The Joys of Farming

We now have lambs. Emily and Soren and I have been patiently awaiting the first lambs for a few weeks now. We have had the two Dorset ewes sequestered in lambing pens (I guess that they're technically call Jugs) in the back of the barn for a couple of weeks now. We anticipated them to drop lambs first. But low and behold as the three of us were heading out the driveway to go for a hike on the Ice Age Trail we saw this out in the field:One of our heritage breed Jacobs sheep ewes had dropped a lamb as causal and cool as pouring a cup of coffee. She was happy, the lamb was happy, we were stunned. I slammed on the brakes and we ran out to have a look. She's a happy, healthy little spotted critter that has bonded well to her mama. \
The following day around the same time one of our Dorsets delivered twins. We had just returned from helping out Emily 's sister do some remodeling work on her gallery (http://www.threesisterstudio.blogspot.com/) and went to check on the mamas and found a still wet and wriggling lamb. I assisted with the delivery of her little brother.
It was a family affair, I was in shoulder length rubber gloves, very focused on the everyday miracle of birth. Soren was in the backpack on his Mama's back laughing while Emily coached me through and provided material support.
I'm not so sure my help was needed, but I was there. I pulled the lamb out, broke the amniotic sac, rubbed the little fellar down with straw and poked my fingers up his nose and pulled out liquid until he sneezed and started to breathe.
Now we await the other two ewes to lamb. It could be tonight, and it could be two days from now. Until then we get to enjoy the excitement of three new lives on the farm, get to study up on lactation, milk fever, and the myriad things that can go wrong, and hope that everything goes right.

Greetings, and nearly a happy new year. We have been living at Elm Glen Farm for nearly 2 years now and are very happy here. Its a beautiful piece of the world that we are happy to call home. We have a healthy and VERY happy 4 1/2 month old boy named Soren Vaughn. He is indeed the light of our lives. He's a beautiful boy who gets to have this farm for his entire life if he so chooses.
We have undertaken the full remodel of of about 50% of the house, done some structural repair on the foundation, and invested heavily in a new high efficiency heating system. Not to mention a fancy high efficiency wood burning stove. We have planted and harvested our 3rd garden and have had the soil tested in the fields. ( it was nearly ruined...ph of 5.7...by a local dairy farmer who had been raising corn upon corn upon corn for years while renting the fields). We have in turn developed a plan to fix them. It includes lime and livestock.
On that note we have a feisty Icelandic Ram and 4 ewes on premises. My dad and I worked on their lambing pen today in anticipation of some March births. The ewes are of mixed breeding. the ram is full of piss and vinegar. lets discuss the Ram first:
Ramikin...or Eigel Skallagrimson ( a tip of the hat to Snoerri's Sagas) as I would have prefered to call him if it rolled off the American tongue a bit easier was an orphaned orphan my good friend Blaise passed on to me. (Blaise raises top quality pork outside of Washburn, WI on the shores of the Big Lake). Blaise and I butcered Raminkin's female counterpart earlier this fall and roasted her heart and loins over an October campfire. Delicious lamb with sage and sea salt washed down with a budget, but quality Pinot Noir by firelight...tough to beat.
Ramikin was spared however and I brought him back to Polk County with the hopes of breeding him to some heritage ewes. He toughed it out here for three months as a bachelor. He made friends with my Gordon Setter bitch, Freya. Crapped on the front step etc., until I completed his fence. Once fenced in he was perpetually grumpy. Christmas came around and I bought two Jacob crosses and 2 Dorset/Friesen Cross ewes. I delivered the Jacobs first. Ramikin was beside himself. He was downright comical with his lingual and iliac antics. Horny Goat indeed. The ewes, however wanted nothing of it. They were already knocked up. Same with the Dorset Crosses that showed up the next day. Ramikin, nonetheless is a much happier fellow, with his feminine entourage. Big Love, indeed.
The upswing is that if these ewes are as pregnant as the sellers promised, we will have anywhere form 4 to 12 lambs on our hands to raise and slaughter come fall. As my good friend David in Norway said about rabbits..."cute and cuddly when they're little, delicious when they grow up".

I wont even try to backtrack the last month or so. I'll just say that we had a great housewarming/spring/birthday party yesterday. Paella with many local ingredients: rainbow trout, wild turkey, organic pork, and homegrown tomatoes. Not local: saffron, all the seafood, and most everything else....but it was good.
After the party we loaded Blaise's trailer with 1000 pounds of barley that we grew last summer. He'll be feeding it to his hogs this summer and we'll receive 45 pounds of Organinc pork out of the deal. Fair and square. And delicious.

We are moving to the farm. !. Yes, you have been deceived over the last 3 months. Due to work related issues we have been living in NE Minneapolis and driving home to Elm Glen Farm on the weekends. I was laid off (for better or worse) during the coldest months of the winter. Minneapolis carpentry in the winter is a practice for fools and masochists. I try to be neither...
Circumstances have allowed us to make the move to live full time at Elm Glen and the timing couldn't be better. Spring is coming, time to start seeds, get the chicken tractor built and go full bore into renovating the old farmhouse.
We have been busy lately in the renovation department. The farmhosue at Elm Glen, where my mom, aunt, and uncle were raised; the place that I have known since (I imagine) the second or third day of my life is under going some major internal changes. Emily and I dug into the ceiling of the living room, with the intention of replacing old water damaged acoustic tiles with new sheetrock. The project turned into a major undertaking. (I am sure this portends the pattern of the every project we undertake on the old house). We ended up tearing out the tiles, insulation, and framing of the old flat ceiling that hung less than 7' high. I lofted the ceiling to match the external profile of the roofline- giving us nearly 9' on the high side and over 7' on the low side. I framed in for a skylight and ran wires for ceiling mounted lights. The little cave of a living room will now be a much more spacious living room. I insulated the roof with formaldehyde free fiberglass and expanded foam, mitigating thermal breaks to R40 (R38 is the reccomendation, locally).
The process gave me insight to the ontogeny of a Wisconsin farmhouse. The room was an addition. Based on the lumber in the walls (and the fact that my Grandma said it was there when they bought the house in the 50's) I am guessing the addition happened in the 40's. As I peeled back the panelling on the west side of the room, the old siding and framing for a front door and window looked me in the face. I dug deeper into the wall, my carpenter's curiousity insisted. The original house was "baloon framed" with red oak 2x4's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_framing#Balloon_framing). My dad observed this and pointed out that the framing must have been done before the wood had dried. This is true. Anyone who has tried to drive a framing nail into a dry piece of oak will attest to the fact that you wouldn't want to build a house that way. Most modern homes are framed with SPF 2x material (Spruce, Pine, Fir mixed species). It is strong, easy to cut, nail into, and manipulate. Loss of trees and countinuous demand for long, durable material has led to the use of manufacted lumber, wooden I-joists, and timber-strand studs. These materials are strong, unnaturally straight, and make use of chipwood that would have previously been waste- however they contains massive amounts of adhesives with innumerable toxicities.
Back to Elm Gle, however. OAK FRAME WALLS. No wonder the house has withstood the years. My Grandma told me that when they originally bought it, the seller told them it was 100 years old, dating the original construction to Pre-civil war. I found a piece of 1912 newspaper in the wall.
Here are some photos. enjoy. more to come.

Alas, Spring has arrived in Northern Wisconsin

Spring, I think, has finally arrived and the farm smells of a thawing pond and decaying reeds left over from October. I have missed the sun, bare arms and dirt-caked hands and knees. Parsnips are first on the list of garden chores. As of last weekend, the ground was not soft enough to pull our parsnips from the garden, but I will try again tomorrow. Our original plan was to let the two rows of yummy parsnips sweeten up with the winter frost under a think layer of mulch. Good plan, if we were able to get them out of the ground during the winter, but that didn't happen. So, I am going to attempt to salvage some before they rot in the warming soil. If so, we will have some sweet and scrumptous curry, soups and maple syrup glazed veggies. Or, we might have to change our strategy for next year. We'll find out soon.

Full Moon on the Farm

Written by Ian:
Winter in Wisconsin is cold. Mostly. It's also dark. Mostly cold and dark. The daylight is limited, the nights are long, and the earth goes into a big chill. It is this time of year that when walking through hardwoods on a cold day you hear the trees pop and crack as the moisture in their trunks freezes and expands. The moisture in the ground freezes, too. Normally up to three feet deep, it can freeze even deeper in the absence of a thick snow cover for insulation. This time of year you take advantage of the less cold days. Once a person's body is acclimated, anywhere from +5 to +25 f. feels just great. Perfect temperature, not too frigid at +5 and not too sloppy at +25 . If it gets much warmer and the sun is shining the snow turns to slush and you'd nearly wish yourself back to zero (Yes, that thermometer reads 20 below, that was last tuesday). But on nights when the reading gets down in the negatives, you settle in, put on an extra sweater burn all the white oak, elm, and whatever else you have stacked in the woodshed and soak in the heat of the wood stove because you know for some reason or another you'll be back out in the cold in the morning.
If I anthropomorphise and allowed myself too much sensitivity I would cry myself to sleep each night thinking of all the non-hibernating and non-torporing creatures in the Wisconsin woods in the winter time. My good friend John and I were deer hunting this fall when he made a simple, but profound comment. He observed that when fall arrives, comfort ends for deer (and most other critters for that matter). After a spring of new greens, a summer of abundance, an autumn of fruit, they are plunged into a winter of scarcity. Their only source of warmth is the byproduct of their metabolism digesting a spartan diet of twigs, some grasses, gleaned field crops, and select evergreens. The snow deepens, sometimes up to their bellies. Their small cleft hooves poorly suited for travel in the snow. Not too mention, a Wisconsin white tailed deer's initiation into winter is being pursued by a few hundred thousand individuals with rifles-- like John and I! (There are couple of genuine, non-native, chinese ring neck pheasant roosters tolerating the cold in this photo...many pseudo-conservantionists will hail the proliferation of this bird as an ecological success story. Those who are better informed know that it is a classic case of a non-native species elbowing in on native territory. Well...I do enjoy hunting and eating them, though).
However, I avoid anthropomorphising and try not to be overly sensitive. I appreciate deer, and all other creatures of the Wisconsin woods for what they are. I carry on wishing them the best through a cold winter.
The prevailing cold and dark makes for a reason to celebrate when we get a little reprieve that is not as cold, not so dark night. The full moon came up over the farm on Saturday as the sun dropped on the opposite horizon. It was half as big as the barn as it bounce up the horizon. I was out skiing on southwest corner and was able to capture the moment (above banner). I skied back to the house as my Dad was pulling up the driveway. We had planned to make beer that evening and he was right on time. Arthur came over, as well, and joined in the beer making. Here he is removing the grains from a batch of "Russian Imperial stout". I brewed an improvised recipe that I deemed "Starvation Moon Amber" on account of the Amber malt and the midwinter full moon.
-6 pounds Amber malt extract
-various grains...about 1 pound
- 1 oz each: Saaz and Cascade hops
My cousin, who is a professional Brewster says..."its easy to make a good beer, its a whole other challenge to make a good beer twice". If this beer turns out to be good, it will never be repeated.
As we brewed we sampled from a batch I had brewed way back in August, the day before my sister's wedding. After putting it in the fermenter I neglected it, The temperatur got above 90 deg(!). My Dad, however was able to rescue it. He bottled it using maple syrup (from his sugar bush, last spring) as priming sugar. Typical priming sugar is a super finely granulated corn sugar. In an effort to get away from refined corn products my Dad experimented with the maple syrup. It worked very well, actually too well. Its pretty tough to pour a pint of the August Bride IPA without overflowing the glass.
We finally siphoned off the wort into carboys and retired them to the fermenter around midnight. At my dad's insistence we then went out for a ski. The moon was fat and bright. We cruised at top speed through hardwood and pine forest over the smoothly groomed track beneath the midwinter midnight moon for over an hour before calling it a night.

Day Dream of Harvest Time

Sitting in front of the computer with fat snowflakes floating outside the window and Tom Waits scratching out a soft ballad, I think of harvest time in the fall. These thoughts come to me often when the dusk arrives so early in the day and my hands itch to dig into the moist earth and pull up carrots, beets and parsnips. But alas, there is still winter in our near future so I will have to enjoy the bounty in our cupboard, freezer and basement and taste morsels of the savory summer.

This past spring through fall, Ian and I were in transition, spending the majority of our time in Minneapolis fixing up an old carriage house, situated behind my cousin's house, using salvaged wood, cement board, paint, and furniture. Were were even able to salvage a tomato red cast iron sink from a house scheduled to be demolished to make way for a larger one and a small electric stove from Craig's List.

Needless to say, we were very busy, but stole a few weekends to spend at Elm Glen farm and put in a good-sized garden. Between Ian's dad and our trips to the farm, we were able to weed, water and plant second crops in the rich soil. It was mainly nature and a little luck that kept if from being eaten by deer and other little veggie seeking critters or drying up in the heat of the sun. A large basswood tree shades much of the garden when the sun is strongest and the deer do not come into the yard due to the wide open space of crop fields that surround it. Even the rabbits seemed to have moved on before the spinach leaves pushed through the soil.

I was able to harvest and can whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickled beets, cucumbers and beans using old jars left in the basement from Ian's grandmother's past canning seasons. Our freezer is full of sweet peas, beans, sun-dried tomatoes and zucchini. Zucchini is in there because I didn't know what else to do with it. I have made some yummy soup broths with it by boiling venison bones with salt and pepper. Then when all the flavor is in the water, I boil the zucchini with more spices and blend it all together into a thick broth...then add more veggies for texture and goodness.
We also have bins full of clean dry sand protecting carrots, beets and potatoes. We have onions held in old stockings hanging in the kitchen. All and all, we have saved ourselves quite a bit of money in groceries and have enjoyed the benefits of organic food grown on our land. This past weekend, we started our list of seeds for the upcoming planting season.
Yum.