We pulled up a few green garlic here and there, took off the scapes, mulched and weeded, but for the most part we left the garlic bed alone.

After watching the leaves die back and change from green to brown, we decided that it was time for the harvest.

We had incorporated leaves and manure into the bed in early October. Our normally dense clay soil was a bit looser at harvest time. The leaf mold and soil fell off the roots fairly easily.

Between the two of us it didn’t take long at all to pull everything up and load the cart.

The longest process was tying up the bunches and hanging them from the barn rafters to dry.

We’ll dry the garlic for a few weeks, trim the stems and roots off then sort through to select the best seed for next year. The rest we’ll eat.

We planted the garlic in November of last year, some six or so pounds of it, enough to get almost to the end of the row. After a couple of mulchings, the garlic is beautiful. And scaping. In order to promote the growth of the underground bulb, the scapes are removed. Scapes can be used in cooking for their light garlic flavor or fermented. We picked all the scapes and handed them over to Adah for fermenting, but not before Kristin grabbed a handful to throw in with some beet greens she was cooking.

Basically all you have to do is pull on the scape to remove it from the plant. Most just break off where they emerge from the stalk. Others come all the way out leaving you with a nice piece of tender goodness.

The harvest went quickly, the two of us filling a five gallon bucket in about ten minutes.

After the scape harvest, it was on to planting ginger. In early March I went to a ginger workshop put on by East Branch Ginger and Debbie Roos of the Chatham County Cooperative Extension. At the end of the workshop everyone received a few pounds of seed ginger. After pre-sprouting the ginger behind our woodstove and in the greenhouse, it was finally ready to plant. The pre-sprouting gives the ginger a head start.

In order to control fertility (ginger is a heavy feeder) and water, we are growing the ginger in our old chicken feed bags from Reedy Fork Farm. The bags provide great drainage as well as easy hilling. Ginger is hilled three times – once when the base of the shoots turns from bright white to bright pink, a second time four to six weeks later and a third time four to six weeks after that.

Our soil mix consists of Sunshine potting mix, feathermeal, leaf mold, worm castings and mycorhizzal granules. We get the potting mix and feathermeal from Chatham Farm and Home Supply. They have bulk feathermeal from North Carolina sources, making it cheaper and more local for us. The fungus comes from Mushroom Mountain in South Carolina and the worm castings come from Carolina Worm Castings who make their compost in the building next door to ECO.

We hope to harvest eight to sixteen pounds of ginger this fall. This is a big experiment, but I can easily see myself getting sucked into this big time.

In the above photo you can see Jerry on his tractor discing in some overwintered red clover. It was starting to go to seed, the bees were finished with it and it was time to incorporate the organic matter.

The manure came from an auction stockyard to the west of Siler City. Apparently there are livestock auctions there frequently with all flavors of beasts present. The manure was a mixture of pig, goat, horse and cow as well as plastic bottles, beer caps and empty match packets. Kind of like the leaves we get from the Siler City street cleaners but with more of an ammonia bite to it.

Hopefully this round of planting is able to sprout and grow. Adah and Kat are putting row cover over the seeds and installing some scarecrows. I guess we’ll know in a week or two whether those two methods get the seeds through the first phase and into the next battle – deer.

I am the first to admit that I am sometimes very cranky to deal with especially if I get woken up. A few weeks ago, Brother was analyzing his bowling ball fetish at 11:30 at night. The backstory is that Gray found a blue bowling ball in the dumpster, brought it home and gave it a roll across the grass. Brother immediately took a fancy to it and began making a very strange sort of noise that no one had heard him make before. The strange thing is that he does not make the noise with any other type of ball or stick or animal. Only the bowling ball provokes this response.

So back to a few weeks ago. The sound of Brother’s yipping echoed through the trees, through the grass and through the tarp that covers the area behind my pillow. I calmly put on my head lamp and rubber boots, walked down the path and past the trampoline where Gray and Adah were giggling, found Brother’s glowing eyes and squeals of joy, took his bowling ball from him, threw it into a ditch full of water and quietly went back to bed.

Now the bowling ball lives in the ditch full of water, waiting for the summer drought. Brother also awaits the return of the romance.

So as Danielle and Noel near the completion of their cob house, Kristin and I focus on bringing down the old house. The condition of the house and the relatively stable condition of our finances allow us to pursue some interesting routes.  We have decided to replace the house with straw bale construction, possibly in conjunction with timber framing.  Kristin is researching the timber option, sourcing some local sawmills and tobacco barn reclamation projects.

Our biggest funding obstacle is the financing above and beyond our current savings. Bank financing is NOT an option since we are building without central forced air (heating/cooling), and banks are ONLY concerned with re-sale values not the builder-owners’ values. We are currently reaching out to friends and family for micro-loans, so if you fall into that category please let us know if you are interested!

We had a work party a few weeks ago to begin the dismantling of the house. Our goal is to save as much as possible for reuse, but there is also a ton of crap – six layers of shingles, five layers of flooring, loose fill vermiculite insulation.

After the wrecking day we had our annual Capricorn versus Aquarius party. I’ll just leave this slide show here -

This is all a bit of good and a bit of bad, with it mostly being pretty exciting.  The bad is that our infrastructure is lacking in some key areas, mainly water access and possibly heated living space. For the most part, the people coming out are pretty resilient and not too terribly bothered by much. Which is good, because an upcoming house project will need resilient folks…

Transport happens with the Safety 1st kid carrier and the farm bike. The kid carrier has hauled a wide array of items – food and tools on the farm, groceries in the city. I picked it up for free in Wilmington a billion years ago. It, like me, has seen its share of work.

After unloading, Kristin and I shared the view from the barn doors on the upper level.

And I got to act like I was jumping down to intercept Brother…

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.

This year there is a new shelter, a scavenged bamboo and baling twine number that I built over the course of a few days.  It isn’t much to look at, but it is dry and, more importantly, lightweight.  Moving last year’s pig house was a nightmare.  It was heavy and unwieldy; I cursed it, the pigs destroyed it as they aged, knocking out the floor and the walls.  Now its shell sits with last year’s scarecrow along the forest edge, waiting for new purposes and locations.

The new house is basically a tent with one open wall.  It can be staked down after moving in case it is windy.  But that is all boring stuff… Who wants to see the two day old piglets!

Five weeks from this coming Saturday the piglets will be weaned (according to the Animal Welfare Approved time line).  Shortly after that, the pigs will come home and join the rest of us animals.

Scavenging also includes gleaning scrap lumber from neighboring demolition projects, concrete pieces (urbanite), old greenhouse plastic, bamboo, hay twine, nails, and irrigation drip tape. Combine all those elements and you get a really decent and basic greenhouse.

The process started with a bamboo harvest – this ingredient was necessary for putting together the top framing as well as the side ribs.

The ends of the greenhouse were built with downed cedar trees that we pulled out of the woods as well as scrap lumber from a demolition up the road from us.  There were also a few pieces from a recent gutting of a few rooms in our house.

The plastic came from an organic farm near the NC coast as did the drip tape that was used to staple through and hold the plastic to the framing.

Photo from Danielle

Total cost for this greenhouse (not including labor of course) is somewhere between $5 and $15 depending on who you ask.  I think the staples were at least $4 for the box, but calculating how many nails were purchased versus how many were scavenged is difficult.

Regardless, the greenhouse is ready for seed flats and a jump-start on the season.  Anyone interested in our CSA?

I am vowing that this coming year the mowing will be minimized.  Going in are perennial beds, hugelkultur mounds, insectory plants by the hundreds and a kitchen garden for fun.  The front yard outside of mine and Kristin’s door is the first to fall.  Step one is to kill the grass or otherwise remove it. Well, actually step one is to figure out where the beds will go and do some measuring and flagging.

A few years ago I attended a workshop at the annual CFSA conference presented by Susana from Salamander Springs Farm. The workshop was all about building no-till beds on top of grass.  I finally found the notes in one of the piles of notebooks that I have only recently brought together into one pile.  The notes spell out a no-till “Layer Cake” garden bed recipe:

Step one – “The Plate” consists of large sheets of cardboard laid over existing pasture or lawn.

Step two – “The Cake” consists of several inches of manure or compost.

Step three – “The Frosting” consists of mulch such as leaves, old hay, shredded paper and straw.

Step four – “The Baking” consists of letting it all settle and rot for three to four months.

Step five – “The Eating” consists of pulling the mulch back to put in plants and replenishing the mulch as the plants grow.

For our cardboard needs we almost always head to Siler City.  The dollar stores’ Dumpsters are usually a nice jackpot for all sizes of box, not necessarily a requirement to fit most mulching needs.  For larger jobs we would hit furniture and appliance stores.  The boxes are bigger and thicker providing more grass and weed killing power.  For uniformity of boxes, the local ABC Liquor store would be perfect.  Most folks hit them up for packing boxes.  For wax boxes, hit the grocery… Since this particular project was just a piece of a front yard, the dollar store cardboard works well.  The only problem is the tape.  There is a lot of tape to remove and dispose of.

While peeling off tape, you get to see where all the crap products come from and come through.  Most of the importers seem to be in New York City of New Jersey.  The origins are India, China, Korea, Vietnam.  None of the boxes were made from recycled material (no notices on the boxes), so I will probably be mulching with cardboard descended directly from trees, most likely trees from Canada.  That is a long way to go in order to get into my front yard.  The boxes also have loads of staples, fabric tape and heavy duty packing tape holding everything together.

The value of the boxes and its associated connectors is probably higher than the value of the stuff inside the box. I know the value of what I am about to grow on and through those boxes is higher than the box plus the stuff inside.  And then some – mostly because so much comes from the cardboard.  Earthworms tunnel under and through it; pill bugs, beetles and earwigs make their home in the crevices between the layers; fungal mycelia run like branching rivers throughout the whole bit.  All of this activity leads to the decomposition of the still useful organic matter and carbon that is nestled within the cardboard.

What would have taken years to happen with the use of a new log, the loggers, grinders, pulpers, pressers, importers and exporters have made into a readily available haven for all sorts of micro and macro interactions. But the folks at the end of the box-chain would have just thrown it away or possibly recycled it into more cardboard that would eventually be thrown away (nothing against recycling cardboard) whereas we at Circle Acres have really recycled the box and returned it to its rightful place – rotting on the ground and being digested by those who can do such a thing.

The only drawback to this system is that it takes a really long time to build.  For one person, by hand, estimate at least two hours to go twenty five feet.  Then of course there is the “baking” part, but after three or four months the area should be grass and weed free.  It will also be a nutritious place to start off new Spring plants for Summer harvest.

Noel read up on how frost can affect sweet potatoes and determined that it would be best if we dug them up promptly.  Another frost was coming, we had the hands needed to get the job done and it seemed like a fun project for a Monday evening.

We had planted quite a few varieties to see how they would come out.  The sizes and yields varied with the only constant being that the roots may have been held back by the thick clay soil.  Sweet potatoes really prefer a light soil and a long frost-free growing season.  Our area is great for the frost-free part but not so much on the for the light soil.

Kristin, Gray, Noel and myself tore up the dying vines, feeding them to the waiting pigs.  Pigs love sweet potato vines. They are great nutrition for people as well.  Next year I plan to try to ferment a few and see how they taste.

With the dying vines pulled up we had to race a dropping sun.  We dug as much as we could in the fading light, but ended up resorting to head lamps for the last hour of harvesting.  I’m not sure if we missed any in the surrounding darkness.  I guess we’ll find out in the Spring when volunteers start shooting up from the soil.

The potatoes spent the night in our room cuddling with the wood stove.  Noel and Gray moved them into the greenhouse to cure for a while.  Curing is a whole other scene…

Last Winter was our first season in the room and our first time using wood heat.  We learned a lot in the process:

• We cut wood as we needed it instead of stockpiling.  This led to some shortages and some work in the dark as we scrambled for a night’s worth of wood.
• We didn’t have a damper in the stove pipe.  This led to most of the heat going up and out the chimney.  It also meant that we had to feed the fire every three hours.  I guess it was like having a newborn baby but with way more cussing and shivering.
• We didn’t have electricity run, so we didn’t have an overhead fan.  Heat went up and up and out.

So we fixed some things, and we are in a little different place this year.  First, we have a ceiling fan wired up.  It keeps the hot air down at our level and helps with heat distribution.

Second, I put a damper in the stove pipe.  This closes off the stove from the chimney, allowing the wood to burn longer  in the stove.  Since the stove is pretty old, it is not airtight.  Without the damper air is sucked through the openings in the stove, making the fire burn hotter and shorter.

Third, we started cutting and splitting wood when it warmer outside and not needed for burning.

Last night we fired up the stove for the first time this season.  We went through eight pieces of wood from six in the evening until morning, much less than our average last year and with no need to load it after we went to bed.  The fire kept the room very toasty all night long.  It was so warm that I slept on top of my sleeping bag.  Kristin felt is was uncomfortably hot under her covers.  This tells me that we might have figured out the formula to keep warm this year.

CircleAcres is a collective land project seeking to create a self sustaining ecosystem that provides its inhabitants and community with food, fuel, and medicine while moving away from mechanization, resource extraction and consumerism. Utilizing biological processes to meet our needs while making use of the unending stream of “waste” produced by the current system. We are nestled in Chatham County, NC a small community with a strong sustainable agriculture presence.

It is our first year on the land so there are lots of projects underway and lots of learning opportunities to jump headfirst into.Some of the things you can potentially learn about while here include:

Permaculture, wildcrafting, rainwater catchment, human scale food production, sheet mulching, establishing a food forest, small scale animal husbandry, goat milking, growing medicinal herbs, making tinctures, vermicomposting, charcoal production, hugelkultur, growing mushrooms, graywater systems, grafting, seed saving, scything, dumpster diving, homemade potting soil from local materials, and cob construction.

We ask that work traders help out 20 hrs. a week with farm activities, and help on a rotational schedule with dish duties and cooking. Food will be provided along with tent accommodation.We are all omnivores but can accommodate vegetarians and vegans though there may be occasions you will have to take responsibility for your own meal needs. Circle Acres is still in its infancy so accommodations are rustic. We shower outdoors and get about 2 gallons of hot water at a time. So if you are in need of more traditional living quarters we may not be the best match, but if you have an adventurous heart and yearn to be a part of creating a Truly sustainable system you’ve found the right place.

No pets please.

Contact us: circleacres at gmail

I pull the lice out of their ears.  That alone makes us pretty tight.

Kristin has become attached to them, giving them their nightly belly scratching and making sure they have enough of everything that they need.  As I alluded to in a previous post, it is because of her view of the way these pigs live that she may be able to eat them when the time comes.  She has been vegan/vegetarian for thirteen years, about half her life, so it is a step that has not been considered lightly or without questions.

I spent some time as a vegan/vegetarian, some five years or so, but as the saying goes, “if you aren’t now then you never were”.  Or maybe that is a straightedge thing.  My reasons for that life were political and human based, focusing largely on the interactions of people in the food system.  Animal rights and treatment were a close secondary consideration but not the major thrust for action.  Living that life greatly informed my decision to eat entirely local and make a conscious decision every time I make a food purchase.

I have eaten meat for the last few years and, with very few exceptions, I know exactly where that meat comes from.  I have to allow some exemptions (such as the weekly free lunch at a church in Pittsboro), but I have to have a pretty good reason and it has to be from a local restaurant or store.

But in a few months, all my pork will have come from a few hundred yards away.

This brings up the issue of how to deal with ending the life of an animal who has shared your space and your time and your close interactions.  I haven’t had to actually address the feelings before simply because this will be the first time I have raised an animal with the intent to eventually kill and eat it.

I can say that the best way to avoid any attachment is to treat the animal simply as a machine, a machine that needs to be checked on once in awhile in order to change the oil or put more fuel in the tank.  This is how many farmers treat everything on their farm – human labor, soil, resources.  Since I am trying to live a new example, I cannot get away with treating non-human farm residents as inferior or not worth any extra effort.  They are not machines; none of the components around me is a machine although sometimes I fail to see that.

I need to know firsthand that I have created a space in which the pigs feel safe, cared for and unstressed and are able to fully enjoy being pigs.  This means mud holes and tall grass, real dirt and kind words.  It means that when it comes down to it there can be some sort of peace between the killer and the killed, that the sadness and harshness of the process of taking lives can be tempered in some way and that life up until the end can be human interpreted as “happy”.

Without trying to justify any action, we, as the users of this food, have to take responsibility for the actions needed to place a meat meal on our plates.  We cannot do that unless we know where our food comes from.

It’s like being ‘a ninja’

The farmers often live very frugally, Philpott says. “You typically produce lots of food, and that cuts down on your food costs.”

Jennifer Belknap, 36, and her husband, Jim McGinn, 43, are old-timers. Their Rochester, Wash., farm, Rising River, dates to 1994. Belknap estimates they net $30,000 a year. They live off the land and keep other expenses to a minimum.

It’s like “being a ninja,” says Fleming, in Nevis, N.Y. You have to be fluid, flexible, an activist and an entrepreneur, she says. “We’re working against the odds. The educational system, the economic system, the subsidies, the tax structure for land owners,” none of them are focused on helping tiny organic farmers, she says.

Trace Ramsey, 35, one of five farmers at Circle Acres in Silk Hope, N.C., works a full-time job and devotes weekends and nights to the farm. “Having a steady paycheck really helps with upfront costs like buying feed or cover crop seed,” he says.

Ramsey worked as a technology manager for a small company for five years after graduating from the State University of New York-Genesee, where he majored in biology.

He met up with a group of like-minded friends and they decided to start a farm together. They spent six years saving and planning and looking for land to buy around the country. They finally settled on North Carolina because it had access to consumers wanting organic produce and there already was a strong organic farming community there. Their 2-year-old farm sells to CSAs, some restaurants and the local Whole Foods.

Ramsey stages what young farmers are calling “crop mobs.” A local farm puts out the word that it’s holding a crop mob to untangle drip irrigation lines or pick sweet potatoes. A crowd descends, works for the afternoon, gets fed a big dinner and then has a party and dances until dawn.

“You can do a week’s worth of work in five hours if you have 50 people,” he says. “It creates such a huge connection between everybody. Living in a rural area, you don’t often have much chance to see folks every day like our urban contemporaries.”

There are five of us at Circle Acres – four owners and an apprentice.  We bought our land two years ago, and we started our project in earnest this February.  We continue to improve new areas for planting.  We are currently growing produce on 1/4 of an acre.  Goats and pigs and chicken occupy another 1/4 acre.

We grow food for ourselves and the surrounding communities.  We do not ship to faraway places.

We live pretty simple lifestyles away from television, mass marketed products and wholesale appeal.  We feed ourselves with the food we grow as well as food we salvage from the trash.  We live apart from the mainstream and have no interest in it.  Email does not reach us at night or on the weekends, but we are available by phone if we can catch a signal.  However, we are not back-to-the-landers or hippies or gun nuts or dropouts.  We are idealistically anarchist, radical, punk  Do-It-Yourselfers interested in promoting systems and ways of life free from hierarchy and experts.

We consider ourselves an educational place rather than a farm, which is why we have omitted the word “farm” from our name.  We are educating ourselves on the diversity of tactics of sustaining ourselves and our neighbors.

We are guerrilla agrarians in the information age.

Oh, and I have never danced until dawn.  They totally made that up…

This first photo is from just after I bushhogged the area last Winter:

Then we get on the building of hugelkultur beds.  You can see the lean-to shed in the background for reference:

Present day (well, two weeks ago) – the potatoes are towering in the hugelkultur beds.

When the next photo comes out it will be off harvested potatoes and the planting of a fall crop.

I have been a strong proponent of the young agrarian movement, writing essays, giving interviews, taking photographs. The Crop Mob is the physical realization of all those words and images, the sinew, muscle and breath behind the imagination.

With the Crop Mob there exists the possibility of something beyond what we usually perceive of as farming.

The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like it.

The Crop Mob is unstoppable, yet flawed on some levels.  Reciprocity from the farmers we have helped is greatly lacking.  We are all busy, yes, but if we are to keep donating our labor, the labor pool must continue to snowball and include previous beneficiaries of that labor.  On that end we can improve our pitch, farms can understand better what they are getting and everyone involved can get what they need out of the day.

We are not unskilled; we bring decades of combined experience in dozens of areas – bed building, fencing, transplanting, harvesting, permaculture, food/farm activism, media outreach – so we are capable of making substantial impacts in a handful of hours.

Where to from here?  The next step may be to franchise the idea or mutate it or trim it down or use it differently.  In the meantime we will continue to do what we have been doing – showing up and getting shit done.

We (Danielle, Gray, Kristin, Noel and Trace) at Circle Acres farm are planning a work weekend for May 22nd-24th.  We are also calling out for a Crop Mob on Sunday the 24th from 10-3.

We have plenty of camping space available for both Friday and Saturday nights.  Parking at the farm is interesting, so please fill vehicles to the max…

Here are some of the things we might get into -

- sheet mulching “lumps” for the pumpkin patch
- removal of privet and bio-char demonstration
- building sheet mulch beds
- prepping land for a living fence
- untangling and testing used drip tape
- plugging mushroom logs
- pulling new electrical wire in the house
- ripping out plumbing
- digging a gray water trench
- building a solar shower
- playing around with cob mixtures

For food, please bring snacks, drinks and whatever you think you might want to have on hand for the weekend.  We will cook for the Saturday dinner and Sunday Crop Mob lunch; we’ll do our best to provide for other meals, but any help is appreciated.

Please RSVP as soon as you can and let us know what days you will be at the farm.  Also let us know if you have any special needs, dietary or otherwise.

One last note – please leave your dogs at home.

Floretta had her baby, Madeline, a few weeks ago.  Madeline is growing her horns and is old enough to be separated from mom for the night.  That means milk in the morning for the human animals on the farm.

The milking process starts out easy enough and gets progressively more interesting.  Especially when one of the morning helpers (me) does something dumb.  It goes something like this -

1 – Clean out the milk container and strainer.  A glug of bleach will do it.  Or a drop.  Or a quarter cup.  Or don’t worry about it.  Sources of information vary as with anything else you attempt to research on the Internets and apply to do-it-yourself type situations.

2 – Fill up the feed basket with corn, oats and hay.  Floretta really loves corn, so you have to hide it under the hay in order to slow her down.  That said, she knows where the corn is from the moment it leaves the bag and will be ready for it whenever you are.  And she’s feisty.

3 – Get Floretta onto the scrap wood milk stand.  Fairly self explanatory but not necessarily easy.

4 – Lock the head gate and get the feed bucket ready.  Floretta will want to get to the feed bucket before you are ready to give it to her no matter if she is attached to the head gate or not.  If an eye pops out just stick it back in and put bleach on it.  Or don’t.

5 – Lock in the feed bucket.  Watch your fingers.

6 – Start milking and hope Madeline keeps quiet…

7 – Trace has disturbed Madeline, so she is getting very loud, and Floretta is getting antsy, so Noel milk faster! before she kicks the damn bucket of milk over, oh come on be quiet Madeline, sorry just isn’t good enough Trace, you idiot!

It didn’t really go like that, but it felt like it to me.  Madi got very loud prompting Floretta to get agitated.  The milking was cut short during this little demonstration session.

8 – Madeline won’t shut up.  Reunite mom and kid before something breaks.

9 – Drink milk.  Try again in the morning.

The more I read about using pigs as tillers, the more I realize that they need to be in a smaller space for an extended period of time in order for the process to be effective.  I may start moving them around in fifty by fifty sections in the larger fenced area.  This will concentrate their rooting and digging efforts.

I’m thinking that if left in the large area, they will focus on the easy spots and basically defeat the purpose of having them on pasture.  They may just wait for me to come feed them, loaf off the rest of the time, occasionally digging up a worm here or there to satisfy some instinctual piece of evolutionary memory.

But maybe I’m wrong and the pigs know what they are doing.  I mean, they haven’t even been with us for a week, and I can already tell where they have been working.

Kristron – ‘We need to get out more.’

Me – ‘We are out more.  We’re all the way out back.’

Kristin moved up in November, easing the loneliness and becoming an inspiration to get some things done.  We split wood, carried cedar posts out of the forest and tried to get our little room in order.  That continues as Kristin builds kitchen cabinets from scratch.

A few weeks ago, Gray came to live with us.  Then Noel started living at the farm most of the time.  In a few days, Danielle will be here and the farm will have its full crew.

The animal workforce – in addition to the human mules – is trickling in to the farm.  A few weeks ago, Noel brought five barred rock chicks home.  Gray built them a small chicken sled, which is a variation of chicken tractor but without wheels.

We use our daylight free time to watch the chicks’ evolution from little puffballs into dirt scratching, bug eating, fertilization helpers.  Their first contribution to the farm is their crap, with eggs still months and months off.

Oh, and just so you know, the chicks are Bosco, Scritchy Scratch, Rufous Beaver, and Peachy Tips.  One remains unnamed, but Kristin wants to call it Mike Slaton.  I said it might be confusing when it comes time to put Mike Slaton in a roaster.  People might get the wrong idea about us if they overheard the conversation…

Speaking of Mike, he is hoping to raise up turkeys on some adjacent land:

If you are interested in having a delicious, pastured, naturally raised, Heritage breed turkey on your table for Thanksgiving this year please consider purchasing one from me.   Here is how we are going to do it:

In order to meet everyones’ demand for a turkey this year, a CSA type situation would work best.  In order to help me as a farmer with the initial costs, including buying the poults, feed, structural needs, etc.  These considerations and processes are starting now, because it can takes up to 7 months to raise Heritage breed turkeys to maturity.  If you are interested please let me know and we can discuss the CSA process (which will more than likely be an initial $25 payment up front, and the rest being paid upon pick up or delivery). Depending on your desired weight, etc.

As of right now the breeds I am highly considering are:

Bourbon Reds (Originally bred in Bourbon County, KY. Bluegrass region in the late 1800′s)
Narragansett (Brought to America by English and European colonists in the 1600′s)
Black Spanish (Originated in Europe as a direct descendent of the Mexican turkeys carried home with explorers in the 1500′s)

Each of these varieties size up to be beautiful, heavy breasted table birds with a very rich flavor.  Your interest and support in this venture will be helping to promote raising livestock sustainably, on pasture, just the way they were meant to be.  While also supporting locally, environmentally responsible young farmers!  Please feel encouraged to contact me with any questions about this CSA program, Heritage breeds, etc…

Mike Slaton – Sustainable Farmer – Pittsboro, NC

Last Sunday I helped Gray put in the last row of posts for the new goat fence.  Floretta the goat arrived Sunday night, but the fence wasn’t finished for her arrival.  It still isn’t…

Floretta is getting into her new surroundings and her new collar, eating up the tall grass and pine saplings.

She is also getting used to the dogs, which she has headbutted a few times.  The dogs got the message…

With the beauty of the snow in NC comes the problem of clearing it from the roads and the ridiculous frenzy and panic of the local population.  Just the threat of snow is enough to close all schools and most businesses.  Bread and milk flies off the store shelves, people forget how to drive and banks close their doors.  It took me three days to make a deposit at the local bank branch; even the day of the deposit had a delayed opening.

Snow plows are in very short supply around here, and it can take a day just to clear a major highway.  We live on a side road off another side road off yet another side road and then down a dirt road, which basically means that we never see the snow plow anywhere near our home.

It is nothing like New York where the plows come fast and often, their sounds destroying the quiet of night.  I wrote about the plows in Quitter #5.  Here is a taste -

Oh, How Long December…
During a snow storm, the plows mostly come at night.  In the sturdy, hoary months of childhood in Western New York, I would lay awake listening as the distant scraping of the plow brushed its steel blades over the roughly poured asphalt.  In the dry winter air, the low hum could be heard for miles, the flashing orange roof lights of the plow radiating off the lumbering snowflakes, themselves moving unpredictably towards any available surface, wrestling the wind’s vacillating directions.

First the plow would pass to the south of our house, down the thin Barville Road, then up North Byron Road and finally across our unmarked, no-shoulder road.  As the sound grew closer I would pull my face up to the window, watching the coming lights reflect off every available inch of ground, the thick cover of flurries yielding very little until the massive vehicle was right in front of my eyes.  A wave of snow and rock passed over the giant chisel, driven by a mass of grinding metal and boiling oil, echoing brutal noises off the aluminum siding of the house.  The sound and lights would fade as the driver made way through the expansive grid of rurality, on and on towards the gawking of other children unable to sleep.

***************

In Chatham County we are blessed with the ability to grow food all year round.  With this blessing comes the curse of trying to fool the natural cycles either through the creative use of energy (wood stove in the greenhouse) or by the less intensive means of row covers and low tunnels.

Yesterday’s snow meant that the folks at Piedmont Biofarm had to battle the flakes in order to keep their crops alive.  I found farmer Doug Jones busy in the storm sweeping off his row covers with a push broom.

Even he had to admit that it was a losing battle.  A day later, he and a few of his interns finished the work, clearing the snow and ice by hand.

***************

Yesterday ended up being a half day of work for myself and Kristin.  The first snow at the farm was an event for me even though snow and cold and ice is basically in my blood.  I haven’t studied an icicle in years.  The icicle is an indication of poor roofing and a lack of insulation, but let’s leave all that for the adults to think about…

One thing you don’t usually see is a Magnolia grandiflora full of snow.  The evergreen leaves stand out during the brown of our short Winter, but they really stand out against the cold white of an even shorter and rarer snow fall.

And what would the short work day be without a little snow fight action?

We threw snowballs at each other and at 80 (our doggie).  But she was busy with work most of the afternoon, and could barely be bothered to play along.

Her “work” mostly consists of chasing mice in the back field and running around like a crazy person.

This work keeps her occupied and healthy, alert and slim.  It is almost a script – the mice run; she follows their scent, bouncing from grass clump to tree stump, digging up rocks and fallen branches all day long.  The mice run some more.  Repeat.

80 doesn’t really come off as a killer.  Now I’m starting to think that I should be cheering her on.  After all, with a depleted mouse population, we may be able to lower the tick infestation in the Spring.  Mouse blood is the gateway drug for young ticks.  Damn delinquents…

After she caught the mouse (the first one I ever saw her catch), I basically took it away from her.  Later on in the evening I thought that it probably would be best if she had been allowed to eat her catch.  We live in the middle of nowhere, so these field mice are not eating poison.  Kind of a waste of protein.

From now on at Circle Acres, the number one rule for all of us is “You eat what you kill.”