Imaginary farm schedule

I enjoyed every hour I spent making this thing, which will probably turn out to have been time wasted. But it really was fun to imagine and plot out my schedule for next spring/summer/fall.

At the moment (I reserve every right to change my mind), here's what I feel like I would like to do next year:

• Find a place to grow lots and lots of things, ideally less than 20 minutes away from my house, something like half an acre, and free (or nearly so) to rent.
• Work there intensively on Mondays and Wednesdays. 
• Work intensively on my home garden on Tuesdays. 
• Watch my nieces on Thursdays.
• Harvest and prep everything for market on Fridays. 
• Bake Friday evenings, using as much stuff I've grown as possible.
• Sell on Saturday mornings, preferably at the Saint Paul Farmer's Market.
• Enlist family and friends and anyone who's willing to help with special projects at the tiny-farm on Sunday mornings (in exchange for a good lunch).

Here are some other things I'd like to do next year:

• Take care of six layer hens in my back yard.
• Can things!!! I would love to sell jam and pickles at the market. 
• Help my aunt and uncle start a garden at their new lake home. 
• Make a very small scale tree nursery in my backyard. The idea is to have a good number of fruit and nut trees established and then plant them wherever we end up buying land.
• Start working on a tiny house!!! This was Aaron's suggestion, and I absolutely love it. We'll build it on a trailer that can sit in the parking spot next to our garage. When it's done, we can bring it wherever we end up buying land.
• Do yoga every day. This was the intention I set for 2014, and I have not done well at making it a priority. I need to make more time for this because farming is hard on my body. I won't wait until 2015.

I milked goats!

This isn’t me milking the goat. It’s Nancy, a lovely woman who welcomed me to her farm; introduced me to her sheep, milk goats, chickens, chicks, roosters, enormous turkey, cute cats, and sweet billy goat; and taught me how to milk goats.

It took me a couple of tries to get anything to come out of the teats. I was surprised by how hard I needed to squeeze. One of her milk goats is pure saanen, and she was the easiest to milk. The others are saanens bred with pygmies, and their teats are teeny tiny. Even my small hands seemed too big to do the job until I got the hang of it.

Nancy let me take some goat milk with me. The book I had just read about raising dairy goats insisted that goat milk tastes no different than cow milk, but I was skeptical about this. I've had chevre and goat milk yogurt that both had a distinctly musty taste (which is good in the cheese and totally gross in the yogurt), and I was expecting to be able to detect at least a hint of this in the milk as well. But no! It’s delightfully mild and creamy and wonderful.

I’m looking forward to visiting again in the near future. Nancy lent me a bunch of books about goats and gardening, so I have some reading to do first. At this point, my initial impression of raising dairy goats is extremely favorable. I see lots of these lovely animals in my future.

Cute chicks and death on a farm

Why, hello!

When I got to the farm last week, a batch of 60 newly hatched chicks greeted me (greet: to scurry away from a human hand). Leg cramps and other forms of mild discomfort were ignored in favor of lengthy observation. They eat, drink, poop, and climb all over each other trying to get the most comfortable spot with the most perfect temperature. This last activity is violent. Sue found a dead chick on Thursday morning, squished by his fellows.

These chicks arrived via USPS, which strikes me as a very strange practice. My aunt and uncle work for the post office and once snatched up a chick from a very large shipment - who would notice? - and raised her in Fred's back yard. She was a beauty named Little Barbara, named in loving honor of my aunt, her rescuer. She's in chicken heaven now, and I regret that I never really got to know her.

I wonder how many chick casualties can be attributed to their shipment? In the case of these new chicks, 63 were shipped and 60 remain (two died the first day, one was the poor squished guy). I guess in terms of percentage this is pretty good - better than 95% survival rate. But it's still so sad that any of them die.

Death is a constant presence on a farm, though, something I'm not used to and feel weird about acclimating to. I grew up in a suburb, with family dogs, and now live in a city with four indoor cats and a history of fostering litters of kittens. I value the individual lives of the animals I take care of so very much.

When I started caring about food towards the end of college, I changed my eating habits (I only lasted eight months as a vegan, but I ate a vegetarian diet for about five years) entirely because of a desire to restrict my participation in the abhorrent treatment of animals. Why should we kill them and exploit them when it's possible for us to survive and thrive on an entirely plant-based diet? My thinking has shifted now. I guess I would summarize it as something like: if I have a reasonably good idea that the animals were treated well (especially given access to the outdoors and appropriate food), I'll buy and eat their eggs, milk, or meat. My ideal is to raise these things myself to change the "reasonably good idea" part to "absolute assurance."

Death on a farm is just part of the process, whether it's because of injuries sustained by a day-old chick during shipment, roosters fighting and killing each other, chickens dying from unknown causes (we found one in the loafing shed last week, too far gone to tell how it died), or just humans killing animals because we like to eat them. While I can't say I want to, I do hope I get experience in processing chickens so I can take part in this last bit - the bit I find most troubling - in a very direct way. I don't necessarily think I need to be capable of killing a chicken to feel morally or otherwise justified in eating it. That used to be my stance, but it's not reasonable to think that every person needs to be capable of doing every task. But I feel like I should try it. If I'm able to do it, it would certainly make things easier on my future farm.

So if I can shift from vegan to vegetarian to conscientious omnivore, can I also shift from thinking about and valuing the animals in my life as individuals to thinking about them as parts of a whole, where connections to individuals are much lighter and deaths are noticed and perhaps analyzed but not really mourned? The excruciating sadness I felt when my first foster kittens were adopted led me to purposely connect less deeply to my next foster kittens. By the time I had done it for a year or so, I didn't even really feel sad after adoptions - it was just part of the process.