As I was doing this, happily engrossed in my work, I looked up to see something across the yard which I had never seen in my whole entire life.  A sight which made my blood run cold.

What I saw was a large black-snake climbing up a tree.  Almost straight up it in fact—it looked like he must have Velcro attached to his disgusting snake belly.

“Snakes can do that?”  I marveled to myself.

That led to a very, very troubling interlude while I pondered the fact that I have been walking under trees in the Ozarks since I was old enough to walk, and it has never once occurred to me to look up and see if there was a snake dangling from a limb overhead while contemplating doing a half-gainer down my shirt.

I’m not sure that I will ever fully recover from this epiphany.

Let me make one thing clear.  I do not like snakes.  In fact, I am completely opposed to anything that doesn’t have enough integrity to get up and walk on its legs, as do most all the other more respectable creatures do.

Yeah, yeah, I know about them catching and eating lots of field mice and other rodents, but I would gladly catch and eat rodents myself if it meant that the world would be free of reptiles of all kinds.

Maybe you’ve noticed that people often associate human traits with snakes and vice versa.  That seems appropriate to me, because I have plenty of problems with humans as well.  One of the things that irks me about the human race is the way they mess around with the English language.  I’ve never fully recovered from what the kids have done to the word “awesome”.

Time was, “awesome” meant something mighty, something inspiring, humbling even.  Nowadays, as best I can tell, it means something like, “no kidding?”

Well, they’ve done the same damned thing with the word  “snake”.  Be honest now, I’ll bet when you saw the title of this piece, you thought this was going to be about used-car salesmen or IRS agents, didn’t you?

Well, it’s not, and you don’t need to expect any stories about Eve being offered an apple by her divorce attorney, although you’d have to agree that it would be just as plausible a story as the original.

Still, humans may be pretty bad, but they don’t sneak into your tent and bite you with venom-injecting fangs.  That’s just a fact, so calling people “snakes” even hate-radio jocks, is just a dilution of a perfectly good word.

I was thinking about all this the other day when I received this email:

Dear Neil,

I got a big chuckle out of the Collie story.  I don’t have a dog (yet) but do have 2 cats.  I love dogs but can’t keep one where I live.

I hate snakes (actually I’m terrified of them) but will have to get used to them or find excellent ways of keeping them away besides cats.  I’ve read guinea hens work well, but are really noisy, and that pigs like to eat them.

Do you have any idea what the copperhead and rattlesnake population is like there?  Not actual numbers (who’d want to count them?) but more like what are seen on occasion or frequently noticed?

I can easily put up with non-poisonous snakes.

~Chris

Dear Chris:

There are four types of poisonous snakes in the Ozarks: the Copperhead, the Cottonmouth, and two species of rattlesnakes, the Pygmy and the Timber Rattler.

That’s what I get from my reading anyway, in an entire lifetime of bumbling into nasty, snake-y looking places, I’ve never encountered a rattlesnake in the wild.

I’m absolutely certain that they’re out there, though.

One of my clients found one in her backyard one evening, and seemed quite agitated over the experience for weeks thereafter.

I also recall a particularly colorful neighbor who was fond of prodigious quantities of cheap wine who once brought a matched pair of rattlers into town where he was photographed displaying them for the local paper.  He handled these specimens by means of strings that he’d tied around their necks.  (Like I say, colorful.)

He confided that he couldn’t recall precisely where he’d found them (evidencing one of the characteristics of drinking a half-gallon of Roma) so I can’t swear they were from the Ozarks, but, as I say, I’ve little doubt of it, because nobody could drive very far that drunk.

Copperheads are the most plentiful of our poisonous snakes, but you won’t see much of them either.  They tend to stay hidden under something during the day, because they dislike the sun’s heat and the light of day, hence the obvious parallel with gang members in the city.

Native Ozarkers tend not to wander out into the yard barefoot at night.

The truth is, unlike that clown who comes on the TV screaming about detergent right after you’ve fallen asleep in your chair, snakes are even more afraid of humans than vice versa, and you can step on a snake without being bitten… probably.

When I started out in the rural real estate business, I decided that I was just going to have to get used to the idea of snakes, and forget about all those years of nightmares I’d had about finding them in my bed, etc.

Well, forty years later, I’ve been in some of the most God-awful-looking places imaginable, and I don’t have even ONE set of fang marks to show for it.

Cottonmouths have to reputation for being the most aggressive snakes, but I’m here to tell you that even they will turn ummm… tail and run given the opportunity.

I was once showing some land to a young couple from Chicago.

When you’re trying to sell property with a creek on it, you’ve GOT to show the customer the creek no matter what’s involved, and you can’t go whining about the snakes, because then maybe they’ll chicken out.  (What’s more important after all, a slow painful death, or paying the rent?)

That’s how I got to be down in this humid, dark valley with these two innocent bystanders, standing waste deep in some kind of broad-leaf weed that almost completely obscured the muddy black creek-bank from view.

Almost.

While we were standing there, while I was busily engaged in trying to look like someone who wandered into places like this all the time, I noticed a spot about ten feet away from us where I could see all the way down to the dirt.  There’s no telling what little surprises the rest of that 20 acres held, but it was in that particular square foot that I saw the characteristic blunt, charcoal-gray tail of a cottonmouth about as big around as my arm, wriggling away from us.

I considered just dying right there on the spot, but I didn’t want to upset the lady, so I never said anything, answered all their questions, and briskly escorted them out of there with what I hope was not obvious haste.

They didn’t buy it.

To answer your questions, Chris, I think you’ll find the cats will do a bang-up job of keeping snakes out of the yard.

Frankly, though, if you plan to mow the lawn every so often, you probably won’t even need the cats all that much, to say nothing of the guinea hens – who have the amusing habit of making their incredibly raucous noise virtually every waking moment of each and every day.

I’m not sure whether you meant pigs like to eat the snakes or the guinea hens, (although I’m certain both statements would be true) but what they’ll do to your rhododendrons is even worse than the noise from the guineas.

So here’s my advice on the best way to deal with snakes on your property in the Ozarks: Fuggedaboudem, it’s politicians and televangelists you have to worry about.

The post Snakes in the Ozarks appeared first on Homestead.org.

Then he said, “Do you know what timber like that is worth?”

Needless to say, I was aghast, both at the crudity of what he was suggesting and by the fact that my wife might overhear.

“Yes!” I hissed under my breath, quickly hustling him into the next room beyond Ola’s earshot.  “Yes I do, but those woods are worth a lot more than mere money to me.”

“You know that lots of those big trees will just get hollow and die, and then they’re not worth anything, right?”, he asked.

“Do you have to scream?” I asked, “Look, they’re just innocent trees.  I don’t believe in vegetable labor, so I don’t expect anything out of them other than the usual things like shade and the continuous daily rebirth of my aesthetic sensibilities.  Besides, without trees, we’d have a bunch of panhandling, homeless squirrels to deal with.”

I could see that he and I just weren’t on the same page, so to speak, and I guess he left thinking I was crazy (just like all the rest of them).

The truth is that, in the past, people like this plumbing gentleman have caused me to feel somewhat… well, guilty about my forest, because I don’t do anything with it, except wander around in it a lot, and how self-indulgent is that?

Boy, what a bonehead I was.

Because that was before I learned a few things of considerable importance both to myself and to The Future of Mankind.

Did you know that in one growing season a single mature tree produces enough oxygen to service the breathing habits of 10 adult homo sapiens?  That’s just one tree, and I’ve got literally zillions of them.  I calculate that here at the Exclamation Pointe Oxygen Generation Facility #1, when engaged at peak capacity, we can supply an annual 24/7 oxygen fix to an entire city the size of Springfield, Missouri, and have enough left over to blow up the balloons for New Year’s Eve.  (Springfieldians can expect a hefty bill in their mailboxes when I work out the kinks in metering and distribution.)

Right now, I have the plant shut down for retooling and maintenance, but come spring, we’ll be coming back online with all units churning at peak capacity, sequestering carbon like it was going out of style, and pumping out massive quantities of safe, clean, 100% organic oxygen (with only trace elements of tree-frog and firefly).

Did I say “organic”?  Yes, that’s another thing you have to watch out for.  Recently, misguided environmental scientists have developed an artificial tree that supposedly generates product at a much greater rate than do our conventional systems.

I mean… REALLY!

What’s this world coming to?  I first predicted this when they started manufacturing aluminum Christmas trees back in the 1950s, but even visionaries such as myself never imagined it would go this far.  Seems to me that faux trees might be okay for someplace like France, or Neptune, but I think the good ol’ red-blooded American market is going to demand the sort of high-quality breathables that are only produced by wooden trees.  In fact, recent polling has found that those surveyed chose conventional oxygen as their Ether of Choice by a resounding margin. (Time–CNN poll)

Truly, I’ve found my niche here in the oxygen business. It’s obvious that the world has a maple on its back, and we oxygen farmers are the only ones doing something about it.

Sure, oxygen farming can be tedious at times, there’s lots of sitting and watching involved, then there are the hardships like never having a good place to get a tan, and the noisome din of the songbirds.

Still, if you’re that special kind of person who would enjoy the rough-and-tumble of the oxygen generation game, this may be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Have you ever invited friends over, only to discover that you were running out of oxygen?  Boy!  That’s really embarrassing, but it’ll never happen again when you “own the farm”.  Think of it.  You’ll have plenty of fresh, wholesome oxygen for the rest of your life, maybe even enough to share with the neighbors—providing they do something about their barking dog.

The post Oxygen Farming for Fun and Profit appeared first on Homestead.org.

One I remember in particular was a lady, probably in her early forties, who told me that, prior to her trip to my office, she’d never been outside of Los Angeles; had never gone before where no traffic lights or sidewalks exist.

Another thing that I remember about her was that she called home three times a day to check with the woman who was sitting her dogs.  Not that there’s anything WRONG with that, mind you.  It just sticks in my mind because I never saw anyone check on their kids that much.  I guess this seemed a little odd to be because it was a few decades ago.  Nowadays, children are kept at heel lest they wander a few feet from the helicopter… er… home… and pets have replaced actual human offspring in many parts of the country.

Well, I drove her all over creation, or at least the Ozark version of creation, for two or three days. During the middle of one afternoon, we were passing down one of the zillion or so little back-county gravel roads hereabouts, past a small farmhouse, when a large collie came running out of the yard barking at us.

I was just about to deliver the punch line of one of my remarkably humorous stories, when I turned to my passenger, not wishing to miss her appreciation of my profound wit.

To my surprise instead of eager anticipation, her face was frozen in terror. Her eyes were as big as saucers and she was making a strange “ACK-ACK-ACK!!” noise deep in her throat.

This was not the sort of reaction I’d been hoping for.

As quickly as I could, I pulled the truck to a halt, preparing to administer artificial respiration, the Heimlich maneuver, or whatever weird incantation seemed most appropriate… assuming I could determine exactly what the situation was.

By that time, she was sobbing uncontrollably.

After several moments, I managed to calm her down enough that she could, sort of, talk.

As it turns out, she thought the collie was going to run head-first into our vehicle and end it all.

I explained to her that rural dogs just aren’t under that much stress, and that they were probably far less prone to fits of depression, ennui, performance anxiety, and all of that sort of thing than their urban counterparts.

Apparently, dogs do not chase cars in Los Angeles, I thought. Maybe it was a city ordinance or something.

It’s moments like this that I realize what a simple bumpkin I am.

Angeleno dogs, in fact, do not chase cars, or if so, only in their dreams, because big-city bowsers only see the clouds and sunshine from the end of a leash.  They’d love to chase cars and cats, and dig up the front lawn, and chew up most everything, and pee on most everything else, but they simply are not allowed.  Not, not, not.

It makes me think of the way that kids today are sheltered and protected from so much that used to be considered just normal life: playing outside in the neighborhood; walking home alone, that sort of thing.  So if folks are so protective of their kids, nowadays, you can imagine how they must feel about their pets who, unlike your pain-in-the-neck human offspring, don’t talk back, don’t roll their eyes, and don’t ever complain about much of anything.

That’s why, when this dear lady sees a collie living a life of wild abandon; eating trash, chasing anything that runs, drooling, licking, and urinating with wild, euphoric rapture—just like we’d all like to do—naturally, she thinks he’s psychotic, and bent on self-destruction.

I wonder if we humans couldn’t take a lesson from this… and I call this exercise The Rule of Fido, which states, that the more we insulate ourselves from nature in our antiseptic little boxes, the less real life we get to live.   The more time we spend watching the (supposed) lives of others on television, the less time we spend actually living our own lives.  So instead of enjoying satisfying personal experiences like hiking the Appalachian Trail, or seeking higher education, we’re watching politicians making even greater fools of themselves on Dancing with the Stars.

Maybe that’s some people’s idea of a life well lived, but to me it looks uncomfortably similar to a bulldog in a pink cashmere sweater who’s never felt his heart race with unbridled ecstasy while terrifying a squirrel; a poor bowser who eats “gourmet” canned food even though he doesn’t speak French, but who has never tasted the heady elixir of fresh, warm blood.

People, this is not for us.  Rather, we should all be doing everything we can to make our lives more wild and natural; to feel our hearts pumping with excitement instead of watching our existence slowly crumble into the sofa cushions.

Look, as long as you’re still breathing and sentient, it’s not to late to redeem your life.  All you have to do is to stop babying yourself with what’s easy and acceptable, and start doing the exciting, dynamic things you’ve secretly always yearned to do.

And if we all start doing this, trust me, our lives will all change for the better.

C’mon, give it a try, what’s the harm?

You can show solidarity with us today by enjoying the wild adrenaline rush of digging up the neighbor’s flowerbed.

The post The Collie Who Tried to End It All appeared first on Homestead.org.

I’m an avid coffee drinker myself.  In fact, coffee is 50% of my evidence that God is good.  Chocolate is the other share!  (Chickens never made the list.)  In any case, I’m the one who dubbed us Half-Caff Country.

Some introductions are in order.  I’m Zoë… a soon-to-be-sixty widow, mom, and grandma.  I was born and raised in Chicago, but had the gift of farm family in southern Indiana.  By the age of four I had an unnamed—but very much felt—connection to the land.  Later I set a life goal of marrying an Indiana dairy farmer (he turned out to be from Michigan and he’s long-since deceased, but that’s a different story).  When the weather is nice I still miss the cows, but now that the snow is flying I’m content to listen to my neighbor’s beef cattle.

The other human character in this adventure is Ruth, a former nun—born and raised in town—who brags about being much younger than I am.  Well, it is nine months, after all!  The only livestock Ruth ever owned was a cat named Korky, and I’m not sure it ever set foot outdoors.  But despite that void, Ruth, too, feels very connected to the land.  The rest of our family consists of a year-old, over-grown pound-puppy named Elle who doesn’t know she’s a dog, a half dozen ceramic fish in a full-sized fish tank, and our newly-arrived rooster, Little Buck, and his girls.

A year ago Ruth and I made a leap of faith, pooled our resources (a.k.a. credit scores), and purchased an old farmhouse in rural Michigan.  We’d love to be a traditional, completely self-sufficient homestead, but our more realistic hope is to grow old in our flannel shirts and work boots, living gently on the land… with a mortgage, of course.

Our little piece of paradise has all the right stuff: five acres with a bit of woods, some open pasture area, a bit of wetland, a beautiful creek, and a great area for a large garden.  In our dreams, it includes assorted small livestock—including rescue animals, fruit trees, berry bushes, enough vegetables to winter us over, and sacred spaces to feed our spirits.  Unfortunately, there’s not an outbuilding or fence to be found on the place.  So when we made the decision to move beyond our first garden and add animals, I said, “Let’s get a few chickens.  How hard could it be to raise chickens?”

Now, keep in mind that my experience is with dairy cows.  I know about milking, breeding, helping deliver calves, even doing CPR on them if they’re not breathing at birth.  With chickens, I knew nothing.  All I had was questions.  How many breeds are there?  Do we want pretty or practical?  Brown eggs or Easter eggs?  I knew the name of only one breed—Rhode Island Reds—and I prefer brown eggs.  And neither Ruth nor I even knew for sure if we needed a rooster in order to get those eggs.  You should have heard the comparative anatomy conversation that question prompted!  The chicken comedy had begun.

Since there’s nothing in our area that even compares to a good, old-fashioned feed mill/farm store, we sought advice from the modern homesteader’s best friend… the Internet.  First was the breed question.  I stumbled across Henderson’s Breed Chart that listed many breeds with straightforward comparisons, including information about size, coloring, temperament, laying tendencies, winter-hardiness, etc.  Two breeds stood out: Buff Orpingtons and Buckeyes.  We needed winter-hardy birds that were adaptable to some version of free-range conditions.  Also, the grandma and teacher in me wanted gentle animals that would seem more like pets than livestock.  And it probably didn’t hurt that both breeds showed up on the first page of an extensive alphabetical list.

After narrowing down our choices, we had to find out what was available in our area for a price that we could afford.  Two sites were particularly helpful in that regard:  Local Harvest and Best Farm Buys, both of which allow you to put in your zip code and find resources in “your neck of the woods.”  We found some of each of our top choices and began the e-mail photo exchange and negotiations.  Buckeyes, from the Local Harvest listing for Wind Racer Farm, won out.  We jumped in our little pickup truck, armed with the dog carrier and total confidence, to go get our new brood… herd… flock…  what do you call a group of chickens?!

If you’re not familiar with them, Buckeyes are a rare heritage breed of dual-purpose chickens.  They are relatively large, have pea combs, and are very winter hardy (we’ll be able to verify that next spring).  The color is described as nut brown or mahogany, depending on what you read.  They remind me of Rhode Island Reds… but you already realize how little I know.  The fact that they were developed by a woman and have fairly easy dispositions outweighed our natural Michiganian resistance to anything originating in the state of Ohio.

We bought three hens and a rooster—a family unit—from some folks who are clearly more experienced homesteaders than we are.  Violet and her husband started producing their own grass-fed pork and chickens out of concern for the food their children were eating.  The kids not only eat well but also are also very involved with the animals and chores.  They called our new rooster Little Buck, and we quickly christened the flock “Little Buck and the Buxoms.”  Maybe if the egg thing doesn’t work out, we could train them as a singing group.

Notice, we still haven’t addressed the issue of no barn/no fence for our impending free-range brood.  “Not to worry… we can build a moveable chicken house,” I quipped in response to Ruth’s growing concerns.  “How hard can that be, right?”  We outlined our plans on the way home, while wondering why the chickens were riding with their mouths open but not making any noise.  We later learned that’s how chickens deal with heat!

Temporary housing was to consist of the Igloo-style doghouse that Elle has never used anyway and a tarp over a portion of the equally unused but “very secure” dog run.  Of course, the run was only secure if we could get the chickens in there in the first place.  We carefully moved the dog carrier from the back of the truck to the front yard where the run is located.  Unbeknownst to anyone, the back end of the carrier wasn’t completely latched. So when we placed it down and opened the door, instead of the chickens gently finding their way to the feed and water waiting for them in the dog run, they scurried out the back and around the yard into the lilac bushes.

The ensuing scene looked like “Green Acres Does Keystone Cops”… multiple laps around the run, flailing of arms, a serious breakdown of communication and on-the-job training on how to catch and hold a chicken.  All we needed was the background music.  By the time we got done, we were laughing so hard we couldn’t stand up.  Fortunately, Buckeyes—ours, at least—really are fairly docile, and we got them into the run without serious insult or injury to them or us.  Day One of our chicken farming was complete.

The agenda for Day Two centered on building the moveable coop.  Keep in mind, we’ve only been on our place for a year, so we didn’t even have all the tools that we needed for the job.  And we always have more ambition than expendable income, so we went bargain hunting.  At a second-hand store in town, we found a great power saw.  It serves a dual purpose: cutting lumber and cutting out Ruth’s whining, “If I only had a saw.”  Then we went to our favorite retired farmer/collector and bought a roost, as well as some vinyl house shutters and an old kitchen cabinet door to make the sides of our coop.  In another second-hand store, we found four wheels so we could “easily” move our coop around the property.  Finally, we went out behind the lumberyard and picked up free pallets for the floor and framing.  The only new items we purchased were a box of screws and three pieces of PVC… and more of the steel posts and fence wire that we had used to rabbit-proof our garden.  By the time we got home to start construction, it was time to gather eggs… two of them, current investment: about $200 each.  But it was all very exciting.

Because the pallets were too small to hold the roost, we had to revise our rather amorphous plan.  We pulled the pallets apart, used two large packing braces for the bottom, and then screwed boards across them to form the floor of the coop.  The coop measures approximately 5’ by 4’ of floor area.  The corner braces also gave us a solid surface to attach the wheels, so we didn’t have to worry about tires and an axle.

Next came the sides.  One end of the coop is taken up with the roost.  It has four boxes and a shelf below.  We attached upright braces to hold it in place, and built two doors on the back to allow for gathering eggs and cleaning.  The other three sides of the coop are made up of the shutters, which offer some protection from wind and rain while allowing adequate ventilation in hot weather.  Finally, we used the cabinet door to make the door for the coop.  It is not attached, but rather held in place by bungee cords (oops, add bungee cords to our shopping list).  During the daytime, the door is lowered to become the ramp for the chickens to get in and out of the coop.

The roof of the coop is shaped by curved PVC, and covered with a tarp.  Continuing the spirit of second-hand, the tarp was cut from a holey, old screen house given to us by a friend.  We used the solid plastic for the roof, and saved the screened part for later to help cover the run… keeping the chickens in and predatory birds out.

It was Day Three before construction was complete, but we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves as we got ready to move our coop into place.  Other than a bruised shin from a flying hammer, things had gone well and we were anxious to turn our flock loose in the new digs.   Yet another adventure in the making.

I’m no wimp, and Ruth is much stronger than I am, but when we got ready for the move, we felt like a couple of pack mules pulling a covered wagon.  It turns out that our property is even hillier than we realized, the coop was heavier than planned, and we probably should have gone for tires and an axle.  The coop is now called the Chicken Wagon, and it moves much less than originally envisioned.  The only upside of the added weight is that we really are comfortable that the birds are secure at night.  In any case, we parked the wagon next to our garden fence and enclosed an area for the chickens to run.  Total free range isn’t an option for our flock because the neighbor’s two dogs have their own version of free range and run, and it could get ugly.  We collected another day’s worth of those expensive eggs and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

Since both Ruth and I have jobs in town, our homesteading is interrupted by hours of absence.  After returning one summer evening early on in our chicken business, we went out to check the garden, feed the birds, and gather eggs.

As all good farmers do, we counted the flock… not much of a job in our case.  We were short one hen. There was no sign of trouble (I’m resisting the temptation to say foul/fowl play), but there was a spot in the overhead netting that had come loose.  So we started hunting.  I went down the hill to the road, to make sure the hen wasn’t about to get hit by a car, and Ruth walked the top of the hill.  Soon we heard the hen, followed the sound, and located her in the tall grass.  The location, of course, kept moving.  Chicken catching, Take Two.

With our vast experience, the process went much more quickly this time.  Very soon the hen was in, the netting was secured, and we brought the dog out in the yard with us.  Elle quickly found what looked to us like a dinosaur egg lying on the hill.  Well, maybe an ostrich egg.  OK, so it was just a two-yolker, but remember we’re new at this.  Later, the dog found two more eggs in the same area.  We still haven’t figured out the math on that one!

The first real chicken emergency occurred a few weeks later.  Since the farm where we got Little Buck and the Buxoms had their dogs penned right beside the chicken runs, as extra protection, we thought nothing of having Elle with us one day while we were cleaning the garden.  Little Buck was watchful but not alarmed.  Elle was curious but not problematic.  And the hens were just doing their thing.  Ruth and I went on to do ours, just enjoying our Peaceable Kingdom as we pulled out dead plants and closed the beds for the season.  Suddenly, total chaos broke loose. Elle had pushed through the fence to the chickens.

Little Buck acted exactly as you would expect a rooster to act.  He drew Elle’s attention to him so the hens could get into their coop.  Once again, a chicken chase was on, only this time it was a matter of life and death.  At one point in the running and yelling and arm flailing, Elle got Buck’s neck in her mouth.  Fortunately, she let go of him long enough for Ruth to grab her and for Buck to escape to another area of the garden.  The dog had a “come to Jesus” meeting with Ruth, the rooster had a few days of canine-induced laryngitis, and we were all faced with the reality that chicken-raising may not be all that easy after all.  It is still, however, exciting.

Since that crisis moment, life is back to our version of normal.  We’ve moved the Chicken Wagon to its winter location, closer to the house and the compost pile.  We’ve wrapped the sides in heavy plastic, added a black metal roof (lined with bubble wrap insulation) to absorb sunlight, and are playing with some ideas to add solar lights and alternate “heat” for the long Michigan winter.

Little Buck and the Buxoms are back to normal, too.  They follow me around when I’m out in the yard, come to the gate to meet me, and eat out of my hand with regularity. The other day, when I bent over to pick up eggs, Buck even decided to jump up on my back and use me for his ramp to get outdoors… and then stood and waited for me to give him some food.  His personality is only exceeded by his appetite.

Despite the chicken comedy of errors, everyone is healthy and happy.  The eggs are less expensive than they were at first, the flannel shirts are warm, and the boots are comfy.  We may not be 100% homestead, but for us this is the real thing.  And Half-Caff Country feels pretty darn good!

Coffee, anyone?

Designing A Chicken Coop: A Work in Progress

The post Half-Caff Country: A Chicken Comedy appeared first on Homestead.org.

Most everyone (or at least country folk) knows roughly what a mechanized post-pounder looks like.  Gas-powered, or PTO driven, they are generally hydraulic nightmares of the highest caliber which brook no mistakes and forgive no carelessness.  It’s only too easy to imagine the dangers a body might come to even without the helpful mangled-stick-figure-man “Caution” stickers plastered all over them.  On the better models, a mechanized arm holds the post in question while a heavy weight smashes down repeatedly, driving the post into the desired depth with no effort (other than stopping one’s ears) on the part of the operator.  As these savage machines are prohibitively expensive to purchase, we have rented them on occasion when we have had fencing to complete in a hurry, or when a looong straight row beckoned.  However, there are many places you can’t use these noisy leviathans.  The gas-powered ones must be hauled around by something (ATV or truck) and the PTO-driven ones require tractor access.

At this point, I must mention that for our farm a post-hole driller or auger wouldn’t work.  Our soil is very sandy and, even with backfilling, our posts are much sturdier pounded in rather than placed and backfilled.   We’ve had some challenging animals (fence-challenging, that is) over the years.  Trust me.  On our raw little farm, there are still many impenetrable places a vehicle cannot go, hence we can’t tow machinery in.  Of course, sheep and goats will happily clear that problem up for you (impenetrable bush), but the problem is you need a fence to keep those tasty little coyote snacks in, leaving one in a bit of a “chicken or the egg” type quandary.

Seeing that photograph, I was instantly inspired.  I had never seen a manual post-pounder before that point and, now that we actually have one, I must confess I have my sincere doubts that the Dutchess was able to lift her end.  A manual post-pounder very strongly resembles a police battering ram. Essentially constructed of a heavy steel tube (greater than the diameter of the post you might pound with it, naturally) with long handles running the length of either side and a heavy metal cap. This object slides over the post in question and a person on either side (or one very strong person) then proceeds to bash the post in with an up-and-down motion, observing all reasonable safety precautions.  Here was our solution to weekend fencing.  If we were going to just do a few posts, we’d use the manual post-pounder, but first, we had to make one.

Now welding, while an indispensable farm skill, is not something husbands are born knowing how to do (of course, neither are wives, but it doesn’t often come to that if we don’t want it to; I freely confess that I’m all about equality of the sexes until the heavy lifting starts).  As we were once urbanites with no welding opportunities, occasions, or experiences, this skill—along with most others—had to be learned the hard way.  As Adam became more proficient, we trusted his welded works more and more.  The litmus test, as we reckoned it, was retrofitting brackets for removable bale forks on our tractor bucket.  Since the brackets have remained in place after much loading, unloading, and moving of 1,700-pound bales, we figure he’s got it down now.  However, the post-pounder was still a bit earlier on in our farming adventure.  I showed him the picture and he confidently agreed it wouldn’t be too hard to make.  We sourced out the heavy materials required and on one balmy spring day he spent the morning in the garage cutting, grinding, and welding the pieces to form one 90-pound pounder.  The heavy steel tube was a quarter-inch thick with a six-inch inside diameter and measured three feet from tip to tip with a half-inch plate steel top.  I could only just lift the monstrosity but do nothing else with it.  Thankfully, Adam, being a very strong man, took full charge of everything.

We decided that now that the frost was out of the ground we’d try it out on the newest paddock division we wanted to make, “The Lamb’s Barn”.  This was a smaller paddock of roughly a quarter acre where we could safely enclose imminent ovine mothers and their new lambs for closer observation.  Sandwiched between the “Bull Pen” and the “Winter Pen”, it had the added benefit of not allowing our resident bull nose-to-nose access with his harem, an always risky temptation that was best to avoid if at all possible.

We headed out down the path, each holding one of the post-pounder’s handles, its heavy weight balanced confidently between us.  To shorten our journey carrying the metal monstrosity, we pitched it over the existing fence rather than taking the long way through the other pens to reach it (a gate was in order, we wryly noted).  Of course, Murphy’s Law always in full force on the farm, our ram, Waits (so named after the singer Tom Waits for his unusually deep, gravelly baaa) chose that moment to come out from around a bush and the edge of the pounder clipped his head.  His front knees buckled momentarily but then he shook his formidable head and eyed it balefully.  A few test sniffs and he rammed it with his head producing an admirable bell-like tone from its hollow depths.  As we clambered over the fence he walked away uninterested, seemingly no worse for wear for his encounter.  I can personally vouch for the thickness of a ram’s skull, that Nature designed it for maximum bashing capabilities.

Since reaching maturity, we have been unable to enter the sheepfold unarmed with Waits around or he’d happily seize the opportunity to ram us into next year.

With our ovine antagonist gone, we lugged the pounder over to the first post laying ready in its place.  I held the post at an angle while Adam heaved the pounder up and slipped it over the top like a sleeve going over an arm.  When it was on we raised the post to its full six-foot length.  At the count of three, we each began to raise and lower our respective ends.  The jarring of the pounder made the hands go numb within moments, despite work gloves, and after only five strokes I called a rest, out of breath and strength.  It was impossible to breathe while using this tool as it required such a straining effort and my head already swam.  Undoubtedly the weaker of the two, I rested so long that Adam grew tired of waiting for me and grasped both handles and began to pound it in himself.  I watched in admiration as his barn jacket strained handsomely against his broad shoulders and then a terrible thing happened.

Unbeknownst to us, on the previous pound, the weld had loosened on the top cap.  Adam’s next forceful downward motion popped the welded cap right off sending the metal sleeve plunging to the ground over the post.  As I watched this happen in disbelief my first thought was that his feet would be mashed, but the top of the cap, still attached to the sleeve by one corner and drunkenly askew like a jaunty baseball cap, caught Adam’s head on the way down and he dropped like a felled ox.  The cap pinged off his head and flew off a full ten feet in the air before Adam even hit the ground.

I gasped and jumped up as Adam floundered to his knees blood obscuring his face, “I’m hurt!” he gasped unnecessarily.  I ran over and grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet.  “I’m hurt!”, he repeated again.  Babbling placating words, I helped him over to the fence he must now climb over to save a very long journey around to our main gate right through the curious flock of sheep.  As an aside, if you’ve never kept sheep you can’t imagine what it’s like to try and keep your balance in the wooly press.  Not renowned for their intelligence, they flock tightly around you with their deafening baaas wondering what you might be bringing them.  It’s very hard to keep one’s balance and Adam was having trouble enough.

I was surprised he managed the climb over the fence, a trail of splattered blood behind him and we began the drunken walk to the yard.  I bellowed at the top of my lungs for my older son whom I could hear outside.  He came running down the path and I saw the look of shock when he saw his father’s bloody face and stumbling gait.  I yelled for him to grab his little brother and get him in the car seat.  He must have flown because when we got to the house both kids were sitting buckled up in the car.  I helped Adam into the car and grabbed the sweatshirt from my son’s back to staunch the flow of blood while I ran inside to get the keys and my purse, and then we drove to town well above the speed limit (a half-hour drive at the best of times, only 15 minutes this time).

At the emergency room, they didn’t even triage us, we walked in with Adam’s face covered in fresh and dried blood and were immediately ushered into a curtained-off room.  I went back and did paperwork and when I returned there was already a nurse cleaning the wound while our kids watched with the morbid fascination of the young.

“Can you hold this?” she asked me, indicating a fresh pack of gauze she had under slight pressure.  I did as she asked while she got scissors to begin snipping away the offending hair around the wound.  The wound measured three inches long and poured out blood so copiously it was impossible to determine its depth.  It was hard to tell with all the gore, but it appeared to be slightly sunken and I prayed that wasn’t the case.

Adam, by now, had recovered his aplomb and we laughed and chatted while she worked.  Wincing in discomfort he nonetheless kept up his end of the conversation until the doctor came in, and I marveled at his fortitude.  The jovial doctor irrigated the wound (still bleeding) and trimmed away more hair, then lifting one of the lips of the scalp with some forceps asked, “Hey, you kids wanna see your dad’s skull?”.  The little ghouls trooped right over and we all observed with some curiosity the smooth dome of my husband’s skull as it was washed with saline.

“Really, you can see my skull?” Adam asked, disappointed none of us had our cell to take a picture.  It was a wasted opportunity.

It was amazing that there was no damage to the skull, and it took nine stitches to close up his scalp again.  His bruised, shorn scalp shone whitely around the long row of ugly stitches as the doctor checked his eyes and reflexes.  For now, it seemed other than the physical damage to his scalp and the tremendous headache he had, there was no lasting damage and no evidence of concussion.  With common sense instructions to bring him back should he experience blurred vision, nausea, impaired motor function, or excessive sleepiness, we were released.

I removed his stitches after a week and the wound was healing beautifully.  We had a formal work-related dinner to go to exactly eight days after the accident and Adam regaled his customers with the gruesome tale, as everyone couldn’t help but notice his enormous bald spot and shining scar and it provoked questions wherever we ambled in the hall.  The pounder remained like a sleeve over the half-sunk post for a few weeks while he recovered enough to help me lift it off and carry it back.  His hair grew back sparsely around the scar until you couldn’t see it anymore, and life got back to normal.

In the end, the posts still needed pounding and we hired a professional welder to fix the post-pounder.  We subsequently use it like one would enlist the aid of a rabid dog, with great caution and precaution.  We wear steel toes, hard hats, no solo use and we’re always watching the cap to make sure it won’t bean anyone.  Despite having seen the arc of trajectory from the original lid bouncing off of Adam’s skull and mentally marking where it landed, the original cap was never found.

When I think of the picture in Maclean’s magazine of the future King and Queen of England holding the handles of a post-pounder bigger than the one we have, him wearing a sober blue suit and expensive shoes, her wearing a designer dress and equally expensive heels, I just smile and think, “PhotoShop.”

The post Adam vs. the Post Pounder appeared first on Homestead.org.

Well, I laughed then, but I got a big payback from Mother Nature after the eggs hatched.  At first, it was just so hilarious to see Momma Chicken with her brood of baby chicks and one baby duck and Momma Goose with her babies including one turkey… but it wasn’t hilarious for long.  I soon discovered that the joke was on me.

When the baby geese got big enough to start going for their swims, baby turkey also went for his swim—big problem since turkeys can’t, and therefore don’t, swim.  My Mother firmly told me that since I was the bright one who put the turkey egg under Momma Goose, it was my responsibility to make sure my “turkey goose” did not drown.  Seems like every time I found something fun or interesting to do, Momma Goose decided it was time for her and the kids to go for a swim.  Off I’d have to go, trekking after them, to the pond, wading in and pulling out Mister Turkey Goose.

While Mister Turkey Goose was little and cute, it was just an inconvenience, but as he grew into full turkey-hood, he got to be rather hard to rescue, not to mention rather mad that I keep pulling him out of the pond every time he and his brother and sister geese went swimming.  For a turkey-goose, he got pretty smart about finding different ways to sneak off when my back was turned, and for a big, fat turkey, he sure could run.  It also apparently really cheesed-off Momma Goose when I wrestled with her turkey boy, cheesed-off to the point that she would start honking, calling the whole goose family—all 16 of them—to her defense.  Being flogged by the entire goose clan, several times each day, had me looking like I had gotten the worst of a bad fight, all the time.

Now, what kid didn’t love any reason to jump in the pond in the middle of the scorching hot summer days?  Me, for one; wrestling with some mad-hatter geese, wallowing in the pond ooze with one big, mad turkey-goose, on those scorching hot days made the smell of pond muck, and wet feathers fairly unpleasant.  Of course, Momma Goose went for more swims on hot days, so most of my twelfth summer was spent running to the pond, pulling out a fighting-mad turkey and being on the wrong end of a flock of mad-geese relatives.  This had become a full-time job, on top of my regular chores, and if I live to be one hundred, I will never forget the sight of this huge turkey wadding out to the middle of the pond, only to sink like a lead brick, time, after time, after time.

I’d be in the middle of milking one of our dairy goats, when I’d see Momma Goose, and family, headed for a swim, so off I’d have to run.  Then when I’d return all muddy and smelly, I’d have to deal with the big mess Miss Goat created while waiting for me to finish milking her.  These messes ranged from tearing open every feed-bag in sight, to eating the radio cord, to leaving out the front door and finding my mother’s favorite flowers to eat or, worse yet, finding all those garden goodies.  Neither of my parents found even an ounce of sympathy for me, in fact, these little mishaps only fueled their lectures about how this was all my fault and all my responsibility, adding more and more things to my list of chores.

When we started haying, it took me three times as long with the drowning turkey trying to go for a swim.  I tried penning Mister Turkey Goose in with some single, good -looking turkey-gals hoping he might find true love with one of them, but no, he did not even like to be near another turkey, instead he fell in love with a young goose-girl, strutting his fully-fanned turkey-butt around her and rubbing his turkey-neck against hers.  Guess what, Miss Goose fell in love with Mister Turkey Goose and they became a pair of lovers who liked to sneak off together for a little skinny-dipping without the goose family, so this meant more trips a day to drag out a big, stinky, mad, male turkey out of the water while a very, very angry Miss-Goose-girlfriend honked, hissed, and flogged me.  Geesh, this was not so funny anymore, in fact, this was just plain sad.  Seemed like the lovers knew when my back was turned for even only a second, they would giggle in their fowl way and head straight for the water.

I must admit that as bad as my summer seemed to turn out, it was better than when cold weather set in.  The water was no longer cool, but downright frigid, the only time I got a break was when the pond was completely frozen-over, but of course, that didn’t last very long since I had to break the ice for the goats and pigs to drink.  Just a small hole in the frozen ice was enough of an opportunity for Mister Turkey Goose to show off to his girlfriend.  He’d just jump right in that hole, feet first, and the promptly began to sink, so here I’d go, pulling out this half frozen, stinking turkey out.  Miss Goose cut me no slack just because it was freezing cold.  Nope, she’d just bite me even harder.  I then had to herd the extremely angry lovers to the barn so Mister Turkey Goose could dry off and warm up, so his little toes didn’t freeze off.

Many times my mother would see the lovebirds headed over the hill, through the snow, to the pond, even when the wind-chill was below zero.  This meant I didn’t have time to dress warmly and run after them, but rather I had to run out into the cold in whatever I was wearing at the time.  I soon began staying fully and warmly dressed during all daylight hours.  My only relief was at night when all the birds, including the lovers, were nestled in and sleeping.  It never mattered if it was pouring buckets and buckets of rain, it never mattered if the snow was blowing.  It never mattered if the wind was howling, wind-chills below zero, and it didn’t even matter when it was too hot to even breathe.  Mister Turkey Goose was more determined than any postal carrier—he did not care what the weather was, he always was ready to head to the pond for a dip.

When Saturdays rolled around, that was my chance to go to town, but before I could go, I had to corral Mister Turkey Goose and his lovely Missus into their small fenced-in pen.  When I suggested to my folks that we should leave them in their small pen all the time, I was informed that while penning the two up for a short time was acceptable, to keep them constantly penned-up in their small yard, was just cruel.  And maybe the next time I decided to fool with Mother Nature, I would remember this valuable lesson.

My social life was impacted dramatically; sleepovers were few and far between unless my friends were staying here with me.  Seldom could I talk my mom or dad into turkey-sitting for me so I could go off and have fun.  My sidekick and partner in crime, Lonesome, the Bassett Hound, couldn’t understand why we didn’t get to run through the fields chasing bunnies as often, or head off to the woods to spend a cool day by the creek.  Nor do I think she ever understood why I would chase that dumb turkey and why wrestling that turkey in the smelly pond mud was what, to her, seemed like my new favorite thing to do.  But like the faithful buddy she was, she was always with me, although more than a few times she would look at me with her head cocked to one side, a bewildered look on her face.

Now, let us not forget there is also a duck who believes he is a chicken that I had to contend with.  Mister Chicken Duck, or “Chuck”, was not as much trouble as Mister Turkey Goose, but he had his problems, too.  For one, he would pick fights with the big, bad, mean rooster who was boss over all the chickens.  Mister Chuck, while tough in his own mind, was no match for a big, cocky rooster with sharp, deadly spurs and the knowledge of how to use them.  My parents again explained to me that since this was my “joke” it was my job to keep Mister Chuck from fighting and getting hurt.  Yeah, that was an easy one… NOT!  Mister Chuck soon found himself a lovely chick of his own and felt the need to always protect her from the roosters, which meant constantly picking fights.  The fighting was almost nonstop during egg laying time, how ironic was that?  And while egg-laying time for Miss Goose and Mister Turkey Goose meant less swimming time, Mister Chuck picked up any slack with his fighting.

As a sort of peace gesture for Mother Nature, I slipped some chicken eggs under Mister Chucks’ woman so they could hatch out a family and I slipped some goose eggs under Miss Goose so her and Mister Turkey Goose could also have a family.  While these gestures may or may not have won me any points with Mother Nature, it did win a few points with my Dad.  He offered to help me build a big, nice pen for Miss Goose and Mister Turkey Goose and family, building them a cement pond.  Big enough for the entire family, including Mister Turkey Goose, but shallow enough that he couldn’t drown.  Mister Turkey Goose lived happily as a goose for 8 years while Missus Goose lived to the ripe old age of 11 years, but she never found another boyfriend, her heart belonged to a goofy turkey who thought he was a goose.  Mister Chuck lived a good long life with his significant other, learning eventually to steer clear of the rooster bullies, so very rarely did he encounter the Boss Rooster’s angry spurs.

At the ripe old age of 12 years, I learned one of life’s most valuable lessons, which was: think twice about your actions and the consequences that might come from them; what might seem funny could possibly end up biting you in the butt.

I also learned that old commercial about fooling Mother Nature was right on, maybe there weren’t any lightning bolts flying thru the sky, but there were much worse consequences from fooling her: Mother Nature turned out to be a lot like karma—a bitch when poked.  Another lesson I learned was, in the animal families, looks didn’t matter, family is family even if your kid looks like the neighbor more than yourself, it is still your little baby.  None of the brothers and sisters ever doubted whether they were related or not—if you were hatched with the bunch, you were one of them.  Finally, love is blind.  It doesn’t matter that you don’t look like the rest of the flock, it’s how you see yourself that the ladies will see you.  Believe you’re a young, handsome goose who can swim, the girls will believe you’re a handsome goose.  Even if you’re a duck who could never crow, if you believe you’re a chicken and you scratch with the chickens, the hens will find you irresistible.

The post What I Learned From Poultry appeared first on Homestead.org.

And the worst part is, they weren’t even MY ticks.  I used to be a rural real-estate broker in southern Missouri, you see.

Sometime I ought to tell you about how many people buy a parcel of land, then, when they come to camp on it for the first time, find themselves coated head to toe with ticks.  This seemed especially true of those clients hailing from A Large Western State.

I think that these dear souls, in particular, must immediately decide that living in the forest means being constantly consumed by ticks, and that we poor rubes just don’t know any better.

Well, I have to admit that, when it comes to Not Knowing Any Better on most subjects, the Ozarks can field a team whose world-class naiveté is a match for any region on earth.  However, if there’s anything, ANYTHING Ozarkers know, it’s ticks… and the avoidance of same.

The other day, I happened to pick up a gardening magazine and I stumbled across an article written by a physician regarding protecting oneself from ticks.

This, in itself, was not so remarkable, but as I read on, it became apparent that I was holding in my hands a manuscript of potential importance to literary collectors.

Difficult as it may be to comprehend, this learned author, who was apparently getting PAID, managed to perpetuate as truth, two out of three of the Most Common Silly Myths About Ticks that are generally held by the tick-feeding public of today.

You can only imagine my elation.  I’d been meaning to write something for our website about ticks for months, but I was looking for an interesting angle so as to avoid making just another dry recitation of tickfact.  What could possibly be more interesting than debunking myth, and who would be a better target for ridicule than a doctor?

I am, of course, ever mindful of the fact that doctors often consort with attorneys, so I don’t intend to mention any names.

Out here in the woods, we don’t know too much about leeches or liposuction or any of those with-it new medical procedures, but gee-golly, do we know something about TICKS! …and I’m just itching to tell you about ’em.

Let’s start out with these Three Common Silly Myths about Ticks:

MYTH No. 1: When visiting the home of the tick, leave as little skin exposed as possible, wearing long sleeved shirts and long pants tucked into your socks.

I love this one.  A few weeks ago, I had the luck to run into a young woman on an river outing.  Meeting this girl was like old times for me because I started out in the real estate business catering primarily to the readers of the original Mother Earth News.  You can imagine then, my sense of deja vu to find standing before me, what appeared to be a perfectly preserved early-70’s-era Hippie Chick.  What was especially neat was that this was during that really hot spell we had back in July and she was wearing, I kid you not… long underwear.  I didn’t learn this because I asked, I assure you, but because over the course of the afternoon, she happened to mention it several times, usually in reference to the fact that she was sweating like a hog in a sauna.

She said it was to avoid ticks.

Had she ever SEEN a tick, I wondered.  I mean, if she, at maybe 5’3″ and 120 lbs.  Could get into her clothes, then why couldn’t someone who was less than a sixteenth of an inch long? It’s a good thing that ticks don’t have any sense of humor, because the laughter out in the woods would be deafening when they see fully grown homo sapiens wandering around in July wearing long sleeves and their pants tucked into their socks.

I told her that the best thing to wear for ticks was nothing.

She looked skeptical and suspicious of my motives.  I just hate how untrusting society has become.

MYTH No. 2: Ticks jump out of trees and land on you.

The same girl (I am NOT making her up) was wearing a sort of a sailor hat.  After I professed interest in her TAS (Tick Avoidance System) she volunteered that the hat was to protect her from the shower of ticks coming out of the trees.

Think about this.  The tick climbs up the tree (which has got to be the approximate equivalent to a human climbing the Washington Monument) then he sits patiently waiting for a victim.  Suddenly, YOU come wandering out of the underbrush fifty feet away.  The tick hastily calculates your mean velocity; your height in relation to his position in the tree; the speed and direction of the prevailing wind.  A hush falls over the forest.  Then, at precisely the correct moment, with a powerful spring of his spindly 1/32-inch legs, Thunder Tick launches himself, in a perfect triple-gainer, out of the tree and into your hair.

I’m disappointed that the doctor got this one right, knowing that ticks make their approach from below rather than above.  Phooey.

MYTH No. 3: Ticks must be removed very carefully.

Luckily for my purposes of ridicule, the doc goes on to tell us that we should never, never, ever remove ticks with our fingers.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t say why, but he does recommend using fine tweezers.

He goes on to say, “Don’t use alcohol, nail polish or petroleum jelly to remove ticks—it just makes them mad.  A provoked tick will attach itself more firmly to it’s host…”

“A provoked tick”—I marvel at the mere suggestion, as ticks in my experience have seemed rather passionless.  Perhaps this is where the term “ticked off” originates.  The Doc recommends you go home and shower after your tick exposure.  Again, he doesn’t exactly say why.  Certainly you’re not going to just WASH OFF any self-respecting tick.  They do this for a living, and they’re damned good at it.  It makes sense though, that if you’re not going to be removing your ticks (maybe you want to show them to your friends when you get home) you’ll want to make certain that they’re as clean as you are.

The article said the doctor was from New Jersey, but is suspect he is originally from A Large Western State.

The other day, I got into a tick discussion on a Usenet group.  Some poor babe was trying to find out how to AVOID ticks, and all the local experts seemed fixated on how to advise her to properly remove them once she’d been “tick-timized”.

My client seemed to favor trying to discourage the attached tick (she got dozens, of course) by burning them with a cigarette lighter.  This appeared to be a very painful solution and a very ineffectual one.  Maybe if you pulled the tick off with your fingers and THEN burned it.

Let’s get to the point here.  How do you spend a great deal of time in the Great Outdoors without being driven to distraction by ticks?

STEP ONE: KNOW YOUR TICK MODUS OPERANDI.

Here’s how ticks do business.  They climb up onto a tall stem of grass or a bush and wait until something warm and juicy, such as yourself, walks by and rubs against them.  When it does, they hop on.

STEP TWO: AVOIDING TICKS

Therefore, the number one best and most effective thing you can do to avoid ticks is to avoid tall grass.  At home, this is best done by mowing the lawn.  In the wild, it’s somewhat more difficult, but there are ways to lessen the impact of your tick-related experience.

Ticks do not immediately sink their choppers into your soft underbelly as might a Doberman Pinscher.  In fact, you might find that they’ll even wander around in your clothes for a few hours before selecting just the right spot from your lush display of anatomy.

That’s just one good reason not to wear a lot of clothes.

When you must walk through tall grass or any area that promises tickfulness, try wearing shorts so you can easily see any ticks that get on you.  Every so often, bend down and look to see if ticks are crawling up your legs.  If they are, simply flick them off and go on your way.

Grizzled old-timers think that anyone who uses insect repellent probably has lace on his shorts too, but a good repellent such as “Off” applied directly to your bare legs in conjunction with this frequent-check-and-flick routine is about as effective as any method you’ll find.  (Besides what’s wrong with lace?)

Nothing, however, is foolproof, so when you do get them, here’s the Noble Savage two-step technique for removing ticks:

1. Grasp the tick between the nails of your thumb and middle finger.

2. Pull.

I think part of the reason that so many people may be squeamish about this technique is because, in the process of sucking your very delicious blood, the tick actually embeds his head inside your skin and when you pull him out, chances are the head stays behind.  This can cause more aggravated itching and, I imagine, increase one’s exposure to Lyme Disease.

I agree that you shouldn’t try unguents or fire to try to get the tick to let go.  Ticks very are slow to pick up on a hint, and you’ll just look silly in the process.  If you want to carry tweezers around with you, I guess that would work okay, but the most important thing is to get the tick as quickly as you can after he bites into you.  The longer he’s been ensconced, the more you’ll itch when he’s gone.  I’ve also read that if you screw the tick out counter-clockwise, you’ll remove him with his head intact.  This sounds a little off-the-wall, but I’ve tried it, and it does seem as though they don’t itch quite as much when you do.  Maybe.

You may note that I’ve not made a lot of comment about Lyme Disease.  I have to admit that for several years I suspected that the whole ailment had been invented by Newsweek.  I’m sure I’ve removed ten thousand ticks from my person in this lifetime, and in my experience the itch is the major down-side.  In recent years, however, my father, a confirmed tough-guy from way back, claims to have contracted the disease and if that’s what he said he had, I’ll not argue.  I’d just comment that the odds of NOT getting it are better than one is led to suppose.

In summary, ticks are a fact of life most everywhere there are mammals living outdoors.  Places that have more ticks tend to have fewer muggers.  You need to put things in perspective.

How to Sell Your Land Yourself and Move on with Your Life

I’m From the Universe and I’m Here to Help (Regretting “Rethinking Everything”)

The post Ticks! appeared first on Homestead.org.

This is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands of jokes about the farming, homesteading, and the back-to-the-land lifestyle.

It started, after all, with Adam and Eve: What excuse did Adam give his kids about why he got kicked out of Eden?  “Your mother ate us out of house and home.”

Everyone who homesteads knows the pluses of this lifestyle, the major one being perhaps the most obvious: you get to work where you live, and live where you work.  But it has its drawbacks, of course.  Self-sufficiency is an always-elusive goal, and cash concerns, as expressed by the farmer mentioned above, sometimes dominate even when we don’t want them to.

One way to make a million as a farmer, it is said, is to start with two million and work really hard.  Another way to put it: if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying til you’re really in trouble.

One hungry homesteader complained, “What happened?  My homestead used to produce produce!”

A broke homesteader decided to make some extra money at watermelon season.  He went around to the local farmers and bought their watermelons for fifty cents apiece, then took them to the farmer’s market in town and sold them all at 2 for a dollar.  When he got home his thrifty wife noted that he didn’t have any more money than he started out with.  “What are you going to do next?” she asked him.  “I guess I better buy a bigger truck.”

The fact is, there is humor in adversity.  That’s why the most basic comic scenario is, or used to be, the sight of someone slipping on a banana peel.  As the great “cowboy comedian” Will Rogers put it, “Everything is funny as long as it’s happening to someone else.”  Rogers knew that we all like to laugh, if we’re human, and what happens to others can activate our chuckle app.  But it’s also true that if we’re lucky humans, we can also laugh at ourselves every once in a while.

“Everything is funny as long as it’s happening to someone else.”—Will Rogers

A great example of “the yoke’s on you” comes from the lore of Norwegian immigrant farmers who settled across the top strip of the Midwest, where, presumably, the snowy weather would have looked inviting.  The “Lena and Ole” humor of this group is notable and has long been collected, some of it spread to a larger audience by Garrison Keillor on his wonderful show, A Prairie Home Companion:

Ole put on both his winter jackets when he painted the barn in July, because the directions read, “Put on two coats.”

When her husband died, Lena told the funeral director to write this obituary for the local newspaper: “Ole died.”  The gentleman was surprised that she had so little to say and urged to think of a bit more to put in the newspaper.

“Isn’t there anything else you want people to know?”

“Okay, I just thought of something,” Lena responded, “You can say—Ole died.  Boat for sale.”

In fact, Keillor himself said it best (from www.garrisonkeillor.com):

“Ole lay on his deathbed,
He knew he was going to die.
And then he smelled a beautiful smell
Of Lena’s rhubarb pie.
He crept downstairs to the kitchen,
There it was, he let out a moan.
Then Lena whacked him with a broom:
That’s for the funeral. Leave it alone.” (Garrison Keillor)

The Amish also have a tradition of laughing at themselves.  Though some of the stories about them come from outsiders looking in, just as many are made up by the plain people:

The Amish flu is like this: first you get a little hoarse, and then you get a little buggy.

A robber decided to break into an Amish shop.  He figured the Amish being nonviolent, the owner wouldn’t resist so he could easily get away if he was caught in the act.  As he was prying open the cash register, the Amish proprietor appeared with a shotgun.  He told the thief, “I would never harm anyone, but I am about to shoot right where you’re standing.”

It’s a funny thing about laughter…

Why do we like to laugh at ourselves?  Could it be to upstage someone who wants to laugh at us, by making them laugh with us?  Or is it that maybe there’s something that starts in the brain and ends up in the vocal cords, and just has to come out?

Surprisingly, making jokes is a relatively new talent among us humans.  The great philosophers never or rarely mentioned humor as an important element in our lives—in fact, it should be said that some of the most famous ancient moralists like Plato and Aristotle were suspicious of laughter.  They considered it to be “mockery” and even asserted that comedy should be tightly controlled by the government.  All through the Middle Ages, among literate folk, humor was decried as godless.  Some philosophers considered it wicked to laugh because it meant we were expressing superiority over others.  Philosopher Thomas Hobbes referred to laughing as a kind of “grimace” and humor as an outbreak of “scorn.”  Early Puritans thought of humor as sinful, right up there with lust and avarice.

By the 20^th century, though, laughing became acceptable (even among Puritans after a while), seen as being a necessary relief mechanism.  The Roaring Twenties really got the ball rolling here in America.  Suddenly, skirts were high and humor was low, and both were there for all to enjoy.  Giggles, guffaws, and chortles came out of the closet.

Even Sigmund Freud weighed in, considering laughter, as you might expect, as a way of expressing repressed emotions.  He went a long way to explain this, as Freud would.  He liked to use the example of humor typified in a story by Mark Twain.  It seems a workman was blown sky high by a workplace explosion; when the man recovered he found that his pay had been docked for absence from the worksite.  Freud considered that the laughter that this kind of story evokes allows us to release pent up energy: we first of deal with the pity we feel for the worker, suddenly transformed into our relief at the ridiculous conclusion.

In the Bible, there is a story about a group of children laughing at Elisha because he was bald; Elisha cursed them and “two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two of them.”  Obviously, Elisha did not share my husband’s folksy sense of humor.  Recently I heard him tell our five-year-old neighbor, Eli, that God had made him bald so He could look down and see Donnie’s beautiful head.

This made me think: if humor is really a new thing, maybe it is our American love of freedom that let the laughter genie out of its tightly corked bottle, with anything and everything being fair game for funnies.  There must have been joking, even back when the philosophers were so worried about it.  What were they scared of?  That someone would make fun of them?  We Americans have long been known for our disrespect for kings and lords; that’s what the American revolution was all about. Humor gave us the freedom to laugh in the king’s face.  At a certain point, somebody said, “Laughter is the best medicine.”  It was finally good for us!

Consider our first humorist, Ben Franklin.  Though some of his one-liners seem a bit staid by today’s raucous standards, the man himself was pretty way out there for his times.  His “Poor Richard” was the voice though which he expressed a lot of wisdom in a light, accessible form:

Plough deep, while Sluggards sleep; And you shall have Corn, to sell and to keep.

Love your neighbor, yet don’t pull down your hedge.

Where there is hunger, law is not regarded; and where law is not regarded, there will be hunger.

Like Freud, I think Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens, writing in the late 19^th/early 20^th) is hilarious.  In fact, most of us probably consider Twain to be a quintessential American humorist.  When on his western travels he saw a dugout homestead on the Great Plains and wrote: “It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house.” (Roughing It)  He also recalled a visit to one of the tiny budding townships on the Great Plains of Nebraska where, he said, “The hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the constable, the city marshal, and the principle citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us, and we gave him good day.”

Twain practiced the story teller’s art when it came to humor.  As he described it,  “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

To further the notion that joshing in the face of danger is an American skill taken to the limit, and that Americans do not mind laughing at themselves, there is no better example than the humor of the Great Depression.

Another great jokester, Will Rogers, had this to say, among other things, about the Great Depression: “The money was appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.  Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickles up.  Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow.  But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”  And, “Last year we said things can’t go on like this, and they didn’t. They got worse.”

From the homesteader’s point of view there could have been nothing worse, probably, than the Dust Bowl.  Many hopeful immigrants and Easterners had bet on their farms in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, only to have them dry up in this horrific, slowly developing natural disaster.

Yet the Dust Bowl engendered a lot of jokes (from various websites):

A Dust Bowl farmer went to get a loan, but the bank turned him down when they saw his farm blow past the window.

People told tales about seeing birds flying backward during dust storms to keep from getting sand in their eyes.

There were a whole series of jokes about dust and real estate.  Kansas farmers had to pay taxes in Texas because that’s where their farms had blown.

Other farmers would have to wait until spring to plow when the south winds would blow their farms back up to them.  Others didn’t have to worry about rotating their crops—the wind did that for them.

Housewives scoured pots and pans by holding them up to keyholes during dust storms for the sandblasting effect.

One farmer and his son went to town and met another farmer on Main Street during the drought years.  “Looks a bit like rain,” said the second farmer hopefully.  The other replied, “Well, it doesn’t matter much one way or the other to me; I’ve seen rain.  But,” he said pointing to his teenage son, “the boy here…”

Others remember how a ‘30s dust storm was so thick that a salesman saw a prairie dog 20 feet above ground digging frantically to get back to its burrow.

Then there was the Dust Bowl homesteader who got knocked out by a raindrop was revived by his wife pouring a bucket of sand on his face.

My dad used to pace back and forth when those dust storms were blowing and say, “There’s a lot of real estate exchanging hands today!”

I reckon my uncle will be along pretty soon.  I just saw his farm go by.

Did you hear about the Dust Bowl motorist who suddenly encountered a 10-gallon hat perched upon a dust drift?  When the motorist lifted the hat he found a face staring at him.  “Can I help you in some way?” the motorist asked.  “Give you a ride into town maybe?”  “Thanks,” replied the buried man, “but I’ll make it on my own.  I’m on my horse.”

Times have changed… but it’s still funny to make fun of ourselves and mine laughter out of our frustrated attempts to make a living, or just a life of self-sufficiency, on the land.  Now that we have become modern, sophisticated homesteaders (as I assume you are since you are reading this article, meaning that somewhere in your life there is a computerized device with access to internet service), our jokes have changed somewhat.  Here are some I saw recently (from various websites):

Turkeys conferring in the barnyard: “Uh-oh, dudes, it must be getting close to Thanksgiving—the farmer just unfriended me on Facebook.”

John Deere stands behind all their equipment—except the manure spreader.

An agriculture student said to a farmer: “I know you want to use organic methods, but if you were to switch over to standard agricultural techniques, a little of this new chemical fertilizer for example, I think you’d be surprised.  Why I’ll bet this tree alone would give you twenty-five percent more apples.”  “I sure would be surprised,” said the homesteader.  “This is a pear tree.”

How does a farmer send messages?  By e-i-e-i-o-mail.

Technical computer terms:

Log on: put another one on the fire.

Log off: it’s hot enough now.

Lap top: where the cat naps.

Modem:  what I did in the wheat fields today.

A wise saying from Mark Twain seems as apt in our health-obsessed times as it probably was back when he penned it: “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.”

And this one, from Twain, hasn’t changed much either:

What is the difference between a taxidermist & a tax-collector?

The taxidermist only takes your skin.

And this one may be my favorite (after Donnie’s story of his bald head, of course):

Interviewer: “Congratulations on winning the $140 million dollar Powerball lottery.”

Homesteader: “Thank you.”

Interviewer: “Do you have any special plans for spending all of that money?”

Homesteader: “Nope. Not really.  I’m just gonna keep homesteading until the lottery money is all gone.”

The post Humor on the Homestead: You Have to Laugh in this Lifestyle appeared first on Homestead.org.

The coyotes were invariably large, long-legged creatures with intelligent eyes.  I admired their natural beauty as I hated their equally natural inclination to attempt to feed their pups our lamb and beef.  Unlike the solitary coyotes I saw from time to time slinking across the mile roads, the ones that flitted through our barbed wire and loped confidently from oak cluster to oak cluster were never alone.  In pairs and once, unexpectedly, in a trio, they trotted through, confident in their numbers.

They’d stay away from the yard but our dogs (secret cowards at heart) wouldn’t venture outside the relative safety of the pool of light cast by the yard fixture.  The coyotes seemed to discover this early in their occupation and would mockingly yip from just down the road.  This canine jeering was never enough to incite my three dogs to pursuit and I fancied that as the coyotes trotted off to begin the night’s mischief their eyes would be alight with laughter and contempt for their poor domesticated cousins.

Running both sheep and the world’s smallest natural breed of cattle, the Irish Dexter, was not for the faint of heart in fields such as ours.  Dreams would frequently be punctuated with a coyote’s high howls and staccato yips.  The house lights would duly come on and I’d trudge, half awake, carrying my flashlight and accompanied by a slinking dog, to the pasture.  I marveled at the sheer number of stars which only seemed to come out after I had gone to bed.

On these nocturnal excursions to the pasture, as the sleep trickled from my body, I would begin the tense listening for stealthy sounds.  Concerned about encountering a pack of coyotes, I wondered if the dog I had cajoled from his comfy spot in the mudroom would keep them occupied long enough for me to turn tail and run, fleet as a deer, back to the house.

I picked my way down the path carefully.  The hazel bushes on either side held only nut clusters and the odd benign chipmunk during the day, but in the dark of night I was certain they willingly harbored bears of all sizes.  To my credit, it was not a completely illogical worry as we did see bears from time to time and bears do love hazelnuts.

At last, I’d be panning my flashlight (which always seemed on the point of burning out because the only time I remembered the batteries were almost dead was when I was outside, in the dark, using them) over the placid cows.  They stood quietly or lay, chewing their cud.  Their eyes reflected back a bright green in the feeble beam, their gazes mildly curious, wondering what Farmer was doing out at this hour.

Of course, it goes without saying that by the time I reached my nocturnal destination any coyote in the vicinity had either long fled or wisely watched from the dark as I shone the light around in futility.  What would I have done (except let escape a startled expletive) had I seen any, I’m not sure.  We had a .22 but I’ve never felt comfortable carrying around a loaded gun, and a shot in the dark was just that; the likelihood of me hitting anything other than one of my own animals was very slim.

We needed a livestock guardian animal to be there when I couldn’t.  One who could see as well as the coyotes in the dark and not be reliant on the feeble beam from the flashlight.  There are three main types of guardian animals: dog, llama, and donkey.  Our own craven canines had already been proven inadequate for the task and I didn’t want to add another.  As well, there was the fact that our cattle and sheep had never seen any dogs other than ours (and coyotes, of which, presumably, they were afraid).

If their interactions with our dogs through the fence were any indication, the sheep would run in terror from their protector and the cows (possessors of wicked, curving horns) would try to skewer it.  I believe it was the presence of these horns which thus far had kept predation to a minimum.  They were likely able to defend themselves against one coyote for the most part, but ours were social rather than solitary and two Wile E’s were too many.  More dogs were out.

I don’t wish to offend anyone when I say, I’ve never understood the logic behind llamas as guardian animals.  How can a telescopic-necked camelid whose only real defenses are tiny stamping hooves like a sheep’s or spitting like a rebellious teen, protect against marauding packs?

Donkeys.  We sagely agreed.  A donkey would be a piece of cake to keep and would do the job effectively.  Known and utilized the world over as effective livestock guardians, a belligerent equine was just the ticket to protect our wee Dexter calves from becoming coyote canapés.  I felt supremely confident in my abilities to read a donkey’s body language and use that knowledge to win her over.  I would bond with her as quickly as with one of my horses, Apache.  In no time, I told myself (and others) she’d be eating from the palm of my hand; literally.  Having put in some time helping break colts in my previous incarnation to “Farmer” (that of “Cowgirl”, an all-too-brief stint due to the financial constraints of being 16 and without employment), I felt eminently qualified.  I was already congratulating myself when off we went to search for a guardian donkey.

The reality was a bit different (as is often the case with expectations).  She was an untouched yearling when we brought her home.  A beautiful chocolate brown with a cream-colored muzzle, her eyes were highlighted with dark rimming making it appear as if she wore kohl.  She was the size of a small horse with frightening hooves the size of salad plates.  Temporarily without a name, that was to change shortly.

As she careened around the pasture braying for her lost herd I felt a small wavering of confidence.  Scattering the cattle, unseen, in front of her like leaves when she burst through a group, she seemed oblivious to all but a blind need to escape.  As I followed at a distance inside the pasture, I wondered when she would realize the cows she had run over were the ones she had to bond with.

On impulse I imitated her screeching bray and froze when she sat down in mid gallop, rear dragging through the sand and then swinging around, ran straight for me.  She gave every indication she was going to run me down and every story I’d ever heard (people always seem to know someone who had a bad experience with a donkey, once you tell them you’ve bought one) flashed through my mind.  I had every intention of standing my ground but in the end, when it seemed collision was imminent, I dove through our barbed wire fence.  Five strands of pointy dissuasion, the wire shredded my pants.  Indeed I was hooked and tangled at the shin, collapsed in a heap with red furrows beginning to appear, as if by magic, where the barbs had relieved me of my skin.  She stopped and watched me for a moment, mirth in her jaundiced eye, and then walked off, pausing to delicately crop a thistle.

She was named the next day when I was able to observe first-hand the manner in which donkeys are such accomplished guardians.  I was inside the house making myself a much-deserved “Shandy”, known in my Spanish household as a “Clara”, when I surmise the following happened:

Our happy dog, “Rowdy” (a strange moniker for a chocolate lab that spent so much time sleeping we would check to make sure he was still alive, perhaps he never lived up to his potential), went to see the donkey.  I’m sure it was a tail-wagging, tongue-out affair as he trotted over in a welcoming fashion.

The ensuing commotion drew me from the kitchen.

The donkey’s brays were strident in the heavy summer air and Rowdy’s answering volley of barks were playful and uncomprehending.  She fixed him with a baleful eye, dilated her nostrils, and, pinning her ears, charged.  Braying, she swung and kicked him almost the length of a bus.  As I fumbled at the gate closure and Rowdy righted himself (with a perplexed inward look that made me wonder if he’d broken ribs) she kicked him again.  She swung to face him and stomped him with her front hooves for thoroughness.

By this time I had reached them, my heart in my mouth, and I drove her off.  I was astounded to see him get up slowly and shake himself off.  Gingerly, he followed me home.  Thanks in part to what I’m certain must be a two-inch-thick skull, Rowdy survived the attack and, as far as I know, never went into the pasture again.  As I could never look at her again without remembering this incident, “Clara” she became.

In short order, Clara the donkey did become part of the herd.  Unable to find the more suitable company of a Jack, she had no choice but to settle for the cows.  They grazed in companionable silence, friends only by proximity.  In the winter months when we fed the animals bales she became the pushy one, pinning her ears and thumping the cows with her hooves to get the choicest spots.  Sturdy creatures that they were, they barely seemed to notice her tantrums other than to give her wider berth and seem mildly surprised at the drum-like sound of her hooves thumping their sides.

She became tolerant of my presence, but didn’t always allow me into her personal space.  Bipolar, sometimes she would eagerly seek me out where I was working on fencing, or cutting thistles before they could go to seed.  On these occasions she would stand close up against me, touching.  A friendly and companionable gesture that softened my attitude towards her, I would scratch her and decide I really did like her.  Other times she only got close enough to make sure it was me she was snubbing and in ultimate equine rudeness slowly turn her backside to me and saunter away, leaving little doubt as to her feelings.

Clara was full of other surprises too.  She came bred, but hadn’t the courtesy to divulge this until Nature outed her.  Donkeys, being somewhat low-slung and potbellied, are of the perfect shape to conceal a surprise pregnancy.  As the months went on, coinciding with the greening of the pastures, she grew rotund and we commented to each other what easy keepers donkeys were.

Eleven months from when we’d bought her, our oldest son came running in from the pasture saying Clara had a foal with her.  Unwilling to believe in immaculate conception or a fly-by-night Jack surreptitiously visiting our pastures, I wondered at my child so unable to tell the difference between a foal and a calf (of which there were many).  He led me to a sandy hollow in vindication where Clara was laying peacefully with a tiny foal stretched out beside her.  I walked closer carefully.  If she was so unpredictable before, how would she be with a new foal?  Of course, I now realized, a lot of her moody behavior may have been explained by her unknown pregnancy.  She lazily flicked her ears at my approach but made no move to get up.  Equally unconcerned the little foal turned it’s plush grey head towards me.  Both watched mildly as I gently stroked the foal and spoke in a soft voice.  A quick lift of a hind leg revealed we had a new jennet on the farm.  And so “Poppy” joined out family.

Despite Clara’s fearsome personality, motherhood seemed to mellow her somewhat.  She didn’t object to my presence around the foal and would only watch with detached curiosity as I gained Poppy’s trust.  As long as I didn’t try to touch Clara, she didn’t seem to care.

Over time Poppy became what I had expected a donkey to be, in my original ignorance.  She was so trusting and even-tempered (she must take after her father, we laughed) she was easily halter-broken, came when you called her, and would pick up her feet.  Unlike her unpredictable mother, who had resumed her hostile and erratic behavior shortly after weaning, Poppy was a pleasure to be around.  Even the cows seemed to prefer her company and the little calves would try to entice her to join their games, ropy tails held high.

And Clara?  She has days when I can touch her or (joyous) rest my head against her.  More often than not she moves away, uninterested in the human-donkey dynamic enjoyed by her more level-headed daughter.

Even considering Clara, and certainly considering Poppy, donkeys were an unmitigated success on the farm.  Where once coyotes were a common sight and sound here on the Hill, the mother-daughter duo has all but banished them.  It’s rare to hear one now in our fields and we’ve never seen one.  I no longer fumble outside in the dark trying to find them (and worried I might) knowing that as I lay safe in my bed Clara’s got it all under control.  We’ve not had a single loss to predation since the arrival of donkeys to our fields.

The other day I gave my husband pause.  He seemed really surprised and I’m not sure why.  All I said is that I was thinking of having Poppy bred…

The post My Guardian Donkey: Burden of Beasts appeared first on Homestead.org.

“I’m not living anywhere that doesn’t have sidewalks.”

“I need a garden.”

“Do you smell that?  Is that manure?”

Ah, marital bliss.  After more than a decade living in a large city—one that annually makes a top ten list of shame, alternating between “highest crime” and “worst places to live”—the family has decided to get out of Dodge.  The appearance of one, then two, small children in our lives added weight to this decision, but secretly I’ve been dreaming of this for years.  You see, unlike my hubby, I have a desire to get away from the city, and its attendant crowds and traffic, just so I can find a little patch of Earth where the air is clean and I can see the stars at night.

Yes, the homesteader in me is starting to show.  I try to hide it in another pot of store-bought herbs for the windowsill.  Just when I thought I’d completely repressed my earlier aspirations to grow a few vegetables, have a little herb garden, or raise some chickens for fresh eggs, they raise their heads and howl.

My secret predilection in favor of self-sufficiency goes back to my roots:  I grew up in a small town in England—a village, in fact—located halfway between nowhere much and the frigid North Sea.  My grandparents owned a pig farm and I spent a lot of days collecting eggs, driving a tractor, planting potatoes, and climbing apple trees.  My version of the Easy-Bake Oven was to take a handful of freshly picked wheat, grind it between two stones to make flour, mix with water, and bake under the glare of a magnifying glass.  I grew up with good Lincolnshire loam perpetually wedged under my fingernails.

The other character in this play, on the other hand, grew up in Los Angeles.  The man who would become my husband believed, as a boy, that a single, struggling lemon tree planted in a dirt-hole to one side of a concrete-paved backyard constitutes a garden.  In this reality, a minuscule patch of soil and a couple of potted pansies equals landscaping.  He hit puberty believing that meat came cleanly packaged in plastic, vegetables arrived on trucks and trains from Mexico, and things that grew on trees made good ammunition when chased by gang members.

Despite our disparate roots, we usually see eye to eye on the important things.  However, this time the one and only thing we agree on is that inner-city life is not good for our kids, and that we need to escape before our eldest graduates preschool and has to choose his gang allegiances.  Hubby would prefer a small city, preferably somewhere on the West Coast.  I’m gravitating to North Dakota.

“Seriously, the smell of manure is making me nauseated.  I’m going to wait in the car.”

Cross this town off the list.

Life is compromise, married life doubly so.  A year later, we manage to agree on a small town that’s less than an hour away from a moderately large city, an oasis of urbanity plopped firmly in fly-over country.  Our new house is close enough to a main road that, with a prevailing wind, you can catch the sounds of a metropolis drifting by.  The amount of actual land that comes with the house is surprisingly small, but since it extends from the house on all but the north side (which demarcates our border with our neighbor with a wide gravel path) I’m happy.  I can work with that.  Now I just have to work on de-citifying my family.  This proves to be more difficult than I anticipated.

“Mummy!  There’s a really big dog outside.”

“That’s a deer.”

“Holy crap!  What’s that noise?  Where’s the baseball bat? There’s a raccoon in the yard!”

“Umm.  Can you leave it alone?  Please.”

“Make sure you check there are no coyotes outside before you let the kids out on their own.”

“Riiiiiight.”

Even I have a few moments of adjustment.  My first encounter with a snake (a harmless garter snake, I discovered after the fact) leaves my heart palpitating while I try to maintain airs of outward calm.  I also find that I spend hours nose to nose with a praying mantis, a creature I never saw in either rural England or urban California.

But, we adjust, adapt, and stop diving for cover every time we hear sounds that remind us of gunfire (such as a neighbor whacking two shoes together, trying to dislodge some dirt).  Gradually, our new home starts to feel like, well, home.

Our new home is a fairly conventional suburban detached house, with a traditional perimeter border of grass more perfectly trimmed, springy, and dense than anything you’d find on the links at Pebble Beach.  However, my opinion of any yard is that it should at least give back equal of what you put into it, and I just can’t see myself mowing, fertilizing, and weeding, without harvesting.  No, the grass that’s asphyxiating almost everything else in the garden will have to go.

First, though, I have to convince someone else.  I refuse to buy an electric or gas mower:  Too smelly (the gas) and noisy (both).  I opt for a push mower in the hopes that I can use the “too much hard work for no reward” argument to get my way.  However, the sight of his poor wife hefting sixty pounds of sharp machinery while sweating profusely simply has Hubby fetching a couple of cold beers.   Fortunately, his lack of interest allows me to “accidentally forget” to mow one area of lawn and by the end of the summer it’s so overgrown it’s beyond redemption.

But I’m not going to contaminate perfectly adequate growing soil with weedkiller, or render the garden unsafe for children’s feet and fingernails.  No, I have a plan.  Did I mention that it will also kill off all the grass?  Perhaps not.  I’m sure Hubby had a few doubts when he returned home from work one day to be greeted in the driveway by a large pile of of interesting-smelling “mulch”.  But to his credit, he didn’t say a word about the lawn’s demise until I had a good thick layer of newspapers and well-rotted manure … I mean mulch … spread out across the entire lawn area.

“So … Are we going to reseed, then?  Or buy sod?”

“How’d you feel about a couple of trees over there?  And this is such a sunny spot, I think some zucchini plants would do really well.  Maybe tomatoes.”

I receive a noncommittal eye roll and decide I’ll wait until the following spring, when the weeds and overgrown grass will be well and truly dead, to broach the subject of my envisioned veggie and herb garden again.  I also decide to temporarily drop my case in favor of a compost heap—essential if we’re going to grow veggies—which has reached an impasse:

“I don’t think so … What about the smell?  The neighbors will complain.”

“A good heap doesn’t smell.  You bury the green waste, the scraps and trimmings, in the brown.”

“Yeah, right.  What about the raccoons?”

“I’ll build a chicken-wire fence around it.”

“No.”

Stalemate.

Our first winter together outside of California arrives with less of a bang, and more a soft suffocation as an overnight storm dumps eighteen inches of heavy, wet snow.  The next morning, as I slog my way to the supermarket, I contemplate how our ancestors survived winters like this.  On the edge of possible starvation, how could they live without going crazy?  After all, we’re only steps from town, and ten miles from the nearest big-box store—packed to the halogen-lit ceiling with shiny plastic-coated produce from around the globe; luxurious soaps and lotions sold in vats larger than anyone should ever purchase; and every kitchen gadget and time saving device ever conceived, mass produced in China for your convenience and economy.

Two generations ago, if you had a bad season you had to rely on your neighbors and good luck, or starve.  Now, hunger isn’t a result of failed crops, but of failed economics; and poverty means buying food at superstores and feeding our kids the worst kinds of junk.  I am determined to make sure our children know where food comes from, and how to provide for themselves.  I strengthen my resolve to help my family become more self-sustaining, more aware of the seasons and close to the Earth.

Right then and there, I decide that instead of approaching this piecemeal one patch of suburban lawn at a time, I need a  plan.  And I need a spouse who supports me, even if he’s not willing or interested in doing any of the actual work.  It’s not that he’s lazy, but he’s never far from his computer, and the hairs on the back of his neck visibly shift a little when his cell doesn’t get good reception.  He can get behind self-sufficiency, but abhors the act of putting it into real practice.  Even camping is a stretch.  With this in mind, I concoct a scheme that he can get behind.

I spend the winter laying the groundwork.  In the supermarket, I point out the origin of the produce we buy, and make a point of choosing purchases mindfully.  We give holiday gifts of homemade bath salts and lavender pillows filled with flowers collected during the summer.  I pour over websites and books from the library and learn everything I can about native plants and introduce species that will thrive in our climate.

In the spring, I unveil phase two of my plan.  After a quick trip to the local hardware store, and some action with a drill, we have a homemade wormery.  Vermiculture in a plastic storage bin.  It’s an odor-free, discrete, discreet compost area that isn’t messy once we equip it with a large brick to keep the raccoons out.  So, now we had a place to put our kitchen scraps, but we were still a long way from even a modicum of self-sufficiency.

For mother’s day, my family cedes to my wishes, buying me zucchini and tomato plants for my vegetable patch.  I also plant a variety of herbs I’ve started from seed on a sunny windowsill.  After a winter buried under newspaper and mulch, the soil is still a sad-looking gray, but the grass and weeds have not just biodegraded but mysteriously vanished, utterly consumed by some sort of lawn-munching subterranean critter.  As I turn and amend the damp, dense clay soil, I cross my fingers.  If the tomatoes are a dismal failure, next year I’ll lose the argument, and we might end up with a concrete patio.

Over the winter, I had decided that the area around the mature ash tree in the yard, heavily shaded and clotted with a thick root system, should remain untouched, but we’ll plant fragrant perennials around the perimeter in the sunny areas.  Long term, we’ll grow plants like lavender, rosemary, calendula, lemon balm, and mint to make hydrosols and essential oils.

I propose a pumpkin patch in a warm, south-facing spot next to our driveway.  Because I propose it to our four-year-old, the idea is received with enthusiasm and excitement.

Chickens are on the list, and although our town will only allow four hens (no rooster) they’ll easily produce more than enough eggs every week for our family.  I start to stockpile ideas for recipes that will preserve the excess—I imagine jars of lemon curd, and frozen lemon meringue pies and lemon poppy seed bread.  Again, these ideas are received with leaps of joy:  who can argue with pies and cakes?

Unfortunately, the town draws the line at livestock.  But, I don’t mind; I have enough on my plate as it is.  Maybe we can revisit this when we can leave the city limits.  For now, our kids’ access to good schools keeps us shackled to suburbia.

As I gradually roll-out my plans to my family, my winter of seeding ideas of self-sufficiency and reduced dependence on unreliable food sources like Mexico and China, pay off.  My family’s desire to get outside and help me in the garden ripens at the same rate as our tomatoes.  Our pumpkins swell until the squirrels find them simply too tempting, and consume them still attached to the vine.  But even this is a learning experience, and as we contemplate ways to keep the squirrels from eating next year’s crop (chicken wire? laser-guided lightsabers? a monster-filled moat?), I realize we are planning another season.  And as we eat the last of the season’s zucchini, sitting under a clear starry sky, I hear the words I’ve dreamed of:

“This is really great.  I’m really glad we moved here.  And these zucchinis are fantastic!  I can’t believe we grew them ourselves …”

Clare Brandt is a freelance writer based in Colorado. A transplant to the U.S. from England, she’s still trying to figure out if there’s a connection between her latent homesteading tendencies, and genetic northern England thriftiness and proclivity to be self-reliant.

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