Don’t Make a Meal of It

We had finished hauling a half-dozen pine logs to the lumber yard. There were still a lot of small branches to pick up. So I told the kid to pick them up and pile them in a ravine and “don’t make a meal of it, come find me when you are done.” He said, sure, and got to work.

Told off since we were kids that a job is not worth doing unless it is done right has mislead generations, left them dithering at the crossroads of inaction A dear friend of ours often abused her husband for cleaning up the house less than perfect. She, being a perfectionist, never cleaned. Knowing in her heart of hearts it would never measure up.

Now sometimes doing the job thoroughly is important, such as heart surgery. But, and perhaps this is my Southern sensibility, I’m a 90% guy: Take care of 90% and the other 10% typically doesn’t matter. In fact, that last 10% can take 90% of your time. Sometimes, actually pretty darned often, not making a meal of it, instead of spending too much time on minor projects, is the appropriate amount to get done.

Learning the balance in completing work or spiraling down an anal retentive vortex of making nail cozies can be a fine line. It is a process we actively engage in each day on the farm, where the list of items increases minute by minute, wind storm by wind storm. Sometimes, even a half-assed completion is the spot-on-amount needed to accomplish the task. The skill and the talent of a good worker is determining when good is good-enough.

We pride ourselves on work well-done. But, we need to know when to move on and that every task fits in a larger framework.

Yesterday we pruned our new wine grapes to a central leader, put up the trellis wire and tied the vines off. I left undone the thorough weeding that was needed and an application of manure and mulch. It was time to move on and rake the hay in preparation for baling today.

Sometimes it is best to snack and not make a meal of it.

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Reading this weekend: The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben. A fascinating look at the “intelligence” and social life of trees. The writing is a bit uninspiring, I was hoping for something both profound and beautiful.

Woodlot Management in the Anthropocene: Part Three

“A constructive and careful handling of the resources of the earth is impossible except on the basis of large co-operation and of association for mutual welfare.”

— Liberty Hyde Bailey, The Holy Earth

 

Winged Elm Farm has approximately 40 acres of hardwoods, and last year I posted a couple of pieces on our woodlot management plan, here and here. In them and here, I use the term “Anthropocene,” the period in Earth’s history when the impact of human existence shapes the natural world and climate. I chose that term to distinguish the plan we’ve embarked upon as being a more old-fashioned management approach.

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A large “wolf” tulip poplar in a new growth woods on our farm.

As we began the process of managing our woodlots, our biggest hurdles were knowledge and the preconceptions of being moderns. Our mindset was geared toward extraction, the basis of our current economy. Our innate resistance to extractive processes like clearcutting was primarily why we had avoided managing the woods at all.

But a Wendell Berry piece three years ago spurred our interest in sustainable management, and a casual review of the 19th century literature based on the knowledge of small farms past showed us a clear path for applying the same model. How markedly different was the approach of those manuals and handbooks — managing woodlands for the benefit of farm and watersheds for future generations — from the “modern” practices of that century and the 20th of the extractive industries.

Last week, as we prepared to take hogs to market and dreamed of the variety of dishes and cuts we were to enjoy, the phrase “nose to tail eating” came to mind. The term is used to describe the process that takes advantage of every bit of the animal. It’s a way to honor the animal’s life and sacrifice.

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One of our Haflinger drafts hauling a small log out of the woods.

The slightly modified term “nose to tail logging” aptly describes a good woodlot management program, the constructive use of every bit of the harvested tree: for our benefit, for the soil’s benefit, for the watershed, for the wildlife, and, most important, for the woodlands’ benefit.

There are innumerable old texts on managing a woodlot, books that describe how to select harvest, reseed, preserve soil, amend and improve the soil. So far, the approach as applied to our farm seems to be working — from selection to lumber, chipping to removal, sowing mushrooms and providing firewood, leaving wildlife habitat to conservation. Future generations will need to be the final judge.

A couple of newish books, too, have helped us flesh out the specific and the larger challenges to sustainable woodlot management.

Paul Stamets’ work, especially his book Mycelium Running, helped reshape the way I viewed the soil and its structure in the forests, a soil as in need of care and replenishment as that in our pastures. And, of course, it opened my eyes to the use of fungi to facilitate those ends.

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Poplar lumber newly cut on our Norwood mill.

But the mindset of extraction lingers as the world’s dominant invasive species. Azby Brown’s recent book, Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan, helped me correct some of that dominant outlook. A study of the Edo period (early 1600s to mid-1800s), his chapters on farming, and particularly the one titled “Guardians of the forest,” were revelatory. The care and thorough use of all woodland products, the steps to endlessly recycle natural products through multiple generations of use, the care of water sources, waterways, and riparian buffers — all were woven in that period into an overall societal commitment to what we would now call planetary care.

The practices of the traditional Japanese and of our own small-farm woodlot ultimately rely on a larger cultural awareness of the need for such intensive conservation of both the woodland and the products derived from it. The evidence of stress on our Eastern hardwoods from escalating climate change is before us. To be successful in both harvest and preservation will require some old-fashioned individual commitment and a multi-generational commitment by our culture.

Our farm can commit to the first. It remains to be seen if there is the will for the second. And that is the real challenge.

It Feels Like Home

The rain is settling in again on the farm this Sunday morning. We have a full lineup of work ahead, and some of that will need to be postponed. Completing the predator-proof fencing for the lower pasture will need to wait for drier days; rolling out and stretching field fence in the rain would be no one’s idea of fun. But cutting firewood can be done with relative comfort and safety while deep in the woods. And this could be a good day to work on my bowl carving technique (currently just about nil).

Regardless of the task at hand, it must be said that living on a farm is endlessly challenging, rewarding, and stimulating. Living on and with the land, learning the strengths and weaknesses of this particular piece of landscape, watching the seasons come and go—all make it more of a home than anything I have experienced as an adult.

There are many who live in the country for the isolation or as a retreat, or as a place of recreation to ride horses or four-wheelers, or to hunt. And I would not dispute their assertion that their house is their home. But there is a tangible satisfaction in the process of working with the land to produce for oneself and those one loves, or for people in town or the city. It ties one to the land in ways that are still revealing themselves to me.

For me, the simplest way to describe it is that it feels like, it is, home.

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This blog began 15 years ago as an occasional letter to friends and family. Three hundred and eight letters later, in January 2012, it emerged as a weekly post to observe that journey. In these posts, I’ve tried to document that process of “coming home”—of learning skills, enjoying exhilarating successes, and enduring spectacular failures—all while still leaving room for plenty of rants and observations.

This is a weekly exercise in which I seldom know what I’m going to write about until I open the laptop on Sunday morning. But like carrying out the work on the farm and producing the food for the table, I find the process and the sharing satisfying. They too feel like home. And, since you are part of that process, I welcome your input and ideas for the future of this exercise. You can reply here or email me at bmiller@wingedelmfarm.com.

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Reading this week: Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan, by Azby Brown. An informative study of the sustainable cultural practices of the Edo Period in Japanese history. I have found it well worth the time spent reading it.