A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

This blog is not abandoned.  :)

It didn’t even go off my radar, get forgotten, nor did I take a deliberate break from it. I am a diarist at heart, and most days this fall when I’ve been in the garden, bringing in the harvest, or walking in nature, I have composed a blog post in my head.  The trouble is with the time it takes to transfer from thought to paper or computer.

I thought of a blog post as we wrapped up the final market day, and switched our focus from feeding other people, to preparing our own winter food supply.

Our table last day at the Westside Farmers Market - incredible celery, leeks, and celeriac this fall.

I thought of a blog post as the first frosts hit and we started to say goodbye to the garden, and began to light a fire in the woodstove daily.

I thought of a blog post as we dug potatoes, and more potatoes ….and more potatoes.

Tiredly, I thought often about posting about the sanctuary I felt in the garden, even if for only half an hour of twilight at the end of a frantically busy work day.

Last big harvest before frost.

I thought of a blog post as I walked through a wooded patch, hearing the birds, noticing how green the moss looks after a rain, when everything else has turned into winter browns.

I thought of a reactionary blog post every time I listened to news about Occupy Wall Street, “consumer confidence”, anti-consumerism, and the Plastic Ocean.

I composed words in my head about our harvest as it filled every bin, bucket, and tray we had, as we worked in the rain and by flashlight to bring the last of the perishables in by the first hard frost.

But with all this doing, our hands have been a bit busy for blog posting.  I am continually thankful and amazed by the enormous amount of food two people working two other jobs can produce from a tiny little plot of land.  We grow so much of what we eat now.  Eggs, chicken, greens of all sorts, beans, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, rutabega, squash, popcorn, apples, berries, herbs, onions, garlic, leeks, radishes, carrots.  Our own pickles, krauts, jams, sauces, cider.  So much to write about, and so little time to write!

Remains of the market garden

Some people call us a farm.  Some are amused that we call ourselves a farm.  Some get grand ideas in their head of how we must live and what the garden looks like, imagining an orderly organic utopia.  Sometimes their silence when they come to visit seems to tell of their disappointment.  We are small.  The “market field” is just a big messy garden.   The shutters are falling off the house because most days, we’re too darn busy or exhausted to fix them.  Our furniture is mismatched, and our kitchen needs remodeling.  This is what it looks like to live as much as we can right now from a patch of land, trying to reduce the need to buy, to turn less garbage loose into the world than we might. This is what it looks like to make do, purchase less, grow more, work hard.

Digging potatoes, and immediately replanting the bed with endive seedlings - just barely visible at the top of the photo.

And yet, somehow, we manage to grow enough beautiful produce to sell to others while feeding ourselves.    Somehow, we had an enormous Thanksgiving supper where the only store-bought ingredients I used in the cooking were milk, butter, cream cheese, salt, pepper, flour, arrowroot powder, olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, sugar, and wine.  There was so much joy and pride in roasting the 10 lb 3 oz “turkey” chicken who grew running around in our back yard, and so much peace and fulfillment in carrying baskets of greens and roots in from the garden, rather than braving the crowd at the grocery store.

The promoters of monoculture farming retaliate against the rise of interest in local food.  They try to win support by saying we can’t feed the world with small farmers, local produce, and organic techniques.  Yet I don’t see how 7 billion+ people will eat sustainably without digging up our lawns to grow chemical-free food.  I’m thankful for those who grow their own, or support others who do.   I’m thankful for the shoppers I know who are trying to buy less, buy locally, and use less plastic (in all senses of the word).  For me, Thanksgiving is about celebrating what bounty we can produce, rather than what bounty we can buy.  It’s about celebrating the wonder of being able to grow our food.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Almost there tomatoes!

We don’t buy much at grocery stores.  In fact, I always feel a bit embarrassed by our cart, or actually, by our basket, since we rarely buy enough to need to roll the cart through the store.  It looks like a terrible diet - often some combination of baking supply, flour, sugar, chocolate, pasta, coffee, butter, raisins, rice and grain products, olive oil, corn chips, cheese.  Maybe, more rarely, some kind of packaged treat or cracker.  And condiments, like vinegars, anchovies, capers, soy sauce, etc.

But most of the rest of what we eat, we grow, or get from someone else who grows it locally. If it’s not in season, we don’t eat it in its fresh form.  So for a big chunk of time now, we’ve dreamed of tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, green beans, okra…the things that we just don’t eat fresh for the parts of the year they aren’t in production or lasting in storage.  All spring, new fresh foods trickled in slowly here.  We’ve had lots of greens since March, but adding to that was a challenge - asparagus, green onions, and herbs were mainstays through May and June, but didn’t feel like much variety after a couple weeks.  We’d had no potatoes since last year’s ran out  about the beginning of March.  Radishes and peas and new celery stems in June brought in more variation, and the wild black raspberries were our first fresh fruit.  But even though it is so much anticipated, the suddenness of the classic summer produce is always a surprise.  When it starts to come in, it just really is suddenly….in.

Impossibly skinny haricots verts

The garlic gets harvested in July, and suddenly after months without fresh garlic, we have garlic in everything.  Zucchini, other summer squashes, cucumbers, green beans, the first cherry tomatoes followed by the first magnificent slicing tomatoes, and then, just last night, the first okra.  The first few days of a newly ripening vegetable are treasured and savored as they only can be when, by eating seasonally, your palate knows how special they are.  We had the first tiny potatoes for the 4th of July, then tried to leave them alone, only harvesting enough to have a taste a couple times a week.  I thought nothing could be as delicious as a plate of herbed new potatoes and sugar snap peas. But then after watching eagerly for the first green beans, nothing compared to the first lightly steamed tiny green beans with butter and a fine grating of parmesan. And the first handfuls of cherry tomatoes never made it out of the garden, of course, savored right on the spot. First eggplant arrived last week, and the rain came just in time to plump up a great harvest of wild blackberries this week.

Produce that was only two weeks ago longed for, for months, is suddenly in such full force that it is our daily staple. Last month’s fried eggs over a bed of greens, radicchio, or side of peas, has given way to a huge frittata full of new potatoes, summer squash, corn, shallots and onions, green peppers, basil, and topped with sliced rounds of tomato.

We’ve been eating this salad daily for about a week now:

Dragonwood variation on Caprese salad, with Asian Cucumber and Cherry tomatoes:

Dice up a “Suhyo Long” cucumber.  Halve some cherry tomatoes.  Dice desired amount of mozzarella into half-inch squares.  Finely slice a small onion or a shallot.   Finely slice or tear basil leaves, according to your preference (I don’t like large chunks of rough basil leaf in a mouthful, but rather prefer it delicately through the whole dish, so I finely slice it.  I’ve been adequately informed that this is improper, and basil must always be torn, thanks.)  Toss all vegetables together.   Combine olive oil and a little red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and shake dressing in a jar until emulsified.  Pour over the salad, toss again.

This is what summer tastes like.  And we are celebrating it at every meal.  Soon, tomatoes will become commonplace, and then they will even perhaps become burdensome, something to be laboriously canned and dried for the winter months.  The green beans are already commonplace, eliciting a “well, we have to eat the green beans twice a day to get rid of them” reaction now, compared to the eagerness a couple weeks ago.  Soon, they will go into pickles and krauts as we truly tire of them.  Such is the life of a seasonal eater.

Much as I’d like to see some sunshine, this gentle rain is so beautiful.  Pretty enough to just snap some quick photos in the rain…..

Perhaps after a couple of greens-toastingly hot springs, this can be the year for cabbage, lettuce, peas, and and the cooler crops.  Here are some shallots that have naturally become interplanted with volunteer chervil which seems to be working out well for them.  I can’t get enough of the spring colors…..

Peas and lettuce are thriving.  The heirloom deer’s tongue lettuce is one of my favorites - reliable, crisp, delicious, early, and gorgeous, with its funny tendency to spiral…….

The old Welsummer Rooster and a few of his hens go for a stroll in the light misty rain….

Lilacs bend to the ground under the weight of their water-laden blossoms…. …happy beautiful Spring!

We reuse a lot at Dragonwood, far more than we recycle.  We don’t buy much stuff, or even much food, and very little of that food is packaged.  So we don’t actually have much to recycle on a regular basis, and we don’t have much to throw away, ever.  We can go weeks or even months without having to get rid of a garbage bag (garbage never really smells too bad if you compost the organic parts).

Mandy wrote the other day about planting and recycling… which was really about planting and reusing.  She reuses and re-reuses constantly in that process, to the point of going to our local recycling station and rescuing reusable resources that others used only once.  We recycle something once it’s broken to the point of not being able to reuse it for nearly anything.

I’m building a sugar shack.  It’s an extension of our West Flock Coop out in the back yard.  The West Flock Coop construction project was a significant effort in reuse for us… vertical posts and siding were salvaged from a disintegrating barn, windows acquired from Recycle Ann Arbor (and streetside, curb-toss finds) over the years, so only some 2×4s and nails were new.  Even hinges for the coop doors were mostly old hinges, most decades old and kept in old tin cans or peanut butter jars until ready for some project like this.

Oh, back to the sugar shack / woodshed / seasonal storage space project.  It’s been on hold this week in the snow and ice, but I’ll be getting back to it shortly (like tomorrow), so I’ll write a bit about it now.  The Coop is about 7′ deep and 15′ wide with a fence along the east side keeping chickens on the coop side of the yard and giving them free range into the woods, but not into our flower and food gardens.  We’re extending the Coop to the east in order to add firewood storage (partially covered, against the coop) and a covered sugar shack/seasonal storage area.

So far:  we’ve got the four posts in the ground (former barn beams and supports, 100+ years old), and we’ve got the full framework of 2×4s and 2×6s on top and connected to the Coop for roof support.  The 2×4s and 2×6s were scavenged from an urban teardown project where Mandy and friends tore things apart and stacked much used/partially rotted wood and plywood in a trailer and hauled it all back here.  We’ve been using it bit by bit for two years now, and have made small coops and repairs from many parts of the stack.  These are nearly the last of the 2×6s and 2×4s, and I took out about 300 old nails using pry bar,  hammer and vicegrip plyers to get them ready for use.

LEFT PHOTO: View from the front (north), West Flock Coop on the right, and you can see my woodpile waiting to be split (mostly) along the fence that keeps chickens safe from us.  I use that tire on the stump for holding firewood while I split it (another good idea I found on the interwebs).  After the roof goes on, our splits will be stored in the new roofed area next to the coop.  The really wide overhang in the front will get angle supports to help it, and we expect to use the area for summer tool storage outside (rakes and spades and barrow).

RIGHT PHOTO: This view is from the top, looking at one of the old beams now used as a post, and our reused lumber with LOTS of old nail holes.  I do sometimes reuse old nails, but these were worthless and I’m using decking screws from another project to hold things together well.  Chickens are on the other side of the fence in their yard.  Aren’t the new Buff Orpingtons looking great?  They’re kinda like those square cows in old pastoral paintings, in that their shape is so exaggeratedly chickenesque.  Gotta love ‘em.  Elm and ash in the woodpile; we’re still fueling the house from the dead trees killed by foreign pests, Dutch Elm fungus and Emerald Ash Borer beetles.  Yet more reuse, in a sense.

More on this sugar shack (and maple weather) coming soon.

It is a cold and still morning.  Nothing moves.  Pink light seeps through the icicles.

A month off in near isolation and reflection is a precious thing.

For the start of this new year, we took a month off.  Not really “off” in the typical way of imagining it.  No, for all but about 6 days of it, we worked.  Hard physical work, demanding work, work to empty the mind, finally, of clutter and conflict.

Many years ago, I read Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and was struck by this passage:

Another row, and yet another row, followed–long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him, and at those same moments his row was almost as smooth and well cut as Tit’s. But so soon as he recollected what he was doing, and began trying to do better, he was at once conscious of all the difficulty of his task, and the row was badly mown.”

This passage has come back to me many times in my life when I was working hard physically, or attending others as they worked.  I have no intention of making this a college essay analyzing a literary passage; I wanted to see the words in print here again, because I have felt them so many times.  There is a release that comes with physical work and exercise - a clearing of the mind, an easing of the perception of hardship, when one lets go and reaches past the stage of considering giving up.  If I do get all philosophical here, it is only to take this truth into a wider consideration.

Last year was a very hard year.  I do not exaggerate when I say that I have never in my life been happier to welcome in a new year, with a new start and new changes.  Somehow, last year was a year that became a series of situations that relentlessly took a great deal from me.  There were many blessings and delights as well, and I am grateful beyond words for my amazing husband, for the earth that sustains us, for those around me who gave me hope and brought me smiles.  But at the end of that draining year, I found myself deeply in need of renewal and restoration of damages.

I thought at the start of the month off I would write a lot.  This winter I gave in and joined a blog “challenge” - the Dark Days eating local challenge.  I have been a past skeptic of, for example, local foods challenges, because I have observed people go about them as just something to get through - okay, that’s done, whew, I did it, let’s go get some junk food, or some fruit from Equador to celebrate!  I felt bad being a skeptic, because these challenges are such a good thing, to raise awareness, to result perhaps in some permanent changes for the better, to teach others from your experience, etc.  I thought it would be easy, because what we eat through these dark days of winter still is, to a large extent, what we have grown ourselves and stored in the pantry, the canning closest, the freezers, or what is still on foot and on the ground outside, despite winter.

And that part was easy.  What was not easy was wondering why I was doing this exactly, when this was the way we ate most days anyway.  And I found that I did not need another deadline in my life to meet, just at this moment.  When it’s 10 pm after an exhausting day and a post is due at midnight, it just suddenly takes the joy out of writing and becomes one more depressing unfinished task.   I did not like the feeling of trying to prove myself to other people on one more level, or to meet their requirements, kind-hearted even as they may be.  Self-doubt is sometimes only enhanced by trying to prove yourself too much.  And was it getting competitive?  Was there some kind of glory we were all seeking in a see-what-I-accomplished sort of way?  Sigh.  With some clarity of meditations, I find I just don’t need that.  I find I will be freer to just be, and share, and write of what we live, without trying to meet a challenge.  So I’ve let my part in the Dark Days Challenge go, with much respect.  Nothing’s changed; we’re still making salad out of jerusalem artichokes, celery and cabbage that have been in storage since October, eating chicken we raised from the freezer, and our eggs, but it’s such a day-to-day, permanent, lifestyle that I am not going to document it as though it’s a novelty.

There is a very humorous side to this, as well.  My old digital camera has started showing its age, and one day when it was being uncooperative, I borrowed my husband’s IPhone to photograph the process of making yogurt from the lovely local milk we enjoy - for, you guessed it, the blog and the challenge.  Now, IPhones can be slick slippery devils at times, and somehow, after many shots of all the steps of the process, the thing slithered out of my grasp suddenly, and as luck would have it, submerged immediately in the bowl of 112 degree fluid milk-and-yogurt mixture.  Completely submerged.  Of course, I yanked it out before I’d even really registered what had happened. Fast forward through several hours of agonized phone triage, and somehow, it survived seemingly unscathed.

That was camera episode one.  Camera episode two came while photographing some other soup or stew-making process, this time with my own camera, and from a place of being deeply engrossed, I became aware of a burning plastic scent wafting through the kitchen.  Searching the source down, I discoverd I’d turned on the wrong burner, and edge of my camera was sitting on, and melting to, the heating empty burner I’d carelessly put it down beside when my hands were full.  Amazingly, the camera mostly survived this too, but is even less reliable with how it uses batteries now.  So - there are hazards as well to photo-documentation of a cooking process!

And, so, I find myself in need of simplicity and joy.  There is so much to navigate as the world tries to bring in its drama, darkness, depression, and neediness.  I take inspiration once again in the beautiful passage of Levin’s work, above, and its lesson: first he fears he’ll fail, fall behind others, and works in competition and strain.  But by the end of his work, all that slips away, and he is working in satisfaction in the work only, and enjoys the peace found there.

“Another row, and yet another row…”  and so we go on, into the next chapter.  Happy New Year, everyone.

Outside, the cold wind bites my face as I walk across the path next to our newest field, the one we covered with sheep manure compost a month ago, and then covered again in raked leaves.  I can feel my cheeks and nose getting red, and my fingers are wanting mittens instead of these ragged work gloves.  I’ve only been outside 10 or 15 minutes.

Twice a day I come out to open and close the chickens, and stay outside for a bit of chores each time.  Tonight it was restocking one of the woodpiles nearest the house, and gathering some wood chip snacks for the stove.

It’s not that cold tonight, about 20 degrees, but the wind is blowing hard out of the north.  I wear my coveralls and thick sweatshirt on top of a few layers underneath, doubled up gloves and a stocking cap.  The path is drifted over with blowing snow, but we’ve had so little snow (compared to the rest of the eastern US this year) that there’s only an inch or so covering this morning’s footprints - mine, and a small deer’s, and a polydactyl cat.

This is still new to me, this sense of being a farmer and not just playing at farming.  I’m outside working every day now, cold or rain or hot.  There’s always something to do, and always something to get out of hand if you don’t.  We have over a hundred creatures outdoors depending on us, so it’s not exactly a choice.  I lived fifty years as a city boy, and now I’m a farmer, inside and out.

The outer part is this, the cold wind and chapped cheeks, the everyday get up and go do and be.  The inner part is… well, what is it?  How do I explain the city-to-farm boy mental adjustment?  How do I convince someone that inside me there has always been a farm boy waiting to come out? Or is it something else?

I have journal entries from my teen years, places I kept lists of hopes and dreams for the future, visions of living off the land and living simply on less.  I wanted to grow my own food, I wrote, and chop wood.  I created these records apart from any attachment to any life partner plans… I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, this was something of my own imagination.  And it was imagination certainly, because I lived in an Ohio industrial city and was allergic to every variety of mammalian hair and avian feathers… I couldn’t sleep under wool or down, I couldn’t ride horseback without getting asthma and just forget about pets.  Just a fluffy dream that fit with my growing aspirations as a 70’s environmentalist mainly, and sounded like fun even if I had no more idea how to grow my own food or chop wood than I did to build an airplane.

I chose a different path.  Oh I picked geology as a college major to keep my butt outdoors, but after college I took urban jobs and rarely did field work at first.  Then to another city for my PhD, then to another university to teach, a city boy teaching geology in the city, with the occasional field trip to keep it real.  I taught environmental truths and sustainable dreams, and personally recycled more than the average urbanite, but I never came close to my earlier aspirations.  I had left childish things behind.

It’s dark now, and the chickens are roosting, the woodstove is near and I’m writing this for… myself.  Outside is a tiny farm that I know nearly every square foot of, and everyday I’m tromping across part of it.  It comforts me to walk in the cold and rain and heat each day, to feel in my bones instead of my brain how short the days are now, and how long they were six months ago.

I have chickens who know me and trust me, as well as a few who know me and don’t (it’s mutual).  I have cats who climb onto my shoulder and ride shotgun for every chore except chopping wood.  If the wood doesn’t get chopped, we’re cold.  If the chickens don’t get watered, they’ll die.  I have to go out, I have to live part of every day outside, working on the farm.

But I don’t.  I don’t have to.  I want to.  I have longed for this all my life.  At certain points in my urbanified life I tried to make more money per hour so that I could pay others at less money per hour to do some of my more mundane chores for me.  Now I rejoice in the opportunity to trudge through the blowing snow to feed chickens in an operation that barely breaks even, but makes us ever so happy.  The eggs are, of course, to die for.  And the joy of sharing those wonderful eggs with grateful others (at $4/dozen to cover our feed costs) is icing on the cake.

Outside, it’s cold and the wind is blowing - I can hear it right now.  Inside… inside me, I’m having my cake and eating it too.  I can’t wait to get outside in the cold and rain and heat every day.  I am thrilled that I have to plan my days to allow an hour before anything else to get those chickens out free ranging in the morning… it’s my childhood dream completely realized.  At one point I thought I’d have died if I had to live on a farm, what with my allergies and all.  At this point, I don’t know what happened to all those allergies.  I help drive horse teams for other farmers, stack hay bales in the mow, and live with cats and chickens.  I couldn’t be happier inside to be outside every day, and needed out there.

Yes, the wind makes my cheeks cold.  But that cold is all on the outside.  Inside I’m warmer on this winter farm than I ever thought I could be anywhere.  And it just keeps getting better.

Why I feelz lik howling? What es howling?

Winter is here.  Today is the solstice, and the full moon, and a lunar eclipse.  The moon came up a couple hours ago… here’s M. and Possum (the cat) pondering the ramifications. We’ll probably stay up late playing Dominion so we can bundle up and go out and howl for the 1:30am peak.

Over the past weeks of pre-winter, we’ve had hard freezes and only one snow.  There’ve been flurries, little ones, but while the southern midwest (and south!) got hit hard with ice and snow, we were only dusted with a dainty 2″ of snow, although it has been cold, barely into the 20s at the warmest these past many days.

Although not actually crinoids, I pretend they are.

My phone is always in my pocket when I go out to open up chickens (or shut them in at night) or split wood, or whatever.  So in the freezes, I snapped a morning shot of these ice dwellers in our flower rows in the front yard.  It’s hard to get a good focus on a gently waving crinoid calyx like this, but it obliged me.

Then on the path over to the East Flock, I crunched into a flock of tiny castles.

No one lives in this castle. I knocked, no answer.

These tiny dwellings are no less elaborate for their size than any human constructs… amazing things. Pine needles for scale.

Finally, after our 2″ of snow fell and sat for several days, just beyond the site of the ice castles I found the most amazing snowy Christmas trees.

Again, amazed that the phone camera can focus this close and catch the details… these crystals grew right on the snow in this sheltered place with morning-only sunshine.

Snowy little Christmas trees.

Breakfast here tends to be pretty local.  There are no packaged cereal boxes in our kitchen.

Veggie hash with eggs

There are bulk rolled oats and steelcut oats, but honestly oatmeal is not my favorite, and breakfast usually involves  other things.  In the summer, autumn, and early winter, very often we have some sort of a veggie hash with a couple of eggs.  Veggies are whatever is available right out of the garden, but often uses peppers, a cole crop such as broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, or kale, and a onion of some sort.  Cheese on top is nice.  Homegrown potatoes are frequently part of it, sometimes as hashbrowns, sometimes refried from leftover boiled potatoes, or chopped and broiled quickly in the oven.  Our brussels sprouts have come in heavily and nicely this time of year, and a typical breakfast side is a quick steam of a couple handfuls of halved brussels sprouts with butter and balsamic vinegar.  It’s easy to get enough greens every day when they are part of breakfast too.

We’ve been doing well keeping up with making yogurt.

It is so nice to have yogurt that minimizes contact with plastic.  Local raw milk that stores in a glass bottle, and a glass container for culturing and storing the yogurt.  I have a hard time looking at the yogurt aisle in grocery stores, and seeing what a healthy food has been reduced to, and what an impact on the environment its packaging is having.  There is no need, and it is so sad, to contemplate the waste of the individually packaged yogurts, and the crazy overpackaging of a few tablespoons of heavily sweetened yogurt to appeal to kids.  The yogurt we make at home is heavenly-tasting, high quality, and free of plastic and landfill dependency.  If we want it sweet, adding maple syrup and canned pears, plums, peaches, or frozen berries, or homemade jam does the trick, and tastes so much better than flavored packaged yogurt.  When we were in Canada, I found some good yogurt (or…yogourt!) that tasted like the yogurts in Germany.  I brought it home and cultured it and was able to keep the culture from that one package going for a long time, with delicious results.

Lacto-fermented red pepper pickle

I guess we don’t have much of the ordinary imported fruit either.  Bananas, citrus, etc, have become rare.  Berries and canned fruits are local, and berries almost invariably handpicked from the wild or a local farm, and frozen. This summer we had a bumper crop of gorgeous blackberries (blackberries, not black raspberries!) from a weedy patch of brambles about 50 feet from our backdoor, that yielded all we could eat fresh, and at least two quarts of frozen berries.  A local diet doesn’t have to be deficient on vitamin C and antioxidants, just because imported citrus is a treat, rather than a staple.

Another way to access Vitamin C is through lactofermentation of certain veggies.  One of our favorite lacto-fermented pickles uses a lot of red bell peppers - a great source of C.  I can understand how foreign it must seem to think of eating vegetable kraut with breakfast, for those whose breakfast is cereal.  But it is delicious with potatoes and eggs, and as convenient to quickly grab out of the refrigerator.  For me, it is as foreign now to imagine pouring out boxed cereal and putting processed milk from a plastic jug on it and eating that.

The thing is - everything tastes so good!  It’s not as though we are torturing ourselves through a breakfast of some weirdly home-fermented stuff combined with choking down our daily greens.  So often we look at each other and just say, “oh, THIS is soo good..”  It is a high-quality, low sugar, usually low-glutin, easily digestible, low on environmental impact, and hugely satisfying way to have breakfast.

That smorgasboard seems to sum up the week!   On our porch is a chicken in a cage, and two planters full of celery plants.  We butchered 17 meat chickens while enduring a communal cold, and something has been simmering on the stove almost all day every day.  I’ve had a bit of a break from work this week, and tried to use it for autumn catch-up, even while nursing a cold.

The young chicken on the porch in a cage has a broken leg. Total mystery how that came to be, she just turned up hopping on one foot with the other hanging, obviously broken.  Chickens are relentless at picking on someone who’s injured, and her companions turned bullies immediately.  She had to be separated from them to not be killed by pecking.  Between the options of putting her down, or going to the vet and ending up with a $500 chicken, I decided I couldn’t do either, and would try splinting her leg as best I could, and leave the rest up to her and the higher powers.  She has a break right in or above the equivalent of the ankle on a chicken.  She’s been doing great in her little homemade cast for the past week -immobilization made it comfortable, and she rests and eats and seems to be healing.  She is one of our new Aracauna pullets for next years’ laying flock; I was not happy about this damage.

On one particularly cold clammy afternoon, I made myself go out even with a throbbing head and runny nose and dig the celery to save it from hard freezing.  We are not as advanced with hoophouses/winter shelters this year as I had hoped we’d be.  We have a wonderful harvest of celery… finally!  It puttered all through the hot dry summer, but has grown to loveliness now in this last cool but not cold 2 months.  I harvested down as much as I can keep in the refrigerator, dug about 15 of the best plants, and replanted them in planters to bring in under cover.  They will keep on producing useable celery for us for a little while.  You just can’t make really good soup without celery, and yet it is on the list of the most pesticide-poisoned veggies you can get (and not easy to wash or peel!).  It’s so nice to grow our own, but it takes some strategizing to have it available more than only 1/3 of the year.

We’re filling our freezer with 6-9 months supply of homegrown pastured chicken, and traded some of the chicken for half a grass-fed organic lamb raised a few miles away.  I’ve been making stocks from boiled bones, from some organic grassfed beef we had in the freezer, and now from the chicken bones.  It is amazing stuff - lovely color, tasty, so full of gelatin and chondroitin that it gels up strongly in the refrigerator.  Making really good soups while we have colds has been wonderful.  Here’s one that disappeared really quickly…it was soooo good:  That rich chicken broth, our own Snowcap beans, and our veggies, including onions, leeks, celery, wax beans, garlic, and kale.

When the stockpot hasn’t been occupied with broth and soup, I’ve made a batch of quince jelly, and one of Green Tomato Chutney.  The chutney turned out really spectacularly.  Green tomatoes, apple, quince, red bell pepper, hot pepper, onions all get chopped and simmered in a pot with raisins, mustard seed, curry powder, cinnamon, cardamon, allspice, and ginger, some sugar, and some vinegar.  I use maple sugar/turbinado/sorghum when I can.  Oh, it was delicious this time!