Hard Work

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Keely

On Saturday, Sean and I got up and started working at 8 am. We didn’t quit until 4, unless you count a break for lunch and to entertain some guests. We cleaned out the chicken house (think Augean stables) and set up the little chicken family in their new digs.

This wire cage is partitioned, so the chicks can move freely between the halves but the big chickens can't. The idea was that Freckles could come and go through the open top, but the chicks would have half the cage to themselves so that they could be safe from the big birds. Unfortunately, Freckles shoved her big chicken self through the tiny doorway, so now it's just kind of a tiny cage for the silly bird.

This wire cage is partitioned, so the chicks can move freely between the halves (chick food and water go in the covered half) but the big chickens can’t. The idea was that Freckles could come and go through the open top, but the chicks would have half the cage to themselves so that they could be safe from the big birds. Unfortunately, Freckles shoved her big chicken self through the tiny doorway, so now it’s just kind of a tiny cage for the silly bird.

We built trellises for the peas, started planting a flowers and forage project in the chicken yard, tilled and weedwhacked around the upper garden, washed, dried and folded two loads of laundry, and planted salad. We’re just sitting here now, trying to study up what we can do now to show the world that we ain’t afraid of hard work.

Sean made a pork sirloin roast for lunch. It’s from the pig’s lower back, just above the hams.

I don’t know how that man does it, but I will never let him go. With the pork we had our first garden salad of the year and some sweet potato fries with sriracha mayo. We ate on the porch, enjoying the breeze and the quiet, drinking in cool water and the pleasant, quiet shade.

check out the cool garden to-do board Sean hung for us!

Days like Saturday, I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Sweat was beading on the sunscreen behind my ears and the plane just above the unscratchable spot on my back was sunburning anyway. I’d been working since I woke up and could have worked until I dropped and not finished everything, but I was splitting my dimples all day.

We left home around four to head to the Juke Joint festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I loved it last year and I loved it this year. There aren’t a lot of events that celebrate Delta culture and heritage, so Juke Joint is special. The way Clarksdale lights up one night out of the year reminds me of the Magic Toy Shop pop up book I had when I was a kid. There’s a lot more beer, crawfish and guitar at Juke Joint, but the mood is the same. ‘Nuff said.

In a total change of scenery, on Sunday, we went to the Orpheum to see Ballet Memphis’ Peter Pan. The Orpheum is a beautiful old theater in Memphis; it’s all chandeliers and gold and silver paint. The show was magical. The ballet and the flying were seamless, and the fantastical, dreamlike mood of ballet suited the story perfectly. I’m still working on understanding the language of dance; a dance party will go on for a while and I’ll lose the plot, fail to understand what the dancers are saying with their movements. I’ll get there, or maybe I won’t, but I’m trying.

On the way home, there was an emergency weather alert on the radio. It’s that tordado-ey time of year again. Sean asked “do you think they make these announcements crackly and use that creepy automatic voice to give these announcements a scary, doomsday kind of quality?” I’ve never heard them that way at all. I grew up thinking that the robot voice was a guy named Noah. When I hear weather radio, I just assume I’m on a boat adventure and that Dad is there, looking out for me. I might be about to get wet, but I feel safe and exhilarated and salty. Thanks for bringing me up on boats, Mom and Dad.

The sand bar at Little Pickering, summer 2002 or 2003, probably. The Larson was my favorite boat, or maybe we just had my favorite adventures in it.

The sand bar at Little Pickering, summer 2002? The Larson was my favorite boat, or maybe we just had my favorite adventures in it.

Off Pond Island, summer… uhh… 2002?

Mother of Chickens!

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Keely

When we came home, I reluctantly hauled my tired self out back to check for eggs. When I peeked under Freckles, to make sure all her eggs were still whole, they weren’t! This is what I saw:

I hollered for Sean, and he came running to see them. The yellow chick is already dry, while the striped chick is still damp. They’re unspeakably precious! Hopefully they are all Cappy’s babies. The last thing we need is some little Spot-spawn, since we’re hoping for a few more layers or at least some edible-sized roosters.
We have to figure out some hen-and-chick-friendly digs for them while they’re small. Some folks recommend moving them indoors for a few weeks, but I’d like to have Freckles do the heavy work of motherhood this time. Right now she’s in a nest box several feet off the floor, so the chicks will need to be moved to somewhere less clifflike and more spacious so that we can fit little containers of food and water. Our chicken house floods when it rains, so a box on the damp floor might be unsuitable for the little birds. Any thoughts? We’ll have to figure something out for them in the morning. Note to self: plan ahead next time.

Coming Home in the Night

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Keely

mud step
the heavy dark
starlit, moonlit
thick owl silence
when the nearest warm
heart panting hot breath
distills on the grass
a coyote yaps
floating on the day’s ebbing warmth
smells of wet grass and thick soil
bank and plunge
and the rickety screen door
the crickets and crying frogs
the creaks and yaps and wails and
slams
home lit but just
a ruffle in the plumage of the night

4-3

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Keely

The little porkers are getting friendlier by the day. I managed to pet one while it was snoozling the other day, and they didn’t scamper away when we went into the pen earlier this evening.

Coming back to school from break has been challenging. Waking up before sunrise every morning doesn’t feel sensible anymore, and spending all day inside feels like madness when the weather is perfect. The mosquitoes aren’t out in force yet, and I spent an hour this evening reading on the lawn in the purple shade, soaking up the bike-riding light, the t-shirt temperatures, the silence of butterflies on the purple flowers in the grass and the smell of yesterday’s rain. The redbuds are blooming like confetti in the understory, and the sassafras tree by our steps has these peculiar firework flowers. Trees are poised to leaf out at a moment’s notice, hazel alder catkins are dripping from branches everywhere, and the quince in the side yard is electric pink. I don’t know how to describe the smell of the wind, but it feels like a warm washcloth on your forehead.

Seeing my kids again has made me happy. I missed their ingenuousness and their contrasting self-consciousness. I missed their jokes and their smiles and the ways they express their frustration. I love teenagers, especially my teenagers. I’m feeling inspired this week, which is a pleasant change from the frustrated apathy I’ve been feeling toward my job recently. Geometry has been awesome and conceptual. I wouldn’t say they’re all grasping the material, but I can confidently say that several of them are grasping it at a high level, and most of them are grasping it adequately. Algebra has been okay. My 7th period is a train wreck right now, but my first and fourth are doing impressive work with quadratics. I have a few students who have made incredible strides this year, and I know that if I hit PEMDAS and writing expressions hard next year (hard = ton of bricks vs. tower of eggs) I’ll see some real magic happen.

When I got home tonight, the piggies had snurfled dirt up over the lowest electric wire of the fence and joined the chickens in the chicken yard. Bad Pork! I chased them back in and collected eggs, noticing the carpenter bees bumbling around the eaves for the first time this year. Freckles is still on her eggs, fluffing up to approximately a cubic foot and gurgling every time someone enters the chicken house. We expect her eggs to hatch within the next ten days.
Look at all those eggs! These birds are out of control!
You can see our automatic chicken door in the background, which has been an absolute life saver and, along with the solar fence charger, one of most useful technological advances in farming since the dibbler.

We had dinner yesterday at Pizza Hut in Helena to help a friend fundraise to bring some of her Spanish students to Costa Rica. You can help her out by making a donation here. On the ride home, Sean and I almost finished listening to Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. We couldn’t stop, so we finished up while we washed dishes together. The book was beautifully written (another win for Gary D. Schmidt, who has a gift for motifs that astonishes me every time) and told a story about my home state that I had never heard before. Mainer or not, you should check out the book, but if you’re a Mainer, you should make a point to learn about Malaga Island.

Look what was raiding the critter-food bin! The flash scared it off… for now. Dang things have those cute little hands and they always figure out how to get into our feed. Sean is going to put something heavy (like our fat cats?) onto the food bin to thwart the varmints.

Time to Bring Home the Bacon

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Keely

Last year, we were a little more on the ball when it came to purchasing feeder pigs. We tracked craigslist for a while, made some phone calls, and finally reserved our pigs a few weeks in advance. We didn’t yet have a truck, so we borrowed a dog carrier from a neighbor and drove the three stinky little critters home in the back seat of the Nissan. We had to ride the whole way with the windows rolled down to keep from gagging on the stink.
When buying feeder pigs, it’s important to get healthy animals from a knowledgeable, competent source. If they aren’t healthy as piglets, they’ll grow more slowly and convert feed to bacon less efficiently. Meat from intact males can have what’s called boar taint. I’ve never tasted it, but it’s not supposed to be delicious. If you don’t want to deal with castrating your own, ask for cut males. Last year we purchased two barrows and a gilt. Barrows are cut males, and a gilt is a female who has never had a litter. They were part China-Poland and part something else.
At that time, our chickens were only a few weeks old and still lived in a Rubbermaid tub in the living room. We brought the pigs home and locked them in the chicken house overnight to get them used to their new home. In the morning, we let them romp in the fenced chicken yard. I remember flipping out the first time we saw one snurfling in the dirt with its little spade face. We had set up the electric fence just inside the chicken yard fence to train them to the electric wire. With the fence set up this way, if they ran through the electric fence, they’d hit a real fence and have to turn back. Pigs are very smart, and these learned quickly. They’d bump the fence with their sensitive snouts, squeal, and back off. A week or so later, we put them out on the site of our future garden with nothing but the electric fence to keep them in. After one mishap (which I described here) they were fine. By the summer, our pigs wouldn’t cross a single strand of electric fence lying on the ground unless they were in a panic.
The first of last year’s pigs, BigUn, was slaughtered for a whole hog barbecue to celebrate the end of the school year. A neighbor helped us butcher the hog, which was a tremendous learning experience for us and for everyone who came to be a part of the festivities. It was fun to watch the fascination and revulsion take turns on our friends faces as they passed around a warm heart. We shared that meat with our community, and I had a ton of delicious pulled pork in the freezer to get me through the summer. The second hog, Raccoon Eyes, we butchered with the help of some visiting friends and the internet. That process was much longer and more challenging for us, since there was no one experienced there to help. We ground meat for almost two days straight to make several kinds of sausage.
Finally, there was Pinkie.

Pinkalink was the last man standing, and he must have weighed over three-hundred pounds. We hoisted him with a rope slung over a tree limb and tied to a comealong attached to our truck. It looked like the truck might come off the ground before Pinkie did. Butchering Pinkie was a slow and careful process because this was the pig we had saved for cuts: porkchops, shoulder roasts, bacon, etc. Sean actually cured the bacon and hams himself. We saved lard from Pinkie (he had plenty) and are still rendering that to make soap.

chunking the frozen lard

Sean is grating the lard and rendering it in the two pots.

Sean made a lard-pig!

soap! We have to let it cure for a few weeks, or the lye could make it too harsh to use.

Slaughtering Pinkie was an emotional experience. As I’ve said, pigs are intelligent. They are also sensitive. With Raccoon Eyes gone, Pinkie was less active. He would lie in his shelter all day, only getting up when someone would come to feed him. When someone was down there, he’d be all exuberance, running up to scratch against your legs, sometimes even rolling over to get his bacon scratched. It looked a lot like loneliness, and it left perfect muddy snout prints on my legs every time I’d go into the pasture. Pinkie was really attached to Sean and would roll right over when Sean walked up like nothing so much as a hugely oversized pink puppy. When it came time to shoot him, Sean put the .22 right against his skull and Pinkie didn’t budge. He went down completely relaxed and easy, which is what I would want for any animal in my care. I cried over that pig for two days, but I was also proud of what we had accomplished.

Sean and Jesse proudly display the New Years roast.

At New Years, when we ate that roast, our friends shared a perfect Wendell Berry poem, For the Hog Killing.

For the Hog Killing

Let them stand still for the bullet, and stare the
shooter in the eye,
let them die while the sound of the shot is in the
air, let them die as they fall,
let the jugular blood spring hot to the knife, let
its freshet be full,
let this day begin again the change of hogs into
people, not the other way around,
for today we celebrate again our lives’ wedding
with the world,
for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we renew
the bond.

—Wendell Berry

Raising my own meat is important to me. With a very few exceptions, I don’t eat meat that wasn’t raised with respect for the animal, the planet and people anymore, and in this part of Arkansas that pretty much means raising it ourselves. Sean was a vegetarian for years before he had the revelation of “happy meat.” I became aware of the issues around meat around that same time and transitioned to a mostly vegetarian diet with what happy meat we could afford when we could afford it. If you’re interested in hearing more about why we eat the meat we eat, ask me! I’m happy to talk or write about it all day, but this post is about our new piggies, so I’m cutting myself short.
This year, we didn’t reserve pigs ahead of time and actually had a pretty hard time finding any. Nobody nearby has feeder pigs for sale, or if they do, they aren’t posting on craigslist. We wound up getting three Hereford gilts from a man a few hours north of us who is selling off his stock in preparation for a move. Since the truck isn’t working this week, we had to drive them home in the dog carrier again. My most recent experience with pigs was with Pinkie, so it was impossible to believe that three pigs could fit in such a small carrier. We hopped out of the car, put on our gloves and the man walked us over to his pig enclosure. He had a network of very clean pens on a concrete slab, and we got to see a few young Hereford hogs before we got distracted by our little squealers. When you pick up a baby pig, it screams bloody murder and releases any solids or liquids it can come up with all over you. Sean got a nice poop splatter down the front of his pants. The man we bought them from carried one by its back leg to avoid this. I wasn’t sure I could pull that off without hurting it or dropping it, so I carried my pig under my arm and it relaxed a little and stopped screaming, which surprised me and confirmed the rumor that Herefords are easygoing pigs. I also managed to come out clean. When we got them into the crate, they hardly took up half the space.
We got home around ten thirty last night, and put them out in their temporary enclosure. For shelter they have the a-frame structure that Sean built for our pigs last summer, and we’re, once again, using the chicken fence as a backup against the electric fence’s failure, though we made the electric fenced area about half the size of the chicken yard, and it doesn’t include the chicken house this year, so our birds still have someplace to scratch.

You can see the electric fence/chicken fence arrangement here, as well as the pig shelter.

When we set them down, they stood still for a moment, then scampered away from us. It’ll take a few weeks before they’re really friendly, but these babies are already less skittish than the last bunch. They bumped the fence a few times (squeeeek!) and then stopped, already miles ahead of what we expected. They immediately began rooting in the mud, searching for tasty grubs and shoots and roots to eat. We went to bed listening to their soft little snores through the bedroom window last night. They are awfully cute when they’re this little.
Our freezer is still nearly full of homegrown pork, as well as turkey and chicken, so we won’t be raising these girls to full size.
One of them is for the end-of-year barbecue, and a second is for Sean to practice his charcuterie on. The third is for a friend, who has asked us to raise a pig for her family. I’m thrilled that we have the opportunity to share what we do here. It’s all very well for us to try to eat sustainably, but the two of us aren’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Spreading the skills and desire to raise and eat good meat is what it’s all about, and our friend is going to leave here knowing how to turn a hog into porkchops!
It’s time to get up and get ready for the week. I don’t want to: I can see the little piggens snurfling in the corner of their pen from bed, and I can hear them grunting and occasionally squeaking as they bump the fence. What more could I want? But there’s gardening to do, and, as you can imagine, laundry. It’s a beautiful day for it. I’d best put on my work pants and get busy.
Here they are! I saved the best for last.