Category Archives: Homesteading

Unknown's avatar

Inheriting a Homestead

by

I spent several hours today in the homestead that I will demonstrate and interpret for visitors to Old World Wisconsin.  Tomorrow I will learn to light a fire in the cookstove and the bake oven and actually cook something.   The house and land was purchased by Adam Schottler, an immigrant from southern Germany who had a larger farm nearby.  He rented the house out until his son Matthias was married, and then he gave his son and daughter-in-law the property.   The Wisconsin Historical Society acquired the house and a few other buildings from the period, and assembled them together to form a homestead for the museum.  The restoration date targeted is 1875.  At that time, Matthias and Caroline Schottler had 2 children.  They had 11 children total during their marriage.  Here’s a photo that shows the zigzag fence, the granary and pig pen, the barn, the summer kitchen (or bake house), and behind it, the house.  The granary, summer kitchen, and house are all one behind the other in this photo, so you can’t see much of them.  The wooden crossbar frame standing outside is for butchering hogs (which we’ll do in the fall).  The green field in the background is planted with rye.  I am supposedly going to help make a rye straw basket, and to raise dough in it for rye bread, which I will bake in the bake kitchen oven…an oven that holds 24 loaves at a time!

 

I will also be busying myself chopping wood and gardening in order to prepare food in that summer kitchen.  Today I saw rhubarb and asparagus and currents and thyme and sage and rosemary and lemon balm and dill and horseradish already growing in the garden.  All of this produce is to be used on site during the season.  I don’t get to take any home, but I do get to help use it.  I have been wanting to learn more about how to “live off the land” for a while now, and this is going to be a great introduction, I think. 

Right now I’m learning all kinds of logistics to interpreting this area for school groups beginning a week from today, but I think of the feel of the sun on my cheeks and the 13-stripe ground squirrel that peeked into the kitchen today, and I imagine moments that I will have simply soaking up the homesteading life, pondering the way of a woman who worked hard, raised 11 children, and knew the land around her intimately.   What will I learn from her?  What appreciation and meaning will take root inside me?  Gratitude, a sense of life rooted and grounded, a hope for my own children to live honestly in the simple abundance of the earth?  It’s a connection that I’m eager to explore.

I apologize for leaving out a poetry challenge for today, but I am too sunburned and tired to concentrate on that today.  Tomorrow I have another early day out at the site.   I am looking forward to sleep!  And to getting my costume….more to come!

Unknown's avatar

Dodging Art

by

What an amazing day!  Training at Old World Wisconsin included visits to the Animal Barn, the Garden curator, and the Collections curator.  I met two oxen, each weighing a ton, and stroked their noses and chins.  I was introduced to three horses who are each in their 90s in “people years”.  I saw a sow who had given birth for the first time just this week and her seven pink little piglets.   Oh, how their little faces captivated me (and made me wish I’d brought my camera)!  I visited a greenhouse full of tiny sprouting seeds which will become food and decor to an entire community, a future rooted in the present and informed by the past.  I browsed through shelves of antique artifacts that illustrate the lives and time of people whose stories encompass miles of external and internal territory.  So much to take in, visually, mentally, physically and spiritually!  I came home to my usual tasks of dinner and chores and a phone call from my darling youngest…and now I’m sitting at my computer and entering this century of technology for the first time today.  It feels kinda weird!  I can only imagine how this feeling will intensify as I spend more time in the Old World. 

I have one more week of the poetry challenge from NaPoWriMo to complete, and already I can tell that it’s not going to be easy to be in the mood to concentrate on composing verse each day after training!  Still, I hope to have a little time to dabble in the word pond.  Today’s prompt is to write an “ekphrastic” poem, a graphic description of a work of art.  “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a famous one.  I went through some art photos that I had collected for a game I invented, and this one caught my eye.  It’s a self-portrait by Van Gogh.  Here’s the picture and the poem, and then I think I’ll call it a day here in the 21st century and get ready to go back 150 years again tomorrow!

Freckled, wistful world

Speckled, swirling molecules

Boundaries camouflaged

Fits and bits punctuating disappearance

Addled, dappled, sparks in the dark

Furtive sideways glance to the canvas

Back to dabbing, daubing, repetition

Poking at the flat reality

Testing the surface, then

Bouncing off again

Unknown's avatar

The End of an Exciting Day

by

For my second day of training at Old World Wisconsin, I got to finally get away from paperwork and training videos and get on site to see the historical buildings where I’ll be a costumed interpreter.  I gotta tell you, I AM SO EXCITED!!!!  My first stop was to see St. Peter’s Catholic Church in the Yankee Village area.   This church was built in 1839 and has a wood stove right smack dab in the middle of the center aisle of the nave.  No bridal procession is gonna get around that sucker!  One of my jobs will be to pull the rope on the carillon to start and end the day.  Swingin’!  I also got to play the pump organ.  I have never even attempted this kind of feat before today.  It was a bit like trying to pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time, as my feet had to keep the bellows going while my fingers worked out the four-part harmony, but I managed to squeeze my way through a verse of Amazing Grace without too much difficulty.  What fun!  After some consideration, I realize that hymn is probably not Catholic, although it may be from the right period.  I still have so much research and learning to do!

I had to cut my time in the Village short and ride up to the German immigrant area to see the place I’ll be working on week days and with school groups.  It’s an 1870s farm with a two-story house, bake house (or summer kitchen), granary, pig barn, regular barn, smoke house and three garden plots.  I will be the interpreter for all these areas.  I will be making bread in the big brick oven (it goes back about 8 feet!), tending the garden, keeping an eye on the pigs so they don’t escape, chopping wood with a mallet and froe, greeting guests and inviting them to interact with the place.  Oh, so much fun going on!  AND, I got fitted for my corset today!  I can hardly stand it!!

Came home to turn my computer on for the first time and saw more than a dozen e-mails.  Then I checked the poetry prompt for the day.   It looks like fun, but frankly, I’m too pooped to poet.  I have so much homework to do, so many questions to answer about the world I am stepping into.  Instead, I will leave you with these sunset shots from our trip to the Mississippi and let you think about settlers moving west into the unknown.  Why is history important… in the big picture?  Why is experience important?  Why is it important to share experiences through stories?

Unknown's avatar

Old World Windows

by

I am borrowing this post theme from a blogger in the UK, a very artistic (and witty!) photographer whose post you can find here.  His windows are truly Old World, mine are from my visit to Old World Wisconsin yesterday.  It was a fabulous day for being outside, and I will post more photos throughout the weekend from that trip.  Here is my rebuttal to Microsoft:

Enjoy your Friday, folks!

Unknown's avatar

Sap Rising

by

Yesterday I went to another Maple Sugar presentation training.  This one was a “Living History” demonstration.  A theater veteran of 35 years took on the persona of “Amos” and told the kindergarteners how he would go with his father and grandfather, beginning at the age of 10, into the woods for a month every year to make maple syrup. When the daytime temperatures are above freezing and the nighttime temperatures still dip below, the sap starts rising in the trees.  We’ve had some very warm nights now, and the leaf buds may already be popping, which means our maple syrup season has been shortened by several weeks.  Once the leaves come out, the sap turns bitter.  It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.  You have to keep your fires going continually to boil it down.  One hundred years ago, it wasn’t unusual for a farm to have 700 taps going at once, so collection and boiling was an intense process.  The kids got pulled out of school and lived in the Sugarbush camp while the sap was running; they spent their time making spiles (spouts), tending fires, collecting buckets and stirring buckets of boiling sap.  And they didn’t bathe the whole time!  (Kindergarteners get a kick out of hearing that!)  For extra energy during the work day, they kept a chunk of Jack Wax in their pockets.  This is maple syrup that has been poured out on some clean snow and frozen into a hard candy.  The kindergarteners got to do a taste test, comparing real maple syrup with two different pancake syrups, and sampling maple sugar clinging to a Popsicle stick.  Real maple syrup is not as sweet and sticky as the high fructose corn syrup blends, and it has a more distinctive flavor.  It’s delicious, but it’s expensive because it is very labor intensive to produce.  Here’s another little factoid: squirrels like maple sap.  They climb into the tops of the trees and bite off the end of a twig and just lick away at the running sap.  I have yet to see this, but I’m hoping I might catch my little friend in the sugar maple outside my bedroom window doing just that.

The trails were very muddy out there in the woods, but the moss was very green.  Spring is in the air!

Boiling the sap over a walnut & hickory fire

Just to reassure you, tapping trees for maple syrup doesn’t hurt the tree.  The bark scabs over and the tree keeps producing plenty of sap to stay alive.  Trees that are big enough to hug (36-45 inches in circumference) are big enough to tap…and then to thank with a appreciative embrace!   Enjoy your neck of the woods, wherever you are!

Unknown's avatar

Maple Sugar!

by

Never let me get dogmatic about anything.  (That word again….one of Steve’s most over-used!)  I had resisted the excitement around the Wehr Nature Center surrounding the upcoming Maple Sugar festival because I just don’t care for the taste of maple.  I had a bad experience as a candihapped kid.  My parents were strict about candy.  We didn’t have it just lying around in big, glass jars on the kitchen counter like my best friend did.  We weren’t allowed to eat our fill out of pillow cases at Halloween like my best friend did.  We weren’t allowed to chew bubble gum like my best friend did.  So where did I hang out?  At my best friend’s house mooching as much candy as I could.  And then, a miracle occurred.  My parents brought home Maple Sugar Candy from a trip, or maybe it was a gift or a find at a specialty shop.   Somehow, these little leaf-shaped, brown, sparkly candies were available IN OUR HOUSE, and I went berserk.  I probably yanked one without permission and gobbled it up to destroy the evidence in a matter of seconds.  My wise friends at the Nature Center told me this morning that the only way to consume maple sugar is in tiny, slow doses.   Maybe that’s where I went wrong.  My overdose at a young age left a very bad taste in my mouth about the whole maple business.  I’ve avoided it for years on pancakes, French toast, spice cake frosting, bacon, you name it.  Somewhere along the line, the real maple sugar and the imitation corn syrupy stuff that’s advertised as “maple syrup” got blurred together in my memory.  It was all bad.  Well, today, I got to go back to the source and re-learn everything I knew about the taste of maple.

Giving blood

This is a new tap in a sugar maple.  The spout is called a spile.  You can see a previous tap above it to the left that has healed over.  Some of the kids think these look like bellybuttons.   The sap drips out and gets collected in a bag.  I tasted a drop of sap that I captured on the back of my hand.  It was just like water with a very slight sweetness.

A stand of sugar maples is called a “sugar bush”.   Tapping trees have at least an inch of sapwood under the bark.  They are the more mature trees, ones about 45 inches in circumference.   You can get sap from any tree, but not every sap will make a syrup that will taste good on pancakes.  Pine sap can be made into turpentine.  Birch sap can be made into root beer.  Oak sap can be made into tannins for tanning leather.  Maple sap has a sugar content of about 2.5%.  It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup.  Remove even more water, and you have maple sugar.   It’s very sweet, but it doesn’t make me sick in tiny amounts.  You know what does make me sick?  Imitation maple syrup.  That’s really the stuff I loathe.  We do a taste test with the kids.  They get a drop from bottle A and one from bottle B to see if they can tell the difference.  Bottle A leaves a trailing thread of stickiness wherever it goes.  It looks like a hot glue gun.  It tastes super sweet and leaves a tinny bitterness in your mouth.  Yuck!  It’s imitation maple flavoring, MAYBE a smidgeon of real maple syrup, and mostly corn syrup.   Real maple syrup is not as harsh; it’s sweet, but with a lower viscosity.

I looked at these bright, vulnerable blue bags hanging in plain sight in the woods and asked, “Don’t you get animals coming after this sweet stuff?”  Oh, yes.  Weasels.  Gnats.  Snow fleas.  Raccoons.  Squirrels.  They get wise to what we’re doing out here eventually.  So they tell us to replace any bags that have holes, and we strain the sap before we start cooking it.  I haven’t seen that part yet, the cooking.  They save that for the big festival in late March.

So now I have a better understanding and appreciation of maple syrup and maple sugar.  I do not hate the taste of it; I do hate imitations of it.  I still prefer honey on my pancakes, though.   I can’t wait to see and taste the Wehr Nature Center’s version of that, too!

Unknown's avatar

November Lights

by

Yesterday was a weird day.  I spent too much time in my head, trying to finish up my memoir contest entry.  The laptop was on the dining room table while the stock for the turkey soup simmered.  Going from writing to cooking gave me a respite from my growing headache, and I managed to get a meal on the table and a satisfactory rewrite done by the end of the day.  But the best part was taking a walk after dinner.  After the sun set, there was a silver sliver stuck in the bare branches.  My favorite decoration.  We muttered and grumbled about Christmas stuff already set out and spewing neon, and ached to have a fireplace of our own so that we could keep the passing woodsmoke high going.  “When are we going to move out to a rural homestead?” Steve asked.  It’ll happen.  Someday.  Meanwhile, I am practicing my skills.  I won’t get any contest results until March, but here are the results of the turkey soup and the chocolate chip bread pudding.

I’m going to take a break from writing today.  The sun is shining.  I want to be outside.  So grateful not to be working in a cubicle any more.

Unknown's avatar

Giving Thanks

by

One year ago, my house had been up for sale with no offers for 8 months, despite making huge drops in the listing price.  We celebrated our last Thanksgiving in the home we had occupied for 20 years with two of my daughters, my eldest’s First Mate, and two college friends of my youngest.  We filled the place with warmth, laughter, good smells and love.  Two days later, I got the offer.  Closing date was January11.  Without hiring professional movers, except for the baby grand piano, Steve and I moved out everything in the house, basement, patio and 3-car garage.  Numerous trips in the van distributed the contents to Madison, Chicago, Harvard, charities, storage and Milwaukee.  We had help from the First Mate’s dad and fireman friend for the couch and a super-heavy TV, but the rest we managed ourselves.  I remember trying to corral the cat after everything else was gone.  She had nowhere to hide, poor thing, and she refused to get into a cat carrier.  Steve agreed to drive the van with her in the passenger seat in the bottom portion of the carrier, top removed.  He petted her and talked to her soothingly as he drove the two hours here.  I drove Jim’s car, grateful not to be distracted by her.

Steve’s place was stuffed to the gills with boxes, furniture, books, and cat.  I marvel at how he made room for us.  He’d been living alone for about a dozen years, five years in this place.  We lived, worked, played, loved and engaged in our relationship intensely, doing the dance of supporting, caring, giving and taking.  There were many tearful times, there was a 4-week adventure on the road, there were late-night Summit Meetings and many long walks through the countryside.  I woke this morning and began to think of giving thanks.  I looked at him sleeping next to me, and my nose prickled.  A quiet stream leaked down my cheeks.  I am so lucky to have a best friend, someone who truly loves me.  I am so grateful to be here, to have a life I love, to be at home again.

For all of you, whatever your situation, I wish you Godspeed to your home.  Welcome.

Unknown's avatar

Winter Metaphysics

by

Winter is setting in.  We had some flurries yesterday.  I spent a lot of time writing online, concentrating on ideas, thoughts, feelings, and other stuff in my head.  It made me feel restless and a bit dyspeptic.  I wanted to walk; I needed to walk.  The harvest moon rose full at sunset, and we walked around the wetlands of the county grounds.  The cold was sharp and stung my nose and ears.  I felt my thighs and feet going numb.  It was a welcome discomfort, inviting me to feel my body and feel alive, real and physical.

Winter can be a time of cabin fever when things feel insular and unreal.  There are so many ways to distract myself from the basics, ways I can move from one bubble to the next without popping up for clear air.  So today, I felt like working with my hands.  I took my tools out to the backyard and broke apart the CD cabinet that’s been sitting there for 11 months.  It was good to observe rot and rust and decomposition.   I put the flat boards back down on the ground to make a home for insects and their relatives.  Come spring, I know where I can find some specimens for my nature walks.  I took a few other boards to make a bird feeder station on the old wicker chair.  Later, I’m going to make some broccoli cheddar soup.

Work, things, tools.  How do you see your relationship to the world?  Are things merely static objects?   Are things actually doings or beings as Alan Watts would suggest (e.g.  this isn’t a ‘tree’, it’s a ‘treeing’ – a dynamic process)?  If I pick up a dishrag and begin to clean, I am entering a relationship with the rag, the dishes, the water, the soap.  I want to know more about each of these things, pay attention and appreciate their qualities and how I experience them.

Is it living?

Sometimes, this seems like an unnecessary complication.  I learned from Sesame Street that certain things are alive and others aren’t.   Does that mean that I can control those inanimate objects and do whatever I want with them?  Great.  That sounds simple.  But what if that’s just one way of looking at things and not The One Correct Way?  What would I learn or experience about life if I looked at everything as a being?

These might be good questions for next week’s Socrates Cafe meeting.   Meanwhile, there are some pots and pans in the kitchen sink longing for a relationship with me.

Unknown's avatar

Living on the Land – or a few feet above

by

I am considering bird feeding options.  I would love to have some cardinals visit our small south yard this winter.  They do anyway, but I want to encourage them to linger a while and refresh themselves.  I stopped in at a wild bird and pet shop to look over some of the products.  I was pretty much appalled at the prices.  Suburban homeowners around here spend a lot of money on their yards.  I am only an unemployed renter, so I’m going the DIY route.  We have a weathered old wicker chair frame and a CD storage chest that have been sitting outside for a few seasons.  I’ve decided to try to build a feed station using them.  Recycling, don’t ya know. So I went online to read up on bird feeders and squirrels.  There seems to be a conflict among humans as to the desirability of squirrel activity in proximity to our dwellings.  They are amazing animals who don’t mind being observed.  They also have been known to move in with us humans and destroy property.  I see squirrels in the trees and in the garbage around the duplex, but so far there haven’t been any signs of them moving into the attic and eating books.  I want to keep it that way.  I don’t think the squirrels need any assistance in finding food around here, so I’d like to provide a food that’s not attractive to them but will be attractive to cardinals and other song birds.  I’ve read that safflower seeds may be just the thing.  So this is my goal: to construct a platform feeder using the chair and storage chest parts and buy safflower seed for the winter.  Then we’ll see what the birds and squirrels do.

Do these guys care about Game 7?

Might Itchy-Twitchy become tempted to move inside?

Even if I didn’ t do a thing, I’d still have cardinals and squirrels as my neighbors. I doubt my project is going to make a difference in their survival over the winter.  I don’t imagine that I have any role as a wildlife manager in this situation.  I could pat myself on the back and say I’m being wildlife friendly, in a way.  But it’s not that big a deal.  I’m really only doing it for my own amusement.  I often wonder at the decisions and efforts I’ve made to be eco-minded.  For example, the online petitions and letters to my congressional representatives urging them to take certain actions on various pieces of legislation.  Does that really make a difference?  So far, I’ve noticed that it only generates more junk mail from Republican officials who write to thank me for my input and inform me that they have no intention of doing what I suggest.  I could take the next step and send money to the originators of these petitions, but I have no income at this time and have therefore decided not to do that. I don’t know what effect that might have if I did.  I have moments when my idealism dares me to hope great things, and then I have moments when my realism admits the futility of my individual efforts.

Making ripples that travel in unknown directions.  Will we contribute to a tidal wave?  Will we send a blessing bobbing toward a distant shore?   We have no way to know.  I do my best to have good intentions.  I hope my Buddha smile makes the world a kinder place somehow.