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.