Author Archives: wingedelmfarm

Violence, BBQ, Ponds and Marcus Aurelius

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I do not consider myself a violent man. Overall my temperament is fairly even keeled. Although there is bit of shading or room for interpretation in that statement, I’ll stand by it. Yet there have been moments on the farm where Cindy has restrained me from getting my 30/30 and dropping an errant and dangerous bull. And the toolbox on the truck has a nice dent where I felt that the locks refusal to open required the use of a crowbar to persuade it to submit. But that is all to this confession: just the odd desire to bash or occasionally throw things about.

Usually I go serenely about my chores. The odd irritation brushed off as irrelevant in the big scheme as Mr. Aurelius teaches. So when the damn lamb spends every f-ing moment outside the paddock bleating incessantly, I smile and think, “Spit-roasted BBQ in the autumn?” Yeah, that’ll be nice.

It is a nice trick. Eat those that irritate you. Works well on a farm as anger management. But perhaps you should not try this at home.

Inclinations towards violence aside this has been a good weekend. We got two hundred garlic bulbs cured and trimmed and ready for storage. Cindy has spent a fair amount of time photographing puppies. I’ll leave it to her to describe the challenges of corralling puppies and dealing with the website. But Becky had ten puppies a week ago. You can see pictures on the website. And Caleb and I spent six hours in the sun and heat laying out erosion mats where the pond is no more.

After three years and more money that we would care to admit we had the big pond filled. It simply never held water. Dozens of know-it-all experts and neighbors each had their own opinions and we tried them all.

But when faced with spending $10,000 to line the pond we capitulated and filled it.  After all, the pond was too big for me to throw about in a tantrum. It took 100 dump truck loads to fill.

So we stretched out straw erosion mats yesterday and put down staples and spread grass seed. Now we wait for it to return to its previous state as an attractive pasture. A hard lesson and one we will pay for if I can ever find where I threw our checkbook.

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Reading this week: Restoration Agriculture: real-world permaculture for farmers by Mark Shepherd.

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “L”

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L is for Lard

Fear of fat, fear of flavor has driven from our less enlightened contemporaries knowledge that the word larder originally meant where the lard was stored or bacon hung. Replaced in the mid-twentieth century from its rightful throne by such offensive mass produced products as margarine and vegetable oil, lard deserves to be reconsidered.   

Rendering pork fat into lard for kitchen use is simplicity itself. Low in polyunsaturated fats and high in goodness it is hard to imagine our larder without jars of various rendered fats to choose from when cooking or baking. Leaf fat is rendered into the purest lard for baking; lard made from fatback for any recipe calling for butter; high heat lard smelling of porky goodness for Mexican dishes or slices of lardo, cured and hanging under the stairs, used to dress up some fresh baked bread, all have their times and uses. All pay homage to the pig and ones efforts at nose to tail eating.

Just remember that the cure for any “lard ass” is not the fat you use but the activity you choose. Get up off that aforementioned body part and move.

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Reading this weekend: Wildflowers of the Smokies by Peter White

The Gods and the Sheep Mock Me

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Childhood readings of my grandmother’s Bullfinch’s Mythology have colored my sense of how the world is ordered more so than childhood attendance at my family’s church. I tend to expect divine intervention, if there is any, to be shaped by petty, meddlesome beings acting for their own benefit.

Last week I headed outdoors to feed before driving into town for a work-related visit. Chickens fed, pigs fed, ducks fed, chicks fed and all watered without drama. The sheep are kept up in the barn for protection from predators at night. Each morning the 10-by-12-foot door is slid open to allow them into an outer corral with access to one of three small pastures. Cindy recently built a service door into the larger sliding door to make the job easier.

Opening the smaller door, I was trampled as usual by the flood of our flock surging around me to get outside and enjoy the spring weather.

Walking back to the house to get dressed I paused for a while to herd one of the lambs back into the pasture. This lamb, the smallest of the newborns, searches for freedom each day by crawling under gates. It has spent most of its short life escaping and then wandering along the fence line bleating to its mom for instructions on how to get back in with the flock. A short ten minutes of chasing it back and forth and I was back in the house.

Heading back out to my truck to leave I saw half the flock in the intended field grazing. The other half was exiting the back gate in the corral into a larger unsecured pasture. Cindy’s calming affect absent, I hurtled into action. Yelling helpful things like “Shit!” repeatedly while asking Becky, our English Shepherd, to go get them back constituted my principle plan of action.

Becky seemed a bit cowed by yelling. A great and effective dog at all farm tasks when asked politely. But when confronted with a man swinging his arms madly in all directions and shouting contradictory instructions, as the sheep scattered to the four winds, Becky did the sensible thing and retired to the barn with her dignity intact.

My default setting in a crisis is food, either for myself or for the livestock. So I sprinted back up to the barn and got a bucket of feed as the flock disappeared across a ravine and headed to the woods. Returning with the feed I ran after them shaking the bucket and yelling “baah” rather stupidly and interspersed with more expletives directed at their lineage. They ignored me. Meanwhile the horses were merrily charging in among the sheep accelerating their pace away from me.

After a few minutes of running up and down a hill my brain finally began working. Opening the gate to the upper field I called the horses.

Shaking the bucket of grain got their attention and they trotted to me in record time. Perversely, so did the sheep. It was a sprint by both to get to me and get the grain. Two of the three horses thundered through the gate before the main body of sheep–it was that close. I slammed the gate closed and was easily able to move the sheep into an adjacent pasture. I ran back to the house, changed out of my sweat soaked clothes and headed off to town.

As I drove into Knoxville, no one could have convinced me otherwise that the whole affair was not the work of that group on Olympus playing with a wicked sense of humor.

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Reading this week: Immoderate Greatness: why civilizations fail by William Ophuls.

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “K”

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K is for Kraut

Kraut, kimchi or kraut-chi: That simple alchemy of veggies and sea salt yields delicious and shelf stable nutritious food in a few short days, championed by Misters Price, Katz and Vaughn. Made from whatever is in season but always benefitting from the crunch of cabbage. Chop your veggies, mix with salt and stuff into a jar and you are off.

Since joining the Church of the Holy Fermented Veggie we usually have a jar or two or five bubbling away on the kitchen counter. Combine cabbage with celery and caraway seeds for a straight forward kraut. Or add in apples for a nice fall dish. Or consider turnips and greens, poblanos or Sriracha, ginger and fish sauce, tomatillos and even anchovies, kohlrabi, pears, garlic, onions or Brussels sprouts in any mad combination you wish. And you will have only begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.

All will be tasty and good in the end. We promise… if not feed the extra to your pig. He will thank you and return the favor. We know.

 

Cigars, Banjos, Lard, Fencing (of course) and Strawberry Mead

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Tim, a fellow farmer from two valleys over stopped by a few nights ago for dinner. I had ground up a beef heart and fixed us both burgers on the grill to go with his, as always, excellent salad of spring veggies. He made a nice fresh raspberry salad dressing that I wasn’t sure whether to drizzle on the salad or add rum and ice cubes. I opted to use it as a salad dressing.

After dining we sat on the front porch and spoke of weather, vegetables, pigs and Billy Bragg as we smoked cigars and sipped our drinks.  It was nice to sit with a friend and watch the sunset over the next ridge and not feel in any sort of hurry. He pulled out his banjo and played while we talked. A couple of hours later we moseyed out to the barn and put up the animals for the night before he headed down the road and over to his own valley.

That night it rained. But, like a slightly soggier version of Camelot, it let up by sunrise yet remained cloudy and misting all day. Hannah, our farm volunteer, part of the WWOOF program, popped out of her apartment around 8 ready to work. She has been on our farm for a week working for room and board and learning about farming. She will stay for a couple more weeks. In one short week she has resurrected the garden after a couple of weeks of heavy rains and knocked out a fairly heavy to-do list. And by all appearances seems to have thrived with the work load.

She and I loaded up our work sled, a truck bed liner abandoned in a back field that we repurposed fourteen years ago. It now serves as a convenient way to haul firewood, equipment or stones anywhere on the property. Pulling it with the tractor we hauled it up into the back forty where we put in a hard mornings work setting t-posts and digging post-holes. As you are now no doubt tired of hearing this ongoing project of rebuilding or repairing every fence line on the farm is now in its third month. Perhaps in fifteen years when I reach retirement age we will have completed the project…in time to start again.

Last night a trip down the hill to our neighbor’s house with dinner prepared by one of her daughters, good conversation, good food, nice wine and when stuffed I trudged back home and was in bed by ten. It was a nice way to cap a day of hard labor.

This morning with rain coming down Hannah and I turned our attention to domestic skills making lard and some mead flavored with Tim’s strawberries and ginger. I await Cindy’s return from her parent’s home, a semi-annual visit, by fixing chicken sausage gumbo for this evening’s dinner. And that is all from the farm this week.

 

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “J”

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J is for Jack Frost

As a kid in south Louisiana I remember the keen excitement of being told at the breakfast table that Jack Frost had visited overnight. We’d run outside to see the brushstrokes of frost on grass, windows and on the last of the summer garden. By the time we were off to school he had already gone, taking his artwork with him.

On our Tennessee farm I still feel the same pleasure, walking a pasture dusted with his work, watching the sun reclaim with streaks of light. Part playful, merry prankster, harbinger of change: Jack Frost signals the exit of summer’s Jack of the Wood and tells us to check our stores of goods for the coming of Old Man Winter.

Foraging in the rain

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Last weekend as our guest speaker, Jeff Ross, began his talk on foraging the rain hammered down on the barn. The sound amplified out of proportion by the tin roof. We were clustered in the breezeway separating the barn from the chicken coop. As he talked about Lady’s Thumb, Lamb’s Quarter, dandelion and their ilk we ventured out of the shelter whenever the rain volume dropped to a drizzle.

A dash out to look at wild edibles and a dash back to the relative dry of the barn shaped the course of this lecture and demonstration. But what saved this from being a total wash (forgive me) was Jeff’s ability to convey practical information on edibles by grounding the facts in a sense of place with good recipes. And hot tea or a glass or two of my muscadine mead helped warm everyone up before heading home.

That rain continued all weekend giving us a total of four and half inches before stopping on that Sunday afternoon. There is still a lot you can accomplish in the rain. But losing a whole weekend in May on a farm, when the grass and weeds, edible or not, grow at an accelerated rate puts us behind our goals. Squash, cucumbers and tomato transplants should all be in the ground. And in three short weeks I will be checking the weather anxiously looking for a date to cut hay.

Rebuilding old fencing lines has been on hold for two weeks. And the list of other must complete tasks piles up behind that one like a log jam on a too narrow creek. So waking on this Saturday morning to the sound of rain pouring down on our roof at 6:30 am was disappointing. Another weekend lost. I know, we all love rain. But we have two and half inches this Sunday morning and it continues to rain with a forecast calling for a possible six inches.

So we switch gears and complete rainy day tasks, those small jobs of insignificance that when piled together amount to one good solid day of work… one hopes.  So we scrub the front porch, clean and oil garden tools, sharpen axes, paint bee supers, clean the apartment in the garage for our incoming WWOOF volunteer, visit a well-run native plants nursery called Overhill Gardens where we picked up some great additions for our yard and farm.

Cindy was in her element at the nursery, rattling off the Latin genus and species, full sun vs. shade requirements with the owner. Which is why, I guess, she came back with a range of useful and attractive plants for the farm.  And I came back with a pot of Black Cohosh that I vaguely remembered as a useful herbal plant. Turns out it will be quite useful if I ever have to deal with menstrual cramps….

And it continues to rain.

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Reading this weekend:  100 native forage grasses in 11 southern states by the USDA and Cooked by Michael Pollan

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “I”

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“I” is for Indian Summer

Late October and our valley gets its first hard frost. Like somewhat tardy ants in Aesop’s fable these cold nights send us scurrying to complete summer chores. Busily stacking hay bales, finishing fence repairs, harvesting the last peppers, storing winter squash and cleaning the summer gardens while waiting for the long days of winter to creep onto our farm.

Then summer plays its annual trick and elbows winter back for a few weeks of warmth. Like a tense interlude before the next act, a stale impersonator of the vibrancy of summer days, a guest who will not leave a party even as the decorations of fall drop from the trees, this is an Indian Summer.

And then one day winter arrives, the wind kicks up, the last leaves hit the ground and ice is found on the water troughs when we feed in the morning. Summer is now a memory we hold for the future.

Evidence of our passing

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The past two weekends Caleb and I have been engaged in a massive fencing project, rebuilding three hundred yards of woodland fence. Some of the fence line dates back twenty years and some perhaps as old as forty. Condition of the barbed wire, size of trees that have grown up in the old fence line, type of wood used for posts all give some indication of the age of the fence. Pulling out the old fence and putting in the new has had me thinking about the visual clues of human settlement. A more knowledgeable observer of the natural world could point out botanical interlopers on our farm. I have to rely on more modest powers of observation.

It is hard to say how long our particular valley has been settled. European settlers, before finally pushing out the Cherokee in the early 1800’s, have now been in the area for 250 years. The Cherokee in turn had pushed out the previous inhabitants a few hundred years before that date. And I’m sure wave after wave of earlier inhabitants engaged in the same activity. But any visual evidence of long inhabitance in this particular valley is slight. Our soil is poor and the land is hilly. Neither are virtues that encouraged settlement until the growth of our current population.

We have no grand antebellum homes in our valley or even prosperous 19th century farm houses. The housing stock dates back at the oldest to the 1920’s with most from around the 1950’s. My guess is that the older families moved in as improved roads and vehicle transportation made settling more marginal land viable.

Over these fourteen years I have found one flint scraper used to clean hides, an indication of at least the passing through of older Americans on this land. And we find the occasional mule shoe in a pasture indicating that the hills have been worked before the use of tractors. But in our locale that could be as recent as 1960, though that could once again become the preferred or only method. Other mechanical debris turns up from time to time: spring tines, cultivating harrows and other twentieth century products of an agricultural bent. In the back forty on the edge of one field is a pile of mattress springs now covered in leaves and dirt, hardly an item to stir ones imagination.

Walking through the woods we see numerous trees that have two or four main trunks shooting from the base. I am sure you have noticed that when you cut down a small tree it often sends up shoots from the stump. Same thing in our woods, they were logged thirty years ago. The remaining stumps that sent up shoots are now mature trees.

Across one of our fields is a long swale that cuts diagonally across four acres. This is evidence of a previous fence that existed long enough to leave a tangible mark on the land. All of which brings me to the reminder that our presence is somewhat tenuous on whatever land we inhabit. We can abuse the land under our stewardship or take care of it. But the reality is that sooner or later someone else will be faced with that same task and deciphering evidence of our own passing.

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “H”

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“H” is for Hay

Security from want, forage in storage is protection against evil days of drought and heat or the cold and muck, a well-stocked hay barn, for all the talk of extended pasture days, brings warmth to this farmer’s heart. It seems a form of wealth.

From the flush of green grass in March through the first cutting in late May that growth and then the rhythm of collecting those grasses ties me to the rhythms of the land and the seasons. The muscle ache from the hard work of fencing off lush pastures, constructing storage barns, cutting, raking, baling and the moving of this basic produce of our land is another definition for joy. It simply makes me feel useful to feed forage to our livestock, a handmaiden, if you will, to the meat on our table.

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Rereading this weekend:  A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath poems 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry.