Words to Read, Words to Write, And the Odds and Ends of Winter

At a recent Christmas gathering a friend, who lives with his family on a farmstead of their own, asked what my winter project will be this year.  My conspicuously blank face apparently being  adequate response, he went on to share that he identifies at least one big project he intends to complete each winter -- partly to keep busy, but partly because the other more routine demands of the property are hibernating this time of year.  Maybe it is equipment repair.  Maybe it is organization of the tool shed.  Maybe it is brush removal.  Maybe it is...well, anything that gets neglected during the more hectic growing season. 

I like the idea, and it presents better than, "I just want to relax," which is what I wanted to say.  To be sure, there is perusal of seed catalogues, and continuous care and feeding of the chickens.  Indeed, I've already winterized the coops with tarps and straw bales to keep snow and wind to a minimum in the runs, and I've switched out the waterers for the electric heated models.  The girls (and now one boy) have already appreciated the tarps and bales with Saturday's couple inches of snow.  And with the nights in the single digits, the heated waterers are essential. 

But those altogether routine assignments don't really have the ring of a true "winter project".  Winter is also the season for farming conferences, and while we have plans to attend a few those don't adequately fit the category either.  There is garden planning to accomplish as well -- keeping track of seed purchases, eventually starting seeds in the greenhouse while snow is still on the ground, laying out the garden map online.  And, if other parts of the year are focused on food production -- growing, harvesting and preserving for later -- this is that season for food consumption.  Given what all we have laid aside in jars and in the freezer, that will be a major undertaking; hard work, eating all that beautiful harvest, but someone's got to do it.

But as I have thought about the question in the ensuing days I've had to admit that no one big, hairy, audacious project is commanding my attention.  But there are smaller things -- more interior work that easily gets neglected in the press of other things.  My stack of books to read is reaching epic heights, and I am determined to whittle that shorter through these colder months.  We have purchased two online classes that will focus us episodically through the season -- one, a training course in fruit tree management that will certainly involve some practical application in winter pruning.  And there are writing projects -- layered with the dust of sad neglect -- that I hope to brush off and move back to the center of my attentions and productions. 

And I won't lie:  that bit about "relaxing" wasn't just an off-handed, throw-away remark.  I plan to take fuller advantage of the longer nights and the shorter days.  And if I fall asleep with a book in my lap, well, it will give me something at hand to do first thing in the morning.

Caught in the Gap Between What I Wanted and What I Have

We have finally brought ourselves to admit the truth -- one that most objective observers would almost certainly claim to have been flatly obvious for some time to all but the most blind or naive or self-deluded.  People, in other words, precisely like us.  Even we, however, have now allowed the scales to fall from our eyes.  The truth?  That large, strutting bird in the chicken yard sporting longer feathers and a wary attitude is not the proudly oversized hen we presumed and purchased, but a rooster.  Samantha, as it turns out, is Sam despite our protests to the contrary.  The "cockle-doodle-do" cannot be denied. 

We never intended this to happen.  Our plan was to steward a quiet little flock of hens, fondly and appreciatively gathering each day their eggs.  Roosters -- cockerels -- are intrusions:  loud and aggressive...in more ways than one.  Yes, that aggressiveness can translate into protectiveness, keeping certain predators at bay.  But I have no interest in cock fighting, especially when I am one of the contestants.  I see the sharp points on those feet and want nothing to do with them.  And I have no interest in hatching eggs. 

That, and we have neighbors I don't want annoyed each day at the crack of dawn.

We did not want any roosters.

But thus far, I'll have to admit, he has been quite agreeable.  While he certainly has taken a conspicuous interest in one or two of the hens with whom he shares living space, he has thus far paid me no mind.  He accommodates my regular visits nonchalantly, preferring to supervise the feathery ones more on his level.  Fertilized eggs, as I have read up on them, seem to be more of a non-issue than I first believed, creating a problem only if allowed to incubate for weeks at a constant temperature of 85-degrees.  And apparently disinterested in daybreak, our big guy delays his crow until midday.  And as far as crowing goes, his has been more of a suggestion than a command.  So far, in other words, the only problem with this newly acknowledged realization is my own prejudiced attitude. 

All that, and the nagging fact that we have invested ourselves for months in his well-being.  One of a pair of 5-week old Mottled Javas we brought home in mid-July, we have fed and watered and sheltered this proud bird all this time and have grown quite attached to him -- as we have with all the birds in our care.  Although some have recommended various surgical procedures or suggested certain recipes as solutions to our problem, we are viscerally averse to simply dispatching him -- either to our kitchen or to some alternative address. 

And so we ponder the road -- and the coop -- ahead, torn between what we intended, what we wanted, and what we actually possess; needled along the way by the slightly bothersome biblical assertion that "everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Timothy 4:4).

And so there is a cock in the hen house.  It happens, it occurs to me, literally and also metaphorically; maybe even politically.  What to do with that which I neither wanted nor intended may well turn on the degree of "thanksgiving" that I can get my mind and heart around. 

And at what hour he chooses to crow.

Stay tuned.

Crossing the Line to Home

It's been awhile, I know. There have been other demands, other disciplines toward which to lean. The “pen”, figuratively speaking, has necessarily remained in the drawer.

But never mind all that. Despite the fact that the garden has finally been put to bed, the countryside is nonetheless alive; the farmstead soulfully evocative in its quieter, wintry way as the first barely-discernible snowflakes portend the assurance of ample more.

Monday night we finally moved the segregated hens from the Annex to the main chicken yard. Having grown larger and more secure since their mid-September arrival, the two Bantam Dark Brahmas and the single Blue Wyandotte were ready to find their place in the larger community and coops. The Blue was ready some time ago, having arrived at 14 weeks of age as the replacement from the same brood as the one killed by a hawk a few weeks earlier. The Bantams, however, arriving at six weeks of age, had growing to do, and they seemed to appreciate the companionship of the older Blue. But with their own maturity and the approach of winter, it was time. That, and a week with sparse daytime commitments on our calendar, affording a more watchful transition.

Monday night, then, around 9 o’clock, equipped with dim headlights attached to the bill of a cap, we accomplished the great migration; lifting each drowsing hen in turn out of her familiar roosting and depositing in their new home.

It isn't, however, the night that worries me. The hens sleep. All are nonplussed by the new arrangement. Morning is the concern. Amendments to the pecking order and all that; plus the fact that two of the new residents are half the size of everyone else. What was I thinking?

Morning came, I opened the hatches, the girls descended, and the usual shuffling ensued. Pecking and chasing, but less than I expected. The Blue admirably and tenaciously held her own, chest-bumping the occasional challenger. The Bantams, of course, promptly escaped the hassle by slipping through the fence and roaming the wild and unprotected yard. I understand the popular fondness for “free-range”, but the vulnerability unnerves me. I maneuvered them back inside -- multiple times during the course of the day. And dusk descended -- dusk being the final vulnerability and ambiguity. Will the newcomers follow the others inside and up the ramp to bed, or feel lost, displaced and confused? It's happened both ways.

I went out to watch and discourage another escape toward more familiar roosting environs. The Blue readily followed the others up the ramp of her new home, but the Bantams paced the fence line in tandem. I stood just outside, unwittingly stepping into the theatre of time in separation. The chickens and I respectively sensed that we straddled a demarcating line, but that line was as diaphanous as it was decisive. What lay on either side was as unknown as the nudge that would eventually carry us over it.

But whether spontaneous or considered, we were nudged. Instead of the deterrent I intended to present standing on the outside of the fence, I apparently represented something quite different. One of the Bantams, summoning all its desperate resources, took a fluttering leap to the top of the fence and then willingly into my hands, where she settled into a heart-melting and passive contentedness. We stood there for moments, the shelter and the sheltered, before I gingerly made my way inside. Still I held her, until the fearful laments of her grounded partner drew her up and I set her down. Once more companioned, they again surveyed the options before taking a deep and determined breath, stepped across the threshold of their new home and as the last of the flock, walked side by side up the ramp to bed.

I admit the lump in my throat and the tear descending my cheek -- of relief? Or pride? Perhaps the tendered heart of the new grandfather I have recently become?

I don't know. I only know that as I walked back toward the house I felt a new appreciation for the resilience of life, the capacities for strength and courage, and the willingness to embrace the possibilities as well as the vulnerabilities of a new normal.

And I slept better last night as well.

With an Eye for Tomorrow's Shade -- and A Few Good Nuts

Borrowing the essence of an Ancient Greek proverb, Canadian farmer Nelson Henderson mused, “The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” 

Or, if I might bend the thought in a more personal direction, “whose nuts you do not expect to eat.”  I hope that notion, in our case, is not literally true.  We fully intend to have many vigorous and vibrant years ahead of us.  Having taken this principle of “sustainability” to heart, we exercise, we eat good food - more and more of it vegetables we grow ourselves, uncorrupted by chemicals on the plants or additives in the processing. But with my 60th birthday only weeks around the corner and Lori’s trailing a few years behind, it goes without saying that we aren't getting any younger. 

Nonetheless, yesterday we planted a dozen nut trees and bushes whose productive maturity won't arrive until we are moving closer to the tail end of ours.  Hazelnuts and chestnuts.  Six of each.  These have joined the pawpaw and pear trees we planted last year, and the apple, apricot, plum, and cherry trees a couple of years before that.  What could we possibly be thinking?

The short and somewhat defiant answer is that we are thinking that we fully intend to enjoy the quite literal fruits of these labors. Despite how our bodies are feeling this morning, the day after the clearing, the digging, the planting, the irrigating and the mulching, as the Monty Python character sang it on Broadway, “We are not dead yet.”

There is, however, a longer answer perhaps more defiant than the first.  The Greek version of that earlier quotation is, “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Just between you and me, society is not growing greater.  All kinds of people are wringing their hands about the state of our world, blaming this collective decline (as they perceive it) on everything from the “removal of prayer from schools” to the changing definitions of marriage to whichever political party is in power.  The real problem, of course, is none of those.  The problem is too little concern for tomorrow's shade.  In a time of slavish attention to quarterly reports, 24-hour news cycles, minute by minute responses to fluctuations in the markets, addiction to immediate gratification, and gratuitous indulgences of our own comfort and convenience, I am increasingly convinced that the greatest threat to civilization is the atrophication of our collective capacity for long-range thinking. 

If the Iroquois people advocated vetting every decision with an eye for how it would effect descendants seven generations beyond, we seem increasingly incapable of considering 15 minutes worth of implications.  We pollute, poison, extract, burn up and throw away as if "we" and "today" were all that matters, unwittingly and malignantly planting a presumptive flag in a tomorrow we will never see. 

Perhaps it's because Lori and I are gaining humility with age, or, with any luck, a little wiser; perhaps, as that quotation suggests, we simply find it meaningful; perhaps the land itself is teaching us a greater sense of stewarding responsibility, or perhaps it is the horizon-broadening anticipation of a grandchild on the way.  Whatever the reason, we are thinking more about the future, these days, than the past, and what it will be like to live there.

And planting trees.  Someone, after all, in that thusly improved society, will surely benefit from the shade once they've grown. 

And will hopefully enjoy the nuts.

Carrots and Cabbage and Beets. Oh My!

I'm still new at this.  It has been 5 years since we moved to the farmstead, turned over a little dirt and started a garden. Perhaps that means we are no longer "beginners" but we remain, by anyone's honest assessment, rank amateurs.  But we are learning.  We have seen enough to know the difference between a squash bug and a Japanese beetle; between a butterfly and a cabbage moth. I can see -- and taste -- the difference between kale, collards and chard.

One might, then, reasonably expect that by this time in the season we might be accompanying the daily transport of heavy harvest baskets from the garden to the kitchen with proud and triumphal whoops of conquest.  The rows are, indeed, exploding with produce. 

- Daily quarts of grape tomatoes augmenting dozens of their full-sized cousins. 
- Armloads of squashes in mixed varieties.
- Peppers, not yet ripe, but dangling like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
- Broccoli, cabbages, collards in their turn.
- For the first time, beets by the bushel.
- And just today, two baskets full of carrots in three beautiful varieties.
- Finally the "promissory notes" of previous investments are coming due, not only with the long-awaited asparagus of earlier in the season, but now blackberries and raspberries in abundance after all these seasons of empty waiting.
- Meanwhile we are baited by the pears still ripening and the apples still coloring, and tricked by the plums already purple but still tart and hard.

To keep up we are cooking, canning, freezing and dehydrating as fast as we can because any kind of waste feels like a death in the family.

But smugness finds no purchase around our cultivated little plot of ground.  Yes, I suppose there is some measure of pride, but our overwhelming reactions are humility and awe.  We take the requisite steps -- we feed the soil, we prepare the spaces, we sow the seeds and water and weed -- but still it feels like a mystery, a wonder, that the earth exudes such abundance. 

All that, and that our dirt-encrusted hands have been privileged to participate in this amazingly common and yet incomprehensible alchemy. Seeds, some so small as to get lost in ones hand; rotted manure; dirt I know intellectually to be teeming with millions -- if not billions -- of microbes and fungi and minerals and worms; sunlight, rainwater, pollinators...

...and time.  All those, and God only knows what else.  And then, as if by magic, a blossom, a bud, and ultimately more, until finally...

...supper.

It seems so utterly and laughably ridiculous on the face of it to crow, with harvest basket in hand, "we did it!" 

God willing, we will be doing this holy work for several more years to come and I anticipate with relative confidence that that will never be our claim.  More likely and no matter how many years we plant and harvest we will still have little comprehension as to how it happens. 

A poverty of comprehension, but a wealth of gratitude amidst the digging and picking for the chance to play some part.

The Today That Yesterday Prepared

It was a good morning before the rains came -- the rains, of course, making it even better.  Earlier in the week extra hands helped us side-dress organic fertilizer, re-purpose recently vacated planting rows and plant new seeds for the fall.  Already we are looking forward to September's chard and collards and kale and carrots, with a few turnips and parsnips added in for good measure.  The newly sown seeds and the freshly applied nutrition will appreciate the encouraging moisture. 

But it's easy, while anticipating tomorrow, to overlook today.  "Oh, yes, that's right; we did plant all that other stuff in May!" 

And that "other stuff" is growing.  The peppers are coming on strong and it won't be too many days before our mouths will be pleasantly burning.  The cabbages are quietly forming, but meanwhile their cousins -- the purple broccoli -- are snapping their fingers, insisting that we don't forget about them.  Similarly the beets that have been forming out of sight are bursting above the soil.  And onions.  I've never been successful with onions -- until this year.  We started seeds all those weeks ago in the chilly greenhouse amidst the mellowing days of winter, and they have surpassed my wildest expectations.  This morning I tugged on the tops of five of the biggest and brought them inside for an expectant taste. 

I had forgotten about the cucumbers.  Last year we were so inundated with the multiple varieties that we cut way back this season.  One lone blond variety sown in two humble hills, back on the furthest trellis.  Today they subtly snagged my attention -- all three of the ready ones.

And tomatoes.  After all this time, all the extra steps of successively transplanting into larger containers and ultimately into the ground; tying and supporting and sitting on our impatient hands.  And now all of a sudden they are ripening -- big ones, tiny ones, red ones and black ones -- all catching me by surprise.  And the blackberries, and raspberries and...

Suffice it to say it's time we started paying closer attention to the "today" that yesterday's attentions prepared.

Wanting What We Have; Taking What We're Given

One of the takeaway mantras we learned in the village cooking school several years ago in Italy was "use what you have."  Sometimes that counsel applied to the substitutionary construction of a particular recipe that called for "this” when what you had on hand was “that”.  Use what you have.  Other times it drove what recipe was selected in the first place.  If chicken is what you have on hand, save the beef recipes for another day. Use what you have.

I like to think our Italian mentors would be smiling over our brunch menu conceived for an Independence Day guest -- hopefully smiling in approval, but at least in amusement at our literal application.  We wanted to use what this land is producing.  The garden is thriving, but it's still early in the season.  At this particular moment in ripening time squash is the primary option and in recent days we have been up to our necks “using what we have” on that score.  Fried zucchini, squash hummus, squash casserole, squash Parmesan, and then more fried zucchini.  We were, in other words, ready for a bit of a break, disinclined to shoehorn the gourd into the brunch menu.  We have laying hens, of course, so eggs were a given.  What we otherwise had in abundance were apricots shaken that morning from the trees, and an ample handful of berries.  Surely we should use what we had.

Perhaps to an indulgent fault.

Alongside the main plate’s egg concoction there was a yogurt parfait layered with apricot slices and berries.  And for dessert we had apricot almond cake with homemade apricot ice cream, collectively garnished with apricot compote.  

In his book, “The Third Plate,” chef Dan Barber advocates, for the sake of the planet, a change in the way we go about eating:  instead of asking ourselves what we want and then calculating how to get it, asking what the land needs to grow and then adapting our eating habits to consume it.  Asking what we have and then conceiving how to cook it.  There are only so many ribeye steaks in a cow, Barber observes, but only valuing the choice cuts leaves a lot of good meat on the butcher table.  Wheat is a delicious and useful commodity, but repeatedly growing a single desirable grain destroys the soil while ignoring the fact that several other grains in a land-nourishing rotation have delectable culinary value as well -- if we ever gave them notice, and space on our plate.  The principle reminds me of the prayerful chorus of a Don Henley song that charts a preferable course:   

“To want what I have; to take what I'm given with grace...”  

It's the kind of psychological inversion that just might save us -- wanting what we have, instead of demanding to have what we want.

If our brunch guest drove home nursing an apricot overload, she can console herself with the relief that it isn't rutabaga season.  God only knows what we might have done with those.  We’ll have to wait and see.  In the meantime, the garden’s diversity is ripening so before long the menus can broaden.  And then, of course, tomato season will begin in earnest.  

I wonder if there is such a thing as tomato ice cream?

In deference to the planet and as stewards of the harvest we will want to use, after all, what we have.