When I was first asking for the privilege of blogging for GRIT, one of the things that I said I wanted to write about was “the relationship between everyday life and the inner creative life,” by which I meant … well, I’m not entirely sure what I meant, except that as an aspiring novelist I know that I have days where my personal and professional lives dovetail gracefully with my creative work, and days when they … um … don’t. The topic seemed relevant to my suburban homesteading aspirations because being a novelist is all about sustaining oneself – not with shelter and food so much as with courage and creative energy; fortitude and perseverance – although, come to think of it, what is any homesteading effort, however suburban, without these qualities?

It’s been a rough week. There’s been weeping, and wine, and deep sleeps, not to mention five days and counting of cold, bone-chilling, grey autumn rain. Some animal ate the tops off three of my broccoli plants. And to top it all off, I read possibly the best novel I’ve ever read whose author is still alive; a novel so good that it caused me to despair of my own work-in-progress and to resent my upbringing, not to mention many of the life choices that I’ve made up till now. And did I mention that I’m on the very cusp of turning forty?

Sigh.

All of this is my way of saying that something has significant has happened. I broke up with my novel – after 14 years.

That is, I broke up with half of it. I think that the other half and I should just be friends. Like, friends who don’t see each other all that often.

The good news is that I found one story in the manuscript which is complete in itself, and I have hacked away the overgrown thorny vines concealing it, much like the prince battling his way towards the waiting Sleeping Beauty. I have turned this unwieldy, sometimes-upwards-of-200K-word inconclusive monster into what might – just possibly – someday soon be a saleable manuscript; coming in neatly at under 70,000 words, thank you very much.

And I vow to never, EVER, again attempt to write a novel without an outline.

Never again.

I SWEAR IT!

It is no easy thing to let go of that on which you’ve secretly banked your whole future, and truth be told it’s not the first manuscript that I’ve had to abandon. I was listening to an interview on NPR a few days ago with the (now former) editor of the (now defunct) Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl, and she said something that really stuck in me. She was basically describing having been a clumsy and homely child, and how her mother had reassured her by telling her, “When you find yourself, you will be beautiful.”

Of course!

Isn’t that how we all feel? That until we’ve fully realized ourselves as what we know deep inside we have the potential to be (in my case until that first novel – especially that first novel – has been lovingly ushered out into the world by someone that isn’t related to me that believes in me) that we don’t yet fully exist in the world; that no one is seeing us; no one is appreciating us as we really are? That we are not yet beautiful?

I’ll admit I’ve been feeling a little sorry for myself, but self-pity – neither the maudlin nor the righteous – makes a darn bit of difference.

What makes a difference (I’m thinking) is to admit that which one most loathes to admit – that something that I love, and in which I have invested every aspect of myself, has failed. Has died. I am not good enough. I cannot do it.

At least, that’s how it felt the first day – miserable, heartbreaking.

As the week went on, though, it felt more like having the strength to let go of characters, and long passages of beautiful (I swear!) writing, because I just can’t pull it all together, and because said characters and long passages of beautiful writing just don’t serve the greater purpose of the novel that I think that I can pull together; and which, in fact, by this past weekend, with the brambles out of the way, is suddenly coming together quite nicely.

I don’t think that this difficulty of mine in pruning my words is entirely unrelated to my dislike of thinning seedlings; I mean, aren’t they all beautiful? Don’t they all deserve a chance? Why CAN’T each one of the spindly little things become a full-fledged purple-topped turnip? Why must I pick and choose, or risk not having anything?

The thing is, I never want to do anything small. Who does? I want a HUGE garden. I want to feed the world with it. I want to have chickens, and a goat, and maybe a sheep, and … well, just everything that I could possibly need so that I don’t have to “need” anything else. And I want to write a book that is everything: fat and thick and intensely philosophical; I want to write an absolute doorstop of a book; a tear-inducing, life-altering, layers-of-wisdom-unpeeling, heartbreaking book. In fact, I wish I’d written this book – Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan, the book that broke my heart this week – because it whispered to me everything that I suspected and really needed to hear about life: that happy endings are not necessarily what you think that they might be; that some things are wrong for you and are not meant to be; that I am “pure-hearted and lovely, and have never done a moment’s wrong. But I am a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks my heart.”

You must read this novel. It’s truly superb.

I’ve made a few interesting observations about my writing life and my writing self in the past few years. First of all, the last time I got really excited about a book; the last time I read a book and thought, yes! YES! It was Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief. I had no idea, until after I finished this novel, that it was a “young adult” novel. I picked it up off of a new fiction table in Barnes & Noble, where it lay among all kinds of other titles, none of which struck me as remotely “young adult.” Then, as now, I have no idea what exactly YA is supposed to mean. All I knew is that the book spoke to me (how could you not be intrigued by a book that is narrated by Death, the character?) and that I began to reconsider my own work; how I tended towards younger protagonists with passionate intensity and a youthful lack of scope, how perhaps the field of YA novels is the one in which I ought to be writing; and how perhaps that is what I’ve always been groping towards, but didn’t know it, because like my intensely passionate and short-sighted protagonists, I had a mistaken understanding of my place in the world and consequently of what my life ought to be.

In fact, it was only because of this mini-epiphany I had after reading The Book Thief that, years later, I was wandering around in the young adult section of a book store at all. I was looking for something … for a place to be, I think, for where I might fit, for something to aspire to, for an aperture into a world in which I would be beautiful.

And there I saw Tender Morsels.

I would normally never have entertained reading this book. At first glance it seems like everything that I’m not; like everything that I don’t like. I think its genre is fantasy, which I don’t and never have read. I normally eschew magic and prefer realism. But when I saw this physically beautiful book on the shelves, read the brief excerpt on the back cover (quoted, having first taken the liberty of changing the POV, above), and then the amazingly sophisticated first paragraph, that seemed so very “full-grown adult” to me, I threw caution to the wind and bought it.

Months later, I finally read it.

And among other gifts it gave me, I suddenly see that there are whole genres out there that are pretty much unknown to me, and in which there is doubtless great work waiting to be discovered – fantasy and science fiction to name but a few – which means that it’s almost like I’m a kid again with the whole reading world ahead of me; something I have over the years despaired of ever being again.

The only hard and fast rule that I seem to be able to discern about what makes something YA is that the protagonist be a young person, but the field seems to be wide open as to whether “young person” means 15 or 22. Here’s what I remember about being “young”: that everything seemed to have its root in a principle; that everything had the severity of fate, the weight of destiny; and that the future was made or broken in a moment. Life didn’t seem so long – perhaps because there was so much more of it ahead of me than behind. When I was young, love was magic and eternal, fated and inevitable. Every moment as a “young adult” was steeped in significance. Everything that happened, good or bad, was part of the story. It was all driving me somewhere. Something was always manifesting. As a young adult I thought about death, and about my life as a whole, as a complete work, fairly regularly. What would I be, what would posterity think of me (because of course posterity would think of me) if I died right now? I never think about dying, or about my life as a whole, as if it were a singular work of art anymore.

And anyway, nowadays I no longer understand works of art as flashes of brilliance. I understand them as the result of long, hard, often joyful, occasionally exuberant and occasionally painful and sometimes even boring work – and for that matter, marriage and parenthood and gardening are kind of like this too. You have your moments of being able to look upon the whole of what you’ve accomplished with satisfaction, with pride, but most of the time you’re just in it and struggling, and doing the best you can because however it may turn out, it’s where you want to be. Over the long haul it is neither romantic or exciting (most of the time) but pretty much like doing any other work that has personal meaning and that one wants to do.

Maybe it’s that perspective that differentiates the “young adult” from the “old” one. And maybe part of my problem these past few years has been that all the real work – all the best work – in any field, is done by “young” people, be they 14, or 40 or 80.

So what I find myself wondering after my week-long breakdown is whether or not what makes a novel YA isn’t anything concrete in a story (like character age, point of view, etc.) at all so much as it is a certain state of mind, and as a state of mind, it can speak equally to sixteen and to forty, in so much as it touches that place inside of us that – fresh or scarred, optimistic or jaded, bored or misused, poor or privileged, hopeful or hopeless – is nonetheless young; is nonetheless still harboring a sense that there is always more to the story, that disappointment and heartache is emboldening us and preparing us for something wonderful; that the story of one’s life matters; that one is unique and significant and not only capable of but destined to make a difference in the world and to do great work, and yearning, yearning, yearning to do it.

So, to try to bring things back – in breaking up with much of my novel I’m not letting go of that on which I’ve secretly banked my whole future – that would be my inner GROWN-UP talking. My inner young adult sees everything I’ve done and been through up till now as landing me finally at a significant and fruitful moment in my life where great success is just around the corner, where a time will come in which I will never do anything that I don’t want to do (can anyone say, commute?), where any day now I’m going to stand in front of the Magic Mirror and be told that I am the fairest in the land.

Honest.

I am poised.

One of my interests, which is rapidly becoming urgent, is in root-cellaring, and my first project in this area has been figuring out what to do with all my sweet potatoes.

The sweet potatoes were a great success this year. It was my first time growing any kind of potato, and I knew exactly nothing about it. I ordered “seed potatoes” from Johnny’s for banana fingerling potatoes and for Beauregard sweet potatoes, and my first lesson in sweet potato cultivation was that I didn’t receive “seed potatoes” from Johnny’s at all. I had expected them to look like the fingerling seed potatoes, so when I found these in my mailbox on the 7th of May – wilted, from having spent over 24 hours in there – I was mystified.

I was not at all expecting plants…and to top it off, I received twice what I had actually ordered. I let Johnny’s know, and they told me that they had accidentally shipped the order twice and that I could keep them both, free of charge. Very nice of them; and after my successful year with both of the potato varieties that I grew, you can bet I’ll be ordering more seed potatoes and sweet potato slips from Johnny’s again this coming spring.

So I put 27 of these very sad looking things in the ground, following the planting directions that came with them, and they looked like this.

Not very encouraging.

Still, I let them be, and before I knew it – miracle of miracles – the little buggers began to grow. Looking back, this was even more amazing from the standpoint that I did nothing in particular for or to them to encourage success. I did not test, “improve” or “correct” my soil. I did not specifically water them, but they got water the old fashioned way, from rain, and whenever something else in the garden was in dire need of water, they ended up getting some too. I didn’t weed.  So they really were a no muss, no fuss crop. My understanding is that Beauregards are pretty tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions, and I don’t know for sure whether I happened to have an ideal soil for them, or if they just accepted what I had and ran with it.

My first summer with sweets was full of surprises. I had no idea that they would bloom, and that their flowers would be so beautiful.

Nor did I know that the sweet potato was such a hardy and attractive vine, that it would creep everywhere, or that it would be pretty doggone tolerant of weeds – a must in my garden.

So things were going along pretty well, but like most veggies that were new to me this year, I had a totally inaccurate idea of when I might expect to harvest them. On Monday 27 July, I was out in my garden inspecting, and I found this deep furrow.

What the heck? Closer inspection revealed this! Could that be a sweet potato popping up out of the ground?

It was indeed! Could it possibly be ready to harvest? One way to find out. I pulled that sucker up, marveled at how big it was, and in fact, I ate it for dinner that night.

A quick check inside with my garden diary revealed that the passage of time had snuck up on me. It had been 82 days since I put those slips in the ground. Because it was my understanding that I could leave them in as long as until first frost, I waited a little while longer before starting to pull up more. Throughout August and into mid-September I was harvesting sweet potatoes.

I was able to learn from firsthand experience what my subsequent research confirmed, that sweet potatoes are surprisingly delicate and thin-skinned, and it’s really easy to knick and scratch them with your fingernails as you’re pulling them out of the ground. It’s also really easy, when trying to dig them up, to break off an end. But if you do – no big deal. Because these open wounds close over with a kind of white scab. I believe this is called “corking.” 

My first attempts at “curing” were to leave them out in the vestibule still covered in dirt for a number of days. After that, I would move them to a carboard box under my kitchen counter. I know now that I should have left them in the ground longer, until just before or the day after the first frost, because the roots grow the most in September and October. But what the heck. I’ll know better next year. This year, by mid September I had every sweet potato out of the ground. By this time my new book had arrived, Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables by Mike and Nancy Bubel, and my first order of business was to figure out how to “cellar” these sweet potatoes; hopefully for the duration of the winter. (Incidentally my mother has told me that her father used to coat his potatoes in lime and store them in the woodshed when she was growing up. Interesting, but that doesn’t sound like something I would want to do.)

The first thing I learned was that during the 10-14 day or so “curing” process that the potatoes should be kept warm (80-85 degrees) and humid, so with my final HUGE bunch of sweet potatoes (3 boxes full) I kept a big damp towel draped over them all in the same spot in the vestibule so that they were kept warm and humid. After a few weeks of this, I was ready to put them away.

After the curing process, what they need primarily is to be kept dry – no damp root cellar for these babies. They prefer temps of 50-60 degrees, but most importantly they need to be kept dry. So for the time being, they’re all under my counter. Here’s what I did. I used a wine box, wrapped half of them in brown paper and nestled them all in there together, and slid the heavy box under the counter and covered it with a black towel. One wine box wasn’t big enough to hold everything. I could probably use three wine boxes, but I have the rest in mason jar case boxes, which works out just as well. There’s a box of little ones on top. These will need to be eaten first, as they’ll keep for the shortest amount of time.

It may be that this isn’t the ideal place to store them. In the winter it may hover around 60 degrees under the counter sometimes, but it’ll probably be warmer than that. My hope is that as the book says, keeping them dry is the most important thing. I’ll check back in on how they’re doing as we head into winter. I’ll also check back in on what day we finally eat our last sweet potato. Anyone want to place a bet? I’m hoping to have them through maybe April … 6 months … any takers?

I’ll admit that whenever I first encounter any kind of garden pest I go into a kind of anxiety paralysis. I think that I want so much for things to go well, and as I’m still fairly new at all of this gardening stuff, I tend to drift towards seeing everything as success or failure in the moment, rather than everything just being part of the process; as if by the very fact that I have garden pests I am a failure as a gardener.

Of course this could not be further from the truth.

Some weeks ago I found these pretty harlequin beetles on my broccoli. I looked them up. I was hoping they were beneficial bugs and not pests, because they seemed too pretty to kill.

But it turns out they had to go. I think I killed about 5, and then I never saw another one. I was feeling pretty doggone proud of myself for nipping that in the bud. Too proud, I think; since I started to let my daily inspections kind of slide.

Consequently, when I discovered this (quite beautiful, I think) creature on a broccoli leaf, the problem was already getting out of hand. Something was most definitely eating my broccoli leaves, and from the looks of some of the holes, it looked like something that was really, really hungry.

Had the Harlequin bugs left behind progeny? I think that I was stupid enough to actually not pluck him off and kill him right away – and stupid enough not to look for more. I mean, he was beautiful, and I didn’t know what he was … I grew broccoli last year and I didn’t have any significant problems with pests. But then again, I grew half a dozen plants last year. I have twice that this year, along with brussels sprouts and collards and kale and various other things. This year I’m using more garden space, I have more plants, and I’m attracting more pests. Also, I suspect that since things went so well last year, and I didn’t really have to deal with fall garden pests, that in a sense this fall I’m operating in even more ignorance than I did last year, in having the audacity to think that pests wouldn’t be a problem. Well, let me tell you something. At this point I’m pretty sure that there is no caterpillar-looking thing on earth that should be left to mind its business on any of your crops. They will eat you out of house and home.

Largely because of my blogging activities – I feel a responsibility to present as much and as accurate information as I can – I overcame my essential laissez faire attitude about the whole thing (translation: laziness) and went on an Internet hunt to find out just what this pretty boy was. Turns out he’s a cross-striped cabbage moth larvae. And these – which I discovered in several places on the underside of broccoli leaves – are the cabbage moth’s eggs.

The cross-striped cabbage moth larvae is not the first visitor against whom I’ve had to wage war this year. Back in June I started noticing these very beautiful beetles on my potato plants.

They turned out to be the (again beautiful) dreaded Colorado potato beetle (brown and yellow) and their slightly less attractive larvae (red and black). I am anti-pesticide, so after learning what they were from the Internet, I started picking them off and smashing them by hand. This is an activity that really gets you in touch with your primal side; it’s a gross task that requires a certain amount of “live and let die” determination. It also requires a certain amount of technique. My approach was to fold over the leaf they were on and to pinch them inside of it. For the most part this kept the goo off of my hands. Quite honestly, the indiscriminate massacre of insects in the garden is something that I can hardly bring myself to do without a twinge of conscience. But I want to grow my own food, so I do what I have to do. Understanding what providing for yourself really means is kind of what this whole endeavor is really all about. And even now, in my pre-chicken days, I can see that what it's all about is life and death – at every level.

For days this summer I went outside and inspected my twelve banana fingerling potato plants, and picked off every beetle and beetle larvae that I saw. And amazingly, once I took this action, the situation was corrected in a relatively short amount of time. I had read that the Colorado potato beetle can damage up to 30% of the foliage of a potato plant before it actually begins to effect the yield of the plant, and my beetle damage never approached anywhere near that amount of green. I’m hoping that I can exert some similar control in the great cross-striped cabbage moth everlasting broccoli brunch that’s going on outside in my garden right now. And so far over the course of three days I bet I’ve killed hundreds of those larvae, of varying sizes, and destroyed a couple clutches of eggs – every day there are drastically fewer of them, so I suspect this approach is working.

Expanding my knowledge of the insect world is another unexpected and useful result of my gardening efforts, but garden pests are not what this post is about – unless you count ignorance as a “garden pest” – because I’m coming to understand that what really causes me transient anxiety about any problem is not knowing exactly what the problem is, and therefore not knowing what I can do about it.

The current issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine has an article titled, “Homesteading Lessons Learned, If I Could Do It All Over Again…” In it, 20-year veteran homesteader Steve Maxwell offers his advice to anyone starting out on a homesteading adventure. Interestingly enough, one of his recommendations is to “get high speed Internet right away” – for the wealth of information that will then be at your fingertips, of course.

I haven’t been in the “homesteading” business for very long, but nonetheless I’m going to offer my first lesson learned here:

Don’t panic or get discouraged until you know exactly what your problem is and what actions you might be able to take to mitigate it. Chances are, once you have that information, you’ll be too busy solving your problem to panic about it anyway.

There is a happy ending here, too. Check it out. It looks like I’m going to have some broccoli this year after all.

Compost Problem Solving Day – Before 9 a.m.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero

I would like to go on record here as saying that I wholeheartedly believe that this is true. I have multiple reasons, but the one that comes to mind at the moment is that if you’re going to garden with any kind of seriousness, you’re going to need the information in that library to figure what the heck to do with the garden – every step of the way. Cicero’s sentiment has particular resonance for me this morning because I also believe that the following (from Mike and Nancy Bubel) is true – that experience can be translated to mean “doing it wrong the first time”.

How do I know? Check it out. Does this look like compost to you?

My two favorite books right now are the Bubels' Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables, and Steve Soloman’s Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times. I pulled out Gardening When It Counts this morning because I woke with a feeling of restless agitation, an inability to concentrate, and an un-assuageable drive to DO something. So … today is the day I solve the composting problem – hopefully without too much flexing of the checkbook.

Quite a few years of studying philosophy has shown me that you can’t solve a problem (in the real world OR in the metaphysical one) unless you can define that problem, so here goes.

Essentially, there are two problems. Make that two “problem areas.” There is The Inside Problem, and The Outside Problem. The Inside Problem deals with how to handle the food scraps before they ever make it outside, and I’m going to save discussion of The Inside Problem for another post. Today we’re heading outside.

The Outside Problem is the mess that I’ve already shown you. It contains the season’s worth of food scraps, dead vegetable plants (with and without vine borers, seeds, and who knows what else), gigantic weeds pulled haphazardly and far too infrequently from the summer garden, at least one dead snake, at least one cardboard box, and a very flimsy and unsatisfactory tomato cage. Oh, and at this point, LOTS of yucky grub-like organisms that have sprung into existence there and are quite obviously having the time of their lives.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that we have a pack of dogs, so whatever we do has to be appropriately fenced off so that the scraps are unavailable to them. They don’t look too intimidating, but believe me, they’re crafty when it comes to snatching scraps out of the “compost” pile, and my raw-foodie cocker would rather eat melon than meat.

We have an out of the way spot picked out for this new pile, but it’s currently full of grass clippings … this I believe is known as putting the cart before the horse. 

Still, as my husband quite rightly pointed out, this most recent massive grass cutting will probably be our last big one of the year, and if we want to do something useful with the grass clippings then we needed to rake them up and pile them somewhere (we don’t have a bagger).

So … my idea was to use the same materials that I did for our un-composting disaster pile – cheap fence posts and rabbit guard – and to close off a much larger space this time, enough space that I can make a pile on one side and then move that pile to the other side. But I feel like I don’t have a whole lot of room here to work. I SO wish I could just go buy one of those big composting turning barrel thingies. But that’s not what we’re (trying to be) about here, so out comes Steve Solomon, the “gardening grandfather that I never had.” Except that I DID have a gardening grandfather of my own.

But he’s been deceased for some years now. I think about him often and really miss him these days. But I didn’t see him all that often before he passed away, since he lived a thousand miles away from me; and quite frankly, I’m ashamed to say, when it came to gardening know-how back then I was happy to pick and eat the produce, but I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention to the know-how. Enter Steve Solomon.

Anyway … It’s a cool September morning and I’m out here on the deck eating my breakfast and waiting for my daughter to wake up, and now I pause to read.

Compost Problem Solving Day – Noon

Well, after reading enough of Mr. Solomon’s compost chapter to feel thoroughly intimidated, I’ve come up with a plan. This rabbit guard and flimsy fence post thing just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t have enough materials on hand to make an enclosure big enough for me to make what should be an effective compost heap, to be able to move around it, and to keep my dogs the heck away from it. I have no problem going and getting more materials if that’s what it takes the get the job done – except that it doesn’t. I have a better idea. It’s this.

Nope, not the rabbit guard in the foreground…the 6 foot tall chain link fence in the background, that’s standing in front of the privacy fence.

I bought this kennel earlier this year in yet another attempt to solve The Dog Problem. They quite refused to be kenneled quietly in it, and its use as a kennel was short-lived. So then I moved it to the side of the yard as you see above to distance my four dogs from our neighbor’s four (or five?) dogs. The neighbors keep their dogs out all the time, and the whole crew tends to get into an insane barking frenzy the moment my dogs step out the door. (I’m going to resist the opportunity to enlarge upon how unbelievably annoying this is. Moving on.)

This fence is an eyesore here anyway, and even though it DID cut down enormously on the fence-barking frenzy, it’s no longer doing any good, because the whole area has been reconfigured because of our immanent construction and now the dogs can get behind it, so Voila! I’m going to go with this as a compost enclosure.

I’ve eaten lunch, fed the kid, and bathed the muddy, groundhog-obsessed cocker spaniel, and I’m heading outside now with a craftsman wrench.

Compost Problem Solving Day – 1:38 p.m.

Well, once I decided what to do, doing it was pretty short work. It’s still an expensive solution to the problem, but it’s hundreds of bucks I wasted months ago, and not hundreds of bucks I’m wasting today; and if it works well then the money I spent on this thing won’t have been wasted at all, and that’ll be a good thing.

So, Phase 1 of The Great Compost Project is complete, and it looks like this.

It’ll keep the dogs out, keep the decomposing stuff contained, and give me some room to work so that maybe I can actually do something useful with all of our scraps.

What's to come? Well, phases 2, 3 and 4 are as follows:

Phase 2: Organize what’s in this cage so that I can collect stuff through the rest of the fall, and then build the compost heap. That’s going to involve moving all of these already nicely-rotting grass clippings up into one corner so that I can put them on as I build the pile at the end of the fall. I think I’m going to need a pitchfork for that. I can’t WAIT to get my pitchfork!

Phase 3: Develop a new in-house system for collecting food scraps. I think I need something bigger than the bowl that I’ve been using, so that the project requires less-frequent trips out to the heap.

Phase 4: Actually build the compost heap so that I will have compost for the spring. I’m still a little fuzzy on this step, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, if I keep reading Steve Solomon and apply myself to it.

So, there you go: a problem-solving project well begun. I feel better already.

Last night, our modest quest for self-sufficiency took a drastic turn.

I mean, gardening – fine. Making bread from whole grain? Great. I’ve even got my own recipe for homemade dog treats. I almost have to. When you have a pack of dogs and you care as much about what goes into their body as you do about what goes into your own, that can get real expensive, real quick. And OK, I’ll admit it; awhile back I was telling my husband that I thought we should get some chickens for eggs. I was extolling the virtues of chickens. Our neighbor behind us, Mr. F, keeps chickens, I told him. They don’t smell if you take care of them. Mr. F showed me his chickens, and they don’t smell! I’m talking about just three or four chickens!

Repeatedly, he laughed at me, and told me there was no WAY that we were getting chickens. He drew the line at chickens.

And yet, I cannot PRY the Northern Tool and Equipment Catalogue out of his hands. What does that have to do with anything, you wonder? Well, nothing actually, but when you still have one foot in suburbia, and homesteading is something new to you, a mere couple of chickens don’t seem to be such a tremendous leap from wanting to buy a tractor.

That Mom might want chickens (and a goat for milk) has become something of a family joke. When I ordered six chickens from a local farmer, I can’t tell you how many times my husband said, “These chickens will be dead, right? These are dead chickens that you’re getting, right?” Honestly, I wanted to thump him on the head with one of those dead chickens by the time I got them home.

The farmer offered to bring me over a few in a cage in the bed of his pickup truck just to mess with him.

But I declined.

I mean, I wanted to convert my husband. Not antagonize him.

And then last night, he threw the gauntlet down.

He said, and I quote, “If you want to get chickens, that’s O.K. Go ahead and order them.”

Gulp.

The last time my husband came to me with this kind of life-altering pronouncement, eleven months later we were bringing home a baby.

Um…WHAT?

I mean, I’ve thought about it. I’ve talked about it. It seems perfect IN THE ABSTRACT. Philosophically speaking. But to actually do it?

Okay. It’s confession time. It may be – I’m not positive, but it MAY be – that that one foot of mine that’s still in suburbia is stuck fast in some recently poured concrete.

Still. Suddenly chickens are on the table (no pun intended).

So I pulled out my copy of The Backyard Homestead, a book that I love, and turned to the section on raising chickens; a section that I had given only a cursory reading up till now. And I know I have a GRIT issue around here somewhere that talks about chicken coops or raising chickens, or something about chickens … and I’m going to read every blog post about raising chickens because I know there’s a wealth of demystifying information right here at my fingertips and because quite frankly – I’m a little bit scared.

But I’m also kind of excited.

It seems that on the ladder of self-sufficiency, “Can you feed yourself?” may be the first rung. I mean, I’m sure it’s cheaper to poke seeds in the dirt and raise chickens than it is to install windmills or solar panels or to build your own home from the lumber on your property (if you even have any).

So. What the heck. I’m game.

I shared with him what little I did know about raising chickens for eggs – and the part that most concerns me about the prospect. It’s not the poop. Are you kidding me? We’ll have our own fertilizer! It’s not that I might occasionally get my hand pecked. It’s not that having chickens requires a twice a day commitment between the cleaning, the feeding and the gathering of eggs. It’s that they really only lay well for a year and two, and that after that, apparently, the best place for them is in the stew pot.

And around here, we tend to get attached to things. How else would I have ended up with four dogs? Quite frankly, having had a few litters of puppies around here over the years, it’s a wonder we don’t have twenty.

But the fact remains that we do eat meat; that the chickens we bought from the local farmer lived for about six or seven weeks before their trip to the butcher; and that they almost certainly had a better six or seven weeks of life than anything I might pick up out of most grocery store coolers.

And then my husband said something both surprising and interesting to me, something along the lines of how having to raise and care for and eventually eat our chickens was likely to reawaken our spiritual sides.

I couldn’t agree more.

I began gardening with gusto because of a perpetual concern about what I’m putting in my family’s bodies, and because of a distrust of the gargantuan pharma-medica-food monster that otherwise runs every aspect of our modern lives. What I didn’t expect from the experience was to be thinking about faith; about what it means to believe in something that you cannot see – like that little seed unfolding some fraction of an inch below the soil line – and upon which you are dependent. I didn’t expect that I would feel so closely dependent both on the earth and on my own efforts, and that this dependency would become tinged with reverence. I didn’t expect to feel a responsibility for every seedling I started, and for every transplant I purchased. And I sure didn’t expect to feel guilt and shame over all of the ones that I allowed – through neglect, or ignorance, and sometimes I suspect through no fault of my own – to die. That is, the ones that died for no good reason; the ones that were not able to fulfill their natural life cycle and end up on my table. I didn’t expect to have an increased awareness of and respect for nature; or a heightened awareness of the cycle of life, and the fact that we, too, are in that cycle, and that life doesn’t last forever, and isn’t supposed to.

So if we do this chicken thing, we’re not going to do it in ignorance. Because one day we’re going to have to look a living creature in the eye, and say, “Thank you” for an upcoming meal. And when we do have that last conversation, I’d like to think that they might also be thinking, “Thank you” to me.

That is both a radical and a sobering thought.

And one we ought to be having more often, I suspect.

So, chickens are on the table, and we have a lot of learning to do. We also have a lot of other, more pressing things to do in the meantime, like solve my compost problem that I just keep putting off, and reading the Root Cellaring book that arrived yesterday, and finding the right storage place for my eight million sweet potatoes. Oh, and finishing the addition we’re putting on the house. Hopefully by Christmas. So, if we can do all of that, and educate ourselves, and my husband builds the coop (no problem there), we may try a few hens this coming spring. So stay tuned.

Oh, and by the way. He’s also on board about the goat. But we’re going to have to work our way up to that.

My three-year-old daughter has been my steadfast partner in the garden from the get-go. I really want her to learn what food actually is, and where it comes from, and I want her to enjoy being outdoors, getting wet and getting dirty (no problems there). So I really try to incorporate her into the daily garden chores as much as possible, for as long as I can maintain her interest. That said, there are days when the heat, a sinus headache, and my own gardening anxieties get the best of me.

Case in point, I made an early morning of it recently, trying to get our fall transplants in the ground while it was still cool, and while I still had the energy to do it. I have had a few of the seeds come up that I planted a few weeks ago – turnips and daikon, and it looks like some chard or lettuce – but not nearly as many as I had hoped.

After the weedy, sprawling mess that my spring/summer garden has become, the blank slate of a fall space comes as something of a relief.

New beginning! Fresh start! A second chance!

And yet, seed planting is always a little anxiety-provoking to me. I have a hard time with that period of time between dropping a seed in the dirt and seeing something green poke up its head. I can’t stand not being able to see the progress. What’s happening down there? Is it working? Why do some seeds seem to sprout within 24 hours of planting, and others of the same veggie and variety take weeks? When that first tiny speck of green finally pokes its head up out of the soil it’s always a great relief to me. I think that’s why when I found THIS, just moments after pointing out the new sprouts to my daughter on that morning, I was less than thrilled.

I didn’t fuss – I explained.

Sure Mom, call it what you want.

But, let bygones be bygones. Moving on. What came next was a back and forth about gardening gloves. I kept putting them on her and she kept taking them off. (I secretly don’t blame her. I hate wearing them too.) I put them back on her again and explained about the manure compost that I had put down the night before, and how she can’t play in it.

It’s cow poop!

Uh huh.

The gloves came off. The gloves went back on. The gloves came off. Literally and figuratively.

Okay. That’s it. You’re out of here.

She walked off across the yard with slumped shoulders. I went after her to make sure that she was okay. Whereupon she told me that I had embarrassed her about the smushed turnip seedling.

Sigh.

Look kid. Here’s the thing. This is all pretty new to me too, and Mom gets pretty worked up trying to do everything perfectly. And yet, perfection continues to elude me. Go figure.

So we try again.

I dig a hole, and she slips in a tiny lettuce plant. We pat the dirt. Job well done.

We do it again. Then she wants to make the hole. Then I make the hole, and slip the plant in, and she pats.

Don’t pat the green part! Don’t touch the plant! Watch your knees! Do you see where your knees are?

Yes, Mom.

And then she loses interest, and starts digging in an empty bed where there are no seeds planted, and no manure compost. And I feel guilty.

Go for it, kid.

And the turnip seed, you ask? Did I get what I paid for?

Heck yeah.

We’ve recently become a one-income family, an unexpected event that fortunately has not left us struggling, but it has given us some pause. The only real casualty here is that we can’t spend money thoughtlessly anymore, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, it’s surprised me how much I’ve come to think of it as a good thing, because this change in our circumstances has forced me to be the one thing that I’ve felt unable to be for most of my adult life – where I am.

My husband and I have spent most of our 15 years together living in and for the future: we figured we’d be happy when we got out of debt, when we got a bigger apartment, when we were able to buy a house, when we could move into a bigger house and onto a bigger piece of property … the list is endless, and the energy required to sustain this kind of thinking is exhausting. So, it came as something of a relief to realize that we aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Ironically, the change has enabled and encouraged us to throw our energy in directions we wanted to head in anyway. A little over a year ago we started a long-term food storage program, and I began gardening. Our first spring’s effort was small, but satisfying. Fall was small and even more satisfying, and this spring we stepped up production.

Our interests weren’t originally about saving money. They were more motivated by an interest in emergency preparedness, concern about the quality of the food we were eating, and an evolving interest in self-sufficiency. But when sudden job loss caught us temporarily broke between paychecks, we found that we had unwittingly prepared ourselves for it. Instead of being in a panic, I found myself thinking, gosh, we’re actually okay. We don’t really need anything. And this was a sudden seismic shift. In our previous, two-income life, I was in a grocery store almost every day. If we ran out of something, well, we were out of it, which implied it ought to be here, which meant I couldn’t relax until I went and got it. I mean, we were out of it! It was a problem!

But being forced to slow down, to think and to plan, to do extra work where previously we solved problems with money, has given me some much-needed perspective.

Recently, hoping for some inspiration in the self-sufficiency department I read Little House on the Prairie, and it really made me think. While traveling west, and finally settling for awhile in Kansas, the Ingalls family ate nothing but cornbread and molasses and whatever they could kill – and I mean for months, a lot of months – and they didn’t complain. They were just happy not to be hungry. I can hear your protest mounting: “But that’s just fiction!”

Well, yes and no. After all, it is autobiographical. And at the very least I think we can all agree that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mom wasn’t running to Safeway every fifteen minutes.

Charles Ingalls hunted all winter, collecting the animal pelts to take into town to trade for a plow and some seeds in the spring, and the whole family looked forward to having vegetables in their diet again.

As a treat.

Imagine.

And in my house it was a catastrophe if we ran out of cereal bars or Goldfish.

We had made the move towards producing food at home and using local sources for meat and eggs (which are actually cheaper) before our recent change in fortunes. But we were still spinning around in the same mental grooves, and struggling with the same bad habits, and that’s the part that, six weeks into our new way of life, is finally starting to change.

Delayed gratification is inherent in the idea of eating locally, which essentially means eating seasonally. While I was waiting for my cantaloupe to mature this summer, at one point I let anticipation get the best of me, and I bought one in the supermarket. But when I cut that thing open it was awful. It didn’t have color or flavor, or even juice, and I ended up throwing the whole thing away. My three-year-old daughter, who had requested the cantaloupe, took one bite and spit it back out. I decided then and there that no matter how much I wanted one, I wasn’t going to buy another cantaloupe this year. I was going to wait until I could walk out to my own garden and pick one right up off the ground – until I could have one that was soft and orange and dripping with sweetness – and then I was going to gorge myself on them.

And I did, because for a few weeks there I had more every day than I could eat. They were a short crop for me this year, I suspect both because I started them right from seed in the ground instead of setting out transplants, and I didn’t take good enough care of them (weeds, drought, etc.). You can bet that’s not going to happen again! When the two on my counter are gone I probably won’t have another cantaloupe for 10 or 11 months. But I’m OK with that, because I suspect that’s as it should be.

“Where I am” is in a still largely rural suburb in Southern Maryland, on .72 acres which we are steadily tilling up with the goal of producing as much of our own food here as possible.

I have a freezer full of locally grown chickens, and I’ve ordered my first half-hog for delivery this fall. I recently started recycling (I know, shame on me, to be starting so late). My adventures in gardening this spring, trying new things, making mistakes, and celebrating my triumphs has given me the courage to start tackling some of the other things that I’d like to do as we continue to shape our dream life.

So, come along with me as I figure out what the heck to do with that un-composting pile of kitchen scraps in my back yard; how to catch and use rainwater; how and where to find raw milk; how to recognize good food growing wild; how to root cellar vegetables; how to decrease our energy bills; how to use a pressure canner; how to make cheese, and crackers, and my own cereal bars. Come along as we install a woodstove for heat; build a greenhouse; and gradually, we hope, go off grid with wind and solar power … the list of things we want to do around here is endless.

Our next stop in life – we hope – will be a “real” farm, but for the time being this place is pretty doggone good, and so is life in general. “Where I am” is oddly reminiscent of my own good old days; you know, when an extra twenty bucks was a windfall, and I think that’s pretty cool.

It makes me feel young again.