If there is a single harvest season, this is it. Exceptionally heavy rains in July have rejuvenated the pastures and put the garden on a course of steroids. The corn in neighboring fields seems to double in height weekly. Harvest time adds just one more layer of work to a busy diverse small farm.
On Saturday we had a father-son drive from an hour away to buy Sussex chicks. Our Speckled Sussex hens are likely to go broody anytime of the year but winter. And although we really shouldn’t be surprised after all this time, we’re still stopped in our tracks to see a hen walk from an outbuilding, chicks tumbling around her feet. Many weeks we have an ad out to sell chicks, pullets or cockerels. Both the birth and the selling of the chicks is a type of harvest.
Wendell Berry remarked that his dad’s farm advice was, “Sell something every week.” It’s a reminder that the farm constantly needs to be generating some income. Balancing the outgoing with the incoming is always a struggle. Our farm has its conventional income—selling meat from our hogs, cattle and sheep—and its self-sufficiency “income”—gardening, orchards, small fruits, poultry, firewood and lumber, and foraging and hunting.
It is a point of pride that we haven’t bought meat at a grocery store in 16 years. Providing for ourselves adds joy and confidence in ways that are hard to measure. Providing for customers is a way to pay the bills and to feel valued for the life we live. Don’t under estimate that latter, for without the steady stream of people raving about our pork, beef or mutton, the soul of the farm would drift away into a purgatory.
Throughout July, we have been selling lambs as breeding stock and marketing mutton; foraging wild mushrooms; harvesting tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, onions, and peppers; canning produce and cutting hay for the winter; and selling the odd batch of chicks.
We spent part of yesterday, the second time this season, canning tomatoes. Forty pints is the minimum to get us through winter. We have 36 on the shelves now and can easily double that amount in the next couple of weeks.
That is if one wants to avoid the shame of purchasing at the grocery store what could have provided by one’s own efforts. There is a point each winter when the hens fail to provide. That’s when I find myself in the grocery, skulking around like a man buying pornography, with a dozen eggs clutched close at hand. That perceived shame is the special preserve of the small farm.
Harvest continued today with honey from the hives, a small amount for our own use, about 30 pounds. That may seem like a lot, but between making mead and using honey for most of our sugar needs, it seems to disappear fast.
We still call these months the harvest season. But if I approached the term with the right mindset, I would say that “harvest season” is really 12 months long. Even in the deep of winter, the land and the farm provide. Cutting and storing firewood, hammering plugs of oyster mushrooms into stumps, bringing in armloads of turnip greens on a cold December day—all are acts as surely a part of harvest as the plucking and eating of a ripe tomato in July.
Regardless of the “when,” a careful harvest, with work and planning, is renewable, an object lesson in resource use we would all be wise to learn and relearn.
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Reading this weekend: Peter May’s The Blackhouse and Todd Openheimer’s The Flickering Mind.
Are the chickens completely on their own for feed, or is there some supplementation? I wonder because I’ve not heard you mention any corn growing of your own. Not that one has to have corn to feed chickens, just wondering.
Those eggs bought in winter – we won’t tell anyone. Some secrets are best kept close to the vest 🙂
Clem,
Good question, and one I may touch on more in an upcoming post. The chickens get a bit of scratch, actually part of the hog meal ration that we have blended. At this juncture it isn’t worth our time to grow out all of our grain for that purpose. The post was going to touch on the range of notions in that term self-sufficient.
More than likely I was going to make some connection about rugged individualists driving on state highways. As we have discussed before the nature of interconnectedness. It can be a bit arbitrary where we draw the lines on what is deemed “self-sufficient.”
Thanks for keeping my “secret.”
Cheers,
Brian
Yeah, touch on in an upcoming post… I find myself in that box now and then as well. So I’m actually toying with putting up a post on gleaning at GP. There is a fairly interesting article on gleaning at Resilience (a link can be provided if someone asks).
As a youngster we used to pick up downed ears of corn after harvest. Our local elevator actually quoted a price back then for ear corn. An ambitious set of youngsters could gather a pickup bed full of corn in an afternoon after school. The proceeds amounted to pocket money… but there is another benefit beyond keeping young folks occupied (not getting into mischief) and this is a reduced weed seed load for the subsequent crop in the rotation. Volunteer corn used to be a nasty weed before broad scale adoption of herbicides. Today volunteer corn can again be an issue if producers aren’t careful to include a grass chemical in addition with their favorite herbicide (read roundup) because the volunteer corn is likely roundup ready.
I’m not aware of any local elevators that will purchase ear corn these days… (if anyone watching knows of some, please leave a comment). So the pocket money side of the equation is missing now. I was going to offer that if a local youth were to pick up ears in the neighborhood you could use them… but then I realized this is most likely to be GMO corn and you might not want to feed that (unless one wants to make an arbitrary allowance of GMO so that the other benefits might be realized). Rugged individualism is hard work, no?
What a great experience. And I too read the article on gleaning. The only problem with gleaning today, that I can see, is most kids or families are not really that desperate for a gleaning economy to work. Not necessarily a bad thing.
I am wondering how it is you have enough tomatoes to harvest. June’s drought stunted the growth of ours and July almost drowned them. Most of our plants have lots of brown leaves from too much watear and while we are getting enough tomatoes to eat, we don’t have enough to can yet. Good thing we canned enough for 3 years last year.
Melanie,
I planted my tomatoes in two batches, about three weeks apart. My first batch looks a lot like yours.
Brian
Hey, I read this on Resilience.org but I don’t want to register with Disqus, so I’m commenting here:
On the topic of egg preservation: If you don’t want to fill up your refrigerator and want to be able to use the eggs for more than frying (which means freezing them isn’t the ideal option) or pickled salads, submerging them uncooked in a large ceramic pot full of waterglass (1 part waterglass, 9 parts boiled, cold water) is a time-honored method that lasts easily through the winter months at room temperatures. And I’ve heard from several people’s personal experience that if you store the pot at root-cellar temperatures, the eggs will mostly still be good after a year. Just remember NOT to wash them (just gently rub off the chicken poop), and to check every egg seperately before using, because if some of the waterglass goes in through minute cracks, the egg will congeal and taste funny. (That’s where the old grandma advice of opening eggs into a cup instead of adding them directly to the christmas cookie dough comes from.)
Mother Earth News did a detailed long-term test of various traditional egg-preservation methods, and short of electrical refrigeration, waterglass turned out to last longest at room temperatures:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/how-to-store-fresh-eggs-zmaz77ndzgoe.aspx?PageId=3#ArticleContent
The waterglass solution (or most likely gel, after a few months) itself is alkaline (protect your eyes and maybe wear gloves, though I’ve never had skin problems) but non-toxic – it’s just silicates of sodium or potash. You can dry the leftover gel on newspaper and compost it, or if it’ll still dilute with water, use it to protect your plants from fungal diseases in the same way as horsetail slurry. Waterglass is also used to waterproof all kinds of stone, mortar and ceramics (though don’t use it on a visible wall or outside ceramic glazing – it leaves a white, patchy ‘bloom’ while drying, and you want potash silicate waterglass for areas that you can’t access easily again, as I’ve read the sodium version can get leaky after a few decades), to make lime-based wallpaint more resistant to rubbing and rain, and to make wooden beams flame-resistant and more durable against rot (it works the same as the silicates in some rushes that make them useful as an ecological, flame-resistant insulation material and which make it so hard to compost the dry stuff). As long as you keep dissolved waterglass from drying out, it will even be stable that way for decades. I recently found a well-plugged container of it that my parents used to treat the roof beams 30 years ago, and while it probably did lose some of it’s dissolved silicates over time (it was really liquid like water when I had expected something as thick as paint or varnish), it nevertheless still worked perfectly fine to waterproof the new wall of my compost heap. (The old wall had been destroyed over 25 years by water seeping into the mortar and freezing.)
(Sorry for any mistakes, English isn’t my native language.)
PS: If you can’t just order food-safe waterglass at your local pharmacy in the US, I’d rather recommend trying to find an online laboratory / chemicals supllier that will sell to private citizens. (The stuff is sometimes used in microbial labs for nutrients gels in circumstances where plant agar as the standard growing medium isn’t an option.) Waterglass may be available from DIY or home improvement stores as well, and probably a lot cheaper, but I wouldn’t be sure waterglass designed for building purposes doesn’t contain traces of toxic minerals – like cement can contain chromium if you don’t buy special cement designed for fish tanks and drinking water cisterns.
Glad to have you comment here on the blog. This treatment, the first I’ve read about, sounds fascinating. I’m going to experiment with it to see how it works. Thanks for the tip.
Brian