Many Hands Make Light Work, Or Sorry About That, All You Horse People

For years, I have thought that all those board fences you see, forming the perimeters of ‘country places’ where horses reside were basically a coded sign of exclusivity. Horses are expensive to keep and are, in themselves these days, a pretty unmistakable sign of excess wealth and exclusivity. Horse country, whether it be in Maryland, west of Towson, or in central Virginia, or Aiken, South Carolina, always has that air of money and privilege, and wooden fences are a consistent feature of those places, and everywhere horses are kept.

Horses are expensive to keep, but not necessarily to obtain, and we have a couple of them ourselves, acquired for not very much money. They are voracious eaters, but we make our own hay, so that is not a big problem. The farrier comes round far too often (about 10 times a year), but there’s not much you can do about that. Once Zach got Dallas – the first horse, we fenced what has come to be known as the Triangle paddock because, well, it’s triangular. Its base is the long side of the big barn, the hypotenuse, which followed one of the brooks (locally called a ‘branch’) already had the remains of a chainlink fence in place. We fenced the third side with steel T-posts and woven wire field fencing. It was not perfect, being our first effort at fencing, but it looked pretty good. The horse – and soon Thunder Donkey –were happy. For a while. But there’s a good reason for that old adage, ‘the grass is always greener on the other side.’ It turns out that steel T-posts are no match for 900 pounds of horse that is trying to graze on the other side of the fence. Pretty soon the field fencing was getting crunched at the bottom by the hooves of the animals; its top was rolling over under pressure from their necks, but it still held them.

Then we got another horse: Titus. After a few months of mutual suspicion, he and Dallas became buddies. One day when Zach was riding Dallas, Titus, not to be left out, backed up and leapt the fence to be with his buddy. So much for a wire fence to keep horses in. Besides, it was looking pretty ratty after a year and a half, with bent T-posts leaning towards the drive and the field fence going in all different directions. A fence that doesn’t even last 18 months is a failure, and we had to do something. I began to accumulate the material for something more substantial: 4x4 posts and 1x6 board slats. I was going to build a wooden horse fence – that semiotic sign of equine exclusivity!

Recently we had a visit from son Gabe, on the mainland between stints delivering one yacht to Caribbean islands and captaining another one for the winter. Sons Rob and Zach are already working for me on the place, so with three strong boys it seemed like a good day to bite the bullet and change fences. Rob and Zach had already taken the old T-posts out, leaving the twisted wire fence lying on the ground. New postholes were soon dug and the 4x4 posts plumbed in them, with a collar of concrete poured around them to withstand leaning horses. Coming along close behind we were nailing the three boards to the posts and by the end of the day we had a complete wooden fence, 175 feet long. Finished. For anyone who knows me: Mr.-95%-is-good-enough-we’ll-finish-it-later, finished is remarkable. Even more remarkable, in the days after this big fencing day, Rob, Zach and I restretched the old wire fence into a semblance of straightness and nailed it to the inside of the board fence so that next spring we can pasture our new crop of kids in the Triangle paddock. A wooden fence might withstand horses and donkeys, but goat kids would go through it like water through a sieve.

So wooden fences are not – or not only – a sign of the elevated social status of horse people. They are pretty much necessary if you want to keep big, strong, dumb animals, like horses, where you put them. I have learned that, and I take back all my indignant feelings at the ostentation of them. They are not even that much more expensive than a wire fence, especially considering that you would have to replace a wire fence every couple of years. And finally, they look very nice; anything to spruce the place up!

postscript: After months of not posting anything, here are two new things within a week. The credit for that goes to the big snow we had last week (that can be seen in the photo of the new fence); 10” of wet snow makes everything more difficult…except, I guess, writing a new blog post.

Some Assembly Required

I am aware – have been since the beginning – that the primary obligation of a blogger is to blog: you have to put the stuff out there regularly. That has not happened this year on our farm. Blogging is like a job on top of a job, but this year it has been a job on top of three other jobs, and has not often gotten done.

I have mentioned before that the farm had a significant amount of what could charitably be called ‘deferred maintenance.’ That is a good term, and could be applied equally to our old house in Charleston, to the current state of infrastructure in Buncombe county, and, it has to be said, to our nation as a whole. Someone is always left sitting at the table when the check comes. Unfortunately for us, the bill for a new septic system arrived when we were the only ones left at the table. That was a struggle that lasted from March until November, but the less said of it the better.

Nevertheless, we push ahead on various fronts. The transformation of the garage down the hill from the house -- affectionately called the ‘Farmer’s Wife’ because of the big sign proclaiming it thus that adorned it when we arrived – into a couple of agritourism rental units is nearly done and will get a posting of its own when it is. Likewise, the transformation of a state-of-the-art 1930s half bath and an adjoining closet into two more functional whole bathrooms inside the house proceeds apace.

The goat milking has shut down for the season. The girls are solar-powered, and as the daylight fades, so does their milk production. I wrapped the last of this year’s cheeses back in mid-November and put them in the fridge for their final aging. But we are already preparing for a new season with ten does bred to our big new buck: another post to come.

The photo at the top of this post was taken a couple of weeks ago when we had our first heavy frost. By rights, frosty nights and days in the country mean a slowdown in the work as things contract. The milking is done for the year, true, but all sorts of other initiatives are forging ahead, and this winter does not seem to be offering much in the way of sitting by the fireside. For example, the wood we need to heat the house is still mostly green, and we need sufficient dry to hold us over until March when we can burn the wood we have collected so far. But unless something really exciting happens, don’t expect a post about cutting wood. If you want something along those lines, look into Robert Frost.

This season’s preoccupation with transformations near the family house has put the cheese house and associated endeavors a little farther back. Nevertheless, the plans for those crucial parts of the farm are moving ahead, however slowly. Posts detailing them will also be appearing – however slowly.

These days, too many people seem to equate comfort and status with sleeping in. During kidding season, back in March and April, and lasting until June, I got up at 4:30 every day to feed the babies before milking. I was not unhappy when the kids were finally weaned! But another, unsuspected, benefit accrued: I found that I was most happy to be outside, watching the world wake up. T.H. White, in the posthumous addendum to his wonderful, The Once and Future King;The Book of Merlyn, has a chapter detailing this very thing: the beauty and illusory innocence of the world before men awoke and began their daily routine of stomping on things and breaking stuff up. I can forego 4:30 am with no trouble, but going from dark to light is a wonderful transformation that I still enjoy, for although I am no longer milking, the goats…and the horses…and the chickens…and the rabbits…and the turkeys…still need daily care and attention. Dredging up an antique word here, that is what a husbandman has to do.

So the photo of the pre-dawn house heater doing its job is pretty much where we are these days on the farm – given that we are also all over the place doing wonderful things. Winter reading by the fire might not quite arrive this year, but it is a goal devoutly to be sought.

Gravity

When I was a college student for the first time, back in the early 1970s, I remember going to a print sale in the student union. This was an event where traveling art salesmen moved from college to college, selling cheap reproductions of bad (and sometimes good) art to students looking to spiff up their dorm room, or brighten up their dreary basement apartment. After wasting way too much time combing through table after table of pictures I didn’t much like, I found a sepia-colored drawing by van Gogh called Avenue of Poplars. In order to improve on the original, the art producers had printed it on authentic fake canvas textured paper – just like van Gogh would have used, had he been producing for the college market. Anyway, I bought it, and spent several times its cost to have it framed so that it looked nice, and I had it hanging on my various walls long past my college days. I have no idea what happened to it, but it no longer hangs on my walls.

The reason I bring up this trivial remembrance now is that the peasant figure in the drawing always struck me as being poorly drawn. Now van Gogh was no Ingres, and his figures are frequently crude and, as the art historians would say, ‘out of drawing.’ He was not interested in getting these sorts of sthings ‘right,’ so it is unfair to criticize him for something he did not want to do. But in this case, I think he got the drawing just right, because it looks to me like he captured one of the realities of rural life about as perfectly as any artist has.

I say this after Kathleen took a phone photo of me being followed by the goats, and I look scarily like the peasant in van Gogh’s drawing: sort of hunched over and lurching along. I remember the moment, and I did not feel particularly burdened, but it is clear that gravity is pulling me downwards. Since seeing the photo I have become much more conscious of how I walk around, and I am constantly finding that I revert to the image of that drawing. Son Zach got a copy of the best-seller book by Jordan Peterson called 12 Rules for Life, and I glanced at the table of contents. One of the chapters is titled ‘Head Up, Shoulders Back.’ I haven’t read the book, but that title keeps bouncing around in my head and I will say it out loud when I am working alone (which is often) to hoist myself up.

I remember reading, years ago, about something called the ‘scholar’s stoop’ that afflicted people in the academic business who spent too much time in the library, bent over tables reading books. I think I only knew one scholar in my 35 or so years in the academic trenches with that malady, and he had earned it. I have seen many more farmers bent over from years of toil who have a harder time standing up straight, or who have given up trying. When I was young our family had a neighbor, an old German farmer in southern Illinois named Rudy Basler, who had broken his back in some way or another, and was L-shaped and could not stand straight. But he was a cheerful fellow despite that.

So, if I can follow Jordan Peterson’s advice and keep my head up and shoulders back (until I can’t anymore), and be cheerful in my life like my old neighbor Rudy Basler, I can minimize the deleterious affects of old master gravity. It’s worth a try.

Spring is Springing

Way back last summer I noted in a post that there were going to be two very busy times on our farm. One was haying season (which we were in the middle of as I wrote the post), and the second is kidding season. Our season started this year on March 10, which was three weeks before I was expecting it to. Last fall I bought a couple of pregnant goats and was told they had been bred at the end of October. Add 5 months – the gestation period for a goat -- to that and you get the end of March. Well, so much for accurate information from goat sellers. One of the goats failed to show up for evening roll call after a day in the pasture, and was nowhere to be found, despite a search that lasted until after dark. Although we have not had problems with coyotes, they are around and you can hear them gabbling most nights, up along the ridges. A lone goat wandering in the woods would not stand much of a chance. Reluctantly, I had to write her off.

The next morning when I went out for morning chores, there Clara was, standing in the barnyard looking anxious. The day before she had been very pregnant, and now she clearly wasn’t, but alas, she was alone. Another search ensued, this time for the kid or kids, but was as much a failure as the one the night before. The first batter of the season strikes out! After that fiasco I kept a closer eye on the other doe I got with her, and sure enough, within a day or two she started acting strange, so I put her in one of our kidding stalls. Within a day she had given birth to two kids: a doeling and a buckling. She was a very attentive mother, but soon the kids were looking as if something was wrong. They were not thriving (‘Thrive’ is a very useful agricultural verb that covers a multitude of vague and unspecified ailments, as in ‘that little buckling just ain’t thriving the way he ought.’) In the middle of the night, Max the dog (another story there) began barking incessantly, enough to wake me up and force me outside. I decided to visit the new babies in the barn since I was already out and enjoying the stars. What I saw was not a happy sight. I picked the doeling up and she was cold. A quick thermometer check confirmed she was way below optimum temperature. Another quick internet search provided some suggestions, so starting at 1 am we began giving the little girl hot baths in the sink to raise her body temperature. We would soak her, then blow her dry, then soak her again. Son Zach had drunk all the Gatorade, so I found a recipe for electrolytes that we had the ingredients for, and we began to force that down her. In between, she fell asleep on Kathleen, who was falling asleep herself.

Just about the time the doeling (now named Daisy) was starting to respond to our emergency efforts, I went out to check on her brother, who was now in the same state. At least we now knew what to do. By dawn we had two little babies who were improving and could be put back with their mother, who was herself frantic at losing her kids. A thorough check of her revealed a defective udder which was not producing milk Everything added up: an attentive mother, who let her kids nurse from her even when nothing was there; no milk from the mama; apparently healthy kids who were effectively starving to death. In farming it’s nice to be able to learn something without having death result.

Daisy is now the biggest of the kids in our bursting kid pen. Duke, her brother, has gone off to be the future buck at another farm in the county. Ciara, the mother, will not be again; I never made up the lost night’s sleep, but who cares.

Jim Jarskey

When I was very young I found an old telephone my mother had kept from her childhood. Then I found a screwdriver and took the phone apart. It would be nice to say that this was the beginning of a lifelong talent for working with machines, but it was not. Once I was done I had a room full of mysterious small parts and no idea how to put them back together. I remember my mother being very angry. I still have a tendency to take things apart too quickly, not paying attention to how they might go back together. Some old habits are hard to break.

I have come to see that fixing things, like learning to use a gun, is most often passed down from father to son – or, in these more inclusive days, from parent to child. I am proud that daughter Sophia is pretty handy with a cordless drill and has built her own bookcases for her Brooklyn apartment. My father always had an adversarial relationship with tool and machines. His assumption was that a machine was going to break down, so why bother to do anything for or to it. His machines responded to that sort of neglect by frequently breaking down, which fulfilled his expectations. I remember my Grandfather Russell once telling me a story about trying to work on an old Model A Ford with my father when he (my father) was about 16. They had just gotten started when a carload of school chums drove up on their way to the beach. My grandfather finished the job by himself.

My father’s antipathy to the way machines worked was exacerbated by his experience teaching math to middle-schoolers, early in his working life. Mathematics is abstract, whereas the real world is not. A mathematical line has no thickness, but when you draw a line on a board and cut it with a saw, it makes a lot of difference where the saw goes. A saw kerf (a word I am positive my father never knew) is 1/8 of an inch. If you cut one board on the right side of the line and the next one on the left side, you will have one board that is ¼” shorter than the other one. Another childhood memory is of my father raging in the garage that his boards would NOT come out the same length.

So when, as a teenager, I began to have conscious confrontations with machines, my father was no help. By that time his fatalism that all machines – but particularly automobiles – were conspiring against him to break down at the most inconvenient times was so deep-seated as to be a basic part of his nature. It did not help things much that at that point in our lives we came into ownership of a Volkswagon truck. Along with the VW bus, the truck was just about the stupidest vehicle ever to be introduced to America. However fitting it was in German cities where the maximum speed might have been 20 mph, it was a disaster on US roads and highways. It was underpowered to start with, and the extra gearing in the rear wheels to raise it up caused the engine to run at about 10% higher rpm than the bug engine. I know this stuff because our VWs broke down all the time and I had to learn how to fix them.

My father was no help here, so I bought John Muir’s old hippie manual about VWs and began to take ours apart. Unlike my mother’s old telephone, I could not simply leave them in pieces, and I could not finish a job and have pieces left over. When that happened, I learned to go back and find where I might have skipped a step. It was a slow and painful process, with more than a few mistakes.

So who is Jim Jarskey? Jim is a sort of jack-of-all-trades guy in Washtenaw County, in southeast Michigan. We met him when we bought a piece of property there and needed to improve it. This was nearly 30 years ago. We first hired him to do excavations to find a suitable place for a septic field. That expanded to general grading and excavating for various things, and we ended up becoming friends. (The friendship was helped along by the fact that we were always good for a check on our balance owed when Jim needed to pay some of his other bills.) When I had time, I would stop by Jim’s shop to shoot the breeze and watch him do whatever it was he was doing. He had a huge metal building, full to overflowing with dumptrucks that didn’t quite run, trackhoes that were missing tracks, backhoes with busted hydraulic lines and other detritus of the industrial age most of us would rather not think about at all, let alone admit that our lives are to a large part dependent on those machines and the people who keep them going. Jim bought old worn-out equipment, fixed it up and sold it as a sideline to his excavating business. He was secure in the knowledge that there was not a machine in the world that he could not take apart and fix and put back together so that it worked better than it did when he started. He never took me under his wing and taught me things directly, but after a couple of years of being around Jim, some small amount of that certainty rubbed off, and now, when I confront my own fractious farm equipment I have an alternative to loading it up and taking it down the road to the dealer. And every time I find myself surrounded by the myriad parts of a diesel engine or have to root around in the transfer case of a hay baler, Jim Jarskey comes to mind; not because I know what I am doing, but because I know there are guys like him who DO know what to do.

Infrastructure, Cheap and Portable

You would think that a farm with two barns (one of them 6000 square feet), an old milk house (now tool room) and an equipment shed – soon to be milking parlor and cheese-making room – would not have a space problem. Alas, we do. Zach’s rabbit operation is expanding as his rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. He had set up the cages along the side of the barn, sheltered from the rain, but not, as it turned out, the wind. Our batch of Tractor Supply chickens, most of them roosters, quickly outgrew the picturesque but not very functional coop and yard that came with the farm. They are now truly free range birds. And to top it off, when our Bresse chickens finally arrived in early November, we had to put them in a corner of the cellar. 

It may seem for a moment that I am changing the subject if I start to talk about Craigslist, which deserves a post in itself as a helpful tool for finding and getting rid of things. At any rate, I find myself checking the farm and garden category of Craigslist a couple of times a day. Last fall I saw an ad for a used greenhouse, more usefully known as a hoop house. It was from a guy in Charleston, which was a little strange in Asheville, NC, but as I was going that way to do some cemetery restoration work, I contacted him. The long and the short of it is that I came back with the hoops and the plastic for a 100’ by 15’ hoop house. I had no idea how to turn a pile of galvanized, half-round pipes and a wad of thick white plastic into something useful, which is one of the reasons the wad of plastic and pile of pipes sat around for a couple of months. But we were pressed for space. The rabbits were in their cages, swathed in blue tarps, and the Bresse chickens in the cellar were getting bigger. So right after Christmas (and after a last-minute change in location), we began to lay out the site for our hoop house, on the edge of our big hayfield, behind the big barn. The ground is relatively level there, and it was worth giving up a few bales of hay every year. 

It turns out there is a lot more you need for a hoop house than hoops and plastic. Who knew? Each step of the process was hesitant, and the project was marked by changes of mind and bad decisions that had to be undone. I have not found an instruction manual for hoop house construction, and You Tube (almost as helpful for beginning farmers as Craigslist) offered lots of different ways to go from step one to step two. But we persevered and eventually got the hoops in the ground and reasonably lined up. One piece of good advice I gleaned from You Tube was not to try to put the plastic on the hoops on a windy day! That’s the sort of thing you don’t think about until you’re hanging on to a giant piece of flapping plastic that refuses to go where you want it to. Which brings up the next question in the long line of questions: what do you do to make the plastic stay where you want it to? It turns out there is some really cool stuff known generically as wiggle wire. It’s not cheap, but I am now a fan and if you decide to put up your own hundred-foot-long hoop house, I heartily recommend it.  

With the plastic on, we now had ourselves a hundred-foot tunnel (technically 105’ since the 5 20-foot ridge poles all turned out to be 21’ long). Since this was to be the home of rabbits and chickens, a tunnel was a pretty useless thing. But how to close off the ends? Back to You Tube, and, at the suggestion of my kids, Pinterest. It turns out that there are a lot of really lame ways to put ends on hoop houses, and I did not find any solutions that made my heart beat faster. Since I wanted to be able to drive a truck through the house when necessary, a plastic end with a door in it was not going to do the trick. 

I remembered as a kid, somewhere seeing a corrugated metal Quonset hut with a barn-type door that could open wide enough to let tractors and other large implements in and out. That became the basis for our own solution, which again was not the cheapest, but seems to  be working well. So, with the ends of the tunnel securely closed we got to work putting a bed of old hay down. That killed two birds with one stone, since cleaning the old hay out of the big barn was something I had wanted to do for a long time. Once the hay was down, Zach got to work building new frames for his multiplying rabbit cages. The plan was to move the Tractor Supply chickens from the cramped chicken house into the spacious hoop house, which we did in the dark of night, throwing indignant chickens into the back of the truck (covered with a cap) and driving them into their new home. 

I had not reckoned with the tenacity of chickens not to adapt to new surroundings, however, and when I let them out of the hoop house after a few days of house arrest, they immediately made their way back to their old haunts in the chicken coop and yard. Uncharacteristically, I was smart enough to admit defeat right away, and did what we should have done in the first place: we moved the Bresse chickens from the cellar to their new home, leapfrogging the older dark Leghorns. So far they show no evidence of pining for the basement, though they do not yet know how to use the roost we so thoughtfully provided for them. Zach’s rabbits seem much more comfortable in their new digs, especially when the sun shines and the inside of the hoop house loses its chill. They are also much easier to take care of now. 

And there you have it; more than 1500 square feet of usable space created in about a week of work time (spread, it is true, over a month of real time), for a cost of about a dollar a square foot. Joel Salatin, arguably the most famous farmer in America – maybe the world, has long advocated for cheap and portable infrastructure, which is what our hoop house is. It certainly improved the quality of life of our chickens and rabbits. And now Zach and I can hire ourselves out as hoop house builders! 

The Twelve Days of Christmas

As our first Christmas season in Green Valley draws to a close it is worth looking back at it with pleasure and gratitude. This Russell family has long celebrated Christmas as a season that lasts 12 days. We are, alas, not so very good at observing Advent as a penitential season, but there are many positive things – many of them unexpected when we first started celebrating with children – that come from not trying to make one single day support all the build up and expectations that now come with the season.

One perennial source of anxiety, however, was getting a Christmas tree. Since the tree does not go up and get decorated until Christmas eve, we did not go in search of trees until a few days before Christmas. The children were always convinced that when we finally went looking for a tree, they would all be gone. That, so far, has not happened. But Christmas, 2017 was the year that the Great Shortage of Trees was a recurring story in various media, and Kathleen was convinced we would come up empty.

So it was that when, a few days before Christmas, the grandchildren, Francesca and Maribel, came to stay at the farm for a couple of days, Kathleen sent them up the mountainside in search of a Christmas tree of our own. Now the wooded part of the mountain has not been cared for very well. Cattle had not been fenced out of the woods and so there was very little understory growth besides brambles. There were a few little wisps of evergreen, but it was not a hopeful expedition. The girls, however, did not know that, and an hour or two later they came huffing down the mountain, dragging a spindly 10-foot tall pine tree. When asked how they had cut it down, they replied ‘we had a Swiss Army knife!’ Well. In the face of such dedication, what can you do? We did the only decent thing: we cut the bottom off the tree until it fit in the house, then rearranged the branches to fill in some of the more gaping holes. A string of lights, a few ornaments (too many and the branches drooped) and voila! A Christmas tree. True, it reminds one more than a little of the forlorn tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, but it has proudly occupied its corner of the living room for the whole season that it symbolizes. In my mind it is the Best Christmas Tree Ever.

Forests and Trees...and Cheese

Cliches are wonderful and dangerous things. They are wonderful because they so often encapsulate some important truth in a pithy and memorable form (by its nature a cliché has to be easy to lodge in our brains); dangerous because they can so easily short circuit further thought. Frost comes to mind here again, as he so often does in this new world of country things:

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I am realizing that these little snippets of life on the farm are like so many trees: interesting, maybe even fascinating in themselves, but in the Big Picture, the Long Run, The Grand Scheme of Things (clichéd metaphors all!) they are side shows. The main point of this undertaking all along has been the creation of cheese as good as I can make it.

I could easily have written about wiring the loafing barn, something Zach and I have spent several hours this week doing. We did it because Shane, our sawyer, is temporarily out of logs big enough to cut siding from, so we are stymied in our goal to finish repairing the scar made to the old barn when half of one end of it was destroyed in order to erect a silo – itself made useless by the march of technological change. Instead, I want to write for the first time about making cheese – the real reason for doing all the other things we are doing.

I have been milking a few of our goats since we arrived on the farm back at the end of May. Milk production has been modest – a gallon and a half or so a day – but it has been enough to allow me to hone my skill in the production of chevre, the simplest and freshest of all fresh goat cheeses. I have not been able to expand into the production of other types of cheese since they all require an aging space with controlled temperature and humidity. In Rhode Island I used an old refrigerator, modified with an external thermostat that allowed it to stay at around 55 degrees. The plan here has always been to construct an aging cave along with the cheese-making room, but we have not got to that yet. Non – if I can refer back to an earlier posting – sine patientia.

Chevre is not a complex cheese, and its freshness is fleeting, but that is part of its charm. Decades ago, when we lived in Italy and I was a medievalist, Kathleen and I (and baby Robertino) made a day trip from Milan, where we went to church, north into the Brianza and hiked a couple of hours up to the aptly named San Pietro al Monte: St. Peter’s on the mountain. It is an abandoned Benedictine monastery, important in the 11th and 12th centuries, and famous among Medieval art historians for it frescoes.

They were worth the trek, but the point of this story is that on our way back down the mountain we came upon a rustic taverna in the woods. It was largely patronized by Italian hunters and there were piles of shotguns leaned against the trees at the entrance. We went in for some refreshment and found, along with the wine, an ancient cooler with chunks of white stuff. I asked the proprietor what it was and he replied formaggio fresco di capre, fresh goat cheese; what the French call chevre. We ate some with our wine, and took the rest home to enjoy later. Two days after, it was inedible. As I said, chevre is a fleeting pleasure. (I also have to say that our chevre is good for a couple of weeks before it goes goaty, and I now know that that Italian mountain cheese had been treated badly. But I don’t care; it was memorable.)

So I am on a quest to make a chevre that highlights the tangy freshness of the milk. I have been experimenting with various flavors, trying to avoid the most common trap of cheesemakers, which is relegating the cheese itself to a vehicle that carries the real flavor, which is whatever has been added. I am trying to bring to the foreground the cheese itself, with hints of additional flavor, like an echo that is heard in these mountains. The ones with staying power so far have been honey-lavender and herbes de Provence with extra lavender; in both cases the lavender comes from our farm, as well as the cheese. And that is the point.

Seasons and Weather

It is true that farmers are more closely attuned to the weather than most other people these days. I have mentioned in a previous post that the last year we lived in Rhode Island there was a pretty serious drought. I was a gardener then, not a farmer, and the drought meant that I spent a lot more time than I wanted to, watering the vegetables. And every night the Providence weatherman would enthuse about how the next day was going to be great for going to the beach! Never a word about how the hay crop was destroyed. That’s what you get when you live in a place that has turned its back on farming. The weather only matters when you want to go to the beach. 

One of the daily joys of living in the country is experiencing the weather and watching the seasons unfold themselves. This being our first year in a new place, every day is a new weather event. Who knew that we would have near-daily morning fogs in the summer? It was eerie to look up and see blue sky while all around you was a grey mystery, often until 9 or 10 o’clock. We did not have a frost until after the middle of October, and the first real freeze only came at the very end of that month. I thought we were pushing things to make our final hay cutting on October 29th, but recently I was talking to a farmer who was still mowing in late November. 

Western North Carolina is known as the best place in the South to go see autumn leaves, and apparently the 3rd weekend in October is considered the peak of the year’s color, so the area is filled with people who make an aesthetic pilgrimage. This year the 3rd weekend was a disappointment, though I was caught in a traffic jam of no-doubt-disappointed leaf peepers. I am reliably informed that the color was delayed this year because of the unusual warmth – which certainly has made it easier for Zach and me to do a lot of the work we have been doing. But my outstanding memory of fall color in Green Valley is that the trees on the south-facing slopes turned color a good week or two before the ones on the other side of the valley did. That gave those of us who do not journey to see golden and scarlet leaves an extra-long season. 

But the event that prompted this post is not some golden haze of a memory of fall’s golden haze; rather it was the recent blindsiding we got from Mother Nature. Last Friday I woke up to assurances from the weather app on my phone that we were in for a dusting of snow in the morning, with possible accumulation of about a half inch. When I looked outside there was already more than that on the ground, and the snow was falling thickly. (A curious thing about our end of the valley is that, despite the fact that our weather reliably comes from the northwest, the arrangement of the surrounding mountains means that the prevailing wind is almost always from the east.) So it snowed and snowed, and by the time the snow ended, on Saturday morning, nearly 30 hours after it started, we had 11 inches of the stuff. 

Fresh snow anywhere is always beautiful. In New York City its beauty starts to fade immediately, but in Leicester, North Carolina it will be with us for quite some time, it appears, since we are now in for about a week of frigid temperatures. Like so many things we humans do, we make our presence known on snow-covered ground by trampling it down until the slushy mud underneath shows through. 

But while the barnyard is a sodden mess, the fields and hills beyond the buildings retain their pristine purity. All it takes is raising your eyes from the near ground to the upper pastures to see a newly-revealed landscape, for snow has the magical capacity to transform everything it falls on. As fall moved on into winter and the leaves blew away, all sorts of things that had been hidden were slowly revealed: houses, hilltops, the very shape of the land. Now that the background has gone from dark to light, the grey and black trunks of individual trees have been thrown into stark relief. Even the brittle skeletons of the cockleburs look beautiful – from a distance. 

A big snow makes the daily chores of farm life a little more time-consuming. Everything gets sloppy. And cold. You are continually putting your gloves on, only to take them off again to do something. The goats and other creatures need much more hay since their grazing has been curtailed. The turkeys have moved in with the chickens. The rabbit watering system has frozen up and broken down. But Orion still throws his leg over our hill every night (to borrow a memorable image from a Robert Frost poem), and it is a blessing to move through so much beauty. 

Non Sine Patientia

In my previous academic life I got into the habit of taking students abroad every two or three years, mostly to Italy. I didn’t do it to make extra money, Lord knows (I always ended up spending more than I made), or because I harbored a secret ambition to be a tour guide, returning continually to the same places. I did it to provide students with a concentrated introduction to the way cities had been built in different times and different places, and also to give my own kids a chance to see different parts of the world. In both of those goals I think I was successful.

These travel-abroad courses were really made possible by our old and dear friend, Oliver Learmont (now Father Oliver in the Anglican Church (UK)). I would tell him what I wanted to do, and he would make it happen. One summer, while we were in Venice, Oliver managed to wangle a tour of a private palazzo that was being converted to a house museum. It was the perfect visit for students on an architecture and preservation trip. As we made our way through the vast building, daughter Sophia noticed a carved inscription over one of the doorways and asked me what it said. It was Latin – fortunately simple: Non Sine Patientia: Not Without Patience. That particular summer had had some trying times during the trip, and the phrase resonated immediately. In the years since then it has become something of a Russell family motto, often brought up when impatience rears its ugly head.

It is the perfect motto for our present farming enterprise, which is branching out in many different – and unexpected – directions. This entry will simply mention the undertakings we have undertaken so far. Some of them will get further elaboration in future posts.

The first thing about which we must all have patience is making a profit. In a recent post about what we were after in this new life I mentioned making a living from the farm. Making a living and making a profit are not synonymous since very important parts of living are simply not profitable: beauty, for instance, which is – quite unexpectedly – coming to have an increasingly large role in what we are doing. But in the long run either you are making a profit or else you are indulging in a hobby.

The primary profit-making venture of the farm has always been intended to be cheese, made from goat’s milk. That is why we have goats. But – oh, boy! – are we a long way from making a profit from cheese. Nevertheless, that is the reason why so many of the things we are doing have to be done. Not without patience.

Primary does not mean sole, however, and we are striking out in different directions to achieve another original goal of this undertaking: multiple income streams. And all of these demand patience. Anything involving raising animals absolutely requires it. Goats kid once a year; rabbits kindle after 28 days, but nothing happens immediately. So far, we are venturing in a number of different directions: goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits. The goats were, as I have mentioned, the original intention of the farm. Chickens were also intended from the beginning, though the single breed has been expanded to a couple. The turkeys can be blamed on Kathleen, who replied to a craigslist ad and came home with four: a Narragansett Jake (who will grow up to be a Tom) and three Royal Palms of uncertain sex. One of the Palms disappeared the first night, but was soon replaced by a Bourbon Red, so we still have four. Even after Thanksgiving we have four, though our goal is to eat our own turkey next year. Not without patience.

In the early summer Zach followed up on another craigslist ad and brought home three rabbits: a buck and two does, along with several cages and various miscellaneous rabbit-growing equipment. Although the initial animals were largely worn out (craigslist is a daily reminder of the duplicity and deceitfulness of human beings), Zach has diligently expanded his rabbitry to the point that it now encompasses a couple of dozen breeders. What have we got from it so far? One tasty (but tough) roast rabbit. Not without patience.

And tomorrow we go off to look at a couple of Shetland sheep. I like lamb; Kathleen wants the fleeces. Not without patience!

You Never Start From Scratch

When we were negotiating for our farm the question of a barn cat came up. There was a cat in the barn that we were not particularly keen on keeping. The old owners were noncommittal, but the cat was gone when we arrived. We did not ask any questions.

As it turns out, a barn cat would have been a snap. Soon after we got here we noticed a whitish creature in our upper pastures. The sons and their friends who moved most of our stuff into the house before we actually arrived had also noticed it, and son Gabe named it Thunder Donkey, for that is what it was. We had not only bought a farm, we had inherited an animal that everyone had sort of forgotten to tell us about. Since you are responsible for your animals, this has caused us no end of consternation: how can you care for an animal that wants nothing to do with you?

Here in the mountains of western North Carolina, it turns out, farmers routinely use donkeys as livestock protectors. No one we have talked to knows the beginning of our own Thunder Donkey, though one neighbor recollects that its halter was put on about a dozen years ago during an unsuccessful attempt to trim its hooves.

The attempt was unsuccessful since Thunder Donkey is fundamentally a wild animal. But even wild animals have common animal feelings – merely overlaid with the wild protections of fear and suspicion. And those qualities did not disappear because the farm had new owners.

So we lived the first few months with a ghostly creature haunting the upper pastures: occasionally seen standing watch at the edge of the woods that cover the top of our hill. It was alone in fertile pastures, so hunger was not a problem. A small stream (‘branch’ in the local parlance) provided water. When we tried to get close to it, it would huff and puff and run away. This is why I am calling Thunder Donkey an it: we could never get close enough to identify it even as a male or female.

But curiosity and sociability eventually overcome even the fear and suspicion of a wild animal. Last week Thunder Donkey made its way down from the woods and upper pastures to our upper hay field. After a few days we were able to persuade it to mosey into the lot behind the barn which led to the hill pasture on the west side of the farm, and the triangle paddock between the big barn and the house. These were huge advances, since Thunder Donkey was now among other animals. Of course we could not get much closer to her than before – though we got close enough to figure out that it was a she, so now I do not have to tiptoe around her sex anymore.

Being close enough to tell her sex also meant that we were close enough to see how terrible her feet were. 

Horse people have their farriers come by every 6 weeks or so to keep their horses’ feet in good shape. Thunder Donkey had gone much longer than that since anyone had touched her. She walked like someone does who is wearing skin-diving flippers on land. We had to do something right away to help this creature we had inherited and did not want. 

We assumed that a wild donkey who could kick your brains out without even thinking about it would have to be sedated by a vet before she would submit to a pedicure. Since we did not think we could even catch her, we began inquiring about vets with the shooting skills to employ tranquilizer guns. It turns out these vets are pretty thin on the ground here in western N.C.

But Zach’s farrier assured us she could manage the task without anesthesia, so early on a Saturday morning in mid-November we assembled in the barn to see what would happen. The footwork on Zach’s horse, Dallas, went very quickly and we move on to the main attraction: getting Thunder Donkey into the barn. Zach got a lead on her half rotted, who-knows-how-old halter and started leading her to the barn. All went well until she stood at the barn door when something ineffable turned her into an equine motorboat who felt the need to give Zach a ski ride. He hung on admirably well until she leapt the creek, at which point prudence kicked in and he abandoned his attempt at direct mastery. Physics was against him anyway: he is about 150 pounds, and Thunder Donkey is probably pushing the scales at 450-500. But her suspicion and fear were fading after only a day or so in the civilization of the barnyard, and we were able to grab her halter after a little coaxing and ease her into the barn where the farrier set to work.

She had taken care of Zach’s horse in about 20 minutes. This job was to keep her busy for more than 90. We tied Thunder Donkey to one of the big barn posts with her halter, and tied up her legs one at a time. I distracted her by puling cockleburs out of her face and ears, but Trish the farrier did yeoman’s work, cutting away a decade and more of neglect. Her estimate is that it will take a year to get TD’s feet back to as good as they can ever be again. In the meantime we feed her apple slices and horse treats and get her used to being around humans. She is adopting our herd of goats as her own and will no longer be the ghostly presence at the edge of the woods that she once was.

But don’t look for us to be giving her a bath for quite a long time!

Where We Live and What We Live For

For those of you intimately familiar with Henry David Thoreau you will recognize the title of this post as a modification of the title of the second chapter of Walden. I happen to be rereading that book, not because I am a great admirer of Thoreau, but mostly because it is one of the few books that has been unpacked since we moved to North Carolina. Having acknowledged the accidental quality of the read, I can say that I am enjoying it very much.

Thoreau begins Walden with a long chapter that largely details how be built his house/cabin/shack on the shores of Walden pond on the outskirts of Concord, Mass. I have been to Walden pond, and spent a pleasant couple of hours one rainy fall day walking around it. I saw the spot that afficiandos have concluded is where he built his house and hoed his beans, and I have looked in the windows of the replica of the building that now stands, easily accessible, next to the parking lot at the south end of the pond. I was not deeply moved, as I suppose I should have been if I had been making a pilgrimage. But I wasn’t a pilgrim, I was merely taking advantage of the small scale of New England when we lived there, and I drove past a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts and Monroe Muffler shops on the way to Concord (which is a very pretty – and very touristy – New England town).

It has been accidental (though understandable) that this blog has been devoted to the myriad of projects necessary to convert one kind of farm to another. The summer and early fall saw a succession of crises, disasters and near-disasters, and unexpectedly funny moments as we worked to establish something. The cliché ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees,’ comes to mind. It is now time to pull back from the examination of our various trees to look at the outlines of the forest they are a part of. After doing that, we can return to the individual trees.

It would be dishonest to say that our family presented a united front as we undertook this new life. From the beginning Kathleen has been skeptical – not to say downright hostile – to the whole idea. She came to North Carolina, but she came kicking and screaming, eyes darting here and there, looking for a way to escape. Her hostility forced me, more than a year ago, to write down what it was I was hoping to discover amid the green hills and valleys of Leicester, N.C. Once I had written it down and showed it to her, she was not impressed. Nevertheless it is the basis of why we have radically changed our lives and taken up our new residence. This is what I put down on paper:

VISION AND GOALS

The vision is three generations of family sitting around a table, sharing a meal that has not involved doing violence to any of God’s creatures. The place is a refuge, as safe as a place can be from the buffeting and storms of this life. But it is not simply hiding under a rock. It is a place that produces things that can be used.

The point of this undertaking is to create a more integrated life that demonstrates:

That people who did not grow up on a farm can be successful at farming;

That a profitable farming/hospitality business can operate successfully in Buncombe County, NC;

That it is possible to make a fulfilling life that is respectful of God’s creation and His creatures, and that demonstrates a more proper form of human husbandry, rather than the domineering tendencies inherent in modern industrial life and farming;

That multiple generations of a family can enjoy and profit from a home place.

None of this has really happened yet, except for three generations of family sitting around a table, sharing a meal. When I wrote it I had not yet read Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World, but I have since. Lasch does not really propose solutions to the problems he identifies, but our Gilead Farm is, I hope, one kind of solution. We shall see.

The End of Haying

There is a pattern here: I write about the last haying as the next one commences. I suppose the concentrated effort outdoors stimulates some latent academic impulse. However it may be, we are now in the midst of our fourth cutting of the year.

Four cuttings of hay is pretty remarkable, but it has been a good year, weather-wise. The drought of 2016 killed the haymaking. I have already mentioned what our fields looked like in July of that year, and when we were in Rhode Island, the drought there made it tough even to find hay for the goats.

But I am still in the middle of writing about hay equipment, particularly out-of-date equipment.

The traditional, culture-based, ways of getting farm equipment (auctions) are gone, and will only return when circumstances get dire – and that means I don’t have to talk about those things now. The modern equivalent – craigslist – is how many (even most) transactions take place in western North Carolina. I suspect the same is elsewhere, but this is where I am, and what I know. So craigslist is how I found the machines we are using to turn grass into winter fodder. I was fortunate to find a guy who was getting out of the haying business and was selling his package of equipment for, as an auctioneer would say: ‘one money.’ There were several zeroes at the end of the price, which was painful, but I have been assured since the purchase that I could have done much worse. What really matters is that we now have the various machines to do all the various things that have to be done to get hay into the barn. Those various things include cutting the hay, flipping it over after it’s cut, raking it up after it has been scattered all over the field, then baling it into a form manageable by a single human being. Oh yes, and finally picking it up out of the field and transporting it back to the barn.

It was a family affair, back in early July, going about an hour away with three trucks and a trailer to get the equipment. Sons Rob and Zach both helped and we brought almost all of it back in one trip. We broke it – and us – in haying in July. When you have equipment, it breaks. We had tractor problems and ended up getting another one to get us through the haying. By the time the third cutting came around we had repaired the equipment damaged during the second cutting and we had two workable tractors to pull the various implements. For this fourth cutting we had all three tractors working and all the pieces of hay-making equipment doing what they were supposed to do and we got through the process with almost no glitches. There are always glitches.

We are making square bales, which is a way of shaping and transporting hay that demands human labor. I have mentioned in earlier posts how human labor is something that modern farming tries to do away with, partly because farming has a bad rep as a brutal, mindless and degrading enterprise, and partly because you can’t find help anymore in the country. Farming has responded by becoming industrial, which is the antithesis of human-scaled. Round bales of hay are industrial and require industrial-sized equipment; you can’t move an 800-pound round bale by hand. Someone might object that a baler that makes square bales is just as industrial as a round baler, and I will concede the point that they are both machines, but the end result of a square baler is something that a single human being can move from place to place, which is a crucial distinction. For example, I can move the bales from the field to the barn tonight before it rains, all by myself. In January, I can sell my spare bales to smallholders and horse people who do not have 100-horsepower tractors with hay spears. There is still a place for human-scaled things in the country.

Making Hay (continued -- as promised)

The late-summer post about haymaking – written during our third cutting – mostly talked about the vagaries of weather. It is truly amazing how quickly Zach and I have gotten critical about other haymakers. Someone will cut hay the day before it rains, and let it sit wet for a couple of days, then bale it into totally excrable rounds without (apparently) a second thought. Or someone will do a good job of cutting and baling, only to leave the bales in the field for weeks. Of course, this is hay for cows, who have a well-deserved reputation for slowness. I guess if cows will eat the stuff eventually, then ok. Goats, on the other hand, have a completely unearned reputation for eating everything in sight. Most people have filed away in their memory an image of a goat contentedly munching on a tin can. Nonsense. Soon after we arrived in Leicester, Buncombe County, North Carolina, I found a craigslist posting for ‘Goat Hay.’ Turns out the guy was selling spoiled hay for mulch or feeding to goats. He clearly had the image of the tin can-eating goat firmly in mind – which goes to show that country people sometimes don’t know any more than their citified cousins. Goats are the pickiest eaters I know on a farm. 

Which brings us to the other part of haying, after the weather, and that is haying equipment. I wrote previously about what haying was all about: the preservation of summer grass in a form that kept it through the winter so animals could eat it. This preservation involves three steps: harvesting, gathering, and storing. These have changed dramatically over the last 75 years or so. 

Historically, harvesting grass meant mowers (men) going out with scythes and cutting the grass. After it dried, it was raked up with hand rakes (later giant, horse-drawn rakes) and stored in haystacks in the fields. Look at Monet’s Haystacks painting at the top of this post. 

As in so many other areas of human endeavor, the Industrial Revolution transformed these traditional methods of accumulating grass. The sickle-bar mower was invented in the 1830s, which did away with hand mowing (at least in this country). In the 1930s the tractor-drawn hay baler appeared, though it did not come into common usage until after WWII. Louis Bromfield, in his Malabar Farm books, talks a lot about ways to cure and store hay in hay mows, and he was writing in the late 1930s and ‘40s. In the 1960s – modern times to me – the round baler was invented, which is currently the state of the art. 

The main ‘advantage’ to the round baler is that it eliminates almost all human labor from the process of making hay. Of course it does this by substituting money and fossil fuel. 

My helpful farmer neighbor wanted to fix me up with a round baler and a hay spear for my tractor and could not understand why I was not interested. He is a cattle farmer, and his idea of goats was the one I mentioned above: contentedly standing in some barren, dirt farmyard, chewing on a tin can. Cows willingly eat crappy hay, but goats won’t. Cows also don’t caper over stacks of round bales of hay, while goats happily play king-of-the-mountain on them, pooping and peeing all the while, then refusing to eat the fouled fodder. What I wanted was a set of distinctly old-fashioned hay-making tools. But how do you find old-fashioned equipment? In the old, agricultural, days, you went to a farm auction after the death of a farmer and had a social day of it where you bid on stuff and talked to neighbors and maybe (or maybe not) took stuff home with you. I remember this from my own childhood in southern Illinois, and later when we lived in the country in SE Michigan. There were Mennonites there, and they were devoted auction-goers and they wore plain clothes and spoke to each other in their strange brand of new-world German. 

Here in Buncombe County, North Carolina there are no Mennonites that I know of, and no farm auctions either. But there is craigslist, and that is how you find hay equipment these days. The social aspect of country life, alas, has diminished significantly, which is a shame. 

So soon after we arrived in the mountains I began an almost daily search for old-fashioned hay-making machines. I knew we needed something to cut the grass, and something to rake it up into rows, and I definitely knew we needed something to bale it into pre-round-bale form, and then we needed something to haul all those pre-round-bales from the field to the barn. Whoever said the farming life was simple! 

Silos

Silos have a bad rap. For most of the world, a silo is a metaphor for cramped and uninquisitive thinking: we are forever being told to ‘get out of our silos,’ and chided for our ‘siloed thinking.’ Farmers, however, don’t think of silos that way. Most of them have no more use for literal silos than the rest of the world does for the metaphorical ones, and the agricultural countryside is littered with the remains of abandoned silos – monuments to a good idea that didn’t turn out so well.

The word ‘silo’ Wikipedia so helpfully tells me, comes from the Greek word ‘siros’ which meant a pit in which grain was stored. So the Greeks dugs holes and kept grain in them. The modern silo that we all recognize -- the tube (frequently blue) shooting up into the air – only goes back to 1894, so it is scarcely an artifact of traditional farming. They are were used to produce silage, which is fermented green crops, in America, mostly corn. The entire corn plant is harvested, chopped up, mixed with some water and frequently something else like molasses, and blown into the silo where its weight packs it down and starts a process of anaerobic fermentation. This preserves the farmer’s crop for feeding to his animals during the winter. So far, so good. Another ingenious way to carry summer’s bounty over into winter. This basically is a parallel idea to haying, which takes grass off the fields and into the barn for feeding animals when there is no more grass to be had out where it was.

   But silos had their downside too. It may well be that more farmers have died in silo accidents than any other non-mechanical part of modern farming. They were filled with tons and tons of silage which had been packed in, but also had to be gotten out. You could do this for a while with a silage fork, reaching through a hatch, but at a certain point the silage just got stuck and the fork would not loosen it any more. Farmers then resorted to long sticks, trying to poke it till it came down. When that didn’t work, they would sometimes climb into the silo itself to get a better position. You can imagine the result of successfully dislodging 20 or 50 or 100 tons of silage: the farmer’s wife would go looking for her husband when he didn’t come in for supper and find his feet sticking out of the silo hatch. Or, since silage produces nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas, the farmer would just be dead next to the silo. That is a high price to pay for fat cows.

So industrial ingenuity moved on past the silo and created first the silage bunker, which is a big horizontal concrete box where silage is kept covered with sheet plastic. The plastic is usually held down with old tires, so if you have ever seen a mound of black or white plastic, studded with firestones, on your drive through the country, you have seen a silage bunker. More recently farmers make silage right in the field. If you have ever seen what looks like a field full of giant white marshmallows, you are looking at modern silage.

But our farm makes hay, not silage. Silage is actually not all that great for ruminants (cows, sheep, goats) since it is acidic and wears away the lining of the rumen. It is particularly bad for goats, which have a bacteria population in their stomachs that is easily thrown out of whack. Goats love silage like kids love candy, but in neither case is the object good for the subject.

We inherited two abandoned silos, which is what this post is about. One is concrete, with a round cap. The other is steel, but long ago lost its lid and when we arrived was a rusting hulk. It was also completely in the way of the conversion of the small barn into the goat house. When silos got popular in the early 20th century it seemed like such a good idea that the farmer here tore off half of the front of his barn to make it more convenient to feed his cows. Silos are bad enough, but to wreck a perfectly good building to install one is pretty close to idiotic.

So what do you do with a useless silo? I have seen one near here, painted red, white and blue and fitted out with a deck on top so now it is an observation tower. That is an arresting sight, however our silo was beyond that. Taking it down was what needed to be done, but how to do it? It was a daunting job. The silo was not huge: 12 feet in diameter and 35 feet high, but that is plenty big enough. It was firmly anchored to the ground in a doughnut of concrete, around and inside the steel of the silo. The guys who put this up were building for the long term.

Finally we could not put it off any longer; we had to do something. Off we went to the hardware store to buy 100 feet of thick rope. Zach got into his climbing harness and scaled the silo. It was not quite like throwing a shrimp net, and I ended up climbing the other side, but we got the rope secured around the top of the silo eventually. I dug out the angle grinder, large size (7” disc), got a couple of metal cutting discs and went to work. It was such an unpleasant task that I actually put on safety glasses and gloves and ear protection. Zach used the smaller grinder and we worked away from each other, cutting more or less evenly. More or less was good enough, since the only crucial thing was that our cuts met up on the other side.

After various adventures – mostly involving wearing out cutter discs, we made our way around the circumference of the silo, which was about 37 or 38 feet. On the way, the small grinder bit the dust, which means that if you ever want to take a steel silo down, go with the big grinders! For those of you keeping score, the cutting took a couple of hours, not more.

Now we had a 35-foot tall steel silo, weighing who knows how many thousands of pounds, sitting essentially on nothing. We had left a couple of inches of uncut steel on the side we wanted it to fall, but otherwise it was free-standing. Exciting. But here I take you back to the paragraph above where Zach had attached a big rope to the top of the silo. The other end of that rope was tied to the hitch of the monster Toyota Tundra 4WD that was bought back in the spring and that gets absolutely lousy gas mileage, but has paid for itself in the things that it does. The silo came down just like we wanted it to. It is, of course, in the way of what we want to do next; we are getting used to that now. We can finish the loafing barn now, but how this steel whale will disappear is fodder for another post.

Making Hay while the Sun Shines

(Note: The first three paragraphs of this post were written in mid-July. describing the second cutting of hay. Now, several weeks later, we have brought in the third cutting.)

‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is, I used to think, an old saw of a phrase that everyone understood either in a literal or a figurative manner. Shows what I know. Daughter Sophia (who reads a lot and knows a lot) had never heard of it. Neither had son Zach. Well, last week the sun shone, and we made hay, and now Sophia knows the metaphoric meaning, while Zach knows the literal.

Our farm does not have a lot of hay fields. Altogether we have 6 or 7 acres, which isn’t much, but is still a lot when the hay is ready to cut, which it was last week. When we arrived at the end of May a neighbor had already cut the first round of hay, which gave us a little breathing space before the next cutting. As it happens, breathing spaces have a tendency to run out of breath before you know it, which is pretty much what happened to us. This was not a matter of being distracted, or lazy, however. There is this problem of equipment…

When I was a kid, I occasionally worked for a neighboring farmer bringing his hay in. That meant that I lounged around the barn until he showed up with his self-loading hay wagon. Then I humped it for 20 minutes or so until the bales were all stacked in the hay mow. Then I sat around for another 15 or 20 minutes until he came back with another load. Before that, haying meant somebody driving the tractor, somebody on the haywagon stacking the bales and someone (or ones) on the ground, throwing bales onto the wagon.

Before I return to the mechanisms of haying – the descriptions of which were so clearly interrupted by weeks of other things – I want to mention one serious impediment. At least it is an impediment to farmers, and that is the weather.

I first developed a real dislike of tv weathermen last year when we lived in Rhode Island. I was growing a medium-sized garden and that became harder to manage as a serious summer drought turned very serious, then deadly serious. The Providence weatherman prattled on and on about what a great day (or days, or weeks) it was to go to the beach, since the sun rarely failed to shine. I, in the meantime, bought extra hoses to extend irrigation to the garden, and hoped for rain, and cursed the glib weatherman (in my soul).

But now back to haying. Haying is the process of turning overgrown hayfields into useful fodder for grass-eating animals during the winter. To the suburban eye a hayfield looks like nothing more than an abandoned plot of ground, growing up to weeds and whatnot. While there are generally a lot of weeds in hayfields, if things are going well, there are also a lot more useful plants.

Haying – successful haying – requires that weather and the plants come together in a reasonable way. You can’t make hay in the rain, so when your good hay (around here mostly grasses: Timothy and Orchard) is ready to cut, you need three or four days of reasonably certain good weather. In a place where the typical summer weather forecast is for ‘partly sunny and warm with a good chance of afternoon thundershowers,’ that can be hard to line up. So you watch the weather forecast, and cut while the weather is good. And worry that the weatherman might be wrong. Because once you have cut hay you are committed. You can’t go back and undo what you have done, so you have to hope-worry-and pray that things will work out as they should.

That is why haying time is one of the two stressful periods in our farming life. (The other is kidding season, but I will get to that in the winter.)

For both the 2nd and the 3rd cuttings we were successful this year. We cannot take credit for the success, however; we just did what had to be done. In 2016 the drought in western North Carolina was so bad that farmers didn’t even cut their hay. When I looked at what is now our farm in July, 2016, I walked across fields that crunched under my feet. This year I waded through green grass.

To be continued…

Tools

We all use tools. All the time. So often that we frequently forget that when we are using something, it is a tool. We can all pretty much agree that certain things stand out as ‘tools’: most people have some sort of tool drawer, filled with hammers too small actually to hammer anything, and screwdrivers with broken ends, and pliers that never quite hold the thing we want to work on. In fact, in this telling, ‘tools’ are things that do NOT do what they are supposed to do. All this means is that the world is filled with bad tools. And with people who try to use a good tool for the wrong purpose, which generally makes it seem like a bad tool. 

Working on a farm you become intensely aware of tools, since you are always using them. Mostly you are aware of them not being where you need them. You reach for a hammer but it is over in the other barn; you can’t remember where you left that pair of pliers after last used them; the shovel you need is at the other end of the fence. All of this, of course, is not the tool’s fault, it’s yours, and can be classified under absent-mindedness, or short-sightedness or some other -ness. Then there are the cases where you are simply let down by a crappy tool. 

When we were packing for the move from Rhode Island to North Carolina I occasionally took advantage of the circumstances and got rid of something. One of the things I happily consigned to the weekly trash pickup was a pair of boots that seemed to get heavier as they aged; heavier and less comfortable. Often I have found that work boots grow to be almost a part of you, and when they finally give out it’s like saying goodbye to old friends. That was not the case with these boots and I was not sorry to send them off to fill their little part of the Rhode Island state landfill in Johnston, an ex-farming community west of Providence. 

I idly wondered where I would find another pair of workboots, but in the same hectic pack up to leave the north I found a pair of barely used boots stuffed into a plastic bag in a corner of a room. Turns out they were son Zach’s boots and he was getting rid of them because they had never fitted very well. I tried them on and they seemed to work well, so I rescued them from the Salvation Army bag and came south ready (I thought) to go to work. 

Go to work we did, almost immediately, and the hand-me-up boots worked fine – for a few days. The first intimation of failure was when grass started getting stuck in the toes. Within a day or two I was starting to trip over the floppy fronts. By the end of the first week it was clear that what I had inherited was nothing less than a pair of crappy tools. 

Having another son who had worked as a cobbler for a while, I was familiar with the concept of unrepairable shoes (the bane of serious cobblers). I now found myself standing in an illustration of that concept. It was time to cut my losses. The boots were sent to the rubbish pile where they will soon fill their little corner of the Buncombe County landfill. I got myself off to town to find another pair that split the difference between quality and cost. 

Years ago at the start of the SUV craze, I remember reading an article that said that some astronomically high percentage of new SUV owners would never use their 4-wheel-drive – which was a good thing, since the off-road capacity of these minivan replacements was pathetic. They looked like they could do something special, but in fact they couldn’t. I had stepped into a pair of fake workboots that had never been designed or built actually to work. 

Our first 4th of July gathering

Rob invited many of his friends to the farm to celebrate a new beginning. Children ran with the goats ,  carried corn cobs to Zach's horse Dallas and played yard games. Shot off some terrific fireworks that had one bang and up went a rocket only to bring down a parachute. We all ran in circles trying to see where it would fall. The tables will be emptied soon but hope they will be filled with many new guests in months to come. 

Poison Ivy

t’s tough living in a fallen world. I have no words of wisdom to console parents whose child has died in a car wreck; or a husband whose wife is dying of cancer; or a child whose father never came back from a war, or a day at work. Years ago while I was rummaging through a bookstore in Charleston I was confronted by a pair of indignant high-school film-makers who wanted to know what I thought of bad things happening to good people. I remember remarking to their camera that I had never actually met a good person, but then expanded that to say it was also remarkable that more bad things did not actually happen to people. That’s my theology for the day.

I have always had a hard time with certain aspects of the world as it is. In 1964, I remember being very affected by a Life Magazine story of a man killed by a Great White shark off a beach somewhere south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Those were the days when I lived in California, and Life Magazine was still alive. I spent years being terrified of sharks. I was also terrified of poison oak, since it turned out I was hyper allergic to it and could get a massive case simply by passing within a hundred yards or so of a tiny plant.

Years later, after I became a Christian, I continued to have trouble reconciling things like sharks and poison ivy (I was no longer living in the west, with its poison oak, but the eastern ivy was just as bad) with God’s providence. I finally came to recognize the legitimate place of the shark as the vacuum cleaner of the seas, but poison ivy’s role in the world continued to elude me…until the other day.

I am starting to think that farmers everywhere – but especially in Buncombe County – must actually plant poison ivy at the corners of all their farm buildings, since it grows so lushly in all the places you need to get to in daily life on the farm. Or maybe it’s simply the case that farmers in western North Carolina are born with a lifetime immunity to the nasty stuff. Whatever the reason, I find it everywhere I need to be, and I have been diligently spraying poison ivy killer on all the glossy three-leaved masses of dense greenery I can find since the day we arrived on the farm. As I said in an earlier post, I got a pretty good case of it already, clearing the vines away from the future goat loafing barn so we could rebuild one of its collapsing walls.

Michael Pollan, in one of his early books, disputes the contention that a weed ‘is just a plant that is in the wrong place.’ He points out that weeds grow around human beings. (There is good theology in that!) and where people are, so are weeds. That is certainly the case with poison ivy. But I was not thinking of that the other evening after supper when I set out to expand my poison ivy eradication program on the farm. What I found was that toxicodendron radicans is indeed a plant that grows where humans have made their mark. I found it mostly along fence lines and in other threshold places. It rarely grows in the middle of a field.

So, as I progressed around the edges of the farm, blasting the three-leaved devilish weed wherever I could find it, I gradually found myself paying close attention to the farm itself. I noticed all sorts of things I would not have seen, had I not been looking for some specific thing. By the time I was about a quarter of the way around I stopped looking for poison ivy and was simply looking at the place. There will be plenty of time in the future to tame the awful stuff, but for now I am grateful it gave me the chance really to start looking at the land that we have. That is a blessing, not a curse. 

Do not, however, think that I have made my peace with poison ivy. I still hate the stuff. Each time I get a case, I hate it more.

Connecting to the local farmers. 1st stop Wine tasting on our ASAP's farm tours.

This past weekend we three visited several local farms.  

Still no bedroom door but I'm finding the house we are in now has little to do with what we had before. A friend told me to embrace the change and ask God for a grateful heart. So I'm working on creative ways to bring in some fun and joy. I love my silk door curtains. Feels like I'm in Arabia every time I walk in. 

Meet Dallas. When you have land you need a horse of course. And if you have a 🏇 you'll need a saddle.