Tan Your Hide

Many of us grew up with it, the threat of "I ought to tan your hide" when we did something unspeakable.  I am beginning to think that this threat was never actually uttered by anyone who really had tanned a hide because, frankly, given even the worst infraction by a kid possible, "tanning" is simply a lot of work and likely more of a punishment for the person doing the tanning.

We have established a strange pattern  on our small livestock farm.  When some beloved, fur bearing, food animal either dies unexpectedly or is sent to market, we have taken to tanning their hide.  Now, granted, we are at a sum total of two at the moment, but once bitten by the tanning bug, it becomes something that you consider every time you run your hands over a soft furry, or woolly back.

The first time this thought even crossed our mind was the day that our beloved sheep, Lambie, died suddenly of heart failure.  It is a terrible conundrum, really to happen upon an animal that you loved as both a pet and a potential farm contributor who has quite suddenly died from an apparent heart attack.  What's to be done?  Bury her and loose all the good meat and wool, or butcher this poor hapless family member that also just happens to be a sheep?  While we deliberated this ethical and moral situation, it was deemed best that we at least start the butchering process because there really is only a small window of opportunity for that process to take place.  Grieving would have to take place while wielding the sharp knives and bone saw.  The skin, of course, is one of the first things to be removed and Lambie had such a fine coat of wool that I was sad to see it, too, go to waste.  Around here, one thing leads to another and, thanks to a few quick references, the initial scraping of the hide was underway.

Salting the hide

There is a strange sort of alchemy that happens when butchering an animal.  Chickens can quickly be turned from feathered friends into rubber chicken-like models, and then into an incredible bowl of chicken noodle soup with a mere flick of a knife, and some really hot water.  Sheep convert from a large, belligerent, somewhat spastic animal into a fleece and a significant amount of red meat very quickly.  I am not suggesting that there is not true affection for these animals, or that we are blood thirsty individuals - quite the opposite really.  Killing an animal, for whatever reason, but especially if we are going to be eating them, is a very thought provoking process in which there is a lot of introspection and palpable gratitude expressed to the animal.  The day Lambie died, Keith and I really did not talk much to one another, both lost in our own thoughts, grappling with our emotions surrounding this farm life altering event, but understanding the time sensitive nature of the material required us to put it all on hold for the time being.  In Lambie's case, we were spared the necessity of trying to decide when, or how we would ever send her to market.  She did it for us, bless her little weak heart.  And just to be clear, before I get a lot of worried responses to the effect of "that meat may not be safe to eat!"….yes, yes it was.  Being the vet that I am, I sent off multiple tissues samples to try to determine the cause of the sudden demise of our entire herd of one.  Turns out it was White Snake Root poisoning - a type of plant that was in our hay that we didn't even know about…. but that is another post for a different time, I digress….

 Lambie was a hand off from our neighbor who had a set of triplets.  She was the one triplet that wasn't doing well because she didn't get any milk.  Our neighbor, also being the school bus driver, knew that we had a lot of kids and a mom who was a vet.  It hasn't taken long for the neighbors to realize that we are a good place to drop the rejects - we are like the island of misfit farm animals.  Lambie, when she first came to us, was not even able to suck from a  bottle so had to be tube fed for three weeks until she learned to eat the new spring grass that was finally growing.  Because of the cold weather, she lived in the house with us for that time, often to be found sleeping behind the door of the mudroom curled into a small ball of warm, black wool.

So it was this now white, fleecy pelt that we skinned off, scraped cleaned and then salted.  These unplanned events never happen at an ideal time, but in Lambie's case, she picked a good day.  Cool temperatures and I was home from work.  What a way to have to spend the day off.  We tracked down a few references for what we were doing and set to work.  The basics are the same for any skin or pelt.

1. Scrape clean of any muscle tissue and fascia (and hair or wool if you don't want it)
2. Salt the skin well to help dry and preserve it
3. Pickle it in an acidic salt brine
4. Tan it
5. Oil it 
6. Break down the fibrous connective tissue in the skin as it dries out to provide with a soft, workable leather. 

This all sounds straight forward, but it can be very cumbersome working with a hide.  They are incredibly heavy and unwieldy, not to mention smelly and somewhat gross to begin with.  Lambie's hide went well up until the point of breaking down the connective tissue in the skin while it dries.  We set the hide out thinking that it would take several days to dry, but it dried too quickly and left us with a stiffer leather than we wanted. 

Undaunted by the less than perfect tanning of the Lambie hide, she now covers one of the chairs in our computer room and is fantastically comfortable and warm. And when I threw my back out some time back, she pillowed the hard floor I slept on and made it far more tolerable .  Somehow the hide has still retained the name "Lambie" so, rather than saying, "hey, go grab the sheep skin rug to lay on", it is simply still, "Go get Lambie" as though the soul and spirit of the animal is somehow infused into their skin.  I am not actually sure what to make of this connection and can't decide if this relationship to a formerly living creature is healthy or not.  While I have been pondering this a bit longer, we have started on Harold's hide.

Harold was another castoff creature.  A poor doing calf from the farm down the road.  He was apparently three weeks old at the time we got him but he didn't weigh more than 25 pounds.  Probably premature or lacking in some important genetic component that stunted his development significantly, Harold spent the first three months of his life just learning how to eat.  Bottle feedings were hopeless, he never did figure out a bucket, and it would take him an hour to eat a small amount of grain.  Green grass saved us once again and slowly he figured out his natural food and took to it with relish. That's not to say he ever really grew much.  By five months old, when most of his contemporaries were several hundreds of pounds, he topped out at 124 pounds.  By his first year, when he should have been about the size of our two year old dairy cow, he was half her size.

Cute and fuzzy, but not entirely all there, his small stature would sometimes make him look as though his internal organs were going to pop out of his small skeletal frame.  By eighteen months, when it became apparent that he was no longer growing any bigger, only wider, the decision had to be made.

Pasture is always at a premium around here, as is hay in the winter.  The options were to send him to market before winter hit, or in the spring…..given the hay situation, the answer was made for us.

Market day is always a sad day around here, and this year was no different except it was also my birthday.  We had decided just that morning to go ahead and get the hide back so we could tan it, and it only dawned on me later that this meant I was likely going to spend some part of my birthday scraping muscle and connective tissue off a newly skinned hide from an animal that I had loved and reared. Some people go out to party…..others flesh hides.

Repairing small holes

Acid bath soak

I could describe the entire process, but I would do a poor job of it at best because the actual process is long, involved, and usually split between Keith and I, with Keith doing the lion's share of the heavy work.  There are many good references available and websites from which to get the tanning chemicals needed, such as Van Dykes.  Having re-read these instructions myself just now, I chuckled reading the last section about the breaking stage on cattle and buffalo hides where it says, "Good Luck! This will be a difficult process."….they aren't kidding.

One thing is abundantly clear when working a hide, Native American women were incredibly strong! Much of the scraping, tanning, and breaking of hides was up to them and this is a process that takes days of hard, back breaking labor….and they were working with buffalo hides to boot! As someone who has spent several hours in the last two weeks working a hide in one fashion or another, I will attest that there are muscles in my arms, shoulders and back that I didn't know were even there, and I have blisters in places on my fingers that I didn't even know could blister.

Stretching the hide

However, as taxing as this job can be, it is also very methodical and mesmerizing.  I will be out in the shop listening to the radio while slowly scraping or breaking the hide and the whole circle of Harold's life will play itself out in my head and there is a quiet sort of thankfulness that emerges when I think of how we will have a part of him around to use and enjoy.  It's difficult to put in words really, without coming across as a total freak, but the hide speaks to a person when you take the time to listen, just like the earth does when you are busy growing food, or the trees do when you walk among them.  There is just a simple expression of wonder and infinite mystery that surrounds anything in nature, whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral and when it is held in respect and deference for its small part of the whole,  it transforms an odious, back breaking task into a transcendent celebration of all of life.

My guess is that our cow hide will continue to be known as "Harold" regardless of where he ends up residing in my house…. and I am completely all right with that.

Wabi-sabi

It is the pre-holiday season again.  The first of November is quickly gone, when all the Halloween decorations have been torn down and stashed until next year and all the Christmas decorations have been put up in the department stores with merry Christmas music blaring to help inspire you to do your Christmas shopping a little early this year.  Giving thanks doesn't sell material things, so the retailers just jump right over Thanksgiving and head for what will move inventory before the fourth quarter of the year is up in order to keep the stockholders happy.  What a world, what a world.

This time of year becomes entirely too compressed, too hurried.  There is the seasonal dread of the darker days and the cold temperatures, there is the requisite shopping to be done with equal parts of faked joy and drummed up enthusiasm that will culminate in one or two days of anticipated holiday bliss which never quite lives up to our memories from childhood no matter how hard we try.  Not to mention the stresses of travel, families getting together, and parties to be attended.  I find myself caught up in a whirlwind of holiday craziness that only subsides when I flip the calendar and realize that it is January 2nd which then leads rapidly to a post holiday funk.

I used to hate the coming of winter. The end of the warmth, the darker days and longer nights, but now I have come to enjoy it as a chance to read, to sleep, to watch a movie with one of my kids on a Saturday afternoon.  As to the "pre-holiday race to new year" time….it will require a little wabi-sabi thinking.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese philosophy that essentially encompasses the idea that nothing is ever permanent, nothing is ever perfect, and nothing is ever complete.  This imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness are things to be valued and cherished in and of themselves rather than constantly striving for some distant, ideal "finish line".  The idea that "I will be happy when__________" is an all to common phrase, especially in the Western hemisphere, as we strive for complete infinite perfection and are constantly stressed and disappointed when it is never quite achieved.

Nature is perhaps the very best model for this concept.  Nature is perfect in its incompleteness, complete in its imperfection, and the seasons quietly change never to allow permanence. The very leaves falling off the trees outside represent Wabi-sabi in their random, chaotic distribution and eventual rotting demise.  The same will apply to the snow, and the spring mud and melting that is sure to come.

Washing dishes is probably the first place I learned to use this principle. The dishes in my house never stay washed.  I would no more than finish one load of dishes only to have my kids hand me another set from the endless meal and snack cycle that goes on with a growing family. It would make me crazy! So, in an effort to avoid the straight jacket and padded room, I learned to let the frustration go and love the process - the sorting, the mess, the hot water, the soap, the cleaning, rinsing, drying and putting away - knowing all the while that it was all right that in another ten minutes I could do it again if I wanted.   My daughters' attic bedrooms are another place where I have to employ this philosophy as well - they are a mess and even after cleaning completely they never stay clean for more than three hours.  No amount of yelling, cajoling, or applying to their (as yet underdeveloped) sense of personal hygiene is going to keep this area clean, but when I stop and realize that in a few short years, they will be grown and gone to mess up houses and apartments of their own, I have to fight the urge to add a few more random pieces of clothes to the mess for a while longer.

Somewhat related to this whole idea is another theory of, "picture it already broken" because all things - even us - will someday be gone.  My favorite coffee cup is the example I use a lot.  I know that at some point one of my children (or myself) will knock it on the floor and it will shatter. I know that typically this sort of thing would have upset me, but since adopting the "picture it already broken" philosophy, I have found that many things come and go without my typical distraught reaction because I have already dealt with their loss mentally.  I notice them and treasure them a bit more because, in my mind, they are already gone.  A bit fatalistic in some sense, but it is oddly very soothing and when a favorite dish crashes to the floor, or a beloved childhood book is found in tatters,  I now find myself thinking, "yep, that's how I pictured it" and there is now space in my cupboard and bookshelf for a new favorite item to take up residence.  I feel that even treasured items are meant to be used and loved rather than placed on a shelf somewhere safe.  I have my grandmother's china set that my mom gave to her for a present - we routinely pull these out and use them for dinners in which I would actually like the plates to match or when we have more people to dinner than we have mismatched plates.  I know that these too will slowly meet with unfortunate ends, but they will have been lovingly used in the process.

How this all applies to this chaotic pre-holiday season is this:  I stop and notice the day for what it is - windy, rainy, cold, hectic- and then, rather than allowing the typical frustration and depression to take hold, I smile and see if for it's imperfect, impermanent chaotic beauty - the quiet melancholy of the fall season. For the holidays this year, rather than striving for the great traditional celebration in which time stops in a moment of perfect  completeness, I am going to rejoice in the imperfections, the craziness, the chaos of last minute shopping, the lack of funds, the messes, the pine needles on the floor, the dry turkey, the kid that doesn't like their present, and even the turning of the year into the dark days of January because, all too soon, this too will pass and the world will roll around to spring again.

Next Year's Garden

I have received a request to do a blog about garden planning from a friend of mine that recently moved entirely too far away to a farm of their very own.  So, for you new homesteaders in Ohio…this one is all yours.

This time of year is the point at which I finally stand up straight from my permanent "weeding" position and take a deep sign of relief.  It's over! I've survived another growing season and maybe, just maybe, I have put up enough tomato sauce, peaches, pears, potatoes, apple sauce, dried beans, frozen peas, herbs and spices to make it through the winter….maybe.

After that one second of relaxation it dawns on me that I have to start planning for next year's garden.

Unlike a lot of gardeners and farmers, I don't do a lot of clean up before winter rears her cold head.  I like to let the leaves sit where they will, I like to let the dried foliage of crops sit where it landed after I was through rifling through it, and I leave the newspaper compost that was dug up with the potatoes lie where it is all through the winter.  It all helps to insulate the ground a little and continues to break down into compost throughout the winter.  No sense in stripping it off only to expose the bare ground underneath.

The one thing I do pull out are weeds.  I especially like to pull out the creeping malva plants that grow rapidly in cooler temperatures.  They have a wicked tap root that goes down sometimes several feet and they seed out merrily in almost every season.  Not only that, but our pigs absolutely love them.  Did a little research on this nasty little weed and, come to find out, it is entirely edible and good for you.  The leaves and seeds have a nutty flavor, but tend to have an unusual texture to them.  The roots were used medicinally by Native Americans and can still be found in some places as 'marshmallow root'.  So, in other words, sometimes even the weeds are a good thing.


But aside from pulling a few weeds periodically and making my pigs happy, there is not a lot of garden work that needs to be done….except next year's planning.

In terms of planning, the basic idea is to make a crude drawing of your garden spaces, mark what you planted where this last year and then change it all around so that the same crop is not grown in the same place two years in a room.  This gets slightly more difficult when you try to avoid putting crops of the same family in an area two years in a row….which is how I ended up with three more garden plots to work into my rotation schedule.  It is important to keep these maps somewhere safe for future reference because after a few years of planting, the crops all start to run together in your head.

Garlic is always the first thing that needs to be planted.  If you are reading this now, at the beginning of November, you have about two weeks to get this into the ground before it freezes too much to plant any this year.  Garlic is, by far, my favorite crop.  Planted in the fall, mulched heavily and then you don't have to do a thing to it until the end of June or the beginning of July. Not to mention that it flavors almost every meal we eat around here.

There are many years where I don't get too serious about planning out the garden until the deep, dark, depressing days of winter when I have seed catalogs and garden maps to keep me from dying of cabin fever, but I do have to at least consider where the Garlic is going to go.  Garlic is a simple crop - it is a bulb so technically it doesn't need a lot of fertilizer, but it does like good organic mater in the soil.  It shouldn't be anywhere too wet or the bulbs will start to rot before they get pulled out of the ground next summer.  It needs a lot of mulching with straw (4-6 inches of it) after being planted 2 inches deep, but that essentially is all there is to garlic.  I like to plant it in an area where there was a high intensity crop the year before - beans, corn, etc just because it requires so little soil manipulation, it gives the ground a chance to rest for a year.

Peas, collards, lettuce, spinach, onions, and leeks - those are the next crops to consider because they will need to go in early.  Generally, the peas in my garden get moved around from one fence to another on alternating years.  That way I don't have to put up a trellis and their season is typically finished about the time some of the other crops are taking off.  You can grow and amazing amount of lettuce and leafy greens in a very small space, but the trick is to leave enough space (and to remember) to do sequential plantings.  You won't be able to eat or save 30 heads of lettuce in one week, so you plant 5 and then the following week plant another 5, and so on until the summer heats up.  Most of the time, but the end of June it is tough to get a leafy green to germinate and grow well unless you have a shaded spot with ample watering.

Water is another thing to consider.  My main garden sits at the bottom of a hill so it receives a lot of the rain run off to keep it moist.  I tend to be one of those gardeners that doesn't water unless absolutely necessary.  There have been times these last two summers when I was convinced that my crops were likely going to curl up and blow away, but what I have been doing is slowly selecting for the crops that best handle the drought-like environment that Iowa seems to be experiencing lately.  I have a feeling that this is only likely to get worse.  So, yes, I neglect my crops on purpose when it comes to water, but I do try to put those crops that need more moisture in a location (such as at the bottom of the hill) where they at least stand a chance.   The seeds from those that do well in these dry, climate crises situations will likely continue to do well in the years ahead.

The only crops that I don't move around much is my herb garden because many of those are perennials or self seeding annuals.  I just have to make their environment habitable and provide a little good compost once in a while so they can grow most effectively without depleting the soil too much….although a lot of perennials are very hardy and actually like to be neglected.  The one that I have found to like a change of scenery is Dill.  It seems to grow better if it gets a new plot of ground, and will often venture off on its own to find one if necessary.  I have found dill growing all over my farm and, unless it is truly in the way, I tend to leave it where it is happiest and just try to remember where that is when it comes time to make pickles.  Not to mention the fact that Tiger swallow tail caterpillars love dill, so I leave it for them to enjoy as well.

Strawberries are a crop that also likes to migrate, believe it or not.  When we first bought the farm ten years ago, I found four strawberry plants under the rhubarb bushes and transplanted them to the corner of the garden where I thought they would be happy.  The keep wandering off.  Strawberries don't like weeds and they don't like compressed soil so they keep marching their little runners into the areas of my garden that are tilled up periodically and more free of weeds.  I really can't blame them.  So, I have started tilling up part of my strawberry patch yearly.  I move some of the bigger plants out of the way, till up a section and then replant the plants.  This seems to be keeping them a little happier.  I have, however noted that a few strawberry plants have showed up in completely different garden plots - one of which was my flower garden where it produced the largest and tastiest strawberries yet.  I call this my rouge plot and didn't tell my kids about it for two years because I would snack on the strawberries while working in the flower gardens.

When a perennial plant, herb, or flower takes up residence somewhere other than where I put it, I try not to take offense and instead I leave them there and watch what happens.  Some plants just prefer different light or soil and I figure they probably know best what works for them.

As to the main crops - corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash, onions - the thing to remember with these guys is to avoid planting families of crops in the same area.  This means not planting potatoes where tomatoes were the year before if possible.  Beans are great almost anywhere because they help to fix nitrogen in the soil.  Tomatoes and peppers need lots of heat, so don't plant them where the shade produced by tall growing corn stalks to going to limit their sunlight at all.  Onions like it cooler, so they are a good one to plant in the shade of another plant that will eventually cool them off in the hot afternoons.  I used to own an organic gardening book that had the best list of what crop should follow another in one location, or what crop to plant next to another crop for the best results, but unfortunately my sister's dog ate the book, and I found I didn't refer to it as much as I probably should have anyway because most of my garden planning and crop rotation comes from experience that I have picked up in the last ten years of working this soil.  I know just how knobby my potatoes will be if I plant them in one location and then we get a little too much rain….I know just how much my corn is likely to get blown over if I plant it in the more exposed area of wind….I know where to plant lettuce so that when it seeds out it will start growing in a plot that I want it next year.

Gardening is 20% knowledge, 30% trial and error, and 50% just dumb luck.  You can have the nicest looking field of corn only to have the whole thing blow over in a high wind situation.  You can have the most heavily producing tomato plants get decimated by tomato horn worms almost overnight.  You can have great potatoes that seemingly disappear underground because of blight.  Farming and gardening can be the most exhilarating or the most demoralizing thing in the world.

Which is why, at this time of year, I heave a big sigh, I think about the crops that went well, I lay some basic plans for the future, and then I cook up some of the best sweet potato fries and make some black bean dip, find a good book, and wait for the snow to fly.