Save Me!

Save Me!

Most of my posts have been about the farm, bringing you here, hoping that you will love the creatures and the dirt of it all.  There is work to be done too, and if you want to share in that as well, then join me in the chores and make your own patch of dirt work for you.

Tomatoes!

The holy grail of gardening pursuits seeking the biggest, the first, the best tasting,and (for me) getting the last tomato.  This time of year, the tomatoes here are finishing their race, ripening slow and smoky on the vine.  

I save seeds now not because it is an ideal time, but because this is the time of year that I am gleaning.  The crops have slowed down enough that I can start to sort and save. 

Here are some tips on saving seeds from your best tomatoes and some advice from the “do as I say and not as I do” category.

11.  Pick out your best really ripe fruits.  Ideally I would pick out 5 of the best tomatoes of the same variety even though I am showing you only 1 tomato from each variety that I am saving.  Best means no rot, no deformities, no weird blotches, but you want them to be soft and really ripe so that the seeds inside are mature.

22.   Slice the fruits in half and spoon out all of the gelatinous seedy oogy stuff into a glass container that you can see through (a mason jar or tall drinking glass will suit this purpose).  Label the container well.

33.  Fill the glass container to about an inch below the top with water.

44.  Leave to sit for about 3 days on your counter.  Why 3 days?  Tomato seeds need to ferment a bit to jump start their ability to germinate later.  If you put on your “I am nature” thinking cap, you will note that in the absence of a farmer/gardener, a ripe tomato would fall from the vine, rot (a.k.a. ferment) on/in the ground and come Spring the seeds would sprout when the timing was right.

55.  At this point, the juice will stink!  Really, worse than a teen boy’s gym clothes locked in his trunk for 2 weeks.  Stir up the juice even though it’s going to smell worse.

6

  6.  Wait an hour and notice that you will have a layer floating on top and another layer of seeds on the bottom.  The top layer goes into the compost.  The bottom layer is your prize.  The seeds that are floating are not going to germinate - trust me.

  7.  Pour off the top layer carefully into the compost bin and then pour the rest of the liquid into a fine meshed sieve straining out the good seed.  Wash the seed a few times under cool water and pick out any vegetable matter.

  

  8.  At this point, I prefer to dump the seeds out onto a labelled paper towel that I have quartered, and spread the seeds out so that they are not bunched together.  Dry overnight or longer to make sure the towel and the seeds are really dry.  Place the entire mass into a plastic Ziploc baggie.  

  9.  Store in a cool, moisture free, dark space.  I like to store seed in a plastic box with a lid, put a few of those little silica packets (this is a desiccant and it takes moisture out of the air) from boxes of new shoes and keep the whole works on a closet shelf until Spring when the timing is right.  Some people use Mason jars and put them in their basement fridge with the silica packets.  This is a great idea as long as the fridge isn’t prone to freezing and as long as you let the seeds warm to room temperature before opening the jar because water from humid air likes to condense on cool objects.  Moisture is really hard on seeds and will greatly reduce your germination rate. 

You are a good scout, already prepared for next Spring!  You have saved yourself anywhere from $2-$4 per variety just by doing this.  You have also selected fruits that like growing in your garden environment which will increase your chances of success next year.  It’s a win-win. 

What about cross pollination?  In my experience, seeds collected from my tomato plants almost always come true from seed.  In an article “The Tomato: Still Champion” printed in “Secrets of Master Gardeners” published in 1982 by Rodale Press (the publishers of Organic Gardening magazine) stated:  “Tomatoes rarely cross-pollinate, and produce little pollen and no nectar.  On many varieties the pistil, which traps pollen, never emerges from the sheath formed by the pollen-bearing anthers.  Since the pistil becomes receptive to pollen several days before the anthers mature, it could accept foreign pollen, but in field observations, this happens with less than 4 percent of all blossoms.”

There you have it.  You are now a seed saver, storing genetic material from your generation and maybe one day, you will pass on seeds to your grandchildren.  If our ancestors hadn’t saved seeds, we might never have seen the likes of Brandywine, or Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter (yes this is a real name).  

Garden, and glean on!

Falling

A stew sky, thick, substantial, coating the branches, wiggling the leaves like they are loose teeth.  

The leaves face plant flat, spread eagle, kissing the ground as if all this time they'd longed for gravity to succeed. 

Drippy, gooey, soup day, nudging genes of old to whisper, "hibernation is near."  

Modern genes mumbling back something about productivity and efficiency battling the wooly

buzzing lullaby in your head.  

Rain drizzles off gutters, and surely there are

sirens swimming there singing us to slack off, enter into the lazy drip dropping heart beat of our very own muddy soil.

Slow Food Season

This is fast food at home- Ruby Hoop's Tomato Soup

"Entry level food worker-Chipotle." 

That's the job alert today.  Yes, a resume and a cover letter are required.  

Since when did fast food applications require cover letters and resumes?  Should I let them in on how I was Chuck E cheese in High School?  Yep, really.  It was a promotion,  fifteen cents an hour more than the $3 minimum wage.  I was paid to sweat, and tiptoe gracefully, while wearing clown shoes, in between toddlers and the occasionally over-zealous teen.   Come to think of it, on the average, $3 an hour is actually more than I earn farming-and sweating.

This is where I start whining so close your ears if you don't want to hear it.  It is high pitched and pleading.  "I don't want to work fast food.  I like slow food!"

Concord grapes!  The smell is amazing-sorry no smellovision

I like wiping my brow with gritty hands, and I like the welts on my wrists from a mysterious sting that the beans keep hitting me with.   I like the aching knees and the laser focus required for picking small green fruits from a sea of green.  I like digging for tubers for hours as if on an archaeological dig.  I love the science behind it all and the sheer "dirt-"iness about it.  Satisfaction is the ultimate reward from all of the muscle mashing, patient perspiration and yes tiptoeing.

In only a week, I will be unemployed.  The wholesale company that sold my crops is folding up like so many paper airplanes in a lecture hall full of teens.  Whoosh-shutting their doors smack dab in the throes of my largest crop.  Seriously, I have 400 lbs of Jerusalem artichokes just sitting in the ground.  That's a lot of money rotting.

Only 4 lbs Jerusalem Artichokes

"Seasons over!" I announce loudly across the garden.  As if the beans and tomatoes will stop - cease cell division, fruit falling, heaped and composting in place.  As if the ripe red raspberries will just wither into fruit leather.  As if the chickens and ducks will stare red faced holding the eggs in like a toddler determined not to "go".  The goats must have had premonitions, because they never did produce anything aside from entertainment which is needed now.

For 11 years produce has held center stage.  First, friends asked to purchase it, then we had a tent at the local Farmers market, and then we formed a CSA (community supported agriculture is where individuals buy shares in a farm's produce).  Finally, for the last 6 years all of this farm's produce has been sold to a wholesaler who provided food to restaurants.  For 11 years this brain has wrapped itself around the timing of crops, the productivity of the soil, the health of the animals, and the unique and fashionable morsel that the palates of the public and chefs will pine for.  Almost like chewing the same cud for 11 years isn't it?

Some things try to wrap themselves around my brain!

I have a BS degree in Medical Technology, and would love to work part time, but ultimately, I  might not be marketable here in this adorably po-dunk town just far enough from civilization.  There are plenty of jobs for bank tellers, nannies, Certified Nursing Assistants (a job I once did to put myself through college), and fast food workers.  I am not saying that I am above these jobs, please don't get me wrong.  I just want to dig deeply into new soil and plant a new seed while still tending the living organism of our home.   I want to be inspired by a new crop of ideas.  I want to buy into some local endeavor.  For at least 11 years, growing organic food, caring for the earth, feeding my family healthy and interesting food, and selling to the community has been the only view in this wonderland's looking glass.  

Wonderland?

The thought of not farming at least for our own nourishment is too harsh to entertain.  Yet, the thought of finding new buyers and starting over has an echo of "been there, done that."  Could this be Limbo?

Standing in our hallway, the transition zone of a home, I can't seem to decide whether to pick a little more produce for today's delivery, call it quits and shower, write a blog, or go hog wild and explore a career as an entry level food worker.  I'm a little stuck.  Must be quicksand below these feet. 

So.... I'm going to move one foot in front of the other.  This is me looking up phone numbers of local chefs.  This is me cold calling and trying not to sound desperate.  This is me peddling this year's final crop. 

Seasons change.  Progress is forward.  Have shovel, will dig!  Here's to new soil and a crop of fresh ideas.  

Have Mercy

The text from the barn reads "Clucky is sick".   "What's wrong?" I text back.  "He's sick."

I should expect this from my youngest son.  Descriptive, diagnostic, deductive language is not in his wheel house.  I will check on the rooster in the morning.  It is dark, the long day has stretched me thin and wimpy, rubbing tired eyes that just beg to close and be let alone for a summer night's short slumber.

My son is tired too, but will never admit it.  He insists and negotiates.  It is the ritual.  A person with autism can always win an argument by sheer perseverance.  The thing is to out-think the argument and turn the requests into inert concepts, this while every creative cell in your body aches for rest.  You still eke out the will to hold on to structure, order, and prayers that he will go to bed or at least let you go to bed despite the emphatic and repetitive statements that: he's not tired, and why can't he play video games, and he's quite sure that his older brother plays video games while we sleep, and can he have one more snack?  

I wash my face, hiding in the basement bathroom to avoid the pelting of repetition and demands. He's 16.  This "phase" is not going away soon.  I pray for maturity - his and mine.   "He's tired," my voice says aloud meant to console my own self, and blissfully I don't argue with me, if only to prove that the statement can be made without an ensuing battle.

I fall asleep in a nano second and wake to a sleeping house, except for the wide awake deaf dog who has taken up barking at 550 am each morning.  This is the dog who a few years ago wouldn't so much as whimper or whine even when she accidentally got locked in the attic for a few hours.  Now, she barks, but only in the morning, and only at me.  She wants to eat earlier each day it seems.  Does she think I'm a morning person?

The barn is quiet.  The sheep see this entourage- caretaker, 3 dogs, and a calico cat posing as a 4th canine, and announce our arrival to the peaceful zoo. Forget about the roosters banging that morning gong, it's the sheep that really begin the cacophony.  Small peeps from chicks, chuff chuffing turkeys, and finally the complaints of ducks matching the sheep to the decibel.  "Good morning you throng of beings!"

Can you hear me now?

The first barn door opens and teenage chicks rush the open air as if they were fleeing a burning building.  In the exodus, a few fly onto the arm that holds open the barn door and then stare at me surprised.    How can a chicken look so surprised?

A few stragglers remain.  The fuzzy headed Golden Laced Polish named Fluffy, her companion "Little One" and then there is Clucky up on the roost teetering ever so slightly.

The barn stinks.  Fetid is the word that bounces around in the sunshine streaming through dusty window panes.

I lift Clucky and examine his back end expecting diarrhea because there are reddish brown streaks on his legs.  I see and smell an awfulness that I don't know how to describe. There is an opening I think, but it is moving. No...writhing.  I look closer because I can't wrap my brain around this grotesque moment.  The writhing, it's maggots and the opening is large. Really large.  The maggots obscure the magnitude of the sore, but there is wetness, and dare I say, a foul juice leaking from him.  

I can't think and just put him down staring into his eyes looking for communication of pain or weakness.  He looks back at me then tends to his wound and looks at me again. It's a "can't you do something about this?" look.  

"Maggots are good" comes out of my mouth.  They are good.  They eat necrotic tissue, and have been used in deep wounds even in people to aid healing.

In chicken populations, it is important to keep things from being shiny.  Shiny is irresistible.  Blood and pus are shiny and the other chickens will peck out of curiosity, and like a "B" rate sci-fi movie, may turn carnivorous.

I find a bottle of Blu-kote in the medical supplies.  It is an anti-septic spray that coats an area blue and dries to a matte finish.  I spray Clucky.  He looks relieved.  He leaves the barn and I watch him closely.  He drinks and drinks from the waterer just filled cool and fresh .

The hens who have shunned him for years come along side of him.  I think "How sweet, they are comforting him", but no they are following him and eating the maggots that fall from the wound. Ugh!  Why didn't I become a vet?  Isn't there more I can do??

After chores and picking vegetables, I tend to breakfast dishes.  Our dog Bailey stays outside while I wash.  She starts barking and I shoosh her.   "You are going to wake the kids!" I whisper-yell.  She doesn't stop.  I walk outside to see what she's fussing about and there is Clucky in the carport looking and smelling like the walking dead.  Her hair is raised at this rooster who has been a pet since his birth.  Unusual.

I lament that I can't do more, but then I realize that I can give him antibiotics to help with the infection.  Getting the needle ready, I see him duck into the cover of the grapevines as if he knows that a needle is coming.  I catch him which is hardly a feat, clean a spot on his thigh and press the healing into him. After that it is prayers and time.  Truly, I am out of ammo and turning it over to God.  I set him down and realize just how warm he was.  Febrile and wounded- poor sweet baby!

The next morning, he looks better.  He feels cooler.  The maggots are still at work but the smell is less intense.  Whew! Maybe he gets a reprieve.  He's young, strong and kind.  He's been taking care of a crippled rooster for years, fetching him food, protecting him from the more aggressive roosters. Truly, karma should be on his side.

Clucky's buddy Crooked Neck.
When he's tired, he just can't
hold his head up any longer.

I notice in the corner, "Little One" is fluffed out like she is cold.  Holding her to my chest, she warms up.  I set her by the food.  Her crop is empty, her keel bone has no meat on it, and she is not growing like the other chicks.  This one is not well.  I wonder if she has survived merely because our 16 year son loves her the most of all 20 chicks in the barn.

I text my boy and let him know that she is sick.  He comes to the barn and puts her into a pen with fresh food and water along with her faithful companion, Fluffy.  Maybe a few days of easy food and a little rest will turn her around.

Another night passes and again, the barn doors open, the chickens burst forth into an unseasonably mild day as if summer has taken a summer vacation.  Clucky stands next to a wall propped up.  "Little One" lies motionless in the pen.  I take Fluffy out and relieve her of duty letting her know that she did not let her friend die alone. 

Fluffy

Clucky is hot again, burning up.  Blu-kote in hand I lift him up towards the sunlight.  The maggots have cleared from half of the wound. The opening is larger than I thought and the cleared portion shows his intestines.

There is no fixing this.  There is no magic spray, or liquid in a needle that can fix this.  This is a fatal error and this is the day that mercy begs to be doled out.  Sometimes, we have to show mercy.  Sometimes, you wake up and you have to, or maybe you get to stop a being from suffering.

I grab an empty feed sack and place Little One inside,  the feed sack seeming to weigh the same after the addition.  She was even more slight than she seemed.

I grab another empty feed sack in my right hand, stoop down and cradle Clucky in my the crook of my left arm.  We walk steady to the house, opening gates gingerly not wanting to cause Clucky even the slightest discomfort.  "You are a good boy." I tell him all the long walk home.  

My oldest son is getting ready for work and I ask him if he can help me with one small thing.  "I'm really in a rush" he says.  "It's Clucky, I just need you to start the car. " I say back.  My voice is steady and my boy knows that he will help me out.  

I open the feed sack, gently place Clucky inside and hold the mouth of the sack up tight against the exhaust from the truck. My oldest son starts the car and I count seconds.  At 45 seconds there is a flapping and a squawk, and then nothing.  I count to 180 and shut off the car.  He has flown.  

The 2 bags feel so limp, or is it me?  I set them both inside of our burn barrel.  I have a meeting at school, so I rush into the house and shower.  The tears run and I shave my legs blindly, reach for shampoo and conditioner, wash my tear streaked face and dry my hair.  Still crying, I apply a thin layer of mascara, grab my purse and drive away from the 2 bags and one sleeping child.

The meeting is so "other" world.  I wonder at how pulled together these women look.  I wonder if anyone else killed a friend this morning.  I wonder what pain is lurking behind their smiles.

I text My youngest son during a break to let him know that 2 of our flock are gone.  I blink tears away while I write it out.  He sends back, "they are in heaven now."  I blink faster pushing the remorse deeper.

My empathetic son greets me at the door when I get home.  "Where are Clucky and Little One?" he asks.  I tell him about the bags and we get a shovel for burial.  At first the plan is 2 holes, but it changes to one after the 20th shovelful.  We dig 2 feet down and place the bags, rolled up so neatly, into the hole.  

I think about the paper feed sacks, how they resemble the brown paper bags the homeless clutch to hide the liquid shame. I should uncover our pets, but it's too much to see. It's tidy this way and easy.  

We cover them with dark crumbly earth, and mark the place with a stepping stone.  It is done, our burdens passed on to the microbes and insects.  We walk back to the house and my youngest asks if I'm ok.  "Yep. OK" I say.  "How about you? Ok?" I ask back.  "I will miss them."  He says.

We walk back into the house arm in arm and he asks the question he asks every day after lunch.  "What are we having for supper?"  I almost say "chicken," but it's too cruel to joke yet.  

"Corn.  We are having corn and something."  

"We just had corn!" He complains.  

"Yep, but the corn is ready so we will eat corn tonite and maybe tomorrow, and probably the next day."  

These are the rules of the farm.  You eat what is in season, you tend to the sick and provide health to the well. Sometimes you cull out a being.  


Always you are merciful.

Clucky, Handsome and Strong.

Hung Up

Hung up

The calf is in the orchard. Again. Number 250, staring me down with an innocence that melts reason. "I will love him and pet him and name him George."  My IQ falls by tens in the beam of his stare somehow made more intense by cud
chewing. Maybe he can stay in the orchard. Is he really harming the trees?  The bent branches make their own plea.

It's a mile around the pasture. Long pants I bought at the Goodwill are tucked into the leather farm boots. The handle of my "fence fixing" pail squeaks as left then right foot land and avoid the hoof ruts on the beaten down grass path.

We take for granted smooth lawns. Nature doesn't lean toward smooth, it is full of nooks and ridges where it can store more life like an excessively pocketed purse. Snakes dwell in those pouches of nature and grass half covers the ground
hog holes.  Intentional steps and laser focus slow the pace allowing the brain to sort out the fence while 13 calves and 7 sheep look on. 

 Sheep "Baa" loudly sounding more like "Maa" appealing for food, activating the guilt lobe in the brain. If you are a woman, you know the guilt lobe. It's located near the lobe that makes us crave
chocolate.

Squeak squeak, Baa, buzzing cicadas, 20 pair of eyes, tops of boots swishing through dry grass, smack a horsefly dead... The fence is hung up on barbed wire
here and on a branch there. The wire breaks in the untwisting and more wire is patched in. Begin and stop, bend and stoop, drooping branches pruned, the electric wire free now to corral the four legged.

Confident steps propel me toward the barn feeling I've all but finished.  Then eyes catch poison ivy growing fresh and bold at the fence corner. The
pruners do their work, but in the stooping, an "aha!" The corner wire is jammed and sneakily twisted around the wires that hold the insulator in place. The root of all hang ups and the whereabouts known only from a tattletale ivy. The wire is pulled tight and tangled, stretched by the greedy gait of number 250 no doubt. A few thistles pulled, then grass laid low under a hand scythe, and finally the fence is switched on. The orchard is safe.

I am safe from making yet another cow my pet, and this a borrowed pet at best. After the losses of last summer with 3 dead cows in less than 3 weeks my own fencing guarding a heart too soft is roughly patched and hung up precariously.

250 belongs to a farmer friend who graciously agreed to bring calves to graze our pasture.  Steers that belong to him, medical bills that belong to him, and guilt and sorrow that belong to him in the event of tragedy.

I carry the green plastic scoop filled with molasses covered grains to the demanding and greedy sheep, and greet each friend- Spanky, Indigo, Larry,
Darryl, his other brother Darryl, Mo, and Birdie.  A quick stop back  inside the house to change into cooler shorts and shoes to return to planned chores in the already sultry garden. 

 I grab a water bottle then reach for a piece of chocolate on the way out.

This post is over a week late....

Only Eight O'clock AM and I'm dripping beads of summer effort when it's not yet a calendar summer day.  Tell that to our cat stretched out pancake formation on the concrete of the car port or the chicken laying in a heap in the screened porch. Tell that my hair slicked back like the Fonz-oh to be cool on any front!

  Chickens do have concrete thoughts!

The sun is not turned up to "full" quite yet.  The morning haze draping the sleepy drooping earth protects us for just moments more, and then whammo! the whole farm is braced-still under the interrogation of heated beams.

The plants gather energy reserves and hum "ohm".  I repeat my own mantra from Psalm 139, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."  The sweat drips and my thighs drive the wheel hoe through the gathering  of weeds between beans, between corn, between tomatoes.  "God doesn't make weaklings.  It's not hot.  It's not hot."  This is the chant until I cease red-faced, heart beating alarmingly fast.

Thank God for pools of water snuffing out the fire, a seeming sizzle as muscles release in the wet.  Me, a spaghetti noodle loose and yielding.

Only 800 am.

"To do" lists remind me that the day is only getting hotter.  "Quick dry" shorts and tank top drip back to the garden, not bothering with a towel.  Japanese beetles munch leaves of fruit trees tearing holes into the efforts of Spring.

Grape Leaf "After" being mobbed.  The white spots are kaolin clay.

Grape Leaf "Before"

"Stop!"  I want to yell to them.
 "Eat the weeds!  Eat thistles! Oh please, eat thistles!  
Eat the grasses that have bent over the electric fence and strangled the charge.  
Eat the green that makes this earth so much work!  
I'm not your enemy, stop being mine!  
There is no murder by chemistry here.  I study hard the laws that Nature mandates and follow the rules- well, the ones that I understand.  
Go eat somewhere else!"

But I know the beetles and thistles can't hear my voice over the drumming thumps of DNA firing cannons of "SURVIVE." So I spray kaolin clay on the leaves mixed with compost tea- a deterrent for the bugs and a palliative for the leaves.  A concoction where every little bug step on every little leaf is a road sign saying "EAT SOMEWHERE ELSE!"  

"Survive" will lead them somewhere else, and quickly is the hope.

"It's not hot.  It's not hot."  The rooster crows half heartedly.  I call back "you are fearfully and wonderfully made!"  A collection of 5 Japanese beetles bristle frantically in a closed palm.  Fingers spread palm open and bronze beetles crawl fast towards edges but my sweet rooster friend is too fast.  They are crunched, crispy protein nuggets.

He didn't always like the beetles.  At first he would peck a bit, flip the insect over, and walk away as if repulsed.  Over time all of the poultry have figured it out.  Like children, introduced to a food enough times, they get the hint, develop a taste.  The chickens have learned to eat what I hand to them.  Yell "treat!" and here they come running, wobbling, flapping, and cackling with gusto!

How can I entice the beetles to eat other things with more than just the "keep out" sign, but a "welcome to the buffet" attempt.  How do I yell "treat!" to a beetle?  

A friend of mine in the entomology department at college studied what scents were released by corn plants that called insects to dine.  Perhaps instead of trapping the beetles, I could spritz a little eau de grape vine on the thistles.  The theory is that the Japanese beetles would cluster.  What a workforce!  Thousands of munchers at my disposal (cue the maniacal laugh).  This just might work.  A couple of fruit leaves, a blender, a spray bottle, it's worth a shot.  

For now, the sprayer coats the trees and grapes with a white slurry of thistle compost tea (extra smelly) and kaolin clay.  Any dog or chicken or farmer standing near will also be polka-dotted. 

Clay mask anyone?

I've always been a little pasty

Wish this were scratch and sniff! EEWWW!
Thistle make every little thing all right!

Today the orchard is covered so to speak.  Tomorrow is another "not hot" day as is the remainder of Spring into Summer.  Five am is looking better every day.  

Ahhh!  Summertime!!!