Creek in the snow

We had about 6-7 inches of snow last night. This afternoon, Katherine went for a walk with the camera. This is my favorite photo of the 75 that she took.

We should consider ourselves very lucky that we only have to walk out the door to see such beauty. And it is unspoiled by crowds and noise that one would find by visiting a natural tourist attraction. I question whether I should feel selfish for having so much beauty right here, just for us. I am willing to share though.

Wood stove update

The wood stove has been smokin' ever since I wrote about it three weeks ago. It's wonderful. My favorite thing is being able to stand next to it when I'm chilly.

The best part (not to be confused with my favorite thing) is that we have substantially reduced the amount of propane we are using. Woo hoo! When I'm home, the propane heat does not run at all because the wood stove can keep the house at 65 or warmer. We've gone two whole days in freezing temps without using the propane heat. In fact, the second floor gets up to 69 or 70. At first we assumed it was because heat rises, but I think a huge contributor is the chimney that runs through our closet. It's a big radiant heater, of course. We were going to wall it in because it's not pretty, but we are trying to think "outside the box" and figure out how to make it more attractive without losing that heat.

What's for dinner? Cloned steak!

Looks like the FDA is really going to let cloned meat into the food supply without any labeling requirements, as well as milk from cloned animals. This sounds crazy, but it's true.According to one story, there are already 570 cloned animals in the United States. I'm glad I haven't eaten any commercially produced meat in the last 19 years. Who knows what is already in meat that we don't know about -- in addition to all the antibiotics and growth hormones that we do know about. It amazes me that we're supposed to trust the government to monitor the safety of our food when they claim that things like BHA, BHT, pesticide residues, growth hormones, and antibiotics are ALL safe! Yet, they fight tooth and nail to keep little farmers from selling raw milk or farmstead cheese or animals butchered on the farm. So, if you live in the city and eat only FDA-approved foods, it looks like you'll be having genetically modified tomatoes in your salad, cloned steak laced with growth hormones and antibiotics, along with your pesticide-laden potatoes. Yum! And it's all safe and nutritious!

Adventures with sheep and goats

On January 8, Sherri gave birth to quadruplet doelings! She has had triplets every year (four years running), so the quads were unexpected. They were also quite large for quads. The smallest was 2 pounds, 14 ounces, and she was not standing or nursing after an hour, so we brought her inside to bottle feed. Her sisters are growing so fast, but she is staying small and runty. That's a picture of a four-day-old kid nursing.

Yesterday, our sheep disappeared. Shortly before sundown, someone called to say the sheep were down the road. When we got there, they had just run into the timber. The dog, who is still green at only 10 months of age, ran straight at them, which just drove them farther into the woods. Then we couldn't find his "off" switch. But as it got darker, the sheep just would not move. Mike caught one and carried her out of the woods, which was about half a mile. We decided to leave everyone else and wait until dawn.

This morning, four of us went out there, armed with corn chips, crackers, and loose sheep minerals. As soon as they saw us, they came running toward us, then they suddenly took a sharp left turn. Thankfully, that was towards home. We couldn't keep up with them though. They ran all the way home! Very strange!

As I was tromping through a frozen, crunchy corn field and then down a deserted country road as the sun started gleaming over the horizon, it reminded me of the Army commercial they had on television about a decade ago. These men get out of bed in the dark, then start jumping out of helicopters, shooting, blowing things up, and then they're sitting around a campfire drinking coffee as the sun comes up. The voice-over says that in the Army, you'll do more before dawn than most people do all day. I guess that homesteaders don't count.

Providing our own heat

In December, we were running out of propane, so Mike called the gas company and left a message on Friday. No response. He called again on Monday, then Wednesday. Finally he spoke to someone who told him gas would be delivered in a day or two. That adds up to Friday, but by 5:00 Friday, we had not received a delivery. He called again and was routed to the emergency number, where he was told that if we wanted a weekend delivery, we'd have to pay an additional $212. I was furious. No, we would not be ripped off by the gas company, even if it meant we might lose heat over the weekend. We have six-inch exterior walls with excellent insulation, and the in-floor heating actually emits warmth for quite a period of time even after the gas turns off.

We came up with a plan. We need gas to heat water, which also heats our floor -- and our house. We also have a gas stove in the house, but in the barn, we have an electric stove. We also have an electric griddle, a crock pot, and a bread maker. We decided to do most of our cooking with the electric appliances -- pancakes on the griddle for breakfast, soup in the crock pot for lunch with bread from the breadmaker, and then for dinner we'd use the electric stove in the barn. We turned down the thermostats to 65 degrees and decided not to shower all weekend or use hot water in any other way.

By the end of the weekend, I realized that 65 degrees really is not that uncomfortable when one is wearing three layers (undershirt, turtle neck, and sweater), and in fact, when I was cleaning house, I got hot and had to take off the sweater. By the time the gas had been delivered on Monday, I had decided only to raise the temperature in the bedrooms to 68 degrees at night and 67 during the day. I saw no reason to raise the first floor temperature any higher than 65.

Then, I saw the bill. They had charged us $3.44 a gallon for the propane. My first reaction was to panic and think about how we would never be able to continue to use propane as a source of fuel if the price was that high. I didn't know what we had paid last time the tank was filled, but I knew that it was under $1 a gallon five years ago. I checked prices on the Internet, and the national average was a dollar less than we had been billed. When we called the propane company again, we discovered that we had been overcharged -- we should have been billed $2.11 per gallon. We were told that our bill would be adjusted, but this did not make us feel much better about the situation. If they wanted to charge us $3.44 per gallon, they could. And at some point, they will. Even with our super-insulated home and 95% efficient gas water heater, it will be too expensive to use propane.

We have 32 acres of mostly wooded property, and every year at least a couple of trees are blown down in a storm or fall down because of beavers chewing up their trunks. We have at least one living tree with solid wood go down every year. Last year, a huge tree fell down because it was growing on the bank of the creek, and erosion caused too much of the roots to become exposed, and the tree just fell down. We have a truly unlimited supply of free heating fuel. Using wood from your own property is also carbon neutral, so it's better for the environment. Although burning wood does emit greenhouse gases, the growing trees have been reducing them. Bringing the wood to our house uses zero fossil fuels, which emits zero greenhouse gases. And if we use wood to heat, we won't be using propane, which has to be trucked in to our house after it has been refined somewhere and brought in from some field possibly thousands of miles away.

As I type, Mike is installing a wood stove. The best thing about a wood stove is that we will always have wood. Mother Nature won't suddenly raise the price to something we can't afford. There are no weekend delivery charges. Chopping wood is great exercise. With our cast iron cookware, we'll even be able to use it for cooking in the winter.

A Christmas to remember

No, I didn't receive some longed-for gift. We did not have a visit from some long-lost relative. We did not even have a meal that was particularly memorable. We did have a priceless experience, although less than joyous. We had our first middle-of-the-night kidding emergency.

The goat's pelvis was so tiny, we couldn't get the kid out, so we took her to the vet, expecting a c-section. He used to raise pygmies, however, so he had lots of personal experience with such problems. He tied ropes to the kid's front legs, and Katherine and I held Giselle and braced ourselves on the opposite side of the table. At times, my brain screamed inside my head, "Just cut her open already! Do the damn c-section!" But I kept reminding myself that he used to raise pygmies and had probably done this lots of times. Finally, after 15 minutes of pulling, a little buck emerged, looking half dead. Katherine squealed with excitement, but as the vet briskly rubbed the kid, he said, "He still might not make it," and then he handed the kid to Katherine. After a few minutes, the limp kid gained some muscle control and was able to hold his tongue in his mouth. We allowed ourselves to get hopeful.

Giselle wanted nothing to do with him. She would not look at him, much less sniff him or lick him like a normal mama goat. When I tried to latch him on to nurse, she acted as if nothing were happening to her udder. Her baby did not exist. So, we have a house goat. He is our first boy in the house, and Katherine is trying to litter box train him. We've trained previous goats to towels, but then realized that they can't tell the difference between a towel and a carpet. Oops. We're hoping this will work better.

After considering St. Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Rudolph, we finally settled on Nick as the kid's name. Since his mama had such a hard time kidding, he will definitely be castrated. We don't want to pass along those genes. We certainly don't need any more pet goats, but it's going to be hard to let this little boy go!

Agritourism vs. working on the farm

Funny how I was just talking about requiring turkey customers to spend a day on our farm, and today I read this in the NY Times: Down on the Farm With Your Sleeves Rolled Up, an article about agritourism, where farms charge people to visit and sometimes work.

I really don't like the idea of agritourism, as I think people visiting farms for sleigh rides completely miss the point that most people need to understand -- it takes work to grow food in a way that is sustainable. I really don't think anyone learns much of importance by taking a sleigh ride in the country or feeding a baby animal for 10 minutes. In some ways it might even do more harm than good. Sleigh rides and baby animals are fun, and while that is part of farm life, it's only one tiny segment of it. When that is the only thing that people see, they get the idea that farm life is this Utopian existence. It's not. I love living out here, but not because it's perfect. Like Thoreau, I appreciate all parts of it, the joyful, the confusing, and the devastating. Learning to live with nature is a constant learning experience. One never knows all the answers, and each new day is filled with opportunities and surprises, some wonderful and some not.

Little of that knowledge is obtained in the few minutes it takes to feed a baby animal, and none of it during a sleigh ride. You might begin to get an appreciation of it in a day, but to really understand farm life, it would take at least a few days or a week. And it's not just any week. We're hibernating during winter, the garden is frozen over, and the animals are just hanging out too. There are some days in spring where I feel like I've lived a month in 12 hours. Summer is not too crazy, but as fall draws near, we're kicking into high gear again, trying to prepare for winter. Maybe this is why some people say I should write a book. I suppose this is my passion -- I really want people to understand where their food comes from.

An Antiquity Oaks video

My busiest day of the year

Yesterday was exhausting. I woke up at 3 a.m. after only four hours of broken sleep. By 4:10 we were driving down the road towards Arthur, where we get our turkeys processed. We pulled into the parking lot at 6:35 and waited almost two hours to start unloading. We had the misfortune to arrive after a couple of trailers that had a few hundred turkeys in them. As we were waiting, I said to Katherine, "You know, I've never seen a bird get loose here." Then I immediately knocked on something I thought was wood.

When it was our turn, Katherine caught the turkeys, handed them to me, and then I handed them to the man who was responsible for hanging them upside-down by their feet on an overhead conveyor system. Another man quickly cut their throats, and within seconds, they were dead. It is probably a much better end than the turkeys at home will have, and it was something that I thought about yesterday. We kept two turkey hens here -- we still have a gobbler from last year -- hoping they'll hatch poults next year. But we've also been having coyote problems, and dieing in the jaws of a coyote is not a pleasant way to go.

We had almost finished unloading. Only two turkeys remained, and as Katherine tried to grab one, the other decided to make a break for it. She flew right past me. I tried to grab her, but she slipped through my fingers and started to fly. The first thought that flew through my head was, "Damn heritage turkeys!" and I realized that the reason none of the trailers full of turkeys ever have any escapees is because they're all broad-breasted mutants who can't fly! Lucky for us, she landed between a car and a wall, so she was trapped. A man grabbed her before she realized she could have run under the car, and she is now in the refrigerator.

After the turkeys were unloaded, we went to breakfast and then shopping at Beachy Bulk Foods and Country Salvage. I love buying kitchen equipment down there because unlike most Americans, the Amish cook at home, and not being wealthy, they buy good-quality, practical kitchen supplies. It is the best place to buy knives -- the only place I've seen that sells something called a "butcher knife." I bought several knives and a diamond knife sharpener, as well as a variety of flours and grains not available at the average supermarket.

We arrived back home at 4:30, which is when the real work begins for me, if you don't count the five hours of driving as work. Katherine called out the weights of the individual turkeys as I wrote them on a pad of paper. Then I came inside and started matching them up with the weights on the reservations. I also realized that we didn't have enough room in the refrigerators for the turkeys, so we had to make room for them. That meant taking out a lot of milk and making cheese! I poured milk into a pot on the stove to be pasteurized while I sent out emails to all the turkey customers, giving them their weights, balance due, and expected time of delivery on Wednesday. Then I went back into the kitchen -- it was past 10 p.m. by then -- to make cheese.

I'm glad I only have one day like this once a year. We did have a few moments of insanity as we were trying to get all the turkeys into the refrigerators, and oddly enough, it was my oldest daughter who was swearing off turkeys next year, rather than me. The good news is that everyone is happy with their turkeys, even though some are as much as 3-4 pounds less than what they'd requested originally. I do think I'll raise turkeys again next year, although I am contemplating ways to make it less crazy. Probably the biggest factor in "craziness" is having the turkeys processed just before Thanksgiving. So I am considering a processing date well in advance of the holiday. That would mean the turkeys would be frozen, but it would also mean a much calmer process for me.

Thanksgiving madness

It's that time of year again -- the time when I start thinking that we really should not be selling our meat. If you've been reading this blog in past Novembers, you might remember that I get a little crazy this time of year. The insanity is contagious and is transmitted through emails and phone calls. The disease starts with the turkey customers, and after a few emails and phone calls, I start to lose it and swear never again to sell turkeys for Thanksgiving.

The emails started last week -- people who wanted to make sure their turkey was still coming next week. It's not so bad when the emails are from people who actually sent in their deposit and reservation form, but one particular man had not done that. Let's call him Homer. He's been a thorn in my side for two or three years now. He's a Chicago lawyer, and if I had to guess, I'd assume he's the ambulance-chasing variety, rather than the honorable type. Homer sends me an email asking when his turkey would be delivered. I email him back saying that we don't have a reservation or deposit from him. He emails me saying that he is certain he reserved a turkey last year right after Thanksgiving. I check my email log, and sure enough, there is an email from Homer saying how great the turkey was, and he'd be getting another one next year. I email him back to say, "Sorry but we can't hold turkeys based on such emails. We need the reservation form and the deposit." I also explain about how we've only got a couple turkeys left, but apparently I wasn't clear on the fact that they would be small. He writes back thanking me for squeezing him in and telling me that 13 pounds would be perfect. [cue primal scream]

It's interesting how people want humanely-raised meat from small, local farms, but they don't want to deal with the reality of that choice. They are seriously stuck in the supermarket mindset. "Yes, I'd like a 14.5 pound turkey." We can't do that! I wrote Homer another email being as blunt as I possibly could. We have only 27 turkeys, and they only grow as big as they grow. Their weights fit a bell curve perfectly, and we take reservations based on that. Most people want big turkeys, so if you contact me in November, you're getting something small -- if anything at all. We can't "squeeze in" another order. I can't make a 13-pound turkey appear out of nowhere!

Monday is D-day for the turkeys. I'll be getting up before dawn to make the drive to the turkey processor. In spite of the early rising, it is usually a fun day for me. The processor is in Amish country, so I spend the day visiting the Amish shops and eating at Amish restaurants. It's a long day though, and we don't get home until after dark. Then I have to write down the weights of all the turkeys and match them to the reservations, essentially putting a customer's name to every turkey. Then I email everyone with the exact weight of their turkey, balance due, and the time my husband will be delivering the turkeys. It winds up being an 18-20 hour day. If that is followed by angry or hysterical phone calls from people who are upset that their turkey isn't big enough, well ... you can see where I start to go into hermit mode and declare that we'll just be raising turkeys for ourselves in the future.

On the other hand, when I read books like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle or Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, it reminds me that we are doing something important. Still, I feel like people should be more involved in where their food comes from. Every now and then I get these crazy ideas -- like only selling to people who have actually come out here and spent a day on the farm, seeing what we do and maybe even helping us for the day. I can hear the screams now, "But I don't have time!" The average American watches 28 hours of television a week, yet they don't have time to plant a garden, shop at a farmer's market, or visit a local farm to see how their food is grown. More than 60% of Americans are overweight, but they'd rather go to a gym to work out so they can continue watching television and eating processed foods.

I suppose some people might think we're just trying to get free labor, but having a green city slicker out here would not be beneficial to us, since we'd spend more time explaining how to do something than they would actually spend working. There are farms where they actually charge people for such an experience. As for me, I just want people to understand where their food comes from. I want them to understand that we can't grow a turkey to an exact size. We can't always stop the coyotes from coming into our pasture and eating our lambs or chickens. When you want animals naturally grown, you cannot control everything. We do not grow animals under scientifically-controlled conditions, which means everything -- weather, predators, parasites -- can affect them. Is this so crazy?