Grandmother’s Council

This is a little posting devoted to helping raise funds to travel to the Grandmother’s Council in Alaska this May! Jan helped me set up this Paypal account. If you feel inspired to help fund this journey, I hope that you send me an email as well so that I can send you a gift! natalieb37@yahoo.com

Among the Aspens

I took a spontaneous adventure to Flagstaff, AZ this weekend to attend a plastering workshop with Bill and Athena Steen. Through a series of unexpected events, I found myself sleeping in my truck under the stars on Pine Mountain where Andrew and Celia Frost have been building their straw bale house. Besides being incredibly wonderful people, Andrew and Celia were classmates of mine at the University of Evansville – a very small liberal arts university in Evansville, IN. We didn’t know each other well then, and I am amazed at how life spirals and brings things back to you that you didn’t imagine. Highlights include being rained out of my truck by a monsoon-like lightening storm on top of the mountain my first night – I went and slept on the floor of the house, meeting three bad-ass women from Texas and staying with them the second night at the Nature Conservancy Hart Prairie Preserve among the aspens, elk and ponderosa pine, having nachos and avocado margaritas with the Frosts, their friends and the Steens, and getting a chance to really do some plastering. I am enamored with this work and want to do a lot more! Also – the Steens are great teachers and very warm people. After a ten hour drive home, I am spending this Monday resting a bit and thinking about all that I learned. Life is good.

Nature Conservancy Hart Prairie Preserve

Original Homestead at Hart Prairie - I stayed here with the Texans

Old stuff hangs on the walls

Porch of the lodge - delicious coffee was drunk here

Yarrow lives all over this mountain

Useful stuff

Nice bird perch

Ethereal Aspen

Andrew and Celia's family home - straw bale

Bill demonstrates fine plaster techniques

Clay slipping the bare bales

Everyone gets in there

Base plaster nearly complete

View from the porch - check out my lovely work truck hauling earth

Double rainbow over Chevron on my way back to California

What is Good Food?

Good apricots?

These are the drops

They came from this tree behind the kitchen

Beautiful drops

They are the most golden and juicy

Fruit alchemy - drops become Apricot, Orange, Lavender Jam

On our tall apricot tree, the best fruit comes from the drops that the birds nibble and knock to the ground for us to collect. We have been doing a lot of preserving this summer and I have come to realize the preciousness of the fruit given to us by our trees. The drops happen to be the sweetest, ripest, best fruit on the tree. I collected all of them throughout the day in a large bowl, checking them to make sure they were not on the ground for too long – if they were you could sense a slight fermenting smell. Then I cleaned them all and cut off the mangled spots – which went to our chickens. After a bit of fruit alchemy, we had a batch of Quail Springs Apricot, Orange, Lavender Jam. Because of the perfect sweetness of the fruit we didn’t need to add sugar . . . just pure fruit and herbs.

A Sense of Sacred

I have not posted in awhile. Instead, I have been taking in the land and deepening my relationships with the things that are present here. There is a kind of quiet and peace that grows strong when one has space to live simply, to return to an awareness of place. I am so thankful for this beautiful land and all of the people who pass through, for those who stay, and for the many animals and plants that give us so much. The cycles of life have been very full this spring, with birth, and this week – with death. One of our baby goats, the oldest and strongest, passed away from eating a kind of toxic plant that lives on the land – perhaps lupine or larkspur. Goats are very smart and intuitive creatures and when they graze on the land they know which plants to eat and which not to. Occasionally a young goat will not be able to discern this instinctively the way the others can. For three days Gracie suffered and we did not know the cause – as the other goats were all strong. We cared for her and tended to her day and night, the way you would a person that was sick and that you love. We did all we could and when we discovered that her excruciating pain would be drawn out in a long death, it was recommended to us by a friend who has been a goat midwife/herder for years that the most compassionate thing we could do to help her would be to drown her and end her suffering. Five of us went to the pond together to honor her and Jan walked her into the water and held her there until she passed. A song was sung as she moved on and we all thanked her and grieved for her on the bank of the pond. A grave was dug beneath a willow tree, and we all gave thanks for her life and sent her into the earth with offerings of flowers and tears. And as difficult as it is to process, I am grateful to have been so present for the entire cycle of a life, from her birth and through the transformation of death. Many questions were answered and many more arise, but I have learned so much about the land, about grief and sacrifice, and felt more strongly the presence of those mysteries that are beyond our understanding.

Here are some pictures of a beautiful sunset we witnessed a few weeks ago. We all rushed outside to admire it together.

Baby Goats

This week our two pregnant goats gave birth. I was there for both of them, one on Wednesday and one on Friday. First was Fennel, who gave birth to three young goats, two girls and a boy.  Fava gave birth to two babies, one boy and one girl. The first birth was very smooth and the babies came out easily with almost no sounds from Fennel. Fava had a harder time with her first baby, and after a  minute of huge contractions where the baby was coming out a bit and then going back in, Lyn reached out and grabbed the little legs to help deliver the boy. Fava bellowed quite a bit, but Lyn knew from a pregnancy the year before that you need to help the mother if she is having trouble – otherwise you could have a stillbirth. All babies are jumping around today and seem to have lots of energy from their mother’s milk. By next week they should have names – very exciting!

Fennel's third baby arrives

Cleaning the newborns

Two girls and one boy

Respectfully congratulating Fennel!

Fava's first baby

Yawning after all that work

With two babies

We love the goats

Wildflowers

You cannot walk around Quail Springs right now without coming upon miles and miles of wildflowers. I just came back from a long hike on the land and saw so many beautiful specimens!

Yellow blanket

These are everywhere

Owl's Clover

Indian paintbrush

Pale yellow daisy-like flowers

A closer look

Even closer

These purples grow under the pinons

A kind of buttercup

Scrub oaks line the hills

Little purple flowers

Spring Gold

A nightshade, possibly Horsenettle

Scrub oak with flowers

Yellow brick road

More new purple faces

More yellow patches

But it still is the desert

Blue Dick flower

Flowers and peaks

Yellow with white fluffs

Canyon view

Goat Walks

My favorite way to see the land this past week has been to take the goats on a walk. It’s like stepping back in time a bit and becoming a shepherdess. These goats are loving and remarkably well behaved. They follow you wherever you lead them and treat you like a member of their herd. This way you can guide them to spots with lots of nice wild fodder. They are particularly fond of Yerba Santa, fiddlenecks, scrub oak, manzanita, dandelions and wild mustard. The goat dogs, King and Bowser, follow along and keep an eye on the herd. It is absolutely as idyllic and peaceful as it looks.

Feasting on fiddlenecks

Foraging willow shoots

King and Bowser bring up the rear

The herd is together

I love these dogs

Goats and blue sky

Bowser and the canyon

Garden and Livestock

We have spent a good bit of time around the garden and with the animals this week. Some highlights for me – tending the food forest, milking both goats by myself, planting fruit trees and visioning the medicinal herb garden that we will be creating. Other things we did – we locked all the chickens and turkeys in the covered coop and had to capture them one by one. Poultry can get mites, and we turned each bird on it’s back and dusted it’s vent area with diatomacious earth. We will be doing this once a week ideally until the mites are gone. Then we locked the birds into their outside area and went about cleaning their coop. We shoveled out all of the existing straw, filled with lots of chicken poop, feathers and other random bits, and shoveled it into a huge compost pile. Then we dusted the earth with more diatomacious earth and sprinkled fresh straw bedding all around the coop. The chickens were very happy and started laying eggs immediately when we let them in. Amy took the opportunity to fix the door on the egg collector and we now have much easier access to this area.

We also have made several cheeses this week – queso fresco, chevre & paneer. The baby chicks got some tending from us this week – we have been checking on them in their brooder, making sure they have everything they need. We seeded some parsnips and carrots in the garden, and also did a lot of lettuce transplanting.

Also, it snowed this week – twice. I woke up in the morning to the sound of snow flakes on my tent and looked outside to see a magical and light snowfall. It didn’t stay on the ground, but I caught a picture of the white dust as it looked on the higher peaks around the canyon.

The birds check our their new clean coop

Even this guy got his backside dusted - imagine picking him up! Brenton did it, of course

The ladies got right to laying

Amy reimagines the door to this egg collector

The final product

View of the barn through the food forest

Beautiful fruit tree with parsley planted around base

Happy Granny Smith

Apple blossoms

Are Beautiful

Medicinal Horehound as mulch - it grows gigantic here, and everywhere

I found this guy hiding in the grass

Baby Artichokes - We planted a bed of these last week

Orach

Green and Purple Bounty

Garlic thriving

Statice

Growing up

One week old

Does this look like the desert?

Before it melted. Lovely snow on the peaks.

Yesterday we saw a green egg in the bird's nest

Baby Birds

Since last Wednesday, the common kitchen has been home to 100 newborn baby chickens. They arrived one week ago in a box – via the post office. Many people order poultry through the mail, and these came from a trusted hatchery in Fresno. Brenton ordered 50 chicks, but due to a misprocessing of the order, twice as many arrived. This was a lot more birds that he had anticipated, and Jan and Brenton worked very hard to make the brooder comfortable enough for this large number – they have warmth, plenty of good food, water and clean bedding. Literally the chicks arrived one day after they were born and they had not yet had their first meal. Baby chicks are born with a part of the yolk still in their abdomen and they can live off of this without eating anything else for three days, which is why it is okay for them to not consume anything in their first 24 hours. Here are some pictures of their arrival . . .

We reach into the box to help give them their first drink of water

100 baby chicks

Brenton teaches the baby chicks to take their first drink of water

In the brooder - set-up in the kitchen; not the same brooder we've been building with earth

Gita and Jan hold a chick

Amy found this home for baby birds woven into the brassica cover crop field today

After One Week

I could write three or four posts about this week. There were many new things that were shared with us and many of them were very full experiences that I cannot explain fully in this format. When I look back on this week, I am thankful for the mentoring that we are being given. Some mentoring happens very quietly and the student is guided to figure out things for themselves and feels very confused for awhile but begins to catch on and take ownership of their knowledge. This is certainly happening here in more subtle ways relating to our integration in the community and in other ways I am not yet aware of. However, I am very thankful for the hands-on teaching that Jan and Brenton have offered us this past week. When we learn something together or do something for the first time, we really talk about it and about all the steps and reasons for what we are doing. Lots of questions are asked and answered. This is a very generous way of mentoring and one that is very affective for me at this time. There may be a lot of information, but we learn and chat while doing and this makes our work more ingrained in our bodies and minds.

The most amazing thing that happened this week was witnessing the butchering of two roosters and a turkey hen. I have been a vegetarian for 12 years, but I didn’t want to miss this process and I am glad that I was present. Brenton raises the birds and they are very well cared for, healthy and have lots of space to roam and forage. When the birds are put down, it is a very respectful, clean and beautiful process. He held each bird in his arms to calm them and sang them a song. And also he honored the birds by thanking each one aloud for all that it has given. The song continued for awhile as he finally put the bird into the killing cone, massaged it a bit and then slit it’s throat.

Other highlights – we learned to make chevre from the raw goat milk and seasoned it with fresh herbs, garlic and salt. We cleared out the middle of an overgrown pond that is shaped in a heart, and now you can see it’s shape. We are bringing up the clay/straw walls of the chicken brooder pretty fast, and it will be ready for the 5o baby birds that will arrive on Wednesday. Part of our work on the brooder this week was done with some amazing students from a high school in Victorville who are particularly interested in sustainability issues. I had a lot of fun working and chatting with Chad and Carlton and was inspired by their worldview – one that is not as common to see in people their age today.

We are coming along with goat milking and two days ago I was able to milk out one the goats completely – meaning I got all of the milk out of her udder without having to switch with someone else or have Jan finish. And lastly, my most hilarious moment this week – learning how to drive a tractor!

Putting up the walls to the brooder

The brooder continues with Brenton overseeing

Fresh harvested mint being cleaned and processed for drying

Clearing the pond with Amy and Gita

Wading in to get out the cattails and vigorous mint

Getting it all out

A better pond

Brenton thanking this beautiful turkey hen

Moments after death

Scalding bath before defeathering

Blood draining in the killing cone

This egg was still inside

the goats

Our chevre

Inside our chevre pot, ready for hanging

Putting the chevre in the cheesecloth

Hanging the cheese

Our giant compost pile

We covered our pile to retain moisture; the climate is very dry here

Our first week - ideas from Jan

Driving the tractor!!

I look very serious driving the tractor

the brooder's walls are coming along

It snowed on the mountain in the distance yesterday