A Pregnant Pause

After a long absence, I return to give you good tidings of great joy: Seth and I are pregnant! The baby's coming sometime around the end of September, and we are SO EXCITED. Absolutely thrilled. Here is me in the greenhouse back at Chris and Jonny's place eating spinach to get lots of iron. This picture was taken only weeks before marauding geese busted in and munched spinach to their hearts' delight. All I can say is that they had better all be pregnant. Meanwhile, I am puzzling over how a new baby, new farm, and hopefully a new house will all compatibilize themselves in our lives while I work 40 hours a week packing seed potatoes at Moose Tubers and 10 hours a week at the Belfast Co-op stocking (or stalking, as I like to imagine) produce. Moose Tubers will only go on for seven weeks, for which I am very grateful.



Anna's new workplace:



Other very exciting news is that Seth and Tyler, as Whiffletree, played a spectacularly successful contra dance at the American Legion Hall--hence the Bingo paraphernalia you may notice in the background--in Belfast about two weeks ago. For those of you not immersed in contra dance culture, a two-member band is quite uncommon and Whiffletree has met with much skepticism in the contra scene, but luckily they have weathered the oft-times cool receptions and succeeded in thoroughly amazing both dancers and dance callers. Below, please find some mug shots of the hot new boy band:

Pig Politics

In response to those who miss the pig-slaughtering pictures, I apologize. The "Vegetarians Beware" entry was deleted in my absence due to complaints from disturbed readers, and the text is now lost in the ether of cyberspace and our memories.

This seems like a good opportunity to explore the politics of meat, which--if you have read Michael Pollan's articles and books OR watched Supersize Me or Food, Inc. OR let yourself be exposed to popular media of almost any kind--you will be familiar with. Huge corporations at whom we should be shocked simply because they haven't been brought down under anti-trust laws are constantly raising millions of meat animals in horrible conditions and mistreating hundreds of thousands of meat industry workers and flushing tons of pollutants into our environment. The public end of all this is a little skinless boneless piece of flesh on a styrofoam tray sealed in plastic wrap, stamped with a price and sell-by date. When the industry is exposed by writers and filmmakers painting gruesome images of what goes on in feedlots and slaughterhouses, the public (so to speak) eats it up. However, it seems that we as a society are so sensitized to these kinds of images that we can't always distinguish a wholesome and respectful death of an animal from a brutal, dangerous and toxic one.

I respect the perspective of our readers who felt saddened, upset, or frightened by the images of us doing in our three pigs. It is indeed a mixed emotional bag for us, as well--none of us would claim that it's an easy or gleeful task, and it is something that we take seriously and try to do well. So while some of us might struggle with a pig's demise, I feel it is important to offer these images as both contradiction and alternative to the agro-industrial meat system.

If any of you were hoping to follow the guidelines for brining and smoking ham or bacon, you can get in touch with Seth, master of the smoky touch, and entreat him to share his expertise. So, at risk but not with the intent of offending our gentle and kind readers, I will repost our piggy pictures.

Outhouse Relocation Campaign

This is a pretty self-explanatory set of photos, but the background is: we are using our slightly ailing Ford 8N, Polly, to move our shiny new outhouse to its final resting place.






















Loading the outhouse on the forks.

















She didn't tip forward on her nose...but she did stall out.






















After adding a beefier strap, heading uphill through mushy snow.


















Stalled out again, in our future garden!

















Delicate work





















Wave a level at it, and maybe it will sit flat?






















Aaaaah...pooping in style, not in a cesspool.

Valentine's Day Roofing Party

On February 14th, Elsie and her father John plotted and executed a glorious roofing workday party. In attendance were the five of us North Branch Farmers along with Elsie's dad, her mother Ellen, neighbor Annie, Uncle Roy, and our friends Lao, Danielle, and young Elizabeth. In classic NBF style, quinoa and stir-fry were served at the luncheon, accompanied by wholesome, imported North Monroe drinking water. A fine time was had by all, and Annie's dog Rudy apparently did not die even after having eaten a quarter of a bar of Dagoba New Moon 74% Organic Dark Chocolate. Let's just be glad he didn't find the Eclipse and Xocolatl bars that were also within doggie reach.
















It was a good thing the roof workday happened when it did, because previously we had been encountering numerous obstacles that incited bouts of cursing, swearing, throwing things, and abandoning the roof mid-panel-installation. Thanks to our guest crew's soothing temperaments and can-do attitudes born of many years' experience, we made slow but steady progress throughout the day and worked out many of the kinks that had been challenging us.





















Elsie spent much of the day roofing our outhouse; it came out beautifully and we now have the confidence that at least one of us can complete a roofing project start to finish. Never mind that the outhouse has 1/320 the area of the barn roof. It looks like Annie is handing her materials and Ellen is prepping drip edge in this shot.






















Elsie seams the outhouse roof while John looks on.






















Towards the end of the day, Gib and Lao--with assistance--set up a roofing station on the west end of the north side of the barn roof, working back towards the other set of panels that stopped at the peak of the silo connector.






















Panel #2 up! The sun was starting to go down, so we soon packed up shop and called it a day. Thanks to everyone who so kindly shared their Valentine's Sunday for the benefit of the North Branch Barn!

Recreational Activities

Hello to our family and friends, and thanks to Mick and Bee for prodding on the entry-writing front. I would like to offer an official Interweb welcome to Gib, the long-awaited newest member of our household, and I hope to be channeling his excellent writing skills, which you may sample at http://adventuresoficenine.blogspot.com/, here. Seth and I returned a week ago from our sabbatical month in beautiful North Carolina and are rushing headlong, with our co-farmers, into the noble drama of barn-house-land caretaking.

Sunday the 7th of February was a busy day. In the morning, while Elsie and Tyler killed trees with chainsaws for firewood, Seth and I almost completed our NEW OUTHOUSE.

Now, we would choose to use an outhouse anyway for many logical reasons, but the reason we need to have one right now is because of our septic system, or lack thereof. In December, our sinks wouldn't drain. Seth took apart the u-bends under both sinks, and they were---to our amazement--clear! So as he dismantled plumbing in the basement farther and farther from the sinks, he discovered that the pipe where all the drains joined up had clogged to about a half-inch diameter opening, down from the two-inch diameter pipe. No wonder things weren't doing so hot. And in the process of exploring the plumbing, Seth noticed that a cleanout-access to the drain from the toilet was backed up to within inches of overflowing into our basement. Seth and I thought, "We need to get this septic tank pumped." We placed a five-dollar bet: Seth thought the tank would be shot and need replacing, and I thought it would still be usable. So we dug up the lid to the tank, called the pumping company, and waited for the weekend to be over to find resolution to our wager.

Come Monday, the pump truck arrived, lifted the concrete lid, and pumped out hundreds of gallons of sewage to expose not a septic tank but what the pump-man technically termed a Cesspool: a pit in the ground lined with rocks. No separation of liquids from solids, no obvious pipe out to a leach field of any kind. All bets were off. So now we throw dirty dishwater on the lawn, take bucket baths, and are looking forward to our classy new outhouse. Elsie says it can even have a standing-seam metal roof to match the barn.



















Side-view
















Top view, pre-roof and pre-seat.
















After lunch, the five of us took off on snowshoe for a two-hour tromp through the woods. Gib talked to us about sustainable forestry practices, and Seth climbed a leaning dead gray birch for a chaga mushroom. It was beautiful and cold and I found traces suggesting we have a LOT of critters in our woods--deer, rabbits, porcupines, foxes, and probably musk oxen and polar bears too.

Money in the Bank

Oh yeah, baby...














We are gonna be warm, and our hay is gonna be dry.

The animals all cozy in the barn