When it comes to reducing our carbon footprint, I find that the ideas and systems that get the most attention are always the big, expensive ones. They are always about electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines and other big ticket items which most of us can’t afford. Often the necessary work of changing how much energy we use gets lost in endless circles of ‘meta’ type discussions and nothing ever really gets done. There isn’t a lot of interesting information out there about what individuals and families can do in their real lives to reduce their personal footprints. Well intentioned people often have little to no idea about how or what they can do on a daily basis to conserve resources other than using compact fluorescent light bulbs and recycling plastic but there is so much more to do than that.

My family and I have been particularly focused on reducing our footprint, conserving resources, and living more simply for the past five years or so. Gradually we have implemented one simplifying and natural system after another with considerable success. Several months ago, my wife came across an incredible way to cook food that uses 20% - 80% less energy, increases nutrition of the food, saves time, space, money, resources, and electricity plus it lets you come home at the end of a long day to warm, well cooked food you don’t have to do anything to but serve. This way of cooking is called retained heat cooking, fireless cooking or cooking with a cook box or hay box. We use it practically every day now and it has made our lives a lot easier.

Scientifically speaking, “cooking” food is not really what most of us think it is. “Cooking” isn’t necessarily boiling or simmering food on your stove top, for instance, because technically food is being cooked whenever it is at 180° or higher. No matter what method you use to keep your food at a minimum of 180°, that food is cooking. You can accomplish this conventionally by setting your pot on a hot burner and continuously forcing heat up from the bottom of the pot over a long period of time until that food is completed cooked OR you can recognize that stove top type cooking is really done best as a two step process. In step one, you create a low insulation set-up in which you add heat to the pot and its contents until they are over 180°. In step two, you transform your set-up into a high insulation arrangement whereby that built up heat is retained in the pot so that it can proceed to cook the food gently and evenly with no additional energy input until that food is completely cooked. All the energy required for complete cooking has already been provided. You are just retaining it within the pot until it has done its work rather than allowing it to dissipate into the surrounding air. In other words, put ingredients in a pot, bring them to a boil, boil for 15 minutes or so, take the pot off the stove and then insulate it in a simple cook box or basket until the cooking cycle is completed. Depending upon what you are cooking, in anywhere from a half hour to several hours later, you can take a pot of piping hot, perfectly cooked food out of your cook box and serve it up just as it is.

My wife has just completed a 50 page e-book about this process entitled Retained Heat Cooking … The Wave of the Future Again: Discover how easy it is to make and use your own off-the-grid cook box to cook uncommonly good food of all kinds. It includes detailed instructions on how to assemble your own retained heat cook box as well as sections on the history behind this method of food preparation as well as the scientific principles behind how it works. She not only includes recipes and other cooking instructions but also a section on the importance of retained heat cooking in developing countries which are so often characterized by deforestation, shortages of potable water and grinding poverty. My family strongly believes that the resources we over-consume here has everything to do with the lack of enough resources elsewhere. So we feel happily compelled to use retained heat cooking regularly in our home as well as any other measures we can manage to reduce our load on the earth’s resources.

Putting together your own cook box can be as simple or as involved a project as you want it to be. Design specifications and ideas are in the e-book. You can make your own from boxes, baskets, drawers, or coolers and insulate with anything from hay, cardboard, or blankets to rice hulls or Styrofoam. Cook boxes are very simple to put together and can be made to fit your kitchen, your wallet and your design sense. You can probably get up and put one together right now from items lying around your house and use it to make a meal right away. That is what my wife did and we are still using that instant cook box she put together months ago. If you have a laundry basket or a similar sized box, an old comforter or sleeping bag or blankets, a few old towels and a trivet then you can can get started right now at reducing your energy bill.

While you are reducing your carbon footprint with retained heat cooking, you will be reducing your energy costs as well. Cook box cooking saves 20% - 80% of your energy costs over stove top cooking, with the most savings coming from long cooking foods like grains, beans and meats. The food in a cook box is cooked slowly over a longer period of time which is actually the most beneficial way to cook many foods. Cooking at a lower temperature preserves nutrients, releases flavor, and increases digestibility. We have learned through personal experience that food cooked by the retained heat method comes out perfectly every time with each ingredient done just right.

The only real adjustment that most people will have to make to use a cook box is to plan meals in advance and start cooking them ahead of time. In the instantaneous microwave world that we now live in, this may appear to be difficult but it really isn’t. Besides it is a small adjustment to make so you that you can help to reduce your contribution to global warming, overconsumption of water and other negative environmental damage. Any little changes many of us make can add up to big changes that can reverse our current disastrous course. All of us pitching in with such small changes is basically mandatory at this point. We are going to have to make adjustments. Making the adjustment to retained heat cooking is easy because it costs nothing to implement and makes the food taste better anyway.

In terms of our 50 page e-book, Retained Heat Cooking … the Wave of the Future Again, it is available at our Bamboo Grove Press website for $5.95. My wife is an incredible researcher and a great cook. Her e-book has all of the information you need about how and why retained heat cooking is the best available method for cooking most of your food. My wife has also released a shorter 10 page e-book about solar cooking entitled On Your Way Towards Solar Cooking:The Why’s and Wherefore’s of Solar Cooking in Brief priced at $1.99. In this book you get a brief overview of solar cooking along with over 50 links to all the information you need about solar cooking, buying a commercial cooker or building your own, solar cookbooks and more.

Please forward this post and links to these e-books to anyone you know who might be interested in cooking with a cook box, improving the taste and nutrition of their food, and reducing their carbon footprint with virtually no start-up investment. It will improve their lives and help the earth tremendously.

Below are two videos we made about our experiences with fuel efficient, retained heat cook box cooking. I hope you enjoy.

All the best,
Paul

Bamboo Grove Press is the publishing arm of Pockets of the Future and today we are releasing our first in a potentially nearly endless series of e-books on a wide range of subjects related to natural living, homesteading, herbalism, homeschooling, old paths/new ways of thinking, innovative building techniques, frugality, preparedness from the inside out and the outside in and so on. I am so excited to have our first two e-books ready for you that as I share this, I am trying to type and jump up and down at the same time!

Our first e-book is:

Retained Heat Cooking … the Wave of the Future Again

by Leslie Romano

Discover how easy it is to make and use your own off-the-grid cook box to cook uncommonly good food of all kinds. This is a frugal, time honored method of cooking that saves time, space, money, resources, nutrition and electricity. Includes sections on the history and science of retained heat cooking, how to make and use your own cook box, tips and suggestions based upon personal experience, recipes, related homeschooling ideas and ten incredible advantages to cooking highly nutritious, perfectly cooked food with this natural, easy to implement retained heat cooking method. Only book of its kind on the market. 50 pages. $6.99

Our second e-book is:

On Your Way Towards Solar Cooking: The Why’s and Wherefore’s of Solar Cooking in Brief
Plus Over 50 Links to Solar Cooking Information, Reviews, Directions for Building Your Own, Places to Buy Commercial, and Cookbooks From Which to Make It All Happen

by Leslie Romano

Once you discover the significant benefits of cooking in ways other than on an industrially made stove in an electrified kitchen, you just can’t stop! Here on the farm, we have become so enamored with retained heat cooking that we are eager to learn more ways to cook alternatively. Solar cooking will be our next endeavor. Become more prepared and more self-sufficient through solar cooking. This e-book will get you started with a brief overview of the why’s and wherefore’s of solar cooking as well as over 50 links to all the resources you need to make solar cooking an effective way to save energy and cook nutritious food for you and your family. 10 pages. $2.50

More titles in the works:
We have several more e-books already in the works on a special herbal tea you can forage yourself that provides surprising benefits, easy to make herbal personal care powders, and the wonderful benefits of raising rare breed livestock on your family farm or homestead. And those are just the titles we have already started writing.

If there are subjects you would like to see addressed by us in e-book format, please leave a comment and let us know or contact us personally.

This is so fun! Come join us. There is much to learn and share.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I just came across this project and want to quickly share it.

The front page says:

By watching and recording the bees at sunflowers in your garden, you can help us understand the challenges that bees are facing. We’ll be sending out annual Lemon Queen sunflower seeds in early March 2009. Just in time to plant!

* It takes less than 30 minutes.
* It’s easy.
* Free Sunflower seeds for planting.
* No knowledge of bees required!

Enter your bee counts online or send us your paper form.
We would love to have you join us; let’s help our most important pollinators together!

If you signed up in 2008, we will send you seeds again this spring. We’ll send you an email this winter to confirm your mailing address and if you respond, your seed will go out in late March or early April.

We love having beekeepers participate.

The site is very simple and has additional great information such as the ecological importance of bees and of this project, tips for growing a bee garden, a bee guide, and quite a few great looking educational resources for the (home or school) classroom.

Joining is free and so is the packet of seeds they send you. Once the sunflowers flower, you go out and observe them once a week and time how long it takes for five bees to come work their magic. Then you send in your data (data sheets provided). There is even a map on the site showing locations of the first 26,000 people who are signed up to participate and a forum where participants can share questions, observations and educational ideas.

What a neat project to be a part of and how important it will be to get a national ongoing map of bee activity. It says on the site that a bee is responsible for every third bite of food. Anyone who needs real food needs real bees. And personally, anything that gets us closer to bees here on Natural Path Farm is most welcome.

So go sign up, if you can, and we will work together!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

As my husband notes in his video linked below, we have been going through a long period of contraction here on the homestead. There has been lots of selling off and going without and getting by for a while now. There has been lots of, “Where do we go from here?” and “How can we possibly do that?” (which could mean either How do we move forward? or How can we honestly allow ourselves to move backward? depending upon the context).

A small personal story from last week:
Last week, we enjoyed the delights of the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. The first time, we went to our usual spot at Rocky Knob and walked in our usual way on the trail down below along the creek. However events conspired to push us to go beyond our usual ways of exploring down there, luckily, so that we ended up walking much farther along the trail than we ever have before. As a result we discovered an entirely new area with new topography, new atmosphere, new kinds of trees and stone remains of old houses, a new creek so much larger and more babbling than the first and so on. It made such an impression on us - this alluring area full of hints of what seems better to us - that we drove back several days later to explore some more.

Now the second time some of us were a bit resistant to heading back out there because we were exhausted. We wanted to be there but the thought of getting there and back felt overwhelming (and I am not just referring to myself here with the exhaustion, by the way, but also to some of the children). I happened to have checked Best of the Blue Ridge Parkway out of the library, though, so I looked up Rocky Knob to get a more complete picture of the trail there. I discovered that the trailhead was in a different area altogether we have never visited before. We reasoned that the trailhead was probably not as mountainous as the other part of the trail we were on several days ago. It would probably be less tiring while still giving us a taste of that special outdoor atmosphere we were craving so we packed up food and water, tied on boots of various descriptions and headed out.

Oh my, oh my, oh my. This new area was heaven on earth. A big roaring creek. Waterfalls literally every ten yards. Huge boulders covered with moss and lichen. Small sparkling stones of many hues so attractive to young children. Wide, easy to follow trial. Rock foundations of past lives. Locusts and pines in abundance. We even discovered a large area where chives were already up which added just the right spice as we drink water and rested for a bit. It was the kind of place you never want to leave and obviously some people never did leave. Once upon a time, people lived there.

As we walked back to the car hours later, I found my eyes filled with tears. I was exhausted past managing but I couldn’t bear the thought of going back “home” to the usual way. No more stick built, four cornered, uncreative, industrial (even if a 1940 farm house, so called), questionably sited house on a road with suburban type houses on it that demands for itself utilities and cleaning out the gutters. As much as we may be “homesteading”, we are still a darn long way away from natural living. I don’t know for sure what all natural living truly means but I know that it means a lot more than this. I longed to stop and stay where we were and live an utterly stripped down, natural, yogic life with the sound of water ever in my ears and the example of unspoiled nature ever before my eyes to help bring me and my family back, back, back to the Original Design.

Even though I was almost too tired to walk and a natural life like that takes much effort.

The somewhat long ride home provided a transition and I was OK by the time we arrived at our stick built, four cornered, industrially built home. I was grateful to have a warm place to rest actually. It turns out, though, that the final movement of this small symphony wasn’t until the next morning.

The Life of a Prairie Mom is a blog I have been closely reading for a while now. Paula has a very calm way about her. No fireworks. No intellectual feats. No blistering analysis of current trends or groundbreaking ways of gardening. No extraordinary flow of words you can hardly keep up with in the busyness of your own day or noise of your own mind. Rather she quietly spells out certain aspects of her day and instructs along her way of thinking. She is very measured and I have found her writing peaceful and yet inspiring these last months. She writes of things I care very much about like raising and educating children in Him and relating respectfully and fruitfully with her “Beloved” (her husband) and how she organizes her sewing things and cooks real food and minimizes shopping or excess energy use and how determined they are to live off the grid. She has detailed some of the steps that she has been prudently and faithfully taking to prepare them for a new off-the-grid, simpler future and I have identified with all of it.

So next morning after this heart touching time spent out in Nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I opened her blog to read “Going Off-Grid.” She shares with her readers that they are going off grid as of tomorrow. It is sooner than expected but she is peaceful and faithful about it. She can only post further when and if she gets to a library which would be once a month at most. She will post again when she can. “May the Lord’s blessings be with you.”

It was the timing, I guess. I felt like I had been punched. She and her family were turning and disappearing into a simpler life, just like that, tomorrow. Wow.

With this story I am saying, and through his video my husband is saying, that we long for more. There is more than this. There is deeper to go. We have all along felt pushed to make the changes we have made so far. We have felt no choice but to go through the contractions my husband details in the video which has left us continually wondering about the future. What are we supposed to do next? We are clearly not at a balance point right now but rather at a point of movement.

I guess my question is this: does “contraction” imply muscles coiled and waiting to spring into the next level?

Please enjoy “Update Winter 2009.”

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Our AI guy got back into town late yesterday and came racing over to check Phoebe out for us.

Nope. Phoebe isn’t pregnant.

Our whole family was out in the barn with him and Phoebe. All the children gazed at him quietly while he did his business and then made his announcement. He felt bad. Said usually “backyard cows” take easily and that he has never had this happen before where he inseminated three times only to end up with no results.

We discussed bulls a little bit. “One thing they have over AI is accurate heat detection,” he said. (This very nice man does AI - artificial insemination - for a living and travels up and down from here to Florida for his company doing it.) We suspect that there may be more to it than that but obviously even just accurate heat detection is an important factor. So is availability. So, perhaps, are other more subtle factors as is always the case with the natural process from our point of view.

He mentioned how this was bad news for a Valentine’s Day a few times.

I said as how at least we never dried her off completely. I was always unwilling to dry her off since I didn’t know for sure more milk would be forthcoming later so we just cut back to milking her once a day. We are getting about a gallon a day now which seems like a lot to folks who don’t milk cows or make butter or cheese or sell kefir grains or feed six children. But it isn’t a lot. It isn’t nearly enough. We will try to build her milk supply back up in the spring.

And lick our wounds. And come up with a new plan.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Perhaps we are just unwilling to let go of a cherished idea, or perhaps we have a cow who does things in a slow, drawn out way, but we are still hoping for a calf. The primary reason for this is probably that having Phoebe turn out to not be pregnant at all would be such a blow to us in so many ways that we choose to continue hoping that she is. We have no way to resolve this “reaching for hope” into “finding the fact” so we remain strongly in the “reaching for hope” camp.

Our AI guy said he would come over a couple of weeks ago and check her out for us but he never did and he is out of town a lot. My husband meanwhile found a number of useful web sites about internally checking cows because I am more than willing to put my hand in - well, arm in - to check her out. I did an internal check on her a couple of years ago (when she was overdue and was being given a shot to induce her) but that was with help. I tried once with her a few weeks ago already but couldn’t understand what I was feeling. After reading through various web pages, I learned that the baby drops out of reach in a cow anyway, and the other signs you would look for internally to confirm pregnancy were things I didn’t really understand and that were not recommended for students to do (these were vet school pages). So we are left with outward signs which are not necessarily easy to read on a cow. As our nine year old commented, “If only she could talk to us.”

My poor husband is going nuts with this. Even back when I was pregnant, we of course knew there was a baby coming at least but didn’t know when exactly. That not knowing when exactly was very stressful for him. I could at least busy myself with trying to cope with the end of pregnancy whereas all the husband really has to do is fret about when the birth will happen. Waiting is hard. Paul is at least getting quite an education about cows and pregnancy and heat and so on because he keeps researching hoping to find hints. I know that the information he is gleaning now will help us in the future as there is much to know about these matters. Especially for us - we had one cow calve unexpectedly when no one knew she was pregnant and none of the experts involved recognized her condition at all even when their attention was drawn to it and our other cow (Phoebe) whom we purchased just before her last calving went late and the dairy folks came over and gave her a shot to induce her. So we have unusual experiences with bovine birth - 2 - and normal experiences with bovine birth - 0.

One day, Paul came in and made a list. I thought his list was interesting and useful. Here it is:

CONS (i.e. signs that she isn’t pregnant)
1. No clear indication of heat;
2. Not getting big enough;
3. We could not feel fetus by internal check(he wrote this before we learned that we couldn’t feel it anyway);
4. Fiona’s erratic mounting behaviors (that is our heifer);
5. Phoebe is well over due;
6. Phoebe mounted Fiona once which she never does pregnant or otherwise

PROS (i.e. signs that she may be pregnant)
1. Months ago she kicked at her belly frequently;
2. No visible signs of heat all these months;
3. A few weeks ago made maternal sounds and had maternal behaviors we have only seen in her back when she first had Fiona;
4. Her belly is much bigger than it used to be;
5. She has put on well over 100 pounds since we last weighed her using a weight tape;
6. Her posture is different than we have ever seen it - her spine isn’t as straight and she holds her tail differently much of the time;
7. She seems to be lying down more than usual;
8. When standing and chewing her cud, she shifts her weight a little here and there rather than standing stock still as she usually does;
9. We tried doing a “baby bump” which is sort of punching at the flank and feeling for a push back. I wasn’t strong enough to do it. Paul did it and knew he felt a push back but couldn’t quite make out if it were a fetus or just incredibly strong cow muscles. It apparently takes practice to perfect doing a baby bump.

Even though the PROS list is longer, the exercise is still totally inconclusive for us. Paul tried another on-line due date calculator and got a different date than the one I used earlier! Sigh. Apparently she is not as overdue as we thought. Not quite two weeks over yet which is well within normal limits.

So what does all of this add up to? Who knows. It is honing our observational skills which is a plus. It is adding considerable stress to our situation which is a minus. It is leaving us humble in the face of Nature which is as it should be. It leaves us pondering the complexities of trying to accomplish these things more simply in the future. None of this feels particularly natural or self-reliant. There has to be a better way but dairy bulls are supposed to be the meanest creatures on earth. The difficulty of this fact is apparently why artificial insemination (AI) was invented in the first place. Well, back to being humble and waiting, waiting, waiting.

I guess Phoebe will keep us all posted.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

I recently came across the following very interesting comment. I can say for a fact that he didn’t have homesteading in mind when he said it, but homesteading is certainly teaching me some of the truth of his sentiment.

[He] always felt that the secrets of Nature are always shrouded in mystery. Birth is not for science according to him. Birth is a mystery. And the moment that mystery is opened and made a subject of science, in a very certain sense, when a mystery is exploded, it is made profane, it is without dignity, it becomes something as [He] used to say, ‘a market topic’ for conversation – a topic reduced to the roads, to the streets for discussion, for conversation, and for condemnation.
He, the Hookah and I p. 260

With us humans, you generally know when the ladies are pregnant and it has definitely become something profane these days. Some feel the sacredness at the moment of birth itself but, other than that, pregnancy and birth are definitely ‘a market topic’ for conversation and there is all sorts of intrusion all along the way.

Now you take goats - you cannot tell when goats are pregnant no matter how expert you are. You basically have to know when they have been bred and then go from there with your planning and expectations. Goats keep their pregnancies to themselves.

It turns out, to my surprise, that cows can do this too. Our first cow, the inestimable red and white Dutch Belted Pezra, was a perfect example. We bought her from friends (husband was a rancher from way back) with whom she had had a calf and who were milking her for some time. They got tired of having to be home for milking time twice a day and sold her to us, whereupon we milked her for quite a long time. Suddenly in the middle of that summer, she basically went dry. No one knew why. Crazy red headed behavior maybe? A couple of months later, her udder suddenly ballooned up in size. Yikes. The rancher-from-way-back previous owner came and looked at her. The dairy managers from whom the rancher had bought her came over and looked at her. They all shook their heads and scratched their chins but had no idea what was going on. We then attempted to treat her for mastitis in a dry cow which is bad news. Meanwhile, being desperate for more milk and having fallen in love with cows. we went and bought Pezra’s older sister who was bred and due to calve three weeks hence.

We made the preparations for two cows. We brought Phoebe, the older sister, over and the two cows got reacquainted and settled in. We settled in too to wait for Phoebe to calve and get milk for the family once again. On a memorable Saturday morning about two weeks before Phoebe was due, my husband went out to the ladies their morning hay. He came tearing back into the house shouting that a calf’s leg was sticking out of the back of Pezra. Yup. She was calving. Yup. She had been pregnant all that time and none of the experts involved had any idea even though they had been examining her abdomen and udder closely. (I, on the other hand, had often gazed at her going into the shed to be milked in previous months and had thought, “Wouldn’t it be a kicker if she turned out to be pregnant?” I guess ‘market conversations’ and intuition are two very different things!)

So we helped Pezra birth her breech calf and then two weeks later Phoebe calved pretty much on her own at which point we drowned in about 8 gallons a day of unplanned for milk. Let’s just say that I made a LOT of cheese and fast forward to the present.

Phoebe is a practically perfect cow in all ways except that she has “silent heats.” You can’t tell when she is in heat so it is tough to get her bred. Our AI (artificial insemination) guy bred her three times and thought that finally with the third attempt that it took. We thought so too.

We waited patiently through gestation. We recently found a due date calculator for cows and ascertained that her due date was January 23. About a week before that, her heifer went into heat (now this gal has nothing silent about her heats - she turns this place upside down sometimes) and Phoebe seemed to respond. I mean she responded more than we have ever seen her do. And we panicked. What? Is Phoebe not pregnant after all? Is she in HEAT? Now that we are so close to the due date will there be no calf and no milk? You see, it just isn’t perfectly obvious whether or not she is pregnant. It seems incredible really because pregnancy is such a huge thing for us but there you have it. For cows (as well as goats and perhaps all other mammals for all I know), pregnancy is still sacred in some mysterious, natural, inscrutable way. If you are just a friendly kind of human companion to the cow (as opposed to a super duper professional/industrial human to the cow), you can easily have no idea about something as essential and basic as pregnancy in them.

The next day, Phoebe suddenly acted very maternal with her now 2 year old heifer. It would paint a more accurate picture to say that she was suddenly psychotically maternal. Chased our dog all over the pasture. Made that sound that cows only make to their young. Flipped out when she didn’t know exactly where her heifer was at all times. Milking time was … well, wow. Wild. We have only seen her that way once (as she is otherwise the most serene and placid cow you could ever meet) and that was when she had her heifer two years ago. She was also overdue for that heifer so … maybe there was hope. Maybe she really was pregnant after all? What a roller coaster. What crazy, crazy cow times. And then a couple of days later that behavior vanished and Phoebe was back to her old serene self and has remained so ever since.

So here we are on February 3rd. She is 11 days past her due date - if in fact she is pregnant at all. You see, we aren’t just waiting for her to calve. We are waiting to find out if she is pregnant! That is a lot of waiting to be doing all at once, I can tell you.

I think this is why people can be so quick to move what is naturally sacred and mysterious over to the profane, measure it, talk about it, control it category of things. Waiting is not easy. Accepting natural consequences and phenomena isn’t easy. Wondering how you are going to feed your children if the cow isn’t going to calve isn’t easy. In fact uncertainty in a faithless, ritual-less, community-starved, unnatural world is not only not easy, it is really, really hard.

And that is where we are. We are waiting. We are waiting on the mystery whichever way it goes. And how we will move forward after that particular mystery resolves itself is also a mystery in more ways than I can even count or would want to mention.

There are mysteries everywhere in our lives together here when I stop to think about it and such has been the case for a long, long time. I have tended to experience them as excruciating uncertainties but I think now as I am writing this that I should redefine these uncertainties for what they objectively, naturally, spiritually are -mysteries.

Furthermore, instead of thinking of the mystery of our lives as nothing but conundrums both exhausting and bewildering, I think I must now choose to think of them devotedly as sacred. What will emerge? Only He knows.

Meanwhile, I am keeping my eye on Phoebe.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

About the only thing that takes the sting out of having to sell animals for us is that all of the animals we have thus far sold have moved on to great situations and caring, hopeful people. The same is true for our little herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats.

As I posted earlier about the family conference we had on Thanksgiving Day, we realized that on our small property we had to pick and choose very carefully what we grow and husband and that we need something more in our homegrown diets than milk and milk products. So we decided to sell our goats and plant vegetable gardens in their pens (most of which had been used as gardens in the first place by previous owners).

Well, a most earnest and hopeful young man came and picked up our herd last weekend. He is bringing back into productivity a good sized old farm in West Virginia and very wisely he is beginning his efforts with getting goats. The goats will eat the weeds out of the old hay fields and clean up the woods and give him a start on a handsome income stream. Very wise indeed.

It was hard to see our goats go, however. It is very quiet around here without them. Peaceful, my husband says. Goats have such a playful, mental sort of energy compared to cows say. I always miss the bit of the spectrum of consciousness that each animal fills. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else. Yes, I miss their milk. I love feta cheese and would otherwise happily keep goats for no other reason but than to have flavorful feta cheese. But it wasn’t their milk I initially missed after they left. It was their “beingness,” their qualities, their ways of thinking and interacting with the world. Each creature (and plant too) has its own intelligence, its own way of contributing. Put the many intelligences together and you have Nature, I guess, so I am aware of any piece that suddenly goes missing. However, Maggie May and Iris and Ivy and Ramone are doing good work in a new place that needs them with fine young people to care for them so a new fabric of natural intelligence will be woven up there in West Virginia.

Meanwhile it is past time for us to get going with planning our gardens and ordering seeds. I have read in many places in the blogosphere that heirloom and open pollinated seeds are already in short supply for this upcoming growing season. Ahem. I guess I had better hurry it up. These are the catalogs I am receiving and studying:

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange - emphasizes heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds that grow well in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Fedco - cold hardy selections for the Northeast. I don’t know if our mountain location qualifies our otherwise mid-Atlantic region location enough to use their seeds or not. A very neat co-op worth checking into in any case.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds - offers heirloom seeds from over 70 countries. People rave about them and also talk about attending interesting homesteading type events at their place in Missouri.

Amishland Heirloom Seeds - You have to go to this site and read about this woman. She is a one woman show of traveling and saving precious seeds. Incredible. She comes highly recommended by Rob at Wildcraft. Read his comments on his Seed Sources page.

Heirloom Acres Seeds - I have also seen this company highly recommended. I think Scott at Homesteader Life uses this company. They have over 1000 varieties of seed as well as seed potatoes and organic herb plants. We are in the market for all of those things and so will be studying their catalog closely.

Seed Savers Exchange - This organization is well known but I don’t think I have ever gotten their catalog. Maybe once when I was gardening back in Denver almost 20 years ago now. In any case, being a part of a non-profit organization of gardeners who are sharing and preserving rare seeds can only be a good thing. I really look forward to it.

I used to use so many other catalogs back in my gardening days like Territorial Seeds (I know a number of people who get their sprouting seeds from them these days), The Cook’s Garden, and Seeds of Change. I will have to check them out again this time around but to start with, I am going to focus on Southern Exposure because they are located so close to us.

So this is the latest development here on the homestead. It is a good development - a necessary one - but it is also one that has required and definitely will require a good deal of adjustment and more hard work and slow but sure knowledge and skill building. There is always more, isn’t there? But we are taught in Sahaj Marg that the natural reward for work well done is more work, so I guess we are on the right track!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Alas, my adrenal fatigue is keeping my mind very diffuse lately which makes writing very difficult for me. However, I can still read ‘cuz reading is what I do!

I thought I would share two great resources I am reading and studying right now to strengthen what we are doing here on the homestead.

The first is all about food storage. Sharon at Casaubon’s Book conducted an online food storage class last spring which starts here (or click on the Food Storage category on the right and make your way backwards to the beginning). What I most appreciate about her class is that she covers the topic in the way that I personally would approach it which is to say she discusses ethics and local eating and planning for caring for unexpected others and, well, health. No ready to eat meals here of dubious nutritional value. Rather how do we grow, procure and store healthy real foods for family and vulnerable others for the future? All excellent questions with many excellent answers and suggestions provided not only by Sharon but also by her educated, highly aware and committed readers. (In other words, do read all the comments.) I have read through every post, taken notes, copied and pasted, followed up on links and so on. A worthwhile odyssey. In the final post I discovered that she ran a yahoo group alongside the blog posts to allow for more information sharing and deeper discussions of vital issues. Luckily her yahoo group is still running and now I am carefully making my way through that in the same manner I made my way through her initial set of food storage posts.

Secondly, we are very focused now on working towards becoming more self-sufficient with regards to our flock of hens here. Going for months just feeding the hens and getting no eggs whatsoever is… well… for the birds (and not for the humans - get it?). We want to introduce some different breeds here such as Buckeyes and Dorkings and become proficient at incubating eggs and caring for chicks and so on. In other words, we want a closed flock of productive, largely self-sufficient, broody, rare breeds hens so we are going to have to do what it takes to make such a flock ourselves. Furthermore, we do not appreciate being chained to the feed store in order to feed these hens what is clearly not real hen food anyway. So while my husband is madly inventing a way to incubate eggs with equipment we already have at hand, my resource for figuring out the rest of this business is currently The Modern Homestead. I have read articles over the years by Harvey Ussery in Countryside Magazine and have found them to be uniformly excellent. On their web site, he and his wife have an extensive section on raising poultry that includes ways and means of feeding live foods to your flock, peak oil considerations, and many other very interesting and timely considerations for productively and conscientiously raising a homestead flock of hens. In other words, the ways I have always wanted to approach maintaining a flock of hens this couple already knows and put into practice long ago and they have spelled it all out for others eager for such a thoughtful and effective approach. I am thrilled to have such a “nutrient dense” resource available to help us find our way to the next level of husbandry here.

So those are the top two of my current homesteading studies at the moment. I find them so useful and forward looking that I thought I would pause in my mad dash to consider and explore and copy and paste to share them with you all.

Study well and go forth effectively!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

It has felt like ages since I posted last. My adrenal fatigue is worse again and we are having heart-stopping trouble with our computer. My whole thought life is on the computer. Which makes me wildly uncomfortable, by the way. It is dopey to rely upon things that are not reliable, right? I mean that is the whole point of the direction of our lives and the posts on this blog. Sigh. Well, I will deal with that one another day…

Meanwhile I have been jotting down little notes about posts I want to write on our various blogs. This shorthand list is three pages long. Makes me tired just looking at it. However, I thought I would take the time now to convey a conversation we had as a family on Thanksgiving that will affect the future direction of our homestead and homestead kitchen.

Just before Thanksgiving, we had to drive to Roanoke. While there, we stopped in at an Indian grocery to pick up a few things we were out of. We eat Indian food here at least three or four times a week and have done so for a long time. In the back of my mind has lurked the thought that someday we may not easily be able to get Indian supplies as, in reality, India is a long way away. But, like the problem of being dependent upon capricious computers, I kept putting conscious thought and problem solving about this off for another day.

Rice has been expensive for a while now, as you may know. We have discovered during this time that basmati rice may actually be as good a deal as jasmine rice because it cooks up to a much larger volume than jasmine rice does. I guess I would have to do a detailed analysis between price and volume but just from cooking every day in the kitchen, we have found basmati to be a better deal than we thought and not just a rice for special occasions. But still - it so expensive. It darn near takes your breath away to pick up a bag of it with an intention of heading towards the cash register. So, I put that off and headed over towards the bags of mung dal.

What I saw shocked me. The price was so high on this ancient, simple food of poor and/or spiritually oriented people that I couldn’t dream of buying it. Rice and dal. Cheap, cheap food. Now so expensive that it is out of my reach. And rice and dal are - or have been up until now - staples in my kitchen. With my mind reeling, we left the store. We had not a bit of mung dal in the house but we left nevertheless.

I had to work on turning my reeling mind into a mind that simply meditated on the problem and came up with a solution or an approach, at least. I did this and it resulted in a family discussion which I will relate but first there is another strand.

In homesteading literature, you constantly run into debates about whether it is better to raise cows or goats. We solved this debate for ourselves years ago by doing the rather unusual thing of raising both on very limited land. We love the cows and don’t ever want to live without one ever, ever, ever gain. The goats are fun and easy to manage and child sized and, well… I really love feta cheese. Plus I need all the minerals I can get and goat milk is higher in minerals than cow milk. Anyway, we have raised both and enjoyed both.

The thing is that my family is very animal oriented. I am very happy to have these animals as companions and do not want to go through life without their energy and intelligence any more. We count on them. However, I am also a very plant oriented person. I crave greens and used to dream about herbs when I was an apprentice to an herbalist so many years ago. We have done little bits of gardening here and there but nothing really major. Everything has gone into maintaining the cows and goats and the many other projects around here like wood-fired earth ovens and outdoor bamboo showers and whatnot.

But with this economic crisis adding a certain flavor and with our maturing a bit as homesteaders, we are starting to take on a different view and this is really what our Thanksgiving Day conversation was about.

I talked with the family about my sticker shock with regards to Indian food supplies. I also talked about the significant reading I have done about families that choose to eat locally only. We then all talked about the morality (or not) of shipping food thousands and thousands of miles just so that others can choose to eat what does not grow in their region. The people I have read who have eaten locally for a year, say, all tend to have far more resources at their disposal than we do. Floyd County would be a great place to undertake such a project, I think, but we just can’t afford it. I proposed that we consider making every effort to eat what at least can be available in the United States. So while mung dal would not be available, mung beans would be (I Googled it. They are grown in unexpected places like OK.). What did everyone think of this idea?

Then I raised the issue of keeping goats when we already have cows and a lifetime commitment to having cows. We need to diversify - we need more than milk and cheese in order to survive and thrive. We need to garden, I suggested. We need to garden A LOT. We need veggies and herbs and so many things. The goats are occupying the space where we would otherwise immediately start expanding our gardens. What shall we do? I asked this with some trepidation because no one here ever wants to give up any animal. But drawing upon my social work training, I had talked with my husband and several family members ahead of time and already discussed their feelings and ideas to a certain extent.

So we as a family decided two things on this Thanksgiving Day:

1. We will gradually learn to limit our food choices to those foodstuffs that can be grown in the United States. We are doing this as a preparedness measure in the face of wildly uncertain times and we are doing this as a morality measure as the resources that go into shipping foods such vast distances should really be spent more effectively locally.

My husband encouraged me to apply Indian cooking spices and cooking practices to more of the foods we will continue to eat and sort of invent a hybrid cuisine that will work for us. I already do this some and I appreciated his practical and supportive suggestion. Now I only have to set about carrying it out. (And get over my heartbreak about eating less Indian food. I am not a foodie. I just have a heart thing with India and an abiding respect for the ancient science of Ayurveda.)

2. We will sell the goats, our surefooted little companions of several years, and put our energies into getting much more serious about veg and herb gardening. As a matter of fact, a young man with a rather large farm to develop is coming tomorrow to meet our modest herd. It will be difficult to see them go. I have resisted selling them several times over the years but now it is time, as evidenced by the fact that everyone is surprisingly on board. Eager even.

I have to immediately start thinking about seeds for spring. I have read lately on a number of agrarian blogs that quality heirloom seeds will be more scarce this spring and to order early. So after the goats go to their new home, we will apply ourselves to this next phase of our homestead development.

Shortly after all of this bracing family discussion and decision-making, I read the following in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver:

He told us that in India it’s sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place - ideally, even to grow it yourself. I like this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. pps. 338-339

Yes, this is exactly what it feels like to us. For us this way of life is about more than adjusting ahead of time to straitened conditions. It is about more than spending time together as a family. It is about more than learning to live frugally so that there are more resources available for others. It is about purification. It is about living naturally. It is about easing out of sense gratification and conventional ways of thinking and finding ourselves. And finding inspiration. And peace. And time to look inward.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie