"Learning Experiences" of 2018: Part 1: The Gardens

I previously titled this post "Failures of 2018" but decided to take a more positive approach.  As my former manager used to say, "We have areas for improvement."

It's been awhile since I have written.  It's not that I haven't had much to write about, it's just that when we take down our 2018 calendar I'm pretty sure we'll just have to write FAIL with a big black Sharpie across the front.

Now I don't like to be a pessimist...a killjoy...a Debbie downer...but I've been pretty bummed out about the past year lately.  Of course 2018 wasn't all bad, we are all happy and healthy, the kids are great, and only one thing that I would label as terrible happened. But it's been a year a growing up for everyone, a year to reset our goals and priorities, and a year to lower--or change--our expectations.

Let's review some of our failures of 2018, shall we?

The Gardens 

    We started out the year with BIG BIG homesteading plans.  G and I have never set out to be "homesteaders," that was never our goal or our dream, we just like to grow and raise things and do things ourselves.  We would really rather not be dependent on anyone else, and we're pretty stubborn.  And we also thought it was being more "efficient" to use our soil and time to grow food.  Somehow we got stuck in our heads that we had to spend our time productively, and somehow this equated to growing all our own food.  As our efforts grew we realized we were starting to fall under the category of "homesteaders," which, honestly, was way too trendy of a title for us anyway, but we embraced the idea of homesteading and ran with it.
    Included in our plans of a fruitful homestead this year were a couple acres of gardens.  We wanted to produce enough sweet corn and pumpkins to sell at a farmers market.  We wanted to can at least a year's worth of tomato sauce for our family.  We wanted to freeze at least a year's worth of vegetables--beans, broccoli, cauliflower, snap peas, squash--for our family.  We hoped to have enough leftover to sell.  The boys were so excited to be planning for a farmer's market.
    The whole family worked hard to meet our goals.  We found a little garden center and were thrilled with the plants we bought.  We ordered seeds online.  We got everything in the ground early.  We planted over 500 hills of pumpkins, a big corn patch, another big corn patch, and a big garden.  We worked hard to weed and water the gardens.  We fertilized everything.

AND.....

    Pretty much nothing grew.
    It was all pretty sad and ridiculous and discouraging.  We wanted to teach our kids about working hard and to appreciate where their food came from, but all they were learning was how to waste time and be disappointed.
     The best we can figure is 1) we have really poor soil and 2) we got some over-spray from the field around us spraying Round-Up (our corn was doing good until the field was sprayed).

      We were able to get a few meals worth of beans and not very tasty broccoli frozen.  It was during the couple hours that G and I spent prepping the vegetables and blanching them that we were struck with the realization--WOW!  WE ARE REALLY WASTING OUR TIME!  WALMART HAS BAGS OF FROZEN VEGETABLES FOR 99 CENTS!
     In our effort to be efficient we were being terribly inefficient.  How many more worthwhile things were on our to-do list than freezing spindly broccoli?  Not to mention that this spindly broccoli was still ending up costing us more per ounce than the stuff we could find in the freezers at Walmart, not even accounting for our time
      It was that evening that we decided to throw our full support behind America's vegetable farmers, as well as Walmart's empire, and allow ourselves to use our time for more worthwhile things.  We kind of completely gave up on the garden at that point.  There was really nothing left growing in it anyway.  We had wasted enough time and money on it and were ready to move on.  I didn't even like gardening anymore.  We had a few pumpkins to pick and GD's sunflowers had actually grown, but as soon as those were done and the ground was dry enough we tilled up the garden area and are going to plant grass there in the spring.  Our gardening efforts are done for now.

      Although I did enjoy not having the tasks of weeding and picking and prepping and freezing looming on my to-do list all summer, the loss of the garden hit me hard.  Gardening has been a life-long hobby for me and it's been hard to admit that I failed at it and to give it up for the time being.  I remember loving helping in the garden from a very young age.  I remember my dad making me stop hoeing the corn rows because he thought I was going to be sore the next day.  I remember going out to the garden every morning in the summer to see what was ready to pick.  I had my own garden from the time I was about 10.  And now I can't even get green beans to grow or keep my flower beds looking nice.
       It's a big change of thinking to move away from gardening for me, but I think we're all a bit relieved to embrace the 21st century and the convenience of mass-grown genetically-modified frozen vegetables.

It's Not Freeloading, It's Foraging

    Last summer both the garden and animals on our little homestead weren't very productive, and we decided to join our livestock in their free-loading fun and picked about 100 pounds of apples out of a ditch down the road.  It was pretty much the only produce we had, besides the several buckets of mulberries we picked, also from a tree down the road.

At least we think they're mulberries.  I kind of let my kids eat them last year without knowing what they were and figured if there were poisonous berries growing in our area I would have heard about it.  Everyone survived.

Anyway, this year we are trying a lot harder at this whole homesteading thing and actually,

1) Identified what we were eating.  We used Google's Pictoral Field Guide to Native Plants (known more commonly simply as "Google Images") and are fairly certain it's a mulberry tree.  Incidentally, ingesting unripe mulberries or their stems or parts of the tree can cause stomach upset and hallucinations.

and

2) Watched a YouTube video about the proper way to harvest mulberries.

So, this year instead of hand picking each mulberry we put a tarp on the ground and shook the branches and got a rain shower of mulberries (and purple stains on our clothes).

Meanwhile, the baby girl kept herself occupied by stuffing her face with berries she picked up off the ground.

After three evenings shaking berries off the tree we totaled about 5 gallons of mulberries.

The thing about mulberries though is that they really don't taste that great.  (Especially the ones you pick up off the ground.  Those just taste like dirt.  But my baby likes dirt.  Her three favorite foods are meatballs, dirty mulberries, and sand.)  And their stems are near impossible to remove in a reasonable amount of time without making a purple sticky mess.  So my kids don't really eat them once we get them home (while we're picking them off the tree they think the berries are the most delicious thing ever, it's all in the novelty of standing in the ditch eating free berries).

So we had 5 gallons of mulberries, minus several small purple-stained handfuls.  Which got me searching on Pinterest for uses for the mulberries, which is where I learned the proper terminology for "free-loading from trees in a ditch down the road."  It's actually called 'foraging,' and it's all the rage on Pinterest.  There are people that are "expert foragers," and you can even hire a "foraging guide."

Meanwhile, our distant ancestors are scratching their heads wondering why they even bothered to invent agriculture.

Real homesteading and foraging bloggers need catchy titles with numbers in them to get traffic to their posts, which means there are all sorts of blog posts about "5 Uses for Mulberries," or "8 Recipes Using Mulberries," or "12 Health Benefits of Mulberries," or "83 Reasons You Should Forage for Mulberries."  But I really question these bloggers' expertise because I really don't want to serve a pie or a three-layer trifle with hallucinogenic berry stems in it to my children.  And I don't think my children should be drinking mead either.

So we ended up putting the berries through the food grinder to juice them.  Diluted with water and a little bit of sugar added, it makes a tasty, fairly healthy drink (after all there are 12 health benefits of mulberries, some random blogger said so).

The juice is fairly easy to make.  My six-year-old did most of the work grinding the berries down.  It's the cleaning up afterwards that makes you rethink this whole foraging trend.

Let's just say that G came home from work the other day to a very purple kitchen, and that we will need to re-paint some portions of our recently-painted cabinets.  Unless some some homesteading blogger has pinned a post on "6 Ways to Remove Purple Berry Stains from Your Cabinets."

Poultry News

Someday when Freeloader Farms is a multi-hundred dollar corporation, we'll send out a fancy newsletter with full-color photos for all of our screaming fans to read up on the latest updates around the farm.  But for now, I'll just post them here for the 3 people that read this blog to enjoy.

Flock Increases by Seven
   My "chicken ticket" birthday chickens arrived about 5.5 weeks ago.  They were special ordered from Meyer Hatchery (who is big enough to not only have an email newsletter but also has a very informative catalog with beautiful photos available for viewing online or by mail order).  Even though they were all supposed to be my chicks, I only ended up with two of them as the others were claimed by the kids.  These chicks weren't handled quite as much as last year's chicks, mainly because the boys had more concern about ending up with manure in their hair from carrying them around on their heads (not necessarily a bad thing to be concerned about).  But the chicks are still very loved and still living in our kitchen.
The chicks added to our poultry roster were named:

-Eggy (GD's chick, named after a chicken in a random foreign kids' movie we found at the library that GD loves.  I don't understand the movie, I've only seen about 15 minutes of it, but there's a line that references the old musical "The King and I," so it must be ok right?)

-Green Layer Like Gecko Is Green, known as simply "Green Layer" by friends and family (GE's chick, he wanted a chick that laid green eggs because chickens don't lay orange eggs and Gecko, his favorite PJ Masks character, is green.)

-Princess (KM's chick, named by her brothers because KM is the princess of the family)

-Watermelon (my Buff Orpington chick, this was one of my specific requests because Buff Orpingtons are so docile, named after our original Buff Orpington who never got to fulfill her lifelong dream to be a mother)

-Sunshine (another one of my chicks, G won't let me name our children hippy names so I might as well give the names to our livestock.  For the record though, I think G was very wise to not allow me to name KM Galilee Sunshine as I had wanted).

-Miss Fritter ("The school bus of death is after me!")

-Cupcake the Fluffy Cloud (GD wanted to name her "I Am A Fluffy Cloud" and GE wanted to name her Cupcake).


Missing Chicken
Missing: one adult hen, answers to the name of Daisy
Description: breed unknown, white with black at her neck and feathers on her feet
Last seen: wandering the farm about two months ago, did not come home in the evening after a day of free-ranging
Other pertinent information: will be looking lost, lonely and confused; may have gone to the nearest chicken therapist for help working through some unresolved trauma related to last winter's chicken massacres


Obituary
I am sorry to report the Obadiah Jonahmicahnahum Habakkuk is no longer with us.  He was an odd little fellow and his fear of grass and hens was simply not compatible with life as a chicken.  There are many stories I could tell of his inability to cope with life, but we are all very sad about his passing and so I will save those for another time (or my first children's book).  He was buried in a private ceremony in which he was, as GE says, "planted in the garden, but he's not there anymore, he went away" (not sure if that is his understanding of chicken souls of just his misunderstanding of death).  Obadiah is survived by his sisters Josephine and Henrietta.


Turkey Narrowly Escapes Death
Just a few days before Tom and Frieda were scheduled for butchering, Frieda started laying eggs.  It is highly unlikely that the eggs were fertile.  Broad-breasted bronzes don't breed well due to their broad breasts (say that 5 times fast).  But on the outside chance we could have baby turkeys, we built an incubator out of a foam cooler, struggled to keep the temperature and humidity the same conditions as a turkey's bottom, and ultimately hatched a couple of rotten eggs that made the house smell like low tide.  The eggs were unfertilized.  Frieda stopped laying eggs.  The turkeys are back on the waiting list for our freezers.

The World's First Pig Farmers

   Tens of thousands of years ago cavemen were realizing that they could domesticate animals. I wonder during those first years of animals domestication if our ancestors really had plans for the animals or if they were just making it up as they went along. Which is totally what we're doing with this whole homesteading thing. I imagine the first humans to raise pigs may have experienced something like this.

   Father Caveman arrived back to the cave late from hunting and gathering one evening. Mother Cavewoman was slightly annoyed but still curious when, after he tossed the squirrels for supper on the fire he pulled out a box (chiseled laboriously from rock of course) with air holes and presented his children with two new strange animals to befriend and turn into something useful.  The animals were small and pink with flat noses and curly tails. 

    "What are they called, Daddy?!  Where did you find them?! What do we do with them?!"  The Cave Children asked excitedly. 

     "I found them for free in an ad carved on a cliff while I stopped to eat my lunch today. I picked them up from some one named Craig after hunting and gathering. They are called piglets and I don't know what they're good for, I just thought the cave drawing of them was cute."

      The Cave Children were delighted with their new pets. Mother Cavewoman did not want to keep them but Father Caveman thought she might be more agreeable once she got some squirrel and foraged roots and mushrooms in her.  

        "After supper we will build a pen for them."

       Soon(ish) the pig pen was roughly constructed from rocks and tree limbs the Cave Children gathered while Father Caveman carved food and water barrels and Mother Cavewoman cleaned up from the lovely squirrel dinner and tried to keep the Cavebaby from climbing the cave walls and swinging from the overhead torch. 

     The Cave Children excitedly cared for their piglets.  They tirelessly tried to train them to do....something.  Even if they couldn't be work animals they could still be pets and maybe even protect the family from wild dinosaurs (the timeline for this may be a little construed). The piglets would dance little jigs when they saw the Cave Children coming, but as the pigs grew all they wanted to do was sit in the mud. The pigs grew larger than the Cave Family could have ever imagined and soon were consuming more than the family could forage. Fortunately there was bulk feed available at the elevator in the next village over (that village was much more advanced than our cave family's village, obviously). The smell of the pigs became overpowering and manure was piling up.  The pigs dug and rooted and made a mess and were constantly destroying their living enclosure.  They repeatedly knocked over their waterer and Father Caveman had to recarve it three times. As winter approached Father Caveman was finding it harder to keep their water thawed and had to rig up a thermostat-controlled fire to thaw their waterer.  The pigs were not too smart either. Father Caveman was getting smoke signals like "Pig stuck in feed barrel" from Mother Cavewoman while he was out hunting and gathering. 

      Finally the family had had enough. The pigs were not earning their keep around the cave and the family could not afford to keep them.  So they did what they had to do....
      After several hours of huffing and puffing, Father Caveman finally loaded them into a livestock cart (this was after the wheel had been invented), to take them out and hunt them.  He brought home so much meat the family had to carve another ice box to store it until meat curing could be discovered.  With all that meat available, Father Caveman no longer had to devote his entire day to hunting down squirrels and could now spend time working the land and inventing agriculture.

Or something like that.  

You can never have too much poultry.

     I was woken up one morning a couple weeks ago by a new sound. At first I thought there was something dreadfully wrong with GE. But then I remembered, Oh, yeah, we have a rooster in the kitchen.

      The day before G decided it had been too long since he showed up with livestock and picked up a rooster and a couple chicks off Craigslist.  These weren't just any chicks, though. These were the Silkies he had been talking about getting for 3 years now. And as a bonus, the Polish-Silkie cross "cockadoodledooster" came free with the purchase of the chicks. 

      These are not the chicks he is giving me for my birthday, those come next week. These were just because we can never have enough poultry in our life. 

       The boys were not real interested in naming these birds, I think they're saving their chicken names for the special chicks they're getting next week.  G had nothing, so I claimed the privilege of naming them. I had just told GD a few nights before while he was working on memorizing the books of the Old Testatment that Obadiah would be a good name for a rooster. So Mr. Rooster became Obadiah, middle name Jonahmicahnahum, last name Habakkuk.  He goes by Obie for short.  The girls are Henrietta and Josephine because I thought their fluffy little bodies deserved vintage-sounding names. 

     The chicks and rooster lived in our kitchen for a couple days before being moved downstairs for a birthday party and to keep down the smell. However, Obie stopped crowing as much and I determined he was lonely and depressed in the basement, so now he gets to grace our presence and to make sure we're awake several times a day from his container in the kitchen. 

Catalog Nostalgia and Insecurities

      The Sears catalog used to arrive at our house in late September, bringing with it the excitement that Christmas was coming. My sisters and I would dog-ear the first page of the toys so we could quickly find it without having to flip through the pages of linens and men's suits first. I would excitedly turn to that dog-eared page time and again to browse through the dolls, only to be disappointed once again that in the whole five-inch thick catalog there were only a few pages of toys sandwiched between the housewares and the electronics (maybe it wasn't quite five-inches thick, but it sure felt that heavy to my five-year-old self). And so I'd flip to the front of the catalog and contemplate that year's version of Santa beaming on the cover, because that's what the catalog really was--a symbol of the coming holiday season. This waxing and waning of excitement about the Sears Christmas catalog would occur several times as I waited for Christmas to come: I would pull the catalog out of the end table we stored it in, open to the toys, and then once again be disappointed to be staring at VCRs a few pages later.

I don't even think Sears sends out a Christmas catalog anymore, but a different yearly catalog mailing causes a similar pendulum emotions in our household: 

The Burpee Seed Catalog. 

We received our copy of the Butpee seed catalog in early January. G brought in the mail grinning and asked the boys to guess what came in the mail that day. As soon as the saw the cover, the boys grabbed the catalog out of G's hands and plopped themselves down on the couch to admire the brightly colored flowers and vegetables and make their "lists."  GD would have copied the whole catalog if we had let him. 

"You guys can pick out a couple things but we're not planting a big garden this year."  I think I told them that five times. And then told G it again for good measure, adding, "We don't have time for a garden or canning this year." 

But then it was my turn with the catalog. It wasn't long before I grabbed a pen and started making a list too.

Maybe we could plant a garden. A smaller one. With just enough plants for a few weeks of fresh veggies during the summer. 

But we do like our canned homemade tomato sauce....

 As my list grew longer and longer with every turn of the glossy pages, I got excited about the huge garden we were going to plant this year and all the glistening jars of preserved food we would have in our pantry. 

      Then I looked over my lengthy list, became overwhelmed, and started crossing out vegetables. 

      Then I went back and circled some of the ones that I crossed out because I really hadn't meant it. 

      Then I proclaimed loudly and resolutely that we were not planting a garden this year. 

Well, maybe a small one. 

Ooh, look at those bright purple eggplants....and I've never heard of a potato squash before, I wonder if the kids would eat that....

We do not have time to weed a garden. 

Beans that are 18 inches long, that might be neat...

But what if we put all this work into a garden and it floods and the goats eat it like last year?

Let's try sweet potatos this year. 

And that's how my feelings about the garden have been swinging for the past two months. Despite my decision to not grow a garden this year, over the weekend I had my kids collecting manure and poking holes in 200 Dixie cups and my husband mixing a special seed starting recipe and setting up a plant stand with grow lights. 

This is going to be so much fun!  We will have so many vegetables!

BUT WHAT IF NOTHING GROWS?  What if it all dies?  What if it floods?  What if the livestock eats it? 

  

GD has also been having these strong farming insecurities. We should both take a lesson from GE's simple solution to everything in life, "Well, then we'll just buy some at Walmart."

       

A Happiness

      My mom likes to compare GE to the ornament Noel from the children's Christmas story. "He has a Happiness," she says. GE's joy has been exploding out of him since the day he was born. I have never known anyone so genuinely content and thrilled to be alive than GE. You can feel his happiness from across the room, but chances are you won't have to because he would love to come over and give you a hug.

       He always has something positive to say. He starts his day rejoicing in what most others would find mundane: that it's morning, that he woke up in his bed, that he still has feet, that he's wearing pants, that his fish is alive, that he woke his brother up, that he didn't wake his brother up...and on and on the list goes. Seeing anything orange is cause for celebration, but he gets pretty excited about any other color too. Needless to say he's pretty easy to please. Even when he's told no about something he usually responds, "Alrighty!" (But sometimes he asks about it 37 more times because he's 3). 

      Earlier this week the weather was beautiful for the end of February. "It's warmer for me!" he exclaimed over and over. 

      Then it got colder again and rained all day. Then it got really windy. Then the rain turned to sleet. And then to a heavy, wet snow coming down sideways. We were pretty negative about the weather but despite this GE wanted to go outside  to "play in the snow."  So Daddy took him out anyway (because we've learned that's the best way to convince a three-year-old it's cold out). He went out and happily tried to catch the blowing on snow on his tongue, told G it was "good!," outside...but when asked he did admit he wanted to go back in. 

      G came in a said it was pretty nasty out. 

     GE came in and brightly reported that "It's not raining!" always finding the good in everything. 

      The next day GE was playing outside and took a big fall off the tube slide. He looked at the ground, which he hit pretty hard, and congratulated it, "Wow!  That was a nice catch!" I don't think he even realized he should be hurt because he was so proud of the ground's nice catch. 

     GE regularly cheers for his older brother when he finished he schoolwork, compliments the rest of us on everything we do (I got a very excited praise for giving him the right amount of ketchup at supper tonight), and serenades with whatever song is going through his head at the moment (today he was singing a song he made up about happy rainbows).  Most people would be exhausted from being as happy as he is all the time, but GE has maintained this level of genuine joyfulness since he was born. I don't know how he does it but I hope he never loses his Happiness.