Midnight Rant

Okay, so I know it is just barley tomorrow, and this is in no way shape or form a photo update… but I just came across this article while getting my nightly before bed news fix, and I just felt it was something worth sharing… something that needed sharing.

This is the link to the article that inspired this rant... 

Isn’t it a bit ridiculous how most Americans (most industrialized humans, really) have determined that debates like these are… normal… acceptable. I personally find the whole situation appalling. I haven’t shared too much personal information (yet) about myself on this blog. That is not because I feel I have something to hide, or because I am ashamed of my past… It is simply because my past life, and my current life, have so little in common that they rarely cross contaminate each other. Two years ago I was a military contractor/fighter jet mechanic working for a foreign entity through a loopty-doop DOD contract… in other words, there have been very few times that the subject has come up in my writing about the farm.

But, here is one occasion that I have some what of a reason to fill you guys in a bit on who I am, and why I do what I do. I grew up on a farm. This farm, to be exact. As a teenager, I motherfuckin’ hated the outdoors. I could not wait to get the hell out of dodge. I was going to grow up, move out, and become an extremely rich and unfathomably successful business man. I was going to move to the city, and I was going to live in my penthouse loft, and I was going to hire some less fortunate soul to do all my laundry and wash my dishes. (For the record, this didn’t work out exactly as planned.)

Ten days after I turned eighteen I joined the military. The Navy to be more specific. I left the farm, and I moved to the city. (After boot camp and A-School I was stationed in Virginia Beach, VA.) After spending most of my childhood living on a semi-self-sufficient farm/homestead, I suddenly found myself one hundred percent dependent on the system… and I couldn’t have cared less.

After the Navy (which is where I received my jet mechanic training) I took a few odd jobs subcontracting for the DOD doing the exact same line of work I had been doing in the service. First I worked out in Maryland just south of D.C., and then I moved out to Nevada and worked for Top Gun out in the middle of the desert. I spent about three years out that way before I decided I was absolutely fucking miserable and I needed to start working on my exit strategy. I found what appeared to be a valid enough option through a year long contract working on fighter jets in Kuwait. The pay was epic awesome, and I figured I could be in and out in one year with enough money to move back to Michigan, pay for a house cash, and go to college full time on my GI Bill.

Now is neither the time nor the place to go into all the details of my entire life story (I’m already off topic enough), so I will save the nitty gritty details for my memoir; I honestly do have a point to this whole thing so stick with me.

While I was in Nevada I had read a book called One Second After by William R. Forstchen… at the time it was just a quick Wal-Mart read to keep me awake on my stint on third shift, but it had planted a seed in the back of my mind without me knowing it. The book, at a very basic level, is a fictionalized account of what would happen in modern day America if an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse) were to go off and essentially kill all electronics –permanently. I found myself wondering what I would do in Nevada. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building. My stove, my microwave, my refrigerator, my heat, all of it, was electric. In the scenario of an EMP not even vehicles would run anymore. So I would be stranded in the middle of the dessert, with no food, no water, and no transportation, and two thousand miles away from the closest person who would give a fuck about me. But, it was only a seed, which is why a few months later I moved to Kuwait for Operation: Exit Strategy anyway.

I thought I had it bad living on the system in the deserts of Nevada, until I got to Kuwait and realized what a true Total Government system looked like. Even the food supply was owned and operated by the royals over there. (I am, yet again, way off topic.) The longer I was over there, the more annoyed I got with the fact that I was in control of absolutely not one single facet of my life. Whether or not I had electricity or air conditioning in the 130 degree heat, was up to somebody else. Where and when I got my water supply was up to somebody else. How much cooking gas I got was administered by the government… I hope I am not coming off as some hard line extreme freedom nut, that is not my intention, I plan on tying this back into food shortly, I swear…

Either way, big picture… those two things combined, the book, and then finding myself in a truly dependent situation, lead to my decision to cancel Operation Exit Strategy, and instead focus on Operation Become Self Sufficient. You see, I wanted to be in control of where my food came from, and what was or wasn’t sprayed on it, or injected into it, and genetically rearranged in it… I originally came back to the farm in order to be more self-sufficient, but the longer I have been back, and the more research I have put into it, the more I realize that I am here for other reasons as well. And this article kind of just sparked off the need to share some of those reasons. I don’t want my food to come from some far away unknown land where things like "portable field toilets" are an issue… I want to know exactly where my bacon came from; I want to know my bacon's name, and I want to know what it was fed, and how it was treated, and what was injected into both the living beast, and the slab of pork belly during the curing process. I want to know that the fruits and vegetables I am eating have been grown in healthy soil, with natural (read: chicken shit) fertilizers, and no chemical pesticides…  I want to know how to do these thing. How to grow and raise my own food, how to preserve and store the excess, and how to cook and prepare my meals from raw ingredient (like for real raw... like I-want-to-grind-my-own-wheat-before-baking-the-loaf-of-bread raw). In other words, I want to be responsible for my own livelihood, and life. I sure as hell don’t want to have to trust in the Kuwaiti government, or in this case, the FDA to set the standards for the safety or the quality of my food.

Okay, so I know this rant was long. And probably, from a big picture perspective, probably not even all that interesting to somebody who isn’t… well, me. So, I hope I haven’t scared any of you off… with any of this… But now I am going to bed, and I still promise that update tomorrow, even if I did blow through like two weeks’ worth of word count goals writing this.

A Tropical Breeze and Some Cheese

Today was windy and freezing (literally), but in a good way. For the past week we have seen the high temperature of the day hover around ten degrees below freezing, and the nightly lows hit the single digits. It was a pain in the ass to keep the animal’s water liquid. I’m pretty sure their water tubs were icing over within an hour of me doing chores. Today, with the practically tropical breeze of 32 degrees it was a pretty nice reprieve from that. As long as the animals managed to make their way over to take a sip every hour or so, the surface wouldn’t freeze over. Which meant less pick axing required of me.

As you will be able to notice, by simply just reading this, that I did not get around to making the tour around the farm and completing the photo update today. It will be coming, I promise, it just didn’t happen today. Between getting caught up on the chores (because of the beautiful weather), and needing to make my way into town for a few errands and to stock up on a few things, I didn’t find the time during the daylight. By the time I got home and unloaded, the sun was already setting beyond the horizon, and the photo shoot was therefore postponed.

On to a different topic: I have been experimenting with fermented foods for a few months now, and, quite frankly, I’m not having any luck with it. I have been reading The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz (what a cool fucking name?!), and he swears that it is so simple to ferment food, that it practically (and in some cases, literally) does it itself. I have had no such luck. I tried fermenting five gallons of kosher dill pickles over the summer, and they went bad after eating just one pickle out of the hundreds in the batch (that one pickle was epic tasty though). And I have tried a few separate attempts at making sauerkraut, and basically the same thing happens: the kraut is really, really tasty for about a day, and then it is rotten. I thought the whole point of fermenting this stuff was in order to preserve it old school style. I don’t think temperature is my problem, this last batch of kraut (that I just found out went bad today) was in the pantry, which we keep at around fifty degrees (it does vary, but only be a few degrees –no massive swings into the seventies or anything of the sort, and it never gets near freezing…) Am I rambling? I can’t tell… Either way, making cheese was way easier than this fermenting shit. Speaking of which…

I know I only shared half the story of making my first batch of feta on here, but since that first batch, I went ape wild crazy in my new cheese hobby. I do have some pictures saved on my hard drive of some of those experiments… like this one, of aged marinated feta in olive oil and herbage that made my mouth orgasm…

But this is my current experiment.

I made just one batch (two gallons equaled this little disk) of homemade goat cheddar. I don’t know how it taste yet, because I am trying to let it age for one year first (I enjoy sharp chesses). Come the spring I intend to make batch after batch of this good stuff because it will store for up to twenty some odd years… Well, I guess I can’t say it is good stuff until I have tried it… Right now the goats are dried up until the spring when they start popping out little ones, so I have had to put my cheese adventures on hold for now… So, maybe I will try a younger cheddar in the early summer in order to make sure I’m not fucking the recipe all to hell or anything.

Well… I guess that is going to be the update for the day. I really and honestly could go on for about five thousand words today, there is just so much that has been going on and has happened, and is happening around here, that I hardly even know where to begin. But I reckon that is a good thing… It means I will be able to update this thing day after day, and you guys will have a reason to check back in a see what is new. I’ll talk to you guys again tomorrow.

Spicy Spanish Paprika Goat Sausage... And Other Such Things...

I know I have been gone for most of year now, and that probably deserves an explanation. I got sidetracked with laziness. I can’t think of a better way to phrase it. I somehow found myself rather doing nothing, and so nothing is what I did.

I don’t know why that happened. I actually really liked writing this blog, and updating it. And to be honest… it kept me honest. On days that I would want to push a project off to a later date, a little voice would pop up in the back of my head and say, but if you don’t do this, then what are you going to blog about today? And I would have no choice but to agree with the imaginary voice in my head and get up and get the project started.

Don’t get me entirely wrong. Just because I stepped away from blogging about my rural life doesn’t mean I quit living it. I have been busy-ish, even if I haven’t been habitually blogging it. Just last weekend we butchered one of this year’s Billy goats, and ground the whole thing up before turning him into a Spicy Spanish Paprika Goat Sausage… The sausage turned out all sorts of epic awesome, but raw goat meat doesn’t photograph very well, and besides, my hands were covered in raw meat so I couldn’t touch the camera… and that is why I have no pictures to share of it.

One cool thing that did come out of the sausage adventure (we also butchered three rabbits and turned that meat into a breakfast sausage) was that we were able to add twenty-five pounds of ground meat to our dwindling freezer stores. If you check back to the very first post I made to this blog almost a year ago, I was raging about the lack of freezer space do to a recent cow butchering… well, since that post we have been eating a lot of beef, and now our ground meat supply is at a critical level, and I hate eating steak (but… we did just buy an electric meat grinder, so I will probably be turning a lot of that steak into ground beef)!

I’m more than off topic. I came on here to say that I am back… again. (I say that a lot, don’t I?) I have missed blogging about my rural farming adventures. Maybe tomorrow I will get a chance to run around the farm and give a quick photo update of everything that you guys have missed out on while I was away… It is winter, and cold, and snowy here, so there will be a lack of garden pictures… but since the last time I have updated this thing we have acquired about twelve heritage pigs, a few more goats, a variety of poultry, and a few other things… Come back tomorrow and check out the update.

I Am Not Dead... Yet

     I just wanted to let you guys and gals know that I have not passed away, but rather just moved to a new location. My new blog is pretty much identical to this one, just with a more simple name and title, on that more accurately projects what the blog is about... So I hope to see you guys at the new location, and I look foward to hearing what you guys think about the changes.

     And just for clarification, I will not be blogging at this location anymore, so if you want to keep up with life on the farm I haven't actually named yet... all the action will be at www.futurekingsfarm.blogspot.com

Cheese, Honey, Garden, Orchard, and Laundry... Update

Wow! Okay, a lot to catch you guys up on and it is raining today so I have the time… This is going to be more of a photo update, and less of a textual experience because even though it is raining, I am doing a million and a half things around the house today. (Making two batches of Chevre cheese, helping my mom make soap, cleaning the kitchen, and I am currently way behind on homework for the two spring classes I am enrolled in this semester –I have three books to read by Monday…)

For starters, I have to catch you guys up on my feta making cheese experience. This first photo is of the ball of cultured curd after it hung for about six-ish hours…

I then sliced it into three pieces and added a sprinkling of salt. I flipped the cheese and salted it about four more times over eight hours before putting it in the fridge to age for a week.

We just sliced a bit of it into cubes this morning and sampled some with our breakfast (of homemade freshly baked cinnamon raisin bread) and the cheese was fucking perfect. Good thing too, because I made another batch of it during the week… We have goats milk coming out of the woodwork around here, which isn't entirely a bad problem to have. Too much free food is never a bad thing. Speaking of which, I priced out some feta at the store just to compare what I have in the fridge aging to what it would cost me to purchase that same amount. And I have a hundred and twenty-eight dollars of feta in my fridge at the moment, and it cost me less than ten dollars to make. But, anyway, onward with the update…

                Honey! We had to buy more bees (I think I covered this in an earlier blog) but, we had all of the abandoned hives honey to process… We got at that this week; it took three days to accomplish, but in the end we salvaged about a hundred twenty pounds of honey. Back to the store I went to price out what local Michigan honey was running, and it was $5.59 a pound… meaning we put up $670 dollars –and about three years’ worth- of honey this week. Not bad for just salvaging some abandoned hives. We also have the new order of bees already living it up in their refurbished homes, so we will probably get close to that amount again this year. 

I showed you guys the repair work I had to do on the clothes line earlier in the spring, and I just wanted to let you know that it was put to good use yesterday. The sun was warm, the breeze was beautiful… we washed about ten loads of laundry didn’t have to turn the dryer on once.

Our chives are already starting to turn to seed. It seems like just a week ago I was sharing a picture of the first of the chives popping through the ground…

My garlic is making a huge comeback… I love garlic!

The rhubarb I planted a few weeks back is growing like weed (and that is awesome).

The newest addition to our semi-orchard… a honeycrisp apple tree. I just planted this about three days ago, and it is doing great!

And finally, some geese that landed in our field that I noticed while writing this blog entry.

This was only about one third of what I got started this week… SO BUSY… I hope I can find some time to give you a more thorough update soon (must read three books in the next forty-eight-ish hours)

P.S. I love the farm life. Good food, good booze, and it is frustrating/challenging/infuriating/fun as hell. Check back soon for more updates.