Three little ladies join the team

Recently there were three new additions to the homestead. I'm pleased to introduce you all to the three little ladies that will be the cornerstone of a hopefully growing herd of brush busting, milk gushing, dairy goats.

Lady Marguerite exploring the van

"Hello, my name is Lady Marguerite Chevre. Its a pleasure to meet you!"Lady Marguerite is a full blood Saanen.  She was born April 27, 2011 and is the oldest of the sisters and appears to be assuming the dominant role.

Tink on the ride home

"Hi! I'm Tink! Well, actually my names Bernice Beauregard, but I don't like it so I go by Tink. Pleased to meet'cha!" Tink is another full blood Saanen. She was born May 3, 2011 to "the Cadillac of milk goats" as the farmer from whom we got the girls called her mother. Due to bloodlines, I look forward to her being a great milker.

Padua on the box near the shelter

"Hi. My name's Padua! Nice to meet all of y'all"  Padua is a mix of Nubian, Boer, and Saanen. She was born May 4, 2011. With a good amount of Nubian, Padua will probably produce less milk than the other 2 but the butterfat content will be much higher for a better quality product. Also if bred with a Boer, her offspring will be the best for meat goats.

Apparently everyone is queen of the mountain

The little ladies are getting adjusted to their new home and have already begun tearing into the brush and forage in what was a very inhospitable part of the property. While they won’t be bred for at least another year and a half, it looks like they are already paying their way by keeping that brushy area clean and cropped! We've given them a few things to climb and play on and a little shed next to the house to hunker down and stay dry at night. We couldn't be happier to have them and they seem to be pretty happy with the arrangement as well. 

Hearing their little voices from the back adds a wonderful new tone to the sounds of the house and never fails to make me smile.  They are friendly, adorable, and curious and they love to have company. Whenever I leave the pen they cry and bleat and generally anounce their displeasure and they come running, back legs kicking whenever they see me approach.  There's a little sample in the video above.

I hope you all enjoy seeing the girls as much as I do. I'm sure new pictures and videos will be taken and uploaded pretty regularly.  They are little now but they grow quickly and I'll keep everyone updated on them as they grow and change!

Constructive Destruction

From an early age I have been an advocate for maintaining a sustainable relationship with nature.  For my 6th birthday my grandmother gave me a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine. This magazine arrived every month and I eagerly awaited every issue. They always came just in time as the previous one would fall apart from my constant flipping back and forth through the pages.  I did all the puzzles, read all the articles and absorbed and reabsorbed all I could of insects, trees, ecosystems and human’s relationship to nature. “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute” was a mantra and Woody the Owl an idol. Old National Geographic back issues did more than the threat of the lash to keep me completely silent in waiting rooms, and watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom narrated by Marty Stouffer was a special and savored treat.  These outside influences, paired with my proximity to forests over my young years, served to create a budding young naturalist. Now here I am many years later at odds with nature, hacking and sawing my way through trees that were saplings when I was reading all about protecting forests and natural habitats.


When I stand among the trees on this sliver of West Virginia mountainside with chainsaw, axe and drawknife, I feel the spirit of this place looking on.  Does it shake its head with disapproval and sadness?  Am I the burning, felling threat humans so often have become?  I would like to think that I am working towards restoration and benevolent management.  When those trees fell and when I attack the fallen timbers and brush with blades and chains, I can’t help but feel like I’m destroying the very spirit that I’ve always fought to protect and respect. No matter how much good you do, the sound of a chainsaw explodes the wonder and silence of forest at peace.

Peeling bark with a drawknife

The bark of a tree is its skin. It is the barrier which separates its inner core from the outside world. It is armor against weather, infestation, distress, and abrasion. When a tree has fallen the bark works in quite the opposite way. It traps moisture next to the wood, creates havens for bugs, and increases the speed of decomposition. These are no good if the wood is to be used for any sort of long term building application.  I have to remove the bark for proper drying, rot prevention, insect discouragement, and of course, aesthetic appeal. To make a protection for myself from the elements I must first destroy the trees’ version of the same.
Now we’ve got conflict. I need the bark off. The tree doesn’t want to give it up.  The tree has spent years, its whole life in fact, growing thicker and thicker bark and it is quite attached. It is a formidable defense system that is none too easy to penetrate, but I have opposable thumbs, steel tools, and a stubborn streak that rivals an oak.

To build the cabin I need a minimum of 40 logs. The cabin is a simple one room affair 16’x12’. I’ll need logs of those dimensions plus 7 logs 20’ long. These larger logs will serve as the foundation logs, eave logs, purlins, and a ridge log for the top.  That will give me 192 square feet of floor space, a loft for sleeping and a 4’x12’ covered porch out front.  Last autumn I felled enough trees to produce the required building logs and left them over winter to dry and cure. You can build a cabin with “green” or uncured logs, but over time they’ll shrink as they dry creating lots of work chinking and sealing the spaces that the shrinkage leaves. Now comes the battle. Armed with a small camp axe and a drawknife I went to work peeling logs. The work seemed easy at first as the drawknife cut quickly through the outer bark. I thought it would take approximately 15 minutes per log. Only later did I realize that the toughest layers lay deeper in and I was nowhere close to being done. As it happens, I’m spending almost an hour per log carefully working the bark off in strips.

Some peeled logs

Each log seems to be an individual. Some release their bark almost willingly, the head of my axe sliding between the wood and the fibrous membrane with ease and large long strip peeling away to reveal the white wet wood beneath. Some, on the other hand, fight every inch of the way and leave my hands, back, arms and shoulders sore with effort.  I feel sometimes as though I’ve lost as much skin as the logs have. The sound of a good strip peeling away is a satisfying “zip” that leaves a long flexible strap of bark and a smile of accomplishment!


Along with peeling the logs is a possibly more challenging feat. I have to skid them from their resting places on the side of the mountain, deep in forested territory, to the building site that I’ve (somewhat) cleared.  The grade of the land is steep and it is completely covered in small to large trees along with underbrush.  As luck would have it, the largest of the logs were situated the farthest from the building site. I worked and worked with chain and come-along and could move those monsters about 6 inches! I needed to get them about 200 yards up the mountain.  A come-along just isn’t the tool for this job.  

Skidding with the Arctic Cat

With the power of a Jeep Rubicon, an Arctic Cat 500 with a winch, and Dale’s help we managed to grab and skid 7 of these monster timbers up above the site and stack em.  It still took us all day to do that amount of work.  When they were stacked, we were exhausted, the winch worn out and road had been turned into mud pit. No, a come-along isn’t the tool for this job.  The job is by no means done. I’ve got 15-20 logs to skid to the site still. Then I’ll have to arrange them and get situated to start the stacking! I can’t express how eager I am to get those logs down and watch those walls rise!


I want to work with this land. The stars know I can’t work against it. My vision for this land is one of mutual benefit, diverse landscapes and micro-ecosystems, and sadly, that involves what amounts to clear cutting much of the timber that currently makes its home on these slopes.  I can only reconcile these by using every last scrap of brush, log, and root.  I’ll need it for compost, construction, and fencing.  I can only hope that this meager justification calms the child in me that can’t help but disapprove of the destruction that must occur before the building and healing can begin.

Sugar makin!

Sugar camp

The first time I remember eating maple syrup was in New Hampshire around 1981. My family lived at a small collective and one of my earliest memories was a pancake breakfast.  This was no ordinary fund-raiser or church get together. This was THE syrup breakfast.  We all bundled up and headed to the big lot where the men had set up what I’ve come to learn was a sugar shack.  It was basically a rectangular pole structure with a roof and open sides. Under the roof was a giant square pan with a wood fire burning underneath. Men stirred what was in the pan with spoons the size of canoe paddles and it smelled like a diabetic heaven!   All the local maples had been tapped and collected for days and the sap was cooking down into syrupy goodness. My family didn’t stay long in New Hampshire but my Dad still won’t eat maple syrup unless it is the100% real deal from NH or VM. I won't either. I guess some things learned just stay with you.

Collecting sap

Making maple syrup requires a lot of work and a lot of waiting. For the small producer or the hobbyist, the factors that are beyond control far outweigh the controllables.   It’s a lesson in patience.
You can’t make the trees run;  you can’t make the wind stop; you can’t make the temperature fluctuate in just the right way.  Once you have the sap collected and the fire burning, you can’t make it boil any faster.  There’s work involved for sure, and after just 3 days of “sugar makin” I was exhausted. But with as much work as is involved, there’s still plenty of time to sit and reflect and just enjoy the elements, the process and people that are with you.

Sugar camp coffee

Mornings were a routine that I could sure get used to!  The quickening of the forest acted as an alarm. Birds, squirrels, and on this trip one deer (!) moving about beginning their day stirred the blood in me. We enjoyed breakfasts of thick slab bacon and eggs with toast cooked over a campfire with a good pot of camp coffee as the world warmed.  When temperatures are right for sap to flow it drops to below freezing all night then warms throughout the day. If the temperatures are warm during the night and rise too high during the day like they do later in the spring, buds start to form and the sap is worthless for sugar making. It is bitter and sugar makers call it "buddy sap" Even thought the temp drops below freezing, trickles of sap still end up in the jugs and those are frozen solid until the sun has had time to work its magic.  There was no sense in punching a clock and rushing to the office. The office was frozen.

Building the pan

Building the pan in which to boil down the sap was a marvel! I’d heard descriptions from Dale’s mom, Wanna about how she had built pans and then had careless watchers burn them up when the fire got too high. She went into good detail about how they were built but I never really wrapped my mind around the concept until Dale and I put one together.   It’s a simple concept, but one that required 2 days of labor and some consternation.  Boat builders must share the frustration I felt at trying to create a water tight seal with wood metal and nails. Trust me folks, it ain’t easy! It’s simple. It’s not easy. Between building a 50 gallon pan from raw materials and lugging gallons and gallons of sap from trees to our holding container we passed the days until we had enough sap to start cooking.

Watch the fire!

There’s one rule to cooking the syrup: Watch the fire.  Its hungry, its temperamental, it is the major factor in how fast or slow your water cooks down, and if it gets to high you ruin the pan you just spent 2 days and some busted knuckles building. Watch the fire.

Filtering

Once the sap was cooked down from 50 gallons to about 2 over the fire we strained the syrup/sap into a pot big enough to accommodate its boil and brought it inside.  It’s a lot easier to control the heat on a range, and when the syrup boils down that much it’s easy to go too far and end up with a scorched black mess if you're still over an open fire.

There was a lot of sediment from the trees pith and the syrup was really cloudy at this point. The research that I did all pointed toward filtering and decanting as the method for clarification.  All this filtering and decanting is a time consuming process.  I decided to use a technique I’ve used many times for clarifying stock: slowly simmering egg whites in the pot.  As the egg whites coagulate they trap all the sediment and rise to the top where once the clarification is complete the “raft” can be scooped off and added to the compost bin or given to the dogs for a sweet eggy treat. Using the egg white raft worked like a charm and the syrup ended crystal clear! Let me tell you though, The cooked egg white raft with all the impurities in it looks mighty disgusting! I'm glad I used that method cause it took a lot of really gross looking detritus out of the product!

Clarifying with an egg raft

When the syrup boiled at a temperature 7 degrees higher than water boiling the sugar content was at the right level and the syrup was done. Then we poured the (now) maple syrup into jars and sealed them. Syrup is done and two weekends of work and 100 gallons of sap resulted in 8 pints and 6 half pints of sticky goodness.

This process has been amazing! I expected to learn a lot and have a good time and I was not disappointed. It is hard work but good work. Its relaxing but exhausting. I don't know how anyone could make a decent wage with all the work and fuel that is involved in making just a very little bit of syrup. I guess the techniques available now are far better engineered and more efficient than our tiny operation but I definitely understand why real syrup is SO expensive. Seen from this angle store bought syrup is not expensive at all. It made me think about modern America's relationship to sugar and yesteryear's relationship with the same. Back in the day, these 3-4 weeks provided almost the entire supply of sugar for the year! It was a hugely important process on the homestead or farm.  It created a respect for sugar and syrup because you just couldn't get it anywhere else. You couldn't just go loading down everything with cheap sugar because it didn't exist.  No small wonder diabetes and obesity just weren't a problem on the American frontier.   I can imagine that a bit cooked down to candy for a once-a-year treat would be a very special thing for children in that era.  It seems silly to say, but this syrup is rather precious to me.

100% WV maple syrup!

A man, a mountainside, and a mission.

I am a chef.  I am a woodsman. Now I want to be a farmer.   That may not seem like a natural next step but let me explain.  For the last 10 years I have lived, loved, played and worked in the grand city of Chicago.  I was trained there to make beautiful and delicious food out of simple ingredients.   I came to love all the different artisanal products that are so integral to cultures around the world and here in America.   I love food, making food and feeding people!  For generations we have made our food out of simple ingredients that didn’t need to be fortified with this or that vitamin because the vitamins weren’t all processed out of it!

 

When confronted with certain challenges in the kitchen and on camping trips, I’ve often used the expression “How hard can it be? People have been doing this since the dawn of time.”   How can we not excel at these basic skills? And yet, many are lost or dying arts.  Who makes sauerkraut, yogurt, or bread except the occasional hobbyist? Now, before there is an uproar, I understand that there are good folks out there doing exactly that, and I salute you! But I think we can agree that this is not the norm.  The collective knowledge of generations of pioneers is slowly dying as monoculture replaces diversity and convenience replaces work ethic.

So I’ve moved to West Virginia.  I’m going to build a farm. And I’m going to put myself to the challenge that “It can’t be that hard. People have done it for millennia.” My cousin’s husband was gracious enough to offer me the use of 16 acres of wilderness up in the mountains that hasn’t been touched in over 20 years.  I’ve got some goals and I’ve got some dreams and we’ll see if I can live up to the challenge.  That’s what this whole blog is going to be.  A record of one man’s journey back in time to confront the challenges that led to the building of this great nation.

My first goal is to build a cabin. I’ve decided to build out of materials on hand.  With all the trees I need to clear to make pasture areas, I’ll have a literal ton of material with which to work.  I’ve already cut enough logs to do the building and they’ve been sitting curing over the winter. Come spring I’ll skin em and stack em.  I’ll be keeping everybody updated on my progress via this media.  If I can build a house out of wilderness land I feel I can tackle just about anything!

My second goal is to create a self sustaining homestead. This means minimal inputs and minimal waste. I’m creating a closed circle system where I manage animals, plants, and soil to maximize their potential and keep everyone involved happy. This is a system where the waste of one production stimulates the next in the cycle, where diverse organisms work in symbiotic relationships just like the natural process but managed with human ingenuity. I want to be able to provide all the needs for that little parcel of land from the land itself.  That includes energy, food, drink and the rest!  We’re going totally off grid here folks! 

The third goal, and this is getting into dream territory, is to create enough overflow of production that I can sell it to family, friends, and neighbors and create a little cash flow.  I don’t plan on selling your average farmers market fare. With my background in the culinary field I’m bringing a wealth of knowledge about world cuisine and production models to this little homestead. My plan is to step-by-step add products to production including fresh and aged cheeses, prosciutto style hams, pickled ramp bulbs, and black pepper infused maple syrup, not to mention the unequaled taste of pasture raised chickens.   I like to eat well and I plan on making food items that are unrivaled!

So that’s the plan. My work is surely cut out for me and I look forward to the challenge. We will see if one man from the city can work with and manipulate nature to create a sustainable, comfortable and ultimately livable space.  We will see if this wilderness can be transformed into an agricultural habitat or if I will break, not able to handle the lack of convenience offered by our modern society.  The gauntlet has been thrown down. Well, actually that was my work glove and if I’m gonna get anything done I’d better pick it up and get to it!