Except this summer. I woke up the day before yesterday to a day of steady rain, and I literally couldn’t remember the last time I’d awakened to rain, or we’d had a real rainy day.  This summer has been very hot and very dry – we’ve had less than 10 inches of rain from May to August, which is very unusual. I know for many of you that would be ample, but remember, our vegetation isn’t designed for that little.

To give you a sense of how little I usually worry about rain, let me note that in the 7 years my main garden has been in the front, we’ve never bought hose enough to reach the back half of it – that is, I’ve never, ever watered that part of the garden, except the occasional sprinkle on new seedlings.   This year, we got hose.  After all, I had just planted the back end of the garden with wetland medicinals and native plants to take advantage of the dampness – a dampness now completely imperceptible.  My direct seeded fall crops mostly either didn’t germinate or withered in the heat and dry weather, despite regular waterings.

But mercifully, starting Sunday, the rain came and it rained more or less nonstop for two days.  It is cool here now, and moist, and more like what we expect here in summer. 

The good news about the heat and drought is that we are having the best year we have ever had for peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and okra, which means your blogiste is spending much of her time over a canning kettle and laying things out in the dehydrator.  The good news about the rain is that now we’re not having heat and drought anymore . 

The kids see the rain primarily in terms of their creek and its wildlife - the waterbound portions of which were dying off pretty rapidly.  The boys were thrilled that the rain would fill up their creek and save the remaining crayfish and minnows – they are there right now getting filthy, examining the life in the creek, and probably annoying the heck out of  our great blue heron who considers that new life his private preserve.

Me, I’m grateful for the sake of everything – and looking forward to weeding in the coolth and canning in the same.  It is amazing what a difference a rainy day or two makes.

Jessie kidded in the wee hours of the morning on Monday – a single buckling, which was pretty amazing given her size.  It wasn’t even that large a baby.   I admit, I was a little disappointed, since I particularly wanted one of Jessie’s daughters this year, but this is one of those “win-some, lose-some” things that goes with agriculture.  I have explained to Jessie how she can do better next year – twins and does and not making us wait, and I’m sure she listened carefully and will take my comments under advisement .  Her baby has her adorable snub nosed face, and I’ll put up some pictures soon.

We are now officially done with kidding for the year (woohoo!) with a final count of 10 babies from 6 does (Tekky, who may or may not be pregnant, or may or may not be infertile or may or may not have been pregnant early and aborted is a big old question mark, but in any case, not having anything anytime soon, and is living with the boys), five does and five bucks.  We’ll be keeping one wether and one buck, and selling the other three wethers, so I’ll put info up about the boys ASAP if anyone wants adorable, friendly pets, lawnmowers, horse companions and brush clearers.  We’re retaining all the does, as we build up and improve our herd, but will have milkers and babies for sale in the spring.

Things are busy here otherwise – lots of preserving and late season garden work to do.  Eli is on vacation, which is not his favorite thing, so that takes up time too.  We’re getting our firewood and hay in this week – once a year we borrow a pickup truck from my friend Elaine who owneth the sheep, and use it to haul all the things we need a truck for.  Putting 200 bales of hay (some of which is for bedding, other for fodder) into the hay barn is a project in and of itself – good exercise, kind of fun, but a project.  Although before we do that we also have to clean out the hay barn, replace some of the broken pallets the hay rests on, and figure out where the rabbits are going to go (they are getting a corner of the hay barn this year, instead of living in the main barn because Phil-the-housemate is allergic to them – he can stand coming in for a few minutes to feed and water them when we’re away, but can’t do all the chores in the main barn if the buns are there.)

Mom and Sue came to visit last week, and as usual, Sue went around fixing things and making them work – she built a hinged cover for the hay feeder to keep the hens from nesting in the goat’s hay.  Whenever Sue is visiting we get proof of what slackers we are.  We had this enormous board on top of the hay feeder which was incredibly heavy and awkward and a huge pain to move for umm…two years.  And although we occasionally thought “maybe there’s a better way” it wasn’t until just recently that it actually occurred to us that we didn’t have to lift that enormous thing every single time we needed to put in hay.  It was just what we did . 

I’m convinced that there are two kinds of people in the world – the kind of person who says “that window is broken, I can’t stand that, I must fix it today” and the kind of person (both Eric and me) that says “Oh, bugger all, that window is open, ok, we’ll just open the other one.”)  I think our failure to be the first kind of person explains a lot about the flaws in our lives .  I’m just grateful to know the other sort!

Plant something:  Lettuce, bok choy and arugula.

Harvest something: Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, onions, carrots, beets, okra, potatoes, green beans, kale, chard, collards, cabbage, parsley, cucumbers, peaches, raspberries, milk and eggs.

Preserve something: Made tomato sauce, tomato puree, canned whole tomatoes and salsa.  Dried sweet corn.  Made the last of the rhubarb sauce.  Dried sweet peppers, made hot sauce, made salt-herb mix.

Waste Not: Composting, feeding of things to other things, picked up scraps for chickens from friends while we were passing by, scavenged my first bag of leaves from the roadside.

Want Not: Bought new farm notebooks for record keeping when the kids got their school supplies – Simon the cartoonist keeps stealing mine and drawing in them. 

Eat the Food: Stewed okra and tomatoes, lemon garlic pickled onions, stuffed tomatoes with pesto orzo…love this time of year.

Build Community Food Systems: Working on a new project – more soon!

How about you?

Sharon

We’re waiting on Jessie.  Now you’ve got to understand that Jessie, while gentle and unobtrusive in personality, is not a slim goat.  She’s a bit of a beachball most of the time.  Right now, she’s huge – I mean, huge.  These goats aren’t that big, you know, so when they are pregnant they look like they are going to burst anyway, and Jessie is the roundest of all.  She’s also apparently decided she likes being pregnant and doesn’t really plan to ever have kids.  Most of our does kid between 144 and 148 days (Nigerian Dwarves run a bit earlier than other breeds), Jessie at 151 days is serenely happy with her present state and simply uninterested in giving birth (this is still within the normal range, so we’re not worried).  Hey, she can still reach the food, right?

Jessie also likes to act as though she’s going to give birth.  Labor signs in goats are a little ambiguous, but most of them have some discharge, go apart from the other goats, and seem a little abstracted at the least, and we’ve always been able to tell (for everyone but Maia, whose only advance sign of delivery both times was the sound of amniotic fluid bursting as she delivers her kid – in about 30 seconds).  Jessie, however, is the mistress of faux-labor.  She has vaginal discharge.  She gets abstracted and goes off by herself and paws the ground.  We get excited and say “today is the day” – and then half an hour later, she’s off grazing or hanging out on the extra milking stanchion letting the baby goats climb on her back.

Nah, I think Jessie is just not interested.  And I sympathize a bit.  With Eli, with my first child, I went overdue by two weeks.  And while there was a part of me that longed to have this over, there was also an inner sense that most likely, as uncomfortable and unpleasant as all this was, he was probably easier to take care of inside me than out.  As it got further and further from my due date, you’d think I would start feeling that birth was more pressing – in fact, it was the opposite – when Eli didn’t come and didn’t come, I gradually began to feel he never would, that maybe I just had to get used to this huge belly of me, and was faintly relieved.

Which is why I think Jessie has just decided to live her life as Moby Goat – every time we say “it has to be today” she says “nope, sorry, it really doesn’t have to be, so there.”  She remembers from her first kidding that babies are a lot of work.  Why not just get comfortable as the goat the size of the moon?

Sharon

Sharon

I picked a bushel of tomatoes today to put up, and I only stoppped because I didn’t want to deal with more than a bushel.  Then I got a phone call from my favorite local farmstand, where I forgot I’d reserved myself several bushels of tomatoes earlier in the season, thinking I might not have this good a crop if thigns turned wet and cool (last year I didn’t put up nearly enough, so I was hedging my bets) – guess what, they’ve got those three bushels of tomatoes for me.  Oops.

So salsa and ketchup, sauce and whole tomatoes it is.  If you are looking for me, I’ll be behind the canning kettle.  There are also the cucumbers, but I’m in denial about those for the moment.

Yesterday was my 38th birthday, and it was not wholly successful.  First of all, I’d spent Saturday night up with a laboring goat.  This one, Selene, has lingering neurological damage and weakness from her bout with meningeal parasite, and our concern was that she might have trouble delivering, even though she can pretty much everything else.  The vet had been encouraging about breeding her, and friends with a goat who also had the same problems had had good luck, but hey, I was nervous.  So when I woke at 12:30 and checked the barn, I stayed out with Selene.

It turned out she was completely fine, except that the buck kid she delivered was huge (I had thought she was going to have triplets) – in fact, he’s bigger than the triplets born a whole week before him.  But with enough time and maternal discomfort, out popped Heliotrope.  We had agreed we would keep one wether, to use as a transitional goat when one of the boys is in with the ladies, so that we never have to keep a goat solo, and after witnessing the amount of trouble he gave Selene, we’ve decided he wins, and we’ll keep him. Selene does not give birth to buck quality goats, but he’s cute and she’s the best and most devoted mother we have. 

So Saturday night was no sleep.  Sunday morning was supposed to be me getting to do whatever we wanted, but my friend Jesse, who I’ve known and loved for 19 years now left a message on our machine.  You see Jesse had stopped by on a trip west a couple of weeks before, and because he missed the kids, promised he’d stop for a bit on his way back.  Although he was meeting up with friends and his fiancee, we were told it would just be him, and he would arrive sometime late on Saturday.

Well, Saturday passed and we wondered where Jesse was. Late that night we got a phone message from him, announcing that he, his fiancee and two other people I’d never met would be arriving at 11:30 on Sunday.  Oh, and despite 19 years of friendship, it was pretty clear he’d forgotten it was my birthday.  So much of the morning was spent preparing for four people to arrive at lunchtime.  And plotting the ass-kicking Jesse was going to get.

As it turned out, while I still would have preferred not to spend the morning cooking and cleaning, it was lovely – the two friends were lovely and one of them, realizing that it was birthday, announced he had a case of Blue Moon Ale in his car he was looking to drop off – the birthday beer fairy arrived!  So it was pretty awesome.  We had a lovely lunch and pie from the local farmstand (the one now holding unbelievable quantities of tomatoes for me).  The afternoon of my birthday was spent cooking for a friend’s shiva minyan (mourning prayer gathering), since our friend had lost her mother earlier in the week, but we’d planned that.

All of which is a really wordy way of saying that one of these days, I’m supposed to get a birthday day in which I get to goof off a lot.  That said, however, with the mountain of tomatoes facing me, I think that might be, say, in December.

Otherwise, things are quiet – we’re milking again, but most of the does are mostly feeding their babies as yet.  The milk quantities will rise gradually over the next few months, in time for some lovely fall cheesemaking.  

Much of what we’re doing is infrastructure re-working and planning for next year’s farm projects.  We’re working on ways to use the CSA model, which I love, without running a conventional vegetable CSA – we did that for four years, and for any number of reasons, I don’t want to do it any more.  But I love the CSA connection, and the way it ties you to your customers.   I also, being a lazy slacker type, like the ways it forces me to structure my time – once you’ve committed to delivery and specific dates, you have to make that work.

We’re considering three CSA model projects.  The first I’ve talked about here before – a seed starting CSA.  I’ll send out a list of varieties and various options on numbers of plants in December and January, and start seeds for people. I love seed starting, and always start insanely too many, so this appeals to me as an excuse basically to grow more stuff.  This will supplement the plants we’ll also sell at farmer’s market.

Second, if we can pull this off, we’re considering working out a schechting workshop with the only conservative schochet in the US, who teaches “slaughter your own” in a kosher style, and setting up kosher (by the standards of Jews who would accept meat slaughtered on farm by a woman and a Conservative, rather than Orthodox Jew – this is a complicated and fraught subject), organic, free range poultry CSA.   This would be a small and specialized market, but it is one we want to serve precisely because it isn’t being served.  We’d slaughter monthly and deliver poultry to our customers for six months - mostly chicken, but duck and turkey as well.  This exercise is more speculative, because it requires that we find a clientele in our area that want what we can offer, accept its limitations, and want to support it.    But the cost of on-farm kosher slaughter through traditional methods in the Jewish community is prohibitive, and that leaves most people buying meat from far away, if they can get organic kosher meat at all – or they buy kosher industrial.  In our case, we schecht our own, but at this stage I won’t do it for anyone else because I don’t feel I’m expert enough.

Finally, I’m thinking about a medicinal herb CSA, and one that could be done mostly by mail, since these are small, light items.  I’d have two tracks – one for practitioners and one for home use, and it would include a monthly delivery of appropriate herbs as they are harvested and dried, tinctured or turned into creams or oils.  I could also make up small themed mail-order medicinal gardens using plants as well, to get people started in growing their own. 

What I love about the CSA is that it connects me to my customers in deep ways – I get to learn what they need and want, and how to get closer to that, and they get tied to the farm and learn about what we’re experiencing.  So I’m experimenting with ideas that would allow me to bring these things together.  I haven’t yet, however, figured out how to make a goat CSA .

What else is up here on the farm?  Not a whole lot – the boys are done with a month of camp and swimming lessons, so there’s some more quiet time, and at the end of this week, Eli will be done with his summer program.  The latter is a mixed blessing, since Eli really doesn’t enjoy disruptions in his routine, and making sure his needs are met will take more time and energy – but at the same time, it is nice to have him more fully integrated into our day to day life.

I’m starting to feel the real press of autumn coming on – particularly since the Jewish holidays are so early this year (that, of course, is misnomer – they fall the same way they always do by the lunar calendar, but since we use a solar calendar they seem that way ) – September will be mostly taken up by holidays.  This is nice in many ways, because it means October will be more laid back, and while we’re eating outside in the Sukkah, it should be warm enough to be pleasant, but it means that school, the holidays and everything else come bang up against us in a just a few week’s time.  Have I prepared my homeschool stuff for this year?  Nope.  Have I ordered firewood yet?  Bought the winter’s hay?  Dealt with the damned tomatoes?  Nope.  Better get cracking!

Plant something: lettuce, spinach, arugula, chives, green onions, peas (for pea shoots, not peas at this point), broccoli raab.

Harvest something: Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra, onions, carrots, beets, kale, chard, peaches, green beans, summer squash, cabbage, lettuce, fennel, cucumbers, peppermint, vervain, anise hyssop, betony, dill, sage, pennyroyal, holy basil, basil, oregano, thyme, gotu kola, spilanthes, blackberries

Preserve something: Tinctured spilanthes, vervain, gotu kola, thyme. Made ketchup and salsa, dried peppers, dried peaches, dried tomatoes, made blackberry jam.

Waste Not: Collected the first batch of dried leaves off someone else’s yard – yay, free organic matter!  Otherwise, the usual composting, not wasting food, etc…

Want Not: Began to clean out my attic. That will be a job.  Many interesting things to be found, I suspect. I’m looking specifically for canning jars – I know I have a couple more boxes hiding in there somewhere, and I’m nearly out of pint jars.

Eat the Food: Gorged on blackberries – straight, as cobbler, as sauce over ice cream, in cake.  We’re a bit cold for blackberries here, and the only picking place is kind of a haul, so we are only going once.  So we might as well enjoy!  We’ve been eating tons of what I call “tomato goop” although frankly, it needs a better name that is truly evocative of its awesomeness.  All it is is sliced tomatoes, basil, garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and breadcrumbs, cooked in the solar oven until it is all soft and served over toast.  Yum!

Build community food systems: Gave a couple of local talks about gardening.

How about you?

Sharon

The class is on-line and asynchronous, and you can participate at your own pace. Every week we’ll have projects involving what’s overflowing in our gardens and markets to get you familiar with the basics of preserving the harvest, and also help you build up food security by building up a reserve of stored food.

My hope is that at the end of the class, everyone will have a plan for how they want to go about increasing their food storage reserves, and will have tried the major methods of food storage. You will be able to watch the jars increase as the class goes on.

Here’s a rough syllabus:

Week 1, August 17 – Introduction to Food Storage, How much, where to put it, and how? Can I afford this? Low energy overview of food preservation methods. Storing Water, making space.

Week 2, August 24: Water bath canning 101, Preserving with Salt, Sugar and Honey, Bulk purchasing, sourcing local foods, finding food to preserve, what food storage can and can’t do.

Week 3, August 31: Dehydration basics, Tools you need and where to get them, Menu making and how to get people to eat from your pantry, Setting up your kitchen for food storage, Storing herbs and spices, Sourdoughs and grain ferments, Preserving foraged foods.

***September 7 No Class, Rosh Hashana and Instructor elsewhere ***

Week 4 September 14: Lactofermentation; Special needs and health issues; Storing food for children, pregnant and lactating women; Storing medications, gluten-free storage; Basic dairy preservation; Building up your pantry and Managing your reserves.

Week 5, September 21: Pressure Canning; Beverages, Teas and Drinks; Preserving in Alcohol, Coops and Community Food Security; More Menus and Recipes; Root Cellaring and in-Garden Storage.

Week 6, September 28: Season extension, Preserving Meats, Sprouting, The next Steps, Getting Your Community Involved, Teaching others, Food Preservation as a Cottage Industry.

We will try and track the seasonal produce coming in, support each other as we experiment with new techniques and build up our pantries as we go – and have a lot of fun! If you are interested in joining, cost of the class is $150 or equivalent barter. I also have three scholarship spots remaining for low income participants who would otherwise be unable to afford to take the class. If you’d like to donate to the scholarship fund, just let me know – 100% of your donation goes to making classes available to low income participants. Email me to enroll or with questions at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.

Sharon

Also, if anyone would like to barter a bit, I could use some help on the update, particularly setting up the farm store and some other bits and pieces.  Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com – I’d be happy to barter class registration, books or something else!

I was also thinking, speaking of barter, about trying to put up a barter page on this site.  I would need some ongoing help with that, but would you folks be interested if I could manage it?  The page would allow you to post what you’ve got and where you are and either set up in-person exchanges or allow barter-by-mail.  This would enable folks who all have me in common to get to know who else is in your area, and maybe share resources and do some community building.  Anyone interested?  Anyone have the desire to manage the technical details – this would be one I’d have to put more or less permanently in someone else’s hands, since I’m your average techno-moron.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the redesign and the forthcoming definite and prospective changes.  Is there anything else you’d like to see?  Again, make plenty of allowences for my lack of skill in this area.

Sharon

We’ve also hit peak goat birthing, with Eric delivering five babies on Saturday while I was on a train back from Maryland.  Three does and two bucks – and bucks from Bast, who I was hoping would give us one.   Maia’s two girls are “Licorice” and “Marshmallow” (remember, we have an herb them going this year, the first baby was Meadowsweet), Bast’s little doeling is “Calendula” and the two boys are “Basil” and Goldenrod.”

 Frodo, our herd sire is getting on in years for a buck – with all luck he should have 2-3 more good years of fathering babies, but bucks don’t live as long as does (the physiological stress of rut) and just in case, we wanted one of his sons.  Bast, whose sire is Gilgalad, Frodo’s nephwe, is about as closely related to Frodo as you can get, and she delighted us by giving us two boys, so at least one of them will be a keeper.  Hard to prefer between them as yet, but I’m leaning towards Goldenrod, who is slightly longer, and has a studly name (we cracked up when Isaiah suggested it).

Mina, Jessie and Selene have yet to kid, along with Tekky, who is way behind the others and may birth in September, October or never.  We think she probably aborted the first time, but aren’t sure.    But Selene is due tomorrow, Mina and Jessie early next week (Jessie possibly earlier, but probably not).  So we are on goat watch.

While I was on the train to Maryland, I did some of the math on the break-even point for our farm, including one scenario that used only goats, and found that we could achieve our ag exemption and our goals for net sales if we upped our goat production into the low thirties with does – we have the land base for that (and more, but I want to stock pastures at well below the maximum), and we love working with the goats.  So we’re thinking of expanding the herd into the thirties, and possibly replacing the sheep with fiber or meat-fiber cross goats – angora, pygora or perhaps kiki meat goats.  Still mulling the details on all of this.  But in general we like goats better than sheep. This has had the advantage of making it easier to eat the sheep – but I don’t think it compensates for the fact that most of the year we don’t find the sheep nearly as much fun or as interesting as the goats.

And I think the goats are more likely to turn a profit, particularly the small goats – bringing small scale production of meat, milk and fiber into people’s communities has a lot of virtues, IMHO, and the desire for it seems to be there – small goats can be maintained in a lot of neighborhoods.

The herb and vegetable plant business has more imponderables in it – our estimates on sales and costs are pretty preliminary and still in the experimental stages.  We’ll just have to see how that works out.  Look, over the next few weeks, for a big expansion of this website and the farm materials.

The main goal is for us to put our own subsistence first at every stage – that is, all of our forms of agricultural production have to feed or serve or help us first – that is, I want to sell dairy goats only over and above our production of our own milk.  I want to produce vegetable plants as a by-result of also raising my own seedlings.  I want to produce medicinal herbs and herb products over and above our own use of the herbs.  Any other way just doesn’t seem to make sense – growing food to sell and then using the money to buy other food –  that’s the failed model of agriculture that has cost us so much.

That means that what we do can’t take away from our subsistence activities too much, and ideally, is integrated into them.  It doesn’t, however, mean that I feel a need to produce everything I use.  We have in the past cut a portion of our own firewood, but last year I didn’t cut any – whch means this year I’ll buy all of our wood from neighbors.  I didn’t grow any sweet corn this year, since we were working on the bed building, much less as much as my kids would like to eat.  We don’t produce our own (traditional) hay on any scale, and we probably won’t do so – four of my immediate neighbors sell hay as a main portion of their living, and I’d much rather work with them.  But that doesn’t stop me from experimenting with woody crops for winter hay as well.

Doing the calculations on how to make the farm profitable and successful for us involves balancing on three legs – maintaining and increasing our subsistence activities, the things that get us further along in meeting our own needs.  Expanind the production of things that are both needed in my area and also concordant with my basic values as a farmer – that is, I want to produce things that people need and that enrich my community.  And finally, building strong relationships with both other growers and producers and also customers.    The great thing about havintg three legs is that is way more stable than two .

Meanwhile, the subsistence preserving is going apace – and I’m working on getting the small kitchen ready to be a preserving kitchen for the production of syrups and jams for winter.  

The peaches are ripe, and the early cabbages are ready to be made into slaw.  The first peppers are in, and I’ll be making hot sauce soon.  We’re eating the eggplant so fast I doubt I’ll freeze much, but I’ve had some luck with freezing eggplant purees like baba ganoush and chinese style strange flavor eggplant.  The heat and drought have been good for crops that don’t usually grow that well for me – I’ve got an abundance of okra, peppers and tomatoes, and even a few small watermelons looking hopeful.

It is time to plant the last round of fall crops, excepting spinach and arugula, and I’m looking forward to getting those in the ground.  Meanwhile, we’re in that stage where everything is rich and abundant and hey, what’s not to like about that!

Plant something: Beets, arugula, pea shoots, kale, turnips.

Harvest something: Eggs, milk, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, okra, beans, beets, onions, garlic, cucumbers, zucchini, peaches, blackberries, kale, chard, many herbs.

Preserve something: Peach salsa, mint sauce, rosemary-lemon jelly, dried peaches, salsa, dried various herbs, tinctured various herbs, made pickles.

Waste Not: The usual

Want Not: Nothing unusual

Eat the food – corn, tomatoes, green beans, eggplant… in every conceivable combination.

Build community food systems: Attended a meeting with Poverty agencies on adapting to peak oil, food was a major component, including advocacy for urban small scale meat production on city food waste, and, of course, more gardens.

Sharon

So, wanna buy the house next door?  It has small acreage at the top of the hill, in a nice, rural setting, across the street from lovely people, and (IMHO of course) next door to some nice folks .  Duanesburg (the school district) is a good school district for those looking for those things, and we have tons of local food resources. 

The house is large and has a nice in-law apartment and is ideally set up for an extended family.  They’ve done a lot of work on the house, and it has definite good adapting-in-place possibilities. 

The community is well out of a flood plain, in easy commuting distance of Albany and Schenectady, pretty and rural and friendly.  The only thing I ask is that if you move in next door, you have to promise not to start an expose blog about how Sharon really doesn’t have it all together .

There’s more info here - see you around the neighborhood?

There were several reasons for doing so. The first was that our offer would be contingent, and we thought there was a better than 50-50 chance that the sellers might well sell the house out from under us – that is, since we didn’t per se want to sell the house, but rather to buy *this particular different house* the fact that we’re in no way ready to show (my comment was that the best way to make that happen would be to put the children in self-storage ) meant that a contingent offer was pretty contingent. We know the realtor wasn’t making stuff up about the additional interest – two more people stopped by to look at the house while we were there.

The interior of the house needed about as much work as we’d expected – and the nature of the work was doable, but one factor made it more expensive than we’d hoped – raising what we’d have to get out of this house to do it without debt. Add to that the expensive fencing requirements (not for the livestock, for Eli, our autistic eldest who needs space to roam without being able to wander off – we’ve got that in place in our current space) and we began to wonder whether we could do this without taking on short term debt – which is the exact opposite of the point.

None of those things, however, was really the defining factor – it was simply that we sat down and talked about what we could do in our current place to lower costs and expenses and make the farm here more profitable. We decided we needed to have this conversation regardless, since there was a real chance we wouldn’t get the house even if we made an offer. And in the course of it, we decided we were more excited about going forward where we are than about the year of chaos and instability that moving would bring – that if we stay, we can make more progress on the farm and less on the marathon job of just bringing ourselves up to speed.

It was a tough decision, and one that we still have some regrets about. It took us until Saturday to finalize it, and for the last couple of days I’ve felt exhausted, as though I ran a marathon – my whole mind was in another place, then back again, and I’m tired. But I think we made, as Eric put it “a right choice.” I’m not sure about “the right choice” but maybe that’s too much to ask for.

Chief among our plans is to lower the property taxes by getting our farm exemption – which means we need to achieve 10K in gross sales averaged over two years. We did achieve that much in sales during two years during our CSA, but were not eligible because our agricultural production occurred on only 2 1/2 acres. Now that the livestock are a larger part of our farming production, we can definitely meet the 7 acre requirement, but because my attentions have been so divided between writing and agriculture, we haven’t sold enough to qualify. So that’s the next project – making the land pay.

We’ve also decided that we’re going to get serious about rebuilding our local community. For years, we were spoiled – we lived near several families with kids about our age, and we were totally intertwined in each others’ lives. We had shared ownership of vehicles, washing machines, traded childcare and carpooled everywhere. There were other members of our community, but three families sat at the center.

And then something unspooled. One family’s marriage broke up, and the remaining parent was too overwhelmed and busy to take part, another family had both partners take new, demanding jobs, and suddenly it didn’t work anymore. And we’ve spent more time and energy trying to recreate this than in moving on and making community with other folks. We decided in our conversation that we would work harder on other sources of mutual support, and look for other people who want to work in the barter economy. We also made a list of all the friends and neighbors we do barter or trade or share with – and it was surprisingly long. Perhaps some of the problem is our intentions.

Meanwhile, the house next door to us, complete with in-law apartment and rather nice open land is for sale, if anyone wants to live next door! And we’re talking about either renting out the apartment Eric’s grandparents once lived in to a nice family who would like to share community, or if we can’t find housemates, converting the apartment to an inspected kitchen for the production of food using our produce, and a space to hold classes in.

We’re also planning on changing the livestock around a bit – we’ve always planned to add sheep for meat and fiber to our upper pasture (we have sheep there now, along with a beloved guard donkey, Xote, but this is in a barter arrangement with a neighbor who actually owns the sheep – it has been a lovely agreement, but she’s got a closer pasture available now, so it will likely end this year), but lately we’ve been talking about fiber and meat goats – small ones, and about participating in the projects going on to breed triple purpose small goats – meat, milk and fiber.

We’ve been doing experiments with woody hay crops and silvopasturing that I’d like to continue. The wetland plants and herbs that we’re growing are doing well despite the unusually dry year, and we have already had inquiries about doing native plant restorations in areas cleared of invasives. We’ve been selling vegetable, herb and flower plants, but are planning to expand.

Moving would have required that we put in several thousand dollars of capital investment into making the farm ready to sell – we decided in the end we’d rather invest that money in projects that make the farm function better, rather than improve the aesthetics of our home (not that they couldn’t use improving in some spots). Our goal is to get the infrastructure of the farm solidified, and enter next spring (I can’t do much before then – I have to finish a book!) ready to achieve a number of new agricultural goals.

So we’re staying. Again, we don’t know if it is the right decision – but we’re hopeful that it is *a* right decision. There are good reasons we might be wrong – but all life is full of risk, and you can never know the best thing to do. This, at least, might be *a* best thing.

Thanks everyone who offered comments and advice, thoughts and suggestions for consideration for helping us think this through!