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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Posts Tagged ‘farm’

Pigs and Anne Murray

 

Fed the pigs a mix of hog feed and curdled goat milk. In the background you can hear Anne Murray singing on the pickup truck radio. It was tuned to WCFW, where FM means Fine Music.

Nice 4th and Baler Photos

Good 4th last night. Sat on our ridge with a fire and 70% homegrown food (have never successfully grown marshmallows), just enough breeze and woodsmoke to keep the mosquitoes and gnats in fly-by mode, and for miles in all directions, amateur fireworks (some of which get bigger every year).

Have never been a fireworks guy. Don’t care to play with them, and figure you might as well light five dollar bills and throw them to the wind. But yesterday I harrumphed and approved the expenditure of $16.50 toward a simple grab-bag batch. We parsed them out over the evening between homemade campfire pies and watching the bigger bursts in the distance. Saved a bunch of colorful ones for the very end. And after watching the 11-year-old dance across the yard writing with a sparkler in the dark, after hearing the four-year-old’s peals of laughter at the colorful ones that spun in the driveway…well, sometimes a guy has to unbend a little, huh? We spread that $16.50 out over two hours and while I stood holding my wife’s hand in the dark as the last colors fizzled, we did the math on any number of other manufactured entertainments and figured we took the cash for a decent ride.

Earlier in the day my wife and daughters went to the river with friends while I stayed home to write, move some chickens, and help my neighbor (same guy who did this) bale a batch of hay. (Later that night when we were going to make campfire pies and realized we didn’t have any bread, I ran back over there and he lent us half a loaf – there’s yer rural barter system in full effect).

Delicate Dance

Finished writing just after midnight last night and on my way to the house I noticed the granary door was open. We have a batch of chicks in there, and although they’re under a screen weighted down with rocks, we secure the doors at night to keep out roaming chicken-nibblers. While shutting the door, I thought, smells like skunk in here. Then I heard a noise, and there he was looking right back at me. I backed away from the door and he moved, but rather than go out the door, he crossed over to the old horse stall where the chicks are. It’s a dead end, basically. So I tiptoe over and peer in, and there he is curled up at the far end of the stall.

I gotta get some work done, so this is the shorthand version, but it took me a while to get that skunk out of there. Somehow he managed to spray everything but me, and we are both out and about our business today. So far no one has told me I smell like a skunk. I cannot speak to whether or not the skunk’s friends and family are accusing him of smelling like a human.

Neighbors Got a Cow

Y’know how it is in the country, sometimes you’ll get a call from the neighbor needing some help with unloading a cow. So you get on your tractor (OK, your mother-in-law’s tractor) and you head on over there.

More photos of the cow in transit over here.

Who made the cow? Our own Steve Bateman, who made Transmission Man and also works in less permanent mediums…

Wisconsin Trails Tractor Tale

The latest issue of Wisconsin Trails magazine is out. I’m honored that the “My Wisconsin” section contains an essay I wrote about my Dad’s first tractor, a hard-working Massey-Ferguson 135. The essay is excerpted from My First Tractor, a wonderful collection available from Voyageur Press.

The May/June issue also includes articles about musky fishing, dirt-track racing, fine dining in Monticello, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, and a “Last Word” essay by my mentor and one of those folks on my “without-whom” list, John Hildebrand. John’s book Mapping the Farm is tremendous (the section on the bull overdosing on apples is worth the price alone), and his A Northern Front deeply influenced my evolving feelings about sense of place.

Good Busy

So much going on right now…writing deadlines, planting, new chicks, getting ready for new pigs, fencing, garden things, fishing with daughters, magazine work, lots of behind-the-scenes stuff to get some projects underway, booking events for 2012, so grateful for my wife and her steadiness…and highlight of the week? After FIVE YEARS on this farm – and with the help of my two daughters – on Monday night I FINALLY got the brown pole barn cleaned out and have a place to park everything AND stack my fencing stuff and my secret stash of prize 55-gallon drums (procured by Mills, natch).

Back at it.

Theoretical Beef

Had a meeting with my wife and my pal Mills last night, planning for this year’s protein projects. Deciding how many meat chickens to raise, how many pigs, and whether or not we’ll be able to pull off raising some beef. As many of you know, I had the same plans for last year but due to my schedule, wound up raising “theoretical beef.” They’re very easy to care for, inexpensive, and you can just go on and on about your operation without ever having to actually drive a fencepost.

Went for a Walk

Mom had to work last night (I use the term Mom here in the context that when you have children, there comes a day when you discover you are referring to your wife as Mom, and your Mom as Grandma), so after school my eldest helped pack a snack and dress the three-year-old, and we headed out for a walk. Skies were gray, temps were cool with some wind, and we had to wade through some remaining banks of grainy snow, but I gotta say I was happily surprised by the demeanor of my fellow hikers, which was sunny throughout.

As flattened, brown, and generally stomped as the landscape is at this stage, when you walk it, there’s also a great sense of rediscovery, and it was heartening to see my children reflect that. Much chattering, tree-climbing, pointing to this that or the other thing emerging from the snow or draped in flattened weeds, and of course – all children seem to have this chip – the greatest happiness reserved for water where there usually isn’t water. We have a small pond out back, and it was something to see last night, larger than it’s ever been. The oldest enjoyed toeing ice floes out into the open water. There were also many streams and rivulets gurgling along where later this summer will only be a faint grassy furrow.

We saw a perfectly preserved bear track (cast in dried mud), a deer (that’s like seeing a squirrel, frankly), and enjoyed a snack while sitting on a stump overlooking the valley. Back in the yard we were greeted by a sweeping clutter of chickens, and supper never tasted so good.

Gratitude.

Dry, Dry Here

This has been a perfect autumn stretch…sunny days have allowed us to get much of our garden bed preps done.  We opened a new patch this year and although it produced, you could tell the soil had been nothing but yard and box elder shade for years.  Things were a tad spindly.  Now it’s heavily dosed with shredded maple leaves and composted chicken manure, and two compost piles cooking beside it so there’ll be more dark brown goodness to add come spring.  Our friend Lori helped tuck over 100 garlic cloves in the other garden plot which has been likewise fluffed, stirred, and blanketed for the winter to come.

Much more to be done…have to pick corn, for one thing.  Will be doing that all by hand.  We’re already feeding the chickens right off the cob.  But the oats has been in for a long time now, and even a dash of wheat.  There’ll still be trips to the feed mill (a guy’s gotta go to the feed mill, if only to lean on the counter and talk smart!) (there’s me with my two hand-picked corn patches standing next to a guy who brings it in by the semi-full!) (I am in the boutique corn business), but it’ll be neat to wade out through the snow this winter and feed the chickens grain grown within sight of the coop.

The only drawback is that all this beautiful weather has dried things out so considerably that the winter wheat we’ve planted (in the new garden bed and also in next year’s corn patches) hasn’t sprouted.  It’s getting late, and nothing but little cartoon suns on the weather page…

I have one other dilemma.  After our neighbor plowed up a patch of long-fallow sod for us, I planted it to oats.  Everything went great until just before the oats was ready for harvest, at which point it rained for about two months straight.  It was never dry enough to take the oats (I fed much of it to the chickens green) and the weeds eventually just roared on past it all and I wound up chopping it down.  Now all of that oats has sprouted and I have a gorgeous field of dense green plants (weed-free) about six inches high.  A big old cushion.  Wondering if I should just let it freeze and till it in next spring, or till it all under now and plant winter wheat?  If I was putting corn there next year I’d do the winter wheat for sure, but we’re likely going to raise pigs on that patch, and if so we’ll be tilling it early in the spring to plant rape and field peas for the pigs to forage.  So I’m not sure there’s any reason to mess with the volunteer oats as it is.

There is also the issue of time.

My First Tractor

In Coop I wrote:

The equivalency is not absolute, but I’ll pretty much guarantee you most farm kids remember their first moment at the wheel of a tractor with the approximate clarity of their first kiss.  Me?  Lisa Kettering, beneath a white pine in the moonlight on the road to Axehandle Lake, and: Jerry Coubal’s John Deere B through the gate beside the Norway pine with the pigtail twist alongside the lane out back.  Nicknamed Johnny-Popper because of the distinctive two-cylinder pop-pop-pop of the exhaust, the tractor was a gangly looking machine with tall rear wheels and a slim front end supported by two wheels cambered to a narrow vee.  The steering wheel was mounted in the near perpendicular and stood flat before your face like a clock on the wall.  The square padded seat sat level with the top of the towering rear wheels, so you rode high, with a clear field of vision.  Rather than a foot pedal, the B model had a hand clutch consisting of a slender steel rod capped with a round ball – rather like a solid iron walking stick.  To engage the clutch you fed the walking stick forward; when you wanted to stop you pulled it backward, and the works disengaged with a steel-drum ping! Dad and his neighbor Jerry shared the Johnny Popper back and forth during haying season.  One morning when I was nine years old I went out back to watch Dad rake hay.  When he was done he unhitched the rake and let me ride back with him.  On the return trip, we came to the gate beside the lane and the twisted Norway pine.  Dad got down from the tractor to open the gate as he always did, only this time after he swung it open he looked up at me and said, “Why don’t you take’er through?”  I still remember the offhand way he uttered the words, and how the adrenaline surged through me when I heard them.  I realize now that he was probably anticipating my wide eyes.

The John Deere was a good starter tractor, because you didn’t have to reach any pedals.  The tall hand clutch, the position of the steering wheel, and a broad steel deck between the seat and the steering column made it possible to operate from a standing position – in fact when I was older I often drove standing up if only because I could fantasize that rather than some hayfield in Sampson Township one was navigating the Mississippi in a Mark Twain paddlewheeler.

Back there at that gate, with the John Deere ­going ­pop…pop…pop at low idle, I addressed the wheel with knees trembling.  Reaching down to the gear selector, I ran it through its cast iron maze and into first.  Then, with one hand on the steering wheel and heart tripping, I pushed that hand clutch slowly, slowly ahead until sure enough the green machine was inching forward, and there I was, driving tractor.  The gate was plenty wide but I felt like I was piloting the Queen Mary through a checkout lane at the IGA.  When I passed through the gate – head swiveling left, right, left to make sure I hadn’t snapped the fenceposts – I pinged the clutch out of gear with a combination of exhilaration and relief.  Dad took the wheel back for the ride home and I rode happily on his lap, still his small boy but much taller in my heart.

There’s more to the story, and I got to tell it in My First Tractor, a collection of essays on that very topic.  Contributors include Roger Welsch, Jerry Apps, Ben Logan, Pat Leimbach, and Bob Feller.  Yes, that Bob Feller.

Book is now out and available.