Sunday, March 20, 2011

Why we haven't built our family room yet


When my darling husband and I first bought the farm, we had grand plans of turning the "shed" that is attached to the kitchen into a family room.  Many evenings were spent discussing how we would reorient the woodstove, where the mudroom would be, would it have a cathedral ceiling (and thus lose the attic space above it), would we open it up to the kitchen, etc.  We believed that this additional family room would be necessary, as we would have several children and our current set up does not provide an ample indoor space for older kids to "hang out".

The "shed" is on the far right in this picture, from the hot water pipe onwards. Conveniently, there are two exits directly to the outside from the shed. 
                                                                               
Now that we've lived in the house through five winters and summers, it has become clear to us that the benefits of the shed outweigh the benefits of a finished family room.  The shed is a space for all seasons, and without a garage, one of its main functions is as a storage unit and recycling containment center. It also is where the workbench and all the tools call home. 

While storage is certainly a noble purpose for a 400 sq. ft. space,  it was the seasonal activities that occur in the shed that led us to believe we would not be able to part with it.

Early Summer:  I use this area to clean the shorn sheep fleeces before sending them out to be carded.  It's a tedious process, particularly since the sheep live with burdock, but I usually get most of the crud off. 

Tess and Rachel's wool on the screen, ready for picking
Late Summer:  Harvesting.  Need I say more?  We set up the saw horses with a screen to lay the onions, garlic and beans out to dry before storage. 

Fall:  We continue with harvesting, but the main purpose of the shed is for apple pressing.  Bud and his father spend evenings out there grinding up apples and then pressing them into fresh cider.  While we end up hardening most of the cider, we also freeze 3-4 gallons each year.

Bud shows off his cider pressing abilities.  In the background of this picture, you can see the sawhorses and screen with beans drying on it!

Winter:  You would think that winters are relatively quiet on the farm, and indeed they are.  However, the picnic table, lawn furniture, fencing and fence chargers, and wood all come in for the winter.  While our barn could hold much of this material in the summer months, the barns in winter are stuffed to the gills with hay (and more fencing equipment). The shed, since it's not heated, is also a fabulous refridgerator in the wintertime.  Pots of stock, soup, left over hams, freshly butchered poultry, pies, puddings, and beer have all been stored out there to great satisfaction. 

Early spring:  This is probably the busiest time for the shed.  I use the floor space in April to cut and dry seed potatoes.  It is also where we raise our chicks and turkey poults for the first 4 (if you're a chick) to 8 (if you're a turkey) weeks.  This year, we actually received our shipments of both types of fowl at the same time, and quickly had to build another brooder for the chickens.  With powerful heat lamps, they seem content, even though night time temperatures are dipping into the teens. 
Turkey poults are in the front box; chicks are in the rear. 
Our chicks from a few years ago.  We actually ended up putting them in our broken shower upstairs when it got too cold for them in the shed (we didn't have heat lamps at that point).


As you see, it would be rather difficult to find a replacement home for all of these activities.  Thus, it appears the shed will stay a shed, as the concept of a family room doesn't seem so necessary anymore.  

Sunday, March 13, 2011

A Prairie Home Companion

I wanted to start this post with It's been a quiet week in...my hometown" but I'm afraid Garrison Keillor claims ownership to that line.

My darling husband and I met just over 8 years ago, and I think back on these years with a certain nostalgia.  This was a time before we had a farm, a time when we gardened on a plot of our dear friends' farm, a time when my stepson, Bud, was still in diapers.  I was traveling through the Berkshires and across the Hudson to visit, still holding down a teaching job in Massachusetts. It was a time when I pondering my next step in life, not wanting to be apart from my soon to be husband.  I applied to a graduate program not far away from where we would eventually settle in a field that would prove to be exciting, but not very applicable to the job market in upstate New York.

During the colder months of these two years, my darling eventual-husband and I would often spend our Saturday evenings in quiet companionship, listening to Prairie Home Companion, a mutual secret love.  I grew up listening to NPR, and my family collected the Lake Wobegon recordings on cassette.  I think there are a lot of us Lake Wobegon wannabes even among the young adult crowd, and it turns out that most of my close friends have been regular listeners at one point or another in their lives. 

Visiting with a dear friend this afternoon I was reminded that my own life here in Upstate is in fact a bit like those who inhabit Lake Wobegon.  While we are well-informed of world events, the inhabitants of the village are very active in local community affairs.  We have three public buildings in our small hamlet of 1000 folks: the church, the grange, and the town hall.  All three buildings have a variety of activities going on, from meetings, lectures and workshops to quilting groups, dinners, dancing and variety shows (in fact, we have a variety show troupe that stages a show every year at the church and was actually a finalist on Prairie Home Companion's "Talent from Towns Under Two Thousand" about twelve years ago).  Much of the region is made up of similar villages, and it is quite possible to sustain oneself solely on covered dish suppers, spaghetti dinners and pancake breakfasts that are offered by each community's gathering center. 

All of these public gatherings provide grand means for propagating gossip.  Sometimes, it seems a bit like the old parlor game, telephone.  "He said, she said", "I heard, you heard..." and can get quite tiresome.  Sometimes, I forget how efficiently the rumor mill gets started.  Just last week, a neighbor (and pediatrician) approached my darling husband saying "I hear your wife is changing careers!".  Aside from this blog (which I know very few people actually read, and most of them are FB friends) I had told a grand total of five people about my career path.  Perhaps the small town living keeps us all honest to a degree and it's a good reminder to me to probably tell my boss of my plans before he hears it from another source first.

Sadly, moving to the farm, we have lost some connection to Prairie Home Companion and the News from Lake Wobegon.  The evenings often run late by the time dinner is cleaned up, animals are fed and baths are taken.  And, with all the hustle and bustle of the day, the three of us will often just collapse on the couch for a half hour before bed, wrap the flannel blanket around us, and read, enjoying each other's company in silence.     

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

You Better Belize It

Four days ago I was snorkeling with sharks off the coast of Ambergris Caye.  A week ago and I was admiring the ancient Mayan city of Tikal.  Now, I'm back in two feet of snow.  

Our vacation was filled with much fun and celebration, and probably a few too many rum punches. If anything can be described as bright and beautiful, Belize is it.  The colors and warmth of Belize contrast sharply with the cold dreariness that continues to envelope us in the Northeast.

Belize is a small country, roughly the size of Massachusetts in area with only 350,000 residents.  We were able to enjoy spending time in two very different ecosystems, the pine forests and the beach.  Tropical rainforests, dry tropical forest, and lowland savannahs are also part of Belize's ecology.  The people of Belize vary just as much as the landscape.  There are sizeable Creole (distinct from the French Creole that we know of here) and Mayan populations, along with a large Mestizo population.  People were proud of their ancestry and described in great detail their ethnic heritage.  The official language is English, thanks to British imperialism (Belize only became fully independent in 1981) and we discovered that some locals don't consider Belize to be part of Central America because Spanish is not the primary language. 

Belizeans seem to live simple yet fulfilling lives.  Many of their homes seem to be built by their own hands; simple structures built on stilts, containing one or two rooms for a half dozen people.  Cooking and much of the daily activity can occur outside thanks to the warm, sunny weather.  People got to work by bus, carpooling, horseback, walking or riding a bicycle. 

The wealth of knowledge of all the Belizeans we met astonished me.  While school is mandatory until age 16 (like it is in the States), every Belizean I spoke with regaled us with information about the Mayan ruins, the seasonal and annual weather patterns, the political history of the country, the natural history of the area.  It was like speaking with a cultural anthropologist, historian, sociologist, archaeologist, ecologist, marine biologist, speleologist and meteorologist all at once.  Because Belizeans don't hold material goods in such high regard, and because their survival is more tightly connected with the land and interpersonal relationships, learning about their environment and their own history is a necessary part of their lives.  As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, such knowledge is lost upon us as middle-class, materialistic, Americans.  We depend on the nuclear family, not the community to help us in times of need or to share in our joys.  We look to specialists to give us the information, and thus we don't take the time to learn it ourselves.  We think that the more stuff we have, the better off we are, paying little regard to the relationships we form with each other and with our land. Ultimately, what does this mean for us as a people, and a culture?   We may be rich in "stuff", but in the long run, how far is that going to get us?