I am having trouble wrapping my head around this weather. My berry bushes are in full leaf with buds, my garden is rife with weeds, and it's been hot. It feels more like mid June than mid April! But, what can't be changed must be endured (or enjoyed, in this case).
Seriously. This one has to cross the road to get to her pond around which a secret nest has been hidden. This one just hangs out on the road: It's kind of funny and then kind of not, when you consider I just took a duck over the burial spot after being hit by a car.
Why not just keep them home? Great idea - please send me a note and tell me how you would do that. When we clip the muscovy wings, we find they're predator bait. And cats... yes, mine are outside cats because their job is to deal with the mice around the shieling. Also - yes, I get to live here. Swoon. So, we live in a world where busy-ness is a normal way of life and exhaustion, its partner. I've seen a lot of "recover from exhaustion" posts but not many of them apply to parents (especially single parents) or even people with other day to day obligations. So, here are a few tips to help you feel less exhausted and more grounded without telling you to quit your job, take a day of silent, private, contemplation, or other thing many of us really can't do.
1) Take your shoes off. Ideally, you'll read this in warm and not too wet weather and you'll take your shoes off outside and walk barefoot in some grass, or a garden, or somewhere that you can really feel the earth. Are you parenting/caregiving? If so, take the people you care for to walk in the grass with you. If you can't get outside, grab a small towel and a straight backed chair. Put the towel on the floor by your feet and using only your toes, scrunch the towel up, moving it along until you've worked the towel all of the way along to the end. I learned about this from my cousin, the Cranky Daoist (also a professor of Traditional Chinese Medicine) and it works like a charm. He uses it to deal with jet lag. I'm finding it works well with life lag. My instructions make no sense at all? Well thank Dogs for the internet. Here's a video on You Tube that shows a demonstration. Can't do that? Try this next one. 2) Make yourself a cup of tea, hot chocolate, coffee, warm milk, hot water and lemon, anything you find comforting (ordinarily). When the beverage is the right temperature - not cool but not hot enough to scald you - take a sip and don't swallow. Instead, close your eyes. Take a moment to savour the flavour and identify it. Is it rich? Sweet? Bitter? Astringent? Soothing? Alert-inducing? What does it make you think of/remind you of? Swallow it and take another drink. Go deeper into it. What do you taste? What good memories come up? Bad memories? No room for them, just the good and savouring ones. One more sip and just totally savour it. 3) Shower. I know this is a difficult one for a parent, especially a single parent. If you don't have a daycare option, see if you can trade with a friend to watch your kid(s) and then you'll watch theirs. You only need about 15 minutes, though you'll likely want more. I just did this one so I'm intimately acquainted with it. It's shocking and rejuvenating and I think you might know where I'm headed. Yep, cold shower. Sometimes I like to have cold and then warm, sometimes, like today, I need the shocking, liberating, freeing effect of all cold. Sometimes I do cold, warm, then cold, it all depends on the day and my mood and all of those variables. Whatever your mood and where ever you want to place the cold, let it shock the bad, blah, dark, angry, whatever is holding you back, right out of you. Let it shock it out and carry it off. It can be returned to the earth and recycled. If you need soothing, you can follow it up with a hot shower but sometimes it's best to just hop out of the shower right after and leave all of the gik (yeah, you read that right) behind. 4) Another recycling option- find a place in nature. Ideally it will be a quiet, private place where you can be alone (I'm giggling a bit remembering how easy that would have been with a four year old). It's ok with you can't be alone - you can teach this one to your kids. Lean against a tree or, if you have no trees around, be close to plants or growing things. You must be in contact with something natural for this to work and while trees work best, it doesn't have to be a tree. Make contact with the earth - with your feet, sitting, or even laying on the earth. Imagine there is a conduit running from your spinal column into the earth and everything bad, yucky, or negative is going through you and into the earth for recycling. Be there for as long as it takes to feel cleansed, or until someone needs a snack/potty/ other demand and you have to get up. Teach your kids to do this too. Let the earth take all of the stress and troubles and cares. You still have to deal with your day to day life but the earth can take some of the stress from them. 5) Plant something you can eat. You might not have money, time, or space for a garden or even a packet of seeds. Most food banks, permaculture centres/programmes, etc. can help get you started, often at no charge. All you need is a pot and something like calendula seeds or nasturtium seeds. Not only are these edible (so safe for small people) they'll absolutely brighten up your life and are pretty fool proof. Seeds+dirt+ water = sprouts. A bit of sunlight= growth and blooming. They're low maintenance. You'll be amazed at how they brighten things up. 6) Forage something yummy. There are few things more fun (for me, but maybe because I'm weird?) than getting some food for free. This is also an adventure you can take your kids on but make sure, before you eat anything or feed it to anyone else, that you really have what you think you have. Some things, like Hawthorn berries or Rowan berries don't taste like much but make good liqueurs. Other things, like lambs lettuce, can be steamed or sautéed to eat - find a reputable foraging site and get hunting! Here are a few I love (in no particular order): http://www.urbanoutdoorskills.com/ http://www.christophernyerges.com/ http://www.urbanhuntress.com/ http://outdoorselfreliance.com/ http://www.selfsufficientish.com/main/ http://www.eatweeds.co.uk/ http://nordicfoodlab.org/ So, that's a decent smattering from the northern hemisphere. I know there are others and please do send them to me if you'd like them included. That concludes your six tips to help get you back online when things are feeling off. They shouldn't cost you anything, can mostly be done if you're caregiving, and don't require too much effort. Happy doing. Once upon a time, I was a strict vegan. Like super strict, checking if there is milk protein extract in the salad dressing I was buying (yes, ironically I was buying something so easy to make). That lasted for a couple of years. And then, for a much longer time, I was vegetarian. I found veganism too difficult and too full of garbage, to be honest. I bought a lot of packaged things then and just didn’t like all of the garbage I was generating. Yes, you can do it with little garbage. I didn’t know how then. I was also a full time student who was also working. And I got tired of beans. Anyway, I’m vegetarian and mostly vegan when I’m eating in a restaurant. I don’t aim to alienate those hosting me when I’m eating at someone’s house so I pretty much eat whatever’s on offer. A compromising of my principles? I suppose. I suspect though, if more people ate the way my family does the fast food industry would largely be out of business and farmers wouldn’t be cramming as many cows as they can into feedlots to maximize sales. Oh, and we eat a lot of the undesirable bits. Not the offal - yet - but the tough cuts that no one wants. I have learned to braise in the past few years and there is nothing like those tough, undesirable cuts after cooking low and slow for 8 hours. The other cuts just don’t have the same flavour or ooomph! I was talking with a beef/cow farmer about the flavour of meat and how that’s gone out of our cooking. The first flavour should be the cow or the pig or the chicken - the marinade, the braise, the sauce, the gravy should enhance that flavour. That was the biggest shock to me when I switched from grocery store meat to growing my own. There was a flavour that I just couldn’t believe. Anyway, at some point I’ll explain why I’m no longer vegan and why I think veganism (and definitely vegetarianism) is (generally) just as hard on animals as factory farming but for now, here’s what’s on for tonight. So, I've started with an assortment of ribs. There are both beef and pork, short ribs, back ribs, side ribs, and even some riblets. To these I have added brown sugar and three onions, chopped. And then things start to go a little crazy... In here I've got homemade ketchup to which I've added a small jar of homemade hotsauce and one of homemade beer mustard (yes, I am that person). In goes red wine (lots) and apple cider vinegar. That sauce is added AFTER I sprinkle the ribs with italian seasoning, cracked black pepper, cracked whole allspice, smoked paprika, chili, and Himalayan Pink salt. Oh. And a whole head (yes, head, not clove) of the best garlic ever from the Dirty Hoe Gastro Farm. Where is the meat from you ask? A friend and I bought a couple of weaner pigs (not weiner pigs) from Karma Creek Farm/ Root and Vine Acres (so delicious). They were raised up at her house and butchered for us. The cow was raised by another friend.
So, to this deliciousness more wine and some water were added. In the dutch oven, I added Worchestershire but none to the flat pan. I don't make that and I wondered how much of a difference it makes. We shall see. The shallow pan was covered with foil, the lid placed on the huge dutch oven and into a 250* oven they went. Yes, 250*F. They cooked low and slow for about an hour and then it was raised up to 275* where they will braise until about 5:45, or just before our friends show up to share this feast with us. This will be our 12th (I think) Spring in this house and it’s the first one where we won’t have any babies. It’s a strange thing to wrap my head around. From the first year in this house where a puppy literally wandered out of the forest to ducklings, goslings, chicks, lambs,and kids, there have been babies of one kind or another. And this year, none (unless a hen or duck on a secret nest surprises us). I have to say I’m mixed on the whole thing. On the one hand, the reduction in stress and worry and busy-ness is a great thing. Chores are simple and haven’t changed. No specialized foods needed. I don’t need to sleep with one ear and one eye open in case babies arrive on the same day as snow. On the other hand, those long nights and early mornings have fond memories for me. The time we watched from our bedroom window with our then little son as one of our ewes gave birth to twins (one of whom would become a bottle baby affectionately referred to as Super Lamb). Here is a pic with her and Paks (our Pyr, also gone) found online (my photos of them are archived) J and I watched a goodly amount of BSG while either waiting for labouring ewes or keeping ridiculously late hours because what’s the point of going to bed when you’re getting up in two hours to bottle feed anyway? of course there comes a point when you have to call it and just go to bed, with your phone tucked under your pillow so the alarm wakes you without waking everyone else. Or last year when the boys were away from home during kidding and my poor, cold Gita had to come in the house to warm up. It was just her and I and the dog. She tipped the scales at just over a pound when she was born so, I would bring her in every two hours, after being nursed, so as not to inadvertently weaken her or interfere with the bonding process. I think it was the goats that did me in this year. To lose two brothers, one at three months old and the other at seven months , and not know why. They were healthy enough at birth but Freyr went downhill quickly. Bern not as fast but he died late on New Year’s Day this year. Rough start to the year. With their deaths and the accompanying unanswered questions, in spite of the investigations that were done, I decided that I wouldn’t be doing any breeding this year and paired my livestock right down.
Now we have three goats, chickens, and ducks. That’s it. And while it’s meant a reduction in stress and work, it’s also reduced other things. No more waking up with all of the anticipation of a kid at Christmas, looking outside to see if babies arrived in the night, no lamb Olympics around the house, no fresh milk, no peepers hopping on your hand and pecking a bit of food out of it (ok, that still happens but the chickens are no longer small and cute when they do it). It’s a well needed break but a trade off too. I suppose that’s smallholding in a nutshell. It’s rarely easy, it’s exhausting, and so full of emotion. But it’s real. It’s a kind of reality you cannot experience in any other way. I think that’s part of what makes the joys so full and the lows so deep. It’s a tough one to explain to people who either aren’t doing it or who don’t get it, especially when you work outside of the home in addition to keeping a smallholding. Why on earth would you want to deal with kidding or lambing and still have to be at work at 8:30 the next morning? I don’t know that there is a way to put that feeling into words. I suppose for those of us inclined to it, the nearest thing would be to call it a vocation, a calling. There are just some things that you do that aren’t about how much money you make or making your life easier, they’re just what has to be. For me, smallholding is very much like that. What's not to celebrate? The sun is out, the hens are laying, and we have sprouts popping up daily. The most recent: Broccoli!
I am so excited. A bit nervous too, if I'm being honest. I have a lot of flats popping up with seedlings. Good thing I have gardeny friends who might want to share the bounty! Those of you who are gardeners already know what this really means. It's exciting and lovely and so wonderful. It also means we're going to be eating a lot of greens (and peas) very soon. The first few salads are going to be wonderful and then....
So, some of these ideas weren't right up my alley but this one seemed worth trying.
It's garden season everyone! |
AuthorI'm a 40-something writer and smallholder living in the wilds of BC with my family, our small herd of Nigerian Dwarf Goats, chickens, ducks, dogs, and cats. Archives
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