Blue Fries

We grew blue potatoes this year.  I thought they looked cool, but I dreaded the kids balking, "they're not the same as store bought!"  They can be so fussy.  Last night we ate our first ones as french fries.  It turns out that blue fries are not creepy.  The kids loved them!  They taste the same as regular to me, but they loved that they were blue.  They said we should grow more next year.  Praise God!

 Today we cook one of our own chickens.  I really like the beef that we bought directly from a guy here in the valley, but there is something so special about meat we raised ourselves, and butchered ourselves.  Chicken pot pie is one of the girl favorite things and with everything homemade, I think they are responding to it being food deliberately given them by God.

My mornings begin with one of my favorite tasks, skimming and pouring milk.  After milking Christina, and putting away the fresh milk to chill, I pull out all the milk from yesterday with risen cream.  We got four gallons!  I had labeled each jar with the date and "a" for am or "p" for pm.  There is something about the gentle skimming of the rich cream into the much more manageable half-gallon jars that I deeply enjoy.

At end we had 1-1/3 jugs of cream (center), three jugs of drinking milk (right), and a little more than two gallons of skimmed milk to use later (left).  Yesterday I made cottage cheese out of two gallons of skimmed milk, so we don't need more of that.  Maybe I'll make a parmesan.

Valuing the Everyday

Our two rows of plants resulted in 22 pumpkins. Most are decent sized, but not big.  I need to look up the expected size for the variety we used, because maybe these are the size they are supposed to get.  Different varieties grow different-sized fruit.  Or, they might be small because they almost drowned from irrigation water in the low area I planted them.  Today I'll cook one up and see how they taste.

The pumkins had mud on them.  We lined them up under the eve to dry.  When we can knock the dirt off, we'll move them downstairs to cure for two weeks before moving them to the cellar for long term storage.

The homeschool curriculum we use includes lots of historical novels. Some, the girls read on their own and others we read outloud.  With so much handwork to be done, we often combine it with our reading.  Our book this week is The Witch of Blackbird Pond.  My twins get enthralled with the story and aren't happy when the chapter ends.  I've never read it so I'm enjoying it as much as they are. 

One of the twins fills the chicken feeder each morning before opening the coop door.  It's a good system that gives the kids responsibility and spreads out the work.  The down side is that we sometimes deal with emergencies.  This morning our daughter let us know that the food was gone.  Not low, but gone.  My husband had to run out and fill the can with the help of our older daughter.  We buy wheat, oats, and ground corn from a local elevator and mix it ourselves.  The chickens won't starve.

Redirecting my life toward the land has made me face several assumptions I didn't even know I had.  I'm learning things that were common knowledge a hundred years ago, but they are new to us.  These are skills that do nothing more than keep people fed.  Is that the point?  Is it just about feeding or is actually about something more important?  I realize that I've assumed it is for something else.  People are fed so that they will do something big and important.  Or they will support a spouse who will.  Or their children will.  Just feeding seems so small and insignificant.  I've heard people talk about how important parenting is because their children may grow up to great, and I realize that they also think just plain parenting isn't enough, it has to lead to somebody doing something great.

Does God agree?  Is God only feeding us so that one of us will do something great?  Jesus said that God "causes it to rain on the just and the unjust" (Mat 5:45) as a sign of God's concern for all people.  This life on the land is teaching me that it really is about feeding us.  Period.  Nobody has to be "worthy" to be fed or even prepare for something great.  Feeding and loving are the point.  It seems that God is teaching me the value of the everyday, the value of my own life, with or without great things on my resume, and about the abundance and tenacity of God's love.  You'd think it was an easier lesson to learn. 

Lets Start by Mowing

Our last child fell to the stomach flu.  It was another mostly sleepless night, but the main activity has subsided and she is resting now.  I am the only one who hasn't fallen, but today I don't feel great.  A week of less than my share of sleep and more than my share of work has taken its toll. 

At dinner last night there were only four of us — two children gone, one in bed, and one moved out.  One daughter commented on how empty the table felt, "and this is the size of a normal American family."

I love having a large family.  I love that our house is full of energy and warmth.  I love that we are together most of the time, not pulled away to school or the office.  But there is a downside to so much life — illness takes a long time.  This bug that takes a person down for three days has lasted two weeks in our family.

As our daughter lay in her sick bed, we gave her some good news. The injured chicken starting walking.  This is the daughter who named the hen Soody.  Last night we let her into the garden with the rest of the flock and she held her own.  She still kind of sinks sometimes, but she walked around capably and even ran at one point.  Thank you God that we don't have to kill that chicken.

This was a week off of homeschooling.  We had big plans to get some things finished outside, none of which got done.  With the majority of the family recovered, we started by mowing the lawn for the first time in a long while, maybe since July.  When it's hot the grass doesn't grow as much and I congratulate myself at the lower carbon-load by not mowing.  But it's not hot any more and we waited too long.  The kids cleared the lawn off and then watched from inside while I drove the machine. Only once did my husband have to fix it.  The job was huge.  Bags had to be dumped every pass and the blower filled up several times. 

Our compost pile is in with the chickens.  I read that chickens make great compost turners by digging through the pile.  Not having to turn the pile ourselves is pretty compelling so we have given it a try.  At the least, the chickens love the fresh green grass and they do kick it around.  Next spring we will have to move it out for one year before it's used.  I've heard that fresh chicken manure, which they add regularly, needs a year to compost before it's safe to put on the garden.

We feed our chickens a mix of wheat, oats, and corn that we buy at a local grain elevator.  It's cheaper that the pre-mixed stuff at the farm store and I like that it's just straight grain.  Yesterday when I went out to check on Soody, I noticed that the chicken food barrel was almost empty.  I pointed it out to my nine-year old who usually feeds them and she said, "oh yeah, we're almost out."  So yesterday afternoon my husband and I made a unplanned run for grain.  While we were there, we drove past a livestock shed and I noticed ears sticking out.  I looked closer and discovered several large pigs housed in the shed.  I pointed it out, "look, there are pigs right there and you can't even smell them." Hmmmm.......

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.

Eggs?

Only eight eggs yesterday.  A few weeks ago we were struggling to keep up with a dozen a day, and then suddenly it dropped off.

This happened last summer.   Late one day we discovered that the coop door had accidentally closed.  We open it right up and laughed at the line up of hens at the nesting boxes.  The next day egg production suddenly dropped.

Two days later we found a dead hen in the coop.  The book said that sometimes hens die of being egg-bound.  The hen doesn't lay her egg and it gets stuck.  We think that's what happened, but because we weren't sure, we treated the hen like she died of disease and carefully wrapped the body in several layers of plastic before whisking it off to the garbage.

Afterward, we made sure the flock had lots of good quality feed and slowly the production came back up.  It took weeks, but it did come back.

Now it's dropped again.  We have one sick chicken, although she might be injured and not sick.  But then, how would we know?!  How do you tell a sick chicken?!   They don't have noses that run.  How could you tell if they were pale?  I don't even know how to check for a chicken fever, and I don't think I'm interested in learning. 

Then something else occurred to us.  It's still warm, but we are on the other side of the equinox.  The books say that chickens lay best with 14+ hour days.  By the end of December when we'll have only nine hours of daylight, production will drop by more than half.  In commercial egg farms they take care of that by using electric lights, but we're going to stay with the sun.  Today we have eleven-and-a-half hours.  Maybe our flock is on the normal decline from shorter days.  We haven't gone a whole year with chickens so we are still learning how their normal cycles work.

I hope it's just normal seasonal decline.

The sick chicken is doing the same.  My nine-year-old checks on her several times a day.  This morning she went out to check on her again.  When she came in I asked how Soody was doing.  "The same," she said confidently.  It's been a week with no change.  Then I asked, "do you think she is suffering?"  My sweet little girl dropped her head, leaned against me and and said, "yes." 

Ghost of Parenting Present

Last night we were visited by the Ghost of Parenting Present — a daughter with the stomach flu and gastric reverse action all night long at about twenty-minute intervals.  Things finally slowed down about 6:30am.  Today we feel like ghosts ourselves.  A life in synergy with the land means that nothing we were going to do today couldn't wait until tomorrow, but the rest of family life went on.

Yesterday I made pancake syrup.  It's so easy I can't believe that I bought the high fructose corn syrup stuff for so long.  Mix one cup water,  two cup sugar (we get organic fair trade sugar from Costco), and 1/2 teaspoon mapleine.  Bring to a full boil for 2-3 minutes.  Let cool for a bit and put in jars.  We found these old syrup jars in my in-laws stuff.

The girls discovered an injured chicken today.  It was on the ground not moving and the other chickens were pecking it.  Cannibalism is a problem with chickens.  The books say that they sense when one is injured or sick and a group can quickly kill a defenseless bird.  My husband rescued the hen and moved into a pen by itself.  He put food and water near it.  My daughter asked, "are we going to have to kill it?"  We'll give it several days and see if it heals.  If not, it will have to become a stew hen.  I hate butchering.

While outside, I noticed how much the fruit trees have grown.  We planted sixteen fruit trees in the chicken pen area last spring.  We have apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, and apricots.  Chickens love nothing more than bugs.  I've read that if you have chickens around your fruit trees, they will eat all the worms before they crawl up into the fruit.  We have big plans for lots of worm-free fruit without any poison spraying.

Since my other children were feeling fine, I asked them to flatten the onions.  When onions get big, they need their tops bent over for the final maturing.  In a few weeks we'll pull them out of the garden and let them dry on the patio for their final preparation before long-term storage.  Even the two-year-old got involved.

When you are a person who wants to follow God, discerning God's direction can feel like such immediate work.  Sometimes I wonder if it's more like today's work.  God welcomes time of rest and times of work.  God's opportunities aren't one chance and then gone.  Instead, if today is good, God work things out.  Or if tomorrow is better, that's OK too.  This garden is more God's work than ours, so it seems that the patterns we find there must have some reflection of their Creator. 

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).