Thursday, August 7th, 2008
Pictured is a classic cloudburst. The sun is shining, the air full of water and sparkle. No doubt a fast runner could find the edge of the storm.
We migrate to windows and porch to imbibe the seemingly perpendicular events of summer sun, and hissing, grape-sized raindrops. Safe under roof, we stand quietly as the world endures its dousing.
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
Pictured is a handy little contrivance I built into the barn. It’s a hinged flap in the wall between our milking room (where I stood to take the picture) and a stall. Above the flap is a hole in the upstairs hay floor.
Open the flap (as shown) and it becomes a chute that carries hay directly from the hay mow into the manger on the stall side. Close the flap, and the hole is open into the Milking Room. The flap eliminates the need to carry hay down from above, and it minimized holes in the hay floor—important in our compact barn.
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
I’ve been taken to task for using the word “concatenation” in yesterday’s post. (The offending phrase was “…the natural concatenation of living things with their environment.”) “Why not,” asked a frustrated reader, “use simple English and be better understood? Don’t you have a thesaurus?”
I will, by way of agreeing with his sentiment, quote my favorite English reference book, Modern English Usage, by Henry W. Fowler (This is from an article titled “Love Of The Long Word”):
“It need hardly be said that shortness is a merit in words; there are often reasons why shortness is not possible; much less often there are occasions when length, not shortness, is desirable; but it is a general truth that the short words are not only handier to use, but more powerful in effect; extra syllables reduce, not increase vigour. This is particularly so in English, where the native words are short, and the long words are foreign.”
He follows by quoting several passages from Paradise Lost and The Idylls of the King, which he describes as “Fifty-six words, of which fifty-two are monosyllables… the natural and best way of saying what was to be said.”
Fowler is no doubt right on the mark, and I certainly do not wish to quibble with him, nor with our greatest authors, nor even with my admonishing reader. But while it is true that the best writing consists of short words, so also do the best writers have the best command of those words. (We may all look to Milton and Tennyson for model behavior on that.) I claim no such powers, and admittedly take on language more like a grammar teacher than a poet. In the referenced (i.e. condemned) sentence, I could think of no more graceful way to describe “a chain of interdependent events” than “concatenation.” Nevertheless, after being chastised, I did open my thesaurus (Roget’s fourth edition—the last edition before that great work was dumbed down from a tool to help think about words to a synonym-finder) to find, among other possibly more appropriate words, sequence; continuum; nexus; and chain reaction.
If you happen to like any of them better, re-read the post, and in your own mind, substitute one.
(By the way, the pictured object suggests a solution to all our English usage issues. It is called a come-along, a name so beautifully practical and playful and poetic, that it might stand as a model for all nouns.
Monday, August 4th, 2008
Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of life in the post-industrial age is that there is no need to prepare for winter. Oh, we may put snow tires on the car, tune up the furnace, pull the woolens out of mothballs, maybe even service the snowblower. But skipping those things makes no real trouble, and anyway they can always be done after the winds turn cold. Even the traditional autumn activities that many of us still ply, like cutting fireplace cord wood or canning and drying food, are these days more supplemental than essential, and merely shadow former urgencies. Electricity and gas will always respond to a touch of the thermostat; the grocery store looks more or less the same in February as in August.
But on the farm, just like in the old days, there is real danger in ignoring imminent cold weather privations. Domestic animals, for example, will not survive winter without an ample supply of stored food. For us the great bulk of that food is hay, and yesterday we loaded about 250 more bales of it into the barn, nearly completing our work there for the season.
Having a job like that behind me makes for a good feeling. I guess I’d describe it as relief, mostly. And because moving hay is a hot, sweaty, and utterly exhausting job, achievement too. But there’s something much more important buried in there as well: Preparing for the cold months ahead settles us firmly into our lives by connecting us, intimately and directly, with the natural world.
I don’t mean to romanticize this. I know that most farmers would jump at the chance to wipe out entirely the need to work hard through what the rest of the world sees as the vacation months. But I also think that every farmer also knows, at some level, that there’s a benefit to all that work that goes way beyond building some extra muscle in your arm. In there somewhere is also a sense of belonging, even comfort, from knowing that one’s labors have fitted well into into the celestial and the earthly, the rotating seasons, the natural concatenation of living things with their environment.
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
I once knew an English professor (PhD in something or other) who rode to school on a huge, chopped Harley. I saw once a maple tree with a sizable branch growing into the passenger window and out the driver’s side of an old VW Beetle. I watched Julia Child (on the Dick Cavett Show) pop on a pair of goggles, reach under the counter for a propane torch, and proceed to brown several bowls of French Onion soup. These memories stick like spilled honey.
Now a new incongruity has entered my permanent memory, through the more subtle but no less effective doorway of the olfactory system. The pictured variety of sage sports the implausible yet unmistakable fragrance of pineapple.
Friday, August 1st, 2008
Most of our milk goes into drinking glasses and down the hatch, but a significant portion also goes into what are known in the commercial dairy world as “value-added” products, like yogurt, kefir, soft cheeses (ricotta and mozzarella), and most commonly in our kitchen, butter.
To make butter we leave fresh milk undisturbed in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours to allow the cream to rise, then ladle the thickest cream—pudding consistency—into quart jars. When a few jars accumulate, we make butter.
One jar at a time is poured into a medium-speed mixer, which we watch carefully as the cream thickens into pebbles of yellow butter plus about a cup of buttermilk. (We then immediately turn the speed down, for in the next few seconds the butter transforms into a single yellow blob, slapping around in its buttermilk like a two-year old in the bathtub.) The buttermilk is poured off and saved for baking; if there’s an over-abundance it goes into a bucket for pig feed.
Finally the butter is rinsed repeatedly in cold water, and “pressed” with a spatula to squeeze out as much liquid as possible (pictured above). Salt is mixed in, and the finished butter is wrapped and frozen.
In this way we make about 50 pounds of butter a year.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
After milking we carry the milk buckets up from the barn, filter the milk, bottle it in half-gallon canning jars (also filling the calf’s bottle if we’re in that stage of calf-rearing) and label each jar with the date, “AM” or “PM.” Then we scrub all the stainless steel equipment with soap and an abrasive sponge, rinse well, and stack it all to dry (as you see in the picture above) ready to go for the next milking twelve hours later. (The pint jar is my morning treat—warm leftovers after the half-gallon bottles have been topped off.)
The process has become completely routine. Lifting and pouring of buckets and pots, sponge swipes, flipping of the stainless equipment under the hot rinse water, is all rote movement. Hands and feet move almost without thought. Even stacking equipment to dry is, for me, a model of regularity—each item has its place in the line-up, each a designated spot on the towel.
The repetitiveness helps us maintain cleanliness and order. From the beginning we were careful and methodical, developing a habit that would preserve “best practice.”
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Milking time starts here, in a corner of our small barn that we call the Milking Room. It’s just big enough to comfortably lead in a cow and turn her around without getting stepped on, plus hold some equipment, a few buckets, a water hydrant, and a storage can of grain. (The window looks through a large free-stall; beyond that you can see the barnyard gate and a lane leading from the house to the barn.)
Carmen enters the Milk Room from the pasture or stall readily, often like a freight train, eager to slurp down her twice-a-day pound of grain and eighth cup of kelp. No need for a lead, much less for a rodeo. Once inside we collar her short, wash down her udder with warm, mildly soapy water laced with a touch of vinegar, and we’re off. It takes about twenty minutes to do the actual milking, start to finish.
Carmen has just three of four quarters functioning, but she’ll still give us a little over 2½ gallons each milking, morning and evening. That amount will gradually taper down some during her lactation cycle.
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
The tomatillo is new to us. Friend Craig got us growing a couple of plants in our shared garden, and in his own home garden has them by the bushel. The harvest is just beginning.
Unlike the tomato (a close relation) the tomatillo ripens to a whitish-yellow. Several recipes I’ve found call for cooking them green, even making the point that the fully ripe tomatillo is past its prime. Having never tried one, our first taste was ripe and raw. I cut a small sample in half, and daughter Gina and I each took a bite. We agreed… “Hey, that’s good!” They are like a crisp, meaty, tomato with a flavor edging somehow, improbably, toward lemonade. I wondered if I’d ever need a recipe.
(Obviously in their husks they are a very beautiful little fruit, so no matter how we eat them—ripe and raw like apples or cooked green into salsa or relish—it would be nice to leave one or two whole on the platter at serving time.)
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Friend Steve introduced me to wild mushrooms by explaining how to find and identify morels. Morels make a good starting point for the new mushroom forager because they’re easy to recognize. But now is the season for Chanterelle’s—not so easy to distinguish, and with many look-alikes—so it’s time to sharpen and expand our knowledge, again with Steve’s guidance. (Son Patrick and I intentionally collected four varieties of Chanterelle masqueraders this past week, to help us learn about the possibilities, and to remind ourselves of the dangers of careless foraging.)
The Chanterelle pictured above is one of several Steve brought us as a gift (packaged with a lemon and Italian parsley—the complete Chanterelle cook-and-eat kit). They will be part of a meal just like those when morels are on the table—simultaneously elegant and humble.