Tag Archives: agrarianism

Foraging in the rain

Posted on by
Reply

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.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

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

Evidence of our passing

Posted on by
2

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”

Posted on by
Reply

“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.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

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

The Blame Falls on Wendell Berry

Posted on by
2

The seventy acres of our farm touch the boundaries, borders, property of ten other landowners or farmers. These ten property owners account for thirty or forty persons who represent our nearest neighbors, who we know ranging from close friendship or partnership to the category of not at all. Having neighbors entails certain obligations. Those obligations range from the simple notification that an animal is loose to working together rebuilding fences. We work to keep those obligations from entering into the realm of being “obligated”.

Of those ten neighbors only one is active in farming his land and he is about eighty years of age. The rest of our neighbors derive incomes from the categories of “best not to inquire”, retirement, toxic waste handling, nursing, and the job of no visible means of support.

I was thinking of neighbors and neighborliness yesterday. We were returning from a conference in Louisville, KY celebrating the 35th publishing anniversary of Wendell Berry’s “Unsettling America”. It was our first vacation off the farm together in ten years. That simple act of leaving obligations and responsibilities behind in the care and trust of those thirty-forty individuals, leaving one’s home place, all brought back to me how thoroughly tied we are becoming to this land.

Our drive through rural Kentucky found us focused on fencing, outbuildings, housing stock, livestock, soil health and all of those small things that make up good or bad agricultural practices. We would find ourselves grimacing at good ponds aware of our eyesore of a pond back home which is still waiting for a solution. Or we would smile at poor fencing that clearly suggested lack of practice, something of which we now have plenty. But overall we were studying the land, observing it for hints at how we could steward our land.

We drove back into Tennessee invigorated by the conversations, moved by hearing Mr. Berry read poetry and humbled by the intelligence of the presenters. We came back home with new purpose and plans. We came back home to a steer standing in the front yard, a steer that simply will not stay in a fenced pasture. A rebel steer does not make for good or happy neighbors. He moves your needle from obligations into the red obligated zone. We moved him back into the pasture without real optimism or expectation that he would stay.

And indeed this morning our small herd of cattle was one short, the rebel steer had gone wandering, again. I found him on the highway. After some work we got him up to the barnyard and loaded him into the trailer for sale at the stockyard. But not before we saw him jump a five foot wooden fence from a standing position…without touching wood.

Obligations discharged we were able to turn our attentions to other matters.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reading this weekend: From the Forest: a search for the hidden roots of our fairy tales by Sara Maitland.

Feeling a bit giddy….

Posted on by
Reply

Perhaps at this juncture in life I should know better, know that doom and disaster lurk in the wings or that the gods of olden days wait to punish those who exercise hubris or at the very least good humor. But, damn it, it was hard yesterday not to feel a bit giddy with life. A beautiful blue sky greeted the sunrise, a temperature of 31 degrees felt spring like and quickly soared ending the day around 60.

That morning over coffee, encouraged by the weather, we filled a legal pad with our “To Do” list. Heading out the door to complete the morning feeding I ran into our neighbor Shannon, who has been helping us out on the weekends, walking up the drive. She got started on the annual cleaning of the chicken coop. We use a deep litter system where straw is added to the base every month to cover the manure and cleaned out once a year. She put the litter in the compost bins and swept the floors and sprinkled diatomaceous earth on the wood floors to cut down on mites. After putting fresh straw down she was off to give the front porch its annual scrub.

Cindy had headed out, meanwhile, to the farmer’s co-op for some supplies and to the feed store for some fifty gallon drums. We have worked out an arrangement with an area restaurant for their vegetable kitchen waste (hence the need for the extra drums). That waste will be used to feed out our pigs and the rest will be composted for our gardens.

Among the three of us we knocked out an impressive list: cleaning the coop, the porch, repaired and greased the sliding barn door, cleaned the barn gutters, took down the hoop tunnels in a fit of optimism, tilled a garden, planted a sixty foot row of red onions (thank you Russ) and three rows of mustard greens. We moved cattle panels after selling off a part of the herd last week for much needed cash, treated new piglets for a troubling cough and the inevitable lice, scrubbed buckets and took down old fencing. Using the tractor’s boom pole we pulled out an old post, put the auger on and drilled a new post hole, put the boom pole back on and pulled out the auger that had gotten buried to its head in the soil, which doesn’t count as a disaster because we solved the problem….

After a short nap we headed out to a dinner party for our neighbor’s son on the occasion of his 27th birthday. Home and in bed by 10pm and ready for another day, we still have a lot left to do from that legal pad. But, curse it I still feel a bit giddy.

I’ll close this week’s missive by noting the passing of our cat Mickey. At fourteen years of age he failed to show up for his breakfast a week ago. We can only surmise that he went off to die. A good cat, he will be remembered for his heroic and extremely funny mad dash from the barn, a dash that finished with a flying leap into a pack of dogs. The dogs were fighting with a stray and Mickey just wanted to get his own licks in before the dog took off. Rest in peace, Mickey!

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reading this weekend: Not the Future We Ordered: peak oil, psychology and the myth of progress by John Michael Greer and The Cooking of Southwest France: recipes from France’s magnificent rustic cuisine by Paula Wolfert.

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “E”

Posted on by
Reply

“E” is for Evening Sounds

The sun sets. And our neighbor’s dinner call to her children echoes out of a nearby holler. The clang of our own dinner bell and the whir of the coffee grinder, the bleats from sheep demanding their due and bellows of cattle from farms up and down the valley all signal a change from day to night.

Deeper in that evening the frogs join the chorus by booming a query for love and answered in summer by locusts in the millions. The owls curiously hoot in a secret language exchanging tips, we imagine, on which field has the plumpest mice. We move out of the kitchen and settle into chairs on the front porch and listen for the night to begin. The sun’s final glow, hours after sunset, is claimed by the stars and moon which were waiting for their showier cousin to exit. On cue coyotes enter the valley singing to each other with weird triumphant yips. The evening ends and night begins.

Vultures

Posted on by
Reply

Today we speak of vultures, those birds that thrive on carrion and carnage, handmaids to battlefield slaughter, useful yet unloved. Like cockroaches or rats, vultures, with their funereal garb, reach deep, churning up some atavistic wellspring of loathing. The grave, putrification, a specter of mortality with shabby black wings, a bald gray head, perfect for diving into road kill and pulling out the best parts. A hiss for a call, it is an unlovely creature, a creature of Poe.

One morning after fixing coffee I took my cup out on the porch. Looking at the skyline I was stunned to see that the tower nearest to our barn was host to large numbers of vultures. More wheeled overhead. A large tulip poplar next to the house had an even dozen roosting on a dead branch.

A small number usually roost on a power line tower about a quarter mile from the house. But that morning they were on all the towers, visible silhouettes giving rise to shades of Hitchcock.

Periodically they had tried to colonize the tower nearest the barnyard. Over the years I’d grab the pellet rifle and lob a few shots at them. It never took much to scare them off.

This morning was different. I’d shoot at one; it would fly off, perhaps with the bird sitting next to them. The rest just sat on their roost. I hollered. I made noise. I had been shooting at the black vultures with a pellet rifle for about ten minutes. The pellet rifle, a gift from my friend Jack, was a single pump .177 caliber. A weakling, it barely dented tin cans at thirty feet and I was taking pot shots at the vultures at over 100. There was just enough power at that distance to cause them to shake their wings and take off.

I could hear the soft thump as I hit them. Since they flew away I assumed no harm to the bird.

Some minutes into my shooting spree a shot sent one tumbling to the ground. Ten pounds of carrion eater bounced off the pylon as it fell, hitting the ground with an audible thump. I stopped shooting.

Cindy was up by the time I returned to the house.  I told her of my morning excursion. She asked if I had checked to see if it was dead. Embarrassed at that oversight, I said no. Grabbing the little 410 shotgun, I walked to the base of the pylon. The vulture was on the ground but still breathing. Putting the shotgun to my shoulder I pulled the trigger. 7:30 am is a loud time to shoot a shotgun. It is also an acute time for shame.

What is the point? We raise animals for food. We kill predators that threaten that food. I hunt. I am an omnivore who embraces a hands on approach with the food chain. Why should I care if dozens of vultures take up residence near the home? They are part of a natural process.

I do not know the answer. Crows would have been welcome as neighbors. Crows eat the dead, too. But crows are not vultures, condemned by their very appearance, a creature who too clearly signals death and decay.

Regardless of the reasons for my discomfort at their presence I no longer take potshots at vultures.

A Farm Weekend

Posted on by
Reply

Weekends on the farm: Attending a farm estate auction last weekend, picking up various tools and putting them back down, kicking the tires on a nice horse drawn buggy ($800), told by the estate operator “We can come down on anything you are interested in” and not really interested in anything enough to pay cash for, so we stood in the doorway to the barn and watched snow start to fall. An elderly man stood next to us as big heavy flakes drifted out of the sky. We talked about the weather for a few minutes.

After polite conversation he said cheerfully, “Since my wife died I can buy pretty much any damn thing I want.“ He went on to speak of the five tractors and bulldozer he had bought in just the last few months. “I could buy this whole estate if I just had room to put it.” Weather worsening, he then volunteered that he had to “go to the house” and we said the same.

This past Friday we both took some time off from work to attend a mule and draft horse equipment auction an hour and a half northeast. A cold rain fell in Mascot as the auctioneer ran through his high-speed pitch on the virtues of plows with broken handles and buggies with mismatched tires. A lot of items were selling for $5-10, a wagon sold for $75, with only about three bidders in the crowd of a couple hundred. We exercised restraint and headed toward home. That night we joined a group of other farmers to watch a documentary on creating an English forest garden. We ate our fill of BBQ and drank some deadly homemade Belgian ale (curse you Tim and Russ) before leaving with a beautiful mix of orange and purple carrots.

Saturday morning we were up before dawn doing the usual chores. Caleb and I cleaned out the barn, part of an annual spring cleaning. A few hours later,the barn now cleared of accumulated junk and the
truck bed full, I headed to the county landfill. From there, I ran up onto the Cumberland Plateau to bring home our horse wagon from a farm where it had been being used.

By the time I returned Cindy and our neighbor Sara had butchered and processed nine roosters, cleaned up the mess and were moving on to other endeavors. The rest of Saturday I spent setting up a new germination room for the garden, tilling the late winter garden. (Today the low hoop tunnels will be set up for early crops of kale, mustard, spinach and cabbage.) Cindy spent the late afternoon light working our Haflinger in harness. Coffee, final chores and then our neighbor Adrienne joined us for dinner.

This morning, back up before dawn with the usual chores–then the last couple of hours spent trying to load hogs for market. Loading hogs, as you may recall, requires the patience of Job. One is loaded and three more to go. We can outwait if not actually outwit these hogs.

And there you go, a standard weekend on the farm: work, community and pleasure.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Reading this weekend: The Localization Reader: adapting to the coming downshift, edited by De Young and Princen and published by MIT. Well worth picking up.

A Gosling’s Demise

Posted on by
1

Two years ago our formerly large flock of Pomeranian geese had dwindled to one aged pair. The Pomeranians are not known for their success at setting, often abandoning the nest before the eggs hatch. Wanting to get some more goslings we took four eggs from their nest and hatched them out in the Brinsea. As geese age the eggs decrease both in fertility and viability. So, it was without real surprise when only one hatched fully and another peeped for a few days before dying.

We put the sole gosling in a makeshift brooder in the library. After a couple of days Cindy broke down and bought some Wyandotte and Partridge Rock chicks to keep the gawky gosling company. We named him Andre the Giant as he lumbered around with the tiny chicks. The chicks snuggled up to him at night for warmth.

After a week we moved them all to the brooder in the coop. After another two weeks we tried introducing the gosling to her parents. They first shunned and then drove it through a fence. We pulled the gosling out and put it back with the chicks.

The next weekend we tried it again. The gosling was now a few pounds and just feathering out. The parents responded with total indifference, which we saw as an improvement to attacking their offspring.

Later that same day Cindy saddled up her horse and I gathered the chainsaw, barbed wire and various tools. Some cattle had gotten out and an afternoon of repairs awaited us in the backfields. It took a little coordination between Cindy’s horsemanship and my gate opening before the cattle were back in our fields. Another hour or so and the fence was repaired. Cindy saddled up and headed home while I followed with the tractor.

Upon our return we discovered the gosling gone. A thorough search of the enclosed paddock and we were unable to find her. The fencing was strong and predator proof. Except, and this was a weakness that only then was glaringly apparent, the gate that led into the pig paddock. An inescapable truth, the gosling slipped into the paddock with four hungry hogs. Nothing remained.

Today only the goose remains, the gander having been killed by coyotes last year.

 

A Winged Elm Farm Alphabet Book: “C”

Posted on by
Reply

“C” is for Crabapples

When planting our orchard crabapples were an afterthought in the main apple orchard. But thirteen years later the larder is full of jars of crabapple jams and jellies. Crabapples with rosemary, with pear, with blueberry and a few jars of apple butters all make buttered toast a more satisfying breakfast.

Thomas Jefferson was able to get 129 gallons of cider from his Hewes Crabapples. My output is more modest. Yet under our stairs are bottles of crabapple wine, cider and mead. The extra fruit is used to make sauces to spoon over pork chops or to spoon into pigs.

It is hard to imagine our orchard without our Calloway Crabapple tree with its bright red fruits each year.