CRP burn

We're planning to burn a few acres of CRP on April 14. Obviously, the weather has to cooperate, but if it isn't too dry, too wet, or too windy, we'll have a nice big crew. Having enough people makes up for a certain lack of experience on our part. After all, we not only want to burn the thick vegetation on the parts that should be burned, but we also want to avoid setting things on fire that should not be! And it's a nice celebration: we'll plan to take the whole tired, sweaty bunch to dinner at the Santa Fe restaurant in Ethel when we're done.
Anybody have any tips or helpful suggestions about the best (or worst!) ways to proceed when burning CRP?

Harvest time

The garden at the Farm was productive this year, thanks to my mother-in-law's green thumb and (I am convinced) the bees, who keep everything well pollinated. In fact, even after some good hard freezes, there is still some Swiss chard that seems quite happy to go on doing its thing until it gets buried by snow. Almost everything else is over and done with, of course, a week before Christmas.
One of the beehives failed (unproductive queen, I think), but we were able to get some honey from the other one. Some we sold, some we ate, and some got turned into my first attempt at mead (now resting in bottles). Next year we hope for more.
The harvest doesn't stop when the garden gives out and the bees hunker down for the winter. The Farm still yields what we need and what we can use. We took another deer this season, a nice buck (after a fat doe last year), and the meat gets shared multiple ways. The little food plots have been visited by birds and animals a-plenty; I "harvested" one head of a sunflower to have a few seeds to scatter next spring.

I don't collect acorns, hickory nuts, or black walnuts, but they apparently feed the deer and squirrels well enough. And the trees themselves are a crop, of course, providing firewood that supplies at least half the heat we need over the winter. (We could probably heat entirely with wood, and maybe we will some day, but for now we simply don't have the time to cut that much wood!) So far we don't need to cut down any living trees: we have all we can handle skidding downed logs out of the steep ravines, and then cutting and splitting and hauling and stacking.
Truly, we often reap where we did not sow. What we "harvest" is not always (and not only) what we planned and initiated and nurtured directly. At least as often, we harvest by simply receiving what the place gives us. This kind of farming isn't far removed from the ancient hunter-gatherers: we try to keep dancing between design, opportunism, surprise, and sheer gratitude. That is the dance of harvest time.

An Elemental Life

If you want to get in touch with life at its roots, life at an elemental level, there's nothing like a hundred acres of farmland (or raising small children!). The reality of the land is both more beautiful and less romantic than the world of ideas (where I usually live). The Farm resists idealization, the soil is resistant to theories. Land is always this specific land, and working the place always means working with this particular combination of the basic elements.

The ancients viewed the world as composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. That scheme turns out to be inadequate for purposes of physics and chemistry, but it's remarkably useful for capturing daily experience with the concrete specifics of life and work on the Farm.

Here's an example: when we got the Jeep or the Polaris stuck in the slippery rain-soaked mud, we wrestled with earth and water. To avoid those problems again, we need to work with the earth (soil) and the water and not against them. The messy details all come about from the way these ingredients interact!

And here's another example: we burned off about 20 acres of CRP grassland last week. It was an impressive interaction of fire and air! We were careful, well-manned, and well-equipped, and nothing bad happened: all the stuff that was supposed to burn did, and nothing that wasn't supposed to burn did! No injuries, no running around screaming in terror! All in all, a successful day. But here's the rub: we were "in control" only in a limited way. The direction and speed of the wind, and the heat and the speed of the fire, were more important for our success than our plan or our tools. A contrary wind could have cancelled the whole business, and fire in the wrong place would have turned it upside down.

To live and work happily with the Farm is a series of adjustments and accommodations, a dance of compromises between our human intentions and the elements we are given to work with. The elemental life of the Farm is a life in which we are not sovereign, not the masters of all we survey. We have to learn to live with only limited control.

The Buzz

In an earlier post, I listed beekeeping as one possible productive use of the hundred or so acres which I call The Farm (but which my wife prefers to refer to as "the country estate"). Yesterday I spent a day at a beekeeper workshop, hosted by the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. It was time well spent. A couple of colonies of prime honey bees will soon be moving into luxury accommodations on the property.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I think I imagined a dozen or so retired introverts, tentatively exploring a new hobby. What I found was a crowd of 200-300 enthusiasts of all ages -- and that was just the beginners. A father and son were buying additional hive boxes and frames for their suburban yard. A couple from my own neighborhood have been keeping bees for years (they went to the advanced class). Farmers were there to learn how to add another cash crop to their operations. Vegetarians wanted to learn about meatlless livestock. Vendors were displaying and selling a wide range of equipment.

Hardly any mention was made of the cultural or philosophical or political reasons to encourage people to keep bees. Colony Collapse Disorder has taken a serious toll among commercial beekeeping operations, and nobody knows exactly what's behind it. Bees are so important and beneficial to both agriculture and gardening that it is almost a civic duty to at least consider keeping a couple of hives.

But the hundreds who showed up for the Saturday workshop needed no persuading. They were there, as far as I can tell, because they had already made up their minds that keeping bees was something they wanted to do -- whether for profit, or because they liked to eat honey, or because the bees would benefit their orchards, or out of sheer love for Western Civilization.

What people were looking for yesterday -- and what they got -- was not the why of beekeeping, but the how. How is a new hive assembled? How do you work safely around the little beasties? How do you get a new queen? How do you recognize and treat common bee pests and diseases? How do you harvest the honey? It was a full load of practical information: from honey-supers to small hive beetles, weighing the relative merits of different kinds of hive tools and the argument about queen excluders (a.k.a. "honey excluders" depending which side you're on).

The thoroughly down-to-earth focus of the whole day, and the ease with which I could get practical answers to all the dumb, novice questions I had, was refreshing and empowering. I've now ordered a beginners kit which will include structures (bottom board, boxes, frames, foundations, and covers -- and, yes, queen excluders!) for two hives and the basic tools and protective clothing to get me started. Queen kits will be ordered soon! Watch this space. . .

More Urban Agriculture

Not too long ago, I commented in these pages on an interesting piece in The New York Times about urban gardening. Now The New Yorker, that most urbane of all periodicals, is getting in on the act. Their staff writer, Susan Orlean, has an article in a recent issue about -- are you ready? -- raising chickens. Technically, Orlean does not live in the city, but in a more rural setting where having a few hens (and a rooster by mistake) does not scandalize the neighbors. But she writes for people with a lot less green space. Even real city folks, she says, can (and maybe should) raise their own poultry.

There are some cities in the U.S. that have ordinances against keeping chickens. And it's not always easy to figure out, or learn, what the rules are where you might live.

Urban chickens need the right equipment, and perhaps the ideal place to start is the Eglu. I don't keep chickens, and I don't plan to, but if I did I would start with an Eglu--simply because it looks like something out of The Jetsons. I'm more interested in raising quail, so I might investigate whether an Eglu can be modified for those much smaller birds. (If I try that, you'll read about it here!)

There must be some kind of urban poultry movement starting, because there are blogs devoted to the subject. (Okay, I know that there are blogs devoted to every subject! My point is--chickens!? in cities!? Who knew?) You can check out TheCityChicken.com, or UrbanChickens.net, or CityChickens.com if you think I'm kidding.

Why would anybody want chickens in the tiny backyard of an Manhattan brownstone, or elsewhere in the concrete jungle? Well, for one thing, they lay eggs, and a couple of nice, fresh eggs every day is not a bad thing. But some people are attracted to these birds as pets: as objects of affection and companions. In other words, we humans seem to have a connection to other living creatures. We enjoy their company, and we care for them and feel affection for them, even if they provide us with no tangible benefits. A couple of hens, scratching at bugs and clucking contentedly in the backyard, renew that connection for us even when our lives are largely alienated from the earth we live on.