Ten Years and Counting: Farming in Michigan’s UP

Yesterday was Steve and I’s ten year wedding anniversary.

As is my custom, I procrastinated in my planning, and decided in the morning that I would make lasagna with homemade noodles, a nice salad, and Steve’s favorite: Lemon Meringue Pie.

Plus a put together Briana and a put together house.

Well, the Day happened, and by the time Steve arrived home, he was welcomed by a still pajama-ed Briana, flour all over the floor, and needing to help put the lasagna together.

But, there were three, beautiful, Lemon Meringue Pies on a nicely made table already done and waiting.

As we put together the lasagna, I couldn’t help but wonder if, after ten years of marriage, this is what we could have imagined it would become.

No way.

We went from super humble beginnings to humble happenings, with hard lessons and a lot of love (and crazy) along the way.

When we got married we were living right in town forty five minutes from Pittsburgh across from the hospital, the helicopter launch pad only feet from our front door. Daily, when it would take off to fly an unfortunate patient to Pittsburgh, our window panes would rattle and the wind would whip my porch flag all around.

We eventually moved outside of town and rented a farmhouse, with no signs of farming ever done there, just a house and yard on a country road.

We decided to put a vegetable garden in the front yard, and, after checking out every available homesteading book at the public library, I was well on my way to realizing my farming dreams.

A handbook for realists and dreamers: This is one of my library check outs that largely shaped my vision.

I didn’t seriously consider pigs, but, I read books about bees and goats, joined online chicken forums and finally flipped through mail order chick catalogs.

Our first order of chicks arrived in the mail in February, and was left on the dock that frigid morning until our country post office opened up for the day.

I tried telephoning the PO, frantically trying to reach someone that could tell me when and where I could pick up my little peepers, and Steve eventually zoomed down the road to see if he would find anyone that would be able to pass them along to us so that we could safely place them under their heat lamp and their new little home that we took great care to ready for them.

What we were left with was a bunch of frozen (literally stiff) meat chicks and a handful of very cold layer chicks that were more than ready to get cozy in their shavings and get a drink of electrolyte water.

We telephoned the hatchery and received a pleasant response, and we even “brought to” some of the stiff meat chicks by grabbing them by their stiff legs and continually dipping their beaks in water and then placing them flat out under the red heat lamp. Some came back for a while, but they eventually didn’t make it.

I received more roosters than I should have, and one was even a bully from the start, pecking at some of the other chicks’ eyes.

I scoured the online chicken forums, and many people suggested doing in an aggressive chick right from the beginning, saying it wouldn’t get better with age:

The snipping of the neck with sharp kitchen shears was the prescribed solution, and, while I couldn’t bring myself to do it, my eyes were opened to the cruel and sometimes shocking aspect of farming and real life.

In James Rebanks’, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, a memoir about farming the northern English countryside, he recounts his grandfather’s explanation to him when they would find a dead ewe in the field or a crow-eaten field of crops:

“He said ‘Mother Nature’s a cruel old bitch.’”

Another great book

Those are true words.

My chick never got better and was forever aggressive- I should have snipped his head off.

We eventually added turkeys, ducks, and geese, and bartered with another farmer: some roosters for a meat rabbit trio, and then with another farmer for hay in exchange for rabbit meat.

Pigs joined the party, and those are the same hogs that came up to the UP with us in an old ice cream freezer in the back of our minivan.

Steve forgot my precious rabbit pelts in the farmhouse freezer during the move (you freeze them until you are ready to flesh and salt them), and it’s a sore subject to this day.

Can you imagine the new tenant’s face when they opened the freezer to put his groceries away?

We brought only a few turkeys and some chickens north with us in a dog cage, and one of the Aracauna chickens got picked on by the turkeys and was scalped. She went on to live and stayed with my mother’s hens for the rest of her life.

Steve and I always imagined that we would live in a log cabin in the woods somewhere up here in the Upper Peninsula, but, we ended up purchasing a little red, cedar-sided cabin in the middle of a field instead, and have been busy ever since turning it into my picturesque English country cottage.

With our sandy soils and lack of self-discipline, we quickly gave up vegetable farming, but, I always seem to find time to tend to my English roses and other cottage flowers.

We immediately logged part of the property to fund our first flock of Icelandic sheep that first fall here on the farm, and, have added more sheep since.

Pigs came back, as well as milk cows, so in the past ten years, Steve and I have been able to say that on any given day you might have found us or the children, making soap, cheese, delivering a lamb (or baby!), painting something or baking something, shearing, or yelling at a farm dog.

Searching for eggs in brush piles that the naughty chickens hid, or loading up goats in the back of a van or raggedy farm truck.

Pallets, baling twine, duct tape and love have kept us all held together, but namely, the great mercy and grace of God that has penetrated our lives.

Since moving, and after ten years of marriage, Steve and I have found ourselves surrounded by like-minded folks and a simpler way of life where every day holds promise.

Customers have enriched our lives so much, and we only hope that our goods have done the same for them, even in some small way,

be it via a special pie, some great sausage for the morning’s gravy and biscuits, or a fresh sourdough bagel.

I think it’s safe to say that even though Steve may find me surrounded by a sinkful of baking dishes and children up to my eyeballs, we wouldn’t trade any of this in, even for a minute, of life “Out There” in the world.

We’re just going to keep on going, and I’m looking forward to the next ten years.