Somebody knows...

That the best seat in the house is the one closest to the fire.  Animals aren't dumb!

December Pictorial

Winter's cold comes

Summer's bounty nourishes us

A cheerful fire sustains us

Fall's fading light becomes winter's darkness

Doing what you have to do?

This morning it is a brisk 17 degrees outside.  Everything that hadn't died already (and is supposed to be dead this time of year) will be dead when I walk outside today.  The remaining eggplants, basil,  a lone tomato, along with the bouganvilla on the side of the house, will have all died down to the ground.  The bouganvilla will come back in spring, but the aforementioned summer food crops are gone for good.

Inside, the pellet stove is humming away, keeping the common rooms warm and cheery.  It's a rural fantasy if you look at the surface....in a few minutes I will don flannel-lined denim overalls and start to clean up the things around the property that didn't survive.  It looks bucolic and seasonal and, friends, it feels that way, too.  And if you looked no further, you'd think we were a pioneer family, living the simple life and loving it.

But if you read this blog, you know there's more to my life than this. And lately it's been bothering me (once again) that others who blog on the so-called "country life" are misleading good-hearted people who read their posts and think, "well, I can quit my job and do that!"

You see, I was at work yesterday, at a job I love. Big Ag, my husband, works long hours on a corporate farm about an hour east of here.  That's how we afford to the fix fences and well pumps, add raised vegetable beds to this property, and rent heavy equipment when we need to dig post holes or re-landscape the front lawn with native plants instead of grass.  

And for some reason, this morning I've been thinking of two other blogs I read fairly often, where good, old-fashioned "country living" is elevated to almost a religious pitch, but where the necessary realities of having cold, hard cash are downplayed -- unless you want to donate some, that is.

One blog site is in the midst of a legal battle because, for the last few years, they have been trying to trademark the term "urban homestead," and shut down all other websites that use the term without giving them credit.  If they successfully trademark the term, anyone using it will have to pay them or at least get permission to use it (and I'm sure the idea that Home Depot will want to market "urban homestead" products has them seeing dollar signs everywhere).  But, hey, they are just simple folks, right?  They're more concerned with baking bread and growin' food than entering in protracted legal battles to own a term that's been in use since the turn of the century before this, right?  Well apparently not.

The other blog is a blog that once inspired me, with a blogger who wrote about growing vegetables and leading a vegetarian lifestyle, playing fiddle, owning rabbits and a goat and working a job in town to keep the bills paid. Then she quit her job and....life went off the rails.  Read the blog now and it's become a celtic fantasy world, filled with descriptions of how wonderful it is to ride horseback in a kilt, speak Gaelic to people and animals, hunt, butcher animals, do archery, falconry and role-playing games, with nary a mention of real farming, except for a few chickens and sheep that seem to be kept around for no real purpose.  None of which will pay the bills or have any real basis in reality at all.  

I'm a believer that you do create your own reality, but only to a point.  When the lawyers come demanding their invoice gets paid, or when the truck that takes you to the celtic fantasy reenactments gets repossessed, life gets real very fast.  And if you don't have any kind of REAL job, you just might lose the whole kit and kaboodle.  Maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday.

Most "farmers" work at other jobs to keep their dream in the black.  Both my husband and I have jobs off the property, which help fund our adventure.  To tell you otherwise would be misleading, and potentially costly for anyone who wants to do what we're doing now.

Farms take funding, and few survive without extra income coming in.  So as they say in show business, "don't quit your day job, kid."  Because while an actor or actress might eventually make millions and win an Oscar, farmers rarely come into that kind of fortune, even by using their talents. At the most, they support themselves by selling what they grow.  We don't even do that; we do put a substantial dent in our grocery budget by growing our food and making most of what we use, but we could never live off what we do here.  To think otherwise would be to engage in magical thinking.

Yet, the latest thing in the blog world is to putter along on your property, and if you get in trouble financially, just ask your readers to support you (literally).  But to ask for money when you're not out there doing anything to bring in a regular income to help yourself survive is, well, the exact opposite of keeping your life simple.  It's becoming beholden to an "audience" and constantly having to come up with new things to keep them entertained and engaged.  That is not farming.  That is public relations and marketing.

And it's not the simple life, not by a long shot. Our life may involve having to drive down the hill and go to work a few days a week, but those every-other-Wednesday paychecks DO help keep our life simple, by keeping this farm running and keeping us in the black.  To imply otherwise would be to insult your intelligence and our work ethic.  

Here's to keeping it real, folks.

Bad Timing

So here it is one day before the start of Hanukkah, two days before Thanksgiving, and I managed to injure my foot by stubbing it on a piece of furniture I happened to be walking past as I was cleaning up in anticipation of relatives arriving later tonight.

I know the manicure is bad, but the bruise is worse!

 My parents may have written a lot of checks to provide me with 15 years of classical dance training in my youth, but it appears that I was just destined to be a klutz.  Maybe they should have sent me to Charm School instead. Or bought cigarettes.  Whatever.

I am not sure if the foot is fractured, broken or just severely strained, but it hurts like the devil and I can't wear shoes at this point.

Of course I can live without shoes, as long as I stay close to the house.  The trick is, of course, maneuvering around the parts of property I can traverse, and working at the winery.

Luckily Big Ag will be home a lot this week, so any tricky property maintenance can be done by him, and I believe I will be able to get at least my cross-trainers on by Friday so I can work at the weekend.  It won't be pretty or fashionable, but it will do. 

And of course this makes me realize that if I lived alone and farmed, a lot of things would be impossible.  As it is, I have a tree full of ripe pomegranates I will be unable to harvest and process now, an orchard that needs weeding, and a vegetable garden that needs water. 

But it does serve to remind me that none of us is ever really self-suffucient, especially not anyone who farms.  The rural life puts you one mis-step away from needing those you live with to take over your share temporarily when you're laid up with injury or illness. 

And if there's no one you live with, you'd better have cultivated enough relationships with your neighbors that they will help you.  It's a sobering thought for anyone thinking owning and running a farm by themselves is do-able.  I see people doing it and, in a way, it's like waiting for a train wreck, because none of us is invincible.  We all need a Plan B for when things like this happen.

It takes a village, people.  Or maybe The Village People. Or at just a family.  But you can't do it alone.

Fermentation!

Stuck my ear into the fermenter this morning, eagerly awaiting the snap, crackle and pop of fermenting fruit juice and pulp. It's a sound that's sort of an alcoholic version of the sound Rice Krispies make.

And I was not disappointed.  The must was chattering away like a parakeet.

Looks like I may have some apple wine to bottle soon!

Windfall Apple Wine

So after putting up 11 quarts of apple pie filling, I still had about 12 pounds of apples left over, and little desire to do any more canning between now and Thanksgiving, since both involve a lot of time in the kitchen, and I need to pace myself.  So I decided to make wine.  There are many recipes out there for windfall cider and windfall apple wine (windfall meaning extra apples, often found under the trees or leftover from other endeavors, as these are).  I minced and simmered the apples, added the pectic enzyme, yeast and nutrient and now.....I wait.

I give it about 50/50 odds I will get any alcohol out of this.  The one variable I forgot to factor in before starting the whole process was the temperature.  Fermentation happens best when indoor temperatures are between 72 and 75 degrees, and we're just not that warm anymore.  With the pellet stove going I usually get the house up to about 71 degrees, but at night we go down into the 60's or lower, which may be enough to shut the process down before it even really gets started.

I've thought of some inventive ways to keep the must warm -- everything from heating pads to sticking it in the oven with the light on, but nothing will keep it at the right temperature.  It's the old Goldilocks dilemma of one being too cold, one too hot, but none just right.

Anyway, I have nothing to lose at this point, so we will give it a couple of days and see if the yeast starts the mixture bubbling.  If so, then we're on our way.  If not, then I'm just out some windfall apples and some pride, neither of which is a huge deal since I'm a homesteader and have had my pride rubbed into the apple must more times than I can count.  At least it smells good.

Old Dog

So the past several months have been ones where I've felt like the proverbial old dog, learning many, many new tricks. In our previous hometown I was a complete introvert.  I kept to my garden and homestead, occasionally attended things for the kids' school, but rarely socialized with anyone other than a couple of neighbors and family.  

The reasoning behind that was logical -- there just weren't too many people in the town I resonated with and felt the urge to chat up, socially. Then we moved here, and from the get-go it seemed like a place I was going to reinvent myself, put myself out there and make new friends. And I have.  I even re-entered the away-from-home workforce with a job at a local winery, and before I knew it, my learning curve became quite steep as I attempted some of the more complex points in the point-of-sale system, inventory, customer relations and all the craziness that happens during tourist season and harvest. 

The people skills were easy; socializing with people (including customers at the winery) was like riding a bike; I jumped into the job and it became easy immediately.  But being brand-new to the industry has also meant assimilating a large amount of information over a relatively short period of time, and that's been a challenge.

And I'll be honest; some of my mistakes, though not large, have been ones I beat myself up over, specifically because I had an idea that someone younger than me could probably learn it all faster and do it all better.  "Oops, I hit the wrong button on the register.  Oops, I transferred that phone call to the wrong extension." That kind of thing. Yet, in speaking to the more experienced tasting room attendants at the winery, I've learned this is not true.  Most of them said they weren't comfortable with all the ins and outs of the job until they'd been doing it a year or two.  And it hit me.  I was making things hard on myself by being waaay too much of a perfectionist.  Not because anyone else saw me as something "less" because I was older -- because I did.

Why are we so hard on ourselves when we should be the ones most in our corner?  Why do we expect more from ourselves than we would from anyone else?  These are questions I've been asking myself ever since I became an adult, and while I catch myself in the act of this kind of self sabotage a lot faster these days than I used to, it's still something I shouldn't be doing at all.

Do we ever learn to have our own backs and become our greatest cheerleader instead of our greatest critic?  And if so, when?  Obviously I'm not as old as I think, because I like to believe that if I was old enough, I would be wiser about this.

This old dog has still got most of her wits about her, but she does need to appreciate that fact more, and maybe pat herself gently on the head instead of hitting herself upside it when she make an occasional and totally human mistake.

Someday, I'll learn.