Sheep Surprise

Because the sheep breeder lives only a half hour or so from Costco, I decided to make a large loop, hitting the organic feed store for sheep minerals, then Costco for basic necessities (we’ve been going through a pound of butter a day, and a gallon of olive oil in two weeks, so I need reasonably priced fats, as well as eggs, cheese, jam, and such). Then we’d see the sheep, drive on into Charlottesville for a Chipotle dinner, a stop at Whole Foods (for condiments, potatoes, and noodles, primarily), and on home again.

We left for this trip well supplied with new-to-us Adventures in Odyssey tapes, recorded off the radio when my siblings and I were young. I’m surprised at how well I remember them—I can quote lines verbatim. It’s a bit eerie that I remember even the proper inflection, fifteen years later!

The trip went according to plan, though all took a bit longer than I expected. We left just before noon and got home after 9pm. The Lord averted bowel accidents twice, just barely. Overall, taking five children shopping went more smoothly than I feared, and we received the regular compliments at Costco and disdainful glances from the shoppers at Whole Foods (the employees tend to be cheerful and courteous).

And the sheep? I drove up to the small farm completely infatuated with the photos I had seen. I took one look and my infatuation died entirely. I wasn’t prepared for that. I was expecting to be so bowled over by, well, puppy love that I was compelled to purchase a couple of sheep immediately, perhaps even driving away with them on top of my Costco goods. (I remember the only time I had such a complete attachment immediately with an animal: when we met our first dog, Diamond, as a puppy. The entire family fell in love at first sight. But then, baby Sheltie puppies are extremely cute.)

What caused the sudden death of my infatuation? I can’t tell for sure. Maybe a field of small sheep look just like sheep; there’s no perspective on the true size of a 24-inch ewe when all the ewes are 24-inches. And while the faces were sweet, they didn’t compel kisses. Or maybe I was just getting grumpy and tired? In any case, the death of the infatuation relieved me. I don’t usually wander around besotted, and am thankful that my brain returned to its usual practicality.

Furthermore, I was expecting them to run to greet their young owners. Instead, the sheep behaved like sheep, moving away from approaching strangers. We all went into the little sheep shed, where all the children and we two adults got to pet them and feed them. Once enclosed, they were remarkably relaxed and friendly. They calmly milled around, allowing us to stroke their heads and ears, their noses and bodies. But they weren’t overly affectionate or companionable the way a puppy would be.

And we don’t have a sheep pen yet, and since we have continued to move our sheep several times a week, a pen large enough and sturdy enough to hold sheep would be difficult (heavy!) to move around.

I had hoped the children would be overcome with enthusiasm for these animals. They enjoyed meeting the sheep, but the allure of the swing set and trampoline was even greater than that of the small sheep. So that “reason for buying” also didn’t pan out the way I had hoped.

No infatuation; no puppy-like companionship; no children begging, “Can we get one, Mommy, please?”—I left without committing to purchase.

But in our two hours there, I found new reasons to want to buy. Perhaps mostly because I loved the owner. Michelle Cude, a professor at James Madison University, adopted two girls as a single mom, and purchased the small farm in rural Virginia. She’s a beautiful believer, and has only beautiful animals: a collie and a great Pyrenees dogs; a Himalayan cat (and I got to see one of the three-week old kittens—incredible). And the seven horses they board. As she enters the final two years before getting tenure, she needs to “publish or perish,” and her parents are trying to make her cut back. “The sheep must go!” they told her, at least for the next two years.

She has about six sheep that must go. I had expected to buy perhaps two. I came away wondering if I should buy the whole flock. The economics, she admitted, are more hobby than profitable, more for the love than the money.

But my initial reason for purchasing these small sheep, to clean up the floor of an orchard, still stands. And seeing that eight sheep run year-round on less than a half acre makes me think that a small flock in a small orchard makes sense. My original vision of little fruit trees and little sheep remains.

When I left, I did not know what was in my heart to do. When I talked to Phil, I still did not know what was in my heart to do. But I think now, after several hours sleep and reflection, we should buy the flock.

Pancake Patch

I am not sure where today went. Some days we get so much done, it amazes even me. Some days, like today, zip past without much to hold on to. Both Phil and I spend much time in research: what kind of hydrants do we want to come off the pump? (A hydrant is like a spigot. We plan to have a hydrant at the well, another at the barn, one across the driveway at the top of our future orchard, and a fourth midway down our clearing.) Where can we buy such a hydrant? Where is a mixing bowl large enough to hold sourdough starter for seven people?

Looking out the window this morning at the patch the pigs turned over, I wondered if I could yet sow it to spelt (which is a relation to wheat, and, thus, an over-wintered crop). I got out my incredibly informative Small-Scale Grain Raising book, and read up on grain. Although wheat should probably be sown in mid-September, author Gene Logsdon said that he has seen wheat sown as late as November 5 that still produces a moderate harvest. So I took perhaps 7 pounds of spelt (all that remains of my first 5-gallon/42 pound bucket of spelt—which I opened around the time Abigail came!), put it in my broadcaster, and broadcast the land. I probably should have “cultipacked” it, which means, rolled over it to press the seeds into the ground, but I don’t own a cultipacker, and I have other responsibilities. If nothing comes up, or the stand isn’t very good, I’ll convert it to vegetable garden or something, and not be disappointed.

But I think it fun that I MIGHT have a pancake patch next year.

I was able to sit through all of Bible study tonight. We’ve made it through the end of Luke 9, where Jesus talks about the cost of following him with three people. In summary, what he says is, you can’t hold on to the things of this world and still follow me. I pray that I would hold the things of this world lightly.

We Move Animals with No Drama Whatsoever

Phil awoke today determined to move the pigs. After about a month in the patch near the trailer, with almost no supplemental feed (well, it SEEMS like no supplemental feed, but as I think about it, it has actually been about 100 pounds, mostly in the first week), their patch of ground is thoroughly cleared. The two photos below show the actual lines around their pen: the turned over, bare soil is where they lived; the untouched soil was just on the other side of their electric line.





Thankfully, this time Phil didn’t give himself a concussion driving T-posts. It took much of the morning to string the wire, and it wasn’t without its stress (when we turned off the charger to move it to the new enclosure, I noticed the pigs eyeing the fence with greater-than-normal curiosity. But aside from the panic that the pigs might get out, so strong that I wanted to vomit, the situation was never out of hand. I carried a bucket of slops from one pen to the next; the pigs followed faithfully; as we worked to give the line a final unexpected tightening, the pigs happily rooted around in their new location, and then even more happily ate at the feeder until thoroughly gorged (and now we’ve fed them 150 pounds).

What a difference from a month ago, when they were stressed, confused, had no idea who their owners were, and had no idea about the electric fence. Yay!

Phil and I cleaned up the pen a little more once the pigs were gone: he scythed the little brush remaining; I removed some of the larger canes and sticks. Then he seeded the area to clover, which is the only cover crop seed we have.



Next spring, I plan to use that area as my garden. Growing up, Butch had a 1 ½ acre garden that provided the family their food. That’s really, REALLY big, compared to what I’ve had in the past.

The older boys helped Phil today. They pulled T-posts, working together with the heavy puller.





They helped him set up the new pen for the sheep and goats. And again, after the A’s were in bed, I read to the older boys from our Robin Hood book. This time we read 20 pages, and it took almost two hours. Jadon confessed (adorably) that “I tried to read the first chapter again, but it’s easier when you explain it.” Ah, yeah.

In two days, we’re going to look at Olde English Babydoll Southdown Sheep. I read about them in a recent Acres USA magazine article, and fell completely, besottedly in love. Besides having cashmere quality wool, they are teeny, small enough to weed a vineyard or orchard (because they can’t reach the fruit), and, apparently, quite friendly (as in, you can hold them, I think!). Imagine having little teddy bear faced balls of fluff grazing among the apple trees. Oh, I can hardly stand it!

Rationally, though, I’m not certain that quality breeding stock of such a trendy animal is in the best interest of the farm—but I am going to find out—on Friday!

Finally, just an FYI that I’ve been meaning to include: I was reading that elderberry is good for fighting H1N1. We took Berry Well with elderberry when Abigail first came, after having been exposed to the flu, and none of us got it. I’d highly recommend the stuff: tastes great, from a good Christian family business.

"Bless Abigail" Day

Tuesday was “Bless Abigail” day. In the morning, my mother sent a box with a babydoll in it, and several little outfits. Abigail was thrilled to have a babydoll, and figured out which outfit went with which task: one was a swimsuit (with pants to keep the baby’s legs warm); one a gown for the ball; one a dress for everyday; one pajamas; one a romper. It makes me smile to see the bald baby dressed up for a ball, but that is imagination at its finest, I guess.

Our dear neighbor Butch returned Monday night from his six week tour of the great National Parks, traveling from North Dakota to Utah to Texas. (He sent two postcards “To Isaiah and His Family” during his travels.) He came by almost immediately, giving Isaiah and Abigail a ride on his John Deere Gator, to their great delight. We talked at length (we’ve both done a lot since last seeing each other), and when Phil came home from the errands he was running, he talked to Butch, then went to help Butch move some furniture, and got a driving tour of the land, and talked on until dinnertime!

We are so thankful to have such good neighbors. Butch made his money in construction, and he has lived here long enough to have made mistakes and had successes (his third time building a bridge over Hog Creek has been the bridge that’s survived).

Abigail’s final blessing of the day was from the box of “dress up” (Halloween) clothes from Phil’s mom. She sent Abigail a pink princess dress, complete with tiara, clip-on earrings, necklace, rings, and magic wand/sceptre. That was a lot of bling, and Abigail enjoyed it thoroughly. Pink in the country gets dirty awfully quickly, but she wore her pink proudly, and since the late afternoon brought showers, her dress stayed clean, as we all stayed in the trailer.



After the As (Abraham and Abigail) went to bed, I decided to try Robin McKinley’s Outlaws of Sherwood with the boys. The first 12 pages took us about an hour to read, between the small type and the vocabulary definitions (which I thankfully know and don’t have to look up, but my goodness, what a vocabulary that woman has!) and the explanations for the turns of phrases. But the boys want to keep reading. We’ll see.

Routine and Rambling

As the basic necessities of life are more-or-less under control, we are trying to get into something of a routine. Schooling has been hit-or-miss since moving here, though we read enough all the time that Jadon and Isaiah are working through Sonlight Core 2, having read all the previous Cores, some more than once. But it felt good on Monday, for the first time in a month, to read history and science, to learn and discuss for a few hours.

That evening, we read the entire book of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, with Phil listening in. We laughed and enjoyed it, even though it’s not quite the right season.

Phil worked on Monday, finding files, getting his office set up in the office trailer.

He found two more dead chicks, so we are down to 49 Rhode Island Reds, and 1 exotic. He strung an extra light, hoping that the extra warmth would be enough to prevent further loss. Thus far, it has. I was encouraged to glance through Joel Salatin’s Pastured Poultry Profits and see that he says that a loss of 1-2% in the first week is normal; we’re not too far off that, especially with the chicks being stressed with no heat lamp for several hours the day before.

On Monday afternoon, Phil said, “I think I’m going to hike to the other side of the creek.” So we all went along, taking a slightly different route than usual. The 40-ish acres besides the clearing is much a mystery to me; we found little spits of land I do not remember seeing. Our land is not a continuous slope; it has gradual slopes, with some steep drop-offs, with bottom land in the flood zone by Hog Creek, which bisects our long rectangle. I was thrilled to see how much mostly-flat land we have: there is plenty for paddocks, plenty for expansion for more sheep or cows. And having steep slopes of hardwoods between future paddocks wonderful, too—these “buffers,” as they are called, support biodiversity, among other benefits that I have read about and subsequently forgotten.



The woods were surreal—beautiful.


Many of the leaves have fallen, now that we’ve had two frosts, but the yellows that remain, against the pale woods; glorious.

And so easy to walk, now that the underbrush is denuded; so easy to see, with the thick layer of leaf carpet underfoot, rather than obscuring our vision hanging on the trees.

The children joyfully ran on the hilltops, and all was most excellent.


Then Abraham was stung by a wasp. While he was wailing, Jadon came charging towards us, face contorted, shirt pulled up off his skinny back. A wasp was still on his back, so Phil flicked it off with his hat. Jadon had a swelling the size of a my finger, and inflamed skin the size of a teacup top, and he wailed for, perhaps, the next half hour. Then Phil found a feather and passed it to Abraham. Other children-who-shall-remain-nameless tried to entice, threaten, trade, or otherwise acquire said feather, which further disturbed the peace.

Between Jadon’s whimperings and the feather disputes, the second half of the walk was more clamorous than the first. Such is life.

It was almost exactly two years ago that we first walked the land (October 22, 2007); we had three children then. What a difference two years makes!

Animal Updates

The whole barn-kitchen (note the chick light at the very back)


Neighbor dog Neeta entered our barn, with intent to kill (again). We tied her up almost all day, but when we released her, she headed straight for our barn. Phil took the BB gun and pegged her. Better a BB than a bullet. She hasn’t been back since. Dennis Bessette remembered that the BB treatment had worked for him one time; the other eleven times, he’s shot the neighbor dogs (or his own, if they mess with his chickens). That’s still hard for us city folk to swallow, but I have little doubt that, should I come across a blood-smeared dog in my barn, I would be angry enough to protect my own.

Can’t do it in cold blood, preemptively, though.

I think the keet that escaped injured/strained itself. Since Friday morning, one keet has been sluggish, able to move, but not quite able to keep up with the rest. And now with the chicken wire in the barn, I think many of the rest of the keets may be not long for this world—they are too curious, and too dumb.

Death is always possible in the country. We had to turn the power off for what ended up being several hours. Phil had trenched the driveway in order to bury the internet line, and to rebury/redo the electric lines to the office and barn (and, I think, the house, too). During those several hours, the chicks’ heat lamp was off. It was a pleasant weather day, but in the afternoon, one chick grew still and gradually expired. (It may have been more humane to kill it quickly, but it is WAY too hard to kill a chick. No way. An hours long, natural death is what this chick had to have.) Thankfully, it was only one, and who knows if it was just shock? Hopefully so!

I gave up on the bread machine. Phil found my KitchenAid stand mixer, and with my mill, my new convection toaster oven that holds TWO bread loaves at a time, I can pump out perfect loaves in little time. We ate four loaves yesterday and four loaves today, so it is good that I can bake two at a time. It struck me: I wanted God to make the bread machine work, when, really, what I needed was my daily bread. The bread machine was not the best mechanism to provide the daily bread (even running every minute, it was a challenge to get three loaves a day); now I have my daily bread, and God has answered that prayer.



It is a wonderful treat to stand in my barn-kitchen, mill my flour, then watch the KitchenAid knead the dough. There are definite benefits to being mechanized! And then I can toast the bread in the trailer. Yum!

And sometimes the free-roaming keets come and stand right under my stove. That's not something that happens to just anyone!



Our fields have a lovely green sheen now. Not a green blanket, but a sheen. They are sparsely covered with a thin layer of oats, about 3” tall. We have taken the sheep and goats through the worst of the pasture, where we moved them every two days because there was so little forage. Now they are coming into the slightly better pasture, where they find enough to eat for about five days. We moved them today and rejoiced to see them head for our new oats. We planted those seeds! They were enjoying the fruit of our efforts! And how great to know that, even if the above-ground oats are clipped off, their roots match the above-ground growth, so there is new organic matter growing underfoot.

Pasture farming is fun!

Our pigs are growing on me (heh heh heh). I don’t think they are much bigger, really, but they are doing a fantastic job turning over our soil. Their role in preparing the garden just upslope from our trailer is almost done. We had intermittent rain all day yesterday, and Phil said that they are pugging a bit of the ground now (where the stock trample wet soil and eliminate spaces in the soil—not good). We will probably move them later this week, once we decide where they should go.

Anyway, the pigs must think they are starving. I got the slop bucket from their enclosure yesterday, and they immediately ran up behind me and trotted at my heels like well-trained puppies, squealing and grunting in ecstasy at the wonderful treat I would soon bring them. Food they wouldn’t have to forage for! What an amazing gift! I dump every scrap I won’t eat (and I find ways to eat most everything, from radish and turnip greens from the garden, to the bread crumbs I put into meatloaf); I also give them the dishwashing liquid, which has food traces and is not plentiful (since I have to haul the water to wash with, and must heat it on the stove, I dispense it frugally).

The pigs tussle a bit once the slop bucket goes down. All-pink Abby is the smarter of the two, and she usually wiles her front feet into the bucket, which effectively forces Alice out. Alice runs about squealing in distress, and tries to turn the bucket over with her snout. But Abby is bigger now, and holds her own. I can scratch them both on their wirey-haired backs while they eat the slops and they ignore me. Which is great progress, as they are no longer afraid, and is, in truth, ideal. I don’t think I want much pig-attention, and pig teeth, focused on me.

The last few mornings, Abigail has been waking at 7am. It is dark in the trailer still at 7am, and she is the first to wake, usually. She and I will get up and head outside to feed the sheep and goats and check on the chicks. She is a morning person, and once she is awake, she wants to get going! She is ready to talk and eat and LIVE! With the exception of Jadon, all us Lykoshes are NOT morning people. In courtesy to the three younger sons who are still sleeping, I take her out where she can talk away, and, mercifully, does not expect much of a response from me. (My mother recalls how I asked her once, while I was in high school, “Mom, why don’t you get up with me before I go to school?” Her answer: “The conversation isn’t good enough.”)

Peeps!

One of the best parts of farming, I think, is baby chicks. We raised two batches of broilers in suburban Boulder (did the processing ourselves, too!). We enjoyed those tasty birds, but we are ready for some layers. We enjoyed some egg layers in Boulder (courtesy of our friend Shelly), but we have never been fully egg self-sufficient. It is nothing for us to eat 18 eggs for breakfast (good protein lovers here), so, in hopes that we would have enough for both breakfast and any other meals, we opted to go with 50 egg layers. I don’t know that we will be able to eat 50 eggs every day, but I also rather doubt that all 50 will manage to live to adulthood.

If you need only one or two chicks, you can try your luck at the local feed store. The one in Highlands Ranch sold out quickly—sometimes within an hour or two of arrival, all the chicks would be gone.

If you have the space and inclination, though, you can order 25 chicks (or more) by mail. Delivered to your local post office, an incredibly small cheeping box is there for pick up. The post office calls as soon as the box arrives (7:30am the call came through today; in Boulder, it was 6am). How magical, to pick up a shoebox of little chicks, each about the size of a Peep you can buy at Easter, and carry the throbbing, noisy box to the car, and then to your home.

How can this transport be ethical? Incredibly, chicks can survive about 72 hours after hatching without food or water, living off the stores from their egg yolk. The minimum of 25 chicks ensures that their collective body heat will protect them in colder weather. (It doesn’t work perfectly, though; one of our batches of broilers arrived on a cold, wet day, and not all the chicks made it. THAT is depressing—dead baby chicks in a box. Ugh!) On arrival, they do eagerly drink and eat. I find it amazing, though, that such transport doesn’t (usually) harm them. (Imagine trying to transport a mammalian baby in such manner!)

I had the joyful task of picking up the chicks. This order was double any previous orders. Phil woke up mildly ill, without the line needed to electrify the heat lamp in the barn, so we set up a very temporary box in the bedroom.

The hatchery wisely sends a few extra chicks, in case any die in transit. Today, I unloaded 52 tiny Rhode Island Red chicks (guaranteed to be at least 90% female!), and one freebie “exotic,” which Isaiah promptly dubbed “Strangey.” I think Strangey will be Isaiah’s pet—all day long he begged to hold it.

I try to prevent eager children from holding chicks too much. They are SO tempting, little balls of fluff, so light and soft. While I’ve never had one die from a drop from child’s waist height, I have heard that such falls can damage the chick’s legs, if not kill them, but somehow a couple of the chicks always do fall.


Abigail, Isaiah, and Abraham held their chicks carefully; Jadon could hardly handle holding one—the teeny legs, trying to stand, tickled him and weirded him out. Jonadab went from chick to chick, with a huge grin on his face, trying to stroke, occasionally poking one in the eye.

Abigail and Isaiah soon tried to use their chicks to act out a story, at which point, they had to put theirs back. Abraham held on to his, seriously, calmly: “I like holding this chick, Mama!” After perhaps twenty minutes, I made him put the chick back, wet all over from the sweat of his nervous, earnest hands.

In order to gain space to sleep, Phil constructed a pen at the back of the barn: chicken wire, with cardboard inside it, pine shavings on the floor, heat lamp above.

Chicks need about 95 degree heat for the first week of their life; after that, the heat declines. It is fun to watch the signs whether a heat lamp is too low: all the chicks scatter to the edges of the box to avoid the glare. If the heat lamp is too high, the chicks huddle underneath. Adorable.

From previous experience, I know that the adorable stage won’t last long, a few days at most. Already, some of the chicks have little feathers starting on the ends of their wings. Within three or four weeks, the chicks will be awkward teenager birds, with motley feathers and scrawny bodies. Eventually they will be full-bodied, fully-feathered adults, majestic yet completely other, with cold, reptilian eyes.

If you are curious about chickens, or other fowl, I suggest you order a free copy of the Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog. Filled with amazing illustrations, I was very pleased with the quality of their birds, and the apparent vigor these chicks have. Enjoy!

Killer Dog

Wednesday notes: I am so thankful the chicks did not arrive today. I had my every-other-week work deadline, so worked well at home while the children played happily outside. Phil the electrician designed and installed an electrical panel in the barn so that, when the chicks arrive, they can have the heat lamp.

We went to the Bessettes for a few hours in the afternoon. Phil had some questions about how to design a water system, so he looked at their setup. He asks me questions at times about electricity or water that are so far outside my comfort zone, I hope that by his asking, he is able to process and figure out the answer, since I feel incapable of giving helpful input.

In the last few days, we’ve had an explosion of strange ladybugs. They aren’t quite the bright red I’m used to, but more a russet color. Michelle said that they have an infestation every year after a strange weather pattern (like our frost nights and 80 degree days). She wonders if the helicopters Phil’s seen flying overhead drops them as a natural insecticide for bugs that kill trees.

If the government is “protecting” us and our forests, I’d prefer they use the ladybugs than a poisonous chemical, but I still think it’s a bit odd.

Thursday notes: Both Phil and I had our little disappointments today. On Tuesday, Phil went into Charlottesville to pick up some electrical line so he could get the barn wired. Neither of the two stores he went to had the right electrical line, but one ordered him some so he picked it up on Wednesday. Yesterday, though, he came down with a migraine (was the culprit the Thai green curry paste? Or Dennis’ bootleg Scotch?) Today, when he could walk around enough to lay the line, he realized that it was about 10 feet too short. He had measured it (obviously), but the extra feet on the front end and the back, buried to the depth it needed, was too much. Argh!

And the stores didn’t have any (again), so he’ll drive into Charlottesville for the third time tomorrow to pick it up.

I’m sure an aching head didn’t help him, but he managed to get a fair bit of digging done. He trenched around the barn, so if we get more deluge-type rains, the barn should stay dry. And he trenched under the barn, so when the electrical line comes in, he can lay it.

Unfortunately, the keets took the opportunity to explore the outside world. At eight weeks now, they are about the size of robins, and very curious. Phil said it was cute to see them pop out from under the barn wall: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I was a bit concerned, since we do have scavenger birds flying overhead, but I figured a hawk wouldn’t swoop down with the boys running around and Phil working right there.

Sadly, the neighbor’s dog Neeta decided to attack. Neeta has been a more-or-less fixture on our property, but I’m not surprised she grabbed a keet and went off running. Somehow Phil managed to nab four of the remaining five. But that fifth flew up on the roof of the trailer, from whence it cheeped most pathetically. And most foolishly: I could just imagine every hawk in the area listening to its little cries: “Come and eat me! Here I am! Alone and unprotected!”

I climbed onto the roof and gingerly made my way across its rusted surface. As I got close to the keet, it flew down and landed about 25 yards away in the woods. Isaiah then tried to corner it against the chicken net near the pig pen, but it squeezed through and flew under the trailer. I climbed down from the roof, and Isaiah returned from the woods. But together we couldn’t nab it: it flew back into the forest.

Thus went most of the afternoon: keet comes to pile of papers for recycling and hides underneath. (Maybe those papers will go to the dump, depending on whether we ever go to a recycling center. We have no trash pickup, let alone recycling service like we did in Boulder. To the casual observer, I suppose parts of our homestead look like a dump, with a separate garbage back for cans, glass bottles, and plastic numbers 1 and 2, as well as one for packing peanuts, several for actual trash, and a large pile of paper. It doesn’t look pretty, but it is environmentally friendly!) Next keet heads to a brush pile. Now keet wanders near the pigs. Now keet calls for his friends.

Finally, finally, Phil herded (in a very loose sense of the word) the fifth keet back into the barn. What a relief!

My disappointment came in food. I have been scrambling to figure out how to cook and bake with the tools at my current disposal (the loss of the oat press is keenly felt every day). I made a loaf of bread first thing in the morning, and it rose, perhaps, too well. Rather than a dense, sink your teeth into it loaf, the frothy center had a thick crust. But it was edible (indeed, we polished off the whole loaf for lunch). The second loaf, though, caught fire in the house, so our smoke alarm went off. It had risen so ridiculously much that one quarter of the loaf had ended up on the heating element. What?!

I tried a third time. It finished right before Bible study: another half-mixed, inedible mess. That was supposed to be either breakfast or a snack after Bible study. But instead, it was nothing, fit for the pigs. It made me cry, wondering how I was to feed my family tomorrow.

Then I realized I’ve been carrying the load of how to feed all these hungry mouths. In the same way that I “gave over” the bills to Phil this month (“gave over” in quotes because I still actually write the checks; I just gave him the responsibility, the potential for worry), I “gave over” the feeding of my family to God. He tells us to ask for our daily bread. My daily bread has been burning. I have done my very best to be the Proverbs 31 woman who looks to the ways of her household, and I feel like I have been thwarted every day.

Very well. I still intend to faithfully prepare food for my family to eat, but it is not my responsibility to make sure that the loaves cook correctly. That’s God’s responsibility. It was a weight off. I have never lacked for food before, and I trust that God isn’t going to start us lacking on October 23, 2009. (And please note that I am not meaning that we have no money or no foodstuffs. We have plenty of both; it is simply the actual preparation of said foodstuffs that has been abysmal the last week. But then, baked oatmeal and pizza aren’t really supposed to be cooked on the stovetop, so part of that is my complete inexperience in cooking in a new medium.)

I needed to water my garden. I may have mentioned that garlic isn’t supposed to get dried out (“even once will diminish yields”), and I didn’t water yesterday. Today the prospect of hauling water was too much, so I hooked a hose up to the well’s pressure tank, ran the hose down the hill to the garden, and turned it on. I immediately heard the water start to run, so I ran down the length of hose, and as I reached the end, I watched the water spurt out the end for the first time.

Turning on the faucet is such a simple thing, so simple I hadn’t really considered what an amazing gift it is. As I ran down the hill, chasing the first stream of water, tears came to my eyes: the first running water on our land! Phil came and joined me; he filled the buckets, and I poured them into the watering can (my Haws watering can has a very gentle “rose,” or head, that allows the water to fall almost like rain). We watered and watered, for probably fifteen minutes, rejoicing in the chance to really saturate the garden, really water the plants.

So there was bad and good today: bad that the keet was eaten; good that the other keet came back. Bad that the bread burned; good that I gave it to God. Bad that the line was too short; good that the water ran.

And in children notes, Isaiah, Abigail, and Abraham played most of the day up on the pulverized rock around the well. It’s their castle, and Isaiah is the king, Abigail the queen, and Abraham the guard. (When Jadon deigns to play with them, he’s the king’s best friend.) They came to dinner covered in blue grit, and very happy. I’m astonished that a flat bit of blue would fuel their imaginations so well, but they preferred playing to read-alouds today. That’s a day for the record books!

Running Water (Just About)

Phil installed a thermostat this morning, so our house will remain at a constant, comfortable temperature. The last two days have been sunny and hot (hot enough for short sleeves and shorts), while the nights freeze. I got the rest of the garlic in the ground, so all 6 ½ pounds are ready for winter.

The well guys unexpectedly showed up right before Phil left for some errands. So we have running water at the pump, but not through hoses or anything—Phil’s errands took long enough, he didn’t have much daylight when he got back.

We are getting 50 chicks at some point tomorrow through Saturday. I called today to try to get a better estimate, but, apparently, with 125,000 chicks hatching each week (!), it’s hard for them to pinpoint which chicks go out where, and then how the USPS will route them. So we live in expectation. And, now that Phil ran errands, we live in readiness, as he bought them feed and lodging today.

After my lovely, philosophical ramblings about the intersection of technology and man power, my oat press/mini grain mill stripped its gears today and quit working altogether. After only two months of use! Honestly, things made in China aren’t good, but this made in Italy product severely disappointed! I’m a bit concerned about how to make oatmeal or bread, with only whole grains. I could try the electric mill, and if I could find the Country Living Grain Mill (a hand-operated one that is supposed to be great), I will use that. Unfortunately, we’ve emptied all our storage and haven’t found it. God knows where it is; I pray he shows me.

Better Off?

Abigail wet in the middle of the night. (I hope that’s not embarrassing for her. I am fairly certain that’s a common childhood occurrence, and I believe that I was a bed-wetter myself.) None of my boys thus far have been bed-wetters, and I must have been in sound slumber, because I was completely discomfited when I awoke at 2:30am. Phil was the hero: he had heard her talking before she wet, so he was thinking a bit more clearly than I: he got up, found the light switch (after walking across the frigid floor--yuck!), and helped me locate her other set of pajamas. She had worked her way out of the sleeping bag, so we were okay there, but her mat was quite wet. I, again, had no helpful suggestions. Phil reminded me that we had another mat stored right below the bunks, that fit perfectly.

Country resourcefulness at its finest: wake up wet in the middle of the night? We can get you new clothes, new blankets, even a new mattress in five minutes or less.

When we awoke in the morning, we found frost on the ground. The thermometer at our door said 28 degrees. I was so incredibly thankful that breakfast was finished in the breadmaker, and I wouldn’t have to go outside for a few hours. (Phil, on the other hand, after researching white-tailed deer habits, went out early to try to get a deer. The neighbor’s dog Neeta followed him, though, so no deer came near.) The pigs cracked me up: we had tossed them large armfuls of spoiled hay, and they made themselves nests. They were so buried that I wondered if they had escaped, until I saw a little pink back, all that was visible of Abby the pig.

Here’s a funny thing. We found my longed-for mill yesterday, and I made a loaf of bread. Now, when I make loaves with the spelt I’ve ground by hand, the loaves came out perfectly. I figured they’d come out even better with machine-milled spelt. After all, the flour is so much finer, so much softer.

Not so. The first loaf didn’t even mix all the way. The pigs were happy, I suppose, with the inedible, somewhat raw mass of unappealing dough-and-flour that was left. Blech! I used a little less flour the second time, and the result was our breakfast: not quite fully cooked bread, that even the toaster could not make delicious (though it did make it edible).

These less-than-luscious loaves reminded me of a book I read some time ago: Better Off, by Eric Brende. The author, an MIT grad student, wondered whether technology actually makes our life “better off,” and lives for 18 months with an Amish-like community. Phil and I were astonished at his insights. One example from the book (not verbatim, as I’m not sure if our book is loaned out or packed): a man using a cross-cut saw says, “I can cut about the same amount now as I did when I used a chain saw. The muscle fatigue is different—with a chain saw, the vibrations and the noise exhausted me, and the fear of maiming was always in mind.”

When we visited the land last year, Phil tested this theory. At least for our little saplings, he found he MUCH preferred the hand tools. The chain saw spewed smoke that covered his arms, and his arms quickly got tired. The chainsaw couldn’t cut as close to the ground, either. A scythe and a handsaw worked much better. He was “better off” without the power tool.

Which brings me back to the mill. Yes, the actual milling process is a good deal faster with the electric mill. But in order to get the mill out, I have to leave the barn kitchen, go to the trailer and lift it down from the wardrobe, clear space on the dresser, mill with it, empty it, replace it on the shelf, and return to the kitchen. In the meantime, I’ve subjected my ears to the airplane-whine of the motor, and subjected my living space to the fine powdery dust (or at least the potential for it). And for a mediocre (at best) loaf of bread.

For the present, when I can only make one loaf at a time anyway, I’ll stick with the hand mill. When I have the ability to make bread in bulk, and I can cook it in an oven where I have control, I’ll probably return to the Nutrimill, which served me well in Boulder. (And, if you want an electric mill, I’d highly recommend it.) It could be even that when Phil goes to cut down larger trees, the crosscut saw is too exhausting.

But I think it’s an interesting question to keep in mind, not to assume that technology makes life better.

(Spoiler for the book: after eighteen months, Eric and his wife decide that they would prefer to move back to the city. So they do, with some modifications. If I remember correctly, they operate a bed and breakfast in St. Louis, where they wash the sheets by hand and live off of solar power. So they end up with more technology than they had during their grand experiment, but significantly less than a normal American. That’s their way of being better off.)

My extra three pounds of garlic arrived today. I got started planting it, but have a ways to go. The frost completely wiped out my poor beans (which is probably just as well. I need a bit more garlic planting room). The pigs ate the wilted bean greens with relish. All the other vegetables continue growing, which is gratifying. Abigail picked Abraham about seven radishes, until he finally had enough. We have turnip greens daily as I keep thinning my impatient planting. I have learned my lesson: plant carefully upfront and enjoy the garden, or scatter the seed in haste and go through the gut-wrenching work of killing baby plants. Thinning: every gardeners least favorite job. Blech. I do not plan to scatter seeds in haste again.

Phil had an interesting afternoon. The Bessettes killed one of their pigs today, and Phil was invited. He didn’t talk about it much, but he, Dennis, and Dennis’ friend/instructor Arra apparently shot a .22 into the head, which killed the pig. Then Arra cut the throat from the side, while Dennis held the tail (Phil watched). “A lot of blood” came out then, and the pig flopped around (oh, those muscle spasms are so yucky!). Then they strung it up and skinned it, then gutted it. Arra took that pig in payment, and next month he’ll do the other pig and teach them how to butcher it. Apparently, it is best to hang a pig for two or three days to let the meat firm up before butchering, so the current plan is to have Dennis and Phil kill it, and have Arra come out a few days later for the butchering tutorial.

In the words of my friend Tamara, “It all sounds rather unpleasant.”

We Continue to Prepare for Winter

The last two days have continued chill, although the sun peeps through occasionally. Phil turned the tarp over our trailers; it no longer runs lengthwise between the two, but runs crosswise just over the doors. This lets in more light, while still keeping the doorways covered, in the event of sun or rain.

I planted the rest of the garlic yesterday. It was a new moon today, and new moons are supposed to be good for planting root vegetables. I ordered three more pounds of garlic, and I’ll plant those whenever they arrive. It’ll be interesting to see if there is any difference when harvest time comes next year, whether a week really helps or hinders. (I suppose it won’t be a terribly scientific test, since the varieties and sources are different, but then, I’m not getting paid to do this research, so even a bit of data will be useful!)

Phil unpacked the storage part of our shed, looking for the boys’ winter clothes, as well as a rug for our “living room,” some blankets and towels, the mill so I won’t have to use the oat press (the mill goes so much faster and the grains are ground much more finely), and anything else that we might appreciate during the winter ahead. We found all of those, as well as the pasta maker (which I had just wished for earlier this week), the special glass oil and vinegar dispensers (in faith that I will at some point have lettuce to cover with said condiments), my recipe box, the toaster, and a couple of boxes of homesteading books that I had missed in the first great unpacking.

There is something so comforting about familiar stuff!

Phil spent some time this afternoon to go “hunting.” Well, he took his gun, but mostly I think he went to walk the land. He came back so excited. Our impression of the far side of the creek is that it is a bit flat in one spot, but then falls off steeply. But that’s not true. There are lots of flatter places, great for meadows and pastures.

I enjoyed reading to Abigail and Abraham. They seem to be getting along very nicely. I am reading Robin Hood to the older boys, and they are very into the adventures. Jadon confessed, “I thought about Robin Hood so much that I dreamed I was in his gang last night. But I didn’t get to see how it ended.”

Isaiah went with me when I slopped the pigs yesterday. The pigs temporarily overcome their antipathy to humans, and we can scratch them while they slurp (and, yes, they SLURP) the slop. They flinch, and their tails uncurl and go between their legs, but they keep eating. Isaiah was thrilled to be able to scratch both at once. We have virtually stopped feeding the pigs and they are doing a great job plowing up and fertilizing my future garden site. We don’t really care if it takes them many months to reach slaughter weight of 200 pounds; we want them more for their plowing than their food. Though Phil eagerly anticipates bacon and ham.

Abigail is a great farm girl. She asks to go outside and happily follows Phil and I about as we do our chores, wanting to help water the garden or move the sheep and goats or whatever we do. While the boys often ignore us, she determinately enters our spheres. It’s a new experience for us both, to have a child choosing to tag along.

Phil ran an extension cord into the barn, so I have bright halogen light in my kitchen. The electricity works in the office trailer now, too, so we are fully wired. Every time I can go into our teeny bathroom and turn on the light it’s a little gift. No more cold, wet mornings. And I am so thankful we brought the bathroom inside before Abigail arrived—what was somewhat unpleasant for me I would imagine would be bewildering and quite objectionable to a four-year-old.

In closing, a cute question from Abraham. He asked, “What is in our walls?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they are making funny noises.”

Actually, it was the pigs on the other side of the wall that were making those noises, but what a cute question!

We remain abundantly blessed.

Bread of Life

Without electricity, we had no refrigeration. Thus, no dairy. No corn tortillas (they mold too quickly in the Virginia humidity). Bread only when we’ve recently been to Whole Foods (even if we buy out the store’s entire spelt bread section, we can eat through it in less than a week). Not many vegetables (ever seen broccoli or kale after they’ve sat on the counter for a couple of days?). Not much fruit.

Plenty of noodles; plenty of pancakes (from a mix). Oatmeal and rice, except certain family members dislike those grains. Eggs when we can get them (the approximately 30 Bessette chickens are now laying two eggs a day, so that source has dried up). Delicious ground beef when we’ve visited the Bessettes.

But now we have electricty, and a breadmaker (courtesy of my sister). And although our two mills (one electric, one hand-cranked) are both somewhere in the storage part of the office trailer, I determined to make bread this evening. Using the oat press, I ground 4 ½ cups of spelt. It was rough, like corn meal, but I prayed over it, and started it on its way.

As the yeasty smell wafted through the trailer, the boys, who were supposed to be going to bed, grew more and more antsy. Abigail, who may be getting sick, fell asleep, but the boys stayed awake until they could have bread.

It was delicious. I have another loaf started, so we can have an easy breakfast tomorrow. (Pancakes are yummy, but they take a lot of time to make.)

Another good news: Phil reviewed his wiring, and realized he had made a mistake. Our heater now runs beautifully—heating our house with minimal noise and maximum heat. Phil also picked up a little radiator, and with the seven of us in here, and the breadmaker, too, we don’t think heating will be a problem anymore. What a relief!

While I figured out a workable kitchen space (mostly), Phil went to the laundrymat and did three double-sized and one regular-sized loads of laundry. I have a mountain to fold now, but how great to have no more cat-peed items. I made a Coconut Red-Lentil Curry (similar to http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Coconut-Red-Lentil-Curry-236684, a recipe courtesy of my friend Steph), and then cooked a chicken for dinner in my cast iron Dutch oven (courtesy of my mother). The children polished off the entire chicken. Every last bite. I’m saving bones and broth for stock or dumplings tomorrow. That sounds good.

I have waited over a month for today’s homesteading moment: garlic planting. Garlic, besides being a culinary MUST HAVE, is also excellent medicinally. And, I have heard, a profitable crop as well. I would hope so, as the seed stock I bought was over $11 per pound! Yikes!

I didn’t know this until I started researching, but there are two main types of garlic, softneck and hardneck. The type I’ve bought in the grocery store is softneck. The cloves are larger on the outside and get progressively smaller as you use them, until the centers, where the cloves can be very small. Had the ends been left long, you can braid the flexible ends together (imagine ropes of garlic hanging from the ceiling in an old cabin).

The type of garlic that discriminating palates prefer, however, is hardneck garlic. I had never seen hardneck, and purchased two varieties. One variety was Elephant. I ordered a pound of it, and I received one head, with two cloves extra on the side. The head was about the size of an orange; there were twelve cloves in all. Twelve.

The other was named Music. As with all hardnecks, it had a single layer of beautiful, uniform cloves around a solid center. When we finished pulling the cloves off, the center with the base looked like little mini toadstools. I had another pound of it, and had 40 plantable cloves. I wasn’t sure how much space the garlic would take up, so I prepared four beds for it. The two pounds I’ve planted so far have planted 2/3 of one bed. I do still have 1 ½ pounds of softneck to plant tomorrow, but I think I’ll order some more. Garlic can go in the ground until early November, so it’s not too late to order some, if you want to try it!

At the risk of blabbing on and growing tedious, it cracked me up today to hear Abigail playing. I overheard the following:

Isaiah: Hi, Abigail, can I play with you?
Abigail: I’m playing by myself.
I: Please? I really want to play with you.
A: Okay. I have a princess and a dragon. You can be the princess.
I: Um, I’d really prefer to be the dragon.
A: Well, it’s a girl dragon, and a queen, too.

My boys have never played queens and princesses before. Moms and Dads, yes, but royalty: never.

First Day with Five

My first thought on waking was, “How are we going to survive in this chill? Five little people needing to go potty, to eat, to play—and it’s probably under 50 degrees in here.”

After finding warm clothes for Abigail (in unpacking her things, I found items I had almost forgot existed: skirts, an undershirt, dresses, tights) and getting all children dressed down to their shoes, I prepared oatmeal for breakfast. (Abigail’s enthusiastic remark was, “Oatmeal’s my favorite!” On the other hand, when Phil later asked her which book at home was her favorite, she looked at the board book she had in her hand, which I think was completely new to her, and said, “This one!” So I’m not sure she knows what “favorite” means, but it was quite charming.)

And then the children played together for much of the rest of the day. Isaiah, ever the hospitable one, read Horton books to Abigail, and showed her how to play simple games. Phil did myriad things to improve our living quarters: hung shelving in the bathroom, after getting the potty box set up inside (not quite indoor plumbing, but no one has to go outside in the rain now, so it’s pretty close as exciting—wow!); put up smoke detectors and hung the fire extinguisher; helped move shelving; began to move the kitchen into the barn. And, best of all, figured out the wiring so the heater unit works. It’s incredibly noisy, and, without a thermostat, requires manual shut off and turn on at the breaker, but it increased the temperature in the house to livability.


I started the process of decluttering and putting in order. I effectively switched just about all the possessions in my house, and that requires a certain level of discombobulation. And it requires decisions on just about everything: what’s the best place for this piece of paper? Where should I store the jam? Do these shoes actually fit anyone?

Meanwhile, the children ran around. Abigail was thrilled to be able to look out the window and see real pigs (it is rather cool; I agree). She wished she could pet the sheep, and went with Isaiah to hold the keets (which, by the way, are growing quite well). The three middle children ran up to the well tailings and dug and played until their hands were red with cold.

At that point, as I looked around my living room at all the yet-scattered things; as I looked at my three cold children with no hot water available; as I looked at the floor, covered with red-muddy shoes and red-muddy footprints; and, mostly, as 5pm loomed, the prospect of preparing dinner as I had lunch (I knew where nothing for the kitchen was: inside the trailer? In the barn? On a table?), my life became temporarily intolerable.

We went to the Bessettes.

A fire in the fireplace, warm water to clean the dishes after dinner, Austyn and Laney to play with Abigail and the others … it was a needed respite.

Then off to Bible study, where the children outnumbered the adults, and home, exhausted, to bed.

Abigail is, in every respect, an outstanding child. She is polite, enthusiastic, cheerful. She plays beautifully with the boys or on her own. She’s not a picky eater. She never asks for treats or electronic entertainment. But even with all that, it is harder than I expected to have a strange child from a different home here. I don't know her family culture, and she doesn't know mine. For example, at Bible study tonight, we were singing. At one point, she stood up and started raising her hands, moving with the music. I wasn't sure if she was worshiping or showing off or merely replicating what she does at her home church. It was disconcerting.

I heard that when a couple gets married, there are two relationships to figure out: man to woman and woman to man. When a child comes, it is six relationships, as you add woman to child, man to child, child to woman, and child to man.

We had, then, thirty separate relationships in our home. To take one new person into our family of six increased the relationships in this 224 square feet to 42. That’s a lot of interacting. And I grieve for little Joe who has no quiet place for a good nap, and I grieve for sweet Abraham who was getting left out, but bravely said, "I'll come, too!" when Isaiah and Abigail were running off to play (not intentionally mean, but simply unobservant). And I grieve for Abigail, who had fun today—anything is fun for a day—but will miss her family soon enough. I grieve for Isaiah, who, on a day of beautiful hospitality also showed character faults. And I grieve for Jadon, who strives so hard (typical first child) and is such an earnest follower of Jesus, he breaks my heart with his little helpful things, but has such a prickly exterior, it's hard to get through to him.

If I am tired adding a godly, well-trained little girl to our household for a time, let’s pray harder for adoptive parents, whose children have much harder things in their pasts.

Blessed All Over

After glorious weather yesterday, we woke to cool, overcast weather today. We were so thrilled to get electricity, hoping that the air conditioner/heater unit worked, that it wasn’t until we plugged in that we noticed there is no thermostat. So we have no heat. That’s no problem when the weather is in the 70s. It gets chilly when it’s in the 50s, and when, by the day’s end it’s in the low 40s, it’s downright freezing. I am looking for wood burning stoves approved for use in mobile homes on craigslist. I’m praying one turns up—tomorrow.

In order to get a woodstove, though, we need more space in the trailer. Phil suggested we swap rooms. Although I liked the layout we had, the living area did feel a bit cramped, and the sleeping area had some wasted space. So we started to swap rooms.

Well, to be perfectly fair, I “helped,” but PHIL started to swap rooms. I thought I had a good idea of how everything would look. Good gracious, I had no CLUE. My mother has a good eye for packing boxes and spatial relations. Phil’s eye is UNBELIEVABLE. It turns out, he rearranged his room growing up every few months (and because he was military, he had different rooms available on a regular basis, too). I suppose some of his gift is just practice, but I think more truly, it is a gift. The one room we more-or-less finished is beautifully compact, completely useable—really perfect (or so it seems at the moment).





And I was so, so thankful to actually empty a room, and clear off all the chrome shelves. Those shelves have been the bane of my existence, having, as they did, cooking spices, gardening gloves, potatoes, keys, cast iron pots, papers and books to go to the office, unread magazines, sprouting seeds, all the bottles of condiments that would normally inhabit a refrigerator door, and some other sundry items. What a psychological horror! How to keep a shelving unit like that clean? It mixes kitchen, garden, basement, magazine rack and more. Ack!

I’m still not sure I know what I will do with all the kitchen stuff, but I will figure it out. I realized today, too, that I have had LOTS more counter space in my “kitchen,” but no cupboard space. No wonder cooking anything is a challenge! I have ingredients in different rooms of the trailer, and more on different tables outside. When I have washed our few dishes, they remain spread out on the table, for want of an orderly place to store them. Frustrating! Maybe craigslist will have some kitchen cabinets. That would be good.

As we gathered some linens from our (only) closet, the smell of cat pee overpowered our poor noses. Nasty cat! Tiger peed all over pillows, blankets, cloth diapers … disgusting. We’ll have to go to a laundrymat tomorrow. We have plenty of laundry to do. And Tiger just became an outdoor only cat.

We went to a new (to us) Costco, about 90 minutes away, then headed south. The trees have not changed color too much, although James Madison University had some stunning trees. The difference between naturally growing trees and the planned landscaped trees shocked me: the color difference between a muddy yellow and a fluorescent orange. Like the difference between a tasteless strawberry in a clamshell box at the grocery store and a fresh-picked strawberry from the garden. No comparison, really.

We drove almost to the border of Tennessee, and there we met my cousin Nathan and his 4-year-old daughter. Abigail is going to live with us for some little time. Birdlike, she has a sweet, chirping little voice, and unfailing politeness. She reminded me in the bathroom that “We should always wash our hands”and, later, “It is always polite to say, ‘Please.’” Clearly, she has been well trained.

To round out this blessed, blessed day, we are under contract on our house in Boulder. The purchase price was less than before, but (unsurprisingly), just about the same amount that we’ve saved from my projected budget thus far. We’ve saved money on our dwelling, on our minerals, on our tractor, on our move itself. We are completely, completely thankful. God has provided again.

Internet!

Tuesday was the day I’ve been waiting for for two and a half months: the day we get high speed internet. I was eager for the installer to come and put the dish on our trailer.

Sadly, he couldn’t put the dish on our trailer, because the nearby trees obscure the night sky. But for $130, the installer dug a hole, put in a pole, poured the concrete, and finished the installation. So now, by the side of our driveway, we have a little collection of uglies: an ugly green electrical box, an ugly electrical “pole,” and an ugly post with a satellite dish on top. (Not to mention the 2 ½ foot trench that currently borders our driveway. Ugly!) I need to get some edible bushes or trees and disguise the uglies!

By 1pm, he was finished, and Phil had me hooked in again. The ability to communicate with the outside world, to research when I wanted to, to work from the comfort of my own home (or, at the very least, not to have to commute)—what a wonderful, wonderful thing. The emotions behind the light were powerful, but the relief of having research access whenever I choose is almost unbelievably great. I know people (including myself until less about a decade ago) lived without Google, but what a hard world it must have been!

Phil took the van in for its 45,000 mile checkup. It had been making some odd noises, and Phil wanted to see what was up. The bad news is that it needs two repairs that are each about $750. The good news is that neither repair is imminent, and, with the house not being under contract, and over $10K in overdue checks not yet received, we were thankful to put those off until a better day.

Tuesday also marked the first livestock death on our farm: a keet turned up dead in the morning. The remaining six keets were huddled in their box, and this one was under some pallets. Perhaps it was foraging and didn’t return to the warmth of the siblings? Who knows what strikes down these birds? We had chicks dying left and right back in Boulder. A little dead keet was sad, but not tragic.

Let There Be Light!

Phil was up early this morning, probably around 6am, waiting for Randy to come and excavate for our electrical line. Randy’s excavator had a skinny little bucket, just right for digging trenches.

And this trench was several feet down, which looked even deeper with the dirt piled on either side.

The electrical guys showed up around 9am, and they used their bucket truck to put down our buried electric box: a big green box like you may have seen in suburban areas with buried electric—we have one now next to our driveway. After they hooked us up at our box, they went up to the top of our driveway and unloaded ANOTHER green electrical box. Now we have two next to our driveway.

Phil and Randy stood around watching, talking, asking questions. I stood fairly near and finished a garden bed, then planted lettuces, chard, and spinach. It sounded like all the electrical guys were in good spirits, making jokes, laughing, chatting. It seems to me that the grunt workers in Virginia are more cheery than those in Colorado. Or maybe this is a rural/suburban thing, and rural guys are happy to be out in the country on an October day.

The electrical guys finished up and left. Then Randy went to work with his trencher. He noticed my herb beds and asked how I felt about them being covered. Phil, rightly, pointed out that I would rather have electricity than a few herbs. And it wasn’t like the beds were doing well—I think the lack of regular watering in their infancy was more detrimental than I would have wished. I have seen a few sprouts of cilantro, and the milk thistle came up so that its leaves were recognizable (milk thistle is neat! Its standard thistle-shaped leaves have white splotches, like spilled milk!), but other than these two little signs of life, the herb beds have been almost a total bust.


Anyway, the trencher worked its way along the driveway, the 200 feet from the trailer to the well on the south side of the driveway, after doing the 200 feet on the north side of the driveway in the morning. Phil worked to unwind the heavy electrical wire, and then to get the wire hooked in properly in the different boxes. I suppose most people would hire an electrician, but Phil did fine work.



He also didn’t really eat. All day. At about 5pm, the boys and I were eating some hash browns and apple crisp and omelets in the gloomy overcast light in the trailer. Jadon was reading to us from Dr. Seuss’s ABC and had just read the words “Little Lola Lopp” when Phil stepped in and flipped the light switch.

LIGHT!

I have pondered how to explain what that moment was like. It’s bringing tears to my eyes as I think about it now, even though the natural light we had was sufficient at the moment. And the light that turned on is just the old style, humming electrical lights like you’d find in a school or other industrial setting. It’s not “good” light.

But it was brightness and, in a way, warmth. We have lived here for two and a half months without electricity. This box we call home has worked without light. But as the nights get dark earlier and the days get light later (and, sometimes, when overcast, the days get light not much at all, it seems), it is hard to find the emotional reserves or the physical fortitude to stay awake or get up.

Light—brightness (albeit artificial). Vivid colors where there had been only muted. Clear visibility into all corners. It was a little, poignant glimpse of what a stunning experience it must have been when God said, “Let there be light!” (A similar little glimpse you might experience on your own from The Creation by Haydn. In German, the singers softly say, “there was …” And in fortissimo, “LIGHT!”—quite dramatic. Listen on YouTube here, with the pertinent moment coming from 6:55 to 7:20.)

On a totally different note, it turned chilly today. Phil said, “It almost feels as if it might snow this week.” Then we checked the temperature in the car—53 degrees. We’re going to freeze. Humid cold is, well, cold!

Guineas!

The boys and I went to get Phil on Saturday afternoon. We certainly ran a lot of errands in that time: the post office, the airport, then Lowes for a book on electrical wiring (Phil’s how to books were packed, and he needed some refreshers on how to get electricity to our house, once they hook up on Monday). Then we stopped at Buck-the-hairdresser’s house to get: guineas!

Guinea fowl are beautiful birds. I read Gardening with Guineas which completely overwhelmed me: the author has a lovely barn and a whole system which she expands on in great detail. It sounded very complicated to get guineas, so I put it on hold. When we went to get pigs, the owners had a few guineas, and they gave us the scoop.

Guineas: get them. Don’t feed them—they forage. Don’t breed them—they reproduce on their own. Don’t build them houses—they roost in trees.

Guineas: the self-sufficient livestock, that eat ticks and snakes and act as watchdogs.

Buck-the-hairdresser was an interesting man. He was a bit hard to understand, which made sense when we met him: no top front teeth. He mentioned several times his wife and grandchildren, and how his wife hates his bird hobby. He breeds canaries for pet stores (they go for $100!), and has, apparently, bred champion birds for bird shows. He bought a second-hand brooder that holds 300 eggs and rotates them automatically. Pretty amazing. And this all happens in his modest-sized townhome basement.

Honestly, people are so varied and interesting—it’s been a great honor to get to meet so many fine folk, and one of the joys of moving here and beginning to raise animals.

After Buck-the-hairdresser’s, we stopped at Chipotle for lunch (yay!) and then to Vintage Virginia to get two bushels of apples (almost 80 pounds). They have a very inefficient system for purchasing, so it took an hour, even though I was second in line when we got there. Phil, tired from travel, and myself, trying to juggle an antsy baby and knowing I had three more energetic boys waiting in the car, were almost frantic by the time we left. Buying food should not be quite so challenging!

After a brief stop at home to get the guineas acquainted with our barn (what we call the metal storage shed), we went to a party up the street. The Townsends live in Norfolk, and every year invite all their friends up for a camping trip weekend, similar to what our church, Hillside, used to do on Labor Day. I was hoping to meet some of the people from our street and community, but, other than the Townsends who have their weekend dream home here, it was just the Bessettes. One of the women I met works at the US Attorney’s Office. She lives in Charlottesville and commutes into DC every day, leaving home at 5am (a bit earlier than she must, so she can go to Mass), getting home at 8pm. Six hours of commuting, every day. I can’t imagine.

In a little moment of That Darn Cat, Tiger had been outside enjoying the lovely weather all day. He came in, went straight to our closet and peed on Phil’s sleeping bag. As if!

On Sunday, we spent a lot of time with our seven guinea “keets” (the guinea word for “chicks”). Our keets are six weeks old, which is good because they have feathers and don’t need supplemental heat anymore. (Good thing, because we have none to give—no electricity … quite.) They were all in their box all night, but by the end of the day, the bravest went flying out. I spent a while stalking the escaped keet so it could return to its happy place. When it (or another one) escaped again, I gave up.


Isaiah, as with the chicks in Boulder, LOVES the keets. He happily held them and petted them, talked to them and chased them for several hours. The keets, for their part, were quite pleasant to hold—a solid little handful of warm, throbbing feathers. The way to tell the difference between males and females is solely by their sound, which they start making at about seven weeks. The males, apparently, only say, loudly, che-che-che; the females have a softer, more varied syllabic repertoire. When we picked up a loud keet, we would say, “This one must be a male,” and put it back until we picked up a quiet one.

At about noon, I felt feverish and flu-ey. I took my favorite homeopathic remedy, oscillococcinum (pronounced AH sill o COX i numb). What a great remedy! I felt somewhat better, and better still after a nap. We walked down to the creek, and I was amazed both at how many leaves have fallen and how many green leaves remain on the trees, still photosynthesizing.

Some Observations about Pigs

On Wednesday, I had to go in to work on a computer, so I left the three older boys with the Bessettes for a couple of hours. Isaiah and Abraham were thrilled to get to sit on and “ride” the horses that the Bessettes started boarding. I drove away with the sight of Isaiah, bike helmet on his head, sitting on Sue-the-horse, with a HUGE grin on his face. What a precious sight. He has wished for a horse for a long time.

On Thursday, the pigs ran out of food. I decided to be frugal and go to the little orchard I had visited before, and buy several buckets of grounder apples for the pigs. So we drove there—45 minutes—to find that they were closed for the season. We drove home—45 minutes. Blah. Jadon called it “the fateful apple orchard trip.”

Today I worked in the garden, shoveling compost and making more raised beds. And making the raised beds I have already made higher, so when I go to plant garlic and onions, those crops will thrive. I had planted turnips and turnip greens in a bed. The turnips are doing great; the turnip greens produced about one reasonably sized plant, and the rest didn’t come up. So I will make that into an onion bed, I think.

The baby, unfortunately, does not like to be away from me, but he doesn’t like walking around the garden, either, as there are pricklies all over (and I don’t like him walking in the garden, as he doesn’t respect the raised beds very well). So he was on my back, which makes shoveling a bit tiring.

As the pigs are still out of food and have begun to look at me longingly, I drove to the Bessettes to get one of their large bags of feed. Michelle was going through her kitchen cupboards, and I was THRILLED to help. I love to go through kitchen cupboards and make them more efficient and orderly. Fun!

I was out feeding the animals after dark this evening with my headlamp on, and I saw glowing eyes from the pig pen. The pigs were ecstatically consuming the feed I had fetched, and as I got closer, I realized that the eyes belonged to Bouncer! Our cat is yet nearby. There have been hints that Bouncer had not permanently vanished (thawing ground beef on the table a bit eaten; butter wrappers removed from the garbage bag), but I was happy to see Bouncer again, even for a brief second.

And finally, some observations about pigs.

It is a bit shocking to me to have animals on the land who are dedicated solely to growing large for slaughter. Up until now, we’ve had domestic pets (dog, cats) and breeding animals (sheep, goats), all of which may become a bit more plump or a bit more skinny, but not noticeably different in size.

Now, behold the pigs. Abby and Alice came to us weighing, Phil figured, about 60 pounds. I almost think I can see them growing day by day. In the two months since we’ve been here, the Bessette pigs have more than doubled in size; seeing them today made me a bit concerned for our little land—a full-sized pig is BIG. And the Bessette pigs have a month to go before slaughter! Eek!

Phil was hoping to do a “root, hog, or die” type feeding system, where they would root up our plants or die in the process. But they look so HUNGRY to me when I don’t feed them, I have been feeding them.

But hog feed has its own issues. We bought a 50 pound bag of organic feed for $22.50 or so from Countryside Naturals. It was good quality stuff. The shoats ate it in about three days. And, calculating that a pig needs about 5 pounds of food to produce one pound, we are looking at a price of $2.25 a pound, not counting butchering costs or waste costs (I’m not planning to eat bones or anything). This is pretty expensive pork!

I don’t think that’s terribly fiscally responsible.

So Phil picked up a bag of nonorganic feed from the feed store. It’s what a standard farmer would use. Meaning: it’s medicated.

Medicated feed has tetracycline. I was just reading this week an article about how animals routinely fed antibiotics—tetracycline—poop out those antibiotics. Even in trace amounts, it causes up to 40% biomass reduction in any plant grown on the soil where the manure lands. So to feed standard feed to a pig is basically death to the soil.

I don’t think that’s terribly ecologically responsible.

What to do?

I called the Bessettes. Michelle doesn’t THINK their feed is medicated, so I bought 100 pounds from her for about $17. Much more reasonable. And I suppose that the pigs are eating some food from their rooting and their foraging, so the total price per pound isn’t quite so high. But still—the question of feed looms large to me.

Michelle gave me the number of the man who mills Joel Salatin’s feed. How handy that she has all these resources already figured out.

Other pig notes: their awesome noses remind me of an elephant’s trunk: they move in different directions. The pigs can’t grab things with their noses, but they can sure flex them in neat ways!

I have heard that pigs are very intelligent. Well, I am going to guess that, as a group, perhaps, pigs are intelligent. I suppose, though, that some are smarter than others. We have less-intelligent pigs. They still get shocked by the electric fence (I’m SO thankful we kept the chicken netting up around the pen—I cannot imagine chasing pigs all by myself). I fill up their water bucket and they go and sit in it and dump it over. Multiple times a day.

Since filling a bucket multiple times a day won’t work long-term (what happens when we need to leave for a few hours?), Phil brilliantly fixed up the following: he bought a “hog nipple,” which is a metal device on the end of a hose that allows water to flow when the hog presses on the nipple. The hose runs up to our 35 gallon water container. I leave the water open, ready to run at all times, and the hogs can get water when they need, and they can’t wallow in it or dump it out. GREAT!

The pigs are not really scary. I was pretty scared of them at first, because the previous owners seemed pretty scared. And they will, apparently, nip. However, Michelle scratches hers behind the ears, and showed me that they got started with a stick, scratching the backs and bellies, and now the pigs are okay with human hands scratching them. I will try that soon; it would be nice to have Alice and Abby not bark in fear and scatter whenever we approach.

They are together all the time. They will sleep next to one another, with their hooves on each other. And sometimes they tussle. I try to be far away when they do.

Pigs smell bad. Well, their manure smells bad. I think sheep and goat manure (at least the females’) smells rather nice. So barn-like, or hay-like, or natural. Pig manure, though, probably because they are omnivores, smells stronger and stinkier. Right now the pigs are penned just upslope of our trailer-house. I don’t know if we can keep that up long-term, as I fear the smell will continue to get worse. And their manure is not nicely pelletized like the sheep and the goats; it is larger than dog droppings, and about the same shape. Eeww.

I am glad I do not have piggy eyes. They are small and, I think, a bit mean. If chickens have reptilian eyes, and goats have eyes with strange irises, and sheep don’t want to look you in the eyes (too threatening), I think pigs have, maybe, malevolent rodent eyes.

Do I like pigs? I like sheep the most, and I like the goats. Maybe after I touch the pigs, I will feel a greater affinity for them. Right now I look at their haunches and think HAM. I think they are interesting to watch, but I am not a pig lover … yet.

Teeny Tidbits from Two Dull Days

On Monday, I worked a bit and did internet research (guineas for sale? Satellite internet available?) and Phil spent much of the day getting ready for his last trip to Colorado for the project that has been ongoing for several months. He ran errands, put the pig waterer up where I would only need to turn a dial and the container would fill, and hacked out another pen for the sheep and the goats. They are down at the bottom of the cleared area now, in a very acidic spot (presumably, at least, as all the downed trees there were pines, as opposed to the redbuds and tulip poplars and oaks in the higher pasture).

We woke well before 5am to bring him to the airport, and were at the Whole Foods parking lot almost two hours before the store opened (98 minutes, but who’s counting?). All four boys were awake, and we somehow managed to read and be calm the entire time—it was a near thing by the end. We had so little food left at the homestead, it really didn’t make much sense to drive all the way home and all the way back in, but it was certainly an interesting and unique challenge.

We drove around in the afternoon seeking working internet. At the moment, we’re signed up for internet service come next Tuesday, but we will see if it will be much good.