Fencegate

Ah, spring.  The birds are singing, the frogs are emerging to thrum and shrill, the mud is everywhere, just absolutely everywhere.

We've had a stiff breeze helping to dry the ground out, and some sunny days to boot, so I thought it might be a nice time to turn the horses out back for some exercise.  They were feeling good, running and bucking and snorting.  

And then Sam, who at 20 years old should know better, missed a turn, slid under the fence and took off like a banshee toward the house. He came back looking for Roxy and steamrolled one of our dogs before letting me catch him. Never a dull moment!  [And please excuse my blue language at the end... it's never good when you realize your horse has just made a jailbreak!]

Fortunately, both Sam and our poor little vicious pit bull Ginger were both fine.  :)

Ham Sweet Hitched

How did it get to be Christmas Eve Eve?  Seems like it was JUST here last year, a fresh ice storm wreaking havoc on our roads, trees, animals and ever-loving souls.

This year, it's in the 40s and rainy.  A slight improvement, I suppose, but for the 10th time our ground is thawing again and the mud is rising up to claim our boots, the grass clinging tightly to the Earth, and plenty of other things I'm sure we haven't realized we've lost yet.

I've been carrying a running dialogue in my head about the differences between last year, our first year here with the Farmstead, versus this year.  Most of my punchlines are FARMING:  YEAR TWO.  It's a good way to blow off steam when I'm dealing with a frustrating problem, but it also gives me hope for YEAR THREE.  Each year we will change our practices, refine our approach, improve our methods and, hopefully, produce better meat from happier animals on improved land.

An example, in case anyone was wondering about my inner joke-alogue...

Year One:  "Oh I can't find my gloves.  I can't lift [______] or tear down [_________] without gloves!  It'll tear up my hands!"

YEAR TWO:  "Gloves?  Ain't nobody got time for dat.  Oh hey I just tore a callous on my hands."

Maybe one more...

Year One:  "Please buy from us!  We'll give you a discount!  Free farm tours 4 lyfe!  Desperation!"

YEAR TWO:  "Dear Customer, you're fired.  Please don't contact us again, as we are clearly not the farm you are looking for."

[Yes, we really did fire someone this year.  Listen— you can argue with us about pricing and whatnot all day long, but at the end of the day, if it's not worth it to you, it certainly isn't worth it to us.  We pay for it all up front, spend a lot of time taking care of animals & infrastructure, such as it is, and you STILL want to argue about 50 cents/lb.?  No thanks, we'd rather keep it for ourselves.]

Anywho.  It was a great year.  We made a number of huge improvements, including but not limited to, adding a wood boiler to heat our house [bye bye propane!], building a permanent goat fence that none of them can climb out of, building two doors for our little red barn, improving the "driveway" that goes down to our shop, planting 50+ saplings, clearing scrub trees & weeds, reseeding with forage mixes & cover crops, and building 3 mobile coops for brooding chicks, ducklings & poults.  We also added a barn from Mid Michigan Mini Barns and brought our horses home!!  No big deal, just my lifelong dream becoming a reality.  Life is sweet.

And, we got married.  10.18.2014.  Amanda VanVels Photography captured the day beautifully, and many, many hands pitched in to get the house and the farm looking its best!



























The sky threatened rain that day, but instead it was cool and breezy.  The trees held their leaves and released them softly, one by one, rose petals of autumn. All of our animals behaved, the guests had fun, and the food was delicious.  I'll post more photos at some point, but for now, I'll leave you with wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Hammy New Year to you and yours.

O Tannenbaum

So this morning as I was doing chores, a van pulled into the driveway with some sort of landscaping decal on the side. The dogs went beserk and of course I was running late like usual. Figuring they were lost, I walked over and asked if I could help them. They said they were "here to decorate the tree," meaning our big beautiful pine tree in the middle of the driveway. I've been talking about wanting to put lights on it for Christmas probably since before we moved in, but it's huge and we have 937655 other things on our list of stuff to do. Maybe next year, I've been telling myself.

ANYWAY.

Guys: We're here to decorate the tree.

Me: Uhh... you know the house has been sold, right? They don't live here anymore.

Guys: [look at each other and smile] No, actually, we were sent here by Jill Baker. We've got a wreath and garland too.

Me: !!! 

Christian: Are you crying right now?

My mother!  What a sneak!  I had no idea, not even a whisper of a clue.  It didn't even occur to me that they might be at our house for OUR tree.  I just assumed they were showing up like they did every year.  But we all know what happens when you assume...

It felt like today would never end.  I buried myself in work and tried not to stare at the clock.  I'm not one to wish my life away, but WHY COULDN'T THE DAY JUST BE OVER ALREADY SO IT CAN GET DARK AND I CAN GO HOME?!

Finally, it did.  The drive home was punctuated by a stunning hot pink and orange sunset, held up by wintry tree bones.  Surely this is what it feels like before the lighting of the Rockefeller Center tree.

I arrived to the house just as the sun was starting to slump below the horizon.  And oh, the lights...

There they were.  Our tree!  Our tree.  Wow.

Tyrone [our sheep] seemed transfixed by the lights.  

That, or, he was staring at me waiting to be fed.  

Sometimes it's hard to tell.  

Baaaaa humbug!

BEST. CHRISTMAS. EVER!!!!!!! There is nothing better than basking in the glow of lights this time of year. On any given day I can't wait to get home to the little piece of paradise that is Ham Sweet Farm, but tonight is particularly special. 

Apparently the company sent a scout earlier in the week and said the tree was so big, this was probably the only year they'd be able to put lights on it. In a good growing year they can grow 3 feet, and this was the absolutely limit that their ladders and crazy-long cherry-picker poles could reach.  Meant to be?  I think so!

The pictures just don't even do justice. It's truly magnificent. I had to make three trips out to the mailbox before I actually remembered to, ya know, grab the mail out of the box.  And I can actually hear cars slowing down as they drive by...

Ham Sweet Farm in the news!

I promise I haven't forgotten about you, little blog!

The passing of time on a farm is marked by empty bags of grain, refilled waterers, ripening tomatoes, and growing babies.  Our ducks, who were once so small that they couldn't be contained inside the small bars of a dog crate, have now outgrown the coop we built for them.  Our pigs outgrew the feeder we made for them, their shoulders growing too wide to fit four-abreast.  When we first got them, all five could eat from one feeder at the same time [albeit with some squealing].

The rotational nature of growing living things is entrancing, hypnotizing, steady.  By the time you catch up on one corner of the farm, another has grown wild and needs attention.  So it is, too, with the seasons.  The bursting greens of spring, the scorching haze of summer, the bounty of autumn, the halting blanket of winter.

With September looming just around the corner, we are starting to think of wintry solutions to what surely will be problems with our methods of feeding and watering everyone.  Currently, you can stumble outside in pajamas and flipflops to take care of morning chores.  A few crisp mornings with dew resting heavy on the grass jolted us into the reality that soon, we will need to be all layered up before we venture outside.  Reality bites.  But it also means an end to the frenetic garden-watering and grass-mowing and fence-building, at least until spring decides to come around again.

The local magazine Capital Gains was kind enough to interview me recently, for an article about eating ethical meat.  I'm always happy to talk about why Christian and I are doing what we're doing.  Check it out below!

Conscientious Flexitarians— eating the right meat

Shiny & New

One admittedly very nice thing about being back in an office as opposed to the farmhand days of the past few years is the ability desire to actually feel a little bit polished.  When I was last working here in the family biz, it felt like most of my days were spent sneaking furtive glances out the window to the world I longed to be a part of.

A few years in the sun's unforgiving glare, the wear on my body and my heart, the sneaking arthritis in my right hand... those and other reasons have shown me that, beyond a certain scale, farming may not be for me.  This new chapter that Christian and I are undertaking... 30 acres, a blank slate, a haven for dogs and all the other animals we love to care for [and consume], that's a space I can see myself inhabiting for the rest of my days.

And that means I get to actually wear "real" clothes [in other words, not my $2 second-hand jeans and the sweatshirt I found in a dumpster on campus back in the day] unless I'm out doing chores or working on a project.  My high heels to muck boots ratio will finally be in balance.

Enchant, stay beautiful and graceful, but do this, eat well. 

Bring the same consideration to the preparation of your food

 as you devote to your appearance.

 Let your dinner be a poem, like your dress.
                                                                               — Charles Pierre Monselet

Oh hey there, Spring.

Spring in Colorado is so very different. Last year, in the depths of a crushing drought, spring showers never quite materialized over the mountain ranges. The green flowery flushes stayed dormant, preserved for a more hopeful year.

I woke up to the steady beat of rain against the windows this morning. Like a kid with a snow day, i was too excited to fall back to sleep. Around home, the crocuses are in full bloom and there are some very fat forsythia buds to be found. I love this time of year when everyone becomes a gardener, checking the ground and trees for shoots and signs that spring has returned.

Sandhill Cranes Trumpeting

Springtime in Michigan is one of my favorites, because I love the prehistoric call of the Sandhill Cranes who frequent fallow corn fields during their migration.  The dogs were more excited about all the mud.

Horses Making Weird Faces

This was Roxy, two days before we left for Michigan.  She slipped in her muddy paddock and tweaked her back just before her cross-country trip, to the point where she was limping on two legs.

Poor Little Miss Cow-Eyes.  The very patient woman standing next to her is a vet based in Boulder who specializes in equine acupuncture and chiropractic.  Roxy absolutely detests needles, so acupuncture was out.  But my normally happy-go-puppydog mare was in so much pain, we had to suffer through some adjustments from the good Doctor.  The picture sums up how it went.

I was very nervous about the horses making the trip.  Would Roxy's sore back make it twice as hard on her?  Would Sam's arthritic hocks flare up?  Would they just plain freak out at the stress, the haulers, the strange trailer filled with strange horses?  Turns out, they were the best-behaved horses out of a group of seven.  We took the drivers out for dinner after Sam and Roxy were unloaded into their new home, a fleeting connection that ended in hugs.

Roxy's registered name is Denver's Ace of Hearts.  She's traveled about 35 miles in her lifetime from her original place of birth.  Sam, well, who knows about him.  My guess is he hasn't gone too far either.  But they are settled in and loving the new digs.  They have more space than they ever have before, with real green growing GRASS!  Well, not at the moment.  But it's coming!  We're all ready for Spring.

They're all settled in and happy [along with their new pasture mate Sparty].  

Now if it would just warm up a bit... 

Among the Treebones

One place I miss whenever I'm not there.  

Starting anew...

... Or am I back to the beginning?  I haven't yet decided.  Here we are back in Michigan.  For good.  I mean that we have moved back for good, but dammit, it just plain feels good too.

Home.  Such a satisfying word to say in a sigh.

Colorado is a breathtaking place, with mountain views and prairie sunsets and tumultuous skies.  But let's face it, I'm a Midwestern girl and I missed the water.  It never felt right to live in a place so barren, so burnt-to-a-crisp, so thirsty for water.  As our vet put it, "there are two kinds of people.  Water people and mountains people.  If you have water in your bones, it never leaves you."

When C and I were home for Christmas, we started looking at properties.  Oh, it was all very innocent at first, but once we realized that we could have land— with WATER— here for far less than we could ever dream of in Colorado, it seemed like an obvious choice.  We could have our "five-year plan" now.  We decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.

We hit the ground running as soon as we could.  Our house in Lyons went up for sale and we started the house-hunt in Michigan in earnest.  C flew back for interviews and house showings, and we worked feverishly on our house to get it in tip-top shape for potential buyers.  The logistical nightmare of planning to get all our belongings...

 my Buttertruck...

our three dogs...

 AND our two horses, goat and lamb home...

well that consumed just about all our energies.  But here we are, all in one piece.  We're still waiting to close on our new home but it's on 33 acres.  Dream life, here we are.  Oh and one more thing...

This year is already getting off to a great start.  I can't wait to keep building...