Light & Pumpkins

My daughters did a cool science experiment today.  They are studying light and color.  We have a prism that breaks light apart, but this is a neat way of putting it back together.  They stuck this spectrum on a pencil and give it a hardy spin.

The color almost completely vanished and turned white!  What a cool way to put light back together.

Our pumpkins in the cellar are starting to look sorry.  It is late February, so they've held up pretty well, but it's time to get them cooked and in the freezer.  There were probably a dozen left.  We got one big batch in the oven today but it will take another day to get them finished.

Today we are attending a tour of the Statehouse with about fifty other homeschoolers.  Some homeschoolers do lots of field trips and activities, but we don't.  We emphasize "home" in homeschooling, but it's fun to do trips like this once in a while.

Saving Squash Rewards

I came across a listing of how long different squash last in storage.  It said acorn squash only make it three months.  It's been almost three months!  My husband got down in the root cellar and pulled all of them out.  Many have turned yellow, which means that rot is next.  We'll cook these up and put it in the freezer.

It also said that you should turn the squash in the cellar every week.  Well, it's been a lot longer than a week, so since he was down there, he did some turning.  Every squash got a new position and most were fine, although a few had gone bad. 

The temperature is 42º down there, while it's been below freezing outside.  That's good. 

We need to get the root cellar into our regular habits.  I guess we need a day of the week for root cellar day, like trash day.  Hmm... I guess we'll start thinking.

It's not really ice cream weather, but it is pie weather, and pie with ice cream is pretty good.  There are a few things that we make from Christina milk that are absolutely unique and spectacular.  Ice cream is one of them.  We use the same old recipe, but it tastes like the best specialty ice cream we've ever had.  I can even forget the vanilla and it's still sensational.

After running through the ice cream maker, it comes out pretty soft.  We scoop it into a tuperware and freeze it hard.  Now it's time to make pie.

When we started this life we knew it was the right thing to do, for moral reasons.  I can't look into the face of the workers (some of them children) suffering from injustice so I can have my processed low-cost food.  I can't face my own children, years from now after decades of fossil fuel burning to transport my food an average of 1500 miles, suffering from a diseased planet.  But we didn't expect the eating to be so good.  Like many things in life, when you do the right thing, God rewards you.  This ice cream sure is a reward.

60

This is my 60th post.  I remember that warm day when it first began.  The words, how hard can it be, were popping in my ears.  We had been at this life for over a year, but finally into the full swing of it.  After giving a workshop at our diocesan Fall Conference about being an imperfect follower of a perfect God, a friend said to me, "you really should start a blog."  Others had said it before, but there was something about it coming out of her mouth at that moment that was like a zooming lens and an echoing voice.  So I went home and started this blog the next day.

Before we began this life about a year and a half ago, I had been in full time ministry for over a decade.  During that time I wrote a book, lots of articles for local newspapers, and a few articles for national newspapers and magazines.  I wrote a lot.  It had become just as much a part of my ministry as the work I did in an official capacity.  But then I stopped writing.  I just stopped.  I was busy, but there was a heaviness on my heart that held the words down.

After only week at this blog, I had written more than I had written the previous two years.  My year with the land had worked away the heaviness and there were words again.  A cork had been pulled.  Now the words were spilling out of me, from that mysterious source that I have come to think of as a best friend.

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. Thank you for reading. Thank you for telling your friends about it.  Thank you for leaving comments. Thank you.

We finally moved all those squash from the basement into the root cellar.  The kids ran them upstairs and out to the garage while my husband arranged them in the cellar.  Remembering that they shouldn't touch, we filled up shelves, filled up slotted boxes, and just as we were out of ideas, the last of the squash appeared and we were done.

We have snow on the ground, freezing temperatures, and it finally occurs to me that we should eat the food in the freezer.  When we freeze it in the summer I think to myself, don't eat these right away, we need to save them for winter.  I just keep thinking that way.  I suddenly realized that I'll be starting the early plants for next summer's garden in only a month, and that it IS winter. So now I tell myself, it's winter, eat it up.

After the big snow snow, we finally got the snow blade on the baby tractor.  We don't have the chains and weights that you're supposed to use with it and last year it worked out.  After half an hour of pushing and bracing with boards, we finally gave up.  It's not working out this year.  One more thing we need to buy. 

Milking still has a new feeling to us.  Christina is peeing and pooping at least once a day during milking.  I think it started as an accident, but now it seems like a habit.  This never happened last summer before she dried off.  When she does it, we whip the milk pail away in time, but it's gross and we want her to stop.  We are catching her business in a bucket and yell at her, like we've read, but it continues.  Yesterday she started to pee, my husband grabbed the bucket and yelled, "Christina, stop that" with a whack on the back.  She stopped immediately.  But this morning, she was at it again.  Any ideas would be welcome.

Husking Party

My daughter came in and said, "something moved in the corn bucket." Ack!  Mice have been in the garage before.  I can't stand them.  I am a city girl, after all.  We whipped the buckets outside and stood back to kick them over.  Nothing. Whew!  Or, if there was something, it got away quickly. But, as soon as they were over we discovered mold all over the husks. 

We stopped everything and shucked the corn before the mold got into the grain.   We lost less than a quarter of the ears, and some of those were probably bad to begin with.  It's a reminder that just growing things isn't enough.  It has to be stored and preserved until we're ready to use it.

We have been reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond as part of my twins' homeschooling.  Just last week we read a chapter describing a corn husking party.  They thought it was so cool that we were having our own corn husking party. 

In the story, it was a big deal to a find a red ear, so the girls looked for them.  They would hold the husk up, guess if it was red, and then pull quickly.   When we finished the pile of colorful ears was quite spectacular.  This is grain corn native to New Mexico.

The last time this outdoor table was covered, it was in onions.  The kids had gathered up the onions and put them away in the cellar while I was busy with something else.  I thought they sorted them, but one quick check revealed they hadn't.  The onions need to be sorted so that the ones least likely to keep are eaten first.  It didn't take long in the root cellar, pulling out the ones with green leaves or thick necks into the "use first" basket.  Everything else I left loosely packed to stay dry.

My husband took several bales of alfalfa hay out to the shed, ready for when Christina has her calf and starts giving milk.  He said that she seemed to perk up when he brought it in, like she knew what it was.  This morning, we found confirmation.  He was sure he had put it back far enough that she couldn't get to it, but that big cow had twisted her head through a little opening and gotten her nose way back into that bale. This morning, my husband put another board up to keep her out.

We have our plans but others have their's.  The mold had plans for those corn husks that didn't involve leaving it for us and Christina had plans for that alfalfa hay that didn't involve waiting.  Even as we jumped in to right things, it seems that God had fun waiting for us — a surprise husking party and the comical sight of a cow twisting herself into knots for a treat.

Clipped Wings

Last spring we got four new chicks to add to our flock.  They have been laying for about two months and finishing their final growing.  They've also gotten strong enough to fly out of the pen.

This morning we found one outside the pen again.  We could build the fence higher, but it's easier to clip their wings.  Thankfully my daughters are able to catch them pretty easily.  She held the chicken while I clipped off the end of one wing.  It's a little creepy, feeling the scissors cut through the feather quills, but it doesn't hurt the chicken any more than clipping finger nails.

Farm animals come with a moral responsibility that gardens don't have. If a farm animal is hurt by me, I feel morally culpable. Since we are raising our own meat, we've had to develop a new morality around caring for animals that we will kill later on.  We've decided that the animal would die anyway, whether we butchered it or somebody else, but that our job is to give it a good life.  Never having worked through this before, I find myself swinging back and forth between too much compassion and too little.

The truth is that all eating comes with moral responsibility.  If the rich man had moral responsibility for Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31), then we have it too.  That is part of what has driven my family back to the land.  What we eat and the way it was raised has implications for the animals, the people, and the land.  And whatever we support we are responsible for.  If you buy your meat at the store, it's no small feat to find out where it came from and how it was raised.  An organic certification helps, but our whole food system has become so depersonalized that it's nearly impossible to track food back to its origins.  At least for the food we raise ourselves, we know the moral culpability we take on.

The sick chicken has been given a reprieve while we recover from the flu.  I noticed last night that she was standing up a little bit.  Maybe she will recover.

The peppers I planted last spring are producing.  I planted lots of different kinds, but many didn't germinate. Things got busy in June and I just started throwing little plants into the soil without keeping track.  Actually, I didn't expect any of them to live, so I thought it didn't matter.  Well, most of them did live and now we have a row of peppers and I haven't a clue what kind they are.  Most of them look like sweet peppers, but I know that I planted some hot ones too.   We picked that row and filled our harvest bucket.  I pulled two off one plant that might be hot.  I'll let my husband try one to tell.

Green peppers are beautiful when they freeze.  I dice them up, just as if I was going to saute them, and lay them out on a cookie sheet.  After freezing solid, I transfer them to a bag.  They freeze as green and perfect as if nothing had happened.

The root cellar book says that if acorn squash turn orange, they won't keep very well.  I noticed that two of our squash were getting orange spots, so I figured it was time for our first squash pie.  After cutting them in half and scooping out the seeds (we'll give those to the chickens), I bake them for an hour or two, until a fork pokes in easily.  I used to cut squash with a knife, but they are so hard that I worried about slipping and getting seriously hurt.  One year I discovered that if I use the little carving saws they sell at Halloween, they were easy to cut.  After baking, I scoop out the flesh and run it through the blender.   Then I cook them up just like pumpkin pie.

The Power of the Sun

We find ourselves using the power of the sun more often.  Of course the sun is ultimately the source of all food — causing the garden to grow and the grass to grow which feeds the cows — but there is more to solar power.

Solar rays are effective sterilizers.  I read that several hours of direct sun exposure is as effective as a bleach rinse.  Because we drink our milk raw, without pasteurization, I'm especially careful about sterilizing the milk jugs.  After thoroughly cleaning them with soap and water, we set them out all day in the sun to knock off any germs that survived the washing.

Actually, I probably don't need to be so fussy.  While Christina was milking, we never had milk over four days old because the frig would get too full!  3-4 gallons a day fills up a frig pretty fast.  But since she's dried up, we actually had some milk sit in the frig for nine days before we used it.  At nine days, the milk smelled as fresh and sweet as the first day, so even raw milk takes a long time to sour.

We started hanging our laundry whenever we could about a year ago.  I've already noticed the difference the sun makes.  Some of the musty smell that I thought was unavoidable, vanishes completely in the summer, only to return in the winter when we're using the electric dryer.  I've found that I love the peace and solitude of hanging laundry.  I love the quiet movement as the clothes go up and I enjoy the camaraderie of taking them down in the evening with whichever daughters are around.

We will use a root cellar this winter for the first time.  The book says that onions need to dry for ten days after they are pulled to harden their skin and make them last longer in storage.  We pulled our first batch of onions and set them on the step to dry.  This is from the patch that grew the worst.  I'm hopefully for a much bigger harvest from the other patch.

Our three walnut trees have started dropping nuts.  We set them out for the husks to dry to a dark brown before we remove the them and crack the shells this winter.  I'm thinking of seeing if we can grind the walnuts into a walnut butter.

Using the sun these ways is slow and quiet.  Nothing needs to be done while the sun's rays silently do their work.  It requires patience in waiting and the ability to remember to bring things in when they're done.  But that's about all that is needed from me.  I don't actually do the sterilization or drying, the sun's rays do.  I just put things out.  God's activity is the same way — often slow and silent, but it is the real power behind the work.  I just show up and put things out.

Waiting

Our life is full of waiting.  I thought it would be the hardest part of this life-style, but I’ve found that it feels more like a promise than a burden.

Today I made granola bars.  I discovered that our stock was out and the kids eat granola bars and cottage cheese most every day for snack.  The granola bars I made today won't be ready to eat until tomorrow.  We’ll wait.

Christina and the calf, who we call beefy, moved to the east pasture today.  Our acre pasture is divided in half so they eat one half while the other grows.  The book says to give the grass six weeks to grow, but after three weeks their other pasture looked pretty mowed down.  Moving them means that we have some work to do in the west pasture — cutting down any weeds they didn’t eat and breaking up or scooping up the cow pies.  Cows won’t eat anything near a cow pie for three years.  Pretty smart.  But, if we break them up good, the irrigation will pull them into the soil and they will be absorbed as just good fertilizer.  The last time we moved Christina to a new pasture, the fresh grass gave her a little spike in milk production.  This time, there will be no spike.  She is dry.  While she grows strong on fresh grass, we wait.

When my in-laws built this house, they put in a mechanic’s pit.  It’s been concealed under oil-covered boards as long as I’ve known this place.  My husband is converting it into a root cellar.  He cleaned it out and cut new boards to cover the top.  Something about those fresh-cut boards makes it look and smell like a cellar now.  We have potatoes and onions ready to go down there.  Soon squash will be ready too.  It will all sit there through the winter and wait.

Last spring we planted nine rhubarb plants.  Nine is really a crazy amount.  A single full grown plant is usually more than a family can eat.  We love rhubarb and when I was ordering plants, I put it out to the family, “should we buy one or three?”  Their response was, "can we get more?"  "Well, they have a bundle of nine."   We watched the plants come up this spring, knowing that if we touch them it will hurt long-term growth.  So we stayed back and waited.  Next year we’ll harvest a little and the following year I think we’ll be market growers of rhubarb!  But for now, we wait.

I’ve always hated waiting.  The week before Christmas was painful.  The time before vacation was agony.  It took monumentous will power to wait until payday for something I wanted to buy.

This waiting is new.  I’m not waiting until I can get something, I’m waiting until God gets it ready for us.  I’m not wishing time to go faster, suffering from the self-denial.   Instead I enjoy the quiet delight of somebody getting a surprise ready for me. While I wait, I find myself savoring the hunger gently growing and knowing that the satiation will be sweeter.  Our I-want-what-want-when-I-want-it culture takes away specialness.  When I ate apples everyday, they were plain.  Now when I only eat them in October and November they are a special.  When I had dessert every day, it was just another part of dinner.  Now when we only have dessert for celebrations, it is special.

So today I wait with a goofy grin on my face while God gets things ready.