November mornings are a frantic place to spend your time, at least in Washington County. The parade is over. The skeletal trees hang around like horror-film extras, and every day we expect flurries and frost. And even if we’re not made jumpy by meteorologists, we don’t let ourselves get too comfortable either.
We use these Days of Grace to prepare for the months ahead. The certainty of winter falls heavy, and you can’t drive three miles into town without seeing dump trucks full of firewood, sliding past the fuel-oil truck chuggin’ toward you from the opposite direction. No one is coasting. Farmers either use every moment to finish those sacred last-minute tasks before snowfly or they’ve already sealed the envelope on the season, far more concerned now with deer camp arrangements.
Back in the eighth century, Pope Gregory chose November 1 for All Saints Day’s because the Celts were then already observing a fire festival known as Samhain (pronounced sow-en, Gaelic for summer’s end).
Lots of rumors and mythology swirl around the old holiday, but Samhain was not about sacrificial goats or satanic rituals. It honored family members who had died during the harvest year. It was a time to take inventory of seeds, herbs, and grain stores for the long winter ahead. Perhaps it developed its current dark mystique because it said goodbye to the daylight half of the year and marked the beginning of the darker half. And with the work of growing the winter’s food done, there was finally time for both reflection and sorrow.
Samhain is a quiet day here. I think of the people I lost, through death or the entropy of lives moving in different directions. At sunset I light a bright white candle and spend a little time remembering them. It’s a humble ritual, but one that keeps me grounded around all the harvest parties and celebrations. It carries me through.
Back in Vermont I started the tradition of the Winter Pig. In late fall, after Hallows, I buy a feeder pig or two. This year, ten-week-old Pig will live in the barn until she is ready to be harvested in February.
That may seem like an odd time of year to be putting pork in the freezer, but for this small farm it makes perfect sense. Winter means that the pen in the corner of my barn is safe and comfortable for Pig. In summer it would be a hot, smelly mess. Most people raise pork on pasture, but the precious little pasture and wood space I have goes to animals not raised for slaughter, like horses and wool sheep. Also, around here pigs get loose all the time and wander into the woods and neighboring farms, causing damage and accidents a-plenty.
Raising Pig in winter keeps down the hassle and smell, and since a comfort-loving pig is more likely to eat and nap in the barn than escape, she grows fast and true. And when Valentine’s Day hits around this farm, my thoughts are red — but not about paper hearts. I am looking up recipes for how to cook real ones. Take that, Martha Stewart.
Wood is held sacred in many cultures, but few as much as the Celts. Oak, Ash, and Thorn were the holy trio of woods to the Druids, and the word Druid actually derives from the Gaelic Dru, meaning oak.
Locust makes the finest fence posts, and a birch sapling twig hung on the front door protects from a storm. The practical and the traditional thrive here.
My first winter as a smallholder in Vermont, it dropped below zero for weeks. I kept having to call the nice people at the fuel oil company to deliver more of their sludge into my house. I was spending more than $400 a month just to keep the thermostat at 50 degrees. Jazz and Annie, my two aging huskies, were welcomed in the quilt-covered bed with my sheepdog. Yes, that winter I learned what a “three-dog night” really means.
Much as I loved my dog pile, I was ready to add some alternative heating to my farmhouse, and I opted for the traditional firewood-burning woodstove. I want to be out in the forest harvesting trees off my own land and using my own horse to pull them to the chopping blocks.
My Vermont Bun Baker is a winter farmer’s dream. I loaded it up with wood first thing this miserable November morning and set my big steel percolator with the heavy bottom on top of it, rancher style. There’s room for a kettle of hot water too. When I finish haying the sheep and horse and refilling chicken and rabbit feed and water containers, I come inside to a warm house, a hot cup of coffee, and a steaming teapot ready to pour over a simple breakfast of oatmeal.
The fire keeps the farmer going, and thus the farm. I can tend to them, all of them — from the sleeping sheep on the hill to the chickens on their wind-proof roosts. It is a comfort on cold nights to know it has been that way since the Druids prayed so long ago and far away.
Oatmeal is cheap, filling, and delicious and gives me the most kick for my budget. Mix in some sliced apple, brown sugar, cinnamon, and maple syrup, and you forget the freezing rain and the wet socks from morning chores.
That’s a comfort and a gift up here in the North Country.
The more involved with the animals I become, back in Vermont and here, the more I realize that sheep are the perfect small-farmer’s investment. They produce not only meat but milk, wool, cheese, shearling, leather, lambs, and lanolin as well. They are easy to manage, respectful of fences, and small enough that if you get attacked by one you probably won’t die. And as a single woman I can manage an entire flock with the very green energy that is my sheepdog, which would not be the case with pigs or cows.
The idea that I can get all this and work beside my Border Collie is why I raise these animals. On a bitterly cold winter night I can bolster myself with a full stomach of lamb chops, cover up in a wool hat, sweater, and sheepskin gloves, and feed my sheep with just a few flakes of hay. I ask you, what other animal gives us so much and asks so little in return? And does it without jumping fences or making a fuss?
November for me isn’t about last-minute preparations, and that isn’t through self-righteous Ant vs. Grasshopperism as much as from the nature of the farm. I’m a single woman managing land and livestock alone. I also depend on wood for 100 percent of my heat now, so unless I want to go into winter terrified, regretful, and cold, firewood better be in. Thus I have a mighty stack, at least four cords, arranged on the overhanging porch built into the side of the farmhouse.
My firewood pile is a mix of bought, bartered, and home-harvested. My friend Brett, a fellow homesteader and a lumberjack, took down some poor and dying locust trees out behind the barn and left them to harden and season, propped above the ground so they wouldn’t decompose. When they were fuel-ready, they were pulled up to the woodpile by Jasper, my working pony, my homestead tractor. He’s only 11 hands and 450 pounds, but in harness he is a force to be reckoned with. Together we pulled trees out of that woodlot at which even the most skeptical farmer would nod approvingly.
Well the sassafras it burns too fast,
It starts the fire but never lasts
And swamp oak likes to smoke you blow it till you think you’ll choke.
But hickory is just the tree to remind you of the ecstasy
Of having a pile of good wood.
— from “More Wood” by Dillon Bustin
A face cord of wood measures 4 feet high by 8 feet long and the depth of the length of the wood (usually 16 to 18 inches long, to fit inside a woodstove or a fireplace). A full cord, by contrast, is 4 feet deep.
When I became a homesteader on a mountain in New York state, not only did I move hundreds of miles from my hometown in Pennsylvania, but I also moved a million miles from my middle-class-family upbringing — a choice that still confounds and disappoints my parents.
My new lifestyle with a farm full of animals and obligations means travel is impossible. So when first Thanksgiving and then Christmas roll around, choices like not going home for these traditional holidays have become wounds. My new life means a life without them. I explain that having a farmer as a daughter is like having a daughter in the army — one deployed indefinitely. People who choose to dedicate their lives to the land and animals, to grow food, to do any level of homesteading, learn quickly that company must come to them. In some families, this is a great divide. I invite mine to join me and I hope they will.
No matter how hard I look, my old path is gone. As a farmer in love with her farm, I only know that to pursue this love, this path, feels correct.
Late November pleads for change inside me. With fall now a memory and winter one snowfall away, I am addicted to the weather radio. I crave snow the way a sinner craves a clean slate. It’s not so much that it creates beauty but that it validates my need to be present here. True winter commands my constant vigilance, and I can let go of other people’s guilt-inducing ideas about me being anywhere else through the holidays. My farm needs me. In winter, I am the farm’s soldier. This brings me peace of mind.
Something about that first snow lets me exhale, lets me accept that I am living on an upstate New York farm, where weather is more real than any family drama. When the farm is covered in snow, the real chores come — raking roofs, defrosting livestock tanks, hauling hay bales on sleds for feeding, bringing in wood to keep the home fires burning. It is in this work that I truly understand the necessity, duty, and responsibility of my choice to live on this farm.
Southbound Canada geese pass overhead, calling out, and my own geese answer. This is my life now.