Taking Care of Babies

2011 is The Year of the Animal on Red Wing Farm.

First there were our girls -- three young Nubian does (Zuzu, Jojo, and Foxy Brown) and a Sannen doe named Rosie. And Buckley, a handsome Nubian buck. These goats came to us from Three Graces Dairy up in Madison County and piled out of the truck into the newly-built barn and made themselves right at home.

Then came more two more goats from Three Graces, a dog, and a brief duck experiment. 13 chickens and one deranged pea hen have been bustling around in the background through it all.

We have been taking care of babies all Spring. It started in February with the spontaneous adoption of Mona, a wonderful mama Nubian, and her 9-day old doeling Moonpie (pictured a few days after their arrival, above).

Then came little Merlin, a 4-month old buckling given to us by our friend Val at Double G Ranch, a "buck trade" on the promise of a future buckling of ours to go to Double G.

On June 1st, our Nubian first freshener Foxy Brown gave birth to the first baby born on the farm, little Felix. Motherhood did not come naturally to Ms. Foxy--she looked at Felix first with confusion and then with fear. She rejected him completely, refusing to let him get anywhere near her to nurse. We had to hold her and force her to let him nurse at three hour intervals for the first four days of his fragile little goat life, and then, miraculously, she figured it out.

The same week Felix was born, we found a listing for a full-blooded Border Collie surrendered by a breeder to an animal shelter in eastern Tennessee. We had been looking for quite some time for a rescued Border Collie to train as a goat herder, and we had to act fast. So I drove to Chuckie, TN and collected Maisey, a sweet and smart 3-month old pup who everyone has fallen in love with.

In the midst of this animal explosion, we tended and sent to new homes somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 annual and perennial seedlings. The plant babies were demanding in their own way, requiring daily attention from February through the end of May.

Three more goats are pregnant, so the babies are going to keep on coming through the fall, and we will very likely have a small flock of Khaki Campbell laying ducks established down by the pond by the end of the year.

It has been an exhausting, gratifying, and humbling experience caring for and connecting with all of the new nonhuman members of our farm family.

I've fallen off the blog wagon as animal and plant chores have eclipsed everything else. But I wouldn't have it any other way - our fridge is full of goat milk, goat sour cream and yogurt are culturing on the counter, Maisey's crashing into things on the porch chasing her tail, and baby Felix is frolicking up a storm. And The Year of the Animal continues!

Christopher and Moonpie at 4 months

Newborn Felix

Little Felix at about two weeks old with Mama Foxy

Goats!

I don't have time to write much, but thought I'd post a few photos of the new farm residents. . .more to come!

Home

I was up early this morning, weeding the raised beds in the hoophouse. The cold-hardy greens are growing faster now, and the lengthening days are providing lots of sunlight for them to soak up and turn into green and growing plant energy.

Being away for two weeks offered me a lot of clarity, and absence definitely made my heart grow fonder of my life. I love being back to cooking on a wood cookstove, back to soaking up the sunlight and warmth in our house on winter mornings thanks to passive solar design, back to my community and my family, back to walking across the muddy fields and even back to weeding. It's good to be home.

After 12 days of cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people, it's so luscious just to make a small meal for myself and Christopher, to pull weeds, to check on the tiny spinach and carrot plants in the cold frames. These small mundane activities feel so good after being away from them. I feel powerfully, intimately connected to the land here, and glad to be back in my own homeplace, touching growing things, watching a Cooper's hawk fly low over the pastures, hearing the first Red Wing Blackbird of the season.

Frankie

I suddenly realized today that I hadn't posted anything for the whole month of January. It's been an extraordinarily full month, teaching, working, setting up the hoophouse--and then the going got really rough in the past week:

Frankie (shown here healthy and happy last summer) has kidney failure, suddenly. She's not an elderly cat (we estimate eight or nine) and she's always been healthy until recently. This week Frankie's been in and out of the animal hospital, and now is home with us, woozy and frail. The vet says it's very unlikely she'll recover.

I can't help but hope for a miracle cure--partly because I'm in denial, partly because I seem constitutionally unable to not hope even when hope defies logic, partly because I don't trust authority, and partly because I always want to believe there's a way to fix problems, find solutions, make it right.

Of course have been frantically researching all kinds of herbal, homeopathic, and nutritional approaches to feline renal failure, and reading accounts of people who have nursed their cats through kidney failure, some claiming to have seen full recoveries. Maybe we'll have time to try some of these remedies -- stinging nettle seeds, fish oils, various raw meat concoctions -- or maybe not. In the meantime, I'm hoping that the touch, affection, sunlight slanting across the floor, warmth of the woodstove, and other comforts of home are providing some healing, or at least some peace.

I know we all die someday. And cats' lifespans are short compared to ours. My friend KT says it's a design flaw. But I sure do wish Frankie could stay a while longer. I love the heck out of her, and it's hard to imagine this household without her in it. Please send her your love, dear readers.

Christmas Eve Gratitude

"When you boil it down, I am a sap." - My sister Mary, 12/24/09

This evening, I pulled some of our homegrown winter squash out of storage to cook for Christmas Eve dinner. I was cutting into a butternut when I started to tear up. Scooping seeds and pulp out of beautiful orange butternuts and creamy yellow Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato Squash, I just felt overwhelmed by gratitude.

The moment of opening up a winter squash--this hard, dry object--and discovering luscious, nutritious, soft, smooth food inside is incredible enough. Even though I have cut into thousands of winter squash in my lifetime, it just never stops amazing me. And knowing that we midwifed this food into the world in our very own garden and carefully kept it in storage for a midwinter feast just feels like a profound gift.

As I stood there at the chopping block scooping seeds with my eyes teary, Vienna Teng's "City Hall," which gets me every time anyway, came up on Pandora, and it was all over. I just cried and scooped, scooped and cried.

While it is probably not winter squash and gay marriage ballads that do it for most people, 'tis the season for gushy emotion, gratitude, and loving sweetness. For me this time of year is about rituals of connection with the family I've chosen, with the family I was born into, and with the family that extends out to all living things on the planet. It was great to let the emotion flow and know that there's a big pool of this sort of gushy love and gratitude out there right now.

CF and I are headed over to my sister's house in a bit for Christmas Eve dinner with my family, and we'll be bringing that emotion-infused winter squash and other concoctions featuring cabbage from Flying Cloud Farm, onions, garlic, and celery from our garden, carrots from Gladheart Farm, and Spinning Spider goat cheese. I'm so grateful for the family I was born into and the family I've found and formed in my life so far. Though I don't celebrate Christmas in any sort of Christian way, I am deeply grateful for the gift of nourishing food grown with care, passed down from food-growing ancestors, and for rituals that celebrate our connection to each other.

Welcome Sun!

Left: Newgrange passage on Winter Solstice

In honor of the Winter Solstice today, here's a video that gives us the opportunity, albiet in 2x3 inch form, to witness a Winter Solstice event created by neolithic farmers:

http://www.heritageireland.ie/en/Solstice2007/ (click "view the archive")

The video shows the sunrise on Winter Solstice at Newgrange, a beautiful neolithic structure in Ireland engineered to observe and honor the Solstice.

More about Newgrange here:

http://www.knowth.com/newgrange.htm

I have been lucky enough to spend time at Newgrange several times in my travels in Ireland over the years. It is awe-inspiring -- the structure is 5,000 years old and its design is brilliant both technically and artistically.

Sidenote for you natural building aficianados out there: its a south-facing bermed structure with a living roof that hasn't leaked in all those thousands of years.

Newgrange is a beautiful symbol of the winter solstice, and resonates deep, deep down for me -- maybe it's molecular, maybe it's the collective unconscious.

Winter Solstice has always been a significant time for my family -- sometimes full of joy and other times marked by profound grief and loss.

It is the longest night, a time to notice and know darkness, a time to honor the dark, a time to honor the dead. It is a time to sit with the painful and the difficult things, with loss, with despair. It's the dead of winter.

And: it is the birthday of the sun--the birthday of light in the midst of the darkest time of year. A turning point, the return of the light, a time of transformation, a time of hope, and a time of rebirth.

In many ancient traditions, Winter Solstice is a time to honor the way that life emerges from death, light emerges from dark in the cycles of the natural world. A time to look forward to Spring and Summer and the bright, hot months when everything will be in fruit and flower, imagining what will come to be.

Solstice morning on the farm

For gardeners, this time of year is a time of planning the garden, deciding what seeds you will plant, what food you will grow. On a metaphorical level, the Winter Solstice is a time for the same sort of setting of intentions, dreaming, imagining good things to come.

The seed is a beautiful symbol of the Winter Solstice to me -- a tiny dormant thing, seemingly lifeless but full of potential, full of life that will sprout, grow, bloom, and fruit as the cycle continues. Today, I will excavate some vegetable seeds from the jars where they live in the back of my fridge, and lay them on my altar, imagining all of the growing things to come!

~~~

More on Winter Solstice traditions:

• Waverly Fitzgerald on the Winter Solstice
• http://www.candlegrove.com/solstice.html
• http://www.religioustolerance.org/winter_solstice.htm

The apple does not fall. . .

. . . too far from the tree.

I went to visit my mom & dad last week, and took some photos of the amazing garden installation that my dad has been creating for some months now, in which my parents have been growing herbs, vegetables, and fruits this summer.

The structure is a dodecagon, a 12-sided shape, made up of ten waist-high raised beds coming together in twelve angles supported by locust posts.

The project, which my mom refers to as "The Eighth Wonder" is not finished yet, but it is already very impressive. When my dad is done, there will be some sides left open for entrances into the lovely enclosed sitting area, and a grape arbor on top (you can see the locust posts ready to hold up the arbor in the photo above).

My dad has the idea that when he is "an old man with a cane" he'll be able to walk right up to the counter-height beds and tend his garden without any stooping or bending. It's so easy and convenient that it makes me want to build tall raised beds for now, not just for when I'm a cane-carrying oldster.

The sides of the beds are made of untreated wood of varying widths, colors, and textures-beautifully diverse boards that have been lying around in my parents' garage for 5, 10, or 25 years.

My mom's initial skepticism of The Eighth Wonder has turned to appreciation, and she and I visited the garden to check on the basil, tomatoes, amaranth,

sunflowers and okra one night before dinner.

We harvested what we believe to be a Small Sugar pumpkin, pictured at left.

The next morning, I had some of my mom's homemade blueberry jam from their blueberry harvest, swirled in yogurt. Yum!

I am so grateful to both of my parents for instilling in me a sense of wonder, a love and respect for the natural world, a knowledge of where food comes from, and a zeal for gardening.

I remember working in the vegetable garden with my dad and helping my mom weed her flower gardens from the time I was a very small child. From childhood onward, both of my parents have nurtured in me my natural curiosity, love of growing things, passion for food and cooking, and appreciation of the healing and nourishing power of plants.

It would be impossible to list all of the gifts my parents have given me, all of the ways that I am thankful for them, but I'll start here: thanks for teaching me to feel at home in the garden!