Morning chores

Illustration by Willow

Yes, we have morning chores on our suburban farm. On our particular farm,  none start at dawn. Being unschoolers, and being as how the kids are at their most intellectually and sometimes physically active late into the evening, we don't get to bed until midnight or one, most nights. So farm chores start about 9 a.m. or maybe 10 if my Facebook friends are posting especially prolifically.

The first chore is turning the florescent grow lights on the spinach flats and the mixed seedling flats, which will stay under them until the sunroom gets enough sunlight to warm it sufficiently. Some days, they stay under those ballast boxes all day. (One cool and one warm bulb gives about the same light as a significantly more expensive set of official grow lights, if you're looking for a cheap way to start seeds indoors.)

The next chore (this and the previous is usually done by Steve, as he is first to bed and first to rise most of the time) involves going into the laundry room and opening the window to add chicken feed to the feeder hanging just outside, and checking the waterer on its heated base to the right of it to make sure it's full and clean. Steve is very proud of this feature of our house, the fact that you can feed and water livestock from the basement laundry room.

Stupid uploader. This is the proper orientation in it's original file. Don't get wryneck looking at it!

We keep our chickens in a run under our back deck, with coops that Steve built (one four-chicken coop built before we realized how many eggs Willow would eat in any given day and one that can house 10 or 12 birds) providing further shelter. I love walking by the laundry room and seeing two or three chicken faces peering in, heads cocked sideways, wondering if we might be delivering treats soon.

If the weather is nice enough, which it mostly is, we let the chickens out to scratch in the backyard and they generally make a beeline for the back upper corner of the yard, where the sunlight falls first, to scratch in the dirt under the elderberry bush and warm themselves. Once the gardens have unprotected crops in them, the chickens will have to make do with a small outside run just off their deck enclosure. This will not please them, and at some point in the growing season I will fashion temporary fencing in a part of the yard and herd chickens back and forth to it every day in a ridiculous waste of time that I nonetheless enjoy.

As always, you can click to enlarge

About the time the kids get up, the sunroom is often warm enough to move seedlings, flats of greens and our flowering bulbs into it. The other morning, Willow and I lay on the floor of the sunroom, peering at the just-emerging seedlings that I will transplant out into a cold frame (broccoli, beets, leeks and onions) or pot up for a couple of months (tomatoes). She was admiring the deep pink stems of the beet sprouts, and I was pointing out the amazing way that onion and leek seeds send up one long, doubled up shoot that grows for several inches before the top end of the stem finally emerges above ground and the shoot slowly unkinks and stands up straight. I think that is the coolest thing I have learned about seedlings so far.

The young pullets in their old metal feed trough in Steve's office will get fresh food and water at some point during the day, and every couple days I'll cover the area rug in his office with an old massage sheet and take the birds, which are now about the size of pigeons, out to run around for an hour or two. They poop often and everywhere still, but they love to flap their wings and race about all excitable like.

One of those pullets, the barred rock, gave us quite the scare a few weeks back when she began suffering a siezure-like fit that is probably wryneck. It's often fatal, if the birds can't get enough nourishment, I guess, so we separated her and hand watered her for four or five days with vitamin-laced water and, for lack of anything more specific to do, I practiced my new energy work training on her. Delightfully, she began to recover and now, she is back with her sisters. While she will still devolve into her neck-writhing and moon-walking when she get overly exerted, she can pull herself out of it reasonably quickly and she seems to be doing well and putting on weight again.

At the end of the day, the seedlings and greens and flowering bulbs go back inside, edibles go under the grow lights for a few more hours, the chickens wander into the coop and we lock up after them, gathering any eggs while we're at it. That's about it, and I like it this simple.

That said, with this arctic blast we're about to get that will take tomorrow night's low down to 18 below, I'm going to move the chickens into my sunroom this afternoon. I've put cardboard down on the floor, brought up a nest box, food dispenser and waterer. I may replace the deck lightbulb, which throws a fair amount of heat off into the newly enclosed sunroom, with the actual heat lamp bulb from the coop, though the light from that shining through the curtains on the sliding glass door might make it hard to get to sleep. I decided that if I was going to spend energy keeping the birds warm in their coop, I might as well use that energy to keep the sunroom, and the bedroom attached to it, a bit warmer instead. I'm all about stacking, right?

If only "a competitive society" were an oxymoron....

Social groups should be cooperative by nature, it seems to me, though I know that's not always the case, perhaps especially in our culture.

The longer we unschool, the more we question how learning occurs (versus something being "taught")  and ask what the consequences are of trying to force-feed information to people, the more our thinking shifts to an outsider's perspective and the more we see what is taken for granted by "schooled minds" (including our own) in a different light.

This weekend, I silently watched a micro drama unfold, in which competition was injected into a cooperative venture and no doubt approvingly considered by most minds there, and wished I were quick thinking and clear enough to speak up about it before it was over, though perhaps it would not have been the right time and place to do so.

The occasion was a trip to an animal rescue shelter to present the results of a youth group's fundraising efforts. Several bake sales had raised an impressive amount of money for the shelter and a mock check large enough for a couple of people to hold was to be presented in a Kodak moment.

A parent asked who wanted to hold the check (immediately creating a competitive moment that could only have a winner or two) and many  hands went up. After thinking about it for a moment, the parent asked who from the group had worked hardest to raise this money. I happened to be watching the very excited and hopeful face of a boy who was bouncing with his arm raised when she asked this, and I saw it fall fast and completely, as his arm sagged down. With a sad smile, he stepped back. The remaining girls continued to jockey with their hands in the air, until the parent asked again who among them worked the hardest, and the girls unanimously agreed that one of them had done so, and stepped back to let her hold the check.

To others watching, I imagine it could have looked like a moment of smart thinking on that parent's part, to find the "fairest" solution to this dilemma created by a thoughtless question of who wants to hold the check, even giving the kids a chance to self-evaluate and be honest.

To me it was an unnecessary injection of competition into a purely cooperative activity, at a moment that should have been filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. Instead, in that moment, the kids were suddenly and unexpectedly judged by adults, by their peers, and perhaps most damagingly, by themselves, and most of them learned yet again to step back, to step down. I don't think that the moment was created or resolved to achieve this end, it's just how a schooled mind works. I have one too, and I recognize its machinations.

I think to some people homeschooling and unschooling looks like a selfish, non-cooperative choice. The more I live it and look at the larger community around me with fresh eyes, the more I think that it's schooling that can be non-cooperative and anti-social in ways that have life-long consequences.

New Moon, You Saw Me Standin' Alone...

Tomorrow is the new moon for the month of January, and, according to folks who plant by the moon cycles, it's a prime time to plant seeds, as root growth is favored for the next week, and leaf growth for the next two weeks. Planting by moon cycles has a long history of anectdotal results and not much empirical research behind it, but seeing as how I don't need much encouragement to start growing something this time of year, I'm going for it. (Apparently the tradition of planting one's potatoes out on Good Friday is directly connected to Easter's lunar calendar schedule.) I'm curious to see how well things germinate and grow, as I've certainly noticed those frustrating times when seeds refuse to sprout for weeks and weeks, and other times when they pop up within a week.

(For reference, I'm gardening in zone 5 and our average last frost date is Mother's Day weekend, which of course means there's still a 50 percent chance of a later frost.)

I started tomatoes about this time last year, and, after potting them up two times and walking them outside and back in throughout the warmer days of late March and April, I had some gorgeous, strong, vibrant tomato plants that won raves at the local food gardening Starter Barter in early May (I won't mention how I tried to shoehorn too many into my gardens when it came time to plant out and they got stressed and attacked by whiteflies and my yields were somewhat disappointing. Lesson learned.)

So in the next day or two I'm going to start some tomatoes (San Marzano sauce tomatoes for me, Cherokee Purples and Yellow Pears for Steve and the neighbors) in a flat. I'm going to wait until after the full Wolf moon on Jan. 19th to play around with starting beets and carrots to transplant out next month into a cold-frame that I have yet to build. I'll also start some leeks and onions after the full moon, as supposedly root crops are better started in the moon's third quarter. I don't know how well the beets and carrots will transplant but I do know that leeks and onions don't mind it. I read somewhere last year that tomatoes actually like being potted up a time or two, as the damage that occurs to their roots at that early stage actually stimulates the formation of stronger, healthier roots.

And, if none of these guys do well, then I've only lost an hour or two's time puttering around with potting soil and I can try it all again during February's Quickening moon.

How we got here.

Looking up old friends I've lost touch with on Facebook makes me wonder what on earth they'd think of my life now, and leads me to vividly imagine what the me of 15 or 20 years ago would think about my current lifestyle (hint: the dominant emotional tone would be horror).

Here I am, home with two kids, trying to grow as much of my own food as possible in my back yard, with chickens under my deck (and three chicks under a heat lamp in Steve's office), a worm composter in the basement (which seems to be producing more fruit flies than useful compost at the moment) and essentially camping in the upper two levels of the house this winter because I'm tickled to see how infrequently we can run the furnace.

In my previous life, I was a very conventional person, really. I shopped at malls, I got my hair colored and cut professionally, I worked 40 hours a week and went on far-away vacations to de-stress. I have no idea what happened to me, but I thank god that it happened to Steve too, or at least that he's very good at pretending that he's on board with all this.

We were lucky to have started out as DINKs for a couple of years before deciding to have kids, and lucky that one of us had a pretty good head on her shoulders about most things financial. We stumbled upon a Simplicity Circle forming in a nearby city about the time that I got pregnant with Willow, and met monthly with a small group of fascinating people to work our way through Cecile Andrew's book on voluntary simplicity and intentional living.

With the excellent foundation that work provided, we resisted the urges to upscale our house, cars and various stuffs, and managed to string together almost a decade of living on a 60-percent time job that Steve negotiated at the LA Times, with me staying home to do the attachment parenting-homeschooling thing. When I could no longer ignore the insistent --irresistable, really -- urge to get the heck out of Dodge, we cavalierly put our SoCal tract home on the market and headed to Colorado, where Steve found two jobs, blew off the full-time managerial position and took the half-time one with the 70-minute commute but good hourly wage. We used most of our ill-gotten equity (we sold our house just as the real-estate bubble was bursting) to pay our mortgage way down and give us a nice nest egg to tide us over until Steve found something in town and closer to full-time, with benefits.

Then, the recession hit.

For the first time, the voluntary poverty of homeschooling our kids began to feel a bit involuntary. Not only were there no more full-time job opportunities, but the freelance work began drying up. Then, Lehman Brothers imploded and I started seeing headline after headline about historic financial and economic crises and bailouts and I decided that I ought to figure out what the hell was going on on a macro-economic level. A couple of months of alarming but pretty persuasive reading later, I became convinced that the bizarre passion for vegetable gardening that had consumed me from almost the first month that we arrived, was in fact the tiny part of my brain that already knows The Score, urging me to get my act in gear and start learning mad self-sufficiency skillz, and fast.

Over the past three years, I've begun learning how to build healthy soil, start vegetables from seed, grow a dozen or so different food crops (it ain't easy for many of them, I was shocked to discover), keep laying hens and preserve food in various ways, not to mention learning how to cook this food I was growing in ways that tasted good to me. I got over my squeamishness about thrift store shopping, garage sales and Steve's occasional dumpster diving. Okay, maybe I'm not totally over that last shred of bourgeois attitude; I often walk ahead and pretend I don't know him when he starts ambling towards a neighbor's tantalizing, overflowing trashcan. But I can say I genuinely thrill to a good score off Craiglist's free section and my new favorite shopping event is our Unitarian Church's annual rummage sale. The wonderful thing about these last three years is I haven't done any of this out of fear or a sense of poverty. I'm really grateful that this all feels like an exciting, expansive and satisfying learning adventure.

So, the nest egg is gone, and we're nibbling away at retirement moneys now, but I'm not really that worried about it. I figure massive inflation and/or huge tax increases to pay for our untenable national debt are going to reduce the real value of our 401Ks to nil before we could retire anyway. We'll continue to stay home with the kids as long as the money holds out, periodically remind them of how much happier they are to be homeschooled kids, and plan to live in their basement in our old age.

Cheap and healthy entertainment in the New Year

Steve and I laughed ourselves into incontinence this  morning (well, not Steve, really;  he's not plagued by that particular after-effect of having kids) over the New Year's letter he proposed writing. Steve, as a graphic artist, and I, as a former news reporter, have very different takes on written communication. He likes his with a minimum of words and one or two elegant visuals. I think it's important to be accurate, detailed and human, and that 1,000 words is a pretty darned good substitution for a picture.

So as he read the draft of his mass-mailing letter to me, I worked very hard  not to crack a smile. It was a couple of vaguely worded sentences about how full 2010 was and how we're greeting the New Year with hope and excitement and other abstract nouns that told absolutely nothing about us or our year.

When he finished, I said that it sounded pretty good but that we should flesh it out with a little information  about my recently uncovered intolerance to wheat.

He started laughing and scribbled a quick P.S. -- "For a long-winded discourse on intestinal issues, please see Sue's blog," which made me howl. I said that I really wanted to send that out but that I didn't want people to think our marriage was on the rocks so maybe I should add a P.P.S. "I'm Sue, and I approve of this message, though I think it should be more detailed and less platitudinous."

Then we pretty much dissolved into incoherent peals of laughter for a while, until we decided that we should instead send out a Mad Lib version of his original letter, in honor of the only activity that keeps the peace on any car rides of over 15 minutes with the kids:

Dear friends and (collective noun),

What a full year (number) was. We know of so many (plural noun) and (abstract plural noun), (vague plural noun) and (platitudinous plural noun) that have taken place in our small circle and the larger (singular abstract noun) that we can only (intransitive verb) at what 2011 has in store for (personal pronoun).

We (transitive verb) the New Year with (abstract noun) and (abstract noun) for all that may be and with gratitude (preposition) another year full of (abstract noun).

We wish for you a (comparative adjective), (comparative adjective) and (superlative adjective) New Year!

(Exclamation!)


Steve, not apparently finished with his bout of hilarity, went on to create a new homemade holiday gift by wrapping up some long-in-the-tooth carrots he dehydrated out of curiosity and declared a culinary failure, with the following typed note:

The Story of 

KALTETI BURKANI

Please enjoy this bundle of kalteti burkani (Latvian dried carrots) to bring good fortune to your New Year.

Originally an element in unspeakably ribald year-end celebrations in small villages bordering the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic Sea (present-day Latvia), these symbols of fecundity have a long and interesting history.

Thought to have originated in the steppes of Central Europe, the tradition of sharing kalteti burkani with an intended spouse, or as payment fora  romantic liason, was outlawed by the early Eastern Orthodox church on pain of death.

Many were martyred until finally the ancient culture was broken, and today the kalteti burkani are widely shared as simple tokens of good fortune as one year ends and another begins.

So in the spirit of kalteti burkani, have a Happy New Year!

He delivered these to our neighbor friends, who Googled the phrase in an effort to figure out exactly what sort of good-luck New Year's food they had received.

Here's an illustration of the gift, by Willow:

It's nice that we can amuse ourselves so cheaply.