Does that dog hunt?

Our life on the farm follows a rhythm, and yet it is a rhythm that changes all the time. Tomorrow I will take the kids who want to go to the Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, and take care of my friends at a horse show. Yesterday husband took off to have lunch with some folks who have been his friends for longer than he’s known me, and to make a new friend too it turns out. He came home with some walker onions as well as barrels and the possibility of mule training and walnut wood. Three days a week I work off the farm. Husband tries to work in his cottage industry at least some every day. I try to train my horse who will be for sale some every day that I’m not working, and some days that I am. We try to work in the garden most days. And eating and cleaning milking is daily. So is play and reading (at least when I can find my reading glasses) and writing and then the other stuff that interests us.

With the hot weather we tend to get to the garden before breakfast . . . but for me it is after coffee. This morning husband transplanted plants, older kids cleaned off a couple of beds readying them for planting. The youngest child and I planted melons. He’s a lot of fun to work with. And it is fun to just be there and listen to the conversations they all get in to.

I scored big bags of broccoli the hay guy at work grew, so this afternoon we froze three steamers full of broccoli. We blanch it, cool it, freeze it, glaze it, freeze it, bag it. We also got our sweet potato slips from him. And we had broccoli salad for lunch and will have steamed broccoli with our smoked chicken for supper.

I am reading William Coperwaite’s A Handmade Life. We got it from the library but we need to own it I think. I think it will be a lot like The Good Life has been, something to dig in to, be inspired by, riff off of. When I get to thinking about the politics and morality of our life, I can get bogged down in the conservative/liberal dichotomy. They are both so wrong. Criticizers criticize, that’s what I’ve been told. I rather think it is the ability, and the willingness, to call a spade a spade. But when it comes down to beauty and simplicity and living a rightful life, well, eyes must be open, and hearts and minds and souls too, and open enough to change, for real (RRR tm). Step outside of the affective world.

People must be independent, doggedly independent. But the fruit of that independence is cooperation. The seed of cooperation is independence. External validation is the thing that gets in the way -- trying to please someone else, or needing someone else to please you. The other side of admiration and respect is fear and loathing and it always gets to the other side. Independence is the antidote. What externally is seen as ego but internally is purpose and knowledge is what keeps one from needing massive amounts of external validation. The validation that is valid is the rather worn Native American saying, “Does it grow corn?” In hillbilly that is, “Does that dog hunt?”

Well, I don’t know quite how I got off on all that. Just the sort of things I think about I guess -- how to live without exploitation, with beauty, with love and all that jazz. Ornamentation is not beauty. But life is.

And life has rhythm. It is a dance.

without words

almost


I've thought a lot of words but none have made it into computer blips. So it is just this image, which I laughed at that hen so much when I saw this.

But that isn't how it looks today. This is today:


Today is also comfort food (can you say, blueberry cobbler? So glad for the berries in the freezer!). Tomorrow is definitely insulated coveralls.

Which, one thing I notice, one thing that stands out like a sore thumb to me, is the expectation that people have that they should be able to go anywhere they want to anytime they want to. It is painfully cold? Snow? Dangerous road conditions, BE DAMNED! That's what I see as the prevalent attitude.

There was someplace I wanted to go yesterday, just for pleasure, and it had some elements of a commitment to it and I am loathe to break any commitment, but as the snow continued to come down, as we struggled to get the chores done (that all had to be done whether or not we were going to be gone for the afternoon), as we thought about coming home on questionable roads to a cold house, the decision to not go was not a difficult one. It is good at home. It is good with us.

Certainly, there is more than one way to live, but something is lacking when there is an overwhelming need to vacate one's life, or to involve others all the time, to have the psychological need to leave the house when all external factors would say to stay home.

love in falling

If you could see the pile of apples and pears in our floor! And the older cow came home after visiting with her bull for three months, and we're milking the newer cow, and the calf is almost as big as her mothers. The turnips that were seeded on the potato hills after the potato tops had died back have made themselves nicely. We had a great crop of winter squash this year, and also got the hard corn harvested (but not shucked or shelled yet).

I've decided to absolutely embrace this time of year again. As a child and young adult, fall was my favorite season. With age or with children or maybe with a house without central heat, when fall came I just started thinking of winter, and being cold. But winter is really just a different rhythm. Cold and snow and the like really can make everything much harder but then again, there is less to do too. Without a heated house, it is helpful if someone can stay home to keep it warm but then again, sometimes a day alone is a welcome thing for each of us . . . and we can take turns.

So this fall came and it has been beautiful. The color lasted a long time and while perhaps not a vibrant as some year, it was nonetheless wonderful. Today I was just taking note of how many trees were still holding on to their leaves, now various shades of brown from ochre to mahogany to dull. The pines have darkened. The mountains, although they really couldn't be seen today for the mist and low ceiling, have their "bones" visible now -- their ridges and lines, their sharpness and age. When you look through the woods, if there is a clearing on the other side, you can see it now. And to walk now is like being in a riot of noise from the leaves. This rain will make it a little quieter.

We have a fire. Chores have moved an hour earlier. The rhythm and steps of the dance change constantly. The apples and pears move in and out of the dehydrator.

On the practical side, we drive bottom feeder vehicles, a sort of protest of having to drive at all. And recently we've experienced all sorts of problems with them. Recently being since about April. But just take the most recent, last night, an axle going, and today, in the midst of trying to deal with that, a neighbor comes up and gives us 30 hens (he raises roosters, if'n you know what I mean). So right there, you have this abundance. There was abundance in me calling my boss and her saying, I can handle today, it's ok; abundance in the in-laws willingness to pick up the new axle and bring it out here; abundance in a new axle costing so little that we could afford it; abundance in that our family made it home safe and sound after a rare and exceptional night out before that axle went. And perhaps even grace in my husband not entirely forsaking me when all I could do was hold my head in my hands and try to breathe after the axle broke.

bawlin' cow blues

And two mammas equals twice the bawling too.

Ok, just the honest to goodness facts is that we're slow a lot of times. We read the books, sure, and talk to the agri-farmers, and we know the theories, but when it comes right smack dab down to it, we feel our way along. We change all the time, but slowly and always in a direction.

So it should come as no surprise that the we've just left the calf on the cow and milked away up until now. And then, finally, I decided its time. We've discussed it way before now, brainstormed through it, come up with ideas, but in the end it comes down to someone deciding that the time has come.

So tonight, for the first time ever, the calf is in the pen by herself and her two mammas are in the field. There are things I'm concerned with . . . mostly that the mammas don't decide to get out. That the real mamma always drinks when she's put in the pen so I want to make sure she knows how to drink from the stream. Well, I know she KNOWS because she was turned out there for months without a trough to drink from, but anyway, her water intake is still a concern. They can actually see each other, mammas and calf, so I don't think anyone will get in any big panic. And it is just until in the morning.

Two mammas, you ask? The three of them are funny. The calf drinks from real mamma but hangs with auntie mamma. Auntie mamma wants to be her real mamma. Hopefully we've found a bull to "expose" auntie mamma to, a Jersey since I'd love to perpetuate her terrific genes. Of course, that is slow to work itself out . . .

And tomorrow will be our first morning milking.

Did I forget to mention daughter belly skiing through the grass behind the calf? Scared me to death. I had just given them the instruction "Don't let go," but then when I saw that I was saying, "Now would be a good time to let go!" What did she say? "It was FUN!"

Another Cat's Tale

He left around seven years ago. That was the year I started mowing for a neighbor and maybe he followed me down there or maybe he wandered on his own, I don't know. What I remember is that periodically that year she told me to come get my cat. She may have begun calling me the previous year and telling me that, I don't know, or the winter before at least. Maybe that's even why I began mowing for her, I don't quite remember how that got started exactly.

I told her to quit feeding my cat and he would come home. I went to mow one day and she came out fussing that the cat that she called Midnight (he has a different name at our house) was still about. In fact he was standing on her porch in front of a big bowl of spaghetti she'd sat out for him. "He's not gonna come home if you feed him like that," I said.

Not that I minded so much. We have plenty of cats. And he'd just shown up, the way a lot of them do. Husband came home one day with him, having found him somewhere. He looked just like a cat we'd petted at a park in town recently and we named him the same thing we'd called that cat. (If I were Alecto, I would tell you about all the memories and feelings and (non-traumatic but still a bit bitter) flashbacks of that day in the park . . . but you know, the cat is more important.) I mean, he was a very good, even very exceptional cat, but who could blame him for going to the lasagna meals instead of more meager scraps.

All these years, I've known he was still down there. I knew that at some point they started keeping him inside most of the time, but he was still let out at least sometimes and I would see him, hunting. For some years he would visit us in the garden -- he could hear when we were there from her house -- but eventually he stopped visiting. And then, even if I saw him out, he would actively avoid me and just go home. I appreciated his caution. He had a good thing going and he didn't want to mess it up.

We've never been all that close with the neighbors. We know them all, but we don't break bread together. I think it is a good idea to keep most everything at arms length anyway, and all the more so with her.

Those neighbors recently moved away. I'll spare you the details there. We knew about the situation because well, that's how it is. People know stuff, especially bad stuff. They took their dog. They didn't take the cat. They didn't call to say they weren't taking the cat I suppose because then they would have had to explain why they were moving. They didn't even call to tell me to come get my damn cat the way she used to when she was feeding it, and now it would have no one to feed it. Her embarrassment was bigger than her concern for the cat, but you know, I guess I understand that too. Especially because I'd look after the cat anyway and maybe she knew that about me.

After they'd gone, I saw him around so I knew he was there. The first time I called to him, he ran back to his old home. He wasn't fat anymore but he wasn't skinny. The guy across the road with the dogs said he came over there and ate regularly. I knew eventually he'd get lonely.

And sure enough, the whole gang of us were in the garden one evening and MEOW! I mean, really loud and long MEOW! Loud, long, repeated MEOW. We meowed back and at first we were just wondering which of our cats it was who'd decided to come to the garden. The big grey tabby often hunts in front and meets us in the garden to get petted? Some of them just like to come to flop. But this continued and before long the youngest child went off to see who this was. He came back reporting that it looked like one of our other cats but wasn't fuzzy. All the rest of us said his name and all went off to claim him.

He was a bit stand-offish at first. Hesitant. Unsure. His rug had been pulled out from under him but he could feel the love. It was the other cats he was much less sure about. But he seems to have decided that he can put up with us. All of us.

Except for a few things. Like yesterday we killed some long overdue roosters. The other cats are used to this routine -- they lick the blood and run off with the heads and know the offal will be put off in the woods for them. On the way back to the house with the now empty offal bowl, husband ran into this new old cat and offered him the bowl to lick. He sniffed this rather stinky offering and looked at husband and almost clearly said, "You've got to be kidding. Where's the lasagna?"

A little later, he did learn to slurp from a stream of milk squirted directly from the cow to his head. That might make up for the lack of lasagna and plethora of cats he must put up with in his new old home.

the first cat's tale

Noon Today

Canoeing through the pine understory and snow?

Not much foraging happening today but lots of huddling in corners. They'll appreciate the hot water they'll get to drink.

Old cow, who has detected that I took hay to the horse, on the moove.

New cow in her temporary pen.

Garbage Out, Garbage In

We don't actually produce much garbage but still, it has to go out sometime. This time, it got from the house to the can rather quickly.

Even the flatter parts are sled negotiable . . .

. . . sometimes with "paddles" (sticks) for speed and steering.

And this is how supplies get back up the hill when the road is impassible. It seems it is always dark by the time we get to this part, but it also seems that we always have fun doing it and that a party always ensues.

tectonics

December and being snowed in by the snow storm for so long highlighted a couple of things.

One is that we had a gosh darn lot of fun jousting with the being snowed in. I mean, it was four days after it snowed before the sun shone and the temperature went above freezing and we began in earnest to get the vehicle out of the place. It took quite a bit of effort over two days, shoveling deep and heavy snow off the steep parts of our road and cutting snow covered bent sapling trees loose (“plop plop” on our heads went the icy snow) and wresting their heavy snow embedded selves out of the road. Not to mention the white knuckle driving to actually get it out.

But when the vehicle and all of us were on the bridge there arose a mighty victory whoop! We had worked very hard, together, and it had been a lot of fun.

If we had not had off the farm Christmas preparations to make, I do not know how long we would just allow ourselves to be snowed in. Perhaps, probably, until it melted.

And I have my off the farm part-time employment. Which I love. And that taught me something too. My off the farm employment is pretty much firmly in the mainstream paradigm, not the homesteading paradigm. Said employment could and probably will morph as times change, and almost certainly the skills and contacts will be helpful no matter what, but it is the modern world that trots endless circles, not the homesteading world. And on the day I was actually certain that I would not be able to get out of this farm to feed horses on that farm, I also did not have a phone. The stress of being unable to let my boss know that I couldn’t get there was very traumatic.

Now, juxtapose those two things -- the stress was only, I repeat only, in the place where the homesteading paradigm meets the modern paradigm. It felt like tectonic plates grinding over each other creating earthquakes and volcanoes and deep ocean trenches. Being inside the homesteading paradigm, with all the things that might be hard or unpleasant about it, is not hard or unpleasant in itself. It is only in the overlap.

The sheer joy in the snow was personified by a giantess snow woman with baling twine hair, a cranberry necklace and pine cone belt who looked in my kitchen window for a few days, arms akimbo. And the many fastfastfast sledding trips down the various hills. She didn’t get a photo taken of her because the camera batteries had not been recharged and even at 7’ tall, she melted before the power came back on (although there is still a lump of her snow out there!).

in the here & now

This has been a year not only of rain but of wind. We had big windstorms in the spring that took lots of trees down, and then again last week and this week, big wind. I haven’t been out and about to see which trees it might have gotten this time. The first windstorm killed someone I knew, not well -- blew a tree down on her car, freak accident they said. Here we lost power both times, this last time for four days.

When I’m home it seems I’m always doing dishes, and so while the power was out I did dishes --I just did them differently than how I do them with the power on since we generally do not have running water without the electricity. And then the dirty water became chicken water to further conserve what water we hauled. We had a wealth of books from the library so we read them by day and then by candle light when the sun went down. We kept the fires going because it was cold, really cold. We genuinely enjoy being around each other for the most part. The first evening without power we told stories and tales and eventually shared dreams we’d had throughout our lives, all six of us. The second day, husband and I had a deep discussion about the theological implications of “saved by faith” vs. “saved by faith alone”, and Presbyterians vs. Baptists, and the like. That night we got the whistles out and the kids learned to play Christmas songs on them, and we all took turns playing various songs for the rest of the time. And we read more and told more tales and played more music and read more books and eventually the power came back on and we all took showers.

Here are some photos from the snowstorm between the windstorms:

early winter wildflowers

There have been lately these moments, visuals for the most part, unconnected, like a wildflower bouquet.

*There was coming home, after dark, and there on a small tree branch beside the bridge a screech owl sitting there and staring at me. I nearly drove into the creek before I thought to hit the brake and put it in reverse to go back and talk to him/her. And so we sat there together for a few minutes blinking at each other, trying to understand.

*There was the day that the sky was variegated shades of grey, low slung, but unraveled in places and each and every hole in the clouds was filled with a different shade of intense blue.

*There was the tufted bird in a stall eeeeeeking like a bat almost, high pitched, before it flitted away.

*There was the day the whole sky surrounded us in a cloud, all day, and even when it "cleared" you could only see maybe 300 feet.

*There was the small, maybe four or five foot tall sapling at the edge of the forest that still had its leaves, maybe 10 of them in all, with the tip top three bright red, the middle four yellow, and the bottom three fading green . . . and all so bright in a forest of muted by winter to greys and browns that it looked like a hunter had hung a flag to find his way but instead it was mother nature who had hung her flag and would take it away in a few days to fool any who would find their way by going backward.

*There is that grey and brown that is the winter palette, more colorful in its own way than all the contrived color in the world.

*There is the shag carpet of leaves in the forest now, and loud and raucous they are when you walk through them, and nice when they are in the forest but less welcome when they blow onto the porch and get tracked through the house.

*There is "yoga tree" visible again . . . a big oak twisted thirty feet from the ground and bent over in a perpetual bow during the big spring winds but hidden by the leaves when they grew and I missed it all summer even knowing it was hiding there.

*There is the goat who comes on the porch nightly to ask for her supper . . . and gets it, and we watch her bag to see when she may kid.

This week we marked a milestone: we dried the cow up. Well, we didn't have much to do with it but rather decided to stop milking for so little milk. We've at least found a cow we like if we can manage to arrange transportation for her (she's about 100 miles away).

Patchwork

The goat we sold.

The fish fry we had. (bluegill and bass, fried cabbage, rice)

A hickory horned devil I think. I love that name. There were a good number of luna moth caterpillars at this same time too, which was a couple of weeks ago.

The wooly worms this year have been totally cool but I haven't gotten a non-blurry photo of one yet. We have them all over the barn -- I think they come in the hay -- but they are also to be seen trying to cross the road and some other unlikely things like that. Anyway, I'm talking about the wooly black and brown ones. The way I always heard it was that the more black they had on them, the worse winter was going to be. Well, this year they are mostly brown with just small stripes of black at the ends. Some of them have even been all brown. So, according to the wooly worms, this shouldn't be a bad winter. I do hope we get a good freeze or two to kill the bugs.

Gosh but I do love October. Except that I know I'm getting old now because I also do think of winter in a way that I didn't when I was a kid and had electric heat that was paid for by my daddy. I remember my grandmother dreading winter and while I don't think I dread it quite like she did, it does cross my mind that things get harder in the winter, that daily chores can be more of a challenge. The husband put a load of shale on the worst part of the road today. Not being able to negotiate the road is one of the things that can make life a lot harder. Having the wood stove going is a thing that makes life easier in the winter though.

The quilt on the mountains in the autumn. My mountains. The mountains that shelter and nurture me and have my family for generations. The arms of the very earth that have endured to embrace me. I love these mountains.

flesh to flesh

Isn't it funny how at spring equinox, I can milk in the light both times, but at fall equinox, more often both milkings are in the dark? It is more like, when I milk early in the morning, it is still dark; and when I milk regular time in the evening, it is dark already.

Ah, but the moon was up tonight. And lately the glow worms have been magnificent, like stars fallen to earth.

I remember when we first moved up here. I'm not sure I'd ever seen glow worms before. But we had rabbits down at the garden. I was pregnant with the eldest child. I still worked full time. And every evening, husband and I would walk together through the dark with the stars filling the sky and the glow worms filling the earth, hand in hand, down then back up the hill.

The little building where the rabbits were then, it is still there, now just a garden storage shed and home for wasps. It was the first thing we built on this land. We built it for chickens, and it was good but we didn't live here yet and, well, the end wasn't pretty for the chickens. Or the dogs that killed the chickens.

But before that, when there were maybe a dozen chickens in there, I would come sometimes after work to feed them before going home. One day I came and one was dead of natural causes. I didn't know then what to do exactly. I knew I needed to get her out but I thought I needed to bury her. So I tried. Something dug her up, of course. But what I didn't know then was that it was perfectly acceptable to just throw her over the side of the hill and life would take care of the rest of it, and fast. We had a goat die once in sight of my kitchen window and I watched and it was amazing. And in three days, it was gone except for some skin and the bones.

A Year of Living Abundantly

Or

Every Year is Different

This year we’ve had abundant rain. One might even call it abundant weather because by gosh we’ve had a lot of it. These first photos are the results of weather (in this case meaning wind) that happened back in April but that I just got around to photographing: Trees down by the back creek and into our back pasture. The scale of it is impressive although I don’t believe I’ve got a speck of that Ansel Adams thing about capturing scale and grandeur and all that.

Do you see the mushroom? Turned sideways. That root ball is well over my head.

This sycamore tree I could easily walk across . . . but where would I go on the other side? Still, the kids have fun traipsing on all these.

A look at what might be called violence. Or it might be called something else. Like it might be called necessary. I do hate the modern “compassionate” view of everything always moving in some progression of unassailable growth without the necessary pruning/death/smiting, aka sh*t happens. Those trees that are snapped and twisted are as big around as my body . . . and yet others stand unbowed. I just have to love, admire, respect and emulate nature.

This is a pine fallen into the pasture and now a favorite scratching post. The dog provides some awesomeness scale.

And this one . . . follow it . . . there is a fence post in the bottom right corner . . . the clump of trees felled over the creek . . . but as the photo goes back you can see three more large trees or clumps of trees on the ground and what you don’t see is the murkwood because it is gone. This little patch of forest floor is now open to the sun and will be vastly different next year until it gradually grows itself back. Maybe this year the bears won’t think they can hide here as much.

And these are the inhabitants of the back pasture, missing the donkey and the baby goats who are no longer actually babies (does anyone have hearty milk goats to trade out?) I always love best photos of the animals.

Before I leave the pasture, I want to tell you something. Someone showed up here the other day. Someone I didn’t know. I think it was good that I was at the barn instead of home. Husband said if he hadn’t had a banjo thrown over his shoulder he would probably have run him off but he did have a banjo and he seemed ok to husband and so he visited awhile. He’s been a reader of this blog. From having read this blog, he also read about Eustace Conway and is currently working over at his place and somehow found his way here ostensibly to visit me. That’s a little creepy. Perhaps I should be more careful. Don’t anyone else get any ideas. I don’t like being on display. And yet, I’m touched and flattered that someone wanted to actually see what I’ve tried to describe.

What our visitor found was a messy house and a messy farm and a messy garden, no doubt. He found a husband willing to play some music with him and to pull a carrot as if by magic out of the weeds -- weeds that are so thick this year as to make the garden an impenetrable jungle to any who do not know where it hides its secret vegetables. He found a corn field that isn’t really very big, and that this year is even quite puny, but that will still likely produce all the table corn we’ll need for the year. He did not find a Contrary Goddess because she’d gone for the day to the barn where she is spending more time. He found some children who have not actually said much about his visit. He found a house that was without bread made at that moment, a rarity but . . . in the end we are not purists by any stretch of the imagination. One of the whole points of living like this, maybe even the main point, is joy . . . is to be able to do what it is we really want to do . . . is to have time to play and to find our work to be play.

I don’t know what he thought of it all, how he experienced it. As far as I know, he’s never left a comment on this blog or written me an e-mail or linked me to a blog of his. He has, however, turned an acre or so of his parents’ property into garden, which is so cool, and come to work with Eustace for awhile, which is also cool. I think I would like to know what he thought and how he experienced it, but it is also uncomfortable. Will the sodas on the table or the jeans hanging on the flue take precedence in his mind?

Visitor, know this: I admire you. You are pursuing stuff, not finding reasons why you cannot or making excuses for what doesn’t work. As should be obvious, there is no one way to do this, any of it. And every year is different.

The weaver of the web:

Hither world, thither world, all worlds are One.

Sunflower serving as food and as table for some critter or the other:
(while the corn might be puny this year, the sunflowers are not)

When zucchinis and crooknecks go bad:

bean blossoms

Eggplants. Notice the flea beetle eaten leaves.

Female.

Male.

The first color change of fall. I think I first noticed this little tree in a neighbor’s yard last year too. Also, I’m not able to milk late without a flashlight anymore. I’ll miss the light.

Another form of abundance this year. One had fallen off in the road and I took it to the horse show with me and gave it to an overgrown pony named Tullamore who I happen to like a lot and who boss says I like because she is just exactly like me.

Nourished by the abundance of this sort of life:

I do want to say, I am thankful to all and for so much. I think this farm and this family have taught me over these years how to be happy, and how to take the chance, and that there is indeed a place in the world for a gambler -- albeit a place that she must needs make for herself. With a lot of help.

P.S. this is post #570 and I just passed my five year blogoversary! woohoo & hahahehehoho

juxtaposition this day

haulms off the corn field
world in handbasket in hell
three roosters lose heads

haiku

five on fishing hike
bluegill, bass come home to fry
slaw and fries on side

The Results of Living a Life

I might have said the results of unschooling but while avoiding school, schooling, and schoolishness is all good, it is not enough. Kids want to do what parents and by extension all adults around them do, want to know all that they know, so if the adults around the kids are not engaged in real and ernest enterprises, the kids can still end up indoctrinated to uselessness.

As you might imagine, not our kids. This year the girls, 13 and 12, took over milking the goat. They don't need any help -- they just do it (because they want to). And they are responsible for it, all of it: For putting the babies up for the night at chore time;
(don't you love the little pen made from pallets and spare fencing)

For putting her in her stanchion the next morning;
(as you can see, this stanchion is just a snap on a wall. It is perfectly serviceable. No need for fancy smancy or expensive -- and she goes there and waits for you anyway)

For milking her out;

Today we made goat milk ice cream as our treat. Life on the farm provides many opportunities for treats.

I think so many things about unschooling and living as a family but I can never adequately express them. You'll just have to read it in all the things I don't say, in all the things we don't have a need to do, in the grins and laughter and freedom that play here.

I picked these the other day
and sitting in my bay window they seem to have inspired

the wasabis.

Today

For comrades and lovers

Click link in title
We are feeding square bale hay this winter. We are feeding other people’s waste hay and I am thankful for it. We store it on pallets and under tarps near one corner of the field. We feed it by taking a bale out, throwing it over the fence, then breaking it open and distributing it in at least four piles at least 20 feet apart so all the various animals can eat in relative peace. Although everyone except the horse plays musical piles. The horse stands there and eats until he is through.
If you know animals though, you know they don’t actually eat every scrap of hay (well, unless they are starving, and even then there is some waste especially when feeding outdoors). So we feed it in different locations every day. By the end of the winter, this will provide a good mulch for the whole field and will prevent a build-up of hay (and a worn out by hooves muddy mess) in one spot.

No surprise, all the easy places have been fed in already, so we are walking the hay further and further afield. No surprise, the animals all know what we are doing when we make our way to the hay, and wait for us patiently to throw it over the fence to them. That is the end of their patience. They are ready to eat and so tear into the bale.

When I am throwing the hay, I cross the fence and pick up the bale and start walking up the hill. The cow generally just gets out of the way and follows, but the queen nanny goat gets directly in front of me but generally sideways to me and tries to continue eating.

And here is what I do: I lift the bale a bit and set it on her back. Then I do my best to follow her. She carries it for me while I balance it on her back, and when we get close to a good spot, I drop it and she resumes eating.

This, I will tell you, is much easier than carrying the bale up the hill by myself while trying to push her out of the way or maneuver around her. It is a bit of a challenge, and I have to jog up the hill to keep up with her, but it is kinda fun too. At least it nearly always makes me laugh.

That little goat is my own labor saving device.

Rhythm & Roots

We rely on a spring for water. After four years of drought, we don’t have any. Our creeks still ran even in the driest part, so we didn’t have to worry about the livestock. And the garden has a pump that pulls from a branch just below it. But the springs that fed the house water system have been dry for months now.

We decided to design a water system around those springs because they never went dry and it was a lot cheaper than digging a well and we could do it ourselves. For many years, they ran year round. The only problem then we ever had was if a pipe that ran from the springs to the cistern would get plugged, we could sometimes run the cistern low before we noticed. But the springs, they ran.

I don’t remember which year was the first that we took to bathing in the creek in late summer but it was sometime in the late 1990s. The springs still ran as I remember, just not enough to allow us to wash clothes or to bathe. We could do dishes and flush. And in late summer, bathing in the creek is really a pleasure, not a chore. We became used to late summer conservation of water. After October the water would returned full force.

But this year, for the first time ever, after four years of severe drought, the springs went dry. Bone dry. Not a drop, not a drip. And it is December and they still are not back (although they are beginning to be wet on the bottom!). We have been on water conservation in the house since at least June. Since the springs went dry, we’ve hauled water from the garden pump to put into the cistern so that we can still wash dishes and sponge bath ourselves. Then we save that water to flush with.

Now it is so cold that the pump in the garden is frozen. So we’ve taken to getting water by the barrel out of the creek and hauling that to the cistern. It is actually easier to do this so that we might well be able to haul enough extra water for everyone to get to take a bath. The reason it isn’t our first choice is that the little branch below the garden is the cleanest water that we trust the most.

I wrote all that, really, to get to this:

Husband and elder daughter had business in town today. It was also today that we realized we were going to have to resort to the creek method to get water instead of the garden pump so the routine of how to do that would be new to us. After sending husband and daughter off, the rest of us bundled up and went to work. It was cold today. The truck was already in the front but the barrel was up here so we walked down carrying buckets and rolling the barrel. Every cat on the place went with us. Younger daughter and elder son dipped fifty gallons of water out of the creek one bucket at a time and I tipped it all into a barrel in the back of the pick-up. Younger son helped sort out the buckets and herd the cats.

While I said this before, it was cold today. And working in water was even colder. But there wasn’t a complaint. The sun was shining. The cats were funny. Daughter found it easier to dip without gloves on and son found it easier to tote without his coat on and I froze for them. The kittens evidently hadn’t been to the creek before and rock hopped and batted and sometimes made mistakes in their calculations. Noses and fingers turned red.

We had the best time.

When I hauled the truck up to the cistern, found the old hose, and tried to siphon the water out, I quickly gave up. I laid it down and went to check to see how low exactly the cistern was. 37 inches down. And daughter hollered, “Mom! It’s dripping!” and sure enough, it was so I took my end of it over to the tank and let gravity do its work.

Fifty gallons gives us about a day and a half of regular conservation use water. A little later I will go down to make sure it siphoned all right and also add a cup of bleach to the cistern. I will move the truck so the sojourners can get all the way home undeterred. I will finish the cheese and make a fresh loaf of bread and sweep the floors and dream of a bath. The kids will do their chores and resume their lives and dreamings. The sojourners will return with some treat for us probably.

We’ll feed the fires and stand around the stoves and warm our bums.

And tomorrow, we’ll do most of it again.

Morning Chores in Snow

This is the first time in my memory that we’ve had significant snow in November. And it is significant. We woke up to several inches and it was still snowing.

I went to milk after fortifying myself with coffee and donning multiple layers for warmth. Visibility was maybe 100 feet, up to 200 sometimes. Then the wind would blow and the snow on the trees, and especially on the pines, would say “Geronimo!” and the air would look like a fog.

I always milk first and feed the horse second, but both things happen in the same little shed and most usually the horse is waiting in the shed even before I milk and I bark “Back!” to him and used to he backed out (he is trained to voice commands) but now he turns around to get out and the shed is just barely big enough for him to manage to turn himself around in. But he comes out and he and donkey wait just outside the shed while I milk and the cow eats.

Milking is a meditation, really. My consciousness becomes a speck while my body continues to sit on the stool and my hands continue to squeeze the milk into the bucket and I am not my body and I am not separate from the cow or from the bucket. This morning I was in such a state when the speck of consciousness became aware that something was eating my hat! The horse was a bit impatient maybe, or maybe he just thought the giant pompom on my hat was funny. My consciousness was immediately aware of my body being on a stool stuck between a 700# cow and an 1800# horse who pretend they don’t particularly like each other. “Back!” I said, and he took a step or two back and I laughed at him and at the beauty of the morning.

Then I took the milk to the house when a wind came and blinded me under the trees and I just stood there while white came down all around me and into the collar of my coat. The children were already sledding, laughing. I took the feed back down to the horse, gave the donkey his obligatory handful, and waited while the horse eats. Donkey took his usual aromatherapy from the empty bucket while I scratched his withers and admired his snowy, spiky mane and the curls on his thick coat. I turned to check the horse over and found a place that needed my attention, just an itchy spot on the side of his hock, and while I was bent over attending to this I felt something quite heavy come up against my behind. It was donkey’s behind. After his withers get scratched, he has a spot on his rump that is his real favorite spot and he can be quite insistent that I attend to it. While I did this, the goats came up waiting to clean up any grain the horse may drop. They were fluffed out to twice their real size.

When the horse was finished I went to get a bale of hay and throw it to them in piles in the field, and then I found my way back to the house and to a breakfast of eggs and toast by the fire.