The Dirty Life

Someone lent this book to Jeremy to read a long time ago.  One technique I'm using for de-cluttering my house is returning things from my home that don't belong to me back to their actual owners.  (Obvious, right?) So I finally sat down to read this so we could return it. 

The author tells her story of "city-girl-mets-hippy-farm-boy."  Interviewing him on his sustainable farm, and becoming interested in him and his "manly work", eventually hooking up with him and moving to a new area to start a larger farm, and finally get married. 

Her boyfriend's vision was a whole-diet farm.  So where some local farms will offer the community weekly or bi-weekly baskets of produce for their membership, he wanted to provide everything for the whole diet: milk, meat, eggs, fat, and something sweet like maple syrup, along with a basket of produce.  Along with that goal he wanted to run his farm sustainably through using draft horses and renewable energy sources.  The author does a good job of not glossing over the tough aspects of starting up a farm from scratch--which are plentiful--without sounding too whiny.  And it was interesting to see the progress of how they went about trying to create this farm. 

(On a side note, there were two sentences in the book I had a problem with because of their sexual nature, one sentence describing an intimate moment, and one retelling a dirty joke.  I really had to ask why they were necessary.  Sometimes it really feels like people are trying to prove something through including unnecessary lines like those.)     

In terms of philosophy, although I respect the idea of the whole diet-farm, I wonder if it is actually counter-productive to some of the ideals her husband believes in.  The cost of the yearly membership to Essex Farm is $3700 for an adult (I looked up their website) and $3300 for a second adult. And for children it is $120 per year of their current age.  So for a membership my family would have to pay $8,920 for the year.  And yes, it is meant to supply all our food needs, and they let you take all you want to can and preserve extras for the winter etc, but that is $743 dollars a month to feed my family, and next year with the boys a year older it would be an additional $40 dollars a month, or $783 a month.

Where is that money supposed to come from?  I'm not saying the food is not worth that much, I believe in paying farmers a good wage, but I'm asking where it is supposed to come from.  He detests commercialism, and consumerism, and "the man", and electricity, but for people to afford buying his food they have to go out into the economic world that he claims to be against in order to earn the cash to buy from him.  He requires that by the very nature of being a whole diet farm.  He leaves no way for people to offset the costs of their membership in a natural, sustainable way.  For example, I can't be a dairy farmer, or an orchardist, and earn money from that and just go to his farm for my other produce needs or my meat.  I have to go to him for everything, and he wouldn't even be interested in bartering or trading with me, because he does it all.  So he requires that all the members have the type of job that pays large amounts of cash in order to support his "sustainable farm".

And along with that he is monopolizing the business from any other small farm farmers in the region.  If he offers only one type of membership--a whole diet--and requires such a large fee to do so, then his members will not have money or need, after picking up their food from his farm, to go support any other regional farmers that sell, just eggs and chickens, or similar.  Instead, he employs ten full-time farmers working for him on his farm.  It seems if he were really so against the commercial system (he only buys second-hand clothes, etc.) that he would be more encouraging of similar choices in others.  In which case it would make more sense to perhaps support and be a part of a local network of a number of small farmers in order to provide the whole diet for a membership in the network, rather than just supporting his farm.

Simply, in our family, we raise our own chickens for our egg needs and some of our meat needs, and we keep bees to provide for a major amount of our yearly sweetner-usage.  We also do gardening that supplies small amounts of produce for our family.  We do these things naturally and chemical-free.  We do it because we think it is good for the earth, and it offsets some of our food costs.  However, a membership at Essex Farm would be a discouragement from our doing those things since they would be redundant to our farm membership benefits, and increase our yearly food budget even more.  Ultimately, if multiple people stopped their small-scale home efforts to just use the farm membership benefits, I feel that is a net loss both to the earth, and the type of sustainability and stewardship mentality that farmers like her husband are trying to promote.

                    

Full Circle on the City Farm

It's amazing to see that our peas on St. Patrick's Day grew from teeny little sprouts,

Into towering plants,

Exploded in blossoms out the top,

Fell over under their own weight,

Provided us with a few days of snacking plus substantial finale harvest,

And have now been pulled from the garden and piled in the compost heap.  It's the circle of life.  It's life and death. Life and death are all around us and it's good for our children to recognize it.  We honor and respect the deaths that sustain our lives. 

Adventures in Home Cheesemaking

Taking advantage of a completely free day last Saturday after some out of town meetings were canceled, we got to work on our very first farmhouse cheddar cheese.

We actually tried to do it a few weeks earlier.  We got everything out and even started pouring milk--until we realized my 7 quart soup pot wouldn't hold two gallons of milk!  So for our anniversary I received what Jonas called: "A yuge pot!"  Which it is--it's as big as my canner, though without the unacceptable for cheesemaking chipped enamel.  Jeremy received a wooden cutting board for drying the cheese on.  Then we were finally actually ready to go.

It turned out o be a good thing we had the entire day set aside--home cheesemaking is a pretty big undertaking.  In the end I was glad we had the book, not just the kit.  The book gave us a bit more information that was helpful, though in reality both the book and the kit instructions would contradict themselves and each other--but we made it work.

Owen got in on some of the action.  Pouring the milk and cream.  We periodically called him back over to "come see" what was happening.

Jeremy cutting the curd after ripening and renneting.

We "cooked" the curd then hung them to drain.  

Then Jeremy took off to school for something or other related to "real work" or"progress towards graduating" or something like that and left me all alone to work from there.  It probably wouldn't have been as much trouble if I hadn't decided we should use the whey to make homemade ricotta while we were at it.  It has to be fresh whey so it was the only time to do it--but it was a lot of work for a little return--not as satisfying, though it did make for a delicious dinner.  

So after draining the curds I broke them up, salted them, and pressed them into the cheese mold and worked on creative ways to get 20 pounds of weight in the form of 5 pound bags of flour and beans to balance on top and press it. (I think what I really need is an old weight set off craig's list.)

24 hours later we had a beautiful round of homemade farmhouse cheddar cheese. It's almost done air-drying to form a rind. 

Then we will wax it and age it for two months in our new little old mini-fridge from the thrift store.  (Her name is Colby.)  A fridge isn't the ideal location for aging cheese this one will be set warmer than most fridges, but colder than most homes.  They say a cool basement is a great place to age cheese, but have I ever mentioned the dirt floor and awesome blue mold that grows on our luggage when we store it in the basement?  We're not going to store anything down there that we actually plan on eating. 

Jeremy says he's operating under the assumption that we did everything perfectly in our first try at real cheesemaking.  In two months I guess we'll let you know.