What if we stand the notion of ownership on its head? What if I do not own the barn, but instead it owns me, or better, we own each other? What if I do not view it as my right to kill mice simply because I can, and because a piece of paper tells me I own their habitation? What if, because their habitation is near my own, I am responsible for their well-being? What if I take care of them and their community as the grandfather ponderosa outside this window takes care of me, and as before that the stars soothed me? This relationship of mutual care doesn't mean that none shall die, nor even that I won't kill anything, nor eventually be killed; it simply means we will treat each other with respect, and that neither will unnecessarily shit where the other bathes. The bees, too, stand in my purview, and so it becomes my responsibility to make sure, to the best of my abilities, that they can sustain their community. The same can be said for the communities of wild roses, native grasses, trees, frogs, mosquitos, ants, flies, bluebirds, bumblebees, and magpies that, too, call this their home. We all share responsibility toward each other and toward the soil, which in turn shares responsibility to each of us. What if all of life is not what we've been taught, a 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' competition to see who may own or kill the others before the others can own or kill them? What if we don't need to live our whole lives alone? What if life is a web of immeasurably complex and respectful relationships? What if the purpose–even the evolutionary purpose–is for each of us to take responsibility for all those around us, to respect their own deepest needs, to esteem and be esteemed by them, to feed and feed off of them, to be sustained by their bodies and eventually to sustain them with our own?

– Derrick Jensen, from A Language Older Than Words

* * * * * *

Belated happy solstice, everyone!

Several days ago, Teri and I heard a ruckus from the field where our chickens roam. After a few seasons with poultry, you learn to distinguish mundane squabbles and triumphant “I laid an egg” squawks from their air-raid siren cacophony – and this was definitely the latter.

We looked over, and there were several crows flying in tight circles about fifty feet up. We ran, shouting, with Daks racing ahead, but the few seconds warning wasn’t enough. Two black missiles began a rapid dive side-by-side while we were still a hundred feet away.

The chickens’ shrieking grew even more frantic, and the crows disappeared behind a blackberry bush. A moment later, as the dog arrived on the scene, they flapped back up empty-taloned.

Perhaps the dog helped, but most of the credit goes to the chickens themselves, who had sought cover under the brambles. The one remaining chick was hidden in a bush with his mama just a few feet from where the crows must have grazed the ground, frightened but unharmed.

I started to contemplate shooting a crow (yes, we would eat it). They’re very smart birds with a complex language, and I expect that the word would get around among the local crows pretty quickly. I even went so far as to save a freshly dead rat as bait. I’d have to set the rat out in the field and hope for a diving attack, firing just as the bird grazed the ground to be sure no stray pellets ended up in a neighbor’s sheep. I didn’t get around to it yesterday, and put the rat out for the vultures to clean up. Always more where he came from.

This morning as Teri and I took a walk in the orchard, we saw three crows chasing each other above the field, doing loops and Immelmann turns in a tight formation…no, wait, it was two crows chasing a reddish hawk! I had read that crows will team up to drive off raptors, and felt fortunate to see it so close.

Had I successfully frightened off or killed the crows, the hawk could have claimed our field, and he’s a far more dangerous predator, one that might well have been able to target adult chickens.

It’s yet another iteration of a very common lesson here; nature is mind-bogglingly complex, and any interference on our part is likely to have unforeseen consequences, both for us and for the environment in general. I might still consider shooting an individual bird that develops a habit of preying on our chicks, but overall the crows are likely working for us more than against us.

It brings to mind a story I heard on the radio not long ago listening to an interview with author Terry Tempest-Williams. In the 1950s on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, the federal government decided that a vast area of marginal grazing land was being decimated by prairie dogs nibbling on the roots of what plants managed to survive there.

In their typical worse-than-useless manner, the feds declared that they would exterminate the prairie dogs from the area. Navajo elders disagreed with the plan, saying “If you kill all the prairie dogs there will be no one left to cry for the rain.” The men from DC dismissed this as superstitious nonsense; surely there is no connection between prairie dogs and rain!

The plan went ahead. With poisons and guns, they succeeded in eliminating the rodents from a large area, just as they had previously done with most of the bison and human natives.

Without the prairie dogs to loosen the soil, it quickly became rain-shedding hardpan. The already sparse vegetation died of dehydration as the rainwater failed to penetrate the ground, instead running across the desert to cause flooding and erosion problems.

The Navajo elders didn’t just warn us what would happen; they laid out the exact mechanism in language a little too poetic for the bureaucratic mind to comprehend.

We – and She – will almost always be better off in the long run if we stay our hands when tempted to actively interfere with nature’s balance. We need to listen and watch and research, and remember that one of science’s greatest strengths can also be an Achilles heel – the practice of weighing only very literal and quantifiable data while ignoring other types of knowledge that are encoded in “folk” wisdom or which can only be learned through direct, subjective experience.

1 dog
1 cat
7 goats
12 chickens 11 chickens 10 chickens

Something has been picking off our 8-week-old chicks. The first to go was the only girl in this batch — she disappeared on Monday. We heard a commotion — the ladies tend to make a commotion after laying an egg, so at first we thought that was it — then I thought maybe I should go check on them. They were all clustered under a group of trees and seemed a little jumpy. I counted: 11 chickens. I counted again. Then I noticed that Molly had only two babies hanging off her wings (ok, they don’t really hang off her wings — but it’s the closest thing she has to apron strings).

We searched as well as we could but couldn’t find even a trace of a struggle, so we’re thinking hawk. The birds all seemed a bit more wary the rest of the day, and at nightfall the remaining 11 were all present and accounted for. Tuesday was uneventful, though we still had some nervous birds.

Well, yesterday, Peter was home alone. He heard a commotion and ran out to check (sound familiar?). He found the birds clustered around their coop area (usually they free-range our side of the property during the day; most often they are to be found out in the fields), and again acting jumpy and nervous. He counted: 10 chickens. This time it was the biggest and prettiest of the two boy babies.

Now Molly has one baby left, and I’m worried that once the easy pickings are gone this guy will start in on the teenagers and adults. And while I’m really sad about losing the babies, I’m way more attached to the adults (our first chickens ever) and the teenagers (who were also born and raised here on the farm, and who have lived long enough to develop personalities — chickenalities? — and become more like pets). Plus, I’ve promised Molly that I’ll do whatever I can to help her keep her last baby.

So, the chickens are now under house arrest for the foreseeable future. They are not thrilled about it. Most of them are confined to the coop and two attached runs, and the two lowest-on-the-totem-pole cockerels are in the chicken tractor nearby (to keep them from being picked on too badly in a space where they can’t really get away). The runs are covered so they can’t fly out, and — more importantly — a predator can’t fly in.

The first frost took us by surprise a few nights ago, so the next day we pulled in most of the remaining garden veggies before a really thorough freeze turns them to mush.

We’ve hauled in a big load of green tomatoes from the truly dead plants, but the area that I over-planted and didn’t trellis still has green leaves in the matted lower layers, so we’re leaving a bunch of fruit on the off chance it might ripen on the vine. (See, this was not neglect, it was a frost survival tactic!)

Unlike the tomatoes, the squash plants are completely done. This was a huge zucchini plant just a few days ago:

There were still flowers on some of the wilted zukes, and I couldn’t help messing with this one in Photoshop a little…

We hauled in the last of the delicata squash, even though many are far too young to finish ripening inside:

These poor little infant delicata went straight to the compost:

…as did their vines:

Cabbages are still going strong:

And so are the aphids on this half-forgotten kale plant (rather, they were until a few minutes after this photo was taken):

Basil seed is plentiful:

and tobacco is pretty in a red sunset. The leaves turn yellow from the bottom up, and are harvested continuously as they turn…picked green, they’re unlikely to ever cure into a mellow smoke.

Finally, the flowers that I hope will provide seed for next year’s tobacco plants – and a little friend:

In my last post a few minutes ago, I related the disappointing explosion of most of our Oregon Grape wine. I looked at the only bottle that still had its cork, and noticed that the level had dropped by about 1/3; apparently it seeped through the reused cork’s corkscrew hole.

“Oh well, might as well see what’s in there,” I thought, and popped the cork the rest of the way out. POP! There may be only half a liter, but I have accidentally created a SPARKLING Oregon Grape wine, and it’s quite tasty! Next time I guess I’ll use less sugar, or wait longer before bottling, but for now I’ll just enjoy the dry, sparkling, exotic beverage that appeared by chance =)

We post lots of beautiful photos on here of all the things that go well…but we want this website to be a resource for other people making similar changes in their lives, so it’s only fair to acknowledge some of the things that don’t go well.

This shouldn’t be discouraging to anyone setting out to grow/can/brew/etc; with so many projects going on, many of them first tries, these “learning opportunities” are inevitable, and far outnumbered by the successes.

Some notable failures in 2009:

• two 5-gallon batches of undrinkable beer. The prime suspect is over-hopping with a hops rated at several times the bitterness of what I normally use
• 3 out of 4 bottles of Oregon Grape wine, and 1 bottle of blueberry wine exploded during aging. Likely cause: bottled too soon, before the yeast had eaten all the sugars, and/or reusing corks and hammering them in with a rubber mallet instead of getting a corker
• potato yield this year looks to be only about twice the weight of the seed potatoes I planted in spring; plants grew well for a few months, then started yellowing and dying. A few survive, but are weak. Possibly underwatered out of fear of creating a moldy mess in the straw mounds, possibly a fungus. Next year, all taters will be planted on the other end of the property, just in case.
• About 1/3 of the biggest, healthiest onions have disappeared. Varmints are supposed to stay away from such strong-smelling plants, but not our little moles/gophers/whatever the little @#$%ers are, oh no, they devour the entire onion and you find the onion tops protruding from a hole in the ground
• blueberry bushes: 2 near-dead, 2 totally gone. Moral: if you want to plant small blueberry bushes, don’t do so where your chickens are hanging out; the mounded, mulched earth is apparently irresistible for scratching.
• 3 of the 4 goat babies have scurs (irregular horn growth after unsuccessful removal). We went with the popular wisdom for this first batch, which is to dehorn (“disbud”) them while very young. Basically you sear and cauterize the little bumps that would become horns. It’s a few seconds of pain and then they’re back to bouncing around, so it it worked flawlessly we might continue to do it, but when it doesn’t work you just get small, deformed horns, and we’ll probably let future generations keep their natural headgear. It’s likely that I was too worried about burning the kids’ heads and didn’t do a thorough enough job of it, but I’ve seen plenty of goats disbudded by far more experienced goat keepers that still have scurs.
• 1 baby chick taken by rats. I poured a couple of inches of concrete for the chicken coop floor, but I left enough of a gap in one corner that rats managed to squeeze in and steal a chick.
• You’ll notice we haven’t posted about our honeybees in a while. they’re gone, and it’s still kind of sad. maybe next year
• liquid cheese – I was making a batch of quickie-faux-mozzarella recently. All was going well; it was almost done when I @#$%ed it up. One of the final steps is to soak long pieces of the half-finished cheese in 170 degree brine and stretch it like taffy. It started firming up a little sooner than I wanted, so I grabbed the teapot and splashed in just a little boiling water. The cheese immediately dissolved, and no amount of straining, cooking, etc. could make Humpty Dumpty edible again.

I’m sure I could find plenty of other screw-ups and strokes of bad luck, but this could get depressing…I think I’ll have to go sample one of the wines that DIDN’T explode…

The best times of the year for blogging are also the ones when it’s hardest to find the time…but here’s a quick update on happenings around our homestead.

In the garden

Fairytale Eggplant – delicious, 3″ beauties:

Blue Lake bush beans are starting to flower:

The tobacco experiments are going better this year. The tallest of these is about 5′ now, because it’s in the raised hay-bale bed filled with pure composted goat bedding/poo:

Watermelons are enjoying the poo-bed, too:

Here it is from the end…zucchini closest to the camera, with 2′ long leaves:

…but even in rather poor soil, zucchini plants just keep cranking the food out like nothing else we grow:

Lemon cucumbers are struggling a bit, but producing well despite whatever I’m doing wrong:

Our little fig tree is going strong:

Delicata squash – one of my favorites. We saved seed from our Wintergreen Farm CSA boxes last year, I’m really glad they grew:

The peas have been wonderful this year, making new pods as fast as we can pick them for months, and are just slowing down now:

Summer is nothing without tomatoes…we have probably about 50 or 60 plants, mostly Brandywine red, seen here:

Sweet 100 cherry tomatoes break our no-hybrids rule, but they’re 6′ tall and LOADED with fruit:

Although 1 good zucchini plant is enough for a small family, we have the two giant ones int he pure poop, plus a few more seen here keeping the cantelope vines company:

Beets are about ready to harvest, and we’re planting more. We both love beets, they store well, you can make dye from them, and if all else fails, they’re good goat food:

Black oil sunflower seeds are great livestock feed…they’re scattered here and there, but next year we’ll probably plant a large field of them:

Finally for this segment – apples! Many of the trees lost their buds in a late freeze, but for some reason this tree is as apple-y as ever:

Infrastructure report

The construction never, ever stops. The goats are now enjoying another 1/4 acre of pasture that I’ve fenced off, and we’ve enclosed about 1500 sq ft around the chicken house so they can still enjoy some freedom on days they don’t have the run of the whole property.

They’re perfectly capable of flying over the fence, as one does every morning to lay her egg in our woodpile, but so far they haven’t figured out that the flying over the fence trick works in both directions. Chasing and flapping ensue.

Since we started milking our goats this spring, we’ve been doing it under a rickety “just for today” tarp arrangement that’s not much fun when it rains:

…but soon, we’ll have a nice, snug 8′x8′ milking shed:

The big old red truck has some problems that I don’t have the time to deal with, and 8mpg isn’t very good even for something that only goes on the road a few times a month. A friend gave me a nice deal on his old truck, a much more reasonably sized Mazda b-2000. Only the perspective makes them look similar in size.

Cuteness

No blog post would be complete without a goat picture…here’s Drama about to eat my camera:

A recent pizza, with our own tomatoes, basil and oregano, plus mozzarella courtesy of our goats:

Chesnok Red and Bavarian Purple garlic, harvested today. Kind of small, but pungent. Next year they’ll go into richer, looser ground, and today I’ll have garlic scapes and new potatoes (couldn’t resist digging just a few!) for every meal:

I recommend wearing gloves. The thick ones, like you would use for gardening or other outdoor work. Or developing a high pain threshold. ‘Cause when they’re broody, they really, really don’t want you taking their eggs away…