Homesteading in the Dark

Our Thanksgiving dinner was mostly homegrown, but not the turkey.  It was a locally-raised free range bird.  We spent a lot of money on it, but it was the best tasting turkey we've ever had.  We are feeling well affirmed for the expense.  A day of homegrown and homemade food on my great-grandmother's beautiful china was a specialness I've never experienced.

Our butter is yellow.  Really yellow.  High food-coloring frosting yellow.  Christina's butter has always been yellow, we've assumed it was because she was on pasture, but we've forgotten how dark it is.  This is the same dark yellow as our chickens' egg yolks.  During our two dry months, we ate commercial butter with its mild color.  Christina's butter is such a strong color that I feel like I'm putting frosting on my toast.  Because I grew up with margarine being the strong colored stuff, it creeps me out until I taste the flavor and confirm it really is butter.

The freezing weather has kept up and our hard-won water system is nonfunctional.  My husband thinks he may have figured out the problem, but needs to wait for a thaw to fix it.  A storm this weekend is supposed to bring higher temperatures.

In the meantime, we've instituted a bucket brigade after each milking to fill up the water tanks.  The girls half-fill four buckets and run them out.  Two girls can do it faster than the time it takes them to get dressed for the outdoors.

Our evening milking is in the dark.  It's been overcast which gives plenty of light for walking out to the cow shed.  As we go through this milking routine — my husband and I milking, me taking the milk in to filter while two girls run water out and help fill the cows' feeder — it makes me wonder if this life is feasible for a small family.  Would we be able to do it if it was just us?  Or is it made practical by our large family?  I am grateful that the burden is lighter because it is spread out.

Christina has developed a nasty habit of peeing when we milk.  She only does it when jerky is not nursing.  At first it may have been an accident, but it's feeling like a pattern now.  I read that you can break a cow of the habit by catching her pee in a bucket, so today we tried it.  My husband said that when he caught it, Christina had a look on her face like, what the heck is going on?   I hope so, that's the idea, to creep her out.

Our first cheese is cottage cheese.  Two gallons gave these curds, about six cups.  The process is the same as for hard cheese except you skip the pressing and aging.  In the store they add cream to the curds, but we leave ours dry.  With applesauce, it makes a wonderful lunch.

There are three gallons of milk in the frig calling to me to become a block of parmesan.  Being in the kitchen with warm milk sounds pretty good to me.

Cozy Cold

It dropped to 9F.  Yesterday, we finished all the pipes and fittings and put heat tape along the exposed areas.  This morning the water isn't flowing.  Dang.  We assume the problem is a fitting but after an hour of pouring hot water here, there, and everywhere, we gave up and filled the stock tank with buckets of water. 

With this cold snap coming, we suddenly remembered our irrigation pipes.  The pipes have a low spot where they take the water to the back of the pasture.  My husband and oldest son pulled and yanked until they finally opened up and found they were already dry.  Dang.

The milk is still filtering slowly but there are no clots.  By the end of the pail, it's just dripping along.  So we're still fighting mastitis.  Dang.  It's getting better but I'd like it to clear up faster.

The cows don't seem the least bothered by this cold weather.  We moved the pasture gate to split the shed in half and put jerky and beefy on one side and kept Christina on the other.  A friend suggested we put beefy with jerky so they can keep either other warm.  It's cute how they cuddle up together when they sleep.  All three cows go out in the pasture several times a day to just run around.  Jerky is bouncy like a fawn.

For as cold as the thermometer reads, milking isn't unpleasant.  I figured it would be painfully cold, but it's not.  The shed breaks the wind, the cows' body heat warms it up, and Christina's udder keeps my hands nice and warm while we're milking.

This morning Christina gave us two gallons and jerky got his belly full.  Our frig is filling up with jars of milk; it's a beautiful sight.  This morning I warmed up two gallons and got a batch of cottage cheese started.  I cooked up a quart of milk with sugar and egg to start ice cream.  A half-gallon of cream is awaiting an attempt at cream cheese.  It is warm in the house, the sun is shining, and the early cooking for the holiday makes everything smell good.  It is easy to be thankful this year.

Milk for Us

Christina continues to improve. Yesterday she seemed marginal, but she came out of it. Her eating is not quite up to normal, but it continues to improve.  This evening we will milk her out fully for the first time.  We are still seeing signs of mild mastitis but we're hoping that it will resolve with diligent milking.

This morning we had our first snow.  After milking, we turned jerky out with her while we cleaned the shed.  He bounded around in that wild, goofy way that babies do and Christina tried to keep up with him.  These times in the morning are becoming cow parties.

We are finding a functional pattern of letting jerky nurse while we milk.  It helps with the let down and he does his own work.   Christina is pretty full and it takes a lot of strength to milk her.  My arms have probably weakened in these two months too.

Christina is past the colostrum days and her milk is now for us.  Tomorrow we will make our first yogurt in two months, and maybe fromage blanc, and we're thinking about whip cream.  Monday I'll make cottage cheese.  These what-to-make-first decisions are difficult.

The storm we've been racing has come in, but the temperature has stayed above freezing.  Work continues on piping water out to the cows.  We got it dug out, laid all the pipe, and have most of it filled back in.  Tomorrow we'll enjoy some sabbath rest and we're hoping to finish Monday.  The kids were complaining about the work until I explained how much water they would have to cart out to the cows *every* day if we didn't do this.  The complaining stopped.

Cow Pies and Song

The pasture finally got cleaned out.  My teenager daughters and husband headed out in the afternoon and didn't finish until almost seven.  They took turns driving the baby tractor and shoveling cow pies.  Using the trailer rather than wheelbarrows meant fewer trips but there was a lot to pick up.  The loads were dumped into the garden in an area that needs organic matter.

As they were working, my daughters started singing, like they always do.  Apparently they were singing "I kissed a girl," when Christina turned around, inspiring them.  They turned it into "I kissed a cow's ass," and a parody was born:

-I kissed a cow’s ass and I hated it
-‘cause it was covered in shit.
-I kissed a cow’s ass and I despised it
-it was so unpleasant.
-It felt so wrong; it wasn’t right.
-Never gonna do it again in my life.
-I kissed a cow’s ass and I hated it.

-This was never the way I planned, not my intention
-I got so brave taking dares, lost my discretion.
-It’s not what good girls do, not how they should behave
-my mouth is so dir-doo, gross, all the way.

Dir-doo is our two-year-old's way of saying dirty.  Between driving the baby tractor and cracking themselves up with their parody, blaming it all on the effects of too much cow pie shoveling, they seemed to have a good time.  They'll never admit it, but when they come inside with smiles and no complaints, I take that as a good time in teenage-ese.

Teenagers are the worst at saying what they need.  They are accomplished at demanding what they want, but what they need is a different matter.  This satisfaction I see in my daughters must speak to a sense of contentment in our lifestyle.  We talk about the industrial food system and contrast the way our food originates.  But I think there is more.  I think they are feeling the sacredness of the land and a sacredness in the food they eat.  It is good to be part of something sacred.

When they came inside, we had dinner ready.  Almost everything was homegrown — onions, peppers, zucchini, corn, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and broccoli.  Only the meat and spices were off-homestead.  This is one our favorite recipes, Stuffed Zucchini from Simply in Season.  It was a good close to a good day.

Urban Homesteading

Overnight those tomatoes shed a lot of water.  One bucket had about five inches of yellow-tinged water but the other had only about a quarter of that.  The first one had tomatoes that had been frozen and the other had tomatoes that we had freshly picked.  Freezing must break down the tissues so they shed water better.  Mental note — freeze tomatoes before hanging.

After dumping the tomatoes in my big stock pot, we brought it up to a boil.  My stock pot is thinner than it should be and food scorches easily.  To save myself stirring constantly, I put the pot in a water bath using my big canner.  It worked.  Stirring every 10-15 minutes was sufficient.  After the tomatoes cooked down, I pulled about half out and ran it through a food mill, getting rid of lots of seeds and some hard spots.

In the end, even with draining all that fluid, the sauce simmered for nine hours to reduce by half, giving us seven quarts of rich, beautiful sauce, just right for spaghetti or pizza.  But my conscience is nagged by running our electric stove so long.

We emptied out the big onion patch.  With four of us pulling, it went pretty fast.  The books say to dry them in the sun for a week or two before putting them in long term storage, so we dumped them out on the patio table.  It looks pretty impressive to me.  The book also says that the ones that still have green tops won't keep well, so we'll separate those out and use them first.

The days are shortening and shade has encroached on the patio from the big walnut trees in the south.  The change in the light takes me back to this time last year.  I wasn't nearly as busy, but I dreamed of this work.  We had spent the summer reclaiming the pasture and garden from the weeds and by this time we had worked up to bare dirt.  Although living in town, we were doing the work of homesteading.  One short year later, God is feeding us abundantly with a heavy garden, milk, and meat and educating us in things that were common knowledge a century ago.

The Garden is a Mess

For the first time in a while, I stepped off the path, over to the tomatoes, and discovered a jungle mess that had been out of sight.  The furrows we worked on so hard last spring have worn down or are completely hidden by the overgrowth.  We were so good at weeding until it got hot.  Those little weeds have grown into huge spindly monsters.  I pulled the ones that came out easily, but then I just gave up.  I'll till them in later.

How much it is like my life.  Just a mess.  My brokenness overgrown and big.  Some sins easy to pull out, but others so entrenched that I just leave them alone.  Many gain strength simply from lack of attention.

As I walked through looking for tomatoes, I couldn't even tell where the rows were.  Those pitiful little tomato plants I put out last June have spilled out everywhere.  Some never got a cage around them and have sprawled out five or six feet.  Others got cages, but grew out more than up.  Others grew up and knocked their cage over.

Looking at that knocked over cage was like taking an honest look at my life.  My own need for control overgrowing and knocking over others with unrelenting pressure.  My self-centeredness searching for a place of importance, but with no support, flopping over in a heap on the ground.

Christina came to say hi while I was walking around.  I don't see her much any more.  I'm too lazy to go say "hi" just for fun, and with no milking to be done there isn't much reason to go out there.  I admit that fear is part of my problem.  She is a large animal and can be pushy.  I don't know how to respond to that, so I stay away.  But she hasn't forgotten me.  She gently walked over, sniffed me, and watched my excursion.  I get lazy and scared of God too.

Some weeds are going to seed.  I can hear my father-in-law, dead almost eight years now, saying, "better get those pulled."  But there are so many of them.  The ground is hard.  The roots are stubborn.  So I walk away, let them spread their seed, providing certainty that they will be back next year.

Weeds discourage me, the same as sin does.  I walk through these uninvited plants and feel overwhelmed.  I wonder if this is how God feels walking through my life, discouraged at the sins grown large from lack of attention and lack of will.

But as I walk I notice other things too.  The broccoli plant I hadn't gotten around to pulling had a new crop of blooms on the back side, down under the dominant topgrowth.  They are perfect flowerettes, dark and dense, better looking than anything we got last spring.  Could there be parts of me flowering on the back side, places where God has been quietly growing something better than I've ever seen?

The cantaloupe plant is dying back, and plump orange cantaloupes are standing up out of the declining vines.  They sweeten as the plant recedes.  I hear an echo of the cross, a dying body, that left such sweet fruit for all humanity.  Are there parts of my life that are like the dying vines, leaving sweet fruit behind?

I looked under a large squash canopy and found perfect fruits in their final preparation for winter.  I didn't even know they were there.  There were lots of them, round, beautiful, and hardening for a long cold wait until they warm and nourish our family.  I have ignored these plants just like I ignored the weeds, but they have produced.

The weeds have grown, but the garden has grown stronger.  The weeds may be big, but God didn't let that stop abundant growth.  In fact, as I look back over the garden, most of it looks as if the weeds didn't make any different at all.  It just looks neater to me without weeds. But God doesn't need the weeds to stay away to make amazing things happen.  My attention or lack of attention doesn't seem to make a big difference either because with God there is new life.  With God there is fruit.  With God there is a harvest.  My job is only to look for it.

Slow Pepperoni

After three days curing in the frig, we dried the pepperoni.  We rolled the meat into two-inch diameter logs and put them on roasting pans.  Using wax paper makes it easier to get them shaped.  The first time we tried, it really was a big mess.  After all the meat was rolled, we put them a "warm" oven (170F) for seven hours.  The kids commented several times during the day that they craved pizza.  Tomorrow we'll run them through the slicer and freeze most.  From the six pounds of hamburger we started with, we'll probably have about four pounds of finished pepperoni.  New pepperoni with homemade Christina mozzarella on whole wheat crust... I'm beginning to crave pizza too.

Things are still slow moving at our house.  The stomach flu has subsided, but energy is low.  Homeschooling for the younger ones today was only the things that we could read outloud to them.  One of the benefits of homeschooling is that things don't have to stop when you're sick, like missing school, they just slow down. 

Another benefit of homeschooling is freedom of movement.  My 15-year-old often moves outside to study when the weather permits.  The gentle sounds of outdoors, the light breeze, and the cool feel of grass energize her and make her feel whole.  I am reminded of the days sitting in classrooms when I was young, longing to be outside.  My longing wasn't to get away from the learning, but just to get outside.  I am so grateful that she is able to satiate that feeling.

We made spaghetti for dinner.  I made pasta for the first time less than a year ago and now I always make it.  It takes about thirty minutes to make a batch for dinner and it tastes so good.  After mixing 2-3/4 cups flour, 3 eggs, and enough water to bring it up to 3/4 cup, the fun begins.  I have the extrusion attachment for my KitchenAid, but I prefer this hand-crank pasta maker.  First you roll the balls out flat and even in a wide setting, then roll them through a fine settling.  Lastly, crank them through the spaghetti cutter.  I just dump them on a towel while I get it all done.  After throwing them into boiling water, they are done in three minutes.  We dined on spaghetti with homemade Christina ricotta and cottage cheese.

Keeping Body and Soul on Speaking Terms

I’m reading Christy by Catherine Marshall.  My teenage daughters will read it later this year for their homeschooling.   It is set in 1912 when a young woman goes to teach at a mission school in Appalachia.  When she arrives a kind woman feeds her and afterward asks,  “have you eaten well enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms?” 

What a potent question.  It makes me ask myself the same thing.  Have I eaten well enough to keep body and soul on speaking terms?  I think that actually they've maintained a polite distance for most of my life and are just beginning to get reacquainted.

I've already noticed that food tastes different when I cook it.  Perhaps it's because I pay attention in a different way, wondering if I would change the recipe the next time.  Eating food that we have raised has taken on a similar quality.  There is a depth to the experience beyond flavor and texture and chemical calories.  Every time I eat our own food, part of me is thinking, "I did it!"   I marvel at the way I contributed to its production and at the same time am in awe of God’s creative power.

A month ago I tried to plant lettuce for a fall crop but it was too hot and few of the seeds germinated (the weeds did fine).  So I started some in the basement under lights.  Today I put them in the garden for their final month of growth. 

When I went out, I discovered that God had a similar idea.  A plant I had let go to seed had fallen over and under its head was a forest of little lettuce plants.

Today we spin another rotation on a cycle of the land.  Chickens need lots of calcium for all that egg laying.  We can buy crushed oyster shells, but that can get pricey over time.  Instead, we save our egg shells, toast them in the oven, crush them, and give them back to the chickens.  We could probably give them the shells straight, but I don’t want them looking at their freshly laid eggs with hunger.  I’m told that happens sometimes.  So we toast and crush (and still occasionally buy oyster shells).

toasting egg shells

ground egg shells
Now I just need to find a little girl to take it out to the chickens.

Tonight at 3am is the fall equinox and with it comes the official beginning of fall. We will celebrate this mid-point in God's seasonal design with strawberry rhubarb pie and ice cream (homemade and mostly homegrown, of course).