Frosty Fall Morning

Lots of work was done around here this week, and I was going to tell you all about the wood hauling, garage cleaning and beer making (and smoke detector battery changing - change your batteries when you change  your clocks!), but when I went out to wake up the animals this morning everything was frosty and foggy. I thought you'd like to see that more than you'd like to see piles of wood, or de-walnut-shell-ified garage floors.

Martha, being dignified:

Rose has recently decided that people aren't all that bad and she'll now eat grain from  my hand, chew on my coat, and stare at me as if to say "why is there no grain in your hand?"

Kaylee started climbing on the straw bales again this week. Her ability to reliably climb was the last sign we were waiting to see for her full recovery. She's still a bit smaller than Saffron, but watching her jump on top of the Barn Mountain warms my heart.

Group shot! Everyone says "Good Morning."

"Now, feed us grain, Woman!"

26-Year-Old Me would never believe this post

One of the side effects of having a farm and only one income is that we travel way less than we did when we had two incomes and zero farms. This is to be expected - and here's the part where the 26 year-old version of me gets skeptical - I don't mind it. I actually rather dig it.

For the first few years of farm ownership (when we had two incomes but were working on our plan to give up one of them), this bothered me a bit and I grudgingly thought about how we used to travel and how we weren't doing that anymore. Consider:

We spent my 29th birthday in St. John snorkeling, drinking rum, and enjoying a tropical paradise even as a plethora of spring break hooligans invaded the campground, including a young gentleman who chose to make monkey noises whenever he laughed. Very loud monkey noises all through the night.

We spent my 30th birthday in New Zealand being amazed at volcanoes, glaciers and wine. In between those birthdays we were fortunate to take two additional short vacations (Vegas and Iceland) and visit with our families in NY. Plus, we lived in DC at the time, so every day held opportunities for local tourism. Except for eating fabulous food, my most fond emotional attachment to living in DC was having the responsibility-free lifestyle and ability to travel to new places.

After my 30th birthday, we took our life in a different direction, and a year later I was shoveling poop out of a barn in Indiana. I don't know if I realized at the time that the barn would eventually hold turkeys...or that I would find turkeys to be a giant pain in the butt...or that I would ever utter the sentence I whispered to Bill earlier this week.

Are you ready?

Bill left work early one day and stopped at the cheese store, a beer store and a cupcakery and brought home these delights.

We spent the evening eating, playing games, and tending to the animals. As we walked out in the twilight to put the farm to bed for the evening, I told Bill I had a delightful evening and it felt like a vacation - just the simple joy in having a couple of extra hours together and sharing food that we don't have often, made the whole day feel special. Also, I was really, really pleased that we could have a vacation where I dressed in pajama pants for dinner and didn't need to interact with TSA.

I realized that I didn't miss the opportunities to travel at all. (That's not to say that I wouldn't take a free trip to Rome if anyone out there wants to offer...)

I think it takes practice and mindfulness to find honest joy and contentment in the really simple things, and to be pleased with where you are and not just where you wish you were. I am so very, very fortunate to know many people who have cultivated this sort of outlook and I thank them for their influence on me (surround yourself with happy people!).

It may look like it was just a few hunks of cheese and some cupcakes, but really, it was a revelation.

Sick of Solstice Salad?

Here's some photos of winter to tide you over until I write a real blog post, including some art made by the turkeys in the snow.

Raindrops and Chickens

The rain droplets on our locust leaves this morning inspired me to dig out the macro and telephoto lenses we have for our camera. Please to enjoy some country life up close...

Elvis has been enjoying the grass seed this morning.

We got rain! And firewood!

 

It finally rained last weekend. We could have guessed that it would have to be a pretty powerful storm to make it to us, given that all the smaller storms were either deflected around us, or broke up before they reached us. Apparently drought is self-reinforcing, and it took a mighty storm to break through all the dryness.

 

The winds were about 80-90 mph and trees were toppled everywhere. The trees that didn't fall over lost huge branches, or their entire tops. We've got a ton of firewood for next year, and today the sounds of dueling chainsaws are echoing throughout the street.

The storm woke us up Sunday morning around 5:00. It was powerful enough that Bill suggested going downstairs to check the radar. By the time we were half-way down, we could hear branches slamming up against the house and decided to skip the radar and head for the basement.

When we were in the basement, the power went out. And then we wished we had thought to bring a flashlight on our evacuation.

As soon as it was light out, went to inspect the damage.

We're not entirely sure what happened to Bill's stove. Perhaps the wind pushed on the walls and the insulation leaked out. Besides that, it is unscathed.

 

The chickens, turkeys, garden and outbuildings are all fine. Our neighbors are all safe and power was restored by noon.

The 'hood looks a bit wind-tossed, though. What surprised me was how far branches flew from their trees. The branch in front of Bill is from that silver maple tree about 50 yards behind him.

 

The corn across the street was all bending in one direction, so we knew it had been straight-line winds and not a tornado. 

 

Our sad, scraggly old peach tree fell, missing our car by a few inches. 

 

Even after the big storm, we're still way, way down on rainfall. We've had about 2.5-3 inches this past week, but the creek down the road is still a bunch of stagnant, disconnected puddles. 

 

We'll be busy for a few weeks cutting up firewood. We've got maple, mulberry, locust, walnut... such a lovely variety. 

 

This is our neighbor's tree. Our neighbors on the other side lost a bunch too...they moved in 2 days before the storm. Such a crazy way to be welcomed to the neighborhood! We met them last night as they were clearing some brush. We're all bonding over the hum of chainsaws.

Fooood!

Yesterday morning, I tilled an area of land bigger (far bigger) than our last apartment.

Hells yeah I had a beer with lunch. Tilling = blech. But I'm excited to plant tons o'pumpkins in that area. The front half is for popcorn.

Bill fired his oven on Sunday (more on that to come) and we ate really well on Monday as a result. He made pizza and bread with the "crappy" flour because he wasn't sure how it was going to all turn out and he didn't want to waste the good stuff on his first experiment. We ate French Toast for breakfast:

...and leftover pizza with an arugula salad and homebrew wheat beer for lunch. This meal was very, very exciting because we could see it all coming together. The pizza is all from scratch - bread, sauce and cheese made by Bill. Someday the sauce will be from homegrown tomatoes and we'll get some goats to milk for the cheese. Bill also talks about growing wheat, but I think that will be more of a fun experiment than a long term, sustained project.

The salad is arugula and radishes from our garden with a simple balsamic vinaigrette (I already lost the recipe. ooops!) homemade croutons (a great way to use up substandard bread) and a young Parmesan cheese. The cheese is not supposed to be done until November, but Bill couldn't wait. It tastes young, but is very good. Check it:

A very satisfying lunch!

For dessert we had some blackcaps.

Already.  

In May (in 2009, we picked at the end of June). I'm sure we've eaten a quart already and they've only just begun. Some day I'll show you the madness that is our blackcaps. They are probably some sort of horrible invasive here in Indiana, but I don't care!!! We let them grow wherever they'd like and are happy to share them with the birds.

Speaking of sharing with wild animals...there is a family of three red squirrels living in our basement. We see them in our mulberry tree every morning and every evening. They don't even wait for the mulberries to get ripe before chowing down.

Here's one of the babies:

Too cute to be evicted, right?

The skills of bad-assery

Once upon a time (yesterday), a woman wrote a blog on Huffington Post. In her article she lamented the growing number of women who enjoy (and blog about) domestic womanly pursuits, like baking and gardening. How they seemed to have retreated into an ultra femininity of the past - a delicate, pathetic girliness. She was aghast that we have squandered the hard-fought gains of our fore-mothers. You know, suffrage and the ability to be the Board Chair of a big company and not wear a bra.

She was making a tired point that so many small minded women have made before... trying to convince us that there is only one form of feminism wherein women are the same as men. (This is naturally stupid. Though women should absolutely have the same opportunities as men, we have different strengths that should be celebrated, not cast aside. Some people even argue that this idea of feminism - being a working mom and the chair of the board - has succeeded not because it was good for women or families, but because it was good for industry.... this is all a separate blog post, and suddenly too long to be parenthetical.)

The blogger, however, in attempting to make her small minded point did something that resulted in a firestorm I am certain she didn't expect.

She called out knitters - and one knitter in particular - as proof of our femininity destroying feminism. Knitters, she implied, are meek, delicate girly girls and the complete opposite of bad asses. We who love fiber arts are ruining feminism for women who shoot guns, hot-wire cars and kill vampires. We, with our lacy shawls, are an embarrassment and should be ashamed.

Here is the problem (and hopefully something the blogger has now learned). Knitters are not homogeneous. Just as Board Chairwomen are not. I recently read an article about a woman serving in the army in Iraq who set up a knitting group for her fellow soldiers. Here in Indy, The Naptown Roller Girls wrote a book of knitting patterns which includes armpit cushions for crutches, an Elevate that Ankle Pillow, and a "hey, at least it wasn't your leg" arm sling. There are active groups of knitters on Ravelry for bikers, gun owners, homesteaders and martial artists. Sounds pretty badass, no?

In a related vein, the large, large majority of business owners in the knitting community - people who sell yarn or dye it, write patterns, publish books and even raise sheep are women (unlike the male-dominated Hollywood that she extols for giving us kick ass role models). With the exception of a very few men, much of the knitting industry is owned and run by women. I wish I could put a dollar amount on that - but instead, know that there are more active knitters in the US than golfers.

Finally, if Ms. Aloi is really, truly concerned about the ability of domestic sorts of women to survive in an apocalyptic future - and she mentions it twice, so I presume she is - I must take issue with her logic. Gardening, she believes is worthless, and women should prepare to "manipulate our way into a bomb shelter" instead (which sounds daftly sexist to me). So, let's say we bad ass women overpower all the men with our bad-assery and superior marksmanship. And we eat their bomb shelter food - we eat it real good. All of it. Then what?? I imagine we're going to wish we knew how to grow some more damn food. Or make some warm sweaters that keep the rain off our bad ass calloused skin as we're out hunting for more men to beat up.

And here is the thing - my whole main point. Women are GOOD at these things. In general, we are better at them than men. Successfully gardening and raising farm animals especially requires the skills of nurturers - observant, intuitive nurturers. And (in general) this is an area where women excel.

So, why are we ignoring those skills and talents? Why would we dismiss them as being anti-feminist? We should consider the ability to turn raw wool into a sweater, or grow pounds and pounds of potatoes, or can a year's supply of beans just as bad ass as defending a border or killing a deer.

Because it is.

I knit and garden. And I am a bad ass.

Around the farm tonight...

THIS!

Today was the sort of day for opening all the doors in the house and drying roving and sheets on rope strung between trees.


The sheets, you will note, are not flannel. This is a milestone. Also, the roving is green. I am craving some green. Fortunately, Mother Nature is obliging.



It was also the sort of day for having dinner outside. Homemade bread, local cheese and salami and the very, very last of the wine we brought back from New Zealand. Cards too. We always play cards when eating dinner at a picnic table. It's a thing. Should you ever eat dinner on our picnic table, expect to be presented with cards.



Today was also the sort of day for replacing fuel lines chewed on by red squirrels. Mmmm. Gasoline coated rubber is so delicious!