A Year of Opening Gifts

Ethan Book is a southern Iowa farmer/podcaster (thebeginningfarmer.com) who reflected, this Christmas week, on the top five failures and successes of his 2015 farming year.  I like the concept, which prodded a bit of reflection on our own experiences this year at Taproot Garden.  I do, however, want to change the vocabulary a bit -- partly because I am yet too much of a novice to speak with any credibility about successes and failures, and partly because on this Christmas Eve I rather have gifts on my mind.  

So, with apologies to the casual reader more accustomed to stories and the occasional poignant thought than this reflective accounting, and who have my honest permission to stop reading now and return again next week for a more usual blog, here are the top five gifts I have received from the farmstead this year.  

1. The Chickens survived the winter.  That may not sound like much, but last winter was our first in the company of these beautiful ladies, and I was none too confident.  I have observed that many chicken keepers manage their flocks spring through autumn, and then butcher them for meat as winter settles in, starting over again with a new flock in the spring.  I completely understand the motivation. Chicken keeping in the winter is not for the faint of heart, adding as it does an extra layer of hassle to the care, beginning with the simple maintenance of food and water in frigid temperatures. I came to the conclusion last winter that work gloves simply aren't made that are warm enough to keep fingers functional while hauling, filling and gathering in the grimmer days of winter.  And then, when snow falls, accumulations must be shoveled and straw spread so that the girls have some space to move about and get a modicum of fresh air sans frostbite.  All that said, we survived -- the chickens, and me.  In fact, the flock continued to grow with the addition of a second, albeit slightly smaller, coop from Murray's Hen Hoops in Missouri that now, as this present winter descends, itself has reached capacity.  Along the way, we have developed a nice little clientele for the eggs which helps keep the girls in premium organic feed to which they have grown accustomed.  And I am not only relieved; I am grateful.

2. We completed one year of “Organic Ministry: Cultivating Soil and Soul.”

A couple of years ago a friend forwarded to me information about a farm-based clergy renewal program developed by a Lutheran pastor in Indiana in partnership with a local counseling center.  Captivated by what I subsequently learned about the program, I queried the possible interest of the local counseling center on whose Board I once served.  They shared my interest, and after a period of development, refinement and recruitment, we launched the program in March with 8 clergy from around the state.  On the first Monday of each month, the group gathered at Taproot Garden for breakfast, worship, light farm work, lunch, personal retreat and facilitated discussion of ministry and reading assignments through the lenses of metaphors inspired by our setting and the husbandry it involves.  It remains to be seen whether there will be adequate registrations to support a second class, but this first one was a nourishing and satisfying joy -- at least for me, but I sensed for all those participating as well.

3. The Solar system was completed and is generating.

Prompted by a wild imagination and the persistent desire to be kinder to and more sustainable for the planet, we began the installation of a photo-voltaic solar system just after Thanksgiving 2014.  Holiday travels and some shipping delays pushed completion of the project back to February 2015.  Since then, our ground-mounted 26 panels have been drinking in the sunlight -- some days more than others, but generally enough to supply our household needs. One of our favorite moments each month is opening our electric bill and seeing a balance due of $8.50 -- essentially the cost of the meter and taxes.  

4. Greenhouse seeding was a larger success.  Each year since moving to the farm, we have nestled seeds into seed cell trays in late winter and nurtured them under lights in the greenhouse -- with acceptable but hardly celebratory results.  This year we adopted a couple of changes we hoped would be improvements.  Instead of using those typical cell trays, we bought a special tool and made our own soil blocks from the compost/potting soil we purchase from Wisconsin.  The result is a 2-inch cube that rather looks like a soil brownie.  With the help of the Organic Ministry participants, we made close to 2000 of these blocks that were nestled together into trays, each hosting one or another variety of seed.  Additionally, having learned that soil temperature is a more critical factor than air temperature in the germination of seeds, I added warming cables beneath the seed trays.  Equipped with their own thermostat, the cables warm up anytime the soil temperature drops below a certain level.  The result of these two innovations was that virtually every seed sprouted -- an efficacy rate more than tripling previous results.  In fact, we had so many tomato plants beyond the 130 or so that we planted in our own garden that we donated almost as many to a nonprofit community garden for refugees in Des Moines.

5. The harvest was a bounty.  Development of seedlings, of course, is hardly the objective.  It is merely the first in a series of means headed toward a desired end.  The end, in this case, is harvest.  Did we actually produce anything of value?  Moreso than ever before, the answer is a surprising “yes”.  To be sure, the mild temperatures and the seemingly scheduled rain showers helped.  I choose to believe the soil development practices we have put in place have contributed as well.  Certainly the extra hand power contributed by the Organic Ministry group didn't hurt either.  In the end, even after sharing the fruits with the class members and neighbors; even after canning and fermenting and dehydrating various parts, we still ended up buying an additional freezer to preserve the abundance.  Meanwhile, all of this was accomplished under the newly acquired umbrella of being “Certified Naturally Grown” covering both the garden produce and the eggs.

All of which is to say that it has been a good year on the farm.  Whatever gifts we have given, we have received beyond even our most outlandish imagination.  We are humbled, but now that the tools are put away (except those necessary for tending the chickens through this winter) more than anything we are grateful.  

Grateful, and of course hopeful. Who knows what 2016 might have in store?

Memories, with the Hope of Happy Tomorrows

The new girls have officially joined the neighborhood.  Since arriving in early October at the ripe old age of 10 weeks, the two Lavender Orpingtons and two Splash Marans have spent their days and nights in quarantine -- in the coop and enclosure we affectionately refer to as “The Annex”, separated from the main community by some 20 feet.  As I've written before, this segregation is initially a precaution against importing diseases into the larger flock, but over the protracted weeks it becomes, as well, a protective growth sanctuary for the smaller birds.  There, secured by both a chicken wire and an electric mesh fence along with an overhung net, they eat and drink and exercise their way into near-adulthood. 

It's no Utopia.  The enclosed space is adequate, but limited.  The coop itself is...shall we say “modest” -- a minimalist shanty compared with the upscale accommodations that await them across the yard, though like children of the Depression they are surely unaware of their privation.  It simply is all that they know.  The greatest shortcoming of the Annex, I’ve come to realize, is not its minimalist construction but it's orientation.  I situated it poorly. A heavy wooden construction, our primary concern when we transported it home was getting it off the truck in one piece.  That mission was accomplished with the help of friends, stationing it on the 4 X 4’s I had laid down to rest it slightly off the ground.  But we should have rotated it clockwise 45-degrees.  As it is, the hatch faces due north -- a Grinch-like aperture for frigid winter winds.  I close it up at night, of course, but during the day “in” is as “out.”  It's cold.

But the girls, for the most part, have managed it.  They are, after all, hardy breeds.  And though it won't benefit these winter veterans, somehow this summer I will get the Annex situated more advantageously.  As for these girls, they are ready for life on different terms. So it was that last night, along with Mike who had stopped by to help, they made the great migration.  This is the second time we have accomplished such a move under cover of darkness.  Docile and drowsy, they hardly notice my nervous hands surrounding their feathery warmth, thieving them one-by-one from their humble but familiar environs, shuttling them across the way into the main yard and re-settling them among the older girls who are, themselves, already cuddled in for the night.  It is a simple transfer.  No chasing. No squawking.  No feather rattling and trespassing protestations.  Old and new simply spend the night together and wake the next morning as curious but benign neighbors. 

At least that's the idea.  Morning brings its own realities as I learn anew this awakening dawn.  Once I lower the ramp and raise the hatch, the coop disgorges its contents in single file.  Cautiously, tentatively at the rear of the line, the new girls emerge.  There is some jostling at the bottom of the ramp -- a little pecking, a little chest bumping just to insure that the young ones keep in mind their “place” at the “peon” end of the order.  But with the help of a few culinary distractions I toss around the yard, the older girls leave the younger ones alone to explore their new neighborhood; and the new day, the new world, has begun.

It's not easy moving in.  While the little girls don't have boxes to unpack and furniture to arrange, they do have relationships to forge, social orders to interrupt and rearrange, food and water to locate, and that latent sense of disorientation to overcome.  That, and that wistfully lingering memory of home as it use to be...

...to fade.

Good luck girls.  I’ll be watching, and pulling for you.  For the most part, however -- like it is for all of us -- the hard part will be up to you.

To Everything There is A Season -- Even Eggs

If I didn't know better I would think the girls were holding back -- or holding out...
 ...as if they were pouting, or exacting retribution for some free-ranged offense.  Egg production has dropped so precipitously that it's hardly worth the afternoon trip out to the coops to check.  With 23 hens of laying age, in recent weeks I have been lucky to find two eggs a day -- three if the Egg Angels are smiling fondly in my favor.

No, the colder temperatures are not to blame.  These are cold-hardy birds that come with their own down jackets.  With all that plumage they prefer the cold over the heat.  And no, I haven't reduced their rations, grounded them, scolded them or taken away their cell phones.  The problem is the light.

Chickens need 14 hours of light per day for routine egg production -- a natural resource in abbreviated supply this time of year.  It's difficult to log that many hours when the sun rises at 7 a.m. And sets by 5 p.m.  Even my limited math skills can add that up.  Compounding the problem is the fact that several of the girls have shifted their attentions to molting in preparation for deeper winter and have understandably diverted their energies and biological resources away from egg production to feather replacement.

It's possible, of course, to fool Mother Nature with artificial light -- a light bulb on a timer can replace those lost hours of sunlight.  The big egg houses do it routinely, as do plenty of backyard flocksters.  I did it last year, feeling greedy.  It's hardly cruel and unusual punishment.  But it turns out that chickens only have so many eggs to lay in the course of their lifetime.  You can spread that number out over a greater number of years by allowing the girls their natural winter rest, or you can run them full-tilt until they are empty and then figure out what to do with your menopausal friends.

Here is where metaphors become important.  If the hens are machines -- production facilities on a clock -- then turn on the lights. “We've got cartons to fill.  When these birds are spent there are more where they came from.”  If, on the other hand they are co-residents of the farm along with the two of us and the two dogs, then the longer view makes better sense.  It's not hard to guess which metaphor we've adopted, and therefore which course of action we've chosen.  We've got lots invested in them after all -- money, to be sure, which isn't insignificant; but who can calculate the time and emotional energy spent caring, tending and protecting?  I'm not in a hurry to replace them.  They have become, in a feathery sort of way, like family.  Plus, I have my own experience with forced production, and have come to value more natural rhythms.  That, plus the realization that my gratitude for what I find in the laying boxes tends to run in inverse proportion to my expectation.

And so despite the dimmer prospects in these wintry days, when the clock strikes 4 p.m. I steadfastly slip into my coat and boots, arm myself with the collection basket, and make my way through the gate for the treasure hunting ritual. 

It's still a thrill, a surprise, and a deep indebtedness, even with the meager returns. 

Already the Interior Season

Rain is falling.  I don't really mind, since by this point in the season precipitation could just as likely be the snow that is, indeed, forecast for later this week.  We watered young trees and shrubs reasonably well last week with the accumulated rain as we were storing the rain barrels for winter, but they can only be helped by an additional soaking.  Outdoor work is essentially complete -- a feat of forethought we have not so well accomplished in prior years.  Tools are stowed.  Produce is processed.  The chickens have sense enough to remain dry and under cover -- or, if venturing out, do so in response to their own recreational need.  

All is quiet.  Even the 8-point buck that breakfasted earlier in the prairie near the garden fence has moved back into the woods.  Wet oak leaves -- among the last of those still clothing the trees -- shiver in the November wind; red berries shimmer on the shrubs.  I have had some office work that had been calling for attention, but I have answered it.  Breakfast is passed and lunch remains a distant anticipation.  There will be afternoon errands, but they, too, are hours away.  My eyes have tired of reading.  Even the lone bird perched atop the bare branch at the edge of the woods seems at a loss for how to spend his time.

It's not even winter and already I am restless.

Perhaps like the seasonal wardrobe I've begun switching out in the closet and drawers there is a seasonal imagination that needs switching out as well -- ways to be and be occupied creatively and meaningfully in these gray and chilly months indoors when the field of endeavor is interior to the soul and the seeds nurtured are of a profoundly different sort.

The truth is I rather look forward to these flanneled and afghan-draped days nestled in front of the fire --

--As soon as I manage to shift gears and settle into them.

Readying for Winter's Work

The garlic is in the ground, the pepper plants have been stripped and removed with the fruits of the former in the freezer and the detritus of the latter in the compost pile.  I had help -- the same extra hands that sowed the winter wheat last month that is well on its way these several weeks later.  In some ways this has become a "community garden" in ways I hadn't anticipated.  They dug, they plowed, they planted, they picked; in the end they carted and carried and, above all, encouraged.

   Even with all their help they did not exhaust the need.  There are still plenty of braising greens to harvest our way through, and there are enough stalks remaining from this and that, plenty of rows to clean out and plenty of manure to spread to still leave plenty yet to do before we can call the garden "winterized."  More than a few hours and sunny days will be needed to finally put it all to bed, but if the weather cooperates I am determined to get it done -- a first, if it happens, in the four years we have been here.  Planting in the spring turns out to be sexier work than cleaning out in autumn.

But the chicken coops are ready for colder weather -- repositioned, straw bales stacked to deflect wind and snow, power cords readied to supply the water warmers and interior lights.  The changes have created some confusion among the girls, but they will thank me for the adjustments eventually.  When the mercury plummets and dances on either side of zero they will be thrilled to sip water instead of pecking it; they will be thrilled to have some place to walk that isn't dusted in white.  In the next week or so I'll need to decide if the grass needs one more trimming or if the mower deck on the tractor can let go and give way to the snow blower taking its place. 

Autumn, which only yesterday seemed to color the leaves, is already stretching out its arm to pass the baton to winter.  Leaves carpet the ground beneath naked branches.  I am pulling on a jacket when only days ago a sweater sufficed.

Each season, of course, has its own important work to accomplish -- though winter's, for a farmstead, are subtler than the others.  To be sure, there are seed catalogs to dog ear, selections to make and orders to place.  Eventually, on the far edge of the season, we'll be straightening and filling up the greenhouse and whispering kind and beckoning words over seedlings.  But surely there is more to do than these.  In the soil, winter is the season of deeper things.  The cold is needed for over-wintering seeds to crack open in readiness for spring; soil and its multi-form lives, rest and renew as though taking a deep breath.  Sugars concentrate.  Some lives hibernate while others incubate; minerals and fungi, trace elements and organic matter integrate while worms and microbes aerate -- all completely out of view.

Underneath.

Deep inside the soil.

My guess is that there are analogs of the spirit that require their own winter workings -- renewals that will translate into a fertility of being for the growing space that is myself...

...if I can be quiet enough, mindful enough, to give them the space and the depth to happen.

Welcomed to be Herself

It's tempting to think of her as a replacement. And it's true that the only reason we have her is the loss of an earlier arrival.  Exactly one week ago we answered the call from the Post Office and brought home the box containing four 10-week old hens -- four little puff balls barely the size of a softball -- shipped from southern Illinois.  

Their route to our house had been a laborious trip -- first to St. Louis, then on to St. Paul, then across town in St. Paul and then back across town, eventually to Des Moines and finally Norwalk.  I tracked them.  Monday afternoon to Thursday morning, never mind the 2-day Express guarantee. If you are shaking your head, know only that I agree with you.  It's a baffling route for anything, but especially for four little hens nestled on a scattering of wood chips and sustained by a wedge of cucumber.  All that said, they did arrive and were finally liberated from their shipping box into the annex coop where they joined the other one already in residence.  

But one of them didn't seem right.  She stood around, lethargically; she kept her eyes closed, and only trotted around under duress.  At night I had to help her navigate the few inch jump up into the coop for bed time.  By Saturday morning she was still -- a feathered wisp where life had been but moved on.  

I had kept in contact with the breeder -- following her counsel about diagnosis and care -- and when she heard the news she promised to ship another one out.  Yes, if you are wondering, such things are guaranteed.  And today, a fraction more expeditiously if no less circuitously, the new little girl arrived.  She seems healthy and spry.  The other girls seem to have given her welcome.  I have every reason to believe she’ll thrive.

And I know she is “only a chicken”.  I don't mean to make of this more than is merited.  She is, on paper at least, a “replacement.”  But I refuse to view any life as merely generic -- as though one were as good as another.  As though we were all interchangeable. It is, I suspect, a distinctly human arrogance to view our own as the only distinguishable and appreciable pulses, and even we don't finally believe it.  Experience decries it as nonsense. Lori and I may have acquired another dog just weeks after the death of our first, but if we were ever tempted to see in his similar gender and breed and coloring a cipher, a fill-in, a mere replacement for the one we had lost, he was quick to disavow us of that fiction.  He would put forward his own personality, asserting his own peculiar mark.  We may have wanted him to simply play the prior part, but he insisted on writing his own script; starring the individual that he is.

As, I am certain, will this new little hen.  We didn't have her predecessor long enough to know her, but I am convinced enough about living, breathing creatures to believe that this new one will not walk or peck or cluck in her shadow.  She will cast her own.  

It will be my challenge -- me, the big, all-knowing, all-powerful Oz of a flockmaster -- to trust enough in the wonder of creation to let her.

A Beautiful, Serendipitous Mistake

Yesterday the sorghum came down.  By successive whacks of the corn knife the seven-foot stalks were relieved of their seed heads and then, with the loosening help of the broad fork, were uprooted and stacked.  It has been a small stand -- less than half of a long row on the east side of the garden -- but it's outsized height flanked the garden shoulder with Beefeater stateliness.

And it had all been a serendipitous mistake.

The plan for sorghum had revolved around making our own syrup -- that molasses-like nectar favored in certain parts of the country for drizzling over hot biscuits.  With only the thinnest background on the subject, I knew only enough to seek out seeds for the sweet variety rather than that destined for animal feed.  I planted in the spring, waited, watched and industriously weeded.  I was some distance down the row one early day in June before I realized that the encroaching grass I was meticulously pulling up was in fact the first expression of the very sorghum I had planted.  Thankfully, my “meticulous” is not ultimately that thorough.  Enough survived to lead to my next misunderstanding.

By August the stalks were towering over the other crops, crowned by seed heads like finials on a flag pole.  With anticipatory foretastes of sweetened biscuits playing over my tastebuds, I thought to start reading up on how to convert those bronze grains into syrup.  That's when I realized I should have started reading months earlier. It isn't, it turns out, the grains that are ground or cooked or fermented into goodness; it's the stalks that are pressed -- squeezed -- like sugar cane to extract the resident liquid. 

“Idiot,” I thought to myself.  “Now what am I going to do with this stuff?”

In dutiful due diligence I researched presses, only to confirm my guess that we would not be interested in making that level of investment. Meanwhile, we had secured a bag of hard red winter wheat seeds that we planned to sow in late September for harvest in early summer with an aspiration to grind our own flour for bread.  I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to break out of my compartmentalized myopia and make the tentative connection, but finally the cylinders clicked.

“I wonder if there is such a thing as sorghum flour?”

To abbreviate the story I’ll just say that the answer is an ancient “yes” with multiple nutritional and culinary assets to its credit.  Having already figured out the end-game of grinding, my next step is seeing what I can learn about those other ancient practices of “threshing” and “winnowing” this beautiful grain I now have in hand.

All that, and then inviting my taste buds down a completely different trail of anticipation -- no longer of a drizzled ambrosia from a jar, but a bready aroma of heaven wafting from the oven.

There is a country song I love that pays grateful tribute to "the trains I missed."  Standing here looking over my sackful of misbegotten sorghum, I'm thinking this looks like a pretty appealing platform at which to be left standing.