Confessions of a Homesteader

This week has seen a real start of working the land and preparing for what is to come.  Grass has been cut, fences have been moved, things have been planted, trees have been felled, and I’ve been doing what every homesteader does this time of year…preserving food.  Obviously we haven’t had much of our own produce to preserve this year apart from an abundance of blackberries but I did strike deals with local farmers and received a mountain of green beans and mini cucumbers.  I jammed the blackberries, experimenting with Chia seeds as a gelling agent thus avoiding artificial things like pectin, and I’ve pickled the beans and cucumbers.  We have enough pickles for eternity!  I like the occasional pickled onion – my Mum always used to lament about the time I was trying to steal one off her Ploughman’s lunch when I was about 2 years old.  I was so persistent she let me take it in the end thinking I’d spit it straight out and leave her be, but instead all she heard was “nom nom nom” as I tucked into the onion.  Anyway, I’ve never really experimented with other pickled veg until recently.  Thankfully, I really quite like it and I’m looking forward to preserving the excess of our own harvest next summer.  I’ve also been reading about the health benefits of pickling.  I didn’t know until this week that pickling is extremely beneficial to your digestive health.

Along with our productive week, there have been a few ‘hiccups’, of course.  We decided to mow the front paddock with the tractor.  Ian started it and I took over after he’d done a few circuits.  He told me that he had seen voles scurrying around as he was mowing and joked about their funny long noses.  Off I went, looking out for these strange creatures but only saw a couple.  After I’d mowed half the field, Lauren came out to do the remainder.  I passed on the information about the resident voles and stepped back as she pulled away.  As she started the tractor, something wet hit my face.  You know that moment, when you just freeze, scared to find out what the offending material might be…yeah, you guessed it, some mangled body part of a small animal had gone through mower blades and had been ejected all over me.  I looked around to realize it was total vole and slug carnage in the paddock.  The corpses lay strewed around.  So there I was, in the midst of a Farmageddon genocide.

That wasn't the only unwanted animal encounter, this time we were the ones at risk.  We set ourselves up with a camp fire, marshmallows and sticks ready to watch the meteor shower.  All was going so well, we saw the international space center pass over and it was fantastic quality time with the family.  But before we saw a single meteor, we heard howling.  We assumed it was coyotes and didn’t panic but decided to take the dog and kids in as they were extremely close.  As I was walking towards the house with the last few items, Ian turned around and stared at something.  I didn’t need to turn around to know what he’d seen was close.  He just about had time to utter “I don’t think they’re coyotes, they’re wolves” before I started running for the safety of the house.  I know, I know, a bit of an overreaction perhaps, but still, nature can be scary sometimes.

So another roller coaster kinda week, from feeling like we were achieving a lot to feeling that we’d taken on too much, and as always, this evokes some reflection.  It wasn’t until today that I teased out the message from our recent experiences.  It was the Insurance lady who had come to finalize some details that made the metaphoric light bulb come on.  Once she had lifted her head from her clipboard and truly started to look around, she began to do what everyone does when they come here, she oooo’d and arrrr’d and wowed.  It made me think back to when I worked in Social Care.  I always believed that you could support someone in a bad situation to make positive changes as long as they had even a tiny spark of hope.  If their hope was gone, the battle was lost.  One of the things that chips away at a person’s hope is their environment.  Too often did we venture into grim, dark homes and find the person inhabiting the stale space had lost all motivation.  And it’s that belief which makes me confident that we will succeed here.  We are so lucky to have this amazing environment.  A wonderful open landscape with a natural serenity and beauty about it.  It’s the environment that makes people ooh and arrr when they come here.  It’s the environment that keeps us working late at night.  It’s the environment that makes me want to pickle and preserve its offerings.  It’s the environment that makes me want to stay home instead of going out, that makes me happy and content and makes me want to share it with my friends.  And I truly believe that, no matter how many mangled animals splat me, this environment will keep us plugging away to make it work. 

Here’s hoping I still find it inspiring in the middle of a wet, gray Vancouver winter!