January Garden? Waste Nothing.

With luck, our lettuce may last until it bolts in May. My fellow Virginians will declare me daft for saying how mild our season has been, without real snowfall other than a dusting twice. I miss snow greatly and the hard freezes that were once more common. At least, in both November and early this month, we did get a good freeze. It heaves the soil well for spring, when I'm going to get serious and plant our entire 6500 square feet of garden.  Yet even now, in the deepest part of what passes for "winter" here, there is something stirring in the garden.

Mostly it is fallow, though a few brave onions and garlic wait out the dormant season. This time of  year means letting the chickens turn soil on rows that have nothing as I peek, on warmer days, into the row-covers where we have some real food waiting. With only a bit of work in fall, any gardener around here can manage it. This year, I have harvested beets and radishes (now done), plus we continue to get lettuce, collards, and broccoli.

My focus for this post is the final item. We long ago harvested the main heads of broccoli; the side ones got nipped in the last really cold weather, even under the row-covers.  But something else remains: the greens. They taught me a small lesson this year.

Americans who enjoy broccoli rabe probably have not given much thought to the tender leaves and small stems of broccoli itself. I found, when making broccoletti this fall, that the leaves work really well when chopped and sauteed. My recipe uses pine nuts, lots of garlic, and sometimes, since we have strong palates, anchovies. We top it all with aged Romano or Parmesan.

As we came to crave this pasta dish as much as we do pesto, I wanted to stretch my supply of broccoli. I was delighted to see that the leaves are great for cooking. They compare well to my collards and kale, so it would be a shame to toss them in the compost heap.

My interest in that part of the plant made me think about what other edibles we casually discard in the garden. In the leanest part of the year, every little scrap counts. Partly my attitude comes from not wanting to waste anything in soil I prepared myself. Partly it comes from a family story of the Depression, when my father and his mom, not long arrived in the US from Lebanon, went to open fields to pick Dandelion greens so they would have a vegetable for dinner. It shamed my dad and he did not tell the story too freely, but it did not shame me. Nature is an abundant gardener, if we know where to look.

If you have a garden, be sure to go out as soon as the wild onions are up. Eat them and be thankful that the lean months are behind us. And then think about what you don't want to waste from every plant you grow. I guarantee you will both eat well and throw a lot less food away.

Small Farms And 2015

Having just set up Beepasture Farms LLC, I do want 2015 to be the year of small agriculture. I've now a personal stake in it, as we move toward retirement from academic work and toward a "sideline income" from producing food without inputs of pesticides, herbicides, or petrochemical-based fertilizers.

Today is a watershed moment, as California's Proposition 2 bans some of the worst practices involved in the intensive rearing of caged animals. Americans have long been distanced from their food, and animal-welfare issues are only the visible aspect for an industrialized method of producing what we eat. I am as concerned with the invisible and slow effects of GMO crops; we do not know the long-term effects of trace amounts of herbicides that build up in our bodies from eating mass-market food. I suspect that in my remaining years, we'll find out and the results will not be pretty.

Writer Bill McKibben has urged America to become a nation of small-scale food producers again. We began that way. With our LLC I'm the only member, and it shields a producer from liability against his personal property. Only the assets of the LLC could be seized in court. It gives a member the flexibility to write off expenses, as long as the firm shows a profit at least every third year. A hobby, on the other hand, can only cancel income with expenses. It cannot show a loss. But mine is no hobby; it's a future small business and part of a much larger future for how we produce and eat food.

An LLC also provides a method to license with the state; some Libertarian friends disliked my doing that (it's not any of their darned business how I conduct my affairs, which should be a Libertarian principle, but I try to be cordial on Facebook). My incentive is licensing with the State Corporation Commission is to establish the firm for the long term. If I pay a few taxes now, it makes it easier to scale up to a larger operation when I begin to lease or buy more land for production nearby.

For now our horizon is small: 400 pounds of hot peppers for one restaurant in 2015 and a small annual profit after the loss shown for starting up in 2014. We ordered seeds, bought a post-hole digger for the tractor, and had several other incidental expenses related to fencing. It's a very hopeful start to the new year.

The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

Self-Sufficiency is a cardinal American value. Yet our chickens demonstrated, just last night, what a crackpot idea it can be.

The hens missed the dusk closing of the automatic door. I'd made the mistake of giving them a treat a bit too late in the day, so they ended up stuck outside the coop. When I went out to check on them, as we do nightly to be sure all are safely tucked away to roost, all six hens were clustered together, for warmth, on and beneath the cleated board that leads to the closed door. In a few minutes, I ushered them inside and shone a light to help them onto the roosting bar.

Chickens, like humans, have no night vision. They needed a light, and without it, they huddle together for mutual protection.

When I visit homesteading e-lists and Web sites, I run into the "Prepper" mentality quite often. These folks often assume that with enough supplies, ammunition, and skills, they could ride out nearly any human-made or natural disaster.

I think they need to watch a flock of chickens. They might also want to imagine their world without helpers with medical skills, without a policeman to call to sort out contentious neighbor, without a local government to resolve property disputes.

No, thanks. I'll take the imperfect compromise we call "modern civilization."  But either way, I'd also take a community over the myth of the heroic, Neitzschean loner who shapes the world with his bare male hands. In truth, that macho posturing gives way to realism of splitting wood with a hydraulic splitter, using a tractor, and hiring help. I do split wood by hand for exercise, but in a time when I must manage other tasks, the big machine helps us heat enough that the splitter has paid for itself in its first two yeas of operation.

Friends offer help, but too often I know them too well. They are not strong enough, they lack the skills and training that I got over twenty years with my father-in-law. They mean well but "play out" after 45 minutes of clearing brush or moving lumber. Even worse, they might be injured and I trust no one with my chain saws, tractors, or other machinery that can lop off limbs or crush a human body. This is what the Preppers fail to consider. Unless they are both physically fit and have a group of similar friends, any ventures into self-sufficiency would fail. Too many of my fellow citizens are metro-area folks and pretty darned soft.  A gym membership does not prepare one for the sort of work a homestead demands. And while I'm not Conan the Barbarian, I can work many hours outside doing physical work. Thank God for that.

So I'd recommend an old and rather forgotten literary reading when one gets tempted to imagine a world without laws or restrictions. Try Emerson's "Self Reliance." I'm breaking his own rule about quoting sages in quoting him, but this passage tells me how an individual might cope with a conformist world without becoming a misanthrope:

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.

Emerson is not much read any longer, yet this Unitarian minister had a great influence on many American thinkers and what were once called "Men of Action." While his prose might not have the punch it did in a less harried, more attentive age, we might wade in again.

Once we know ourselves, in the way Emerson recommends, then seek out a community of others, we won't be self sufficient. But we'll have the self-reliance to find others to huddle with us, to help us in a sustainable way,  through the darkest of seasons.

A blessed Solstice to you all, as the light comes back and the ground warms enough for another year of turning the soil

The Hungry Stove

From now until April, the wood-stove will gobble up cord after cord of seasoned firewood. A cord measures 8' x 4' x 4' and we may well use FOUR of them this winter, if the cold endures as it did in 2013-14.  If I load it right, the stove will burn nearly all night and keeps the entire house warm. Last night was a cold one for November, and I came downstairs at about 3am and added logs. I was up anyway. When I woke again at 6, the fire was still burning a bit. Add more wood and the house responded.

All that burning brings to mind a few things, and that's not bad when one spends so much evening time by the hungry stove, sipping a good whisky and writing.  I think there is a time-suck called television, but ignoring it for the stove's show is one reason I get so many things done, including learning about what matters to me.

First, there is the notion of burning wood itself. I plan to do so until I am physically unable, but already I've outlasted a few contemporaries who find wood too much trouble. They want to come home flip a switch, and warm up by the simulacrum of a wood fire. That's their choice to make, but to me the entire point of a wood stove is to make you work for heat. The effort to split wood is great, even with a hydraulic-ram splitter such as the one I use for twisted or large logs. Increasingly I hand-split just to get some exercise, a trip to the gym being my idea of hell. Thus the old adage that wood warms you three times: splitting, toting, and burning. 

Gas logs do not add a thing to the garden, and between Dominic's market-garden and mine, we went through 100 gallons of wood ash to raise the PH of our acidic top soil. I will barely replenish that in a season of burning, but it is good to know that ash goes back into the cycle of planting and harvesting out here, not into the landfill. My gas-log acquaintances tend to go to gyms and gripe about the ash-removal part, as they do about raking (or for them, blowing) leaves. I take away leaves and actually bring them here to compost, to add leaf-mold to our garden.

The earth is as hungry like the stove, after all, as are our bellies. Now, after nearly two years of rural life, nearly every meal we fix includes a home-grown ingredient. Some meals are nearly all from the garden, a life-long goal of mine. All that ash and compost is doing the job well.

The biggest lesson of having a stove is spiritual. The second half of life should be a time of letting go, gently. Dylan Thomas was wrong: we should go gentle. So tending stove becomes a ritual of personal and even metaphysical import: I'm reminded of the Busk, a Native-American tradition that Thoreau discusses in Walden, after he encountered it in the travel narratives of William Bartram (a writer I wish we remembers more).  We refer to "busking" today as a way to sell things, but the old word was quite the opposite: it was an act of creative and cleansing destruction.  Tribes would burn old and broken possessions, worn-out furniture, and other items to make way for the new.

My stove is doing exactly that, by trading old wood and kindling (the latter from a hundred carpentry projects) for a Spring garden. The fire-pit outside burns other less seasoned and softer woods, but also outdated paperwork and such. It's a wonderful tradition we might revive in our consumerist present.

And thus, be a bit thankful about letting things go. Happy Thanksgiving and stay warm!

Mend It, Don't End It

I have been accused of being a Cheapass. Guilty as charged, but only if you mean my penchant for saving some stuff that might be of future use. There's a profound lesson in saving-and-mending for the next generation of tinkerers, hobby-farmers, and market gardeners.  In sum, a long way from the "ending is better than mending" in Huxley's Brave New World.

Long ago I dispensed with saving or trying to repair everything. It was a habit acquired from some Depression-Era friends and family members, and while it worked well for them in very hard times, today it induces madness when one cannot find a counter-top clear enough to do useful work. At times my urge to purge has gone too far: I once chucked, unknowingly, into a dumpster the air-cleaner for a '56 Chevy under restoration (this is my official confession). The damned thing looked like a flattened and filthy tin can, so "toss!" out it went.

Yet faced with an disposable present--who can recall returnable bottles?--I felt that I had to reuse things by upping my repair and restoration skills.

October 2014 was, most certainly, a month of successfully fixing stuff. The big project was disassembling, repairing, and repainting a John Deere M tractor, a piece of machinery that has given the family long and dutiful service since purchased new, in 1950. It saved my bacon in 2013, when our new John Deere had to go to the shop after a hydraulic line broke. The old M ran, but had some issues with the fuel system that I've repaired with replacement parts, learning how to flare a metal fuel line along the way.  It may still have a slow oil-leak around the engine, nothing fatal for a machine made to be serviced on the farm. Once I diagnose that, if anywhere leaks I even have extra (cork!) gaskets for the valve cover and oil pan, a dirty but rather simple job on such a simple engine.

Now I'm zeroing in on the final coats of paint for the cowl, nose, and fenders. The tractor will even get a shiny new gas cap and some factory-fresh decals. Along the way I taught myself how to use an auto-paint gun, including how to employ hardener and reducer in the paint. I've sanded out the blemishes using the same techniques I employ on 1/35 scale tanks, with Bondo in place of modeling putty. The results really "pop" and I'll feature the old machine in a future post.

Yet the tractor will be back next year, cutting grass along with its harder-working, younger stablemates who mow, skid logs, and dig ditches. That's typical for old gear, and I like that about the farm-equipment collectors. One rarely sees "trailer queens," as one does with show cars. Of course, getting the right finish on a tractor is far easier, after some paint chips, than on a Corvette. Keep it clean, put it up dry, and a machine or implement may be left to the next generation. I just pulled a rake-harrow out of the leaves after finding it. it will get a redo in the Spring, when I clean and repaint our plows and disk harrow.

As with cars, such old equipment teaches one the values that produced them. That's also true of an old GE electric fan I fixed. A machine from that time was meant to be mended and owners were considered to be smart enough to fill a small oil-cup containing a wick. When maintained, these things last down the eons. Newer technology is tricky, but help is usually a YouTube video away, as attested by helping with a starter motor in a friend's pickup and repairs to two left-for-dead lawnmowers.  It surprises me how simple and inexpensive many of these repairs can be.  In fact, these tasks bear some resemblance to growing one's own food, a task that many dream about yet do not attempt.

Yet why don't more of my peers do some of these DIY projects? I'd not be much of a Tractorpunk if I did not speculate.

First, there's a type of patience and intelligence that one must have, or acquire, when doing this work. Matthew Crawford, who is the husband of one of my colleagues, discusses it at length in his influential book Shop Class as Soulcraft. Everything in our 140-character culture, from our want-it-now, Huxleyan consumerism to broken political system appears to lead us to crave immediate gratification.  Yet the slow accumulation of mechanical and agricultural skills does not match any calendar but that of the seasons. This may be why so many young people I teach choose careers such as accounting and finance, chasing phantoms called money that are really no more than electrons dashing around the Internet and appearing as no more than glowing pixels on a computer display.

It may be that a new generations of farm-hacktivists, locovores, and old-gear fanatics can reverse the ethics of the Brave New World we're in. Matt Crawford's book helped show me that it would be possible again to recapture craft as meritorious, as or more meritorious than the more hands-off, but no less intellectual trades.

I like that idea; in the 70s we made progress against the tsunami of disposable culture and goods, fixed our motorcycles after reading Robert Pirsig. We slipped in the "Greed is Good" 80s, yet re-embarked on a quest for meaningful relationships to hard work, perhaps out of a half-acknowledged and almost spinal sense that our resources are either limited or come at an enormous cost to the biosphere. I still think there's time to prove Huxley wrong, and I'll be turning my wrenches and, I hope, teaching a few skills to a few young tractorpunks in the decades left to me.

And to Matt Crawford, I promise I've not tossed the three old motorcyles in a shipping container. We chatted about them LAST winter, but now that the snakes are hibernating again, they are ready, this winter, for you or your customers to mend.

Mowing the Upper Field: Some Autumnal Bliss

There's a small field on the family's Buckingham County property that once was part of an organic farm. The last owner, a cousin to my wife's, cultivated several areas and I've kept them open with an eye toward my project of growing Christmas trees without herbicides or pesticides.

To keep these outer fields viable, I have to mow them with a rotary cutter; folks call them Bush Hogs, although that's a brand name, one made as generic as "Kleenex" and "Xerox." I mow the field twice annually, in Spring after the fawns have grown up enough to move around and in Fall after the milkweed sets its seeds. I want to encourage wildlife, both four-legged and threatened butterflies, so twice a year is enough until we put in our Christmas tree saplings. There's a lone Persimmon tree there, too, so I'm sure the wild turkeys haunt the place.

Mowing a field in summer can be really hard work in the hot sun, even when sitting on the seat of a tractor. In Fall it is very different. The air is crisp and the sky a perfect deep blue overhead. The trees start to turn, first with the Tulip Poplars.  The contrast is shocking, as is the quiet. The four-cylinder engine for our old Ford 8N is not deafening, though I wear ear plugs at all times. When I get off the tractor to move a log, as I often do in this field where sapling pines topple over from the edges, the silence grows profound and watchful.

Some of my friends in the Unitarian-Universalist Church follow an earth-centered spiritual path, and they believe in Fall the veil between our world and that of our departed, beloved ancestors grows thin. We can hear them if we are very quiet. At Halloween, the old Celtic festival of Samhain marking the final harvest, the departed come down to Earth again and walk about. The Jack o' Lanterns could be seen as benevolent guides to lead old friends to our doorsteps or as warning beacons to keep less friendly spirits away.

As I mowed today I mused. The spirit of the last owner, Ray, seemed to be watching from the trees, as did my in-laws who bought that 8N so my wife and I could learn to use a tractor that was small and easy to manage.  That was a good plan. Some of our big diesels are real beasts.

Today, as the little Ford putted along, even a few friends who died recently seemed close at hand. That made the job less solitary, though solitude is my goal when I go to the upper field. Not being a social person, I like that feeling of separation from a world hurrying after phantoms, and not the ghosts of old friends and family. Just dots on a screen, dots that distract us from the seasons turning and the ephemeral, artist's light of a late fall afternoon.

Go out and enjoy some of that weather, if you have Fall where you live. I'd not live anywhere that did not have an Autumn.

A New Future, Visible in the Distance at Monticello

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson was already fretting about the localized changes to the state's climate, brought on by the clear-cutting of forested lands between his home and the coast.  Jefferson describes hazier, more humid weather from what he recalled from his youth.  At his mountain home, the man could see far and, whatever the foibles and contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson recognized far ahead of his time the changes humanity can bring to the land that should sustain us.

I suspect that the former President, buried just beyond the lawns at Monticello, is proud to see the annual Heritage Harvest Festival take place on his land. My wife and I have been going for several years, and 2014 proved one of the finest so far. The classes ran a bit short; I'd prefer 90 minutes so the presenters have enough time, but I got to attend one free and two paid events.

Here are a few highlights for this Tractorpunk.

• Michael Levatino of Ted's Last Stand Farm (shown above) talked in detail about "The Sustainable Farm Lifestyle" for hobby farmers such as me or "sideliners" who make extra income, which is what I plan to be during retirement. I was impressed by the Levatinos' ability to find the right niche at their farmers' market, to learn the hard way the best practices for water use, weed control, and cool-season crops. Michael also alerted me to the free woodchips from tree companies. They work well in paths and build soil under the paths (that can be raked up onto raised beds on either side).
• Given my larger-than-usual Fall food garden, I was an avid attendee of Pam Dawling's workshop on Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables.  Pam's excellent book Sustainable Market Gardening has been on my shelf for over a year, and this season I am starting to apply its lessons to our small crop. Next year, we plan a business license and first sale to a restaurant, so Pam's will be indispensable advice. Her remarks on using row-covers and hoop houses at Twin Oaks Community for three-or-four season production came in VERY handy.
• Ken Bezilla of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange reinforced Pam's lessons and added more tips that I plan to use this year. He focused a free workshop on "Fall & Winter Vegetable Gardening," and, like Pam, discussed the cold-hardiness of various crops. I'm already thinking of ordering my big batch of spring seeds from these folks.

What I'm getting from these festivals is nothing less than the birth of a sustainability movement to bring local food and best practices to every corner of our state, a future beyond the Monsanto and Ortho hegemony of sterile seeds and pesticides. A future where local growers and consumers put as much back into the land as they take from it. In a time of accelerating climate change, such efforts may be too little, even doomed. Yet they come not a moment too soon.

Jefferson would be proud of another revolution, this time one fought with muskmelons not muskets, brassicas not bayonets, being dreamed up at Monticello.