how we love Spring

Just a few pictures this time. We are super busy around here, what with the sun shining every day. Really! Every day! It's the best Spring tonic ever, but it doesn't have any interest in sharing me with the computer.

So I thought I'd update with a few pictures of all the outside stuff we've been doing that has kept me away.

Jeff built me a small greenhouse out of old windows. Yay! My new seedlings hit the greenhouse after just a few days under the green lights, and they appear very happy. The greenhouse faces due south, so you never know...we might just have winter-long veggies this year. Next to the greenhouse, you'll see our cedar cuttings set up for staking our peas. And on the side, you'll see the two half barrels of roots - one all orange carrots, the other half purple carrots, half beets.



Here is a view of our strawberry patch in the foreground (where we planted 70 strawberry plants this year) with our cut garden space in the back. All that cut space will become planted gardens for our CSA work with Allways Farm Collective within the next couple weeks. There's about twice as much more on the side of the house. It's so amazing to see it cut, since it's finally starting to take on its future form. We can totally imagine it all planted with vegetables and melons now.



Here is a close-up of the empty side of the strawberry patch, where I took advantage of the soil improvements we made to plant a small hill of potatoes.



This is what makes all the work out here worth it....growing organic children with organic food! Sydney and Mazzy are such good friends already, which is amazing with their age difference. Syd has wanted a little sister so badly, for so long! Here, she tries to teach Mazzy ballet.



The two of them played "ballet teacher" for a good 15 minutes while I admired yet again, more sky.



And this is how we roll these days when Mama gets to do work. I drive the John Deere while the girls ride along behind me. I just can't physically do what I could do 3 months ago. But the countdown is nearing. I have about 9 weeks left now until we should be welcoming our third little bitty into our life.

vow of poverty

Here's some heady stuff I've been gnawing on lately. The more I sit with it, the more comfortable it feels, and the more exacting my thoughts have become. After writing this over a month ago, I'm finally ready to share it.

The conclusion to this post occurred to me this morning: the only way to become free and spiritually whole in our consumer-driven society would be to take a vow of poverty. Preferably, as a family, or at least as the heads of the family.

Now, like those movies that show you the last scene before getting into the juicy parts, I'll backtrack. First off, why poverty? And second, why an actual vow?

There are so many reasons to choose a lifestyle of poverty as opposed to a lifestyle of chasing wealth, it's hard to pinpoint just one. More than anything, focusing on achieving wealth as the measure of our success shifts our focus onto ourselves and our achievements as the center of everything worthwhile. We spend the majority of our time thinking about how to acquire more....more money, more assets, more things.

In the Bible it's written, "It's easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." I think this is absolutely true. If you think of your soul as something you cultivate throughout your life, like a well-loved garden, it's easy to see how greed and the love of money would make your soul a vast, brown wasteland like the GMO corn fields beside us, needing a constant application of money, achievements, and nifty things like the corn needs its Round-Up.



Greed corrupts firm principles into weak idealism. Greed becomes the definition of success. Greed permits you to do things you know are wrong because "I have to - it's my job" or "I work hard - I deserve it." Greed holds you down to a life you aren't purposefully choosing, in a job where the greedy person above you can make a nice dollar off your time - you know, your time...that finite substance we all have only so much of, but spend the majority of it doing what we "should," what the experts tell us is best.

Experts have great expertise in broadcasting their opinions and convincing others to believe them. Experts self-promote their "expertise." In reality, they have an opinion, just like you, just like me, based on their own particular worldview and their own particular goals and measure of success. By the way, if you're talking about an expert in America, their opinion is always that wealth = success. You may throw out any expert opinion with wild abandon if you don't happen to share the same definition of success. Even the most popular self-help, Zen, figured-it-all-out author on Oprah at any given time is there because she made a bunch of money selling her book. Can you really be all that Zen when you're drowning in royalties?

A life of poverty begets a life of self-discipline. Or is that the other way around? If I were writing my own set of spiritual truths, I would certainly include this one: "It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for an undisciplined person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

A life of poverty begets a life of self-denial, and although it's extremely counter-cultural in our times, please hear this: self-denial is not a bad thing! Really! Self-denial leads to ingenuity, creativity, new skills and often, a greater sense of meaning and community.

If you were to decide not to buy any more clothes, for example, what would you wear? Perhaps you would learn how to sew. Perhaps you already knew how to sew and you would further your skills by designing your own clothes. Perhaps you would accept outgrown clothes from others, increasing your feeling of friendship and sharing in your community. Or perhaps you would downsize your existing clothes even further and make clothing entirely simplistic for yourself. None of these side effects could have been achieved without first denying yourself the convenience of buying more.

But a vow? Really? Isn't that rather old-fashioned, simplistic, monk-like even? Isn't it our responsibility for our children to provide well for them and leave them a legacy to help them succeed later in life?

I ask, isn't it our responsibility to ensure that our children are creative, disciplined, principled, and generous? Isn't our primary responsibility to raise our children to be spiritually whole? Shouldn't our last priority be to raise little camels and then try to push them through the eye of a needle?

In America, this is the status quo. From all directions, we are told that success is measured by wealth, that monetary success is of utmost importance, and that your financial class is a huge component of your worth as a person.

It's extremely difficult to counter these incoming messages unless you do something drastic. Something like making a purposeful decision, now and forever, that this is not the path you choose. Something like a vow of poverty.

"I vow that my time will be used to serve God, my family, and those in hardship. I vow that my time will not be used to acquire and hoard wealth. I vow that if wealth comes my way, I will use it to serve God, my family, and those in hardship. I vow that I will strive to be satisfied with what has been given to me and not constantly seeking more. I vow that I will vocally and adamantly oppose and bar from my home any cultural practices that promote the acquisition of wealth and consumerism over generosity."

When you choose poverty over wealth, you can free yourself to tune out the messages that surround you. They can buzz around, making themselves heard, like the swarm of flies that they are, but not gaining entry into your foothold. For our family, they can share the same buzzing, swarming space with all the other expert opinions we don't buy into.

Hospitals are the only safe place to have a baby.

Schools are the best place to educate and socialize children.

Food additives are perfectly safe.

Genetically modified plants help feed the hungry in third world countries.

Your investment portfolio is important.

The government is looking out for your safety.

In this country, we seem to have "the gift of too much." This is no gift at all, but a constant burden to bear. For me, overcoming this burden is a constant struggle, but a fight worth fighting. I hope that the "legacy" we leave our children is the message that they are worthy from the inside out, that they are free to spend their finite time on pursuits more meaningful than chasing wealth and comfort, and that building their bank accounts is the easiest way to degrade their souls.

priorities

I was talking with a friend the other day who was telling me about a recent dinner her family had spent with her husband's parents. She and her husband and their little baby had just come back from a long permaculture conference, and she was excited about what she'd experienced and learned during the conference. She was telling her in-laws about all the different things she'd like to try that she'd experienced there.

"You know, you can't do everything you want to," her mother-in-law told her.

Why not? She wanted to know.

I'm more or less of the same mentality she is. Why not? Or at least, why not try? Like she said, you can't sit around doing nothing just because you might not have time for everything.

The only problem with wanting to try everything that interests me, I'm finding, is that I always seem to have too many projects and too little time. Now if I could just blow off the projects that aren't currently drawing me and think, "Maybe one day, maybe not," then I think it would be fine. Instead, I get a little weird about accomplishing things.

What might start out as a small to-do list suddenly seems to billow out of control. Before I know it, I'm adding project minutiae (buy cups for starting seeds), then soon after, I'm adding any random interest that strikes me to the list (build bee boxes), then the minutiae associated with random interests (find cheap trays for bee boxes). Thing is, I might never keep bees. Seriously! Do I need to be spending time watching for a good price on the trays for the bee boxes for the bees I might never even keep?

It sounds unbelievable, doesn't it? I should publish one of these out of control to-do lists some time, except I think they'd be hard to find since eventually simply knowing that they're lurking around somewhere overwhelms me and I have to destroy them.

I was considering this topic standing in front of the goat barn last week, and I decided to ask myself, what are the most important things I hope to accomplish this year? If I had to list my bare-bones priorities, would they be realistic, or is it possible that I already have a mental to-do list that is starting to spin out of control?

Off the top of my head, I quickly listed 4 projects I'd like to complete by the end of 2010. At number 4, I could have gone on to list several more, but I was getting the picture that even those I'd already spouted were bordering on unrealistic. It seemed wise to stop the train that's trying to get going before it ever reaches the careening and wrecking point.

The List

One
Grow and preserve enough fruit and vegetables to support our family's produce needs for the whole year.

Two
Get Penny bred and milking again, and purchase a companion for her, by the end of the year.

Three
Oversee the building of the new house by coordinating the contractors, filing appropriate paperwork, and finding the most financially viable options for the building project.

Four
Have a new baby.


Yikes! Number 4 sure is the kicker, isn't it? The rest sounds fairly reasonable until you add birth, birthing recovery, sleeplessness, exhaustion, crankiness, and weepiness into the mix. For all of us.

It has been amazingly helpful to define my priorities for this year. I am not a "resolution" type person, nor do I really analyze things each New Year's to say what's working, what's not, what should stay, what should go. But I can see why these things appeal to people so. If my time is adequately filled by the priorities I've outlined above, then when another draw on my time is proposed - a new class to attend or teach, a side job, a new skill to learn, a new animal to care for - I can make an educated decision about whether or not I have the time for that, rather than saying "Yes!" based on interest alone, just to be left overwhelmed and frustrated a month down the line.

And it has given me the freedom to not add more to the to-do list. No thank you overactive ambition, I have enough already.

In between the big priorities, we do other stuff. It's not all about the list. We still do our co-ops, which we enjoy, and we amble around the property, stopping here and there to study a big fat black woolly worm of unknown origin or a very strange thing growing on an evergreen tree. (I know money doesn't grow on trees, but perhaps brains do.)



We stop by the swings so Mazzy can blink her little eyes in the wind as she goes up and down and Sydney can show off her newest tricks.







We hover by the tipi Jeff put up, while Sydney sticks her head out and pretends again to be Native American, her newest fascination.



We watch incoming storms for the fun of it, and we marvel at Mazzy's new skills.







It's nice to have a little more time that is free and unaccounted for, on any list of any kind. Our days have gotten longer, and often go slower. This is a good thing for the Spring.

And of course, the priorities can be (and will be, and already have been) tweaked when needed. They're not written in stone. How confining would that be!

There are so many interesting things out there just itching to make it on this year's priority list. But they will have to be patient, as will I. We'll have to have faith that there will be another year and another list and a time where there is a blank line for something different. And if not? Well then we'll have to have faith that checking off all the interesting experiences available isn't the point of This Whole Life anyway. Right?

i fought the goat and the...goat won

I have had to accept the inevitable: Penny is going to dry up this time. We can breed her again as soon as she's physically ready and in estrus, but for now, I have to let it go. It's disappointing, but I know it's for the best.

Penny was making some swift improvements, but then a confluence of events occurred over which we had little to no control. First, she got a significant skin wound just above her left knee, leaving me unable to use the goat hobbles as she was used to. Instead, I had to use the new, strong, perfect goat hobbles when they finally arrived around her ankles. She did not like this. Did I mention goats are extreme creatures of habit? Just when I got her used to the hobbles above her knees, we had to switch down to her ankles. She had been in the very first stages of standing still for me to milk. We were going from two hours of working together each time to 45 minutes. We went straight back to two hours plus and she wasn't even empty when I finally gave up.

While her routine was changing for the umpteenth time in less than two weeks, it started raining. And raining. And raining. And her barn floor went from fairly dry straw to sloppy, mucky, quicksand-like mud puddles in about three days time. Did I mention goats do not like water, especially on their feet?

We covered the barn with a tarp for extra protection. Still the rain came down around it, seeping in under the walls. We let her sleep on her milkstand. We put an army cot in for her. Meanwhile, both the front and back exit became so wet and mucky they tried to pull my boots off every time I went out there. She started refusing to come out, even to browse for food.

It was too wet to get the fence in good shape, so we bought concrete blocks for her floor. Still the rain came down, and the concrete blocks are waiting in the back of our truck for a day sunny enough (tomorrow I hope!) to get a truckload of sand to put under the blocks and create a nice dry barn floor for her.

Day one of the downhill slope, I got her up on the milkstand and began very patiently. I would reach for her udders and she would kick up with her new hobble, then slip on the milk stand from all the wet, then freak herself out even more. I would touch her udder again, she would kick. Touch udder. Kick. Slip. Freak out. Touch udder. Kick. I would hold her leg, she would fight as if it were for her life. I would take a break, take a breather. Touch udder. Kick. Slip. Freak out. Kick. Slip. On and on. I became more matter-of-fact with her, then enraged, then I cried. Then she let me empty her, which took a total of 20 minutes on each side. Two and a half hours later I was bringing less than a quart of milk into the house. Most of it had to thrown out because it was too dirty from all the mud slung around.

That night I went to (shudder) WalMart, evil of evil that it is, to buy her a non-slip mat for her milkstand. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Day two of the downhill slope, I went out in the morning. The milkstand was too wet to install the mat, but I couldn't get it out of the barn with my pregnancy, so I planned to install it later that afternoon when Jeff could drag out the milkstand so I could clean it. It was supposed to be sunny and dry that day. It wasn't. It got soppier and wetter and muckier and yuckier.

And Penny had learned that if she kicked enough with her hobbles near her ankles, she could get quite some vertical action. Enough to get me to quit messing with her. At least, that's how I read it that day. In reality, she could have been even more upset about the lack of browse, the wet, the slippery milkstand, and my wacked-out emotions the day before. I was far from my Zen place already when I first walked in the door. I think she smelled it a mile away.

For two hours I tried to empty her. I got one side halfway emptied and the other side barely touched. I felt violent toward the poor goat. I hate feeling violent toward anything, except maybe my computer on occasion (shhh...don't tell it). Finally, after telling her over and over how she was not going to win this, she might as well give up, well...I gave up and she did win.

Here's a little thing that I struggle with in my personality - I do not like to fail. It doesn't matter if other people consider it a failure, or if it's even all that important to me. I refuse to fail. This can create a lot of pressure in situations like these. I felt like I was on a deadline to get it straight before she dried up. I felt like I wanted to succeed at it very badly, especially for Mazzy's dairy-free diet sake. Yet, our success wasn't entirely dependent on me. It was also dependent on Penny, and on the normal time constraints that come with having a family, and on the weather. It's hard to refuse to fail at something when there are so many factors out of your control.

Fast forward to later on the second Very Hard Day. I started getting really crampy in my lower belly. On the first Very Hard Day, I kept trying to pull Penny closer while she kept trying to hover near the wall where I couldn't reach her. One time that I pulled her toward me, I also pulled something in my belly and I felt it as soon as it happened. When I started cramping the next day and it didn't quit, I knew what had to happen. I had to let this go for right now.

Jeff, in a last-ditch attempt to save her milk, tried modifying the milk stand with something permanent that would keep her legs in place. She squatted and refused to let anyone near her udders. He gave up, and we haven't looked back. It's the right decision. Does it count as failure when it's a conscious choice, I wonder?

There were four major factors that contributed to my choice.

Penny was rapidly developing a negative connotation with her milkstand and with being milked. She would continually shake and shiver and barely breathe while on the milkstand. She stopped having the grain that was right in front of her and would just stand shaking in obvious fear. She comes from great milking bloodlines. I'd prefer to not lose the ability to milk her entirely by pushing it right now.

I was over-exerting myself for this stage of pregnancy, and although having more healthy food choices for Mazzy is extremely important to me, not threatening the unborn baby is more important. I'm not a stranger to pregnancy loss.

The stress in our household since we've been trying so hard to milk such a reluctant milker has been insane. I would welcome the opportunity to learn how to care for her, house her, and bond with her without having the milking in the equation right now.

The girls and I still do have a life, and everything else was falling by the wayside to make room for the milking and the ensuing exhaustion. 20 minutes once, even twice a day, no problem. Two hours once or twice a day? I'm sorry, but I can't keep that up.

So what's the plan now? You know I have one!

Well, my plan is to really focus my energy on learning how to care for her and create a strong bond with her before we try again. I've been consulting my internal dog training experience as well as any goat behavior books I can find to develop a training plan for her to help us milk later. I plan to feed her grain twice a day in her milkstand with her head in the head lock while I first pet her and make her comfortable, then move on to brushing and eventually working with her udders again, even when she's not in milk.

We'll let the hobbles go until her wound is completely healed, but they will come back as part of her eating routine. She should be quite comfortable being handled by the time she can be bred again.

We're also looking for a companion goat for her. A local breeder was recommended to us by a woman in our homeschool co-op. As soon as I can get in touch with the breeder, I'd like to see what she suggests. We are thinking either a young dairy doeling or an older doe that is already in milk but is a second or third freshener. We could try to milk her before we left the breeder's farm. An easy milker would be a welcome addition to our little homestead at any time.

And now, I'm looking at Penny as if we'd never tried to milk her. Let bygones be bygones. I love her too much to hold onto anger over this. As far as I'm concerned, we got a sweet, friendly goat from great milking bloodlines, and as soon as we can breed her, we can give milking a fresh try.

penny

We now have a dairy goat and I love her. She is alternately affectionate and needy, stubborn and punky. Hmmm....come to think of it, sounds a little like yours truly.

She's a year old and this is her first time in milk. Her previous owners milked her very rarely, choosing to let her kid nurse instead. I've never milked an animal before her. We are quite the pair, both of us ignorant to what each might want and need from the other. But we're working it out - on intuition, a little instinct, and a growing trust in each other.

Penny is slowly getting adjusted to our place. She has started eating well and jumping on up to her milk stand, head through the head lock, nose right into the grain bowl at milking time. A process that took two hours the second day takes about 45 minutes now. This is progress!

With a dairy goat, you have to be there. Every day. Every milking time. Ten months of the year, give or take. You can't skip a day just because you feel like it, and you can't go on vacation or, say, have a baby, without finding someone to take over the milking for you. How do I like this big responsibility?

Well, after having children of my own, a daily responsibility doesn't really scare me anymore. One doesn't exactly give pause before assuming the status quo. When all our kinks are worked out, it should take about as long as the time I spend changing and rinsing diapers each day. Or nursing Mazzy my Magpie down for her various naps. Much less time than cooking. Those things don't overwhelm me, they are just life.

Jeff built her a lovely barn in just 2 days. The barn feels cozy inside, and warm. It smells good. I'm the milker right now. That feels good too. It has a strange familiar feel to it, a certain rightness. Not once have I thought, "What the heck am I doing milking this goat? This is weird!" Instead, it feels like something I might have been doing all along.

My picture of Penny above is poor, quickly snapped on my Blackberry with little to no consideration of lighting or composition. Who knows when I might get a better shot. The weather turned warm here, Penny joined our crew, and now each morning I hit the ground running and never stop until nightfall. I can't be taking time out to tote around a heavy camera and compose lovely shots when that time could be spent finishing one more railing section on our deck, or planting 10 more seeds, or prepping the root bed, or, or, or.....

a new crafty blog

My cousin Cara has started blogging her crafty projects at Pink Tea.

She's good. Really good.

Right now, in her own words, she is "obsessed" with felt foods, and they are beautiful! Check out her felt tea sets for inspiration when you get your next children's birthday party invitation.

Next on the agenda, she says, will be freezer paper stenciling on onesies and t-shirts.

Cara and I have had lots of fun over the years, from practicing and performing grand dancing productions in our grandparents' living room for our family audience, to staging art shows in the same space, with little price tags on our "art" for our adoring family fans, to sharing the same month of June in the same year for our respective weddings, one in Kentucky and one in Virginia. My only regret is that we don't live closer, so we could make barrettes and stenciled shirts over our kitchen tables as we shared tea and our children shared play.

I've never met an artist quite as good as she who refuses to admit to her talent. But you be the judge.

maple sugarin'

5 weeks since my last post?! I'm so sorry. Believe me when I say it hasn't been from lack of desire, but from the lack of time and purposeful prioritizing that happens when you have needy wee ones in the house. One day it will not be so, and I'll long for their little days back, I'm sure.

So many posts have rolled around in my head these past 5 weeks, it's been hard to narrow down which one should come first. Until we did our maple sugaring. Correction: if you're going to tap your maples for syrup, you gotta say "maple sugarin'." Just how it is.

It's been so exciting to plan the sugarin', learn about it (we attended a free park program for Backyard Maple Sugaring that was invaluable), prep the supplies, then follow through to receive...syrup! Real, 100%, all organic, maple syrup from our own maples on our own land. Ahhh....

The pictures in this case truly are worth 1000 words, so I'll let them (mostly) speak for themselves.

For weeks, I've been working on crafting some spiles from our elderberry limbs. You can purchase commercial spiles to use for tapping, but I wanted our first sugarin' attempt to give us free food, not stress us with a big upfront cost that we didn't know if we'd get back. As it turned out, crafting the spiles from elderberry was very fulfilling for me. Our friend Lauren came over one day and we sat at the kitchen table with Sydney (yep, Sydney! Sassy as she may be), all three of us carving out the soft pith from inside the elderberry limbs. It was such a nice handiwork activity to have while we talked about babies and homebirth and summer gardens.



I tied the leftover elderberry limbs that were too small to use as spiles into a bunch and stuck them in a large jar of water. I was so pleased when their little buds began to sprout! We will plant them in our orchard area this Spring.



Jeff took care of tapping all the trees. First, he drilled a hole at a slightly upward angle, about 2 1/2 inches in.



Then it was time to tap in the spile. He covered the hammer with a heavy cloth so it wouldn't split the elderberry.



Some of our trees began dripping sap right away!



It was Jeff's idea to use the little clamps on each spile to hold the catchment containers. We used empty water gallon jugs since they were inexpensive and easy to obtain.



Jeff then tied each jug to the tree as an added precaution.



Our first day was a sunny one with perfect sugarin' temperatures, so we got a full half-gallon of sap, which we then strained before boiling.



We boiled it down to the "maple tea" stage, which is about halfway to the syrup stage. Then, we could no longer resist the urge to taste it.





Yes, we are camera dorks, as if you did not already know!

It finally seems that Spring is around the corner here in our little part of the world. There hasn't yet been a day quite nice enough to leave us with the fresh, renewed vigor of being Alive Again. But there's been enough promise to make me break out The Beatles' Here Comes The Sun, one of my traditional Winter-to-Spring rites of passage. Premature? Probably. But little darlin, it has truly been a long cold lonely winter at times, more so than I can ever remember.

Sydney and I started our first round of seedlings over the weekend. We started all the frost-tolerant plants in our seed cabinet.





Next week, I plan another round of frost-tolerant plants, and then we'll move on to the frost-intolerant plants by the end of March.

And for tonight, that is all. I've just popped a big bowl of local popcorn to which I added chopped honey glazed walnuts I made last night. I'm off to watch one of my guilty pleasures on Hulu while the children are finally sleeping.