The Yearly Optimist

The 2018 master plan

Standing in the kitchen, each with a cup of coffee in hand, we stare at the plan. “I want tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes”, she says. And, you will have them, I reply, grandly.

But, you will also have beets, mustard, turnips, peas, kale, chard, onions, garlic, cabbage, lettuces (lettuce is good, she says), collards, black beans, October beans, cowpeas, lima beans, sweet corn, cucumbers, melon, okra, watermelon, eggplant (yes, eggplant, lots of eggplant, she adds), crookneck and winter squashes, and, certainly, sweet potatoes. There will be a small field of mangles and hickory corn for the pigs, as well. And, a sorghum trial plot. Oh, and the buckwheat for the bees, I finish. That covers spring, summer and brings us to fall.

“Enough”, she says. She does not want to hear about the fall garden. “As long as there are tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes”, she adds, again.

“Seems like an awful lot, who do you think will eat it?”

We will. And if our customers picking up pork or lamb need a mess of greens or beans, well, Bob’s your uncle.

“Who is Bob”?

What? Nobody.

“Then why do you say, … oh, never mind.”

Never mind indeed, I say… well, I think.

And, we can feed the excess to our pigs, I throw in for extra weight.

Besides, if we grow it they will come.

“Who said that? You got that from that movie.”

No, I didn’t. I made it up.

“No, you didn’t, he said, ‘if you build it, they will come’.”

Well, that is completely different, he said ‘build’ and I said ‘grow’.

“Hmm.”

Hmm.

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Reading this weekend: Sheep Farming in America, by Joseph E. Wing (1908)

A Mid-Winter Scrapbook

The old Cook’s Mill, across from the farm, is clearly not much to look at. Until, that is, you begin examining how much skill went into the building and the old stone flume channel across the creek. Here was an appropriately scaled technology for a small self-sustaining valley.

 

 

 

 

 

File under: I know the feeling. The larger hogs in the woods are hard to rouse for breakfast, when the temperature is ten degrees.

A friend gifted us one of his few remaining North Georgia Candy Roasters (a winter squash) from the fall garden. Which we used as the foundation for a delicious sweet stew on a cold night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The year-old ram lambs on a sunny six-degree morning, always hungry.

The sun just peaking over the eastern ridge, reveals beauty in unexpected places (the chicken coop and a maple tree).

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, even in a drab winter landscape, the cardinal is easy to spot and always welcome. The first of the new crop of lambs, confident and healthy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And, finally, yesterday as the temps rose to 59 degrees, the girls took advantage of the warm weather to take a cleansing flight.

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Reading this weekend: Grey Seas Under, by Farley Mowat. An exceptional book about ordinary heroism. It is the history of a salvage and rescue tug on the North Atlantic.

The Butcher’s Bill

The obligatory cute lamb picture

This mid-winter morning, the mercury hovers around 10, the ground is lightly covered with brittle snow, and, as the prospect of another week in the deep freeze settles into my chilled bones, my thoughts are dark. I spent most of yesterday avoiding outdoor projects on the farm. Time that could have been employed constructively was devoted instead to a post comparing our cushy fossil-fueled lives to a 19th century slaveholder economy. Eventually I shelved it. “Too bleak,” Cindy said. “I want to hear about the lambs.”

Heck, I too would rather hear about lambs than read yet another rant about our fatal addiction to consumption. Which, I admit, is just one more pile of sand in which I bury my head. My competing impulses create a quandary. When a young person talks to me about his dreams for a good life, my first instinct is to interrupt, to tell him the planet has determined that our good life is no longer viable, dreams or not. Instead, I tell him about lambs. The promise of birth and death and birth again. I believe in both narratives, and I don’t want to burst his bubble, so I tell only the one story.

Which is why I love farming. It is a great place for a short-term optimist/long-term pessimist like myself. The old joke about the farmer who won a million bucks perfectly encapsulates my outlook: “So what are you going to do with that million dollars?” “I guess I’ll keep farming until it runs out.” Well, I too will keep on farming, enjoying and embracing it for however long it lasts, even as I remain convinced that the planet is preparing to reboot. If I could just find my pipe and supply of hope-ium seed, then just maybe I could help extend that optimistic vision out another generation.

My own inclination for a favorable construct, meanwhile, continues to be fed by lots of new pigs, a new pregnant sow, baby lambs hitting the ground daily, an ongoing diet of learning new skills, dreams of a better garden, and good friends in the community. Two of the latter stopped by last night with a gift one of them had worked on for the better part of a year. A beautiful rustic bench adorned with a seat back that spelled out “Winged Elm,” it was handmade of wood from both theirs and our farm. We invited them in to share some homemade chicken and dumplings. The chicken itself was a gift from two young farmers in exchange for the use of our chicken plucker. So, despair not, gentle reader, for your scribe. I’ll always enjoy a convivial evening and the miracles of everyday life.

Well, the sun isn’t up, but in this frigid dawn light I see the ram lambs. They are gathered at the hay barn, trying to magic their feed down onto their dining room table. I must leave you — thinking of cute lambs, not about the butcher’s bill that inevitably comes due.

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Reading this weekend: Lanterns On The Levee: recollections of a Planter’s son, by William Alexander Percy. A beautifully written memoir of the Mississippi Delta, that also manages to be both offensively racist and full of class snobbery. 

Chill Hours

There is no pretending that this is anything but a misery, walloping a completely frozen cistern in the vain hope of finding water in the depths. Nothing for it now but to head up to the house 300 yards a way and start lugging buckets of water. Two three-gallons at a time, filled at the hydrant. Stoop, stand, walk, repeat. Three times a day.

This might be a good time to call upon my reserve of latent Scandinavian DNA, that inner vast, untapped, frozen reservoir of stoic resolve. Or, perhaps I could mitigate the effects of the cold by cursing like my great-great-uncle, a merchant marine captain legendary for his facility at swearing within a word. I try my hand. “Miser-damn-able weather!” I say. It is the best I can muster, and it does nothing to thaw the cistern or warm my toes. It does, however, bring a smile to my frozen cheeks.

It’s a smile that quickly fades as I peer into the hoop-house. The collards and mustard greens — at a balmy 69 degrees, they benefit from the radiant warmth of Old Sol as all outside struggles to hit 18 — need water. Stoop, stand, walk, repeat, repeat, repeat. Miser-damn-able weather.

I walk the quarter-mile to the mailbox, in and of itself a feat of Shackleton proportions. It’s the wind that does me in. Zero, sunny, and calm I can handle. But any wind at 18 degrees is “in-goddamn-sufferable.” (Eureka! esteemed mariner, I think I have it!)

What I don’t have are the seed catalogs. And what I want more than anything, having now accrued enough chill hours for this gardener to go dormant and prepare to bud, is to while away my evenings dreaming of a better garden. One that this year will be free of flea beetles, squash borers, and potato bugs; one that will sport well and timely mulched rows and neatly trellised crops, receive just the right amount of rain at just the right moments, with temperatures not too hot, not too cold. Not too much to ask.

Even the inestimable SESE hippies have let me down. Still lost in 1969, they are late in delivering. I imagine the whole collective hard at work, turning the crank on the old mimeograph and hand-stapling the 2018 catalog, before all climb into their beflowered VW bus for the annual trip to the post office and the mailing of their excellent offerings.

Fat lot of good that does me right now. I could break dormancy at any moment.

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Reading this weekend: Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. and, Southern Harvest, by Clare Leighton.