Tomatoes

We noticed a few tomatoes turning red so we ran out to get them before the irrigation comes tomorrow.  Pretty soon the five-gallon harvest bucket was full and we were looking for another bucket.  This is becoming routine — I think I'm going to pick a little and find a whole lot.

I already had a bunch of tomatoes in the freezer, so I couldn't just throw these in the freezer and deal with them later. While my husband and daughter made pizza for dinner, I blanched and skinned tomatoes as fast as I could.  Tomato skins just slide off if they've been in a boiling water for a few seconds.  (My nine-year-old took this gorgeous photo of tomatoes coming out of the boiling water, skins pulled back)

In the past I avoiding making tomato sauce because it had to boil for so long to get rid of the water.  I read that if tomatoes are hung overnight, much of the water will come out.  It's worth trying.  We set up a hanging contraption in the pantry with a milk bucket to catch the drippings.  There's already an inch of clear liquid in the bottom.  Tonight we have two of these large bags hanging.

Just like the peppers, I started a bunch of tomatoes plants last spring, but lost track of which kinds they were.  In June I just threw plants in the ground.  In the middle of the big tomatoes we found arms of cherry tomato vines heavy with fruit.  There's enough for several good snacks.

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). 

Bread Rising in a Warm Oven

It is a bread-making day.  Timing has become routine, grinding the wheat while we clean up from breakfast, letting the machine rest, and then making the dough after family prayer.  The wheat grinding is noisy and can be a little messy, but the bread comes out sweet and deep flavored.  I used buttermilk saved from the butter we made last Friday.

I love fresh ground flour, full of the wheat germ and bran that is missing from “whole wheat flour.”  But we grind it with a machine.  The motor died a few weeks ago, still under warranty, and we were without a grinder while they shipped a replacement.  I felt our dependence.  We have to have electricity and this machine to make flour.  I looked over the hand-crank models again, thinking maybe now is the time to get one.

My life has become like the dough sitting in the warm oven, slowly rising.  As I’ve stepped out of full time ministry for almost 18 months now, telling the world I’m taking a little break, I’ve wondered many times if actually ministry was just a phase in my life, not this break.  Am I turning to something different, or is God resting me in the warm oven, letting the yeast slowly rise until I become sweet and deep flavored?

From the kitchen window, the garden looks healthy but not urgent.  Then I remember what’s out there, ripening under leaves, waiting to be harvested — watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers.  It is urgent.  Tonight we’ll pick a watermelon for dinner.  We’ll put cucumbers in the frig until we’re ready to make pickles.  We’ll pick tomatoes and freeze them until I’m ready to make sauce.  God’s abundance can be demanding. 

The Last Day

We milked Christina for the last time today.  Well, until November.  But it feels like the last time.  Seven weeks ago when she arrived, I longed for this day.  Milking our first week was an ordeal.  I had read lots of books but had milked only twice in my life.  I felt incompetent and overwhelmed.  At the end of each milking I remember thinking, "oh my God, I have to do that again in 12 hours!"  I had to hold on for seven weeks and then it would be over. 

But today I don't feel relieved; I feel sad.  I'm not overwhelmed any more.  I've learned how to grab the top of Christina's teet and pull with a satisfying gush of milk and cream.  I've learned to love the taste of her milk, more than I ever thought I would love milk.  I've learned how to make butter, yogurt, ice cream, sour cream, and cheese.  And I've felt cared for by a large brown animal with dark eyes. I've seen God's abundance in the simple grass transformed into milk and cream just waiting for us.  All we have to do is go get it.  But tomorrow it won't be there.

After moving from the dairy and feeding us for seven weeks, Christina gets these two months off to grow strong for the birth of her calf.  On or about November 18th we'll go through our first calving.  Another first.

I've felt so called to this life of sustainable living but it's been a year of crazy firsts.  I'm a city girl.  There's no farm or livestock in my past.   We've read lots of books and had wonderful people with real knowledge who have helped us along the way, but we've been living a sitcom learning so many things the hard way.   Only a year-and-a-half ago this all started when we moved to a house on 1.5 acres.  Now we've got a big garden, 14 laying hens, about 20 meat chickens in the freezer, a milk cow, and a beef calf that will be ready for the butcher in another year.  We've rejected most every disposable that had been part of our normal American life (except toilet paper, good God!).  We've reduced our energy consumption by putting in sky lights, switching to low-energy appliances, hanging our laundry to dry, and learning to live with heat in the summer and coolness in the winter.

It has only been as we've intentionally moved to this life that I've realized how dependent we have  been on modern food systems.  I carried an assumption that since I had money I had a God-given right to the food I bought and that it would always be there — magically, just always on the shelf, ready to be bought.  But the truth is that I was profoundly dependent on the labor and intelligence of others, many of whom don't have the money to eat as well as I did.  I also had become dependent upon the practices that provide cheap meat, food in boxes, and ingredient names that look more a chemistry supply list than God-created food.  Food was a factory product.  I was a committed Christian who had lost touch with with the God who feeds us.

Today I am slowly moving to dependence on God the Creator... God acting on this land, growing things in their own season, as is proper and right for the plants of God's creation.  What I used to see as just plain old land, a source of dust and dirt and weeds, I now see as sacred ground, as life-giving, as a way to find God.

Our family-life has been redirected toward the fertile soil.  My nine-year old twin daughters begin their day by "getting up the chickies."  Early in the morning in their outdoor shoes, they fill the feeder, open the coop door and rush out of the pen.  They love the chickens but are still a little intimidated by them.  Our 15-year and 13-year old daughters have become competent milkers, taking over my spot in the evening milking with their Dad.  Our 2-year old son has learned to play in the yard while we work in the garden right beside him.  He joins his sisters when he can talk them into it and squeals, "Christina," every time he sees her.  Our 19-year old son moved out this summer and shares little in this adventure, making me struggle with how do you be a family member without being a household member.

Our lives have taken on an easy rhythm of caring for animals, homeschooling, cooking, harvesting and back to animals before the night slows the tempo into satisfying rest.  Our family life has become centered around food and family rather than clocks and schedules.  Sabbath rest is an exciting freedom from weeding, harvesting, and cheese-making giving time for lazy eating, movies, books, and music.  But every day is each other.

Even our education has moved into the family.  We've homeschooled for several years, off and on, but there is a contentment in homeschooling this year that I've never felt.  Learning, a life-long activity, has become interwoven into the life-long activity of eating.  After trying lots of different things, we've settled on a curriculum that uses lots of narrative.  Starting our third year with Sonlight, I have fallen thoroughly in love with their approach and don't plan to ever use anything else.  Immersion into history and historical fiction makes deep learning nearly effortless.  After many years of mistakes, we've learned how to push enough to create the excitement of challenge but not the despair of burden.  Watching their eyes spark as they grasp a new concept and their shoulders square as they approach a problem with confidence is a constant source of joy for me.  My husband and I joke that each evening we arm-wrestle to see who gets to homeschool the girls the next day.

Our two months "off" begins.  We can leave if we want, only needing someone to feed the animals while we're gone.  Our milk will come from the 20-gallon store in the freezer.  My arms will rest and heal into a strength that I hope will prevent the carpal tunnel from returning.  Although we are approaching the equinox, it feels like we have entered the winter solstice and will wait for the silent land to wake up.