The Trees Are Coming! The Trees Are Coming!

Phil ran errands in the morning, and then installed three hydrants in the afternoon. It was dark by the time he finished, and there was one little leak, but that’s the first little plumbing leak he’s had since being here. That is reason to be thankful. And I have a hydrant now between the house and the barn—so close!

I received an email from Cummins Nursery, asking whether I would like most of the trees delivered this month, rather than waiting until March. After considering, Phil and I decided that, yes, we would like to receive those trees (about 350 of them) sooner rather than later. Which means, Lord willing (and weather permitting), the week after Thanksgiving.

We’ll have to heel them in, which means dig a trench and bury them shallowly until ready to plant. I had expected to heel some in, since no matter how fast we are, the bareroots on trees number 20 and up would dry out before we could get to them. This way, though, we’ll have them “in house” to plant at our leisure until March, when the remainder come in.

Tomorrow Phil will (hopefully) finish the massive water line project. He brought home a ton of gravel in the back of the truck, and he and the boys will have to shovel it out of the truck and into hydrant holes to help them drain well. (Without the gravel, the drainage holes would get stopped with standing water whenever it rains here.)

And at some point tomorrow, we will get our shipment of 305 apple tree stakes; then we can lay out our orchard in situ. I confess I am a little bit concerned: just how much of our clearing will 408 trees take up, anyway? We will see soon!

Farmer John's Cookbook

When I was a newlywed, I set about learning to cook. If I found a cookbook I liked, I cooked almost every recipe in it. I cooked through my college boarding house Big Haus Cookbook, a Hershey’s chocolate cookbook, Salsas That Cook, and Healthy Foods. Before I had multiple children, I would spend easily an hour and a half preparing dinner: sweet potato galettes, stuffed grape leaves, mushroom risotto, chicken-broccoli crepes, steamed dumplings!

With an ever-growing family, my time in the kitchen became limited, as did the palette I had to work with. Little people don’t tend to enjoy spicy or exotic food. So I began to cook without recipes some of the time. Most dinners could be prepared in half an hour, using minimal pans.

Yesterday, though, I received a cookbook (courtesy of my wonderful mother-in-law Cheri): Farmer John’s Cookbook. I looked up “radishes,” because our radish harvest is just about done. And my mouth started watering. Over radishes! I eagerly awaited the new day.

So this morning I went to pick whatever radishes I could find. I sliced some thinly and put them on buttered bread with salt: canapés! I sautéed the radishes in butter, then added the greens. Pressed some lemon juice on, added salt and pepper—delicious! I did the same thing with turnip greens.



Then I took the turnips, peeled and shredded them. Also an apple: peeled and shredded. Pressed lemon juice, added olive oil, salt, pepper, and some raisins. Not too bad!

I haven’t cooked something from a cookbook in many, many months. Perhaps not in all of 2009, the year of house showings, moving, and kitchenless living. Cooking things today from a real cookbook, a gourmet vegetable cookbook, felt like a return to normal life, in a way.



And if you want a way to prepare YOUR daikon radish (see photo above!) or regular radish, your chard or your kale, I’d highly recommend this book!

Other fun things about today: Phil and I sat in the sheep paddock and just watched them. They have settled down, so that if the ewes do not love the babies, they tolerate them and no longer flee.

We also went down to the “bottom land” (the flat land around our creek). Phil used his machete to hack out a path through the denuded brush. It’s actually possible to see the forest now that the leaves have fallen from the trees and the brush, and we were thrilled to see about four acres of potential grazing land. It will need to be cleared, then seeded to grass, legumes, and herbs, but wow! Four acres would more than double the land we currently have cleared.

I found a persimmon on the ground during the hike. About the size of an apricot, with similar orange flesh and six flat seeds, the first lick was delicious. Then my mouth felt like all the moisture was gone—I think that was the astringency coming out. As I looked to find more, I realized they were growing at the tops of many trees: 80 to 100 feet up. Ah, well.

P.S. A quick note about the Babydolls. We took the three lambs born in spring 2009 home yesterday. They are too young to be bred this year. Breeder Michelle put her ram, Starbucks, in with the three ewes yesterday afternoon, so he will, Lord willing, breed all three. The sheep have 18-day cycles, I believe; in 2009, she had one lamb born on May 1st and one born two and a half weeks later. Clearly, the late ewe missed her breeding opportunity by about a day.

My plan is to pick up the three bred ewes in December. All three ewes could potentially have twins: that is what I am praying for. We are pleased that we will have lambing and kidding in January and February, then a few months hiatus before the Babydoll babies come sometime in April.

Oh, and Phil’s arm remains somewhat swollen, but is definitely on the mend. Thankfully, we had no red line heading to the heart, so we avoided a trip to the hospital!

Baby Babydolls!

I find it interesting that little things can become big problems. In this case, a little bee. While Phil was digging yesterday, he was stung three times in quick succession, most likely by a ground hive. The stings on his cheek and underarm were normal, sharp pains that quickly subsided. The sting on his wrist was stronger and hotter from the beginning. Overnight it swelled his entire forearm with such pain he got up for several hours. At one point, teething Jonadab woke me, and when I saw Phil’s light in the other room, I figured that today’s intended trip to the quarry wouldn’t happen. (Which was probably not all bad—the quarry may not have been open today anyway.)

So Phil went to the Bessettes to process his white-tailed deer meat. I weighed the results when he came home: 14 pounds of ground meat, 7 pounds of roast, and another roast that Dennis had cooked for us. Not a lot of meat, but well over $100 worth, were I to buy it.

While he did that, the children and I went to get the sheep. I have been looking forward to it all week—the excitement of new life coming here, of new woolly bodies grazing our fields. Breeder Michelle showed me how to clip the hooves and trim the wool around the eyes (and the private parts, if needed). We talked about proper emasculators and dewormers, about rumens and lambing. Then we loaded the three lambs into a tarp spread with hay in the back of the minivan, and drove away: one adult, six children, and three lambs. Not a bad load.

And I must say, I LOVE these sheep. As soon as the three little bodies were in the car, and I felt their incredible fleeces (one has the finest fleece I’ve ever seen), and I smelled their earthy smell, I was so SO thankful that we’d decided to buy them. All my doubts and concerns vanished, and I called Phil to tell him how pleased I was. On our way home, we stopped at the Bush house. Their daughter Johanna said, “They have Ewok faces!” And that is exactly the word that’s been eluding me. They look like something familiar, but not quite a teddy bear.



When he saw them for the first time, he was astonished. “They’re so much cuter than I was expecting!” he said. “Make sure everyone reading knows how incredibly cute they are!” Phil, though, hates Ewoks, so maybe they are not quite like Ewoks.

Phil carried the brown baby ewes to the pen first, then the white wether (a castrated male). The brown babies have black legs, and their fleeces will be black on the inside, but the outside has bleached in the sun. I was thrilled to see that one of my questions the first day was correct: they didn’t look small because they were all proportionally small. Next to our regular-sized sheep, they are adorably teeny, yet completely proportionate. One of the most wonderful observations: these are quality animals from a quality line. Their breeding shows in how they move.



And we got to see them move quite a bit. Our sheep and goats were completely freaked out by these little brown babies. The white wether looks like a baby regular sheep, so our two white ewes tentatively accepted him. The brown babies, though, were personae non gratae. Where they went, the larger animals fled. Here was an unexpected turn of events: two large ewes, running around the pen, pursued first by a small white wether, then two more brown ewes pursuing their flock mate. Around and around they go!



The goats watched this all carefully, and kept their distance.

Dinner was the first meat harvested from our land: the roast venison, courtesy of Phil’s rifle. After dinner, I read to the children, until their high spirits reminded me that we had been in the car the better part of six hours today. Although it was pitch dark, we all tumbled outside and did driveway laps: up and down, up and down. Jonadab held my hand and did his fair share. When we first went out, we couldn’t see a thing, but as the minutes ticked by, the stars shone brighter, the outline of the driveway faintly came into focus, and the dark shadows on the driveway became, more clearly, little children hiding for a “surprise” attack.

A happy half hour that was, full of running and shouting and laughter. At one point, I picked up Jonadab and tossed him just a bit in the air, with a backdrop of the Milky Way.

Marvelous!

Water Matters

Yesterday Phil was working on the final detailing of the pump house, when Martin Bush called. Martin ended up coming over to sight in his rifle, and he and Phil ended up talking for most of the day. Phil was in college when he met Martin, a little 8-year-old, youngest child of Doug and Denise. Now Martin is married, and settled in Charlottesville.

I watched them interact from a distance. And I was so thankful that Phil had a man to hang out with. He’s talked to Dennis a few nights while I’ve stayed back with the children, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that he used to get together with other men about six times a month, whether going to coffee with Tim or men’s Bible study with the Hillsiders. I think that survival has been so pervasive a concern, the less immediately important things, like interpersonal relationships, have been put on hold. Maybe it’s time to rejoin humanity. Or maybe we’ll wait until we have running water, but after that, we’ll have no excuse.

Because of all the hanging out, Phil didn’t quite finish the pump house. So he woke at 6am this morning, while it was yet dark, and did his morning routine: feed and water the chicks, make coffee, read the Bible. When the sun rose, he went up and did the final touches on our adorable pump house by the time the rest of us woke up.



We’ve been trying for a week to get in touch with our excavator guy to come and backfill the trenches we’ve had open for the last three weeks, as well as dig more trenches for the other two hydrants. It got down to 26 degrees last night, and Phil is worried that our pipes will freeze. So he called Butch at about 10:30 this morning.

Butch was here within the hour. He and Phil dug ditches for six and a half hours. It was 6pm and very dark by the time they were finished, but they got the job as done as they could. Tomorrow Phil hopes to install the two remaining hydrants.

I will say, Phil has a vision. I liked having the water running in the hose down to the garden, but I still had to fill the watering can, because the hose itself was not quite long enough. Well, today I tapped into the water line close to the barn, and was able to water with my fine Haws watering wand. It was so, well, normal, to turn on the faucet and use the hose.

What used to be a normal part of life has become so miraculous, it’s worth writing home about.

(Parenthetically, speaking of the miraculous: at Bible study, I washed my hands. When I turned on the tap and the water came out warm, I stared at it in disbelief—warm water, at the turn of a handle. And then I laughed at myself—I had forgotten about such fine accommodations.)

The Great Rice Debacle of Ought Nine

Phil finished gutting the deer after midnight last night. Today he skinned the deer, removed the head and lower legs, and hosed it down, then wrapped it in cheesecloth. It looks like a mummy hanging in a tree. We aren’t sure what to do with the venison, but will probably turn it into jerky and sausage (courtesy of the Bessette’s meat grinder). For now, though, it can hang in the tree and age.

I spent more time than usual lately making dinner. I picked turnip greens from our garden. The garden has been an interesting experiment. I think the planting chart in the seed catalog was not terribly accurate, or, perhaps, more useful for the Deep South. We are rapidly heading into mid-November, when the earth hibernates at this latitude (I think when there is less than 10 hours of daylight, the growing season ends. In D.C., there is less than 10 hours of daylight from November 17 to January 24). Many of my plants from October will be fortunate to have an inch of growth. Perhaps we will cover them, and hope for early growth in the spring (after January 24th!).

My garden has surprised me in more ways. I planted two types of turnips in a bed. The leafy greens turnips did absolutely nothing, while the purple root turnips have provided us with greens for several dinners a week over the last month. And the bed gets more full all the time, as the leaves grow to support the roots.

The cherry belle radishes are almost gone, but in one bed they produced heavily. In the bed immediately adjacent, they did not do nearly so well. In my bed of beets, the standard beets are mediocre; the red and white striped Chioggia are stellar. In my bed of random greens, the daikon radish took over the center in dinner-plate whirls, while everything else stays a careful three inches tall.

But my biggest surprise came today, as I once again admired my kale bed. I love kale. Besides being the most nutritious of all vegetables, it tastes great! (I cut off just the bottoms of the leaves, chop the whole thing, stems and all, fry in butter with some fresh garlic pressed on top—yum!) It doesn’t cook down as much as spinach, and retains enough crunch so as not to be insipid.

To ensure a constant winter supply of this tasty (and pricey) vegetable, I planted two types, green and red. Surprisingly, they all came up red. I have been thinking for weeks now that the two types would differentiate themselves—at some point, the green would be more green. The red stems were all lovely, but so uniform.

As I looked today, I noticed some green kale. Way off on the edge, about one-fifth the size of the red kale. For some reason, it never took off. So strange!

But I digress from my story about dinner. I picked the turnip greens. I cooked a Bessette chicken in my cast iron Dutch oven. When the breast was done, I put some brown rice on. With a single burner, it can get tricky to juggle the various parts of a meal, but that’s okay. The last two times I have made rice, we haven’t eaten it all. In Boulder, I had a pot of rice cooked at all times, though now I don’t recall what I did with it. I had hopes that this night, we would eat the rice, and in time, the rice was done, and we sat down to eat.

The meat was still raw. Not all of it, but enough. Apparently, when a chicken is frozen, the breast is not the part to check; the part of the leg next to the body would be more indicative. In the future, Phil reminded me that we can use our toaster oven to roast. That would alleviate the single-burner stress.

While we waited for the chicken, we snacked on bread with butter and jam. As the chicken continued to cook, and the children ate three thick slices of bread apiece, my hopes for rice consumption rapidly faded.

When at last the meal was done, the chicken picked clean of meat, ready for the stock pot tomorrow, I surveyed the table. I considered bringing the chicken and the rice pots outside, but it was cold out there, and the children needed their bedtime books, and Phil would probably go out before me, anyway. He could bring the pots out.

I should have asked him to.

He went to the office while I was reading Bible stories to the A’s. Apparently, the stories were enthralling, for Isaiah and even Jadon soon joined us. Neither adult realized that Joe was alone in the room with the pots, until I said goodnight and stood up to find rice … everywhere. Joe had gleefully removed the lid of the pot, and spread great fistfuls around the room. The newly-vacuumed carpet had heaping tablespoons of rice mashed into it. Joe’s pant legs themselves were sticky with rice up to his knees. Rice on my sheets; rice on the floor; rice on the chairs and the table and the Ergo baby carrier.

And not much rice left in the pot. Yet another meal where the rice goes uneaten. What was salvageable will go to the pigs. “Cheer up,” said Phil. “At least rice is cheap. Isn’t it?”

Jadon, to make the encouragement complete, continued: “And the bacon is free!”

Several hours removed, I can see that this was not the end of the world. We summoned Chloe the dog, and faithful Dyson the vacuum. We changed clothing and used baby wipes and hands to get those sticky grains from every place we could. Jonadab somehow missed getting rice on the basket of clean clothes waiting to be folded—amazing in such a small space. But at the moment of discovery—oh, ick. Hundreds (thousands?) of sticky, mashable grains all over my living space.

And that, faithful reader, was the Great Rice Debacle of Ought Nine.

Evening Excitement

As evening progressed, I was bewailing the lack of interesting things to happen today. What a normal, dull life! Nothing interesting to report.

BANG! A rifle shot sounded from up towards the road. A bit later, Phil came to the door. “We’ve got deer meat.”

Well, we will, anyway. He first had to figure out how to drag the dead deer down to the woods (used the little John Deere riding mower), then try desperately to remember how to gut a deer. He’s only done it once, several years back. I checked his progress at 10:30pm, and he had almost disemboweled the animal. In the light of the flashlight, the steam from the innards rose constantly. And there was my husband, hacking away with knife, leather gloves on his hand. There was the deer, looking remarkably like our goats, cavity filled with blood, guts hanging out but not cut free.

My husband, who refuses to cut the umbilical cord at our children’s births, dealing with this bloody processing like a pro.

As I walked back to the trailer, mainly pleased that I now had something worth writing about, I realized that more happened today than I remembered at first glance. Phil and I compared symptoms of mange with what is on Annabelle’s neck, and we didn’t think the symptoms were at all similar. We don’t know what the problem is, but we are reasonably sure it is not mange. That is a relief.

Phil worked on siding the little house. At the end of the day, he was surprised with how little he got done, and how quickly the day had passed.

Besides normal duties, I reread the lengthy description on the “right” way to plant fruit trees (see “Fruit Trees on Steroids” at http://www.highbrixgardens.com/general/downloads.html). Or, if not the right way, the way we plan to plant. There were some encouraging points, such as the need for 10 pounds of soft rock phosphate per tree. Well, we have leftover soft rock phosphate from our mineral spreading adventure, probably even 4080 pounds (what we’ll need for our 408 trees). What a blessing not to have to buy more totes, at least until next fall.

The most discouraging point was that the grower recommends digging out a cubic yard for each tree. In the bottom foot, put in “muck” or leaf litter, compost, animal wastes. The middle foot gets the topsoil that was removed, and the top foot gets, again, the muck/compost layer. So each tree needs, basically, 18 cubic feet of compost-like material. Phil figured we would just order some from our compost company again, until he realized that we would need about $11,000 worth. That’s really not feasible.

We do have 40 acres of trees, though, and the leaf layer right now is quite voluminous. I am not thrilled about taking the fertility of the forest to give to my orchard, but I’m REALLY not thrilled about an $11,000 bill, so I’ll probably transport leaves.

But before I can do that, I need to know where to transport them. And before I can do THAT, I need to figure out the spacing of the trees, and for that, I should probably have stakes to mark the spots, rather than spray paint. So I ordered 305 stakes for the apple trees (the cherries, peaches, plums, pears, and apricots don’t need stakes). And that was really great. The nursery recommended AM Leonard’s stakes, and I figured the fiberglass ones would be best. I called and asked for a discount for my bulk order, and I got a good one, over 25% off the regular online price! Yay!

We are considering purchasing a few Dexter cows, so their manure will help restore our land. We might wait until after our Thanksgiving trip, when we’ll be away for nine days (and the regular busyness of life might force us to wait anyway!), but to get a few small cows will be fun. Phil spoke with a Dexter breeder yesterday, and the man recommended that, since Phil plans to seed new pasture, he do so in February. The freezing and thawing of the ground, he said, will suck the seeds in to their appropriate depth. Pretty slick!

Mice, Mange, and Multiplier Onions

Saturday was gorgeous. I woke up and Isaiah came to hug me (or something like that). We looked out the window and he said, “Look, Mom—helicopters!” And it was true. We saw little leaves behaving like orange helicopters, twirling down into our clearing. And later, when the breezes blow, the clearing is full of orange leaves, gently floating on currents of air, not ready to rest—quite. I love it!

As it was, once again, close to a full moon, I shoveled minerals out of one of the remaining totes into the wheelbarrow, and wheeled them upslope to the former pigpen, where I spread them over the spelt seeds. I understood why Chinese coolies would run while pulling their loads—the momentum really helps! And then I popped a tire, so I should look into the foam that you can spray into tires that then hardens. Makes it really hard to pop a tire, when it’s actually basically solid!

I also got impatient with my multiplier onions. I should probably have waited until around Thanksgiving, but who knows what the weather will be like then? So I planted my shallots and my potato onions, and my Egyptian walking onions. According to the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog, “According to the National Gardening Bureau, multiplier onions can produce a larger yield per area than any other vegetable except staked tomatoes.” (Trees and ponds can produce more, since they have the potential to stack.) The multiplier onions will, apparently, grow clusters of onions at ground level from the single onion bulb planted. The Egyptian walking onions I am excited to see: they grow like a green onion, then send out bulblets at the top, then another shoot, and more bulblets. Eventually (after two or three stories), they topple over and re-root. Perennial onions that walk around—that’s pretty cool!

Dennis Bessette came by to visit, driving his old farm truck. After he left, I was walking down the driveway, when I came across a tiny, living mouse in the center of the gravel, so small its eyes were not yet open.



It was breathing, but just barely, and it would emit teeny squeaks. Now I know that mice are nasty, that they pee while they run, and chew through purchased goods (car engines, chick feed), and attract other pests, like snakes. But the tiny perfection of this baby, and the certainty of its death, made me want to sit and watch it die, to be with it in its last, dignified moments.

But then interested children came to see and touch the tiny animal, so I picked up its tiny chilly body and hid it in the straw of our compost pile, where I hope it found some measure of privacy and warmth as it died.

That’s my life in the country: something profound and beautiful that passes in a slew of other events, almost forgotten. How fortunate I am that I have profound and beautiful moments.

I called the sheep breeder to tell her that we would like her flock. Although I had strong certainty until I called, after the call I had a bit of buyer’s remorse, wondering at the frivolous purchase. Miniature sheep with cashmere wool are not exactly stern, strong farm animals. They are the hobby farm animal of choice; an animal that makes a good pet or photography prop. How will they fit on our farm?

Thankfully Phil remained the voice of reason, reminding me that, rather than spraying our orchard floor with Round-Up, like the local orchards do for ground cover control, we will have natural lawn-mowers, who also produce wool, lambs, and, in a pinch, meat (though because of their cuteness factor, their pet quality would bring a high enough price that their meat would not be the best use of any offspring).

He is right, and I am excited about becoming a shepherd to a larger flock.



Phil spent Friday and Saturday building an adorable watertight hut around the pump’s pressure tank. Martin Bush came on Friday, while I was away, and helped Phil build the foundation and the framework, as well as offering suggestions and being a sounding board for ideas. That is not my strong point, at all.

On Saturday, Phil tarpapered the exterior and put up siding. The little hut is, so far, adorable, far more cute than our trailers. But, since it is more-or-less permanent, and our trailers are temporary, that is as it should be, I think.

Thankfully Phil made the hut water tight when he did; on Saturday night, it began to pour. It poured about two inches, and when we woke the next morning to pounding rain, we figured we would head to the Bessette’s sooner or later.

Jonadab is teething, which means he is more cranky than usual. And, when we eat bread or toast with butter and jam, he has developed the sweet/annoying habit of dipping his little pointer finger into the butter. Or the loaf of bread. Or he’ll pat the already-jammed bread. Or drop pattern blocks or pen caps into the jam jar.

If all those amusements are out of reach, he likes to charge Abigail and grab her around the waist, or by the shirt. He’s only 15 months old, but his grip is incredible, and I must pry him off of her, finger by finger. She, for her part, hates his charges, and defends herself as best she can, protesting his advances (loudly).

So with such shenanigans, and the high-spirited boys playing, and the loaf of bread I’d baked for breakfast coming out raw in the middle, I lost it for a few minutes, and found great relief in running up the driveway by myself, shrieking. Michelle Bessette later said that “You couldn’t have lost it that bad—we didn’t hear you.” I maintain that they had their windows closed against the chill and rain.

Amazing, though, what a shower, three and a half loads of laundry, children playing happily upstairs away from me, and adult conversation did for me by the end of the day. It was a good day.

And today, Monday, the weather was sunny. I worked and Phil took the children on a nature hike across Hog Creek. They helped him move the sheep and the goats, into a beautiful new paddock. The oats are up to about six inches in places (the rain has helped them grow significantly), with a lovely rich green. The small leaves on tree stumps are reds and oranges, and there are tiny purple flowers in the mix. It all glowed in the sun.

The one blot about the animals is that Annabelle the goat has a strange patch of hair on her neck, almost like someone has stroked her the wrong way. I looked at it more closely today (it has been there for, perhaps, a week and a half), and realized that the hair is actually gone in spots, almost like it has been chewed short. Looking in my book of basic animal problems, I wonder if it is mange, which would require medicines of some sort.

Do you buy medicine for a free goat?

I should figure out what that is before we get our precious sheep.

Current animal count: 2 pigs, 2 goats, 2 ewes, 5 keets, 49 Rhode Island Red chicks and 1 exotic, 1 cat that comes around (and maybe another feral cat), 1 pet dog that comes with us everywhere, and 6 sheep that will join us sooner or later. W expect to get the three lambs on Friday or Saturday and have the three ewes bred. To ensure that breeding is successful, we will get them about six weeks later.