Archive for the ‘Farm Life’ Category
This is the first of several reintroduction posts in anticipation of resuming this blog for the fall, winter, and hopefully beyond. I’ve been absent for multiple months now, so I’ll be setting the stage of where I am right now and what’s been happening in my life. That will all lead into my plans for this blog over the next several months, which are going to be tweaked a bit from what I was doing last winter.
It’s good to be back.
— ∞ —
It’s hardly rained since I last posted here.
Some days it feels so dry. The humidity is low. The deep blue September sky has transitioned to the deep blue October sky. The sun is surprisingly harsh. I’ve noticed the last few years—once I began farming—how intense the September sun is. Even though it’s usually cooler than in August, direct sunlight seems somehow merciless, more draining than during the hotter days of July and August. This year has been no exception. September was a month of almost no rain and few clouds or fog, even. Just intense sun.
In fact, July through September was the driest on record in Portland. While I’m not sure if that holds true out here on the coast as well, it’s been one of the driest summers here, too. I’d guess we’ve received maybe an inch of rain in those three months, and there’s been none so far this month. The couple rains we did receive wet things down but did little else. It never penetrated deep into the soil.
The creek we get out water from is low. The creek at the farm just down the road I worked on last year is almost dry, though there’s still enough behind the small dam to supply their water. It shocked me, though, when I walked back there about a week ago and saw the stagnant puddles and mere hint of trickle that now makes up the creek I normally know as a healthy flow. The direct and immediate connection to water out here keeps these dry days ever more present in the mind.
The pastures are brown and thin, yet the cows and sheep still seem to be finding food. We’ve been feeding hay, but not massive amounts. The animals are mostly staying out on the grass—dead as it appears—for the time being, rather than spending most their time in the barn where the hay can be found. Last week, the wind kicked up, though now it’s died back down. It was nice in the sense of variety, but it further dried things out. I could feel it on my irritated skin, my chapped lips, in a strong desire for a good rain storm that continues even now.
Of course, this is nothing like what the Midwest has seen this year. I don’t mean to be wringing my hands so much as describing the reality out here—a reality so different from the one I experienced last summer when we received semi-regular rain even during our dry months. We normally receive 90-100 inches of rain annually and the winter months are dominated by clouds and rain. It’s odd to have gone so long without any good storms, without the occasional dumping of precipitation. It feels so antithetical to this climate. In many ways, of course, it’s been nice and I think a number of vegetable growers are appreciating it, even if they are starting to feel the need for a good rain storm. But working now on the animal side of things, I see these dry pastures and hear about the hay bills, eye the barely-trickling creeks and see this flip side of the coin—the danger of too little water. Luckily, we had a wet spring, so we had a good base from which to deal with this dryness.
Still, it’s been interesting seeing the reactions even of my friends who hate all the rain we get in the Northwest. Most all of us are feeling ready for a storm—even those who aren’t eyeing a low creek or worried about feeding animals. Sure, we love the sun we get—especially with how limited it is in this region—but the reality is that we’re all adapted to a climate that just normally isn’t this dry, even during our natural drought months. The leaves are turning and dropping, and yet it still doesn’t quite seem like fall. The wind and rain is missing. The dark dreariness. That constant wet chill. It’s not the loveliest sensation in the world, lord knows, but it’s what should be. And so it’s missed.
In 1952, after receiving only a half inch of rain from July through September in Portland, it stayed relatively dry all through November. Hopefully that doesn’t happen this year; it’s not appearing that it will. The rain is supposed to start tomorrow and we may be in for as much as five or six inches over the next few days here in the coastal range, though the models seem to be backing off that extensive a scenario. A possible deluge, perhaps. A good rain, almost surely. A reprieve, for sure.
“It’ll make up for it,” one old farmer’s said to me about this dry weather. I suspect that’s true. While the rain beginning tomorrow may be followed up by another dry spell to close out the month, I suspect November’s going to be a soaker. It probably won’t be long before we all forget just how dry this summer has been. It won’t be long before we’ll be dying for a cold, sunny day—anything to remind us that the sun’s still out there, that our little star hasn’t collapsed and disappeared. Anything for a break from the constant dreary drizzle and downpour, the multiple different types of rain, each of which we have names for here, sometimes all of them falling in the same day. But still, I can’t wait for that first heavy rain and wind, to see these falling leaves through a prism of water, to hear the creeks roaring again and watch the mud and muck build, as annoying as it is. It’s not the most glorious of conditions, but it’s ours. I look forward to that (literal) cold comfort.
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Monday, I went to Soapstone Lake, hiked around, startled a couple elk having an afternoon drink, laid down in the moss and shade, trees above me and a fern dangling inches from my face, and briefly napped. I sat by the lake and finished Dave Eggers’ A Hologram For The King, which is a beautiful and sad novel. On the way to work Tuesday, I saw two deer off in the distance fording the Miami River and then shortly after that a bird began to fly diagonally toward and away from my car, somewhat mesmerizing me as I very slowly grew closer and closer to it—at a high speed—before it disappeared from my view, only to reappear a few moments later in my rear view mirror, tumbling in the road and surely dead or dying. I didn’t mean to hit it; I hardly even thought about it as it was happening. The moment hypnotized me.
I’ve been trying to hold onto this magic the last few days, as the human world hasn’t quite been so lovely or magical, though it’s had a sadness I was thinking of even as I accidentally killed that bird. The days keep being beautiful and my work outside invigorates me even while I fight melancholy in my quieter, less engaged moments. At some point nearly every day of late, I feel overwhelmed, seemingly always in different ways.
I need to be writing stories.
— ∞ —
I wrote the above almost two weeks ago. I meant it to be part of an entry here on the blog, but it’s only now making it to this venue. As I imagine most of my regular readers have noticed by now, I’ve been missing for about a month. As you might also have inferred, it’s as much as anything because of the subject of my previous post: the current busyness of my life. I already catalogued much of that, so I won’t recount the details. Suffice it to say, I haven’t managed to set up a system for myself to get my writing done despite my work. Hence the quiet around here.
However, there’s a bit more to it than that, and it’s something I realized a couple weeks ago while working out in the garden. It’s a realization summed up in the last sentence of the above writing. While I’ve been so busy this summer with the actual work of growing and raising and selling food, I’ve become more interested in focusing on and writing about the abstract during my down time. I’ve been reading fiction rather than nonfiction and have felt a strong urge to write fiction rather than essays.
Throughout the winter, I rambled on and on here about homesteading and voluntary poverty and simplistic living and connections to nature. Now that much of those ramblings have manifested themselves in the messy, imperfect ways that the real world tends to deal in, and now that these manifestations are taking up a good deal of my time, I find myself not particularly motivated to continue to explore them in my writing. I honestly want to deal more in the abstract in that part of my life. It’s not that I’m not still thinking of all these things, of course—it’s that I’m a bit sick of constantly thinking of them in concrete terms and am interested in trying to hash out some of the emotional reality of all this floating under the surface. And I want to do it in an under the surface sort of way.
I feel the need for some metaphors, in other words.
That’s why I wrote that I need to be writing stories above. Writing stories is therapy for me. I could use a little therapy at the moment, and I could stand to tackle some of these issues from a different direction.
— ∞ —
Thus, much as I took a hiatus last August after starting this blog to get through the busy season, I’m taking something of a hiatus again. I hate to do it, but it’s simply what I need. I want to keep writing, but I don’t want to, for the moment, do the sort of writing I’ve been doing here.
Earlier this week, in fact, as I pondered a complete rewrite of a short story I wrote years ago, something more ambitious and perhaps nearing the state of a novel came to mind, and I’m excited to dive into writing that. So that’s where my writing energy is going to be going for at least the next few months. However, I also hope to write some smaller pieces, perhaps some flash fiction even, and to just dabble with whatever comes to me.
With that in mind, I’ve been considering how to handle this hiatus. I may not post much of anything here until the fall, but that’s not what I’d prefer. I hate to shut the blog down completely. So, rather than going entirely quiet, I’ll look to perhaps post some small writings like what I wrote at the beginning of this post. I may put some kind of flash fiction up, or just some small recounting of something that happened to me written in a bit more of a literary style. I don’t know if any of my readers are really interested in that; please feel free to chime in in the comments, and don’t hesitate to let me know if you’re not interested.
It’s entirely possible, too, that none of those plans will manifest here on the blog and that I won’t really start writing again until after the summer passes. Either way, you can expect much less frequent postings here than was common before the last month.
I do plan to get back to the blog’s regular tone once the fall and winter roll back around. I have little doubt that I’ll find myself quite preoccupied with this blog’s themes in the quiet dark of the winter season, and I imagine I’ll be a bit recharged and refreshed in that regard. I’m hoping not to lose what readers I do have, so please don’t never come back. If you want, you can always sign up on the left hand side of the page to get emailed new posts as they’re published.
— ∞ —
I’ll end this with a small garden update.
There’s one red Stupice tomato just about fully ripe in the hoop house; many other tomatoes—a wide variety—will follow on its heels. The squash, summer and winter alike, is suddenly growing like crazy. A deer got into the garden about a week ago, but the beans and peas it munched on seem to have survived and are coming back. The deer ate selectively, so really it just provided me a bit of unexpected succession planting. I can’t be too unhappy. The potatoes are in bloom, eggplant and peppers are coming on, the summer salad mix is about ready for a harvest and soon I’m going to have far more kale than I know what to do with. My first broccoli head is almost ready and I have a few hundred fall crops seeded in trays, just starting to sprout. The work is never ending, but it’s also a nice level of casual—I can find time for other things if I need it. And I will—for writing, for play, for sanity, for contemplation. But it’s the work that keeps me going, that keeps each day moving into the next.
I hope it’s much the same for everyone else here. No matter how much I find myself yearning for the abstract of late, it’s the work that creates that yearning. It’s the base. It’s the sustenance. I try always to keep that in mind.
That’s the update. I hope everyone is having a more or less good summer. (As for you, Chris—and any other southern hemisphere readers—I hope you’re having a fine winter.) I’d love some updates in the comments. Don’t take my hiatus as a lack of interest. Without the small community that’s formed here, I may have run out of steam long ago.
— ∞ —
In other words, thank you.
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It’s amazing what the summer brings. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve found myself without a single day that I haven’t been doing at least some work for one of my two farmhand jobs or working on the garden. That doesn’t mean life has been crushing or brutal—some of those days have only involved a bit of work and others have involved quite a bit of gardening that proved enjoyable and invigorating as much as anything. But it has kept me busy and pretty consistently feeling in service of a never ending to do list, even in the moments when I’m not working on one of the tasks.
On that to do list for awhile now has been to write a new blog post. As I imagine is obvious, that keeps slipping further down the list. I’ll hope that most of my readers understand that sort of prioritizing. My jobs take precedent over the blog and my garden screams a bit more loudly than this blog does. When I’m looking to get some seeding done before the end of the day to hopefully have some home grown salad on the table in a few weeks or taking advantage of cool and cloudy weather to trellis tomatoes in the hoop house, I have to prioritize the actual work of this life over the writing about the work of this life.
Furthermore, when a long day of work is followed up by some evening gardening, dinner and zoning out (or reading, or getting to bed early) is much easier than writing a blog post. Simply put, I’ve been a bit too fried of late to get a good post written. I’ve sat down with the intent to write just such a post a few times, but it hasn’t quite come together. The inspiration has been lost in exhaustion.
So here I am writing something easier, so that I can get something written and posted and let you all know that I haven’t entirely disappeared or lost myself in more basketball (though I am watching the NBA Finals.) This is my meta update. And there are updates to my life, beyond what I’ve just written.
Aside from the work I’m doing—or as an element of all this work—is the fact that two WWOOFers, Lily and Kayleigh, are now living with me and helping out on the farm and with my garden. They worked at Ginger’s place—the farm I interned on last year—for six weeks and decided they didn’t want to leave the Oregon coast. So they’re staying the rest of the summer. After a bit of checking around, talking, debating, thinking about it, and making arrangements, it worked out for them to move into the house I’m living in now—staying in the second bedroom I hadn’t been using. So now I have helpers, roommates, friends, companions, dare I even say students. They play a wide variety of roles and so far it’s been a great arrangement.
One of the consequences of their arrival, though, has been an increased workload. It’s ironic that help can add to the work, but so be it. I’m not complaining about that; the workload has increased because I’m now getting more done with the motivation of having others around to help out. I even am attempting to teach a bit, though I still feel a far way from being a truly knowledgeable teacher. The garden keeps expanding, though it also still seems so far from complete. The hoop house is getting filled out with tomatoes and eggplants and peppers. New beds are being worked up and seeded outside and I’m seeding trays and pots to eventually be transplanted. There’s a lot going on and if much of this comes through, I’ll eventually be swimming in more food than the three of us likely can eat.
Not a bad problem to have.
I also have been working more for the farm here, both in helping to lead Lily and Kayleigh when they’re working and also in doing other tasks without them that seem to be cropping up as the season wears on. I’m now working two full days for Lance and Tammi, in addition, and this week I start working a second farmer’s market on Thursdays. So that leaves me working full days for Lance and Tammi on Tuesday and Friday, working markets on Thursday and Sunday, and fitting in other work here around the farm and gardening on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. And I try to get in some socializing and down time, as well. The season is in full swing indeed.
This isn’t to complain, I want to be clear. It’s been really inspiring having such purpose and feeling so in service to a wide variety of people, animals, land, and personal goals. After my stretch of distraction and lack of accomplishment, I feel like I’m making up for that down time with a flurry of activity and good work. But it’s also been tiring and I’m still trying to find my feet; to find a pace that’s effective and sustainable. I think it’s going to take a bit more thought and experimentation.
I feel, though, that all this is moving me toward something. I have vague thoughts and ideas and schemings about what that may be. Suddenly living and working with two women who I also am, in a few small ways, teaching and leading has helped to affirm for me that I could manage and lead WWOOFers in other capacities. Gardening and growing my own food is helping to affirm that I could run some kind of farm or homestead of my own. Figuring out what tasks need to be done, prioritizing and accomplishing those tasks, and just generally being in the mode of management is also helping to affirm that I could manage my own place. None of it would be easy—and we’ll see where I am with all this in a few months—but all this good work is reminding me that I’m capable and that there are opportunities out there, so long as I’m open to them, willing to be creative and flexible, and willing to take a few risks.
I’m not sure exactly where all this is leading, but it feels like it may be somewhere good. The future suddenly feels a bit more close to the present.
We’ll see. In the meantime, forgive me my lingering silences and know that this blog still is important and still remains on my to do list. It’s just that there are plants and animals and people depending on me and they have to take a bit more priority at the moment, while the sun’s (occasionally) shining and the days are (somewhat) warm. Sometimes the season calls for contemplation and sometimes it calls for work. It’s calling for work at the moment. The contemplation will be back, and I’ll no doubt manage to sneak it in, at times, amongst the work over the next couple months, but for now the work calls a bit more insistently.
I hope to get something up later this week. We’ll see if the garden and my sanity allows it.
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There’s a bacteria in soil that has been shown to make humans happy by triggering serotonin production in the brain.
But there must be more to it.
— ∞ —
The garden has made me happy. I’ve spent a good number of hours working out there, on the days I’m not working as a farm hand elsewhere. I don’t work fast in my garden, but the leisure of digging in the soil is invigorating. I string out a bed and start raking it, removing clumps of sod, shaking out the dirt and tossing them aside. Occasionally I wear gloves, but mostly I don’t. The soil is good against my skin, caking itself into my hands’ tiny crevices, bits of the earth settling into my Life Line. As my hands turn black, my spirit becomes light, bolstered by the cultivation of life, the nourishment of future food.
Most of the garden to date has come from friends. Tomato starts and a multitude of seed from Ginger—from the farm I worked on last year—and a mixed tray of starts from Linda, who introduced me to farming. Appropriately, I use a mix of techniques from both farms—the 3-tooth cultivator Ginger relied on so heavily and the digging fork so prized by Linda. The Hori-Hori Linda gave me as a going away present is indispensable and always on my hip, ready for so many tasks.
— ∞ —
I can’t deny this took me partly by surprise. I’ve interned at vegetable CSAs for the last three years, yet every summer eventually brought me to the question of if I really would want this as my life. I loved being outside, the changing seasons and rhythm of the work, the soil, the incredible communities built, the care and love so evident day in and day out. I disliked the stress, the pace that could become so insane, the constant financial pressure obvious even to me, who wasn’t paying the bills.
Did I really want that constant sense of being on the verge? Did I want the stress of just barely getting by, day after day? And the work itself, or at least the pace of the work: it didn’t fit me, or the way I experienced the world when allowed to do so at my own natural rate and rhythm. It too often didn’t make me happy when happiness was the point of farming.
But by the time the season ended and winter rolled around, I always found myself ready to farm again, looking forward to the next season. An odd cycle.
— ∞ —
I wondered, too, if I would even be a successful farmer. Could I actually grow these vegetables if I were left to my own devices? I was relatively good at following direction—at being given tasks to carry out and accomplishing them. But I so often set myself on autopilot and allowed the rote process of finishing a task to take precedence over understanding what was actually being accomplished by that task. Even after three seasons of farming, the idea of being in charge of an operation of my own and successfully producing large amounts of food struck me as daunting, almost impossible. I doubted I had a green thumb and didn’t even trust in my ability to fake it, even after many cumulative months of assisting with the work of others with unquestionable green thumbs.
— ∞ —
The “garden” I tried to grow in 2010 didn’t help. I put in too little effort, in a poor gardening plot, and allowed budding philosophical beliefs to cloud an important truth in growing vegetables: that most cultivated vegetables are not nearly so hardy as weeds, and thus need some pampering.
I didn’t pamper them. I damn near abused them. And, worse, I at least partly took this as a condemnation of my abilities, when in reality it was just a lesson that I needed to provide more attention to the work I was doing—that I needed to actually take the steps I had learned needed to be taken.
I didn’t obsess over this garden and its failures, but it’s sad specter at times haunted my already-established self doubts.
— ∞ —
Then came this year’s garden plot. The beautiful soil, dark and rich and deep. The promise it held and its small whispers of the future.
It helped to get a small break from vegetable farming. Transitioning into animals and facing my first summer in three years devoid of the promise of the stress of vegetable farming, and all the doubts and insecurities that stress could inspire, left me better able to focus on the intense joys of growing food. The potential fulfillment offered by that plot came with almost no strings attached. It would be for me, no others dependent on this bit of earth (aside from the innumerable critters living in it, of course.) I could do it right, or at least to the best of my ability. And even if it yielded far less than hoped for, I would let it be learned wisdom rather than condemnation.
This was mine; I could do it as I wanted, at the pace I wanted. I owned this.
— ∞ —
It’s amazing the difference ownership makes. Of course, I don’t actually own the land. But I own what’s going to happen in that plot for the foreseeable future. I own whatever successes come of it, whatever failures, whatever lessons learned and joys experienced. I own the surprises and revelations. And my involvement will be intimate and complete.
It’s incredible how often during my three seasons vegetable farming that I would walk by a bed and not know what was planted in it, often times even when it was already up. Now, I know. Everything went in by my hands. I own it. I planned it. I guided and built it, then handed it off to all the creatures and natural processes that will ultimately do the vast majority of work. But I’m the instigator, and thus I know what’s intended to happen.
I’ve already realized how big a piece this is. I always suspected, when I questioned whether I would really want to have my own farm, that actual ownership would change the equation. The early results suggest just that. Doing this on my own—it changes so much.
— ∞ —
But what am I actually talking about here? What have I done on my own? Much of what’s in the ground and growing are starts from two of the farms I interned for. I’ve direct seeded, as well, and some of that is coming up. Some of it remains to be seen.
Also, though, what I’ve done so far is so small, and the pace so slow and leisurely. How could I not be enjoying it? How could I not be invigorated by it? Sure, it’s easy to enjoy it at such a simple pace, when the pressures of feeding other people and making a living aren’t bearing down on me.
Yet, I can’t help but think my happiness is the most important point so far. I find this joyful. I find this invigorating. Digging in the soil has proved a renewal for me, a source of life. Despite three seasons of prior farming and plenty of happiness in it, I didn’t trust that gardening would make me as happy as it’s proving to make me. I didn’t trust that it was the love I hoped it was.
But it is. And that opens up the future.
— ∞ —
The question now is one of possibility. It’s one of pace and scale. It’s whether or not this love can be a bigger part of my life. It’s what it would take, what work would need to be done.
I’ve been scheming the last week. Thinking about possibilities and wondering what kind of situation I might be able to devise. Thinking of how I could make this more of my life, of who I am and what I do. How can I expand this joy without losing it?
I think small, intimate, reasonable—yet even those thoughts are big. What could I do with a small bit of earth, my hands, perhaps one other helper, a steady pace, and little cash? How could I make it a bigger part of my life yet but not depend on it? Not force it to make my entire living? Not morph it into the disquiet of stress and constant worry?
I don’t have the answers to these question, but I have the tentative thoughts of possibilities. Possibilities that may be gone by next week or next month, granted, but possibilities nonetheless. What’s truly amazing to me is that it seems possible at all. It never felt like something potentially imminent before, in the last three years. It always felt necessarily farther away. Yet now it does seem possible, perhaps in the near future, even with the realization that this potential future could disappear at any time.
There’s something shocking and heartening about that.
— ∞ —
The soil gives life and possibility. It invigorates. It’s magic, what it can do.
What it can inspire.
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An entry in the Encounters series
I keep staring at the moon.
I only noticed it perhaps an hour ago. Granted, I saw earlier in the day on my wall calendar that it would be full tonight, but I’ve become so conditioned to cloudy nights that I feel like I haven’t seen the moon in ages. It’s just not out there most nights; I’m not used to looking for it. Yet tonight, I happened to glance outside and noticed a bright light in the night sky. There hung the very bright, very full moon.
It’s out there—visible, conspicuous—because today turned out to be a day of sun. While clouds came and went in the morning, the afternoon brought clear skies, blue and accented by that lovely daytime orb that’s grown so unfamiliar over the winter and early spring. In eventual celebration of said sun, I opened up a few of the windows while I went about making butter and seasoning a couple cast iron pans. Granted, I opened the windows more for the smoke from the pans. However, the cool spring breeze that began streaming through the house brought about a certain seasonal joy that overtook me. As I made my butter (which I’ll be writing about soon enough) I kept feeling that cool but exhilarating air, kept hearing the lambs and ducks, wind and birds, kept smelling the grass and dirt and kept remembering how achingly beautiful this area is in the overgrown thick of summer. It’s beautiful year round, of course, but when the plants are bursting and there’s even more green than usual, the skies are blue and the mountains bright, the breeze is warm and refreshing—well, there are few places so incredible I’ve ever experienced in this world.
That insistent breeze and shining sun brought about a pleasure that I’ve been missing of late. I haven’t been hiking in awhile and my forays outside have mostly involved work. While I certainly can revel in nature while working—one of the many benefits of working outside—I’ve tended in the last couple weeks to be more focused on tasks at hand and have done much of my work in less-than-lovely weather, which makes the appreciation of the natural world not quite so spontaneous. During my free time, I’ve been mostly inside, working on unpacking and cleaning, organizing and—yes, it’s true—engaging in various distractions like the internet and television. (More about that soon, as well.)
Today, though, I remembered that there’s a world outside, and that it often calls to me. I felt the sun, the breeze, the happiness of a clear and sunny day. I felt the emerging spring, the impending summer. As I felt these seasons, I made butter and listened to music, drank coffee and cleared smoke and felt a contentment that has been too infrequent of late.
Then came the dark of evening and this glorious, full moon.
Stepping outside into the cold night and taking a few minutes to just stare at it, to marvel at it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of what a gift the moon is. It’s really quite incredible, hanging up there in the night sky, such an otherworldly presence so regularly available to us. I find it slips into the background too easily for me, as does the night sky in general, that cascade of stars. Every now and then I’ll remember the beauty waiting up there above me—that glimpse into the universe, stretching out to such impossible depths.
It’s really a blessing to have. It’s a blessing to be able to look above me and see something that brings the world into such a sharp focus and provides us a context for our existence. I’ve been here in my new place, wrapped up in such a very small world and forgetting, in many ways, the much bigger world around me. It’s bound to happen, but it’s important to bring back an understanding of my context and to remember what makes me happy. The moon, bright and full and dominant in this Good Friday night sky—that makes me happy. An early spring breeze slipping in through windows that have been opened for the first time in months—that makes me happy. Homemade butter and freshly-seasoned cast iron pans—those make me happy.
Today lived up to its name. It was a good Friday. There’s a moon out there confirming it. I can’t stop staring at it and I don’t particularly want to. It reminds me of so much, calms me, brings about reflection and meditation, all while hanging there silent and present, offering an entire world of understanding and an even greater amount of mystery. How lucky I am to have that, and how amazing it is that I continue to be surprised by its presence, that I must so often be reminded of what’s always there waiting.
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This week, I took a few days to go into Portland to see family and friends, run errands, and revel in the warmest days of the year. Spring in Portland is a particularly wonderful experience. There’s little that’s better than wandering around pleasant Portland streets while the sun is bright and the sky clear and blue, providing for at least one day the warm and sunny spring I so desperately hope we get this year.
Due to my trip into Portland, though, and four hours of cleaning today as I prepare to move from my yurt to the farm down the street, I haven’t had much chance to write a new post. I feel bad that it’s been so long, so here are a couple pictures to help tide you all over until the next real entry, which will hopefully arrive Sunday night. In celebration of spring, I’m going green for these photos.
Cutting arugula in the hoop house last summer. I used to hate cutting greens, but I've long since come to really enjoy it. Arugula is one of my favorites.
This is from a 2003 trip to the Hoh Rain Forest on Washington state's Olympic Peninsula. The tree would seem to be some kind of maple—perhaps a Big Leaf? Sadly, my tree identification skills are not nearly as good as they should be. I labeled it as a spider tree when I took the picture, and I love the draping moss. The Hoh Rain Forest is insanely beautiful and highly recommended, if you ever get a chance to go.
This is a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail, coming out of Panther Creek in Washington, and one of my very favorite hikes. In fact, it's where I first went hiking—with my father, during a camping trip. I owe him for showing me this glorious bit of the PCT and instilling in me a love of hiking that's served me well throughout the years. There's probably no trail I've hiked more often than this one. I know it intimately and I'll always love it.
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This morning I woke up to the farm covered in maybe half an inch of crunchy, icy snow. It provided just enough blanketing white to turn the gardens and the surrounding forest into a winter wonderland. We rarely get snow here, but when it does fall this is one of the most beautiful places to be. Since I recently stumbled upon my camera’s lost battery charger, I figured I would fire up the camera and take a few pictures. It’s been a long time since I posted any photos here on the blog.
I also am hoping to get a post proper up later today, or perhaps tomorrow. I should have enough free time to get something written. Now on to the pictures.
Brian's Japanese house tucked in the snow-covered trees, with the chicken run in the foreground. The house is really a beautiful, amazing home.
Blue sky peeking through the clouds, above the snow-covered trees. In the foreground are some snowy beds. This side of the farm, however, is going to be put into perennials this year.
My little yurt, otherwise known as home. I love living here. It's about 12 feet diameter and nestled in the second section of the farm's upper gardens. Sadly, I'll be moving on in a few weeks. It'll be pretty easy packing, at least.
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This may end up being a recurring series on this blog, or more likely it will be a one off occurrence. I want, simply, to write out a series of small thoughts I’ve had in the last two days and provide them for comment, consideration, or even contempt, should these provoke such a response. (I hope they don’t provoke such a response.)
This, admittedly, is more a product of avoidance than it is significant insight. Over the next week or two, I plan to finally roll out introductory posts (or in one case, a re-introductory post) for the four categories of posting that will be my main focus in this year. However, my introductory post to How To Be Poor may take a bit more focus than I have in the next few hours before I head up to Cannon Beach to visit a friend who’s in town. I wanted to post something today, though, so here are a few small thoughts I’ve had in the last 48 hours.
The birds are out in force today. The snow we received earlier in the week has melted, the weather has turned to a combination of rain and warmth, and our little avian friends are exploring, with considerable spring in their hop. They’re all over the gardens, rooting around in both our bare and cover-cropped beds, no doubt searching out bugs and seed. This isn’t much of a surprise; I imagine they’re hungry after multiple days of snow-covered earth. All this rain, as well, has likely brought worms to the surface and unearthed quite a few other tasty morsels.
It’s a real joy to watch them bounce around and explore. This is one of my favorite sights on the farm, of these winged creatures foraging. There is something mesmerizing about the behavior—and very gladdening of the heart.
The approximate design of the gates I built on Thursday, with the difference being that mine were made of standard boards, rather than small, beautiful logs like this one. Also, I shamelessly stole this image from a blog post at idostuff.co.uk. Check them out.
Yesterday, I spent most of the day building wooden gates for Lance and Tammi. I had a demonstration gate from which to work—built by Lance—a series of boards, a pencil, a hammer, a bucket of nails, and a miter saw. Each gate looked much like the gate at left, except made from more standard boards rather than fantastic, small salvaged logs. The gates will be used for lambing season, which is around April over at Lance and Tammi’s as opposed to right now at Meadow Harvest. (The many baby lambs there are incomprehensibly adorable.)
Over the course of the day, I made seven gates. I managed to get the process down quite well and really enjoyed the process of hammering endlessly at nails, marking the wood, buzzing the miter saw, watching the familiar shape take form. I have built few things in my life, not having grown up with much craftsmanship happening in our household and having worked retail jobs before starting to farm. I know this isn’t an original thought, but there is something very satisfying about constructing real, physical, useful items by hand. It feels productive in the best of ways. It feels like real, good work. And it is good, as the gates will prove useful tools, utilized in the service of raising healthy lambs and feeding the community. They were made with a mix of spare and low-cost materials and human labor—and they’re simple, attractive and functional. In an age when that often is not the case, I felt a real satisfaction crafting such tools.
It also helped me to realize I can build things and I even, dare think, can be fairly good at it. Not that my gates are of any surpassing quality, but the basic skill seemed to be there. That left me thinking that, with much more experience, I might be able to become a solid builder. That is an eventual goal of mine.
Last night, Ginger made a fantastic chili. Now, I’ve spent much of my life not being a fan of chili. I never hated it, but neither was a huge fan. My father made chili—good chili—and I did like that okay, but still was not in love with it. Then I became a vegetarian for something like twelve years, and let me just say that I am far less a fan of most vegetarian chilis. This is probably unsurprising given the fact that I don’t love beans. Ground beef, to me, was often the one saving grace of chili.
Ginger, however, has since revealed to me the secret of making great chili, vegetarian or otherwise. It’s the use of pumpkin or winter squash. The first time she did this in my presence, she simply used canned pumpkin. Future times, she’s used our own winter squash. Let me just say that this makes all the difference—I have yet to taste a chili Ginger made I didn’t enjoy. Last night, however, she outdid herself, not only through the use of sweet meat winter squash, but also some fantastic green chilies from New Mexico, which she discovered buried in the freezer. The resulting dish was absolutely fantastic, just a beautiful melding of flavors.
One way to heat up a wood stove quickly is to use small pieces of oak. I learned this recently from Brian. Due to his kayak-building business we often have small sticks of oak around that can be thrown into the fire. This creates a near-instantaneous heat boost, as oak is a hardwood and, accordingly, burns quite hot.
I found myself today in the situation of needing to heat the stove quickly. Ginger had fired it up to reheat the aforementioned chili and we both wanted corn bread with it. I’ve been on a corn bread kick of late, making it left and right. When you have chili, you really should have corn bread, and we were missing it as we ate the chili last night. So today, the corn bread was a must. I delayed, though, and before long the chili was already hot, I hadn’t started the corn bread batter, and the stove’s oven chamber was only 150 degrees. What to do?
Well, we waited and I got busy. I went out to the wood shed, scrounged up some sticks of oak, threw them into the fire, then started making the batter. Before long, the oak was crackling away in the wood stove and I had the batter ready to go. Into the quickly-heating oven went the cast iron skillet and about three tablespoons of butter. Once that had melted, I swirled it around in the skillet, coating the inside, poured the rest of the butter into the batter, mixed it, dumped the batter into the skillet, and put the whole thing back in the oven, which was now up to about 300 degrees, thanks in large part to the oak.
Within a half hour, we had hot cornbread straight from the oven and hot chili that tasted even better than the night before. Outside, the rain fell and the birds hopped and inside, before long, Ginger and I both had contented bellies. A fine winter day, indeed.
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Monday evening, I returned home.
In literal terms, this only entailed pulling up the farm’s gravel driveway in my car, coming back from about a week and a half spent in Portland celebrating the holidays with family and friends. Yet, it was more than that. Stepping out of the car, I heard the creek from which we drink and noticed its volume had increased. It was louder, yes, but also surely held more water. While I was away, a few storms had descended on the farm after an unusually dry December. The creek no longer was a whisper but instead a chorus, infusing the quiet night air, and that chorus immediately caught my attention and bound me to the land. I listened to it a moment and marveled that I even noticed the difference. It was a small epiphany.
After that moment, I walked to my yurt. Entering, I noticed the sharp scent of firewood and stood again—another small moment of wonder—letting that wonderful smell wrap itself around me. Mingled with the sound of the creek, the smell brought back memories of camping, of those necessary moments in which the natural world asserted itself as a dominant element in my life. Knowing that this was my life, my home, I felt a certain joy then that I had managed to grab hold of that particular happiness and integrate it into my daily life. The smell of firewood was typical now, rather than a brief, annual-at-best escape from work and the mundane happenings of a life too far removed from trees and dirt and creeks and rivers, lakes and hiking trails and a forest floor carpeted in fallen pine needles and twigs and leaves and billions upon billions of microscopic critters.
Somehow I had found that and made a home in the midst of it.
Thinking about all this in the vague terms of the meditative mind, I settled into my yurt for the evening only to have M, one of the farm’s cats, show up at my door. I let her in and she jumped into bed with me, kneading my chest and purring loud, occasionally gnawing on my hands in her particular way. She, too, felt like home. I was there for her birth—the only person there, as a matter of fact—and so she is a definite tie to my time here. Her presence is a constant reminder that while I do not own this farm and my place here is temporary, I am a part of it. For now, I have a home here.
While my time here on the farm will necessarily end in a few months, that doesn’t negate my sense of home. I may not live here on the farm come spring, but I plan to live nearby on another farm—assuming my plan works out—and certainly I am staying in the area, regardless. My ability to do this lies in large part with another element of that night I returned home: the anticipation, lying there in bed with M, of the new job I would be starting the next day. I have been working for a few months now for Meadow Harvest, a farm down the road that raises grass-fed beef and lamb. But that night, I was anticipating the start of my second job in the area, with a farm further down the road which also raises animals: cows, sheep, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and even a couple goats. With that second job, I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of security and know that it would work for me to stay in the area.
I’ve only been here ten months, so it may not seem like a big deal for me to plan to stay for at least another season. But since I started farming in 2009, I’ve lived a transitory life. Each year, as the season has wound to a close, I’ve ended up leaving to go back to Portland, hang out for the winter while considering my next move, and then start at a new farm in the spring. Granted, in 2010 that meant staying in Portland to farm, but even that felt transitory. I found a new place to live toward the start of the season and I never knew if I would stay in Portland beyond that, despite the fact that a large part of me wanted to. And, indeed, I didn’t. I came here instead. I moved to this farm in March and have been here since, uncertain of where I would be in 2012.
For awhile, I figured I would likely move on, just as I had before. But I also didn’t want to do that forever. At some point, I wanted to settle. My ideal would be to settle on my own farm, but I haven’t felt quite ready for that yet and—more importantly—haven’t had the means or the opportunity to make that happen. But then came a moment earlier this season in which I started to think about staying on here at R-evolution Gardens into next year, though in a different capacity. There was talk of my integrating more into the farm, becoming not a partner, but someone perhaps more permanent. I could teach homesteading classes and figure out a way to eek out a living while helping to build the farm’s educational components.
That idea faded. I didn’t necessarily feel prepared to take on that role and as plans for the farm’s future changed, my ability to stay here long term looked less likely. But something else started happening during all those changes. I began to integrate more into this community, through small conversations and simple asides. When the opportunity arose, I started to work at Meadow Harvest. Then Lance and Tammi, owners of the farm I just began working at, asked if I might be interested in picking up some work with them after their then-current employee made her planned move to a different town. I said yes, and yesterday that work began.
I’m not sure how it happened exactly, but somehow I made a life here. I’m beginning to integrate into a community in a more permanent and sustainable way than I have been able to elsewhere in recent times. Somehow, ten months after first moving here, I came home to an evening when everything seemed right—when stepping out of the car and settling in for the evening assured me that I had found a place where I could say I would be for the foreseeable future. I’m not saying I’ll never move again. I suspect I will. But for the time being, there’s no deadline for transience in my future. I’ve found a place here on the Oregon coast. I have good work, friends, a small social network, and a place to stay.
I even, in the last few weeks, have started to form a plan of action for the next year. It’s something of an ambitious plan for me, and I doubt all of it will play out exactly how I want, but I have high hopes and excitement for it. In the next couple days, as time permits, I’ll write about that plan here on the blog. Much of it will dovetail with my writings and form the basis of multiple posts. I plan some big steps this year in my ongoing attempts to craft a satisfying, creative, low-energy, low-money, rooted life. I’ll be writing about all of that as the year unfolds, as well as delving into a variety of related philosophical issues. Stay tuned.
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One of the more impressive and fascinating aspects of living here at R-evolution Gardens is watching the ways in which Brian and Ginger ingeniously piece this farm together, crafting a place of beauty, function, comfort and humanity while working on a budget somewhere between tight and nonexistent. Using permaculture-inspired design, thoughtful creativity, and thrift, they consistently work within the context of this land and climate. As such, the farm exists off the grid, with all our electricity being generated on site via solar PV panels and a micro hydro generator. Hot water comes from passive solar in the summer and waste heat from the wood stove in the winter. The wood stoves also provide heat and—in conjunction with a hot plate running off the on-site electricity and the occasional use of the outdoor cob oven and a rocket stove—cooking. The farm uses no propane and the wood for the stoves is cobbled together from multiple sources—this year, half came from off the land and the other half was salvaged from a downed tree in a nearby bay, prepped and then kayaked in to an accessible location during a high tide. In other words, Brian and Ginger have created a farm that works with the land and local energy flows, crafting a comfortable living space using a building and design model that’s much more sustainable than the typical one.
The key component of the bath house---the soaking tub. Photo courtesy of Brian, with many thanks to Leann for modeling.
While the farm is a constant collaboration between Brian, Ginger and a continuous flow of interns, WWOOFers, volunteers, friends and neighbors, Brian is the point person when it comes to building the farm’s structures and alternative energy systems. Incredibly, he does this having self-taught himself the ability to design, craft and install these systems over the last few years. His is a certain kind of energetic genius that can be a mixture of inspiring, confusing and dumbfounding to watch—but which always seems to lead to beautiful and effective structures. He calls his methods “farmitechture,” but I would simply call it appropriate (though I love his term.) He works within the land, on a budget, and he creates buildings that fit their surroundings and are built as much as possible from salvaged and local materials.
In that vein, the most recent addition to the farm is a Japanese-inspired bath house, powered by sun and wood. Brian built it over the course of this summer with a bit of help from a friend, a couple WWOOFers, Ginger and a few brief assists from me. A significant portion of the bath house is made out of salvaged and recycled materials: blown down cedar poles from a friend’s property, a downed cedar from the bay, beautiful 3x3s found washed up on the beach, old solar hot water panels from the 70s found at the dump, a soaking tub bought at a recycling center. The building fits into the land, looking like it belongs there. The hot water for the tub can be heated by the sun in the summer, by burning wood in the winter, or by a combination of the two during the shoulder seasons.
There are clever touches, such as the electric water pump that circulates the water through the solar hot water panels. While Brian’s preferred method of rigging a solar hot water system is to entirely use natural thermal siphoning (that’s how the system in the main house is rigged) that design wasn’t feasible for the bath house. So instead, the water pump is wired into a small PV panel, so as soon as the sun hits it, the pump starts up. This works perfectly, as the water only needs to be circulating through the solar hot water panels if the sun is shining on them. In another nice touch, the Chofu wood stove resides in a small room which takes up half of the bath house space. The waste heat from the Chofu is thus captured in this room, quickly warming the room to about 90 degrees in the winter. While it’s not sauna-level heat, it does provide a nice, warm space to rest in if desired. It also provides a heated dressing room.
A look at the bath house from the outside, showing off the two solar hot water panels and the solar PV powering the pump. Photo courtesy of Brian.
Of course, the draw of the bath house is not just it’s inspiring and appropriate design, but the actual comfort and relaxation it provides in the form of hot baths. A night of hot tubs has become quite the common occurrence here on the farm and the pleasure it provides is something of a revelation. Hot water does amazing things to tight and sore muscles, and the experience of soaking while exposed to the cool night air is a lesson in juxtaposition, creating a pleasant discord that only serves to heighten the sense of comfort. Furthermore, there’s a certain luxury to the bath house the effect of which is hard to overstate. It’s a luxury that isn’t always a part of this off the grid lifestyle, no matter how much I do love this lifestyle. The fact that it’s been instituted in a fairly sustainable and thrifty way is a small revelation. It’s a push back against the idea that living sustainably necessarily equals living uncomfortably. It doesn’t. While this lifestyle may not provide the sort of hermetic seal that a life on the grid can and often does, it provides something much more: connection, purpose, a life that feels humane, a sense of care and respect—and now, a significant bit of luxury to go along with all of that. That’s something to be noted and documented.
And it has been documented. Not just here, in this post, but in greater detail and with significantly more pictures at Brian’s website. I urge you to check out that link for the story of the bath house’s building in Brian’s own words and a much more detailed break down of how he built it, what materials went into it, and the philosophy behind his design. A structure as beautiful and generous as his is all too much a rarity in this mass-produced world, so I encourage all to read about what he did and use it as inspiration and as proof of what can be done in this world, even within a low-energy framework.
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Of The Hands 