A Tale of Two Homesteads
(Page 3 of 6)
August/September 2007
By David Cavagnaro
The animal business started innocently enough. We got our first goat from friends and waited for the milk to flow. We were so green; we didn’t even know that animals had to be bred to make milk! Later, after we’d bred the goat, and the first kids were born, we had to face the next big lesson in keeping animals for dairy products: deciding what to do with all the offspring, especially the males. We wanted to take full responsibility for the meat we ate, so I learned slaughtering and butchering skills from a Bulgarian friend who had grown up on a farm in the old country. We kept sheep to graze the dry grass low in summer for fire protection, and raised chickens for both meat and eggs.
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We tanned hides and made our own soap. Maggie dyed wool from our sheep with homemade plant dyes, and used it for spinning and weaving. We established beehives for honey. And we made cheese, lots of cheese.
I learned cheese making by reading and experimenting. Because we didn’t have a separator to remove the cream from naturally homogenized goat’s milk, we were confined to soft, rather than aged cheeses. I still made about six kinds every week, though, including my own versions of Camembert and Roquefort. In summer, we cured the rounds in the coolest place we could find — a basket lowered down into the cabin’s original well, now dry.
In the end, we achieved almost total food self-sufficiency. We grew all our fruits and vegetables, and raised animals for meat and milk. We raised most of our own goat food, and our sheep and chickens were free-range. We bought salt, commercial rennet for cheese making, canning lids, wheat for flour — and that was about it. We even supplemented our bread baking with flour we ground by hand from corn, fava, soy and amaranth.
FRIENDS ON THE HOMESTEAD
Homesteading on such a scale is hard work. No wonder pioneer families had lots of kids! We managed the labor force in a different way. Although we never established an official apprenticeship program, each year young people would somehow find us, usually two or three a season. Officially, they came to learn about gardening and natural history, but there was always a deeper reason, usually associated with a need to heal or a desire to grow. Our visitors included students uncertain about their path in college, refugees from broken relationships, and people stressed out by life in the urban world. They all came to live in this beautiful landscape of rolling hills and were healed by the garden.
Each person who came to the farm brought a new dimension into our lives. Two different friends named Greg added to the richness and depth of our spiritual practices. Jana came with added horticultural skills and, with her friend Karren, taught us the joy of Balkan folk music and dancing.
Those years were filled with learning and inspiration. But like most youthful utopian journeys, our ship ran aground on some rough reefs, and Maggie and I went through a painful separation.
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