Harvest Potluck - September 10th!

Yes, it 'tis the plain 'ol "Harvest Potluck."

Because it's simple, and I like simple.

I wanted a name that would cross cultural boundaries, something fun and snappy, then realized that it didn't have to be.  People were excited enough with the word "potluck" - it'd be pure madness if I had a stellar name.  Crowd control would put this free event over budget!

This isn't a completely thought-out event yet, but here are the basics:

• It's open to the public - as feeders or eaters or both!
• The main ingredient of each dish must be produced in southwest Montana but not necessarily by you.
• There will be music:  The Dillon Fiddlers have agreed to play country and bluegrass.
• I'm hoping to get local grain, potato, beef and lamb producers involved also.  BBQ would be awesome.
• Horseshoes for the adults and "wa-shoes" for the kids.
• An information booth will be available, and all dishes will be tagged with the "production" information.  People can network and eat, no shopping.
• It is not a fair, festival, or anything else super-duper entertaining.
• It's good food and community.
• I have very little idea what I'm doing, but it's working so far! 

I reserved the park (September 10th)- while also paying my water bill, love a small town - and got the run-down from the Mayor on the fact that I don't need a single permission, permit or inspection.  "We love people to do stuff like that. It sounds great" was all he had to say about it.  Oh, and he was glad I was going for participation from farmers and ranchers too.


Talking to the Farmers Market group on Monday, so should have a bit more to say about this then!

Seed-planting Has Begun!

Yesterday, we received our order of seeds from the Seed Savers Exchange and we are thrilled!  They are all heirloom varieties and are much more colorful than the hybrids I've seen.  I can hardly wait until they come up and produce. 

We have a ton of seeds already, from seed-saving last year and varieties we didn't get planted (herbs and flowers mostly).

So today, the kids and I planted another batch (10 holes with 2 seeds each) of Swiss Chard after lunch, and then once they'd ditched me for snack, I planted the first of a "gourmet lettuce blend," as well as Simpson lettuce and spinach.  I'll plant the same again next week, and continue each week until mid-May.  In early June the "greens beds" will become the "tomato beds."  I just figured they should go to work until then too.  I'll be covering these beds with bed-size hoop houses to help protect the greens from death by snow-flattening.

If all goes well, we'll be able to eat and sell greens in a month or so;  a very exciting prospect in the land of long winters. 

Next week, I'll be starting several seeds in the cold frame and can hardly express how exciting it is to have so many interesting new varieties this year!  Better get my tail in gear and organize all my pots etc! 

UP NEXT:  The Harvest Potluck

Gearing Up Again

This odd thing happens at the end of every growing season:  we furiously gather the bounty, then sprint inside and peel, slice, freeze, boil, and can until we pass out in our food-stained aprons all over the living room.  Really.  This is what canning days look like.  They always end with two or more of us lounging/napping/staring-stunned-into-the-distance. 

And then this happens...nothing.

Clean-up?  Like, clean off all the beds and prepare for spring? 

I am worked.  No way.  Or in the case of last fall, "there's a crazy man living with us and we all are therefore running around all crazy."

Not this year. 

Not going to happen.  We have decided to get serious - not only about producing - but about making this space produce enough for us all within the next year or two. 

That and crazy people aren't welcome here any more. 

Well, the good crazy ones are fine, it's those bad crazy that you have to watch for.  Good crazy would mean we couldn't live here either!

New things happening this year:

1.  A ton of ground will be rototilled and then planted in green manure (legumes this year - calorie crop next year).  The largest space will be the "alley easement" that is basically a long driveway along one side of our lot.
2.  Another large-ish piece will be tilled and planted with potatoes.  I am really interested in what the soil here looks like - it's been our compost heap (not a well-managed region) for two years.  It is now moving up in the world, it's going to be soil.
3.  There is a strip of ground between our sidewalk and the street.  Not much going on there, so we're going to till it up too and plant stuff.  It's 4' x 120' I'm pretty sure.  Hopefully it'll be a lot of stuff, but it's going to have to be some kind of "stuff" that likes crummy soil and wind....bet that's a long list.  It will get better with use though, and may very well just be planted in green manure also.  Clover's nice...hmm.
4.  We will have both children running around wild and helping us this year.  I am really excited about this!  They both are very good about plants, barring a few incidents, and really love to see things grow.  Between the two of them though, we may not have many tomatoes actually making it in the house.  There are much worse things to worry about though : )  Besides, they're much, much cuter than tomato worms.

We cleaned up around the cold frame yesterday, and Rick and Thomas built all the panels for it (we are getting good too - these are much better than last years).  I will post photos once the snow we got today melts a bit. 

Until Today - It Wasn't a Concern

Just yesterday my mom and I were discussing "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" (I've just started it).  I made the statement that while I understood why people were concerned with oil consumption, and were therefore changing their lifestyles to a more sustainable one; our main reasons for producing more of our own food were the quality of food and personal fufillment that came along with it.

Today, I was listening to the radio while making dinner, there was an interview with some scientists involved in an independent study of the affects of the tar sand mining in Canada (National Geographic photo gallery and article).  This little bit of trivia just shot me into the group concerned with oil consumption:  "About half the oil produced heads south: The U.S. is Canada's biggest oil customer, importing more from its northern neighbor than from any other nation." 

I'm not from any kind of background that stands up and shakes their fist at the industrial machine.  I understand the need for fuel.  My husband is a diesel mechanic (semi-trucks and heavy equipment), and I was one for a few years.  Our very livelihood is dependent upon the industry.  I get all these things.  What I can't wrap my head around is the incredible way this process affects everything around it.  Thousands of acres of woodlands are just...gone.  Not just picked up and carted out either, the soil is washed with water.  Shale mining also falls into the shameless-use-of-water category.

It's the water thing that mostly gets me.

And the fact that I grew up in wide, beautiful spaces...and seeing those pictures of thousands of acres of land just gone just baffles me.  When you grow up outside, you constantly think of where animals travel on land, what they eat, where they drink/sleep, and what the predator/prey balance is.   It gives me a big, empty feeling inside seeing this resource harvest...where's the consideration of life in all this?

I can do without a car.
Without a lot of things.

Water is second on the need list only to oxygen.

Therefore, all things have clicked and I'm now concerned.

It's been a long time coming.

I think about what we can do, really simply and cost-effectively.  There is not a chance that we can buy a new, high MPG car.  We drive older vehicles because we own them outright and they're easy and inexpensive to fix.  We spend less in fuel than we would on a payment plus fuel.  Plus, I drive a total of 50 miles a month probably.  Not a big need there.

This isn't where I hop on the activist wagon, just where I add another reason to the list of why we spend our growing season months with our hands in soil.

There will always be a need for equipment and vehicles, but how much it is used depends much on how we choose to live our lives collectively. 

So.

What can we do?

Get serious about producing most of the food we consume.  I will continue to buy big, fat watermelon until we find a way to grow them here.

1.  Convert more of the lot to food production this spring (in reality, we could grow enough food for all of us on half the lot).
2.  Grow our own grains.
3.  Buy some sort of bike (suggestions appreciated here) that has 3 wheels and a basket for 2 small children.  They wiggle and I'm certain we'd get tipped over on 2 wheels.  I am not an exceptional bike operator.
4.  Find a property/barn near town to keep whatever milk cow is fresh in, and ride my bike to milk her.  This would cut down our dairy-based food costs quite a bit...since we drive old, low MPG vehicles!
5.  Raise a beef and/or a few lambs on free pasture (hauling them would be our only costs beyond purchase), and fill the freezer in the fall.

These are just the things that we have been nonchalantly thinking about for the last couple years, and are now more convicted, so may actually get serious about implementing a few of them.

I would love to hear some input on these ideas, the issue (especially if I have misunderstood at some point), things that you may be doing to lessen your impact etc.  Suggestions are always appreciated!

P.S.  The prospect of paying over $4/gallon for gas this summer is seriously influencing the thinking about a bike.

We Live in Town

Yes, in town.  Our 1908 farm house is on a 1/4 acre in town. 

We'd never lived in town before moving here.
As someone who's from out there, in the end-of-the-long-road-conspiracy-theorizing part of the world, it is sometimes difficult to tell people that I live in town.

It's town after all!

People live there!

They just show up at your place *poof* and you don't even have a chance to slip off to avoid the religious zealots that swing by.

I am from the places where if you see a vehicle you know who it is, where they're headed, how long they've lived/worked/eaten/hunted there, who their kids are and what they want if they're headed to your place.  Conversations revolve around seasons and cows, children and fencelines.

Town is different.

We're learning it's enjoyable with the right attitude though.  It can be absolutely stifling if you don't have the right outlook.  This is a work-in-progress for me.  I'm better.  I don't want to talk about it lol.

But after moving not only our things (of which we brought way too many), our 1 year old daughter, my mother, 4 horses, a heifer (Ruby), 4 dogs, 5 cats (I paid to have them spayed, therefore they were not getting left behind - OK, Crazy Lucy was welcome and my mothers two were quite near-and-dear to her) 1,000 miles in November to Montana...

we were ready to live in a house.

Any house that was warm and had a fair-sized lot.

And was cheap.  The trip cost a penny or two.

Part of the rush was that I got pregnant our first week here and we were all (darling husband, sweet daughter, myself and my mother) living in a travel trailer.

I was vomiting.

In November/December.

In Montana.

It was a touch cool.

Cabin fever was hard core.  More like cabin plague or gangrene.

We were for the most part nice to each other.

In the preceding six months, we had looked online at homes listed in the area, and kept coming back to the one we ended up buying in the end.  It just seemed like we were meant to be there.  The mortgage would be lower than the average rent in the area, and no one would complain about our living habits adjusting to town besides possibly our neighbors.

You may be confused here; as in, "What's to adjust?"

Let me introduce my husband:

He has been known to run a chainsaw at 10 PM.  In town. [insert me frowning and hollering at him here...in town at 10 PM]

He has NO problem with multiple dead vehicles/our two trailers - one of which is bright yellow - parked on premises (doesn't happen anymore, he's adjusted to the town thing in this respect).

We used floodlights, near midnight, to harvest tomatoes and tomatillos frantically before a hard frost last fall.  The kids were asleep, and it'd been a wild week.  You work when you can around here.

These are just what pops to mind, but we ultimately have most definitely had an adjustment period.  Now that it has been just over two years we're settled into the routine of it pretty well.  Our trash can even makes it out when it's supposed to and the kids sleep right through the truck when it "BEEEEEP BEEEEEP BEEEEEPs" out their window.

We have several planting beds:
a 5'x60'
two 5'x20'
four 1'x20' aka "strip beds"

these are built with cast-off wood from the local mill (the bark pieces: flat on one side, bark on the other).

We have a cold frame made from boards hoarded from a nearby feedlot torn down and $40 worth of clear 6mm plastic.  We replace it yearly, convinced it's cheaper since we won't be in town long enough to justify a greenhouse.  Right?

Eventually, we'll move out of town.  But for now, this space works well...except the whole milk cow being 3 miles away bit.  It will be nice when she is "on site."  We're still working on acquiring a leased bit of land, but are certain it will be at least another year before we can sell our home and move out of town again.

Until then, we are forever thankful for our kind neighbors with thick walls and a sense of humor.

Graining The Girls w/ Wild Kids

There is something more to be said about nice cows:

Most of my previous experience with cattle has not been with pets or milk cows or even cows that are fed hay/grain by humans.  I was previously accustomed to cows that would run from or over a person.  The last thing they would be doing was hanging out, looking for a handout.  Steep, nasty country breeds some wild types...and some fun/occasionally frustrating riding.

Our older two (Ruby & Carrara) live with 75-100 Angus/beef cows.   The gentleman that owns and cares for these cows is a kind man - he gives grain to the pheasant, rabbits, and deer on his farm/ranch through the winter so that they don't have such a hard time - and I have found that he only keeps kind cattle.  What a blessing, because our 1 1/2 year old son has no respect for cows.  He thinks it's hilarious to run - squealing in laughter - right at them. 

This is NOT on my list of "it's cool, go ahead" things for him to do with his time. 

However, these beef mamas may startle, trot off, and in general stare at him like he's a tiny crazy man (which he is) but they have never acted aggressively towards him. 

He's only gotten out-of-grasp to do this twice.  Usually I trap the kids in the suburban with the windows rolled down most of the way, so they can watch and look but are not any worry for me. 

I do this because while graining our 2 cows, anywhere between 5 and 30 girls show up looking for their feed tubs.  They stare.  I feel like a heel.  They pace.  I really really feel like a heel.  They sneak in close, I try to touch them, they dance out of reach and pace some more.  Maybe I am a heel, but I love to get one of them to let me touch her.  And I have grain, that gives me an edge.

Today, my friend Christina and her boys came along with us, and it was so fun seeing them experience cows up close.  I was so proud of Ruby, letting all four small children pet her while I am shoo-ing the other cows away.  She did occasionally give me the "this-is-a-lot-of-tolerance-I-should-get-extra-grain" look though.

Poor kid. 

The things a cow has to do to get the good stuff around here. 

I am so thankful that I spent time with Ruby so that now she is safe and kind, especially with the kids.

When she kicks me later this year (probably right after she's calved and her teats are tender), remind me that she was the most wonderful cow ever in February.

I'll forgive her. 

Sore teats are the pits.

A Dear Friend and Macaroni & Cheese

We have this wonderful friend, Becca, who lives nearby and walks/bikes by on her way to work.  Sometimes, I snag her off the sidewalk - her all scarves, sweaters, gloves and fuzzy boots - for a warming cup of tea.

I'd like to make a note here that, in being a "walker" here in Montana, you have to be OK with being cold.  Occasionally very cold.  She never complains; I love this gal.  She has fortitude.

Anyways, today her walk turned into being accosted with a dark chocolate truffle (which I thought would surely make her walk more enjoyable), then helping fill a wheelbarrow with wood, then tea, then playing with wild tiny children, helping with dinner and dishes and OH, she's wonderful.  Lovely guest.

We had homemade mac 'n cheese and homegrown & pickled beets.

What?
You don't eat pickled beets with noodles?

Oh.

Maybe it's a "my grandma" thing.  Which is fine, I love family-specific traditions.

When I was growing up, my grandma lived with us for nearly eleven years.  She taught me how to make many things from scratch, starting at three or four years old.  I miss my grandma.  With her I ate many things, but my favorite (other than homemade, single-apple-spoil-your-granddaughter-sauce on hot, buttered, homemade toast) was when we'd eat this mac 'n cheese with pickled beets on the side.  I don't know how this got started, but I do know that she raised three children through the Great Depression, alone (she was widowed in 1928)...so I'm betting it was cheap dinner.

We make it by first making a rue, adding milk, then a pile of white sharp cheddar cheese, then a teaspoon of horseradish sauce (trust me, it does good things; this is from a different grandma - picked up along the way), then salt and pepper to taste.

Try it, it really is simple and tasty.

Back to the beets, they are slightly sweet, acid, and refreshing with the thick, gooey-ness of the noodles.  Plus, these were canned by my mama last fall, after we pulled their fat little selves from our beds in a frenzy (the soil would freeze soon).  Bulls Blood Beets.  They're so sweet and lovely to eat, plus their greens have excellent flavor and can be harvested as the root grows.

I am learning that some of my favorite times surround sharing food with family and friends.  Having people in the kitchen, all chipping in here and there, talking, learning, laughing...it's good stuff.  I'm considering making a point in having people over at least once a month, just to share food and community.

Note about tea:  It amazes me how many people accept a cup and a chat if you offer.  I am now carrying several blends.  I don't even own a tea pot, but they come, they sit and relax a bit.  It must be the steam and warm hands...or maybe there are more people waiting for me to reach out to them kindly than I realized.