On the Advent of Fall

a seasonal masterpiece by Cindy

Fall arrived, perfectly, with a cool front. This morning the predawn sky is a dark purple, star-bedazzled, upside-down wine glass rimmed with light. And the brisk morning air signals renewal after the last summer blast of heat earlier in the week. Sunrise is still a couple of hours away, but the farm is already stirring to life. Out in the coop, the cockerels are giving voice in creaky adolescent tones, like an inexpert boys’ choir, while the older rooster lazily offers up an occasional full-throated crow, just to show the boys how it is really done.

Not that the cockerels have much time left to practice the fine art of greeting the dawn. Another four weeks of fattening and they fall to my knife. This is one of those many small cycles of life lived out on a farm: birth to death to gumbo served on a Saturday night.

The ram lambs are growing well on the late season pasturage on the upper hill. Their days too are numbered. A date has been set for slaughter in January. Truly, they are ready to make the trip any day, but the bottleneck at the meat processor shows no sign of abating. One of their number did depart yesterday. It was slaughtered on the farm by a recent immigrant of Uzbekistan, accompanied by an English-fluent Ukranian who interpreted. He made short work of humanely dispatching the lamb; butchering to cleaning up, all took less than an hour.

The unannounced visit was a nice reset for our relationship with newly arrived immigrants. Earlier in the summer we had a lamb stolen by what we believe were gypsies, who claimed they had just arrived in this country the previous week. Another attempt was made a week later by a different family that we surmised was related to the first group. If you have never seen gypsies in action, they stage an impressive assault. Their operation was a master class in attempted thievery. Adults and children dispersed from the car like a disturbed hill of ants. They spread out in every direction of the farm, touching and fingering anything and everything in and out of sight, far too much for two people to keep track of. But we finally managed to get that last group herded back into their car, sending them on their way without a lamb or the live chickens the children kept trying to grab (although they did snag a few apples, quinces, and possibly fresh eggs). We do hate to mistrust — it is neither in our nature nor in our culture — but, fool me once….

In the new farrowing yard, our Red Wattle gilt is spending the week with a loaner Berkshire boar. All evidence suggests that yesterday their brief engagement was capped by consummation. If successful, in three months, three weeks, and three days a litter of piglets will be on the ground. Farrowing will be in late January, but with plenty of hay bedding and a heat lamp if needed, keeping the piglets warm should not be a problem. Having said that, I do recall a sow that gave birth during an ice storm a decade ago. We had to bring out a small generator to power heat lamps and keep the watering troughs ice-free. But all of the piglets survived. Pigs really are very hardy, and a 400-pound sow is amazingly able to warm 6-12 piglets without crushing any. Which is to say, if one dies after the first week, the fault can generally be laid squarely at your door.

As fall arrived yesterday with the chill of the passing cold front, the signals of this, the dying season, were also easily read in the turned back leaves of the tulip poplars that line one of our smaller sheep paddocks. Against that backdrop, I tilled six test strips, each measuring 4 x 200 feet, and sowed them with three combinations of purple top turnips and annual ryegrass. The turnips are intended as an early winter forage supplement for the pregnant ewes. The rye is to serve as a complement to the turnips in two of the strips and as a green manure to be cut down in the rye-only patch. All will be resown with clover in late winter.

Perhaps it is because I have grown accustomed to viewing life through the lens of a farmer, but each season really does have its own time and place. And even as things die, they are reborn, including hope.

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Reading this weekend: The Hour (B. DeVoto) and Emergent Agriculture (G. Kleppel)

Get Thee To A Pig

We spent yesterday rendering out fat into lard for the coming year; a product of our recently butchered family hog. It reminded me of an older blog post of mine

Headcheese: made from our hogs.

Headcheese: made from our hogs.

: King of the Southern Table.

“Mogul of appetite, lord of misrule, the king who must die”: John Thorne, a favorite quote from a favorite author. More pork is butchered each year per pound than beef, lamb, goats or chickens and any other competing livestock. That is more pork around the world. Scratch the billion plus Muslims, scratch the kosher adherents of Judaism, pork is still tops.

The pig has been our constant companion for over ten thousand years. A fellow omnivore, a perfect companion, a domestic vacuum cleaner or gleaner of all things left over. The pig converts food into pounds at a ratio of 33%; a sheep does the next best at 13%, and a steer at a measly 7%. The hog plunges out of the starting gate at a couple of pounds and ends the first year at an easy 300 pounds. Take that you squalling human infant!

I have no books on my shelves celebrating the sheep or goat (excluding the instructional), only one on the steer, a handful on chickens and an even two dozen celebrating the hog: Serious Pig, Pork and Sons, Pig: King of the Southern Table, The Whole Hog, Pig Perfect and Everything but the Squeal, to name but six.

Pig meat: nothing is more communal than a pig roast. Next to it beef is positively boring. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We all eat “high on the hog” with pork because pork is easily raised by one and all. In Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, she speaks of how little kids gather choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed to the family pig: A year-long family project to fatten the pig so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, blood puddings.

Pigs are the meat of choice for the sustainability crowd. We can survive, do for ourselves, a pig in a paddock proclaims. Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn and stale bread and you shout Comrade!

Tonight we dined on what Cindy referred to as a keeper: Lacon Con Grelos, A Galician dinner that could be ripped from the pages of any decent Southern cookbook. We physically restrained ourselves from eating until sick. Fix this immediately and restore your soul, find a new center for well-being, toss out the yoga class, deliver up your Lipitor to the porcelain god. Better to check out a few years early than to squander those extra years deprived of good eats.

Lacon Con Grelos: as adapted from The Food and Wines of Spain by Penelope Casas.
• 1 ½ pounds of smoked or salted pork. We used left over smoked shoulder
• Salt and fresh ground pepper
• 1 pound collard greens, rinsed and roughly chopped
• ½ pound Andouille sausage or other piquant cased meat
• 4 new potatoes
Place pork in pot and cover with water. Add salt and pepper. Bring to boil, cover and simmer for one hour. Add greens and sausage and potatoes. Simmer for another hour. Serve.

This dish is so elemental that it blew us away in its complexity. Get thee to a pig!

Reading this weekend: The Empty Throne by Bernard Cornwell. The master novelist of manly historical fiction has done it again. If you aren’t prepared to stand in the shield wall alongside Uhtred, then you better pass. Also, just started The Emergent Agriculture: farming, sustainability and the return of the local economy by Gary Kleppel.