Closure: The Last Blog Post

So this is it.  The last post from Pleasant Places Farm.  Done.  Finale.  Closure.

We have sold the place.  Signed papers last week, and are now on borrowed,  correction: rented, time until we close on the new house and get moved.  Inside this house there are boxes everywhere.  Empty ones, taped up and labeled ones,  gaping ones.  Large pieces of furniture are missing, either given away or sold.  We are downsizing, after all.  The house's original carpeting, in a color I would have never chosen, I notice is still in obstinately good shape.  I kept waiting for it wear out so I could justify replacing it, and it just never did.

Outside, the spring season is glorious, and Pleasant Places is as beautiful as she has ever been.  I can not tell whether she is bidding me a fond farewell, or taunting me.  I wake every morning to the dawn chorus of birds.  There is, to me, something almost humorous in the extravagance of all that singing. It makes me smile.  The apple tree is blooming, and the dogwoods, and the iris, or it irises?  After a weekend of soaking rain, the springs have popped up again in  the barnyard.  The sparkle of the water everywhere among the bright green grass has a surreal beauty.  The chickens make their happy, clucky noise.  A tractor putters away in a distant neighbor's garden.  Wild turkeys visit the far end of the pasture.  Apparently, all is right on Pleasant Places Farm.

Two of the hens are setting eggs which should hatch just before we leave.   Most of the chickens are staying here, and so is Pico, the guard dog.  He seems to belong more to the farm than to us, and though I will miss him, when the new owners asked us to leave him, it seemed right.

With or without me, things go on as they should.  I am reminded of a summer day when I sat on the stone wall at the old homestead above the pasture and realized I was just one in probably a very long line of stewards of this piece of land.  I, like the ones before, would move on or pass on, but the land itself would remain. And now that day has come.  Sooner that I expected, but in the proper time, I have no doubt.

I am starting a file for the new owners, writing down things it will be helpful for them to know.  Trying to resist the urge to tell them everything it took ten years to learn about this land.   Enough to be helpful, not enough to rob them of the adventure of discovering things on their own.  They are escaping the city and longing to come here and learn to be more self-reliant.  I feel glad to be handing it over to people I believe will enjoy it as I have.

The move here almost ten years ago was about self-reliance for me as well, about producing our own food, about learning the skills of a past era.  In the last ten years there is very little in the way of food production I haven't tackled, from milking goats to butchering chickens and, of course,  growing all manner of fruits and vegetables.  Ten years ago, there really was no "local food" movement in this area, and if you wanted organic and didn't want to drive two hours, you had to grow it.   So I did. Now, ten years later, I will be able to walk to a weekly farmer's market from my new house. I am looking forward to that.   I am still a believer in local food, and I don't think I will ever regret learning what it takes to produce it.

Neither will I ever quit, of my own volition, being a gardener.  As soon as I knew we were going to move to a house on a town lot, I starting reading about urban homesteading and edible landscapes.  I will have a garden and fruit trees, and probably a couple of city chickens.  And what I have learned to do on a larger scale here, I think I may can do even better on our postage stamp yard.  And there will be the luxury of free time.  I have loved my farm, but she  has demanded much attention.  Ten years of never being long away from her.  Now, if I want go away for two weeks, or four, I can...city chickens notwithstanding.  ( I have family close by to look after them)

So another phase of life awaits us.  We move on to a small house with a small yard (way less than acre, can you believe that?) in an even smaller town than we live now.  But though it may sound like my life is shrinking, I feel it is, in fact, expanding.   We will spend less money in gas and in energy, and less energy  and time in upkeep.  That means more time to travel, to hike, to canoe the nearby lake, perhaps to write.  A new adventure.

  I have sifted through all my possessions in the last few weeks, everything, forcing myself to consider every piece and edit, edit, edit. "If you don't absolutely need it or love it, get rid of it,"  I tell myself repeatedly.  And the more I jettison, the freer I feel, and the clearer my sense of what is truly beautiful and necessary.  How odd, that in order to simplify my life, I must pull a reverse Thoreau and leave the countryside for a town, albeit a very small and rural one.

So  I embrace this change; and yet there will certainly  be dusks when I will miss watching the sunset from this porch, and springs when I will remember the awe of helping a new goat kid into a new, green world , and winters when I wish I could once more see the snow clouds roll over the mountains toward Pleasant Places.

Betwixt and Between

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post.  Seven months.  But I have some pretty good excuses--no, really, I do.

First, starting in early (way-too-early) August, school cranked back up, which meant I went back to work.  This year, that meant back to kicking off our amped-up breakfast program and to preparing my assistant manager to...drumroll, please...take my place.  As of January, I have moved into a more educational role, and I am loving it, but I was definitely feeling in between roles there for several months.

And then there is this.  Sometime between July and now (February 5, to be exact) I slipped over from my forties into my fifties.  Now, mind you, I don't have a lot of angst about this.  Being fifty kind of feels like, I don't know, a relief.   Like it gives me permission to, as Ousier Boudreaux said, "wear a funny hat and  ugly clothes and grow vegetables in the dirt" ...Not that I haven't always done those things.  But anyway, 49 felt like being "on the cusp" of something, a feeling I distinctly do not like.  Now, finally fifty, I can grab my funny hat and AARP card and run (being careful not to fall and break a hip) happily into the last quarter. (Actually, since I plan to live until about 90 and die peacefully while napping in the sun in my garden, I am still a few years away from the last quarter, but I am no good with fractions.)

Shirley Maclaine as Ousier Boudreaux in "Steel Magnolias".  I think she is about 55 in this photo.
I remember when I saw the movie, I did think she was old. Ha!

But the ultimate in being "in between" is this:  we put Pleasant Places on the market back in late September. The market being what it is,  this is more of a "well, let's just see what happens" move.  If it sells, we will move to a down-sized property more centrally located...and I will be fine with that.   The reality is that it does get harder to keep up the acreage and work full time, and we spend a lot of money in gas and vehicle wear and tear just driving to work every day.   If  the house doesn't sell in a year, we will pull up the sign, fold up our fleece as it were, and start figuring out how to make the property less maintenance intensive...and I will be fine with that.

But in the meantime, I am in between...did I mention I dislike being in between?  I am not a cusp-dweller, at least not a comfortable one.   It is as if someone hit the "pause" button.  Yes, I will plant a garden and I may even raise some chickens for the freezer, but nothing long term.  I have to put off  raising the turkeys I had planned because they take too long.  I can't plant any more fruit trees because I don't want to invest in something I may have to leave. I really should find a home for the five remaining goats, just in case.  No new fencing. No big remodeling projects.  Just pause.  For now.

What to Do When the Zucchini Fairy Visits

Whether you planted too much zucchini again or you forgot to lock your car, this time of year you really can't have too many zuke recipes. Here's a recipe we tried last night and really liked. 

Zucchini Fritters

2 cups shredded zucchini-drain if  it is watery

1/2 c diced onion

3  eggs slightly beaten (you might could do with 2.   I just have lots of eggs)

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

1 cup bread crumbs

1 tablespoon Italian herb blend

salt and pepper

oil for browning

Mix the first six ingredients together in a medium bowl.  You want the mixture to stick together.

Heat a small amount of cooking oil in a skillet over medium heat. 

Drop the zucchini mixture onto the skillet about 2 tablespoons at a time and flatten slightly. Cook until one side is brown and crisp. Flip fritters and brown the other side. When browned, remove to a plate with paper toweling and salt and pepper to taste.

Accompaniments and variations: I served this with Imagine organic tomato soup topped with homemade croutons last night. A green salad would have been nice too.

I think maybe a dill sauce would have made a nice spread/dip for them.

Other spices (cayenne instead of the Italian?) and vegetables (diced bell peppers?) could be used to change the flavor profile.

They were even good warmed up for lunch today!

Kids On The Farm

The kids have finally arrived.  Beatrice gave birth to quads on June 27.  They are all boys (sigh).  Hermione gave birth to two pretty little does on Saturday, July 7.  Both does birthed without my assistance, which suits me fine. I was around for clean-up and to make sure everyone had figured out where the milk came from, and then to move mom and babies into private quarters for awhile. 

Three of Bea's babies were various shades of brown and one, the smallest, was white.  Whether it was his color or his size or the fact that she just couldn't deal with all four of them, I don't know, but for some reason, she rejected the little guy.  She just refuses to let him eat.  So we have a bottle baby.  I have been raising goats for about 12 years and this is the first one I have had to bottle feed as we always let dams raise their kids.  So here I am washing baby bottles and heating milk, and it has been how many years since I did this for any kind of a kid? 

My family came up for the fourth, and we had a wonderful visit.  Lots of good, old-fashioned food like chicken and dumplings, vegetables from the garden and homemade ice cream.  It was so good to have my mom, dad, sis and her kids here.

My niece and nephews enjoyed visiting the animals. My niece helped me feed the bottle baby...

And my nephews gathered eggs...

And hung out with Peaches, the cow.





Solstice

Something about the solstice intrigues me, feels like something that should be celebrated, and so I had made plans, important plans mind you, to piddle in my garden last evening and then sit on the porch and drink in those last long rays of the longest day of the year.

Instead, I came down with this awful summer cold complete with aches and chills. I caught the fading rays of the day through my window as I sat wrapped in a blanket watching "American Pickers" on Netflix. Not the celebration I had planned. Sometimes I think life is made up of the"insteads".

But summer proceeds with or without me. The garden is starting to produce the warm weather vegetables now: squash, beans, zukes. I even had a salad the other day that included our romaine and our first grape tomatoes. I think this is the first year I have ever had both ready at the same time. Usually the lettuces are gone long before the tomatoes come in. For sure the romaine won't hang on much longer in these ninety degree days.

The peaches that the late frost and hail storm spared were stolen by a marauding squirrel. I caught him in the very act. He also boldly visits our front porch every day looking for a way into the squirrel-proof bird feeder. The varmint stands his ground until I am within a couple of feet of him, and I have to follow him off the porch to get him to leave. Very cheeky. I had to buy peaches this year.

The pullets are growing and the layers are laying, or most of them are. We have eight layers currently and are getting about six eggs a day. I have never been any good at discovering the slackers. Heidi, the duck, has decided she is a chicken and lays her pretty blue-green eggs in the nest boxes with the others.

Goat babies are imminent. Bea is as wide as she is tall. It has to be soon. Next week probably.

The katydids are already clacking away in the trees. Really early for them. During the day, haze hangs over the mountains nearly hiding those farthest away, muting and smearing the colors in the nearer ones.

Last night just after dark, which came around 9:30, I pulled myself off the couch and stuck my head out to listen to the night sounds for just a moment. There in the dark the crickets chirped, the toads trilled and the tree frogs sang their summer song. The longest day of the year had passed.

Bunnies and Chickens and Cows, Oh My!

It has been a wild and wonderful spring at our place. So busy that I haven't found time to write about all that goes on here...

Like the March 2 tornado that thankfully missed our farm completely, passed just yards from where our daughter was housesitting and devastated houses and businesses in our town.

And the weeks of beautiful, warm weather that has the garden jumping out of the ground.

 And the return of my feathered friends, like this bright goldfinch, the ruby-throated hummers, and just today, my favorite indigo buntings.

The batch of pullets is growing fast. It will soon be time for them to join the bigger birds.  Hobley, the drake, disappeared while we were away Easter weekend.  Whatever got him was large enough to just take him out of the pen without leaving much of a trace.  So now the only duck left is Heidi,who has been moved to the chicken house for safety where she maintains an uneasy peace with her new roomates. 

The menagerie grows.  We have adopted our niece's huge rabbit, Baxter.

More big news, and I do mean big,  is that a cow now lives at Pleasant Places--  A pretty, friendly Jersey named "Peaches".  She belongs to a friend, and is just staying with us temporarily.  Besides just the fact that I am enjoying having her around,  I am hoping she will cut down on the summer mowing and provide us with some good fertilizer. 

The Season Begins

The non-event winter and early, early spring are conspiring to make me feel behind.  I am not fond of cold weather, but winter does keep you inside where you might, perhaps, clean out closets or the pantry or the freezer.  There are a dozen inside chores that simply did not get done this winter-that-never-was because it was just too nice outside.  In fact the weather was so inspiring that I started too many projects: the new herb bed (about 3/4 ready), a place for a small three sisters garden down by the barn (about 1/4 ready), more raised beds by the fence (started in my head only)...to name a few.  Not to mention the more mundane things like stringing new electric fence that should have been done.  And now with spring flowers blooming in February, it feels like the gardening season has begun.  In fact, it has.

I have lettuce coming up in the garden.  I bought a couple of really cheap packets of  an Italian mix at the Dollar General.  I thought it would be a really skimpy amount of seeds, but I was pleasantly surprised.  They seem to be germinating well too.

I have also become intrigued with a new (to me) seed-starting method called winter sowing.  The idea is not so much to push the season as it is to use the winter downtime to pot up seeds and then leave them outside to sprout on their own schedule.  I have read that the result is hardy seedlings that you don't have to harden off before transplanting.  So I bought handfuls of dollar store seed packets to experiment with.  So far the bachelor buttons have sprouted and look good.  A vine called cardinal climber sprouted but then got nipped off by cold.  Possibly not all seeds are suitable for this.  It is frightening to me to be sticking tomato seeds outside in February, but winter sowing experts admonish beginners to "trust the seed".  You can read more at WinterSown.Org.  Below are my wintersown seeds in all manner of  repurposed containers.