Homesteading: Heartbreak, Healing, Harvest

There is a popular meme on the interwebs that states “you are not starting over, you are starting from experience” (insert flowing font text over picture of beach horizon with sun rays). I feel this statement is slightly trite, but very accurate. After all, two things can be (and often are) true at once. My mom says that gardening is often heartbreak and I agree much of the time. Our daughter likes to say that we “have a farm” and I am always correcting her that it’s more of a homestead. A small one at that. With less than an acre of our 2.5 acre patch of Maine woods cleared for our use, it provides us with many experiences, some good, some devastating, but all valuable. 

I’m not sure exactly how many critters we’re keeping as I type this. I just sat down from helping the last chick out of its shell (not recommended, but occasionally necessary) from this last run of Black Copper Marans I plan on doing this summer (probably).

This marks the first generation of a breeding line I hope to establish, with the goal to deepen the color of these already beautiful chocolate colored eggs.

The stock of these BCM is originally from Ca, like myself and the boys. A fitting beginning to this new endeavor. I have never bred for any specific trait before and I’m excited about the whole thing. 

I also want extra points for not saying I’m eggcited. Though I guess I just did, so we’ll call it a wash. We can add it to the never ending pile of wash that is a homestead constant. 

I have been doing this long enough to know that intentions and execution are as different as expressed and unexpressed traits from any given endeavor to progenerate. All it takes is a bad run of weather, or unforeseen catastrophe to make well thought out plans become nothing more than future impossibilities. At least this time around, (please refer to the introductory quote). We try to be self-sustaining here though we are still very dependent on the wider world. We are able to produce many products annually for our family from this land. Kitchen scraps and garden waste pass through the flock and result in eggs for the kitchen or incubator. Sustaining our bodies and the flock itself. It is a nice feeling when things begin and end here. Our meat bird stock is brought in each year and in the freezer within a season. Our laying flock is a year round chore and joy, where many of the coop residents are born in the house and die in the yard. 

We have established perennial plants and trees that provide food and medicine without much intervention, but they are not without their trials and maintenance issues. Miscalculations can result in the loss of some or all of a year’s harvest. It is always sad when anything has to be culled, or cut back especially when the beginning of the season looks so promising. We have been lucky that most of the time the resources take turns teaching us lessons. Sometimes the flock is doing amazing, but the garden is a loss. Sometimes the flock is a draw and the garden a bounty, and sometimes we are just lucky we are saving money on maple syrup because there are vet bills to pay. 

The primary difference between a farm and homestead, is that a farm produces a surplus of product for sale to others and a homestead sustains itself. I also believe that when done right a homestead creates systems. Closed systems where the waste from one aspect is absorbed by another. One of my favorite things is a meal or treat that was entirely sourced here. Like maple popcorn balls. Corn grown in the summer and syrup boiled from the snow encased springtime trees. Most other meals have some element of the outside world responsible for the offering. Even something like the roast chicken and pesto pasta from last night is a collaboration with our land and the outside world.

After all, we are not growing wheat and milling flour for pasta, yet. 

I find a lot of idealization and flat out miss representation in some of the homesteading content easily found on that intangible world we keep in our pockets. It’s easy to cut out all the stuff between beginning and end and gloss over the multitudes of past failures that enabled any current harvest. I would love to come to a harvest without the trials and attention it takes to exert your will over the natural order of things, but that would be wildly inauthentic. 

Mobile internet makes these things very simple. All it takes is a picture or general description in a search engine while sitting on a rock, for me to learn that the beautiful black blue beatle with the vibrant orange band is in fact an elderberry borer, which is just as shitty as it sounds.

A concrete threat to the elder plants I have been growing from wild clippings for a decade. Bushes grown from twigs now with thick wooded trunks that I will likely have to cull at the end of the season.

It’s not a fun way to find out about new things, especially when it finally looked like I would have a year’s worth of medicine for the family. Every year is something new, a new pest to watch for and new management protocol to become familiar with. 

By all New England yard standards, most of our property looks overgrown and disheveled. It’s too easy to look at the sea of green and see weeds, but I know better. I know there is food and medicine not just for us but for the bugs and birds and that this is just as important as what I plan to harvest for our table. I don’t believe in calling some plants weeds, but the act of weeding is constant during the growing months. There are simply plants we are helping to grow here and ones we are actively discouraging. Doing this requires learning about all the green things, not just the ones you planted, but also the ones that show up. It is easy to discount a new friend or to enable a threatening visitor by not taking time for quiet observation and research. 

It’s an ecosystem for snakes, toads and insects of all types. When we remove these things from the space our food and medicine come from, there is a net loss for all. These creatures care for the soil, they lived here before our house was ever a line on a blueprint. Last year’s construction really drove home the impact that human ‘progress’ has on the land and the many equally deserving life forms that we should be sharing this space with. 

From butterflies, to nematodes and the mycelium in the soil that we hope will nourish not only us, but the roots of future crops and caress the bare feet of future children. It is important to us that the harvests do not come by way of harming or poisoning for the benefit of a single aspect of the equation. Though our management absolutely causes the death of entire populations of creatures for the benefit of others. The systems we support matter, not just the final product or increased yield at any price. 

There is value in tending soil, kids and critters. Perhaps the most important thing I can do for the earth is to spend as much of my effort as possible participating in a simple existence. It is calming for the nervous system in a way that the majority of modern human existence is not. This opportunity is born of a privileged position. Made possible by land that is not mine at all and that was taken from its original custodians by an unsuccessfull genocide. What a strange choice we made when we were given a world with enough space and abundance to provide everything we could need for our basic care and enough natural beauty to feed our collective soul and we choose colonization in conquest for a one particular shiny yellow rock. I think the only meaningful rebellion we can provide is for our children to see the boundaries we draw and the sacrifices those choices mandate. A juxtaposition with the other households and lifestyles they experience. I hope they draw from the peace of simple things that live in your core.

An inarticulate feeling experienced by the gut rather than frontal lobe. Like the joy of ripening cherries.

 I hope that they can start their adult lives from the vantage point of these experiences we have provided them, the sacrifices we have made to not just preach, but demonstrate making diversity a priority.  They can feel it when the forest embraces the trails they walk. A church with a roof of tree boughs and floors of fungi. I hope they remember to learn the names of the beings who live around them, to react from an informed place rather than a fearful one. There are many creatures that can seem foreign and scary, but we must remember that we are the ones who have made ourselves strangers to a natural existence, becoming the harbingers of destruction. Within three generations most of the population has lost its direct connection with their food and the six inches of arable soil that makes all life possible. There is a vacuum there, but I have hope that it can be repaired. That our grandkids will see the value in the wild places where I have found an almost boundless peace. 

It’s idealistic, but there are worse things to be. 

Be well, and thank you for reading!