Snow Day

Up before 5:00 am, KeroSun silently heating our place on less than 2 quarts of kerosene in the last 12 hours. That’s fairly efficient for a cabin that’s 40 degrees warmer than outside, especially considering that our windows are drafty and probably establish the baseline for inefficiency.

The snow that fell overnight makes the outdoors look like a beautiful postcard. I suppose it’s nature’s way of Photoshopping the outdoors into a surreal scene. I just want to look out the front door and marvel at the sight. Mine is decidedly a minority opinion, the community has utterly had it with winter-like weather in what’s nominally springtime. But the beginning of spring is purely an astronomical event here, the snow isn’t interested in the calendar. 

It’s amusing to ask the neighbors when to plant. Bob says to plant when you can work the ground, which at this rate ought to be around August. Bill said that he planted after his mom’s birthday, May 24. The ladies at the library were firmly of the opinion that one should wait until after the first full moon in June; then plant the below ground crops in the waxing moon. They said to be prepared to cover your plants when there’s a hard freeze – usually the night after you finish planting. 

I’ll continue to collect advice and take the square root of it.

Yesterday was the much-anticipated Poultry Day at Ward’s Lumber. I expected to see chickens scratching about the store, probably the little peepers in a big washtub under a heat lamp. Instead there was one frozen dressed chicken next to the signup sheet, 'dressed' being an odd term for a bird that was denuded and gutted. We all sat facing a projector screen, so this was going to be a PowerPoint presentation. Jay Ward spoke first, definitely a good guy in my opinion. He advocated sustainable farming, offering to let people borrow his Pollan and Salatin books. He also had several documentaries on agriculture and the food business to loan out, such as King Corn. Incidentally, the producer of that documentary, Aaron Woolf,  is running for Congress here. There’s a lot of sustainability awareness here, far more than I’m used to.

Jay introduced Mike, who drove up from Pennsylvania. It was wonderful to hear that there's a growing market for sustainable agricultural products. Some consumers are making deliberative food choices instead of thoughtlessly buying whatever’s cheap or happens to taste good. It was depressing to hear firsthand from a poultry farmer that there are no economics in raising pastured poultry. We learned that pastured poultry bears absolutely no resemblance to the ‘free range’ poultry, which is marketed as healthy and humane. Free range is just a marketing gimmick that sounds good but still permits farmers to cruelly pack their birds in huge CAFOs with only a little door leading to a green patch of pasture – that they never venture into. Pastured chickens are truly free range, they supposedly taste better and are, predictably, far more nutritious.

Mike used his own records to show that farmers are woefully under-compensated for their efforts. I suppose we already knew that but it’s sad to hear about it firsthand. No one wants to pay a fair wage for reduced-cruelty and nutritious farm products. Until society can get over that - or we reach an unsustainable tipping point - we’re going to be stuck with the current system that ‘ain’t normal’, to quote Salatin.

The presentation was intended for growers, not spectators like us. Mike went in depth about feed and processing, and we weren’t interested in ‘processing’. We left after the de rigeor filibustering-type question from an attendee who had a lot to say after being quiet for two hours. 

When we got home I made a Tuscan bean and kale soup (which, come to think of it, fairly cried out for diced chicken). We ate it with a Kalamata olive bread baked by our local grocer, Arly. Then we prepared for our big overnight snowfall.