Hunters, gathers, and my Dayton 7th grader

Fall always makes me think of so many favorite food things… cooking down squash and pumpkins, making applesauce and cider, carving pumpkins, and definitely hunting, which invariably reminds me of one of my all-time favorite classroom moments in Dayton…

I was attempting to paint a vivid enough picture of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that my inner-city 7th graders, who were lucky to see a patch of grass or a tree on the way home, could understand and visualize.

I felt I’d been making ample progress when one of my favorites raised his hand (yes, I said favorite – he was independent, dry-wit funny, sarcastic, struggled with authority and senseless rules he must abide though they defied logic… if it weren’t for the age difference, gender, and race discrepancies, we could have been twins).

I always knew I was in trouble anytime they raised their hands enthusiastically shouting, “Miss Pierce!” before even being called on. Enthusiasm usually meant a question with which I wasn’t prepared to deal or an educating moment for Teacher.

So “Keon” says, “Yo Miss Pierce!”

”Yes Keon?”

I know for real how black people are smarter than white people!”

”Do please enlighten me, Keon – how this time?”

”Have you ever met a black hunter?”

”Well I’m sure there are, but no I’ve never met one personally.”

”Of course! That’s cuz we know we can go to Kroger!”

To this day that’s one of my favorite ice box laughs. You know the kind, when you’re standing at the ice box and you remember something so distracting and amusing you stand there laughing, forgetting what you came for!

What struck me most was that although he knew he was being funny, he was also completely serious. Amazing. The same reason I would’ve pitied him, he took as a positive. Perception is simply amazing.

Get your Fresh Local Produce all year long!

I never appreciate the Market more than once the weather cools – even though the outdoor gardens slow down we are fortunate to still have fresh local greens to offer, all year long!

Between our two hydroponic growers, Davidson and Decker, aquaponic Green Fins, and both Simple Living and Grumpy Goat with their unheated high tunnels, we have an ample variety of lettuces, kale, Swiss chard, herbs, and more even thru a harsh Ohio winter.

Everyone thinks of supporting local and eating fresh thru the summer with sunshiny favorite veggies, but you can’t go wrong with some tender, versatile greens to brighten a cold grey day!

And you’ll even notice a special sweetness once the weather turns cool – so many things thrive late in the year, and aren’t I glad! :-)

Potatoes and Tomatoes, going, going...

And JM Gardens is almost entirely out of potatoes for the year – and we’re nearing the end of available, fresh tomatoes as well!! Grab them while you can!!

Bread ties and Sequestering Carbon

My grandma had a special drawer in her kitchen where she saved bread and cereal bags, and a cannister in the cupboard for bread ties and rubber bands. The family teased her mercilessly, and she always got eye rolls when she’d hand these saved practicalities to her children to be put away. Yet we all got plenty of use out of them even while we belittled her self-proclaimed Depression Era mentality.

I have been missing that “make-do” mentality. Sure, reuse, remaking, upscale, those are hot button words right now – yet that makes no sense to me in a culture reliant on paper towels, plastic wrap, sandwich baggies, and so many other “throw away” convenience items… it’s better Gram isn’t alive to see our lives come to a screeching halt or all out brawls break out over toilet paper.

She’s been on my mind so much lately as we clean fencerows, clean out buildings, and generally get our new farm into shape… the largest of the three barns was used mainly for tobacco, and is full of tobacco sticks. What to do with all the thousands of them so we could ready the barn for functional use! Set them on fire to burn to nothingness? Leave them to rot? Add to a landfill? Or can they serve an immediate purpose for us right now?

Biochar. Activated charcoal. Our farm key to building organic matter, carbon sequestration, and retention of both moisture and micronutrients. We can burn the tobacco sticks without releasing any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and it will soak up all the nutrients in the soil to keep from leaching with the rain… the biochar we make from junk wood when spread on our pastures and gardens slow releases the nutrients back to the plants and the carbon never leaves the soil, all the while providing a home for billions of soil microbes and good bacteria…

It’s an easy process. Anyone can do it on a small scale as we do, but if the people in power were serious about soil, food, climate, health, environment, what have you, they could easily and cheaply do it on a large scale, even as a service to taxpayers the way some municipalities pick up leaves or offer free leaf and wood chip mulch – and everyone’s garden, field, business, home or diet would benefit.

We’ve seen the kind of wood wasted on any construction site – to heck with the dumpsters sitting on every lot where a new development, home, or building is going up. Who doesn’t have junk wood laying around!

And if corporations or the government were actually interested in recycling and global warming, all glass jars at the stores, whether holding peanut butter, jam, honey, spaghetti sauce, etc, would fit a Mason lid! Oh the wonder of all the jars I could reuse!

It’s funny how your mind wanders when you’re working on a project, and as I was working with those old tobacco sticks I couldn’t believe how much I was missing my grandparents, and their “oh you can make do” attitude. Raising ten children on one small income and not only living comfortably but leaving a legacy, they truly inspire me to think how I can “make do” better, in as many ways as possible. And if I can make a difference in my little world, with very little effort, it’s extraordinary to think what truly would be possible on a larger scale.

Here’s to your own flow of ideas, whether implementable or just for fun, and the ability for all of us to rethink “make do”.

The fun and freshness of seasonal eating

We had old friends over for dinner the other night – a real treat for us, as our hectic farming schedule is not conducive to sneaking in regular visits!

Our happy-to-be-city-people friends get as much of a kick out of our “farmy weirdness” as we do from how out of touch they are with where their food comes from, or how it’s produced. Listening to the animated Q & A these intelligent, supposedly functional adults engaged in with our young farm-raised children was priceless!

Case in point – the wife asked the children what were their favorite foods – our five year old longingly sighed, “Strawberries” as her answer. When pressed for why she answered so sadly, Molly gave a “how can you not know this?” look and replied, “Because it’s hard to wait for spring”. Then my friend said, “Oh if I had known they were your favorite we would have picked them up for dessert!” Complete and utter silence, along with looks on the four older children’s faces ranging from disbelief and shock to pity and disgust.

Poor dear, she just didn’t know eating fruit out of season verges on blasphemy. They told her to visit in May so she can taste a “real” strawberry – and they told her they’d rather wait for the real deal :-)

No matter how many strawberries we try raise, we always seem to just eat them as they come on, and I never have as many as I’d like for jam, desserts, canning, heaven forbid Saving… so they got a big kick out of showing off our last two jars of strawberries, that we’d saved up for a birthday!

If you have the chance to put up something, whether fruit, vegetable, herb, or protein, at its peak of freshness, there’s just nothing so refreshing come a dreary winter day as opening up a jar of dried herbs as green as the day you stocked them away, or some tomato sauce from the freezer, or a jar of pumpkin, berries, stock, what have you… I have been thrilled to no end lately that Grumpy Goat has been bringing extra herbs for sale at pickup so I can keep the dehydrator full, and enjoy using them all winter long!

Now if we could just raise enough berries to have enough to actually do something with other than just eat them… ????

Thanksgiving Turkeys from King's available!!

Now available – Pre-orders for fresh, local Turkeys from King’s, just in time for Thanksgiving!

The King family not only raises these birds but processes them -
a true local product! Fed Non-GMO feed on their Bradford farm, and processed fresh so when you pick it up at First Place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, it will come out of the fridge – never having been frozen! And if you’ve never experienced a truly fresh turkey, you are in for a treat!

How it works – you pre-order and pay NOW to reserve your bird…
Then everyone who has ordered and paid picks up their turkey during regular Market pickup hours on Tuesday Nov 23!

Great News! Holiday Night Market - Nov 30th!!

For the first time in over a year – the Holiday Night Market is back!!

All your favorite Market vendors and even more local faces will be set up at First Place on Tuesday November 30th!!

Join us for our fun traditional farmer’s market – the perfect time to meet your favorite farmers and enjoy shopping for local foods, crafts and Holiday gifts!

Running simultaneously with Virtual Market pickup, the Night Market will be open from 3:30-6:30pm Tuesday November 30th, in the same building as Virtual Market pickup – just down the main hall!!

We’ll also accept any food or monetary donations on behalf of First Place Food Pantry! Won’t you join us? :-)

Fall flavors in Bakery, Favorite Fall Produce

Wait til you see all the new Fall Flavors across our Market when we open tonight!!

Pumpkin Maple Glaze or Pop Tarts

Pumpkin Spice Brioche Donuts and Apple Cider Cake Donuts

Maple Nut Blondies and Carrot Cake Cookies

Pumpkin Gelato and Maple Pecan Brittle Ice Cream

Plus cool weather staples such as Black Beans, Red and Yellow Onions, Acorn and Butternut Squash, and even the freshest Greens! :-)

Happy Shopping – and Thanks for keeping your food dollars local!

Part Three: You never know where life will take you

I always teased Lee that we were lucky we met – I from Michigan, he from Kentucky, to meet in Ohio in the middle, where neither of us wanted to be or intended to stay!

And early in our marriage, our naturopathic doctor told Lee his asthma and breathing complications would not improve while we continued to live in this area – that his body was unaccustomed to such things as the molds in the corn, and the best thing he could do for his lungs would be to move. Needless to say we didn’t take him seriously in the least. Not then, anyway.

When he got a call that the full-time farmer position at Carriage Hill was open, he went back to work there in June of 2018. It was a place we both loved – not just from the historical aspect and because it was fun for the whole family to volunteer with Daddy, but because we’d met there, he proposed there, we took our wedding pictures there – it felt as if we’d grown as a couple and a family all over that farm.

And if he’d been looking for a job to make actual money he’d have gone elsewhere, but 1880s farming at Carriage Hill meant a lot to him, and he went back, intending to save up his salary so we could afford another few acres around Fletcher and expand our livestock. Things went smoothly until his newly appointed manager in late 2020 refused to honor Lee’s Federal Holidays or saved up vacation, sick, and personal days, actually telling him to his face the work at Carriage Hill was more important than God, his health, his family’s health, and his own farm work at home; that if Lee used any of his many weeks of saved up and earned time off, he’d take it without pay and be written up.

So when I continued to have complications from a difficult pregnancy and delivery of our last child, hemorrhaging again, Lee called in to stay home with me and the children – only to be told it was an unapproved use of a sick day, he’d have to take it unpaid, and was being written up. No matter it was only the second sick day he had used that calendar year, the first being for his grandmother’s funeral because no one told him he got five paid bereavement days. It was the beginning of the end for his involvement with Carriage Hill, and the end of my support of a union.

We knew he was having more regular breathing attacks – we also knew we were under a lot of stress, he was working too hard on both farms, not getting enough sleep, had plenty of environmental airborne complications that negatively affected his breathing if he wasn’t careful, as we faced this past summer…

When he was hired, Lee agreed to forgo his nine Federal Holidays, working seven of them if he was guaranteed instead three religious holidays off – Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter. His former manager thanked him and accepted his acquiescence. His new manager, himself a father of four and supposedly a Christian, refused and told Lee he’d work a full shift on Christmas, regardless that the park was closed. When Lee suggested he simply drive in to feed the animals and go home as was past practice, he was told he’d work a full shift – the manager’s concession was to allow Lee to bring his family to work with him for the day. Christmas Day.

Needless to say, when he quit just before Christmas 2020, we were all done with the stress of the previous year and got serious about actually moving out of state. Land being cheaper in Kentucky than Ohio or Michigan (since we agreed to at least look where my family was), we were Blessed to find a farm – further away than we expected, South of Lexington, but things work out, not always how you expect!

So yes – we are in the process this year of consolidating our farm, moving lock stock and barrel 200+ miles south to a new farm – more secluded, more land, more possibilities for our homesteading dream.

It’s been so much back and forth, working here and there, wondering how long it’d be before we’re ready to sell and move, finding someone to continue the Market, not knowing what, when or how to tell anyone – it’s been a heck of a year for us. And harder each week to think about being permanently gone, wanting to hold off saying anything to anyone until I couldn’t wait any longer. When my in laws asked questions about a timetable for our move, and we tried explaining we’re day by day trying to keep our heads above water, I mentioned the Market, that I wasn’t sure how I was going to leave you. My father in law acted as if it should be no big deal. I realized how little they understood what it meant to us to have built this business from scratch that was less business and more network, more family of like-minded people – people who chose to support each other, their neighbors and family farmers – who’d grown closer to us than most of our family members, offering to babysit and help on the farm, bringing flowers, gifts, snacks, flower and plant seeds you’d saved, diapers when our babies were born, and more than anything smiles, kindness and generosity. I can’t tell you what this Market has meant to me, and my whole little family. I can’t even write without getting emotional – I just could not tell it in person.

The moment it hit us we were moving… when we sold that beautiful orange combine. It’d never survive the trip down or be safe on the gentlest of our rolling KY hills. Lee drove it down the driveway the final time as I stood at the window bawling like a baby, pulling myself together so my wet face wouldn’t freeze when I went out to see him load it on the semi in the frigid air. It felt right that that ended the Ohio chapter of our life together. I no longer would need my Allis to look at when we disagreed or times got harder than normal, to remind us we could survive anything. Maybe I matured so my memories are enough, or maybe we have enough other instances to point to and say, Yes, see? We can make it.

Lee was hospitalized in July for his asthma. We then ramped up the move. When he flatlined on the table for a full ten seconds I, yes I, was speechless. I felt it was a wake up call we must heed, that a permanent move to the clean mountain air, where he knew he felt better, was best. ASAP.

While I know the Market will be in the good hands of our friend and customer Erin Harris as of the Christmas Break, I’d be lying if I said the thought of leaving wasn’t oh so hard. My parents are in Michigan, Lee’s family is in Kentucky, and my scattered brothers we only see sporadically. The Market has been a constant in our family’s life each week, more family than just friends. And part of me has had a very difficult time wrapping my head around leaving. Yet when we go down to Kentucky every Tuesday after Market to be ready for work on the new farm Wednesday, whether it’s moving gravel, building fence, clearing hedgerows and trees, fixing barns, painting the house, ripping out carpet or making it our own in a million other ways, it’s so peaceful and quiet in our corner of the Daniel Boone National Forest that when the time comes for us to pack up and head back to Ohio, all seven of us are truly sad to leave our newfound serenity and peace. And are excited to be starting anew, together.

With four of our five children now in school (plus two year old Anna thinking she is as well), and so much to learn and share together, I’m glad I have the ability to stay home full-time, as I can look at how much they’ve grown since yesterday and know any hour that slips away we can’t get back. Just as true, Lee and I aren’t getting any younger, and goodness, if there was a big difference having the last baby at 36 compared to our first at 27, I hope if we’re Blessed with more they come soon before I get much older! A mischievous older gentleman told me last year after I’d come back from having Anna that he’d read older mothers were more susceptible to twins, so if I was planning any more I’d better get on it before I was too tired. I kindly showed him the door, of course, wondering how much more tired we could get. And I do look forward to that final trip south, when we as a family can sigh, rest, look around and know we’re home, ironically just on a new road that dead ends on our new farm at our End of the Road.

Part Two: Our End of the Road

When you purposefully choose to live further under the poverty line than the IRS believes possible (I don’t wish an audit on any of you!), making money is not your priority. That the food we grew and raised was fresher, cleaner, and more organic than anything you could purchase at the grocery store was true – it was also true that our consciences wouldn’t let us sell for their exhorbitant prices, especially to customers who’d become friends, when we couldn’t have afforded it even when we both had good paying jobs. As I’ve always said, we may be bad business people but who cares if we’re happy? And a major perk of making little is how little they can take in taxes for programs we don’t support! Woohoo!

We’ve set up at various area farmer’s markets including downtown Piqua, downtown Troy, and the virtual market in Urbana, and had a wonderfully fun CSA program where customers came to the farm to choose their produce and proteins for the week before I started as manager of our Miami County virtual market. We continue with our 100% grassfed raw milk herdshare which I think is misleading, because any grass farmer will tell you alfalfa and clover is so much higher in protein than simply grass, and we can get a high butterfat content in our milk and beautiful marbling in our meat “just” from our good grass because we are committed to caring for the soil providing the cows’ food.

We continue to add various pieces to our diet, whether sorghum syrup as a sweetener after multiple disasters with bees (no one will ever tell me our neighboring farmers’ spray did not cause us to lose hives three different years), to popcorn, sunflower seeds, jerky, dried fruit, and peanuts as snacks, as well as yogurt, buttermilk, cheese and butter after we started milking in 2016, plus whole wheat flour, spelt flour, cornmeal, oats, potatoes, and dried beans as our staples.

As of last year, Lee and I have now taken down nine different barns and buildings, some timber-frame, some more modern, either to rebuild in their entirety on our farm or simply (ha) to use for pieces and parts in fixing our existing structures. The shop is the most sentimental to me since it was a unique first date, but the 24’x45’ building that has been our CSA, herdshare, and meat customer pickup room in the front, and chicken coop/milking parlor in the back, is dearest to my heart because it was 100% salvaged materials – not just the lumber as is our usual, but even the sheet metal roof, tar paper, windows, tek screws… there are so many times I laugh to think of what is “normal” to our children and how off their sense of reality is, when our then three year old watched my husband jack up our old garage using large timbers, knock the foundation out from under it, set it on our flatbed trailer, and drive it across the yard to park it in it’s new home next to our old Shop as his new and improved Blacksmith Shop. He creates himself so much work simply because the children have seen there’s nothing he can’t do. The sky is the limit, Daddy!

One goal with our animals, whether it be the chickens, pigs, cows or sheep, was similar to our gardening goal – breed our own replacements so we don’t have to purchase new feeder livestock or new seeds every year, because if we’re intending to live on as little as possible, we need to avoid spending money unnecessarily. We started small when we married, both in the livestock and gardening department, and have grown to saving over 64 varieties of fruit, herb, vegetable, and field crop seed as well as letting our broody hens raise replacement chicks, keeping two boars and several sows to raise pastured pigs, and the bull Little Boy Blue for a yearly crop of calves from our cows. Happy animals taste better – we want them to enjoy sunshine, fresh air, quality pasture, and as stress-free a life as possible, and we want to be sure the end of their life is going to be instantaneous… you can taste the difference when there’s no adrenaline rush, no fear being handled in a strange place by strange butchers who prod you with electric shocks… I don’t care how cost-prohibitive and back-breaking it may be – I’ll continue to raise and process my own meat.

Butchering is still and will always remain one of our favorite farm jobs – it’s how we met, we truly enjoy its variety and necessity, and although our hand-crank grinders get a mite tedious (or just show me yet again how much stronger he is than me!), we’ve worked hard to perfect our ideal recipes when it comes to curing and smoking the meat in a way that will both preserve it for a long time and taste delicious. We use our sorghum syrup to cure the bacons, hams, corned beef, and dried beef, and save our apple and maple wood prunings for smoking the meat. We can hang it in the smokehouse until we want to use it or I can a lot of ground and chunked so we have ready-to-go fast food available, and food stored which doesn’t add to a freezer or fridge costs.

I saw a study put out by Ohio State University detailing how difficult it is to farm with children – trying to get your work done and make enough money to live. I always want to smile when people tell us they can’t afford something. Can’t? Or are unwilling to do without something else to be able to afford it, so in effect choose not to? I told Lee they should’ve asked us. He said it’s better they didn’t as we’re not the norm. Bah! If part of our reason for living this way is to provide a healthy lifestyle and future for our children, how could we not make them a part of everything we do? They need to understand where their food comes from, so they’re not like my former students who didn’t know that cellophane-wrapped burger on Styrofoam came from a bovine. Or who’d never tasted a truly ripe fruit or vegetable they’d picked – no comparison to a store or restaurant. I don’t want them to be like the professional who worked in an office all day before his wife sent him to pickup her Market order, and when I commented “Sure has been wet, huh?” he looked up at me curiously and said, “Has it been raining?” I thought, raining so much so our potatoes rotted in the ground, our high tunnel greenhouse flooded for the first time, and the farmer behind lost most of his corn crop when it swept away with the flooding into our pastures. I want them to be aware of the changing of the seasons, and the life in the gardens and field, and know how they can adversely or positively affect everything around them. Lee and I are just weird that way.

The problem with building up an old farmstead while farming full time is that it takes a lot of time just to grow everything both your young family and your animals eat. And there’s only so much money and time left every season to squeeze in the infrastructure projects you’ve been planning. Rebuilding the bank walls of the barn, replacing the hay mow timbers and floors, building stalls, pens, and fence, clearing fencerows and perpetually beating back invasives, replacing electric, plumbing, insulation, floors and windows in the house, and heaven forbid the basic and unexpected maintenance any of you with older homes understand – it’s been a productive road we’ve been on since we married in 2010.

But we’ve said since we’ve met, if we like each other, and our home, and prefer to be home together than anywhere else, we’ve got all the time in the world, and it’ll never be the same as going to an off-the-farm job for more money. We choose to live, on one hand, simply – even in such terms as no microwave, computer, dryer, dishwasher, tv, toilet paper, with cloth diapers, etc. On the other hand I’d say it’s a more complicated lifestyle than most, and we wouldn’t do it if we didn’t love it. Our children don’t want for anything, have never known hunger, are spoiled when it comes to good food and homecooked good eating as a family three times a day, or the fun of family cooking, reading, playing, and general togetherness. That’s the way we like it. And when we searched for a farm name, and hit upon End of the Road because First Street in Fletcher literally becomes our driveway and we ARE the end of the road, we knew it also fit because this was our end of the road, where we always intended to happily live out our days. Or so we thought. God knew He had other plans.