American Gothic

I used to think that the strong stoic farm woman in the painting American Gothic was meditating on the miles of wheat blowing serenely on her thousand acre farm.  Now that I live on a farmette,  I am  pretty sure she was thinking, "Hurry the hell up and paint the picture, because I just noticed that the pigs got out of their pen again, the dog is about to eat one of the chickens and I think I see a tornado headed in this direction."  I hear you sister.  This farm woman feels your pain.

Life has been kind of kicking my ass lately. Having a full-time job, a full-time farmette,  and three full-time children combined with the fact that I am an over achieving procrastinator who needs eight hours of sleep, means I am a train wreck.  As I write this I am realizing it has been so long since I have gone to a hairdresser that my current updo bears a sad resemblance to the one my lady friend in the painting is sporting, but not as tidy.

My day starts at 5 am and doesn't stop until I plop into bed around 8:30 pm to read to Scrappy and James Dean as I sip on a very large glass of merlot. Luckily, since the husband has started his own business, he is home and is able to deal with animals and has even taken on doing laundry and cleaning up after dinner, but this past week he was away and it was all on me. I got up at 5am to attempt some sort of exercise since all of this sitting on my ass everyday instead of manual farm work has manifested itself around my waist.  I am sure the nightly vino Big Gulp has nothing to do with my pants feeling a little snug.

After letting the dogs out and feeding the cats, I casually check my emails, shower, turn on the coffee and start making the waffle batter and oatmeal for the children.  Everything is totally under control. I then glance at the clock to see when I need to wake my little angels for breakfast.  Shit!  I am ten minutes behind schedule! I  run upstairs to get dressed and quietly go into Prince's room to tell him in my nicest mommy voice that he needs to get up.  I then run back downstairs to remove the waffles from the waffle iron before they turn to hockey pucks and turn off the oatmeal which has now boiled over spreading a sticky gooey mess all across the top of the stove. I run back upstairs throw the covers off of Scrappy and manage to get him dressed before he even realizes it's morning.  At this point I scream in my scariest mommy voice for Prince to get out of bed and they head downstairs to eat.

I throw lunches into backpacks and head outside trying to brush my teeth while finishing my coffee on the way to let the chickens out, and give the cow and horse some clean water and hay.  I burst back in the front door screaming for everyone to brush their teeth and put their shoes on because why would they ever think to do that on their own?

Two out of three of the boys manages to get out to the car without their backpacks and I start cursing under my breath as I slip my clogs on while holding onto six bags and Scrappy's hoodie. I get out the door and start to relax.  We are not going to be late after all!  Wait. There was a frost last night?

I watch little JD as he tries in vain to reach the windshield of the minivan to scrape the ice off. I jump into the driver's seat, turn the heat to eighty degrees and start maniacally spraying the windshield with washer fluid in the hopes that it will melt the ice.  I manage to get strip of visibility at the bottom of the windshield so we pull out with the windows down and my head hunched over the steering wheel so I can see.  Please don't let a cop see me right now.

We get to school with two minutes to spare and I let out a sigh of relief.

When we get home, I feed the layers and collect the eggs.  Noelle sees me and rambles over to the fence and gives me a lonely greeting and I feel very guilty that I have not spent any time with her since the previous weekend. I then feed and water the meat birds after I move their chicken tractor and then spend 20 minutes trying to get the escapees back into the tractor.

 Luckily it wasn't too hot because I forgot to open the greenhouse door.  Lettuce, broccoli, arugula and spinach is all growing nicely.  The dogs are a bundle of wagging licking, jumping energy since they cannot believe we actually came back! I fight my way past them back into the house to help with homework while I clean up the breakfast mess so I can begin the dinner making mess.  If I start dinner before soccer practice, MAYBE we will eat before 8pm.  Why not just give them some chicken nuggets you ask?  Because I am determined to be the mother who makes the healthy home cooked dinner even if it means Scrappy is falling asleep in his quinoa.

Of course, I don't start dinner before soccer practice and I cannot possibly start it after until I scrub the hardened oatmeal slime off the burners, put away the dishes from the dishwasher, unpack the boys luchbags and check Facebook.  What is wrong with me?  "Looks like dinner will be 8:30 tonight boys!" They don't even ask when dinner is going to be ready anymore.  They grab a bowl of cereal at 5 and wait.

I crawl into bed thinking tomorrow will go smoother and remember that JD has play rehearsal and I need to start fundraising for the drama club like I promised.  Oh yeah, and that French teenager I agreed to host for ten days is coming next week.  I'd better clean Prince's room this weekend.  I guess the unopened bag of winter rye we bought to plant as a cover crop last year is going to have to wait until next year.  I can probably hold off on mulching the beds until next weekend, but I am definitely, positively going to plant the garlic after Scrappy's soccer game but before JD's on Saturday; right after or is that before I go grocery shopping and make shrunken apple heads for the Halloween Party I swore I wasn't going to have but am now feeling a little ambivalent about? Is it OK to have a Halloween Party the week before Thanksgiving?

We Need to Talk About Noelle.

I think a year of raising animals on a farm with only 3 fatalities out of around eighty critters*  makes me somewhat of a farm animal expert.  So here is my one piece of advice for all the folks out there who want to to live on a farm with all of those cute cuddly farm animals that are featured in your kids' picture books:  Do not anthropomorphize any farm animal that will end up weighing as much if not more than your car.

Many of you will remember the photos of a two month old calf we brought home in the back of our mini van.  She was adorable and small enough that the husband and I could easily hoist her in and out of the car.  I re-purposed an old sweater and turned it into a calf blanket.  We took her for daily walks in the pasture and hugged and kissed her constantly.

Fast forward six months and we have a very large, spoiled, sociopathic teenager on our hands.  While it was very cute a few months back when she would come running up to us to taste whatever green thing we had picked from the garden, it terrifying when a 450lb beast comes barreling up to you in order to snatch the beet greens out of your hands.

The scariest thing is she is really stealth for her size. There have been days when she is nowhere to be seen as I silently walk up to the garden hoping to avoid notice and then all of a sudden I feel her hot breath on my neck as I am opening the gate. It's creepy. Her playfulness was charming and easily managed when she weighed 150, but now it is kind of like living in a maze waiting for the minotaur to appear.

I try to convince myself that the gentle nudges she gives me in my butt as she follows me down the hill are her way of saying, "I love you.  Please pay attention to me!"  and not that she wishes she still had horns so she could send me flying through the air.  My trepidation is somewhat warranted given the fact that she likes to mount the horse and tried to hump the husband when he mistakenly bent over while in close proximity.  Luckily he was able to rebuff her advances before she actually made contact.

So, is she serial killer cow in the making?  Is this just a phase she is going through?   Have we managed to treat her so much like a human that she actually thinks she is one of us?  Thank god I am farming in the internet era.

When we first got Noelle, I joined a group called, "Keeping a Family Cow".  This is a chat group for people who have one or two cows and are not running a full fledged dairy farm.  Surprisingly, there are a lot of people out their who also have cows who try to hump them.  Seems all of the love and affection we showered on her as a baby with no mama cow around to set her straight, made her imprint on us and she really does think she is human.  I guess the wrestling matches the husband had with her early on were not a good idea.

What should one do with a cow who thinks she is a person?  Send her to dairy boot camp.  I now spend about 15 minutes every day training my surly bovine recruit.  She must stand still while  I put her harness on and she must walk like a lady.  She must lift her legs for me and no chasing me down the hill.  All of this is done with the help of a bamboo stick and a very firm voice.  The first day I had to hit her with the stick she shot me a look of complete shock and betrayal and yes, I do know that I am STILL anthropomorphizing her.

We are both starting to fall into our roles of farmer and farm animal instead of mother and daughter.  It isn't easy when she does something super cute, but I am trying to stay strong.  May the force be with me when we breed her and there is another beautiful little calf to bottle feed.  I am sure I will fall in love all over again.


*I am not counting the 10 guinea fowl who disappeared in this statistic because I like to think that they declared an intifada against the deer ticks and are living a beautiful spiritual life somewhere in the woods surrounding the Farmette.

Sleep Tight Little Chickens

Saying the weather in Central New York is unpredictable is kind of like saying women find Ryan Gosling mildly attractive. It is an understatement.  We went from 85 degrees to a frost warning to back up to 90 in a week.

As much as I hate to admit it, one day in the not too distant (probably next week) future I am going to wake up to snow on the ground.  No more messing around. It's time to process the rest of our meat birds and move the pullets in with the dragon lady herself: Chicky Rivera.

I hate to use the term, "process" because it sounds like I have some sort of Tyson chicken factory when in reality we put the bird in a cone, slit its throat, scald it and then throw it into our homemade chicken plucker; aptly named the "Mudda Plucka." I guess that sounds a little more grizzly than, "processing" the birds, but my personal belief is that keeping thousands of chickens in a tiny cages until they are killed is a whole lot more grizzly than the way we are doing it.

Since I am back to work it is going to be up to the husband to put the rest of the meat birds in the freezer.  Given his dislike of butchering chickens, I think we may have a very full chicken house soon.

The two problems we immediately needed to solve were how to introduce the twenty-one pullets and one rooster named Gregory Peck (thank you CM for the name) into Chicky's lair and what to do about letting them outside during the day.  When you have three chickens roaming the neighborhood it can be kind of a sweet bucolic scene, but looking out your window and seeing 25 carpeting your front yard may be our tipping point from amusing city people turned farmers to THOSE people in the eyes of our neighbors.

The husband got to work on fencing in a large area around the chicken house so our feathered friends can just exit their little door in the morning and happily forage in the wooded area all day, thus ensuring harmonious relations with the neighbors.

Once the fence was installed, all five of us lined up outside of the chicken tractor to move them one by one into their new digs.  They were not happy to go and I can't say as I blame them.  For anyone who knows chickens, introducing new ones into an existing flock is about 1000 times worst than being the new kid in junior high school.  Even though it was twenty-two against three, chickens are not so bright and the bullying was sure to be severe.  The Taj Mahal was being turned into a Brooklyn tenement circa 1900.

The new tenants did not venture outside the entire next day.  By day two we had to go in and throw their fluffy butts outside.  I littered their playground with melon rinds and the corn cobs from the previous night's dinner to entice them to remain outside.  I then spent the next hour watching twenty-two chickens run away from Chicky Rivera whenever she got within two feet.  I think she probably made it known the night before that she is the fearsome slumlord of the tenement.

We were quite pleased with ourselves and the new setup.  After a year of raising chickens perhaps we had moved from dilettante to competent poultry farmers.  The pride quickly faded as I looked up a couple of hours later to see one of the Cuckoo Marans walking up the driveway and another in the herb garden. Seems we forgot one little thing about keeping chickens in a simple fenced in area: They can fly.

We got everyone rounded up and contained again and they seemed content to stick close to home.  When I went out around 8 pm to close them in for the night, I realized we forgot something else: Chickens like to sit in trees.  This time it was the Australorps and Golden Comets.

I made Prince come out with a flashlight so I could try to grab them.  I tripped and stumbled over the rocks and tree branches until I captured a couple.  One was a little too high up for my diminutive self to easily reach, so I stood tiptoe on a rock directly underneath her just praying she didn't poop right then.  I managed to grab her and put her safely into the chicken house.

It has been a week since we moved the group into their new digs and they seem pretty happy.  For the most part everyone goes inside at night, though I did see one of the tree nesters in the backyard when I woke up the other day.  It is impossible to get a head count in the dark every night.  Relations seem to have gotten slightly better but the seas do still part if Chicky Rivera decides she wants that watermelon rind.  The only one who remains a little skittish is a Faverolle named Fifi.  She is a tiny, sweet and slightly crazy little girl who gets picked on a lot.  Of course she is now my favorite.

WAAAAAHHHH

As my best friend just posted on her FB page, let's just call today August 32nd live in denial. Honestly, I much prefer the crisp cool air and the fiery hued leaves of autumn, but there is just something about summer that I don't want to let go of and it isn't just because I have to go back to work in two days.

Summer is the delicious time when we get to spend way too much time together as a family and I can pretend the boys are going to be young and innocent forever.  It is a time for spending eight hours at the lake on a ridiculously hot day or playing Stratego on a rainy afternoon. It is the time for learning how to ride a bike. (Yes, Scrappy is riding!) It is a time for finding crazy looking bugs and caterpillars and toads at the back door. It is a time when the kids know to get themselves a snack around 6pm because Mommy is still in the garden picking vegetables for a dinner that won't be ready until 9 or my personal record: 11pm.  It is also the time when we all get to pile into the king sized bed and watch a movie after the 9:00 dinner.

Every summer is a reminder of how one September in the not so distant future, those (mostly) adorable kids will head off to college and work and lives of their own and their childhood summers will just be Popcorn Bowl memories.  I am pretty sure those memories will be of searching for crabs at low tide on Plum Island or swimming in their friends' pond or making a movie or playing tag in the dark or geocaching or maybe even of butchering chickens.  The Popcorn Bowl will probably not be full of memories of  doing homework packets, math drills or even tennis lessons, so round about week three of vacation, I pretty much gave up on the notion that the kids were going to have any sort of schedule.  The summer bucket list went right out the window and we slid down the summer slide.  I'll admit, there was more Xbox than I would have liked and I am feeling a slight twinge of bad mommyitis that James Dean only read four books and that we are not all going on tour as the newest classical guitar playing family sensation, but all in all, it was a great summer.

So as their backpacks hang full (that's right, I actually managed to finish back to school shopping BEFORE school started and now that I am onto the teachers' little game of putting unattainable items on their school supply lists; next year I am ordering all of the white and orange folders I can find online in May and selling them in front of Office Max for $2 each over Labor Day weekend.) I bid another summer adieu and get ready for homework, swim lessons, soccer games, instrument practice, bed time schedules and a lot less time hanging with my kids.

Thanks summer 2013.  I am looking forward to your return as summer 2014.

Roast chicken

I used to be really into dating bad boys.  It wasn't because I liked the danger or was trying to piss off my mother, it was because I liked being considered the nice one in the relationship.  I wanted people to say, "JoAnn is really nice, why is she with that guy?" So, fifteen years ago, when I started dating a 30 year old guy who still got into the occasional fist fight with strangers who pissed him off, I figured I was a shoe in for the role of  "nice one" in the relationship. Unfortunately, recent events have forced me to admit something I have known for a very long time:  The husband is really much nicer than I.

He is the one who captures raccoons and groundhogs in the Have a Heart trap so he can drive them to the middle of nowhere and release them, while I would probably opt for the guillotine style trap.  He is the one who saved a baby rabbit from the jaws of our cat and then pleaded with me to take it back to New York City with us in the van the cat and dog were also going to be in.  I refused and the next weekend the cat finished the job.  He is also the one who tried to nurse a baby bird back to health who had fallen out of its nest and the one who sat by Itty Bitty Kitty's side and played midwife as she birthed her kittens.

While one of my favorite sports is sarcasm laced gossip, the husband rarely has an unkind word to say about anyone.  If you cut him off in traffic however, he will get out of the car and pour a soda down your windshield as he unleashes some colorful expletives.

Given the husband's kindness and love of little animals, I was really surprised by the zeal he had for raising meat birds, but I figured he was a committed homesteader now and ready to butcher his own food.  The fact that he doesn't even like to carve the Thanksgiving Turkey probably should have made me doubt his resolve for cutting a chicken's head off and pulling out its feathers.

Last Friday was the big day.  We were all set to put 15 birds into our freezer.  Two days before the event, we separated the meat birds from the layers and after we pardoned a few of the favorolle hens because they were really sweet so we deemed them too small, we were down to 12. Most of the chickens destined for the roasting pan were roosters.  Note to anyone who wants to raise their own meat birds: choose roosters.  They are bigger and they are such little fuckers that you will be dying to slit there throats.

My mother-in-law thankfully arrived at high noon on Friday.  The husband had his killing cone (a metal cone you nail to a tree which you place the chicken in so that only it's head is sticking out.)  This gives the chicken some comfort and makes for a lot less blood splatter since chickens really can run around with their heads cut off.  My MIL also brought her cone since she had recently butchered some of her own meat birds and she quickly got to work slitting the throat of the first one.  The husband tried to do the second one and got, shall we say, a little squeamish, so his mom offed that one too. The two of them then got to work scalding the birds to make the feathers come out easier.

The birds were supposed to go into the chicken plucker contraption so we wouldn't have to pluck by hand but there was a glitch in the design so this group needed to be plucked by hand.  After the first couple of birds, I could tell the husband wasn't going to last.  He took over the job of boiling water and I joined his mom in the plucking and gutting.

I was kind of surprised by how unfazed I was by the whole process.  The feathers were soft and pulled out easily after the bird was scalded. Removing the innards reminded me of junior high school biology class when I had to dissect a rat.  It was fascinating seeing its heart and intestines.  I was starting to worry my lack of empathy for these chickens I had just fed the day before, meant I may have sociopathic tendencies.

By the time I cleaned and bagged the birds for the freezer and prepared the three I roasted for dinner that night, the chickens just looked like the chickens I buy in the grocery store, except with longer legs and much skinnier bodies.  I do NOT want to know what Purdue does to get its chickens to grow two pound breasts.

That night there were seven of us for dinner including my five, a friend of the boys and my mother-in-law. We all sat down and gave thanks for the meal we were about to eat and for the chickens that gave their lives to sustain us.  (Obviously I had this speech all written in my head months before.)  I really thought I would tear up or get a weird feeling in my stomach the first time I ate an animal I raised for meat, but again, I was feeling slightly sociopathic.  Prince, James Dean and my mother-in-law all dug in despite the the husband's declaration that he didn't like it.  Scrappy and our friend were a little reluctant to eat the birds they had just helped carry to the killing cones.

I felt a little disappointed that we didn't all have a spiritual kumbaya moment when we tasted our first Farmette chicken, but as I looked around the table and saw three generations enjoying each other's company and experiencing this newest family adventure, I realized this was a popcorn bowl moment none of us will soon forget.

the nice one in our relationship.

Farmer vacation?

Seriously, how the hell do farmers go on vacation?  The President is on Martha's Vineyard.  Why is it so difficult for me to go away?  I know, he is on the phone dealing with Egypt blah blah blah, but he got to GO AWAY.

Granted, the President and Vice President don't go anywhere together, so technically I suppose Joe Biden could hold down the fort, but I am taking my VP along with me.  Sorry honey, you are the VP in this scenario because ever since you claimed, "Mommy tax" (a term I coined for when the kids have to give me a bite of ice cream or other decadent food I don't want a full serving of) was originally "Daddy tax" (a term you stole from me) I cannot help but remember Joe's plagiarism of Neil Kinnock's speech.

Anyway, it is hard enough going away on vacation, but when you have two dogs, five cats, a bunny, a horse, a cow and a whole bunch of chickens, not to mention a garden and a greenhouse, it is damn near impossible.

Luckily, we have some friends from the city who are willing, I mean DYING to come play farm so the whole family gets to go away for an entire week! (Note to city friends: If you want a free summer vacation at a farm, read a couple of books about farm animals and then put an ad in some high end horse magazine as a "farm sitter." I bet you get to stay at a really swank horse farm in Virginia or maybe even the farmette.)

Going away has always been hard for me because for some reason I need my house to be ten times as clean as it usually is.  This means instead of just packing clothes, I have to go through everyone's drawers and throw out tattered old clothes that were just fine to wear the day before, not to mention the fact that I always have to clean the refrigerator for the first time in six months.

So here is my "to do" list of things I need to do by Saturday morning:

1. Catalogue all of my saved seeds from this year. (How could that possibly wait another week?)

2. Finally make blueberry bacon jam √ (Did it this morning. Hope the pressure canner worked!)

3. Launder every article of clothing in the hamper.  (Don't think this will ever be possible unless I force the boys to be naked for a couple of days.)

4. Spray squash plants for powdery mildew. ( Tomorrow.)

5. Clean out chicken house. √

6. Shovel out horse and cow stall. √ (Now I need to keep them out of the barn until we get back.)

7. Exercise every day for a week and not drink wine or eat bread so I can wear bikini.  (Doing sit ups while I type.  Really.)

8. Wash nasty dead animal smell off of dog. √ (I will kill her if she rolls in it again.)

9. Spend quality time with my cow. √ (I love that beast even though she has no manners.)

10. Brush the horse's mane. (I am thinking the Rasta look suits her.)

11. Download all of the "This American Life" podcasts available. √

12. Bring those two books I was supposed to read this summer to the beach with me. (Just bringing this one:)

13. Butcher 20 chickens the day before we leave even though we have never butchered chickens before. (Yeah, this should be interesting.)

I guess I should end at lucky 13.  I am sure there will be some interesting stories next week.

Grow a Row

Gardening is much like golf.  Well, at least I think it is.  I don't golf. There is no such thing as a perfect garden.  While we have been eating carrots and broccoli out of the greenhouse on a daily basis for the past two months, the recent hot spell has made my salad greens bolt up the hill. There is no telling from year to year what is going to happen with crops.  One year it is cool and rainy and the arugula grows like crazy while the squash rots on the vine.  The next year you are eating zucchini bread for breakfast lunch and dinner while you crave a nice salad.  It can be very frustrating.

The greenhouse helps tremendously with the cool rainy weather, but 90 degree days spent under plastic can be difficult even for the heat loving tomato.

I was a little worried about a week ago that I was going to have to write that I failed for the fifth year in a row to produce more than a dozen tasty tomatoes.  The fact that we spent hundreds of dollars and countless hours building the greenhouse, creating the richest soil, and procuring a wide array of exotic heirloom seeds,  in the never ending quest for the perfect tomato weighed heavy on my mind as I watched several of the delicate yellow flowers that hold the promise of  big juicy tomatoes, turn brown and die.

A few well placed fans in combination with a healthy dose of sea kelp fertilizer and my frantic shaking of the plants to help with pollination seems to have done the trick and we have eaten the first of the sweet little black cherry tomatoes this week.

It is funny how sublime the first taste of the first ripe tomato, first leaf of lettuce or first sweet berry  is every season.  The peas are usually the first things up and are eaten right in the garden.  Ditto for the asparagus that gets snapped off and chowed down without the hope of ever being bathed in a butter sauce.

Diminutive zucchini are sliced and eaten raw in salad and the entire family eats two blueberries for every one that goes into the bucket.  This culinary merriment seems to always come to an end a few weeks after that first taste.

This year was a bumper crop for blueberries.  I would like to attribute the bounty to my careful pruning and mulching but I am pretty sure it was just dumb luck and the fact that we didn't have a really warm winter followed by a freak frost in May like last year.

The husband and I eagerly awaited the first ripe berries watching the branches hang to the ground under the weight of so much fruit.  Prince had his recipe for Blueberry Dump Cake all ready to go and with the addition of the pressure canner, I was going to be able to avoid killing anyone with my blueberry bacon jam.

The first day of blueberry picking, we filled our bowls and bellies without making a dent in the number of berries still on the bushes.  By about the tenth day of picking, the boys revolted and Prince announced that they were striking unless they got paid.  The labor dispute was settled with an agreement I think would make many farm workers jealous, but the berries just kept coming and by the time I canned the 100th jar of jam, I was not really enjoying the blueberries quite as much.

There are still many blueberries ripening on the bushes and every time I pass by on my way to the garden, I realize I need to buy even more pectin and canning jars to keep up with the harvest.  The freezer is also full and I don't think anyone is too keen to eat another blueberry dessert for a while.

Today,  it hit me.  The way to reinvigorate our blueberry picking mojo is to change who we are picking the berries for.

A couple of years ago I heard about an organization started in New Jersey called "Grow a Row."  They encourage farmers to grow a row of fresh produce to be donated to those in need.  The boys cannot comprehend why we need more than 20 gallons of berries in our freezer but they can get behind the idea of picking them and giving them to a food pantry.  So now, I don't have to worry about wasting all of those nutritious little blueberries AND I get to cross "have the boys do some volunteer work" off of my summer bucket list.

Anyone who wants to come help us pick or if you know of a great food bank in the Oneonta area, please get in touch.  I am really hoping I will be able to do this with the tomatoes as well.  Fingers crossed.