Summer Portraits and Scattered Thoughts

Let’s start with news from the farm, it’s a (mostly) very nice place to begin.

My garden looks pretty awful this year. It was heat stressed for the better part of six weeks. We had relentless triple digit weather at the farm and everything in my gardens seemed to want to curl up and perish even though I flipped the irrigation schedule to twice a day and additionally hand watered some sections which seemed perpetually parched. I reckon I might have to dream up shade structuring next year if we have another sustained heatwave like this year. Whew! I feel a little sweaty and tired just typing about it and remembering it.

My garden looks pretty awful this year, also, because Idaho Department of Agriculture sent out a couple of folks to pick up garlic samples for testing and while they were in the shop building they unplugged our electric box that fires the electric fence that keeps the pigs out of my garden and they did not tell me about it. A few days later, I woke up to…PIGS IN MY GARDEN. They destroyed most of my melon patch, squash patch, and dug up a good portion of my potato row while trampling a few other things. I was pretty miffed about it at the time. I replanted squash and some of my melons have bounced back a bit but it was a full blown disaster zone for a while. Rather heartbreaking.

Two of our jenny turkeys have successfully hatched out chicks and I have them all in our nursery coop. I ADORE TURKEYS. We have found baby turkeys to be quite susceptible to immediate and terrible death. They’re such fragile things when they’re young. While I’d love for them to be out and about eating bugs and nibbling tender plants they will almost all certainly die if they aren’t in captivity for the first month of their life, we learned this the hard way.

Pumpernickle, our wonderful sow, gave birth to a nice little batch of piggies about a week ago. They are such sweet things. Something awful and bizarre happened. One piglet sustained an eye injury somehow and wound up losing his eyeball because maggots found their way into his eye wound and began to devour him. Let me tell you something, it’s one thing to come across carrion that is being processed by bugs and beetles and worms but it’s another thing altogether to see a young critter being literally eaten alive by maggots. I did my best to doctor him (I only puked once) and as the situation progressed it became apparent that he was in extreme pain, he wasn’t going to survive, he was going to have a slow and terrible death, so we decided to put him down — at our farm, this involves a shot to the brain with our small .22 rifle. Instant death. This is one of the most difficult things for me when it comes to animal husbandry — knowing when to ease the suffering of livestock and set them free by granting them death and there is nuance between this and harvesting a mature animal to eat. I feel many different emotions when we harvest animals to eat, but I do not feel sad — I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve talked about this in the past many a time and in the past I thought I did feel a sort of sadness for our harvested animals but now I’m not sure that’s one of the emotions I’m feeling. That said, I feel deeply saddened whenever we must make the choice to end the suffering of a sick or hurt animal — I have a sense of sadness that is related to the nature of young life ending too soon. I don’t know if any of this is coherent, sorry if it’s not, I’m tired this week and my mind feels like it might be spinning its wheels. I think about this stuff ALL the time and just when I think I know how to express what I’m thinking something shifts and I have to start my thought process all over again.

I really love each and every one of our animals here, they enrich my existence. I want them all to have the best lives we can possibly give them and I want them all to die excellent, quiet, calm, clean deaths but sometimes nature takes over and believe me when I say, nature can be a bloodthirsty hag — she’s sunsets and coyote pups and wild sunflowers but she’s also a real bitch.

I’ve been trying to chip away at studio work here but it seems like I endure at least one small farmtastrophe almost every single day that drags me away from my studio. It starts to drive me crazy after a while, being creatively unexercised, but it’s just that time of year. I keep doing my best. That’s all I can do!

I was up in the high country on horseback for a few days in July, just in time for the big fireweed bloom. What a beautiful world we live in and so much of it is edible. Sometimes I move through a forest or along the riverbank at home and I point out to myself everything that can be picked or collected and eaten or steeped as nutritious teas and it’s astounding. Did you know fireweed makes a nice nibble and a nice jelly and a nice tisane? It’s also easy on the eyes. This fuchsia hue is one of my favorite colors on earth.

I wake up every day now and feel like the state of the world is a small, sharp knife sticking through the meat of my ribs and into my heart. These are hurting times, fearful times, worrisome times, lonely times.

Hurt, fear, worry, loneliness.

I wake up every day now and I look for hope everywhere, watch for pinpricks of light and warm sunbeams and good hearts and helpful souls and I root myself in those details, situations, people.

I have realized lately how important it is that I feed my spirit with great care. The human spirit can be sullied in a thousand different ways and one of our greatest duties to ourselves (and others) is to use caution and care in our own lives, to moderate our intake of all things, to guard what we allow our eyes see, to be careful about which ideas we allow to take root in our minds, to sift through and sort out good from evil. It’s tricky work.

I am busy seeking beauty and redemption and wisdom. They come to me in simple forms that ring out like thunder in the night.

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“Our hands imbibe like roots so I place them on what is beautiful in this world and I fold them in prayer and they draw from the heavens light.”

[Saint Francis of Assisi]

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I have been thinking of you all as this summer draws to a close. I hope your gardens and your local farmers have fed you well. I hope you have had time to relax and rest and drape your bones over the earth in the shade beneath a mighty tree or two. I hope you have sipped iced tea. I hope you have picked berries. I hope you have discovered new music and new artists and new teachings. I hope you have read one hundred wonderful books. I hope it has been a glorious season you will remember forever.

Luminous ametrine and sterling silver bound for my shop shelves within the hour!

[Someone recently emailed me and signed off by saying, “Love and bumblebees!” I liked that so much. So…]

LOVE AND BUMBLEBEES

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2021/08/24/16157/

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2021/08/05/16118/

Made With Love

I have forty necklaces bound for my shop shelves July 29 @ 10AM MST.

I love everything I’ve been making lately. It all feels so good on, which is a sign that I’m right on track with my work. I hate to part with any of it. But there are chickens to feed, irrigation water bills to pay, thirsty truck tanks and chili pepper flakes to import from New Mexico for Robbie. That said, I am keeping that ruby wolf necklace with the carved flower aquamarine for myself. Eee! It’s more beautiful than I deserve!

I hope to see you tomorrow morning.

Thank you so much for considering my work.

+OF THE WEST+

Sundries Farm Garlic

Robbie was able to come home for three weeks in June and it was a marvelous time. We haven’t had three weeks together during the fire season ever, not ever, and we’ve been in fire for 15 years now. We needed that time for ourselves, of course, but we also really needed three weeks to get our garlic crop harvested and curing (full disclosure — we also floated and fished a ton while Robbie was home so there was a lot of hard work but also some relaxation and camping and beautiful fishing and visiting with friends).

Growing heirloom, organic garlic requires a lot of passion and a lot of hard work. Everything about this crop is done by hand and each garlic bulb is touched by us about 8 times before it is ready to go to market! Did you know growing garlic is this labor intensive? It must be planted by hand, clove by clove, with proper spacing and orientation. It must be weeded by hand. It must be picked by hand. It must be hung (hanged?) to cure. Once cured, it must be cleaned by hand, trimmed by hand (roots and leaves removed) or braided (if it’s a softneck variety). In the case of Sundries Farm, we will be selling or garlic though our online farm store and shipping it out, order by order, which will be the last time we touch it before it heads out to you.

This year we have been working closely with the Department of Agriculture here in Idaho to officially certify our garlic as “white rot free” which will enable us to sell seed garlic for top dollar to every county in the state of Idaho as well as the entire USA making this niche crop of ours even more niche! If all goes according to plan we will also be the only Idaho garlic farm offering certified Nootka Rose variety. WOO HOO! It’s very exiting and we are grateful that the wonderful people at Idaho’s Department of Agriculture have been willing to work with us. We had a couple ladies out to the farm last week to pull cloves for inspection and testing and it was clear to me that they care deeply about small, regenerative, diversified farming. They are passionate gals who really know their stuff and Robbie and I look forward to working with them and being in relationship with them for years to come.

We are hoping to launch our farm website in the next couple of weeks — Robbie has been website building in hotel rooms, on tarmac while waiting for fire calls, in the Airstream in McCall…working working working — and we plan to be shipping orders out by September. I would say it’s a miracle we have been able to manage all of this during the fire season when we have so much going on, however, I know how hard we have worked to succeed at farming this crop and I know that in life, you do not get what you wish for, YOU GET WHAT YOU WORK FOR. So pats on the backs for us. We’re building a dream and so we go in grace, with grit.

More details are coming with regards to purchasing garlic from us for anyone who is interested. We’re overjoyed that we will be able to share the fruits of our labor with you this year, and hopefully, for many years to come.

Love,

The King and Queen of Sundries Farm

Post Scriptus

I can’t believe I forgot to tell you about our tractor! After shopping for a tractor for a few years and being outbid at auctions we found this little John Deere beauty in a nearby town and a miracle happened. The seller’s phone number was wrong in his Craig’s List sale listing and we tried and tried to phone him (so did a bunch of other people) and finally, in desperation, we emailed him. He emailed us back immediately and we galloped over to look at the tractor. Once there, he told us he listed his phone number incorrectly and he had 18 other emails inquiring about the tractor and some other fellow was continuously driving by to ogle the tractor and had already offered him a lowball cash offer…which was rejected because we were coming to look at the darn thing!!!

There was going to be a tractor riot. I’m not kidding.

Suffice to say, we bought it for a very fair price. It came with nine implements. It’s a 70s model, so it’s still built heavy enough to handle some bigger implements like a hay mower for instance. It was a great find and we are thankful we had the means to swoop in and make it ours. Since it was nearby, we drove it home to the farm that day. That’s right. We were the jerks on the highway driving a tractor. IT WAS GLORIOUS.

Robbie has been teaching me to operate it which is fun and empowering. He’s a heavy machinery operating genius thanks to his time as a fish biologist in Arizona. It’s so much fun to watch him work on it. A friend of ours calls the tractor the “machine of opportunity” and it’s so true. We’re just so grateful to have this tool at our fingertips now. It’s changed our farming lives.