It's harvest time. I left the garlic in too long this year. I did a better job with not watering as they were hardening off but left them in about a fortnight too long. This resulted in a lovely treasure hunt but I think I got most of them. This was a wee portion of the harvest - such fun. I'd just been away for a week at a Master Dyer's retreat (more on that later) and worried about all of my crops with the encroaching cold, especially this little beauty: I'm so excited to have a fair few proper squashes and really hope I'm able to get them to ripen. The weather has warmed a little again so... fingers crossed. Next year, tomatoes and squashes and the like are going in about a month earlier and going to be covered at the start of the season as well. Will it help? Who knows but it will be a worthy experiment. In other news... later, I think actually. I have so much going on and so many announcements but they'll have to wait. Sorry folks, there are no babies for sale at this time. Thanks to everyone who's messaged me with requests. I don't think we're going to be breeding next year. If you're still looking, do drop me a line and I'll send you in the direction of some great goat producers. Well, in spite of my best efforts, I've given in to my habit. And yes, another goat came home. He's just young but shows great promise. He comes out of spectacular dairy and temperament bloodlines, and we love him already.
I cannot wait to see his babies! I have so appreciated the notes sent through the contact us page but there are two themes emerging that I would like to address. Conveniently, they relate to each other. The first is: I think you're advocating for simpler, sustainble living but it's such hard work. The answer is: yes, it is. I am so tired of blogs and webpages that promote this lifestyle as a "grow the flour to have your cake and eat it too" kind of lifestyle. It's just not that. What's happening because so many resources are making it look simple is people jump in with both feet and not looking, buy goats, and chickens, and land with the plan to live off it. That's great, if it works. More and more and more people I know are doing this rapid fire downshift in an upsizing way and it's actually hurting them. I think it's got some big implications for the planet as well, and I know it's got implications for the animals they're purchasing. So yes, this lifestyle is hard work. You have to be up to feed goats whether or not you feel like, chickens also need to be fed, coops need to be cleaned, gardens weeded. It really doesn't stop. For some of us, it's like a vocation. It's not that we walk around the farm with our halo firmly intact, we bitch and moan and grumble but if you've drunk the Kool Aid (as it were) chores aren't 'Chores'. I think the work aspect is the thing that people comment on the most - that and the cuteness of the goats. It's like somehow they think I don't know this is hard work. The hardness of it is also the thing I have started commenting on the most too. It's not that I want to discourage people because I think if we all adopted a bit of this lifestyle, we could manage a lot of change; it's just that I think the repercussions of people leaping in are too high. I used to tell people about the jobs - like kidding/lambing season where you wake up and there are babies running around playing. I didn’t really get into the three sleepless weeks when I still had to parent and go to work and be able to make good decisions. I also didn’t tell them about the heart ache of losing babies, especially when you think maybe it was something that could have been prevented if you’d just… I didn’t tell them about the times when your whole family is down with the pukey flu and you still have to drag your butt out of bed to feed and secure animals. Or the ‘OMG, how I am paying for this vet bill. Thank Dog I still have an ‘off the farm’ job’ moments. Or the nights when a cougar steals one of your goats because you forgot you no longer have a Pyr to keep them safe so you don’t lock them up… and you’re supposed to be travelling an hour and a half away to a family birthday supper. Your Reluctant Goatherd spends the day building building building and when you all get home, at midnight, he’s building, building, building some more. Or when you’re running late to get to work and fling open the door to the coop only to find that the reason your dog kept you up with barking (that you wished would stop but instead of letting him out to do his work, you kept telling him to shut up and went back to sleep because you were so tired) was because a bob cat managed to sneak into a hole in the coop and have a duck party. Now you have about a dozen dead and dying ducks, as well as a few chickens to deal with. And you were already running late. So, your teen aged son deals with the euthanasia while you finish sobbing/getting ready for work. And then your husband is home that night when it manages to be both wet and -20*C and is redoing the soffits (or facia, I never know) of the coop so there will be no more bobcat predation. On when you’ve just rung in New Years with friends and family and you spend the next evening trying to keep a dying goat alive. And then you spend the next day packaging up the body to send to the Provincial et because no one can figure out why he (or his brother) died but sister is fine. It’s not that I want to talk you off this path, if I did, I wouldn’t bother with this blog. It’s just that while the Lamb Olympics and Gambolling Goats and Cute Chicks are such a a wonderful reality, so are these things. And these are the things that seem to catch people by surprise. That and the hauling of hay (and water, unless you’re super fancy which I am not) and so on and so on.
I think those of us who write about and advocate for this style of living are partly to blame. We’ve sheltered far too many of you from the flip side of it all because we were SO EXCITED and SO COMMITTED but it’s not the right way to go about it. When I read articles like this one I am seriously surprised. You were shocked that doing things you've previously outsourced would take time and effort? Really? There is a reason that the whole agrofood complex has been able to suck most of us in. Because growing and preserving your own food is damn hard work. But the pay offs are huge too and every time I think I’m going to throw in the towel (and my husband starts doing the happy dance -he tries not too but…) I just can’t. That leads me to the second theme emerging from the “contact us” notes. How do you do it? Where do I start? What do I do? I do not recommend that you read a few books or blogs and go from an urban environment never having raised your own food in any real way to opt out and come to a rural area to "live off the land". Can it be done? I think it could but not by just anyone. I have had more phone calls and emails over the years from people who did just that and couldn't I take their goats/chickens/ducks/rabbits/cows/whatever because it turns out you need money to live (especially if you've made no changes to your lifestyle) and animals really get in the way of taking holidays and and and. I don’t recommend starting off with chickens or goats or livestock guardian dogs or any of those other things that can seem like a super cute and awesome idea (and it is) until you’re stuck with the reality. I do recommend that you give some thought to what is drawing you to the lifestyle and work back from there but start off small. Maybe start off making your own jam one year and maybe plant a very small garden with stuff you would like (like a salad pot with greens and cherry tomatoes). Make your own laundry soap (yep, instructions to follow), just start cooking a meal entirely from scratch one or two nights per week. There are so many ways to get started and I hope you do it in a way that works for you. It’s no good to try to be sustainable in a way that’s not sustainable for you. 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. |
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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