First Snow & 8th Annual Biochar Burn!

Winter is here! Welcome!! On the eve of what was predicted to be our first big snow, we did a whole bunch of harvesting from the gardens before things were covered. Let's see if I can remember: carrots, turnips, lettuce, radishes, spinach, collards, parsley, dill and cilantro. So we had a December salad for one night which was a treat. And then for a spell, it was all covered in a few inches of snow. I believe carrot and turnip digging will resume today!

Oh, there was one other harvest - all the prickly pear cactus fruits. They fruited so well this year and so the desire and time emerged for Jason, with Kali's assistance, to experiment with prickly pear cactus fruit jam. After labor over small parts of 3 days, we have about 1.5 cups of a very interesting jam made with just the fruit and some raw honey. We'll savor it, especially since we still keep finding little spines from the fruits in parts of our bodies! We think maybe the shirt Kali harvested with got in the wash and then the spines got everywhere? They are SO tiny and can hurt an awful lot and be hard to get out. So additional caution will have to be taken if we undergo such a dangerous culinary act again in future years!

And then the snow came! It was a beautiful snow and the girls were out in it for hours every day! I was able to bail on watching a webinar live and carved out a delightful 1.5 hour sledding adventure on day 1. We were able to introduce Tala to sledding for the first time with sledding on our favorite hill over at our neighbor's. While not very deep there was a crusty layer that made the sledding fast! I was smart and left my camera at home so just fully focused on enjoying the time together. It was a much needed break from my computer screen! On Sunday morning, I came out to help with chores for the first time in weeks and went for a few runs right at our place. While a shorter hill, it was fast and we crashed into the prairie patch full of sumac at a rather rapid clip. Still fun but I was a tad more worried about someone getting poked unpleasantly. 

While snow fun was happening for the girls outside, it was also time to prepare for our biochar burn. Step one is distributing the duff that we had loaded into the pit after the old biochar was out of it earlier in the year to absorb water and any excess nutrients in the surrounding soil. It was carted around (in the snow, which was quite an adventure) and placed at the base of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and fruit trees. The rows of dark duff contrasted on the white snow were striking. While a lovely sight, I won't choose often to do wheelbarrow work in the snow. It definitely made for some sore muscles!

So if we count the first biochar that Jonathan and Jason did on the other side of the garden, this is our 8th annual burn. And this one felt pretty different than the ones preceding it. While we actually had the perfect number to "get the job done," we did miss having others join us for the day. I found myself remembering various people who had joined us over the years, the soccer games happening in the yard in the background, people milling about and gabbing since there wasn't enough work to keep everyone busy, and then coming in to enjoy a potluck and hanging out together at the end (all smelling of wood smoke). This year, it was just our family of 6 (yay, for having Tala join!) and then for our evening meal our table was full as Mom and Dad had returned from WV to their Tangly Woods abode. So the day was still sweet and the ritual still so very meaningful and a perfect way to welcome winter!

I do not get tired of hearing the meditation Jason wrote (he wrote a longer one initially and this is an abbreviated version we read before lighting the fire each year). This year Alida read it for us and I felt the yearly swells of emotions from deep within! I'll intersperse it here with some more pictures from the afternoon. The wood was nice and dry so the burn was clean and went fast (less than 3 hours). We even had time between carting brush and stoking the fire for throwing snowballs at each other. And we ended the burn with a twist that may never happen again - we started extinguishing the fire with snowballs (followed by the hose). 

We kindle this fire for gratitude.  The wood we have gathered to burn is the flesh of plants, our partners and providers on this earth.  We gratefully acknowledge that we need them more than they could ever need us.

We kindle this fire for memory.  We know that without fire, our species could never have become what we are.  To be human is to burn wood; to use its power to change things to our advantage. 

We kindle this fire for light. Through the plants and like the plants, we need light: to fully understand our world our eyes need to see it reflecting off of our landscapes, and we need it striking our skin to promote our health.  Even in our languages, light is truth and shadows are ignorance.  In this shadow time of year, the light leaping from this fire will be a comfort

We kindle this fire for warmth.  As flames spring from the branches burning here, we will eagerly hold our palms out to face them like leaves, absorbing a small fraction of the heat released there.  This world is our home and we know no other, but it can be a cold place, too. 

We kindle this fire for life.  As the smoke rises, we will be reminded that life changes form; it is always being lost and destroyed, it is always being reborn. The char that is left will be used to enrich the soil—a stable place to store nutrients and habitat for soil organisms. 

We kindle this fire for healing.  In these times too many of us are neglecting our connections to the soil, to the plants, to the Sun.  Our willful ignorance has cost us so much; has been so destructive.  We hope that this one small act of burning a char fire can be a part of a trend of restoration. 

We kindle this fire for our descendants. Like trees stretching their roots into the forest duff made of the decaying bodies of their progenitors, we too live by the gifts of our ancestors to us; gifts of resources and knowledge, skill and values that were a response to their time and place.  We have adapted these for our time in this place, and we know our descendants must do the same.  With this fire we mark our desire to leave to them a world that supports their thriving at least as well as it has ours, and our willingness to work to make it so.

For gratitude, for memory, for light, for warmth, for life, for healing, for our descendants, here and now, we kindle this fire.

And now Jason will empty the toilet on the new pit for the first time this morning. And that is coming just in time as last year's was getting rather annoying to find a spot for each new bucketful in recent days! And so now here we are! Having welcomed winter yesterday, we are also eager to welcome a slower pace in the coming days. I look forward to putting on my autoresponder at the end of tomorrow and turning my full focus to our Tangly Woods pod for a bit. I know both Jason and I are looking forward to more times hanging with the kids without the to do list nagging constantly in the background! That is definitely all I want for Christmas!

Leaves Collected, Hog Butchering Complete, Christmas Tree Up and more!

Kali is home (and has been for just over a week)! And we are glad! Stay tuned for more from her trip. We were ready for the reverse "Kali exchange." Terah rocked our little Kali one last time and then sent her on her way with Alida, who wanted to make the trip with Grandma and Grandpa to pick up our big Kali.

We tried to hold off on as many fun and exciting seasonal things as we could for Kali's return, but it was not possible in every case. We did take advantage of some good weather days to wrap up our leaf collecting for the year. At some point there are diminishing returns and it's time to call it good enough. We have now done just that!

And just in time, as we had one of our biggest annual projects just around the corner: Hog butchering! Every year this is a taxing undertaking - emotionally, logistically, and physically. This year had the added component of this being the first time we were butchering pigs that had been born and lived every day of their lives here at Tangly Woods with us. This is how we want to do it, even if it is hard. My emotions go all over the place in the days leading up to butchering. As we went down to talk with the pigs and thank them for their lives and tell them that we would be butchering them, I felt so grateful that they were not scared of us. They flopped over immediately for their belly rubs, giving us contented grunts while we talked with them. On the one hand, it makes it harder to kill an animal that is so tame. On the other hand, I'm so glad that our pigs lived lives where they felt safe in their home and were trusting of us. It does strike me that it seems many are most comfortable eating the meat of animals that they haven't personally known, and sadly in many cases this also means animals who have been bred to be uncomfortable due to breeding them for what we want to eat the most of, have lived their lives scared of humans who mistreat them, and then experience fear and stress in their last moments. If I'm going to nourish my body with the abundance of products a hog provides for us, I want to know that that animal was well cared for and enjoyed a good life. These three "piglets" (yep, I called them "the piglets" until the very end) did indeed have a wonderful pig life and not a bad view either!

There hadn't been much "down time" leading up to the butchering, so it felt good to get up well before dawn the first morning and join Jason out by the fire. The scalding trough needs to get going early to be over 150 degrees when we have the first pig ready to go in. Jason and I drank our decaf coffee, fed the fire, and talked about how we were feeling about the day ahead. We had once again pulled out our Wendell and Tanya Berry book For the Hog Killing, 1979. This year the line of his poem that struck me the most was, "let this day begin again the change of hogs into people, not the other way around..." The day before during my weekly town trip, I was hearing stories on the news about how the few wealthiest nations of the world had bought up most of the contracts for all the promised COVID vaccines. It felt more like people turning into hogs rather than the other way around. 

I went through a lot of the steps in last year's hog butchering blog post so will not go into much detail this year. We keep refining our system, but the main things were unchanged this year from last (except we moved the large kettles off the concrete pad this year so the fires didn't crack it again). Each year we do it, I learn a little more and get my hands in more parts of it. 

And I'm not the only one learning more each year and getting more involved. Our kids are right in there with us, and the littlest is particularly excited about the ways in which a year's growth means she can do more things this time around!

The first day went seamlessly and I always feel such relief when the killing is over. And the first day is always a bit shorter and has less work for many hands. Day two is another story! 

The more hands the better when  the time comes to break down the halves and cut lard and prep chunks for sausage.

I got a lot of practice at skinning this year.

Last year Terah had her little chin poking over the table asking if she could cut lard. We told her we thought she needed to grow a little more but maybe next year. And now it is next year and she has her very own cutting board and some experience with sharp knives under her belt. She was ready!

It's always a satisfying moment when we can get the lard kettle going. 

With the ponhoss kettle and the lard kettles going, we can move on to sausage.

I had a good helper for sausage grinding too.

When the lard is really rolling, that is when it is time to put potatoes in the lard to deep fry. Then the tasting can begin - the tongues are the first things to try, then the potatoes and soon after that: ponhoss.

Terah was right in the action the whole day. 

It's nearing the end of the day when the sun is starting to set and we are filtering the lard and jarring it up and putting ponhoss in pans. 

By bedtime that night the fresh lard on the bottom shelf of the root cellar was beginning to solidify. By morning the golden liquid was solid and white!

But it's still not done at the end of day 2. There is plenty of clean up in the following days. And then arranging and rearranging freezers as we load them up with ponhoss, sausage, backbone, ribs, backstrap, and then after salt curing for 3 days, bacon. Our job was made easier by a very last minute purchase of a small used chest freezer from a friend to help us through this crunch time where we have just done chicken and hog butchering and we have lots of seeds to make their way through the deep freeze. As of this morning, we finished the last step in the process of organizing and packing away the bacons. Hog butchering 2020 is over.

Maybe some day I'll take the time to write more of my reflections about hog butchering, but once again I found those two days to be some of my favorite of the year. And this year the feelings were even deeper and also more accessible to me. I realized at the end of Sunday that I was tired to my bones and felt more alive and with more joy than I have for much of this year. I felt connected to some of the sources of my sustenance and a deep gratitude. There are times that raising pigs feels like too much. But they fit so very well into our systems here at Tangly Woods, we all like them (thank goodness Kali came around from her days of picketing with her "no pigs" homemade sign), they provide so many useful products, and they help keep me honest and uncomfortable and I am glad about all of that!

Now fast forward to today! The yearly jaunt around Tangly Woods to find a suitable Christmas tree. Some of us were a bit overdressed in sweatshirts and some of us a bit underdressed in sleeveless dresses. Either way, it was strange to put up a Christmas tree on such a warm day.

As always, the pickings seem slim but then we find one! But the process of looking is the most enjoyable part. I don't know when we last just took a stroll around the land together. Today it was the last spot we looked and we all agreed it was the best for 2020, with a few in the wings just needing a year or two more of care and growth. For the first time this year, while Kali climbed a neighboring tree, Alida cut down our Christmas tree! She was clearly proud as she drug it to the front walk for clean up and trimming before we brought it in to decorate. 

As I finish this up, Kali is playing Christmas carols on the piano. To stay with the Christmas theme, as soon as I post this the whole Tangly Woods' crew will gather to watch the American Shakespeare Center's A Christmas Carol. But before that, two quick newsflashes.

1. We are deep into seed testing for next year - sometimes a whole bunch of kinds at one time. All the girls have popcorn seed to test for next year. We are still making our way through the bushel baskets of Delicata squash. And now we are starting in on the PA Dutch squash. Yum!

2. Alida is not losing interest in the chickens! She loves them and they are pretty fond of her too. Following a family meeting months ago, the plan was for Alida to become more involved in the breeding and selection and care of the birds here at Tangly Woods. A big move in that direction happened this week as her two birds joined up with a larger flock in the arch coop and Alida is now the caregiver of those chickens. That coop involves Little Buddy pictured here - who seems to be the chicken that never grows. We all quite fond of them, but are a bit perplexed as to why they don't grow!

Learning To Do Hard Things

I (Jason) overheard Janelle's Mom saying to Alida, "...but thirty of them in a day? I don't think so!"

She was referring to the next day's (last Tuesday, Nov 24) butchering task, which Alida, our confirmed chicken aficionado, was probably telling her about. Truly I was apprehensive myself about the possibility of getting done before dark with how short the days have become. Several people had mentioned they might lend a hand, but one never knows exactly how that will turn out...things come up that take people away, and not all help is created equal! Also, if there is an opportunity to teach, I usually take the time. However, I was hopeful because Janelle's Dad and Tala were part of the volunteer crew, and they had both already proven themselves as Actually Helpful, with good sticktoitiveness.

When Alida and Terah started hanging around, I presumed I might get some plucking help, then off they would dash for more interesting activities. Alida came first, and while it took a moment to work up the courage to get her fingers immersed in wet feathers, once she acclimated she was off and running, and began challenging herself to get the whole bird plucked before I returned after getting the next one killed and draining. By the time she switched to helping with evisceration (something I did not expect out of her day), she was, with the exception of a few pinfeathers, sometimes succeeding! My day started to feel a little more spacious.

Tala was on hand at some point and stuck around as long as she could, and she and Alida zeroed in on the evisceration. I had taught this to Tala in September...this time she taught Alida. Magic! I didn't realize September was a "Train the Trainer" event (wink!). Alida's native curiosity has been focused on chickens recently, and I guess that extended to the interior. She's quick with her hands (and her mind), and seemed to pick up the gutting tasks with ease. Plus, her 9-year-old hands are just the right size! It was a lovely sight for this chicken-nerd dad. She was proud of herself, and I think that was proper.

Terah stuck to plucking, but with an age-appropriate gumption that matched her sister's. I laid a scalded chicken on the concrete for her to work on, and did she ever work on it! A few minutes and it was ready for a little adult touch-up, then evisceration. So I gave her another, and she made relatively short work of that one, too, creating a sizable mound of feathers. As she was busily flinging yet another handful onto the heap, she burst out, "This is like a feather festival!" Kids on a farm: my favorite Muse! We're not doing chicken butchering days at Tangly Woods anymore, folks. No, no. We are putting on Feather Festivals!

That evening I stashed all 31 birds (I added one to the count that morning) in my sister's extra fridge for aging, and planned to break down the carcasses on Friday. But I was under strict instructions not to forget to tell Alida and Terah when I was doing that because they wanted to HELP! This became slightly complicated when Friday rolled around and they were still at Em and Jonas's. I put it off by a day. Saturday came, and the kids had still not come home. Sunday, then, anyone? Five days is not too long for the aging of heritage poultry (aging tenderizes poultry and improves flavor), but I dearly hoped I would not have postponed the cutting-up day for the sake of eager helpers only to have them bop in once or twice but otherwise do their own thing.

I was not disappointed. Teaching Alida to break down a bird was pretty fun, she was great at it, and by the end we were switching for every other bird and there was nothing really for me to do on her turns but watch her work. Which was a pleasure to match Tuesday's! Terah, at 5, couldn't tackle a whole carcass, but when she asked about helping chunk up breast fillets from old laying hens that was going to be ground as sausage meat, I figured her veggie cutting skills developed this summer had earned her the chance to try if that's what she wanted. She did great, of course. I now feel confident that our younger kids, 9 and 5, could pull off breaking a chicken carcass down into usable pieces between the two of them without further guidance. Exclamation points. (!!!!!!!!!,!!!!!)

We finished the day out by grinding (Terah helped a lot with that) and spicing the sausage meat, then freezing it in 2 oz. patties. It was 27 1/2 pounds of it! That's 220 patties. We should have a lot of great breakfasts out of that. My bedtime snack at 11:00 was the 1.6 oz. leftover patty. It's never better than when perfectly fresh. Yes, it was a long day.

The next day we vacuum-sealed the frozen patties. Measuring and zipping off bags from the roll, heat sealing and filling, then vacuum/heat sealing the other end for a tidy freezer pack...what kid wouldn't want to be right in the middle of that, pushing all those meaningful buttons, initiating all those time-sensitive processes with variations in texture, temperature, shape, and color? Opportunities to get it wrong and fix the error, balanced by lots of times of getting it right. Building upon lessons learned from packaging the breast fillets and bone-in parts from the day before. These are kids on whom opportunities for education are not, or not always, wasted. Knowing how to learn: the most important lesson. And the rewards are natural when we reach into the freezer once per week or so for another round of nutritious, scrumptious sausage to fry up for brunch. The ends of the circle will close this spring when it's time to cuddle the freshly hatched fuzzballs of 2021. 

These kids know how to adore animals. They know what it means to treat them well. They can judge the health of the animals and they see us adjusting care as needed. They know what a merciful end to a farm animal's life looks like. They are sad but not afraid, and they know what to do with the body to make good use of it. And they are ready to do it all again. I feel gratitude for this, and a sense that something industrial culture has taken from most of us has been restored, at least for these precious few.

So: Thirty in a day? Alone, I would have been hard-pressed. With this good help, we did 31 with time to spare.

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On an unrelated note, readers might be intrigued to know that I recently attended (online) the annual meeting of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is "A Quaker Lobby in the Public Interest." Why should I, a non-Quaker, have done such a thing?

Years ago, a friend or relative (who shall remain nameless because I can't remember who it was), upon hearing us yearning for a political perspective that was principled and non-partisan, passed us some literature from FCNL. You know how reading something is sometimes like taking your first deep breath in a long time?

So we've been on their mailing list since about that time, and have now been supporting FCNL financially for a few years. This is partly simply a response to the merits of their work, which there are aplenty, and partly an outlet for the mandate we hear repeatedly from folks both here and around the world who are on the receiving end of some of the worst injustices our civilization produces, who when asked by privileged U.S. citizens, "What can we do to help?" so often respond with, "Use your voice as a citizen to get your country to change its policies!" FCNL fills that role week-in, week-out, and is also a scaffold for persons of good will who are ready to make that good will heard by the powerful. In other words, if you want to exercise your rights as a citizen to talk with your elected representatives about priorities you care about but you don't know where to start, get in touch with FCNL.

I've been toying with the idea of joining one of their lobby days for a few years, but the online format this year for their Annual Meeting made it more of an opportunity, so I took the plunge. Four days' worth of conference-style gathering with Friends made for what I've been calling a "sanity spa." Not that Friends don't have their issues with, for example, a legacy of White predominance in their ranks, but they are meaningfully working at their issues in their refreshingly plainspoken and practical way, and the preeminent impression I came away with was of a deeply intelligent, aware, and caring religious body with a functional moral compass. One could be forgiven for having taken that sort of creature for extinct. I really needed that contact.

The days culminated in a lobbying day in which I was a warm body on the line for most of two visits with aides for Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, then was one of two folks who met directly with Ben Cline. Our organized ask for the day was the cosponsoring and promotion of the "Justice in Policing Act." Not that I feel this law would solve all the issues with or history of policing, but it contains some definite improvements and for the circumstance I thought it reasonable to support that effort. I hoped dabbling in lobbying would a) help me discern whether it is something I am up for in an ongoing way, and b) give me the familiarity to pursue it further if I decided to. It succeeded on both counts.

The results:

A) Discernment: I don't enjoy lobbying especially. It is not energizing for me to meet with representatives to try to get laws passed, repealed, or what-have-you. But I see the value in it in the real world; I see that if the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease then it might be worth sometimes "squeaking out" for what I believe in even if I don't like to very much. I'm a big boy...I can do hard things! Clearly if I did it often I would soon lose my will to live, but I can do some of it if for no other reason than to carry out the wishes of the aforementioned friends who asked me to do exactly this.

B) Familiarity: It's not technically that hard, but having experts around lends confidence, and borrowing from their savvy about what to advocate for and when may catalyze important changes faster.

I was heartened to participate in a session in which the FCNL Theory of Change project was discussed. In that time it was clear that some folks there are thinking beyond pulling the available political levers in timely and wise ways, and considering how the culture itself, of which the representative government is purported to be a reflection (I think there are reasons to be dubious here), might be moved towards truth. This is where I started to really perk up, which was telling. To me, cultures are changed in a million ways, but relationships and the arts stand out to me as typical vectors. Right up my alley!

What encouraged me most from the time, however, is that this organization succeeds in genuinely embodying the Quaker value of heeding "that of God" in each person, while holding forth a high moral standard to the powerful. For FCNL, respecting the value of each individual is not a mealy-mouthed excuse to back off from saying what must be said. FCNL has a policy and habit of entering respectful dialogue with legislators and others in government, and highlighting more compassionate and equitable paths forward in a disciplined way. May I be infected with a good dose of this ethos!