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.

An Eerie Absence in the Barn

It's quiet now when I approach the little barn that houses the pigs and once housed the chickens.  There is some grunting and the odd squeal, but no more clucking and squawking.  Yesterday our yard became a sort of carnival of bright reds, of loose white feathers and fluff, and of colourful boxes of squishy innards.  As the snow and sleet slowly soaked us, we bagged the chilled birds and by nightfall, they were in the freezer.  Bags of necks, feet, livers, and digestive tract (for the dog), and then lovely meaty shells we tend to think of as whole chickens. 

In other news, we are on a low-tech binge:  we are clearing our 300-metre long driveway with only an ordinary snow shovel; we are chopping our own wood and splitting it with an ax and we are avoiding unnecessary car trips.  All this makes the world seem big again.  It is what an extreme version of post-peak oil might be like, one that we are choosing to live, which can be rewarding and at the same time, feel very masochistic.  I don't know much about peak oil scenarios, what they could be and what they most likely will be, but energy costs are in the news a lot lately and so is climate change.  I guess that either energy becomes so expensive that we all learn new ways of living, or oil remains cheap and places like the Maldives and the countless other much more heavily populated places near sea level will be submerged and Canada's security costs will rise.  Either way, it will be expensive and we will feel it slowly happening but no one will say:  "Starting this year, we can officially say we are in a peak oil condition."

If you live in the country and you are neither in a supply-managed industry, nor on a good pension, nor gainfully employed, you learn to be frugal.  Ideally, this makes you more resourceful and more ready for a tougher future, if you believe that is where we are headed.  But speaking with a friend who is also a farmer, also frugal and of limited financial means and also interested in the impacts that runaway energy consumption have on our lives, it was agreed that while being "on the land" can position a person to be better equipped to live with scarcity, and living simply can be satisfying, the only people prepared for calamities like power shortages or famines or natural disaster are those for whom survivalism is a hobby, something they revel in. 

These would be the people who are skilled with knives and ropes; who have created bomb-proof spaces on their properties and set up traps to ensnare trespassers.  They would be the kinds of people who would raise animals and slaughter them without anyone's help.  Very few of us are prepared for a world where big industry can't meet most of our needs, including myself and most of the people I know.

We had a trained butcher do our slaughtering:  quickly and efficiently but with due care.  Propane was running low on the scalder and our butcher just barely managed to get through without running out. If he'd had to come back the next day, he wouldn't have made it to our yard since we got a massive snowfall that night.  We were lucky.  I helped put them in the cones and watched decapitation after decapitation, which was not traumatising, but also not pleasant.  I can stomach chicken slaughter, and I can clear my 300-metre long driveway by hand, but I am not on a path to self-reliance and a rejection of the world that seems to be extinguishing itself.  I do, however, find it exciting to pare back some of the complacency I grew up with regarding food, housing, and travel, all of the things that require substantial energy inputs which, when the world is moving so fast, are so easily taken for granted.

Livestock Fatigue

"These Chickens are so annoying!" I said, portioning out their meal as they pecked at my legs.  My sister, who was visiting, stood to the side.   "Yeah, but they're so yummy!"  she said.  I have days, especially those when it's cloudy, dark, muddy and cold, when the chickens are constantly hungry, jumping at me and crowding me so closely I have nowhere to step, when I can curse the chickens with the vilest language, and wish them all nothing but suffering.  I think of the notion I've heard many times: "If thought crime were enforced, a lot of people would be jailed for their murderous desires." If thought crimes were enforced, the SPCA would be on my case.

Both XB and I do treat the chickens quite well but both of us are exasperated by them.  They don't ask much, they do not want me to say nice things to them. They are utterly indifferent to the nuances of facial expression and gesticulation.  But like any animal, they are subject to suffering and so I try to keep them comfortable and fed and give them space to roam between meals, which are frequent and met with great anticipation.  Chickens are not known to skip meals at will.

Recently, when I came to the barn to feed them, I noticed one with a spot of red on one of its wings.  I gave it a closer look and realized that underneath the wing, the bone was exposed and its skin had been badly broken.  It looked like a predator of some sort had grabbed it and fled, leaving it to languish.  I corned it and picked it up, carried it to the garage and made the little house we'd built for the chicks into its hospital room. I hoped that if it were isolated from the rest (where it would not risk being pecked to death - chickens are vicious) it would perhaps heal.  I also knew I would have to start researching the most humane euthanization methods in case it didn't.

The issue of humane treatment of animals in rural farming circles is a tricky one.  No one that I have met would condone neglect or intentional mistreatment of any animal, even chickens, which can try anyone's patience.  But vet bills can be prohibitive, and not everyone believes that a chicken's life is sacred; that giving it a few more weeks of life is worth a $150 vet bill.  A chicken might fetch $20 to $30 by the end of its 10 weeks.

I browsed through a few forums.  One chicken owner posted that her pet chicken was ill, suffering, and in need to being put down.  The owner simply did not have the funds to have it nursed back to health, to which another responded:

"I don't mean to be rude, but that is just wrong...call around, find a vet who can do it,work out a payment plan.  Sell your TV, stereo, computer, whatever. That's what a responsible pet owner would do."

I can't say this dissuaded me.  The chicken is hardly a pet in our case. But, thinking back to the afternoon when I discovered the injured bird, I did have a moment, as I hauled it to the garage and the rest of the flock stood back, where I felt a pang of sorrow.  I was sad seeing the animal seemingly oblivious to the fact that it had been maimed, as she pecked about with the others.  This was one of the cute yellow chicks we picked up from the feed store in the cardboard box, one of the little peeping sounds coming through the cracks. One of the big white birds running out to greet me (for food of course), who has no arms, which makes them look especially goofy and cute as they run and which makes me forget that they are dumb and selfish.

Another blog presented the following advice:

"If you own a dog, you tend to take it to the vet if it is ill.  But chickens bridge that gap between pet and livestock.  You don't have to take a chicken to the vet if you don't want to, and I feel you shouldn't feel guilty about that."

Again, I would not have felt guilty killing it and these words weren't the words of comfort I was in need of, but for some, this is an especially sensitive topic.  The blogger then explained that over several years raising chickens, she had had to kill a few before their time was up, who had either come down with viruses or succumbed to injuries.  By kill, she meant chop off its head.

Chickens' lives are okay if they are treated with decency.  There probably aren't a lot of "happy chickens," Even free range chickens who are well fed and sheltered and given adequate square footage when indoors are not suffering the way they would be in a less humane environment, but I doubt they experience self-actualization.

The challenge, especially in November, is making sure that whatever one's frustrations, the animals are taken care of as well as they were when they were younger and nicer.

In other news, the electric furnace is on now.  Does anyone know how to operate a wood-burning furnace? One of the differences between cities and rural areas is that urban dwellings are toasty warm.  The office I worked in, my own house, which was crammed between two others, a narrow place that held heat well, and shopping centres, which are notoriously sweltering in the winter.  Here in the country, houses are spread out and heating is a more contemplated matter.  Thermostats are watched more closely.  People don't walk around in shorts and t-shirts.  Winter in the country is a good setting for comfort withdrawal.