Aunt Hennie's Fruit Cake

This morning I laid down the fruit cakes.

Let me explain…

Most all of us have family traditions with roots back to our childhood. Sure, they can be quirky and idiosyncratic, but cherished nonetheless. One of the ones that bubbled up for me recently was homemade fruit cake—far better than store-bought—which was deemed an essential contribution to the Schaub family Christmas hoopla. lovingly assembled by my Mom's older sister, Aunt Hennie.

As it happens, Hennie and I share a birthday (a sure omen of astral connection). She was born in a two-story frame house built on the open prairie 20 miles west of Chicago in 1899 and lived a homesteading life growing up. Over the years, of course, the inexorable march of the suburbs gradually overtook her and today the house—which still stands—is located smack in the middle of an established residential neighborhood in Elmhurst Il. 

As the acorn that wandered furthest from my suburban upbringing, I helped start Sandhill Farm  a homesteading community in northeast Missouri when I was just a callow youth of 24. One serendipitous result of that was that I was the beneficiary of much homesteading equipment that had been languishing in Hennie's basement, looking for a good home. I'm talking about a major league cabbage shredder (think sauerkraut in quantity), a bunch of ceramic crocks, a start of hard-to-find black currant cuttings, and a massive wooden butcher block contributed by my mother. 

In any event, Hennie got along in years (it's a trend, I've noticed) and at some point she was no longer able to deliver the fruit cakes. I believe that ended in the 80s, but the memory persists and she passed along the recipe. Once or twice my sister Tracey had a go at it, and another time my daughter Jo did a batch. This fall, in the Year of Quarantine, I decided it was my turn in the barrel and I took advantage of my weekly trips to Mayo Clinic (in Sept and Oct) to lay in a supply of dried fruit and nuts.

Not finding a ready source of dried orange and lemon peel, I made my own (isn't that what homesteaders do?). I chopped and combined all the fruit, nuts, and spices in late October and the sticky conglomeration all went into an airtight container where it marinated in a sacred concoction of brandy and whiskey. This got carefully stirred and replenished from time to time until yesterday, when it the baking happened!

This entailed creaming sugar and butter until my arm cramped, adding the fruit, and finally some. flour before pouring it all into tins (think banana bread size) and slowly baking for a couple hours.

They turned out beautifully and I'm now in the finally stage. This morning I took the cooled down cakes (there are four) and wrapped them in brandy-soaked cotton cloth (did you notice the alcohol theme?) and then in tin foil to retard evaporation of the precious liquor. They now rest on the basement floor in an airtight container for two weeks of seasoning. They'll be ready Dec 17—just in time to be mailed to my kids for a renewed under-the-tree tradition.

What could be a more loving gift?

A Day in the Life

One of the ironies of living the simple country life—by which I mean an intentionally low-consumption lifestyle that's agrarian based—is that most days are anything but simple. In fact, as a homesteader, community networker, process consultant, and husband (to a wife who lives three miles away and is recovering from Lyme disease), most days are a complex choreography.

Every now and then I have a day where the gear changes are especially nuanced. Yesterday, for example, I rotated through all my hats, some more than once...

o  Right after an eye-opening cup of coffee, I started laundry so that I'd have a clean tablecloth for the Historic Folklife Festival in Hannibal MO this weekend, plus a clean fair shirt that has special meaning for me. This particular shirt was custom made for me by Jules, an ex-partner from 20 years ago, when she lived at Sandhill. The shirt is now frayed a little at the cuffs, but it's still my fair shirt and can't imagine wearing anything else when standing behind our product table.

o  While the laundry whirled, I made a small batch (six jars) of red horseradish, by adding pickled beets to regular horseradish and whooshing it through the Robot Coupe. We'd sold out last weekend in Lawrence and I knew there'd be customers looking for our distinctive red variety in Hannibal. While we'll sell out the first day, at least the early birds will get some and it will set up a great quip for those who ask for it too late: "There are only two kinds of people," I'll deadpan, "the quick and not red."

o  Next I began cleaning the floor in our food processing kitchen (which is also where the laundry machine resides). Our annual organic inspection is coming up this weekend and I agreed to hand scrub the floor—which hadn't been done in many months and had an incredible build up of gunk and food detritus. For some reason, over the years I've gravitated to cleaning floors as a specialty and the community was grateful for my offer at last Thursday's community meeting to tackle this odious job.

o  As I was the cook Thursday night, I was also responsible for Friday's lunch. Thus, I took a break from doing the floor to get the leftovers from the Indian dish I'd prepared into our solar oven, so that the morning sun could be heating it up while I cleaned the Augean stables kitchen floor.

Fortunately, I finished with the floor 15 minutes before noon. That left me with just enough time to empty the dish rack, put out lunch, and clean up the residual breakfast dishes. Whew.

o  After cleaning up the lunch dishes I went down to the FIC Office (a funky 12x60 '70s-era house trailer) and did an office shift for Jacob, who's on his honeymoon. This entailed fulfilling web orders for our publications, followed by a stint screening over 160 records of people (or groups) whose annual membership will be expiring in the next 60 days. Major supporters—anyone whose given $100 or more at one time in the past five years—are singled out for special treatment. While the letters won't go out until next week, I did the culling Friday.

o  Then it was time to take the laundry off the line and start packing the pickup with product for the trip to Hannibal. That took a couple hours, and I was pleased to finish before dinner (by 15 minutes).

o   It was good to sit down for a bit and pore over the email that had accumulated during the day. While it didn't take long to delete the spam, there were a number of important exchanges I needed to handle before the weekend, including:
—Discussing with FIC's webmaster the importance of coordinating databases with the work being done in Europe by the Global Ecovillage Network. The goal is to make it possible for a community to create one listing that can be used by both groups. The problem is that GEN's database has been created using Drupal and ours uses Word Press. So getting the databases to play nicely together may take some doing.
—Getting the green light from the Ecovillage Network of the Americas Task Force charged with creating a sub-network that focuses on the English and French-speaking countries of North America (essentially the US and Canada) to consider combining efforts with FIC. This is a big deal and I made sure to notify the Board right away. (For more on this see my blog of Sept 16, Cooperation Among Cooperators.)
—Agreeing on a date to conduct a public get-together in Portland OR next month, to generate interest in the capital campaign to raise money for Dancing Rabbit's Green Community Center, which will include office space for FIC (replacing the aforementioned trailer).
—Buying a plane ticket to get to Las Vegas to see me daughter (Jo) and son-in-law (Peter), once I had the fundraising date in Portland settled.
—Giving date guidance for a church in Columbia MO that wants to hire me to work with the congregation on dealing constructively with conflict. They're leaning toward a Sunday in March, but three of the five are already spoken for. I book on a first-come-first-served basis and they're losing wiggle room by proceeding so deliberately.
—Coordinating with McCune in the FIC's Virginia Office about what days I'll be in the Missouri Office to field the web orders he sends my way.
—Responding to an inquiry from an old friend and community veteran in Wisconsin who's considering sponsoring the winter 2014 issue of Communities magazine, with a special focus on sustainability.

o  After roaring through my email, I slurped down two bowls of borscht (featuring a great crop of fall beets and some of the venison we harvested last November) and then jumped into the shower.

o  All clean, I headed over to Dancing Rabbit in the packed pickup, to spend the night with Ma'ikwe—who is not just of the fair sex, she's my fair partner as well—so that we could get an early start this morning for the 75-mile drive to Hannibal.

o  It was a pleasure to sit down in a easy chair next to a wood fire in Ma'ikwe's living and simply relax. After a bit of yakking, I made a cup of tea, shelled some pistachios, and we made a serious dent in a New York Times Sunday crossword. Partway through, Ma'ikwe's son, Jibran, stopped in our bedroom to relate how his day had gone, which also featured some careful scheduling. It was enjoyable to see him get excited, as a 16 year old, developing self-discipline about how he uses his time. It's a life skill he'll never regret.

o  When Ma'ikwe cashed in (circa 9 pm) I lingered near the wood stove for another 90 minutes and banged out this blog entry (since I knew I wouldn't have time today).

• • •

Thus, I went from homesteader, to FIC Office worker, to fair honcho, to community networker (with a dab of logistical work for process consulting, public speaking, and travel arrangements), to husband, to writer.

Though a bit schizophrenic at times, it's my life and I enjoy the dance.

Water!

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

—from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Coleridge (1798)

It was a rainy winter morning in northeast Missouri today. With outdoor temperatures in the 40s, it was lovely sitting snug inside, next to the wood stove at Moon Lodge—Ma'ikwe's house at Dancing Rabbit—drinking coffee, and visiting with Ma'ikwe's brother, Mark, who's visiting from Fennville MI for three days. 

 

I was reminded of Coleridge this morning because outside there was water running everywhere, and inside there was none. Though Ma'ikwe has been living at Moon Lodge since Halloween 2009, all the water in the house has been hauled in buckets and jugs (in a stretch, you could say we regularly run to get it, but it's really more like walking).

 

Today, however, all that changed. Ma'ikwe, Mark, and I conspired to devote the last three days to eliminating the final barriers standing in the way of being able to manifest running water when you turn the faucet at the kitchen sink. The picture tells it all.

Ma'ikwe and I think of it as an early Xmas present to ourselves. While there's still tile work to complete the work surface and back splash around the kitchen sink (which means we'll have to disconnect the water and pull the sink), that's not very difficult. With any luck, we'll have that wrapped up before it's time to plant broccoli seedlings (in February).

There remains plenty of work in the bathroom, too, where there will be both a sink and and a shower, but enthusiasm for completing the bathroom (more tile work) is tempered by the fact that running hot water is still two-plus years down the road, requiring the construction of an additional building. While cold showers may be fine if you're a teenage boy, or in the navy, it takes a very warm day to choose that experience over a shower where you can mix hot with the cold.

 

Here's why the hot water tortoise is going to be so far behind the haring cold. Ma'ikwe shares with neighbors Bear & Alyssa a plot of land (called a "warren" in DR argot, extending the rabbit theme) that they lease from the community. Both have homes on the warren and both are designed to be principally heated with hydronics—radiant floor heating. As it's cheaper (and more communitarian) to share utilities, they've conceived of building a separate Power House on the warren that will include:

o  A wood-fired boiler to supply hot water both for domestic use and for the hydronic systems.

o  The batteries and master panel for their solar photovoltaic power system.

o  A washing machine.

o  A small rental housing unit, the income from which will cover their warren fees. As the ecovillage is growing at a steady clip, housing is always at a premium and they anticipate an easy time finding renters.

The main drawback to this plan is that they don't expect Power House construction to start sooner than 2014. Of course, the good side of such incremental improvements is that they get to savor each one as it comes along. (Think of how many people miss the chance for that particular pleasure by moving into a house that's completed built!)

As the electrician on the team, it was a somewhat embarrassing and anticlimactic moment this afternoon when we finally had everything hooked up and I had everyone pause while I dramatically flipped the switch… and blew a breaker. Hmm. My nightmare thought (which flashed in my brain in a nanosecond) was that I'd failed to make a watertight connection when wiring the submersible pump and I was going that have to wade into four feet of 42-degree water to fish that sucker out. Ugh.

However, there were other things to try first, and my spirits were buoyed when I isolated the pump from the circuit via an outdoor cut-off switch, reset the breakers, and tried again—only to blew the breakers a second time. Aha! That meant the problem was before the pump, and by studying how I'd wired the pressure relief box I realized that I'd done it wrong. Whew. That was an easy fix, and after reconfiguring the wires, the next time we actually got water (and no blown breakers). Eureka!

Like many things in life, plumbing and electrical work are both quite easy when you do them right. The corollary to that adage is that plumbing and electrical work can be quote humbling when you mess them up. Today we got a bit of both. But the main thing we got today was running water.

A Day at Home

Today is exactly halfway between my birthday (Oct 25) and Christmas—which I've always considered auspicious (of course, May 25 is also halfway between those dates, but spring is too far removed from the holiday season to have the same gravitational pull on my psyche). Occasionally Thanksgiving falls on this date, which makes it extra special, but this year it's only one of the days in waiting as part of the long Thanksgiving Weekend. 

While many good citizens are out shopping this weekend, responding to the clarion call of Black Friday and the materialistic imperative, I'm enjoying a quiet weekend at home. I haven't left my zip code in three days! That's noteworthy in that my arrival home Thursday afternoon—just in time to make the prune stuffing and giblet gravy for the 5:30 feast—ended a 90-day stretch where I was only home 15 days.

As I lay in bed this morning thinking about what to write about, it occurred to me to simply describe what I'll do on my Sunday at home, as it does a fair job of capturing my exotic mix of homesteader, process consultant, partner, and network administrator…  

o  Butcher a Deer
Yesterday Mica & I started working up the four deer that had been shot during the hunting season and were hanging in our walk-in cooler, which represents the major portion of the community's meat supply for the coming year. Starting yesterday morning, we took our time with the first one, slowly reacquainting ourselves of deer anatomy. Once in the groove, we polished off two more by mid-afternoon, leaving the final one for today, when Cody, a nine-year-old neighbor from Dancing Rabbit, comes over for his first up-close-and-personal encounter with a deer carcass.

o  Decant Wine
Every year, the bulk of the community's black currant crop goes into homemade wine. Twenty pounds of fruit is enough for seven gallons, which is the size of our largest carboy. Often we harvest enough for two or more batches but the fruit set was poor this spring and there will only be one batch. Per usual, I started the wine right after the fruit was harvested in July and it's a tradition to bottle it (siphoning it from the secondary fermenter) Thanksgiving Weekend. Now's the time.
 
o  Scrub the Kitchen Floor
There are a bunch of chores on the farm that don't need to be done every day (there are also a bunch that do, but that's a different rhythm) and we divvy up most of them among the membership to see that they all get covered without anyone being asked to shoulder too much. One of my tasks in this regard is scrubbing the kitchen floor. 

While cooks are expected to sweep thoroughly at the end of their shift each day, it's a rear guard action where we're slowly losing ground to stray food scraps and feral dust bunnies that breed behind storage buckets and in the corners that escape the reach of the broom. In the end, there is nothing for up but to get down periodically on your hands and knees and push entropy back. Today's my day for that.

o  Do My Laundry
I'm between road trips (home Thursday and out again Monday) and aim to take advantage of a sunny forecast to sneak in a load of laundry to have clean clothes in hand (and on body) for when I board the train west tomorrow evening. Tomorrow there's a chance of snow flurries, so it's prudent to get it done today. As we rely on a clothes line for drying, you have to take what Nature gives you.

o  Fill the Back Porch with Firewood
We have four buildings with bedrooms at Sandhill and I live in the White House (the original farmhouse), which also has the community's kitchen and serves as Sandhill's nerve center. Our primary heat source for the White House is a reliable airtight wood stove that we've had for more than 35 years, and we stage about a week's worth of split and dry cord wood to fuel it in our back porch, just eight feet away. As the wood there gets used, we resupply it from an open-sided storage shed out back. It's timely to fill the porch today, ahead of tomorrow's snow flurries.

o  Write Text for a Capital Campaign
As FIC's main administrator, I'm also the main fund raiser. Our Board made a commitment last spring to building a new office, replacing a funky '70s era house trailer that has served us for the last 15 years. The new building will cost us $90,000 and we'll be trying to raise half of it through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that will launch Tuesday (if everything comes together in time). It's my job to write the text that will be posted on the campaign website, succinctly making the case for why this project is worthy of support.

o  Put Out Lunch
At Sandhill all the adults take turns cooking. Your shift starts in the afternoon and continues through lunch the next day. As I was the dinner cook yesterday, that means I'm responsible for lunch today. While this tends to be dinner revisited and no big deal, it nonetheless has a guaranteed slot on Laird's dance card today.

o  Listen to a Football Game
I'm a sport fan and enjoy following football, the NFL in particular. Having grown up in Chicago, I'm a Bears fan. They've stumbled the last two games against strong opponents and have fallen into a 7-3 first place division tie with the Green Bay Packers—their archrival. The Bears badly need to get back into the win column this afternoon against the Minnesota Vikings. Kick-off is at noon. 

o  Write a Blog Entry
I aspire to post something every three days, and I'm overdue…

o  Post a Homework Assignment
I conduct facilitation trainings around the country and in two weeks I'll be in Santa Cruz for Weekend VI of an eight-part training. The teaching theme will be Delegation and it's time to send out homework in advance of the class, to get the students thinking about the topic before I send them the handouts.
 
o  Complete My Report from Last Weekend
A week ago today I was up to my eyeballs working with Vashon Cohousing in Seattle, offering them my thinking (and skills) about how to handle conflict constructively. I worked with them three days, culminating in seven hours Sunday. For each client I have as a process consultant, I make a commitment to write a report afterwards providing an overview of what we did, what I observed, and what I recommend they think about. While I sketched out my report on the train ride home, I still have a chunk of work to wrap it up and send it off.

o  Eat Dinner with Ma'ikwe
My intention is to complete my chores at Sandhill this afternoon and sashay over to Dancing Rabbit in time to enjoy the late afternoon and evening with my wife. It's a priority to spend time with her when possible, and I'm leaving tomorrow for 16 days.

o  Take a Sauna 
I was first introduced to saunas as an eight-year-old, when I attended summer camp in northern Minnesota and I've always loved them. A silver lining to Ma'ikwe's battle with chronic Lyme disease is that her doctor urged her to get an infrared sauna as part of her treatment protocol (Lyme bacteria don't like the heat) and this summer she did. Ma'ikwe aspires to take two sauna sessions daily (30+ minutes each), and I can get in there with her if I'm around at the right time. This activity is all the more enjoyable now that the weather is turning cold. And besides, I like seeing my wife naked.

o  Play a Game with Jibran
My wife's son is 15 and we enjoy playing board games together. Sometime between the sauna and bedtime I'm hoping that we can connect for a game or two. It'll be the middle of December before we get the next chance and I'd rather not wait that long.

So that's my day this November 25.

It Droppeth as the Gentle Rain

It rained yesterday, and boy did we need it.

I doubt there's any natural phenomenon that encapsulates the essence of pure beneficence as much as a soaking rain to a farmer when you're dry. Though we only had a 20-30% chance of precipitation according to the US Weather Service, we hit the lottery late Friday afternoon when a couple of small storm cells wandered into northeast Missouri, dropping 1.3 inches of liquid salvation. Yeehah! 

It was the first significant rain we'd had in four weeks, which included a brutal stretch of record-breaking days of with triple-digit temperatures.

While the quality of mercy may or may not have been strained at Sandhill Farm the last month, our crops and our resilience sure were. When we are blessed by a good soaking in mid-July, several good things happen:

o  The temperature drops, and every living thing breathes easier.
o  It settles the interminable dust.
o  All the folks signed up to irrigate garden crops get a holiday.
o  The plants thirstily uptake the water and then transpire it back into the atmosphere, providing significant evaporative cooling for the next several days. (Yes, the humidity shoots up, but it's a good trade-off.)
o  In a few days we'll be able to effectively weed between the rows (with hoes) of our field crops; it's hard to kill weeds when you can't easily penetrate to the root layer in dry conditions.
o  The sorghum and soybeans will come out of stress and experience a growth spurt based on the water. (While we are committed to irrigating our gardens, the field crops are on their own and this rain will make a huge difference in crop yields come September.)

In short, we're way more than twice blessed.

People fret about how US culture will cope with diminishing oil supplies and I appreciate that it's a worry. But it's nothing compared with the challenge of living with uncertain water supplies. In our part of the Midwest the long-range global warming forecast is for hotter and drier conditions. There's absolutely no question that it's getting warmer (we've already been assigned a different agricultural zone based on steadily warmer temperatures the past few decades). As a working farm, our critical concern is whether we'll have enough water to grow food—first for ourselves, and then for our neighbors.

Historically our average annual rainfall is about 35 inches, which is plenty for good crops. What if we have to make do with half of that? Observing the trend toward less predictable weather, my community is questioning the extent to which we can count on "normal" weather. Recognizing how dependent we are on access to water, we're converting the roofs of all our major buildings to metal and planning to build large cisterns next to all of them. Over the course of the next decade we'll gradually increase our ability to impound potable water by 20,000 gallons or more—which may or may not be enough.

For all of the increased security that represents, however, I don't expect it to lessen by a single drop the joy I derive from a July rainstorm.

Easy as Pie

A few weeks ago Kathryn, an intern at Sandhill this summer, was thinking ahead to a visit she was going to make to St Louis. Anticipating that she'd be seeing a special friend on his birthday she wanted to honor his request for a real mincemeat pie, but was despairing of where to she'd be able to find filling that actually contained meat. Not expecting a response, she was gobsmacked to discover that I had some in the root cellar—which underscores the potency of the adage, if you don't ask, the answer is "no."

One the many benefits of living on a farm is that a person has the time and ingredients to work with old recipes. It's the original slow food. Part of my personal legacy is an association with traditional English cuisine that I was introduced to by association with my mother's older sister, Aunt Hennie. Through her, I learned to appreciate plum pudding, fruitcake, mincemeat, and red currant jelly with roast beef. 

Inspired by her example, I've maintained a bucket of homemade mincemeat for the past 30 years. As it takes about a decade to use up a batch, I keep the mixture well-preserved in the cool temperatures of the root cellar, sitting quietly in a bucket with a tight lid. Every time I take some out, I liberally dose the remainder with brandy, port, or sherry. Bugs and/or putrefaction never have a chance.

When Kathryn thanked me profusely for producing a few pints of this precious aged concoction—to which she only needed to add equal parts of fresh chopped apples to have a delicious mincemeat filling—I told her it was my pleasure to share. It's all part of the simple country life, or at least my version of it.

When Kathryn returned from her visit, I asked how the birthday went and was dismayed to learn that she encountered yet more challenges. She was unsure of her footing with pie crust from scratch, and had a balky oven to boot. Uh oh. The crust was tough (too much water and/or overworked dough) and they burned the top on the first attempt because the oven didn't heat evenly. While they eventually got some edible forkfuls out of the deal, they had to persevere to get there.

After commiserating with Kathryn over her travails, I let her know that I could have helped with the pie crust as well. As I told her at the time, I take pie rather seriously. (For example, I know that my favorite pie crust recipe is on page 520 of Craig Claiborne's classic, New York Times Cookbook, one of my culinary bibles.) While I no longer make pie as often as I once did (my craving for sweets has diminished with age), after listening to Kathryn's lament I reflected on the years I spent in my 20s learning how to make a decent pie crust.

It turns out to be trickier than most people realize. You want the shortening (I prefer butter, though lard is terrific) to be cold; the water to be just enough for the dough to hold together (and not a tablespoon more); and the kneading to be minimal (as it develops the gluten—a good thing in bread, and a bad thing in pie crust and pancakes).

Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Bill Boy?

Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?

This back and forth with Kathryn put me in mind of pie, and I had no trouble connecting the dots when it was my cook day yesterday and Mica delivered to the kitchen more than a gallon of fresh-picked sour cherries from our orchard. While it's work removing the stones (whence the phrase, it's the pits), I slowly got that accomplished in the interstices between other kitchen tasks, and was able to crank out two pies that popped out of the oven around 8:30 pm. While their late arrival meant that they featured more as a bedtime snack than the final course for dinner, they were no less delicious.

Even if though I'm happily married and am thus not interested in auditioning for the role of Billy Boy's partner, it's nice to know I could make the grade.

 • • •

While I'm on a culinary theme, I'll close with a libational vignette from yesterday morning. First let me set the stage.

I was over at Ma'ikwe's for a staff meeting during which we pulled the plug on the Ecovillage Education course at Dancing Rabbit this summer. We just didn't get enough enrollment to ensure that staff would make at least $10/hour. As we knew this in the works, yesterday's gathering was part wake (the official end of a dream for this summer) and part planning session (the official start of thinking ahead to offering the course again next year). The course is dead! Long live the course!

While cancelling was disappointing, there's a silver lining—the training won't kill my wife. Ma'ikwe was going to be the lead teacher for the course, yet she's battling the debilitating effects of chronic Lyme disease and her energy is sharply limited. We were both concerned about the possibility of Ma'ikwe pushing herself to do more than she could reasonably sustain—given how important this opportunity is to her—and then paying the piper afterwards with further damage to her constitution. It was a scary prospect and one I'm glad that we now won't face.

As people starting gathering for the meeting, Alyson Ewald was the first to show up, and I asked her if she wanted a cup of coffee. I was about to make a French press for myself and it was no extra trouble to make a cup for her at the same time. She gratefully accepted and after five minutes of steeping I inquired how she preferred to drink her java. She replied, "Sugar, no cream." 

I followed that up with a choice between sugar or honey, to which she responded, "I'll take sugar… unless you have maple syrup." Though not nearly as spectacular as my being able to produce mincemeat for Kathryn, it happened that we had an open jar of maple syrup on hand, allowing me to give Alyson exactly what she asked for—a simple thing that gives me considerable pleasure as a host. 

That said, there was still one hurdle to jump. The quart of syrup had a layer of mold growing on the top. (Maple syrup, unlike honey or sorghum, is a sweetener that cannot be cooked down to a low enough water content that it won't mold because it will crystallize and you'd never be able to get it out of the jar.) 

Fortunately, Alyson wasn't squeamish at all about my lightly skimming the mold with a spoon and then proceeding straight away to doctor up her cup of joe—knowing that a few stray spores would inevitably get into her cup. As a 40-something who grew up in Vermont, she's ingested plenty of maple syrup mold in her day, and it didn't daunt this homesteader a bit. I figured that for her it was the equivalent of New England penicillin. Or perhaps a more creative way to reach her pound-of-dirt quota that we're all expected to consume in our lifetime.

Hauling Wood & Chopping Water

I've been spending the three months of winter (mid-Dec through mid-March) at Dancing Rabbit, living with Ma'ikwe. In addition to the preciousness of exploring day-to-day rhythms with my wife, I've enjoyed adapting to the diurnal rituals of living in her house.

Ma'ikwe started construction of her home (dubbed Moon Lodge) in 2009, and bravely moved in that Halloween—which, unfortunately, foreshadowed some horrific nights wintering over in a structure with unfinished and highly leaky walls. When the wind blew out of the north, it tended to congeal the marrow in your bones.

Two years further along, the walls are much tighter (more plaster over the strawbale walls) and cold weather outside no longer presages an arctic experience inside. Still, Ma'ikwe has been going through a second bout of low energy and achy joints associated with chronic Lyme disease, and it's handy that I've been around so much to help with the routine of homestead domesticity while she concentrates on healing. While she still helps out when she can, she can't easily do as much.

Here are the recurring elements of my winter days:

o Each morning I roll up the quilted shades in front of the windows if the sun is shining, and roll them down again at dusk.

o I practice energy conservation (think Little House on the Prairie; not Leave It to Beaver). As Moon Lodge is off the grid, electricity depends on what's generated by a 1440-watt solar panel array. The extra juice is stored in eight deep cell marine batteries. Mostly this is sufficient to do whatever we need, including refrigeration—so long as we're prudent (no hair dryers or electric can openers) and so long as we don't get three cloudy days in succession. There have been a few evenings when the system was shut down and we were reading by candlelight. It's romantic, but doesn't help manage one's email In Box.

o I wash the dishes, usually every other day. While this may seem a plebeian task, there's no plumbing in the house yet, resulting in a complex dishwashing choreography. It begins by hauling a five-gallon bucket of water in from one of two rain barrels strategically parked under the eaves. This protocol works so long as the nighttime temperature doesn't dip too far below freezing, and bounces above it during the day—otherwise the water doesn't tend to flow so well (hence the phrase, "chopping water"), necessitating a a 100-yard schlep to fill buckets at the community's frostproof hydrant.

Regardless of how it's procured, once the water is inside, it gets transferred into a granite ware stock pot that's a constant fixture sitting atop the wood stove. After several hours you have hot water sufficient to wash and rinse the dishes. The waste stream drops into another five-gallon bucket, from which it is conveyed outside.

o I keep the wood fire burning. Beyond the obvious task of adding another chunk when we're down to embers (which chore I share with Ma'ikwe, and is greatly aided by a glass panel in the door to the firebox), this means hauling wood in from the not-yet-finished attached greenhouse just south of the living room, where we stockpile split wood until its needed inside. When the greenhouse supply runs low, this means some personal time with the splitting maul, segmenting drums into pieces that are digestible by the stove. On a bright sunny day, we'll have enough power that I can occasionally run the electric chain saw, allowing me to reduce logs into stove length drums and to splay open the pieces that are too large for the stove and too knotty for the splitting maul. The real monsters make great overnighters once I get them small enough to be eased into the fire box.

In addition to keeping the wood box filled, I also have to maintain a proper distribution of size: we need the right mix of thin pieces suitable for start-up in the morning, medium pieces for maintaining throughout the day, and lunkers (that barely fit) for burning through the night.

o I serve as the back-up hauler of potable water. While this is a primary household chore for Ma'ikwe's 14-year-old son, Jibran, when he can't answer the bell (which happened twice last week when he was stricken with pink eye) I'm the next monkey in the barrel. While we get most of our wash water from the rain barrels, we always go to the hydrant for our drinking and cooking water.

o Jibran & I share the task of taking out the recycling and emptying the household trash, which happen about once a week.

o Ma'ikwe and I share the cooking. If we plan far enough ahead, a fair amount of it can be done on the wood stove, substituting renewable wood for the propane consumed by the kitchen range.

o About every five days or so I sweep the floor, cleaning up the mud and wood scraps that we invariably track into the house.

In short, living at Ma'ikwe's provides all the baseline ingredients needed for Buddhist enlightenment. The relevant zen aphorism goes like this: Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.

I figure the Moon Lodge adaptation goes like this: Before the house is finished, chop wood, haul water. Afterward, haul wood, chop water. It's a subtle thing, enlightenment. Luckily, we don't have to wait for the house to get finished before we can turn the lights on.

The Facilitator's Magic Eye

When I first began
To cut up oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
After three years
I no longer saw this mass,
I saw the distinctions…

—excerpted from Cutting Up an Ox, an ancient Taoist poem

• • •

I am the Sandhill butcher.

While many others in my community share in the work of this quintessential homesteading task, I enjoy it. Though I am not a hunter, I approach cutting up carcasses and preserving meat with considerable care and respect for the animals whose lives have been taken to sustain mine. Butchering has become part of my sacred relationship to food.

It has taken me a while to embrace the identity of butcher, in part because one meaning of the term is to do a job badly, or clumsily. Another is to kill indiscriminately, or brutally. While not wanting to be associated with either of those flavors of the term, there is yet a third meaning, which is honorable—or at least has the chance to be. A good butcher is one who is thrifty and skilled in the craft of transforming animals into food. Better yet, a good butcher is one who wastes little, operates humanely, and works in right relationship with the universe.

I recall when I first encountered this more noble sense of "butcher" employed outside the confines of the abattoir…

About 30 years ago, when I was teaching myself how to make insulated glass windows (is there no end to the ways in which youth will carelessly throw labor at the fortified walls of a tight budget, in the hopes of saving pennies?) we bought supplies from a New England company called Wood Butchers. I was immediately struck by the name. Surely they weren't implying that that they sold the tools of wanton woodworking, were they?

Indeed, "wood butcher" is an old term for carpenter, and meant as a label of respect for a craft. The meaning here runs parallel to that of meat butcher, and thus began the rehabilitation of the term in my consciousness.

Today, I happily consider myself an amateur meat butcher, as well as an amateur wood butcher. Taking this one step further, I am also a meeting butcher. As a professional facilitator, I am fully skilled in the dissection of meeting dynamics. When I am at my best, there is little waste and I am able to transform logjams into flow, chaos into agreement, and disharmony into music. It is an art. While learnable, not everyone is willing to put in the effort.

As it was for the butcher referenced in the opening poem, one of my main challenges as a facilitation teacher is getting students to experience the unfolding of a meeting and seeing the underlying distinctions. What at first seems an overwhelming tangle of disparate viewpoints and discordant feelings, can instead be viewed as a montage of patterns, of which there are a limited number.

One of the main reasons that I am valuable as an outside facilitator is not inherent skill; rather, it's that I have spent many hours in the butcher shop and bring with me a wide pattern library. Today, it's hard to show me something I've never seen before. While the details are undoubtedly unique to the current manifestation, the applicable patterns are not. By breaking down the dynamic into its characteristic components, complex and/or volatile issues become more tractable, less daunting.

After conducting more than 40 facilitation training weekends over the last eight years, I've come to appreciate much better what it is I've learned to do as a professional facilitator (there is nothing quite like attempting to teach a thing to expose the gaps in how well you understand it). Over and over I am in the position of watching a live meeting with my students, detecting patterns, and then observing how long it takes for the students to see the same thing.

While a portion of the teaching is breaking things down into primary questions (what are the themes in the conversation; is the energy rising or falling; what questions remain to be addressed; how well are people hearing each other; to what extent are people feeling heard; are there underlying questions that haven't surfaced yet; where is this likely headed?), there is another portion for which an atomistic approach will not work.

It is the gestalt ability to absorb the whole of the meeting and have the essential patterns emerge when concentrating with a soft focus. Just as with Magic Eye graphics, the patterns can pop out of the fog in a blink. The trick is learning the art of the soft focus, where you let all of the data wash over you and resist the temptation to lock onto any one thing.

As a teacher, it's exciting to watch the students develop over the course of the two-year training, where there's a steady progression in relation to their ability to approach what I can do—all the way from awe to aw, shucks:

o Awe (I have no idea how you did that)
o Inkling (I knew something needed to happen but I had no clue what)
o Fuzzy (I had a general idea about what was needed but couldn't articulate it clearly)
o Slow (I got the same inspiration, but not as quickly)
o Aw, shucks (I could have done that!)

My dream is a world where my insights are aw, shucks all the time; where my eye is no more magic than anyone else's.

A Chip from the Old Block

Sandhill Farm is a rural homestead. Naturally enough, over the course of living here 37 years, I've gradually picked up an eclectic set of self-sufficiency skills. In addition to the basic C's: cooking, cleaning, and childcare—which all members take turns at—I do some specialty C's here: canning, currant wine, and cutting up carcasses (when it's butchering time).

Stretching the alliteration for all its worth, it turns out that I have developed some expertise at a handful of exotic C's also: canoeing, contract bridge, and consensus training—though none are particularly called for when it comes to chasing chickens, cultivating carrots, corralling cows, churning cream, cutting corner posts, chopping clover, curing cucumbers, crushing cane, or caring for compost.

We learned early on in our country tenure that homestead husbandry means figuring out how to do for ourselves as much as possible, and hiring out as little as we can get away with. Thus, after more than three decades, I've learned how to be proficient at house wiring, I know my way around most woodworking tools, and I'm one of the heavy hitters when it comes to either filling mason jars or filling the need for a mason.

It's this last skill I want to comment on today. Since laying the concrete block foundation for a 16'x30' house extension our first summer, I've come to enjoy all manner of cementitious construction (perhaps because it starts with the right letters). Everything from pouring concrete slabs to laying brick hearths; from assembling refractory ovens to decorative tile work.If there's cement involved, I dabble in it.

Last week I spent three days over at Dancing Rabbit, working on Ma'ikwe's cistern (which, auspiciously, begins with C). This project was started in a rush 15 months ago, but got stalled out abruptly when rain precipitated cave-ins after only three days on the job, and before we could get the walls completed. It wasn't just dead in the water—as recently as a month ago it was dead under the water, by virtue of a wet spring. Finally, last week that we had enough dry weather, a stout enough sump pump, and a suitable forecast to go back.

It was time to chip in again and help with the old block work. After having a local backhoe operator re-excavate the hole (I can only shudder at how many hours it would have taken to remove all that clay by hand), we started hauling out all the blocks (about 100) that had not been grouted in place before the collapse, in order to clean off the mud. With a scoop shovel and buckets we removed most of the dirty water that was pooled on the cistern floor. As if packing blocks uphill wasn't challenge enough, you had to be very careful where you stepped because the clay residue made the cistern floor as slicker than bog scum (they don't call clay and water mixtures "slip" for nothing).

Twenty hours later (spread out over three days), we'd finished laying up the walls (12 courses of 44 blocks each) to within one course of the top and had grouted everything half way. Whew! That was the good news. Unfortunately, it's also July—April of last year is not only a distant memory for its temperamental rain forecasts, it's also a distant memory for its temperate thermometer readings. I mean it's hot in that pit, and my 61-year-old body has been feeling it!

While I arrived at Sandhill as a 24-year-old, I was more of a Young Buck—eager to try anything and with sufficient stamina to handle heavy labor all day long and still joke about it over a beer at the end of the day. Now however, I'm the Old Block that chips have steadily been taken from, and I can't do as much as I used to. Saturday we placed nearly 300 blocks, and at 35 lb a lift, they added up. By 4 pm I was plum tuckered out. After walking home, I was dismayed to discover a heat rash on my ankles from wearing the same socks three days running (the throbbing itch of my ankles was masked by the sunburn on my neck). I was so tired that I couldn't eat solid food at dinner, and settled for several glasses of milk and a bed time slightly ahead of the chickens—after a soothing cold shower and the therapeutic topical application of aloe vera lotion on my neck and ankles. Ahh!

After a couple days off (for Sandhill's regular Sunday meeting, my weekly child care shift, and a cooking day Monday) our cistern crew is back at it today. If all goes well we'll complete the surface bonding of the walls by Thursday, after which it'll be safe to backfill. We'll still have the roof to build (a tricky barrel vault that will be poured in place), but we'll be beyond any danger from cave-ins.

As I type, this Old Block is happy. I can still chip in on construction projects (though my accumulated knowledge is now surely more valuable than my stamina); I still enjoy working with blocks (maybe this goes all the way back to childhood, not just to that first block wall in 1974); and it's gratifying that my body has bounced back from the exhaustion of Saturday afternoon. After two days of yoga, steady hydration, and unfettered air flow on the stressed skin of my ankles and neck, and I'm ready for three more days in the pit. Yeehah!

With any luck, Ma'ikwe will have cold running water this winter—one more of those good things that begin with C.

Suet Pudding

I was the cook yesterday, and the timing was right to gather the ripe berries needed to create a traditional Schaub family dessert: suet pudding. The direct lineage for this recipe comes through my Aunt Hennie (my mother's older sister), who made this summer treat with Stendhalesque proportions: red & black raspberries, combined with red & black currants.

The roots of this concoction go back centuries into English cuisine (Hennie was born a Howard), and can be made in a wide variety of ways. Most commonly, it relies on a sweet biscuit-like topping that is steamed atop a base of small fruit—fresh in the summer, or dried if featured at Christmas. However, it can also be offered in savory forms, such a steak & kidney pie.

While for the most part suet pudding is steamed—that's the way Aunt Hennie prepared it—I've come to favor baking, and presenting this dish as a cobbler. (Where do these English names come from? When, for example, dried fruit is used instead of fresh, this offering is sometimes called "spotted dick," the etymology of which I'm going to refrain from exploring.) As yesterday was sunny and in the 90s, I was easily able to accomplish the baking in our solar cooker (which has no trouble reaching 250 degrees in such conditions) thus neatly shunting BTUs from a kitchen that was already plenty warm. It's fun employing modern technology in service to the adaptation of a traditional dish.

While the recipe that Hennie passed down to me calls for the traditional beef fat (suet), I long ago switched over to butter—which is still beef fat if you're willing to stretch a point. It says something profound about the origins of a recipe that its name highlights fat as its most salient feature. In the context of 15th Century England, the rural peasantry would not frequently enjoy desserts as part of their meal, and beef fat would be a treat more prized than fresh berries.

In today's world—where a third of Americans are considered overweight—it's the other way around, and I only dust off this recipe when there's a convergence of the ripe fruits featured in the Howard version. Yesterday was that day. Some years I'm not home at the right time and it doesn't happen at all.

The key to this fruit mixture is the pleasing flavor of the raspberries commingled with the piquancy of the currants. Over the years I've learned to use just enough honey to bring the taste into a balance of tart and sweet. Yum!

This year's edition was on the dark side, as the blacks (both raspberries and currants) were far more prolific than the reds, yet the taste was exquisite nonetheless. One more time I was able to evoke Aunt Hennie at a meal, and keep alive the homesteading heritage that she passed to me.

Black Currants Passing in the Night

Last night I participated in an hour-long interview for a thing called the Prepper Podcast, talking with Pat Carson from Wild Horse Ranch (a quarter section located in Sandy Lake, about 35 miles northwest of Edmonton, Alberta—which Pat refers to as "the land of oil and money"; a shibboleth updated from "the land of milk and honey").

The Prepper Podcast is a network of radio hosts promoting survival, preparedness, and sustainable living lifestyles, and I was solicited by Pat to be the guest for his Life on a Wild Horse Ranch program, which holds down the 8-9 pm slot every Friday. As always, it was fun talking about community, the FIC, & sustainability, and the hour went quickly. Pat was an enthusiastic interviewer and it was easy finding the intersection between intentional community and his homestead ranch.

It turned out that Wild Horse Ranch is an intriguing amalgamation of interests, offering a distinctive trinity of foci:
a) preservation of the Carson Breed Mountain Horse.
b) development of wild black currants as a vitamin-packed food source with excellent medicinal properties.
c) a retreat center for Japanese interested in experiencing a taste of the "Western lifestyle." Yeehah! (I knew right away I was onto something unusual when I went to their URL and the opening page—for a remote location in northern Alberta, mind you—offered me a choice of continuing in English or Japanese.)

I feel reasonably confident that this particular trifecta is not duplicated anywhere in the universe. In fact, I seriously doubt you'd find any two of these specialties combined elsewhere.

I wound up on the program because I'm a spokesperson for the FIC and Pat wanted to talk about intentional communities. Fair enough. Unexpectedly, we also had a lot to share about homesteading. Though Sandhill Farm only goes back to 1974, Wild Horse Ranch goes back to 1887. Both places place an emphasis on practicing self-sufficiency, using technologies that we can maintain ourselves, and growing a high percentage of our own food.

Current Affairs
Most improbable of all was stumbling onto Pat's passion for black currants. (Apparently wild horses augmented—as opposed to holding back—his enthusiasm for Ribes negrum.) Currants, both red and black, are native to northern Canada, so it didn't surprise me that it was a feature of their homestead. What was surprising was how fond he was of them and what a long and special tradition his family has had with this relatively obscure fruit (apparently his family exported black currant jam to England during the Depression—which is analogous to exporting orange juice to Florida).

We have a thriving stand of black currants at Sandhill that has been highly emblematic of our homesteading tradition. The rootstock came from cuttings lovingly obtained from my Aunt Hennie's house in Elmhurst IL—a house that had been in my family's ownership from 1899 until it was sold in the 90s, after my aunt and uncle passed away. The Sandhill patch occupies a position of honor, right between our greenhouse and our main garden plot.

For many years, the sale of black currants was banned in sections of the US where white pines were being managed for commercial forestry, because it's a favored alternative host for the fungus that causes white pine blister rust. While this approach to control has since been discredited and the ban has been lifted, black currants remain a relatively unusual component of farmstead fruit production. While the plants need little care and are easy to propagate, there are two main reasons that folks are able to contain their enthusiasm growing black currants: a) the fruit comes ripe over a three-week period which complicates the harvest—you have go over the bushes multiple times to gather all the little darlings; and b) most people find the ripe fruit too tart to enjoy raw, preferring to employ them as the featured ingredient in jams and wine—which translates to more work. (When Julez was a member of Sandhill, she used to refer to black currants as dog breath berries—which was not meant as a compliment.)

How amazing is it that Pat and I are both black currant aficionados rooted in a multi-generational family tradition dating back to the late 1800s? It's such a delight when you happen upon a serendipitous discovery like that. I just hope someone got some useful information about cooperative living on last night's podcast, interspersed in the midst of our spontaneous black currant love fest.

The Morel of the Story

I got home just in time.

I arrived about 12:15 on Saturday and everyone (including this season's interns, Michael & Sofi) was eating lunch. After unloading my luggage and traveling paraphernalia, I said hello to everyone (I'd been on the road for over a month), had a glass of milk, and put on my boots. By 1:15 I was in the woods hunting for wild mushrooms. While about 25% of what I found were past peak, I found a number of prime specimens and my three-hour stroll netted a tad over three pounds of morels. Whew! I wasn't too late.

While there are occasional aberrations, in northeast Missouri morels pop up only in a fairly tight 10-day window starting in late April and drifting into the first week of May. Though I was arriving at the early end of when the season typically occurs, there is enough uncertainty about timing—due to the vagaries of moisture and temperature (fungi like it wet and warm)—that I was nervous. I hate missing the morels. [For more of my personal journey with morels see my blog of May 7, 2008, The Morel Imperative.]

At Sandhill Farm we do mushrooms two ways: a) we cultivate shiitakes on 42-inch sections of oak logs, stacked to form a serpentine picket fence under a shady maple grove; and b) we hunt morels during their ephemeral season of manifestation. As it happened, on Saturday we harvested both, and our fungal cup runneth over. While cultivating shiitakes is essentially about technique, teasing morels out of the woods is more of an art form. Think of them as the yin and the yang of mycological farming. Most of the work with shiitakes is in the set up; most of the work with morels is in the walking and developing the magic eye needed to discern the little darlings as they peek out of the leaf mold or from underneath a mayapple canopy. While you can find one boldly out in the open from time to time, most fruits are shy, requiring a technique where you peruse the same ground from different angles when you're in suitable habitat.

While there are patterns to look for (medium to full-sized silver maples are indicator trees), there is no guarantee where they'll appear. Spots can produce steadily for years and then inexplicably go dry; certain stretches can be a bonanza one year and then never again. Every so often you'll encounter a singular morel in a location you've never found one in before and with no apparent second fruit within 100 feet. Mostly though, if you find one mushroom you're as likely to find ten. The mycelium propagates underground (following some mysterious biological impulse) and it's highly likely that if conditions are right for one fruit that the same rootstock will produce more nearby. Thus, whenever I encounter one morel, I slow down to one-quarter speed to look more carefully for buddies. They're almost always out there, if you can just tease them out.

My triumph of this season was walking through a patch of woods where I'd had some consistent luck in the past, yet was reporting no joy on this occasion. I was almost through and about to give up when I noticed that the downed tree I was about to step over (as I attempted to effect my exit from the copse) was a maple. Walking back to the base on instinct, I discovered a flush of morels ringing the edge of the root ball disturbance. Jackpot! Noticing two additional modest maples veering in a direction I hadn't walked (how had I missed those moments before?), I followed the trail. With one morel in sight of the next, I collected about 40 mushrooms before the vein petered out. It's humbling to reflect on how close I was to walking right by and missing the whole mess.

Today is my day in the kitchen, where I'll get the opportunity to make pasta (from eggs laid by our chickens and from flour ground this afternoon from our wheat), flavored with a sauce made by cooking down my precious morels in butter and olive oil, seasoned with onions, garlic, sage, and homemade black currant wine. Don't you wish you could come to dinner?

Bridge Work

As a professional facilitator and conflict worker, a lot of what I do is build bridges between two or more folks having trouble hearing each other. While my life in community didn't start out with this focus it has decidedly become a central part of what I do.

After 36 years of living at Sandhill Farm, my role has gradually evolved from homesteader (there was no end to what things we didn't know how to do when we bravely moved onto the land in the spring of 1974) to community networker (I became my community's delegate to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities in 1979) to nonprofit administrator (I've been the Secretary of the Fellowship for Intentional Community since the late '80s) to facilitation trainer (mainly through a two-year program I pioneered in 2003, where I teach others how to build bridges).

Over the decades, my life has shifted more toward meetings and report writing, and away from milking cows and swinging hammers. While I know why this has happened and don't regret my choices, I haven't lost my enjoyment of more physical tasks, and I've been looking forward for some time to this past week, where I set aside my laptop to honcho building a cistern next to my wife's house at Dancing Rabbit.

Ma'ikwe shares the leasehold of a lot (styled "warrens" in DR argot, to continue the rabbit theme) with her next door neighbors, Bear & Alyssa, and we were all on hand at first light Tuesday morning, when Luke Zimmerman arrived with a backhoe to start excavating the site. Where there had been grass and undisturbed soil at 6 am, there was a 26'x13' hole eight feet deep by 10 am. Ever-conscious of the risk of a cave in (where the digging out would be done by hand), we were poised to work as fast as we could, and were in the hole by 10:05, trying to find the low spots with a transit.

After carefully shaving down the high spots in the clay subsoil, we slapped together 2x6s sufficient to build forms for a 22'x9' slab six inches deep. After leveling and staking the forms, we laid out a lattice of 1/2-inch rebar on two-foot centers, bound every intersection with tie wire, and called for four yards of ready-mix to be delivered from the concrete plant in our county seat, 13 miles away. I had about 30 minutes of down time between the completion of the prep work and before the truck had not arrived—just enough to realize how tired and sore I already was from having worked all day with shovels, ladders, and hacksaws (to cut the rebar). When the truck rumbled in at about 4:30, there was no time to contemplate how tired we were; it was time to work concrete.

While pouring a 22'x9' slab is relatively straight forward, I knew that this pour would be extra effort. For one thing, we didn't want the truck coming too close to the edge of the hole, where it might precipitate a cave in. That meant we'd have to push the concrete into the corners. For another, concrete is stronger (much stronger) if poured with minimal water and extra cement. Most residential jobs are done with a five bag mix (bags of cement per cubic yard), and contractors regularly allow extra water to be added to enhance workability—even though it results in a marked degradation of the 2500 psi strength that is possible if extra water is not used. I had ordered 3000 psi concrete and had told them up front that I didn't want any extra water. I knew that this was going to be the stiffest concrete anyone in the pit had ever seen.

With the help of neighbors, there were about eight people in the pit: five to push concrete and agitate it in place, two to run a screed board, and one to bull float the finished product. After the floating, we had to place 34 L-bolts at precise locations in the hardening concrete, so that the slab could be tied to the concrete bock walls yet to come. Last, I crawled out on a pair of 2x6s that we laid across the forms and I hand troweled two shallow depressions in the slab to facilitate pumping out the water when we needed to clean the cistern.

When we were finally done, we gently lay a film of polyethylene over the top to retard drying and climbed up the ladders for the last time. It was about 6:15, and beer never tasted any better. When the driver of the concrete truck came over to have us sign the work order, I asked him if he ever made deliveries calling for 3000 psi concrete with no water added. He thought about it for a second, and replied: "It's not common, but we do it for bridges."

Hah, I thought. Even when I try to go back to homesteading, I'm still doing bridge work.

Home is Where the Hart Is

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. This is the second installment of a blog series where I unpack some of those meanings…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to, nor ever truly free ourselves from.

Here’s the outline of my series:

—home as family (Dec 24, 2009)

—home as place

—home as culture

—home as routine

—home as work

In this second entry, I’ll focus on Home as Place.

I've been living in the same place for more than 35 years. While that statement would hardly qualify as remarkable for most of human history, it is a rare today—at least in the US, where we have become a highly mobile society and there is little resistance to scratching the itch of wanderlust. In fact, I know hardly anyone who is living today in the same place they were living in 1974.

Apropos my theme, and people knowing where they live, there is a great story that Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) tells about traveling in the jungles of New Guinea. The group of locals he is journeying with explores beyond the boundaries of its tribal territory and finds it itself unexpectedly needing to bivouac overnight in an unfamiliar location. Needing food, a few break off to forage and return with a quantity of mushrooms. When Diamond expresses his uneasiness over taking a chance on eating fungi found in unknown territory, his hosts reply with disdain, "Why would we feed you poisonous mushrooms?"

The point here being that "civilized" people, such as Diamond (and you and me), have largely been raised without a developed sense of our local environment, and mostly wouldn't know which mushrooms are safe to eat. In contrast, indigenous people tend to be much better connected with their local environment and probably have known which foods were safe to eat since they were five years old. Our lives used to depend on that kind of knowledge. And while you might reasonably argue that they still do, few people today are that aware of the place where they live.

Instead, Home as Place has come to mean familiar sights and sensations: the unique feel of your own bed; the spot where you drink your morning cup of coffee; the view out the west window at sunset; how rain sounds on the porch roof; the smell of the workshop.

Because my community (Sandhill Farm) places a high priority on raising the food we eat, I have gradually extended these markers of home to include more subtle signs, gleaned from a third of a century of homesteading:

o I know within 24 hours when the spring peepers will emerge from the mud to launch their vernal chorus. More than just monitoring the thermometer, it is a matter of sensing the right combination of warmth, length of day, and rising humidity. My body has come to know that combination when I feel it each March.

o I know when to cut hay. While the nutritional value peaks when about 10% of the seed heads have emerged from their sheaths, it is more complicated than that. The cool weather grasses like brome and orchard grass are ready in May and that's also our wettest month. If you cut grass on wet ground it will mold from underneath; if you wait until the ground is completely dry, it may be June. You have to consider the maturity of the crop, the dampness of the earth, and the prospects for enough sunny weather to cure the crop and get it baled before the next thunderhead spoils the lot.

o How many know the optimum temperature for churning cream into butter? It's 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Though Sandhill no longer has its own dairy herd, I used to make butter a lot, and got good enough at sensing the right temperature that I could tell when it was time just by feeling the side of the churn as the cream gradually warmed. If you hit it right, you can turn a gallon-and-a-half of cream into three pounds of butter in about five minutes. If you start with the cream too cold it can take 20 minutes; if you let the cream get too warm, the butter won't separate well from the buttermilk and the butter will tend to sour.

o Garlic is one of our culinary staples (we only semi-joke when we tell prospective members that they can have any dietary preferences they want… as long as they eat onions and garlic). While planting garlic is straight forward—pretty much any time in the fall before freeze up will do—the art to being self-sufficient in the stinking rose is knowing when to harvest and how to store your bulbs.

Garlic is ready when the bottom pair of leaves turn brown. In northeast Missouri that usually occurs around July 1, give or take a week. Once we get close, we pay close attention to the weather, as it's far less work if we can get into the field about 48 hours after a good rain. The rain will soften the ground (meaning most bulbs can be extracted by hand instead of requiring the assistance of a garden fork), and the two days of sunny weather will mean that most of the dirt can be crumbled off the roots by hand (instead of extracting gooey mud balls with each plant).

After that it takes about 30 days for the bulbs to cure in an outbuilding, where summer temperatures and good air flow will gently extract the excess moisture. Then, before the drying goes too far, we trim the bulbs and place them loosely into boxes where they're stored on the concrete floor on an earth-sheltered building. There, the cool temperatures, medium humidity, and modest air flow will keep them in good condition until needed—even into the following spring.

o In these modern times, where most countrysides has been thoroughly reconfigured by modern agriculture, the two largest undomesticated species remaining in northeast Missouri are wild turkeys and white-tailed deer. The combination of low human density (my county has fewer humans than the high school I attended in the suburbs of Chicago) and plentiful woodlands (more than 10%) makes ideal habitat for these species (as well as for raccoons and possums).

In fact, over the years we've lived here, the population of both turkey and deer has increased, to the point where some locals earn more from renting ground to out-of-state hunters than from farming. When it's not firearm season for deer, I enjoy walking the woods (which is fully 40% of Sandhill's property), looking for deer trails and where they bed down for the night. In the spring, I can find clutches of wild turkey eggs by watching where the hens flare up from their nests when I wander too close while stalking for morels.

• • •

Having now invested 35 years in learning some of the natural rhythms of my home place, these lessons have become precious to me. And they are all the more valuable in that I am often not here to enjoy them. One of the paradoxes of my community life is that I feel called upon these days to spend a large fraction of my time on the road extolling its virtues (or consulting with others about how to better unlock its secrets), rather than staying at home enjoying the fruits of my investment.

As this is the last day of 2009, I did some toting up. In the last 12 months I've slept in 46 different places that were not my own bed, and that doesn't count any of the 23 nights I slept on a train. Fortunately, the vast majority of these beds were with friends or clients, and only three were in commercial establishments. With luck, I won't sleep in any commercial beds next year, and I'll spend the entire year either enjoying the place I call home, or sampling a place that's home to someone else I know.

The Same Old Grind

Today is Day Three of this fall's deer butchering and my hands are sore.

I put in 5.5 hours Friday, 7.5 hours Saturday, and I'll keep at it today until I'm done—pushing 20 hours all together. We worked up six deer this season, yielding about 350 lbs of ground meat, roasts, ribs, stew meat, sausage, jerky, and soup stock. With the addition of occasional contributions from our poultry flock (chickens and turkeys) this is Sandhill Farm's meat supply for the year. It's one of the jobs I've learned to specialize in over the years, yet I don't do it regularly (or even every year) and I've been using muscles the last couple days that are not typically exercised by virtue of my routine three hours/day at a keyboard. And while I've successfully avoided any major slips with knives or saws (knock on wood), I nonetheless have an impressive array of minor nicks and scrapes on my hands that are souvenirs of my time in the abattoir that is otherwise our food processing kitchen.

Just before dinner yesterday I finished cutting and deboning the last carcass. I got the last of the bones into the stock pots, and all that remains is to complete the sausage making (half done when the dinner bell rang last night), to start drying the jerky (which was marinading overnight) and to grind up about 200 lbs of deer hamburger (which is the way we most prefer it). Monday I'll give the kitchen floor a thorough cleaning and put the equipment away until next year.

While Sandhill doesn't eat a no-meat diet, we do eat a low-meat diet (on average, we serve meat at a meal 1-2 times/week). We live in a climate with terrific deer habitat (the population has been steadily rising the entire 35 years we've lived here) and with topography that supports grass production (that is, most of the land is too sloped to farm in row crops without serious erosion). With modest stocking rates, grazing animals fit well into the ecology of our land and we believe that a diet that includes moderate amounts of grass-fed animal protein is responsibly sustainable.

My main challenge today will be coaxing the homemade meat grinder (a hand-me-down from Stan's father, Jake, who passed it on to his eldest son when his butchering days in southern Manitoba were over) into working through all four buckets of meat chunks, converting the tougher cuts—plentiful in a deer—into lean hamburger. It'll take all day.

There are many tasks on the farm like this, that take hours to complete and require more perseverance than perspicacity. The trick to it is setting aside the time with grace and embracing it as a meditation, rather than as a burden. I am not butchering deer so much as I'm feeding my family and honoring the deer by using it as fully in the process as possible. The deer graze on our land, we eat the deer, and, ultimately, we will die and our bodies will nourish the land. It's a cycle.

While the gears of this cycle turn slowly, just as the auger in our homemade grinder, it's also inexorable, and I embrace my small part in it and accept responsibility for occasionally having my hand on the crank.

Farm Camp

This past week I’ve been in Fennville MI, visiting my wife’s brother & sister-in-law, Mark & Kim. They have an acreage in the country where they homestead and also hold down full-time jobs—as nearly as that’s possible in Michigan’s seriously depressed economy. (Kim’s an automotive engineer and lately she’s been making better money selling Tupperware.)

For the second year in a row, Mark & Kim have set aside a week in August for “Farm Camp,” where friends and relations are invited—kids especially welcome—to spend as much of the week as they can experiencing the bucolic life, with events scheduled daily. There was garden work, animal care (new calves and ever-hungry chickens who looked forward with relish to every bowl of kitchen scraps that came their way), trips to the beach (Lake Michigan is just a few miles to the west), a horse drawn wagon ride, a field trip to a Michigan State University experimental dairy farm with robotic milking machines, a raku pottery firing with Grandma Kay (proprietress of Capricorn Clay in Jackson MI), and U-pick blueberries. Some days it was hard to catch your breath.

All of this was capped off Friday with a block party. Mark believes that everyone ought to have a neighborhood all-skate at least once a year, both for social relations and to nudge a person into seriously cleaning up their yard. Ma'ikwe and I got a rare chance to dance together and the DJs taught us to line dance the Electric Slide (where do they get these names?).

I thoroughly enjoyed a week of being with my wife every day. This was her one break from a summer of house construction and she was cherishing putting up peaches and blueberries for the winter ahead. Heretofore she’d had no time whatsoever for food processing, and we did tomatillo salsa, pizza sauce, peach chutney, apple-peach sauce, frozen peaches, and blueberry preserves. (Of course, living on a farm myself, if I’d been home this past week I’d have been doing food processing there—but it was a pleasure nonetheless “putting up the summer in jars” (a la Greg Brown) for others. It was especially satisfying helping Mark & Kim get current with their garden during a stretch when they were serving nonstop as hosts & tour guides.

I even had time to read a Jeffrey Deaver potboiler, and watch Kay’s Alaska slide show (she was at Denali last month).

The thing I did not have was Internet service. Mark & Kay have rigged up some kind of dial-up service to work with their laptop, but I did without. Every now and again it’s good to be reminded that the world can basically get along just fine without me being plugged in every 12 hours—though I'm girding my loin for the 100+ emails relentlessly accruing in my In Box.

Dog Breath Berries

This week I'm stripping the black currant bushes. It's the end of the season and I'm spending an hour or so each afternoon before dinner diligently finding all the late-ripening berries on our 30 or so bushes. The patch is located just south of our new greenhouse, on the edge of our main garden, and berry picking is a meditation for me. Very centering. The patch is dense and I carefully, methodically work my way around one bush at a time, looking under each branch for the precious black fruit—about the size of a pea.

Sandhill Farm is now 35 years old, yet our black currant stock is much older than that. The scions came from my Aunt Hennie's house in Elmhurst IL, carefully transplanted cuttings from her homesteading backyard—now smack in the midst of the Chicago suburbs. Hennie is my mother's ony sister and both of them were born in that house—Val in 1917 and Henrietta in 1907, the duaghters of Johnnie and Gertie Golden. The two-story clapboard house with its steep winding stairs was built in 1899, and we have a picture in the family archives of the surrounding area just after it was built. At the advent of the 20th Century there were no other buildings in sight, just wind-swept prairie. Today you'd have to drive for more than two hours west to get a comparable sight.

As the suburbs gradually crept west, the Goldens kept their plot of land and continued a tradition of serious gardening. They still had chickens in my lifetime, and one of the highlights of the holidays was the homemade red currant jelly (stored in glass with a paraffin seal) that Hennie used to contribute to roast beef dinners, and the fruit cake she'd make every October (and soak in bourbon for two months before distributing it the form of carefully wrapped bricks to all her nephews and nieces under the Christmas tree). There was a long run of Concord grapes in the backyard and once we found several bottles of a forgotten vintage in the cellar, left over from when Johnnie & Gertie made communion wine during Prohibition. It was incredibly good.

The Goldens favored raspberries over strawberries, and currants over blueberries. When I moved to Sandhill in 1974, Hennie gifted me a set of ceramic crocks, a sauerkraut slicer, and and an asortment of various hand tools. It didn't occur to any of us (at first) that we might also need plants.

Upon arriving at Sandhill we enthusiastically purchased lots of fruit stock, almost all of which was easily obtained from mail-order nurseries. It turned out though, that black currant bushes were not obtainable. We learned that black currants serve as the alternate host for the fungus that causes White Pine Blister Rust and the forestry lobby (in the '70s) had sufficient strength to get black currants banned from interstate sale in an effort to contain this disease.

We were somewhat put out about the whole thing (given that white pine lives nowhere near us), but instead of calling Congress, we just called Hennie—and placed an order for some cuttings. She obliged and black currants are now firmly established in northeast Missouri—both at Sandhill and anywhere there's a neighbor who's requested starts over the years. While the ban on the sale of black currants plants has since been lifted, and you can now buy rootstock from nurseries, we're self-sufficient these days and no longer needing nursery help.

Black currants are a hardy bush that needs little attention. Too tart to be enjoyed fresh, they're best used in jams and in winemaking. While almost everyone I've met enjoys the wine, I've known many who were able to contain their enthusiasm for the task of picking the berries. The tedium of small fruit collection is typically relieved by the allowing harvesters to graze as they work. In the case of black currants, however, there's not much incentive.

In fact, we had a long-term member at Sandhill named Julez (she was with us 1988-95) who used to call them "dog breath berries," and it wasn't a term of endearment. I took it as a sign of her enduring affection for me (and perhaps the wine) that she'd agree to help pick the berries at all.

Tomorrow, I will dust off one of Hennie's 10-gallon crocks and continue a family tradition: I will begin a batch of black currant wine. When Ma'ikwe and I got married two years ago, I had reserved the entire 2006 crop of black currants to make 20 gallons of wine for the wedding. Although Hennie did not live long enough to see me get married (she'd died in the '90s), she was there in spirits.

And it raises my spirits each year as the new berries ripen and I practice my heritage. This week in the agricultural cycle, my mantra goes something like this:

I am Laird
Son of Valborg
Nephew of Hennie
Picker of Berries
Vintner of Black Currant Wine
Keeper of Tradition
Celebrant of Life
L'Chaim

When Meat is Deer

I'm the community butcher.

Tough most years this is a busy time for that, there are currently no deer hanging in our walk-in cooler, and it's unclear whether I'll sharpen the knives this month or not. Even though we're four days into the rifle hunting season for deer, none of our three hunters have been successful yet. Northeast Missouri is about 10% wooded, and has a low human population, which combines to make excellent habitat for deer. Over the course of our 34 years here, the deer population has steadily increased—despite increasingly liberal regulations about hunting limits. (In fact, there are farmers in the county who net more annual income from renting their land to out-of-state hunters for the 11 days of deer season than they do from growing crops.)

While almost all of the omnivorous members of Sandhill have helped take part in processing our meat over the years, one of my homestead niches has been to take the lead on working up the meat from our homegrown animals when their time has come.

While I don't have a taste for killing, and I generally leave that part for others, I am drawn to the role of overseeing the transformation from carcass to food. I view it as part of a sacred trust between myself and what I eat, and I try to honor the spirit of the animal whose life I (and others) have taken by using the carcass as fully and as respectfully as possible. In addition to having the flexibility of cutting up the meat to suit our preferences (getting the right ratio of roasts to ground meat, for example), we make our own sausage, boil the bones to make soup stock, and preserve the scraps as a prized supplement to store-bought dog food.

Among other things, butchering is one of the bonding rituals I have with my children, and both Jo (21) & Ceilee (27) already have plans to be back on the farm for the 2009 deer season. We're looking forward to a fortnight of family time, culminating in Thanksgiving—which I consider the perfect homestead holiday. The larders will full and the agricultural cycle will be ended; it's a great time to kick back and celebrate the bounty of life with friends and loved ones.

In our first quarter century on the land, no one here had interest in hunting and we relied on the animals we raised domestically for our meat (culled chickens, males born to our milk cows, and sometimes goats, pigs, and turkeys). Steers comprised the lion's share of our domestic meat. However, that shifted when we let go of our dairy program back in the late '90s. Our lead cow contracted Johne's Disease—the bovine equivalent of Crohn's Disease in humans—and we needed to eliminate all cattle from our land for at least a year to kill off the contamination in our soil. After a year of not milking twice a day, people rather enjoyed the increased flexibility in their daily routine. When a neighbor switched his Holstien dairy to an organic operation, we started buying our milk from him and we didn't revive our own herd.

Without milk cows, there were no steers. Ceilee, then a teenager, developed an interest in hunting, and we made the transition from beef to deer as our primary meat source. As an organic farm, it was a somewhat tricky issue. On the one hand, we saved all the grain and pain of domestic care. On the other, we knew what our steers were eating, and we had no control over what the deer were eating. That is, the steer meat was organic, but the deer wasn't. While there are several of plusses to eating deer—the meat is local, lean, and sustainably raised & harvested—all meat is a known sink for environmental poisons and we're taking a risk.

Several years into incoporating deer into our regular diet (at Sandhill we tend to eat a low-meat diet; on average it shows up on our menus only once or twice a week) we haven't noticed any detrimental health consequences. Still, we're keeping an eye on it.

This fall, three different friends had approached me about helping with the butchering so that they could learn the craft. I enjoy teaching and was pleased that folks thought well enough of both my skill and my attitude to apprentice with me. However, there will be no lessons without successful hunting. As there's still another week of the firearm season, the carcasses may yet appear. We'll see.

Meanwhile, it's amusing to realize that as a proess consultant and experienced communitarian, I consider the opportunity to meet to be dear. As a homesteader in northeast Missouri, I also have the opportunity for my meat to be deer.