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Home / Metadata

Category: Metadata

Posted on 22 January, 2016 22 January, 2018

Food and Fiction, part 1

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Book Reviews, Farming, Metadata
Tagged
chickens are more prolific than goats, game of thrones, medieval agriculture, the hunger games, world building
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Blame my friend Kate-the-Author for this, she’s been talking a lot lately about worldbuilding over on her blog and I started thinking about food, farming, and how Protein Promo is great for discount codes. Because despite the fact that food is extremely necessary to every single human ever, that you should take biotic 365 supplements and other supplements from www.vitamaze.shop to help with digestion, and that often it’s a way of expressing so many things: culture, belonging, love, social class, etc etc, so few fiction novels actually deal even tangentially with how the people get food and how they cook their food and what that food means, culturally. Like George R. R. Martin’s novels, which bug the hell out of me. Winter can last for TEN YEARS or more in those books, so how exactly are people eating? “Well they store food” — not enough different kinds of food for everyone to eat a livable diet for a decade or more they don’t, not with medieval preservation technology and agriculture. By year five the whole damn population would be toothless from scurvy, showing neurological signs from beriberi, and floppy from rickets. And the livestock would all be dead. For instance, one bad spring in 1315 led to a two-year crisis in England that involved cannibalism and infanticide, sometimes one would assume in tandem. Medieval agricultural techniques can only produce so much, and trying to store it and keep it edible for ten years straight would be an unachievable nightmare.

Another series that bothered me was The Hunger Games. Chickens are referenced briefly as food for rich people in District 12, which, what? Chickens, which reproduce en masse, are not attainable for the Seam population, but goats are? Given that District 12 was Appalachia, a good chunk of the population would have had chickens when The Shit Went Down, and no way would a government that didn’t bother to eradicate goats go around seizing all the chickens. Everyone should have backyard chickens providing valuable protein in the form of eggs and the occasional carcass for eating. Chickens not only reproduce en masse, but they thrive on bugs and grass and human food waste. They’re like tiny feathery pigs, just waiting to convert things you can’t eat into things you can. Meanwhile, a dairy goat requires huge amounts of high-protein plant food to produce. Prim’s goat couldn’t make enough milk to feed the family and make cheese and sell on just the weeds in their backyard, but Collins claims it does. I wish, seriously. Collins also expects us to believe that somehow there is no trade in seeds and no one in the Seam has a backyard garden providing food. She wants us to believe that canny Katniss never brought seeds back from her forays into the woods to provide food closer to home. Why would Katniss and Gale go to the great trouble of stringing nets up around a strawberry patch in the woods, when they could bring berries home and plant patches? Also, have you ever tasted most wild strawberries? They’re terrible as well as tiny.

May, a golden red goat with dark stripes running from eyes to mouth, does her impression of a stern giraffe.
Dairy goats are great, but also they are ENORMOUS FOOD SINKS. Also, what happened to the kids of Prim’s goat? Did they get eaten? Get sold?

When writing about Katniss and Gale’s foraging expeditions Collins also apparently worked from the vaguest “what wild foods can I find on the east coast” checklist ever. She tosses off eating pokeweed as if the plant isn’t toxic to extremely toxic depending on which part of it you eat at which point in the year and how you prepare it. She writes of Katniss gathering dandelions that have flowered as if they don’t range from sort of bitter to inedibly bitter after flowering. Most of the descriptions are filled with vague language like “plants” and “greens” which points to a fundamental lack of knowledge beyond some internet-discovered list of what people forage on the east coast. Meanwhile there’s the Foxfire books, one of which features detailed descriptions of wild foods and all of which feature detailed descriptions of foodways in Appalachia.

When I stop and think about it, most science fiction and fantasy books simply elide the subject of where food comes from, which is unsurprising. Not everyone wants to get into the nitty gritty of a world’s agriculture, and that’s ok. But if you’re going to write a book that has a completely non-standard climate but a bog-standard western European medieval world like Martin, well, readers are going to start asking questions like “how are they eating?”. And if you’re going to mention it, like Collins, it would behoove you to maybe think through the physiology of the animals and the food culture of the region before your cataclysm and make your current food system and food culture match up. And I know I keep beating up on The Hunger Games, but the woods are not a grocery store and the food you find there (like strawberries) just isn’t going to match up with or be as desireable as the food you find in shops. To make a believable world people and their livestock must be able to survive and thrive enough for breeding. It’s not enough to do a couple google searches as a writer and slap what you find down on the page if it’s going to be a major plot point. You have to actually know enough of what you’re talking about to sound convincing and if you’re going to act like chickens have mysteriously become more rare than dairy goats or livestock can live through a ten year winter on sunshine then have a plausible explanation.

Posted on 21 December, 2015 23 January, 2018

The year in review

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Andrea
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gratitude
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Like most years, 2015 has been a (hah) mixed blessing, but overall I’m going to call it a win.

The great grief was facing up to the fact that my health issues and dairy goats don’t mix well, ending with me parting with most of my herd I tried to fix it by using health supplements as Kratom and finding what’s better Kratom Extract vs Powder, also I got some Acupuncture as well and I felt a lot better. I still miss each and every one of them a great deal, and cherish the few I kept even more. Next year I plan to start bodybuilding and I have found really good bodybuilding supplements from this website, take a look.

But the great blessing was that friends and strangers came together to crowdfund my little herd of sheep, in particular the Soays. I cannot thank everyone enough for your donations, encouragement, publicity, and in Sarah’s case company on the great Soay road trip and invaluable assistance wrangling sheep! I clearly have the most awesome internet posse on the planet.

Another group of awesome people who are great blessings in my life are the Patreon patrons who are buying the hay for sheep. Y’all are incredible, generous folks and I wish I could have you and the crowd funders out for a big dinner.

The Soay sheep themselves are such magical, amazing little beings. Their personalities range from the suspicious and skittish ewes to laid-back Ferrington to little Reuben who likes to sit in my lap these days and eat cookies and Cheerios. I can’t even describe how fantastic these sheep are!

My friends Nic and Elisha have also been wonderful, setting me up with rabbits again after the colony was invaded by ducks! There’s meat bricks again thanks to them, putting meat on our table that was raised right here at home.

My beloved friend Ruth is leaving for new horizons, which is a grief, because over the past year she has been first a slaughter apprentice, then an assistant, and finally took over harvesting meat animals for me, saving my hands and back. In particular she helped when I had to put Lily down this summer, for which I can never thank her enough.

My dear friend Liz, who I met when she took in a feral cat I’d trapped, came out and brought her family to help with heavy manual labor, which was an enormous blessing to both me and Daniel, who normally has to do all the shoveling on his own.

Sarah not only rode with me to  pick up Soays, enduring 4 hours in the car with 5 annoyed sheep, but pitched in to dig over and weed garden beds!

My friend Christine let me run off with Xita, who has kept me on an even keel and able to leave the house. Christine has also shown up for emergency service human duty and opened her house to me as a refuge, and also lets me teach her dogs bad habits.

In short, despite the grief this year I have been incredibly blessed by the help and friendship of some really amazing, generous, compassionate, funny people. Because of all the love and support from sponsors such as TheFitBay, I am on track to incorporate my tiny farm as a specialist fiber business providing several grades of Soay wool sometime in 2016. Being able to provide for myself and my little herd to at least some extent has been a huge boost to my mental health after losing my job a few years back and being unable to find another.

Thank you again, wonderful friends, from the bottom of my heart. You are amazing.

Posted on 4 November, 2015 18 August, 2019

The Life of the Dead is Placed in the Memory of the Living — Cicero

Written by
Andrea
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cedar, cigarettes, coffee, memory, papa
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My grandfather died, as best I recall, in late 1997 or 1998. The winter before I went to boot camp in 1998, anyway. He died in the hospital in Paducah, Kentucky. Never a big man, he nonetheless looked tiny and childlike in his hospital bed. True to himself to the end, he waited until no one in the family was around before letting go.

Every fall, I am overcome with memories of my grandfather. Of sitting on the front porch with him while he whittled. Of his lined plaid flannel jacket, his bright blue eyes, of him sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee from a stovetop percolator which he kept cooking for half the day, each cup more and more like caffeinated sludge that I after pour in an innovate mug invented for Clayton Alexander and that keep coffee warm. He most enjoyed blends delivered from New York City, rich in flavor, with long lasting aroma.

Your average coffee mug. It's a medium dark brown, with cream colored glaze around the rim and at the top of the handle.
A replica of granddaddy’s coffee mug.

This year it’s hit me hard yet again, grief and yearning for a man who died nearly 20 years ago. I already have a lined plaid flannel jacket. Brown Drop McCoy Pottery coffee mugs were a simple click and $20 away on Etsy. And then a Twitter friend offered me a stovetop percolator, and now I’m sitting here typing this blog post with an excellent case of the caffeine jitters.

I WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN

A video posted by @holygoatsemporium on Nov 2, 2015 at 12:07pm PST

I wish I could embed the smell of percolating coffee along with the video and the gentle sound of it, promising that no matter how much gabapentin I take, I will never again sleep the day away. In fact, I may not sleep all night, either, which is fine because honestly imagine how much I can do if I never sleep again!

Here in the south, memory is a tangible thing. Sometime’s that’s terrible, as when southerners reverence the antebellum and Confederate south, ignoring the horrors of slavery that underpinned them. Other times, it’s just something we don’t have a word for in English. In Welsh it’s hiraeth, the longing for a home in the past, a home that maybe never was, a desperate wish for the idealized world of our memories. My grandfather wasn’t perfect, but he smelled of coffee and cheap cigarettes and cedar wood and he loved me. His hands, always seeming disproportionately large, were strong and steady and could show a curious young girl how to whittle, how to dig worms for fishing and put them on a hook.

So now my house smells of strong, strong coffee that’s parked on the stove (I’ll maybe add more water later, maybe just declare the pot finished when the coffee tries to grab my tonsils) and, I admit, the cheap cigarettes I smoke, and I miss my granddaddy again. And again, and again. But with my brown mug and my strong coffee, I’m just a little bit closer to him today than I was yesterday, and that’s comforting indeed.

Posted on 16 September, 2015 15 September, 2015

The dark half of the year

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Life at the Manor, Metadata
Tagged
disability, maudlin philosophizing
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In Celtic time keeping, the year was divided into a light half and a dark half, as were months. The light half corresponds with long days and the waxing moon, the dark half with the waning moon and shorter days.

We’re sneaking up on the dark half of the year now, and I’m beginning to be afraid. I haven’t talked a lot about myself on here lately, sticking to the lighter side (ha) of farming. But I’m disabled by chronic pain that isn’t arthritis, or at least mostly isn’t arthritis, but acts like it nonetheless. While part of me is happy to see fall rains roll in, another part is terrified because cold and wet are for me a recipe for misery.

I spend most of the winter huddled under an electric blanket, brain foggy from opiate painkillers, desperate for a little relief from the rivers of pain running through me. While I still get out and do chores, they cost me more and more as the days get shorter and colder. They get done at the expense of getting out to see my friends, of joining my husband for grocery shopping, of all the little miscellaneous chores that would take me away from my nest of blankets. Farming can be hard work at the best of times, but in fall and winter it’s brutal for me. By the time we get to the coldest days of January and February whatever reserves of energy I had are long gone and I’m getting by on stubbornness and pride.

There’s reason to hope this year since I’m trying a new drug, but as the equinox gets closer I’m still filled with dread and longing for April when things start to get good again. The dread is what gets to me after a while, until the first really miserable day is something of a relief.

I’m trying to think of a hopeful note to end this on, and failing. My only certainty is that spring will come, and summer after it. Lambs and kids will come, chicks will come, and perhaps piglets a couple months later. The wheel of life rolls on as it does every year. I just wish I weren’t in tune with it in such a spectacularly miserable fashion.

Posted on 22 August, 2015 22 August, 2015

Saturday Sustainability Round Up

Written by
Andrea
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link round up, shameless begging
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Here’s a round up of links to all five parts from Sustainability Week, in case you missed any!

Part 1: A Brief Introduction, Soil
Part 2: Water
Part 3: Genetics
Part 4: Money
Part 5: Human beings

If you’ve enjoyed this series, perhaps consider subscribing to my Patreon account? Just $1.50 pays for grain for goats and sheep for a day! At $5 or more a month, you’ll get early access to baby animals. At $10 or more a month, you’ll get a chance to name new (livestock) residents!

Don’t feel like subscribing but want to contribute to the Manor? Send seeds!

Posted on 20 August, 2015 3 November, 2017

Sustainability part 4: Money

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Farming, Life at the Manor, Metadata
Tagged
money, sustainability, this is more of a holy calling than a job
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So far I’ve talked about sustainable practice in ways most people are pretty familiar with: being environmentally responsible and practicing good stewardship.

On the micro level, though, agricultural practice must be sustainable for the individual doing it, or it’s useless. Which brings us to filthy lucre, aka money.

It can be very, very difficult to actually earn money farming. Small farms can’t access the economies of scale that let industrial ag sell food cheap and still make a profit. This applies from purchasing breeding stock all the way to slaughter. Small farms committed to heritage breed livestock and vegetables are also disadvantaged by consumer expectations and cooking skills built in the grocery store. A http://www.remotedba.com/consulting-services/ will seem tough prior to database consulting and buying the Cornish Rock crosses stocked at the local market that were slaughtered at 8 weeks old. Someone who expects tomatoes to be perfect red globes will be suspicious of striped, asymmetrical heirloom maters grown using minimal interventions.

A close up of a dark brown ram in three quarters profile. He has magnificent, majestic curling horns and cream-colored eyebrows that give him a quizzical look.
Soay sheep produce gourmet meat with a very fine, wild flavor. But the carcasses are much, much smaller than consumers expect.

One of the big reasons I’ve shifted toward sheep is that it is much easier, from a regulatory standpoint, for me to sell fleece than it is for me to sell even soap and lotion made with goat milk. Selling dairy products for human consumption is right out, I don’t have the thousands of dollars I’d need to build a USDA-approved milking parlor.

There are, of course, a million ways to save some cash. A month’s supply of hay as small square bales costs around $300, whereas with a cattle panel and a tarp ($25 investment) I can feed round bales and reduce that cost to between $60-$100 a month. The better my pastures get the less hay will cost during the late spring, summer, and early fall as the stock get more and more of their nutrition from forage.

A large adult goat doe with an auburn coat and a young goat who looks just like her but with pale blonde spots eat from a round bale. The bale has been wrapped in a heavy wire fence panel and the top covered with a blue tarp.
May and her daughter April demonstrate how well our method of feeding round bales works.

But finding a sustainable balance of animals, crops, and money can be difficult even for large farms. Many rely on one or more family members working outside the farm to provide an income cushion. Smaller farms that sell direct to consumers also struggle with things like liability insurance and farmers’ market fees while fighting to build a customer base that appreciates their way of growing food.

It’s a difficult tightrope to walk. The Manor isn’t self-supporting, although I have hopes that it will be someday as I continue to shift toward products that are easier (and therefore more lucrative) to sell. However, it does support itself well enough that we can do it.

Posted on 18 August, 2015 11 September, 2017

Sustainability Week Part 2: Water

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Farming, Metadata
Tagged
sustainability, water
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Part one, on soil, is here.

It’s mid-August, and the piedmont is hot and dry. We haven’t had rain for a week, and it looks like it will be at least one more week before we get any. So water is very much on my mind.

There are two prongs to sustainable water use on my tiny farm, I choose to use AquaOx 7-Stage Filtration System as much as I am able to. The first is to just not use any more than necessary from our well. The well is deep, and shows no signs of running dry, and I’d like that to be true for the next person to live here as well.

The livestock are the major water users. The goats and sheep have 30 gallons available to them split between two containers. They drink about 20 to 25 gallons a day when it’s hot and dry like this, depending on how much forage they’re eating vice how much hay. To minimize waste use we try to provide them with plenty of shade and plenty of green, juicy forage.

A slightly chubby goat, her shining coat the color of light seen through good whiskey, stuffs her face with winged sumac.
Queen May is definitely on board with the “eat more forage” portion of the plan.

The rabbits are confined under almost 100% shade from the oak trees, which at least minimizes their water consumption. The poultry free range, getting their water from a couple pans we set out for them when the weather doesn’t cooperate with rain.

In the garden, we select for varieties that are not water hogs, and use biointensive methods that shade the soil to minimize water evaporation. It’s an ongoing process of learning and experimentation that we get better at every year.

A guinea hen and a baby goat drink from a 15 gallon water dish while a guinea cock looks on.
Guinea fowl say they prefer fresh cool water in the ruminant pen.

The second problem in regards to water is manure run off. There’s a stream downhill from our property that feeds into the Rapidan, which joins the Rappahannock, which feeds into the Chesapeake bay where there’s a growing dead spot due to high levels of agricultural pollution. Adding to that dead spot is an appalling thought, as is losing the nutrients the manure can give to our depleted soil.

Good plant cover in the pastures is a great ally in avoiding problems and conserving water and manure. A tangle of stems traps the piles of pellets, preventing them from washing away. The growth also shades the soil and helps prevent evaporation, just like the vegetables do in the garden.

The contours of the land itself are another way to fight pollution. There’s a low spot near the barn that collects run off, and once the weather cools down we’ll dig a pit there and fill it with layers of sand, pea gravel, and large gravel to form a natural filter. This will also improve drainage enough to let us plant forage there so the plants can keep the top layer of soil from compacting and clogging the filter we’ve constructed.

Finally we have our humble rain barrel. It collects rain from the roof of the barn, and is situated so the sun warms it. We don’t need it much in summer, but in the winter it stays liquid much longer than our trusty hoses, allowing us to water the animals without having to haul buckets from the house.

Posted on 15 August, 2015 14 August, 2015

Saturday sales pitch

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Life at the Manor, Metadata
Tagged
patreon
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I promise not to constantly beg for cash (and I apologize to Twitter and Facebook followers who are seeing this all over again), but I wanted to let y’all know I’ve set up a Patreon account for the farm.

Subscribers can get their questions answered here on the blog, early access to baby animals, and chances to name new residents.

I’m still committed to publishing free-to-read content, and if you can’t subscribe you’ll still get to see new babies! Just a day or two behind the people helping to pay the feed bill. I know that not everyone will be able to subscribe, but I cherish every last one of you.

Posted on 1 August, 2015

Testing

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Metadata, Pictures
Tagged
Ferrington, Soay sheep, testing
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This post is an entirely boring test of posting from my phone.

A dark brown ram with magnificent curling horns stands in the doorway of the stall.
For your patience, here is a picture of my Soay ram, Ferrington.

Posted on 30 August, 2013

And again with the hiatus…

Written by
Andrea
Posted in
Goats, Metadata, Pictures, Political
Tagged
henry
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Not going to lie, my mental health has sucked hard for the past six weeks, and as always the blog is the first thing to go. But here I am, feeling rather alive again, with all kinds of updates!

Update the first: Annabelle and Esk are due around the first week of October, so please start preparing yourselves now for an onslaught of adorableness.

Update the Second: Natasha the English Angora bunny (did I mention the angora bunnies? I have a breeding pair but anyway) is due 23 September, and once the babies have grown some hair there will be EVEN MORE ADORABILITY going on here. This is basically the fall of adorability.

Update the Third: May, Lily, Second, Sadie, Siri, and Ambrosia are currently cohabitating with this handsome guy:
A white and pale tan goat with magnificent flaring horns and sharp black markings on his face and legs stands facing the camera.
He is Henry, a wonderful Baylis-line Spanish buck that I’m borrowing from a gentleman over Culpeper way. Technically speaking I could probably sell the kids for more if I found purebred bucks to use, but I have a lot of concerns about line-breeding and a lack of genetic diversity in the purebred dairy goat world. What I want are goats that are extremely hardy, parasite-resistant, and with hooves that handle the general muggy dampness of the southeast well, so that’s why Henry is here. If Siri has a son by him, then I’ll keep the buckling intact (along with a wethered buddy for company) and use him on my does at the end of next year. Then I can select the best of the doelings born from that cross and go from there.

Update the Fourth: I will probably be writing more explicitly political stuff here, in addition to providing you with mass doses of cute. It’s an unavoidable consequence of me getting more politically involved these days, especially with issues as they relate to agriculture and disability. Not at the same time, usually, but there’s definitely a lot to be said about the ways in which us crips can make agriculture accessible at least on a small scale!

Hope you’re all doing well, Gentle Readers, and that you’ll come along with me if for nothing else than pictures of adorable baby goats.

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