Long Road "Easter" Eggs

Have a Pleasant Easter

This Easter I completely forgot it was Easter.  I had plans to run errands on Good Friday, then realized that everything is closed.  I keep forgetting it is a holiday and have to stop myself from making farm-related phone calls about things like hogs and geese.  Most people are setting aside the day for nice ham or turkey suppers.  Farming, especially in spring, especially in the first spring on the farm, is a wheel that spins faster and faster.  There are many things that need to be done, other things that should be done, and an infinite number of things that would be nice to do.  There are plans in the works for some decorative vine work on the front yard; plans for getting firewood ready for next year so that it has time to season; cedar fencing that needs sprucing up...then there is the logo design, the wooden crates that will hold veggies for CSA and market.  The list goes on, with items jumping into my head and leaving before they are written down.  It's a perpetual chase.

That said, the farm is running.  We have a lot of laying hens laying nice eggs.  Colourful eggs of various sizes.  It's nice having a farm project that does most of the work itself.  These chickens are quite self-sufficient.  As long as they get a bit of mash, they will wander around the yard, finding earthworms, and making sure they make eggs they can be proud of.  Something like that.

I've mentioned permaculture in previous posts.  The idea that one can create a farm where the natural world works to the farmer's benefit is appealing.  Most of the time, entropy rules and the farmer tries to decide what parts of it to challenge and what parts of it to accept.  We were excited by the idea that the pig would dig up our garden beds.  He would methodically dig up the grass roots and then beg for another project.  But the pig does not aim to please.  In the greehouse patch, where we had him fenced in for a few days, he managed to dig one massive crater about six feet in diameter and leave the rest of the grass neatly intact. Then, after a long day of lying on the field, he tore out the concrete tiles in his pen and dug a hole so deep, I couldn't imagine how he climbed out.  One can't really be upset with him for the fact that his priorities differ from ours.  

Then we have beavers in the pond at the back of the property taking down tree after healthy tree.  We have been taking the trees they have left lying around for our own use.  I don't thing either party is really winning.  I wish they would stop taking the trees down; they probably wish I would stop taking the trees that took so much effort to fell.  

Back from a Trip to the Prairies

I'm glad that my current line of work does not require that I travel often.  In fact, it doesn't allow for much travel.  There is something about flying that irks me.  The usual irritations: security check, delays, airport food.  The hassles of the trip I took recently back to my hometown in Alberta was typical enough.  A three-hour delay on my connecting flight, a food voucher, a $10 mozza on ciabatta that tasted like cardboard. That is all irksome. Then there is the feeling that you are in a HSBC world, being propelled into its future, where corn and cotton compete as commodities, where technology and nature are one. We've all seen it in the bridge to the plane, but I have to look away.

I won't harp on that. What really pained me, on this particular trip, was a moment that was very much routine, but wasn't for me, not this time. Like Dostoevsky and the flogged horse, or Byron and the dead Goldfish, I was deeply upset by the chucking of my jar of honey at the security gate. I had forgotten about the restrictions before I walked in with my backpack, which held the honey jar in a bag of clothes. Though I am used to packing my shaving kit and its lotions in my checked luggage, and though I never bring yogurt as a snack, the honey didn't register when I was configuring my bags. I guess because I just haven't come to see honey as a lethal weapon like I have yogurt and lotion. Maybe because it was creamed and it seemed so solid. I don't know. I know that most people think, “well, you should have known better.” And they think that the people there were just doing their job when they took the bulbous jar, and tossed it into a big plastic bin, where it landed with a woosh on the black plastic lining and with a thud on the base. Indeed, they were just doing their job. I had said, “don't throw it out, it's good honey” and it was good honey, it was not pasteurized and sold in a store but was sourced from a local source, it was not a commodity to be traded along with BT corn and cotton. And they said languidly that they couldn't keep it because it would be like taking a gift, which was against their policies. And who knows if it might be laced with something or set to blow up.

When I reached for a different jar of honey at my home, the one that was to be followed by the one that got chucked, after arriving late last night and getting a piece of toast ready, I felt a twinge. Now, I'm afraid that whenever I see honey, I will feel the thud of the jar as it went into a garbage, to be trucked to a landfill. It's not an occurrence that has brought any particular resolve, like “I am never going to travel on a plane again,” though it has made the experience of going through airports sourer than it was. No, it just makes me sad.

I should mention briefly that the fields are drying and the seedlings are thriving, which is some consolation.

Seedy Saturday Rolls Around Again

Seedy Saturday is the gateway to planting season.  We gather in a church or community hall and wander the tables, labeling our envelopes, laying them out and scanning the ones left by others, intrigued by names like Purple Peacock pole beans.  A woman breastfeeds on the couch off to the side of the row of booths set up by groups like USC and Seeds of Diversity.  Lunch in the kitchen upstairs is an assortment of soups by donation.  The morning has gone by quickly, I meet many people who are interested in what I am doing.  "We are calling it Long Road Eco Farm" I tell one lady who is listening keenly, "because our laneway is the distinguishing feature of our property, and many people tell us how sorry they are to see us out shoveling."  I sometimes elaborate further on the metaphor of ecological farming as a long road with no shortcuts, just a long road with hard-earned rewards.  Of course, It has been a short road for me thus far, the metaphor will only work for me once I've been at it a few decades.

We humans are used to the idea that hard work brings richer rewards.  The afternoon lecture was given by a beekeeper who discussed the decline of the honey bee.  It is a weak creature to begin with and the combinations of neonicotinoids and loss of habitat due to sprawl, among other variables, many of which may never be know, have threatened its survival as a species of late.  Honey bees are one of many varieties of bees, and each, I learned, has different interests, plants-wise.  Tomatoes are one of my favourite crops, and are a good crop for a market gardener, especially when a greenhouse is at hand.  Bumble bees have a preference for tomatoes.  I am learning to appreciate bumble bees, to watch them and to feel my racing heart slow a bit when I can tell they are absorbed in the flower, oblivious to my presence.

I have a pathological fear of bees, and I have to remind myself that they work incredibly hard.  They have good character, they only sting as a last resort.  They are not cranky scavengers like wasps and yellow jackets, who sting on a whim.  I seize up when I see them, my tendency is to cover my head with my hands and whimper or wail.  When I learned about the dances and the waggles in elementary, I got nervous.  It's not an adaptive fear.  Bees, I learned at Seedy Saturday, do that dance to tell their mates how far away and in which direction their food source is, and then they fly.  One fact that I made a point of remembering was this: A pound of honey is the product of some 2 million  flower visits, and 50,000 miles traveled.  Unlike most other insects or animals of any kind, bees operate on a substantial surplus of nutrients in their hives, which we take for ourselves because it is so delicious. What goes through their little insect minds? Or are they too busy working to be bitter?  It seems a shame that they haven't been more richly rewarded for their hard work.

The list of interesting bee facts goes on for pages, but the one other bee fact that I learned Saturday that affects humans is how their extinction would affect what foods are available to us.  We would have about half of what we find in today's produce section. Unless we could get people to go around and dust pollen onto fields of flowers.  This, apparently, is currently happening in parts of China where bees are no longer.

Talking about seeds, pollination and pollinators can be heavy, a bit overwhelming.  It's sordid, and seedy - opportunistic pests prey on the plants and animals we like, so we find ways to kill them off, we eliminate mites and weeds, and then we find that killing milkweed because we didn't like it was in turn killing the monarchs or driving them away to places where there was still milkweed.   And we find that the neurotoxins killing the very little bugs are disorientation and weakening insects like bees.  In the thick of all of these things happening, we made a good social gathering.  I look forward to seeing how my Purple Peacock pole beans turn out.

Restless

It's 9:30 and on my last trip out for the evening, I gather three logs from two firewood piles:  the one we chopped, which is less seasoned, and the one we bought which is a little bit better.  I then grab one of the shovels in the snow bank by the garage and chisel away at the first fifth or so of the laneway, which is covered in snowdrifts again.  I catch sight of the dog, whom I've brought out with me and who is trotting down the path to the barn, and instead of whistling at her to come back, I decide to follow her. 

She doesn't seem to see me as I peer from about twenty feet behind her, obscured by some trees where the path bends before reaching the barnyard's fence.  She is sniffing around the door.  Then she goes around to the run-in shed, where cracks in the lower wall of the barn let her get within inches of the pig's bed.  She could whisper something to him, sweet nothings maybe.  I feel like a parent who has been in denial, who has imagined that her teenaged daughter has been secretly seeing a boy from a reasonably good family down the road, fretting that they might be going too far too fast.  And then one day I happen to see her leaving the house of a middle-aged biker. 

The dog seems to be taking a lot of interest in this pig.  His name is Doug.  Since his brother Rob was brought for slaughter two weeks ago, Doug has been in surprisingly good spirits, but he seems, well, to be more sexually restless than before.  And our dog is in heat.  She has been dropping blood spots throughout the house for weeks now. 

I have read that cross-breeding can occur within genus or even family, but not as far down as order.  That's good news.  I guess Doug and the Dog are just fond of each other and there is no way to correct that.  I might be able to find an animal psychologist and have them attend together but that would be costly and probably not very helpful.  I think for now I will just let it be.

I could also be dead wrong.  They may not like each other at all, and the dog may just be visiting the barn because social contact with the pig is better than social contact with bossy humans.  Maybe she goes there to commiserate.  Or, maybe she goes to remind him that she gets to roam around while he lies in the barn, to remind him that she is privileged above all of the other animals - at least she would never be brought to a slaughterhouse.

Robbie, right, later in life.  Doug, left and tan cat above

Prison Farm Gathering

In our careful, self-preserving culture, many of us, when we think of activists, think of scary, irrational radicals; unkempt people absorbed in lost causes, among other things.  But we ought all to be activists in some respect.  This was the bulk of the message of the Save Our Prison Farms meeting recently held in Kingston.  This is a movement that is focused and down-to-earth; one of ordinary rural people rebuffed by a government that boldly went forth with an initiative that was not grounded in clear benefits, an initiative that was ghastly, short-sighted, and an insult to many things the people here hold dear.  Kingston's prison farm was functioning at a profit; it was creating a beneficial product (supplying foods that would then be consumed within the prison system) and offering inmates skills and purpose (which the government claimed were useless because they were in the field of agriculture, and who needs skills in agriculture?)

The prison farm was also home to a large herd of purebred Holstein cattle.  Anyone who works with cattle will point out that a herd cannot simply be broken up - it is a functioning unit, not a bunch of individuals that can be mixed in with a bunch of other individuals at random.  There was no intention on the part of the federal government of ensuring that the herd would be preserved, and so farmers in the movement worked together to buy as many as they could.  The herd is surviving and growing.  Many inmates, meanwhile, were dedicated to the work; they were developing skills that, contrary to the federal government's suggestions, were transferable; skills such as machinery operation and maintenance, punctuality, attention to detail, care for living beings.  But, in the name of punishment, this was taken away.

The meeting was held at City Hall on a blustery late January evening to commemorate the handful of people who were arrested in 2010 for civil disobedience as they attempted to block the process of dismantling the farm, and the house was full.  There were farmers, prison workers, social workers, artists, scientists, aboriginal chiefs, and interested locals, all of whom brought a swell of concern and a desire for change to the room.  There was coffee on tables covered with white table cloths, there were donation jars, there were homemade donuts, and Sarah Harmer opened the evening's discussion with a couple of songs, including Pete Seeger's "Take it from Dr. King".  There was insight and focus, and there were pleas from the most active to the least active:  get involved.  Please, look at what is happening to our democracy, to the value placed on science, to logic and reason in public policy.  Bob Lovelace, aboriginal leader and professor, spoke of the distinctly Canadian quality of "standing by" as our culture becomes further degraded.
 
When the Harper government depicted the arts as something only dainty rich people engaged in, a decadent and frivolous distraction from the interests of the real world, they alienated a sector of the population.  When Veteran's Affairs minister Fantino got testy with protesting vets for pointing fingers at him, he alienated a sector of the population.  When the federal government insisted that farming skills are useless, as it continues to make prisons more gulags, and as it continues to devalue what is working in our society and opt for choices that leave us poorer, they continue to weave threads of alienation. 

Why would Anybody live here?

It is the absolute dead of winter.  My skin is cracking all over my hands, I have five layers of clothes on, and I am hearing every day about the infamous polar vortex and rolling my eyes because it sounds so sensational, even if it is as good an effort as any to name the phenomenon.

The pigs have been out in spite of it, and they wander slowly around the icy, snowy yard on their cloven hooves.  It looks like they are walking on stilettos, their big bulky bodies and ugly faces carried with a strange grace.  They eat, they wander out, excrete, dig, go back to bed in the piles of straw they so carefully arrange before plopping themselves down.  It was -30 last night and still they got up after a long cold night, shook in their whip-like way and begged to be fed.

The night of the Screen Guild awards, I happened to catch a few minutes (or a few hours) of the show.  All of the biggest film people gathered in a banquet for an evening of endless pomp.  What happens when the evening winds down?  Do they all head to the doors and stand around, each waiting until his or her chauffeur has finally made it to the pick-up spot, and do they have to grab a jacket at the coat check on their way out?  These questions hounded me, especially the latter, and I finally looked up the weather in L.A.  The highs that week ranged from the mid to high 20s and the lows were around 12 (Celsius that is).

If only the pipelines could carry warmth instead of oil.  Having been to L.A., I know that it is no more inhabitable than eastern Ontario, only for different reasons - it's a sprawling car haven beyond GTA standards and the extremes of glitz and poverty make it unsettling. But if I were given the chance to be one of the directors or writers or actors at the guild awards, walking out into a night thirty degrees warmer than the warmest point of my day today, I would give it serious consideration.

I have to remember to take off my jogging pants when I come in from doing chores, because the pigs come up to me and stamp their noses to the fleece.  Within seconds I am marked all over with dirt and food residue.  When the pigs' pen flooded during the melt earlier this month, we promptly moved them to a drier stall and drained the sludge.  My boots got dipped a bit further than I'd hoped and sure enough, my socks were damp when I got back to the house.  Eventually, we would like to breed animals, sheep or goats most likely, and it means more time around beasts.  Every now and then, in a hardware store or a feed shop, I find myself standing in line behind a guy in overalls who smells a bit like a cow and I know I am a long way from Hollywood.

Ice Fields

Ice storm are new to me. I never experienced anything like it growing up in the west, and the two winters I spent in Toronto were unimaginably mild - rainy but not freezing-rainy. What is most frustrating about these storms, at least when they haven't knocked out power or done major damage to house, car or body, is how sedentary they make a person. It's not pleasant being surrounded by nothing but slippery surfaces for miles on end. When you do venture out, especially in uncleared rural places, you walk in a slow Mike Duffy fashion, not briskly and upright. The ground becomes unfriendly, a rib-breaking menace.

I asked around in my community to see if anyone knew of anywhere that pickup hockey was played. With all of the lakes around, I thought surely someone had been clearing off the ice and taking advantage of a free rink. But it seems that out here, it's snowmobiling or hunting that occupies free time. Pond hockey is quaint, something hip city people might do in a post-ironic way. I thought about smashing the ax into the creek behind my house to see if it would hold, but then I decided to spare myself the long slow shuffle down to the property line. I laced up my skates and cautiously set out on the rolling surface of the hay fields instead.

I suspected that it would be too coarse and full of weak spots, so I snowplowed along, knees tight, but it was almost as gentle as the leveled, zambonied surfaces of public recreation facilities and just as solid. I skated across the field, skipping over the lines and swerving past the snowy patches, marveling at the fact that this was possible. It felt like a strange dream, from which you wake up and think, “that would be great, if only the physical world could accommodate it”. I wandered and found patches that were especially clear, and I circled for a while before moving on. Toward the tree line I hovered for a while on a long, slightly sloped stretch, rushing up and then gliding down. By then the afternoon sun had broken through the cloud cover and was glaring up from the fields. Now it was exhilarating and pretty.

Eventually blisters and sore ankles got the better of me and I packed it in. The next day it warmed up and began to melt, and soon we will have a sloppy mess. It's probably for the best.