Category Archives: Farm Work

Notes on The Harvest

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For those of you with your cold Dixie longnecks in hand and ready to ride with me, we will resume our 2006 journey to Louisiana next week. Perhaps.

The onslaught of veggies has been underway since June. The bean field alone is threatening to overwhelm our storage capabilities, and certainly my energies. The tomatoes are weighing down the stalks even with a daily harvest. The okra grows from one inch to four inches and inedibility overnight (though some say the inedibility begins when it’s placed on the plate). But at least the dent corn is harvested and drying, so I can check it off my list.

And then there is this: A few evenings back I found a handful of Granny Smith apples that had fallen to the ground. Thirty minutes later, and a bushel basket was full and inside the house. Which, if my farm journal is any guide, means the Foxwhelp apples are almost ripe and will be ready to harvest any moment. A full morning will be required to gather the heavy crop from those large trees. The old orchard may have been planted with semi-dwarf rootstock 20 years ago, but … My How The Trees Have Thrived. The Yarlington Mills and both the Arkansas and the Kingston Blacks are a few weeks behind the Foxwhelp, meaning they will not be ready until mid-August.

It has taken many years to adjust my expectations of an apple harvest to our East Tennessee weather, and adjust them again to a warming climate. In my mind, perhaps because of nearly a lifetime of reading rural literature from England and other northern climes, my expectation was always that gathering takes place in the fall. Yet year after year the harvest disappointed with wormy, wooden, and rotten apples. I’d walk among the trees in October or November waiting for some transformation, not realizing that the transformation had happened a few months past.

Eventually my expectations for harvest time shifted from blaming the trees to simply resetting the calendar. As a farmer and orchardist, the fault was mine, a failure to observe being a chief liability for anyone who wishes to if not thrive, then at least muddle through with a minimum of waste. But wisdom is a tough mistress to keep if she is ignored.

Harvest tip: When your apple and pear trees bloom in March and April, expect your fruit to arrive in late July through September (unless, of course, your trees or fruit choose an earlier or later date to bloom or ripen).

The majority of trees in the orchard are old English and Southern cider varieties, so the apples will be sweated for a week after harvest. It’s a simple process in which they are piled in the barn on a tarp and allowed to further ripen and soften. After sweating, the cider press will be retrieved from the well house — wasps exterminated from their clever hiding places — and the pressing will begin.

If I were diligent about a thorough harvesting, I could easily expect 20 or more gallons of juice from these first trees. But, knowing that the Foxwhelps are just the start, with the remainder of the apples and the Kelly pears crowding into the calendar in August, I’ll aim to produce more or less 10 gallons of cider from each session with the press, allowing an extra gallon or two for apple jelly. The “cake” from the pressing and the windfalls gathered will be fed to the pigs.

August also brings the muscadine harvest, easily 200 pounds of fruit from our little vineyard that traditionally are turned into even more jelly and then some wine. I’ll distill some of the latter into brandy or gin using my five-gallon copper alembic still.

Harvest tip: Add herbs or spices when making preserves. Rosemary and ginger are perfect flavorings for apple jelly. A bouquet garni of black peppercorns and coriander seeds added to the juice can also give your buttered and jellied toast a nice pop in the morning.

September brings the endless supply of Callaway crabapples, which when fermented with honey make for a delicious mead. Hopefully, sometime between now and then, the figs will be ready — that is, if we ever get more than a trickle of rain. Once they ripen it will be a race between me, the chickens, and the wasps to determine who eats them first.

Harvest tip on figs: Gather early morning before sunup or late in the evening. Otherwise, you risk grabbing a wasp with every other fig. Believe me when I tell you, that grows old rather quickly.

Harvest season in Tennessee is really an almost year-round event. From the greens of winter and spring, the traditional vegetable season of summer, and the small and large fruits from summer to fall, it takes planning, energy, and a willingness to forgive yourself for not saving it all. My friend Tim likes to say, “In East Tennessee we can grow everything, just nothing really well.” True, the weather can be a challenge, the soil is never what you want, and the insects are always ravenous. But overall, I have found that the harvest seasons on this farm are usually generous if the farmer is willing to do the work.

Harvest tip: Take notes in a journal on when vegetables and fruits ripen. Note also how you cooked or preserved their bounty. Your next year’s self will thank you.

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left to right: her son-in-law Lindsey, grandson Joseph, nephew Brian (me). Marjorie Jo Roberts Yeomans.

Addendum: Our Memory Keeper turns 100 today. A century is a long time to be an active witness. Happy Birthday, Aunt Jo!

A Guide to Successfully Completing Tasks

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A carefully crafted to-do list is a thing of beauty. Its creation is an exercise in organizing that separates the men from the boys, the doers from the layabouts. My personal farm to-do list gets updated each Friday morning without fail. I turn on the computer and pull up the previous week’s document, spend a few minutes deleting the accomplished tasks, adding new ones and shuffling unfinished ones within and between the long-, mid-, and short-term goals, and then print. What could be simpler?

In print, of course, the list is highly successful: it’s neatly laid out, just waiting to be put into action. That some items remain long enough to become fossilized, I am aware. Those tasks become like river rocks, highly polished before being ground into sand by the swift-flowing currents of time and good intentions.

And so it has been, since May of 2019, for items 3 and 4 on the short-term to-dos:

  • Set up wire/waterer in wooded pig paddock; rebuild shelter.
  • Chainsaw cedars that have fallen across pig fencing.

Items of such long standing become affectionate companions, even age into venerability. For tasks 3 and 4, there had been a comfort in knowing they were both on the list and yet had no urgency to tackle, even as they malingered in the “complete now or within 14 days” company. The wooded paddock remained empty of pigs, after all; hence, there was no stock to contain or care for. So the tasks remained, week after week becoming month after month, occasionally moving down the short-term queue, occasionally (in moments of wild optimism) moving up to the top.

Ultimately though, the day did come — along with a trailer load of weanling pigs — when numbers 3 and 4 needed quick and decisive action. Although I had been repeatedly forewarned in the preceding weeks of the piglets’ impending arrival, I had felt comfortable postponing. These were small tasks, easily achievable with the minimum of time and effort.

Saturday morning, the mercury at 20, found me restringing electric wire, pounding posts into frozen ground, cursing the Aesopian-grasshopper instincts that had left me unprepared to adequately welcome the new piglets. That my electric fence charger had finally disintegrated after 15 years in the elements and the chainsaw coughed and shuddered at starting in the cold … well, neither improved my opinion of that lazy farmer who had postponed these simple tasks for nine months.

Finally, after completing what should have been a two-hour project in six hours, I returned to the house and crossed off items 3 and 4. Then, after a moment’s reflection on the lessons learned, I took up my master list and made a few adjustments. By moving items 5-8, which had also been on the short-term list for months, to the mid-term category (15 to 90 days), I bought myself not only time but also self-respect. Genius! I do love a good to-do list.

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Reading this week: A Very Stable Genius (Rucker & Leoning), The Biggle Swine Book (Biggle), The Third Plate (Barber)

Angels: The Phone Always Rings Twice

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Turnips in the yard

Reader beware. If you are expecting the seraphim to flap their wings solemnly throughout this piece, search elsewhere. This is not a theological work, no musing on how many of their numbers might fit on a pin head. Today, we simply speak of destiny.

I may wish for a different role in life. But alas, although the home phone seldom rings, when it does, I always answer with some hesitation. Are we marked at birth for the roles we will play in this life? Do the gods gather up a handful of archetypal or character dust and randomly start slinging it about — a little leadership landing there, a bit of maternal instinct here, the jovial, the innocent, the hero cast willy-nilly over the sleeping infants. Is that how it works, what it all comes down to in the end? An Angel of Death for this valley?

It pains me to make this public admission, but when an animal needs to be dispatched, I get the call. It is not a job I sought, yet it comes to me more often than I wish.

The neighbors with a mortally injured lamb who can’t bring themselves, literally, to pull the trigger? They call me. Dying deer on the side of the road, they call me. Pet chickens in the final stages, they call me, Brian the Neck Wringer. It can all get a bit depressing, this being the spine for, shall we call them, the timid. I’d much prefer that they get on with the job themselves. But they can’t, they won’t. They call. Like the day my muscle-bound neighbor followed his hog around a pen for half an hour, pistol in trembling hand, looking for just the right shot to put the pig down, but could never quite pull the trigger. I felt compelled to act. I went to the house, grabbed the 30-30, and, returning to the scene of indecisiveness, pushed past and killed the hog with a single shot.

If you are going to eat meat — hell, if you are going to drive a car — you are going to have blood on your hands. My attitude, perhaps, has more than a strong whiff of the judgmental. But it is justified, certainly. Soon after I first met Cindy, a neighbor’s Doberman got into her barnyard and savaged her sheep. After watching the neighbor hem and haw over killing the bloodied and dying animals, I reached for the 410 in his hands and did the deed myself. I hate to see an animal suffer or a hard decision postponed on account of spinelessness masquerading as compassion.

I hasten to say I’m not insensitive (right?). I chalk up my willingness to kill to a lifetime of gutting catfish caught on trotlines from the family pond, cleaning speckled trout and dolphinfish all night after a day of fishing on the gulf, butchering hundreds of chickens I’ve raised to put meat on the table. One carries out these unpleasantries if one eats. Or did, before the advent of mass man and consumerism distanced us from death. Allowed us to believe that it is better for the immigrant, the lower waged, the lower class to do our dirty work, butcher our meat, butcher our enemies. Washed our hands….

Oddly, and perhaps one reason Cindy and I have been together 35 years, she is called out for the opposite function. If the Angel of Mercy is needed, the phone also rings. When a mother goose got separated from her goslings at work, colleagues called Cindy to solve the problem. When a dog gets injured in the valley — bitten by a snake, shot by a neighbor, hit by a car — the call comes for Cindy. Where my toolbox contains an axe, rifle, and knife, hers includes clear-eyed compassion and skills honed over decades caring for animals in her charge.

Hers is the more rewarding role to play. People come up to her and give her hugs years later for helping nurse a beloved pet or farm animal back to health. I, on the other hand, get the careful nod, averted eyes. Wary, they seem, lest I discern a limp in their step and go for my shotgun.

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Reading this weekend: Sign Posts In A Strange Land (Percy). “the fruit of such mismatch is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry.”

The Return of the Doldrums of Summer

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We seem a little too happy for being so miserable.

There is a moment that comes every year, usually about this time, when the heat and humidity kills all ambition on the farm. We stage a coward’s retreat to the inside, where the air conditioning wages war with the mighty forces beyond the walls.

The humid furnace outside is best experienced with quick forays and small bursts of committed energy. Our own response to the heat is mirrored by that of the pets and livestock. The cattle emerge from the woods just long enough to traverse the pasture for a much-needed drink in the pond. There, the catfish have given up emerging from the cool bottom muck until the seasons change.

Upon hearing the door to the house open, Becky, our farmdog, leaves the cool concrete in the workshop to stare out the door and assess. Do they need me? She clearly would rather stay put. But should I be an Englishman who ventures out into the midday sun, she will gladly be my mad dog and join in the folly.

The hogs, even the ones in the woods, spend their days lying on the cooler dirt under trees or in the wallows. Mud coated, they seldom arise even when we come bearing buckets of feed. A snort of acknowledgment, a shrug of massive shoulders, and they burrow deeper into the mud with a reasonable confidence that the feed will still be there when the sun goes down.

Confined at night, the sheep have little choice but to graze during daylight hours. But gone are their enthusiastic bursts from the barn in the mornings. Instead, they cluster in cliques at the door as I open gates to fresh grass. “After you, no, after you” they bleat before grudgingly crossing the corral to the pasture. Once there they feed in brief gorgings before falling back in a controlled withdrawal to the shaded sanctuary of the barn. Their pantings, like so many muffled drums: humph, humph, humph, humph, are steady and insistent and do not subside until long into the evening.

Heat-sapped hens, with parted beaks, panting, stand in the shade of the maple. They mirror most closely how we feel, their wings held out from their sides, much like we would flap a sweaty garment to stay cool. The rooster, his heart not really in his job, makes a few obligatory attempts at coupling. No doubt firing more blanks than bullets in the heat, he finds few partners willing to submit to his brief embrace.

Meanwhile, in a clever adaptation to this misery, the red fox in the nearby woods has taken the opportunity to pluck an unsuspecting young chicken from the pasture in broad daylight. Armed with the instinctual knowledge that all domestic life is locked in a listless stupor, the fox takes advantage of the situation and provides a nice meal for its kits. A minute later, my obligatory dash from the house with shotgun in hand ends with a random desultory blast into the undergrowth, the fox no doubt long gone.

Like the catfish retreating to the muck, I return to my cool study, where, with all ambition withered, I check the calendar, willing it to be any month later than July. I close the shades and lay my head on the desk, and resolve to hibernate until fall.

(This one is from the archives: after the past brutal week of 90 plus days, 3-4 shirts by early afternoon, we are ready for cooler weather…even if it is found inside. This post captures how we felt most of the week. The fellow with me in the picture is one of my nephews. For some strange reason he comes back each summer for this type of punishment.)

Life Lessons in Killing a Hog

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The ideal: When you look at a diagram, you see that the proper placement of a killing shot is just off center of an X formed by two lines that run from each ear to the opposite eye. The reality: When you’re faced with a pen full of weanling pigs that never stand still for more than a moment as they jostle for feed, you discover that that perfectly executed shot of the drawing is nothing more than a pipe dream.

At only 65 pounds, the chosen pig of friends had been handed down a sentence of early termination, the result of an already grossly distended hernia that was growing larger by the day. On a pet or a human, repair would be a straightforward, albeit expensive procedure. On a hog destined for slaughter in another six months, it was a foregone decision to move the timetable forward.

Some years back, our farm had a 200-pound barrow that broke its back in a rugby scrum with its brethren. A friend came over and assisted me in the killing and butchering. The hog, located at the far end of a two-acre wooded lot, had to be dragged across the uneven ground to the scalding pot. “Dead weight” has never been such an apt description.

If you’ve never done it, dragging a dead animal is a most peculiar exercise. It rolls about and shifts weight without warning, the bulk animated and yet unliving. (The dead can be such hard work.) No matter how often I have to do it, manhandling a carcass still comes as a disquieting reminder, one that manages to be both alien and, with familiar elements of the personal, foreshadowing.

At our friend’s farm, with Cindy and Sabine looking on, Michael hit the mark on the second try. He and I both sprang on the now stunned animal. I plunged the sticking knife in above the sternum. Pushing against bone for leverage, I severed one of the carotid arteries. The pig bled out on the grass. The other weanlings showed no interest in his fate and continued instead to gorge on the corn we had spread as bait.

Over the next couple of hours, Michael and I cleaned, scalded, scraped, eviscerated, cut, and packaged the pig into smaller primal cuts. Our task finally completed, the table cleaned, and the offal bagged and removed, we then retired to the shade for a beer.

Butchering is never as tidy as the illustrations show. My clothes were blood-splattered, and spare bits of hair from the vigorous skin scraping adhered to the far parts of my anatomy. If I’d been stopped by a state trooper on my way home, a serious inquiry followed by a search of the truck would inevitably have ensued.

Some hours later, back at our farm, Cindy positioned the livestock trailer at the entrance of our wooded hog paddock. Three 300-pound animals that need to be loaded for a trip to the processor on Tuesday reside there. (Although advocates of self-sufficiency, we believe that such large-scale butchery is best left to a professional.)

Such are the cycles on the farm, as mirrored in life: beginnings and endings and beginnings again. As the long day closed, we found ourselves sitting quietly in the back yard, idly gazing out at the hill pasture. The soon-to-be-full moon was rising in the east with Jupiter in a slow-motion chase. The wind tossed the trees on the far Southern horizon, and it was some minutes later before the breeze found us. The last light in the sky, a soft lavender in the west, finally diminished. With some reluctance, not wanting to release the day, we got up and went inside to read for the closing hour before bedtime.

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Reading this week: The Whole Okra (Smith), Deep Work (Newport), Letters From Europe (Thomson). The latter is an account, through letters back home, of the author’s book-buying trip to Europe on behalf of Ohio Wesleyan University, published in 1856.