One-Woman Farm: My Life Shared with Sheep, Pigs, Chickens, Goats, and a Fine Fiddle
208
One-Woman Farm: My Life Shared with Sheep, Pigs, Chickens, Goats, and a Fine Fiddle
208eBook
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Overview
In this inspiring memoir, Jenna Woginrich reflects on the joys, sorrows, trials, and blessings discovered through a year of homesteading. With eloquent prose, delightful illustrations, and inspiring snippets of poetry, Woginrich revels in the unique charms of each season on the land. Full of poignant observations and fascinating tidbits of farming lore, this book is a heartfelt testament to the deep fulfillment one can find in the practical tasks and timeless rituals of an agricultural life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603428675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2013 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 14 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Jenna Woginrich is the author of An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Keeping Backyard Chickens, Barnheart and Made from Scratch. She blogs at coldantlerfarmny.com, as well as for the Huffington Post and Mother Earth News. She shares her farm in rural New York with chickens and geese, sheep, a hive of bees, and some amiable rabbits.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
DAYS OF GRACE
The thing was to get now and then elated.
— From "In a Glass of Cider" by Robert Frost
My friend Paul once ran a dairy of considerable size here in the upper Hudson Valley, but I met him when we worked for the same company, plugging away in a sanitized office. Paul always stood out from the rest of our coworkers, mostly because he looked exactly like I felt: so very out of place. When I think of him with his farmer's stride walking across those buzz-cut lawns of corporate carpeting, I smile.
On a wet, dreary, late-November day, Paul looked out at the bleak scene on the other side of our sealed office windows and sighed. Leaning back in his chair, he crossed his arms, smiling, then said softly that these were the Days of Grace. I asked him what he meant. He explained that the Days are what farmers in this area call the time of year between fall's fireworks and the first snowfall — when everything in nature is in a state of transition and naked waiting. This fragile period is a window of reverent preparation, a gift of last chances to farmers in our four-season climate to get everything done before winter nails us. The Days of Grace are filled with tasks like stacking wood and repairing tractors, loading the last hay and feed grain in barns, and oiling the snow blower so that it's ready to growl. Anything and everything necessary to prepare for the harsh season ahead gets completed, and everyone is grateful for the stolen time.
This becomes a chance for quiet reflection in a life that forces constant vigilance and resourcefulness. Weeds are long dead. Cash crops have been sold. Wallets are fatter. And mornings start a little later. The entire world takes on the calmer veil of the shoulder season.
Hearing Paul talk about his feral holiday, I felt like a child on Christmas Eve. Paul gave me the ability to see the holidays that were hiding out past the fence posts and swirling around milk cans in the corner of the barn. Something was waking up inside of me and bringing back a sense of lost tradition that I was missing dearly. It was a relief to have it fill up the dusty place between my lungs and heart again.
Days of Grace struck me, and struck hard. I wanted to know it; I wanted to be in that club. Farmers became a sacred tribe to me, and their November mornings were so much holier than mine. If not for the weather and pages on a calendar, it could have been any morning of the year for me — every Monday-through-Friday routine was precisely the same. People who farmed had a different way of understanding time, one based on sunlight and seasons, ebbing and flowing in activity like river water. Their year was alive, growing and dying. I felt cheated working indoors. I was so jealous it stung.
As those cold November days in the office plugged on, I imagined how it could feel to light the woodstove, pour a cup of coffee, and sit down with the newspaper, my dogs curled up at my feet. I desperately wanted this. I was grateful for my full-time job, but it was still a place I could not leave until darkness fell — a whole day lost to a computer and walls. I obsessed about the ranchers, corn growers, and dairy owners sitting around the table at the Wayside Country Store just a few miles away from my office. With their morning work behind them and the season ended, those men and women gathered over breakfast, talking about grain prices and silage and gossiping about their neighbors. They were free — and making life matter in a visceral way.
I ached to join their ranks.
COLD ANTLER FARM
When I first saw the place, I knew I had found my farm. The 900-square-foot house, built in 1850, was white and stout, sitting on the property's only level piece of land. Its center of gravity was a red door and three windows, no more complex than if you asked your 10-year-old nephew to draw a house for you with a ruler. It had a steep slate roof that was more than a hundred years my senior, and the kind of angle that made you think of ski lodges. I smiled up at it. A dramatic roof = a dry house. This place had good bones. And I liked the look of it.
All around it was six and a half acres of forest and rising land, so even though this outcrop was free of trees, it still felt protected and surrounded by the maples and oaks. A stream gurgled behind us, cutting a route through the snow and ice. A small artesian well bubbled to my left, under the grandest maple tree I had ever seen. Picturing her in autumn's glory, I got goose bumps. If hobbits had to live above ground, they would like it here.
To the house's right was a steep hill free of trees, save for a few old apples that twisted out of the snow as if Tim Burton had drawn them. Beyond were open fields, presumably an old pasture that the current residents mowed as an extended lawn. To the left was a barn, just as simple and quiet as the house, with red paint fading in the way people who reproduce "primitive" barn-board furniture try to replicate. Beside it was the old chicken coop, same red as the barn but with a fake chimney stove pipe jutting out the top. With the snow on it, it looked cozy. The place was free of livestock, but I could see its potential. I didn't even care what the inside of the house looked like. This was exactly what I needed: a small farm I could afford that made me feel safe. It's a good thing to feel before you step into a place you already love.
I acquired the place through a combination of luck and pure, unadulterated stubbornness. It took a few months of paying off credit cards, pinching pennies, and eating pasta every night, plus a kind and savvy real estate broker, a special USDA program, and a Hail Mary book deal. But I made an offer, and it was accepted.
I moved out of my old Vermont cabin that spring and became a resident of the Empire State. With me went two dogs, chickens, a pair of geese, three rabbits, and three sheep. I had big plans for a sheep-herding dog, more sheep, pigs, honey bees, and maybe even a horse I could ride along the winding road.
My part of Washington County is a mostly agricultural landscape based on dairy with occasional forests and sloping hills. There are a lot more cows than people, a lot more blue-collar jobs, and a lot more folks who spend as much time outside as those in Vermont — but they do because it's their occupation, not their recreation.
Jackson is a town of fewer than 700 households, sheltering some 1,700 people, positioned between the larger villages of Cambridge, Salem, and Greenwich (pronounced "Green-Witch"). It is part of the Upper Hudson Valley and home to fields, mountains, streams, rivers, and every sort of farm under the sun. Around my little freehold are cattle farms, alpaca farms, fish hatcheries, miniature horse trainers, artisanal cheese makers, and wood-fired bread businesses right alongside conventional corn, dairy, and soybean operations. It has historical roots in the American idealism of country living. Grandma Moses's farm is literally just down the road. I wasn't sure if I could live up to one of her paintings, but I was going to pull a hamstring trying.
And so my farm is where I'll follow this story of a year. A year of timeless work in honor of fellow agrarians, past and present, who have shared my climate and diet. This story will start and end in the same place — October — and weave through the work of woodstoves, cart horses, sheepdogs, gardens, orchards, livestock, and music. It's the story of these things and my learning about them here in Washington County, of days still kicking uphill here where oaks and maples sway brilliant red and gold under the cold October sun.
Every month has its own story, temperament, and celebration, and between the timelessness of the farm and that heady dance we call tradition, you will — as I do — see these months as living things you smell and touch. October is visited twice because that holy month is my anchor point — the four weeks of the year when my endorphins speed up, and every day I am six years old again. It's also the month I have the most to say about since so much living is packed inside it.
Becoming a farmer has turned calendar pages into irrelevant symbols. Days of the week do not matter like they used to. I'm damn sure a ewe trying to deliver a lamb doesn't care about meeting a spreadsheet deadline. The previously understood calendar year has chosen to stop and turn around on me like an obstinate workhorse. My year is now measured not by days but by life cycles. My holy days are based on the work and events of the farm and of the seasons. I need no liturgical trappings or pews, just a used Dodge pickup and some livestock.
I have discovered a wealth of ritual in this farm, and it suits me. It is everywhere, in every part of my day. My calendar is blessed with these annual holidays — Apple Gathering and Lambing among them — events I look forward to with the same fervor I felt in my footie pajamas waiting for Santa. The night before my first Shearing Day was wrought with excitement and plans. I lay in bed feeling (for the first time in nearly a decade) the innocent excitement of a kid. I now was a part of the timeline of human civilization, a part of an infallible religion: Traditional Agriculture.
Becoming a farmer ushered me into the gospel of dirt, life, sex, and death. My pillars of faith are simple and yet timeless to the human animal. I revel in them.
CHAPTER 2
AUTUMN
Need Fires
There's an ancient tradition in the Scottish Highlands called Tein'-éigin (in English, the Need Fire). Whenever a group of farmers or clansmen fell into a particularly bad patch of luck — diseased cattle, looming war — the Need Fire was the remedy. The clan would extinguish individual hearth fires and start a new fire in an open space where the entire village could gather. This special fire was started not with a match or fuel but by friction. You needed to light embers with the traditional methods of rope against wood, because this was a blaze to be earned. This was the fire that invoked change and blessing, healing and calm, and kept the people strong.
Once it flamed high, they added wet wood to create smoke — lots and lots of smoke that filled the village and blew through people's hair. Farmers would run their cattle or horses through it as baptism and cleansing. The smoke was supposed to heal and bless all it touched. Then everyone grabbed coals from the common fire and took them home in small iron cauldrons to start their kitchen hearths anew. They lit those home fires from the mother coals of that ritual, knowing that the whole clan was there together in whatever happened. They had the proof in their hands.
This Need Fire is more than superstition: it's faith that through our directed efforts we can change our luck. The Need Fire is a connected people at collective prayer, an action on the soil itself, involving elemental basics of human survival tied with force and hope.
Perhaps it's the farmer in me, or the romantic, but I see the same hope in the steam curling off a coffee cup in a church basement AA meeting as in the smoke swirling from a 1356 Highlands bonfire. I know if my own clan up here in Washington County ever fell on hard times I would feel a lot more confident we'd get through it all together than if I had to deal with it alone. Strength comes from community and that hasn't changed, nor will it.
OCTOBER
October himself is my Tein'-éigin. The entire month is ablaze with hard work, prayers, memories, and community. Here in the Upper Hudson Valley the leafy maples, ashes, and oaks explode into the colors of the fire. Reds, yellows, oranges, and all shades in-between light up the world for one last bonfire before those sacred Days of Grace begin.
Some people associate autumn with death, and in a way that is accurate. Winter is coming, and plants are fading into senescence. Leaves are falling off trees to feed the soil, leaving skeletal branches, naked and cold. But we all know those trees aren't dying, just hibernating. They spent all summer collecting sunlight, harvesting and storing their own food deep inside, and their leaves will return in the spring with a green so bright, we'll have to shield our eyes or go happily blind.
1 OCTOBER. ANCHOR
At Cold Antler, October is my anchor. It's where my year begins and ends because it's when the farm work that governs this life begins and ends. The garden has been bedded down and tomatoes line the larder shelves inside Mason jar reliquaries. Beans, pesto, and other greens sleep in the freezer until they are brought back to life one snowy day. The lambs have been weaned, sold, or are now old enough to breed as Ram Time approaches.
Hay is stocked in the old barn behind the house. Although it's never as much as the farm will need, it's as much as I can afford — and at least enough to let me rest easy and enjoy the month-long celebration that is October.
That relief is the first gift of the year. It makes me feel like a sleeping cat by a woodstove: for the moment completely content.
11 OCTOBER. SCRUMPY
When you make October the biggest holiday of your year, you must honor its passing properly. In my book, all celebrations deserve some hearty wassailing, and hard cider is my October libation of choice. You can buy it in grocery stores from a few large commercial presses, but we scrappy homesteaders, fishermen, and mountain musicians prefer to make it ourselves. As frugally as possible.
A large group of us meet at an orchard where a "drop deal" has been struck. This means the Orchardist in Chief will let us fill up a pickup truck or two with "drops" (apples that have fallen off the trees and are usually enjoyed only by deer and other four-legged critters) for a ridiculously low fee — around forty dollars. Commercial orchards can't (or just don't) sell the apples that hit the ground, so we show up to clean house. It takes a few hours, but bucket load by bucket load we leave with a few hundred apples. They may be slightly bruised or gone off, but as long as they aren't black and soft, we consider them fine for our hooch.
Once we've loaded our orchard drops, we hit the back roads of Washington County and southwestern Vermont where we knock on doors, check with local officials, and plain old steal the wild apples we find on the roadsides or in the woods near our homes. These wild apples aren't as large as the orchard hybrids, but they are tart as can be. That combination of domesticated sweetness and wild bite is what makes our signature blend of hard cider.
Hauling our scavenged goods, we make a caravan to Dave and Sue's house on the Vermont side of the border. Dave's modified antique press will reincarnate our apples as scrumpy. This form of hard cider is so dang strong, it has surpassed the name of cider, and ends up at around 12 to 14 percent alcohol by the time we get our lips around the bottles in early January. It has quite the kick to it.
Think of a flat apple champagne with a few shots of whiskey added to make it more interesting. Our scrumpy ages like wine, and as it ages, it gets stronger (if not in alcohol, then in legend).
12 OCTOBER. CLAN ISN'T ALWAYS WHAT YOU'RE BORN INTO
Your clan isn't necessarily your current friends, family, and acquaintances. You may have to seek outside your comfort zone for people who want to share the firelight with you. A tribe that supports and respects your dreams is a rarity — but if you can kindle it, you are rich.
Sometimes we get lucky and it is our own siblings, parents, childhood best friends, and cousins around those bonfires. Sometimes it isn't. A clan isn't necessarily what you're born into or marry. A clan is people who wrap you in their support and concern — people you can call at 1AM and they will come running with shovels. When you find them, you find home. They are out there, waiting.
Trick is you must look. You don't have to be religious to let the Tein'-éigin burn in your heart. You do need to accept that a better life is something worth believing in.
May your clan light the way.
14 OCTOBER. PLUCK
Fiddling is more about the season than the activity — and nothing makes me reach for my fiddle like October's crisp exhalations. I could be sawing out tunes at an apple pressing or in the Agway parking lot. Something about the color and the smells seems to create the physical space and climate for Dorian and D-major tunes, and I can't stop myself from playing.
I'm a self-taught musician who values stubbornness over discipline — a card-carrying member of the Determination Party. I didn't even know how to string a violin, but by god, I wanted to be a fiddler, so I was going to figure out how. I bought the cheapest fiddle on eBay and a book called Old Time Fiddle for the Complete Ignoramus (fitting) from some instructor in North Carolina and taught my hermit self to play.
I quickly learned that while a violin is a delicate Arabian show horse, a fiddle is more of a sturdy Haflinger. And this particular fiddle was a cart horse! The book and accompanying CD were my only teachers, and they let me be a little pluckier than conventionally taught violinists could ever be. I practiced with the dedication of the Recently Inspired until I could hear fiddle tunes in movies and television shows and readily copy them.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "One-Woman Farm"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Jenna Woginrich.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Days of Grace
Cold Antler Farm
Autumn: Need Fires
Winter: Light
Spring: I Do Too Much
Summer: Committing
Autumn: Harvest Home
Holy October
Epilogue
What People are Saying About This
Silver Award Winner, Memoir/Personal Growth
"Woginrich is a little bit crazy, a lot resourceful, and one of the bravest people I know. A delightful read and an inspiration for aspiring farmers."
"Read this book to learn why farmsteads need to be loved. Jenna's One-Woman Farm is a jewel: small and lustrous."
"A sweet and powerful book about one woman's fierce struggle for a meaningful life. Touching, elegiac, smart, and informative."
"One-Woman Farm is an ode to a life well-lived. Jenna Woginrich is one of those rare and wonderful people who allows nothing to stand between herself and her dreams. This book coaxes readers one step closer to their own dreams."
2014 Silver Award Winner, Nautilus "Better Books for a Better World" Award in the Memoir/Personal Growth category.
"Jenna's lovingly written, candidly poignant memoir of a year in the life of her farm is full of honesty, triumphs, travails, and seasoned advice. I didn't want to put it down."