In Memory of Trees, Gayla Marty tells a compelling story about her family’s eastern Minnesota farm and the folks who inhabited it for several generations. Although I am compulsively drawn to retrospective memoirs such as Memory of Trees, the piece is especially powerful because the story is told from a daughter’s perspective and this particular daughter weaves a tale of land, roots, connectedness, belonging and loss. Memory of Trees is a reflective and at times mournful piece, but the story serves as a lovely elegy that also guides the reader to a palpable understanding of the joys associated with the life of the land.

Gayla Marty effectively chronicles the aging process of so many American farms. Hard work, dedication, conviction, faith and even more hard work, conviction and faith founded them. That first generation did everything for the farm, which was expected to remain in the family forever, it seemed. Subsequent generations continue to build and grow the farm until the combination of circumstance, new economic models, and generational immiscibility create cracks in the long standing foundation. And eventually, all too often, the land pays the price – sold to the highest bidder – to be repurposed, developed or otherwise disposed of. Sometimes the remaining family members are left with a wad of cash to temper the inevitable emotional baggage hidden in the pile of memories. Sometimes it’s considerably messier. Marty tells her version of the story with believable grit and sufficient edge that it easily avoids the path to sentimentalism.

Memory of Trees is beautifully written – so perfectly crafted that it was difficult to put down after reading the first paragraph. I found myself laughing, nodding, smiling one minute and feeling a burning sensation in my sinuses with a lump in my throat the next. Whether you have loved the land and lost, or dream of getting to know a piece of ground and all of its multigenerational history intimately, or even plan to lay your own foundation for subsequent generations, please read Memory of Trees: A Daughter’s Story of a Family Farm. 

Lambing season has begun on my Osage County Kansas farm. Missy, our black bottle lamb from last year dropped her Katahdin twins last Tuesday without any complication other than being slow to clear the membrane from the ram lamb’s face. Happily, my Partner in Culinary Crime was on hand to let the gasping guy out of his sack – he was a little slower than his sister but within an hour was up on his feet claiming his share of colostrum. The comical milk moustaches Missy’s twin lambs wear today are a testament to her fine ability to handle the reproductive load – she’s got lambing season down pat.

I once read a blog post decrying the value of Katahdin hair sheep, particularly during lambing season. The post’s author had a personal vendetta against the breed and offered up the Merino breed as the end all be all. (Funny the things that get people wound up – Ford vs. Dodge, John Deere vs. IH ….) His principle complaint regarding Katahdin sheep was that they had a “very poor” reproductive rate. Huh? He reported that Katahdin ewes were lucky to pull off a birth rate of 100 percent – that’s one live birth per ewe. Anyone in the livestock business knows that if a bred ewe can’t deliver at least one live offspring during lambing season, she isn’t long for the flock. Not one to take everything I read at face value, I did some investigating. Turns out Katahdin ewes are known for multiple births – up to 222 percent average in large flocks. That explains why the Katahdin ewes I know in Kansas often produce twins and triplets during lambing season and wean twins on their own most of the time.

More Katahdin twins are on the way at my farm. Plenty of lush, protein-rich grass is available to help their moms get them off to a good start. All we have to do is keep the coyotes at bay and soon enough that good grass will turn into some of the most delicious, nutritious and tender meat I know of.

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.

The cool season pasture grass at my Osage County Kansas farm is alive and well, and growing so nicely that I rotated the Highland cattle onto their first new break of 2010 last Sunday. They performed very nicely through winter on the standing hay from one of my warm season, native grass paddocks (requiring hay due to deep snow only twice) but were beginning to put pressure on the fences. Although the farm’s pastures consist of mostly native warm season perennials such as big and little bluestem and Eastern gama grass, there are several sizeable patches that contain bluegrass, fescue, brome and some native cool season grass species. One reason that I like to keep the cattle on range all year is that it helps me select for thriftiness on grass. Another reason is that the cattle will work over small cedar trees and tear up various thickets that the farm’s previous managers allowed to grow and shade out the more valuable pasture grass.

Moving cattle to fresh pasture breaks is compelling work. In this case, I simply called the herd from deep in a thicket-filled draw to a gate they haven’t been through in about 6 months. Gus, my goofy, but ever so helpful, Border Collie circled the quarter mile behind the group and walked the animals up the slope and through the gate. No barking, no cattle romping, no muss, no fuss. And one by one as they passed through the gate, their heads went down – buried in fresh cool-season pasture grass.  Another rite of spring accomplished for 2010.

The herd will move many times throughout the growing season. In a month or so, they will tell me they want to move long before it is time. But moving the cattle to fresh grass on a regular basis is key to producing grassfed beef efficiently, and in a way that improves soil, pasture and water quality on the farm. With each passing of the herd, the soil organic matter content increases, soil water percolation and water holding capacities improve, and the plant matrix diversity increases. When I began grazing in earnest in the early 1990s, people thought I spent too much time with my cattle. When they saw my weaning weights and tasted our beef, they wanted to know how to do it. Grassfed and management intensive grazing isn’t a panacea by any stretch, but for me, it works – I really like spending time with the cattle.

My Partner in Culinary Crime and I have wanted to fence the dogs out of the vegetable garden for some time now. I have cut and stacked the Osage Orange fence posts earmarked for the project; the welded wire is in the barn too. Setting corner fence posts, especially the huge corner and gate fence posts is a chore that’s been waiting for just the right moment to happen. The folks at Cub Cadet Yanmar provided the right opportunity for setting fence posts when they dropped off a backhoe-equipped Model Ex450 tractor at the farm last week. Post-hole augurs work great when the fence posts are straight and true, but when gnarly Osage Orange posts – fresh from the tree – are used, a backhoe makes digging the post hole, and lifting the post into the hole, much easier.

Setting fence posts wasn’t the only chore on tap last weekend. The house needed its lichen- and dust- coated siding pressure washed, and the cattle and sheep needed some new temporary pasture fence set up. But in between those activities and painting the new mudroom, I managed to get three big garden fence posts in the ground. I will probably use the human-powered post-hole digger to make holes for the remaining line posts – one or two an evening this week. Then I will cobble up some Kiwi braces and string the wire. We’re going for the rustic look with this fence and plan to use the posts and wire as trellises for crops and assorted ornamental vines. With any luck, we will fashion an old-time hurdle from native wood for the gates.

The 45 horsepower Cub Cadet Yanmar Ex450’s backhoe attachment was a little overkill for the fencepost setting exercise but it sure made short the hole-digging work. And as a diesel junkie, you know I dug those holes just a little deeper than necessary because that four-cylinder engine’s hum is music to my ears. I have in mind some more appropriate work for the Ex450 – hopefully I will get to it in the next week or two.

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.

When I was a kid in North Dakota, I knew spring had really arrived when the substantial lilacs in our yard bloomed. That far north, the lilac bloom came in May some years and in June others. This year, at my farm in Kansas, the lilac bloom started the night before last – I noticed that familiar scent when passing my only lilac bush on the way in from feeding the lambs. This morning, about half of the clustered flower buds had burst. I figure it will be another day or so before the lilacs bloom full force – I hope the predicted rain tomorrow doesn’t destroy the flowers.

My favorite lilacs are all shrubs in the genus Syringa that belong to the species vulagaris – the plain old ordinary common lilac. I so enjoy this deciduous plant because it thrives in the same harsh environments of my childhood and adolescence where it shaded me in summer, its arching under story provided endless opportunity for creating secret forts, and its beautiful flowers offered springtime cheer. My Osage County farm has but a single mature lilac hedge that hides the propane tank from view. I’ve transplanted a number of suckers but they have not yet matured.

Non-hybrid common lilacs bloom in a variety of colors. Some are deep lavender, others are purplish pink and still others are white. The shrub as we know it originated in what is now Eastern Europe and has been the subject of much cultivation and hybridization in the Western world since the mid 1500s. These plants have history, and in spite of their susceptibility to mildew in the late summer and fall, gardeners and landscapers the world over continue to make a go of growing them – especially in colder regions. I don’t think I could ever move much further south than central Kansas because common lilacs bloom only after a period of real winter.

Lilacs bloom to announce spring to my way of thinking. And spring just wouldn’t seem real without the sight and scent of lilacs.

In spite of my somewhat over-zealous tilling exercise from a couple of weeks ago, thankfully I avoided wiping out my asparagus patch. I got to day dreaming a bit and forgot about the growing asparagus patch a couple of times and just tilled right on top of it -- oops. Luckily the growing asparagus crowns were smarter than I am and hadn’t sent the first probing spears close enough to the surface for me to grind into oblivion. I love growing asparagus. I enjoy the way it stakes a wild claim along the fencerows and I love that it performs year after year in my garden. I especially dig that asparagus is the first meaty vegetable crop of spring.

I planted this asparagus patch three years ago. Finally, in 2010, the spears are fat, luscious and hopefully plentiful – thanks to all that chicken manure and compost that got worked into the soil last fall and over the winter. My mouth is watering as I write this because for a few fleeting weeks, beginning this week, my Partner in Culinary Crime and I will be able to grill, sauté, steam and smother with melted real cheese (not that processed kind that was the subject of a food show last week) the freshest asparagus we can ever get. I know I will also eat a few of those spears straight from the garden, with no more prep than a quick brushing to get the big pieces of debris off.

In a perfect world, you might want to have fresh asparagus from the garden all year long. Not me. I prefer the seasonality of the spears – I know that spring is well along when I can break the first bunch, soak it with olive oil and wrap the works in a foil envelope to set on the charcoal grill right next to that lovely grassfed lamb loin. Some folks don’t like lamb because it is “too” flavorful. Some folks don’t like asparagus because it makes their urine smell “funny.”  I enjoy it all and all of it helps me realize that there are seasons and that those seasons shape my life.

My Osage County, Kansas ground finally dried out enough last week to make it worthwhile to fire up the DR Roto-Hog pull-type tiller to work some straw and chicken manure into the vegetable garden. My Partner in Culinary Crime brought along a positively modern Husqvarna lawn tractor when she moved to Kansas, so I left the vintage Cub Cadet 884 Diesel in the shed for this garden exercise. The Husqvarna had no trouble towing the DR Roto-Hog garden tiller – in fact I probably used the brakes to slow things down more than anything else. I have to admit, it was a little strange to operate a lawn tractor that pretty much lacks quirks. Sometimes I like working around the quirks of 30 year old machines – however it was cool to operate a machine that started up with no coaxing and didn’t require any tweaks or adjustments halfway through the operation.

The DR Roto-Hog tiller I have is equipped with a culti-packer, which is perfect for preparing a firm seedbed and for pressing broadcast seeds into contact with the soil to facilitate germination, but my mission last week was just to get things stirred up. What I particularly like about the DR Roto-Hog garden tiller is that it utilizes a remote control for electrically raising and lowering the tiller and for turning it on and shutting it down. The 36-inch wide tilling swath is nice too and it makes short the work of tilling a large garden.

I managed to give the garden a second, deeper tilling on Sunday before the first spring thunderstorms hit. My Partner in Culinary Crime and I managed to seed all kinds of greens and some other things before the deluge commenced early this week. When a normally dry waterway is running like a white water creek after work, you know a lot of rain fell pretty quickly during the day. Now I know why ponds have carefully designed spillways.

We planted the potatoes a couple of weeks ago (before the soil was sufficiently fit for seeding) and have plenty of other crops to get in. The rhubarb is up but so far no asparagus. There’s spinach in the cold frame and lush basil in the house. I am supposed to build a garden fence to keep the dogs out during the growing season and a group of chickens in after harvest. I’ll try to keep you updated as the growing season progresses.  

Photos courtesy Karen Keb.