the farm — Page 2

Farm Fresh

February 8, 2020 by The Noisy Plume

Good morning to you all from our beautiful little farm on the wild and winding Snake River in the sagebrush sea of Idaho. It’s a good day to be alive! The sun is rising and the sky is electric pink as far as I can see to the East. Behind me, out our big bowed window in the kitchen, I can see the canyon rim lit by daybreak and the night rolling back into the West.

The farm is awake. The pigs are squeaking for breakfast. The turkeys are turbo charged. The hens are rooting through the compost pile at the far end of the garden while the roosters strut about. The horses are in slack-hipped repose, waiting on the warmth of morning to hit them and chase away the chill of night. In the pine trees, the owls are hooting, full of the mice and voles they hunted in the hayfield all night. All is well here! All is well.

Our farm grew a little last month when we acquired a few kunekune pigs — a sow, a boar and a piglet. They are Pumpernickel, Rye Bread and Jeffrey and have added so much life and comedy to our place. It’s a joy to have them. These pigs will be pasture raised and we will be raising a couple piglets a year to eat and to render lard from which I am really looking forward to. The piglet surplus will be sold off to friends, local 4H kids and anyone else who needs a piggy! It’s so special to know these animals before they become our food — some of you will be able to understand that and some of you won’t, and that’s ok with me. I just want to say that it is possible to be friends with our food. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Pumpernickel and Rye Bread will be our kunekune breeding pair for years to come and Pumper is currently pregnant with her next batch of little squeakers, they will be due mid-May. I witnessed the piglet making a few weeks ago with my own two eyes which was both gross and delightful as these things tend to be…

What I really love about having these pigs (and all the livestock we keep here) is they aren’t just future food. I have come to know that this is such a narrow view of what farm animals are (and I’m not talking about industrial farming right now, I’m talking about small farming). While they are alive and being tended to and cared for they all seem to serve great and small purposes. The chickens spread manure when they are eating larvae and flies in the summertime. The turkey tasks are similar to the chicken tasks except they have a bigger footprint, they cover more territory. The horses create FOOD (manure) for my garden soil! The pigs will help turn my garden spaces for me in the spring and fall, they are masterful at cleaning orchard-fall which we have a lot of here, and I am happy to tell you we currently have ZERO food waste in our household thanks to these piggies. Not a single scrap goes to the landfill here. Livestock eats the things people cannot eat and they turn those bugs, weeds, grubs, rotten fruit, grass, hay into muscle, bone and fat. It’s pretty brilliant. It’s pretty cosmic. It’s pretty simple.

While I have always known what the terms “biodynamic” and “regenerative” mean, it is fun to be slowly implementing the concepts on our own little farm. The future of food, farming and ranching in this country will be found in small, biodynamic, regenerative and diversified farms. It’s pretty fun to be one of many, many young families in this country joining this movement. I never want to tell you guys how to eat, I always ask you to simply do your best. But it’s more important than ever that we see the value in quality, locally grown foods. Please get to know your farmers and ranchers, do a work/food trade, show up at farmers markets, take up CSA shares, buy local meats (and look beyond steak and chicken breasts), keep your money in your community. Eat well. Be well.

In other news, Hawk and Resero are as wonderful as ever. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone working hard to prepare for this show in Jackson and have been utterly remiss with regards to horsemanship practices here. I look forward to squandering more of my time on my beauties in March, being out in the wind and sage, pressing up against the sky, sweat and leather.

We’re starting to make our springtime plans for the farm and gardens. I’m hoping to plant more forsythia, flowering quince, horse chestnut, catalpa, roses, poplar, and perhaps some locust around here. But I’m especially looking forward to planting some tobacco flower in the garden which I have heard is one of the most beautiful flowers of all. We are under contract to grow a few hundred pounds of our heirloom garlic for a small, fermented garlic company in Ketchum this year. By and by the days lengthen and the growing season approaches. All my green fingers have started twitching in my sleep. It’s almost time to plant! It’s nearly time to grow.

Lastly, all the pups and meows are doing wonderfully. Penelope was recently snatched by an eagle which is a story I will share with you in full in the next few weeks. Don’t fret. It all turned out ok. Tater Tot has taken up his position as King in Farley’s absence (we miss the old boy every day). Ernest is phenomenal. We haven’t lost a single critter since he began his guardianship in late summer. His talents and gifts are one of the things I am most thankful for at this time in my life. What a dog, and what an honor to be able to give him a job and the life he deserves. We’re starting a new pointer this spring! I can’t wait to share him with you!

The sun is up now and I must begin my day. I hope all is well with you.

Canned Plums

September 6, 2019 by The Noisy Plume

These are canned peaches. I want to tell you the story of my mum’s canned plums.

I have a memory of my mother’s canned plums. I share this memory with my two sisters. Whenever one of us speaks the memory aloud all three of us squint our eyes and will our tastebuds to travel back in time to Sugarloaf Warden Station in Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba. When the winter nights roared with wailing winds and sideways snows we would clear the dinner table of dirty dishes and my mum would say, “Should we have plums?”

One of us would be asked to fetch the plums from the root cellar and the anticipation of dessert outweighed the terror of having to tromp down slatted stairs to the concrete basement where the wood stove glowed like a demon in the dark. In the root cellar, the potatoes were doing their terrifying mid-winter sprouting (nothing should have so many eyes) and one had to make quick work of grabbing the plum preserves off the shelf before scooting past the terrible potatoes and latching the cellar door shut. The final test was making it back up the stairs before the creature that lived beneath them grabbed ankles with a thorny, merciless grip.

Once back upstairs in the kitchen my mother would pop the mason jar open, spoon plums into bowls and drizzle cream over them. Plums and cream, the dessert of peasants. I have never tasted better dessert in all of my life. It was like eating sunshine in the dead of winter.

I’m in the kitchen canning peaches today. I have stripped them of their fuzzy pelts before slicing their thick flesh into quarters. I have brewed a small vat of syrup for the peach pieces to swim about in. The work is almost done for the day and I find myself looking forward to the winter. I know just how we’ll eat these peaches. We’ll come in from the howling wind after a day of hunting the dogs in the canyons and on the steppe. We’ll be windburned and tired and calorically deficient. We’ll feed the dogs and lean the shotguns against the wall to dry out and recover from the weather. Robert will clean the birds we shot while I prepare other aspects of dinner and we’ll cook our high desert bounty up into a simple, flavorful meal. We’ll eat at the dining room table by the fireplace. After dinner, we’ll look at each other and I’ll say, “Should we have peaches?” Robert will nod his head. I’ll take a jar down from the pantry shelf, pop it open and spoon the precious fruit into bowls with some yogurt or a drizzle of milk on top. As we sit and eat our fine treat, our peasant dessert, we’ll feel the sun of summer in our bellies and bones and we’ll sigh aloud as the wind bashes against the house and I’ll be thankful I spent today in the kitchen canning peaches.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: the farm

Summer on the Farm

June 30, 2019 by The Noisy Plume

I sent out a distress signal and Robert came home for four days to help me get the farm back on line. In that span of time we managed to get the wheel line up and running (which required the rest of the assembly as well as refurbishing an engine), get the set handlines reassembled and watering rotated, weed the entire garden, re-seed the former garlic rows with carrots and beets, rotate the horses in various grazing spaces, wire a few almond trees (the horses like to eat them)….and so on and so forth. I also finished two studio projects, kept up with my packaging and shipping on a daily basis, caught up on all my emails, took two conference calls and met a writing deadline. We did take one evening to ride our horses together but were otherwise ready to fall into bed at 9pm every night. Exhausted.

Because summer isn’t already unfathomably full for me (note sarcasm), I also took on a big commitment this week as editor in chief of the fourth volume of Modern Huntsman which will be an all-women’s issue. I’m excited and scared about the position and am a little worried about how I’m going to fit being an editor into my life over the next 3 months with everything else I have going on but I couldn’t say no to the opportunity! It’s going to be a great learning experience for me and I hope it will help fuel my own writing career which is such a tender little hatchling at this point. Wish me luck!

Lastly, isn’t that just such a gorgeous image of Robbie and Ernest. Ernest is currently weighing in around 35-40 pounds. I can’t believe how fast he is growing. Starting this little guardian dog continues to be such a joy for me this summer and such a marvelous excuse to slow down when life feels out of control.

I’m about to head home to Canada to be with my family for a week. I hate to leave this place when it’s in full bloom and the garden is feeding me so beautifully and my horses and the sunsets…the sunsets…but it’s going to be good to hug my sisters, tease my nephews and hang out with my mum and dad for a stint. I’ll miss you, Sundries Farm, but I’ll be back soon enough.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ernest, sundries farm, the farm

First Cut

June 11, 2019 by The Noisy Plume

We’re taking our first cut of hay this week. People are always curious about what this little farm is growing so I’ll share with you now that we grow an orchard hay which is mostly grass with some alfalfa and clover mixed in — it’s an excellent horse hay. Our farm has water rights to the Snake River and this hayfield of ours is irrigated by handlines which are long sections of metal pipe with sprinkler mounts. These pipes have to be carried out and attached to each other by hand across the span of our hayfield which is cumbersome work and it only gets more difficult as the hay grows. The work becomes uncomfortably humid as the season warms up and as the hay grows taller it’s like wading through hip deep water out there. I actually really hate moving handlines but a hayfield is a beautiful thing, provides organic weed free food for our own horses and our hay goes to market — it’s part of our yearly income so we get the job done around here!

We take three cuts of hay a year. We don’t own our own haying equipment so we have a neighbor cut it for us — he hays throughout this ranching community and does a good job. He pays us per bale that comes off our property and then he turns around and sells it himself locally. It’s actually kind of a bad deal for us, it’s a ton of work to keep that field growing and we pay for our water rights every year. We would love to have our own tractor and swather but we’re not quite there yet. I do look forward to making 100% profit on our hay someday though. After a season of irrigation work I always feel let down by the hay checks.

Robert estimates our first cut of hay will put up about 800 70lb bales this week which is a beautiful first cut. Some of our hayfield has grown taller than me! It’s a lush place that the wind plays like an instrument these days. I’ll be sad to see it mowed. But that’s the way of things. The first cut is always the sweetest!

If you live in Southern Idaho or South Central Idaho and you’re looking for high quality horse hay, please feel free to email me about it. Our field is never sprayed and it’s grown with a lot of love and **a lot of cussing by me** if I’m having to move handlines by myself…so it’s extra zesty.

Our place isn’t huge but it’s hard working. I come from Saskatchewan, land of commercial, non-irrigated, mono-culture-mega-farming. My relatives always seem confused when I refer to this place as a farm because it’s less than 2000 acres. I think there’s some danger in trying to market something as bigger than it really is. Based on my roots, I would call this place of ours an acreage if it was just a house plopped on some land with a couple of gardens. Because it actually has a crop going to market on a yearly basis that contributes to our annual income here, I call it a small, working farm. There’s no growing season like the high desert growing season if you have water rights and the roots we put down sink themselves into rich, volcanic, river flood plain. There isn’t anything we can’t grow. Amen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: hay farming, the farm

Neighbors. Am I right or am I right?

June 6, 2019 by The Noisy Plume

I’m neighbored out. It’s amazing how we can live in the middle of nowhere on a little farm and still, there’s neighborhood drama. I feel like it’s been going on all spring, too, culminating in one specific neighbor popping by last weekend to pontificate about a situation she’s in which led to her talking crap about some other neighbors who are good people which led to me calling her out on being poorly behaved (Robert says I should have kept my mouth shut but there’s a moment when silence is the same as lying and I couldn’t tolerate her thinking that I agreed with her) which led to her screaming at me at the top of her lungs and coming completely unhinged which led to her telling me she would see me in court.

HOLD ON.

What???!!???? Gold star for bad behavior and bullying, neighbor lady, and thank you for making me LAUGH aloud as you drove away!!! Too ridiculous!

I’m not interested in being enemies with this woman but I sure as heck don’t want to be friends. I can practice civility but I can’t have any of this individual in my life. And that’s ok. But it raises the question: what do we do when the lives of others begin to spin out and crash into our own lives? What do we do when others splash unsavory details all over our tranquility? What do we do with the neighborhood-arse? Every neighborhood has an arse, every office has a jerk, every swimming pool has had a turd floating in it. I know the answer is not to move again, to a bigger farm or ranch that has a wider buffer zone between my neighbors and I…or maybe that is the answer? The fact is no matter where we go we’re going to have to live with others to some degree. The only thing I can think to do is take my lessons as I can from the people I have to share this canyon with — some lessons will be full of joy and others will be hard knocks. And more importantly, I think I’ll strive to be a good neighbor to my neighbors. Lord knows, one rotten egg is more than enough rotten eggs in this community.

If you’re reading this rant-of-exhaustion of mine this morning, I suppose I just want people to know that despite the fact I have created a beautiful sanctuary for myself to live and work within, there are still human generated disruptions in my life and I know there are for you, too. We’ll all get through it in good time. In the meanwhile, sow flowers, tug weeds.

ON THE TOPIC OF GROWING THINGS:

My gardens are coming up so beautifully here. I managed to get the last of everything planted over the weekend and chased the garden planting with an intense two days of shrub, tree and rose planting. Everything is in the ground now drinking up water and sunshine and getting taller every day. Each morning when I survey my cultivated dominion I’m amazed at how quickly things grow. I wish there was a way to measure growth of adults. So much of how we grow and change once we are physically mature humans is invisible!

ON THE TOPIC OF GARDENING FAILURES:

I confess to being in extreme dahlia distress. I’m in the depths of despair! I think all my dahlia bulbs are duds. I don’t know what I’ll do without them. My dahlia grove brought me a lot of joy and beauty last summer. I might have to go to the plant nursery one last time to see if I can remedy the situation but I think all may be lost.

How do your gardens grow?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: realities, the farm