A rare midweek post: here are some pictures of our new sawmill operation.
New Sawmill
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Monthly Archives: July 2014
Sleep Walking
Another nice evening with our South Roane reading circle/supper club, starting around six it lasted until long after dark. We have gathered once a month for the past two years to read and discuss climate change and peak resources and how they might affect farming here in our county. We rotate the gatherings between our farm and Kimberly Ann farm a couple of valleys and ten miles away.
Usually about ten area farmers or residents gather, bring food, homemade wine or beer. Invariably we spend time walking around the gardens and barnyards, before or after eating, chatting about the weather, our successes and failures. After a couple of hours we settle in to discuss the topic for the night. The readings have ranged from Wendell Berry to new works on permaculture.
Last night we read a governmental assessment on the Knoxville Food-shed, covering the 11 counties bordering Knox. It was a fairly benign piece that surveyed the state of agriculture in the region, what the region was capable of producing and what it was currently producing. It was fairly ambitious in tone, yet like so many such documents it walked a bland bureaucratic line, offering some substance tempered by the language of restraint and institutional structure.
It outlined three recommendations for the food-shed: USDA slaughterhouses, food corridors and food hubs. As the evening progressed, between the wonderful spread of food, a few pints of the local brew and the stimulating conversation I realized that our current cultural vocabulary was inadequate to explain or anticipate the future.
We lack, in this age of abundance, the vocabulary of the past. Our knowledge of the cycles of history has been reconstructed into ever ascending cycles plateauing into greatness. Knowledge of dark forces in the past, of the ebb and flow of empires and stability, has no place in our vocabulary of the present. Even as the current generation of twenty-somethings matriculate in their parents’ homes or on friends’ couches; as the drought ridden Imperial Valley begins to resemble more and more its southern cousin, the Death Valley, or as the planet racks up another hottest year on record and another species goes extinct as you read these words, we still cannot conjure a language of need.
It is not that we need to learn the words of despair. But we desperately need to learn the language of limitations. A Sysco selling local produce is not going to change our global trajectory or solve either climate change or peak resources. One of these days, whether in ten years or a hundred, one of the children of this culture will once again be able to write convincingly these words written by Kathryn Anne Porter, “I am a grandchild of a lost war, and I have blood knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation.”
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A Farm Toolbox: The Pitchfork
Often the weapon of choice by angry peasants and fathers chasing away a daughter’s suitor, the pitchfork is part of our collective farm image. Picture Grant Wood’s American Gothic and you know the tool we speak of today. With a pitchfork in hand work will happen. And if you have chosen the right fork the work will happen more efficiently.
The pitchfork typically ranges from three-five prongs, with many exceptions. We have four pitchforks: one each for hay, manure, compost and a useless horse-stall fork.
Lounging by the coop.
The hay-fork: a slender three prong fork with tines spaced a couple of inches apart. This is for moving loose dry hay. Amazing how much hay can be lifted and tossed with this fork. One of my favorites, I use it frequently in the barn. We keep a round bale of hay in one of the stalls. Once or twice a week, using the fork, I tear hay from the bale and spread it around the barn for fresh bedding.
The manure-fork: Each spring we clean out a years’ worth of bedding and manure. It is layered in the barn to a depth of about twelve inches. What the front-end loader cannot get, the four prong manure-fork gets the rest. Not elegant, like the hay-fork, but it gets the job done. The extra tines give it more surface area for lifting bedding and manure.
The compost-fork: very similar to the manure-fork but it has five tines. The design allows you to shovel into a compost pile with ease and turn it with minimal effort. Just remember to lift with the knees. The more tines on the pitchfork, the greater the load; and the greater the load the more risk to ones back.
The stall-fork: designed for hoity-toity horse barns with paved surfaces, it has a dozen plastic tines and is near useless for real work. We bought it our first week on the farm. It leads a lonely life in the back of the tool shed.
Auctions and antique stores usually have well-made pitchforks for bargain prices. Pick one up, use it on your farm. Or save it for the next suitor or politician who knocks on your door.
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Rereading this weekend: Travels With a Donkey, by Robert Louis Stevenson. One of the greatest travel works of all time.
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A Summer Walk
I enter the woods near the wet weather spring, the ground moist and spongy under foot. The air is cool, so different from the oven-like summer day left behind a few feet back. The lane as it curves up into the woods dips then rises gradually up the long slope of the ridge. Becky weaves back and forth in the brush following her own invisible road of smells and enticements.
Leaving the lane I begin my own weave in the woods, not her scent driven journey, but no less purposeful for that. Boletes and milk-caps carpet the floor, sprung into being after the rain. An act of creation as remote from the distant buzzing saws and trucks in the next valley where a man’s son’s clear-cut an inheritance left. A pact, I imagine, completed with the same quiet understanding and betrayal of the sons in the final pages of “The Good Earth.”
Looking for a flush of chanterelles, or at least enough to accompany dinner, I find only two. I am now in the middle of the woods where sounds entering are muted and filtered, sanitized of offence. A doe jumps and runs away with an exaggerated slowness. I know that dance. She has left a fawn in the brush and leads Becky far away before easily eluding. Looking nearby I see the bright red and white spots, no more than twenty pounds, of a fawn asleep, unaware of her mother’s exertions.
I have now come to the fence at the base of the ridge. Newly installed last year, a large branch has fallen crushing the wire to the ground. Shifting the branch, I repair the wire with my fence pliers, each strand crimped back into tight harmony with the whole. We walk the perimeter until we get to the gates between the upper pasture and the hopper field. I pull and latch the gates. I’ll move the cattle in a few days and have come on this walk to make the pasture secure.
We walk out of the shade across the pasture. Becky plunges into a pond to cool off sending a dozen bull frogs skittering from shore to the depths. I’m sweating as we reenter the woods. Seemingly less open to wonder, the details of the remaining to-do list begin to crowd in as we walk back down the lane. Becky, no longer chasing scents, senses the change and walks by my side.
The woods now seem a bit stifling as the mid-afternoon sun drives all thought of breeze away. We cross the pasture back to the barn. Becky dives for the shade under the chicken coop. I piddle around for a few minutes and then follow her example and head to the house for a nap.
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A Covenant Terrine
This Farm Note is from the archives, before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived “Notes.”
We speak today of jellied meatloaf. Terrines, that wonderful pressed meat dish that turns cast-off odd bits into tasty treats. Headcheese is a form of terrine. Basically any meat mixture that once cooked has a weight placed on it to compress the ingredients is a form of terrine. The recipes are numerous: pigs-feet terrines, foie gras terrines, lamb kidney terrines are just a few gleaned from a random perusal of our cookbooks.
Technically a terrine is the container in which the dish is cooked. But, over the years it has come to be synonymous with the end result. That is at least according to Elizabeth David in her classic French Provincial Cooking. Below is my version of a goose giblet and venison terrine.
Our roast goose at the New Year and the confit made with the legs and goose fat had been excellent. But, what to do with the giblets besides adding them to the gravy? A terrine, that French jellied style meatloaf served cold, was our answer.
I include this in the farm notes because it gets to the heart of one core value in farming: thrift. Making use of everything is not limited to farming, of course. But for us it seems to resonate more now that we live on a farm. Thrift is a more intimate trait, a principled outcome, to that process and work of growing food and raising animals.
And we feel that killing an animal for your own use establishes a covenant between you and that animal: a covenant to make use of every part. And making something wonderful to eat is the best way to honor that life.
Goose Giblet and Venison Terrine
Chop up some stock vegetables; add the goose neck (cut into a few pieces), the gizzard, heart and a bay leaf. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 1.5 hours. Discard the veggies (our pigs loved them), save the stock for gravy, pick the meat off of the neck and roughly chop the gizzard and heart.
To this meat-mixture add the liver, finely chopped. Add a nice sized dollop of goose fat, fresh thyme and sage leaves (chopped), freshly grated nutmeg, 1-2 tablespoons of brandy, 1-2 tablespoons of bread crumbs and an egg. The recipe called for a ½ pound of sausage. Conveniently our friend Melanie had gifted us some of her homemade deer sausage. Toss it all together and mix well. Add plenty of salt and freshly ground pepper.
Place mixture in a terrine and cover with foil. Place the terrine in a water bath. Place all in a 330 degree oven for 1.5 hours. Remove and weight down with a heavy object that fits within the terrine until cool. Slice thick and serve cold with chutney and a pickle.
Pretty damn good, I must say.