Fencing for beefers is progressing, we have a fresh batch of chicks due to arrive in a week or so (thus, actual spring would be nice), and next week we’ll be getting feeder pigs. The photo below was taken of our last batch, fairly early in their career. The wheelbarrow is full of acorns: here’s the story on that, and here’s the story on how some of the acorns were gathered. And here’s the album we were working on when we gathered the acorns.
From here I can see the pig hutch marooned in the snow (open end is turned toward the woods…it doubled as a deer blind in November). Plan is to get pigs again this summer, use’em (temporarily…) to till up some more garden ground. I hope so. Schedule is such that I’ll need help to pull it off, but it looks like that will happen.
With every passing day, the pigs and garden feel ever more essential. Last night the three-year-old and I made a bunch of miniature snowmen, practiced throwing (and eating) snowballs, and went scouting for deer. Highlight was when she threw a snowball and her mitten went with it. Funniest thing ever, apparently. And the joy in her voice when she spotted two deer pawing around beneath a young pine…
Full circle to backyard bacon and potatoes, though, is that moment when you look at the tot laughing there in the snow, standing on ground that stretches all the way around the shaky world, and you feel a flood of chill wondering how/if you’ll get her safely fed and growed and guided…
Then you just say, well, alrighty then, suck it up, walk it off, and get to it.
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.
A while back I talked about pigs with Yael Grauer of the food magazine Spezzatino. The entire interview is available here as a downloadable .pdf. Yael asked some good questions that led the conversation off into a few less-common corners.
Another interview for the Coop paperback tour, although we got delightfully off-track and managed to discuss Truck and Population 485 and the music as well. I like this blog radio business. I can yap all around the country while staring at my actual (as opposed to virtual) chickens.
Hadn’t thought about the bull for a few years…then I did this interview with the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel.
A friend forwarded this video of the poet Kevin Young reading four selections. Last Saturday we had a whole crew of kin over to the place for a meal that included a big ol’ tank of pork in various forms, and Mr. Young is right on the money regarding the joys of that meat (“Ode to Pork”, commencing at roughly 4:35 in the video, but I’d watch the whole thing, this is good stuff) (and catch that “B/babe” joke in there). Kevin Young will be appearing here, by the way. Based on our schedules, we’ll likely cross each other in the airport. The “Ode to Boudin” is a gorgeous thing, a poem for his departed father, the universal intersection of grief and food and joy and memory: …his sisters/my aunts dancing/in the yard to a car radio...
Thank you to Jim Fleming and Wisconsin Public Radio for the gracious reading of Coop. It’s a humbling honor to hear that coming out of the radio. And for two weeks I’ve been running into folks who’ve caught a listen. One of those things a guy never expected…and as a lifelong cheesehead, even more meaningful.
They’re reading a chapter of Coop on Wisconsin Public Radio every day from now until February 12. If you missed a segment, the five most recent chapters are available here: http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=cad&repeats=no (not sure for how long).
Weekdays at 12:30 p.m. CST from now until February 12, Jim Fleming will be reading Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Chapter A Day.” Jim has a wonderful reading voice (I have learned he is a favorite of rural mail carriers) and you can listen to a live stream of the reading right here.
Missed a segment? The five most recent chapters are available here: http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=cad&repeats=no
When our friends John and Julie (they shot the cover of Coop, Off Main Street, Population 485, Truck, and Headwinded) visited this summer, they brought their friend and student Wilmer and made a short film starring a fly and our pigs.
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