coldantlerfarm

Mountain Music Workshop: Saturday!

2012-01-31T18:37:00.003-05:00

If you are coming to the farm this weekend for the mountain music workshop, please email me at jenna@itsafarwalk.com and let me know the following: diet restrictions, what instruments you are interested in, what instruments you will be bringing, and if you have any allergies to dogs/cats/rabbits/horses/peanuts etc. While this place is kept clean, I do live with two cats and three dogs. Hair happens. Lunch will be potato soup and pulled pork served with fresh bread and local cheeses. There will also be a breakfast spread of NYC bagels, donuts, and a homemade quiche. If you need directions and information about times and such, ask me via email as well.

Looking forward to it, and I have three spaces left if anyone wants to swoop in and take them!

Ashford Kiwi Spinning Wheel GIVEAWAY!

2012-01-31T13:08:00.003-05:00

This is the first giveaway on this blog I am insanely jealous that I can't enter for. It's a BRAND NEW Ashford Spinning Wheel from the amazing folks at Halcyon Yarn of Maine. (Halcyon Blake herself set us up with the wheel!) Halcyon Yarn is an independent yarn shop in Maine and offer everything you could dream of to scratch that fiber itch. They are going to give away an Ashford Kiwi Spinning Wheel on the blog this week and here's how you enter. You go to their website and peruse a while and then report back here on what you would create if nothing was stopping you. For example: If I had my druthers I would buy some Cascade Magnum 100% wool in red and make a new hat tonight. I love that about those super bulky wools, you can whip up a piece of clothing in less time than it takes to finish a Lord of the Rings movie. And I would get a traditional spinning wheel, whatever is out there that can handle thicker and thinner yarn weights...I'd have to do some research, but hey, this is just me thinking out loud. I dream of a snowy afternoon spent by the woodstove spinning roving from the flock carded in the farmhouse. It's bound to happen here, just not this week. I can assure you that one of you lucky folks will end up with a brand new spinning wheel Monday night.

You get the idea. Check out the yarns, supplies, carders, drop spindles, roving and more and then report back here with what you'd make from your dream stash from this charming store. You can enter with a new comment and facebook share every day if you like, which means each of you can enter to be the random winner 14 times! I'll pick a number with an online random generator Monday Night. As always, you can double your chances by sharing a link to this contest on Facebook, just report back here with the comment SHARED!

Good luck Antlers! Visit Halcyon yarn here and start looking around!

P.S. Canada is welcomed to enter too, but you have to help pay the shipping!

wear your horns

2012-01-31T11:32:00.003-05:00

Very excited about this book coming out in a few weeks from Storey, and even more excited to have an essay inside it. The book has over 50 new farmers writing stories, advice, and inspiration to other dreamers and doers out there. I haven't read it yet, and when I do I will post a longer review, but in the meantime I am thrilled to know there is such a growth in new farmers there's a market for such a compliation!

dancing chickens

2012-01-31T08:54:00.004-05:00

photos by 468photography.com

fresh hell

2012-01-31T08:41:00.000-05:00

it is time

2012-01-30T20:30:00.008-05:00

So often I get emails from people that I call the "long sighs," they are the laments of frustrated men and women alike who want to start homesteading, but can't. They have a pair of teenagers in highschool and hate to move away from their friends and district. They have a spouse who thinks they are crazy. They are too young, too old, to used to the way things are. Some feel trapped, others feel victimized, and more just feel like they have a million tomorrows ahead of them to make their plans turn real. I am sorry to break it to you, but you don't have five decades, you have a few, no matter what your age is. Time leaps ahead of us all, stealing years and taking lives. Do not wait, to not doubt. Join me on this worn buckboard seat and we'll take this cart to the farm.

As for those of you raking nails across want, but unable to step onto your own acres: here's the thing... You do not need to have a 6.5 acre farm to grow food. You can do it in a 6 x 5 raised bed in a sunny spot in your yard. You don't need a cart pony, or a flock of sheep, or any of this chaos here at Cold Antler to be more self sufficient at all. What you need is a feral mind, a predators grin, and a stubbornness to change how you see the world. Your suburban half-double townhouse may have rules against chickens, so what? Does it have rules against canning? Homebrewing? Stocking up on local farm's good and food? Can you still knit a sweater, plant a container garden off your fire escape, and pick up a banjo? There are plenty of feral people living all over cities and towns, far away from the fields they are called to in spirit and kin. You don't need to own a farm to prepare for hardship, or enjoy a night without television, or spend a day hiking in the forest or train your dog to carry a light pack. Myself, I rented for five years before I got lucky (and it was luck as much as it was will) that landed me this piece of land, tucked into a mountainside on a curve in a mountain road. Your small holding may be waiting for you too, but it may also be waiting inside, as a desire and determination to finally walk into your bookstores knitting circle and ask to be taught. It may be taking that first guitar lesson from a friend. It may be your first three chickens I hand you in April, or a song you hear on a drive home from work that splits open your heart and makes up your mind that this is the year, the blessed year, you put the apartment up for sale and move to a place with a well and a lawn.

Tonight that is all I want to stress. Its an old homily from this well-worn soapbox: start where you are. Dreams are like caged beasts, they need to tended to, fed constantly or they perish. If some part of you wants a herd of goats, and you are reading this on the subway, then you need to order a goat care book and set it on your nightstand and read it every night. You need to email some goat farms a train ride away, or invest with friends in a rental car and get out there and actually milk an Alpine. Workshops, extension classes, phone calls and more. Buy that water bath canning kit and some strawberries (even if they are out of season, to hell with it) and learn to can jam. Get a subscription to a farm magazine, join a National Organization. Hell, I was a member of NEBCA for three years before I owned my own border collie. Just get started, there is no reason to wait any longer and the more you do all you will gain is regret. Trust me.

No more long sighs, okay? You are the only person who can start changing your life. Take the reins and snap that horse cart.

photo of jasper from 468photography.com

tim's photos from the wool workshop!

2012-01-30T10:33:00.008-05:00

all photos by tim from 468photography.com

giles and sue (and their new pigs)

2012-01-30T07:21:00.001-05:00

Here's a clip from this series, a BBC wonderfest of backyard homesteading. I think it is hilarious, and have been enjoying the series online before the office. Have fun with these two, folks.

a little snow

2012-01-29T20:42:00.002-05:00

They are calling for snow tonight, a few inches, nothing drastic. I am looking forward to it with ferocious anticipation. Remember when I mentioned how restraint, scarcity, and hard work make all those simple comforts so much the more? Well, it goes for the entire farm as well. Tonight as the snow falls I can fall asleep knowing some amazing things. I have nearly refilled my freezer with wholesome meat and did right by the ends of two fine pigs. I filled the barn with 30 bales of green hay. I was delivered to this farm late in the day and as I climbed up into the bed of the large pickup, I realized it was easy for me to personally pick up and toss 30 fifty pound bales. I am not bragging here, but appreciating this hefty body of mine. I am always, always hard on myself about my looks and yet this vessel I have been given can do such labor, can run a farm. I may wish to wear a size 8 jean again, and will (mark my words), but tonight I am just so happy it is alive and able. I have arms and hands and legs and heart. It still beats, it still loves the world, and it still hopes. I don't care how fat, thin, young, or old you are: this is our gift tonight.

Jasper was seen to this morning by a farrier. The little firecracker was calm as a swaybacked drafthorse at the county fair. I met a new and grand farrier and soon as he left the trio of butchers arrived and I thought to myself, What must these men think of me? A women alone with working ponies, pigs to slaughter, and chickens running around like toddlers at a town park? Whatever they think, they are kind and keep it to themselves.

I brewed ten gallons of beer this weekend. Five with Kate on Friday night and five just now while typing the pork post. It is fermenting as we speak. Five of said gallons are a Coffee Stout Porter and another five are an English honey-brown ale. I am loving home brewing, so much. I love soaking the bag of grains in the nearly boiling water and then pouring in the malt, boiling it and adding hops. I love adding my honey at the end, an hour of boiling later and filling the house with bubbling. And I adore sharing those beers with friends, and letting folks know they too can carbonate and kick one back! As the video I watched said: if you can make mac-n-cheese out of a box, you can brew beer. Hell yeah.

So tonight the barn is loaded with hay, the animals are fed and content, Jasper has better feet, the pigs are on their way to being sausage, and ten gallons of magic is brewing in my kitchen. A pot of wool is soaking in the bathroom to clean. The dogs are fed and walked and the only thing left to do is unwind and call it a night. Snow comes, and as it comes I hope it purifies more than the chicken-poo covered ground. I hope it cleans up my head and my angry thoughts about my body or status. I am a lucky and clever little wolf, and I have a body to prove it. And it only gets better, long as that is my goal and belief.

I'm happy tonight. I hope you are, too.

pork

2012-01-29T19:18:00.013-05:00

The following post goes into detail about exactly what happens during a farm kill by a mobile slaughterhouse team. It is a graphic post, with both graphic words and photographic descriptions. If you do not want to read about the slaughter or see the pictures (which should start below the fold of this page, as a courtesy) than please ignore this post. I understand some readers may be upset, and we are all entitled to own our feelings about diet. I am not posting this to offend anyone, nor telling them that backyard meat is what they should do. It's what I do. I am proud of the animals and food I raise. So read on if you like, and if you don't, then simply shut the browser and check back later and I promise the next post will not include a dead animal (well, I certainly hope not!).

There were only two shots fired from Greg Stratton's .22 Magnum rifle. The first dropped Bacon instantly, and she fell into the pen's hay with a thrashing thud. The second took a few seconds to aim at, since Kevin was certainly confused by the commotion and ran around the pen, but he didn't run for long. Ten seconds later one shot hit him squarely in the head and he too hit the ground, flailing as much as Bacon did. Their thrashing was normal, it is what happens. It's not pretty and the combination of bullet holes and chaos made for a very messy end.

In Kristin Kimball's The Dirty Life she writes about how different animals die. How the steers seem to drop with a force stronger than gravity (she says so do sheep), how chickens flap and seem to panic, and how pigs scream and bleed and thrash. She said when she started farming, she thought these were the beasts' personalities coming out in their deaths: the calm steer, the quirky chicken, the charismatic pigs, but after a while that assumption died with the livestock as she witnessed more and more deaths. It was a series of synapses and nerves, a chemical reaction of the end of a life. I agree with her observation. What I saw in the pen was not a piteous flailing, but a last explosion of life, the mind's finale of fireworks sent through the parts it has always controlled and moved. The struggle was energy leaving the body and moved into another form. A mystery and a gift, that.

Soon as both pigs were shot one of Greg's assistants, a gentleman from the Eagle Bridge Slaughterhouse close by, jumped right into the pen and slit their throats. If there was any life left in the two hogs, it was gone within moments of that significant artery being sliced. The blood covered the hay that made their bed the night before. Jasper was about five feet away and showed zero emotion. His ears did perk up at the gunshot, but as they died he just ate his hay outside.

Once still, a large hook on a wooden handle as slid into each pigs' mouth and then the animals were dragged across the farm one at a time to the Stratton Truck: our little farming community's abattoir on wheels. While getting the pigs hocks onto the two hooks that would lift them up to chest level for skinning and gutting, Greg told me he did in three steers this morning for one of my coworkers. He had come recommended by the Daughton's, who used him for Tasty the cow a few weeks earlier. This was a man well appreciated and it showed why in his careful work, he was professional the entire time.

Once the pigs were both hooked, the skinning process could begin. First Greg sawed off the feet at the ankles, and threw them too the ground. I couldn't help but smirk and take a picture, there I was again, looking at carcass feet on a sunny winter day: this time, porker edition. Soon after the feet left their heavenly body, so did the heads. One of the gents cut out the tongue for me and asked me, while dumping it in the bucket of hot water, if I'd like to keep it. He held it right up to my face, and it felt almost like a character test. Could she handle seeing a tongue cut off a dead head and sloshed in a bucket and then still eat it? Darling, I wanted to say, as if a little tongue ever made me shy? Who do you think you're dealing with here, son?

Instead I smiled and asked, "I never ate pig tongue, before. Is it good?"

Greg chimed in at this, "A pig tongue is good eatin'. You boil it with bay leaves and it makes a great meal. Can't beat it."

"I'll take them!" What the hell. You only live once. It's the only tongue I'll be getting anyway next week.

After my lesson/recipe, the two pigs were skinned expertly, starting at their hoofless ankles, down around their inner thigh, and then the tail and bum area were removed. From there the pig skinned just like I would skin a rabbit, starting with shallow cuts near the skin and then peeling away easily. I watched the blood-soaked animals, all hair and chaos moments ago, being slipped off like a bad memory. As if their death was an outfit and instead of being naked, there was just food under their coats.

I was asked what I wanted to do with the heads, feet, offal, and such. I went and grabbed the wheelbarrow I mucked the stall with earlier this week and parked it right by the hanging pigs. That'll do the job, it has done worse.

Post skinning, it was time to disembowel. The animals were cut open right down their middles and their organs came out, clean and bloodless, in one package. This is called the offal, and it isn't awful at all. Because these fellas were experts no stomach opened or intestine shared their putrid inside smells. In fact, the entire process had no unpleasant smells at all. It was a beautiful 30+ degree day dappled in sunshine. The conversation was casual and happy, about the farm and how long I lived here, about deer harvests and their work. It's not a somber thing, at least not sad. Their death means so much bounty for this little farm and its guests. Folks coming to the farm soon as next week's mountain music workshop will be chowing down on slow-cooked shoulder roasts of pulled pork sandwiches at lunch. I celebrate these animals, and do so with respect in my joy. If that makes no sense to you, just wait till you bite into your first home-raised pork chop. Things change.

While the men went on with their work, Greg sidled up to me with a clipboard and order sheet. We went through a detailed list of packages and cuts. It was so detailed I got to pick how many slices of bacon went into a package and how many chops made it into another. I got to choose how heavy the smoked hams would be, and what kind of sausage I wanted (breakfast, Italian sweet or spicy, or meat ready to grind.) I chose all of them!

The wheelbarrow was filled soon with the pile of bloody hides, heads, feet and organs. It was set to the side, kinda of watching the whole thing go on. Later, I would carry the thing back into the woods to dump off the ridge down a steep slope. The crows would host a levee in my honor soon as they found out. I owe crows a lot, they are lucky to this girl, and I am glad to offer them dinner too.

Next the animals were to be halved, and this was the final step in the process. Greg plugged in his big ol' meat saw and made short work of the job. The halves were hanging in the sunlight and I looked on at them, at the barrow of dead parts, and at the four people who made this happen today. Then, realizing with a sheepish smile, it was far more than four people who would create hundreds of meals for me and mine. There was the breeder upstate who sold me his own stock, Tara who joined me on the adventure and helped me set them up in their new home. It was the folks at Wayside who offered their scraps as food saving me tons of cash) and all the folks saving scraps at workshops and birthday parties at the office. My pigs ate well, grew well, lived well, and died well. This is something to be proud of, and I am. Proud and grateful for all involved and enjoying my wolfish grin as I think about the recipes ahead and the ability I have now to barter and trade for things I don't have right now, like turkey or duck or a bed of vegetable starts.

So how did I feel about it? I didn't feel any guilt, nor any disgust, or anything beyond a scientific interest in what was going on and a desire to learn the trade myself. That doesn't mean I wasn't mindful of what happened, it's just that it gets easier and it gets to be more about the bigger picture than one or two deaths. I can only say that time offers this and it was much easier than last year's Pig. And I can not stress how lucky I am to have a professional team like this come out, for what I consider a good price: fifty dollars a pig, talk about a reasonable fee. Then I buy my meat back from him at the shop later this week, all frozen and packaged and ready to enjoy and the smoked pieces a week or two later. As a small farmer with a full time job and other things to tend to (this day also included a farrier visit and 30-bale hay drop off) it is a blessing having pros come and take care of this and then offer me packaged roasts and sausages for a dollar a pound (or whatever his rate was). I am expecting to pay around 280 dollars total for the whole ordeal. Not bad for 140+ pounds of home-grown meat.

Of course, it isn't about the money or the deal. It's all more than that, but what I want to stress before I head off to bed is this: You can raise your own bacon and hams. It wasn't hard, or expensive, nor did it take a lot of space or equipment. I built them a pen in the corner of a barn with hog panels, deep bedded them every other day, and offered them fresh water and food morning and night. There were no vets or antibiotics, wormers or pills, or anything unnatural used in their rearing. They got to keep their tails, keep their noses free of rings, and spent every day being scratched behind the ears and given space to root into the hay looking for corn kernels, tussle, and scratch their big asses on the wall. This kind of pork is rare in this country, but only because folks like us haven't had at it yet. If you have the land and space, I say give a pig a try next year if you enjoy pork, bacon, or hams. It is nothing a person with a house cat can't handle, and you don't have to be there like I was at their ends. That said, I bet there are mobile units like Greg's all over the nation and you can find out about them from livestock vets, auction houses, feed stores, and friends. You can do this too, if you want to. I promise you that.

Thank you for reading along. Hope some of you get to come over and enjoy their reincarnation as farm meals in the months to come.

goodbye kevin and bacon

2012-01-29T10:05:00.005-05:00

Just in from feeding Kevin and Bacon their last meal, homemade apple pie. They ate like they always do, with pure bliss and purpose. In a few hours the butcher will be here to shoot, hang, skin and disembowel the two hogs and then load them into his truck to be wrapped and smoked. The next time I see them they'll be in plastic vacuum sealed freezer wrap as chops, bacon, and hams.

While I am prepared, I am always emotionally hit by such events. I don't feel guilt, but you can't raise an animal from a young thing without bonding on some level. So in a way, the Slaughter day is both a celebration of bounty and a time to pause, be grateful, and understand on a visceral level how much blood goes into glossy photos of restaurant dishes in magazines. And after a short spread of time that gore ebbs and flows into recipes and gatherings with friends, or sausage making work parties over home brewed mugs of beer. The death becomes a reason another story goes on. That is how it has always worked, but having a farm means I get to understand it. The difference between watching birds and hang gliding.

I have chosen to be a part of the entire story of my future meals. It's better this way.

P.S. The next post will be about the slaughter, there will be photos and content about how a farm kill and slaughter is done on small homesteads. If it makes you uncomfortable to see dead animals, skip the post. I think this is fair warning.

a bunch of black sheep

2012-01-29T07:06:00.003-05:00

When I planned to host this winter wool work class I had visualized something very particular. I imagined people driving through snow squalls to the farm from apartments and cities all around, braving the winter weather to be welcomed into the warm embrace of a wood stove. I imagined snow-covered sheep watching us from their hay piles, a pony warm in his stall, and folks knitting to music and noshing on comfort foods like soup and chili spooned out of mason jars, lost in conversation. That wasn't how it went at all.

Instead the thermometer almost reached fifty degrees and I stood inside the hay bale chicken coop holding a 6-week old Freedom Ranger by the body explaining their story and place in the farm's plan. I was in a light sweater, jeans, and bandana. I wasn't even wearing wool. You could see every puddle of water, legions of mud, ugly bit of trash, and every other imperfection and ugliness working farms have. There was a flooded mud room with a black pipe, a cat scared to leave her realm behind the washing machine, and folks who booked a hotel room downtown ended up being bumped to a local B&B because Gordon Ramsey's film crew needed their hotel rooms...

That said: yesterday's Black Sheep Wool Workshop was one of the best events the far has ever hosted. Readers from Montreal, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, and just down route 22. The weather wasn't frightful, but the food was plentiful and all the guests seemed to enjoy the event. We started out with brunch, then went on a short warm-weather farm tour, then came inside to learn how to handwash, card, and spin wool with a drop spindle. After a while the energy of the event took over and I just stood back and watched. Two people were winding the drum carder with four others sat with their spindles. A pair of dedicated attendees with an open copy of the ol' Reader Digests' Back to Basics, tried to get someone's spinning machine to work. Others were already starting to learn how to knit on the supplies they brought from home. Tim Bronson stopped by for a few minutes to take photos of the event and the pigs' last day. (In a few hours they will be slaughtered). I can't wait to show you what he shot, including many photos of King George, who wasn't shy of crowds and spent the day in the middle of the workshop, loafing about, large and in charge.

After a hearty lunch we all just enjoyed the quiet fervor of a knitting circle, people sitting all over the farmhouse knitting and chatting until the lights started to fade and the table lamps needed to be lit. It went well over the usual workshop end time and none of us cared, knitting is a five-course meal.

I loved this event, and I especially enjoyed meeting the folks who I only know as emails and comment names. Everyone was so kind, some brought gifts (like Taylor Ham Pork Roll from New Jersey, jonquils, and letterpress images of sheep, horses, and bee keeping!) and there was left over food to feed several more people than I planned, folks went home with whatever I could unload on them. Some left with garbage bags of fleece (no joke). Some left with a plate of pie and a smile.

Some folks left eventually because they were going to be filmed at the "reveal dinner" of the new Gordon Ramsey show filming downtown. They had no idea (neither did I) when they signed up for a CAF class it would coincide with the Cambridge Hotel's filming of Hotel Hell , and while they did get bumped from their rooms they were invited to be at the dinner and in the television program. Who knew they'd learn to hand wash wool and then get on a reality show?

So today, post workshop is a day of reloading and re-upping the farms needs. The farrier comes today (new appointment time), the pigs are done in, and a truckload of hay gets delivered. Usual management, plus heavier moments like gunshots and butchering. It'll be a long one, but rest at sunset will be savored like Cathy Daughton's potato soup...

Next Saturday: Mountain Music Workshop at the farm! Still 3 spots left if anyone wants to come and learn the basics of making traditional stringed Appalachian style music part of your life. It starts with wanting to learn. It is that simple.

the morning before a workshop

2012-01-28T06:37:00.000-05:00

The roosters sing, and the fires are burning bright. The cat is curled up in his chair and the dogs are stirring. Bread rises and bakes and stray coffee beans and grinds swirl around the flour swirls on the countertop. Two apple pies I baked last night were once hanging from a New York orchard's trees. Eggs from the hens outside and whipped up into quiche pourin' and kale from my friends' farm are prepped to be baked inside with salt and pepper and local cheeses. The mason jars are all washed new and set out on the drying rack to get ready for Firecracker Farm's home-grown potato soup and beef chili. If you didn't know about the 20 drop spindles and 8 bags of raw wool upstairs you might think this was a feast or a cooking class, but it is just humble, simple food to make people warm and well for a day dedicated to fiber.

My guest is still asleep upstairs and I'll hop in the shower soon, but soon as I am out and cleaned up, and the sun is too, I'll head outside to see to the birds and beasts and then come inside to the warmth and hot coffee on the stove top and call that a beginning.

I'm excited for today, and I hope you are too.

chill that wort, son

2012-01-28T06:27:00.001-05:00

Only 8 spots left for Antlerstock 2012

2012-01-27T13:14:00.002-05:00

email me if you want them. You can pay for the spots via credit card through paypal, if that is what you prefer. Hope you can make it!

sheep to the rescue!

2012-01-27T08:44:00.005-05:00

The beautiful few inches of snow covering the farm last night were demolished in a torrent of rain. It rained all night, nonstop, and in the morning there was a real stream flowing from the crawl space behind the washing machine in the mudroom out onto the floor. Lilly was perched on the dryer, angry and scared. I looked with a flashlight and saw that an overflow/drain pipe was spewing water. I knew it was coming from outside. I grabbed a shovel and pickax and went to dig out a new path for the water to flow (instead of into my home). What I saw was a nonstop funneling of water going under the house, all the water from the driveway was pooling right to the natural whirlpool to Lilly's lair.

I had to divert the flow. I tried using the axe and shovel but the ground was frozen and it would take forever. I realized I needed sandbags and some sort of plug. I didn't have either. Instead I used pieces of firewood to make a dam, and then watched the water flow slow down (a good step). Hmm...what would work as a plug that could fill that space, slow down (but not stop) the natural drainage), and me flexible enough to fit that wonky area?

FLEECE!

I grabbed a handful of raw sheep's wool and filled in the hole. It did the trick great. The stream has stopped. The mudroom is drying out. And the cat isn't swimming. Sheep to the rescue!

UPDATE!The fleece worked for about half an hour, but it was a finger in the dam. I needed to line the entire water entry-point with fleece (which you can see in the photo) and then run to the hardware store to buy hose and clamps and run a tube from the pipe spewing water inside to outside the house. It isn't pretty, but I did it. No need to call in rescue rangers! It just took sheep, hose, ducttape, and then more sheep!

P.S. Sorry Wool Workshop friends, this farm will not be covered in snow. It will not be pretty. It will be slush and mud and pools of standing water and wet sheep. But I promise we'll be comfy inside, thanks to the wool.

next time, too

2012-01-26T20:55:00.005-05:00

I have watched Braveheart more than any other movie, ever.
Hundreds of viewings, at least.
I still cry. Every time.

growing up gray

2012-01-26T19:48:00.001-05:00

nuggetless

2012-01-26T19:44:00.000-05:00

a correspondence course in subterfuge

2012-01-26T18:41:00.002-05:00

Snow came, soft as a snow globe turned gently upside down and set on a child's night stand. I was out by the barn, taking deep breaths in as I worked. Flakes danced around my face, fat and happy as tummy-rubbing Buddhas. I wanted to enjoy it, I tried to enjoy it, but I was too busy yelling at my horse.

"DO. NOT. PLAY. WITH. KNOTS!" I yelled up at the pasture gate, raising a pitchfork in the air and shaking it at Jasper. He was in the pasture by the large metal gate with his lead rope in his mouth. He had been watching me load, haul, and dump18 wheelbarrow loads of hay and horseshit from the deep bedding of his 12x10ft indoor stall. When I walked the pony out to the pasture (he was raring to go, that was a challenge in itself on slippery ground) I used his orange lead rope and tied it around the gate to shut it tight. The previously frozen chain that usually held it shut was currently defrosting near the wood stove. I didn't think anything of it when I tied him in. I'd done the trick a hundred times. But as I looked up from barrow 12 at my little dappled asshole, he was pulling the lead rope knot out as discreetly as if he took a correspondence course in subterfuge while I was at the office. He had untied the knot with his teeth and was flinging the lead rope in the air like a cat plays with a mouse. I was about five minutes ahead of him pushing the gate open and leaving for a jaunt around the mountain. Maybe up the hill a little ways to greet one of the other three homes with horses.

I marched up and tied the gate shut to a horse with a twinkle in his eyes. I locked it up with some baling twine. That'll showed him, I thought. And if it didn't, the giant truck unloading a cord of dried, seasoned, split firewood certainly would prick those ears to attention. I rubbed his nose and told him his room service was almost done.

Today was Jasper's day. His stall was cleaned and laid out with fresh straw. He got a long recess in the pasture to run and scamp around, and a treat of carrots and an apple from me. I tied him up to an apple tree to give him a long curry combing in the field. He stood as it the plastic teeth were the best feeling he's had in days. He was then lead back to a stall of soft bedding, fresh water in a frost-proof bucket, a little grain and a cookie in his feeder. It was nice to spend an afternoon dedicated to the little guy. Tomorrow the farrier comes to trim his feet and meet, as he said in a bemused voice on the phone, "The only POA in America pulling logs..."

It was good doing that sort of work too. Winter is such a time of resting muscles and fattening bellies, so to spend a day heaving pitchforks and dumping the manure was nice. At one point I remember thinking as I pitched the acrid sheets of hay, urine, and feces into the small barrow this is making earth, and I swelled with a bit of pride for being a human animal that makes soil, adds to the fertility of a place. It is impossible not too when you live with livestock. Their care, feeding, life, death...all of it feeds the ground as much as it feeds us. And today I added a long trail of composting grass and rich dung to a piece of land screaming to come back to the small farm it once was, long before I was born. Sure, you need to pop some ibuprofen and get out the heating pad when you're done but it's worth it. It is always worth it.

Oh, and Jasper ran like a jackrabbit away from the wood truck! So HA!

a rough idea

2012-01-26T12:15:00.001-05:00

first taste of homebrew

2012-01-25T21:07:00.001-05:00

i'm on it!

2012-01-25T20:26:00.004-05:00

I would like to share that in the past two weeks I have received hundreds of emails, facebook messages, people leaning over cubicle walls, posts, or comments about the Cuppow mason jar lid. For all concerned: I ordered two.

Coworkers sick of me spilling coffee out of mason jars and mugs are thrilled to know it. I have a sippy cup, or as I say "It's a travel mug when made for adults." Thank you for the suggest, but rest-assured I am on it.

this must be the place

2012-01-25T13:42:00.000-05:00

COFFER from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.

Birchthorn: Interlude One

2012-01-25T12:48:00.006-05:00

E. Mauren was a patient man. A war, 60 years of farming, and 17 grandchildren taught a person to be still when he had to be. He was just outside milking barn's main doors leaning on his cane, staring at one of his favorite jersey heifers standing alone. She was about 300 yards away on a gently sloping hillside. A brown figure surrounded by white, clean, snow nearly at the forest's edge. The heifer had not moved in nearly fifteen minutes he had locked eyes on her. She did not flick an ear, swish her long tail, or lift a hoof. For a healthy second-calf milker to be frozen where she stood was making him was churning his stomach. He remained still as a raptor, watching without so much as a blink. Terrified that if he did he'd miss the movement that would wash him over with sweet relief. The heifer remained a statue. Something wasn't right at White Creek Farm.

He first noticed her away from the rest of the herd when chores started at dawn. He usually liked to have his morning work completed before Sun Up, but today had not allowed the habit. He had risen at the chimes of his brass alarm clock at 4:15, just as he had every morning since he took the farm over from his father after the war. He'd married his girl, had six children, and watched his family blossom here in the Battenkill Valley while he tended his beloved cow. The children were grown, and his dear wife had passed from the flu last winter when it spread through the county like wildfire. He truly believed it was the cows that saved him. That so many years outdoors among the rust, woods, blood, milk, and dung had build an immune system no sickness had touched since he laid in a hospital bed after the battle of Cold Harbor, so many lifetimes ago...

He got dressed in heavy wool and his favorite leather fur-lined cap and started the coffee while he fetched a lantern and lighting supplies from the cabinet. While lighting his favorite black lantern in the farmhouse's kitchen, he was thinking about how much he liked his oil light, how he hated the harsh gas lights of those new Colemans every other dairyman was raving about. He was startled out of his murmuring by a sudden and violent wind that shook the entire home, knocking cans off the shelf and rattling the windows. The fire in the kitchen's hearth spat and howled as the wind caused such a strong draw it shot up and filled the room with orange light. He spilled his metal tin of lamp oil, and sent an angry curse into the room. A torrent of snow screamed across his valley farm. He tried to go outside, but didn't make it five paces before he felt nearly lost in the white-out, chilled into his bones, and turned around and back towards the nearly-diminished light of his kitchen's fireplace. He had never seen such weather. It swallowed everything.

He crawled back inside and shut the door behind him panting, sliding to the floor. He then tried to listen to the farm in the storm. He couldn't hear anything but cloven air and angry branches breaking from the force. He prayed that the herd was near the barn, taking shelter in the sturdy walls his great grandfather built when this country was new. He remained on the floor, and let himself rest his eyes while it blew and fussed behind the 3 inches of maple that made his barrier. Without meaning to, he fell asleep, and when he awoke it was dawn and the farm seemed as unaffected as the stare of the Virgin mother statue outside his garden wall.

When he did start at his morning chores he was calmed at the site of his girls by the old red barn, near their feeders and water trough. He fed them fresh hay by the pitchfork, and noticed they all seemed more skittish than usual. Their eyes showing more of the white than he cared to see. As he pitched what his body could afford, slowly and with much strain, he raised his scratchy voice in a loud, "Home Girls! Home!" hoping to round up all the stragglers up near the tree line, probably taking shelter in the woods from the storm. All came down in their ambling, eager, way save for the brown heifer near the trees. It stood still. And as he called, watched, went about chores and heading inside for a bowl of oatmeal with butter and maple syrup, she remained standing.

And so now it was an hour since he first saw the girl on the hill, and he stood near his barn afraid. His son, who lived on the opposite end of his property—a mile away near the main road into town—would not be here to start morning milking with his sons for another hour. Mauren decided to investigate. He could not wait through the suspense, and if something was wrong he would need to know so to properly convey it to his son. He fetched his shotgun and a few medical supplies into a shoulder satchel and slowly started up the pasture.

Crows watched from high in the birch branches as Mauren slowly climbed the hill. He stopped twice, to look around as much as to catch his breath. Curious? There were no prints in the snow, no disruption at all on the entire hillside. Yet he could see the trails through the powder plainly on the other side of the barn where the cattle ate. he could follow them to places in the forest a half mile away. But not over here? This stretch of snow was virgin ground, save for the tracks he made behind him.

Now, just fifty feet from the heifer he could see she was dead. Dead and frozen where she stood. He had heard stories of this happening, but never saw such a thing in his own life nor knew anyone who had. As he gained on her his curiosity grew. She was, without a doubt, dead as a hammer but she had actually died mid-stride. Two hooves were off the ground reaching forward, and her face placid as a calf's. But something was odd about her front left foot. It was black. It seemed skinnier too? He stopped walking, not ten feet from the animal, and then looked harder. It was bone. The front hoof was nothing but black bone reaching out trying to step. It was clean as glass. No sign of blood, sinew, or skin? Then he noticed the same from the back left leg, planted firmly into 5 inches of snow but also nothing but black clean bones. As he stepped closer, he unintentionally held his breath. His heart pounding in his temples, his eyes wide and mouth agape.

As he turned the corner on the giant animal he clasped his hand into a fist and shoved it into his mouth to bite into it. An involuntary reaction he hadn't succumbed to since the first terrors of war when he was 18. The drastic lurch for his teeth made him drop his shotgun and cane and then didn't even flinch when the buckshot exploded into the dead cow in front of him. The side of the beast facing the forest was gone, save for the black skeleton, perfectly in place as if a surgeon had come in the night and sawed the animal in two. A perfect division right down the spine left one side flesh and the other just bone. It looked as through some how the animal was frozen, picked up, and dipped into deadly acids that perfectly consumed the flesh to the water's level, then lifted out and set back on the ground. The muscle and organs that had been spliced were frozen too, not a drop of blood or a single sick smell filled the air. The bones on the flesh side seemed white, normal. But the bones facing the old farmer were black as if charcoal. He composed himself, reached out to touch the bowl of the shoulder blade, expecting soot on his fingers, but recoiled back his hand at the shock of their metallic firmness. Never in his life had he seen such a sight. Not in books, or side shows, or even posters at the animal doctors' offices. This was abomination.

He reached a rattling hand into his coat pocket, searching for his rosary. He found it, solid ground at last, and started chanting through Hail Marys as he stared into the cavern of the heifer's ribs. Something caught the light, a flash of gold. He leaned forward, slowly, and saw that hanging from a black ribbon was a golden locket. He prayed louder, as if to scream sense into the moment, as if to tame the experience into understanding. As he shouted, HAIL MARY, FULL OF GRACE. OUR LORD IS WITH THEE.." He reached into the black ribcage to remove the small pendant from the bones. It came away gently. It looked identical to the last time he saw it. He could never forget the family heirloom. His wife was buried with last winter.

Shaking now, covered in cold sweat, Mauren took the locket into his cold hands and forced it open. If this really was his wife's jewelry their pictures taken in New York City in Central Park would be inside. His hands were clumsy, cracking, and starting to bleed from the cold but he persisted even through the shaking, his rosary dangling around the black ribbon in his hands. Inside on her side of the locket was his wife. She looked just as he remembered the photo, smiling under a flowering dogwood tree. Then he stopped his persistent prayer. Stood silent in the snow.

His photo was gone.

Catch up on the story:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

Birchthorn is a work of community fiction, a story of the Battenkill Valley in 1919 dealing with a mysterious creature of local legend and song. Readers of the CAF farm blog are part of it, becoming characters, names of places, horses, and so forth. Reader comments and suggestions help move the plot along, and create the mystery. Each chapter is supported through donations to the "Story Pot" which is the donate button on this blog, on the right-hand side, under the heart image. If you like what you read, and want to read more, please throw in a dollar or two and leave a comment with your thoughts and ideas. If may become legend!

good morning from cold antler farm!

2012-01-24T07:05:00.000-05:00

ice rain and respite

2012-01-23T19:40:00.003-05:00

No part of this farm is level. None of it. The land all slopes downhill to some degree and the farmhouse's old floors are so warped from a century and a half of human life and weather, no ball set down won't roll. Usually this isn't worth mentioning or concerning yourself with, but when the entire thing is covered in ice in a hard rain at night: it matters.

Chores tonight were long, wet, and rough. I think about the people who email me wishing they had a farm of their own and wonder if they too would want an evening like the one I just pushed through? Melting snow from the warm winter day quickly covered the earth in a saran-wrap layer of ice. Even with my good snow-gripping boots I had to slow down. I had to really slow down when it came to carrying 80-pounds of water or a 50-pound sack of feed. Every step tonight was a measured and calculated motion. Add a wheeled cart and some plastic-battery lantern and it ante ups to a ballet. You have to know your body the way a yogi does, or a dressage rider. Everything you do from toes gripping around stones through a boot to a deep exhalation while you pull hay bales down from the high places could mean a slip or a fall. So you think. You go as slow as your mind needs you to. You consider things. You get very, very wet.

I am proud that I am gaining focus. I didn't fall down once (though I did spill water all over my jeans), and no part of me is bleeding, bruised, or even scratched. A homestead kindles a messy grace.

I'm inside now and grateful that I did the dishes and set out firewood before I left for work. Chores are done, tea is on the stovetop, and I am fed and feeling fine with a glass of cider. I just fed the cats and spent some time with the timid Lilly, who meows and lets me pet her honey pelt, and then eats wildly before hiding back behind the washing machine. I'm just grateful she is so used to the litter box she uses them, and isn't filling the house with cat scent. Little things like this make me beam.

I have changed into my "post-farming clothes". I have fallen in love (this is not a dramatization, but love) with Thai Fishing Pants. I come inside and wash up, and change into clothing so impractical for farm chores it is laughable. However! These clothes are perfect for meditation, yoga, sitting cross-legged with a bowl of rice and beans, or sitting with a fat cat and a book. The Thai pants are practically sheets—comfortable swathes of airy and clean cotton you wrap around your waist like a hug and then tie around you with a fabric belt. A comfortable tank top later and you feel equally ready to do downward dogs or cook dinner. It's a silly luxury but a happy habit, using a pair of baggy pants to celebrate being dry and warm.

And I am dry and warm and happy as a clam. Its an easy emotion to drum up when just an hour ago I was out in that endzone of icepiss. I say that with a coy smile, but the truth is, I love nights like this. Even when I am out there amongst the concentration and cold rain—I love that kind of work. I love it because no matter how cold, or miserable, or wet, or whatever it is out there I am literally a couple dozen feet from certain comforts. You don't have to fret about pain or wet gloves on a temperate night that close to your hot shower, warm meals, and dry bed.

I have a theory that people drawn to homesteading and comfort pornographers. I mean that. We are so serious and into creature comforts that we will put ourselves through all sorts of physical exertion, animal slop, weather, and strife because we all secretly know that the more we put into the world outside our farmhouse door the better that woodstove and fiddle feel when we return from the war. It's twisted, really. I bet I am not the only one out there with a horse or chickens who worships her shower and bathrobe and revels in a favorite blanket and movie? This kind of farming makes the simplest things: clean pants, warm soup, cold beers - seem like coveted jewels. I adore this modest sadism, it feels normal. How far removed must we be from normal human toil to be irreverent about such things? I like this about our tribe, this desire to sink into comfort that we earn. It's not being lazy, and it's not mindless relaxation, but instead the kind of end-of-toil prayer we call respite.

Does your town come with an abandoned hospital?

2012-01-22T19:37:00.004-05:00

Mine does. Check out this amazing set of photos off flickr, by IanC83. It's a hospital right here in Cambridge, downtown, that has been empty since it shut down in 2003. Just two miles from Cold Antler Farm is this hot mess. Where are the Ghost Hunter shows? This is golden!

Think I should put it in Birchthorn?

What a night!

2012-01-22T18:33:00.009-05:00

The event at Battenkill Books was my best-attended book event ever. Standing room only, and an hour of reading, conversations, and questions. Folks came from a few states, shook hands, listened politely, and even laughed at my jokes. Jon did a wonderful introduction for me and Connie. I read a bit and talked a bit, and afterword made some new friends. A woman up the road who belongs to the Washington County Draft Association (I didn't even know about them) offered to teach me driving with her Percheron. A teacher from Saratoga just bought a homestead near mine, and we got to say hello to each other. A veterinarian with a Border Collie gave me a truckload (no joke) of Jacobs' wool and introduced me to her red Border Collie in her car (Gibson likes any event with girls). Jim Kunstler gave me a box of pots and pans for the farm. My coworkers brought me pie, and Cathy Daughton brought me sharpies tied up in a bow! Others I am forgetting to mention made the night complete as well. It was almost surreal, to see that amount of folks wanting to hear about my tornado of a dream. Soon as Jon sends some photos I'll post them! If I sound like I am gushing it's because I am. I'm just floored. Thank you all, so much.

And now for my next trick I will feed all the animals, have a glass of wine, and go to bed.

photo by jon katz. I need to hit the juicer, I can see that much.

adaptation

2012-01-22T09:52:00.003-05:00

Common Sense Farm is giving me an old metal nesting box kit like this. It's old, rusty. I don't care. So what am I going to do with it? I'm going to sand it. Spray paint it. And mount it as a bookshelf on my wall for all my livestock care books and manuals.

Score.

ruth stout's garden

2012-01-22T07:41:00.004-05:00

Thanks for sending this my way, Meg!

many hands...

2012-01-21T15:18:00.007-05:00

Spent a few hours today with two good women, Alice and Kathryn, who gave up a Saturday afternoon to held saw, sand, glue and screw together 20 drop spindles for next week's big wool workshop. We had a beef chili with some crusty bread, bottles of juicy yerba mate, and talked like old friends while we worked. Within no time all the spindles were completed and we were all shocked at how fast our little factory put out the product!

When the work was done we walked around the farm to see the hay bale chicks, pet the pigs, talk to Jasper, and check for eggs. It was cold, around 18 degrees, but they were both good sports. When we came back inside we just hung around the Bun Baker rubbing our hands and keeping the conversation going.

Thank you ladies, it was a pleasure.

Come to the Barnheart Launch Party Tomorrow!

2012-01-21T15:12:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow, right here in my adopted hometown of Cambridge New York, Battenkill Books of Main Street will be hosting the Launch Party for Barnheart! Come on down to hear good friend and famed author Jon Katz introduce me as the crazy farmer I am, and enjoy in some reading, talking, and food and conversation. It'll be an informal and warm event in a wonderful little bookstore championed by Proprietress, Connie Brooks. Connie is just back from an Indie Bookstore Owner conference in New Orleans, and she damn well deserved the vacation. She's been working harder than anyone in the book world, keeping a bookstore thriving in a town of roughly 2,000 people. She is the one who approached Jon and I to sell autographed copies. I don't think she expected to sell 1500 combined!

What I love about Battenkill Books is it is Our store. The only place I know where you can get Backwoods Home, Orion, The Believer, Chickens Magazine, People, and The Economist on the same shelf. It's the size of a 3 car garage and yet has a larger farming and homesteading section than Barnes and Noble. I'll be there tomorrow night and I hope some of you can make it, say hi, pat Gibson on the head and shake hands. Have a cup of coffee and hear about all my big dreams and share some of your own. I look forward to it. I hope you do, too. And I promise Gibson will look more excited than he does in this post paw-printing photo!

More information at Battenkillbooks.com

wool past the winter sunset

2012-01-20T18:35:00.000-05:00

so they grow

2012-01-20T18:21:00.003-05:00

The winter meat bird project, so far, has been nothing but easy, inexpensive, and holding strong. A rectangular structure of haybales held in place with t-posts, and roofed with some metal sheeting is all their "barn" really is. One heatlamp hangs inside, and the 29 red fat birds make it home. Twice a day they get fresh water and feed—and they seem to need fresh bedding every other—but that is the extent of the work. I don't recommend raising meat birds when it is 10 degrees outside but for this farm they are growing fine.

Either a local farm or I will butcher these birds. If I do it I will only do four at a time, weekly, and deliver the two fresh birds to Steve and Molly to eat or freeze. I daydreamed about this while hauling water buckets to Jasper today. Thought about handing a couple of people I care for a meal I spent weeks tending to, like a little garden, and knowing they will savor and sustain their day from it. So simple, so very very simple. But I really look forward to handing him that cooler in a few weeks, and shaking his hand, and telling him the River Cottage Meat Book's herb chicken recipe is all you need the rest of your life, and to enjoy it.

If Jenna from college could meet Farmer Jenna of her own future, she would shudder at this post. Things change.

Antlerstock 2012 is going to be HUGE!

2012-01-20T11:21:00.004-05:00

Antlerstock 2012 will be held here at Cold Antler on Columbus Day Weekend. I'm expanding the workshops, events, and options this year and starting it (informally) on Friday night for those who come into town early and would like dinner on me. There will be a campfire and burgers and dogs for anyone who wants to enjoy a totally class-free evening of music and firelight. BYOB.

The classes offered last year will be the same, but expanded to include all sorts of grand new teachers and animals! A Polyface Farm intern-come-dairy goat farmer will be here with some of her Nigerians, with a class on the littlest-dairy herd in the city. Learn about a dairy animal you can raise around the size of a labrador.

Brett will be back, of course, with more axe man skills such as backyard timber work, axe throwing at targets, felling trees, chopping, and Jasper will be helping to pull timber out of the forest as well, in harness. There won't be a working horse class -so to speak- but I will talk more in depth about being a new equine owner and what goes into the spirit and education of a working pony. I'll show you the harnesses and how to put one on. You'll see my own homegrown methods of working with the 11.2 hand beast I call Sir, on occasion.

There will be a new class on raising pigs, taught by a pig farmer. Also adding workshop on honey and the hive and homebrewing beer or ciser. A sourdough starter bread workshop is also a welcomed addition. All of this happens along with constant classes and demonstrations. You have to pick and choose what you want to do, but it is always a blast. There will be an optional trip down to Common Sense Farm to learn about herbalism and their farm. There will be a herding demo with Gibson and I, plus the usual classes in cheesemaking, music, soapmaking, canning, and more.

Breakfasts are quiche and homemade apple pies as well as apple cider donuts and hot cups of strong locally roasted coffee. Lunch is hearty and hot, chili, stews, soups and pork bbq. All of the food is grass fed, free range, and locally sourced as possible. Apples from the farm's trees will be pressed and served as cold cider. Eat all you can and be merry!

This is the Mother of all Cold Antler Farm events, and held during the peak foliage time Veryork has to offer. Already it is 2/3rds filled up but there are still some spaces for folks if they would like to attend. the plan for next year is to have a tighter schedule and help from my friend Raven to organize it the way only her mind can. I think it'll make last years seem like more of a gathering than a festival, and for anyone wondering, yes, the pumpkin procession to the Saturday Night Bonfire will be back!

email me at jenna@itsafarwalk.com if interested! First come, first served as far as reservations go!

photo by timothy bronson of 468photography.com

no lambs?

2012-01-20T10:07:00.006-05:00

I started filming the next webinar, set for the month of February today. It'll be a Wool 101 type video, going from raw sheep's wool to yarn with nothing but some dish soap in a tub, a carder (hand or drum), and a drop spindle. Wool is all over my head right now. I'm sending out CSA share packages, planning a spindle gathering for tomorrow, and all of it to prepare for the at-farm workshop next week. This place looks more like a yarn factory than a farmhouse right now.

The living woolies outside, the ones on the hoof, seem to be wintering well. I'd like them a little fatter, but everyone is in hearty spirits and ambling through the light dusting of snow we received last night. I'm a little sad to announce there may not be lambs this year. I don't have much faith in Atlas, that he did the job. It wasn't his fault as much as it was this shepherd's failure to offer the right circumstances for success. I put a too-small and too-young ram in with a flock already protected by a wether (named Sal) who still thinks he can work the ladies. So little Atlas couldn't sneak in any hits unless Sal was penned up or not watching. I don't know if the work was done or not, but I didn't see any real gripping evidence it was.

What may happen is one or two ewes might be pregnant, but not the numbers I was hoping for. I suppose only time will tell. In the meantime, I will treat them all as if they were pregnant and start feeding them accordingly, same with their mineral intake. I'll know for certain in late March or April if any little ones will arrive. I hope so. It's kind of a tough blow, but a lesson well learned.

photo by timothy bronson of 468photography.com

drop spindle work party?

2012-01-19T09:02:00.005-05:00

If any local folks would like to come by this Saturday for an indoor work party, I will be making 20 drop spindles and preparing wool for next weekend. It'll be a day of hand saws, wood glue, and wool but I'll make some good lunch and you can take home a spindle for yourself and pet a pony.

11-2pm, if you're free send me an email.

P.S. Folks coming to the first wool workshop, it is next Saturday the 28th at 10AM. Hope you are excited?!

smoke, bracers, and great horns

2012-01-18T20:47:00.003-05:00

Little mistakes change everything, change the whole pull of the day. On the way home from work I had planned to stop at Wayside to pick up a bucket of scraps for the pigs and some 25lb bags of feed to hold me over until Friday. The little general store always has a few sacks of layer feed, rabbit pellets, cracked corn, and scratch for folks like me. I did stop at Wayside, but other things on my mind and conversations in the store made me forget the point of the trip.

I went home and went about the pre-farm chores the farmhouse and its inhabitants demand before I head outside to the livestock. The dogs are walked and fed, George and Lilly get their fresh water and kibble too. Then I try to suss out what will feed me and what (if any) tasks can be done that night to help me unwind from the day. I had already started preparing to bottle some stout beer when I realized the pigs had just enough for a single meal and the rabbits and chickens of Cold Antler would wake up famished. I forgot the feed. This wouldn't do.

If it was just the pigs, or just the dogs, or just the chickens I would simply cook for them at home. On more than one occasion the dogs had rice and scrambled eggs or the chickens a pot of cooked pasta to fill them up till proper rations could be acquired. But I wasn't about to cook for 60. I told Gibson we'd be heading out, and he ran to the front door, tail wagging.

Back now from the errand, and all the animals at Cold Antler are either chewing, slurping, pecking, or ruminating as I type. There's a pony keg of beer I'm going to bottle soon, and after that I'll send out some emails to folks asking on workshops and ads. The mortgage payment will go out this month, and like every month, it is at the last minute, but making it. For that I am proud, and will stay up late as it takes to cover the truck payment too.

I'm taking the break now because writing to you folks has become a meditation and a chance to unwind for me. I so look forward to it. I can't haul wood or water or bottle beer while typing, I can just stand and think and breath.

So what does that extra trip on a work night mean, really? It means it will be another hour before bed, and things will slip. It means another day that an interview request goes unanswered, or a chapter isn't written for a contracted book. It means that the list of addresses to mail wool off too might sit another day. It means a lot, it took a lot.

I felt the tiredness scoop me up as I lifted the third bag of feed into the back of the truck at Wayside, and I stepped aside from it. The way you might step out of the wafts of smoke from a campfire if the wind sends it your way. You don't argue with the smoke, you know it is real and present, but you can't deal with it so you keep moving. I have learned to move tired, and move smart. The farm is covered with ice now, and slipping on a patch with 80 pounds of water in tow, or moving the full garden cart of haybales could mean serious injury. So you slow down. You hold onto things with all your weight before you take the next step. I'm a natural klutz, and my body proves it, covered with burns and scars and bruises. However, I have learned that some areas can not be cut deep or you are in grave danger. I farm with bracers on my wrists if they are ever exposed. Honest to God bracers, little leather cuffs around my wrists because I have nearly sliced them open on wires, tools, or fencing. When you farm like I do you need armor.

The winter here is always a little trying. The cold takes morale, and sometimes, lives. I lost one Freedom Ranger this week when the temperature dropped to -10. A runt without much fat on him. I removed him without ceremony and dropped a fresh load of straw down for bedding for the other 29. Tonight as I was listening to an audiobook on my iPhone during extra-late night chores I walked past the hay bale coop and was shocked by the heavy WffftWFFFTWttff of flapping wings taking off. A Great Horned Owl had been feet away from me on a fence post. I watched it take off terrified from the shock and in awe that such animals share my property (or more accurately, I share theirs). Then I remembered the catamount sightings earlier this month and took the story out of my ears. If a bird could sneak up on me out in the open, a catamount could chomp me up easier than I could order Chinese take out.

Which is what I ate for dinner. I would have cooked something but I forgot the feed. Not very authentic, not even that good, but it was the first meal of the day and I savored the spicy veggies and rice. I chewed the way Sal chews up under the apple trees in summer. I chewed like a girl who needed calories. I chewed like someone who knew their take-out days were numbered. When you change your whole plan for backyard chickens and perform their humble funeral rites, you chew different.

Thank you for reading this another day.

Breakfast in the Backyard

2012-01-18T14:58:00.003-05:00

Breakfast in the Backyard
Saturday April 7th 2012
This is crash course in how to raise backyard chickens for beginners, and get this, it comes with chickens! Everyone who signs up for the all-day workshop will go home with three herrtiage breed laying chicks and a copy of my signed beginner’s book: Chick Days. The Chicken 101 will cover brooders, housing, feed, healtcare, HOAs, nosey neighbors and more. The spread will include breads, quiche, and other goods made with free-ranging eggs.

You’ll go back to your own coop with your new birds and everything you need to know to raise them right. This is a great opportunity for people who just need that friendly push to take the plunge into the poultry world. No experience with chickens needed to attend, and I am confident anyone leaving CAF that day will go home with gumption that they can raise their peeps to laying hens come fall.

The workshop will start at 10AM and include a brunch spread, coffee, and juice and start with group intros and lecture on how I came into birds and how they changed me into the farmer I aim to be. There will be a tour of the coop and farm and more discussions on housing, healthcare, and a Q&A period as well. Lunch is also provided (CAF pork bbq!)and after that we'll take a trip down to Common Sense Farm to see their HUGE and amazing chick operation in their brand new barn project. See their special housing (called Cotes) for their jungle fowl and talk with some experts there and see the hatchery.

I would also like to host a group discussion about the importance of self-reliance and the first steps of adding animal husbandry to our modern backyards: both for food security and local production. It will be a day of like minds, baby chickens, farm animals, and probably a fiddle tune or two. Sign up by emailing me at jenna@itsafarwalk.com

Cost: $150 for the full day, three birds, book, tour, and two meals. Discounts for pairs.

write your congressfolk or answer to maude

2012-01-18T12:01:00.004-05:00

...and now a break from our regular programming

2012-01-17T21:33:00.006-05:00

photo by tim bronson

what isn't authentic?

2012-01-17T12:37:00.003-05:00

One of the keystones to modern homesteading, be it rural or urban, is striving for a more authentic life. You must read that phrase, speak it yourself, as much as I do. It comes up over and over in the world of homesteaders, small farmers, authors and bloggers. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, a whole lot. I'm trying to come up with what Authentic means to me, because I feel I have a long way to go. Having a farm, growing your own food, raising your own

This is harder than I thought it would be.

I find myself constantly getting caught up in other people's definition, constantly. To some people authenticity is more about the state of mind than lifestyle changes, they have no problem being "authentic" homesteaders with ziplock bags and cable. To others, it's stripping the house of anything that may bring inklings of consumerism, materialism, or character-building shortcuts. Some authors write about how the only way they felt authentic was being pulled out of a rut and forced to change to new circumstances, find themselves so to speak. It all seems like a fairly personal religion, and we could probably spend a lot of time deciding what authentic is to us and to society in general. I know I have my own ideas, a collage of things.

But I think it's easier to know what something is, by deciding what it isn't. So I ask you? What isn't authentic to you?

photo from thebritfarmer

old threads

2012-01-16T12:40:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I took part in a local Arts and Science event held by my shire of the SCA. The SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) is a living history club, based on the middle ages and prior (pre 1600AD), and all things lifestyle before motors, guns, engines, and such. The skills are old, the clothing is old, the sports are old (equestrian, archery, jousting, combat practice with swords, etc.) So as you can imagine, there are a lot of homesteaders, blacksmiths, seamstresses and historians involved. All of them have a lot to teach! Skills are traded, events held in meeting places and homes. This particular class was in embroidery. And not just any sort of embroidery, but the delicate and detailed work of past ages. The day was part sewing circle, part history lesson, and part cookie-eating. My kind of scene.

As for my first club activity, it was a small group, all women, but their skill and dedication to authenticity floored me. That sample above, it's about 8 inches long on a piece of blue wool, a wyvern done entirely in stem stitch (there's a video below that teaches it to anyone who wants to learn). Watching these architects, real estate agents, and computer programmers gently copy images from old rune stones and ancient texts and bring them alive again was inspirational, link all of us around some card tables to women hundreds of years before us. My own stitches were clumsy, but empowering. But you know me, I get off on doing anything by hand that a machine usually does.

I showed them my humble crow sample, and they were all very polite about it, but drawing a crow on linen and filling it in with as many stitches needed to make it a solid, heavy, patch was a little crude for their taste. In the class I learned the chain stitch, stem stitch, satin stitch and the French knot. I worked on a small piece of linen in the circle, and then when I came home I got more ambitious. I took an image from the Book of Kells, a lion, and changed it into a wolf but kept the same vibe. I used the stitches I learned and while it's nowhere near as nice as their work (or even historically accurate) it is a nice way to learn a new craft.And it is addicting, like knitting, but maybe even moreso for me. I love making handmade things, even more personal, a little soul branding. Which for this farm girl, means Scottish wolves from old manuscripts. It takes all kinds, people.

thank you, ed!

2012-01-16T10:00:00.002-05:00

Ed, a reader and backyard farmer from Pennsylvania dropped off this handmade garden cart yesterday, a gift to the farm. Here he is putting it together in downtown Cambridge. It will be put to good (and hard!) use. What an amazing, skilled, and kind thing to do, sir. Me and everything else with paws, claws, and hooves at Cold Antler thank you!

balance restored

2012-01-15T11:02:00.002-05:00

Balance has been restored to the order of the animals. Cat and Dog are resting side by side now (notice who is on the sheepskin) and scratching and hissing is at a minimun. And on an unrelated but equally good note: all the chicks are fine outside, even at the below zero temps Washington County is offering up...I am on my way out the door to meet a CAF reader down at Battenkill books, says he has a gift for the farm he built himself! What a grand thing.

a day of idle stitches

2012-01-14T21:18:00.000-05:00

Birchthorn: Chapter 3

2012-01-14T19:44:00.006-05:00

I turned my head towards the Library and started my march, passing the tables of produce carts and ignoring the waves and calls of neighbors as I passed through the village trade center, eyes dead-locked on the two-story house in town Ronald had turned into his workshops and lending house. If Goff was there (and he very well couldn't be, being a market day) he could tell me what he knew about the song, share all the verse and lyrics. Something told me—as certain as convent folk are told by the Lord—that the mystery of Birchthorn was in the music. And so I was on a mission to understanding the mystery, collecting the forgotten verses through any attempt of scavenging I could muster. I was completely drowning in my own thoughts as I moved from the freight depot and onto Main Street. I passed two young boys, Trent and Caden playing in the high branches of a sturdy oak that overlooked the train tracks. "Where are you going, Anna?" Trent yelled from thirty feet above my head.

"Library!" I yelled without looking up, waving a hand in the air. "And what are you two doing up in a tree in winter?!" I tried to sound less occupied than I was.

"More of a challenge when they are cold and dead-like" was Trent's grinning response. He grinned from above. I wasn't worried about him any more than their mother was, buying extra storage potatoes at the depot. The boys could climb a hundred feet up in the summer if the trees offered the option. this was just a stretch of the legs. They lived on a dairy farm closer to town, near where the splendid Cambridge Fair was held, across from the McClellen Manor. Their father worked the dairy with the boys and their mother worked as the head trainer with the Manor's fine horses for extra income. She was a skilled carriage trainer, had taught me everything I knew. Before Ironale fell entirely into my hands I worked for her. I'd watched her boys grow up, on their farm and mine. Trent loved his father dearly, but had a special attachment to Uncle Adam, and was beginning his apprenticeship as a Blacksmith. Caden was more drawn to horses, fast horses in particular. He'd won the sprints at the fair every year since they allowed a 5-year-old to sign up in the youth class. He showed them, went home with ribbon and a sow. He named his first horse after that pig, too. Fair Pig. Not the grandest name for a Morgan mare, but there could be far worse.

Sur, hitched to a post off Main Street, watched me in silent concern as I passed him. His head and ears lifting as I quickly walked by. The Library was just a few blocks from the train station and surely I could be there and back before the girls even noticed I had gone? I was a town block away from the clatter of the station when then ballad of filled my ears. Someone was humming, muffled humming of the fiddle tune as if it was a dirge, slow and somber. Stopping dead in the street I turned to the direction of the music, just across the busy road. Carriages parted, and there, just off the sidewalk, the Apothecary Rosalyn was singing as she trimmed lavender and rosemary in the window of her shop.

Rosalyn Bishop was a newcomer to Cambridge. In her early thirties and always dressed in curious, elegant clothing. This morning she was in a pinstriped skirt out of the city magazines, but it was covered by a delicately embroidered canvas apron over a nearly pressed high-collared shirt. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat banded with a red ribbon and round spectacles. The plants she was tending grew behind glass all through the winter, (no mean feat for the Upper Hudson past the Solstice). As she trimmed stems with a long set of garden sheers, her lion's mane of golden hair fell around her face from a loose bun. If a lioness lived inside a spider's web, it would be Roslyn Bishop.

But perhaps that was an unfair character assessment? In truth, my current discomfort with the woman was not her ways but the fact that this strange outlander knew the tune of that song... The very same tune I had been told was only known to us farmers around the Battenkill? And If the humming wasn't enough to make me wary, the rumors that her husband conversed with the dead certainly did. He spent his professional time on trains south to Albany or north to Montreal. He traveled there and all points in-between, speaking with the spirits haunting those wealthy enough to still employ spiritualists. His high level peculiarity was matched equally in style. He wasn't a dandy, yet he was a dapper man. Always dressed smart in a crisp linen shirt and leather waistcoat. He kept a pocket-watch, derby hat, and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His hair was odd though, always shoulder length and tied back in a tail. He was not out in the front of shop with his wife today, possibly out talking to ghosts...

"You're looking ridiculous out there, Miss..." She said to me, through the glass of her window without looking up from her work, "...standing there like a doe in October. You should stop staring and introduce yourself proper, or head on down the walk."

I headed across the street, which was mostly mud and wet snow. The smell of fresh horse manure was pungent in the streets. I walked up to the door, and stepped right through as if she owed me a huge debt. As I stepped inside I said, perhaps too loudly, "Anna. Anna Caldwe.." and was stopped short of my widow surname by the sound of ringing shop bells hitting dried bamboo stalks with a clammer. I looked up confused at the hollow sounds of tin and wood clanking together, unable to keep up my fervor and volume.

"That is exactly the kind of effect we aim to achieve, dear."

I recomposed myself while the wood rattled on the light chimes. "What were you just humming? What tune was that? "

Roslyn looked up over her glasses, not at all interested in the song question. Behind her the white walls of her shop seemed to make her seem larger, more powerful. A thousand glass bottles holding every flower, seed, and leaf that could grow from one woman's garden lined the walls. The white and glass made it look like a spider's eye under a microscope. "Hello there Anna Caldwell. Do you make a habit of staring at new townspeople, or is there something perched on my hat?" I smiled, sheepishly, but didn't lose my focus.

"I'm sorry about seeming rude, but that song you were humming? I haven't heard it since I was a little girl? I couldn't mistake it for anything else, can you tell me how you learned it? Do you know more of it?

The woman set down her sheers inside the large embroidered pocket in her apron. RPB was stitched on it surrounded by small stars in black thread. "Why don't you come back with me to the greenhouse and we'll get to know each other as neighbors? Don't you and your husband own that small sheep farm outside of town? I remember him from his conversations with Robert down at his shop. How is he?"

"He died. Last Year. Flu." Now it was Roslyn's turn to look sheepish. She seemed to awake at that reality though, as if she was back in the world again and out of her head and plants. Cambridge and the farmland around it was such a small town. How could she not know a man her husband used to talk with had died? Or was it in their lines of work—keeping plants and spirits going long after they should pass—death wasn't worth the ink the obituary was pressed with?

"I'm sorry, truly. Come back to the greenhouse."

"Isn't this your greenhouse?" I said, waving at the shop windows bursting with green life, and the rich smells of tea herbs and spices.

"It most certainly is not." She said, scoffing at the absurd comment, entirely insulted at the assumption.

I followed her past the shops front room, all lined with shelves and glass bottles holding every leaf and seed imaginable and through the black door marked, Land of the Living.

The contrast between the world was so shocking, I gasped out loud. Roslyn just smiled. the entire back of the Victorian shop had been transformed into a domed greenhouse. Instead of carpet or tile, I stepped onto granite walk stones between tufts of green grass. A white picket fence surrounded the entire first floor, for privacy, but besides that one minor piece of humility it was astounding. Like walking into June.

There were long rows of tables, hanging plants, and trees growing right out of the ground. The one edge of the rounded rectangular house was an older Oak tree, and the glass had been built right along and into the truck so half of the tree was indoors and the other, outside. A small red squirrel stared down at us from an indoor branch, eating a Sunflower seed from the ten-foot tall beasts lining the back fence. I half-expected a candy-filled cottage with a witch, or to wake up from another fainting spell in the front shop, but this was as real as the beast who chased me the night before. I circled, slowly, taking it all in. Seeing how the shop front was just that, and above it, two small rooms made an apartment kitchen and living room come bedroom looking over the greenhouse. The Bishops had completely altered their house and business into a fantasy. Something not even Jane Austen could have dreamt of her fictional characters doing. I smiled for the first time in days.

then I noticed something odd about the small glass panes that made up the bulk of the glass walls. Each one had a slightly faded image of a person, just barely visible as you turned your head in the light. Somber and serious looking men in jackets stared back at me, some old and bearded and some young as teenagers. All of them brandished weapons. I stared closer, confused, trying to angle my head into the sunlight better. I looked at another pain and noticed nothing but shapes on white. I pressed my face even closer, and went white where I stood, slamming my hands over my mouth so I would not scream. There in the glass were the black pig bones amongst split pumpkin rinds. I backed away slowly, visibly unsettled.

"Oh darling, it's not a ghost, it's just old photograph plates from the Civil War." She said, pointing back at the glass I just recoiled from. There were no bones at all, but a man in a faded gray jacket and slouch cap with a black, scrawny horse. It must be my mind getting to me. Was I going insane?

Roslyn explained: "When the war was finally over, these were set aside in warehouses, and the images faded to nothing but suggestions on the old glass. Greenhouses all over the country bought them up as cheap building material." She looked up at the now thousands of nearly-faded faces looking back. "But I like to think they watch over these plants, all these War dead. Robert thinks so too."

"There really is someone for everyone..." I said to myself, grasping at a honeysuckle.

"The Ballad of Birchthorn" She said, as plainly as sales tax.

I did not speak. I waited.

"The song? You asked me about the song? It's a folk song about a monster, from back when Cambridge was just a few wood-slatted clabboards with dirt roads. I heard it from my grandfather, who grew up here, well, just south of here where the Mohawks used to live. My grandfather was pure Mohawk, and before he was sent to an Indian School to forget that, he used to sing that song with the settler's children he knew. He said his people told them about the Watcher, and they named it Birchthorn and sang songs to tease it. I think this all happened just a few day's saddle ride south, like I said."

This was the most history I had ever learned about the ballad, and I must have lit up at the hint of understanding. Mohawks? Settlers? How much more was there to learn?

"Do you know the verses? The words?"

"You know, I don't. I just know the chorus bits, the Birchthorn is watching part? My grandfather used to dress up in deerskin pants and sing it to us at Pow Wows in the Hill Towns. He always sang it slow like that, scary. He said the pale children played it in the key of D major, but it was always to be sang in Dorian if you meant it. So I sing it low, like him. I'm not sure how it is sang up here, or even if it is? I grew up in the Berkshires, just moved back here because of your new train station and the cheap price of homes. Shame we had to pay for all of that house just to tear it down..." Her story trailed off. I tried to rein her back.

"Do you have a copy of it anywhere? In journals? Old letters?"

"Why are you so enamored with this song?" She asked, earnestly concerned. She also sounded grateful, as if my questions about something so mundane was the apex of politeness she had received in this town? I realized it might very well be, as most folks are probably far more concerned about the sanity of destroying a perfectly good home to build a glass house and marry a ghost interviewer.

"It's been on my mind." I coughed, now it was my turn to rein in, "I apologize. I'm Anna Caldwell," I put out my hand, "and it's nice to meet you. This place," I looked up as I spoke, a pair of (extinct?!) Carolina Parakeets flew across the false sky, "it's amazing, magical as hell. You must be proud." I sighed, looked around at the Eden I didn't even know was right beyond the 4-month old potatoes at the train station. "And I'm sorry I didn't get to meet Robert, perhaps when he gets back into town?"

Roslyn almost teared up behind her glasses, my suspicions about kind guests must have been spot on. She hid her gratitude well enough, and beamed back at me.

"You know, I think there was a copy of that tune up in one of my old diaries. Let's go upstairs and see if we can find it, eh? And if we can't, my uncle Ronald at the Library will know for certain."

I beamed back. In a town of monsters, spiritualists, hidden paradises, winter tree-climbers, and possibly insane shepherds...this was a bit of hope I could hold onto. We took the iron stair case up to their abode and a thousand dead men watched me as the red squirrel nickered in his tree.

Catch up on the story:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

whose hard cider?

2012-01-14T16:22:00.002-05:00

passing afternoon

2012-01-14T15:45:00.002-05:00

There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon
Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon
And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her
Wooden spoons, her children stir her Bougainvillea blooms

There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days
Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made
And she's chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings
Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves

There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass
Springtime calls her children 'till she let's them go at last
And she's chosen where to be, though she's lost her wedding ring
Somewhere near her misplaced jar of Bougainvillea seeds

There are things we can't recall, blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers, rolling 'round the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned

There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the windows closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone

-Iron & Wine

afternoon practice

2012-01-14T15:33:00.007-05:00

Gibson and I are still beginners, still at the very start of our training as shepherd and sheepdog. It's not a race for us and I am treating it as a lifelong education of a farmer and farm dog. I don't know if we'll ever see the trial field together, but when the weather turns better we'll get back to lessons on a regular basis. Today I wanted to give him a brush up, so we went out in the 18-degree waning light of the afternoon. Our work today was a flurry of excitement, as Gibson had not been out with the sheep in weeks. The frozen ground cut his paws, but he didn't even notice. When we came inside I washed them carefully, gave him some water, and he is now asleep in his crate. I'm getting back to my craft, and the audiobook, and will hopefully come back tonight with Chapter 3 of Birchthorn. I didn't get the amount of $300 for the chapter, and I am not waiting to reach that amount to keep it going. I love writing it, and as long as someone donates something, that means someone loves reading it. That is good enough for me.

Animals. Work. Words. Craft.

A fine practice.

cold coming in...

2012-01-14T11:24:00.002-05:00

Cold is coming, below zero temperatures tonight. I made sure all the animals got some extra feed, clean warm bedding, and plenty of water. I'm not worried about anyone but the Freedom Rangers, who were not intended to be raised in January in New York, for certain. But the structure Steve, Molly, and I built out of hay bales withstood the 40 MPH winds that ripped down the mountain last night and it is holding steady around fifty degrees inside the 18 inch-thick walls. I think the birds, all of them bulking up and covered in red feathers, will be okay though. I say that with 80% confidence, I might lose a few. This will be a true test of our best intentions.

The farmer is spending this day bouncing from a chapter of Birchthorn (hoping to post it later today if the goal is met), some practice embroidery work of a crow, and outdoor chores. It is cold, and on the weekends I do more of everything but in shorter spurts. For example: I just got in from cleaning out all of the rabbit cages and filling them with fresh hay and straw, clean and dry. While in the barn I also feed the pigs a big bowl of food scraps and grain and dumped half a bale of hay into their pen so Kevin could rip it apart and roll around on it to itch his back and chew up the grass. Jasper watches all of this with frustration. Everyone seems to get more grain than him.

Going to head into town soon to do some errands and stop at Battenkill books to sign some more copies of Barnheart with Gibson. Then once the feed, groceries, and such are unloaded I'll be tucking in with some more embroidery work (totally winging it, no pun intended) and more of my audiobook binge. A reader suggested Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling and I am listening to the whole thing being read to me while I sit by the woodstove and sew. It is a wonderful way to warm cold feet and plan monster stories. Not a bad way to spend a below zero night.

I swear a fat cat sleeping on an armchair makes the place warmer...

monsters and emails

2012-01-14T05:30:00.008-05:00

George is a force to be reckoned with. 22 pounds of Feline Demands who has decided this farm house is his, was always his, and everyone else just has to deal with it. He has cornered, scratched, and hissed at every dog in the house and now walks from the laundry room (his and Lilly's original apartment) and struts across the kitchen to drink out of the dogs' water bowl and then into the living room to sleep on the dumpy armchair I inherited with the house. This morning he leapt up into bed where Gibson and I were sleeping (Gibson, mind you, is terrified of this compact monster) and as the cat got closer and closer, rumbling like a stalling dumptruck stuck inside a microwave, Gibson curled up closer and closer to me. It was like that last scene in JAWS were Quint is slowly eaten off the boat.. That's what Gib was picturing anyway, and as George padded closer Gibson ended up curled up around my head with his neck resting over mine, whimpering.

So I was up.

Early Saturday morning here. The first fire is lit in the living room stove and soon I will head out to feed the farm. When I return there's breakfast and more writing to sink into. This weekend has light plans but tomorrow I am going to join an embroidery group in Albany to learn the traditional stitches and skills. My current definition of embroidery is "drawing with thread" and there is no sense to it, just sewing in pictures and words however it happens to appear. This group is a little more organized and trained in the older tapestry and traditional aspects of this craft. I am thrilled to make some new friends.

Perhaps because of Barnheart I have been getting a lot more email than usual, and I honestly can't keep up with it. If I don't reply, please do not feel discouraged or brushed-off. Or if I reply swiftly either. I am just not used to the level of correspondence on top of all the other goings on here at the farm. I am doing my level best, but I might not get to them all.

More Birchthorn soon. I have attached a photo of Lilly.

Backyard Barbeque Workshop/Cook Out!

2012-01-13T19:07:00.000-05:00

So this is a workshop I'm really excited to share with you. I'm taking last years' backyard Barbeque Meat Bird Workshop and upping the ante. Come to the farm this June 16th for a full day of summer fun and slaughter. On June 16, 2012 the farm is open for chicken school! It will kick off with a farmcentric morning brunch from 9:30Am-10:30 to meet and greet, then from 10:30 to 11:30 we'll go over the basics of chick care and raising. This workshop will feature Freedom Rangers, meat birds an animal apart from the standard Cornish Rocks, and everyone who signs up is welcome to take home 5 chicks to raise for the table. After we discuss everything from brooders to coop plans, we'll break for a light lunch and tour of the farm.

After lunch we'll go through backyard butchering, step-by-step, from killing a chicken to wrapping it correctly for the freezer. This is not a workshop for the faint of heart, but you will learn the steps and supplies needed to prepare meat birds at home. After this we'll talk about the importance of pasture-raised poultry, both for our own health, and the health of the animals and planet. We'll discuss the birds role here at Cold Antler and with the help of Axe Man Brett, build a portable chicken tractor for the pasture. he'll show us all how to cinstruct our own chicken tractors for backyard-meat production on grass instead of stationary pens. Mine will be made to follow the sheep from pasture to pasture via pony power! Yup, Jasper will drag it for me!

Workshop ends with a campfire and BBQ of Cold Antler Farm raised chickens, stay for music and stories into the night.

Email me to sign up, limited to 15 people.

Full List of Workshops Here

Gordon Ramsay is coming to town!

2012-01-12T16:12:00.002-05:00

The Cambridge Hotel, the place many of you stay when visiting CAF from out of town, is going to be taken over by Gordon Ramsay for his series "Hotel Hell" which, I think, means he goes to historic hotels around the area and takes over the menu. Big doings for this little burg. Read the story here!

birchthorn on my mind

2012-01-12T15:37:00.003-05:00

Spent two hours on the phone last night talking with my friend Raven about Birchthorn, telling her the story, asking if she wanted to be in it. We ended up weaving a new character, angle, and complicated back story I would have never thought of! I spent the whole time on the phone with her listening to her character's world (which she crafted up) as Roslyn Bishop, apothecary and her husband Robert Bishop, traveling spiritualist. We sat in our living rooms, states apart with a bottle of wine at each home, laughing and talking about an imaginary world. Both of us chucked our televisions recently. Having a living story and personal character to conjure was more fun than anything on cable.

Anyway, you'll get to meet her, her greenhouse, and tamed squirrel Shadowtail in the next chapter when the story pot is full again. Right now it needs about $260 to rustle up another chapter, and as I expected, it will take a while to get their! But I thank all of you pitching in a dollar or two and cheering the fiction on.

Raven and I talked a lot about the monster, and what it is or should be. I told her I had a gut feeling about this beast and she had her own guesses about what Birchthorn is. You'll all find out more as the story moves forward, and so will I.

settling in to farmlife

2012-01-12T15:26:00.001-05:00

two bleeding huskies...

2012-01-11T19:21:00.001-05:00

No, I am not worried about the cats.

You're Invited to the BARNHEART Launch Party!

2012-01-10T19:06:00.006-05:00

There's going to be a Launch party and poster giveaway at Battenkill Books right here in Cambridge on January 22. It's a Sunday, and the event starts at 4PM. I'll be doing some reading from the book, talking, and doing a Q&A. Jon Katz is being kind enough to introduce me. Storey Publishing is also giving away 50 posters of the cover art too, to folks who come to the event. Come support a grand little bookstore, meet Gibson, ask questions and enjoy hearing the latest goings on at Cold Antler Farm. It'll be a big time!

For more information visit battenkillbooks.com

P.S. You can order signed copies of Barnheart, Made From Scratch, and Chick Days any time from Connie down at BKB.

too compassionate?

2012-01-10T15:22:00.004-05:00

The other day a man was standing by my vehicle, looking at my dogs panting in the car and told me he was ready to call the police on me for animal abuse. I had been inside a grocery store for exactly ten minutes, the windows were open. And yes, Jazz and Annie were in fact panting and the sun was out. I explained to him that we just got back from the dog park and these two older dogs tend to pant a lot more than they used too, but it wasn't from the car heat, it was from playing less than 15 minutes ago for over an hour. I was only gone ten minutes and was getting a lecture because it looked like I was a deadbeat. The man didn't believe that the owner drove 30 minutes from her home so her usually-leashed huskies could run at will in a safe fence and socialize in a dog park. He told me he had already called the police. I drove away so angry my knuckles were white on the wheel.

A few years ago when I was renting in Vermont, a neighbor accused me of animal abuse because she didn't understand any of my methods of animal husbandry. She thought the deep bedding in the goat pen was "me being too lazy to clean it out" and I was cruel to keep rabbits in cages, dogs in crates, and I was poisoning the well water with the chicken poo in the yard from twenty chickens. She called animal control on me and when the officer came to inspect the farm he shook his head at my neighbor, telling me if all animals were as well tended as mine his line of work wouldn't be needed.

I think Joel Salatin put it best in his recent book Folks, This Aint Normal. An entire chapter “A Cat is a Cow is a Chicken is My Aunt” is dedicated to the recent abnormality of ridiculous levels of anthropomorphism mixed with a general agricultural ignorance. I run into this constantly, both on the blog and in real life. I never worry about leaving Gibson in the truck in Washington County, as ride-along dogs are common as ticks, but in Vermont I worry someone will be standing there writing a note on my door. I always want to laugh, because if they knew what a farm dog goes through in a usual day....5 minutes in a car with a cracked window is a joke. There's a good chance by the time I got to Manchester Gibson has cut himself on a sharp briar in the woods, got burrs in tail feathers, faced a horned sheep head on and barely avoided her headbutt, ran till he was ready to collapse, got covered in mud....and loved every minute of it. Waiting in the car isn't always comfortable, but its more boring to him than dangerous.

Compassion is good. Animal abuse is bad. These are things we can all agree on, but when righteousness and ignorance hit you full force is makes you very, very tired. Just because an animal isn't in a situation you would want to be in means it is being abused. Just because an animal isn't constantly comfortable (I am rarely comfortable and have yet to be accused of self-human-abuse) doesn't make it a victim. I am all for animal welfare and practice it constantly, but comparing our comfort level to livestock is silly.

crusty bread, son!

2012-01-10T12:19:00.002-05:00

This is the easiest bread recipe I can offer you. Easier than the highly popular no-knead dutch oven recipes, and anyone can do it, even if you never, ever baked bread from scratch before. You don't need anything but a mixing bowl, flour, water, salt and active dry yeast and some sort of round bakeware to let it rise and bake in. It is an overnight, no-knead rise, so it's not insta-bread, but for about 5 minutes of effort before work you can have amazing fresh crusty bread every night for dinner. This is an adaption from the No-Knead recipe features in the NYtimes a while back.

Easy Crusty Bread

1. Pour a cup and a half of hot (not boiling) water into a mixing bowl and add a teaspoon of active dry yeast. Let it set for 5 minutes and if when you return the cloudy water is cloudy and there is an active foam bubbling on the top, your yeast is activated and you are ready for step 2.

2. Mix in 3 cups of flour (do not use all wheat flour, it won't rise. If you want wheat bread use half wheat and half white) a cup at a time into the yeasty warm water. Add a teaspoon of salt and mix it in as well while you turn the water into a sticky, even paste free of clumps.

3. now cover it with a cloth and leave it alone at room temperature for 8-12 hours.

4. When you return after your day at work, or after a night of sleep, check the bread dough. It should be bubbly and expanded in size. It is ready!

5. Sprinkle flour on your table and take out the whole doughy mass. Fold it over itself a few times and make it into a ball. You'll need flour on your hands to stop it from sticking. Now gently place the ball in your bowl again and let it rise back up for another hour or two.

6. Twenty minutes before you bake, turn the oven to 450 degrees and put your baking apparatus in at the same time you start the pre-heating. It could be a cast iron skillet, Dutch oven, Pyrex cake pan -whatever, but it has to heat up with the oven.

7. When it is heated to 450, take it out and place your ball of dough in it. It doesn't matter if it loses it's shape, it'll bake even.

8. Bake at 450 till the bread is browned, about 30-45 minutes. Keep an eye on it.

9. When it is done, take it out and let it cool before slicing, at least half an hour. Enjoy!

they're getting big, boss!

2012-01-10T11:12:00.001-05:00

Birchthorn: Chapter 2

2012-01-09T21:49:00.004-05:00

The next morning Lara raced over with cousin Meredith Robertson, double mounted on Lara's big bay Quarter Horse, Pit. At 16 hands the stallion was stunning. His black mane shedding a dusting of snow, cold air puffing from his wide nostrils as he trotted in from their canter up the swings of the mountain road.

From my view at the sheep shed on the hill I could hear Pit's shod hooves before I saw them, the clacking across the frozen ice and stones in the road was such a foreign sound if jostled me from my place on the hill by my favorite ram, Sal. I was leaning against the old boy on the soft dry straw of the shed, reading a copy of Pride and Prejudice so dog-eared and batted from mud and rainwater it was read more by memory than by sight. Adam always said the real owners of Ironale farm were not he and I, but Austen and Anvil. He understood the true rulers of this little realm were, but he named the farm after his two favorite things instead: blacksmithing and wort spirits. I kept the farm's name after he was gone. It sounded stronger than it was. It made me feel safe.

Yet there was no feeling of safety when I saw the dark brown haze of Pit and his passengers. I called Anvil back from his position in the far pasture and grabbed my crook. The black dog came running like a jack rabbit, but walked quietly by my side while I used the crook as a steadying cane down the snow-covered steepness. I yelled out to them, tucking the book into my thick leather belt behind my back. "What's the matter? What's the word?" I was concerned they had seen the same thing I had the night before, but the fact they were alive proved that they hadn't. I searched their eyes and the back of Pit for fear and sweat. They seemed tussled but not terrified. They swiftly walked Pit to the stone wall that made the gate for the entrance of my freehold. Meredith dismounted first, using the stones as a step ladder from the tall animal. Her brown wool cloak held tight around her neck by her hand. She was visiting Cambridge from Maryland, near the capital. She thought a quiet holiday in the countryside would do her good. But the look in her young eyes was not ease. She was white as a ghost between her blond locks and I wondered if perhaps they did see the monster, at a distance in field. I didn't know much about Meredith, but I did know she worked in a large hospital as a volunteer and was no stranger to gruesome sights. Lara seemed slightly more composed but still worried. She leaped down from Pit and quickly tied his reins to the hitch post by the front gate, The word IRONALE across it in twisted black wrought.

"We had planned to surprise you this morning by showing up with a thermos of coffee, cinnamon cakes, and this..." Lara pulled a hefty sack with a whale printed on it, the holy word SALT in thick type. "We thought we'd offer to rub those sides down with you and get the hams and bellies ready to smoke. But when we saw what happened down the road, I told my boy to pick up the pace and then as we passed the smashed pumpkins and bones...we started to run here."

Bones? I didn't know what to say, or if I should say anything at all. Admitting I was chased by a folk song monster the night before and gave up seventy pounds of their sow out of blind fear didn't seem appropriate. I asked them what she saw that caused such a ruckus on this fine morning. I tried to smile.

"Anna Caldwell, do you think we made up this tale? We were riding in the same tracks your pony cart left, laughing and enjoying this sunny morning when, as if your cart had been lifted off the ground into the sky, the tracks just stopped. And not just blown over by windrows or snowfall, but stopped clean. You could've set a book up in the straight edge of that track...."

I just stared at them.

"So we looked around, and felt somewhat ill all of a sudden, like as if someone put a curse on that very piece of ground. Then I looked ahead and the forest was just clean and pure as if no one had traveled it in a hundred years. We trotted on and then smashed pumpkins covered the ground and around the smashlings there wasn't a print or track of deer. Can you imagine that? So we kept on and the perfect corpse of pig bones lay right there, every rib and shoulder looking like you dipped the sow in acid. But the bones were black, like they were burned, but not a drop of fat or sprinkling of ash. Just a perfect pile of black bones in snow without a track. So we ran here with purpose. And if you don't tell us what happened we'll take you back their ourselves and show you."

I listened to this, my head heard all the words, but my mind couldn't take them all in.

"Anna? ANNA? Are you okay?"

The last things I heard before I fainted was the cry of Meredith as she reached out to grab my tartan. And as the world slowly dimmed into black another verse of the old song carried me into a nightmare.

...The weather, he owns it. The forest his mare.
Thunder and wild winds are his only true lair.
He can not be drowned or burned in a fire
And all that he devours gone dark as a pyre...

The beast known as Birchthorn is watching us
Yes Birchthorn is watching tonight...

When I came to, I was on my own kitchen floor. I didn't understand why I wasn't touching the wood and realized Meredith's heavy cloak was acting as a carpet. Lara handed me a glass of water from the stone crock at the counter.

"Anna. What just happened to you?"

I squinted at the sun shooting through the dirty windows. Who had time to clean windows? I thought this as I sat up, rubbing my temples. Meredith handed me a bottle of whiskey and I gladly accepted it. Lara shot her a look as if she didn't approve and Meredith whooshed it away with a hand wave and pointed at my face. "She needs it more than I did a bit ago! At least when I saw the black bones I didn't faint!"

Lara smiled, Meredith did too, and I felt more comfort than I had in days. The events of last night were so horrifying they didn't seem real once I was inside the farmhouse with locked doors and a loaded shotgun. I had thrown Sur into the stable with all his tack on and nailed a board across the barn door. The chickens and sheep stared at me from their roosts and hillside shelters, they had already been fed before I left the farm and didn't understand the fray at all. I waited for hours to hear banging on the wall and howls of the storm following me home, but they never came. Eventually, pure exhaustion took me over and I fell asleep sitting up in a chair, Anvil's head on my lap.

I knocked back a few fingers of whiskey and stood up, handing Meredith her beautiful cloak. It was rare I felt envy, but a riding cloak that warm in such a winter was a treasure.

"I'm sorry, I fainted. I've been out in this rare sun too long. It's made me daffy. Working for two and all, keeping this place afloat. I just got overwhelmed there for a moment"

"What happened on your ride home last night?"

I tried to think, and came up with a half truth of a response.

"I was riding back with Sur, calm and steady as a broody hen, when a squall of snow came out of nowhere. Covered the road in an instant, scared Sur all up. A globe off the cart's front crashed and broke and it scared Sur to the point of bolting. The pumpkins and pork flew off the cart in the breakaway and I'm sure the scavengers picked that meat clean in no time. Probably why no deer touched that squash..." I was actually scaring myself with the confidence I felt in the lie. I had never held anything back from Lara, she'd been my closest friend since Adam and I bought the farm four years earlier. She was the first person to introduce herself, offered to take us for a tour of the town's seed factory and proper rail station. She showed us the grand Rice Mansion and Cambridge Hotel, sweeping over the bustling downtown freight depot like a emperor over his people. Now I was, for some unspeakable reason, protecting the beast just to keep the illusion of my sanity in check. "You must have seen the spoils from the cargo and storm." My voice trailed off.

Lara crossed her arms. "And then you butchered and burned a pig before trotting home?"

"Frostbite." I said it like as if another voice had my throat. I coughed. "Frostbite, is all. the leftover flesh from the wolves and ravens went black, just like ours does on such nights, laying in the snow like that."

Meredith nodded, Lara cocked her head and looked at me as if something wasn't right in my tone. But she didn't press on. Strange things happened around here and sometimes it was better for all parties to accept the most logical story and go on with life. She grabbed the bottle of whiskey out of my hands, kicked back a dram, and then set it on the table.

"Okay ladies. We still have pork to salt and my coffee is getting cold." she grinned and slapped the bag of salt on the table. I didn't have the heart to tell her the other half of the pig was still in the cart.

*******

After the pork was butchered, salted, and piece set into the barrel smoker behind the house—I agreed to join them for a trip into town. Since Pit was still wound from their ride (stallions always seem wound) I offered to drive Sur the three miles south to town proper. I said I was planning on heading into town anyway and Sur was already tacked up in the barn. Another lie.

We headed into town for the usual rounds. This was the main market day at the Freight Depot. All sorts of good would be on display in boxes that couldn't be delivered to merchants. It was usually second-quality stuff. Flowers with shoddy petals and stems, good for drying but not pretty enough for the dinner table. Leather with pock marks and barbed-wire tears, bruised fruits and wilted vegetables. I knew all the yardmen by first name, as many of them did business with Adam when his smithing shop was around the corner. I was eyeing a round of questionable cheddar when Meredith asked if there was a bookstore in town?

"Yes, over there." I said, flailing the wheel of cheese in the direction of Main Street. "Next to the hotel." She nodded and headed off that way and Lara was a few yards to my left, trying to haggle down a bolt of muslin. I tried to keep an air of calm around me, but my head was reeling. I was certain of what I saw, and the verses of the old song kept coming together. I had lied to friends with utter confidence, as if I was in service to Birchthorn himself, and yet I didn't even know what Birchthorn even was? All I knew was what the few memorized verses of the song told me, and if memory served me well enough, even the full song didn't explain what Birchthorn was or why he came and left this valley? While mindlessly piling cheese in small cairns on the table tops, I tried to remember where and when I heard that tune so many Octobers ago?

Goff. It was Ronald Goff, the librarian and chair caner. He kept books in his front of shop and his workshop was out back. The man was older now, in his seventies, but he always opened the library part of his home on Halloween night to tell legends and stories of the Battenkill valley. He had a fiddle and a strange old German zither and he played the zither while his wife played the fiddle and told stories to us while we sat cross-legged on the floor gnawing candied apples and swilling sweet cider. If he still knew the song, still had those lyrics written down, I might be able to understand what was going on. Any clue, any hint at all of what was happening in these winter woods and to my mind would be a sense of peace.

I dropped my cheese and hustled across town....

So there you have it chapter 2. Delivered as promised upon the story pot being full. Thank you to everyone who donated towards this goal, as it is such an amazing help to the farm and so much fun to craft. I hope you are enjoying it, a little intrigued, too. I am having fun welcoming you readers into the tale, making you part of this fictional version of Cambridge soaked-in-folklore in the early 20th century. And when the donation pot is full again, I will spin more of this yarn for all who want to know what happens next!

Dear Trent, you and your brother will be in the story soon! Promise!

birchthorn is alive!

2012-01-09T13:36:00.003-05:00

I am just twenty dollars short of our chapter goal, I think the surge of initial excitement made the $300 mark so fast! I don't expect to reach that goal every time this swiftly, but as for today I would say you can expect a second chapter for certain, and soon!

I'll keep the story going long as readers are willing to support it, and I must admit, it is so much fun going home to characters and plot as much as it is to animals and the farm. Birchthorn is alive!

How do you picture the beast? What do you think it really is?
(I know and I'm not telling!)

...and the seed winners are!

2012-01-08T18:35:00.002-05:00

Winner of the seed packages from Annie's are...

Sue Steeves
Miss Peach
thisbountifulbackyard
Vanessa Williams
lemoineau

Email me at jenna@itsafarwalk.com to claim your prize.
I will put you in touch with Annie's!

the coons have arrived

2012-01-08T15:30:00.003-05:00

This regal beast is George. Lilly, his ginger-colored sister is still hiding behind the washing machine. They are in the mudroom with their litter boxes, food, and cat tree —away from the dogs for now. Thought they could use their own apartment suite while getting used to the place. In a few days I'll slowly introduce them to the wolves, but I think it'll be a while before we all get along.

I'm not worried about the cats though, they are huge! George is a portly Winston Churchill character and Lilly isn't any meek being either. I've never lived with cats this large...Here's to life with tigers.

Birchthorn: Chapter 1

2012-01-08T11:59:00.019-05:00

The snow was so thick and came upon the forest road so fast, that the lanterns blew out from the angry wind that delivered it. One was hit to the ground and the globe smashed into a rock with a clatter as biting as the air around it. Sur, the small Haflinger pulling the shoddy farm wagon, stopped and lifted his two front hooves a foot off the ground, slamming them down with a concerned whinny. He shook out his flaxen mane, pressed his ear against his head and stared at the world he could see with blinders on. Other horses would have bolted at such a sudden fuss in the weather and glass. Yet that was the extent of his fit, and for that I was grateful. We were but three miles from the farmhouse, stranded in a blinding squall. Had he tore off into the night I would be without horse and cart in a storm. People have died in weather far better, far closer to home. Being alone without my rig was an unspeakable terror to my already pounding heart.

I jumped off the cart and clasped both doeskin reins in one hand, placing a flat palm of my other on the length of his nose. I whispered for him to be calm. He picked up his feet a few times, walking in place while he blew, but otherwise returned to the steady animal I knew. When Sur was calm enough, I went back to my leather shoulder bag under the unimpressive farm shop bench seat. Inside (among other things) were some matches, twine, lampwicks, and oil. It didn't take long to relight the left-side lamp, but it was barely enough glow to see the head of my horse in this weather. The storm seemed to be gathering. In the dim light around the left side of the cart I found a good long staff of maple and grabbed a handkerchief from a back skirt pocket. I soaked the rag in the lamp oil and tied it to the end of the staff, lighting it from the bravely turning torch on the cart. It exploded in flame and Sur craned his head around to see what force of nature brought light back to the path again. I tied it to the bench seat and let it burn a few feet above my head. In this wind no ash would burn me, and I just hoped it would last till we trotted home to the farm...

I jumped back onto the wagon bench, and wrapped a the wool blanket back around my legs. My feet were freezing, the wool socks below my slouch leather riding boots soaked with sweat from loading the cart. I had driven the six miles on back roads to the Thomason's farm. There Lara and her father helped me load up two sides of pork and a load of winter squash they owed in barter for some logging Sur and I had did at their home last weekend. My Thomason had a fine pair of quarter horses at his farm for saddle and carriage, but preferred not to use his only mode of transportation for rough forest work. "One casts a shoe or goes lame and this farm is done in." He said, and we shook on the barter. Sur was my only horse, but he had worked hard his entire life and was surefooted as an Alpine Buckling. All that aside, I needed the silver.

I thought it would be a quick and gentle ride. These were roads both Sur and I knew as well as our own farm's pastures, but the weather change came so quickly it seemed as if someone had just cursed our travel. We were in a new and strange place without recourse. Turning back seemed foolish when we were halfway between the Thomason's and home. So, ever onward, I clicked and asked Sur to step up easy. Under my breath I muttered "Fortune favors the brave..."

I cursed that I had not brought my dog along. He would have been a comfort next to me on the bench, and could see things in the forest neither horse or woman ever could. My imagination wandered to tales and songs I heard of as a child, of a beast that once roamed the wild places where the stone walls and hedges stopped. You can't help but sink into myth on nights like these.

I wanted him to trot but he refused. I suppose it was for the best. Sometimes horses are more sensible than their drivers. At a brisk walk we moved across the gently sloping road- all thick forests of pine and birch on both sides. The only light around us was the yellow glow, like a locomotive campfire hovering above us. It crackled and hissed as the wet wood itself started to burn, and I prayed we could at least make it to the open fields at the base of our mountain before it was gone to darkness.

I pulled the leather hat by the large brim over my knit hat and wrapped the scarf around my head a few times tighter. My skirt was a heavy wool and I was grateful for that as well. I wore it over my canvas trousers more as an attached blanket than out of respect for looking like a proper lady, as I was anything but. I used to be seen as an upstanding woman, but ever since I took on the farm alone I had become an outcast and thing of pity to eyes behind shelves in the mercantile. I couldn't blame them, I suppose. A young woman living alone on a sheepfarm in the upper Hudson Valley was a rarity, and certainly not in my original plans, but it was where I had landed so I dug in. The man I was engaged to died from that Spanish Flu when he demanded taking our best lambs to the city on a barge heading down the Hudson last summer. He said he knew people were sick there, but since all the other farmer's had refused to bring their meat into the city the price they could fetch could build a new stable for that horse I had been dreaming of. He promised he would be careful, and he promised he would not shake a hand or walk into a single home or tavern. He made his handsome deal and then returned with a fever and cold hands. He was dead three weeks later.

So I was alone on our six acres with a flock of sheep, collies, and this pony I'd bought cheap at auction with some of the money left from the last lambs New York City surely would ever see from this farm. Sur's full name was Surcoat, because "that was all he was good for" was what the auctioneer taunted as he was brought out the rib and limping ghost into the ring as foddertrot for stew and leather. I bought him so cheap I could have bought a roll of butcher paper and twine instead. I treated him like a sheep till he healed and was ready to train again. Now the auctioneer calls him the same respectable moniker I call him when I pass his home in town, Sur. He deserves it.

Yet no matter how steady a horse it does not have the eye of a dog, and I wished my large black sheepdog Anvil was beside. Dark as cast iron and tougher than any ram that might charge him, Anvil was a beast to be reckoned with. I felt stronger beside him and on this awful night he could have me singing instead of darting my eyes and praying into the wind.

Sur could feel the tension in the reins and walked even more cautiously, slowing our trip home. All I could think of was the fireplace in the kitchen and the dutch oven of rabbit stew on the rack and how far away they seemed as the wind grew colder, more biting at my cheek. "Com'on gelding" I whispered, and tried to be more confident as I snapped the reins, lifted my voice and asked for a trot. The haflinger picked up his pace and I started to ease as I noticed the snow starting to calm, leaving as quickly as it came. Fresh white powder covered the trees and more fell gently all around us as the torch went out above my head. Through the cleared path I could now see the opening in the trees and a hint of the full moon. My spirits raised I gave a small cheer and a weight slipped off my shoulders like an sack of grain.

Just ahead, just where I could barely see well beyond the yellow circle of light, an animal dashed across the white road. It was large as a bear, fast as a horse, and black as the sky. Sur stopped dead in his gait, ears shot up and forward. My head shot up too as I tried to see where the animal went. "it couldn't have been..." I whispered to myself, now watching Sur with the intensity of a predator. Sur looked into the forest where the animal was, eyes unblinking, staring at a single point not twenty yards away. I could see nothing, but didn't understand why the horse trapped in harness and cart, was acting calm as if someone had walked by with a bucket of oats while he was tied to a post. My heart was slamming into my ribcage as I put legend and reality together. Words from an old, local, fiddle ballad played in my mind.

...The cattle won't low and the lambs will not gasp
But when he is near them their heartbeats won't last
They never show fear, he won't let them cry
Trapped silently in his eyes right before they die...

The beast known as Birchthorn is watching them
Yes Birchthorn is watching tonight...

The song played, verse after verse in my mind as I stared at the pony in the cart. An animal the size of a shorthorn just raced across the night and Sur had been more terrified by broken glass. I stopped breathing. I listened. I slowly turned my head to the place where the equine gaze laid.

It was nearly impossible to see the dark forest, or to see what crouched amongst a field stone fence. Guttural and low growls, as grating as a mill grinding corn, shot through my body. Sur just stared, calm as a colt nursing in spring. I suddenly felt grateful I still had wet and cold feet under my blanket. If this was what I thought it was, if this was the monster long considered gone from folksong and legend, we had about three minutes to regard this world before both of us were nothing more than another verse at next Halloween's balefire dance.

I was done staring. "STEP UP AND HIKE!" I shouted to Sur as I slapped the reins and kicked towards his rear at the same time. The horse now broken from his spell tore off as if he just remembered what a hundred-thousand generations of herd animals knew before him. He dug his hooves into the ground, the cart nearly flipping over on its side at the turns that lead to the opening into the woods. He cried out as he ran, and I turned my head to see if we were being chased. Behind us a black blur of fur seemed to glide at us, like a banshee. Jutting from it's circle of black, arms as thick as trunks and claws gripping into the ground behind me were all I could see. It was silent now, silent as death and it scared me more than the growls I heard in the dark. It gained on us. Each clawing of the earth towards our cart seemed to pull the road closer to him. I screamed to Sur, "HOME HOME HOMMEEE!" And used the reins as a whip to slap his hindquarters before I released the reins entirely. Now just two miles from the farm I had to trust him to flee to the safest place he ever knew. As the cart jutted and crashed over potholes and limbs, skittered around corners at a breakneck gallop, I crawled over the bench to where the pumpkins and sides of pork resided. Soon as I got to the back of the cart Sur hit a small sapling downed from the wind and the entire contents of the back of the cart flew into the air, pumpkins falling back into the snow, pork sliding off the sides. I nearly slid off myself, but grabbed the leg of the bench as my body swung off the side. I swear I felt hot breath on it as bare boot leather flew through the air. I looked back to see an animal unlike anything I had ever witnessed loping beside just to our side. I wanted to stare, to take in the beast for what it was, but the chaos of the cart's cargo, the falling snow, the terror of it all forced me to act, not study. Inspired by a wish to see daylight, I swung my body back onto the cart and pushed my back against the wagon's bench. Using both feet I kicked a side of pork right into the road and watched as the black blur of hair and sound descended on it. I didn't know if I had seconds or sanctuary, so I climbed to the bench, regained hold of the reins and slapped them hard as I could, forcing Sur to reach farther and sweat heavier than he had in the few months we knew each other. Home was just around these switchbacks, and I was being tailed by a monster I once believed only lived in music and bedtime stories.

No one would believe me. I knew this as I watched the water fly off Sur's neck as we raced up the mountain, past the lights of neighbor's candles and fires. I didn't let him slow down, and I didn't dare let go of my held breath until we were within eye shot of the flock, Anvil racing down the hill to welcome back the animals he knew so well. I screamed at him to come to the wagon as it slowed to a trot and he jumped over the side-rail fences and slammed into me as he did so. I held his coat like a child hugging a father back from war. "You're sleeping inside tonight. No arguments". Anvil looked up at me with yellow eyes, concerned as a dog can look about a woman wrapped up in sheep hair.

As my dog stared at me, as my horse opened his mouth to pant and blow, as the stars started to come out of the cloud-covered sky, revealing the full moon and sheep on the mountain pasture—I could only think of the question I asked my father when I first heard the song of the beast on Hallow's night long ago. "Why do they call the monster Birchthorn, papa? Birch trees aren't supposed to have thorns?" My father stared into my eyes, and with a stare not unlike Anvil's, he put a hand on my frail shoulder and replied;

"And these forests aren't supposed to have monsters, darling."

That was the first chapter of Birchthorn. It's an online novel I'd like to write right here on this blog. Using an idea of several other fiction writers, the way Birchthorn will work is this: I write a chapter, and then the blog readers who want to hear the next bit of the story, make a small donation to the blog, a few dollars or so. When we hit $300 in donations, the story continues. So every chapter is a community-supported story, a way to help pay the bills for me, and a way to get an entirely original story for you.

Now, here is the kicker. I am going to create this novel using names and people from the Cold Antler Farm community! this is our story, you will be characters and parts of the tale. I used Lara so far, thinking of how she fell asleep by the Bun Baker the last night of Antlerstock this year, and how that sense of comfort is what the cart-driver felt so far away from as the beast followed the cart through the woods. You can bet that many more of you will show up in this early-20th century tale of a small farming community's dealings with a monster of legend. It will be family friendly, but spooky. I hope you will join me for the ride. I already have plans for an ex-seat weaver out there (wink wink).

So to keep the story going, make a donation with the donate button under the blog. And this is, of course, voluntary. No one has to pay anything, and no one will be asked to ever pay to read this blog. But when a reader suggested this idea to me, it felt like a blessing and answered prayer. She wrote, "your work is valuable and you are a writer." And I read that over a few times. Since most of my writing is for free, on this blog, I never see it as a thing of value, just something I do. But perhaps a novel is a different approach, and through comments, feedback, and this community we can create a work of fiction about real farm skills and life, with names and faces we know, and have a fun time doing it!

It won't be perfect. You are helping create a manuscript, not a finished piece. I will have to keep going back to fix things and correct mistakes but you can help there too, if a plot goes astray or I explained harnessing a horse the wrong way. We can all make this happen, and who knows what will come of it. Maybe Birchthorn will become a real book? If that's the case, it'll be even more exciting to see this on;ine community of urban and rural readers and homesteaders become a world of fiction, farming, monsters and myth for the ages!

If no one likes this idea, the story will simply go away, and no one is worse for the wear. But I hope you want to hear more, because I certainly want to write more!

first webinar is a success!

2012-01-07T18:43:00.004-05:00

So the first Webinar was delivered to the subscribers and I think it was met with a a happy applaud! It felt good to hear some of the reviews emailed in, such as:

"It was well worth the wait. I loved it. I loved the stories too. I don't know how you have time to do all you do. You rock. Keep them coming."

"Awesome work Jenna! I ordered a dulcimer for Christmas and am still waiting for it to arrive. I feel like I'll have a head start with your great instructions. Really enjoyed the webinar and thought it was very well done."

"This is freakin' awesome. I so want a dulcimer now..."

"Thanks for sharing--love the webinar format!"

"We just finished watching and listening to your Webinar. Marvelous job! We really enjoyed your music lesson -- it was very encouraging, you explained just what a newbie needs to know at first, and you gave meaningful reasons why we could benefit from making some music for ourselves. I was glad to hear that we don't have to be a prodigy to begin learning an instrument."

You can sign up for webinars any time of year, and will get all the videos you missed of that season (we are in the 2012) season now. To sign up for the entire season is a hundred dollars, but you get your money's worth! This last one was over half an hour. It started with Dulcimer 101, and next up is working with wool from sheep to yarn. We will wash, dry, card, and spin it using a drop spindle. After that wool working webinar the rest will follow the workshops (generally) and you should expect 9 to 12 more this year. Some will be longer, and some shorter. At the end of the season you can get them as a DVD, so you have them to watch whenever you want. I am hoping to sell enough video subscriptions to buy a newer computer (the one I am using is from 2005) so I can create better videos and a better blog here. But right now, just running the joint is what I use the bulk of shares for. Subscriptions to webinars and workshop attendance is what makes up for the salary cut I voluntarily took this past fall. I figured if the dream is to work on the farm full time as a writer and farmer, then I better see if I can cut it just giving up one day of pay before I give up five.

That day is a while off, but so far I am making it (just!) and I consider that a blessing. I have all of your support and encouragement to thank you for how far I have managed to get towards my dream.

Hey, would anyone like it if I kept that story going of driving home in the horse cart at night? Maybe wrote a little more and more every few days? If I wrote a fictional piece about me and the farm would it confuse people? What should I call those entries?

the new gosling (short video)

2012-01-07T15:37:00.001-05:00

it takes a village

2012-01-07T15:03:00.004-05:00

Read this post on friend and fellow farming author, Ben Hewitt's blog. He talks about the upcoming hog slaughter and wanted to share it. He writes about the animals, friends, neighbors, and shared work that will feed a group of people. Also, dog nuts. Here's some of Ben's fine writing, if you don't already tend his blog, get to it right quick.

On Saturday, we kill the pigs. It goes well; one shot each followed by a quick probe of the knife to loose the blood and as always, the shock of the sheer quantity of it, spreading across the frozen ground like unfurling sheets. Ryan and Jocelyn show up, and we spend the next two hours skinning and gutting and sawing and hoisting the halves to hang overnight so they’ll stiffen for cutting the next day. We have lunch. We skin and gut and saw and hoist some more. We are tired and the job is done....

Read the rest of the story here at Benhewitt.com

brewing again!

2012-01-07T12:02:00.010-05:00

I know a lot of folks out there have mixed feelings about Jimmy Carter, but those of us who are homebrewers love the man for making homemade beer and wine a legal endeavor again. From the time of prohibition to 1978 it wasn't legal to make alcohol at home as a hobby or for home consumption. But when an amendment was added to a bill allowing zymurgy in the home once again, homebrewing clubs, stores, and small micro-breweries exploded.

One very micro, micro-brewery is this farm. I'm new to homebrewing, but I adore the entire process. From heating wort over the stove to clasping the final cap on the last bottle, it feels almost subversive. Like I am part of something I'm not supposed to be. Anyone out there who has opened a hand-sealed cap off a bottle of a backyard batch knows this feeling. A buzz in a bottle, a creation of alcohol and carbonation. I remember seeing that first ever IPA froth up and I could not believe I had done something in my kitchen I had only see done from factory products. It's like wearing a pair of jeans you sewed yourself. Totally possible, but rare to the uninitiated.

I am a homebrewer and proud of it. Equipment in this kitchen includes items like siphons and bottle cappers, sanitizing potions and saved brown bottles to wash and reuse from other (larger breweries). There are Guinness bottles full of hard cider in the fridge right now with shiny cold caps. The cider making wasn't exactly "brewing" since I wasn't over a hot kettle mixing grains and hops and then rapidly cooling it off before sticking it in a fermenting container with yeast. This was just apple juice fed honey and yeast and fermented twice to give it a kick. I drink it cold and feel the happy sting, like a sharp, flat, champagne. It's 12% alcohol and that's enough to stop anyone from driving the school bus after a few pints.

I think for a lot of people who like the idea of homebrewing, it just seems so complicated? The sanitizing, chemical reaction, racking bottles...what a bother. Truth is it can be. But it can also be very simple, just like any craft practiced in the home...

I can hand you a fiddle and ask you to play Old Joe Clark or a Bach Concerto. One is more complicated and usually higher praised for the effort and results, but that doesn't mean Old Joe Clark doesn't sound like a fun tune, get you dancing, and you made it yourself. My homebrew is like that. It's not fancy (yet), and nothing to brag about at the homebrewing contests around the area. But no one can dispute that what comes out of those bottles is frothy, home made beer. And to pour a glass of black homemade stout and play a fiddle tune you taught yourself is just as satisfying and real as any chicken raised for the table or hand-kneaded loaf of bread. It is growing a celebration from seed.

Today I'll mix and start a batch of an Irish Black Stout from a kit I have here. It'll be ready to drink in about three or four weeks. The small pony keg I use makes exactly a case of 12pz bottles, and a case lasts me a long time. I just ordered a intermediate kit from Northern Brewer called Peace Coffee Stout. It's a dark, smooth beer with coffee and spices in it. I added a larger brewing kettle to my arsenal as well and bought some growlers to fill and carbonate for parties or music circles in the spring. This batch should be ready by the Meat and Beer party workshop, where we'll brew several types of beers together and make homemade sausage from scratch (thanks to Kevin and Bacon). That day will end with music, homebrew, and some seriously good brats and buns. If you're coming, bring your instruments!

I moved all thirty chicks outside in this weirdly warm weather we are having. It is 40 degrees out there. I swear it feels like a thunderstorm is coming...

P.S. If you are brand, brand new to homebrewing there are several beginner kits. I already talked about Mr. Beer (a company that I truly adore) for their kit beers anyone with a 2-gallon steel kettle can make good beer from. I suggest this super easy mix-and-pour brew kit for all beginners. For those ready for a little more of a challenge, there is this beautiful and inexpensive kit from the folks at Brooklyn Brew Shop for making a gallon of beer at home with a small glass carboy, and i can't think of a better gift to hand to hands-on friends. And no, neither of these companies are CAF sponsors!

the chickloo worked great!

2012-01-07T07:17:00.003-05:00

All 15 youngins made it through their first night, and it dropped below 30 degrees! The rest of the gand will join them soon. I'm proud of Steve, Molly, and I (mostly Steve) for putting together this simle structure to raise thirty meat birds in the middle of winter at low cost!

And when those birds are in freezer camp, I am going to turn it into a cold frame with a plastic top for kale and lettuce! Fresh chicken over roasted kale in winter, I'm upping my game!

jasper being jasper

2012-01-06T16:25:00.000-05:00

would myth return?

2012-01-06T09:56:00.000-05:00

Fridays in winter are such an amazing blessing. Any hesitation I had about giving up a fifth of my professional salary for one more day a week on the farm melts on mornings like this.

The fires are lit and the animals are fed. The Creek Drank the Cradle is on the record playing, spinning lazily in the living room. With the giant television gone and no speakers in that main room with the stove: the record player is the center of high-tech entertainment. Last night while paging through seed catalogs I listened to Johnny Cash at San Quentin and closed my eyes and smiled when he and June sang together. What a story, theirs. This morning it is a favorite record I know every lyric and tempo by heart. It turns with that static and scratching I love. The record player is older than I am. It's still got it.

I woke up to a snow covered farm, just a dusting. But still, all that clean white covering up months of senescence and mud, it is purifying to the farmer's soul. It makes the fires inside warmer, the mind expand into wild and older places. Outside the morning was warmer than it has been this week. The sun rose over the barn and Gibson was by my side through chores. The gosling is doing great, almost twice its hatch size and always with mom and dad. I decided to let the lad stay. A trio of geese just sounds right, doesn't it?

About those older and wilder places: on the way home from work last night I cut through Shushan because I wanted a slower drive over the river and through the woods (literally) to the farm. As I drove through the frozen night, it felt so still and cold with the new snow it was as if it had been paused and only my gray truck was left to move past the statues of does behind birch trees and windless pines. Suddenly, a snow squall started up again and the forest became a live again. In the streetlampless roads the only lights are the ones mounted on the front of your car and just ahead a dark form raced across the road and far into the night.

I don't know what it was. A deer, probably, or a bear. It could have been a dog or coyote or any other sort of North Country critter but it was fast and silent. I imagined myself not inside a V8 pickup in 2012, but in a horse-drawn farm wagon with nothing but two torch lanterns on the front. Could you imagine moving through a winter squall in near pitch-black roads with nothing but a yellow orb around you and your trotting horse? Wrapped up in a wool blanket and coat, a knit hat tight around your head and covering your ears, with a thick leather hat on top of that to keep the weather out? A scarf around your face, thick deerskin gloves, and the only sounds the wind and hooves? Now, imagine just out of view a black blur races across the road. The horse's head and ears shoot up in alert and he blows hard, stops in his tracks. You click him forward and his ears go from pressed against his head to orbiting around, listening for the monster. There's no radio, no steel and glass terrarium to keep you from the sounds of crackling brush, banshee winds, and then the low guttural tones of something just 20 yards to your right.

Don't you think your mind would take in that racing animal totally differently? That black blur would become a tale! Another sighting of a legend, or something out of folklore like a werewolf or ghost. You would take off your hat and wool layers and set them by the fire indoors and as you sat down to your dinner of slow-booking beans and beef from the dutch oven and ladle, you would tell everyone about what you and the horse saw, just 3 miles from the farmhouse...

I sometimes wonder if we lost all the electricity, all the modern, numbing conveniences of the world that treat many of us like we are handicapped—if myth would rise again? I'm not saying I want that (I have grown fond of my plug-in cage) but I certainly think I could deal with it just fine, and that a different kind of synapse would fire driving home in the snow. The forest would become bigger, wooly, and a place where magic and mystery writhe again. A part of me loves that idea. Another part of me is still nervous about a catamount on the barn roof. I'm not sure if it's hypocrisy or just idle thought, but either way I'd still like to drive a horse cart home in the snow one day. A come home and tell a story about it.

Win a Beginner's Garden Seed Set!

2012-01-05T12:36:00.006-05:00

It may be the middle of winter, but that isn't stopping those of us with seed catalogs on our coffee tables from dreaming. I am already planning my gardens for next year, and how to best grow herbs, flowers, and vegetables to add to the farm kitchen and pantry next season. I'll be installing a south-side facing mini greenhouse on the farm house's outer wall to start Kale and other greens soon as the below zero temperatures fade. I can't help it, soon as the Holidays are behind me I just want to get back into the dirt...

Want to get dirty too?

Annie's Heirloom Seeds (that's some of the Annie's Heirloom Seed family in the photo) has agreed to try out a sponsorship on the blog for a month, and in the spirit of our collective cabin fever, has offered up to the blog a wonderful giveaway! Annie's is offering five Beginner's Garden Collection Seed Sets to the readers of this blog. The collection includes five easy-to-grow vegetables you'll never find in the produce isle of your supermarket. They include: Contender Bush Bean, Boothby's Blonde Cucumber, Black Beauty Zucchini, Annie's Lettuce Blend, and Annie's Radish Mix. In a few months you could have your own salads under cold frames, radish heads poking out of dark healthy soil, and bean and squash seeds started indoors. By this Autumn you could have beans saved in your freezer, special pickles in jars, and have had enough roasted Zucchini to write a ballad about it.

What makes these seeds "beginner" is they are easy to grow, without much fuss or special needs. Besides some good soil and well-seasoned compost in a raised bed, all you need is a trellis for the cucumbers to climb. That, and some water, weeding, and critter vigilance and this could be the year you finally get some food out of your backyard! Find a little time, and get those hands dirty.

To win one of five Beginner's Collections, leave a comment saying what other heirloom vegetables you are planning to grow this summer? They can be ones you discovered on the Annie's site, or ones you have saved for years and years. One entry per reader please. But, if you are willing to share a link to this contest on Facebook, you can come back and write a second comment that says "SHARED!" to double your chances for winning!

Winner picked soon, enter away!

wonderful and ridiculous

2012-01-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

big cats

2012-01-04T09:37:00.002-05:00

This is a Maine Coon, a large domestic breed of cat suitable for a famer who lives with a pack of wolves. Two are arriving here on Sunday, adopted from a home who needs to find a new place for their twenty and fifteen pound pets, Lilly and George.

I always hesitated getting housecats, worried the dogs would bother them. I had been warned when I got Jazz that he used to chase cats...but George and Lilly are huge, clawed, and Jazz is now 14 years old and can't get up the stairs easily. I'm not worried. Well, not about the cats anyway.

Get ready for thirty five pounds of feline Cold Antler!

I am a member!

2012-01-03T19:33:00.004-05:00

I joined the coalition today, and proud to be a member. The world of food is going to change a lot in my lifetime, and small, vibrant farms are (what I think) will feed families of the future. It's cheap to join, just twenty dollars a year, and helps support a non profit fighting for small farmers, A decent Farm Bill, and running summits and meetings around the nation.

Lean more here, you don't have to be young (or a farmer!) to join either: www.youngfarmers.org

P.S. Having problems with email. Most addresses are blocking my IP address as spam. Need to fix it but for now contact me via Facebook or please be patient. I hope to have it fixed asap...

learning the ropes

2012-01-03T19:32:00.002-05:00

Monday afternoon I loaded up the truck at Nelson Greene's Farm with some of the last hay stores he had for the year. Nelson's hay is the best I have ever seen, and worth every penny at five dollars a bale. Not a blade of grass is yellow, all green and dry as tinder. His bales are nearly 60-70lbs, enormous and nutritious. I was sad to load up the last 23 bales I might get from him. As I sat four bales high (about 12 feet off the ground) I looked over his barn and fields and listened to him talk to a gentlemen named Harold about his new angus in the field below. He was proud of those beefs, and I was proud of him. Nelson is 72 years old, raising cows, hauling hay bales, and can lift me off the ground with one hand on my belt buckle. His hands are the size of basketballs, and he is always laughing. I got off the truck by putting a foot into his two gloved hands and he lowered me down as if I was a kindergardener. Farming, in his case, was a magic fountain. He might be in the hospital every so often for breathing problems due to a lifetime of dust and haying, but that is his biggest health issue. If I am this lucky and alive at 72 I will consider myself among the blessed.

After both Harold and I had our trucks loaded up, we headed down route 22 to Salem. I didn't realize it but two bales had fallen off the truck on the trip south. It wasn't until I pulled into the Stewart's for a cup of coffee and a wheat bun with peanut butter that I noticed the gapes in my load. I groaned. That would feed my hoofstock for an entire day, and cost ten dollars. With hay being so dear, I shook my head and chalked it up as a loss and a lesson.

Then I heard someone call my name and glory be, it was Harold! The 60+ year-old man had stopped after each bale fell and loaded them onto his truck. Then when I pulled into the gas station he did too, and I was so happy to see the man. I knew he could have easily kept that hay for his seven horses, but he returned it. He helped me load it back onto the Dodge and tie it down with baling twine from his own rig.

Around here, we look after each other. And Harold and Nelson both know you gotta keep an eye on a greenhorn like me. Can't even tie down her hay yet...

on comments

2012-01-03T12:23:00.003-05:00

I was at lunch a few week's ago with Jon, talking about blogging. He said one of the best things he ever did for his own blog was remove the comments in his posts. He said his blog wasn't a conversation or an argument, it was a place to share his writing and art. He was not going to spend his time defending himself, or reading negativity, or welcoming controversy in a life striving for peace and spirituality.I think he's on to something.

Part of me wants to stop the comments here, but I do not want to lose the open forum of this blog. I have made some great friends, networked with farmers across the country, and have been able to address people's questions and concerns because of the comment section. However, it seems that over the past few months things have gotten combative in that part of the blog. Some anonymous commenters are overly sensitive to the content they read, and overly insensitive about how they respond to it. Thinner skins and angrier words are a dangerous combination.

And not necessarily an unwelcomed one! Here is my solution: You are free to say anything you want on this blog about me. Go right on ahead, but from here on out if you are going to say something in anger, resentment, or complaint you need to do it with your real name and contact information, just as I have. Anyone who has something degrading to say about my views, my reader's views, or the conversation being held here who can't also publicly link back to their real name and email address will be deleted. There is no credibility here behind angry anonymity.

This doesn't mean you all have to share your full name and email address to give advice or say hello or ask questions. No one needs to make a new user name unless they have a bone to pick or hurtful things to say. In that case you need to do it to my face.

gibson is a beautiful springer spaniel

2012-01-01T21:03:00.008-05:00

"That is a beautiful Springer Spaniel!" A stranger said to Gibson and I. He was in his forties with his young son outside a shop in downtown Cambridge. He then asked if it was okay to pet Gibson and I said sure, of course he could, and then I couldn't help myself. I introduced my dog as a Border Collie, not a Springer Spaniel.

The man instantly changed his demeanor from open and friendly to slightly abashed. It was subtle but clear as if someone dumped water on his face. I also corrected him in front of his young son. I was hit with a big ol' stick of realization...

This wasn't life-saving information, nor was it something that would show up in a voting booth or grocery list. He was not a dog professor or trainer, making a living off wrong information. And it's not like he was about to enter a game show and someone would flash dogs on a screen, and knowing what a border collie was by sight would win him a million dollar prize...

I had no reason to correct him so why did I do it? He was being perfectly happy and polite. If a 40-year-old man can't tell a springer spaniel from a sheepdog then he probably doesn't need to know (or care about) the difference. All I did in pointing out his mistake was possibly stop him from complimenting the next dog he saw. Possibly make him consider being friendly to the next stranger he meets with a puppy. That's a damn shame, to possibly stop a flow of kindness from a person. Already we are so rarely nice and open to strangers in this country. So many rarely go out of our way to tell people on the street kind things. And there I was, smiling through a smarmy rejoinder, correcting a stranger just because I could.

I just corrected someone in the post below because they called my hay straw. Why the heck did I need to do that? Soon as I saw it posted in reply my chest fell. There I go again... What if it stops that reader from commenting again, or another reader who was considering commenting stop because they don't want to make a mistake? We worry so much about perceptions already nowadays. Why am I adding to it?

Growing up takes the whole time, doesn't it?

The next time a person tells me I have a beautiful setter or pointer or mutt I am going to thank them and compliment them on their hair cut. This world needs a lot more sweetness in it.

Gibson really is a beautiful springer spaniel.

a new year, a new coop

2012-01-01T18:48:00.006-05:00

I'm enjoying this long weekend, spending a lot of time catching up on rest and working on the farm. I finished the Dulcimer Webinar, and soon as I can upload the whole 34 minutes of it, I will email it to the entire list. I tried today, twice, and either I exported the video too high of a resolution, or I need to take it on a DVD to a friend's computer and upload it from there. Either way, the latest you will get it is Tuesday night, dear subscribers, and I think it's a heck of a way to welcome 2012. The video will also come with emailed links to PDFs for the song taught, and other resources you can use as beginner strummers. Let me know what you think of it!

I got a local farmer to deliver a truckload of hay yesterday and it was enough to build the Freedom Ranger's winter Oasis. Friends Steve and Molly came by to help build it, as the birds were ordered by them in our joint-deal. (They order the chicks, I raise them, and I get to keep half for my own freezer.) It took longer than I thought it would, than any of us did. But the final design was safe, warm, and predator proof as possible. Soon as the birds are a little older and this coming week's lows (hanging around zero degrees!) warm up, I can move a trial group outside. I'm pretty confident they will be comfortable. I sure would be! That thing is like a heat igloo.

On a more personal note, five times this weekend I started, and then deleted, long posts about how in just a few years of farming I have experienced such a change of spirit and heart. I kept falling into lists and examples though, saying things like "I can't imagine buying gravy at the grocery store!" or "I'll never not own a pickup truck." While these things are certainly true, that's not the change I am talking about. Learning skills, getting used to chores, owning 4x4 vehicles does not reflect what I was trying to convey. So I will work on it, and hopefully explain what goes on in a woman's mind 5 years into farming solo. The security and insecurities of it. How I see friends, people, experiences, morals, so many things differently. If this sounds vague, well, that's because it is for me too. But I think when I figure out how to communicate this baling twineline of mental evolution towards the authentic self I strive for (not there yet), it will resonate with many of you on the same path, or who yearn to be. That is my writer's challenge of 2012. To tell the story of how a person grows when they plant themselves on 6.5 acres.

I hope you all had a safe and grateful New Years, and will have an amazing 2012. Bring it on.

P.S. The television and microwave got the boot yesterday.

Plan B: A Very Special Workshop This Spring!

2011-12-31T12:23:00.000-05:00

I'm very excited to announce this special workshop coming to Cold Antler on May 12, 2012. It's about a topic on many homesteader's minds and the occasional topic of discussion on this blog: Emergency Preparedness and the Future of Energy. The focus will be specifically on preparing your small farm or homestead for a disaster (natural or man made) and how the future of energy will affect us as and how you can be ready for it. And there are going to be two amazing guest presenters sharing their minds and experiences on this topic: Kathy Harrison and James Howard Kunstler.

Kathy is the author of the book Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens, and James Howard Kunstler, an internationally-renowned speaker and author on Peak Oil and Collapse. His book, The Long Emergency, as well as Kathy's, will be included in this workshop. Both have been featured in several television shows and documentaries on these topics They are leaders in the field. And both agreed to help set up this event as a way to support Cold Antler Farm, I'm lucky to know them both.

The day of conversations and demonstrations will focus on personal disaster prep for your own farms and families. Kathy Harrison will talk about things you can do to prepare for when that ice storm takes out the power for a week, and what you can do in your current situation even if it is an apartment in the city. Topics covered will include food and water, car and personal emergency packs, first aid kits, non-electric alternatives for everyday appliances, alternative energy for your home and gadgets, gardening and preserving food, hunting and fishing, and all day questions will be welcomed and answered.

While some topics covered will be controversial, all will be based on practical skills and knowledge. This is not a Survivalist Training Camp, Tin Foil Hat Sewing Circle, or a UN stake out. If you're looking for a scary day talking about the end of the world, it isn't that either. This is a day about empowerment, action, preparing, and safety. It's about knowing that if a tree crushes your car in a storm and you're snowed in for 3 days without power you, your kids, and the dogs will have a lamp-lit scrabble night by the fireplace with some back-up kerosene heaters with a warm meal you cooked on the gas grill on the deck. Kathy will be explaining to us exactly why being prepared matters, and our responsibilities to do so. I'm sure she'll be happy to sign books and field your questions about many homesteading and preparedness topics. She has a heck of a farm!

JHK will be hitting us from a different angle. He'll be having a conversation with us on energy, peak oil, and the bigger picture, as well as his thoughts on what's in store through the next few years. Get a chance to hear one of the leading people in the field in a home setting talking about communities and localized economies. Hear his theories on why we should be thinking more about things like trains, local businesses, sustainable farm practices, and other topics. Get your copy of World Made By Hand signed by the author in the very county the book was written about!

The workshop runs from 10AM - 3PM Saturday May 12th at the farm. A water bath canning demonstration, a pressure canner overview, backyard homesteading tour, and homegrown music and home brewing will also be discussed. James is one heck of a fiddler and has been known to saw out a tune here at the farm on occasion, maybe he'll bring his along? So I hope you'll join us in this information-packed weekend talking about how to prepare for the worst, and feel safe and comfortable no matter what mother nature, your boss, or the economy throws at you!

Email me at Jenna@itsafarwalk.com to reserve a spot!
Limited to 20!

pumas, banjos, blood and cancer

2011-12-30T19:38:00.008-05:00

I only have four things to discuss tonight because this woman is tired, and seriously in need of an adult beverage. I got some rest today but also unloaded a truck of hay, entertained some guests, and did some serious stall mucking. However, these four items are of great import in the life of this farm and blog:

1. A catamount has been sighted in Cambridge, 6 miles from Cold Antler!!! I heard it from the horses mouth (err, Julie Dugan's mouth) when her and her husband Dennis stopped by the farm today to check out my Bun Baker wood stove and sit for tea. They told me they both saw what was certainly a catamount, a tawny brown cat about 3-4+ feet long with a tail easily 3 feet long, at close range to their farmhouse. And for those of you certain "It's not a puma!" (I hope you said that with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent). These are educators in the community who know wildlife and exactly what they saw. They are the fourth sighting in the last few weeks around this area as well, I am told. They have since bought a rifle, air horns, mace, and set up a gamer camera! Suddenly my backyard has turned into a place of mystery and concern, as silly as that may sound. But I sure did look up in the trees when I did my night rounds tonight!

2. Julie agreed to come instruct and play at the Mountain Music workshop! This is a HUGE DEAL! She's a nationally known clawhammer player, and has taught all over the nation at banjo camps and festivals. She's amazingly talented and said she'd bring her whole music group and old mountain instruments too (she has over 30 banjos!). This is a great treat to any banjo folks coming to the workshop this winter! And remember, farm food and a fiddle giveaway happen that day too!

3. A reader emailed me about blood in her hen's eggs. More than the usual little red spot. She asked what to do. I tried to email you darling, but Comcast blocks itsafarwalk.com as spam, so no dice. Here is my best guess: red spots (more than usual) mean a vitamin A deficiency. Put a teaspoon (no more!) or it diluted in a cup of warm water and mix it into an entire gallon of feed every day for the flock (depending on flock size, the ration of liver oil to feed is 2%). If the yokes are blood red, like the whole yoke, DO NOT EAT THE EGGS and know this might be cholera. Research both of these online and be mindful of the symptoms! Remove any infected birds from the flock by culling. Don't get the hatchet out right away though, most of the time it's the vitamin A thing.

4. Test results came back from the lab. My mole was not cancerous, and melanoma has been defeated, at least for now! I'm okay! It's not a puma!

Everyone with a backyard flock should pick up The Chicken Health Handbook. It is like having a poultry vet on your bookshelf (you can actually afford) and understand!

she's back!

2011-12-29T16:41:00.004-05:00

Last year I had to sell my Leaping Deer Dulcimer to make some bills, and sent it off to a new home at a reader's house. But this month I got Craggy Mountain Music to sponsor the blog and instead of payment via cash, we bartered for this little girl. Such a beautiful tone, and what could be more CAF then a mountain instrument with antlers!

I have only every played TK Obrien's dulcimers. Craggy Mountain Music is his site, and I highly reccomend, I have long before he agreed to support CAF.

You'll see more in the Dulcimer Webinar! Coming real soon! Got 15 more minutes filmed this week!

home

2011-12-29T10:02:00.014-05:00

No animal even remotely compares in import to the dog here at Cold Antler Farm. Dogs get the lion's share of attention, love, and care. They live in the house with me. They share my bed and furniture. They get the best medical attention, food, and effort I can afford. Dogs are not livestock to me. They are not children, siblings, or any other simulacrum of human interaction. They are my dogs. That is enough.

I am a dog person. When I say that I do not mean that as a sub-culture identifier. I do not spend my evenings in paw-print embroidered sweatshirts scouring Petfinder.com to foster homeless canines or sifting through breed-specific email lists. Dogs are not my hobby, occupation, or entertainment. When I say "I am a dog person" I mean my personhood is intensely connected to, and made better through, my life with dogs.

They are my partners in living in this world. And I don't mean "partners" as a replacement for a human spouse or family, not at all. I mean partner in the most basic way possible. They are my wingmen, staff, and teammates. we exist in a primal partnership that has sang the same long howl since before any human beings had surnames or used complex tools. We ran beside each other long before memory-foam dog beds and nylabones. This partnership is ancient and ceremonial. It is the combination of two amazing stories, shared over meat and firelight. It is our legacy and privilege to share our lives with another beast so in tune and useful to us.

Dogs chose us. Unlike cats, horses, or other domestic animals, they became a part of our lives by their own volition. They didn't do it because of some cosmic wanderlust to serve man, but because we kept some mighty tasty scrap piles at the edge of our camp. So they became comfortable with our campfires and voices. and over the centuries have co-habituated with man in a pact of mutual benefit and success. Dogs, like man, are predators that live in groups and hunt by daylight. Their skills in running down prey far exceed our own. When the spoils were shared, pups raised with humans, and generations of selective breeding and adaptation were put in effect, we were gifted the company of an amazing and multi-talented animal. We now have dogs to aid people in every civilization in the world. No other domesticated species has become so useful in so many ways. So adaptable, varietal, and integral to our own civilization.

Dogs protect our livestock, homes, and children. They detect bombs, lead the blind, and track criminals and the stranded alike. Some tow boats to shore. Others race across fields in search of game. Some dogs flush, retrieve, or point. Others herd, gather, drive, or drove. Some dogs pull sleds, taking us where we could never go alone. Others sniff out drugs, detect heart attacks, or listen to sounds in the forest we could never hear. Some dogs fill stewpots while luckier ones sit on cushions in royal halls. They are heroes and villains. They are lab rats and show stock. Some dogs go off to war for us while others simply let us hold them until we can't cry anymore. Look at any painting or any piece of literature (of any class!) in the history of Man and there is a dog. They have helped us live, work, and eat and in this relationship both of our species have exploded in populations and prominence. While such population explosions come with their problems, the numbers don't lie.

I refuse to see all animals as equals. Call me a speciesist all you like. Livestock raised for our plate are not on the same emotional, societal, or cultural plane as dogs. Certainly not to me, or to our history as co-dependent species. If you have the audacity to compare my working dogs to my edible livestock, I have already stopped listening to you. Dogs are not dinner, they are home. And even if some dogs are raised as food by other cultures, it doesn't diminish the story of Dog, or negate the work they have done and continue to do with us humans. They have been watching over us, protecting us, hunting with us, carrying us, and sharing our lives since the story of modern man began. Don't you dare compare them to a pig.

I could live the rest of my life in peace without another person, but would collapse in spirit without a dog. This, I am certain. For those who don't like or share your life with dogs, my heart goes out to you.

It must be hard going through life all alone like that.

photo by tim bronson

words and work

2011-12-28T20:33:00.005-05:00

I got home around 6PM, cold and aching for a hard work and a stove to warm myself by. My truck's heat is on the fritz, so there's no comfy commute from the dropping temperatures, but there is refuge from the wind, and tonight with 30MPH gusts ripping through Veryork: that was enough.

By the time I finally got back into the farmhouse I was almost blown back as I stepped through the threshold of the 51-degree home. It seemed so incredibly comfortable compared to the alternatives since leaving the office. Greeted by Jazz and Annie, it was even warmer. I sweat that huskies smile.

First task: Take all three dogs out for a constitutional to release their urgencies. When returned and fed, I was free to see to the warming of the place. I heated up the oven to 410 degrees to bake up a small pizza. Then I set to work collecting the last few day's worth of ashes from the two wood stoves and set to work lighting them in their fresh homes.

With fires starting to blaze, I set outside for the first trip of wood collecting for the night. I chose thinner, lighter, dry logs to ensure a healthy fire before I headed outside to the farm animals. While they burned and the fires grew warmer, I dined on a quick supper while I watched the kitchen thermometer climb a few degrees from the oven and two stoves. Heat is not a fast thing here. It comes only from labor, the elements, and sweat. I prefer this kind of heat. It is warmer than the degrees tell.

When all the wolves were fed, it was time to head down the farm's food chain, starting with the 30 (I lost one) meat birds in the brooder. Like so many of you warned: the birds stank. Every night they needed a fresh layer of bedding and every third night I had to bring the wheelbarrow indoors to unload all that soiled bedding and totally re-clean the brooder. Tonight was a barrow night, so I set out to fetch it and spent a half hour scooping, dumping, scooping, dumping, shaking fresh wood shavings down, and offering clean food and water services. The chicks seemed to appreciate it. Now twice their incoming size and ready to be moved to their hay bale winter barn (yet to be constructed) any day now. I swept up the mess I made around the brooder and left the room smelling and looking better than when I arrived in it a bit earlier. The fire across the small room warmed my back, and I decided it was time to feed the pigs.

In the back of the truck were two two-gallon buckets of food scraps from The Wayside Country Store. They've donated all scraps and edible garbage to Cold Antler and every day after work I pick up the buckets of old deli meats, sandwiches that didn't sell, salad greens and somesuch. The pigs are voracious now. They get four gallons twice a day now and could probably eat more. As they dove into their rubber bin I cleaned out and refilled their water bucket. Jasper watched from his stall. He doesn't seem to understand why the pigs eat so much more than he does?

Jasper got three flakes for the cold night and a fresh bucket of water as well. None of the water around here comes from a hose. There are no outdoor faucets. The people who I bought this farm from had spent five years turning a beat-up farm into a beautiful retirement home. They had no need for hoses or pumps. They sold it to a farmer though, and she uses the 5-gallon buckets by the artesien well and carries them the 50 yards to the barn or sheep trough.

And so the pigs and Jasper had food and water. I stand in the barn a bit to collect my breath and think. I am hoping the farrier comes soon, he really needs a trim. Ken Norman will come by when he can fit it in, I'm sure, but the young man could use a manicure. I make mental notes about the shuffling of bills and circumstances to make sure it happens soon as possible. I scratch his head. His salt-and-pepper mane makes me smile. I am so very partial to those colors on my good boy.

I collect eggs and I grab the frozen rabbit water bottles and bring them all inside. It has now been over an hour since I lit the fires and I need to go inside to mind them. Deciding not to waste a trip, I bring in an armload of proper stove wood too. As I hand-feed the fires I start to sing to myself. I sing Pretty Saro, the folk song my goose is named after and the words float from my work like a soundtrack to evening.Oh, when I first came a to this countrrrrryyyyy, iiiiinnnn eighteen and foooorrrrrty nine. I saw many true a looovers, But ne'er sawa miiiinnnne...

I smile, thinking of how I sing it like the woman on the porch in Songcatcher. I wonder how accurate that is to the real Appalachian vocal traditions. Annie just wags her tail. That bitch loves a good miserable ballad. The house is now 56 degrees and outside it has dropped into the high teens.

I head back outside to carry a barrow of hay to the sheep. I know their 30-gallon water tank is fine, mostly full, and a submersible de-icer is keeping it from turning solid. The water in the barn doesn't freeze at this temperature, kept warm by the hay and life inside it. I do not fret, and know that the water bottles by the stove are ready to return to the rabbits. I think my does might kindle in this cold. I am excited and worried for them. We will see what comes of it. Bruce, my rabbit mentor, says kindling goes okay in barns save for the days over 100 degrees and below -5. We are still in the safe zone of the local legends. I put my faith in them.

I shut the door on the coop. I bring the chicken water font in by the stove to defrost for morning's chores. It has been over 2 hours of solid work. the house is new 58 degrees and in celebration of the work I will drag the sheep skin and some quilts to the Bun Baker to read my book. The TV is still here, but it's dead to me right now. Instead of watching reruns of television shows I wrote this to you. I emailed some hopeful blog sponsors (Got plans for heat in that truck!). All of it better and made me feel more alive than the empty feeling I get watching Netflix alone in an old house.

Some people took my post about television removal as a judgement on their own usage, or even of the medium in general. This is silly. I have no qualms with the invention or art of television. I appreciate the news, education, and entertainment of it. But for me (and this blog only speaks for me) it has become a sad center of my evenings. I want my evenings back. I want to write, play music, work on the business, write books, call friends, and read. I want to close my eyes on a sheepskin rug and hear the sounds of breathing dogs, nearly asleep, chicks in a brooder, and cracks from the fire. I love Jon Stewart, but I love this more. You folks do whatever it is you need to do with your televisions. I just need to see other people for a while.

I have split my night instead into words and work.

That is my favorite life. One of writing and chores. Tonight I got to live it, take it in in every sense. To an outsider looking in, this place is a burden. To me, it is a sanctuary, temple, dance hall, theatre, therapist, library, best friend and grocery store. Isn't that what all homes aim to be?

This was a weeknight at Cold Antler Farm. I'll be asleep by 10. I'll set my phone to wake me up every two hours to keep the stove fires alive, but I'll enjoy the naps in between. Tomorrow is the last full day of work before a 4-day holiday weekend. And you know what I will do with those 30-degree afternoons in a 68-degree farmhouse?

Sleep!

say goodbye to my little friend

2011-12-27T19:20:00.005-05:00

The television, all 46 inches of Living Room Glory, is being picked up by friends and removed this Saturday. Good riddance. I don't like that a television has been the center of my relaxation and creative free time on the farm. I'm too distracted by it, too enamored by the endless thrills of Netflix, Crackle, and Amazon Prime. I don't have cable, haven't for years, but just having a giant screen as the focal point of my home had changed my idea of relaxation. I used to just play music, read, call friends or family, and research farm projects. Recently, these past few months, I have just pushed through chores and meals to get to a point where I sit down and mindlessly watch TV. I have seen seasons 1-3 of Glee. I watched the Hanna Montana Movie. I rewatched shows I had seen a million times. And you know what? All it did was make me put off the work I liked, that I wanted to do! I used to end an evening on my farm with hard work, good food, and then a book or a fiddle. Now I just fall asleep to nameless voices on streaming entertainment.

If I could use its forces for good, if I had the self control to just use it for documentaries and education, or if I had the ability to leave it off for days In a row, I would keep it. But I don't. For me, the television is poison. It's keeping me from writing, from my animals, from going out and making connections with other people and places and farms.

I'll get my news from the radio, internet, and (gasp!) other people I converse with every day. And the best part, no conversation with my friends about Iraq or Peak Oil will be interupted by a stranger trying to sell me tampons or diet soda. Even on the streaming internet channels—like Crackle and Hulu—commercials reign.

I think, to some people, turning off the television is harder than losing indoor plumbing or refrigeration. I know plenty of people who think backyard chickens, worm composters, and dairy goats are easier sells to their partners than no TV. Why is this? How did this thing that isolates us in our homes and distracts us from our goals become so addicting? It's become the center of our time and lives after work and before bed. To me, it's a time suck and dangerous to the soul. It has swooned me away from the energy of the farm and my dreams. It's easy to put off that book proposal if you've got a Ghost Hunter's marathon staring you in the eye....

It's not going on tonight, or ever again. If I want to watch Braveheart, I'll need to set up a computer screen in front of a couch when I am really jonesing for it. Tonight, I'll work on the dulcimer video and return to Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children. I consider this a little victory. It's taking back hours of the night lost to mindless distraction and directing it to music lessons, books, conversations, meetings, and creativity.

lamp black

2011-12-26T19:21:00.002-05:00

This morning I was in the kitchen cleaning out and organizing some drawers and cabinets when some good advice wafted from the computer screen. I was watching the Victorian Christmas series I had blogged about Saturday, and there was a scene where Ruth (one of the show's historical renenactors) was cleaning up the cottages oil lamps. She explained that as the lamp black fills the glass chimneys they let out less light. They need to be cared for and cleaned on a weekly basis of regular use. She also talked about refilling the oil levels, and trimming the blackened edge of the wicks. This kind of service done in daylight means that at night the farmhouse would literally shine. "Neglected, and the lit dims from all the soot. Your whole home becomes a little dingier..." I looked across my own farmhouse to the oil lamp that sits in the center of my living room dining set. It was embarrassingly dirty.

I picked it up and ran a glass cloth through the black chimney. In minutes it was clean. I then trimmed the black end of the wick with scissors and refilled the reservoir with some oil I had under the kitchen sink. I set it back on the kitchen table, ready for service. When it was lit again it would burn true, and bright, in service to whatever purpose I called it to. I smiled.

There is something decent about letting light shine. You feel cleaner all over.

P.S. Willow, I read your letter and cried in my kitchen. Your painting hangs on the wall. Keep drawing wolves.

csa update

2011-12-26T11:14:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to check in with all of you CSA and Webinar subscribers. CSA packages have began shipping, some hopefully have arrived at your doors before Christmas. For those that have not, I do apologize and they will get to you soon. As for the webinars, had no DSL since Saturday afternoon into this morning, and it is spotty at best, so I am waiting for a connection strong enough to support a 25 minute upload! You will get the dulcimer video in all its glory soon as I can get it too you.

I realize to some of my more cautious readers that might sound like a line. But feel free to call the folks at Common Sense Mechanical who came out on Christmas Day to check for rat/mice damage chewing through my phone lines. Turns out it wasn't chewed lines (like I thought) but the actual phone jack outside in the gray box is dead. So someone from the phone company has to do their voodoo to the outside connection. In the meantime I get my 5-8 minutes here and there where it works! (took three failed attempts to post just this!). It's always something.

Know I am doing my level best, and as things move forward and I have more time to dedicate to just the farm it will only go smoother. I appreciate your kindness, patience, and support.

a victorian farm christmas!

2011-12-24T11:52:00.001-05:00

comfort and joy

2011-12-24T08:40:00.008-05:00

Yesterday afternoon Brett arrived at the farm with the most beautiful leg of lamb I have ever seen. I beamed with pride, looking at it. It was, as he called it, our joint-custody dinner, but the credit goes to him. This past summer at a chicken butchering workshop he loaded up lamb number 9 into a crate in the back of his pickup, with plans to raise him for holiday meals. He left here a scrappy little ram lamb with amazing vertical jumping abilities (he had to nail a lid on the 4-foot tall crate on the back of his truck, funny story), and now the lamb had come full circle. He returned to the place of his birth for a Christmas Meal.

Brett didn't let me help with the cooking so I headed outside to see to the animals while he bathed the leg in cream sauce, butter, garlic, mushroom and rosemary. He also had biscuits, beans, Adirondack Blue potatoes (which make purple mashed potatoes!) and I had set a peppermint pig on the table as a post-meal treat. (Peppermint Pigs are an upstate NY tradition from Saratoga) My first chore was the Freedom Rangers, who are still in the brooder. They were already doubled in size and would need more space soon. But they next week or so they would be fine. I gave them clean bedding, fresh feed, and water and then walked outside to the barn..

Standing next to the barn, was y Christmas Present. A Jasper-sized stone boat! I squealed! A stone boat is what you see in that picture, a wooden draggable sleigh used by draft horses to pull field stones, firewood, farm implements, and move over ice and snow with sap buckets in March. It is the original "tractor attachment" the most basic working horse's rig. It's not something that comes in pony sizes, but Brett took a photo of the stone boat at Merck Forest during Antlerstock and made it from his own home-milled lumber. Amazing...

The meal was epic. I had never tasted such lamb. It was succulent, slightly pink (the greatest sin of lamb is over cooking), and covered in the creamy sauce. The potatoes and greens were perfect sides. We enjoyed the biscuits with butter and a bottle of red wine. Cheers to a friendship so grand, and to his skills and kindness. This is a man who not only raised the sheep, but created a 4-star meal out of the flesh he butchered himself and has the home-tanned fleece rug on his cabin floor to prove it. I'm proud to know him, and constantly impressed by his talents.

I am impressed by your talents as well. I received hand knit socks (wore them last night!), a painting of a howling wolf with antlers, hand-knit sheep toys (with a border collie!), music, books, letters, and enough cards to drown my kitchen door. There will be a donation made from this community to Heifer.org for (you guess it!) a lamb for a family in need. That's right, we came together with enough to deliver a sheep to people who truly need it. A blessing, one of many, from you wonderful readers across the globe.

And as far as eating my own lamb, I will say this, for anyone curious. Eating the leg of lamb from a sheep I delivered here on a cold spring night was not in any way weird or uncomfortable. It was an honor and a blessing. It was possibly the best meal of my life and I could not believe such a feast started in my own pasture. I asked Brett how he felt about the lamb, since his relationship was more primal. He was the one who raised, slaughtered, butchered and served him. He thought about it for a moment and replied, "I chew slower." Perfect.

This Christmas, we should all take a moment to chew slower. You don't have to raise your meal to be so grateful for it it gives you pause. To be celebrating a religious holiday without fear, in a country at peace, with people you love and cherish deserves the reflection and amazement it should deliver to everyone warm and surrounded by grace this season.

From this farm, to yours, Merry Christmas.

The Best Last Minute Gift!

2011-12-23T10:22:00.002-05:00

If you're looking for a great, last-minute gift for the holidays, consider buying a workshop or a season pass to webinars from Cold Antler Farm. It's a great way to inspire and connect, and your support is essential to keeping this farm and blog going.

If you email me today about a workshop or webinars, I would be happy to offer a Holiday discount and you can expect the first full-length webinar (Dulcimer 101) in your mailboxes by Christmas Day. For more information on webinars, click here, and for a complete list of upcoming workshops and classes, just check out this list below!

Thank you, so very, very much.

Mountain Music!
February 4th 2012
This is going to be a fun one. A full snowy day at the farmhouse with an introduction to the mountain dulcimer, southern fiddle, and clawhammer banjo! The morning will start off around the woodstove with dogs and introductions, and then we'll go over the basics of stringed mountain instruments. You'll learn how to play a tune on the dulcimer, bow and hold a fiddle, and the clawhammer strum known as flailing. This beginner's class will be about getting acquainted with the instruments, as well as how to teach yourself. You'll learn my method of self-education that comes from using very beginner-friendly audio/visual aids like tab/cd sets as well as easy practice schedules and tips. I'll point you in the direction of good beginner instruments and anyone who already has a fiddle, dulcimer, or banjo laying around they want some re-upping of inspiration on: bring it along! We'll spend the entire day getting group and one-on-one instruction. and eat some amazing slow-cooked pork and potatoes with apple pie for dessert! We'll have drawing for a mountain dulcimer too, so some one will go home with music in their hands!

MEAT & BEER PARTY
Feb 18th 2012
Yup. Just like it sounds! We're going to learn some meat basics, including home sausage making, perfect crock-pot pork BBQ, the herb-buttered oven roasted chicken, and introducing rabbit into your diet. There will also be running conversation over the ethics of meat, and how to support and raise your own even on a small scale. Also, home brewing 101. How to start making beer at home, and includes how to bottle and store. I'm going to get some pros involved in this (Alli and Collin..cough cough) We'll be giving away a beermaking kit from Northern Brewer as a drawing!

Urban Homesteading 101
March 24th 2012
This will be a workshop for those of you in the suburbs or the city who want to take a daytrip out to the farm and learn about what can be done to be more self-sufficient in your own backyards or fire escapes. We'll start the day learning to bake bread from scratch (no bread machines or kitchen aids here, folks!) and cheese making 101. The entire morning will be these two domestic basics: bread and cheese and for lunch we'll be enjoying our morning's creations! (as well as other potluck goodies). The afternoon will go over container and small-space gardening, introduction to vermi-composting, backyard chicken basics, and small-scale rabbitries. Everyone who comes along leaves with heirloom seeds ready-to-plant for early season crops and all you need to make a few pounds of mozzarella at home! There will be a drawing for a small library of urban farm books too!

Sign up for these, or any of the workshops below by emailing me at jenna@itsafarwalk.com

And for anyone interested in other dates of upcoming workshops!

Black Sheep Wool Workshop
full!
January 28th 2012

Mountain Music!
8 spots available!
February 4th 2012

Black Sheep Wool Workshop II
1 spot available
Februrary 25 2012

Urban Homesteading 101
8 spots available
March 24th 2012

Backyard Chickens
(comes with chickens!)
12 spots available
April 7th 2012

Plan B:
(with Kathy Harrison and James Howard Kunstler!)
10 spots available
May 12th 2012

Backyard BBQ Meat Bird Class and Cookout!
12 spots available
Mid June

Antlerstock 2012
2 Days of workshops and fellowship!
17 spots available
Columbus Day Weekend 2012

meet the new kid

2011-12-23T06:49:00.000-05:00

solstice work

2011-12-22T21:54:00.002-05:00

I was standing outside the sheep's gate with a wheelbarrow. All sixteen sheep charging towards me, thinking their evening meal had finally arrived. This was bad, and only because I wasn't toting a bale of beautiful Washington County Second Cut. Instead I had one, dense, 70-lb bale of straw I had bought and stored just for nights like tonight. A storm was moving in, starting with freezing rain and turning into several inches of snow. My flock like to be under cover and on dry ground as night snow falls, and so, for this exact purpose, I cover their barns with a new layer of clean bedding the night before a snow hits. It's a clean sheet to call home as the coming snow storm wailed into the small hours. I needed to get it up the hill and right now opening the gate would be a mob riot. I needed help.

I let Gibson take on this task, however he saw fit. I opened the door to the farm house and he bolted to the sheep gate. At his sight, many of the flock started to move towards their barns. I let him in the fence and told him to lie down. He did, and the flock raced to their pen, away from my working area as if Gibson had read all of our minds. I let him walk towards the flock, and when I told him to stop and lie, he did. I shut the gate. I then told him to look back at the pasture behind him and he shot off into the night, looking for a fleece under the waning moon. He saw none and sprinted back to me. I was thrilled for his help, as simple as it was. He calmly got the flock away from my work zone and behind a gate. A small victory for this eager pup and new shepherd.

It's the solstice tonight! The longest night of the year. Tomorrow the days start to grow longer and hark towards spring. If I needed a more blatant reminder, a gosling was born from Sara and Cyrus, and I am so proud of those 3-year-old geese I could hug them. The little one is doing fine and I am leaving it to its mother's care. No brooder box for this fella, just down, feed, water, and hay. I hope the little one is just the first of many. The Twelve Tribe farm down the road wants to barter for some goslings and I hope to deliver. Good friends deserve good geese.

this just in!

2011-12-22T21:17:00.002-05:00

Today I came home to a new edition to CAF! Cyrus and Saro did it, a gosling was born today, hatched on the solstice. I don't know what the Farmer's Almanac has to say about goose babes on the winter solstice, but I am chalking it up as a good sign! I hope he/she is just the first of many little ones out of that clutch of eggs. Both geese have been working hard to guard and care for that nest in the coop, may it bring all sorts of chirps into this new light!

take me back

2011-12-21T16:50:00.001-05:00

the chickloo, and other life changes

2011-12-20T20:02:00.003-05:00

The Freedom Rangers are doing well. They are thriving in the mud room brooder. Under a heat-lamp near a roaring fire, they are learning to scratch, socialize, and stretch their little red wings. I have not lost a single bird, and am excited to build and create their winter shelter. I have plans for a super low-cost, low-energy chickloo out in the snow by the barn this winter. I'll purchase an inexpensive garden tractor/single car type tarp-covered "garage" and line the sides with pallets and haybales. A thick floor of pine shavings and straw, hanging heat lamps and feeders, and cozy meat birds should cost less than 300.00 to set up and be used over and over throughout the season. I'll post photos and updates as we go, but right now the Rangers are still in that amazingly-cute fluffball stage. They'll live inside with me for another 3-5 weeks and slowly we'll learn how to make-do outdoors.

You know your life is permanently changing when the idea of suspending heat lamps in a backyard chicken camp makes you want to spend the night drawing plans and sketches, and researching recipes yet uncharted...

P.S. Thank you for all the gifts and cards! Today I reached the 45 dollar mark towards the Heifer International Fund, and someone sent a beautiful set of presentable cookware...amazing. I am AMAZED!

tough love

2011-12-19T18:00:00.001-05:00

This has been a tough morning.

I started writing all that had been going on here in the last few days and (even) hours while waiting for the chimney sweep to get here. The paragraph was full of drama. A series of accidents and incidents, personal strife, fear, and anger at myself. I looked at my blog post, shook my head, and hit delete. Not because I wanted to hide it from you, dear readers, but because I am fairly certain that writing about strife, fear, and anger just creates more and more of it. It causes me to get sucked into feeling like a victim, or fills my head with notions of things that haven't even happened yet. I don't want to live that way, not anymore.

I'm not saying I won't share bad news about the farm on the blog, or turn this into the fluffy-bunny of homesteading network. But I don't think any of you need to hear about my problems that you already have yourselves... things like money issues, relationships pains, medical problems or any sort of negative talk about politics, farms, bloggers, or farmers.

So here's what I will share about today:

Today amazing things happened. Through a lot of luck, love, community and phone calls disaster was avoided, stress relieved, and problems dealt with in a timely fashion. This farm was full of animals that got attention, feed, water, room to move around in and explore. The dogs have full stomaches. The house is warm. The electricity is on. The truck is getting repaired in the shop. I have a 4x4 rental sitting outside waiting to take me to work. I am blessed. I am lucky. I am grateful.

Tonight I would love it if every reader posted to share something they are grateful for, too. It can be anything, just something that makes them happy and that they truly appreciate. Write it down. I can't imagine the positive energy a list of gratitudes can create, but it has to be stronger than a list of pity-filled comments or there there's. I want to be uplifted, not consoled. I want to be proud of the generosity, kindness, and good will of strangers who sit down to check in on this blog. I want to hear about your grandchild's first steps, your puppy's healing leg, your overcoming cancer, your husband's warmth, your sister's laugh. I want to hear what you are smiling about.

I'll start: I am grateful for all of you who support this farm, in every way. Your comments, donations, workshops, emails...your love is a reason to wake up and create words and pictures and keep this dream alive. Thank you.

whoever mailed me this, you made my week

2011-12-19T15:40:00.001-05:00