Art and bellies full

Food makes sense to me. Our desire for it, our pleasure derived from it. The feeling of satisfaction when we feel connected to its creation. It makes sense that food full of nutrition or energy tastes good to us, and food that has gone bad or is bland is either harmful or contains little benefit. It even makes sense that some food itself has evolved or been evolved by us to show us its flavours: brightly coloured fruit shows us it is full of sugars, the pulp encasing the seed that the plant wants us to carry away. It makes sense to me that when we are well fed we are happy; that the quality of our lives improves with the quality of our cuisine and that growing our own food can enhance our enjoyment of life even further.

I can extend this theory to other elements of our lives. To our community which sustains and supports us, to our homes and tools and equipment; neccessity and simplicity; utility and beauty; the skill of our hands come into contact with the raw materials from our backyard...

I can understand music. The rhythms which mimic the beating hearts of our mothers; the syncroncity which only humans possess; the reminisence of the cries of war and the cries of grief or happiness. And finally the perfect mathematical harmony that creates pleasing resonances within our ear drums, and the hearts that become one heart when the voices become one voice.

I can understand theatre, literature and storytelling. They are there to teach us, to warn us and to ask us what we might do if we found ourselves in such a situation. They ask us to reflect, to improve our relationship to the world, and thus they enhance our ability to survive. Or at base, a story might communicate what tasks we have done, so that our neighbour knows that it is done, and the knowledge of the work gets passed from one person to two people, and thus two lives become one and the work is shared...

But what of art? The music of the eye? It serves no strict evolutionary purpose... nor do we need it for survival. It has no rhythm, the harmonies of the frequency of light cannot account for it when we are constantly receiving such a full spectrum of light. I could understand it as a discipline for training the eye, but that is an academic subject which holds no bearing on need. I could understand it as a method of representation and communication, but it so often does neither of those things.

So I return to the basics. I return to brightly coloured fruit. The colour tells us that it will taste good and is full of nutrition and energy. Our eyes, our minds and the fruit have evolved together so that this can be the case. So we know that by consuming the brightly coloured fruit we will derive pleasure and health and the quality of our lives will be improved. Beauty is thus equatable with health, pleasure and life, and ugliness and decay points to disease and death.

And art*? If we enjoy art because it is beautiful... it quite simply put, makes life taste better. If art is the celebration of beauty, it will guide us towards health, happiness and life. If we are deprived of beauty, we will feel ill because our minds will panic, afraid that we have entered an environment of death and disease.

Thus art is the affirmation of life... it is a symptom of health and when a culture produces good art, it means that that culture is thriving; bellies full, happy and healthy.

What purpose art serves doesn't stop there... but this satisfies my question of our basic human relationship to it... before philosophy, culture and identity... before subject and before politics. Art makes life taste better.

*I more or less put conceptual art under the category of philosophy and art that addresses and communicates ideas or dark matters under storytelling.

Portrait of an artist as a young farmer

I'm beginning my artist's apprenticeship, working under Wesley Bates, a wood engraver, painter & private press in Clifford--a short drive from my farm and a shorter drive to Caitlin's where I was this past season.

Wesley moved here a number of years ago, enamored by farming and the country and finding this building in town, a shop front downstairs for his workshop and gallery, and with ample living space upstairs. The price was something even a professional artist could afford. In his time here he has been an advocate of culture in the country, and bringing the city gaze up north to find that the city is not the only place where art can thrive. A self-declared armchair farmer, he is *tickled* to see the young city-turned-farmers like Caitlin and Tarrah moving up here and deciding that this is where they want to live and farm. There are also murmurs of more artists buying buildings up here every day... the first early steps before culture, commerce and community can move in and create booming neighbourhoods.

But we still have work to do. The quality of the majority of the artwork could use a boost (Wesley and his daughter and ex-wife exceptionally excepted). We could use some sort of an art school or space for classes and life-drawing sessions. I personally need to re-examine the importance of the arts in community. Not as a justification, but to renew its purpose specifically within this part of the world.

I also need to find a way to bring good art up here. I suppose it will start with bringing good artists up to my farm, and seeing what happens.

Aldergrove Farm

Aldergrove Farm. That's my farm.

My family and I bought our farm. 75 acres in Grey County, just outside Mount Forest in Ontario. A two-hour drive from Toronto.

Rolling hills, a maple grove and two forested areas with a creek running through. Roughly 45 acres of pasture rolling in and out between the woods.

I am unbelievably excited and terrified. Maybe not even as terrified as I should be, but I've got no choice. And even if I had a choice, I would still choose this over anything.

...

Our offer was accepted the morning I left for Halifax. It had competition from another offer, a better offer. But the story goes that the owner, 83 years old and born in that house, adopted a daughter who passed away when she was ten. He still tears up thinking about her. And luck would have it that I reminded him of her, so he wanted it to go to me. But we had to meet the better offer.

Back and forth on the phone with the agent, the owner tearing up the background and my mother and I poised to drive to the train station while madly putting our brains together to figure the money. Yes. Yes we can meet the offer.

Still shaking we get in the car and I'm at the train station. I recognize someone from behind, my ex. Who I haven't seen since we were together... living together. "Matt... I just bought a farm." "Glynis. I'm going to Mongolia. Today..." He saw his new girlfriend off who was getting on the same train as me (who I didn't know about) as I got my ticket, and then we caught up, still in the daze of the story of the daughter, buying the farm and running into one of the most important people in my life who I hadn't seen in over half a year, and who I wouldn't see again for at least nine months.

I got on the 30-hour train... and the credits must have rolled. I'm now waiting for the next movie to begin...

...


My apprenticeship begins on Friday and I'll be close to my farm. We take possession a week into the new year and by spring I'll have dogs, chicks and ducks, an acre ploughed and a sunroom full of seedlings.

FARMING

One season at a farm... and not even a whole season... and I'm planning to run a market garden, CSA and young farmer's collective next year and break into the Toronto scene. Next year... when I will be tied up building yurts in Nova Scotia until the end of May. I have no land, no farm, no tools or implements. I plan to live in my yurt... the yurt I haven't started building. Part of me is almost embarassed at throwing myself into it after one broken season.

But I realized that growing vegetables isn't the only thing involved in starting a garden. In fact, I think it's pretty easy to grow vegetables. The hard part is knowing what to do with them once they've grown. The mad dash to sell and distribute the ripening vegetables that will go bad within days. Harvesting and marketing... it is all business and planning. So starting small projects and enterprises, organizing, advertising, networking, planning... all this is needed. And This is where I have experience and This is why I feel confident about it.

Whenever I get overwhelmed or get cold feet, I try to think what else I would do. There is nothing. All I know how to do is farm. I think that's all I ever knew how to do I just didn't have the farm to farm on, so how could I have known.

Oh I'm also writing a book on homesteading this winter, designing it, printing it and binding it... as well as two more issues of the Driftwood Quarterly. Life is busy.

Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea...

Frustrated with my future and with lard.

The McQuail's and Tarrah have both given me about 25lb of pork fatback. The fat of the pig between the skin and the muscle. Last time I rendered pork fat, I rendered the flare; the lovely flakey stuff from around the kidneys that's makes leaf lard... first rate lard that is revered in for making pastries. It is so flakey that is rips around and when you blend it in the food processor it turns to a pulp. Then there are virtually no cracklings (left over bits) after rendering. All that is left is a little of the membrane that you couldn't peel off. The lard is almost scentless and cools white. It takes maybe less than an hour of work all together.

But the fatback is chewy, and determined to stay attached to the skin. You need the sharpest knife you can find, which I can't find, and the skin is offputting since it is still often covered with stubble from the Birkshire pig's black hair. The odor is strong and unpleasant. We got off work early yesterday so I sat and sliced the McQuail's fat for an hour and a half. I had barely gotten through one sixth of the fat and half of the fat was still attached to the skin after wrestling with each piece. It blended into a pink lumpy pulp and the fat is over half cracklings. An hour and a half of cutting produced about two cups of second rate lard. If I paid myself it would cost at least $10 for a 250ml jar, which it is not worth.

I find this frustrating because I want to use the fat. There is still hours' worth in the cooler and it has been there a week--cutting it close. Drowning in fat.

Along with the veggies rotting in the feild. I want more time to myself to deal with the amount that is produced. I want an acre of garden, a stream and to put up my yurt and live simply, garden and raise chickens for meat and eggs. Next year, anyhow.

Long Dirty Monday

Last night we feasted by candle light to celebrate Wesley and Caitlin's birthday. We had a big long table, ate cock-aux-vin avec our laying hens; our vegetables, roasted and mashed; Yvonne's apple cider; Juanita's incredible gluten-free baguette, and Wesley recited the Mad Farmer's Liberation Front.

This morning started with a jolt, more or less. A five minute breakfast then out with my coffee. I was preparing for the chicken slaughter. Well... my, our chicken slaughter. A somewhat needless endeavor that Yvonne and I wanted to experience.

I was the more experienced in the matter and thus it was my job to prepare for the events to come. We hung up the state-of-the-art chicken killing cone made from an old plastic sleigh, lent to us by Sean, taped up some plastic and underneath placed a wheel barrow with some straw to catch the blood. We put a garbage bag in a bin to pluck the feathers into and lay a plastic table cloth on the picnic table to do the gutting.

Caitlin had the water on to boil and Jake emerged from his Westphalia which he had drunkenly slept in preceding the festivities last night. It must have been bizarre for him to walk out into the windy, dark morning and see me sitting outside the garage in my complete filthy rain gear, apparently doing nothing. He was, of course, soon informed of the events to come and ended up documenting the process and fetching us bowls of warm water and pots of coffee.

Yvonne and I were nauseous. Caitlin was more or less decidedly Not participating. Jake said he'd do it if we didn't want to. The water was ready. I asked who was going first. "You!" chirped Yvonne.

I grabbed the chicken from the cage and popped it in the cone. I reached in from the hole at the bottom and felt its warm neck and pulled it out. The chicken was totally calm. It didn't even do anything when I dug the blade into its neck until the blood began to pour and its head went limp, then it contracted and the nerves began to fire. There it was. The rest was no mystery, I had done it before.

After the gutting and whatnot, we mucked out the chicken coop in the barn and found far too many baby mice which Yvonne ended up drowning. We then moved about 60 laying hens from the chicken trailer into the barn, except for one that escaped. Banjo, our young lab, ended up killing her. Caitlin was livid. She threw it to the pigs. Then the trailer was mucked out.

Long dirty Monday.

My chicken is currently simmering on the stove with a carrot, parsnip, celeriac, red pepper, onion and six chicken feet.

Wealthy and Broke

A skunk got into the barn. We trapped it and Jill and I took it to the creek in her hitch and with a rope tied to the cage and lowered it into the water.

If we had let it alone it would have eaten the animal's food, probably bred and then there would be more skunks to deal with. If we had let it loose nearby it would have come back. If we had driven it far and let it loose it would have been in an unfamiliar territory and it would have probably been killed by another animal anyway. So it had to be done and Jill did it.

A few days ago we were visiting another farm and I helped a young man lift a deer from the back of his Volkswagan Golf and put it into the freezer next to another, smaller deer. He lived on the farm in a teepee and helped with the livestock in exchange for meals and the land. He kills the animals with a bow and arrow and then tans the hides with brains and sumach.

Sean has also been saving skins. So looking at this beautiful animal, of course I thought to skin it. I don't know much about it, but if they could do it, why not I. And I'd have to start somewhere. And if I didn't it would go to waste anyway. So I had to try.

I read that tying it up in and leaving it in a stream with running water for a day would help remove any scent left over, and I researched where the scent glands were so I could carefully avoid them.

The weather has been grim. Always spitting, windy and dark. I set off at 5 today to fetch the skunk from the running creek. It was still where I had tied it but the creek had risen a foot and it was harder to reach and untie my knot. The water was running more rapidly, and when I grabbed the skunk it had stiffened with its paws up near its face. I lowered it onto the grass and untied its feet, and began cutting into the skin from the inside of the backleg. It felt more appropriate to skin it there, surrounded by trees, rushes and the creek. I removed the scent glands and threw the carcass for a wild animal to feast on. The animal was beautiful. It was easier than I thought. But kind of shameful to cut around the eyes, releasing the skin from the head and leaving the small beast naked. I'd have rather cut off its head and butchered the muscle into strips to roast on the fire.

On our initiative we're slitting the throats of three old laying hens this weekend. I feel more prepared for the first life I'll have to personally take. I have processed chickens before, but never killed. It will be interesting.

It dawned on me the other day that I will never have much money. I will always be scraping my pennies together. I'll have holes in my socks and experience little glamour. My childrens' clothes will be patched and we'll have no time for television. But we will never go hungry and never have idle hands. We'll have to work for our firewood but we will have warmth.

My writing might be more indepth were I not so tired. We are roasting by the fire; reading novels and how-to books on self-sufficiency; dogs snoring and kitten playing.

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

In real life: Thanksgiving, hours on the highway at the wheel through the maples ablaze with colour. Discussions of farms, looking for land, almost finishing the Driftwood and diving into music... Getting scared at the prospect of getting what I want. Getting scared at the prospect of not. But always walking away full of love and planning...

I have been thinking about our role as humans here. We conduct and shepherd the forces of life into a union on the farm... all the beings rotating around the fertility of the soil, the energy of the sun and the carrier of the water. The animals both wild and domestic, the grasses and the grain, the vegetables and the woods... and then us. And what makes us different? Music and fire. Hands and stories.


...


Since awakening to the life of the farm this Spring and learning its rhythms, I have discovered poetry.


"In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie--
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.
Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrickles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning." -T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


...


"There is the bad work of pride. There is also the bad work of despair--done poorly out of the failure of hope or vision.

Despair is the too-little of responsibility, as pride is the too-much...

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces it with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose lonliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments...

To work at this work alone is to fail. There is no help for it. Loneliness is its failure..."

-Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

But I have got some business out at the edge of town

Today I was angry at the vegetables. The tomatoes in particular. I took down their knocked-down trellising, the grey-dead vines bearing various stages of ripening, split and rotting fruits. I hated that I let them die, I hated that I had no time to charish them all. Angry at my own wealth and my lack of energy for them. Angry at the weeks of harvest and still, that there were more.

Then I got angry at the farm. At the light and the colours and textures in particular. I get frustrated that I can't keep it. I get angry that I can't share it all, that my camera can't capture it rightly and that I don't have a partner to see the animals backlit by the setting sun in the field.

I'd like to build a tower in my house to look west, out over the pasture, so that I can sit and have time to take it in. And to plant a garden almost too small, so that every imperfect product will be saved and we will still have time to preserve it.

Save up; up where the light, undiluted, is weaving, in a drunk dream, at the sight of my baby, out back

I keep thinking this is the first year of my life. Everything feels a first, like something I read about this Spring that I finally get to do. My first thanksgiving. My first Christmas. My first red pepper.

I got a new job for the winter, though "job" doesn't quite suit. I will be an artist's assistant and apprentice in his printing shop, where I will assist him with wood engravings, letter press printing, marketing (touring), etc. and there will be time set aside for my education and independent projects.

Yvonne brought home a kitten on Sunday. Her name is Emmer Wheatfeild and she is currently napping on a chair in my room.

It is Driftwood season and I am busy editing, creating, writing. Soon it will be printing and binding.

The winter wheat and spelt are sprouting and taking root.

The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined, and hold us close forever.

I often mean to write about farming itself... sentences trickle into my minds eye in the morning when thoughts are fresh and clear, and by the evening I am worn and can barely remember what I did, which is why I try to write them down in some semblance because by tomorrow they may be gone.

Up until this year, I hadn't considered farming as a... a job. A viable "career" option for me. I have always been passionate about the idea of maybe one day owning a small cottage, raising sheep, using the land to provide me with materials for my house... I have been passionate about historic "ways of doing things," resonating with images of beautiful landscapes, historic architecture, heritage crafts... I almost went to school for architecture. I thought it would give me the foundation to build structures out of materials that I found in the building's natural surroundings... clay, wood, stone.

I have also always been passionate about having a part in the origins of an object that is part of my life. Perhaps to own a mug that I made from clay that I harvested... or leather from an animal that I reared and slaughtered, skinned and tanned... I remember telling Bryn that all I wanted to do in life was to "complete a cycle". To raise bees and use the honey for the beer I made with my own barley and hops, the wax with some tallow and neatsfoot oil from a cow I knew... have it come full circle. I'd die happy having done that.

But farming? Surely I'll be a carpenter or something. I ain't no farmer.

But mostly, whenever I was on farms for short week stints, I felt lonely. I couldn't imagine isolating myself in the country, away from culture, away from community. Only cities had that, so I guess I couldn't have sheep. When I came here, I found I was backasswards wrong about that, and suddenly my dreams were not only attainable, but maybe a bit better and more exciting than even what I imagined.

And as for farming itself...

See... farming isn't really the same as being a carpenter or a cobbler or a cook. At least not this kind of farming. In fact, farming, as it turns out, can be all of those things.

Farming is what you do when you live on a farm. It is living and working with the land and all it can provide, sustain or hold, whatever that may be. It is assisting and accompanying forms of life and helping or seeing them grow, then incorporating them back into our lives to sustain us and our communities and our other enterprises. It is building, it is creating and often playing. It is... whatever you want it to be.

And in the end, farming, to me, isn't farming at all. It is living. It is the art of living, and Life is in turn the medium itself. Both mine, and the lives of plants, animals, insects and soil around me. I see birth, I see growth. I see nurture, sickness, failure, thriving and death. I see the cycles, I know the weather intimately. I know the soil, I have helped make it what it is. I have tasted what it can provide me, and I know exactly what it feels like today.

So in that sense, I have always wanted to do this. I have always wanted to live, and be apart of the Life around me that becomes my life when I interact with it in the form of food, shelter, clothing, relationships, landscapes... I just didn't realize they called that farming, and that you could do that for a... well, for a living.

So maybe I still don't even consider myself a farmer. But I know I will buy land, and make my enterprises dependent on that land. I know I will aim to feed and shelter myself off that land, using its resources as my creative medium. I know I will probably raise cows, sheep, pigs and chickens, house horses, grow my own food and plant orchards. But that's not farming, that's just living.

Speaking of which, the wheat we planted is sprouting.

And you stack in your barrow...

Found a farm.

They bought 100 acres in 1973, they were 21 years old. They had it plowed up and they planted grain. They made the 1891 barn livable in one room while they built their passive solar board and baton house and more or less started with just a few sheep. They now raise pastured beef, chickens, pork and work with draft horses. Their barn is full of old belt threshers and horse-powered equipment. They barter with their Amish neighbours. They inherited an apple orchard, and just grow enough vegetables for themselves.

They more or less do... exactly what I want to do...

Well, some of it... I am young and full of dreams after all.

Pie

Writing from the barn. The sun is at three hands from the horizon and starting to turn gold, along with the leaves which also adorn speckles of reds, burgundies and pumpkin oranges.

Yvonne is laughing at me because my hat and my computer clash with the barn and the banjo.


I made pie today. For the first time. Apple pie. I've been too afraid to make it because my mum said she tried to make pie pastry once and it was inedible. But then I realized she'd only tried ONCE. And she's KNEW what she'd done wrong.

But nevertheless, I was nervous. Partly because I had never done it before, partly because I was bringing it to a potluck at my first intern-network meeting, me being the "new kid in class." But I was mostly nervous because I was using lard. Lard that I had rendered myself, and surely something that I did from scratch by taking instructions from books and the internet wasn't Actually going to work. I was afraid the faint (very faint!) porky smell would clash with the apples. When the lard flaked apart rather than broke like butter or shortening, I began to doubt the quality of the lard... Maybe it would make everyone sick. Or it would just be a disaster and I'd have wasted Yvonne's time who was making the filling, and wasted Caitlin's time who let us make something instead of work... and we'd have to make something else for the potluck tomorrow... all a waste...

I used a recipe left behind by Caitlin's mum (a pie-master). It called for a cup of lard and two cups flour, but it seemed a little dry so I put in a little more lard. I did that and looked at other recipes, they all called for less lard. The pastry was also yellow, but that was the egg. A real farm egg, with an orange yolk, not a yellow yolk.

I rolled out the pastry and recalled seeing my dad doing this many times before, perhaps I had even rolled it out on occasion. It stuck to the counter so I rolled it again, but remembered that dad says he usually rolls it twice so I wasn't too worried. The second roll went well, as well as the top, and the rolls I made for a mini-pie (to test so that I didn't have to blindly feed a bunch of other farm interns poisonous rock-pie) went well too. With an awkward combination of hesitation and blind faith I threw the pies into the oven.

After ten minutes, it smelled pretty good.

...Pretty goddamn good.

The crust started to brown earlier than it said it would, so I took the test pie out of the oven and poked it. The crust acted like pie crust. Like really flaky, buttery (well, lardy), light, crusty pie crust. So I ate it. It burnt my mouth so I couldn't taste it. So I slowed down and took another bite.

It was goddamn delicious. Really... goddamn good.

One gets the impression that this pie has taken on a life of its own. Like it's one of the barnyard animals... I suppose in a way it is... or, it was. Part of one anyway.

That pie for the potluck better still be there tomorrow.

I need more pig lard. Maybe I'll go into business. The lard business.

GLYNIS' PIE CRUST
Stolen from Marilyn Hall

2 cups pastry flour
1 cup leaf lard (I talk about rendering fat in the Driftwood Quarterly, Vol. I. No. II)
3/4 tsp salt

1 egg
2 Tbsp water
1 Tbsp vinegar

Cut lard into flour and salt until it pebbles up into pea-sized bits. Combine wet ingredients with a fork. Pour onto flour and lard and mix JUST until everything is combined. Make a ball of the dough and chill in the fridge. Pour a bunch of flour on the counter or table, and place chilled pastry dough on it. Flour up the rolling pin (or wine bottle) and roll out into round shape and desired thickness. If desired, or if it's too delicate to lift, fold it into a ball and roll out again. To lift into pie pan, fold in half, lift and place, fold it out again.

Once the pie filling is in and the top is on, bake at 450 for ten minutes, and then drop the temperature to 350 for the remaining time, until the edges begin to brown, about 25-45 minutes.

I'm walking to a farm to grow wheat...

Wheat that is planted in the fall has a higher yield than spring wheat. I've been wanting to grow grain--Yvonne as well--and she has the opportunity to see a planting of wheat through to the harvest next year. So two sacks, one of hard winter wheat and one of spelt, were broadcast by hand this afternoon over a small patch of land tilled up for her. We each took a sack and spread the grain. It seemed easy until the second step: the raking. We raked and raked... most of the seed still showing. Then we raked and raked some more. The skin began to peel from my hands and we still had more raking.

We timed it for today because it said it would rain tonight, which would save it from getting eaten by the birds and help it germinate. And luckily as I write this, I can hear the pitter-patter of rain drops on the roof.

The Aeon, Reversed

Been working since yesterday morning. Harvest in the rain, we and the carrots covered in mud. Damp to the long johns and unable to decide whether we were hot or cold. CSA pick-up in Waterloo and we got home after sunset. With Caitlin gone it was our job to finish up the chores and close the chicken coops.

I hobbled to the barn in the dark and walked in to complete silence... then a quiet pig snort. I turned on the light to the two sleeping sows, but by the time I got to their feeding trough they were nuzzling me to get to the grain and practically knocking me over (all 400 pounds of them). From the other pen Poppy, the lone sheep started baaing at me, with Wally the Llama now awake next to her. Then came the sound of the two Geese and the two runner ducks... quacking away as they entered the pig pen and tried to get in on the pig food. Then came Poppy and Wally. All quacking and snorting and baaing and trying to find a way to squeeze between the pigs. I couldn't help but just watch and laugh, and forgot all about getting the chores done quickly.

Back at it at 7 the next morning. Off to the market, but this time I was picked up and driven into Toronto. A few hours and I was on the subway with my carrots, leeks, peppers and squash in arm... the 22 bus to my parent's house...

Princess of Cups

Yesterday we doddled. The weather was grim and windy. But we went to a small apple orchard and the trees were beautiful and full of perfect fruit. Later, I recorded some songs in the barn. I had to stop one of the takes because a chicken was making me laugh.

The day started today with shucking garlic in the barn. Drove to a new order Mennonite's farm, a man who has started an organic, grass fed cow share. He practices intensive pasture rotation which benefits both cow and pasture, and his jerseys are healthier, longer living and longer producing than the high-protein grain fed animals in commercial farming.

He also keeps riding horses and two of his Australian Shepherd's just had pups. They are fed jersey milk and are fatter than piglets. His four-year-old daughter (who was wiser than her years) walked with me and we exchanged quiet conversation as the farmer showed Caitlin and Yvonne around the pasture ahead of us. I knew I was missing important information, but I felt she, and quietly meeting the animals, was more important in that moment. She introduced me to some of the horses and cows and gathered a bouquet of grass just like I do. I gave her some small peacock feathers from my pocket after sharing a glass of the raw jersey milk...

We harvested squash, leeks and tomatoes in the afternoon, and then my brother and mum arrived for a visit. I showed mum how to collect the eggs and nearly died laughing she was so excited and hesitant at the idea of picking an egg out of a roost. Then I dragged Calum around with me for the evening chores, and he laughed at the big Berkshire sows when I poured them their feed. We helped pick rocks out of Yvonne's test winter wheat crop, I taught Calum to ride the tractor, and barked extensively at my mother about buying land and building a small cottage.

We walked down to the creek with the dogs and through the wooded path. We sampled apples from the trees we discovered, and found spearmint growing wild on the path.

Caitlin cooked us a meal of all her farm's creation. Roasted sausage with tomatoes, mashed potatoes and sweet corn. I bid my family adieu and collapsed into a ramble.

Sun rise fog settles

Extracted honey at Jana's then movie night in town: Midnight in Paris. Caitlin teased me because I am one of those people, nostalgic for a time I never lived.

This Cylinder Is Bored True

Yesterday: Woke before dusk, worked 'til dark. Harvest and night market, slow days for money. Ate fresh sweet corn in the field.

Today: Woke before dusk, off to market. Slow day for busking, competition with some speakers and a cloudy, cold morning. Prize of the week: an antique Enterprise Sausage, Lard & Fruit Press, cast iron beauty. The apples are ripe in their trees, if I find time to restore the press, pick a few bushels of apples, get a carboy, yeast and airlock, I'll make cider. Yvonne had the idea of saving it for her wheat harvest next summer, as payment for anyone who comes out to help (as tradition has it).

Caitlin saved me her pig fat and it's been thawing in the downstairs sink... the smell was nauseating and I couldn't bring myself to render the fat back. Something about the shaved stubble on the skin. I plunked the 'flare' into a big silver bowl for rendering leaf lard, their slightly bloody mauled ends sticking into the air. I noticed some customers at the door on my way back up wanting to pay for a couple dozen eggs... their eyes unable to avoid the large carcass parts under my arm, and I chuckled to myself. After processing, the quality of the oil impressed me. I couldn't get it off.

Farming by day (and sometimes night), working on the Driftwood Quarterly in my moments between meals, banjo and sleep...

Bread

Bread is a science, but a human science. Temperatures and time and ratios of ingredients and moisture and all those things form chemical reactions which produce a loaf of bread. But most people just learn the chemistry through feel, and that's what I'm doing.


O N E . L O A F . O F . B R E A D


1:
PROOF THE YEAST

Yeast is a little animal that eats sugar and poops out air and a bit of booze. It needs to be about body temperature to do this, and it needs sugar to eat in the first place.

One cup of warm water, a few tablespoons of sugar (honey, maple syrup, etc) and about 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast, stirred and left to bubble is part of the fine science. If the water is too hot you'll kill it. If it's too cold it will go to sleep.

2:
MAKE A SPONGE

Add about 2 and a half cups of flour (whatever flour), one tablespoon of melted butter and some more sugar (how sweet do you want it?), mix it all up and make sure it stays in a warm place. It will grow and bubble and be sticky.

3.
MAKE A DRY DOUGH AND MASH THE GLUTEN TOGETHER

I like to pour a bunch of flour on the table and pour my sponge onto it, working the flour from the table into the dough until the dough stops absorbing the flour. I had to go a little drier than my intuition told me. Knead the dough and imagine that you're mashing the gluten in the flour together so that when the yeast poops out the air, the gluten won't let it get out. This is how bread rises.

4.
LET IT RISE

Put some oil on your dough and place it in a bowl. Put it in a warm place to rise until it gets big.

5.
PUNCH THE AIR OUT

Punch it down so there are no giant bubbles and let it rise a bit more. After it rises, if you are making multiple loaves, divide them here.

6.
BAKE

Grease up a pan, maybe sprinkling some flour over it. I like to grease my loaf too. Preheat to 375, but turn it down to 350 when you put the loaves in. Bake until slightly gold on top, and hollow sounding when tapped, about 25-30 minutes. Brush the top of the loaf with oil to keep it moist.

Use cloth or paper to store it.

The clouds hang low

In the barn, shucking garlic to plant for overwintering. The second floor holds the advantage of seeing out an open sliding wall. It is nice to do the jobs where you sit and do something repetitive, to look over and see the dogs nesting in the hay, to hear the sparrows and the barn swallows flying above in the rafters.

More picking rocks and potatoes, the sound of pickings hitting the bottom of a bucket... grabbing an apple from a nearby tree and finding it sweet...

Not all days aren't ugly

Misty morning on neighbour's farm, digging up potatoes. Stole a dying piglet and kept it in my shirt, trying to keep it warm. Named it Clarence, and Maya, the old golden retriever, stared blinklessly at my belly in the truck ride home as I tried to rub the life back into it. Gave it milk and lay it down, and saw the bruising of what looked like a hoof, the mother sow weighing 600 some odd pounds.

It died while I was picking rocks out of next year's field, the newly naked soil dry and being lifted into dust with every move. After the hot, dusty afternoon I buried Clarence by the bees and gathered tiny peacock feathers.

Once I had a banjo, made it out of pine

If I don't keep track, I will forget.

Last night I took the dogs down to the creek and we muddled about in the woods. The grass and the rushes and the dogwood have grown to meet me eye to eye and I can barely recognize it from the Spring. We came to the end of the birch trees and maples and found the neighbouring bean fields, turning yellow against the backdrop of overgrown trees with a roof peaking out from beyond the hill, and I felt like I was in farmland Ontario in September, which I was. Which I am... and I am consistently reminded of it.

Caitlin came home and we harvested tomatoes until our only source of light was the almost-full moon. There was a few minutes where she disappeared completely as I waited by the wagon in the stillness of newly fallen night. I looked into the dark field and tried to catch the shadow of her movement distantly down the row. When she returned we hobbled up to the house, drunk on farming 'til sundown.

Slept in 'til 6:50am and dashed to market with enough vegetables to pack four tables and still have bins and bins full behind us. Yvonne ran the market and I sauntered off with my banjo and gathered toonies from the passers by until my string broke.

New Life in Autumn

I harvested ground cherries and tomatillos all afternoon, alone in the field with my thoughts, the sun and my music. By early evening I was cutting flowers and tonight I'll be rounding up the last of the tomatoes for tomorrow's market.

I have arrived and all my thoughts have already manifested: soon, we sow our winter grains and I didn't even have to order the seed. I have slipped into a life carved for me, a perfect fit. I am struck by how peaceful it is, and yet always poised to be disappointed because surely I will find a way to screw it up. But the disappointments are muffled and muted by the fact that out here, we have the land and the animals. I survive alongside them, and the hard work is rewarded with the bounty of harvest.

Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now

I drove into the city yesterday with a Dad and his three kids. In the back were five chickens which I had helped catch that morning on the farm. We made a stop in a parking lot on the way so that the kids could stretch their legs and have a snack. I watched the chickens in their cat-cages, stuffed in the back trunk of car, remembering their former home in the pasture. All around me were cars and pavement. I saw myself in the chickens, and all the beauty of the land in them, a caged transplant dragged into the concrete city.

The kids wanted some grass after their snack. "Some grass?" said the Dad. Then we remembered that Sean had taught them to be farmers by taking a blade from the field and chewing on its end. But the grass in the parking lot was tough and bitter. "It's because it's not farm grass," they said. "Farm grass is better."

We drove away from the seeds I had sown, from the chicks and the lambs I had watched grow. From the crops that I was terrified of losing when the hail almost drove us off the road. I won't be back for almost three months. The closest I have ever felt to this was when I left a lover behind. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson by now, what a mistake it is to leave.

The Weather Says Change

During a long gap between obligations, as the green made its reappearance after the months of grey, on a whim I headed north to a farm in Ontario. I expected nothing, I wasn't even sure why I was going. Only that the weeks that lay ahead of me in the city seemed vacant and anxious, and that I was hungry for Spring, hungry for work, and nothing in me had the desire to spend money or scramble to fill the boredom.

I've been here for two weeks now. It has begun to feel like home. I know the animals and the plants now, and feel differently towards them than I do others. I have planted seeds and seen them grow. I have even planted ideas and seen them manifest. I have gained the affection of the dogs and the lone pet sheep, learned to drive the tractors and have taken over the barn chores. I have caught chickens and carried home day-old chicks, placing them one by one into their new home and seen them double in size in one week.

It is one thing to hear the murmuring clucks of chickens peck around you, startle at the peacock's cry or marvel at the large awkwardness of a llama. But it is so different to actually know an animal, throw down the pigs feed alone in the barn or have that same llama and that same lone sheep break into a galloping run to follow alongside your tractor in their open pasture on a sunny day.

Today, as I fished through a pile of wood scraps, looking to build a door for a newly acquired outhouse, I heard the familiar warble of a laying hen in the barn... the part of the barn that the chickens are not supposed to be. The hen was clearly low down on the pecking order, but even still had probably been in the barn, away from food and water for at least a day or two. I couldn't tell if she was unusually thin, or if the missing feathers on her neck made her look especially scrawny. I tried to herd her towards the door but eventually realized I would have to catch her. Catching chickens has been a personal goal of mine, but I've found that it's an impossible skill to practice because one can only really catch a chicken if one actually needs to catch the chicken. The lack of willpower in a useless catch renders the job impossible.

The hen was on some large bales of hay, her wings level with my face. I placed my hands close by her to show that it was not blood-lust driving my presence. Head on, I reached for her sides and picked her up, feeling her wings struggle in my hands at first, and then relax. I could feel her warm body against me as I brought her in closer, hoping that she would feel the calmness of my good intention. Her head bobbed as I walked her out of the barn, and decided it would be best to drop her on the chicken run so she could find her way to the food. She looked a little startled, but I felt I had made a friend. Significantly smaller and with less feathers, she was easy to pick out amongst the other brown hens. Of course she headed for the ground, away from the food...

I went to do the chores, and low and behold found that she'd made her way to the coop by the time I'd reached it. I watched her peck around, and witnessed the pleasure of seeing her spot the food dispenser, jolt and make a frantic run for it, looking just like any starving animal would upon seeing food and water. I never thought I'd make a friend of such a silly animal, but I couldn't help but feel a fondness for her, for that barn, for the whole farm, in light of the feat that I made alone in that barn, as I fished for wood to make a door.

Soon after, the thunder rolled in in the middle of my chores. I stayed in the barn as the world darkened and the rain poured down, with the pigs, the dogs, the calico barn cat, the lone sheep, the llama, the peacock and swallows. I watched the runner ducks play in the rain, and the two geese brace themselves against the wind, hanging out in the middle of the driveway.

Ginger Tissane

If you find yourself at your parent's home, and your throat grows ever so sore but you've left your elderberries, astragalus and echinacea at your apartment in Montreal, whip up this tissane using ingredients which you have lying around.

First: eat an orange, or have your mother begin eating an orange and give you half. Everyone knows the vitamin C is good for you, and that oranges taste especially good when you're sick.

Then take:

some of the orange peel

a portion of ginger root

a few pieces of cinnamon bark

water

raw dandelion honey from Meadowview Farms

Fill a small pot with water and turn on the stove. Rip up the orange peel, chop up the ginger, and put in your cinnamon. Bring to a boil, then let steep for ten or so minutes while you load up the laundry machine. Wait until you've poured your cup and let your tissane cool a little before putting your honey in: you don't want the honey to pasteurize, it will lose its healing qualities.

Ginger will do nothing to help your cold, but might help settle your stomach if that happens to be bothering you, and will feel good as it burns your throat on the way down.

Cinnamon will stimulate the circulatory system and produce warming affects. It is thought to be helpful in the resolution of colds and flues. It's also used as a bactericide, a fungicide, a digestive remedy, helpful for wretched menstrual syndromes, and a natural pain reliever.

Orange peel; I haven't a clue but it's darn tasty in this mix and I'm sure it's good for something.

Raw dandelion honey has antibiotic and antiseptic and antiviral qualities, will boost the immune system, reverse aging, cure death and make a better prime minister than Harper. It is also more delicious than everything.