Mixed Feelings on a Turkey Harvest

Warning: this post contains images and text pertaining to animal slaughter that some may find disturbing.  They're buried down towards the bottom of this long post.  So if you don't want to see them, skip this one.

Christmas morning was cold, and quiet.  That was to be expected.  It was also perfectly still; no wind.  This I counted fortunate, since it fell to me to cut off the turkey's food supply on my morning round of chores.  I hated doing it, knowing she'd be suffering from hunger for the next 24 hours.  I thawed and rinsed her frozen waterer with a kettle of just-boiled water from indoors, then came back with a pot of hot water to fill it up again.  This had been the routine since winter weather set in and turned the poultry's water to blocks of ice each night.  She had shelter from wind in the mobile pen, but that small grace on her last day made it just a little easier to accept what had to be done.

I've had very mixed feelings about keeping this Bourbon Red turkey.  We got her as a handicapped poult from my farming friend in June.  She was blind in one eye, and had been picked on by the other poults to the point that it was obvious that the others would kill her if she weren't removed.  So she came to us, small enough to perch nervously on my wrist.  We didn't know her sex back then, and frankly hoped she'd be a tom so that she'd grow big.  My feelings for her were an odd mixture of concern for her well being, excitement over a new species, responsibility for her care, and the clinical approach that I use towards most livestock.  We intended this bird for consumption; she was not a pet.  So I held my emotions in check.  I do the same with our laying hens, but I don't have to with the honey bees.  I'll probably never have to take the step of killing our bees.  They live or die largely on their own, beyond intimate supervision.  Thus I can allow myself a variety of pure affection for them, at least to the extent possible for an undifferentiated seething mass of insects who can inflict pain. For whatever reason, the combination of diligent care and emotional detachment towards livestock comes easily to me.  I don't know why, but I'm grateful for it.

But there was something else going on in my emotional relationship with this turkey.  I felt badly for her in a way that I don't for the laying hens.  The turkey was forced into a solitary existence, never knowing the company of other turkeys.  This, I think, deprived her of something important, and definitely affected some of her behaviors.  She never learned to eat much other than what I put in her feeder.  Had she enjoyed the company of other turkeys, she would have learned by observation and imitation that foraging was a worthwhile endeavor.  I thought that the company of laying hens would be better for her than no company at all, but that turned out not to be the case.  The hens dominated her mercilessly when she was around more than one of them at a time.  And laying hens can be mean.  So my attempts to relieve her solitude failed.  There was nothing I could do to make her life better.  She had the basics: enough room, fresh air, natural light, clean food and water each day.  But beyond that, the best I could do for her was to keep her from being physically picked on by other birds.  She was always a flighty, easily spooked bird, probably owing to her lack of vision on one side.  That meant that she didn't take to any of my attempts to interact with her either.  It didn't seem like much of a life for her, and that gnawed at me steadily through the summer and fall.  When winter added the challenge of cold weather, it only made me feel worse.  I don't have a problem with animals dying; everything that lives also dies.  I don't even have a problem with being the agent of that death.  What I feel is my own responsibility is to ensure that the creatures in my care have good lives, with the ability to express the full range of their natural behaviors and as little suffering as possible, until they meet their end.  For our turkey, I felt that there was no way for me to give her that good life.

I recognize that our experience with raising our first turkey is not typical.  We would never have chosen to get just one bird, and the fact of her blind eye was unusual as well.  Also, I put in a disproportionate amount of work for a very small yield.  With more birds, and some of them being toms, that work would have yielded far more.  Still, raising a turkey this year was a learning experience.  Among the learning experiences I've been through in pursuit of homesteading, this was certainly one of the harder ones, emotionally speaking.

Anyway, today was slaughter day, and we aimed to get the job done early.  Even if I hadn't wanted to spare the turkey further discomfort, there's also a snow storm on the way.  My preparations were in place: mulch in the wheelbarrow parked beneath the slip knotted cords I'd attached to the framework for our solar array earlier this fall, knife well sharpened, water in several pots heating on the stove, outdoor work space arranged on the saw horses, a fully charged battery in the drill used with our homemade plucker, latex gloves, a cutting board, separate containers to receive the organs and the guts, and a cooler full of ice to receive the bird when when she was all finished.  For our own preparations, we watched this video of Joel Salatin demonstrating the evisceration of a chicken a few times.

I could only hope that the differences between chicken and turkey evisceration were minor.

At the moment of truth we said thank you and apologized for not being able to give her a better life.  My husband held the wings, and I cut the jugulars.  Her head was warm in my hand as I exposed her neck, and she bled rather more than I expected based on what I'd seen when slaughtering chickens.  Her wings flapped strongly, or tried to, as she died.  My husband held on tightly, impressed by her strength.  In a few moments, it was over.  Once she was dead, the job became nothing but the challenge of a skill I was still trying to master.  I used a thermometer to make sure we had the scalding water at just the right temperature.  The feathers came out so readily after that that we decided not to use the plucker.  It was easy to pluck her by hand, all except the largest wing and tail feathers, which the plucker wouldn't have been able to handle anyway.  After plucking, the evisceration went fairly easily too, thanks to that video. While she wasn't a big bird, the thick layer of fat around her gizzard told me that she'd been plenty well fed, with reserves to fall back on for those final 24 hours.  We had her chilling in a cooler full of ice water less than an hour after we started setting up.

After six months of work and feeding, our ready-for-table heritage breed turkey hen weighs merely eight and a half pounds.  There's no way to make that yield sensible from a strict accounting, measuring either by money, resource use, or labor, even having gotten the poult for free.  All I can do is chalk this up to a learning experience.  I take satisfaction in knowing we were able to keep a disabled animal alive, and in my improving skill at slaughtering.  If we were to raise turkeys again, given our inability to free range birds, I'd think long and hard before choosing a heritage breed.

So that's the story of our first meat bird ever.  We'll have her for New Year's dinner, and then I'll make stock from her bones. We haven't quite decided how to cook her, but I'm sure it will be a special meal.

Hobbled

I've been laid low the last several days.  When the days were blazing hot last week, I went about my garden chores wearing my beat up garden shoes without socks.  I got an innocuous looking rash on the base of my toes which looked like it might be athlete's foot.  I didn't yet realize that it was an abrasion, and so treated it generally, just washing it, putting some salve on it, and keeping it well dry and aired.  Turns out, this was a bad move.

By Friday night it was looking not so great, and worse still on Saturday.  Sunday morning I was running a fever and I could barely walk on my foot.  It was clearly an infection, with my fourth toe swelled up and angry looking.  I did what little I could, keeping my foot on a heating pad, taking a variety of immune-supporting herbal supplements, and mostly letting my fever take its course.  It got above 101 F.  The infection had no pinpoint location, everything was swollen and ugly pink or red.  Had there been anything to lance, I would have done it myself.  But this was something beyond my abilities.  Monday morning early I took myself to a walk-in clinic, using a cane and wearing a slipper.  The doctor took one look at the infected foot and put me on antibiotics.  As an afterthought, he asked if I wanted anything for pain.  I thought it wasn't a bad suggestion, even though I hadn't thought to ask.  The pain had been increasing, and it was to get worse still before things started to turn around.  I'm glad I took his offer.  Yesterday any amount of standing or walking was painful and difficult.  At times I scooted to the bathroom on my butt.  Yay for wooden floors!

Things have turned around now.  It doesn't look a great deal better, but the redness is receding slightly.  I can tell because the doctor marked the edge of the infection with a sharpie marker.  The pain and swelling have reduced enough to let me walk on that foot now, even if I favor it with a pronounced limp.  It was a relief to be able to tend to the poultry this morning, knowing I could move the pens, if slowly and carefully, and that I could clean their waterers and give them fresh water rather than obliging them to make do with what remained from the day before.

This has all given me much food for thought, which is good because I've done a whole lot of sitting around the last few days.  There's no doubt in my mind that without antibiotics this would have been a very serious situation.  Maybe with the herbal supplements and many hot foot baths my body would have fought off the infection.  Maybe.  But I can just as easily believe that I might have ended up with amputated toes or a whole foot lost.  I might even have ended up dead.  In earlier times, the chances for one of the more extreme outcomes would have been very high indeed.

I'm not into illness.  I'm sort of the stoic type.  But that doesn't mean I was toughing it out and ignoring something that obviously should have been attended to.  It just didn't look remotely serious when it first appeared - a little abrasion because I took my socks off and did routine garden work.  Big deal!  Well, it turned out to be a very big deal.  This is chastening on several levels.

I'm chastened because even though I rarely make use of our health insurance, it's there, and I didn't worry about paying for my treatment beyond finding an approved doctor under my plan.  I know not everyone enjoys that luxury.  I'm chastened because I now have a better appreciation for what it's like not to be able to move easily even around one's own home.  I know how quickly a kitchen can disintegrate into a smelly mess when dishes can't be done and neither the compost nor trash get taken out.  (My husband's traveling for work this week.)  I've a new appreciation for leftovers and more sympathy for those who find it very difficult or impossible to cook due to physical limitations.  I had to leave the garden to fend for itself.  Fortunately we've at least gotten rain in the last few days, but I could have lost an awfully big investment of my time, effort and money simply because I couldn't get out there for three days.  If I'd been incapacitated and alone last week, lots of stuff would have died in the heat.  Our garden isn't our livelihood, and I know its loss would have been minor in the economic scheme of things these days.  But I can see how an infection like mine could cost other people, other families, a great deal more than a backyard garden.

Anyway, I'm on the mend by the looks of things, and I've got a follow up appointment to confirm my impressions.  Aren't you glad I spared you a header picture?

Harvest Meal: Rabbit Stew

Our garden rabbit made a nice stew.  We used a few homemade ingredients to prepare it, though only one of them (other than the rabbit) came from the garden.

Riffing on a recipe from the The River Cottage Meat Book, I started by browning some of my homemade smoked lardo in olive oil, and put that in a slow cooker.  Then the jointed rabbit was browned on all sides in the leftover fat, and added to the slow cooker. Next, fat slices of onion were browned in the fat and put in the slow cooker.  To all that were added big chunks of peeled carrot, fennel, some bay leaves, kosher salt, white pepper, a bit of honey, thyme from our garden, and two bottles of my husband's hard cider (from our own apples) that had been aging in our cellar for two years.  I added just enough water to cover the ingredients.  The rabbit that frisked and nibbled in our garden around 8 am was in our cook pot before 9:30 am.  The cats got the liver and kidneys.

Since it was so hot on Sunday, I got an extension cord and put the slow cooker on the porch.  Because of my concerns about tularemia, I let the stew cook on low heat for a good portion of the day.  I don't know that this disease is even a concern in my area, and there were no spots on the liver, but it didn't seem problematic to cook the meat thoroughly.  (We also wore latex gloves - a recommended precaution - when butchering the rabbit.)

When the stew was cooked, I strained off the liquid, reduced it in a skillet, finished it with some cream, and added the meat and veg back in to warm again.  The reduced sauce brought everything together nicely.  If we'd had potatoes, I would have served it with mashed spuds.  Instead we had it over pasta (parboiled, of course - handy on such a hot day) with a salad of spinach, fennel, and marinated strawberries.  The meaty stew went surprisingly far as a topping for pasta.  I think the quantity of vegetables in the stew could easily have been doubled and it wouldn't have felt skimpy on the meat.  We found it quite good.

I was pleased to note that I had nary a moral pang about killing and eating this rabbit.  I know it ate well, since it was eating from my garden on a regular basis.  I also know I gave it plenty of chances to go away.  The rabbits around us are utterly brazen.  They laugh at the fencing I've used to protect the garden in past years.  They are nonchalant about being shooed or chased away.  They barely stay six feet ahead of me when I try to run them out of the yard.  I can see this working out as a viable alternative to the hassle and effort of raising rabbits for meat.  Instead, we can just shoot the wild ones, and protect our garden in the process.  There is, after all, neither a limit nor a season to rabbits, though I expect they'd be best in the fall.  My husband knows my rule - we don't kill it unless we're prepared to dress it, butcher it and eat it.  (I might make an exception for crows though; they're giving me a very hard time with my popcorn plants this year.)

I don't have to figure that there are more rabbits where this one came from.  I know it for a fact.  Which is good, because it means we'll probably be able to try out the awesome sounding grilled rabbit that Wendy mentioned in the comment section of the previous post.  Other cookbooks I own list a few other rabbit recipes I'd like to try out, including curried rabbit and a ragu of rabbit over pappardelle.  Maybe wild rabbit will become a fixture of our dinner table.  There's an indescribable satisfaction in eating a varmint that tried (to an extent successfully) to eat my garden. May this be the first of many.

On Meal Planning with a Garden

I've been thinking lately about the ways that producing our own food has changed our eating and cooking habits. Although fresh foods are somewhat scarce for us right now, in the depths of winter, in some ways I have more freedom to choose what I feel like cooking. When the garden has passed its peak output for the year, and much of what it produced has either been eaten or preserved, the pressure eases off. Oh, there are still things out there to harvest; parsnips and a few hardy plants in the cold frame. But all these things can hang out for a while. They don't present themselves with the same urgency as summer crops, which will rot, bolt, turn tough or bitter, get eaten by varmints, or simply overwhelm through sheer numbers if not harvested promptly.

What arrives in fall and stays through early spring is a measure of free choice in what I cook and what we eat. Sure, there are the harvested pumpkins, and squash, and potatoes to use up, but they too give me more latitude than summer's bounty. All summer long and into early fall I cook and preserve food in a race to keep up with what's coming in. That comes about from - and requires - a change in the way I think about cooking, and this was no small thing for me.

See, I trained as a chef. After mastering the fundamentals, we were taught to approach cooking as a creative challenge and as an expression of "personality." It was about sexing up a chicken breast to make it seem less trite, or assembling flavors in novel ways to tickle a jaded palate. We weren't taught to think about seasonality or regionality very much, unless it was something that could be translated into marketing text on a menu. And yes, we were very much taught to look at menus as marketing tools. Back then, the concept of local food was nowhere near the surface of national consciousness; it had only a small novelty value to a few menu-scrutinizing gourmands. Food miles never entered the discussion of my culinary training - not once.

That way of thinking took hold strongly in me. I've lived in areas where high quality ingredients were available to me at any time, irrespective of food miles or season. For years just about any exotic ingredient you could imagine was at my fingertips, ready tools at the service of my artistic vision in the kitchen. When thinking about meal preparation, it was routine for me to thumb idly through a cookbook, looking for a recipe that caught my fancy. Or I might simply sit back and ask myself what I felt like eating that night, and then proceed to acquire the necessary ingredients from the store. This was a deeply ingrained habit of thought, and it's one that runs counter to the realities of a food garden. This meant that when I gardened back then, I was a dabbler, and the food I produced myself was always adjunct and secondary to the "real" source of food - stores and farmers' markets. If I didn't feel like eating what was ripe in my own garden, I didn't. And I did no preserving in those days. I'm ashamed to say that (while some of it got eaten and some given away) too much of that homegrown food simply went to waste.

When I became more serious about producing my own food and frugality in general, the harvests soon collided with my habits of thought around cooking. It was no longer about what I felt like cooking; wasting home grown food was no longer acceptable. The game had changed, and the challenges were now based in real life and not the creative life of a "culinary artist." It took a while, but I came to consider the garden and my pantry my primary sources of food. Purchased food, from any source, is now secondary. The differences are significant. I now understand the value in single-ingredient-themed cookbooks. When you're getting upwards of 25 eggs per week, or have just harvested 100 pounds of potatoes, cookbooks devoted entirely to egg or potato dishes seem like a really good idea. I used to find such cookbooks boring. Not any more.

Now meal preparation begins with an assessment of what needs using up, whatever the season. That's not to say my cooking is a constant state of triage in which I find ways to salvage food that's beginning to go off. No, I'm talking about staying ahead of the curve and eating or storing foods at their peak. I still have plenty of range for creative expression in my cooking. But now I start with the given of the foods we have, and I take pleasure in finding interesting things to do with these high-quality building blocks. I still use cookbooks, but I'm much more likely than previously to substitute ingredients based on what we have.

Even in winter, the food put up in canning jars, the freezer, or simply hanging out in cool storage needs to be tracked and eaten. Those foods have a shelf life like any other (natural) food. Even if they aren't about to go off, I need to know what I have on hand in order to plan the next year's garden crops and how they will be eaten or preserved. We got almost no tomatoes in 2009, so this year I'll try to put up two years' worth of sauce, just in case we get hit with blight again. On the other hand, we made enough jam to last us a couple of years. So we'll use up the fruit we produce in other ways.

Another difference is that for most of the year we eat fresher, more nutritionally dense food, and we eat in the seasonal sequence of produce gluts. During the winter, we eat food that was processed (by me, at home) at optimal nutrition and freshness. I'm working on making fresh foods more available in the cold months through season extension with cold frames too.

Here are a few ingredient-themed cookbooks I've found useful in helping me cook from both the garden and preserved or stored foods.

Simply in Season
The Compleat Squash
The Bean Bible
The Good Egg
One Potato, Two Potato


If you can recommend any other cookbooks that help use up garden gluts or commonly stored foods, please let me know in the comments.

More Connections, Less Waste

Last year I posted a piece over at the Simple Green Frugal Co-op about the complexity of life on our little homestead. Complexity is not bad, not at all. It's just that I nearly always have to bite my tongue when people talk about "the simple life." Nature is far from simple, and though agriculture isn't necessarily "natural," it moves in the same realm. The human routines of self-sufficiency are rarely more simple than for those who are plugged in to the industrial way of life at every juncture. What people mean when they talk about a "simple life" is really anything but. As we started producing more of our own food, and started adding livestock to our system, the connections between living things just became more and more apparent.

I speculated in that co-op post about what new connections would become apparent as we continued to add different kinds of livestock. It turns out that we haven't even added bees yet, and I already see new connections that are going to happen. We grow our own popcorn. The stalks and husks and cobs from the plants have up till now only been material for composting. Now I learn that dried corn cobs make excellent material to burn in the smoker for the bee hives. It's not as if I would have gone out and paid for stuff to burn in my smoker; there are plenty of free options. It feels good to know however, that from now on at least some of the cobs will be set aside for beekeeping supplies. It will make me happy, when the green corn stands tall in the garden, to look at the plants and see not just food, but useful materials.

Connections happen a lot between animals and plants on our little homestead. But they can happen between plant species too. I put in four blueberry bushes last spring, where we'd cut down a white pine tree. I had expected the tree to have acidified that soil pretty well, but a soil test showed the soil was nowhere near the range that blueberries prefer. We've been dumping our spent tea leaves, and what few citrus rinds we still buy on the blueberry patch. I also brought in several large bags of pine needles from a relative's property to mulch with last fall. I neglected however to save the apple pomace from our fall apple pressing. Apple pomace is highly acidic. So much so that it's not advisable to put it in the garden without first thoroughly composting it. Blueberries are a different case however, especially in a situation where the soil pH needs to be lowered. Usually when we press cider we give the pomace to a farmer with goats who shows up to press with us, for use as feed. Last year the farmer couldn't make it, so the pomace went into my relatives' (the press owners) compost pile. I could have, and should have brought that pomace home for the blueberries. This year I will.

When people describe life as a web, it sounds poetic and a little corny. I don't live in the wilderness; I'm not a new age-y sort; and I don't come from a line of people who have retained a mystical connection with the earth. But I'd have to be blind to do what I do and not see at least a few of these connections. Corn and honeybees. The apple tree and blueberries. These things make me happy.

The $64,000 Question

It's funny how life takes shape, how we end up on paths that we never intended, but which come to feel deeply right to us nevertheless. When I began this blog, it was mostly about figuring out how to pay off the mortgage as quickly as possible, with a vaguely defined notion of financial independence at the end of that road. Any technique that saved money, which could then be put towards an extra principle payment, was worth considering. We started changing our habits, and kept changing them, and bit by bit those changes added up to a pretty radical lifestyle overhaul.

Along the way though, other things began to motivate me. I'd always considered myself an "environmentalist," even when my behaviors weren't particularly worthy of the name. "Green" and frugal go together quite often, so it was easy for that to become more of a priority in my life. And then the whole issue of social justice came in - using our fair share of the world's remaining resources and doing as little damage as possible. Self-sufficient lifestyles have also always had my admiration. My frugal journey became heavily flavored with homesteading elements, such that I now feel justified (albeit a little shy) in calling our suburban residential lot a homestead, or at least a budding homestead.

Then there's the elephant in the living room. I believe that we are headed into a future of increasingly expensive and scarce energy. I believe that more people in my country will have to do more for themselves than we have recently been accustomed to, that many things we now take for granted will become luxuries few can afford. There are plenty of people who discuss these things with more knowledge and eloquence than I can. Read them. But there's a little piece of the puzzle that I might - just might - have a corner on. Not that I've figured it all out, but I think I have a chance of helping to answer an important question.

Our property technically exists in a suburb, even though it doesn't look like what you think of as a typical suburb. For one thing, our house is 130 years old, and in a tiny little neighborhood of similarly aged homes surrounded by much newer development. Our lot is 2/3 of an acre. By comparison, those newer developments consist of larger parcels. Like I said, not a typical suburb. In this part of Pennsylvania, recent zoning codes were written with low-density development in mind. So new construction happened on lots of at least an acre, and often more than that. Our own parcel was established decades ago, and left with less land. The average suburbanite across the US would think our property large, but in our area it's significantly smaller than average.

So here's the question in my mind: I want to know how much food this 2/3 acre residential parcel can produce. We harvested 600 pounds of fruit and vegetables, plus 458 chicken eggs in 2009. Not only has it been a bad year for crops, but we had a backyard flock for only 8 months out of 12. We also had no yields at all from half a dozen perennial species that are planted but not yet in production. I wasn't particularly diligent about succession planting, season extension, or efficient use of the garden space we already have cleared. Nor have we yet used all the available space on our property that could be turned to food production. How much will we harvest in two, five, or ten years as our fruit trees, berries, and grapes begin to produce, as our experience grows, and we make more efficient use of the available space? I'll take a wild guess and say I think 1200 pounds sounds completely achievable to me. As a more ambitious goal, I would aim for a 2000 pound tally or even more. That would be in addition to eggs and, I hope soon, honey. Admittedly, those yields take for granted the good precipitation and high quality soils of our area, as well as the fact that one able-bodied adult makes this food production a very high priority, with occasional help from a second healthy able adult. But I anticipate that my experience is going to be of most interest to those in my area anyway, so these pre-conditions aren't much of an issue.

This question of how much food can be produced from a suburban backyard isn't just a personal lark for me. I'll admit, I'm curious and I will derive great satisfaction each year that we show an increase in our harvest tally. But I believe that the answers I collect over the next few years are going to be very important sooner or later. Those of us looking to a future beyond peak oil know that food production and perhaps more importantly, food distribution, are going to be a huge crisis. We need to begin feeding ourselves more locally, and not just as a trendy lifestyle choice. Locavorism is going to become a given, not an option. If my community doesn't know what's possible on our residential lots, then we will be poorly equipped to make plans for our own needs.

There are small scale farmers doing what they can with parcels of 5, 10, or 20 acres. There are urban farmers maxing out production in tiny spaces. And there are many hobby gardeners with modest vegetable plots. There are some consciously working towards sustainable food security, and others gaining gardening skills without any such goal in mind. But very little of the prime farmland that was converted into suburban sprawl is being used as well as it will one day need to be used. There's also an important difference between urban spaces occupied largely by renters, and the suburbs largely occupied by homeowners - however heavily mortgaged those properties may be. It's not the size of their properties. Homeowners, broadly speaking, are more fixed in their residences than renters, and likely to become only more so. That means there's a better return on investment for the expense and effort of planting perennial food plants such as asparagus, fruit trees, nut trees, and berries, among many others. These plants give yields for years and even decades, but not immediately. If you don't think you'll be in the same place two years from now, only a Johnny Appleseed altruism will motivate you to plant these crops. And those perennial crops are going to be important to us one day.

I've already got one year of data showing harvest quantities on my property. I'm in a position to continue documenting how much food can be produced on a small piece of residential land in zone 6a by able-bodied adults with no background in farming. And that's exactly what I'm going to do as our perennials come "on-line." I'm going to push hard to make those numbers as high as possible while still maintaining good soil fertility in a sustainable system. I believe the answers I come up with will be extremely important for my area.

But my findings won't necessarily be relevant to a property in Mississippi, or the Pacific northwest, or New Zealand. They won't say much about what might be achievable for an elderly person living alone, nor for a family with four children of an age to pitch in. Your area is going to need answers just as much as any other. So why not join me in documenting what is possible in your area, with your abilities, on your property?

Fantasy Fiction and Reality

Sharon posted recently on her craving for retail therapy and other forms of escapism. I can relate. My preferred form of escapism is fantasy fiction, though I long nurtured the not-so-secret conceit of good taste when it comes to literature. I've been re-reading Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, and relishing every line of her austere, majestic storytelling. But strangely enough, I had a couple of wallops straight to the gut while reading these novels.

In A Wizard of Earthsea this bit of dialog from the Archmage to Ged leapt off the page and brought me straight back into my own world:

"And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and as his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do..."

And then just last night as I finished up the last novel in the series, The Other Wind, Le Guin returned to this theme and reminded me yet again of what's been happening in my own life:

"Once when my lord the Archmage was here with me in the Grove, he said to me he had spent his life learning to choose to do what he had no choice but to do."

These brief passages spoke to me powerfully. I'd read these books years ago, and loved them. But if I took any note of this idea back then, it was most likely with a sense of dread that ethics might someday constrain my freedom, my choices, frivolity, my ability to indulge my whims.

The world looks very different to me now. I see that each action of mine has consequences. And I know that most of those consequences affect other people - people far away, and people yet to be born, and other living things as well. I have a sense of myself and my place within the larger pattern of life. Yes, the way I can follow now is narrower and, by the looks of things, becoming ever more so. Yet I don't feel constrained. This is not something imposed on me, and it's not a burden I resent. It is my path. I don't claim that it is either easy or perfect. On the contrary, it is difficult and involves a great deal of struggle, and I'm still learning to choose. But I can say that on this path, my heart is less heavy. I choose, more and more often, to do what I have little choice but to do. I can no longer turn away from that responsibility. While the path before me is narrow, there is a deepening, a sense of putting forth roots, of finding my purpose, of integrity and homecoming and wholeness. I'm hinting here at what cannot be fully expressed, but that thing is what allows me to continue willingly and happily.

What began for me as a shift to a more frugal lifestyle has become a life path of much larger dimensions. Frugality is still a part of much of what I do, and I desperately want us to be free of our mortgage debt. But thrift has become almost an incidental. More central now is the idea of restraint, of finding a way to live my life within means that are sustainable and just. And when I have time to raise my head above my own tasks, I have visions of sharing what I have learned. Sharon's Jewish faith charges her to contribute to the "repair of the world." It's a daunting command. As an atheist, religion offers me no motive, neither the promised rewards nor punishments. Nevertheless, motivation has found me, and I am willing and even hoping to be a small part of the repair of the world.

I know this isn't the usual fare here at Living the Frugal Life. Thanks for listening.

Poultry Reprieve

So I'm in a quandary this week about my four laying hens. Since early summer I've been mentally preparing myself for their slaughter. I've never slaughtered an animal before, though I have done some butchering. There are lots of reasons I'd made the decision not to keep them through the winter, none of which would have made sense had I put the decision to the hens.

These girls are more than two and a half years old; well past "retirement age" for the average layer. That means they produce fewer eggs and will only grow less productive as time goes on. I don't have a way of keeping the hens warm through the winter. The shorter hours of daylight over the winter will also mean less and less productivity from the hens. These animals are not pets, though I consider their care and well being a solemn duty.

But the most important reasons I have for making the decision to slaughter these hens will sound nonsensical to some people. I planned to slaughter them because it's a sort of moral reckoning for me, a life-long meat eater. As Michael Pollan pointed out in his excellent Omnivore's Dilemma, too many meat eaters "look away" from the realities behind the meat they consume. While I'm aware of many of the issues and I now source my meat locally from sustainable and humane farms, there is still a difference between slaughtering the animal myself and purchasing a dressed and packaged piece of meat. I won't say that I was eager to kill the girls, but I was, in a way, looking forward to taking that final piece of responsibility for what I eat and how I live. I expected to feel a sense of honesty and respect towards the hens, even as I was killing and eating them. It was to be a way of facing the relationship I have with animals directly, instead of turning away.

And then there's the whole competence issue which Sharon discussed yesterday. I feel very strongly that I don't want to be a helpless dependent of my food system - local, and sustainable, and humane as it may be. I want to have the knowledge and the skill it takes to slaughter a chicken and put it on the table. I want to know, intimately and directly, that the animals I eat had good lives and humane deaths.

So, to my quandary. A real farmer friend of mine asked how my hens were doing. When I told her that they were still laying pretty well, but that I planned to slaughter them before Thanksgiving, she asked the obvious question: Why are you slaughtering them if they're still laying well? I then explained their ages and that I had no winter setup for them. Her reply was "I'll keep them for you over the winter. You can have them back in the spring if you want them."

This produced a cascade of thoughts and feelings that really surprised me. I wasn't initially at all pleased by this un-looked-for offer. I've been preparing myself for the slaughter for so long, that I felt disappointment about not getting to do it. I've been looking forward to seeing whether a three-year-old hen can be turned into a decent coq au vin. I've been looking forward to developing those new skills, and to being able to say, "yes, I did it; I can do it." The strength of my own reactions surprised me. And then there followed the more rational side that talked me down from my emotional response: they can have a few more months of a good life. I can still slaughter them in the spring. Not having to slaughter them now frees up the better part of a day later in this busy month.

Still, I wonder about my initial reaction, which was a strong disappointment. I haven't yet given her an answer, but I guess I'm going to agree to it. I'm glad that the girls will live a little longer, and that their continued potential as egg producers will not be wasted. I just wish that there were a way to have my hens, and my moral reckoning too.

Update: The girls were finally dispatched in late July, 2009.

Friday Quotes

Here are a couple of inspiring passages that recently caught my attention while reading:

This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. - G. B. Shaw

To the extent that things we seek are limited in supply (money, fame, victory), there will be strife. To the extent that we seek treasures that deprive no one (wisdom, health, skill) or treasures that help others (love, friendship, justice) we take part in building a better world. - William Coperthwaite

Wearing It Out & Making It Do: Simple Repairs

Frugality is a many faceted approach to life. It can include a huge variety of activities - from clipping coupons, to shopping around for the best deals on major purchases, and from doing it yourself, to digging yourself out of consumer debt. A lot of the time it's not glamorous, and it nearly always goes against the grain of consumerism in a culture that urges us to spend, spend, spend!

One of the lesser aspects of frugality that I was slow to embrace was the practice of really wearing out material goods, and making them do for longer than the expected useful life. I suppose this practice just isn't as thrilling as getting a good deal when it's time to spend money, or knocking an extra chunk off the principle of a mortgage. After all, it's a little bit like doing nothing: it's just finding a way not to spend any money, while making do with what we've already got.

But having come around to it, I now really see the value in making things last through small repair jobs. For instance, this is our hand-me-down wheelbarrow. There was nothing seriously wrong with it. But it had a crack about two or three inches long on the front end of the basin. I looked at the crack carefully and decided that it would be a fairly easy fix, using a basic sewing technique. I carefully burned pairs of holes on either side of the plastic, then ran lengths of small gauge wire through each pair of holes and twisted them tightly together underneath, creating a kind of suture. The twisted ends of the wires were sharp, and located just where someone would be likely to grab the rim of the basin. So I thought about how to remedy that for a while. I decided that a little bit of hot glue melted over the sharp wires would provide sufficient protection and stay in place. I got out the hot glue gun and covered each sharp point with a dollop of melted glue. Even without that simple repair, which probably took no more than 45 minutes of my time, we would have had a pretty good wheel barrow for free. The repair cost only pennies in materials, and it has kept the crack from progressing any further during the two years we've had it. I see no reason to believe we won't be able to use it for many more years.

Here's our teapot, which gets daily use year round, except for summer time when I brew sun tea in a big glass jar. Sometime last year the lid fell off as I was draining the last of the tea from it, and broke on our countertop. There was a time when I would have just gone shopping for a new teapot. Teapots do wear out eventually, I can assure you. But this one still has years of use in it. So we glued the pieces of the lid back together. It may not be as good as new, but it'll serve just fine until the thermal stress from daily hot water baths takes its toll on the body of the pot.

My husband is a handy sort. He fixes all kinds of things that would intimidate me too much to even tinker with. Things with gears, and valves, and circuits. I'm really grateful to have this skill set in my mate. It's not one that I would be eager to pursue on my own. His attitude is: it's already busted, so why not try messing with it? As a philosophy, this is pretty unassailable. More often than not, when something breaks he'll eventually get around to taking it apart and trying to fix it. It might take him a while, and the first attempt might not succeed. But usually, in his own good time, he can fix things. Recently he's fixed my leaking garden hose spray nozzle, our busted paper shredder, and an alarm clock that went on the fritz. Handsome is as handsome does, wouldn't you say?

Repairing things is one of the ways that creativity and ingenuity come into living a frugal life in a big way. Too often there's little advice available to those who want to repair things. Our disposable culture is at least partly to blame for this. "Throw it out and get a new one" has become the lamentable standard practice. It's well to remember that it wasn't always thus. Those who want to try fixing things instead of throwing them away have to summon a little gumption, and gather their wits about them. The results may not always be aesthetically pleasing. But I've found that the satisfaction of accomplishment and thrift from repairing things is its own reward. That fondness for repaired objects more than compensates for the imperfect appearance.

A Phone Call Worth $56.20 Per Hour

Not long ago, we got our quarterly garbage bill from the township. It was just slightly higher than normal because of a mystifying charge of $2.81 in addition to the regular quarterly amount. I called to find out what it was. They'd charged me a late fee for paying late last quarter.

I happened to know that my last payment was delivered on time, because I pay it in person. To save the cost of a stamp, I simply bring the bill into the township office with a check for the exact amount. The office is located right next to the local library, which I visit weekly anyway. So I was in a pretty strong position to argue my case. As it turned out, I didn't need to argue at all, because the woman who answered the phone admitted that she couldn't see any reason why I was charged the late fee. She removed it without any fuss.

In previous years, I would have looked at that unexplained charge and wondered what it was, felt slightly annoyed about it, and would have felt that I should call and find out what was up with that. But then I would have procrastinated about it, and eventually I would have given up all intention of calling because the dollar amount was so low. With a shrug, I would have just written a check to cover the extra amount and told myself something along the lines of, "It's not worth the time to fight through layers of bureaucracy to get the charge removed. My time is more valuable than that." But in fact, my time has never been worth that much in terms of a paid wage.

As it turned out, the call took about three minutes and didn't involve a frustrating phone maze, poorly trained and indifferent employees, or the runaround. I just saved us $2.81 in three minutes of my time. That works out to $56.20 per hour. Actually, the equivalent of $56.20/hour after taxes. At our tax bracket, I would need a pre-tax hourly wage of $78 to match what I just saved with a three-minute phone call. I don't know about you, but I've never had a job that paid me $78 per hour.

So yeah, it's a small amount. Maybe even a trivial amount to some people. For me, that's another $2.81 that I don't have to divert from our extra principle payment for our mortgage this month. Granted, I can't repeat this to save us $78 worth of income hour after hour. It's still a good example of how doing the math can give you a different way to look at frugality. If someone offered you a low effort, perfectly legal way to earn $78/hour from the comfort of your own home, you'd probably do it, right? But how many of us would just pay the extra late fee because it's too much hassle to pursue an explanation for $2.81? Three years ago, I probably would have. Not today though.

Just to add another layer of perspective to this trivial amount, let's look at what that money could do. If I added just that small amount to my monthly mortgage payment, I'd save a whopping $910 in interest and reduce the term of my 30-year mortgage by a full 6 years. That seems incredible to me, even when I run the numbers. But that's the virtue of tiny amounts of extra money applied to principle early in the term of the mortgage. Less than three extra dollars per month would get me out of debt six years faster. Hard to believe isn't it?

We have an ambitious goal to repay our mortgage at a much faster rate than that even. But I crunch these numbers and present them here to illustrate the power of small sums. If you have a mortgage and you're reading this, you can probably scrounge up an extra $3 per month. Provided you start early in the term of your mortgage, even tiny amounts such as this can make a huge difference. Once again: have faith in the little things. They really do add up.

I'm About to Run Out of Toothpaste

Last fall I cracked open a new tube of toothpaste, the last of three 6.5 oz. tubes I bought in bulk at our local not-worth-the-membership-fee warehouse club. (I've since let the membership lapse.) On a whim, I wrote the date on the crimp at the end of the tube. I wanted to see how long it would last me. And it is just me, because I use a different brand of toothpaste than my husband does. That date, in case you can't quite make it out, is 9/17/07. That's more than ten months ago, and there are still a few portions left in the tube.

My toothpaste portions are tiny. And usually I only brush my teeth once a day. Before I get reamed about this, I'll lay out a little personal medical history. In the time since I opened that tube of toothpaste, I've seen the dentist once. At my last cleaning this spring, I finally got some great dental news: my gingivitis was gone! I've struggled with chronic gingivitis for years. I took up daily flossing about five years ago to combat it, but it's been a long struggle. Other than that, my mouth is in great shape. I have all the teeth I was left with after extractions for overcrowding in my teen years, have never had a root canal or crown, and I haven't had a cavity in at least 25 years.

So what gives? I use a small amount of toothpaste only once a day. But I brush my teeth for at least three minutes, and that's after flossing - every single evening without fail. I don't use any mouthwash on a regular basis. I'm no medical authority whatsoever, but I believe this longer brushing routine was what allowed me to clear up the gingivitis problem. This is great because the dentist had suggested that I consider buying a sonic toothbrush if the problem didn't clear up soon. I looked into it and the cheapest I could buy one of those for would have been $100. That would have meant using electricity to run my toothbrush, and more expensive replacement brushes. Still, gingivitis is not a completely trivial problem, and I was seriously considering buying one of those brushes until I got the good news. The best news is that it doesn't cost me anything to brush a little longer, manually.

So what are the frugal angles here? Well, aside from avoiding or at least postponing seriously expensive and painful dental work, and saving on a fancy-dancy toothbrush, I made a tube of toothpaste last the better part of a year. And when it's finished, here's what I'm going to use before I buy any more.



These are all from little courtesy toiletry packets my husband picked up while traveling, and that one Burt's Bees tube is from a sampler pack that I got in my Christmas stocking last year. But there's a point here. I'm writing this silly post on toothpaste to make the case that little things add up. "But it's only toothpaste." you say. "That won't get me out of debt!" Alright, that's true. The savings from using small amounts of toothpaste and little free tubes isn't going to amount to a whole lot.

The larger picture is that I've made a game out of frugality, and this is one little part of that game. I feel rewarded, and sometimes even smug, by these tiny feats of frugality. And psychologically that's very important, because it keeps me going. It helps to pat myself on the back and feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe it's silly. Maybe all those tubes of toothpaste are only going to save me a dollar. But it works for me. The value of that dollar saved is more than a dollar earned because of the intangible bonus of motivation to continue conserving our financial resources, to continue looking for new ways to save a little bit here and there.

I'm not going to grandstand on appropriate portions sizes for toothpaste. But I am going to encourage everyone who reads this - all six of you - to have faith in the little things. To quote Gandhi on a much more serious subject, "Almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." And my addendum is that it's also important to give yourself a lot of credit for doing it, day after day.

Last Night's Dessert

After the thrill of gleaning yesterday, I was in for a treat for dessert. My husband has a wicked way with fruit crumbles. And since he refuses to write down his recipe, he's basically on the hook whenever there's a suitable fruit in the house. In June it was cherries. Last night it was our gleaned blackberries. And he also used some gleaned hickory nuts in the topping. It was divine! Those two in the back are going to be breakfast this morning.

I was particularly proud of this little feat of cheap eating, since it helped us with July's $50 Grocery Challenge. We'd been tempted by fresh berries at the farmer's market, but I remembered my aunt's offer to pick her berries while she was away. True, we spent some gas getting to my aunt's place. But it was on the way to the hardware store, which we needed to visit anyway. Also, you may note that the individual crumbles were cooked in the toaster oven, so we used less electricity to cook them, and we didn't heat up the house so much. I froze the raspberries we gathered yesterday so as to prevent spoilage in this delicate fruit. They'll get used later for some other special treat.

Frugality, for me, has nothing whatsoever to do with deprivation, want, or lack of pleasure. It's much more about creativity, and to a lesser extent, trading cheap convenience for a sense of adventure, self-sufficiency, and accomplishment. We ate very well last night. (Our dinner was a dish of pasta with our garden vegetables, eggs from our hens, and a tiny bit of leftover cooked bacon.) It didn't cost us very much, but it was delicious. We went to bed with the satisfaction of having fed ourselves from our own labor.

Frugal Philosophy - When You Feel Punished

Frugality gets a bad rap from many people today. Too often it is seen as stinginess, or indicative of poverty. Those who are forced to abruptly change their spending habits by financial difficulties are especially apt to feel that frugality is synonymous with deprivation and unhappiness. Yet those who embrace frugality as a voluntary lifestyle don't see the practice in this light at all. Those voluntary frugalites have attitudes that might mystify those who come to frugality through necessity. So for those new to frugality who are feeling deprived in an unfamiliar lifestyle, I offer these ideas.

Try to look at frugality not as a punishment or as a penalty for lack of savings in the past. Instead, look at it as a challenge, a game and a choice you have made for yourself. Because even when money is scarce, it still is a choice, isn't it? You're choosing to live responsibly: within the means you now have, rather than racking up credit card debt you can't repay in order to live your former life.

Look for little ways to economize. Pat yourself on the back when you find each way to stretch a dollar a little further, to get by with a little less. Everyone is different and will find different ways of conserving their hard-earned money. Many aspects of a frugal lifestyle truly do allow you to live well on less. Comparing prices and buying in bulk saves you money without requiring you to go without. Learn some new recipes built around cheap ingredients. There are plenty of frugal meals that have no taint of deprivation about them.

Remember that a lot of people who live the way you used to have very little money in the bank. They look like they're rich and they behave as if they are, but in reality they're not rich (and never will be) if they're not saving. Only a tiny number of people, the multi-millionaires, can act rich and be rich at the same time. A lot more people can choose between looking rich and eventually being rich. And then there are those who can't choose at all and will never be rich. You may yet end up in the middle with a lot of the rest of us.

Look at your new lifestyle as an opportunity to teach your kids to do better than you did. Model frugality to them, talk to them about it frankly, so that they might avoid the patterns you followed earlier. Parental behavior is an enormous influence on children. You might not think your children listen to you, especially when they reach the teenage years. But they are assuredly watching you and learning from what you do. The most powerful lessons your children will learn are when your actions match your words. Challenging them to rely on their creativity and industry, rather than on expensive conveniences, will provide them with invaluable skills for their early adult years when their incomes will be modest.

A good way of thinking about expenditures is to ask yourself whether a brand new gadget is really worth 10 times as much as the same gadget bought used at a yard sale or thrift shop. Sometimes, we really need new things. No one will tell you that a used toothbrush is a good buy. But clothing, toys, furniture and tools can often be had for a fraction of the price of the new item. And often in excellent condition. Well made furniture will last more than a lifetime if well taken care of. The same can be said for most metal tools. It takes an investment of time to collect what is needed from yard sales and consignment shops. So try to see the time spent as a bonus: free entertainment and recreation.

Most importantly, when money is tight, try to retain a positive outlook. Don't beat yourself up over the past and don't despair for the future. You may have made less than wise choices with your money in the past. But every little step you take today to work your way out of debt, and to spend your money carefully means a better future for yourself and your family. Each little effort adds up. It really does!