – the food mills, dehydrator, some canning jars, the pressure canner.  Also my homemade liqueurs and pickle overflow, as well as my kerosene lamps and solar lanterns.

Moving down, there are the herbs and medicinals in their jars in the dark spot by the door, then several shelves of home canned stuff – a selection.  At the moment the pickings are kind of thin – I’m trying to use up or give away a lot of it.  Not that it goes bad, but I need room for this year’s bounty.  But there are still plenty of pickles, there’s peach sauce, some rhubarb, cranberry vanilla jam, some strawberry jam, canned chicken broth and a few other things.  I need to do inventory soon, so I know how many jars of each thing we used this year – some things I know we need more of – we ran out of salsa really early, for example. 

On the other side of the wall are dried beans, grains, pastas, sugar, salt,  etc… all in glass jars.  Some of them I collected myself at yard sales, but many of them were people’s discards taken straight out of the recycle bin.  I try to keep a little of everything out on the shelf – I can always go back and get more out of the buckets.  Those shelves could use reorganizing, and I plan to do that…any day now .  But it does look pretty with everything out like that, if I do say so.   Besides, it frees up my limited cabinet space for pots and pans and dishes and such – and in a kosher kitchen, there are lots of those. 

Over here on the counter I’ve got my grain grinder, and underneath this old one, I store the really awkward big stuff – the giant pressure canner, the crock pots, all that stuff that doesn’t really fit.  Check out my dishwasher – it doesn’t work, it never really did, but it is a great place to store canning jars.  Cool, no?

I hang herbs and greens from the rafters in the kitchen and the big living room – the beams in the living room are from an old Quaker barn – the area has a large Quaker settlement – and they are gorgeous, about 150 years old.  They look really cool with herbs and dried flowers hanging from them, although, of course, it does lead to bits of dried herb on the floor now and again. 

The dining room doesn’t have much but my vast collection of cookbooks – but they are as integral to my food storage as  anything is – we live out here in the boonies, and there aren’t any good restaurants that deliver, so we cook three times a day, every day.  I find a lot of inspiration and good ideas in my self-indulgently large collection. 

Come through the kids’ playroom/schoolroom into the back.  This was Eric’s grandparents’ room, and if we ever find someone to share the house with, we’ll have to move things around, but for now, we use it for miscellany – art supplies, school books, the freezer, and food storage.  Out on open shelves are things like cans of olive oil and bulk pasta.  And the closet is pretty stuffed full of home canned goods, purchased goods and bulk staples.  We put cheap plastic shelving up all along the closet and on the back wall of the bedroom.  This is where the bulk of the bulk stuff is stored – it stays cool down here even in summer.  Also, we’ve got sauces and seasonings, dehydrated things that we put up, and the ever important stash of “inferios” – I let my kids get addicted to cheerios when they were young, and now it is like crack to them - I can’t get them off the stuff ;-).  We don’t buy the originals, though, but the bulk generics – hence the unofficial name at our house.

 I know, we’re lucky in some ways to have all this space. That said, I don’t like it very much – that’s why I’m still looking for housemates – I actually would like less space, since I find it hard to keep clean and feel like we’re not making good enough use of what we have.  So my plan is to eventually move all this food storage upstairs to our room, if we can find a family that wants to share the homestead with us (if you are reading this and interested, I would be most interested in you if you are already accustomed to a certain measure of loudness and chaos – email for more details ;-)).

And yes, I know what I’m getting into. The place before this one was 1400 square feet for us and Eli, and we stored food then, and before that, we had the two of us and three housemates in a 900 square foot apartment -and we still bought in bulk and made space. It wasn’t always easy, of course, and less than now, but it was amazing what we managed, and a lot easier to maintain.  I have so much to do outside, and at the computer – and as you can tell I just am not the world’s finest housekeeper.

We’ve already moved some stuff upstairs, since we really are hoping to find housemates to take the apartment, and maybe the downstairs bedrooms as well.  I’ll show you the situation upstairs.  I’m in the process of rearranging closets.  Yes, I need to fill those buckets up – I’m behind, as you can see from the bags awaiting repackaging.  Yes, sometimes I don’t do things right either.  Actually, surprisingly often . 

Oh, and yes, those things trying to trip you as you come up the stairs are one of the central tools we use to preserve our bulk staples – cats.  We’ve got an absurd number of them, but they really do a wonderful job of keeping out the rodents, which is so important!  Zucchini really takes good care of the barn as well.  They are bed warmers as well.

In the bathroom cabinet upstairs, we’ve got most of the health care stuff – we were fortunate that Eric’s grandmother was a nurse, and while not all medications last well, the bandages and bandage scissors, her blood pressure cuff and her stethoscope and other such things (I know enough from my EMT and hospice days to be able to use them correctly) are extremely nice to have.  We are fortunate that we don’t take a lot of medications, but I do store extra vitamins, some benadryl, asprin, and other basics.  I’ve also got some shampoo and toothpaste – I know I can use baking soda, but I don’t really prefer it to either of these.  That baking soda hair thing didn’t work for me.

In our bedroom, we’re in the process of converting the walk-in closet to food storage - yes, we’re lucky to have it – the house is old and the original part of the house doesn’t really have closets, so this is the one really big one we’ve got.  I’m trying to pare down our wardrobe so we won’t miss the closet space.  There are more bulk goods in here, and stuff that can handle the fact that it is necessarily warmer upstairs than down, like honey, and salt, soap and such. 

It is hard to know where to stop – do I show you the linen closet and the extra sheets, the set up so we can house a crowd if need be?  What about the bins of the kids’ clothes that keep us from having to shop so often and mean we don’t have to buy clothes for a few years, if things get rough financially?  What counts?  What doesn’t? Do all the books?  I mean, sure, the preparedness ones, and the cookbooks, but what about the art books that allow us to homeschool, or me to toss in  reference on the blog to Holbein as I’m writing about legumes?

Over here is the porch we use to root cellar – the basement is too wet for that.  Someday we may renovate the basement, but is far too low on the list.  It stays cold without freezing unless the temps drop below 10 below, at which point, I’ve got to run out and cover things with blankets, or pull them into the house – but it is worth the hassle so far, to be eating apples in May that we picked in October.  They taste a lot better than the store ones too. 

Then there’s the main garden out front, if you don’t mind leaving the house again (ignore those weeds) - the kitchen garden emphasizes herbs, salad ingredients and greens – the kind of thing you run out for right before you eat.  But there’s also the main garden that keeps us in potatoes and beets, cucumbers for the summer’s pickles.  And I haven’t even shown you the food forest/orchard/berry patches.  There’s the wild ones – the raspberries that sprung unbidden under the spruces, and there are the blueberries I laboriously acidify each year.   You see small green apricots – I see jars of jam and dehydrated apricots.  You see small cherries, I see lush jars of sour cherry pie filling.  

Then there’s the wild stuff  – I guess, my food storage doesn’t stop at the garden – there are the morels I forage by the creek, the yarrow patch I’ll be harvesting in July, and the apple trees and hickory nuts gone feral back in the woods that will feed us just as much as the cultivated trees. 

Over in the barn, there’s how we store eggs – in the chickens, mostly (although I freeze some and preserve some in fat for the dry winter period).  Milk occasionally gets stored as cheese, but really as goat feed – and we’re putting up hay now, little by little.  That’s really stored milk, in a sense – you just can’t see it.  We store fuel as well – but in the form of trees and split firewood.  I’ve got to stack this wood, and figure out how much more I’ll need.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure where the food storage and preparedness begins and ends – and that’s probably how it should be.  It is all of a piece – welcome to my home, welcome to what measure of security I have.  You’ll have to show me yours sometime!

Sharon

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Sharon June 8th, 2009

A while back, at a talk I gave, a small scale farmer asked me why my family didn’t farm full time.  I observed that one of the reasons we don’t is simply that we have young children and we feel that we have a need for benefits.  He pointed out that my state, New York, has a program to provide health insurance for the children of the uninsured, and that we could rely upon that.  My own observation was (beyond the fact that I prefer not to burden state safety nets if we can avoid it and the insurance provided is vastly inferior to the one we have now) that I do not expect that program to continue for very long, and thus, we would not give up my husband’s existing benefits to switch to a state program that I suspect will at some point be cut in the vast rush of states to cut social service programs to balance their budgets.  While I suspect that my husband’s university may also eventually cut benefits, I’d still say the odds were a little better for hanging on to health insurance via his job.

And, of course, we can see that other states are leading the way here – most notably California, which plans to resolve its budget crisis not by legalizing pot or releasing non-violent drug offenders,  by stripping benefits from children, the disabled and the elderly.  But California isn’t alone –  children’s health care is threatened or there are pushes to curtail it in nine other states, and I suspect it is only a matter of time before more states make the push to cut health care programs for children and the working poor.

Now with luck, the state budget cuts won’t matter all that much – if we can pull together a functional and meaningful national health care system.  The problem is that that’s a bigger “if” than it may seem.  Besides the endless debate about what type of national health care system to provide, there’s the very real possibility that our enormous deficits and bailouts may have made it truly impossible for us to have a system that looks like the one we have at present, and is sustainable.  Even if we can implement national health care, the question becomes whether we can sustain it over the long term, as our demographic situation shifts towards an older and sicker population, and our national economic, ecological and energy system puts us closer to crisis.  So far, as far as I can tell, most of the proposed programs for national health care do comparatively little to regulate costs, and assume levels of growth that we simply may not see.

In _Depletion and Abundance_ I included a chapter on health care – on the ways that could keep national lifespans up and spend much, much less than we do now – half as much or even less than that.  It involves a great deal of system triage and difficulty, but it is possible – and IMHO, in the end, as long as we imagine that the goal of national health insurance is not keeping infant mortality low and lifespans high, but the serving of people accustomed to a large range of drugs and interventions with as may drugs and interventions as possible, we are facing trouble.

And yet, we need national health care desperately – we already have a tiered class system in the US where those who are poor and lack health insurance get sicker, die younger and suffer more.  We already have a lifespan pathetic in the developed world – we are 44th, and lifespans are declining in many poor counties in the US.   

We need national health care because otherwise we will see that class division, and the differences in lifespans and infant mortalities between rich and poor grow and grow.  We need it because our current system is too costly and devours too many resources in every sense.  We need it because it is a basic issue of justice, and because having the crappiest medical care system in the developed world is not an honor.  We need it because we already bear the costs of medical care for the uninsured in our society, both directly and indirectly – we all pay for the poor mother who takes their daughter to the ER in the middle of the night for an ear infection that could have been handled with a ten minute  office visit.  We already pay for the people who age into Medicare with uncontrolled diabetes and high blood pressure, whose medical costs are double the costs they would have been if they’d had basic preventative care.  We already pay – the question is whether we pay honestly and directly, or inhumanely and dishonestly.

But we need national health care for another reason as well.  We need it because we need sustainable food systems, and national health insurance is the key to ensuring that we can have the Nation of Farmers we so desperately need to be.   Because one of the things preventing people from farming, one of the things small farmers off their land is the cost of medical care.

Nationally, a survey showed that farmers pay twice as much out of pocket for health care as the average American.  Most farmers large enough have to buy their health care coverage as individuals, driving up the cost, and because of the risks of farming, their premiums are higher than average.  Others have no insurance, and have to put their insurance on credit cards, or pay with their savings.  The average US farmer is nearly 60 years old, and many have pre-existing conditions that come with age – either forcing insurance costs out of reach, or driving them up.  No wonder so many of today’s farmers, when polled, say they wouldn’t want their children to follow in their footsteps – but that leaves us with the very real question of where the population that grows our food will come from.

Among younger small farmers getting started, I’ve watched many of them struggle with the insurance conundrum – they start out young and healthy, and often are willing to forgo health insurance because they truly and honestly want to do something good.  But farming pays poorly, and the first serious injury can be a disaster – and working outside all day, you get hurt sometimes.  Or perhaps they have a child – even those able to take on a homebirth find that the cost of having a child is a few thousand dollars or more – on a small household income.  Those who must have a hospital birth or more interventions can find themselves rapidly indebted.  Soon, finding a job with health care coverage starts to look awfully good – and there goes the farm, or it goes down to a part-time venture.

Farmers who experience a major injury or illness risk losing their land to bankruptcy – while losing your home is always traumatic, there’s a big difference between losing the house you love but that mostly provides shelter and a good school district, and losing the land you use to make your living.  Up to 10% of all agricultural bankruptcies are linked to illness and injuries - mostly among the uninsured.  Once the land is lost, it is gone – most farmers once out of agriculture, are out for good. 

Without a national health care system, we can become a nation of hobby farmers and victory gardeners, but that won’t resolve the grain production problem, and it won’t feed our cities.  A lot can be done by home scale agriculture, and I am an ardent proponent of it – but we need professional, full time farmers as well, and without insurance, the lure of any other work that covers the child’s asthma medication or the husband’s heart pills will always drive agriculture.  What parents wants their child to go into a profession that leads in so many ways to heartbreak and loss at so many levels – including the fact that one medical crisis is the end.

We have spent four trillion dollars bailing out the banks already, and committed another 9 trillion at last estimate.  Now whether you are a fan of big central government or not (and I’m not for many purposes), I think there can be little debate between honest people on the left and the right that the money would have been better spent serving the needs of people in need than bailing out the banks.  And we simply cannot allow our venal foolishness in subsidizing the rich to allow us to forget that we can and should take care of the basic needs of the population. 

It is certain that there will be costs and losses in whatever system arises – in _Depletion and Abundance_ I strive to acknowledge that we cannot do all the things we do at present, and that will hurt some people.  That said, however, enormous cuts could be made in the costs we incur at critical times in our lives – for example, 1/3 of all medical interventions take place in the last 3 years of life.  Some of that is inevitable – someone who gets cancer, has major interventions, but then dies two years later will fall in that category.  But an enormous number of those interventions operate simply to draw out the process of death and add to suffering – my great-aunt, visibly dying, was pressured into having open heart surgery a few months before she died, simply because no one would say “you are dying, it is time to talk about relieving your pain.”  My husband’s grandmother was pressured into giving her dying husband medications to prevent a heart attack that caused him great discomfort - at a point where a heart attack was the most benign and merciful sort of death possible. 

Even if we were simply to radically cut back our interventions at the time of death and birth – for birth too is radically overmedicalized, and many nations successfully demonstrate that the safest form of birth, barring medical complications that affect only a small percentage of the population, is home birth with a midwife – and shift our emphasis not to treating disease, but to preventing it, we could afford health care that would keep lives long and infant mortality low, that would minimize suffering and allow us to keep our farmers farming and every other useful person engaged in subsistence and cottage industry business going, doing what we desperately need – increasing the self-sufficiency of our nations, states and communities.

Few of us think of the debate on health care in terms of food security and our agriculture – but we are on the cusp of a great shift in our food system, mostly driven by demographics.  The average age of US farmers is approaching 60 years old, and there are not enough young farmers to follow them.  If we do not make it possible to go into farming a profession – if we make it only the province of the young, the healthy, the childless, we risk facing a national food crisis far more acute that the one shadowing us due to other causes.  The reality is that all of us have a real investment in our country’s continuing to produce sufficient food, and the right kind of food – and that investment requires that it be possible to become a farmer without sacrificing your health.

I do not doubt that we will struggle to afford the kind of national health care system being discussed right now.  I do not doubt that we will find ourselves at some kind of impasse at some point in the political process. I do not doubt that our spiraling debts and unfunded mandates will stress our ability to provide health insurance – but we should not believe that this means we cannot achieve health care for the masses that meets most of our basic needs.  And that we must do so.

Sharon

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Sharon June 8th, 2009

We’ve been talking in homeschool about cycles – birth, life, death and composting; the seasons of the year and the way farmers must think ahead when they plant, harvest, etc…; and touching lightly on the cycles of history.   We’re still planting madly, of course – it is only really just warm enough now for the heat lovers to go in, and the garden redesign is still in progress, but it is time to get serious about harvesting and preserving as well – we picked the first strawberries. 

While rhubarb, asparagus and a few spring leaves and herbs offer a slow ease into preservation here, I don’t think of it as harvesting and preserving season for real until we eat the first ripe strawberries.  We haven’t made jam or dehydrated any yet – we’re still eating the early ones, and not enough yet to be willing to put any aside.  But it is coming.  Despite two large strawberry beds, we never have enough, and have already marked Thursday down on the calendar as the day our favorite local pick-your-own opens.

Underneath it all is the realization that most of what we will do is collecting summer’s warmth and heat in the form of fruit and vegetables, and putting them by to warm us through the winter.  In the north, where I live, winter is always coming, and you can never have too much summer sun in jars to compensate.  It is hard, as they days warm and lengthen, to realize that summer hasn’t even begun, but we can already see winter on the horizon, but, of course, that is the way of things in cold places.

And it is the way of life on our farm – if I want to expand our egg business for next spring, I need to order layers now.  If I want to buy a buck this fall, I need to build a pen this summer.  If I want kids in May, I must plan for breeding in December or January.  If I want strawberry jam left next April, I must beginning making jam in mid-June.  If I want winter luxury pumpkins to roast in November, I must order seeds in February and plant in May.  To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose – and it is never fully possible to live in the moment when each season pushes you towards the future.

So every day we plant things, and every day we harvest something, and soon, we will try to preserve something, if not every day, but a few things every week.  For soon, the rush will be upon us – the strawberries and peas will go past, and then will come July with the corn and the cucumbers, the blueberries and the currants, the raspberries and the peaches, the tomatoes and the beans, and the siren song of “not enough, but too much, but it will be wanted when the snow blows.”

Ok, winter may be coming, but it isn’t here yet – lovely, lovely weather this week, although we could use the rain I’m told is coming.  Still, along with looking forward, there’s enjoying what you’ve got.

 Oh, and btw, for those of you asking for kid photos, Selene decided she was not pregnant .  We’d been debating back and forth for a while “is she, or isn’t she?”  Despite three good breedings, before witnesses, she was awfully thin for a pregnant goat, and clearly not because she wasn’t eating .  We were dubious, but our friends assured us that she just tended to carry thin – but since no baby goats appeared ;-(, we’re off kidding watch.  She’s been in with a buck for almost two months now (Wiggy, who has to go back home soon, but will be incredibly missed – he’s such a sweet animal – my kids adore him), so all I can say is that there had better be kids in September – both she and Maia should kid then.  Meanwhile, we’re buying two more does, and I’m trying really hard to resist the temptation to ask for this little girl as my birthday present (Eric’s rolling his eyes as I write this, but he’s the one who said to me recently “we need more goats.” ;-)) – I’m having baby goat envy!

Planted: Queen Anne Raspberries, Seaberries, Gojiberries, Strawberries, Beets, Good King Henry, Sorrel, Forsythia (who knew it was medicinal ?), thyme, basil, peppermint, marshmallow, valerian, meadowsweet, green beans, red noodle beans, asparagus beans, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, onions, parsnips, carrots, zinnias, dill, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, melons, gourds, kohlrabi, cabbage, daikon, mustard greens, lettuce, calendula, gladioli, bachelor’s buttons, rue, horehound, rhubarb, blueberries, wintergreen, bearberry, ginkos.

Harvested: Strawberries, shelling peas, snap peas, bok choy, chinese cabbage, napa cabbage, lettuce, spinach, arugula, rhubarb, chives, nettles, lambsquarters, dandelion root, eggs, angora fleece.

Preserved: dried chives, raspberry leaves, canned rhubarb sauce, froze beaten eggs, made more apple cider vinegar with last of the wrinkly apples.

Waste not (someone in comments is using this, and I really like it - thanks!): Used up next to last chicken in freezer and made laotian chicken soup, asorted out bins and combined oatmeal, began making more closet space for food, brought last year’s pickles and rhubarb sauce to community picnic, discarded last year’s dried herbs, unpicked a really pretty hat that I made for baby Asher, to reuse yarn.

Preparation and storage: Picked up a couple more air-tight glass jars at a yard sale on Friday, bartered plants and future seed starting with a friend for speedling trays, added more black beans and brown rice to storage, bought Eric a swiss army knife and dulcimer and fiddle playing materials for birthday, traded remaining hay for composted horse manure, priced a ton of goat feed – Agway no longer carries the local, organic feed, and am not sure we want to buy by the ton, but am considering it.  Finally organized yarn, sewing supplies and sewing box. 

Community Food Systems: Gave a talk at a local foods group, met cool new goat farming Jews and began evil plan to form a new “Union of Agrarian Jews” .  Anyone want to join?  Not entirely about food, but began discussions with editor about a new book…more on that soon.

Eat the food – ate all the peas out of hand, same with the strawberries.  Using up last of last year’s sweet potatoes, discovered that they are *fabulous* with chipotle-cheese sauce on them and whatever greens are lying around.  Made a rhubarb-sauce cake for a friend, decided I like it better with applesauce – but I had rhubarb and was out of apple. 

How about y’all?

 Sharon

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Sharon June 4th, 2009

This post is not for my readers who have enthusiastically embraced the agrarian lifestyle, whether city farmers and suburban permaculturists or outright farmers or wanna-be farmers.  This post is for your loved ones – your husband, wife, girlfriend, lover, parents, children and siblings…whoever you are hitched to, the people who have tied their lives to yours, and who are now wondering what on earth happened to their yoked partner?  In some cases, they may be whether to unhitch and run in the opposite direction, since their beloved child/partner/sibling/best friend/whatever has gone completely ’round the bend and is talking about farms.

Now I realize that some of you will look at any advice of mine on this subject with skepticism – after all, you may even blame me (quite correctly, perhaps), for your loved one’s going bonkers and talking about sheep and nut trees all the time.  And yet, I do feel your pain.  Or rather, my husband does, and he’s happy to tell me all about what it is like to look over at the person you love and wonder why on earth she’s babbling about soil. 

Eric got rather a shock around the time of our wedding – you see, he’d met this woman (me) who seemed to be a good match for his goals – both of us working towards academic careers, both of us happily living in the city, both of us planning an intellectual, urban life, complete with cats, futon and travel.  And somewhere between the wedding and the honeymoon, his wife went a little insane.

From my perspective, I can’t really remember what caused it.  I’d had a garden everywhere I lived all through college – it was hugely important to me, and on balconies and in backyards, I always planted some things.  We were living in Somerville Massachusetts, across the street from a major subway/commuter rail station.  You could hear the trains rumbling under the building from our third floor apartment.  And the balcony was covered with food and flowers – alpine strawberries in window boxes, herbs, letuce, peppers, even a few tomatoes, morning glories and moonflowers twining up the balcony.  Every bit of dirt had been hauled up three flights of stairs, but it was beautiful.  I occasionally mentioned how nice it would be to have some dirt on the ground somewhere, but that was really all.  I liked my balcony.  And yes, I liked animals, but hey, I had pet cats.

The first thing I remember was a book – Paul Heiney’s beautiful British coffee table farm book _Country Life: A Handbook for Realists and Dreamers_ – I have no idea what led me to buy it, or even where I found it, but there I was in my apartment, staring at this book and thinking about chickens, to my new husband’s complete and utter disbelief.

And unfortunately, I’m not the only one.  Consider this excerpt from the very funny book _Hit by a Farm_ by Catherine Friend – she writes about her partner Melissa’s sudden shift into “wanna farm” mode:

“I should have realzied what the future held the day I looked up and caught her giving me a dreamy look from across the kitchen table.  Touched, I reached over and took her hand in mine.  She squeezed it gently, and said, ‘God, I love chickens.’

But I still didn’t see it coming.”

And just as I’m still a little mystified by my own sudden urge to farm, other wanna-bes can’t really explain it all very well themselves.  Christopher Losee, coauthor with his wife Kimberly Schaye of _Stronger than Dirt_ writes,

“It wasn’t that I’d ever fantasized about being a farmer.  That thought was about as, say, becoming proficient in Chinese and leading tour groups to see the Great Wall.  But between July and October 1994, I somehow became convinced that this was what I wanted to do and this was what I would do.”

The farm dream hits someone, and in many cases, becomes intractable – and bloody annoying for the person not suffering from this weird disease.  And it is a dis-ease – that is, all of a sudden you are dissatisfied with the life you’ve built. I think of it rather like (benign) malarial parasites – the infection could have come from anywhere, and once they build in your bloodstream, well, there’s not much you can do about it.  They are always with you.

In our case, my husband thought it would go away.  I thought it would too – we talked about it, and agreed that eventually, someday, maybe we’d get some land.  So a few months before Eli was born, early in our second year of marriage, we bought an apartment in a very, very urban place – Lowell Massachusetts, a wonderful city of immigrants, with an amazingly diverse culture, a long history and everything we thought we wanted.  We had originally been shopping with a friend for a duplex, but he backed out, and then we purchased an apartment in an old mill building.  It was a great apartment, a wonderful building, filled with wonderful people, a great neighborhood, we could walk to synagogue, it had everything we wanted, except one thing – no outdoor space.  And about two months after we’d moved in, I realize that we’d made a terrible, terrible mistake – much as I loved everything else about the place, the lack of dirt was almost physically painful.  The brain-altering parasites had reached critical mass, and now, nothing looked the same – it was all seen through the lens of the farm I didn’t have.

Now Eric doesn’t like to move.  In fact, he doesn’t like change at all.  We joke that now (we’ve been together almost 13 years), if we left it to him, we might (might, I’m not sure I believe it) be engaged by now.   I, on the other hand, like change – I get bored easily, and like a constant diet of new things.  Eric’s job in our marriage is to try and get me to slow down.  Mine is to drag him kicking and screaming on to the next things .   It was painful for him to give up the apartment he’d been living in for almost 7 years and move to Lowell. Having done it, he planned to spend at least a decade there.  And here was his crazy wife again, talking farms.

He tried to pacify me – we looked into community garden plots – there was a two year waiting list.  We looked into taking over some small part of the Mill building’s public space – management was not thrilled by the idea of eggplant instead of impatiens.  If I knew then what I know now about urban farming and agriculture, I might have pushed harder or found other solutions.  At the time, all I could think of was getting out to someplace where I could have poultry and a garden.

My husband thought this was nuts.  We didn’t know anything about chickens.  How would we grow our own food – strawberries and basil were a lot different than a huge garden, wheren’t they?  Wouldn’t it be too much work?  What if he didn’t want to do any of it?  Would it be weird?  Would it be different?  What if we screwed up?  No, asking for a farm was too much, pushing him too far.

And quite honestly, he was right.  We would screw up.  It would be weird.  It would be more work than we understood.  He would end up doing things he’d rather have skipped, frankly. 

Catherine Friend observes about the way the farm pushed her limits,

“It turns out that, at age thirty-eight, I knew myself about as well as I knew the breeding habits of the Pygmy Butterfly, which is to say, not at all.  So when I answered Melissa’s request to help her start the farm with a hearty yes, I might as well have stood on the center line of a four-lane highway and opened my arms.  I would witness chicken sex.  I would witness duck sex.  I would even get frightfully involved in sex between two goats, something no feminist should ever have to face….Boundaries are good things; they’re the signposts we use during our lives to measure just how far we’ll go.  My boundaries have always served me well. No touching worms or spiders or anything gross.  No touching wild animals because they could be dangerous.  No touching feces, urine, blood or any other bodily fluid.  Definitely no stocking my hand up inside an animal’s body, or touching it anywhere I wouldn’t want to be touched myself.”

Eric is no where near as squeamish as Friend, but he didn’t feel any particular need to ever, say shine a flashlight on a goat’s genitals to detect whether she’s in heat.  Nor have any of his prior job choices involved nearly as much shit shoveling as agriculture (in teaching astronomy, the manure is mostly metaphorical ).  And I think it is safe to say that most Americans would regard this lack of interest in these subjects as completely normal, perhaps even a sign of good mental health.

But the thing about the farm-obsessed is that they manage, if they are even remotely persuasive, to make it seem completely normal that one would want to take on a life that involves early morning wakeups, picking vegetables on 100 degree days, more than ample manure, flies and blood, and examing goat pussy.  Indeed, perhaps the most bizarre element of this is that the farm obsessed begin to try and make you feel weird for not wanting to live the agrarian life.  This is a neurological symptom of the farm-thing.

And, of course, they emphasize the benefits.  “Think about all the delicious vegetables.”  “The country life is so great for kids.” “It will be beautiful.” “The farm will pay for itself.” “You’ll hardly have to do anything.”  Even I have to admit that the latter two of these points (which I used on my husband) are outright lies.  The middle one is probably true, for a particular variation on “beautiful” – that is, real working homesteads and farms don’t usually make it house and garden unless there’s money enough to hire a lot of labor.  It is beautiful – but you have to be the sort of person who can look past the clutter, the unmowed grass, the weeds, the manure and see the inner farm.  The first two points are true, but it is worth noting that even the delicious vegetables don’t come without effort, and older kids, attached to their lives, may be less than enthusiastic when presented with “Here’s a creek, now you can play in it every day – no more wii, isn’t that great!”  It is quite possible that some of you are the teenaged children of parents who have gone mad, and wondering what can be done about it.

And that brings us to the central point.  What can be done about it?  Well, if your loved one has a mild case of the farm dream, there’s hope.  One possibility is to simply draw the line “Me or the farm.”  In some cases, you may actually stay together.  The difficulty with this is twofold.  First, it is easy to understate how compelling the farm dream actually is – you can’t make brain-parasites go away easily.   Once the farm dream penetrates into someone’s inner life, it truly becomes their *dream* – and one stands in the way of a loved one’s dream at their peril.  Maybe you have a dream or two also, and you know how fundamentally losing a dream can alter your life – there’s the horrible chance that they might decide that they pick the farm.  And if you do win, your partner may end up behaving like someone who has seen his dream killed – and if you have a good marriage, you may find that’s not so desirable either.

The next possibility is compromise – this will require you to actually get involved to some degree with the farm dream, because you are going to reshape it.  Mom is dreaming of 50 acres and cows?  Your job is to research urban farming, and bring her back to earth, convincing her that you could have a garden and chickens here, or that perhaps a 3 acre lot and 1 cow is sufficient.  Here’s where the magic of the internet and the library come to your aid – “Honey, that’s a great idea, I’d love a farm (yes, it is permissable to lie through your teeth here)…but my dream is not to actually ever help birth a cow, plus to keep my job here – how can we both make it work?  Have you seen this cool stuff on urban permaculture?”

You might even find that there’s an element of this project that can hook into your dreams.  Ok, you really don’t want a llama, not even a llama that your daughter thinks is super-cute.  But you’ve always wanted a big workshop, with all the tools, or some justification for buying more quilt fabric - so perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a portion of this “let’s go live the self-sufficient life like freakin’ Thoreau” that might be turned to your own purposes.  Think self-interest here.

The next possibility for dealing with the farm dream is to accomodate, but draw firm lines about what belongs to whom.  “Yes, honey, we can have a farm.  It will be all yours.  I’m going to keep on commuting, doing my stuff, etc… the farm is yours, and this is mine.”  Inwardly, you think ”He can have pig shit on him, but that’s not going to happen to me.”  This is an excellent plan, one that balances your needs against your crazy loved-one’s.  I commend you for your being accomodating, and your loved one for his/her willingness to divide the labor.  All I can say to this, however, is that you are kidding yourself if you think that’s actually going to happen. Ok, I know a couple of couples where the farm is mostly one person’s job – but even when they manage to keep those boundaries, the farm tends to leak into daily life.

You see, farms suck up your life, whether little or big.  There are a lot of jobs that can’t really be done easily by one person, particularly, most importantly, by one totally inexperienced person.  So unless your loved one grew up on a farm and already knows how to castrate pigs, you will be drafted into helping. Welcome to pig shit central. 

You know those “honey-do” lists?  Well, new and strange things are going to start appearing on them.  It is only a matter of time until you are off to the Ag-way with a list of soil amendments to purchase, as you try to pretend that you have the faintest idea what greensand is, or why you would care about the color of your sand.  The money you’d definitely planned to spend on a weekend meditation retreat is mysteriously gone – replaced by a big pile of stock fencing and orders to go pick up the gas powered augur, whatever that is.  One day, Sweetie-pie comes wandering in, not with a small bag of peaches, but with three bushels, and expects you to help her do something with them.  You can say “wait, this wasn’t in the deal” – good luck with that.

Eric’s advice to all of you, if you have a spouse with a serious case of the farm dream, is simply “let go, complain a lot (so that he/she appreciates properly how much you are suffering, and feels guilty enough to be accomodating of *your* dreams and pleasures), but go with it – it really isn’t that bad.”  Now this is perhaps a little self-serving of me (me, self-serving? ) to quote, but that’s his genuine take on it – that if the farm dream has penetrated too deep to be removed, you are about to begin a long, strange trip.  And it is a lot more fun if you just try and enjoy it.

And the funny thing is, it can be fun, and not just for the one with the dream. There’s something about learning new stuff, about building, making, growing and tending your own that is…well…neat.  And neat not just to the person deeply infected by the crazy-agrarian-brain-parasite, but often, to the least likely people.  Here’s Catherine Friend again,

“One evening I watched one of my favorite movies, The Hunt for Red October. The submarine commander, played by Sean Connery, used a fascinating battle tactic: he turned his submarine toward the torpedo racing at him through the water.  The sub and the torpedo met before the torpedo had armed itself, so it bounced harmlessly off the sub’s hull.

Hey, what an idea.   Why not move out to meet the farm, embracing it?  I gave it a great deal of thought, then announced to Melissa I would do chorse two days a week.  She was skeptical….Weekend after weekend, I trudged outseide.  I think Melissa expected me to tire and give up after just a week or two….We argued over method, but I insisted that if the end result was teh same, why did I have to do things just like she did?…At one pointe, she literally stamped her foot, shouting ‘You can’t do chores anymore then!’

That would have been the perfect opportunity to utter one simple word.  ‘Okay.’  But my response surprised us both. ‘This is my farm too, and I’m going to do chores.’” 

Kimberly Schaye, initially the reluctant partner to her husband’s flower farm dream eventually begins giving other people lessons in the dream and its realities – and of course, what’s funny about all of them is that most of them applied to her just a few years before:

“I had developed a handy quiz to identify people who should think twice before they start looking for lad.  Tehse are the people who would say any of the following:

‘I like money and feel that I need a lot of it.’ – This disqualifies you instantly

‘I hate bugs and when one lands on me, I tend to scream like I’m being brutally murdered until someone flicks it off.  I’m not much fonder of dirt.” – Get used to both.  As a farmer you will be covered with them most of the time.  But you will get to learn which bugs are truly your friends and which you should kill with wild abandon.

‘I feel I might want to work for someone other than myself again someday.’  – Forget it.  You will be completely ruined for this.  And should you ever find yourself back in a corporate workplace environment, you will immediately wonder why everyone is dressed so uncomfortably and how they can take themselves so seriously

…’How do I tell my friends about my workday and make it sound like I did something?’ – What you mean you don’t think ‘I kneeled in the dirt for eight hours and pulled tiny weeds out of a hole in the ground sounds like anything?’

Not everyone learns to, as Friend puts it, “stop worrying and love the barn” but it seems surprisingly common.  Every time I go out among agrarians, I find that most couples or families are made up of people who are truly dedicated to farming, and their other relatives, lovers, partners, etc… who, well, weren’t.  Maybe your spouse was raised on a farm, and the parasites lay dormant for a while.  Maybe you just married a farmgirl or farmboy, and knew going into this meant “love me, love my muck-covered bottomland.”  Maybe the parasites somehow infected your otherwise perfectly normal spouse or partner, Mom or roommate, and you keep thinking “I didn’t sign up for this.”

My Mom is the perfect example of someone who got caught in someone else’s farm dream.  First there was mine, but hey, she could be supportive, since she no longer had to live with me.  What she didn’t realize was that the parasites were indeed contagious, and would infect her partner of nearly 30 years.  Soon, there was the garden plot, the chickens, and the talk, after they retire, of “the baby farm.”  My mother didn’t like bugs or worms.  She liked her food properly encased in plastic.  She thought chickens were weird, and didn’t really want to get to know her neighbors better, particularly around the subject of poultry.  Fast forward a couple of years – my Mom has a community garden plot, three hens in the backyard, two chicks living in her kitchen and worms in the basement.  She helps run open houses for future chicken owners.  So far, she’s holding the line against goats on their 1/8 acre city lot, but even she admits that she no longer says “never” about much of anything.  The funny thing is, she likes most of it, and everyone is happier now.

So can’t blame you for trying to get out of it, or complaining, but it is important to know that real people do adapt all the time.  Moreover, the brain parasites are contagious – it is surprisingly common for reluctant farmers to wake up one morning, go out into the dirt and think “Wait, I this doesn’t seem quite so insane.”  The good food, the fresh air, the physical activity, the sense accomplishment – whether you’ve made your farm on your old lot or moved – these things suck people in, and soon, you can’t understand why your Mom thinks goat manure is so gross, and you are laughing at your Brother in Law, who swears he’d never actually eat eggs that came straight from a chicken’s butt.

The thing is, farming, on any scale, really isn’t just a job – it is a way of life.  Even if you keep your job as a mechanic, waiter, college professor or lawyer, there’s something oddly real about the time you spend in the woods securing your winter’s heat, or about the brush of feathers, or the taste of warm tomato – more real, many times, than the other work you do.  And the realness is addictive – even to people who thought it couldn’t possibly be.

If you can’t find a compromise position, if the tractor is coming straight at you, the best way is to climb on up and enjoy the ride.  Here are some suggestions for doing so, while also maintaining what’s left of your sanity:

1. Do not believe anything your agriculturally besotted partner claims will “pay for itself” until you see actual numbers, and have actually done it.  Assume upfront that everything will cost more than you think.  Also, when your partner makes to-do lists, cut them in half, then in half again.  Halve one more time if you have young children or a full time job.  Then, you have a real shot at getting the stuff on your list accomplished…mostly.

2. Your definition of “gross” will change pretty rapidly.  If it started out as “poop of any kind” it will now be “five acre chem-lawn lots that grow only grass that nothing eats.”  If it started out as “Getting filthy and sweaty anywhere but the gym” it will now be “wearing your barn clothes more than two consecutive weeks or after they get sheep placenta on them.”  If it started out as “the idea of eating some animal you once met” it will now be “the idea of eating factory farmed meat delivered on a styrofoam tray.” 

3. You will do things you would have been willing to swear not that long ago, that you would never do.  Absolutely, positive sure you’d never kill an animal?  Wait until you have either a sick one that desperately needs to be put down, or some animal so obnoxious and unpleasant that the thought of eating them is actually kind of appealing (my three year old still announces, with some satisfaction “We ate Corey” – the mean rooster who kept attacking him.)  Absolutely, positively sure you’ll never get a cow/pig/horse/tractor/business plan/worm bin/bees/truckload of manure/post hole digger/adze/quilting frame/orchard/llama/butter churn/chicken plucker/milking machine?  Don’t speak quite so soon.  The amazing thing is that you’ll end up feeling pretty good about it in a lot of ways – the funny thing is that when you finally fix that tractor, or when you actually do barn the hay or raise the turkeys – not only do you get the sense of accomplishment, but there’s an underlying “hey, I’m pretty cool to be able to do this.”

That said, however, expect a steep learning curve, and plenty of screw ups.  Try very hard to be good at laughing at yourself.  Try very hard to remember that it is not always wise to laugh at your spouse, no matter how funny he looks with the raw egg dripping out of his pants pocket or covered in mud and G-d knows what else.

4. You may both find (assuming your relationship is a romantic one) agriculture strangely sexy.  You wouldn’t think your partner would look especially handsome covered with little bits of hay, or holding a scythe, death style, but oddly, he seems to.  Your wife, it turns out, looks really, really good with a sledgehammer, or perhaps less strangely, while holding a basket of ripe eggplants or a baby lamb.  Country folk are, well, earthy, and there’s a good bit of sex in that.  Admittedly, chicken sex is repulsive.  But all those bees and flowers and rich fertility have their influence too – make sure you make time for love. 

5. Your job is to say no.  Even if you’ve been infected by the parasites, yours is probably still the voice of reason (scary thought, eh?).  So no matter how much it makes perfect sense, you couldn’t have planned it better, and is such a great deal, it may not be the time to add 40 more sheep to your flock, to expand the CSA to 70 members (up from 12), to begin breeding Great Pyrenees dogs or to take down that old barn and rebuild it.  Someone has to have a sense of perspective, and you are designated.  At the very least, you should offer some resistance, a downpayment on the next crazy idea.

6. One of you should keep your job.  I’m all for farming, however, if you are a beginner, the odds are very good that you are not going to fully support your family in the first year.  Some of you will simply be looking to grow a little food and have a garden, some to make a little money on the side – to get the chickens to pay for their feed, make enough money from the produce sales to take a vacation, or offset the vet bills with your handspun yarn.  But some of you will be looking to be FARMERS – the serious version of this.  This is great.  Farming is great.  But it doesn’t come with health insurance, and it is not a reliable income stream at first for most people.  Yeah, have a business plan and get started.  But one of you keep the day job – you can always quit later when you are making money hand over fist. Ha!

7. The first step is probably not the last one.  That is, just because you’ve let go and said “ok, we can have vegetables in the back yard, where none of the neighbors can see them, and maybe two chickens” do not think you are done.  At a minimum, your pride and joy front yard perennial plantings are probably going to be replaced by hazelnuts and blueberries, and I’ll lay you good odds that there are a few more chickens, and maybe some bunnies in your future.

8. Once you eat the food, you are stuck for life.  We all rhapsodize about the food – I mean, this is food money literally cannot buy.  Unless you are rich enough to have your own private gardener rushing the asparagus from the ground, and bringing the heirloom tomatoes in warm from the garden, you will never quite get the perfection of taste.  You can get close at the farmer’s market, but the best stuff comes straight off the plant, and is eaten within seconds of harvest.  But now you are spoiled for life – your kids will never eat store jam again, after they’ve eaten Dad’s raspberry-blackberry.  You will never be able to eat a grocery store tomato, or a salad of iceberg lettuce again.  Even the lowly potato will be dead to you, if it comes from far away. 

9. Your crazy loved-one will start out wanting to do everything – but will probably begin eventually to specialize.  This is a process – expect it to take a while to shake out what your things are.  That is, most of us come to this wanting to do it all – we’re going to have the chickens for eggs, the cows for milk, the huge garden, the… you get it. 

 After a while, we find that there are some projects we do better than others and some we like better than others.  I know some people who do it all – who produce nearly everything they eat or use.  But most of us eventually settle down a little, and find that we’re happiest focusing on the things we like – the issue, of course, is that we don’t always know what we like until we try it, how much it costs, how much time it takes.  That is, they find out whether they are a sheep person or a goat person by having sheep and goats.  They find out whether they really want to cut hay or log with horses by working with horses.  They find out if you like to sew their own clothing or build their own barn by trying these things out. 

Sometimes, they (or you) find out they are losing money, failing miserably or that they really don’t like coppicing trees nearly as much as you thought - they forgot they are afraid of heights.  Ok, that’s fine, no need to make yourself crazy - they do like growing watermelons and making pickles.  So just remember, if it sounds like you are being dragged every which way, you are, but it probably won’t last forever – sooner or later, you’ll only be dragged six or seven ways, and you’ll have time to get good at most of them. 

10. There are a couple of ways you can come to share a dream.  First, you can find a part of the farm that you love, too.  Maybe you’ll never really be crazy about all those plants, but the chickens, now, those you do like.  Or maybe you’ve always loved building and fixing things, or cooking and preserving – and that part is enough to make up for the parts you don’t always love. 

Or maybe you can find a way to integrate your dreams with one another, or simply to be happy that she’s happy, or he’s happy.  That is, you love your daughter, and even if, left to yourself, you’d prefer to winter in Florida, not Ohio, and spend your retirement playing golf, rather than growing pecans, well, maybe it doesn’t matter – assuming that she too wants you to be happy, and is willing to give way on the things that really do matter most to you – say, making sure you have your shed to putter in or your books to read.

Or maybe, just maybe, the little brain parasites will work their way up your bloodstream, until you no longer remember what it was like to live without a farm.  Gradually the process of forgetting becomes so acute that you think a life without manure on your boots and the crow of a rooster, or the swoop of the barn swallows wouldn’t be worth living.  You start looking forward to haying, or to going out the barn in winter to check on the rabbits.  You start dreaming of the day you’ll retire, and can spend all day farming, or the day you can pick up your first beehives.  I know that sounds crazy now, but sometimes you look up, and your dreams have changed, and that’s ok, even good.  Sometimes there’s nothing more to dream of than being yoked together in the same harness, on the same land and doing the same good work for all the days of your life.

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