Book Farmers

Everything we knew about farming we learned from books. We set out for our new land with books we had found on going back to the land, and some books that Don and Dotty had given us about soil management. These were old books, but they were good.

We had found new books about raising goats and rabbits, and about living on one acre with a cow. We had books and magazines about organic gardening, and we had lots of copies of “Mother Earth News”. We had a copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue. And when we got to Canada, we started reading Harrowsmith.

And so we began our farm life. We learned as we went along. The first animal we acquired in our new life was Katie. Then we bought Patches. Learning to take care of Patches was a huge undertaking. We had to know what to feed her in the winter and to supply her with minerals, and we had to learn to milk her.

We got Patches when we were still looking for our own farm and living on the Berry Farm that first hard winter.How did we discover Patches? Well, it was this way: We were out driving around. I think we may have still been looking for our own farm, even though we had rented the Berry Farm for the winter. However it happened, we had driven our old green Chev pickup to the top of a hill. Why we had done that, I can’t remember. In doing so we discovered a n unusual geographical aspect of Nova Scotia, that is, that unlike most places, where the soil is wet and boggy down in the low places, in Nova Scotia the wet boggy places are on the heights of hills. So — of course we got our pickup truck stuck in the mud on the side of a hill.

We needed help. Dave figured maybe we could find a kind farmer who would pull us out with his tractor. And that is how we met Floyd. He did pull our truck out and in return asked that Dave help him repair the roof of his barn. Which Dave gladly did, and in doing so, we got to know Floyd and Cherie, the dairy farmers. They became our friends, and they sold us Patches. Patches was a high producing cow, but she had a recurring ulcer on one of her knees. Floyd had to push all his cows to produce as much as possible, and Patches could not stand to be pushed any more. Floyd knew that she was a gentle cow who would adapt to being milked by hand – and he was right. Patches was a wonderful cow for us, and gave us a huge amount of milk.

Besides learning how to take care of a cow, we had to learn how to heat our home with wood. All we had for heat was a wood stove in the kitchen and an old stove in the parlor that was not air tight. We had a place to cut wood, but we soon learned to our sorrow that green wood would not keep us warm. We put on a green, wet log and watched it sizzle. It gave little heat and kept going out. And the weather was getting colder by the day.

This was close to a disaster right at the beginning, but Patches saved us. We had lots of extra milk that we didn’t know what to do with, so we offered some to a Nova Scotian neighbor, whose last name was Langille, I believe. I don’t know how we met him, but he did like our fresh milk for his family. We would not take any money for our milk, but Mr. Langille would not take it for nothing, so he offered us some of his dry firewood. What a blessing! We traded milk for dry, cut wood, and at last we were able to heat our house – at least in the kitchen!

Mr. Langille took to stopping by to pick up gallon jars of milk from us, and he often stopped a while and stood in the kitchen, passing the time of day – in the Nova Scotia way. He never agreed to stay for tea, but he did visit a while, while standing near the doorway.

Soon we heard a story from somewhere – I don’t remember where we heard it, but it was a story that was going around the neighborhood. The story made us roar with laughter – it was that our little 3 year old boy was shaking pepper into his palm and licking it off with relish. Not only was he doing that, over and over, but he didn’t raise an eyebrow over it. Never grimaced or choked at all. We realized pretty soon what had happened. Mr. Langille, while visiting in our kitchen, had seen TJ shaking a shaker filled with kelp powder into his palm. TJ had taken to licking up the kelp powder whenever we were all sitting around the kitchen table. So he became famous as the little American boy who licked up pepper and loved it! Oh how the rumors about us must have flown. Luckily that is the only one that ever got back to us.

At the Berry Farm, with the wood from Mr. Langille’s woodlot, Dave and the boys began to learn how to cut wood and how to stack it, and how to burn it. I learned how to light a fire in the kitchen range, and little by little, I learned how to cook on a woodstove. After a while I learned how to add sticks to the firebox at just the right rate of speed to keep the temperature of the oven the same. It was an art, and I loved it. It took a long time for me to learn it, but by the time we had our own stove set up at our own farm, I was pretty good at it. I was especially proud of my homemade whole wheat bread. Baked in the woodstove, it was food fit for the gods.

Here on the Berry Farm we also survived our first chimney fire. One day I was upstairs in a room over the kitchen. I looked on the wall and saw a shadow dancing there. It was a shadow of flames! It suddenly dawned on me that the flames should not be outside of the kitchen stove. That meant that there was a fire somewhere.

The fire was in the chimney! At that time, Dave was home, and he and the boys went up on the roof and dumped baking soda down the chimney. I don’t think that was enough to put out the fire, but I can’t remember what else they used. Someone had told them that we mustn’t put out a chimney fire with water, or it would break the chimney apart. I think we had some powdery substance on hand that was especially for putting out chimney fires. It worked, but that was a close call. None of our books had prepared us for the danger of flu fires and how easily they could happen.

We also learned how to use an outhouse in the winter! The Berry Farm had no indoor toilet. It was not an easy winter. We discovered that the water we were using to drink had a high coliform count due to the fact that the outhouse was in the barn, which was up above the well. So we bought some large blue plastic jugs and drove to a public spring not too far away. There we loaded up with water to use for drinking and cooking.

Well at least we didn’t have to walk for miles with water on our backs; all we had to do was drive our van to the spring and fill our very large plastic jugs. But for us, it was another chore on top of the things we were learning to do. It was another strain. Later on, Dave bought some pressboard and built a little outhouse. Cleverly, he made it so that it could easily be collapsed and rebuilt in a new location. So we took it with us when we moved to the Ross farm to spend the next summer.

The other strain that first, long winter was that we could never get warm. The house was truly like a barn, and the only part of it we could heat was the kitchen, where we spent most of our time. The living room stove was not safe, but we did use it some. The bedrooms were completely unheated and freezing cold. Mostly when I think about the Berry Farm I remember being cold.

Jeff was not happy either. Of all the boys, he was having the hardest time to adjust. It was because he was too old, and because he was a very sociable person and always had been. He needed to be with other people; after all, he was a teenager! He finally solved his problem by going to the local card parties. There he met all kinds of people, and it gave him time in a social setting. He wanted to go so badly that he used to ride his bicycle there in the winter, over the snowy ruts. It was an amazing feat. Now that I look back on it, I wonder – why didn’t we drive him there? I guess it was because we didn’t want to stay to drive him home again,. It was probably better that we didn’t go, since he desperatelly needed time away from his family.

Finally, spring did come, slowly and tentatively. At last it was warm enough for us to let Patches out of the barn. We fixed up a corral for her in the barnyard so she could come out and enjoy the warm, Spring sunshine. It was a happy day. We felt that the worst was over.

The next day, however, we had a new worry. Dave reported that something was wrong with Patches. It was Sunday and we weren’t able to reach the vet. It seems that when Dave went out to milk her, he leaned on her or patted her, and her knees buckled as if she would fall. Dave was alarmed and we were all worried. We had no idea what could be the matter.

Finally Dave decided to call one of our neighbors, Lloyd. He explained how her knees buckled and she seemed sick. Then Dave mentioned that she had been fine the day before, and we had let her out of the barn to enjoy the sunshine, and she had been quite frisky.

Then Lloyd asked Dave what color she was. When Dave said she was mostly white with some black patches here and there, Lloyd laughed. Well, he said. She will be all right. She just has a bad sunburn! Dave remembered how he had patted her, maybe rather hard, maybe had slapped her affectionately on the back. And her knees had buckled then. Of course, she had been in pain, and Dave had slapped her sunburn!

We were so embarrassed. But relieved too. Our first crisis with our first animal was over, and the animal had survived. So had we!

We had an awful lot to learn, and most of it would come through experience with our books as distant guides. The books did help, but this was the real world, with real animals, and in a new country where we really didn’t know anyone. The first winter on the Berry farm was terribly hard. I remember always being cold, and I remember how hard it was in the beginning to milk Patches dry each morning and evening. We knew we had to be careful to empty her udder or she might develop the dreaded mastitis.

Things were very hard, and I was finding it desperately so. I was lonely, scared, cold, and homesick. I knew no one, and I was all alone. With Dave away most of the time, I realized with despair creeping up on me that my kids depended on me for survival. I was in a new situation. I had come from the small, rather wealthy little town of Andover, Massachuseets, with all the amenities right at hand, including my childrens’ school and the Phillips Academy prep school. Here, there were no next door neighbors or stores or doctors to turn to for help.

I am a strong person, but sometimes I forget that. When I do, all I have to do is remind myself that I was strong enough to survive a winter at the Berry Farm. And I did become a competent milker. I also learned how to take care of chickens.

It was on the Berry farm that we got our first red hens, and it was there too, that TJ got his baby ducks. We bought a bunch of baby ducks, and they came under TJ’s special care. I am sure we had read about how to care for poultry in one of our books. We gave TJ the special job of taking the little yellow downy babies down to the water and bringing them back to their pen every day. He was so cute, herding his babies down for their time in the water, and then solicitously bringing them back to their pen.

All the time we were on our own farm, TJ had the care and feeding of ducks every spring. On our farm Dave made a special duck pen next to the little cottage, and I can still see TJ stretched out on his stomach on the roof of his own pen watching his ducks. He took good care of them too!

TJ was amazing for such a little boy, because he never got sentimental about his ducks, or any of the animals. He knew, young as he was, that we were raising the ducks for food, and that when fall came, they would be slaughtered along with the meat chickens. And that was the way things were. He seemed to be completely okay with that.

Killing and dressing the chickens was not a pleasant job, but we all got involved. We made it an assembly line, someone (maybe Dave) chopped off their heads, and then they were dipped in scalding hot water, or maybe wax, and tied up by the feet from the rafters in the barn. Then we all had a chicken to pluck. We hurried to get the feathers out while the skin was still hot. I guess then, we must have cut off their feet, washed them carefully, and put them in one of our large chest freezers.

Each spring, at the same time TJ got his ducks and we also bought white leghorns to raise for meat. We were dismayed that even though we kept them in an outdoor pen, their legs were deformed and often too weak for them to walk properly. It was the way they had been bred, to be heavy of body, and not to walk around too much so they would put on meat and not be too stringy. We were not very happy about that, but we did the best we could with the situation.

One of the biggest challenges was to make butter. We read in one of our books how to make butter by putting the cream in a gallon jar and rolling it back and forth on a table. So we all sat around the table taking turns rolling a big jar of cream until, finally … finally, it started to turn into butter. Since we all did it together, it wasn’t too bad a job.

Our kitchen table was a large round mahogany pedestal table, an antique that we had bought when we were back in Andover. It would easily seat eight people, and since we were only six, there was plenty of room for a lot of food to feed four growing, hardworking boys.

Actually, soon there were only three boys, because Jeff was not happy on the farm. We were even more isolated than when we were in West Branch, and it was boring and lonesome for him. He didn’t have interest in cutting down trees, splitting wood, raising vegetables, or caring for animals. When we were in the motel that first fall, he had found an agricultural bulletin that told how to raise goats, and he might have enjoyed that. That could have been his thing. But Dave flatly declared: “No goats!” It took us a few years on our own farm to actually find a goat that could be made a part of our menagerie. A goat would have been hard to keep, and would have had to be tethered. We just had too many other things to learn and to cope with to try to cope with a goat.

After about a year on our own farm, which, as I have said, was really quite isolated, we let Jeff move into Truro. He got a job and lived in town. He was so young to be on his own, but he was really very sensible, and we often took jars of fresh, raw milk to him.

Once he got away from home, the strain that had developed between teenager and parents subsided, and we began to be friends again. He just needed to be away from the farm and away from his family for a while. He was the first baby bird to leave the nest, and we missed him. I missed him a lot, and I wrote little notes to him, telling him how much I loved him. It was very hard to lose my firstborn son in this way, and I secretly cried over him and wondered if we had done the right thing to make this huge change in our childrens’ lives.

And so we were only five. And we continued to learn about farming. We bought a real ceramic churn with a wooden top and a wooden paddle, that went up and down in the cream. It worked very well! It was a lot more efficient than rolling the jar around on the table, and I became the maker of butter. I got very good at it. I washed all the skim milk out of it at the kitchen sink, squeezing and squeezing it and washing it with clear, cold water from our spring. Then I salted it, squeezing it some more until the salt was all the way through it. Then I pressed the butter into a white china bowl we had that was just the right size. I put the bowl into the refrigerator until the butter got hard, and then I popped it out of the bowl with a knife and wrapped it in aluminum foil and put it in the freezer. I made all our own butter, and now I realize how good and healthy that was for us. Butter made from raw milk, from our healthy cows, who grazed on green pasture was an excellent health food. I really didn’t realize then, but I was doing the best thing I could do for our family.

I also read how to make bread from a book. Actually, it was from Adelle Davis’ book, Let’s Cook It Right. The recipe for whole wheat bread in that book was the best recipe I have ever found. The boys used to help me stir the dough in a big kettle with a crank in it, made especially for mixing bread dough. Of course it was baked in the wood stove, and it was the most delicious bread I have ever eaten.

In one of our books, I found a way to store eggs through the winter when the hens were not laying. We used a barrel and some stoneware crocks and I carefully laid the eggs in salt, so that not one egg was touching another, and so that each egg was completely surrounded and covered by salt. It was amazing. The eggs really did keep for months! They were perfectly good until spring, and the hens started laying again. That was one of our successful adaptations of old-timey farming that we learned from an old-timey book.

Another successful method of storage we tried was to bury carrots in sand. Dave and the boys found a big sand pile somewhere, and they shoveled it into the pickup truck and brought it home. They made a wooden bin in the dirt-floor cellar, and we buried carrots in the sand the same way I had salted away the eggs. This too worked very well. We had carrots all winter. In the spring, they would start to sprout, so we knew that we were eating live food! It was so much healthier for us than if we had cooked and frozen the carrots.

We tried to keep cabbage over the winter too, but we didn’t have as much luck with the cabbages. They would go black before we could eat them all. And I think we had winter squash too, that Randy grew.

Randy became our expert gardener. When we first went to the farm, Randy was our bookworm. He read a lot! Spring had come, and we had moved to the dilapidated old Ross farm. Since we would have to be there for the summer, we had decided to plant a vegetable garden, and we wanted Randy to help. That meant that we had to pry him away from his books, and so we did; but once he began to read about how to plant seeds, he got very interested. He made little piles of different kinds of seeds; some had to be soaked for a day, some for longer, and some not at all. Each kind of seed was prepared according to its need.

Then Randy started to plant, and he absolutely loved it. He became completely interested and absorbed in his garden. He was a natural gardener with a green thumb and a love of growing things. He continued to read and learn about gardening when we moved to our own farm. I remember one year he planted a part of the garden as the Indians used to do; corn stalks, beans, and sqash, all together. These were the three sisters, he informed us.

One fall, after we had been on our own farm for a few years, Randy had a bumper crop of winter squash. He had almost a whole truckload of them, the green kind, like the buttercup squash we now pay big bucks for in the supermarket. Randy’s squash were beautiful, and there were far more than we could eat. So he decided to take them to the farmer’s market and sell them. (It must have been in Truro, but maybe not – maybe someplace else.) To our ustter amazement and disgust, poor Randy spent the whole morning at the market and sold only one of his beautiful blue-green squashes for a dollar. It was a big disappointment, but I guess we gave them to the pigs and the cows.

Actually, on our own farm, Randy and I used to have little squabbles about what we were going to plant where. We ended up having three great vegetable gardens, one on the side of a hill, which we called Slanty Garden, one next to the barn, which we called, Barn Garden, and one which was just Randy’s and was planted alongside the road. Maybe that one was the first garden we ever had on Mt. Thom. Maybe that one was already ploughed for a garden when we moved there; I can’t remember.

I do remember, though, in our first spring on our own farm, we were planting beans in that road garden. TJ shared Randy’s love of planting, young as he was. He had a case of the flu that spring, and yet he would not allow the planting to go by without him doing his part. So he went out to the garden and planted his beans while lying down alongside the rows. He was that determined not to miss the planting time.

Luckily, he was none the worse for wear, and his beans flourished. Floyd, the farmer we bought Patches from, must have come by that day and seen TJ planting his beans while lying in the sunshine. For a long time after that, Floyd called TJ the “Bean Man”.

Both Randy and TJ became skilled gardeners, not only when they were children, but after they grew up as well. They just naturally love to grow things. I have a picture of Randy, standing in the road garden behind a rototiller that we rented or borrowed one spring. Randy looks so young and vulnerable in his blue cotton work shirt.

Jody, on the other hand, never cared for putting in seeds. It was too much fussy, fine motor skill stuff for him. He preferred to drive the tractor and cut hay for our animals. Jody was our tractor worker, and he became skilled at haying, besides cutting and hauling wood for firewood and to sell for pulp. He also helped Dave with “chainsaw carpentry” building pens when needed, here and there around the farm. He, along with Randy, took over the job of milking our two cows, Patches and Bossy. Jody was also good at helping Dave put up fenceposts to fence in our sheep and cows.

So it was that we learned, little by little, the skills that ordinary farmers had known for generations. With our books to get us started, we graduated to experienced homesteaders. Once we finally got to our own farm on South Mountain Road, we began to accumulate more and more animals, and so to become the mixed family farm that Jody and I had dreamed about when we read Mother Earth News back in our kitchen in Andover.

Jody raised rabbits and we bought him an ox named Spark. Randy raised sheep and bees. TJ raised his ducks and helped with all the things his big brothers did. We all hayed together, and I am still proud of myself that by the time we had to leave the farm in 1980, I had become strong enough to throw a bale of hay onto the truck from the field. Yes, I was and still am proud of the fact that I became strong enough and skillful enough to throw bales!

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