THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I FEEL ALMOST OVERWHELMED with a sense of the abundance in our lives. We’re healthy, we have no debt, and we get to live in this amazingly beautiful place. Certainly, we face challenges like anyone else: in our marriage relationship, occasional unexpected financial issues and now and again being slowed down by illness or injury. I still struggle with ambivalence about raising animals to slaughter for food. I feel guilty when an ongoing physical challenge prevents me from doing my share of the work on the farm. It is not always easy, and not always fun.
But we keep going. Why? We love this place, we love our community, and doing what we do here has enabled us to contribute something to the quality of life of our customers, friends and family. Sure, having animals ties us down; we haven’t been away together from the farm overnight since we got our first chickens in 2007.
The birds have contributed greatly to our lives, too. We’ve had a lot of fun over these years, observing and laughing over the different personalities, the funny and perplexing mannerisms and learning about the different calls they make and the predator-alert system. We have laughed ourselves silly over the goofy antics of the ducks and the shoe-fetish behavior of Old Tom. We have had many moments of frustration looking for nests of turkey hens who insist on laying eggs somewhere other than the perfectly nice broody coops I built for them. Many times I have cried when a bird was killed by a hawk or a bobcat, and felt guilty that I didn’t do more to keep it safe.
Of course, there is more to the farm than chickens, turkeys and ducks. I love gardening, and it is positively delightful to have so much space and peat-rich soil available. Every year, though, I’ve cut down on the amount of planting I’ve done, always trying to find that elusive balance between all my responsibilities without becoming stressed or too tired. Our short growing season is a challenge. Over the past couple of seasons, I’ve managed to be organized enough to plant some fall and winter crops. Since my little greenhouse isn’t heated, growing late-season crops seems to me to be a good way to effectively extend our gardening season well beyond the first October frosts.
Since our first year here, in the course of getting used to a shorter growing season, I had been wishing for a greenhouse to start plants earlier in the spring. A couple of years ago, and not a moment too soon, I had an inspiration. An old A-frame chicken coop (the first coop I built in 2007) had been sitting unused for some time, since our rapidly growing chicken flock had been moved into more spacious sleeping quarters. I stripped off the chicken wire and pulled out all the rusty staples, nails and hardware. Then I dismantled the frame just enough to make it easy for me to move up the hill to the spot I’d marked off for it at the north end of my kitchen garden.
My brother John had given us forty-two 8-by-8-by-16-inch concrete blocks. I made a sketch, did some number-crunching and discovered that I had just the right amount to build a two-course foundation for the 8-by-8-foot frame. I cleared and leveled the site and covered it with overlapping pieces of landscape cloth. Then I laid out the first course of blocks, taking my time and getting everything square and level. Once that was in place, the second course went up quickly. Lifting the frame onto the foundation was a little tricky. Excited about getting past the foundation stage, I was working on it one day when David was in Seattle. It would have been much easier with two people, but eventually I managed it. The frame was secured to the foundation with long masonry bolts.
David bought some clear polycarbonate panels to cover the greenhouse frame. They were just the right size so that, when overlapped with the next panel, four panels covered the sides nicely. I added a door on the south end and a window on the north; a nifty piece of hardware automatically opens the window when the greenhouse temperature gets above about 75°F. I installed two deep shelves on either side, thick cedar lumber wide enough to easily hold standard seedling flats.
Considering the footprint of my little greenhouse is only eight-feet square, it is surprising how much space there is for both storage and seed-starting. I also had the satisfaction of finding a new use for an unloved surplus coop, and the whole thing didn’t cost much. Most of the cost was the polycarbonate panels (around $20 each, and I used ten), plus a little for hardware. It’s made a huge difference to be able to start seeds much earlier in the year.
Every year is different; weather patterns, other projects that come up, family health issues — lots of factors affect what and how much we’re able to grow. But I also work hard at preserving as much of the food we produce as possible, partly because I dislike wasting good food. I also have the additional satisfaction of a well-stocked pantry at any time of year.
Coop converted to greenhouse.
Whenever we slaughter chickens, some inevitably end up in the stockpot. I make a nice big batch of chicken broth, strain it and process it in the pressure canner. Once the meat has been cooled and picked off the bones, it gets canned as well.
Sometimes, I’ll combine broth with chicken meat, add a few garden vegetables and can it as chicken soup. But having the meat and broth in separate jars is handy too. Just the other night, when I knew David would be coming home late from visiting his mother in Seattle, I made chicken curry. I put a pan of his favorite organic brown basmati rice on to simmer, then got two pint jars of chicken and one quart jar of chicken broth from the pantry. I melted a stick of butter, sautéed some onions and garlic, then made a roux by stirring in a half cup of flour, a few grinds of black pepper, curry powder, a pinch of garam masala and a couple of pinches of cumin. Once the roux was lightly browned, I stirred in the broth. As soon as the mixture started to thicken, I dumped the two jars of chicken with its own broth into the pan. David likes to adjust the seasoning of dishes like curry with a little soy sauce instead of salt, and this time I thought of him and remembered the soy sauce. As brown basmati rice takes about forty-five minutes to cook, the curry was actually done well ahead of it. As I noted earlier, it’s lovely not to have to thaw out anything. Plus, that batch of chicken curry provided three meals for us. You’ll have to pardon me if I sound a little smug.
The Abundance of Having Less
When we moved from Seattle to the farm, we made a conscious decision to live debt-free. Even while living in Seattle, we had a mortgage but otherwise owed nothing. We drive used cars bought with cash and do much of the maintenance and repair work ourselves. We have no television, so we have no cable TV bill. Ditto for high-speed Internet service. Our culture has pushed the message for years that there is something wrong with us if we don’t have the latest electronic gizmo, more cable channels, a newer car, a bigger house.
What about those of us who not only don’t have all those things, but find that we are perfectly content living without them?
It seemed to me that, living in Seattle, even our relatively simple life was getting more complicated and more expensive all the time. Here, our lives are busy and the days full. (David likes to say that he went from working seventy hours a week to working one hundred, and he’s not exaggerating.) But we have more choices available to us. We are not stuck in a cycle of working to maintain a certain lifestyle, just to maintain a certain lifestyle. We’re growing more of our own food now. Would we like to be more self-sufficient? Sure. But we also see the need to be realistic. For one thing, we didn’t start this new life when we were in our twenties.
Living off the grid has a way of changing your priorities. I truly thought I would miss having a television. I didn’t spend hours every day with it, but I did enjoy watching a little news in the morning and Law & Order reruns in the evening. And although I’ve always been a big sports fan, about the only sports events I even think about anymore are the tennis grand slams. And honestly, I was surprised to find that I didn’t miss the TV at all. These days, who has the time anyway?
I guess it comes down to knowing what is truly important to you and taking what steps you can to follow your heart. I’ve heard lots of people say, “Oh, I’d love to be off the grid.” I suspect they might be as ignorant as I was about what that means. Possibly what they really are expressing is a desire to live a simpler life, away from city traffic and stress, closer to nature. We’ve also heard a few mildly disparaging remarks about us “going back to the land,” and other comments that seem to imply that we’re somehow strange. I am also taken aback when people react negatively to our desire to live debt-free. (We don’t go out of our way to talk about this, but occasionally it does come up in conversation.)
Everyone, at some point in his life, has to decide which way he’s going to go. We know our choice of lifestyle is right for us. It’s not so convenient to have to take our garbage and recycling to the local dump instead of having curbside pickup like we did in Seattle. In the city, we could walk just about everywhere: to the grocery store, the local swimming pool, the public library; here we have to drive pretty much everywhere. There are always trade-offs, and I think that the majority in our situation are in our favor. There is an abundance of space, of trees and water and wildlife, of fresh air and starlight here that is precious to us. With all of the challenges this life has given us, we have so much to be grateful for and look forward to every day.